C++ the Good Parts
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Kim Jong-un: fragile and under pressure but he won’t give up
The Observer The North Korean leader’s surprise freeze of his nuclear programme is less a genuine move than a diplomatic manoeuvre,...
Wednesday 30 September 2020
Learn to code with the help of engineers, data scientists, and other experts
TL;DR: The Epic Python Developer Certification Bundle is on sale for £31.17 as of Oct. 1, saving you 97% on list price.
If you want to communicate with the locals on your trip to Florence, you learn to speak in Italian. If you want to communicate with your computer, you learn to code. Everything you know about your devices — from the operating systems to your favorite apps — is designed and coded using a computer language. That language makes it possible to tell your machine what you want it to do in a way that is similar to human language. Cool, right?
There are literally hundreds of different computer programming languages out there, just like there are human languages, and naturally, some are easier to learn than others. If you're interested in getting inside the mind of a machine, Python is one of the best places to start. It's versatile, easy to read, and powerful enough to run complex programs. And you can learn it with the help of elite instructors from the comfort of your couch with this Epic Python Developer Certification Bundle. Read more...
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Release your inner artist with this creative bundle
TL;DR: The Ultimate Creative Arts Bundle is on sale for £27.28 as of Oct. 1, saving you 97% on list price.
There are only so many puzzles that a person can take. If you're looking for a new hobby, may we suggest something you also loved as a kid: painting.
If you really want to take your inner artist seriously, it's time for you to sign up for some virtual classes. Luckily, this Creative Arts Course Bundle will keep you busy without cutting into your budget. It packs six courses and over 18 hours of video instruction for just £27.28, which is hundreds off the price of the individual courses. Read more...
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'Like watching democracy get a lobotomy': Seth Meyers condemns 'embarrassing' Biden-Trump debate
The first presidential debate between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden took place on Tuesday. It was, by common consensus, "a shitshow."
"Watching that debate was like hotboxing a Porta Potti with crystal meth in Phoenix in July," said Late Night host Seth Meyers on Wednesday. "It was like being hit on the head with a lead pipe in a room filled with nitrous oxide. It was like watching a two-person performance of 12 Angry Men where one actor played one part, and one was mad enough for the other 11."
The entire spectacle was 90 minutes of barely intelligible, unadulterated chaos, lowlights of which included Trump stumbling when asked to unequivocally denounce white supremacists. Read more...
More about Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Seth Meyers, Late Night With Seth Meyers, and Election 2020from Mashable https://mashable.com/video/seth-meyers-trump-biden-debate/
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The First Presidential Debate Was an Alarm Call for American Democracy
John Cassidy writes about troubling takeaways from the first Presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, including Trump’s refusal to denounce a white-supremacist group.
from Everything https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-first-presidential-debate-was-an-alarm-call-for-american-democracy
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from Everything https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-first-presidential-debate-was-an-alarm-call-for-american-democracy
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Cut his mic, don't kill the debates: What Trump's terrible night taught us
There is, so far as we know, only one moment in Donald Trump's long and privileged life in which he was actually made to shut up: the mashed potato incident.
When Trump was 7, his elder brother Fred dumped a warm bowl of mash on Donald's head at the dinner table "because he was being such a brat" towards their younger siblings and wouldn't listen to his mother, according to Mary Trump's family tell-all Too Much and Never Enough. "Everybody laughed, and they couldn't stop laughing," she wrote. "It was the first time Donald had been humiliated ... from then on, he would never allow himself to feel that feeling again." The incident still stings: Trump glowered at the family when they brought it up during a White House lunch in 2017, Mary wrote. Read more...
More about Trump, Biden, Culture, and Politicsfrom Mashable https://mashable.com/article/trump-biden-debate-microphone/
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NBA and NFL players allegedly targeted in social media phishing scam
Two men were charged by the U.S. Department of Justice for allegedly hacking the social media accounts of NBA and NFL players.
Both men, Ronnie Magrehbi, 20, of Florida, and Trevontae Washington, 21, of Louisiana, face a hefty fine along with time in prison.
According to a statement by the DOJ, between December 2017 and April 2019, they targeted the social media accounts of professional athletes in the NFL and NBA via phishing campaigns.
Washington would create fake login pages for social networking sites and then message the athletes on those platforms. When a player clicked the link, they were greeted with what looked like a login page for a social network. When an athlete entered their information, that sensitive information was sent to Washington. Read more...
More about Nfl, Nba, Hackers, Crime, and Department Of Justicefrom Mashable https://mashable.com/article/nba-and-nfl-social-media-phishing-scam/
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Tuesday 29 September 2020
Learn to play the piano like a pro with this online class
TL;DR: The Learn to Play the Piano & Music Composition Bundle is on sale for £27.18 as of Sept. 30, saving you 95% on list price.
With the unexpected downtime that comes with self-isolation, each of us has been given a rare opportunity to learn a new skill or take up a new hobby. You could choose to learn TikTok dances, or you could finally use your time wisely and take on something you've always wanted to try, but never had the time. For example: learning to play the piano.
Under normal circumstances, we'd suggest you find a good teacher to show you the ropes, but thanks to social distancing measures, we recommend you turn to the great information superhighway and do some virtual learning. This Learn to Play the Piano and Music Composition Bundle, for example, gives you a whopping 27 hours of instruction on music theory, composition, and arrangement with piano. It's led by three trusted pros in the world of music and is basically the closest thing you'll get to the real deal. Plus, it won't cost you an arm and a leg. Read more...
