The department told the outlet that they apologize for his behavior and that Rodgers has received “received a written reprimand for a violation of the department’s social media policy and will remain on duty.”
Oh, he got a reprimand. Well that should take care of everything. I’m sure he’s learned a valuable lesson. Public trust restored.
Remember kids, if you like anything in a series, you must like everything in that series, or you aren’t a real fan.
Also, anyone who likes the parts of a series you dislike is an idiot that uncritically absorbs trash and doesn’t understand why the good parts are good.
And of course, the coolest thing you can do is reduce both sides of a discussion to a straw man and mock them to claim a dubious high ground for yourself.
You’re fabricating outrage at something that does not exist in the comic
The comment I was replying to was clearly talking about a pattern of behavior beyond what is in the comic.
The artist is making fun of the petty nonsense that people complain about.
Which is a pretty goddamn petty thing to complain about. How dare people express their opinions and dissatisfaction with anything that isn’t the end of the fucking world, right?
Yes, there are people who blow such things way out of proportion, but this comic does nothing to distinguish between reasonable responses to these issues and unreasonable ones, it just lumps them all together and tells everyone to shut the fuck up in the most condescending way possible.
“It’s about family, and that’s what makes it so powerful”
It’s also being dismissive of real problems people face. It’s an excuse to not address problems here and now because bigger problems exist elsewhere. But you aren’t going to do a goddamn thing about those issues, so this implied triage is a lie. It’s just a way of trying to act morally superior while lacking empathy.
The whole first world problem concept implies everyone has it easy in first world countries. As though we don’t have poverty, mental health issues, crime, corruption, police brutality, abusive families, disease, loss of loved ones, and so on. There’s no shortage of problems anywhere.
And you know what, fuck this attitude of turning suffering into competition and mocking people for being bothered by things that aren’t life altering. There’s nothing wrong with a healthy expression of emotion when you are disappointed or irritated, as long as you aren’t taking it out on others. But being a snarky asshole to someone and judging them for having a bad day isn’t helping.
If you see someone frowning and your instinct is to tear them down rather than cheer them up, maybe you should take a good look at yourself and figure out what your fucking problem is.
He could give actual blowjobs on stage after getting the words “filthy whore” tattooed on his forehead and it wouldn’t crack the top ten things he’s done to drive away potential voters.
Harris holds on to the support of nearly all Democrats, with 97% saying they will support her and 0% saying they will support Trump.
But she also gets 5% of Republicans who say they will vote for her over Trump. Trump holds 89% of Republicans.
The poll shows a small universe of people who say they previously supported Trump and have now switched their vote to someone else.
Among those not supporting Trump, 16% say there was a time when they supported him, while 81% say they have never supported him. Another 3% are not sure.
This is a factor that very few polls ever look for. There are so many reasons to oppose Trump which transcend partisan politics. We’ve had so many Republicans endorse Harris, but you don’t see many polls looking for the voters that are making the same jump.
The implications are huge. Every voter that switches from Trump to Harris is a net gain of 2 votes. And if they are still registered Republicans, any early voting data will likely be interpreted with them in the Trump column until they are actually counted. And of course, any voter turnout efforts paid for by the Trump campaign will likely be turning these people out as well, which is just delightful.
We’ll see how accurate this is on Tuesday. But if Iowa really does go blue, it seems likely that it won’t be the only surprise that night.
All the recent talk of Epstein has been bringing back memories.
Local employye owned grocery chain is consistently the best place to shop, didn’t inflate prices across the board like everyone else, and the workers actually get treated like human beings. It’s proof enough for me that this model should be far more common
There are some additional reasons to be optimistic.
First, the poll numbers have been getting skewed by Republican affiliated pollsters that consistently show Trump in a better position than the nonpartisan polls. The race is definitely close, but if these partisan polls really are just trying to give the impression of a surge in Trump support and aren’t actually more accurate than the nonpartisan polls, then that potentially pushes some states from a narrow Trump lead back to a narrow Harris lead. And it’s not like there isn’t a precedent for this, it’s exactly what happened with the polls in 2022.
Second, while Republicans are casting a higher percentage of the early votes than in 2020, that increase is largely coming from people who voted on election day in 2020. Moving a vote from election day to early voting is a net change of 0. And the Harris gotv machine appears to be much stronger than the one Trump outsourced to Musk, which seems to be targeting the least reliable voters while also using the least reliable canvassers. It’s no wonder Musk resorted to buying votes petition signatures.
Harris has a stronger lead among women than Biden or Clinton did, and the gender gap in turnout so far is also higher in the previous elections. In addition, Harris is leading among voters over 65, a reversal from previous elections and particularly important because they are by far the most reliable voters.
And the news cycle has not been kind to Trump this past week. It turns out that insulting groups that make up a sizable chunk of the voting population in certain key swing states isn’t a good move. Will it make a difference by Tuesday? Hard to say, but it sure as hell isn’t helping him.
