REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

A thread for Democrats Only

POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Monday, October 21, 2024 20:59
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Monday, March 28, 2022 8:28 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Life at Fox News became “unsustainable”

From Chris Wallace, longtime Fox News host, on why he finally left the network:

"I’m fine with opinion: conservative opinion, liberal opinion. But when people start to question the truth — Who won the 2020 election? Was Jan. 6 an insurrection? — I found that unsustainable.

....Some people might have drawn the line earlier, or at a different point. I think Fox has changed over the course of the last year and a half. But I can certainly understand where somebody would say, ‘Gee, you were a slow learner, Chris.’”

https://web.archive.org/web/20220328003506/https://www.nytimes.com/202
2/03/27/business/media/chris-wallace-cnn-fox-news.html

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


His CNN Masters are going to treat him a lot better.

Hey dumbass, you know he's just saying this now because the CNN+ roster is pathetic and they've got to find a way to charge people $6 a month for the service when nobody watches regular CNN. It's called advertising.

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

Me: "Remember Covid?"

Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"

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Saturday, April 2, 2022 6:04 AM

SECOND

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


This Is Why It Took More Than 100 Years to Get an Anti-Lynching Bill

The law comes into being after more than 200 failed attempts, over more than 100 years, to pass anti-lynching legislation through Congress.

A lynching is more than a violent act meant for a single individual. Past and present, lynchings are meant to intimidate an entire community — to reinforce hierarchies of race and class through brutal acts of communal violence. Despite its relative rarity, lynching had a singular psychological force, generating a level of fear and horror that overwhelmed all other forms of violence. Lynchings were barbarous, defined by an extreme, often sadistic violence, including burning, sexual mutilation and the removal of limbs.

The South, when voting as a bloc, could kill legislation that threatened white Southern power and autonomy before it reached the floor. Any bill that somehow survived the House could be strangled in the Senate using the filibuster, which is what happened, again and again, to anti-lynching (and other civil rights) legislation. There is something a little funny here, if you have not seen it already.

The reigning justification for institutions like the Senate or rules like the filibuster — or, for that matter, the entire edifice of American federalism — is that they protect the rights of the minority from the depredations of an overbearing majority. But it is in the story of the long and frustrated effort to make lynching a federal crime — to, in Dyer’s words, “protect the lives of citizens of the United States against lynch law and mob violence” — that we see the reverse. We see how the American system can, and often does, protect tyrannical and overbearing minorities, like the architects of Jim Crow, from the only power, the federal government, that can defend and enforce democratic equality across the entire nation.

We should celebrate the passage and signing of an anti-lynching bill. It is, truly, a historic accomplishment. We should also pause to reflect not just on the long struggle to make this law a reality, but on the ways that our system itself was the primary obstacle to protecting the lives and livelihoods of its own citizens.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/01/opinion/anti-lynching-bill-biden.ht
ml

Emmett Till Antilynching Act
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/55/text
Section 249(a) of title 18, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following:
“(5) LYNCHING.—Whoever conspires to commit any offense under paragraph (1), (2), or (3) shall, if death or serious bodily injury (as defined in section 2246 of this title) results from the offense, be imprisoned for not more than 30 years, fined in accordance with this title, or both.
“(6) OTHER CONSPIRACIES.—Whoever conspires to commit any offense under paragraph (1), (2), or (3) shall, if death or serious bodily injury (as defined in section 2246 of this title) results from the offense, or if the offense includes kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse or an attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, be imprisoned for not more than 30 years, fined in accordance with this title, or both.”

There is almost nothing here, but Congress couldn’t pass it for 123 years. Congress finally made it possible to charge people who only watch and cheer a lynching, but refuse to testify against the murderers, as conspirators to a lynching. Those historic photos of lynchings with hundreds of witnesses now can be charged as hundreds of co-conspirators to a lynching.
Lynching of black teenager Henry Smith in Paris, Texas


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

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Saturday, April 2, 2022 6:17 AM

SECOND

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


Disney will be crushed for opposing us

When Republicans get back into power, Apple and Disney have to understand one thing: Everything will be on the table, your copyright/trademark protection, your special status in certain states, and even your corporate structure itself…

This is the kind of revenge culture that Vladimir Putin would understand and approve of. Needless to say, Donald Trump also understands and approves of this. It's basically the guiding principle of his life.

If a corporation does something conservatives disapprove of, they should expect a conservative president to use the full power of the US government to wage war on them. Your copyrights will be toast. The Justice Department's antitrust division will break you up. Any official levers that we can use to make your life miserable, we'll use them. You should understand that we will treat the government as simply an extension of our own personal rage.

Both parties support policies that have the potential to hurt certain categories of companies. Democrats favor labor unions, for example, which has the potential to hurt any company that hates the thought of being unionized. Republicans oppose abortion, which has the obvious potential to hurt any organization that supplies abortion services.

That's fine. But singling out a specific company for state sanctioned revenge because it said or did something your party opposes? That's banana republic stuff. It's also how many Republicans view politics these days.

https://jabberwocking.com/ingraham-disney-will-be-crushed-for-opposing
-us/

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

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Saturday, April 2, 2022 8:56 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Disney will be crushed for opposing us

When Republicans get back into power, Apple and Disney have to understand one thing: Everything will be on the table, your copyright/trademark protection, your special status in certain states, and even your corporate structure itself…

This is the kind of revenge culture that Vladimir Putin would understand and approve of. Needless to say, Donald Trump also understands and approves of this. It's basically the guiding principle of his life.

If a corporation does something conservatives disapprove of, they should expect a conservative president to use the full power of the US government to wage war on them. Your copyrights will be toast. The Justice Department's antitrust division will break you up. Any official levers that we can use to make your life miserable, we'll use them. You should understand that we will treat the government as simply an extension of our own personal rage.

Both parties support policies that have the potential to hurt certain categories of companies. Democrats favor labor unions, for example, which has the potential to hurt any company that hates the thought of being unionized. Republicans oppose abortion, which has the obvious potential to hurt any organization that supplies abortion services.

That's fine. But singling out a specific company for state sanctioned revenge because it said or did something your party opposes? That's banana republic stuff. It's also how many Republicans view politics these days.

https://jabberwocking.com/ingraham-disney-will-be-crushed-for-opposing
-us/

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



Wow, they have this twisted.

And it's hilarious watching Democrats stand up for Big Business in the 2020's.

Your party is done.

Finished.

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

Me: "Remember Covid?"

Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"

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Wednesday, April 6, 2022 9:24 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Wow, they have this twisted.

And it's hilarious watching Democrats stand up for Big Business in the 2020's.

Your party is done.

Finished.

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

Me: "Remember Covid?"

Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"
6ix, your low income will tragically kill you young. It is statistics. Occasionally, but not too often in my experience, the kind of poor white trash that vote for Trump will live almost as long as the national average of 78.79 years for males, but statistically voting for Trump shortens your life.
https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+the+average+male+lifespan+in+t
he+united+states

The inequality of life expectancy by income

It's a well-known fact that in the United States rich people have much longer life expectancy than poor people. Much of this is attributed to our private health care system, which does a lousy job of treating the uninsured and under-insured.

That got me curious: do other countries with national health care systems do better? In a nutshell, not really:

The rich live about ten years longer than the poor in the US. In France it's about 12 years. The UK and Belgium are a little over 9 years. Sweden is around 4 years.



https://jabberwocking.com/chart-of-the-day-the-inequality-of-life-expe
ctancy-by-income/

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

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Sunday, April 10, 2022 11:15 AM

SECOND

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


Surveying the politics around global warming — and what we must do to slow it — hope is often lost as we doom-scroll through dozens of stories a week about each new indicator that humans are haplessly overheating the planet.

If the world can unite to stop growing greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 and manage a 40 percent drop by 2030, we can save the world as we know it, the panel explained. A new book by Rice University professor Dan Cohan provides some ideas on how to break through the political morass.

“Confronting Climate Gridlock: How Diplomacy, Technology, and Policy Can Unlock a Clean Energy Future” dives into how the technologies that will replace fossil fuels can spur economies and boost corporate profits and how game theory could lead to a global climate deal. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300251678/confronting-climate-grid
lock/

An emerging inducement to cooperate on climate is the opportunity for large corporations to profit from reducing emissions. Cohan spends multiple chapters explaining clean energy technologies and whether they are economically superior to carbon dioxide-producing alternatives.

“There is this one camp that is all about R&D and all the new technologies,” he said when I interviewed him in front of a live audience at Rice to celebrate the book’s release. “Then here are the people who say, ‘We have the technologies that we need; we just need the policy, the will, to put them in place.’”

The challenge now is the shrinking timeline to avoid disaster. President Joe Biden wants to neutralize emissions by 2035, which does not allow emerging technologies such as small nuclear reactors, fusion or even carbon capture to reach maturity in time.

“If we are serious about doing this quickly, and moving quickly is what we have to do, we have to move quickly to electricity,” he said.

Political scientists often use game theory to understand diplomatic negotiations. A classic game is the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

The game begins with police interviewing two co-conspirators separately, offering both a deal if they flip on their accomplice. The prisoners can stand pat and hope their ally doesn’t confess, or they can save themselves. If both confess, neither gets a deal.

If you play the game like a tournament with many rounds, game theorists say a winning strategy emerges. Keep quiet and if you lose, then confess in the next round to win. By always doing what the other prisoner did in the previous round, a player can encourage cooperative behavior in a few rounds of the game.

The steps to success are simple: In the first round, be nice, then retaliate, if necessary, and ultimately forgive betrayals to foster future cooperation. If the strategy is clear, prisoners learn always to cooperate.

