Plus the incoming Lieutenant Governor is a Democrat. And in the Texas governmental system, the Lieutenant Governor has a ton of power over the Senate, akin to the Senate Majority Leader in most other American systems: ability to set committee memberships, control the calendar, etc.

The electoral college is quite literally based on the apportionment of Congress.

Yes, but the disproportionality between electoral votes per voter comes more from the existence of the Senate than it does with the slightly different population sizes of the House districts. Wyoming has almost 4 times the electoral votes per voter than Ohio, whereas right now the widest ratio in House district populations is Delaware’s 980k having 80% higher population compared to Montana’s 542k.

And the genuine unfairness of the electoral college is the winner take all nature of it. Even if the electoral college itself were divided exactly proportionally to the population of the states, there would still be divergence between the national popular vote and the electoral college winner when one candidate wins a disproportionate number of very close states. Apportionment is a separate problem from the electoral college, and both independently need to be fixed.

This is mixing up two related but distinct ideas.

The electoral college system leads to a winner-take-all for the electoral votes of any given state, with the exception of Nebraska. Passing a Wyoming rule or something similar to expand the size of the House, and increasing the number of electoral votes from 538 to 900 or whatever won’t change that basic dynamic.

Yeah, yeah, Wyoming has a house seat elected by a population of 590,000, a little bit smaller than the national average house district population of 780,000, but that’s not nearly as big of a source of voting power discrepancy compared to the existence of the Senate, or the winner-take-all phenomenon that happens in the Electoral College.

So yes, I agree that the Apportionment Act needs to be repealed/modified, but don’t agree it should be as high a priority as electoral college reform.

Yeah, the whole story needs to be told because it’s just so, so much worse than even what you were saying.

lame duck implies that the sitting president would be restrained in some way.

Mainly restrained by the fact that they’re running low on time remaining in office. No matter how you slice it, time keeps marching forward, and people who want to continue to have careers after January 20, 2029 will start making moves to move up after Trump moves out.

For the unique dynamic in the Trump administration of requiring absolute loyalty to a particular man, that means that the expiration date will cause significantly more turmoil and turnover in his inner circle, as they position for the 2028 campaigns, where they maneuver to inherit Trump’s power he’s never been keen on sharing anyway.

He went to jail and her mother took his side.

No, he was facing criminal charges for raping her from the ages of 9 to 12, so her mother actively helped him flee the state and hide from justice until he died 25 years later. The mother chose to stand by her child’s rapist, moving states with him and leaving her children behind, so the state where they were left behind had to take the abandoned children into custody.

Ramaswamy tracked down the mother and said “yeah, let’s get her on camera to call Acton a liar.”

I’m celebrating this result. It’s not about the money, because as everyone else is saying, this is chump change to him.

But what’s beautiful is the blow to the ego. The reminder that all the money in the world can’t buy popularity or adoration. The suspicion that he might be getting taken advantage of by others taking his money. The confirmation that he’s not fully in control, and never will be.

That is worth celebrating.

This is just another flavor of that lazy “both parties are the same” nonsense. We are in the midst of a Trump-driven party realignment, and that means both parties are moving in different directions on different issues, and there are debates within both parties about where to go.

A generation ago, it was an active debate about whether sex acts between two people of the same sex should be a crime punishable by prison. We pushed real reforms through, from decriminalization to allowing them to hold security clearances and serve in the military, legalizing same sex marriage and recognizing their parenthood of children. We made it illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or transgender status. In all this time, these positions on LGBT rights shifted from far left fringes to internal divisions within the Democratic Party to mainstream views within the Democratic Party to influencing divisions in the Republican party. And although I’m disappointed in many Democrats not doing more to defend against active hostility towards transgender people, their positions aren’t actually less transgender friendly than the norm even 10 years ago (much less 25).

On abortion, we’ve moved the party towards pro-choice, even as we’ve lost ground on the battlegrounds in the courts and in state legislatures. It used to be a fairly normal view to be a pro-life Democrat. Not necessarily the party majority, but there were enough elected Democrats who would vote against abortion rights, and compromises with them led to at least federal funding restrictions of abortions. At this point, pretty much any elected Democrat will not only fight for abortion rights, but are ready to bring the fight on putting government resources behind abortion access.

The active debate right now, within the Democratic Party, about Israel and Palestine, is so much further pro-Palestine than would be recognizable 20 years ago. For the first time, we have elected officials who are publicly against military aid for Israel, and in favor of prosecuting war crimes against senior Israeli government officials.

It’s not every issue like this, though. Union membership is no longer a reliable indicator of Democratic Party support, and labor rights are a bit more muddled within the party. Lots of economic issues have gone from being partisan coded to mixed coalitions (tariffs and trade, environmental and energy policy, financial markets and banking regulation, health policy). And Democrats have backslid on immigration/border issues, much to my disappointment.

