God Has Abandoned Us: U.S. Politics November 2023

Trump and Biden will be the nominees barring what my favorite Cuban in Oliver Stone's JFK called ahn act o' gahd.

I don't want Trump to die or get removed from the ticket by lawsuit or otherwise. He needs to be beaten at the ballot. Repudiated.

He can die the day after the election.

But then we're stuck with someone even worse than Mike Pence.

Would be hilarious if Trump got nixed from the ballot for insurrection in a key GOP state like Texas (will never here happen since our state supreme court is 100% Republican). But you only need 1-2 swing states to bounce him for his candidacy to be DOA (say any two of Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, or Nevada).

He needs to be beaten at the ballot. Repudiated.

Already happened once. That's plenty enough for me, so let's get on with it. He's welcome to die asap.

i'm done with hoping for him to get his comeuppance. our society is too dumb for it to happen.

hoping he goes to a gas station one night and his driver dies mid-ride and careens into the pumps

He will have to be buried in an undisclosed location to prevent people from pissing on his grave.

https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Montesi_Formula#:~:text=The%20Montesi%20Formula%20is%20an,close%20proximity%20to%20the%20caster.

Best case scenario:

Trump wins all the Primaries and chooses Laura Loomer as his running mate. He accepts the nomination at the convention and then immediately dies of rabies. Loomer declares herself the nominee but Haley calls for a new delegate vote. Loomer delegates and Haley delegates begin fighting and setting themselves on fire. The Republican Party flees to Hungary.

M bison

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsnMjotLgxE

xpost Eric Braeden is then given the nomination

And for jimbeaux

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-BZIWSI5UQ

hoping he goes to a gas station one night and his driver dies mid-ride and careens into the pumps

― a very very unfair (Neanderthal), Tuesday, November 21, 2023 1:41 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Maybe a “Zoolander”-esque mishap

trump being barred from running in one or two states (that he would have lost anyway) would be bad for the long term "popular vote winner should be the winner" cause.

nah, not states like Colorado which he has basically no chance of winning in, a couple of swing states like PA, MI, or NV where not being on ballot destroys any real path he has to 270

I'm not a fan of this drive to get Trump off state ballots. Either beat him for real or throw him in jail, but this option isn't a good way to win.

yeah it just plays perfectly to his "weaponised DOJ" shtick that his base already believes and makes it look even more credible to their addled hick brains.

He will have to be buried in an undisclosed location to prevent people from pissing on his grave.

"The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the potentially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body of the man who was, after all the President of the United States. Awkward questions might be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. Long court battles would be inevitable--some with liberal cranks bitching about corpus delicti and habeas corpus and others with giant insurance companies trying not to pay off on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and duplicity was sure to follow any public hint that Nixon might have somehow faked his own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese interests on the Central Asian Mainland."

Moodles and I are of one mind on this. I prefer he lose the election first and then he gets thrown in jail, but let the election and legal system play out as they will.

^^^
This. Having him kicked off of ballots in certain states is a slippery slope, especially these days.

they can just bury him in that corner of the golf course next to his ex-wife

^^^^^

I'm not a fan of this drive to get Trump off state ballots. Either beat him for real or throw him in jail, but this option isn't a good way to win.

You seem to be under the impression that the old rules still apply. If only one side is abiding by them, they don't. Do you think if the poles were reversed, if Republicans held the incumbency, they wouldn't be filing motion after motion after motion to get Biden knocked off the ballot? It's very simple: When you are fighting for your life, every weapon at hand should — must — be used. And as has been stated many times, if Trump wins the next presidential election, there will never be another. So whatever it takes to stop him from winning is not just legitimate but necessary.

The big problem is convincing the Democratic party, and the nation's journalists, of this.

You can be sure, now that they've learned it is an even remote thing, Republicans will inevitably start fighting to keep Democrats off the ballot in the future, no matter the success of these attempts.

"Well, WE think Kamala Harris is a terrorist, so..."

Yeah I understand the concerns, but as with the criminal cases I’m in favor of letting it play out. It’s a good and legitimate constitutional question to raise. If it ultimately forces SCOTUS to rule in Trump’s favor, OK.

regardless the plain language of the 14th, the drafters intent for same, or any situational similarities with history, i cannot imagine scotus allowing any sec of state to ban trump from a ballot based on the 14th. long term maybe it's for the best.

Had Congress had the courage to convict him in the second impeachment, the case under the 14th Amendment for keeping him off the ballot would, I think, have been stronger. Of course, they could have just barred him from ever holding federal office again as part of the conviction.

yeah, I think a conviction would be necessary

putting it to the legislative via impeachment was very much better, and i was very supportive as it brought the facts to light and showed those evil simps for what they are. but it failed. 14th amndmt will be viewed as non-justiciable, but even if it was upheld, it will be cast as illegal sleight of hand (which it is not, but still).

