REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

A thread for Democrats Only

POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Wednesday, March 13, 2024 08:08
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Thursday, August 1, 2019 10:09 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by captaincrunch:
Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Buttigieg is right about why Democrats keep failing to pass their big plans. He said:

This is the conversation that we have been having for the last 20 years. Of course we need to get money out of politics, but when I propose the actual structural democratic reforms that might make a difference — end the Electoral College, amend the Constitution if necessary to clear up Citizens United, have DC actually be a state, and depoliticize the Supreme Court with structural reform — people look at me funny, as if this country was incapable of structural reform.



He is the clearest and least political thinker running. He thinks of Problems as things to be solved and defeated, and not "who will gain?" Trump is the exact opposite. If Trump wins we'll have 20 more years of reality tv presidents and 20 years of media over coverage. Buttigieg is the other direction.




Yeah. It's too bad the 8 of them polling lower don't drop out. He'd probably get a decent amount of the percentage of that and maybe he could get into the double digits finally.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/us/2020_democr
atic_presidential_nomination-6730.html



I think that Trump would destroy any one of them in the debates, but there's really not a need to speculate on that. There's almost zero chance that anybody but Biden is going to get the nomination. Something that I called many months ago.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Friday, August 2, 2019 6:43 AM

SECOND

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


The Democrats Need to Get Their Act Together
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-democrats-need-to-get-their-a
ct-together


I found the first two series of Democratic presidential debates painful to watch, and I don’t think it was simply the result of the format or of the questions asked. It was because in their preoccupations, I don’t think the Democratic candidates have developed the message and the language that can win the White House for the party.

Medicare for All has all the problems of past plans: it threatens higher taxes; and it comes across as another welfare program in which the middle class will have to subsidize the non-working poor….Trump’s nativist attacks against immigrants from South of the Border and his administration’s inhumane treatment of asylum seekers has had the perverse effect of pushing the Democrats toward a virtual endorsement of open borders….Senator Elizabeth Warren and several candidates, while bemoaning growing economic inequality, called for increases in legal immigration based on family reunification, which in the past has brought millions of unskilled workers into the labor market who compete for jobs with unskilled native-born and first-generation Americans.

….Trump has played upon a politics that could be described as “white supremacist.”…But in responding to Trump’s racism, Democrats have been using these terms in every other sentence – and add to that Senator Gillibrand’s high-toned blast against “white privilege.” In doing so, they are implicitly attacking not merely Trump but his past supporters and — even more important — people who are queasy about the Democrats for one reason or another. The terms also suggest that white voters have little to complain about, a message that won’t play very well in November 2020.

I also fear they think that in reiterating these terms — or in promoting reparations — the Democrats think they are courting black voters. In my experience — and I hope this won’t seem like some kind of weird racism — black adult voters are among the most sophisticated in the electorate. You could see it in Virginia after the various Democratic presidential candidates fell over each other to call for Governor Ralph Northam’s resignation for a 36 year old yearbook photo of questionable origin that had been publicized by a rightwing website angry about the governor’s stand on abortion. Virginia’s black Democrats, cognizant that Northam had not run a racist administration, or had a record of racism as a legislator, continued to back him. You see it in the continued African-American support for former Vice President Joe Biden in spite of Senator Kamala Harris’s attack against him for his decades-old stances on busing. Biden’s support might disappear, but again I think it is based currently on a reasoned assessment of who among the candidates is best equipped to get rid of Trump.

More at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-democrats-need-to-get-their-a
ct-together


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, August 2, 2019 6:58 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 like we’re living in the 19th century again:

The White House has instructed newly installed Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper to reexamine the awarding of the military’s massive cloud-computing contract because of concerns that the deal would go to Amazon, officials close to the decision-making process said….The president’s directive represents a departure from what is usually a scripted bureaucratic process. Trump on several occasions has spoken out against Amazon and its chief executive, Jeff Bezos.

….Oracle has lobbied Trump aggressively on the matter, hoping to appeal to his animosity toward Amazon as well as former defense secretary Jim Mattis, who angered the president when he resigned last year over the administration’s foreign policy decisions. Oracle Executive Vice President Ken Glueck, who runs the company’s policy shop in Washington, said he created a colorful flow chart labeled “A Conspiracy To Create A Ten Year DoD Cloud Monopoly” that portrayed connections among Amazon executives, Mattis and officials from the Obama administration. That graphic made it to Trump’s desk and led to a discussion between the president and his aides, people familiar with the matter said.

This is like a hellscape mashup of kindergarten temper tantrums with vindictive adult corruption. Trump doesn’t like the Washington Post, so he takes revenge on its owner by lashing out at Amazon and telling the Pentagon he doesn’t want them to get any big contracts. Meanwhile, the Oracle folks, obviously having taken the measure of our moron-in-chief, know exactly what buttons to push. Hell, they’re so proud of it — and so sure that Trump will never catch on — that they brag about it publicly.

www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/08/trump-takes-his-revenge-on-jeff
-bezos
/

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, August 3, 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


What if Fox News covered Trump the way it covered Obama? It would look like this:



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, August 3, 2019 7:28 AM

SECOND

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


The molten core of right-wing nationalism is the furious denial of America’s unalterably multiracial, multicultural national character

The question of who “we” are as “a people” is the central question on which we’re polarized. High-minded calls to reunite under the flag therefore tend to take a side and amount to little more than a demand for the other side’s unconditional surrender. “Agree with me, and then we won’t disagree” is more a threat than an argument.

The way the nationalist sees it, liberals always throw the first punch by “changing things.” When members of the “Great American Middle” (to use the artfully coded phrase of Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri to refer to non-urban whites) lash out in response to the provocations of progressive social change, they see themselves as patriots defending their America from internal attack.

The attackers — the nature-denying feminists, ungrateful blacks, babbling immigrants, ostentatiously wedded gays — bear full responsibility for any damage wrought by populist backlash, because they incited it by demanding and claiming a measure of equal freedom. But they aren’t entitled to it, because the conservative denizens of the fruited plain are entitled first to a country that feels like home to them. That’s what America is. So the blame for polarizing mutual animosity must always fall on those who fought for, or failed to prevent, the developments that made America into something else — a country “real Americans” find hard to recognize or love.

The practical implication of the nationalist’s entitled perspective requires submission to a vision of national identity flatly incompatible with the existence of America’s urban multicultural majority. That’s a recipe for civil war, not social cohesion.

The author of “The Virtue of Nationalism” and impresario of the “national conservatism” conference argued that America’s loss of social cohesion is because of secularization and egalitarian social change that began in the 1960s. “You throw out Christianity, you throw out the Torah, you throw out God and within two generations people can’t tell the difference between a man and a woman. They can’t tell the difference between a foreigner and a citizen. They can’t tell the difference between this side of the border and the other side of the border.”

“The only way to save this country, to bring it back to cohesion,” Mr. Hazony added, “is going to be to restore those traditions.”

Mr. Hazony gave no hint as to how this might be peacefully done within the scope of normal politics. “It’s not simple,” he eventually conceded.

More at www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/opinion/national-conservatives-republicans-
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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Saturday, August 3, 2019 11:43 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
What if Fox News covered Trump the way it covered Obama? It would look like [the way the rest of the MSM covered Obama].

FIFY



Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Saturday, August 3, 2019 11:49 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
The Democrats Need to Get Their Act Together
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-democrats-need-to-get-their-a
ct-together


I found the first two series of Democratic presidential debates painful to watch, and I don’t think it was simply the result of the format or of the questions asked. It was because in their preoccupations, I don’t think the Democratic candidates have developed the message and the language that can win the White House for the party.

Medicare for All has all the problems of past plans: it threatens higher taxes; and it comes across as another welfare program in which the middle class will have to subsidize the non-working poor….Trump’s nativist attacks against immigrants from South of the Border and his administration’s inhumane treatment of asylum seekers has had the perverse effect of pushing the Democrats toward a virtual endorsement of open borders….Senator Elizabeth Warren and several candidates, while bemoaning growing economic inequality, called for increases in legal immigration based on family reunification, which in the past has brought millions of unskilled workers into the labor market who compete for jobs with unskilled native-born and first-generation Americans.

….Trump has played upon a politics that could be described as “white supremacist.”…But in responding to Trump’s racism, Democrats have been using these terms in every other sentence – and add to that Senator Gillibrand’s high-toned blast against “white privilege.” In doing so, they are implicitly attacking not merely Trump but his past supporters and — even more important — people who are queasy about the Democrats for one reason or another. The terms also suggest that white voters have little to complain about, a message that won’t play very well in November 2020.