But most of it is just that Democrats have lost on policy issues over the last 10 years, and so the debate between Democrats on lots of these issues feel only theoretical rather than practical. Are there Democrats fighting for reducing carbon emissions, shoring up social security and the safety net, raising taxes, replenishing the middle class? Yes, sure, but they don’t have the opportunity to actual discuss the details because they’re mostly an opposition minority party fighting to stop the bleeding on destructive Republican policies going the other way.

Let’s win some fucking elections so that we can actually have the debate. I’d love to see Democrats control a trifecta so that the coalition can churn out something like what Pelosi/Reid/Obama accomplished between 2009-2011 and listen to the left complain that the sausage making was too corporate/neolib/etc. That’s the debate I’d like to have, from the position of having actually won back power.

I would share the Mac and Me wheelchair cliff scene in celebration, but out of respect for Josh Turek winning Iowa, I’m gonna lay off the wheelchair jokes.

They pale in comparison to what’s happening somewhere like Paris.

Protests and disruption in Minnesota did a lot at the beginning of this year. There were many violent clashes coming out of those protests. Two protestors were killed, dozens were permanently injured or disabled, hundreds more were hospitalized, and thousands were arrested. And the result of those protests were the firing of the senior official in charge of the Department of Homeland Security, several other immigration officials, and a major pullback of operations, an end to that style of aggressive immigration enforcement operations.

Meanwhile, other action included legal work that got literally thousands of arrestees released and the resignation of many of the prosecutors brought on to try to investigate and prosecute fraud in the Somali American community, a racially targeted and legally unsupported use of law enforcement resources.

The whole operation was also a disaster for the popularity of the ruling party, and we’ll see in the next 16 hours or so just how badly this costs them in the actual power structures of our governments.

Yup. Mathematically, gerrymandering is a combination of packing (putting as many as you can of the opposing side into a concentrated district you lose) and cracking (spreading the opposing side among the remaining districts so that they can’t get a majority of any of them).

If you try to grab too many seats, though, your gerrymandering advantage is diluted in any given district so that you may actually lose a lot in a wave year, more than if you even didn’t gerrymander.

So imagine a state that has 10 districts of 100 usual voters each, 500 of each party. Most years, each party gets 5 out of the 10 seats. But if you’re gerrymandering, you can pack 2 districts 90/10 and build a 60-40 advantage in the other 8, which holds your 8-2 advantage unless the population swings 20 points. Or you can get greedy and try to pack one district 90/10 and build only a 55-45 advantage in the other 9, good for most years but vulnerable to a swing of 10%. At that point, you might have accidentally given the other side a 10-seat sweep in a year where the popular vote goes 560-440, with one district going 99-1 and the other 9 going 52-48 or so.

Most real world gerrymandering isn’t that clean, but the intended goal was to create a bunch of 55-45 districts. And now those districts might actually swing.

I am a lawyer, but not a trademark lawyer. Just knowledgeable enough to be dangerously wrong, I guess.

But trademark protection must be tied to a product, and don’t provide protection against a word or phrase being used at all.

And so the strength of a trademark description relies on where it lies on the spectrum between totally fanciful words invented specifically for the trademarked use (Xerox, Exxon, Pepsi), arbitrary words that are normal words but have nothing to do with the product (Apple computers, Monster energy drinks), suggestive words that have something to do with the product (Coppertone for suntan lotion, Airbnb for an online service for BnB listings), descriptive words (Quarter Pounder for a burger that is a quarter pound in weight), to fully generic words for products that can’t be limited to one producer/seller (bicycle, automobile, hamburger).

Common terms can be trademarked, but the scope of protection is necessarily much narrower. Apple can enforce its trademark in computers and electronics. Monster Energy Drink can enforce its trademark in beverages.

Crowder’s “Change my mind” trademark seems pretty tough to enforce. It’s at best a descriptive mark, and descriptive marks are hard to enforce unless the mark is so distinctive in commerce (like McDonald’s Quarter Pounder) that a consumer might be confused about who is producing it. I don’t think any regular person on the street will assume that a CNN-produced town hall with James Talarico is sponsored or licensed or produced by Crowder’s team, so there’s no risk of consumer confusion.

But like I said, I’m not a trademark lawyer so I wouldn’t put too much weight in what I say.

Don’t sign up anywhere. Just do. The lack of coordination makes it harder to counter, at least not without other collateral damage to legitimate customers and the like.

You’re right, and it’s actually not that hard to show, using actual real world examples, that the rules are stacked. Among federal criminal lawyers (and both of the examples here are federal crimes), it’s basically common knowledge that the punishment for bank robbery is unusually harsh compared to other crimes, and that the risk/reward calculus just doesn’t make any rational sense. It’s also common knowledge that white collar fraud is both easier to get away with and more lightly punished when caught.

Don’t just boycott. Actively do things that cost them money.

If I have $100 to spend, steering that away from them only loses them $100 or so. But if you actively interfere with their income streams, you’re not actually limited to the amount of your own spending power.

Report them for fines and penalties. Poison the data they collect on the world. Take advantage of the costly perks they offer (e.g., 100% return policies on open box items), clog up their customer support lines, exercise your consumer rights to your data or data deletion, target their loss leaders to cut into their profits, etc.