DL Open Thread Wednesday, Dec. 20, 2023

The media is having a newsgasm because Colorado’s Supreme Court barred Trump from the ballot there, based on the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause. The appeal to SCOTUS will determine the issue, and you can find dozens of pundits who’ll tell you exactly what they’re going to do with the case. Few of them agree, but my money is on “it’s outside the Colorado court’s jurisdiction.”

Republicans have no effective policies to deal with any of our problems, which is why they so often turn to sophistry. Sadly, it works. One of their go-to issues is crime, which never goes away and can be highlighted whenever necessary. The media is happy to play along because crime sells, especially violent crime (“if it bleeds, it leads.”) Fox News, especially, has been pushing the “Democrat crime cities” narrative hard by focusing on organized shoplifting. That’s a big reason California lawmakers are considering a crackdown by rescinding the laws that downgraded property crimes to misdemeanors. And that’s how the sausage gets made.

One of the many idiocies of our political culture is that the president gets blamed for everything that happens whether or not he has any control over it. For example, Politico’s reporter took a road trip to El Paso and found that the same people who blamed Trump for the mess on the ground are now blaming Biden for it, despite the fact that it’s Congress that won’t deal with the issue. My other takeaway from the article: A lot of the people griping are legal immigrants themselves. They aren’t racist, they’re annoyed by the inconveniences caused by the sheer number of people moving through.

NASA successfully tested a new deep-space laser communication system by beaming a video to Earth from 19 million miles away. Guess the subject of the 15-second video. You only get one guess.

The floor’s yours.