A thread for Democrats Only by THGRRI

Quote:
Originally posted by JJ:
-

The 12 countries involved have a collective population of about 800 million - almost double that of the European Union's single market. The 12-nation would-be bloc is already responsible for 40% of world trade.

The pact aimed to deepen economic ties between these nations, slashing tariffs and fostering trade to boost growth. Members had also hoped to foster a closer relationship on economic policies and regulation.

The deal was seen as a remarkable achievement given the very different approaches and standards within the member countries, including environmental protection, workers' rights and regulatory coherence - not to mention the special protections that some countries have for certain industries.

This deal would have strengthened our hand when dealing with China concerning tradee. By not completing the deal we left a huge opening for China to lead the way globally. That will have a disastrous effect on our power globally.

JJ

I can find equal and opposite views on the TPP, by both Right and Left leaning sources, T.

Looks like Trump might have changed his mind on the issue. Maybe you two finally found something you can agree on?

I just had a funny thought about a future where Trump turns Globalist and all of the sudden T is arguing in favor of Trump's every move, and going forward with the TPP is the genesis of that.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Friday, April 13, 2018 12:28 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by JJ:
-

The 12 countries involved have a collective population of about 800 million - almost double that of the European Union's single market. The 12-nation would-be bloc is already responsible for 40% of world trade.

The pact aimed to deepen economic ties between these nations, slashing tariffs and fostering trade to boost growth. Members had also hoped to foster a closer relationship on economic policies and regulation.

The deal was seen as a remarkable achievement given the very different approaches and standards within the member countries, including environmental protection, workers' rights and regulatory coherence - not to mention the special protections that some countries have for certain industries.

This deal would have strengthened our hand when dealing with China concerning tradee. By not completing the deal we left a huge opening for China to lead the way globally. That will have a disastrous effect on our power globally.

I can find equal and opposite views on the TPP, by both Right and Left leaning sources, T.

Looks like Trump might have changed his mind on the issue. Maybe you two finally found something you can agree on?

Do Right, Be Right. :)

I don't care what your opinion is jack. You don't read and you have a conspiracy driven, uneducated, ill informed, FOX news concept about everything.

JJ

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Friday, April 13, 2018 12:34 PM

Yup. Elizabeth Warren's and Bernie Sanders' hard anti-TPP stance are the things that FOX News is made of.

Idiot.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Friday, April 13, 2018 3:45 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

I can find equal and opposite views on the TPP, by both Right and Left leaning sources, T.

Looks like Trump might have changed his mind on the issue. Maybe you two finally found something you can agree on?

I just had a funny thought about a future where Trump turns Globalist and all of the sudden T is arguing in favor of Trump's every move, and going forward with the TPP is the genesis of that.

How about the obvious interpretation of Trump? Once he was comfortably living in the White House for a month, he sold out Candidate Trump to become the GOP's preferred President?

Candidate Trump promised to avoid cutting Medicaid. Candidate Trump promised to deliver affordable health insurance to all Americans — at government expense, if necessary. Candidate Trump promised to defend Social Security benefits. Candidate Trump said that wealthy people like Donald Trump would pay higher taxes under his plan. Candidate Trump positioned himself as an enemy of global financial elites and vowed to reimpose Glass-Steagall regulation and break up big banks.

None of those promises were kept.

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

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Friday, April 13, 2018 5:17 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

I can find equal and opposite views on the TPP, by both Right and Left leaning sources, T.

Looks like Trump might have changed his mind on the issue. Maybe you two finally found something you can agree on?

I just had a funny thought about a future where Trump turns Globalist and all of the sudden T is arguing in favor of Trump's every move, and going forward with the TPP is the genesis of that.
How about the obvious interpretation of Trump? Once he was comfortably living in the White House for a month, he sold out Candidate Trump to become the GOP's preferred President?

Candidate Trump promised to avoid cutting Medicaid. Candidate Trump promised to deliver affordable health insurance to all Americans — at government expense, if necessary. Candidate Trump promised to defend Social Security benefits. Candidate Trump said that wealthy people like Donald Trump would pay higher taxes under his plan. Candidate Trump positioned himself as an enemy of global financial elites and vowed to reimpose Glass-Steagall regulation and break up big banks.

None of those promises were kept.

Yeah. I think I'm just going to start calling him Hillary.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Saturday, April 14, 2018 8:19 AM

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

Trump, like much of the public, bounces between the desire to minimize our involvement in long, costly wars and the belief that we should always get our way in the world. The ideal is an intervention that is quick, easy, successful and low on American casualties.

George W. Bush and his administration sold the Iraq invasion on the promise that we would go in, remove Saddam Hussein, liberate the country and be home for Thanksgiving. “I can't tell you if the use of force in Iraq today will last five days, five weeks or five months, but it won't last any longer than that,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld assured Americans beforehand. It lasted longer than that.

Barack Obama had a similar aspiration in Libya, using airstrikes to defeat and topple Moammar Gadhafi. They achieved the goal but had the unwanted consequence of turning Libya into a terrorist-infested cauldron of violence. Even Obama said the Libya operation was his “worst mistake.”

When you go big, as Bush did, you run a high risk of being fatally bogged down for years in a savage but inconclusive war. When you go small, as Obama did, you stand a good chance of achieving little or making things worse.

Trump has already run this experiment and learned nothing from it. In 2013, as Obama was being urged to intervene in response to Assad’s use of chemical weapons, he tweeted, “Stay out of Syria.” Shortly after Trump took office, the regime allegedly used gas again, and he ordered a missile strike to “deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons.”

The one-off went quickly, cost little and produced no American casualties. The downside was that it didn’t work. Assad’s forces have not only gained ground in the past year but apparently used nerve agents several times in the past year — and they used them again this month.

To respond by hitting Syrian or Russian targets with missiles would satisfy Trump’s need to assert his toughness. As Naval War College professor Andrew Stigler told me, “They offer gratification without commitment.”

But we can be confident that they wouldn’t change the course of the war, bring down Assad or serve as a reliable deterrent against more gas attacks. More likely, blowing up some targets would simply highlight the administration’s refusal to take action that would alter any important outcome.

This option has a small potential upside but a huge possible downside: a military conflict with the Russians or the Iranians. Both have more at stake in Syria than we do, as well as strong alliances with a government that has all but won the war.

Defense Secretary James Mattis seems to recognize the depth of our predicament. “We’re trying to stop the murder of innocent people,” he told the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday. “But on a strategic level, it’s how do we keep this from escalating out of control — if you get my drift on that.”

www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chapman/ct-perspec-chapman-trump-s
yria-chemical-weapons-war-20180413-story.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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Sunday, April 15, 2018 7:06 AM

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

"If it were true that the economic system we have today can’t even bring our most poverty-stricken workers to a semi-decent standard of living – and $15 is not even a living wage, by the way – then why would we defend it? That would be straightforward evidence that we need a better system."
www.theguardian.com/news/2018/apr/13/how-much-is-an-hour-worth-the-war
-over-the-minimum-wage

President Franklin Roosevelt openly declared his desire to reshape the American economy by driving out “parasitic” firms that built worker penury into their business models. “No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country,” he said in 1933.

Inevitably, this vision had its dissenters, especially among business owners, for whom minimum-wage increases represented an immediate and unwelcome increase in costs, and more generally, a limit on their agency as profit-seekers. At a 1937 Congressional hearing on the proposed Fair Labor Standards Act (FSLA) – which enacted the first federal minimum wage, the 40-hour work week and the ban on child labour – a representative of one of the US’s most powerful business lobby groups, the National Association of Manufacturers, testified that a minimum wage was the first step toward totalitarianism: “Call it Bolshevism or communism, if you will. Call it socialism, Nazism, fascism or what you will. Each says to the people that they must bow to the will of the state.”

Despite these objections, the FLSA passed in 1938, setting a nationwide minimum wage of $0.25 per hour (the equivalent of $4.45 today). Many industries were exempt at first, including those central to the southern economy, and those that employed high proportions of racial minorities and women. In subsequent decades, more and more of these loopholes were closed.

But as the age of Roosevelt and his New Deal gave way to that of Reagan, the field of economics turned decisively against the minimum wage – one part of a much larger political and cultural tilt toward all things “free market”.

