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Eugene Volokh | 9.8.2025 3:00 AM
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Congratulations to DJT on the Grand Opening of the Rose Garden Club.
Is that one of those things where they send you 4 different wines every month?
Women 60 years ago had learned how to walk on grass in heels -- events were outdoors on grass. Graduations were on the football field, and women wore heels much more often.
Today events are on hard surfaces, women don't learn how to walk on grass like their grandmothers did. And that;s why he;s doing this.
Since shockingly last week someone asked for proof that Trump hates trade, I thought I'd mention this quote from Bod Woodward's Fear that I came across yesterday:
Coming back from the G20 summit, Trump was editing an upcoming speech with Porter. Scribbling his thoughts in neat, clean penmanship, the president wrote, “TRADE IS BAD.” Though he never said it in a speech, he had finally found the summarizing phrase and truest expression of his protectionism, isolationism and fervent American nationalism.
An absurdly stupid conclusion on your part, assuming true (it is Bob Woodward). But even if (big if), such an out of context incident did occur, it is absolutely NOT proof President Trump “hates” trade. It would be like some idiot saying President Trump hates immigration because he rejects the left’s open borders insanity.
As for the left, I need no proof that they indeed do hate the United States, their labeling this country as inherently racist, their desire to destroy its monuments, and of course their obsessive dream of replacing a noncompliant population (ask the UK and Europe how that works for them).
President Trump, of course, hates immigration.
I need no proof
Bots never do.
> It would be like some idiot saying President Trump hates immigration because he rejects the left’s open borders insanity.
lmao found the first one
The left's hatred of the United States speaks for itself. And President Trump has NEVER expressed any "hatred" of immigration. He doesn't much care for violent illegal alien criminals invading the country. But only democrats (and apparently crazy Dave) call that "immigration."
Of course Trump hates trade. He doesn't understand it, but hates it anyway.
I don't need a quote from a draft of a speech.
His behavior - setting huge obstacles to trade - is quite enough proof. You don't block things you like.
Do you try to fundamentally change things you like? Asking for a big eared friend.
No, but I have no idea WTF you are talking about. Do you?
Yes, actually I do. Now, let's put on our thinking caps, shall we? You wrote: "You don't block things you like." Now, of course, this statement is grossly wrong to the extent it suggests President Trump's efforts to combat illegal and damaging trade abuses is a dislike of trade. And also as stupid as the comments above equating President Trump's efforts to clean up the mess left by the democrats' dangerously corrupt and incompetent open borders experiment with a "hatred" of immigration.
But to get back to your question, my comment above to you was mocking your idiocy by relating it to a well known comment of the One. If you're confused, the reference to "big eared" was a reference to Obama, who just in case you missed it, has really big ears. Really f'ing big. Comically f'ing big. And, since you appear to be rather an idiot, I should also point out that the reference to the "One," was also to Obama. (I was mocking him but Oprah, in her worship, sadly was not). Now back to the big eared One. He is well known (to reasonably informed people, not idiots like you) for saying he wanted to "fundamentally transform the United States of America." Because he hates the United States, like all leftists.
It would be like some idiot saying President Trump hates immigration because he rejects the left’s open borders insanity.
No, it would be like saying Trump hates immigration because he's trying to kick as many legal immigrants out of the country as he can figure out excuses for.
Even when he makes a big display of letting some white immigrants from South Africa in, it ends up being just a few dozen people.
“White immigrants”? Democrats do seem obsessed with race. In fact, they seem to love racism as much as they hate the United States. But i can see why they’re so distraught. The self evident truth about this vile racist America hating party is finally starting to dawn on the communities they have been exploiting and abusing for decades. And the vile race baiters just don’t know what to do.
Hey Riva, it's not me who's obsessed with Race. This is literally from the Trump administration's policy:
To be eligible for U.S. resettlement consideration through this initiative, individuals must meet all of the following criteria: · Must be of South African nationality; and · Must be of Afrikaner ethnicity or be a member of a racial minority in South Africa;
To be eligible for U.S. resettlement consideration through this initiative, individuals must meet all of the following criteria:
· Must be of South African nationality; and · Must be of Afrikaner ethnicity or be a member of a racial minority in South Africa;
(my emphasis)
So it's an explicit race-based policy, created by Trump. In yesterday's open thread, a bunch of folks were talking about how all race-based preferences were bad. I wonder how they feel about this one.
It is NOT a policy to favor “whites” because of the color of their skin, little nimrod. It is a policy “to consider eligibility for U.S. refugee resettlement for people who are of Afrikaner ethnicity or a member of a racial minority in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination.”
If you know a way to aid people who are of Afrikaner ethnicity or a member of a racial minority in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination without reference to the people who are of Afrikaner ethnicity or members of a racial minority in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination, don’t keep it to yourself super genius.
In news that may come as a shock to Americans: Angela Rayner, the deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, got caught cheating on her taxes (specifically the stamp duty for buying a new house) and resigned.
"Stop making mistakes" is, of course, objectively hilarious advice.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/sep/07/senior-labour-figures-keir-starmer-stop-making-mistakes
"specifically the stamp duty"
Huh. We don't have a "stamp duty". We only use stamps for postage.
Well, then this could be a learning opportunity for you!
Stamp duty is a tax that is paid by buyers of real property (aka real estate) in the United Kingdom. There are opportunities for fraud because there are opportunities to reduce the tax amount paid, depending on whether the property is one's primary residence or an income property, etc. Selecting the wrong category to reduce the taxes owed could be fraudulent.
Why would someone bother learning the tax details of a failed state that seems driven to become entirely irrelevant, unless they're a subject of said state?
Calling the UK a failed state. What a serious poster you are!
MAGA sure does hate our allies.
He also thinks UK citizens are "subjects"...
The state treats them as subjects, not citizens.
https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/new-banksy-mural-london-royal-courts-covered-up-1234751094/
Indeed, why would someone bother to learn anything?
You should probably remove your head from your ass long enough to learn that.
Just in case, the whole situation is explained here: https://timleunig.substack.com/p/angela-rayner-and-stamp-duty
Doesn't seem that different than homestead exemptions that some US states provide.
By the way, Rayner also stepped down as deputy leader of the Labour party, which is an elected office within the party. So now there needs to be an election, which will be an interesting test of the popularity of Sir Keir Starmer within his own base. Rayner was already seen as representing the (relative) left of the party, and now that Starmer has spent the last year moving right, I would imagine that the members of the party would vote for whoever arises as the credible voice of the party's left.
And in real shocking news, Keir Starmer has announced the appointment of the radical pro palestinian activist Shabana Mahmood as Home Secretary. As one commentator observes:
BREAKING: Shabana Mahmood has become the UK Home Secretary. She is in charge of immigration, visas, and borders,
Here she is at a rally calling for a “globalize the intifada.”
I like how the bot is so incompetent as to quote a random twitter account as the sole source of a fake claim, but forgot to actually include the link.
David, a real bot would never "forget" to include a link!
Crimea Riva is a fake bot.
Didn't forget. It isn't necessary, especially when the comment this responds to provided no link to anything. But more importantly, since, you are, by any objective measure, a world class asshole crazy Dave, and you would like it, not going to provide any further info. That she is a radical nut supporting the global intifada can be verified with a cursory search. Look it up if you're curious, jackass.
Ms. Rayner has proved herself a lot more honorable than Mr Adam Schiff or Ms Lisa Cook. Bully for her.
Strange that you didn't mention Sean Duffy, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, or Lee Zeldin, all high Trump admin figures who also claimed more than one property as their primary residence. Must've slipped your mind.
There is a general election in Norway today. The governing centre-left were as low as 3rd in the polls a while ago, but may well win today. The Guardian is calling it too close to call: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/08/norway-heads-to-the-polls-in-highly-polarised-maga-fication-election
The Japanese PM also resigned. There is at least one commenter on this blog who will be able to explain this situation better than me. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/08/japan-shigeru-ishiba-resignation-next-pm-will-face-problem-that-wont-go-away
Done yesterday. https://reason.com/volokh/2025/09/07/sunday-open-thread-3/?comments=true#comment-11193292
Le Figaro has a live update thread going about today's confidence vote in the Bayrou government: https://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/francois-bayrou-premier-ministre-en-direct-vote-de-confiance-heure-gouvernement-macron-20250908
He will lose, and the expectation is that Macron will appoint a new PM asap to handle the nationwide strike that is coming up next week.
I'm not sure whether Macron will also call new elections. (He might as well, given how gridlocked the Assemblee has been since the last election.)
How, exactly, does a nationwide strike work? I can see a major incentive for scabs to intervene.
HAHAHAHAHAHA
I don't think there's a French word for "scab". Clearly you've never been near a French strike.
In this particular case the Independent has a helpful explainer for the "Block Everything" strike planned for Wednesday. https://www.independent.co.uk/bulletin/news/france-strikes-bloquons-tout-protest-b2820355.html
Try "Merde" and be grateful you're not speaking German.
Based on a quick search, the French say strikebreaker (briseur de grève) instead.
Like English "boycott", French "grève" (strike) is an accidental word. The word boycott is named after a person. The word grève is named after a place. They could have been completely different.
Calvin Cooledge, as MA Governor, established the principle that no strike against the public interest is ever lawful with the Boston PD strike -- he fired every one of them.
If these are public sector employees, French authorities ought to simply dock them a week's pay for the first day, a month for the second, and a year for the third.
Sucks to be you, we have the guns. And if necessary, the nukes.
The thread tells me Bayrou has just insulted the police force by admitting to "contrôles au faciès", which I understand to be the terse French expression for American "stop and frisk for dark-skinned people."
In Greece, as in every other country that has tried a baby bonus in recent years, it hasn't worked. So they're doubling down.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/07/greece-announces-16bn-relief-package-to-tackle-population-decline
Well, that IS what they should do: The studies I've seen say that baby bonuses DO work, they're just typically about 5-10% of what would be necessary to get the job done.
So the solution is to blow up the government's budget in order to, euh, what?
You know what else blows up a government's budget?
Not having taxpayers.
The usual alternative is just importing more taxpayers, but as the birth dearth spreads across the entire world, that's like "solving" the Titanic going down by running to the high end of the ship. It just buys you a little time, and the costs are enormous. Yay, you still have France. Boo, France is now Pakistan with a different name.
To be clear, just paying people to have more kids is a very complicated thing to do right, because the easiest people to get to have more kids with an offer of money are the people you don't WANT having more kids, the poor.
The Marching Morons was not, as they say, an instruction manual.
In terms of blowing up the budget, you're assuming the incentive to have children is on top of other spending. What if it's just redirecting other spending?
What if we just switched from having tax brackets based on income, to having tax brackets based on how many children you've had? Designed to yield the same amount of revenue, but now if you have enough kids, you don't pay taxes, if you prefer the child free life, you pick up the load for having a next generation financially, instead.
Sounds like the sort of thing that might be hard to sell? Of course! The ugliest thing about the birth dearth is that it's self-reenforcing, the lower birth rates get, the harder it becomes to sell people on what's necessary to get them back up, because they shift from thinking of having children as a normal part of life, to viewing it as an expensive hobby. And you don't subsidize hobbies.
You know what is a great way to reduce government spending?
Having fewer inhabitants in the country.
But yes, the other solution is to get people from abroad to do the work. Your comment doesn't exactly explain why that isn't a viable solution for Greece.*
* Yes, I understand, brown people are bad. But Greece can get more Turks than it can ever need, and Turks are just Muslim Greeks.
" Turks are just Muslim Greeks."
Wow...Talk about a complete lack of knowledge.
And Armenians must similarly have just been Christian Turks!
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-construct-scientists-argue/
"Ignore your eyes and listen to the Scientismists(tm)! Race is a social construct, and men really can be authentic women... pregnancies and all"
If they could realize why they're so dumb, they wouldn't be that dumb.
There's a reason that the law uses "actual or perceived membership" in protected classes as the basis of legal protections against discrimination. It's not because Year Zero socialists want to redefine language.
I was simplifying slightly for an American audience. But for the record, the 1923 ethnic cleansing basically involved shoving all the Muslims over the border in one direction, and shoving all the (Greek speaking) Christians over the border in the opposite direction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_exchange_between_Greece_and_Turkey
"I was simplifying slightly"
Nah, you were just being insensitive about centuries of cultural differences that go far beyond just religion
You are working hard to take offense.
That's pretty easy to take offense over. Just vastly saying one culture of people are just a different culture and only the religion is different thing.
It's offensive on its face,
It was flippant, and about history from millennia ago.
You are addicted to resentment.
The first time was flippant. The second time doubled down. And the history is far more involved than "just a millennia ago"
There's that little Greek Genocide thing from about a hundred years ago that the Ottoman Turks were perpetrating.
Again, you're (also) vastly ignorant of history and culture here, or deliberately being offensive.
At least someone is working, what does Martinned do for a living again, apart from trolling here? How much does that pay I wonder? Fortunately can’t be USAID dollars anymore.
What does Riva do for a living, other than fellating Trump on the blog comments here?
If you take offence so quickly, maybe the internet is not for you. In any case, I would direct you to at least a dozen things that have been said in this Open Thread alone that were a lot more offensive.
"You know what is a great way to reduce government spending?
Having fewer inhabitants in the country."
I'd say that does nothing to solve the problem on a per capita basis, but it's actually worse than that, because a declining population shifts your demographic curve away from a productive population in the direction of an aging and very expensive population.
"But yes, the other solution is to get people from abroad to do the work. Your comment doesn't exactly explain why that isn't a viable solution for Greece.*"
Actually, it did address that, aside from saying "France" instead of "Greece":
1. The birth dearth is world-wide, so moving people around isn't a solution. It buys a little time here at the cost of accelerating the problem there.
2. I don't give a fuck what color the people being imported are. If you want "Greece" to survive, importing people who aren't Greek is not a solution. You're just creating a new copy of wherever they came from, and calling it "Greece".
Which, don't get me wrong, would be fine if the place they came from was nicer than Greece. But if the place they came from was nicer than Greece, the Greeks would be moving there! If you're importing people, it's always from someplace WORSE.
And the country importing them becomes more like that place that's worse.
Somin is a believer in 'magic dirt', that you can take somebody from anywhere in the world, drop them on America's magic soil, and they become an American, with all the traits that make America better than wherever they came from.
I don't believe in magic dirt. If tomorrow you swapped the populations of America and Africa, after the initial disruption was past, "America" would be dirt poor and ruled by warlords, and "Africa" would be a prosperous country. Because what makes a country a nice place is the people in it, and their cultural values.
Not their genes, not the melanin content of their skin, their cultural values. Some cultures WORK. Some don't. And people carry their cultures with them when they move, and as an immigrant assimilates into a country, that country assimilates into the immigrant, too.
I don't believe in magic dirt, I believe "you are what you eat".
This is right, but to deny that there is a connection between a people's cultural values and their genetics is naivety.
That's not to say the connection can't be broken or overcome in certain circumstances, but it certainly is there.
No. People are people. What makes a country a nice place is the institutions.
And you think institutions exist apart from cultural values?
Only an idiot thinks race, religion and culture don't matter.
There's a reason why Canada and Australia are the way they are, and why Kenya and Pakistan are the way they are.
"Turks are just Muslim Greeks." As they say "una fazza, una razza."
The problem is not declining population; the problem is the fiscal model for retirement principally, but also other benefits. Said benefits need to be fully funded by people during their working lives, in government-regulated but individualized, heritable accounts, with withdrawal in retirement based on actuarial models.
That doesn't help the problem. Ultimately, the value of those retirement assets (or any assets) is based on the productive capacity of the people. That is still dependent on the working population.
Yay, you still have France. Boo, France is now Pakistan with a different name. To be clear, just paying people to have more kids is a very complicated thing to do right, because the easiest people to get to have more kids with an offer of money are the people you don't WANT having more kids, the poor.
Yay, you still have France. Boo, France is now Pakistan with a different name.
Not even trying to hide the race-based eugenics.
No, I didn't say anything about race there.
Replacing race with 'Western Culture' or whatever is functionally the same thing.
And your goal of 'encourage only the rich to have kids, not the poors!' is similarly functionally identical to the policies pushed by the social Darwinists of the early 1900s.
OK, David Nomind, look at this:
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6378764435112
Can you imagine if a White thug knifed a Black girl?
It's things like this and people like you who will bring back the Klan.
Yes. There are about 20,000 homicides a year in the U.S. Do you actually think none of them involved a white killing a black girl?
At which point Dr. Ed will die of orgasmic happiness.
Heather Mac Donald's data suggests otherwise.
“bring back the Klan”
The people bringing back the statue of Albert Pike might also be interested in this.
There are no studies showing baby bonuses working. "A hypothetical program that has never been tried because no country could possibly afford it could work" is not even a thing.
Baby Bonus, Fertility, and Missing Women
I realize confidently stating the easily disproven is your signature move, but don't you get tired of it sometimes?
Don't you ever get tired of making a fake claim, googling until you find something you think supports it, immediately stop reading, and then triumphantly proclaim you proved it? Did you look at the size of the effects? Statistically significant, but trivial. Did you even stop to wonder for one second why South Korea has one of the lowest fertility rates on the planet if they proved that such programs worked?
While it sounds like the plot of a bad porno movie, if the state can conscript male bodies, why can't it conscript female bodies?
Congratulations! You've re-invented Lebensborn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensborn
No, Lebensborn involved women who were already pregnant -- I am talking about involuntary impregnation, forcibly if necessary.