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The K-shaped economic recovery, explained
President Trump and Joe Biden during the first presidential debate on September 29, 2020. | AFP/Getty Images
Joe Biden and Donald Trump offer up two visions of economic recovery.
When you think about what’s going on in the economy, you’ve also got to think about who. And right now, things are not going evenly for everyone.
During Tuesday’s first presidential debate between President Donald Trump and Joe Biden, moderator Chris Wallace posed a question to the two candidates about the economy: is the US in a V-shaped recovery or a K-shaped recovery?
For those who aren’t familiar with the alphabet soup of economic terms, it seems confusing. But it’s not as complicated as it seems.
Essentially, those who say America is undergoing a V-shaped recovery mean, well, what it looks like — the economy is going to bounce right back to where it was pre-pandemic, like the letter V.
But others say what the United States needs to watch out for is a K-shaped recovery — one where the rich recover much faster than everyone else. It looks like the letter K — two lines starting together and then diverging as they branch out. Trump and the Republicans are V-shaped believers, focusing on measures like the stock market to argue that the economy is bouncing back.
Biden and the Democrats argue that what’s happening is a K-shaped recovery: maybe the market is doing well and rich people have recovered, but for others, it’s going to be a long slog.
The contrast is about more than what letter the economy looks like — it’s also about the policies Trump has in place and the policies a Biden administration would seek out. The president has taken a free-market approach, cutting taxes and deregulating businesses in an attempt to generate growth at the top (which is not always successful) that, he argues, will eventually help everyone else.
Biden’s platform would attempt to create a recovery for more people, more quickly: Instead of a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats approach, he wants everyone to row in the same direction.
The basic idea of the K-shaped recovery, briefly explained
The general concept behind the K-shaped recovery is that if you were to draw a graph of how the economy is doing, the line representing rich people would go up and the line representing poor people would go down.
Vox’s Matt Yglesias recently outlined the idea. Basically, wealthier people and those with white-collar jobs are doing fairly well during this — their jobs are sticking around, they’re cutting some spending, and life is generally fine. And stockholders’ wealth is even going up.
But for less well-off Americans and people who have lost their jobs, it’s different — the stock market isn’t helping them, and for those who are unemployed, expanded unemployment benefits dried up at the end of July. With Congress not in a particular hurry to provide fiscal support, that means a drag on the economy.
The divide isn’t just rich versus poor — it’s also white versus Black and people of color. For example, the overall unemployment rate is 8.4 percent. But when you break it down by racial lines, the story on what’s happening is quite different: white unemployment is 7.3 percent, and Black unemployment is 13 percent. White workers are the only ones with an unemployment rate below 10 percent. Vox’s Aaron Ross Coleman recently outlined the distinction and its impact:
But now, as the top-line unemployment numbers have come down, Congress has failed to come to any consensus on aid for its most vulnerable citizens, particularly minorities. And this failure has left these Americans with no aid at all, abandoning them to suffer the effects of high unemployment in this unprecedented recession. And despite past warnings about the difficulty people of color have in recovering from recessions, lawmakers are repeating the mistakes.
Donald Trump wants to talk the stock market. Joe Biden would rather talk the broader economy.
When the coronavirus pandemic took hold in March, the government shut down the economy in an effort to try to get the virus under control. Businesses shuttered, millions of people lost their jobs, and activity ground to a halt. Activity is starting to recover, but the economy looks different depending on the measure you’re considering — if you look at the stock market (which is in large part being driven by the Federal Reserve), it looks pretty good.
If you look at small businesses that are permanently closing their doors or millions of people still on unemployment, not so much.
To talk about the contrast between Trump and Biden on the economy is to talk about the type of recovery the US wants to have. Whoever is president come January 2021 is going to have a lot of work to do to rebuild what has been lost during the pandemic. And reopening can only do so much — like it or not, plenty of people just are not falling over themselves to get on an airplane or go to a restaurant when a deadly virus is still spreading. The longer the government waits to act, the worse the economy gets, and the harder recovery becomes.
Trump signed a $1.5 trillion tax cut that disproportionately benefited corporations and the wealthy the year he took office, and while he’s promised more tax cuts, it’s not clear what they’ll be. The president has talked about middle-class tax cuts around elections in the past, only for them to dissipate once votes are cast.
Biden is running on a “build back better” economic agenda aimed not at re-creating the economy the US had back in February just as it was — one that was unequal in myriad ways — but at creating a new one that is fairer and better. It entails putting money and efforts into clean energy, caregiving, reshoring business, and addressing the racial wealth gap.
While there is often thought to be a tension between equality and growth, Biden’s plan seeks to thread the needle. By some estimates, it could do so successfully — Moody’s Analytics recently projected Biden’s plan would create 7 million more jobs than a Trump second term.
If you look at it closely, the economic recovery, even through the rosiest of glasses, is looking more like a check mark than a V. But regardless of the shape, it’s important to keep in mind when talking about what’s happening in the economy who it is and isn’t happening for.
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from Vox - All https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/9/29/21494818/economic-recovery-chris-wallace-biden-trump-2020-debate
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When is the next 2020 debate? The vice presidential debate is on October 7.
Kamala Harris participates in the Democratic presidential debate at Tyler Perry Studios November 20, 2019, in Atlanta, Georgia. | Alex Wong/Getty Images
Kamala Harris and Mike Pence will face off.
President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden have had their first debate matchup; next, their vice presidential nominees will have the chance.
Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) will face off in the next 2020 debate on October 7, with Susan Page, the Washington bureau chief for USA Today, moderating.
The debate will air live on ABC, CBS, CNN, C-SPAN, Fox, NBC, and PBS Utah from 9 to 10:30 pm ET from the University of Utah’s Nancy Peery Marriott Auditorium in Salt Lake City, where there will be a small live audience of students. (That’s 8-9:30 pm CT, 7-8:30 pm MT, and 6-7:30 pm PT.) Debate organizers have secured the Cleveland Clinic as a health adviser to ensure that the debates can continue safely amid the pandemic.
Vice presidential debates haven’t historically attracted much fanfare, drawing much lower viewership than presidential debates. But Democrats are hoping that Harris — a former San Francisco district attorney who earned a reputation for being a strong debater during the Democratic primaries and who is known for her incisive style of questioning witnesses during congressional hearings — will go on the attack.
Her most notable debate performance during the primaries was when she criticized Biden, now her running mate, for opposing mandatory school busing during the 1970s, which she argued created an obstacle to desegregation efforts. Harris, as the most junior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, also famously grilled Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings in 2018 regarding his stance on abortion and about whether he had inappropriately discussed the Mueller investigation with Trump’s personal attorney.
In preparation for the upcoming debate, Harris reportedly has been practicing with former presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, who has been playing the role of Pence in mock debates.
Pence, for his part, has enlisted the help of former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican who served at the same time that Pence was governor of Indiana, the Washington Post reported. Page, the moderator, hasn’t announced debate topics yet, but Pence, as the leader of the White House coronavirus task force, will likely be called on to answer for his role in failing to prevent the deaths of more than 200,000 Americans amid the pandemic. He recently told the public to “anticipate that cases will rise in the days ahead,” predicting another surge.
Pence has faced criticism over his handling of the pandemic even from within his own camp: Olivia Troye, his former top aide on the coronavirus task force, went so far as to endorse Biden publicly, joining the group Republican Voters Against Trump.
There are still two more presidential debates
There will also be two more presidential debates on October 15 and 22 in Miami, Florida, and Nashville, Tennessee, respectively. C-SPAN editor Steve Scully will moderate the Miami debate, and NBC anchor Kristen Welker has been selected to do so in Tennessee.
With just weeks to go before the November 3 election, Biden remains ahead in the polls, besting Trump nationally by a margin of about 7 points on average, according to FiveThirtyEight. He also appears to be carrying a narrower lead in critical swing states, including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona. At this point, it doesn’t seem like those polls will move significantly ahead of Election Day given that the biggest crises facing Americans — a pandemic that shows no sign of slowing down, an economic downturn, and a national reckoning over race — aren’t going away anytime soon.
It remains to be seen how much — or little — the Tuesday night debate and the three remaining shift those numbers.
Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what’s happening in the news, from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world: Contribute today from as little as $3.
from Vox - All https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/9/29/21492994/2020-next-debate-harris-pence-vice-presidential
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What Trump has done to the courts, explained
Amanda Northrop/Vox
No president in recent memory has done more to change the judiciary than Donald Trump.
In less than four years as president, President Trump has done nearly as much to shape the courts as President Obama did in eight years.
Trump hasn’t simply given lots of lifetime appointments to lots of lawyers. He’s filled the bench with some of the smartest, and most ideologically reliable, men and women to be found in the conservative movement. Long after Trump leaves office, these judges will shape American law — pushing it further and further to the right even if the voters soundly reject Trumpism in 2020.
Let’s start with some raw numbers. Both Obama and Trump appointed two justices to the Supreme Court, but Trump’s impact on the highest Court far exceeds Obama’s, because Trump replaced the relatively moderate conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy with the hard-line conservative Brett Kavanaugh (after appointing conservative Neil Gorsuch to fill Antonin Scalia’s vacant seat). Obama’s appointees — Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — largely maintained the balance of power on a conservative Court, while Trump has shoved that Court even further to the right.
And that’s not counting Trump Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, who is likely to be confirmed soon.
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Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
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Christy Bowe/ImageCatcher News Service/Corbis via Getty Images
On the courts of appeal, the final word in the overwhelming majority of federal cases, more than one-quarter of active judges are Trump appointees. In less than four years, Trump has named a total of 53 judges to these courts, compared to the 55 Obama appointed during his entire presidency.
In their first terms, Obama appointed 30 appellate judges; President George W. Bush filled only 35 seats on the federal appellate bench; President Clinton, 30; President George H.W. Bush, 42; and President Reagan, 33.
On the district courts, the lowest level of federal courts, Trump’s impact has been less significant, although he’s still appointed judges far faster than Obama. Obama appointed 268 federal trial judges in eight years, while Trump has appointed 210 so far. But district judges deal far more often with routine matters like individual criminal sentences and trial schedules, and far less often with the kind of blockbuster cases that shape thousands of lives. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in a candid moment while she was still a lower court judge, “the court of appeals is where policy is made.”
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Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
It’s tempting to assume that Trump’s judicial appointees share the goonish incompetence of the man who placed them on the bench, but this assumption could not be more wrong. His picks include leading academics, Supreme Court litigators, and already prominent judges who now enjoy even more power within the judiciary.
Before he became president, Trump promised to delegate the judicial selection process to the Federalist Society, a powerful group of conservative lawyers that counts at least four Supreme Court justices among its members. “We’re going to have great judges, conservative, all picked by the Federalist Society,” Trump told a radio show hosted by the right-wing site Breitbart while he was still a candidate.
