Oh yeah you’re right. I just looked it back up and this article says one of the commentators was getting $400k a month, a $100k signing bonus, and additional performance based payment in exchange for I guess 4 videos a week.

I guess according to the allegations only the founders of Tenet Media or whatever it was called knew the money was coming from Russia and they hid it from the talking heads.

But like… How much money do these people have to be getting paid before they have a thought to question where it’s coming from? Dim Tool was apparently getting like $100k a WEEK from them. Like at what point does it start to get suspicious?

Edit: I was misremembering. Apparently it was $100k a week so that’s $400k a month.

From Wikipedia:

In November 2022, Gearbox Entertainment acquired the Risk of Rain IP. Hopoo Games remains an independent studio. Hopoo now states that they are working on other games and projects.

The Steam page for the DLC also lists Gearbox Software as the developer and Gearbox Publishing as the publisher so yeah. Seems accurate.

I would absolutely kill for a Weird Al parody of “Not Like Us” about how deeply and toxicly creepy and weird these rightoid freaks are.

More than just non-conforming generally too. They super quickly embraced that non-conformist image when it came to the masks.

But it feels like just calling them weird triggers a primal fear within them that they’re not really part of the “in-group” after all. It works where other insults don’t because they can’t easily write it off as their enemies simply being jealous of how cool they are basically.

Most likely you’d have to allow the sitting president to appoint an acting justice to serve out the remainder of that justice’s term. Yeah we’d still have the problem of RBG dying under Trump and giving us a 6-3 conservative majority, but if she only had a few years left on her term when she died the damage would at least be limited.

As for what McConnell did to Garland, having term endings scheduled would make that a lot harder. If their terms are staggered such that they always end 1 year and 3 years into each president’s term it destroys the argument that it’s too close to an election and the people should get to decide who makes the appointment. They’d be forced to outright deny the nominee and let the president try again. That’s much harder to maintain.

The idea would essentially be that they wouldn’t all hear every case. You’d randomly assign a panel of say 5 justices from the pool and each panel would hear their own cases.

That way we stop bullshit like what Thomas did in his Dobbs concurrence where he straight up said he thinks cases like Obergefell (gay marriage), Lawrence (can’t criminalize gay sexual acts), and Griswold (contraception) also need to be reversed and all but instructed conservative legal circles to back challenges to those cases. Since there’d be no guarantee that a baseless partisan legal challenge would end up in front of favorable justices they would be much less likely to succeed.

This does potentially introduce a problem with consistency, but such a problem isn’t unsolvable. You could institute a rule that allows for basically an appeal on a SCOTUS ruling to be heard by either a different panel of justices or the entire body as a whole, for example. It obviously wouldn’t be perfect, but we don’t need perfection. We need SCOTUS to not be some unaccountable council of high priests who can act with blatant partisan interest and we can’t do anything about it.

A couple things. First, you might need to freshen up on your Schoolhouse Rock, because this is not true:

The 60 vote thing is true. It’s referring to the filibuster and cloture procedures in the Senate.

When a bill comes up for consideration in the Senate, first it gets brought up for debate. A filibuster is when someone usually opposed to the bill makes this debate go on as long as possible to delay a vote on the bill. This process has been shorthanded a lot in recent years so senators merely need to indicate intent to filibuster so that the Senate can still attend to other business such as committee hearings and the whole chamber isn’t locked in by the filibuster.

Since the entire GOP is bent on obstructing the Democratic party agenda this means in practice that you need to use Cloture to end the filibuster and bring the bill up for a vote. This is why we see so many things crammed into the Budget Reconciliation bill. It’s one of the only bills that can’t be filibustered like that. For pretty much all other things if you don’t have 60 senators willing to vote for Cloture the bill is dead on arrival.

Oh no that’s broken as well. But that same kind of disenfranchisement happens in the Senate. Wyoming per your example has ~600k people and California has ~39 million according to Wikipedia but both get 2 Senators. That’s what, 65x the population but the same voting power? Then there’s also the fact that unless you’ve got 60 votes in the Senate it doesn’t matter what anyone in the House wants it won’t even come up for a vote. Which means there’s a lot of comparatively empty land that can basically just hold the rest of the country hostage. Point is there’s a lot that’s broken in the legislative branch.

I mean it was very smart for the time when the average citizen couldn’t possibly know enough to make an informed decision and news that could change who someone would vote for could take weeks to arrive somewhere.

But let’s not kid ourselves. Both the Electoral College and the Senate were specifically created to thwart the will of The People if it was too inconvenient for the elites. What was that quote about the Senate being the “cooling saucer of democracy” or something like that?

I think I agree with that. The media, especially the more right leaning media will always find something to attack Democrats over.

It seems like a bit of a stretch to me as well. But that seems to me to be the thought process of the people who are advocating for an open convention rather than Biden just endorsing Harris and letting her pick a new VP.

Maybe I worded something poorly there and caused some miscommunication. I was responding to someone equating unverified with made up. What I was trying to say is that it’s unverified right now because the only statements on it were from what seems to be the same primary source(s) that wish to remain anonymous. That doesn’t necessarily mean the reporting is false, only that there hasn’t been a separate source saying the same thing. I wasn’t trying to say “it’s true actually, they just have to say it’s unverified because no one wants to put their name on saying it”

I then separately wanted to explain what seems to be the thought process behind people saying that Biden wouldn’t endorse Kamala going into the convention if he dropped out.

To my knowledge it’s only unverified because the people saying it are doing so on the condition of anonymity. The idea seems to be that they want to go into an open convention with Biden at most saying something like “I have the utmost faith in the delegates to pick the best candidate to be our nominee,” because if he’s too involved in the choice whoever ends up being the nominee will have that looming specter of the narrative of Biden’s cognitive decline haunting them. “How could he pick a good replacement when he doesn’t even know where he is?” and all that.

There it is. Yeah that tracks with the general Republican playbook. Sell off any and every part of government that business interests could even remotely squeeze money out of no matter how detrimental it would be for society.

Doesn’t AccuWeather also depend on NOAA data? I was under the impression that they basically just parse the stuff that NOAA/NWS puts out and make people pay to have convenient access to it. Am I misremembering something?

Yep. Now I’m not gonna lie, I didn’t think they’d actually fully overturn Roe in the Dobbs decision either. I figured upholding the 15 week or whatever ban with maybe some meaningless language about exceptions beyond that time was the most likely outcome from Dobbs. But I wasn’t at all surprised when it happened. I knew as soon as they had a good excuse to do it they’d overturn Roe.

For a couple reasons. Some cynically wanted to continue to use abortion as a political football. Codifying Roe in any meaningful way in their minds would have meant they had to find a new wedge issue to drive turnout and donations. We saw this on the other side when SCOTUS actually overturned it and the right didn’t know what to do with themselves for a while.

Then maybe in part because of the former, there were a bunch of people that naively didn’t believe they’d actually entirely destroy Roe. They genuinely thought the worst that could possibly happen was some minor restrictions at the margins. So those people were not motivated enough to actually do something about it.

Of course. It’s pretty much just to get headlines and for people to campaign on. But that’s really all you can hope for when Republicans control the House and won’t actually take up any meaningful oversight.

Idk, if I had to guess I’d say probably something like renting out an entire resort for the duration plus whatever they did there.