A thread for Democrats Only by THGRRI

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

The Dumbest Moments of the Trump Presidency

For five years, we kept a Google Doc of the most deeply idiotic episodes of this monumentally stupid era. Now it’s time to share our work with the world.

The Donald Trump presidency ended, in a way, on Nov. 7. It was the day that Trump tweeted his campaign would be holding a press conference at the Four Seasons in Philadelphia, only to follow up with a clarifying tweet that he meant “Four Seasons Landscaping,” a business located on the outskirts of the city near an adult bookstore and a crematorium. Yes, the campaign later claimed there was a reason why they booked this particular venue. So, yes, we don’t know for sure that the campaign actually meant to hold its event at the Four Seasons Hotel, only to book the completely unrelated landscaping company by mistake. But we know.

When the story of this era is told many years from now, students and history enthusiasts may not grasp—and what even now is hard to comprehend—is just how stupid it was to live through. The president told the nation to inject bleach during a pandemic; his team altered the projected path of a hurricane on an official document, with a Sharpie, to help the president save face after an erroneous tweet. There were the dishwashers that had to be run 10 times. The blank pages that the White House pretended were important documents. A long, long time ago, Trump declared himself a “very stable genius.” By now, that phrase feels almost normal. But seriously: What?

For almost five years, we have been collecting such stories with quick notes to our future selves—notes that, when we looked through them last month after Trump lost his reelection bid, read less as presidential history than the diary of a lunatic. We had to go back and make sense of them all, matching our mad scribbles to events that actually happened in the real world. And now we bring them to you.

Critics sometimes alleged that the president’s bad tweets and Borscht Belt schtick were calculated distractions from his controversial policies and criminal personal conduct. We do not think that was the case with the following moments. They are the most absurd of the period’s tragicomic phenomena, the smallest dumb experiences of a big, dumb time to be alive. They are the most baffling pronouncements, grievances, and excuses of a president who never, ever did the homework—the deepest cuts of America’s mush-brain years. We share them here not so you may remember them, but so that you might—finally—feel free to forget just a little bit about the past four years.

Dec. 14, 2015: Amid questions about what CNN described as Trump’s “self-avowed lack of an exercise routine and his indulging diet,” his campaign releases a statement from a doctor that purports to establish his physical bona fides. Despite Trump’s previous promise to release “a full medical report,” Dr. Harold Bornstein simply attests in a short letter that Trump’s lab work is “astonishingly excellent,” that his “physical strength” is “extraordinary,” and that Bornstein believes, “unequivocally,” that the candidate would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” Bornstein, who looks like his picture goes next to the entry for “quack doctor” in the Big Book of Sitcom Character Tropes, later tells CNN that Trump dictated the letter.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20201223114755/https://slate.com/news-and-
politics/2020/12/donald-trump-stupid-moments-dumb-comments.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, December 23, 2020 11:08 AM

Trump was the greatest president in my lifetime.

Now we get to wind the clock back to 2004 and relive GWB all over again for a while.

Trump might be back.

What have you done today to earn your place in this crowded world? :)

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Wednesday, December 23, 2020 4:01 PM

That Jack, is because he is mentally ill like you.

T

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Wednesday, December 23, 2020 7:32 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
That Jack, is because he is mentally ill like you.

T

Learn to English, dummy.

And fix your fucking signature.

What have you done today to earn your place in this crowded world? :)

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Thursday, December 24, 2020 6:50 AM

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Thursday, December 24, 2020 8:09 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
That Jack, is because he is mentally ill like you.

T

Same illness.

grandiose fantasies and behavior, such as a preoccupation with thoughts of personal success, power, and attractiveness or sex appeal
little or no empathy for other people’s emotions or feelings
a significant need for attention, admiration, and recognition
an inflated sense of self-importance, such as a tendency to exaggerate personal talent or achievements
a belief in personal specialness and superiority
a sense of entitlement
a tendency to take advantage of others or exploit people for personal gain
arrogant or conceited behavior and attitudes
a tendency to envy others and believe others envy them
https://www.healthline.com/health/malignant-narcissism#traits

Ding!

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Thursday, December 24, 2020 9:49 AM

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

Alarmists expected all sorts of bad things to come from the Trump presidency, but no one quite expected this: The Democratic Party has sprouted a left wing too extensive and organized for that wretched party’s leaders and donors to marginalize. Even after the Occupy movements of 2011 and the Sanders campaign in 2016, this was unexpected. It is also, by far, the best thing that has happened in American politics in decades.

It probably would not have happened but for Trump. Who would have expected that? Who could have imagined that his unmitigated vileness and his incompetence would have had that unintended effect?

It did, though. And so, calls for social policies comparable to those achieved in advanced social democracies a half century ago have become almost mainstream.

It is essentially an up-dated version of New Deal-Great Society liberalism. Calling it “socialism” can therefore be misleading and even counter-productive in a political culture in which capitalists and capitalist ideologues have expended a great deal of effort and treasure over the past century and a half with a view to assuring that the very word would bear negative connotations.

But northern European social democrats and Sanders-style democratic socialists are cut from the same cloth, and, in a political universe that is rapidly becoming more global (and therefore less provincial) than it was in the twentieth century, there is little to lose and much to gain by pointing this out.

More at https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/12/23/calling-trump-to-account-with-
sticks-and-stones-and-words-as-well/

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, December 24, 2020 1:44 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
That Jack, is because he is mentally ill like you.

T

Same illness.

grandiose fantasies and behavior, such as a preoccupation with thoughts of personal success, power, and attractiveness or sex appeal
little or no empathy for other people’s emotions or feelings
a significant need for attention, admiration, and recognition
an inflated sense of self-importance, such as a tendency to exaggerate personal talent or achievements
a belief in personal specialness and superiority
a sense of entitlement
a tendency to take advantage of others or exploit people for personal gain
arrogant or conceited behavior and attitudes
a tendency to envy others and believe others envy them
https://www.healthline.com/health/malignant-narcissism#traits

Ding!

