I-95

Almost 3 million people voted for him.  And we're told that 81 million voted for the vegetable in the White House.  And don't you dare suggest otherwise!

(Seriously though, the stroke victim who dresses like he's going for a coffee run to 711 actually did legit win.  That's how bad your state is)

We deserve whatever we get, on a local, state, and national level.  TPTB won't dare let President Eggplant run again, which is of course why Hunter Biden is cutting a deal with the Feds.  To your average dumbass voter, it looks like justice being served - and all of the Biden family's corruption/bribes/schemes get buried, and The System can run a nominee capable of speaking in complete sentences.  

I'm not too concerned about that whore Eva Longoria - frankly, I hope she gets a real taste of what she campaigned for (I'll leave out the details).  And why the surprise?  Biden is on video molesting multiple children, and of course he used to fuck his 12-year old daughter in the shower, according to her diary.  (the 2 who discovered her diary have pled guilty and will serve time in jail of course)

2 weeks until July 4th, where we celebrate our freedom!

As the Hunter Biden-Big Guy LLC's business dealings hit the fan, you will see that the Dems will at some point jump at the opportunity to rid themselves of Sleepy Joe. They'll have a medical opinion of dementia and it will cease any real prosecution as that would be inhumane. Deep state media will agree and next up will be the candidate of choice. It won't be RFK JR. That guys wanders off the script too often.

If only DeSantis or someone else would step up to the plate................. but I digress.

I'm not a big fan of giving lifelong leftist hacks like Matt Taibbi praise for recognizing some level of reality.  Same with the Bill Maher/Glenn Greenwald types.  People like that are exactly the reason why we're at this stage in our republic.  Taibbi and Maher are complicit in creating legions of batshit citizens.  I don't care to feel much for when Taibbi is on the receiving end of what he's given for so long.  But yeah, welcome to the club Matt.

DeSantis is running a good campaign, and he has to be considered the frontrunner (no, I don't give a shit what polls say.  I care who the media and other candidates are attacking).

I want to hear him go after the DOJ, and promise to abolish the FBI.  Change the paradigm of our discourse.  I don't want investigations and firings.  I want lifetime prison sentences or worse.  My two cents.

I won't vote for him again.  He handed the keys to the country over to that evil little midget, and let his political opponents crash an economy in an election year, over the flu.  He allowed widespread rioting during all of this.  Of course, during the lockdowns his enemies used the occasion to completely change our electoral process.  Because of that, naturally, he "lost" to a demented child molester.  He then chose to leave office, despite the election obviously being stolen, instead of demanding a full audit.  And for good measure, he's STILL bragging about the Pfizer jab.

Fuck him.  He's best served as a martyr at this point.  Let the System throw him in jail, and keep waking more people up.

Anyone not Progressive will draw fire from the left, but Trump holds a special place in their dark hearts and would be attacked relentlessly if he were to be elected again. The American people would be further divided and his administration would be effectively emasculated. Nothing of significance would be accomplished in his administration and the world would become a more dangerous place. The man needs to accept that he can do far more to save this country as a private citizen than he ever could as president.

That definitely describes where I am.  There are several in the Republican primary I would prefer - DeSantis, Tim Scott, Ramaswamy, Haley - in roughly that order.

I really don't want DJT to win the nomination.  I mean I REALLY don't - maybe as much or more than I didn't want him to win it in 2016.  So I'm torn over his legal battles.  On the one hand I hope they take him out of contention.  On the other hand, I don't want those tactics on the part of our opponents to be encouraged by a victory like that.

This maybe the Stupid question of the day, but I’ll ask.

Trump gets credit for the conservative leaning Supreme Court.

Isn’t that just the luck of being in office when former justices die or retire and plugging in a guy or girl from your side?

May be missing something so pardon ignorance.

Thanks MD makes sense. Thanks for the research.

As far as not backing down under withering attack, do Presidents pull back justices they recommended or does the Senate put the kibosh on them?

Great question.