I also fear they think that in reiterating these terms — or in promoting reparations — the Democrats think they are courting black voters. In my experience — and I hope this won’t seem like some kind of weird racism — black adult voters are among the most sophisticated in the electorate. You could see it in Virginia after the various Democratic presidential candidates fell over each other to call for Governor Ralph Northam’s resignation for a 36 year old yearbook photo of questionable origin that had been publicized by a rightwing website angry about the governor’s stand on abortion. Virginia’s black Democrats, cognizant that Northam had not run a racist administration, or had a record of racism as a legislator, continued to back him. You see it in the continued African-American support for former Vice President Joe Biden in spite of Senator Kamala Harris’s attack against him for his decades-old stances on busing. Biden’s support might disappear, but again I think it is based currently on a reasoned assessment of who among the candidates is best equipped to get rid of Trump.

More at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-democrats-need-to-get-their-a
ct-together


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




It's too late for any of them now. Biden is going to be the "safe" choice since he's largely just kept his mouth shut while the rest of them are extolling the virtues of socialism, open borders, "free" healthcare for all that is anything but free and White Man Bad, but not as much as Orange Man Bad.

Biden is the only one even worth paying any attention to now, unless you're in it for the yucks. And he's not even saying anything. He's letting the other clowns destroy each other.

Biden's nomination is going to be the easiest nomination ever secured. And then Trump is going to destroy him.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Sunday, August 4, 2019 6:53 AM

SECOND

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


Trump’s Trade Quagmire. He keeps escalating as his strategy fails.

Why is Trump doing this? A lot of center-right apologists for Trump used to claim that he wasn’t really fixated on bilateral trade balances, which every economist knows is stupid, that it was really about intellectual property or something. I’m not hearing that much anymore; it’s increasingly clear that he is, indeed, fixated on trade balances, and believes that America runs trade deficits because other countries don’t play fair.

Strange to say, however, despite all those new tariffs the U.S. trade deficit is getting bigger, not smaller, on his watch. Why aren’t tariffs shrinking the trade deficit? Mainly the answer is that Trump’s theory of the case is all wrong. Trade balances are mainly about macroeconomics, not tariff policy.

This article, by the way, while not very technical, is going to make use of a number of charts and even a few terms of art.

To preview, I’m going to make five points:

1. The trade war is getting big. Tariffs on Chinese goods are back to levels we associate with pre-1930s protectionism. And the trade war is reaching the point where it becomes a significant drag on the U.S. economy.

2. Nonetheless, the trade war is failing in its goals, at least as Trump sees them: the Chinese aren’t crying uncle, and the trade deficit is rising, not falling.

3. The Fed probably can’t offset the harm the trade war is doing, and is probably getting less willing even to try.

4. Trump is likely to respond to his disappointments by escalating, with tariffs on more stuff and more countries, and — despite denials — in the end, with currency intervention.

5. Other countries will retaliate, and this will get very ugly, very fast.

I could, of course, be wrong. But that’s how it looks given what we know now.

More at www.nytimes.com/2019/08/03/opinion/trumps-trade-quagmire-wonkish.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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Monday, August 5, 2019 8:38 AM

SECOND

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


Bosses can fire you for your politics. The First Amendment does not apply.
Updated: Aug. 5, 2019 6:32 a.m.

The public mingling of politics and work are just a hint of what we can expect as the 2020 campaign season kicks into high gear after Labor Day. Politics will soon seep into every crevice of our lives, presenting challenges for workplace supervisors.

The first and most important lesson for every worker is that your employer has no legal obligation to respect your freedom of speech. The First Amendment does protect people from government censorship, but your boss is the undisputed dictator at work, especially in Texas.

With the 2020 races likely to raise tempers and emotions, many bosses will decide a total ban makes sense. But he or she should be prepared for the hothead who storms their office questioning whether the boss can censor speech.

“The blunt answer would be, ‘Oh, yes, I can. Get out of my office,’” said Chip Babcock, a First Amendment lawyer at Jackson Walker.

Where it becomes more disturbing is that your boss can punish you for off-duty political activities. As long an employment or union contract does not specify otherwise, Texas employers can fire any employee who engages in politics they don’t like.

“If you’re an at-will employee, and the employment action is based on the speech you give out in the community, and that’s not just a pretext or something else, then sadly the employer can terminate,” Babcock explained.

www.houstonchronicle.com/business/columnists/tomlinson/article/Bosses-
can-fire-your-for-your-politics-the-First-14188340.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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Tuesday, August 6, 2019 7:44 AM

SECOND

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


How the Republican Majority Emerged

Fifty years after the Republican Party hit upon a winning formula, President Trump is putting it at risk.

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/emerging-republican-majority
/595504
/

In July 1969, Kevin Phillips, a 28-year-old staffer in the Nixon White House and special assistant to Attorney General John Mitchell, published a book boldly titled The Emerging Republican Majority. For nearly four decades, the Democratic Party’s New Deal coalition had dominated American politics. But in the book, Phillips argued that the old order had come to an end, and that a new conservative era was in the offing.
Quote:

From now on, Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote, and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Phillips_(political_commentator)

Phillips’s projection was grounded in his assessment of recent Republican strategies. At the same time, he asserted that his analysis offered the best hope for the party’s future: pitting racial and ethnic groups against one another and capitalizing politically on the competitions and resentments that followed. “The whole secret of politics,” he told the journalist Garry Wills during the 1968 presidential campaign, is “knowing who hates who.”

Fifty years later, the GOP has come to dominate every part of the Sun Belt, just as Phillips predicted, and President Donald Trump has mobilized the politics of division in a way no modern president has before.

Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater famously declared that the GOP should “hunt where the ducks are” by writing off “the Negro vote” and pursuing southern whites instead. Capitalizing on the white southern backlash against civil rights was central to his strategy. In making federal involvement in social, cultural, and economic issues the ostensible focus of his opposition, rather than race itself, Goldwater managed to reassure the South that he would protect the status quo.

As the political scientists Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields chronicle in their new book, The Long Southern Strategy, the old “coded racism” continued, but in concert with social appeals to religious conservatism and anti-feminism. Taken together, these approaches solidified the South for the Republicans and, as a result, secured their victories in national races.

The Republican majority that emerged did so largely on the terms set forth by Phillips. Appeals to racial resentments, handled lightly, did much of the work, but the broader social issues ultimately played an even more important role. Striking a delicate balance between the two proved to be the winning strategy for the GOP.

The risk for Republicans today, of course, is that President Trump has upset this balance, rejecting old dog whistles on race for full-throated racism. Unlike Nixon, who disastrously tried such a strategy in his first midterm but then dialed it back considerably in his reelection run, Trump has doubled down on the race-based themes that failed to work in his own first midterm. In doing so, he runs the risk of reversing decades of work and rendering the Republican majority a thing of history.

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, August 6, 2019 3:12 PM

SECOND

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


Fox host: It is important to pay some people less than $30,000 a year

Stuart Varney: Democrats are “buying votes” by advocating for $15 minimum wage

The Republicans are very upset by even the idea of $15.

www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-host-it-important-pay-some-people-le
ss-30000-year


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, August 7, 2019 6:02 AM

SECOND

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


America’s nuclear-weapons policy isn’t what you think—it’s much worse
https://qz.com/1680411/us-and-russia-are-starting-another-nuclear-war/

There is a large disconnect between what Americans think our nuclear policies ought to be, and what they currently are. Trump tearing up of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty is just a reminder that the specter of nuclear war, so long ignored, is still with us.

Nuclear is back, baby.

Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama considered US reliance on nuclear deterrence to be a minor part of its overall international outlook. The Clinton administration definitely de-emphasized nukes; George W. Bush managed to cut the US nuclear warhead arsenal by half; and one of Barack Obama’s first speeches as president was about the importance of eliminating nuclear weapons.

These presidents kept the nuclear system alive, even if it wasn’t predominant. But under Trump, plans to maintain the arsenal have morphed into a grab for new hardware, new capabilities, and a return of lost prestige.

And a drive to spend, spend, spend.

There’s nothing particularly peaceful about the US’s new gadgets. The Trump administration is seeking to deploy low-yield warheads on its Trident missiles to make our nuclear threat seem less like a bluff.

But making the weapons “easier” to use might in fact encourage their use; there is no such thing as a “small” nuclear weapon in the eyes of our enemies. Every time the US pursues a program that could negate the existing offensive capabilities of other nations, they in turn are pushed to develop new offensive capabilities.

It’s a vicious cycle, and not a new one. What’s new is that Trump is pursuing it deliberately, again.

The best-case scenario is that we get out of this era without any nukes going off, having wasted our money on weapons. That means spending trillions on new systems that will likely leave the balance of power exactly where it started and creating new possibilities for things to go out of control.

