Stilicho

I'm stunned, every fucking day, by the number of people in this state who have no recollection of McVeigh or the Murrah Building or any of that shit. I didn't even live here at the time and I fucking remember it. Timothy McVeigh would absolutely win the governor race as a Republican in Oklahoma at any point from 2010 onwards.

Like a quick-draw circular firing squad for most of us.

Look at the big brain over here.

Oh, I won't argue that point. Scalia was corrupt, (I'd argue textualism in itself is fucking bogus and has done a good deal of irreparable damage to the country) and if you follow his opinions, you can see where the corruption starts to really take root (right around Heller, imo). I despise Antonin fucking Scalia. I'm saying that what Thomas has put down on paper is actually worse than the stuff Scalia put down on paper (like the Violent Video Games case). Reading Thomas's opinions is like rubbing on-fire gasoline in your eyes.

If we make it to 50 years from now, I think most level-headed scholars will easily agree that Thomas was actually worse for the country as a Justice than Scalia was. Thomas is a fucking scumbag. If this was Sotomayor on the take, the House would be calling for severing Puerto Rico from the U.S.

I'm sure this will be the next round of model legislation for most of the mid-south and south. Kind of surprised Kansas beat Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, etc. on this, to be honest.

Fair point. Been a bunch of litigation concerning the status of Cherokee freedmen and whether they can be considered 'Indian' (since Indian = political classification, not race / ethnicity). So 'some' was a bit of an underwhelming statement.

The shittiest version of the Fabulous Freebirds. Coming this summer… to Frisco.

This is pretty close to true. The 5 Tribes split (not sure the exact dynamics), but the Cherokee and Waite went with the Confederacy on the somewhat thin promise that they would get their ancestral homeland in Georgia back. But the Cherokee did own some slaves.

I enjoy pointing out to folks around here that "cancel culture" is pretty close to that "invisible hand of the market" they're always on about. But they'll still go out and buy the shit just to film themselves blowing it up to own the libs. Surprised this shitheel didn't lob a grenade in for good measure. Or just run through the fucking thing like a maniac. We're like... six months from seeing Kid Rock / Ted Nugent as a semi-regular tag team at some old Jim Crockett Tribute Show in Bumfuck, North Carolina.

Eh. Sort of a crap Roman god.

Folks need to give "Lindbergh" by Woodie Guthrie a listen. Amazing how much history folks have either ignored, been made to ignore, or were just never taught in the first place. Then again, that seems to be a feature rather than a bug.

This is the fight I see. In places like the south and the mid-south, it's Christian fundamentalists against the rest of us. Whomever you religious folks cast your lot with in that fight will probably help tip the scales one way or another. They're message has been pretty fucking clear though: you're either with them or you're against them. They can call it whatever they like... "religious-secular hybridization" has been thrown around at the law school. But it's just Christian fundamentalism all the way down. Here in Oklahoma, the shithole of shitholes, they're trying to run folks out through book banning and teacher banning and basically hammering down on anything and anyone that runs counter to "biblical teaching." There's plenty of pulpits in OKC calling for me and mine's execution. They're certainly not all podunk snake-handlers or spirit-talkers, there as mainstream as any southern Baptist congregation I've ever set foot in across three separate states.

stay the fuck out of woke acres lewandowski

Had our first lockdown experience with my youngest's elementary school in the OKC metro last week. Soft lockdown over a suspicious vehicle, ended up all clear. Still though... it has a way of sort of gripping you by the throat.

Rock clapping .gif

Impeachment isn't unheard of. But it would require Dem supermajorities. The easiest / fastest way is through dilution. Expand the Court to give each Circuit a Justice. There are various combinations of how to pass out those new seats, but again... you need votes that aren't there at the moment. Dilution / expansion may be our legit last shot other than relying on our better angels. Nothing will come of the Thomas / Alito bullshit, sadly. It's a hot topic in law how this Court is really pushing the bounds in results-oriented jurisprudence and open bias. Like having a Court of dumber, more malevolent Rehnquists.

At some point, legitimate Court reform and expansion should be on the table. Give each circuit a Justice and keep it that way.

Not much of one, no. But realities sort of are what they are if you end game is to speed up a liberal Court swing. It would be less problematic all the way around if we could legislate more effectively or, and I know this will surprise everyone, if the lower courts and certain state courts weren't packed full of loyalist crazy fucks. We're boxed in at certain spots and nothing short of time or some sort of cataclysm / revolution / rapture is going to get us out of this mess.

Another reason why, if we gain outright control of the Senate, someone needs to have a serious conversation with Justice Sotamayor. Getting to a liberal majority without relying on octogenarians is a fucking chore unless we can get enough support to expand the Court.

Court hasn't really had a liberal majority since the 1960s.

It was folly, but then again, a lot of it is folly. Lawyers or law professors have a tendency of trying to thread reason through Supreme case law and try to have it make sense (4th Amendment jurisprudence is but one example), but it is much easier when you recognize decisions for what they are: political statements driven by the makeup of the Court and the context of the case. Too many decisions are simply reverse-engineered to try and keep some semblance of precedent, but they rarely even try now. Scalia spent decades bitching about non-enumerated rights and the Due Process clause... until he needed something other than originalism to anchor his holding in Heller. Kavanaugh explicitly ignored settled Indian Law for five centuries and latched on to a single-line of cases that arose out of western state jurisdiction battles. No one in the field ascribed to the McBratney line of cases the authority that Kavanaugh has. Gorsuch, who actually seems to give a shit about Indian issues, at least called him out on that. Then he goes onto the same sort of slanted reasoning / record twisting to get to the decision he wants in the Kennedy case, overturning decades of Establishment Clause jurisprudence in the process. TLDR: the Court is a mess. It's just a political stamp from the majority at the time.

Sick fucks like Kenny Bilko and the New Scotland Front, that's who.

We're trying. She's not even a Democrat, but the party apparatus is beyond fucked up here.