Don't be a hater Marcos.

One day you too will own your own trash cans that you can burn to the ground without breaking the law.

What have you done today to earn your place in this crowded world? :)

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Thursday, December 24, 2020 9:21 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Don't be a hater Marcos.

One day you too will own your own trash cans that you can burn to the ground without breaking the law.

Your inability to use facts to support your emotion-based fantasy is telling. See ya, wouldn't want to be ya. You're a mess.

So glad I'm not a narcissist like you.

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Thursday, December 24, 2020 9:26 PM

What I Did as a Lawyer in the Trump Justice Department

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Thursday, December 24, 2020 9:38 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Don't be a hater Marcos.

One day you too will own your own trash cans that you can burn to the ground without breaking the law.

Your inability to use facts to support your emotion-based fantasy is telling. See ya, wouldn't want to be ya. You're a mess.

So glad I'm not a narcissist like you.

I'm so sorry that you're not amazing like me dude.

My Christmas gift to you this year is pity, despite the fact that a hateful and shameful, wicked little worm like you doesn't even deserve that.

Not sure who keeps pissing in your cheerios every morning, but may 2021 and the Biden* presidency make all of your dreams finally come true.

What have you done today to earn your place in this crowded world? :)

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Friday, December 25, 2020 7:20 AM

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

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
I saved at least 8 Republican Senators, including Mitch, from losing in the last Rigged (for President) Election. Now they (almost all) sit back and watch me fight against a crooked and vicious foe, the Radical Left Democrats. I will NEVER FORGET!
5:06 PM · Dec 24, 2020·Twitter for iPhone
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1342245390540804096

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Twitter is going wild with their flags, trying hard to suppress even the truth. Just shows how dangerous they are, purposely stifling free speech. Very dangerous for our Country. Does Congress know that this is how Communism starts?
4:59 PM · Dec 24, 2020·Twitter for iPhone
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1342243632833814528

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, December 26, 2020 6:16 AM

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

The Day After Brexit
https://crookedtimber.org/2020/12/24/the-day-after-brexit-2/#more-4824
3

Alex SL 12.25.20 at 11:50 am

As others have pointed out, the motivations for the Leave vote appear to have been varied. Surely there were some who at the time truly believed that it would be possible to get all the benefits of EU membership while shedding the obligations, some who were motivated by (a misunderstanding of) immigration, and some who simply wanted to submit a protest vote but did not seriously expect Leave to win.

Following from the outside of the UK relevant discussions on social media and in comment sections, it seems to me that many of the original motivations and claims have by now fallen away, and predominantly the following two are left:

First, an entirely irrational hatred of the EU, grown out of decades of lies and propaganda in UK media. This motivation is clearly evidenced by the plethora of comments to the effect of “the EU tries to keep us in”, “Barnier wants to punish us”, or “glad we are out”, comparisons of the EU with the USSR, the Nazis, and, most ironically of all, colonial empires, certain recent newspaper title pages directed towards France and Germany, and denunciations of anybody who argues for remain/rejoin as some kind of fifth columnist.

Second, joy and pleasure at seeing remainers in despair. Just today I must have seen at least half a dozen such comments, the latest one reading, and I quote, “hahaha I’ll take this deal just because of this reaction” in response to somebody expressing sadness at how the UK’s international reputation has been trashed by the Internal Market Bill affair. That is a clear pattern, again and again. R: we all, including you Leavers, will lose influence / prosperity / freedom of movement, that makes me sad / angry. L: haha, Remoaner tears, totally worth it just for that, haha.

There are obvious parallels to Trumpism here; swap US ‘liberals’ for the EU, and the methodology is really quite the same. (There is even an odd parallelism between the unfair structure of Senate and Electoral College on the US side and the First Past The Post system and an undefined referendum mandate used as a blank slate on the UK side: imagine just for a moment what Republicans and Fox News would say if a Democrat won the presidency while losing the popular vote, and then what the Leavers and the UK press would have said if Remain had narrowly won and Cameron then taken it as a mandate to join the Eurozone.)

The point of all this is that I really do not know how the impact of Brexit will make a difference. Yes, I am also finding it hard to see that anything will happen to justify the massive effort involved, but that is because I am coming at it from the angle of a rational cost-benefit analysis.

I have no idea what you do when a third of your population, i.e. enough to win elections under a FPTP-style system with a fragmented opposition, would respond that, yes, impoverishing everybody, losing personal freedoms, and dissolving the Union is indeed a price worth paying if that means that black Labour MP here and that feminist comedian over there are visibly upset on Twitter.

I have no idea what you do when large parts of the electorate, many politicians, and most journalists see politics not as a vehicle to formulate coherent, meaningful policies but as a game in which it only matters that you win and the other side loses, no matter how and with what result for the long-term interests of your country. There are many people e.g. in the UK, USA, or Australia who are so visibly proud of themselves or their leaders for stopping policies that would have helped millions or increased their nation’s influence in the world or reduced carbon emissions because, hey, that way they managed to kill that Labor politician’s career or frustrate that Democrat’s agenda.

So, yes, everybody will see and know that Brexit wasn’t worth it economically, nor for the fish, nor for the sovereignty. But it won’t matter. At all. Because the point is to have defeated the other side and to upset them, and everything is just a game, and that’s all there is to it. It will probably take a much more painful crisis than merely having to fill out customs forms and having 5% less GDP to demonstrate to that kind of person that facts, expertise, and policies matter more than the transient joy of having successfully lied oneself to election victory.
12

Alex SL 12.25.20 at 12:27 pm

I should have added, by the way, that nothing shows the two motivations I outlined as clearly as the recent public discussions of the UK-EU negotiations.

