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1 year agoHey, I’ve been doing this 30 years and just learned it today, you have NOTHING to feel bad about. :)
Jordan Lund
Hey, he’s like, just this guy, you know?
- 17 Posts
- 683 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 11th, 2023
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Or cheese.
1·1 year agoI would love to teach again, but aside from the fact that, physically, standing and talking for 8 hours a day is outside my reach now, I would also take probably a 66% to 75% paycut to do it. :(
3·1 year agoYup. I, personally, want 100% vote by mail. We’ve been doing it in my state since 2000, it’s safe, effective, results in high turnout and engagement, really nothing to hate.
Oh, except Republicans lose when more people vote. ;)
The Supreme Court was thrown into chaos because republicans refused to appoint any justices under Obama
Now, now, Obama DID get Sotomayor and Kagan. McConnell only blocked Merrick Garland.
That being said, in my lifetime, Democratic Presidents have only put FIVE members on the court, Republicans got 15. Carter is the one who drew a blank.
Nixon/Ford got as many in their two terms as all the Democrats since then COMBINED.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/members_text.aspx
Ginsburg, Ruth Bader - Clinton
Breyer, Stephen G. - Clinton
Sotomayor, Sonia - Obama
Kagan, Elena - Obama
Jackson, Ketanji Brown - BidenBurger, Warren Earl - Nixon
Blackmun, Harry A. - Nixon
Powell, Lewis F., Jr. - Nixon
Rehnquist, William H. - Nixon
Stevens, John Paul - Ford
O’Connor, Sandra Day - Reagan
Scalia, Antonin - Reagan
Kennedy, Anthony M. - Reagan
Souter, David H. - Bush, G. H. W.
Thomas, Clarence - Bush, G. H. W.
Roberts, John G., Jr. - Bush, G. W.
Alito, Samuel A., Jr. - Bush, G. W.
Gorsuch, Neil M. - Trump
Kavanaugh, Brett M. - Trump
Barrett, Amy Coney - Trump
And Trump should have been removed when he was impeached.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/13/politics/mitch-mcconnell-acquit-trump/index.html
It’s less the economic definition than it is this:
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/banana-republic
noun - Usually Disparaging.
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a small, poor country, often reliant on a single export or limited resource, governed by an authoritarian regime and characterized by corruption and economic exploitation by foreign corporations conspiring with local government officials.
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any exploitative government that functions poorly for its citizenry while disproportionately benefiting a corrupt elite group or individual.
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Unlike the House, Senate races are state wide and can’t be gerrymandered.
It’s going to take a major effort focused on reforming the Supreme Court to flip those seats, but looking at 2020, we flipped BOTH seats in Georgia which is about as red as it gets.
We need to look forward to 2024, take back the House and get a 60 vote majority in the Senate, along with the White House…maybe then, things will change.
I dunno if “serious problems” is quite it. There are 535 active members of the House and Senate, 50 active Governors, and lord only knows how many living former members of those positions.
Each case is a political tragedy, but coming up with a couple dozen cases out of multiple hundreds of people doesn’t seem endemic.
One the author seems to have missed was the 28 month long DOJ investigation into Democratic Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber for influence peddling.
Ultimately, it resulted in 0 charges, but Kitzhaber was forced to resign and was hit with multiple ethics violations.
https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2015/02/gov_john_kitzhaber_resigns_ami.html
It’s pretty clear you have no concept of how our system of government works.
The Supreme Court is the top tier of the Judicial Branch, the 3rd “Separate but Equal” part of our government.
You can’t just decide “Well, I don’t like you, I don’t have to do what you say.” Doing so cracks the very foundation of what our government is built on.
Same if someone decided to ignore the President (Executive Branch) or a ruling coming from the House and Senate (Legislative Branch).
The only difference is the President has the ability to sign or veto laws passed by Congress, and Congress can over-ride a veto.
There is no similar constraint on Supreme Court rulings. They are the arbiter of what is or is not Constitutional. That’s their job. If you disagree with that, your options are 1) pass a new amendment or 2) a Constitutional convention.
