A thread for Democrats Only by THGRRI

You can get radio from any part of this world online

Remember that Never Forget Thing...I think I finally figured out the meaning of 'Conservative'

I never once called myself Conservative,
but
I had to go to Canadian morning radio news to find 911 mentioned.

Radio on in the early hours of this morning in the USA bla bla Taxes, bla bla vote Left vs Right or Leftwing vs Righting bal bla bla, Trump rape case, noisy Rap 'music, some Mexico Hispanic noise like a slow out of tune trumpet not the good Salsa Bosa stuff, there might have been an Arabic radio thing, some redneck country noisey stuff, more politics bla bla Trump Biden, Some person who sounded like Black guy on a morning show was blabbing about schools people calling making slang rap jokes on air and called in about kids dress, kids going to school in pajamas and starting fights, everyone sounded like they were in their own Bubble and Balkanized. There was a song playing on a California station that sounded by a really bad 8-bit video game. the composition was ok, it was layered, had melody, texture but the 8-bit like samples were terrible, New England, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, Ontario and Quebec in Canada maybe they will mention it more...maybe it is almost forgotten it just becomes a note in history like the Titanic, Pearl Harbor, Sinking of the RMS Lusitania the Fall of Saigon

Quote:
Originally posted by second:

Democrats have not forgotten that Republican Pres. Bush ignored all warnings: An exclusive look at how the Bush administration ignored warnings, including some that were far more detailed than previously revealed.

maybe little Bush was and still is worse than Biden...but little Bush was there for 2 terms.

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Monday, September 11, 2023 8:17 AM

Archive from Japan

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Tuesday, September 12, 2023 5:41 AM

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

Here are 23 of Joe Biden’s greatest accomplishments as president of the United States.

1. Passed the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package to increase investment in the national network of bridges and roads, airports, public transport and national broadband internet, as well as waterways and energy systems.

2. Helped get more than $500 million life-saving COVID-19 vaccinations in the arms of Americans through the American Rescue Plan.

3. Stopped a 30-year streak of federal inaction on gun violence by signing the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that created enhanced background checks, closed the "boyfriend" loophole and provided funds for youth mental health.

4. Made a $369 billion investment in climate change, the largest in American history, through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

5. Ended the longest war in American history by pulling the troops out of Afghanistan.

6. Provided $10,000 to $20,000 in college debt relief to Americans with loans who make under $125,000 a year.

7. Cut child poverty in half through the American Rescue Plan.

8. Capped prescription drug prices at $2,000 per year for seniors on Medicare through the Inflation Reduction Act.

9. Passed the COVID-19 relief deal that provided payments of up to $1,400 to many struggling U.S. citizens while supporting renters and increasing unemployment benefits.

10. Achieved historically low unemployment rates after the pandemic caused them to skyrocket.

11. Imposed a 15% minimum corporate tax on some of the largest corporations in the country, ensuring that they pay their fair share, as part of the historic Inflation Reduction Act.

12. Recommitted America to the global fight against climate change by rejoining the Paris Agreement.

13. Strengthened the NATO alliance in support of Ukraine after the Russian invasion by endorsing the inclusion of world military powers Sweden and Finland.

14. Authorized the assassination of the Al Qaeda terrorist Ayman al-Zawahiri, who became head of the organization after the death of Osama bin Laden.

15. Gave Medicare the power to negotiate prescription drug prices through the Inflation Reduction Act while also reducing government health spending.

16. Held Vladimir Putin accountable for his invasion of Ukraine by imposing stiff economic sanctions.

17. Boosted the budget of the Internal Revenue Service by nearly $80 billion to reduce tax evasion and increase revenue.

18. Created more jobs in one year (6.6 million) than any other president in U.S. history.

19. Reduced healthcare premiums under the Affordable Care Act by $800 a year as part of the American Rescue Plan.

20. Signed the PACT Act to address service members' exposure to burn pits and other toxins.

21. Signed the CHIPS and Science Act to strengthen American manufacturing and innovation.

22. Reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act through 2027.

23. Halted all federal executions after the previous administration reinstated them after a 17-year freeze.

https://www.upworthy.com/joe-biden-s-23-greatest-achievements-as-presi
dent-of-the-united-states-so-far

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

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Tuesday, September 12, 2023 6:01 AM

Virginia Democrat candidate posted sex acts with husband online while soliciting tips: report

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/virginia-democrat-candidate-posted-se
x-acts-husband-online-soliciting-tips-report

Meet Susanna Gibson, AKA ‘HotWifeExperience’ Candidate Who Has An X-Rated Profile

https://www.dailywire.com/news/meet-susanna-gibson-aka-hotwifeexperien
ce-the-dem-candidate-who-also-has-an-x-rated-chaturbate-profile

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Tuesday, September 12, 2023 10:44 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
Virginia Democrat candidate posted sex acts with husband online while soliciting tips: report

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/virginia-democrat-candidate-posted-se
x-acts-husband-online-soliciting-tips-report

Meet Susanna Gibson, AKA ‘HotWifeExperience’ Candidate Who Has An X-Rated Profile

https://www.dailywire.com/news/meet-susanna-gibson-aka-hotwifeexperien
ce-the-dem-candidate-who-also-has-an-x-rated-chaturbate-profile

Quote:
Gibson did not return a request for comment from The Daily Wire asking whether the “good cause” was her Senate campaign. But she appears to acknowledge to The Washington Post that the videos are authentic, claiming that they are “an illegal invasion of my privacy designed to humiliate me and my family.”