Handmaid's tale writ large -- healthy single women (of all races) being "drafted" to serve up to 18 months in an impregnation & birth center.
Why in the world would you draft people to do what you could just pay them to do?
Cheaper. Way cheaper...
Meanwhile, I spent the weekend in Riga, Latvia, which I found to be lovely. No idea about the countryside though. Given that the population of Latvia as a whole is way down since 1990 and expected to decline further, I suspect that most of the countryside isn't exactly bathing in luxury.
Martinned — Were you pleased with Latvian food?
Yes, although I have no real way of knowing how authentic it was. But given how I grew up, a potatoes and meat-based cuisine suits my sensibilities...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latvian_cuisine
Yes, but I have no way of knowing whether the restaurants we went to made the dishes more tourist-friendly in any way. They may well have, given that they were all within walking distance from the Old Town. Although one place we went to was basically all Latvian language, so I have reasonable confidence in the authenticity of that restaurant. (It was a buffet restaurant where I had to resort to good old fashioned pointing to order.)
Just speak loudly in your native language, they love that.
Or, one can just tuck one's hands under the armpits, flap the elbows, and say "buck buck." Works every time...
Could you get by there, on a tourist level, with German, or is that as useless as English?
I thought most of the ethnic Balto-Germans vamoosed before 1944, and the Soviets booted out the surviving remainder shortly afterward.
As an aside, I was just reading a biography of Alfred Rosenberg (born in Reval (now Talinn) Estonia), and his wartime diary. He was a real charmer. Lex A and Poxi might get along swimmingly with him, though.
Buffets are a great way to learn a new cuisine. When I first moved to Florida, it's how I experimented with Cuban cuisine. You can see the food in front of you and make out ingredients and point to the things that look appetizing. That's a lot easier than a menu in a foreign language with dishes that unknown names. (Though easier now with search engines and translation tools.)
Riga is, as you noted, just lovely. One of my favorite Old Towns in all of Central and Eastern Europe. Been to Latvia 4 times, and only got to explore the countryside on one of those trips. Rural, wild, and very beautiful. My few phrases of Russian came in handy, as back then, outside of Riga, I often struggled to find older people who spoke English. (All my trips were 2004-09). Vegetarian food was super-easy to find in Riga, of course. Much more challenging outside of there. In many spots, a restaurant would literally scoop the hunks of meat out of a soup or stew, and helpfully hand the bowl back to me. My friend (who was playing tour-guide for me) was a local, and spoke the languages natively. I would not have survived otherwise--would have had to eat cheese sandwiches every day, I reckon. But the non-veg food looked, to my eyes, hearty and filling. And it all certainly smelled delicious.
Back then, one could get 10 Euro flights to Riga from Berlin, where I was usually based. No idea what it costs to get there now. But I highly recommend Latvia (and the other Baltic countries, for that matter.).
Visit soon, before Putin decides to embark on his next adventure there. 🙁
Let's hope that does not happen = Putin deciding on another adventure in the Baltics
Let's hope it doesn't happen while his asset is in the White House.
Good news! He only invades places when a Democrat is in the White House.
I've been to Latvia twice while in the Army. Riga is a wonderful city. The countryside is vast and heavily forested. Reminds me a lot of Northern Michigan. A lot of Lutheran churches. Also like Northern Michigan. Each of the towns seem to have their own local beer and I enjoyed sampling them. Lots of ethnic Russians the farther East you go and you start seeing more Orthodox churches. All in all, the people were terrific and the food and booze were great. Also got up into Estonia. Ditto.
The story about the latest Google fine for abuse of dominance keeps getting more mysterious.
By way of background: EU law (the ECN+ directive) requires every member state to have an independent competition authority, and it sets some rules for what that means. The European Commission, on the other hand, is as political as it gets. And the big competition decisions are made by the College of Commissioners, not by the Commissioner for Competition (Teresa Ribera) and definitely not by an independent regulator.
So last week Monday the press reported that the Commissioner for Trade, Maroš Šefčovič, had persuaded his fellow commissioners to kill the fine they were about to impose on Google. And then on Friday the fining decision came after all: €2.95 billion.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_1992
This fine is for abuse related to Google AdTech, it follows earlier fines for Google Android (€4.34 billion) and Google Shopping (€2.42 billion).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_cases_against_Google_by_the_European_Union
Curious. Assuming Google pays any fines assessed, where does the money go?
To the budget of the EU, with the result that the pro rata share of the budget that the Member States have to pay is reduced accordingly.
(For a variety of historical and political reasons, the way the income side of the EU budget works is that the EU's "own resources", i.e. the taxes that it has the power to impose for itself, like import tariffs and a share of VAT, only cover about half of the money that it is allowed to spend. So every year the Member States cover the difference, based on each country's share of GNP.)
And yes, Google will pay. It likes being able to do business in Europe, it likes not having its assets seized, etc.
Hmm... Extorting American Businesses for money?
Sounds like a barrier to trade...
Yes, I can see how enforcing the laws against businesses might confuse you.
When those laws seem suspiciously targeted and applied to certain companies from certain countries... It's an effective trade barrier.
But hey, tariffs are laws too! Gotta apply those laws.
So are GATT treaties. Also laws! Maybe someone should apply those!
This weekend on the US version of Have I Got News For You? they ended up having a serious, non-comedy discussion about whether trolling Trump is something the governor of California should be doing. And I found both sides of the case at least somewhat compelling. Maybe someone should be doing it, but not someone who holds high office, and definitely not someone who wants to be president himself someday?
...or someone who has turned the Golden State into the Golden Shower State (no video available).
Oooo. How clever1 That remark is sure to piss off Mr Newsom
Behaving like a juvenile has worked well for Trump. Why would anyone begrudge Newsom for doing it too?
Because the whole point is that we all think it's not something Trump should be doing. So logically it's not something that the governor of California should be doing either.
Look, Martin. You see how the MAGA movement is just a bunch of infantilized adults calling people names and stuff? Apparently American's enjoy being this way. So no more high road. Be an agent of chaos and maybe win back some of that vote. Yeah, it sucks. But what can you do?
"... is just a bunch of infantilized adults calling people names..." Like hayseeds, huckleberries, deplorables etc.
I'm running for office, Bumble.
The person who made "deplorables" famous was doing what when that was said?
Any ideas?
Yes, that was the counterargument: "We need the idiots to vote for us."
Still, live how you think office holders should live. Don't take bribes, don't appoint your kids and other relatives to high office, etc.
I think there's a difference between adopting that style because Trump seems to show that it works as a campaign strategy to behave that way, and just doing it to mock Trump. That is, I would be strongly opposed to Newsom doing that wrt anyone other than Trump.
I'm in the same boat. Mockery as a means to shave a few inches off of Trump's public image is a reasonable approach. The one thing strongmen cannot withstand is being laughed at.
I think you're probably correct. It's an interesting intellectual point, and ethical point. Even though (as I already said) I agree with you; I'll play devil's advocate and argue Newsom's position.
Okay, you want to be elected President. That means two things: (a) Stand out in the Dem primary, and (b) capture a large bunch of Independent voters in the general election. You look at Donald Trump, at his wins in 2016 and 2024 (and his near-win in 2020). I think it's perfectly rational to say to yourself, as a would-be candidate,
"Man, I listen to Trump supporters on the news a lot, and many of them are fucking morons. At first I refused to believe that *they* believed what they were saying. I refused to believe that they would show up to vote. But the last 3 presidential elections has showed me that I was completely wrong, and Donald Trump was completely right. There is a huge segment of the voting population that have mental retardation. Now, as a candidate, I'll never call these voters such a dismissive term. Hillary is still paying the price for calling deplorable people "Deplorable." But I won't make that mistake. I can appeal to stupid people just like Trump can. I won't aim my appeal overtly to racists...because I myself am not a racist. Trump (as a lifelong racist) could do it authentically. Voters would see through my charade. But I have lots of non-racist stupid arguments I can make, and those will hopefully still appeal to these same idiots."
Yes, Newsom will not get 95% of the racists' votes. But I'll bet that if he does some targeted ads, with brain-dead memes promoting, say, anti-vax paranoia, he'll get a bunch of those dipshits to vote for him. A significant bunch.
In 2028, there will be 20,000,000 Imbecile Votes™ up for grabs. Dems already have 4 million of them; Reps have 8 million of them. But it's those remaining 8 million that will decide the election. And whichever side panders best, and most shamelessly, to the "I'm with Stupid" wing, will win these critical votes.
You're welcome, America. Please send my MacArthur Genius Grant to me c/o the Volokh Conspiracy.
I think at this point, we can all look back and say that 'deplorables' was actually a charitable description
Don’t be so hard on yourself
I think it's amusing that, having demonstrated that insulting people isn't a good way to get them to vote for you, your first impulse is to insult them harder. Sure, you realize on some level that you shouldn't, but it's what you really WANT to do.
Fundamentally, you don't LIKE the country you want to rule over.
If the rule they followed led them to this, of what use was the rule?
Careful, you dropped out of character for a moment.
I think the left never abandoned the seductive notion of "false consciousness", where if somebody wants something different from what you think they ought to want, it's not because they have different preferences or starting premises from you, they're just deceived or stupid.
There's also this tendency on the left to assume that everybody actually agrees with them about their proposals' virtues and effects, and so if you don't want a policy that (they think) does good, it HAS to be that you don't want good. Because that you think it won't do good, or is morally/legally foreclosed, is simply inadmissible.
So what's your theory for why Florida has abolished vaccines? Other than shameless populism/pandering to idiots?
Call it, you have to call it, I can't call it for you.
My theory is that Florida hasn't abolished vaccines. Were you under the impression that you can't get vaccinated in Florida?
They're talking about abolishing vaccine mandates.
Florida surgeon general says state will eliminate all vaccine mandates
"The state is not banning vaccinations.
“You want to put whatever different vaccines in your body, God bless you. I hope you make an informed decision,” Ladapo said. “You don’t want to put whatever vaccines in your body, God bless you. I hope you make an informed decision. That’s how it should be.”"
I think I want children vaccinated for polio. We have decades of safety data.
I agree. I'm very pro-vaccine, and it's not my fault that I caught Covid before the vaccine became available locally for my cohort. I was gung ho to get it, the virus just beat me to the punch.
Then my doctor recommended holding off a few months to avoid getting a bad reaction, and by the time those months were over, the Branch Covidian had my hackles up, and I wasn't in the mood anymore. I did manage to get a booster shot, and even that required signing up for the whole series, and then just not showing up after the first shot, because the public health authorities were committed to acting like natural immunity wasn't a real thing.
The public health authorities seriously screwed up with Covid, and squandered good will and credibility that they'd taken generations to accumulate. They need to accept that they did that, and that for decades to come, they need to persuade people to take vaccines, not order them to.
You understand that the protection you receive from a vaccine depends on whether *other people* also get vaccinated, right? There is an externality to vaccines. Hence the mandate. Abolishing the mandate defeats the whole purpose.
So no, I don't think the guy who said “Every last [vaccine mandate] is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery" is doing anything other than pandering to dunces.
"You understand that the protection you receive from a vaccine depends on whether *other people* also get vaccinated, right?" How so? If a vaccine is meant to protect the recipient what does it matter if their neighbor hasn't been vaccinated?
How so? If a vaccine is meant to protect the recipient what does it matter if their neighbor hasn't been vaccinated?
Because no vaccine is 100% effective, and some people can't get vaccines because they are immunocompromised. The more people who don't get vaccinated, the bigger the size of the reservoir of the disease out there, and the bigger risk there is to everyone. Google "herd immunity." (I promise you it isn't something people just made up for COVID.)
Geeze, of course I realize that. I didn't sleep through 4 years of human biology in college.
This isn't an argument about whether or how vaccines work, Florida is not proposing to ban vaccines.
It's an argument over under what circumstances you can justify forcing somebody to be vaccinated. It's a moral argument, not a medical argument.
Mr. Bumble:
Vaccines protect in two ways: They protect the person who actually got vaccinated, by enabling their immune system to rapidly respond to infection by the pathogen you were vaccinated against. Ideally so fast you never notice the infection.
The other way they protect, not just the person who got vaccinated, is by making it harder for that pathogen to spread in the community; Can't get infected with a disease that never reaches you because everybody who was exposed to the original carrier was already immune, after all!
And that latter form of protection does indeed depend on what fraction of the population is vaccinated.
It would matter if the vaccine in question actually prevented infection and transmission of the virus.
But if the vaccine does not prevent infection and transmission, then it won't.
I was fully vaccinated when I got covid, it didn't work for me.
Everyone I know who got vaccinated also got covid.
Does anyone know anybody who never got covid, even if they were fully vaccinated?
SCIENCE!
[raises hand] Kaz, fully vaccinated with Pfeizer. Never got COVID. But I also masked in public until 2023. I mean, I'm not gonna put myself and the people around me at risk just to raise a metaphorical middle finger at the government
Hobie, that's because nobody wants to be around you.
Sarcastro, do you know anyone fully vaccinated who never got covid?
About 12% of the population has never had Covid, 67% are fully vaccinated.
The reason they think some people never get it, is not the vaccine, but natural genetic immunity.
https://www.snexplores.org/article/why-some-people-never-get-covid
I mean, yeah, Kaz, - everyone I know who hasn't yet gotten Covid was vaccinated.
But it's really incredible that I call you out for rank anecodtalism and your response is asking me for anecdotes.
And then you link to a popular science story about a study with an N of 36.
I suppose I'm glad you snuck something scienceish in there, but your just confirmation-biasing vibes. Maybe one day your take will be established as correct, but that's a ways off.
See John F. Carr's comment below.
Projection, Brett.
You're the one who thinks Republicans you disagree with are not real Republicans, and that anyone who disagrees with you is part of some evil conspiracy to undermine the country, and couldn't possibly disagree in good faith.
Bernard, if Republicans who I disagree with weren't real Republicans, there'd hardly be any real Republicans in the country. Aren't a lot of Republicans out there who want all drugs legalized, for instance, but I do.
The problem is there are a lot of Republican office holders who don't disagree with just me, (That's almost all of them except for Rand Paul!) but with your median Republican voter.
Brett,
Are you sure your notion of "median Republican voter" is accurate, and not just tilted towards your point of view.
Selection bias is a real thing. You live in rural or suburban SC where, I suspect, most people are pretty right-wing, maybe more so than the median GOP'er. So you may have a distorted view.
You also neglected to respond to the rest of my comment. You wrote:
To which I responded that, judging by many, many comments, you think:
that anyone who disagrees with you is part of some evil conspiracy to undermine the country, and couldn't possibly disagree in good faith.
Lots of projection.
The whole point of deplorables is that they won't vote for a non-populist president anyway. And, for that matter, part of what makes them deplorable is that they are immune to facts/information. Deplorables are angry because they believe educated people and uppity black people look down on them, and they will be angry about that regardless of whether it's true.
He thrusts his Fist against the Post and still insists he sees the Ghosts! and you have to call it, this Quarter's been traveling since 1978, and you stand to win everything.
Shhhh! Stop confusing them with the facts.
No worse than saying city dwellers are not "real Americans."
insulting people isn't a good way to get them to vote for you,
Hillary got a lot more people to vote for her than Trump did for him!
...but not enough.
That basically tells us that the US electoral system creates terrible incentives, and that American politicians shouldn't try to fight those incentives. The former is definitely true, but I'm not sure the second follows. The Democrats and the non-Trumpist Republicans can try to win elections without "going low". (And when they do, they should ideally change the system.)
There's another aspect to this that I haven't seen in this thread yet. Democratic voters are pissed off at their representatives for not doing anything to counter Trump. Even though the Democrats are in the minority in all branches of government, the voters want to see action. Newsom's trolling of Trump is being seen as "doing something," especially given the reaction on the Right. Whether or not someone, especially someone who isn't a Democrat, thinks this isn't a good use of Newsom's time or that the tone of his trolling should be considered a negative for any elected official, it does give him the badge of doing something when other Californian legislators, like Adam Schiff, seem to be doing nothing. It creates a political contrast that might fair Newsom well in future elections.
Interesting to see no comments on the events in Jerusalem. The shooters were neutralized, but not to worry the PA's pay-to-slay program will support their families.
What events? Oh the Ham-Ass Terrorists murdering Israelis? Jew-rusalems still safer than Chicago(and has fewer Ham-Ass supporters)
Frink
Attacks on Jews are not considered newsworthy.
And yet you heard about it. Did you hear about all the Palestinians who have been killed in recent days?
"Did you hear about all the Palestinians who have been killed in recent days?" No I haven't, maybe the Marxist Stream Media should publicize them.
Every night on the news there's a body count from Gaza.
Yes, a statistic.
"And yet you heard about it. " Yes, but NOT FROMYOU, who has has so much to say today. "Did you hear about all the Palestinians.." Not even Hamas bothers to report that as they believe that they have already one the propaganda war.
Bumble's complaint was about the news. If you want me to deliver you a comprehensive daily news digest, you're going to have to pay me more.
you are already overpaid
Yes I have heard of several prominent Hamas that have been eliminated
Yes, tens of thousands of them, in fact.
Talk about whataboutism!!
Do you know why Israel is in Gaza? It is because the Palestinians keep attacking and killing Israeli citizens And the Palestinians purposefully target the civilians. It isn't an accident or colateral damage. It os specifically targetting civiians and that includes women and children.
And the Palestinians purposefully target the civilians. It isn't an accident or colateral damage.
