I certainly can be wrong, but Gorsuch happened back when he occasionally took advice. When he still had advisors. Before he fired them or they quit. Before he started feeling his oats as president and noticed that he could do whatever the fuck he wanted to. We’ll see though, won’t we? I don’t have any booze riding on this.
I don’t agree. Randolph and Mortimer were directly responsible for the ruination of Winthorp’s life: they hired Beeks to plant the drugs, bribe the intake cops, and bribe Ophelia to pretend, in front of Penelope that Winthrop was a drug dealer.
Here, we are essentially powerless observers. Trump won’t take my phone calls.
Moreover, I, at least, don’t agree that ruination of lives is even in the cards. I want the kind of the judge I think Trump is likely to appoint. Any one of the choices on his list would be positive, in my view.
Why would you possibly imagine I would adopt your unsupported view that this amounts to ruination, and thus feel some moral opprobrium about wagering on the result?
This critique suggests you believe that I have to feel as you do. I don’t. (NB: If it should happen that ThelmaLou is right, and Kim Kardashian returns to the White House to accept Trump’s nomination, I will of course readily acknowledge error – but I regard the chance of a reality TV star of any stripe being chosen as infinitesimal).
I don’t share the progressive agenda, of course, but I completely endorse the sentiment above. We have the gift of representative democracy. We are self-governing. We steer our own course by the ballot box. That’s EXACTLY how our representative democracy works.
Hear, hear.
You use a lot of words, but you’re not saying anything to refute my point. Gay people may have their rights curtailed. Women’s rights to choose may be removed. These are not abstractions! These are real people.
Yes, I would hope you’d feel like I do, that damaging people’s freedom is a bad thing. That’s basic human decency. Not a booze bet over whose lives get to be screwed over worse.
No. Many of Trump’s attempted appointees to various courts so far have been a travesty. Unprepared and unqualified, except i ONE way… they were ideologues.
Example:
Trump judge nominee, 36, who has never tried a case, wins approval of Senate panel
Brett J. Talley, President Trump’s nominee to be a federal judge in Alabama, has never tried a case, was unanimously rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Assn.’s judicial rating committee, has practiced law for only three years and, as a blogger last year, displayed a degree of partisanship unusual for a judicial nominee, denouncing “Hillary Rotten Clinton” and pledging support for the National Rifle Assn.
On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee, on a party-line vote, approved him for a lifetime appointment to the federal bench.
Poor Vetting Sinks Trump’s Nominees for Federal Judge
One of President Trump’s federal judge nominees has withdrawn after he was unable to answer basic questions during his confirmation hearing about the courtroom process, showed little familiarity with federal trial rules and acknowledged that he had never prosecuted or defended a case.
A clip of the exchange between the nominee, Matthew Petersen, and Senator John N. Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, became a viral sensation and drew ridicule across the internet.
Mr. Petersen’s withdrawal over the weekend was the** third nomination by Mr. Trump to collapse in recent days**. Last week, the White House pulled back two other Federal District Court nominees who had attracted controversy, Jeff Mateer and Brett Talley. Mr. Talley also had scant trial experience and apparently defended the early Ku Klux Klan under a pseudonym on a sports website. Mr. Mateer once described transgender children as proof of “Satan’s plan.”
As for Gorsuch, fuck him and the horse he rode in on. he wrote that disgusting “decision” saying a man should be expected to freeze to death in a busted truck, rather than try to stay alive. And be fired if he chooses to live. THAT is what his “ruling” raelly said. Fuck that rat bastard.
So don’t try to bullshit me with any “Trump best judge chooser ever” crap.
And another thing. This “president” and everyone around him is under investigation. For damn near everything possible. He should NOT get to pick the judges. What the fuck.
You are being very silly. Trump published his Supreme picks short list, which included Gorsuch, during his election campaign that included plenty of firings and quittings. He knows this is the one carrot that will keep the establishment Rs from messing with him too much. If he picked Honey Boo boo, they might have actually got off their ass and fought him on his silly trade war, I suspect.
Can we distinguish between, “He’s unqualified for objective, measurable reasons,” and “He’s unqualified because I strongly disagree with his judicial philosophy?”
See, you look at a ruling and decide “what it really said,” without care for understanding what the law it was applying really says. You want a judge to approach a situation like the broken truck one and write an opinion that says, “No matter what the law’s words are, making a guy choose between getting fired and a risk of freezing to death is just wrong!”
True?
The Constitution has words. Those words mean things.
The words do not say, “Hey, if the president is under investigation, all bets are off.”
It does say that Congress can impeach for pretty much any reason they like.
