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Originally posted by captaincrunch:

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Originally posted by second:
I’m struck at how many people have come up to me recently and said, “Trump’s going to get re-elected, isn’t he?” And in each case, when I drilled down to ask why, I bumped into the Democratic presidential debates in June. I think a lot of Americans were shocked by some of the things they heard there. I was.

Dear Democrats: This is not complicated! Just nominate a decent, sane person, one committed to reunifying the country and creating more good jobs, a person who can gain the support of the independents, moderate Republicans and suburban women who abandoned Donald Trump in the midterms and thus swung the House of Representatives to the Democrats and could do the same for the presidency. And that candidate can win!

But please, spare me the revolution! It can wait. Win the presidency, hold the House and narrow the spread in the Senate, and a lot of good things still can be accomplished. “No,” you say, “the left wants a revolution now!” O.K., I’ll give the left a revolution now: four more years of Donald Trump.

That will be a revolution.

More at www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/opinion/trump-2020.html

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Great article from someone I tend to agree with all the time, Thomas Friedman. He would be my Consigliere if I were president - at least on speed dial. He points out many of the problems that come from Trump that aren't even caused directly by him. Namely, hating him so much people want to go to opposite extremes to balance things out.

I don't know how any rational person could argue with:

"I was shocked that so many candidates in the party whose nominee I was planning to support want to get rid of the private health insurance covering some 250 million Americans and have “Medicare for all” instead. I think we should strengthen Obamacare and eventually add a public option.

I was shocked that so many were ready to decriminalize illegal entry into our country. I think people should have to ring the doorbell before they enter my house or my country.

I was shocked at all those hands raised in support of providing comprehensive health coverage to undocumented immigrants. I think promises we’ve made to our fellow Americans should take priority, like to veterans in need of better health care."

Unless it's because Trump. I do it sometimes myself because he's such a loathsome pos. It might take half dozen presidents before we get past the Trump Effect.

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Originally posted by second:

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Originally posted by captaincrunch:

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Originally posted by second:
I’m struck at how many people have come up to me recently and said, “Trump’s going to get re-elected, isn’t he?” And in each case, when I drilled down to ask why, I bumped into the Democratic presidential debates in June. I think a lot of Americans were shocked by some of the things they heard there. I was.

Dear Democrats: This is not complicated! Just nominate a decent, sane person, one committed to reunifying the country and creating more good jobs, a person who can gain the support of the independents, moderate Republicans and suburban women who abandoned Donald Trump in the midterms and thus swung the House of Representatives to the Democrats and could do the same for the presidency. And that candidate can win!

But please, spare me the revolution! It can wait. Win the presidency, hold the House and narrow the spread in the Senate, and a lot of good things still can be accomplished. “No,” you say, “the left wants a revolution now!” O.K., I’ll give the left a revolution now: four more years of Donald Trump.

That will be a revolution.

More at www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/opinion/trump-2020.html

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Great article from someone I tend to agree with all the time, Thomas Friedman. He would be my Consigliere if I were president - at least on speed dial. He points out many of the problems that come from Trump that aren't even caused directly by him. Namely, hating him so much people want to go to opposite extremes to balance things out.

I don't know how any rational person could argue with:

"I was shocked that so many candidates in the party whose nominee I was planning to support want to get rid of the private health insurance covering some 250 million Americans and have “Medicare for all” instead. I think we should strengthen Obamacare and eventually add a public option.

I was shocked that so many were ready to decriminalize illegal entry into our country. I think people should have to ring the doorbell before they enter my house or my country.

I was shocked at all those hands raised in support of providing comprehensive health coverage to undocumented immigrants. I think promises we’ve made to our fellow Americans should take priority, like to veterans in need of better health care."

Unless it's because Trump. I do it sometimes myself because he's such a loathsome pos. It might take half dozen presidents before we get past the Trump Effect.

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Are the Democrats Too Stupid to Beat Donald Trump?
by Martin Longman July 17, 2019

Policies like free health care for undocumented people or abolishing all private health insurance are going to do damage. These things are not popular in general and are especially unpopular with the Democrats’ suburban base. A lot of the Democrats’ rhetoric on border issues is toxic not just in the sticks but also in the communities ringing our cities.

So, yes, the Democrats really could blow this election by running a non-strategic campaign based on abstract values against a campaign that is laser-focused on just the voters it needs to win.

