All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[babyblob]

Cheri Beasley, like other Democratic Party candidates, probably serves Wall Street instead of the people.

You say Probably serves Wall street. So you know nothing about her but are attacking her as a tool of Wall Street. Because she is a Democrat he is the tool of Wall Street because you know all of them all.

Rather then just discount her with pout knowing anything about her as this statement shows you know nothing about her try and learn about her and her platform.

[Matt Rat]

With hours to go before his resignation speech, Boris Jonson has formed a new interim government cabinet.

[babyblob]

Just goes to show the difference in the politics of the UK and America. The UK Prime Minister resigns because of a sex scandal involving sexual assault and it has done great damage to his party (At least according to the media I have seen).

Meanwhile In America we vote a man in office that openly brags about committing sexual assault, has been accused of it many times, his party makes him a hero and supports his attpemt to overthrow the government and hang his own VP. And that party is stronger then it has ever been.

[Matt Rat]

And it's done. Boris has resigned, but will remain in power until the next PM is elected in a leadership contest. The timetable has been finalized but will not be revealed in detail until next week.

[CSTowle]

Wasn't that what his whole first campaign was supposed to be? Only thing is he didn't bow out, because he didn't think he'd actually win. And then he did, and he was stuck with the job. I think if he runs this time, though, he'll truly be in it to win it, because to loose twice in a row (even if he'll never admit it) would be too much for his fragile little ego to bear.




Did Tucker just watch Reefer Madness or something? The urge to shoot people is the exact opposite of what weed does to a person. Hell, it give me panic attacks, but I don't want to shoot people. I just want to get the hell out and be alone.




While I'm all for renaming those bases, you just know the first thing a Republican President and Republican controlled House and Senate would do is to change the names back.

On Trump, I think most of the way you get to be a successful con man is by believing a portion of your own bulls##t. If he's the one choosing to drop out to avoid responsibility he'll sell himself that he would have won (and been the best damn President ever, again!) but chose not to. Maybe he'll want it, but I feel like he can get the glow of the crowd and the money of fools without the office and duties and knows it, and will choose to play golf and talk s##t instead.

Breaking: UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has stepped down.

I'll be damned, good.

On the Green Party candidate being blocked from the ballot, if true then yes that's an awful thing and should be criticized by every Democratic-supporting poster (and honestly, everyone else) on the board. However, I'd be interested if what 30 said is true and there are fraudulent signatures (harder to determine in a post-Trump world where anyone can declare anything about legitimacy and it's embraced by those who wish to believe it, regardless of facts) involved. I'd like to hear a follow-up Zauriel, when those facts are investigated.

[Mister Mets]

Just goes to show the difference in the politics of the UK and America. The UK Prime Minister resigns because of a sex scandal involving sexual assault and it has done great damage to his party (At least according to the media I have seen).

Meanwhile In America we vote a man in office that openly brags about committing sexual assault, has been accused of it many times, his party makes him a hero and supports his attpemt to overthrow the government and hang his own VP. And that party is stronger then it has ever been.

There are several differences here.

The UK has a system where the prime minister is the head of government, selected by parliament. We've gone through quite a few already. Boris Johnson has been Prime Minister for just under three years. He follows Teresa May, who was Prime Minister for just over three years, so at the end, he'll likely beat her tenure by a few days. She followed David Cameron, who served for six years and had led the party to a big win in the previous year. It's a different dynamic.

Johnson has had multiple scandals. I suspect this was more of a straw that broke the camel's back than a scandal that would've taken him down.

Trump did lose his effort for reelection. And the Republican party has certainly been stronger at other times. Reagan and Nixon won reelection with 49 states. Democrats currently hold both houses of Congress.

The main issue here is plain as day...

If your version of gaming the system is acceptable?

It gets tougher and tougher to sell folk on that someone else's version of gaming the system is where the line got crossed.

Never mind that keeping a Green party candidate off of the ballot may very well alienate "Non.." Green party independents in a time where Democrats might wind up needing those votes.

Gaming the system also goes against the messaging Democrats make about the importance of people having the flexibility to vote whichever way they want.

You do realize that dining with Putin was part of the job of the president and Sec. of State, it was not part of Jill Stein's job (as what, a folk singer?), it was her choice as a private person to dine with a brutal dictator who wants to destabilize the West.

Who makes that kind of choice?

There is a bit of precedent for people who consider themselves major political figures to get involved in these kinds of situations.

