REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

A thread for Democrats Only

POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Wednesday, March 13, 2024 08:08
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Thursday, December 13, 2018 9:30 AM

SECOND

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


Trump recently agreed to a defense budget of $750 billion for the coming year, reversing his plans to shrink a $716 billion defense budget allocated in 2019 that he thought was too much money, calling it "crazy."

Trump's decision came out of a meeting with Sen. James Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, the chairman of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, along with Defense Secretary James Mattis and the chairman of the House Armed Services committee, Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas.

A week after the meeting, Inhofe purchased thousands of dollars in defense stock after successfully pushing the Trump administration for more Defense Department spending.

www.cnn.com/2018/12/12/politics/james-inhofe-purchase-raytheon-stock/i
ndex.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, December 13, 2018 11:19 PM

JO753

rezident owtsidr


I bet he wuz counting on the nonstop hurricane uv corruption blasting outa the Wite House to keep anybody frum notising.

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

http://www.7532020.com .

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Friday, December 14, 2018 8:20 AM

SECOND

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


The billionaire founders of Microsoft, Google, Tesla, and Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson see a future where Americans work far-far fewer than 40 hours per week and 50 weeks per year because of high tech making work easier.

None of the billionaires predicted what decade that future arrives.
www.cnbc.com/2018/12/13/richard-branson-the-9-to-5-workday-and-5-day-w
ork-week-will-die-off.html


The billionaires also see the Federal government making Americans' take-home pay higher-and-higher despite working far fewer hours. I think the GOP will fight against that high pay future as the GOP fights in the present against higher minimum wages.

If you google 'Does the GOP oppose raising the minimum wage?' you will find all the highly imaginative ways the GOP fights against it, but you will also find that even Democratic voters in the upper 50% of incomes are not willing to pay much more, either. The higher income Democratic voters start feeling very uncomfortable with the idea of people who now work in jobs that pay minimum wage getting pay increases that move these people into the lower range of the middle-class.

On a personal note, my mother was paying for a home health care worker who was making minimum wage. That is all my mother was willing to pay. I secretly paid the worker an extra $700 per week, totally unconnected to what my mother paid. The worker was instructed to absolutely NOT let my mother know. I also had the worker's 21 year old Toyota Camry repaired, too. It was leaking oil all over my mother's driveway. Her speedometer was repaired because it always read zero MPH and the worker was getting speeding tickets she could not afford. Fixed the CV joints, A/C, heater, radio, broken door handles, windows that won't roll up, even bought hubcaps for it. And I kept paying $700 per week until the worker died. She was in almost as bad health as my mother, dying at 59, 13 months after my mother.


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, December 15, 2018 5:32 AM

JO753

rezident owtsidr


Youre a good guy. Thanks for existing.

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

http://www.7532020.com .

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Saturday, December 15, 2018 8:32 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:

Originally posted by JO753:
Youre a good guy. Thanks for existing.

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

http://www.7532020.com .

What is fascinating about Democrats who are in the upper 50% of income brackets is that they don’t want to pay much more than the minimum. The woman who cared for my mother used the nickname "Surely" because you could depend on her. The day Surely died, she was getting ready to look after two rich little old ladies. The ladies were living in the same house and were paying Surely just $2 more per hour than minimum wage, but Surely was doing twice as much work because there were two ladies. The rich ladies believed it was perfectly fair to work a woman to death because a Surely is easy to replace.

The two old ladies were not interested in coming to Surely’s funeral or helping to pay for it. That would have been an unnecessary expense that they did not want to take upon themselves. That is why many things don’t make it out of Congress. Some large percentage of voters don’t want to pay. Both the GOP and Democratic politicians know that about their voters in the upper 50% income brackets. The Democrats just don’t have as many voters in the upper 50%, so the Democratic politicians are more inclined to do something about raising the minimum wage, but not too much higher or else there will be a backlash -- from your own voters resenting the higher cost.

www.cnbc.com/2018/12/11/house-democrats-will-push-for-15-per-hour-fede
ral-minimum-wage.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, December 15, 2018 9:26 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by JO753:
Youre a good guy. Thanks for existing.

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

http://www.7532020.com .



lol

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Sunday, December 16, 2018 6:25 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:

Originally posted by JO753:
Youre a good guy. Thanks for existing.

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

http://www.7532020.com .



lol

Do Right, Be Right. :)

6ix, I wouldn't give you even a dollar. I did it because I liked "Surely". You better pray that in a few years from now Elizabeth Warren eventually succeeds over the objections of every GOP Senator and Trump. That is your only hope for more dollars.

Top House Democrats join Elizabeth Warren’s push to fundamentally change American capitalism.
www.vox.com/2018/12/14/18136142/pocan-lujan-warren-accountable-capital
ism-act


The proposal would have drastic consequences, redistributing trillions of dollars from rich executives and shareholders to the middle class — but without involving a penny in taxes.

The plan starts from the premise that corporations that claim the legal rights of personhood should be legally required to accept the moral obligations of personhood.

“Throughout our country’s history, the well-being of our workers has been directly linked to the prosperity we have achieved as a nation,” Luján says, but that’s changed somewhat in recent decades as corporate managers have had a singular devotion to enriching shareholders.

The core idea of the Accountable Capitalism Act is to alter that balance of interests in corporate decision-making. Luján argues that “Elevating the voices of workers in our corporate boardrooms will help restore balance in our economy.”

The Accountable Capitalism Act focuses on how to prioritize workers in the American economic system while leaving businesses as the primary driver of it.

The legislation would sharply reduce the huge financial incentives that entice CEOs to flush cash out to shareholders rather than reinvest in businesses. Warren wants to curb corporations’ political activities. And for the biggest corporations, she and her co-sponsors are proposing a dramatic step that would ensure workers and not just shareholders get a voice on big strategic decisions.

The hope is that this will spur a return to greater corporate responsibility and bring back some other aspects of the more egalitarian era of American capitalism post-World War II: more business investment, more meaningful career ladders for workers, more financial stability, and higher pay.

And as much as accountable capitalism is about curbing inequality, it’s fundamentally about saving capitalism itself.

. . .

My late grandfather, who was an old-line communist in his day, used to tell me with mixed admiration and regret that FDR had saved capitalism by entrenching institutions that guaranteed broadly shared prosperity. Those institutions, fundamentally, are what was undone in the shareholder value revolution.

Warren and her new allies are betting is that at a time when the political right is increasingly not even bothering to pretend to offer economic solutions anymore, America can pull off the same trick a second time — offering the public not a huge new expansion of government programs, but a revival of the midcentury stakeholder capitalism that once built a middle class so prosperous that the idea of surging mass interest in socialism was unthinkable.

More at www.vox.com/2018/12/14/18136142/pocan-lujan-warren-accountable-capital
ism-act


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, December 17, 2018 6:20 AM

SECOND

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


It’s a Wonderful Life is parodied as
It’s a Wonderful Trump, a world where Trump lost to Hillary.

The real Trump was offended. He may sue for defamation and libel!
(But probably not, once he talks to a competent lawyer, not Rudy Giuliani.)

