The true evil of the Electoral College is that makes the vast majority of people's vote not matter, and by extension it makes their lives not matter to politicians.
Trump has no reason to care that California is on fire. Literally none. Because he can't get votes from it.
The crazy thing is, most of the towns burning in California are Republican parts of the state! It's Trump-supporting farmers and loggers losing their livelihoods. And he has no political incentive to give a fuck because California's a blue state and their votes don't matter.
Every state has Democrats and Republicans. Every state has regions of voters with different needs and interests.
If we had a national popular vote, politicians would be forced to listen to all of these disparate groups. Under the Electoral College, most of it doesn't matter.
The entire reason we have the idea of red and blue states — the only reason our politicians and our media stereotype each state as latte-sipping urban elitists or backwards cow-tippers from Bumblefuck County, Nowhere — is that the Electoral College artificially makes them so.
This is why I want to slam my head on a desk whenever someone says the Electoral College is necessary to ensure small/rural/middle/whatever states are properly heard.
It does the opposite. It makes politicians see each state as a bastardized, one-dimensional parody of itself.
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Sigh... every year I have to explain this. THIS PART OF THE TAX CODE HAS A VERY GOOD REASON FOR EXISTING.
Of course the IRS doesn't expect criminals to follow it. The idea is that when they DON'T follow it, they can then get charged with tax evasion on top of their other crimes.
Organized crime bosses are hard to prosecute because they can kill, threaten, or intimidate any witnesses to their crimes.
But it's MUCH harder for them to beat tax evasion. Because they clearly have the money, and clearly didn't file a tax return and declare how they earned it.
That is why this provision exists. So that in the event that a mobster silences anyone who could prove their murder, racketeering, etc, the IRS can still nail them for not reporting how they got their ill-gotten gains.
Neither side wants "a secular binational one state solution for Jews AND Palestinians" because both sides are (rightly) terrified of what would happen if the other elected a majority to rule over that combined country.
The *only* path to peace is both of them getting a state.
What's maddening about the whole Colorado decision is that tons of people aren't even trying to argue the court erred — they're just saying, "we should ignore what the plain text of the Constitution says and let Trump run anyway for the sake of avoiding political controversy."
If you want to argue Trump didn't really participate in an insurrection, go for it — the trial court found mountains of evidence that he did, and even Trump's *own lawyers* have called January 6 an insurrection, but you're welcome to argue why the trial court is wrong.
Likewise, if you want to argue the President of the United States isn't an "officer" as intended by the 14th Amendment, that's a stretch, but hey, the trial court judge ruled that, that's probably what the Supreme Court will rule, so you're in good company, go for it.
Caroline, Hamas *filmed themselves* committing rape. They are literally boasting about doing it. And many of the recovered bodies of women from 10/7 show clear sexual trauma.
Okay but... "a terrorist organization well-established to have committed mass rape violated its ceasefire agreement to return all the women in its captivity" is in fact already reason enough to continue war operations against them. We don't need "proof" they're still being raped.
It's absurd to compare racist tropes of sexual violence used to justify the lynching of Black men, to military operations against a *literal terrorist organization that tortured and killed over a thousand people*.
In summary: at least half the people Florida's new education standards cite as slaves who learned useful skills in slavery weren't even slaves, and most of the rest didn't learn their skills from slavery.
Also, as I pointed out yesterday, even if some slaves DID learn skills from slavery, this whole framing misses the point: Skills or no, Black people had little freedom in labor in the South post-Emancipation, and many effectively were kept in slave-like states by the Black Codes.
The narrative of Black Americans going from bondage on Southern farms to successful entrepreneurs might have been true in some cases, but it was not the norm, and that's a direct result of racist laws passed post-Reconstruction, most of which are barely even discussed in school.
DeSantis is saying any corporation that does anything Republicans don't like, will now be investigated by the state for supposedly breaching responsibility to shareholders, because of potential revenue loss from Republicans not buying their products.
This is a psychotically authoritarian attack on free enterprise.
And it also doesn't have any basis in law. Companies are not liable for breach of fiduciary responsibility for literally any single thing they do that fails to turn a profit. That's not how it works.
Breach of fiduciary responsibility means executives are engaged in a conflict of interest, or theft or misuse of company resources, in a way that benefits a third party over the company.
It doesn't mean, hey, we did an ad and conservatives got mad at it and didn't buy our stuff.