A thread for Democrats Only by THGRRI

Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Maybe our worthless press would be happier if Joe Biden called them 'fake news' and 'enemy of the people' and barked incoherent bullshit at them while being drowned out by a helicopter. So sorry that quiet competence is boring you, you scandal-starved fucks.

That's hilarious coming from one of the dudes here who can't stop posting about Trump, two months into Biden's* administration.

Do try to enjoy the next two years. Democrats will be thrown out soon.

--------------------------------------------------

" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher

Collection of links to Second's, Nilbog's and Marcos' death threats: https://cutt.ly/tkCvEX6

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Tuesday, March 16, 2021 12:37 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:

That's hilarious coming from one of the dudes here who can't stop posting about Trump, two months into Biden's* administration.

Do try to enjoy the next two years. Democrats will be thrown out soon.

Trump has not paid his taxes in 20 years and he is still refusing to pay. Now that he is not President, Trump can pay, but only if he is forced. He won't be volunteering to pay.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller documented efforts by the Trump campaign to impede his investigation into Russia’s attack on our election. He decided that because he was unable to charge a sitting president with a crime, he would not conclude whether any of these efforts amounted to the crime of obstruction of justice. Now that he is not President, Trump can go to jail, but only if the government uses force on him. He won't be volunteering to plead guilty to obstruction, same as he won't voluntarily pay his taxes.
https://www.justsecurity.org/64679/did-trump-and-his-team-successfully
-obstruct-muellers-investigation/

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, March 16, 2021 1:16 PM

Didn't care when he was president. Certainly don't give a shit now.

Collection of links to Second's, Nilbog's and Marcos' death threats: https://cutt.ly/tkCvEX6

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Tuesday, March 16, 2021 3:48 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Didn't care when he was president. Certainly don't give a shit now.

That's because you are, as you've repeatedly proven, a complete moron.

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Tuesday, March 16, 2021 3:50 PM

It's Time to Roll Back Reagan's Middle-Class Tax Increases!
https://www.opednews.com/articles/It-s-Time-to-Roll-Back-Rea-by-Thom-H
artmann-Background-Checks_Billionaires_Reaganomics_Retired-210315-719.html

Back in 1981, Reagan passed the biggest tax cut for billionaires and giant corporations in the history of the world, lowering the top rate from around 74% to around 28% and shoveling, in today's money, trillions to the top 1%.

The result was an explosion in the budget deficit the following year, so Reagan decided something had to be done, requiring the largest tax increases since World War II. But, being a Republican, he put it almost entirely on the shoulders of working people, unemployed people and those receiving Social Security.

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Tuesday, March 16, 2021 4:16 PM

‘It’s the Biggest Assault on Voting Rights Since the End of Reconstruction’
https://fair.org/home/its-the-biggest-assault-on-voting-rights-since-t
he-end-of-reconstruction/

Participants in the January 6 attack on the Capitol were fueled by a mixture of things, but importantly by a big lie about the theft of the election, itself fueled by a multiyear GOP effort to propagate urgent concerns about voter fraud—that effort abetted by some media that now express dismay at the not-unpredictable effects.

But while the need to defend the integrity of US elections may be, for some, a sincere delusion, if you will, that’s not what’s at work when the Republican chair of a Georgia county board of elections demands that voter access be restricted, “so that we at least have a shot at winning.” Or when Donald Trump declared of a defeated franchise-expanding congressional proposal last year, “They had things, levels of voting, that if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

Voter suppression is a Republican strategy. And it’s not slowed or shamed in the wake of January 6, but moving full steam ahead. Media’s ability to confront assaults on democracy as precisely that will mean letting go of their go-to bipartisan balancing act, woefully inadequate to a crisis that will shape the political landscape for years to come.

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Tuesday, March 16, 2021 4:23 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:
Didn't care when he was president. Certainly don't give a shit now.

Trumptards "don't give a shit", which is why they struggle to remain middle class. Being crazy and stupid doesn't help them achieve success, either.

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, March 16, 2021 4:25 PM

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

Dick Durbin, Illinois Democrat, who also serves as the Senate Majority Whip -- the No. 2 leadership position in the party -- went very public with his issues with the way the filibuster is being used in the modern Senate during a fiery speech on the floor on Monday.

Here's the key bit:

"Today, nearly 65 years after Strom Thurmond's marathon defense of Jim Crow, the filibuster is still making a mockery of American democracy. The filibuster is still being misused by some Senators to block legislation urgently needed and supported by strong majorities of the American people. This is what hitting legislative rock bottom looks like. Today's filibusters have turned the world's most deliberative body into one of the world's most ineffectual bodies."

“I Support Discussing Any Proposal That Ends The Misuse Of The Filibuster As A Weapon Of Mass Obstruction”
https://www.durbin.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/durbin-the-time-
is-now-for-filibuster-reform

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, March 16, 2021 4:42 PM

Mitch McConnell THREATENS "Scorched Earth" if Democrats abolish Filibuster

Mitch the bitch needs to step down and go enjoy all those millions he scammed with his Chinese spy wife.

Most evil piece of shit in congress.

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Tuesday, March 16, 2021 5:35 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Mitch McConnell THREATENS "Scorched Earth" if Democrats abolish Filibuster

Mitch the bitch needs to step down and go enjoy all those millions he scammed with his Chinese spy wife.

Most evil piece of shit in congress.

Republicans would use every rule and option at their disposal to halt the chamber, making the Senate "more like a 100-car pileup, nothing moving," says Mitch.

I think Democrats should call Mitch's bluff. If he is not bluffing, Democrats should go to war with the Republicans as if everything depends on the Democrats winning. If, instead, the Democrats decide they prefer "peace in our time", the next two years won't see anything pass Congress and, on top of that, the GOP will take back control in 2022 because it will look like Democrats do nothing when in power. I hope Mitch is bluffing, but if not, go to war. The worst option is to not fully and brutally test Mitch and the other Republican Senators.

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, March 16, 2021 6:16 PM

Democrats don't have the authority to abolish the filibuster.

Why are we still talking about this like they do?

--------------------------------------------------

" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher

Collection of links to Second's, Nilbog's and Marcos' death threats: https://cutt.ly/tkCvEX6

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Tuesday, March 16, 2021 10:35 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Democrats don't have the authority to abolish the filibuster.

Why are we still talking about this like they do?

Keep demonstrating your ignorance. We'll keep laughing.

