post hole digger posted:

for the last like 2 months I have been getting approximately 20 texts a week from the dnc asking me for money. thanks for selling all my info Bernie you fucker

HashtagGirlboss posted:

It’s really no different than how Biden can’t be assed to go tour disasters. There’s no point to the ritual in any material sense, but the fact that he can’t be assed to perform the ritual is very telling

Willa Rogers posted:

hillary debated him 3 times.

World Famous W posted:

im just a sicko who loves debates and watching two frail old drugged up rapists flail about to no purpose

Willa Rogers posted:

yeah; it's kind of a bare-minimum requirement to be able to ad lib for 90 minutes on topics of concern to voters, even when the questions are softballs without follow-up questions.

watching libs huff-n-puff how biden shouldn't lower himself to debate cheetolini just sounds like massive cope (which it is).

fits my needs posted:

https://x.com/Slate/status/1780292152515231975

fits my needs posted:

https://x.com/Slate/status/1780292152515231975

post hole digger posted:

"These calls always seem to end up at women's feet" is really funny given how everyone who said rgb needed to retire was unequivocally correct and totally vindicated.

Danann posted:

Uncle Wemus posted:

PoontifexMacksimus posted:

I hope they both get drafted.

mags posted:

cant say that i have actually

fits my needs posted:

https://x.com/Slate/status/1780292152515231975

quote:

Dahlia Lithwick: What started with a trickle of think pieces has now become a cascade of D.C. press releases and talking heads on whether Sonia Sotomayor is duty-bound to step down before the election. And this kind of cajoling and pushiness and smoke signaling is, by its very nature unseemly. Some would also suggest, including me, that it’s also quite sexist. In fact, I hate this conversation with the heat of a million suns.

Zerg Mans posted:

Breyer was run out under what can only be described as the closest you can legally get to threatening someone

sullat posted:

And Kennedy was pretty openly bribed to leave.

raisin kane posted:

women’s feet

Wraith of J.O.I. posted:

quote:

Dahlia Lithwick: What started with a trickle of think pieces has now become a cascade of D.C. press releases and talking heads on whether Sonia Sotomayor is duty-bound to step down before the election. And this kind of cajoling and pushiness and smoke signaling is, by its very nature unseemly. Some would also suggest, including me, that it’s also quite sexist. In fact, I hate this conversation with the heat of a million suns.

how can you continue to run with this poo poo after RBG jesus christ

quote:

The Real Way to Think About Biden’s Age This Run
We’re in a Biden-Trump rematch. And the media is focusing on this?
By Dahlia Lithwick
Feb 14, 20241:24 PM

Because last week’s natterings unerringly become this week’s news, we are now trapped in a mind-numbing collective freakout about special counsel Robert Hur’s purposefully deceptive and broadly misunderstood takedown of President Joe Biden’s possible criminal conduct, a “report” replete with wholly gratuitous potshots about his mental acuity. The freakout has become a national news story on par with former President Donald Trump on Sunday threatening to abandon our NATO allies and let Russia “do whatever the hell they want.” (Note for those at home: these two things are actually not at all on par in terms of threats to world order and planetary stability.) As Margaret Sullivan points out, the Biden story consumed the weekend news cycle, while the Trump comments barely registered as a blip.

Interestingly, all of the #BidenTooOld coverage is about as new and revelatory as #ButHerEmails. If nothing else, it proves that a scandal holding that the president forgets things is always going to go down smoother than a scandal in which a special counsel flagrantly violated a long-standing Justice Department practice and protocol not to “criticize uncharged conduct.” As Sullivan was quick to point out, CNN and the New York Times and every U.S. corporate media entity and its cousin jumped onto the bandwagon. “For the media to make this the overarching issue of the campaign is nothing short of journalistic malpractice,” the former public editor of the New York Times wrote.

Biden is old and he forgets things. Nobody is unaware of these facts, up to and including President Joe Biden, who said as much of himself in his press conference last week. But the ploy worked as intended, with the Hill cheerfully reporting that as a result of the Hur report and the wall-to-wall questions it spontaneously raised, 86 percent of Americans now believe that Biden is too old to serve in office.