I am pretty much past the point of worrying about precedent because the events of the past 7 years show it just doesn’t matter. Basically unperson OTM and the “what if they do it” hypotheticals show a fundamental misunderstanding of what the conservative politicians actually want because I guarantee you they have already been planning this gambit way before Trump gave the Democrats an opening to use it.

This Times piece is worth reading, not just because of what it openly says — that Donald Trump is a narcissistic psychopath in observable cognitive decline, who absolutely wants to declare himself dictator of America — but because it makes no attempt to be "even-handed" by raising bullshit complaints about Biden. Perhaps it represents a tipping point in the media narrative.

It links to this piece (headline: "The Case for Amplifying Trump's Insanity"), which is also good.

Edsall's one of the good ones.

yeah good piece and I'm guessing the media won't cover him this time the way they did in 2016, or even 2020. not because I think they've learned their lesson or whatever but because it's a lot harder to do the "both sides" thing when one of them has 91 felony charges and is openly using fascist language. not to mention the fact that he legitimately sounds like an insane person every time he speaks now. I know that's always been the case to some degree but as that article points out it definitely feels like his neurons are misfiring

I think they've learned their lesson

Good god, I hope so. It feels like the pertinent people in the media (e.g. reporters, editors, producers) have been "having a conversation" about how to cover Trump ever since he won the nomination in 2016, even as Trump has consistently framed them as enemies of the people, but they have coveted their reputations for fairness, objectivity, and respect for democratic norms above the need to hammer away daily at the existential danger Trump poses. They've constantly waited in vain for the Democratic Party to do that job, so they could duck it, but when the Democratic Party has tried to put that message out they've failed to amplify it.

I'm not concerned that the 14th amendment case will encourage Republicans to try the same thing. I just think it's a bad way to try to win the election and gives credence to the idea that it's all rigged. It's important to have the election be as straightforward as possible.

There is no Biden victory that the GOP will not call rigged, it's pointless to make that part of your calculus for any campaign strategy.

on the other hand who cares about giving creedence to something they're going to believe no matter what you do

I think if you can get a conviction on the insurrection charge it's worth trying! people who have actively tried to overthrow the government shouldn't be allowed to be on the ballot! if you don't like it run a better candidate!

f. hazel otm, they are not acting in good faith, the social contract has already been broken, gloves off, all the tools, etc

Edsall's one of the good ones.

This is kind of a funny thing to say about someone whose columns tend to consist mostly of block quotes of political and social scientists and research reports, but yeah, good piece. (Tbc, I actually appreciate what Edsall does quite a bit, but have very little sense of him as a person.)

No idea what he's like as a person. As for the column: I don't mind collated columns.

I appreciate Edsall’s columns, tho sometimes the very subject of his columns seems to betray certain viewpoints.

wild stuff

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/22/indian-americans-caste-discrimination-newsom-veto/

(ctrl-f "vice president harris", among many other things)

yes - read that the other day and had to re-read sections over and over to make sure i wasn't misunderstanding. the argument of the wealthy indian-americans seems to be "don't say caste"

Detractors of caste anti-discrimination laws — including many Indian American big-money donors and political power players — say the bills could fuel rather than curtail discrimination against South Asians, particularly Indian Hindus, because they are most often associated with caste hierarchy. They argue that the measures could falsely characterize all Hindus in America as inherently biased against members of their own community. They also said the laws could make people who belong to an upper caste — or whose surnames suggest they do — targets of frivolous lawsuits.

“They are trying to divide us among different castes and different classes,” said Romesh Japra, who founded the Americans 4 Hindus super PAC and recruited Bhutoria and other Democratic Indian American donors to fight the bill. “We came here to this country, to America, and we did not think that we’ll have to face this again.”

Japra said that during his 50 years in the United States, he has never experienced or seen any caste discrimination. “It doesn’t exist,” he said.

Ananya Chakravarti, a Georgetown University history professor and expert on the caste system, said this is a common refrain from wealthy American Hindus who are not from a lower caste.

“It would be a lot like White people standing up and saying they have never experienced race discrimination,” said Chakravarti, who is from an upper caste. “It’s literally a case of the upper caste trying to speak for the entire community.”

wondering how much of this is the supposed psudo-"moderate" beliefs of the interviewees as stated, and how much of it is far right ultra-nationalist stuff.

yeah I am a tiny bit sympathetic to the idea that the US judicial system might be bad at adjudicating this issue, but if your only response to "then what should we do about caste discrimination?" is "it doesn't exist" your stance is clear

for some reason I stopped feeling the need to wonder about the backgrounds of the "don't talk about caste" people after reading a few quotes

I do appreciate seeing Shri Thanedar's amazing hairpiece in one of the pictures, though

the stories from that guy's office are pretty ridiculous

At a glance it seems like this federal definition of existing civil rights protections could be understood to encompass caste, particularly the "ancestry" part: "Discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin includes discrimination based on a person’s actual or perceived race, color, national origin, ethnicity, or ancestry."