Though she posted the videos online for her nearly 6,000 followers on Chaturbate, she now claims it to be a “sex crime” to shed light on the existence of her account.

“My political opponents and their Republican allies have proven they’re willing to commit a sex crime to attack me and my family because there’s no line they won’t cross to silence women when they speak up,” Gibson told the Washington Post.

Oh no, honey... That's not a sex crime.

You are a whore. Your husband is a cucked simp. And it appears that you might be in violation of a few federal laws yourself, having sucked and fucked dudes off when you're not just flicking your bean for perverts to watch while paying you to fund your political campaign.

It's smart that you didn't admit to that one. You better have a good accountant.

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

How you do anything is how you do everything.

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Sunday, September 17, 2023 6:23 PM

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suffers assassination scare — Armed man posing as U.S. Marshal arrested at Robert F. Kennedy Jr. event at Wilshire Ebell Theatre

https://twitter.com/TheInsiderPaper/status/1703032863648530461

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Wednesday, September 20, 2023 1:57 PM

break way secession and Active Separatist Movements SECOND blames Trump, others might blame Biden?

https://ibb.co/R2PBX6g

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Thursday, September 21, 2023 8:53 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
break way secession and Active Separatist Movements SECOND blames Trump, others might blame Biden?

https://ibb.co/R2PBX6g

I blame Trumptards for their problems:

The Death Spiral of an American Family

Kristal sat on the bed and started sifting through the first box. There was Dave Sr.’s Army enlistment form, where he’d lied about his birth date to make himself a year older, so he could serve in Vietnam. There was his associate’s degree in criminology, his police badge and a picture of him posing with his wife in front of a little red Mustang at their three-bedroom house, just before things began to unravel. That marriage had ended in divorce. Dave Sr. sank his half of their money into Detroit-area real estate, only to see values drop 82 percent from 2006 to 2008 in the Great Recession. He lost his house to foreclosure. His next wife became addicted to opioids and stole what little money he had left. He had his first heart surgery in 2010 and went thousands of dollars into medical debt. He moved in with his son and tried to redeem himself by opening a string of businesses, each more desperate and more leveraged than the last, until they seemed to Dave Jr. more like delusions. He was starting a photography business in the backyard. He was buying and reselling Tasers on the Internet. He was trying to make TikTok videos for a profit. He was hoarding the family’s household items and hiding them in his room — cellphone chargers, magnets, pencils and razors that Dave Jr. found now at the bottom of the cardboard boxes.

“How do you go from being a police officer to basically stealing people’s trash?” he said, lifting out one of his daughter’s old toothbrushes. “It makes no sense, but I know I shouldn’t be mad at him. He was suffering. He kept trying.”

It had been almost a month since Dave, 39, found his father lying unresponsive in bed next to his cellphone and a bill from a collections agency, having died of a heart attack at age 70, and ever since then Dave had been trying to make sense of what his father had left behind. He’d read through his father’s credit card statements and then talked to a banker, who concluded that the final estate of David Ramsey Sr. was of “inconsequential value.” Like a record 23 percent of Americans who’ve died in the past five years, the ultimate financial worth of his father’s life was nothing — a number somewhere below zero.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-death-spiral-of-an-american-fam
ily

All the East Texas Trumptards I know are following approximately the same path as this family, but maybe in other parts of America the Trumptards are not as retarded.

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

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Saturday, September 23, 2023 9:42 AM

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

Tim Gurner, an Australian real estate titan and multimillionaire, made international news last week by being recklessly honest about his desire for unemployment to spike and regular workers to suffer. Gurner has been understandably condemned for this across the globe and has now issued a weak, vague apology.

“We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around,” Gurner said. “There’s been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them, as opposed to the other way around. It’s a dynamic that has to change. We’ve got to kill that attitude, and that has to come through hurting the economy.”

What truly deserves attention is why Gurner feels the way he does — and how it’s precisely explained in an essay written in 1943, titled “Political Aspects of Full Employment.”

In it, Polish economist Michal Kalecki argued that government spending could ensure a permanent economic boom with both low employment and increased business profits. Crucially, however, Kalecki predicted that business executives would hate having what everyone else sees as a good economy, because it would allow regular people to be less subservient to them. For the business class, no amount of money can replace the daily joy of watching your inferiors grovel when in your presence.

Kalecki perfectly understood the psychological suffering that low unemployment caused executives like Gurner 80 years ago.

He was writing in the midst of World War II, at a time when capitalism had produced catastrophic recessions for the past 100 years. Enormous swaths of the population had been intermittently thrown out of work and into terrifying destitution. This had culminated in the Great Depression of the 1930s, when John Maynard Keynes and other economists proposed a solution for these vertiginous falls: The government could just spend money to get the economy going again.

This had been proven to Kalecki’s generation by what they saw right in front of their eyes: a gigantic world war that put everyone back to work. Kalecki started his essay by declaring “a solid majority of economists is now of the opinion that, even in a capitalist system, full employment may be secured by a government spending program.” It didn’t require armed conflict, though: Socially productive spending or just handing out money to everyone would do just as well.

The key limiting factor, Kalecki believed, was not some shortage of money, since the government could create as much money as it wanted. Rather, it was the productive capacity of the economy. For this perspective he is recognized as a key forerunner of modern monetary theory (especially by people who hate him). As Stephanie Kelton, an economics professor and present-day proponent of MMT, has put it, “the government really could give everyone a pony … so long as we could breed enough ponies. … [The ponies] have to come from somewhere; the money is conjured out of thin air.”

