A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Thursday, September 17, 2026 12:03
VIEWED: 757778
PAGE 25 of 73
Quote:Don't laugh. None of the Republicans I fired laughed, but it was such a relief for all the other employees and me. Life got simpler and business got more productive. Trump won't laugh if he is fired, but it would be a relief for President Mike Pence and the White House staff. MAGA.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
It looks as though somebody is on tilt again.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Cemeteries are full of indispensable men.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/21/graveyards-full/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Don't laugh. None of the Republicans I fired laughed, but it was such a relief for all the other employees and me. Life got simpler and business got more productive. Trump won't laugh if he is fired, but it would be a relief for President Mike Pence and the White House staff. MAGA.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
It looks as though somebody is on tilt again.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Cemeteries are full of indispensable men.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/21/graveyards-full/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
I'm laughing because you're admitting to everyone here that you are pro censorship, and you're completely fine with ruining lives of people because of their "wrongthink".
We already knew you are a garbage human being, Second. Just one more piece of evidence.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:I fired these people because I've got a policy of three strikes and you are out. Things like stealing a trunk-load of my power tools or selling my diesel fuel has gotten Trump-lovers fired. It's more than taking home a box of paperclips. 6ix, what did you do to get your career ended? Or do you blame "The System", the one that Trump is gonna overthrow?
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I'm laughing because you're admitting to everyone here that you are pro censorship, and you're completely fine with ruining lives of people because of their "wrongthink".
We already knew you are a garbage human being, Second. Just one more piece of evidence.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:I fired these people because I've got a policy of three strikes and you are out. Things like stealing a trunk-load of my power tools or selling my diesel fuel has gotten Trump-lovers fired. It's more than taking home a box of paperclips. 6ix, what did you do to get your career ended? Or do you blame "The System", the one that Trump is gonna overthrow?
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I'm laughing because you're admitting to everyone here that you are pro censorship, and you're completely fine with ruining lives of people because of their "wrongthink".
We already knew you are a garbage human being, Second. Just one more piece of evidence.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
lol... are you insinuating that Trump voters steal from business owners and Clinton voters don't?
That's hilarious.
It's also not what you said before.
Quote:
Don't laugh. None of the Republicans I fired laughed, but it was such a relief for all the other employees and me.
Don't change your story and backpedal now, idiot.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:I'll give you an example of Trump voters thinking like thieves. They want to steal elections then claim it is not them. And in my experience limited to White Texans, they do steal whatever they think their employer won't notice.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
lol... are you insinuating that Trump voters steal from business owners and Clinton voters don't?
That's hilarious.
It's also not what you said before.Quote:
Don't laugh. None of the Republicans I fired laughed, but it was such a relief for all the other employees and me.
Don't change your story and backpedal now, idiot.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Before the 2016 vote 84 percent of Republicans told pollsters they believed a “meaningful amount” of fraud occurred in American elections, and almost 60 percent said “illegal” immigrants would “vote in meaningful amounts” in the presidential election. A July 2017 poll showed that 47 percent of Republicans believed that Trump had won the popular vote, rather than losing it by nearly 3 million votes. Fifty-two percent of Republicans said they would support the president if he postponed the 2020 elections to “make sure that only eligible American citizens can vote.” This April, Trump returned to this theme, claiming that “in places like California,” millions of people vote illegally.
This is norm-breaking of a very particular kind. If it succeeds, it prevents elections from settling political conflicts, because agreement over their meaning has been destroyed. The Republican party is pressing this story because it needs to sustain minority rule — in the Electoral College against the popular vote, in a gerrymandered Congress against the national trend toward Democrats, in closely divided states like North Carolina and Wisconsin where voter suppression helps to sustain artificial majorities and supermajorities. And it is no coincidence who is in the ruling minority: the nearly 90 percent of Republican voters who identify as white, compared with not much over 50 percent among Democratic voters. Trump’s rhetoric of “places like California” is as racialized and nativist as tracing Obama’s birth to Kenya. On one level, the lies establish the rationale for voter suppression, on another, the possibility of openly rejecting an election loss. On yet another level, they rely on the idea that a non-white American majority is not really a majority at all. That is, they tend to switch the basis of political legitimacy from majoritarianism to ethno-national identity.
www.dissentmagazine.org/article/normcore-trump-resistance-books-crisis
-of-democracy
White Texans voted for Trump, the crook, the thief, the liar. No surprise when the same White Texans are crooks, thieves, liars. It matches their politics. As a reminder that Trump is crooked:
www.ais-cpa.com/tax-fraud-by-the-numbers-the-trump-timeline/
www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/donald-trump-scandals/474
726/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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SIX, you may feel that you're making progress with SECONDRATE by engaging him endlessly, but SECONDRATE will twist and turn and slither around to avoid reaching any sort of negative conclusion, because he is, in a word, nuts.
He has an astonishing level of hatred against Texas Republicans, Republicans in general, Trump specifically, the apocryphal "Trump supporter" voice in his head, and anyone who refuses to get on the crazy-train with him.
The reason "why" you'll never get anywhere discussing anything with SECONDRATE is because the reasons "why" he hates that whole host of people (real or imaginary) aren't the reasons that he posts. I know this because it's obvious that he doesn't care WHAT he posts, as long as he's flinging poop. He'll shift arguments and even contradict himself from one moment to the next ("Republicans protect Trump/ Republicans secretly want to get rid of Trump" and "Republicans have to be secretive/ Republicans don't need to be secretive" are just two recent examples)... genuine opinions don't contradict themselves that frequently.
It's obvious to me that the posted "reasons" why SECONDRATE hates this whole host of people are mere RATIONALIZATIONS ... excuses as it were ... because they're entirely unthought-out and secondhand. Still, it's obvious from the sheer volume of posts that SECONDRATE flings against the wall that he's driven by a powerful emotion, sourced in something that even he can't admit to himself.
There is not a shred of honesty in there because SECONDRATE can't even be honest with hinself. He must be evil, or he must believe that he's evil, in order for such powerful denial, projection, and hate to be at work in there.
That's my $0.02 anyway.
-----------
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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Quote:Wasn't worth 2 cents. Russian troll, when are you suing me?
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
That's my $0.02 anyway.
For the Russian version:
https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=en&
;tl=ru&text=Russian%20troll%2C%20when%20are%20you%20suing%20me%3F
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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To repeat:
The year 2016 brought the first genuinely post–Cold War election: the perennial carnage of American capitalism, intensified by forty years of growing inequality, prepared the ground for Bernie Sanders’s socialism, while the nativism and racism that had slunk just outside respectable politics returned full-throated. Trump is not an anomalous departure but rather a return to the baseline — to the historical norm.
The thing that really defined Trump’s political language was its nihilism about politics itself, the appetite it stoked for political bullshit that doesn’t even pretend to hold together, but just staggers from one emotional trigger to another. Trump essentially short-sold the high-minded political style of the late Cold War, betting that it would prove weaker than it looked under pressure — that people neither expected much from government nor thought it important enough to be well run; that a lot of voters despised their political class and the cultural and financial elites around it; and that recreational cruelty and you-can’t-bullshit-a-bullshitter snark would feel more authentic than any respectably sanctioned appeal to better angels. We are, he intimated, the barbarians we’ve been waiting for. His Trumpism is basically Reagan Republicanism without the California simulacrum of sunny goodwill.
www.dissentmagazine.org/article/normcore-trump-resistance-books-crisis
-of-democracy
For the American right, Donald Trump’s inauguration as the forty-fifth president of the United States was a moment of political rebirth. Elements of American conservatism had long fostered a reactionary counterculture, which defined the push for civil rights as oppression, resisted the equality of women and the transgression of conventional heterosexual norms, pilloried the hegemony of the liberal media, and was suspicious of globalism and its corporate liberal institutions, including the UN and the WTO. Already in the 1950s this reactionary politics had secured a niche on the right wing of the GOP. It was reenergized by the Goldwater campaign and the conservative backlash against the social revolutions of the 1960s. Reintegrated into the mainstream GOP by Ronald Reagan, it then flared into the open in the ferocious hostility to the Clintons in the 1990s. With Trump it finally claimed center stage. For the right, the explosion of “truth-speaking” by Trump and his cohorts, the unabashed sexism and xenophobia of his administration, and its robust nationalism on issues of trade and security need no justification. His election represents a long-awaited overturning of the consensus of liberalism.
www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/06/06/democracy-and-its-discontents/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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To repeat
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SIX, you may feel that you're making progress with SECONDRATE by engaging him endlessly, but SECONDRATE will twist and turn and slither around to avoid reaching any sort of negative conclusion, because he is, in a word, nuts.
He has an astonishing level of hatred against Texas Republicans, Republicans in general, Trump specifically, the apocryphal "Trump supporter" voice in his head, and anyone who refuses to get on the crazy-train with him.
The reason "why" you'll never get anywhere discussing anything with SECONDRATE is because the reasons "why" he hates that whole host of people (real or imaginary) aren't the reasons that he posts. I know this because it's obvious that he doesn't care WHAT he posts, as long as he's flinging poop. He'll shift arguments and even contradict himself from one moment to the next ("Republicans protect Trump/ Republicans secretly want to get rid of Trump" and "Republicans have to be secretive/ Republicans don't need to be secretive" are just two recent examples)... genuine opinions don't contradict themselves that frequently.
It's obvious to me that the posted "reasons" why SECONDRATE hates this whole host of people are mere RATIONALIZATIONS ... excuses as it were ... because they're entirely unthought-out and secondhand. Still, it's obvious from the sheer volume of posts that SECONDRATE flings against the wall that he's driven by a powerful emotion, sourced in something that even he can't admit to himself.
There is not a shred of honesty in there because SECONDRATE can't even be honest with hinself. He must be evil, or he must believe that he's evil, in order for such powerful denial, projection, and hate to be at work in there.
That's my $0.02 anyway.
-----------
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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Oh. I already know there's no changing Second. He's a despicable human being and a completely static character incapable of change.
I get a kick out of making him lose his shit, however, and putting him on blast for any of the hypocritical and terrible things he routinely has to say about others.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Well, OK, if that's what amuses you then ... carry on.
-----------
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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Quote:There is no contradiction. Despite Trump breaking the Ten Commandments, the showy Christian Mike Pence defends Trump on all occasions. Pence wants and could be an adequate President, but if he ever stops slavishly defending Trump, Trump would drop him in a second. Then Pence would not be a Vice Presidential candidate in 2020 and he won't have a chance to replace Trump, should he have a stroke and suddenly die. It has been known to happen. Another example: Mitch McConnell needs Trump to nominate judges on McConnell's list. If McConnell ever stops defending Trump, Trump stops picking names from McConnell's list. McConnell's life would be much easier with President Mike Pence, but there is nothing McConnell can do to get rid of Trump without Trump completely sabotaging McConnell's plan to pack the courts with extremist judges.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
To repeat
He'll shift arguments and even contradict himself from one moment to the next ("Republicans protect Trump/ Republicans secretly want to get rid of Trump . . . "
www.politico.com/story/2019/03/06/trump-mcconnell-judges-1205722
Did you really need this explained to you, Signym? You did. fff.net has a million words by you that show you are overly articulate but you don't understand American politics. I suspect you are a Russian troll who would do Russian politics more competently.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:I consistently say terrible things about terrible people. I've always been judgmental. It works for me. You have probably had your life derailed many times by bosses like me or girlfriends who dumped you, but you never understood why they fired you or dumped you. You never figured out what you did wrong because they didn't warn you a hundred times before they pushed the big red button and ejected you from the airplane or the job or their life. Trump cannot save you from yourself and your faults.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Oh. I already know there's no changing Second. He's a despicable human being and a completely static character incapable of change.