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Tuesday, March 16, 2021 10:37 PM

US Intelligence Cartel: All The Governments We Hate Interfered In Our Election
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/03/17/us-intelligence-cartel-all-the
-governments-we-hate-interfered-in-our-election/

So what the US intelligence cartel is asking us to believe this time around is that America’s democracy has suffered yet another invisible attack, the evidence for which is of course top secret, and that the culprits involved are most of the governments the US intelligence cartel doesn’t like. Also, we’re being asked to believe that US-aligned nations like Saudi Arabia and Israel have had no similar interventions in the US electoral process at all.

And of course we’re already getting reports that this narrative will be used to justify sanctions against many of the accused nations, including Iran (which would necessarily kill the nuclear deal Biden campaigned on re-entering).

“The Biden admin is expected to announce sanctions related to election interference as soon as next week, three admin officials tell me,” CNN’s Kylie Atwood reports on Twitter. “They didn’t disclose details related to the expected sanctions but said that they’ll target multiple countries including Russia, China and Iran.”

So this completely unevidenced narrative is being used to justify support for increased aggressions which have already been long sought by the US intelligence cartel, which has an extensive and unbroken record of lying to us about exactly this sort of thing. The response to this is of course disbelief absent the mountain of evidence required in a post-Iraq invasion world, which (spoiler alert) will never surface. We will never be given any solid evidence for these US spy claims, yet US foreign policy and mainstream news coverage of it will march on as though we have.

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Wednesday, March 17, 2021 12:18 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Democrats don't have the authority to abolish the filibuster.

Why are we still talking about this like they do?
Keep demonstrating your ignorance. We'll keep laughing.

Keep laughing all the way until nothing comes of this.

Democrats need to be able to bust the filibuster to remove the filibuster.

I doubt very much you'd ever even get 50 Democrat senators to vote to remove it, let alone the 10 extra votes you'd actually need to remove it.

This issue was dead before they even brought it up.

It's nothing more than a mere publicity stunt to rile up low-info morons like you when it doesn't go anywhere.

--------------------------------------------------

" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher

Collection of links to Second's, Nilbog's and Marcos' death threats: https://cutt.ly/tkCvEX6

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Wednesday, March 17, 2021 6:47 AM

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

Christopher Lasch - The Culture of Narcissism

The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations by Christopher Lasch:
free download https://libgen.unblockit.buzz/search.php?req=Lasch+Culture+Narcissism+
2018
or Amazon https://amzn.to/3vgDcQu

from the first chapter:

Notwithstanding his occasional illusions of omnipotence, the narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience. His apparent freedom from family ties and institutional constraints does not free him to stand alone or to glory in his individuality. On the contrary, it contributes to his insecurity, which he can overcome only by seeing his “grandiose self” reflected in the attentions of others, or by attaching himself to those who radiate celebrity, power, and charisma. For the narcissist, the world is a mirror, whereas the rugged individualist saw it as an empty wilderness to be shaped to his own design.

We live in a time, Lasch observes at another point, when “all politics becomes a form of spectacle.” The narcissist, he argues, “admires and identifies with ‘winners’ out of his fear of being labeled a loser.” No one is more obsessed with “winners” and “losers” than Trump.

Lasch might offer a wry smile at how accurately his descriptions of narcissism fit Trump.

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

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Thursday, March 18, 2021 8:49 AM

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

Make President Joe Biden seek War authorization before launching lethal strikes.

“Offensive military action without congressional approval is not constitutional absent extraordinary circumstances,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), a longtime advocate for bolstering Congress’s role in authorizing military operations, said.

In a letter to Congress shared exclusively with Vox, two dozen organizations across the political spectrum — from progressive foreign policy groups to conservative think tanks — are calling on lawmakers to pass a new War Powers Resolution.

What the War Powers Resolution letter says

Under Article II of the Constitution and the 1973 War Powers Act, the signatories write, the president’s legal authorities to take military action without first receiving formal approval from Congress “apply only to a narrow set of situations where the imminent and extreme nature of the threat makes it impractical or impossible to convene Congress in a timely fashion that would enable the necessary defensive actions.”

Kaine and Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) introduced a bill that would repeal the 2002 AUMF and a 1991 measure that paved the road to war with Iraq. “Congress has a responsibility to not only vote to authorize new military action, but to repeal old authorizations that are no longer necessary,” Kaine said in a statement.

More at https://www.vox.com/2021/3/16/22331880/biden-war-powers-congress-lette
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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Thursday, March 18, 2021 10:09 AM

^ That could just possibly be the first sign of intelligence in Congress in my adult life.

I reserve the right to remain skeptical about the underlying motives.

--------------------------------------------------

" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher

PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.

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Thursday, March 18, 2021 10:23 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:
^ That could just possibly be the first sign of intelligence in Congress in my adult life.

I reserve the right to remain skeptical about the underlying motives.

What has happened all my life is Congress has deferred to the judgement of Generals. This is probably because the typical Congressman knows he is no damn good at making life and death decisions. That's why the Pentagon keeps fighting wars and losing them. If you know any generals, they aren't that smart. Yes, they can fly airplanes, sail ships, launch missiles, drop nukes, but can they do more than kill? No, they cannot because they are fundamentally only killers, definitely NOT the kind of people who should be deciding who to kill and where. But the White House and, especially, Congress keeps letting Generals make the decisions. Those decisions should be made by people who are NOT fundamentally only killers incapable of doing more than that simple job with very complex and expensive machinery purchased by Congress and designed/built by engineers who are far smarter and less likely to get into rage to kill than most Generals and soldiers.

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, March 18, 2021 1:08 PM

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

A New Report Adds Evidence That Trump Was a Russian Asset
He helped Putin manipulate the U.S. election in 2020, as he did in 2016.

By William Saletan March 18, 2021 12:07 PM

Donald Trump was a tool in a long-running Russian campaign to weaken the United States. That's been documented in Republican-led investigative reports, and now it has been updated with new evidence, thanks to the U.S. Intelligence Community's assessment of the 2020 election. The report, drafted by the CIA, the FBI, and several other agencies, was released in unclassified form on Tuesday, but it was presented in classified form on Jan. 7. In other words, it was compiled, written, and edited during Trump's administration. It destroys his lies about the election, and it exposes him as a Russian asset.

