Apparently Dokken is legal now?

[StevenC]

Trump has partial immunity from prosecution, Supreme Court rules

The top court's landmark decision is a major boost to Donald Trump as he bids to return to the White House.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[MaxOfMetal]

 

[narad]

Onward to 22 pages!

 

[MaxOfMetal]

Onward to 22 pages!

We'll see.

 

[Nightside]

Do his thoughts still count as official acts?

 

[sleewell]

money buys the SC. they are all owned by special interests and wealthy donors.

thanks to everyone who stayed home in 2016 or voted for jill stein in protest, you really showed us!!

 

[Wiltonauer]

I wonder if they’ll remember this when they decide to go after former presidents from the other party.

 

[Randy]

thanks to everyone who stayed home in 2016 or voted for jill stein in protest, you really showed us!!

I've got bad news for you about 2024

 

[Dumple Stilzkin]

Come witness our accelerated transformation into complete decline, if you don’t like it you can always try out our many popular varieties of addiction (fentanyl is becoming a favorite where I live).

 

[sleewell]

I've got bad news for you about 2024

oh yeah we are fucked. our country basically ended with citizens united and its just been a slow motion series of disasters since with just enough distractions so enough people didn't notice. now the avalanche is coming down the mountain at full speed and there isn't anything to stop it. the debate simply confirmed a maga / fascist takeover was happening sooner rather than later. its going to get real spicy here in a few months. the rest of the world (minus the dictators) must be looking on in complete abject horror. camps for migrants, public executions, rounding up journalists, rounding up the gays... they are telling us what they plan to do and no one seems to care.

 

[Musiscience]

I'm not a US citizen, so my opinion isn't worth much of anything. But yet, I'm still deeply disgusted by this turn of event. It's at the very least another complete contempt of the people in favor of the wealthy and ruling class. The message is clear: we are not like you, rules for thee not for me.

Also definitely not looking forward to how other recent changes will impact my industry (FDA).

Come witness our accelerated transformation into complete decline, if you don’t like it you can always try out our many popular varieties of addiction (fentanyl is becoming a favorite where I live).

It's becoming more and more endemic around my parts as well, which is a somewhat recent development as opposed to the west coast. In my opinion, this is just the reflection of an ailing system on it's death bed.

 

[Randy]

oh yeah we are fucked. our country basically ended with citizens united and its just been a slow motion series of disasters since with just enough distractions so enough people didn't notice. now the avalanche is coming down the mountain at full speed and there isn't anything to stop it. the debate simply confirmed a maga / fascist takeover was happening sooner rather than later. its going to get real spicy here in a few months. the rest of the world must be looking on in complete abject horror. camps for migrants, public executions, rounding up journalists, rounding up the gays... they are telling us what they plan to do and no one seems to care.

Just to kinda reiterate my point from above...

I don't think "people staying home and voting for Jill Stein" is exactly the issue. I mean, it is but that's focusing on the final outcome and not how you got there.

Being overly round with the numbers, you kinda have a say 45/45-ish split as far as turnout from people who reliably vote Republican and Democrat, whether they identify with the party or are independent etc. That shifts depending on where you go obviously, and since the President isnt chosen by popular vote, you're beholden to these pockets where the voter numbers are close or work against you; aka "swing states".

The candidates are yes, making appeals to their partyline voters and donors to help turnout but generally speaking, those people are safe/reliably in their corner already. Biden doesnt need to spend a lot of time campaigning in New York and California.

The real pool both candidates are vying for are those people in the middle, in those swing states. And "in the middle" doesn't mean ideologically center. It means people that are probably usually apolitical, or underinformed/disinterested and typically sit on the sidelines. The reason why the rhetoric gets hotter and hotter is because they're trying to entice those people to get off the sidelines and come vote for them "because it matters more than any time before".

Those people are wishy washy and they have no loyalty to you, your party or your cause. I agree the stakes are high and we should all be paying attention but in their universe, it doesnt matter.

