H R Pickens

I dunno, voters are fucking aliens. They gave George W. Bush a second term because he let 9/11 happen and John Kerry got a Purple Heart and this made them trust Dubya more on national security. Maybe they will decide communism is good one day. But if they do, it’ll be because the frumple was blorpf.

Nobody said that? But if that's what you think you heard, that tells us a lot about where your head is at.

I mean, I get it. Way back in the day I was a John Edwards guy for about five minutes once. So I totally understand how people could get snowed by a soulless asshole with some superficial charisma.

(Correction: Lots more than two did.)

What makes them different is all the stuff that makes them anti-choice Democrats instead of anti-choice Republicans.

Henry Cuellar voted to impeach Trump both times.

Several anti-choice Democrats voted to pass the ACA, and it would have fallen far short without them.

I hope you don't. You're one of the interesting people that makes this site worthwhile for me.

I expect it must be incredibly frustrating to be beset with an endless supply of stupid assholes. Blocking just can't work at that scale.

Anti-abortion Democrats suck. But they're better than anti-abortion Republicans, and the way I know this is that two anti-abortion Democrats voted in the Senate to pass ACA and zero anti-abortion Republicans did.

A party with no room for pro-life democrats couldn't have got the ACA passed. That was a huge achievement that improved the lives of something like fifty million people so far, and has saved the lives of many tens of thousands at least.

That makes your position quite clear.

Thank you, and have a nice day.

Damn right.

Here's a useful exercise: explain why we'd be better off today if the ACA had fallen two votes short in the Senate because Bob Casey and Ben Nelson weren't there and two anti-abortion Republicans were.

I can't imagine I'd vote for an anti-abortion Democrat in a primary where a pro-choice candidate was present. But in a general election I expect I could very easily vote for one if their opponent was an anti-abortion Republican.

That's a big flaw, but one should still vote for the least flawed.

I guess the court reasoned that the right of listeners was more important than the rights of broadcasters. But since the government was making demands of broadcasters and not of listeners, it's not clear that the two needed to be weighed against one another at all.

In hindsight it's bonkers that the FD ever survived a first amendment challenge.

I can't imagine another plausible way to read that.

They don't and they have. But that unconcern isn't going to produce happy results for them.

Preaching to the choir, buddy.

I'm simply in the camp that doesn't expect a TRO to be a contempt finding.

It is. You complained that the TRO had "no consequences listed" and then later wrote that without such, it was unenforceable.

And...you think the reason for this is that judges keep forgetting to spell out the consequences of defiance in their TROs? And because of this omission they're unable to sanction violations?

Because I've read many TROs and I've never seen one that contained the elements you're expecting.

If your belief is that a TRO has to spell out the consequences of violating it, within the four corners of the order, in order for violations to be punished, I must again ask why you think this.

How did you come to believe that a TRO should contain details about the penalties for violating it?

What we know we've got is plenty bad, and is the kind of thing that has, in the not too distant past, been understood to be a concentration camp.

Extreme overcrowding, hostile guards with no accountability, and a regime that regards the detainees as subhuman with no rights is a recipe for murder.

One could possibly make some kind of argument about how the meaning of the term changed over time, and in the popular imagination now means an industrialized murder camp, which so far as we know the regime isn't yet operating.

But that's not a distinction a civilized people ought to have to make.

Is a TRO the proper vehicle for that?

My God that was fun to read. Her fastball was really popping.

Also: My God that was infuriating to read. This outright lawless behavior ought to result in the entire department being USAIDed.

Okay. I hate those exclamation marks. To me they read as juvenile and the lines would land cleaner with a period.

Also: a federal judge has the right to make style choices that don't suit me. Give 'en hell.

Nixon Tried to Spoil Johnson’s Vietnam Peace Talks in ’68, Notes Show (Published 2017)

www.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/u...

That seems to be overstating the case. Best you can fairly say is "while there's a lot of evidence that something like this happened, it's not 100% conclusive. And there isn't any evidence that Reagan personally directed or even knew about the effort."

They'd best hurry. You're exactly right--the shorter that list gets, the worse it is to be on it.

Ew. That's not a list a decent person wants their name on.