State of the Discussion

I agree with the age thing but there are better primary challengers out there or maybe not. Diane Feinstein's last primary challenger got caught doing racisms against African-Americans, Jews, and even Armenians in a hot mike moment after Feinstein was elected.

I'd go with #10. We've had 3 DJT election cycles now, and there's not an obvious successor. The guy is such an outlier, it's hard to figure him into regular political science.

I'd probably throw in #8, as well. The 2020s are going to be an odd decade, historically.

Because her opinions on Israel are very different from the opinions of many of the residents of the district on Israel.

It's a very Democratic district, with a relatively large Jewish population, who still make up a minority of the district (~10%). Assuming that the non-Jewish population of the district looks like the Democratic Party nationally, and that every Jewish person in the district voted Democrat (a ridiculous assumption, but this is just to make sure we've got a conservative estimate), then with 68% of the district voting for Harris, take away the 75-80k Jewish voters (obviously, some of them can't even vote, but again, we're being conservative), then with Dems nationally sympathizing with Palestinians over Israelis at about 3:1, we'd still have a majority of Dem voters sympathizing with Palestinians over Israelis. When you throw in Republicans, who sympathize with Israelis at about 8:1, this is still less than 50% of the total electorate, but it's pretty close. Considering that there are probably at least some Jewish residents who are either anti-Zionist or are pro-Israel but oppose the genocide, I bet it's probably right about 50:50. I'm not sure it's at all unreasonable for her to run, but then, that's why we have elections, right?

Jan Schakowsky is 80 years old and has had very few primary challengers in the last quarter century. Besides, no House district belongs to anyone or any group. Kat probably won't win, but good for her for throwing her hat in the ring.

Because her opinions on Israel are very different from the opinions of many of the residents of the district on Israel. Jamal Bowman got into trouble by using the term Zionist in very weird ways, embracing 10/7 conspiracy theories, and saying that Jewish majority neighborhoods are bad in a Jewish majority district. Same thing.

I'm confused about why you think she's a poor representative of a district that, while it does have a sizeable Jewish population, is still overwhelmingly non-Jewish, and more than 40% non-white.

Looks like it's ~10% Jewish, though the statistics I found are a bit outdated.

I've mentioned this previously but by formulating the protests around "Anti-Zionism" and "settler-colonialism, the Pro-Palestinian protests did nothing to help the Palestinians and prevented a lot of useful political alliances with Israeli and Diaspora Jews. Netanyahu isn't popular in Israel. There were massive protests against him since his coalition won the last election. He is on trial for massive corruption in Israel. The Israel-Hamas War did nothing to improve Netanyahu's popularity in Israel and his coalition is only held together by him regularly appeasing the most rightest members.

There was big potential to teaming up with anti-Netanyahu forces in Israel including the hostages families and Diaspora Jews. By framing the protests around "anti-Zionism", "settler-colonialism", and the legitimacy of Israel itself, the Pro-Palestinian protest movement made this impossible. They did nothing to help the Palestinians as well.

if the israelis had shared what they knew he wouldn’t have gotten citizenship of any kind. his visa was lawful. the investigation\surveillance was lawful. his deportation was lawful. nothing has been violated. an expectation has been set.

One has to wonder why we would _ever_ detain someone even if they did flatly say they were going to do things that would violate their visa. Either they didn’t understand the requirements before and maybe could be corrected and let in, or they aren’t going to follow it and we should _have them leave on the next plane_. Why on earth are we holding them?

I put that in parenthesis, but it actually cannot be emphasized enough how screwed up this is, how this is just the impotent bullying you get under early fascism.

The executive has, at the border, the right to reject the admission of almost anyone who isn't a citizen or permanent resident or asylum seeker. If they're on a tourist or work visa, they can just no. There's no due process, no hearing required, they can just say 'Nope, get back on the plane'. We talked about this with Trump's Muslim ban, which was fought in court not on the grounds the power didn't exist, but that it was used in an extremely harmful way by mass rejection of visa holders and causing complete chaos, it unlawfully rejected permanent residents and asylum seekers, and that it also had discriminatory intent.

No one, absolutely no one, asserts the executive cannot just say 'Hey, you! Yeah, you! Coming here on a 45 day tourist visa. You hinted at working in this country on this tourist visa, so you have to leave!'.

That's maybe stupidly used sometimes, we should maybe have a bit more discernment, but legal.

What is almost incomprehensible except on the the grounds of 'We can harm non-Americans', is _imprisoning_ that person for several weeks. There is no possible crime to charge them for...you could maybe try 'attempting to lie on their visa application' because they probably attested they weren't going to work, but the fact they supposedly _told the authorities_ what they were doing sorta renders any sort of intent claim idiotic...they clearly didn't understand some part of the rules, so no intent!

The thing you do with those people is say 'Nope. Back on the plane!'

Unless you are just...fascism, and want to HURT foreigners because they are the designed outgroup. There actually isn't another word for this, no other explanation. If we were farther along in fascism they'd probably send these people to the camps, but they can just use immigration law, which doesn't really have the concept of rules about how long you can hold people who walk up the border and try to enter the country and they say no, because no one ever thought anyone would keep those people around!

Mike Waltz is married. The woman to whom he is married has a sister. This sister is married to Scott Stapp, lead singer of Creed.

Edit: Never mind. They got divorced last year.

In defense of the Democrats in power at the time: it's 2023 and coming up on the most important election of our lifetimes and they didn't want to just walk up to Donald Trump and hand him the biggest W they possibly could.

In 2023, I listened to a discussion/interview with a well-known American philosopher and a couple philosophers outside of the U.S., mostly about his most recent book (which has little to do with politics, and nothing to do with American partisan politics), but they ended with talk of movies and then current American politics, and they all, the American philosopher and his non-American interlocutors, agreed that Biden was in serious cognitive decline and the Democrats should be holding a primary to find another candidate.

Point being, it was obvious even to random (admittedly leftist, so not big fans of Biden or the Dems) philosophers in other countries, so it must have been obvious to the people in the White House and the Dem national leadership. In a just world, nobody who worked in that administration or in the national party would ever work in politics again. Alas...

Team Blue waited until the last second to notice their guy was unable to talk and then replaced him with someone who managed to get zero delegate votes over two election cycles.

They/we shouldn't be picking a VP based on their group membership but rather on their ability to head the ticket.

If you're going to replace your guy, do it earlier.

If you're going to replace your guy, actually replace him. A President Harris would have looked a lot more Presidential and would have removed the conflict of running both for and against Biden. She could have showed herself righting the ship and taking charge.

Of course that assumes she actually had that ability which is unclear.

There are modernist Zoroastrians, though they are a minority within a very small religious group anyway, so you're unlikely to meet them. There are also restorationists, who reject "recent" (as in, over the last millennium) changes to the original, pure Zoroastrianism of the Gathas, but they're also a small(ish) minority within a very small religious group. I think most Zoroastrians are somewhere in between the two, though the only Zoroastrian I've ever known personally is a Parsi, which is a group known for their conservatism, though they're not restorationists.