At the time, given the incipient Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, you might imagine that business leaders would rejoice at this argument. After all, they could largely eliminate pressure for radical change, while keeping capitalism. Moreover, Kalecki argued, “higher output and employment benefit not only workers but entrepreneurs as well, because the latter’s profits rise.”

There was a big, big problem, however. Here’s how Kalecki described it:

Under a regime of permanent full employment, the “sack” would cease to play its role as a disciplinary measure. The social position of the boss would be undermined, and the self-assurance and class-consciousness of the working class would grow. … “[D]iscipline in the factories” and “political stability” are more appreciated than profits by business leaders. Their class instinct tells them that lasting full employment is unsound from their point of view, and that unemployment is an integral part of the “normal” capitalist system.

More at https://theintercept.com/2023/09/23/tim-gurner-speech-unemployment/

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

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Saturday, September 23, 2023 11:27 AM

Once the layoffs happen, the price of food goes down and I get to buy all the shit you didn't need for pennies on the dollar.

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

How you do anything is how you do everything.

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Saturday, September 23, 2023 12:00 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Once the layoffs happen, the price of food goes down and I get to buy all the shit you didn't need for pennies on the dollar.

The Houston Food Bank gives away free food. I assume there is free food available where you live, 6ix, without the need to starve while waiting for layoffs to happen. https://www.houstonfoodbank.org/

And "I get to buy all the shit you didn't need for pennies on the dollar." That's every Saturday at a million garage sales and estate sales all across America.

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

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Saturday, September 23, 2023 8:12 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Once the layoffs happen, the price of food goes down and I get to buy all the shit you didn't need for pennies on the dollar.
The Houston Food Bank gives away free food. I assume there is free food available where you live, 6ix, without the need to starve while waiting for layoffs to happen. https://www.houstonfoodbank.org/

I'm not starving. I have plenty of money even with your president killing the value of it for the last 2.5 years.

Quote:
And "I get to buy all the shit you didn't need for pennies on the dollar." That's every Saturday at a million garage sales and estate sales all across America.

I'm talking the good shit, bro. Not the crap that I took to Goodwill or left out on the curb for the pickers because I can't be bothered with haggling with a bunch of strangers for an entire weekend.

Got my house back in 2011 for next to nothing the last time you losers did this. I think this time I'll get a nice car.

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

How you do anything is how you do everything.

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Tuesday, September 26, 2023 11:44 AM

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

Superbugs are gaining ground via economics, not evolution

September 25, 2023 at 11:43PM

We need new drugs to fight the surge of antibiotic-resistant bugs that have been making the rounds in recent years. And we have them! But there's a catch:

Six startups have won Food and Drug Administration approval for new antibiotics since 2017. All have filed for bankruptcy, been acquired or are shutting down.

The problem turns out to be a simple one: there aren't really that many superbugs out there. This means that demand for super-antibiotics is fairly low, which makes them very expensive, which in turn reduces demand even further. A million bucks for a cancer drug is pretty ho-hum these days, but apparently we haven't quite gotten ourselves used to million-dollar penicillin:

About 13,000 people in the U.S. each year develop a severe type of drug-resistant infection that Achaogen’s drug Zemdri was developed to defeat. Up to half of people hospitalized with such infections die. They are among the more than 35,000 people in the U.S. who die annually from drug-resistant bacterial or fungal infections, a toll that has risen in recent years.

The year Zemdri was approved, Achaogen spent almost $200 million on manufacturing, marketing and other costs and generated $800,000 in sales of the drug. Achaogen’s stock price fell more than 96% from approval in June 2018 to the end of the first quarter in 2019.

I don't know how much $800,000 represents in doses, but it's way less than 13,000 people. For some reason, thousands of people die every year from this particular type of infection, but almost none of them were prescribed Zemdri to treat it. This is not a good thing for the future development of super-antibiotics.

https://jabberwocking.com/superbugs-are-gaining-ground-via-economics-n
ot-evolution/

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

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Thursday, September 28, 2023 8:49 AM

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

In the United States, the political charge of socialism tended to carry a peculiar meaning, one forged in the white supremacist backlash to Black civil rights in the 1870s.

In 1867, Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act, extending the vote to Black men in the South. White southerners who hated the idea of Black people using the vote to protect themselves started to terrorize their Black neighbors. Pretending to be the ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers, they dressed in white robes with hoods to cover their faces and warned formerly enslaved people not to show up at the polls.

But in 1870, Congress created the Department of Justice to enable the federal government to protect the right of Black men to vote. Attorney General Amos Akerman oversaw the prosecution of more than 3,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan, winning more than 1,000 convictions. Meanwhile, Congress passed laws to protect Black voting.

Suddenly, it was harder for white southerners to object to Black rights on racial grounds. So they turned to a new argument, one based on economics.

They did not want Black men voting, they said, because formerly enslaved people were poor, and they would vote for leaders who promised to build things such as roads and hospitals. Those public investments could be paid for only with tax levies, and most of the people in the South with property after the war were white. Thus, although the infrastructure in which the southern legislatures were investing would help everyone, reactionaries claimed that Black voting amounted to a redistribution of wealth from white men to Black people, who wanted something for nothing.

Black voting was, one magazine insisted, “socialism in South Carolina.”

The argument of poor Black workers being dangerous socialists offered justification for former Confederates to block their Black neighbors from the polls, to read them out of American society and ultimately to lynch them. It’s a peculiarly American version of “socialism.” It might have been a historical anomaly. A small group of business leaders and southern racists resurrected it in the 20th century.