The research I did was mostly to confirm that my memory was reliable - an iffy proposition these days.    My actual memory of paying attention and seeing/remembering events in real time started in the late seventies with Carter - I was almost 10 when he took office in 1977, but I grew up in a very political family and that was the conversation at the dinner table and at larger family gatherings most of the time.  I remember hearing Carter's "malaise" speech in real time, believe it or not.  But my sort-of "second hand" memory goes back further than that, with a combination of remembering my family discussing Watergate and Nixon generally, Viet Nam, and my later reading/researching those times that roughly coincided with when I was born.  

Anyway, withdrawal - whether from the nominating President or from the nominee himself/herself - is rarer than I thought (see above re: memory.)  I remembered correctly that Bush withdrew Harriet Miers.  He also withdrew John Roberts (to replace O'Connor) a few months before he re-nominated him to Chief Justice to replace Rehnquist.  That was in 2005, I think . . . but I don't remember why that sequence of events transpired the way that it did.  Alito ended up replacing O'Connor a few months after Roberts was successfully confirmed as Chief Justice.

But make no mistake, withdrawal was what the Democrats were after with their vicious attack on Kavanaugh.  They either wanted this man to fold to protect his family, or the President to fold under the withering attacks revealing what a horrible human being he had nominated to take a seat on the highest court in the land.  I have been watching politics for a long time, probably with the intensity with which you watch sports, and I have never seen anything like that in my life.  The Bork and Thomas hearings, while brutal in their own rights, were tame by comparison.  (By the way, if you ever encounter someone who perceives Biden to be a "nice guy" - just have them go back and watch his performance at the Thomas hearings.  That will dissuade them from that notion if they have any decency whatsoever.)  Biden is a bitter, evil, petty, corrupt, nasty ideologue . . . but I'm holding back.  He is in an elite class of despicable human beings.

But here's the real takeaway, from my perspective.  My political opponents' duplicity, cynicism, and bloodlust for power knows no bounds.  For the vast majority of my adult life, they sought to achieve political ends that they had no hope of achieving at the ballot box through the courts - and they felt as if they owned the Supreme Court.  It was theirs - their domain in perpetuity.  Abortion, affirmative action, gay marriage - you name it.  The Supreme Court that they owned would proclaim victory on their behalf from on high.  Anyone who questioned the authority of the Supreme Court was an anarchist.  Unlawful.  ETC ad nauseum. "Law of the Land" blah blah fucking blah.  

The very MILLISECOND that switched, and there was even a faint leaning toward my political perspective on the Court - they began to trash its legitimacy and go hysterical on any nominee that didn't see the political landscape the way that they did.  To put it in a sports context, these people are homeys of the worst sort.

Bastards, each and every one of them.

Huh?!?!?  Did you just not communicate that well?  They are openly running on packing the courts, calling SCOTUS illegitimate, and trying to get justices whacked.  Wtf are you talking about?  It's the one thing in the country they don't fully control.

I wrote an essay on AA in college, and almost word for word my solution was #1.  If the top 10% of each HS got to choose out of their first 3-5-10 picks or whatever, whatever "diversity" quota is to be desired would happen, while having kids earn their spots through merit.  It also wouldn't be detrimental to groups that tend to achieve well above their percentage of the  population.  However, that's if the goal is positive.....

You seem like a good-natured and pretty smart guy, but like so many Americans, you simply have no clue of what you're up against.  The "lowering of standards" is the entire point.  Destruction is the goal.  Having a population of poor, angry young idiots buried under debt, with useless degrees, who only know how to protest and vote is the entire goal of our public education system.  Oh, and for good measure they leave college worshipping communism.  That's the point.  That's the goal.  Every single institution in the country has become less efficient, less capable, and less reliable over time.  As has our entire population.  There's a reason for that.

*FWIW, I got a 'D' on that essay.  They don't like it when you question them.

So it seems like you're tracking with me, to some extent. It's so blatantly obvious that the leftists love the Court right up until they don't. Take Stare Decisis for example. The Court's precedent shall never be overturned!! How DARE YOU! So they accumulate "wins" they like and put them in the "never challenge" category, whilst anything they don't like was poorly decided and subject to challenge. It's a ratchet that only tightens when it's turned in one direction. It's nothing short of stunning how duplicitous they are, and how much they rely upon the ignorance of the average citizen to get away with it. Obergefell overturned a couple of millennia of natural and common law, for crying out loud. Don't lecture me about Stare Decisis, you leftist morons!!



