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ChristianDiscer
124 days ago
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That's why I use Proton password manager. It can generate alias email addresses and logins for these kind type of requests.

Simply delete the alias when it's no longer needed.

Trump Again Says That Christians ‘Won’t Have to Vote Anymore’ if They Vote for Him - The New York Times

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ChristianDiscer
131 days ago
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FALSE - WSJ cut out two seconds which takes it out of context. Another media change the facts story.
mareino
131 days ago
Neat. So why is it that, when Laura Ingraham suggested that to Trump, Trump himself rejected her, and repeated that Christians won't need to vote anymore?
ChristianDiscer
130 days ago
Read it all, not just the media slant. https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4799157-ingraham-donald-trump-christians-vote-anymore/

President Venn Diagram

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Hard to imagine political rhetoric more microtargeted at me than 'I love Venn diagrams. I really do, I love Venn diagrams. It's just something about those three circles.'
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ChristianDiscer
139 days ago
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Mickey Mouse for president? This classic diagram looks more like Mickey, oh I'm sorry, Minnie Mouse!
SimonHova
139 days ago
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I love that this is a fact about our future president.
Greenlawn, NY
matthiasgoergens
139 days ago
It's possible, but seems unlikely. At least in the 2024 election.
steelhorse
139 days ago
You really think Randall is going to be our future president? Are yard signs available yet? I'll take twenty.
gordol
139 days ago
Let's make it happen!

Taylor Swift Is Trademarking ‘Female Rage: The Musical’

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Photo: Getty Images for TAS Rights Mana

I wasn’t aware one could simply trademark a complex gendered emotion, but then again, there are apparently no rules for those with obscene wealth. On Monday, TMZ reported that Taylor Swift, fresh off the start of the European leg of the Eras Tour, has trademarked the section of the concert dedicated to her most recent album, The Tortured Poets Department.

When Swift kicked off her Paris show — with beau Travis Kelce and buddies Gigi Hadid and Bradley Cooper in tow — fans were delighted to find she’d added seven songs to the set list, along with a slew of new costume changes and visuals. At one point during the evening, she referred to the TTPD additions as “Female Rage: The Musical,” and in an Instagram post from Sunday she doubled down on the phrase. “This post is dedicated to the new Tortured Poets section of the Eras Tour (aka Female Rage The Musical!) and everyone who made these memories so magical,” she wrote. Now, we must agonize over whether or not we will be forced to watch a real production of Female Rage: The Musical on Broadway someday.

According to documents obtained by TMZ, Swift reportedly filed a trademark application last week under her company TAS Rights Management. While we don’t have specifics just yet, it seems Swift’s team plans on using the phrase in musical recordings, video recordings, and potential merchandise. The outlet noted, however, that Etsy sellers have already plastered Female Rage: The Musical onto T-shirts, mouse pads, and tumblers, so the filing might have been a preventative measure to protect Swift’s profits.

Given that the idea of “female rage” is often invoked by women striving for radical racial or gender equality, it’s a strange choice of verbiage for someone who’s been altogether politically bland as a vanilla wafer. But I get it! Getting out of toxic situationships with scrawny alt-indie rockers is a rage-inducing experience, too, I guess.

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ChristianDiscer
209 days ago
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Can I trademark "Male Indifference?"
hannahdraper
209 days ago
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Given that the idea of “female rage” is often invoked by women striving for radical racial or gender equality, it’s a strange choice of verbiage for someone who’s been altogether politically bland as a vanilla wafer. But I get it! Getting out of toxic situationships with scrawny alt indie rockers is a rage-inducing experience, too, I guess.
Washington, DC

Can Someone Please Explain To Tommy Tuberville That Killing A Newborn Baby Is Homicide?

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As much as I may believe that it is entirely unseemly to call a grown man who is not a cartoon “Tommy* Tuberville,” Tommy Tuberville is a 69-year-old man who has been speaking English all of his life and should probably know most of our more common terms.

For instance, abortion, as a medical procedure, is the termination of a pregnancy while one is still pregnant with a fetus that, in cases where there is nothing life-threatening happening, could not survive outside the womb.

Once the baby exits the womb, however, that is homicide. Or infanticide, if you want to get real specific about it.


Exciting news! If we get up to 5200 paid subscribers, YOU get a week without pictures of Tommy Tuberville’s face!


This comes up because, once again, Tommy Tuberville is echoing Trump by claiming that post-birth abortions are a thing.

“You have to give it to the Democrats, progressive Left; they’re all in on abortion, anytime, anyplace, on the public dime,” Tuberville said on a podcast on Tuesday. “They’re for abortion anytime, sometimes past the birth of the baby.”

So, first of all — we are not in favor of abortion “anyplace.” I am vehemently opposed to anyone having an abortion or any other medical procedure at the table where I am eating, as it is both rude and unsanitary. Neither I nor anyone else I know would recommend one have an abortion on a rollercoaster, or on a flight to the Maldives, or in the dressing room at Nordstrom Rack. We would all prefer that abortions occur in clean, sterile environments.

