Don’t forget that the Hamas leaders are living in luxury as billionaires in Qatar. If the Israeli response kills a few thousand Palestinians, then Hamas’ leaders will shrug their shoulders and say “sounds like good PR” while lounging in a hot tub.
There are pockets of NY, outside of NYC, that are blue. The big areas that are red are mostly rural counties. But land doesn’t vote, people do, so it doesn’t matter if 1,000 people in a huge area vote red when 100,000 people in a small city vote blue.
You’re right that NYC helps keep us blue, but they aren’t the only ones. In 2020, NY voted for Biden over Trump 60.8% to 37.7%. If we removed NYC’s counties, NY would have still voted for Biden, but at a much closer 52.4% to 45.9%.
A mass reading would be a cool protest tactic. Get hundreds of kids hundreds of copies of banned books. Have them sit outside a state legislature - clogging up traffic to and from the building as they read to themselves. Have extra books on hand to give out to people trying to get through, while encouraging them to just sit and read for a bit.
My 16 year old has done that. He finds a book that’s banned, takes it out of the library (either physical copy, eBook, or audiobook) and then reads it. While doing so, he keeps an eye out for why it was banned.
He noted that one book was banned because one page describes a sexual encounter. It was about 3 lines and wasn’t extremely graphic. It just got the point to the reader that an event happened and then the book moved on. But apparently any mention of sex even existing is enough for a book to get banned.
Unless, it’s the Bible, of course. Then you can have daughters sleeping with their fathers and it’s all good for kids to read!
Some judges are already demolishing standing. The Texas judge in the Mifepristone case ruled that the doctors suing to stop the drug had standing even though they weren’t hurt yet by the drug’s use. The fact that they claimed that they might be hurt at some hypothetical point in the future was standing enough.
Meanwhile, in another case, a judge ruled that citizens don’t have standing to sue over infringements to their voting rights.
If they demolish standing, why not destroy jurisdiction as well? Of course, a ruling from the Supreme Court would likely be worded in such a way that red states could get anything they wanted while blue states had no rights to request anything.
If he successfully kept states from certifying their votes, then Congress wouldn’t have been able to name a winner on January 6th. At that point, the vote would have gone to the House. In the House, each states’ Representatives vote and the winner gets that state’s vote. The candidate who wins the most states wins.
The Republicans hold the majority here and Trump would have been elected President regardless of the actual election result. So keeping the election from being certified was a last ditch effort to overturn the election results and “win” despite the fact that he lost.
It doesn’t count. It was just a locker room insurrection!
I’ve never ridden a motorcycle, but I have had a bug (and part of its web) go into my mouth and down my throat while biking. Just thinking about it makes me want to gag. If, after that, you offered me a bike helmet with a front visor, I’d have put that thing on ASAP.
Now take that bug incident and make it happen at 30-50 mph? No way would I have my face hole exposed for bugs to invade! (And that’s totally apart from the safety issue.)
I didn’t factor in inflation as I was trying to keep it quick and simple. I also didn’t factor in any interest he might have received from a bank account. This was purely “he works minimum wage and stuffs all the cash he gets into a big jar - how much does he have after 50 years.”
I was also using the federal minimum wage. Obviously, many states have higher minimum wages so he might have made more than the federal minimum wage had he been free to move to another state.
Of course, the $500,000 figure only accounts for money that he would have made. It doesn’t include all the suffering he had to endure or the fact that the state basically ended his life at 21. He didn’t get to live his life and his future life is going to be rough. Not only does he need to adjust to life out of prison, but he likely has nothing. It’s not like many places are rushing to hire a 71 year old with no job experience for the last 50 years because they were in prison. The money he gets should at least be enough for him to comfortably retire.
Are these big strong people with tears in their eyes?
Seriously. We went from “you spelled potato wrong or screamed slightly weird so no presidency for you” to “you’re quoting Hitler? Well, no big deal. It looks like you’re still the frontrunner for your party.”
About 16 years ago, a friend of mine was getting married. I attended his wedding at a former plantation in South Carolina. (Nowadays, I’d question this decision, but it didn’t occur to me at the time.) While there, I decided to take a tour of the grounds. After all, it was beautiful there and I wanted to learn about the history of the place.
That’s when I realized how much they tried to sweep slavery under the rug. They referred to the slaves as “workers” and never used any term that would lead one to believe that they were “employed” against their will. If you didn’t know US history and took that tour, you’d have pictured a group of men getting hired, working an 8 hour day, and collecting a paycheck. This was certainly not what had happened there.
I sometimes wonder if they’ve updated their tour. Would they today actually acknowledge what took place there or do they still talk about the “workers.”
$175,000 for 50 years? He’s 71 now so he went into prison at 21. That means he spent virtually his entire life in prison. He could have done so many things, but instead he needed to sit in a prison cell. All because he was wrongly convicted.