After World War II, most Republicans joined Democrats in believing that the federal government had to oversee business regulation, welfare programs, and infrastructure. They knew what businessmen would do to the economy unless they were checked; they had seen people homeless and hungry during the Depression.

And they scoffed at the notion that the New Deal system was a bad idea. They looked around at their homes, at their candy-colored cars that they drove on the new interstate highways built under what was then the biggest public-works project in U.S. history, and at their union-boosted paychecks in a nation with its highest gross domestic production ever, and they dismissed as a radical fringe the people trying to undermine this wildly successful system.

But the federal protection of civil rights added a new element to the liberal consensus that would threaten to tear it apart. Between 1967 and 1977, a North Carolina billboard urged people in “Klan Country” to “help fight Communism & Integration.”

The stagflation of the ’70s pushed middle-class Americans into higher tax brackets just when they needed their income most, and helped spread the sense that white tax dollars were being siphoned off to help racial minorities. As towns and governments tried to make up their declining funds with higher property taxes, angry property owners turned against the government. Republicans were courting white workers by painting the Democrats as a party of grievance and special interests wanting to pay off lazy Black supporters. Rather than their being interested in the good of America as a whole.

In 1976, former California Governor Ronald Reagan ran for president with the story of a “welfare queen” from the South Side of Chicago—code words for “Black”—who lived large on government benefits she stole.

“She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands,” Reagan claimed.

“And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names.”

There was such a woman, but she was a dangerous criminal rather than a representative welfare recipient. Nonetheless, the story illustrated perfectly the idea that government involvement in the economy handed tax dollars to allegedly undeserving Black Americans.

Reagan suggested a solution to such corruption. In August 1980, he spoke to voters in Philadelphia, Mississippi, 16 years and just a few miles from where the civil-rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner had been found murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan as they registered Black voters during 1964’s Freedom Summer. There, Reagan echoed the former Confederates during Reconstruction: “I believe in states’ rights,” he said.

Reagan’s campaign invited voters to remember a time before Black and brown voices and women began to claim equal rights. His campaign passed out buttons and posters urging voters to “make America great again.”

Voters put Reagan in the White House, where his administration cut taxes and slashed spending on public welfare programs (while pouring money into defense spending, and tripling the national debt). In the name of preventing socialism, those programs began the process of hollowing out the middle class.

In the years since 1981, wealth has moved dramatically upward. And yet, the language that linked socialism and minority voting never ceased to escalate.

Talk hosts such as Rush Limbaugh insisted that socialism was creeping through America at the hands of Black Americans, “feminazis,” and liberals. After its founding in 1996, the Fox News Channel joined the chorus of those who insisted that their political opponents were socialists trying to wreck the country. Republicans insisted that Barack Obama was a full-fledged socialist, and in 2018, Trump’s White House Council of Economic Advisers used the word socialism 144 times in a 72-page report attacking Democratic politicians. Trump’s press release for the report read: “Congressional Democrats Want to Take Money From Hardworking Americans to Fund Failed Socialist Policies.”

There is a long-standing fight over whether support for the modern-day right is about taxes or race. The key is that it is about taxes and race at the same time: Since Reconstruction, white supremacists have argued that minority voting means socialism, and that true Americans stand against both. In recent history, that argument has led Republican-dominated state legislatures to make voting harder for people of color, and to rig the system through gerrymandering. Three years ago, it led Trump and his supporters to try to overturn the results of a presidential election to keep their opponents out of power. They believed, and insist they still believe, that they had to destroy the government in order to save it.

https://angrybearblog.com/2023/09/a-government-in-which-racial-minorit
ies-have-a-say-is-illegitimate

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

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Thursday, September 28, 2023 12:58 PM

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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Monday, October 9, 2023 11:18 AM

Biden condemns Hamas attack on Israel

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Monday, October 9, 2023 11:29 AM

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Tuesday, October 10, 2023 5:16 PM

20 or more Americans "are missing" in Israel.

https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1711822705136140555

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Tuesday, October 10, 2023 5:29 PM

I'll bet they are.

Gotta get the voters to back another war, yanno.

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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Tuesday, October 10, 2023 7:14 PM

THG

Quote:
Originally posted by Oonjerah:

I'm an actual, registered Democrat.

But I'm not sure what the topic is. Democrats can post in here,
and talk about themselves ... about why they are democrats ...
or what democrats believe in?

My parents were Republicans.
I was an adult in my 40's before I found out I was a democrat.
I didn't really know what the 2 parties stood for, so I asked a
friend who loves politics what I was.

Republicans tend to be conservative. Democrats tend to be liberal.
Can I even say what those words mean? Not very well.
Conservatives stand for law & order. i.e., Authority.
Democrats believe in human rights and equality. i.e., Freedom.
Anarchists believe in every man for himself?

... oooOO}{OOooo ...

Miss ya...

T

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Saturday, October 14, 2023 6:35 AM

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

Opinion | An Economics Nobel for Showing How Much Women Matter

Paul Krugman
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/12/opinion/columnists/claudia-goldin-n
obel-prize.html

Technological progress is a key source of economic growth, but its effects aren’t always fully captured by its effects on gross domestic product. Sometimes a new technology changes everything — the way we work, the way we live, the way we relate to one another in society.

Consider, for example, the effects of the birth control pill.

If it never occurred to you that modern birth control was a transformative technology, or more broadly that expanding women’s ability to choose had profound economic as well as social effects, you have plenty of company. There have been innumerable books and articles about the economic impacts of, for example, globalization and information technology.

