America is coming back, and America is coming back strong

[Mike C]

So, Brian, I didn't see in the forum rules that name calling is permitted if one "spreads conspiracy theories". Mind giving me the section reference?

According to Joe, the COVID pandemic is over so a mass COVID outbreak is not going to happen if we all go the polls the same day. And, why is it that we could safely shop for food at grocery stores during the pandemic but could not cast a ballot in person for 5 minutes safely?

Again, I have no issue using absentee ballots so long as the voter requests the ballot and signs an affidavit. I do have an issue with mass mailing of ballots to everyone on the voting rolls which is an open invitation for fraud, as The New York Times even argued against in 2012.

As far as spreading conspiracy theories, I think you have myself, Kari Lake and others confused with these folks.

[BrianTCB]

Covid-19 bivalent booster vaccine: done.
Flu vaccine: done.

Both at the same time. Just like last time.

Now THAT's multi-tasking!

Making America strong again. One vaccine at a time.

[BrianTCB]

And that is why Joe Biden is one amazing President, keeping America coming back STRONG!

[iplayastrat]

Wonder why most Democrats are running
from biden right before the election?

And I'd like to say goodbye to pelosi. The
single worst Speaker of the House ever. She
won't be missed.

The election draweth nigh. I'm excited!

[Mike C]

Speaking of Pelosi, based on the report that aired on the Today show yesterday, there are lots more questions than answers about the Paul Pelosi incident. He answered the door when the cops knocked but didn't declare an emergency when they asked him if he was all right. Huh?

Here's a link to the report with new details:

https://rumble.com/v1rjkrg-bizarre-new-details-emerge-in-paul-pelosi-attack.html

But after listening to it, I am starting to wonder if this song was playing in the background.

[iplayastrat]

Speaking of Pelosi, based on the report that aired on the Today show yesterday, there are lots more questions than answers about the Paul Pelosi incident...

Mike, I haven't really being staying on top of this.

Is it true that DePape didn't hit Pelosi until the cops arrived?

One of my friends suggested to me that Pelosi and DePape
had some sort of sexual relationship. Normally I wouldn't
give that type thing much of a thought, but until all security
camera footage is released it begs the question.

[BrianTCB]

Mannnn. So many people at the University of Michigan. They had to have an overflow room...

And they say younger people don't vote.

crowd-uc-michigan.jpg

crowd-uc-michigan2.jpg

Hmmmm...something's wrong with this picture at the Trump (Hitler) Cheetolini rally...

crowd.PNG

[Mike C]

Speaking of Pelosi, based on the report that aired on the Today show yesterday, there are lots more questions than answers about the Paul Pelosi incident...

Mike, I haven't really being staying on top of this.

Is it true that DePape didn't hit Pelosi until the cops arrived?

One of my friends suggested to me that Pelosi and DePape
had some sort of sexual relationship. Normally I wouldn't
give that type thing much of a thought, but until all security
camera footage is released it begs the question.

That's what the NBC News report said (which you can watch on the rumble link I provided). They pulled the report hours later without any explanation. If they want to stop all theories, just release all the body camera footage. I still like actual confirmation of 'Where's Nancy?" being yelled.

From all account, he seems like a nice man and I hope he is okay. His wife's party wants to make it a political issue. Why not just let it go for the sake of his privacy?

[Mike C]

Hmm, I didn't know Bernie Sanders is running for office in Michigan.

[BrianTCB]

And the Supreme Clown Court now goes after more human rights. Next on the chopping block: diversity and equal rights for all in affirmative action.

When will the assault on our democracy and on equal rights for all end?

That's why a vote for democracy - democrats - is essential and why I am voting dem straight down the ticket. And why you should too! Don't give these people an inch! Because they will take a mile.

Do you want your sons and daughters to have less rights than you did? Unbelievable the destruction that this Supreme Clown Court is doing against this country. They must be stopped.

The Sad Death of Affirmative Action

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-sad-death-of-affirmative-action

It’s clear that what’s at stake isn’t a vision of social and racial justice that would ameliorate inequalities for a broad swath of people but, rather, a fight for spots in the élite ranks of society.

Of all the questions that were batted about during Monday’s Supreme Court arguments on affirmative action, the only one that seemed to get to the heart of the matter was asked, repeatedly, by Justice Clarence Thomas. Does diversity confer any actual educational benefits? For decades, the legal justification for considering race as a factor in college admissions has rested on the idea that students learn better, and more broadly, from being around classmates from different backgrounds, whether geographic or racial.

