Oh yeah you’re right. I just looked it back up and this article says one of the commentators was getting $400k a month, a $100k signing bonus, and additional performance based payment in exchange for I guess 4 videos a week.

I guess according to the allegations only the founders of Tenet Media or whatever it was called knew the money was coming from Russia and they hid it from the talking heads.

But like… How much money do these people have to be getting paid before they have a thought to question where it’s coming from? Dim Tool was apparently getting like $100k a WEEK from them. Like at what point does it start to get suspicious?

Edit: I was misremembering. Apparently it was $100k a week so that’s $400k a month.

I would absolutely kill for a Weird Al parody of “Not Like Us” about how deeply and toxicly creepy and weird these rightoid freaks are.

More than just non-conforming generally too. They super quickly embraced that non-conformist image when it came to the masks.

But it feels like just calling them weird triggers a primal fear within them that they’re not really part of the “in-group” after all. It works where other insults don’t because they can’t easily write it off as their enemies simply being jealous of how cool they are basically.

Most likely you’d have to allow the sitting president to appoint an acting justice to serve out the remainder of that justice’s term. Yeah we’d still have the problem of RBG dying under Trump and giving us a 6-3 conservative majority, but if she only had a few years left on her term when she died the damage would at least be limited.

As for what McConnell did to Garland, having term endings scheduled would make that a lot harder. If their terms are staggered such that they always end 1 year and 3 years into each president’s term it destroys the argument that it’s too close to an election and the people should get to decide who makes the appointment. They’d be forced to outright deny the nominee and let the president try again. That’s much harder to maintain.

The idea would essentially be that they wouldn’t all hear every case. You’d randomly assign a panel of say 5 justices from the pool and each panel would hear their own cases.

That way we stop bullshit like what Thomas did in his Dobbs concurrence where he straight up said he thinks cases like Obergefell (gay marriage), Lawrence (can’t criminalize gay sexual acts), and Griswold (contraception) also need to be reversed and all but instructed conservative legal circles to back challenges to those cases. Since there’d be no guarantee that a baseless partisan legal challenge would end up in front of favorable justices they would be much less likely to succeed.

This does potentially introduce a problem with consistency, but such a problem isn’t unsolvable. You could institute a rule that allows for basically an appeal on a SCOTUS ruling to be heard by either a different panel of justices or the entire body as a whole, for example. It obviously wouldn’t be perfect, but we don’t need perfection. We need SCOTUS to not be some unaccountable council of high priests who can act with blatant partisan interest and we can’t do anything about it.

Because they’re not in it for profit. It’s a project of the chuds at the Daily Wire. Any profit is a side effect of their true goal, right wing culture war. It exists to take money from their fans and use their “successful business” to prove that they’re correct. They’d still do it even if it wasn’t profitable just to push their preferred narrative.

Not a piss take. But yes part of the show. It’s entirely owned and operated by the chuds at the Daily Wire and their entire purpose is right wing culture war. It’s just classic conservative grifting

They don’t. If you look into them it’s entirely a company owned by the same guy that owns The Daily Wire. It’s literally only there to grift from their audience and further their culture war.

Of course. It’s not political if it’s just The Way Things Should Be™

• The two Races: White and Political
• The two Genders: Male and Political
• The two Sexualities: Straight and Political

Their views are never “political” because theirs is the “natural state” of things. They’re on top because they deserve to be, and they deserve to be on top because they are. It’s anything that deviates from that so-called natural state that’s being political.

A couple things. First, you might need to freshen up on your Schoolhouse Rock, because this is not true:

The 60 vote thing is true. It’s referring to the filibuster and cloture procedures in the Senate.

When a bill comes up for consideration in the Senate, first it gets brought up for debate. A filibuster is when someone usually opposed to the bill makes this debate go on as long as possible to delay a vote on the bill. This process has been shorthanded a lot in recent years so senators merely need to indicate intent to filibuster so that the Senate can still attend to other business such as committee hearings and the whole chamber isn’t locked in by the filibuster.

Since the entire GOP is bent on obstructing the Democratic party agenda this means in practice that you need to use Cloture to end the filibuster and bring the bill up for a vote. This is why we see so many things crammed into the Budget Reconciliation bill. It’s one of the only bills that can’t be filibustered like that. For pretty much all other things if you don’t have 60 senators willing to vote for Cloture the bill is dead on arrival.

