A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Thursday, September 17, 2026 09:05
VIEWED: 757578
PAGE 52 of 73
They're just going to move the site if they unionize.
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" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher 
PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.
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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is considering putting a $15 minimum wage into the next reconciliation package, which will be focused on infrastructure, multiple sources familiar with the New York senator’s thinking told The Intercept.
Senate Democrats attempted to include the wage hike in President Joe Biden’s Covid-19 relief package, but the Senate parliamentarian ruled it was out of order, and Senate Democrats allowed that ruling to stand. An effort to overturn the ruling, which required 60 votes, garnered just 42.
Schumer has suggested to progressive groups that there is a glimmer of hope that the parliamentarian would rule differently this time: The new legislation is focused on infrastructure, and setting wages is directly related to the budget impact of any infrastructure spending. If there’s even a small chance of it working, he reasoned, it’s worth the fight.
Schumer, though, is encountering resistance from some backers of increasing the minimum wage, who argue that attempting to include it is doomed to fail just as it did last time, and in the process it will trigger another wave of indignation from the public at the failure.
The Senate still needs to lock down 50 votes in support of hiking the wage, however. Of the eight Democrats who voted no last time around on overruling the parliamentarian to enact a minimum wage, most are assumed to be gettable in a clean vote, though doing so could mean giving ground on the tipped minimum wage, a key priority of the National Restaurant Association. That would still leave Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., but there is hope that a package of small business tax credits, which would subsidize the wage increase, could get them there.
To bypass Democratic Senators Manchin and Sinema, could two Republican Senators vote for $15 per hour? Not a chance.
https://theintercept.com/2021/03/29/minimum-wage-senate-chuck-schumer/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Welcome to Day 69.
Today in one sentence: CDC Director Rochelle Walensky warned of "impending doom" as Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths rise throughout the U.S.; Biden announced that 90% of adults will be eligible to get a coronavirus vaccine starting April 19; the Biden administration expects the number of unaccompanied children crossing the border to increase from more than 16,000 currently to as many as 26,000 by September; and Russian hackers gained access to email accounts belonging to Trump's Homeland Security chief and members of the department’s cybersecurity staff, who were responsible for identifying threats from foreign countries.
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Trump giving Putin what he wants, 'til the last.
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Now Is the Perfect Time to Stream the Movies of Preston Sturges. The writer-director’s comedies show how to live in a nation of hucksters and dupes.
The Trump years are over, the pandemic is winding down, and as Americans slowly return to what’s left of our normal lives, many of us are carrying a lot fewer illusions about the nature of our national character. A country where Donald Trump is possible is not a country you can trust, and the same goes triple for its residents. And yet we’ve still got to live here. It would be nice if there were a way to reconcile the knowledge that our society is a series of interlocking scams with some kind of happiness.
Unlike most of America’s ongoing problems, however, this one was solved 80 years ago, by screenwriter and director Preston Sturges. In an extraordinary run of seven films Sturges wrote and directed at Paramount from 1940 to 1944, he mapped out a way to be clear-eyed about the hucksters, hustlers, and horse’s asses that make up our great nation, while somehow loving it anyway. Taken together, these cynical comedies add up to an essential user’s manual for life in these United States, and the Criterion Channel is currently streaming all seven of them, plus 1948’s Unfaithfully Yours, so now is the perfect time to watch them. Here’s where to start.
The Lady Eve
Barbara Stanwyck plays Jean Harrington, a con artist working the card room of an ocean liner who sets her sights on the biggest mark on the ship: Charles Poncefort Pike (Henry Fonda), the exceptionally naïve heir to a brewing fortune. Naturally, Jean falls for Pike, complicating her plans to fleece him. “Couple falls in love under false pretenses” plots are a dime a dozen, but Sturges sprints through the obligatory plot points (deceit-to-love-to-revelation-to-rejection) in the first half of the movie. The usual payoff, in which the mark realizes over the course of a sad montage that he is still in love with the person who deceived him and races to the airport or takes her to the prom or whatever, is a non-starter in a Sturges movie, because a couple learning to be honest with each other is anathema to his vision of romance. Instead, Charles drops Jean cold when he realizes she’s not who she said she was.
That leaves Sturges with half the movie to fill, and he does so by repeating the love-under-false-pretenses plot nearly beat-for-beat. Jean tracks Charles down in Connecticut, where she reintroduces herself with an even more ridiculous fake identity: Lady Eve Sidwich, an Englishwoman visiting the United States who just happens to look exactly like Jean Harrington. Finding a satisfying ending for a romantic comedy with one plot is hard enough; Sturges has to resolve two at once, while sticking to his basic premise that no couple ever solved anything by sitting down face-to-face and being honest. No spoilers here, but the ending is perfect.
More at https://web.archive.org/web/20210330112527/https://slate.com/culture/2
021/03/preston-sturges-movies-lady-eve-streaming-criterion-channel.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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Fuck Slate.
I already knew I couldn't trust people like you, and I didn't need some two bit shill website to tell me to think that.
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" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher
PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.
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Quote:Tell us the names of the sites you trust.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck Slate.
I already knew I couldn't trust people like you, and I didn't need some two bit shill website to tell me to think that.
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Mitch McConnell Terrified because Republican Voters LOVE Democrats' Voting Rights Bill
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Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Mitch McConnell Terrified because Republican Voters LOVE Democrats' Voting Rights Bill
No they don't.
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" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher
PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.
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Quote:How do you feel about the Christian Science Monitor? This article is from there:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck Slate.
I already knew I couldn't trust people like you, and I didn't need some two bit shill website to tell me to think that.
www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2021/0329/If-you-can-keep-it-Where-next
-for-a-strained-democracy
There are four tests to determine whether a democracy is under threat. For the first time in its history, the U.S. meets all four.
The great machine of governance established by the Constitution in 1788 has long been beset by underlying problems such as partisanship, gridlock, and disinformation. Then in November 2020 an incumbent president threw a match on this tinder: a false claim that the election was stolen, and that despite certified counts electing his opponent, in fact he had won.
This lie has since rooted itself in part of the nation’s body politic, drawing support from hundreds of elected Republican officials. A mob smashed into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 to stop the purported “steal.” Former President Donald Trump’s evidence-free assertion about the election was a dangerous seed that can no longer be unplanted – a little over a third of U.S. voters, and three-quarters of Republicans, say they don’t think President Joe Biden won legitimately, according to one recent poll.
That false belief endures despite more than 60 court cases heard by more than 90 judges, including Trump appointees, and despite Trump administration officials, including the attorney general and the top cybersecurity official, saying the elections were secure and there was no credible evidence of widespread fraud. One of the most vocal boosters of the lie, lawyer Sidney Powell, is defending herself against billion-dollar libel lawsuits, saying “no reasonable person” would believe her “wild accusations” and “outlandish claims.”
An American coup d’état in 1898, not 2021
White supremacists powered the mob. They were angry about the demise of the world as they had known it, including a loss of political power they felt rightfully theirs. Their leaders called on them to take it back. So they planned something that could only be called a coup d’état and attacked a citadel of their opponents.
The year was 1898, not 2021, and the place was Wilmington, North Carolina. But the similarities between the 19th-century insurrection, in which a mob of white men overthrew an elected biracial government in Wilmington, and the Jan. 6 insurrection, in which a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol to stop the counting of Electoral College votes, are inescapable, says Suzanne Mettler, professor of American institutions at Cornell University.
That’s what she kept thinking while watching scenes of the Capitol riot. “There are so many parallels,” Professor Mettler says.
The most obvious similarity is the refusal to accept an election. President Trump’s unwillingness to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 presidential vote, and his months long effort to overturn the results, were “among the most abnormal and important events of the Trump presidency,” according to Bright Line Watch, a group of experts that monitors U.S. democratic practices.
This denial was clearly anti-democratic. “Democracy is a system in which parties lose elections,” according to a pithy definition from New York University political scientist Adam Przeworski.
Another similarity between the events of 1898 and 2021 is the extensive planning involved in operations. While some organization took place at the grassroots, it was political leaders in both cases who rallied and aimed the crowds at their destination. At least a dozen Capitol rioters facing federal charges have said they stormed the building because their president told them to.
Race was also a driving factor in both events. It was more central to Wilmington, but white supremacist symbols, signs, and supporters were present in Washington as well.
Democracy survived past sieges
These are the book’s four threats, which separately
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Quote:Funny, mail-in voting was used more by Republicans than Democrats before 2020. They didn't mind it then, since, as all the evidence shows, there is no fraud.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Mitch McConnell Terrified because Republican Voters LOVE Democrats' Voting Rights Bill
No they don't.
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Texas' voter suppression bills are fueled by millions in corporate cash
https://popular.info/p/texas-voter-suppression-bills-are?token=eyJ1c2V
yX2lkIjo2ODg1MzEsInBvc3RfaWQiOjM0NTY5ODA3LCJfIjoidFlaVHoiLCJpYXQiOjE2MTcxOTQwMTksImV4cCI6MTYxNzE5NzYxOSwiaXNzIjoicHViLTE2NjQiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.95-VU0r2Mixh4-fnQXQ-yYyHOW7XjEgMQqedGQ9ySd8
Texas already has the most restrictive voting laws in the country. But with the state trending blue, Governor Greg Abbott (R) and Republicans in the Texas legislature are pushing a series of draconian bills that would make it even harder for Texans to cast a ballot. An investigation by Popular Information reveals that the elected officials in Texas advocating for these voter suppression measures are backed by millions from corporations that purport to support voting rights.
The Brennan Center has identified a dozen bills introduced in the Texas legislature to restrict voting. But omnibus voting legislation in the Senate (SB 7) and House (HB 6) have the most traction. These are expansive, complex bills that would limit voting in a variety of ways.
Texas does not have no-excuse absentee voting and did not even allow it last year during the pandemic. SB 7 would create additional hurdles for voters in future elections seeking to vote absentee due to a disability. These voters would need to submit either: (1) Documentation of their disability from the Social Security Administration or the Department of Veterans Affairs, or (2) Certification of their disability on a form completed by a licensed physician, chiropractor, or Christian Scientist. Under SB 7, local election officials would be prohibited from mailing an absentee ballot application to anyone who doesn't explicitly request it. The bill also bans the use of drop boxes to return absentee ballots.
Notably, SB 7 would also require all countywide polling places to have approximately the same number of machines. Why is this important? It would effectively prohibit the use of sports arenas as mega-voting locations. Last year the arenas for the San Antonio Spurs, Dallas Mavericks, and Houston Rockets were all used for voting.