I get a kick out of making him lose his shit, however, and putting him on blast for any of the hypocritical and terrible things he routinely has to say about others.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
You have probably had your life derailed many times by bosses or girlfriends like me, but you never understood why they fired you or dumped you.
Nope. Never had a girlfriend like you. They were all twice the man you'll ever be, cupcake.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:In hundreds of "Witch Hunt" tweets, Trump denies that Russians committed crimes, but dozens of Russians were indicted by Mueller. That is Trump damning himself when he can't even be trusted to understand simple things like indictments of criminals.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Yeah. The only problem with that is the Mueller report didn't damn Trump.
lol
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Trump's answer to every question Mueller asked in Appendix C of the Mueller Report was either "I have no recollection" or "I do not recall". Trump damned himself with his amnesia and dementia. If he can't recall, he shouldn't be in the White House. Mike Pence should be in the job.
Trump is a confused old man. But if 6ix can't see it, 6ix is as confused as Trump is. I've read enough of 6ix's stuff to know he is mentally handicapped as severely as Trump. This is why both 6ix and Trump have physical troubles in the real world -- their brains are malfunctioning. It is all there in the Mueller Report about Trump's mental problems. 6ix's problems are spread all over fff.net for anyone to see.
www.fireflyfans.net/mthreaduser.aspx?u=20928
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
lol
Let's see how many threads we can find where Second threatens the lives of others, wishes death on political figures, talks about how he would murder political figures themselves, how he revels in ruining other people's lives, how he's better than you because he's rich, yada yada yada...
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthreaduser.aspx?u=20832
There's a huge collective of reasons why we're both different, Second. One I might point out right now is that I'm not full of hatered and anger toward my fellow man, and I don't make a living using and abusing other people. Another I might point out is that I've admitted in plain view my own shortcomings here, on many occasions.
I do it here, as I've said before, rather than talking on Facebook where everybody knows my name because the RWED is my toilet.
Unlike you, a completely static character who is exactly the same person that they were when they signed up on this site in 2013, I've been working very hard to turn things around. I take full ownership of my problems. They were many years in the making. Trump isn't going to fix them. Hillary wouldn't have fixed them.
Yeah... my back is a bit up against the wall at the moment, but believe me, I've faced worse in my life. I'll figure it out and everything's going to be alright.
You would wither away and die if you had to spend a week in my shoes.
Why don't you go back to work in your Ivory Tower and go fire somebody else and ruin their life? You seem a bit on tilt today. I'm sure destroying somebody will make the pain go away.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:second seems to have found a home for shovelling his nonstop heap of manure.
Originally posted by second:
How Abraham Lincoln helped rig the Senate for Republicans
https://thinkprogress.org/how-abraham-lincoln-rigged-the-senate-for-re
publicans/amp/
By 2040, according to a University of Virginia analysis of Census population projections, about half of the country will live in just eight states — which means 16 senators for one half of America and 84 for the other half. Meanwhile, according to Stanford political scientist Jonathan Rodden, partisanship closely correlates with population density — “as you go from the center of cities out through the suburbs and into rural areas, you traverse in a linear fashion from Democratic to Republican places.”
America is fast approaching a tipping point where the GOP will enjoy a permanent supermajority in the United States Senate — and with it, permanent control over the federal judiciary. Democrats have no choice. They must embrace the Party of Lincoln’s tactic of selectively admitting new states, or they must perish.
In 1860 the virtually unpopulated Nevada became its own territory. Republicans would admit it as a state just four years later. That gave the Party of Lincoln two extra seats in the Senate — helping prevent Democrats from simultaneously controlling the White House and both houses of Congress until 1893.
Nor was this selective admission of the Republican state of Nevada an isolated case. Among other things, the reason why there are two Dakotas — despite the fact that both states are so underpopulated that they each only rate a single member of the House of Representatives to this day — is because Republicans won the 1888 election and decided to celebrate by giving themselves four senators instead of just two.
But this is more nutso. Lincoln rigged the Constitution?
Nevada is currently the 7th largest State. It was larger than 10 States (at the time) combined: RI, DE, CT, NJ, NH, MA, MD, WV, SC.
According to second's wacko delusions, RI should have their 2 Senators taken away.
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Quote:
You have probably had your life derailed many times by bosses or girlfriends like me, but you never understood why they fired you or dumped you.- SECONDRATE
Nope. Never had a girlfriend like you. They were all twice the man you'll ever be, cupcake.- SIX
OMG!!!!
Holy fuck, SIX! Pure genius!
I laughed so long hubby wanted to know what was funny, and despite the fact that he's a pretty humorless guy, he laughed out loud too.
I gotta direct my friend's attention to this, it's a gem.
-----------
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 .
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
The Rise of “Game of Thrones” was Part of The Fall of America
https://theintercept.com/2019/05/20/the-rise-of-game-of-thrones-was-pa
rt-of-the-fall-of-america/
“Game of Thrones” thirst for cruelty was always unsettling. Decapitation, rape, crucifixion, children being burned at the stake, people eaten alive by dogs. Then it culminated in actual genocide. The show’s enormous conglomeration of creative talent was harnessed to exquisitely depict ever more baroque barbarism.
Of course, great stories almost always involve some degree of violence. It’s hardwired into humans to pay close attention to it, for good reason. But because that’s true, the not-so-great stories pumped out by America’s entertainment industry include violence as well, because they don’t have anything else. “Game of Thrones” was perfect for an audience that’s been marinated since birth in bad stories full of more banal brutality. Like drug addicts, we needed higher and higher doses for our burned-out nervous systems to feel anything. The core viewership for “Game of Thrones” was people who are rich enough to afford an HBO subscription — and therefore have almost any kind of distraction instantly available to them — yet deeply bored. ( I paid HBO nothing. Free HBO https://psarips.org/tv-show/game-thrones-season-8/ )
Anyone who knows anything about history will recognize this kind of decadence of imagination. It’s common among the elites of societies in decline. In fact, “Game of Thrones” puts this worldview in the mouth of Sansa, a princess from the provinces who yearned to move to the sophisticated capital — and is herself part of a collapsing elite.
“You’ve got to invent a story,” she tells one of her servants as she sits on a dock, speculating on where all the ships on the water are going.
“Why should I make up a story when I know the truth?” asks the servant.
“Because,” Sansa replies, “the truth is always either terrible or boring.”
This is completely wrong: If you can taste more than the strongest mental flavors, much of the truth is both non-terrible and exciting. We actually have the capacity to power everything via the giant glowing orb in the sky. We could use a small fraction of our wealth to provide everyone on Earth with clean water. We could focus our lives on creating something the world’s never seen before: an actual democracy.
However, anyone who’s spent time in the upper precincts of America knows many of the people there believe Sansa in their hearts. Their lives are so cosseted and lush that only extremes can get their attention. Indeed, Donald Trump — even as he experiences the most extreme life possible in the United States — is so bored that the only thing he wants to do is watch cable TV.
That’s where “Game of Thrones” leaves us in the end. As some of the few remaining characters discuss building better sewage systems so that regular people don’t die like flies, the camera slowly pulls back, leaving them to it. HBO knows that we simply don’t have the imagination to care about 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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Game of Thrones’ political realism fell apart in season eight
The West Wing (TV show) is defined by its optimistic account of democracy. At its core, Aaron Sorkin’s White House drama believed that people are rational and open to persuasion, and that the American political system centers on people having good-faith conversations about their beliefs and frequently changing their minds as a result. Speeches persuade; the marketplace of ideas works.
This is not how American politics — or politics anywhere, really — actually works. It’s a naive vision that Game of Thrones has spent years deconstructing, pointing out all of the ways in which self-interest and ideology not only make it difficult for people to compromise, but sometimes lead to war. And yet, the end of this long struggle for supremacy ends in the most saccharine way possible: all the lords agreeing to a new king, without any debate, because Tyrion offered up some pretty words about stories.
www.vox.com/game-of-thrones/2019/5/20/18632343/game-of-thrones-finale-
season-8-bran-tyrion-iron-throne
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Good to know that everybody hates the end of Game of Thrones.
No reason to watch it now.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Trump Stalks Out of Infrastructure Meeting With Democrats
Donald Trump’s trillion-dollar infrastructure bill was DOA from the moment he first announced it. His own party made it clear that they had no intention of spending a bunch of money on infrastructure. On the other hand, he had promised infrastructure and Democrats were playing along. What to do?
Easy! Make up some whiny nonsense about how Democrats are being mean:
President Trump abruptly ended a meeting with Democratic leaders on Wednesday, saying he was unable to work with them on legislation. Trump said he can’t work on infrastructure “under these circumstances.”
Speaking to reporters shortly after Trump’s appearance in the Rose Garden, Pelosi and Schumer said they were taken aback by Trump’s behavior. “To watch what happened in the White House would make your jaw drop,” Schumer said.
In any case, this is obviously just a way for Trump to extricate himself from a promise to his voters to build infrastructure that the GOP refuses to pay for and to get in a little bit of victimization playacting while he’s at it.
www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-takes-aim-at-house-democrats-as-
they-prepare-to-discuss-impeachment-calls/2019/05/22/a36ea0d0-7c79-11e9-8bb7-0fc796cf2ec0_story.html
Trump's tirade wasn't spontaneous: a sign on his podium suggests that his Rose Garden remarks were not as impromptu as the White House led on.
www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2019/05/22/trump-rose-garden-remarks-sign-
jake-tapper-sot-lead-vpx.cnn
House Republicans said that $2 trillion was a wildly unrealistic sum, with House Republican Whip Steve Scalise saying there were not any financing options agreeable to both parties “that would come anywhere close to $2 trillion.” Senate Republican rank and file were similarly uninterested.
It was up to the White House to come up with the financing options and present it to Democratic leaders for the meeting scheduled on Wednesday. But Wednesday morning, Politico reported that “the White House is not going to present any plan to pay for rebuilding the nation’s roads and highways” and would instead ask Democrats to offer their own payment plan. This was not the first indication that Trump was trying to walk away: On Tuesday night, he sent Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer a letter saying that he felt they should pass his new North American trade agreement before working on an infrastructure bill.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/05/trump-rose-garden-infrastr
ucture-pelosi.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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Trump sure knows his supporters:
Harriet Tubman $20 Bill Is Delayed Until Trump Leaves Office, Mnuchin Says
Harriet Tubman — former slave, abolitionist, “conductor” on the Underground Railroad — will not become the face of the $20 bill until after President Trump leaves office, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Wednesday. Mr. Mnuchin, concerned that the president might create an uproar by canceling the new bill altogether, was eager to delay its redesign until Mr. Trump was out of office, some senior Treasury Department officials have said.
www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/us/harriet-tubman-bill.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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Can't they find a prettier picture of her?
The $20 is one of the most common bills out there and we have to see that ugly mug on it every time we go to buy something?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Like I wrote: Trump sure knows his supporters, 6ix. Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill was a murderer, slave-owner, and an ugly-looking man.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Can't they find a prettier picture of her?
The $20 is one of the most common bills out there and we have to see that ugly mug on it every time we go to buy something?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Why Andrew Jackson’s Legacy Is So Controversial
www.history.com/news/andrew-jackson-presidency-controversial-legacy
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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You're crazy. Andrew Jackson looks dead sexy with that quaffed hair.
Plenty of great black men we could put on there. Why not Martin Luthor King Jr.? I'm assuming because his messages don't fit in well with the current Democratic party's extreme racism and sexism.
My vote is for Dr. Mae Jemison.
Quote:
Dr. Jemison is the first black woman to be admitted into the astronaut training program and fly into space in 1987. Jemison also developed and participated in research projects on the Hepatitis B vaccine and rabies.