“The minimum wage has caused more misery and unemployment than anything since the Great Depression,” claimed Reagan during his 1980 presidential campaign. In many ways, Reagan’s governing philosophy (like Margaret Thatcher’s) was a grossly simplified, selectively applied version of neoclassical price theory, slapped with a broad brush on to any aspect of American life that Republicans wanted to set free from regulatory interference or union pressure. Since becoming law in 1938, the US federal minimum wage had been raised by Congress 15 times, generally keeping pace with inflation. Once Reagan was president, he blocked any new increases, letting the nationwide minimum be eroded by inflation. By the time he left office, the federal minimum was $3.35, and stood at its lowest value to date, relative to the median national income.

When Roosevelt pushed for America’s first minimum wage, he was confident that capitalists would deal with the temporary price shock by doing what capitalists do best: relentlessly seeking out new ways to save costs elsewhere. He rejected the idea that a functioning economy simply must contain certain types of jobs, or that particular industries were intrinsically required to be poorly compensated or exploitative.

Economies and jobs are, to some extent, what we decide to make them. In developed economies like the US and the UK, it is common to lament the disappearance of “good jobs” in manufacturing and their replacement by “bad” low-wage work in service industries. But much of what was “good” about those manufacturing jobs was made that way over time by concessions won and regulations demanded by labour activists. Today, there is no natural reason that the exploding class of service jobs must be as “bad” as they often are.

The Fight for $15 has not notched its victories by convincing libertarian economists that they are wrong; it has won because more and more Americans work bad jobs – poorly paid jobs, unrewarding jobs, insecure jobs – and they are willing to try voting some of that badness out of existence.

This willingness is not the product of hours spent reading the post-Card and Krueger economic literature. It has much more to do with an intuitive understanding that – in an economy defined by historically high levels of worker productivity on the one hand, and skyrocketing but unevenly distributed profit on the other – some significantly better arrangement must be possible, and that new rules might help nudge us in the right direction, steering employers’ profit-seeking energies towards other methods of cutting costs besides miserably low pay. But we should not expect that there will be a study that proves ahead of time how this will work – just as Roosevelt could not prove his conjecture that the US economy did not have an existential dependence on impoverished sweatshop labour.

www.theguardian.com/news/2018/apr/13/how-much-is-an-hour-worth-the-war
-over-the-minimum-wage

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

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Sunday, April 15, 2018 12:07 PM

That's about right. Something is going to change because it's getting to the point where it has to.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Sunday, April 15, 2018 5:30 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
How can you be a fan of TPP? I can understand why Democratic politicians are, because politicians are liars and don't care about the people anymore than Republican politicians do in general, but as a citizen who happens to be a Democrat, how do you support it?

A reversal on this will be devastating to Trump's reelection chances. If that's the reason why you support it though, that is just sad.

Quote:
Here’s one easy way to identify the distorted priorities of the TPP: the term “climate change” isn’t so much as mentioned once in all 30 chapters.

There’s a lot of talk about the Trans-Pacific Partnership because after years of absurd secrecy, the text of the deal was finally released in November 2015. Now, if Congress approves this deal, the TPP can trump common-sense protections for workers, the environment, public health, food safety and much more. It is a deal that strengthens the power of corporations and weakens our democratic institutions by putting global commerce ahead of the public.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/11/24/wtf-tpp

Quote:
"In a series of broken promises Trump made to the working people of this country, rejoining the job-killing Trans-Pacific Partnership would be the biggest yet," warned Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) also weighed in, calling Trump's move "a ridiculous reversal and a slap in the face to the hard-working Americans Trump promised to fight for."

Negotiated under a veil of strictly-enforced secrecy by the Obama administration and so-called trade advisory committees stocked with corporate representatives, the TPP was never really even about establishing conditions for "free trade," as numerous analysts have noted.

Rather, as The Intercept's Zaid Jilani argued, the pact is primarily aimed at "protecting corporate profits" by "crafting regulatory regimes that benefit certain industries."

The deal—which was signed in March by 11 Asia-Pacific nations amid fierce grassroots opposition—is particularly generous to Big Pharma, as it "expands monopoly protections and patents for various pharmaceutical drugs," Jilani observed.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/04/12/confirming-he-does-not-gi
ve-crap-about-working-people-trump-proposes-rejoining-tpp

Do Right, Be Right. :)

ahhhh yes. Another of the forgotten Obama-Gates.

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Sunday, April 15, 2018 6:56 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
ahhhh yes. Another of the forgotten Obama-Gates.

What I'm glad to see here is that we all seem to be in agreement that TPP is bad. Even Second and G don't seem to support it. Whether or not that's because Trump might be is up for debate, but I'll take opposition to it in any form.

I can't figure out why T seems so pro-TPP though.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Monday, April 16, 2018 6:38 AM

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

I’ve often heard veterans wish for a draft, for something that would drag more Americans into orbit around the dark star that is the country’s constant exercise of military power. The Founders of the republic originally wanted to force Congress to vote every two years just to keep a standing Army; these days Congress won’t even permit a vote to replace an Authorization for the Use of Military Force that was passed prior to the Iraq War and that we are now using to justify fighting against groups that didn’t even exist back then.

For the military men and women overseas looking to explain why they’re risking their lives, they have no public debate to refer to, no clear benchmarks of success being analyzed in Congress and on TV. Nor is there even clear guidance from the commander in chief, who one month rolls out an escalation in Afghanistan with the express purpose of increasing military pressure on the Taliban to motivate them to engage in a political settlement, and then a few months later announces that he’s uninterested in negotiations. Can service members maintain a sense of purpose when nobody — not the general public, or the Congress elected to represent them, or the commander in chief himself — seems to take the wars we’re fighting seriously?

Our military is a major part of who we are as a country; it is the force that has undergirded the post–World War II international order. Being an American means being deeply implicated in that, for good or for ill. The solution to our current dead end doesn’t lie within the military itself. The military can’t set its own goals, can’t determine its own budget or which ideals it fights and dies for, and can’t decide how its losses will be honored, dishonored, or appropriated after the fact. So while America as a whole chooses to express its love for its military in gooey, substance-free displays, our military waits, perhaps hopelessly, for a coherent national policy that takes the country’s wars seriously.

What would such a thing look like? It would probably look like rescinding the open-ended Authorization for the Use of Military Force and making the president regularly go before Congress to explain where and why he was putting troops in harm’s way, what resources the mission required, and what the terms of success were. It would look like every member of Congress carrying out his or her constitutionally mandated duty to provide oversight of our military adventures by debating and then voting on that plan. It would look like average Americans taking part in that debate, and scorning anyone who tried to tell them they couldn’t. It would look like average Americans rolling their eyes in disgust when our leaders tell us we’re not at war while American troops are risking their lives overseas, or claim that Americans must support the wars their country engages in if they want to support the troops, or when a press secretary argues that anyone who questions the success of a military raid in which a service member died “owes an apology” to that fallen soldier. It would look like our politicians letting the fallen rest in peace, rather than propping up their corpses for political cover.

Without a political leadership that articulates and argues for a mission and objective worth dying for, it’s no surprise that soldiers sometimes stop caring about the mission altogether. A sergeant who deployed to the Korengal Valley, in Afghanistan, told me that by the end of his deployment, he had purposely adopted a defensive posture, sacrificing mission for safety at every opportunity he could. This is reminiscent of what one officer said of the later stages of the Vietnam War: “The gung-ho attitude that made our soldiers so effective in 1966, ’67, was replaced by the will to survive.” It’s not that those troops lacked courage, but that the ends shifted. “We fought for each other,” I’ve heard plenty of veterans claim about their time in service, and no wonder. If your country won’t even resource the wars with what its own generals say is necessary for long-term success, what else is there to fight for? But if you think the mission your country keeps sending you on is pointless or impossible and that you’re only deploying to protect your brothers and sisters in arms from danger, then it’s not the Taliban or al-Qaeda or ISIS that’s trying to kill you, it’s America.