Indeed. And it's also not an accident or collateral damage when the Israelis do it to the Palestinians. I'm not sure what that has to do with what we were talking about, but I'm glad we cleared that up.
Not surprising an anti-semite gets material facts wrong - or distorts the facts for partisan purposes.
Hamas intentionally targets Israeli civilians Hamas intentionally uses palestinian civilians as human shields Israel intentionally announces that they will attack Hamas at specific locations so that civilians can escape Hamas intentionally prevents palestinian civilians from fleeing so that the can be used as human shields
Martinned knows the real facts but is simply a lying anti-Semitic bitch. Also either his ancestors that were adults.during WW2 were NSB or he is one of those "Asians" that Euroe is letting take control.
Speaking as a Jew, I formally request that you two stop combatting "antisemitism."
Thank you. That is all.
In related news, Israel's High Court ruled that Palestinian prisoners must be given enough food “to enable a basic existence.”
Israel's Ben Gvir - national security minister - had ordered the starvation rations.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/high-court-rules-state-failed-its-duty-to-feed-palestinian-prisoners-in-slap-to-ben-gvir/
Food as a weapon seems to bind MAGA and Israel. Do you hayseeds also keep little shrines to Pol Pot or something?
Israel's High Court fabricates many ruling out of whole cloth. But what could you expect from a group that appoints its own members (another example of its inventions in la).
hobie 3 hours ago Flag Comment Mute User In related news, Israel's High Court ruled that Palestinian prisoners must be given enough food “to enable a basic existence.”
There is zero evidence that Israel has not been providing food. So what is your point?
You’re an incredibly careless reader. Or thinker.
I don’t know the facts here, but it’s right there in hobie’s post the claim that:
And:
Palestinian prisoners must be given enough food “to enable a basic existence.”
So, clearly it’s not about whether “food” has “been provid[ed]” but about the quality and quantity.
Another anti semite pontificating based on facts that dont exist.
The only careless reader is the one parroting facts that are obviously false. Hint - make an effort to ascertain the validity of accusations instead of simply parroting bogus junk
Notice the non-response: he’s so dim he doesn’t know what my criticism was, but so proud and small he has to lash out (in the way his basement bloggers have taught him)!
The response was inane and did not address your reliance on false facts.
Your original comment was based on false facts - You should address why you parrot bogus claims.
As usual, you’re confidentially spouting answers to the wrong question.
I explicitly clarified this wasn’t about the facts, but you misunderstanding the question given alleged facts.
And you dutifully stepped, no stomped, on that rake.
You’re a careless thinker.
malika
Apparently you cant address the bogus facts which on which you comment is based on.
All you comments are based on facts that dont exist.
Look at him running around chasing his tail!
Let’s make this simple.
You said there is zero evidence Israel isn’t providing food.
But NOONE claimed there was no providing of food. The claim was about the quality/quantity of food provided.
Once again, you couldn’t grasp the question here.
Bro, there's a link to the article from the Times of Israel. All the fake facts are right there
You are continuing to base your entire string of comments on false premise of facts.
Your premise of facts is wrong and thus your string of comments is wrong. Grasp the reality.
Note that bookkeeper_joe has not identified a single specific false fact, let alone explained how he knows that such fact is false.
I expect someone commenting on the subject to have a basic understanding of the facts and the falsehood in the article.
Maliki obviously did not. Same as correcting your frequent intentional distortions of facts.
I expect bookkeeper_joe to have no understanding of any facts on any subject he comments about. And to therefore never specify any such supposed facts or explain his basis for thinking them to be.
Dishonest Dave attacks the person because he cant dispute the facts. In this case the reports of israel not providing sufficient food is a bald face lie, yet the resident leftist knows it is a lie, but cant control his dishonesty
Martinned had 9 of the first 10 posts.
and he still hasn't called the Quarter.
It provides the impetus to annex Judea and Samaria. Stay tuned.
When googled I saw it was reported by Fox five hours ago. I haven’t read this mornings news so, yes, I missed it. Upon seeing it, seems horrible. How does this interest you?
He doesn't need to answer, we already know. Hundreds of murders over the last year, but there's one thing different about this event.
Relatively peaceful weekend in Chicago, only 16 shot, 4 fatally. Watch out tonight though, Bears/Vikings on MNF
I saw that the Chicago mayor asked Trump for help in stopping the flow of guns into Chicago. Seems like a good task for the ATF
Maybe they can stop the flow of books and crucifixes, too, while they're at it. Why stop at violating one amendment?
So no more copyright protection for religious books?
Yeah, let's pretend that what Chicago is asking for is for the federal government to block the flow of counterfeit Glocks, because it's cutting into Glock's legitimate revenue.
No, it is asking for the enforcement of laws that are on the books, and that have not been declared unconstitutional. Are you against that?
"No, it is asking for the enforcement of laws that are on the books, "
Yeah, and that's all the South was asking during Jim Crow, too.
"and that have not been declared unconstitutional."
So, it's going to be denial. At the time the Supreme court had ruled in Brown against segregated schools, they still hadn't gotten around to declaring a lot of Jim Crow laws unconstitutional. But they still were unconstitutional.
Should the South have gotten federal help in enforcing the parts of Jim Crow the Court hadn't gotten around to striking down yet?
So we're back to "the government should be enforcing Brettlaw instead of the actual law"? Very productive.
You know, calling the 2nd amendment "Brettlaw" isn't actually an argument.
The fact of the matter is that Chicago wants to violate the 2nd amendment, they find that they can't effectively do so on their own, and so they want federal help.
Well, screw them.
Their problem isn't guns coming in, it's people who want to shoot each other. They're like somebody who's got a ship, and some of the passengers are drilling holes in the hull. So what do they do?
Demand that the ocean be drained.
I wasn't able to find any news story relating to what Hobie had alleged, but I did see that the mayor of Chicago had asked for additional help from the ATF in 2021, specifically "to help get illegal guns off the streets."
Nothing about violating the 2d Amendment, obviously.
Brettlaw is only constitutional law that leftists dont like.
it gets old that you cant argue the issue on the merits
I can, I just don't want to. Arguing 2nd amendment law with Brett is less likely to yield productive results than having the argument with my dog. Many have tried...
Brett is generally correct on his discussions regarding 2A.
Yes your discussions with your dog are not going to be productive since your dog has a better grasp of 2A than you
I'm curious whether that proposition is based on your extensive study of second amendment scholarship and caselaw, or whether you went back to the original 18th century historical documents and derived it from those.
DN - both - why ask the question since you know Brett is generally correct.
DN - both
Joe just did the 'which magazines do you read?' 'All of them' but for the Second Amendment.
So would you be in favor of reinstating Project Exile? That was a program where the federal government sent in a whole bunch of federal whose sole purpose was to prosecute felons caught in ossession of a firearm under federal law. That meant longer sentences in a federal facility with very little time off for good behavior(when in federal custody a person must serve at least 85% of their sentence).
Incapacitation of actual career criminals is a proven way of lowering crime rates. Project Exile is a matter of leveraging federal gun laws to throw career criminals back in jail.
Project Exile specifically was pushed by the NRA, other more principled pro-gun groups like the GOA oppose it.
There's a federal firearms trafficking strike force in northern IL. Joint fed/state/local operation with funding from DOJ to focus specifically on inner city guns and their sources.
That funding is being cut because Trump wants to punish IL for being a sanctuary state. ATF also cut funding and is reducing number of agents (like the rest of the fed govt). It is expected that the number of federal prosecutions for gunrunning/straw purchasing/trafficking will also go down since the task force will be less effective. But what won't go down is the number of guns on the streets with less enforcement the number is likely to simply go up.
Trump is a short sighted petty man. If he cared about making Chicago safe he wouldn't defund a gun trafficking task force..he would increase funding. Nobody is capable of eliminating gun violence in a large midwest city. But it can be reduced. He don't care. He wants a photo op and to score political points against his perceived enemies.
A lot of problems in Chicago would very quickly end if EVERYONE had a gun.
I was under the impression the adminstration weren't supposed to enforce the laws on the books.
At least not immigration laws, and not mortgage fraud laws.
But lets do a thought experiment, lets say the administration took Johnson up on his request and put in checkpoints (akin to DUI checkpoints), and asked everyone about weapons in the car, and when reasonable suspicion is present, about other possible crimes like illegal presence in the US.
I don't think Johnson would be happy, he just wants some of the laws enforced.
The MAGA take on immigration laws is just made up.
There is nothing in the INA that says deport everyone immediately. And Congress has not given sufficient resources to do that in their appropriation bills, which are also law.
And illegal presence *isn't a crime*.
Nothing shows the identity > facts of MAGA more than their inability to understand things after they've been repeatedly pointed out.
There is nothing in the INA that says they should stay either.
Congress just appropriated 170 billion in new funds for immigration enforcement in the OBBB in July, so I think that is sufficient for now.
And they are putting it to work.
You are the one saying the law isn’t being followed, not me.
Maybe they should stop the flow of certain peoples into Chicago.
Like maybe ICE people?
A small army of progressive influencers are naming and shaming ICE goons who attack citizens. It is starting to have an effect
You're really going to enjoy having that tactic turned back on you.
That doesn't work anymore, Brett.
Mostly because you're cheerleading the utter destruction of any and all guardrails for an imperial presidency that we've had (with small exceptions during actual wars that threatened the existence of the country) since the country started.
In other words, you can't seriously be trying to say, "Just wait until this tactic is used against you," when you know full well that there is absolutely no way that you could ever support a Democratic President doing exactly what is being done right now.
As we all know, this means one of three things- 1. You think that laws apply to the Democrats, and not the GOP, and that Calvinball is the deciding factor. 2. Despite what you say, you actually (revealed preferences) know that Democrats follow the law, while the GOP doesn't- so you're not worried about what might happen. 3. You are confident that the Democrats will never win another election again ... which means that you are hopeful that there are no more elections.
1 and 3 pretty much show that the rule of law is dead. And 2 just shows your hypocrisy ... but is also pretty sad, because I can tell you that I've met a number of people that are becoming pretty radicalized on the left - something you've blathered about for years, but is now coming true.
To quote the old saw during the Iraq War- if you break it, you buy it. Well, your incessant nonsense has drive the country to where it is. Pretty much the entire post-WW2 order (and our alliances and the global system etc.) that both parties spent decades building up is being destroyed in months. Congratulations?
(FWIW, I will keep mentioning this- it's been nine months. You don't see the results immediately. But we are seeing the payback of what Trump has been doing begin to unfold. It's not going to get better. And it can't be easily rebuilt.)
It’s so weird to see ostensible libertarians support such a powerful executive.
The dynamic is consistently seen on Somin immigration policy comment sections. Somin argues (for better or worse) that a Trump administration effort is not aligned with libertarian, small government principles and the “paleo” libertarian Trump supporters consistently offer two responses:
1. Sure, but what about Biden, Obama, etc.? 2. See 1, this has created an existential crisis demanding extraordinary measures.
Arguably the most respectable trait of honest libertarianism is: resist the tendency to empower government because of “existential/think of the children” crises.
"Libertarian" is a somewhat flexible term as a matter of self-definition. Some people have also at times said they were conservatives.
Some abuse the term so we have lay-ups that basically remind us that Republicans are not libertarians.
The anti-government rhetoric aside. They are Republicans. They support the government in many ways, just in different ways than Democrats.
A few decades ago before the LGBT rights movement showed many results, a lot of gay men would first come out as "bi." Think of it as a half-step out of the closet to test the waters but with a built-in right of return. Later, they would abandon the "bi" moniker* and leave the closet altogether. I see this as the same path MAGA-style conservatives are taking. They've been dabbling with the Red Pill but don't want to be seen as extremists so they call themselves "libertarians." Eventually, they go full Red Pill and end up in something like the 3%ers driving a Tesla Cybertruck and stocking up on MRE's for the inevitable collapse of society.
* Real bisexuals actually exist and this whole half-step thing by gay men pisses them off. I don't hear about this any more as kids are discovering their sexuality at puberty these days. I imagine there are real libertarians who are equally pissed off at the proto-MAGA neophytes ruining their good name.
Brett is not an ostensible libertarian. Brett is an ostensible Iusedtobealibertarianbut.
Yeah, pretty much. I'm more libertarianish at this point. Actual libertarianism has no political support to speak of anymore, and what's the point of an ideology of liberty that could only be put into effect coercively?
If we are selecting sprinters for a track team, we might look at their best times for the 100-meter dash. But if someone had, for some reason, only ever run races uphill or against the wind, it would make sense to take that into account and not compare that runner’s times to others’ directly. We would be treating those people differently but only because their paths were different; really we’d be evaluating their paths fairly relative to their contexts.
Other forms of achievement are not as straightforward to measure, but the idea is analogous. If someone achieved a certain SAT score after months of tutoring and someone else earned the same score having never seen an SAT before, it would be reasonable to be more impressed with the latter result and think that the second test taker has more potential. We should think of D.E.I. efforts as the best versions of this and aim to design systems that can measure the fuller picture of someone’s professional journey, not just the current result…
It shouldn’t be called sexist to help people overcome sexism, and it shouldn’t be called racist to help people overcome racism, but if we give this help too crudely, then we leave ourselves open to these criticisms. Math teaches us that D.E.I. initiatives should be about carefully defining the metrics we use to measure how far people have come and thus how far they have the potential to go. They should be about uncovering when some people are constantly running uphill or against the wind, which can inform us how to give everyone an equal tailwind and an equal opportunity to succeed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/opinion/math-dei.html
But how do the Asian's score so well with their slanty eyes? Amazing they can even read the questions!
Maybe it would make Them write Like ) this
And you wonder why MAGA exists...
I don’t wonder, resentment is a very powerful force in politics.
You spelled "resentment" with a small "r".
Yeah, I’m educated and sane unlike your fellow fabulist friend.
Tell us more about the liberal values you feigned in your past performances here, the ones betrayed and all. lol
What "liberal value" did I betray? What "liberal value" did I feign?
You'll have to copy/paste at least one quote of my comments to make your answer legitimate.
Malika la Maize 4 hours ago "Yeah, I’m educated and sane unlike your fellow fabulist friend."
Is that why you get fooled so frequently along with posting alleged facts that are simply not true?
I see two problems here.
1. The SAT is designed to predict academic success. It does so pretty well. If life events result in you having a lower SAT, that generally means that life events have resulted in you having a lower chance of academic success. Don't shoot the messenger.
In your analogy, if you'd done all your training running uphill, sure, your numbers running uphill wouldn't look great compared to somebody else's numbers running on level ground, but when you take the SAT, you're both running on the same track, so the SAT results are still accurate.
But, running uphill is... actually pretty good training, not a disadvantage as such. So if you want an accurate analogy, the disadvantage would have to be something that actually harms performance, like bad childhood nutrition. Something, sadly, with effects that don't vanish when you take it away. So maybe you know WHY Bob is screwed academically, but the fact remains that Bob IS screwed academically.
2. We have a bit over half a century of experience with affirmative action, and it seems pretty clear at this point that it ALWAYS degenerates into crude racial quotas. I think that's because the norm against "blaming the victim" introduces this bias in the system where, if somebody is a member of a minority, you're simply barred from admitting anything is actually their own fault. So if compensating for measurables doesn't get you to equality, you have to assume that you're missing something, and keep leaning in harder until you do get to equality.
And if you're not allowed to fall short of equality, that' s just a quota.
1. I agree the analogy is a bit lacking. I don’t hunk a better one that gets the same point across is an athlete who had crappy gym equipment and no strength coach and one who had access to a great gym and strength coach and then judging them on perspective bench presses at a combine. If the former did slightly less good they could still be a justified pick on the idea that they had done more with what they had and thus maybe had more potential in a setting with better resources.
2. I agree the experience of it was fraught with problems. We may, of course, find that we have other problems without it.
"I agree the experience of it was fraught with problems. We may, of course, find that we have other problems without it"
We may....why don't we try for 50 years or so, and see what happens?
Oh, I think we should. There was a lot of problems being generated by the previous attempts.
Excellent. We're agreed, there were all these problems with "affirmative action" caused. For the next 50 years, we should just be race-blind, race-neutral. No DEI nonsense.
Let's see what happens when we just judge people on merit and not on the color of their skin.
I don’t think you got the initial analogies-merit can be very difficult to measure and that difficulty can be intertwined with opportunities.
How do you propose to test whether "race-blind" is truly "blind?" The "I don't see race" crowd comes down in favor of the status quo where the trickle-down impacts of slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow laws still affect people today. If the status quo has non-race blindness baked in, how does one do race-blind without first dismantling the status quo?
I suspect the overwhelming answer will be: blame the status quo on the victim and pretend that the current system is already race-blind.
Sure, but even in your new analogy the reality is that, if you don't catch them really early, they're NEVER going to catch up.
And a lot of this isn't crappy equipment or schools. The problem is that the strongest influence on academic success, after you've taken care of easy things like prenatal nutrition, is parental involvement. Not just the amount, but the nature of it.
If parents don't raise their kids to value academic achievement and have good study habits, they're basically screwed for life, and improving the schools will barely move things at the margins.
Like I said, the norm against 'blaming the victim' makes it almost impossible to confront that truth: Almost all of the inter-group variation in achievement is due to differences in cultural values, and can't be fixed by outside inputs.
“but even in your new analogy the reality is that, if you don't catch them really early, they're NEVER going to catch up.”
