Rov_Scam
8m ago
You're making the same mistake that Republicans (well, Trump at least) did on the campaign trail where you handwave away voter concerns. "Well, I did some calculations and the increased prices as a result of my policies are only costing the average family $514.64 per year. You should be able to afford that." isn't a good message. Inflation is 100 basis points more than when Biden left office. Biden telling the American public that inflation was transitory and that no government response was necessary was bad politics. Trump telling the American public that cost of living isn't even an issue and, by the way, look at how great this gold-covered ballroom you'll never attend an event at is is even worse politics.
The big swing in Texas was Hispanic voters. I think the takeaway is once you have immigrants you can’t keep out more of them in a Democracy. Your only choice is fascism or figuring out how to run ethnic politics.
Those were the same Hispanic voters who propelled trump to a 14-point win in Texas in 2024. For years, Democrats assumed that they owned the Hispanic vote (which was always a curious position since they loved George W. Bush) and got owned themselves when they took the vote for granted. Then the Republicans made huge Hispanic gains and immediately pissed them away by assuming the same, even going so far as to redistrict based on this shift. The takeaway here is that Hispanic voters are ultimately like any other voters and will respond to the same things that other voters respond to. And this only considers Texas; it doesn't explain similar leftward shifts in Kansas, Iowa, Ohio, Mississippi, and other places with much smaller Hispanic populations.
Rov_Scam
2hr ago
You or I could also say that, but it doesn't really get us anywhere, since neither of us are anybody. The race isn't going to be about who can recite generic party lines into a microphone. There has to be a reason why he, Ron DeSantis, should be president over someone equally as capable of holding generic opinions, and the reasons that existed in the past are no longer relevant.
Rov_Scam
2hr ago
Average US gasoline price in October 2006 was $2.32/gallon, or about $3.87 in today's money. Accounting for fuel economy is harder to do, but I would caution that while economy has improved as far as specific cars are concerned, the market has shifted toward less economical vehicles. In 2006, passenger cars accounted for 11 of the top 20 best-selling vehicles in the US. In 2026, they accounted for 4, and that's giving the Tesla Model Y credit for having infinite fuel economy despite being an SUV. The modal American appears to have replaced a sedan that gets 25 mpg with an SUV that gets 25 mpg. But this is all pointless because nobody is comparing gas prices now with what they were 20 years ago. Fuel economy was about the same one year ago as it is now, and gas was significantly cheaper. Hell, if you look at the 2024 election, it was over a dollar a gallon cheaper. People notice when it costs an extra $20 to fill the tank, and it's not exactly an occasional purchase.
Rov_Scam
14hr ago
It's not so much about them remembering it as it is him not having anything to run on. You said it yourself, what's he going to run on, his COVID policy?
Rov_Scam
17hr ago
He had his shot and didn't follow through. His entire schtick was that he was a fighter, and he wisely kept his distance from Trump throughout 21 and 22. But when he entered the race, he refused to go after Trump, even though Trump had no problem going after him. Maybe voters will forget how spineless he looked four years prior, but I think he lost his chance.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
Calling it an ad is a bit of a stretch, since it evidently never aired on television, or indeed anywhere other than social media posts. Anyway, this was posted on the 23, the NYT evidently had an article about it last Monday, and this is the first time I'm hearing of it, and I'm following the elections somewhat closely. My guess is that this is completely irrelevant and will have no effect on the election. Six million views sounds like a lot, until you realize that most of those views probably don't come from Michigan voters, and they're heavily concentrated among people who are following political commentators on Twitter, who presumably aren't among the category of people whose voting decisions aren't going to be changed by an ad run at the last minute.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
The guy he's interviewing is clearly an idiot. I can't find much information other than that his name is Jess, not Jeff, and he's some kind of ceramic artist from South Dakota who claims to live on a farm but apparently lives in the suburbs. Anyway, the other thing Tucker clipped from this interview is the guy claiming that the CIA paid Jackson Pollock large amounts of money to make "art" that was terrible for the express purpose of fucking with the Soviets, who wouldn't understand it. There seems to be some kind of agreement on Tucker's part that the abandonment of all the aspects of traditional painting that the Russians supposedly valued is indicative of American decadence blah blah blah, complete with pro-Russian undertones and blaming drug overdoses on bad art.
Aside from the entire premise being ridiculous, it evidences a complete lack of understanding of art history, which probably makes the opposite point that Tucker (and by extension his target audience) would intend. The Russians would not be shocked by something like Pollock, least of which because there was an entire Russian tradition of avant-garde art, the most notable proponent of which was Vasily Kandinsky. This mostly dates from the beginning of the twentieth century, but it was suppressed following the Bolshevik revolution for being "bourgeois". Abstract art did not appear suddenly in the late 40s, but developed for a half-century prior to that, longer when you consider that movements like Impressionism were considered abstract at the time relative to traditional court painting. The Soviets not only knew about this, but consciously rejected it. The emergence of an artist like Pollock would have proven the Communist point about the decadence of capitalism, but is this the point that a conservative like Carlson wants to make?