The report debunks conspiracy theories, promoted by Trump and his lawyers, that hackers in other countries robbed him of victory. "We have no indications that any foreign actor attempted to interfere in the 2020 US elections by altering any technical aspect of the voting process,” including "ballot casting, vote tabulation, or reporting results,” says the document. A separate analysis released by the Department of Justice reaches the same conclusion. The IC report adds that evidence of such operations, if they existed, would have shown up in U.S. surveillance or in "post-election audits of electronic results and paper backups.” The report implicitly mocks insinuations from Trump's lawyers that former Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013, somehow rigged Trump's defeat. "We have no information," it notes drily, that "current or former Venezuelan regimes were involved in attempts to compromise US election infrastructure."

https://web.archive.org/web/20210318165850/https://slate.com/news-and-
politics/2021/03/trump-russian-asset-election-intelligence-community-report.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, March 19, 2021 11:54 AM

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

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch Supports an Originalist Theory That Would Destroy Modern Governance

On Thursday, the Columbia Law Review published one of the most important and topical scholarly articles in recent memory, Delegation at the Founding.
https://columbialawreview.org/content/delegation-at-the-founding/
https://columbialawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Mortenson-Bag
ley-Delegation_at_the_Founding.pdf

Its authors, Julian Davis Mortenson and Nicholas Bagley, assert that a legal theory championed by conservative originalists has no actual basis in history.

That theory, called the Nondelegation Doctrine, holds that the Constitution puts strict limits on Congress’ ability to let the executive branch set rules and regulations. Congress, for instance, could not direct the Environmental Protection Agency to set air quality standards that “protect public health,” and delegate to the agency what limits on pollution are necessary to meet that goal. Nondelegation Doctrine has enormous consequences for the federal government’s ability to function, since Congress typically sets broad goals and directs agencies to figure out how to achieve them. The Nondelegation Doctrine is supported by a majority of the current Supreme Court; in 2019, Justice Neil Gorsuch signaled his eagerness to apply the doctrine, and at least four other conservative justices have joined his crusade.

Gorsuch and his allies in academia insist that the men who wrote the Constitution believed in the Nondelegation Doctrine, giving the theory an originalist pedigree. Yet Mortenson and Bagley, both law professors at the University of Michigan and former Supreme Court clerks, have painstakingly debunked originalists' claims of historical support for the doctrine. The publication of their article presents a grave challenge to conservative originalists like Gorsuch who purport to follow the evidence even when it leads to an outcome that clashes with their political preferences. As Mortenson and Bagley put it: "You can be an originalist or you can be committed to the nondelegation doctrine. But you can't be both."

What is the Nondelegation Doctrine?

Nondelegation is a judicially created doctrine that has had exactly one year of actual existence, 1935. It says, in essence, that only Congress can make rules that govern private conduct, and all administrative agencies can do is apply the rules and maybe fill in some small details about the rules in the course of doing their work.

What happened in 1935?

The Supreme Court was very hostile to the New Deal, to economic interventionism. And it issued two opinions concluding that Congress had given the president too much discretion without giving him enough guidance.

It’s pretty much dormant until the 1980s and 1990s, when the conservative legal establishment starts to poke around for doctrines that might be able to restrain the federal government at a time when they felt it was too big, too powerful, and doing too much at the states’ expense. Conservative scholars glom onto nondelegation and start pushing for its reinvigoration in the courts. The Supreme Court slapped that down in 2001 in a unanimous decision written by none other than Justice Antonin Scalia. He said: Look, we’re not going to play this game. There’s no principled way for a court to draw these distinctions. We’re going to trust Congress to take care of protecting its own prerogatives.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20210319153418/https://slate.com/news-and-
politics/2021/03/neil-gorsuch-nondelegation-bagley-mortenson.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, March 19, 2021 5:08 PM

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

Joe Biden Wiped Out Big Time on the Air Force One Stairs

• Right-wing media is already all over Biden’s fall; the best reaction yet was probably given by Greg Kelly, an anchor for the pro-MAGA conspiracy channel Newsmax, who posted a picture of the president’s stumble on Twitter and wrote with grave concern that “Resignation should be considered.” After years of enabling right wing by giving oxygen to contrived, bad-faith claims like “Obama was born in Kenya” and “Hillary has Parkinson’s” even in the course of debunking them, the more mainstream press has become justifiedly cautious about giving out free ammunition. And yet:

• The president fell down a bunch. That is, at the least, something that the public probably would like to know about, even if only to be able to discuss the video of his experience, which, assuming his sprightly finishing move at the top of the stairs means he was not seriously injured, admittedly has a certain comic timing to it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210319200841/https://slate.com/news-and-
politics/2021/03/joe-biden-falls-on-air-force-one-stairs-paralyzing-the-punditry.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, March 19, 2021 7:59 PM

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

Joe Biden Is Not the Next FDR

Is Joe Biden the most progressive president ever? Is he maybe even the second coming of FDR? Will he permanently change the face of the nation?

These are all actual questions that I've seen highlighted in recent articles or op-eds. I say: settle down, folks. So far Biden has passed a big stimulus bill and hired a fairly progressive bunch of folks to run the government. That's it. And he's had the good fortune to face no new crises during his first couple of months, which has kept his approval level high.

But the hard stuff comes next. Republicans aren't going to allow any further legislation to pass, and there's a limit to what Biden can do via executive order. Anybody's who's expecting the dawn of a new age really needs to think again.

Historically, there's one thing that determines how effective a Democratic president is: the size of his majority in Congress. Wilson, FDR, and LBJ all had huge majorities and got a lot done. Obama had a big majority and got a few things done. Biden, by contrast, has a 50-50 tie in the Senate and a bare majority in the House. Filibuster or no, this is just not the makings of a progressive revolution.

It's remarkable to me how quickly people can overreact to political news. Is it because they're bored and feel like they need to write something exciting? Or do they really believe this stuff? Either way, take it with a huge shaker of salt. Biden may turn out to be a pleasant surprise for progressives, but he's not the leader of a revolution.

https://jabberwocking.com/joe-biden-is-not-the-next-fdr/

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, March 19, 2021 8:39 PM

Biden* is a walking corpse that's selling out our country to foreign interests.

Worst president ever.

--------------------------------------------------

" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher

PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.

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Saturday, March 20, 2021 1:04 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Biden* is a walking corpse that's selling out our country to foreign interests.

Worst president ever.

I suppose you have something beyond your unsupported assertion?

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Saturday, March 20, 2021 1:05 PM

Neoliberalism Doesn’t Care
'Neoliberalism is a relentless and shameless assault on the commons: the planet, public health, community, public spaces, rich conversation, trust, love, history, clean air and clean water.'
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/03/20/neoliberalism-doesnt-car
e?cd-origin=rss&utm_term=AO&utm_campaign=Weekly%20Newsletter&utm_content=email&utm_source=Weekly%20Newsletter&utm_medium=Email

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Saturday, March 20, 2021 2:11 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Biden* is a walking corpse that's selling out our country to foreign interests.

