I refuse to believe that; they just didn’t care, no matter what they claimed.
Oh, never mind your mental well being Doc; letting everyone know that he’s the smartest person in the thread is the clear priority.
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Yes they are… absolutely they are…
Silly, the next part is to completely do away with women’s sports, because that could hurt their fertility, which is the only thing us wimmins are good for… /s
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For those that felt so strongly that neither Harris nor Trump deserved their vote because both sucked on Israel/Gaza policy, they definitely fucked around and found out.
I have no idea if that voting bloc that abstained entirely because they didn’t want to have to involve themselves in a “Douche and Turd” contest would have actually made a substantive difference for Harris or not. But I will say that Trump’s positions here were obvious – hell him and his family (like Jared Kushner) had been talking about razing Gaza and turning it into a theme park for the rich pretty much the day the bombs started dropping after 10/7. Prior to that, Trump has bent over for Netanyahu every chance he got. Clearly he was going to be the worse choice here. Now, he has now gone to the logical extreme of proposing that America send tropps into Gaza to clear it out, to ethnically cleanse Gazans from their homeland, and to demand other Middle East countries pay for all of it.
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As much as you mean that sarcastically, wasn’t it a Project 2025 or at least GOP talking point about wanting to have more women home making babies because there weren’t enough white people?
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That argument may work with Alito and Thomas, because they’re fully in the cult of MAGA, but I don’t think Gorsuch, Roberts, Kavanaugh, and certainly Barrett, will buy that argument. I skimmed the brief. It’s full of a lot of logical errors. For one thing, they keep insisting that, at the time the 14th Amendment was enacted and for awhile afterwards, no one interpreted it to mean that children born of people here illegally would gain citizenship. The biggest legal problem with that argument is that the United States didn’t begin restricting immigration until 1875. Prior to that, we didn’t restrict immigration at all. We restricted citizenship. And sometimes we kicked people out of the country. But we did not restrict who could come here to begin with. The concept of an “illegal alien” did not exist when the 14th Amendment was drafted and ratified. To argue that the framers of that amendment intended it to exclude a class of people who did not exist at the time is asinine. That first immigration law, by the way, only restricted criminals and forced Asian labor. Seven years later, we banned all Chinese immigrants. The thing is, I can’t imagine any of the current Justices believing that that law wasn’t unconstitutional. Every few years after that, new immigration laws were passed, but we didn’t start imposing limits on the number of immigrants from a country until 1921. In other words, our modern idea of immigration, where you had to get permission ahead of time to come here, didn’t begin until then.
All this to say that trying to figure out how the framers of the 14th Amendment would view its applicability to the class of people today called undocumented or illegal aliens would require complete speculation. We have no fucking clue how they would have viewed it. In that case, we just have to go by the words. And the words say anyone born here is a citizen, with the only exception being people who are not subject to our laws, which is clearly what “jurisdiction” meant to the framers of the 14th Amendment. There is no factual basis for this idea of sovereign allegiance or whatever bullshit they’ve cocked up to justify Trump’s clearly unconstitutional order.
Now, that doesn’t mean everything is all hunky dorry. My fear is not that SCOTUS will uphold Trump’s order. My fear is that Trump will just ignore SCOTUS if they don’t rule in his favor. Until then, though, I have hope.
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Yeah, doing nothing at all rather than doing something small, a little bit at time, is really not working out the way they claimed they thought it would.
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So, the U.S. is going to occupy a beautiful new Gaza and the Middle East will pay for it?
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Today there were a bunch of protests around the country.
This is the one in Lansing.
There’s video in the news article from a real piece of work, a republican state representative walked through the crowd.
The comments from his X video are pretty sad and unhinged.
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I mean I fully get the frustration and disillusionment from the Uncommitteds and others who were pissed at Biden and the Democrats over their lack of substantive action against Netanyahu’s war crimes. The witholding votes for Biden during the primaries was a powerful symbolic gesture that brought a lot of attention for their cause while not actually causing any harm in the process.