That’s certainly not true. A gifted athlete with access to poor training and equipment for their teen years can make significant gains once introduced to better equipment and gains.
“after you've taken care of easy things like prenatal nutrition”
Seems to me one thing we can do here then is make sure all expecting mothers get that then, right?
“norm against 'blaming the victim'”
I don’t think that’s what’s going on, it’s more like assuming groups have nearly equal potential.
“Almost all of the inter-group variation in achievement is due to differences in cultural values”
I think there’s something to this, but where do you think those values come from? Often they seem to be responses to things like opportunities (if you were a slave your only reason to value hard work was the cultural value of avoiding the lash).
“can't be fixed by outside inputs.”
I’m not sure about this, at least as an absolute. For example some disparities between blacks and whites did narrow post Great Society, though admittedly they’ve seen stuck for a while.
"I don’t think that’s what’s going on, it’s more like assuming groups have nearly equal potential."
I'm not sure that's a valid assumption, but call it true as a first approximation. It's equal potential at a biological level, before the groups' cultural values kick in. Saying this is really only meaningful for children who get adopted out as babies.
"but where do you think those values come from? Often they seem to be responses to things like opportunities (if you were a slave your only reason to value hard work was the cultural value of avoiding the lash)."
I'd personally blame the War on Poverty, I think the timing for when things really started going to hell fits better, but, sure, let's say that it's a long delayed side effect of slavery.
So what? It's not like anybody can hop in a time machine and make slavery not have happened. So you have to deal with those cultural effects regardless of where they originated.
“I'd personally blame the War on Poverty”
The problem here is the data, as I said disparities and disadvantages dropped immediately after this. Another problem is common sense (if I told you that a kid was neglected and abused for most of their life and then spoiled for a shorter part blaming their subsequent problems in the latter seems odd).
“It's not like anybody can hop in a time machine and make slavery not have happened”
Sure, but you might can make sure to work to eliminate badges and incidents of it that linger.
The reason I blame the war on poverty is that you see the same sort of cultural problems with whites who were similarly situated when it began. And they certainly had no history of slavery!
I'm sure it had some benefits for particular people, but the uphot was that it killed the tendency of people to move away from places where the economy tanks, and was an enabler for single motherhood.
So you got a whole generation of children raised outside intact families, in areas where they were lacking in good employed role models and job prospects.
As I said, this caused cultural damage to everybody living in those areas, it's just that blacks were over-represented in them.
One of the arguments for treating tropical diseases thousands of miles away from American taxpayers is the impact on children. On average, children who get a lot of malaria and parasitic infections don't catch up to their healthier peers.
Brett -- the SAT was invented for the kids running uphill -- the Jewish kids coming out of NYC schools that the Ivy League admissions folk had never heard of.
Black kids would do better if they played less basketball and read more books....
The SAT was invented as an intelligence test that would among other things keep Jewish students out of elite universities.
The SAT is designed to predict academic success. It does so pretty well. If life events result in you having a lower SAT, that generally means that life events have resulted in you having a lower chance of academic success.
Yes, but that doesn't mean that the effect of some of those life events can't be fixed. And how do you feel about efforts to avoid some of those things, like instituting pre-school programs, providing better nutrition, etc. Shouldn't you be in favor of that, if you're interested in equal opportunity?
Plus, you know what else is correlated with academic success? Diligence and motivation. The kid with a lower SAT score, maybe because of a crappy high school, who worked part-time and did well at the CHS, may well do better in college than the one who got tutored and practice-tested out the wazoo, and scored higher.
This.
SAT scores correlate with household income. And, high school GPA is a better predictor of college performance, regardless.
You will find that many American right-wingers will reject your hypothetical because they are aware of its implications and they don't want to think about it.
Or worse-some are fine with it.
Well, on a moral and legal level, I just don't care: All people are entitled to from the government and society is equality of rights and equal protection of the law. NOT equality of outcomes.
And EVERYBODY is entitled to equality of rights, and equal protection of the law, even if those get in the way of achieving equal outcomes.
So, a lot of what the left wants to do is just off the table, period, end of story, and why they want to do it Just Doesn't Matter.
It’s interesting because Brett is all about group grievances in other settings. Social media, academe, Hollywood, etc., they all clearly are discriminating against straight white conservatives (you can tell by the disparate outcomes don’t ya know) and this is very unfair and demands redress!
But groups that were literally enslaved and/or faced strong government backed barriers for most of our nations history being underrepresented? He don’t care.
Look, 160 years ago we had slavery in this country, and if you find a 160 year old ex-slave, I will definitely support giving them some compensation for it. That's not racial discrimination, that's "Treating people according to what personally happened to them."
But stop trying to use events 160 years ago to justify racial discrimination today, for and against people who just happen to look vaguely like the long dead victims and perpetrators of history.
Sunk costs are the fundamental building block of history. Everybody has their grudges for past wrongs, EVERYBODY.
You have to let it go, or else the payback never, ever, ends. At some point you have to just say, "That's history, and I'm sorry it happened, but you can't turn around and do it to somebody else to try to get even."
In the end, Roberts was right: The way to stop racial discrimination is to stop racially discriminating. I'm sure some people are unhappy about that, but the only alternative to making somebody whose ancestors were wronged decades ago unhappy, is wronging somebody else today.
These things get passed down. For example, you yourself espouse a strong cultural theory to explain disparities. It might have been a bit more difficult for black peoples ancestors to adopt a value of college education when there were so many barriers to it.
How do these lingering effects of awful government intervention get addressed? Your answer is: who cares?
No, my answer is, "Not by racially discriminating".
What I don't care about is all the excuses for racial discrimination. They really don't matter, it is off the table.
So find a solution that doesn't involve it.
You’re on record approving of efforts to compensate past victims of government discrimination even though this will certainly mean disadvantaging current non-victims similarly situated economically but against helping the descendants of that discrimination overcome the lingering effects of the past discrimination.
Yeah, because past victims actually ARE victims. Not just people who vaguely look like long dead victims.
Did you ever read the case for reparations? Didn't convince me to be in favor of reparations, but did help me to not look like as much of an ignoramus when talking about race issues in America.
It spends plenty of time on the 'everyone is equal now we solved racism a generation ago' argument. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
Sarc: "It spends plenty of time on the 'everyone is equal now we solved racism a generation ago' argument."
Which might be helpful contrast to somebody who makes that argument.
But Brett is just foil for you, right? So you got where you wanted to go, right?
Have you ever considered trying to make yourself relevant?
Ah, it seems Queenie has taken over the roll as your remora.
Let's make a deal here... if Americans who think other Americans were better off as slaves or should still be slaves stop flying the 160yo "Let's Keep Slavery!" flag in modern day America, the rest of us will stop believing that events 160 years ago are affecting real, black Americans today. M-kay?
if you find a 160 year old ex-slave, I will definitely support giving them some compensation for it.
And what if you find someone whose life was greatly harmed by Jim Crow? For someone who wants to talk a lot about culture and so on, you seem utterly unaware of intergenerational effects.
What do you think culture is?
Redlining, which ended a bit less than 40 years ago, continues to have an impact on black people.
If you care to look, there are a ton of other structural issues that came about due to explicit race discrimination and are still in play.
All people are entitled to from the government and society is equality of rights and equal protection of the law. NOT equality of outcomes.
The issue is that the hypothetical explicitly states that people are starting from a position of inequality - which in turn, unless addressed, leads to inequality of outcomes. You cannot fairly deny addressing the initial inequality by appealing to outcomes.
Sure I can, I just did.
It's unfortunate that past wrongs led to present inequalities, but the one thing you can't do to address those inequalities is to commit fresh wrongs in the present.
Way to instantiate the aristocracy.
Of course, you also think rich people are actually better than everyone else.
You're talking about some general past inequality when I think it's clear I'm talking about a current situation of inequality. If I'm wrong, please correct me and then you can agree with me that a present state of inequality can be remedied.
"But if someone had, for some reason, only ever run races uphill or against the wind,"
If I were selecting sprinters for a track team, I would NOT look at people with no experience in running on flat ground.
A likelier situation is sprinter A has access to a fast recently-laid Mondo track and is wearing Maxflys (with a carbon plate) and sprinter B only has access to an older and slower track and is wearing a previous generation Nike spikes - decent, but not as good as the Maxflys.
And the difference in 100m times is less than the effect of the surface and shoes.
Now do you pick sprinter B?
Malika, let me ask you a related question:
Should educators respect the preferences of the person actually in front of us, or the person we think they should have been if life was fair and they'd been raised without bias?
Because at the college level, a large part of success is a genuine interest in your subject combined with a tolerance for some intellectual drudgery in the necessary but less fun parts.
By the time we get an 18 year old, they are an adult allowed to make their own decisions. Even strong DEI advocates, if they've actually worked on it rather than just talk about it, eventually admit that 18 year old women as a group genuinely have less desire to go into certain fields. Let's just stipulate that this is entirely the result of growing up in a biased culture. So what? Are we going to force women into fields they dislike because they would have liked it if they'd been raised differently?
Similarly, some people have been brought up to regard deferred gratification as an essential value, while others have been brought up with an attitude of seize the moment and enjoy life while you can. Unsurprisingly, the first attitude is correlated with a middle class income - enough stability that you can plan, no so much money that you don't need to.
So again, some 18 year olds have decided they're not deeply attracted to four years of mental slavery for some later uncertain payoff. They'd rather skip college or do some lite major. But they get pushed into engineering and then end up suspended in the third year. Or pushed into pre-med, graduate with a now unacceptable 2.9, and never go to med school. Wouldn't it have been better to just accept who they are, rather than get all dreamy about who they could have been?
DS,
... 18 year old women as a group genuinely have less desire to go into certain fields. Let's just stipulate that this is entirely the result of growing up in a biased culture. So what? Are we going to force women into fields they dislike because they would have liked it if they'd been raised differently?
Depends on what exactly the effect of that biased culture is. Suppose women who are interested in engineering or whatever are discouraged from pursuing it by biased advisors, or maybe by an unwelcoming attitude from some in the field. Then we are in danger of doing what you deplore - discouraging the person from making her own decisions.
Then, assuming she has the ability to do well, we should help her overcome bad advice, and try to be welcoming. That's not "forcing" her, it's helping her do what she really wants to do.
Similarly, recognizing that SAT scores correlate with household income and that there are other indicators for success at the college level which could result in some students getting admitted to college that might not otherwise have stood a chance. Access to college is a good way to break the cycle of poverty for students that are willing to do the work.
Suppose women who are interested in engineering or whatever are discouraged from pursuing it by biased advisors
I think you are focused on the idea of a mature adult wanting to study engineering, and some male bigot tells her she shouldn't either explicitly or by various more subtle signals. No doubt somewhere that happens, although I think it's been decades since that was common. But that's not what I was asking Malika.
I'm talking about almost the opposite: a DEI office observes the numbers aren't where principles of equity say they should be, and therefore more initiatives are needed to get women into engineering.
Step 1, they put together a team of people deeply committed to DEI. The team gets ahead of the advisors. What they find is that statistically less women than men are interested coming in.
Step 2, they try to educate these women out of their false consciousness. (Of course they don't put it that way.) There is a small amount of "success" if you define success as diverting a woman from what she said wanted into engineering. But not much before they start getting pushback: "What's wrong with me choosing social work? Why do I have to be an engineer?". To the point where professors from social work complain that the team is biased, and another team starts a counter-campaign that it's OK for women to be social workers.
Step 3: By 2010 or so most every engineering school in the country realized the game is fixed much earlier, leading to "Girls in STEM" programs targeting late elementary and middle school. There's less pushback from the girls because they aren't being pressured to change a decision they'd already made.
Is it effective? On the one hand most incoming engineering freshmen women report that they went through such a program, on the other hand it could just mean we've reached saturation coverage. The numbers are substantially better than 40 years ago but not even close to 50-50.
Is it right? It modestly benefits my department's enrollment numbers, but I honestly can't say why pushing little girls into engineering in 2025 is ethically any better than pushing little girls into home economics was in 1955.
To put it more plainly: implicit in what you said is the existence of some "real" preference, which is good, that can be distinguished from the learned preference, which is bad. I'm not certain that "real" preference exists, it could just be whoever got to them first. If it does exist, is there some reason we should value it more?
Are they "pushing" girls into STEM, or just making them aware that it is a sensible choice if they have the right aptitude?
Obviously we shouldn't order anyone to take STEM classes (aside from some basic distributional requirements. I personally hold the unpopular and idiosyncratic view that a year of calculus, or maybe probability and statistics, should be a college graduation requirement.)
But there is nothing wrong with making sure they know they have that option.
I don't think you can at all say that there's no impediments to women in STEM such that the proportions we see now are revealed preferences.
Disentangling and trying to combat learned preferences on an individual basis is a fools' errand, I agree. Doesn't mean it isn't an issue - certainly I've heard of plenty of examples of women being discouraged from going for STEM PhDs.
The expectation that women are responsible for childrearing remains, and without a better parental support system it remains a structural impediment. That, and network effects (you get women in the program, they tell their women in STEM friends about it) are where I'd target my interventions.
Flag football, that playground pastime, has found its moment. It offers a means of enjoying the beauty of the sport, to girls as well as boys, with a significantly lower risk of wrecking your brain or the horror of watching that happen to others. Even the N.F.L. is pushing it hard — not as a replacement for its more violent main product but as a more palatable addition.
The N.F.L.’s Pro Bowl is now a flag game, in large part to avoid injuries. Flag football will make its Olympic debut in 2028 in Los Angeles for men and women. Seventeen states — including California, New York and Florida — have added flag football as a high school varsity sport for girls. And if the N.F.L. has its way, that number will soon be 50, thanks to an initiative, Flag 50, that the league promoted in a flashy Super Bowl commercial.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/07/opinion/nfl-flag-football.html
In College the Fag-Foo-Bawl players were mostly the Fraternity Bro's the ones who were too big of Pussies to have played HS Foo-Bawl (I played 1 year, enough for me) They'd dance around on the fields like Forest Fairies, easy to swivel your hips when you don't have to worry about Bubba or Joe-Bob laying you out with a Forearm Shiver. Once in a while, like a Rescue Pitbull, Bubba or Joe-Bob would return to form, and Brett, or Drew, or Alex would have to go into Concussion Protocol, Oh wait, they didn't have Protocols in 1981, just Concussions.
So they cut you? Did they at least let you be the “manager” of the team as you surely did often in high school? I’m thinking you could carry their jocks because no doubt they didn’t get you to Fill out there Entry forms
No, I made the team, 9th Grade, I had a "Growth Spurt" (the last one unfortunately) to my final 5'8" that Summer and saw myself as the next Jack Lambert (Miranda Lambert probably tackled harder) and Fred Biletnikoff (Fred Flintstone had better hands). Pre-Prop 13 California High Screw-els had lots of money, there was a Freshman Team, Sophomore, JV, and Varsity, so if you could fog a mirror you could play in 9th or 10th grade (I can fog a mirror like a Mo-Fo) Unlike Baseball, which is mostly standing around throwing a little ball, it was 2 weeks before we even saw a Foo-Bawl, running wind sprints in the Southern California heat, "Oklahoma" Drills, but I saw that Varsity Jacket at the end of the road, and all the Cheerleaders I'd be nailing if I could just tough it out. I didn't quit, got into a few plays, (we played Thursday Afternoons) and left with most of my Cerebrum Intact (Debatable)
I wonder if getting cut and having to “manage” the team is what Addled francis’ Brain.,.
The "Ultimate Flag Fighting Championship" is next...
Good one.
Better that the high schoolers learn to play rugby football
You should encourage your kids (or grandkids) to do that. There’s lots of rugby clubs around.
It takes leather balls to play rugby!
Another NYT link. I am seeing a pattern.
Some people gravitate to more reputable sources?
If China is as active on Russia's side as alleged, why no sanctions?
Because the US Regime also supports Russia?
Because they're backing our debt
MSM continues to not cover the murder of Iryna Zarutska. Local news reports that the suspect apparently did not pay either bus or train fare for the fatal trip -- and that the transit system tolerates that "for safety reasons".
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/cats-believes-light-rail-murder-024515808.html
That's what happens in a country that has so many murders. The press simply can't keep track. (Or, to put that another way, yet another murder simply isn't news.)
You, of course, care a lot more about a pretty blond woman being murdered than about any of the countless other murders that happen in the US every day. That also makes sense.
It is funny how MAGAns go from “we live in a dystopian murder world” to “why isn’t there this focus on this single murder we’re focused on, must be a lizard people conspiracy!”
Just pretend it was that Wife Beating Junkie Floyd George who got murdered instead of an actual Human.
Not surprising a person who can’t write with basic English thinks someone who was convicted for domestic abuse years ago should be summarily executed.
He "Executed" Himself when he took too much Fent-a-nol (Leave the Fent-a-nol giving to the Experts)
That’s of course as false as it is Stupidly expressed
You spelled "course" c-o-u-r-s-e.
Oh, look, fellow fabulist friend is jumping up and down on his white knight horse. He put a quarter in the slot, after all.
Blond girl murdered in camera.
MAGA has been arguing for a Trump (Miller)-mediated police state already.
This is good for a news cycle.
Cynical emotionalism is their favorite.
On the brighter side she could have got killed in You-Crane. Probably not by a Knee-grow.
"Cynical emotionalism"
Better than cynical indifference. All the victim to you is a "Blond girl".