But it seems that Congress doesn’t share your opinion.
We live in a representative democracy. Why do you think your rules should trump (ha!) the actual written ones?
I feel that we have a system for enacting new law. And the Supreme Court should not be the source of new law, and I feel that this is a more important principle than any specific law they enact, even if it’s a good one.
Hey! Who you callin’ silly? :mad: I never joke around. Okay, I sometimes joke around.
And he ALWAYS sticks to what he says he’s going to do. If he published a list and said he’d pick from that, then, by cracky, he’ll goddamm do it! This is a man who always does what he says he’s going to do, right? :rolleyes:
No, a crate of dynamite couldn’t get those bozos off their asses. He feeds them shit and they gobble it down like it’s buttered toast.
I am fooling around a bit, but I want to emphasize thump’s unpredictability and the sheer folly of expecting him to act like a normal person, let alone a normal president, ever. In any circumstances. There’s only one thing you can expect from him: the unexpected.
I pronounce this horse dead.
Ah, so you are in favor of complete normalization of gay relationships and down-to-bedrock reform of the criminal justice system so all defendants of all races can be treated equally by the police and judges? Glad to hear!
This sentiment seems a bit gauche to me; kinda like enjoying the crying of traumatized toddlers on the news because it upsets liberals.
The people have the right to flip the country upside down and turn it inside out. We, the people, have the right to turn ourselves into a total autocracy, if such is our choice. What would be required for that? Seems to me, a landslide of popular support would be essential, without it, any such power would be illegitimate. Am I wrong about that?
But Trump does not have that, unless anyone here believes that horseshit about five million illegal voters. Even then, it would be be a bare majority of the voters, not really in “landslide” territory, not even close to a massive popular majority.
Where’s the mandate in losing the popular vote? Well, we are told, this time we will turn out our voters, this time we will get more of our voters to the polls. OK, but what if you already did? Any reason to believe that you haven’t already gotten your maximum result? Who are you planning on getting that you didn’t already have?
You are a minority claiming the just powers of a majority. And not just a plurality, but a huge hulking massive majority. If you are claiming the right to turn the country inside out, shouldn’t you have that already? And if you don’t, well, then, who are you? By what right do you rule? Not “power to the people”, you clearly deny that. Not “majority rules”, you don’t have the majority. So, God, then? Is that it, God has decided that you should rule? Well, OK, howcum He didn’t give you that solid landslide you need? Hedging His bets?
Didja notice that Trump doesn’t talk much about his anti-choice inclinations? Do you wonder why? Why he isn’t he throwing that out as red meat for his pep rallies? Well, now that Kennedy has bailed, its put up or shut up time, isn’t it? You think nominating someone who wants to make reproductive choice illegal will help him win over the soft guys with the wobbly bits?
Good. You keep thinking, Butch, that’s what you’re good at.
The liberals being upset about our administration traumatizing children is just a bonus in his eyes.
Put your money where your mouth is? Six-pack of any cheap beer?
I notice someone recently started a thread about an Orchiectomy. I didn’t click but I assume the surgical target was not the Democratic Party — its testicles are long gone.
From the same post:
Amendment XII:
I know of no legal provision that specifies a President elected with a landslide has additional powers under the Constitution.
What right places Trump in the White House? He was “The person having the greatest Number of votes for President,” in the electoral college.
There you go!
Sure, the notion of meritocracy assumes that everyone stats at the same starting line but affirmative action does care where you start, only where you end up. The vast majority of blacks admitted to ivy leagues under affirmative action are not the poor descendants of slaves. As long as they can say they are 10% black, they don’t really care where those black applicants started out in life.
On the other hand it has pushed schools to focus on diversity and this has led to discrimination against Asians.
Some Asians do not think this makes the world a “better” . So perhaps more important than defining merit would be to define “better” If we can’t agree on the goal, its pointless to debate the means of accomplishing that goal.
Besides, in this case the traumatized toddlers are the liberals.
Regards,
Shodan
Really? I wonder. But no, you probably never met teenage me.
I agree with this, as would many, many liberals.
In a caste system?
To this day I don’t understand how people who live in a society with international supply chains and a wide variety of obscure chemical technology from steels to housepaints can be “self-reliant.”
You know that you live in a society with specialization and division of labor, right?
Do you mean a tug-of-war between utilitarianism and hedonism? What do those words mean to you?
My education in biology and in economics tells me that skill and merit are in fact not where the things that sustain us come from. Skill may help us access things we need, but really life-forms go where there are resources to sustain us, and human beings, like algae or mold, may end up taking whatever path is easy enough for us.