BootmanLA

If that's the only rebuttal to my post you can make, I think you're making my points for me.

I don't disagree with your overall point. But again, Roe involved a dedicated push by single-issue groups attacking the foundation of the Roe decision for over 40 years, in conjunction with a lot of religious groups and others with a broader focus. While a lot of moralistic groups (broadly speaking) oppose Lawrence and Obergefell, there are essentially no major groups whose sole focus is re-criminalization of sodomy or abolition of same-sex marriage - and the same is essentially true about porn. Also: there were very few cases in the Supreme Court on abortion after Casey (the 1992 case that affirmed the core idea that abortion is a right) that didn't chop away at abortion rights. Restriction after restriction was permitted so that even before Dobbs, abortion was heavily restricted in red states, with large numbers of clinics having been shut down over the years. That doesn't mean Dobbs wasn't a major hit, but it was a major hit to an already enfeebled right (in states where it wasn't respected to start with). There's been no such long-running whittling down of the First Amendment with respect to porn. In fact, law after law after law, over the years, has been struck down in places across the country, even in deeply red states like Texas. And when the lower courts uphold a 1A restriction that is contrary to established law, the Supreme Court has been pretty good about smacking those courts down. That's not to say that will continue forever. But none of the justices, as far as I can tell, believe that internet porn is less protected than printed porn, and printed porn is very clearly protected under existing precedent. And this is one of those areas where even a lot of right-leaning culture warriors won't go - not only because they know how unpopular it would be, but because they know if a court can ban online porn (even if just for children) because some don't like it, there's no principled reason a more liberal state couldn't ban right-wing rhetoric as harmful for children, too.

As we say down south here.....Oh honey, bless your heart. I'd go through this piece by piece but it's such a delusional screed it's not worth it. The president has literally zero to do with insurance costs, and if your taxes went up, it was either state/local taxes (again, the president doesn't control those) or you made more money, because there have been NO income tax increases under Biden whatsoever. Gas prices, again, aren't set by the president, and they respond almost entirely to supply and demand. Even oil company executives will tell you that federal drilling policy has almost nothing to do with gas prices in this country. Crime cannot be "1000% lower" because "100%" lower means eliminated entirely. In point of fact, most crime has been dropping, and people's perception of crime is skewed because social media and sensationalist news sites play up crime for ratings and clicks. Both crime overall and violent crime in particular are lower. Moreover, Republicans love to tout high crime rates in big, Democratic-led cities, but the truth is that red-state crime (in places like, say, Mississippi) are double that of big cities like Chicago and New York. And as for the military equipment - in order to have left "trillions" in military equipment (presumably in Afghanistan), he would have had to have left behind nearly three years' worth of the ENTIRE military budget - including salaries, health care costs, etc. - but all in equipment; or in other words, about 10 YEARS' worth of ALL equipment purchases. If we take big-ticket items like aircraft carriers and such out of the picture (because we sure as hell didn't leave those behind), you're saying that we left behind about 35 YEARS' worth of purchases of military equipment in that country. That's bullshit. We don't even have that much stuff in total around the world. Look, I get it - you like the wannabe dictator, so fine, vote for him if you insist. Just try to come up with more credible lies, because right now, this is just pathetic.

I think if they actually controlled everything completely, including the Supreme Court, the answer might be "No". But as strong as the right (in a general sense)'s control is over the political system, the Christian nationalist types don't control the Supreme Court. Some will argue that point with me based on the Dobbs decision, but I'd argue that even though religious groups loudly supported that decision, and take credit for it, the full truth is a lot more complicated. I don't think Clarence Thomas, for instance, is a Christian Nationalist; he's very much a conservative and farther to the right than most other judges, but it's largely driven by a very slavish (pun intended) devotion to the text of the Constitution (or at least, what he thinks the text meant in 1789). I don't think Gorsuch or Kavanaugh is particularly religious. Barrett is a bit more so, but even she seems to understand there's a difference between allowing religions to mostly operate unhindered (the new "default" interpretation of the free exercise clause) and imposing religious beliefs on others (ie warping the establishment clause, which some lower courts seem inclined to do).

