I’m not sure why people want him to humiliate Democrats by trying something doomed to failure. Hegseth can’t be impeached successfully unless multiple Republicans support doing so.

So we’re at the “I didn’t do it, but if I did then it isn’t so bad” stage.

My favorite part of this is that the redistricting would have had no problems in court if the Republicans had simply not talked about their race-related motives in public.

With that said, I don’t have high hopes for the Supreme Court here.

he has no control over his party

He can’t actually order them to do anything. One might argue that if he was a better leader, he could have persuaded them to stick with the plan longer, but maybe he had already done that weeks ago and this is the longest that anyone could have persuaded them to hold out. It is the longest shutdown ever, after all…

The random sample survey of 604 D.C. residents was taken between August 14 and 17 shortly after Trump signed the executive order. It indicates some 65 percent of residents do not believe the presence of FBI agents and uniformed National Guard troops from an increasing number of states makes the city safer.

Eight of 10 residents surveyed oppose Trump’s executive order to federalize law enforcement in the city. Seven in 10 oppose it “strongly.”

Source.

I’m not sure why they thought a DC jury would ever convict, given that even a DC grand jury (which hears only the prosecutor’s side) didn’t indict.

Because disenfranchising people is the solution to disenfranchising people. But who knows - this may be the least bad option.

So people want him to (1) believe that the Catholic faith is essential for eternal salvation but also (2) not care whether or not his wife is Catholic? That wouldn’t make any sense. Of course any Catholic who cares about his loved ones is going to hope that they convert to Catholicism.

I wouldn’t say that Trump is interested in being a theocrat - his movement pays lip service to Christianity as part of its nostalgic fantasy of America the way that it used to be, but the actual Christian conservative movement has been sidelined within the Republican party since 2016 (if not earlier). Trump and his inner circle care about Christianity only to the extent that it is a label that divides “us” from “them”.

That’s true, and I think that Trump is actually not a Catholic theologian but rather that he is expressing the view, common among cultural Christians today, that God weighs a person’s good and bad deeds against each other. There’s still the hope for divine forgiveness in this view, but the abandonment of the idea of unearned grace is contrary to the teachings of every Christian denomination, as far as I know.

Catholics consider the idea that any living person can be sure of getting into heaven a heresy. Trump isn’t Catholic but he’s still not saying anything theologically controversial here.

Reid’s longtime partner, Alonzo Mable, is Black.

If they’re into race play, that’s weird but none of our business. Judge not lest ye be judged for the porn that you like.

It may be related to the motive for the shooting somehow, but it’s neither chilling nor political.

I guess some protestors woke up and thought “Today’s the day that I’m going to do something which cannot possibly accomplish anything useful.”

Vote blue if you don’t want the Republican to win, but here I’d actually prefer Curtis Sliwa. (Not that he has any chance of winning.)

I don’t think that’s correct.

“Businesses cannot discriminate,” Bondi said, referring to the Office Depot incident. “If you wanna go in and print posters with Charlie’s pictures on them for a vigil, you have to let them do that. We can prosecute you for that.”

I should clarify what I mean by tolerance. I’m talking about the ability to co-exist peacefully even with the people that one hates. If this sort of tolerance breaks down, then the left is at a large disadvantage in the conflict that would follow - the right is generally more unified, better at violence, and in control of the federal government.

I’m not saying that people shouldn’t look for objective truth, but rather that the behavior of someone who thinks he’s probably right and the behavior of someone who thinks he’s definitely right are going to be quite different, and that we would all (probably) be better off if cultural norms favored the former sort of behavior rather than the latter.

Norms according to which it is ok for one side to attack the other in some way but it is not ok for the other side to respond in the same way (because the first side considers itself objectively correct) only work when the balance of power between the two sides is so uneven that it would often be called oppression. The desire to oppress others is a part of the human condition that everyone ought to be alert for in themselves - being on the left does not mean being immune. However, even those on the left who are in no mood for tolerance currently don’t have the power to win the fight their way - if tolerance doesn’t win then the right will win.

Everyone doing this sort of thing is sure that he’s the one speaking objective truth while his enemies are evil and destroying the country. The sight of so many people on the other side equally sure that they’re actually the ones speaking the objective truth ought to cause some self-doubt but it seldom does.

There really are people out there who are evil and people who are destroying the country (not necessarily the same people) but we either have rules for everyone or rules for no one. “Rules for them but not for me, since I’m speaking objective truth” is, in effect, rules for no one.

The members of Trump’s first administration seem like saints compared to the guys he has now.

Ironic.

I wonder if they’ll try again.