Qualified immunity more or less means that the cops can't be held directly liable for something that the courts haven't yet found to be wrong for a police officer to do while in the course of their duties. So, if a cop does something obviously wrong and fucked up in the course of their duties (like, say, detaining you in a car parked on railroad tracks) and you suffer injuries from it, but a court hasn't previously found that exact situation to be a wrong thing for a police officer to do, qualified immunity prevents them from being held personally accountable. The next person who gets detained on railroad tracks is covered, but you're shit outta luck.
I know what QI is about, the comment has more to do with fighting the cops in court when courts meet all manner of egregious police behavior with little more than stern finger wags and exasperated sighs at best (often. Very rarely, they actually do get held accountable) and endorsement at worst.
My buddy is on the side of the Russians in all this (we've agreed to disagree) and even he admits that the Hostomel airport wasn't anything else but a disaster. But it did give us one of the funniest moments in the whole war (so far), when a war journalist approached a Russian soldier to ask when he thought the Russians would be arriving.
This was actually discussed. The bill makes an exception for "members of a secret society demonstrating in public" as long as they get a permit from the police first.
Not a Russia simp, I've been watching this war with some interest, and I've got a friend whose only hobby at this point is following this war.
If you look at how much Russian military ops have changed across almost every consideration over the course of the war, it's really a stark difference between where they are today and where they were two years ago. It's pretty clear Russia totally bunglefucked the opening maneuvers in the war. They've had to learn a lot of lessons and learn them hard, and they're still learning them, but they are learning. I definitely think that Russia really did expect this was going to be a cakewalk, and that they were going to force Kiev into negotiations or else kill Zelenskyy in the first week. I can't be 100% sure what the Russian military leadership was expecting, but I seriously doubt it was this.
Thanks for this. I wasn't aware of that. All of my experience around Roe was seeing republicans wanting it dealt with in the legislature/executive.
Gotta love Pelosi, just when the Democrats are in danger of not spilling the spaghetti, she reliably shows up to make a disaster of it. She's got, like, the anti-McConnel*.
*McConnel is, imo, one of the most talented statesmen of my lifetime. It's a goddamn shame he's used his talents for evil. It's a little bewildering to imagine how different a place the US could be if he'd been on the side of the people. It's also a powerful statement of what a wreck the GOP has become that Mitch couldn't control the MAGA/freedom caucus members anymore. I hope the whole thing just implodes on itself and we get something new and less horrible.
So, I don't think there's a good single answer to this question.
Obama isn't and wasn't as progressive as he was (and sometimes is, mostly by Republicans) framed. The democrats only had a filibuster-proof majority for a few months, and even then, Joe Lieberman gummed up the works big time on getting the ACA through. Somebody mentioned that they wasted a lot of time trying to get bipartisan support for the ACA, and it's true. They spent months negotiating against themselves with the republicans, whose answer was always "no", and by the time they were done, the ACA was a shell of what it could have been. After the ACA, which I must add is basically comprised of all the non-insane (read: mostly pointless) reforms the Republicans were proposing as well as some more rational reforms, the right-wing hype machine started red-lining (as in tachometers, not the racist housing policy, though I guess that could also work since they really didn't want that black man living in that house) and you'd have thought we had an actual communist overthrow of the government on our hands. The democrats absolutely bungled the PR (the more things change, the more they stay the same, huh) and pissed off everyone outside the party and made everyone inside the party facepalm. After the supermajority disappeared, the republicans started cynically abusing the filibuster and turned the rest of Obama's presidency into anything from a lame duck to just one (republican caused) crisis after another.
Tl;Dr a lot of the democrats aren't progressives, and we had a lot more of the old cold war blue dog crowd that Biden is from than we do now, mixed with absolutely bunglefucking both the political strategy and PR around the ACA and not being able to get past the filibuster once the supermajority disappeared.
P.S. it's worth noting that, at the time, Roe was considered settled law. From what I recall, nobody was too anxious about the SCOTUS citing 400 year old witch hunters and overturning pretty well settled and accepted case law. The republicans were generally seeking to overturn Roe via the federal legislature/executive at the time.
I've really been waiting for gas stations to jump in on this. Tying it to vehicle manufacturers just doesn't make that much sense to me, not nearly as much sense as using the companies whose mission is already to deliver energy to vehicles. You need a tiny fraction of the infra for electric charging that you need to supply gas. Shell or Chevron could EASILY ink deals with, say, Starbucks, to put one or two chargers in every Starbucks parking lot in the country and just sit back and laugh as the money rolls in. And yet, they just keep pushing for exclusively fossil fuels.
AFAICT, the charger network is a huge part of Tesla's value proposition. Laying off the entire 500 person team like this is going to be a massive, massive disruption no matter what anyone says, you can't just patch it with [checks notes] an entirely different team. It's going to take that new team months to get up to date, put out fires, find their bearings, etc. and by that point, issues are already snowballing. The rapport and contacts problem is also going to be enormous; basically shit canning all of the company's industry/logistics ambassadors is what, in any other light, would be called a disaster. This is going to be a clusterfuck, and that's before any competitors interested in starting their own charger network start scooping these newly available specialists up.
It's incredible to see this man still idolized, even by bosses and other execs, as he tanks not just one but two household name businesses AT THE SAME TIME.