The Frankish Reich

There's just no rhyme or reason to what happens in the elite colleges. I had a kid get into an Ivy, get rejected by a "lesser" Ivy, and waitlisted at places like Boston University - a fine (albeit way too expensive for what it is) college, but hardly on the level of the others. It's a crapshoot. Kids now may apply to 20 or more colleges. We'd be better off if the elite colleges just had some kind of grades/test scores cutoff and then held a lottery to see who gets in. (But that would mean requiring test scores, which is becoming the latest no-no in this crazy world)

Right. The fake electors thing was the single biggest threat to our system of government.

If our "anti-Marxist" commenters here would actually read Marx, they would be converted to Marxism in a week. Why? Well, because Marx was all about the conspiracies of the capitalists. In fact, he was one of the first (and probably still the best) at that particular type of analysis.

It's UNPRESIDENTED!

These are fantastic credentials. Congratulations to her, and with this record of achievement (demonstrating intelligence and hard work) she will no doubt do extremely well at whatever college she attends, and then in her career. But we have to be realistic about exactly how competitive admissions is at these colleges. It is difficult to compare to other applicants in the Ivy League or public Ivies applicant pools, except for the ACT score: a 29 was in the 91st percentile. Again, solidly top 10 percent. People don't realize exactly how competitive these schools are, and this is even with the now-infamous race/legacy/recruited athlete/major donor advantages. In other words, nearly the entire entering class is just about perfect. Harvard Admissions Statistics There are three critical numbers when considering your admissions chances: ACT scores, GPA, and acceptance rate. All these combine to tell you what you scores are required to get into Harvard University. Average ACT: 34 The average ACT score composite at Harvard is a 34. The 25th percentile ACT score is 33, and the 75th percentile ACT score is 35. In other words, a 33 places you below average, while a 35 will move you up to above average. There's no absolute ACT requirement at Harvard, but they really want to see at least a 33 to have a chance at being considered.

I prefer the latest piece by "Jennifer Galardi," a health/fitness/yoga writer. This one brings a special kind of prognostication skill to the table. Skip it at your own risk! https://www.19fortyfive.com/2023/07/larry-elder-the-next-president-of-the-united-states/

Aren't you kind of sad to see the band breaking up? Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Lin Wood ... we will never see the likes of that team again.

Chris Farley/Matt Foley, is that you? The CNN reporter just said (how could we make this up?): "he was living in a van down by the DC jail." "We've got these losers surrounded!" Or more accurately, "I'm a loser who's now surrounded!"

I don't understand why certain posters here think that a dozen or more states are run by commies, yet they think that the American flag, representing the unity of the 50 states, should be celebrated. Some of those posters probably favor reducing the number of stars on the flag to the 30 red states only.

Does that adjust for my 2 marriages by the age of 40?

Meanwhile ... I'm more on board with this optimistic, pro-America sentiment: Every generation launches a new competitor to America and the people who don’t like capitalism and America’s individualist, free market economy trumpet that now the American way is being left in the dust. In the progressive era it was the Germans (how did that work out?), then it was the Russians (remember Sputnik?), then it was the Japanese (buying up Rockefeller center! the horror!), then it was the Chinese (look at those high speed rail lines!). My message to Americans is to double down on America. Double down on immigration, entrepreneurship, innovation, building for tomorrow, free markets, free speech and individualism and America will take all new competitors as it has taken all comers in the past. The world should be more like America not the other way around. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/07/happy-july-4th.html Implicit in Make America Great Again is exactly what Big Blitz said -- the idea that America today is horrible, sucks big time, has no future. I guess I disagree. We've got problems, but in many respects no other country can compete.

I dunno, maybe its just me, but you don't exactly sound proud to be an American yourself ...

And c. 2023 too. See Frazier, Leslie.

I see a disturbing trend of agreement on many issues ... I'll make sure to say something ultra-lefty to reset the old Crossfire dynamic. Otherwise this will get boring and PPP will be canceled. Interesting, particularly Sweden. You are correct that a stronger social welfare state in some ways allows for this.

Look, there's nothing wrong with doing something -- setting up a website that won't handle requests for a gay marriage site, going into a cake-makers shop and announcing "we're a gay couple and we want you to bake a cake honoring our relationship," etc. -- for the purposes of setting up civil rights litigation. Either way. Rosa Parks never would've gotten anywhere if the courts had said "but you typically drive a car to work and don't need to take the bus, so we don't have to bother with your case." The point here is about standing. Rosa Parks actually was told to move to the back of the bus. There was an actual person directly impacted by the law/policy. We're not so sure about the 303 case ...

We're still not sure. All I can say is this case has a weird history. It didn't start off the normal way: website designer approached by gay couple asking her to create a website for their wedding, designer refuses on religious grounds, gay couple files a complaint, issue gets elevated all the way to the Supreme Court. Instead, it was this: website designer sets up shop, says "based on my religious beliefs, I will not accept jobs for creating gay marriage websites," designer asks Colorado to validate that this is allowed under Colorado anti-discrimination laws, validation denied, then SHE sues. We don't know the rest of the story, but someone she claims asked her to create the gay marriage website says he never did so, and that he's married already. To a woman. This all goes to the standing issue a lot of people have been talking about. The Supreme Court doctrine on standing is getting very confusing. It is now kind of like "when is a catch a catch in the NFL?" The answer: when the refs say so.

