Oh yeah you’re right. I just looked it back up and this article says one of the commentators was getting $400k a month, a $100k signing bonus, and additional performance based payment in exchange for I guess 4 videos a week.

I guess according to the allegations only the founders of Tenet Media or whatever it was called knew the money was coming from Russia and they hid it from the talking heads.

But like… How much money do these people have to be getting paid before they have a thought to question where it’s coming from? Dim Tool was apparently getting like $100k a WEEK from them. Like at what point does it start to get suspicious?

Edit: I was misremembering. Apparently it was $100k a week so that’s $400k a month.

I would absolutely kill for a Weird Al parody of “Not Like Us” about how deeply and toxicly creepy and weird these rightoid freaks are.

More than just non-conforming generally too. They super quickly embraced that non-conformist image when it came to the masks.

But it feels like just calling them weird triggers a primal fear within them that they’re not really part of the “in-group” after all. It works where other insults don’t because they can’t easily write it off as their enemies simply being jealous of how cool they are basically.

Most likely you’d have to allow the sitting president to appoint an acting justice to serve out the remainder of that justice’s term. Yeah we’d still have the problem of RBG dying under Trump and giving us a 6-3 conservative majority, but if she only had a few years left on her term when she died the damage would at least be limited.

As for what McConnell did to Garland, having term endings scheduled would make that a lot harder. If their terms are staggered such that they always end 1 year and 3 years into each president’s term it destroys the argument that it’s too close to an election and the people should get to decide who makes the appointment. They’d be forced to outright deny the nominee and let the president try again. That’s much harder to maintain.

The idea would essentially be that they wouldn’t all hear every case. You’d randomly assign a panel of say 5 justices from the pool and each panel would hear their own cases.

That way we stop bullshit like what Thomas did in his Dobbs concurrence where he straight up said he thinks cases like Obergefell (gay marriage), Lawrence (can’t criminalize gay sexual acts), and Griswold (contraception) also need to be reversed and all but instructed conservative legal circles to back challenges to those cases. Since there’d be no guarantee that a baseless partisan legal challenge would end up in front of favorable justices they would be much less likely to succeed.

This does potentially introduce a problem with consistency, but such a problem isn’t unsolvable. You could institute a rule that allows for basically an appeal on a SCOTUS ruling to be heard by either a different panel of justices or the entire body as a whole, for example. It obviously wouldn’t be perfect, but we don’t need perfection. We need SCOTUS to not be some unaccountable council of high priests who can act with blatant partisan interest and we can’t do anything about it.

I think I agree with that. The media, especially the more right leaning media will always find something to attack Democrats over.

It seems like a bit of a stretch to me as well. But that seems to me to be the thought process of the people who are advocating for an open convention rather than Biden just endorsing Harris and letting her pick a new VP.

Maybe I worded something poorly there and caused some miscommunication. I was responding to someone equating unverified with made up. What I was trying to say is that it’s unverified right now because the only statements on it were from what seems to be the same primary source(s) that wish to remain anonymous. That doesn’t necessarily mean the reporting is false, only that there hasn’t been a separate source saying the same thing. I wasn’t trying to say “it’s true actually, they just have to say it’s unverified because no one wants to put their name on saying it”

I then separately wanted to explain what seems to be the thought process behind people saying that Biden wouldn’t endorse Kamala going into the convention if he dropped out.

To my knowledge it’s only unverified because the people saying it are doing so on the condition of anonymity. The idea seems to be that they want to go into an open convention with Biden at most saying something like “I have the utmost faith in the delegates to pick the best candidate to be our nominee,” because if he’s too involved in the choice whoever ends up being the nominee will have that looming specter of the narrative of Biden’s cognitive decline haunting them. “How could he pick a good replacement when he doesn’t even know where he is?” and all that.

There it is. Yeah that tracks with the general Republican playbook. Sell off any and every part of government that business interests could even remotely squeeze money out of no matter how detrimental it would be for society.

Doesn’t AccuWeather also depend on NOAA data? I was under the impression that they basically just parse the stuff that NOAA/NWS puts out and make people pay to have convenient access to it. Am I misremembering something?

My partner hates when I open bananas like this because there’s a little dark part of the banana under that end of the peel that she calls “The Ban-anus” and thinks it’s gross even if I pick off that part and don’t eat it.

Yep. Now I’m not gonna lie, I didn’t think they’d actually fully overturn Roe in the Dobbs decision either. I figured upholding the 15 week or whatever ban with maybe some meaningless language about exceptions beyond that time was the most likely outcome from Dobbs. But I wasn’t at all surprised when it happened. I knew as soon as they had a good excuse to do it they’d overturn Roe.

For a couple reasons. Some cynically wanted to continue to use abortion as a political football. Codifying Roe in any meaningful way in their minds would have meant they had to find a new wedge issue to drive turnout and donations. We saw this on the other side when SCOTUS actually overturned it and the right didn’t know what to do with themselves for a while.

Then maybe in part because of the former, there were a bunch of people that naively didn’t believe they’d actually entirely destroy Roe. They genuinely thought the worst that could possibly happen was some minor restrictions at the margins. So those people were not motivated enough to actually do something about it.

Of course. The only question they ask is “Does this make my side look bad?” If the answer is No, then this is Just, Good, and the Will of the People. If the answer is Yes, then it’s a False Flag, a Psy-Op, or the work of the Deep State.

This particular kind of hearing might not necessarily need to conclude before the election to be impactful. Trump’s lawyers arguing with a straight face that his alleged attempt at subverting the election was actually an official act just before the election could be fairly damaging on their own.

My understanding reading this is that they’re worried that some of their evidence might have just become privileged and inadmissible via the whole “can’t use testimony or communications between the president and his staff” part of the ruling.

I doubt that the SCOTUS ruling actually saves him here. It seems to me at least that the prosecution is agreeing to postpone sentencing mostly to go back and make sure that they aren’t likely to lose too much of their evidence on appeal.

The payment by Cohen to Daniels for her story happened before the election. The problem is that a bulk of, if not potentially all of the fraudulent payments to Cohen from Trump to reimburse him didn’t happen until he was president. I don’t remember exactly when the repayment started.

The worry I guess is that while the crime itself doesn’t involve official acts, some of the evidence of the crimes used in the trial might have just become privileged communication that can’t be used as evidence. I don’t think anything has changed personally reading it, but I’m no lawyer. So they might have agreed to postpone the sentencing as a bit of caution to review everything to make sure that too much of their evidence didn’t just become inadmissable. Basically, it seems mostly like a bid to make sure they don’t get torched on appeal.

They’ve pulled that one a lot recently, haven’t they? I seem to recall one of the other recent rulings, I think it was against the EPA basically being a hypothetical about a proposed rule they hadn’t even actually passed yet?