A petition calling on House Democrats not to support House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries as the next Speaker has hit 500,000 signatures, according to its creator.

It follows the Democrats' dramatic midterm election victory that saw the party flip both the Senate and the House of Representatives, which will lead to a new Senate Majority Leader and Speaker of the House.

The petition, which labels Jeffries part of the “Democratic establishment,” suggests Democratic leaders are likely to remain under pressure from their party’s left-wing over both personal and policy choices. It was created by Nicole Whitted, an author and Democratic supporting social media creator with over 210,000 followers on TikTok.

For those who don't want to give newsweek a click: https://www.change.org/p/house-democrats-choose-a-new-speaker

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/48002449

https://explosm.net/comics/millennia

We now have off an on snow showers.......

Still snow is better than rain. I can move snow out of the way. But mud is mud and sucks.

Less than 24 hours after a historic sweep of Texas’ statewide elected offices by Democrats, the state’s attorney general-elect Nathan Johnson said Tuesday he will not continue Ken Paxton’s practice of suing doctors in other states for sending abortion medication to patients here.

It’s the first big salvo against the state’s four-year-old near abortion ban which makes the procedure virtually impossible to access in this state and is likely to be the first of many tweaks to make the ban less rigid. The attorney general’s office under Ken Paxton, who gave up the role to run for Senate, has been a powerful enforcer of the state’s abortion ban laws and a Democrat coming into that position cuts off a powerful tool for the country’s anti-abortion movement.

The first thing I do when people ask me about abortion is point out that I’m not a legislator, and I can’t change abortion law,” Johnson told The Texas Tribune. “What I can do is cease using Texas abortion laws as an instrument of persecution and intimidation, harassment and political showboating. All four of those things have happened.”

It is illegal for Texas doctors to mail abortion medication within the state and Paxton has sued doctors in other states who prescribe the medication, chilling Texans from obtaining these pills, abortion advocates say. Those lawsuits have run up against blue states’ so-called shield laws that protect physicians who send abortion medications.

Johnson said he won’t be suing those out-of-state doctors anymore. “I will not pursue the judicially absurd position that Texas law has extra territorial effect. I can honor other states’ shield laws.”

While this eliminates an obstacle to accessing abortion pills, Democrats won’t be repealing the abortion ban anytime soon.

Despite the increasing use of executive power by Gov. Greg Abbott, Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa cannot legally repeal the abortion ban with her own pen stroke. She also told Politico in September that repealing the ban would not be a priority because it would require Republicans to pass such a bill and that seems unlikely.

Instead, University of Houston political professor Brandon Rottinghaus points out she can greatly limit how the law is applied. Hinojosa has said that she would work to end penalties for doctors who perform life-saving abortions, although lawmakers provided additional protections for doctors in these situations last year.

“She can influence how portions of the law are implemented, and how certain exceptions are interpreted, and other reasonable additional restrictions that might become law eventually,” he said.

It turns out you can’t post Malfoids and Anakin when diesel is $6 a gallon and expect America to vote for you.

Many right-wing personalities went into Tuesday somehow expecting to win despite a disastrous war, a disastrous economy, disastrous polls, and a doddering president whose closing argument seemed to be more about his ballrooms, golf courses, and the Reflecting Pool than anything else.

Since Trump was re-elected, these same people have called everyone else out of touch, convinced by their X algorithm and prediction markets that no blue wave would materialize. The media has similarly spent many thousands of words suggesting that Bluesky is an out-of-touch leftist echo chamber while mostly failing to suggest anything of the sort about the AI-pilled Silicon Valley executives, bots, and racists shitposting on X.

Tuesday’s election wipeout highlights how detached from reality the Malfoid/Anakin-shipping, X-brained billionaires and their acolytes have actually become.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/54004235

🤖her

1923, "mechanical person," also "person whose work or activities are entirely mechanical," from the English translation of the 1920 play "R.U.R." ("Rossum's Universal Robots") by Karel Capek (1890-1938), from Czech robotnik "forced worker," from robota "forced labor, compulsory service, drudgery," from robotiti "to work, drudge," from an Old Czech source akin to Old Church Slavonic rabota "servitude," from rabu "slave" (from Old Slavic *orbu-, from PIE *orbh- "pass from one status to another;" see orphan).

DS9 s5e25 "In the Cards" and Citizen Kane

that is all