In many of the cases that Republicans refuse abortions for, there is no baby at the end. If a woman is at risk of dying and the fetus has such severe abnormalities that it will breathe twice and die, then what’s the argument against an abortion? It could save the woman’s life and wouldn’t “kill a baby” (even if I accepted that abortion killed a baby - which I don’t).

But the Republican line seems to be that a woman needs to be actively dying before they’ll even start to consider allowing her to have a life saving medical procedure.

My company switched up retirement plans and they held a seminar to explain them. The person running the seminar said that we should be putting 15% of our salaries into retirement.

Nice idea, but if I put 15% of my salary into retirement, then I wouldn’t be able to pay my bills. I’m not living extravagantly or anything (buying something for $20 for my enjoyment seems like a splurge to me). Still, whenever I seem to be getting on a better financial footing, life throws me a curve ball. Need new hearing aids ($3,600). New a new dryer ($750). Might need a new car soon.

So either I need to be paid a lot more, I will be working until I’m 90, or I put away the money and go deep into debt but can retire. (Just kidding. I’m nearing 50. I likely won’t have enough to retire. Maybe when I’m 80.)

That’s okay. They can still sing “Born in the USA” because that song is super-patriotic and not critical of America at all.

Oh, wait…

Yes, they did. Before that, LEGO also released blind bag minifigures for Steamboat Willie and Minnie Mouse. I’m currently designing a LEGO MOC to display my figures with a small rendition of the Steamboat Willie boat. (I purchase my parts used from BrickLink to reduce costs.)

There are pockets of NY, outside of NYC, that are blue. The big areas that are red are mostly rural counties. But land doesn’t vote, people do, so it doesn’t matter if 1,000 people in a huge area vote red when 100,000 people in a small city vote blue.

You’re right that NYC helps keep us blue, but they aren’t the only ones. In 2020, NY voted for Biden over Trump 60.8% to 37.7%. If we removed NYC’s counties, NY would have still voted for Biden, but at a much closer 52.4% to 45.9%.

Biden has called this out. A lot of companies are still raising prices or aren’t letting prices fall. They’re still saying “oh, this is inflation causing this” while their costs fall and their profits rise.

Biden can’t stop them singlehandedly. (He’s a President, not a Supreme Dictator.) But he can call them out on it and use what powers he has to bear down on them somewhat if they don’t stop.

It might not get all of them to stop (some might risk fines because the profits would be greater), but hopefully it will direct the anger towards the actual culprits - big companies taking advantage of past inflation to raise prices.

Now? During the 2016 Republican primaries, Trump insisted that he had large hands and large genitalia because one of the other candidates said he had small hands.

Trump has never been dignified.

I’ve never ridden a motorcycle, but I have had a bug (and part of its web) go into my mouth and down my throat while biking. Just thinking about it makes me want to gag. If, after that, you offered me a bike helmet with a front visor, I’d have put that thing on ASAP.

Now take that bug incident and make it happen at 30-50 mph? No way would I have my face hole exposed for bugs to invade! (And that’s totally apart from the safety issue.)

You do realize that Biden can’t just declare things into law, right?

For the first two years, Biden had a Democratic House that could theoretically pass anything he wanted, but a Senate which was split nearly 50-50. If they didn’t get every vote, they could fail to pass a bill. And this doesn’t even get into the filibuster which would tank bills unless 60 votes were reached or the fact that Manchin and Sinema frequently acted to sink Democratic bills despite technically being Democrats. Biden could put some pressure on them, but his options were limited. It’s not like he could hold a gun to their heads and force them to vote on favor of bills

Since January, Biden has had a Democratic Senate with a razor thin margin and a Republican House. This threw even more wrenches in the works.

And then there’s the Supreme Court. Thanks to Mitch McConnell, Trump, and the Republicans, the Supreme Court has a huge conservative majority. So Biden can try to take action for things like forgiving student loans, but then Republicans sue, the case ends up in the Supreme Court and the conservative justices rule that Biden isn’t allowed to do this by law. (He’s managed to find a way to forgive some loans even if it wasn’t as much as he wanted to do.)

Putting all the blame on Biden and saying “he didn’t fulfill all his promises” is disingenuous. He hasn’t exactly had the Congress and Supreme Court that could support what he wanted to do. Could he have done everything anyway and proclaimed that he makes the laws now? Perhaps, but then he’d be a fascist dictator and not working within our political system - exactly the type of thing that Trump wants to do and is properly criticized for.

$175,000 for 50 years? He’s 71 now so he went into prison at 21. That means he spent virtually his entire life in prison. He could have done so many things, but instead he needed to sit in a prison cell. All because he was wrongly convicted.

And because I’m a math geek and need to figure this stuff out, $175,000 over 50 years is $3,500 a year. If we calculate what he would have earned at the federal minimum wage over that time frame (ignoring bank account interest or inflation just to keep things simple), we’d get over $500,000.

