The only reason that Ezra Klein interview is not more depressing is that I already knew about many of the missteps (from our point of view) that the US has made. Not just the many things that we have done wrong, but the multiple opportunities to do something right which we have ignored.
That's what makes the JPCOA so impressive. Under Obama, we (eventually) did something right. Of course, Trump insists that anything and everything that Obama did must be reversed. So, another opportunity squandered. And now he's making another huge mess (making messes being, arguably, his core "competency"). There's no way that ends well. The main question is: will it be a massive failure or an epic fail?
Still, making the heroic assumption that we manage to preserve our own nation, there is reason for hope. The last 3/4 century notwithstanding, Iran has remained open to good relations with the US. Maybe we will even get an administration which will take yes for an answer.
a number of American social scientists had been doing contract and consultation work for the Defense Department.
The challenge, always, is to figure out whether the work you are doing will be used for unethical ends. Sometimes, that's easy. But other times, it isn't -- especially with work which might, or might not, be used for unethical purposes. Social science has that issue, but so does medicine, engineering, etc.
It's easy, especially after the fact and with 20/20 hindsight based on more complete information, to say "Obviously this work...." It takes actual effort to work out what information the actors had, and the context they were working in. Pundits rarely, in my observation, are quite that industrious.
I've mentioned Giovanna Borradori's Philosophy in a Time of Terror (2003) a few times here over the years. Borradori's book is her dialogues with Habermas and Derrida speaking with her separately, but responding to parallel questions about terrorism and philosophy in NYC not long after 9/11. It's an extraordinary work, giving the reader a chance to see both philosophers thinking and responding in real time to an extraordinary circumstance. I found it very approachable reading, so it might make a good introduction to anyone wanting to get a taste of Habermas's thinking, and an idea of the philosophical tensions between him and the post-structuralists.
I found Derrida's responses in the book to be very insightful and clarifying, and a good corrective to the straw man portrayals of him as fast-talking charlatan.
That someone can be me! If this is what lj meant, the transcript is included in this gift link (it doesn't start in exactly the same place, but goes on with the stuff in lj's video):
Regarding any past missteps by Ezra Klein (I'm thinking of, as I assume lj is, his comments after Charlie Kirk got killed), my view is very definitely that one doesn't have to agree with every single thing someone has ever said or done to find their contributions useful, valuable or interesting. And Ezra Klein is certainly a frequent provider of all three kinds of contributions.
Thanks. I hope it's ok if I use this as no open thread:
Juergen Habermas has died. I doubt many people made it through "The Theory of Communicative Action" but his (and Apel's) discourse ethics were certainly influential when I studied philosophy. The idea that the better argument will eventually win out, together with Gadamer's principle of charity, i.e. assuming that your interlocutor is rational and possibly correct, seems strangely antiquated in these times.
I only ever read "The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity" and took away that Habermas tried to valiantly defend Kantian reason against various irrationalists and postmodernist upstarts - however, I wasn't really buying it, especially since he seemed to contradict his own maxims by not really trying to understand where, say, Foucault and Derrida were coming from.
His concept of "Verfassungspatriotismus" (patriotism based on the constitution) was a useful corrective to the nationalist and xenophobic tendencies in Germany.
Finally, he recently made some contentious remarks about Ukraine ("compromise") and Gaza ("Jewish lives are a priority") which exposed the limits of his universalism, a generational shift in German intellectual discourse and left a bit of a sour aftertaste. But then this just showed that even the most rational thinkers are children of their time.
We are the corpses unless we decide not to be. But it's got to be soon. Time is short. Their only chance to survive, their final gambit, is savage, murderous violence against us.
And don't tell me they don't have the fascist, subhuman will to do it:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Vga2stK5bBo
If you can get beyond the paywall, this Fintan O'Toole piece describes the coming worldwide freakshow authored by the Christian Republican Conservative movement.
My immediate reaction to Trump's "invitation" was... Wait. Did you just invite China to bring their aircraft carrier in, and give them a chance to fly planes around measuring US carriers' premier radar signals, and getting a chance to bounce radar off F-35s? The US very carefully did not deploy F-35s over much of Syria while the Russians were there, because they didn't want the Russians to know what the returns were like.
Particularly funny, apart from the obvious, because China, for example, is being allowed by Iran to send ships safely through the Strait of Hormuz according to the C4 News I watched half an hour ago. It looks like Trump is still being advised by the same experts who didn't factor in closure of the Strait when planning the war...
