ChiGoose

1. Two types of people: those that believe the unanimous opinion and those that are skeptical. I honestly very much disagree with this take. I think the overwhelming majority of Americans do not spend their time thinking about politics. They are thinking about their family, their jobs, bills, (and The Bills for most on this board), etc. What news they consume is what is most convenient or what makes them feel the best. They are not especially well tuned in to the discourse and if you asked average people about Smollett or Covington, I would wager most would have no idea what you're talking about or have completely forgotten. I also do not believe that Democrats are inherently more susceptible to falsehoods than Republicans. For all of your examples, there are countless examples of Republicans believing ludicrous claims like JFK Jr. is still alive or Barack Obama is secretly still controlling the presidency. There was a very interesting story from Planet Money a while back about finding the source of some of the viral fake news on Facebook. They interviewed a guy behind a lot of it and he mentioned that he originally targeted both liberals and conservatives but the liberals didn't engage while the conservatives completely took the bait. I don't think it means that conservatives are inherently more susceptible either, but Democrats certainly do not have a monopoly on getting hoodwinked. I am also very wary of people doing "research" on the internet. Most of us are not trained to do research. When I am trying to figure out the efficacy of a particular COVID test, I cannot run clinical studies. I don't know how to interpret the p-value of a particular study. I just don't have that background and neither do the vast majority of us. I am not saying this of you in particular because I do not know you, but generally when I see someone saying "do your own research" on the internet, they are advocating a position that is demonstrably false. 2. Media Criticism in General I generally try not to engage in media criticism, but I'll dip my toe in for a moment. I think CNN is one of the main root causes of why everything in our politics is awful and I think Fox News is a truly, truly evil company. I do not watch television news because it is just empty infotainment designed to create an emotional reaction in the viewer that keeps them glued through the commercial break. I find that so many posts on PPP devolve into how the media covers things instead of the thing itself. While it is fair to criticize the way things are covered, it generally just ends up derailing the conversation. It also routinely ends up into straw man arguments where people end up arguing about what some outlet said instead of what actually happened. That being said, I do not believe the "mainstream media" is as much a monolith as you claim. Media outlets, especially television ones, are incentivized for revenue and will present what gets the most engagement. MSNBC targets people on the left, Fox Targets people on the Right, CNN targets shooting itself in the dick every day. Generally, I try to avoid looking at what the media says and instead look to what the principle actors are saying and doing. I care far less about what a media outlet says Richard Donoghue testified at the hearing than taking the time to read or listen to his actual words. 3. Democratic Party intentionally destroying America I have worked on a campaign or two, I have friends working in the government. And from that small experience, I can say that getting things done in the government is incredibly hard and complicated. Government is complex and it is chock full of rules and bureaucracy. People cannot generally snap their fingers and get something done. It often takes quite a bit of time and work to get something meaningful done, if you ever get it done at all. When Trump came into office and tried to institute the ban on travelers from Muslim countries, it failed twice before he finally got it done. Why? Because his advisors did not understand the rules nor the process. They were incredibly inept at administrative law, which resulted in them running into hurdles they could have avoided with better experience or knowledge. Look at Biden's whole Build Back Better debacle. You had the far left arguing for an incredibly expansive program while moderates were pushing for a much smaller package. They spent months arguing about it in private and public before it actually tanked. They blew up most of the administration's political capitol for absolutely no gain. At the federal level, the filibuster sets a very high bar to get most anything meaningful done. Even when Obama came into office with 60 votes, it was a mess for him to get the ACA across the line, and the effort cost them that power in the midterms. This stuff is really hard even for people who are good at it. The Dems are not good at it. For example, your claim that the Dems could pass a common sense abortion bill. That would require them getting rid of the filibuster, which they do not have enough votes for. You could argue that they could try to get GOP votes, but why in the world would the GOP senators do anything that would make the Dems look good? They would either propose poison pills or just not come to the negotiating table at all. In a two-party system with an election coming down the line, delivering a win for the other party just doesn't make sense. Finally, I have a hard time understanding what the point of the Dems destroying America through incompetence would be. Why wouldn't they just do it competently? 4. Pointing at each other and civil war I really wish we could break out of this "us vs them" mentality, but I am skeptical it can happen in a two party system in a world with social media and 24/7 news outlets. The easiest way to get someone to support you is to tell them that some "other" is bad and they will save you from them. In a two-party system, it devolves into anything the other team does is bad, therefore if they do something, it must be bad. But this is not exclusive to the Left. I have never heard anyone say "own the Cons" unironically but "own the Libs" is a common discourse from the Right. Even on this board, I frequently see people seemingly celebrating that Dems are not happy, as if their follow Americans are their enemies. This is why I try to avoid language that points at voters. I try to use "GOP" or "Republican officials" to make it clear I'm talking about party officials and electeds, not voters (though I am not perfect and probably have missed that at times). People vote the way they do for a variety of reasons and neither side is a monolith. While I do not think we're actually headed to a civil war (partly because the geographic breakdown would be more urban vs rural than a clean break of states), I think the best way to turn down the heat is to change our political incentives through electoral reform. We currently have a system that incentivizes candidates to move to the extremes of their parties to get elected. The Dems electeds are getting more liberal (look at the backlash to Pelosi endorsing Cueller) and the Republican electeds are getting more conservative (look at Elise Stefanik's ongoing shift from moderate to the extreme). There are a raft of electoral reforms I would like to enact that might solve this, but even something as small as outlawing gerrymandering nationwide would dramatically change the type of people being sent to Congress. Maybe if we changed the kinds of people going to Congress (on both sides), and incentivized them to actually *do* something instead of pandering for media, we could make some beneficial changes.

