There you are erroneously assuming that the GOP would allow the democrats to play by the rules that they use for themselves. That isn't how it works any more. The permanent new rules are now that the MAGA party has power over the Senate under all circumstances, without concern for the composition of its members. They can make, break, and discard rules any time they wish. If elections are held in 2026 and the GOP lost every senate seat it had up for election, they would still hold all the power in that chamber. What McConnell did to rewrite senate rules will look like nothing compared to what the MAGA party will roll out in 2025.

The biggest challenge in dividing the US into new countries lies in the fact that political divisions do not follow geographic lines well this time. The bluest states have red counties, the reddest states have blue counties (except perhaps Florida, but Bugs Bunny already laid out a solid plan for dealing with Florida).

That would be true if the democrats and republicans played by the same rules, or allowed each other to do so. The GOP would burn down Washington DC before they would allow the democrats to get such an appointment through, even if the democrats had enough votes to do so. Hell if Joe Biden wanted to appoint Sean Hannity to fill that theoretical vacancy, the GOP would refuse to hear it just to deny him that "win" and would make sure no hearing ever occurred.

I would put the odds at least at even for this administration being the last one of a 50 states United States. Now whether or not the GOP would allow for secession is another matter; we know that Trump is willing to send the US Military after his own American opponents. Likely we'd need to split into at least three different new countries if not more. There would likely need to be an amnesty period as well to allow people who find themselves on the wrong side of the border at the start to pack up and relocate to a different new country. Naturally a lot of people who would want to accelerate this would have less than no idea of how complicated such a relocation would actually be for actual people.

If you're arguing that politics exists in a post-truth reality, I couldn't agree more. The frustrating part is that one party embraces that reality very enthusiastically while the other keeps hoping that someday enough voters will catch on to it to come back around and vote for the candidates who actually sell a product based on reality.

Unfortunately it is more likely that Trump will completely dismantle our democracy before 2028 comes around (if he lives that long). He will have absolutely nothing to stop him this time around, even with single vote majorities in both chambers.

There is chatter about encouraging Sotomayor to retire from the SCOTUS before January. That ship has sailed. There is no way that the GOP would allow the senate to appoint a replacement for her even if she resigned this evening; her resignation would lead to an even more hopeless 7-2 conservative uber-majority.

Interesting! Where do we find the cap? I guess I'm not sufficiently social here. I've got a few dozen on my friends list, and none on my foes.

Trump won't reduce income taxes for people from the lower 95% of the wealth distribution in our country. He will continue to tell us - incorrectly of course - that China will pay for the tariffs. Anyone who knows the smallest amount about tariffs know that is not how they work; consumers will notice the tariffs as soon as they are implemented. The Trump administration will then quickly divert those tariff funds to their preferred destinations; the consumers will never see benefit from them.

The idea behind a tariff is to make the imported goods less attractive to consumers. One problem we're overlooking though is that there are a lot of goods that nobody makes in the US. One small example is slow cookers (crock-pots) for the consumer kitchen. Whether you buy the least expensive one at Wal-Mart or the most expensive one at William-Sonoma (or Macy's, or anywhere else where you can pay hundreds of dollars for one), it came from China. I've looked through as many sources as I can find and I cannot find an American made one that is currently in production for any amount of money. Yes, there isn't huge demand for these - and most people who want one already have one - but this is but one example. Can you find a hard drive that was made in the US? Of course not. Video card? No again.

Does the cap go away if you're a subscriber? I recall one infamous foes list that was really, really long.

No checkbox for it when this option is selected. Go figure.

My only confusion is why the Harris campaign thought they had something to gain by selecting Walz as VP. If anything that only energized the MN GOP to vote against him as they absolutely hate him with a passion seldom seen in state level politics anywhere in our country. That was almost certainly the main reason why this was the closest any republican POTUS candidate has come to winning MN in the past half century.

Indeed as a country we're all fucked. His supporters don't realize it yet but they will likely be fucked even harder than the rest of us. It boggles the mind how people can expect his threatened tariffs to be good for anyone. Those are of course but one of many things that target the lower 99% of the wealth distribution curve for special treatment.

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I was often particularly irked by the last one, as there used to be someone here with a rather infamous foes list who then had the ability to block lots of people from other people's JE discussions when they chose that one. Now it doesn't matter much as JE volume is so low that those entries pretty well never happen anymore.

It really baffled me why the Harris campaign chose Walz for VP. They chose a governor from a state that democrats haven't lost in the presidential elections since Nixon. The Pennsylvania governor would have been a massively better choice.

They followed up the mediocre choice with the predictable choice of letting the GOP set the narrative on who Walz is. Walz is not "far left" by any meaningful metric, yet the GOP promptly threw that label on him and it was allowed to stick.

If we should have learned nothing else from previous years when Trump ran, it is that reality takes a second seat to perception. Every. Single. Time. If people think you're "far left" then you've already lost the race, it doesn't matter how centric you are. We've established that the Trump campaign is more than willing to attack military veterans in a campaign as well; there is no floor for how low they will go to win a race.

We're also going to hear plenty of whataboutisms pertaining to how Biden dropping out of the race led immediately to Harris being the nominee for the race. Whether primaries could have been held in that time frame is a great distraction; the country needs to focus instead on the mayhem that is about to emerge from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

I demonstrated (or rather it was demonstrated in one of my JEs) years ago that the "no AC" function doesn't actually work in JE discussions. I can't imagine that has been changed as they don't have any programmers on staff at slashdot any more.

Yeah, the subscription has some perks but blocking AC isn't one of them.