Trump seven days ago, still very pissed off that Starmer had refused permission for the US to launch offensives from UK air bases:
“The United Kingdom, our once Great Ally, maybe the Greatest of them all, is finally giving serious thought to sending two aircraft carriers to the Middle East. That’s OK, Prime Minister Starmer, we don’t need them any longer – But we will remember. We don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won!”
Trump today:
“We have already destroyed 100 per cent of Iran’s military capability, but it’s easy for them to send a drone or two, drop a mine, or deliver a close-range missile somewhere along, or in, this waterway, no matter how badly defeated they are.” In what appeared to be an appeal to the UK and other nations, he added: “Hopefully China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and others, that are affected by this artificial constraint will send ships to the area so that the Hormuz Strait will no longer be a threat by a nation that has been totally decapitated.”
May Pete's end be as sticky and icky as anyone could come up with for a B movie (extended cut) with a count Rugen organized prelude.
At the minimum at the next security conference a bunch of foreign defense officials should gang up on him with knuckledusters and blunt instruments and then run the video of the event non-stop with laughing track and looney tunes sound effects attached. "Dick season! Rabid Season!" Then send him home (alive but wishing not to be) in an empty (American) beer keg with a big sticker: "Spoiled and rejected. Turn back to sender (Fox)" and another with "special/toxic refuse".
Following on GftNC, I picked this particular link because it's from almost a year ago yet is pertinent to the US strike killing scores of school girls in Iran. There are more recent articles linking the two directly, but I find there's something more biting about this older article that simply raises the question "What could go wrong?" now that we know one thing that went horribly wrong.
I liked this, in today's Times (a Murdoch paper, don't forget).
Pete Hegseth’s rhetoric gives me that sinking feelingWhen the US gloats over Iranian deaths and pumps out propaganda war videos, it’s not just their enemies who recoil
Already sinking under heavy fire at the Battle of Santiago de Cuba in 1898, the Spanish cruiser Vizcaya burst into flames. The ammunition store ignited, a torpedo went off, hell was unleashed and desperate, burning men hurled themselves into the sea. Watching all this was John Woodward Philip, commanding the USS Texas on the other side. “Don’t cheer, boys,” he admonished his men. “The poor devils are dying.”
Last week, the Iranian warship Iris Dena was sunk by the Americans off the coast of Sri Lanka, claiming almost 100 lives. Perhaps you saw President Trump at a Republican conference recounting what a navy official told him when he asked why ships like this hadn’t instead been captured. “He said, ‘It’s more fun to to sink ’em’,” reported Trump, with a smirk. And his audience guffawed. From one to the other. From “Don’t cheer, boys” to “It’s more fun to sink ’em.” Really, I could stop there.
Pete Hegseth, Trump’s self-declared secretary of war, has also had a chatty week. Here he is talking about Iran’s long-running antipathy towards the US: “They didn’t always declare it openly,” he said, “except for their constant chants of ‘Death to America’.” Ah, that old giveaway. His own rhetoric, though, isn’t terribly different. In the same speech, he gloated: “The regime who chanted ‘Death to America’ and ‘Death to Israel’ was gifted death from America and death from Israel.” Over the past fortnight, he has also said: “They are toast and they know it,” and, “We will hunt you down without apology and without hesitation and we will kill you.” Plus, “This was never meant to be a fair fight, we are punching them while they are down, as it should be.” And more, and more, and more.
One might say Hegseth sounds like he thinks he is in a film, but only if it were a really bad film, perhaps written by a 15-year-old using ChatGPT. A comic, perhaps. A computer game. Probably, one should not use the phrase “small dick energy” on the comment pages, and particularly not when accusing other people of cheapening the discourse. But damn it, I think I must.
Hegseth is a veteran. He served in Iraq and Afghanistan. What he’s trying to channel here, I suppose, is a sort of gung-ho military pep talk; how soldiers talk to other soldiers before leading them into war. Not all of them, though. Perhaps you recall Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins addressing his men in 2003 before leading them into battle in the Iraq War. “Iraq is steeped in history,” he told them. “It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birthplace of Abraham. Tread lightly there."
“Is it something they teach at Sandhurst,” wrote Jane Shilling in these pages, “that beautiful, bleak, apocalyptic turn of phrase?” Don’t assume my intent is to crassly contrast Britain and America. George W Bush admired Collins’s speech so much he had it displayed on the wall of the Oval Office.
