McCarthy, who made history as the first Speaker to be formally removed from the post, announced his coming resignation earlier this month, just before California’s deadline to file for reelection.

Gavin Newsom (D) has to call for a special election within 14 days of when McCarthy officially departs his seat.

Speaking to reporters last week, McCarthy referenced a quirk in California election law that could have allowed Newsom to keep the seat vacant rather than calling for a special election if he stayed in Congress into January — a scenario that happened when former Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) resigned in 2020.

A piece of shit to the very end, deliberately timing it to force California to waste money on a special election (that would likely have lower turnout and thus skew Republican, to boot).

Comically-short prison sentence aside, look at the bright side: at least the PBS headline is actually admitting it’s an “insurrection” instead of downplaying it as a “riot.”

That’s the real 4D chess, LOL.

Then it’ll be up to SCOTUS, of Bush v. Gore fame.

I think folks might not realize how literal that statement is: fully three of the current sitting Supreme Court Justices (Roberts, Kavanaugh and Barrett) were on Bush’s litigation team in that case.

This made me check whether Jack Black is eligible to be President (i.e., not Canadian or something) and yes, he is.

Theoretically, nothing in the US Constitution actually requires states to hold Presidential elections at all. They could have the State Legislature simply appoint whatever Electors they wanted. (That’s how the process was originally intended to work!)

Of course, there’s probably a bunch of state-level legislation and procedure that would hinder most states from doing that, but with a strong enough state legislature majority, almost any of it could be changed. (Anything short of something written into the constitution of a state that required a referendum to amend, anyway.)

Vigilance and reporting. Blocking only hides bad actors from you; it doesn’t remove them from the platform.

Are the North Sentinel Islanders who you meant?

This is one of those comments that makes me almost miss being able to gild things.

That’s another fallacy: they might vote Democrat, or they might vote Green or Libertarian as a protest, or they might not vote at all. And it’s those latter two possibilities that matter, because (even Democrats admit that) elections are won on turnout, not flipping mythical swing voters.

Appealing to leftists and/or anti-authoritarians is what increasing turnout looks like, but neoliberals would rather lose than admit that.

Unlikely More likely to win the moderate independent vote

FTFY.

There are a whole bunch of leftists and anti-authoritarians who are almost as disillusioned with the Democrats as they are with the Republicans. The notion of the general election hinging on “moderates” is nothing but Democratic Party fiction.

This might answer some of your questions: https://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate-accountability-history-corporations-us/

Considering how many evangelical Christians are Zionists because they want to trigger the End Times and get Raptured, that doesn’t surprise me at all.

There are also people to their, uh, whichever direction the anti-authoritarian axis is.

The Philly suburbs have a pretty influential Jewish population. Nothing like NYC, of course, but they’re politically active and probably donate a lot of money.

I would very much like to think that “Jewish” and “supportive of Israel’s genocidal tactics” are much less synonymous than this comment assumes.

The idea behind doing that was so that the people in Hickle Dickle have their needs heard as much as the people from New Franciscago.

No, not really. The actual idea behind the Electoral College (and Senators prior to the 17th Amendment) was so the state Hickle Dickle is in, collectively as a sovereign unit could have its needs heard, as expressed by its state legislature. It was basically intended to work like a parliamentary system (where the prime minister is chosen by members of parliament themselves, not by vote of the public), except with the power given to each of the state legislatures instead of Congress, for enhanced Federalism/separation of powers.

Electors don’t exist to change the balance the power between urban and rural; that’s a side-effect. Their real purpose is to compensate for the fact that different states have different legislative structures [for example: Nebraska is unicameral!] with wildly different ratios of constituents per legislator. They couldn’t do “one legislator, one vote” and have it be fair (read: normalized by population across states), so they did the next best thing and gave each state’s legislature a number of elector slots equal to that state’s representation in Congress, and let them choose people to fill those slots however they wanted.

People think the Electoral College and the Senate don’t work right, and that’s because they really don’t. But that’s not because they were designed poorly for what they were intended to do (limit “mob rule” and provide a voice for States as sovereign entities/the middle layer in the federalist separation of powers), but because we’ve subsequently fucked them up by bolting half-assed attempts at direct democracy to them in the form of the 17th Amendment, the Reapportionment Act of 1929, and state legislators abdicating their power to appoint electors and choosing them by statewide popular vote instead.

At this point, IMO, either implementing direct democracy properly (abolishing the Electoral College and the Senate) or going back to the original design would be an improvement over the broken status quo!

Nudity has been normalized in video games since at least Custer’s Revenge for the Atari 2600, if not earlier.

He’s into cars (and an incredible mechanic as well as being a generally good person I enjoy spending time with) so this is on his feed.

Which aspect of cars is he into and which Youtube channels does he watch? I’m curious if there are any particular channels that have led him down the “pewdiepipeline” and what differences there might be between my feed and his that have spared me from any overt exposure to the same garbage.

It’s the same as all the way back in 2016 - after Trump won the election, the NYT published a lengthy, complicated story detailing his many conflicts of interest which probably took a team or reporters months to do.

There’s still plenty of room for criticism of the media, though – like the fact that the piece you mention was published after the election instead of before it, for instance.