If you’re a hawk, your range of emotions range from enthusiasm for these new “opportunities,” or that they are “unfortunate but necessary.” If you’re a complete dove, you go to the same old answer as before: ban the bomb. Or, if you’re a more moderate dove, you hope that future treaties and negotiations will tamp down the worst possibilities and, maybe, in the very long term, lead to a more stable world. (The hawks currently rule the roost, and may for some time now.)

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, August 7, 2019 7:06 AM

SECOND

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


Doomsday Machines
https://inference-review.com/article/striking-second-first

The best way to ensure the success of a nuclear first strike, one might assume, is to target the opposing president or leader, the individual with sole authority to press the button. In an effort to counter this vulnerability, suppose that an enemy nation has delegated the power to launch a nuclear attack to multiple people, each of whom can, under certain circumstances, also delegate that power. Suppose, moreover, that alongside this cascading structure, reprisals are launched automatically and that this task has been assigned to a computerized system. The deterrent power of this arrangement seems assured. But, suppose, finally, that the enemy nation fails to inform its rival about the existence of the automatic reprisal system. If the first nation then seeks to decapitate its adversary, it will be confronted with a thermonuclear hydra — mutual assured destruction would be inevitable.

This absurd scenario evokes the dark humor of Dr. Strangelove. In the film, the Soviets invent a Doomsday Machine that responds automatically to an American nuclear attack by detonating a network of buried nuclear bombs and rendering the earth uninhabitable for a century, but they neglect to warn the US leadership of its existence. As Martin Hellman has noted, far from being simply satire, the film could almost be considered a documentary.23 “Everything in that film,” Ellsberg has remarked, “existed as an operational reality at the time.”24

During the Cold War, neither the Americans nor the Soviets thought to let each other know that they had each developed Doomsday Machines by delegating the power to launch attacks beyond their leadership. At the height of the Cuban missile crisis, the American leaders were unaware that Soviet submarines patrolling the waters around Cuba were equipped with nuclear warheads. As a result, the Americans almost provoked nuclear attacks on several occasions by putting Soviet submarine commanders in situations in which they could have chosen to launch reprisals. Ellsberg acknowledges the lunacy of this situation. To admit to the world that a Doomsday Machine had been developed, he explains, was to risk terrifying one’s countrymen, allies, and, of course, the rest of the planet.25 This secretiveness reveals just how little importance deterrence had for the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union. And this is Ellsberg’s point. The fact that each nation did not inform the other about the existence of a deterrent is proof that deterrence was not their goal.

Ellsberg broadly defines the Doomsday Machine as

a very expensive system of men, machines, electronics, communications, institutions, plans, training, discipline, practices, and doctrine—which, under conditions of electronic warning, external conflict, or expectations of attack, would with unknowable but possibly high probability bring about the global destruction of civilization and of nearly all human life on earth.26

Rather than focusing on the dangers posed by nuclear proliferation and terrorism, widely considered the most pressing threats in the current era, Ellsberg believes that it is the American and Russian Doomsday Machines that constitute the greatest danger to humanity. These two Doomsday Machines, he writes, must be dismantled: “And that, at minimum, is what we must hasten to do.”27 Each are “susceptible to being triggered on a false alarm, a terrorist action, unauthorized launch, or a desperate decision to escalate.”28

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, August 7, 2019 3:55 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK




Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Wednesday, August 7, 2019 7:39 PM

SECOND

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


Contrary to popular opinion, Ellsberg believes that the US military has never regarded the use of nuclear weapons as a taboo — whether for threats or actual strikes. Nuclear weapons are far from the weapons of non-use suggested by the theory of deterrence. With an overwhelming array of examples, Ellsberg demonstrates that when it comes to deciding between preemption and retaliation, the former has always been preferred, and there is no reason to think that it will not triumph in the future. It turns out that the world is much more dangerous than we had imagined.

https://inference-review.com/article/striking-second-first

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, August 8, 2019 9:34 AM

SECOND

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


Seeds of fascism: Growing number of Republicans favor expanding presidential power

The share of conservative Republicans who say that presidents could deal with problems more effectively if they “didn’t have to worry so much about Congress or the courts” has doubled since March 2018. Today, about half of conservative Republicans (52%) hold this view, compared with 26% a year ago.

www.people-press.org/2019/08/07/republicans-now-are-more-open-to-the-i
dea-of-expanding-presidential-power
/

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, August 8, 2019 2:16 PM

SECOND

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


Billionaire Trump donor explains he’s in it for the tax cuts, not the racism

It’s quite plausible that multi-billionaire Stephen M. Ross is telling the truth and he legitimately does have profound disagreements with Trump over certain culture war issues. It’s just that the amount of money at stake for Ross, personally, in the question of Trump’s continuing political success is mind-boggling. That is the fundamental truth about what keeps Trump in power.

Impeachment, meaningful congressional oversight, and everything else is on hold because Trump’s presence in office serves the interests of the billionaire class.

If you want to understand what’s really happening in America in the Trump era, you could do a lot worse than read a statement provided to the press Wednesday evening by Stephen M. Ross — a rich guy who, like a lot of rich guys, enjoys spending some of his riches in order to influence public policy to make himself richer.

As a fan of turning wealth into political influence, which begets more wealth, Ross wants to see Donald Trump continue to entrench himself in office. But at the same time, like a lot of other rich guys, Ross got rich in part by selling services to the affluent masses of urban America — specifically through the upscale gym Equinox and the bicycle “cult” SoulCycle — so when news broke that Ross was hosting a Trump reelection fundraiser at his Hamptons mansion where tickets sold for up to $250,000 a pop, it damaged Ross’s brand.

In an effort to stave off criticism, Ross told the press that he has “known Donald Trump for 40 years” and that “while we agree on some issues, we strongly disagree on many others.” He didn’t explain which issues were which.

Billionaires benefit enormously from Trump

It’s interesting that though Ross is willing to support Trump’s reelection bid in material ways, he doesn’t seem particularly inclined to tell us what the issues are on which he agrees with the president.

The issue on which Ross agrees with Trump is likely taxes. Ross has an estimated net worth of $7.7 billion. And while you might think that part of the pleasure of having $7.7 billion is that you don’t need to sweat the small stuff, the fact of the matter is that Trump’s changes to the estate tax alone are worth $4.4 million to a guy like Ross.

More at www.vox.com/2019/8/8/20782269/stephen-ross-soulcycle-equinox-trump-don
or


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, August 9, 2019 8:10 AM

SECOND

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


Another story about Trump being out of his mind:

Trump considering ending Rod Blagojevich’s prison term, citing ‘Comey gang and all these sleazebags’

www.chicagotribune.com/politics/ct-president-trump-considering-rod-bla
gojevich-commutation-20190808-y3ixmutnfnd5havbgdgtxcvyd4-story.html


President Donald Trump has once again dangled the idea of commuting the 14-year prison sentence of disgraced former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, telling reporters aboard Air Force One that he was “very strongly” considering springing Blagojevich from prison almost five years early.

But Trump also showed he has done little homework on the case since he first raised the idea of using his powers of executive clemency for Blagojevich in May 2018.

Trump repeated the same misstatement he made last year that Blagojevich was sentenced to 18 years in prison and once again mentioned only one wiretapped phone call by Blagojevich, when much of the evidence presented at trial came from witnesses who said the governor was shaking them down for campaign cash in exchange for official acts.

The victims included the then-CEO of Children’s Memorial Hospital, now Lurie Children’s Hospital, who said he was pressured to contribute tens of thousands of dollars in exchange for state funding.

“He’s been in jail for seven years over a phone call where nothing happens. But over a phone — where nothing happens,” Trump said after making visits to Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, following mass shootings in those cities over the weekend. "But over a phone call which, you know, he shouldn’t have said what he said, but it was braggadocio you would say.”

Such mischaracterizations have been blasted before by those who investigated and prosecuted Blagojevich.

Speaking to reporters Wednesday, however, Trump said he thought the former Democratic governor — who had been a contestant on Trump’s former NBC show “The Celebrity Apprentice” before his firing — was mistreated.

“I thought he was treated unbelievably unfairly; he was given close to 18 years in prison," said Trump, a Republican. "And a lot of people thought it was unfair, like a lot of other things — and it was the same gang, the Comey gang and all these sleazebags that did it.”

The president was referring to former FBI Director James Comey, a frequent Trump target who he contends sought to politicize the nation’s top law enforcement agency in the 2016 election in which Trump faced Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. After taking office, the president fired Comey amid the investigation into Russia’s interference in the election and whether the Trump campaign was involved.

The president’s comments mirrored what Patti Blagojevich has said in not-so-veiled attempts to link her husband’s prosecution to some of Trump’s perceived political enemies.