Worst president ever.

I suppose you have something beyond your unsupported assertion?

Yup. Every time he opens his mouth or signs a paper it's clear as day to anybody with half a brain who isn't in a cult.

PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.

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Saturday, March 20, 2021 6:10 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Biden* is a walking corpse that's selling out our country to foreign interests.

Worst president ever.

I suppose you have something beyond your unsupported assertion?

Yup. Every time he opens his mouth or signs a paper it's clear as day to anybody with half a brain who isn't in a cult.

Says the trumptard cultist. So, you obviously can't provide any facts to support your baseless assertion, but facts never matter to trumptards. They can't tell fact from fiction. Everything for you is based on your feelings, and nothing else. You're as dim as it gets. Pathetic.

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Saturday, March 20, 2021 6:10 PM

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Saturday, March 20, 2021 7:08 PM

The only Trumptards are the people still mentioning his name every day 2 months after their guy was inaugurated.

That's you, Trumptard.

--------------------------------------------------

" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher

PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.

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Sunday, March 21, 2021 2:44 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The only Trumptards are the people still mentioning his name every day 2 months after their guy was inaugurated.

That's you, Trumptard.

--------------------------------------------------

" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher

PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.

Not so, SIX! These guys mention Trump MULTIPLE times a day? So, what does that make them?

Trumptards+ ?

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.

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Sunday, March 21, 2021 7:49 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Not so, SIX! These guys mention Trump MULTIPLE times a day? So, what does that make them?

Trumptards+ ?

You're still a Russian affiliate, Signym. A new report lays bare why Russian disinformation succeeds.

The Science of Making Americans Hurt Their Own Country

The National Intelligence Council has released an unclassified report assessing, retrospectively, foreign threats to the 2020 election. It has a few twists and turns: The Iranian government attempted to run some kind of online influence campaign; the Chinese government considered doing the same but then dropped the idea. But most of the report is about Russia. Unlike in 2016, Russian intelligence operatives weren’t in the business of hacking and leaking this time around. Instead they concentrated on planting what they would call kompromat. The NIC focuses in particular on the activity of Andriy Derkach, a Russian agent and Ukrainian citizen who used former President Donald Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to spread disinformation about Joe Biden and his family. The report also mentions Konstantin Kilimnik, another Russian agent, who was playing the same game.

When I read the report, my instinctive reaction was I know all of this already. No wonder the story is familiar—most of it appeared in newspapers as it was unfolding. Giuliani’s contacts with Derkach can’t be described as an open secret, because they weren’t secret at all. In 2019 the two men appeared together on the One American News Network, OANN, a far-right channel that breathlessly described Derkach as part of a group of “actual whistleblowers,” talked about the “impeachment hoax,” and referred to the FBI’s “personal hatred for Donald Trump.” Giuliani and Derkach provided the channel with doctored tapes and other material designed to create the impression that Biden was somehow involved in corruption in Ukraine.

Kilimnik, too, has become an old and familiar face in American politics, one that appears in election after election. During the 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager, passed polling information to him. Although this fact turned up in former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of the 2016 election, nobody has ever explained why Kilimnik wanted this polling information or what he might have done with it. Now here he is, back again, front and center in 2020. The new report says that—in addition to providing kompromat to OANN—Kilimnik, Derkach, and others “met with and provided materials to Trump administration–linked US persons to advocate for formal investigations; hired a US firm to petition US officials; and attempted to make contact with several senior US officials.”

All of that helps explain why my second reaction was If I know this already, and none of it seems to matter, then something is seriously wrong with the American political system. If the link between Russian security services and the stories about the Biden family was bleedingly obvious at the time, why did anyone go along with it? Why were American journalists, American politicians, and the American president’s advisers messing around with Russian intelligence agents?

The problem is not only the outgrowth of the peculiar climate created by Donald Trump—however simple and satisfying such an explanation might be. Think, for a moment, about why the Russian state indulges in this kind of activity, year in and year out, despite the political costs and the risk of sanctions: Because it’s very cheap, it’s very easy, and a lot of evidence suggests that it works.

For decades now, Russian security services have studied a concept called “reflexive control”—the science of how to get your enemies to make mistakes. To be successful, practitioners must first analyze their opponents deeply, to understand where they get their information and why they trust it; then they need to find ways of playing with those trusted sources, in order to insert errors and mistakes. This way of thinking has huge implications for the military; consider how a piece of incorrect information might get a general to make a mistake. But it works in politics too. The Russian security services have now studied us and worked out (it probably wasn’t very hard) that large numbers of Americans—not only Fox News pundits and OANN broadcasters but also members of Congress—are very happy to accept sensational information, however tainted, from any source that happens to provide it. As long as it suits their partisan frames, and as long as it can be used against their opponents, they don’t care who invented it or for what purpose.

As a result, supplying an edited audiotape or a piece of false evidence to one of the bottom-feeders of the information ecosystem is incredibly easy; after that, others will ensure that it rises up the food chain. Russian disinformation doesn’t succeed thanks to the genius of Russians; it succeeds thanks to the sharp partisanship of Americans. Russian disinformation works because Americans allow it to work—and because those same Americans don’t care anymore about the harm they do to their country.

For one, they have successfully undermined the reputation, the morale, and maybe even the capacity of the FBI. Last summer Peter Strzok, the FBI’s former chief of counterespionage, told me that, under Trump, the bureau and the entire Department of Justice had a “motivation not to get on the wrong side of a vengeful president.” That meant they had a motivation not to stop Giuliani and Derkach, for example, even though Derkach was known to be a Russian operative. The two men peddled disinformation together with impunity. The FBI and the DOJ didn’t have a motivation to investigate Trump’s role in these matters either, even though that was pretty obvious too. He was paying Giuliani, after all, to do what Giuliani was doing. America’s counterintelligence teams, when faced with open collaboration between close associates of the president and known Russian agents, were rendered helpless.

In the long term, the absence of accountability for all the Americans involved could have consequences. Trump successfully intervened in the Mueller investigation, openly hinting at a pardon for Manafort in exchange for his silence. He made good on that promise in December. Though Mueller’s report concluded that Trump had obstructed the investigation, the special counsel declined to recommend prosecution, which he felt was not part of his job description. (“Because we determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment, we did not draw ultimate conclusions about the President’s conduct,” Mueller wrote.) He left the decision to Congress; Congress did nothing. And so everyone involved, including Kilimnik and Giuliani, felt perfectly free to stay in the game.

