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[cartoon_soldier]

I like Vox

 

[benjipwns]

Real explanatory journalism:
"It's clear monetary police has shot its wad." - Barack Obama's first words to Christina Romer; November 21, 2008.

 

[Diablos]

Senators Ayotte and Johnson who are both quite vulnerable said there should be no replacement for Scalia until 2017.

Really wish Ginsburg would have stepped down in 2014. Breyer too.

 

[Jay-Hova]

The only way I see Bernie not winning the general election is if he has some secret old interview quote or something he wrote where he praises communist Russia or talks about seizing the means of production (not fake ones), or if he died.
Otherwise it seems ridiculous for the Hilary fans here to act as though he'd somehow lose especially if it's against Trump imo.

 

[QuiteWhittle]

Senators Ayotte and Johnson who are both quite vulnerable said there should be no replacement for Scalia until 2017.

I doubt this obstrutionism will hurt the GOP, it never does, but I'm glad Johnson continues to dig his grave. Can't wait to see him get Blanched in the fall.

 

[Makai]

I doubt this obstrutionism will hurt the GOP, it never does, but I'm glad Johnson continues to dig his grave. Can't wait to see him get Blanched in the fall.

He got Blanche on his t-shirt

 

[shinra-bansho]

I think you probably underestimate the GOP smear machine. I imagine it's churning away gathering oppo, in the [still unlikely] event he becomes the nominee.

For the most part, anything that has arisen thus far has basically been left alone, because until recently they didn't really care about him but now the GOP essentially want him to be the nominee.

There are old [and frankly pretty irrelevant given that antiquity] quotes and articles about him wanting to nationalize industries, businesses, assets. But they will be used to effect. There are visits to "enemy states." There is a weird essay about gender roles from the 70s, for instance, that mentions a rape fantasy. It will be contorted and twisted. As will anything else that's being held back in contingency.

 

[benjipwns]

The election is boring, trite and over with, let's move on already.

And discuss how Vox is basically a young adult Politico without any real reporters:
winners and 2 losers from Saturday night's Republican debate
8 feminist Valentine's Day cards to share with your friends

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is dead
The conservative stalwart has passed at age 79.

Ted Cruz and other conservatives are arguing Obama shouldn't get to replace Justice Scalia
The stage is set for a constitutional crisis.

Scalia’s death comes just a month before the court’s biggest abortion case in years
The Court will rule on a controversial Texas law that clinics say has forced many of them to shutter.

Antonin Scalia’s death could lead to more 4-4 ties. Here’s what happens if it does.
Some of the biggest cases of the term could be affected.

Mitch McConnell has no intention of letting Obama replace Scalia
The Senate's top Republican: "this vacancy should not be filled" until 2017. The Senate's top Democrat: that's "shameful."

Antonin Scalia's death makes the 2016 election a referendum on the Supreme Court
With Scalia's death, the stakes are bigger than ever.

Replacing Antonin Scalia will be a profound test of the American political system
Can America’s political system work amidst divided government?

Hillary Clinton: GOP calls to leave Scalia's seat vacant "dishonor our constitution"
"the Senate has a constitutional responsibility here that it cannot abdicate."

The coming fight to replace Justice Scalia, explained
The fight over Obama's next Supreme Court nominee will be the most politicized and high-stakes nomination fight in decades.

Antonin Scalia routinely ruled against gay rights. Those opinions explain his philosophy.
How Scalia's opinions on gay rights explain the former Supreme Court justice.

Read: President Obama vows to nominate replacement to Justice Scalia
Republicans have said the Supreme Court seat should not be filled until after the upcoming presidential election.

At least 14 Supreme Court justices have been confirmed during election years
The death of Justice Antonin Scalia has forced partisans to become experts on Supreme Court history.

Who will Obama choose to replace Antonin Scalia? Here are 7 of the strongest candidates.
Place your bets now.

Republican candidates really don't want President Obama to nominate a Supreme Court justice
None of the presidential candidates seemed to believe that an Obama nominee should ultimately wind up on the high court.

