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wildcat09

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by wildcat09

  1. 11 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

    I've got some good stuff, and I live near you.  We'll get Chitown on Skype, toast the country, and sing the Russian national anthem.

    Because (1) irony, and (2) goddamn, that's a great national anthem.

    Counterpoint: it sucks.

  2. 4 minutes ago, David Dennison said:

    Please, please, please let this happen.

    I really don't want to see it, because there is no way in hell Ryan or McConnell will do anything about it, and then Trump will have free reign to clean house at the DOJ and essentially turn it into his own private police force.

  3. 17 hours ago, Parliament said:

    The reaction from his peers is the real story.  They all wanna put him back on the Liberal plantation.

    Ah, yes, informing him that slaves didn't actually choose to be slaves equals "putting him on the liberal plantation." Are you really this stupid or do you just enjoy playing a moron on the internet?

  4. 1 hour ago, Sawbonz said:

    Tell me your estimate of the odds of that happening. What should our realistic “preparation “ for that occurrence be (other than calling people names on the internet)?  Do I need to buy that bucket o slop meal plan? Guns and ammo and a bunker? I thought only right wing nuts thought about stuff like that 

    Well he challenged the validity of an election he won, so I'd say they're pretty fucking good. And I've got no clue what happens after he does that. It's not something we've ever had to consider before. 

  5. 52 minutes ago, 77horn said:

    Agreed, but our constitutional process is built around a broad consensus to do something. And for quite a while now, it seems like both sides are infested with extremists who, rather than compromise and get something better, would rather get nothing just to blame the other side.  (See wildcat09's post)

    The Democrats in Congress have no leverage to convince Paul Ryan to bring a bill to the floor. He is not doing so because he doesn't want to. It's that simple.

  6. 18 minutes ago, TahoeHorn said:

    sawbonz,

     

    I'm with you.  This country is run by 325MM people.  The government, and much less the President, play a far, far smaller role than people indicate.  And that's good.

    The President has a bunch of problems.  But when I go down the list of things he's actually done - appointments he's made, orders he's given, bills he's signed - I see more good than bad.  I wish it were better.  There are a bunch of unforced errors (e.g. travel ban, being Putin's Bitch, raising tariffs).  And there are some missed opportunities.  But he's shoving in the right direction (e.g. tax cuts, judicial appointments, deregulation, no bow and apologize).

     

    But, most of all, he isn't Hillary!  :P

    This is the worst trolling you've ever done.

  7. 1 hour ago, Sawbonz said:

    I see Dems taking the house in 2018, trump gone by 2020 at the latest, and likely the democrats having both houses and the WH in 2021. I hope they make good choices when they get it

     

    i don’t see any scenario where the republic is in jeopardy 

    What happens when Trump refuses to recognize the validity of the election in the event he loses in 2020?

    • Haha 1
  8. 14 minutes ago, Sawbonz said:

    Is it more likely that 2016 was a sea change in American politics or rather a perfect storm where we had 2 candidates that 2/3 of the country didn’t like? Maybe I’m too much of an optimist but I sincerely believe it’s the latter. 

     

    Here's a crazy thought: the answer to that question depends on how people react to Trump now. When people act like everything is still mostly-normal and that shit will just return itself to normal, they make the possibility that it will end up being a sea change much more likely.

    The appropriate time for Germans to begin freaking out about the Nazis wasn't when they started rounding up the Jews.

  9. 24 minutes ago, FondrenRoad said:

    That damage is already done though.  What's the difference between 1.5 years of an assclown President and 4 years?  We are still a nation that elected a complete moron.  Nothing is going to take that away from us.  Ever.

    Some damage is already done, yes, but it gets worse every day that Trump remains in power. 

  10. 3 minutes ago, 4th&Five said:

    Trump going off on Mother would be the highlight of the last 2 years. Who would Pence side with?

    Is this even a legitimate question? It's obviously Trump. Ben Carson threw his wife under the bus over some office furniture, Pence isn't going to publicly oppose Trump over a cabinet appointment.

  11. https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/more-appropriate-white-house-correspondents-association-dinner-jokes-for-2019:

    Quote

    Good evening, and welcome to the 2019 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. After last year’s uproar, I’ve been instructed to use only dignified language and humor considered appropriate for our current cultural discourse.