This one? Probably. Originalism is the jurisprudence of doing whatever the hell you want and then finding a reason to justify it.

The small government thing was always BS.

Without Roe and Casey, those exceptions are no longer required

Pretty dismissive of the women who will die because of this.

If we had IQ tests here, there would be no posts on PPP.

Except for the guy who tried to run down protesters in his truck.

In America, we protect the right for a kid to be born and then killed in a school shooting. It’s the American way!

I'm going to answer this to the best of my knowledge and in good faith, but before I do so, I want to make a quick(ish) point. The current Democratic Party is far more heterogenous than the modern Republican Party. While there is common ground that accounts for a significant percentage of the GOP, the Democratic Party is very decentralized. From a political science perspective, it does not make sense that people like AOC and Bernie Sanders are in the same party as Joe Manchin and John Tester. In a society with a political media that can best be described as terrible, that means that one can take a statement from one person and try to ascribe it to everyone in the same party, regardless of the truth of the exercise. I state this not to try to wiggle out of answering your questions but more to underscore that just because some people in the party espouse a view does not mean that is the view of the party as a whole. Anyway, to your questions: 1. Inflation Traditionally, the Fed targets an inflation rate of around 2%. However, for years we were well below that despite the Fed's best efforts. It had been understood that there was a relationship between inflation and unemployment, but that uncoupled in the recovery from the great recession. Unemployment kept dropping but inflation stayed low and was still unable to meet the 2% target. During the pandemic, we passed several stimulus bills to keep the economy afloat and inflation still stayed below target. So it seemed to many like a good time to invest in our infrastructure and economy. No matter how much we spent over the past several decades, we couldn't even get inflation as high as we wanted, so why not? This is where the transitory idea came from. They pumped money into an economy that seemed very receptive to it, but they unwittingly passed the threshold. While we were coming out of COVID, the economy hadn't righted itself yet. We were still spending disproportionately on goods instead of services. And unlike services, goods relied on the supply chain. So now we have more money coming in for goods into a supply chain that is broken, China has a new COVID outbreak and shuts down major cities, the supply chain hasn't fixed itself yet, and then the war in Ukraine starts. What, to some, seemed like a transitory problem quickly became recognized as a real problem. Janet Yellen recently owned up to this, saying she was wrong. 2. Crime There has recently been a recognition that our rate of incarceration is abhorrent. We have, I believe, the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Unless you think that Americans are inherently criminals (which I do not), that would seem at odds with our view of American greatness and freedom. There has been really good work on how to intervene to prevent crime and arrests in different cities that show real progress. The CAHOOTS program in Oregon routed certain types of calls to social workers instead of police for certain calls and it's been a success. Generally, what you see are different attempts at trying to weigh the reactions to certain crimes. Is it justified to end someone's life over a property crime? At what point does chasing a criminal actually pose more risk to the public than letting them go for the moment? If a kid does something stupid like shoplifting a couple of things, do they need to enter the judicial system and all that entails, or could they be diverted in a way that reduces the chances of future incarceration? Police are inherently reactionary and not proactive. So there is a movement for earlier intervention to prevent the need for police in certain situations. Unfortunately, some people who may be more well read on policy and study than the average American decided that "defund the police" was the right slogan for this. They focus on the end result instead of spending more time on root causes. Obviously, most people who spend most of their focus on their family and their career, would be absolutely befuddled by that idea. And it certainly doesn't help that these sorts of changes would take a generation to show a return and in the meantime their advocates would be (rightly) ridiculed. This anti-cop attitude, in combination with instances of awful actions by some police, has driven a big divide about cops that should not exist. Ideally, we would establish many of the reforms that reduce violence and make things easier for cops, but do so in a way that doesn't create an "Us vs. Them" mentality between the cops and the public. But the slogans matter to a very vocal minority, which throws a wrench in real, meaningful reform. 3. Democratic Leadership I don't think I've ever seen an organization so starved of leadership than the modern Democratic Party. I spent most of my life dismissing the Dems and supporting the GOP. During the late Bush years and then the Obama administration, I was a proponent of serious GOP reform (i.e. I did not understand why a small government party would have a problem with gays being married). But I finally left the party during the Trump administration, realizing that the party I wanted to be a part of would never exist. I use that as a preface to say that joining the Democratic Party SUCKS. They spend most of their time infighting and blaming each other for everything and very little time on how to get power and then do something with it. Every Democrat I know wishes we had a version of Mitch McConnell: a ruthless leader who keeps everyone in line and drives the party towards power. Instead, we have senate leader Chuck Schumer, who spent months publicly feuding with Joe Manchin before it was revealed he was sitting on Manchin's list of requirements. I've never been a big Nancy Pelosi fan, but I recognize her skill during the Obama administration in navigation legislation. But why in the world is an 82 year old leading the party? Unlike the GOP, which has a decent crop of younger politicians, the Dems set their rank almost solely on seniority. Which is why they are far older, and act as a gerontocracy that is totally unable to meet the moment. I have a hard time in believing theories that there is some grand plan they are pushing because they lost to a failed businessman in 2016 and continue to get destroyed in elections across the country. They are completely incompetent and not up to the moment. 4. Blitz I haven't been on the board very long, but I have yet to see Blitz post anything that even closely approximates a rational thought, so going forward, dismissing their posts is generally a good idea.

