FlamingLiberal posted:

If this is a low turnout election I think Biden is toast

FlamingLiberal posted:

People were a lot more pissed at Trump in 2020

If this is a low turnout election I think Biden is toast

FlamingLiberal posted:

People were a lot more pissed at Trump in 2020

If this is a low turnout election I think Biden is toast

single-mode fiber posted:

One thing I'll point out about this, delinquencies on auto loans and revolving credit, every year it always peaks in January/February, and magically always drastically falls over the next couple months. Some people do it on purpose, some have no choice, but people's delinquencies always get highest right before tax refund season hits. Every year, though, the media dusts off a scare story about how loan delinquencies are going up and The Next Crisis is right around the corner, but 2 months later everyone gets their tax refund and everything goes back to normal.

quote:

During Wednesday’s arguments over the language of a proposed ballot initiative to protect abortion rights, Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Carlos Muñiz kept returning to a well neither side had briefed.

“It talks about ‘all natural persons are equal before the law and have unalienable rights’ — I don’t know that I could affirmatively say that the term ‘natural person,’ as a matter of just ordinary meaning, doesn’t include the unborn,” Muñiz said. “We certainly talk about the unborn that way.”

Muñiz was quoting from one of the earliest passages in Florida’s constitution that says that all natural persons “are equal before the law and have inalienable rights, among which are the right to enjoy and defend life and liberty, to pursue happiness, to be rewarded for industry, and to acquire, possess and protect property.” If this passage applied to “the unborn” — or in non-anti-abortion political speak, embryos and fetuses — abortion at every stage would be murder. This is a state-level version of fetal personhood, the anti-abortion white whale.

While Muñiz was eager to promote his radical interpretation of the state constitution, Florida, even under its hard-right regime, does not presently embrace it. The state currently has a 15-week abortion ban, with a six-week one tangled up in court. If the state was operating under his preferred approach, abortion would likely be banned completely.

Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody (R) had asked for the state Supreme Court to issue an advisory opinion on whether the text of the proposed ballot initiative — titled “Amendment to Limit Government Interference with Abortion” — was misleading or contained multiple subjects. The proposed amendment states that no law shall “prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health.”

In most states where abortion rights advocates have pushed for a ballot initiative, Republican officials often lodge challenges at each procedural step to try to quash the effort. As of early January, the group behind the ballot initiative, Floridians Protecting Freedom, announced that it had gathered well over the 891,523 signatures required to get the proposal on the 2024 ballot.

On Wednesday, many of the chief justice’s colleagues — all of whom were appointed by Republican governors — also reflexively adopted anti-abortion postures.

“Why would it be unreasonable for a voter to read this language and say, ‘I’ll vote for it because the legislature will be able to have a ban at 21 weeks with exceptions for the health of the mother?’” Justice Meredith Sasso asked, parroting the attorney general’s dubious argument that the term “viability” is unimaginably vague and freighted with double meanings.

As Floridians Protecting Freedom attorney Courtney Brewer tried to respond that such a read would be “inconsistent” with the language of the initiative, Sasso quipped that that would “be a surprise to a lot of voters.”

Still, despite the court’s clear comfort echoing the arguments of its political allies, some of the anti-ballot initiative arguments were too flimsy for even these judges to swallow.

Judge Charles Canady, chuckling with incredulity at one of the anti-initiative group’s arguments that the amendment rolls together multiple subjects, read off a line from the Florida constitution’s freedom of speech passage.

“If somehow that had been omitted and we were faced with an initiative to add such language, it sounds like, to me, your argument would be we’d have to strike that too!” Canady exclaimed.

Canady pushed back most consistently against the lawyers for the attorney general and group formed to oppose the initiative throughout, at one point accusing them of imposing “an impossible burden on the people proposing an amendment,” by demanding that they explain in the proposal all the possible legal knock-on effects. Canady, ironically, is married to the co-sponsor of Florida’s six-week ban, and ignored calls to recuse himself from the case.

