"Gavin Newsom plants flag on climate, spurring 2024 chatter"
It will genuinely be a shock if he does anything BUT run against Biden in 2024.
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"Trump's Education Secretary Betsy DeVos calls for abolishing department"
I, for one, am shocked the evil crone didn't do it during her time running the department. Oh wait, no I'm not. That would have meant she didn't have a podium of power.
Allow me to give my deeply considered and complex response to her: Fuck you.
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"Fact Check: Joe Biden Says Guns Are Biggest Killer of American Children"
User /u/LibraryGeek on Reddit gives the following summary:
"True.
Statistics from the CDC show that firearm deaths were the leading cause of death for children aged 1-19. Although that analysis does not count infants, firearm deaths would still be the leading cause of death among children if they were."
But you know, the 2nd amendment and all...
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"WA Poll shows Patty Murray up big over Tiffany Smiley"
I would have been shocked if it was anywhere near a close race.
U.S. Sen. Patty Murray holds a substantial 18-point lead over Republican challenger Tiffany Smiley, claiming huge majorities of Democratic voters and breaking even with independents, in a new poll commissioned by The Seattle Times and partners.
Murray, a Democrat seeking a sixth term in office, leads Smiley 51% to 33%, according to the WA Poll.
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"January 6 hearing makes it clear: MAGA is a cult"
What the committee hearing on Tuesday made clear is that Trump viewed his supporters as mere instruments in his quest for illegally obtained power. He cared not one whit how much damage he inflicted on his supporters.
"These Americans did not have access to the truth," Cheney said of the Big Lie believers. "They put their faith, their trust, in Donald Trump ... he deceived them."
To be sure, there's a genuine tension there. Painting Trump as a mastermind who knows what he is doing, but portraying his followers — or a good chunk of them, anyway — as mere dupes feels like a contradiction. If the Big Lie is so obviously false that Trump didn't believe it, then why would his followers believe it? Or, conversely, if his followers convinced themselves the Big Lie was real, then why couldn't Trump have done the same? Isn't it simpler to just view Trump and his followers as like-minded liars, people who collectively agree on falsehood in order to achieve their political ends?
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Leaked audio of Bannon explaining Trump planned to claim victory regardless of election result, on Oct. 31, 2020
“What Trump’s gonna do, is just declare victory. Right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner,” Bannon, laughing, told the group, according to audio of the meeting obtained by Mother Jones. “He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.”
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Re: President Biden's statement about life saving abortion treatment
After seeing a Twitter war over it, I went digging. And indeed, I checked nearly every state's filed law that bans abortion, and none of the ones I checked prevented abortions in the case of saving the mother's life.
I do not bring this fact check as a way to get people to settle down. Pro Choice is firmly the stance which is right.
The laws that I reviewed were all written with exceptions for life saving abortions. By my reading though, most of the ones I skimmed were written in such a way that the doctor could then find themselves under the microscope to determine if they're judgment that it was a life threatening situation was correct. This looming threat might could make doctors less likely to make that call, and speaks to why the President's statement today is still impactful even though the laws all already permit it, and makes clear that the federal law still supercedes their state laws in those cases.
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A Great Overview of the upcoming Midterm Elections
Roe v. Wade and the whole host of things that Democrats have sought to do only to be blocked by Sinema and Manchin are on the line with this upcoming set of Congressional elections. Vox.com has a great overview of districts, candidates, etc. It makes no predictions as to what could be, but I was glad to have a better understanding of seats up for election in both houses as I only knew a handful of what the article covered.
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‘They are preparing for war’: An expert on civil wars discusses where political extremists are taking this country
An interview with Barbara F. Walter. She is a political science professor at the University of California and wrote How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them. She discusses that studies have shown two variables to be recurring as signs of a coming civil war:
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Anocracy - Basically, a measure of the government of a country on a scale from authoritarian to democracy. Countries firmly at an end of this spectrum rarely have civil wars. Countries in the middle do.
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"And then the second factor was whether populations in these partial democracies began to organize politically, not around ideology — so, not based on whether you’re a communist or not a communist, or you’re a liberal or a conservative — but where the parties themselves were based almost exclusively around identity: ethnic, religious or racial identity"
That is... unsettling. The USA is currently still heavily on the democratic side of the scale, but I think we can all see how much the second point is a thing here in the country.
She goes on to recall conversations with her father, who is German and who saw the rise of Nazis in his home country. Her father saw the rise of Trump and was fearful the US was recreating the world of WWII Germany. And it was from these conversations which urged her to dig deeper in civil war research and its relevance to the US:
That’s when I started to follow the data. And then, watching what happened to the Republican Party really was the bigger surprise — that, wow, they’re doubling down on this almost white supremacist strategy. That’s a losing strategy in a democracy. So why would they do that? Okay, it’s worked for them since the ’60s and ’70s, but you can’t turn back demographics. And then I was like, Oh my gosh. The only way this is a winning strategy is if you begin to weaken the institutions; this is the pattern we see in other countries. And, as an American citizen I’m like, These two factors are emerging here, and people don’t know.
She also dives in, noting that a US civil war won't look like the first "Civil War."
I didn’t do a great job framing it initially, that when people think about civil war, they think about the first civil war. And in their mind, that’s what a second one would look like. And, of course, that’s not the case at all. So part of it was just helping people conceptualize what a 21st-century civil war against a really powerful government might look like.
I'm definitely adding her book to my reading list.
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New Proposal Bridges Gap Between Term Limits and Court Expansion, Charts New Course on Reform
Fix the Court today is releasing a new two-part statutory proposal that would end Supreme Court justices’ terms after 18 years and includes a “backup” provision on court expansion, so if the justices deem the term limits section unconstitutional, SCOTUS will automatically expand from nine to 13.
The proposal is based on what’s referred to as “backup law” or “contingent design” and hews closely to an idea discussed in a law review article and op-ed last year by legal scholar G. Michael Parsons.
“Rather than settling on one [court reform] plan,” Parsons writes, “Congress instead should use […] ‘backup law’ to layer its policy preferences from most politically desirable to most constitutionally secure. If the court holds the first preference unconstitutional, the second will automatically take its place.”
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With Roe overturned, Congress must act on data privacy
It’s incumbent on lawmakers to prevent state governments from circumventing people’s Fourth Amendment rights and to protect consumers from being harassed by antiabortion activists.
Found via a tweet from Elizabeth Warren. The article is authored by the Boston Globe's Editorial Board.
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Rep. Pramila Jayapal floats National Women's Strike in response to Supreme Court Abortion Decision
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