Not to change the subject, or anything, but here’s a petition to nominate Anita Hill (LOL):
https://www.change.org/p/nominate-anita-hill-for-supreme-court-justice?recruiter=40939820&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink

bnw wrote:

Will never know without an autopsy. No autopsy in the unanticipated death of such an important government official. The surprise death of a man comprising one ninth of one of the three branches of the federal government doesn’t warrant an autopsy?

I would think it would, yes. Though I have no knowledge of how those decisions are made. I don’t know who was at the ranch, how many were there, what Scalia’s last day was like, what health issues he had, who found him, how it was handled.

I will say that suffocating somebody with a pillow is not a very professional way to go about killing someone, and carries a significant risk of failure, as well as the likelihood of leaving signs of struggle that would invite an autopsy and an investigation. I would think that – you know – assassins would have a better plan than that, and probably wouldn’t leave a pillow on his head.

I am actually starting to think that this is an opportunity for Obama to nominate – not a moderate – but a liberal to the court. The Republicans are in a bad, bad place right now. First of all, they lost Scalia. He was a lock as a conservative vote. His subtraction just made the court more liberal. I mean…that’s math. In a court where a lot of votes were 5-4, they have now just become 5-3, or 4-4 at worst. And a 4-4 vote means the lower court ruling is upheld, and the lower courts are currently more liberal than conservative. So the stay the SC just put on the environmental initiative would get through with only the 8 justices there now, and in fact, I expect it will be tweaked and sent back up because of that very opening. So they are under pressure to move.

Also, the Republicans have more senate seats up for grabs this year, and several of them come from moderate to slightly liberal states, and none of those guys have come out and said they are playing the roadblock game. It could kill them.

Now, on the positive side of the ledger for Rs, freezing this debate is red meat for the culture war types. But the problem is that Citizens United is unpopular with most Americans, and most Americans don’t want Roe overturned. So if these firebrands are going to lock down this nomination, they are not only going to fire up their base, they are going to fire up some democrats who are usually lazy about voting. There were 3.6 million fewer votes for Obama in 2012 than 2008, but this could bring more people to the polls, and greater voter turnout favors democrats. And if he nominates Eric Holder, it could bring out the black vote.

Meanwhile this game of Russian Roulette doesn’t have any payoff if the next president is a democrat. They could potentially damage their hold in congress by forcing a stalemate over this issue, all gambling that they get to send a Republican to the white house to make a conservative nomination. It’s a gamble they have to take, and it is more likely to bite them in the ass than to come out the way they want.

Additionally, they have already announced that their opposition is purely political obstructionism. No matter who the nominee is, their opposition to him/her has already been defined as politics by their party leadership. So even if they have some “real” reason to oppose Obama’s nomination, they have already ensured that their objections can’t be taken at face value.

The death of Scalia has hurt conservatives pretty badly. They are between a rock and a hard right place.

The election becomes a referendum on the President versus a do-nothing congress, progress versus obstructionism. The Rs cannot win that. And most Americans are going to reject the implied argument that we need a cultural conservative on the court. Americans have moved to more liberal social views, so the Rs are just on a losing track.

I think nominating a liberal justice will absolutely FORCE the Rs to take this stand, including senators up for re-election. There are 5 R senators in toss up races right now in states that Obama carried in 2012. Obama can pressure those seats by making it harder for them to break ranks with the R. They will either have to vote for the nominee, or face a backlash in their state.

I don’t think Obama will do that because he’s mostly tried to play nice with these assholes for the past 7 years, but even if he nominates a moderate, the Rs are in bad shape.

Man, I am getting jacked up about this election cycle, I must say. All the entrails I am casting on the fire are telling me conservatives are going to get their knuckles rapped pretty hard.

I’ve never liked O’Rourke. Yeah, he’s a rightie libertarian, a group that as a leftie libertarian myself, I would think I would have more affinity for, but of all possibilities in the political spectrum, I find rightie libertarians to be the most annoying by far. I wonder where they are going this election with Paul long gone. Kasich, I guess.

To the rest of the world Donald Trump seems like a joke. And, please, let’s hope he is. Trump is a prank the American electorate is pulling on the American political establishment.

Like many jokes, Trump is a manifestation of discomfort and anxiety.

This is Karl Rove’s and Roger Ailes’ cynicism having now grown large enough to bite the Republicans in the ass. They have deliberately seeded anger, resentment, and fear through Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, Beck, O’Reilly, and the FOX news network in order to line up this voting bloc, and guess what? They now have a fully grown angry, resentful, and xenophobic group of voters on their hands who are dissatisfied with all the empty promises. The hardline cultural conservatives are feeling the same way. For more than 30 years, the corporate politicians have been giving lip service to abortion and gays and illegal immigration and Big Government et cetera, and then not doing much of anything about it. Those people are pissed now. Trump isn’t a joke. He is the embodiment of the disenfranchisement of the uneducated white males who have been deliberately targeted with this propaganda and USED by the Republican party to support their money grab for the 1%. They seeded this monster, fertilized it, and used it for decades to consolidate their rigging of the economic system, and now that bloc is getting out of control and demanding delivery of these crackpot solutions they’ve been sold as reasonable solutions.