In reality, Comey was in private practice from 2005 to 2013 — virtually the entire time Blagojevich was investigated and prosecuted.

Blagojevich, who served as Illinois governor from 2003 until his impeachment and removal from office in 2009, was sentenced to 14 years on federal corruption charges after his June 2011 conviction.

Blagojevich was convicted of attempting to use his office to personally benefit himself, offering the former U.S. Senate seat of then-President-elect Barack Obama in return for a prosperous job or campaign contributions.

Some counts involving the alleged sale of the Senate seat were subsequently thrown out, but his sentence and corruption conviction for that scandal and other actions stood. In addition to the children’s hospital executive, Blagojevich was convicted of attempting to shake down the horse racetrack owner to sign favorable legislation into law in exchange for campaign donations.

Government agents secretly recorded Blagojevich discussing the Senate seat appointment with his onetime deputy governor, Doug Scofield.

“I’ve got this thing and it’s f------ golden,” Blagojevich famously said in the secretly recorded conversation. “I’m not just giving it up for f------ nothing.”

In Blagojevich’s first appeal, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago in 2015 threw out on technical grounds five counts involving the governor’s efforts to trade the Senate seat for a job for himself.

But the court left intact the conviction on perhaps the most sensational allegations — that Blagojevich schemed to nominate Jesse Jackson Jr. to the Senate post in exchange for $1.5 million in campaign cash. The panel also tempered the small victory for Blagojevich by calling the evidence against him overwhelming and making it clear that the original sentence was not out of bounds.

Trump has done worse than Rod Blagojevich, which is why Trump's sentence would be more than Blagojevich's 14 years. Hence, Trump sympathizes, and wishes to commute, Blagojevich's sentence. They were both on “The Celebrity Apprentice”, you know.

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, August 10, 2019 5:33 AM

SECOND

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


Trump promised to get the trade deficit down, but his profound lack of understanding of economics has led to it increasing, just as most economists predicted it would.

Trump’s mismanagement of the economy is monumental.

Foreign Trade Deficit:
Economists have repeatedly tried to explain to Donald Trump that trade agreements may affect which countries the US buys from and sells to, but not the magnitude of the overall deficit. But, as usual, Trump believes what he wants to believes, leaving those who can least afford it to pay the price.

Federal Budget Deficit:
If it takes trillion-dollar annual deficits to keep the U.S. economy going in good times, what will it take when things are not so rosy?

Income Redistribution:
Redistribution from the bottom to the top – the hallmark not only of Trump’s presidency, but also of preceding Republican administrations – reduces aggregate demand, because those at the top spend a smaller fraction of their income than those below. This weakens the economy in a way that cannot be offset even by a massive giveaway to corporations and billionaires. And the enormous Trump fiscal deficits have led to huge trade deficits, far larger than under Obama, as the US has had to import capital to finance the gap between domestic savings and investment.

www.marketwatch.com/story/trumps-mismanagement-of-the-economy-is-monum
ental-2019-08-09

www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-trade-and-fiscal-deficits-b
y-joseph-e-stiglitz-2019-08


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, August 11, 2019 6:38 AM

SECOND

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


When Did the GOP Lose Touch with Reality?
Originally published in New York 11.20.2011

I’ve been a Republican all my adult life. I have worked on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, at Forbes magazine, at the Manhattan and American Enterprise Institutes, as a speechwriter in the George W. Bush administration. I believe in free markets, low taxes, reasonable regulation, and limited government. I voted for John McCain in 2008, and I have strongly criticized the major policy decisions of the Obama administration. But as I contemplate my party and my movement in 2011, I see things I simply cannot support.

America desperately needs a responsible and compassionate alternative to the Obama administration’s path of bigger government at higher cost. And yet: This past summer, the GOP nearly forced America to the verge of default just to score a point in a budget debate. In the throes of the worst economic crisis since the Depression, Republican politicians demand massive budget cuts and shrug off the concerns of the unemployed. In the face of evidence of dwindling upward mobility and long-stagnating middle-class wages, my party’s economic ideas sometimes seem to have shrunk to just one: more tax cuts for the very highest earners. When I entered Republican politics, during an earlier period of malaise, in the late seventies and early eighties, the movement got most of the big questions—crime, inflation, the Cold War—right. This time, the party is getting the big questions disastrously wrong.

It was not so long ago that Texas governor Bush denounced attempts to cut the earned-income tax credit as “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor.” By 2011, Republican commentators were noisily complaining that the poorer half of society are “lucky duckies” because the EITC offsets their federal tax obligations—or because the recession had left them with such meager incomes that they had no tax to pay in the first place. In 2000, candidate Bush routinely invoked “churches, synagogues, and mosques.” By 2010, prominent Republicans were denouncing the construction of a mosque in lower Manhattan as an outrageous insult. In 2003, President Bush and a Republican majority in Congress enacted a new prescription-drug program in Medicare. By 2011, all but four Republicans in the House and five in the Senate were voting to withdraw the Medicare guarantee from everybody under age 55. Today, the Fed’s pushing down interest rates in hopes of igniting economic growth is close to treason, according to Governor Rick Perry, coyly seconded by The Wall Street Journal. In 2000, the same policy qualified Alan Greenspan as the “greatest central banker in the history of the world,” according to Perry’s mentor, Senator Phil Gramm. Today, health reform that combines regulation of private insurance, individual mandates, and subsidies for those who need them is considered unconstitutional and an open invitation to “death panels.” A dozen years ago, a very similar reform was the Senate Republican alternative to Hillarycare. Today, stimulative fiscal policy that includes tax cuts for almost every American is “socialism.” In 2001, stimulative fiscal policy that included tax cuts for rather fewer Americans was an economic recovery program.

I can’t shrug off this flight from reality and responsibility as somebody else’s problem. I belonged to this movement; I helped to make the mess.

More at http://davidfrum.com/article/when-did-the-gop-lose-touch-with-reality

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, August 11, 2019 9:23 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


At least we can say that David Frum knows who he is.

Whether or not he's genuine? The jury's still out on that.

I recommend that he give all of his money away and live under a bridge a while to contemplate what he's done.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Monday, August 12, 2019 6:17 AM

SECOND

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


Throughout his time in office, Trump has been his own worst enemy. Any other incumbent president with relative peace abroad, a good economy and a united party would be sitting pretty for reelection. However, he shows the nation every day the immense risks of keeping him in power.

The reason that impeachment is on the table has less to do with the Mueller report than the President's own actions. In the same way that President Andrew Johnson's attacks on Reconstruction fueled the impeachment drive against him, the President's far right agenda is emboldening Democrats to consider voting for impeachment -- even if Senate Republicans will inevitably prevent his removal from office.

The worse that the President behaves, and the clearer the real world impact of his actions becomes, the easier it will be for Democrats to go on record saying that obstructing justice in a serious investigation is unacceptable. He tried to stifle the investigators in ways that President Richard Nixon would never have imagined possible.

We are still far away from that kind of vote. The fears that Pelosi has about a backlash to impeachment in moderate districts are very real and have not disappeared. Until she has the entire Democratic Caucus behind her, she will likely be reluctant to give her full support.

Trump, however, keeps making it difficult to just say no. His presidency is off the rails, and he is playing with a fire of racism, nativism and social division that is dangerous -- if not deadly. His rhetoric keeps getting more explosive as the election heats up.

More at www.cnn.com/2019/08/11/opinions/trump-impeaching-himself-zelizer/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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Monday, August 12, 2019 6:26 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:
At least we can say that David Frum knows who he is.

Whether or not he's genuine? The jury's still out on that.

I recommend that he give all of his money away and live under a bridge a while to contemplate what he's done.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

6ix, the following misfortune happened to you, but your answer is to vote for the GOP:

Conservatives have been driven to these fevered anxieties as much by their own trauma as by external events. In the aughts, Republicans held more power for longer than at any time since the twenties, yet the result was the weakest and least broadly shared economic expansion since World War II, followed by an economic crash and prolonged slump. Along the way, the GOP suffered two severe election defeats in 2006 and 2008. Imagine yourself a rank-and-file Republican in 2009: If you have not lost your job or your home, your savings have been sliced and your children cannot find work. Your retirement prospects have dimmed. Most of all, your neighbors blame you for all that has gone wrong in the country. There’s one thing you know for sure: None of this is your fault! And when the new Democratic president fails to deliver rapid recovery, he can be designated the target for everyone’s accumulated disappointment and rage. In the midst of economic wreckage, what relief to thrust all blame upon Barack Obama as the wrecker-in-chief.

The Bush years cannot be repudiated, but the memory of them can be discarded to make way for a new and more radical ideology, assembled from bits of the old GOP platform that were once sublimated by the party elites but now roam the land freely: ultralibertarianism, crank monetary theories, populist fury . . .