Others will surely draw the same conclusions. The National Intelligence Council found no Chinese involvement in November’s U.S. election. But because nothing all that bad really happened to anyone who collaborated with Russian foreign intelligence, either in 2016 or in 2020, maybe the Chinese and their potential American partners will grow a little bolder. The lesson of the past four years is that money is to be made and advantages are to be gained by accepting foreign help in American politics. Perhaps 2024 will be the year to try again.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210320093015if_/https://www.theatlantic.
com/ideas/archive/2021/03/russia-studied-how-get-americans-make-mistakes/618328/
or at
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/russia-studied-how-g
et-americans-make-mistakes/618328/

Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic, a fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.

Download the book for free from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.buzz/search.php?req=The+Seductive+Lure+of+Aut
horitarianism

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, March 21, 2021 8:06 AM

JAYNEZTOWN

Another Central Florida man arrested for role in Capitol riot
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/another-central-florida-man-arres
ted-for-role-in-capitol-riot/

Former AlexJones Infowars and Volusia Proud Boys member Joseph Biggs indicted in US Capitol riot
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/volusia-proud-boys-member-joseph-big
gs-indicted-in-us-capitol-riot/

Police shrugged off the Proud Boys, until they attacked the Capitol
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/nation-politics/police-shrug
ged-off-the-proud-boys-until-they-attacked-the-capitol/

Quote:
In the weeks before the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol, Biggs and other leading Proud Boys posted on Parler, calling on their followers to dress "incognito" on January 6, hoping to pass as antifa. "We are going to smell like you, move like you, and look like you. The only thing we’ll do that’s us is think like us!", he wrote, and "Jan 6th is gonna be epic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Biggs

Joe Biggs was an Infowars reporter, who carried out several tours of duty in the military, he said he suffered PTSD.

He currently works for CRTV and Rogue Right.

https://culturalreconquista.com/wiki/joe-biggs/

In 2014, Joe Biggs said that a police officer threatened to kill him, The Huffington Post reported. He was covering the Ferguson protests in Missouri and said he was filming in the media area when a bottle was thrown in his direction. Then he said a police officer walked up, pointed a gun, and threatened to kill him. The officer was identified as Lt. Ray Albers, Huffington Post noted.

https://heavy.com/news/2019/08/joe-biggs/

Biggs has seen many of his social media accounts suspended recently, including his “Bo Jiggs” account that was on Facebook and his Joe Biggs’ “Rambobiggs” account on Twitter. His Twitter account had more than 240,000 followers at the time it was banned.

Joe Biggs’ Facebook account was banned while he was talking to one of Laura Loomer’s associates on Facebook about his Instagram ban

At least 24 Floridians arrested in U.S. Capitol riot: Here’s what we know about them
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/crime/os-prem-ne-central-florida-
capitol-rioters-20210320-t25ecsgoyjddrmxxfgh7eocy2i-story.html

The 2021 U.S. Capitol riot, also known as the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol, the 2021 attempted coup in the United States and the 2021 insurrection at the United States Capitol, was a coup attempt that took place at Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021. As the US Congress was about to certify former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s defeat of President and sore loser Donald J. Trump in the 2020 presidential election, a group of a few thousand far-right pro-Trump terrorists, paramilitaries, rioters, and "patriots" stormed the fucking Capitol building, demanding that Congress subvert the will of voters they didn't like and declare Trump the winner. The building was trashed and vandalized by the insurrectionists, resulting in dozens of injuries and the deaths of four rioters and one police officer.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/2021_U.S._Capitol_riot

During a largely peaceful protest at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 organized by Trump supporters in opposition to certifying the "official results" of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, a small mob broke into the Capitol Building violently, forcing the people inside to evacuate. Despite the MSM blaming the breaking and entering on President Trump, falsely accusing him of "inciting" the situation, evidence has suggested the militant storming to have been the result of infiltration by Antifa and paid protesters.
https://conservapedia.com/2021_Capitol_riot
CNN and NBC paid BLM/Antifa terrorist John Sullivan $70,000 for his services inside the U.S. Capitol on Januuary 6, 2021

Proud Boys organizer Joe Biggs charged in Capitol riot
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10142676575

Proud Boys organizer Joe Biggs arrested as FBI alleges more possible planning in U.S. Capitol breach
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3927353/posts

Quote:
The 2021 storming of the United States Capitol was a riot and violent attack against the United States Congress at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_storming_of_the_United_States_Capit
ol

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Monday, March 22, 2021 5:57 AM

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

Three Wars, No Victory – Why?

America is the most powerful country in the history of the world, yet it has not won any of the three major wars it has fought over the past half century. This has not been due to a lack of effort and persistence. Our troops fought in Vietnam for nine years and in Iraq for a dozen. We’re still fighting after 20 years in Afghanistan, where our generals are asking the Taliban to stop attacking. That’s not a sign of success; the victor does not make such requests. The fact is that in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, America has failed in its mission to develop and sustain democracies.

What accounts for this trifecta of failure?

More at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/03/08/three-wars-no-victo
ry-why/

The Real Reasons the U.S. Can’t Win Wars Anymore

. . . Another reason we failed in Vietnam is that the war was never winnable in the first place. Bing argues that our poor military strategy from 1965 to 1968, bad policy decisions, and the popular mood doomed the Vietnam War. These factors played a role, but in truth only heightened an already existing reality — a reality made clear to me in 1966, when my colleagues and I got lost coming back from a meeting with SWIFT-boat officers in the northern part of Cameron Bay, South Vietnam. As we rode around aimlessly trying to find our way back to our base, we came upon a Catholic monastery. A priest there gave us directions and fed us. But as we were leaving, one of the monks asked me in French (which I had studied in school) why we thought we were going to make out any better in Vietnam than the French. President Eisenhower was conscious of this when he refused to bail out the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, even though most of his national-security advisers, including then–Vice President Nixon and the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Radford, recommended it. But Army chief of staff General Matthew Ridgway, who prevented us from losing in Korea, helped convince Eisenhower not to intervene, because he, like the monks I met, believed Vietnam was unwinnable.

Similarly, the majority of the American people turned against the war in Vietnam not just because there was a draft, as Bing correctly points out, but because of how the privileged were able to avoid the draft, thus leaving it to the lower class to bear most of the burden. For example, the four most recent presidents who could have served in Vietnam avoided that war and the draft by dubious means. Bill Clinton pretended to join the Army ROTC; George W. Bush used political connections to get into the Air National Guard, when President Johnson made it clear that the reserve component would not be activated to fight the war; Donald Trump, of course, had his family physician claim he had bone spurs, (Trump himself cannot remember which foot); and Joe Biden claimed that the asthma he had in high school prevented him from serving even though he brags about his athletic exploits while in high school.