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
A REAL scandal is the one sided coverage, hour by hour, of networks like NBC & Democrat spin machines like Saturday Night Live. It is all nothing less than unfair news coverage and Dem commercials. Should be tested in courts, can’t be legal? Only defame & belittle! Collusion?
5:58 AM - 16 Dec 2018
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1074302851906707457



The cameo that seemed to really get under the real Trump’s skin was Stiller’s Michael Cohen, who as well as being in unusually high spirits in this alternate reality, rattled off (now ironic) affirmations of their “close” relationship. “I would never ever flip on you,” said alternate-reality-Cohen, who in this reality flipped on Trump and then did an interview about it. “You’re my best friend.”

“And since it's Christmas,” Stiller said meaningfully. “I just wanna say that you taught me everything I know. Every single thing I’ve done is because you directed me to do it.”

The Cohen jokes seemed to really affect the president, who tweeted:

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Remember, Michael Cohen only became a “Rat” after the FBI did something which was absolutely unthinkable & unheard of until the Witch Hunt was illegally started. They BROKE INTO AN ATTORNEY’S OFFICE! Why didn’t they break into the DNC to get the Server, or Crooked’s office?
6:39 AM - 16 Dec 2018
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1074313153679450113

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, December 18, 2018 11:06 AM

SECOND

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


What Does the 2018 Vote Say About 2020?

www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/12/what-does-the-2018-vote-say-abo
ut-2020
/

If Democrats nominate someone who’s nothing more than as popular as the average Democrat, they’ll probably win the White House. If you convert the votes for the 2018 election into the equivalent number of Electoral College votes, Democrats get 314. They only need 270 to win.

Trump was something of a fluke and Republicans know perfectly well they can't keep winning the Presidency. It’s true that a lot of people have been saying this for a long time, and it’s continued not to come true. So why should it come true now? That’s simple: Trump has now irreparably identified Republicans as the party of white racism. It’s hard for me to see him winning in 2020. Somehow the GOP needs to reinvent themselves as a conservative party sans racism, and that’s going to take more than the next two years.

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, December 19, 2018 7:15 AM

SECOND

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


A new theory for why Republicans and Democrats see the world differently

www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/12/18/18139556/republicans-democr
ats-partisanship-ideology-philosophy-psychology-marc-hetherington


“Of the many factors that make up your worldview, one is more fundamental than any other in determining which side of the divide you gravitate toward: your perception of how dangerous the world is. Fear is perhaps our most primal instinct, after all, so it’s only logical that people’s level of fearfulness informs their outlook on life.”

That’s political scientists Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler, writing in their book Prius or Pickup, which marshals a massive trove of survey data and experimental evidence to argue that the roots of our political divides run deep. Our political divisions, they say, aren’t about policy disagreements, or even demographics. They’re about something more ancient in how we view the world.

Hetherington and Weiler call these worldviews, “fixed” versus “fluid.” The fixed worldview “describes people who are warier of social and cultural change and hence more set in their ways, more suspicious of outsiders, and more comfortable with the familiar and predictable.” People with a fluid worldview, by contrast, “support changing social and cultural norms, are excited by things that are new and novel, and are open to, and welcoming of, people who look and sound different.”

What’s happened in recent decades, they argue, is that politics in general, and our political parties in particular, have reorganized around these worldviews, adding a new, and arguably irreconcilable, difference into our political divisions.

The ideological conflict that used to divide the parties was the size of government. The Democrats said bigger, the Republicans said smaller. Importantly, most Americans didn’t have intense commitments on this question. In addition, party elites could compromise across it. Hence, the political conflict spawned by it wasn’t rancorous most of the time.

That changed in the late 20th century, accelerating into the present day. The dividing line between the parties was no longer a philosophy about governing (a political ideology — more or less government). It evolved into differences in philosophy about life (a worldview — is the world a basically safe place to explore, or is it a dangerous snake pit to hunker down against).

If you think the world is dangerous, safety is always the No. 1 concern. When it comes to physical safety, letting your guard down against adversaries could be disastrous.

A worldview isn’t an identity. It is a way of understanding the nature of the world. Is it safe or dangerous? Should we protect traditional ways of doing things, or is it safe to challenge them?

Today’s political acrimony results from Americans’ worldviews becoming married to their partisanship. Because people’s worldviews organize their whole life — not just the political part of it — a party identity defined by them produces intense conflict. Opposing worldviews have always existed in America (and probably since humans have been around). What is new is that they are now mapped neatly onto Americans’ party identities.

Evidence is everywhere. The clear theme of the 2016 GOP convention was that life in 21st-century American is perilous. “American carnage” was central to Trump’s inaugural. His recent statement on standing with Saudi Arabia literally began with, “The world is a very dangerous place!”

Much more at www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/12/18/18139556/republicans-democr
ats-partisanship-ideology-philosophy-psychology-marc-hetherington


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, December 20, 2018 8:26 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
6ix, I wouldn't give you even a dollar.



I wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire. Let's call it even.

Quote:

You better pray that in a few years from now Elizabeth Warren eventually succeeds over the objections of every GOP Senator and Trump. That is your only hope for more dollars.



Pocahotmess is a laughing stock. I don't need any dollars. She can use them for another DNA test, or whatever that liar wants to do with them.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, December 20, 2018 9:09 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:

Originally posted by second:
6ix, I wouldn't give you even a dollar.



I wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire. Let's call it even.

But Trump would piss on those fighting for him. Trump got tired of his Kurdish partners in Syria:

The U.S. military is preparing to withdraw its forces from Syria, people familiar with the matter said Wednesday, a move that marks an abrupt reversal of the American military strategy in the Middle East.

The move follows a call last week between President Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has threatened to launch an assault on America’s Kurdish partners in Syria. Mr. Erdogan steadfastly opposed the American partnership with Kurdish forces in Syria that he views as a terrorist force intent on destabilizing Turkey. But the U.S. has relied on the Kurdish forces as the most effective fighting force in Syria against Islamic State, which has been pushed to the brink of defeat.

Now that Trump has used the Kurds to accomplish his own goals, he is leaving them to Erdogan’s tender mercies.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1075397797929775105

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, December 21, 2018 7:17 AM

SECOND

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


www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/So-now-you-re-raising
-eyebrows-at-Trump-13482278.php


The Constitution is very clear: Congress — and only Congress — has the power to declare war. It hasn’t formally declared war since World War II. Since then, it has sometimes used phrases like the “authorization of military force,” and other times presidents have acted unilaterally, invoking U.N. resolutions or really almost nothing at all. To the extent that Congress has complained, the outrage has usually been partisan. Congressional Democrats hate it when Republican presidents don’t get their approval, and vice versa.

The so-called war on terror, well into its 18th year, is a sprawling enterprise around the globe, tenuously justified by constitutionally flimsy pronouncements by Congress. The Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists passed after 9/11 doesn’t cover ISIS in Syria (or Africa, or the Philippines, or cyberspace).

The president basically has carte blanche to wage war — and retreat from it — without any real congressional sanction. President Barack Obama invaded Syria without congressional authorization. President Trump ramped up that war without congressional authorization. And now he wants to pull out without congressional authorization.

War is just the most grave and appalling example of bipartisan congressional cowardice. Congress gave the president almost unilateral authority over trade decades ago, even though the Commerce Clause gives Congress total authority over trade, both foreign and domestic. I understand why many support the president’s trade policies toward China, but why Congress yawned as the president invoked national security threats to wage trade wars with Canada or the EU is a different matter.

