The Frankish Reich

I don’t often agree with you, but, umm, yeah, choosing Kamala as VP was kind of the best insurance policy against impeachment (or that 25th Amendment thing) that any 78 year old nominee could buy.

Yeah, get the damn government off our marginal farmland backs! But please wait until I cash that EU subsidy check. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/20211118STO17609/eu-agriculture-statistics-subsidies-jobs-production-infographic

All true. I have no problem with Jordan Palmer saying “the most talented I’ve ever seen in my time watching football.” But his time may only cover the tail end of Steve Young’s career, and he may only know of Bert Jones and Roman Gabriel as names on some old guy’s list of something or other. Watch some YouTubes of those guys! My dad always did the same thing to me as I do to Palmer today, saying “if you’d seen Mickey Mantle when he first came up you wouldn’t be talking like that about Barry Bonds…”

Yeah, let’s read the damn transcript before accusing Trump of telling a Sec of State to “find” him some extra votes!! Oops, on second thought: ”All I want to do is this. I just want to FIND 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have (sic; he seems to mean “one more than the count shows we lost by”) because we won the state.” Damn liberal media, making up stuff like saying that Trump asked the Sec of State to go out and “find” 11,780 more Trump votes!

We should try to bring back all US citizens who are being held in custody based on anything other than open/transparent criminal process. The Griner case started that way, but it certainly isn’t going that way. And if you trust the Russian judicial system, well, that says a lot more about you than it does about Griner.

Astoundingly juvenile take. I don’t care about her politics. She is an American. To the extent she violated Russian law, we’ll, fine, Russia has every right to treat her the same way they treat Russian citizens trying to take a small quantity of cannabis oil out of Russia. But is that what’s going on here? Denied release on bail? Seems like she’s getting “special” treatment to use her as leverage. And that’s something we should care about.

I was waiting for the most asinine hot take on this latest shooting. I am pleased to announce that I need wait no more. https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation-where-this-r-1849141086 Indeed.

I know that’s a popular talking point. But I don’t see it. Look at these creeps. Was there any “masculinity” there to wring out of them? If anything, society is more accepting of the offbeat, non-traditionally male kid than its ever been. I’ve not been a big fan of the social critics who go in the opposite direction, blaming everything on a “hypermasculinized” society, but their argument seems to fit the data points a lot better. These are troubled, misfit kids who don’t fit the typical boy stereotype, who go out of their way to prove their “masculinity” by emulating first-person shooter video game male role models.

Interesting. I assume the person posting as a former friend of the killer is legit. And sadly, it makes sense. We are in the middle of some kind of crisis of older boys/young men. The trend is now unmistakable. These boys/men come from different backgrounds. Buffalo shooter and this Highland Park killer: intact families, middle to upper middle class. Uvalde shooter: broken family, looked to be teetering on the edge of middle class. Some non-Hispanic white, Uvalde Hispanic/white. But … All young men. Or at least what we used to call young men. They relate to the world more like 12 year old boys. And let’s be honest: losers. All of them. Despite access to good schools and in most cases solid middle class upbringings, they are emotionally stunted little boys who exhibit little or no talent or drive, beyond the drive to have their names all over media as the next mass shooter. Where are the girl mass murderers? Answer: probably in college, getting on with their lives, leaving their childish middle school grudges behind them (the sex ratio of college grads is astonishing to someone of my generation). The arrested development “young men” are playing video games all day, getting stoned, posting embarrassing rap videos on social media, never talking to a girl in their entire lives, much less dating one. It’s creepy, it’s troubling, it’s the new reality. And I really don’t have any answers anymore.

Agreed. Unfortunately, we are in an era of overreach. "Safe, legal, and rare" used to express the position of the majority center of American politics, and it was embraced by political leaders. Not anymore.

It's the old political consultant's mantra: Candidates Matter. Why Georgia Republicans saw fit to nominate such a crackpot is beyond me. At least they didn't fall for the Trump ego move in the Gov primary.

You are free to criticize some of her testimony as hearsay, or double hearsay, or whatever. But "lies under oath" is simply unfair. She is a young Republican supporter/loyalist, and she is reported what she heard and saw. Some of it direct observation, some of it second or third hand. The direct observation material is pretty compelling.

Q. How can you tell, just by reading a football fan forum, that Trump had a very, very bad day? A. His supporters will have started multiple threads filled with nothing but attempts at "humor" by his sycophantic tweeters.

And remember: many of these supporters (Ashli Babbitt was one notable example) were full-on, all-in, 100% QAnon adherents. To them, this was it ... The Storm they were promised.