Granted. And if I didn't have to follow what they do closely (including reading most of their opinions, including dissents, completely), I might just assume "SCOTUS Republican, always vote that way". But each justice has his or her own quirks and views, and while it's certainly true that 6 of the 9 are farther to the right than the other 3, that doesn't mean they all vote in lockstep with whatever the Republicans seem to want. Bear in mind that Trump lost every case tied to the election in 2020 save one, and that one was only a minor quibble over something that in no way came even remotely close to affecting the outcome. The Supreme Court, with a 6-3 conservative majority, wouldn't even consider taking up most of his garbage lawsuits. In terms of the First Amendment, I haven't seen any opinions from Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Roberts, or Barrett that suggest they might even come close to trampling on porn rights. Alito - sure; he's a cheap whore for the right and would sign anything the Federalist Society wants him to. Thomas - even he would be a tough sell on a porn ban (or something that had that kind of effect). Because the right has made no secret, almost since the beginning, that they thought (for instance) Roe was decided wrongly. They've likewise said the same about Obergefell and Lawrence. But there's never been any hue and cry from the right that the key First Amendment cases on obscenity should be overturned. I just don't think these justices see that as an issue where they need to expend any political capital to deliver something for the right.

In other words, you're bullshitting and can't actually point to anything he accomplished. You say, but you provide no proof. Regardless, I assume you're going to forfeit your social security and medicare, because those are "socialist" and you certainly don't want to be a socialist. Actually, communism and socialism are two entirely different things, and both come in many varieties. Communism in eastern Europe (including the USSR/Russia) failed spectacularly. It's done fairly well in Vietnam. Socialism - especially the Social Democracy variant - has provided very well across much of Europe, where the poverty rates are lower, people work fewer hours with more guaranteed time off, they're healthier, and they're happier. I suppose if you think the only measure of a good governmental system is how many billionaires it manages to produce - a status that 99.99999999% of people in this country will never achieve, no matter how great the USA is - then yeah, I'd say you're onto something. This is 100% bullshit. About 50% of LGBT people are Democrats. About 15% are Republicans. The rest are other party or not affiliated with any party, and both of those tend to vote with one or the other party >95% of the time, in general proportion to the parties' numbers. So the reality is, there are fewer than 25% of LGBT people who routinely vote Republican. Walk Away was an AstroTurf organization - one created with fake people promoting something that never really happened. In fact, most of the people shown in Walk Away's ads were stock photos available online, or AI generated images. And exit polling showed that in fact Walk Away had zero impact on actual voters voting. People are leaving many states, both blue and red, and moving to other states, both blue and red. Washington is a very liberal state (not the eastern part, but only about 10% of the population lives on that side of the state), and it's one of the fastest growing states in the country. So is Colorado, and all the growth is happening in the blue parts of the state. Texas is growing, but it's becoming more purple, trending blue, in the process. Texas would actually have a fairly balanced legislature and congressional delegation if it weren't gerrymandered to hell and back for the Republicans. Ditto for Georgia. Logical reasoning is clearly not your strong suit, but let me see if I can simplify this for you. Just because A happens, and then B happens, does not mean that A caused B, any more than a rooster crowing is what makes the sun rise. Migration patterns happen for a lot of reasons, and if it were all due to "modern leftist democratic policies" then West Virginia and Mississippi, two of the reddest states in the nation, wouldn't be the ONLY two that actually LOST population - not just failed to grow, but LOST population - in the 2020 census. Louisiana is also a very red state, and we're barely holding even on population, much less growing. Other states with very slow growth rates: Kansas, Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Wyoming, Kentucky, Indiana - all red states. In fact, despite your take that everyone is fleeing California, it grew faster in the 2010-2020 census data than ANY of the red states I listed. Yes, and unencumbered by our constitutional norms, they're rapidly becoming autocratic sewers. You're putting an awful lot of faith in our constitutional norms - which, in essence, have to be taken on faith - to assume Trump won't do to us what Erdogan is doing in Turkey, or Orban in Hungary. Republicans are using LCR and other "gay republicans" as cover - tokens, just like token Blacks have been used for decades to cover up their racism. And I'm sure you do know some super conservative gay guys - unfortunately, the kind of "I got mine, fuck the rest of you" attitude infects gay men just as it infects straight people.

