SCOTUS: “There are not”

More distraction from his kiddie diddlying/trafficking/protecting his handlers

No. I think he’s just looting the place.

Obviously he did something right.

Hillary: “Donald, my close personal friend and Epstein associate, would you mind running in the Republican primary and sabotaging their campaign so I can be president?”

Trump: “Absolutely. Would love it. Really looking forward to you winning. Unless you don’t! Haha. But seriously, good luck out there. Can’t wait to receive a bunch of kickbacks under your administration.”

2016 was literally “What if The Producers ran for President”?

How else are they supposed to win, by trying to steal votes?

California’s giving this a shot with their gerrymandering initiative. Probably the smartest thing a blue state legislature has tried in decades.

Don’t fret, though. The dems are adept at bending to Republic卐n will by now

It’s not even “bending to the Republicans” so much as “getting money from the same six trillionaires and their lobbyists”.

Like, you want to pretend this is a Red State / Blue State problem, but the bluest blotches in the country are home to some of the most prolific reactionary mega-donors. NYC, Chicago, LA, Seattle, Houston… They’re all pock marked with board rooms full of ice-chewing fascist psychos.

I mean, she’s a fashion model by trade not a stage actor. She can still sorority girl posse with the best of them. But then she opens her mouth, and you get a sorority girl tier of conversation.

His tariffs have short shelf lives, exceptions, and are constantly rolled back.

He loves to threaten triple digit tariffs, then ratchet them back down to double digits. The average rate on international imports right now is around 14%, compared to 1.5% under Biden. Trump is very seriously and deliberately attempting to pivot the US from an income tax based government revenue model to an import tax model that we haven’t seen since Coolidge (a paleocon celebrity since the Reagan years).

You could pick a given item that was continually tariffed for a year and discover unit by unit what actual effect of tariffs was. You would presumably find that broad tariffs on everything as a source of revenue is ultimately 99./9% a tax on the population

Real price increases haven’t kept up with the increased tariff rates. If you ever make it through B-school or drop into a few college economics classes, you’ll understand why. Retailers maximize profits at the “clearing rate” for their sales goods. That’s the retail price which maximizes gross revenues at an optimal marginal unit price.

You can’t pass on 99% of a tariff increase if it results in a drop in sales disproportionate to the rise in price. That is to say, if you sell 1000 units for $1 but only 500 unites for $1.15, you are losing $500 in revenue to avoid paying $150 in taxes. Depending on the profit margin by unit (let’s say you pocket 30% of the $1 in sales - or $300 on that $1000 gross expenditure) there may be no incentive to pass on the tax to the consumer for your business. In this example, you can either pay $150 on $300 in pre-tax profit or… $150 on $300 in pre-tax profit.

Losing a lot of your margin may be worthy to keep the business you when you expect it to be rolled back 90 days later it is not acceptable as the permanent state of affairs.

Rapidly changing prices has its own chilling effect on your client base. If consumers see the market price jump 15%, they won’t perfectly mathematically optimize their behaviors to match. They’ll just blindly cut back on consuming out of sticker shock. Or they’ll go hunting for lower rates elsewhere.

The savvier play is one we’ve already seen across the retail sector - shrinkflation. Reduce the volume of unit sold so the margins stay high but the consumer never suffers sticker shock. A bag of chips doesn’t become 15% more expensive, it just gets <insert math on cost of chips>% lighter.

But when they win, it’ll be their police force! And if they don’t support it, the Swing MAGA Voter can’t be persuaded to support them when they campaign on “Release The Epstein Files” in October.

You just don’t understand what it takes to win elections, unlike a liberal party that runs Perfect Campaigns. If they don’t win in 2026, it’ll be your fault.

Netflix is streaming it.

Epstein traffic victim who came out of the collapsing Eastern Bloc and got passed around Paris/Italy high society for a few years before being turned out by NYC real estate tycoon Paolo Zampolli to sell high end Manhattan units?

She was the fly on the wall and the floozy in the sheets for a parade of corrupt plutocrats. If you wanted a real tell-all about the seedy back end of high society in one of the world’s richest cities, you could do a lot worse than produce a Melania biopic.

Not what this movie is about, of course. But she’s definitely had an interesting life. How many US/EU presidents do you think this single woman has fucked?

No shortage of Chuds who were horny for Eva Braun. But I’ve seen far more slashfic of Sarah Palin than Melania, even now.

Idk what it is about this generation of MAGA, but they’re way less into jerking it to their (female) fascist overlords than they were 16 years ago.

They made two different Steve Jobs biopics that both flooped

Why would someone be humiliated that their money laundering scheme is laundering money?

And why is there wall to wall clickbait headlines about the Melania movie to begin with?

Please tell me you all aren’t that fucking blind.

Shocked to discover two guys who like one another would proudly show off a picture together

Things are most assuredly changing.

Kinda depends on what your downloading. Movies in the 2160p resolution are getting into the 10s of Gigs. And you still need a seed with comparable bandwidth serving the file you want.

Gorsuch voted to overturn Roe which was a fairly epic disrespect for court precedent.

Gorsuch had a long history on the bench as anti-choice. He overturned a 50 year old precedent, not one he’d just co-signed last year.

But I no longer put anything past this SCOTUS.

There’s more to the judiciary than just issuing rulings on a whim. They need the lower courts to line up behind them. And conflicting decisions at the highest level ultimately allow lower courts to rule at their own whim rather than according to a supreme precedent.

Imagine the SCOTUS ruling against California and sending it back down to a liberal California appellate court, only for the lower court to disregard the SCOTUS California ruling by referencing the Texas SCOTUS ruling. Or for the lower court or the state to feign confusion and refuse to follow the SC decision. Or do what so many other states have done and hastily engineer a new map that’s just different enough to force a new case. Without some kind of bright line distinction between the two decisions, they could just do that and send it back up to SCOTUS in a case that wouldn’t resolve before the next election.

As ACB said “we’re not just a bunch of hacks in here.”

If you’ve got to say shit like that out loud…

But she’s not wrong. These aren’t celebrity hacks who came in on the reality TV circuit, they’re legal street fighters who know how the system works in practice. If they do rule against California, it’ll be curious to see how they try to thread the needle. And how the California legislature - which still has plenty of time to submit revised (but still gerrymandered) maps - chooses to respond.

Hard truths

Two years

2026 - 2 = 2024.

No no, that’s impossible. That would have been under a President who Respects the Constitution. No way they’d just ignore the 5th amendment like this.