Any sympathy I for the Uncommitted Movement in particular was erased in their statement yesterday that went into “both sides” and explicitly blamed Democrats for what Trump is now trying to do. That’s some high horse bullshit if I ever saw it.
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I’m certainly hoping that they do. With barbs, knobs &/or a knurled shaft.
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I’ve seen a lot of rage directed at third-party voters and people who were critical of Dems before the election. It’s understandable, to a point-- but if you added up every third-party vote cast in 2024 (including the Libertarians and other right-wing parties) it wouldn’t have been enough to sway the Electoral College votes. It might have impacted two of the swing states, according to some analyses I’ve seen on Bluesky (which I haven’t fact-checked yet), but again, it wouldn’t have changed the final outcome.
I can empathize, again, to a point; there’s been a bottomless well of rage and despair in me for months now, which I’ve yet to find a way to cope with. Finding somebody to blame for a situation (right, wrong, or otherwise) can create an illusion of consolation when times are tough.
But I feel like the endless bickering and vote-shaming doesn’t really accomplish all that much. The voting totals are past and unchangeable. For me, the important thing is what we can do about what’s going on RIGHT NOW. I’d rather worry about the rest after we’re safely through the worst of it, and to get through it, we’re going to have to work together. That’s kinda hard to do when we’re at each others’ throats. It’s hard to extend patience and compassion when we’re all hurting-- and we’re all hurting-- but maybe we need to try a little harder?
And as far as the Democrats… don’t get me started. I do think they share some portion of the blame for what’s going on. They knew which way the wind was blowing, labeled trump’s election as an existential threat to democracy… and completely failed to enact any guardrails or barriers to bad behavior before trump came to power. They built up the law enforcement agencies (police, ICE, etc.) that trump’s Fourth Reich will use to oppress the people. And the supposed “opposition party” isn’t doing anything substantial to stop anything. They’re voting to confirm his nominees; they’re still attempting to “work for bipartisan solutions;” they’re saying a lot of pretty, pretty, useless words and relying on custom and law when TPTB are ignoring all of it (even the Constitution they swore to uphold) and plunging ahead like a bull in a china shop. In my most humble and irrelevant opinion, until and unless they actually do something– obstruct and filibuster in session, utilize the Federal police to clear unauthorized parties from departments they have no right to be in, chain themselves to office doors, get arrested protesting, what-the-hell-ever-- the Democrats can go fuck themselves.
We’re on our own, I think. We’re going to have to get each other through, because the politicians aren’t coming to save us.
As always, YMMV.
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There is some movement on the filibuster front, at least:
Peters is even taking part, even though he (and Slotkin) were both still voting to confirm Trump cabinet appointees yesterday (I left Slotkin an angry message about that today). I’m actually shocked that Peters is showing any backbone now, I figured he had checked out and is just looking for the most lucrative position after office at this point.
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I don’t disagree with your argument’s premise, but I think the decision will be more venal.
Yes, Thomas and Scalito are fully on board with fascist America. But the rest? I don’t think they will want to give up their position of power determining what is constitutional and what isn’t, what is legal and what isn’t. Letting Trumplestiltskin just decide what is constitutional, what is legal, completely takes away their power.
Of course, I also think we’ll face an Andrew Jackson moment, so that’s going to keep me up at night.
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In theory you can actually run a war at a net profit if you’re able to loot enough. It’s against international law and not very plausible in an era of bombers rather than horse archers, but neither of those would stop these assholes from thinking they could.
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If a recall petition shows up for Slotkin, I’m signing it. WTAF. I didn’t vote for her so she could enable the orange asswipe and Heritage Foundation’s evil plans. She was sent to DC to stand against fuckery. Peters sucks, he needs to be replaced by Whitmer or Duggan.
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Yes, hence, my comment. 
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Next: the 1st amendment doesn’t ban state religion, it only protects the king’s duty from congressionl interference.
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