A thread for Democrats Only by THGRRI

He's just letting them know that we're voting them out if they don't.

He's not wrong.

The first draft of anything is shit. :)

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Wednesday, January 6, 2021 3:25 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
He's just letting them know that we're voting them out if they don't.

He's not wrong.

The Trump family wants the Primary elections to replace Congressmen who can get votes from Independent voters with new candidates who cannot get Independent votes. That would be a strategy for the new Republican candidates to lose in the general election.

Quote:
Supporters of President Donald Trump have breached the US Capitol and one woman has been shot as one of the most iconic American buildings is engulfed in chaos after Trump urged his supporters to fight against the ceremonial counting of the electoral votes that confirmed President-elect Joe Biden's win.

Shortly after 1 p.m. ET hundreds of pro-Trump protesters pushed through barriers set up along the perimeter of the Capitol, where they tussled with officers in full riot gear, some calling the officers "traitors" for doing their jobs. About 90 minutes later, police said demonstrators got into the building and the doors to the House and Senate were being locked. Shortly after, the House floor was evacuated by police.

An armed standoff was taking place at the House front door as of 3 p.m. ET, and police officers had their guns drawn at someone who is trying to breach it. A Trump supporter was also pictured standing at the Senate dais.

A woman is in critical condition after being shot in the chest on the Capitol grounds, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The sources could not provide further details on the circumstances of the shooting.

Vice President Mike Pence was also evacuated from Capitol, where he was to perform his role in the counting of electoral votes.

Video from inside the Capitol showed Trump supporters marching through Statuary Hall. The US Capitol Police is asking for additional law enforcement for assistance, including federal authorities, per a source familiar.
The source says there are several suspicious devices outside the Capitol building.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/06/politics/us-capitol-lockdown/index.html

I wonder what caused the mob to explode? Check Trump's tweet:

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!
1:24 PM · Jan 6, 2021·Twitter for iPhone
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1346900434540240897

Twitter marked that as: This claim of election fraud is disputed, and this Tweet can’t be replied to, Retweeted, or liked due to a risk of violence

Maybe the Independent voters will remember this day at the next election, but who knows for sure?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, January 6, 2021 3:38 PM

What's happening now at the capital is the nail in Trumps coffin. Many of those who would have assisted Trump to quietly exit in the name of unity from both sides of the aisle, will now call for his imprisonment. The evidence of Trumps involvement is substantial. This is his followers attempting a violent over throw of the government. It is, a coup attempt. It's a sad one doomed to fail but it is an attempt nonetheless. Big fuckup big fuckup.

Remember, the democrats control the White House the congress and the senate. These militant groups are in for a big surprise as well.

Here we go again, tick tock

T

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Wednesday, January 6, 2021 5:48 PM

Oh. So it's only a riot when the right does it.

lol

Fuck the both of you. The Left has been pulling shit a lot worse than this all across the country for a year straight.

Civil War is coming. I wouldn't want to be on your side.

Yanno... where all the pussies and soy bois are.

The first draft of anything is shit. :)

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Wednesday, January 6, 2021 6:08 PM

Jack, tell your doctor your meds are not working.

T

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Wednesday, January 6, 2021 6:14 PM

The first draft of anything is shit. :)

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Thursday, January 7, 2021 1:29 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Democrats Have a Filibuster-Proof Tool to Erase the Trump Administration’s Final Months

Over the last few months, federal agencies have rushed out dozens of new rules to gut crucial safeguards against pollution, corruption, labor abuse, segregation, workplace discrimination, and much more. They plan to keep working up until Jan. 20 to roll back as many regulations as possible.

But Congress has a way to swiftly undo the damage. The victories of both Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in Tuesday’s Georgia Senate runoffs puts the Trump administration’s eleventh-hour deregulatory blitz in grave jeopardy. A federal law called the Congressional Review Act allows Congress, with the assent of the president, to repeal recent agency rules by a simple majority vote. It is not subject to the filibuster. Once Congress kills a rule under the CRA, the agency can never enact it again.

When Republicans secured a trifecta in 2017, they used the law to erase the closing months of the Obama administration. Democrats are now positioned to do the same for Trump.

Many major statutes outline a broad goal, then delegate authority to a federal agency to fill in the details. For instance, Congress doesn’t decide exactly how much mercury is allowed in drinking water; instead, it directs the Environmental Protection Agency to determine what level of mercury is safe, and enforce that limit through a federal rule. Trump’s political appointees have exploited their rule-making power to strip away crucial regulations that guard against environmental devastation, fraud, financial malfeasance, and other threats. Congress may have been paralyzed by partisanship for much of Trump’s term, but bureaucrats have spent the last four years dismantling life-saving regulations.

Many of the worst rules have arrived in the twilight of Trump’s presidency, and that’s good news for Democrats. The CRA, passed in 1996, uses a complex formula to establish which rules are subject to fast-track repeal, and regulatory expert Cheryl Bolen Smelson has identified the cut-off point as Aug. 21, 2020. Any agency rule finalized after that date may be repealed by a majority vote in Congress, plus President-elect Joe Biden’s signature. According to ProPublica’s tracker of “midnight regulations,” some of Trump’s most noxious rules were finalized (or are scheduled to be finalized) in this window.

None of these rules have popular support. Many of them are blatant favors to the industries that fund the GOP. Congress can repeal every one of them at the start of Biden’s term—and permanently bar the agency from passing any regulation that is “substantially the same.”

More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/01/congressional-repeal-act-t
rump-democrats.html

or at

https://web.archive.org/web/20210107182336/https://slate.com/news-and-
politics/2021/01/congressional-repeal-act-trump-democrats.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, January 7, 2021 1:38 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Oh. So it's only a riot when the right does it.

lol

Fuck the both of you. The Left has been pulling shit a lot worse than this all across the country for a year straight.

Civil War is coming. I wouldn't want to be on your side.

Yanno... where all the pussies and soy bois are.

Says the biggest pussy here. ^

The left hasn't been pulling any shit like that. You're completely making shit up with your feeble, malfunctioning brain again.

There won't be any civil war because you Nazis are way outnumbered by people who are smarter than you. You, particularly, wouldn't last 3 seconds in a real fight, you fucked up traitor.

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Thursday, January 7, 2021 3:31 PM

http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=61954&p=93

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Quote:
Thursday, January 7, 2021 1:29 PM
Originally posted by second:
Democrats Have a Filibuster-Proof Tool to Erase the Trump Administration’s Final Months

Over the last few months, federal agencies have rushed out dozens of new rules to gut crucial safeguards against pollution, corruption, labor abuse, segregation, workplace discrimination, and much more. They plan to keep working up until Jan. 20 to roll back as many regulations as possible.

But Congress has a way to swiftly undo the damage. The victories of both Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in Tuesday’s Georgia Senate runoffs puts the Trump administration’s eleventh-hour deregulatory blitz in grave jeopardy. A federal law called the Congressional Review Act allows Congress, with the assent of the president, to repeal recent agency rules by a simple majority vote.

going in the predictions thread (v2) http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=62972&p=2

Because If democrats* don't do any different, how are they any better? and this opportunity will be a great indicator of just how much better the democrats* are.

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Thursday, January 7, 2021 7:37 PM

So you're going to put it in a place where it will never be seen again; brilliant.

T

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Friday, January 8, 2021 7:42 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Far from a partisan for free markets, the Founding Father Alexander Hamilton insisted on the need for economic planning. We need more of that vision today.