Again, this isn’t about Trump. Congress has been surrendering vast swaths of its constitutional authority to the president, to the courts and to a permanent bureaucracy for a century. Indeed, critics of the Mueller probe have a point when they complain that the executive branch should not be conducting what is in effect an impeachment inquiry. We’ve stumbled into this bizarre situation because Congress handed over much its oversight of the presidency to the Department of Justice and the FBI.

The Founders never imagined that Congress would just give away so much of its power. James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 48 that Congress would always be “extending the sphere of its activity and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex.”

While the problem has been worsening for generations, the era of cable television and social media has put the trend into overdrive. The legislative branch is often little more than a peanut gallery — a parliament of pundits — full of people who use their office as a way to get on TV or as a stepping stone to a presidential bid.

Schools often teach that we have three “co-equal” branches of government. But that’s not what the Constitution established. Congress is the first and supreme branch of government, with the power to declare war, write laws, create all of the courts save the Supreme Court, and raise taxes.

We don’t live in that Constitutional system. We live in a constitutional-ish one.

www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/So-now-you-re-raising
-eyebrows-at-Trump-13482278.php


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, December 22, 2018 12:15 PM

SECOND

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


Hundreds of government people who had prepared to brief the incoming Trump administration sat waiting. A day became a week and a week became a month … and no one showed up. The parking spots that had been set aside for Trump’s people remained empty, and the briefing books were never opened. You could walk into almost any department of the US government and hear people asking the same question: where were these Trump people who were meant to be running the place?

The department of agriculture was an excellent case study. The place had an annual budget of $164bn and was charged with so many missions critical to the society that the people who worked there played a drinking game called Does the Department of Agriculture Do It? Someone would name a function of government, say, making sure that geese don’t gather at US airports, and fly into jet engines. Someone else would have to guess whether the agriculture department did it. (In this case, it did.) Guess wrong and you had to drink. Among other things, the department essentially maintained rural America, and also ensured that the American poor and the elderly did not starve. Much of its work was complicated and technical – and yet for the months between the election and the inauguration, Trump people never turned up to learn about it. Only on inauguration day did they flood into the building, but the people who showed up had no idea why they were there or what they were meant to do. Trump sent, among others, a long-haul truck driver, a telephone company clerk, a gas company meter reader, a country club cabana attendant, a Republican National Committee intern and the owner of a scented candle company. One of the CVs listed the new appointee’s only skill as “a pleasant demeanor”.

All these people had two things in common. They were Trump loyalists. And they knew nothing whatsoever about the job they suddenly found themselves in. A new American experiment was underway.

More at www.theguardian.com/news/2018/sep/27/this-guy-doesnt-know-anything-the
-inside-story-of-trumps-shambolic-transition-team


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, December 24, 2018 7:55 AM

SECOND

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


Houston Texas Republicans grapple with changing electorate after disastrous November

www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Harris-Cou
nty-Republicans-grapple-with-changing-13487934.php


Drubbed. Shellacked. Whooped. Walloped. Routed.

However you want to describe November’s midterm election, it was disastrous for Harris County Republicans. They were swept from the remaining countywide posts they held — the other shoe to drop after Democrats booted the Republican sheriff and district attorney two years ago — and lost all 55 judicial seats on the ballot. For the first time in decades, Democrats will hold a majority of Commissioners Court.

The path forward for the local GOP is unclear. The party’s statewide slate went undefeated yet rebuked by Harris County voters, raising questions about whether its pitch to rural voters alienated urban ones. In the state’s most populous county, and his home base, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz got just 41 percent of the vote.

“Pendulums will swing back,” Republican Party Chairman Paul Simpson said. “I’m confident in the near future, we’ll be back.”

Scholars and Ed Emmett, the county executive for 11 years before his upset loss, offered a less rosy assessment — that of a party catering to a largely white, graying base that is failing to adapt to changing demographics and awaiting the return of a “normal” electorate that has ceased to exist. November 2018 should be a wake-up call, they say, but they wonder if the local Republican Party is listening.

“If you look at ’18 as a turning point for Harris County, there’s nothing data-wise that would give you any indication this was an aberration and not a structural change,” said Jay Aiyer, who teaches political science at Texas Southern University. “If anything, you could see it actually swinging harder to the Democrats in ’22.”

Mark Jones, who studies Texas politics at Rice University, offered a more tepid view. He said the broad unpopularity of President Donald Trump drove some voters to the polls this fall who may not have participated otherwise.

“If you take Trump out of the equation and put in a more liberal Democrat … it’s not clear to me that Democrats have the same level of advantage,” Jones said.

Emmett, who narrowly lost his bid for re-election despite outperforming every other countywide and statewide Republican on the Harris County ballot, said he wants to pull the local GOP toward the center.

He said he finds irony in the don’t-let-Texas-become-California applause line that Senator Ted Cruz, Lt. Governor Dan Patrick and other Republicans used in their campaigns. Emmett warns the Texas GOP is repeating the mistakes of California Republicans in the 1990s, who adopted a hardline stance on issues such as immigration as the state diversified, to disastrous results.

In 1996, the California party controlled five of seven statewide offices and 19 seats in Congress. Now it has zero statewide elected officials and just seven congressional seats.

Emmett warned that Texas Republicans are running out of time to expand their base to include more young and nonwhite voters, and make inroads in cities where voters increasingly are turned off by their message.

“If we don’t do something by 2022, this state’s Democrat,” he said.

More at www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Harris-Cou
nty-Republicans-grapple-with-changing-13487934.php


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, December 24, 2018 1:42 PM

JO753

rezident owtsidr


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Hundreds of government people who had prepared to brief the incoming Trump administration sat waiting. A day became a week and a week became a month … and no one showed up.

More at www.theguardian.com/news/2018/sep/27/this-guy-doesnt-know-anything-the
-inside-story-of-trumps-shambolic-transition-team




Scary, but it makes sens - If youre job iz to tear it down, you dont need to learn much about it.

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

http://www.7532020.com .

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Tuesday, December 25, 2018 8:50 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:

Originally posted by JO753:

Scary, but it makes sens - If youre job iz to tear it down, you dont need to learn much about it.

It also could be that Trump voters prefer doing something passive and easy on their brains, like Trump prefers:

An Isolated Trump is Reportedly Watching More TV Than Ever and Often Starts His Day at 11

President Donald Trump increasingly feels like it’s him against the world. And he has fewer and fewer people at his side who he can trust. In a devastating New York Times piece, Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman write that the commander in chief is increasingly feeling isolated and paranoid. As a result, he is retreating to spending time alone, which means he is watching more television than ever. What has euphemistically long been known as “executive time” is lasting longer. Whereas Trump’s first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, used to make a point of forcing him to have his first meetings at 9 or 9:30 a.m., that has now slid back “to roughly 11 many mornings.” The commander in chief doesn’t just watch television in the residence for hours though, he also leaves Fox News while in the West Wing so he can always keep track of what is being said about him.

More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/12/isolated-trump-more-tv-tha
n-ever-and-a-day-that-often-doesnt-start-until-11.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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Tuesday, December 25, 2018 8:51 AM

SECOND

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


"This is Donald Trump's Republican Party," Sen. Claire McCaskill said. "Make no mistake about it."

As she sat back in her chair in the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee's hearing room, where she served as the ranking Democrat, she said of Trump, "I mean, he's almost the master of, 'I'm going to do so much stuff that's crazy that nobody notices crazy anymore.' "

One instance, she cited, in particular was when the rapper Kanye West spouted off on a wild, profanity-laced tirade in the Oval Office -- all in front of the television cameras.