Nations that have taken steps to slow climate change, though, generally do not retaliate against those that refuse. They create a free-rider problem, where some countries bear most of the burden. Cohan explains that European Union proposals to impose carbon tariffs on imports from noncomplying countries are emerging as the retaliation necessary to encourage cooperation.

One of Cohan’s key observations is that successful international climate deals typically ratify existing U.S. legislation. Conversely, presidents who cut a deal overseas first and then try to pass it at home often fail.

The Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer, for example, was signed only after the Environmental Protection Agency banned the dangerous chemicals at home. Passing climate bills through Congress then becomes the best way to make international deals that will hit emission reduction goals.

“If we ever get our act together domestically, we could have a better hope of driving things globally,” Cohan said. “And when we do act, we want to make sure everyone else comes on board.”

Unfortunately, in a deeply divided body politic, Republicans have made opposition to climate legislation a litmus test. Even the conservative clean energy advocacy groups I follow such as the Conservative Energy Network rarely mention climate. Instead, they call for market solutions over regulations.

The real challenge, then, is convincing Republican primary voters that mitigating climate change is necessary and economically beneficial. Unfortunately, after eight years of making this argument, I’ve seen only a slight reduction in the number of climate-change-denying messages from readers.

Cohan’s book provides an accurate assessment of the current situation and an excellent strategy for breaking the climate gridlock. He also provides a much-needed break from the climate doom-scroll.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220409120610/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/business/columnists/tomlinson/article/New-book-from-Rice-professor-shares-climate-17064805.php/

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

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Friday, April 15, 2022 11:34 AM

SECOND

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


Bernie Sanders @SenSanders
The Congressional Budget Office, run by a Republican, estimated that Medicare for All could save the American people $650 billion each year while Yale estimated that Medicare for All could save 68,000 lives each year.
1:05 PM · Apr 12, 2022·Twitter for iPhone
https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/1513941301972119556

But every Republican is opposed, just because.

https://i.imgur.com/CYC4wpZ.jpeg

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

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Friday, April 15, 2022 4:02 PM

SECOND

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


Why is the G.O.P. the enemy of any policy that might help its many working-class supporters?

To understand the puzzle, consider the policy positions of Marine Le Pen, who has a serious chance of becoming France’s next president. Her party, National Rally — previously called the National Front — is often described as right-wing. And on social issues it is; in particular, the party is largely defined by its hostility to immigrants and the alleged threat they pose to France’s national identity. On economic policy, however, Le Pen is if anything to the left of President Emmanuel Macron.

Now, it’s important to understand the context. France provides social benefits on a scale beyond the wildest dreams of U.S. progressives: universal health care, huge family benefits and more. Macron isn’t challenging the fundamentals of that system. He is, however, trying to trim some benefits, notably by raising the retirement age. Le Pen, by contrast, actually wants to reduce the retirement age for some workers.

I am not making a case for Le Pen. But there is some genuine populism — advocacy of policies that might actually help workers — in her platform.

Compare that with the positions taken by prominent U.S. Republicans. I can’t tell you what the official Republican economic program is, because the party doesn’t have one — in fact, it has made a point of not saying what it will do if it regains power.

We do, however, know what the party did when it was last in power: It gave huge tax cuts to the wealthy, while almost succeeding in repealing the Affordable Care Act, which would have caused tens of millions of Americans to lose health insurance. There’s no reason to believe it won’t once again pursue anti-worker, pro-plutocrat policies if it regains control.

At the state level, the debacle in Kansas has apparently done nothing to shake Republicans’ faith in the magical power of tax cuts for the affluent. Mississippi — America’s poorest state, with the lowest life expectancy and facing a collapse of its rural hospitals — is slashing income taxes.

And recently Senator Rick Scott of Florida, who heads the Republican senatorial campaign, released a “Rescue America” plan that called for tax increases on the half of Americans whose incomes are low enough that they don’t pay income taxes (even though they pay payroll taxes, sales taxes and so on). He also warned, falsely, that Social Security and Medicare are headed for bankruptcy, without offering any suggestions about how to preserve them.

Senior Republicans have said that they don’t support Scott’s agenda, but haven’t explained what their actual agenda is — and have left Scott in his key campaign position, suggesting that his views have wide support within the party.

So everything suggests that the Republican Party is as pro-wealthy, anti-worker as ever. Unlike right-wing European parties, it hasn’t made any gestures toward actual populism. Why?

The answer, presumably, is that the G.O.P. caters to plutocrats, even as it attacks “elites,” because it thinks it can. After all, being nice to plutocrats and crony capitalists can yield tangible rewards, not just in the form of campaign contributions but also in the form of personal enrichment.

And the Republican Party doesn’t believe that it will pay any price for pursuing these rewards. It believes that its supporters will focus on denunciations of critical race theory and buy into conspiracy theories — almost half of Republicans agree that top Democrats are involved in child sex-trafficking — while not even being aware of what the party is doing for the very rich. After The Times revealed Jared Kushner’s highly questionable $2 billion deal with the Saudis, Fox News simply ignored the report, while harping endlessly on Hunter Biden.

I wish I could say with any confidence that this cynicism will backfire. But I can’t. In particular, Democrats who want to campaign on bread-and-butter issues are assuming that voters will understand who’s actually buttering their bread. And that doesn’t look at all like a safe assumption.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20220415012302/https://www.nytimes.com/202
2/04/14/opinion/republicans-populism-rich.html

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

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Monday, April 18, 2022 7:34 AM

SECOND

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


Tax exempt charity’s goal is to prevent the approval of all Biden Administration nominees.

Mudslinging is not new to American politics. Adams’s supporters predicted that if Jefferson were elected President he would unleash a reign of “murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest.” Yet the American Accountability Foundation’s (A.A.F.) approach represents a new escalation.

Rather than attack a nominee, the A.A.F. aims to thwart the entire Biden slate. The obstructionism, like the Republican blockade of Biden’s legislative agenda in Congress, is the end in itself. The group hosts a Web site, www.bidennoms.com , that displays the photographs of Administration nominees it has targeted, as though they were hunting trophies.

The A.A.F., which is run by conservative white men, has particularly focused on blocking women and people of color. As of last month, more than a third of candidates it had publicly attacked were people of color, and nearly sixty per cent were women.

Late last year, Saule Omarova—a leading academic in the field of financial regulation, who is a law professor at Cornell and holds doctorates in law and political science—withdrew her name from consideration as Biden’s Comptroller of the Currency. She did so, she told me, because an opposition-research campaign against her, which the A.A.F. took credit for, had, among other things, falsely portrayed her as a secret communist.

Born in Kazakhstan, in what was then the Soviet Union, Omarova received an undergraduate degree from Moscow State University, but she became a naturalized American citizen in 2005. Yet, during her confirmation hearing, in a moment reminiscent of the Joseph McCarthy era, the Republican Senator John Kennedy, of Louisiana, declared that he didn’t know whether to call her “professor or comrade.” Omarova replied, “Senator, I am not a communist. I do not subscribe to that ideology. I could not choose where I was born.” Omarova’s résumé is hardly anti-capitalist: she worked at the corporate law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell and served in George W. Bush’s Treasury Department.

Omarova told me, “There were so many accusations. A.A.F. was at the forefront of making my life extremely and unnecessarily difficult.” The group discovered that Omarova, after she’d read an article in The Economist about potatoes, had tweeted fondly about a time she helped farmers harvest potatoes outside Moscow. The A.A.F. proclaimed that the Biden Administration had “nominated a woman who waxes nostalgic for the good ole days of poverty, hunger, and forced labor in communist Russia.” Conservative outlets pounced on similar tweets about her past. “The A.A.F. made it into this big deal,” she told me. “They said, ‘She wants to make America into the Soviet Union.’ It was a complete absurdity. But people who have no idea who I am jumped in and said, ‘Go back to the Soviet Union!’ ”

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20220416165930/https://www.newyorker.com/n
ews/a-reporter-at-large/the-slime-machine-targeting-dozens-of-biden-nominees

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

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Monday, April 18, 2022 9:35 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Delusional.

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

Me: "Remember Covid?"

Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"

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Wednesday, April 20, 2022 6:24 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Delusional.
The GOP is delusional about climate change.

Republican state leaders are on the warpath against BlackRock, the largest financial asset manager in the nation. The company’s sin? Statements by BlackRock leadership that climate change is a long-term threat, and that the company will pursue investments that promote a reduction in emissions.

In January, West Virginia declared that it was barring the company from managing its state pension funds. Texas passed legislation in February prohibiting any firm divesting from fossil fuels from managing state assets. In March, the Arkansas State Treasurer March withdrew $125 million from money market accounts managed by BlackRock. This followed a letter last year sent by a dozen Republican state treasurers threatening to pull funds from banks that had made commitments in line with the Paris climate accord to stop financing new fossil fuel investments.

Despite Chairman Larry Fink’s bold statement, in his annual letter to CEOs, that “every government, company, and shareholder must confront climate change,” BlackRock pledged in a February letter to Texas officials, “We will continue to invest in and support fossil fuel companies.”

As a company holding investments in nearly every major firm in the nation, BlackRock’s change of tune did not amount to an actual change in policy—since the firm hadn’t actually divested from anything.

The reason red states are scrambling to pass such legislation and make these threats is because fossil fuel firms are facing disinvestment campaigns all over the country.

While pro-fossil-fuel red-state officials tout the $600 billion in pension and other financial assets they oversee, that’s a tiny fraction of the $5.6 trillion in public pension funds and related assets in 6,000 separate public-sector retirement systems across the nation.

“The assets of those who believe in climate change dwarf the assets of those that don’t,” observes David Walleck in dismissing the Texas and West Virginia threats.