Elizabeth Warren: Republicans risk threatening "our democracy itself" over Supreme Court seat
In four paragraphs, the Massachusetts senator strikes back at Republicans who don't want President Barack Obama to nominate a successor to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

What Antonin Scalia's death means for Obama's big climate plans
Obama's big plan to cut CO2 from power plants is no longer in quite as serious legal jeopardy.

Read Justice Ginsburg’s moving tribute to her “best buddy” Justice Scalia
Why the friendship between the court's most outspoken liberal and its most outspoken conservative was so special.

There are plenty of outlets that tell you what happened yesterday, but virtually no organizations that simply tell you what’s going on.

What do you mean by "explain the news"?

Our end goal isn’t telling you what just happened, or how we feel about what just happened, it’s making sure you understand what just happened.

The media is excellent at reporting the news and pretty good at adding commentary atop the news. What’s lacking is an organization genuinely dedicated to explaining the news. That is to say, our end goal isn’t telling you what just happened, or how we feel about what just happened, it’s making sure you understand what just happened.

We're going to deliver a lot of contextual information that traditional news stories aren't designed to carry, and we're hiring journalists who really know the topics they cover. There’s no way we’ll be able to help readers understand issues if we haven’t done the work to understand them ourselves.

Enter Pam Karlan, one of the most celebrated liberal law professors of her generation and a former deputy assistant attorney general for voting rights under Obama. Openly bisexual and with a female partner, she famously wrote Justice Harry Blackmun's dissent in Bowers v. Hardwick, the since-overturned Supreme Court decision validating state bans on gay sex. She has attacked the Roberts Court for overly constraining Congress's power, and thinks the Court is too soft on both the death penalty and prison conditions.

"Would I like to be on the Supreme Court?" she once said in a graduation speech at Stanford Law. "You bet I would. But not enough to have trimmed my sails for half a lifetime." She hasn't trimmed her sails, and as such has a paper trail that would make her hard to confirm even with a Democratic Senate. But that makes her a perfect "fuck you" nominee if Obama just wants to wait until his successor takes over.

Now I understand what happened.

http://www.vox.com/2016/2/13/10987456/antonin-scalia-gay-rights/in/10751011 is a perfect example of how bad Vox is in comparison to their lofty claims. I'll let Meta explain why this article is a terrible "explainer" for Scalia's "philosophy" on the Court.

 

[teruterubozu]

When Hillary wins I'm going to come back and laugh at everyone who's diablosing right now.

Unfortunately that seems to be the prime motivation for many people this election. "I told you so." I wonder how many folks have old posts bookmarked for crow-eating purposes.

 

[benjipwns]

Unfortunately that seems to be the prime motivation for many people this election. "I told you so." I wonder how many folks have old posts bookmarked for crow-eating purposes.

This is why you say everything.

 

[Makai]

I didn't realize that Democrats were on the cusp of packing the court. The justices are clumped together in age.

2016-2020
Ruth Bader Ginsburg - 82 yr 11 mo
Anthony Kennedy - 79 yr 6 mo
Stephen Breyer - 77 yr 6 mo

2028-2032
Clarence Thomas - 67 yr 7 mo
Samuel A. Alito, Jr. - 65 yr 10 mo

2036-2040
Sonia Sotomayor - 61 yr 7 mo
John G. Roberts - 61 yr 0 mo

2044-2050
Elena Kagan - 55 yr 9 mo

 

[dramatis]

I think, regardless of whether you are a Bernie supporter or a Hillary supporter, that right now you absolutely have to square yourself with the idea of a President Trump. All it takes is one October surprise and everything can fall apart.

You can be a lot more zen if you do that.

Y'all Robby Mook is gay?? Hot damn

You just found out?

 

[benjipwns]

I think, regardless of whether you are a Bernie supporter or a Hillary supporter, that right now you absolutely have to square yourself with the idea of a President Trump.

I don't see how he can beat Gary Johnson.

 

[teruterubozu]

I think, regardless of whether you are a Bernie supporter or a Hillary supporter, that right now you absolutely have to square yourself with the idea of a President Trump. All it takes is one October surprise and everything can fall apart.