Question: Toward the Revolutionary War’s end and immediately following it, the United States enters the so-called critical period, which sees existential threats to the fledgling country in the form of mutinies, rebellions, and economic turmoil. How did this period influence Hamilton’s thinking?

Answer: The war has contradictory economic effects. It produced widespread destruction, but it also provided tremendous economic stimulus and created an economic boom. The three armies had ravenous appetites for everything: weaponry, boots, paper, salt, livestock, fodder, firewood. This consumption drove production and investment, much of it paid for with vast emissions of paper money. All of this created an inflationary boom. But when the war ends, the economy collapses into a depression about as bad as that of the 1930s. Investment dries up, production and consumption contract, and huge often unpayable debts come due.

At the same time, a plethora of small military conflicts emerge. The governments of Georgia and South Carolina are fighting Maroons—armed, self-emancipated people of African descent living in autonomous communities. From Georgia up to the Ohio territory, Native Americans and settlers are fighting. This combat is particularly brutal in what is now Kentucky. Rival groups of white settlers clash in what is now Eastern Tennessee and in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, commercial conflicts are breaking out on the coast. New York imposes crippling tariffs on New Jersey and Connecticut. Maryland and Virginia struggle over navigation and trade on the Chesapeake.

Exacerbating all this is an environmental crisis. In 1783 there are two massive volcanic eruptions—one in Japan, the other in Iceland. The latter goes on for almost an entire year. Emissions from the eruptions create a cooling effect across parts of the Northern Hemisphere. In the Northeastern United States this means harsh winters, catastrophic springtime flooding, and cold, wet summers. All of this hurts crop yields, which only exacerbates the economic crisis.

Finally, the critical period involves brutal, deflationary, debt-fueled austerity. Congress and the states have borrowed heavily, and by the mid 1780s they’re attempting to extract enormous amounts of money from increasingly stagnant economies. Taxes go up and public spending is cut. This increases the economic burden on common people, hampers investment, constricts consumption, and drives down prices. As the value of money suddenly increases, people start hording it. Private sector investment contracts, which hurts economic growth, causing further deflation.

All of this culminates during the summer of 1786 in Western Massachusetts, where a widespread foreclosure crisis turns into an almost year-long guerrilla war known as Shays’ Rebellion. Named for Daniel Shays, who had been a captain in the Continental Army, and then helped lead the uprising, these rebel farmers actually called themselves “Regulators.” To stop foreclosures and evictions, they closed down the courts and threw out all the judges and the lawyers. State authorities attempted to muster the militia, but the units either refuse to mobilize, or mobilize and then dissolve—or, worst of all, switch sides and join the rebellion!

In desperation, the merchant elite and the government of Massachusetts create a privately funded army. During the bitterly cold winter of 1786–87 there is on and off combat including two actual force-on-force conventional battles that even involve some artillery. But mostly the fight takes the form of ambushes, small shootouts, assassinations, beatings, arrests, arson, threatening “night letters”—basically guerilla terror tactics and counterinsurgency.

As Shays’ Rebellion is being mopped up in late May 1787, the Constitutional Convention convenes in Philadelphia. The Convention is a direct response to the panoply of crises that arise in this period. In short, the whole revolutionary project is sinking into economic stagnation, political fragmentation, and military crisis. To survive, at least in the view of federalists like Hamilton, the central government has to be reorganized and re-founded.

Much more at https://bostonreview.net/class-inequality-politics/christian-parenti-m
ichael-busch-what-we-still-get-wrong-about-alexander

Download the book “Radical Hamilton: Economic Lessons from a Misunderstood Founder” at
https://libgen.unblockit.ltd/search.php?req=Christian+Parenti

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, January 8, 2021 7:52 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Keep in mind, during the American Revolution, the richest people in the country were all white Southern elites. This was true even as about a third of white southerners were landless, desperately poor, often semi-vagrant. (Keri Leigh Merritt’s 2017 book, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, is really good on that contradiction.)

Economic life for some whites got worse between the Revolution and the Civil War:

Analyzing land policy, labor, and legal history, Keri Leigh Merritt reveals what happens to excess workers when a capitalist system is predicated on slave labor. With the rising global demand for cotton - and thus, slaves - in the 1840s and 1850s, the need for white laborers in the American South was drastically reduced, creating a large underclass that was unemployed or underemployed. These poor whites could not compete - for jobs or living wages - with profitable slave labor. Though impoverished whites were never subjected to the daily violence and degrading humiliations of racial slavery, they did suffer tangible socioeconomic consequences as a result of living in a slave society. Merritt examines how these “masterless” men and women threatened the existing southern hierarchy and ultimately helped push southern slaveholders toward secession and civil war.

Download that free book at https://libgen.unblockit.ltd/search.php?req=Keri+Leigh+Merritt

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, January 8, 2021 5:54 PM

SEOND you certainly are a dedicated poster.

T

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Saturday, January 9, 2021 6:53 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
SEOND you certainly are a dedicated poster.

This is true.

The animating force of modern Republicanism is this: Democratic Party rule is an existential threat to America and is by definition illegitimate. It is a belief that explains much of what we’ve seen from the GOP in the past few decades, the glue that binds together Republicans.

There are at least three critical features of the GOP as an institution that have allowed this process to go on as it has.

First, there is the argument, offered by mainstream Republicans at the highest levels, that freedom itself is on the ballot: that the Democratic agenda is so catastrophic that it might spell the end of America as we know it.

This is something Republicans have been saying about Democratic policies — including ones common in other advanced democracies — for decades. In 1961, Ronald Reagan warned that the passage of Medicare would be the end of liberty in America: that if federalized insurance for the elderly were to become law, “you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.”

Sarah Palin offered a more recent variant in 2009, writing in a Facebook post that Obamacare would create “death panels,” transforming the “America I know and love” by imposing “a system [that] is downright evil” on it.

In 2014, Ted Cruz claimed that Obama’s use of executive orders was creating “an imperial presidency [that] threatens the liberty of every citizen.” In 2019, the National Republican Congressional Committee — the official arm of the party responsible for House races — all but accused Democrats of being murderous Stalinists.

Hyperbole in politics is normal, of course. There are plenty of examples of rank-and-file Democratic partisans calling George W. Bush “Hitler.”

The difference is that casting the opposing party as an existential threat, a demonic force bent on destroying the very fabric of a free society, has become an accepted part of conservative rhetoric at the highest levels of the party. Yes, you’ll see an example here and there, but there is simply no comparison with how Democrats talk about Republicans; polarization in the United States is profoundly asymmetric.

These arguments do not merely attack Democratic policies; they attack the very idea that Democrats can be legitimate leaders of the American government. Among some Republicans, they bleed into baroque conspiracy theories about Democrats as individuals, explanations for how people like Obama and Hillary Clinton can support such heinous policies. Obama isn’t merely a liberal Democrat; he must be a Kenyan Muslim anti-colonial plant pushing America toward full communism.

Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, in their book How Democracies Die, talk of “mutual toleration”: the idea that, in a democracy, both parties respect the other one’s right to win elections and hold power. In the United States, Republicans have all but told their supporters that Democrats do not, in fact, have a right to rule — that they are fundamentally hostile to the American way of life.

More at https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22217696/republicans-trump-cap
itol-hill-storming-mob-responsible

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, January 9, 2021 6:41 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

For once I agree with Salon:

Quote:

Can we save democracy from the two-party system?