    Low-IQ crazy Kellyanne Conway is here tonight. Kellyanne came to Mar-a-Lago three nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!

    Sarah Huckabee Sanders has also graced us with her presence. She gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem.

    I see Fox News in the back, which is a failing pile of garbage and the enemy of the American people. I never watch Sean Hannity, who I once called “the dumbest man on television!”

    A few members of the Trump cabinet showed up this year, such as Liddle Jeff Sessions, who lied to Congress under oath. He is an untruthful slimeball. And there’s Mike Pence, who is weak, both physically and mentally. Don’t threaten gay people, Mike!

    I’m so glad to see the Trump family represented. Let’s see, there’s Crooked Don Jr., who embarrassed himself and the country with his email lies. I refuse to call Ivanka Trump a bimbo, because that is not politically correct. And let’s not forget Eric, who should be forced to take an IQ test. Not very bright.

    As for the First Lady, I did try and fuck Melania. She was married. I moved on her like a bitch. Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything. I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.

    In closing, I will reserve my most civil words for the president himself, who has finally made an appearance at this dinner. Bad (or sick) guy!

     

    • Like 1
  12. 19 minutes ago, Mojo Hand said:

    That is not a forgone conclusion, and it's something that we are all in a position to affect. Dems are winning everywhere without sinking to the GOP's level.  Some good people won in Virginia.  Doug Jones is a good dude who took down a pedophile Republican without throwing bombs.  The voters are already proving you wrong. 

    I think it's likely that the Dems retake the House this November and use their power to investigate the Trump campaign into a slow political death, leading to the Dems taking the White House in 2020 (not sure what the Senate electoral map in 2020 will look like, but it must be better than this year so it's likely the Dems could take full unified government). The problem is that, if that happens, the Republicans will probably win a wave election in 2022, because the American media and the American public refuse to learn that modern Republicans are almost universally crooked and evil liars and saboteurs, and whatever problems exist at that time will all be blamed on Democrats regardless of how much damage the Republicans do before they lose power.

    • Like 1
  13. 10 minutes ago, F250 said:

    As I said, I randomly pulled three names from the list and none were controversial. Would you say that the majority of the nominees are similar to James Ho or more similar to the 3 nominees I posted?

    I don't know the answer and I really am curious if most of the nominations are decent nominations with a handful of ideologically slanted picks.

    I get that Trump is a crooked fuck that would sell a nomination, so his picks shouldn't be trusted but I also don't think Trump is actually picking all of these people.

    I'm not a litigator so I'm not really familiar with most of the people on the list. And I agree that Trump himself for the most part has no hand in picking these nominees, though a fair number do appear have been selected for no reason other than as thanks for their campaign support. But it seems clear that the people who are being chosen are being chosen first and foremost for their willingness to advance a partisan agenda from the bench. I think the entire concept of judges simply being there to call "balls and strikes" is unmitigated bullshit, and there's certainly always been political/ideological considerations taken into account when nominating judges, but what we're seeing now (along with nominations for executive agencies) is more than a difference in degree, it's a difference in kind. It's one thing for a judge to allow their ideological beliefs to influence their judgment on legal questions with no clear answers. It's another thing entirely for a judge to simply hold that the law is what they want it to be in the face of substantial evidence to the contrary.

  14. 1 hour ago, F250 said:

    I randomly selected 3 nominations and was curious if they were unqualified right wing partisans. None of the 3 seem to meet that description. I am not going to go through all of them but I am guessing that the "unqualified right wing partisan" accusations is just a partisan justification for standard team politics.

     

    Fernando Rodriguez Jr

    Susan Paradise Baxter

    Daniel D. Domenico

     

    How about James Ho?

    Quote

    Judge James Ho has been a federal judge for only a few months. Until Wednesday, he had never handed down a judicial opinion in his life. But the Trump appointee’s very first opinion, a dissent calling for a sweeping assault on campaign contribution limits, is a doozy.