I do not feel the need to debate the question of whether or not diversity is meaningful to a person’s education, mostly because I think the answer is pretty self-evident and broadly accepted. The more pointed legal question—whether the benefits of diversity actually provide a compelling enough reason to practice racial preferences in admissions—is certainly more contested. But it is worth noting just how the attorneys for the University of North Carolina and Harvard argued for the benefits of diversity on their campuses. When Thomas asked Ryan Park, the solicitor general of North Carolina, his go-to question, Park talked about a study on stock trading that showed diverse stock-trading units performed better than more homogenous ones because they were more resistant to “groupthink.” Seth Waxman, the attorney for Harvard, declared a bit theatrically that the fate of the country depended on “leaders who have enjoyed wide exposure to students as diverse as the nation itself.”

All of this might be true. But it’s clear that what’s at stake isn’t a vision of social and racial justice that would ameliorate inequalities for a broad swath of people but, rather, a fight for spots in the élite ranks of society. We want diverse stock traders, corporate-boardroom members, and tenured professors. While it’s important to have diversity in any space, I think it’s crucial to clearly detail what, exactly, Harvard is making the case for. The university is arguing that it has to use racial preferences in admissions in order to maintain a helpful amount of diversity on campus. It’s also, by extension, defending its entire admissions policy, which includes seemingly looser standards for athletes, donors, and legacy admits.

Harvard’s logic is based entirely on what is allowed by law, which is that race can only be used in a “narrowly tailored” way. The definition of this term has changed, but in Grutter v. Bollinger, the Court said schools must engage in “serious, good faith consideration of workable race-neutral alternatives that will achieve the diversity the university seeks.” To prove this, schools like Harvard are supposed to show that there aren’t reasonable other ways to create diversity that do not consider an applicant’s race, such as socioeconomic affirmative action or implementing something similar to the University of Texas’s system, which admits the top ten per cent of students at any school in the state.

This line of inquiry set up a layup for the plaintiffs, which Cameron Norris, one of the attorneys for Students for Fair Admissions—the conservative legal organization fighting to end affirmative action—gladly took in his address on Monday. Norris argued that Harvard, in fact, is not diverse in any way other than racially. This, ultimately, is true not only in the Ivy League but at all sorts of exclusive colleges that typically practice racial preferences in admissions. A good thing to remember here is that the majority of college students in America attend schools that accept the overwhelming majority of their applicants, making the question of racial preferences mostly moot. For example, Harvard’s Black population is around fifteen per cent of the student body. By comparison, twenty-two per cent of the students at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston are Black. Harvard practices affirmative action. Bunker Hill accepts all of its applicants, and so has no need or ability to balance their classes based on high-minded ideas about diversity.

The diversity that Harvard promotes, by the very fact that it has to be within Harvard’s institutions, will be for wealthy high achievers, the majority of whom have led immensely privileged lives. The following numbers cannot be repeated enough: two-thirds of Harvard students come from families in the top twenty per cent of income earners. A full three per cent of students come from the top 0.1 per cent, compared with 4.5 per cent from the bottom twenty per cent. And bias toward wealthy students extends across all racial categories. An article for the Harvard Crimson’s magazine, published in 2020, looked at the relative underrepresentation of students who identify as “Generational African American” (G.A.A.), compared with the children of more recent immigrants from Africa. “If we were to count the number of GAA students at Harvard who were descended from enslaved people, came from low income backgrounds, first generation, four grandparents descended from enslaved people, I feel like that number would be so low,” one of those students said. “Like, maybe one person. It’s just so, so, so low.”

So what happens at élite schools after the Court’s eventual ruling? One bit of history that has been cited in the past few weeks is what happened in the University of California system in the late nineties after the passage of Proposition 209, which effectively banned affirmative action in the state. Between 1995, the year before Prop. 209 passed, and 1998, the Black and Latino populations at U.C.L.A. were effectively cut in half to 3.4 and 10.5 per cent, respectively. Today, after a quarter century, and half a billion dollars in interventions to boost diversity numbers without explicitly using race as an admissions criteria, those numbers have gone back up to about what they were before the passage of the law.

Today, the élite schools that practice affirmative action are much better equipped to deal with the Court’s potential decision, in part because they have had to perpetually adjust their admissions practices as the court has narrowed the scope of what is permissible through successive rulings since Regents of the University of California v. Bakke—the case that began the affirmative-action legal fight. Admissions offices now specialize in a byzantine and confusing language aimed at satisfying the Court’s mandates on just how much they can consider race.

The decision to stop requiring the SAT or ACT, which was taken up by nearly every élite college in the country, most likely did not come out of some sudden collective epiphany about the harms of standardized testing. Rather, I’d imagine that those scores could be the potential evidentiary basis for lawsuits that compared admissions rates between applicants of different races. It’s far easier to explain gaps in grade-point average, extracurricular activities, and the like than it is to explain why someone who got a 1590 didn’t get in, but someone who got a 1350 did.