SB 7 would prohibit mobile, outdoor, and drive-through polling locations. Last year Republicans unsuccessfully sued to invalidate 127,000 votes cast in drive-thru polling locations. The bill would guarantee that poll watchers have "free movement" inside of polling locations and end the prohibition on poll watchers filming voters, including inside of a voting station. Anyone who "obstructs" a poll watcher could be charged with a crime. Combined, these measures are a recipe for voter intimidation.
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If you can't win with your ideas, cheat. The Republican way.
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Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:Quote:Funny, mail-in voting was used more by Republicans than Democrats before 2020. They didn't mind it then, since, as all the evidence shows, there is no fraud.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Mitch McConnell Terrified because Republican Voters LOVE Democrats' Voting Rights Bill
No they don't.
Do not conflate absentee ballots with mail-in ballots. They only sound the same if you're an easily manipulated idiot.
Get rid of absentee ballots too except for people serving overseas in the military and people who are tied to their bed in a hospital or on hospice.
I've always said that of absentee ballots.
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" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher
PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:Funny, mail-in voting was used more by Republicans than Democrats before 2020. They didn't mind it then, since, as all the evidence shows, there is no fraud.
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Do not conflate absentee ballots with mail-in ballots. They only sound the same if you're an easily manipulated idiot.
Get rid of absentee ballots too except for people serving overseas in the military and people who are tied to their bed in a hospital or on hospice.
I've always said that of absentee ballots.
Abesentee ballots, like mail-in ballots, are also proven reliable and fraud-free.
But, don't let facts stand in the way of your delusions. That's not your style.
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The Media Must Stop Demonizing Immigrants
Before someone else “having a really bad day” decides to pick up a gun in response to their lies.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/media-demonizing-immigrants-
border/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%2003.31.2021&utm_term=daily
Over the past several weeks, we’ve all heard the news about what is happening at the border. Most of the headlines and commentary in the media have painted a picture of a “surge” of migrant children crossing the border on their own. They talk about this “security crisis” at the border over and over again. After hearing these news stories, it’s hard not to think that the United States is being invaded by brown children. Which we know is not the reality, but with the amount of coverage this issue gets and the type of narrative that the media focuses on, it’s hard for the public to see it through a different lens: through the lens of humanity.
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Why Can’t Republicans Be Populists?
The establishment has been routed, but its economic orthodoxy rules.
By Paul Krugman, March 29, 2021
President Biden’s American Rescue Plan is incredibly popular, even among Republican voters. We don’t have details yet on the next big Democratic initiative, but we can expect it to poll well, because we know that it will combine major infrastructure spending with tax hikes on corporations and the rich — which are all popular things.
But like the rescue plan, the next plan probably won’t get a single Republican vote in Congress. Why are elected Republicans still so committed to right-wing economic policies that help the rich while shortchanging the working class?
Fair warning: I’m not going to offer a good answer to this question. The point of today’s article is, instead, to argue for the question’s importance.
I ask why Republicans are “still” committed to right-wing economics because in the past there wasn’t any puzzle about their position.
Like many observers, I used to have a “What’s the matter with Kansas?” model of the G.O.P. That is, like Thomas Frank, the author of the 2004 book with that title, I saw the Republican Party essentially as an enterprise run by and for plutocrats that managed to win elections by playing to the cultural grievances and racial hostility of working-class whites. Bigotry, however, was mainly a show put on for the rubes; the party would go back to its pro-rich priorities as soon as each election was over.
The classic example came when George W. Bush won re-election by posing as America’s defender against gay married terrorists, then followed his victory by announcing that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security. (He didn’t.)
But that feels like a long time ago.
Billionaires may have started the Republican Party on its march toward extremism, but they’ve clearly lost control of the forces they conjured up. The G.O.P. can no longer put intolerance back in the closet after each election so as to focus on the real business of tax cuts and deregulation. Instead, the extremists are in charge. Despite a lost election and a violent insurrection, what’s left of the old Republican establishment has abased itself on the altar of Trumpism.
But while power in the Republican Party has shifted almost completely away from the conservative establishment, the party is still committed to an economic ideology of tax and spending cuts. And it’s not obvious why.
When Donald Trump rolled over establishment candidates in 2016, it seemed possible that he would lead his party toward what some political scientists call “Herrenvolk democracy,” policies that are genuinely populist and even egalitarian — but only for members of the right racial and ethnic groups.
South Africa under apartheid worked that way. There were limited gestures toward whites-only populism in the Jim Crow U.S. South. In Europe, France’s National Front combines hostility to immigrants with calls for an expansion of the nation’s already generous welfare state.
As a candidate, Trump often sounded as if he wanted to move in that direction, promising not to cut social benefits and to begin a large infrastructure program. If he had honored those promises, if he had shown any hint of genuine populism, he might still be president. In practice, however, his tax cut and his failed attempt to repeal Obamacare were right out of the standard conservative playbook.
The exception that proves the rule was Trump’s farm policy, which involved huge subsidies to farmers hurt by his trade war, but managed to give almost all of those subsidies to whites. The point is that there was nothing like this on a broader level.
Was Trump’s continuation of unpopular economic policies simply a reflection of his personal ignorance and lack of interest in substance? Events since the election suggest not.
I’ve already mentioned lock-step Republican opposition to Biden’s relief package. Rejection of economic populism is also apparent at the state level. Consider Missouri. One of i
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Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
The Media Must Stop Demonizing Immigrants
The Media blows them constantly.
The Media and everyone else needs to call them what they are.
They aren't demons. They are foreign invaders.
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" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher
PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.
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Quote:That's quite an opinion. Could you back any of it up with some sort of facts?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
The Media Must Stop Demonizing Immigrants
The Media blows them constantly.
The Media and everyone else needs to call them what they are.
They aren't demons. They are foreign invaders.
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Only After Boycott Threat, Delta CEO Reverses Praise Of Georgia’s Voter Suppression Law
Ed Bastain had some very kind words for SB 202 less than a week ago.
https://newsone.com/4119999/delta-ceo-reverses-praise-groegia-voting-l
aw/?omcamp=es-n1-nl&cx_medium=sailthru&cx_brand=no&cx_delivery=NewsOne&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NAT%20-%20NewsOne%20-%20Daily%20Dynamic%20Send%202021-04-01&utm_term=NewsOne%20Subscribers%20-%20SEND%20TO%20ME
fter threats of a boycott and being the target of other proposed protests against Delta Air Lines, its CEO is doing an about-face on the controversial topic of Georgia’s new law restricting voting access that is expected to disproportionately affect Black and brown communities.
Delta CEO Ed Bastian previously praised the new law — SB 202 — as recently as last week. But on Wednesday, he conveniently had a change of heart after the prospects of losing business during a time when the travel industry has already been crippled because of the pandemic.
After describing SB202 as having “improved” existing election laws, Bastain said Wednesday it was “unacceptable.” He suggested his words in a company statement were taken out of context and said he was finally setting the record straight about his opinion on the matter, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“I need to make it crystal clear that the final bill is unacceptable and does not match Delta’s values,” Bastain wrote in an internal memo sent to Delta employees.
That didn’t match the same energy Bastain had when he selectively glossed over SB 202 provisions such as barriers to mobile voting, preventing volunteers from handing out water and other line-warming activities, and additional restrictions placed on absentee voting. Bastian’s previous statement also fed into claims that SB 202 promotes greater election security when there is no evidence that warrants a genuine concern of election integrity and security.
Bastain addressed that in his memo on Wednesday.
“The entire rationale for this bill was based on a lie: that there was widespread voter fraud in Georgia in the 2020 elections. This is simply not true,” Bastain wrote. “Unfortunately, that excuse is being used in states across the nation that are attempting to pass similar legislation to restrict voting rights.”
But Gov. Brian Kemp said Bastain was all-in on the bill leading up to it being signed into law.
“Today’s statement by Delta CEO Ed Bastian stands in stark contrast to our conversations with the company, ignores the content of the new law, and unfortunately continues to spread the same false attacks being repeated by partisan activists,” Kemp said in a statement.
Bastain’s updated thoughts on SB 202 fell in line with civil rights and voting activists who called the law what it was: racist voter suppression.
“There’s no acceptable version of this bill partially because the entire premise is a lie,” Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, previously told NewsOne.
Calls for an economic boycott spread across social media after the passage of SB 202. Corporate accountability in democracy organizing has become a major topic after the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
Voting rights groups have been pushing back on Delta, Coca-Cola, Home Depot, and other Georgia-based corporations that were exposed for donations to elected officials who supported voter suppression and Trump’s big lie. Demanding corporate support for HR 1 and HR 4 could be the next major push in this ongoing accountability effort.
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Delta is racist when you are! At least until you notice.
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Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:Quote:That's quite an opinion. Could you back any of it up with some sort of facts?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
The Media Must Stop Demonizing Immigrants
The Media blows them constantly.
The Media and everyone else needs to call them what they are.
They aren't demons. They are foreign invaders.
Why do you need somebody from the Media to tell you that people who are trying to come here illegally and leech off of our economy are invaders.
That's the real question. That's the only question.
--------------------------------------------------
" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher
PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.
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Outdated filibuster rules allow a small minority of the US population to hold the rest of the country hostage
Right now, the 50 Senate Democrats represent roughly 61% of the country’s population, according to census data. The filibuster rules allowing 41 senators to halt legislation effectively empower a group of Republican senators representing just 22% percent of the population to gridlock the government. Again, considering that it only takes 50% of the state's vote to get elected to the Senate, the filibuster means that about 11% of America's voting-age population could successfully elected Republican senators who can theoretically block anything that polls show the overwhelming majority of the country might want.
As everyone from President Joe Biden to the conservative Democratic senator Joe Manchin to liberal groups now push to reform the Senate’s rules, the defense of the filibuster goes something like this: by design, our nation is a republic, not a direct democracy, and therefore we must create institutional obstacles to empower a minority of Americans to prevent the whims of the majority from being too hastily enshrined in legislation. By this logic, we must keep the Senate’s cloture rule, which requires 60 of the Senate’s 100 members to end a filibuster and move a bill to a vote.
Those who make this case seem to love sounding like erudite constitutional scholars steeped in the grandeur of American history, and they purport to be pluralists worrying about minority rights.
“Letting the majority do everything it wants to is not what the founders had in mind,” said the Senate Republican whip, John Thune, in a floor speech defending the filibuster this week. “The founders recognized that it wasn’t just kings who could be tyrants. They knew majorities could be tyrants, too, and that a majority if unchecked could trample the rights of the minority … so the founders created the Senate as a check on the House of Representatives.”
But an inconvenient fact undermines Thune’s argument and should set pluralists at ease: even if the filibuster were eliminated and bills could advance on a simple majority vote, the Senate would still be giving a minority of the American population enough Senate representation to block legislation supported by the majority of the country.