    More than just an ideologically radical opinion, Judge Ho’s dissent from the full United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit’s decision not to rehear Zimmerman v. City of Austin is a monument to conservative political rhetoric and right-wing historical myths. It’s the sort of commentary one would expect to find in an especially strident political magazine — perhaps one of the publications one of Ho’s current law clerks used to write for. It is emphatically not the sort of writing one expects to find in a judicial opinion.

    Newly confirmed judges — or, at least, newly confirmed judges who aren’t named “Neil Gorsuch” — are typically more careful than this. They don’t use their very first opinion to burn down the distinction between law and political myth-making.

    The core issue in Zimmerman involves an Austin, Texas ordinance prohibiting candidates for mayor or city council from accepting campaign donations greater than $350. It is constitutional, even after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, to limit contributions directly to candidates — the federal contribution limit of $2,700, for example, is constitutional even under the Roberts Court’s reading of the Constitution.

    There are also some Supreme Court decisions suggesting that an excessively low contribution limit might violate the Constitution. But a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit held that Austin’s $350 limit is not too low, and 12 of Ho’s 14 colleagues voted not to rehear this case. Judge Ho was one of only two judges who thought that the panel’s decision needed further review. As it happens, Ho spends much of his opinion arguing that the $350 limit is, in fact, too low.

    But then he goes even farther. The newly minted judge suggests that all contribution limits “are simultaneously over- and underinclusive—defects that have been held fatal in other First Amendment contexts.” It appears that Judge Ho would even strike down the much higher federal limit.

    The most striking part of Ho’s opinion, however, is his conclusion. There, he steps away from legal argument entirely to launch into a political rant against big government — complete with a gratuitous swipe at Obamacare.

    To be sure, many Americans of good faith bemoan the amount of money spent on campaign contributions and political speech. But if you don’t like big money in politics, then you should oppose big government in our lives. Because the former is a necessary consequence of the latter. When government grows larger, when regulators pick more and more economic winners and losers, participation in the political process ceases to be merely a citizen’s prerogative—it becomes a human necessity. This is the inevitable result of a government that would be unrecognizable to our Founders. See, e.g., NFIB v. Sebelius, 567 U.S. 519 (2012).

    There’s a lot to break down here, but let’s start with the citation. NFIB v. Sebeliuswas a mostly unsuccessful attempt to convince the Supreme Court to repeal the Affordable Care Act. It has literally nothing to do with any of the legal issues present in Zimmerman. NFIB claimed that a health regulation exceeded Congress’ authority under Article I of the Constitution; Zimmerman is a First Amendment challenge to a campaign finance law.

    The only reason to cite NFIB to support the proposition that our government “would be unrecognizable to our Founders” is to take a political swipe at Obamacare and at the Supreme Court that disagreed with Ho’s view of this law.

    (Ho’s implication that the Affordable Care Act is inconsistent with the framers’ understanding of the Constitution is also dubious — to the extent that it is even possible to claim that a group of Eighteenth Century political leaders with divergent views shared a common understanding. The very first Supreme Court decision interpreting Congress’ power to regulate interstate commerce provides a great deal of support for the Affordable Care Act.)

    Ho’s suggestion that a modern regulatory and welfare state necessarily requires a lax campaign finance regime is also inaccurate. Canada, with its single-payer health care system, has both strict limits on donations to candidates and even stricter limits on campaign spending. In 2015, for example, the Canada Elections Act limited spending by candidates for the most expensive parliamentary race to about $210,000 US dollars. That’s not nothing, but it is far less than the $28 millionraised by competing candidates for a US House race last year.

    Great Britain, with its socialized medicine, has a similar regime limiting spending by candidates and parties.

    And then there’s Ho’s suggestion that the Founding Fathers would be appalled by Austin’s limit on campaign contributions. Judge Ho begins his opinion with a flourish. “The unfortunate trend in modern constitutional law is not only to create rights that appear nowhere in the Constitution, but also to disfavor rights expressly enumerated by our Founders,” he writes, adding that “this case reinforces this regrettable pattern.”

    But Judge Ho’s appeal to the Founders is nothing more than James Madison fan fiction. It bears no more resemblance to the original understanding of the Constitution than a Harry Turtledove novel resembles the Civil War.