The reason the U.S. is effectively a one-party state, and only nominally a two-party one, is obvious and known to all: Democrats and Republicans serve the same masters. Whether the president is an African-American Democrat or a white nationalist Republican, he staffs his administration with representatives of the highest stratum. Power remains in essentially the same hands — CEOs from the biggest firms, bankers from the biggest banks, executives from the biggest names on Wall Street, orthodox economists, corporate lawyers, corporate lobbyists, ex-generals, etc. — people who can be trusted to serve the system that has served them. A large contingent simply moves back and forth between government and the corporate world.

Another way politicians of both parties avoid addressing tangible public needs that run counter to their patrons' interests is by pandering to nationalist vanity, a classic strategy especially effective in a country that has chosen to remain at war for the past 75 years.

(For example) Obama specialized in over-the-top flattery of the national ego that presented itself as hard truth. He used the occasion of the Nobel Peace Prize award in 2009 to boast about our many wars and violent interventions since 1941, saying they all promoted peace and security, as we had in saving Europe (single-handed) from the Nazis and Soviets. Clearly, America has been singled out to fight evil. On other occasions, Obama would talk about the kind of people we Americans are, and the kind we are not, using flattery to reassure us that whatever punitive action he had taken or was proposing was simply what our collective conscience demanded.

(And) The fantasy of American greatness was there for Donald Trump to exploit. With his MAGA and KAG (Keep America Great) rallies, Trump took pandering to near-fascist heights while leaving his campaign promises unfulfilled or taking actions directly contrary to them, and suffering no consequences at the ballot box.

Unfortunately, government social programs do not get the same welcome in Congress as requests for "national security" funding. Those programs unavoidably limit the amount of money private companies can extract from the public and that politicians can extract from the companies for their services. In other words, they "squander precious taxpayer dollars" on not-so-precious taxpayers. The media also do their part to put social programs in a bad light. Look how they seized the opportunity Trump provided to misrepresent and denigrate populism, as Thomas Frank has noted.

Long before the Supreme Court made it official, "Money talks" began to emerge as our dominant political ideology. Such a system does not require the players to be conscious of it. On the contrary, their amour propre requires them not to be. No conspiracy is called for. Politicians only have to know which side their bread is buttered on and that they and their families can get very rich through holding office. They are genuinely convinced — indeed, have persuaded themselves — that the policies that benefit them most are good for everyone.

https://www.salon.com/2021/01/09/can-we-save-democracy-from-the-two-pa
rty-system/

There's much more in the article, accessible at the link.

If democrats* don't do any different, how are they any better?

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Saturday, January 9, 2021 9:01 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:

There's much more in the article, accessible at the link.

If democrats* don't do any different, how are they any better?

There's a once-in-a-generation chance to split up the Republican Party, and what's on the leftwing menu? How to split up the Democratic Party. Sometimes I truly despair. This is just not the time.

If one admires Sanders - and Warren and AOC and Omar and so on - why not accept their strategy? Which is NOT to split up the Democratic party or make voters disgusted with it, to the benefit exclusively of the GOP, but to pull it to the left. Why not see how remarkably successful they've been at that?

Chomsky rightfully called the Republican Party the most destructive organization in the history of mankind. Who's doing something about it? The biggest victory this past week was taking the speakership of the Senate away from McConnell. That was not achieved by armchair handwringing over the Democratic Party but by tireless on-the-ground work by Stacey Abrams and her people working the two Georgia Senate runoff elections.

Republican Party 'most dangerous organisation on earth'
1kiki, IS THAT A BIG ENOUGH DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS?
www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-39879374

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, January 10, 2021 10:12 AM

Salon is progressive/liberal. Their opinions need to be scrutinized before being accepted as the right course to follow. What they report is certainly more relievable than say, FOX.

T

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Monday, January 11, 2021 1:23 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Nearly 160 million voters cast a ballot in the 2020 presidential election, but if a total of 43,000 Biden voters had stayed at home in the states of Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin, Trump would have won a second term. The GOP’s Electoral College advantage grew in 2020, even as Republicans lost the presidency.

More at https://www.vox.com/2021/1/11/22224700/electoral-college-joe-biden-don
ald-trump-bias-four-points-one-chart

Clinton lost in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, which tipped the electoral college map in Trump’s favor. Trump’s margin of victory in those three states? Just 79,316 votes. And in 2004, John Kerry lost to George W. Bush by losing Ohio by a little over 118,000 votes. The elections are getting closer and closer, year by year. That is a wonderful advantage for the GOP. They will own the White House with a probability around 50% of the time. 50% is the GOP's probability in 2024 and it matters not at all who the GOP runs or how well Biden performs his duties. The winner will be decided randomly, not logically or reasonably.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/12/hillary-clinton-margin-loss-vo
tes

Americans can't accept that Presidential elections are random events caused by the silly design of the Electoral College. Trump certainly couldn't accept the randomness, the unknowableness of Presidential elections. When Donald Trump stood before his followers on Jan. 6 and urged them to march on the United States Capitol, he was doing what he had always done. He never took electoral democracy seriously nor accepted the legitimacy of its American version. Even when he won, in 2016, he insisted that the election was fraudulent — that millions of false votes were cast for his opponent. He and his voters believe they can know ahead of time who will win, but it is not possible when the Presidential election is really 50 smaller elections, not one great big election (with a possible runoff) as it is for every other office in the United States.
https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2021/01/10/post-truth-is-pre-fascism/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, January 11, 2021 2:16 PM

I know SECOND and it's worrisome. I think a place to start would be to change how many delegates these states get. I haven't given it to much consideration as of yet but something has to change.

T

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Monday, January 11, 2021 6:14 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Quote:
There's a once-in-a-generation chance to split up the Republican Party, and what's on the leftwing menu?

You may not have noticed it but the republican party already split - not once, but twice.

The first time was when the Tea Party split off from the SOP repubocrats, as a populist movement. But when the TPers were absorbed into the repubocrat Borg, 16 of 16 of them were rejected during the primary, in favor of Donald Trump, populist attempt part deux.

And 75M voted for the populist, again.

If democrats* don't do any different, how are they any better?

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Monday, January 11, 2021 6:19 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Quote:
Nearly 160 million voters cast a ballot in the 2020 presidential election, but if a total of 43,000 Biden voters had stayed at home in the states of Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin, Trump would have won a second term.

Which is what makes the election SUCH a tempting target for manipulation!

Which is why we need a .thorough. neutral. academic. statistical. analysis of the 2020 election, for example, by the CalTech/ MIT Vote Project - to determine whether or not it was a valid election.

Unless you want to equate democracy with mystery-voting?

If democrats* don't do any different, how are they any better?

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Tuesday, January 12, 2021 7:54 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:

Quote:
Nearly 160 million voters cast a ballot in the 2020 presidential election, but if a total of 43,000 Biden voters had stayed at home in the states of Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin, Trump would have won a second term.
Which is what makes the election SUCH a tempting target for manipulation!

Which is why we need a .thorough. neutral. academic. statistical. analysis of the 2020 election, for example, by the CalTech/ MIT Vote Project - to determine whether or not it was a valid election.

Unless you want to equate democracy with mystery-voting?

Such an excellent idea! But the Inauguration remains set in law at Jan 20th. And the law does not allow for Biden to step down and Trump to step back into the role of President until after another election has been held in 2024. The law doesn't allow an earlier election, even if Trump desperately wants a re-do immediately.

