• 3 Posts
  • 1.71K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle



  • No, my point is that not all Conservative judges are the same. And, if you take the Constitution seriously, the President has a right to pick someone, and the Senate has a right to advise him on who they find acceptable, and their consent is a requirement. So this the way it was supposed to have worked all along.

    Remember that Anthony Kennedy is a conservative, and he was nominated to the Court by Reagan. Yet, once the Court started to lurch to the Right he ended up being the swing vote. Regardless, though, he retired while Republicans could fully control his replacement.

    You could argue Kennedy was a compromise choice, because the Senate was in control of Democrats at the time, and they had already rejected Robert Bork for the job. If Chuck could force a similar outcome, wouldn’t that be a good thing?


  • I get it, but I think this time even Chuck will be on board. He can even call it the “McConnell Rule” if he wants. Politicians always love blaming the other side.

    The only way a Democratic Senate would approve a new Trump justice would be if Democrats went to him and said “I know you won’t nominate a Liberal, here is a list of Conservatives we would back” and Trump picked one of them. Yes, even Fetterman would support that.

    And before you start hating on Chuck over supporting any Conservative judge, remember that there are a pile of Conservative judges who are pissed off over this Administration also. Forcing Trump to appoint a centrist may make the difference between Trump being able to successfully ratfuck the next Presidential election, or not.



  • No, it’s not really that obvious, at least for Alito. The article doesn’t mention the fact that he has a book coming out soon, and I read in a different article that his scheduled book tour conflicts with the next Court term.

    Plus, there is a small chance that Democrats win back the Senate, and if that happens before the next SCOTUS opening then there is zero chance Democrats act on it, after what happened with Garland’s nomination to replace Scalia. So, if either justice was thinking of retiring, they would prefer to do it while Republicans still held the Senate.

    I doubt Thomas ever leaves before his health forces to, though. He makes too much in bribes gratuities to make any other gig attractive.




  • I was about to complain yet again “that’s not how it works”, but then I looked up the text again and this is explicitly allowed. Congress can set up a commission that basically takes the place of the Cabinet for 25th Amendment purposes. So now all this talk of the 25th amendment makes a bit more sense to me.

    They still need a 2/3 margin in both houses even after the commission makes their determination, because the idiot is guaranteed to contest it. But maybe there is some truth to the idea that Republicans won’t vote to impeach but would vote to declare him incompetent, based on his dumb tweets








  • No, you won’t have to pay taxes on that cash when importing it. But you can bet that CBP will ask nosy questions about where you got it. And unless you can satisfy them that you got it by legitimate means, they will assume you got it by illegal means and confiscate it. It’s called “civil asset forfeiture”. Look it up.

    However, as a US citizen you still technically owe income taxes on all your worldwide income. But you would settle that with the IRS regardless of whether or not the money ever makes it back to the US.

    Now, this situation is one of the few legitimate use cases for crypto. Find someone locally who will sell you a few hundred BTC with that cash, and now CBP has nothing to find at the airport. Then cash it out once you are in the States. The IRS would still be interested in where you got the money, because they monitor all the ways to get cash out of the Crypto ecosystem into the US. But, as long as you have documentation of your lottery win (and crypto transfers) and file it all it shouldn’t be an issue. I would prefer to take my chances as a documemted rich person by the IRS than as a rando who shows up at Newark with a briefcase of foreign currency.



  • The toilet handled solid and liquid waste differently. Solid waste was stored for disposal on earth, liquid waste was stored in a smaller container and intended to be periodically vented out into the void. But the mechanism for that froze, and the container they had to store it in was too small for the whole trip, so they had to use a backup supply of pee bags for pee instead of the toilet.

    I wonder if we were saved from an even worse fate, and if the toilet had worked as planned we would be destroyed at some point in the future by a race of aliens who we accidentally peed on when we threw our pee overboard in space