You can be a lot more zen if you do that.

Yup. The Republican clown car days are over. The Democrats also need to get out of their Punch & Judy phase.

 

[QuiteWhittle]

I didn't realize that Democrats were on the cusp of packing the court. The justices are clumped together in age.

2016-2020
Ruth Bader Ginsburg - 82 yr 11 mo
Anthony Kennedy - 79 yr 6 mo
Stephen Breyer - 77 yr 6 mo

The next president could make four SCOTUS appointments to determine the nation's course for decades to come and the two major party frontrunners are a woman under FBI investigation(with a close primary challenge from an atheist socialist) and Donald Trump.

 

[Diablos]

Yup. The Republican clown car days are over. The Democrats also need to get out of their Punch & Judy phase.

What are you talking about? Did you watch the debate on Saturday? It's still a clown car.

 

[benjipwns]

Democratic presidential hopefuls Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are flooding Nevada with volunteers ahead of this week's key nominating contest but they face a problem - the addresses, phone numbers and other personal data they need to reach many voters are out of date.

Nevada, which is more than a quarter Latino, was one of the states worst affected by the 2008 financial meltdown, with hundreds of thousands of families unable to pay their mortgages and forced to move in a crisis that by some estimates hit minorities twice as hard as whites.

With the foreclosed homes often switching hands multiple times - from homeowner to bank to investor and back to another homeowner in just a few years - keeping up with voters who at some point lived in those homes is difficult.

Data that might have been corrected in the 2012 general election has, in many cases, already fallen out of date again because the Nevada housing market has continued to see wave after wave of foreclosures, the campaigns said.

...

Underscoring the problem, about a fifth of the 1 million voters registered in Clark County, where Las Vegas is located, are tagged as inactive, according to Joseph Gloria, the county’s registrar of voters - meaning their mail has been returned to the county elections office as undeliverable.

Latinos make up almost 32 percent of Las Vegas.

Jeez, Sanders will stop at nothing to suppress the minority vote.

 

[dabig2]

Senators Ayotte and Johnson who are both quite vulnerable said there should be no replacement for Scalia until 2017.

Really wish Ginsburg would have stepped down in 2014. Breyer too.

Can't wait to flush these 2010 Tea Party wave senators down the fucking toilet.

And yeah, Ginsburg and Breyer should have stepped down when the going was good. Assuming Dems win in November, both should be pressured to step down sometime before the 2018 midterms. I have zero faith in the Democrat establishment to motivate midterm turnout and we very well could see another Republican wave if the economy decides to hiccup again.

 

[HylianTom]

I didn't realize that Democrats were on the cusp of packing the court. The justices are clumped together in age.

2016-2020
Ruth Bader Ginsburg - 82 yr 11 mo
Anthony Kennedy - 79 yr 6 mo
Stephen Breyer - 77 yr 6 mo

2028-2032
Clarence Thomas - 67 yr 7 mo
Samuel A. Alito, Jr. - 65 yr 10 mo

The next president could make four SCOTUS appointments to determine the nation's course for decades to come and the two major party frontrunners are a woman under FBI investigation(with a close primary challenge from an atheist socialist) and Donald Trump.

Yep. This is why I've long harped on voting for whomever the nominee is.. and why I'm still praying to Din that Trump or Cruz is the nominee. There's a damn good chance that we're still feeling the judicial effects of this one well into the 2030s.

 

[Teggy]

I think Huffpost hired Drudge to design their homepage this morning. I'm surprised there aren't any sirens on it.

 

[benjipwns]

Whoever Trump's nominees are will be interesting.

 

[Diablos]

Wouldn't Loretta Lynch have to indict Hillary? Can't see that happening.

 

[Frank the Great]

I'm totally going to sound like a Right Winger for part of this, so fair warning:

One way or the other you're going to be paying people a living wage. Whether its by mandating a livable minimum wage or by making up the difference in welfare payments to those who aren't getting paid enough. That or you let people slowly die through insufficient nutrition / medical care / housing (which I'll admit is a more popular solution than I'd have anticipated).

