That and the fact that there's a not insignificant number of people who are center-right politically and identify as Republican but don't like Trump or the recent direction of the party. It's not a majority or even a plurality of Republicans, but it's enough to have an impact in close races.
Biden attacking "MAGA Republicans" instead of "Republicans" gives the center-right voters a permission structure to support Democrats because the choice gets reframed from "us (Democrats) vs. you (Republicans)" to "us (the sane ones) vs. them (the crazies)".
"Nah, your fingernails don't need a trim. If she can't handle your adult man's untrimmed fingernails inside her, she does not deserve to have sex with you."
Hair that's long and overgrown can cause problems just like long fingernails can cause problems. Keeping them trimmed so they don't is just being considerate of your partner.
They legitimately don't think it's an issue to threaten violence against anyone who impedes Donald Trump. In their deluded minds, he's an innocent victim who only wants what's best for the country and all these evil judges and persecutors and federal employees are trying to take him down and literally destroy the country.
The role of a district court judge is to do two things:
Apply existing precedent to individual cases to the greatest extent possible.
Set new precedent only when absolutely necessary because the facts of the case don't align well to existing precedent.
Cannon has basically decided to do the exact opposite of these two rules by pretending that the facts of this case are so incredibly unprecedented that she has to throw out the rulebook and set new precedents on everything.
Literally the only unusual thing about this case is that the defendant, a private citizen who currently gets free government security protection for the rest of his life, used to be a president. That's it. Everything else about this case is straightforward obstruction of justice and willful retention of national security information.
I saw a comment on YouTube a few weeks ago that I think perfectly captures the mindset of the people who scream about the "woke mind virus".
The comment was something like "I never had a problem trusting a minority surgeon, but now they're all woke DEI hires and I can't trust any of them."
In other words, "I had no problem with minority surgeons when there were almost none of them because I had to accept that there were a handful of 'good ones' that worked hard and earned it. But now that I'm seeing more of them, I know lots of the 'bad ones' are getting in that could only get in because it was handed to them because of their skin color."
In these people's minds, 95% of white people are "good ones" and 95% of minorities are "bad ones". So if any respectable job has more than a few percent of minorities, the only logical conclusion for them is that there are lots of "bad ones" getting jobs they aren't qualified for and didn't earn.
While I agree with you, and I do dearly love garlic, I feel obligated to give you a word of caution:
If you eat too much roasted garlic, for the next 24-48 hours, every room you enter will smell like garlic, your sweat will smell like garlic, your farts (and there will be many) will smell like garlic, and your poop will smell like garlic. It will not be a pleasant experience.
The thing you have to keep reminding yourself is just how disconnected from politics the average voter is. We've seen 2 full months of every day bringing some new chaos, but for most Americans, the only major things that have happened are:
Elon Musk is firing lots of government workers
Trump is enacting tariffs
Everything else is just noise to them and they filter it out. Until things really start to affect them directly, apathetic Trump voters who thought voting for him would magically turn the economy back to what it was before Covid are going to assume things are improving (because they already were before the election, they were just in a sour mood and refused to admit it).
Any market where choosing not to participate is simply not a viable option should be prohibited from being for-profit.
If all smartphone makers start getting too greedy and charge too much, people will just not upgrade their phones and the smartphone makers will have to lower their prices or justify their higher prices with innovations. People can choose not to participate in the market and pressure the entire industry to lower their prices or create new features to encourage participation.
If insurance starts getting (read: gets even more) greedy, cancelling your insurance isn't an option, especially if you're sick. Foregoing insurance means either dying or accumulating extraordinary medical debt you can never repay. There is no pressure on insurance companies to lower their prices because you will always have to pick one of them. As long as they all increase their prices together, they all benefit and their profit keeps going up. Their only "innovations" in the industry are to minimize payments for medical services and maximize how much they shove in their pockets.
They just realize this is a political loser and are pretending to buck party leadership because they're all in districts that they're almost certain to lose in the midterms. They know the Senate will never approve the subsidy extension. It's all about publicity for them. I hate that they're being described everywhere in the media as moderates just because they realized they're going to lose their next election unless they act like they support the ACA.
They all voted for the Medicaid cuts. Bresnahan in particular put on this big show saying how he's "a hard no on Medicaid cuts" and that he "told leadership I'm not backing down."
Then the bill came up for a vote and, surprise surprise, he voted for it without hesitation, then insisted it wasn't actually Medicaid cuts because it was "only targeting fraud."
Democrats don't usually force shutdowns because the people most likely to suffer under a shutdown are federal, state, and local government employees, people who work in academia, and people in major metropolitan areas, all of whom make up a significant portion of the Democratic base. It doesn't make sense to force a shutdown if your own voters are just going to blame you for the disruption it causes to their lives anyway.
Now there's far more to lose, and Trump is going to get the blame for it. Shutdown for a few weeks to protect a few hundred thousand federal workers for at least a year is a pretty safe gamble when you're not likely to get blamed for the short-term disruption anyway.
Absolutely. They can't amend the Constitution through ordinary means. Which is why they've installed a bunch of extreme right-wing Supreme Court justices who can interpret the Constitution however they want to benefit right-wing extremists.
