The House can always impeach if it wants, but nothing could mandate they do so in advance.

Right. Jane Roberts here is obviously cashing in on the implied access and influence of being the chief justice's wife, and that is properly corrupt and should be seen as corrupt. But that doesn't mean it's "hey honey, this case is one of my clients, wink wink nudge nudge." It doesn't have to be.

I don't think there are cases where a justice is flipping their vote because they're making money off that particular outcome. They're corrupt in other ways both pecuniary and ideological. But it's not case by case vote-buying, and framing the problem that way is a mistake because you won't find it.

If white people in Mississippi voted Republican at the same rate as white people in Louisiana (about 73% vs. 81%), it would be a tied tossup state. At the same level as Georgia or South Carolina, it would be a safe blue state.

Simpson "I don't recall saying good luck."

A Cabinet firing announced in a tweet by the White House comms director is new kind of humiliating snub. You can almost appreciate the pettiness of that.

Sure, but is he really a tech CEO until he tells us about the brand new but highly-specific form of Aldous Huxley dystopia he hopes to imprison us in?

I'm guessing they were sold after the whiff of grapeshot.

Definitely some real swing of Swalwell support to Becerra, but still the data's very limited and very noisy. Any combination of the top five candidates taking the top two spots would be plausible, except that Hilton's very likely to be one.

The Minions were convicted at Nuremberg but escaped hanging because how do you make a noose work on that.

That doesn't contradict that this poll shows a four-way tie for second place.

We didn't on coins for a long time, it was all allegorical figures until the Lincoln penny in 1909.

These polls are all over the place because so many candidates are clustered somewhere in the teens. Doesn't really tell you anything more than who's in the double digits and who isn't (and what result the sponsor wanted, if applicable). Effectively meaningless in telling top two from 3rd or 4th.

I admittedly haven't kept on my Minions-verse lore, but I distinctly recall they were shown as having been frozen in ice from Napoleon to the present day, as an obvious way to dodge the implications of them "looking for another evil boss to serve" in the 20th C.

Dictator Perpetuo That understanding did not originate in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787. It goes all the way back to Rome. Like America, Rome was a people consciously rooted in having overthrown a monarchy. In 44 BC, Julius Caesar had his portrait placed on the coinage of the Republic. It was a shocking statement. Roman coins had never before carried a living man’s portrait at the Rome mint. Much less one bearing his newly claimed, unprecedented title: dictator perpetuo, the dictator for life. To put your face on the money was to claim a status above that of a citizen, to assert that you were not first among equals but something closer to a sovereign. It was emblematic of his concentration of power, consolidating his rule into an open autocracy. Within weeks of issuing the “CAESAR DICT PERPETVO” coin, he was assassinated. Though the Roman Republic fell, the ideal survived. Public institutions exist apart from the men who lead them, and conflating the two is the hallmark of tyranny. That ideal profoundly shaped the generation that designed the American constitutional order. The Founders created a Senate, placed it on a “Capitol Hill,” and embraced neoclassical architecture. They modeled their concept of civic virtue on Cincinnatus, the farmer-general who, having defeated a foreign invader, relinquished his dictatorial powers after just 15 days and went home. The Federalist Papers were published under the pseudonym “Publius,” while others posed as “Cato” or “Brutus.” Washington’s voluntary departure from the presidency after two terms, and his earlier resignation of his military commission, were modeled on that Roman example.

When Congress debated the Coinage Act of 1792, an initial version of the bill called for the president’s portrait to appear on U.S. coins. Washington rejected the idea, and James Madison successfully had it removed, arguing that stamping the president’s head on the money was un-republican.

"Time is not my adversary" insisted the man a few weeks from his 80th birthday.

“Every program that carries the president’s name sends a message that the benefits of government flow from him personally. Not from Congress, or the Constitution, or our collective project of self-governance.”

From Res Publica to the United States of Trump This president's vulgar self-glorification is revolting to a self-governing people and must not stand

A deep dive on the history of our Roman-inspired republican symbolism and why Trump's desecrations of it are worse than merely being cringe-inducing.

Gil Duran tweet: TLDR: Fascism in response to Palantir's long fascists screed on X.

"Your Account is Suspended" Message on X

The CEO of Palantir posted a fascist manifesto on X.

I pointed out that it was fascist—which resulted in a permanent suspension from X (my second time!).

So, when you hear the tweeters complaining that BlueSky is intolerant, remember why many of us came here in the first place.

Wrote about a court blocking *actual* jawboning by the Trump admin... and how the people who spent the last 5 years screaming about how supposed Biden admin jawboning (for which they presented no evidence since it didn't happen) was the worst thing ever, are completely silent about this case.

That'd be good. Even better: officeholders flatly shouldn't be able to sue for defamation at all. It's seditious libel by other means. If it's really that important, if your personal vindication outweighs the public interest against officials punishing criticism, then pursue it as a private citizen.

And of course FBI director is itself also an impeachable office.

Over here knitting my list like Madame Defarge.

The FBI director filing even a hypothetically meritorious defamation suit while in office would still be so improper as to be a same-day firing offense.

There's been a lot of talk about how the war was stupid, incompetent, illegal, etc., and that's all true of course. But perhaps not enough saying head on that Trump "lost" a war with Iran. I get why politicians would be skittish on that, but a) it's unambiguously true, and b) Americans hate losing.

Slotkin won on the same ballot and nobody reckons her to be left of Harris.

Yeah, Michigan is the only state where it's maybe arguably true, as in the numbers can at least get you into the rough ballpark of plausibility. But even there it's a debatable tossup at best, leaning toward probably not.

It's a useful fiction if what you want for the intra-Dem debate is either to punch left by blaming them or else drag left by insisting they made the difference, but it's a fiction either way. She could have won that whole pile of votes, which in the grand scheme wasn't many, and still would've lost.

Both sides of this are arguing over a fictional premise: that Harris lost because of votes withheld on the disgruntled left flank. The data's just not there to support that. There were of course some, mostly on Gaza. But not enough, on any credible estimate, to account for the margin of defeat.

I know there's Dubai and such, but I wouldn't have guessed there was this big a market for going on a cruise in the Persian Gulf.