Incidentally, I came up with what I think is a great line about AOC, and I'm shocked that none of my favorite commentators have done likewise. I think she's a hot mess. (drum roll, please!)



So with regard to your speculation about how the electorate feels about recent big decisions by the newly constituted and right-leaning SC - I'd be remiss if I didn't preface any comments on that with a hearty "who cares?" The whole point of the careful checks-and-balances system that the Founders put into place with the Constitution was to protect the minority factions from the will of the majority. The analogy I've always liked best is that we can't have a society of 20 wolves and 10 sheep - majority wins, the sheep are dinner. So we put together a ruling document that says, as the first article in the Bill of Rights, "Nobody gets to eat anybody, especially by simple majority vote. Congress shall make no law allowing the wolves to eat the sheep. Period." So then the Supreme Court's job is to step in and forbid Congress from passing a sheep-eating law, right? So it matters not that 2/3rds of the population vote to go ahead and eat the sheep - it's Constitutionally prohibited.



So with that out of the way . . . stated more concisely that it matters not what the population thinks of the Supreme Court's rulings, and that is the very POINT of the Court . . .



Roe was TERRIBLE law. So here again, who knows where the electorate would come down if it were put to a nationwide referendum. The idea that the Court, in 1973, would remove it from the democratic process entirely and enshrine abortion as a Constitutional right was so far outside the pale that even the Notorious RBG recognized the deleterious effects of the court having done so. This was the poster child for the idea that the Court ought not "legislate from the bench." So however you feel about the practice of abortion, this ruling needed to be overturned in the interest of restoring jurisprudence to its intended purpose. How it works out in policy going forward is a different question.



I personally would outlaw abortion under any and all circumstances. I realize I'm in the minority in that view, but I'm fully prepared to defend it. I think most Americans are against late term abortions, and most Americans are horrified by the idea that you can set aside a living baby that survives an attempted abortion and let it die . . . as much as they are about the idea that you can kill a baby as it is in the process of traversing the "birth canal."



I personally am very glad that Roe is gone from precedent of the Court - it's only too bad that it took 50 years for that stinking heap of shit to be thrown out. Justice Blackmun wrote the opinion for the majority, finding a right to abortion in the "eminence of the penumbra" of the fourth amendment, and launching a "right to privacy" that never existed in the Constitution. (If I kill someone in the privacy of my own home, is it still a crime?)



2 - I agree, most people want to move past race on any and all levels.



3 - I think a majority recognize the unfairness of this proposition. There was a dude who asked Pocahontas if he would get back the payments he made on his student loans, and she said "Of course not!" Given that those with student loans in the country are a minority of all citizens, I think this proposition would go down in flames if it were put out there in a referendum.



4 - I agree. I think most people recognize the effort by LGBTQ activists to make everyone bend the knee to their agenda. They purposefully seek out those who would object (that poor baker in Colorado comes to mind) to push their point. They could go to any number of other bakers (or web designers) in Colorado to bake them a cake with any message they wanted or put whatever message on a website - but they just can't tolerate the idea that someone, ANYONE disagrees with their lifestyle and thinks it's immoral. So they seek to have those people punished for their apostacy. It's not enough that their critics are silenced, their critics must be made to affirmatively affirm and praise their lifestyle choices. Again, most people recognize this for what it is.



As for your prescriptions for how to get around the affirmative action issues that are presented by the Court's recent decision - no offense, but I don't care enough to comment. I think that our post-secondary education system is so hopelessly broken that it needs to be burned to the ground and rebuilt. (I'll leave the "hard" sciences out of that, to a point.) But the humanities and the "soft" sciences (social, political, economic, etc.) are hopelessly broken. It'd be like trying to "fix" your dining room chair after you burned it in your barbeque pit.