Exactly. There was one target on Jan 6, and one target only: Mike Pence. Trump was following the John Eastman script where Pence would refuse to certify the electoral slate from certain states. Pence wasn't going to do it, unless .... unless he legitimately feared for his life or safety, both on Jan 6 and later. It was a desperation move, but that was the plan. Oh, there was another plan too: shut down the counting of the votes and the certification of the election by storming the Capitol. That might just delay things long enough for Pence to accept an offer he couldn't refuse. And yes, the senile and moronic (sometimes both at the same time!) advisors actually thought this could work.

No cross examination!! Where’s Congressman Jim Jordan and his exquisite cross examination skills? Oh. I forgot. The Repubs FORFEITED THEIR RIGHT to have their people on the committee.

I dunno. A lot of the prior “bombshells” turned out to be duds. But this one is likely to stick. Just as Trump’s nicknames for his opponents (remember “Low Energy” Jeb?) stuck because there was a kernel of truth there. Temper tantrum baby Donnie works, just like that parade balloon caricature works. They fit our perceptions. That’s the political front. On the legal front, something important happened today. We learned that Trump knew (or as lawyers would say, had reason to believe) that his rally crowd had stuff with them that couldn’t make it through a metal detector. Let’s call this stuff “weapons.” And that he nevertheless directed them to go TO THE CAPITOL (his yelling, not mine). It’s slow, it’s methodical, it’s effective in the manner of a grand jury presentation. Will Trump be charged? Who knows. I like the GA election interference charge better. That one is pretty compelling.

Agreed. How does this devolve into talk about student loan forgiveness? Reasonable minds may differ. I believe the value of personal autonomy trumps the value of a “potential life” until the earliest possible date of viability outside the womb. The right is to not be forced to be pregnant. It isn’t a right to destroy the fetus/baby. And I do believe that the constitution protects such personal autonomy.

Mods (well, if we had them)—please merge this into the Q Analysis Redux thread.

To jump in uninvited here … … I was raised in the Catholic Church, went to Catholic schools, and sent my kids to Catholic schools. I consider myself a Catholic now, although I suppose the more doctrinaire bishops would disagree and call me a cultural Catholic rather than a real member of the faith community. Whatever. Are people really familiar with the Catholic Church’s positions on these “life” issues? They’ve got the abortion part down, but, for example, I’ve known many Catholic parents of in vitro fertilization (often multiple) births. And nobody is refusing them communion. Despite this: https://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/human-life-and-dignity/reproductive-technology/begotten-not-made-a-catholic-view-of-reproductive-technology The Catholic Church position is consistent (life begins at birth), but extreme (even things that don’t terminate a potential life are morally wrong - see above) and sometimes, well, you tell me: https://www.catholic.com/qa/why-*****-is-wrong Maybe they should have a separate section set aside for all the wankers so they can’t get communion?

Same here. I was convinced in my little kid way that Dennis Shaw and Marlin Briscoe were the best QB-WR combo in the whole wide world. I didn’t know anything about the whole black QB controversy. He was just …. The Man. RIP.

I always find it instructive to flip the script to see what the other side of a debate will/won’t concede. I’ve mentioned this before. Imagine a wave of (pseudo) scientists win political control of a small state. They pass a eugenics law akin to Buck v Bell - the “two generations of imbeciles are enough” mandatory sterilization case. Now point me to the clause in the constitution or its amendments that says a state can’t do that. Good luck. The great jurist (and I don’t use that term lightly) Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that “two generation” line in finding that the state had a strong interest in improving its genetic stick and that nothing in the constitution prevented it from enacting a mandatory sterilization law. A later case - Skinner - kind of qualified what states can and cannot do in this area, but it was an equal protection case: Oklahoma sterilized “habitual criminals” but excluded white collar criminals. So it failed on those grounds. So if you believe that a state cannot involuntarily sterilize you (because, say, you already have 2 kids and the state finds that each additional child will contribute to climate change), what’s to stop it? An unenumerated right, perhaps? A right to personal autonomy? Shall we dub it a … right to PRIVACY?

I love the poorly educated.

That’s kind of where we were headed if the Court had 3 more John Roberts clones instead of 3 Robert Bork clones.

I wouldn't be that dismissive of it. It's a real problem for a lot of people. But there's a point here too -- we've had relatively cheap gas for a long time, and that has made a lot of people make lifestyle decisions based on the assumption that cheap gas will be here forever. I have an in-law who's now an empty nester. He used to have a giant Ford Explorer XL (the extended size!) for all those kids going to school and practice things. It finally gave out. He replaced it with ... the largest Explorer they currently sell. For a family (at home) of 2. He complains about gas prices. A lot. And I work with people who bought houses over the last couple years that were over an hour's commute away in pre-COVID traffic. Those houses are now over an hour's commute away in semi-post-COVID traffic. I get why they did it -- cheaper housing, cheaper land. But people very quickly adapt to facts on the ground, and assume that the status quo today will be the status quo forever. So ... yeah, sometimes we need to adapt. And to plan ahead.