Still, the deck is heavily stacked against the abortion rights side, both at court and in general. Florida voters had in 2006 approved a constitutional amendment proposed by the legislature that all amendments must be approved by a 60 percent supermajority. Such a high threshold would have thwarted other states’ recent abortion initiative successes, particularly the major win in Ohio, where voters passed protections by about 57 percent (and where Republican legislators tried unsuccessfully to hike the threshold to 60 percent as well). One poll from November, though, showed 62 percent of respondents in favor of the proposal, including over half of registered Republicans.

Similarly to Ohio, Republicans dominate every part of Florida government, from the governor’s mansion to the state Supreme Court to the severely gerrymandered legislature. A ballot initiative is almost certainly the only way to preserve abortion rights in the state, and to head off permanently the not-yet-enacted six-week ban Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has already signed.

quote:

all natural persons “are equal before the law and have inalienable rights, among which are the right to enjoy and defend life and liberty, to pursue happiness, to be rewarded for industry, and to acquire, possess and protect property.”

Kalli posted:

Two things, this doesn't appear to be true according to the data and secondly, the article was off the dataset for Q4 2023.

Page 10 has credit card data and autoloan data is on a bunch of graphs as a data type throughout:
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/interactives/householdcredit/data/pdf/HHDC_2023Q4

CC debt in particular fell sharply from Q4 2019 until Q2 2021 and has risen each quarter except for being flat in Q1 of 2022 and 2023

quote:

As of December, 3.1% of outstanding debt was in some stage of delinquency, up by 0.1 percentage point from the third quarter. Still, overall delinquency rates remain 1.6 percentage points lower than the fourth quarter of 2019.

haveblue posted:

I feel like ruling that children are identical to adults and may not receive special treatment or abridgment of rights under the law may have some repercussions

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

To be fair to O'Keefe, it wasn't even really an attempt to wiretap. It was a comically bad plan and the details from the FBI report are hilarious.

They literally dressed up like cartoon repairmen, asked someone to take them to the Senator's phone, got asked for ID, didn't know what to do, faked a phone call, ran away, and got arrested.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

There was a poll of Wisconsin just released today that seems to support your theory.

With the obvious caveat that this is just Wisconsin and just one poll, enthusiasm for both candidates is down massively from 2020.

SpeedFreek posted:

Biden needs to make sure everyone knows dumb rear end doesn't drink and shotgun a can of Spotted Cow on a campaign stop at the brewery.

Bellmaker posted:

I can’t say I’m enthusiastic about voting in November either but I’ll crawl through broken covid glass to vote against trump

Angry_Ed posted:

Your mistake is thinking Florida has no problem defining a fetus as a natural person but a child is not.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

To be fair to O'Keefe, it wasn't even really an attempt to wiretap. It was a comically bad plan and the details from the FBI report are hilarious.

They literally dressed up like cartoon repairmen, asked someone to take them to the Senator's phone, got asked for ID, didn't know what to do, faked a phone call, ran away, and got

World Famous W posted:

i don't think being incompetent at the crime is a valid defense

Sephyr posted:

The fact that O'Keefe was caught red-handed trying to wiretap a sitting Congressperson and the official response was "lol, that scamp, I mean who hasn't, rite?" is just one of those distopia markers that would seem heavy-handed in a comic book.

Cimber posted:

what a loving shitheel.

https://twitter.com/AdamParkhomenko/status/1755278108117139647

zoux posted:

Yeah the dipshit thing was Johnson holding a vote that he either didn't count noses on or was so close that he was reckless in holding it, given his insane caucus. Just from a legislating perspective, the House GOP has no idea what it's doing.

Cimber posted:

what a loving shitheel.

https://twitter.com/AdamParkhomenko/status/1755278108117139647

FlamingLiberal posted:

I don't understand why you would admit this.

Cimber posted:

what a loving shitheel.

https://twitter.com/AdamParkhomenko/status/1755278108117139647

ephori posted:

ephori posted:

Angry_Ed posted:

I feel like I'm missing some context here.

Angry_Ed posted:

I feel like I'm missing some context here.

Zore posted:

Mike Johnson gave an interview about how he and his son are accountability buddies on one of those apps that tracks if you view porn that sends a notice to the other one.

Gyges posted:

What the flying gently caress?

Gyges posted:

What the flying gently caress?

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

officially licensed bible app

Morrow posted:

officially licensed by who