Whether I like or dislike their definition of the 2nd amendment is irrelevant. It’s THEIR definition. It’s settled law. My liking it or disliking it doesn’t change that.
Want to change it? Make sure we have Democratic Presidents exclusively for, oh, the next 20 to 25 years or so. Hope we don’t have another block like they did with Merrick Garland.
Thomas (75) and Alito (73) are the next likely two to age out. If that happens under a Democratic President, it could shift the balance from 6-3 to 4-5. Given ages of court deaths and retirees that’s probably 10-15 years from now.
The next three though are Sotomayor (69), Roberts (68) and Kagan (63). Say what you want about Roberts, but he has served as a key swing vote, siding with the “liberal” judges on multiple occasions. Losing any or all of them under a Republican President would lock in a conservative court long past my lifetime.
Kavanaugh (58), Gorsuch (56), Jackson (53) and Barrett (51) could all be with us for 30 years or more. So that’s a baked in 3:1 disadvantage until maybe 2053? I’m 54 myself, so it’s unlikely I’ll live to see this.
I can’t help you if you continue denying the reality of the situation.
The highest court in the country has ruled. That’s it. It’s over. They are going to make more gun rulings and I guarantee it will get worse.
The court DOES NOT CARE what you, or I, or anyone else thinks about their rulings, they don’t have to because they know there’s absolutely no check on their power. They can’t be overturned, the House and Senate won’t impeach them, and Biden will never pack the court (if he did, the next Republican President would just re-pack it the other way.)
They might get overturned in 50 years, like Roe did, but that seems highly unlikely given how the court is becoming more conservative, not less conservative. In my life there have only been 5 Democratic appointees to the court compared to 14 Republican ones.
I’m not asking you to LIKE it. I’m asking you to acknowledge that the court and it’s rulings are not illegitimate. They are a function of our founding document and denying that is to deny what it means to be an American.
You can’t do that without throwing out the Constitution, where all these entities are defined.
You’re free to not like it, it doesn’t change the law of the land.
Good question, no clue.
Could have just got orange masks…
The ruling is the ruling, there’s only one way to over-ride the Supreme Court and that’s by passing a new amendment.
Here’s what needs to happen:
Get 290 votes in the House. The same people who don’t have 218 right now to fund the government.
Get 67 in the Senate. The same people who can’t get 60 to over-ride a filibuster.
Get ratification from 38/50 states. In a country where 25 + DC voted Biden and 25 voted Trump. You’d need all 25 Biden states + 13 Trump states.
Alternately, we could bag the whole thing and write a new Constitution, but again, the new one needs to get ratified by the states, and between the states who want to outlaw abortion and the states who want to outlaw guns, nobody is going to agree on it.
as long as the hospice medical director or other hospice doctor recertifies that you’re terminally ill.
And all it takes is one paperwork failure to lose coverage.
they aren’t calling for banning ALL guns, they’re calling for banning certain types of guns.
From a rights oriented perspective “that’s how it starts”. Especially for the folks online calling for an Australia style ban.
people are eventually just going to eliminate the 2A altogether, which would be harmful IMO.
That would require a new amendment and that’s just not possible given the current governmental dysfunction. You’d have to start by getting 290 votes in the House, the same folks who needed 15 tries to get the 218 votes needed to decide who their own leader would be. :(
Instead of insisting that a sentence written hundreds of years ago means you can do whatever you want with no restrictions, maybe come up with a reasonable argument as to why it is important for our democracy for you to bear those particular arms.
People confuse semi-automatic rifles for fully automatic rifles. I was uneducated myself, until I went out and bought an AR-15 myself and ran through a training class with it. I felt I needed that experience to speak intelligently about it.
Like any other semi-automatic, it fires one time every time you pull the trigger. It’s not dramatically different from other kinds of rifles, other than it automatically ejects the shell and loads the next round instead of the shooter having to do it manually with a lever, pump or bolt.
But man, have you SEEN some of those non semi-auto shooters?
Pump:
https://youtube.com/shorts/TUSjkwGopdw
Bolt:
Did they really “fall” for it though? Or did they just spread it because it fit their agenda?