Stomach isn’t enough. If you’re not actively campaigning and donating for her–or whomever the candidate is–then you may as well have been a Republican.

EDIT: Nevermind. Clearly the hivemind wants to stay in our armchairs. Who can blame us, right? We’ll continue this conversation in November. I hope it’s not I-told-you-so.

Well congratulations “liberals”, bots, propagandists, defeatists. You win. If Trump had beaten Biden, it would have been Biden’s fault, along with the party. Now the party gets to share the blame with you. You lot gambled this for the rest of us. Let’s hope your bet pays off. Open your wallets and hit the pavement. If you’re a real person and you pitched a fit so this would happen, you got what you wanted. Act like it. Your lobbying won you an obligation to campaign. If you were on social media begging for Biden to quit, now you owe the time you spent here to Harris’s campaign (or whomever the fuck they nominate).

You bought it. You own it.

My brother in Christ, I have worked in landlord-tenant on and off for decades, and I’ve been on both sides of many, many evictions. If you think courts always exercise their discretion fairly and equitably, I have a bridge to sell you.

Bonds are paid into court. They don’t go directly into the landlord’s pocket. Also nobody gets evicted without notice (and understand that notice is a term of art in this context–plenty of people get evicted without knowing about it or being actually made aware, but every state has a requirement that you have to do one of a limited number of things in order to provide notice to a tenant of an eviction).

This is a shitty law, but please don’t make stuff up or draw assumptions to pretend it’s worse than it actually is.

The problem this state (via the landlords’ lobbying for this change) is trying to fix is the scenario in which an evicted tenant gets a sympathetic judge in a jurisdiction with a long docket backlog and basically gets to squat in the property rent-free for however long they can stretch out the litigation. If you’re just now becoming familiar with the value of litigants dragging out litigation, well, welcome to 2024.

I know social media despises landlords (and there’s very good reason to revile institutional real estate hoarders), but there are good public policy reasons to not want people squatting in properties rent-free, one of which is that if the landlord can’t get a non-paying tenant off the property through legal means, they will pursue non-legal means instead. There are much better ways to accomplish this than the way TN has here, but shotgun evictions are something we’d really like to avoid.

Holy shit, actual analysis from a thinktank! And here I was so used to thinly veiled lobbying, propaganda pieces, and bribery that I had begun to think the American research institute was dead.

On the actual substance: if this is true, it should be good politically, but I suspect that recovery from the lingering economic trauma arising from inflation (real or imagined) will lag even further. People feel like prices are still rising too fast, whether they actually are or not, and the aforementioned propaganda engine doesn’t help.

No matter our politics, hopefully we can all agree with JB about not wanting to get shot by reactionary Christofascist radicals. I assume Black and Gass’s politics are pretty well aligned with each other, and Gass didn’t say anything a lot of people aren’t also feeling. But you can’t say that shit on stage in front of thousands of amped up fans. --not because it’s wrong to say or because it’s not politically correct or even because it’s controversial. You can’t say that shit because some of the people in the audience are unhinged and have already been radicalized by the Right.

Take a stand for the First Amendment, and take a stand against censorship, sure–but while you’re standing, be prepared to duck.

I don’t blame any public figure for not wanting to expose themselves to an outsized risk of violence. That risk is largely Trump’s fault, but notice how I’m blaming him from somewhere other than an elevated, well lit platform in front of a room full of strangers on drugs.

Well, thief! I smell you and I feel your air. I hear your breath. Come along! Help yourself again, there is plenty and to spare!

That’s a very large assumption. The simplest explanation is that we feel like we have free will because we do. Quantum mechanics suggests some major challenges to determinism, and the best arguments to restore it require a very unsatisfying amount of magical thinking.

Me too.

I’ll also vote if he’s not.

Blue all the way down the ticket. Fuck the agitprop. Save the Republic.

Nope. Affirmative defense burden of proof is on the accused. See, for example, ORC Section 2901.05.

Ohio’s not my jurisdiction, but that’s exactly how this works.

Source: Lawyer here.

This headline is a disaster. The court found that the exceptions–things you’re allowed to do with your phone while driving–are affirmative defenses. That is, if the prosecutor already made a prima facie case that the defendant was breaking the device use law, then the burden shifts to the defendant to prove one of the exceptions applies.

