If I'm not mistaken, Saul isn't a Christian, so what some Christians think about Mancheanism is as relevant as who were the rightly-guided Caliphs -- a big issue to Muslims, but irrelevant to anyone else.

Isn't she too busy getting out subpoenas to members of the Warren Commission?

Irony is dead.

Obama 2016?

Private companies can, mostly, do whatever they want. Freedom of the press is for those who own one. The rest of us can point and laugh.

She's a Mississippi state judge so a Mississippi lawyer should chime in. Generally, though, judges don't get punished or reprimanded just for being wrong. They can be laughed at if they're really or frequently wrong and, depending on whether they're elected or appointed, not be re-elected or re-appointed. Whether they can be recalled is a matter of Mississippi law.

Reason prevails in Clarksdale:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/25/us/clarksdale-register-mississippi-lawsuit-dropped/index.html

I have often asked the empirical question of how many folks fit into your second category, how many of them voted for Trump or stayed home, rather than vote Democratic, and how many of them would swing to vote Democratic if the Democrats presented a nipped, tucked, and cleaned-up version of DEI? And kept it a back-burner issue, which actual, flesh-and-blood candidates generally did. (This assumes that what the Democrats do, short of curb-stomping DEI entirely, would protect them from Republican lies -- a questionable assumption.)
My belief is that the numbers are politically trivial, but if there is evidence that I am wrong I am eager to see it. I don't suppose, though, that asking again will make a difference.

Don't hold your breath.

Bug or feature?

The court won't, and shouldn't, get into 28th Amendment issues because it will be able to decide this case without reaching out to give a purely advisory opinion on whether the 28th Amendment has been ratified or not. That's how it's done.

You asked, I answered. A thing is true or it isn't. Someone who says something exists can back it up or he can't. Do you play by different rules?

Not for the kind of fine- grained, small- bore issues being obsessed about. If the data existed showing non-trivial constituencies who would swing on this stuff, we'd have seen it by now.

The complaint is don't waste my time on this s**t unless you bring the receipts.

My thought process is that the Pundit's Fallacy isn't a thought process. Throwing out a pet peeve on a small- bore issue may be fun, but you do things that will win you net votes, preferably significant net votes. Not non- zero votes, not there must be some votes out there somewhere that might possibly turn if the party accommodates my pet peeve on this marginal issue.

That's certainly a theory.

OK, you want me to dispute something?

If you have a society that upholds Enlightenment ideals, it won’t matter if the government doesn’t.

If you have a society that doesn’t uphold Enlightenment ideals, it won’t matter if the government does.

I dispute that. We have long had a society where what you insist on calling Enlightenment values are widely unpopular and generally invoked opportunistically. Despite that, there are all sorts of protections against the government punishing people for their speech, indeed, more than we used to have. And they largely work. So the two notions aren't linked the way you suppose.

It has been tried, and people will continue to try. And when they succeed, it will be news, as this one has been. And they will almost always be reversed.

As far as goalposts go, if you want to argue with the voices in your head, that's your right. My original comment said a lot of things, none of which I have heard you dispute.

More of what "sort of thing"? And whatever that sort of thing is, why more than we're already used to? After all, free speech has never been popular and censorious assholes of every persuasion have always been with us. I doubt it's any worse than it has ever been, and, indeed, it's probably better now than before. Our current notions of free speech are barely 100 years old, to the embarrassment of self-styled originalists, and long after the Enlightenment was over.
And that wasn't the case. I read the case I'm vaguely remembering in law school, which was well before 1984.

There was a Supreme Court case -- I'm too busy to look up which one -- in which the Court said there was a significant difference between "First Amendment values" (I believe the term came from one of the parties' briefs) and the First Amendment. The unsuccessful plaintiffs were trying to sell the idea that some nice, speech-enhancing idea they wanted the government to adopt was actually required by the First Amendment. They failed.
Lots of things that would enhance a "culture" of free speech are not required by the First Amendment and many such things are not only not required by the First Amendment, they are forbidden by it. Free speech, whether legal or cultural, is a complicated notion not resolved by slogans. It is also, as a matter of historical and social fact, not an especially popular one.
Let's take the idea that "private companies can do whatever they want," whether you're for or against it. First, it isn't quite true. The government can, and does, forbid private companies to put up Help Wanted signs that say "No Irish need apply" and First Amendment challenges have lost. But it largely is true. And would you have it any other way? If so, what happens to the free speech rights of the private companies themselves? Must they say things, or platform others to say things, that they don't wish to say or be associated with? Maybe there would be more speech in such a world, but not more free speech.
And much social pressure that inhibits free speech is, itself, free speech. Many years ago, when I was working on a major free speech case, someone sent me a memo pad with the printed heading: "Free speech means you can say what you like -- and everyone else can laugh at you." There is no "first speaker" privilege. Anyone who says anything must be prepared for others to disagree. Perhaps they are wrong, unenlightened, and censorious, but wrong, unenlightened, censorious speech is, itself, free speech. Freedom of speech is not freedom from all its consequences. It has always taken guts to say unpopular things, and moving out of small-town America to the sinful big city where you can say what you like and be what you are -- or at least more freely than you could in East Bumf**k -- is a well-documented historical phenomenon and, by now, a literary cliche. As Dr. Gottlieb told Dr. Arrowsmith in Sinclair Lewis's novel, you can't have both freedom and the rewards of popular slavery.
The law can let people talk and prevent interference, and in America it largely does; but nothing can make people listen.

If ditching the performative, stupid and grifty elements of DEI; not (I emphasize -NOT-) the genuine substantive areas where DEI overlaps with our many other principles about helping and protecting minorities and other disadvantaged groups; why the fish should we not do that?

How many votes would it swing?

Wait and see.

I'm starting a new Jaybird Bingo Card. This is a contender for a square.

Well, that certainly clears things up.

You assume that blatant philosophical inconsistency and shame have more force than they do. The self-proclaimed originalists rarely do originalism in any rigorous or consistent way. Indeed, they rarely do it at all. They, like almost everyone else, are cafeteria originalists. The only potentially interesting question is whether they are cynics or merely believe their own press clippings.