“What colleges and universities will need to do after affirmative action is eliminated is find ways to achieve diversity that can’t be documented as violating the Constitution,” Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, told me. “So they can’t have any explicit use of race. They have to make sure that their admissions statistics don’t reveal any use of race. But they can use proxies for race.”

These solutions won’t coalesce overnight. Chemerinsky predicts that the decision will be a shock to many school’s systems, and may drive down the racial-diversity numbers at a number of schools in the short term. But he also believes that many schools will find alternatives in the way that the University of California system did. “It will take concerted effort,” Chemerinsky said. “That’s what the experience in California shows—it took a great deal of trial and error.”

The real tragedy here is that the most consequential ruling on affirmative action had to come out of the Harvard case, given that there’s so little to admire or even defend about the most exclusive and élite institution of higher education in the U.S., perhaps even the world.

In one of the most embarrassing parts of the trial, Justice Samuel Alito asked Waxman the question that has been on the minds of many Asian Americans since this trial began: Did Harvard’s “personal rating” system, on which Asian applicants consistently scored lower than others, constitute an insidious way to keep Asian student numbers low, or did Harvard actually believe that Asian students lacked courage and curiosity? Waxman avoided answering the question, and continued to deflect when Alito pointed out the evasion and asked the question again. Eventually, the Justices simply gave up on getting an answer. I do not think any equity-minded educator or politician would have simply shrugged at the clear racial disparity, nor do I believe that most progressives would accept Waxman’s or Harvard’s circuitous non-answer.

The vast majority of Americans, I imagine, also believe there is value in meeting people from all walks of life and learning from other experiences. But few would argue that the ideal setting for that is a place where there are almost as many kids from the top 0.1 per cent of income earners as the bottom twenty per cent. The defenders of affirmative action, then, are placed in a nearly impossible position, one that will almost certainly end up being for naught when a 6–3 conservative majority ultimately rules in these two cases.

A broad, wide-ranging decision on affirmative action will have effects that span well beyond the admissions practices of exclusive schools. A mandate that no institution or organization that receives funding from the federal government can consider race in any of their decision-making will effectively end all types of racial remediations and interventions, whether around voting laws, financing, or housing. These are not areas where a small group of well-intentioned, hardworking admissions officers and university administrators can still work to produce the outcomes they desire. Affirmative action has been the foundation for upward mobility for women and minority groups for the past several decades. It deserves a more dignified and robust defense than what Harvard could possibly offer.

[BrianTCB]

America is coming back strong, indeed.

The GQP has a democratic force to reckon with at the polls.

Very exciting times.

[iplayastrat]

Speaking of Pelosi, based on the report that aired on the Today show yesterday, there are lots more questions than answers about the Paul Pelosi incident...

Mike, I haven't really being staying on top of this.

Is it true that DePape didn't hit Pelosi until the cops arrived?

One of my friends suggested to me that Pelosi and DePape
had some sort of sexual relationship. Normally I wouldn't
give that type thing much of a thought, but until all security
camera footage is released it begs the question.

That's what the NBC News report said (which you can watch on the rumble link I provided). They pulled the report hours later without any explanation. If they want to stop all theories, just release all the body camera footage. I still like actual confirmation of 'Where's Nancy?" being yelled.

From all account, he seems like a nice man and I hope he is okay. His wife's party wants to make it a political issue. Why not just let it go for the sake of his privacy?

It's almost funny. The Dem's are all for homosexual rights and such,
but they don't want that part of the story out on Pelosi. If, and I say
if, he was in a homosexual relationship with DePape why are they so
embarrassed by it. Is it because it was an affair?

Release the body camera footage Dem's.

[BrianTCB]

314423173_10101912938203431_8561294977547625809_n.jpg

[Mike C]

Speaking of Pelosi, based on the report that aired on the Today show yesterday, there are lots more questions than answers about the Paul Pelosi incident...

Mike, I haven't really being staying on top of this.

Is it true that DePape didn't hit Pelosi until the cops arrived?

One of my friends suggested to me that Pelosi and DePape
had some sort of sexual relationship. Normally I wouldn't
give that type thing much of a thought, but until all security
camera footage is released it begs the question.

That's what the NBC News report said (which you can watch on the rumble link I provided). They pulled the report hours later without any explanation. If they want to stop all theories, just release all the body camera footage. I still like actual confirmation of 'Where's Nancy?" being yelled.

From all account, he seems like a nice man and I hope he is okay. His wife's party wants to make it a political issue. Why not just let it go for the sake of his privacy?

It's almost funny. The Dem's are all for homosexual rights and such,
but they don't want that part of the story out on Pelosi. If, and I say
if, he was in a homosexual relationship with DePape why are they so
embarrassed by it. Is it because it was an affair?