The Federalist Society spent decades preparing for this moment, and they’ve helped Trump identify many of the most talented conservative stalwarts in the entire legal profession to place on the bench.
There’s no completely objective way to measure legal ability, but a common metric used by legal employers to identify the most gifted lawyers is whether those lawyers secured a federal clerkship, including the most prestigious clerkships at the Supreme Court. Approximately 40 percent of Trump’s appellate nominees clerked for a Supreme Court justice, and about 80 percent clerked on a federal court of appeals. That compares to less than a quarter of Obama’s nominees who clerked on the Supreme Court, and less than half with a federal appellate clerkship.
In other words, based solely on objective legal credentials, the average Trump appointee has a far more impressive résumé than any past president’s nominees.
They’re young, too. “The average age of circuit judges appointed by President Trump is less than 50 years old,” the Trump White House bragged in early November, “a full 10 years younger than the average age of President Obama’s circuit nominees.”
Trump’s nominees will serve for years or even decades after being appointed. Even if Democrats crush the 2020 elections and win majorities in both houses of Congress, these judges will have broad authority to sabotage the new president’s agenda.
There is simply no recent precedent for one president having such a transformative impact on the courts.
How Trump’s judges will change America
In an age of legislative dysfunction, whoever controls the courts controls the country. In the past decade or so — or more precisely, since Republicans took over the House in 2011 — Congress has been barely functional. You can count on one hand, and possibly on just a few fingers, the major legislation it has enacted.
Judges, by contrast, have become the most consequential policymakers in the nation. They have gutted America’s campaign finance law and dismantled much of the Voting Rights Act. They have allowed states to deny health coverage to millions of Americans. They’ve held that religion can be wielded as a sword to cut away the rights of others. They’ve drastically watered down the federal ban on sexual harassment. And that barely scratches the surface.
The judiciary is where policy is made in the United States. And that policy is likely to be made by Republican judges for the foreseeable future.
There are likely now five votes on the Supreme Court, for example, to effectively give the judiciary a veto power over all federal regulations. Similarly, the Court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014) signals that religious conservatives may now ask the judiciary for an exemption from any law — and courts are likely to become quite generous in passing out such exemptions in the coming years. Republicans spent most of 2017 trying and failing to repeal Obamacare — but that failure means little to a federal appeals court that is expected to strike down the Affordable Care Act any day now.
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Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
And that’s not all. In the coming months, the courts are poised to gut abortion rights, eviscerate gun control, and neuter landmark environmental laws. Federal judges have already stripped workers of their ability to assert many of their rights against their employers, and this process is likely to accelerate in the near future. Many of our voting rights lie in tatters, due to conservative judicial appointments, and this process is likely to accelerate as well.
When Congress has been unable to function, the executive branch has relied on existing federal laws that delegate some policymaking authority to federal agencies, in order to deal with many of the nation’s pressing needs. But with the Supreme Court poised to give judges a veto power over these agencies’ actions, the courts could in effect strike down any regulation they dislike. In a Republican-controlled judiciary, this likely means that Republican administrations will retain broad discretionary authority, but Democratic administrations will be hobbled.
And here’s the thing: We probably will not fully understand just how much power Trump’s judges will wield until after Trump leaves office. Right now, the executive branch is ideologically aligned with Trump’s judges, so those judges are less likely to object to the Trump administration’s actions than more liberal jurists. But it’s a fairly safe bet that Trump’s judges would spend an Elizabeth Warren or Joe Biden administration wreaking havoc on the new president’s agenda — and that any future Democratic president will face similar opposition.
Two reasons Trump has been able to stack the courts
Broadly speaking, there are two reasons Trump has had such an outsize influence on the federal courts.
The first reason is the effective blockade Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell imposed on appellate court confirmations the moment Republicans took over the Senate. McConnell’s effort to block Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland is well-known. Less well-known are the many lower court nominees who received similar treatment. Under Trump, McConnell has turned the Senate into a machine that churns out judicial confirmations and does little else — he’s ignored literally hundreds of bills passed by the House. Under Obama, by contrast, McConnell’s Senate was the place where judicial nominations went to die.
The numbers here speak for themselves. In the final two years of the Obama presidency, when Republicans controlled the Senate, Obama successfully appointed only two federal appellate judges — and one of those judges, Kara Farnandez Stoll, was confirmed to a highly specialized court that primarily deals with patent law.
By contrast, 10 such judges were confirmed during the same period in the George W. Bush presidency, a period when Democrats controlled the Senate.
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Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post via Getty Images
The second reason for Trump’s outsize impact on the judiciary is that when Democrats last controlled the Senate, one especially important Democrat — Judiciary Chair Patrick Leahy (VT) — took an unusually expansive view of the rights of the minority party.
An informal tradition known as the “blue slip” sometimes gives home-state senators an exaggerated influence over who gets confirmed to federal judgeships within their states (the tradition gets its name from blue pieces of paper that home-state senators use to indicate whether they approve of a particular nominee).
Traditionally, the Senate Judiciary Committee showed some level of deference to senators who disapprove of their home-state nominees, although the level of deference given to these senators varied wildly depending on who chaired the committee and whether that committee chair was politically aligned with the incumbent president.
Leahy, who chaired the Committee for most of the Obama presidency, gave home-state senators a simply extraordinary power to block judicial nominees. Under Leahy, a single senator of either party could veto any nominee to a federal judgeship in their state (although federal appeals courts typically oversee multiple states, each individual seat on these courts is traditionally assigned to a particular state).
