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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • There’s only two routes to getting this undone. One is a constitutional amendment, the other is for the Court to get several justices who are eager to overturn this decision, and then bring a case to trial specifically to address this issue.

    I can’t think of an amendment that would likely have a broader appeal than one that says presidents aren’t kings and aren’t above the law. But even so, I can’t see it getting passed any time soon, given the overwhelming bipartisan support it would need. Personally, I’d like to see this done anyway, if only so that we could also include a provision stating that a president can’t pardon himself, and can’t pardon crimes that he ordered.

    By comparison, it seems a lot easier to change the balance on the court, since one way or another it will be changed over time. And assuming we reach a point where we can be confident that the majority is ready to completely erase this ruling, then you just need to bring a case against a former president.

    One could wait for such a case to arise organically, but that’s leaving a lot to chance. You need a former president to have allegedly committed a crime, you need a evidence enough to bring a case, you need to go through the appeals process, they need to try to use presidential immunity, and then it needs to be taken up by the Supreme Court. Any number of things could go wrong, and there could be political fallout. If there’s a serious enough situation that requires this, by all means, go after them and make this an issue in the case so that it has to get appealed. Worst case scenario, they get away with something they would have gotten away with anyway.

    Personally, if I were president and had shifted the balance of the court back to one that respects the rule of law, I’d probably tell the justice department to bring a case against me, appeal to the Supreme Court, ask that they expedite the appeal, and then they can completely reverse this insane precedent. It would all be contrived, but that’s hardly anything new. I would make sure that anyone I appointed to the Court was down with a plan like this, If they won’t do that much to safeguard the country, the constitution, and rule of law, they can’t be trusted with the responsibility of being on the Supreme Court.



  • Farscape is a very soft sci-fi, but it has a mostly consistent world that mostly follows its internal logic. It has muppet aliens and the supernatural along side more traditional TV space tropes, but the narrative makes sense as presented, and it doesn’t do much to hurt your suspension of disbelief.

    Doctor Who is the opposite of consistent. It makes shit up as it goes along and isn’t even consistent in the kind of bullshit it’s throwing at you. It can be tropey nonsense, comedy overriding reality, fairy tale reasoning that breaks down when you try to think about it to much, or whatever other idiocy it feels like being today. Instead of building a world that you can understand, it basically just says “don’t worry about it, assume we already did the boring set up stuff, and just run with the fact that plastic can be alive and chasing after people because that’s what we’re doing this week.”






  • The next steps would be ordering the justice department to prosecute him, going to court, and appealing all the way to the new Supreme Court so they can overturn the precedent. Which would require either moving very quickly or preventing the other side from taking power, one way or the other.

    Of course, by then pandora’s box is open. As long as someone is willing to follow those kinds of orders, nothing would prevent the next president from doing the same thing. It’s a slippery slope not unlike the one that caused Rome to go from being a republic that viewed regicide as a fundamental virtue to an empire that would persecute groups for denying the divinity of the emperor.



  • I had felt the same way, until they ruled that partisan gerrymandering is constitutionally protected, that racial gerrymandering can only be unconstitutional if it doesn’t provide a partisan advantage to one side, and that the court must assume that legislators are acting in good faith because their need to not be embarrassed outweighs the constitutional rights of the people and the need for honest elections. I read that decision and said “shit, they’re gonna rule that Trump’s immune.”

    I never thought the Court would put out a decision that could rival Dred Scott for worst in history, but these asshole’s have put out multiple contenders for that title in a single term.


  • Fucking insanity.

    Civil immunity makes sense because anyone can sue anyone for anything at anytime, and allowing people to sue the president for official acts would leave him vulnerable to a nonstop barrage of lawsuits. Crime doesn’t work that way. The only way the president should be facing criminal prosecution is if he’s breaking the fucking law. That’s kind of the opposite of what the president is supposed to be doing. You know, faithfully executing the laws and all that. If a presidential action violates the law, it can’t really have the legitimacy that’s being presumed for all official acts here, because by definition it violates his official duties under the constitution.

    Now, I would never suggest that a sitting president order the unlawful detention or summary execution of political opponents and/or corrupt justices. But I might suggest that, in the interest of national security, that he order intelligence agencies to troll through communications records, financial records, etc. to search for signs of treason and corruption at the hands of foreign powers. And if that search should happen to find evidence of any kind of illegal activity among his political opponents or on the Court, well…



  • I’d vote for ToS era Pike over Trump. I’d vote for a candidate who only communicates via ouija board over Trump. I’d vote to not have a president for 4 years before I’d vote for Trump.

    It’s crazy that Trump can get convicted of fraud, be found liable for sexual assault, promise to abuse presidential power to get revenge against those who cross him, actively undermine both national and global security, promise to round up millions and put them into camps, attempt to overthrow the election and refuse to not try it again, and so on, and his side is still so loyal they’ll wear solidarity diapers for him.


  • They need a format that breaks the debate up into sections and actually includes fact checking, and a cross examination after each section. Have a team scrambling to find the records, studies, video clips and other evidence that they can bring up. Someone who is mostly honest gets lay ups and affirmation. Someone who lies constantly gets called out and put on the defensive.

    Wouldn’t happen of course. Even if the hosts were down to have someone take on a more adversarial role, Trump would never agree to something that actually holds him accountable for spewing nothing but bullshit. It’s his entire strategy, if he can’t sell snake oil he has nothing to sell at all.


  • This means that anyone who doesn’t like a particular rule or regulation can pick a venue with a friendly judge, challenge it in court, and likely get the outcome they want. Even if judge shopping wasn’t a major problem right now, this would still be a bad idea. The reason Chevron told judges to defer to agencies in matters where the interpretation is ambiguous is because those agencies have the experience and and expertise to understand the issues involved far better than a judge who has to try to master the subject from inside the courtroom.

    This is all the more crazy in light of the recent racial gerrymandering decision, where Alito not only ignored the deference that appeals courts are supposed to show to trial courts (where the case is actually experienced and not just summed up in a brief) but then says that the judicial branch must defer to the legislators when they claim that they are being fair. So judges can just override the executive branch in subjects that they likely do not understand, but they can’t actually contradict the legislature over something like whether a policy is violating someone’s constitutional rights, despite that being one of their core functions for the past couple of centuries.




  • I like wireless, I just fucking loathe earbuds. Unfortunately, they have completely replaced the wrap around on-ear headphones that were the best for wearing while running errands or exercising.

    I don’t want something big and bulky while I’m walking around, but I also don’t like having shit jammed into my ears. And critically, those on ear headphones are just the right size to have a convenient button layout so I can easily pause or go back a few seconds in my audiobook whenever I need to.

    But Apple decreed that wireless earbuds were the future and the market for everything else fucking died.