Also funny is that even if MAGA rounds up all the immigrants, and neegroes and gays...the very next day all their problems will remain. It is hard to convince MAGA that, all along, they were the problem
You, of course, care a lot more about a pretty blond woman being murdered
100% of the people ranting about this murder not getting enough attention wanted this woman to be forced to remain in a war zone rather than being allowed to come to the United States.
She almost certainly would have lived longer. Why do you have a problem with that?
I think this is an accurate diagnosis of why the MSM avoids the story: https://pjmedia.com/athena-thorne/2025/09/07/the-image-that-killed-the-democrats-in-2026-and-beyond-n4943417
I've heard that fare evasion is extremely common in NYC as well and operators have been told not to make a fuss. Press a button to log the incident and continue. So the MTA is already halfway to being free for all.
The externalities of causing congestion should be internalised by pricing congestion (i.e. a congestion charge) and the money should be used to reduce congestion (i.e. by subsidising public transport and, where possible, new transport infrastructure). So yes, that may well mean that MTA should be free.
I can always predict where you'll end up. But it's an idiot's errand to predict how you'll get there. Still, I'm sure it feels "logical" to you.
Remember, this guy did this sealioning thing here and got caught. He’s a pathetic troll.
I don't believe for a moment that current policies are driven by economic cost-benefit analysis. New York City wants to tax nonresidents to pay for things residents want. It's a common attitude in cities. Boston's mayor wanted new tolls on the road into Cambridge to be spent on things she likes in Boston. Pennsylvania's highway tolls are dumped into Philadelphia, hundreds of miles away.
Here's an experiment. The federal government seizes the bridges into Manhattan. After deducting costs for the Corps of Engineers to maintain the bridges, any surplus toll revenue goes to Washington to be spent on therapy for lesbian goats or cluster bombs for Gaza (depending on the party in power). Then ask the Mayor: how high would you like the tolls to be?
At the same time split out the real estate development arm of the MTA and leave it running mass transit. Then ask the Mayor, how much would city taxpayers like to pay the MTA to subsidize fares or increase service?
This is a weird take. It's not like a hotel tax that essentially no residents will pay. And at least for suburban New York and Connecticut residents, it's very unlikely they'd pay the congestion pricing unless they're actually traveling to Manhattan, in which case it also supports mass transit that serves those same areas for people traveling to Manhattan.
And I think you may be confusing the MTA (which doesn't own much property) for the Port Authority, which does. And NYC already directly funds a significant portion of the MTA's budget through various taxes.
Indeed, I may be mixing up two money pits. The difference between fares and operating costs should be borne by the city for services within city limits. The revenue from the so-called "congestion" toll should go elsewhere to make it clear that the toll is high-minded and not a money grab.
The difference between fares and operating costs should be borne by the city for services within city limits.
This is where you're most confused. The vast majority of people (86%) entering the congestion relief zone do so by mass transit! Why should NYC have to pay for that whole system?
I think your Boston analogy breaks down because mass transit use is much lower there. Most people are driving in, and mass transit use is much more intense inside the city than in commuting patterns. So maybe it's fair to claim that diverting toll money to mass transit primarily benefits people in the city at the expense of commuters, but you can't apply the same reasoning to a completely different set of facts in NYC.
The revenue from the so-called "congestion" toll should go elsewhere to make it clear that the toll is high-minded and not a money grab.
It is a money grab, but it's a money grab to pay for alternatives to driving into the city.
But why do the Boston suburbs have to pay for transportation to Boston instead of transportation to THEIR stores and THEIR business locations?
I'm pretty sure the trains and buses go in both directions.
You can't be that obtuse.
OK, maybe you are.
So picture Boston and Edtown which is located, say, 10 miles from Boston. Edtown has to pay for trains that go to and come from Boston, while there are neither trains nor buses going between East Edtown and West Edtown.
So when JB Inc is planning to locate its new regional headquarters, lots of good jobs at good wages, it's not interested in East Edtown because there is no public transportation other than Edtown's spoke out from Boston. So Boston gets the jobs and the multipliers such as coffee shop business, etc. Boston can also insist that *its* disadvantaged youth be hired, not those in Edtown.
And Edtown also deals with the East/West traffic.
As an aside, Route 128, the beltway around Boston (and also I-95) no longer has a rush hour -- it's busy 13 hours a day -- 6AM to 7PM.
Usually there's not enough demand density for suburbansuburban mass transit. Nothing stops East and West Edtown from making some bus routes if there was. There's no particular reason why Boston should be paying for that, but they probably would, indirectly, through federal and state taxes that get redistributed to local transit efforts.
Ever notice the folks who are most against congestion pricing are people who aren’t actually affected by it in the real world? Tell us, John F. Carr, the last time you drove a car into Manhattan below 60th street between 5am and 9pm on a weekday or 9 and 9 on a weekend?
There are many salutary effects beyond the monies raised. Less wear and tear on the streets. Less pollution, both from fewer cars and more people taking mass transit, which is more efficient. Commute times reduced for those who do drive. Fewer traffic fatalities.
I'm against congestion pricing, and I'm affected by it. Every time I enter/leave my neighborhood (lower Manhattan), I pay an addition $6 toll now.
By your logic, you should have a toll like that in your neighborhood. Heck...they should have them everywhere there's at a least a bus. "Less wear and tear on the streets. Less pollution, both from fewer cars and more people taking mass transit, which is more efficient. Commute times reduced for those who do drive. Fewer traffic fatalities."
Your notion that "mass transit is more efficient" is true, as long as you ignore the issues of travelers' time and money. Typical Democrat-sponsored eco-supremacist doctrine.
I have no basis to dispute your assertions other than to say that if you are regularly commuting, by car, from lower manhattan into and out of the city you may be somewhat uniquely situated. And if that is indeed true, have you noticed that traffic is better?
As a car-owning resident in lower Manhattan, I am not "uniquely situated." I can't even drive to Brooklyn without paying that toll.
Most of the angriest people are car-owners who have problems with their cost of living and paying their bills. You sound like you're not very familiar with that demographic. There are a lot of them almost everywhere.
As for the relative change in traffic, I really can't tell you. Midtown on a week-day is a crawl as always.
I worked in New Jersey for a couple of years, and was surprised to see that many of my coworkers there lamented daily about their traffic encounters, as if they expected some alternative reality. There are very few New York area residents who have such an expectation. I don't expect this alleged treatment of "congestion" to significantly affect congestion, nor to be curtailed if it doesn't. In fact, I can pretty much guarantee you it will do nothing for me but go up in price.
I do assure you that the people who have problems with congestion pricing are not limited to ones who are unaffected by it. City wage-earners are especially affected by it, and are very angry about it.
This is a pro-taxation, pro-environmental, intellectual class policy that hurts wage-earners especially. But Democrats don't fashion their policies for stupid, I mean ignorant, I mean screwed again people like that.
“ I don't expect this alleged treatment of "congestion" to significantly affect congestion”
Hmm, I wonder if anyone has been keeping stats on that?
People who have problems with their cost of living and paying their bills do not own/drive cars in lower Manhattan. The cost of parking is far more significant than the congestion tolls.
Facts not in evidence, David...
DMN: "People who have problems with their cost of living and paying their bills do not own/drive cars in lower Manhattan. The cost of parking is far more significant than the congestion tolls."
That's a really dumb remark, David. Of course they don't park in garages. The ones who live in the city park on the street. And then there are all the wage-earners who commute to work by car, which on an incremental basis is much cheaper than train given that the car is a non-optional sunken cost. (Gas and tolls are their only incremental costs.)
You seem to have a problem of deafness to other people's problems.
“Midtown on a week-day is a crawl as always.”
The more details you add, the less believable you become. Why are you driving from lower manhattan to midtown on weekdays? It’s like 15 mins on the subs.
You can take the subway to Brooklyn too, you know, to avoid the ruinous tolls that are part of your “non-optional”“sunken” costs. You know what else is an optional cost? Gas. Just take mass transit and you won’t have to spend nearly as much money on gas. Or how about a bike? Don’t tell me you hate the bike lanes, too.
And of course your very simplistic calculations don’t take into account things like vehicle maintenance, negative externalities to your fellow New Yorkers, and the fact that driving is much more dangerous, for you and others, than taking mass transit. I suppose you care little for the last item, but it’s something you could theoretically price into your “sunken” cost analysis.
Again, you may have unique circumstances which absolutely force you to drive constantly but you haven’t really articulated that. Instead, it sounds like you want to drive everywhere as cheaply as possible, others be damned, and harbor seething resentment to the idea of being asked to modify your behavior for the common good.
Estragon: "The more details you add, the less believable you become. Why are you driving from lower manhattan to midtown on weekdays? It’s like 15 mins on the subs."
I almost always walk or take subways in the city. I only use the car to transport stuff. Did you consider the possibility that one doesn't have to drive to observe traffic in midtown?
You should ignore comments from idiots like me, and heed the statements of Governor Kathy Hochul and her selected experts. Endorse the Gloriously Good Plan, and let your suspicions guide you when voters like me contradict you.
Have you considered looking beyond your anecdata? I know this may shock you but they are actually keeping data— easily and publicly obtainable— about the effects of congestion pricing on… well, on congestion. And traffic fatalities.
I have watched government follow-up on programs for decades. In case you haven't noticed, the government typically only reports statistics that support its initiatives. See, for example, New York City's Vision Zero program, which though intended to reduce traffic-related fatalities, showed no such effect. But all the Vision Zero regulations remain in effect, including citywide reduction of speed limits. (How's *that* for helping congestion?)
In case you haven't noticed, failure is not usually cause to reverse course in a government program. You're a believer. You show little skepticism. I've seen too much.
“showed no such effect”
I find that hard to believe, but I’m always open to persuasion. I do know that 2025 thus far has been great for traffic fatalities in NY. Another benefit of congestion pricing?
So yes, that may well mean that MTA should be free.
The MTA's prices are not a meaningful deterrent to usage, except from people (like the alleged killer in this incident) that we want to deter. Making the MTA free will just attract the sort of people who drive away normal riders, which will make it even less palatable.
If you wanted to use the money to increase the quality and quantity of service, that would be one thing. But making it free is a terrible idea.
“quantity of service”
Your understanding of the NYC subway system is indeed unimpeachable.
Subway crime panic has been a feature of life in NYC forever. Raise prices to reduce undesirables has got to be one of the dumber things I’ve heard. Millions of people depend on the MTA every day and many of them are fine upstanding folks who are barely making it, even at $2.90 a ride. You sound like a Cuomo voter.
I didn't say anything about raising fares, and as I only work, not live, in NY it would be voter fraud for me to vote for Cuomo.
That is indeed the logic. If $2.90 deters the wrong sort of people from the subway, wouldn’t $5 discourage even more of the riff-raff? I bet if the subway cost $10 dollars a ride you wouldn’t see anyone who you don’t “want” riding.
Or are you asserting that $2.90 is some sort of perfect platonic ideal fare— high enough to deter the undesirables but low enough to accommodate the working stiff?
I am not selecting any one single fare as the optimal price; that would of course require a detailed study. I am saying only that $0 is too low.
Well, $2.90 didn’t deter this guy, did it? So is that too low as well?
Ah, for the good old days when the fare was 5 cents. Prior NYC Subway Fare Rates and Date of Price Changes:
$0.05 (1904 – 1948) $0.10 (1948 – 1953) $0.15 (1953 – 1966) $0.20 (1966 – December 31, 1969) $0.30 (January 1, 1970 – December 31, 1971) $0.35 (January 1, 1972 – August 31, 1975) $0.50 (September 1, 1975 – June 28, 1980) $0.60 (June 29, 1980 – July 3, 1981) $0.75 (July 4, 1981 – December 31, 1983) $0.90 (January 1, 1984 – December 31, 1985) $1.00 (January 1, 1986 – December 31, 1989) $1.15 (January 1, 1990 – December 31, 1991) $1.25 (January 1, 1992 – November 11, 1995) $1.50 (November 12, 1995 – May 3, 2003) $2.00 (May 4, 2003 – June 27, 2009) $2.25 (June 28, 2009 – March, 18, 2017) $2.75 (March, 19, 2017 – Present day)
Um, this was the Charlotte line; I don't know how much it costs. Also, I don't think he paid.
My mistake. You were talking about the MTA. Choose whatever recent NY subway crime you like.
If he “didn’t pay” how would having non-zero fares (as Charlotte does— one way appears to be $2.20, comparable to NYC) deter him from using public transit— in charlotte OR New York?
I have no idea if the first sentence is true or not. I'm open to some evidence one way or the other.
Based mostly on my own observations, your second sentence is incorrect. Fares don't seem to deter "the sort of people who drive away normal riders", and every free bus system I've been on has been quite pleasant. The NYC free bus pilot showed a decrease in crime.
"MSM continues to not cover the murder of Iryna Zarutska" he says, linking to an article from the mainstream media covering the murder.
While we're at it, though:
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/09/08/us/iryna-zarutska-murder-ukraine-refugee
Yes. But I subscribe to both the NY Times and the Washington Post, and neither have covered it. These are tow of the supposedly most important news outlets.
What a narrow and convenient view of what counts as the MSM.
Just a blonde girl, no need to cover her her murder.
I know it’s mostly driven by your white knight thing, but in case you can’t read the comments no one is buying your shit, Bob.
No lefty you mean. Its the usual posse of idiots, led by LTG.
I’m not leading a posse. Just pointing out your obvious character flaws by 1) referring to your own words and actions 2) asking you pointed questions that you’re too much of a pussy to answer which leads to even more negative inferences regarding your character.
There are even murders in NYC and Washington DC that the Times and the Post don't cover. Not sure why it should be remarkable that they didn't cover one in Charlotte.
Isolated internet articles is not really coverage. How much [and at what times] has this been covered on actual CNN shows.
The white guy who put a thug in a chokehold on the subway a year or two back got a lot of coverage.
CNN is a tv network. The Charlotte murder has compelling video.
“Compelling” isn’t the word I would use to describe a snuff film. It’s almost like you are a violent person attracted to things like that.
Haven't watched it. But CHN, after a warning, should show it, which they would if it was a white guy murdering a black girl.
Counterfactuals are always so easy to prove.
Russia launched its largest air attack of the war on Ukraine overnight, setting the main government building on fire in central Kyiv and killing at least four people, including an infant, Ukrainian officials said on Sunday.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-hits-ukraine-with-biggest-air-attack-war-sets-government-building-ablaze-2025-09-07/
“Before I even arrive at the Oval Office, shortly after we all together win the presidency, we will have the horrible war between Russia and Ukraine settled. It will be settled. The war is going to be settled. I’ll get them both – I know Zelensky, I know Putin, it’ll be done within 24 hours, you watch. They all say, ‘That’s such a boast.’ It will be done very quickly.” Trump July rally 2023 Iowa
and Barry Hussein said "You can keep your Doctor(I'm omitting his perpetual stutter and "Uh"s, oh, heck, for old times sake... "Uhhhh Y-y-y-y-y-ou Uhhhhh Like Y-y-y-y-y-our Uhhhh Doctor Y-y-y-y-y-y-ou can Uhhhh K-k-k-k-k-eep Your Uhhhh D--d-d-d-d-doctor!" William Juffuhson said he didn't Inhale, "W" said "Mission Accomplished) You actually believe Politicians?? Now who's the stupid one (Hint, it's you)
That's an impressive string of whatabouts, Frankie.
Thanks!
I wouldn’t expect a person who can’t write English to get the idea of the qualitative and quantitative difference between those examples and Trump, but it’s especially fun to see someone with less than third grade writing skills try to make fun of how anyone else communicates. MAGA, deranged, dumb and lacking self-awareness!
...and repeated by Trump in various forms dozens of times since.
He has since noted that ending that war "seems to be something that's a little bit more difficult than some of the others".
What a surprise!
What do you expect when the day before any peace talks the war mongers and forever war types make a large strike into Russia.
It should’ve been settled by then according to Trump’s stupid comment/lie.
Ah, the 'don't punch the aggressor, it might make them aggressive' flavour of war strategy. It's a bold tactic, I'll give you that.
Don't cause a fucking stink the day before peace talks is now controversial?
Wtf is wrong with you people?
Some of which others? The India/Pakistan thing that he had nothing to do with? The Congolese civil war that has already restarted again? The whole Israel/Palestine situation that gets worse by the day?
"Before I even...." We have been down that road before. It seems like very open thread. Even DJT admits he was mistaken. So what is your point?
We’ve been over this. That he’s a bragging, reckless jackass. He repeated this recklessly stupid claim (and others like it), over and over. He’s an unprofessional, narcissistic dullard and fabulist.
And you support him.
Weren't there also going be giant, huge, sanctions on Russia if they continued attacking civilians?
What happened?
Arkansas farmers beg for help as they face mass bankruptcies https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/arkansas-farmers-beg-for-help-as-they-face-mass-bankruptcies-heres-what-trump-has-offered-them/articleshow/123723070.cms
1 in 3 Arkansas farmers are facing bankruptcy. Begging Trump for government handouts to stay afloat
Do they normally export a lot of their crop, by any chance?
He’s given them that before. He’s all for federal welfare largesse for certain constituencies.
If Trump actually had a strategic approach to tariffs this might even make sense. Like we want to reduce our dependence on China, so we're going to strategically disadvantage trade with them with relatively high tariffs compared to other countries. They retaliate, so you use some of that tariff revenue to ease the blow on businesses that are dependent on exports to China and maybe encourage them to shift to crops that we import a lot of instead.