Public tantrums by red-state officials reflect the climate change shifts by the financial sector, even if the steps actually taken by BlackRock and others are only the beginning of what is needed.

More at https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/blue-state-divestment-bl
ackrock/

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

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Friday, April 22, 2022 8:27 AM

SECOND

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


Rep. Katie Porter @RepKatiePorter tweeted:

We have a tax gap because the richest Americans don't pay what they owe while the rest of us do.

In a hearing today, I quizzed the IRS Commissioner: how much have audits of millionaire taxpayers declined in the past 10 years?

For those playing along at home, leave your guess.

Sorry! This was actually a trick question... The correct answer is more than these: 66%.

The IRS Commissioner acknowledged that audits of millionaires have dropped by at least 66% in the past decade.

If the richest 1% of taxpayers paid what they owe, like the rest of us do, we could give every taxpayer $1000.

11:06 AM · Apr 21, 2022·Twitter Web App
https://twitter.com/repkatieporter/status/1517172835252375554

A New York Times investigation shows that President Donald Trump paid just $750 in federal taxes during the years straddling his 2017 inauguration, and none at all for 10 of 15 years before then. Trump dismissed the report as "fake news." But Trump has never revealed what he actually paid, although he promised many times to share his Form 1040 with the public, never keeping that promise.

Trump reported here income of at least $594 million for 2016 and early 2017 and assets worth at least $1.4 billion, in a financial disclosure in June 2017.

HOW THE U.S. BUDGET IS FUNDED

Individuals, whether they are self-employed or earn a paycheck from a small business or a giant corporation, foot most of the federal government’s bills.

Individual income tax funds U.S. federal spending:

Of the $3.46 trillion in receipts taken in by the U.S. Treasury during fiscal 2019, nearly half came from the $1.72 trillion in individual income taxes collected.

In addition, $1.24 trillion in Social Security and Medicare taxes were paid by individuals, bringing their share to 85%.

Taxes paid by corporations last year totaled $230 billion, or just 6.6% of the total in 2019. The remainder of federal revenues are made up from customs duties on imported goods, excise taxes such as those on gasoline, estate taxes and other miscellaneous taxes and fees.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-taxes-revenue-explainer/e
xplainer-the-4-trillion-u-s-government-relies-on-individual-taxpayers-idUSKBN26J30F

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

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Saturday, April 23, 2022 7:35 AM

SECOND

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


Democrats, You Can’t Ignore the Culture Wars Any Longer



Diana Wolman, a schoolteacher in Brooklyn, was called before a Senate subcommittee to answer questions about alleged Communist membership while she worked for the U.S. Army Signal Corps in New Jersey in 1953.

Almost 60 years ago, the historian Richard Hofstadter described what he saw as the true goal of McCarthyism. “The real function of the Great Inquisition of the 1950s was not anything so simply rational as to turn up spies or prevent espionage,” he wrote, “or even to expose actual Communists, but to discharge resentments and frustrations, to punish, to satisfy enmities whose roots lay elsewhere than in the Communist issue itself.”

Likewise, in a much more recent book, “The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left,” the historian Landon R.Y. Storrs shows how conservatives used loyalty pledges to purge the federal bureaucracy of government officials “who hoped to advance economic and political democracy by empowering subordinated groups and setting limits on the pursuit of private profit.”

Left-leaning New Dealers in the federal government, she explains, “believed that race and gender inequality served employers by creating lower-status groups of workers who supposedly needed or deserved less, thereby applying downward pressure on all labor standards, including those of white men. They saw their mission as sweeping away beliefs and practices that were based on obsolete conditions but defended by those whose interests they continued to serve.”

The Red Scare is, in this view, less a sudden outburst of reactionary hysteria than a political project aimed directly at dismantling the New Deal order and ousting those who helped bring it into being, both inside and outside the federal government.

Without making a direct analogy between then and now, I think that this perspective is a useful one to have in mind as conservatives pursue yet another witch hunt against those they perceive as enemies of American society, using whatever state power they happen to have at their disposal. Both the crusade against “critical race theory” and the slanderous campaign against L.G.B.T.Q. educators and education are as much about undermining key public goods (and stigmatizing the people who support them) as they are about generating enthusiasm for the upcoming midterm elections.

To be clear, this isn’t some secret. Christopher Rufo, a right-wing provocateur who helped instigate both the panics against “critical race theory” and against L.G.B.T.Q. educators in schools, has openly said that he hopes to destroy public education in the United States. “We are right now preparing a strategy of laying siege to the institutions,” he said last November in an interview with my colleague Michelle Goldberg. In a recent speech, delivered to an audience at the conservative Hillsdale College, Rufo declared that “to get universal school choice you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.”

It’s not subtle.

Republican lawmakers are similarly open about why they ginned up this panic: to dismantle public education for political and ideological reasons. Last year, Republicans in Michigan backed a bill that would slash school funding if educators taught “critical race theory,” “anti-American” ideas about race in the United States or material from The New York Times’s 1619 Project.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20220423011358/https://www.nytimes.com/202
2/04/22/opinion/red-scare-culture-wars.html

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

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Saturday, April 23, 2022 10:44 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


LOL

That's not the lesson Democrats should be learning.

But by all means, do go down that route and see how much worse you make it for yourselves.

I implore you.



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

Me: "Remember Covid?"

Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"

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Monday, April 25, 2022 7:46 AM

SECOND

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


We had our government shutdown in December 2018 and it lasted for over 30 days. I took this list of federal employees who’d been nominated for one of the awards they gave out every year and picked someone at random. Arthur A. Allen. He won the alphabet contest.

This is a guy who spent his whole career as the lone oceanographer in the Coast Guard search-and-rescue division, where he’d started in the late ’70s. There was a particular problem he was working on by himself, and the problem was costing a lot of American lives. It was people being lost at sea. The Coast Guard didn’t know how they drifted in the ocean. And Americans have this unbelievable talent for getting lost at sea, which is a whole other thing. On average, every day, the Coast Guard is saving 10 people who are lost in the sea and losing three. So you’re talking about thousands of people who are getting in this situation every year.

The problem is that if you fall off a boat into the ocean, you’re going to drift differently than if you are in a life raft, or if you’re on top of an overturned sailboat, or if you have a life vest on — you get the point. So if the Coast Guard knows where and when you started, as they often do, they should be able to predict where you are in the ocean four hours later, knowing the currents and the wind and your drift. But they didn’t know the drift, until Arthur A. Allen figured it all out. He spent years of his own free time tossing objects into the Long Island Sound, where he lives, measuring the specific drift of like 80 different categories of objects.

That all sounds boring and tedious, I know. But he reduced the drift to mathematical equations and embedded them in the search-and-rescue software program, and instantly they were able to find people they never would’ve found before. Thousands of Americans are alive because of Arthur A. Allen. And thousands of people are alive around the world because of the work he did here. No one knows who he is. No one pays any attention to him. They furloughed him as if he’s useless.

The punchline to all of this, to your point about the way we treat these experts who save our tails over and over again, is that when I went to go see Arthur to talk to him about what he had done with his life, I spent three days with him, interviewing his family, going to see his old office, going to the Long Island Sound to see where he dropped his objects, asking him every which way the story of his career.

After the three days, I’m going back to the airport to head home and he calls me and says, with real wonder in his voice, “Hey, you’re a published author.” And I said, “Yeah, yeah, I’m a published author.” He says, “You’re like a real deal. You’re a real writer.” And I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Are you going to be writing about me?” And I said, “Yeah, that’s why I spent three days learning how objects drift. Yes. I’m going to be writing about you.” He goes, “Wow. I didn’t expect to get any attention for this.” And I said, “Well, what did you think I was doing for those three days?” He said, “I just thought you were really interested in how objects drift.”

This is the mental world of the government expert. They’re so used to nobody caring about what they do, even when what they do is mission-critical, that they can’t imagine us even taking an interest in them. We so don’t value them that they don’t value themselves.

https://www.vox.com/vox-conversations-podcast/23030205/vox-conversatio
ns-michael-lewis-against-the-rules-experts

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

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Friday, April 29, 2022 12:10 PM

SECOND

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


How the American middle class has changed in the past five decades

The middle class, once the economic stratum of a clear majority of American adults, has steadily contracted in the past five decades. The share of adults who live in middle-class households fell from 61% in 1971 to 50% in 2021.

In 1970, adults in middle-income households accounted for 62% of aggregate income, a share that fell to 42% in 2020.

Among adults overall, the share who were in the upper-income tier increased from 14% in 1971 to 21% in 2021.

Meanwhile, the share of aggregate income accounted for by upper-income households has increased steadily, from 29% in 1970 to 50% in 2020.

There is a sizable and growing income gap between adults with a bachelor’s degree and those with lower levels of education.

More at https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/04/20/how-the-american-midd
le-class-has-changed-in-the-past-five-decades/



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

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Monday, May 2, 2022 6:33 AM

SECOND

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


Almost from the beginning, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” has presented a dominant narrative, recasting American racism to present white Americans as an oppressed caste. The ruling class uses fentanyl and other opioids to addict and kill legacy Americans, anti-white racism to cast them as bigots, feminism to degrade their self-esteem, immigration to erode their political power. Republican elites, however improbably, help to import the voters Democrats require at the ballot box. The United States, Mr. Carlson tells his viewers, is “ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule.”

He leaves little doubt who these mercenaries are. Among the most frequent recurring characters on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” are Black politicians like the Democratic congresswomen Maxine Waters and Ilhan Omar and Vice President Kamala Harris, whom Mr. Carlson has portrayed, against the available evidence, as a kind of shadow president. He regularly disparages Black women as stupid or undeserving of their positions. “No one outside of her own neighborhood had ever heard of Kamala Harris before she showed up as Willie Brown’s girlfriend,” Mr. Carlson said last November, referring to Ms. Harris’s long-ago relationship with the California politician. “Then a few years later, she became Montel Williams’s girlfriend. Interesting.” When President Biden nominated Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, Mr. Carlson demanded that the White House release her law school admissions test scores to prove she was qualified.

