I'm beginning to wonder if the Republicans are even going to make a serious effort to take down Sherrod Brown. Also it's looking like Richard Cordray could actually win the governor's race. I'm not sure if the Dem has a serious chance, in the race to replace Pat Tiberi in my Congressional District, but not knowing is a huge improvement over the absolutely certain defeat in previous elections.
That's the good news from Ohio.
Just voted in the Maryland primaries today. I didn't see any obvious Russians.
Everybody moved very slowly. Nobody was russian. (Sorry, I'll see myself out.)
2: That governor race looks interesting. Who did you vote for? Do the Dems have a chance?
2: That governor race looks interesting. Who did you vote for? Do the Dems have a chance?
I should sit down and figure out if there's any hope at all of taking the Senate -- I don't think there is, but maybe I'm missing something. First I should send Beto O'Rourke some more money, I guess.
4, 5: Relax, man. No need to be a russian to double-click.
NYS is lively this year -- we should finally take the state senate (fingers crossed) and while Cynthia Nixon probably doesn't have a hope, she's making that rat bastard Cuomo sweat.
8: TIL that you guys have federal and state primaries on two separate days. Thats's awful.
6: I don't have a link handy, but recent modeling says the chances of a Democratic US Senate are about 30%.
4: Ben Jealous. He seems like the left-most candidate. Also, I think "Governor Jealous" has a nice ring to it.
I suspect Baker will win, though.
I was going to vote for Ben Jealous, but it turns out I changed my address at the wrong time and can't vote. Maybe in the general election.
At least I found out, surprisingly, that I'm not in the district with the competitive congressional primary.
10: 30% sounds much more cheerful than I was hoping for.
Ditto...I'd guess that the Republicans will gain one or two.
Which could actually be consistent with a 30% chance of a Democratic majority.
I've been in kind of a dark mood lately. To summarize: if the Republican House is re-elected, Medicare & Medicaid get cut a lot, Trump's reorganization gets passed, every executive check on the president (like the special counsel regs) gets either repealed or eviscerated. If Trump gets re-elected, he calls a constitutional convention to get rid of (a) citizenship under the XIV, (b) judicial review, (c) term limits, (d) choice, and (e) god knows what else.
Yes. And I don't think there's much of a chance of Trump not getting re-elected if the Republican House is re-elected in 2018.
I don't know about those specific things, but certainly there will be enough changes to institutions that electing somebody reasonable will be impossible.
I mean, there's a reasonable scenario for the Democrats to win the Senate - NV, AZ, and hold all the existing seats; it's just that this would involve everything going right.
As it turns out, really only one thing has to go right: people have to fucking vote.
And not be prevented from voting, but yeah.
And we might be able to get turnout to overcome renewed voter suppression, but we also need to assume Republicans aren't straight-up rigging the vote, which I have less and less confidence in this year.
I should sit down and figure out if there's any hope at all of taking the Senate -- I don't think there is, but maybe I'm missing something.
Nate Silver has declined to offer odds, but he recently mentioned that someone else proposed something like a one-in-three chance, and he thought that was in the ballpark. (Kreskin and I are probably talking about the same thing. I also lack a link.)
That governor race looks interesting. Who did you vote for? Do the Dems have a chance?
I voted for Madaleno. My wife likes him, and I don't have a strong opinion, though I like Jealous. It would take a huge Democratic wave to unseat Hogan, who is popular and has distanced himself from Trump. But it's not impossible.
Probably this is the article under discussion: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-republicans-may-have-a-narrow-senate-advantage/
Except for the part about Medicare---they won't touch that.
Shocking how militaristic Hegar's ad is. Sometimes I imagine that the Democratic party is anti-war. It's a nice fantasy.
Hard to get elected anywhere in the world being anti-war.
29. Sure, but
1. Changing attitudes is only possible if you try
and
2. There is still space between being anti-war and an ad that codes as visually fascist
Waiting for ten more comments, so I can inveigh against Obama and every "high road" liberal fuck. He absolutely should have done a recess appointment to the Supreme Court.
OK, maybe I didn't really wait the ten comments.
He chose his decorous image over other people's suffering and did not respond with the force our situation required because it wasn't courteous or something.
He probably thought Clinton would win the election. As inexplicable as that belief might have been.
Yet Mitch McConnell apparently didn't think Clinton would win the election, or he would have approved the lovable centrist Garland instead of waiting for the appalling liberal Clinton would nominate.