In the debate over the filibuster, then, the question is not whether you believe the majority should rule. Instead, the question is this: how small a minority should be given legislative veto power over the rest of the country?
More at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/26/just-how-severe-
will-americas-minority-rule-become
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:The profound racism and ignorance you once again freely demonstrate here would be laughable, if it weren't so pathetic.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Why do you need somebody from the Media to tell you that people who are trying to come here illegally and leech off of our economy are invaders.
That's the real question. That's the only question.
You don't know a single fact about any of it. Not one.
I could attempt to educate you, but you are incapable of learning. That's why you did so poorly in school. It's one of several mental defects you possess.
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This year, over 100 bills have been introduced across the country targeting trans people, mostly youth, and they have moved aggressively through state legislatures and been debated with vitriol and cruelty.
This wave of anti-trans bills is based on model legislation written by extraordinarily well-funded right-wing think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation; the Eagle Forum, which was founded by religious right icon Phyllis Schlafly; and the Alliance Defending Freedom, which is a designated hate group according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The legislative attacks, and the ferocity with which Republicans are pushing for them, work to produce a convenient target for moral panic and right-wing identity formation. Harkening back to the moral panic of Anita Bryant and Phyllis Schafly, this moment is part of a long tradition of consolidating fear and disgust of the unknown to leverage political power. The right wants to conjure a frankly lurid obsession with children’s bodies.
Conservatives are obsessed with nonexisting children. This is nothing new: The paranoia is a central tenet of the modern American right. They worry about a zygote or embryo as if it were already a child (it is not). Then there was the whole generation of nonexistent children whose brains turned to fried eggs on marijuana. The murderous Satanic children. The Black “superpredator” children were a powerful racist fantasy.
The right has taken up the cause of another sort of nonexisting child: the children who are coerced into becoming trans; the so-called biological male children who pretend to be girls to play sports, and the other little girls on the team who are devastated by this; the children getting gender-affirming surgery or other irreversible medical interventions; and several variants on these nonexisting kids.
None of these categories of children actually exist, even if a number of children are wrongly described in these terms by conservatives and their anti-trans allies. People who don’t exist are far better suited to cynical political manipulation and prurient psychological projection than are living, breathing children.
More at https://theintercept.com/2021/04/01/trans-kids-rights-arkansas-gop/
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 Conservative Movement Is Rejecting America
A recent essay in a prominent right-wing outlet gives an unusually clear window into the modern right’s anti-democratic worldview. The American Mind — a publication of the Claremont Institute, an influential conservative think tank based in California — published an incendiary essay arguing that the country has already been destroyed by internal enemies.
https://americanmind.org/salvo/why-the-claremont-institute-is-not-cons
ervative-and-you-shouldnt-be-either/
“Most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term,” Glenn Ellmers, the essay’s author, writes. “They do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people. It is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-American Americans; but they are something else.”
These seditious citizens are opposed, according to Ellmers, by “the 75 million people who voted in the last election against the senile figurehead of a party that stands for mob violence, ruthless censorship, and racial grievances, not to mention bureaucratic despotism.” (74,222,958 voted for Trump. 81,283,098 for Biden.)
If Trump voters and conservatives do not band together and fight “a sort of counter-revolution,” then “the victory of progressive tyranny will be assured. See you in the gulag.”
What exactly this counter-revolution entails is unclear, but Ellmers has some tips. “Learn some useful skills, stay healthy, and get strong,” he writes. “One of my favorite weightlifting coaches likes to say, ‘Strong people are harder to kill, and more useful generally.’”
Ellmers’s essay has been widely discussed in American media and intellectual circles, due to its bracing honesty about the modern right’s worldview and the prominence of the outlet that published it. Claremont is an influential institution of the right; one of its publications, the Claremont Review of Books, published the notorious “Flight 93” essay arguing that the 2016 election was a choice between Trump and national extinction. (“2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die,” that essay declared in its opening line.)
Minutes before the January 6 assault on Capitol Hill, former President Donald Trump told his assembled supporters that “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” In a 2019 speech, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) warned that “we have come again to one of the great turning points in our national history, when the fate of our republican government is at issue.” In a 2020 Facebook post, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy declared that “Democrats want to defund, destroy, and dismantle our country.”
Ellmers’s essay should be taken seriously because it makes the anti-democratic subtext of conservative discourse into clearly legible text. And it is a clear articulation of what the movement has been telling us through its actions, like Georgia’s new voting law: It sees democracy not as a principle to respect, but as a barrier to be overcome in pursuit of permanent power.
More at https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2021/4/1/22356594/conservative
s-right-wing-democracy-claremont-ellmers
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 reaverfan:Quote:The profound racism and ignorance you once again freely demonstrate here would be laughable, if it weren't so pathetic.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Why do you need somebody from the Media to tell you that people who are trying to come here illegally and leech off of our economy are invaders.
That's the real question. That's the only question.
It's not racism. It's NATIONALISM.
Do not conflate the two. You look like an idiot when you do.
--------------------------------------------------
" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher
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Add a $2.25 trillion infrastructure bill to a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill and what do you get? How about a massive economic infusion equal to roughly 20% of overall U.S. GDP. To be clear, the infrastructure spending won’t happen all in one year, more like eight years if all goes according to plan.
Bidenomics Is as American as Apple Pie. Big spending on infrastructure goes back to the Erie Canal.
The era of big government investment and high taxes on the rich coincided, not incidentally, with the U.S. economy’s greatest generation — the postwar decades of rapidly rising living standards.
But the story of public investment and progressive taxation in America goes back much further than the ’50s.
We’ve relied on government infrastructure investment to jump-start economic growth ever since the construction of the Erie Canal between 1818 and 1825. Unlike the privately owned canals that had proliferated in 18th-century Britain, the Erie Canal was built by the government of New York State, at a cost of $7 million. This may not sound like a lot, but the economy was vastly smaller then, and prices much lower too. As a share of state G.D.P., the canal was probably the equivalent of a $1 trillion national project today.
And a big public role in infrastructure continued down the generations. Land grants were used to promote railway construction and higher education. Teddy Roosevelt built the Panama Canal. F.D.R. brought electricity to rural areas. Eisenhower built the highway network.
So when Republicans denounce the American Jobs Plan as an “out-of-control socialist spending spree,” remember, large-scale public investment is the American way.
More at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/01/opinion/biden-infrastructure.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:Fixed. And yes, you're racist as fuck, and always were. Your nationalism IS racism (and fascism). You're just using a slightly different word.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
It's not racism. It's FASCISM.
Do not conflate the two. You look like an idiot when you do.
Every fascist in the world calls themselves a nationalist. Idiot.
https://www.justsecurity.org/72339/qanon-is-a-nazi-cult-rebranded/
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Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner is right about the GOP before Trump
Opinion by Charlie Dent, former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania who served as chairman of the House Ethics Committee.
During Donald Trump's presidency, many of his critics argued that he was the cause of so many problems plaguing the country and the Republican Party. While Trump was far from innocent, as a former member of Congress and lifelong Republican, I have never bought the simplicity of that argument.
Instead, Trump was a consequence of the shifting dynamics in the United States -- and specifically within the GOP -- that allowed an anti-establishment candidate to rise to power and act on his worst impulses while in office.
In simpler terms, Trump was gasoline on the proverbial fire.
Former House Speaker John Boehner, in excerpts from "On the House: A Washington Memoir," provides clear evidence that the Republican Party was already struggling with its identity and ideology long before Trump was a serious candidate for political office.
In the 2010 midterm elections, when the Tea Party-affiliated candidates gained a number of seats in Congress, Boehner wrote, "You could be a total moron and get elected just by having an R next to your name -- and that year, by the way, we did pick up a fair number in that category."
Unfortunately, those Boehner labeled "morons" gained an outsized voice within the House GOP conference, bringing their extreme views and conspiracy theories to Congress. They pushed for legislation that had no chance of passing -- including defunding Obamacare while President Barack Obama was in office and Democrats controlled the US Senate -- and attempted to obstruct the raising of the debt ceiling, which would have led to fiscal Armageddon.
Their views were further amplified by a right-wing media ecosystem eager to support these congressmen. As Boehner notes, Fox News talent, like Sean Hannity, and Fox News leadership, at the time Roger Ailes, were all too willing to provide those fringe members primetime placement every evening. After all, giving a public forum to those members to rant about their latest contrived outrage was good for ratings -- and the network's bottom line.
What made a number of these Tea Party members -- many of whom formed the Freedom Caucus -- so difficult to work with was their seeming lack of interest in actually governing. Instead, many of them were consumed with developing their media personas. Former US Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, first elected in 2006, was one such example. Boehner writes that her political rise was emblematic of conservative media's ability to make "people who used to be fringe characters into powerful media stars." ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michele_Bachmann#113th_Congress Bachmann left a legacy of political missteps and lots of incendiary rhetoric — often loaded with false accusations and wild exaggerations.)
Rather than laying out policy plans to address issues facing everyday Americans, the rejectionist wing of the GOP was more interested in airing grievances, stoking anger and settling political scores. In contrast, I spent most of my days focused on doing my committee work, serving my district's interests and largely avoiding national media attention.
More at https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/02/opinions/john-boehner-right-gop-pre-tru
mp-dent/index.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:Quote:And yes, you're racist as fuck, and always were. Your nationalism IS racism (and fascism). You're just using a slightly different word.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
It's not racism. It's NATIONALISM.
Do not conflate the two. You look like an idiot when you do.
Every fascist in the world calls themselves a nationalist. Idiot.
https://www.justsecurity.org/72339/qanon-is-a-nazi-cult-rebranded/
I'm sure my step-dad, who's MEXICAN parents moved here legally and worked their asses off are racists too.
You're an idiot.
That's the problem with all you virtue signalling white idiots. You think you speak for everybody.
I assure you that you don't.
You are an enemy of America, and of all Americans of any ethnicity.
--------------------------------------------------
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Quote:There is a place in Texas I know well called Barrett Station. The demographics have not been updated for 2020 to show an influx of Hispanics and it doesn't get mentioned in the Wikipedia, but the blacks are secretly contemptuous of the Mexicans. You might call it racism. And the Mexicans are secretly contemptuous of the blacks. Could be called racism. And the white man second is amazed at how foolish people are in secret about racism.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I'm sure my step-dad, who's MEXICAN parents moved here legally and worked their asses off are racists too.
You're an idiot.
That's the problem with all you virtue signalling white idiots. You think you speak for everybody.
I assure you that you don't.