I do believe that wouldn't only make her the first black and the first woman to be put on US currency, but it would make her the first person to still be alive when it happened too.
And she's not ugly.
Short of those two, I'll settle for Samuel L. Jackson. That choice would be pretty meta.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Meanwhile, in America . . .
Republican: I'm terrified of Muslims. I don't want Sharia law in America.
Democrat: Okay. Let's avoid that by separating church and state.
Republican: Nope. I believe in Jesus. I want this country to be more Christian.
Democrat: Okay. Here are some refugees who need help.
Republican: Nope. Not helping refugees while we still have homeless kids and veterans here.
Democrat: Okay. Here's a bill to help veterans
Republican: Nope. I don't want to raise taxes.
Democrat: Okay. What about homeless kids?
Republican: Nope. Their parents are just lazy and want handouts. They shouldn't have had kids if they can't afford kids.
Democrat: Okay. Let's fund Planned Parenthood to help people plan their parenthood.
Republican: Nope. Some of that money might go for an abortion. I'm pro-life.
Democrat: Okay. Let's give everyone easier access to healthcare to improve and extend their lives.
Republican: Nope. That's socialism. I believe in the Constitution. Not dirty, dirty socialism.
Democrat: Okay. At least we can agree on that. I especially like how the Constitution gives everyone freedom of (and from) religion.
Republican: Yes! Freedom of religion! Except Muslims. I'm terrified of Muslims.
https://twitter.com/Guerraeterna/status/827835168585031680 from http://andymcclure.com/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Meanwhile, in America . . .
Oh. Does that mean that you're done trying to paint me as a racist and sexist when it's clear that I'm not?
lol
That's a rare complete change of subject that didn't involve quoting a single line of a previous post from Second.
I accept the terms of your surrender.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:6ix, you can claim whatever you want about yourself, but when I have spent money to investigate who people really are, rather than who they say they are, the Republicans fall short of their personal claims of honesty, integrity, and intelligence. It could be as simple as talking to their references and discovering those are fake. It often gets much worse than that when I dig deep. With Democrats, on the other hand, I have never had ridiculous contradictions between who they pretend to be and who they truly are. Could be luck, but probably not. Maybe it's the difference in personality between Democrats and Republicans as illustrated in that comic:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Meanwhile, in America . . .
Oh. Does that mean that you're done trying to paint me as a racist and sexist when it's clear that I'm not?
lol
That's a rare complete change of subject that didn't involve quoting a single line of a previous post from Second.
I accept the terms of your surrender.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Meanwhile, in America . . .
Republican: I'm terrified of Muslims. I don't want Sharia law in America.
Democrat: Okay. Let's avoid that by separating church and state.
Republican: Nope. I believe in Jesus. I want this country to be more Christian.
Democrat: Okay. Here are some refugees who need help.
Republican: Nope. Not helping refugees while we still have homeless kids and veterans here.
Democrat: Okay. Here's a bill to help veterans
Republican: Nope. I don't want to raise taxes.
Democrat: Okay. What about homeless kids?
Republican: Nope. Their parents are just lazy and want handouts. They shouldn't have had kids if they can't afford kids.
Democrat: Okay. Let's fund Planned Parenthood to help people plan their parenthood.
Republican: Nope. Some of that money might go for an abortion. I'm pro-life.
Democrat: Okay. Let's give everyone easier access to healthcare to improve and extend their lives.
Republican: Nope. That's socialism. I believe in the Constitution. Not dirty, dirty socialism.
Democrat: Okay. At least we can agree on that. I especially like how the Constitution gives everyone freedom of (and from) religion.
Republican: Yes! Freedom of religion! Except Muslims. I'm terrified of Muslims.
https://twitter.com/Guerraeterna/status/827835168585031680 from http://andymcclure.com/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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I'm not even a republican, idiot, so keep on dreaming that you're some sort of savant when it comes to judging people.
You're certainly great at the act of putting judgement on people. That says nothing about your ability to properly judge somebody's character.
We already know what a despicable person you are in real life. You gleefully exclaim it for everyone to hear how awful you are for all of us to see whenever somebody has you on tilt.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:You voted for Trump, 6ix. You defend Trump. Drop dead, 6ix. Make America Great Again.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I'm not even a republican, idiot, so keep on dreaming that you're some sort of savant when it comes to judging people.
The military doesn’t want these pardons. But Fox News does.
Taking cues from Fox News, President Donald Trump is reportedly considering commemorating Memorial Day by pardoning several American troops accused of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Trump’s interest in the pardons is in part a result of “a months-long lobbying campaign” by Iraq War veteran Pete Hegseth, a Fox & Friends weekend co-host who doubles as an informal adviser to the president.
Hegseth calls for pardons for:
Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher, a Navy SEAL leader who is awaiting court-martial on charges he shot unarmed civilians and stabbed a defenseless teenager while deployed to help Iraqi forces fight ISIS in 2017;
Mathew Golsteyn, a Silver Star recipient (the honor was later stripped) who admitted to killing a Taliban bombmaker in Afghanistan in February 2010 and is scheduled to be tried on charges of premeditated murder;
Clint Lorance, who is serving a 19-year sentence following his conviction on murder charges stemming from the shooting of three Afghan men in July 2012.
Trump is considering a pardon for a former Blackwater security contractor found guilty of shooting Iraqis, and a group of Marine Corps snipers charged with desecrating the corpses of Taliban fighters.
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/5/24/18637360/trump-war-crimes-pa
rdons-gallagher-golsteyn-fox-news-hegseth
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Of the two of us, I'm not the one making a living exploiting others and then ruining half of their lives for their political leanings.
You jump off the bridge and MAGA first. Nobody would miss you.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:I find a strong correlation at work between an employee's inability to learn and the employee being a Republican. Work goes much smoother without the people who won't learn from their mistakes. It is best to fire them. I have a list of three Republicans that Obama should have fired as soon as possible. (Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner, and Ben Bernanke) These 3 numbskulls are still writing books to justify the mistakes they made. They learned nothing, same as my Republican employees learn nothing from their mistakes:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Of the two of us, I'm not the one making a living exploiting others and then ruining half of their lives for their political leanings.
You jump off the bridge and MAGA first. Nobody would miss you.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
https://bostonreview.net/politics/reed-hundt-playing-fire
According to Jamie Dimon, cumulative economic growth over the last decade has been half of what it would have been in a normal recovery. As a result the economy is $4 trillion smaller than it should be. In his words, that growth “certainly would have driven wages higher and given us the wherewithal to broadly build a better country.”
It is widely recognized that the economic disappointments of the last decade made it extremely difficult for the Democratic presidential nominee in 2016 to run on her predecessor’s record, even though unemployment was at last reaching satisfactorily low levels and wages had begun to increase. Conversely, Donald Trump’s successful campaign is often seen as reflecting voter dissatisfaction with the government’s response to the financial crisis of 2008.
Given the ample volume of hindsight, it takes conviction verging on stubbornness to insist that the United States government under the Bush administration did all it could to prevent the crisis and that both the Bush and Obama administrations did all they reasonably could have done in response. Yet in their three separate memoirs, numerous public statements, and now in their jointly written book, Firefighting: The Financial Crisis and Its Lessons, the trio of President Bush’s Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Bush’s president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and, later, President Obama’s Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, and both presidents’ Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke have made these claims.
In Firefighting, for instance, they look to the next crisis and correctly assert that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) should be able to “fully stand behind” the obligations “of large complicated banks on the brink of failure . . . while winding them down in an orderly fashion.” But in an FDIC resolution shareholders and creditors take some loss. The firefighters rejected that approach in 2008, and they continue now to argue that in a crisis it is wrong “to ensure that risk takers pay a price for their risk taking” such as by “imposing haircuts on creditors.” By arguing that risk takers should be held harmless in the next crisis, they are restating the position that tied President Obama to one of the most unpopular government actions in history—namely, the bail-out. No future president should, or would want, to take this advice.
Notwithstanding many actions by the trio in emergency conditions, their reaction to the recession was not what the country deserved. Indeed, it had at least three serious flaws that we should be revisiting and learning from for next time.
First, they bailed out Bear Stearns in March 2008, then let Lehman Brothers go bankrupt on September 15, 2008, and finally bailed out AIG on September 16, 2008. In the first of these moves, they had another firm buy the failing firm. In the middle decision, they magnified the losses for everyone by implementing no plan in advance. And in the last of these moves, the government took control and fired management.
This unpredictable signaling intensified the dreadful reaction to the Lehman bankruptcy. The government’s sinuous path of decision-making inspired a lack of confidence. That in turn contribut
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
I find a strong correlation at work between an employee's inability to learn and the employee being a Republican.
Yup. I'm sure anybody is going to take the word of somebody who eats, sleeps, shits and breathes Democrat. And is already scrambling for reasons to not look so horrible for firing people they don't agree with on something that has nothing to do with work.
Why bother man? Everybody knows you're either a piece of shit or the entire story of your riches is a flat out lie in the first place. You can't even go back and delete your history on that since it's been quoted so many times by other people.
Just own it man. You seem to revel in it most days. Be yourself.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:So, 6ix, you have disappointed your bosses and they fired your fat dumb ass. Tough to be you. I told you about the TV show My 600-lb Life. Doctor Now orders his patients to eat less. He weighs them every few months to find out who is lying to him about keeping their diet. He sends them to a psychiatrist for their mental problems. If they won't slow down their eating, as Doctor Now has ordered, he will never schedule surgery to reduce the size of their stomachs. Bosses are very much like Doctor Now. If you won't follow your boss's orders, he will never pay you, 6ixStringJack. He might send you to a psychiatrist, or he might fire your dumb ass. Since bosses don't swear a Hippocratic Oath, bosses are not required to "Do No Harm" in America. They will "Harm" you if you piss them off.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
I find a strong correlation at work between an employee's inability to learn and the employee being a Republican.
Yup. I'm sure anybody is going to take the word of somebody who eats, sleeps, shits and breathes Democrat. And is already scrambling for reasons to not look so horrible for firing people they don't agree with on something that has nothing to do with work.
Why bother man? Everybody knows you're either a piece of shit or the entire story of your riches is a flat out lie in the first place. You can't even go back and delete your history on that since it's been quoted so many times by other people.
Just own it man. You seem to revel in it most days. Be yourself.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_600-lb_Life
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
So, 6ix, you have disappointed your bosses and they fired your fat dumb ass. Tough to be you. I told you about the TV show My 600-lb Life. Doctor Now orders his patients to eat less. He weighs them every few months to find out who is lying to him about keeping their diet. He sends them to a psychiatrist for their mental problems. If they won't slow down their eating, as Doctor Now has ordered, he will never schedule surgery to reduce the size of their stomachs. Bosses are very much like Doctor Now. If you won't follow your boss's orders, he will never pay you, 6ixStringJack. He might send you to a psychiatrist, or he might fire your dumb ass. Since bosses don't swear a Hippocratic Oath, bosses are not required to "Do No Harm" in America. They will "Harm" you if you piss them off.
Wow. You put more fake news in a single paragraph than Maddow usually puts in her nightly show.
What's a'matter, Princess? You on tilt because I've got you pegged?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Pete Buttigieg and Nancy Pelosi have both mastered the art of puncturing Trump — far better than his Republican primary debate rivals did.
“I don’t have a problem standing up to somebody who was working on Season 7 of ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ when I was packing my bags for Afghanistan,” Buttigieg told The Post’s Robert Costa, saying he took a dim view of Trump’s bone-spurs excuse to get out of serving in Vietnam.
Pelosi winds Trump up when she drips condescension worthy of a Jane Austen grande dame, saying she will pray for the president or pleading for someone to stage an intervention with the poor soul.