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/05/left-behind/556844/

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

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Monday, April 16, 2018 7:15 AM

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

The president is not a king but a citizen, deserving of the presumption of innocence and other protections, yet also vulnerable to lawful scrutiny. If Trump doesn't recognizes this, how Republican lawmakers respond will shape the future not only of this presidency, but of the American experiment itself.

http://money.cnn.com/2018/04/15/media/new-york-times-editorial-rule-of
-law/index.html

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Monday, April 16, 2018 7:47 AM

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

www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/As-you-file-your-t
axes-don-t-forget-about-12835908.php

Tax Day, on Tuesday, offers a reminder that President Donald Trump continues to refuse to release his tax returns. In doing so, he is ignoring a tradition in transparency followed by every president since Richard Nixon.

For the past several decades, most presidential candidates have released their tax returns, including Trump’s 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton. But not Trump.

This should concern all Americans.

Tax returns show how much a person earned, where the money came from and how much they paid in taxes. For Trump, it could help reveal whether he’s had financial ties to foreign interests. Without a doubt, politicians give up some of their privacy by releasing details about their income — but voters have a right to expect their leaders to show where they derive their income, and what potential financial conflicts of interests they may have.

Trump’s claim during the campaign that he could not release his tax returns because he was being audited by the IRS was bogus. The tax agency itself said Trump was free to release them.

Throughout our history, the conduct of presidents has often been guided by norms rather than formal rules and laws. Trump’s refusal to follow many of these norms may mean such rules are needed.

The Maryland Legislature took the unprecedented step this year of passing a bill that would require presidential and vice-presidential candidates to release their tax returns in order to get on the state’s ballot. It is unclear if such alaw would be constitutional, as judges have never tackled the issue.

As president, Trump wields great influence over policy and can even induce swings in the stock market. We deserve to know where his financial interests lie, and, for example, how he was personally affected by the tax reform bill he signed into law in December. The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said her boss would “likely take a big hit” by the tax changes. On that count, we ask the president to prove it.

Trump has gambled that Americans would stop caring about his tax returns. He may be right — with repeated firings and resignations in his White House, the Mueller probe, salacious allegations about extramarital affairs and tensions with Russia, Americans can be forgiven for focusing on more pressing issues.

Trump has long boasted about being a savvy dealmaker and businessman, a real estate scion and television star who has earned billions. If there is any argument that may appeal to him, it’s this one: Release your tax returns, Mr. President, and think how impressed we’ll be to count all of those zeros.

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

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Monday, April 16, 2018 8:06 AM

The IRS knows exactly what is in Trump's returns.

Instead of focusing on his taxes, or the ridiculous Russian probe, we should be focusing on more important things. I can think of three just off the top of my head...

1. TPP
2. Jobs and quality of life for the working class.
3. Figuring out why the kids today aren't alright.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Monday, April 16, 2018 3:26 PM

I'd be more impressed if Hilliary released something more important and pertinent, like her subpoenaed E-mails to the Investigators.
Trump's Tax Filings have never been subpoenaed before, have they?

Lame Red Herring from Libtards today, yet again.

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Monday, April 16, 2018 3:56 PM

CAPTAINCRUNCH

... stay crunchy...

Quote:
Originally posted by second:

Tax Day, on Tuesday, offers a reminder that President Donald Trump continues to refuse to release his tax returns. In doing so, he is ignoring a tradition in transparency followed by every president since Richard Nixon.

"Russian Money Laundering" - I don't recall, is there a separate form for that?

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Monday, April 16, 2018 4:07 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by captaincrunch:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:

Tax Day, on Tuesday, offers a reminder that President Donald Trump continues to refuse to release his tax returns. In doing so, he is ignoring a tradition in transparency followed by every president since Richard Nixon.

"Russian Money Laundering" - I don't recall, is there a separate form for that?

I think it's just on the standard money laundering form that most of the Clinton Foundation bribes were put on.

They simplified all of that with the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Tuesday, April 17, 2018 8:24 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by captaincrunch:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:

Tax Day, on Tuesday, offers a reminder that President Donald Trump continues to refuse to release his tax returns. In doing so, he is ignoring a tradition in transparency followed by every president since Richard Nixon.

"Russian Money Laundering" - I don't recall, is there a separate form for that?

I think it's just on the standard money laundering form that most of the Clinton Foundation bribes were put on.

They simplified all of that with the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

A normal commander in chief would not operate ongoing businesses in two countries that are backing rival factions in an ongoing civil war while pivoting US policy toward that war. A normal commander in chief would not be pocketing checks from foreign governments and their lobbyists in Washington. A normal commander in chief would not collect large, entirely secret financial flows on an ongoing basis — flows that make him an easy mark for foreign states seeking to influence American policy.

The sheer number of financial conflicts of interests is so large that it’s unclear which direction personal business interests would push Trump. But it’s certainly clear that he has personal interests that are separate from the national interest. Every issue Trump touches — including Syria — is awash in conflicts of interest. Four examples:

1) Earlier this month, Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr. were in the United Arab Emirates to promote the family’s golf resort in Dubai. The UAE is supporting the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which is the umbrella organization led by Syria’s Kurdish separatists.

2) George Nader, who once served as a key influence peddler on behalf of the UAE, is now a cooperating witness working with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

3) Trump also has a major real estate venture in Turkey. Turkey backs some opposition groups in Syria, but its main current interest in the war is blocking the SDF and Kurdish separatists from controlling too much territory.

4) Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars at Trump’s hotel. Bahrain and Saudi Arabia loudly support military action against Assad, and the Saudis in particular have at times been key financial backers of anti-Assad rebels. Kuwait is less vocal about its position.

None of this is to say that Trump’s decision-making on Syria is being driven by narrow financial considerations — indeed, one could make the case that’s impossible since Trump is on the take from so many different directions — but it underscores that essentially nothing the administration does in the region is entirely on the level.

www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/16/17238058/syria-bombing-trump
-business-interests

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

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Tuesday, April 17, 2018 12:26 PM

CAPTAINCRUNCH

... stay crunchy...

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

I think it's just on the standard money laundering form that most of the Clinton Foundation bribes were put on.

Was that the money the Clinton's took to sell homeless children into slavery on Jumanji Island where they had to make pepperoni for that sex/pizza shop in Manhattan?

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Tuesday, April 17, 2018 3:18 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by captaincrunch:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

I think it's just on the standard money laundering form that most of the Clinton Foundation bribes were put on.

Was that the money the Clinton's took to sell homeless children into slavery on Jumanji Island where they had to make pepperoni for that sex/pizza shop in Manhattan?

I don't know what they did with it. Neither do the Haitians.

If you ever figure that out, maybe you could let us know.

I'd bet the prince of Qatar would like to know where his million dollar bribe... ahem.... i mean birthday present to Bill went to, come to think about it.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Wednesday, April 18, 2018 6:30 AM

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

Donald Trump's business ethics could be contagious

https://work.qz.com/1254508/

Until 1960, nearly every adult male in America wore a hat. To men of almost every rank, a proper hat was as important to a wardrobe as shoes. Blue-collar workers wore cloth caps. Businessmen chose a fedora when sporting a suit and tie. But after 1961, hats became as rare on the heads of American men as lampshades. The reason? John F. Kennedy was elected president the previous year. Kennedy disliked wearing hats and dispensed with them. Soon, so did most American men.

I think about this story sometimes when I wonder what the impact of Donald Trump’s presidency will have on American business ethics.

Research over several years has revealed that companies rated highly for their ethical standards outperform the average for the U.S. Large Cap Index by as much as 6.6 percent. But Donald Trump appears to reject any notion of “doing the right thing” if it fails to enhance either his earnings or his ego.

From declaring multiple bankruptcies while ignoring their impact on partners, employees, suppliers and shareholders; to concealing his income tax returns and walking away from failed and apparently fraudulent business ventures such as Trump University, Trump Airlines, Trump Mortgage and Trump Steaks, the man’s actions have been weighed only according to whatever benefit they afforded him personally. Let’s be clear: On their own, business failures do not indicate an absence of ethics. But the circumstances surrounding so many of Trump’s failed companies—such as his overhyped Trump University, for which he paid $25 million to settle claims from disgruntled fraud victims—suggest that the only thing guiding Trump in the venture was another way to maximize his profits with minimal concern for others.