Listening to Hegseth this week, and to Trump, I also found myself remembering Tony Soprano’s despairing wail to his psychiatrist. “Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?” he demanded. “The strong silent type? That was an American!” That’s Tony bloody Soprano. It’s quite something when the White House’s view of American values is less appealing than his.
Speaking of TV shows, you may have also seen the videos pumped out by the White House as another part of their propaganda blitz. Computer games mixed with real war footage alongside clips from films and TV shows. “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY!” said the attached tweet, no matter that it includes Bryan Cranston saying “I AM the danger!” in Breaking Bad, from a sequence in which his character brags about being a murderer.
Bad enough if you thought this was just an administration trying to communicate with its public in language it assumes they’ll understand. The suspicion, though, has to be that it’s worse than that. This is real. This is them. This is how they see what they are doing, their world view and their oomph.
Doubtless Hegseth, in his likeable way, would regard all this as “pearl clutching”. That’s what he said about those among America’s traditional allies, including the UK, who were sceptical about this war at the start. But language matters. When Trump smirks about dead sailors you can only conclude he is without doubts, without those 3am ceiling-staring moments of normal human horror at those poor devils lost at the bottom of the sea. Which in turn makes you wonder what he thinks about the collateral damage in Tehran as flames engulf the city. But you don’t need to wonder. “The president doesn’t like the attack,” a White House insider told Axios after Israel bombed Iranian fuel supplies. Why? “It reminds people of higher gas prices”.
So no, it’s not just pearl clutching. Nor is it just about aesthetics. This is a real war with real, huge costs, and not just for America’s enemies. Few in Britain would instinctively side with the Iranian regime even in a war of at best dubious legality, begun seemingly on a whim, with little coherent plan for how it might end. But do they grasp, these chest-thumping war bros, how hard they are making it for their traditional, instinctive allies, whose own populations can see and hear every word? “It’s more fun to sink ’em.” When our enemies talk like this we conclude they are dangerous and immoral lunatics. It’s going to take some circumspection, biting of tongues and blinkers if we’re to avoid the same conclusion about our friends.
This is the text google provides as an intro to a Faux News story. (I do not follow links to Faux News, nor will I provide them for others to follow.)
House Speaker Mike Johnson sounds the alarm on what he calls a growing Sharia law threat in the U.S., urging vigilance to protect American ...
Sharia law was one of my go-tos when listing old Republican boogeymen that had fallen by the wayside and amounted to nothing. I don't know if this means this one is back, but someone's doing CPR on it.
Thanks for the clarification, MC. I've since discovered the MEGA (Make Elections Great Again - how original!) act with even more neat stuff in it. Holy hell.
I suppose this is the best thread to discuss the SAVE America Act. Don l’orange is pushing hard to sign it into law before the midterms.
The version of the SAVE Act that passed the House and has been submitted to the Senate affects registration. The most onerous provisions that Trump rattles off in his social postings -- restrictions on mail-distributed ballots, photo id for in-person voting, etc -- are not in this bill. Thune has already said he doesn't have the votes to dump the filibuster for this bill; some people believe he doesn't have enough votes to pass it even w/o the filibuster. As for Trump's demands, I don't think either Thune or Johnson have the votes to pass something that requires state/local Republicans to implement a new voting system on the fly, in a very short period, sans funding.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Iran and the US”
The only reason that Ezra Klein interview is not more depressing is that I already knew about many of the missteps (from our point of view) that the US has made. Not just the many things that we have done wrong, but the multiple opportunities to do something right which we have ignored.
That's what makes the JPCOA so impressive. Under Obama, we (eventually) did something right. Of course, Trump insists that anything and everything that Obama did must be reversed. So, another opportunity squandered. And now he's making another huge mess (making messes being, arguably, his core "competency"). There's no way that ends well. The main question is: will it be a massive failure or an epic fail?
Still, making the heroic assumption that we manage to preserve our own nation, there is reason for hope. The last 3/4 century notwithstanding, Iran has remained open to good relations with the US. Maybe we will even get an administration which will take yes for an answer.
On “Don’t know the words, but the tune sounds the same”
The challenge, always, is to figure out whether the work you are doing will be used for unethical ends. Sometimes, that's easy. But other times, it isn't -- especially with work which might, or might not, be used for unethical purposes. Social science has that issue, but so does medicine, engineering, etc.