After Pelosi remarked that the president was engaged in a cover-up, Trump dynamited his own meeting with “Crazy Nancy,” as he called her. His I’m not crazy, you’re crazy rebuttal to Pelosi echoed his I’m not a puppet, you’re a puppet line to Hillary Clinton during the debate.
Trump tweeted a video of Pelosi that was manipulated to make her look as if she were slurring her words. “Well, I don’t know about the videos,” the president told reporters as he left on his trip to Japan.
“He does outrageous, nasty, destructive things, knowing full well he’s crossing a line, and then he pretends he didn’t,” said Trump biographer Tim O’Brien.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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lol.
What these idiot journos don't get is that Trump is still very entertaining.
Look at those idiots on the Left act like morons in 2019.
Trump's bringing them all down to his level, and that's not a playing field that they're going to win on.
If they weren't so insecure and hated by the people they're supposed to represent, they'd ignore anything he had to say and he'd be left looking like the asshole.
But they can't, so they won't.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Trump biographer Tim O’Brien said, “He has spent five decades going to gossip columnists, radio shows, TV interviews and newspapers to stick a knife into almost anybody who crosses his path that he doesn’t like and he revels in it. There is something amazing in the Energizer Bunny aspect of his nastiness and his ignorance. He doesn’t care what people think about how mean or dumb he is. He just keeps going.”
O’Brien said Pelosi “hit on something that is core to his con. His whole life is about the cover-up. He has covered up his academic record, his health reports, his dalliances with women, his finances, his family history. Even while he was saying he was the most transparent president in history, his Treasury secretary was across town telling Congress, ‘I’m not giving you the president’s tax returns.’
“One of the biggest motivating factors in Trump’s life — other than food, greed, sex and revenge — is mythmaking. Deep down, he knows he’s a pathological liar and he’s not the person he says he is. But any time anyone pierces that veil, it sends him into a rage.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump biographer Tim O’Brien said, “He has spent five decades going to gossip columnists, radio shows, TV interviews and newspapers to stick a knife into almost anybody who crosses his path that he doesn’t like and he revels in it. There is something amazing in the Energizer Bunny aspect of his nastiness and his ignorance. He doesn’t care what people think about how mean or dumb he is. He just keeps going.”
O’Brien said Pelosi “hit on something that is core to his con. His whole life is about the cover-up. He has covered up his academic record, his health reports, his dalliances with women, his finances, his family history. Even while he was saying he was the most transparent president in history, his Treasury secretary was across town telling Congress, ‘I’m not giving you the president’s tax returns.’
“One of the biggest motivating factors in Trump’s life — other than food, greed, sex and revenge — is mythmaking. Deep down, he knows he’s a pathological liar and he’s not the person he says he is. But any time anyone pierces that veil, it sends him into a rage.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Sounds like he should be your hero, Second.
You've certainly modeled your life after him.
Or if it's all a lie you've been feeding us, it's the reality you wish others to believe of you.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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So Far, Models Are Predicting a Trump Victory in 2020
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/05/models-predicting-trump-vi
ctory-2020.html
Three analysts who set up and look at predictive models say President Donald Trump is likely to win reelection in 2020. The secret? A combination of favorable economic data as well as the normal advantage that incumbents enjoy, according to Steven Rattner, a counselor to the Treasury secretary in the Obama administration.
In a column for the New York Times, Rattner notes that “one of the best” models to predict election outcomes makes clear that Trump is likely to receive a significant tailwind from the economy. Ray Fair, a professor at Yale, has come up with a model that takes into account GDP growth rates, inflation, and incumbency and has been quite accurate in previous cycles. In 2016, for example, the model accurately predicted a victory for Trump although it overestimated his share of the popular vote. According to that model, Trump’s vote share should be as high as 56.1 percent in the next election, although in reality the divisiveness of the candidate means the actual number won’t be as high.
Fair isn’t the only modeler to see Trump with a clear advantage in 2020. Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics analyzed 12 models and found that Trump comes out on top in all of them. Donald Luskin of Trend Macrolytics analyzed the Electoral College and came to the same conclusion.
“So the question for 2020 may well be whether Mr. Trump can overcome the majority of voters’ poor perception of him and use a good economy and incumbency to win re-election,” Rattner writes.
More at https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/445668-3-modelers-predict-trump-
reelection
TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald
by Timothy O'Brien
www.amazon.com/TrumpNation-Donald-Timothy-L-OBrien-ebook/dp/B0169GGSJU
https://pirateproxy.lat/torrent/16575664/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Vice President Pence spoke to the West Point graduating class on Saturday, and amid the standard congratulations and tributes to the graduates, he said something truly shocking:
Quote:Let’s pause and consider what this means. Pence is saying not just that more wars are inevitable, but that they are inevitable soon. Let’s not forget that while many of those who attend the service academies go on to careers in the military, many do not. They have an eight-year commitment after graduation — five years on active duty and three in the reserves.
It is a virtual certainty that you will fight on a battlefield for America at some point in your life. You will lead soldiers in combat. It will happen.
Some of you will join the fight against radical Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of you will join the fight on the Korean Peninsula and in the Indo-Pacific, where North Korea continues to threaten the peace, and an increasingly militarized China challenges our presence in the region. Some of you will join the fight in Europe, where an aggressive Russia seeks to redraw international boundaries by force. And some of you may even be called upon to serve in this hemisphere.
And when that day comes, I know you will move to the sound of the guns and do your duty, and you will fight, and you will win. The American people expect nothing less.
So, wherever you’re called, I urge you to take what you learned here and put it into practice. Put your armor on, so that when — not if — that day comes, you’ll be able to stand your ground.
So the vice president announced to these young men and women that within the next eight years, they will all see combat. In fact, Pence sees America waging war everywhere very soon, whether it’s “the fight on the Korean Peninsula and in the Indo-Pacific,” “the fight in Europe” or somewhere in Latin America. As for Iraq and Afghanistan, Pence is saying that there will be no end to not just American presence but American combat in those places.
And, who knows, if we’re lucky we’ll get a new invasion before long! Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), one of President Trump’s closest advisers on Capitol Hill, said on Fox News Sunday this weekend that “I would give Cuba an ultimatum to get out of Venezuela. If they don’t, I would let the Venezuelan military know, you got to choose between democracy and Maduro, and if you choose Maduro and Cuba, we are coming after you. This is in our backyard.”
More at www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/05/27/mike-pence-predicts-war-eve
rywhere-next-few-years/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Wait? Pence is part of the Establishment War Machine? Ya don't say?
That's the guy you've said on quite a few occasions in the last month that you want running the country now.
Changing your mind?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:I haven't changed my mind. I am a big believer that people (Trump, Pence, 6ix) who don't learn their lessons in life need to be punished harder and harder until they either do or they die. Sorrowfully, that's not how things are run inside America, but when you leave the country, you can get yourself killed for being stupid or incompetent or lazy. I'd really like to see the Republicans start a war, run it incompetently as Donald Rumsfeld did, lose it like in Iraq, then lose the next election.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Wait? Pence is part of the Establishment War Machine? Ya don't say?
That's the guy you've said on quite a few occasions in the last month that you want running the country now.
Changing your mind?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Why America doesn’t win wars anymore
An expert explains why the US struggles with modern wars.
www.vox.com/2018/2/15/17007678/syria-trump-war-win-interview
The US can still successfully fight the wars of yesteryear — World War-style conflicts — but hasn’t yet mastered how to win wars against insurgents, which are smaller fights against groups within countries. The problem is the US continues to involve itself in those kinds of fights.
We’re still stuck in this view that war is like the Super Bowl: We meet on the field, both sides have uniforms, we score points, someone wins, and when the game ends you go home. That’s not what war is like now.
Trump himself recognized this: He said on the campaign trail numerous times that we used to win wars and we don’t win anymore. And he has promised to turn the page on this era of defeat and said that we were going to get sick and tired of winning. I doubt him.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Another non answer.
Sometimes I wonder why I'm the only person here who even bothers engaging in conversation with you anymore.
I think it's time to put an end to that.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Another non answer.
Sometimes I wonder why I'm the only person here who even bothers engaging in conversation with you anymore.
I think it's time to put an end to that.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Quote:http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=58882&mid=10766
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK: Tuesday, May 28, 2019 5:59 PM
New beginnings. :)
56#1076656
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The Congressional Research Service has analyzed the 2017 Republican tax bill and concluded that it had no noticeable effect on GDP, consumption, domestic investment, or wages. None of the Republican arguments in favor of the tax act were offered in good faith anyway, so it’s no surprise that it had little to no effect on the economy. The real goal of the tax act was to reduce the taxes of rich people. Rep. Chris Collins explained things elegantly: “My donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again.'”
The numbers are here:
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/05/chart-of-the-day-heres-what-cor
porations-did-with-their-tax-cut/
Congress’s official think tank finds the Republican tax cuts helped corporations, not workers.
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/5/29/18642928/trump-tax-cuts-and-
jobs-act-analysis
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Bernie Sanders Is Not That Rich for Someone His Age
Bernie Sanders has lived most his adult life in the middle class. But thanks to the book he published in 2017, he is now a millionaire. And because the Vermont senator has spent his career railing against the power of the rich, some writers have wondered if his newfound wealth somehow undercuts his political message.
There are many things that make this whole pseudo-controversy a bit silly. But one of them is that Sanders really isn’t that wealthy for somebody his age. His level of affluence is normal for a college-educated American in his 70s.
Even if Sanders was a member of the wealthiest 1 percent, I don’t think it would really make him a hypocrite. The man wants to make America look a bit more like a Scandinavian social democracy, and last I checked, Swedes and Norwegians don’t have any problem with authors earning a payday. They just tax more of it. But the bottom line is that Sanders’ rhetoric about millionaires and billionaires has always been a shorthand for the power of extreme wealth, the kind that can buy political influence.
More the wealth curve for senior citizens in the 80th through 99th percentiles of household wealth among Americans age 65 or older at https://slate.com/business/2019/05/how-rich-is-bernie-sanders-wealth-c
omparison-millionaires.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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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Another non answer.
Sometimes I wonder why I'm the only person here who even bothers engaging in conversation with you anymore.
I think it's time to put an end to that.
Do Right, Be Right. :)Quote:http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=58882&mid=10766
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK: Tuesday, May 28, 2019 5:59 PM
New beginnings. :)
56#1076656
Yup. :)
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:Yup. :)
Originally posted by second:Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Another non answer.
Sometimes I wonder why I'm the only person here who even bothers engaging in conversation with you anymore.
I think it's time to put an end to that.
Do Right, Be Right. :)Quote:http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=58882&mid=10766
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK: Tuesday, May 28, 2019 5:59 PM
New beginnings. :)
56#1076656
Quote:That seems more the speed of BungBetty.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:That seems more the speed of BungBetty.
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:Yup. :)
Originally posted by second:Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Another non answer.
Sometimes I wonder why I'm the only person here who even bothers engaging in conversation with you anymore.
I think it's time to put an end to that.
Do Right, Be Right. :)Quote:http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=58882&mid=10766
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK: Tuesday, May 28, 2019 5:59 PM
New beginnings. :)
56#1076656Quote:
Do Right, Be Right. :)
It's A New Start!!!
lol
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Trump’s Latest Brainstorm Will Fail. And No, He Won’t Admit It Was Always Doomed to Fail
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump tweeted:
On June 10th, the United States will impose a 5% Tariff on all goods coming into our Country from Mexico, until such time as illegal migrants coming through Mexico, and into our Country, STOP. The Tariff will gradually increase until the Illegal Immigration problem is remedied, at which time the Tariffs will be removed. Details from the White House to follow.