In August 2020, Trump floats idea that fraud could lead to re-do of November election. Trump does not have the authority to reschedule an election. A national election “re-do” has never occurred in the more than 200 years the U.S. has held elections, including during the Civil War, the Great Depression and two world wars.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump-redo/trump-float
s-idea-that-fraud-could-lead-to-re-do-of-november-election-idUSKCN25E297

On January 23, 1845, the 28th US Congress passed "An act to establish a uniform time for holding elections for electors of President and Vice President in all the States of the Union." The act selected "the Tuesday after the first Monday in November" as the day on which all states must appoint electors.

As travel and communication methods became faster in the 19th century, potential manipulation and fraud concerns grew due to different election days in different states: “The 34-day period during which elections could be held prolonged excitement and provided time for more intrigue.” Members of the House, when debating a bill in 1844 that would set a uniform presidential Election Day across the country, declared the goal was “to guard against frauds in the elections of President and Vice President.”
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R46413.pdf

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, January 12, 2021 7:55 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

G.O.P. cynics have been coddling crazies for a long time.

One striking aspect of the Capitol Hill putsch was that none of the rioters’ grievances had any basis in reality. No, the election wasn’t stolen — there is no evidence of significant electoral fraud. No, Democrats aren’t part of a satanic pedophile conspiracy. No, they aren’t radical Marxists — even the party’s progressive wing would be considered only moderately left of center in any other Western democracy.

So all the rage is based on lies. But what’s almost as striking as the fantasies of the rioters is how few leading Republicans have been willing, despite the violence and desecration, to tell the MAGA mob that their conspiracy theories are false.

Bear in mind that Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, and two-thirds of his colleagues voted against accepting the Electoral College results even after the riot. (McCarthy then shamelessly decried “division,” saying that “we must call on our better angels.”)

Or consider the behavior of leading Republicans who aren’t usually considered extremists. On Sunday Senator Rob Portman declared that we need to “restore confidence in the integrity of our electoral system.” Portman isn’t stupid; he has to know that the only reason so many people doubt the election results is that members of his party deliberately fomented that doubt. But he’s still keeping up the pretense.

Anyone shocked by the prevalence of insane conspiracy theories in 2020 should look back to “The New World Order,” published by Reagan ally Pat Robertson in 1991, which saw America menaced by an international cabal of Jewish bankers, Freemasons and occultists. Or they should check out a 1994 video promoted by Jerry Falwell Sr. called “The Clinton Chronicles,” which portrayed Bill Clinton as a drug smuggler and serial killer.

So what has changed since then? For a long time Republican elites imagined that they could exploit conspiracy theorizing while remaining focused on a plutocratic agenda. But with the rise first of the Tea Party, then of Donald Trump, the cynics found that the crazies were actually in control, and that they wanted to destroy democracy, not cut tax rates on capital gains.

You might have hoped that a significant number of sane Republican politicians would finally say that enough is enough, and break with their extremist allies. But Trump’s party didn’t balk at his corruption and abuse of power; it stood by him when he refused to accept electoral defeat; and some of its members are responding to a violent attack on Congress by complaining about their loss of Twitter followers.

And there’s no reason to believe that the atrocities yet to come — for there will be more atrocities — will make a difference. The G.O.P. has reached the culmination of its long journey away from democracy, and it’s hard to see how it can ever be redeemed.

More at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/11/opinion/republicans-democracy.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, January 13, 2021 5:11 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

There will be more violence, especially if the Capitol perpetrators and those who incited them -- starting with the President -- are not held accountable

By Garry Kasparov

The correct response is the dispassionate application of the law. Not political persecution, but nor politically motivated leniency, either. We don't have to choose between unity and justice. Avoiding doing the right thing will only prolong the crisis and give aid and comfort to enemies of the state and of the peace. Our Founding Fathers failed to resolve the historical challenge of slavery, passing a bloody Civil War on to future generations. Despite Abraham Lincoln's assassination, Reconstruction allowed the South a "defeat with honor," decades of Jim Crow, and the pernicious Lost Cause mythology that persists today.

Consider the repugnant image of a Trumpist Capitol invader carrying a Confederate flag in a building that Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson only dreamed of conquering. No new mythology should be allowed to sprout from this vile transgression. The worst result would be letting the mutineers off the hook -- and this includes the elected officials who encouraged them, like Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and especially President Trump. That they, and scores of other Republicans, continued to attack the integrity of the election even now is beyond the pale.

The perpetrators won't become heroes or martyrs if the process of justice is not unduly politicized. It would be a blunder for the left to turn a clear case of criminal justice into a battleground for racial justice, which would help the Trumpist Republicans twist their illegal insurrection into the culture war they crave. White supremacy is a terrible evil of American history, and Trump and his followers' traffic in it is repugnant, but we should not overburden a clear-cut criminal proceeding with the cleansing of sins.

History teaches us the cost of well-meaning but shortsighted attempts to sacrifice justice for unity. Russians learned this in the hardest possible way after the fall of the Soviet Union. As I discussed at length in my book, Winter Is Coming, they declined to root out the KGB security state in the interest of national harmony. It would be too traumatic, our leaders said, to expose the countless atrocities the Soviet security forces committed and to punish their authors.

A feeble truth commission was quickly abandoned by President Boris Yeltsin, and soon even the Soviet archives were closed, although not before researchers like Vladimir Bukovsky revealed some of the KGB's atrocities. The KGB's name was changed to the FSB and its members quietly stayed in touch and intact. The result? A mere nine years after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russia elected a former KGB lieutenant colonel, Vladimir Putin, to the presidency. It was the last meaningful election we ever had. We chose unity and we got dictatorship.

America should not make a similar mistake. The truth may hurt, but lies will do far greater damage in the end. Americans should be prepared for a long fight against these anti-democratic forces. The attack on the Capitol has opened every eye; there can be no more feigned ignorance of the crisis.

Many Americans were shocked by how many of their compatriots, including nearly all GOP officials, have been willing to go along with Trump's open assault on the pillars of their open society, from the free press to fair elections. As I warned early on, demagogues don't find radicals to lead, they steadily radicalize their followers one outrage at a time. The culmination, so far, was January 6.
Hemingway wrote in "For Whom the Bell Tolls": "There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes." The time has come, and we are finding them out. Fortuitously, they are inclined to boast of their transgressions on Instagram and from the Senate floor, which makes them easy to find.

The question is if the will exists to apply the justice they deserve. Failing to do so will not mollify them. They are living in an alternate universe, where 70% of Republican voters say that Republican lawmakers who tried to stop the certification of Joe Biden's win in the 2020 presidential election were "protecting democracy," according to a Quinnipiac poll taken AFTER the assault on the Capitol Trump incited. Seventy-three percent told pollsters they thought Trump, too, was "protecting" democracy.

More at https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/12/opinions/battle-against-anti-democratic
-extremism-kasparov/index.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, January 14, 2021 7:37 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

One of the hallmarks of these conservative movements is the idea that the United States is being betrayed by its elites. That really remains constant from America First (1918–1939) through the McCarthy era (1950–1957), and through the John Birch Society (1958–Present) and into the present day. But Joe McCarthy was not calling his followers to arms. He was saying, “Support me and I’ll make things better.” Barry Goldwater (1953–1987) wasn’t really calling for an armed uprising. If anything, Goldwater was overly optimistic in thinking most Americans believed what he believed.