"I mean, Kanye West was in the Oval Office M-F---ing on live TV," McCaskill said, seemingly perplexed. "I mean, think about that. That is crazy weird. Can you imagine would have happened if that happened during the Obama years? . . . The lid would have blown off this place."

She added: "I think Fox News Channel would have gone up in some kind of spontaneous combustion, had that happened (during the Obama years). But it happens under Trump and it's like, well, just another day at the office. So there is a numbing that's gone on, that some of the craziest stuff that he says and does is not as noticeable because there's so much of it."

www.cnn.com/2018/12/24/politics/mccaskill-exit-interview/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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Tuesday, December 25, 2018 9:49 AM

JO753

rezident owtsidr


MeRE KRISMIS, eVREBUDE!
http://www.nqalf.com/KaPNHOBO.html

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

http://www.7532020.com .

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Tuesday, December 25, 2018 10:16 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/So-now-you-re-raising
-eyebrows-at-Trump-13482278.php


The Constitution is very clear: Congress — and only Congress — has the power to declare war. It hasn’t formally declared war since World War II. Since then, it has sometimes used phrases like the “authorization of military force,” and other times presidents have acted unilaterally, invoking U.N. resolutions or really almost nothing at all. To the extent that Congress has complained, the outrage has usually been partisan. Congressional Democrats hate it when Republican presidents don’t get their approval, and vice versa.

The so-called war on terror, well into its 18th year, is a sprawling enterprise around the globe, tenuously justified by constitutionally flimsy pronouncements by Congress. The Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists passed after 9/11 doesn’t cover ISIS in Syria (or Africa, or the Philippines, or cyberspace).

The president basically has carte blanche to wage war — and retreat from it — without any real congressional sanction. President Barack Obama invaded Syria without congressional authorization. President Trump ramped up that war without congressional authorization. And now he wants to pull out without congressional authorization.

War is just the most grave and appalling example of bipartisan congressional cowardice. Congress gave the president almost unilateral authority over trade decades ago, even though the Commerce Clause gives Congress total authority over trade, both foreign and domestic. I understand why many support the president’s trade policies toward China, but why Congress yawned as the president invoked national security threats to wage trade wars with Canada or the EU is a different matter.

Again, this isn’t about Trump. Congress has been surrendering vast swaths of its constitutional authority to the president, to the courts and to a permanent bureaucracy for a century. Indeed, critics of the Mueller probe have a point when they complain that the executive branch should not be conducting what is in effect an impeachment inquiry. We’ve stumbled into this bizarre situation because Congress handed over much its oversight of the presidency to the Department of Justice and the FBI.

The Founders never imagined that Congress would just give away so much of its power. James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 48 that Congress would always be “extending the sphere of its activity and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex.”

While the problem has been worsening for generations, the era of cable television and social media has put the trend into overdrive. The legislative branch is often little more than a peanut gallery — a parliament of pundits — full of people who use their office as a way to get on TV or as a stepping stone to a presidential bid.

Schools often teach that we have three “co-equal” branches of government. But that’s not what the Constitution established. Congress is the first and supreme branch of government, with the power to declare war, write laws, create all of the courts save the Supreme Court, and raise taxes.

We don’t live in that Constitutional system. We live in a constitutional-ish one.

www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/So-now-you-re-raising
-eyebrows-at-Trump-13482278.php


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



Every once in a while Second is good for posting a worthwhile article and/or opinion piece.

This is one of those times.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Wednesday, December 26, 2018 12:48 PM

SECOND

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


Did a Queens Podiatrist Help Donald Trump Avoid Vietnam? YES!

It is a long story about Fred Trump paying off doctors with reduced rent on offices and their apartments in exchange for the doctors keeping Donald Trump out of Vietnam by lying on documents signed by the doctors.

More at www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/did-a-queens-podiatrist-help-donald-tr
ump-avoid-vietnam/ar-BBRropb


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, December 28, 2018 10:33 AM

SECOND

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


Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez is setting a kind of cover charge to get onstage for the Democratic presidential primary debates, but not just any money will do. In addition to the usual polling metrics required to join the debate, candidates will also have to meet a to-be-determined criteria for “grassroots fundraising.”

It will force potential billionaire self-funders like Michael Bloomberg, Tom Steyer, and Howard Schultz can’t just flash their own cash and buy their way onstage.

This is a remarkable decision for any political party, and it reflects a growing shift in how campaigns are run and won.

More at https://theintercept.com/2018/12/27/dnc-primary-grassroots-fundraising/

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, December 30, 2018 9:08 AM

SECOND

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


Deciphering the Patterns in Trump’s Falsehoods
www.msn.com/en-us/news/factcheck/deciphering-the-patterns-in-trump’s-f
alsehoods/ar-BBRz0ft


Mr. Trump refuses to correct most of his inaccurate claims, instead asserting them over and over again. They become, by sheer force of repetition, “alternative facts” and staples of his campaign rallies and speeches.

Examples abound. He has misleadingly said over 90 times that his promised wall along the southern border is being built (construction has not begun on any new section). He has falsely accused Democrats of supporting “open borders” over 60 times (Democratic lawmakers support border security, but not his border wall). There are many more examples.

Yet Mr. Trump does not rely on repetition alone. He also embellishes talking points to amplify his achievements.

Take his repeated fabrication about the construction of new steel mills. After his administration announced tariffs on steel and aluminum imports in March, the president claimed in June that United States Steel was “opening six new plants.” A month later, the number rose to seven. He has also occasionally cited eight, possibly nine or a vague “many plants,” and he claimed once that plants were “opening up literally on a daily basis.” To date, United States Steel has yet to open or build even one new plant.

Inventing Straw Men

The usual target of this particular strain of falsehoods is the news media, which Mr. Trump suggests purposely underestimates or misinterprets him.

Mr. Trump often lauds strong job growth under his watch and says that the “fake news” would have deemed such numbers “impossible” or “ridiculous” during the 2016 campaign. Yet he neglects to mention that the number of jobs added in the 22 months after his inauguration — 4.2 million — is lower than the 4.8 million jobs added in the 22 months before he took office, undermining the premise of his retrodiction.

More at www.msn.com/en-us/news/factcheck/deciphering-the-patterns-in-trump’s-f
alsehoods/ar-BBRz0ft


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 4, 2019 7:50 AM

SECOND

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


Chapter 4. "Selling A Failing Foreign Policy" from The Hell of Good Intentions: America's Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy, 2018
www.amazon.com/Hell-Good-Intentions-Americas-Foreign/dp/0374280037/

According to the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, for example, there were forty-seven Islamic terrorist attacks in Western countries between 2012 and 2016. These attacks killed 269 people, more than half of them in a single attack in a Paris nightclub in November 2015. By comparison, roughly fifteen thousand Americans are murdered each year by guns, yet the federal government does little to address the problem, even in the wake of such mass shootings as the Sandy Hook massacre in December 2012 or the slaughter of fifty-eight concertgoers in Las Vegas in October 2017. Lightning strikes and bathroom accidents take more American lives than terrorism, yet no politician is declaring a War on Thunderstorms or announcing a National Campaign against Slippery Tile.

