> it's my wife's fault we raised the flag upside down on January 6
Yeah, there's quite a lot of reason to believe SCOTUS is political. I think the simplest one: the conservative justices lied and/or told half-truths about their views on Roe v Wade. Under oath. The ones who lied are liars. The ones who dodged the question are politicians.
Sotomayor literally made the same types of claims about DC v Heller during her confirmation hearing, despite later joining a dissent to overturn the results. So if that's the case it runs both ways.
It's also worth pointing out that there is a gulf of difference between how a court interprets law and the constitution, and how a court interprets a previous "Precedent". Courts have a lot of power to throw out or reverse previous precedent, but much less permanent power to change interpretation of the laws themselves.
As I understand it, one of the main disenfranchisement tactics is to challenge ballots already cast. It's potentially very effective because the voter must see that their vote was challenged and then proactively contest it.
Based on this NPR article, there are only about 28k voters nationwide on the "potentially fraudulent" list. And when Texas tried pursing theirs, they only ended up being able to act on ~100 of them.
Realistically, the rate of fraud nationwide is actually really low and this database would just a waste of time for the states that pursue it. But by holding it off the courts would be doing more to cover the administration (by giving them a plausible excuse) than letting it proceed.
It reminds me of those police drug busts where they take a picture of all the drugs and it's just like a couple small bags, but they'll run the press release like "hundreds of lives saved!"
Acting like there are going to be millions of voters purged serves both party messages right now.
I'd say it serves multiple purposes. Optics is certainly one of them "look upon my works, ye Republican...".
But I think another perspective is a more dangerous effort to chip away at state responsibility for the process and procedures of voting. Once this is owned or easily influenced by a national institution then a single-party state disguised as a republic becomes far simpler to implement.
The danger here being that our system has relied on decentralized states handling these tasks and thus has not created the guardrails necessary (if ever they could survive a unitary executive theory) to ensure fairness.
Challenging cast ballots is non-scalable because it requires a lot of formal judicial process separately for each ballot challenged. Realistically a State could go after less than a thousand.
Even if you know with high certainty that a million ballots are fraudulent it is effectively impossible to challenge them because the judicial capacity required to do so doesn't remotely exist. There are adversarial scenarios where someone dumps vast numbers of fraudulent ballots and those ballots cannot be contested.
State legislatures have historically been empowered to vote in place of the people if the vote becomes infeasible or unreliable. People voting in Federal elections is largely a 20th century invention; the old methods are still available.
No, of course not, because life isn't black and white. Just those with licensing agreements that conflict with the militaries mission, where the product could be manipulated to hinder the mission. Most manufacturers would jump at the chance to rewrite their licensing agreements specifically for the military just to get a government contract.
This was not manipulated to hinder the mission. Every account of this indicates it was clearly spelled out. They could not use it for mass surveillance or for targeting. The lawyers at the DOD did not miss this. They agreed to the terms, because they had no intent to use it for such purpose purposes.
This is like the change order from hell.
Nothing was stopping the DOD from just entering into a new contract with OpenAI…
But if they don’t jump at the chance to retroactively rewrite the already-signed license, you’re OK with designating them a supply-chain risk?
That’s going to make it rather risky for anyone to sign licenses with the DoD. In fact, it renders the licenses pointless since you just have to do anything the licensee says.
I mean typically the outcome of civil suits is black and white (at least on a per-claim basis).
So Amazon and Microsoft don't enforce cloud licensing agreements with the USG? If the government wants to add 3,000 Windows users to support their mission Microsoft is shit out of luck in getting paid for them?
At the time when the jet violated Turkish airspace it wasn't a territorial threat either. Strangely enough no jet has violated Turkish airspace since (but a few drones have landed in Turkey during the war in Ukraine).
Meanwhile Russian drones, cruise missiles (!) and planes violate NATO airspace almost daily it seems. And are being launched from within NATO arispace quite frequently (see Germany).
And no, the drones are not the "Amazon delivery drones".
E.g on September 8 Geran-4 flew 120 km unopposed through Romanian airspace, took a leisurly turn above a small town with population of ~20k people, and then flew back, eventually crashing in Moldova.
Peripheral countries are demilitarized but maintain Article V status, Putin is exiled to Saint Helena and required to spend the remainder of his life lecturing Tucker Carlson on Russian history.
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