It’s a much better rule than one that would, implicitly or worse, give the cops carte blanche access to your phone.

Freight rail is still alive in my area–and that means commuter rail could be. But like a lot of places, the public has been duped into voting against their own interests. I don’t want to hijack the thread, but it’s an issue that–if you care about it, you should be voting for Amtrak Joe. Public transportation needs to be part of the nation’s climate agenda, and the Criminal Cheetoh wants to sacrifice us all on the altar of petrol.

The problem is that the infrastructure doesn’t exist, and introducing it is cost-prohibitive for large parts of the US. I would love to be able to take a train from my small town to the nearest metro area 30 miles away and then take a tube to a block away from my destination–but that’s just not going to happen in my lifetime, because the city can’t afford to install a subway, and the auto lobby won the war against commuter rail before I was born.

Could it be better? Sure. Might it become better? Maybe, but probably not in my lifetime.

In the meantime, people are de facto dependent on cars. Destroying infrastructure necessary to support the reality of how people must, through no fault of their own, travel punishes the traveling public without addressing the actual problem.

If we’re going to transition to better transit infrastructure, we first have to build the better infrastructure–and pay for it by eliminating unseating political opposition. Only then can we dismantle these kinds of monstrosities without disenfranchising the people who depend on them.

Good for them. At least somebody did.

Hi, comrade! I love Joe Biden and I hate genocide, so there.

Everywhere the GOP has a lock on state government, the looting inevitably follows. Vouchers literally siphon state taxes and pass them to the hands of rich conservatives and their churches who serve only rich, white, privileged children. By design, vouchers work to entrench the upper class; further impoverish poor and minority citizens; and increase wealth disparity, illiteracy, and crime.

We all called it. Didn’t matter. Time to move to the next box.

Except there’s no such thing as a hollow blue suit! Any alternative to Biden has to be a real live human being, probably with real live political aspirations of their own. That means they’re going to want to win. Anybody who stands any chance of being anywhere remotely close to competitive also stands a chance of outright winning under better circumstances in four years.

You’re asking an ambitious politician to take a real, serious risk of political suicide just to save face, and the reality is that no matter who your replacement is, polling better than Biden isn’t a win condition. Winning the election in November is the only good outcome. All other outcomes are bad not only for the nation but also personally for whoever replaces Biden.

Sure, you can run a would-never-win-or-even-run-anyway candidate, but like I said: that’s essentially conceding the election, and Biden can do that on his own.

Uh… okay, bro. You know that Donald Trump is also running in this election, right? Biden could be running single digits, and it still wouldn’t change the calculus: If a Biden alternative can’t beat Trump, they’re not going to put an albatross around the neck of their political career just to lose in November.

Newsom was on MSNBC singing Joe’s praises, just like he would have done regardless, because Newsom wants to be president, but Newsom also polls worse than Biden. That’s not hypothetical. Those polls already exist, and a drop in Biden’s numbers isn’t automatically a boost for Newsom. If Newsom thinks losing in 24 hurts his viability in 28, he wouldn’t do it. And who could blame him? It’s five months to the election.

The point is: It’s possible that all of the options are bad. Biden was in the mid-forties before the debate and the thirties after. He went from near toss-up to probably losing if the election were yesterday/today. Newsom might out-poll Biden today, but that’s not the contest.

The contest is with Trump. It’s not good enough to poll better than Biden. You have to actually carry all of Biden’s states and then some. If I’m Newsom and deciding whether to try to cobble together a five-month campaign and limp to November to save the DNC from itself and protect Amtrak Joe’s legacy when I’m starting 15 points in the hole or run my own campaign against the likes of a Haley or DeSantis also-ran once Trump is term-barred, dead, or both in four years, I’m not taking a risk at the convention unless someone makes me very, very confident that I could win.

And there’s the rub. Newsom wants to be president, and he’d love to be president in six months, but he’s not going to take over a campaign that’s already lost. If the party thinks Trump wins no matter what–not an unreasonable conclusion–why on earth would they burn their best shot of a rebound in 28?