A thread for Democrats Only by THGRRI

Section of Donald Trump's 'indestructible' border wall COLLAPSES as Tropical Storm Hanna lashes south Texas
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8562843/Moment-Trumps-indestr
uctible-border-wall-collapses-Tropical-Storm-Hanna-lashes-south-Texas.html

The video posted to Twitter on Sunday shows construction workers standing by and watching as fierce gusts knock the steel structure to the ground. The clip became the target of ridicule on social media as critics likened the collapse to President Trump's re-election campaign.

So much for that wall...

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Monday, July 27, 2020 12:12 PM

Leave a job to the Unions and you get Union quality work.

Then again, the Legacy Media was showing children caged up a few years ago claiming that it was Trump doing it when the photos were actually taken from a story that happened during the Obama administration.

The media probably shouldn't be "Covington Kidding" this story until they know what actually happened. It's quite clear from the article they don't, and they don't even know where it happened.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Monday, July 27, 2020 12:41 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
ICE agreed to a Netflix documentary for propaganda but they recorded so many examples of illegal tactics, lying, terrorizing, and mocking that ICE is demanding it not be aired next month.

A Rare Look Inside Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Draws Legal Threats
A new documentary peers inside the secretive world of immigration enforcement. The filmmakers faced demands to delete scenes and delay broadcast until after the election.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/us/trump-immigration-nation-netflix
.html

Agreed, I'd add, Jacob Soboroff is the guy to follow regarding this topic.

T

Stupid people don't know they're stupid, and they certainly don't realize how obvious it is to others.

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Monday, July 27, 2020 12:55 PM

We wouldn't even need a wall if we just cut off any and all forms of financial aid and the ability for anybody without a social security number to make money here.

Wouldn't need ICE either.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Tuesday, July 28, 2020 6:23 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:
We wouldn't even need a wall if we just cut off any and all forms of financial aid and the ability for anybody without a social security number to make money here.

Wouldn't need ICE either.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

6ix, stop thinking that your social security number means you deserve special treatment. I can cut more than you with no consequences to me, but it would be terrible for the unemployed, poor white trash, prisoners, the homeless, the mentally ill, etc. Too bad, so sad, for them, but great for me since my taxes would be lower:

The Cult of Selfishness Is Killing America

The right has made irresponsible behavior a key principle.

America’s response to the coronavirus has been a lose-lose proposition.

The Trump administration and governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis insisted that there was no trade-off between economic growth and controlling the disease, and they were right — but not in the way they expected.

Premature reopening led to a surge in infections: Adjusted for population, Americans are currently dying from Covid-19 at around 15 times the rate in the European Union or Canada. Yet the “rocket ship” recovery Donald Trump promised has crashed and burned: Job growth appears to have stalled or reversed, especially in states that were most aggressive about lifting social distancing mandates, and early indications are that the U.S. economy is lagging behind the economies of major European nations.

So we’re failing dismally on both the epidemiological and the economic fronts. But why?

On the face of it, the answer is that Trump and allies were so eager to see big jobs numbers that they ignored both infection risks and the way a resurgent pandemic would undermine the economy. As I and others have said, they failed the marshmallow test, sacrificing the future because they weren’t willing to show a little patience.

And there’s surely a lot to that explanation. But it isn’t the whole story.

For one thing, people truly focused on restarting the economy should have been big supporters of measures to limit infections without hurting business — above all, getting Americans to wear face masks. Instead, Trump ridiculed those in masks as “politically correct,” while Republican governors not only refused to mandate mask-wearing, but they prevented mayors from imposing local mask rules.

Also, politicians eager to see the economy bounce back should have wanted to sustain consumer purchasing power until wages recovered. Instead, Senate Republicans ignored the looming July 31 expiration of special unemployment benefits, which means that tens of millions of workers are about to see a huge hit to their incomes, damaging the economy as a whole.

So what was going on? Were our leaders just stupid? Well, maybe. But there’s a deeper explanation of the profoundly self-destructive behavior of Trump and his allies: They were all members of America’s cult of selfishness.

You see, the modern U.S. right is committed to the proposition that greed is good, that we’re all better off when individuals engage in the untrammeled pursuit of self-interest. In their vision, unrestricted profit maximization by businesses and unregulated consumer choice is the recipe for a good society.

Support for this proposition is, if anything, more emotional than intellectual. I’ve long been struck by the intensity of right-wing anger against relatively trivial regulations, like bans on phosphates in detergent and efficiency standards for light bulbs. It’s the principle of the thing: Many on the right are enraged at any suggestion that their actions should take other people’s welfare into account.

This rage is sometimes portrayed as love of freedom. But people who insist on the right to pollute are notably unbothered by, say, federal agents tear-gassing peaceful protesters. What they call “freedom” is actually absence of responsibility.

Rational policy in a pandemic, however, is all about taking responsibility. The main reason you shouldn’t go to a bar and should wear a mask isn’t self-protection, although that’s part of it; the point is that congregating in noisy, crowded spaces or exhaling droplets into shared air puts others at risk. And that’s the kind of thing America’s right just hates, hates to hear.

Indeed, it sometimes seems as if right-wingers actually make a point of behaving irresponsibly. Remember how Senator Rand Paul, who was worried that he might have Covid-19 (he did), wandered around the Senate and even used the gym while waiting for his test results?

Anger at any suggestion of social responsibility also helps explain the looming fiscal catastrophe. It’s striking how emotional many Republicans get in their opposition to the temporary rise in unemployment benefits; for example, Senator Lindsey Graham declared that these benefits would be extended “over our dead bodies.” Why such hatred?

It’s not because the benefits are making workers unwilling to take jobs. There’s no evidence that this is happening — it’s just something Republicans want to believe. And in any case, economic arguments can’t explain the rage.

Again, it’s the principle. Aiding the unemployed, even if their joblessness isn’t their own fault, is a tacit admission that lucky Americans should help their less-fortunate fellow citizens. And that’s an admission the right doesn’t want to make.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying that Republicans are selfish. We’d be doing much better if that were all there were to it. The point, instead, is that they’ve sacralized selfishness, hurting their own political prospects by insisting on the right to act selfishly even when it hurts others.

What the coronavirus has revealed is the power of America’s cult of selfishness. And this cult is killing us.

www.nytimes.com/2020/07/27/opinion/us-republicans-coronavirus.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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Wednesday, July 29, 2020 7:31 AM

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

A small federal agency focused on preventing industrial disasters is on life support because Trump wants it gone.

The Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board is without enough voting members, and its investigations are stuck in limbo.

It was late in the second shift when workers at a silicone factory in Illinois noticed something had gone wrong. A tank of silicon hydride, used to make water repellent, started foaming and hissing. An operator mixing the chemicals in the tank yelled in frustration. Two of his coworkers came running. A pale yellow haze filled the air. It was hot. None of this was normal.