4:30 PM - 30 May 2019
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1134240657621438464
The new tariff plan is pretty simple. www.vox.com/2019/5/30/18646618/tariff-mexico-asylum-trump-usmca
Starting on June 10, all goods shipped from Mexico to the United States will face an extra 5 percent tax — all of which will be paid by American consumers in the form of higher prices. Altogether, Americans import nearly $400 billion from Mexico this year, so the tariff will amount to about $20 billion, or $200 per family. If Americans buy less from Mexico, which is what Trump wants in order to motivate Mexico to do the work of Trump's Border Patrol, then the cost will be less than $20 billion.
On July 1, that tax goes up to 10 percent. That is $40 billion paid by Americans per year if Trump raises the tax no higher.
On August 1, it goes up to 15 percent. $60 billion paid by Americans.
On September 1, it goes up to 20 percent. $80 billion paid by Americans.
And on October 1, it goes up to 25 percent. $100 billion paid by Americans. Per year.
White House Chief of Staff Mulvaney was, however, at pains to say that he is not eager to see 25 percent tariffs imposed on Mexican imports.
“We sincerely hope it does not come to that,” he said. “We actually have some level of confidence that the Mexican government will be able to help us . . .” because the Border Patrol is helpless. On the other hand, I’m confident that Mexicans are not paying the $100 billion per year. It will be paid by Americans. So Mexico won’t help Trump out, but illegal migration changes with the seasons. Spring is normally the high point for border-crossings and summer a low point. Whether or not Mexico changes anything, in other words, numbers will fall in July. Trump will brag in July about his tariff policy finally working because he doesn’t understand how migration changes with the seasons.
Mulvaney would not lay out specific success criteria that he wants to see Mexico meet. Instead, he said simply that “we’re going to handle this on an ad hoc basis. We are going to judge success here by the number of people crossing the border. And that number of people needs to start coming down immediately in a significant and substantial way.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Yeah. I don't know what he's doing.
Let's stop pussyfooting around and call invaders invaders. No tariffs.
If somebody illegally crosses the border, they will be treated as hostile invaders and and anybody crossing the border after July 1st will be considered an act of war.
"Help".
Please.
We don't need Mexico's help.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:The next logical step for Trump is to escalate the border war to machine-guns and land mines, but he'd lose some votes in 2020. Same thing if he opens concentration camps, complete with cremation furnaces, for illegal migrants. It is not too farfetched for Trump:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Yeah. I don't know what he's doing.
Let's stop pussyfooting around and call invaders invaders. No tariffs.
If somebody illegally crosses the border, they will be treated as hostile invaders and and anybody crossing the border after July 1st will be considered an act of war.
"Help".
Please.
We don't need Mexico's help.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/japanese-american-relocation
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The modern Fed’s independence is an outgrowth of the wild inflation of the 1970s spurred by Richard Nixon’s meddling.
Nixon appointed Arthur Burns to run the Fed during his first term and then sought to control Fed policy through both overt and sleazy means. Nixon’s basic goal was to keep the economy hot through his 1972 reelection campaign, even if that meant running some risk of inflation. Inflation, of course, became a major problem in the mid-1970s. As inflation came back under control in the early 1980s, the conventional wisdom became that central bank independence was key to avoiding it.
There’s a theory that an incumbent president will always want to err in the direction of a little less unemployment now even if it means a little more inflation. And while on any given day that may be a reasonable trade-off, over the long run, it inevitably means a lot of inflation. And, as the theory goes, in the end, this won’t even get you sustainable low unemployment — just the dreaded “stagflation” of the late 1970s.
During the 1980s and ’90s, this evolved into a norm of Fed independence that had grown so strong that Obama administration economic policy officials would routinely decline to comment at all on monetary policy, whether on or off the record.
Still, at the end of the day, the Fed chair and the other members of the board are presidential appointees. Trump wants a Fed that will do what he wants. Modern central banking, meanwhile, is built on a foundation of independence from the day-to-day political needs of elected officials. Trump is not exactly a huge respecter of norms or a big believer in independence. That tradition has held up in the Trump years, but arguably more due to Trump’s sloppiness than to anything else.
More at "Judy Shelton’s potential nomination to a Federal Reserve Board seat"
www.vox.com/2019/6/5/18652025/judy-shelton-federal-reserve
The former “sound money” advocate and gold bug now suddenly backs Trump’s push for lower interest rates.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Letters sent from prison by the former Irish mob boss detailed his love for President Donald Trump and annoyance at the Mueller probe.
James "Whitey" Bulger wrote on a number of topics ranging from the first lady to the news media to Trump's foreign policy efforts.
“History may show Trump was the man of the hour,” Bulger wrote. “Feel China respects him and hesitant to try to bully him.”
Bulger also talked about Mueller, who led the FBI at a time when rogue agents had protected mob bosses like Bulger.
"Trump is experiencing what Mueller and company can orchestrate," Bulger said last September. "[Mueller] should observe biblical saying - 'Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.'"
The former mob boss said he enjoys Trump's war against the media and that the President has his vote in the next election.
More at Fox News www.foxnews.com/us/whitey-bulger-praised-trump-prison-letters
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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America’s Political Mood Is Now the ‘Most Liberal Ever Recorded’
The American public is in the mood for “big government.” According to the distinguished political scientist James Stimson’s “Public Policy Mood estimate” — a widely respected tool for measuring shifts in ideological opinion across time — the U.S. electorate is more sympathetic to left-wing economic policy today than at anytime in the past 68 years (which is as far back as Stimson’s data goes).
Economists who favor increasing worker power, promoting full employment, stimulating demand, and having the public sector play a more active role in channeling investment now have a lot more empirical ammunition at their disposal than they did a decade ago — while those who champion fiscal austerity, a hawkish posture on inflation, and supply-side tax cuts as a panacea for increasing productive investment have far fewer arrows in their quiver.
And it shows. The Democratic Party’s leading economic thinkers have ceased worrying about deficits and grown far friendlier to organized labor and comfortable with sweeping state interventions in the economy to mitigate inequality and facilitate socially beneficial investment. And while the Republican Party’s finest hacks have carried on supplying the same rationalizations for plutocracy they always have, other GOP policy wonks (like those working in Rubio’s office) and center-right think tanks (like the Niskanen Center) have been gravitating away from supply-side dogma and toward the formerly “liberal” terrain of industrial policy.
More at http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/americas-political-mood-is-now-
most-liberal-ever-recorded.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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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
America’s Political Mood Is Now the ‘Most Liberal Ever Recorded’
The American public is in the mood for “big government.” According to the distinguished political scientist James Stimson’s “Public Policy Mood estimate” — a widely respected tool for measuring shifts in ideological opinion across time — the U.S. electorate is more sympathetic to left-wing economic policy today than at anytime in the past 68 years (which is as far back as Stimson’s data goes).
Economists who favor increasing worker power, promoting full employment, stimulating demand, and having the public sector play a more active role in channeling investment now have a lot more empirical ammunition at their disposal than they did a decade ago — while those who champion fiscal austerity, a hawkish posture on inflation, and supply-side tax cuts as a panacea for increasing productive investment have far fewer arrows in their quiver.
And it shows. The Democratic Party’s leading economic thinkers have ceased worrying about deficits and grown far friendlier to organized labor and comfortable with sweeping state interventions in the economy to mitigate inequality and facilitate socially beneficial investment. And while the Republican Party’s finest hacks have carried on supplying the same rationalizations for plutocracy they always have, other GOP policy wonks (like those working in Rubio’s office) and center-right think tanks (like the Niskanen Center) have been gravitating away from supply-side dogma and toward the formerly “liberal” terrain of industrial policy.
More at http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/americas-political-mood-is-now-
most-liberal-ever-recorded.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
The title of that article is quite misleading.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:What qualifies as the “liberal” or “conservative” position on a given issue evolves over time. This is most conspicuously apparent on social and cultural policy, where Barack Obama’s “liberal” 2008 position on gay marriage would be more “conservative” than some congressional Republicans in 2019. But Stimson’s "liberal" index confines itself to the role of government in the economy and only the economy.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
The title of that article is quite misleading.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/americas-political-mood-is-now-
most-liberal-ever-recorded.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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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:What qualifies as the “liberal” or “conservative” position on a given issue evolves over time. This is most conspicuously apparent on social and cultural policy, where Barack Obama’s “liberal” 2008 position on gay marriage would be more “conservative” than some congressional Republicans in 2019. But Stimson’s "liberal" index confines itself to the role of government in the economy and only the economy.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
The title of that article is quite misleading.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/americas-political-mood-is-now-
most-liberal-ever-recorded.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
A more appropriate title would be "According to Stimson's Liberal Index, which confines itself to the role of government in the economy and only the economy, America’s Political Mood Is Now the ‘Most Liberal Ever Recorded’"
I would agree with that statement. But that's not what the article title says at all.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Economic policy divides the GOP and unites Democrats
www.vox.com/2019/6/11/18659986/voter-study-group-democrats-economics
The study, released Tuesday, gauged support for different progressive economic policy ideas and then compared the views of low-income voters (with less than $40,000 per year in household income) to more comfortable ones (with more than $80,000 per year in household income). For Democrats, the more affluent voters were generally more left-wing, but the difference is small.
For Republicans, by contrast, there’s a huge fall-off in support for progressive economic policy ideas as you go up the income ladder.
Alignment with cultural conservatism (but not economic conservatism) is near universal among Republicans, and it keeps the party together even as its members have a lot of disagreements about specific economic policy issues.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Economic policy divides the GOP and unites Democrats
www.vox.com/2019/6/11/18659986/voter-study-group-democrats-economics
The study, released Tuesday, gauged support for different progressive economic policy ideas and then compared the views of low-income voters (with less than $40,000 per year in household income) to more comfortable ones (with more than $80,000 per year in household income). For Democrats, the more affluent voters were generally more left-wing, but the difference is small.
For Republicans, by contrast, there’s a huge fall-off in support for progressive economic policy ideas as you go up the income ladder.
Alignment with cultural conservatism (but not economic conservatism) is near universal among Republicans, and it keeps the party together even as its members have a lot of disagreements about specific economic policy issues.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
If the underlined is true, that may be enough going forward for them.
Democrats can't agree on anything under the sun, and now that they've boldly claimed that their the party of intersectionality and identitarianism they never will.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Pete Buttigieg is the first Democratic presidential candidate to actually articulate foreign policy proposals beyond general themes and ideas. Specifically, he said he would:
1) “Repeal and replace” the 2001 congressional authorization that the US military still uses to this day to fight terrorism and engage in foreign wars around the world
2) Recommit the US to the Iran nuclear deal
3) Withhold some US taxpayer money from Israel if it annexes parts of the West Bank
4) Rejoin the Paris climate accord
5) Increase investment in renewable technologies to reverse environmental degradation. Buttigieg’s most specific proposal was to quadruple federal government funding for research and development on renewable energy technology, to at least $25 billion. That’s likely to anger the fossil-fuel industry but delight those that work in solar, wind, and other growing energy sectors.
More details about all 5 at www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/11/18661329/pete-buttigieg-fore
ign-policy-speech-indiana-university
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The thinking typically goes that boomers have put undue pressure on the Social Security system because of the size of their generation.
About 10,000 people turn 65 every day. Many of those individuals are claiming Social Security retirement benefits, which has created the perception that they are draining the system.
However, the Center for Retirement Research found the boomer cohort born between 1946 and 1964 will actually have paid more into the system than they will receive in benefits.
There is a group of retirees, however, who did receive more money than they contributed: people born before 1946 who predominately vote Republican. That’s because they generally worked for fewer years before collecting benefits.
More about how elderly Republicans didn't pay their fair share and got a free ride on Social Security at www.cnbc.com/2019/06/10/its-not-baby-boomers-who-have-taken-the-most-f
rom-social-security.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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You must be really gassy lately.
