271–280 of 310 posts
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It’s in the Constitution. There isn’t that much anyone can do.
> It’s in the Constitution. There isn’t that much anyone can do. We have modified the constitution before. It is not easy, sure. But, presidential pardons are being abused so thoroughly that it does warrant people making the effort to change things.
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Hmm. I feel like it isn’t over the history of the US and there was a period where US governance tended toward an ideal but the last 50 years have reverted to the norm. E.g Oliver North
So exactly when was that? Before 50 years ago, “Separate but Equal” was the law of the land as decided by the Supreme Court, laws against interracial marriage and laws against “sodomy” (homosexuality) were also upheld by the Supreme Court. There is absolutely no point in US history that the US was “ideal”. My still living parents grew up in the segregated south.
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The real embarrassment is how little effort there's been to limit/reform the pardon system since then. Pardons have valid uses, but it's wild that a single person can unilaterally pardon donators, family members, former presidents, etc, without needing so much as a simple majority confirmation vote in the House or Senate. The questionable pardons that we've seen over the last few years (and the Nixon pardon) are just…
It’s in the Constitution. There isn’t that much anyone can do.
Presidents shouldn't have the right to outright pardon people. It should have to go through some sort of body beforehand and be voted on like everything else.
Extracted all the raw pardons here: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/varenc/cb2e2dacf1c92d36bc... I wanted to do some stuff with this data so need a raw format. (process was so easy since its included on a single page load, so I assume you don't mind! thanks for making this )
I'm thinking of exposing the sqlite db, and now possibly this JSON file as well.. I can take both during the build process and throw them up on CF. Great idea, thank you.
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From the article you linked, child sacrifice allegations came from an anonymous FBI interview in 2019 and are not confirmed by any credible evidence. There are no cannibalism allegations; the word "cannibal" only appears in innocuous contexts. So child sacrifice and cannibalism are only technically "in the Epstein files;" there's very little evidence that anyone did those things. For other readers, if you hadn't hear…
Little evidence that I was abused as a child too, must not have happened.
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This claim is ahistoric. The ancient Athenians, the inventors of democracy, would reject it because they used popular elections in only a limited number of cases. Their suspicion was that popular elections were tools of oligarchy. Instead they preferred sortition, selection at random, to give rule of the people. They punished abuse of public power severely. In the context of American thought, Federalist No. 10 goes i…
A democracy means political authority ultimately comes from the people.
https://pardonned.com/pardon/details/cindy-marie-griffith-fk... How come this ended up in the drug offence category? The sentence reads: “Distribution of satellite cable television decryption devices”
probably run it against something small like haiku and not cost me an arm and a leg.
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Waiting for the day when both the Democrats and Republicans are so very obviously shitty to even the most uninformed voter that we get some new thought in office instead of two sides of the same coin that are both beholden to capital and to foreign interests
As long as our voting system is "first past the post", it will be nigh impossible for a third party to make any significant headway. IMO Citizens United and first past the post are the two main issues holding the US back from any kind of significant overhaul or change.
https://transparentelection.org/
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2025/08/07/transparent-elect...