Rov_Scam
8d ago
I don’t see why White Europeans should be governed by a corrupt commie because a bunch of negros voted for it.
You'd prefer being ruled by a corrupt commie whom nobody voted for?
Rov_Scam
8d ago
I mean, if they have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant had the required mental state and there is plausible evidence in the record that he didn't, the defendant is going to have a pretty good chance of being acquitted.
Proof beyond a reasonable doubt doesn't require direct evidence. If the jury hears that Irving cut him off, he tailgated the guy for a period of time, pulled up alongside him, and fired a gun into his car, they can infer from the circumstances that he intended to hit him. Romero can argue otherwise, but the jury doesn't have to believe him. If Romero did make that argument, then yes, the prosecution could counter that it was depraved indifference murder because if firing a gun into a moving vehicle on a busy highway doesn't create a grave risk of death, then it's hard to argue what does, but the defense isn't going to make that argument for precisely that reason.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
Right now they don't have to work any angle since he's only charged with manslaughter.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
The reporting I saw suggests that there is video, but that the police aren't releasing it. The video is supposedly how the police determined that the bullet ricocheted off of the headrest before hitting the driver.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
A jury can reasonably infer that someone who shoots at someone and kills them had the requisite intent to do so. Just because the defendant says otherwise doesn't mean that the prosecution has to come up with an alternate theory of the case. The jury isn't required to believe the defendant.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
The canonical example is a spouse walking in on an act of adultery and killing one of the parties. Some states require that the act be illegal. So something like finding out your son's baseball coach was molesting him or that your employee drained the company funds to finance a gambling spree might qualify. Some states have held that it's a sort of modified version of the battered wife defense, where long-term domestic abuse would count as sufficient provocation to reduce the charges to manslaughter if the provocation weren't severe enough to be justifiable self-defense. In the same vein, some states allow manslaughter in the case of incomplete self-defense, where the defendant genuinely but unreasonably feared for his life. Mutual combat would be another example, where the perpetrator develops the intent to kill during the course of the fight. I would also add that the killing has to take place before the perpetrator has time to reflect on his actions. If the coach admits he's been abusing your son and your immediate reaction is to beat him to death, that's a better case than if you drove to his house armed after your son told you he'd been abused. But, like I said, it's reserved for unusual cases where a juror would say "I understand that as a society we can't allow people to get away with this, but I understand why the guy would have gone to those extremes". It's not for cases—like getting dumped, or fired, or cut off in traffic—that normal people experience on a regular basis without getting the urge to kill.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
I hate to be cynical, but it honestly looks like they're trying to go easy on a retired cop. Some journalists have noted that the police haven't provided a photo of the alleged perpetrator, and that he was whisked in and out of the courthouse through the back door. Additionally, his entire online profile appears to have been scrubbed before his name was made public. A defense attorney interviewed by the New York Post suggests that it's because they couldn't prove depraved indifference, which, if firing a gun into a moving vehicle on a crowded highway doesn't count, I'm not sure what does. The recklessness argument is irrelevant anyway, since if that were the case he'd be charged with Second Degree Manslaughter, not First Degree.
The whole "extreme emotional disturbance" argument that's available in New York does offer another possibility, though it would be heavily dependent on the facts. For instance, if the guy owned a failing business and was having trouble sleeping over it and was on his way back from a meeting where the deal he thought would save the company fell through and now he has to tell his wife, who is already suggesting they get a divorce since he left his good job at the foundry to pursue a hare-brained business venture, that the bank was probably going to foreclose on their house and they'd have to pull the kids out of college, and he found himself in the parking lot of the Harrisburg Coat Outlet three hours after the shooting with no idea how he got there and no recollection of the incident, the event might qualify as an extreme emotional disturbance under New York law. The whole thing sounds to me like a "don't call it an insanity defense", and like temporary insanity defenses, it seems unlikely a jury would buy it. Unlikely enough, at least, that as a prosecutor I'd at least make them argue it as a defense at trial and wouldn't automatically reduce the charges.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
See my above comment, but road rage is very much not the definition of manslaughter. Manslaughter requires an unusual emotional disturbance predicated on an amount of provocation that would cause an ordinary person to snap. There was a road rage killing in Pittsburgh this summer where a guy got out of his car and shot a guy who didn't pull all the way up to the stop line at a red light. This isn't the kind of thing where we say "Oh yeah, I totally understand why he would have flown off the handle and killed someone".
Rov_Scam
9d ago
By the way, I am not familiar with the New York law of homicide, but I am aware that in general there is a principle called the "depraved heart" doctrine. The idea is that some acts are so reckless that they will imply the necessary intent for murder even in the absence of premeditation or deliberation. The classic example of this is discharging a firearm into a building which is known by the shooter to be occupied. So it seems like there is a basis here to charge the (alleged) shooter with murder even if it was just a spontaneous road rage incident.