A supervisor quickly ordered one worker to turn on the exhaust fans and another to open the building’s garage doors, but neither got the chance. Within seconds, the 30,000-square-foot building exploded, rattling homes and businesses within 20 miles of the Waukegan, Illinois, factory. Rescue crews had to sift through the rubble for four days to find each of the bodies.

Four workers died the night of May 3, 2019, at AB Specialty Silicones, including the chemical operator and his boss. Yet the public may never find out what went wrong, and other chemical companies may never learn how to prevent a similar blast. That’s because the small, independent federal agency that investigates chemical disasters is on life support, and the Trump administration wants it to disappear altogether.

That agency, the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, investigates accidents and makes recommendations — but it doesn’t regulate the industry. Since 1998, it has looked into some of the nation’s biggest industrial disasters, including the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout, which killed 11 workers and dumped an estimated 4 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico; and the 2005 explosion at the BP refinery in Texas City, Texas, that killed 15 workers and injured 180. The board’s work has led to changes in industry practices from Texas to Kansas and laws in states from Mississippi to Connecticut.

It’s likely, however, that when the investigation into the AB Specialty Silicones explosion wraps up, the board will not be able to meet the quorum needed to vet and approve investigators’ findings and recommendations. Since May 2, it has been operating with only one voting member out of a possible five — one vote short of a quorum. It’s been effectively disabled.

The White House hasn’t announced plans to fill the board’s four vacant seats. In fact, President Donald Trump has been trying to do the opposite, pushing to eliminate the board in each of his annual budget proposals — though he hasn’t persuaded Congress to defund it.

More at www.vox.com/2020/7/28/21336481/chemical-safety-hazard-investigation-bo
ard

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, July 29, 2020 9:14 AM

1KIKI

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

If only Biden were the bearer of that button.

But he's not.

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

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Wednesday, July 29, 2020 9:17 AM

This comes as no surprise. 6ix would even agree.

Alt-Right’ Watches Most Porn But Has Least Sex, New Survey Finds
https://avn.com/business/articles/legal/alt-right-watches-most-porn-bu
t-has-least-sex-new-survey-finds-884526.html

Members of the political faction known as the “alt-right,” the extreme right wing of the ideological spectrum, are more likely to watch porn than any people who subscribe to other points of view. But at the same time, alt-right individuals are less likely to actually have sex with another person. Those are just a couple of the findings in an extensive survey of sex and politics conducted by the tube site xHamster, released this week.

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Wednesday, July 29, 2020 9:25 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
If only Biden were the bearer of that button.

But he's not.

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

The establishment Dems, like the Republicans, are loyal only to their lobbyists.

Dumping Trump is only step 1. Joe defeating him is not an instant escape from fascism. Joe's fine with fascism, as his record plainly shows.

I'm afraid that when Trump is gone, people will assume that our slow march into total fascism has somehow been stopped. They will be wrong.

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Wednesday, July 29, 2020 9:39 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
If only Biden were the bearer of that button.

But he's not.

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

You are aware that the GOP will demonize Biden if he raises taxes, while Democrats are for raising taxes, right? Without the GOP Senators, taxes can't be raised. But to quote you: And if democrats don't do any different, how are they any better? It is clear you don't understand that the GOP prevents Democrats from enacting policy into law.

Joe Biden Tells His Donors He Plans to Jack Up Their Taxes
https://slate.com/business/2020/06/biden-taxes-jack-em-up.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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Wednesday, July 29, 2020 10:27 AM

Stupid people don't know they're stupid, and they certainly don't realize how obvious it is to others.

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Wednesday, July 29, 2020 11:28 AM

Senate GOP won’t extend pandemic food stamps but doubles ‘three-martini lunch’ deduction
The pandemic has left millions of Americans hungry, but the relief bill offers no new assistance
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/07/28/senate-gop-wont-ext
end-pandemic-food-stamps-doubles-three-martini-lunch-deduction/?utm_source=reddit.com

How does any thinking person vote for these idiots?

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Wednesday, July 29, 2020 11:35 AM

Hell, yeah! Sign me up!

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Wednesday, July 29, 2020 12:41 PM

That actually sounds like a great idea.

One way tickets only, please.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Wednesday, July 29, 2020 1:11 PM

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Thursday, July 30, 2020 9:55 AM

Trump’s New Favorite COVID Doctor Believes in Alien DNA, Demon Sperm, and Hydroxychloroquine
https://www.thedailybeast.com/stella-immanuel-trumps-new-covid-doctor-
believes-in-alien-dna-demon-sperm-and-hydroxychloroquine

Maybe she's on to something?

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Thursday, July 30, 2020 10:05 AM

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Thursday, July 30, 2020 4:38 PM

Correct.

Also correct.

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Friday, July 31, 2020 7:57 AM

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

In one of the most jolting moments in modern political history, former President Barack Obama reclaimed his political pulpit with a stark warning that his successor is a grave and imminent threat to American democracy and racial justice. Then, even more remarkably, President Donald Trump went on television and proved him right, putting a foreboding shadow over an election that he is already seeking to cast as illegitimate in the eyes of millions of Americans.

Obama's speech for Lewis was urgent and in the tones of an activist, not a healer or the optimist who once declared there is "not a Black America" nor a "White America."

It brought into the open a clash between the nation's first Black president and the one who has made his name with a racist "birther" campaign against Obama and who is running for reelection wrapped in the Confederate flag and defending monuments to Civil War generals who fought to preserve slavery.

More at www.cnn.com/2020/07/31/politics/donald-trump-barack-obama-election-dem
ocracy/index.html

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

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Friday, July 31, 2020 8:01 AM

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

In a speech that was almost surprising in its frank invocation of politics, Obama compared the brutal 1965 violence that nearly ended Lewis’ life to the violent suppression of peaceful protests by federal officers today, called the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision to gut the Voting Rights Act and the wave of voter suppression that followed “an attack on what John fought for,” challenged hypocritical congressional leaders who have opposed a renewal of “the law that Lewis was wiling to die for” while issuing empty statements calling him a “hero.”

Obama turned to a powerful and direct political attack on present-day police brutality against Black people and voter and protest suppression efforts.

“Bull Connor” — the infamous Birmingham, Alabama, police commissioner who turned dogs and fire hoses on civil rights–era protesters — “may be gone, but today we witness, with our own eyes, police officers kneeling on the necks of Black Americans,” Obama said, alluding to the murder of George Floyd. “George Wallace may be gone, but we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators,” he added, alluding to the Trump administration–ordered assaults on protesters at Lafayette Square in D.C., and in Portland, Oregon.

Obama concluded by proposing that America honor the late congressman by enacting a new John Lewis Voting Rights Act and other measures to protect the vote, and by ending the “Jim Crow relic” of the filibuster if necessary to pass it.