When Did the GOP Lose Touch with Reality?
http://davidfrum.com/article/when-did-the-gop-lose-touch-with-reality

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, August 12, 2019 9:18 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:

When Did the GOP Lose Touch with Reality?



Probably right around the same time the Democrats lost touch with reality.

Anybody who can ask me why I vote GOP after watching the Democratic debates currently going on is not somebody worth debating.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Monday, August 12, 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:
Quote:

Originally posted by second:

When Did the GOP Lose Touch with Reality?



Probably right around the same time the Democrats lost touch with reality.

Anybody who can ask me why I vote GOP after watching the Democratic debates currently going on is not somebody worth debating.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

Two things:

Why would anybody watch the debates? I never watch them for more than a minute because those have always been ridiculous until after the Convention. The craziest candidates, the ones that never will have a chance, say the darnedest things to get noticed. But it doesn't work. It simply underlines who is not Presidential. They might not even be sane. See Trump. That guy gave off the stink of a crook and a liar from the first time he wrote a book. But to get a whiff of insanity, you had to see him "debate". That guy literally is a nincompoop on taxes, the economy, nuclear weapons, international trade and always has been. But so are the people who voted for him, which explains why they do not do very well, financially.

And what was the second thing? The Democrats did not lose touch with reality and did not crash the economy in 2008. It was the Republicans who crashed it. Signym tried to blame the Democrats today, here:
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=63212&mid=10809
47#1080947


Warren Buffett pointed out to 6ix that between 1945 and July 2016 that the S&P 500 fell 5% to 9.9% 56 times, 10% to 19.9% 21 times, 20% to 39.9% nine times, and 40% or more three times. Yet Buffett has made billions in the stock market. He is pointing to the fact that 6ix understands nothing useful about the stock market, much like Trump knows nothing useful about, well, any subject. Go vote for Trump, 6ix. As for me, if the market crashes because of Trump, it will be a wealth creating opportunity to buy low. Much later, sell high, making a fortune.
www.fool.com/slideshow/warren-buffetts-advice-stock-market-crash/?slid
e=2


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, August 13, 2019 6:49 AM

SECOND

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


The Great Land Robbery

The shameful story of how 1 million black families have been ripped from their farms

“The telling factor, looking at it from the long view, is that at the time of World War I there were 1 million black farmers, and in 1992 there were 18,000,” Fraas told me. The settlements stemming from the Pigford v. Glickman lawsuit of 1997 cover only specific recent claims of discrimination, and none stretching back to the period of the civil-rights era, when the great bulk of black-owned farms disappeared.

In Pigford v. Glickman, thousands of black farmers and their families won settlements against the USDA for discrimination that had occurred between 1981 and the end of 1996; the outlays ultimately reached a total of $2 billion. The Scotts were one of those families, and after a long battle to prove their case—with the assistance of Scott-White’s meticulous notes and family history—in 2012 the family was awarded more than $6 million in economic damages, plus almost $400,000 in other damages and debt forgiveness. The court also helped the Scotts reclaim land possessed by the department. In a 1999 ruling, Judge Paul L. Friedman of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia acknowledged that forcing the federal government to compensate black farmers would “not undo all that has been done” in centuries of government-sponsored racism. But for the Scotts, it was a start.

Through a variety of means—sometimes legal, often coercive, in many cases legal and coercive, occasionally violent—farmland owned by black people came into the hands of white people. It was aggregated into larger holdings, then aggregated again, eventually attracting the interest of Wall Street.

A war waged by deed of title has dispossessed 98 percent of black agricultural landowners in America. They have lost 12 million acres over the past century. But even that statement falsely consigns the losses to long-ago history. In fact, the losses mostly occurred within living memory, from the 1950s onward. Today, except for a handful of farmers like the Scotts who have been able to keep or get back some land, black people in this most productive corner of the Deep South own almost nothing of the bounty under their feet.

More at www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/this-land-was-our-land/59
4742
/

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, August 13, 2019 10:09 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:

Originally posted by second:

When Did the GOP Lose Touch with Reality?



Probably right around the same time the Democrats lost touch with reality.

Anybody who can ask me why I vote GOP after watching the Democratic debates currently going on is not somebody worth debating.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

Two things:

Why would anybody watch the debates? I never watch them for more than a minute because those have always been ridiculous until after the Convention. The craziest candidates, the ones that never will have a chance, say the darnedest things to get noticed. But it doesn't work. It simply underlines who is not Presidential. They might not even be sane. See Trump. That guy gave off the stink of a crook and a liar from the first time he wrote a book. But to get a whiff of insanity, you had to see him "debate". That guy literally is a nincompoop on taxes, the economy, nuclear weapons, international trade and always has been. But so are the people who voted for him, which explains why they do not do very well, financially.

And what was the second thing? The Democrats did not lose touch with reality and did not crash the economy in 2008. It was the Republicans who crashed it. Signym tried to blame the Democrats today, here:
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=63212&mid=10809
47#1080947


Warren Buffett pointed out to 6ix that between 1945 and July 2016 that the S&P 500 fell 5% to 9.9% 56 times, 10% to 19.9% 21 times, 20% to 39.9% nine times, and 40% or more three times. Yet Buffett has made billions in the stock market. He is pointing to the fact that 6ix understands nothing useful about the stock market, much like Trump knows nothing useful about, well, any subject. Go vote for Trump, 6ix. As for me, if the market crashes because of Trump, it will be a wealth creating opportunity to buy low. Much later, sell high, making a fortune.
www.fool.com/slideshow/warren-buffetts-advice-stock-market-crash/?slid
e=2


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



I'm going to guess that a post full of more feels and baseless assumptions is not made on fff.net today.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Tuesday, August 13, 2019 10:34 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:

I'm going to guess that a post full of more feels and baseless assumptions is not made on fff.net today.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

The Final Report of the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis of the United States says that Republicans were responsible for the 2008 Crash.
www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-FCIC/pdf/GPO-FCIC.pdf

According to the Final Report, between 2001 and 2007, mortgage debt rose nearly as much as it had in the whole rest of the nation's history. Around the country, armies of mortgage salesmen hustled to get Americans to borrow more money for houses—or even just prospective houses. Many salesmen didn’t ask borrowers for proof of income, job or assets. Then the salesmen were gone, leaving behind a new debtor holding new keys and perhaps a faint suspicion that the deal was too good to be true.
www.history.com/news/2008-financial-crisis-causes

Ronald Reagan signed a law allowing banks to engage in trading profitable derivatives that they sold to investors. These mortgage-backed securities needed home loans as collateral. As more and more banks got familiar with what the law allowed, the derivatives slowly at first, then very quickly, created an insatiable demand for more and more mortgages.

Hedge funds and other financial institutions around the world owned the mortgage-backed securities. The securities were also in mutual funds, corporate assets, and pension funds. The banks had chopped up the original mortgages and resold them.

Why did stodgy pension funds buy such risky assets? They thought an insurance product called credit default swaps protected them. A traditional insurance company known as the American International Group sold these swaps. When the derivatives lost value, AIG didn't have enough cash flow to honor all the swaps.

The first signs of the financial crisis appeared in 2007. Banks panicked when they realized they would have to absorb the losses. They stopped lending to each other. They didn't want other banks giving them worthless mortgages as collateral. No one wanted to get stuck holding the bag. As a result, interbank borrowing costs, called Libor, rose. This mistrust within the banking community was the primary cause of the 2008 financial crisis.
www.thebalance.com/2008-financial-crisis-3305679

The Federal Government had the power to stop banks from selling very risky securities that were falsely rated as safe as AAA bonds, but because Republicans controlled the government for 8 years, the banks were not stopped until it was too late -- trillions of dollars in mortgage backed derivatives were defaulting.

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, August 13, 2019 11:55 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:

The Final Report of the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis of the United States says that Republicans were responsible for the 2008 Crash.
www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-FCIC/pdf/GPO-FCIC.pdf

According to the Final Report, between 2001 and 2007, mortgage debt rose nearly as much as it had in the whole rest of the nation's history. Around the country, armies of mortgage salesmen hustled to get Americans to borrow more money for houses—or even just prospective houses. Many salesmen didn’t ask borrowers for proof of income, job or assets. Then the salesmen were gone, leaving behind a new debtor holding new keys and perhaps a faint suspicion that the deal was too good to be true.
www.history.com/news/2008-financial-crisis-causes

Ronald Reagan signed a law allowing banks to engage in trading profitable derivatives that they sold to investors. These mortgage-backed securities needed home loans as collateral. As more and more banks got familiar with what the law allowed, the derivatives slowly at first, then very quickly, created an insatiable demand for more and more mortgages.

