I already told you, I will not hear corrections! Blocked!!!

I agree that he wouldn’t have been right for either part, but I’m sure they still would have been very successful franchises. Also, he probably wouldn’t have gotten either part (definitely not Gandalf), they were just approaching him about it. Producers on Batman (1989) were in talks with Bill Murray and Pierce Brosnan before they moved on to Michael Keaton, but it’s pretty unlikely either one would have made it.

With adult eyes, it’s pretty bad. Also, it’s an adaptation of a much better Alan Moore graphic novel.

Ah man, I used to live in this town. I wish the infrastructure had been this good when I was there.

I heard this story, not sure if it’s true, but I choose to believe it and will not hear any corrections; apparently, he was approached about Gandalf, but he turned it down because he didn’t really understand it. Then he was approached about Dumbledore, but turned it down because he didn’t really understand it. After seeing how those two franchises turned out, he said, “screw it, I’m taking the next role that I don’t get.” That role was Alan Quartermaine in League of Extraordinary Gentleman. After that movie bombed he retired from acting altogether.

Wonder how they snuck this by Bari Weiss.

I disagree that there is nothing the states could do. They have armed personnel, they have citizens that support them, they have the law on their side. We outnumber them, we have a national guard, we have cops, and we could create militias, blue states not only should physically prevent the feds from marching in and running fixed elections, they have a duty to.

I mean, yeah, if the feds try to seize ballots, this is probably what’s going to have to happen, but please understand where this goes. Feds come in, demand the ballots to look for, “fraud,” local authorities refuse, and there is an armed standoff. Maybe a state calls in the National Gaurd for backup. Trump can then either nationalize that gaurd in response, leading to conflicting orders, and Trump almost certainly invokes the insurrection act, allowing him to send active duty troops into the state. That would be the beginning of the Civil War.

I doubt Trump wants something that messy though. He’ll almost certainly attempt to purge voter rolls wherever he can and suppress the vote with ICE. Dominion voting was also bought out by a Republican election official, so that could be another method to falsify the vote as well. Luckily those methods are imperfect (even Dominion voting requires a physical ballot trail), so we can still overcome that kind of voter suppression.

I mean, if you’re talking about Trump sending in federal agents to seize ballots, then yes, that would be bad and there is very little an individual state could do to stop it without an armed conflict. At that point, ballot stuffing would be a secondary concern over the fact that a second Civil War had broken out. I maintain that the more likely scenario, though, will be Trump sending CBP and ICE goons to stop, “illegals,” from voting, which would be a flimsy pretense for voter suppression. But, “federalizing the elections,” would require upednig Article 1, section 4 of the Constitution, and even with our deeply fucked up court system, I can imagine Trump getting that through in 9 months. Maybe I’m wrong, and a favorable court would allow him to proceed until he got it to the Supreme Court, but I think that’s a stretch.

What would stand between him are the state’s Attorneys General. They have been very successful in blocking Trump’s actions through the courts (at least until the Supreme Court, which has been ruling against lower courts’ decisions at an incredibly high rate). It’s likely that the AGs would block this long enough for the midterms.

That’s about ending the Electoral College. What Trump is talking about is the federal government taking control of how elections are run. The state’s are in charge of conducting their own elections, even federal elections, rather than the federal government, per the Constitution. This is what makes it difficult for Trump to rig elections through direct methods such as ballot stuffing.

Yes, but most of those have either not been achieved yet or have only been achieved because they were relatively easy. He tried to abolish the 14th Amendment through EO on day one, and it’s just getting to the Supreme Court now. He’s been able to illegally dissolve federal agencies because the Republicans in Congress have abdicated their power, and destroying something is much easier than building it.

Even if he signs an EO to take over the elections tomorrow, he’ll still face legal challenges that will likely wind up in the Supreme Court, and he’ll still need to build out the infrastructure to run these elections federally, something the federal government has never done. I’m not saying that he can’t steal the elections, or that we shouldn’t be worried, but the idea that he’s just going to, “federalize,” elections in fifteen states before the midterms seems pretty unlikely.

The thing is, there’s no mechanism for nationalizing voting, and I don’t really see a clear path for Republicans to do that in the next nine months. They’d have to pass legislation to do that, which would be extremely difficult given their margins in congress. Even then, states control elections as a function of the Constitution, and while the Supreme Court is happy to approve whatever unconstitutional bullshit Trump dreams up, it will take times to get through the courts. He could try to seize control of the voting process from states, but I don’t know that he has the infrastructure to manage the whole voting process through the executive branch, and the fact that he’s asking the Republicans to do this for him makes me think he knows this. Either way, any kind of coup on the election process would face the same legal challenges as legislation.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be extremely worried. I think it’s unlikely that the Republicans will, “nationalize the voting,” but I think it’s very likely he’ll send federal goons in to, “prevent voter fraud,” (AKA suppress the vote).

And your husband knows what he’s doing on a skateboard. Learning at my age will destroy my knees and make me look like an idiot. Part of me will always want to know the thrill of zooming down a half-pipe, but it’s just not worth it. Someone suggested longboarding, that might be fun, or maybe surfing.

Oof, that is my nightmare. I’m a runner, and so far I’ve never torn a ligament or anything, but as I get older I get more worried about it. I always stretch before and after each run, but I know any damage I do will take 10 times as long to heal as it did in my 20s, if it even does heal.

Oh, no, I agree that I’m primed for a midlife crisis, but it’s way too late to start skateboarding. I’m in pretty good shape, eat fairly healthy, exercise regularly, etc., but I can’t shake off an a injury like I did in my teens or twenties. I’m not risking permanently messing up my knees learning how to ollie.

Skateboarding. I was into punk in middle/high-school, some of my friends were skateboarders, but I never bought a board. I’m pushing 40 now and it’s way too late to start, even as a midlife crisis.

“Please be aware that I have instructed ICE and/or Border Patrol to be very forceful in this protection of Federal Government Property.”

Well, they just gassed a bunch of peaceful protesters in Portland, including children, so I guess that part is true.

Please stop with the assassination conspiracy theories. A false-flag might be somewhat plausible if there were just shots fired at the rally; it would certainly be possible to convince some mentally unstable MAGA chud to shoot wildly into the crowd, and then have Trump fake his injury. But we have a photograph that actually catches one of the bullets passing by his head. There’s no way he risked someone missing him by inches to fake an assassination.

Honestly, I’m kinda impressed. I didn’t think you could start a diplomatic crisis wandering around Minneapolis, but ICE found a way.

It would be naive to think race isn’t a factor here, but documentation of the crime is also a huge portion of it as well. I have seen the murder of Renee Good from at least 3 different angles, and Alex Pretti from 4, including the exact moment they shot him in the back. There are certainly a lot of Americans that would be more likely to justify this if they had been PoC, but there was also a lot of national outrage over Eric Garner and George Floyd because of how heavily documented those murders were.