More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/07/barack-obama-eulogy-for-jo
hn-lewis-was-perfect.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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Friday, July 31, 2020 8:04 AM

I agree with both of these last two posts second.

T

Stupid people don't know they're stupid, and they certainly don't realize how obvious it is to others.

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Saturday, August 1, 2020 8:39 AM

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

White House senior adviser Stephen Miller scolded former President Barack Obama on Friday for his “shockingly political” remarks on voter suppression at the funeral service for Rep. John Lewis, an icon of the civil rights movement.

In an interview on “Fox & Friends,” the policy aide to President Donald Trump accused his boss’ predecessor of spreading lies about efforts by elected officials to stifle voter participation and minority engagement ahead of November’s election.

“That was shockingly political for a funeral service, but it’s also totally disconnected from reality,” Miller said. “It is scandalously, outrageously false.”

Obama: “Even as we sit here, there are those in power who are doing their darnedest to discourage people from voting — by closing polling locations, and targeting minorities and students with restrictive ID laws, and attacking our voting rights with surgical precision, even undermining the Postal Service in the run-up to an election that’s going to be dependent on mail-in ballots so people don’t get sick,” he said, alluding to voting laws championed largely by Republicans.

Miller, perhaps best known for his support of hard-line immigration policies, defended voter ID laws but otherwise offered little in the way of evidence to rebut Obama’s claims.

Obama: “I know this is a celebration of John’s life. There are some who might say we shouldn’t dwell on such things. But that’s why I’m talking about it. John Lewis devoted his time on this Earth fighting the very attacks on democracy and what’s best in America that we are seeing circulate right now,” he said.

www.politico.com/news/2020/07/31/stephen-miller-obamas-comments-at-lew
is-funeral-totally-disconnected-from-reality-389386

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

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Saturday, August 1, 2020 9:59 AM

Stupid people don't know they're stupid, and they certainly don't realize how obvious it is to others.

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Sunday, August 2, 2020 7:35 AM

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

The Spectre of Socialism Haunts Mike Pence

Vice President Mike Pence made another campaign swing through the battleground state of Wisconsin in July, hoping to reconnect with the better angels of Republicanism. Pence traveled to the college town of Ripon, where the party was founded in 1854.

There, with his now-familiar aplomb, the vice president offered a false narrative that was at odds with not just contemporary reality but American history.

“The American people have a choice to make. And the choice has never been clearer and the stakes have never been higher,” announced the vice president in what was billed as a major address on July 17. “I came here to the city of Ripon, Wisconsin, where the Republican Party was born, to describe that choice.”

Pence declared, “Our economic recovery is on the ballot, but also are things far more fundamental and foundational to our country.” Unfortunately for Pence, he got tripped up by ignorance of his own party’s history.

“Like those first Republicans,” he chirped, “we stand at a crossroads of freedom. Before us are two paths: one based on the dignity of every individual, and the other on the growing control of the state. Our road leads to greater freedom and opportunity. Their road leads to socialism and decline.”

It was an epic rewrite of history that the vice president attempted when he suggested that he and Trump are “like those first Republicans.” The first Republicans were radicals, who sought to upend the politics of the country at a time when the existing parties were capitulating to the demands of Southern slaveholders and their political patrons.

More about the first Republicans at
https://web.archive.org/web/20200802051243/https://www.thenation.com/a
rticle/politics/mike-pence-wisconsin-socialism/

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

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Sunday, August 2, 2020 12:24 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
It was an epic rewrite of history that the vice president attempted when he suggested that he and Trump are “like those first Republicans.” The first Republicans were radicals, who sought to upend the politics of the country at a time when the existing parties were capitulating to the demands of Southern slaveholders and their political patrons.

More about the first Republicans at
https://web.archive.org/web/20200802051243/https://www.thenation.com/a
rticle/politics/mike-pence-wisconsin-socialism/

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

Hmmmmmmmm...

Maybe they're just appealing to their base?

Everybody to the right of Obama has been called "alt-right" and has been abused by the Left for the last 4 years. Articles 6 months to a year ago were going as far as to say that Obama was a Republican. (You won't see those articles now, of course, since they need Obama to raise money for Biden... but they were there).

It sure seems like you're a revolutionary if you're not a wear-a-mask-and-bend-the-knee Liberal in 2020.

Incidentally, this is why Democrats are fucked when Generation Zed starts voting too.

Somehow you lefty idiots made being Republican cool. Lord knows that Republicans weren't ever going to figure out a way to do that themselves.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Sunday, August 2, 2020 2:45 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:

Hmmmmmmmm...

Maybe they're just appealing to their base?

Everybody to the right of Obama has been called "alt-right" and has been abused by the Left for the last 4 years. Articles 6 months to a year ago were going as far as to say that Obama was a Republican. (You won't see those articles now, of course, since they need Obama to raise money for Biden... but they were there).

It sure seems like you're a revolutionary if you're not a wear-a-mask-and-bend-the-knee Liberal in 2020.

Incidentally, this is why Democrats are fucked when Generation Zed starts voting too.

Somehow you lefty idiots made being Republican cool. Lord knows that Republicans weren't ever going to figure out a way to do that themselves.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

If you google the words party affiliation by age, it does NOT support the idea of the GOP IS THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE. www.google.com/search?q=party+affiliation+by+age

The Future is most likely gridlock in Congress and the Presidency switching back and forth between D and R.

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

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Monday, August 3, 2020 9:01 PM

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Tuesday, August 4, 2020 1:07 AM

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

Hmmmmmmmm...

Maybe they're just appealing to their base?

Everybody to the right of Obama has been called "alt-right" and has been abused by the Left for the last 4 years. Articles 6 months to a year ago were going as far as to say that Obama was a Republican. (You won't see those articles now, of course, since they need Obama to raise money for Biden... but they were there).

It sure seems like you're a revolutionary if you're not a wear-a-mask-and-bend-the-knee Liberal in 2020.

Incidentally, this is why Democrats are fucked when Generation Zed starts voting too.

Somehow you lefty idiots made being Republican cool. Lord knows that Republicans weren't ever going to figure out a way to do that themselves.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
If you google the words party affiliation by age, it does NOT support the idea of the GOP IS THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE. www.google.com/search?q=party+affiliation+by+age

The Future is most likely gridlock in Congress and the Presidency switching back and forth between D and R.

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

I don't care what your Google has to say about it.

Kids don't like being told what to do.

When I was growing up, it was the Republicans and the religious right that sucked the fun out of every room.

In 2020 that's the Democrat's job.

You morons just made Conservatives the counter culture and didn't even realize it.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Tuesday, August 4, 2020 7:02 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:

I don't care what your Google has to say about it.

Kids don't like being told what to do.

When I was growing up, it was the Republicans and the religious right that sucked the fun out of every room.

In 2020 that's the Democrat's job.