Jesse Jackson went to Syria in 1983 to help secure the release of an American pilot. That said, he was able to get it done.

Opinion editorials are not news. Sadly, a lot of people treat the op ed's and magazine TV shows as "news".

An opinion piece should still be rooted in facts. People will be able to disagree with the conclusion, but the underlying facts should not be made up.

Opinion The proposed new names for military bases are in, and they’re inspiring

Those are good choices.

[CaptainEurope]

Jill Stein is no Jesse Jackson.

[worstblogever]

Jill Stein dines with Vlad Putin? So what? Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton also dined with Putin.

Cheri Beasley, like other Democratic Party candidates, probably serves Wall Street instead of the people.

In your sad imagination, only.

Beasley's spent her whole life fighting for people in the Tar Heel State.

Nice of you to use "whataboutism" to handwave Stein being used as one of Putin's many, many 2016 catspaws... when your examples are people who met with Putin during diplomatic negotations... TENSE ONES, as President and Secretary of State. Stein was a f***ing private citizen who had no legitimate reason to go over there to a propaganda celebration honoring Vlad.

I can't decide if you're willingly, or accidentally a sucker to the Green Party's lies at this point.

[kidfresh512]

Two Latino pioneers, in civil rights and education, honored with Medal of Freedom

Two Mexican Americans who have dedicated their lives to fighting for equality and the advancement of Latinos are to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, at the White House on Thursday.

Raúl Yzaguirre is the founder and former leader of the National Council of La Raza, considered the nation's largest Hispanic civil rights and advocacy group, and Julieta García is a former president of the University of Texas at Brownsville — the first Latina to serve as a university president.

Born a decade apart in the Rio Grande Valley, Yzaguirre and García took lessons from their upbringings in the South Texas region to achieve positions of power, which they then used to dismantle discrimination and fight for the advancement of Latinos and other people of color.

Yzaguirre, 82, born in San Juan, Texas, took a small organization with about $500,000 and 23 affiliates and grew it into a formidable one with a $40 million budget and 250 affiliates.

Feels like much more deserving recipients than Rush Limbaugh

[Zauriel]

Pres. Biden awards 4 Vietnam veterans with the Medal of Honor

Those brave men should have received this honor 4 decades ago.

[Zauriel]

Just goes to show the difference in the politics of the UK and America. The UK Prime Minister resigns because of a sex scandal involving sexual assault and it has done great damage to his party (At least according to the media I have seen).

Meanwhile In America we vote a man in office that openly brags about committing sexual assault, has been accused of it many times, his party makes him a hero and supports his attpemt to overthrow the government and hang his own VP. And that party is stronger then it has ever been.

Yes, Boris Johnson had to resign because of cabinet ministers' resignations and also because of pressure from his own party, whose confidence he has lost. If he didn't resign, the parliament would dismiss him. The Parliament of UK has the power to appoint and dismiss prime ministers without needing a two-thirds majority.

Apparently the Conservative Party has more common sense and more integrity than the Repuublican Party.

[Tami]

Boris Johnson’s resignation speech: what he said, and what he meant

[Tami]

Group of Pa. Republicans bucking party to endorse Democrat Josh Shapiro for governor

[Mister Mets]

Jay Michaelson, a legal affairs analyst for New York magazine, considers why gay marriage is probably not doomed after the Supreme Court decision is Dobbs.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022...eme-court.html

Dobbs sets out a five-part test for when precedents should be overturned: the nature of the precedents’ error, the quality of their reasoning, the “workability” of the rules they imposed on the country, their disruptive effect on other areas of the law, and the absence of concrete reliance. While Roe and Casey (the 1992 decision upholding Roe) failed this test, Obergefell passes it.

The first two factors can be considered together: the nature of the precedents’ “error” and quality of their reasoning. For Justice Alito, Roe was “egregiously wrong” for a number of reasons: It arrogated to the judiciary what should be a legislative power by inventing the trimester framework out of whole cloth. Furthermore, it is grounded in the doctrine known as “substantive due process,” which, in Justice Alito’s formulation of it, requires that a right be “rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition,” which he says a right to abortion is not. And unlike other applications of this doctrine, an abortion “destroys … ‘potential life.’”