That being said, it is deeply concerning that both Tuberville and Trump are going around telling people that it is entirely legal to execute newborn babies, because you never know who is going to hear that and decide “Hey, if it’s legal, I think I’ll go kill me a newborn baby.”

It could happen.

But the real sick thing here is that, you know, we all know that’s not what either of them is talking about. They’re talking about palliative care, the standard procedure that happens when a child is born who will not survive more than a few minutes or hours after birth.


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It was repulsive before, but it’s extra grotesque and extra cruel now that Republican politicians are forcing people to give birth to babies with no chance of survival. What is it, exactly, that they want doctors to do when babies are born with their brains on the outside of their heads or other fatal fetal anomalies? They don’t want the women to have abortions, they don’t want the doctors to do all they can to make the babies comfortable before they pass on, what is it that they want?

I sent a message to Tuberville asking him some of these questions I have. I doubt he will write back. But it would be really nice if people in the more “legitimate” media could be just a little harsher with this nonsense as well so that we don’t have people going around making this claim — or anyone thinking that homicide is legal.

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ChristianDiscer
224 days ago
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99.9% of this abortion controversy can permanently go away ..... and you know how as well ..... stop having sex ..... or at least use effective birth control methods. Yes, birth control is not 100% - but the "need" for abortions will dramatically go down as the true "need" would be VERY rare.
hannahdraper
224 days ago
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So, first of all — we are not in favor of abortion “anyplace.” I am vehemently opposed to anyone having an abortion or any other medical procedure at the table where I am eating, as it is both rude and unsanitary. Neither I nor anyone else I know would recommend one have an abortion on a rollercoaster, or on a flight to the Maldives, or in the dressing room at Nordstrom Rack. We would all prefer that abortions occur in clean, sterile environments.
Washington, DC

The Supreme Court sees no problem with another Trump presidency.

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The latest decisions out of the Supreme Court, first on when to hear former President Donald Trump’s immunity appeal, then on how to deal with his Colorado ballot disqualification, have made one thing very clear: We need to stop deluding ourselves that a majority of the Supreme Court sees the same political emergency that many of us do in terms of the threat Trump poses to American democracy. Whether it understood or even accounted for the consequences of the decision to delay the criminal case against him and to expedite its decision to keep him on the ballot, the high court ensured this past week that Trump is extremely unlikely to have a jury decide if he engaged in election subversion before voters cast their ballots for the next U.S. president this fall. After failures by outgoing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and now the Supreme Court, it’s clear that if anyone is going to save American democracy, it is going to be the voters.

To briefly recap how we got here: Trump engaged in a multipronged effort to turn himself from a loser in the 2020 presidential election into a winner by pressuring federal, state, and local officials to find “fraud” or “irregularities” that could serve as the basis to send in a bunch of fake electors to Congress. That might have provided a fig leaf for allowing Congress to ignore the will of the voters and subvert the election outcome by declaring Trump the winner. The plan failed. After Trump’s lies inspired a violent invasion of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Congress counted the real Electoral College votes, and Joe Biden was declared the winner. The House of Representatives impeached (again) Trump for his attempted election subversion (again), and 57 senators voted to convict, short of the 67 needed under the Senate’s rules. McConnell pointedly voted no, bringing others with him, arguing that the criminal and civil processes would take care of Trump.

That kicked the ball over to Garland’s court, where he did little—as far as the public is aware—for a long, long, long time. The Justice Department focused instead on the Capitol invaders, not the folks at the top who directed them or who participated in wider attempts to interfere with the peaceful and legal transition of power. Only belatedly did Garland appoint Jack Smith as special counsel to investigate these potential crimes, killing precious time that we all knew was ticking because Trump had said, early on, that he was going to run for president. By choosing to run, Trump put himself in a position to yell “Election interference!” as every charge was brought by a DOJ attorney headed by an appointee of his political rival. (Running also sets himself up for self-pardons or to scuttle ongoing federal cases if he wins the presidency again.)

It sure looks as if Smith moved expeditiously, not only in the election subversion case but also in the Florida classified documents case. But Trump has every incentive to delay, and a key part of his strategy involved taking an “interlocutory” (that is, before trial) appeal in the election interference case, claiming that he is wholly immune from criminal prosecution for official acts as president. (Never mind that many of his acts, such as cajoling the Georgia secretary of state to “find” 11,780 votes, were not in any way part of the official duties of a president, who has no role in running or supervising elections.)

The wheels of justice take time, but in this case the Supreme Court holds all the cards. Smith asked the justices back in December to let this appeal leapfrog over the D.C. Circuit, which sits between itself and the trial court, and the Supreme Court refused. That cost months. Then, after the circuit ruled against Trump, Smith tried to expedite things again.