Before Leahy, just one committee chair imposed such a rigid blue slip rule: Sen. James Eastland (D-MS), an arch-segregationist who took over the committee not long after the Supreme Court’s school integration decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). A strict blue slip rule allowed Southern senators to block judges who might try to desegregate public schools.
Leahy, to be clear, is not a segregationist. He’s a reliably liberal Democrat. But he nonetheless reinstated the Eastland Rule during his tenure as chair of the Judiciary Committee.
Leahy says that he did so to protect the “rights of the minority.” And protect Republicans he did. Red-state Republicans used the power Leahy gave them to hold many judicial seats open until Obama left office. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) effectively held a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit open for eight years until Trump could fill it.
It’s tough to estimate the full impact of Leahy’s adherence to the Eastland Rule. The rule often stopped the Obama White House from nominating anyone to a vacant judgeship. According to Daniel Goldberg of the liberal Alliance for Justice, Obama “did not even make a nomination” to two seats on the Fifth Circuit because the blue slip would have doomed anyone he named; those seats were eventually filled by Trump nominees.
In other cases, the blue slip allowed Republicans to drag out negotiations over a particular vacancy until McConnell took over the Senate in 2015 and imposed a blockade on nearly all of Obama’s appellate nominees.
The Eastland Rule also weakened Obama’s hand in negotiations with Senate Republicans, and sometimes forced him to name relatively conservative judges in order to placate senators who could veto judicial nominees. Sens. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) and Johnny Isakson (R-GA), for example, effectively held one of Obama’s Eleventh Circuit nominees hostage until Obama agreed to also name Judge Julie Carnes — a George H.W. Bush district court appointee — to a second vacancy on that same court.
Republicans did not reciprocate when they came to power. Not long after Trump took office, then-Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley (R-IA) started confirming appellate court nominees over the objection of their home-state Democratic senators. (Republicans, for what it’s worth, have largely honored the blue slip tradition when a home-state senator objects to a district court nominee.)
Leahy continued to defend the Eastland Rule well into the Trump administration. In a 2018 Senate floor speech, he touted the fact that he was “criticized by advocacy groups and even the editorial page of the New York Times” for allowing Republicans to veto Obama’s nominees, and he painted himself as a hero who “resisted such pressure.” Leahy also warned in the 2018 speech that Republicans were “failing to protect the fundamental rights of home-state senators.”
By that point, Leahy’s adherence to the Eastland Rule had denied Obama the opportunity to fill many seats forever.
Filibuster reform fundamentally changed who gets to be a judge
In 2013, in a preview of how they would later treat the Garland nomination, Senate Republicans filibustered three Obama nominees to the powerful DC Circuit in an effort to keep Democrats from gaining a majority on that court. In response, Democrats fundamentally altered the filibuster to allow lower court judges to be confirmed by a simple majority.
Under the old rules, the minority party could block a vote on any nominee, and it took 60 votes to end that filibuster. Now, only 51 votes are required to move forward to a confirmation vote.
One consequence of filibuster reform is that it enabled Democrats to fill seats that Republicans held open with a filibuster. Democrats controlled the Senate for more than a year between the November 2013 reform vote and January 2015, when Republicans took control of the Senate.
So filibuster reform prevented Republicans from holding many judicial vacancies open until Trump could fill them. It also fundamentally altered who gets to be a federal judge.
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Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Democrats controlled the Senate for less than 14 months after filibuster reform. Yet nearly half of the former Supreme Court clerks Obama appointed to federal appellate judgeships were confirmed during this brief period — nearly as many as Obama appointed in the almost five years before filibuster reform.
Similarly, nearly three-quarters of Obama’s post-reform appointees to the federal appellate bench clerked for a court of appeals judge — as compared to less than 38 percent of Obama’s pre-reform judges. One immediate impact of filibuster reform, in other words, is that it made it far easier for nominees with elite credentials to become federal judges.
Here’s why: In the pre-reform Senate, a sterling résumé was often a liability for a judicial nominee because it flagged the nominee as a potential candidate for a future Supreme Court appointment. Both parties can tell stories of fallen martyrs, like George W. Bush nominee Miguel Estrada or Obama nominee Goodwin Liu, whose immaculate résumés painted a target on their backs. Both Estrada and Liu fell to filibusters.
By filibustering plausible Supreme Court nominees before they got on the bench in the first place, the opposition party could diminish the governing party’s pool of potential justices and make it harder for the governing party to find an ideologically reliable Supreme Court nominee when the time came.
But filibuster reform did not just improve the quality of nominees’ résumés. It also cleared the path for known ideologues to join the bench. And it appears to be altering how many sitting judges behave.
As the 2016 election drew nigh, then-10th Circuit Judge Neil Gorsuch looked like he was openly campaigning for a promotion. During this period, the Federalist Society grew increasingly obsessed with limiting the power of federal agencies to create binding regulations — an agenda that could hobble government bodies such as the Environmental Protection Agency. Gorsuch signaled his loyalty to this anti-regulatory agenda by writing gratuitous opinions laying out new limits he hoped to impose on federal agencies. In one case, Gorsuch even attached a separate concurring opinion to his own majority opinion.
As David Kaplan reports in The Most Dangerous Branch: Inside the Supreme Court’s Assault on the Constitution, one of these anti-regulatory opinions “proved decisive in clinching” the Trump White House’s decision to name Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Gorsuch’s opinions, according to Kaplan, were “a way for Gorsuch to call attention to himself, and it worked.”