    For one thing, attempting to figure out how the framers understood the First Amendment is a fool’s game. As Jud Campbell, a young conservative legal scholar, writes in the Yale Law Journal, “after a century of academic debate . . . the meanings of speech and press freedoms at the founding remain remarkably hazy.” First Amendment scholar Rod Smolla is even more pointed — “One can keep going round and round on the original meaning of the First Amendment, but no clear, consistent vision of what the framers meant by freedom of speech will ever emerge.”

    Judge Ho, in other words, is claiming a level of certainty about the founding era understanding of the First Amendment that evaded scholars for generations. Ho is either a singular and transformative genius in the field of First Amendment history, or he is letting his political desires get ahead of what anyone actually knows.

    But here’s something we actually do know about political campaigns at the time of the founding: Fans of the musical Hamilton may remember President Thomas Jefferson’s dismissive swipe at Vice President Aaron Burr near the end of the play — “Man openly campaigns against me, talkin’ bout ‘I look forward to our partnership.'” One reason this line is so biting is because, for much of American history, the idea that a presidential candidate would actively campaign for their own election was considered a vulgarity. Campaigns were typically conducted by surrogates.

    As President Andrew Jackson once said to a friend, “I meddle not with elections. I leave the people to make their own President.”

    And here’s something else we know about the founding era: they didn’t have television. Or the Internet. Or anything resembling modern political communications. The Founders and their contemporaries had no concept of what a modern political race would look like, or myriad of ways that contemporary technology allows big spenders to shape elections.

    There is simply no way to know, in other words, whether modern campaign finance laws “disfavor rights” that the founding generation understood the Constitution to protect. As Doug Kendall and Jim Ryan once wrote of Justice Clarence Thomas’ originalism, asking how 18th Century figures would have reacted to such a transformed landscape is “as productive as asking an only child: Imagine you have a sister. Now, does she like cheese?

    Nominating partisan and/or ideological hacks like this, regardless of their particular partisan or ideological alignment, does substantial damage to our judicial system. Nothing good can come of attempts to turn ideological screeds with no basis in law into legal precedent. We need look no further than Roberts' dicta in Northwest Austin, in which he essentially made up from whole cloth the "equal sovereignty doctrine" that he later used to justify his decision in Shelby County, to see the harms that result when judges abandon any pretense of being anything other than partisan actors. 

  15. 1 minute ago, David Dennison said:

    Are you seriously griping about a slow process after what Barack Obama's nominees had to put up with?

    Please.

    When the nominees are qualified center-left candidates, infinite obstruction is perfectly justified. When the nominees are horribly unqualified far-right partisan dipshits, even the scantest review is a horrible affront to democracy. Moose out front should've told you.

    • Like 9
  16. 12 minutes ago, trauma babe said:

    It's really something else to witness a person embody every single trait they accuse everyone who disagrees with them of holding. No wonder Trump was elected, if Fox News + email forwards are that effective. 

    Every accusation is a confession.

  17. 22 hours ago, BigOrange1 said:

    i really don't get this mindset.  yeah, the stockton/malone teams were very hateable, but that was 20 years ago.  this version of the jazz team is a ton of fun to watch and is lead by a young guy who could be a top 5 player in the league 4 or 5 years from now.

    Counterpoint: fuck the Jazz.

    • Like 1
  18. 10 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

    Well, he repeatedly punches himself in the dick, finding certain actions to be complete disqualifiers when Hillary did them, but looking past them when Trump does them repeatedly, shamelessly, and in our face daring us to do something about it, so....

    z8t5y.jpg?a423480

    I don't care about Hillary, but we've got evidence showing that she actually DIDN'T do what they claim she did routinely. It's not simply hypocrisy on his part, it's delusion.

  19. 7 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

    Yeah, I mean, she might have used campaign funds for illegal purposes, or sent taxpayer funds by the tens of millions to her own bank accounts, or appointed people who see public office as their own slush fund.

    And we can't stand for a president who  would do that....right?

    No, you see, emails showed that a Clinton Foundation donor who requested a meeting with her was denied a meeting, which is proof of the worst corruption imaginable. Mick Mulvaney's got nothing on Crooked Hillary.

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