Because only Trump or Biden will be the next president. If you think Biden is any better than Trump, AT ALL, then you should vote for him. If you think Trump is better, by all means, vote for the fascist. If you see no difference between the two, then by all means, throw your vote away on someone who can't win, and then prepare for four years of people telling you "Shut the fuck up about anything governmental or political because you had a chance to affect the outcome, and you threw it in the trash."

I've never seen Biden wearing orange makeup, the way Trump does. Nor does he have any authoritarian impulses that I can tell. If he did, he'd just lock Trump up without a trial, the way Trump wants to do to his political enemies. But then only one of them claims that presidents are "absolutely immune" from prosecution for anything they do as president. Hint: It ain't Biden.

Perhaps you can understand why someone might vote for Biden if you consider the following: 1. At the end of the day, either the Republican candidate or the Democratic candidate will take the oath of office for the presidency January 20, 2025. 2. If that candidate is Biden, regardless of whether you think his policies are disastrous or wonderful, you don't have to worry that he's going to take steps to ensure he can evade the two-term limit, or that he's going to try to cancel the 2028 elections, or that he's going to try to overturn the results of the 2028 elections if they go for the other party. No one who saw what happened on January 6, or who's listened to the (admittedly deranged and rambling) promises Trump has made to install an authoritarian administration can legitimately NOT worry that those things may well happen under Trump. Especially if the Senate flips to Republican control, since all the leading candidates for Republican leader in that chamber are hard-core MAGA types. It's not the mean tweets; those just show what a complete asshole Trump is. It's the deranged tweets that reveal a mind beset by paranoia and dwindling daily in capacity; the brain that can't produce a coherent stump speech, that can't remember that Biden, not Obama, is the current president, that Nikki Haley was never Speaker of the House. It's the utter disregard for anyone other than himself, including this nation and our allies. Early in his term he blabbed Israeli intelligence to Russian officials right in the Oval Office, including giving enough detail to out intelligence sources. He's essentially promised not to come to the aid of any NATO country Russia decides to attack. The only current leaders he seems to admire are the autocratic thugs - Xi, Putin, Orban, Erdogan - even when he can't keep straight who leads which country. That's why he's expressed frustration that police can't just beat people when arresting them, regardless of the alleged crime of which they're accused - he wants a country ruled by fear of the government. And if he wins, you can bet - as I've said elsewhere - that his people will bring enormous pressure on Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito (who are 75 and 73, respectively) to retire, so that he can appoint another pair of early 40's right wing justices who'll control the Supreme Court until I'm almost 100. There are already likely four votes on the Court to overturn Obergefell. There are at least three, possibly four, to overturn Lawrence. And on and on. Not mean tweets. Deranged promises to turn this country into an authoritarian nightmare.

"Obscene" may be subjective, in one sense, but there's an actual legal definition from the Supreme Court. Obscene material must "(1) have a dominant theme in the work considered as a whole that appeals to prurient interest, (2) be patently offensive because it goes beyond contemporary community standards, and (3) be utterly without redeeming social value." I can't imagine the Supreme Court wanting to tackle that definition to rewrite it.