More at https://news.yahoo.com/real-reasons-u-t-win-103057654.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, March 22, 2021 11:40 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The only Trumptards are the people still mentioning his name every day 2 months after their guy was inaugurated.

That's you, Trumptard.

Not so, SIX! These guys mention Trump MULTIPLE times a day? So, what does that make them?

Trumptards+ ?

Trumpaholics... No Longer Anonymous.

That's cute. Did you see that Second says you're still a Russian affiliate?

That's the Post-Trump Democrat playbook in perpetuity. Work in tandem with the Liberal controlled Media to put the narrative they want out there, then defame anybody who doesn't gargle their shit and ask for more by calling them Russia or Q.

Doesn't make any goddamned sense, but 90% of the morons are on the Left so it never had to.

--------------------------------------------------

" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher

PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.

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Tuesday, March 23, 2021 6:51 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:

That's the Post-Trump Democrat playbook in perpetuity.

"Russian Troll" is shorthand for Trumptard Dishonesty about their true goals. Here is a law that would prevent Trump's tax cheating, but it has a larger purpose of making the major donors to the GOP (and Democratic Party) pay all their taxes, rather than not report half their income:

Khanna Introduces The Stop Cheaters Act, Making Ultra-Rich Pay Their Fair Share
https://khanna.house.gov/media/press-releases/release-khanna-introduce
s-stop-cheaters-act-making-ultra-rich-pay-their-fair

How to Collect $1.4 Trillion in Unpaid Taxes

Wealthy Americans are concealing large amounts of income from the I.R.S. There is a straightforward corrective.

When the federal government started withholding income taxes from workers’ paychecks during World War II, the innovation was presented as a matter of fairness, a way to ensure that everyone paid. Irving Berlin wrote a song for the Treasury Department: “You see those bombers in the sky? Rockefeller helped to build them. So did I.”

The withholding system remains the cornerstone of income taxation, effectively preventing Americans from lying about wage income. Employers submit an annual W-2 report on the wages paid to each worker, making it hard to fudge the numbers.

But the burden of taxation is increasingly warped because the government has no comparable system for verifying income from businesses. The result is that most wage earners pay their fair share while many business owners engage in blatant fraud at public expense.

In a remarkable 2019 analysis, the Internal Revenue Service estimated that Americans report on their taxes less than half of all income that is not subject to some form of third-party verification like a W-2. Billions of dollars in business profits, rent and royalties are hidden from the government each year. By contrast, more than 95 percent of wage income is reported.

Unreported income is the single largest reason that unpaid federal income taxes may amount to more than $600 billion this year, and more than $7.5 trillion over the next decade. It is a truly staggering sum — more than half of the projected federal deficit over the same period.

The government has a basic obligation to enforce the law and to crack down on this epidemic of tax fraud. The failure to do so means that the burden of paying for public services falls more heavily on wage earners than on business owners, exacerbating economic inequality. The reality of widespread cheating also undermines the legitimacy of a tax system that still relies to a considerable extent on Americans’ good-faith participation.

Proposals to close this “tax gap” often focus on reversing the long-term decline in funding for the I.R.S., allowing the agency to hire more workers and to audit more wealthy taxpayers. But Charles Rossotti, who led the I.R.S. from 1997 to 2002, makes a compelling argument that such an approach is inadequate. Mr. Rossotti says that Congress needs to change the rules, by creating a third-party verification system for business income, too.

The core of Mr. Rossotti’s clever proposal is to obtain that information from banks. Under his plan, the government would require banks to produce an annual account statement totaling inflows and outflows, like the 1099 tax forms that investment firms must provide to their clients.

Individuals would then have the opportunity to reconcile what Mr. Rossotti dubs their “1099New” forms with their reported income on their individual tax returns. One might, for example, assert that a particular deposit was a tax-exempt gift.

Mr. Rossotti has proposed that the I.R.S. require the new forms only for people with taxable income above a generous threshold. A bill including Mr. Rossotti’s plan, introduced by Representative Ro Khanna of California, sets that threshold at $400,000, to minimize the burden on small business. The money is undoubtedly in chasing wealthy tax cheats, but equity argues that business income, like wage income, should be subject to a uniform reporting standard. Small businesses ought to pay their taxes, too.

The proposal would not increase the amount anyone owes in taxes. It would, instead, increase the amount paid in taxes by those who are currently cheating.

It would have the immediate benefit of scaring people into probity.

Consider what happened after Congress passed legislation in 1986 to require taxpayers to list a Social Security number for each person claimed as a dependent. The government could not easily crosscheck all of those claims then, but the requirement itself caused a sharp drop in fraud. The next year, seven million children abruptly disappeared from tax returns.

To realize the full benefit of the new data, however, Congress does need to make a significant investment in upgrading the I.R.S.’s outdated computer systems, and in hiring enough qualified workers to examine suspicious cases and to hold accountable those who cheat.

In 2008, for example, Congress passed a bill to require credit card processors to report payments processed on behalf of online retailers on an annual form called a 1099-K so the I.R.S. could verify the income reported by those retailers. But in December, the Treasury Department’s inspector general reported that “resource limitations” had prevented the I.R.S. from investigating more than 310,000 cases in which individuals and businesses failed to report more than $330 billion in income documented on 1099-Ks.

Congressional Republicans, unable to muster public support for reductions in federal spending, have pursued that goal indirectly by constraining federal revenue, in part by hacking away at the I.R.S.’s budget. The share of all tax returns subject to an audit declined by 46 percent from 2010 to 2018, according to the Congressional Budget Office. For millionaires, the decline in the audit rate was 61 percent. Today, the government employs fewer people to track down deadbeats than at any time since the 1950s.

The result is a parallel increase in federal debt and in tax fraud.

Mr. Rossotti, together with the Harvard economist Lawrence Summers and the University of Pennsylvania law professor Natasha Sarin, argued in an analysis published in November that investing $100 billion in the I.R.S. over the next decade, for technology and personnel, in combination with better data on business income, would allow the agency to collect up to $1.4 trillion in lawful tax revenue that otherwise would go uncollected.

The logic of such an investment is overwhelming. The government can crack down on crime, improve the equity of taxation — and raise some needed money in the bargain. There are many proposals to raise taxes on the rich. Let’s start by collecting what they already owe.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/20/opinion/sunday/unpaid-tax-evasion-I
RS.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, March 23, 2021 10:27 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

That's the Post-Trump Democrat playbook in perpetuity.
"Russian Troll" is shorthand for Trumptard Dishonesty about their true goals.