Business ethics are not hats, I agree. (And, if I need point out, Donald Trump is no JFK.) But the effect holds true. As I write this, America has a leader whose values are almost entirely at odds with those of the majority of U.S. citizens. Yet he occupies a position that represents a model of behavior for all of us. The high profile of his presidency serves as a paradigm, a guideline we feel obligated to accept and perhaps follow.

Few men in the early 1960s thought to themselves, “Gee, Kennedy doesn’t wear a hat, so I guess I won’t either.” Their minds began shifting away from tradition toward an unaware mimicking of the much-admired young president’s behavior. They were influenced by Kennedy’s fashion sense even when it conflicted with their customary behavior, because “what is good enough for the president…” We don’t, in other words, always consciously choose to follow an influential person’s behavior. We are naturally and sometimes unwittingly drawn into the orbit of a charismatic leader, and we fall into step while following along. It’s not heel-clicking blind obedience. It’s a matter of assuming that, in this case, the leader of a country that has signified freedom to much of the rest of the world for more than two centuries represents a standard of behavior for citizens everywhere—especially those who call themselves Americans.

We choose our leaders partly because we believe their goals and values are aligned with our own. Or at least we used to. Today, even if no one or only few are choosing to act like Trump, America’s standard of ethical behavior risks slipping because of his influence.

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

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Wednesday, April 18, 2018 9:19 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:

We choose our leaders partly because we believe their goals and values are aligned with our own. Or at least we used to. Today, even if no one or only few are choosing to act like Trump, America’s standard of ethical behavior risks slipping because of his influence.

I'd argue that our President is more a reflection of our goals and values more than an influencer of them.

Look at any facebook profile that talks regularly about politics and tell me that We The People are a bastion of ethical behavior.

On the contrary, there often even more vile to each other there than we can be here in the RWED. What makes that infinitely worse though is that they actually know who they're talking to when they do it and often times it's with people they supposedly care about. To this day there are still real world relationships that are likely ruined forever in the aftermath of the 2016 election.

We already weren't wearing any hats. Then we voted in a guy who didn't wear them either.

And to be fair, in the end, our only other option was to vote in a woman who doesn't have a single hat in her closet either.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Wednesday, April 18, 2018 9:45 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

On the contrary, there often even more vile to each other there than we can be here in the RWED. What makes that infinitely worse though is that they actually know who they're talking to when they do it and often times it's with people they supposedly care about. To this day there are still real world relationships that are likely ruined forever in the aftermath of the 2016 election.

You think you’ve got it bad now, 6ixStringJack, wait until the top 1% see the living proof that all of them can act like Trump and nobody can stop them. If Trump can steal money from the bottom, while all he has to do to get their vote is lie to them, more and more in the top will follow his example. And those in the top don’t face elections every four years where there could be consequences for all the lies they used. They have no limit to 8 years in office. You will never be rid of them.

Now that I think of it, using the term "top 1%" makes them sound like a multimillionaire in Texas, too remote for 6ixStringJack to ever deal with in real life. Maybe I should say "top 10%". One person in every ten. You will be dealing with these people who learned just how much they can get away with because Trump proved what is acceptable over 8 years.

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

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Wednesday, April 18, 2018 11:23 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

On the contrary, there often even more vile to each other there than we can be here in the RWED. What makes that infinitely worse though is that they actually know who they're talking to when they do it and often times it's with people they supposedly care about. To this day there are still real world relationships that are likely ruined forever in the aftermath of the 2016 election.
You think you’ve got it bad now, 6ixStringJack, wait until the top 1% see the living proof that all of them can act like Trump and nobody can stop them. If Trump can steal money from the bottom, while all he has to do to get their vote is lie to them, more and more in the top will follow his example. And those in the top don’t face elections every four years where there could be consequences for all the lies they used. They have no limit to 8 years in office. You will never be rid of them.

Now that I think of it, using the term "top 1%" makes them sound like a multimillionaire in Texas, too remote for 6ixStringJack to ever deal with in real life. Maybe I should say "top 10%". One person in every ten. You will be dealing with these people who learned just how much they can get away with because Trump proved what is acceptable over 8 years.

You say this as if it isn't already the norm.

None of those 1%'rs got there because they're good people. They're liars and crooks and got there because they're likely sociopaths.

Trump isn't going to change anything. He is just putting an honest face on for them. Any of the 99%'ers who believe that the 1% were good people before Trump got in office are troglodytes.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, April 19, 2018 8:04 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

You say this as if it isn't already the norm.

None of those 1%'rs got there because they're good people. They're liars and crooks and got there because they're likely sociopaths.

Trump isn't going to change anything. He is just putting an honest face on for them. Any of the 99%'ers who believe that the 1% were good people before Trump got in office are troglodytes.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

So much bitterness, 6ixStringJack. So much simplistic reasoning.

The top 1% only have 1% of the voters. So why do the bottom 99% NOT cooperate with each other in vaguely Utopian schemes to spread the wealth? Even in simple things like raising the minimum wage, the 99% are only slightly interested in helping those below them. Raising it more than $1 or $1.50 seems too much. I think there is little cooperation and generosity because the upper 50% hates the lower 50% of Americans and the country bumpkins hate the city slickers and the whites hate the blacks. Maybe hate is too strong a word. Maybe antipathy or dislike are better words. Whatever the words, there is enough antipathy to prevent effective cooperation and generosity to spread the wealth. Americans don’t dislike each other enough to kill in a Civil War, but they do dislike enough to kill cooperation, other than paid employment. It is a perfect American environment for moving money toward those who already are wealthy. The rich will cooperate with the rich and look after each other’s interests. This I have seen and benefited from. The lower classes have not understood this lesson from the wealthy or from church or from their time in the military where you only survive combat if you cooperate.

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

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Thursday, April 19, 2018 8:06 AM

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

In the wake of the 2000-’01 stock market crash, it turned out that several high-profile companies, including Enron and Worldcom, had engaged in major accounting shenanigans. The George W. Bush administration then decided to do what Barack Obama’s team would later not do after the housing market crash, and bring a series of high-profile white-collar criminal cases against the major malefactors.

The Supreme Court ultimately ruled against the government in most of these cases (which is one reason Obama didn’t bring them), launching a string of precedents that ended up serving to mostly legalize political corruption https://goo.gl/Ukneyz when they were eventually applied to overturn the conviction of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell. https://goo.gl/KRmrTu

But at the time, Comey was the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, high-profile securities fraud cases were in vogue, and allegations emerged that Martha Stewart had violated the rules against insider trading. She was ultimately exonerated in this investigation but was nonetheless prosecuted and convicted of making false statements to investigators and of a securities fraud violation that amounted to making false statements about the case in public. At the time, a range of observers from Michael McMenamin in Reason on the right to Doug Henwood in the Nation on the left saw the prosecution as a huge stretch, with Stewart essentially convicted of covering up a crime she didn’t commit.

Talking to George Stephanopoulos recently, however, Comey described his decision to prosecute the case as central to his worldview:

Quote:
And folks don’t realize this, but I almost hesitated and almost didn’t bring the case against Martha Stewart, in hindsight, because she was rich and famous. And decided that if she were anybody else, any other ordinary person, she would be prosecuted. And what helped me come to that conclusion was I remembered a case I’d been involved in against an African-American minister in Richmond when I was a federal prosecutor there, who had lied to us during an investigation.

And I begged this minister, “Please don’t lie to us because if you do, we’re going to have to prosecute you.” He lied. And at the end of the day, we had to prosecute him. And he went to jail for over a year. And as I stood in my office in Manhattan, I’m looking out at the Brooklyn Bridge, I remember this moment. And I’m thinking, “You know, nobody in New York knows that guy’s name except me. Why would I treat Martha Stewart differently than that guy?”

And the reason would only be because she’s rich and famous and because I’ll be criticized for it. The truth matters in the criminal justice system. And if it’s going to matter, we must prosecute people who lie in the middle of an investigation.

That Comey isn’t railroading obscure black ministers in Virginia while letting rich white celebrities off the hook in Connecticut is surely laudable. And while equal treatment under the law is an important concept, there is also an important question as to how everyone should be treated. Comey’s answer is: harshly.

