Ah interesting, I hadn’t see where the decision was announced (maybe federation was slow at sending the update). Mind linking or recapping here?

I might be late to the party, but aside from the “unnecessarily harsh” bit (which doesn’t involve the moderators) I didn’t express any opinions, so no harm done fortunately.

Yes. Another reason why Citizens United (2010) was so bad…

Effective campaigns spend more time getting votes than money.

Well, you can use money to buy outreach. Which can bring in more votes. So they are connected.

One of the reasons Biden dropped out was because donors had decided to withhold money from his campaign.

no one watches cable so ad buys are cheap.

I imagine it’s more popular in certain parts of the US (e.g. the midwest). In particular where we need to pull never trumper votes away.

Spam texts/emails are essentially free,

Texts cost money. Emails are not free either if you are doing it with a high enough volume. See https://sendpulse.com/knowledge-base/email-service/general/how-much-bulk-email-costs for a comparison. (This is because it costs the underlying ISP some money to deal with the traffic involved.)

Internet/social media ads are also dirt cheap…

The ultimate problem is, even if they are cheap, if one side has more money than the other, then that side can outspend the other on ads, meaning they get larger outreach, potentially more influence (tho money doesn’t always buy influence - who wants to take the risk), and so on.

I legitimately don’t even know how this much money is even spent,

Actual campaign funds have to be reported regarding spending, you can view that info over at https://www.fec.gov/data/browse-data/

This stuff is generally opaque and hard to understand, but a good “rule-of-thumb” kind of guide to it is available at https://www.propublica.org/article/how-to-understand-political-contributions-campaign-finance

This is not a good thing.

Agreed.

Not sure if federation is being wonky or what. But that link took me to the same MSN page instead of to the ABC one somehow.

This seemed unnecessarily harsh. By stating “no issues” instead of objecting, OP was basically making the path smoother (as mods would have to take into account or at least briefly consider dissident opinions if they existed).

And … while I specifically get why you wouldn’t want to consider OP’s opinion in particular, OP is not the only one who post links from link aggregators. And it’s worth asking if any of the folks who do so why they have done so and if they would have any objections.

In fact jordanlund brought up a good one - that maybe it’s worth allowing because we sometimes get original news articles from those sites as well. Perhaps we could allow only original new articles from those sites but not copies of articles sourced from elsewhere.

I’d bring up a second potential objection to address - sometimes MSN and Yahoo will post articles in full from WSJ, Financial Times, etc. Basically being an alternative to a paywall. (And being the most unobjectable kind of paywall bypassing as these sites presumably got permission to post those articles in full from the original source.) So maybe that means we allow only original new articles from those sites plus copies of articles sourced from paywalled sites, but otherwise not copies of articles sourced from elsewhere.

Just remember folks, this analyst has been wrong before,

He would also immediately endorse Harris as his replacement, a move that contradicted Halperin’s reporting.

It’s a huge difference, as going forward there’s a lot where the two may differ, with the past four years not exposing these potential splinters as well as the next four.

The other thing is the specter of the other guy’s re-election likely hovered over Biden’s time in the seat, while it’s likely that by the time Harris faces re-election the other guy he’s too old/in jail/etc giving Harris a freer hand.

It might not be so bad, depending on the actual choice (and that assumes that this actually happens rather than being walked back).

But for example I imagine a lot of Dems would be okay with Liz Cheney being a cabinet member.

“I’ve made it very clear that I don’t want Donald Trump to be the next president of the United States,”
Mr. Romney also holds Mr. Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, in particularly low esteem.
“I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more,” Mr. Romney told his biographer, McKay Coppins of The Atlantic, last year.

This is not too far off from Uncommitted’s non-endorsement of Harris - won’t explicitly endorse her but asks to make sure the other guy doesn’t become President.

And more similar to Obama…

Republican Ray LaHood served as secretary of transportation from 2009 to 2013 under President Barack Obama.

In fact, it was Biden who once considered going even further (though obviously this did not happen in the end), https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/02/opinion/joe-biden-2020-republicans.html

If he had went thru with that, this year’s election would be … interesting.

My guess would be Stein herself (for collaborating with Russians, even tho that’s not exactly what a “useful idiot” does).

Anyways, Stein’s actual take is more reasonable:

When I look at January 6 it was dangerous, people broke laws, they should be held accountable for breaking laws
it was a serious and problematic event,
whether the sentences were reasonable, I would have to dive more into the weeds than I have done.

Basically she would have to individually review to ensure sentences are not unduly long, harsh, etc. And there’s no commitment to actually pardon anyone, it may be no more than a check that due process was followed and punishment is not cruel and unusual, etc. (Of course, this is a politician using the usual vague words, etc.)