I don’t think Donald Trump conservatism is a confident conservatism in that way. It’s a conservatism very much rooted in white identity. It sees the demographic decline of whites, in particular, working-class, non-college-educated whites, as a mortal threat to the country’s identity. It can’t figure out any way to reach beyond this, even though we saw in this last election evidence that Republicans and conservatism actually can be quite appealing to minority Americans. And it’s also no longer confident, I think, that the standard processes of government and democracy can be trusted to bring about a good result.

And the feeling on the part of the most extreme Trump supporters is that you have to overthrow the government if you actually want to have the proper results. So that’s really a dangerous place we’ve arrived at.

I’m surprised by the extent to which we’ve seen violence become almost part of the Republican mainstream, how at almost every Republican and conservative demonstration, you now expect to see people carrying weaponry, how it’s no longer a shocking thing when men with guns walk into a legislature and force its dissolution.

Part of this is simply the evolution over time of the Second Amendment from something that conservatives didn’t really think much about to almost a kind of sacrament. And people who might’ve had guns once now coming to identify themselves as gun owners in a way that they just really wouldn’t in the past.

More at https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22220645/trump-capitol-attack-
republican-party

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, January 14, 2021 1:42 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The ‘Shared Psychosis’ Of Donald Trump And His Loyalists

“Shared psychosis”—which is also called “folie à millions” [“madness for millions”] when occurring at the national level or “induced delusions”—refers to the infectiousness of severe symptoms that goes beyond ordinary group psychology. When a highly symptomatic individual is placed in an influential position, the person’s symptoms can spread through the population through emotional bonds, heightening existing pathologies and inducing delusions, paranoia and propensity for violence—even in previously healthy individuals. The treatment is removal of exposure.

The violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol Building last week, incited by President Donald Trump, serves as the grimmest moment in one of the darkest chapters in the nation’s history. Yet the rioters’ actions—and Trump’s own role in, and response to, them—come as little surprise to many, particularly those who have been studying the president’s mental fitness and the psychology of his most ardent followers since he took office.

What attracts people to Trump? What is their animus or driving force? Two major emotional drives: narcissistic symbiosis and shared psychosis. Narcissistic symbiosis refers to the developmental wounds that make the leader-follower relationship magnetically attractive. The leader, hungry for adulation to compensate for an inner lack of self-worth, projects grandiose omnipotence—while the followers, rendered needy by societal stress or developmental injury, yearn for a parental figure. When such wounded individuals are given positions of power, they arouse similar pathology in the population that creates a “lock and key” relationship.

More at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-shared-psychosis-of-don
ald-trump-and-his-loyalists/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, January 16, 2021 7:51 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

In August, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pressured the U.N. Security Council to pass a ban on conventional arms sales to Iran. Only one of the council’s members, the Dominican Republic, joined the U.S. in supporting the ban; Russia and China opposed it; the others—all U.S. allies—abstained.

The episode typified, in extreme form, two of Pompeo’s most distinct traits—an obsession with regime change in Iran and incompetence at making that or any other goal happen.

Like Trump, Pompeo ceaselessly inveighed against the Iran nuclear deal; Trump pulled out of the deal and reimposed sanctions against the Islamic Republic on May 8, 2018, just 12 days after Pompeo was sworn in as secretary. (His predecessor, Rex Tillerson, had advised Trump to stay in the deal.) Pompeo claimed, with swaggering confidence, that the sanctions would compel Tehran back to negotiate a “better” nuclear deal—or possibly force a collapse of the regime. Fast forward to today: the regime survives, its hard-line factions are stronger than before, and Iranian reactors are closer than ever to churning out an atomic bomb. (President-elect Joe Biden wants to restart the nuclear deal, but Iran’s technological progress and the stiffening of its politics will make this harder to accomplish.)

This week, perhaps realizing that his “maximum pressure” campaign had been a total failure, Pompeo changed course and claimed, in a speech at the National Press Club, that Iran is the new “home base” of al-Qaida—the terrorist movement’s “operational headquarters”—and declared, “The time is now for America and all free nations to crush the Iran-al-Qaida axis.” U.S. intelligence officials say there is no evidence whatever for this claim.

Pompeo’s other big bugaboo has been China, and he has called for regime change in Beijing as well—despite the clear preposterousness of the goal. The Chinese Communist Party is a mischievous force in the world, but Pompeo is simply wrong in claiming that it is “totally separate from the Chinese people” or that it’s a “regime” imbued with “a Marxist-Leninist core”—or that the “challenge of resisting the CCP threat is in some ways much more difficult” than resisting the Soviet Union’s Communist empire during the Cold War. In fact, though it enslaves minorities and imprisons democratic activists, much, perhaps most, of the Chinese population supports the CCP, which lifted over 850 million people out of poverty in astonishingly fast time. In any case, there is nothing “Marxist-Leninist” about President Xi Jinping’s philosophy, which seeks expansion through mercantilist techniques, not ideological conformity. And while it’s important to contain China’s military aggression in the South China Sea (something the U.S. military has been doing for some time), it’s a huge stretch to compare its scope or ambition to that of the Soviet Union, which once enjoyed a truly global presence. Pompeo misunderstands the nature of China’s challenge—and, as a result, comes up with half-baked notions of how to deal with it.

His overheated rhetoric has further isolated the United States from the rest of the world—a shame since real challenges, including China and Iran, require a concerted response along with allies. As an example of his insensitivity to allies’ concerns, Pompeo made his distorted case against the CCP in a speech to the Czech Parliament in August. The speech contained just one sentence about Russia and nothing about ongoing threats to Ukraine, the recent rigged election in Belarus, the rise of illiberalism in Hungary and Poland, or the dangers of a splintered European Union. He even suggested the possibility of a Russia-West alliance against China—this to an audience, in the heart of Europe, whose members viscerally recall the 1968 Soviet coup that left their country occupied by five Red Army divisions and a harsh Moscow-installed dictatorship for the subsequent 22 years.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20210116012416/https://slate.com/news-and-
politics/2021/01/mike-pompeo-worst-secretary-state-ever.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, January 16, 2021 10:05 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:

In August, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pressured the U.N. Security Council to pass a ban on conventional arms sales to Iran. Only one of the council’s members, the Dominican Republic, joined the U.S. in supporting the ban; Russia and China opposed it; the others—all U.S. allies—abstained.

The episode typified, in extreme form, two of Pompeo’s most distinct traits—an obsession with regime change in Iran and incompetence at making that or any other goal happen.

I think a larger point is our allies abstaining. This is due to Trump and the way he has attacked them, along with other concerns. They now have doubts about American backing them up in a conflict to name one.

T

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Saturday, January 16, 2021 11:03 AM

Don't worry your little heads about it.

Biden* will waste no time in selling out the Jews to Iran.

--------------------------------------------------

A government is a body of people usually, notably, governed by Mark Zuckerborg and Slack Dorsey.

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Saturday, January 16, 2021 2:49 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Don't worry your little heads about it.

Biden* will waste no time in selling out the Jews to Iran.

Israel wants the US to knock down its rival -- Iran. But Israel is not the 51st state. Netanyahu's ultimate strategy is to encourage a US escalation with Iran that would prompt an American military strike against Iran's nuclear sites, which some Israelis believe would be far more effective than any strike the Israelis could carry out on their own.

https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2011/RAND_MG1143
.pdf

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, January 17, 2021 8:03 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Trump blows up the Arizona GOP on his way out

The Trump era did more damage to the Republican Party in Arizona than almost anywhere else. Over the past two years, Republicans lost both Senate seats. In November, the state flipped Democratic in a presidential race for the first time since 1996.

