The optics on this are abysmal. I get that he’s trying to be consistent with party ideology any time there is a shooting where someone dies, but we’ve got an election in 4 months and talking about banning guns of any kind gets conservatives motivated to turn out.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. This is red meat for the base, but that’s what we need right now after weeks of feeling deflated.

It isn’t. The framers of the constitution believed that judges would put the letter of the law ahead of their own personal convictions and conduct themselves honorably by recusing themselves from cases where there could be even a hint of impropriety or conflict of interest. I’m sure they also assumed that a judge who ignored those social norms and committed such a nakedly partisan act would be held to account by Congress, who would have a collectively vested interest is using their constitutional power as a check against the Judicial.

Unfortunately, we live in a timeline where loyalty to one’s political party comes ahead of all else, and Congress would rather cede their ability to govern entirely than turn against “one of their own”. Even if the result is objectively bad for everyone. The failure of the framers to codify these rules are exactly why we are in this situation today, and nothing short of a constitutional convention will fix it at this point.

Why does a farce like this need to drag on for four days? Just to have people go up on stage and puff up these authoritarians? Does anybody actually care about anything that goes on during these events other than the nomination?

It will never cease to amaze me that someone can go up on stage, say “the political elite and the billionaires are screwing you guys over”, and then point to Trump and say “Vote for this guy, though.”. The complete lack of self-awareness is baffling.

“Listen to him”

Why? Why the fuck would you say that, man?

I gave Biden a pass for the “Doing the goodest job” flub during the ABC News interview, because how do you answer that question on the spot without sounding like a nihilist? Obviously, he should have said that trust in the system is important and that checks and balances will still be a thing even if he doesn’t win, but he opted for the feel-good sentiment of “At least we tried our best!”.

But for this? The question was “Trump is already tweeting about you mixing up Vice President Harris with his name and citing it as evidence that you are not fit for office. How do you respond to that?” and he says listen to him. WTF man. Biden is his own worst enemy right now. He could have walked off stage and said nothing.

The very existence of Sarah Palin might give that theory a run for it’s money. She almost single-handedly tanked McCain’s election chances back when people doing bizarre and outrageous shit would actually convince voters that they were *checks notes* unqualified for the position.

“You sit and wait for hours and then are notified that the plane won’t leave, that they have no idea when they will. Where ticket prices have tripled. They don’t have the pilots to fly the planes, they don’t seek qualified air traffic controllers, and they just don’t know what the hell they are doing.”

Man who flies exclusively on private jets complains about public air travel.

Trump must really think we’re all fucking idiots.

Trump lies so often that it’s no longer newsworthy to point it out. Even if Biden had debated well, the media probably wouldn’t have even scratched 5% of Trump’s falsehoods in a fact check and just focused on soundbytes of Trump saying dumb shit as usual.

It doesn’t fucking help that the right have been repeating a lie about Biden having dementia and, regardless of what the actual cause of his poor performance was on debate night, he put wind in their sails and essentially “proved them right all along” with his hoarse voice and incoherent train of thought. The seed has been planted and now some will start to wonder that if the Republicans were right about that, then what other farfetched nonsense could they also be right about?

It’s been 12 days since the debate and people are still talking about how bad it was. I’m pissed that the Biden team is treating this as if it’s no big deal when this one event was an absolute torpedo to his campaign that he might not recover from if he can’t convince both the Democratic establishment and the Democratic electorate that he is capable of doing another 4 years.

I’m worried about Biden’s chances because he won in 2020 while Trump’s atrocious term was still fresh in everyone’s minds. People apparently have short fucking memories because they all want to go back to Trump mismanaging the country and potentially ending free elections forever just to shave 30 cents off the price of eggs at the supermarket. Biden is still coasting on the policy-agnostic idea that the people will reject Trump more strongly than they will approve of him and I think that’s a huge mistake. He needs to be hammering his achievements home and also talking about stats from the Trump era and how they were great when Obama left office, terrible when Biden took office (due to Trump’s admin) and now improving thanks to him. That makes the best case for re-election, more than just convincing everybody to not vote for the openly fascist candidate because there’s no realistic alternative.

Trump is a lot less great than that.

Been saying that for years. It’s been a quarter millennium, how about we get the best and brightest minds from every field of academia, science, philosophy, and yes, even *shudder* religion, to get together and literally hold a constitutional convention? Just toss that old scrap of parchment out and re-write it from scratch, with modern language that is unambiguous and straightforward. If the rights enshrined in the Constitution that we hold so dear to us are actually that important, I’m sure they’ll make the cut for Constitution v2.0. But while we’re in there, we might as well clarify some stuff. Let’s clarify that 14th amendment, let’s define what a “well regulated militia” is, and so on.

Of course, the people in power like the ambiguity. It means that as long as someone somewhere could interpret the constitution in some way that is favorable to them, they can have it mean whatever they want when it suits them and as long as they keep the populace at each other’s throats with an unending culture war they know we’ll never organize enough to change that. It’s a bit of a pessimistic outlook. Our fates are controlled by people who like the dysfunction and that sucks because we could very easily fix a lot of the problems by unifying, but I don’t know if that’s possible at this point.

Has he tried claiming that he hasn’t been excommunicated and storming the Vatican?

If they toss out this guilty verdict, I’m going to burn it all down. No justice, no peace.

We’re waiting at this point for the lower courts to to decide which of Trump’s egregious crimes were “official” or not. In the meantime, all his trials get suspended. In January, if he takes office, they will vanish when he becomes a dictator on day one (his words).

Like seriously, I’m tired of whining on the internet about this shit. Where can I go to learn about joining a protest? It’s better that doing fuck all by tut-tutting the establishment hellbent on fucking us over while they count their money.

I’m clairvoyant and I can see the future: They won’t. It’s always been all bark and no bite when it comes to armed revolution here in the states.

The problem is he would never put his support behind anyone other than a corporate approved neoliberal. If he does step down, the person he picks is 110% going to be contentious among base Democrat voters especially among the younger voters. We’re not getting Bernie or AOC, full stop.

I also think Democrats are the worst about their purity tests and will turn their noses up at anyone for the slightest reason. When put into that perspective, I’ll take the chances with Biden.

Literal last minute decision on this one. SCOTUS is definitely running interference for Trump, without a doubt.

Biden should declare Trump a national security threat and have him assassinated. That’s an “official act”, is it not? Sure, it helps Biden immensely, but now who is to determine where an official act ends and a private self-serving one begins? Are those two necessarily mutually exclusive?

The moderators were less moderators and more like living sheets of lined paper with the questions printed on them. Human teleprompters with no willingness or ability to engage with the speakers, only desiring to feed them question after question. There was no point to having them there. We traded actual moderation for the semblance of decorum by cutting off a microphone.

At the end of the day, that’s the main takeaway here. It’s not so much the men themselves, but the people they intend to appoint to positions of authority. Biden will appoint experts and professionals to run the country for him. Trump will appoint sycophants and yes-men to do whatever he wants to do, even if it flies in the face of reason or standard procedure, and unlike last time he won’t allow anyone who isn’t 100% loyal to him to work in his administration.

The only people less intelligent than Trump voters are people who are still somehow undecided. The fuck have these people been doing that make them fence-sit after Trump’s first term? Both of these candidates are known quantities at this point.