Interestingly, FOX News itself has a fault line trembling through the middle of it right now. Murdoch is trying to line up succession both to himself and to Ailes, and it isn’t going well. Ailes ended up getting a contract extension, but he is reportedly much more scattered these days, and FOX isn’t receiving a clear cut set of marching orders like it used to. That’s part of the reason why FOX hasn’t delivered a clear Trump message. FOX is for Rubio, evidently, but without a Trump plan, it is floundering. There is also a schism between the News side and the Programming/business side with the leaders of those two divisions openly hating each other and rarely speaking, and publicly exemplified by the little cat fight between George Will and Bill O’Reilly. FOX is more likely to repair their rift than the Republican party is, but the conservative branches in this country are starting to turn on each other, and that can only be good for the country.

I am as “into” it as I have been since W finally left office. I have been taking a vacation from politics to a large extent post-Bush since I was worn out, and also because I pretty much expected mainstream Cruise Control under Obama which is what we got. But at least he wasn’t out doing abnormally sociopathic things like W.

But I am intrigued by this election. The establishment people are facing rejection by a large number of voters. This is the storyline. Both Rs and Ds are pissed at the establishment – as they have been for a long time – but this time is different. There are large numbers in each party that are demanding changes to the status quo. The shit-stirrers are the candidates with passionate followings. They may still lose out, but the threat is real, and I think is going to have consequences.

I had hoped with Obama – best case scenario – that he could be transformative in the way that Reagan was. That he could start the pendulum swinging back away from conservative excesses. He wasn’t. But he may have at least put brakes on the rightward swing.

The establishment Rs are getting zero love. One of them may still win, but it will clearly be because he is not Donald Trump more than because he is inspiring.

Hillary has some love, but there’s no passion. The only sign of passion coming out of her campaign is coming from her supporters attacking Sanders’ followers with all the petulance of someone who feels like some kids cut in line in front of her.

The passion squares up behind Sanders and Trump only. They are the ones promising changes in the system, and come across as honest rather than calculated. Hillary just isn’t able to fire anyone up with her rallying cry of “Hey, I can make incremental progress!” and the Rs are all just making each other look completely unfit for the Oval Office.

Something is happening here. And it may get swallowed up under the SuperPACs in the long run, but the establishment needs to take control of this by the first week of March, or there are going to be fireworks this summer and into the Fall.

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/fnb7mg/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-the-human-dissentipede

nittany ram wrote:

Zooey wrote:

snowman wrote:

Bill Murray looks like a zombie.

And I can’t imagine he is a fan of the Jaguars. Why would he be? He was born in Illinois, and lives in Chicago.

How can you make that statement on a board full of nomads?

I was born in PA and live in VT yet I am a Rams fan.

Pa Ram and JackP were born in PA and live in Reading yet they are Rams fans.

zn was born in Heaven but was cast out and after a few millennia in Hell moved to Maine yet he is a Rams fan.

There’s more to fandom than geography, or you would be a Raiders or 49’ers fan.

Oh.

Right.

Let me amend that by saying there’s *usually* more to fandom than geography.

Certainly.

Yet the Rams EXISTED when you became a football fan.

The Jaguars did NOT exist when Bill Murray became a football fan. And why would a Bears fan switch to become a fan of the Jaguars? No how, no way, not one instance of that happening may be found in the history of mankind.

From Wikipedia:

Murray is a fan of several Chicago professional sports teams, especially the Chicago Cubs, Chicago Bears and the Chicago Bulls.[48] (He was once a guest color commentator for a Cubs game during the 1980s.)[49] Murray is an avid Quinnipiac University basketball fan, where his son served as head of basketball operations. Murray is a regular fixture at home games. He cheered courtside for the Illinois Fighting Illini’s game against the 2004-05 Arizona Wildcats in the Regional Final game in Chicago. He is a fixture at home games of those teams when in his native Chicago. After traveling to Florida during the Cubs playoff run to help “inspire” the team (Murray joked with Cubs slugger Aramis Ramírez he was very ill and needed two home runs to give him the hope to live),[50] he was invited to the champagne party in the Cubs’ clubhouse when the team clinched the NL Central in late September 2007, along with fellow actors John Cusack, Bernie Mac, James Belushi, and former Cubs player Ron Santo. Murray appears in Santo’s documentary, This Old Cub. In 2006, Murray became the sixth recipient of Baseball Reliquary’s annual Hilda Award,[51] established in 2001 “to recognize distinguished service to the game by a fan.”[52]