All the centrists who say "wE nEeD cOmMoN sEnSe BoRdEr SeCuRiTy" or whatever, point to an actual immigration law in our history that you can stand by. Impossible. Started with Chinese exclusion, evolved into the quota system. It's literally all just racism.

You can't legitimately point to a single harm that has been done to this country because of "too much immigration" at any time in its history unless you're just a bigot.

This 10000%

Challenge: name one single immigration restriction law or enforcement program in American history that was morally justifiable and wasn't just an expression of racism.
Difficulty level: impossible.

A church I previously belonged to went through some convulsions this year, such that the spouse of a presbytery official told me "the wheels are completely off" over there. When I got the chance to talk to a session member of that church I was given no tea whatsoever. Perfect integrity 😖

We are much better served with leaders who made it through college with a B average but believe in liberal democracy than leaders who got straight As and believe in nothing but their own success

That seems like a sane response to the political situation here. There’s a chance that not only will women lose the right to abortion nationally but also birth control. Then there’s the problem of the manosphere teaching young men that women are undesirable unless they are doormats.

ahh, you know

It's getting worse. They start a new "generation" like every fifteen years it feels like. The name generation implies that one of the characteristics of one cohort is that their parents belonged to the previous cohort, and they will be raising the next one, so the cycles should be 25-30 years long.

$5.95 activation fee

Good God how I miss that time.

One predictable downside of making it "no this is only about ACA, our only demand" is that does get harder to defend as time goes on and the shutdown pain stacks up. The line for giving up on that, taking its loss as the lesser evil, is much lower than "we're not funding this fascist police state."

To say this was Dems voting, e.g., to fund ICE paychecks isn't unfair or an exaggeration. It's literally true. That they'd already given up on even trying to do anything about that doesn't change it, it's still in there. This is what constitutional accountability for the power of the purse is for.

the only time the filibuster has ever been used to protect a particular interest of a set of states is to kill anti-lynching and civil rights legislation. that's it.

My great-grandfather's middle name was Benjamin, because his father had been evangelized by AB Simpson himself in the 1880s. Checkmate.