Release the body camera footage Dem's.

Well said. As I have said, I have heard he is a nice man and I hope his recovery goes well. If Joe and his party did not go around trying to claim a right-wing person attacked him, I'd be for letting the body camera footage stay private. My hunch is we'll see the footage after the election.

I'd still like to know which "source" claimed he shouted "Where's Nancy?". It is not in the police report so somebody added this detail.

I think they want to keep it covered because if DePape was an "invited guest" the whole narrative of Trump sparking political violence is destroyed. Just watch any mainstream media report the last few days. In each, the reporter notes "Democracy is on the ballot."

No, Democratic candidates are on the ballot -- and voting them out is Demcoracy.

[Mike C]

Speaking of the affirmative action case for which the Supreme Court held oral arguments this week, we saw a classic example of why appointing a justice to the High Court based on looks -- rather than merit -- is a bad idea (i.e., Affirmative Action).





Wow, that is bad!

[Mike C]

Man, even the fates (and the wind) are against Fetterman!!

[BrianTCB]

[iplayastrat]

Man, even the fates (and the wind) are against Fetterman!!

Kind of a sign isn't it?

[iplayastrat]

Speaking of Pelosi, based on the report that aired on the Today show yesterday, there are lots more questions than answers about the Paul Pelosi incident...

Mike, I haven't really being staying on top of this.

Is it true that DePape didn't hit Pelosi until the cops arrived?

One of my friends suggested to me that Pelosi and DePape
had some sort of sexual relationship. Normally I wouldn't
give that type thing much of a thought, but until all security
camera footage is released it begs the question.

That's what the NBC News report said (which you can watch on the rumble link I provided). They pulled the report hours later without any explanation. If they want to stop all theories, just release all the body camera footage. I still like actual confirmation of 'Where's Nancy?" being yelled.

From all account, he seems like a nice man and I hope he is okay. His wife's party wants to make it a political issue. Why not just let it go for the sake of his privacy?

It's almost funny. The Dem's are all for homosexual rights and such,
but they don't want that part of the story out on Pelosi. If, and I say
if, he was in a homosexual relationship with DePape why are they so
embarrassed by it. Is it because it was an affair?

Release the body camera footage Dem's.

Well said. As I have said, I have heard he is a nice man and I hope his recovery goes well. If Joe and his party did not go around trying to claim a right-wing person attacked him, I'd be for letting the body camera footage stay private. My hunch is we'll see the footage after the election.

I'd still like to know which "source" claimed he shouted "Where's Nancy?". It is not in the police report so somebody added this detail.

I think they want to keep it covered because if DePape was an "invited guest" the whole narrative of Trump sparking political violence is destroyed. Just watch any mainstream media report the last few days. In each, the reporter notes "Democracy is on the ballot."

No, Democratic candidates are on the ballot -- and voting them out is Demcoracy.

Yes sir, I do agree.

Pelosi and DePape's relationship needs to see the light.
And we know the Democrats don't want that.

[Mike C]

Man, even the fates (and the wind) are against Fetterman!!

Kind of a sign isn't it?

Yes, it sure is.

[mike edwards66]

Hope you all got your balloons and bunting ready for tomorrow!

When you go to the polls remember Biden's BICE. That's: Borders - Inflation - Crime - Economy

On the subject of crime, how on earth could any party, not just the Democrats - but ANY party, saddle themselves with a police defunding, cashless bail, soft on crime mantra. Unbelievable.

[BrianTCB]

Hope you all got your balloons and bunting ready for tomorrow!

[snip]

I'm voting democrat straight down the ballot. No republican should ever be allowed power ever again.

10639.png

A few reminders:










How could anyone on either side vote for such a horrible party who ignores and rolls back basic human rights?

[BrianTCB]

Whoops.

[BrianTCB]

Philadelphia: by this time in 2018 or 2020 - 28,000 of the youth vote had voted.

Today: it was 88,000.

The blue wave is one to be reckoned with.

Republican response: sue, sue, and sue again when they can't win.

Man are they terrified.

It's already happening.

Republicans sue to disqualify thousands of mail ballots in swing states
https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2022/11/07/gop-sues-reject-mail-ballots/

The lawsuits coincide with a systemic effort by GOP leaders to persuade voters to cast ballots in person, not absentee

blue-wave-drink.gif

[iplayastrat]

When you go to the polls remember Biden's BICE. That's: Borders - Inflation - Crime - Economy

On the subject of crime, how on earth could any party, not just the Democrats - but ANY party, saddle themselves with a police defunding, cashless bail, soft on crime mantra. Unbelievable.

Says a lot about Democrat voters.
It is pretty unbelievable when you
think about it.

The evil that men do.