While criminal justice reformers push for less punitive treatment of poor and minority suspects and defendants, the Comey view is that true justice is treating Martha Stewart just as shabbily as the cops would treat anyone else.

www.vox.com/2018/4/18/17242766/book-james-comey-hillary-emails-trump-f
iring-fbi-director

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

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Thursday, April 19, 2018 1:01 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

You say this as if it isn't already the norm.

None of those 1%'rs got there because they're good people. They're liars and crooks and got there because they're likely sociopaths.

Trump isn't going to change anything. He is just putting an honest face on for them. Any of the 99%'ers who believe that the 1% were good people before Trump got in office are troglodytes.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
So much bitterness, 6ixStringJack. So much simplistic reasoning.

The top 1% only have 1% of the voters. So why do the bottom 99% NOT cooperate with each other in vaguely Utopian schemes to spread the wealth? Even in simple things like raising the minimum wage, the 99% are only slightly interested in helping those below them. Raising it more than $1 or $1.50 seems too much. I think there is little cooperation and generosity because the upper 50% hates the lower 50% of Americans and the country bumpkins hate the city slickers and the whites hate the blacks. Maybe hate is too strong a word. Maybe antipathy or dislike are better words. Whatever the words, there is enough antipathy to prevent effective cooperation and generosity to spread the wealth. Americans don’t dislike each other enough to kill in a Civil War, but they do dislike enough to kill cooperation, other than paid employment. It is a perfect American environment for moving money toward those who already are wealthy. The rich will cooperate with the rich and look after each other’s interests. This I have seen and benefited from. The lower classes have not understood this lesson from the wealthy or from church or from their time in the military where you only survive combat if you cooperate.

"Bitterness?" "Simplistic Reasoning???"

I don't see how any of this argues with any of my points, specifically that Trump as President is more a reflection of who we are, rather than a danger to who we're going to be in the future.

We're not "wearing any hats". Neither does Trump, and neither did Hillary.

You'll see that I never sung any glowing praises about the 99% either. The reasons they're not part of the 1% vary between being too stupid or being just a little slightly less bad than the 1%, or a combination of both.

I dunno...

Maybe Trump and Hillary really are all we deserve.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, April 19, 2018 3:38 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

"Bitterness?" "Simplistic Reasoning???"

I don't see how any of this argues with any of my points, specifically that Trump as President is more a reflection of who we are, rather than a danger to who we're going to be in the future.

We're not "wearing any hats". Neither does Trump, and neither did Hillary.

You'll see that I never sung any glowing praises about the 99% either. The reasons they're not part of the 1% vary between being too stupid or being just a little slightly less bad than the 1%, or a combination of both.

I dunno...

Maybe Trump and Hillary really are all we deserve.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

The guys I know who voted for Trump were untrustworthy assholes long before Trump ran for President. The guys I know who voted for Hillary I would trust with my business and my life long before Hillary ran for President. Maybe you know different guys than I know.

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

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Thursday, April 19, 2018 3:48 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

"Bitterness?" "Simplistic Reasoning???"

I don't see how any of this argues with any of my points, specifically that Trump as President is more a reflection of who we are, rather than a danger to who we're going to be in the future.

We're not "wearing any hats". Neither does Trump, and neither did Hillary.

You'll see that I never sung any glowing praises about the 99% either. The reasons they're not part of the 1% vary between being too stupid or being just a little slightly less bad than the 1%, or a combination of both.

I dunno...

Maybe Trump and Hillary really are all we deserve.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
The guys I know who voted for Trump were untrustworthy assholes long before Trump ran for President. The guys I know who voted for Hillary I would trust with my business and my life long before Hillary ran for President. Maybe you know different guys than I know.

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

Well that's because you're laughably ridiculous in your partisanship.

Most people who are in the real world don't only judge somebody on something so stupid.

Talk about "simplistic reasoning"...

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Friday, April 20, 2018 7:35 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Well that's because you're laughably ridiculous in your partisanship.

Most people who are in the real world don't only judge somebody on something so stupid.

Talk about "simplistic reasoning"...

Do Right, Be Right. :)

I am ridiculously focused on money and truth. Some of my deals fell apart because I was lied to about what they (the Republicans involved) think are minor details: “Do you have full authority and are you willing to make the deal?” The minor detail is the Republican needs a cousin to also sign the deal, which the cousin won’t do at the price she is gonna be paid for her 2.5% share of ownership. A political example: I am so focused on the truth that Bill Clinton burned me and himself when he said, “I did not have sex with that woman.” (I made a bet with a Republican that Bill was telling the truth. I remain angry to this day that I lost the bet.) Bill caused years of trouble by perjuring himself on that minor detail. All his troubles could have been avoided by not lying, but rather accepting some minor embarrassment. All of that is a preamble to two stories about Republicans not truthfully speaking about money:

Story #1:
“A Wall Street Journal and NBC News poll published this week found that 27 percent of respondents thought the tax law was a good idea, while 36 percent said it was a bad idea.”

Bummer. So what’s the Republican plan to get the public back on its side?

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) aims to pass another massive tax cut this summer, which Republicans hope will rev up the GOP base and improve the standing of Republicans at the polls….Conservative leaders met with Ryan on Monday and expect a vote in June or July. That would give lawmakers time to discuss the issue with constituents over the August recess and ahead of Labor Day, the traditional kickoff to the election campaign season.

Of course that’s the plan. The answer to every problem always and everywhere is a tax cut.

www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/04/guess-what-paul-ryan-wants-to-d
o-as-his-congressional-swan-song/

Story #2, where the White House lies, then lies some more:

White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow on Tuesday said the Congressional Budget Office has no idea how to measure the impact of tax cuts, and dismissed the CBO's prediction that the tax cut bill would raise the debt by $1 trillion over a decade.

"Never believe the CBO," he said on Fox News. "Very important. Never believe them."

"They're always wrong, especially with regard to tax cuts, which they never score properly because they don't understand the growth, the incentives and the encouragements to reward success," he added.

CBO said the tax cut bill would add another $1 trillion in debt. But Kudlow and others have rejected this finding and argue it doesn't reflect the growth that the tax cuts will bring to the U.S.

"We're already moving towards a 3 percent growth path," Kudlow said. "I believe we will stay on that path and make it even better."

"The CBO people are professionals, this is not a personal attack," he added. "But their track record on tax cuts is not good."

Trump and his supporters have been touting the tax cuts as a major achievement as Republicans head toward the midterm elections, and are hopeful that achievement will help keep the GOP in control of Congress.

www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/larry-kudlow-never-believe-the-cbo

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

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Friday, April 20, 2018 8:49 AM

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

With the American public holding such little confidence in the federal government, the value of an honest politician seems like it should be at an all-time high. But if that were the case, a politician known to be a consistent liar would pay a heavy price for his duplicity.

Donald Trump’s election appears to disprove any such premium on honesty or penalty for lying. Take, for example, the following chart from The New York Times benchmarking Trump’s falsehoods to Obama’s: https://angrybearblog.com/2018/04/what-happened-to-the-political-price
-for-lying.html

Or consider the analysis done by PolitiFact that shows only 16% of Trump’s public statements are true or mostly true, with the rest being some type of falsehood. A similar analysis by The Washington Post found that Trump made 1,628 false claims in 298 days for an average of 5.5 (public) lies per day. Objectively, then, Trump is an incredibly dishonest man.

Trump’s dishonesty has been well known and well documented throughout his career and presidential campaign. So only a few possibilities can explain his election; his voters must be either delusional about his dishonesty, they don’t care about honesty, or they do care but not very much.

Starting with the delusional possibility, it seems unlikely that most of the 62,984,825 people who voted for Trump are entirely unable to discern fact from fiction. So while I can’t rule it out, I’m going to move on.

To address whether voters say they care about honesty, we can examine polling data, such as the chart below from Fortune, which shows that honesty is actually the number one quality people say they want in a leader, followed closely by integrity: https://angrybearblog.com/2018/04/what-happened-to-the-political-price
-for-lying.html

In fact, when broken out by political party, the Fortune poll showed that Republicans actually ranked honesty higher, at 57%, than Democrats did at 46%. (On a side note, this data is from 2016 and the most recent I could find. It would be interesting to refresh these poll numbers and see if opinions have shifted since then.)

