I’m not sure that kind of election calculus works anymore. If anything, Trump is even dumber and less qualified than Palin (who had at least some experience in public service) and he won when he ran for the top spot.
The Republicans keep getting more and more extreme but instead of alienating their voters it mostly just shifts the Overton window.
i think it had a lot to do with the fact he was a man. but yeah: they have gone so far off into lala land it’s possible that mtg could be seen as presidential now ( precedential i think is how she spells it ) - it feels impossible to say anymore
wow! that’s wild. people should talk that up way more often.
i think ive posted this before, but it was rebroadcast this week: about thomas’ particular brand of male oriented black nationalist thinking. ( basically, his belief that things like segregation can be fine as long as men and money are in control )
the library’s website is a little hard to navigate, so i cut and pasted from its transcription there:
Without a doubt, Judge Thomas has achieved a remarkable success in his career, raising himself up from humble beginnings to the nomination for the highest court in the land. That is to his great credit and I applaud him for it.
Yet I have to believe that his confirmation to the highest
court in the land would not represent a step forward in the road to racial progress but a U-turn on that road. The record and rhetoric of the man leaves me little confidence that his confirmation would in any way help address the profound racial problems and divisions that drag our country down. His statements on the Brown v. Board of Education case on affirmative action, and even on the Roe v. Wade to me indicate that he wants to push to clock back.
African Americans I believe want to have confidence in the promise of the courts, we want to believe that they are a place we can turn for the redress of the racial discrimination and many deprivations that are still clearly rampant in our country. The Supreme Court decision in the Brown v. Board of Education instilled in us the hope nearly forty years ago as did many that subsequently followed.
Yet much has changed in recent years. The Supreme Court now appears to be turning its back on the undeniable fact of discrimination and exclusion, ruling that anti-discrimination laws and remedies have gone too far. I believe that Judge Thomas will accelerate that trend and that will be destructive for our nation.
The article is from February, before D’Satan’s tiff with the mouse.
At an evangelical victory party in front of the Supreme Court to celebrate the downfall of Roe v. Wade last week, a prominent Capitol Hill religious leader was caught on a hot mic making a bombshell claim: that she prays with sitting justices inside the high court. “We’re the only people who do that,” Peggy Nienaber said.
This disclosure was a serious matter on its own terms, but it also suggested a major conflict of interest. Nienaber’s ministry’s umbrella organization, Liberty Counsel, frequently brings lawsuits before the Supreme Court. In fact, the conservative majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which ended nearly 50 years of federal abortion rights, cited an amicus brief authored by Liberty Counsel in its ruling.
In other words: Sitting Supreme Court justices have prayed together with evangelical leaders whose bosses were bringing cases and arguments before the high court.
A brave young man speaks up about how forcing religion on school athletes IS coercive:
“disturbing dinner was an act of selfishness and void of decency,” said the restaurant chain’s spokesperson lacking all self awareness
( wow. that is the world’s largest onebox. good they got the advertisements in there 
)
I’m glad that the person i was hoping wrote this article did indeed write it.
This line struck me:
Thomas’s argument against substantive due process is more than doctrinal. It’s political. In a speech before the Federalist Society and the Manhattan Institute which he gave in his second year on the Court, Thomas linked a broad reading of the due-process clause, with its ever-expanding list of “unenumerated” rights, to a liberal “rights revolution” that has undermined traditional authority and generated a culture of permissiveness and passivity.
The last bit seems contradictory to me, mostly the part about passivity. How can a society that is NOT beholden to “traditional authority” be “passive”… It seems far more likely that traditional authority causes greater passivity, as everyone is bound to the dictates of the “traditional authority.” Really fucked up thinking on that one…
If people missed this, it’s worth listening to, primarily for Elie Mystal telling it like it is…
That is horrifying and scarcely believable. But also, sadly, believable.
the logic - i would assume - is that in a tolerant society people live and let live: so their interactions with each other are “passive.” in a hierarchical society, the upper tiers work to keep everyone below them in their place, non-conformity is actively stomped out, and the state not only allows them to do so it actively encourages them to
conformity is not a natural state so it takes energy. work on behalf of authority. therefore it’s not passive.
awful but i believe that’s what he means
… and yet the algorithm still cuts the punchlines off 80% of The Onion links?
Thomas is, uh, at least partly motivated by a … let’s say potentially misguided nostalgia for the clearly defined (by overt, forcible segregation) Black communities of the early twentieth century
If that’s the lost golden age in his head, who knows what weird pretzel logic is going to come out in his opinions pointing us all back there 
The ban on contraception already exists.
