I really hope the media loses these hard, honestly. At this point I don’t even mind if Trump benefits some, I just want to see the media that sanewashed Trump and pretended there was anything reasonable about him returning as a presidential candidate get what they deserve.

It was actually a majority this time, don’t forget. Over half of Americans chose Trump.

At the end of Obama’s term wouldn’t have made any difference because by then McConnell was committed to holding the seat open for the next Republican.

But people called for her to resign back during the middle of Obama’s presidency, when the Democrats controlled the Senate, and he hubristic old ass decided to fuck everyone else by hanging onto power and prestige and trying to be even more historically important.

Woman had a bigger ego than Trump and Musk, and I really hope that historical opinion of he fucking remembers that.

Upside is the cult of personality is attached to Trump, and no one else has been able to pull it off him. Trump is only effective because somehow, for some insane reason, he, personally, has a lot of devoted followers.

This is not quite accurate. The vice president must be eligible to be the President, not to be elected President. The 22nd amendment has some very specific language.

“No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.”

It prevents someone from being elected President, but does not make the person ineligible to be the President since it only restricts that one method of gaining the office. A person can definitely become President through succession even if they have served their full two terms already…at least by the constitution as written.

Even Trump can occasionally be right!

To be fair, there is someday going to be a generation where that doesn’t happen (assuming humans don’t obliterate themselves first). Eventually it’s practically a certainty that we will develop the means to preserve humans indefinitely.

Up until the court decided to start ignoring centuries of legal tradition that is the bedrock of our legal system and threw out stare decisis the decision was actually more secure than a specific law.

Any law codifying it can be challenged on many grounds, especially the 10th amendment. It could easily have been struck down as unconstitutional because the federal government has no power to pass a law affecting this issue, since the constitution doesn’t grant it.

Only a constitutional amendment would have been likely to survive a court willing to do what this one has done, and there is zero possibility the Democrats could have passed one.

Yeah, this. I don’t understand it. Why does anyone not in the MAGA cult do anything for this man if not fully paid up front? It’s been decades since he was well known for not paying his debts and stalling as much as legally possible if taken to court to make him pay. There shouldn’t be a single person who is in a position to provide services to him that doesn’t know this!

The funny thing is he might be the one in the right, if we examine with logic.

A mayor probably has no particular skills or abilities to help personally in that sort of situation, and if he was doing his job correctly in the past, then everything in his power to do would already have been done. The appropriate experts are ready. Emergency plans are in place. There’s backup plans, and backup plans for the backups, all carefully considered and planned by the best people the mayor could get to do them in the past.

But humans are weird and have stupid ideas, so we want to see the mayor in his office, giving interviews, or even better, at the site of the disaster, helping. Except the most the average mayor is likely to do in an emergency situation is get in the way and be a distraction.

That’s the sad thing - your city’s mayor may or may not have done a good job, I have no idea, but the average mayor will definitely be attacked if this happens and he doesn’t make a show of ‘helping’.

Contingency plans. Yeah. Sure. I don’t think there are any that most of us can make. There aren’t any countries I could move to that would be any better I don’t think. I’m too old, I don’t have degrees, my only job qualifications aren’t particularly in demand because the training for them is fast, and the only family connection to citizenship elsewhere I had is insufficient because it’s too many generations removed from me.

I suspect the cast majority of people who would be even worse off than me under another Trump/Republican administration are in just as bad if not worse a position.

Norfolk has four carrier strike groups and the entire Atlantic submarine fleet. Even without the ability to repair or resupply, just with what they currently have as far as ordnance goes, that wins the war immediately.

You take a week at most to position submarines in the right spots and then eliminate Axis leadership in a single simultaneous strike.

Every former president tends to be called president still quite often. If you look up news articles about most former presidents you’ll find a pretty solid split between just saying ‘President X’ and specifying ‘former President X’.

It might be related to a military rule where retired officers get to keep using their rank title unless discharged in negative ways. Or maybe it’s just sort of traditional.

Every person in these movies is a blistering idiot. Like, the levels of stupid on every single person in these expeditions is insane.

The original Alien didn’t require the entire cast to be complete morons, unfit to even operate as an adult in society, much less be mission-critical crew on a colonization mission.

If it hadn’t been for the android in the original Alien, they would have observed reasonable quarantine procedures and there wouldn’t really have been a problem.

That’s one of the main reasons I think these movies are bad. The writers either did not care enough or were too incompetent to write intelligent, believable, relatable characters that I actually grow to care about.

No, but they should be public to everyone, and not hidden unless you jump through hoops.

“AI”, especially art. I’ve spent years trying to learn to draw on and off and have never gotten good at it, but now I can use words to create illustrations I want in a level of quality and detail I could never dream of.

Now I just want the interface to be easier and more able to understand natural language and be capable of making directed changes better.

Seriously? From the story, anon did everything right.

Saw potential interest, acted on it in a nonthreatening way, when no positive response came, took it as a rejection and did not harass or continue pursuing.

We could start with holding police officers responsible. It’s great that they charged this one, but why aren’t the other police there being charged as accomplices since they took no action to prevent the shooting?

So here’s a few simple starter thoughts.

1. Establish an external agency with the mandate of prosecuting police. They have their own prosecutorial system, their own investigators, their own prosecutors, their own courts and their own judges, completely unconnected to the prosecutorial system the police work with. You cannot have the same people that work together one day and rely on each other be the ones to investigate each other, it doesn’t work. Not even a separate ‘internal affairs division’ is enough.

2. Any police officer who discharges their weapon, for any reason, is immediately suspended, and any pay is withheld until an investigation for why the weapon was discharged is completed. The investigation of course is conducted by that external agency.

3. If a police officer discharging a weapon causes injury or death, all police officers on the scene are suspended and their pay withheld until the investigation is over.

4. If the police officer who discharged their weapon is charged with assault, murder, whatever, then all other officers at the scene are charged as accomplices, unless they took proactive action to prevent the first officer from committing their illegal action. Think of it like felony murder - if you and a group of friends are committing a crime and someone is murdered, you are all prosecutable under felony murder even if you had no direct hand in the murder at all.

That’s probably a good start, it may not solve all the problems, but it’d be a lot better than what’s being done now, which is very, very little. I’d say an even better thing to do in addition would be to have every current police officer purged and never work in law enforcement again. All police organizations kinda need a clean slate with fresh people and no organizational momentum and culture carryover from how it’s happening now, because a lot of what needs to change is organizational culture, and just altering the rules is more difficult than rebuilding a completely new organizational culture from the ground up.

Better to acknowledge it in a response. I prefer to do that myself if I’m wrong or something of that nature, post a reply acknowledging instead of trying to cover up that I was ever wrong in the first place.

That would be hilarious if someone prepared a bunch of little clips of things Hitler said that Trump also says very similar things to, and then anytime he says one, just respond by playing a clip of Hitler saying basically the same thing, and giving a ‘Do I need to say more?’ look.