Nightwingdragon

Right. But here's the thing.

Those issues you brought up probably don't even make the top 10 in terms of issues that are important to the average voter. Your average voter doesn't care about "fixing" a system that they believe has been long since broken anyway, regardless of who is offering to do the fixing. It's not even a matter of who's right or wrong. It's the fact that the entire issue is just not important to the average voter to begin with. To your average voter, it will just come off as Democrats being out of touch with kitchen table issues and just trying to implement "fixes" that will primarily cement their own power. Even if those fixes end up having benefits for the average voter, they'll be seen as largely irrelevant if it doesn't actually help them pay the bills.

Put that up against someone who's making promises (regardless of how empty) that he will do things that will actually impact everyday voters, and the ones making those promises are going to win every time. Kamala Harris promising to fix the government while Trump is promising to actually bring prices down (Yes, I know....) would have just led to her losing by an even bigger margin.

Here's a question.

There are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of federal employees who apparently have received this email.

Who the fuck is supposedly going over all the responses?

These days, it's pretty easy to automate the process of sending out those emails and checking out who did and didn't reply. But who's to say if those responses are even valid? Would Elon even be able to know if some of them just responded with a copy of their shopping list from last week? Or an AI-generated random word salad? Or one of those Nigerian Prince emails? If it were me, I'd make it fun -- I'd just respond with what appears to be gibberish until you realize that the first letter of each word spells out "FUCK YOU ELON" over and over and over. If I'm gonna get fired anyway, might as well enjoy it on the way out the door.

There's zero chance that these emails are being reviewed and used to making hiring and firing decisions. None. At all. They're probably not even being read. If they're planning on firing you, that decision has already been made. All this is doing is giving Musk a way to justify his own job by saying he's doing 'something', and using the responses as justification for doing what he was going to do anyway, regardless of the content.

Not something I'm a fan of for multiple reasons.

One is that Zelinsky is making the same mistake that Trump routinely makes: Making concessions before even sitting at the negotiating table, eliminating your own leverage. Why should Russia offer any concessions to secure his resignation when he's already said he's willing to resign? No reason for them to give him anything if he's willing to concede that for free.

The second is simple. Zelinsky blinked. Never mind giving an inch and Trump taking a yard -- once you give so much as a micrometer to Trump, he believes the rest of the entire light-year is his by birthright and will never let it go. He will portray this in the media as Zelinsky conceding that he is an "illegitimate dictator" and will use this as support for the US supporting Russia's demands for his removal.

Zelinsky is also saying he may be forced to give up half the mineral rights in his country. Again, making this statement public is a huge win for both Trump and Russia as it essentially takes another point of negotiation off the table, while also validating Trump's belief that Ukraine is barely even a third wheel in their own peace talks. Those mineral rights and Zelinksy stepping down could have extracted enormous concessions that could have included Ukraine getting their land back, joining NATO, creating a NATO-managed DMZ, or any number of other things. But instead, Ukraine giving up half its minerals and Zelinsky stepping down are now simply a given and where negotiations are going to start, not where they're going to end.

And look, I fully admit that in the end, Ukraine may not have much of a choice here. I'm not saying I like the idea, but at a geopolitical level, Trump is right in saying that Ukraine really does have little to say about its own future. With Trump in office, Ukraine really does have little to no real negotiating power here, and Zelinksy may simply be acknowledging the reality of the situation and taking the least bad option. But if Zelinsky wants any shot at even having a seat at the table, he needs to at least keep up the appearance that he's intending to keep fighting. Rolling over and playing dead will only reinforce Trump's belief that Ukraine's minerals are his, Russia's statements that the war is justified to remove an 'illegitimate' leader, and both of their beliefs that Zelinksy needs to just sit at the kiddie table like a good little boy and let the adults handle things.

Dems could have run on fixing the actual flaws in the system that are allowing this coup

It would have accomplished exactly nothing if they did. Voters aren't interested in "fixing the system". It would have come off as Democrats caring about nothing but "making power grabs" while ignoring kitchen table concerns such as the price of groceries. It would have come off as Democrats being more disconnected from the needs of everyday voters than they already are.

Harris, or whoever the dem nominiee would have been, would have been focusing on "fixing the system" while Trump just made all the same empty promises about "bringing down the price of eggs on day one", and he would have won by an even wider margin. Your average voter gives exactly zero shits about how things work in DC and what does and doesn't need to be fixed.

As said by others in the comments, there are quite a few things that come into play here, which all would be true regardless of who the actual sitting President is.