The willingness of Brexiters to accept obligations in trade deals with partners such as Japan and the USA that they reject as outrageous infringements on UK sovereignty if agreed with the EU demonstrates that these particular concerns are not actually about sovereignty but about irrational hatred of the EU, specifically.

The way the UK-EU deal is discussed in terms of “Boris has won”, “on how many points has the UK side won – a scorecard”, and the weird piece of Frost fan-fiction slash hagiography published in the Guardian today shows the obsession with winning and outmaneuvering the other side as opposed to formulating beneficial policy in the framework of a long-term strategy.

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, December 26, 2020 8:54 AM

Devin Nunes Loses Lawsuit Accusing The Washington Post of Conspiring with House Democrats to Defame Him

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/devin-nunes-loses-lawsuit-accu
sing-the-washington-post-of-conspiring-with-house-democrats-to-defame-him/ar-BB1cezfV?ocid=msedgntp

T

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Sunday, December 27, 2020 7:06 AM

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

The Case For Democrats Moving To A Red State

I’d spent years denouncing Trump’s gleeful destruction of the country that I grew up believing in, using the strongest language I could muster. So why am I only now getting all the hate-spam?

Then a possible explanation hit me: namely, the sort of person who’d leave such comments is utterly impervious to moral condemnation. The only thing such a person cares about—indeed, as it turns out, feels a volcanic need to shout down—is someone articulating an actual plausible path to removing Trump’s resentment-fueled minority from power. If this is right, then I’m proud to have hit a nerve.

1) The US is now a failed democracy, with a president who’s considering declaring martial law to avoid conceding a lost election, and with the majority of his party eager to follow him arbitrarily far into the abyss. Even assuming, as I do, that the immediate putsch will fail, the Republic will not magically return to normal.

2) The survival of Enlightenment values on Earth now depends, in large part, on the total electoral humiliation and defeat of the forces that enabled Trump—something that the last election failed to deliver.

3) Alas, ever since it absorbed the Southern racists in the 1960s, the Republican Party has maintained a grip on power wholly out of proportion to its numbers through anti-democratic means. The most durable of these means are built into the Constitution itself: the Electoral College, the over-representation of sparsely-populated rural states in the Senate, and the gerrymandering of Congressional districts. Every effort to fix these anachronisms, whether by legislation or Constitutional amendment, has been blocked for generations. It’s fantasy to imagine the beneficiaries of these unjust advantages ever voluntarily giving them up.

4) Accordingly, the survival of the nation might come down to whether enough Americans, in deep-blue areas like California and New York and Massachusetts, are willing to pick up and move to where their votes actually count.

5) The pandemic has awoken tens of millions of people to the actual practical feasibility of working from home or in a different time zone from their employer. The culture has finally caught up to the abridgment of distance that the Internet, smartphones, and videoconferencing achieved well over a decade ago.

6) Still, one doesn’t expect Brooklynites to settle by the thousands on remote mountaintops. And even if they did, there are many remote mountaintops, so the transplants’ power could be diluted to near nothing. Better for the transplants to concentrate themselves in a few Schelling points: ideally, cities where they could both swing the national electoral calculus and actually want to live.

7) There’s been a spate of recent articles about the possible exodus of tech companies and professionals from the Bay Area, because of whatever combination of sky-high rents, NIMBYism, taxes, mismanagement, wildfires, blackouts, and the pandemic having removed the once-overwhelming reasons to be in the Bay. Oft-mentioned alternatives include Miami, Denver, and of course my own adopted hometown of Austin, TX, where Elon Musk and Oracle just announced they’re moving.

8) If you were trying to optimize your environment for urban Blue-Tribeyness—indie music, craft beer, ironic tattoos, Bernie Sanders yard signs, etc. etc.—but subject to living in an important red or purple state, where your vote could plausibly contribute to a historic political realignment of the US—then you couldn’t do much better than Austin. Where else is in the running? Atlanta, Houston, San Antonio, Pittsburgh?

9) to 18) continue at https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5209

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, December 27, 2020 8:28 AM

Trumptards are working overtime to destroy all democracy.

Sign: https://defendourconstitution.org/

We the People will not allow unelected, unaccountable delegates to write their agenda into our Constitution. Our state lawmakers must stand firm -- and reject and rescind calls for an Article V Convention.

A major threat to our democracy is gaining serious traction -- thanks to secretive, wealthy special interest groups like the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Far-right groups are spending big and wielding their influence with state lawmakers, demanding that they vote to call an Article V Constitutional Convention. At this unprecedented event, unaccountable and unelected delegates could propose ANY amendments they want to our Constitution.

That could mean gutting environmental regulations... rolling back civil rights advances… or even shredding our First Amendment protections.

We need to show our lawmakers that we’re paying attention -- and that we won’t let them gamble with our rights. Add your name now to defend our Constitution.

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Sunday, December 27, 2020 10:00 AM

Trumpatards are mostly angry people who are losing out on the best life has to offer. Then there are those who work to exploit these same people for their own personal gain.

T

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Monday, December 28, 2020 7:50 AM

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

Republicans have been remarkably successful in labeling Democrats as socialists. But Democratic proposals that get tagged as “socialism” amount to little more than expanding the safety net, bringing the United States closer to Sweden, Canada, or Germany, all prosperous, democratic, capitalist countries. By contrast, Republicans are the ones that are gumming up the gears of American capitalism, promoting policies to prop up aging, anachronistic industries and, worst of all, enabling the imposition of environmental harms far in excess of what it would cost to avoid them. Republicans say they are in favor of capitalism, but they are actually in favor of crony capitalism, which tips the scales in favor of their favorite industries. Capitalism can be a tough master: The point of capitalism is that competition causes some industries to fail. But protecting industries from failure in exchange for political benefit is far worse: It is a dangerously short step to socialism. And traditional socialism necessarily implies authoritarianism—how else is a country to undertake central economic planning except by an authoritarian government? That is actually where the Republican Party is taking us.