When I speak to judges, I often hear them use a derisive term to describe this kind of behavior: “auditioning.” In a world without the filibuster, ambitious judges have less to fear from the opposition party. So they have every incentive to audition for the job that they want. After all, the best way to win the prize that Gorsuch captured for himself is to catch the eye of the Federalist Society and its adherents.
The future of the judiciary favors Republicans
While Trump has been very successful at filling the bench with brilliant Republican partisans, a Democratic president is unlikely to enjoy similar success.
A badly malapportioned Senate means that to get even a bare majority in the Senate, Democrats have to win commanding popular vote majorities — and if Democrats don’t control the Senate, Democratic nominees could face the Merrick Garland treatment. Just look at the last two years of the Obama presidency if you want to know how a Republican Senate is likely to treat Democratic judicial nominees.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19436724/GettyImages_516971304.jpg)
Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
Even if Democrats do overcome the odds to capture a majority, moreover, the balance of power is likely to be held by red-state Democrats who could be vulnerable to pressure from conservative interest groups hoping to keep Democratic nominees off the bench.
In other words, it’ll be a long, long time before Democrats can undo the work Trump and the Republicans have done to turn the judiciary rightward.
In the early months of the Trump presidency, so-called “Never Trump” Republicans often directed a derisive phrase against Trump supporters: “But Gorsuch.” It was a taunt that mocked the idea that it was worth selling your soul to a manifestly unfit TV celebrity who has been accused of sexual assault and misconduct by more than a dozen women in order to keep control of the courts.
But, as conservative columnist Hugh Hewitt wrote in 2018, “this bit of childish taunting always struck me as an unknowing admission of ignorance about the role assumed by the Supreme Court in modern American governance.” Certainly, McConnell understood this role. It’s why he was willing to use any means necessary to ensure Republican control of the judiciary.
The truth is, by worshipping at the altar of Trump, Republicans haven’t simply ensured conservative dominance of one branch of government. They may have entrenched conservative governance for decades.
Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what’s happening in the news, from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world: Contribute today from as little as $3.
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Biden to Trump: “Will you shut up, man?”
Joe Biden during the first presidential debate. | Scott Olson/Getty Images
An absurd moment from an absurd night.
There was one moment in Tuesday’s chaotic presidential debate that really crystallized the entire awful experience: an exasperated former Vice President Joe Biden saying, “Will you shut up, man?” to President Donald Trump.
The context was, as with most of the debate, strange. The moderator, Fox News’s Chris Wallace, asked Biden whether he would abolish the filibuster and add new justices to the Supreme Court if elected. Such measures would depend heavily on who wins the Senate, but the president would set the tone and the Democratic nominee has been cagey on where he stands. At the debate, he launched into a seemingly canned response designed to dodge commitment one way or another.
During Biden’s answer, Trump interrupted and heckled him — as he had throughout the entire debate. Eventually, when Trump interrupted to accuse Biden of preparing to add “radical left” justices to the high court, Biden seemed to have had enough — and told the president of the United States to “shut up.”
"Will you shut up, man?" -- Biden to Trump pic.twitter.com/F1oX6VM7Wz
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 30, 2020
Nobody looks good here. Biden’s answer was evasive and boring, politician-like in the worst way. Wallace proved himself incapable of preventing this from descending into chaos.
But let’s not lose track of what really caused Biden’s retort. Trump seems to have used interruption as his central strategy, attempting to fluster Biden and prevent him from making actual substantive arguments. Instead of engaging on the merits, Trump deliberately turned the first presidential debate into a carnival.
In that sense, it felt good to have Biden tell Trump off. He really deserved it!
But in another, deeper sense, it felt awful. Remember, Trump is the incumbent. The character of the man currently leading our country was on display tonight, and it wasn’t pretty.
Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what’s happening in the news, from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world: Contribute today from as little as $3.
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Joe Biden spent the first debate staring into the camera like Jim Halpert
Look out, Jim. There's a new reaction guy in town, and his name's Joe.
On Tuesday night, Joe Biden made his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, proud by spending the majority of the first presidential debate imitating another famous Scranton man: Jim Halpert.
As fans of The Office know, Jim is the go-to camera reaction guy in Dunder Mifflin's Scranton branch. His signature move is a look straight to camera, often accompanied by a smirk or a dumbfounded look — depending on the situation. And as the first debate unfolded, Biden essentially perfected Jim's famous reaction.
For those who missed the debate (or simply blacked out from stress and can't remember anything that happened) Donald Trump and Joe Biden had a tough time communicating. The two spent nearly 90 straight minutes talking over each other and moderator Chris Wallace, and at one point Biden got so frustrated with Trump's constant interruptions that he simply said, "Will you shut up, man?" Read more...
More about Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Presidential Debate, Jim Halpert, and 2020 Electionfrom Mashable https://mashable.com/article/joe-biden-jim-halpert-2020-debate/
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The angry Australian animal Australians are actually scared of
Australia has a reputation for terrifying, deadly animals, from brown snakes to redback spiders to buff red kangaroos that can disembowel you with their feet. Fortunately, most of these hell creatures will won't start anything if you just leave them alone. Unfortunately, magpies do not extend the same courtesy.
Also known as "spring" in the U.S., swooping season is in full swing in Australia, adding just one more reason for everyone to stay indoors right now. Every year from early August to late October, the Australian magpie loses its tiny feathered gourd and starts indiscriminately dive-bombing anything that comes within 50 to 100 metres (164 to 328 feet) of its nest, as seen in a video that went viral this week. Read more...