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
tic tac
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Noam Chomsky, June 04, 2019:
Both parties shifted to the right during the neoliberal years: the mainstream Democrats became something like the former moderate Republicans, and the Republicans drifted virtually off the spectrum. There’s merit, I think, in the observation by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein that increasingly since the Newt Gingrich years — and strikingly in Mitch McConnell’s Senate — the Republican Party has become a “radical insurgency” that is largely abandoning normal parliamentary politics. That shift — which predates Donald Trump — has created a substantial gap between the two parties. In the media it’s often called “polarization,” but that’s hardly an accurate description.
Both in the United States and Europe, neoliberal/austerity programs have sharply concentrated wealth while also stagnating wages for the majority, undermining benefits, eroding functioning democracy, and encouraging what former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan hailed as “growing worker insecurity.” These socioeconomic policies, quite naturally, have engendered anger, resentment, and bitterness — which are often exploited by demagogues. As centrist political institutions have declined, sometimes virtually disappearing, both political parties have been affected. The Republican establishment used to be able to crush extremist candidates who rose from the voting base in primaries, but not in 2016.
What [Bernie] Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mean by “socialism” seems to be something similar to New Deal social democracy. Sanders’s platform, for example, wouldn’t have greatly surprised Dwight Eisenhower, who argued strongly that anyone who challenged New Deal programs didn’t belong in the U.S. political system — an indication of how far to the right politics has drifted [since Eisenhower.]
More at https://bostonreview.net/politics/noam-chomsky-scott-casleton-choosing
-hope
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Noam Chomsky, June 04, 2019:
Both parties shifted to the right during the neoliberal years: the mainstream Democrats became something like the former moderate Republicans, and the Republicans drifted virtually off the spectrum. There’s merit, I think, in the observation by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein that increasingly since the Newt Gingrich years — and strikingly in Mitch McConnell’s Senate — the Republican Party has become a “radical insurgency” that is largely abandoning normal parliamentary politics. That shift — which predates Donald Trump — has created a substantial gap between the two parties. In the media it’s often called “polarization,” but that’s hardly an accurate description.
Both in the United States and Europe, neoliberal/austerity programs have sharply concentrated wealth while also stagnating wages for the majority, undermining benefits, eroding functioning democracy, and encouraging what former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan hailed as “growing worker insecurity.” These socioeconomic policies, quite naturally, have engendered anger, resentment, and bitterness — which are often exploited by demagogues. As centrist political institutions have declined, sometimes virtually disappearing, both political parties have been affected. The Republican establishment used to be able to crush extremist candidates who rose from the voting base in primaries, but not in 2016.
What [Bernie] Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mean by “socialism” seems to be something similar to New Deal social democracy. Sanders’s platform, for example, wouldn’t have greatly surprised Dwight Eisenhower, who argued strongly that anyone who challenged New Deal programs didn’t belong in the U.S. political system — an indication of how far to the right politics has drifted [since Eisenhower.]
More at https://bostonreview.net/politics/noam-chomsky-scott-casleton-choosing
-hope
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Well...
It seems as though somebody is finally agreeing with me that the Democrats of 2019 are a goddamned carbon copy of the GWB administration... finally. Pro censorship, pro surveillance and anti-Constitution as well.
Glad to have you on board, Second.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:I am not onboard with you, 6ix. Today's Democratic politicians are carbon copies of Eisenhower Republicans from the 1950's. They are nothing like GWB. And Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are old-fashion FDR New Dealers, not radical at all, despite silly fools and Republican voters shitting themselves over the existence of New Dealers.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Well...
It seems as though somebody is finally agreeing with me that the Democrats of 2019 are a goddamned carbon copy of the GWB administration... finally. Pro censorship, pro surveillance and anti-Constitution as well.
Glad to have you on board, Second.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
https://bostonreview.net/politics/noam-chomsky-scott-casleton-choosing
-hope
6ix, I have a much longer memory than you do, very clear and detailed, but how actual Republican voters I know have evolved, no, make that devolved, over my lifetime. And today's Republican politicians? Republican President Eisenhower would have recognized Trump as a Mussolini -- a loudmouth, a liar, and an incompetent -- while today's Republican voters think Trump is somebody special deserving of reelection because Democratic candidates will never be good enough for today's Republicans.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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You don't have a better memory.
You're just an old hippie piece of trash is all.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Trump tweets Vote for me — or you’ll never see your precious bull market alive again.
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
The Trump Economy is setting records, and has a long way up to go....However, if anyone but me takes over in 2020 (I know the competition very well), there will be a Market Crash the likes of which has not been seen before! KEEP AMERICA GREAT
6:44 AM - 15 Jun 2019
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1139891393252474880
Trump brags about U.S. prosperity. But conditions improved more under his predecessors. (Even Pres. Jimmy Carter.)
The Trump years have been no better than average and mostly below average in 12 of the 14 measures. The bond market suffered its worst performance the past two years than in any other presidency since Carter. Anemic productivity and a widening deficit as a percentage of GDP are the worst since George W. Bush was president. The dollar’s 3.2 percent annualized decline and GDP growth of 2.24 percent give Trump no better than a No. 5 ranking.
The 14 measures where Trump does not measure up to the last 7 Presidents (but he does beat Bush):
Trump’s Rank out of 7 Presidents
4 S&P 500 Index
4 Gap between U.S. and global stocks
4 Nonfarm payrolls
3 Disposable income per capita
4 Debt-to-income ratio
5 Gross domestic product
6 Deficit as share of GDP
4 Home equity
7 Bond performance
5 Dollar value
1 Manufacturing jobs
4 Auto sales
4 Hourly wages
6 Productivity
6 Trump’s OVERALL RANK (But at least it is better than G.W. Bush, who crashed the economy in 2008. Trump is threatening to do the same if you don’t vote for him. www.thebalance.com/2008-financial-crisis-3305679 )
Much more at www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-28/trump-economy-lags-clint
on-s-obama-s-reagan-s-and-even-carter-s
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The one thing I won't argue you on is that the working guy is still getting screwed just as bad as he has for decades.
The DOW means nothing to most of us.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Does the minimum wage mean anything? There is a bill to raise it, but the Republican majority leader in the Senate refuses to vote on it because it's communism or something according to him. It has a cute name: "Raise the Wage Act". It's not gonna happen so long as the GOP can stop it. www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/582/text
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
The one thing I won't argue you on is that the working guy is still getting screwed just as bad as he has for decades.
The DOW means nothing to most of us.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
The federal minimum wage was last raised on July 24, 2009, when it rose from $6.55 to $7.25 per hour, the last step of a three-step increase approved by Congress in 2007. Before 2007, the minimum wage had been stuck at $5.15 per hour for 10 years.
According to 2017 estimates from the Economic Policy Institute, raising the minimum wage to $15 would increase wages for roughly 40 million people — nearly 30 percent of the workforce. Once fully phased in, this roughly translates into an annual pay increase of about $3,500 for the average affected worker. (It is raised in steps to $15/hr over 5 years. $15 in 2024 is equivalent to $1.05/hr I was making at Burger King in 1970, adjusted for inflation. I felt rich going from 95¢ to $1.05. A 1 dime raise was huge to an 18 year old. I figured that if I saved my dimes I'd be rich someday. I was right.)
https://edlabor.house.gov/imo/media/doc/2019-01-16%20Raise%20the%20Wag
e%20Fact%20Sheet.pdf
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Doesn't really mean anything without any meaningful healthcare. Probably won't mean much when a lot of people lose jobs and prices of everything go up too.
Minimum wage should have been tied to inflation all along.
It's really going to suck for people who make $15/hr right now and don't see any increases.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:1) Democrats have drafted a law for meaningful healthcare. The Republican majority leader in the Senate will never allow it to be voted on.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
1) Doesn't really mean anything without any meaningful healthcare. 2) Probably won't mean much when a lot of people lose jobs and prices of everything go up too.
Read it: www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/1129/text
2) It is a standard Republican talking point that you will be fired if the minimum wage is increased. Read it: www.epionline.org/oped/o161/
It also happens to be a standard Republican lie. In the places where the minimum wage has been raised to $15/hr they aren't fired. Amazon had to be pressured to raise wages, but it did and Amazon is still hiring: https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/11/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-challenges-riv
al-retailers-to-raise-their-minimum-wages-too/
Seattle and $15/hr: www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattles-minimum-wage-hikes
-didnt-boost-supermarket-prices-new-uw-study-says/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Yup. Because all of that magic money comes from magic money trees.
No sir. Nobody will be fired and prices of stuff won't go up to pay those additional wages. We've got magic money trees.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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That ranking is bullshit. How can anyone who gets mostly "4" rank "6'? The numeric average for the ranking is 4.3.
Sheesh, doesn't Bloomberg know how to do arithmetic?
-----------
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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Quote:In golf, everybody shoots 3's and 4's and once in a great while a 1 from a hole in one. How in world can they possibly rank the players if everybody is almost equal? They add up the number of strokes for the entire game. The player with the fewest strokes is #1. The player with the most strokes gets assigned the #7 rank. Something like that happened to Trump's score. Only Bush, who crashed the economy in 2008 and inflated the national debt and started two wars (that's a two stroke penalty), has a worse score than Trump.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
That ranking is bullshit. How can anyone who gets mostly "4" rank "6'? The numeric average for the ranking is 4.3.
Sheesh, doesn't Bloomberg know how to do arithmetic?
Trump brags about U.S. prosperity. But conditions improved more under his predecessors, except Bush.
www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-28/trump-economy-lags-clint
on-s-obama-s-reagan-s-and-even-carter-s
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:In golf, everybody shoots 3's and 4's and once in a great while a 1 from a hole in one. How in world can they possibly rank the players if everybody is almost equal? They add up the number of strokes for the entire game. The player with the fewest strokes is #1. The player with the most strokes gets assigned the #7 rank. Something like that happened to Trump's score. Only Bush, who crashed the economy in 2008 and inflated the national debt and started two wars (that's a two stroke penalty), has a worse score than Trump.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
That ranking is bullshit. How can anyone who gets mostly "4" rank "6'? The numeric average for the ranking is 4.3.
Sheesh, doesn't Bloomberg know how to do arithmetic?
Trump brags about U.S. prosperity. But conditions improved more under his predecessors, except Bush.
www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-28/trump-economy-lags-clint
on-s-obama-s-reagan-s-and-even-carter-s
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Well, to be fair, under your own metrics here, there are quite a few years left before you can truly tally up Trump's score. At least 1/2 if we're only comparing to GHWB and Carter.
Trump's had 2 1/2 years.
Obama had 8.
GWB had 8.
Clinton had 8.
GHWB had 4.
Reagan had 8.
Carter had 4.
That's not even going into the fact that the economy just gets worse the longer time goes on and we run out of 3rd world countries to exploit and US labor gets replaced by cheaper labor and automation.
The good times are over, and nobody's going to right that ship.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:That is how the King of Belgium got rich, by exploiting the Congo. But that strategy for wealth building is 100 years out of date.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
That's not even going into the fact that the economy just gets worse the longer time goes on and we run out of 3rd world countries to exploit and US labor gets replaced by cheaper labor and automation.
The good times are over, and nobody's going to right that ship.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Leopold%27s_Ghost
The basic formula for national economic growth is simple: Economic growth = Population growth + Productivity growth. Population growth has been slowing down for decades. We know exactly what the population of the country is going to be over the next few years.
So that leaves productivity growth, which the BLS estimates. In order to achieve 3 percent economic growth, we need productivity growth of about 2.3 percent. This is decidedly not normal for the history of the country—not in the past 50 years, anyway. With the brief exception of the unsustainable housing bubble era, we haven’t hit 2.3% productivity growth since the end of 60s.