You morons just made Conservatives the counter culture and didn't even realize it.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

I hang out with poor white trash in Texas. They say: "The police accidentally kill some worthless nigger and the Democrats act like that gives 'em permission to riot. They are anarchists overthrowing the government." Or "Old person dies of Covid-something, who was gonna die of something anyway, and the Democrats act like they can tell me to wear a mask, those Commies!" Or "Democrats have got no right to check Trump's income tax returns until after the IRS audit is completed -- it's the Law! Besides, taxes are too high and completely unfair. Everybody cheats. Why not Trump?" Poor white trash of the GOP are the new counter culture. All the smartest American youth want to join Trump's party, Party, PARTY! So much fun.

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

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Tuesday, August 4, 2020 11:19 AM

Trump focusses on the fringe, the border or outer edges of a group and many of you follow suite. Stay focused, and remember the fringes of a group are small. The larger part of the group often disagrees with its fringe. It often holds different beliefs entirely.

Don’t go where Trump points.

T

Stupid people don't know they're stupid, and they certainly don't realize how obvious it is to others.

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Tuesday, August 4, 2020 12:09 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
I hang out with poor white trash in Texas.

No you don't.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Tuesday, August 4, 2020 3:22 PM

Careful, if you hang out with garbage, you start smelling like trash. Jack knows this firsthand, right Jack?

T

Stupid people don't know they're stupid, and they certainly don't realize how obvious it is to others.

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Wednesday, August 5, 2020 6:03 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 second:
I hang out with poor white trash in Texas.

No you don't.

The Covid recession that began in February may have been the simplest, most comprehensible business downturn in history. Much of the U.S. economy was put on hold to contain a pandemic. Job losses were concentrated in services that were either inessential or could be postponed, and were highly likely to spread the coronavirus: restaurants, air travel, dentists’ visits.

The main goal of economic policy was to make this temporary lockdown tolerable, sustaining the incomes of those unable to work.

Republicans, however, have shown no sign of understanding any of this. The policy proposals being floated by White House aides and advisers are almost surreal in their disconnect from reality. Cutting payroll taxes on workers who can’t work? Letting businesspeople deduct the full cost of three-martini lunches they can’t eat?

They don’t even seem to understand the mechanics of how unemployment checks are paid out. They proposed continuing benefits for a brief period while negotiations continue — but this literally can’t be done, because the state offices that disburse unemployment aid couldn’t handle the necessary reprogramming.

Above all, Republicans seem obsessed with the idea that unemployment benefits are making workers lazy and unwilling to accept jobs.

This would be a bizarre claim even if unemployment benefits really were reducing the incentive to seek work. After all, there are more than 30 million workers receiving benefits, but only five million job openings. No matter how harshly you treat the unemployed, they can’t take jobs that don’t exist.

It’s almost a secondary concern to note that there’s almost no evidence that unemployment benefits are, in fact, discouraging workers from taking jobs. Multiple studies find no significant incentive effect.

And unemployment benefits didn’t prevent the U.S. from adding seven million jobs, most of them for low-wage workers — that is, precisely the workers often receiving more in unemployment than from their normal jobs — during the abortive spring recovery.

By the way, a great majority of economists believe that unemployment benefits have helped sustain the economy as a whole, by supporting consumer spending.

So the attack on unemployment aid is rooted in deep ignorance. But there’s also a strong element of malice.

Republicans have a long history of suggesting that the jobless are moral failures — that they’d rather sit home watching TV than work. And the Trump years have been marked by a relentless assault on programs that help the less fortunate, from Obamacare to food stamps.

One indicator of G.O.P. disingenuousness is the sudden re-emergence of “deficit hawks” claiming that helping the unemployed will add too much to the national debt. I use the scare quotes because as far as I can tell not one of the politicians claiming that we can’t afford to help the unemployed raised any objections to Donald Trump’s $2 trillion tax cut for corporations and the wealthy.

More at www.nytimes.com/2020/08/03/opinion/republicans-unemployed-coronavirus.
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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Wednesday, August 5, 2020 11:06 AM

Fascism Comes In Many Forms- In America, It Is Normalized, Bipartisan, and Good For the Stock Market.

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Wednesday, August 5, 2020 11:28 AM

Unpaid medical bills are the number one cause of bankruptcy in the United States. In fact, three out of every five bankruptcies in our country are due to medical bills.

T

Stupid people don't know they're stupid, and they certainly don't realize how obvious it is to others.

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Wednesday, August 5, 2020 11:37 AM

CAPTAINCRUNCH

... stay crunchy...

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Kids don't like being told what to do.

Grow up and people won't treat you like a child.

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
You morons just made Conservatives the counter culture and didn't even realize it.

You got that mixed up - try:
Conservatives just made morons the counter culture.

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Wednesday, August 5, 2020 11:50 AM

Yep, good to see you back G.

T

Stupid people don't know they're stupid, and they certainly don't realize how obvious it is to others.

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Wednesday, August 5, 2020 11:54 AM

Oh good. Your little circle jerk buddy is back.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Wednesday, August 5, 2020 6:46 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.

https://apnews.com/36ae43993c0fe43e67bcdd9539675997?utm_medium=APCentr
alRegion&utm_source=Twitter&utm_campaign=SocialFlow

Protest leader Bush ousts 20-year US Rep. Clay in Missouri

Michael Brown’s death in 2014 in Ferguson vaulted her into (the) role: (BLM) activist. She became a leader of some of the many protests that followed the fatal police shooting of the Black, unarmed 18-year-old. She was back on the streets in 2017 after a white St. Louis officer was acquitted in the shooting death of a Black suspect.

Bush, a onetime homeless woman who led protests following a white police officer's fatal shooting of a Black 18-year-old in Ferguson, Mo., ousted longtime Rep. William Lacy Clay Tuesday in Missouri's Democratic primary, ending a political dynasty that has spanned more than a half-century.

“They’re ready to turn the page on decades of failed leadership,” Korth (Bush’s campaign spokeswoman) said.

DNC ...

... I can see which way this is going. By failing to moderate yourself and move away from back-room big-money politics, you've alienated a chunk of the democratic voters. And the extremists are rushing in to fill the vacuum as the populist-leaning voters make the only populist choice available to them.

I'm not sure even very successful election prediction models will work in this situation. The Democrats have a severe enthusiasm gap.

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Thursday, August 6, 2020 6:13 AM

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

Two decades of pandemic simulations failed to account for Donald Trump

www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02277-6

Like all pandemics, it started out small. A novel coronavirus emerged in Brazil, jumping from bats to pigs to farmers before making its way to a big city with an international airport. From there, infected travellers carried it to the United States, Portugal and China. Within 18 months, the coronavirus had spread around the world, 65 million people were dead and the global economy was in free fall.