More about Australia, Birds, Australian Animals, Magpie, and Face Masksfrom Mashable https://mashable.com/article/australia-magpies-swooping-season-masks/
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New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: How to find “senior” jack of all trades jobs?
Ask HN: How to find “senior” jack of all trades jobs?
13 by stevenhubertron | 2 comments on Hacker News.
I have been in my current role for about 6 years. While I wasn't hired for it specifically, my average week has my time split between product management, managing a small team to develop those products, ux design, and front-end JS/Python development. It's really a roll where I am all over the place and I do really enjoy it. However, due to the Covid reality in the world right now I am starting to think my time here is up. How can I find another job that isn't specialized to one specific roll as I really do enjoy being a jack of all trades master of none and would like to continue to do that in my next role. I'm also fairly experienced with 16 years of "jack of all trade" type positions.
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13 by stevenhubertron | 2 comments on Hacker News.
I have been in my current role for about 6 years. While I wasn't hired for it specifically, my average week has my time split between product management, managing a small team to develop those products, ux design, and front-end JS/Python development. It's really a roll where I am all over the place and I do really enjoy it. However, due to the Covid reality in the world right now I am starting to think my time here is up. How can I find another job that isn't specialized to one specific roll as I really do enjoy being a jack of all trades master of none and would like to continue to do that in my next role. I'm also fairly experienced with 16 years of "jack of all trade" type positions.
Middlesbrough
Trump says murders are up in Democrat-run cities. They’re up in Republican-run cities, too.
President Donald Trump at the first presidential debate. | Scott Olson/Getty Images
Trump’s comments at the presidential debate paint a misleading picture about crime and violence in the US.
President Donald Trump at Tuesday’s presidential debate claimed that crime is up in Democrat-run cities. “I think it’s a party issue,” Trump said, repeating a claim he’s made in the past, and citing recent increases in the murder rates in Chicago and New York City.
The argument, in short, is that if you can’t trust Democrats to run cities, you shouldn’t trust Democratic candidate Joe Biden with the presidency.
But Trump’s underlying claim — that Democrat-run cities are unique in their crime spikes — is wrong.
For one, crime isn’t actually up this year. Based on the latest reports, violent crime overall is flat, and property and drug offenses are actually down.
What is up is the homicide rate. A report by the Council on Criminal Justice found that the homicide rate increased sharply this summer across 27 US cities: “Homicide rates between June and August of 2020 increased by 53% over the same period in 2019, and aggravated assaults went up by 14%.” Other data, from crime analyst Jeff Asher, found that murder is up 28 percent throughout the year so far, compared to the same period in 2019, in a sample of 59 US cities. A preliminary FBI report also found murders up 15 percent nationwide in the first half of 2020.
But this is true in both Democrat-run and Republican-run cities. According to Asher, the murder rate in cities with Democratic mayors is up 29 percent so far in 2020. In those with Republican mayors, the murder rate is up 26 percent, a statistically negligible difference.
Consider Miami, a city overseen by a Republican mayor and Republican governor: The murder rate there is up by more than 28 percent, with 77 murders in 2020, up from 60 last year. Asher reported that increases in the murder rate were recorded in several Republican cities across the country, from Jacksonville, Florida, to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Fort Worth, Texas.
Not to mention all these increases are happening under Trump’s watch.
All of that is to say that whatever is causing murders to spike this year, political party isn’t it.
So what’s going on? Criminologists and other experts caution that they don’t really know yet. But they’ve offered several potential explanations: The Covid-19 pandemic, and all the chaos that it’s wrought, could have led to more homicides — by hurting social support programs that can prevent escalating violence, damaging the economy, and overwhelming hospitals that treat violent crime victims, among other possibilities. The protests around police brutality and systemic racism may have led cops to back off proactive policing, or caused the general public to trust the police less and subsequently work with the cops less often, both of which could have led to more unchecked violence. A surge in gun purchases this year could have fueled more gun violence.
Or maybe none of this is right. With limited data in very strange times, it’s entirely possible we have no idea what’s going on. “We can bet on it being unpredictable,” Jennifer Doleac, director of the Justice Tech Lab, previously told me.
Such uncertainty isn’t strange in criminology. Over the past three decades, America has seen a massive drop in violent crime and murder — a decrease that the current surge hasn’t erased. Though there are many theories about what’s caused the decades-long crime drop, there’s still no consensus among experts.
But, at least for 2020, we can say one thing: The year’s spike in murders transcends political parties.
Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what’s happening in the news, from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world: Contribute today from as little as $3.
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Biden asks Trump what everyone's thinking: 'Will you shut up, man?'
Joe Biden isn't moderating the first presidential debate, but he did have one very important question for Donald Trump: "Will you shut up, man?"
For those who aren't subjecting themselves to this extremely painful night of Men Talking Over Each Other. Here's what you need you need to know.
Donald Trump appears to be incapable of having a normal back and forth, and instead of calmly and constructively debating he keeps interrupting Biden. This then leads to them loudly butting heads and speaking over actual debate moderator, Fox News' Chis Wallace.
At one point Trump yammered on so relentlessly that Biden snapped and asked what so many people have been wanting to say to Trump for years now: "Will you shut up, man?" Read more...
More about Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Presidential Debate, 2020 Election, and Culturefrom Mashable https://mashable.com/article/joe-biden-will-you-shut-up-man-donald-trump-debate/
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Hillary Clinton hitting a Zoom limit on TV is a 2020 mood
Even former presidential candidates have to deal with Zoom's time limits.