But in 2002, when Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz published an article titled “The Power of the Pill: Oral Contraceptives and Women’s Career and Marriage Decisions,” they were entering a sparsely populated field.

On Monday, Goldin, a professor at Harvard, received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in recognition of her role in advancing our understanding of women’s labor market outcomes. It was a richly deserved honor.

In fact, if you ask me, the Nobel announcement sold Goldin a bit short by failing to note her hugely important contributions beyond the issue of women’s work. In particular, it didn’t mention her work on inequality more broadly, notably her role in documenting the sudden and drastic decline in inequality that took place in the 1940s, creating the middle-class society I grew up in (which has now been destroyed).

Which is not to say that women’s work is a minor issue. It’s an immensely important subject, one whose study Goldin pioneered.

Put it this way: For most of the 1960s, American women in their prime working years were less than half as likely as men to be part of the paid labor force; by 2000 three quarters of the gender gap in labor force participation had been eliminated.

This represented a large increase in the economy’s labor supply, and hence in potential G.D.P.; my back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the impact of rising female employment on economic growth was comparable to, say, the effects of globalization.

But the effect on G.D.P. was only part of the story.

In 2006 Goldin published an extraordinary, panoramic overview of the history of women at work in America. As she documented, the percentage of women in the paid labor force rose steadily between around 1930 and 1970, a rise Goldin attributed to the combination of the economy’s shift away from manual labor toward clerical work and rising female education, along with the diffusion of household technologies like refrigerators and washing machines that freed more married women to work outside the home.

But these changes, she argued, did not at first fundamentally change the way society and women themselves thought about women’s work. For the most part, women were seen and saw themselves as secondary earners, working to supplement their families’ income but ready to drop out of the work force if they had children or their husbands earned enough that they didn’t need the money.

Around 1970, however, there was what Goldin called a “quiet revolution” in the economic role of women, as women began to view work much the same way that men did. They saw themselves as likely to remain employed even after marriage, which led them to get more education, get married later and, as men always had, see their jobs as an important part of their identity. This was a profound transformation of society — I would say for the better.

And one important enabler of this transformation was the birth control pill, which made it easier for women to delay marriage, which in turn, Goldin wrote, meant that they “could be more serious in college, plan for an independent future, and form their identities before marriage and family.”

That said, you shouldn’t buy into crude technological determinism. Goldin and Katz noted that the pill didn’t have its most profound effects until legal restrictions that made it unavailable to most single women were removed in the late 1960s. Goldin’s latest paper, released just as she received the Nobel, is titled “Why Women Won” and emphasizes the importance of a large expansion of women’s rights between 1965 and 1973.

And as I was reviewing Goldin’s work for this column, I couldn’t help wondering whether those victories are in danger.

Much commentary I’ve seen about Goldin since the Nobel announcement focuses on the prospects for removing the remaining barriers to women’s advancement. But in the current political environment, I think we should also be worried about retrogression. Conservatives have succeeded in overturning Roe v. Wade, with many red states quickly moving to ban abortion. A significant faction is now setting its sights on restricting access to birth control, and you shouldn’t assume that it won’t happen.

Foreboding aside, however, this is a wonderful moment for the economics profession. Claudia Goldin’s pathbreaking research, deeply grounded in history yet hugely relevant to the present, is a model of what social science should be. This is truly a Nobel to celebrate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudia_Goldin

Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a distinguished professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman

Download all Claudia Goldin’s books for free from the mirrors at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Claudia+Goldin

Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity
by Claudia Goldin
Publisher: Princeton University Press, Year: 2021
Description:
A renowned economic historian traces women’s journey to close the gender wage gap and sheds new light on the continued struggle to achieve equity between couples at home

A century ago, it was a given that a woman with a college degree had to choose between having a career and a family. Today, there are more female college graduates than ever before, and more women want to have a career and family, yet challenges persist at work and at home. This book traces how generations of women have responded to the problem of balancing career and family as the twentieth century experienced a sea change in gender equality, revealing why true equity for dual career couples remains frustratingly out of reach.

Drawing on decades of her own groundbreaking research, Claudia Goldin provides a fresh, in-depth look at the diverse experiences of college-educated women from the 1900s to today, examining the aspirations they formed?and the barriers they faced?in terms of career, job, marriage, and children. She shows how many professions are “greedy,” paying disproportionately more for long hours and weekend work, and how this perpetuates disparities between women and men. Goldin demonstrates how the era of COVID-19 has severely hindered women’s advancement, yet how the growth of remote and flexible work may be the pandemic’s silver lining.

Antidiscrimination laws and unbiased managers, while valuable, are not enough. Career and Family explains why we must make fundamental changes to the way we work and how we value caregiving if we are ever to achieve gender equality and couple equity.

Download the free book from the mirrors at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Claudia+Goldin+Career+Family

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

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Saturday, October 14, 2023 12:36 PM

Fuck you Paul.

Your party is dead, and you haven't made a correct prediction in at least 4 years.

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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Monday, October 16, 2023 11:22 AM

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

VP selections aren’t taken seriously enough
Kamala Harris is the rule not the exception
Matthew Yglesias
Oct 16, 2023
https://www.slowboring.com/p/vp-selections-arent-taken-seriously

Two new profiles of Kamala Harris — one by Astead Herndon in the New York Times, the other by Elaina Plott Calabro in The Atlantic — both add a lot of texture and detail to a pretty well understood situation.

