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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 20th, 2023

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  • https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/vice-presidential-pool-reports-april-14-2021

    Here you go. Press pool for the meeting that started this whole thing. About as primary of a source as is possible. It’s very clear she’s being asked to help address root causes of immigration, specifically political unrest and economic instability in central America. She quickly corrects the interviewer when they ask if this is about the border. If anyone was the border czar (a term the admin itself did not use for anyone to the best of my knowledge), it would be the secretary of homeland security.

    And of course, Trump convinced Republicans to kill their immigration wish list law because he was so upset that he wouldn’t get credit for it.

    Q: Madam Vice President, will you visit the Southern Border? Do you have a trip planned or will you plan a trip in the future if the situation with migration doesn’t resolve itself?

    A: So, as I mentioned to the experts, the President has asked Sec. Mayorkas to address what is going on at the border, and he has been working very hard and is showing some progress because of his hard work. I have been asked to lead the issue of addressing the root causes, similar to what the then-vice president did many years ago, but I will tell you that these are not issues that are going to be addressed overnight in terms of the root causes issue. A large part of our focus is diplomatic in terms of what we can do in a way that is about working with these countries.

    So when Republicans are like, omg she was the border czar and didn’t even visit the border. Uh no, she was helping with diplomacy and economic development in central America so was of course visiting those countries. The whole republican border czar thing is misinformation.

    https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/what-kamala-harriss-record-in-central-america-and-the-caribbean-reveals-about-her-foreign-policy-approach/


  • You seem confused on what an executive order is (or you’re not confused and are just saying this in bad faith). It’s not just the president randomly saying I order this to happen like some kind of dictator. It’s the executive laying out his/her interpretation of specifics on how a law should be implemented, a law already passed by congress. So unless congress has passed a law already, saying congress gives the executive the power to increase the size of the court on a whim, or decide to impose term limits on a whim (and they most certainly have not), then the power still rests with congress. Setting up and regulating the courts is a job expressly delegated to congress in the constitution. An executive order is meaningless here. What law would it derive its authority from? A congressional law might not even be enough for all of this, that’s why part of the plan talks about a constitutional amendment.

    And “No words” ?! How on earth are we supposed to build a concensus to do something, if in your opinion no one is allowed to even talk about it or express their support until it’s already happened? You make no sense. The sitting president endorsing supreme court reform is a huge step. And Harris is endorsing it too. Now we just need enough members of congress to get on board, and that’s how it could happen. Not talking about it because it can’t happen this second doesn’t make it any more likely to happen. Comments like yours if anything make it less likely, and discourage support for the people trying to actually get it done.

    I’m tired of all these nonsensical, “why doesn’t Biden just become dictator right now” comments. We’re voting against Trump because we don’t want a dictator.





  • On July 23, 2016, ahead of the 2016 Democratic National Convention, the 2016 DNC Rules Committee voted overwhelmingly (158–6) to adopt a superdelegate reform package. The new rules were the result of a compromise between the Hillary Clinton and the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns

    Ultimately, the DNC decided to prevent superdelegates from voting on the first ballot, instead of reducing their numbers

    People keep seeming to forget about the super delegate reform Bernie fought for. They are still there now, 15% of all the delegates (a lot of the super delegates being democratic elected officials like members of congress since that automatically gives the status). But they can’t vote in the first ballot any longer. They could only vote in a contested election in subsequent ballots, after all the other pledged delegates are unbound as well.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdelegate

    Even before those reforms, they never really made a difference in any convention, except possibly 1984 when they helped push Mondale from a plurality to a majority by voting for him on the first ballot.

    I’m not personally in favor of them at all, but it’s not nearly as bad as it’s made out to be sometimes. If we go to an open convention though, unless there’s a majority choice on the first ballot, they may play a role on subsequent ballots.



  • Yes, that’s true. The poll averages themselves haven’t moved much either though. And the reliance on the fundamentals forecast has me nervous, but they definitely do it for a reason. When they developed the models and looked at poll history the pattern they found was the fundamentals had a big influence on what the polls would look like closer to the election and the eventual result. Polls closer to the election are more predictive than the fundamentals. Polls farther away from the election less so. There’s at least some reason to think things have changed enough maybe the fundamentals aren’t as fundamental for this race, but I guess we won’t know until afterward.


  • Exactly, I think because races have been so close lately, and the probabilities are ending up close to 50% often, people sometimes unintentionally conflate them with poll numbers. 53% to 46% would be a massive poll lead. For probabilities though in this situation it’s the same as saying they have even odds of winning. Look at those massive 95% confidence intervals, the race is in a statistical dead heat. It’s kind of remarkable how steady it has been despite all the wild events that have happened.




  • They try to get you to submit articles to them (usually for a fee too). But they’re kind of sham journals with no peer review or standards who no one actually reads. They’ll publish pretty much anything without even looking. They have bots that just mass email every corresponding author in every paper published just begging for submissions to their journal. Whenever an article is published in a reputable journal, one author has to have contact information publicly listed so they can answer any questions about the paper, and these predatory journals just scrape that info. It’s bad, so many emails every day.