To say that government officials, think tank experts, and assorted interest groups inflate threats is not to say that the United States faces no dangers or to imply that hostile powers cannot affect U.S. interests. However, overstating the dangers they pose is still costly when it distracts U.S. leaders from other problems or leads them to act in ways that make the problem worse.

“OUR ENEMIES ARE HOSTILE, IRRATIONAL, AND IMPOSSIBLE TO DETER”

In addition to exaggerating enemy capabilities, threat inflators typically describe potential enemies as irrevocably hostile, irrational, and impossible to deter, which in turn implies that they must be removed. In the run-up to the Iraq War, for example, the Brookings Institution senior fellow Kenneth Pollack’s influential book The Threatening Storm portrayed Saddam Hussein as an inveterate risk-taker who could not be contained — an alarmist portrait that helped convince skeptical liberals that it would be too dangerous to leave Saddam in place.

In much the same way, those who called for tougher sanctions and/or preventive war against Iran routinely portrayed its leaders as fanatical religious extremists who would welcome martyrdom and would therefore be quick to use nuclear weapons. Former CIA director R. James Woolsey described Iran’s leaders as “theocratic, totalitarian, and genocidal maniacs”; the columnist Bret Stephens (formerly of The Wall Street Journal and now at The New York Times) justified preventive war by describing Iran as a “martyrdom-obsessed, non-Western culture with global ambitions”; and Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute suggested that “it is plausible [Iran’s leaders] might believe Islamic interests make Iran’s weathering a retaliatory nuclear strike worthwhile.”

A variation on this same theme is to claim that animosity toward the United States does not arise from straightforward conflicts of interest or opposition to specific U.S. policies, but rather from a deep-seated antipathy to what America stands for. As George W. Bush famously explained after the September 11 attacks, the terrorists “hate our freedoms.” Or as he subsequently told a prime-time news conference, he was “amazed that people would hate us … because I know how good we are.” In fact, numerous independent surveys have shown that anti-Americanism around the world is largely a response to U.S. policy — not a rejection of “American values.”

Nonetheless, threat inflators still depict foreign opposition as the result of deep antipathy to America itself. This argument reinforces a key article of faith for proponents of liberal hegemony — the idea that the United States is an exceptional country that is always a force for good in the world — and implies that only misguided or evil people could possibly oppose whatever the United States does around the world. As such, insisting that opponents “hate our freedoms” conveniently absolves Washington of any responsibility for foreign hostility and implies that nothing can be done to reduce it. If America’s enemies are implacably hostile no matter what we do, the only option is to eliminate them. Or as Vice President Dick Cheney put it in 2003, “We don’t negotiate with evil; we defeat it.”

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 5, 2019 8:09 AM

SECOND

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


Chuck Lorre Productions, #594
www.chucklorre.com/index-mom.php?p=594

I’m developing a new sitcom about a guy who was raised in wealth and privilege by a cold, distant mother and a racist, moneygrubbing father. In a series of flashbacks we learn that the guy’s entire adult life has been maniacally devoted to profit, prestige and sex. No amount of money, attention and orgasms could fill his dark, empty soul. Catching up to him in present time, we’re treated to a fun-filled peek at a man who is completely lacking in moral boundaries, principles, truth and love. What he does have though, and here’s where the show might get a little silly, is an uncanny knack for sensing people’s fears and exploiting them to his favor (in the pilot episode we get to see him use this ability to gain unimaginable power). Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “How can this possibly be funny?” Not to worry. My hope is to find belly laughs in his golf game, which he cheats at, and the people around him, all of whom know right from wrong, but are utterly lacking in common decency and courage. I haven’t settled on a title yet, but I’m playing around with calling it, “Traitor Traitor, Hater Baiter!” (The exclamation point is just to jazz it up, add some energy.)

1st Aired: 27 Sept 2018

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 5, 2019 8:26 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Sounds like a story about every politician that ever lived.

I'll pass.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Saturday, January 5, 2019 9:31 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Sounds like a story about every politician that ever lived.

I'll pass.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

Trump makes claims about himself that other politicians would not dare to make. There is humor in Trump's Paul Bunyan boastfulness:



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 5, 2019 10:06 AM

REAVERFAN




Anyone who's ever dealt with a narcissist recognizes the pattern.

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Saturday, January 5, 2019 10:10 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


lol.

Look in the mirror often, don't you Reaverfan?

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Sunday, January 6, 2019 7:46 AM

SECOND

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


The War Before The War – Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul
www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/books/review/andrew-delbanco-war-before-the
-war.html


“The War Before the War” is mainly a straightforward account of events that, although familiar to professional historians, ought to be known by anyone who claims to know anything about American history.

In 1787, Southern delegates to the federal Constitutional Convention obtained a fugitive slave clause that called for (albeit vaguely) the capture and return of successful runaways. Over the following six decades, persistent slave escapes tested the ramshackle machinery put in place to halt them. In time, alarmed but emboldened Northern free blacks and their white abolitionist allies formed vigilance committees to ward off slavecatchers, while Northern legislatures began approving so-called personal liberty laws to shield the fugitives.

In 1850, responding to slaveholders’ outcries, Congress passed a Fugitive Slave Act that strengthened the federal mandate for arresting and returning escapees. In a series of shocking confrontations, antislavery Northerners intervened, either to prevent the capture of fugitives or liberate those already in custody. The uproar of these pitched battles — Delbanco’s war before the war — helped turn Northern moderates into abolitionists and temperate Southerners into fire-eaters; at its height in 1854, it prompted President Franklin Pierce to order 1,500 federal troops to escort a single fugitive in Boston named Anthony Burns back into slavery in Virginia. Enforcing the fugitive slave law put the federal government emphatically on the side of slavery over freedom, which hastened the collapse of the national political system, the rise of the antislavery Republican Party and the coming of the war.

Delbanco aims to balance his antislavery allegiances with caution about the smugness that can come with historical hindsight. In some of his earlier writings, this wariness has led him, by my taste, to be a little too charitable to revisionist interpretations that present the Civil War as a product of political failure, a catastrophe, instigated by malcontents, that a more responsible national leadership could have prevented. This view has arisen from an admixture of pacifism and an insistence on diminishing the moral as well as political disaster of slavery; and it has sometimes led its advocates to demonize the abolitionists as the chief fomenters of an unnecessary war. As Delbanco admires the abolitionists, and slights slavery’s terrors not at all, his occasional revisionist musings seem to stem from his horror at the military slaughterhouse, his wonder at whether it could have been avoided and his wariness of sanctimony, including Yankee sanctimony.

In this book, though, Delbanco sticks to viewing the war as the ghastly but necessary price for abolishing slavery — what Abraham Lincoln described in his Second Inaugural Address as cruel justice meted out by the Almighty.
www.bartleby.com/124/pres32.html
Quote:

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh."


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 7, 2019 11:35 AM

SECOND

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


In a 2005 article in Science, Princeton psychologist Alexander Todorov showed individuals two pictures side by side of competing congressional candidates and asked them to rate their competence solely based on their appearance. Their judgments, which they were capable of forming within a second, predicted with almost 70 percent accuracy which candidate went on to win the election.

“We decide very quickly whether a person possesses many of the traits we feel are important, such as likeability and competence, even though we have not exchanged a single word with them,” Todorov said at the time. “It appears that we are hard-wired to draw these inferences in a fast, unreflective way.” Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, Todorov demonstrated snap judgments carry a powerful emotional charge, as they are associated with activity in the amygdala, a primitive brain structure, the seat of the fight-or-flight response.