Harris has a job, Vice President of the United States, that essentially everyone who ever gets it ends up finding awkward and unrewarding. But her awkward and unrewarding version of it is unusually high-profile because her boss is unpopular and she is even more unpopular. To make matters worse, he is very old so there is more attention on her than there normally would be, and while she’s a pretty good politician, she’s not a great politician who electrifies every room she steps into. And, crucially, her team is caught between a conviction that many of her struggles are rooted in sexism and racism and a profound desire to avoid the conclusion that this means only white men should be nominated for office.

It’s a sticky situation.

I have, in the past, offered my thoughts on what she should do about it. But reflecting on these pieces, I’m struck by how fundamentally ordinary the problem facing the Biden-Harris administration is.

Joe Biden selected a likely future leader of the Democratic Party, but he did so without ever saying explicitly “I am picking ____ because I believe ____ would be a good future leader of the Democratic Party.” That’s an irresponsible error of judgment on his part, but it’s an extremely common one. In fact, the whole reason he is president is that Barack Obama picked him to be VP because Obama thought Biden wouldn’t run for president in the future.

Because time and again, we see presidents make VP selections for unimportant short-term reasons that underplay the real stakes of the choice.
VP selections matter a lot

There have only been 46 presidents, and nine of them (nearly 20 percent!) took office due to the death or resignation of a predecessor.

Over and above the fateful nine, there are also the cases of John Adams, Martin Van Buren, Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush, and Joe Biden — VPs who used the national platform afforded them by the vice presidency to win election on their own terms.

And then there is the Al Gore / Walter Mondale / Nixon 1960 model where the vice presidency lofts you to a major party nomination but you lose anyway.

The point is that even though the day to day work of vice president is kind of a weird nothing job, the vice presidency is a genuinely huge political prize. And this seems to be more true in contemporary times than it was historically because the more “open” presidential nominating process has in practice advantaged candidates who are already well-known. A Gilded Age nomination process might have looked at Joe Biden and said to themselves “everything you are saying is totally correct and that’s why we’re picking Steve Bullock.” But voters had no idea who Steve Bullock was. Biden, as a former VP, just dominated the brand of “normal Democrat who wins to win and not be too left-wing.” It’s hard to beat the Veep.

That means that picking a vice president is a choice that presidential candidates ought to take very seriously.

Candidates ought to play to win. But I think even the cynical among us (like me) still believe candidates should pay attention to the real world consequences of the things they say and do. And the VP selection has very large real world consequences. What’s more, there’s almost no evidence that a VP pick has ever helped anyone win. You can certainly hurt yourself by doing something bizarre like the John McCain choice of Sarah Palin. But VP selections have minimal upside, so you might as well pick the right person. Unfortunately, this is not how anyone approaches it.
All the wrong reasons

The Herndon profile in particular is really clear on two things:

Biden was facing a lot of pressure from various inside party actors to select a Black woman, which in practice meant Harris.

Despite this, nobody was telling Biden that selecting Harris had significant electoral benefits. There was no polling or data or demographic analysis that suggested this “you should pick a Black woman” vibe was correct.

Here’s how Herndon describes the final showdown between Harris and Gretchen Whitmer:

After Whitmer impressed Biden during an in-person meeting in the veepstakes’ final stages, one question rose to the top: Could two white Democrats win?

Campaign research said yes — Biden could win with any of the four. Klain argued for Harris specifically. Obama played the role of sounding board, weighing the pros and cons of Biden’s options rather than backing anyone, including Harris, according to a person familiar with the conversation. But Harris was the only candidate who had the full complement of qualifications: She had won statewide, was a familiar name with voters because of her presidential run and enjoyed a personal connection with the Biden family, having been a close working partner of Biden’s son, Beau, when he served as attorney general of Delaware.

And she was Black, meaning the announcement would be met with enthusiasm rather than controversy. On Aug. 11, the day the campaign announced Harris as the running mate, it raised $26 million in 24 hours.

None of this is wrong, exactly. But note that in his telling, there is not a point in the process where Biden stops and thinks “who will be the best candidate in 2028?” or “if I die, who will be the best person to take over?” But note that even leaving Biden’s age out of it, the base rate for presidential death or resignation is nearly one in five!

Instead the decisive characteristic was that Harris would generate more enthusiasm.

And here I do think I should be clear about what I think this meant in practice: Picking Harris minimized short-term complaining. Plenty of people would have been thrilled with Whitmer and plenty of people were not thrilled with Harris. But as a rare person who criticized the Harris selection at the time, I know that given the atmosphere prevailing in the summer of 2020, that made me a kind of un-fun skunk at the party. By contrast, Harris proponents would have felt empowered to complain about a Whitmer selection. And to be clear, in Harris’ defense, she really is a properly qualified choice. The discourse around her has gotten so mean you’d think this was the greatest debacle in VP selection history when it’s not even close.

The problem is that this kind of fuzzy, short-term thinking is extremely common.

Again, the core absurdity of Democrats’ current Old President problem is that if you go back to the 2008 coverage of the Obama/Biden ticket, he was picked precisely because he was too old:

The choice by Mr. Obama in some ways mirrors the choice by Mr. Bush of Dick Cheney as his running mate in 2000; at his age, it appears unlikely that Mr. Biden would be in a position to run for president should Mr. Obama win and serve two terms. Shorn of any remaining ambition to run for president on his own, he could find himself in a less complex political relationship with Mr. Obama than most vice presidents have with their presidents.

Oops!