Certainly there are pollsters who ask leading questions - as Yes, Prime Minister demonstrated in the mid-1980's, you can get a lot of people to answer almost any poll question the way you want. Certainly enough to skew the result. A pollster mentioned a couple of years back that when they conducted polls that year, the "uptake" rate - people who answered the phone and agreed to take the poll - was 0.4%. It can't have gotten any better. So you're already dealing with a very small segment of the population (those with a phone who'll take calls from an unknown number) and then filtering it by those who are willing to take the poll at all. I have no doubt those people skew heavily older. Because people answering the phone and taking the poll used to be far more common, it was easy to figure out a "correction" factor - if people 55 to 65 were 12% of the population but only 9% of the respondents, you could weight the responses of that 9% slightly higher. You do the same for all age brackets, races, sex, income brackets, and so forth, by comparing them to the general population. But when the respondents are so few in number, it's virtually impossible to guess how much weight to boost, say, the 18 to 25 age group when you have only 2 out of 1,000 respondents in that age group, despite that group being much, much larger in the general population. We're also in a far more polarized age than we were as recently as, say, 2008 or 2012. So there are fewer swing voters, for one thing. We have a huge population who are registered with neither major party, but the truth is that most of those people vote for one party or the other on a consistent basis; they just don't want to be officially affiliated with them. Yet gullible reporters breathlessly talk about the "growing number of independent voters" without realizing they're anything BUT independent in practice. And finally, two other things were historically true: youth voter turnout always lagged older voters; and while young voters skewed liberal/Democratic, they often shifted more conservative as they hit their 30's. But in the last few elections, youth turnout has skyrocketed (at least compared with election cycles early in the century), and millennials are largely NOT changing their voting habits as they age. Demographers suspect this has to do with the fact that two major factors that used to coincide with a rightward shift - starting a family and buying a home - are increasingly out of reach for a lot of younger voters. All of which is to say that there are no valid models for figuring how all these factors need to be weighted to "correct" a poll sample that is already small and out of balance with the population as a whole. But it's worth noting that Biden, and Democrats in general, have been outperforming the polls since right after Trump was elected, and Trump and the Republicans have been underperforming. Trump's gotten a smaller share of the primary vote than expected in every state so far, especially considering he's a virtual incumbent. He's clearly still popular with much of his base, and many of those who voted for DeSantis or Haley or anyone else will probably vote for him in the long run, but when you're actually only the second or third choice of many of your own party's rank and file, things aren't looking good. That often presages a turnout gap.

And again, I say: only one of the two parties is going to be the victor in November (for the presidential race, that is; each chamber of Congress will also have a victor party and a loser party). I'm all for pushing the "less bad" party to be better. 100% for that. I'm not for discouraging people from voting for the "less bad" party because that can ONLY help the "more bad" party. I agree that Strom Thurmond was a shitstain of a senator. I never knew him personally, however, and I've known a number of people who I consider professional shitstains who are nonetheless (to some degree) likeable people. Perhaps Biden should have declined to give Thurmond's eulogy; but to decide that doing so means he's simply unacceptable in perpetuity means nobody can be given any credit for growth.

I'm not particularly worried about the "undecided" Democratic ballots in Michigan. From what I understand from political folks up there, the percentage of such is well within the "normal" range for a presidential primary. (I could be wrong but I'm going based on what they're telling me.) What concerns me most is not who the Senate Republican leader is, but whether that person is Minority or (shudder) Majority leader. If we lose the Senate AND the presidency, look for Trump to pressure Alito and Thomas both to step down during his term so he can appoint someone young, like Barrett, to their seats, and lock in a Republican majority for another 30+ years. Conversely, there's no guarantee either would retire (or die) during a second Biden term, but if one or both of them did, we might have a rare shot at flipping a seat back to saner hands.

That would absolutely run afoul of the First Amendment, just like virtually all the other "bans" that have been proposed. Of course, the Supreme Court could overturn its jurisprudence on that, but even these right-wingers don't seem inclined to mess with the First Amendment. But as things stand now, discrimination on the basis of the content of the expression (including porn, but not stuff that is legally "obscene") is subject to the highest scrutiny, and absent a compelling state interest that cannot be achieved in a less intrusive manner, such discrimination is (ordinarily) unconstitutional on its face.

They may not officially hate gays. But they're happy to back Republican officials who do. They were absolutely giddy over all of Trump's nominees for every position in the federal government, despite how clearly homophobic many of those nominees were. There's an old phrase from antebellum daysdescribing some of the Black persons kept in slavery, which I won't repeat here, that aptly describes the LCRs.