I attended one semester of college at a religious institution in Chicago named after a famous 19th century evangelist. As I'm approaching the end of my sixth decade on this planet, I reflect on the successes that I've had - and they're numerous. None of them are related to my short-lived college career. My (and my wife's) net worth puts us in the top . . . I don't know, 10% or so, I imagine. She has a master's degree - but she's in medicine and that is required. I'm beginning to ramble. The point is . . . the connection between college education and financial success isn't as tight as some would have you believe.

I'm almost with you.  The frustration of watching our republic being systematically and intentionally dismantled and realizing that the election of 2016 was probably a pivotal point where a reversal could have begun, but didn't because Trump was/is a terrible diplomat, a devout narcissist and dangerously inexperienced in dealing with a bureaucratic adversary.  But then I think of the most important thing he accomplished, and it wasn't appointing conservative justices.

With all of his boorish honesty he turned a spotlight on the engine that's been driving the fundamental transformation of America.  He may have been ineffective in combatting the administrative state, i.e. communist weed-seed strangling the constitution, but he brought it out into the daylight which created a highly energized army of citizens to counter it.  I agree he's not the leader we need for that army, but it may be that his faults served as the bait to pull the enemy out of the shadows and encourage them to misjudge their attraction to the majority of Americans.  For that the nation owes him our gratitude.

I'm in line with md717 on Trump.  He was my second least favorite candidate in both 2016 and 2020, but the alternatives in both elections were far worse.  That we are given those choices has to be some indication of the state of our country.  I don't think it's an accident and is likely the product of our education system, our media, and the corruption of our politicians and the system that feeds them. 

But not voting is essentially the same as voting against the republic.  Because I'm neither a registered Republican or a registered Democrat I'm not allowed to participate in round one of the voting process, the primaries.  I'm not sure how many states subscribe to that concept, but in this state it could ultimately be a deciding factor.  I don't get to participate in selecting who I can vote for in the national election.  I'm left with a choice between bad and worse, and refusal to participate is not rebellious, it's surrender.

Robbie,

That’s probably the harshest criticism of Trump that I’ve heard from a conservative. Not wrong, but not a popular one. The next guy has gotta learn from his mistakes. It’s tough for a guy like Trump to do things for the common good. He had some great policies but his megalomaniacal self doomed it’s execution. They definitely had it out for him more than anyone else ever so he gets some understanding on that from me. However, the attacks on him made it about him more than it would have been. A more polished less flawed individual with an eye on the goal would have fared better. But when the goal is Trump front and center, it was probably a losing cause. Give the same goal to a more skilled personality and results would have been more successful. Not sure who that is.

I’ve been hearing doom and gloom that the Republic is dead from too many on the right. I’ll tell you like I tell my friends. No it’s not. The right has the SC, is winning in states left and right and Biden as the representative of that side is very beatable. The most dangerous weapon they have to keep us down is Trump. He will hijack the Republican Party during the no,I nations process and debates etc. it will be all about him, just like it always has been. That being the case, he would rather bring the party down rather than share the spotlight. Tough spot. If most conservatives had the same opinion a you, he wouldn’t win the nomination. The people who know him best politically have deserted him. They know what the Republican base refuse to open their eyes to. Problem is, a candidate needs to have the audacity to criticize the Republican zJesus which in turn gets the party’s delicate panties in a bunch and probably hurts said candidates chances.

Our last president is currently being charged with several felonies, after spending 4 years in office being accused of being owned by Russia.

Our current vegetable president's handlers are currently provoking WW3, while sending billions of our dollars to a puppet client, which in turn gets funneled back to the people who own Biden.  If you aren't familiar with Blackrock and its practices, it would be a good idea to get familiar with them.  Below is a video of Max Blumenthal describing in detail some of what is going on.  For context, Blumenthal is a career leftist hack, and son of Sidney Blumenthal, one of the Clintons' bagmen.  Even some leftists are outraged by Blackrock.  Guess what people in the media are calling Blumenthal?  Right, a "Putin shill."  




My one pause on DeSantis is he already backed down once after calling Russia/Ukraine a "territorial dispute."  Somebody needs to get into Washington, and throw a ton of people in jail (Blackrock execs are all over Biden's cabinet and staff).  Until then, the republic is dead.