The occasional illusion that comes up is that those people maybe show up early on in the process like during the primaries and the mainstream party assumes they can tap into them. But again, they're wishy washy and they might not show up at the polls even if they agree with the cause. I've got a good friend that's politically engaged because of what he sees on social media and then election night comes around and hes like "oh yeah i forgot that was today. Well, I got out of work late and I'm on my way to a date so oh well maybe next year". The political process is too confusing and not really that important to them.

So I mean, those voters are important but they're still along the margins. You can't guarantee them. They're certainly orders of magnitude way too separated from the political process to understand things like SCOTUS appointments X number of years down the line and decisions they'll render Y number of years after that.

Also, RGB deserves a good bit of blame for not retiring when Obama could've replaced her safely. And the Sentate Dems back when Obama had a majority in both houses could've restructured things to prevent the eventual Mitch McConnell blockade that held up Garlands appointment.

Lotta blame to go around.

 

[BlackMastodon]

I've got bad news for you about 2024

But he's ooooooold!

 

[JDB123]

Is it time to cash in on my wife's Canadian citizenship and retreat to the border or no?

 

[Moongrum]

Outside of my control, so not going to worry about it.

 

[MetalDestroyer]

Outside of my control, so not going to worry about it.

View attachment 146133

Pretty much same. No amount of my anger over the last 8 years has done anything to slow the slide into fascism. My vote didn't matter when I lived in MO and it doesn't matter in CA. I voted then and I'll vote again this time, and beyond that what can I possibly do except try to adapt to the new regime.

We are now on a when-not-if trajectory with authoritarianism. Congress is locked down and no longer doing its job. The SCOTUS is blatantly corrupt and not beholden to any laws of our country. If we vote in Biden-which I actually do think will happen after this ruling-we just delay 4 years. The minute someone stamped (R) takes office it's over. The Heritage Foundation won. We lost.

 

[Gudbrand]

This ruling feels like a disaster to me. Maybe the worst yet in a long line of disasters. It’s exhausting. Every election requires a massive effort to delay the slide into christian fascism. We can only get lucky so many times. Democracy has already been seriously eroded, maybe irreversibly.

Biden needs to win in November, no question. However that only delays the inevitable unless we can figure out a way to undo decades of damage. I think we need all of the following and more:

* Election reform. Get rid of the electoral college and switch to approval voting.
* Campaign financing reform. Reverse Citizens United.
* Expand the supreme court. Set term limits with no reappointment.
* Somehow fix Congress. Make it more representative. Maybe get rid of the Senate entirely, and add seats in the House to better represent population.
* Reverse this supreme court ruling and place more reasonable limits on the president’s powers.

I’m no political scientist. There’s probably unforeseen consequences to these ideas. I also have no idea how they could be accomplished.

 

[jco5055]

Is it time to cash in on my wife's Canadian citizenship and retreat to the border or no?

i wish I had something like this just as a safeguard, but sadly I'm a "family came over hundreds of years ago" situation with none of the WASP elite privilege to go with it lol

 

[budda]

Is it time to cash in on my wife's Canadian citizenship and retreat to the border or no?

The conservative party follows the republican playbook - they even get to see what works before they try it.

Canada is gonna follow the leader right down the hole as we’ve already been seeing imo - nothing fundamentally changes here because those in power plan to keep it and set it up decades ago. (This is also why I laugh at “F Trudeau” stickers as if somehow its him alone).

 

[BlackMastodon]

Is it time to cash in on my wife's Canadian citizenship and retreat to the border or no?

I'll parrot what Budda said: we're not much better up here, we're just lagging behind and will repeat the same things as the US soon enough. There's enough backlash against JT that I'm pretty confident that the Conservatives will win the next election, and then things will keep slipping the same direction they've been going: an overloaded, utterly fucked national healthcare system that will be stripped and privatised, public utilities sold off and privatised with little government oversight, a housing market in shambles that seems to be owned by outside interests at the expense of citizens, an opioid crisis that keeps growing, etc. Oh, and our dollar is shit and professional jobs don't pay nearly as well as they do in the US, so there's little incentive to build a Canadian tech industry. I used to joke to my US co-workers that we'll gladly take them in, but I don't think there's much of a point honestly.