Exhibit A: This past summer, as the COVID-19 crisis pummeled markets and industries of almost all types, 36 Republican senators and representatives singled out energy companies and wrote to President Donald Trump urging him to “prevent financial institutions from discriminating against America’s energy sector.” Discriminating? Investment firms such as BlackRock were considering divesting their holdings in fossil fuel energy stocks as gas, coal, and oil prices plummeted. Republicans, those rugged individualists, were seeking to forbid private investment firms from divesting their fossil fuel holdings. That is the essence of socialism: authoritarian government dictating private investments.

Exhibit B: The Trump administration has spent more than $1 billion of taxpayer money trying to figure out how to capture the global-warming carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants, so as to be able to keep them running. That, despite the fact that not a single coal-fired power plant has been proposed for construction since 2017. But that has not discouraged Republicans from trying to prop up coal.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20201228124613/https://slate.com/news-and-
politics/2020/12/republicans-fossil-fuel-industry-crony-capitalism.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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Monday, December 28, 2020 10:37 AM

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Monday, December 28, 2020 10:49 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Trumpatards are mostly angry people who are losing out on the best life has to offer. Then there are those who work to exploit these same people for their own personal gain.

T

We've got at least 4 years of gross and angry posts from you and Marcos and Second and Nilbog here.

You certainly don't seem to know how to enjoy life.

Looks like you're projecting again.

What have you done today to earn your place in this crowded world? :)

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Monday, December 28, 2020 11:40 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 THG:
Trumpatards are mostly angry people who are losing out on the best life has to offer. Then there are those who work to exploit these same people for their own personal gain.

We've got at least 4 years of gross and angry posts from you and Marcos and Second and Nilbog here.

You certainly don't seem to know how to enjoy life.

Looks like you're projecting again.

6ix, have you not watched a movie about WWII? The bad guys get destroyed for our entertainment. Some of the highest quality movies show us that the bad guys (the Nazis) think they are, at least in their own minds, the good guys, which makes it even more entertaining to see them suffer and die. You probably cannot understand that Trump is the bad guy who thinks he is a good guy. But then again you heaped ridiculous amounts of praise on the movie Joker, which is about a bad guy who doesn't die for what evil he has done -- numerous murders -- his mother for one. As reminder, Trump is on a murder spree right now, killing prisoners. And he is pardoning murderers.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/15/trump-is-spending-the-la
st-days-of-his-presidency-on-a-literal-killing-spree
www.npr.org/2020/12/23/949679837/shock-and-dismay-after-trump-pardons-
blackwater-guards-who-killed-14-iraqi-civil

Joker
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=36&tid=63327&mid=10857
85#1085785

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, December 28, 2020 12:29 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Trumpatards are mostly angry people who are losing out on the best life has to offer. Then there are those who work to exploit these same people for their own personal gain.

We've got at least 4 years of gross and angry posts from you and Marcos and Second and Nilbog here.

You certainly don't seem to know how to enjoy life.

Looks like you're projecting again.
6ix, Some of the highest quality movies show us that the bad guys (the Nazis) think they are, at least in their own minds, the good guys, which makes it even more entertaining to see them suffer and die. You probably cannot understand that Trump is the bad guy who thinks he is a good guy. But then again you heaped ridiculous amounts of praise on the movie Joker, which is about a bad guy who doesn't die for what evil he has done -- numerous murders -- his mother for one. As reminder, Trump is on a murder spree right now, killing prisoners. And he is pardoning murderers.

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Monday, December 28, 2020 12:40 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Trumpatards are mostly angry people who are losing out on the best life has to offer. Then there are those who work to exploit these same people for their own personal gain.

We've got at least 4 years of gross and angry posts from you and Marcos and Second and Nilbog here.

You certainly don't seem to know how to enjoy life.

Looks like you're projecting again.
6ix, have you not watched a movie about WWII? The bad guys get destroyed for our entertainment. Some of the highest quality movies show us that the bad guys (the Nazis) think they are, at least in their own minds, the good guys, which makes it even more entertaining to see them suffer and die. You probably cannot understand that Trump is the bad guy who thinks he is a good guy. But then again you heaped ridiculous amounts of praise on the movie Joker, which is about a bad guy who doesn't die for what evil he has done -- numerous murders -- his mother for one. As reminder, Trump is on a murder spree right now, killing prisoners. And he is pardoning murderers.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/15/trump-is-spending-the-la
st-days-of-his-presidency-on-a-literal-killing-spree
www.npr.org/2020/12/23/949679837/shock-and-dismay-after-trump-pardons-
blackwater-guards-who-killed-14-iraqi-civil

Joker
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=36&tid=63327&mid=10857
85#1085785

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

How much does Emperor Xi pay you to write this bullshit everyday?

What have you done today to earn your place in this crowded world? :)

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Monday, December 28, 2020 2:07 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:

How much does Emperor Xi pay you to write this bullshit everyday?

In the real world, not just the movies, the Germans believed they were the good guys in WWII almost to the end, when they lost. Also in the real world, the Confederates believed they were the good guys in the Civil War even past the end, when they lost. Recently, Trump vetoed the defense bill because "Mr Trump is objecting to provisions that remove Confederate leaders' names from military bases." Trump honors the traitors. The Trump voters I know in Texas don't think the Confederates were the bad guys. They say things like 'Trump and the Rebels are alright.' Trump voters are very confused about what is right and wrong, as were 74,216,747 Nazis who survived WWII.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election

Trump voters are also very confused about what is the right and wrong way to be financially successful in America, but that is another story, perhaps connected to their politics since it is the same brain making both financial and political choices. Why would their brain do one better than the other? Most likely the brain would be bad at both.

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, December 28, 2020 4:05 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:

How much does Emperor Xi pay you to write this bullshit everyday?