But, of course, there are many worse screwups than this. If you go back to the fateful election of 1840, the Whigs put John Tyler on the ticket because he didn’t like Andrew Johnson without checking to see if Tyler was on board with Whig policies. William Henry Harrison died after 40 days in office, Tyler became president, and it turned out that — oops! — he did not agree with those policies. Abraham Lincoln made Andrew Johnson VP to try to get an electoral boost in the border states and ended up wrecking Reconstruction. Probably the funniest VP fuckup of all time is when Republican Party bosses were so annoyed by Teddy Roosevelt’s conduct as Governor of New York that they decided it would be clever to get him to be William McKinley’s Vice President, thereby trapping him in a powerless office. Except McKinley got shot by an anarchist and Teddy became president. Oops again!

In the scheme of things, Harris is actually a totally fine choice. She is in line with the party mainstream on policy and ideology and is of appropriate age to take over, which sounds like a low bar to pass but is actually impressive in comparative terms.
Bad incentives

The perverse thing is that even though a dynamic, popular VP would in some sense be good for Biden, there’s another sense in which that’s not true.

If he’d put Gretchen Whitmer on the ticket, after all, the odds are good that he would have faced loud calls to step aside in 2024 in her favor. And if he didn’t step aside, the mere existence of those calls would have tempted some other Democrats into the race. Harris’ weakness induced party actors to rally around Biden as the only really reliable stop-Harris strategy. So the fact that nobody thinks she would be a good party leader turned out to be good for Biden.

By the same token, if you go back to Bill Clinton surviving the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998, you have to imagine he was glad that Al Gore isn’t a very charismatic figure. But for all the reasons that Democrats might have preferred Clinton to Gore, Gore ended up being a relatively weak standard-bearer in 2000.

Obama, too, was in some sense trying to tank the party’s future in order to make life easier for himself. He thought a VP who was “too old” to run for president would simplify his own situation. But instead we ended up with mainstream party leadership that is sub-optimally old. All of which is to say that one reason presidential nominees keep making bad choices about future party leadership is that they have almost uniquely weak incentives to make the right choice. By the time it’s relevant, they will be dead or retired and a politically unappealing VP tends to help them and make them look better.
The Harris rebuild

In summary, while I do think Harris was sort of a bad choice, we should understand that bad choices are actually the norm here.

What’s more, compared to a lot of previous bad choices, she really wasn’t so bad!

I believe that in part because I continue to think there is a pretty obvious way for her to get her mojo back. The basic reality is that Americans of all kinds put a good deal of stock into the personal identity of our political figures. And progressive Americans put even more stock into it than average Americans. You can see plain as day that as people fight about Israel/Palestine, that Jewish leftists condemning Israeli government overreach is seen as particularly valuable spokespeople, as are Arab condemnations of Hamas. Having the right identity can inoculate you against certain charges in a way that can make your voice uniquely valuable.

By the same token, there are certain things that Harris as a Black woman “can” say that Joe Biden as a white man “can’t” say — i.e., things that are moderate-coded about race and gender matters.

As I noted at the top, there’s something a little paradoxical about simultaneously believing that racism and misogyny are big forces in politics and also insisting that it’s important to nominate a diverse slate of candidates. A little paradoxical — but it’s not unresolvable. Harris would have the flexibility to speak some “tough truths” or otherwise cut a reassuring posture with swing voters while maintaining credibility with the base. That’s the kind of move that would make huge swathes of the party glad she was elevated, and that would set her up for a plausible message as a presidential candidate in her own right. Ideally, that message would be delivered by someone who’s also an incredibly charismatic public speaker. That said, nobody is great at everything, and Harris seems a little bit weirdly reluctant to deploy her advantages to maximum upside, which just isn’t how you do politics.

It would be very challenging for Harris to suddenly start convincing people she’s a once-in-a-generation political talent, but I sincerely don’t think it would be all that hard for her to remind people why they thought it was a good idea to elevate her in the first place. Many past VPs have been picked for much worse reasons.

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

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Monday, October 16, 2023 12:25 PM

Kamala Harris is an idiot.

Everybody knows that she is an idiot.

Democrats are just praying that Biden* doesn't die before the election.

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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Monday, October 16, 2023 1:22 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Kamala Harris is an idiot.

Everybody knows that she is an idiot.

Democrats are just praying that Biden* doesn't die before the election.

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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

Having a niwit VP is a President's term insurance. Can you imagine how fast Biden* would have been out of office if Camel-like Harris was even halfway competent?

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Monday, October 16, 2023 3:43 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Kamala Harris is an idiot.

Everybody knows that she is an idiot.

Democrats are just praying that Biden* doesn't die before the election.

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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

Having a niwit VP is a President's term insurance. Can you imagine how fast Biden* would have been out of office if Camel-like Harris was even halfway competent?

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

Yeah... but what are they going to do if they run Biden* again? One way or another, whether he dies or deteriorates mentally to the point that it would be impossible for the media to defend him any longer, Joe* would not last another 5 years from now. They'd finally get the first female US President with a big ole' asterisk on her name, and the damage she would cause the nation might keep women from being president for another 100 years after her.

They can't very well replace Harris as VP with anybody else outside of Michelle Obama, and I doubt very much that Barry would allow his "wife" to be the VP for his idiot ex-VP simply on a matter of pride, even if the idea were to only pretend Joe* was President for a year before making Michelle President.

It doesn't matter if they even came up with a media campaign to totally discredit Harris, or if Harris herself were to do something so abominable in the next 13 months that nobody would ever vote for her again. Whoever they tried to replace Harris with, she'd have to be a minority and a woman.