This fictitious scenario, dubbed Event 201, played out in a New York City conference centre before a panel of academics, government officials and business leaders last October. Those in attendance were shaken — which is what Ryan Morhard wanted. A biosecurity specialist at the World Economic Forum in Geneva, Switzerland, Morhard worried that world leaders weren’t taking the threat of a pandemic seriously enough. He wanted to force them to confront the potentially immense human and economic toll of a global outbreak. “We called it Event 201 because we’re seeing up to 200 epidemic events per year, and we knew that, eventually, one would cause a pandemic,” Morhard says.

The timing, and the choice of a coronavirus, proved prescient. Just two months later, China reported a mysterious pneumonia outbreak in the city of Wuhan — the start of the COVID-19 pandemic that has so far killed around 650,000 people.

Morhard was not the only one sounding the alarm. Event 201 was one of dozens of simulations and evaluations over the past two decades that have highlighted the risks of a pandemic and identified gaps in the ability of governments and organizations around the world to respond.

The exercises anticipated several failures that have played out in the management of COVID-19, including leaky travel bans, medical-equipment shortages, massive disorganization, misinformation and a scramble for vaccines. But the scenarios didn’t anticipate some of the problems that have plagued the pandemic response, such as a shortfall of diagnostic tests, and world leaders who reject the advice of public-health specialists.

Most strikingly, biosecurity researchers didn’t predict that the United States would be among the hardest-hit countries.

More at www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02277-6

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

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Thursday, August 6, 2020 6:54 AM

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

On the anniversaries of Hiroshima, like some doomsday variant of Passover, we ask the four questions that ethicists and historians have been posing for decades:

• Why did President Harry Truman decide to bomb Hiroshima?

• Why did he then decide to bomb Nagasaki?

• Would a demonstration of the weapon—a massive eyewitnessed explosion in the middle of nowhere—have persuaded the Japanese to surrender?

• How might the war have ended—would more or fewer people have died—if the atom bomb had never been invented?

On the first two questions, declassified archival documents are pretty clear: There never was a decision to drop either bomb. Instead, there was a decision to build an atom bomb. Once it was ready, it was used; once the second bomb was ready, it too was used. From the outset, this was the plan — an automatic sequence from building the bomb to testing it to dropping it on the enemy. The only decision Truman made was not to alter the plan.

Even well before World War II, distinctions had been drawn between civilian and military targets, especially in the context of aerial bombardment, which had started in the First World War. However, this Rubicon was firmly crossed by the time of Hiroshima.

In June 1945, a few of the physicists in the Manhattan Project, notably James Franck and Leo Szilard, expressed concerns about what they called “political and social problems” of the bomb — its murderous destructiveness and the possibility of a nuclear arms race after the war — and urged the administration to demonstrate the bomb, on a “desert or barren island,” before using it to kill people. A month later, they and 66 of their colleagues signed a petition to the president, making the same points. However, the top-ranking scientists on the project — including J. Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, Enrico Fermi, and Arthur Compton (who was Franck and Szilard’s immediate supervisor) — disagreed, saying a peaceful demonstration would prolong the war. The top U.S. officials sided with the directors — or, more accurately, took the directors’ reports as affirmation of their own position. President Harry Truman — who hadn’t heard of the Manhattan Project until April, when Roosevelt died and he stepped up from vice president to commander in chief — never saw these petitions, in any case. (After the war, many of these scientists joined or led anti-nuclear organizations. Oppenheimer opposed development of the much more powerful hydrogen bomb and lost his security clearance as a result.)

Before the bombs fell, Truman’s briefers told him that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were military targets. (There was a troop-loading dock on the outskirts of Hiroshima, but this was a minor consideration; the bomb was aimed at the city’s center.) For many years after, Truman feigned total comfort with having dropped the bombs, boasting that he “never lost any sleep” over Hiroshima or Nagasaki. However, the archives reveal that, in fact, he was horrified by the civilian destruction—and even ordered his generals not to drop a third bomb, so he wouldn’t have to kill more of “those kids.” Groves, the Manhattan Project’s supervisor, had been planning to do just that as soon as a third bomb was ready, sometime after Aug. 24, if Japan hadn’t surrendered by then; but Army chief of staff Gen. George Marshall told him not to do so without Truman’s express orders.

More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/08/hiroshima-anniversary-trum
an-atomic-bomb.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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Thursday, August 6, 2020 4:57 PM

Stupid people don't know they're stupid, and they certainly don't realize how obvious it is to others.

N.Y. Attorney General Files Lawsuit Against NRA

Letitia James is seeking to put the gun advocacy organization out of business. The suit claims NRA executives diverted millions of dollars for lavish personal trips, no-show contracts for associates and other questionable expenditures.

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Friday, August 7, 2020 4:04 AM

1KIKI

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

The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism
Matt Taibbi book review

Thomas Frank is one of America’s more skillful writers, an expert practitioner of a genre one might call historical journalism – ironic, because no recent media figure has been more negatively affected by historical change. Frank became a star during a time of intense curiosity about the reasons behind our worsening culture war, and now publishes a terrific book, The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism, at a time when people are mostly done thinking about what divides us, gearing up to fight instead.

Frank published What’s the Matter with Kansas? in 2004, at the height of the George W. Bush presidency. The Iraq War was already looking like a disaster, but the Democratic Party was helpless to take advantage, a fact the opinion-shaping class on the coasts found puzzling. Blue-staters felt sure they’d conquered the electoral failure problem in the nineties, when a combination of Bill Clinton’s Arkansas twang, policy pandering (a middle-class tax cut!) and a heavy dose of unsubtle race politics (e.g. ending welfare “as we know it”) appeared to cut the heart out of the Republican “Southern strategy.”

Yet Clinton’s chosen successor Al Gore flopped, the party’s latest Kennedy wannabe, John Kerry, did worse, and by the mid-2000s, Bushian conservatism was culturally ascendant, despite obvious failures. Every gathering of self-described liberals back then devolved into the same sad-faced anthropological speculation about Republicans: “Why do they vote against their own interests?”

Frank, a Midwesterner and one of the last exemplars of a media tradition that saw staying in touch with the thinking of the general population as a virtue, was not puzzled. What’s the Matter with Kansas? was framed as an effort to answer that liberal cocktail-party conundrum – “How could anyone who’s ever worked for someone vote Republican?” was the version Frank described hearing – and the answer, at least on the surface, was appealing to coastal intellectuals.

Frank explained the Republican voter had thrown support to the Republicans’ pro-corporate economic message in exchange for solidarity on cultural issues, as part of what he called the “Great Backlash”:

While earlier forms of conservatism emphasized fiscal sobriety, the backlash mobilizes voters with explosive social issues — summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art — which it then marries to pro-business economic policies.

What’s the Matter with Kansas? was about more than that, but for the chattering classes, this thesis was enough. What they heard was that the electorally self-harming white Republican voter from poor regions like the High Plains was motivated not by reason, but by racial animus and Christian superstition.

