Raptorpat

NEVR FORGET

Happy birthday @scoobdogand @Stonergoth187! hope you guys do fun things, etc.

It's just the oral arguments, people won't pay attention until the decisions are released in like June.

what the god damn heck

Impeachment is the correct answer. Their decisions will always be subject to appellate review, and I'm sure there are plenty of informal ways to pressure judges to step down voluntarily (like Breyer definitely didn't retire on his own).

My understanding is that what makes Lyman key is that it was the fallback position for regrouping after the northern offensive, and Russian commanders basically abandoned their guys there. So if Ukraine surrounds them and they surrender, yes Ukraine liberates the city but more strategically it knocks out a lot of Russia's fighting capacity in the north.

merged for your viewing pleasure

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-still-do-not-show-a-gop-bounce-back/

The assumption that if Hannity and now Kushner are attacking him in this, Trump wants to knock DeSantis down a peg because he intends on running.

happy birthday country frylock

FL and TX passed laws declaring social media platforms as common carriers and prohibiting content 'censorship'. The platforms sued and the two circuit courts went different ways, creating a 'circuit split' which can only be resolved by SCOTUS. Meanwhile, blue states are requiring those same platforms to have anti-discrimination and anti-hate speech procedures, which is the opposite of censorship. The best result would probably just be Facebook to come out and say 'social media was a mistake and we're shutting everything down.'

I was just told that he's not even spending FL taxpayer dollars to traffick migrants/refugees out of Florida. He's using FL taxpayer dollars to traffick migrants/refugees out of Texas. On top of not eliciting the intended reaction (liberal hypocrisy), it just all seems so ripe to blow up right in his face from every angle.

It's now the union's job to sell this agreement to their members before the ratification vote. If the ratification fails, not only are the negotiations back at square one, but the union leaders are effectively handed a vote of "no confidence". It feels similar to the fallout from the entertainment workers' near-strike.

mirror mode

Given all post-Dobbs special elections (discounting Alaska) saw Dem over-performances, alongside the Kansas referendum, and combined with Biden's reversal of fortunes, it seems more like if the elections were today, the Republicans would win a bare majority based only on the fact that FL and OH were allowed to shit all over their congressional maps but NY and Maryland weren't. I can elaborate on any of the non-abortion stuff over in the midterms thread. But take Michigan for example. Their new redistricting commission made an actually competitive congressional map, and competitive statehouse maps for the first time since like the 1980s. On top of that, the top half of the GOP gubernatorial candidate pool got tossed from the ballot all for petitioning fraud or whatever, so they have a comparatively weak top-of-ticket. Now combine that with the fact that the Dems got an abortion protection referendum on the ballot (the court overrode Republican ministerial vetoes over spacing errors, because desperation). If you take that whole cocktail in a post-Dobbs environment with a Kansas-style abortion referendum, it's possibly for a disproportionate crushing. (Also possible that all polling is wrong and nothing matters.)

Though, according to this article, the Senate GOP are claiming he's on his own with this one. https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/13/grahams-abortion-ban-senate-gop-00056423 Maybe less an intentional pivot and more a favor to that constituency? idk, but the extent the other Senators are distancing themselves from it, the more it appears to be a gift to the Democrats.

It's to pivot as much dialogue as possible to just ban on what they consider to be "late-term", because that is less unpopular across the board and doesn't completely abandoning their religious allies. Their most engaged activist constituency for decades has been the religious right. This is the one issue they care about (not literally, but it's their #1), and 40 years of squeaky wheel gets the grease. Basically, once it was delegated down to the states, a bunch of statehouse Republicans who will never have to worry about their seats flipping (or losing their GOP majorities) due to gerrymandering immediately pulled the trigger because the only thing they have to worry about is pleasing their partner activists who have been waiting 40 years for this and who decide whether Republicans get primaried. So then the unsafe Republicans and unsafe majorities elsewhere are weighed down by that anchor and suddenly a wild pivot appears.

I'd speculate that the Kansas results and everything else we've seen triggered a real fear amongst those preoccupied with not-losing (more so than those having actual philosophical pro-life principals), leading to a complete policy reset on abortion because they fear the true believers will walk them off a cliff.