It will be interesting to see if it gets anywhere. Especially with this Supreme Court, campaign finance laws have become really hard to enforce. Political fundraising is basically bribery with extra steps, with a wink and nod to the idea that companies and the rich aren’t just buying special treatment. Trump has certainly been less circumspect about it, but it’s going to be interesting to see if his staff has been flagrant enough to actually have charges stick.
I’d go for the latter. The main reason being that banning Nazi ideology or speech is probably a violation of the First Amendment. Nazis are bad and their ideology is bad. But the First Amendment has been interpreted by the courts to prohibit government regulation of speech based on its content, except in very narrow circumstance. This usually means direct and specific threats.
Just to get in front of the usual counter examples folks try to use here. Yes, you can yell, “fire” in a crowded theater. In fact, if there is a fire, you really should. There is no prior restraint on yelling, “fire” in a crowded theater. Now, you might be held accountable for causing panic and injuries in the resulting stampede for the exits. But that is not the same as a prior restraint.
Slander is also not a prior restraint. I’m fact, it’s usually not a crime. It’s an actionable tort, a private cause for litigation.
I get it. Banning Nazis would feel really good. But it’s basically a dead issue while the First Amendment holds. There are better places to spend political capital than tilting at a windmill.
The easy part of a democracy is saying, “I have the right to vote”. The hard part of democracy is say, “ya, that asshole also has the right to vote.” Whether we like it or not, the country as a whole is no where near as liberal/progressive/left wing as Lemmy. This is going to mean that we have to work with folks with whom we have pretty significant disagreement. Hopefully with these wins, things can shift leftward and more can get done. At minimum, we can slam the brakes on the GOP and Trump’s corruption and undermining of our democracy. It’s slow, its frustrating and it often means we don’t get what we really want. But, as terrible of a form of government as democracy is, it’s a damn sight better than anything else we’ve tried in history.
I really don’t see any way the GOP wins the presidency in 2028. That’s just not how US politics work. People always hate Congress, but they blame the president for bad economies and bad news.
Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974. Regan trounced Carter in 1980. Never underestimate the American public’s willingness to forget about past crimes. I hope you’re right that 2028 becomes a second drubbing of the GOP over their failed policies and corruption. I also doubt that what we saw last night will have any durability. It wasn’t all that long ago that Democrats were talking about the the Blue Wall. And that fell apart almost as fast as it got named.
Swing and low info voters simply don’t give much of a shit about the work Congress actually does on a daily basis. They’re going to blame the president for their problems like they always have.
I agree that most voters don’t care about politics. And more importantly, they don’t want to hear about it. And this is why I see an impeachment (which will ultimately fail) is such a dumb play. It will force people to deal with politics. It will be the news cycle for months. And ultimately the votes just don’t exist in the Senate to convict. Which means the public has politics shoved in their face for months and the end result is a propaganda win for Trump. He will push a failure to convict as him being “INNOCENT of any wrong doing” (of course it will use ALL CAPS). And the Democrats get what out of that? No one is held accountable, nothing useful gets done to begin the process of fixing the country, and the public just sees the Democrats being useless for months on end.
We need to hold Trump and his cronies accountable. But it’s not really possible right now. Once he is out of office and we have a DOJ which isn’t filled with criminals, then they can pick apart the criminal empire. Until then, the Democrats need to show the public that they are working to make the lives of the public better.
I agree that it’s needed. But it’s a dead issue for the next two years. Let’s assume both Alaska and Mississippi break for Democrats. That’s 56 seats in the Senate. If we assume that all 56 Democratic Senators vote for impeachment, that’s still 4 votes short of a conviction. Where do those last 4 votes come from?
Maybe they can convince Rand Paul to vote for impeachment. While he may be a couple cards short of a pair, he’s pretty consistent in his Libertarian views. He might be willing to go against Trump.
Then there is Ted Cruz. Sure, he’s been a full on cock-Gobbels-ing Trump. But, he did originally fight Trump and might be quite willing to jettison Trump and try to build a “savior of the GOP” for a 2028 Presidential run.
And then who? Oddly, I think Lindsey Graham might have been a possibility, but he’s done the world a favor and dropped dead. And this is before we consider John Fetterman seeking to ingratiate himself further to Trump,. meaning Democrats would need to pick up another vote for impeachment.
I just don’t see it as within reach. At best, it becomes virtue signaling. At worst, Trump touts the lack of conviction as “Proof” that he is innocent and of Democrats’ “Trump Derangement Syndrome”. It hands Trump a propaganda win while accomplishing nothing real in return. It gives him an issue to take back to the GOP base and repair some of the damage to his cult of personality. And nothing actually gets done.