Jochen Menges, a lecturer in organizational behavior at the University of Cambridge, terms the emotional impact of charisma the “awestruck effect.” He came up with the concept as a doctoral student in 2008, when he traveled to Berlin to hear Barack Obama speak in the hopes he might glean some new insights about how charismatic alchemy worked. When Obama bounded onto the stage and announced he was not just a citizen of the United States, but a citizen of the world, Menges himself was taken in. For a few minutes, Menges forgot why he was there — he was taken out of himself, became a follower.

When he looked around, he was fascinated. Everything he had read on charisma implied leaders worked their magic by making people feel good emotions. But this was not an animated, energized crowd. The entire crowd seemed frozen in place, entranced. Afterward, a woman next to Menges gushed that Obama’s speech was “amazing,” “wonderful,” and “awesome.” Yet when Menges asked her to name three things she liked about the speech, she couldn’t.

More at http://nautil.us/issue/45/power/the-anatomy-of-charisma

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 7, 2019 5:22 PM

JAYNEZTOWN


and they say the Left has moved very far from centrist position, some might even say Libertarians are the truer Democrat these days, Democrats changed and became Neo-Liberal?

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Thursday, January 10, 2019 7:25 AM

SECOND

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


THE PREDATOR STATE
How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too, 2008
by James K. Galbraith

This book got under way right after Hurricane Katrina, the destruction of New Orleans, and the dispersion of several hundred thousand refugees across the American South, including to my hometown of Austin, Texas. It seemed clear immediately that Katrina had been the Chernobyl of the American system. That is, beyond the natural calamity and the human tragedy, it was—like that Soviet reactor meltdown nineteen years before—a disaster that exposed and laid bare the fallacies of an entire governing creed.

But where the Soviet creed was of central planning, ours was its polar opposite, a cult of the free market. And as I charted my way through this book, I came to realize that the relationship between actual policy in the United States and the doctrines of policy is not simple. In uncanny ways, this relationship has come to resemble its counterpart in the old Soviet Union: actual policies were (and are) in no principled way governed by official doctrine. Rather, the doctrine serves as a kind of legitimating myth—something to be repeated to schoolchildren but hardly taken seriously by those on the inside.
. . .
The catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina pointed to two types of damage. One was an erosion of capability, evinced in this case by the failure by the Army Corps of Engineers to maintain the levees protecting New Orleans to a standard sufficient to withstand a Category Three hurricane, which is all that Katrina actually was by the time it came ashore. This kind of erosion presupposes nothing about intent. It can and does happen simply because of resource constraints, misjudgments, accidents of politics, and history. We see this sort of erosion far and wide in American government, but repairing it is characteristically thought to be mainly a matter of dedication, competence, time, and money.

But Katrina, and especially the aftermath of the disaster, also illustrated a second and more serious sort of rot in the system. This I will call predation: the systematic abuse of public institutions for private profit or, equivalently, the systematic undermining of public protections for the benefit of private clients. The deformation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency into a dumping ground for cronies under the government of George W. Bush—“Heckuva job, Brownie”—captured the essence of this phenomenon. But so too does the practice of turning regulatory agencies over to business lobbies, the privatization of national security and the attempted privatization of Social Security, the design of initiatives in Medicare to benefit drug companies, and trade agreements to benefit corporate agriculture at the expense of subsistence farmers in the Third World. In each case, what we see is not, in fact, a principled conservative’s drive to minimize the state. It is a predator’s drive to divert public resources to clients and friends. This seemed to me to have become the reality underlying the myth, and the second part of the book is devoted to sketching it out.

https://1337x.to/torrent/2988114/The-Predator-State-by-James-K-Galbrai
th-EPUB
/
www.amazon.com/Predator-State-Conservatives-Abandoned-Liberals/dp/1416
56683X
/

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 10, 2019 12:08 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
and they say the Left has moved very far from centrist position, some might even say Libertarians are the truer Democrat these days, Democrats changed and became Neo-Liberal?



Yup.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, January 10, 2019 12:16 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:

Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
and they say the Left has moved very far from centrist position, some might even say Libertarians are the truer Democrat these days, Democrats changed and became Neo-Liberal?



Yup.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

Nope.

Give you something:(Joe Biden is the Hillary Clinton of 2020.
Americans want outsiders, reformers, and fresh faces, not politicians with decades of baggage.)
www.vox.com/2019/1/10/18173132/joe-biden-hillary-clinton-2020
Quote:

Trump, in debates, sensibly assailed Clinton’s record on Middle Eastern interventions.

“Take a look at Libya. Take a look at Iraq,” he said. “She gave us ISIS because her and Obama created this small vacuum. A small group came out of that huge vacuum. We should have never been in Iraq.”

In fact, Trump was significantly overstating his degree of opposition to the war. But that's neither here nor there — a well-known Iraq War supporter who, unlike Trump, was actually in the Senate at the time was very poorly positioned to argue against him. And by 2020, there’s simply no reason to do that again. Most of the party’s bench consists of people like Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar and Cory Booker, who are young enough not to have participated in the war debate in Congress.

But what’s Biden’s excuse? He was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time — the guy with privileged access to top officials in the American government and around the world. The guy who, though he surely couldn’t have stopped Bush’s folly, certainly could have warned about it.



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 13, 2019 8:07 AM

SECOND

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


The crisis of globalisation
www.socialeurope.eu/crisis-of-globalisation-mark-blyth

What were essentially national labour markets and national financial markets that were relatively closed — homogenous states that looked the same, made the same stuff and occasionally traded with each other but kept their finances separate — became one big market in the sense of integrated finance and capital movements etc.

Interesting things begin to happen:

1) The first one is labour’s ability to command its share of the surplus declines to zero. The strike becomes a meaningless weapon. Strikes decline to function — like to zero — in the western world. And you get prolonged wage stagnation, because essentially all the surplus goes to capital. There’s no reason for it not to. Labour’s ability to push up wages goes to zero.

2) But there’s also something interesting that’s happening in financial markets and product markets at the same time. It’s like the second-order effect of neoliberalism. We dumped about 17 trillion dollars—yen, euros and everything else we could get our hands on—and we’re continuing to do so in Europe through QE-type programmes, through central banks, because of the financial crisis. And the weird thing is there’s no inflation anywhere. In fact, Europe is still deflating. It hasn’t hit its 2 per cent target in almost a decade. So there’s no structural inflation, despite a massive, absolutely unprecedented monetary injection.

3) Then think about the third section, which is competitive product markets. Think about the price of a computer. Think about the price competition going on in all sectors. If you look at words called ‘mark-up’ and ‘margin data’ across firms, what you find, particularly in the US but not exclusively, is that if you’re a digital monopoly you’re making 50 per cent to 60 per cent profits. But if you’re a small or medium-sized firm and you’re in global competition, your margins are tiny, your profits are tiny and you’re very resistant to pushing up wages, because that literally could drive you out of business.

Add this all together and you’ve got a very, very strange world that we haven’t experienced before. One in which you’re going to have structurally low interest rates because there’s no inflation to combat. Then you’ve got a world in which labour markets can have full employment but it does nothing for wages, which means sustaining and perhaps making worse the inequalities that are already there. Then in product markets you have a winner-takes-all dynamic, whereby quasi-monopolists get monopoly rents and everybody else gets to return to perfect competition.