“If the coronavirus death rate in the United States were similar to that of Australia, it would have had 187,661 fewer COVID-19 deaths . . . and, compared with Canada, it would have had 117,622 fewer deaths.” And another hundred thousand US deaths have accumulated since October. So amplify those numbers accordingly, please, as this president’s personal death-toll on the nation.
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2020/12/normalmancing-the-afterm
ath.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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Tuesday, December 29, 2020 8:14 AM

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

Why? A religious historian explains why Trump wasn’t a trade-off for American evangelicals

Sean Illing - Help me understand why masculinity and nationalism are so foundational to the contemporary evangelical worldview.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez - What I look to as a historian is this critical period in the post-World War II era when these gender ideals fuse with anti-communist ideology and this overarching desire to defend Christian America. The idea that takes root during this period is that Christian masculinity, Christian men, are the only thing that can protect America from godless communism.

At the same time, you have the civil rights movement destabilizing white evangelicalism and conceptions of white masculinity. Then you have feminism destabilizing traditional masculinity. And all of this comes together for evangelicals, who see their place in the culture slipping away, and they see their political power starting to erode because of this cultural displacement. That’s the moment when you see Christian nationalism linking together with a very militant conception of Christian manhood, because it’s up to the Christian man to defend his family against all sorts of domestic dangers in the culture wars, and also to defend Christian America against communists and against military threats.

Sean - So the idea is that Christian masculinity is the only thing that can preserve traditional American culture, and that belief is what precipitates the turn toward a more muscular Christianity?

Kristin - That’s exactly right. So when you think of evangelicals, a lot of people think of the term “family values.” But I actually went back to the origins of family values evangelicalism and I was really surprised just how much it was placed in the context of foreign policy, how much it was in the service of defending the American nation. If you go back and listen to James Dobson of Focus on the Family and read the books that emerged during this period, this is all very clear.

Sean - The phrase “family values” is typically hurled at evangelicals in order to call out their hypocrisy, but I think your book makes pretty clear that they’re not hypocrites at all. They only appear hypocritical if you misunderstand what they actually value.

Kristin - Exactly. If you understand what family values evangelicalism has always entailed — and at the very heart of it is white patriarchy, and often a militant white patriarchy — then suddenly, all sorts of evangelical political positions and cultural positions fall into place.

So evangelicals are not acting against their deeply held values when they elect Trump; they’re affirming them. Their actual views on immigration policy, on torture, on gun control, on Black Lives Matter and police brutality — they all line up pretty closely with Trump’s. These are their values, and Trump represents them.

In the ’40s and ’50s, it’s all about anti-communism. But once the civil rights revolution takes hold, it becomes about defending the stability of the traditional social order against all the cultural revolutions of the ’60s. But the really interesting moment for me is in the early ’90s when the Cold War comes to an end. You would think there would be a kind of resetting after the great enemy had been vanquished, but that’s not what happened.

Instead, we get the modern culture wars over sex and gender identity and all the rest. And then 9/11 happens and Islam becomes the new major threat. So it’s always shifting.

More at www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/7/9/21291493/donald-trump-evangel
ical-christians-kristin-kobes-du-mez

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, December 29, 2020 12:53 PM

Trump Caller Hilariously Falls Apart On Simplest Of Questions From James O'Brien. This caller told James O'Brien that the four Congresswomen who Donald Trump criticized are trying to create a socialist country. But his point fell apart when he couldn't name them or say what socialism actually is!

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Wednesday, December 30, 2020 10:22 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Oonjerah:

The way I was taught, both in & out of school ...

The Founding Fathers* seriously wanted Freedom of Religion in this country.
Naturally, that includes freedom from religion.

I argued with a lay preacher about it once; he was certain that
they intended this to be a Christian nation. ...
An odd point of view, since he was much better educated than I was.

* Adams, Franklin, Hamilton, Jay, Jefferson, Madison, and Washington.

... oooOO}{OOooo ...

This is a gem because of the wisdom it contains.

T

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Wednesday, December 30, 2020 10:29 AM

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Thursday, December 31, 2020 2:03 PM

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

The Life in The Simpsons Is No Longer Attainable

The most famous dysfunctional family of 1990s television enjoyed, by today’s standards, an almost dreamily secure existence.

The 1996 episode “Much Apu About Nothing” shows Homer’s paycheck. He grosses $479.60 per week, making his annual income about $25,000.

Adjusted for inflation, Homer’s 1996 income of $25,000 would be roughly $42,000 today, about 60 percent of the 2019 median U.S. income. But salary aside, the world for someone like Homer Simpson is far less secure.
www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-270.html

The purchasing power of Homer’s paycheck, moreover, has shrunk dramatically. The median house costs 2.4 times what it did in the mid-’90s.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS

Health-care expenses for one person are three times what they were 25 years ago.
https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Tr
ends-and-Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/NationalHealthAccountsHistorical

The median tuition for a four-year college is 1.8 times what it was then. In today’s world, Marge would have to get a job too. But even then, they would struggle. Inflation and stagnant wages have led to a rise in two-income households, but to an erosion of economic stability for the people who occupy them.

Last year, my gross income was about $42,000—the amount Homer would be making today. It was the second-highest-earning year of my career. I wanted to buy a home, but no bank was willing to finance a mortgage, especially since I had less than $5,000 to make a down payment. However, my father offered me a zero-down, no-interest contract. Without him, I would not have been able to buy the house.

I finally paid off my medical debt. But after taking into account all of my expenses, my adjusted gross income was only $19. And with the capitalized interest on my student loans adding thousands to the balance, my net worth is still negative.

I don’t have Bart, Lisa, and Maggie to feed or clothe or buy Christmas presents for. I’m not sure how I’d make it if I did.