Seemingly every social ill is laid at the feet of immigrants and refugees — not just working-class unemployment, but rising home prices, out-of-wedlock births among native-born Americans, even the supposedly sorry state of his favorite Beltway fishing spots. With pastoral care, Mr. Carlson reassures his viewers. “It’s OK for you to say: ‘What is this?’ and ‘Maybe I don’t want to live in a country that looks nothing like the country I grew up in,’” Mr. Carlson told a guest in 2017. “Is that bigoted?”

Like his counterparts on the fringe, Mr. Carlson obsesses over Somali immigrants, who represent a tiny fraction of first-generation Americans but are at once Black, Muslim and foreign-born. One of the largest communities of Somali Americans, numbering several thousand people, lives less than an hour from his home in Maine, in the old mill city of Lewiston. In Mr. Carlson’s hands — as on sites like American Renaissance, which promotes “the biological reality of race” — Lewiston is a parable of replacement. Mr. Carlson has repeatedly depicted Somalis as threatening strangers deposited in a small, struggling city without the consent of its citizenry. “Go to Lowell, Mass., or Lewiston, Maine, or any place where large numbers of immigrants have been moved into a poor community, and it hasn’t become richer,” Mr. Carlson lectured a guest in 2017. “It’s become poorer. That’s real.”

In fact, according to Maine’s Labor Department, Lewiston’s unemployment rate has generally tracked that of the rest of the state, and the city has experienced neither a significant drop nor a surge in economic growth since the first Somalis arrived. And economists broadly reject Mr. Carlson’s central argument that immigration to the United States “drives down wages for low-skilled workers nationwide,” as he said in a 2019 segment. As one review of the relevant literature put it, “Decades of research have provided little support for the claim that immigrants depress wages by competing with native workers.” Immigrants compete for jobs but also help generate new ones, not only by raising demand for goods and services but also by helping fill out workplaces as they expand to hire native-born workers with different skills. While some studies have found that earlier waves of low-skill immigration may have had short-term impacts on the wages of one relatively small group — high school dropouts — other studies have found “small to zero effects,” as a landmark analysis by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine stated in 2017.

But as televised theater, the formula works. Mr. Carlson reliably draws more than three million viewers. When he defended the idea of demographic “replacement” on a different Fox show in April, the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights group, called for his firing, noting that the same concept had helped fuel a string of terrorist attacks, including the 2018 mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue. But when Mr. Carlson ran a clip of his comments on his own prime-time show a few days later, according to Nielsen data, the segment got 14 percent more viewers in the advertiser-sweet “demo” of 24- to 54-year-olds than Mr. Carlson’s average for the year.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20220430221258/https://www.nytimes.com/202
2/04/30/us/tucker-carlson-gop-republican-party.html

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

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Monday, May 2, 2022 8:11 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Save it.

Nobody wants to hear from the racists at the dying NYT.

Pathetic.

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

Me: "Remember Covid?"

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Monday, May 2, 2022 8:58 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Save it.

Nobody wants to hear from the racists at the dying NYT.

Pathetic.
Tucker Carlson has been calling blacks niggers all his life. Tucker gets angry that anyone would think he is a racist just because he hates niggers. Niggers earned Tucker's hatred according to Tucker. To Tucker, the real racists are the people who call Tucker a racist in Tucker's opinion. Whatever, but Tucker is a complete nutjob on the subject of race, which appeals to certain Americans who watch his show.

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

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Monday, May 2, 2022 9:11 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Save it.

Nobody wants to hear from the racists at the dying NYT.

Pathetic.
Tucker Carlson has been calling blacks niggers all his life. Tucker gets angry that anyone would think he is a racist just because he hates niggers. Niggers earned Tucker's hatred according to Tucker. To Tucker, the real racists are the people who call Tucker a racist in Tucker's opinion. Whatever, but Tucker is a complete nutjob on the subject of race, which appeals to certain Americans who watch his show.

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


Hey look.

Not black Second decides yet again that he's virtue-signaled enough this week to earn him the right to throw the word around half a dozen times.

Archived.

NOTE: There's a special place in your archive for these moments.

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

Me: "Remember Covid?"

Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"

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Monday, May 2, 2022 10:28 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Not black Second decides yet again that he's virtue-signaled enough this week to earn him the right to throw the word around half a dozen times.

Archived.

NOTE: There's a special place in your archive for these moments.
What does Tucker Carlson signal? He has claimed the moral high ground, many-many times, but there is no trace that he has ever done anything virtuous. He and Trump and Trump voters have proved over and over to be selfish crooks who think they are God's chosen people. The Confederates believed they were God's people and, for a while, it looked to themselves like they were, politically and militarily. But God stomped on the Confederates and will eventually stomp Trump voters for what they have done with their lives and, especially, to other people.

There is a reason why 2/3 of economic activity is in counties where Democrats are a majority. The other 1/3 of the economy is where Republicans control. I can see that at work, the Republicans are the worst, and because of that, produce the least. It is pretty much because a Republican does only half the work a normal person does, but the Republicans whine about how hard they strive. Too bad about how ineffective they are at life and work. They think they are trying very hard, but they are not really.

Biden-voting counties equal 70% of America’s economy. What does this mean for the nation’s political-economic divide?
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/11/09/biden-voting-coun
ties-equal-70-of-americas-economy-what-does-this-mean-for-the-nations-political-economic-divide/

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

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Monday, May 2, 2022 10:27 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
What does Tucker Carlson signal?


Nah. Fuck that.

You just threw around the N-word like you owned it.

I want you to show me NOW when Tucker Carlson said it even once, let alone a barrage that you feel that you're entitled to do, you "rich" white racist fuck.

Otherwise, shut the fuck up.

You're done here.

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

Me: "Remember Covid?"

Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"

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Tuesday, May 3, 2022 6:55 AM

SECOND

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


The GOP is no longer a political party. It’s a movement to impose White Christian nationalism.

People might be confused about how a Republican Party that once worried about government overreach now seeks to control medical care for transgender children and retaliate against a corporation for objecting to a bill targeting LGBTQ students. And why is it that the most ambitious Republicans are spending more time battling nonexistent critical race theory in schools than on health care or inflation?

To explain this, one must acknowledge that the GOP is not a political party anymore. It is a movement dedicated to imposing White Christian nationalism.

The media blandly describes the GOP’s obsessions as “culture wars,” but that suggests there is another side seeking to impose its views on others. In reality, only one side is repudiating pluralistic democracy — White, Christian and mainly rural Americans who are becoming a minority group and want to maintain their political power.

The result is an alarming pattern: Any moment of social progress is soon followed by reactionary panic and claims of victimhood. It’s no mere coincidence that Donald Trump, the leader of the birther movement, succeeded the first African American president. Nor should the anti-critical-race-theory movement surprise anyone given the mass protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Understanding his phenomenon is crucial to preserving pluralistic democracy.

Full piece:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/04/27/gop-no-longer-a-par
ty-movement-impose-christian-nationalism/

20 years ago I had a friend who was a professional educator and she told me the GOP really wanted a theocracy.

I shrugged it off as hyperbole and told her she sounded ... well, hyperbolic. Boy was I wrong. She was incredibly prescient.

2024 is going to be a very scary election, not to mention the mid-terms, but 2024 could be a tipping point for the Country in the worst way.

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

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Tuesday, May 3, 2022 7:17 AM

SECOND

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:
What does Tucker Carlson signal?


Nah. Fuck that.

You just threw around the N-word like you owned it.

I want you to show me NOW when Tucker Carlson said it even once, let alone a barrage that you feel that you're entitled to do, you "rich" white racist fuck.

Otherwise, shut the fuck up.

You're done here.
Tucker Carlson is nuttier than you, 6ix, about vaccines :



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

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Tuesday, May 3, 2022 8:27 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
What does Tucker Carlson signal?


Nah. Fuck that.

You just threw around the N-word like you owned it.

I want you to show me NOW when Tucker Carlson said it even once, let alone a barrage that you feel that you're entitled to do, you "rich" white racist fuck.

Otherwise, shut the fuck up.

You're done here.
Tucker Carlson is nuttier than you, 6ix, about vaccines :


Nope. Vaccines aren't the topic here.

Try again.

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

Me: "Remember Covid?"

Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"

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Tuesday, May 3, 2022 9:00 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Nope. Vaccines aren't the topic here.

Try again.
The actual topic is the mental illness of people who vote for Trump. The only sane people I know who voted for Trump are rich people. Trump delivered what the rich wanted: lower taxes and lax enforcement of tax laws because he would benefit along with the wealthy. The other people who voted for Trump have long lists of mental problems: stretches of well-deserved unemployment, proliferate spending, substance abuse, gross obesity, drunkenness, violence within the family, tax cheating (but not the sophisticated schemes of the wealthy), divorces caused by adultery, runaway children who hate their nutty parents, phobias, pointless conflicts with neighbors, feuds, DWIs, unpaid child support because they are mad at their ex, fights with relatives over who inherits Mom's furniture, etc.

All that personal, financial and workplace craziness shows when the Trump voters go to the polls because it is the same ill brains making political decisions. The average Trump voter is not normal and doesn't live sanely between elections.

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

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Tuesday, May 3, 2022 9:08 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

Nope. Vaccines aren't the topic here.

Try again.
The actual topic is the mental illness...


Nope. This is the topic:

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Save it.