That seems, in a very abstract sense but in a very real sense, to characterise a world we haven’t been in before, and the consequences of thinking through that world are quite profound.

Question: Do you see any significant differences in how this pans out in the United States and how it pans out in Europe? What would you say is maybe specifically characteristic of the United States and what is a European thing?

Well, let’s start with the fact that Europe still has significant welfare states and welfare transfer. If you look at Ireland, for example, which is a very small unrepresentative country admittedly — because it basically lives off American FDI stocks and them being a trans-shipment point into Europe — but Ireland has a very high pre-tax Gini inequality coefficient yet comes among the lowest when they do post-taxes.

So government policy matters and Europe still has policies. It actually wants to do something on climate change. It’s finding out the distributional politics of that: in France in particular they are more tough than we thought. But there’s effective governance and an attempt to basically deal with these agendas.

In the United States you have a governing class which is utterly in denial about the challenges that it faces. So in a sense what you see in the United States is the most accelerated version of these pathologies.

Question: What can be done? If you wanted to come up or start with a policy agenda to address some of these issues, what would you do?

Go back to the story about globalisation and how it emerged. The first thing neoliberalism did, in a sense, was to globalise labour markets and thereby render labour’s ability to command its share of national income obsolete. Then you have that product-market effect, and it eats through product markets. In a sense what happened was all of the little cartel structures, corporatism in Germany — let’s think product-market coalitions, all that sort of stuff, that kept the national economy insulated, all the little rules about who could buy your stocks on the stock market etc — all of that was stripped away.

Once all that was stripped away and everything really did go global, then you’ve got a question as to what happens to the political-party structures. Because what made all those little labour-market cartels and cushy arrangements possible, what made all those product markets safe for domestic companies and all the rest of it, were the political classes that mediated that post-war compromise — that were based everywhere on either a two-party system, Labour and Conservative, or a majoritarian coalition system of the type that you have in Germany.

Now you’ve destroyed the labour-market cartels. You’ve destroyed the product-market cartels. You’ve globalised everything. What’s the point of the existing parties? They don’t really have one. They were there to stabilise structures that no longer exist. Which is why they’re strangely clueless about what’s going on.

So the thing we don’t want to do is to say: ‘Well, let’s hand it over to the technocrats. Let’s get some policies. We will have some policies.’ This was the 2016 US election. Senator Clinton had hundreds of policies. They were all ranked. You could see the Randomised Control Trials that they were scored against to prove that they worked. And we could just add them together and that was a platform. Except it’s not — because what people are crying out for is a vision, a reason to believe in something.

What they actually want is someone to explain to them why, if global warming is so important, they have to pay through their wallets, through a diesel tax, when people that own yachts seem to get off scot-free. What they need is somebody to explain to them why it is that inequality has got so out of whack and our politics is run by the very people who are sitting at the top of the pile pulling the strings of the politicians.

. . . My point is this: if you’re waiting for a bunch of superannuated, septuagenarian politicians to save your arse, start looking elsewhere.

More at www.socialeurope.eu/crisis-of-globalisation-mark-blyth

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 13, 2019 1:23 PM

JO753

rezident owtsidr


Interesting article. Alot to think about there.

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

http://www.7532020.com .

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Wednesday, January 16, 2019 7:04 AM

SECOND

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


Washington loves imaginary problems that give it an excuse for not solving an actual one.

Especially when that hypothetical is some kind of long-term issue that lets pundits and politicians flatter themselves for having the wisdom to look past what’s happening today toward what is really going to matter tomorrow. All of which is to say that it should be no surprise that the — entirely wrong! — idea that unemployment could not come down because workers simply did not have the skills needed was able to take over the policy conversation the way it did the past decade.

Now, like most successful falsehoods, this one seemed to have at least some basis in reality. It is true, after all, that American students have not done that well on international tests compared to kids in other rich countries. And it is also true that American companies have said that they can’t find enough qualified workers for all the positions they have. Couldn’t these two things be related? And, more to the point, explain why unemployment stayed so high for so long? Well, it certainly seemed that way to, among many others, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and economist Tyler Cowen, who, back in 2011, had speculated that unemployment might stay around 10 percent forever because the people who had lost their jobs during the crash allegedly lacked the skills to add any value in the marketplace.

What made this story so seductive to Washington was that it depoliticized the economy. It said that unemployment was high not because we did not have enough stimulus — which, of course, really was the case — but rather because workers did not have enough education. It was something that, whether or not you fully agreed with it, gave Democrats like President Barack Obama and Republicans like Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) a chance to come together over the most uncontroversial of issues.

There was only one problem. This was — or at least should have been — obviously wrong. Now, that’s not to say that trying to help workers keep up with the demands of an ever-changing economy is not a good idea. It is. But rather that acting like our failure to do so was a big part of the reason millions of people could not find work was as bad as ideas get. For one thing, it did not explain why people who were skilled enough to have a job in 2007 supposedly were not in 2008. And for another, it did not show up in any of the data, either. Indeed, if certain types of workers were in short supply, then the ones that existed should have seen their employment, hours, and wages all go up even in the face of the slow recovery. In other words, businesses should have been in a bidding war over them, and only them. But, as the liberal Economic Policy Institute has taken pains to point out, nothing of the sort was going on. What was happening instead was that all of these labor market indicators were falling for every profession, no matter how skilled they were. Which — surprise, surprise — is exactly what you would expect if our problem was one of inadequate demand rather than inadequate training.

None of this is hindsight bias. All of it was clear enough as it was going on. But in case it wasn’t, the fact that unemployment has now fallen to 3.9 percent is a pretty good sign that workers had enough skills all along. Unless, that is, you think it’s more likely that they mysteriously gained and lost them as economic growth went up and down.

More at www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/01/14/skills-gap-is-fixed-because
-there-was-no-skills-gap
/

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 16, 2019 8:07 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Washington loves imaginary problems that give it an excuse for not solving an actual one.



It's still early, but I nominate this sentence for post of the year.

Couldn't tell you about the rest of the post that I didn't bother reading though.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, January 17, 2019 7:45 AM

SECOND

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


Remember when Trump announced he wanted the US Government to work on a “Space Force”? Turns out, someone at Netflix thought this was the PERFECT thing to build a new series around.

Steve Carell and Greg Daniels are reuniting — but not to reboot “The Office.” The star of the workplace comedy and the creator of said workplace comedy are reteaming to bring you a new workplace comedy for Netflix called “Space Force.”
www.thewrap.com/space-force-steve-carell-greg-daniels-office-netflix-c
omedy-trump-video
/



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 17, 2019 8:13 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


That actually sounds pretty awesome.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, January 17, 2019 8:58 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

That actually sounds pretty awesome.