You are an enemy of America, and of all Americans of any ethnicity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrett,_Texas#Demographics
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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"Virtue signaling." -Another Nazi tell. To the Nazi's twisted mind, anyone who stands up for anything is "virtue signaling," because in their world, no one is capable of caring about anyone else.
GOP: break your Keurig, burn your Nikes, don’t watch CNN, MLB, NBA, NFL, or NASCAR, don’t shop at Walmart, Target, Kohl’s, Nordstrom, or Macy’s, don’t drink Pepsi or Starbucks, don’t watch HBO or Netflix and don’t eat Oreos.
Also GOP: Let’s talk about how cancel culture is bad. 
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This is the most important chart in all of national politics. Read it carefully. Absorb it. Only then can you begin your journey toward lasting insight.
https://jabberwocking.com/chart-of-the-day-politics-in-a-nutshell/
Also, none but Biden faced an intractable, block-everything opposition party. LBJ had the rump of the Dixiecrats to deal with, but in the mid-Sixties those clowns were still in our circus until switching to the GOP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixiecrat
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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A lawsuit names Jeffrey Epstein, Maxwell and alleges actions sinister even by his standards
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/crime/article250316759.html
Leaked video of horrific mass execution has drawn attention to bloody crisis unfolding in Ethiopia, where civil war over territory erupted in recent months. Video shows dozens of unarmed prisoners surrounded by heavily armed men with Ethiopian flags emblazoned on their shoulders.
https://www.news.com.au/world/africa/footage-shows-soldiers-killing-un
armed-men-on-cliffside-in-ethiopian-civil-war/news-story/50197b7af59289863a3e7b99e8d454c8
Noah Green Facebook Posts Show Nation of Islam Ideology
Capitol cop killed by 'Nation of Islam' knife-man who mowed him down
his FB page promptly gets wiped
How a college football star became Jihadi? became an Afro-Centrist islamist, conspiracy follower and devout Nation of Islam follower
Noah Green, US Capitol attacker, was a supporter of ‘Nation of Islam’. Here's all you need to know
https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/noah-green-us-capitol-attack
er-was-a-supporter-of-nation-of-islam-101617468479317.html
Louis Farrakhan Silent After Noah Green Linked to Nation of Islam
https://www.newsweek.com/louis-farrakhan-silent-after-noah-green-ident
ified-nation-islam-follower-1580842
What is the Nation of Islam?
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/14539205/nation-of-islam-louis-farrakhan
-noah-green/
LIVE UPDATES: Capitol attack suspect identified as Noah Green, a Farrakhan and Nation of Islam follower
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/live-updates-capitol-locked-down-arme
d-suspect-in-custody
What do we know about Capitol attack suspect Noah Green?
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/noah-green-capitol-attack-nation
-of-islam-what-we-know-b927712.html
Suspect's Nation of Islam ties thwart progressive narrative on Capitol attack
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/apr/2/noah-green-nation-isla
m-ties-thwart-progressive-na/
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Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
"Virtue signaling." -Another Nazi tell. To the Nazi's twisted mind, anyone who stands up for anything is "virtue signaling," because in their world, no one is capable of caring about anyone else.
No. We just know that YOU, specifically, are incapable of caring about anyone else.
--------------------------------------------------
" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher
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Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
Louis Farrakhan Silent After Noah Green Linked to Nation of Islam
https://www.newsweek.com/louis-farrakhan-silent-after-noah-green-ident
ified-nation-islam-follower-1580842
Well... I guess we should look on the bright side.
Somebody finally found a way to shut that loud-mouthed racist fucker up.
--------------------------------------------------
" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher
PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
This is the most important chart in all of national politics. Read it carefully. Absorb it. Only then can you begin your journey toward lasting insight.
https://jabberwocking.com/chart-of-the-day-politics-in-a-nutshell/
Also, none but Biden faced an intractable, block-everything opposition party. LBJ had the rump of the Dixiecrats to deal with, but in the mid-Sixties those clowns were still in our circus until switching to the GOP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixiecrat
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
We're lucky.
Only have to weather this storm for about another year and a half.
--------------------------------------------------
" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher
PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.
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Quote:It could be less than 1.5 years if any Democratic Senator pulls a Sen. Ted Kennedy -- that means becoming too ill to vote in the Senate, yet refusing to resign and be replaced with a Democratic Senator that actually does the job of voting for Democratic laws. In that case, the Senate becomes deadlocked with 50 Republicans and 49 Senators caucusing with the Democrats plus 1 more Democrat, the V.P. Kamala Harris who would normally be the tie-breaking 51st vote. (Bernie and Angus King of Maine are Independents caucusing with the Democrats.)
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
This is the most important chart in all of national politics. Read it carefully. Absorb it. Only then can you begin your journey toward lasting insight.
https://jabberwocking.com/chart-of-the-day-politics-in-a-nutshell/
Also, none but Biden faced an intractable, block-everything opposition party. LBJ had the rump of the Dixiecrats to deal with, but in the mid-Sixties those clowns were still in our circus until switching to the GOP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixiecrat
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
We're lucky.
Only have to weather this storm for about another year and a half.
Kennedy lived for 15 months after being diagnosed with a glioblastoma, slightly longer than the average of one year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kennedy#Aftermath
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:Projection. Another Nazi tell. ^
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
No. We just know that YOU, specifically, are incapable of caring about anyone else.
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You realize that every dumb thing that you say can easily be turned right back on you and you exhibit the behavior where any rational person would agree, don't you?
You are without a doubt the worst person I've ever met in my life. Pure trash. Absolute waste of carbon.
--------------------------------------------------
" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:It could be less than 1.5 years if any Democratic Senator pulls a Sen. Ted Kennedy -- that means becoming too ill to vote in the Senate, yet refusing to resign and be replaced with a Democratic Senator that actually does the job of voting for Democratic laws. In that case, the Senate becomes deadlocked with 50 Republicans and 49 Senators caucusing with the Democrats plus 1 more Democrat, the V.P. Kamala Harris who would normally be the tie-breaking 51st vote. (Bernie and Angus King of Maine are Independents caucusing with the Democrats.)
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
This is the most important chart in all of national politics. Read it carefully. Absorb it. Only then can you begin your journey toward lasting insight.
https://jabberwocking.com/chart-of-the-day-politics-in-a-nutshell/
Also, none but Biden faced an intractable, block-everything opposition party. LBJ had the rump of the Dixiecrats to deal with, but in the mid-Sixties those clowns were still in our circus until switching to the GOP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixiecrat
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
We're lucky.
Only have to weather this storm for about another year and a half.
Kennedy lived for 15 months after being diagnosed with a glioblastoma, slightly longer than the average of one year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kennedy#Aftermath
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Ted Kennedy was a mindless zombie the last 10 years he "served". Democrats did him dirtier than Ginsberg.
--------------------------------------------------
" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher
PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.
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Why Republicans are the party of the White working class
Take a look at the Cooperative Election Study, which is a large academic survey of voters taken after each election, to better understand how little income matters to White voting patterns. https://cces.gov.harvard.edu/
Non-college White voters wanted no part of voting Democratic in 2020 House races, regardless of their income levels. White voters without a college degree favored Republicans by about a 26-point margin, if their family income was below the median. They voted Republican by a 31-point margin if their family income was above the median.
Among all White respondents, the Democratic margin increased by 39 points when respondents had a college degree. The House margin among all White respondents shifted by 5 points toward the Democrats, when their family income was above the median compared to below.
It's not that higher income makes White voters more Democratic, but rather that education is such a powerful pull and more educated voters tend to be wealthier. This is why we see wealthier White areas trending Democratic and poorer areas trending Republican in recent years. The latter tend to be filled with less educated voters, while the former tend to have more educated voters.
In other words, income matters very little among White voters. Education means everything.
But in 2006, it was very different. White voters without a college degree actually favored Democrats by a 3-point margin, if their family income was below the median. White voters favored Republicans by a 13-point margin, if their family income was above the median.
In fact among all White respondents, the Democrats' margin increased by 14 points depending on whether their family income was below or above the median. It increased by just 5 points, depending on whether they had a college degree.
That is, income seemed to have a greater effect on voting patterns than did education levels in 2006, which is very different from 2020. When you had districts that had below-average education levels and income levels, there was a decent shot they'd vote Democratic, just like Iowa's 2nd and Ohio's 18th Districts did in 2006. This isn't the case today.
Back in 2006, Democrats could rightly argue they had a lot of support by at least one definition of the White working class.
Today, Republicans can rightly claim to have the support of the White working class based on either an economic- or education-based definition.
More at https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/04/politics/republicans-white-working-clas
s-education/index.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Hunter Biden tries to suppress his laptop scandal
https://www.weeklyblitz.net/world/hunter-biden-tries-to-suppress-his-l
aptop-scandal/
Twitter's Jack Dorsey calls it a 'total mistake' that New York Post got blocked over Hunter report
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9403861/Twitters-Jack-Dorsey-
calls-total-mistake-New-York-Post-got-blocked-Hunter-report.html
Hunter Biden: I Smoked ‘Parmesan Cheese’ During Battle With Addiction
https://www.thedailybeast.com/hunter-biden-says-he-smoked-parmesan-che
ese-during-battle-with-addiction?via=twitter_page
Hunter Biden was suspected of smoking crack inside a strip club where he dropped “thousands of dollars” during multiple visits — at the same time he held a seat on the board of a controversial Ukrainian natural-gas company
https://pagesix.com/2019/11/26/hunter-biden-suspected-of-smoking-crack
-in-dc-strip-clubs-vip-room/
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Quote:Joe Biden's long experience dealing with crazy son has toughened and strengthened Joe for dealing with crazy GOP:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/hunter-biden-says-he-smoked-parmesan-che
ese-during-battle-with-addiction
Hunter Biden, who dives into his long-running battle with drugs and alcohol in his upcoming memoir Beautiful Things, also recounted how his father staged an intervention while he was binge-drinking vodka and smoking crack. “He came to my apartment one time, and this was when he was in office as vice president, he ditched the Secret Service and figured out a way to get over to the house,” Biden recalled. “And I said, ‘What are you doing here?’ And I said, dad, I’m fine. And he said, ‘You’re not fine.’”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Half of Republicans believe false accounts of deadly U.S. Capitol riot: Reuters/Ipsos poll
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-politics-disinformation/half-of
-republicans-believe-false-accounts-of-deadly-u-s-capitol-riot-reuters-ipsos-poll-idUSKBN2BS0RZ
Three months after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol to try to overturn his November election loss, about half of Republicans believe the siege was largely a non-violent protest or was the handiwork of left-wing activists “trying to make Trump look bad,” a new Reuters/Ipsos poll has found.