For a certain kind of blue-state media consumer, and especially for Democratic Party politicians, this was a huge relief, the political version of Sean’s hug-it-out message to Will Hunting: It's not your fault.

A reader looking back at that book will note Frank also predicted political disasters that would later befall Democrats, and outlined the thesis of his current book The People, No, which will probably suffer financially for being pretty much the opposite of “All this shit, it’s not your fault.”

The Kansas title alone spoke to one of Frank’s central observations: while red state voters might frame objections in terms of issues like abortion or busing, in a broader sense the Republican voter is recoiling from urban liberal condescension.

That Democrats needed Thomas Frank to tell them what conservatives fifteen miles outside the cities were thinking was damning in itself. Even worse was the basically unbroken string of insults emanating from pop culture (including from magazines like Rolling Stone: I was very guilty of this) describing life between the cities as a prole horror peopled by obese, Bible-thumping dolts who couldn’t navigate a Thai menu and polished gun lockers instead of reading.

Republicans may have controlled government at the time, but when they turned on TV sets or looked up at movie screens, their voters felt accused of something just for living in little towns, raising kids, and visiting church on Sundays. What’s the matter, they were asking, with that?

As Frank and basically anyone who’d been to an antiwar meeting knew, actual liberals in the Bush era were “an assortment of complainers – for the most part impoverished complainers – who wield about as much influence over American politics as the cashier at Home Depot.” In those circles, the union member was still revered, and the villain in small towns was a GM or Cargill executive, whose assaults on factory workers and family farmers of all races were central to the story of America’s decline.

Still, by the Bush years something had gone terribly wrong, in liberalism’s effort to reach small-town America: Liberalism may not be the monstrous, all-powerful conspiracy that conservatives make it out to be, but its failings are clear nonetheless. Somewhere in the last four decades liberalism ceased to be relevant to huge portions of its traditional constituency, and we can say that liberalism lost places like Shawnee and Wichita with as much accuracy as we can point out that conservatism won them over.

Frank ripped the political strategy of Clinton Democrats, who removed economic issues from their platform as they commenced accepting gobs of Wall Street money in a post-Mondale effort to compete with Republicans on fundraising. Gambling that working-class voters would keep voting blue because “Democrats will always be marginally better on economic issues,” New Democrats stopped targeting blue-collar voters and switched rhetorical emphasis to “affluent, white collar professionals who are liberal on social issues.”

The move seemed smart. This was the go-go eighties, we were all Material Girls (for whom the boy with the cold hard cash was always Mr. Right), and as Frank put it, “What politician in this success-loving country really wants to be the voice of poor people?”

While Clinton Democrats were perfecting a new image of urban cool, opponents were honing a new approach: Republicans, meanwhile, were industriously fabricating their own class-based language of the right, and while they made their populist appeal to blue-collar voters, Democrats were giving those same voters—their traditional base—the big brush-off…

The news media and Hollywood shifted accordingly. Working-class voices disappeared from the press and earnest movies like Norma Rae and The China Syndrome gave way to a new brand of upper-class messaging that reveled in imperious sneering and weird culture-war provocations: In an America where the chief sources of one’s ideas about life’s possibilities are TV and the movies, it’s not hard to be convinced that we inhabit a liberal-dominated world: feminist cartoons for ten-year-olds are followed by commercials for nonconformist deodorants; entire families of movies are organized around some transcendent dick joke…

In Frank’s home state of Kansas, voters reacted by moving right as the triumvirate of news media, pop culture, and Democratic politics spoke to them less and less. “The state,” he wrote, “watches impotently as its culture, beamed in from the coasts, becomes coarser and more offensive by the year.”

Perceiving correctly that there would be no natural brake on this phenomenon, since the executive set was able to pay itself more and more as the country grew more divided, Frank wondered, “Why shouldn’t our culture just get worse and worse, if making it worse will only cause the people who worsen it to grow wealthier and wealthier?”

We have the answer to that now, don’t we?

When I was first sent out to cover the Donald Trump campaign years later, I assumed the editorial concept would be simple: mockery. New York’s infamous “short-fingered vulgarian” had taken over national headlines in the summer of 2015 with a foul-mouthed stream-of-consciousness rap, organized around an impossible Pharaonic wall project and scare tales about rape-happy Mexicans – the Diceman doing Pat Buchanan. If this was taking over the Republican Party, there wasn’t much to report. The enterprise was doomed, and journalism’s only mission was to make sure the silliest bits were captured before being buried under the sands of history.

Twenty minutes into my first Trump campaign event, I knew this was wrong, and was seized by a sinking feeling that really hasn’t left since. Trump in person sounded like he’d been convinced to run for president after reading What’s the Matter with Kansas? His stump act seemed tailored to take advantage of the gigantic market opportunity Democrats had created, and which Frank described. He ranted about immigrants, women, the disabled, and other groups, sure, but also about NAFTA, NATO, the TPP, big Pharma, military contracting, and a long list of other issues.

In 2016, it was clear only a few people in the lefty media world understood what Trump was up to, and why he was a real threat to win. Michael Moore was one, and Frank was another. I don’t think it’s a coincidence both were Midwesterners. Frank released his next book, Listen, Liberal, in May of 2016, just as Trump was seizing the nomination. It began with the following observation: In the summer of 2014, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average hitting all-time highs, a poll showed that nearly three-quarters of the American public thought the economy was still in recession—because for them, it was.

He noted that workers’ share of GDP hit the lowest levels in American history in 2011 and stayed there, as inequities stemming from the Obama “recovery” became a “quasi-permanent development.”

Most of the press lived in a different America, though, and saw Frank’s warning as annoying, repetitive whining. Cocky reviewers at places like the New York Times bemoaned the book’s “pessimistic note” and berated him for seeing the “uneven recovery” of the Obama years as “a tragedy rather than a triumph.” Listen to what? Hadn’t he read the latest polls? Didn’t he know the rout was on?

(It should be noted that new Times reviews of books this week by Robert Reich and Zephyr Teachout, under the familiar headline, “Why the Working Class Votes Against Its Economic Interests,” are similarly snooty in telling both to “temper their anti-corporate zeal” in this election year. Very little learning takes place at these institutions).

After Trump’s election in November 2016, the first instinct of everyone wandering amid the smoldering wreckage of Democratic Party politics should have been to look in all directions for anyone with an explanation for what the hell just happened.

Of course the opposite took place. Frank seemed to be put into deep-freeze after Listen, Liberal, largely I think because he was telling a truth no one wanted to hear about the difference between the way the New York Times saw America, and how, say, Iowans or Nebraskans saw it. Trump meanwhile constructed his argument for the presidency atop that difference, and is still doing it today.

