Smart cars had to pass US crash test standards and have the appropriate safety equipment. The kei trucks that you can currently import and use are 25+ years old and wouldn’t have even passed US standards back then. Your legs are the crumple zone in these things.

I assume that new ones would have a chance, but it’d be expensive for a manufacturer to modify and certify for the US market. Small cars haven’t sold well here, and the profit margins are slim.

Maybe with the recent size and price increases in autos here, well see some movement. I’d love a modern Honda kei to go with my element.

They’re not silly at all, they’re thugs. They want to influence the next one by showing the cost of going against them.

Now, we’re lucky that they’re mostly grifting, incompetent, blustery cowards, so the risk isn’t what it could be.

Gosh, you mean that he’s playing by the rules that the republicans have put in place and not unilaterally disarming? How scandalous.

They should flush the entire “money is speech” concept, but until we can replace most of the SC with people who don’t suck, we work with what we got.

Oddly, sort of related to some of these same complainers sitting out 2016. Weird how elections can have consequences.

Probably, but for other reasons. Neither of those are owned by the US, are they?

Come on, NYT, they’re lies. There’s no reason to soften it. Write it clearly.

Not (re)building in areas prone to wildfires, mudslides, floods, and the like would be a good start. Otherwise, someone has to pay to rebuild when the ever more frequent disaster hits. State farm and other insurers suck in many ways, but this isn’t unreasonable on their part.

No. You don’t get the goodies that you we’re holding your breath over without helping Ukraine.

Or perhaps put something in about a militia, but one that was well regulated.

Unfortunately, republicans will quite likely take the senate in the next cycle. With Manchin retiring, WV is essentially a republican lock. More broadly, Democrats are defending 20 seats to 11 for republicans, and the lowest hanging fruit for democratic pickups would be Rick Scott (FL) or Ted Cruz (TX), and as much as they both suck, that’s still going to be tough.

So, just to retain their slim margin, they’d have to defend all of their other seats and knock off one of those two.

If she only had a record to check… oh, wait, she does:

Haley has consistently supported bills that give rights to an unborn baby and restrict abortion, except when the mother’s life is at risk. In 2006, as a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives, Haley voted for the Penalties for Harming an Unborn Child/Fetus law, which asserted that an act of violence against a fetus is akin to a criminal act against the mother. She has also re-signed a new state law that bans abortions at 20 weeks of pregnancy.[38]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Nikki_Haley

Haley is opposed to Jail or Death Penalty for women who have abortions.[41][42][43]

Is that the moderate republican position?

If one of them gets into power, Canada might just pay for that wall.

Changeling barbarian.

Huh

The difference is that Manchin, for all of his many flaws, is probably the only Democratic senator that we’re likely to see from WV in the foreseeable future. So, the option isn’t “Manchin or a better Democrat”, it “Manchin or a hard right-wing republican”. WV is one of the reddest of states and it’s almost shocking that a Democrat won there at all and it’s easy to understand why he bucks the party.

Sinema has no excuse aside from her seeming delusions of importance and dreams of cushy corporate cash once she’s out.

I’m using it presently, and aside from a few quirks in electron app rendering (slack input box flickers sometimes; things like that), it’s been solid:

• Ryzen 9 3900X (24)
• GeForce RTX 4070 Ti
• Fedora 38
• Nvidia proprietary driver
• Hyprland (used Gnome before and it was fine)

I use it daily for work and some gaming (CP2077, BG3 of late) and it works well.

Before I’d updated the video card, I had a AMD 5700 xt and it mostly worked, but I was getting sporadic driver crashes (card would reset), which was annoying.

This assumes that the mass shootings are a problem that they’d want to solve, but it’s not since mass shootings are useful to them. They’re flashy, get lots of media coverage, and feed a sense of chaos and societal breakdown. With that, they make the case the current system can’t keep you safe, and we need an authoritarian to bring order, which they’re happy to provide.

The ironic thing about all of this is that the Founding Fathers structured everything in such a way that this should have never been an issue at all. It was originally designed for all parties to vote on a speaker. Whether or not there were two parties, three parties, or 27 parties is irrelevant. The speaker was intended to be someone that all parties could agree on, not just the majority party.

How so? The structure has ‘majority wins’ and there’s nothing to compel the majority to vote for a candidate that ‘all parties agree on’, nor would that even make sense.

It only got this way because tribal politics has taken over our entire political system, devolving into tribal warfare and an “us vs them” mentality…

This may not be your intent, but this reads like a very elaborate "both sides’ argument, when it’s really clear that the pathological behavior here isn’t evenly distributed between the ‘tribes’.

If the roles were reversed, I’d be shocked if Democrats didn’t compromise and put in place a power-sharing agreement to allow the House to function.

The republican base isn’t conservative in the modern sense, they’re reactionary. In a similar vein, evangelical republicans don’t support the people who embody the values that they profess to hold sacred, they fully, and loudly, back people who are quite the opposite.

I imagine that both groups feel that they’re increasingly losing out in modern society and are seeking someone who’ll crush their perceived enemies and return them to their rightful place ruling the rest of us. So, the allure of a strongman to return them to their imagined golden age.

I don’t see how this follows. He was never a serious contender for the DNC in the first place. It always seemed weird he was running as a Democrat instead of a Republican to me as his policies were much closer to Republican policies.

Because he’s being funded as a spoiler to siphon off enough Democratic voters to potentially throw the race to trump? trump has a low cap to his general election support (probably mid-40’s), but most of that is strongly committed, so he has a high base. With that, he won’t win, but if they can run spoiler candidates to pull a few percent, that might be enough to win with his low cap.

The Democratic coalition is far broader, less cohesive, and thus overall more fickle than the modern republican one, so susceptible to these sorts of things.

I get the reflexive urge to both-sides things, but rail workers did end up getting their sick leave:

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/most-unionized-us-rail-workers-now-have-new-sick-leave-2023-06-05/

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/may/01/railroad-workers-union-win-sick-leave

Biden wanted to avoid the disruption that a rail strike would bring, especially when we were trying to deal with inflation, but like many things, they quietly got it done.

So, if they have a family and kids, I guess they’re on the street now? The parent involved is likely going to prison, so they’re not going to be able to provide support. This is “tough on crime” theater that would likely do nothing but cause more harm.