Many of us wrongly believed that the court would move quickly and let the case get back to trial, on the reality-based theory that the American people deserve to know before voting if Trump, the candidate in 2024, was guilty as the 2020 candidate of trying to steal the election. The case for sending it back for trial is especially strong because Trump’s immunity argument on the merits is loony. As one D.C. Circuit judge noted, it would allow the president to order SEAL Team Six to assassinate political rivals without any consequences.

But the court did not move quickly. Not at all. After 13 days of silence following the end of emergency briefing, it set a schedule allowing almost two months of further briefing, with a likely decision delayed until two months after that, at the end of June. Compare that to Bush v. Gore, in which the Supreme Court went from order to hearing the case to issuing a final decision in just a few days. Or, perhaps more pertinently, compare it to the decision Monday to allow Trump to remain on the ballot, despite arguments for his disqualification under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, after a speed run of just three months.

Despite this timeline of a May or June (or July) SCOTUS decision, it is possible that Trump could go on trial for election subversion before the 2024 election. Indeed, over at Just Security, Norm Eisen, Matt Seligman, and Joshua Kolb game out eight-week trials and 12-week trials with different start dates going far into the fall up to and sometimes even through Election Day. And if you watch the cable news channels, you can see all kinds of legal commentators suggesting that the courts could still move heaven and earth to get this thing to trial by Election Day. The chief justice could release an opinion before dissents are authored. The court could still issue a decision in a matter of days after arguments.

But why should we expect the court to do anything of the sort in light of how it has acted already? Just because the court expedited the Colorado ballot removal case doesn’t mean that it considers the election subversion trial an emergency. We made a massive category error in imagining that at least six justices, the number needed to rubber-stamp the D.C. Circuit Court’s ruling without further argument, saw the need for speed in the Trump immunity case.

And what did the court do on the merits in the disqualification case? It not only held that states cannot enforce the disqualification provisions against an insurrectionist running for federal office. It put a straitjacket on Congress’s ability to enforce it too, raising serious questions about whether even Congress could possibly satisfy the Supreme Court if it attempts to say that Trump cannot serve as president again.

With disqualification off the table, attention turns back to the immunity appeal pending before the court and whether Trump can be rushed to trial before the election. There are a lot of people who are devoting their time to crafting scenarios in which the court might still evince interest in saving itself and the possibility of preserving a functioning democracy after the election by expediting a decision in Trump’s immunity appeal. That’s their prerogative, and we fervently hope they are correct. But let’s be candid about the fact that the court has missed its last best chance to do so: A completed trial before Election Day seems highly unlikely. Rolling Stone reports that Trump’s lawyers literally popped Champagne when the Supreme Court’s scheduling order came out.

Even though Smith has now taken the view that the internal rule keeping the DOJ from bringing charges within 60 days of the election doesn’t apply to criminal cases that have already been instituted, it would be quite extraordinary for a court to make one of the two major political party candidates stand for trial in the middle of the general election season and even during the period of early voting (which begins weeks before Nov. 5, Election Day). Would a court even start a trial before Election Day that wouldn’t be finished until afterward? Such trials are rare. We think of the 2008 case of Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, who wanted to go on trial and clear his name of corruption charges before the election. He went on trial, was convicted, and lost reelection. (A blistering report from the DOJ issued after trial showed that it hid exculpatory evidence from Stevens.)

And even if Judge Tanya Chutkan allows the trial to go forward, Trump has a right to put on his defense, and he would have every incentive to call witnesses and drag out sending the case to the jury until past Election Day.

Do we deserve a Supreme Court that cares about putting the evidence of Donald Trump’s potential criminality before the American people before they head to the polls? We do. Do we have such a court? We do not. Clearly. So, the sole remaining question seems to be whether it is a delusion or a useful exercise to spin out elaborate fantasies in which the justices reverse course to step up. Is producing an elaborate flowchart of a trial that might take place between the first and second presidential debates going to somehow soften and change a justice’s mind?

There are between four and five votes at the court to treat Trump’s presidency as ordinary and his actions in trying to reverse the election results as not a potential national emergency. As Aziz Huq notes, Donald Trump is getting treated infinitely better than most criminal defendants before the court, which doesn’t give a break even to those who are actually innocent of the crimes of which they are accused. We can sit around reading entrails from the court’s scheduling order in the immunity appeal to attempt to parse that breakdown and to hurl our efforts at changing those numbers through hope and limited influence. Or we can thank the court for its inadequate service and move on.

We should move on.

In the end, all this wishcasting about a Supreme Court that is going to save us has material costs. It deludes us into thinking that someone else is going to rush in while we watch and cheer from the stands. Call it Mueller Derangement Syndrome or whatever else you’d like. But let’s stop thinking there’s someone else. The 2024 election, like everything else, all comes down to turnout. That isn’t in the court’s hands. It’s in ours.

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ChristianDiscer
279 days ago
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EXACTLY! So it's agreed SCOTUS was correct, as your last sentence states; "That isn’t in the court’s hands. It’s in ours." --That is, not the state.
dlwright
279 days ago
Giving up on SCOTUS to do what they should is not the same as saying they were correct.
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