Six in 10 Republicans also believe the false claim put out by Trump that November’s presidential election “was stolen” from him due to widespread voter fraud, and the same proportion of Republicans think he should run again in 2024, the March 30-31 poll showed.
Since the Capitol attack, Trump, many of his allies within the Republican Party and right-wing media personalities have publicly painted a picture of the day’s events jarringly at odds with reality.
Hundreds of Trump’s supporters, mobilized by the former president’s false claims of a stolen election, climbed walls of the Capitol building and smashed windows to gain entry while lawmakers were inside voting to certify President Joe Biden’s election victory. The rioters - many of them sporting Trump campaign gear and waving flags - also included known white supremacist groups such as the Proud Boys.
In a recent interview with Fox News, Trump said the rioters posed “zero threat.” Other prominent Republicans, such as Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, have publicly doubted whether Trump supporters were behind the riot.
Last month, 12 Republicans in the House of Representatives voted against a resolution honoring Capitol Police officers who defended the grounds during the rampage, with one lawmaker saying that he objected using the word “insurrection” to describe the incident.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll shows a large number of rank-and-file Republicans have embraced the myth. While 59% of all Americans say Trump bears some responsibility for the attack, only three in 10 Republicans agree. Eight in 10 Democrats and six in 10 independents reject the false claims that the Capitol siege was “mostly peaceful” or it was staged by left-wing protestors.
“Republicans have their own version of reality,” said John Geer, an expert on public opinion at Vanderbilt University. “It is a huge problem. Democracy requires accountability and accountability requires evidence.”
The refusal of Trump and prominent Republicans to repudiate the events of Jan. 6 increases the likelihood of a similar incident happening again, said Susan Corke, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups.
“That is the biggest danger – normalizing this behavior,” Corke said. “I do think we are going to see more violence.”
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Fake mail-in fraud election was fake.
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Imagine the hypocrisy of a government who will allow businesses to card people to get a job or buy groceries, but won't card people to vote in elections and gives millions of non-citizens free money from taxpayers.
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Quote:Do you have any evidence of your claim?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fake mail-in fraud election was fake.
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Restaurant Chains Debunk Their Lobbyists’ Arguments Against A $15 Minimum Wage
While restaurant lobbyists tell lawmakers it’s the “wrong time” for a wage hike, companies they represent
are telling investors they can afford to pay higher wages.
https://www.dailyposter.com/p/restaurant-chains-debunk-their-lobbyists
-f03?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo2ODg1MzEsInBvc3RfaWQiOjM0Nzc5NTQ3LCJfIjoidFlaVHoiLCJpYXQiOjE2MTc2MzM5NzUsImV4cCI6MTYxNzYzNzU3NSwiaXNzIjoicHViLTM3Nzc4Iiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.g7C_0ntd2WKESIItLMf5ZrdTscxPr6VfIgrFhzCSQ-4
As corporate lobbying groups in Washington fight plans for a $15 minimum wage and warn lawmakers it's not the right time to make companies pay their workers more, big restaurant chains are telling investors a national minimum wage hike wouldn’t be a big deal.
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Yup.
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Quote:So, you have zero evidence, just like your cult leader.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Yup.
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Sidney Powell: Pro-Trump lawyer tells court no ‘reasonable person’ would listen to her in bid to get Dominion suit thrown out
Powell seeks dismissal of the defamation suit on grounds that her rights were protected under First Amendment
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-la
wyer-sidney-powell-dominion-lawsuit-b1820886.html
Donald Trump’s former lawyer Sidney Powell has submitted in court that her assertion about voter fraud after the 2020 US presidential election was opinion, and not a statement of fact.
Ms Powell is seeking dismissal of the $1.3 billion lawsuit against her by Dominion Voting Systems, which has alleged that the conservative legal firebrand defamed the election voting technology company with conspiracy theories in the weeks following the polls.
Ms Powell, who is notable for saying her lawsuits challenging the election were akin to “releasing the Kraken,” made Dominion Voting Systems the centre of her legal challenges to the 2020 election results.
The lawyer claimed that agents from Iran and China had compromised Dominion’s voting machines so that they would change the votes for Trump to those for Joe Biden.
Ms Powell, who was later disavowed by the Trump campaign, submitted before the federal court in Washington that “it was clear to reasonable persons” that she was sharing her “opinions and legal theories on a matter of utmost public concern.”
----
The Tucker Carlson defense.
Jesus, dude, the people who lied you into the cult don't even believe their own bullshit.
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Welcome to Day 76.
Today in one sentence: A record 4 million people in the U.S. received a coronavirus vaccine on Saturday; nearly 200 companies signed a joint statement against proposals that threaten to restrict voting access in dozens of states; Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called for a global minimum corporate tax rate; the Trump campaign refunded 10.7% of the money it raised online in 2020; and 55% of Republicans believe the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was led by left-wing activists "trying to make Trump look bad."
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'Follow the Money': Corporations Gave $50 Million to GOP Lawmakers Behind Voter Suppression
Onslaught
"No matter how many PR statements Big Business puts out, its complicity with the antidemocratic
forces that want to make voting harder is clear."
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/04/05/follow-money-corporations
-gave-50-million-gop-lawmakers-behind-voter-suppression?cd-origin=rss&utm_term=AO&utm_campaign=Daily%20Newsletter&utm_content=email&utm_source=Daily%20Newsletter&utm_medium=Email
Since 2015, AT&T, Comcast, UnitedHealth Group, Walmart, and other big businesses have donated a
combined $50 million to state Republican lawmakers who are currently supporting voter suppression
bills across the United States—generous political spending at odds with recent corporate efforts to
rebrand as defenders of voting rights.
A new report (pdf) released Monday morning by consumer advocacy group Public Citizen found that
during the 2020 election cycle alone, U.S. corporations donated $22 million to Republican architects of
voter suppression bills that are advancing through state legislatures nationwide.
---
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of
state and corporate power." -A fascist
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lol
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Quote:Nazis love Nazism. It makes them lol.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
lol
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Imagine how the trolls would howl if a Democrat did that.
Trump's hypocrisy is not an issue to his cult. It reminds them of their own.
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lol
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Democrats Suddenly Get a Big Break
This is a big deal:
Alex Bolton @alexanderbolton
Chuck Schumer scores a big win as Senate parliamentarian rules that a revised budget resolution may contain budget reconciliation instructions. This will allow Senate Democrats to move two more reconciliation packages in 2021, averting GOP filibusters.
For the past couple of months Schumer has been arguing that Section 304 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 allows two budget reconciliation bills per year, not just one. The second one, he says, can be passed as a revision to the first one as long as the House agrees.
The value of a budget reconciliation bill is that it can't be filibustered and requires only 50 votes to pass. Democrats have already used it once to pass the $1.9 trillion coronavirus bill, and they'd like to use it again to pass President Biden's infrastructure bill. Now, according to the parliamentarian, they can.
This is an end-run around the filibuster, but not a perfect one. Reconciliation bills are limited to things that affect the budget, like taxes and spending, and nothing else. So it's probably OK for an infrastructure bill, but not, say, for a bill to raise the minimum wage of $15.
Nevertheless, there are a fair number of things that fall under the broad umbrella of the budget. Since Democrats control the House—which has to agree to all this—it means they get a chance to pass two big bills this year and then another two later in the year during work on the FY22 budget.
None of this changes the fact that they still have to round up 50 votes in a Senate with 50 Democrats. And it won't help with some of their highest priorities, like the mammoth bill to set federal voting standards. But it still opens up a lot of possibilities.
https://jabberwocking.com/democrats-suddenly-get-a-big-break/
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:It's Trump bullshitting, not hypocrisy. Trump bullshitted about the Jan 6th riot and the November election. A majority of Republicans don't have a problem with that bullshitting, either. From yesterday:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Imagine how the trolls would howl if a Democrat did that.
Trump's hypocrisy is not an issue to his cult. It reminds them of their own.
Three months after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol to try to overturn his November election loss, about half of Republicans believe the siege was largely a non-violent protest or was the handiwork of left-wing activists “trying to make Trump look bad,” a new Reuters/Ipsos poll has found.
Six in 10 Republicans also believe the false claim put out by Trump that November’s presidential election “was stolen” from him due to widespread voter fraud, and the same proportion of Republicans think he should run again in 2024, the March 30-31 poll showed.
Since the Capitol attack, Trump, many of his allies within the Republican Party and right-wing media personalities have publicly painted a picture of the day’s events jarringly at odds with reality.
Hundreds of Trump’s supporters, mobilized by the former president’s false claims of a stolen election, climbed walls of the Capitol building and smashed windows to gain entry while lawmakers were inside voting to certify President Joe Biden’s election victory. The rioters - many of them sporting Trump campaign gear and waving flags - also included known white supremacist groups such as the Proud Boys.
In a recent interview with Fox News, Trump said the rioters posed “zero threat.” Other prominent Republicans, such as Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, have publicly doubted whether Trump supporters were behind the riot.
Last month, 12 Republicans in the House of Representatives voted against a resolution honoring Capitol Police officers who defended the grounds during the rampage, with one lawmaker saying that he objected using the word “insurrection” to describe the incident.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-politics-disinformation/half-of
-republicans-believe-false-accounts-of-deadly-u-s-capitol-riot-reuters-ipsos-poll-idUSKBN2BS0RZ
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:It's Trump bullshitting, not hypocrisy.
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Imagine how the trolls would howl if a Democrat did that.
Trump's hypocrisy is not an issue to his cult. It reminds them of their own.
You'll have to forgive Marcos.
He still hasn't figured out how words work yet.
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Quote:There is an old quote: "Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue." Getting to the core of what that quote means: Bullshitting is far worse than being a hypocrite who missed the target. The bullshitter may never have even aimed at the target and may not even have pulled the trigger. The bullshitter is saying "Bang! I hit the bullseye!" but the rifle wasn't loaded. There wasn't even a rifle. It was all pretending and pantomiming.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:It's Trump bullshitting, not hypocrisy.
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Imagine how the trolls would howl if a Democrat did that.
Trump's hypocrisy is not an issue to his cult. It reminds them of their own.
You'll have to forgive Marcos.
He still hasn't figured out how words work yet.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Cute quote, but I disagree with the sentiment.
Nothing is worse than a hypocrite. A hypocrite has no cornerstone in their life and changes their mind and the reality around them at the drop of the hat to suit their current argument.
While some bullshitters are certainly hypocrites too, not all bullshitters are hypocrites.