Setting a minimum wage below living and then making up the difference in welfare is effectively subsidizing company wages out of the public pocket. Why should companies who can't afford to run themselves be living off the public largess ?

This is the best justification of the minimum wage and frankly this would play great with moderate voters in the general election. I wish Hillary would make this argument in addition to the fairness argument her and Obama always make.

White people love anything that will reduce welfare.

 

[Teggy]

Wouldn't Loretta Lynch have to indict Hillary? Can't see that happening.

Yes, but if you have voices coming out of the FBI annoyed that an indictment was recommended but not brought down it would probably have the same effect as an indictment.

 

[Diablos]

Yes, but if you have voices coming out of the FBI annoyed that an indictment was recommended but not brought down it would probably have the same effect as an indictment.

How? They can't indict by whining.

 

[Roland_Gunner]

And yeah, Ginsburg and Breyer should have stepped down when the going was good. Assuming Dems win in November, both should be pressured to step down sometime before the 2018 midterms.

How exactly do you propose to pressure two Supreme Court justices?

 

[SmokeMaxX]

Yes, but if you have voices coming out of the FBI annoyed that an indictment was recommended but not brought down it would probably have the same effect as an indictment.

I wouldn't be surprised if that information was "leaked" in the coming months whether it is true or not.

 

[Teggy]

How? They can't indict by whining.

I mean effect on the election. it would consume all coverage.

 

[QuiteWhittle]

Yes, but if you have voices coming out of the FBI annoyed that an indictment was recommended but not brought down it would probably have the same effect as an indictment.

A leak like that would bring down Obama and the Democrats at large too, not just Clinton.

 

[benjipwns]

Based on my proprietary unskewed regression model it looks like the most likely election results are, at 99.9% probability:
Trump (R) - 57% / 538 EV
Bloomberg (I) - 31% / 0 EV
Sanders (D) - 12% / 0 EV
Johnson (L) - 0% / 0 EV

 

[Y2Kev]

I wonder if the Rethuglicans can hedge by waiting until they see who will win the election. For example, if it's October and Ted Cruz is ahead of Bernie Sanders by 20%, continue blocking. If the Queen is destroying Donald Trump by 60 or 70 points, then perhaps they compromise.

 

[Diablos]

How exactly do you propose to pressure two Supreme Court justices?

You don't, but they should have had the common sense to realize what a huge risk they took by not stepping down before the Senate was likely to go back into Republican hands. Really disappointed in them. I guess they don't care about enough about all the cases they ruled on over the many years that went their way and keeping the court from shifting to the far right.

A leak like that would bring down Obama and the Democrats at large too, not just Clinton.

True. I don't think she will get indicted but if she does, we're really doomed.

 

[dramatis]

Young Latinos Power Both Democrats in Nevada Caucus Campaign

At a training session for Clinton precinct captains last week in a heavily Latino neighborhood of Las Vegas, Alex Noriega, 23, said she became a Clinton supporter in 2008 because of Mrs. Clinton’s support for women’s reproductive rights. Then 16, she recalled, she went to Planned Parenthood to get the Plan B medication to avoid a pregnancy after having unprotected sex and became convinced that the policies Mrs. Clinton was advocating were essential for women to control their bodies.

When Sanders supporters set up an information table at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, last week, Santiago Gudiño-Rosales, 20, a freshman pre-med student, stood outside for hours handing out fliers.

“We as Latinos have to come out and realize he’s the only candidate who is going to help us get on that pathway we need to pursue a better life,” Mr. Gudiño-Rosales said.

But his path in aiding Mr. Sanders so far has been uphill, Mr. Gudiño-Rosales said. He has knocked on about 140 doors — but nearly every Latino voter he has canvassed, he said, has asked the same question:

“Who is Bernie Sanders?”

 

[gaugebozo]

I wonder if the Rethuglicans can hedge by waiting until they see who will win the election. For example, if it's October and Ted Cruz is ahead of Bernie Sanders by 20%, continue blocking. If the Queen is destroying Donald Trump by 60 or 70 points, then perhaps they compromise.