Oh no that’s broken as well. But that same kind of disenfranchisement happens in the Senate. Wyoming per your example has ~600k people and California has ~39 million according to Wikipedia but both get 2 Senators. That’s what, 65x the population but the same voting power? Then there’s also the fact that unless you’ve got 60 votes in the Senate it doesn’t matter what anyone in the House wants it won’t even come up for a vote. Which means there’s a lot of comparatively empty land that can basically just hold the rest of the country hostage. Point is there’s a lot that’s broken in the legislative branch.

I mean it was very smart for the time when the average citizen couldn’t possibly know enough to make an informed decision and news that could change who someone would vote for could take weeks to arrive somewhere.

But let’s not kid ourselves. Both the Electoral College and the Senate were specifically created to thwart the will of The People if it was too inconvenient for the elites. What was that quote about the Senate being the “cooling saucer of democracy” or something like that?

My partner hates when I open bananas like this because there’s a little dark part of the banana under that end of the peel that she calls “The Ban-anus” and thinks it’s gross even if I pick off that part and don’t eat it.

Of course. It’s pretty much just to get headlines and for people to campaign on. But that’s really all you can hope for when Republicans control the House and won’t actually take up any meaningful oversight.

Idk, if I had to guess I’d say probably something like renting out an entire resort for the duration plus whatever they did there.

Defense Department Dimmadollars

Of course. The only question they ask is “Does this make my side look bad?” If the answer is No, then this is Just, Good, and the Will of the People. If the answer is Yes, then it’s a False Flag, a Psy-Op, or the work of the Deep State.

My understanding is the majority of detransition occurs due to financial reasons. So basically “I can’t afford my HRT anymore,” or “I can’t afford top surgery right now so I’ll go back to presenting as a woman,” or what have you. Then once the financial issue is gone a lot of those resume transition.

Full on “I thought I was trans but I’m actually not” detransition seems to be pretty rare. Almost like the current standard of care does a pretty good job at weeding out the people for whom transition isn’t the best treatment option. But to the conservatives who’ve decided this is their new culture war front if literally a single person ever regrets their transition, that’s enough to ban it for everyone.

So most of these bills ban pretty much all medical interventions for anyone under 18. Puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapy, surgery, the whole nine. Some go further and are trying to ban it for anyone under 26. You could theoretically still get counseling but you wouldn’t be able to actually do anything.

And yeah sure, on its face that might seem reasonable. Wouldn’t want impulsive teens rushing into big irreversible medical changes on a whim right? But those safeguards already exist. You can’t just walk into a gender clinic as a 10 year old boy, say the magic words “I’m actually a girl,” and walk out with an appointment for bottom surgery and a prescription for titty skittles. It takes long term counseling, social transition steps like trying out a new name and pronouns, wearing clothing that aligns with your gender, etc.

In reality that hypothetical 10 year old boy walking into the clinic is going to get extensive counseling. From that counseling he might try out using a different name, she/her pronouns, or dressing in more feminine clothing. She then might get prescribed puberty blockers here to make sure she has time to do all of this and be sure of herself without being forced into male puberty. A few years go by and last statistics I saw something like 2% of people at this point say, “No I think I actually am a boy,” and they go through that slightly delayed puberty. But almost all progress to HRT and later surgery.

Do some people later truly regret their transitions and try to go back? Of course they do. But realistically, transition already has basically the lowest regret rate of any medical procedure out there. A higher percentage of people regret getting something like a hip or knee replacement surgery than regret transition.

Puberty already forces your body through permanent changes that can range from easy, to nearly impossible to reverse. That’s why puberty blockers are so important. Imagine if as a young cis boy through some rare medical issue you start going through female puberty. But you’re a boy! You know you are. You’ve got a penis and everything.

But now you’re growing breasts. Like big enough that you can’t really hide them. Big enough that they get in the way, they’re heavy, and you have to wear a bra otherwise they hurt like hell. The other boys in your grade stare at you or bully you because you’re a boy but you’ve got bigger tits than a lot of the girls in your grade. Soon everyone starts mistaking you for a girl. Guys start hitting on you even though you’re a guy and you’re attracted to girls. A lot of the girls aren’t interested in you because they’re attracted to more… Traditional looking guys. You get told that you should just accept it. After all you look just like a girl. But you’re not a girl damnit. You’re a boy. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Now imagine they tell you they can’t do anything about it until you turn 18… Or maybe 26. Sounds terrible right?