Politics 2025

[Buster's Uncle]

Weeelll - nobody was INVENTING a thing w/ presidential immunity.  There's a legal principal that's been there all along, and a look at why Julius Ceasar crossed the Rubicon tells you why - the Cato crowd was going to sue him off the face of the Earth the second he lost the immunity of the proconsul office, so he had to resort to desperate measures.  It's necessary for it to be difficult to harass an official going about officiating, see also Clinton and HIS Cato-suing problem.

They just went and took it to ridiculous lengths.


It IS good that it tends to protect Bakrama from something stupid....

[Lorizael]

Ceasar crossing the Rubicon was bad, actually. He was an imperialist warmonger who conquered large parts of Europe with an army personally loyal to him and then set his sights on Rome.

[Buster's Uncle]

I didn't say overthrowing the republic was a good thing - I said petty, petty reactionaries harassed him into doing it in self defense.

Cato sucks.

[Lorizael]

Leaders should be harassed, especially when they have authoritarian and cult of personality tendencies. Honestly I think we should get rid of "leaders" and mostly just have boring anonymous department heads. Gotta curb the tendency for people to want their elected officials to be inspiring saviors they follow to the ends of the earth. The current guy certainly isn't, obviously, but Obama wasn't, either.

[Buster's Uncle]

I don't disagree with a word of that - I was explaining to a filthy Belgian.  -And it's true.  We don't want the trap Clinton sprung being set, do we, and however bad it is to have nazis in our country, we can't fight them by bending the system, but rather trying to preserve it -at least the good parts left- and get rid of the nazis somehow.

[Buster's Uncle]

Kato, btw, is win and awesome.  The Green Hornet's chauffer is a Kato of another color.

[Geo]

Leaders should be harassed, especially when they have authoritarian and cult of personality tendencies.

Are you saying we should harass our residential hiAppalachian, Lori?

[Trenacker]

When they issued the decision, I got the impression the Supreme Court punted on [Sleezebag]'s ballot eligibility so as to avoid accusations of rank partisanship. The wanted to claim that they had deferred to the people even though, to the best of my understanding, it appeared [Sleezebag] had very clearly met the criteria for ballot disqualification. That said, I am not a lawyer.

Subsequent decisions suggest to me that Thomas and Scalia, at least, have come to believe in conservative propaganda hook, line, and sinker. Their opinions are clearly designed to enable and protect a Republican imperial presidency. Scalia in particular is apparently hoping that [Sleezebag] will enact a Christian Dominionist agenda. I see no other way to find consistency of approach, or even logic, in their decisions. Roberts seems not to be far behind. Although in the past I think he has tried to vote in ways that allow him to pretend non-partisanship, it seems to me that, when the Republican agenda is on the line, he breaks right. And it's patently obvious that Thomas is bought and paid for, although I think he is only just slightly less arch-conservative than Scalia.

This is compounded by the fact that tens of millions of Americans don't actually seem to care about freedom of speech, freedom of religion, or separation of church and state. Every day, Donald [Sleezebag] speaks for them. If they find that somebody else's presence is off-putting, either because that person lives a different lifestyle, has opposing political views, or is a scapegoat for their resentments, they want them literally gone--and they don't care if that person suffers or dies. So the Court has a lot of room to maneuver.

Republicans don't care about Jeffrey Epstein, his crimes, or those of [Sleezebag] in the sense we imagine. Part of this is because Fox News and other [Sleezebag]-friendly outlets suppress stories unfavorable to [Sleezebag], lessening the extent to which his supporters actually get to see his manifest deficiencies of intelligence, morality, leadership, management, or mental stability. Part of this is because the propaganda about Democrats is so effective that no actual Republican will ever do anything nearly as bad as an imaginary Democrat--and this gives an important escape hatch for anyone ever confronted by compelling evidence of [Sleezebag]'s wrongdoing by allowing them to claim they had only a binary choice between bad ([Sleezebag]) and much worse. Part of this is because a lot of Republican voters just like that [Sleezebag] is prepared to stroke their egos and only use policy as a shield to discourage questions about their vote. If it looks like they can use Epstein as political ammunition to press the case for their side, that excites and delights them because it makes them look smart, wise, or virtuous, but when it becomes inconvenient, you quickly discover that they don't actually want blind justice.

[Buster's Uncle]

Former NC Governor -and democratic presidential running mate contender- Roy Cooper is reported to be about to announce for a Senate run circa Monday.

I'm not convinced he won't be another Democrat with not enough fight in him -as I said on page one, an amiable presence- but not-a-nazi with such name recognition as to have a really strong shot?  VERY good news.

[Trenacker]

I forgive the Democrats for engaging in limp stunts because, given their lack of control in any of the three branches of government, all they have left is their voice.

That said, [Sleezebag] appears to be governing so ineptly that Democrats will probably be returned to legislative control by swing voters in the 2026 mid-terms.

[Buster's Uncle]

Limp stunts?  Pray elucidate.

I doubt there's any probably to it.  Losing congress mid-term is pretty traditional, though the Dems will have to be smart fighting a movement they don't understand.

[Trenacker]

Right now, I think everyone is down on Democrats.

Conservatives still have every incentive to hammer Democrats for political reasons, and to resist the idea that [Sleezebag] is failing on his own merits. Given the dominance of the GOP right now, however, I think it's going to be hard for them to argue that Democrats were genuinely to blame if people are still fed up by 2026. Plus, the conservative media does a great job of strawmanning the Democratic Party for conservative and, increasingly, swing voters, partly because conservative media is eating an ever-increasing share of the media marketplace, and partly because Democrats often feel compelled to defend coalition members even when doing so is politically disadvantageous--because it is natural, morally right, and also often necessary inasmuch as certain groups are over-represented in the Democratic Party apparatus.

The Far Left and people who sat at home are upset with Democratic Party moderates, who they see as failing to have stopped [Sleezebag]. This always strikes me as nonsense. When you're politically powerless, you can only really undertake performative outrage, especially when the other side has no real agenda to try to influence.

Voters of all stripes also see Democratic weakness right now and naturally feel Democrats can do nothing for them, so the sense that Democrats are feckless and worthless and not to be trusted to fix anything is a self-licking ice cream cone, and I think pollsters should be careful of over-stating things. For example, I think Democrats are really powerless to fix things right now, but I still intend to vote for them in 2026.

[Buster's Uncle]

Dunno, I blame Nancy Pelosi for a LOT of wrong moves; Cheney Bund collaboration back in the day, through to the outrageous stupidity last year.

If they know for a fact -that didn't actually go public to my knowledge- that Joe's really gone stupid, it was too late to push him out like that that late in the cycle.  The smart play would have been to roll the dice on him campaigning and push hard for a strong chief of staff and general good staffing/handlers, to probably way outdo the Reagan administration, which suffered horribly for six years from no one really being in charge after he went senile.  But we pulled through that one, albeit painfully, and could have this.  Instead, we got the worst of all worlds.

-A lot of that's what I thought at the time, not just hindsight.

[Buster's Uncle]

Roy has indeed announced for Senate: https://abc11.com/post/roy-cooper-us-senate-former-north-carolina-governor-announces-bid/17274141/

[Lorizael]

...Democrats often feel compelled to defend coalition members even when doing so is politically disadvantageous...

lol? Democrats eat their own and hate everyone who isn't their precise brand of left-ish. Republicans stand behind every Republican and loudly proclaim that terrible behavior X has always been core to the party.