Someone I follow on Twitter, Erika Chappell, recently encapsulated my feelings about The Simpsons in a tweet: “That a show which was originally about a dysfunctional mess of a family barely clinging to middle class life in the aftermath of the Reagan administration has now become aspirational is frankly the most on the nose manifestation of capitalist American decline I can think of.”

https://web.archive.org/web/20201231175050if_/https://www.theatlantic.
com/ideas/archive/2020/12/life-simpsons-no-longer-attainable/617499/

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, December 31, 2020 5:23 PM

Ok

T

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Friday, January 1, 2021 9:06 AM

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

The runoff elections for two U.S. Senate seats in Georgia next Tuesday have the potential to inject volatility into a high-flying stock market that has mostly looked past political turbulence in Washington this year.

Market participants say any complacency among investors could be misplaced, since if the Democrats win both senate seats, then the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden would have control of both chambers of Congress and may move to reverse the corporate tax cuts of 2017, putting company earnings and stock prices under some pressure.

However, a Democratic victory could also boost equities by raising expectations for more aggressive fiscal stimulus measures next year, on top of the billions of dollars deployed already by Congress.

These are reasons why the Georgia runoff elections could turn into a “big deal” for Wall Street, Michael Reynolds, investment strategy officer at Glenmede, said in an interview.

“If we get a shot in the arm with a larger fiscal package, you need to balance that out with the specter of increasing corporate tax rates,” said Reynolds.

Most analysts are forecasting a victory for the incumbent Republican senators from Georgia, and Betting market PredictIt gives Republicans a 65% chance of staying in charge of the Senate as of Thursday.

www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-why-the-georgia-runoff-elections-for-t
he-u-s-senate-could-turn-into-a-big-deal-for-markets-11609443446

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, January 1, 2021 10:19 AM

All that shits above my pay grade two.

T

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Friday, January 1, 2021 11:17 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
All that shits above my pay grade two.

If either Democrat running for Georgian Senator loses the runoff election, then Mitch McConnell will be majority leader in the Senate. Why is that important? You will possibly lose $2,000, THG.

Mitch McConnell introduced a bill Tuesday linking $2,000 stimulus checks to a repeal of Section 230 and the creation of a new commission to study election fraud, a move likely to doom the increased direct payments.

If Republicans actually disagreed with Mitch, they'd replace him as majority leader. McConnell is nothing more than a scapegoat shielding the party from wildly unpopular policies.

Thank you Mitch McConnell for making it explicitly clear that if Georgia votes in Democrats Ossoff and Warnock, most everybody, but not me, will get $2,000 in 3 weeks, and if they do not then we will get nothing for the next two years because Mitch will remain in a powerful position that allows him to kill just about anything President Biden might want to do, such as mail out $2,000 checks.

Joe Biden, who has promised to deliver more economic relief to Americans in the early days of his administration, has endorsed sending $2,000 stimulus checks to qualifying individuals and households.
www.newsweek.com/what-joe-biden-has-said-about-2000-stimulus-check-ame
ricans-1558107

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, January 1, 2021 11:52 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
All that shits above my pay grade two.
If either Democrat running for Georgian Senator loses the runoff election, then Mitch McConnell will be majority leader in the Senate. Why is that important? You will possibly lose $2,000, THG.

Mitch McConnell introduced a bill Tuesday linking $2,000 stimulus checks to a repeal of Section 230 and the creation of a new commission to study election fraud, a move likely to doom the increased direct payments.

If Republicans actually disagreed with Mitch, they'd replace him as majority leader. McConnell is nothing more than a scapegoat shielding the party from wildly unpopular policies.

Thank you Mitch McConnell for making it explicitly clear that if Georgia votes in Democrats Ossoff and Warnock, most everybody, but not me, will get $2,000 in 3 weeks, and if they do not then we will get nothing for the next two years because Mitch will remain in a powerful position that allows him to kill just about anything President Biden might want to do, such as mail out $2,000 checks.

Joe Biden, who has promised to deliver more economic relief to Americans in the early days of his administration, has endorsed sending $2,000 stimulus checks to qualifying individuals and households.
www.newsweek.com/what-joe-biden-has-said-about-2000-stimulus-check-ame
ricans-1558107

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

What I mean by above my pay grade is what the stock market will do. I understand how Moscow Mitch operates and what is at stake in the senate runoffs in Georgia. I sent money. In fact for the first time I sent money several times this election period and am not disappointed I did.

I agree with the gist of this post. I just avoid going into the weeds concerning some topics. That's because we have posters here who distort even the most basic of truths, which then becomes the foundation of their debate. I focus on that.

T

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Sunday, January 3, 2021 1:33 PM

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

‘Illegitimate’ president claims against Biden harken to 1868, the first Presidential election after Lincoln's assassination

Historians say there’s no equivalent for Trump’s response to his loss.

Trump has spent the weeks since the election trying to undermine the results, claiming without evidence the election was “stolen” and repeatedly calling Biden an “illegitimate president.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s failed attempt last week to convince the Supreme Court to overturn election results in four battleground states was widely supported by the state’s Republicans, including both Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick .

Stephanie McCurry, a Columbia University historian specializing in the Civil War and Reconstruction, said the moment parallels the response from white southerners to Ulysses Grant’s election in 1868.

Southern Democrats never accepted Grant’s presidency as legitimate because they believed it was based on Black votes, she said. That same view was taken toward Black senators, congressmen and members of state legislatures. The Republican Party was viewed as “the enemy’s party,” she said.

“It’s like what we’re hearing now — that the vote was illegitimate,” she said. “This is what worries me now. What happens now? We’re heading into a period that’s looking increasingly like there’s a chunk of the population that won’t concede the legitimacy of the election of Joe Biden.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin beat many Texas Republicans to acknowledging Biden’s win, including more than a dozen Texas congressmen and Sen. Cruz, who had agreed to argue Trump’s case before the Supreme Court.

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/As-American-po
litics-grow-still-more-divisive-15812248.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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Sunday, January 3, 2021 1:35 PM

Good post SECOND. I'll sum up what Trumps doing in two words; attempted coup. Between the two of us I'd say we nailed it.

