How come Trump gets to be as polarizing as he wants, but nobody to the left of McConnell can?

It’s a compromise position. Under Chevron, Conservative justices couldn’t strike down regulations that put limits on corporations. At the same time, more liberal justices (leftist justices don’t really exist) couldn’t reverse agencies that had been captured and start ending regulations.

This ruling only makes sense for their position if they think they can hold onto the judiciary indefinitely.

There is no option for “not genocide” at this juncture. There’s “genocide with a leash” and “genocide with no leash”. If you want something else, it has to start 2-4 years ago.

Now, I don’t want to keep voting this way. Which means when this election is up, there needs to be a concerted push for more fundamental change. Nationwide ranked choice voting is a start, but that alone won’t be enough, either.

Rove is one of the old strategists of the GOP. He knows how to play the game the traditional way, and he was pretty successful at it for a long time. He’s evil, but not dumb.

What he apparently still doesn’t get is that Trump took that playbook, noticed it has words in it, shat on it, and threw it back at Rove.

At this point, she’s already delayed things enough to push any ruling past the election. There’s less and less downside to having her removed as the date gets closer.

All this for what should be the easiest case against Trump. Did he store boxes full of classified documents on his personal property? Yes. Did he declassify them before leaving office? No. Did he have the right to store them? No. We should be done here.

Yup, we had the vaccine the whole time. Problem was testing it.

There’s one part of that article that I really want to highlight, because this needs to get actual political traction. You can make a set of vaccines that cover a broad set of viruses that are pre-tested to be safe. If one virus breaks out, you take out vax that covers its family off the shelf and tweak it to this particular virus. Then you just need effectiveness testing, which only takes a few months.

According to Florian Krammer, a vaccine scientist at Mount Sinai, you could do all of this at a cost of about $20 million to $30 million per vaccine and, ideally, would do so for between 50 and 100 different viruses — enough, he says, to functionally cover all the phylogenies that could give rise to pandemic strains in the future. (“It’s extremely unlikely that there is something out there that doesn’t belong to one of the known families, that would have been flying under the radar,” he says. “I wouldn’t be worried about that.”) In total, he estimates, the research and clinical trials necessary to do this would cost between $1 billion and $3 billion. So far this year, the U.S. government has spent more than $4 trillion on pandemic relief. Functionally, it’s a drop in the bucket, though Krammer predicts our attention, and the funding, will move on once this pandemic is behind us, leaving us no more prepared for the next one. When he compares the cost of such a project to the Pentagon’s F-35 — you could build vaccines for five potential pandemics for the cost of a single plane, and vaccines for all of them for a fraction of the cost of that fighter-jet program as a whole — he isn’t signaling confidence it will happen, but the opposite.

This would do a whole lot more good for humanity than the F-35 program, and ought to have been put into a congressional spending bill years ago.

Miami is still under water right now, correct?

We absolutely should not have such an ID. People buying votes would ask you to show them your verified vote on your phone before you get paid. There’s a long history behind anything that could let you show your vote to another person after the fact, even voluntarily, and we’ve banned them for a reason. It’s one of those problems that we’ve solved so well that people forget why those rules are there.

Morning Consult does online polling, and they seem to do OK. If you look through the FiveThirtyEight polls, you’ll notice they sometimes have an unusually large sample size, like 10k registered voters when most others have between 1k-3k. That’s because they gather a whole lot of people in their polls, but the result isn’t particularly random. They then have to apply weights to get something like a random sample.

Where do they get those weights and how do we know they’re valid? That’s a very good question. They match up with other polls, but those other polls have problems that we’re trying to get away from.

So first off, you seem to be confusing direct campaign activities with polls. Campaigns do sometimes run internal polls, but you should never trust the numbers they put out. Generally, they do want them to be accurate because they want to make strategic decisions around them. However, they aren’t obliged to release those numbers to the public, and if they do, it’s often for a specific reason; they may want to spin a narrative that they’re in a powerful position, or perhaps paint themselves as the underdog. Either way, you don’t want to rely on those numbers.

FiveThirtyEight has not historically included campaign polls in their Presidential model. They sometimes do for Congressional campaigns, because those don’t get polled as heavily and there would be a lack of data if they weren’t included (which also means they have to use other factors to correct the results to get a good model).