I don't think it's too derailing to put this in the mix:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/06/federal-judge-dismisses-cities-climate-case-against-oil-companies/
Because the use of fossil fuel energy has obviously produced benefits as well as harm, Alsup felt this necessitated a weighing of pros and cons--a tricky calculus. "Having reaped the benefit of that historic progress," the decision reads, "would it really be fair to now ignore our own responsibility in the use of fossil fuels and place the blame for global warming on those who supplied what we demanded? Is it really fair, in light of those benefits, to say that the sale of fossil fuels was unreasonable?"
Alsup doesn't answer those questions but explains that they're a better fit for Congress than a courtroom. And that's ultimately the thrust of the decision. Alsup cites precedent for courts steering clear of opening new legal pathways, deferring to the other branches of government. In this case, ruling against the oil companies would clearly expose them (and perhaps any other company involved in fuel sales) to a flood of liability. The fact that this would have international implications gave Alsup further pause.
Thoughts from the lawyers? I'm not happy.
After Clinton didn't win, and it had been evident for months that McConnell would block Garland. There was a window Nov-Jan when Obama could have done a hell of a lot more.
A recess appointment would have been temporary, and would have required the Senate to actually go on recess, which they don't have to. But he certainly should have kicked up more of a shrieking fuss than he did.
34: It's almost as if McConnell had inside information that election tampering and shenanigans were going to make Trump's victory more probable than might otherwise have been the case.
I would have liked to have seen Obama at least make the case to a court that the Senate's refusal to even hold hearings on Garland was an abdication of its duty to advise and consent and that Garland should therefore be seated forthwith.
There's no chance that case breaks in our favor, but at least it would have showed some fight.
Holding the seat open was probably as significant a cause of the election result as any one of the other 17 but-for causes. It's what kept the religious right willing to overlook Trump's sins.
(OK, the small subset of the religious right for whom Roe really is an election deciding single issue, and which wasn't already on board for the gratuitous cruelty to people of color plank. Still, enough votes to be a but-for.)
I assume Obama's calculation was that putting himself at the center of the debate would kick up a white supremacist backlash. This doesn't seem obviously wrong to me.
39 last -- we'll have to agree to disagree on whether in a struggle with authoritarians, a sure loser of a legal or political strategy produces a net benefit by showing fight.
I wish lefties would stop assuming responsibility for both the action and the backlash. As in, 'we can't do [important thing] because the crazy fucks will go batshit'. We are not responsible for the batshit response, and we should not be factoring the batshit response in to prevent us from doing the important thing. We do important things, and if crazy fucks go batshit, that's on them! Then we point out that they're being batshit and go on to do the next important thing!
At this point, I am as little interested in their batshit response as I am in the neutral third party who would object to something, although the person referencing the third party doesn't personally. Fuck 'em! Second order responses are NOT deterrents for doing important things!
Yeah. I think you're right about that -- less because the batshit response is unimportant, it can be a huge deal, but more because it's just really hard to predict in detail how that sort of thing will play out. Will right-wing lunatics be more energized than left-wing citizens who finally see something useful happening? Maybe, but there's no way to tell ahead of time, so might as well do the practically most useful thing and let the chips fly.
(This is a little complicated in the SC case, because I don't think there was much Obama and the rest of the Democrats could really have done but make a fuss. But I do think making a fuss was the right thing to do.)
43: I think that's right for folks like you and me; wrong in some situations for leaders. (I'm agnostic about the specific scenario that I raise about Obama in 41, but I am inclined to defer to his judgment about how to be efficacious as a black man in US politics.)
We see this with Nancy Pelosi calling out Maxine Waters regarding the harassment of Trump flunkies. Waters is fine with me; Pelosi is fine with me. They have different roles in this conversation and it's perfectly legit for them to take different stances. Certainly in my restaurant-work days, it would have been unwise for someone like Stephen Miller to eat food I had prepared -- and I wouldn't have given a fuck what Tip O'Neill thought of it. (My restaurant days were a long time ago.)
34 - my assumption is that if McConnell ended up with a majority vs. a President Clinton, he would just not ever hold hearings on any SC justice appointed by her and assume he would get a big fat wave to ride in the mid-terms.
Yes. To fuck shit up, you don't even need a majority. To do something decent, you need a supermajority.
an ad that codes as visually fascist
In the end, I'm a single issue voter when it comes to Congress. I only want to know which party you're going to caucus with. Joe Manchin is a fine representative of West Virginia, and Hegar would be great for Texas.
"Visual fascism" is certainly a thing, but not a thing that seems to apply here. Was there anything in this ad that was fascist beyond the military theme? Is anything military-themed necessarily fascist? Is a military vocation inherently loathsome? I'd say no to all of the above.
Furthermore, the democratic (small "d") majority that I aim to be a part of definitely includes soldiers and people who find military service honorable.
Plus, when the civil war starts, we need somebody who knows what they're doing.
We see this with Nancy Pelosi calling out Maxine Waters regarding the harassment of Trump flunkies. Waters is fine with me; Pelosi is fine with me.
I am generally a Pelosi fan, but I hated her doing that a whole lot (Schumer did the same thing, and I'm not generally a Schumer fan). Waters was not unreasonable, and there's a real value to not breaking solidarity. Pelosi doesn't have to say intemperate things herself, but she shouldn't be condemning her own people unless they're really inexcusable.
43 is absolutely correct, and furthermore, there will be 100% batshit response by the rightwing to literally anything done by our side, because that is their entire playbook. There is never a good faith response from them, just kneejerk batshittiness.
Megan's point is to do the right thing, and not be deterred by the batshit response possibility. I'm just saying: it is a certainty, whether or not you do the right thing. (So you might as well do the right thing.)
less because the batshit response is unimportant, it can be a huge deal
That's not why. The reason is that we are letting other people's poor behavior control our own. That is hostage taking behavior and it can't be accommodated. If we do a thing and they go batshit crazy, they must then be held responsible for their batshitness. But predicting their batshitness, even accurately, doesn't impose responsibility on us not to do the important thing that pseudo-provokes them.
I am less principled than you are -- if a hostage taker has a gun to someone's head, I'm going to negotiate, even if that means being controlled by someone else's bad behavior. There's a point where the possibility of brains splattered on the wall overcomes my principles.
But in the case of political backlash, I don't think outcomes are predictable enough to reliably make that kind of calculation (that is, the backlash is predictable, but what happens as a result isn't), at which point I'll get principled about it again and advocate doing the right thing regardless.
I am generally a Pelosi fan, but I hated her doing that a whole lot
Here's Pelosi:
"In the crucial months ahead, we must strive to make America beautiful again. Trump's daily lack of civility has provoked responses that are predictable but unacceptable. As we go forward, we must conduct elections in a way that achieves unity from sea to shining sea."
And here is Waters:
And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they're not welcome anymore, anywhere.
In keeping with the theme of 48.last, I don't see an American majority that excludes folks who agree with Pelosi here. "Predictable but unacceptable" is pretty tepid criticism, and it puts no constraint on me whatsoever. "Create a crowd" and "not welcome anymore, anywhere" is pretty hardcore -- really a straightforward threat of violence.
This is a redux of the Nazi-punching debate, and I am onboard with the punchers. But it's entirely okay with me if Rep. Pelosi leaves that task to us.
Counterpoint: "Create a crowd" and "not welcome anymore, anywhere" are not straightforward threats of violence, and being called "Predictable but unacceptable" is a pretty insulting and condescending form of criticism.
I am Ned. Saying that it is unacceptable for Waters to say "tell them they're not welcome anymore" seems to me to be a really unfortunate breach of solidarity. Waters was not calling for violence, she was calling for speech.
Pelosi doesn't have to join in Waters' rhetoric, but I'm very unhappy with her for condemning it.
I also thought Trump was unambiguously threatening violence:
She has just called for harm to supporters, of which there are many, of the Make America Great Again movement. Be careful what you wish for Max!
Maybe Trump thinks Waters would regret it if actual harm came to Trump supporters. Yeah, that must be it.
Remember that the context in which Waters was speaking was that Sanders had been politely and non-violently asked to leave a restaurant. That was the real-life conduct Waters was encouraging more of.
Trump, eh, nothing's coherent enough to be unambiguous. He looked to me to be falsely claiming that Waters had called for violence and wishing for violence against her in response, but I would t call anything clear.
Megan is talking sense. The Dem leadership telling me to not be confrontational with fascists doesn't seem like the kind of thing that will get the base fired up for midterms. So I'll put my marker down for: win a handful of house races, don't take either chamber.
Amazed and also dismayed, tbh, that the restaurant thing has caused such offence to the crypto-fascists that their very next resort is to issue calls to violence; there have been several today that I've seen. I have no idea what to say; it looks bad.
Oh man, I am loving the looks of the ProtestPlaydates. Parents with very young kids are occupying ICE offices, nursing and setting up pack'n'plays, doing story times. I gotta organize one for Sacramento. I mean, why even have a cute very young child if not to use as a (relevant) political prop?
Aren't you worried they'll steal your kid and sent it to Guatemala or a Baptist couple in suburban Charlotte?
I don't know if you know this about me, but I am a white lady. I can generally trust my privilege.
"Now there's people - and I know 'em - who'll pay a lot more than $25,000 for a healthy baby. Why, I myself fetched $30,000 on the black market. And that was in 1954 dollars."
48. Lieberman is generally recognized as having torpeded the public option for Obama if we take that administration at their word. So it's probably worth caring about the politics of those caucasing with the Dems beyond having a D after their name. I think West Virginia can do better than Manchin and the suburbs of Austin can do better than Hegar. Manchin is flirting with supporting Trump in 2020 so the D after his name may not be worth so much.
"Was there anything in this ad that was fascist beyond the military theme?"
That was enough. The bulk of the subject matter of the ad is her military career and the US military operations in Afghanistan. It transitions from military helicopters to children playing with a toy helicopter. "Being his constituent and a veteran wasn't enought to get a meeting." How much more overt do you need the supremacy of the military to be?
"Is anything military-themed necessarily fascist?"
In 2019 Amerina, probably.
"Is a military vocation inherently loathsome?"
Is there some number of offensive attacks (a couple), countries destroyed (a couple), and innoncents killed (hundreds of thousands) where people should begin regretting their military service? I think America has reached that point but reasonable people differ.
Hyping up the Pelosi/Waters debate kinda all feels to me like yet another example of social media intra-liberal debate for the sake of the "fun" of social media intra-liberal debate (i.e., people are bored and feel helpless and want to talk about some easy-to-debate topic on social media). Should we have people tell Sarah Sanders not to eat in their restaurant, and do similar things to other Trump cabinet peiole? Yes, that's helpful. Is it also helpful to have other Democrats say that we should be generally more civil to everyone? Yes. Who is right? It kinda depends on how you feel individually about what would be more effective. Is Maxine kinda awesome but also kinda a ridiculous blowhard and conspiracy theorist? Yes, both at once. Let a thousand flowers bloom, keep the eyes on the prize, or pick your own relevant slogan from 60s political movements.
Yes. If you can't roll your eyes at the old people telling you to be civil while they slip you $50 to go to the bar, you've started to focus on the wrong things.
67: I want to believe that "cabinet peiole" is a truly horrendous insult in some Polynesian language. I am much more annoyed by the civility distraction than you are, unfortunately. (but not by your comments on it per se)
So, I'm curious, why is it that for the right, an open SC seat is a great GOTV motivator, but for the left, it's blackmail material that party leaders use as a cudgel to keep their troops in line?
71 - Because Democrats who are not super-informed still think that the Supreme Court is basically on their side and thus are not mad at the Court or overwhelmingly worried about it. The only decision that's served as a mild motivator in the other direction is Citizens United, but campaign finance isn't really a rile-up-the-masses issue for Democrats. Meanwhile the uninformed evangelical base of the Republican party is overwhelmingly focused on abortion, gay marriage, and "religious freedom" issues and has hated the Court since, to date it precisely, Brown.
To be clear I think that this attitude amongst the Democratic base is unbelievably dumb and that the Court is so important that it's almost everything, but my understanding is that this is, at least to date, the political reality, and I don't think that's been particularly changed by Donald Trump. Overturning Roe would I think be the only thing that would break it.
Relatedly, I should say that while I'm professionally stodgy enough to find the whole "Notorious RBG" thing weird and vaguely distasteful (judges aren't celebrities, celebrities are my clients), I do find it very encouraging as the basis for a popular-ish movement focusing energy on the Court.
If feel like I should learn who "Joe Crowley" is to understand how the Democratic Party is changing, but I'm afraid that if I look it up, I won't be able to forget who he is.
Manchin is flirting with supporting Trump in 2020 so the D after his name may not be worth so much.
You actually believe this?
I just realized: I don't care. Sorry for having asked.
75. Do you think Manchin is not sincere? Even if not, that a Democratic senator would say this is shocking.
"I'm open to supporting the person who I think is best for my country and my state," Manchin said. "If his [Trump] policies are best, I'll be right there."
and
"It was a mistake. It was a mistake politically," Manchin said of supporting Clinton. But, she had promised $20 billion of investment in his state.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2018/06/06/manchin-politico-interview/679684002/
She defeated the 4th most powerful Democrat in the House. Or the 239th most powerful Rep in the House, depending on how you want to count.
77: I think he's a politician who wants to get reelected in West Virginia, a state that Trump won by 40 points or something (I swear I'm not making that up, but maybe I am).
Lamb won his seat on by similar tactics.
How come NY has a separate primary night for the state races? I can't pay attention to shit that often.
Anyway, if people don't fill in the "Name" bar, I'm going to assume they're Joe Crowley.
Does this help Nixon, because of a similar dynamic, or hurt her, because Cuomo has a lot of warning?
||
If you like horror, I mean other than everything going on in the US right now, I recommend Hereditary It's a slow build but man, that ending. It left me with a creepy feeling like Rosemary's Baby meets Cries and Whispers meets The Wicker Man.
I only know and accept the original.
Is Joe Crowley who just lost the Democratic primary to a DSA candidate one of these fuckbirds who caucuses with the Republicans? I need to gauge how much I should celebrate.
82:
In order to reduce political participation, and thus increase the power of state and local machines.
85: the trailer was plenty spooky for me.
Oh holy shit, that was or a congressional seat. Carry on.
"Hereditary" was awful. A real mess of a movie. Nice performance by Toni Collette, though.
89. No. He's in a federal slot. The NY state primaries are later. What a system. Designed to discourage voting.
94 Fight me, pf. I found it extraordinarily creepy and an intense family psychodrama. Agree about Toni Collette. That was an amazing performance.
88: You are missing out. That is one special special movie.
Joe Crowley is a generally good Congressman, he just never spends any time in his district, relies on tiny turnout and apathy to get re-elected, and gets 100% of his campaign contributions from big business because he aspires to be a kingmaker in party leadership. He doesn't deserve to lose nearly as much as Dan Lipinski, but nobody has a right to be in Congress.
If Trump gets re-elected, he calls a constitutional convention to get rid of (a) citizenship under the XIV, (b) judicial review, (c) term limits, (d) choice, and (e) god knows what else.
I think a lot of this could happen, but without a constitutional convention. For example, birthright citizenship is just another bullshit Supreme Court reversal away, which also favors keeping judicial review. Why take the risk of open discussion when you can just reap the benefits of your long-term project to stack all the institutions of American government in your favor?
I guess you need an amendment on term limits, but how plausible that is depends on whether it looks like you can push it through the states. You need a few super majorities at different levels to get that through. Give it ten years.
Right, that's why what DT really needs is a convention. Two thirds of state legislatures, so what's that, 34 states? Republicans control 31 now, 4 more* are divided, and there's Nebraska.
DT would end on the currency of the Second American Republic. And a whole lot of it would end up in his pockets.
* NY, CT, ME, CO. This line-up does give some cause to hope we'll dodge the bullet,
What could be more American than traitorous collusion with foreign powers?
Three fourths of states have to approve. Yes you can get to a Convention with two thirds, but you can't get anything out without three fourths.
Have to approve of an amendment, that is.
I would fear a convention would create such a sense of crisis that Rs might feel emboldened to seize power, regardless of the law, and that they might get away with it.
Fake Accent, you don't sound like you actually want to make America great again.
I think the Rs can seize power on everything but term limits without a convention. And then work on dumping term limits in the long run, though that would probably mean an authoritarian other than Trump would get the benefit.
So what emerges from the convention will be a new constitution, with an expedited ratification process, allowing emergency powers to be exercised while ratification is going on.
It's probably going to be much less formal-legal than that. What the Supreme Court appears to have done is enshrined "It's not racist if the (white) person doing it says it isn't racist." That's enough.
The Ocasio-Cortez victory seems pretty huge to me. Crowley may be a good guy (I have no idea), but if you want progress, you need to do this every now and then pour encourager les autres.
It wasn't even close, which is very impressive for something that wasn't attracting any attention.
I'm with Bass on being concerned over the Democratic embrace of militarism. In addition to it being concerning on the merits, Democrats are never going to play that game better than Republicans.
Max Cleland comes to mind.
Anyway, I think a lot of the subtext of the bullshit civility debate is because the people Trump needs to run an administration are about as likely to want to spend 15 minutes with the kind of people who would go to a Trump rally as I am. Which is why I think social shunning is a great idea. It might work at the margins.
Wait, you want to *keep* term limits after they gave you GWB and DJT? And the only president who actually won more than two terms was FDR?
Why on earth would you want term limits on any elected office?
Personally, I don't, except for the presidency. Plenty of people think of them as a way to avoid entrenched politicians becoming disconnected from those they represent. And, more practically, as a way of gaining seats for the minority party because there are generally advantages for incumbents.
In Nebraska, they used term limits to purge the unicameral of Democratic* senators in the rural areas. There weren't many, but plenty had such a strong personal connection to the voters that they couldn't be defeated even though the electorate was like 80% Republican. The Democrats couldn't replace them, but finding another Republican meathead is easy.
*It's nominally non-partisan, but nobody doesn't know who is a Democrat.
Term limits exist in many states and had no progressive impact AFAICT. Or anti-money.
96: I'm on Barry's side here, mostly. There were a few moments when I thought it might be spiraling out of control, but it stuck the landing. And we all agree about Toni Collette.
I think they're pro-money, on the whole. If you don't have some long-time sitting reps, the lobbyists have the upper hand at working the system and all the reps are looking for how to transition to being a lobbyist anyway.
People often get fed up with perennial officeholders in my city and propose term limits, but I really don't think it would help significantly. Maybe in the first year only.
120: The CW in Ohio is that term limits have made the lobbyists even more powerful as the legislators never have time to figure anything out and rely on the lobbyists completely. But that may be naïve as it's pretending the legislators are well-meaning but clueless, as opposed to utterly corrupt.
Term limits are great stuff for super-wealthy rightwingers -- and on the local level, great stuff for developers. With term limits, liberals have to start from scratch every election -- something that increases the importance of money in elections.
Also the CW in CA state government. We loosened limits recently bht they're still there.
121: I went to see it based on the 90 Rotten Tomatoes score (87 Metacritic) and nothing else. Despite some good acting and some interesting bits, the whole thing totally failed to hang together. As the movie went on, I became increasingly convinced that there was no coherent idea behind it, and that the ending would utterly fail to tie the pieces together. And that, in fact, is what happened.
Start with the title. I mean, why "Hereditary"? Why not any other random word in the English language? Wood. Treehouse. Mother. Almost nothing in the movie existed for an identifiable reason; it wasn't visually interesting. It was just a collection of scenes that contradicted the logic of the previous scenes, with a tacked-on ending that seemed unrelated to the rest of the movie. A disaster!
129: After seeing the movie, I had to go back and read the reviews, and trusted reviewers were as off-base as Barry and peep. Some were comparing it to The Shining, which is nuts! (Though the director clearly stole some stuff from was influenced by Kubrick.)
128, 130. The ending totally brought it all together. I don't want to give away any plot points but c'mon, there's a good reason why it's called "Hereditary". I found it didn't really echo The Shining as much as it did Cries and Whispers, Rosemary's Baby, The Wicker Man, etc.
I'm with pf on Heredity. I enjoyed some creepy scenes and some goofs on other horror movies, but the ending didn't bring it home for me. I'm not sure how to get into the issue without spoilers though.
there's a good reason why it's called "Hereditary"
I suppose you can't explain this without spoilers, but I literally can think of no rationale. This is a movie about a family, and the key plot point was that there was something big going on that was NOT hereditary. "Non-Hereditary" would have been a more apt title.
133: The trick of the movie is that the most important is character is never seen alive.
132: While the critics loved that movie, the few dissenters thought it fell apart at the end. The Missus and I seem to be alone in having despised the whole thing. We may have spent an hour after the movie talking about all the different ways it failed.
131: It certainly calls back to Rosemary's Baby in obvious ways, and that made it worse for me by comparison. I swear, I think I would have liked that movie better had Toni Collette's performance not been so great. (All of the performances were really good. It seemed like a gross injustice to have such a bad movie be so well-acted.)
Not since Henry Fool have I seen a movie that the critics loved that I hated so much. Not since Celebrity (which was wisely panned by the critics) have I wanted to get up and walk out of a movie in the middle.
I did get up and walk out in the middle of Celebrity. Not everybody I was with wanted to leave and smart phones hadn't been invented yet, so I read movie posters for an hour.
So apparently Ben Jealous actually won. I didn't see that coming.
136.1 I thought the ending brought it all together. As peep said it really stuck the landing.
(I just called Nancy Pelosi and left a message telling her how disappointed I was in her for throwing Maxine Waters under a bus.)
I just started calling elected officials with Trump's election. I'm not sure I'm ready to graduate to calling ones that are in other states.
Also, the union decision is out and as bad as expected.
Not since Henry Fool have I seen a movie that the critics loved that I hated so much.
I hadn't thought of it in a while, but I found Henry Fool incredibly depressing. I don't know that I thought it was a bad movie, but I was not capable of seeing it as a black comedy, I just found it black.
WTF New York Times.
I open google news and here are some of the headlines about the Janus decision:
Supreme Court deals major blow to public sector unions -- CNN
Supreme Court deals blow to unions, rules against forced fees for government workers -- FOX News
Opinion: Janus Decision Reins in Unions Political Power -- New York Times
How is it that they NYT headline reads as more anti-union than the Fox News headline?!?!?!
I am having inchoate thoughts about stare decisis -- that is, one of the awful things about this decision is that it it rejects prior established law for no good reason. I'd kind of like someone to make a public statement that no decisions made by the Gorsuch court should be given stare decisis consideration by future courts, but I'm not quite sure who and how.
144: Because they're dishonest monsters. That is, CNN delivered the news straight. Fox delivered the news straight because 'blow to unions' is good news to their readers -- they don't have to lie about it, they can be straightforwardly, honestly celebratory. The NYT is a bunch of hideous weasels who has to make the decision sound reasonable to woo their mostly liberal readership into thinking this isn't all so bad. I hate them.
144: To be fair (I know, barf, but), that's an opinion piece, whereas the news headline in big letters I see on their front page right now is "Supreme Court Deals Blow to Labor Unions". (And the opinion piece is set against another from the left, "Workers Must Get Radical to Fight Back Against Janus".
That was intemperate, although deeply felt. On looking at it again, you're also comparing two news headlines with an opinion headline, so it completely depends who the opinion writer is.
Pwned by Minivet, who's right. But the NYT doesn't have any excuse for having opinion writers who suck so badly.
On looking at it again, you're also comparing two news headlines with an opinion headline, so it completely depends who the opinion writer is.
Yes, I noticed that, and it made me suspicious of the google news algorithms. But it still made me want to hit my head against the monitor.
Nick
Not since Henry Fool have I seen a movie that the critics loved that I hated so much.
Is it an aversion to Hal Hartley movies in general, or just Henry Fool?
(And the opinion piece is set against another from the left, "Workers Must Get Radical to Fight Back Against Janus".
That's good to hear. I was curious about this bit from the Vox article (which was clearly written prior to the release of the decision and isn't based on the specific opinion at all)
Moreover, some union advocates have argued that conservatives will rue a ruling overturning Abood for what it might imply about the application of the Constitution to public employment more generally. "Imagine if a teacher called in sick, and an administrator had to procure a warrant before searching her desk drawer for a text book, or else risk violating the Fourth Amendment," Moshe Marvit, a fellow at the Century Foundation, wrote in the New York Times. "Or imagine if a police sergeant who tells an officer that he didn't have time to listen to a complaint about the break room now has to worry that he violated the First Amendment."
Shaun Richman, a veteran union organizer, warned in the Washington Post that a ruling against agency fees could require public employers to allow multiple unions to compete for workers, instead of dealing with just one. That could lead to greater union militancy and power as unions fall over each other to show they're the most committed worker advocates.
Now that the anti-union forces have won, expect challenges like that from unions trying to make whatever lemonade they can out of a lemon of a ruling.
Is the Janus mentioned the same as what is now Janus Henderson?
Asking for a friend who was thinking of moving his IRA anyway.
151: Huh. It appears I haven't seen anything else by Hartley.
I'm generally against term limits, I just have a hard time seeing a Constitutional Convention being called when it doesn't seem necessary for anything other than term limits for Republicans to get what they want.
155: His movies are all stylized in a very peculiar, very recognizable way. I was just curious if it was the Hartley-esqueness of the movie that irritated you (I like Hartley's movies but I know people who can't stand them).
I guess "Janus" here has nothing to do with "Janus funds."
Does the ruling reverse itself every year or what?
After somebody restarts the Molly Maquires, maybe?
The first analysis is up on scotusblog, and this part of the opinion seems ridiculous to me (emphasis mine):
Alito pointed to several factors that led the majority to conclude that Abood should indeed be overruled. First, he asserted, the Abood decision was "poorly reasoned, because, among other things, it relied on cases involving a "very different First Amendment question" than the one before it. Second, the ruling has proven "unworkable," because (as even the unions themselves conceded in this case) it is so hard to distinguish between the expenses that nonmembers can be required to shoulder and those that they cannot. Third, the court decided Abood in a very different legal and economic environment; since the ruling 41 years ago, public spending - including the "mounting costs of public-employee wages, benefits, and pensions" - has skyrocketed, giving collective bargaining a political significance that it might not have had at the time of the Abood ruling.
Does that imply that any supreme court decision that is related to public spending on health care or college education is now open to be reviewed without putting any weight on precedent?
I don't know, but I'm fairly certain it doesn't mean that a case with identical facts except for being about a private-sector union would have a different decision.
I'm fairly certain it doesn't mean that a case with identical facts except for being about a private-sector union would have a different decision.
I don't think that's true. What I'm reading is that the court considered it a First Amendment issue, and that only binds government and not private actors.
145 I'm with LB, every Gorsuch majority opinion is illegitimate.
151 I like Hal Hartley's films a lot.
On Hereditary, I don't mean to suggest that I find it on par with the likes of Rosemary's Baby or The Wicker Man or Cries and Whispers but it effectively evokes the same moods and it's a damn fine film.
161. Wow. Yeah, absolutely nobody was thinking about unions or collective bargaining agreements as much of an issue in 1977. (Wish I could all-caps that year.)
156 They very much want the elimination of the citizenship provision of the 14th Amendment -- eventually, even voter suppression isn't going to be enough to maintain white supremacy -- and I think that's a much harder thing to get from the courts than ruling for Capital in labor cases or for Christianity in cases that affect religion.
Really? In this the year of our lord 2018?
Yes. Really. They want to pretend we're not a New World nation.
Birthright citizenship corresponds pretty well with the settler colonies of the Americas. (See the map at the end of this article, which is specifically about birthright citizenship for illegal aliens[sic]. Other colonial nations have weaker forms of birthright citizenship.) By denying it, they want to assert that we're intrinsically a white land.
168: I mean, if you want to be really rigorous about it, Charlie should have been more specific about who "they" are. And for that matter, what "want" means. (Fantasy from deep in the id or something they have come to the measured conclusion would be good, pie-in-the-sky plans or agenda for the next year, etc.) But I think 167 is basically right, yeah. The whole of section 1 of the 14th amendment (birthright citizenship, due process, and equal protection), are all bad for the conservative movement and Republican Party as they exist these days. Due process and equal protection are vague and easily hollowed out, but birthright citizenship is hard to get around.
Oh. I should let the lawyers comment, but the 14th Amendment is pretty explicit and has a lot of case law behind it, no? Conversely, we've had a tradition of ruling in favor of capital (and to a lesser degree Christianity) going back forever. My uninformed interpretation of the current conservative SCOTUS justices is that some of them lean libertarian, and so might be reluctant to roll back citizenship rights.
I was surprised to learn recently (thanks to the podcast Life of the Law) about US vs Wong Kim Ark - more specifically, the fact that it was needed at all. I would have thought the text of the 14th Amendment was plain enough for it not to be in question whether it applied to immigrants as well as black people, but apparently our government had to be dragged kicking and screaming to accept that fact.
But it looks like there is a qualifying clause to that part of the 14th Amendment ("subject to the jurisdiction thereof") that the caliber of weasel currently controlling SCOTUS could conceivably use.
There are Republicans who have been working to create the environment to reverse Wong Kim Ark for years.
The Ark of Kim is Wong, but it bends toward justices.
178 - Nice.
Justice Harlan joined the dissent in Wong Kim Ark and then also (famously) dissented in Plessy, suggesting that elite politics of the 1890s really, really did not line up with today's. There's nothing formally stopping the Court from adopting the Wong Kim Ark and finding that the 14th Amendment means jus sanguinis, I mean except precedent, intellectual honesty, and common sense.
preventing the Court from resurrecting the Wong Kim Ark dissent, to be precise.
OK, with Kennedy definitely out, maybe they won't need a convention after all.
I'm so old I remember when some liberals (and to the left of them) thought getting rid of the filibuster would end up being a good idea.
Optional archive links. I guess some commenter named "eb" used to think it would take a convention to strip away birthright citizenship.
Going back to this because everything else is so depressing:
This is a movie about a family, and the key plot point was that there was something big going on that was NOT hereditary.
But at least two possibly inter-related things that were major drivers of the plot were hereditary, Collete's family's predisposition to mental illness and the other spoiler thing.
Update: The headline to that opinion piece, formerly "Janus Decision Reins in Unions Political Power", has now been switched to "Unions Needed to Be Reined In".