Hedge funds and other financial institutions around the world owned the mortgage-backed securities. The securities were also in mutual funds, corporate assets, and pension funds. The banks had chopped up the original mortgages and resold them.

Why did stodgy pension funds buy such risky assets? They thought an insurance product called credit default swaps protected them. A traditional insurance company known as the American International Group sold these swaps. When the derivatives lost value, AIG didn't have enough cash flow to honor all the swaps.

The first signs of the financial crisis appeared in 2007. Banks panicked when they realized they would have to absorb the losses. They stopped lending to each other. They didn't want other banks giving them worthless mortgages as collateral. No one wanted to get stuck holding the bag. As a result, interbank borrowing costs, called Libor, rose. This mistrust within the banking community was the primary cause of the 2008 financial crisis.
www.thebalance.com/2008-financial-crisis-3305679

The Federal Government had the power to stop banks from selling very risky securities that were falsely rated as safe as AAA bonds, but because Republicans controlled the government for 8 years, the banks were not stopped until it was too late -- trillions of dollars in mortgage backed derivatives were defaulting.

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

I see you're flogging your favorite "Hate the GOP" meme but you never addressed this (from another thread)


Quote:

The 2008 Financial Crisis

Before the financial crisis of 2008, there was more money invested in credit default swaps than in other pools. The value of credit default swaps stood at $45 trillion compared to $22 trillion invested in the stock market, $7.1 trillion in mortgages and $4.4 trillion in U.S. Treasury. In mid-2010, the value of outstanding CDS was $26.3 trillion.

Many investment banks were involved, but the biggest casualty was Lehman Brothers investment bank, which owed $600 billion in debt, out of which $400 billion was covered by CDS. The bank’s insurer, American Insurance Group, lacked sufficient funds to clear the debt, and the Federal Reserve of the United States needed to intervene to bail it out.

Companies that traded in swaps were battered during the financial crisis. Since the market was unregulated, banks used swaps to insure complex financial products.

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=63212

The most important sentence is that quote is


Before the financial crisis of 2008, there was more money invested in credit default swaps than in other pools. The value of credit default swaps stood at $45 trillion compared to $22 trillion invested in the stock market, $7.1 trillion in mortgages and $4.4 trillion in U.S. Treasury.

Credit Default Swaps = $45 trillion
Mortgages = $7.1 trillion

YOUR VERY QUOTE REFERS TO CDSs.

Quote:

Why did stodgy pension funds buy such risky assets? They thought an insurance product called credit default swaps protected them. A traditional insurance company known as the American International Group sold these swaps. When the derivatives lost value, AIG didn't have enough cash flow to honor all the swaps.


The thing that made all of this possible was Bill Clinton's Commodities Futures Moderinization Act, which deregulated CDSs.




-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake


"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .

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Tuesday, August 13, 2019 12:11 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


OOPS.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Tuesday, August 13, 2019 5:04 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 SIGNYM:

The thing that made all of this possible was Bill Clinton's Commodities Futures Moderinization Act, which deregulated CDSs.

Wrong you are, Signym. There were many things done badly. Doing any of them even half right would have prevented the Crash, but nobody did a damn thing right because doing what was risky was profitable. There is much more in the report, but one paragraph stands out on page xviii :

Yet we do not accept the view that regulators lacked the power to protect the financial system. They had ample power in many arenas and they chose not to use it. To give just three examples: the Securities and Exchange Commission could have required more capital and halted risky practices at the big investment banks. It did not. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York and other regulators could have clamped down on Citigroup’s excesses in the run-up to the crisis. They did not. Policy makers and regulators could have stopped the runaway mortgage securitization train. They did not. In case after case after case, regulators continued to rate the institutions they oversaw as safe and sound even in the face of mounting troubles, often downgrading them just before their collapse. And where regulators lacked authority, they could have sought it. Too often, they lacked the political will—in a political and ideological environment that constrained it—as well as the fortitude to critically challenge the institutions and the entire system they were entrusted to oversee.

www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-FCIC/pdf/GPO-FCIC.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, August 13, 2019 6:06 PM

1KIKI

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:

Originally posted by second:
To give just three examples:
- the Securities and Exchange Commission could have required more capital and halted risky practices at the big investment banks. It did not.

Under Clinton, the US allowed lower capitalization rates, and in fact allowed banks to calculate their own rates to be competitive with BASEL II. "The IRB approach uses risk parameters determined by a bank’s internal systems in the calculation of the bank’s credit risk capital requirements. The AMA relies on a bank’s internal estimates of its operational risks to generate an operational risk capital requirement for the bank." That was a big OOPS. https://www.federalreserve.gov/generalinfo/basel2/FinalRule_BaselII/Fi
nalRule_Draft.pdf
"our results imply that much of the decline in CRE risk premiums ... was associated with weaker regulatory capital requirements." https://www.dallasfed.org/~/media/documents/research/papers/2015/wp150
4.pdf
Quote:

- The Federal Reserve Bank of New York and other regulators could have clamped down on Citigroup’s excesses in the run-up to the crisis. They did not.
Aside from the fact that many lenders / financial institutions proved so unstable they were ready to fall like dominoes, WHAT WAS IT SPECIFICALLY about Citigroup that, all on its own, caused the Great Recession?
Quote:

- Policy makers and regulators could have stopped the runaway mortgage securitization train. They did not.
Policy makers would have had to write new policies, for regulators to regulate to them. Regulators just can't look at something and say - I don't like it. But the policymakers under Clinton already wrote the policies. see above


And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?

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Tuesday, August 13, 2019 6:56 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 1KIKI:
Quote:

Originally posted by second:
To give just three examples:
- the Securities and Exchange Commission could have required more capital and halted risky practices at the big investment banks. It did not.

Under Clinton, the US allowed lower capitalization rates, and in fact allowed banks to calculate their own rates to be competitive with BASEL II. "The IRB approach uses risk parameters determined by a bank’s internal systems in the calculation of the bank’s credit risk capital requirements. The AMA relies on a bank’s internal estimates of its operational risks to generate an operational risk capital requirement for the bank." That was a big OOPS. https://www.federalreserve.gov/generalinfo/basel2/FinalRule_BaselII/Fi
nalRule_Draft.pdf
"our results imply that much of the decline in CRE risk premiums ... was associated with weaker regulatory capital requirements." https://www.dallasfed.org/~/media/documents/research/papers/2015/wp150
4.pdf
Quote:

- The Federal Reserve Bank of New York and other regulators could have clamped down on Citigroup’s excesses in the run-up to the crisis. They did not.
Aside from the fact that many lenders / financial institutions proved so unstable they were ready to fall like dominoes, WHAT WAS IT SPECIFICALLY about Citigroup that, all on its own, caused the Great Recession?
Quote:

- Policy makers and regulators could have stopped the runaway mortgage securitization train. They did not.

Policy makers would have had to write new policies, for regulators to regulate to them. Regulators just can't look at something and say - I don't like it. But the policymakers under Clinton already wrote the policies. see above


And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?

It's very evident you have no intention to read and understand THE FINANCIAL CRISIS INQUIRY REPORT:

The prime example is the Federal Reserves pivotal failure to stem the flow of toxic mortgages, which it could have done by setting prudent mortgage-lending standards. The Federal Reserve was the one entity empowered to do so and it did not. The record of our examination is replete with evidence of other failures: financial institutions made, bought, and sold mortgage securities they never examined, did not care to examine, or knew to be defective.

page xvii www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-FCIC/pdf/GPO-FCIC.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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Wednesday, August 14, 2019 4:13 AM

1KIKI

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.


It wasn't the mortgages.


It's that they were packaged and sold as assets instead of debts; and re-packaged and re-sold; and re-re-packaged and re-re-sold, and re-re-re-packaged and re-re-re-sold, and so on. And every time those packages got sold / bought the value got inflated roughly 10X till they'd ballooned to not even remotely resemble the original mortgages they were based on. Because the housing market and commercial markets were hot, and firms wanted to rake it in as fast as they could as long as the gravy-train was running.

Nobody ever said you had to be smart to be greedy.

If the Federal government had simply covered everybody's mortgages - just gave the money away directly to the borrowers - then the whole edifice built on top of them would have been secured, and it would have been far, far cheaper then securing those ridiculous monstrosities the investment banks created.



And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?

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Wednesday, August 14, 2019 6:21 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 1KIKI:
It wasn't the mortgages.


It's that they were packaged and sold as assets instead of debts; and re-packaged and re-sold; and re-re-packaged and re-re-sold, and re-re-re-packaged and re-re-re-sold, and so on. And every time those packages got sold / bought the value got inflated roughly 10X till they'd ballooned to not even remotely resemble the original mortgages they were based on. Because the housing market and commercial markets were hot, and firms wanted to rake it in as fast as they could as long as the gravy-train was running.