The basis for charging murder would be that he shot at a guy and killed him. If he thought the GW Bridge would be a good place to get some target practice in, then one could make the case for depraved heart murder. When you actively aim at someone you intend to hit, and hit them, the prosecution doesn't need to show evidence of recklessness.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
That he fired in a "moment of emotion" isn't enough to reduce the charges from murder to manslaughter. If it were, then "I was pissed off" would be a partial defense to murder, and that's ridiculous. The test in most states is that the victim provoked the defendant to such a degree that a reasonable person would be expected to lose their composure and self-control. The canonical example is the husband who walks in on his wife's infidelity, but more typical examples would be a wife responding to years of abuse, someone learning that the victim molested their child, the victim making threats, the victim brandishing a firearm, etc. Some states explicitly require that the provoking action be illegal, or otherwise meet a series of onerous requirements. New York's statute is actually more expansive than the majority of states, in that it creates its own "extreme emotional disturbance" test rather than rely on the traditional common law definition, but it's unclear if this has any practical effect. What is clear is that the emotional disturbance has to be of an unusual nature, and not simply a response to the normal irritations of daily life.
When you look at this case, the provocation was being cut off in traffic, or "nearly getting into an accident" to use the phrasing of the defense. There are over 600 traffic accidents in New York City every day. Almost everyone who has been a licensed driver for any amount of time has nearly gotten into a dozen accidents that were avoided. I don't know exactly what happened, but based on the setup of the ramps my guess is that where two lanes were merging into one as the ramp merged onto the bridge Mr. Irving, being in the lane that was ending, sped up and cut off Mr. Romero as he merged over. As a resident of a city where it's not uncommon to have to cut across five lanes of traffic multiple times just to stay on the same road, I am familiar with the frustrations that can come from either end of the transaction, but it's hard to see any circumstance where I'd sympathize with someone whose response is to chase down the car and start shooting into it while it was moving. Even if Romero was a hair away from slamming into Irving's rear bumper, this is not the kind of experience likely to result in extreme emotional disturbance. For most people, a honk of the horn and a few choice words would be the end of it, and it wouldn't even be remarkable enough to comment on at dinner.
Romero shot at a guy and killed him. It's about as clear-cut a case of murder as one can expect. Premeditated murder would be a stretch, but he did tailgate him for a while before rolling up alongside of him and shooting, and prosecutors have successfully charged premeditation based on a lot less. (Courts have ruled that a few seconds premeditation is enough, though I disagree with this as a matter of principle and believe that the present shooting is a clear example of non-premeditated murder.) The fact that it was a longshot is irrelevant. This isn't a case of recklessness. He wasn't trying to hit a deer that jumped on an embankment and ended up hitting a driver; he was specifically aiming for Irving, and that it wasn't a high-probability shot isn't a mitigating circumstance.
Rov_Scam
11d ago
I agree both are borderline, but Goff was run out of town after one bad year, and he's led a top-5 offense since the Lions got their shit together. I'm not quite as hot on Purdy, but he's never been in a situation where the 49ers have questioned their choice to roll with him. The point is that I'd rather have him under center than Jordan Love, Sam Darnold, or Trevor Lawrence, and it's not even close. Comparing him with Roethlisberger and Rivers isn't appropriate because both of them played in the high-flying 2010s. Ben put up big numbers during the Killer Bs era, but he was generally the kind of guy who would put up his biggest numbers in seasons when the team was mediocre and he had to pass a lot. During the Killer Bs era he usually hung around the lower end of the top ten in passing yards and his first two years he didn't crack the top twenty, including his first Super Bowl year. Rivers put up bigger numbers but is widely regarded as worse. This isn't to rag on either of them, just to demonstrate that I'm not looking at raw numbers here to make my determinations. You have to account for the era, and Ben and Phil played in an era when QBs put up the biggest numbers. Joe Montana never had a 4,000 yard season, while Matt Schaub had 3. Who would you rather have as your QB?
As for Mahomes, it's the same deal. The guy isn't putting up the fantasy numbers he used to; so what? Would you rather have Bryce Young as your quarterback? Rashee Rice has been out the past 2 games, Kelce isn't what he used to be, and they finally have a reliable running back. Andy Reid isn't trying to rack up fantasy points for Patrick, he's trying to win games, and the Chiefs are 5–0. What games has Mahomes played poorly in?
Rov_Scam
11d ago
It was only money in the sense that his value to other teams was more than it was to the Chiefs. The Bucs completely shut him down in the Super Bowl, and the following season his numbers were still up but he wasn't getting the big plays he used to get. If he were as critical to their success as he was in 2019, they would have found a way to keep him, and Mahomes's contract is one of the most team-friendly in the league considering he was arguably the best QB in the league when he signed. It's also worth keeping in mind that they traded him. Yes, it was clear that he wasn't going to sign long-term, but if they thought he was critical to their success they would have let him play out his contract and take the compensatory draft pick.
Maybe Vivek Ramaswany will move there and take a crack at it in 2030.
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