A text yesterday from my friend Shanin Specter:
“I took your poll question to heart… Today I’m flying from Phoenix to San Francisco… I went through the magnetometer process and asked a TSA agent whether they were getting paid. She said no. I asked whether she had a tip jar. She said no, but the supervisors would accept gift cards. I said that I didn’t have a gift card. I asked where was her supervisor. She pointed me to a desk on an elevated platform, where there were three supervisors present. I walked up to the desk and announced ‘I know you guys can’t take tips’ as I put down a $100 bill. I immediately walked away as they were screaming at me ‘no, sir, no sir, we can’t take that’… And with my back to them, I yelled back ‘I’m sorry!’… It’s not every day you get to flagrantly disobey screaming TSA supervisors and get away with it!”
Set a reminder for 7:44pm tonight. Here’s why: Friday morning brought the news that the Pentagon is making its second massive deployment of Marines to the Middle East within a week. But later that afternoon, President Trump said that where the U.S. is close to meeting its objectives, he was considering “winding down our great Military efforts in the Middle East”. Well, which is it? But wait… There’s more. Saturday night, he delivered an ultimatum to Iran saying he would “obliterate” Iran’s power plants if they did not open the Strait of Hormuz within forty-eight hours “from this exact point in time” which was 7:44pm ET. Iran wasted no time in vowing retaliation. So what happens tonight? That is the focus of today’s poll question.
Remember when President Clinton said it depends what “is” means? (Full quote: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If ‘is’ means ‘is and never has been,’ that is one thing. If it means ‘there is none’, that was a completely true statement.”) Well today in SCOTUS, the question is what does “election” mean? Said differently, should ballots have to be received, not just postmarked, by Election Day? Nearly 1/3 of Americans voted by mail in the 2024 election and many states have grace periods for receipt of ballots. According to USA Today, twenty-nine states allow at least some late-arriving ballots cast by U.S. service members and Americans living overseas to be counted. Fourteen states have extended deadlines – as long as two weeks in Illinois − for counting all mailed ballots that are postmarked by Election Day. President Trump is no fan of mail-in voting, and today the Administration joins with the RNC to challenge a Mississippi law in a bid to prevent the counting of ballots received after Election Day. Fun fact: the law at issue was passed by a GOP-controlled legislature and the law is being defended by a Republican AG. So when is an election? Mississippi says it only matters that voters cast their ballots by Election Day. The RNC and Trump Administration say that an election is the day by which valid ballots must be received. The trial court sided with the state but the 5th Circuit sided with the Administration.
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