None of this is terribly solid, it’s just trends and indicators, no one should be getting complacent here. But it’s enough for me to feel cautiously optimistic that Harris will be able to secure Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, with a reasonable chance of picking up at least one more state.
If the Republican gotv gamble backfires and their election day turnout advantage doesn’t fully materialize, we could see more states flip. More importantly, it could be enough to flip the House (currently a toss up) and maybe even hold the Senate (requires defying expectations in at least 2 out of 3 races, so a long shot but not impossible).
He’s not relying on Ukraine’s allies running out of money, he’s betting that they’ll lose interest and/or vote for pro-Russian stooges before he loses the ability to win the war.
They’re trying to portray it as something that was done from the very beginning, as opposed to something they only pinned down in preparation for the 3rd game in the series. Nothing wrong with them getting through two games before writing out their bible, but that doesn’t make for a very compelling article.
“A lot of that was in my head until we were starting Inquisition and the writers got a little bit impatient with my memory or lack thereof, so they pinned me down and dragged the uber-plot out of me. I’d talked about it, I’d hinted at it, but never really spelled out how it all connected, so they dragged it out of me, we put it into a master lore doc, the secret lore, which we had to hide from most of the team.”
So, no they didn’t know the “deepest secrets” of the lore 20 years ago. One guy had vague notions in his head, and they only actually fleshed it out when they were working on Inquisition.
Worked for Captain America
Oh he knew the spoiler effect was a thing. He just didn’t think it was Trump that he’d be hurting.
Well, I generally agree that party leaders have way too much power, but that seems to be an issue across many different systems. Your example is from a FPTP system. Is there some reason to think it would be worse if we had proportional voting?
It’s not that it would be worse, it’s that it would be the norm. The party would always be the one with the final decision on who actually represents you.
I mean I can see how party leaders might have more power in some ways. But on the other hand it’s much easier to abandon them for another ideologically similar party if they abuse it. Yes it means abandoning AOC or whoever your favorite is but they can also jump ship if need be. I think we need a different solution to overly powerful party leaders.
Which makes it an all or nothing proposal. You can have the entire party or none of it. You can’t vote out a particular shithead, you can only take the nuclear option and abandon the whole party. That makes it a lot harder to hold each individual representative accountable to the people they are supposed to be representing.
To bring this back to real world examples, the only reason Kari Lake and Mark Robinson are not likely to win their elections is because the voters get to vote on a specific candidate. Both would easily have the support of their party’s leadership, and the party’s supporters would certainly vote for their party, but a large number of those who support the party don’t want those candidates. That ability to say “no, not you” is not something we should give up when trying to reform the system.
But the thing is, there are so many things I would want to change about the Democratic Party, but I can’t abandon them because my only alternative is far worse. If we had a diversity of somewhat similar parties then it would be much much easier to pressure them into doing what voters want.
Not suggesting we keep the status quo, Just suggesting that any reform should keep representatives directly accountable to voters.
Ranked choice would do this to some extent as well, so I broadly support both. However, I have concerns about election security with ranked choice. Unless the election authorities share their ballot data, it’s very very difficult to determine who the true winner should be from exit polling or similar. There was a major fiasco in Alameda co California where the wrong candidate was seated by accident and no one even noticed until a later audit was done by a non-profit group.
Transparency absolutely needs to be the rule. If we move to RCV, we need to have the full dataset released with each election. Results should be published showing the percentage each candidate got for 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. and the order in which they are eliminated. It would take a while for everyone to get used to it, but the data should be straightforward and it isn’t hard to figure out how to fit into a simple enough graphic for people to understand.
The issue isn’t just one of partisan extremes. Just look at the near miss in the Democratic primaries this year. Biden was the choice of the party leadership and it took his public humiliation and a massive pressure campaign to get a replacement. The people calling the shots at the party level do not necessarily have same interests as the voters, even when they are politically aligned.
Sure, you can jump ship and go to a new party, but that only works when enough voters care to make them jump ship, and when there is a worthwhile alternative. That also means abandoning anyone you support in the party, because they are all lumped together and there’s no separating the people you want to vote for from the people you oppose. Building a new party from the ground up is a much more extreme reaction than just voting for a different person.
I wouldn’t have the same objection if we had a system where we were had proportional representation spread across specific candidates voted into office. I would have some questions about how it would work, but it would address the issue I’m bringing up.
My concern with proportional representation is that it typically means you are voting for a party, not a specific person. Imagine voting for the Dems and not knowing if you’re getting AOC or Joe Manchin.
With Ranked choice, you can know exactly who you are voting into (or out of) office. I’d rather let the voters be the ones who choose candidates directly and not have the party do it for us.
That just leaves the other 999,993 reasons to cover.
Lotteries are specifically called out as illegal when used to incentivize voting or voter registration. By making a lottery only for registered voters, he is violating that law. The petition is a smoke screen, but it doesn’t actually negate the fact that this is a lottery for registered voters.
That’s why they switched to saying they were sponsors, they were trying to avoid lottery regulations. Unfortunately for them, you can’t make it legal retroactively by changing your story.