Nope. "Russian Troll" is "I don't have a valid argument, so I'm going to just be a dick."

--------------------------------------------------

" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher

PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.

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Wednesday, March 24, 2021 6:11 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:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

That's the Post-Trump Democrat playbook in perpetuity.
"Russian Troll" is shorthand for Trumptard Dishonesty about their true goals.

Nope. "Russian Troll" is "I don't have a valid argument, so I'm going to just be a dick."

I was thinking about writing a Firefly story about a spaceship full of Trumptards. Because of a lack of maintenance, that ship has a low probability of killing its crew, about 1% per year, on takeoff. Kaylee tries and fails to persuade the crew from this other ship to fix the problems. The other crew has various reasons not to do the work, reasons that boil down to the ship didn't explode yesterday so it certainly won't explode today. Not one of the crew is convinced by Kaylee's reason, logic or experience to fix their ship.

River's method is different from Kaylee's. River forces all of the Trumptard crew off the ship. Then River sorts them into two groups, allowing one group to go back on the ship. The ship takes off and explodes, killing everyone River allowed to do what pleased them. All the foolish Trumptards could have died in the explosion, but River saved the ones worth saving.

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, March 24, 2021 6:12 AM

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

We Could Solve Homelessness if We Wanted
https://web.archive.org/web/20210323214817/https://slate.com/business/
2021/03/homelessness-lets-solve-it.html

The American Rescue Plan Act that President Joe Biden signed this month contains a big investment in fighting homelessness. In addition to $21.6 billion for low-income renters, it contains $5 billion for housing vouchers specifically targeted at at-risk renters and $5 billion in HOME grants, which cities and counties can use to invest in permanent supportive housing to prevent homelessness. It’s a lot. (The entire annual outlay for federal Section 8 housing vouchers, for comparison’s sake, is $22 billion.)

To diagnose the homelessness in their own towns, people have tried to convince themselves of many things: It’s the weather. Drugs. Social estrangement. Low wages. State disinvestment in psychiatric care, in caring for people with disabilities, in services for veterans. Ronald Reagan, infamously, said homelessness is a choice. There are at least half a million homeless people in the United States, so there is room for all those things to be a little bit true. But most of all, homelessness is about a shortage of low-income housing.

As Conor Dougherty writes in his book Golden Gates, urban redevelopment programs in the 1960s and ’70s “destroyed thousands of rooming houses and ‘cage hotels’ with single-occupant dwellings and shared bathrooms, removing a crucial support of last-resort shelter.” New York lost 109,000 single room occupancy units between 1971 and 1987. Roughly half the SRO stocks of Los Angeles and Seattle vanished in the same time frame. Chicago lost 80 percent of its SROs between 1960 and 1980, a decline of about 70,000 units. Prior to that, a man could work a little, drink a lot, and still afford a room to lay his head. Afterward, not so much.

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, March 24, 2021 11:03 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

That's the Post-Trump Democrat playbook in perpetuity.
"Russian Troll" is shorthand for Trumptard Dishonesty about their true goals.

Nope. "Russian Troll" is "I don't have a valid argument, so I'm going to just be a dick."
I was thinking about writing a Firefly story about a spaceship full of Trumptards.

Go for it buddy.

I promise I will read the first sentence of it before moving on to something productive.

--------------------------------------------------

" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher

PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.

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Thursday, March 25, 2021 6:18 AM

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

“But there is no common ground between the people who defend these things and those who want to have them removed.”

Fight over whether to change name of Robert E. Lee High School leaves scars in Baytown

It has been 51 years since Elmer Cartwright and a handful of other leaders in Baytown’s Black community first wrote to their school board in 1970.

The district had begun integrating schools several years prior, and Black students, including Cartwright’s daughter Karrie, came home with stories of inequitable treatment and racism they faced. They said it was even baked into the name of the school his daughter was transferred to: Robert E. Lee High School.

They asked the board to change it, but trustees refused.

Last September, Cartwright’s grandson Kevin Craven asked the board to do the same and remove the name of the Confederate general. Again, it refused.

“I never thought I would be carrying this mantle,” said Craven, who now lives in Pearland. “There’s a certain level of irony that here it is, 50-plus years later and we’re still having that same conversation about renaming a school that ultimately is offensive.”

The Goose Creek CISD board voted 4-3 against changing the name of Lee High in September, opting instead to create a committee to study the idea.

On March 1, the group issued its final recommendation: take no action.

GCCISD Board President Jessica Woods said the board has not yet decided if it will put a proposed name change on a future agenda.

Baytown’s Robert E. Lee High School is one of only three campuses left in Texas named after the Confederate general, according to a Houston Chronicle review of Texas Education Agency records and published news stories. There had been 13 campuses named after Lee in June 2019, but a dozen of those changed their names following protests and conversations sparked by the May 2020 killing of George Floyd.

Debates about whether to change or replace symbols of the Confederacy have been ongoing since the Civil War ended in 1865, said Karen Cox, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and author of the forthcoming book “No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice.” However, she said nationwide momentum for removing Confederate icons began to change in 2015, after a white man killed nine people at a historically Black church in Charleston, S.C.

“What’s happened since the Charleston massacre is, you have an awful tragedy involving racial violence, people will get upset, people will discuss it and some (Confederate symbols) will be removed,” Cox said. “But there is no common ground between the people who defend these things and those who want to have them removed.”

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/education/article/
robert-e-lee-name-change-baytown-school-16049791.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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Friday, March 26, 2021 8:12 AM

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

Republicans do not take policy seriously.

The most important reason Trump failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act was that Republicans did not think through hard choices, make the compromises necessary to build alliances within the G.O.P. and get the thing done.

That same loss of seriousness inhibited their ability to effectively oppose Biden’s rescue plan. They didn’t do the hard thinking required to settle on a plausible line of attack. So while Democrats were pushing through tax credits that will cut child poverty nearly in half and subsidies that will make health insurance more affordable, Republicans were focused on cancel culture and Dr. Seuss.

And looking forward, why should we expect the G.O.P. to do any better in opposing Biden’s longer-term initiatives?

To block this push, Republicans will have to come up with something beyond boilerplate denunciations of socialists killing jobs. Will they? Probably not. Bear in mind that both infrastructure spending and raising taxes on the rich are very popular. Democrats seem united on at least the principle of an invest-and-tax plan — and these days they seem pretty good at turning agreement in principle into actual legislation.

The prospects for a big spend-and-tax bill are quite good because Democrats know what they want to achieve and are willing to put in the work to make it happen — while Republicans don’t and aren’t.