Nobody ever said you had to be smart to be greedy.

If the Federal government had simply covered everybody's mortgages - just gave the money away directly to the borrowers - then the whole edifice built on top of them would have been secured, and it would have been far, far cheaper then securing those ridiculous monstrosities the investment banks created.

Wow, 1kiki! There was a much more direct and cheaper solution – do not allow government regulators to be controlled by the financial industry. It’s right there in the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Report:

But as the report will show, the financial industry itself played a key role in weakening regulatory constraints on institutions, markets, and products. It did not surprise the Commission that an industry of such wealth and power would exert pressure on policy makers and regulators. From 1999 to 2008, the financial sector expended $2.7 billion in reported federal lobbying expenses; individuals and political action committees in the sector made more than $1 billion in campaign contributions. What troubled us was the extent to which the nation was deprived of the necessary strength and independence of the oversight necessary to safeguard financial stability.

page xviii www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-FCIC/pdf/GPO-FCIC.pdf

Rather than to just admit that the government had been either purchased or bribed to not do its job, the Report says something much more bland: “Too often, regulators lacked the political will—in a political and ideological environment that constrained it—as well as the fortitude to critically challenge the institutions and the entire system they were entrusted to oversee.”

Were the regulators incapable of doing their job because of their political ideology? Or were they simply bribed? We will never know because the regulators were not forthcoming with explanations for their peculiar behavior.

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, August 14, 2019 10:17 AM

1KIKI

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:

Originally posted by SECOND:
There was a much more direct and cheaper solution – do not allow government regulators to be controlled by the financial industry. It’s right there in the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Report:

By 'government regulators', do you mean Clinton? It’s right there in the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Report!
Quote:

These policies were put in place and promoted by several administrations and Congresses—indeed, both Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush set aggressive goals to increase home-ownership.

In Washington, four intermingled issues came into play that made it difficult to acknowledge the looming threats. First, efforts to boost homeownership had broad political support—from Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and successive
Congresses—even though in reality the homeownership rate had peaked in the spring
of ????

He finally took his warnings to the highest level he could reach—Robert Rubin,
the chairman of the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors and a former
U.S. treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, and three other bank officials.
He sent Rubin and the others a memo with the words “URGENT—READ IMMEDIATELY” in the subject line.

In ????, President Bill Clinton announced an initiative to boost homeownership
from ??.?? to ??.?? of families by ????, and one component raised the affordable housing goals at the GSEs. Between ???? and ????, almost ?.? million households entered the ranks of homeowners, nearly twice as many as in the previous two years.
“But we have to do a lot better,” Clinton said.

In December ????,
in response, Congress passed and President Clinton signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of ???? (CFMA), which in essence deregulated the OTC derivatives market and eliminated oversight by both the CFTC and the SEC.

In November ????,
Congress passed and President Clinton signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), which lifted most of the remaining Glass-Steagall-era restrictions.


In ????,
President Bill Clinton asked regulators to improve banks’ CRA performance * while responding to industry complaints that the regulatory review process for compliance was too burdensome and too subjective. (* The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) is a federal law enacted in 1977 with the intent of encouraging depository institutions to help meet the credit needs of low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. The CRA requires federal regulators to assess how well each bank or thrift fulfills its obligations to these communities.)


Initiated by Congress in 1992 and pressed by HUD in both the Clinton and George W. Bush Administrations, the U.S. government’s housing policy sought to increase home ownership in the United States through an intensive effort to reduce mortgage underwriting standards.

FHA was tasked with insuring
loans to low-income borrowers that would not be made unless insured; banks and S&Ls were required by CRA to show that they were also making loans to the same group of borrowers; mortgage bankers who signed up for the HUD Best Practices Initiative and the Clinton administration’s National Homeownership Strategy were required to make the same kind of loans.



followed by a whole lot more "Clinton" results.





And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?

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Wednesday, August 14, 2019 12:17 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


SECOND, your attempt to blame 2008 on the GOP and deflect crticism from Bill Clinton is wrong, wrong, wrong, and has been demonstrated to be wrong three times already, using the very report that YOU cited. So give up, already; you're just burying yourself deeper.

Nobody is saying that the only President at fault was Clinton ... Presidents of BOTH parties kept rolling that ball forward, INCLUDING Bill Clinton. And btw, Clinton didn't just favor big banks, he also favored transnationals' move out of the USA by forwarding China's accession into the WTO and pushing for - and getting - NAFTA. And tech companies by pushing for - and getting - DMCA. Also "ending welfare as we know it". Bill Clinton was NOT a friend of us regular Americans, he was a smooth-talking bought-and-paid-for serial rapist.

Let's just say that neither party has really had our interests at heart for decades, and both parties have pretty much sold us downriver, including Obama.



-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake


"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .

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Wednesday, August 14, 2019 2:08 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 SIGNYM:
SECOND, your attempt to blame 2008 on the GOP and deflect crticism from Bill Clinton is wrong, wrong, wrong, and has been demonstrated to be wrong three times already, using the very report that YOU cited. So give up, already; you're just burying yourself deeper.

You are misunderstanding how the Republicans crashed the economy in 2008. I’m going to give you a very real analogue because you, and the GOP, would insist the GOP did not crash economy, but rather Clinton is to blame because he signed a law ten years earlier. Here we go: I was a control systems engineer for Bechtel. A client would accidentally destroy a petrochemical plant that had been running for decades and they’d come to us to rebuild so it would not happen again. The plant that exploded was not a bad design, although old-fashion, but only if the people operating it on the day it exploded knew what they were doing. And the operators must pay attention and not panic and do nothing. In the case of the Crash of 2008, the regulators kept their hands off because everybody was making so much money. Why stop when the system was running profitably?

In a petrochemical plant disaster there are usually several things that went wrong and if any of them had gone right there would not have been an explosion. The spare cooling water pump needed to be started, but was not because it was manually operated, not automatic. The furnace needed to be shutdown to reduce the heat, but it too was manually operated. Some human must press the shutdown button. The furnace won’t press the button for the human. The high pressure needed to be vented to the flare, but it was not. If the operators had done at least one of these three things right, there would not have been an explosion.

Similarly, the GOP policy makers and regulators could have stopped the runaway mortgage securitization train years before it crashed. But they did not. The Securities and Exchange Commission could have required more capital and halted risky practices at the big investment banks. It did not.
www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-FCIC/pdf/GPO-FCIC.pdf

It is completely nuts to think Clinton should have stopped them in 2000 when it was the GOP that was operating the financial system more and more dangerously for the next seven years. The system worked fine, but only so long as the regulators made correct decisions. If they made no decisions, it would explode eventually. And it did in 2008.

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, August 14, 2019 2:14 PM

1KIKI

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:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Presidents of BOTH parties kept rolling that ball forward, INCLUDING Bill Clinton.

Quote:

Originally posted by SLOPPY SECONDS:
... you, and the GOP, would insist the GOP did not crash economy, but rather Clinton is to blame because he signed a law ten years earlier.

And constantly LYING about what people post is why you're a used asswipe, and nobody credits a fucking thing you post.


And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?

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Wednesday, August 14, 2019 2:42 PM

1KIKI

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.


So, a LONG time ago, back in 2007, I read an interesting article whose subject was 'the bubble economy'. https://prospect.org/article/bubble-economy and how fragile it is to popping at any time.

I just want to point out that I think we're in a stock market bubble. Before that was a bank / investment bubble. Before that was a housing bubble. And before that was the dot.com bubble. And before that was the S&L bubble.

Without real overall growth, government needs these bubbles to create good economic averages. Without the bubbles averaged in, the actual dismal state of the real economy would be exposed.

EVERYONE in government since the 70's wants to keep those bubbles frothing!




And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?

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Thursday, August 15, 2019 6:03 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 1kiki:

And constantly LYING about what people post is why you're a used asswipe, and nobody credits a fucking thing you post.

1kiki, you are getting testy.

In the 1990's I built safety shutdown systems for petrochemical plants. The people on duty when a plant exploded tended to shade the truth, doing their worst to avoid culpability for what happened. Lied, or at least misdirected, in other words.

But the control room records told the real story. Did the people on duty correct themselves when their story disagreed with the story the control room recorders showed? No, but they did get testy that their stories weren't being believed.

You are not really interested in the real story, are you, 1kiki? You are committed to your fake story. You know what the real story says about the GOP.