If voters say honesty is important, and they’re not delusional, the incongruity of electing an inherently dishonest person indicates the voters themselves are not being terribly honest about how much they value honesty.

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

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Friday, April 20, 2018 10:27 AM

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

Forbes reporter claims that Donald Trump lied about his wealth in order to crack the Forbes 400 list.

"He figured out what he had to do in order to deceive me and get onto that list. And he did it very well. And he maintained that persona of just sort of talking about his assets without any sense of debt and lying about it," Jonathan Greenberg said in an interview Friday on CNN's "New Day."

Greenberg broke the news in a Washington Post story. He wrote that when he was compiling the magazine's list of the richest people in America in the 80s, Trump had called him posing as "John Barron," a purported executive with The Trump Organization.

Greenberg said Trump's actual net worth at the time was less than $5 million, though the magazine had listed it as $100 million for its first-ever Forbes 400 list.

"He should never have been there in the first place," said Greenberg, who provided an audio recording of the phone call between him and "Barron" to CNN.

www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ex-forbes-reporter-says-trump-lied-to-
him-to-embellish-wealth/ar-AAw6MLT?ocid=spartandhp

Does it need mentioning that Trump, when caught in a lie, denied he lied? "Believe me," spoke Trump.

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

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Friday, April 20, 2018 12:45 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Forbes reporter claims that Donald Trump lied about his wealth in order to crack the Forbes 400 list.

"He figured out what he had to do in order to deceive me and get onto that list. And he did it very well. And he maintained that persona of just sort of talking about his assets without any sense of debt and lying about it," Jonathan Greenberg said in an interview Friday on CNN's "New Day."

Greenberg broke the news in a Washington Post story. He wrote that when he was compiling the magazine's list of the richest people in America in the 80s, Trump had called him posing as "John Barron," a purported executive with The Trump Organization.

Greenberg said Trump's actual net worth at the time was less than $5 million, though the magazine had listed it as $100 million for its first-ever Forbes 400 list.

"He should never have been there in the first place," said Greenberg, who provided an audio recording of the phone call between him and "Barron" to CNN.

www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ex-forbes-reporter-says-trump-lied-to-
him-to-embellish-wealth/ar-AAw6MLT?ocid=spartandhp

Does it need mentioning that Trump, when caught in a lie, denied he lied? "Believe me," spoke Trump.

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

lol

Forbes should sue this guy for back pay since he obviously wasn't qualified for the job.

What did it take... 20, maybe 30 years for him to figure out he had been played.

Priceless.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Friday, April 20, 2018 2:04 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

lol

Forbes should sue this guy for back pay since he obviously wasn't qualified for the job.

What did it take... 20, maybe 30 years for him to figure out he had been played.

Priceless.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

The Washington Post reported in May 2016 that Trump routinely made calls to reporters in the 1970s, '80s and '90s posing as a publicist named John Miller or John Barron. Following the report, Trump denied it was him on the phone or that it sounded like him in an interview with NBC's "Today" show.

There is a running list of Trump lies. www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/statements/?list=speaker

The latest one is "James Comey Memos just out and show clearly that there was NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION"
— Donald Trump on Thursday, April 19th, 2018 in in a tweet

It just so happens that is a Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire in the terminology. https://goo.gl/kjvxiA

Comey wrote the memos because Trump would lie about the meetings with Comey. Now that Trump has seen the memos, he lies about what is in the memos. If Comey had been smarter, he would have audio recording of the Trump meetings to play on TV today. If Trump didn't like it, too bad for Trump.
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/20/comey-memos-trump-what-biggest
-takeaways

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

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Friday, April 20, 2018 2:58 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:

Comey wrote the memos because Trump would lie about the meetings with Comey. Now that Trump has seen the memos, he lies about what is in the memos. If Comey had been smarter, he would have audio recording of the Trump meetings to play on TV today. If Trump didn't like it, too bad for Trump.

Well there's the rub, huh.

You don't know if Trump is lying about what is in the memos, do you?

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Friday, April 20, 2018 4:00 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:

Comey wrote the memos because Trump would lie about the meetings with Comey. Now that Trump has seen the memos, he lies about what is in the memos. If Comey had been smarter, he would have audio recording of the Trump meetings to play on TV today. If Trump didn't like it, too bad for Trump.

Well there's the rub, huh.

You don't know if Trump is lying about what is in the memos, do you?

I do know because I read Comey's memos. Trump lied about what is in the memos because he knows that Republicans aren't readers. Trump can say anything and Republicans (at least the ones that are not rich) will believe him about what was written. Not being rich is correlated with being gullible; the proverb is "A fool and his money are soon parted."

If you clicked either link, you could read the Comey memos, or if you are lazy, read what somebody who read memos summarizes. I will give you a third link for you not to click: http://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2018/images/04/19/2018-4-19.comey.memo.-..enclo
sure.unclassified.pdf

But the simple truth is that Trump falsely says James Comey memos disprove collusion and obstruction.

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

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Friday, April 20, 2018 4:08 PM

You've entirely missed the point.

Because Comey didn't record anything, the memos themselves might be about as real as tales of Narnia.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Saturday, April 21, 2018 8:17 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
You've entirely missed the point.

Because Comey didn't record anything, the memos themselves might be about as real as tales of Narnia.

With the resources of the FBI, Comey could have cheated by creating fake audio recordings. Comey asks on the recording: "What about Russia?" The Trump impersonator: "I colluded with Putin. Isn't that great!"

6ixStringJack, you are deluding yourself into being cynical about Comey and everybody. That cynicism got you to vote for Trump because he was the unknown "outsider" who was going to "drain the swamp", so rich he would never steal. But Trump was not unknown. He had a long, long history where he would say anything to defraud his investors, bankers, tenants, subcontractors. He has been in court thousands of times and lost. He has threatened to sue tens of thousands of times, claiming that work was poorly done, and then did nothing, just a cheap intimidation trick so that he could get a quick 10% discount on what he owed a contractor who didn't want to go to court to get paid.

6ixStringJack, you fell for Trump's campaign lies. But instead of refusing to believe Trump when he claims the memos are fake, now you are also refusing to believe Comey the Boy Scout who wrote the memos, because Trump the-Well-Known-Liar says Comey is the real liar. If only Comey had a recording of Trump to back the written memos, but you still have to trust Comey to not make a fake recording with a Trump impersonator. Do you trust the Boy Scout? Or do you trust The-Well-Known-Liar? Or are you too stupid to trust anyone but family because you can't remember who has a history of lying?

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

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Saturday, April 21, 2018 8:19 AM

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

The real reason the Republican tax cut isn’t going to work. Why are businesses investing so little when profits are so high?

www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/04/20/the-real-reason-the-rep
ublican-tax-cut-isnt-going-to-work/

Profits are supposed to be a signal showing businesses where to invest. When they're high, it usually means that there's so little supply of what consumers demand that companies can charge almost anything for it. Other firms, then, should be able to swoop in and compete away some of these profits while still making enough themselves for their upfront costs — the investments they have to make — to be more than worth it. That's what's supposed to be the magic of the market: Just by having everyone pursue their own self-interest, we can figure out how much of everything we need better than any bureaucrat could.

But this process has lost some of its mojo recently. Corporate profits, adjusted for taxes, inventories, and depreciation, have hit an all-time high as a share of the economy the past 10 years, but business investment has not. Nowhere close. It has been average at best.

So what in the name of Adam Smith is going on? Economists aren't entirely sure, but one explanation that makes a lot of sense, and has quite a bit of evidence to support it, is that monopolies are choking off growth. Indeed, corporate markups have increased from an average of 18 percent in 1980 to 67 percent today, with a significant part of that being due to new winner-take-all markets and, yes, mergers and acquisitions, which perhaps shouldn't be too surprising when every sector of the economy has gotten more concentrated during this time. Big profits, then, might not be a sign that there's a big opportunity for others to try to take advantage of so much as that there's none at all. Companies, in other words, might be making so much money not because they've discovered a big, new market, but rather because they've cornered an old one. But that's not a reason for anyone to invest money in it, least of all the monopolist.