From office happy hours to college classes, the world has had to adjust to meeting virtually during the pandemic — even former Secretary of State, FLOTUS, 2016 presidential candidate, and feminist trailblazer Hillary Clinton.
Clinton appeared on MSNBC ahead of the first presidential debate on Tuesday, declaring that Trump's "series is about to be canceled." Her insight, however, was interrupted by an all too familiar pop up: "Your meeting will end in 10 min."
It seems that neither Clinton nor MSNBC upgraded their Zoom accounts for unlimited meeting time. Read more...
More about Hillary Clinton, Twitter Reactions, Debate, Culture, and Web Culturefrom Mashable https://mashable.com/article/hillary-clinton-zoom-msnbc/
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The Trump campaign spent months portraying Biden as senile. That might be a mistake.
Democratic presidential nominee and former Vice President Joe Biden exits his plane after landing in Cleveland, Ohio, to participate in the first presidential debate at Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland Clinic on September 29, 2020. | Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images
Trump lowered the bar for Biden’s debate performance. Why?
Donald Trump has made it very clear of what he thinks about Joe Biden. In his speeches, “Sleepy Joe” Biden is barely coherent, a “dumb guy” who “doesn’t know where the hell he is.” In online advertising, the Trump campaign has repeatedly alleged that Biden is “too old and out of it” to be president.
And during a Tuesday appearance on Fox & Friends, Trump ally Rudy Giuliani excitedly shared his theory that Biden has dementia and will “get through” the debate thanks to drugs typically used to treat attention deficit disorder.
Meanwhile, some Trump allies are currently busying themselves by pushing a conspiracy theory about Biden using an earpiece during the debate — a conspiracy theory that first originated in 2000 and resurfaced in 2004 during a debate between George W. Bush and John Kerry before being wielded against Hillary Clinton in 2016.
To be clear, there is absolutely no evidence for any of this.
But the play seems clear: If Biden trips up during the debate, he’s a “dumb guy.” If he seems competent, it’s because he had help. But by aggressively pushing the image of 77-year-old Joe Biden as a senile old man, the Trump campaign has unintentionally lowered the bar and made it easier for the Democratic candidate to succeed.
And rather than focus on his policy successes — or even on the major challenges facing the country, from the coronavirus pandemic to the economic disaster hurting so many American families — Trump would rather discuss fake earpieces and drug tests.
Pro-wrestling-style politics, but with a glaring flaw
Trump allies’ accusations of drug use and earpieces in the runup to Tuesday’s debate have proven to be part of a series of endless distractions — Biden won’t even debate! Demand drug tests! Check for hidden earpieces! Yell about how one candidate may have gotten the questions ahead of time (which is untrue)! — intended to heighten the tension and drama.
This isn’t new for Trump. In 2016, he demanded Hillary Clinton be drug-tested before the last debate as part of an all-out assault on her health because “at the beginning of her last debate, she was all pumped up at the beginning, and at the end it was like, huff, take me down. She could barely reach her car.”
These are tactics straight from pro wrestling, where it’s common to summon up distractions to heighten the tension before a match. They remain markedly effective, seeping from conspiracy theory-focused corners of the internet (from QAnon adherents to Facebook pages for conservatives) to mainstream outlets that do their best to debunk them but, by doing so, also give them more attention (a technique known as “trading up the chain”).
The challenge for Trump and his campaign, though, isn’t successfully spreading rumors. It’s that based on Trump’s rhetoric, Biden will be a success if he simply shows up and seems fully lucid.
This was a problem that Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien and Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh seemed to note a few weeks ago when the two began publicly praising Biden’s debate skills. (Murtaugh previously argued that Biden had declined cognitively.)
As HotAir.com’s Allahpundit wrote earlier this month, the GOP had spent months “inexplicably lowering [the bar for Biden] until it rested flat on the ground” until Stepien stepped in:
Until recently the Trump campaign’s line on Sleepy Joe was that he was in late-stage mental decline and would probably duck the debates altogether to avoid revealing that to the world. We’re now 18 days away and someone, probably Stepien, finally figured out that reducing expectations for Biden to the point that he only need speak in complete sentences to prove he’s fit for office was a bad idea.
Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer told Politico, “This idea of Biden not knowing how to debate is ridiculous. The more that expectations are lowered for him the worse.”
It’s more typical for a candidate or a campaign to play up the debating skills of their opponent, rather than argue in ads, as the Trump campaign did, that the opposition has lost their touch.
Trump doesn’t seem to be preparing for a debate victory, but instead readying himself and his allies to explain a humiliating loss in the style of a college football coach. Biden won’t have really won, they’ll argue — he’ll have had help.
But the real problem with this entire discussion is that it’s not just a distraction for the candidates; it’s also a distraction from the issues that Americans are most concerned about — the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting economic tumult.
Wow... this data from @axios is very telling. pic.twitter.com/g5HfPUfmO7
— Brad Polumbo ⚽️ ️ (@brad_polumbo) September 29, 2020
Earlier Tuesday, Disney announced 28,000 layoffs. Those are 28,000 workers who have just lost their jobs, while future stimulus payments remain largely hypothetical.
So, sure, Trump’s “Biden is senile and using performance-enhancing substances” rhetoric is problematic because it’s both false and harmful to perceptions of his own debate performance. But it’s also problematic because it focuses on a very online atmosphere and elides the real problems Americans are facing — problems that, you might recall, he declared he alone could fix.
Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what’s happening in the news, from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world: Contribute today from as little as $3.
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