Here's a completely plausible scenario: Donald Trump orders ICE to deport any child born here to non-citizen parents in complete defiance of the court order. The district court judge gets really annoyed and issues criminal contempt rulings against the head of DHS and ICE for disobeying an order of the court. Trump orders DHS and ICE to ignore the court and promises pardons to anyone facing criminal contempt charges.
Because the SCOTUS has ruled "core powers" are "absolutely immune" and the pardon is an explicit power granted to the president with no limitations, he can use the pardon power literally however he wants, including as part of a criminal conspiracy to break the law.
And bam, full blown constitutional crisis because the SCOTUS basically neutered the entire judicial branch and gave the president dictatorial powers.
The railway strike would've caused shortages of chlorine for city water supplies, shortages of essential medicines like insulin and antibiotics, severe food insecurity and inflation, and would've led to millions of people losing their jobs. Railway freight accounts for 40% of freight transport in the US. Imagine 40% of everything that's made every day suddenly not getting to where it needs to go. There's a reason Congress has never refused to block a railway strike every time it's been threatened over the last 150 years.
The contract was good for the workers but didn't include paid sick days. Congress imposed the contract on the rail workers when a couple of unions didn't ratify it (although most of the unions did).
Biden kept working behind the scenes after signing the law Congress passed to block the strike and got the rail workers their sick days without the suffering a rail strike would've had on the millions of Americans who were already struggling with high inflation on essentials. The IBEW union explicitly thanked him for it: https://www.ibew.org/media-center/Articles/23Daily/2306/230620_IBEWandPaid
Byron Donalds, a black Republican Representative from Florida, said Democrats need to stop talking about Project 2025, a policy document created by hundreds of people who literally worked for Trump during his term, because it's "dangerous."
But he also thinks Trump calling Harris a communist dictator who literally wants to destroy America, take your guns, force everyone's children to undergo surgical sex reassignment surgery against their will, flood the country with millions of noncitizens so they can vote, among hundreds of other extreme and completely false accusations, are all perfectly fine and fair game.
They all know it's not consistent. They all know Trump's rhetoric is worse, but they see a cynical opportunity to gain a political advantage and they take it. Assholes.
She was subpoenaed by name, not by title, and just because she is not in the AG role anymore doesn't mean she can't be subpoenaed and legally compelled to appear by Congress. She absolutely still has information Congress has the authority to compel her to provide.
See Hillary and Bill Clinton just a few weeks ago, or Hillary being subpoenaed about Benghazi in 2015, long after she stopped being Secretary of State.
The Reddit API changes around third party apps like a lot of other people here. It was so clear they were being disingenuous about the changes and that it was a de facto ban. Pretending it wasn't a ban and that they "support third party developers" really pissed me off.
It's one thing to charge for API access (which is not unreasonable, per se, since API calls cost Reddit money), but Reddit decided to charge an extremely unreasonable and unjustifiable rate to third party app developers. On top of that, they decided NSFW labeled content could only be seen in their official app and could never show up in any third party apps that decided to pay for API access. They claimed it was about "making sure children don't see adult content," but that was clearly BS since they could just not serve that content in the API for non-18+ accounts and require third party developers to agree to certain terms of use or have their app cut off.
So Reddit forced third party apps to have to charge a subscription fee to their users and those users would not get full access to Reddit content anyway. Gee, I wonder what users will do if they have to choose between paying a subscription for less content or using the crappy official app with worse and fewer features to get all content for free...
The disingenuousness of the justification for the changes and pretending there was no ulterior motive was worse to me than the changes themselves. I missed Reddit a lot at first, and occasionally I still do, but I haven't been back since.
Silicone isn't what makes parchment paper heat-resistant (and isn't even used on most standard parchment papers). Cellulose pulp is treated with sulfuric acid to cross-link the cellulose molecules, making them more chemically and thermally resistant, and the result is parchment paper.
The short answer is that it's ultimately down to the number 43 (the number of protons technetium has) and the number of neutrons that could potentially form stable isotopes being atomically weird numbers.
The picture below shows relative stabilities of isotopes of different elements. N represents the number of neutrons, Z represents the number of protons. As a starting rule, moving above or below the N=Z line (creating an excess of protons or an excess of neutrons) tends to decrease overall stability.
You can see for lower atomic numbers, the most stable isotopes closely follow N=Z because protons and neutrons "balance" each other in the nucleus. But as you increase the atomic number (and therefore the number of protons), the protons begin to repel each other more strongly, which means additional neutrons are needed to make the nucleus stable. This is why the "line of stability" (the line of dark red "stable" elements) increases above the N=Z line as you increase the atomic number. Deviation from this line means an atom is less "beta stable" (and therefore more likely to beta-decay).
There are certain "magic" numbers of protons and neutrons that are more stable than others because they comprise a full shell. These occur at 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82, and 126. This means nuclei that have (or are very close to) one of these numbers of protons, or neutrons, or protons + neutrons, are inherently more stable. If you look at the other stable isotopes on the graph, you would expect a stable isotope of technetium would need around 55 neutrons to follow the line of stability.
As it turns out, the combinations of 43 protons and 55 (± a few) neutrons just can't form a stable enough configuration to not beta-decay.
