Well, that's one way to look at it, but too, keep in mind Hemingway's famous description of how somebody goes broke: Slowly, then all at once.

No, it can be done "legally." Article 1, Section 9, Clause 2:

The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.

If President Biden suspended habeas corpus as allowed by the Constitution as required to protect public safety from seditionists who, remember, have made public threats of violence, and rounded them up, that would be an official act and he would be immune from charges. Furthermore, there would no longer be the votes in the House to impeach him.

ETA: Scare quotes. This would buy quite a lot of time as the issue worked its way through the courts. It might even incite open rebellion, then the question would be essentially moot.

Why do you imagine that a President wouldn't get away with assassination of a Congressional leader? Say, for example, that Pres. Trump tells special ops forces that he has ironclad intelligence that Rep. Hakim Jeffries is a Chinese agent orchestrating an imminent attack on the U.S., and orders him killed on an overseas trip. That's a legal order from the commander in chief, on the face of it. (I mean, the track record of the military refusing orders is extremely thin on the ground, and it won't really matter if they install loyalists like Project 2025 calls for.) We've already established the precedent that the President has immense discretion to handle immediate threats.

And maybe it was a lie, but that's irrelevant. He has absolute immunity in the exercise of his Article 2 duties. End of story. The only possible remedy is impeachment, and, well, who's going to do that?

They can't take us back to the way things were on June 30th, 2024, to make this ruling like it didn't happen. It doesn't have the power. The best the that Congress can do is pass an unconstitutional law that may, at some future date, through a highly-fraught process in the courts, reverse it.

Yes, technically they could, but any suit under that law would be vulnerable to getting thrown out on summary judgement. Would you agree that it's more accurate to say that Congress can't fix the system by reverting to the old law?

No, Congress cannot pass legislation on this matter. The ruling says that the Constitution itself grants the President immunity, so it would take a Constitutional amendment to change it.

Yes, exactly. "They were insurrectionists bent on overthrowing our government, and it was a tough, but necessary, decision to protect the nation, which is my duty as President."

That claim isn't even entirely untrue.

The point is to explain what people mean when they say that nobody becomes a billionaire by their own effort alone. It's impossible for one, single human to generate that much value. Notch just got incredibly lucky.

You have a good point about the difference in risk versus reward of entrepreneurship compared to a job. People often choose the job because the alternative is destitution. It's not a free choice. Rates of entrepreneurship are much higher in countries that have a robust social safety net. Places like the U.S. actually have a relatively low rate.

They won't control the House after a few official acts.

If Biden did that the House might impeach him. I mean, the surviving members of the House probably wouldn't, but they theoretically could.

Exploitation is a loaded term, with many negative connotations. It's more neutral to state the same thing as, "Nobody gets to be a billionaire without accruing the surplus value of other people's labor."

And that's true of Notch, too. Minecraft wouldn't exist without countless people who built the computers, the OS, the Java language, built out the Internet, operate the electrical grid, operate the payment networks, litigated and legislated copyright law, et cetera.

Now, you might say that all of those people got compensated for their labor, and it's true. (That's why the negative connotations of exploitation don't apply.) However, the result of their labor unlocks immense value, which they do not share in because of the way the Internet developed. We could easily imagine a different scenario in which the online services won, an alternate reality in which Notch worked as a programmer for PepsiCo-Prodigy-AOL, and got paid a very good salary to create Minecraft for it. Then, it would be fair for the company to reap all of the subscription fees generated by putting the game on their network service.

We can say that in both scenarios, as long as we're imagining, Notch would have put in the same amount of work. In one, though, he'd live a decent, middle-class life, with a corporation reaping the surplus value of his labor. In our world, he's a billionaire, benefiting from the surplus value of others' labor.

Yes, but he gets so deep into character, he could turn American!

Sacha Baron Cohen.

The appeal of Trump's rhetoric and populist message is entirely subconscious, and doesn't stand up to even a few moments of critical analysis. Baron Cohen has a genius-level understanding of how to get into people's heads, and what's more, he can do it fluently, on-the-fly. His U.S. presidential candidate character would totally dismantle MAGA.

Perhaps. My point is not that Sanders definitely would have won, but that his winning was absolutely a plausible outcome. Heck, I know two Sanders-Trump voters, so I know at least that they exist.

Bernie Sanders is a centrist by UK standards, though. At least one analysis of the vote totals found that he would've won the electoral college count, at least based on the voters who say they would've voted for him or Trump.

And they've been neglecting that. There are a couple of street names that they have wrong, and I've been using the edit feature fruitlessly for over 8 years. I've included links to local business web sites with the new name of one, links to municipal web sites with the new name, geo-tagged photos of the street signs, and even links to the municipal ordinance that changed the names in 2003. It all goes into the same black hole.

Also, it's not even the same corporation or factories behind them. It's just a brand name at this point, and the product has nothing in common with the old, good one. For example, Maytag bought Amana, and then Whirlpool bought Maytag. (It's enlightening to read the list of Whirlpool-owned brands.)

Oof, yes, we need opponents for this guy who understand the fundamentals of how he and his rhetoric work. The better way to deal with him is to flip the frame. Specifically, in the opening statement, Biden needed to call out very explicitly that Trump was going to lie constantly, and furthermore, point out that you can recognize his lies when he says "best, strongest, biggest, greatest." That little bit of verbal jiu jitsu would've ensured that it was no longer Biden calling out the lies, but the viewers' own ears, and by bringing them to conscious attention, draining the power of those statements. (Trump spews lies and nonsense that don't parse analytically, like that alphabet-soup closing statement, but he's really aiming his words at the subconscious mind.)

Not quite. The Santa Clara decision gave corporations equal protection under the 14th Amendment, is law in the same sense that Citizens United is, and has been applied many, many times. The 2010 decision held that 1st Amendment protections apply to corporations.

It's a 19th century idea that appeared in the published decision of the Supreme Court in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co.

Only—get this—it wasn't even what the Court decided. Instead, it was the guy in charge of recording the decision for publication who declared "corporate personhood" in the headnote (summary) of the case. And would it surprise you to learn that the guy was the former president of a railroad company? We just sort of went along with this not-precedent until the Citizens United case.