Which brings us to the Trump tax cuts. The entire rationale for them is that slashing corporate taxes will increase profitability enough that businesses will increase their investment, which, by making workers more productive, will eventually increase wages as well. But what if bigger profits won't make a company put any more money back into its business, because it's a monopoly that doesn't need or want to expand? Won't a corporate tax cut then just be shoveling money into the pockets of shareholders with no other economic benefits? Well, yes. That's something that Paul Krugman, for example, has been warning about since well before this bill became a hastily drafted law.

And now the Trump team finally has an answer to this: Pretend it can't be a problem. “Opponents, echoing leftists from Marx to Piketty,” Council of Economic Advisers Chair Kevin Hassett wrote, “describe” the Trump tax cuts “as a giveaway to the wealthy at the expense of the working class” when that couldn't possibly be true because “a dynamic, competitive economy” means that “the relationship between companies and employees is symbiotic” and “not antagonistic.” Never mind that there are serious questions about just how dynamic and competitive our economy really is. Hassett is sure that “when profits go up, capital investment goes up, and wages follow” even though that hasn't been the case for a decade now.

Translation: This will work if you assume it will, and pay no attention to all the reasons it might not.

The GOP spent the past 38 years proclaiming that tax cuts for the rich work in theory, and ignoring all the evidence that they don't in practice. Things like the fact that the economy didn't implode like they said it would after Bill Clinton raised taxes, or take off like they predicted when George W. Bush cut them, or collapse like they once again insisted after Barack Obama hiked them, or set off a boom like they were sure it would when Kansas slashed them, or send California into its own private depression when it increased them, or . . . I think you get the idea.

Being a Republican means remembering to forget that tax cuts for the rich hardly ever work. They are always going back to the future that is the 1980s.

Where they're going, they don't need facts.

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

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Saturday, April 21, 2018 10:31 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Well that's because you're laughably ridiculous in your partisanship.

Most people who are in the real world don't only judge somebody on something so stupid.

Talk about "simplistic reasoning"...

Do Right, Be Right. :)
I am ridiculously focused on money and truth. A political example: I am so focused on the truth that Bill Clinton burned me and himself when he said, “I did not have sex with that woman.” (I made a bet with a Republican that Bill was telling the truth. I remain angry to this day that I lost the bet.) Bill caused years of trouble by perjuring himself on that minor detail. All his troubles could have been avoided by not lying, but rather accepting some minor embarrassment.

Story #1:
“A Wall Street Journal and NBC News poll published this week found that 27 percent of respondents thought the tax law was a good idea, while 36 percent said it was a bad idea.”

Bummer. So what’s the Republican plan to get the public back on its side?

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) aims to pass another massive tax cut this summer, which Republicans hope will rev up the GOP base and improve the standing of Republicans at the polls….Conservative leaders met with Ryan on Monday and expect a vote in June or July. That would give lawmakers time to discuss the issue with constituents over the August recess and ahead of Labor Day, the traditional kickoff to the election campaign season.

Of course that’s the plan. The answer to every problem always and everywhere is a tax cut.

Story #2, where the White House lies, then lies some more:

White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow on Tuesday said the Congressional Budget Office has no idea how to measure the impact of tax cuts, and dismissed the CBO's prediction that the tax cut bill would raise the debt by $1 trillion over a decade.

"Never believe the CBO," he said on Fox News. "Very important. Never believe them."

"They're always wrong, especially with regard to tax cuts, which they never score properly because they don't understand the growth, the incentives and the encouragements to reward success," he added.

CBO said the tax cut bill would add another $1 trillion in debt. But Kudlow and others have rejected this finding and argue it doesn't reflect the growth that the tax cuts will bring to the U.S.

"We're already moving towards a 3 percent growth path," Kudlow said. "I believe we will stay on that path and make it even better."

"The CBO people are professionals, this is not a personal attack," he added. "But their track record on tax cuts is not good."

Trump and his supporters have been touting the tax cuts as a major achievement as Republicans head toward the midterm elections, and are hopeful that achievement will help keep the GOP in control of Congress.

www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/larry-kudlow-never-believe-the-cbo

Did you have a bad day? Refilled your bottle of meds?
Seems so weird that you swerved into the truth for one post. I can see that after this, you returned to your normally scheduled programming.

By the way, maybe you know the answer to this: where are data regarding economic growth on a quarterly basis, or less? The Beige Book reports I see are extremely vague and only use unspecific terms, and seem to avoid numbers. I believe it is published 8 times per year, including this past week and also in February. Do you know of somewhere that actual numbers are used? Like billions of dollars, or percentage of growth?

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Saturday, April 21, 2018 10:41 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
Did you have a bad day? Refilled your bottle of meds?
Seems so weird that you swerved into the truth for one post. I can see that after this, you returned to your normally scheduled programming.

JewelStaiteFan, are you a lying sack of shit?

Trump has been lying since childhood

In an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper, Trump biographer Michael D'Antonio claims President Trump has been lying since he was a child. Watch the video about what a weirdo Trump has always been:
www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2018/04/21/michael-dantonio-intv-trump-lie
s-childhood-sot-cooper-ac.cnn

Take it from a rich business guy, we only give out raises when we have to. Don't count on that $4,000 Donald Trump & Paul Ryan promised from tax cuts.

www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/04/10/donald-trump-gop-tax-cuts-wo
nt-deliver-big-raise-column/471188002/

Paul Ryan and Donald Trump promised you a $4,000 raise. They said the rich and corporations would give it to you after they got giant tax cuts. But guess what? It’s not coming. That’s because their entire economic theory of growth is a scam.

Here’s the reality: If Trump wanted to give you a raise, he wouldn’t rely on trickle-down lies to do it. A mere $2 increase in the minimum wage would give millions of hard-working Americans a $4,000 raise. A modest updating of our overtime regulations would give a $4,000 raise to tens of millions more.

The rich are not job creators. The customers are the job creators. If taxes on the rich go down, job creation does not go up.

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

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Saturday, April 21, 2018 11:09 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
You've entirely missed the point.

Because Comey didn't record anything, the memos themselves might be about as real as tales of Narnia.
With the resources of the FBI, Comey could have cheated by creating fake audio recordings. Comey asks on the recording: "What about Russia?" The Trump impersonator: "I colluded with Putin. Isn't that great!"

6ixStringJack, you are deluding yourself into being cynical about Comey and everybody. That cynicism got you to vote for Trump because he was the unknown "outsider" who was going to "drain the swamp", so rich he would never steal. But Trump was not unknown. He had a long, long history where he would say anything to defraud his investors, bankers, tenants, subcontractors. He has been in court thousands of times and lost. He has threatened to sue tens of thousands of times, claiming that work was poorly done, and then did nothing, just a cheap intimidation trick so that he could get a quick 10% discount on what he owed a contractor who didn't want to go to court to get paid.

6ixStringJack, you fell for Trump's campaign lies. But instead of refusing to believe Trump when he claims the memos are fake, now you are also refusing to believe Comey the Boy Scout who wrote the memos, because Trump the-Well-Known-Liar says Comey is the real liar. If only Comey had a recording of Trump to back the written memos, but you still have to trust Comey to not make a fake recording with a Trump impersonator. Do you trust the Boy Scout? Or do you trust The-Well-Known-Liar? Or are you too stupid to trust anyone but family because you can't remember who has a history of lying?

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

Comey the "boyscout", huh?

The same Comey that I keep hearing Democrats blame Hillary's loss on.

I don't trust somebody just because they were a boy scout. There are liars and assholes in every organization.

I'm not saying what was in Comey's memos isn't true. I just saying that there is no way of knowing if they are.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Saturday, April 21, 2018 5:00 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Well that's because you're laughably ridiculous in your partisanship.

Most people who are in the real world don't only judge somebody on something so stupid.

Talk about "simplistic reasoning"...

Do Right, Be Right. :)
I am ridiculously focused on money and truth.

Story #2, where the White House lies, then lies some more:

White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow on Tuesday said the Congressional Budget Office has no idea how to measure the impact of tax cuts, and dismissed the CBO's prediction that the tax cut bill would raise the debt by $1 trillion over a decade.

