Following W’s plan - give everyone a flat tax refund in time for the mid-term elections to help out your “team”, and then try to time the economic bust for just after leaving office, so that voters remember the next guy as being responsible for the problem in time for voting the next round in.

Clarifying - anti-choicers. Pro-lifers are a larger group that include those against the death penalty, and may have an actual struggle with cases where the gestation endangers the mother, as opposed to strictly denying that those cases exist.

Hey, if Indiana could only narrowly avoid making a mathematical untruth law, fifteen years after fairly emphatic proof, something that depends on basic moral truths instead of basic arithmetic to prove would take significantly more effort to debunk. Which is a sad.

It can be both - the people are both the strength and weakness of democracy and republics.

Maybe some of them would like a viable alternative, but aren’t able to come up with one... and it’s hard.

Don’t forget church. Nothing like millenia of “just do what we tell you, and you’ll have a wonderful (after)life.” Luckily, we won’t have much difference going forward, if the new SecEd has her way.

A by-hand recount may, but several officials are opting not to do so. Given that it would have taken hundreds of instances of direct physical access to very distributed tabulating machines, direct hacking seems implausible. Possible, but implausible. If fewer machines were involved, the variation in percentages…

I’m wondering what kind of “stop oppressing me!” is being referenced here.

He invented a gizmo that does the braiding / unbraiding + whatnot in minutes, and selling that invention is what’s funding Team Arrow nowadays... or something like that...

Print money for the related jobs for the people that voted for him, that otherwise wouldn’t have well-paying job prospects?

Permanent (unelected) undersecretaries take over is the possible worst case scenario, and depends on having a weak journalist corp, or an uninterested electorate, or structural protection like handy people to take the blame for things, like the actual elected officials. Smaller governmental bodies make it harder to…

The Wild West one was hilarious, IMHO

Really, really not. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/01/china-great-famine-book-tombstone

Much like suburban developments named things like White Pines, which is what had to be cut down to build up the housing?

I have a vague recollection of stories of his assaulting someone over calling him out... did I imagine this happening, or were those reports just buried in search results after all these years?

FWIW, the latest Paper Mario uses the tablet screen as a separate screen.

There is / are vaccines against rotavirus, have been for a few years now

The great thing about that system is that it’s fluid. The not so great thing about relatively recent history is how much power one of the branches has divested of itself to the ideal of a strongman executive. See also, signing statements sidestepping the chance for a veto, the broadening of executive orders...

... are you serious? 5th generation japanese born Koreans that can’t become citizens...

Are they smart people? The smartest? Are they heard by other candidates perhaps?