President Donald Trump’s fingerprints are on all of it, yet the state party will likely pass a resolution next week to officially “support & thank” the president. It’ll also vote on measures to censure three prominent Republicans who were deemed insufficiently beholden to Trump: Gov. Doug Ducey, former Sen. Jeff Flake and Cindy McCain, the wife of the late senator.

The adulation is an expression of GOP grassroots loyalty to Trump, but it’s also a portrait of a party that’s run aground in service to him. His defeat has triggered attempts to adopt an even harder pro-Trump line.

“The craziness from the state Republican Party … it’s pretty embarrassing,” said Kirk Adams, a former Republican state House speaker. “We have been fed a steady diet of conspiracy theories and stolen election rhetoric and, really, QAnon theories from the state Republican Party since before the election, but certainly after.”

Business leaders are publicly recoiling from the GOP after party officials thrust Arizona into the center of Trump’s failed effort to overturn the election results, further dividing an already fractured party. “Let us be clear: we find the weeks of disinformation and outright lies to reverse a fair and free election from the head of the Arizona Republican Party and some elected officials to be reprehensible,” read a full-page ad in The Arizona Republic this week from Greater Phoenix Leadership, a group of CEOs.

The Arizona GOP is now operating as an almost wholly-owned subsidiary of the outgoing president. Rep. Andy Biggs, chair of the House Freedom Caucus, played a leading role in congressional Republicans’ effort to challenge the electoral vote count in Arizona – undermining the vote in his own state.

The Republican Party in Arizona does need to have a bit of a reckoning with itself. Will it be the party that follows Trump, or will it be the party that follows conservative principles? And so far, some in the leadership apparatus have chosen Trump over conservative principles.

More at https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/16/arizona-gop-trump-459772

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, January 18, 2021 6:17 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Trump ignites a war within the church

David Brooks says unreason is a voracious beast that can devour a nation if not confronted.

“Over the last 72 hours, I have received multiple death threats and thousands upon thousands of emails from Christians saying the nastiest and most vulgar things I have ever heard toward my family and ministry. I have been labeled a coward, sellout, a traitor to the Holy Spirit, and cussed out at least 500 times.”

This is the beginning of a Face-book post from Sunday by conservative preacher Jeremiah Johnson. On Jan. 7, the day after the storming of the Capitol, Johnson had issued a public apology, asserting that God removed Donald Trump from office because of his pride and arrogance, and to humble those, like Johnson, who had fervently supported him.

The response was swift and vicious. As he put it in that later Facebook post, “I have been flabbergasted at the barrage of continued conspiracy theories being sent every minute our way and the pure hatred being unleashed. To my great heartache, I’m convinced parts of the prophetic/charismatic movement are far SICKER than I could have ever dreamed of.”

This is what is happening inside evangelical Christianity and within conservatism right now. As a conservative Christian friend of mine put it, there is strife within every family, within every congregation, and it may take generations to recover.

On the one hand, there are those who are doubling down on their Trump fanaticism and their delusion that a Biden presidency will destroy America: “I rebuke the news in the name of Jesus. We ask that this false garbage come to an end,” conservative pastor Tim Remington preached from the pulpit in Idaho on Sunday. “It’s the lies, communism, socialism.”

The violent Know-Nothingism, which has always coursed through American history, is once again a torrent, threatening more violence in the days ahead.

More at www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2021/01/17/david-brooks-trump/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, January 18, 2021 5:13 PM

Christian Textbooks Are Already Rewriting the Obama and Trump Presidencies
https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2021/01/16/christian-textbooks-are
-already-rewriting-the-obama-and-trump-presidencies/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Imagine+No+Religion&utm_content=44

About a third of all private Christian K-12 schools in the country — roughly 2,400 of them — use textbooks published by Abeka, BJU Press, or Accelerated Christian Education.

As you might guess, those textbooks whitewash U.S. history, teach fake science, and present conservative Christian views of the world as fact rather than opinion.

HuffPost reporter Rebecca Klein looked at textbooks from Abeka and BJU Press, and their coverage of politics reads just like a post from a right-wing website.

One passage in an 11th-grade U.S. history textbook from Abeka states, “Although many false philosophies were popular in America before 2000, the new millennium heralded a dramatic acceptance of immoral ideology on a national scale. … Three such philosophies are globalism, environmentalism, and postmodernism.”

“Believing religion — particularly Christianity — to be divisive, globalists discourage its influence on public life,” it continues.

Here’s another passage from an Abeka history book concerning the Obama era:

“Many Americans’ views about race relations had improved at the time that Obama was inaugurated. Unfortunately, Americans’ views of race relations declined after Obama came into office. Race riots in places such as Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, greatly escalated racial tensions and worsened strife between minorities and local police. President Obama’s attempts to resolve these problems often seemed to make the situation worse.”

There’s no mention of why people were rioting in those cities or any mention of the role of law enforcement.

And here’s a similar passage from a BJU Press book:

“Despite President Obama’s call for racial harmony, his eight-year term of office saw an intensification of racial discord. Several controversial shootings of black men led to protests, some of which were violent and destructive with black communities bearing the brunt of most of the destruction. Groups such as Black Lives Matter sharpened the divide between police and citizens, and black and white, with divisive rhetoric. Mixed messages from the Obama administration, the Department of Justice in particular, seemed to increase the racial discord.”

Why were those shootings controversial? WHO KNOWS! But Black Lives Matter is the problem.

You expect this kind of thoughtless, nuance-free analysis from conservative bloggers, right-wing TV hosts, or whatever the hell Eric Metaxas is these days. But when something is in a textbook, students often treat it as fact. These beliefs were readily seen during last week’s attack at the Capitol, and it’s clear that indoctrinating children in this brand of Christian Nationalism is the goal of these publishers.

Christians have no hope of being part of the solution when their own schools are brainwashing kids with this garbage. Even Donald Trump is treated like a savior and fighter for Christians and not someone who rode a wave of disinformation into power thanks to a political party with no regard for truth or decency. He’s described in one textbook as someone “whose determination and bombastic mannerisms gave Republicans the fighter they wanted,” as if his racism, insult-comic-humor, and ignorance weren’t also appealing to those voters.

How do you undo this much damage when these kids get older?

There’s really no way to fix any of this either. There’s a reason public schools reject these books — they’re not reliable — but there’s nothing stopping Christian schools from using them. Unless parents or responsible administrators decide they want their kids to get educated instead of brainwashed, these publishers will continue rewriting history to serve their own purposes.

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Monday, January 18, 2021 6:03 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
HuffPost reporter

That's funny man. Thanks for the laugh.

--------------------------------------------------

A government is a body of people usually, notably, governed by Mark Zuckerborg and Slack Dorsey.

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Monday, January 18, 2021 6:05 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Don't worry your little heads about it.

Biden* will waste no time in selling out the Jews to Iran.
Israel wants the US to knock down its rival -- Iran. But Israel is not the 51st state. Netanyahu's ultimate strategy is to encourage a US escalation with Iran that would prompt an American military strike against Iran's nuclear sites, which some Israelis believe would be far more effective than any strike the Israelis could carry out on their own.

https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2011/RAND_MG1143
.pdf

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

In other words, Second doesn't care much for Jews.

--------------------------------------------------

A government is a body of people usually, notably, governed by Mark Zuckerborg and Slack Dorsey.