Productivity growth is a real problem. Trump cannot more than double the productivity growth rate of the past ten years, reaching a target we haven’t hit in a normal, healthy economy for the past half century. There’s simply no reason to believe him, and Mick Mulvaney hasn’t even tried to explain how he thinks Trump can accomplish it. Not even hand waving. He’s literally said nothing about productivity growth at all.
More at www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/05/productivity/
If you wanted tremendous economic growth, America could make every roof a solar electric roof, every car an electric car, every city connected by 400 MPH high speed rail, etc. It is the Green New Deal. That won't happen because the GOP Senators will filibuster it to death. The GOP doesn't want to tax the rich to pay for these projects that create middle-class wealth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_New_Deal
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Joe Biden, speaking at a fundraiser in New York on Tuesday night, fondly remembered the days he served in the Senate with James O. Eastland, a white supremacist Democrat from Mississippi.
It’s not the first time Biden’s ties to Eastland, a man who called the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education a “monstrous crime,” have drawn scrutiny. As CNN has reported, as a young senator, Biden tried to enlist Eastland’s help in his fight to prevent busing in school desegregation. He also had this to say to at a Doug Jones rally in 2017:
"I’ve been around so long, I worked with James Eastland. Even in the days when I got there, the Democratic Party still had seven or eight old-fashioned Democratic segregationists. You’d get up and you’d argue like the devil with them. Then you’d go down and have lunch or dinner together. The political system worked. We were divided on issues, but the political system worked."
Well, as long as we’re talking about the way things used to get done in the Senate, there’s no reason to settle for Joe Biden’s imitation of Eastland’s Southern drawl: the man can speak for himself just fine.
The video is here https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/06/joe-biden-james-eastland-m
ike-wallace-interview.html
I can’t tell if the video cuts off when interviewer Mike Wallace suggests a centrist compromise is obviously the answer to questions like “Should black people be allowed to vote?” or if I keep having a minor stroke whenever I watch it. Anyway, that’s James Eastland. Joe Biden misses having dinner with him.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
If you wanted tremendous economic growth, America could make every roof a solar electric roof, every car an electric car, every city connected by 400 MPH high speed rail, etc. It is the Green New Deal.
No. It's not.
I'm on board with all of that. Unfortunately, there is a LOT more in the Green New Deal, including a lot of identity politics and open border bullshit.
Take the shit out of the Green New Deal and then we'll talk about it.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:6ix, quote some of those parts you object to in the Green New Deal from Congress's website:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
If you wanted tremendous economic growth, America could make every roof a solar electric roof, every car an electric car, every city connected by 400 MPH high speed rail, etc. It is the Green New Deal.
No. It's not.
I'm on board with all of that. Unfortunately, there is a LOT more in the Green New Deal, including a lot of identity politics and open border bullshit.
Take the shit out of the Green New Deal and then we'll talk about it.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolution/109/text
There is not even one item (A to N, see below) that will pass in the Senate. It is the way it will be for as many years as there are at least 41 GOP Senators to filibuster these goals:
The goals should be accomplished through a 10-year national mobilization (referred to in this resolution as the “Green New Deal mobilization”) that will require the following projects—
(A) building resiliency against climate change-related disasters, such as extreme weather, including by leveraging funding and providing investments for community-defined projects and strategies;
(B) repairing and upgrading the infrastructure in the United States, including—
(i) by eliminating pollution and greenhouse gas emissions as much as technologically feasible;
(ii) by guaranteeing universal access to clean water;
(iii) by reducing the risks posed by climate impacts; and
(iv) by ensuring that any infrastructure bill considered by Congress addresses climate change;
(C) meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources, including—
(i) by dramatically expanding and upgrading renewable power sources; and
(ii) by deploying new capacity;
(D) building or upgrading to energy-efficient, distributed, and “smart” power grids, and ensuring affordable access to electricity;
(E) upgrading all existing buildings in the United States and building new buildings to achieve maximum energy efficiency, water efficiency, safety, affordability, comfort, and durability, including through electrification;
(F) spurring massive growth in clean manufacturing in the United States and removing pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing and industry as much as is technologically feasible, including by expanding renewable energy manufacturing and investing in existing manufacturing and industry;
(G) working collaboratively with farmers and ranchers in the United States to remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector as much as is technologically feasible, including—
(i) by supporting family farming;
(ii) by investing in sustainable farming and land use practices that increase soil health; and
(iii) by building a more sustainable food system that ensures universal access to healthy food;
(H) overhauling transportation systems in the United States to remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector as much as is technologically feasible, including through investment in—
(i) zero-emission vehicle infrastructure and manufacturing;
(ii) clean, affordable, and accessible public transit; and
(iii) high-speed rail;
(I) mitigating and managing the long-term adverse health, economic, and other effects of pollution and climate change, including by providing funding for community-defined projects and strategies;
(J) removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and reducing pollution by restoring natural ecosystems through proven low-tech solutions that increase soil carbon storage, such as land preservation and afforestation;
(K) restoring and protecting threatened, endangered, and fragile ecosystems through locally appropriate and science-based projects that enhance biodiversity and support climate resiliency;
(L) cleaning up exi
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On June 7, 1892, a dapper shoemaker purchased a first-class ticket on a Louisiana train for a short journey he knew he wouldn't finish.
The 30-year-old man of mixed-race heritage sat in the whites-only section of the train. When a conductor ordered him to move to a dingy rail car reserved for blacks, he refused, was arrested and convicted at a trial.
The man appealed his case to the Supreme Court. Four years later, the court rejected his claim that sitting in a segregated train car stamped him with "a badge of servitude."
The New York Times published only two paragraphs on the 7-1 decision. But Homer Adolph Plessy, the man on the train, did not fade from history. Plessy v. Ferguson eventually became known as one of the Supreme Court's most nakedly racist decisions. The 1896 ruling played a pivotal role in giving legal cover to Jim Crow segregation that would last for more than half a century.
It's hard today not to marvel at the casual cruelty of the Plessy decision. How could the court accept the transparent lie that blacks lived in separate but equal worlds with whites? And how could they give Constitutional sanction to a blatant display of racism?
You don't have to study history to answer those questions. Watch what happens this week when the US Supreme Court issues its decision on whether the Trump administration can add a question about citizenship to the 2020 census, some legal scholars and historians say.
They say the conservative majority on the court is on the verge of embracing in the census case some of the same legal rationalizations that produced Jim Crow segregation.
If they accept the census question, they are following the same pattern that the late-19th-century and 20th-century court made that was clearly intended to cement white rule. The census-citizenship case is expected to be one of the most significant Supreme Court cases involving race in recent history.
The formula for this version of White Supremacy 2.0 is the same as it was then: Ignore the racist intent behind laws to justify a preordained decision. Supporters of the census-citizenship question say that its purpose is actually protecting racial minorities. But documents from the Supreme Court case show that the Trump administration’s true purpose in putting the citizenship question on the upcoming census was not its stated one to help Hispanic voters under the Voting Rights Act, but rather to create policy that would be “a disadvantage to the Democrats” and “advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic Whites.” It’s difficult to produce a greater smoking gun than explicitly saying you are hoping to help the GOP by increasing white voting power.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/05/census-memo-supreme-court-
conservatives-white-voters-alito.html
But instead of asking about those memos describing the purpose of the citizenship question, the conservative justices focused on tangential questions revolving around the Trump administration's authority to add the question to the census.
What the court does -- and the court does this often -- is evade reality. It allows them to focus on technical questions.
More at www.cnn.com/2019/06/23/us/supreme-court-census-citizenship-blake/index
.html
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There is zero comparison between the two scenarios stated above if you have an ounce of common sense within you.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Wow, then I should have ended as a complete failure because my commonsense doesn't work like your oh-so-superior commonsense. Every single time you comment I understand more about why you fell to the bottom of the economic scale, 6ix. In the census-citizenship case, the Supreme Court may once again affirm 'white rule'. That 19th century Supreme Court case wasn't about blacks only railroad cars, but about whites only railroad cars, or 'white rule'.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
There is zero comparison between the two scenarios stated above if you have an ounce of common sense within you.
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I don't give two shits what that was about.
Right now it's about citizens (which include blacks and legals born of Mexican and South American descent), vs illegal aliens.
Go fuck yourself for purposely trying to conflate the two as being even remotely similar by making it a "white" thing.
Idiot.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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People who claim it's a 'white' thing are racist.
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Quote:The existence of conservative Southern Democrats — the Dixiecrats — was the fundamental fact of Congress in the mid-20th century.
Originally posted by 1kiki:
People who claim it's a 'white' thing are racist.
The Southern Democratic Party was an institution unto itself. As the political scientist V.O. Key Jr. observed, “the one-party system of the South is an institution with an odd dual personality. In state politics the Democratic party is no party at all but a multiplicity of factions struggling for office. In national politics, on the contrary, the party is the Solid South; it is, or at least has been, the instrument for the conduct of the ‘foreign relations’ of the South with the rest of the nation.”
The Dixiecrats had hegemonic control of the South. They ran it as an authoritarian state built to sustain a violent racial hierarchy. And they protected their autonomy by currying favor with, and amassing power in, the national Democratic Party.
For Southern Dixiecrats, good relationships with the broader Democratic Party were the currency of Southern power. So long as they had seniority and allies, they could protect the South. The moment they didn’t, they were endangered.
By the time Joe Biden got to Congress, the Civil Rights Act had passed, and the realignment of the South from Dixiecrat to Republican was beginning. . . . but the Southern Dixiecrats still had the power to slow-walk civil rights legislation, and they wielded that power cunningly, ferociously, and with a smile. Biden could cut deals with Eastland the Dixiecrat because it was in Eastland’s interest to cut deals with him. Eastland’s power — his committee chairmanship — came from remaining a Democrat in good standing. If he didn’t cut deals and build relationships with young bucks like Biden, his influence was over. This was the strategy and the structure of the Dixiecrat bloc.
Biden wasn’t a master legislator at age 30; he was one piece in a much larger game, a game that was ending even if the players didn’t yet know it. That is not a knock on him. We are almost all pawns of the larger forces that order our worlds. What’s important is to be aware of that fact, to not get so caught up in our individual stories that we lose sight of the structures that shape us.
The Republicans of today may be the inheritors of the Dixiecrats’ seats, but they have adopted an entirely different strategy. It is not in Mitch McConnell’s interest to cut true deals with Biden. Here, again, Biden is a pawn in the politics of his era, not the master. The problem is he doesn’t seem to realize it.
More at www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/26/18715650/joe-biden-2020-prim
ary-democrat-senator-segregation
Did I mention the Dixiecrats were all white? They are all gone now, but they were replaced with all whites from another party.
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Quote:With Census Decision, Trump’s GOP Falters in March Toward White Minority Rule
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I don't give two shits what that was about.
Right now it's about citizens (which include blacks and legals born of Mexican and South American descent), vs illegal aliens.
Go fuck yourself for purposely trying to conflate the two as being even remotely similar by making it a "white" thing.
Idiot.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Today the Supreme Court agreed with the government that a citizenship question on the 2020 Census could be legal, if justified by a legitimate reason.
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s justification for adding the citizenship question was “contrived,” and remanded the decision back to the lower courts.
The ruling essentially says, ‘You can’t give a fake reason.’ Ross would now have to give a real reason, but the time window is closing quickly on that. And if Ross can come up with a justification, derived from a reasonable decision-making process, it would still have to survive the scrutiny of New York City District Judge Jesse Furman, to whom the case has been remanded. But Furman has no shortage of skepticism for Ross.