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Quote:I am guessing that you have never been in charge of a big project with lofty goals that you failed to meet on time. Publicly, if you are the boss or the politician trying make a difficult project work as intended, you will hypocritically praise everyone involved for what they accomplished. The bullshitter will do much the same, but with one big difference -- he fakes it. While the hypocrite has to continue working to actually achieve the goal, not just 90% of the way, the bullshitter claims total victory, even if he failed to reach 50%, and he will walk away from failure without acknowledging his failure, continuing to claim it is a huge success and he won the election. Meanwhile the hypocrite will keep working on the project to make his promises as real as possible.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Cute quote, but I disagree with the sentiment.
Nothing is worse than a hypocrite. A hypocrite has no cornerstone in their life and changes their mind and the reality around them at the drop of the hat to suit their current argument.
While some bullshitters are certainly hypocrites too, not all bullshitters are hypocrites.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Oh. Okay.
You don't know what a hypocrite is either.
Gotcha.
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America's most important political battle
Trump claims that instead of the deadly violence by his supporters on January 6 (the day Congress was certifying Biden's winning vote count) the rioters were "hugging and kissing" the cops in what was nothing but a peaceful protest. Unless it was violent, in which case it was the work of leftist agitators.
It's easy to become accustomed and blasé about this new reality. But we should stop to think about what it means: One of the two governing parties in the United States is controlled by people promoting the delegitimization of America's duly elected president, people who are endorsing or refusing to rectify dangerous lies.
The phenomenon risks making political violence more acceptable. Although most Americans blame the former president for the deadly events at the Capitol, according to an ABC poll, a majority of Republicans think Trump did nothing wrong.
It wasn't very long ago that the country had two reality-based, generally centrist parties. Democrats and Republicans, with different philosophies, debated the merits of their ideas, in search of a workable compromise.
But then, bit by bit, the GOP started veering in a different direction. By the time Trump became president, the maximalist, nativist, conspiracy-driven, scandal-manufacturing, hate-stoking wing was already ascendant, propelled by the engines of Fox News and other far-right provocateurs. Trump's victory was the coup that toppled the old GOP and turned it into the extremist MAGA machine.
Many of Trump's former critics, people like Senators Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz, who had all lambasted him in the past, now praise him with unselfconscious abandon.
And yet, the fight is not over. More than a few Republicans are still willing to speak out. This is not about Republicans deciding if they are conservative or moderate, it's about deciding if the party will respect the truth, democracy, and some manner of principle other than what is good for Trump and those seeking favor with him.
We've seen flashes of courage from conservative Republicans, like Rep. Liz Cheney and moderate ones like Sen. Mitt Romney and Rep. Adam Kinzinger. And at the state level, we saw Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and other Republican election officials hold firm despite Trump's verbal slings and arrows.
Other political battles may seem more interesting, more urgent, maybe more entertaining. But when it comes to America's future, this one matters most. American democracy will struggle to survive if one of its two parties turns its back on reality and stops believing in democracy.
More at https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/06/opinions/americas-political-battle-ghit
is/index.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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What is QAnon? Everything You Need to Know About the Conspiracy in 2021
Intro
QAnon, you might have heard about it. But even if you haven’t, you’ve probably heard some of its claims.
And you probably have a lot of questions.
Do QAnon followers really believe that child-eating satanic cults control our lives? And Donald Trump is the savior of humankind? Where did it come from? How did it become so popular?
What the hell is going on?
Like most people, before writing this guide, I mostly considered QAnon a joke. But learning about its origins and watching events unfold in real-time as I was writing, it all started to make a lot more sense.
QAnon’s rise from internet obscurity to a global phenomenon is a complicated, surreal, and troubling tale of a world plagued by anger, division, lies, and loneliness.
Hopefully, by the time you finish reading, you’ll understand QAnon (and its appeal) a little better. And in doing so, you’ll be prepared for the next chapter in this wild, crazy story.
What is QAnon?
In a nutshell, QAnon is a conspiracy cult that started on 4chan (an anonymous imageboard) and quickly spread into mainstream politics and culture.
QAnon followers believe:
A secret global cabal of Satan-worshipping politicians, celebrities, billionaires, and Catholic church leaders control the world. They traffick children to engage in ritualistic pedophilia and eat the children to harvest a life-extending chemical, adrenochrome, from their blood.
According to QAnon, Donald Trump is aware of all this and has been secretly waging a complex battle against the cabal and their collaborators in the US government – known as the ‘Deep State.’
When he’s successful, thousands of cabal members will be rounded up and imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay. Mass unrest will break out across the US, which the National Guard will brutally suppress. Eventually peace will prevail.
Over the years, QAnon has grown more complex, weaving in threads from older conspiracy theories and co-opting current events (i.e., Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest, Coronavirus, 5G conspiracies). An increasing number of public figures have been exposed as villains and cabal leaders, from George Soros and Bill Gates to model Chrissy Teigen and Pope Francis.
It’s also grown more Biblical and apocalyptic. Many in QAnon now believe that God chose Donald Trump to lead the struggle, along with his ‘digital soldiers’ (a term for QAnon followers).
After Trump overthrows the evil cabal, God will deliver salvation to the human race, and there will be utopia on Earth for all eternity.
More at https://www.mysticmag.com/psychic-reading/what-is-qanon/
Skipping to the last chapter: Final Thoughts
In early 2021, QAnon was a little over 3 years old – and facing a major crisis.
Donald Trump was kicked out of office, failing to fulfill Q’s prophecies; the attempted insurrection failed to overthrow the US government; and after months of silence, it appeared Q had abandoned his followers altogether.
So, what happens next?
Nobody knows for sure, but one thing is guaranteed: the grievances, anger, and conspiracies that inspired QAnon’s meteoric rise from fringe internet forums to global cultural force are stronger than ever.
While the QAnon brand may fade back into internet obscurity, the lies and false beliefs it created will continue to spread unless drastic action is taken.
QAnon – and all its craziness – has laid bare the divisions and social ills that have been plaguing society for years. We can continue to ignore them and wait for the next QAnon to emerge, more violent and better organized – or we can start to address these complex but urgent issues.
Our futures may very well depend on which course of action we choose.
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
Second's afraid of bogey men.
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Quote:OMG, 6ix! QAnon has written extensively about imaginary bogey men. See conspiracy claims: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon#Conspiracy_claims
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
LOL
Second's afraid of bogey men.
The bogey men don't exist, but crazy Republicans, armed with automatic rifles, believe in the bogey men. Those weaponized crazies are a problem.
Since you won't click the link, I will copy over a description of the beliefs of crazy armed Republicans: "... there is a worldwide cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who rule the world, essentially, and they control everything. They control politicians, and they control the media. They control Hollywood, and they cover up their existence, essentially. And they would have continued ruling the world, were it not for the election of President Donald Trump. Now, Donald Trump in this conspiracy theory knows all about this evil cabal's wrongdoing. But one of the reasons that Donald Trump was elected was to put an end to them, basically. And now we would be ignorant of this behind-the-scenes battle of Donald Trump and the U.S. military – that everyone backs him and the evil cabal – were it not for "Q." And what "Q" is is basically a poster on 4chan, who later moved to 8chan, who reveals details about this secret behind-the-scenes battle, and also secrets about what the cabal is doing and also the mass sort of upcoming arrest events through these posts."
The above description is more coherent than the ramblings of a typical Texas Trumptard, but it gives you a faint idea of what is wrong in their heads. It also hints at why millions of Texas Trumptards have trouble functioning at work, at home, and at holding on to the lower economic ladder rungs of the middle class.
https://www.google.com/search?q=QAnon
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:How is crying for a Coke boycott while drinking Coke not hypocrisy?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You'll have to forgive Marcos.
He still hasn't figured out how words work yet.
You're still really, really stupid. There's no cure.
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Quote:How is crying for a Coke boycott while drinking Coke not hypocrisy?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You'll have to forgive Marcos.
He still hasn't figured out how words work yet.
You're still really, really stupid. There's no cure.
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Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:Quote:How is crying for a Coke boycott while drinking Coke not hypocrisy?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You'll have to forgive Marcos.
He still hasn't figured out how words work yet.
You're still really, really stupid. There's no cure.
Why don't you ask Second, fuckwit.
He was the one who disagreed with you.
I just never pass up any opportunity to talk about how dumb you are.
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Well, my search is over!
I think I found Q's representative HERE, and it must be SECONDRATE!
I mean, look HOW MUCH! SECONDRATE posts about Q, and how much SECONDRATE seems to know! Clearly, only a representative of Q would bring all this info to the board!
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.
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Quote:Fears of white people losing out permeate Capitol rioters’ towns, study finds
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Well, my search is over!
I think I found Q's representative HERE, and it must be SECONDRATE!
I mean, look HOW MUCH! SECONDRATE posts about Q, and how much SECONDRATE seems to know! Clearly, only a representative of Q would bring all this info to the board!
When the political scientist Robert Pape began studying the issues that motivated the 380 or so people arrested in connection with the attack against the Capitol on Jan. 6, he expected to find that the rioters were driven to violence by the lingering effects of the 2008 Great Recession.
But instead he found something very different: Most of the people who took part in the assault came from places, his polling and demographic data showed, that were awash in fears that the rights of minorities and immigrants were crowding out the rights of white people in American politics and culture.
If Mr. Pape’s initial conclusions — published on Tuesday in The Washington Post — hold true, they would suggest that the Capitol attack has historical echoes reaching back to before the Civil War, he said in an interview over the weekend. In the shorter term, he added, the study would appear to connect Jan. 6 not only to the once-fringe right-wing theory called the Great Replacement, which holds that minorities and immigrants are seeking to take over the country, but also to events like the far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 where crowds of white men marched with torches chanting, “Jews will not replace us!”
“If you look back in history, there has always been a series of far-right extremist movements responding to new waves of immigration to the United States or to movements for civil rights by minority groups,” Mr. Pape said. “You see a common pattern in the Capitol insurrectionists. They are mainly middle-class to upper-middle-class whites who are worried that, as social changes occur around them, they will see a decline in their status in the future.”
One fact stood out in Mr. Pape’s study, conducted with the help of researchers at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, a think tank he runs at the University of Chicago. Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic white population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists. This finding held true, Mr. Pape determined, even when controlling for population size, distance to Washington, unemployment rate and urban or rural location.
More at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/06/us/politics/capitol-riot-study.html
Mr. Pape's career has mostly been focused on international terrorism. After the Sept. 11 attacks, he created a database of suicide bombers from around the world. His research led to a remarkable discovery: Most of the bombers were secular, not religious, and had killed themselves not out of zealotry, but rather in response to military occupations.
American officials eventually used the findings to persuade some Sunnis in Iraq to break with their religious allies and join the United States in a nationalist movement known as the Anbar Awakening.
Recalling his early work with suicide bombers, Mr. Pape suggested that the country’s understanding of what happened on Jan. 6 was only starting to take shape, much like its understanding of international terrorism slowly grew after Sept. 11.