Also: the word, “populism,” became a synonym for plague or menace. Post-Trump and post-Brexit, pundits tended to use the term in tandem with other epithets, e.g. the “populist threat.” For Frank, a liberal intellectual whose breathless admiration for the actual Populist movement of the 1890s had been a running theme across two decades, this must have stung.

He responded by plunging into a history of Populism that probably began as quaint nostalgia but quickly turned into something else: a portrait of anti-Populism. The People, No documents the furious elite propaganda response to bottom-up political movements that has recurred in uncannily similar fashion at key moments across nearly a century and a half of American history, and is firing with particular venom today.

The Populists were a third-party movement that popped into view in the late 1800s in response to the excesses of monopoly capitalism. It centered around regulation of railroads, currency reform, federal loans to farmers, and other issues. In a development that particularly frightened the very wealthy at the time, it sought and secured alliances with Black farmers. Proving the concept of breaking the political and economic monopoly of New York elites with sheer voter energy was almost more important than the individual issues.

A sort-of populist, William Jennings Bryan, became the Democratic nominee in 1896, only to be slaughtered by a mediocrity named William McKinley. The Republican was backed by mountains of corporate money and the dirty-pool genius of his campaign “generalissimo,” Mark Hanna (whose media-dominating, cash-gobbling wizardry in suppressing voter preference ironically made him the hero of Karl “Turd Blossom” Rove). Mountains of propaganda depicted populists as diseased demons, unshaven slayers of American virtue:

In many popular histories, including Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, the Populists are depicted as failures, crushed by almighty capital after selling out to make alliances with Democrats. But many of their ideas were implemented after the 1929 crash. Frank writes in detail how the same corporate messengers scrambled to defame Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 with an 1896-style anti-Populist attack.

F.D.R. himself was a genteel aristocrat, but battered as a Russian agent – one Chicago Tribune cartoon showed his hands covered with the “red jam of Moscow” – and his followers were described as a mob of “sentimentalists and demagogues” who wanted to “take away from the thrifty what the thrifty or their ancestors have accumulated.” His followers were “people of low mentality” who backed policies that were the “laughingstock of the leading monetary authorities of the world.” This campaign, which should sound familiar, failed over and over, as F.D.R. retained broad support and populism even became culturally dominant in the thirties and early forties, through the films of people like Orson Welles and Frank Capra.

It wasn’t until after World War II that the more effective version of anti-Populist messaging was developed, as Frank writes: Now anti-populism was taken up by a new elite, a liberal elite that was led by a handful of thinkers at prestigious universities … In short, the highly educated learned to deplore working-class movements for their bigotry, their refusal of modernity, and their borderline madness.

The new conception of populism, as popularized by historians like Richard Hofstadter, pitted the common run of voters against a growing class of elite-educated managerial professionals, philosopher-kings who set correct policy for the ignorant masses.

The model of enlightened government for this new “technocratic” class of “consensus thinkers” was John Kennedy’s “Camelot” cabinet of Experts in Shirtsleeves, with Robert McNamara’s corporatized Pentagon their Shining Bureaucracy on a Hill. This vision of ideal democracy has dominated mainstream press discourse for almost seventy years.

Since the establishment of this template, Frank notes, “virtually everyone who writes on the subject agrees that populism is ‘anti-pluralist,’ by which they mean that it is racist or sexist or discriminatory in some way… Populism’s hatred for ‘the elite,’ meanwhile, is thought to be merely a fig leaf for this ugly intolerance.”

Trump and Bernie Sanders both got hit with every cliché described in Frank’s book. Both were depicted as xenophobic, bigoted, emotion-laden, resistant to modernity, susceptible to foreign influence, and captured by “unrealistic” ideas they lacked the expertise to implement.

At the conclusion of The People, No, Frank sums up the book’s obvious subtext, seeming almost to apologize for its implications: My point here is not to suggest that Trump is a “very stable genius,” as he likes to say, or that he led a genuine populist insurgency; in my opinion, he isn’t and he didn’t. What I mean to show is that the message of anti-populism is the same as ever: the lower orders, it insists, are driven by irrationality, bigotry, authoritarianism, and hate; democracy is a problem because it gives such people a voice. The difference today is that enlightened liberals are the ones mouthing this age-old anti-populist catechism.

The People, No is more an endorsement of 1896-style populism as a political solution to our current dilemma than it is a diatribe against an arrogant political elite. The book reads this way in part because Frank is a cheery personality whose polemical style tends to accentuate the positive. In my hands this material would lead to a darker place faster — it’s infuriating, especially in what it says about the last four years of “consensus” propaganda, in particular the most recent iteration.

The book’s concept also reflects the Sovietish reality of post-Trump media, which is now dotted with so many perilous taboos that it sometimes seems there’s no way to get audiences to see certain truths except indirectly, or via metaphor. The average blue-state media consumer by 2020 has ingested so much propaganda about Trump (and Sanders, for that matter) that he or she will be almost immune to the damning narratives in this book. Protesting, “But Trump is a racist,” they won’t see the real point – that these furious propaganda campaigns that have been repeated almost word for word dating back to the 1890s are aimed at voters, not politicians.

In the eighties and nineties, TV producers and newspaper editors established the ironclad rule of never showing audiences pictures of urban poverty, unless it was being chased by cops. In the 2010s the press began to cartoonize the “white working class” in a distantly similar way.

This began before Trump. As Bernie Sanders told Rolling Stone after the 2016 election, when the small-town American saw himself or herself on TV, it was always “a caricature. Some idiot. Or maybe some criminal, some white working-class guy who has just stabbed three people.” These caricatures drove a lot of voters toward Trump, especially when he began telling enormous crowds that the lying media was full of liars who lied about everything.

After 2016 it became axiomatic that the Trump voter, or the Leave voter, was – without exception now – a crazed, racist monster. As detailed here multiple times, ruminations on Republican voter behaviors became not merely uninteresting to pundits after November 2016, but actively taboo. By 2020, the official answer to What’s the Matter with Kansas? was Kansas is a White Supremacist Project and Can Go Fuck Itself.

Frank in 2004 wrote about how confused Midwestern voters were, watching TV images of the beautiful people of the time. Movie stars and hedge-funders donned ribbons in support of animals or the “underprivileged,” while spending huge sums on pictures of Jesus covered in ants or on crucifix-shaped popsicles that supposedly were comments on “fanaticism and violence.” This, while factory towns were basically being moved en masse to China.

Imagine the reaction in these places now, to editorials in the New York Times instructing white liberals to cut off their relatives (by text, incidentally) until they donate to Black Lives Matter, or a CNN tweet instructing “individuals with a cervix” to start getting cancer screens at age 25, or to widespread denunciations of Mount Rushmore as a “monument of two slaveholders” when visited by Trump, after those same outlets praised its “majesty” just four years earlier.

These stories are as incomprehensible to Middle America as the pictures of MAGA fanatics going maskless and dying of Covid-19 to own the libs are to blue-state audiences. Yet both groups are bombarded with images of their opposite extremes, with predictable results: we all hate each other.