Nobody wants to hear from the racists at the dying NYT.

Pathetic.
Tucker Carlson has been calling blacks niggers all his life. Tucker gets angry that anyone would think he is a racist just because he hates niggers. Niggers earned Tucker's hatred according to Tucker. To Tucker, the real racists are the people who call Tucker a racist in Tucker's opinion. Whatever, but Tucker is a complete nutjob on the subject of race, which appeals to certain Americans who watch his show.

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


Hey look.

Not black Second decides yet again that he's virtue-signaled enough this week to earn him the right to throw the word around half a dozen times.

Archived.

NOTE: There's a special place in your archive for these moments.


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
What does Tucker Carlson signal?


Nah. Fuck that.

You just threw around the N-word like you owned it.

I want you to show me NOW when Tucker Carlson said it even once, let alone a barrage that you feel that you're entitled to do, you "rich" white racist fuck.

Otherwise, shut the fuck up.

You're done here.


Try again.

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

Me: "Remember Covid?"

Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"

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Tuesday, May 3, 2022 10:09 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Try again.
I have tried to persuade Trump-voting construction workers who are crazy to behave slightly more sane. It never works for long. Sometimes a month. Other times a day. When I fire them, usually they either threaten to kill me or whine about needing the job or both. Few leave quietly because crazy people are talkative and lack the insight that their problems are caused exclusively by their crazy fool behavior. They vote for Trump because he loves the poorly educated mentally ill. He has their behavioral problems, but has transcended them because he can afford the best lawyers, thanks to an inheritance that Trump didn't pay all the taxes on. Trump is to them a bigger crook and nutjob, which his voters admire. He is them.

Donald Trump’s family avoided taxes, but did they evade them? We asked an expert why the difference matters.
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/10/3/17934360/trump-taxes-illegal-n
ew-york-times-expose

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

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Tuesday, May 3, 2022 10:43 AM

JAYNEZTOWN




Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The GOP is no longer a political party. It’s a movement to impose White Christian nationalism.



Impose?

While the GOP can be super retarded

If this was true there wouldn't be a Condi Rice or Benjamin Solomon Carson Sr.
Also granddaughter of Bush and the Daughter of Trump would not have been married off to Jewish or people of Jewish descent.


Quote:
Originally posted by second:


Nor should the anti-critical-race-theory movement surprise anyone given the mass protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Understanding his phenomenon is crucial to preserving pluralistic democracy.





BLM has helped push race relations backwards, divide ethnicity and Balkanize America.

The Floyd bullshit was almost like an Occult Brainwashing Human Sacrifice Ritual tv broadcast across every tv station in the Western world for a full 2 weeks we watched the knee on the back of the head played on repeat over and over and over and over, repeating
repeats again and again and again and again and again
they keep showing the Knee on the Back of the Head again and again like some weird Occult Satanic Aztec Voodoo Brainwashing Ritual
This was the only film played for a full Two Weeks in the Middle of Covid Lockdowns.
It gets Marxists angry, BLM and other Bolsevisk out rioting,
B urning L ooting and M urdering,
and causing mass social unrest

BLM membership consists of many ex-convicts who hate police, hate the judicial system, are super racist and Afro-Centrist, they will attack and say 'Dindu Nuffins' they will Loot and claim they deserve 'Gibs' or Reparation for something that happened to dead people by other dead people hudnreds of years ago or they Hate America's system, hate the taxpayers who support the system of the United States.

BLM have as a group murdered and attacked dozens of Blacks, including two policemen, two children, and shot at least 3 other innocent Blacks including one minor. Black Lives Matter is collecting funding from foreign government groups and outside interests, it also funded by groups linked to George Soros one of the conspiracy people's favorite theories. BLM participated in a massive upsurge of coordinated anti-civilisation riots that spread throughout the Western world not jsut in America but across the entire West, in Britbongistan film was show of them chasing down unarmed British Cops and beating the crap out of them. There was massive property damage and a breakdown of public order, with bystanders killed in random gun and knife attacks, some were left with life changing injuries attacked by gangs in melee brawls and hand to hand attacks groups stomping on people. BLM protesters also murdered two African Americans inside an attempted break-away region called Seattle's Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, Black Lives Matter also considers covid vaccines racist, and mandates racialist.

You keep having hissy fits every time someone says something you don't like about Corona

So why not call out BLM?

Quote:
Originally posted by second:


Full piece:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/04/27/gop-no-longer-a-par
ty-movement-impose-christian-nationalism/

20 years ago I had a friend who was a professional educator and she told me the GOP really wanted a theocracy.



I honestly can't be bothered to click on any worthless link from the DeepState Mocking Bird Media crap known as the Washington Compost

However on the point of Theocracy it seems the Leftwing of Swedistan are importing islamics, the Socialist Lefts of Britbongtistan, the neo-illiberal Nu-Democrat Left in the United States are importing islamics by the Tens of Thousands

Second you keep saying to me you know islam and you have read the Quran or Koran, you know islamic texts, isn't that correct?

Maybe you know of what kind of terrorist pedophile the founder of islam was?

Second if you have read the islamic books can you quote me any page, any paragraph at all

Tell me what kind of person this mahomet was?

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Wednesday, May 4, 2022 8:13 AM

SECOND

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


Even though GDP grew at 5.7% last year, the highest rate since “Morning in America” 1984, and job growth was the largest ever for the first year of a presidency, fully 29% of the population recently declared that we have been seeing job losses, with only 31% somehow aware that we have seen job gains, with many declaring the economy “bad,” although that is explained by the public listing inflation as their biggest concern. But how people can turn stories about “worker shortages” into job losses is beyond me. I also observe that people worried about “worker shortages” are also likely to be worked up about blocking illegal immigration, so consistent.

https://angrybearblog.com/2022/05/major-economic-confusion

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

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Wednesday, May 4, 2022 10:37 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

Nope. Vaccines aren't the topic here.

Try again.
The actual topic is the mental illness...


Nope. This is the topic:

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Save it.

Nobody wants to hear from the racists at the dying NYT.

Pathetic.
Tucker Carlson has been calling blacks niggers all his life. Tucker gets angry that anyone would think he is a racist just because he hates niggers. Niggers earned Tucker's hatred according to Tucker. To Tucker, the real racists are the people who call Tucker a racist in Tucker's opinion. Whatever, but Tucker is a complete nutjob on the subject of race, which appeals to certain Americans who watch his show.

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


Hey look.

Not black Second decides yet again that he's virtue-signaled enough this week to earn him the right to throw the word around half a dozen times.

Archived.

NOTE: There's a special place in your archive for these moments.


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
What does Tucker Carlson signal?


Nah. Fuck that.

You just threw around the N-word like you owned it.

I want you to show me NOW when Tucker Carlson said it even once, let alone a barrage that you feel that you're entitled to do, you "rich" white racist fuck.

Otherwise, shut the fuck up.

You're done here.


Try again.

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

Me: "Remember Covid?"

Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"


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

Try again.
I have tried to persuade Trump-voting construction workers who are crazy to behave slightly more sane. It never works for long. Sometimes a month. Other times a day. When I fire them, usually they either threaten to kill me or whine about needing the job or both. Few leave quietly because crazy people are talkative and lack the insight that their problems are caused exclusively by their crazy fool behavior. They vote for Trump because he loves the poorly educated mentally ill. He has their behavioral problems, but has transcended them because he can afford the best lawyers, thanks to an inheritance that Trump didn't pay all the taxes on. Trump is to them a bigger crook and nutjob, which his voters admire. He is them.

Donald Trump’s family avoided taxes, but did they evade them? We asked an expert why the difference matters.


Yup. That's what I thought, bitch.

You're lucky there aren't any black people on this site or they'd have run you off of it long ago.

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

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Saturday, May 7, 2022 6:15 PM

JAYNEZTOWN


Ethics Watchdog Sounds Alarm

https://conservativebrief.com/ethics-group-62615/

Ethics Watchdog Sounds The Alarm On The Biden Administration And Its New White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre Over Her Relationship With CNN Journalist

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Monday, May 9, 2022 7:22 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Yup. That's what I thought, bitch.

You're lucky there aren't any black people on this site or they'd have run you off of it long ago.
6ix, too bad you can't see yourself from outside. The Confederates couldn't see themselves and they started a war because, in their heads, they were the good guys fighting for their freedom. The Nazis were just as blind as Confederates when they looked in a mirror. In their heads, they were good people, but maybe you remember what those good people did because they couldn't see themselves as others see them. The Russian Communists were the good guys who just so happened to starve 4,000,000 Ukrainians to death because those Ukies, as Signym has called them, did not understand the beautiful ideas motivating the Communist party. And then there are today's Trump voters who haven't grabbed absolute control, yet, but when they do, the beauty of their ideas, not different from Confederate ideas about what freedom is, will sweep across America, transforming everything. Too bad Trump voters can't see themselves as non-Trump voters see them. But they can't see, which is precisely why they vote for Trump.

By the way, 6ix, that blindness Trump voters have about themselves is why they don't prosper in America between elections. They cannot see what they did wrong, what is keeping them down. They are also blind to Trump's tax cheating, adultery and his constantly being sued, all which keep his life in turmoil. If he hadn't inherited his wealth, to afford lawyers to clean up after his unnecessary adventures, his life would be as sorrowful as his voters' lives.

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

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Monday, May 9, 2022 7:22 AM

SECOND

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


The philosopher who warned us about loneliness and totalitarianism

A podcast revisiting Hannah Arendt’s ideas about social isolation and mass resentment.

Hannah Arendt writes about loneliness as a distinct modern problem. She looks both to Nazi totalitarianism, which had just ended, but also to Soviet totalitarianism, which is still going strong at the time. And she also looks toward her new home in America.