But Trump's policies are fickle and not strategic. He's mad Modi won't nominate him for a Nobel so we have higher tariffs on Indian goods than Chinese goods. US businesses have no idea how to adjust what products they grow/manufacture where, because they have no idea what the trade policy will be in a month or two. Trump will probably figure out how to throw some money their way unless Huckabee Sanders accidentally says something he gets insulted by. Right now she's doing all the right things, like having the black kids stand out in the rain as props for her speeches so it will probably work out for the farmers.
It seems that Banksy agrees with me and (as far as I can tell) pretty much everyone here that the UK authorities need to stop arresting people for the crime of supporting Palestine.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgrq0r0y878o
Banksy is with Climate Girl on the list of people I wish the press would stop paying attention to.
Outside of some parts of the art world he’s pretty much unknown (well, not talking about his true identity) isn’t he?
You're "part of the art world?"
lol, look at this poser trying so hard! I never claimed that, of course, unlike your claiming to be a recently disaffected liberal.
They're not being arrested for supporting Palestine. They're being arrested for supporting a specific group (Palestine Action) that was prescribed for doing things like attacking a military base. You can claim that's still wrong but it's certainly not the same thing.
I know, but the distinction is pretty stupid. (And supporting Palestine Action and/or opposing its designation as a terrorist organisation is/ought to be protected speech regardless.)
Amazon.co.uk was selling "Plasticine Action" t-shirts, but I see that they are no longer being sold there, lol.
(Made infamous recently by someone getting arrested for wearing one: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/18/protester-arrested-wearing-plasticine-action-t-shirt-palestine-gaza-protest)
I support free speech.
After the senate hearings, can we all agree that Kennedy is a lunatic? Is there any reason at all to keep that lawyer in charge of health and science?
His comment that we are the sickest nation is beyond laughable. It’s like saying the Jets were the best NFL team last year.
Malika, per dollar spent on health care, we are...
Wanting safe vaccines and safe food ingredients is lunacy?
You people are deranged. Literally deranged.
No. Thinking that his ideas have anything to do with safe vaccines or food ingredients is lunacy.
One of his ideas is to not recommend or mandate vaccines that haven't passed the gold standard of human studies.
WHAT A WHACK-A-DOO!!! TOTAL NUTJUB!! If J&J SAYS IT'S A VACCINE AND A CDC BUREUACRAT STANDS TO MAKE MILLIONS, IT'S A MUST HAVE!! WON'T YOU PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!??
Another one of his whacky ideas is to not have fake food colorings that have been shown to cause cancer, JUST LIKE IN MOST OF CIVILIZATION.
He's such a whacky nutjob!!! That must be his brain worm? Who doesn't want to get cancer from his M&Ms?!?! We know David N. wants to get cancer! His turbo-cancer from the COVID vaxx wasn't enough cancer for him!!! No siree.
People ask....why do people support Trump?
There are a lot of reasons, but one might be this. Democrats like Biden "say" they're going to "work on" curbing illegal immigration. But it never seems to happen. Trump says he'll work on it...and it's a near immediate drop.
https://usafacts.org/answers/how-many-migrant-encounters-are-there-along-the-us-mexico-border/country/united-states/
Biden always had the tools to limit illegal immigration, if he chose to use them. He simply chose not to, while saying something entirely different.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Biden’s immigration policy was awful and also devastating to his party. I think when he got elected as the “not Trump” he mistook that for “anti-Trump” and tried to undo everything Trump did, whether it made sense or not.
But he didn't just do that to mindlessly do the opposite of everything Trump did. He did that because, ideologically, the Democratic party has been hostile to enforcing immigration laws for decades now. ANY Democratic President would have done the same.
But kudos for admitting he was actually doing it. We've never been able to get Sarcastr0 to admit that illegal immigration shooting up when he took office was anything but a coincidence.
Are you seriously suggesting that the Biden Administration did not "limit immigration" in any way or he did not "enforce immigration laws"?
Right, right, he about 50% enforced them, while deliberately allowing massive violations to continue.
He enforced them as little as he could get away with. Well, no, given the 2024 election results, a bit less than he could get away with...
Queenie: "I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Biden’s immigration policy was awful and also devastating to his party. I think when he got elected as the “not Trump” he mistook that for “anti-Trump” and tried to undo everything Trump did, whether it made sense or not."
I agree with you here.
Yes, Biden could have also broken the law and acted in myriad ways that go against the most fundamental values that Americans claim to hold dear as a nation, but he chose not to. Silly him.
Meanwhile, Trump's job approval ratings are still way lower than you'd expect if his policies were as popular as you claim: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/poll-trumps-job-ratings-stay-negative-americans-express-strong-support-rcna228110
There has long been a trend, I've remarked on it before, of partisans being less and less inclined to express approval of a President of the opposing party. I wish I could find an updated version of this.
At this point, just the fact that you're a President of one party means that your approval rating with members of the opposing party will be in the single digits. I believe Trump's current approval rating with Democrats is about 2%? So his having an overall approval rating in the mid 40's is actually pretty good, about as good as it gets. EVERY President is going to be underwater for most of their administration, until something basic changes.
There has long been a trend, I've remarked on it before, of partisans being less and less inclined to express disapproval of a President of their party.
At this point, just the fact that you're a President of one party means that your approval rating with members of your party will be in the high 80s. So his having an overall approval rating in the mid 40's is actually pretty bad, about as bad as it gets.
Oh, gimme a break.
Look at that graph again: The upper lines, (Approval of Presidents by their own party) are staying in the same general area. You had a bit of a dip there for Johnson-Carter, but modern Presidents are in the same territory with their own party as Eisenhower and Reagan were, the 80% range.
Then you look at the lower lines, and there's a distinct trend of the other party hating on a President more and more as time goes by, regardless of what their support within their party looks like.
That's why I phrased it the way I did: Presidents are almost always loved by their own party, they had to get the nomination, didn't they? But Presidents getting the white hot hatred of the opposing party is a new thing, and it guarantees the average between them will be in the 50's at best.
Honestly, my main takeaway is that it's depressing that Republican nuttiness has dropped support for vaccines down into the 70s.
With regards to Trump in particular, more than the overall approval number (which, Brett is right, is not all that dynamic these days) is that the approval numbers on what are supposed to be Trump's areas of strength: immigration and the economy, are now underwater.
Yes, I didn't link the article for the overall number.
Because they have authoritarian tendencies, which only someone like Trump can satisfy.
Let's start with Trump is willing to break laws and violate civil rights to achieve his anti-immigration goals. The GOP's willingness to put heads on pikes to discourage legal and illegal entry by immigrants is nothing to be proud of.
The GOP's cruelty to immigrants in general has had immediate and measurable destructive impacts on multiple industries nationwide to include agriculture, manufacturing, and tourism. When Democrats say they're going to work on illegal immigration, they mean without demolishing our own economy and making things worse for our citizens and legal residents.
Biden likely never saw cruelty and lawlessness as tools he had to limit immigration. It takes a Republican to do that.
Worth a repost.
People are often concerned "Why do people support Trump?" This chart is one big reason. Under Trump, the real incomes for poor and middle class people went up dramatically. Under Biden...not so much.
Maybe those poor rubes are just supporting their own economic well being
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/09/who-did-better-biden-or-trump.php
Doesn’t get any less silly the second time.
Nor does denial the three-hundredth time.
You don’t like it when someone points out your fakery, we get it.
Hey! I’m supposed to be the Faker here!
Yeah, Frank. Queenie can tell you a thing or two about what real doctors are like.
I posted my own analysis back during the campaign that the lowest quintile had the largest income gain in a single year in 2019 under Trump than any President going back to Reagan.
And median real household income for the lowest quintile increased by more than 14% over Trump's full 4 year term, even including the covid year.
But really what do you suppose accounts for the surge in Trump support among the working class if not that they did better under Trump's policies than Biden's?
It had to be something.
How were they able to figure out what's in their best interest without some Lib telling them?
wtf, they're always voting against their best interest!
Yes, we should definitely have the Crypto-fraudster and the brain-worm guy tell us what is in everyone's best interest! I'm sure they're more reliable than people who are actually trying to do the right thing.
Or we could look to some Euro who stands by while Whites get jailed for tweeting about rapists raping their White children with the government protecting the rapists.
That sounds like a wonderful alternative.
"Overall, we rate Power Line strongly right-biased based on story selection that always favors the right. We also rate them Mixed for factual reporting due to the use of poor sources that have failed numerous fact checks, as well as rejecting the consensus of science when it comes to climate change." Media Bias Check
Can you provide a source with more credibility?
The details of the Florida vaccination rule change are coming out. I gather they were available last week but reporters didn't look at the state equivalent of the Federal Register.
"Florida’s plan would lift mandates on school vaccines for hepatitis B, chickenpox, Hib influenza and pneumococcal diseases, such as meningitis." The statutory requirement for "measles, polio, diphtheria, pertussis, mumps and tetanus" vaccines to attend school would remain.
https://apnews.com/article/florida-vaccine-mandates-children-4e697db6085dc5dd4bd9b206ed9a51b6
My thoughts:
Must have a tetanus shot to attend school? That's weird. It's not contagious. I understand the shot is currently bundled with others so as a practical matter students will get it as a consequence of diphtheria and pertussis vaccinations. It shouldn't be explicitly required.
Must have a flu shot to attend school? That sounds like a blue state rule.
Meningitis vaccination wasn't available when I was in school. Kids got chickenpox as a matter of course.
You mean the neighborhood moms didn't get together and have "Meningitis Parties"??
Seems like going back to the precovid definition of vaccines would be helpful. It's a prevention tool, not a therapy tool. That's how most people think of Vaccines anyway.
“The statutory requirement for "measles, polio, diphtheria, pertussis, mumps and tetanus" vaccines to attend school would remain.”
I don’t see flu in there.
“Kids got chickenpox as a matter of course.”
Yeah, and it sucked and is contagious. They should trade that one and tetanus.
Yeah, I got chickenpox as a kid, it sucked, but if it weren't for the fact that chickenpox sucks about 100 times more if you get it first as an adult, and leads to shingles when you're older, it wouldn't be such a big deal.
But, of course, it DOES suck a lot more if you get it first as an adult, and it DOES lead to shingles later in life, so vaccination for chickenpox is pretty important.
And shingles. I hate shots and going to the doctor. But I got the shingles vaccine after hearing how awful it was from friends and family that got it.
Mom basically died of it; It seems that if you have a shingles outbreak right after getting steroids for something, (Like her arthritis.) it becomes much worse. It was so painful she lost the will to live.
My sympathies. Sound terrible.
Treating old people is like that. You give steroids to stop one thing and the suppressed immune system lets something else pop up. You give antibiotics and the original infection is replaced by a C. difficile infection.
Dropping chickenpox seems weird. Seems like they're just getting rid of all the vaccines that are relatively recent requirements rather than being thoughtful about how to cut down on the list. This would explain why they're keeping the tetanus requirement while dropping chickenpox and meningitis.
My guess, (But just a guess) would be that they think the cost/benefit isn't there, because annual cases of chickenpox in Florida are running in the upper two digits, which is low enough that kids in Florida probably suffer more from vaccine side effects than the disease itself.
I don't personally approve of that sort of static analysis, but it IS a lot harder to justify mandating a vaccination, when the odds are it's going to be a net harm to the recipients.
And I believe most of the chickenpox cases in the US at present are due to immigrants, mostly illegal ones; Herd immunity to chickenpox in the US is so high it would extinguish entirely without outside cases coming in.
That. Is. Because. Of. The. Vaccine.
Which you yourself acknowledge! This reminds me of the Ginsburg umbrella analogy. Not sure why Republican brain somehow gets from "this policy is working really well and achieving its exact intended outcome" to "we should get rid of it!"
We're seeing with measles what happens when vaccination rates start to fall. Rates were essentially 0 for decades until 2019, and now we're having an even bigger outbreak this year.
The umbrella analogy is standard logic for Republicans.
Happily, mRNA and reverse transcriptase vaccines and cancer remedies (likely from China since we've defunded) are around the bend. I'll gladly take them. MAGA, on principle, won't. Which will end up being a great way to decrease the surplus MAGA population just like COVID did. I'm largely past feeling any empathy for them because of their ignorance
"I don't personally approve of that sort of static analysis, but it IS a lot harder to justify mandating a vaccination, when the odds are it's going to be a net harm to the recipients."
Again, this is not a medical argument, it's a moral argument, about when you can justify imposing a risk on one person to benefit a DIFFERENT person.
You talk about cost/benefit (with the cost being side effects) and also blame immigrants above.
Those are not moral arguments.
No new goalposts.
The justification for the list may be as simple as "drop all the vaccine requirements that were imposed by regulation and not by statute."
Fair point, and a reasonable rationale if so. Does this imply that state legislatures (or at least Florida's) are now just as dysfunctional as the federal one and are no longer capable of doing an update of the statute, though?
The state legislature is not in session and will not reconvene until next year.
If tetanus is bundled, that helps explain why it is included.
It prevents a serious disease. The requirement for school children is a means to encourage parents to protect their children.
Kids got various diseases "as a matter of course." An older person I know, for instance, suffered from whooping cough. It was a regular thing when they were younger.
Query, per recent remarks out of Florida, if measles vaccines are "akin to slavery"?
I don't consider keeping individual kids healthy to be a legitimate aim of school vaccine requirements. Individual health is a job for parents. A disease like measles is both serious and contagious. From experience we know outbreaks can be prevented by a high community vaccination rate. Requiring measles vaccination can be justified by collective health, not only the desire to make parenting decisions for others.
I was reading about pertussis recently after a child I know had a short but severe coughing fit. The vaccine cut the frequency by maybe 80%. It was hard to make sense of the all the numbers I saw. Definitely down but not close to eradicated. So it's not as good as the measles vaccine. Maybe it helps the immune system without preventing spread of the bacterium? That's been claimed for the COVID vaccines. I didn't dig into the epidemiology.
It's harder to eradicate diseases where a large percentage of the infections are asymptomatic, because contagious people don't tend to self-isolate. When a disease is almost always symptomatic, you've got self-isolation to assist in preventing transmission.
More specifically, if the infection is asymptomatic during the infectious period.
My argument for tetanus would be that one could contract it on school grounds or at school events. Although rare, it can be extremely serious/fatal, and, I believe, untreatable after a certain point.
My thoughts about tetanus is legal liability. The shot is good for 10 years and it protects against cuts from rusty playground equipment and the lawsuits that would inevitably result.
Elon Musk openly expressed essentially Nazi ideology, arguing that the world was overpopulated, and that the West’s tendency for compassion had inhibited natural and salutary evolutionary forces that, for the overall good of the species, tend to kill off the poor, the weak, and the lesser breeds, and strengthen the position of the rich and the strong. He openly called compassion Western Civilization’s greatest weakness. While not going as far as the Nazis did in instituting active measures like extermination camps, he favored stopping this business of helping poor and weaker people by allowing them into this country, giving them welfare and medical care, etc.
No-one else in the Trump administration has been as open or as outspoken about this ideology than Musk was. And I doubt that Robert Kennedy personally espouses it. Vaccine skepticism may simply be one of his quirky beliefs without regard to the consequences.
But the overall policy and actions of this administration, taken as a whole, seem highly consistent with this ideology. The combination of accepting only rich white nationalists (South African Afrikaaners) as refugees, the war on vaccines, efforts to reduce welfare and health care, selective immigration enforcement not-too-subtlely aimed mostly at non-White people, and other measures, are all measures that people with an active goal of culling out the weak and the non-Aryan but politically unable even to openly articulate that this is their policy, let alone employ the sorts of active measures the Nazi regime in Germany did, would do as a partial start in the direction of their goal.
"Elon Musk openly expressed essentially Nazi ideology, arguing that the world was overpopulated,"
So, what color is the sky in your alternate universe? Chartreuse?
And, man, did you ever take his views on empathy out of context.
You are right. I misspoke. I should have said the world has too many of the wrong kind of people, and not enough of the right kind.
But far from being a contradiction, this is completely consistent with Nazi ideology. The Nazis instituted the lebensborn program to increase the population of healthy Aryans, while simultaneously exterminating “lesser” races.
Musk is known for instituting a personal lebensborn program. But this is also completely consistent. He obviously considers the best and purest racial stock to be his own.
Wow, this is right up there in "Hitler was a vegetarian, so anybody who likes veggies is a Nazi" territory.
I mean, the American eugenics movement started well before Hitler came to power
Also, I don’t see the link on context for the empathy quote as contradicting what I said. In his view, empathy has to be for civilization as a whole. And the whle point of what he was trying to say, as I see it, is that empathy for civilization as a whole requires not having empathy for individuals that he regards as being in the way of its progress.
“ active goal of culling out the weak”
It starts from the top. Perhaps you have seen Dr Oz on TV recently talking about it being a “patriotic duty” to be healthy. Also, and perhaps most obviously, there’s this:
“Those people . . . ” Donald said, trailing off. “The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.”
https://time.com/7002003/donald-trump-disabled-americans-all-in-the-family/
It's only September in his first of four years. Even the Nazi's took a while to get the political and social machinery in place. The Republicans are still in the process of isolating the US from all of our allies and creating a more insular social view among the population.
I was watching a few episode of "Leverage: Redemption" over the weekend. (The series itself is great lightweight fun.) One episode featured a villain who's a human trafficker. At the end of the episode the women who'd been working for him under duress (seized passports, threats of deportation, etc.) are standing around as the villain is being arrested and someone says, "what will happen to them?"