If that's the criterion we're going to use for racism - giving a eulogy for someone who was a friend, even if he differed dramatically from you politically (and bear in mind, Thurmond joined the Republican Party in 1964, at the very bleeding edge of racist white flight from the Democrats), then there's an awful lot of today's Republicans who need to be labeled racist - because they go a lot farther than giving such a eulogy. And yet you seem happy to lick their boots for some reason.

Granted. And every time I look at the methodology behind any particular poll, but particularly those showing Trump ahead or right behind Biden, I see rather obvious flaws, either in the way the questions are framed or the way the participants were selected. The biggest problem with the latter, of course, is that most people below the age of, say, 45 won't answer a phone call from an unknown number, and a huge number of people no longer have a home phone at all. Pollsters constantly tell us they "correct" for such discrepancies, but the reality is, those changes have happened so rapidly that nobody knows how much "correction" to apply.

I'm not sure how anyone who claims to have a conscience could cast a vote for Mango Mussolini and sleep at night, but then I guess "conscience" is relative.

It's not the reason. I'd suggest you read back through the last several pages of posts in this topic - the issues with "Chat" are well-known and not really within the scope of the site's owner to fix (it's a third-party module that no longer really integrates well with this forum software (which is also third-party software). Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and until the site gets rewritten from the ground up, I don't think it's going to work on a consistent basis.

If my state had had party primaries (ours are open, "jungle" primaries where all the candidates run together, and the top 2, regardless of party, go to the general election), I might have considered doing the same thing. We're *supposed* to go to party primaries for Congress and a few other state offices (but NOT our statewide officials or our legislators, or any local officials). Starting in 2026, that is. Our law will allow unaffiliated (that is, "independent", not "Independent Party") voters to vote in either primary, but only one of the two, so I may "unaffiliate" from the Democratic party just to be able to crossover vote in the Republican primary against whoever is the worst option with a chance of winning the nomination.

By all means, demand what you want. But withholding your vote if you don't get what you demand? Again, that's masturbation, because the voting outcome affects everyone, whether your "demands" are met or not. Agreed, and those who won't vote, or who throw their vote away by voting for someone with no chance of winning, clearly don't give a fuck about how those resources will be allocated - and absolutely need to shut the fuck up when they aren't allocated to their liking if they didn't vote in a meaningful way to affect the outcome. Because again, doing anything BUT voting for someone with a chance to win is exactly like masturbation - self-pleasing but ultimately wasted effort. These two things are diametrically opposed. If voting is only symbolic, then it doesn't determine anything. And if voting DOES determine how resources are allocated, then it's anything BUT symbolic. On its face, this sounds fine. But it ignores a basic fact: one of the two candidates is going to be better for you, and the other is going to be worse for you, and refusing to vote for the "better for you" one because he's "not good enough" means you deserve whatever the fuck you get if the "worse for you" guy wins. Voting is more than an "endorsement of you being in power". It's also very much a means of preserving the system long enough for things to get better, as opposed to electing someone who's going to blow it all up. And frankly, if you don't think that there have been benefits to you from the current administration, compared with the prior one, then I'm not sure there's any hope for you understanding any of this. Again, on its face, fine. But when one party produces (at worst) benign neglect and the other produces outright racism, I would think the intelligent thing to do would be to support the former. I backed a number of candidates in the past who were, at best, wishy-washy on LGBT issues, but they were far better than the ANTI-LGBT opponents they faced. And in my experience, sometimes benign neglect, while certainly not advantageous, gives one the breathing room to make further advances in the future. Having to fight losing battles against committed opponents is exhausting. Your mileage may vary. I'm all for pushing politicians to do better. But we won't GET politicians who do better if we keep letting the racist, misogynistic, homophobic right win elections simply because we fail to sufficiently support the only real alternative to that.