The real story is Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Report
www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-FCIC/pdf/GPO-FCIC.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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Thursday, August 15, 2019 6:10 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 1kiki:

I just want to point out that I think we're in a stock market bubble. Before that was a bank / investment bubble. Before that was a housing bubble. And before that was the dot.com bubble. And before that was the S&L bubble.

Without real overall growth, government needs these bubbles to create good economic averages. Without the bubbles averaged in, the actual dismal state of the real economy would be exposed.

EVERYONE in government since the 70's wants to keep those bubbles frothing!

These "bubbles" happen because the wealthy want them. It is their ideas, not the government's. Not the government, but the Wealthy, and their prejudices, direct America.

Why a Banking Heiress Spent Her Fortune on Keeping Immigrants Out
www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/why-a-banking-heiress-spent-her-fortune-on-k
eeping-immigrants-out/ar-AAFNPSB


An heiress to the Mellon banking and industrial fortune with a half-billion dollars at her disposal, Mrs. May helped create what would become the modern anti-immigration movement. She bankrolled the founding and operation of the nation’s three largest restrictionist groups — the Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA and the Center for Immigration Studies — as well as dozens of smaller ones, including some that have promulgated white nationalist views.

In many ways, the Trump presidency is the culmination of Mrs. May’s vision for strictly limiting immigration. Groups that she funded shared policy proposals with Mr. Trump’s campaign, sent key staff members to join his administration and have close ties to Stephen Miller, the architect of his immigration agenda to upend practices adopted by his Democratic and Republican predecessors.

More at www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/why-a-banking-heiress-spent-her-fortune-on-k
eeping-immigrants-out/ar-AAFNPSB


It's fascinating what ideas lurk in the tiny brains of the rich and powerful. More thrilling is the story of how their wealth spreads those ideas into the big World.

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, August 15, 2019 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


Last month, the Trump White House put out a typically Orwellian statement, chock-filled with lies, distortions, and half-truths about Iran and the 2015 nuclear deal. One line in particular stood out from the rest: “There is little doubt that even before the deal’s existence, Iran was violating its terms.”

Huh? The Iranians were violating an agreement — before it even existed?

Is it any surprise that even the foreign minister of Iran took to Twitter to join the online ridiculing of the White House?

Javad Zarif @Jzarif tweeted:
Seriously?
https://twitter.com/JZarif/status/1145856200262737921

The Trump administration’s lies on the topic of Iran are now beyond parody. There is, however, nothing funny about them. U.S. government lies can have deadly consequences: Never forget that hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women, and children, not to mention more than 4,400 U.S. military personnel, are dead today because of the sheer volume of falsehoods told by the George W. Bush administration.

So it is incumbent upon journalists to do in 2019 what they collectively did not do in 2003: Check the facts, challenge the lies, debunk the myths.

More at Five Lies About Iran That We Need to Refute to Stop Another Illegal War
https://theintercept.com/2019/08/14/trump-iran-worst-lies/

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, August 15, 2019 9:19 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Maybe Trump can get your boy Mueller fully on board and it will all come full circle.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, August 15, 2019 9:20 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 1kiki:

And constantly LYING about what people post is why you're a used asswipe, and nobody credits a fucking thing you post.

1kiki, you are getting testy.

In the 1990's I built safety shutdown systems for petrochemical plants. The people on duty when a plant exploded tended to shade the truth, doing their worst to avoid culpability for what happened. Lied, or at least misdirected, in other words.

But the control room records told the real story. Did the people on duty correct themselves when their story disagreed with the story the control room recorders showed? No, but they did get testy that their stories weren't being believed.

You are not really interested in the real story, are you, 1kiki? You are committed to your fake story. You know what the real story says about the GOP.

The real story is Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Report
www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-FCIC/pdf/GPO-FCIC.pdf

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



I know with a little digging I can find quite a few times where you've blown your cool.

Best to remember this from that glass house you're living in.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Friday, August 16, 2019 5:56 AM

SECOND

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


In the US, unlike in other developed countries, the minimum wage is a political issue. That means it gets raised irregularly and unpredictably. And that causes a bunch of problems for American workers and businesses.

Every other developed country with a minimum wage has some sort of commission or formula to determine what the rate should be. Some countries consult with business leaders and union representatives, and nearly all of them involve economic experts. And they review it every year or two. In the US, though, it’s in the hands of politicians.

And that goes about as well as you’d expect.
Republicans against, Democrats for, wage raise stymied.



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, August 17, 2019 6:04 AM

SECOND

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


Our Caesar: Can the country come back from Trump? The Republic already looks like Rome in ruins.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/amp/2019/08/is-there-hope-for-the-amer
ican-republic-after-trump.html


The American system has a vulnerability Rome didn’t. We have always had a one-man executive branch, a head of state, with exclusive and total command of the armed forces. There is no need for an office like Rome’s dictator, who serves only 6 months, for when a systemic crisis hits, because we have an existing commander-in-chief vested with emergency powers who can, at any time, invoke them. The two consuls in Rome shared rule and could veto each other; what defines the American presidency is its individual, unitary nature. Over the past century, moreover, as America’s global clout has grown exponentially, and as the challenges of governing a vast and complicated country have spawned a massive administrative state under the president’s ultimate control, what was once designed as an office merely to enforce the laws made by the Congress has changed beyond recognition.

So what happens when a populist celebrity leverages mass resentment of elites to deploy that power — as Marius and Sulla and Pompey and Caesar did — in ever more expansive, innovative, and authoritarian ways?

When you think of how the Founders conceived the presidency, the 21st-century version is close to unrecognizable. Their phobia about monarchy placed the presidency beneath the Congress in the pecking order, stripping him of pomp and majesty. No newspaper bothered even to post a reporter at the White House until the 20th century. The “bully pulpit” was anathema, and public speeches vanishingly rare. As George F. Will points out in his new book on conservatism, the president of the United States did not even have an office until 1902, working from his living room until Teddy Roosevelt built the West Wing.

Some presidents rose above this level of modesty. Lincoln temporarily assumed far greater powers in the Civil War, of course, but it was Teddy Roosevelt who added celebrity and imperial aspirations to the office.

FDR, as president for what turned out to be life, revolutionized and metastasized the American government and bequeathed a Cold War presidency atop a military-industrial complex that now deploys troops in some 164 foreign countries.

Kennedy — and the Camelot myth that surrounded him — dazzled the elites and the public.

Reagan ushered in a movie-star model for a commander-in-chief — telegenic, charismatic, and, in time, something of a cult figure.

And then the 9/11 attacks created an atmosphere similar to that of Rome’s temporary, emergency dictatorships, except vast powers of war-making, surveillance, rendition, and even torture were simply transferred to an office for non-emergency times as well, as theorists of the unitary executive — relatively unbound by Congress or the rule of law — formed a tight circle around a wartime boss. And there was no six-month time limit; almost none of these powers has since been revoked.

Like Roman commanders slowly acquiring the trappings of gods, presidents have long since slipped the bounds of republican austerity into a world of elected monarchs, flying the world in a massive, airborne chariot, constantly photographed, and now commanding our attention every single day through Twitter.

More at https://nymag.com/intelligencer/amp/2019/08/is-there-hope-for-the-amer
ican-republic-after-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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Saturday, August 17, 2019 6:13 AM

SECOND

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


Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump tweeted:

Biggest crowd EVER, according to Arena people. Thousands outside trying to get in. Place was packed! Radical Left Dems & their Partner, LameStream Media, saying Arena empty. Check out pictures. Fake News. The Enemy of the People!

Great news! Tonight, we broke the all-time attendance record previously held by Elton John at #SNHUArena in Manchester, New Hampshire!
8:11 PM - 16 Aug 2019

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1162562469283471360

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Saturday, August 17, 2019 9:48 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
In the US, unlike in other developed countries, the minimum wage is a political issue. That means it gets raised irregularly and unpredictably. And that causes a bunch of problems for American workers and businesses.

Every other developed country with a minimum wage has some sort of commission or formula to determine what the rate should be. Some countries consult with business leaders and union representatives, and nearly all of them involve economic experts. And they review it every year or two. In the US, though, it’s in the hands of politicians.

And that goes about as well as you’d expect.
Republicans against, Democrats for, wage raise stymied.



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




Well... It looks like Vox finally got rid of Carlos Maza and his race-baiting and hate-mongering.

Let's see if Vox can continue to take the steps it needs ahead of time to gain a shred of integrity and something worth saving overall before the missing link media goes the way of Blockbuster Video.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Saturday, August 17, 2019 2:48 PM

JO753

rezident owtsidr


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump tweeted:

Biggest crowd EVER, according to Arena people.



If he manajez to stay out uv prizon, he will be doing theze rallyz till he'z 100 and idiots will keep buying tikits.

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

http://www.7532020.com .

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