It's easy, especially after the fact and with 20/20 hindsight based on more complete information, to say "Obviously this work...." It takes actual effort to work out what information the actors had, and the context they were working in. Pundits rarely, in my observation, are quite that industrious.
"
I've mentioned Giovanna Borradori's Philosophy in a Time of Terror (2003) a few times here over the years. Borradori's book is her dialogues with Habermas and Derrida speaking with her separately, but responding to parallel questions about terrorism and philosophy in NYC not long after 9/11. It's an extraordinary work, giving the reader a chance to see both philosophers thinking and responding in real time to an extraordinary circumstance. I found it very approachable reading, so it might make a good introduction to anyone wanting to get a taste of Habermas's thinking, and an idea of the philosophical tensions between him and the post-structuralists.
I found Derrida's responses in the book to be very insightful and clarifying, and a good corrective to the straw man portrayals of him as fast-talking charlatan.
On “Iran and the US”
That someone can be me! If this is what lj meant, the transcript is included in this gift link (it doesn't start in exactly the same place, but goes on with the stuff in lj's video):
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/14/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-ali-vaez.html?unlocked_article_code=1.TVA.Pk5_.8_X0pkHJtduY&smid=url-share
Regarding any past missteps by Ezra Klein (I'm thinking of, as I assume lj is, his comments after Charlie Kirk got killed), my view is very definitely that one doesn't have to agree with every single thing someone has ever said or done to find their contributions useful, valuable or interesting. And Ezra Klein is certainly a frequent provider of all three kinds of contributions.
On “Don’t know the words, but the tune sounds the same”
pi + 0.01
"
A comment that refers to "irrationalists" would have been better for Pi Day, but Pi+1 is still appropriate, I guess.
"
Thanks. I hope it's ok if I use this as no open thread:
Juergen Habermas has died. I doubt many people made it through "The Theory of Communicative Action" but his (and Apel's) discourse ethics were certainly influential when I studied philosophy. The idea that the better argument will eventually win out, together with Gadamer's principle of charity, i.e. assuming that your interlocutor is rational and possibly correct, seems strangely antiquated in these times.
I only ever read "The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity" and took away that Habermas tried to valiantly defend Kantian reason against various irrationalists and postmodernist upstarts - however, I wasn't really buying it, especially since he seemed to contradict his own maxims by not really trying to understand where, say, Foucault and Derrida were coming from.
His concept of "Verfassungspatriotismus" (patriotism based on the constitution) was a useful corrective to the nationalist and xenophobic tendencies in Germany.
Finally, he recently made some contentious remarks about Ukraine ("compromise") and Gaza ("Jewish lives are a priority") which exposed the limits of his universalism, a generational shift in German intellectual discourse and left a bit of a sour aftertaste. But then this just showed that even the most rational thinkers are children of their time.
On “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran”
We are the corpses unless we decide not to be. But it's got to be soon. Time is short. Their only chance to survive, their final gambit, is savage, murderous violence against us.
And don't tell me they don't have the fascist, subhuman will to do it:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Vga2stK5bBo
If you can get beyond the paywall, this Fintan O'Toole piece describes the coming worldwide freakshow authored by the Christian Republican Conservative movement.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/02/12/whose-hemisphere-venezuela-fintan-otoole/
It will be nuclear.
"
wj: I did consider putting the word experts in quotes, but rather thought it wasn't necessary!
"
Assumes facts definitely not in evidence.
"
My immediate reaction to Trump's "invitation" was... Wait. Did you just invite China to bring their aircraft carrier in, and give them a chance to fly planes around measuring US carriers' premier radar signals, and getting a chance to bounce radar off F-35s? The US very carefully did not deploy F-35s over much of Syria while the Russians were there, because they didn't want the Russians to know what the returns were like.
"
Particularly funny, apart from the obvious, because China, for example, is being allowed by Iran to send ships safely through the Strait of Hormuz according to the C4 News I watched half an hour ago. It looks like Trump is still being advised by the same experts who didn't factor in closure of the Strait when planning the war...
"
Trump seven days ago, still very pissed off that Starmer had refused permission for the US to launch offensives from UK air bases:
“The United Kingdom, our once Great Ally, maybe the Greatest of them all, is finally giving serious thought to sending two aircraft carriers to the Middle East. That’s OK, Prime Minister Starmer, we don’t need them any longer – But we will remember. We don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won!”
