Senate The US Politics 2.0 Discussion Thread

Trump managed to piss both anti-abortion and pro-choice group activists with his abortion opinion. He claimed that he he favors a states' rights compromise whereby individual states should vote on measures or legislatures to determine what the states' abortion policies But he supports Project 2025, which has endorsed a nationwide abortion ban. So, he is ****ing up his own chances perhaps. We shall see. The pro-abortion people don't believe him and still support him. CatholicVote and Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America still support him. These people are thirsty for anti-abortion policies and they must be stopped.

 

This may help keep Arizona blue. Be better if Democrats actually had an agenda to help people they could campaign on, but pointing out that SCOTUS may do the same thing nationwide come June with the Comstock Act seems to be all they've got at the moment.

 

I am reading a book on Enron as well as watching a documentary titled Enron: smartest guys in the room. And man the bushes loved that oil money. Which isn’t surprising that they were corrupt as hell. It’s just astounding to learn how corrupt they are. But then again almost every politician is corrupt at some levels. The Bush family just made it an art with Enron.

I am writing about Enron for my business capstone paper and 900 words are dedicated to the bush families entanglements with Ken Lay out of a 3,500 word paper lol.

 

The Left-Wing Authoritarians Shutting Down the Democratic Party:
Liberals would justifiably freak out if the right was doing this to Biden.

http://web.archive.org/web/20240409...rians-shutting-down-the-democratic-party.html

Uhh... Yeah?

 

"You don't believe the people you view as bad should have rights" - Conservative, after thinking the people he views as bad shouldn't have rights.

 

Erm. He literally makes that point. That’s part of his argument for why it’s a bad thing to do.

 

Any comment about Yellen yelling about the fact that the Chinese market is a bit too competitive when it comes to clean energy ?

 

Another spotlight that needs to be made: the Arizona Supreme Court was made conservative by... just adding Supreme Court justices to the state Supreme Court, aka "the thing that absolutely can't be done with the US Supreme Court, that would be wrong"

 

It's funny that the major complaint is the PRC is subsidizing solar panels and electric vehicles (President Xi, please sell me a $15,000 car) as though the US doesn't do the same thing routinely and could use the same tactics to make its "green" industry "competitive."

US capital and the US government gutted manufacturing capacity and moved it to China over the past 40 years, and now they're whining that China is better at making and selling things.

 

Yes, that's pretty much where I was getting at.

It feels like the celebration of free market only works as long as it benefits us.

 

Im sure some of it is a lot of people worked so hard to convince everyone that it is literally impossible for renewables to be competitive and China is ruining it.

 

I should be getting just a massive tax credit this year for installing solar in last tax year...

So you are spot on there...

 

But without our fossil fuel overlords (pbut) green energy would kill everyone. According to them.

 

A good thing that might come of GOP dysfunction:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/co...aos-fighting-key-surveillance-tool-rcna147175

 

Spoiler: MTG being MTG

There is little doubt in my mind that this woman (if you want to call her that since that, to me, is an insult to all women) will eventually be SOTH. She will simply keep asking to speak with the manager until they finally make her the manager. Then, she will complain about herself.

 

She'll be what?

 

If she becomes the Manager, then she'll complain about the Customers. That's how that works.

 

@DarkGingerJedi MTG already does that. She complains all the time about anyone who isn't in the Trump cult. God knows my wife and I, being public educators, are up high on MTG's complaint and really enemies list, which I must admit we wear as a badge of honor. That won't change when she becomes Speaker. She will complain about former speakers "ruining" everything for her and her saying the quiet apart aloud, aka accidentally outing herself as the problem.

 

Get the lettuce head ready. Didn't think there could be a worse Speaker then Kevin McCarthy. I was wrong.

 

MTG is so stupid that if she becomes Speaker, that she will end up getting voted out herself.

 

If Jim Jordan couldn't get the job, no way Marge ever gets it.

 

Shes going to introduce the vote to get rid of herself and then vote herself out probably.

 

To pick up on your earlier theme, this again shows us the truth of Republican politics. Donald Trump was complimenting this guy on Friday. We've not even made it a full 4 days before he's distancing himself. They all run scared from whomever is willing to do the stupidest, most conspiratorial, vilest thing imaginable. Often times that's Trump, but he'll just as often yield to whatever idiot happens to outdo him at a given moment. Just like the Congressional Republicans, even though he knows this is completely self-destructive, he's too scared to say that directly and so dances away from the topic, letting it seem more and more credible that deposing the Speaker moves forward despite him not wanting it to happen. Meanwhile, their base is more and more radicalized because all sides are too scared to say something that might contradict how radical they're already thought to be.