What she sees everywhere she looks is that loneliness is the result of a lack of a common ground of experience. This is what she’s getting at when she writes, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, in other words, the reality of experience, and the distinction between true and false ... people for whom those distinctions no longer exist.”

In her book on totalitarianism, Arendt talks about the emergence of “the masses,” which is distinct from what we might think of as classes or interest groups, because those are groups that are by definition fighting for some common interest. She’s talking about the rise of an “unorganized mass” of “mostly furious individuals” with nothing in common except for their contempt for the present order. She calls this “negative solidarity” and it’s the raw material of totalitarianism, because it’s a world without connection and friendship, where the only basis of collective action is some kind of awful combination of anger and desperation.

How did the world get so lonely in the first place? Was it just the rise of capitalism and individualism? It’s that, but also much more. When I was re-reading Origins of Totalitarianism a couple of months ago, I was astonished by how often the word “hate” came into her conversation about the creation of the mass. She noticed that it’s really easy to work with people’s anger and whip up a mob, and she has this great statement in the book about the alliance between the mob and the elite and how the elite are quite good at spotting and using the hate that’s already there.

She says anger is things like unemployment. It is things like not being able to keep your home. And when you look at the early 20th century and look at those rates of inflation and unemployment, and then you have the World War and the civil wars across Europe, and then you have mass migration and so on, we’re not just talking about some kind of ennui here. This is raw, real anger. It’s easy to raise a mob in these conditions. You’re starting with real anger.

This is the creation of the mass and it isn’t just fascism. This isn’t just populism. This is totalitarianism proper in Arendt’s mind. She says at one point, and this is a quote that’s resonated with me for a few years now, that “the masses’ escape from reality is a verdict against the world in which they’re forced to live.” Often the question is, well, how can people be so stupid? How can anyone fall for this? That’s the wrong way to think about it. Totalitarian politics is a verdict against the world in which people are forced to live. It’s a slap in the face. It’s a middle finger up against the real conditions of existence.

People will often refer to the masses as if they’re gullible and stupid, which on the one hand is just terrible politics. But on the other hand, it’s actually stupid. I mean, people aren’t stupid. A term that’s just as important as loneliness is cynicism. Totalitarianism works through cynicism. It’s crucial because it allows people to say, “They’re all the same, it’s all bullshit, isn’t it? It’s just politics, isn’t it?” What cynicism allows you to do is be gullible and disbelieving at the same time.

Arendt thought that before a totalitarian ideology could overwhelm reality, it had to first ruin people’s relationship with themselves and others by making them so skeptical and so cynical that they could no longer rely upon their own judgment. Without the ability to think, there can not be any judgment. She saw that when she looked at the Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 in the courtroom: a self-important man chattering away, talking self-importantly, not even realizing who he was facing — the relatives and survivors of people he had murdered — and he just spoke in cliches. The longer she listened to him, the more obvious became his inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of someone else.

The last paper that Arendt published was based on a talk that she gave in 1975. She was asked to speak a few weeks after the fall of Saigon, and she says, “this is what America has to face: It’s gone further and further away from itself into a culture in which politics is marketing, in which politics is PR.” For her, the fall of Saigon revealed that America had just suffered a humiliating and outright defeat.

Then she listed the things that led up to that. She talked about the Pentagon Papers and how they revealed that there was no purpose to that war other than maintaining the fiction that America was an all-powerful free nation — a fiction, by the way, that was good enough for other people’s children to die for. Watergate showed that this whole thing was being cooked up by a bunch of second-rate crooks. This was American politics.

She insisted that we had to recognize that reality. And the reality was that America was not great and free and wonderful, it was not that powerful. We had just suffered a catastrophic loss, and we had jeopardized our politics at the same time. That’s what she called the “big lie,” a phrase that was picked up again when Trump pushed his own big lie about the election. She said that this is how totalitarianism works. You just invent an outrageous big lie and you stick to it.

More at https://www.vox.com/vox-conversations-podcast/23048597/vox-conversatio
ns-hannah-arendt-totalitarianism-the-philosophers

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

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Tuesday, May 10, 2022 6:30 AM

SECOND

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


2022 Pulitzer Prize Winner

The Houston Chronicle Editorial Board on Monday won a 2022 Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing for a series on voter suppression in Texas.

The top honor was awarded to writers Lisa Falkenberg, Michael Lindenberger, Joe Holley and Luis Carrasco. Mostly published in a series called, "The Big Lie," their winning work examined and debunked GOP-driven falsehoods about voter fraud that have persisted for decades.

Jurors who decided the award wrote that the Chronicle won for a "campaign that, with original reporting, revealed voter suppression tactics, rejected the myth of widespread voter fraud and argued for sensible voting reforms."

The articles are here: https://web.archive.org/web/20220224095908/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/opinion/editorials/big-lie-series/

EDITORIAL
How Texas steals your voting rights while you're sleeping
The GOP's heedless rush to pass voter suppression gives up the game.

EDITORIAL
The GOP's not listening, but voter suppression is bad for business

EDITORIAL
What happens when a GOP state tells the truth about voter fraud?

EDITORIAL
For 20 years, the GOP has groomed their voters to believe in fraud

EDITORIAL
Texas has been crying 'fraud' since it blocked ex-slaves from voting

EDITORIAL
Is Crystal Mason proof of Texas election fraud — or a political ploy?

EDITORIAL
If voter fraud is an epidemic, why can’t Texas find it?

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

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Tuesday, May 10, 2022 9:12 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
2022 Pulitzer Prize Winner


https://unherd.com/thepost/the-new-york-timess-worst-pulitzer-prize-wi
nners/

Nobody cares.

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Thursday, May 12, 2022 6:16 AM

SECOND

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


The Smash-and-Grab Economy
Private equity billionaires are looting the country, leaving everyday Americans to clean up the mess

Jerome Kohlberg Jr., Henry Kravis, and George Roberts, friends from their time engineering deals at Bear Stearns, had started investment bank KKR. They presented ­Saltarelli with a plan that they said could check all the CEO’s boxes: a leveraged buyout, or LBO. Saltarelli had to admit he’d never heard the term.

KKR arranged a meeting with Houdaille in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where they explained how an LBO would work. Institutional investors would lend them money based on Houdaille’s healthy cash reserve, enabling KKR and partners to buy up all the company’s shares and take it private. Houdaille would easily pay that debt back in four to five years, they said, thanks to the magic of corporate tax write-offs: Through some clever accounting, they could help Houdaille push off paying almost all corporate income tax for years, savings the company could use to pay off the debt it would incur during the buyout. By the time Houdaille had to pay Uncle Sam, the debt would be under control, and KKR would take the company public again, but at a much higher share price. Thanks to this plan, they could immediately offer Saltarelli and investors around $40 per share, about double what ­Houdaille was trading at. Not only would Saltarelli get his wish, but he’d make a hefty profit.

When Saltarelli agreed to KKR’s terms, it was historic: At the time, leveraged buyouts had only been applied to a few smaller companies worth less than $100 million. The Houdaille deal was worth almost four times that. Both Houdaille executives and the KKR financiers were set to come out of it nicely: According to journalist Max Holland’s 1989 book about LBOs, Saltarelli got around $5 million in cash ($20 million in today’s dollars), plus a retirement package, and new CEO Phil O’Reilly’s salary reportedly almost doubled. Baked into the deal were also annual management fees that Houdaille would pay to KKR (ranging from $646,000 to $1.3 million in today’s dollars), plus 1 percent of the total transaction cost for putting the deal together, and 20 percent of any capital gains accrued by KKR’s partners in the deal, which the industry calls “carried interest.” KKR kicked in as little as $1 million toward the buyout, which cost around $380 million, nearly all of it financed with debt that Houdaille alone would be responsible for repaying.

Within a few years, however, the American machine tool business went south, and Houdaille found itself drowning in its debt. Soon, KKR divested seven divisions of the company, eliminating 2,200 jobs. Then it borrowed even more money, put the debt on Houdaille’s tab, and used it to engineer a handsome buyout for the LBO’s initial investors who now wanted out. A year later, KKR sold Houdaille to a British firm, which sold all but one of Houdaille’s remaining divisions back to KKR, which used them to form a new company, IDEX. Houdaille died, yet the investors who’d killed it walked off with millions and called it a success: “All of the Houdaille ‘constituents’…fared well in the LBO,” declared a report commissioned by KKR. Just like that, a new kind of financial monstrosity was born.

Houdaille “was a wake-up call,” says Eileen Appelbaum, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Wall Street firms, she says, were giddy at the discovery that they could load companies up with debt they’d never be responsible for paying down themselves and take an ample cut of the proceeds that came from stripping a company bare—and it was all legal.

More at https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/05/private-equity-buyout-kkr
-houdaille/

Just so you know why LBO is still legal, Democrats have written laws to make this illegal but Republican Senators always filibuster those laws because slowing down the biggest business crooks would be Communism. It was lobbyists for KKR, the big crooks' investment bank, that told Republicans it was Communism.

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

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Thursday, May 12, 2022 8:39 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Let's get full transparency on every US FEDERAL politician's stock portfolio and we'll see who's really against us.

Remember the vote on abortion that just happened, dummy?

The one that they knew never was going to pass?

We've got one party in America. It's the party of Money and we're all fucked.


Open your eyes, stupid.

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

Me: "Remember Covid?"

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Tuesday, May 17, 2022 8:52 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Let's get full transparency on every US FEDERAL politician's stock portfolio and we'll see who's really against us.

Remember the vote on abortion that just happened, dummy?

The one that they knew never was going to pass?

We've got one party in America. It's the party of Money and we're all fucked.


Open your eyes, stupid.
There are two parties and they are very different. Every vote in the Senate makes it absolutely clear where each Senator stands. Most recently every Republican in the Senate and conservative Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin (West Virginia) voted against a bill to guarantee abortion access in the U.S. In a tweet clearly aimed at Manchin, Sen. Bernie Sanders wrote: “If you can’t stand up for a woman’s right to choose, for voting rights, for an economy that works for all, why are you caucusing with the Senate Democrats? We need a Democratic Majority where all members believe in economic, racial, social and environmental justice.”

https://truthout.org/articles/sanders-asks-why-manchins-a-democrat-aft
er-his-no-vote-on-abortion-bill/

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

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Tuesday, May 17, 2022 8:54 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Let's get full transparency on every US FEDERAL politician's stock portfolio and we'll see who's really against us.

Remember the vote on abortion that just happened, dummy?

The one that they knew never was going to pass?

We've got one party in America. It's the party of Money and we're all fucked.


Open your eyes, stupid.
There are two political parties. Each is very different from the other:

From Voodoo to MAGA to Buffalo

May 16, 2022, 7:00 p.m. ET

I never thought I’d say this, but I miss voodoo economics.

It was shocking at the time when a crank economic doctrine — the claim that tax cuts pay for themselves — became in effect the official Republican party line. It was dismaying to see that doctrine’s hold on the party become ever more entrenched even as the evidence for its falsity — the Clinton economic boom, the lackluster performance of the Bush economy even before the 2008 financial crisis, the tax-cut debacle in Kansas, the failure of the Trump tax cuts to generate an investment boom — kept accumulating.

And voodoo economics continues to do real damage to this day. The Republicans who control Mississippi, a poor state with desperately underfunded educational programs that’s closing hospitals, recently moved to boost the state’s economy by … cutting taxes.

As far as I know, however, diatribes about the evils of high marginal tax rates haven’t inspired any acts of domestic terrorism.

As has been widely reported, the suspect accused of fatally shooting 10 people in Buffalo is a devotee of “replacement theory,” which claims that sinister elites — especially Jews, of course — are deliberately bringing in immigrants to displace and disempower white Americans. So were the men charged with massacres at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 and an El Paso Walmart in 2019.

Replacement theory used to be a fringe doctrine, but these days, in at best thinly disguised form, it is attracting significant mainstream support within the G.O.P. And this mainstream acceptance helps it spread.

As The Times has documented, Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show has amplified the doctrine more than 400 times. And lest you dismiss Carlson as a mere media figure, remember David Frum’s dictum: “Republicans originally thought Fox worked for us. Then we discovered that we work for Fox.”

In any case, a growing number of prominent G.O.P. politicians also espouse barely veiled versions of replacement theory. Elise Stefanik, the third-ranking Republican in the House, has run Facebook ads claiming that Democrats want to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants to “overthrow our current electorate.” J.D. Vance, the Republican nominee for Senate in Ohio, claims that “Biden’s open border” is bringing “more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”

Why is the paranoid style taking over the Republican Party? Facts have little to do with it. Some of the most anti-immigrant politicians come from places with hardly any immigrants: Fewer than 5 percent of Ohioans and fewer than 4 percent of the residents of Stefanik’s district, in New York, are foreign-born. In New York City the share is almost 38 percent.

Nor does there seem to be a popular groundswell driving this political shift. Yes, large numbers of Americans are anti-immigrant, racially hostile, or both. But this has always been true. Public opinion seems, if anything, to be more favorable to immigration than in the past; indicators of racial tolerance, like approval of interracial marriage, are at historic highs.

What has changed, however, is the behavior of Republican elites, who used to push back against conspiracy theories but now cheerfully embrace them whenever it seems politically expedient.

Which, I’d argue, is where voodoo economics comes in — not as an idea but as a determinant of the kind of people who became Republican politicians.

The rise of supply-side economics coincided with the rise of movement conservatism — an interlocking network of elected officials, media organizations, think tanks and lobbying firms. Because the movement’s core ideology involved reducing taxes on the rich, it was lavishly supported by billionaires and corporate interests, and this in turn meant that it offered job security to anyone who remained sufficiently loyal.

Who was attracted to this movement? Many were careerists: people happy to serve as apparatchiks, following whatever the party line happened to be at the moment. They may have signed up to promote low taxes and a weaker safety net, but most of the party immediately went MAGA when the winds shifted.

Stefanik is a perfect example: a Paul Ryan protégé who pivoted seamlessly to full Trumpism, including false claims of election fraud, and now to promotion of the great replacement theory.

Someone like Vance, who isn’t a professional political operative, is actually the exception that proves the rule. His defining characteristic is opportunism: a Trump denouncer turned slavish acolyte, a self-proclaimed champion of the rural poor who opposes any program that might help them. And his very lack of an ethical center is probably why Donald Trump endorsed him.

So when I say that I miss voodoo economics, what I really mean is that I miss the illusion — which I shared — that the impact of its rise would mainly be limited to the politics of taxes and spending. What we now know is that the embrace of crank economics presaged the general moral collapse of the Republican establishment.

This collapse opened the door for paranoia and conspiracy theorists of all kinds — and the consequences have been deadly. There is, I would argue, a direct line from the Laffer curve, to Jan. 6, to Buffalo.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220516235158/http://www.nytimes.com/2022
/05/16/opinion/republicans-taxes-great-replacement.html/

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

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Friday, May 20, 2022 7:50 AM

SECOND

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


Colorado GOP candidate for governor wants to eliminate statewide popular vote so Republicans can win more races

Greg Lopez wants to create an Electoral College-style system that gives rural areas more voting power than cities

Each county would get between three and eleven electoral votes, depending not on their population, but on their voter turnout rate. As 9NEWS noted, "Colorado’s rural, conservative counties had seven of the 10 highest voter turnout percentages in the 2018 race for governor. Those counties had an average of 1,077 ballots cast in the election."

Under this system, Democratic Gov. Jared Polis, who won the 2018 election by double digits, would have received 181 electoral votes to the 263 earned by his Republican opponent, Walker Stapleton.

https://www.rawstory.com/greg-lopez-parker-mayor/

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

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Friday, May 20, 2022 7:59 AM

SECOND

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


The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued yet another astonishing decision on Wednesday in Jarkesy v. SEC.

The Jarkesy decision claims that the system the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) uses to enforce federal laws protecting investors from fraud has been unconstitutional for years and that somehow no one has noticed this fact until two particularly partisan judges, taking liberties with existing law, discovered these defects in the Jarkesy case.

The two judges in the majority, Jennifer Walker Elrod and Andy Oldham, are both known for interpreting the law in creative and unexpected ways to achieve results that align with the Republican Party’s policy preferences.

The holding of Jarkesy is broad. It could destroy the federal government’s power to enforce key laws preventing companies from deceiving investors, and it likely goes much further than that. Among other things, the decision could blow up the process that the Social Security Administration uses to determine who is entitled to benefits.

https://www.vox.com/2022/5/19/23130569/jarkesy-fifth-circuit-sec

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

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Monday, May 23, 2022 6:09 AM

SECOND

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


September 25, 1986

Memorial Day, 1986. Laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery, President Ronald Reagan paid special attention, in his remarks, to “the boys of Vietnam…who fought a terrible and vicious war without enough support from home…. They chose to be faithful. They chose to reject the fashionable skepticism of their time. They chose to believe and answer the call of duty.”

Ronald Reagan was adopting for his own ends one of the enduring conservative myths of the Vietnam War, that never were so many betrayed by so few. It has become a commonplace in the conservative canon to compare the combat hardships endured by the troops in the line with the cowardice of the military deserters in the field and the draft resisters at home. The truth is more ambiguous. In what Lawrence Baskir and William Strauss call the “Vietnam era” — that is, between August 7, 1964, when the Senate passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, and March 29, 1973, when the last US combat forces left Vietnam — 26,800,000 American men came of draft age. Of that number, there were 570,000 apparent draft evaders. Another 15,410,000 — or 57.5 percent — were “deferred, exempted, or disqualified,” one of whom, on medical grounds, was Ronald Reagan’s eldest son.

Class was always the domestic issue during the Vietnam War, not communism. At the peak of the conflict, draftees were getting killed at twice the rate of enlistees, with the result that avoiding the draft became the preoccupation of an entire male generation, or at least that part of it which had the means and the wit to manipulate the Selective Service system to its advantage. Evading military service has a long history in American life. During the Civil War, Union conscripts could buy a substitute for $300; in the South, plantation owners could keep their sons home under the so-called 20-Nigger Law, which exempted one overseer for every twenty slaves. So many registrants had their teeth pulled to avoid induction during World War I that the War Department had to warn dentists publicly that they were liable for prosecution for abetting draft dodging. Only World War II, which mobilized 10 million draftees, could by any stretch of the imagination be called a people’s war.

The men “who fought and died in Vietnam,” write Baskir and Strauss, “were primarily society’s ‘losers,’ the same men who got left behind in schools, jobs, and other forms of social competition.” In other words, a rainbow coalition of black, brown, and redneck who, according to the Notre Dame survey which was the inspiration for Chance and Circumstance, were “about twice as likely as their better-off peers to serve in the military, go to Vietnam, and see combat.”

The documentation presented by Baskir and Strauss, and by Myra MacPherson in Long Time Passing is relentless. A survey conducted by Congressman Alvin O’Konski of one hundred draftees in his northern Wisconsin district showed that not one came from a family with an annual income of over $5,000. Another survey, in 1965–1966, indicated that college graduates made up only 2 percent of all inductees. Of the 1,200 men in the Harvard class of 1970, only fifty-six served in the military, just two in Vietnam. People disposed to the war showed no more inclination to serve than those with antiwar attitudes. “A 1970 report showed that 234 sons of senators and congressmen came of age since the United States became involved in Vietnam,” MacPherson writes.

More than half — 118 — received deferments. Only 28 of that 234 were in Vietnam. Of that group, only 19 “saw combat,” Only one, Maryland Congressman Clarence Long’s son, was wounded…. No one on the House Armed Services Committee had a son or grandson who did duty in Vietnam. Student deferments were shared by sons and grandsons of hawks and doves alike. Senators Burdick, Cranston, Dodd, Goldwater, Everett Jordan and McGhee had sons who flunked the physical.

More at https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1986/09/25/the-war-that-wont-go-away/

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

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Wednesday, May 25, 2022 7:52 AM

SECOND

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


Republicans did what they always do and Dem. Senator Joe Manchin did what he always does therefore nothing will be done about the problem:

Republican senator warns against curbing gun rights in wake of Texas school shooting

GOP Sen. Thom Tillis (North Carolina) warned Democrats against having a “reflexive reaction” in the wake of the Texas school shooting that left 15 people dead, by trying to pass laws that would impinge on Second Amendment rights, saying he is confident in the coming days it will be learned that there were “signs” the 18-year-old shooter was “at risk.”

“It's horrible. And you know what we need to avoid is the reflexive reaction we have to say this could all be solved by not having guns in anyone's hands. We can always talk about reasonable measures, but we also have to talk about better situational awareness. I'm almost certain that in the coming days or weeks, we're going to find out that there were signs that this person was at risk, and we need to have an equal or greater attention on prevention and that's a key part of it,” the North Carolina Republican told CNN.

Asked if there was a component of guns that could be part of the solution for the problem of mass shootings in the country, Tillis said “no.”

“What people immediately want to jump to are red flag laws. Virtually everyone that I've seen here has been one that sweep up law abiding gun owners into what I consider to be an overreach. So the question is can we can we actually get to policy that could make a difference, but not deny people their Second Amendment rights and give them due process? That's what we talk about every time something like this comes up and that hopefully will be the discussion if we have one versus what could potentially be the plot of people going into their political corners, which I've seen every time something tragic event like this has happened and the seven and a half years I've been here.”

https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/texas-elementary-school-shooting-05-2
5-22/h_f17bb8f9015accd714e84cfcc4918364

Meanwhile, Sen. Manchin refuses to eliminate filibuster to pass gun legislation

Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (West Virginia) said Tuesday he would do anything he could to move “common sense” gun legislation forward, but he refused to eliminate the filibuster to get gun legislation through the Senate.

"You would think there’d be enough common sense," Manchin said when asked directly if he was open to getting rid of the filibuster to pass gun reform laws. "The filibuster is the only thing that prevents us from total insanity," he added.

When asked by CNN what his message to outraged and frightened parents and grandparents is, Manchin noted he’s a grandfather, adding:

“It makes no sense at all why we can’t do common sense, common sense things and try to prevent some of this from happening.” I assume Manchin wasn't listening to the other Manchin who had just said "The filibuster is the only thing that prevents us from total insanity." The filibuster is the totally insane rule that prevents common sense law changes. 3 minute audio: https://theworld.org/stories/2013-06-26/are-filibusters-used-outside-u
nited-states

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

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Wednesday, May 25, 2022 8:43 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


He believes that destroying the 2nd Amendment and letting Democrats ram whatever they want down our throats until 2024 when Republicans can ram anything they want down our throats is the solution.

This is all you need to know about Second.

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

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Friday, May 27, 2022 7:05 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
He believes that destroying the 2nd Amendment and letting Democrats ram whatever they want down our throats until 2024 when Republicans can ram anything they want down our throats is the solution.

This is all you need to know about Second.
It’s hard to say which of the Republican responses to the latest mass shooting was most reprehensible. The reliably awful Senator Ted Cruz attracted considerable attention by insisting that the answer is to put armed guards in schools, never mind that Uvalde’s school system has its own police force and officers seem to have been on the scene soon after the shooter arrived.

And the Buffalo supermarket that was the location of a mass shooting just 10 days earlier also had an armed security guard, who was killed because his gun was no match for the shooter’s body armor.

But if you ask me, the worst and also most chilling response came from Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas. What we need to do, declared Patrick, is “harden these targets so no one can get in, ever, except maybe through one entrance.”

That restriction would have interesting consequences in the event of a fire. But in any case, think about Patrick’s language: In a nation that’s supposedly at peace, we should treat schools as “targets” that need to be “hardened.” What would that do to public education, which has for many generations been one of the defining experiences of growing up in America? Don’t worry, says the Federalist Society: Families can keep their kids safe by resorting to home-schooling.

Actually, if you take the proposals by Cruz, Patrick and others literally, they amount to a call for turning the land of the free into a giant armed camp. There are around 130,000 K-12 schools in America; there are close to 40,000 supermarkets; there are many other venues that might offer prey for mass killers. So protecting all these public spaces Republican-style would require creating a heavily armed, effectively military domestic defense force — heavily armed because it would face attackers with body armor and semiautomatic weapons — that would be at least as big as the Marine Corps.

Why would such a thing be necessary? Mass shootings are very rare outside the United States. Why are they so common here? Not, according to the U.S. right, because we’re a nation where a disturbed 18-year-old can easily buy military-grade weapons and body armor. No, says Patrick, it’s because “We’re a coarse society.”

I know it’s a hopeless effort to say this, but imagine the reaction if a prominent liberal politician were to declare that the reason the United States has a severe social problem that doesn’t exist elsewhere is that Americans are bad people. We’d never hear the end of it. But when a Republican says it, it barely makes a ripple.

And I guess I should say for the record that I personally don’t believe that Americans, as individuals, are worse than anyone else. If anything, what has always struck me when returning from trips abroad is that Americans are (or were) on average exceptionally nice and pleasant to interact with.

What distinguishes us is that it’s so easy for people who aren’t nice to arm themselves to the teeth.

OK, I think everyone realizes that none of what Republicans are saying about how to respond to mass shootings will translate into actual policy proposals. They’re barely even trying to make sense. Instead, they’re just making noise to drown out rational discussion until the latest atrocity fades from the news cycle. The truth is that conservatives consider mass shootings, and for that matter America’s astonishingly high overall rate of gun deaths, as an acceptable price for pursuing their ideology.

But what is that ideology? I’d argue that while talk about America’s unique gun culture isn’t exactly wrong, it’s too narrow. What we’re really looking at here is a broad assault on the very idea of civic duty — on the idea that people should follow certain rules, accept some restrictions on their behavior, to protect the lives of their fellow citizens.

In other words, we should think of vehement opposition to gun regulations as a phenomenon closely linked to vehement (and highly partisan) opposition to mask mandates and vaccination in the face of a deadly pandemic, vehement opposition to environmental rules like the ban on phosphates in detergent, and more.

Where does this hatred of the idea of civic duty come from? No doubt some of it, like almost everything in U.S. politics, is related to race.

One thing it doesn’t reflect, however, is our national tradition. When you hear talk of home-schooling, remember that the United States basically invented universal public education. Environmental protection used to be a nonpartisan issue: The Clean Air Act of 1970 passed the Senate without a single nay. And Hollywood mythology aside, most towns in the Old West had stricter limits on the carrying of firearms than Gov. Greg Abbott’s Texas.

As I suggested, I don’t fully understand where this aversion to the basic rules of a civilized society is coming from. What’s clear, however, is that the very people who shout most about “freedom” are doing their best to turn America into a “Hunger Games”-type dystopian nightmare, with checkpoints everywhere, loomed over by men with guns.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220527011345/https://www.nytimes.com/202
2/05/26/opinion/republicans-guns-uvalde.html

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

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Friday, May 27, 2022 10:30 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Not reading one second of that bullshit.

Nothing you say matters dude. Democrats are finished.



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

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Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"

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Saturday, May 28, 2022 7:16 AM

SECOND

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


The Minimum Wage Should Be $24. The minimum wage once went up hand in hand with the productivity of the U.S. economy.

The coronavirus pandemic relief bill passed by the House of Representatives this week would raise the federal minimum wage in steps until it reached $15 an hour in 2025. But an increase in the minimum wage has been removed from the Senate’s legislation. At least for now, it is stuck at $7.25.

This is bad enough in itself, but even worse is that almost no Americans understand how low we’ve allowed our aspirations to become. Our country’s productivity gains in recent decades should have translated into a minimum wage today of $24 an hour — and by 2025, it should be almost $30.

This may sound preposterous. But in fact, U.S. society was once on a path to this destination. We simply chose to step off that path.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20220329214619/https://theintercept.com/20
21/03/05/minimum-wage-raise-15/

$15 federal minimum wage amendment fails in Senate. Eight Democratic caucus members joining all 50 Republicans in rejecting the change. But 40 Republicans could have made the failure.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/05/democrats-15-minimum-wage-hik
e-473875
https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/15-federal-minimum-wage-amendmen
t-fails-in-senate-heres-what-you-should-know/

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

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Saturday, May 28, 2022 11:15 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Nothing you say matters dude. Democrats are finished.


This is not an Opinion piece...

https://archive.ph/Q2tdl

CNN's "Editor-at-large" paints a grim picture for Democrat's in November.

He offers no excuses. No solutions.

He finishes off the article with this paragraph:

Quote:
The reality of this current political moment is that things appear to be getting worse for Democrats the closer we get to the election. Fears of a wave washing away even incumbents previously considered safe now seem entirely justified.


This might be the only honest article I've read by CNN since 2015.


That being said, I'll post the actual link here. They've earned their Ad Revenue for this piece.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/26/politics/midterm-election-wave-republic
ans/index.html

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

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