StrangeSox

Oh for sure. It's not just Article 3 that's a hot mess when it comes to modern ideas of what a democracy is.

The structure of the Supreme Court is terrible and should be completely overhauled. At a minimum, the Democrats should be strategizing on how to pack the courts after 2020 assuming they win Presidency and Senate to balance this out. Ideally, we'd see term limits for Justices, possibly giving each President a set number of appointments so it isn't such a lottery that can have an impact that lasts decades. A court with Roberts as the median vote is a very conservative court. That just means he's in the middle, not that he's a moderate.

Kennedy was the most moderate of the conservatives, but don't mistake him for a moderate. Replacing Kennedy with a right wing partisan like Kavanaugh definitely shifts the court to the right, though. Roberts will now be the median vote.

The single positive outcome of this is that more and more people will recognize that SCOTUS is just another political branch, and one in need of major reform.

She either thinks Mainers are this stupid, or she is actually this stupid. Possibly it's both. "Hi, I'm Susan Collins, a US Senator who is apparently unaware of anything the Roberts Court has actually done"

People like to treat Collins as a cynical political player, trying to pose as a moderate while being a reliable conservative all along. I'm pretty sure she's just actually this dumb.

She has to vote Yes, you see, because liberal groups spent money opposing Kavanaugh! Weirdly, no mention of conservative groups' spending supporting Kavanaugh, and apparently no reflection on whether Kavanaugh would ever vote to overturn Citizens United. LOL at anyone that ever thought Collins would do anything but vote Yes while giving the dumbest possible reasons. I wonder if she got another meaningless promise from McConnell?

A leading Holocaust historian just seriously compared the US to Nazi Germany “If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell.” I’ve observed this kind of modern authoritarianism firsthand in Hungary. In my dispatch after visiting there, I warned of the same thing as Browning does here: The threat to the United States isn’t so much Trump alone as it is the breakdown in the practice of American democracy, and the Republican Party’s commitment to extreme tactics in pursuit of its policy goals in particular. We are living through a period of serious threat to American democracy. And Browning’s essay, a serious piece by a serious scholar, shows that it’s not at all alarmist to say so.

I haven't listend to it, but my wife has been listening to WBEZ's "16 shots" podcast and really enjoys it https://www.wbez.org/shows/16-shots/55c63c72-d518-4ad9-b5dc-dd0d841d79a7

Kavanaugh's previous rulings would be a disaster for Native Alaskans if implemented on the SCOTUS level. The state's governor and lt. governor also came out opposed.

That 37% includes full-time students and retired people, doesn't it?. Given the boomer bubble moving into retirement, isn't it completely predictable that we wouldn't reach the peak LFPR from the 80's?

No, it was "stop tweeting dumb crap" How's the $35k model 3 coming along?

He actually seems even worse than Alito in that regard, somehow. Alito will reliably rule in accordance with the current GOP policy preferences. Kavanaugh seems like he'll make rulings purely on partisan spite.

Incorrect. The tradition they've created is that a Democrat doesn't get to appoint a Supreme Court justice if Republicans hold the Senate.

The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies The attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 U.S. companies, including Amazon and Apple, by compromising America’s technology supply chain, according to extensive interviews with government and corporate sources. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies?srnd=businessweek-v2

The IRS is intentionally chronically underfunded to the point that recent estimates show that the US government will lose about $140B over the next decade to tax "avoidance" (read: fraud). Putting more money into the IRS would more than pay for itself.

NLCS, world series champ, NLCS, 95 wins and lose wild card How far back do you have to go to get as many playoff appearances for the Sox?

The American conservative movement is one gigantic melting pot of increasingly insane conspiracy mindsets these days. John Birch Society 100%.

That's basically going to be dictated by the GA though, right? Rauner stamped his feet and cried for months and months over the budget/wanting to crush unions, which hurt the state even more. He's unpopular with his own party these days. I don't think he has much influence, so if the GA wanted to hike property taxes, they will. They would almost definitely be signing Pritzker's political death warrant if they did, though. I would expect a broad income tax increase and lots more fee garbage spread around before you got a property tax hike. I don't know how exactly Illinois got into such a hole. Other states are high tax, but they also have better services and are doing fine financially. It's not like the option is garbage state with no/crap public services or good public services and broken state. Illinois has the worst of both worlds. But at the end of the day, at least we don't have to wake up in Indiana every day. *shudders*

Dig it out. My real goal is to increase the rate of hilarious in the park home runs