And I realised that this scene, pretty standard in any number of crime drama series, is now out of date. The answer now is that they will all be imprisoned in an ICE camp awaiting deportation.
I wonder if that will make it more or less likely that various crimes will be reported to the police...
It certainly makes it more likely that trafficked victims will be more at the mercy of their captors. The resident situational psychopaths here will no doubt argue that the victims shouldn't have wanted to come to the US without proper authorisation in the first place.
Well, yeah. They shouldn't. That they might be victimized like this is just another reason for that.
This is one of the main ideas behind "sanctuary cities." If the local police assist with ICE enforcement, it drives wedges between the police force and their community which makes crime harder to fight and creates an underclass exposed to criminals without the protection of the police.
Terrific NFL opening season imho. Eagles Cowboys weird but close. Chargers playing a great game to overcome Chiefs awesome. Steelers reach down and pull another one out over Jets, Fields and Rogers looked great. SF with a great win and the Bills surging to edge out the Ravens, fantastic.
The Dolphins whooping, wtf? Also, revamped Pats fall short. Packers, best bet for NFC?
Don't forget the Commanders and two goal-line stands, basically shutting down the Giants.
Shutting down the Giants is really not that impressive.
Yeah, I'm a Giants fan; the only thing they managed to do was underperform even with expectations so low a Dachsund could walk over them.
I HATE shotgun formations on the goal line
Russia Steps Up Disinformation Efforts as Trump Abandons Resistance: The Kremlin has begun a campaign to sway the parliamentary election in Moldova in what could become a new model of election interference online.
https://archive.ph/XjUFz#selection-4321.0-4325.144
Since returning to the White House in January, President Trump has dismantled the American government’s efforts to combat foreign disinformation. The problem is that Russia has not stopped spreading it.
How much that matters can now be seen in Moldova, a small but strategic European nation that has since the end of the Cold War looked to Europe and the United States to extract itself from Moscow’s shadow.
The Trump administration has slashed diplomatic and financial support for the country’s fight against Russian influence, even as the Kremlin has conducted what researchers and European officials described as an intense campaign to sway that country’s parliamentary elections, scheduled for Sept. 28.
The Russians have flooded social media with fake posts, videos and entire websites that are created and spread on TikTok, Telegram, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube using increasingly effective artificial intelligence tools.
I flagged the usage of social media by Russia to help Trump, including in misleading ways & ways that used personal data in ways the people did not expect it to be used, and some people around here honestly said, "So? I like Trump, I'm glad they helped him."
Picture-in-picture would have been helpful for New York sports fans on Sunday. The Yankees, Mets, Jets, and Giants were all on the same time much of the time. [Mets started around 1:40.]
Only the Yankees won. The Bills (who actually play in New York) won the night game, coming back twice from fifteen points down.
The main contest left in baseball is to decide which team might blow it. There are some seeding battles still going on. Seattle is high on people's lists and might not even make the playoffs. The Blue Jays might blow their first-place spot.
The "Trump was actually an informant against Epstein" spin didn't even last the whole weekend.
Very curious to hear what the next excuse for covering up for pedophiles will be.
Now we also get to start asking questions about Jamie Dimon! Very clearly an attempt to underbus subordinates in the NYT magazine yesterday. Like Ron Wyden keeps saying… follow the money
"Trump was actually an informant against Epstein"
As with all good propaganda, there may actually be a kernel of truth here. One theory that seems to fit the known facts would be a sort of race to the FBI: Trump and Epstein had dirt on each other (Sex ring for Epstein, Russian money laundering for Trump), and the relationship soured over the WPB mansion and Trump was faster to tell his story to the feds. In any event, Johnson did seem to be speaking out of turn. Curiouser and curiouser.
By the end of the month there will be 218 votes, minimum, in the house for the Massey/Khanna discharge petition. Will John Thune sit on it? Will Trump veto it?
There's no kernel of truth there; Johnson admitted he made it up. One lawyer for one of the victims had once said that after Epstein had been exposed, Trump told him — not the FBI — he'd help if he could with the victim's attempt to go after Epstein. (There's nothing to indicate that any help from Trump was actually forthcoming, though.) That's all Johnson was garbledly referring to.
“There's no kernel of truth there”
Well, if what Michael Wolff says is true— Epstein himself believed it to be the case.
But Kazinski was assuring us just yesterday that this was the real reason that Trump was trying to keep the files secret.
Actually I think I got it right:
"Being an FBI snitch is not going to go down well with the base."
It must not have polled well.
...So you repeated a lie, people pointed out it was an obvious lie, and now when it's admitted, you're like 'haw haw, yeah.'
Do you care about the truth at all, or do words exist only for you to convince other people to do what you want?
I posted a news report quoting someone could be assumed to be in a position to know.
Obviously anything said by a member of Congress is subject to further verification, but they still get quoted all the time.
“ Obviously anything said by a member of Congress is subject to further verification”
Not by you! Your post began: “ Well now we know what Trump was hiding and why he doesn't want the Epstein files released, he was an FBI informant.”
So this is kind of a blatant lie by you, eh?
Anyone who doesn't know that all Congressmen just pull stuff out of their ass shouldn't be allowed outside without adult supervision.
Who's watching you today?
It must be nice to have a completely non-falsifiable belief system.
Ouch! On the release of another love letter to Epstein by Trump. And the words are damning. You hillbillies are propping up a pedophile
With at least one child victim naming Trump as her rapist, I'm amazed this lie even had legs to begin with.
Well, you see--this "informant" thing explains why he was doing all that bad stuff! It was like in Donnie Brasco where he has to do some drugs to not mess up his cover. Trump just had to go along with all of Epstein's child rape so that he could get his invite to the island.
/s (but also an argument I could see some of the people here making)
Liar gets some street justice.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/08/us/dorian-johnson-fatally-shot-ferguson-michael-brown
Cool, I'll put you down as being in favor of the general proposition, "liars should be fatally shot"...
Wow. This thread is like the Ur-example of Bob victim white-knighting, complete with a gross racial subtext.
Above we see Bob, in his zeal to defend all crime victims, declare that Sarc was being cynically indifferent to a brutal murder. Accusing him of saying to her he’s just “a blond girl.”
But here, we see another murder victim that Bob is okay with because the person is a “liar.” Indeed, rather than “cynical indifference” he seems down-right happy and gleeful about this murder.
Always remember: Bob does not care about victims or crime. His opinion in such matters is completely determined by whether 1) he likes the victim or not and 2) he likes the perpetrators or not. Nothing else matters to him.
Dead dude caused massive riots because he made up the "hands up" myth. Its the victims of those riots that matter, mostly black people so screw your reflexive use of the race card.
I mean, it was a movement not just that guy.
One wonders how many people do you want killed. On behalf of the victims, of course.
This does not negate what I said. You were happy someone was murdered because you didn’t like them. That was your first reaction. You wrote this because you realized you were caught being a hypocritical piece of shit. You don’t care about crime and you don’t care about victims. You like violence when it suits you.
You are a thuggish person who has a worse personality than many of the criminal defendants I’ve represented. If you ever did a PSR interview, the probation office would think you’re a remorseless asshole who is constantly making excuses for his obvious anti-social behavior.
You’re just a run-of-the-mill thug. No amount of crocodile tears upthread or histrionic appeals to “justice” can change that.
Just recognizing karma when it bites someone in the butt. Not "happy", just amused.
No tears for bad people dying though.
You’re a really bad person, you know that right? And that for your sake you better hope karma isn’t real.
So you say.
Let’s look at the facts in this thread. By your own admission you are “amused” at a murder. Is that what a good person would say? Would you feel comfortable say explaining why this murder “amuses” you to say BLSA?
Maybe you need to sit through some murder trials and see the testimony of and statements of victim’s families to understand how shitty you’re being. Their pain is real no matter how “bad” of a person you think they are.
I would think Darren Wilson's shooting Michael Brown was the actual proximate cause of the riots.
Then you'd think wrong. Criminals get shot by the police all the time without causing widespread riots.
Great take. Understanding the longer-term underlying trends behind events is Marxist analysis, after all.
No "hands up" lie, maybe no riots. Or not as severe.
Even Holder's DOJ found the shooting justified.
Maybe!
Though I tend to be skeptical of the great man theory your counterfactual implies. This was a bubbling issue independent of any particular event.
No. The false narrative precipitated by Dorian Johnson that the "mainstream" media ran with was the proximate cause of the riots. It was a lie, and the truth, that Darren Wilson was attacked by Michael Brown, was covered up by the same media. "Hands up, don't shoot" never happened.
Um, IANAL, but I understand that "proximate cause" has an actual meaning, and wouldn't apply here.
"But here, we see another murder victim that Bob is okay with..."
We do? Which one?
Bob is happy about the person in this story being murdered but not the one in the thread above.
The person in this story appears to have been shot in self-defense.
No. A person claimed self-defense. That is often a given as a defense to murder, and it doesn’t always work out that way.
The prosecutor says it appears to be self-defense.
It's true that we don't have all the facts, but I'm gonna go ahead and say that my claim of apparent self-defense is on a lot firmer ground than your unqualified claim of murder.
No. She said it “involved a claim of self-defense.” That’s not the same as saying it “appears to be self-defense.”
Sigh. It certainly isn't the same as saying it was murder. And the person was released with no charges filed, which lends credibility to the claim.
She will have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt it was not self defense.
"If a defendant asserts that his or her use of force is described under subdivision (2) of subsection 2 of this section, the burden shall then be on the state to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant did not reasonably believe that the use of such force was necessary to defend against what he or she reasonably believed was the use or imminent use of unlawful force."
563.031. Use of force in defense of persons. —
What does Trump have against Carlos Alcaraz? When the Spaniard won Trump had this look on his face like someone shit in his soup. Laid a few bucks on Sinner, maybe?
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trumps-reaction-carlos-alcarazs-us-open-win-goes-viral-2126210
Couldn't find a good enough booing story? The NY Times (and many "trustworthy" outlets like NPR) tried to float that angle.
You must've read the "Why It Matters" section of the article you cited, which strangely makes no mention of The Look. It was at least an attempt to explain why something about the story mattered, so it is unsurprising that they ignored The Look.
But you couldn't.
Try to upgrade your life. TDS is a lousy excuse for dwelling there.
I don’t understand your gripe. Political figures get booed at sporting events in NY all the time. I would anticipate boos when Trump goes to Yankee stadium, but again— they boo almost everyone. It doesn’t have anything to do with Trump. What is unique, if anything, about the whole booing thing is how thin skinned the White House seemed to be about it being televised.
He did in fact have an extremely dour look on his face at the end. It’s not a criticism, just an observation. That you felt the need to jump in here with the “TDS” stuff in response to an extremely anodyne observation is indeed revealing of some kind of derangement, but perhaps not what you had in mind.
I summarized my point: "TDS is a lousy excuse for dwelling there."
But as they say: you do you.
The 2nd Circuit upheld the absurd $83 million judgment against Trump. Writing the opinion are 1 Obama judge and 2 Biden judges. Color me surprised.
The detestable Denny Chin wrote the opinion. Remember, he's the piece of shit who held that the NY government bullying insurance companies to drop the NRA didn't constitute state action.
The first time in American history someone was found guilty of defamation for asserting his innocence.
Democrats are vile and evil. Every single one of them. Monsters.
Asserting your innocence is a far cry from what Trump did. Trump had every opportunity to challenge and fight the case in court. Instead he chose to fight it in the public square and in the doing so did it in a way that is classic defamation.
I didn't touch her! She is a nut job! I don't know who that crazy lady is. She is not my type. It's a made up lie. I've never met her in my life.
"first time in american history someone was found guilty of defamation for asserting his innocence."
One of these things is not like the other.
I wouldn't say it's the first time, but it's pretty unusual to be found guilty of defamation for asserting your innocence when your accuser can't even identify the YEAR in which she claims you assaulted her.
It’s pretty unusual to be found guilty of defamation because criminal defamation isn’t a thing in most jurisdictions and to the extent it is, it’s rarely prosecuted.
Brett understands memory and trauma so hard he'll countermand a jury's finding just on his own vibes.
Brett you are missing the point that claiming your innocence is as easy as saying just that. IT is how Trump chose to make his case for innocence that got him on the losing end of a large judgement.
9 jurors, of which 7 were non-white. It was a kangaroo trial.
Wow! That's horrible! I'm surprised such a horrific act didn't cost Trump $73 GAZILLION BILLION dollars instead of just $73M
These judges just protect Trump constantly! This must've come from SCOTUS!!
Trump just lucky he is wealthy, many people or organization would be bankrupt because they said the things he said.
It'll be hilarious when SCOTUS reverses on due process grounds.
The Supreme Court continues to stay busy on the shadow, interim, emergency, and Calvinball docket.
Kavanaugh, concurring:
To be clear, apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion; under this Court’s case law regarding immigration stops, however, it can be a “relevant factor” when considered along with other salient factors.
Citing US v. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U. S., at 887 (1975). https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/25a169_5h25.pdf
Gonna be super gross when he writes a concurrence about the color blind constitution in the VRA case.
Or the university case. It's writing like this that really shows the lie of any claim of idealogical consistence. The only rule is calvinball.
I think there is ideological consistency, just not legal or moral consistency.
What's super gross is that he tried to mitigate his opinion by saying, "But if ICE abuses these people, they can just sue." No, they can't! Kavanaugh and his ilk have decided that Bivens doesn't apply to anyone not named Bivens.
That too
Do you not see a difference between institutional racial preferences and frisking a mestizo or zambo because he's 100 times more likely to be an illegal immigrant than a white?
If I were a lower court, I'm not sure what precedential value I'd take from a shadow docket concurrence.
This whole thing is no way to run the top institution in the judiciary.
If you were a lower court, the Supreme court would be raking you over the coals, then.
But, that said, I agree. They should turn the lights on, and just take a lot more cases.
Your vibes based legal understanding may not be able to see the lack of concrete guidance here, but to most legal types - the ones who care about precedent - it's an open issue.
One Justice on a non-merits docket doesn't have legal weight. Or, because he's the only one who wrote anything, maybe he does. The only thing that's clear is nothing is clear.
Here Sarcastr0 is calling for Judicial insurrection because he didn't get his way.
That's how all Leftists think. All of them. By Any Means Necessary.
I mean by definition solo concurrences have no precedential value whatsoever. So ignoring Kavanaugh is totally fine.
So Conservatives are okay with security forces engaging in racially discriminatory arrests at the behest of a leader they have shown extreme personal loyalty to because they believe the leader and the security forces can be constrained legally or politically? I’m sure this will be fine and that there is no historical example of that kind of assumption backfiring.
Of course they are. They've made that clear.
Bind the outgroup, protect the ingroup.
The ingroup is an increasingly small group of white conservatives.
Next comes school prayer and crypto-eugenics natalism.
lmao vibes
A very revealing data point that supports the idea that the Trumpist-right doesn’t actually care about violent crime or victims, this time from Trump himself:
https://x.com/phil_lewis_/status/1965078979825877157?s=46&t=swfuX8A13L7H9PAYSakPtA
https://x.com/edmartindoj/status/1965001679545450596?s=46&t=swfuX8A13L7H9PAYSakPtA
Here’s another one. This time with sexual assault.
Well, they support Trump, so that isn't too surprising.
A significant fraction of the MAGA commentariat on this post attributes everything said by the most extreme left-wing faction of the Democratic Party to the Democratic Party itself and takes it as Gospel, evidence notwithstanding, that it’s what ecefy Democrat believes.
But there are plenty of things being said by a not-insignificant fraction of what was once the extreme right-wing faction of the MAGA right that could equally well be attributed to MAGAand Trumpism as a whole. Take, for example, this effort to rehabilitate Hitler.
Should we assume this is what everyone in MAGA believes? It seems to me that at least for those commentators who continue to attribute views to the Democratic Party that are well outside its mainstream, doing so ought to be considered an admission that this is in fact what they believe.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/09/maga-hitler-anti-semitism/684078/
Taking a different example: Trump's attacks on civil rights and abuse of executive orders--including tariffs. The Republican majority in the House and Senate could vote to undo these things but does not. Is it then fair to assume they approve? We've always known that Trump courted the extreme right, to include neo-nazis. Race-based ICE raids that don't distinguish between citizens, legal immigrants, and illegal immigrants until after they're dumped into a pen like cattle isn't creating much blowback from the average Republican. There's the occasional FAFO complaint by a non-white conservative who didn't expect their friend/sibling/child/parent to get sent to a foreign prison but those aside, Republicans are good with the methods and results. Build detention camps in the middle of the swamp and brag about how the detainees lives will be threatened by alligators? Republicans seemed to love that level of brutality while the camp was still open.
I think if you asked the average MAGAt if they believe that Hitler was bad, most would say "yes." But, if you instead rephrased Hitler's ideology using today's euphemisms and aimed it at (non-white) immigrants, they'd agree to quite a lot of it. I'm sure there's a line and it might be before the "final solution" portion of Hitler's movement, but then again, sending non-violent immigrants with misdemeanor-level crimes to US-funded CECOT didn't create any outcry from the Republican majority.
Why is the monster that butchered that young Ukrainian woman in Charlotte still alive? I thought Criminals had some sort of Ethics where certain acts got you killed.
Frank
It was things like this which led to Nathan Bedford Forrest to form the Klan.
We've had a lot of back and forth about whether Humphrey's Executor is still alive. It may be still alive but, its being sealed in the basement vault brick by brick.