 

I think the OJ Simpson trial covers a lot more about a prosecution that didn't handle it well and that jurors are ruling on the case provided to them.
Example points from attorney Scott Turow:
"And when it takes you six months to make your case, the jury is going to be left with either one of two impressions: Either your evidence is overwhelming, or in point of fact it's not, and you're laboring day by day to make it appear to be better than it is. And unfortunately in this case, it was the latter impression that the jury got left with."

"So it's not very hard to understand that the suspicion of the L.A. police department in the minority community was enormous, and I think that the only way to have won that case once decisions were made that led to having an almost exclusively minority jury was to be able to stand in front of that jury and say: "I know what you've heard about the L.A. police; I've heard it, too. But I'm going to show you that's not the case here; that's not how we're prosecuting this case. Everything's on the up-and-up." Instead they went in the complete opposite direction."

And Law Professor Peter Arenella:
"There was no reason for the prosecution to rush to a trial. They could have started a grand jury investigation and then carefully got all their ducks in a row that looked at not only the physical evidence, but other evidence that could have been gathered. Evidence that was gathered for the subsequent civil trial could have been gathered in a reliable timely fashion for the criminal prosecution."

Given how many commentators noted also that the prosecution was putting black women on the jury thinking that they'd be sympathetic to trying to make a case that domestic violence was a proof to murder (Law Prof Donald Jones: " See there were two cases, and you can't try two cases, you can only try one case. And the domestic violence case had tremendous appeal as a spectacle, [but] it had no value as evidence. Thousands and thousands cases of domestic violence occur every year, but a very much smaller number of murders occur. You can't convict a person because they're a member in a group, that amounts to a profile."). Looking at a jury where the presence of black women was considered key, and then in analogy dismissing them as oblivious to real world events seems to skip over that one of the factors may well have been that they were all too aware of real world events, it was just the daily real world events of a system that is often prejudicial towards black men.

That sort of point comes from both Prof Kimberle Williams Crenshaw ("I think there are a lot of reasons. Some of them have to do basically with what we know about the African American community in general, not necessarily distrusting the police, but not giving them trust either. And I think that was somewhat across the board for all African Americans, and maybe a lot of urban dwellers in Los Angeles.

I think second, if the idea was that the case was going to turn around certain images, namely that [it was] Nicole [Brown Simpson] being the angelic, lovely victim and O.J. being the savage bestial monster of a killer, that that kind of framework wasn't really going to work unless you could get a set of jurors who would identify with Nicole as the angelic victim. And for all sorts of reasons, that wasn't a narrative that was going to play well to a lot of different jurors, but particularly not to African American women jurors. They would see that as being a particular kind of race and gender card, if we want to use that language, that the prosecution was willing to play.") and Simpson defense team member Alan Dershowitz ("I think [prosecuting attorney] Marcia Clark believed that gender would trump race with black women, and it turned out that wasn't the case; that many of these women identified much more with their brothers and fathers and uncles, who had seen police harassment. They were black first and women second.")

That's not the picture of people oblivious to "real world events".

Prof Charles J. Ogletree did frame it as a prosecution that was in a bad situation: "A [third] was that the scrutiny of their evidence -- all these flaws [in it] were known. How can you put on this DNA evidence when you know it's going to be seriously challenged by experts? How can you put on this forensic evidence when Dr. Henry Lee, the most noteworthy criminalist of his time, had grave doubts about it? How could you put on Mark Fuhrman as a credible, central eyewitness to critical details in the case -- critical details -- when you knew that he had many flaws in the way that he thought, his views about African Americans and his conduct in many years in law enforcement?"

Or as attorney Robert Ball puts it, as he represented one of the jurors, "Brenda said that they just could not buy the connection between O.J. Simpson having previously engaged in domestic violence and him murdering his ex-wife. That was too big of a leap. And she couldn't understand why they spent so much time trying to make that connection. [The jury] just didn't buy it. They didn't buy the lack of blood or other physical evidence in O.J. Simpson's home. She was of the belief -- and many jurors were of the belief -- that whoever committed this heinous murder had to be covered with blood. Well, in the trial it came out that O.J. Simpson came home and took a shower, and the LAPD did Luminol tests to check for blood in the shower. And they took loose his plumbing and pipes, and they found no [traces of] blood. And it was those sort of things that just in the minds of Brenda and the jurors, [was] enough to make them believe there was a reasonable doubt."

It's on the jurors to rule on the case provided to them, not on what they otherwise think the case should be. And a bad case, or a prosecution relying on untrustworthy people, is going to allow reasonable doubt to start to show up. That's not on the jury.

And with a jury where 10/12 were women and 9/12 were black, the "they're just too ignorant of the real world" feels like a really questionable take.

(All comments can be found from PBS:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/oj/themes/prosecution.html )