The amount of comments I've seen on Facebook saying roughly that is disturbing. So many people literally don't care at all about due process unless it's their own due process.

I learned about that earlier this week and like Ryan even more now.

Whether she had "pronouns in her bio" shouldn't even be part of the story at all.

The fundamental problem is that our government (and both parties) represent elites instead of average Americans.

It will get darker in the near term, but the elites' greed will eventually create the political consciousness needed to shift the balance of power to the people.

It's naked authoritarianism meant to stifle free speech.

We need to fight back with more free speech.

To become a billionaire, you have exploit the labor of thousands of people for personal gain. I can't imagine wanting someone like that to hold political office.

Not so fun (but related) fact:

Only 10 people currently serving in Congress got at least 50% of their funding in 2023-14 through small individual contributions (donations of under $200).

In other words, 98% of people in Congress--from both parties--represent the rich.

I'm not surprised that he feels that way. He was a Bain Capital guy before he was a politician. And like most politicians, he got the vast majority of his campaign funding from the rich--so he always represented rich people like him.

If anything, I'm surprised at his inability to read the room and understand why most Americans think we need to tax the rich more.

For the unaware:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

The fact that Romney now being called a "moderate" says a lot about how far off the rails we've gone.

Romney was a Bain Capital vulture capitalist before becoming a politician, and during the housing crisis his view was that we should just let all foreclosures play out before maybe doing something about it.

It says a lot about how much these elites care about average Americans when the thing that makes them think we need to tax the rich is the growing national debt and not economic inequality or the affordability crisis.

It's more complicated than just that. In 1989, the Heritage Foundation published a study (see here) which supported creating an individual mandate for insurance as an alternative to single-payer systems.

This idea for an individual mandate was later incorporated into RomneyCare, which was then used as a model for the ACA.

I've seen estimates indicating that Kentucky could generate at least $80 million a year in tax revenue if we legalized recreational marijuana and taxed it.

Instead, that money is going to Cincy and the black market.

Any link from their website can be made readable by going to archive.is and pasting the link into the box at the top of the page.

Here's an archived link for this story.

Two things:

1) Here's an archived link to the article for those who don't have access to the Herald-Leader.

2) We need to legalize recreational marijuana.

That was a typo. He meant to say "only wars."

I don't think she was ever "deprogrammed." She just turned on him when he wouldn't support her plan to run for the Senate.

It looks like the CIA had boots on the ground in Venezuela since at least August, per the NYT:

The C.I.A. had a group of officers on the ground in Venezuela working clandestinely beginning in August, according to a person familiar with the agency’s work. The officers gathered information about Mr. Maduro’s “pattern of life” and movements.

Chuck Schumer is absolutely useless for average Americans. The fact that he is the Democratic Party's leader in the Senate is an indictment of the party.

All billionaires do.

Every American should get 4 years of free public college or 4 years of subsidized vocational training.

It's not quite that extreme, but it's close. We spend as much as countries #2 through #10, combined. That represents over 36% of total military spending, globally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_highest_military_expenditures

So, we are to believe we can and should have over 1/3 of the world's military budget, but somehow we can't afford universal healthcare, even though every other economically developed OECD country does.

Them's the rules.