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Monday, January 18, 2021 7:38 PM

Even After January 6, Some in Media Can’t Kick Their Addiction to False Balance
https://fair.org/home/even-after-january-6-some-media-cant-kick-their-
addiction-to-false-balance/

In the wake of the unprecedented events of January 6, many in corporate media—on both the editorial and reporting sides—have displayed a new and refreshing ability to apply accurate labels to people and their behaviors (“sedition,” “incitement,” “white nationalists,” etc.) and to apportion blame based on reality, not a wished-for fantasy of balance.

That false concept of balance, which FAIR has criticized for years (e.g., 9/30/04, 9/17/20), is finally coming under greater scrutiny. As Washington Post media critic Margaret Sullivan (1/17/21) recently wrote: “When one side consistently engages in bad-faith falsehoods, it’s downright destructive to give them equal time.”

And many of her colleagues appear to have finally absorbed that lesson as they cover this month’s events. Where previous coverage of Trump and his followers often strained to balance the positive and the negative (e.g., FAIR.org, 6/1/17, 7/24/19), reporting and analysis of the insurrection and its aftermath have largely cast aside attempts at false balance. At CNN.com (1/12/21), a news headline unequivocally announced, “Defiant Trump Denounces Violence but Takes No Responsibility for Inciting Deadly Riot,” using language corporate media in the past would typically have reserved for opinion pieces. In the New York Times (1/6/21), after quoting several of Trump’s statements to the crowd, Rudolph Giuliani’s call for “trial by combat” against the Democrats and Donald Trump Jr.’s “we’re coming for you” threat to Republicans who wouldn’t back Trump’s efforts to overturn the democratic election, reporter Maggie Haberman wrote directly, “Mr. Trump helped set in motion hours of violence and chaos that continued as darkness fell on Wednesday.”

Considering that Trump has few allies left within the establishment—even many big businesses have publicly turned against him—perhaps it’s easier for journalists to cast off their commitment to false balance. But it’s far from inevitable. At the New York Times, longtime White House correspondent Peter Baker (1/13/21) proved incapable of escaping the magnetic pull of both sides–ism as he described the second impeachment of Donald Trump :

With less than a week to go, President Trump’s term is climaxing in violence and recrimination at a time when the country has fractured deeply and lost a sense of itself. Notions of truth and reality have been atomized. Faith in the system has eroded. Anger is the one common ground.

As if it were not enough that Mr. Trump became the only president impeached twice or that lawmakers were trying to remove him with days left in his term, Washington devolved into a miasma of suspicion and conflict. A Democratic member of Congress accused Republican colleagues of helping the mob last week scout the building in advance. Some Republican members sidestepped magnetometers intended to keep guns off the House floor or kept going even after setting them off.

Ah yes, the miasma of suspicion and conflict that envelops all in Washington without distinction, as each side gets their dander up over actions they find offensive. It’s all equivalent, isn’t it? But let’s be frank: The country has not lost a sense of itself here. One faction of the country has been encouraged and enabled by Trump and his GOP supporters to embrace an increasingly vocal and emboldened fascism. That the New York Times‘ senior White House scribe cannot bring himself to distinguish between these things seems reason enough to disqualify him from his job.

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Monday, January 18, 2021 7:42 PM

Did a Conservative News Site Admit Its Voter-Fraud Claims Were False?
American Thinker joined the likes of Newsmax in issuing a correction to various claims it spread during the 2020 election.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/american-thinker-vote-fraud/?utm_cam
paign=Snopes%20Debunker%20-%20Monday%2C%20January%2018%2C%202021%20-%205%20Presidential%20Facts%20from%20Snopes%20%28XsN83C%29&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Snopes%20Debunker%20-%20Monday%20Edition

They lied.

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Monday, January 18, 2021 7:49 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Don't worry your little heads about it.

Biden* will waste no time in selling out the Jews to Iran.
Israel wants the US to knock down its rival -- Iran. But Israel is not the 51st state. Netanyahu's ultimate strategy is to encourage a US escalation with Iran that would prompt an American military strike against Iran's nuclear sites, which some Israelis believe would be far more effective than any strike the Israelis could carry out on their own.

https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2011/RAND_MG1143
.pdf

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

In other words, Second doesn't care much for Jews.

In other words, Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel wants the U.S. to defeat its rival, Iran. In other words, Ngo Dinh Diem, President of South Vietnam wanted the U.S. to defeat its rival, North Vietnam. How well did that go for the U.S.?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, January 19, 2021 7:55 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

What the Founders Would Have Done with Trump

The key to the Founders’ fear of the demagogue was not merely that he might secure high office. The source of the demagogue’s power does not expire if he is expelled from office; so long as he retains the loyalty of the mob, he may return to power.

As concerned as the Framers were about the dangers of the demagogue, they imagined that they were protecting their new Republic in a variety of ways – including a presidential electoral system managed by state political elites and large House districts – that would defeat the wiles of such a person in an age when communication was limited to voice, letters, and newspapers of limited local circulation. Imagine their terror if told of today’s technology that allows the demagogue to appeal directly to millions through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.

Donald Trump is the living embodiment of the Framers’ fears, amplified many-fold by the reach of modern media technology. If there were any doubt that his departure from the White House will not alone end his threat to the national government, consider that, even now, after the failure of the January 6 assault on the Capitol and the chastisement of a second impeachment, Washington, D.C., has become a vast armed camp fortified, not against foreign invaders, but against Trump supporters still seeking to overturn the results of a free and fair election.

Trump was the man against whom the founding generation armed the constitution with the disqualification clause. They would surely think anyone quite mad for suggesting that a president who actively sought the overthrow of democracy could not be disqualified from trying again because the failed plot reached its crescendo too close to the expiration of his term.

The Senate trial of Donald Trump to disqualify him from ever again holding office for inciting insurrection is entirely consistent with the founders’ original intent.

More at https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/01/17/what-the-founders-would-have-
done-with-trump/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, January 19, 2021 7:57 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The FBI received information that Trump partisans were calling to "storm" government offices in every state on Jan. 20, when Biden will be sworn into office. The Capitol Police warned House Democrats in a briefing Monday night of a plot to kill Democratic representatives so Republicans could take control of Congress.

If you think that these violent elements of Trump’s base will leave with him, you haven’t been paying attention.

This is why the siege of the Capitol by Trump supporters to prevent the congressional certification of President-elect Joe Biden's electoral victory cannot be dismissed as a one-off. These events are just a show of coming attractions.

Republicans supported the attack on the Capitol. A Reuters poll released Friday found that 22 percent of Republicans approved. A Marist poll found that 18 percent of Republicans "support the actions of the Trump supporters who broke into the U.S. Capitol."

If these polls are accurate, that means 1 in 5 Republicans approve of embracing violence to keep political power. If this extremist wing of the GOP goes unchecked, it is likely to spread as Republicans become angrier with election losses and resort to attempting to acquire power by using force.

More at https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/gop-was-sowing-seeds-fascism-violence-lo
ng-trump-n1253970

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, January 19, 2021 11:23 AM

“What is spreading today is repressive kleptocracy, led by rulers motivated by greed rather than by the deranged idealism of Hitler or Stalin or Mao. Such rulers rely less on terror and more on rule twisting, the manipulation of information, and the co-option of elites. Their goal is self-enrichment; the corrosion of the rule of law is the necessary means. As a shrewd local observer explained to me on a visit to Hungary in early 2016, “The main benefit of controlling a modern bureaucratic state is not the power to persecute the innocent. It is the power to protect the guilty.”