In fact, there’s to commitment to actually do the review, this was just in response to being asked if she thought the sentences were fair - “i don’t know, i’d have to get into the weeds to see if they were or not” perhaps with an implied “and i can’t be bothered to do that”.

There’s no standing in any state for being given something for free.

So this would be why a student getting debt relief won’t have standing to sue against the D of Ed saying that the relief is harming them…

It’s not a bad counter argument to say they should be rejecting these cases outright.

Have you read the article? The lawsuit is because an agency of Missouri - and thus the State of Missouri - is losing money due to the debt relief. (Or at least, so they claim - whether or not they’re actually losing money is something that’s up for debate.)

When the argument is,

“I’m losing money because”

A bad counterargument is,

“You can’t sue because you were getting something for free”

Why? Because it doesn’t address or refute the original statement.

A good counterargument is,

“No, actually, you weren’t losing money, because those negative numbers are just the result of an accounting trick but aren’t actual losses”

Exactly this.

Stein said … would four more years of Democratic rule, given high rental costs, the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, and attacks on civil liberties.

Huh? Dems attacking civil liberties?

“This is a very dire situation that will be continued under both Democrats and Republicans. So we say there is no lesser evil in this race,” she said.

This only makes sense regarding the line on Gaza, and even then it’s not true. Biden is having a hard time restraining Israel, that’s true, but under the other guy there wouldn’t be any attempt at restraint at all. This is why Arab Americans for Harris-Walz and Emgage Action are endorsing Harris, and even Uncommitted is encouraging votes for Harris without an explicit endorsement.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but… this isn’t quite as bad as it looks.

although clearly they could have handled the situation better.

Agreed, but I mean has been the general theme with the new owner. Everything could have been handled better, but nothing was.

Users do not technically own their handles on X.

Another reason why the fediverse is better. We have better control over this, simply by owning our own instances. Then admins on another instance can’t simply seize our usernames.

It appears the original owner hasn’t posted on X since it was called Twitter, in May 2020.

So basically they released a handle that otherwise wasn’t going to be used and would have gone to waste.

It would be better if they had a general policy about these things … but considering the owner…

as it pertains to the @X handle, the company had a good case that they should have ownership of it

Less good as the user was actively using it beforehand but the justification is also stronger in this case.

The requirements literally violate church/state seperation because it requires a specific version of the Bible that also has to contain things like the constitution and declaration of independence.

This is interesting though because if the religion is okay to incorporate those elements, then … it’s only an issue if the religion doesn’t want interference from the State, but the State tries pushing it anyways.

No one makes a bible like that because it doesn’t make any sense.

Only one fits the criteria as per the article. Basically the requirements were developed so only orange voldemort’s bible would fit. (His is also interesting because in addition to mixing church/state, politics is getting added into mix too - whereas we often see things like the Hatch Act - https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/13/politics/what-is-the-hatch-act/index.html - designed to try and keep them separate.)

This was always the danger of defending Biden’s age, and why I never got the big push to do so

Happily, we now know it was wrong. At the time, there were concerns that only Biden, with his incumbent advantage and the need to win over midwestern voters ( as was the case four years ago, https://www.vox.com/2020/5/26/21264719/joe-biden-election-coalition & https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/3/3/21155150/electoral-college-2020-bernie-sanders-joe-biden-trump-wisconsin ) would be the only Dem who could beat the GOP’s choice. And it’s not like we could swap Biden out for someone else and then tag him back in if the new choice did poorly in polling and such.

Electability was such a huge concern in 2020 that we ended up in a competition between two old white men in the 2020 Dem primary.

Again, happy to know that this was wrong, but this is the line of thinking that was occurring back then.

It shouldn’t be a big deal to say a candidate is good enough to vote for, but isn’t everything you want.

Agreed, but also recall how greatly gerrymandering has affected this election. Of course you can’t directly gerrymander the presidential election, but the gerrymandering of Congressional seats and State legislature seats, governorships, etc has had a trickle-up effect, essentially. (E.g. laws passed in the name of preventing voter fraud that make it harder to vote and reduce turnout, increasing the odds that a State will swing for the GOP in the presidential election, as per https://www.npr.org/2020/11/08/932880774/how-gerrymandering-efforts-fit-into-2020-presidential-election )

I wonder if the percentages refer to the popular vote, and it’s a toss-up because of the GOP advantage in the Electoral College?

Ah, like in https://www.npr.org/2023/09/06/1197998443/hunter-biden-gun-charge-special-counsel-indictment

Think I finally am on the same page as you on this. Thank you for educating me!

Hmm. Well, not disagreeing, but, from your perspective, what should Garland have done that he failed to do? (And under which position - as he never made it to the SC and thus couldn’t have voted down any of the things that happened there).