So now Americans face the problem that Biden is old, while Trump is an authoritarian who wants to “create a private red-state army under the president’s command.” The purpose of this army, per Stephen Miller, is to deport as many as 10 million “foreign-national invaders” who he claims have entered the country under Biden, and the plan, as Ron Brownstein describes it, is to “go around the country arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale raids.” Then, he would build “large-scale staging grounds near the border, most likely in Texas,” to serve as internment camps for migrants designated for deportation.

One can certainly see why the two stories would weigh the same.

Perhaps one way to navigate yourself through this seemingly insoluble morass would be to ask yourself why Biden, who is stipulated #Old, has managed to helm the most successful presidency in modern history. Booming economy, eye-popping jobs reports, first gun violence reduction bill in decades, $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan plus COVID relief, Inflation Reduction Act, infrastructure prioritized, judges seated. Pick your metric—there have been a lot of wins. And the reason this old man who sometimes forgets things like dates has gotten all this done? He has, for the most part, surrounded himself with experts, genuine scientists, respected economists, and effective governmental actors and advisers.

Governance is not an action film. There is no minute-to-minute psychodrama involving someone in a tight black T-shirt mincing along the outdoor ledge of a skyscraper, ninja-kicking his lonely way down to the stairwell, where he karate-chops the well-armed baddies and then commando crawls his way into an empty vault with the glass chest where the nuclear reactor sits. No. Despite our fascination with the Great Man theory of American lawmaking, the presidency is an office that largely turns on superb staffing, visionary planning, deft political negotiation, and artful execution. Joe Biden doesn’t actually have to remember every single detail himself—he has to use his judgment to employ and empower a large contingent of skilled experts to execute upon their agreed-upon vision.

If you are unconvinced, the best evidence that we keep falling for Great Man fantasy propaganda is the unmitigated failure of the first Donald Trump presidency. Here we had a self-described loner literally trumpeting his I-alone-can-fix-it worldview, all embodied in Great Man megalomania. He managed to accomplish virtually nothing: Almost none of his promises for single-handed economic revitalization, world domination, or intrepid urban crime-solving panned out. His great dreams were either strangled in infancy by staffers or halted by courts. And whether you believe that this happened because Donald Trump surrounded himself with incompetent yes men or steely adults in the room, both versions serve to offer proof of concept: Donald Trump accomplished close to nothing because the people around him were either too inept to put his vision into practice or too skillful at blocking him to allow him to put his vision into practice.

Put another way, if you or anyone you know finds themselves reacting to the Biden Is Old revelations with the thought that, sure, Donald Trump is a 91-indictments-richer, adjudicated sexual abuser, defamer, liar, violator of national security, self-enriching, fascist-boosting insurrectionist, but it’s OK because he will surround himself with people who might check those impulses—well, doesn’t it rather intuitively make more sense to instead vote for the highly effective, internationally respected, but yes, sometimes forgetty guy who is surrounded by people with day planners? Donald Trump may be four-years-less-elderly, but he still confuses Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi. He is also still an authoritarian fantasist who has run through every reasonably competent staffer and Cabinet official and is now turning to the profoundly dangerous ones. It’s really not a contest when you compare him to anyone who has surrounded himself, and will continue to surround himself, with competent, skilled people who get things done.

The real reason we all keep falling for Great Man horse race stories is because they are good for fueling fantasies of all-powerful big daddy presidents who control every tiny aspect of governance in their tiny wee hands. If that is your jam, well, it would make sense to vote for the only candidate who believes in the same dream. If it’s not, the question is reducible to rather simple stakes: Do you want the Big Daddy who surrounds himself with sycophants and nutters and people with shared last names, or the one who surrounds himself with competence and expertise? This doesn’t seem, on balance, like a really tricky call. Do we prefer presidents who can backflip and ninja-kick their way to total world dominion? Perhaps. To my knowledge, nobody ever made a Tom Cruise movie about listening and learning and compromising. But if you still believe governance to be a sober and serious enterprise, vote like the alternative is chilling, because it is.