More at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/25/opinion/republicans-biden-stimulus.
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, March 26, 2021 9:21 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/25/opinion/republicans-biden-stimulus.
html

Remember, the Roomba argues that the NYT isn't a total Lefty shill site.

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" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher

PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.

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Friday, March 26, 2021 10:43 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:

Remember, the Roomba argues that the NYT isn't a total Lefty shill site.

6ix, you are using too many words. Compressing the Trumptard political science message to fewer words: "Democrats are socialists killing jobs." That's five. Go for three: "Democrats are communists." How about two words? I'm not sure the Trumptard message can be compressed that much ("Heil Trump!" is a possibility) and still be a sentence expressing a complete idea on which most Trumptards agree, but I am pretty sure most Trumptards agree that the New York Times is a lefty shill site. It is not, unless reality has a lefty bias, but when have Trumptards ever stopped talking rubbish?

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, March 27, 2021 6:57 AM

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

Fixing capitalism: Capitalism is just a collection of human decisions. We can change it if we want to.

March 26, 2021
It’s easy to spot the growing wealth of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and other entrepreneurs who made their fortunes with publicly traded companies. The Robert Brockmans of the world are harder to spot.

If you don’t know who Brockman is, I don’t blame you. The Texas software billionaire, who has never appeared on Forbes’ vaunted list of the wealthiest Americans, is allegedly responsible for the largest tax fraud in US history. What’s more, new economic research suggests he is hardly the only high-earning American dodging taxes under the radar.

Brockman is alleged to have used a complex network of offshore entities in the Cayman Islands to conceal $2 billion from US tax collectors. The scheme was discovered only when some of Brockman’s salesforce sued him, alleging that some of the revenue flowing to foreign trusts belonged to them as commissions.

That money is among an estimated $175 billion in potential tax revenue that the top 1% of American earners conceal from the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) each year, representing more than a third of unpaid taxes, according to a new paper (pdf) from economists at the IRS and several universities.

Notably, the findings also suggest that the US suffers from more economic inequality than previously understood, since most measures of relative prosperity rely on tax data that undercounts the income of the wealthiest Americans. The focus on rich people whose wealth is mainly in publicly disclosed corporate stock lets high-earners with harder-to-track incomes slip under the radar.

The new findings derive from comparing the results of random audits with voluntary disclosure programs that allowed Americans to reveal undisclosed offshore holdings and pay back taxes without being subject to criminal prosecution or penalties. By comparing the various data sets, the researchers were able to make new estimates of tax avoidance across the income distribution.

The researchers argue that random audits are not designed to find sophisticated tax evasion in offshore accounts, and that auditors generally lack the resources to compare reported pass-through income to the actual activities of the underlying businesses.

This jibes with other research that suggests investing more money in tax enforcement would result in a net gain for the US budget. One recent study found that upping the tax man’s budget by $100 billion over 10 years could result in more than $1.5 trillion in additional unpaid tax collected. After years of budget cuts by Republican lawmakers, new Democratic majorities in Congress could lead to a funding boost for the tax agency.

Those gains could come from deeper investigations and the deterrent effect that they might provide, but also just doing the fundamentals: The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration reported last year that the agency simply didn’t audit more than 800,000 high-income taxpayers who stopped filing tax returns and are estimated to owe nearly $46 billion.

https://qz.com/1989014/

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, March 27, 2021 7:13 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Remember, the Roomba argues that the NYT isn't a total Lefty shill site.
6ix, you are using too many words.

Nope. I said what needed to be said.

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" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher

PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.

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Sunday, March 28, 2021 6:36 AM

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

Culture War Over Wolves -- Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte (R) killed a radio-collared wolf from Yellowstone National Park.

A typical Montanan, their political views are all across the board. We have these college towns, Bozeman and Missoula, where you’ve got a lot of pretty liberal environmentalists. I’m sure they would be super angry that he killed a wolf so close to the park, and that it was radio-collared.

And then you have the super conservative contingent in Montana, including a lot of people who have moved here in recent years from places like California or Texas. They’re coming with a much more Trumpian conservatism that we haven’t really seen much in the state prior to, even, the pandemic. A lot of those new folks are not going to care whatsoever that the governor did this. In fact, they might like the governor more because he did this.

Within Montana, there are more questions. How did he expect to check his traps every day while also serving as governor? You have to check traps at least every 48 hours. But ethically, you should be checking it every day. And those traps were set two and a half or three hours south of the Capitol. It’s a very time-intensive thing to do, to trap. Was that the best use of the governor’s time?

The governor told a local reporter that the traps have been out since January, which would be at least two weeks prior to trapping that wolf. This is where it gets a little wonky. Gianforte was setting traps on a private ranch owned by a big conservative media mogul. And that guy’s ranch manager (who’s also the vice president of the Montana Trappers Association)—his name was also on these traps. And so there’s a good chance that the ranch manager was actually checking the traps for Gianforte. And maybe Gianforte was lucky enough that he was just down there on a federal holiday, and there was the wolf, after two or more weeks of waiting for the animal to get trapped. Was it just serendipitous? Or was the wolf trapped, and the ranch manager found it and called Gianforte? I don’t want to say either way, but that’s my biggest question. If the ranch manager called Gianforte, and Gianforte drove or flew over to kill it, that would have broken the state hunting regulations because you’re supposed to kill it or release it immediately upon seeing it. It’s the more humane thing to do.

Wolves are super controversial. In the West, they do kill livestock. Some people rely on cows and sheep to make a living. On the other hand, Montana relies on a lot of tourism. Maybe you went to Yellowstone National Park to see those wolves. The wolves are a big boon for our tourism industry. And so it’s just kind of a very classic push-and-pull between those two camps. Americans had pretty much eradicated the wolf from the West up until 1995, when they were reintroduced in Yellowstone National Park. And so it’s still very fresh. They’re like a symbol for the kind of culture wars that happen out West.

There were major hurdles reporting this story. I was frustrated with the governor’s office for not answering the questions I posed to them and for not making the governor available for an interview. I think that that’s something we’ve noticed since the Trump era. Gianforte is famously antagonistic towards reporters. There has been a culture in the past of openness among both Republicans and Democrats. And it’s been frustrating to watch that culture of openness change. It doesn’t feel very Montanan.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210328101408/https://slate.com/news-and-
politics/2021/03/montana-governor-greg-gianforte-yellowstone-wolf-reporter-interview.html

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

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Sunday, March 28, 2021 8:44 AM

lol

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" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher

PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.

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Sunday, March 28, 2021 5:31 PM