“We really still are at the beginning stages,” he said.
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:
Fears of white people losing out permeate Capitol rioters’ towns, study finds
No they don't.
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Jen Psaki humiliates Fox reporter over ridiculous rightwing question
"Let me just refute the 1st point you made."
What she really wanted to say was "Dude don't you do your homework before coming here and embarrassing yourself on National Television?"
He's from Fox, so of course, the answer is "No."
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Rudy Giuliani: I'm the REAL Victim of My MASSIVE Trump Election LIES
This is what passes for credible with the trumptards.
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Most Americans Know Nothing About Politics. Nothing.
Even when I try really hard to take into account that most people don't know much about politics, I still overestimate how much they know.
Do they know that Republicans filibuster everything? Nah. Do they know that most Republicans think the election was stolen? Not really. Do they know anything at all about policy issues? Probably not, unless there happens to be one that impinges on their day jobs.
Frankly, for the vast majority of Americans, your best bet is to assume not that they are "low information voters" but that they know nothing about politics. Literally nothing. (Many, of course, know less than nothing because they listen to Fox News and come away with misinformation that makes them mad. They forget about the misinformation quickly, but they don't forget that they're mad.)
No matter how little you think most people know, cut it in half and then cut it in half again. That should get you somewhere close to the truth.
https://jabberwocking.com/most-americans-know-nothing-about-politics-n
othing/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Noam Chomsky wrote:
Hume was a great philosopher. He wrote an important essay, “Of the First Principles of Government” (1741), one of the classic texts on what we now call political philosophy or political science. He opens his study by raising a question. He’s surprised, he says, to see the “easiness” with which people subordinate themselves to power systems. That’s a mystery, because the people themselves really have the power. Why do they subject themselves to masters? The answer, he says, must be consent: the masters succeed in what we now call manufacturing consent. They keep the public in line by their belief that they must subordinate themselves to power systems. And he says this miracle occurs in all societies, no matter how brutal or how free.
Hume was writing in the wake of the first democratic revolution, the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, which led to what we call the British constitution—basically, that the king will be subordinate to parliament. Parliament at that time basically meant merchants and manufacturers. Hume’s close friend, Adam Smith, wrote about the consequences of the revolution. In his own famous book The Wealth of Nations (1776), he pointed out that the now sovereign “merchants and manufacturers” are the true “masters of mankind.” They used their power to control the government and to ensure that their own interests are very well taken care of, no matter how “grievous” the effect on the people of England—and even worse, on those who are subject to what he called “the savage injustice of the Europeans,” referring mainly to the British rule in India.
The year before Smith published The Wealth of Nations, the American Revolution broke out. About a decade later the American Constitution was formed, very much like during the first democratic uprising. That’s presented as a conflict between the king and parliament. And it ended, as I said, with the king being subordinate to parliament, the rising merchant and manufacturing class.
But that’s not the whole story. There was also the general public, which didn’t want to be ruled by either king or parliament. It was a lively pamphlet period. Itinerant workers and ministers reached much of the general public. Their pamphlets and talks called for being ruled by fellow countrymen, who know the people’s wants, not by knights and gentlemen who only want to oppress the people. They called for universal health, universal education, and many things. But they were ultimately crushed. Hume and Smith both wrote after the victory of the merchants and manufacturers in Britain—not only over the king, but over the general public.
This was reenacted in the American Constitution, as Michael Klarman documents in his book The Framers’ Coup (2016). The public wanted democracy. The Framers—wealthy men, nearly half of them slave owners—wanted to prevent the threat of democracy, much like the men of “best quality,” as they called themselves during the first democratic revolution. It didn’t take more than a few years for James Madison to realize what Smith had realized before. In 1791 he wrote a letter to his friend Thomas Jefferson in which he deplored the collapse of the democratic system that he hoped he had established—not too much democracy, but at least some. The stock-jobbers—in our day that means the financial institutions—had taken so much power, Madison deplored, that they had become the “tool and tyrant” of government. They work for government but they also control government, working for their own interests.
Many of the same problems exist today. More at https://bostonreview.net/class-inequality-politics/noam-chomsky-david-
barsamian-mole
Download a free copy of The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution
from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.club/search.php?req=The+Framers+Coup+The+Maki
ng+of+the+United+States+Constitution
or https://libgen.is/search.php?req=The+Framers+Coup+The+Making+of+the+Un
ited+States+Constitution
or http://library.lol/main/940F53EE19E9AC1C408DA01A214A07D8
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Most Americans Know Nothing About Politics. Nothing.
Even when I try really hard to take into account that most people don't know much about politics, I still overestimate how much they know.
Do they know that Republicans filibuster everything? Nah. Do they know that most Republicans think the election was stolen? Not really. Do they know anything at all about policy issues? Probably not, unless there happens to be one that impinges on their day jobs.
Frankly, for the vast majority of Americans, your best bet is to assume not that they are "low information voters" but that they know nothing about politics. Literally nothing. (Many, of course, know less than nothing because they listen to Fox News and come away with misinformation that makes them mad. They forget about the misinformation quickly, but they don't forget that they're mad.)
No matter how little you think most people know, cut it in half and then cut it in half again. That should get you somewhere close to the truth.
https://jabberwocking.com/most-americans-know-nothing-about-politics-n
othing/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
This started out as a good article.
Then it went into fantasyland when it pretended that anybody who watches CNN or MSNBC or reads jabberwocking is any better off than somebody who watches Fox or Newsmax.
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Quote:That is a fact, not an opinion.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
This started out as a good article.
Then it went into fantasyland when it pretended that anybody who watches CNN or MSNBC or reads jabberwocking is any better off than somebody who watches Fox or Newsmax.
https://trofire.com/2020/08/08/another-study-confirms-that-fox-news-ma
kes-you-stupid/
https://www.businessinsider.com/study-watching-fox-news-makes-you-less
-informed-than-watching-no-news-at-all-2012-5
http://www.digitaljournal.com/news/politics/fox-news-viewers-tend-to-b
e-less-informed-says-new-study/article/433762
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/07/21/a-rigorous-scientific-lo
ok-into-the-fox-news-effect/?sh=6ea3493812ab
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Legal reporter reveals how the Supreme Court 'radically altered' a key part of US law in the dark of night
https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/religious-liberty-supreme-court/?utm_
source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=6950
Vladeck told Stern, "Friday night was the seventh time this term that the Supreme Court has issued an emergency injunction pending appeal. All seven were in COVID free-exercise cases…. Those who like these decisions are getting increasingly comfortable with the court flouting and defying its own internal standards and rules for this kind of relief simply because they like the result. In the process, they attack critics for being insufficiently sensitive to religious liberty. And that's a preposterous claim."
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Trump finally jumps the shark
https://theweek.com/articles/976786/trump-finally-jumps-shark
When Trump ran for president in 2016, he bonded with his audiences mainly on their terms, placing himself in their camp, defending and championing them against all the fools and crooks who had turned the country into a "disaster" (his favorite adjective during the general election campaign). Once he'd ascended to the White House and found himself in the position of having to defend himself against charges of collusion with Russia and other misdeeds, Trump's public remarks were much more defensive and focused on himself. But he was also the president, which allowed his fixation on "deep state" antagonists to be transmuted into a battle for Republican survival more generally.
But now? Either Trump is the sorest loser in the history of American democracy — the Big Baby his critics always claimed he was — or else he really did win in a landslide and yet nonetheless allowed himself to be deposed and banished to South Florida while Joe Biden effortlessly took over the White House in a coup. Either way, he looks very small indeed.
Now, none of this means that Trump is going to slink away to hide under a rock — or that Republican Party officials will be able get out from under his thumb anytime soon. Because Trump needs money, big time. And the surest way to get it is to attempt to remain a kingmaker within the party for as long as possible, so his most loyal supporters think it's reasonable to keep clicking the "Donate" button on his website (or just not notice for a good long while that the "autorenewal" button has been prechecked).
So Trump will keep trying to remain relevant — but he will do so, I suspect, with steeply declining returns.
I don't for a minute believe that Trump will be able to manage the launch of his own social media platform. (It would actually be quite difficult and expensive to pull that off, and unlikely to succeed.) Will people even show up to rallies if he tries to hold them? Who wants to listen to an angry old man rant and rave about how he was robbed and outsmarted in 2020 by people he labels as dumb? There's a performative contradiction there that even a populist of Trump's considerable talents is going to have a hell of a job trying to surmount. The most likely outcome is that, with each passing month, he will sound more and more like a petulant crank railing impotently against his enemies, real and imagined.
The great irony here is that Trump has been so successful at remaking the GOP in his own image that the party doesn't really need him anymore. Sure, they'll try to avoid provoking his wrath. But every viable candidate for president in 2024 is going to be following Trump's lead on immigration, trade, and waging a rhetorically ferocious culture war against the left — and most of them will be doing it without Trump's own considerable personal liabilities, including the hatred of a large swath of the electorate.
Put in slightly different terms, the 2020 election results show that Trump has given Republicans a potentially fruitful way forward — but also that he can't be the one to lead the way there because he's a drag on the party. Trump's own dead weight, and not some cockamamie conspiracy, is what accounts for his loss last year despite Republicans doing so well down ballot.
Trump will likely go down in history as a blunt instrument who shattered a staid consensus on the right but who was far too widely loathed and incompetent at governing to deliver the party to the Promised Land himself. That's never been clearer than it is right now. And it's bound to grow clearer still as more broadly appealing politicians try their hands at domesticating Trumpian politics on a national level.
It's too soon to know who is going end up at the head of the GOP. But it's not too soon to know that it's exceedingly unlikely to be Trump.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, w
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Oh... he only now jumped the shark, huh?
Does this mean you're going to stop posting about him every day?
I doubt it.
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Quote:Did you not notice that Trump is still crazy as hell and yet GOP politicians won't put a straitjacket on him and lock him in a soundproof room with padded walls? The GOP is still taking marching orders from Trump when he earned being spit in his face, kicked in his fat ass, and dumped in the garbage bin of history. And that is just over Trump giving Kim of North Korea respect by meeting with Kim! Twice! What a time-wasting idiot Trump is when he does "International Diplomacy", Trump style! But Trump and Kim had fun, and that's what being President is all about -- fun, fun, fun, and no work done.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Oh... he only now jumped the shark, huh?
Does this mean you're going to stop posting about him every day?
I doubt it.
https://www.npr.org/2019/06/30/737365074/trump-to-meet-kim-jong-un-at-
dmz
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:Did you not notice that Trump is still crazy as hell and yet GOP politicians won't put a straitjacket on him and lock him in a soundproof room with padded walls? The GOP is still taking marching orders from Trump when he earned being spit in his face, kicked in his fat ass, and dumped in the garbage bin of history.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Oh... he only now jumped the shark, huh?