Most polls aren’t like that, though. They’re run by private companies.

Second, any little road bump you do to polling means fewer participants. Need to verify MFA through a text message? Whole lot of people are going to see that and promptly stop and go back to what they were doing.

Third, advertising for opt-in? No way you’re getting a randomized sample out of that.

Turns out, polling companies are not run by idiots. This is not an easy problem.

How do you prevent duplicate voting when anyone can share a link? How do you avoid spam filters, or stay within compliance of anti-spam laws?

We also have a drinking culture where doing it alone at home is considered taboo. You’re supposed to go out to a bar and do it, and then get home somehow.

Cannabis use doesn’t have that culture, not even in legalized states.

I see that you, too, have met a lot of teachers outside of the classroom as an adult.

It’s definitely a movie cut from the same cloth as Catcher in the Rye. You love it as a teenager because you vibe with the main character. Then you grow up and see how self-polluting and obnoxious the character is.

I did love the exchange between Mary McDonnell’s character and the fundie lady. “Do you know who Graham Greene is?” “Please, I think we’ve all seen Bonaza”. It has a layer of humor that couldn’t have been intentional. The fundie lady is mixing up Graham Greene with Lorne Green, and Mary McDonnell would go on to play the political half of Lorne Green’s character in the Battlestar Galactical reboot a few years later.

I thought the first one was at least fun, but had some obviously annoying parts that should have been cut from any sequel.

Then the second one comes out, and the annoying parts of the first are the entire movie of the second.

Is this extremely dangerous to our democracy?

Lots of European countries have mandatory military service. Including scandanavian countries that are sometimes held up as a social democracy ideal. It works because they are primarily defensive in nature. When invaded, you want to have a large reserve list to fall back on; people who can return to service with minimal training. Motivation isn’t usually a problem, because people tend to rally around the flag when invaded.

Conscription doesn’t work as well when you’re the aggressor. You have to convince those conscripts that they are here for a good reason. They otherwise start questioning why the hell they’re putting their life on the line for a bunch of rich idiots at the top. Even if they don’t desert, they won’t put in their full effort.

This is basically the difference between the armies of Russia and Ukraine. They’re both relying on conscripts, but one is clearly the aggressor and has motivation issues. We can also look back to America’s history in Vietnam. Lots of people both pressed into service and at home who question why the hell we’re doing this.

So what you do instead is ramp up jingoisim. Convince people they should enlist, and then it was their own “free will” to run off and die for rich idiots at the top.

Some of the people most opposed to mandatory service are the top military officers. They want a voulenteer military, not because they’re high minded or anything, but because they know what kind of wars America fights.

That is, until one party had its brain eaten by a man who doesn’t understand the playbook.

Europe as a whole never was “better” than the US, just different. People tended to focus on issues like healthcare and the social safety nets, where most European countries make better decisions than the US. However, when you take individual European countries (since “Europe” isn’t a single united country to begin with, not even with the EU), and look at issues like gay rights, abortion, or even racial issues, the US often comes out ahead.

In context it’s clear that he is saying we should have acted sooner and it was a failure for not having done so

In even larger context, Graham is one of the one’s not acting sooner by giving Trump a pass. The generous interpretation is still hypocritical, but why even grant him the generous interpretation?

You’re outright admitting that you aren’t being objective.

Yes, because Graham is a fuck head. I don’t feel the need to worship objectivity.

“We celebrated the 80th anniversary of D-Day. It was a failure. It was the 'unnecessary war, ’ described by Winston Churchill. We had a dozen chances to stop Hitler. It’s not about NATO. It’s not about American weapons in Ukraine. It’s about a megalomaniac wanting to create the Russian Empire by force of arms.”

He did say what was in the title quote.

If I was being really generous, I’d say this is a nuanced statement saying that Hitler could have been stopped in a hundred different ways before it ever got to that point. I’m not inclined to be generous to Lindsay Graham, however. Part of that is because people who were Graham’s political ancestors in Germany–people like von Hindenburg, or Georg Neithardt, the judge in the Beer Hall Putsch trial–are the one’s at the top of the list of people who could have stopped it much sooner.