Trump today:
“We have already destroyed 100 per cent of Iran’s military capability, but it’s easy for them to send a drone or two, drop a mine, or deliver a close-range missile somewhere along, or in, this waterway, no matter how badly defeated they are.”
In what appeared to be an appeal to the UK and other nations, he added: “Hopefully China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and others, that are affected by this artificial constraint will send ships to the area so that the Hormuz Strait will no longer be a threat by a nation that has been totally decapitated.”
"
Kash Patel so wants to be shiny and chrome. Witness him.
"
Mad Max, you say? Don't forget about the water.
https://apnews.com/article/iran-war-desalination-water-oil-middle-east-12b23f2fa26ed5c4a10f80c4077e61ce
"
Hegseth is starting to give me an Immortan Joe vibe, which is fitting since we are on our way to Mad Max style fighting over petrol any day now.
"
May Pete's end be as sticky and icky as anyone could come up with for a B movie (extended cut) with a count Rugen organized prelude.
At the minimum at the next security conference a bunch of foreign defense officials should gang up on him with knuckledusters and blunt instruments and then run the video of the event non-stop with laughing track and looney tunes sound effects attached. "Dick season! Rabid Season!" Then send him home (alive but wishing not to be) in an empty (American) beer keg with a big sticker: "Spoiled and rejected. Turn back to sender (Fox)" and another with "special/toxic refuse".
"
https://digbysblog.net/2026/03/11/the-boys-who-destroyed-our-government/
This vermin will murder you and your children.
He is Republican. He is MAGA. He is conservative. He is Libertarian. He is Christian. He is subhuman vermin.
He is not human.
"
Civil War and Nuclear War.
I thougt perhaps one would come after the other, but now I believe they will be simulataneous.
These vermin will murder all of us.
Run for your fucking lives.
"
Following on GftNC, I picked this particular link because it's from almost a year ago yet is pertinent to the US strike killing scores of school girls in Iran. There are more recent articles linking the two directly, but I find there's something more biting about this older article that simply raises the question "What could go wrong?" now that we know one thing that went horribly wrong.
https://theintercept.com/2025/04/15/pete-hegseth-pentagon-civilian-casualties-harm/
The f**kface won't lose a second of sleep over it, I'd bet.
"
I liked this, in today's Times (a Murdoch paper, don't forget).
Pete Hegseth’s rhetoric gives me that sinking feelingWhen the US gloats over Iranian deaths and pumps out propaganda war videos, it’s not just their enemies who recoil
Hugo Rifkind
Wednesday March 11 2026, 7.11pm, The Times
Already sinking under heavy fire at the Battle of Santiago de Cuba in 1898, the Spanish cruiser Vizcaya burst into flames. The ammunition store ignited, a torpedo went off, hell was unleashed and desperate, burning men hurled themselves into the sea. Watching all this was John Woodward Philip, commanding the USS Texas on the other side. “Don’t cheer, boys,” he admonished his men. “The poor devils are dying.”
Last week, the Iranian warship Iris Dena was sunk by the Americans off the coast of Sri Lanka, claiming almost 100 lives. Perhaps you saw President Trump at a Republican conference recounting what a navy official told him when he asked why ships like this hadn’t instead been captured. “He said, ‘It’s more fun to to sink ’em’,” reported Trump, with a smirk. And his audience guffawed.
From one to the other. From “Don’t cheer, boys” to “It’s more fun to sink ’em.” Really, I could stop there.
Pete Hegseth, Trump’s self-declared secretary of war, has also had a chatty week. Here he is talking about Iran’s long-running antipathy towards the US: “They didn’t always declare it openly,” he said, “except for their constant chants of ‘Death to America’.” Ah, that old giveaway.
His own rhetoric, though, isn’t terribly different. In the same speech, he gloated: “The regime who chanted ‘Death to America’ and ‘Death to Israel’ was gifted death from America and death from Israel.” Over the past fortnight, he has also said: “They are toast and they know it,” and, “We will hunt you down without apology and without hesitation and we will kill you.” Plus, “This was never meant to be a fair fight, we are punching them while they are down, as it should be.” And more, and more, and more.