No president in history has burned more public money to sustain his personal lifestyle than Donald Trump. Three-quarters of the way through his first year in office, President Trump was on track to spend more on travel in one year of his presidency than Barack Obama in eight—even though Trump only rarely ventured west of the Mississippi or across any ocean.”
- David Frum

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Tuesday, January 19, 2021 1:14 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI:

If you meet the requirements ( slightly to the right, middle and liberal ) and you have an interest in starting a discussion say so.

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Wednesday, January 20, 2021 5:32 AM

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Wednesday, January 20, 2021 10:15 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

In the End, the Trump Presidency Was a Failure on Its Own Terms

http://www.honestgraft.com/2021/01/in-end-trump-presidency-was-failure
-on.html

. . . what if we tried for a moment to give Trump the benefit of the doubt by attempting to evaluate his presidency as much as possible on its own terms? Did Trump succeed in achieving what he wanted to do, even if it wasn't what others wanted him to do?

One approach to answering this question involves returning to the 2016 campaign and comparing the positions of Trump the candidate to the record of Trump the president. Trump did deliver on some of his promises once in office: he cut taxes and regulations, he strengthened barriers to immigration and travel from overseas, and he appointed a large number of conservatives to the federal judiciary. But his signature proposals were never enacted, including the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act, the significant renegotiation of international trade agreements, a major federal infrastructure investment, and a wall spanning the nation's southern border funded by the Mexican government.

There was also a more general set of failures that didn't concern specific policies as much as a basic approach to the job. While a candidate in 2016, Trump presented himself as an energetic deal-maker who would fight harder than his predecessors in both parties for the interests of the American people. But he turned out to be much less invested in his official responsibilities than in spending his daily "executive time" watching cable television and his weekends playing golf; he was sufficiently self-conscious about this lack of work ethic to inelegantly deny it in public ("President Trump will work from early in the morning until late in the evening. He will make many calls and have many meetings") but not to actually alter his behavior.

Trump's pre-election suggestions that he would attract an all-star team of executive personnel to join the government similarly stood in sharp contrast to the actual staff of his administration, which was by some distance the least qualified and talented group of subordinates assembled by any modern president of either party. (And many key positions were filled by acting appointees or were simply left vacant for months and even years.)

With Trump's evident lack of interest in substantive details, his instinct for combativeness (a universally-acknowledged personal quality which many of his supporters admired), and his apparent difficulties in grasping the motivations of others, the promised knack for deal-making never materialized either. Both major legislative achievements of his presidency—the 2017 tax cut bill and the two rounds of COVID relief in 2020—were, by all accounts, developed and enacted with minimal direct involvement by the president. When Trump did insert himself in legislative negotiations in late 2018 and early 2019 by demanding that Congress approve funding for his border wall, the result was a prolonged government shutdown and subsequent retreat after Senate Republicans abandoned their support for his position.

Of course, politicians occasionally have been known to make promises on the campaign trail that they do not expect to keep if elected. Maybe it's inaccurate to treat public commitments in the midst of a tough electoral race as evidence of a president's true goals. So, based on the actions of the Trump administration once it began, what can we conclude about what it wanted to do and whether it succeeded in doing it?

The primary animating force of the Trump presidency, the juice that fueled the president and his subordinates every day, was the waging of a permanent political war against an array of perceived enemies. The Democratic Party was one such enemy—this was by far the most thoroughly partisan presidency in memory—but hardly the only one. The news media, career bureaucrats, intellectuals and educators, the entertainment industry, and any insufficiently supportive Republican were all dependable targets.

This war was unrelenting, but achieved few victories outside the bounds of the Republican Party (where Trump's influence and threats were most effective at punishing dissenters). Trump's critics spent the past four years feeling sad, angry, offended, and even fearful about the potential destruction of American democracy. But it's hard to make the case that their political or cultural power was weaker at the end of his presidency than it was at the beginning.

Trump succeeded in preventing Hillary Clinton from leading the country, but he wound up empowering Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer instead. He railed against liberal elites who predominate within social institutions like universities, media organizations, and technology companies, but his time in office only saw a continued progression of leftward cultural change in American society and a parallel departure of highly-educated voters from the Republican Party. The conservative intellectual project has not suffered as much damage in many decades as it did over the past four years; conservative thinkers and writers were internally divided into pro- and anti-Trump factions, were exposed as holding a limited ability to speak for the conservative mass public, and were deprived by Trump's behavior of a precious claim to moral superiority over the left. And the fact that the Trump administration is leaving office complaining of being "silenced" and "canceled" by a multi-platform social media ban imposed on its leader is evidence enough of its lack of success in gaining influence over the tech sector.

A final, inadvertently-acknowledged testimony to the failure of the Trump administration was its prevailing communication style. Both the outgoing president and his succession of spokespeople stood out for two distinctive traits: a lack of commitment to factual accuracy and a perpetually grouchy demeanor. The typical public statement from this White House was a misleading claim delivered with a sarcastic sneer. Of course, no member of the administration would admit on the record that the Trump presidency was anything less than a parade of unparalleled triumphs. But it doesn't make sense to lie so much unless the truth isn't on your side, and there's no good reason to act so aggrieved all the time if you're really succeeding as much as you claim.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, January 20, 2021 11:25 AM

And so the piece of shit leaves in disgrace.

Let the record show that Trump leaves office as the least popular president of all time.

Melania is likewise the least liked first lady in all of history. May they both be as miserable as they've made the world.

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Wednesday, January 20, 2021 12:51 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
And so the piece of shit leaves in disgrace.

Let the record show that Trump leaves office as the least popular president of all time.

Melania is likewise the least liked first lady in all of history. May they both be as miserable as they've made the world.

Where I am from, Texas, Trump is popular enough to be reelected and only a quarter of Republicans think he lost. According to them, Biden stole the election and is NOT the President.

Where your enemies are at their weakest, that is where you attack. Democrats ought to attack Trump's tax returns and his lying about the election and his part in encouraging violence against Democrats during a riot. If the Democrats decide to "let the nation heal" or whatever the fancy catchphrase is for withdrawing from battle and craving peace, Trump or somebody worse will be back in 2022, kicking the Democrats to death in Texas. Fight the GOP bravely now or it will return stronger, dumber and more vicious than ever, maybe with a few Federal buildings blown up and political assassinations along their way back into complete power over the nation rather than the 50/50 split America has at this second.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, January 20, 2021 9:44 PM

JO753

rezident owtsidr

Quote:
Originally posted by second: But it doesn't make sense...

For them, nothing haz to make sens.

To me, thats the main take away for the entire Republican party. Trump just took it to another level.

I hav several 'conservativ' frendz. Every wun uv them will deny being Republicanz, claiming they only vote for them to oppoze the Democrats. They all deny watching Fox or getting their info from any rite wing sours you name.

If confronted by an obvious undeniable lie or lojikl contradiction by Trump or any GoP, they rezort to wutaboutizm or chanje the subject or stop tokking.

----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early

The real solution: https://fundrazr.com/71jIY1?ref=ab_f9ZUS0

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Wednesday, January 20, 2021 9:46 PM

JO753

rezident owtsidr

A breif summary:

----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early

The real solution: https://fundrazr.com/71jIY1?ref=ab_f9ZUS0

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Thursday, January 21, 2021 6:31 AM