The Netflix version of Space Force will be a bureaucratic comedy, much like "The Office", not a drama. When I look at the real Space Force, it is a complicated bureaucratic move that will take detailed planning and coordination with groups to bring it all together (organizing is not a Trump strength):

The responsibility for space acquisitions is fragmented between approximately 60 different organizations within the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community. Within the military services, approximately 80% of the space budget is invested in the Air Force, but other components are located within the Army and Navy, including satellites and space personnel. Moreover it is reported that the classified military intelligence space budget of the National Reconnaissance Office and other intelligence agencies may rival that of the Air Force.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Force

What needs to be done does not sound like one of Trump’s strength as an administrator. He will delegate the work, but Trump doesn’t have people who can do it, unless he hires new people exclusively for Space Force:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie sees the Trump White House as a rogues' gallery of flawed people sidetracking the work of the U.S. president. Trump employs a “revolving door of deeply flawed individuals — amateurs, grifters, weaklings — who were hustled into jobs they were never suited for, sometimes seemingly without so much as a background check via Google or Wikipedia,” Christie, who was a senior adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign, says in his memoir, “Let Me Finish,” which is due to be released on Jan. 29.
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-christie/grifters-weakling
s-felons-christie-on-the-trump-white-house-idUKKCN1PB02L


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 17, 2019 9:26 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Meh... why ruin a Steve Carell vehicle with political opinion.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, January 17, 2019 11:00 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Meh... why ruin a Steve Carell vehicle with political opinion.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

Everything is politics. That is why Carell picked Space Force to lampoon, rather than another project. Politics has always been about finding the hidden motivation that the politician or the voters don’t want to talk about. Business is the same. Jack Bogle died yesterday and he was worth well below $100 million, despite once being head of Vanguard. His competitor, Edward C. Johnson 3rd, the chairman of Fidelity, is alive and worth $9.3 billion. Johnson turned over the Chairmanship of Fidelity to his daughter Abigail Johnson. She continues the looting of customers and is worth $10.3 billion, more than her daddy. Johnson 3rd got rich by organizing Fidelity to make his family rich, all the while claiming he wasn’t in it for the money, wasn’t screwing over his customers. Bogle’s wealth was more modest because his motivation, which he did not keep hidden, was building a monument to himself – he wanted to prove that he was looking after his customers, not just falsely claiming it. Bogle wanted to prove he actually understands the stock market, unlike the Johnsons, whose main talent is knowing how to legally separate suckers from their money and keep those ignoramuses coming back for more.

www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/business/john-bogle-vanguards-founder-is-to
o-worried-to-rest.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 17, 2019 11:13 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


The stock market was designed to siphon wealth off of the labor of others.

They're all scumbags.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Friday, January 18, 2019 8:14 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
The stock market was designed to siphon wealth off of the labor of others.

They're all scumbags.

Really? Retirement funds for lower middle class people are stored in the stock market because the return on investment is higher than a bank account. That retirement money is huge, it attracts sharks. The sharks are kept under control, sometimes even put in jail if you remember famous swindler Bernie Madoff, by government regulations. Who is against regulations? The GOP.

www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/regulating-economy.asp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Madoff#Investment_scandal

Vanguard’s John Bogle created more social good than any contemporary in finance
https://qz.com/1527689/
"A sub-theme of the course I teach on ethics in finance explores role models in the finance industry. They are few and far between. The challenge in discussing Bogle lies in the scale of his impact. By so effectively pressuring the asset management industry to lower its fees, he created more social good than perhaps any contemporary in the finance industry. He makes comparisons with other potential role models daunting."

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Friday, January 18, 2019 8:17 AM

SECOND

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


It’s always hard to envision the road not taken, but let’s try: Suppose there had been no Iraq War. The war wound up amplifying a central talking point of jihadist recruiters — that America is at war with Islam. (A number of anti-­American terrorists, including Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, have cited the Iraq War as motivation.) So absent the 2003 invasion, there might well have been less terrorism—especially less “homegrown” terrorism — and the electorate Trump faced might have been less freaked out, less susceptible to his fearmongering.

In fact, this alternative history lacks one distinct and large fear inducer: ISIS. Its precursor incubated amid Iraq’s post-invasion chaos before rebranding as the Islamic State and then metastasizing during the Syrian civil war. Imagine a candidate Trump who couldn’t point to ISIS — an actual territory-­occupying army that commits (and videotapes!) vivid atrocities and targets Christians — as an evil that matured on the watch of President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (and that Trump alone can conquer). Does that candidate Trump get elected?

As long as we’re imagining roads not taken: Consider Obama’s decision in 2011 to turn a bombing campaign in Libya aimed at protecting endangered civilians (which was explicitly authorized by the Security Council) into a regime-change operation (which wasn’t). After the regime collapsed, Libya became home to various terrorist groups, and weapons from its stockpiles flooded the region ­— flowing to jihadists in Africa and also, in large quantities, to jihadist rebels in Syria, as well as to more secular Syrian rebels. The rebels still lost the civil war, but not before they had used Libyan weapons to intensify it, creating more dead bodies and more refugees.

In a world with fewer Syrian refugees clamoring for passage to the US and Europe, does Trump’s proposed “Muslim ban” carry so much power? (And does the Trumpian right in Germany, France, and Italy have so much energy? Does Brexit pass?)

Again, alternative histories are speculative. But the general principle makes sense: If your policies bring instability that in turn breeds fear and hatred, then candidates who thrive on those things are more likely to get elected.

More at www.wired.com/story/trump-style-nationalism-make-globalism-great-again/

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 18, 2019 8:20 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


lol...

Do try to remember that our current "fear" of Russia was started entirely by Hillary Clinton.

This is a both-sides problem.



I have noticed that you don't seem very scared of that yourself. It's one of the defining characteristics that set you apart from some of the stooges here who can't make a single post without Russia in it.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Friday, January 18, 2019 8:40 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
lol...

Do try to remember that our current "fear" of Russia was started entirely by Hillary Clinton.

This is a both-sides problem.



I have noticed that you don't seem very scared of that yourself. It's one of the defining characteristics that set you apart from some of the stooges here who can't make a single post without Russia in it.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

The thing about connecting Trump and Russia is about making Trump look like a traitor. And a traitor he could be, if you look at his 45 year business history, there are reasons to believe he would cheat and lie and sell out for money. Russia is just a convenient stick to beat Trump with, but there is probably worse crooked deals. My favorite is that Trump owes about a half billion to the IRS in unpaid estate taxes. But to understand how he cheated the IRS is even trickier than his international connections.

". . . he received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s."
www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-tax-sc
hemes-fred-trump.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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Friday, January 18, 2019 8:45 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
lol...

Do try to remember that our current "fear" of Russia was started entirely by Hillary Clinton.

This is a both-sides problem.



I have noticed that you don't seem very scared of that yourself. It's one of the defining characteristics that set you apart from some of the stooges here who can't make a single post without Russia in it.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

The thing about connecting Trump and Russia is about making Trump look like a traitor. And a traitor he could be, if you look at his 45 year business history, there are reasons to believe he would cheat and lie and sell out for money. Russia is just a convenient stick to beat Trump with, but there is probably worse crooked deals. My favorite is that Trump owes about a half billion to the IRS in unpaid estate taxes. But to understand how he cheated the IRS is even trickier than his international connections.

". . . he received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s."
www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-tax-sc
hemes-fred-trump.html


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



A convenient stick, indeed.

I'll hold you in higher regard for realizing this. Maybe you'll reciprocate and appreciate that I noticed you don't go around Russia fearmongering either.

I'm sure there's plenty of skeletons in Trump's closet to find if you stop looking under rocks outside of Putin's mansion. We could put every single politician behind bars from here to eternity if we dug up the dirt on them.

Because, believe me, it's there. Every single time.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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