There is no need for the constitution to be reviewed by an independent judiciary, because it has already been reviewed by landowning / white people with guns. Judicial review = reverse slavery.

Good lord, what a mess.



The "no u" gambit is not going to succeed here. First because, again, I know more about this than you do, and second because what I'm saying is true.



I don't know if you believe that Roger Taney was a qualified candidate, but I will say that if you do, that would be perfectly on-brand for a Republican in 2018.

Snark aside (and I wouldn't have snarked at all here if it weren't the clearest illustration of my point), you're making an unjustified leap here from "confirmation fights occurred" to "confirmation fights that were not about the nominees' qualifications occurred." Now, the process of judging a nominee's qualifications is unavoidably subjective and usually political, and sometimes the Senate gets it wrong. Douglas Ginsburg was deemed unqualified because he once smoked weed with his students, and that was wrong. Robert Bork was deemed unqualified because he thought Bolling v. Sharpe was wrongly decided, and that was right. But Supreme Court fights have historically been, at least nominally, about the nominee's qualifications. If you can pick out a clear example from one of these fights that was explicitly not about whether the nominee was qualified, I'm interested to hear it, because that's the standard you have to meet even start justifying McConnell's rejection of Garland by historical precedent.

(I'm happy to remind you, in case you've forgotten, that McConnell was refusing to hold hearings on any Obama nominee, however qualified, as early as one month after Scalia's death--God rest his soul in heaven; his and Vince Foster's and Seth Rich's vengeance on their Clinton-hired murderers will be swift, I'm sure--and maybe earlier! I haven't done an exhaustive look back yet. But no one in the Senate GOP caucus ever seriously questioned Garland's qualifications; no one ever even waited to see whose qualifications they'd be judging.)



Later? The few people who heard the speech live were well aware that there was no pending nominee, and the "during the 'election campaign'" part is in the speech; did you bother reading the whole thing, or did you have The Federalist read the fun parts to you?

Look, there's no denying the Biden speech is politically self-serving. There's no doubt that he'd have preferred George W. Bush never nominate another Supreme Court justice, and in retrospect it's hard to blame him, because from the moment Samuel Alito got onto that stage he's publicly and repeatedly proven himself to be one of the absolute dimmest human beings ever to serve in the federal appellate courts. But you don't create precedent with dicta. Biden or Schumer or whoever can say what they want. Their public politicking, premised on hypothetical nominations that never came to pass, did not and could not have created the rule that McConnell pretends existed.



See above.



Well, hey, that sounds like a perfectly logical extension of the principle McConnell invented to deny Garland a hearing. They're coequal branches of government, after all.



Heh. John Cornyn tried floating this conspiracy theory during the hearing and got nowhere. The original reporter has confirmed it's not true. If anyone's still wondering whether you're offering genuine arguments or just parroting your preferred conservative-friendly current events website, I hope they feel they've got their answer now.

This is basically correct. The Federalist Society has had an outsize influence on judicial nominations—not just the Supreme Court, but the Circuit Courts as well—since well before Trump came on the scene, and while there's no guarantee Kavanaugh would have been the first or second pick of a President Cruz or President Rubio, he'd absolutely have been on the short list. He's a mainstream conservative jurist by any measure.

I do think that Kavanaugh has the sort of temperament that Trump respects and relates to; this may have helped elevate him over Raymond Kethledge or Thomas Hardiman. (I suspect he never seriously considered Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative favorite, for the obvious reason.)

The Onion's political cartoons rule.

After looking at that cartoon for a solid minute, my eyes still can't figure out where they are supposed to start. My brain may have suffered a smugeurysm thinking about it though.

yo why’d they build a Free Speech Zone around the Wonderbread factory?

I've stated a number of times I don't follow things like I used to. My understanding is that Ford desired to remain anonymous and her lawyer was even offered for her to be questioned anonymously, although that information might have been withheld from her. Anyway, A very limited number of Democrats supposedly had access to her letter. You can choose to believe who and what you want. I'll wait for facts however, to be perfectly honest, I really don't care. I've been playing games and listening to Jocko far more than I've paid attention to ANY news. Sad maybe but much more fulfilling. I'm at about nine hours into HL2 now. Just hit the Sand Traps.

On the one hand, I definitely agree that paying attention to the news too much is really bad for your health.

On the other hand, conservatives never paid attention to the lamestream media anyway (even if they sometimes pretend to).

This is probably why conservatives have been found to be happier people than liberals: they DGAF, less likely to become deranged and join ISIS / become activist Democrats, etc.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_terrorism_in_the_United_States

a partial list of happy Republicans

That might be a good point. Perhaps in those surveys that purport to gauge conservative levels of happiness are skewed, because the survivalists living in their bunkers are too paranoid and busy building bombs to answer their phones to respond to any survey.

ummm EXCUSE ME but since when is ANTIFA not a terrorist organization? this has clearly been edited by the radical left to scrub clean their history of violence against honest right wingers, like in Charlottesville.

I've already explained why I have sort of withdrawn from my former pastime. It's really mostly because of people like you (plural you).

You have them. I've given them to you.

Are you an uneducated man?

Uh...

"I would rather claim to be an uneducated man than be mal-educated and claim to be otherwise."

I'm curious what he'll say, idk

You can't win. But there are alternative realities to fight within. While some of us don't pull alternative facts out of our asses when we lose, Wookiees are known to do that. I suggest a new strategy: let the Wookie06 win.