Obergefell is different. First, as law professor Kenji Yoshino recently noted, it is grounded in the Constitution’s equal-protection clause as well as the due-process clause, and thus does not trigger Justice Alito’s dubious “history and tradition” requirement. On the contrary, since (straight) marriage is unquestionably part of our nation’s history and tradition, Obergefell is about granting an existing right to all people equally, not creating a new right.

But for Justice Alito, the important distinction is that while same-sex marriage is also grounded in substantive due process, it does not “destroy potential life.” For Justice Alito, this feature of abortion was dispositive. Quoting Casey, he said, “[a]bortion is a unique act” because it terminates “life or potential life. … And to ensure that our decision is not misunderstood or mischaracterized, we emphasize that our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right. Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”

Now, the Court’s conservatives could still extend the logic of substantive due process to all cases, including same-sex marriage and mixed-race marriage. (It would be hard to explain why the Constitution protects mixed-race marriages but not same-sex ones; both were anathema at the time of the founding and the passage of the 14th Amendment.) Or they could simply decide, as Yoshino speculated, that equal-protection claims cover only race, not gender. That would be a devastating earthquake in constitutional law. But as the post-Dobbs law stands now, Obergefell is clearly distinguishable from Roe because it does not terminate “potential life.”

Justice Alito’s third criterion is the “workability” of the precedent, or in his words, “whether it can be understood and applied in a consistent and predictable manner.” Applied to Casey, which preserved Roe but allowed abortion restrictions that did not place an “undue burden” on women, Alito correctly observed that the results have been neither consistent nor predictable. Of course, this is mostly due to anti-abortion politicians incessantly testing the boundaries of Casey by passing ever more creative restrictions. But it is the case that numerous regulations have been proposed, reviewed, sustained, and struck down in 20 years of judicial chaos. This is not the case for Obergefell. While there are heated debates over the right balance between same-sex marriage and various religious claims — on the part of bakers, florists, wedding venues, employers, and others — these are actually quite limited in application, and nothing like the shifting parameters of Roe and Casey.

Relatedly, Justice Alito’s fourth prong — the precedent’s effects on other areas of law — is again quite different in the case of marriage equality. In Justice Alito’s briefly stated view, Roe “require[d] courts to engineer exceptions to longstanding background rules” such as standing and statutory interpretation. This is, at best, debatable, but even if true, Obergefell has had no comparable effect.

Perhaps most important, if problematic, is Justice Alito’s fifth criterion, “the absence of concrete reliance.” The doctrine of reliance applies when someone depends on a rule or contract being in place, and takes actions on that basis. If we have a signed contract for me to sell you my home, and you sell your own home as a result, you have a reliance interest in that contract, and I’ll be liable for breaching it.

The question of reliance on Roe is tricky. On an individual level, the decision to get an abortion, by definition, is never made more than a few months in advance, so traditional reliance interests do not apply. More broadly, pro-choice advocates have argued that women depend on the availability of abortion to plan their professional and civic lives, but Justice Alito dismissed this claim as “intangible” and “hard for anyone … to assess.”

That claim, too, is debatable at best — I would call it offensive. But even if we grant it, the case of marriage equality is entirely different. Like millions of other LGBTQ+ people, I have built my entire life around the Obergefell decision since it was rendered. My husband’s and my shared custody of our daughter depends on it. Our end-of-life plans depend on it. Even our mortgage depends on it. If the rug is pulled out from underneath us, our lives will be severely disrupted. That is the essence of reliance. We rely on Obergefell every day.

And of course, we’re the privileged ones. What about same-sex couples whose immigration status depends on their marriage? Or their ability to visit their spouses in jail? Or to access health insurance? In ways not analogous to Roe, millions of families rely on the right announced in Obergefell for their very existence.

Now, for progressives, Justice Alito’s five criteria may be cold comfort. They still rely on highly contentious, highly conservative views about the nature of constitutional interpretation, not least the notion that in adjudicating fundamental rights, history gets a veto rather than a vote. My use of Justice Alito’s five-part test here is not meant to imply that it is correct, or properly applied in Dobbs, or consistent with the Court’s previous jurisprudence. (Indeed, it is largely based on an invention of Justice Thomas in 2019, which I said at the time “showed how the Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade.”) My only point is that, if you do apply it, the right of gay people to marry should stand.

[worstblogever]

Gee, that's exactly the same sort of assurances that were given about Roe v. Wade, too.

Alito and Thomas said they're coming for it. The three installed by Trump are fanatics motivated by their own hypocritical faith.

One guy at New York Magazine needs to pull his head out.