It’s no accident that the consensus press pumping out these messages spent the last four years denouncing Sanders – whose campaign was a polite promise to restore New Deal values for everyone, Republicans included – as far too radical for America.

Once Sanders was out of the way, those same news outlets embraced a significantly more radical ideology, one that swore a lot, described everyone to the right of Ibram Kendi as a white supremacist, and told small business owners they should put up with their stores being smashed for the cause of progress.

The history outlined in The People, No predicts this. America’s financial and political establishment has always been most terrified of an inclusive underclass movement. So it evangelizes a bizarre transgressive politics that tells white conservatives to fuck themselves and embraces a leftist sub-theology that preaches class as a racist canard. Same old game, same old goal: keep people divided. The only cost to the “consensus thinkers” who will likely re-take the White House under Joe Biden is, they will have to join Nike and Bank of America in flying a “Black Lives Matter” banner above a conference room or two as they re-take their seats at the controls of the S.S. Neoliberalism.

Frank was never a David Broder type, preaching airy centrism and celebrating phony “bipartisanship.” Instead his books, which filled a vacuum created by the disappearance/expulsion of working-class writers like Mike Royko or Studs Terkel, said conservative Middle America was worth understanding, and there was overlap between its concerns and those of the frustrated, oft-impoverished complainers who were the Democrats’ base.

Frank insisted there was both a danger in ignoring those shared concerns, and a huge potential benefit in addressing them. Fifteen years ago, that was an acceptable topic for elite discussion. In the Trump era it’s heresy, and even an eloquently-argued warning like The People, No will likely be denounced, as too much like paying attention to deplorables.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/kansas-should-go-f-itself

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Friday, August 7, 2020 4:10 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
T

Stupid people don't know they're stupid, and they certainly don't realize how obvious it is to others.

N.Y. Attorney General Files Lawsuit Against NRA

Letitia James is seeking to put the gun advocacy organization out of business. The suit claims NRA executives diverted millions of dollars for lavish personal trips, no-show contracts for associates and other questionable expenditures.

lol

Good luck. That ain't ever going to happen.

They could make a kickstarter campaign for the legal funds and meet the goal in a day.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Friday, August 7, 2020 8:33 AM

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

How inequality is changing the Republican Party — and breaking American politics

Historically, conservative political parties face the problem Harvard political scientist Daniel Ziblatt calls “the conservative dilemma.” How does a party that represents the interests of moneyed elites win elections in a democracy? The dilemma sharpens as inequality widens: The more the haves have, the more have-nots there are who will vote to tax them.

This is not mere ivory-tower theorizing. Conservative politicians know the bind they’re in. When Mitt Romney told a room of donors during the 2012 election that there were “47 percent of the people who will vote for the president ( Obama ) no matter what” because they “believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it,” even though they “pay no income tax,” he was describing the conservative dilemma. “Our message of low taxes doesn’t connect,” he said, a bit sadly.

Occupy Wall Street’s rallying cry — “We are the 99%!” — framed the math behind the conservative dilemma more directly: How do you keep winning elections and cutting taxes for the rich in a (putative) democracy where the top 1 percent went from 11 percent of national income in 1980 to 20 percent in 2016, and the bottom 50 percent fell from 21 percent of national income in 1980 to 13 percent in 2016? How do you keep your party from being buried by the 99 percent banding together to vote that income share back into their own pockets?

In their new book, Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality, political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson offer three possible answers.

More at www.vox.com/2020/8/6/21354453/inequality-trump-election-populism-pluto
cracy-hacker-pierson-let-them-eat-tweets

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

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Friday, August 7, 2020 10:50 AM

Vox...

Hope they're saving their money. They're all going to be stocking shelves like me some day soon.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Saturday, August 8, 2020 8:28 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:
Vox...

Hope they're saving their money. They're all going to be stocking shelves like me some day soon.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

Trump has let every nuclear weapons treaty expire. If Vox told you, you won't believe, 6ix.

Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World
www.amazon.com/Fallout-Hiroshima-Cover-up-Reporter-Revealed/dp/1982128
518/

Media coverage of the bombings had been initially widespread and intensive, but details of the aftermath were actually scarce from the beginning, thanks to U.S. government and military efforts to control information about their handiwork in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The United States—which had just won a painfully earned moral and military victory over the Axis powers—was not eager to “get the reputation for outdoing Hitler in atrocities,” as the country’s secretary of war put it. Right away, officials in Washington. D.C., and newly arrived occupation forces in Japan went into overdrive to contain the story of the human cost of their new weapon. The Japanese media was forbidden by occupation authorities to write or air stories about Hiroshima or Nagasaki, lest they “disturb public tranquility.” As foreign reporters began to get into the country, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were immediately put off-limits to them. The few journalists attempting to report on the atomic cities in the weeks immediately following the bombings were threatened with expulsion from Japan, harassed by U.S. officials, and accused of spreading Japanese propaganda, dispensed by a defeated enemy attempting to cultivate international sympathy after years of aggression and their own outsized atrocities.

On the home front, U.S. government officials corralled the population into thinking of the atom bomb as a conventional superbomb, painting it in terms of TNT and denying its radioactive aftermath. “It was just the same as getting a bigger gun than the other fellow had to win a war and that's what it was used for,” said President Truman. “Nothing else but an artillery weapon.” When it was eventually conceded that bomb-induced radiation poisoning was real, its horrors were downplayed. (It could even be a “very pleasant way to die.” stated Lieutenant General Leslie R. Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, which had created the bombs in just three years.)

The American public was allowed to see images of the mushroom clouds and hear triumphant eyewitness descriptions from the American bombers themselves, but reports containing testimonies from below the clouds were virtually nonexistent. Images of Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s devastated landscapes were also released to newspapers and magazines by U.S. forces. However, while sobering, the post-atomic landscape photographs failed to register deeply enough with readers who had been inundated with images of decimated cities—London. Warsaw. Manila. Dresden, Chungking, among scores of others—on a daily basis for more than half a decade. Hersey himself acknowledged that post-bomb landscape photos could only get a limited emotional response: ruins, he thought, could be “spectacular: but . . . impersonal, as rubble so often is.” What the American public did not see: photos of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki hospitals ringed by the corpses of blast survivors who had staggered there seeking medical help and died in agony on the front steps. (Most of the doctors and nurses had been killed or wounded anyway.) Nor did they see images of the crematoriums burning the remains of thousands of anonymous victims, or pictures of scorched women and children, their hair falling out in fistfuls.

The published images of Hiroshima’s demolished landscape gravely undersold the reality of atomic aftermath. Usually a picture is worth a thousand words, but in this case it would take Hersey’s 30,000 words to reveal and drive home the truth about America’s new mega-weapon.

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

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Saturday, August 8, 2020 12:16 PM