One might say Hegseth sounds like he thinks he is in a film, but only if it were a really bad film, perhaps written by a 15-year-old using ChatGPT. A comic, perhaps. A computer game. Probably, one should not use the phrase “small dick energy” on the comment pages, and particularly not when accusing other people of cheapening the discourse. But damn it, I think I must.
Hegseth is a veteran. He served in Iraq and Afghanistan. What he’s trying to channel here, I suppose, is a sort of gung-ho military pep talk; how soldiers talk to other soldiers before leading them into war. Not all of them, though. Perhaps you recall Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins addressing his men in 2003 before leading them into battle in the Iraq War. “Iraq is steeped in history,” he told them. “It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birthplace of Abraham. Tread lightly there."
“Is it something they teach at Sandhurst,” wrote Jane Shilling in these pages, “that beautiful, bleak, apocalyptic turn of phrase?” Don’t assume my intent is to crassly contrast Britain and America. George W Bush admired Collins’s speech so much he had it displayed on the wall of the Oval Office.
Listening to Hegseth this week, and to Trump, I also found myself remembering Tony Soprano’s despairing wail to his psychiatrist. “Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?” he demanded. “The strong silent type? That was an American!” That’s Tony bloody Soprano. It’s quite something when the White House’s view of American values is less appealing than his.
Speaking of TV shows, you may have also seen the videos pumped out by the White House as another part of their propaganda blitz. Computer games mixed with real war footage alongside clips from films and TV shows. “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY!” said the attached tweet, no matter that it includes Bryan Cranston saying “I AM the danger!” in Breaking Bad, from a sequence in which his character brags about being a murderer.
Bad enough if you thought this was just an administration trying to communicate with its public in language it assumes they’ll understand. The suspicion, though, has to be that it’s worse than that. This is real. This is them. This is how they see what they are doing, their world view and their oomph.
Doubtless Hegseth, in his likeable way, would regard all this as “pearl clutching”. That’s what he said about those among America’s traditional allies, including the UK, who were sceptical about this war at the start. But language matters. When Trump smirks about dead sailors you can only conclude he is without doubts, without those 3am ceiling-staring moments of normal human horror at those poor devils lost at the bottom of the sea. Which in turn makes you wonder what he thinks about the collateral damage in Tehran as flames engulf the city.
But you don’t need to wonder. “The president doesn’t like the attack,” a White House insider told Axios after Israel bombed Iranian fuel supplies. Why? “It reminds people of higher gas prices”.
So no, it’s not just pearl clutching. Nor is it just about aesthetics. This is a real war with real, huge costs, and not just for America’s enemies. Few in Britain would instinctively side with the Iranian regime even in a war of at best dubious legality, begun seemingly on a whim, with little coherent plan for how it might end. But do they grasp, these chest-thumping war bros, how hard they are making it for their traditional, instinctive allies, whose own populations can see and hear every word?
“It’s more fun to sink ’em.” When our enemies talk like this we conclude they are dangerous and immoral lunatics. It’s going to take some circumspection, biting of tongues and blinkers if we’re to avoid the same conclusion about our friends.
On “As it all falls down around our ears: An open thread”
(BTW, I died of Ebola. Thanks, Obama.)
There's a big difference between "dying of Ebola" and "ALMOST dying of Ebola".
Good luck storming the castle.
"
This is the text google provides as an intro to a Faux News story. (I do not follow links to Faux News, nor will I provide them for others to follow.)
Sharia law was one of my go-tos when listing old Republican boogeymen that had fallen by the wayside and amounted to nothing. I don't know if this means this one is back, but someone's doing CPR on it.
(BTW, I died of Ebola. Thanks, Obama.)
On “The ides of Texas”
Thanks for the clarification, MC. I've since discovered the MEGA (Make Elections Great Again - how original!) act with even more neat stuff in it. Holy hell.
"
I suppose this is the best thread to discuss the SAVE America Act. Don l’orange is pushing hard to sign it into law before the midterms.
The version of the SAVE Act that passed the House and has been submitted to the Senate affects registration. The most onerous provisions that Trump rattles off in his social postings -- restrictions on mail-distributed ballots, photo id for in-person voting, etc -- are not in this bill. Thune has already said he doesn't have the votes to dump the filibuster for this bill; some people believe he doesn't have enough votes to pass it even w/o the filibuster. As for Trump's demands, I don't think either Thune or Johnson have the votes to pass something that requires state/local Republicans to implement a new voting system on the fly, in a very short period, sans funding.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.