My parents were both conservatives, and neither of them spoke one word to me - ever - about sex. Nothing about how babies are conceived, nothing about STI's, nothing about nothing. I know that my mom must have told my sisters at least some basics about how to handle menstruation, but I don't think that she or my dad went beyond that. The worst part, in my view, is how abuse of kids with no sex education is cyclical and repeats, especially in poorer families and even more so in single-family ones. It starts with a father or uncle or whomever molesting kids in their care; the boys grow up thinking it's normal to do that to younger kids, and the girls grow up thinking they can't say no to men who want to do things to them. Eventually the girls get pregnant - not always from the abuser, but often someone they turn to for affection in the only way they know - and they end up dropping out, going to work, and the kids end up being cared for someone in the family who keeps doing what the previous generation did. Like I said, famuhleeeeeee values.

I'm sure you'll get a number of responses that are more based on personal experience than mine could be (as I am on HIV treatment, not PrEP), but I would throw out a few things for you to consider. 1. PrEP doesn't do anything, as you probably know, to prevent any STI with the exception of HIV. In fact, if you're moving from condom-using sex to bare sex with PrEP, and especially if you're going to be expanding the universe of your sexual partners, the likelihood of getting an STI along the way go up considerably. That said, it's hard to say just how much, because it largely depends on what the STI picture is where you live - or where you visit, if you travel and have sex while traveling. 2. It used to be easy to cover the side effects of PrEP because until not long ago, there was essentially only one form of PrEP - the one we know by the brand name Truvada. While not everyone experienced side effects at all, those who did typically had a limited range of issues (though there were always odd cases where a particular person's body reacted differently than anyone else's). Descovy introduced a new wrinkle, because although its ingredients and Truvada's were almost identical, one of the two active ingredients was a slightly different compound - one that had fewer side effects in some areas but at least one that was more common. There's now injectable versions of PrEP as well, but they're newer and less is known about them. And Truvada's formulation is now available in many places as a generic drug, too. 3. I would imagine that virtually everyone who's on PrEP will report that it's very much a net positive - the sex is more pleasurable, you can relax about worries like condoms breaking, and so forth. The drawback for the longest time was cost - until most insurance companies began to cover it, it was expensive. There are people who complain about having to take a pill daily (or having to plan ahead and take PrEP before and after sex, which is even more complex). But those are just what I expect the responses to address - I'm sure others will have considerably more detail to add, particularly about how various PrEP options affected their bodies.

Not teaching kids about sex is one reason red states, which largely lack sex education, lead the nation in teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections. It's also why they lead the nation in child brides and sexual assaults on children, because when you don't have a culture that tells children from an early age that it's wrong for people to do things to certain parts of their bodies, surprise! people get away with doing just that. And before anyone jumps in and bleats "Buh that's the parents' responsibility, famuhleeeeeeeeeeeeeee values!" that's also why most child molestations are by family members. The state won't step up and tell kids that this is a violation of their bodies, and the parents who are molesters are thrilled because they're much less likely to get caught - there's no "message" out there for the kids to hear that what Daddy or Uncle JimBob does to them when Mommy's out is wrong.

News flash: we don't "fund NATO". You, like the fucking moron who served as our 45th president, seem to think that NATO has dues and that most countries are behind on their dues. That's not how it works. NATO member countries are supposed to spend 2% of their GDP on THEIR OWN MILITARIES, so that they have sufficient resources to participate in a conflict if a NATO member is drawn into one. We CHOOSE to spend more than 2% of our GDP on our military, mostly because members of both parties like the defense contractors who have operations in their states and love showering them with money. As for your perception of the world's opinion of Biden, all I can charitably say is that it's uninformed, at best. I don't see other nations' leaders rolling their eyes at comments Biden makes, as they did with Trump; I don't see foreign leaders frantically trying to "no comment" their way out of criticizing a crucial ally, the way they did repeatedly with Trump. In fact, the only people who seem to have liked Trump better are the authoritarian dictator types, like Orban, Erdogan, and, of course, his favorite, Putin. Anyone who thinks that Europe's leaders don't respect Biden over Trump should consider what he said about what he'd do if Putin invaded a NATO country: he'd roll over and let Putin take it. Something something Denial something something River something Egypt.