This isn’t an argument for changing values, but it is an argument for not being too stupid to beat a man like Donald Trump.

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/07/17/are-the-democrats-too-stupid-
to-beat-donald-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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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Yup. That just about sums up the main reason the Dems are going to lose a lot in 2020, including but not limited to another run for president.

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Or, yanno, it's their ridiculous Socialist views that are getting them the attention they deserve.

But no... That would mean that women in America, particular minority women in positions of power, have a voice. That goes against everything that the Democrats stand for.

They're victims because they're women. They're victims because they're not white. They're victims even though they hold great positions of power and get paid the same as every old white male colleague.

They're eternally victims.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

If Pelosi can't get the AOC's and the Omar's to shut their fucking mouths until then and they keep getting worse, you might even be looking at a GOP supermajority in the house in 2020.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I see SECOND is still on a soapbox.

Hey, SECOND, has the irony of you posting about "factionalism" escaped you? If it has, I just want to point it out.

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...he promised a higher minimum wage, a big infrastructure bill, a universal health care plan, and even higher taxes on the rich — would be real.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

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...he promised a higher minimum wage, a big infrastructure bill, a universal health care plan, and even higher taxes on the rich — would be real.

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He did?

Well, it's a good thing that isn't why I voted for him, then!

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Originally posted by SECOND:
I will be voting for a Democrat in 2020, but I won't be saddened if Trump#2 wins because I am the Plutocrat#5 that Mulvaney, White House chief of staff, is enriching. Besides, a Democratic President would be unable to make any headway against the 41 or more Republican#6 Senators in 2021.

A Republican#6 President will make me richer#5 than a Democrat. The extra money#5 Trump#2 sends my way in reduced taxes and regulations will ease my disappointment that he is reelected. And if Trump#2 causes the economy to crash, like Bush did in 2008, I will be buying American real estate and stocks at a huge discount#5, just like I did during the Bush crash. Eventually, the economy will turnaround after a Republican#6 caused crash, as it did under Obama and Bill Clinton and, going way back, FDR.

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Originally posted by SECOND:
2. Donald Trump.
2. Donald Trump
2. Donald Trump
2. Donald Trump.

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Originally posted by SECOND:
2. Donald Trump.
2. Donald Trump.
2. Donald Trump.
2. Donald Trump.

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Originally posted by SECOND:
2. Donald Trump.
2. Donald Trump.

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Originally posted by second:
Republicans want to protect the statues of Robert E. Lee. They describe this man as an American hero, but that requires reducing the sum of human virtue to a sense of decorum and the ability to convey gravitas in a gray uniform.

It also requires ignoring the immense suffering for which Robert E. Lee was personally responsible, both on and off the battlefield.

Lee's own views on slavery were explicated in an 1856 letter that it often misquoted to give the impression that Lee was some kind of an abolitionist. The argument Lee made was that slavery is bad for white people, good for black people, and most importantly, it is better than abolitionism; emancipation must wait for divine intervention.

Lee’s heavy hand on his Arlington plantation nearly led to a slave revolt, in part because the enslaved had been expected to be freed upon their previous master’s death, and Lee had engaged in a dubious legal interpretation of his will in order to keep them as his property, one that lasted until a Virginia court forced him to free them.

During his invasion of Pennsylvania, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia enslaved freemen and brought them back to the South as property. Pryor writes that “evidence links virtually every infantry and cavalry unit in Lee’s army” with the abduction of free black Americans, “with the activity under the supervision of senior officers.”

Soldiers under Lee’s command at the Battle of the Crater in 1864 massacred black Union soldiers who tried to surrender. Then, in a spectacle hatched by Lee’s senior corps commander A.P. Hill, the Confederates paraded the Union survivors through the streets of Petersburg to the slurs and jeers of the southern crowd. Lee never discouraged such behavior. As the historian Richard Slotkin wrote in No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, “his silence was permissive.”

The presence of black soldiers on the field of battle shattered every myth the South’s slave empire was built on: the happy docility of slaves, their intellectual inferiority, their cowardice, their inability to compete with whites. As Pryor writes, “fighting against brave and competent African Americans challenged every underlying tenet of southern society.” The Confederate response to this challenge was to visit every possible atrocity and cruelty upon black soldiers whenever possible, from enslavement to execution.