True. Raising the federal minimum wage would have zero impact where I live, even if there weren't a state minimum wage. Labor shortages have driven starting wages well over $15/hour in just about every job out there. But raising the federal minimum wage in Arkansas or Mississippi would severely harm the ability of those states to attract new business, create new jobs, and get toward a place where their local labor markets drive up wages to something more like the booming parts of the country. It's time to repeal federal minimum wage laws entirely.

Not gonna happen. People bring their political beliefs with them.

It started out as "I have a summer charity golf tournament, and it just so happens that I scheduled it for a Trump course." Either as a reaction to criticism, or as an expression of Poyer's true intent, it is not now something that is implicitly political, but something that is expressly political.

Who's bitching? I said I don't care about his politics. I like him as a football player. I'm saying that he did, in fact, double down on the political implications of his tourney. It started as a charity that just so happened to be scheduled for Trump's Doral. His original sponsor was uncomfortable with that. So he found a substitute sponsor that is overtly political. It's a fact, not an opinion, not bitching. Some will love it, some will hate it, I will watch him on Sundays in fall and ignore him in the summer.

This may surprise you: I don't think "The Wall" was necessarily an evil or even a bad proposal. We went through phases of runaway (quite literally) illegal immigration across the southwest border, and "walls" (or fences, or other barriers) were reasonably effective in controlling this, at least for some period of time before the smugglers adapted. Here's the problem: smugglers now have a different model entirely. Classic "illegal immigration" in the sense of "sneaking across the border, making it inland, and then blending in" is no longer what happens. The new model is to exploit the asylum laws. The vast majority of illegal entrants now don't try to escape into the interior; they immediately surrender to the Border Patrol and claim asylum. This overwhelms the system, which was simply not built to deal with a hundred thousand asylum claimants per month. The new smuggling model exploits that, and yes, the Biden Administration (and to greater or lesser extents, every administration since Bush 43) adopted more lax approaches to the law that facilitated the development of the new smuggling model. So ... we need to look at the asylum laws and treaties. As we've seen, it isn't just a U.S. problem - look at the craziness of migrant boats from safe countries (France) to other safe countries (the U.K.) thought to be more accepting to new immigrants, or the horrific sinking of a modern-day slave ship off the coast of Greece last week. It bothers me that no developed world leader has stepped up to say we need an international conference on how to update the asylum system to best (1) ensure that truly persecute people have the ability to seek safety; but (2) doesn't incentivize the international human smuggling trade. So as for The Wall: it just doesn't respond to the facts on the ground now. If someone floats across the Rio Grande with an inner tube, they are in U.S. territory before they'd ever hit a wall on the Texas side, and yes, we have to (under the law and under basic human decency) rescue them and then put them into our legal process. So we are better off not talking about easy soundbites ("build the Wall" or "the very idea of The Wall is offensive to everything we stand for"), but moving on to actual policy/legal responses that will break this new smuggling reality. And yes, part of that is working with (squeezing, if you prefer) Mexico to do its proper part to stop smuggling across it's vast territory. Easier said than done when the smugglers actually act as the real government on the ground in large parts of that country. Like much of American politics today, the tendency is to reduce a complex issue to a slogan. You are for the wall or against the wall. I am for stronger immigration enforcement, and "the wall" would have a minimal impact on that today. Is there any candidate now (including Biden) putting forth a realistic plan to address the new human smuggling reality?

Funny how Paul Ryan's budget bill passed then (budget reconciliation is not subject to the filibuster) without any "make Mexico pay" funding mechanism. It was campaign b.s. Trump will now no doubt blame all the "RINOs" for ruining his half-baked ideas. The truth is he didn't seriously pursue them. So ... how was Mexico going to be made to pay? And how does reprogramming U.S. taxpayer money to building the wall cause Mexico to pay? There was a way to do it if he had really meant what he said. It was campaign silliness, not a serious policy proposal.

Well, I gotta hand it to Poyer for doubling down here. I had not idea what the new sponsor - "PublicSq." - was, so I checked. It's an attempt to create an alterna-Amazon that vets merchants for their adherence to "conservative" principles. Apparently Donald Trump Jr. is an investor. You now know the facts. Support him, decry him, or ignore his politics (my choice; he's a football player, I watch him play football and really don't care about his politics).

The Wall/Mexico will pay for it: this is one of the strangest things about Trump's presidency. Of course Mexico wasn't going to take its own government funds to build a wall. I always understood this to mean that the Trump Administration - which had control of Congress! - would enact tariffs or probably a special excise tax on remittances to Mexico to create a dedicated fund to pay for "border security," i.e., a wall. And then ... no such tax (which could have been sold as a tax on Mexicans) was ever proposed, not even in Paul Ryan's huge tax package. Instead they tried the shady repurposing of U.S. taxpayer money, which was shot down as it was initially proposed, and that would have clearly been United States taxpayers paying for it anyway. A lot of people get so worked up about Trump's abuses that they forget how inept the Trump Administration was in getting things done.

Isn't anyone going to give us a visual assessment of Dawkins weight and conditioning just 71 days before opening game kickoff?