It doesn’t matter what they want, they’re too incompetent to get it. They couldn’t organize a pizza party if they tried, nonetheless secure power. They spent months negotiating privately and in public with Manchin over Biden’s signature legislation only for it to turn out that Manchin had given his list of wants to Schumer months ago but Schumer failed to mention that. They are in way over their heads and the idea that they are going to do somehow take over everything is laughable.

The Dems have had: 13 months since SCOTUS granted cert to Dobbs. 6 months since oral arguments 1 month since the opinion was leaked, confirming their worst fears Most of a week knowing the most likely day the opinion would come out. And their best plan was to… sing on the Capitol steps, fundraise, and say they will get around to doing something about this. These ideas that the Dems are behind the scenes doing sinister conspiracies with the deep state and the FBI and the media and colleges and reverse vampires or whatever, is completely undercut by the fact that the Democratic Party is probably the most incompetent organization on the planet.

Mask, err hood, off

He is probably upset his bid for Congress isn't going well so he's going to try and whip up the clownshow.

What if she did not consent? What if she could not consent? What if she did consent and wanted the pregnancy but now it endangers her life? Without the protections of Roe and Casey, there are no guardrails for these scenarios. It is completely up to state legislatures on how to handle them.

I’m in central time, so I still have an hour or so before bedtime. What did I say that was histrionic?

The states will all set their own laws, so that rich people always have access to abortion but poor people may not. Some states will enact long arm statutes to punish people seeking abortions elsewhere. People in some states will have more rights than people in other states. People in some states may be prosecuted for miscarriages, needing to spend money on a lawyer to fight the charges. Taxpayers in some states will have to pay for care for people fleeing other states for medical care. That is what “letting the states decide” means.

It means that if you’re pregnant and then not pregnant, you can be investigated for an abortion. Which is why everyone should delete their period tracking apps.

Everyone knew they were lying at the time. Collins and Manchin are fools.

They are. And who’s gonna stop them?

Something I've noticed is that some people only see things through the lens of winning or losing, not principles. You see that with people claiming the Jan 6th committee is a plot to influence the midterms, which would be very dumb because the midterms are too far away. If that was the actual plan, they would have started in September and ran through October. There's obviously value in creating a historical record of what led to the events on Jan 6th and what happened that day, regardless of whether or not it helps a particular party. But to believe that, you need to value things beyond your side winning. So when you see posts about the committee failing, or not moving the needle for the election, I think it's just because those people cannot see a reason for action other than personal or political gain. Who is winning the horse race? That's all that matters to them. If the GOP is still expected to win in the midterms, it must mean the committee is meaningless.

Funnily enough, Roe v. Wade was decided on similar privacy grounds as Obergfell v. Hodges, Griswold v. Connecticut, Lawrence v. Texas, and Loving v. Virginia. In his concurrence, Thomas stated that they should look at cases to revisit all of those except Loving v. Virginia.

Originalism is the idea that the justices can know with certainty what the founders intended about any issue, and therefore any precedent that contradicts it should be overturned. So justices get to ask themselves questions like "What did the founders think about airplane regulations?" come to a conclusion and write that decision. It's an easy way to decide the issue however you want and them make up a reason to support your decision. Under originalism, we would never have had Brown v. Board of Education. You may be thinking of textualism, which is to simply focus on the plain meaning of the text. It's a legit method of constitutional interpretation but is often confused with originalism. Traditional judicial precedent interpretation takes into account the constitution, the law in question, as well as the history of the law as applied to the facts of the case. It promotes stability of the law as opposed to the quickly changing law we find ourselves in with an originalist court.

Originalism is a bunk jurisprudence.

Maybe it should be left to the states?

We're basically in a race to see if Boomers can install permanent minority rule before they die off and lose power. I think we're losing.