Does this mean you're going to stop posting about him every day?
I doubt it.
Yup. Sounds like your article was full of shit.
You're never going to stop talking about Trump, dude.
--------------------------------------------------
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Quote:I talk about Nixon, too, and he wasn't even impeached once, let alone twice. A big plus for Nixon, and big minus for Trump, was when Nixon got caught cheating on his taxes. Nixon actually paid back what he owed, which equaled half of his net-worth, rather than run to the Supreme Court as Trump has done.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You're never going to stop talking about Trump, dude.
Quote:from President Nixon's Troublesome Tax Returns
Nixon's greatest concern with the IRS audit and the JCT investigation was that fraud might be charged, thereby imposing a civil fraud penalty of 50 percent of the tax deficiency, increasing his chances for impeachment. Amazingly, fraud was not mentioned either by the IRS or by the committee report. However, the House Judiciary Committee, which was considering the impeachment of Nixon, stated that it might investigate the possibility of tax fraud.
By agreeing to pay $465,000, Nixon's wealth was reduced to half of the previous $988,522. One White House spokesman stated that Nixon was "almost totally wiped out" by the agreement (WSJ, Apr. 5, 1974). However, Nixon was fortunate to have had $433,000 in liquid assets to pay the tax deficiency.
http://www.taxhistory.org/thp/readings.nsf/cf7c9c870b600b9585256df8007
5b9dd/f8723e3606cd79ec85256ff6006f82c3?OpenDocument
Congressional Republicans were very different in 1970 than today. Nixon's tax returns were audited by Republicans in Congress who would not tolerate even a hint of cheating by a President.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Why Republicans are Betting the Farm on Attacking Transgender People
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/04/12/why-republicans-are-betting-th
e-farm-on-attacking-transgender-people/
The GOP’s latest culture war is focused squarely on the nation’s transgender community, specifically transgender youth. It isn’t a new war, simply a new front in an old war that can be traced back to the famed “bathroom bills” from some years ago that spread across dozens of states. Those bills were introduced in tandem with former President Donald Trump’s targeted federal government-led attacks that included the overturning of anti-discrimination statutes protecting trans people and an outright transgender ban in the U.S. military.
Now, in the wake of Trump’s humiliating electoral loss, Republicans have accelerated the state-level attacks to a breathtaking level. In just the first three months of 2021, GOP-led state legislatures introduced more bills aimed at transgender people, especially youth, than they did over the entire previous year. There are now more than 80 bills introduced this year alone that, according to Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign, “are not addressing any real problem, and they’re not being requested by constituents. Rather, this effort is being driven by national far-right organizations attempting to score political points by sowing fear and hate.”
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Fox News anchors accused of conspiring behind the scenes with Trump attorneys as they face massive lawsuit over election lies
https://www.rawstory.com/smartmatic-lawsuit-fox-news/
"The Fox anchors were not innocent bystanders and the disinformation generated during their interviews was no accident," the motion claims. "Prior to the interviews, the Fox anchors decided to join forces with Giuliani and Powell to disseminate disinformation about Smartmatic. The Fox anchors knew what Giuliani and Powell would say on their shows, asked questions to elicit lies about Smartmatic, and endorsed Giuliani's and Powell's investigation. The Fox anchors added their own defamatory comments about Smartmatic for good measure. This was a scripted performance by the Fox anchors, Giuliani, and Powell to defame and disparage Smartmatic for personal gain."
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The Internal Revenue Service could be missing out on collecting approximately $1 trillion every year from taxpayers who are not paying their full tab, Charles Rettig, the tax collector agency’s commissioner, said Tuesday.
“It would not be outlandish to believe that the actual tax gap could approach and possibly exceed $1 trillion dollars,” Rettig told members of the Senate Finance Committee.
The figure is massive by itself, but Rettig’s own estimation during Tuesday’s hearing of the federal tax gap — which is the difference between taxes legally owed and taxes actually paid — was a drastic upward revision of the IRS’s own projections.
Rettig said the agency’s existing estimates of the tax gap read like they’re “from the dark ages.” The most recent official IRS estimates said that every year from 2011 and 2013, taxpayers failed to pay $441 billion in tax money. IRS compliance efforts and late payments narrowed that annual divide to $381 billion.
A new study looked into tax evasion and pointed a finger at the wealthiest taxpayers.
The IRS is performing fewer complex audits to recoup cash. In the last 10 years, the IRS is down 17,000 members in its enforcement wing alone, Rettig said. “That has to have an effect, and it does,” he told lawmakers.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/tax-cheats-cost-the-u-s-far-more-tha
n-previously-thought-and-cryptocurrency-is-part-of-the-problem-irs-commissioner-says-11618340252
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 will be fine.
--------------------------------------------------
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Quote:The IRS could collect $1 trillion more taxes per year by doing only one thing: jailing Trump for tax evasion. Once that happens, other tax cheaters would start complying, but so long as Trump can effortlessly defy the IRS the cheaters will feel as free as Trump to cheat:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Trump will be fine.
The Internal Revenue Service could be missing out on collecting approximately $1 trillion every year from taxpayers who are not paying their full tab, Charles Rettig, the tax collector agency’s commissioner, said Tuesday. A new study looked into tax evasion and pointed a finger at the wealthiest taxpayers.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/tax-cheats-cost-the-u-s-far-more-tha
n-previously-thought-and-cryptocurrency-is-part-of-the-problem-irs-commissioner-says-11618340252
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 will be fine.
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Quote:Trump is fine because the IRS budget for 2021 is Trump's budget.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Trump will be fine.
Funding the IRS Pays Off: Preventing Tax Dodging by Wealthy Filers Is the First Step to Fixing Our Tax Code
https://budget.house.gov/publications/report/funding-irs
"the IRS failed to audit more than 897,000 wealthy individuals who skipped out on filing tax returns over a three-year period"
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 will be fine.
--------------------------------------------------
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Quote:Trump will be fine for the reasons mentioned in three paragraphs from Democrats on the House Budget Committee:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Trump will be fine.
After Republicans took control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1995 and Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House, calls to abolish the IRS became a mainstream Republican talking point. Soon after, the Republican-controlled Senate held a series of dramatic hearings on alleged abuses by the IRS (later debunked by the Government Accountability Office), followed by a new law limiting the agency’s collection powers and independence.
Not surprisingly, IRS audits and collections sunk to historic lows. When Republicans took the House majority again in 2011, they pushed to cut the IRS’s budget, citing the agency’s implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Soon, Republicans targeted the IRS again by holding hearings and launching investigations. Despite the Obama Administration’s efforts to secure sufficient funding for the IRS, Republican lawmakers continued to punish the agency and push severe funding cuts. For example, House Republicans recommended cutting the President’s budget request for the agency by 30 percent for fiscal year 2014.
Since 2010, the IRS’s budget and staff have been steadily cut in real terms, leaving the agency understaffed, constrained, and operating with archaic information technology (IT) systems. From 2010 through 2018, IRS funding was cut, resulting in the elimination of 22 percent of its staff. These cuts have gutted the agency; depleted its well-trained, specialized staff charged with auditing corporations and wealthy taxpayers; and weakened its ability to carry out emergency tasks. It follows that Trump will be fine.
https://budget.house.gov/publications/report/funding-irs
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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This thread was meant to be just one giant circle jerk for desperate Dems.
Eeeeeww
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.
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Quote:I don't see why a Russian troll would even care.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
This thread was meant to be just one giant circle jerk for desperate Dems.
Eeeeeww
Oh, wait. You're paid to lie.
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'That is not how it works': Jen Psaki dismantles conservative reporter's factually incorrect question
https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/jen-psaki-2652581115/?utm_source=&
;utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=6964&recip_id=28351&list_id=2
Yet another trumptard fake journalist gets owned. She's good.
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Welcome to Day 85.
Today in one sentence: The U.S. Capitol Police inspector general found that the agency’s leaders failed to adequately prepare for the Jan. 6 attack despite being warned that “Congress itself is the target”; hundreds of U.S. corporations and executives signed on to a statement opposing “any discriminatory legislation” that would make it harder for people to vote; the former Minnesota police officer who shot and killed Daunte Wright during a traffic stop was arrested and charged with second-degree manslaughter; and Matt Gaetz's associate has been cooperating with the Justice Department since last year.
The U.S. Capitol Police inspector general found that the agency’s leaders failed to adequately prepare for the Jan. 6 attack despite being warned that “Congress itself is the target.” In a 104-page document, Michael Bolton criticized the way the Capitol Police prepared for and responded to the violence, finding that “heavier, less-lethal weapons,” including stun grenades, “were not used that day because of orders from leadership.” The IG report also found that some police equipment was at least 20 years old, including riot shields that shattered on impact. (New York Times / Wall Street Journal / Reuters / NPR) https://www.npr.org/2021/04/13/987047876/report-capitol-police-leaders
hip-equipment-deficiencies-hampered-jan-6-response
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Quote:But in an act of extreme irony (that I notice every time this thread comes up) "A thread for Democrats Only" was started by THUGGR, a self-described non-democrat. The meaning of *only* is so hard to figure out!
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
This thread was meant to be just one giant circle jerk for desperate Dems.
Eeeeeww
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.
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What happens if you mixed a disgusting Cretin and a perverted Grinch you get Vitaliy Grechin?
Some Degenerate guy who previously posed with Hillary Clinton and donated to Barack Obama, took a bunch of women to the islamic Arabic Dubai, the most populous area in the United Arab Emirates...I'm not sure these women might have been actual whores, most are from Ukraine, then he got them to pose naked flashing their boobs and ass like whores or instagram, snapchat, facebook prostitutes ... all the muslim neighbors see what is going on in this public balcony photoshoot...the scandal goes viral on scoail media
Moslem Cops are called, all the women are arrested, probably going to be jailed, raped, beaten in some rich islam nation, the guy is Ukraine and US Democrat connected, he is behind 'the naked Dubai balcony photoshoot'
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/14568105/dubai-photoshoot-hillary-clinto
n-obama-donation/
https://nypost.com/2021/04/14/model-detained-in-dubai-claims-she-was-f
orced-to-pose-nude/
https://www.rt.com/russia/520346-grechin-ukrainian-dubai-arrest/
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/naked-dubai-photo-shoot-model-cla
ims-she-was-forced-to-pose-in-public-by-idiot-organiser/BPUCE4L5GAPQWZRVOSILURF2NY/
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Trump...
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Trump will be fine.
Trump will be fine.
--------------------------------------------------
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