They’re giving him a third of what he should have earned at bare minimum. (And that ignores all the other horrible things involved with being wrongfully imprisoned for 50 years.)

Those of us who feel like both are to blame tend to be outshouted by the “I ALWAYS STAND WITH ISRAEL NO MATTER WHAT THEY DO” and the “HAMAS ARE JUST FREEDOM FIGHTERS SO ANYTHING THEY DO IS JUSTIFIED” groups. And if we speak up to point out that both groups have issues, we get attacked by both groups for not being on a side and especially for not being on their side.

One of the big problems with the Middle East is that it’s a messy situation and people like simple narratives. They don’t want to hear a hundred plus years of attacks, revenge attacks, generational trauma, etc. That’s not easy to resolve. Instead, people want to know that A is always good and B is always bad. That’s nice and simple and easy to fix. You just eliminate the bad people and all is well.

Sadly, the real world is rarely so black and white.

I needed Unicode symbols for a story I’m working on. (I want to use them as “magic runes” so I could type them into a document, but without using the standard “runes” that are typically used.)

Shape Catcher let me draw what I was looking for and then get a list of Unicode characters that matched that drawing. It’s not exact so if there’s no perfect Unicode match, it will give you ones that are close. This actually turned out to my benefit as I found shapes I hadn’t considered but which worked nicely for my uses.

Hey, I may feel old, but I’m not THAT old! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to yell at some kids to get off my lawn.

Back when I was in high school, a friend of mine introduced me to his friend. This kid, knowing that I’m Jewish, started to go on a rant ending with “the only thing Hitler did wrong was not finishing the job!”

Him saying that me and my family should be killed for the “crime” of being Jewish… Well, offended seems too light of a word. I blew right past offended and landed in ANGERED.

Now, usually, I’m a pretty relaxed guy. I typically don’t get angry even if I should. But this made me want to punch the guy right in his Hitler loving face. My friend had to hold me back.

(And before anyone asks, this wasn’t the kid being “edgy” or trolling me to get a reaction. He actually worshipped Hitler and thought he was a great man.)

Did you read what I wrote? It’s not that they decided they weren’t going to do anything. It’s that the rules of the government limit what they can do with a small majority. They can’t just unilaterally decide that they are passing a new constitutional amendment with a few vote majority in the House/Senate. They could try for a bill, but there they are limited by various other rules not to mention the conservative Supreme Court. If the Democrats had a big enough majority, they could get more bills passed.

And that being said, what’s the alternative? Allow the Republicans to get into power and hope that they don’t take away women’s rights too much? Many Republicans have already declared that they want a national abortion ban. Others have said that they want to criminalize miscarriage and ban contraception.

Voting third party (thanks to our First Past The Post system) won’t work. Sitting out the elections and not voting won’t work. The best thing to do is get as many Democrats in office as possible from local positions to the highest offices. Then, put pressure on the higher up Democrats to get a women’s rights bill passed.

At this point, and with our current political system, not supporting the Democratic candidate is essentially supporting the Republican one.

The Democrats could have passed a bill, but “enshrining it in the Constitution” would mean passing a Constitutional amendment. First, they would need a 2/3rds vote of Congress. That means that the Democrats couldn’t have a slim majority - they’d need a large majority. Or they’d need to find Republicans willing to vote for a Constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights. Basically an impossibility.

Even if the Democrats managed to get the Constitutional Right To Abortion passed, they would need to have 75% of the state legislatures pass it. Democrats don’t control that name state legislatures.

So perhaps the Democrats could have passed a national law, right? Except that the Republicans would inevitably filibuster this in the Senate. The Democrats could have changed the filibuster rules, but not all of them supported changing these rules. (Mainly because it would prevent them from stopping the Republicans if the Republicans regained the Senate.) Any law that was passed would inevitably have been challenged up to the conservative Supreme Court.

You could definitely criticize the Democrats for not pushing harder to pass a law guaranteeing abortion, but a Constitutional Amendment was out of reach.

Trump has said that he’s being treated differently than any other defendant. He means that he’s being treated worse, but he’s accidentally right. Trump has been consistently treated with soft kid gloves. Had you or I done 1% of what he did, we’d be awaiting trial from a jail cell.

Trump is being treated differently, alright. He’s being given much more leeway than anyone else would be given.

I’d say it’s more like 40% of us are being dragged by 25% of us while 35% watch on, refusing to participate either way despite the fact that they’ll be dragged in next.

Hey, at least before going on vacation, the House tackled the oh-so-important topic of (checks notes) whether whole milk is served in schools and whether almond/soy milk counts as milk. Because the House has obviously solved every other pressing issue before them!

What? They didn’t?

He’s still holding up a lot of other spots by holding those top general slots as well. For the lower promotions to go through, they need the people moving into their top general slots to vacate their positions. And for the even lower ones, they need the lower ones to move up.

Tuberville essentially said that he’s not going to hold up the entire line of people, just a few at the head of the line. But holding up the head of the line means the rest of the line is impacted.