I always thought Han’s promotion straight to general was completely absurd. Luke joined the Alliance military immediately and served through the entire war, while Han was still freelancing it on Hoth and then spent a year or whatever in carbonite. How could possibly outrank Luke when they get to Endor?

Ah hah! A thing we agree upon regarding The last Jedi! I had despaired that not such thing could exist :D

Not coincidentally, the deadliest mass shooting in US history was carried out by a killer using bump stocks to simulate automatic fire. I would suggest America should be making that sort of thing harder to get rather than easier.

Yep, great link - it really makes it clear what happens when governments don’t pay attention to what people bring across their borders.

Ahhh, Dredd is so good! Rumors persist of a Netflix series with Urban reprising the role, which I’m sure is too good to end up being true...

Covering up sex scandals at Fox News? At least Trump has finally managed to hire someone who’s actually qualified for his job.

Corner gun shops can’t sell fully automatic weapons made after 1986, and the scarcity of legal automatics in the US puts the price outside the range of what most people would be able to pay.

Well yeah, that’s the same result. Cartels use straw buyers to get AR-15s in the US, bring them to Mexico (where border enforcement IS more relaxed), and convert it for automatic fire. American gunsmiths won’t risk jail for that, but if Mexican dealers can walk them back across an unguarded border and resell at a…

I don’t know that the intersection between ‘want to watch Hollywood live-action anime’ and ‘will boycott for racially inappropriate casting’ is enough to explain the GitS box office. Being distilled into a generic looking sci-if film that had very little to do with the plot of the original story probably hurt it more…

“wouldn’t suddenly dissolve all borders. (Although that would be a great next step.)”

I wish what you were saying was actually true, but no Hollywood studio that can afford to cast Scarlett Johansson as their lead is going to pass her up in favor of a virtually unknown actress, cis or trans. If Johansson didn’t take it, it’s be Jennifer Lawrence or someone else of that profile.

You tell ‘em, Dave!

Because a significant number of Democratic senators up for election this year have a difficult path to re-election. Manchin in West Virginia, Connelly in Indiana, McCaskill in Missouri and Heitkamp in North Dakota are all on the ballot in red states, and taking a very partisan stance on a Supreme Court nominee might…

If McCain is out, and the Dems are really willing to tell McConnell to fuck himself, they entire caucus can just refuse to enter the Senate chambers en masse. That leaves just the 50 Republican senators in the session, and the Constitution requires a majority of at least 51 senators in the chamber for quorum. Pence…

Best Concussions In Baseball.

Try not to mine any coal on the way to the parking lot!

Right, I fully expect a Gorsuch clone to be on the bench before the end of the year. But using ACA as a (not very reliable) guide, replacing Kennedy with another typical conservative jurist makes it 4-4 with Roberts deciding how it breaks.

I’m not making a prediction either way, I just wanted to note that he’s not certain to side with the conservative position on this topic the way Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch are.

Not necessarily. Kennedy was a dissenting vote on the Affordable Care Act case in 2012, while John Roberts was the swing vote that decided the case 5-4. The four liberal yes votes remain, so a Kentucky healthcare challenge could come down to Roberts again.

Prizing internecine squabbles over the 90% of things that liberal voters have in common worked out so well for the Democrats in 2016, I can’t imagine Pelosi not wanting to take that bait today.