Why stop there? They can wait until it looks like there's going to be a Democratically controlled Senate.

 

[HylianTom]

Ralston was on MSNBC this morning. Made it sound like it's tighter than it was in December, but that things still seem to slightly favor Hillary (shocking, right?). Definitely hyping this up like its some sort of prize fight.

 

[cartoon_soldier]

I wonder if the Rethuglicans can hedge by waiting until they see who will win the election. For example, if it's October and Ted Cruz is ahead of Bernie Sanders by 20%, continue blocking. If the Queen is destroying Donald Trump by 60 or 70 points, then perhaps they compromise.

I wonder if Democrats can stop fucking around do the Hillary coronation already.

 

[benjipwns]

I wonder if Democrats can stop fucking around do the Hillary coronation already.

They should kick Sanders off all the ballots for not being a member of the Party.

 

[Joe Shlabotnik]

I wonder if the Rethuglicans can hedge by waiting until they see who will win the election. For example, if it's October and Ted Cruz is ahead of Bernie Sanders by 20%, continue blocking. If the Queen is destroying Donald Trump by 60 or 70 points, then perhaps they compromise.

That's exactly what will happen, even though a blatant spiteful cave like that ahead of a Hillary win will double-seal the election for her. Of course, then Obama has all the leverage to nominate a more liberal judge.

It's a huge risk and bad play all around to delay a nomination, if they're being realistic about their chances. Obama picking right now is their best bet for a compromise nominee. If they're being realistic.

If.

 

[samn]

They should kick Sanders off all the ballots for not being a member of the Party.

they should kick Clinton off the ballot for her and her husband helping destroy the party.

 

[SmokeMaxX]

I wonder if the Rethuglicans can hedge by waiting until they see who will win the election. For example, if it's October and Ted Cruz is ahead of Bernie Sanders by 20%, continue blocking. If the Queen is destroying Donald Trump by 60 or 70 points, then perhaps they compromise.

I think it's in their best interest to wait until there's a new President (if possible). That way they can pin the new "liberal activist justice" on the new President (if it's a Democrat) which would give them further "reason" to obstruct the new President.

 

[Cesare Borgia]

I wonder if Democrats can stop fucking around do the Hillary coronation already.

If she can't beat Sanders she doesn't deserve anything.

No one is being handed the nomination on the GOP side btw, their fight could go on eve longer.

 

[shinra-bansho]

They should kick them both off. #bringbackjim

 

[benjipwns]

If she can't beat Sanders she doesn't deserve anything.

The polls say she's already won. No reason to continue with this facade and hold back the progress of democracy.

 

[teruterubozu]

The polls say she's already won. No reason to continue with this facade and hold back the progress of democracy.

Yup. Might as well advance Trump as well, according to the polls.

 

[Elaugaufein]

They should kick them both off. #bringbackjim

No, clearly what we need is for people to #feelthechafe

 

[Diablos]

Could the SCOTUS do anything to force the hand of the Senate in holding a vote? Or could the Obama admin do some kind of appeal perhaps arguing it's the constitutional duty for the institution to hold a vote?

 

[benjipwns]

Could the SCOTUS do anything to force the hand of the Senate in holding a vote? Or could the Obama admin do some kind of appeal perhaps arguing it's the constitutional duty for the institution to hold a vote?

Will they do some kind of appeal to get past the 4-4 tie?

 

[Diablos]

Will they do some kind of appeal to get past the 4-4 tie?

I could see Kennedy and/or Roberts joining the liberals

 

[Elaugaufein]

Could the SCOTUS do anything to force the hand of the Senate in holding a vote? Or could the Obama admin do some kind of appeal perhaps arguing it's their constitutional duty to hold a vote?

I doubt that SCOTUS would touch this with a 10' stick. Their response for whats a high crime or misdemeanor was basically "Whatever the House says it is".

 

[Diablos]

Why? Do you really think they want a bunch of their pending decisions pushed back down to lower courts indefinitely because they can't be decided by a tie?