• The Constitution of the US is seen as the Supreme Law of the Land. The US being subservient to the ICC would be a direct violation of that. The ICC does not and cannot carry any legal weight in this country.
• There are already laws in place saying that the US can and will use military force in order to extract a US citizen held by the ICC.
• The US is, by far, the most powerful military in the world, and it isn't even close.
• The US is also the cornerstone of the global economy. Any attempt at enforcing sanctions against the US in order to force compliance with any kind of international law would likely simply be ignored, and would probably do more damage to the sanctioning country than to the US anyway.
• The US is host to the United Nations. I don't think I have to say what kind of shitshow would happen if the UN tried to arrest the leader of the country that's hosting it.

The ICC could issue a warrant for Trump's arrest as a symbolic gesture, but it would have about as much practical effect as if I had issued it.

This is all a result of decades of the GOP and Mitch McConnell's policies of "Whatever the Democrats are in favor of, we must be against, no matter what" and "Ban it and everything associated with it." taken to their most extreme extremes.

They were against Covid vaccines and wanted them banned. When people asked "what about other vaccines", it became "ban them too". Science? Fuck it, science is bad, ban that too! And without science, who needs research? Might as well get rid of that. Just teach the kids the truth: God created everything, you don't need science, and that cough will go away eventually......

<> Don't need Alzheimer's research if people aren't gonna live long enough to suffer from it!

Me smart, see!

There was a little kernel of sanity behind that ruling, though. Absent a clear conviction for a crime that smells like insurrection,

The House of Representatives, by a majority vote, found that Donald Trump engaged in insurrection and impeached him for this after January 6th. The Senate failed to vote to remove him from office, but this does not change the fact that he was found to have engaged in insurrection by the House of Representatives.

who gets to decide what insurrection means?

The House of Representatives already did.

Texas would have taken Biden off based on some bullshit theory that he was instigating a foreign invasion of migrants.

And when either the House of Representatives votes to impeach him for it, then he can be removed from the ballot as well. They tried, and failed. Repeatedly.

And if the courts just randomly decide that Biden's actions constituted an insurrection, we have much bigger problems to deal with, as the courts at that point can just declare anything they want as an insurrection, including political dissent.

The language behind a third Presidential term is much, much clearer. The plain text of the amendment bars it

Going based on the "kernel of sanity" thing, the argument is that it was meant to bar more than two consecutive terms, and was not meant to bar non-consecutive terms. The argument is that those who wrote the amendment knew the importance of being specific, and if they wanted to bar non-consecutive terms, they'd have specifically said as much.

There is absolutely nothing barring Trump from running for a third term.

The Supreme Court literally just hand-waved away another Constitutional amendment that should have barred Trump from running for a 2nd term, let alone a third. And they basically did it on the legal precedent of "because fuck you, that's why." All 3 branches of government have completely ignored the blatant constitutional violations he's committed since taking office. There's absolutely nothing stopping the Supreme Court from just striking down another constitutional amendment because hey why not and letting the guy run as often as he wants.

And remember, we even had one state legislator asking why we even have elections instead of just handing the votes to Trump......

Didn't one of Trump's professors call him one of the dumbest students he ever had?

In that light, these two are perfect for each other.

I know it goes without saying, but can you imagine if Biden or Obama literally went on national television and declared to a United States governor "I am the law!" like he's a dollar-store Judge Dredd?

Well let's just put it this way.

• Chuck Schumer just found out that he is under one of Trump's retaliatory investigations for a comment he made over 5 years ago. Rather than tell Trump to fuck all the way off, he's basically groveling and saying it was all just one big misunderstanding.

• NY Governor Kathy Hochul just declined to remove Adams from office and is saying she's gonna keep an eye on things. Because having a mayor that was indicted on multiple corruption charges and who is being openly blackmailed by Trump is A-OK to have in charge of the country's biggest city. Surely nothing can go wrong here.

So let's just say I have little faith in our elected representatives doing a god damned thing. So far, all our elected officials (and for that matter, our entire judicial system and media ecosystem as well) have proven that they will first bend the knee and kiss the ring before doing anything that might be viewed as "resistance". All of them. The whole god damned lot of them. The ones we elected to be the first to hold up the pillars of our society when threatened are proving to be the first ones to step aside the minute they see someone with a sledgehammer.

Are we looking at the same article? This piece is literally a fact check.

I think the guy you're responding to was making a statement about the lack of fact-checking in the media in general, not with this piece in particular.