Ya, it sucks big old donkey balls, but the real accountability is going to have to happen after he is out of the Presidency. His own DOJ has kinda shown the way on this. Break out the RICO act and go after every single one of the criminals who supported his corrupt regime. Toss everyone we can in jail and throw away the key.
It would be nice, but that’s probably not in the cards for the next two years. Even if everything goes right at this point, the Democrats would be looking at 55 seats in the Senate. That’s still 5 seats short of overriding filibusters or vetoes and also for an impeachment conviction. The Democrats need to govern well, get the cost of living down and they need to show that the trust put in them was well placed. Spending the next two years in a bunch of political theater won’t do that and Democrats will lose the trust they have now.
Trump’s corrupt regime needs to be held to account, but that’s not going to happen in the next two years. Democrats need to prove they can make peoples’ lives better so they can expand (or at least maintain) their advantage. Then, if they can win the Presidency in 2028, then it will be time to retool the DOJ into an actual law enforcement arm and turn them loose on the corruption of Trump’s administration.
It’s a spiritual successor to 538, but if anyone has a better option, glad to be informed:
I would argue that the actual successor to 538 is Nate Silver’s substack. You know, the guy who founded 538: https://www.natesilver.net/
There is also Galen Druke’s podcast/substack, where he continues the spirit of the 538 podcast directly: https://www.gdpolitics.com/
And then there is the Still Counting podcast which might as well be titled “The 538 podcast, but ABC still owns that name, so we called it something else”: https://www.youtube.com/@StillCountingPodcast
Ok ya, it’s second. A pretty distant second:
I care about corruption and would like to see everyone involved in the Trump Administration and ICE dragged into a RICO suit as soon as we have a DOJ which isn’t part of that corrupt conspiracy. But, voters are going to vote on the same thing they always vote on: their own perceived economic interest. Thankfully, Americans seem to finally be waking up to the idea that the GOP really doesn’t have their best interests at heart and now trust Democrats more on the economy.
If we’re going to stop the bleeding, we need to flip the Senate to get any sort of push-back against the corruption. We need to keep reminding people that the price of diesel is directly the fault of Trump and the GOP Senators who refused to stop his tariffs and war. And that the price of everything is tied to the price of diesel.
Republicans have nothing to run on, so they are trying to manufacture something to run against. Given what the polls look like at the moment, and some of the numbers from early returns, it hasn’t been working. Year after year after year, James Carville keeps being proven right:
It’s the economy, stupid.
Wait, it has uses other than doomscrolling?
AI isn’t replacing people, its just making skilled workers somewhat faster and better at their jobs. I use AI pretty heavily in my work these days. I work in cybersecurity and if you go into the vendor room at any conference and throw a lawn dart in the air, it will almost certainly impale some vendor talking about their “AI Enabled” tool. Thing is though, some of those tools are actually really useful. When you are trying to dig the three malicious events out of tens of thousands of routine events which look very similar, an LLM trained on that sort of data can be really good at surfacing the bad stuff. Get yourself a few million log events per day, with attackers trying new stuff all the time, and you start to need something better than static algorithms and heuristics to find evil. Actually getting in front of attackers and stopping their attacks, before data walks out the door, gets even harder.
The problem arises when you have inexperienced folks using those tools and management is not willing to put the money into training and having more skilled workers to back the less trained workers. Part of that is just not knowing how things work and part of it is the AI lying very convincingly. Someone who knows systems reasonably well might look at one of those hallucinations and immediately call bullshit. Someone without that knowledge might assume the AI is right and kick off a pretty disastrous series of events. But this means that the company might just be spending more on workers plus AI tokens than they did on just workers.
And that’s really the crux of the problem for businesses. AI isn’t a magical worker replacement program. Its a tool to enhance workers. And it won’t magically make marginal workers less marginal. It’s like handing a wet behind the ears kid a chainsaw. He’s not going to suddenly become Paul Bunyan and be the worlds most efficient lumberjack. He may not even be OK at the end of the day. On the other hand, get that chainsaw into the hands of an experienced lumberjack, and he might just be cause for better environmental regulations. The problem is, eventually every business will be using AI tools and any competitive advantage they offered will disappear. AI will just be a tool everyone uses and not using it will be like that lumberjack showing up to work without an axe and dressed in high heels.
Microsoft builds its ecosystem around vendor lock-in. You’re using Entra? M365 integrates real nicely with that. Oh, you want to use something else? Well, good luck with that, our documentation is so piss poor even CoPilot won’t be able to help you. And once you drink the M365 kool-aid, now you have Exchange, Outlook, Teams and Office. You also get afflicted with SharePoint as a bonus! Good luck justifying anything else to your management.
Honestly, I don’t see how MS hasn’t fall afoul of EU anti-trust laws, again. They have bound everything up so tightly that you’re lucky installing Windows doesn’t obligate you to a lifetime of M365 subscription costs.