jhymesba

I'm hoping that Harris/Walz spends a few resources here, to make Republicans nervous. Not a LOT of resources, but enough to make the Republicans nervous. We need Dems to turn out in all 50 states, Safe Red, Safe Blue, or whatever, to ensure that we have a resounding victory. Fellow voters, you shouldn't need to be told this, but if a few million here or there in Texas and Florida gets Dems out to vote while putting the fear of Dog into Republicans and force THEM to spend resources there, it's a good strategy in my book.

Thanks for saying this. It's Mid-August. There are two whole months in which things can go wildly off the rails. Rather than celebrating polls in mid-August, let's take this happy energy and make plans to go to the only poll that matters -- the actual election -- and make these mid-August hopes turn into January certainty. Plan the celebrations after we win in November, to coincide with Harris taking the Oath in January.

I've always said that you can't just take one piece of a person's life out of context to judge them. You have to look at the complete picture. You from 30 years ago doesn't represent who you are today. BUT...it can inform a complete picture.

Remember the news articles about teenaged Mitt Romney holding a classmate down and forcibly cutting the kid's hair? By itself, it just said Romney was a jerk as a kid. If Romney turned into an upstanding person over the years, it would be unfair to judge him based on what he did as a teenager. But we have the family dog incident and the numerous Bain articles to add to his teenaged antics, and we can build a complete picture of him, a picture that shows year after year, he was a jerk that liked to lord it over 'inferiors'. We harped on that, all the way to his 47% comment, to illustrate that he thinks people who aren't multi-millionaire hedge-fund conservatives should shut up and take the boot to the face. We convinced enough people in 2012 that despite Obama's handling of 2009 through 2012, Obama should get a second chance rather than let "Better Than Thou" Romney get into office.

JD Vance (and his boss) fit in the same boat. We're NOT just hammering him based on the fact that he did stupid stuff as a kid. We're pointing the hypocrisy of getting all up in other people's business while having some really weird shit going on in his business. And his history of telling other people what to do extends all the way to the present day.

In short, Vance hasn't changed, so his teenage antics are fair game.

I don't know how you can say this while looking at the US. Sure, other systems allow for fringe hard-core extremist parties like, say, NZ First, but the US shows that if the extremist faction isn't allowed its 10% to 20% of the vote, the extremist faction then promptly takes over the main-stream party closest to its ideology. I.E. the Alt-Right takes over the Republican Party in the US.

FPTP doesn't seem to have any inbuilt immunity to extremism, as far as I can see living in Trumpland.

And go out and vote as soon as you can. Make sure you know your registration deadline date and check specifically around that date to stop the Trump ratfucking attempts.

Planets in general must be spherical objects (which excludes asteroids as they are too small to form spheres) that orbit a star (which excludes moons which orbit planets). The problem with this definition is it becomes hairy quickly. Buried in the asteroid belt is a large asteroid that meets that definition: Ceres. Ceres is round. It orbits the Sun. By that definition, it qualifies as a planet. Likewise, Pluto has several counterparts in its area of space that are round and orbit the Sun: Haumea, Makemake, and Eris come to mind. Remember that old saying "My very educated mother just served us nine pizzas"? Well, they lampshaded a big problem with that definition with the new pneumonic: "My very educated mother can't (Ceres) just serve us nine pizzas; Hundreds may eat."

Astronomers, seeing the problem with that definition, decided we needed to exclude all these new worlds. This would unfortunately exclude Pluto, but many astronomers were thinking that Pluto should have never made the cut in the first place. Pluto is weird. Unlike every other major planet in the Solar System, Pluto orbits outside the ecliptic. Its orbit doesn't align with the other planets, and for parts of Pluto's year, it's closer to the sun than Neptune. While Neptune's and Pluto's orbits don't intersect (if they did, Neptune would either fling Pluto out of the solar system or capture it, and we think Neptune has already captured another Pluto-like object in the form of Triton), Pluto does cross the sphere at Neptune's distance from the sun and orbits inside Neptune's distance for part of its orbit. And its orbit and characteristics matched other so-called Trans-Neptunian Objects pretty darn closely, and we'd already found something out there heavier than Pluto in similar situations (Eris). Any definition that includes Pluto would include potentially dozens or even HUNDREDS of other TNOs, and couldn't exclude Ceres.

So they made a definition for major planets which would cover the classical planets plus Uranus and Neptune. It wasn't enough that you be spherical. You ALSO had to have cleared your orbital. This covers the Major Eight clearly, while excluding a population of tiny worlds that could grow gargantuan if we allowed them to. While Pluto is still a planet, it's no longer a major planet like the classical 5 plus Uranus and Neptune. And excluding it makes it easier for us to keep up with.

But don't expect this is settled! We have some indications that there may be something out in the Outer Solar System that might set the debate again. There are several Kuiper Belt Objects that have orbits that suggest there's something out there 'shepparding' them and forcing them to assume set orbits that they'd not be in otherwise. Simulations suggest the possibility of a super-Earth or mini-Neptune (things not found in our Solar System but observed in others) orbiting the sun in a distant orbit. This silent, cold traveller would have a mass of between 5 and 10 Earth masses, and would be moving so slowly that it can't possibly clear its orbit like Earth or Jupiter can. Still, something between Earth's and Uranus's mass should probably be a bit more special than Pluto, so I suspect the definition will change again when and if we find this hypothetical large body in the outer solar system.

You're wrong. I suspect that's not an uncommon occurrence for you and that your reaction will be the typical factless rant you people are really known for.

Fascism is all about demonising the 'other'. It doesn't care about truth and facts as long as there are enemies, external and internal, to scapegoat. Khelif is just a good boxer. Do you really think Algeria of all places would cover for a transgender female throughout her entire life, from childhood to when she got her Algerian passport that lists her as female through the 'revelation' that she was somehow male after beating down a Russian Oligarch's undefeated prize fighter? No, but since the BS is out there, Reich-Wing authoritarian shitheads are harping on it to further their stupid fears that there are Transgenders EVERYWHERE.

And I agree with the others. This goes beyond opinion to slander. It's Fascism because in this case, the slander is furthering the idea that transgendered people are somehow evil and wrong and must be opposed by all means ... by attacking an Algerian who was assigned female at birth. Fuck off with that bullshit.

I'm hoping that they take a swing at all 50 states plus DC. Dean may be known primarily for his scream, but his 50 State Strategy was a good idea.

"Beautiful" is far from the first word I'd use to describe our future Madam President. "Smart". "Dedicated". "Hard-Nosed". "Driven". "Focused".

Reduce her to her looks at your peril, shitgibbon.

Chef's kiss on this.

No. No they aren't. Not in any fucking world is Biden equally evil compared to Trump.

First, Netanyahu is the guy ordering the murdering of Palestinians. Not Biden. And the world isn't Evil Black and Good White. There's a reason Netanyahu is attacking Palestinians. It has everything to do with Hamas attacking, killing, and kidnapping Israelis. There are no good guys or bad guys in this war. Just a bunch of pretentious pricks using the other side's bad behaviour as cover for their own, and innocents who can't get out of the way quick enough. Netanyahu has a Casus Belli in this war, even, so don't pretend like this is unprovoked.

Second, Trump has made it clear that among a whole bunch of other really bad shit, he's going to give Netanyahu carte blanche to go run roughshod over ALL of Palestine with no conditions or strings. Biden has made it clear that we aren't cool with Israel bombing Palestine back to the stone-ages, but we're sure not going to stop supplying Israel with arms and money because we know that the instant we do that, all the Middle Eastern countries who have constantly and consistently said over the past half century that their sole goal is to erase Israel from the map will come running in to finish the job.

Third, even if we DID say that cutting off the flow of guns and bombs to Israel was on the table, they'd immediately turn to their good friend and fellow autocrat Russia and start buying up guns and bombs from them. And Israel has American F-35s. I can imagine the deal now. "Ship us one of those F-35s so we can tear them down and figure out how to detect them and counter them and duplicate them, and we'll send you a constant supply of bombs and missiles at a discount, while propping up our handpicked dictator-candidate with accusations that the Dems are anti-Semitic and hostile to Israel."

Fuck off with your both-sides bullshit.

Excellent answer.

Whether it was planned or just fell out this way, this is probably the best outcome we could hope for. Trump and Putin and their assortment of flying monkeys were lining up the 'he's just OLD' attacks, hoping to ride that into the White House in January. Then Biden withdrew and now the 'he's just OLD' points right back at Trump.

Shitheads like abracaDavid above keep harping on Biden's age when Biden's not even in the race again really makes me question how much the attacks against Biden were astroturfed by Trump and Putin (but I repeat myself).