Ah, but they vote Democrat, so they must be enemies of America. Iran would be doing America a favor by taking them out.

Assuming there's even the slightest trace of thought process going on here.

Pure good news, nice and simple. :)

And always bear in mind; you've proven you did this once, so you can do it again. Even if it's hard. Another nine months and it'll be 18, another nine after that and it's 27, and so on. You'll start counting in years at some point.

There's not really much greater chance of that happening during the Andromeda collision than there is during the routine churn of stellar existence in our galaxy anyway, though.

During his first term I would consider this to be a more likely explanation, but second-term Trump has been doing a pretty good job of purging anyone with actual competence. He wasn't happy with how they kept telling him what to do last time around.

Hanlon's razor has been getting an exceptional workout these days. It could just be that Trump is monumentally stupid and didn't think about this at all.

Sure, but it's not like they have much need for diesel right now. The crops have all finished growing, there's just that "harvest" thing they need to do before winter comes and everything stops. So they're like 90% done already, right?

I don't think it'll be a good time in the short term.

Long term, maybe. I don't know. But short term it'd result in massacres with no restraint whatsoever, not even what little restraint they have now.

It's hard to believe, but Israel currently has restraint. Yes, they're slow-motion genociding the Palestinians in a grindingly cruel manner, but the reason it's slow-motion is because they have endless debates and factions and desire not to completely rip their masks off while the rest of the world watches and could maybe react on some level.

If Israel turns into full blown civil war all that restraint goes away. If you're already at the point where you're willing to gun down fellow Jews, why not mow down a bunch of Palestinian refugees along the way? If you're not even in control of all of Israel, where can you move Palestinians to get them out of your way? Just kill 'em.

I have no idea what is best in the short term. I have no idea what is best in the long term. Israel is just fucked. I wish there was some way for all the people who want to kill each other to just go ahead and do that without everyone else getting trapped in the crossfire.

I think she also missed the fact that a lot of people wanted a lunatic. They were dissatisfied with "the system" and someone like Trump promised to blow the system up.

Which he has, frankly. Not the ideal way to go about it but it was effective. They're also starting to learn how good the old system was for them, too late alas.

This is the thing people keep missing. Democracy is usually reactionary. What gets people to come vote is to "throw the bums out", to bring in change. It's hard to get people to rally around the boring old status quo, especially if people think the status quo sucks.

Ah, so as this progresses the Republicans steadily run out of "competent" lawyers because they keep getting disbarred (or quitting to save their legal skins), leaving them with increasingly incompetent ones that have an even harder time accomplishing stuff.

Here's hoping their legal wells run dry quickly, I suppose.

Federal judges still do threaten and issue contempt of court penalties and disciplinary referrals to officials who blatantly disobey court orders.

I guess this is my main point of concern right now, as an outsider. I know that the courts are still ruling against Trump and the Republicans fairly regularly, but then I hear about situations where they're simply ignoring the courts' rulings and little seems to actually happen as a result.

What do those "disciplinary referrals" actually do? Do people actually get fired, or is it just something else for the Republicans to ignore?