T

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Sunday, January 3, 2021 2:15 PM

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

Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert sued to empower Vice President Mike Pence this week to throw out electoral votes against Trump when he presides over the congressional session. So ridiculous. If Gohmert were right -- if the vice president could, at his own whim, simply discard certain electoral votes while accepting others, then on January 6, 2017, Vice President Joe Biden could have decided to install President Hillary Clinton, rather than Donald Trump. And on January 6, 2001, Vice President Al Gore could have named himself the winner of the 2000 election. You can see the absurdity here.

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, January 3, 2021 5:44 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:

Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert sued to empower Vice President Mike Pence this week to throw out electoral votes against Trump when he presides over the congressional session. So ridiculous. If Gohmert were right -- if the vice president could, at his own whim, simply discard certain electoral votes while accepting others, then on January 6, 2017, Vice President Joe Biden could have decided to install President Hillary Clinton, rather than Donald Trump. And on January 6, 2001, Vice President Al Gore could have named himself the winner of the 2000 election. You can see the absurdity here.

The Consistency of Trumps allies relying on alternative facts is still at 100%. It reminds me of what jack=ass Polish Russian collaborators kiki and sig do. They're learning the hard way you cannot be right if what you say is based on lies and subterfuge.

T

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Monday, January 4, 2021 6:54 AM

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

A “Seditious Caucus” Stunt to Defraud America

Although the State Department’s final report on Clinton’s email use, issued in October 2019, declared there was no systematic or deliberate mishandling of classified information, the constant barrage of accusations made the email story the most important story of the 2016 election. It outweighed all the scandals involving then-candidate Donald Trump: the ones involving sexual assault, financial corruption, mocking of a disabled reporter, attacks on immigrants, and so on.

A study by Duncan J. Watts and David M. Rothschild in the Columbia Journalism Review noted that in the 2016 election season there were 65,000 sentences in the media about Clinton’s email use but only 40,000 about all of Trump’s scandals combined. There were twice as many sentences about Clinton’s emails than about her policies. The authors wrote, “in just six days, the New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election.” The email scandal likely cost Clinton the 2016 election, and even now, after the State Department cleared her of wrongdoing, many Americans still think Clinton mishandled classified information in her emails.

Trump tried the same tactic in 2020. Smearing an opponent through investigations was at the heart of the Ukraine scandal of 2019. Trump pressured new Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, not to start an investigation of Hunter Biden and the company on whose board he had sat, but rather simply to announce that he was starting an investigation. An announcement would be enough to get picked up by the American news media so that story after story would convince voters that Hunter Biden and, by extension, his father, were involved in corruption, even without evidence.

Then, just before the election, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani drummed up the story that Hunter Biden had left a laptop that contained incriminating evidence against both Bidens at a repair shop, and Republican leadership clamored for investigations– this time to no avail because the story was so outrageous.

“Now,” they are alleging the need for an investigation into irregularities in the 2020 election, although they have failed repeatedly to produce any evidence of such irregularities in court. Their argument is that the country needs an investigation to relieve people’s worries about the legitimacy of the election, but those worries have been created precisely by the unjustified accusations of Republican leaders. An investigation would simply convince people that the election results are questionable. They are not.

The attempt of the senators to get Congress to appoint an investigatory committee into alleged fraud in the election is dangerous and unprecedented, and they know it. In their statement, they tried to suggest they are simply following the precedent established by Congress after the chaotic 1876 election, but the two situations are very different.

In 1876, elections were organized by the parties themselves and were notoriously corrupt. Parties printed their own ballots in a distinctive color with only their own slate of electors. Men dropped the ballots for their party, unmarked, into a box, but their votes were not secret: how men voted was obvious from the colored ballots, at the very least. Politicians watching the polls knew exactly what the counts would be, and it was not unusual for ballot boxes to be either stuffed or broken open before results were reported.

In Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina in 1876, Democrats appeared to have won the election, but there was no dispute that they had terrorized Republican voters to keep them from the polls. The results were a hopeless mess: in South Carolina, for example, 101% of all eligible voters cast ballots. Florida and Louisiana both reported more reasonable numbers of voters, but they each sent competing sets of electors to Congress. In both states, different officials signed off on different certificates of election, so it was not at all clear which certificate was the official one. In this utter confusion, Congress established a committee to figure out what had actually happened.

None of that is the case today. The processes were transparent and observed by Republicans as well as Democrats. The Trump campaign had the right to challenge vote counts and did so; each turned up virtually the same result as the original count: Biden won, by a lot. Each state in the country has delivered to Congress certified results that have been signed by the state governors, who nowadays have the final say in the state certification process.

This should be a done deal. But Trump Republicans are trying to undermine the election, and Biden’s administration, with a disinformation campaign. This is about more than this particular election. It is clear that a faction of today’s Republican Party refuses to accept the legitimacy of a Democratic president, no matter how big the victory. They are working to smear Biden by investigation, as has become their signature move.

Democracy depends on a willingness to transfer power peacefully from one group of leaders to another. By revealing that they refuse to do so, the members of the “Sedition Caucus,” as they are being called on social media, are proving they are unworthy of elected office.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-2-2021

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, January 4, 2021 10:02 AM

I have no problem with people who were blatantly cheated defending themselves.

The only coup was the Establishment cheating to throw Trump out.

Enjoy the next 4 years of war and getting nothing you thought you were voting for.

The first draft of anything is shit. :)

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Monday, January 4, 2021 3:11 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.

from the LATimes (which is behind a paywall) republished in Yahoo

Republican congressional wins in California won't avert party's 'death spiral,' analysts say
https://news.yahoo.com/republican-congressional-wins-california-wont-1
40052398.html

Republicans regained 4 of 7 House seats in 2020 that they lost in 2018.

