silence7

Right. There's impeachment, but actually using it to remove people from power requires a supermajority, which makes it substantially ineffective against a criminal political party

They actually built a database of willing sycophants as part of it.

In general, preventing abuse via static rules is really difficult. People who want to abuse the system are innovative. Most systems really depend on having people who respond to the abuse by stopping it more than having specific written rules to block the kinds of abuse that have happened in the past.

Political change tends to be like that — nothing at all for a long period when you don't have the power to act, and sudden rapid change when you do.

Mostly because the progressives didn't control them in the early 1900s, so they don't have legislature-bypassing initiatives, and even in states where you do have that, it's expensive to get one through.

While I've known that for a while, a lot of the press was in utter denial months after he gave this money, as with this NYT article dated December 10, 2022

Four states don't use first-past-the-post for legislative elections. In particular:

• Alaska - uses a top-4 primary + ranked choice general
• Maine - uses ranked choice voting
• California & Washington - use top-two primaries (note: CA can be top-3 if there is a tie for 2nd place)

If a third party wanted to succeed, they would put significant resources into winning legislative and congressional seats in those places. I don't see any of them actually doing that though.

They wanted to redact witness names before releasing it.

An archived copy shows

J.D. Vance Freaks Out Over the Slightest Pushback in V.P. Debate

The whole modern commercial web is like that. Pretty much unusable without uBlock origin or the likes.

Yep. Needs to have both clearly cheaper up-front costs and longer-term costs paid by the property owner.

It appears possible to scroll the window where you don't have accept/cookie settings buttons fully visible.