Uncle Wemus posted:

the_steve posted:

I remember having the same argument back in the bad thread.
Dumbasses straightfaced claiming that the left's inability to merely overrun the party like a horde of World War Z zombies and through sheer numbers overcome billions of dollars in lobbyist money, a multimedia empire, and the party literally changing the rules to always win is proof that they just don't want it badly enough.

quote:

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has been pursuing a bizarre legal strategy at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) against a former employee who filed an unfair labor practice (ULP) charge against the ACLU after the organization fired her for criticizing her supervisors (I, II, III). After the case started getting attention, AJ Hikes, the second-in-command at the ACLU, allegedly instructed staffers not to talk about the ULP charge pending against the organization, which resulted in another ULP charge being brought against the ACLU late last month.

On April 16, the NLRB attorney responsible for the case involving the former employee filed a motion with the administrative law judge (ALJ) that reveals the precise instruction given by Hikes to ACLU staff. According to the motion, Hikes made the following statements in a live chat:

quote:

Normally, we are not able to comment on personnel matters, but since this has been reported in the Times, it's a matter of quite public record, and so I just have one or two things I would like to say. This case is principally about a former employee who demonstrated a consistent pattern of anti-Blackness in this organization and I don't want this to get lost in the conversations that we have about this outside of this space. Over and over and over again, this person was counseled on that behavior. And so I don't want it to be seen through a myopic lens as it's been represented here as somebody who's deeply involved in it. And we will not tolerate treatment of employees like that, certainly on my watch, at this organization, at all. I'm not going to get into a back-and-forth with folks, especially non-Black folks frankly, about what anti-Blackness is and is not, but I will say very clearly that is what's at the heart of this case.
. . .
The tone in this chat is all the way out of pocket. Y'all got me on the right day today. I understand frustration. I understand the need to advocate. I understand that. And we are your colleagues. We are your colleagues. Please, please, please, please try to come at your colleagues with some sense. That is all I have to say. Laugh all you want. But baby, I'm not the one or the two or the three. Please, please, please, please try to get this together, y'all. Office hours is a very important space for us to be able to connect, for us to be able to answer questions, for us to be able to engage around each other's work. We are not coming here to harass people, to humiliate people, to drag people, to act a fool. Please, please, please try to treat each other a little bit better than this.

Before getting into the problem with saying this kind of thing to workers, it is worth recalling that the “anti-blackness” Hikes is referring to was former employee Katherine Oh engaging in the following conduct:

After the national political director, a manager that Ms. Oh and her colleagues had submitted complaints against, left the organization, Ms. Oh stated that, even after his departure, “the beatings will continue until morale improves.”

Ms. Oh said in a phone meeting that she was “afraid to raise certain issues” with her direct supervisor.

Ms. Oh claimed that another manager “lied to her when she identified the members of management who had ultimate responsibility over whether to proceed with a particular campaign.”

ACLU acknowledges that there is no racial content to any of these criticisms, but Hikes apparently believes that, because the supervisors being criticized are black, that makes the criticisms anti-black. The ACLU also appears to believe that it has a right to fire Ms. Oh for making these complaints despite the fact that criticizing working conditions is protected activity under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).

The problem with the new statements made by Hikes is, as noted in the motion, that they threaten employees with unspecified reprisals for raising concerns about working conditions and constitute an unlawful overly broad directive to employees not to raise concerns about working conditions to management.

In addition to likely being separate unfair labor practices, Hikes’s coercive statements here also could cause problems for ACLU’s already very weak case against Ms. Oh as they reveal a pattern of hostility to protected activity and specifically the kind of protected activity that Ms. Oh engaged in, which is raising issues about working conditions to supervisors.

Beyond the legal implications of this, Hikes’s statements here appear to confirm that ACLU’s management — and Hikes in particular — has (or at least pretends to have) a peculiar view about anti-blackness that leads them to think they can crack down on workers in ways that are actually illegal.

mawarannahr posted:

Not remotely what I said, but you're spiraling, so I genuinely and sincerely recommend therapy. It helped me get to a place where at least some of the time I can have a functional day without breaking down into soggy ball of terror and depression. SA is NOT the place for healthy versions of this conversation you're trying to have. It's actually a bad place for this poo poo that will make your mental health worse.

luv2shit posted: