He reminds me of one of my glad-handing, and heavy-drinking, uncles, for real.
Most grassroots Dems don't much care about whatever now-controversial positions (relating to race and gender and etc.) Biden once took in the 1970s and 1980s. They just want to be reassured; and they just want to back a winner.
And the polls now tell them that Biden is a winner, so...
I remember one time I dared Jesse and Strom to slip the word "cocksucker" into a spending bill. I told them if they could get it through committee and on to the Senate floor, I'd strip $2 million from the enforcement budget for the Voting Rights Act.
They almost pulled it off, too, but got shut down by that battleaxe Mikulski. Those rascals!
My pet theory has been that the poll support for Biden is more about rejecting the Sanders (really more the Sirota) style, than anything about Biden, or ideology. And so Biden can and will lose his lead as folks get more comfortable with Warren and Harris.
"I dare you not to vote" -- Biden 2020 campaign slogan
Is 2 a real story? I can't tell!
Then you've never been to the Great Cocksucker National Park.
The rangers have to paint that on the signs before covering it with "Smokey Mountains".
I followed the link in the OP, and then looked at the thread. bob was trolling us by saying that Carly Fiorina was going to be the first woman President. What innocent times!
I agree with 3. I went in thinking Harris would be the most likely winner. When people only know Joe and Bernie, it's no surprise that people would pick him. The pleasant surprise is that it's Warren that's leading the pack (for now, anyway). I thought she'd be too wonkish, grandmotherly, and tainted by the ancestry stuff. I was preparing myself to be happy with Harris but if I can have Warren as the nominee, all the better.
I think much of the support for Biden comes from mostly white male voters who have a lot more ewww in their past than Biden and figure that asking for "centrism" sounds better than asking for reassurance that nobody is going to look at what they were doing in 1986.
Then you've never been to the Great Cocksucker National Park.
Presumably that's where Deadwood was set.
Is the post title making anyone else hear "Cotton-Eyed Joe" in their head?
10: The polls I've seen indicate that Biden is a huge frontrunner among black voters. Presumably this is due to a combination of high name recognition, association with Obama, and belief in his electability. I doubt this news cycle will affect that significantly.
Obama was great. I miss him so much.
I would vote for Obama as a non-executive head of state repeatedly, but I think we need somebody more willing to play hardball with the Republicans now.
13 As Harris and Warren gain ground, I'd think 13(c) will shift. Isn't Biden at his peak now? Who leaves one of the other candidates and picks him?
Weren't black voters slower to embrace Obama, only really moving when it became clear that he actually could win? Am I misremembering?
I love Obama the person, but I would not vote for his clone in a primary. I would vote for him as speech-maker, though. What an orator.
|| Because there are so many cases still not decided, the Supreme Court is issuing decisions on days that aren't Monday -- today and tomorrow. So what did they do today? (a) narrowly decided not to revive non-delegation (this is a big deal for the Administrative State, but the issue is going to come up again, and soon); (b) upheld a big cross as a war memorial with a slew of opinions (7!); (c) set the limitations period for suing prosecutors for falsifying evidence; and (d) punted the jurisdictional question in the unauthorized fax case. |>
16: I doubt many people will shift to him from different candidates; they'll shift to him from not paying attention.
17: Exactly.
I don't know if I can bear to watch Elizabeth Warren get corrupted by the U.S. presidency. Watching it fuck Obama up was just awful. In this respect Hillary was sort of my ideal candidate, although the Sanders scenario is also compelling...
18(a): Please elaborate?
I reiterate my 2 libra opinion that Warren looks and sounds exactly like Clinton and would fail in exactly the same way.
16.2: You're remembering correctly. Here's an article from January 2008.
In a national survey by CNN/Opinion Research Corp., 59 percent of black Democrats backed Obama, an Illinois Democrat, for their party's presidential nomination, with 31 percent supporting Clinton, the senator from New York.
The 28 point lead for Obama is a major reversal from October, when Clinton held a 24 point lead among black Democrats.
"There's been a huge shift among African-American Democrats from Clinton to Obama. African-American Democrats used to be reluctant to support Obama because they didn't think a black man could be elected. Then Obama won Iowa and nearly won New Hampshire. Now they believe," said Bill Schneider, CNN senior political analyst.
"Obama's lead over Clinton among black men is more than 50 points, and among black women, once a Clinton stronghold, Obama has an 11 point advantage," said CNN polling director Keating Holland.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/01/18/poll.2008/index.html
I'm sure the presidency would fuck Warren up in many ways, but it's can't be us watching her from the sidelines as it so often was under Obama (I say we, I mean at a minimum myself) - there needs to be as much policy mobilization as electoral mobilization following a Dem win (alevai).
And if not abolition of the Senate, at least its discrediting as an institution. (Give them one last chance.)
21: I share your concerns, but a big difference is that Warren is running a truly populist campaign
https://newrepublic.com/article/154113/democratic-party-fighting-spirit-give-war-chance
23.2: How do you envision this happening? Do we just throw out the Constitution?
21.1 The dispute is over how much 'lawmaking' authority Congress can delegate to the executive. Up until the New Deal, the courts policed it somewhat, but with the explosion of the Administrative State, the Supreme Court adopted a very loose standard. Today's decision was 4-1-3 -- dissenters were Gorsuch, Roberts, Thomas. Kavanaugh sat out. Alito's concurrence was, in toto:
The Constitution confers on Congress certain "legislative [p]owers," Art. I, ยง1, and does not permit Congress to delegate them to another branch of the Government. [cite omitted]. Nevertheless, since 1935, the Court has uniformly rejected nondelegation arguments and has upheld provisions that authorized agencies to adopt important rules pursuant to extraordinarily capacious standards. See ibid.
If a majority of this Court were willing to reconsider the approach we have taken for the past 84 years, I would support that effort. But because a majority is not willing to do that, it would be freakish to single out the provision at issue here for special treatment.
Because I cannot say that the statute lacks a discernable standard that is adequate under the approach this Court has taken for many years, I vote to affirm.
Will the Court restore non-delegation in time for it to be used as a cudgel against the Warren Administration? The votes are certainly there.
24 is a rationale from a different era.
21.2 No one is going to sit out because Warren is sure to win, or because Republican adults-in-the-room are sure to restrain Trump's worst impulses.
27: Thanks. AIUI in a reality-based world Congress actually has been neglecting in its oversight role for decades, and some clawback would be in order. But we don't live in that world, so.
I reiterate my 2 libra opinion that Warren looks and sounds exactly like Clinton and would fail in exactly the same way.
By having her convincing popular vote victory nullified by the Electoral College?
I'm guessing that you actually mean: by being subject to bizarre, sexist abuse by the media and other players. To that I say: Too bad. America is just going to have to fucking grow up.
25: I think I've discussed some here before - there are several, including making the body's role advisory rather than vetoing; the anti-dead-hand option of an amendment that deletes the last clause of Article V; or in an emergency, pure judicial decree that the Fourteenth Amendment by right abolished the Senate 150 years ago. Certainly it would be a sea change, out of anyone's imaginable scope and it's not the kind of thing that could happen even with four years of a federal Democratic trifecta, but without sea changes like that, even trifectas won't save us.
I mean, 24 and 29 make sense and may prove to be true, but why take the chance? Run a white guy who can string two sentences together and Trump isn't the alpha anymore.
31 is exactly what you did in 2016. How's that working out for you?
Congress can write statutes as detailed as it wants -- there's no clawing back needed. The question is whether its practical for bills to really cover all the minutiae that something like a health care scheme has to have. Or whether you leave minutiae to the experts, and if you don't like what they come up with, tinker with it then.
Is some enterprising Republican going to see if they can get a non-delegation challenge to some CFPB regulations before the Supreme Court in time to be decided next June? Tossing out Warren's signature legislation would have some value. Problem is, maybe CFPB would have to actually do something to create standing, and maybe they're not doing anything??
34 I think you're really under-appreciating aspects of 2016 that cannot recur. The press will be awful, no matter who our candidate is. Trump will be awful. Awful people will be awful. We outnumber them, even in Pennsylvania and the Upper Midwest, and we just have to decide we want to win.
The weirdness of the EC means freak wins are easy to reverse. "Convince 10k people in Philly to vote who didn't in 2016" is an achievable goal.
32 It's still possible that the Red Sox will hire me as a DH. OK, I'd have to learn how to hit a 90+ mph pitch. Actually, I'd have to learn to hit a 40+ mph pitch first. Still more likely than any of these scenarios in your lifetime.
One of the worst aspects of the current Dem slapfight is that Biden's fond memory of reaching across the aisle was on the relevant issue of... ending school busing.
36: Fair. OTOH in 2020, unlike 2016, you'll have a shamelessly partisan AG, even more shamelessly partisan Senate and Court, equally partisan Secretary of Defense, and Putin presumably going for broke.
36: Yes, but to argue agaist myself, maybe we're underestimating the advantage of incumbency, especially when you are willing and eager to cheat.
His approval rating has been hovering at 41% forever. That's lower than G.H.W. BUsh's at re-election time. I don't see how he turns that into a win.
34: I mean, sure, everyone knows you can't elect a black guy president, too. The civil rights movement itself was, for the majority of its existence, hopeless. Certainly by 1950 or so, reasonable people had given up. There are a lot of people who think Bernie would have been a more electable choice in 2016, but despite my own support for him, I am skeptical.
Who are you proposing as the electable white guy? Bernie? Joe? Beto? Pete? I'm guessing that you're advocating for some imaginary unicorn to have run and won in 2016, and now for him to run for re-election in 2020. But any white male Democratic unicorn is still going to be too sympathetic to women and minorities to avoid the abuse that Hillary got (see Al Gore or John Kerry) or he'll have to stake out positions that alienate women and minorities, who are often permitted to vote in the US. And the white male unicorn would still be subject to the other systemic issues that sunk Hillary.
The only long-term solution is to challenge the conditions that made Trump possible. Warren seems to have the best grip on that fact, but it's early, and we'll have plenty of opportunity for someone to demonstrate electability -- maybe even one of the white guys! Despite their history of failure, they keep trying, and they should!
(Sure, yeah, we could seek to find common ground to appease the nitwits. We've seen in that approach in the UK, and someone like Trump could never become prime minister there, right?)
43.1: Johnson delivered Civil Rights in virtue of a Democratic trifecta. Obama, lacking such trifecta, delivered nothing but speeches, and whatever fragments remain of the ACA.
43.2: "White guy who can string two sentences together." Very low bar, no unicorns required. I think any of the men you name could beat Trump
43.3: All long term solutions start with winning elections. I think 2016 gives excellent reason to think Warren can't do that; or at minimum there's a good chance she can't do that, and you do not have time to take chances.
43.4: I do not and never have proposed common ground with the nitwits. I propose speaking to monkeys in the language of monkeys: if Trump doesn't look like the alpha, he won't get the turnout he needs. Policy never enters the story, presentation is everything. Every presidential election since 2004 at least tells that story.
44: This all seems profoundly ahistorical. As one white guy famously (and correctly) said, the ACA was a big fucking deal. Still is. So was the stimulus.
Gore and Kerry were white guys who could string sentences together. They failed, and their failures were, if anything, more decisive than Hillary's. You're logic requires us to reject white men, too.
You have an answer: You want to retroactively define Gore and Kerry as women or black or something. Your 44.4 makes them non-alphas, I guess, and turns Barack Obama into a white man for these purposes. The problem is, Gore and Kerry really were white guys who could string two sentences together, and Obama was (by the US definition) a black man. I get your logic: No true white man could lose, and no true black man (or woman) can be elected. There's a name for that fallacy.
The monkeys are still out there, typing at their keyboards. Do you seriously think it will be impossible to SwiftBoat Mayor Pete? To argue that there's something a bit effeminate about Beto? Bernie's a freaking socialist! Surely that makes him either black or a woman, right?
Warren looks and sounds exactly like Clinton
I find this a truly weird take, because, no she doesn't.
Unless you just mean because she's a white lady -- is that what you mean?
I think 2016 gives excellent reason to think Warren can't do that
I'm not seeing it. Because she looks and sounds like Clinton, you mean? (which she doesn't)
Well, I'll go ahead and predict that this thread will be 99% male going forward...
My only complaint about Warren is her age. I'd still vote for her in the primary ahead of the younger white guys that haven't ever won a state-wide election. Or even stood in one.
This Eastland businesses has really put me off Joe. There was a time when, in my presidential rankings, I was thinking he could break into the top 10.
51 I had that moment with JB last year, attending an event where he was the featured speaker. He's so clueless he doesn't see the need to act like its the 21st century.
I really do think Biden has already peaked -- I think Sanders has as well -- so now it's the long process of their followings slowly bleeding away.
Steve Bullock is surging, by the way, from whatever tiny percentage in the polls to a still tiny percentage that is nonetheless way higher than it was. I can see him draining off some of that white male Biden support, along with several of the other guys.
Where do normal people get their information on the primary candidates from anyway? I'm guessing not from here. I wouldn't have known Bullock was running otherwise.
That is, I'd be surprised if Bullock gets out of single digits, at least without something pretty wild happening, but since it's all going to come at the expense of Biden, this is still useful. Maybe Harris will be able to pick those votes up when Bullock bows out.
I get emails and follow him on Twitter, but you can see him in the msm
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/05/20/gov-steve-bullock-sits-down-policy-discussion/
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/us/politics/steve-bullock-2020-campaign.html
https://freebeacon.com/politics/steve-bullock-jane-fonda/ -- What kind of idiot thinks Jeff Bridges is best known for K-PAX?
Mossy, dude, you radically overestimate your ability to handicap American politics.
55.5: Charley, that link should be banned from Unfogged.
56: How many of you genii called 2016 correctly?
PF I won't bother responding to.
New Hampshire already has lots of Tulsi! billboards along the roads, and I didn't see any others for other candidates yet.
I suppose it's worth remembering that nobody is seeking my vote just yet.
55.5, 57: Wait, what? K-PAX is like the second most prominent alien visitation movie Bridges has done.
The Clinton/Warren comparison I'll reevaluate if I have time; I expect though their being white ladies is sufficient for the Trump base.
The theory I'm fumbling toward is roughly:
1. 2016 was a normal election: voters are tribal, margins are tiny, there is no center, base mobilization is everything.
2. The Democratic infighting I see revolves around mobilizing the Democratic base: [Candidate] isn't populist enough, woke enough, whatever.
3. But candidates mobilize opposition supporters too. Clinton did just fine mobilizing Democrats, but she mobilized Republicans too*.
4. Given tribalism, and the way Trump mobilizes Democrats, just about any Democrat candidate should do okay mobilizing Democrats.
5. But, some Democrats will mobilize Republicans more than others.
6. Just about any white male Democrat will do just fine mobilizing Democrats, but will mobilize relatively few Republicans**.
7. And, given as pointed out above Trump's very poor polling, the degree to which the Democratic candidate will mobilize Republicans should perhaps be given greater consideration than normal.
*Granted much of this was her unique history, which isn't directly transferable to anyone else; again though, why take the chance?
**The crux of the argument, and I'm happy to listen to arguments with evidence.
6. Just about any white male Democrat will do just fine mobilizing Democrats, but will mobilize relatively few Republicans**.
This is where I disagree, and the short reason is the Kerry 2004 campaign (which PF also mentioned). Going into that race I would have predicted that Kerry wouldn't have mobilized Republicans but, in practice, they were mobilized anyway.
The longer answer is that it depends on what you mean by "mobilize" anyway. Consider three different groups of possible voters.
1) People who identify with the Republican party as a core political identity (let's say, by default, 80% of them will vote R without "mobilization" and that if mobilized 90% will vote R).
2) People who identify as conservative but not necessarily Republican (let's say the range of results is 65-75% voting republican).
3) White people and men who do not identify as either conservative or Republicans but who are receptive to white identify politics (45-60% voting Republican).
4) People who lean conservative but who don't generally vote. Likely R voters who may or may not come to the polls.
I think modern political campaigns are already good at mobilizing people in categories 1/2, and that the opposing candidate doesn't make much of a difference. To the extent that you think the center is gone, and that people are sorting into tribes, I would argue that is a reason to not worry about the Democratic candidate mobilizing Republicans (because they will be mobilized anyway).
For category 3, I think Trump was a much more important factor than Clinton.
Category 4 is more complicated. I think that category is large enough to swing elections, but I also don't think anybody has a good theory about what motivates low-engagement voters.
I agree with Nick so far as I understand things.
||
Melvyn Bragg slyly throws support to Revoke and Remain
The Mytilenaean Debate
In Our Time
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss why Athenians decided to send a fast ship to Lesbos in 427BC, rowing through the night to catch one they sent the day before. That earlier ship had instructions to kill all adult men in Mytilene, after their unsuccessul revolt against Athens, as a warning to others. The later ship had orders to save them, as news of their killing would make others fight to the death rather than surrender. Thucydides retells this in his History of the Peloponnesian War as an example of Athenian democracy in action, emphasising the right of Athenians to change their minds in their own interests, even when a demagogue argued they were bound by their first decision.
|>
Granted much of this was her unique history, which isn't directly transferable to anyone else
This was a really important factor that I think you're underrating. One of the oddities about 2016 was that both candidates were historically unpopular, so a key constituency was people who disliked both, and they ended up breaking for Trump. The GOP will do its best to demonize anyone the Democrats put up, of course, but in the case of HRC they had been doing that very successfully for decades. There just aren't very many other potential candidates with that particular liability.
I don't know, Kerry had no particular stigma before the machine reared against him, did he?
No, but he didn't end up exceptionally unpopular either, did he? That was also a close race but I don't think the dynamics were quite the same as 2016.
There's also the factor that Apostropher pointed out, even in 2016 (but I'm not gonna find it). He said that all of his family will contentedly vote for Clinton, but that all of them "would crawl over broken glass" to vote for Warren. Which is how I felt then too. And how I am trying to restrain myself from feeling now, although I'm losing that battle. I remember getting teary over the Will.i.am videos for Obama. I don't actually want our political contests to be about charisma, but they are, and I think Warren has it. I mean, Ogged linked her in, like, 2006 as a remarkable explainer.
Kerry was quite popular, overperformed the fundamentals, and very nearly beat a popular incumbent. (Why Bush was popular I'll never understand, but it's a fucked up country that likes killing foreigners.)
God, that video really was that good.
And it's not Obama's charisma that makes it work, although he's charismatic in it, it's the story he's telling, along with a bunch of unnamed famous people, about us.
65: Great find.
And on the topic of changing your mind after the troops have been deployed, today's developments with Trump and Iran are very concerning. I'm scared how dependent we are on his fundamental cowardice.
70 gets it exactly right (or maybe "quite popular" is a bit of an overstatement). But if anyone thought that Kerry would be able to run as a war hero, they were crazy.
Sadly, 73.2 also gets it exactly right.
58.1: Not sure what bearing it has on this discussion, but the one person I know who really did anticipate and fear the 2016 outcome well in advance is lurid.
Biden isn't going to be president. Whether he loses in the primary or general is to be determined.
And what says lurid of Warren's prospects in the general?
Based on responses I'll drop my view on a Warren candidacy from clearly suicidal to merely dangerous.
I don't remember much about my Cassandra moment -- it reflects pretty fucking badly on me that I never made it back to Wisconsin to GOTV, lifelong bitter regret, if my sense of disaster was that keen -- but I know I wasn't making predictions in 2015. A lot of shit is up in the air for 2020. At the *very" least, Trump is a craven opportunist who will say yes to any proposition where he thinks he can see a win, so *of course* he will attempt to cheat, lie, steal, etc. The question is more what's going on with the people around him who could facilitate or inhibit the shenanigans. I really think anything could happen at this point. We're more than a year out. The country is as unstable as I have ever seen it. I am a broken record on the power of misogyny, but even that is a wild card....
In 2016 everyone was sleepwalking. In 2019 we are alert and ready to fight, but still really have no idea who or where the enemy is. *Figurative language is not regulated by the Analogy Administration and is not intended to treat or cure any disease.
73. I too preferred it when Dr Strangelove wasn't a documentary.
67: of course Kerry had a stigma. Two stigmata. He was a decorated war veteran, and American voters dislike war veterans because they make them feel inadequate; that's why the candidate with the less impressive military record (or no military record) almost always wins. Obama v McCain. Bush v Kerry. Bush v Gore. Clinton v Dole. Clinton v Bush. Reagan v Carter. Nixon v McGovern.
And he was a very prominent anti war campaigner in the 70s.
80: You're forgetting George W. Bush's service in the Texas National Guard! And with McCain, maybe Americans think that people shouldn't be considered war heroes who were captured. We like people who weren't captured.
More seriously, it seems unlikely to me that military service contains some sort of stigma that only shows up in presidential elections. Every one of those presidential losers was a very successful politician - up to and including their nominations by their parties for the presidency. There were quite a lot of other things going on in each of those elections. And, of course, if you're saying that pluralities won't go for military vets in presidential elections, Gore v. Bush is evidence against your thesis.
The other obvious counter-examples are Eisenhower, Kennedy and HW Bush v. Dukakis.
81. Truman, LBJ, (winners) and Ford (loser) were also veterans. (All of them initially succeeded to the presidency due to vacancy of the office). JFK had a more exciting (heroic!) war record than Nixon. Maybe the deal is that after 1968 veterans were less popular. Drat those hippies!
I hadn't forgotten about W and the Air National Guard - but Gore still had a more impressive service record, having actually been on the ground carrying a rifle (albeit as a combat journalist) in Vietnam.
Of course this is generalising from a very small sample, but it's not impossible that different things are required of a president than of other politicians - specifically, that a president has to be the acceptable priest-avatar of the nation, while the governor just has to be good at running the state. And a radical shift in attitudes towards the military after 1968 makes sense - on the left because the military produced Vietnam, and on the right because they lost it.
|| And so, you wonder, what did the US Supreme Court do today? (a) clarified due process limits of state taxation of out-of-state trust beneficiaries; (b) struck down a conviction where the racist use of jury strikes was too blatant to ignore; (c) made a truly significant change to Takings law by eliminating the state exhaustion requirement; and (d) reversed the conviction of an unlawful immigrant (a foreign student who'd flunked out) for shooting a firearm, holding that the state had to prove that he knew his exact status at the time. There are 12 cases left to be decided next week. |>
85(c) is just a random string of words, admit it.
No, 85(c) is a giant mess that is going to fuck up my professional life.
I'm most confused by d) to be honest. Shooting a firearm is illegal in the US if you're an undocumented immigrant, in a way that it wouldn't be illegal if you were a legal immigrant?
87: obviously 85c) has something to do with clams.
Many engrams, for example, could be traced back to clams. The clam's big problem was that there was a conflict between the hinge that wanted to open and the hinge that wanted to close. It was easy to restimulate the engram caused by the defeat of the weaker hinge, Hubbard pronounced, by asking a pre-clear to imagine a clam on a beach opening and closing its shell very rapidly and at the same time making an opening and closing motion with thumb and forefinger. This gesture, he said, would upset large numbers of people. 'By the way,' he warned, 'your discussion of these incidents with the uninitiated in Scientology can cause havoc. Should you describe the "clam" to some one [sic], you may restimulate it in him to the extent of causing severe jaw pain. Once such victim, after hearing about a clam death, could not use his jaws for three days.'
90: Sure looks like. 922(g) includes them in the middle of a long list that also includes convicted criminals, fugitives from justice, drug-users, and people with restraining orders against them.
In America!
(The federal crime in this case appears to be possessing the gun, not shooting it.)
I don't have a full sense of the implications of 85(c) yet. But roughly, the language 'may not be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law' means that the government can't take your stuff without compensating you. And there are complicated questions about how much regulation of what you can do on your property counts as 'taking' it. But prior law had been that if a state government did something that you regarded as 'taking' your property, you had to go through (that is, 'exhaust') the state law procedure for compensation before running to the feds about it, and now you don't have to do that. This is right in the middle of stuff I do for a living, and there's a good chance it's going to be very troublesome.
91: The first rule of clam death is don't talk about clam death.
Kagan's dissent certainly predicts a huge mess following the Takings case. She's probably right.
Alito's dissent predicts a huge mess following the alien possession of a firearm case. He's probably right.
Thomas' dissent in the jury strike case doesn't predict huge mess, but accuses the court of pretty gross incompetence. (He does not suggest, though, that Kavanaugh was drunk when he wrote the majority opinion).
91: The first rule of clam death is don't talk about clam death.
You can't anyway, because your jaws are shut.
(Also, this morning the DC Circuit rejected the government's favorite contention in GTMO cases, that a previous Circuit case had held that GTMO prisoners cannot assert rights under the Due Process Clause. Whether this will end up being truly significant is going to depend on subsequent developments, of course, but a win at the Circuit is worth having, in any event.)
80: Kery's stigmata was that he founded Vietnam Veterans Agaisnt the War, and denounced the war in a congressional hearing shortly after his enilstment was over, while the war was ongoing, and then used his fame to launch a political career. Being an antiway war veteran. Without that, the swiftboat bullshit wouldn't have mattered. Antiwar combat vterans are distrusted by the left because they are combat veterans and by the right because they are antiwar. McGovern's problem also.
101: Kerry wasn't distrusted by the left because he was a combat veteran. He was distrusted by the left because he voted for the Iraq War.
Yeah, the takings ruling seems like a great widening of pathways for Federalist Society judges to pick away at state economic regulation. Kagan:
To begin with, today's decision means that government regulators will often have no way to avoid violating the Constitution. There are a "nearly infinite variety of ways" for regulations to "affect property interests." ... And under modern takings law, there is "no magic formula" to determine "whether a given government interference with property is a taking." For that reason, a government actor usually cannot know in advance whether implementing a regulatory program will effect a taking, much less of whose property. Until today, such an official could do his work without fear of wrongdoing, in any jurisdiction that had set up a reliable means for property owners to obtain compensation. Even if some regulatory action turned out to take someone's property, the official would not have violated the Constitution. But no longer.