I've not rewatched Voyager since its original airing, but my recollection is that they had been playing up a Seven/Doctor pairing for a while and then Chakotay just swept in out of the blue as the Designated Guy in the final episodes. I always wondered if there was pressure against pairing off the two most "synthetic" members of the crew as being too much like having them "keep to their kind?"

In Trump's case it is usually to do with his own inflated claims of rally attendance rather than any firm polling data. Donny really knows how to inflame his base, but his party's consistent underperformance in by-year elections suggests that doesn't translate into general election success.

The only people who didn't take that bet were ones who didn't see the point of putting money on 1:1.01 odds.

So this is something that I already have to deal with at the state and local level, in the form of building and fire codes. Most such codes are developed by standards organizations. Is it a little bullshit that these organizations are able to maintain copyright control over parts of the law? Yes, but also organizations like the International Code Council and the National Fire Protection Association generally do a very good job developing these documents, and the current state of affairs is such that these organizations and other like ANSI and ISO are de-facto part of the fabric of law in the specialized areas they write standards and tests for. Requiring their publications to be freely and publicly available will actually be an improvement on the current state of affairs, where much of their work is locked behind paywalls.

After leaving the church, I've always found Saul/Paul's conversion story a bit suspect. So you mean to tell me that you're just out on the road one day, going from town to town persecuting Jesus-cultists, and a beam of light from heaven strikes you and tell you that what you actually need to do is join the Jesus-cultists, but spend the rest of your life assiduously walking back every radical thing they believe? Suuuure. I think maybe ol' Saul just saw a movement with a power vacuum at the top and thought he should be one to fill it.

Jumping all the way back to 1954 in Lee Atwater's infamous timeline of the Southern Strategy and hoping the 2024 electorate will go with them is a bold strategy. We'll see how it plays out for them.

There's a certain sweet irony in the "token DEI hire" being the overwhelming and enthusiastic consensus pick to take over the campaign. Not that I expect Republican commentators to make the connection, but at least I can enjoy it.

An Eisenhower-era deportation program that set up the current dynamic of militarized deportation and border control.

I also grew up in Missouri, though I live in Kansas now, and I know several people who fit that description.

The thing that kills me about Missouri is that it used to be a competitive state for moderate Democrata, but the rural chunks of the state fell victim to right wing populism during the Tea Party wave in 2010 and now there's a whole generation of Missourians whose defining political characteristic is rancorous hate for "liberal" city people. Kansas' politics aren't great, either, but at least the rural voters care about farm issues here... In Missouri, particularly south of I-70 where the only real industry they ever had was lead mining, all that's left is the hate they've been fed from right wing assholes.

Not even that. The 22nd Amendment states that a person can only be elected to the office twice, unless they've served two or more years of somebody's else's term, in which case they can only be elected once. Five months away from the next inauguration, it would change nothing if Harris had to take over the Presidency for some reason.

This psycho was just in the news for attaching her Democratic opponent for "raising a groomer" because one of her grandkids is trans. She makes Marjorie Taylor Green look polite by comparison, and the shame of it is that, given how state-level politics have been trending in Missouri, she's got a decent shot of winning in the general just because of the magic (R).

I think that's giving the media too much credit. The day of the debate I was honestly feeling optimistic -- All Biden really needed to do was talk sense and dunk on the guy who'd just become the first Presidential candidate to also become a convicted felon, and the rules had been set to cut Trump off at the knees by muting his mic when it wasn't his turn to talk. The night should have been a cake walk, but instead Biden came off like a tired and confused old man.

The level of despair I felt the next morning cannot be understated -- I even started to lay the groundwork to emigrate out of the US if necessary. Having Biden step aside and make way for someone more able to fight Trump is a desperately-needed breath of fresh air.

Are there a lot of people who individually hold chaotic, mutually-incompatible political opinions? Sure! I don't think you can boil their ultimate decision-making process down to a box-ticking exercise, where if a candidate represents sufficient number of demographics they hold bigoted views about they automatically vote for Default Old White Guy. For example --

I can’t even tell you how many people had both Bernie and Trump as their top two candidates in the 2016 and 2020 elections.

-- that's very clearly low-information voters dissatisfied with the status quo, who would happily glom onto anybody promising to sufficiently shake things up. Sure, Trump and Bernie had wildly-divergent platforms, but Joe Sixpack -- who probably doesn't feel like he has a dog in the fight on any of the particulars like abortion or finance law and assumes anybody sticking it to the broader political class is a net positive for him -- doesn't see much practical difference, and is so little affected by the bigotry of the right that none of it bothers him, so of course the two candidates presenting themselves as outsiders with a plan to shake up Washington are basically interchangeable.

This was something I struggled with during the early years of the Obama presidency. At least initially, while the avenues of attack that right wing demagogues deployed against him were unique in their racist overtones, the volume and intensity wasn't all that much different from what was directed against Clinton or Gore.

Then, as the years went on, they went progressively more insane and vitriolic. It turns out, I think, that it's a lot easier to get a casual racist on your side if you can use the upending of the racial status quo to activate them.

I just don't think that's a very big demo. Anybody who's suddenly motivated to keep the White House white and estrogen-free is more than likely a foaming-at-the-mouth MAGAt, who was already motivated to put their guy back in office. There will of course be a few people who fit that description, and probably many more diet racists and sexists who will just stay home if their options are Trump or a "left-coast liberal woman," but I don't think they make up a significant-enough proportion of the voting public to outweigh that latter group you mention, who couldn't muster much enthusiasm for Biden but are amped-up to vote for somebody younger, healthier, and more dynamic.

Obama won by healthy margins in '08 and '12, and Hillary -- the least likeable candidate that's made it to the top of the Democratic ticket since Dukakis -- still won the popular vote. I think the people who would vote against a black woman for President were never going to vote for a Democrat in the first place, and given the general aura of relief and enthusiasm I've seen in left wing spaces since the announcement I think Harris is going to be riding a wave of support from the left, even if half of it is just from people who are glad they don't have to hold their noses to support a doddering octogenarian because the alternative is fascism.

The real galaxy brain moment here is that there's a window of time after a Democratic politician goes "over the top" (to borrow a WWI turn of phrase) during which undecided voters evaluate them on their own merits, before right wing media outlets can calibrate their smear campaigns and really start eating into their favorables. Kamala's been out of the public eye for long enough that the clock is at least partially reset. AOC, on the other hand, is The Devil Herself to the right and they've been attacking her for years. Better to pull a rising star who is unknown enough to similarly benefit from the right-wing hate machine's warm-up period, and being enough progressive bona fides to the ticket to cushion some of the criticisms of Harris's prosecutorial history.

Yes, but the Obama "Hope" poster is probably the most famous piece of campaign graphic design in at least 50 years.

o7 Vile Rat, but grr gons

I have a friend who had a case before Cannon and told me that she was both one of the stupidest and the meanest judges she's ever dealt with, which is saying something since she practices primarily in Florida. As a representative of the caliber of judges the Federalist Society has to offer, Cannon is pretty damning... and if we get four more years of Trump, the federal bench is going to be stacked with jurists even worse than her.