An educated and successful conservative will always be much happier than an educated and successful liberal, because they believe the system is working and they deserve what they’ve gotten. This attitude is where the prosperity gospel comes from, but to be clear, it also transcends it: conservatives of this sort believe that because they are able to cheat and steal, those are therefore legitimate strategies. In short they can’t feel bad about anything because there is nothing to feel bad about. At least until they, hopefully, spend some time in prison.

Educated and successful liberals, on the other hand, are not exempt from understanding the problems of the world. And unsuccessful liberals and conservatives are most harshly punished by them. The difference is that liberals and others on the left have a productive output for their frustrations: the political and democratic processes, or at least the language and wherewithal to discuss these issues with others. Unsuccessful conservatives of all sorts, whether they are white Americans or Saudi Arabian fundamentalists, only have one means of self expression: violence.

So, superficially, this is right. Conservatives are happier, when you account for all other variables. Stupid people are happier too. Perhaps I detect some multicollinearity at work here?

Maybe that's why Kavanaugh got emotional at his hearing. His entire life he's believed he's literally done nothing wrong.

Obviously.

An important point from Lawrence Wright's book about 9/11. The Soviet Union disintegrated after it invaded Afghanistan, and many mujahideen believed that they were responsible for causing the collapse of the USSR. Osama bin Laden launched the 9/11 attacks because he wanted to draw the US into a war in Afghanistan that he believed would lead to an endless conflict that would eventually lead to the break up of the United States into multiple countries and the withdrawal of the US from the Middle East.

https://www.1843magazine.com/and-finally/reluctant-global-citizen/the-decivilising-process

This is my favorite genre of fiction. When conservatives write these articles about a false world wherein people lack manners. They're really imaginative and funny satire.

I'm not surprised Osama Bin Laden would be that narcissistic.

Because he was a religious nut?

No, just given what I knew, and his rhetoric, it seems clear that he overvalued his importance on the world stage greatly.

Wait, what? The significance of 9/11 on geopolitics has been overvalued??

The mistaken idea that the mudjahideen both defeated the USSR in Afghanistan and caused it to disintegrate was a common interpretation of history among mudjahideen at the time, so bin Laden wasn't unique in that regard. (Of course there's also a religious dimension to this, where the mudjahideen see themselves as agents of God's will on Earth, and that God's ultimate intention is Muslim domination of the world, made possible first by the collapse of the world's two superpowers, first the USSR and then the US.)

He was astute about the US in certain regards, and it's interesting how some of the things that Wright depicts as pathetic self-aggrandizement on bin Laden's part turns out to have been closer to true as the years go by since Wright wrote this book. For example, Wright describes bin Laden as wanting to carry out terror attacks on 9/11 because he wanted to create another Vietnam: he knew that Americans like their wars short, and once they begin to drag on the public turns against them, and the public becomes divided. He expected that a terror attack would lure the US into the Middle East, but then the public would become so disaffected after years of war that the public would be on the side of withdrawing entirely from the Middle East. Some of his predictions were actually quite apt, making 9/11 seem quite effective, almost entirely because we overreacted to it.

Not to mention the enormous cost of the Iraq war, as well as the apparently never-ending war on terror that has transformed the DoD. It's pretty hard to understate the consequences of 9/11 on the United States, imo.

Importantly, he also believed this: https://mobile.twitter.com/bbmonky/status/1047171604713824259

Let's also not forget that in the mid-1980's, the Soviet Union was spending 70% of its industrial output on the military, which no doubt played a role in the collapse of the USSR.

That said, 9/11 had a much smaller impact on the United States. We went from spending 2.9% of our GDP on defense in 2000, to 4.7% in 2010 (and back down to 3.1% in 2017).

So he was incel.

I wonder if it's even that relevant that we went up from 2.9%. One of the great promises of the end of the Cold War was that the US could cut its defense spending, which, iirc, we had by 2000. I wonder how 9/11 spending compared to Cold War era spending.

It's actually fascinating how much Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual godfather of radical Islamism, comes across as a kind of proto-incel in some of his writings.

There was the same lusty, erotic language used to describe sex, even when he talks about how much it sickens him. Seems like a distinctive pathology.

Apparently also most members of al-Qaeda at the time of 9/11 weren't impoverished, and weren't driven to join the organization because of economic difficulties (although it was true at other times in al-Qaeda's existence). Most were actually middle class and had lived and been educated in Europe. What they shared in common which caused them to join a terrorist organization was that they never felt capable of integrating into European society. Asociality, in other words.

It's not even a blip really. And even the Cold War was small beans compared to WW2.



Either the USSR was a much smaller economic power than the United States and was foolish to spend so much on its military, or they were doing something really stupid by pouring that much money into all those tanks.

Source on that? I find that figure suspicious. The 70% one.

You just know he had a massive madonna whore complex, too.

If bin Laden believed it, then his mistake was believing that empires can succumb to single stressors. But I'm not convinced he believed that either. The 9/11 hijackers didn't just attack the United States, they legally crossed the border, legally lived in the United States, and legally boarded those planes. The attacks made the US government afraid of its borders, its residents, its civilian infrastructure, and even more skeptical of immigration - damning blows for an empire built so much on trade, soft power, and acquisition of foreign capital. Changes to policing inflamed racial tensions. Changes to national security deepened the divide between politicians and the public.

I guess it's possible that bin Laden didn't anticipate those consequences, but I'd guess he did. The hijackers could have just as easily grabbed a flight from Toronto to Buenos Aires or Rio and hijacked it over NYC, with just as much fuel onboard. So I think there was at least some deliberate choice made there, to attack the United States specifically using an American plane from an American airport.