Roberts today stayed the reinstatement of (former) FTC Commisioner Rebecca Slaughter:
"DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, ET AL., Applicant s v. REBECCA K. SLAUGHTER, ET AL. O R D E R UPON CONSIDERATION of the application of counsel for the applicants, IT IS ORDERED that the July 17, 2025 order of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, case No. 1:25-cv-909, is hereby stayed pending further order of the undersigned or of the Court. It is further ordered that a response to the application be filed on or before Monday, September 15th, 2025, by 4 p.m. (EDT)."
Humphrey's executor may have been a ticket for more than one ride, but it has expired.
Is it as dead as Humphrey?
In law school I learned lower courts are supposed to cite cases as precedent.
Not unexplained orders on the shadow docket that signal what the Court's gonna do.
If the Court wants to change that fundamental principle in the way our judiciary works, it has a lot more work to do. With a majority of the Court signed on.
As it is, this is just vibes and chaos. Just like the other branches of government right now.
Seems self-evidently bad to me.
They asked for briefs by September 15th.
So the whole court is going to rule and I don't think it will take more than a month.
As for the chaos in the lower courts, they could just follow my comments in the open threads, they'd do much better than they are now.
Its just a so called administrative stay until Slaughter files her response to the stay motion.
It's a stay until the court says different.
I just perused the Court of Appeals decision last week that dissolved the previous administrative stay, denied a motion for a stay pending appeal, and then for good measure denied the motion to expedite the appeal (Roberts evidently disagreed).
But the majority opinion did do a good job explaining the Administrations argument, and the precedent they are relying on to assert the 1930's Humphrey's should not apply to the modern FTC, even though they didn't find it convincing:
The government emphasizes that the present-day Commission can seek monetary penalties against private parties in federal court. Gov’t Stay Mot. 13–14; see also Meredith v. Federal Mine Safety & Health Rev. Comm’n, 177 F.3d 1042, 1050 n.5 (D.C. Cir. 1999) (“[A] civil penalty constitutes something other than monetary damages, which the Supreme Court has described as ‘a sum of money used as compensatory relief[.]’”) (quoting Department of the Army v. Blue Fox, Inc., 525 U.S. 255, 262 (1999)). ... To be sure, the Supreme Court has characterized the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s power to seek civil “monetary penalties” as a “quintessentially executive power not considered in Humphrey’s Executor.” Seila Law, 591 U.S. at 219. But the Commission’s authority to seek such penalties is far less “daunting” than the Bureau’s."
The bolded part above is from Roberts' decision of course, so I don't think its going out on a limb to assume Roberts hasn't changed his mind on that issue in the last 5 years.
But I don't fault the Appeals court for following Humphrey's for now, because it hasn't been overruled, that's up to the Supreme Court, and Roberts has recognized that.
Boston Mayor Wu:
We expect that federal law enforcement will abide by the constitution and laws of this City, Commonwealth, and country, and we are prepared to take legal action at any evidence to the contrary.
Boston's lawyers will need to explain the Supremacy Clause to her. And standing. And the Supreme Court's action today following her statement yesterday.
https://www.bostonherald.com/2025/09/08/wu-boston-prepared-to-take-legal-action-if-ice-deportation-surge-violates-laws/
Speaking of standing, did anyone see the nutjob ex-Trump doctor Ronny Jackson sued Gavin Newsom in federal court in Texas over California redistricting, despite not living in California or having any cause of action and despite California not being located in Texas?
California and Illinois election cheating disenfranchises millions of actual Americans.
Everyone should have standing in unlawful and gross Democrat election meddling.
Too bad the Supreme Court ruled political gerrymandering is non-justiciable. It's almost like some people predicted that was a bad idea!
The best complaint against California's election cheating is that it violates CA law.
But since the government is Democrat top to bottom, laws don't matter when youre trying to Save Sacred Democracy.
It's not a very good complaint when what's being done is a ballot measure to ask the voters if they want to change the law.
I mean it was smart to file it in front of Matt K because he and his lawyers won’t get sanctioned.
Was he a "nut job" when he was Obama's doctor?
Yes. And in Trump’s White House too. Who was he prescribing all the ketamine and provigil for?
https://media.defense.gov/2024/Jan/09/2003373440/-1/-1/1/DODIG-2024-044_REDACTED%20SECURE.PDF
Provigil's commonly prescribed for those who work irregular and/or long shifts, it's similar to Caffeine, and "Addicting" in the same way that your Morning Cup O' Joe is. Ketamine's a "Dissociative Anesthetic" Unusual in that it provides General Anesthesia but the patient appears to be awake. It's currently being prescribed for PTSD, now don't you feel Stupid??
Supremacy Clause? Bah. We can always find a district judge who never heard of it.
So the International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution accusing Israel of genocide. That was full of lies and intellectual dishonesty. This article sets it out pretty well.
The Genocide Lie Is Back https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/09/the-genocide-lie-is-back/
More debunking here: https://www.thefp.com/p/another-reason-not-to-trust-the-experts?utm_campaign=email-post&r=9bwdc&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&hide_intro_popup=true
The assertion that Israel is committing genocide is as noxious as the medieval (and not so medieval) accusation that Jews kill children to use their blood in matzah. An accusation that is still popular in pasts of the Muslim world. https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/classic-blood-libel-against-jews-goes-mainstream-iran
The president of Ireland, a noxious little troll, at least had the decency to admit that he would have to change the definition of genocide before accusing Israel. These scholars just did so without telling anyone.
Make no mistake. This Big Lie has a purpose: setting the intellectual foundation for the destruction of Israel and the wiping out of all Jews there. I have already seen comments to that effect on the internet. That’s the Hamas charter. And Iran’s explicit goal. And, though they won't admit it, many fellow travelers around the world.
I'll listen to what prominent Israeli's say out of their own mouths and the experts instead of some rando on this forum.
Ah, yes, the poster who asserted here that blood libels are true defends blood libelers. What a shock!
Any criticism of a Jew being labeled " blood libel" is straight out of the Protocols.
The word "any" in that sentence is a dodge. No one said "any."
I did. I did dude. It's right there in my comment.
And in positive news on the same topic:
'Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza,' UK government concludes
https://www.jpost.com/international/article-866809
My math skills are failing me here, not that someone who confessed to killing 52 people is being released, I guess that is par for the course in the UK, but the part in bold below:
"A judge has been criticised for wishing a mastermind of the 7/7 London bombings “all the best” upon his release.
Mr Justice Jay made the remarks at a High Court hearing before Haroon Aswat’s release despite fears that he remains a threat.
Aswat, 50, was jailed for 20 years in 2015 after admitting he had conspired to set up a terrorist training camp in the US state of Oregon. After serving his sentence in the US, he was deported to the UK in 2022.
Although initially detained under the Mental Health Act, it was disclosed in April that Aswat’s release was “expected in the relatively near future” after effective treatment.
In a transcript of the High Court case obtained by The Sun, the judge told Aswat “it could not have been too pleasant being in American custody all that time.”
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/law/article/justice-jay-judge-77-haroon-aswat-8cd22b2ph
How would he get out of Federal prison after serving 7 years of a 20 year sentence? Did his sentence get autopenned?
Just a reminder.
The WSJ reported that Trump sent the birthday note to Epstein.
Trump denied it. He said, it was a "fake thing" and "These are not my words, not the way I talk. Also, I don't draw pictures."
Of course, people quickly uncovered that: 1. This was the way he talked, and he used similar phrasings during that time. 2. Not only did he "draw," he had a doodling thing during that time.
But sure, Trump sued the WSJ for ONE BILLION DOLLARS (or something else silly) because that's what he does- he uses his power to bully and to extort, since he can just sic the government and people and make 'em pay up (Paramount, Disney, etc. etc. etc.).
Anyway, it was released today. Reminder- Trump knew what was in the filed because the DOJ reviewed them all this spring.
Guess what? It wasn't fake- he knew the whole time the thing existed, and it was exactly what the WSJ reported.
What do you think the story is now? Do you think he was like, "Oh, sorry. My bad. I thought I could keep the DOJ from ever releas... um, I don't even know if I'm lying, 'cuz it's like breathing."
HA! Of course not.
It's not his signature. Sure. Why not?
At a certain point, who do you believe? Trump, or your lying eyes? I mean, I could say that, every day. But I think some people just don't like their eyes. Must suffer from some sort of terrible bias or something.
Slightly OT, but a few years ago, DeSantis and Republicans made a big deal of doing signature matching to prevent voter fraud. Then some reporter published all the different ways DeSantis signed things differently. That apparently had no effect on Republican’s desire to implement the measure. So at least they’re very consistent in their erroneous belief that people sign things the exact same way for their entire lives.
Someone should invent a device that signs a document the same every time…I would call it the “auto quill”. 😉
Loki, there is a phrase on Wall Street: Priced into the Market. It means that certain information has already been taken into account. So what you might think is big news is greeted with a yawn on Wall Street.
For many of us, we already know that Trump is a lecherous scumbag that we would not allow within 100 yards of our daughters.
I don't think there's any proof right now that Trump is a pedophile.
But it sure seems like a number of posters on here would just shrug if such proof came to light.
Video of someone being arrested in the UK: "Because someone has been caused anxiety based upon your social media post. That's why you've been arrested."
https://x.com/wideawake_media/status/1964947054662127882?t=4bCskj-8247n5zmfA00jTA&s=19
God help Trump if he ever goes to the UK as a private citizen again.
Sounds similar to arresting people in America for saying anti-israel/pro-peace
Let's stand together against the Jew Menace, brother.
Birds of a feather . . .
I ain't anti-Jew, nigga
Please provide proof that people have been arrested merely "for saying anti-israel/pro-peace." (Spare us examples where someone engaged in criminal activities in the process.)
Joe Biden has called upon the President to create an "International Strike Force to hit the Narco Terrorists where they live".
I guess that's an endorsement of the drug boat attack.
https://x.com/mazemoore/status/1965054020852334657
I am pretty sure the usual suspects will po po this story because of the source, ignoring that MN under Dancing Queen Sgt. Major Pepper Waltz and the DFL is a failing state.
Wilson Tindi in ICE custody
Minnesota’s Alpha News reports:
EXCLUSIVE: Alpha News rides along with ICE, captures arrest of former state employee on camera.
Reporter Liz Collin witnessed the arrest firsthand. She reports:
The first stop was an address in Plymouth [MN] the home of Wilson Tindi—a convicted sex offender and former director at the Minnesota Department of Education. Alpha News exposed Tindi in June, as part of an investigative report that sparked a firestorm online about the state’s hiring practices.
You will recall that Tindi, a Kenyan national, served as a senior career executive at two (2) state agencies, despite a felony sex crime conviction and his status as an illegal alien.
Tindi is no longer employed by state government.
Collin reports that today’s arrest of Tindi occurred after a lengthy federal investigation of his complicated legal and immigration history, which we summarized previously. I’ve been following his case here.
Since Alpha News broke this story at the end of June, we still have not gotten any explanation as to how a man with Tindi’s background rose to occupy the highest rank in the state’s career civil service. Minnesota officials continue to hide behind “privacy laws” in refusing to discuss the case.
An earlier version of this story was posted at AmericanExperiment.Org. From Powerline
Oh, are we playing the fun game where we post about random sex crimes by people? Here's another one from Minnesota. This Republican state senator apparently likes 'em young. Maybe he was trying to emulate Trump a little too hard:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-mn/pr/minnesota-state-senator-charged-attempted-coercion-and-enticement-minor
"You will recall that Tindi, a Kenyan national, served as a senior career executive at two (2) state agencies, despite a felony sex crime conviction and his status as an illegal alien." You don't see the difference? As to the state Senator; I have no problem with him being prosecuted.
Oh, I get it! We're playing a different game where we post random stories about people illegal hiring immigrants. I've got a good one of those, courtesy of Marco Rubio:
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/rubio-campaign-press-release-fact-check-donald-trump-used-illegal-immigrants-build-trump
Or maybe we're playing the game where we post random stories of people hiring convicted sexual offenders? This one isn't quite as good because the guy was just invited to kickstart an initiative on children's fitness. I don't think he was actually hired, but Trump did hand him the mic at a White House event and praise him:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/donald-trump-praises-registered-sex-181414603.html
I can't post more than two links, but there's a lot more good ones if we want to keep posting more random stories!
Are passports reliable indicators of government-determined identity (and thus good basis to qualify people for sporting events), or are governments required to put whatever people want on them?
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-appeals-court-rejects-trump-bid-restore-passport-policy-targeting-transgender-2025-09-04/
Heads or tails -- you have to call it; I can't call it for you.
Are passports reliable indicators of government-determined identity (and thus good basis to qualify people for sporting events)
Why do I get the feeling that basically none of the people who think that "passports reliable indicators of government-determined identity (and thus good basis to qualify people for sporting events)" thought that Imane Khelif should be allowed to participate in women's boxing at last year's Olympics?
Because you operate on feels rather than logic, I think.
That was exactly the argument of why the Olympics boxing people used Khelif's passport as an authority rather than making any kind of independent decision for which they could be held responsible.
So, I'm confused. Are you saying they should be able to rely on passports?
I'm saying that people can't have it both ways. Either the government picks what goes on passports, or they're not worth using the way that World Boxing used them.
Hey, I'm the one doing the Anton Chigurh references!
What problem, exactly, are you chasing?
That a trans woman uses a passport to sneak into an international running event they shouldn't qualify for, and also dodges any blood tests?
The thing is, what counts as a woman for athletic performance is different than what counts for a passport. The cases at issue right now largely focus on hormones, not wang presence: https://radiolab.org/podcast/dutee
"The thing is, what counts as a woman for athletic performance is different than what counts for a passport."
Wrong. The category is women's sports, not low-T people's sports.
I'm not surprised that a gaslighter would make an argument that World Boxing and IOC explicitly rejected: https://apnews.com/article/olympics-2024-imane-khelif-boxing-paris-2eb07d442ffb29a61e09911884dcdaa9
That's a very specific problem to chase, if that's your argument.
Sounds more judges have become incapacitated by gender ideology. If it is eventually decided that chief judges can decline cases to incapacitated judges, we should make sure that chief judges are appointed who recognize this incapacity.
We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.
Does that sound like an impartial jurist just reading & interpreting the laws, or a jurist who rules on feelings and emotions?
One thing about living in an all-black neighborhood, is that the people here have never had politics help them for 300 years. Consequently, no one talks nor cares about politics. This is my eye in the storm. But I come here to this den of racists to remind me of the shit I left behind. And you niggas never disappoint.
Why can't they help themselves? Could their genetic low IQs be the reason?
The thing about you hateful people, is that you are having so much fun abusing everyone, that you have no idea the people you're hurting. I've seen the single black women get their SNAP shut down. Because of the cuts these past couple of months, I've had all these black children come to me asking for food. Yes, their mothers are fat pieces of shit. But I have to help these kids
Help them? Lets see, we had the Tuskegee Experiment to see how untreated Syphilis progresses (Not well, See Queenie) and literally the year after they end the Tuskegee Experiment they legalize the slaughter of millions of unborn Black Babies, without "Roe" you'd have at least 60,000,000 more Blacks in the Country. and are you Black? if not, it's not really an ""All-Black Neighborhood" is it??
Fuck off, Frankie. You live in your comfortable life. I'm surprised you don't recognize a fellow cohort scared out of their mind
Really, Frank?
How do you claim to know how many black women who aborted fetuses later bore children that they otherwise would not have borne?
The issue is whether women themselves, or instead the government, will have control of their fertility. Even though I generally disapprove of pre-viability abortions in the absence of extraordinary circumstances, I favor self-determination in that regard.
The alternative -- conceding control of fertility to the government -- gives rise to abominations such as the People's Republic of China's one child policy.
Come to think of it, enslaved women in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had no control over their reproductive lives either.
Hobie: "One thing about living in an all-black neighborhood, is that the people here have never had politics help them for 300 years."
I'm sure not many of them have been around for 300 years. But beyond your hyperbole, you might consider that poorer white people are quite the same: they don't talk or care about politics, and consider themselves to not have "had politics help them."
More honestly, almost everybody has been helped and harmed by politics. But poorer people are acutely aware of how little government contributes to goodness in their lives. (It's much easier to appreciate government when you can afford to need little aside from its roads in your day-to-day life.)
Still, the greatest advocates of the poor, Democrats, like to take victory laps touting government accomplishments. And all the poor people are too stupid I mean too ignorant to grasp the benefits of government, and the benefits of more government. So generally speaking, Hobie, they don't believe in what you're selling. But that should matter little to you.
Try to get unstuck from the "black" thing, Hobie. The more vexatious problems of life typically transcend race.
Trump loses his appeal in the Carroll suit
A pretty-well-reasoned and clear decision that will of course be appealed to the SC.
Given NY state law, and as laid out in the decision, Trump doesn't have a leg to stand on. But I don't think anyone expected Trump to win here. It was merely a necessary waystation to an SC hearing. Cert should be denied - but the Trump Rule prevents such certainty. If some SC justices are determined that Trump must not lose this case, they will find some purported defects in the appellate court's ruling, most likely - IMO but IANAL - in Trump's procedural waiver of immunity.
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Jeff Luse | 9.8.2025 5:06 PM
Matthew Petti | 9.8.2025 2:28 PM
Eric Boehm | 9.8.2025 1:20 PM
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Jacob Sullum | 9.8.2025 12:40 PM