"Never believe the CBO," he said on Fox News. "Very important. Never believe them."

"They're always wrong, especially with regard to tax cuts, which they never score properly because they don't understand the growth, the incentives and the encouragements to reward success," he added.

CBO said the tax cut bill would add another $1 trillion in debt. But Kudlow and others have rejected this finding and argue it doesn't reflect the growth that the tax cuts will bring to the U.S.

"We're already moving towards a 3 percent growth path," Kudlow said. "I believe we will stay on that path and make it even better."

"The CBO people are professionals, this is not a personal attack," he added. "But their track record on tax cuts is not good."

Trump and his supporters have been touting the tax cuts as a major achievement as Republicans head toward the midterm elections, and are hopeful that achievement will help keep the GOP in control of Congress.

www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/larry-kudlow-never-believe-the-cbo

By the way, maybe you know the answer to this: where are data regarding economic growth on a quarterly basis, or less? The Beige Book reports I see are extremely vague and only use unspecific terms, and seem to avoid numbers. I believe it is published 8 times per year, including this past week and also in February. Do you know of somewhere that actual numbers are used? Like billions of dollars, or percentage of growth?

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Saturday, April 21, 2018 5:03 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
You've entirely missed the point.

Because Comey didn't record anything, the memos themselves might be about as real as tales of Narnia.
With the resources of the FBI, Comey could have cheated by creating fake audio recordings. Comey asks on the recording: "What about Russia?" The Trump impersonator: "I colluded with Putin. Isn't that great!"

6ixStringJack, you are deluding yourself into being cynical about Comey and everybody. That cynicism got you to vote for Trump because he was the unknown "outsider" who was going to "drain the swamp", so rich he would never steal. But Trump was not unknown. He had a long, long history where he would say anything to defraud his investors, bankers, tenants, subcontractors. He has been in court thousands of times and lost. He has threatened to sue tens of thousands of times, claiming that work was poorly done, and then did nothing, just a cheap intimidation trick so that he could get a quick 10% discount on what he owed a contractor who didn't want to go to court to get paid.

6ixStringJack, you fell for Trump's campaign lies. But instead of refusing to believe Trump when he claims the memos are fake, now you are also refusing to believe Comey the Boy Scout who wrote the memos, because Trump the-Well-Known-Liar says Comey is the real liar. If only Comey had a recording of Trump to back the written memos, but you still have to trust Comey to not make a fake recording with a Trump impersonator. Do you trust the Boy Scout? Or do you trust The-Well-Known-Liar? Or are you too stupid to trust anyone but family because you can't remember who has a history of lying?
Comey the "boyscout", huh?

The same Comey that I keep hearing Democrats blame Hillary's loss on.

I don't trust somebody just because they were a boy scout. There are liars and assholes in every organization.

I'm not saying what was in Comey's memos isn't true. I just saying that there is no way of knowing if they are.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

Have you read the memos? I do not see a link to them.

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Saturday, April 21, 2018 8:05 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
You've entirely missed the point.

Because Comey didn't record anything, the memos themselves might be about as real as tales of Narnia.
With the resources of the FBI, Comey could have cheated by creating fake audio recordings. Comey asks on the recording: "What about Russia?" The Trump impersonator: "I colluded with Putin. Isn't that great!"

6ixStringJack, you are deluding yourself into being cynical about Comey and everybody. That cynicism got you to vote for Trump because he was the unknown "outsider" who was going to "drain the swamp", so rich he would never steal. But Trump was not unknown. He had a long, long history where he would say anything to defraud his investors, bankers, tenants, subcontractors. He has been in court thousands of times and lost. He has threatened to sue tens of thousands of times, claiming that work was poorly done, and then did nothing, just a cheap intimidation trick so that he could get a quick 10% discount on what he owed a contractor who didn't want to go to court to get paid.

6ixStringJack, you fell for Trump's campaign lies. But instead of refusing to believe Trump when he claims the memos are fake, now you are also refusing to believe Comey the Boy Scout who wrote the memos, because Trump the-Well-Known-Liar says Comey is the real liar. If only Comey had a recording of Trump to back the written memos, but you still have to trust Comey to not make a fake recording with a Trump impersonator. Do you trust the Boy Scout? Or do you trust The-Well-Known-Liar? Or are you too stupid to trust anyone but family because you can't remember who has a history of lying?
Comey the "boyscout", huh?

The same Comey that I keep hearing Democrats blame Hillary's loss on.

I don't trust somebody just because they were a boy scout. There are liars and assholes in every organization.

I'm not saying what was in Comey's memos isn't true. I just saying that there is no way of knowing if they are.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
Have you read the memos? I do not see a link to them.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-pdf-ex-fbi-director-
james-comey-memos-20180419-htmlstory.html

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Saturday, April 21, 2018 8:16 PM

1KIKI

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

re economics discussion

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-04-21/economy-cooked
not an answer, just an analysis with links

So anyway ... anyone up for a rational, fact-based, and civil discussion about the topic?

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Sunday, April 22, 2018 7:07 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:

By the way, maybe you know the answer to this: where are data regarding economic growth on a quarterly basis, or less? The Beige Book reports I see are extremely vague and only use unspecific terms, and seem to avoid numbers. I believe it is published 8 times per year, including this past week and also in February. Do you know of somewhere that actual numbers are used? Like billions of dollars, or percentage of growth?

There are buttons on these pages to download the data. The graphs are “live”. Running the cursor over the graph will give actual numbers at each point.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=jxo1

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=jxnZ

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

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Sunday, April 22, 2018 7:08 AM

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

Debunking the myth that “identity politics” is bad for the Democratic Party

By the late 1930s and early 1940s, the core constituencies backing the New Deal were groups that supported civil rights: industrial labor unions, African Americans, and urban liberals.

Conversely, it was Southern white Democrats who not only opposed civil rights but also adopted a virulently anti-union stance. Leading Southern white Democrats worked with Republicans to attack the same labor unions that were essential to electing New Deal Democrats in the North. These same Southerners increasingly worked with Republicans to block a range of New Deal initiatives, not just those relating directly to race.

Long before civil rights rose to the top of the national agenda, it was evident to labor leaders, African Americans, and other liberal New Dealers that they had to act together to defeat the Southern Democrats who stood in the way of both civil and labor rights.

Where most commentators trace the Democrats’ downfall to the late 1960s, when the party broke with the allegedly “colorblind” universalism of Martin Luther King Jr. and embraced something these critics call “identity politics,” Traub makes the case that the Democrats’ decline can be traced all the way back to 1948, when Hubert Humphrey persuaded the Democratic National Convention to endorse a platform in favor of civil rights, over the objection of Southern conservatives and risk-averse Northerners.

By committing the Democrats to racial equality, Humphrey set the party and the country on the path that led to desegregation, mandatory busing — and, finally, white “backlash.”

“Did the commitment of 1948 lead inevitably to the electoral calamity of 1968 and beyond?” Traub asks. “That is, did the Democrats doom themselves to lose much of the white middle class simply by demanding equal rights for black people?”

The defection of white Southerners, the loss of support among white working- and middle-class voters in the North, the rise of George Wallace, Ronald Reagan, and now Donald Trump — each might have been avoided but for this commitment to racial equality. In Traub’s words: “Thanks to Humphrey and the ADA [Americans for Democratic Action], the Democrats had done something even more dangerous than they understood: They had exchanged a politics of self-interest for a politics of moral commitment.”

Traub’s point is that the strength of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition derived primarily from white voters. That helps explain why the introduction of racial issues to the Party by Humphrey and others was so destabilizing, in his view. “FDR had created the modern Democratic Party by deploying the state on behalf of ordinary citizens — ordinary white citizens,” he writes.

To hold on to Southern white Democrats, the New Dealers enacted numerous policies that excluded African Americans, particularly from 1933 to 1938. For example, most black Southerners were initially barred from receiving Social Security because farmworkers and domestics were not included.

More at www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/4/16/17242748/identity-politics-racial-j
ustice-democratic-party-lilla-traub-trump

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

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Sunday, April 22, 2018 7:16 AM