The court’s characteristically narrow ruling, however, elides the most important revelation of the census saga: that the Donald Trump administration allied with anti-immigrant demagogues and the architects of Republican gerrymandering in an effort to specifically suppress the political power and participation of immigrants and people of color. Emails released by the Commerce Department during litigation revealed that former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, mastermind of nationwide voter suppression efforts, wrote to Ross in July 2017, “at the direction of Steve Bannon,” urging him to add a citizenship question because its absence “leads to the problem that aliens . . . are still counted for congressional apportionment purposes.”
Then, earlier this month, it was reported that the late Tom Hofeller, a Republican National Committee redistricting expert, had urged the Trump transition team to adopt a citizenship question after determining that it “would clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and “advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.” A paragraph drafted by Hofeller and found on his hard drive by his estranged daughter supported the premise that citizenship data would help enforce the Voting Rights Act. That paragraph later appeared word for word in a draft letter from the Justice Department to the Census Bureau requesting the citizenship question.
This accumulation of evidence suggests not just that Ross’s justification — to Congress and the public — was a lie (or, as Roberts would put it, a “contrivance”), but that the real motive was the one suspected by Democrats and civil rights advocates from the outset: to transfer political power from minority communities to white people in red states.
More at https://theintercept.com/2019/06/27/census-citizenship-question-suprem
e-court/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
People who claim it's a 'white' thing are racist.
Quote:fify
Originally posted by SECOND:
fart
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
tic tac
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The other day The Times published an Op-Ed that used analysis of party platforms to place U.S. political parties on a left-right spectrum along with their counterparts abroad. The study found that the G.O.P. is far to the right of mainstream European conservative parties. It’s even to the right of anti-immigrant parties like Britain’s UKIP and France’s National Rally. Basically, if we saw something like America’s Republicans in another country, we’d classify them as white nationalist extremists.
True, this is just one study. But it matches up with lots of other evidence. Political scientists who use congressional votes to track ideology find that Republicans have moved drastically to the right over the past four decades, to the point where they are now more conservative than they were at the height of the Gilded Age.
Or just compare the G.O.P., point by point, with parties almost everyone would classify as right-wing authoritarians — parties like Hungary’s Fidesz, which has preserved some of the forms of democracy but has effectively created a permanent one-party state.
Fidesz has cemented its power by politicizing the judiciary, creating rigged election rules, suppressing opposition media and using the power of the state to reward the party’s cronies while punishing businesses that don’t toe the line. Does any of it sound like something that isn’t already happening here, and which Republicans will do much more of if they get the chance?
One might even argue that the G.O.P. stands out among the West’s white nationalist parties for its exceptional willingness to crash right through the guardrails of democracy. Extreme gerrymandering, naked voter suppression and stripping power from offices the other party manages to win all the same — these practices seem more prevalent here than in the failing democracies of Eastern Europe.
www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/opinion/socialism-2020.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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Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
People who claim it's a 'white' thing are racist.
Quote:fify
Originally posted by SECOND:
fart
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
tic tac
Yup. Second's an idiot.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Former President Jimmy Carter, on Friday, describing President Donald Trump as an illegitimate president who wouldn’t have won but for Russian interference on his behalf.
“I think the interference, although not yet quantified, if fully investigated, would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016,” the 94-year-old Carter said. “He lost the election, and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.”
The panel moderator, historian Jon Meacham, asked Carter if that means he thinks Trump “is an illegitimate president.” Carter said he does.
Trump indicated that he’s not opposed to the idea of Russia helping him again in 2020. Trump said he’d be willing to accept dirt on his Democratic opponents from a foreign entity — a willingness at odds with the position of FBI Director Christopher Wray, who testified to Congress that candidates should contact the FBI in such a scenario.
“The FBI director is wrong,” Trump proclaimed when Stephanopoulos brought up the position of his own handpicked FBI director.
Just a few hours before Carter called him an illegitimate president, Trump signaled during a photo op at the G20 summit in Japan with Russian President Vladimir Putin that he still doesn’t think Russian interference is a serious matter.
It’s worth noting that Carter has been relatively muted in his criticisms of Trump to date, and has in fact praised aspects of his foreign policy — including his openness to diplomacy with North Korea and his decision not to launch military strikes against Iran — so it’s not as though he’s an outspoken member of the “resistance.”
Trump himself recently drew the results of the 2016 election into question, but for quite different reasons. During an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd that aired last Sunday, Trump suggested he may not have actually lost the popular vote, if you factor in what he claimed was massive voter fraud.
“There were a lot of votes cast that I don’t believe,” Trump told Todd, citing zero evidence for the claim, which elections experts have repeatedly debunked.
www.vox.com/2019/6/28/19127475/jimmy-carter-trump-illegitimate-preside
nt
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Jeff Flake @JeffFlake tweeted:
Words matter, Mr. President. Joking with Vladimir Putin about "getting rid" of journalists is not funny at all. It puts journalists at risk.
4:15 PM - 28 Jun 2019
Jeff Flake offers rare defense of Trump after Jimmy Carter suggests POTUS is 'illegitimate'
www.foxnews.com/politics/jeff-flake-offers-rare-defense-of-trump-after
-jimmy-carter-suggests-potus-is-illegitimate
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Yeah. Nobody should joke about getting rid of journalists when they're being laid off left and right.
Being out on your ass with no prospects of ever getting a comparable wage in your future is no laughing matter.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:It is not about wages:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Yeah. Nobody should joke about getting rid of journalists when they're being laid off left and right.
Being out on your ass with no prospects of ever getting a comparable wage in your future is no laughing matter.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
List of journalists killed in Russia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_Russia
Not everyone who has a quarrel with Russian President Vladimir Putin dies in violent or suspicious circumstances. But enough loud critics of Putin's policies have been murdered that Thursday's daylight shooting of a Russian who sought asylum in Ukraine has led to speculation of Kremlin involvement.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called the shooting in Kiev of Denis Voronenkov, a former Russian Communist Party member who began sharply criticizing Putin after fleeing Russia in 2016, an "act of state terrorism by Russia."
That drew a sharp rebuke from Putin's spokesman, who called the accusation "absurd." Throughout the years, the Kremlin has always dismissed the notion of political killings with scorn.
Here are some outspoken critics of Putin who were killed or died mysteriously:
10 critics of Vladimir Putin who died violently or in suspicious ways
www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/03/23/here-are-ten-crit
ics-of-vladimir-putin-who-died-violently-or-in-suspicious-ways/
At G20, Trump Continues to Excuse and Justify the Murder of Journalists
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/06/28/at-g20-trump-continues-to-exc
use-and-justify-the-murder-of-journalists/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:fify
Originally posted by second:
fart
Meanwhile, actual - yanno - facts from Statista that SLOPPY-SECONDS seems to be allergic to:
Where's Russia on that list, SLOPPY-SECONDS?
Where's the US?
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
tic tac
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Quote:I see you misunderstood, launching yourself into a defense of Russia as a Russian troll would. What is to be understood is that it was about Trump, the US President, joking with the Russian about killing Trump's personal journalistic enemies. So if the US is killing journalists, has Trump already started killing his enemies? Who knows? That is not in your graphic, but the Russian sure has a dozen dead enemies. The Russian says he did not kill them. Who knows? That, too, is not in your graphic.
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Where's Russia on that list, SLOPPY-SECONDS?
Where's the US?
Dozens of Russian journalists have been murdered since 2000, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Glasnost Defense Foundation. They weren't covering shooting wars or riots but powerful Russian institutions. A surprising number have implausibly fallen or slipped to their deaths.
Why Do Russian Journalists Keep Falling?
www.npr.org/2018/04/21/604497554/why-do-russian-journalists-keep-falli
ng
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Trump presents himself as an alpha male, bigger, badder and sexier than anyone else in the zoo. Threats and insults are his standard operating procedure. People don’t support him because they think he’s nice or sophisticated in his reasoning.
The irony, of course, is that once you get past his mouth he turns out to be an uncommonly weak and ineffectual president. True, his allies and cronies are securing judgeships and eviscerating regulations, but Trump himself is 99% Public Relations. His job is to distract you from what the real movers and shakers in the White House, the Cabinet, and the GOP controlled Senate are doing.
The New York Times, by giving us megadoses of Trump’s mouth, is a megaphone for him. If they secretly want him to be re-elected, they should continue doing more of that and less and less covering what his Cabinet and the Senate are doing. But here’s a better way:
1. Absolutely no front page news on Trump unless he actually does something — and saying stupid or mean stuff doesn’t qualify as doing.
2. Change the ruling meme from “He is upending the world through his threats and insults” to “He is a blowhard who actually does almost nothing.” Treat him not like an alpha but more like an omega with endless vocalizations, best ignored.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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America’s Indefensible Defense Budget
www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/07/18/americas-indefensible-defense-budg
et/
If you have read anything about defense spending in recent years, it was probably expressed as a percentage of GDP. At roughly 3–4 percent (it was more than 40 percent in 1944, 15 percent during the Korean War, and over 10 percent in the early 1960s), it seems eminently affordable.
But this almost universally used measure is close to meaningless, except to make rough international comparisons. It makes no sense to expect that external threats will expand in parallel with a country’s economic growth. A country whose economy has grown by, for example, 30 percent has no reason to spend 30 percent more on its military. To the contrary, unless threats worsen, you would expect that, over time, defense spending as a percentage of a growing economy should decline.
Instead, the valid measure of affordability is defense spending’s share of the federal discretionary budget: that is, of all federal spending other than the mandatory allotments to entitlements and interest on the national debt.
The budget embodies the country’s core political choices: how much government its citizens want, what their priorities for it are, and how large a debt they choose to shoulder and to pass on. Defense spending now accounts for almost 60 percent of the budget: everything else is accommodated in the remaining two fifths. By this measure, defense spending looks anything but easily affordable. Nor, on its projected path of continuing growth, does it look sustainable. What would finally be too much? Two thirds of the total? Seventy percent?
The consequences are huge. At home, defense spending crowds out funds for everything else a prosperous economy and a healthy society need. Abroad, it has led us to become a country reflexively reliant on the military.
Are we actually as threatened as our lopsided spending suggests? Or are we achieving, through a rapidly growing military, valued international aims that are otherwise unattainable? If funds were tight or we were really concerned about deficits — that is, if we were forced to make tradeoffs — could we achieve equal or better security for much less money? In short, do we need to or want to devote three fifths of the government’s discretionary funds to defense? There are no widely agreed-upon answers because the questions aren’t being asked.
The so-called undernourished military against which Republicans railed at the close of the Obama administration was supported by the highest spending in inflation-adjusted dollars since the end of World War II. Under the Trump administration, the budget soared to $700 billion in fiscal year 2018 and $716 billion this year, with a proposed leap to $750 billion for next year. In order to partially pay for these increases, the administration proposed to cut or slash spending for thirteen of the sixteen Cabinet agencies — all but the Department of Defense, the Veterans Administration, and the Department of Homeland Security.
Congress rubber-stamped the FY 2019 defense budget but rejected most of the draconian cuts proposed for everything else, thus enlarging the deficit. Legislators are unlikely to go as high as $750 billion for FY 2020, but they will almost certainly approve another large jump in defense spending, for a total increase of more than $100 billion since Trump took office.
The underlying political dynamics are what drive the money machine year after year. The Pentagon has, by a wide margin, the best long-range planning and budgeting capability in the government. Thousands of people are involved. Even if they wanted to, Congress’s armed services committees couldn’t attempt a zero-based budget of six or seven hundred billion dollars: that is, beginning with an evaluation of asserted threats, followed by an independent assessment of the proposed strategy for meeting them and analysis of the forces and facilities needed to execute the strategy. Mostly, though, they don’t want to. They prefer to protect spending and jobs
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