This article makes the same argument that the DNC* was aiming at prior to 2016 ... democrats*! because ... "demographics", as if people were born with Democratic* genes along with their personal identities. But none of the Asians I knew voted for Hillary*, and 2 of the seat-flippers of 2020 were Korean immigrants, speaking to the American dream of hard work and success. (Of course their successes are more complicated than being self-made women, but nuance is lost in politics.)

I don't think state or national democrats* have a lock on California politics due to "demographics". Democrats* will still have to earn votes.

Oh, and playing out in all this is a 'repeal Gov Newsom' (D*) push due to the pandemic.

If democrats* don't do any different, how are they any better?

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Tuesday, January 5, 2021 9:33 AM

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Tuesday, January 5, 2021 9:36 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I have no problem with people who were blatantly cheated defending themselves.

The only coup was the Establishment cheating to throw Trump out.

Enjoy the next 4 years of war and getting nothing you thought you were voting for.

The first draft of anything is shit. :)

Biden got more votes.

Trump never got higher than about 40% approval, ever, because people with 3 digit IQs see him for the stupid, evil, openly criminal psycho he truly is.

Trump got his ass kicked because true American patriots stood up and got rid of him. No cheating required, dummy. Most fair election, ever.

Biden is our fairly elected next president. Trump will spend the rest of his life trying to avoid prison.

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Tuesday, January 5, 2021 10:00 AM

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

CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale said President Donald Trump’s speech in Georgia on Monday night seemed to come from an “alternate universe” given how many lies it contained.

“The president is not even remotely connected to reality,” Dale told the news network’s Don Lemon. “Either he’s lying, his brain has been completely captured by internet weirdos, or both.”

But Dale said the most striking thing about Trump’s lie-filled speech in Georgia on Monday was that it boring.

“Have you ever sat at a family gathering, or at a bar or on a date and had someone just talk your ear off ? complete nonsense ? for like an hour, and you feel like you can’t escape?” he said. “That’s all of us right now because that’s the president right now.”

Then he got to the work of debunking Trump’s myriad lies:

More at https://www.huffpost.com/entry/daniel-dale-fact-checker-trump-brain_n_
5ff3fa66c5b65a92291106b0

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, January 5, 2021 12:47 PM

Watched the video reaver, dead on correct. Dead on correct.

T

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Tuesday, January 5, 2021 12:48 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale said President Donald Trump’s speech in Georgia on Monday night seemed to come from an “alternate universe” given how many lies it contained.

“The president is not even remotely connected to reality,” Dale told the news network’s Don Lemon. “Either he’s lying, his brain has been completely captured by internet weirdos, or both.”

But Dale said the most striking thing about Trump’s lie-filled speech in Georgia on Monday was that it boring.

“Have you ever sat at a family gathering, or at a bar or on a date and had someone just talk your ear off ? complete nonsense ? for like an hour, and you feel like you can’t escape?” he said. “That’s all of us right now because that’s the president right now.”

Then he got to the work of debunking Trump’s myriad lies:

More at https://www.huffpost.com/entry/daniel-dale-fact-checker-trump-brain_n_
5ff3fa66c5b65a92291106b0

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

fascinating

T

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Wednesday, January 6, 2021 7:03 AM

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

Ending Poverty in the United States Would Be Easy

Question: You both have worked with poor people in the United States for a long time. But you write that it took a while for you to come to your own realizations that our approach to confronting poverty is fundamentally flawed.

Answer: At the policy level, we create systems that make it hard for people to be self-sufficient.

For example, many people who are part of the TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) or workforce development programs are trained to become certified nursing assistants, CNAs. That’s a very important job that we need to do. But it is a poverty-wage job. By and large, people who work in those positions don’t have workplace benefits and are not paid a living wage. But the government trains someone to be a CNA and then it can feel like it’s done something because it’s gotten that person off of the rolls.

At the soup kitchen where I worked, you would always have people after the meal asking, “Do you have 75 cents for the bus?” I used to think, gosh, we should teach them planning skills, how to think more long-term. Because they knew when they came to the soup kitchen, they had to get back home. Later on, I realized: they were hungry, and they got 75 cents somehow to come to the soup kitchen to eat in the first place. That was the wise survival strategy.

So often we make judgments about poor people’s motivation and cognition that are really a reflection of not having resources. I do a lot of work in the criminal legal system, and motivation is a big deal. Do they show up for their appointments? Do they return phone calls?

Well, to show up for an appointment, you need transportation and childcare. To return phone calls, you need a working phone. The written notices may be written in a language they don’t speak. And on and on. It’s very much like that woman who didn’t have toilet paper: she didn’t need a lecture on being a better parent; she needed toilet paper. And the guys at the soup kitchen that I was making judgments about — they needed 75 cents for the bus.

Poverty is simply not having enough money to meet your needs. There is nothing more complicated about it than that. And we live in the richest nation in the world, where there is plenty of money. So if we have the political will, we could end poverty.

There are lots of different ways to do it. A living wage is necessary, and a universal basic income can help. We talk in the book about universal health care, housing supports, about making water and electricity and heat a public good. Other countries do all this, and there is no reason we could not do so as well.

Question: You mention other nations’ approaches to basic needs. The United States has a dramatically higher poverty rate than other wealthy nations and dramatically greater levels of income and wealth inequality. What are other countries doing right that we don’t do here?

Answer: They establish some sort of floor. There is no floor in the United States — there is no depth of poverty that you can’t fall to. We have made TANF time-limited, we have enacted policies to make SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly Food Stamps] time-limited. You can be literally left out in the cold here.

One of the biggest things that’s different about the United States than most other countries is that you can become bankrupt due to medical debt. Not having guaranteed health care and the likelihood of accumulating debt related to health care is uniquely American and incredibly dangerous. Many of the other issues poor people struggle with are smaller dollar numbers, but you can go into hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for medical issues. You talk to people around the world, and they just are gobsmacked that we allow this.

More at https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/12/broke-in-america-ending-us-poverty

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, January 6, 2021 9:45 AM