Yeah my students do a double take when I mention that I typically rate as an introvert on any “personality test”.  They don’t understand the difference between a lecture or office hours where I know the basic structure of everything that’s going to be said and have a sense of control vs. the sheer terror of the party…

Trump may not be the technical “target” as Mueller (and Comey for that matter) apparently believes in the contested position you can’t indict a sitting President (an idea that isn’t overtly in the Constitution but there’s a lot of people who believe it) and targets in the jargon of the DOJ are people who charges could…

That would do it - more than a few people got run over by that turn of fate’s wheel because they were suddenly insufficiently ethnic. My relatives were all gung ho about a free Latvia, but none has emigrated there (I think they do have their dual citizenship though and I briefly considered it as a back door to an EU…

My father is Latvian ethnically, grew up in the diaspora, married and moved away from his adopted home town and as a result I don’t even pronounce my own name the right way. My experience with the Baltic communities in the US is that the war generations and their kids/grandkis are either like me (totally assimilated…

There all bur certainly would be people who just didn’t vote at the top of the ticket or entered a joke candidate.  But at least polling suggests without Stein a pretty good chunk would have voted Hillary.  If nothing else Stein could have endorsed voting for Hillary in close states, instead of after the fact calling…

In Oregon at least, it is all about keeping ballot line access and funds for the party itself as part of its multi-generational plan to go from 5 percent to 10 percent of the vote.  They seriously pour a shitload of resources into a selected state wide race because if they get above the minimum threshold they have a…

Thank you for this fun digression. What explains the features of a Boris Yeltsin though (i.e. drunken Mr. Potato Head)? Is that the “native” Slavic look? 

Bill and Melinda Gates have put a lot of money into education. It wasn’t well spent, but it was a lot. In no small part it failed because in classic “disrupter” vulture capitalist style a lot of what they did was insist that to get their dollars schools do things their way in the hopes they had found a magic bullet…

California now lets everyone do it if they want to in all elections - check one box on the SecState’s website and done.  Still not as good as Oregon and Washington’s ballot delivery systems (policy wonks in Or insist it isn’t vote by mail because most people just turn the ballot in at the library).  

CNN has Balderson up by less than 2k votes out of nearly 200K cast with 99% reporting. No idea if that includes mail in ballots (I’m guessing not since they haven’t called the race) but even if he pulls it out that’s a -10 point result from the 2016 Presidential election between two guys who are pretty much Generic R…

I’d recommend working the polls in some capacity for a lot of reasons, not just to guard against fuckery (although that’s important).  When I’ve done it, it was pretty heartwarming to see people fired up about voting (although the asshole who picked a fight with me was no fun, she was more than offset by the people…

Theoretically, the purpose of this is to go beyond the “nukes only” portion of the original deal to all the other shady shit the Saudis, UAE, Israel (the weird coalition of Trump’s buddies). want us to oppose Iran on (Yemen, missiles, Hamas, Syria etc. - basically being a regional power that doesn’t align with either…

I vote Goebbels, if he had a heroin addiction like Goering he was trying to cover up.

Using the Sunken Place as a motif seems pretty spot on and also fairly sympathetic to Dak. Where a lot of people see MJ’s “Republicans buy shoes too” line as craven and calculating, Dak’s position is probably genuine if misguided. A black quarterback who played at Mississippi State and became the starter at Dallas…

Truman - by executive order - integrated the military over the objections of most commanders. FDR had cautiously allowed experiments with letting African Americans into combat roles in WWII like the Tuskegee Airmen, and the nature of the war had led to a lot of examples of African American competence in combat in…

The first time I saw this I didn’t catch the apostrophe and thought James was being listed as a potential 49th President.  Which would actually make him between 47-59 when he’d be elected - not all that unreasonable, actually.

Yeah, but as much as I’d like to think they’d give him a pass, Secret Service would probably swarm James and potentially kill him - not an outcome anyone should want.

What are you talking about - Buchanan did act when he conspired with Taney on the Dred Scot decision, and hence managed to advance the timetable to secession through a ruling both of them somehow thought would resolve the issue. Trump might very well do the same - his bizarre not quite a deal with North Kroea, servile…

Please don’t use retard. The word has been retired from medical practice because its connotation of permanent incapacity was considered inaccurate and stigmatizing for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (along with using ID/DD terms like delay, difficulty or even deficit are used along with the…

No its the fault of US politicians for not insisting on linking our beliefs in basic human rights to our oversized economic power in the 20th and 21st century. FDR talked about the 4 freedoms everywhere, and we fought multiple wars nominally in favor of democracy, human rights and the rest of the American way of life,…