As the historian James McPherson recounts in Battle Cry of Freedom, in October of that same year, Lee proposed an exchange of prisoners with the Union general Ulysses S. Grant. “Grant agreed, on condition that blacks be exchanged ‘the same as white soldiers.’” Lee’s response was that “negroes belonging to our citizens are not considered subjects of exchange and were not included in my proposition.” Because slavery was the cause for which Lee fought, he could hardly be expected to easily concede, even at the cost of the freedom of his own men, that blacks could be treated as soldiers and not things. Grant refused the offer, telling Lee that “Government is bound to secure to all persons received into her armies the rights due to soldiers.” Despite its desperate need for soldiers, the Confederacy did not relent from this position until a few months before Lee’s surrender.

Privately, according to the correspondence collected by his own family, Lee counseled others to hire white labor instead of the freedmen, observing “that wherever you find the negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find a white man, you see everything around him improving.”

Publicly, Lee argued against the enfranchisement of blacks, and raged against Republican efforts to enforce racial equality on the South. Lee told Congress that blacks lacked the intellectual capacity of whites and “could not vote intelligently,” and that granting them suffrage would “excite unfriendly feelings between the two races.” Lee explained that “the negroes have neither the intelligence nor the other qualifications which are necessary to make them safe depositories of political power.” To the extent that Lee believed in reconciliation, it was between white people, and only on the precondition that black people would be denied political power and therefore the ability to shape their own fate.

More at www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-ge
neral-lee/529038/

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All these years posting here and kiki, while attacking you, shows she still doesn't know how to do it. Sad second, it's very sad.

T

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Originally posted by THG:

All these years posting here and kiki, while attacking you, shows she still doesn't know how to do it. Sad second, it's very sad.

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When Sherman was a young officer at Ft. Moultrie, he rented a slave. I want to say he rented him from a cousin who was living there. I can't recall which book I read this in, of course....

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Duing the Atlanta campaign of May-September 1864, General Sherman opposed black enlistment with word and deed. An avowed white supremacist [I can't find any support for this whatsover-SIGNY] and a reluctant liberator at best, Sherman made no effort to conceal his contempt for blacks or to disguise the racist dogma behind his opposition to black soldiers. [I think his objections to blacks in the army were based more on lack of education the effects of slavery, not racism per se-SIGNY] Such phrases as "niggers and vagabonds," "niggers and bought recruits," and "niggers and the refuse of the South" filled his personal letters. Anxious to employ blacks as laborers, Sherman was determined that the forces under his command would remain exclusively white. On June 3, 1864, he issued Special Field Order No. 16 forbidding recruiting officers to enlist blacks who were employed by the army in any capacity.[I have heard these words read from his letters myself, and his disgust with those who followed his army was pretty plain. I believe it was from Ken Burns' CIVIL WAR series- SIGNY]

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Originally posted by second:
“On the Clock: What Low-Wage Did to Me and How it Drives America Insane” is the first nonfiction book that ever gave me a nightmare.

www.houstonchronicle.com/entertainment/books/article/On-the-Clock-is-a
-horrifying-look-at-14188366.php

Something about it was triggering, and I woke up after reading it in a cold sweat convinced I had just been fired from a warehouse job for taking a break one minute over the allotted time while I was desperately trying to save money for a surgery. It was the classic “I have a test and didn’t study” dream for an adult in late-stage capitalism.

“A bunch of people have told me that, actually,” author Emily Guendelsberger says. “Especially the Convergys chapter. They told me it gave them anxiety dreams. Good. I did my job.”

Guendelsberger is a journalist who found herself out of work after her newspaper folded. She decided to spend a year investigating some of the biggest low-wage-employment options in America, including working for Amazon during the holiday season, fielding customer-service calls at Convergys for AT&T and the old standby, McDonalds.

It’s a book that could have come across as terribly elitist, as if Guendelsberger were an anthropologist studying the lower classes like Jane Goodall studied the chimps.

What makes “On the Clock” work is how careful she is to never fall into that mindset. In fact, she goes out of her way to highlight those who have contributed to the grueling plight of the wage worker and their lack of empathy or basic consideration toward workers. Titans such as Ray Kroc and Henry Ford get mentioned, but it’s a little-remembered man named Frederick Taylor who truly started the ball rolling in the 19th century. Taylor began using a stopwatch and promises of bonuses to convince ironworkers they were capable of working much harder, while also somehow paying them less to do it.