And because I’m a math geek and need to figure this stuff out, $175,000 over 50 years is $3,500 a year. If we calculate what he would have earned at the federal minimum wage over that time frame (ignoring bank account interest or inflation just to keep things simple), we’d get over $500,000.
They’re giving him a third of what he should have earned at bare minimum. (And that ignores all the other horrible things involved with being wrongfully imprisoned for 50 years.)
I needed Unicode symbols for a story I’m working on. (I want to use them as “magic runes” so I could type them into a document, but without using the standard “runes” that are typically used.)
Shape Catcher let me draw what I was looking for and then get a list of Unicode characters that matched that drawing. It’s not exact so if there’s no perfect Unicode match, it will give you ones that are close. This actually turned out to my benefit as I found shapes I hadn’t considered but which worked nicely for my uses.
Did you read what I wrote? It’s not that they decided they weren’t going to do anything. It’s that the rules of the government limit what they can do with a small majority. They can’t just unilaterally decide that they are passing a new constitutional amendment with a few vote majority in the House/Senate. They could try for a bill, but there they are limited by various other rules not to mention the conservative Supreme Court. If the Democrats had a big enough majority, they could get more bills passed.
And that being said, what’s the alternative? Allow the Republicans to get into power and hope that they don’t take away women’s rights too much? Many Republicans have already declared that they want a national abortion ban. Others have said that they want to criminalize miscarriage and ban contraception.
Voting third party (thanks to our First Past The Post system) won’t work. Sitting out the elections and not voting won’t work. The best thing to do is get as many Democrats in office as possible from local positions to the highest offices. Then, put pressure on the higher up Democrats to get a women’s rights bill passed.
At this point, and with our current political system, not supporting the Democratic candidate is essentially supporting the Republican one.
The Democrats could have passed a bill, but “enshrining it in the Constitution” would mean passing a Constitutional amendment. First, they would need a 2/3rds vote of Congress. That means that the Democrats couldn’t have a slim majority - they’d need a large majority. Or they’d need to find Republicans willing to vote for a Constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights. Basically an impossibility.
Even if the Democrats managed to get the Constitutional Right To Abortion passed, they would need to have 75% of the state legislatures pass it. Democrats don’t control that name state legislatures.
So perhaps the Democrats could have passed a national law, right? Except that the Republicans would inevitably filibuster this in the Senate. The Democrats could have changed the filibuster rules, but not all of them supported changing these rules. (Mainly because it would prevent them from stopping the Republicans if the Republicans regained the Senate.) Any law that was passed would inevitably have been challenged up to the conservative Supreme Court.
You could definitely criticize the Democrats for not pushing harder to pass a law guaranteeing abortion, but a Constitutional Amendment was out of reach.
And it’s not only the population, but its GDP is tiny. Back when Russia first invaded Ukraine, I wondered how big Russia would be if it were a US state. I compared the GDP per Capita of all US states to Russia’s.
Mississippi’s GDP per Capita was almost 4 times larger than Russia’s. Mississippi! I finally went into the US territories to find one that Russia could top (American Samoa).
And, in case you’re thinking “well, that’s GDP per Capita, they’d dwarf all US states in GDP,” they’d be the third largest state behind California and Texas and just ahead of New York. The US as a whole has a GDP over 10 times larger than Russia.
And this woman also WANTS to have the baby. She and her husband were trying to get pregnant. Unfortunately, the fetus has abnormalities that mean it won’t survive. Without an abortion, she will need to wait until she hits term, have a C Section, and then have a dead baby.
Oh, and thanks to her medical history, she’ll likely be unable to have another pregnancy after that C-section. So it’s either give birth to a dead baby now and have no more or have an abortion now and (after she recovers) try to have another baby. Only one of these options might result in a baby that’s alive and it’s the option that includes abortion.
But Paxton will scream about how he’s “protecting the unborn baby” without caring that the fetus has a nearly zero chance of survival and without caring that the woman faces potential severe (possibly life threatening) medical complications if she’s forced to continue the pregnancy. He’ll force women to carry pregnancies to term even if it kills them!
That and the “Alpha Male” garbage. Even the author of the study on wolves has said repeatedly that his study was totally wrong. And yet some people continue to reference it and apply it to humans when even the original study wasn’t about people.
Weren’t some hostages also drugged so they’d be “happy and smiling” for the cameras when released? I heard that, but don’t know the authenticity.
Edit: I found many news sources that said they were. I know some folks don’t trust anything Israel says so take reports like this with a grain of salt. Still, it’s been confirmed that many of the hostages were drugged while in captivity. Especially the kids - to keep them quiet. (Anyone with little kids knows they can be loud while scared and this must have been extremely scary. As a father, the reaction of “drug the little kids” makes me angry.)