His techniques have been expanded into the modern workplace in frightening ways. Guendelsberger describes the omnipresent cataloguing of every movement from her Amazon scanner, how any deviation from the expected schedule is blared in forms of countdowns and loss of points. She describes the red glare of counters on her customer-service screens as badly integrated systems boot up and she is expected to sell rather than aid, and she asks people to listen at our next fast-food trip to the sheer number of alarms going off, goading the employees to move Move MOVE.

“It’s been interesting to see the disparity in the reactions between people who haven’t worked jobs like this in the last 10 years or so and people who have,” Guendelsberger says. “That is what I was trying to accomplish. To build a bridge. They weren’t aware. It’s people in power from good families with good jobs who tend to have the most power in politics. When you’re working jobs like this, oftentimes you can’t even take a Tuesday off to vote.”

More at www.houstonchronicle.com/entertainment/books/article/On-the-Clock-is-a
-horrifying-look-at-14188366.php

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

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Oh good. Second read a book.

Does that mean I can expect you to stop giving me shitty comments about my current work situation when you've lost an argument then?

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Originally posted by second:

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Oh good. Second read a book.

Does that mean I can expect you to stop giving me shitty comments about my current work situation when you've lost an argument then?

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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No. My advice to you is to kill any boss who fucks you over, steal his money, and don't get caught. You'd be making the world a better place. The author Emily Guendelsberger was earning money and hoping she made the world better by writing about it, but she would have actual done far more good for the world by murdering her bosses. It's kind of like a slave uprising: if you don't kill the slave owner, the slaves will end back in slavery. See the American Civil War. That problem of slavery was solved with cold steel and hot lead fired at slave owners, not by writing books or talking about the hardships of slavery. Slave owners knew they had a good thing for themselves back then and bad bosses know they have a good thing for themselves now and neither bosses nor slave owners will change unless violently forced.

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

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Another good story ruined by an eye witness...

https://www.macrotrends.net/2015/fed-funds-rate-historical-chart

Why don't you go ahead and read that chart to me, Second.

Tell me what the average fed rate was the entire time Obama was in office and tell me where it's at now.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Originally posted by second:

But, anyway, there were perfectly good reasons why the interest rates were at zero during Obama's term and there were perfectly stupid reasons why Trump voters complained. I remember them whining about how Obama was about to set off hyper-inflation because of zero interest rates and trillions of dollars in "quantitative easing". I didn't believe them because I have seen these same Trump-voters making fools of themselves in their financial lives. Inflation stayed at 2% or less.

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Originally posted by second:
Republicans see Israel as a model for what they want America to be

If you listened earlier this month to Republican responses to Donald Trump’s call for Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley to “go back” to the “places from which they came,” you noticed something odd. Trump’s defenders kept mentioning Israel.

“They hate Israel,”replied Lindsey Graham when asked about Trump’s attacks on The Squad. Republican Congressman Lee Zeldin called Omar and Tlaib “anti-Israel.” Trump himself responded to the controversy by declaring that Omar “hates Israel.”

This is strange. As reprehensible as it is to demand that an American politician leave America for allegedly expressing insufficient patriotism, the demand is at least familiar.

“America, love it or leave it,” has been a conservative slogan since the 1960s. What’s virtually unprecedented is demanding that an American politician leave America because they’ve expressed insufficient devotion to a foreign country. Can anyone imagine Republicans defending Trump’s calls for expelling Omar and company by accusing them of hating Canada, India or Japan?

Of course not. The reason is that Republicans no longer talk about Israel like it’s a foreign country. They conflate love of Israel with love of America because they see Israel as a model for what they want America to be: An ethnic democracy.

Israel is a Jewish state. Trump and many of his allies want America to be a white, Judeo-Christian state. Israel, despite its free elections and parliamentary institutions, structurally privileges one ethnic and religious group over others. That’s what many Republicans want here.

In the press, commentators often overlook the right’s affinity for ethnic democracy in favor of other explanations for GOP support of Israel. But those other explanations are at best incomplete. One common argument is that Republicans love Israel because of its commitment to democracy and human rights.

But in the Trump era, democracy and human rights are not Republican foreign policy priorities. It’s not just Trump who admires authoritarian leaders. Rank and file Republicans do too.

More at https://forward.com/opinion/428488/the-real-reason-so-many-republicans
-love-israel-their-own-white-supremacy/

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

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

So, in other words, when my guy does it it's cool. When your guy does it it's the end of the world as we know it.

Gotcha.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
lol

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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

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

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