Who does that leave? Stacey Abrams? AOC or anybody else from The Squad?

Outside of Michelle Obama, I can't think of any Democrat they could run with Biden* that isn't white and/or male that would do anything but further harm Biden*'s chances at re-election.

They're running out of time to ditch Joe*, and if they're stuck with him AND Harris in the end they lose 10 times out of 10.

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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Tuesday, October 17, 2023 1:13 PM

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

The Apotheosis of Jim Jordan Is a Sight to Behold
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/apotheosis

No problem in the American system at this moment is as acute and disruptive as the one posed by the Republican Party.

Yes, of course, there are a number of structural problems facing American politics.

Our system of elections — first-past-the-post voting, the Electoral College, single-member districts and partisan gerrymandering — feeds into and amplifies our partisan and ideological polarization. Our system of federalism and dual sovereignty between state and national government allows for laboratories of autocracy as much as testing grounds for democracy. Our counter-majoritarian institutions and supermajority rules stymie democratic majorities and turn stability into stasis, putting terrible stress on our entire political system.

But it’s hard to deal with any of those, or even just live with them, when one of our two major parties is on a downward spiral of dysfunction, with each version of itself more chaotic and deviant than the last.

For years, it has been evident that the Republican Party can’t govern. When Donald Trump was in office, it was revealing to see the extent to which Republican majorities in Congress struggled to write and pass any legislation of consequence. To wit, after an unsuccessful herculean lift trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act and a successful effort to cut taxes (the lowest hanging fruit on the conservative menu), congressional Republicans essentially stopped legislating until they were dislodged from control of the House in the 2018 midterms.

What’s become clear of late, in the midst of the chaos that has left the House without a speaker at a particularly fraught moment in foreign and domestic affairs, is that Republicans are as unable to organize themselves as they are incapable of leading the affairs of state.

The worst of the problem of the Republican Party, however, is evident in the rise of Jim Jordan and the ascendance of the insurrection wing of the party, with only modest opposition from supposedly more reasonable Republican lawmakers.

Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas, for example, has a reputation for being reasonable. He is staunchly conservative, but his feet are mostly planted in reality.

Crenshaw has been publicly critical of the most disruptive and intransigent members of the House Republican conference, especially those in the House Freedom Caucus, and even wrote an essay in The Wall Street Journal condemning the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. A small gesture, all things considered, but still more than most of his colleagues could manage.

Crenshaw seems like the kind of Republican who would oppose Jordan’s bid to be speaker of the House. Jordan, first elected to the House in 2006, is a far-right ideologue and conspiracy theorist whose most notable accomplishment in office was helping to organize his fellow ideologues and conspiracy theorists into the House Freedom Caucus in 2015. Jordan, who represents the Fourth District of Ohio, was one of Trump’s leading supporters in the months leading up to and following the 2020 presidential election, accusing Democrats, repeatedly, of trying to steal the election.

“Jim Jordan was deeply involved in Donald Trump’s antidemocratic efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election,” Thomas Joscelyn, one of the authors of the final report from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol, told CNN last week. “Jordan also helped organize congressional opposition to counting Biden’s certified electoral votes. None of Jordan’s efforts were rooted in legitimate objections. He simply sought to keep Donald Trump in power, contrary to the will of the American people.”

Crenshaw’s stated contempt for exactly the kind of rhetoric and behavior exemplified by Jordan has not, however, stopped the Texas Republican from backing his colleague from Ohio for speaker of the House. In an interview on Sunday with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Crenshaw claimed that Jordan had “become part of the solution, not part of the problem” with regard to the chaos among House Republicans and dismissed Jordan’s contempt for the law and attempt to overturn the presidential election as non-issues. “If I held that grudge, I wouldn’t have friends in the conference,” Crenshaw said. “I was on an island there.”

Crenshaw isn’t the only supposedly reasonable Republican member of Congress willing to look past the fact that the leading candidate for speaker of the House was an active participant in a scheme to subvert the Constitution and install a defeated president in office for a second term.

“Even some of the Republicans who have vowed, publicly and privately, to fight him at every turn are beginning to get weak knees about supporting him, fearing that collective will is dwindling as their numbers decrease,” Politico reports. Jordan’s allies have also expressed their view that the opposition to his bid for speaker will melt away as the actual vote on the floor comes near.

Once again, Republicans are confronted with a deeply transgressive figure with open contempt for the institutions of American democracy, flawed as they may be. Once again, Republicans swear they’ll resist his ascent. Once again, Republicans cave, more fearful of losing a primary — or coming in for criticism from conservative media — than they are of virtually anything else.

And each time they cave, these more moderate or mainstream Republicans make the situation a little worse, for themselves and for the country. Kevin McCarthy bowed to expediency and pressure when he voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election in the House of Representatives. He did the same when he empowered the most gleeful insurrectionists in his attempt to gain the speaker’s gavel. Now he’s out, and Jim Jordan is on the rise.

If he wins, Jordan may not last in the position. The kind of speaker who must twist arms and make threats using conservative media to win the job is, in the modern House, not the kind of speaker who survives long beyond the next election cycle, even if his party holds its majority.

Who will replace Jim Jordan if and when he falls? It could well be someone worse. And it will probably be someone worse because there is nothing happening inside the Republican Party right now that can keep it from falling even farther into the abyss.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/17/opinion/jim-jordan-house-speaker.ht
ml

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

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Thursday, October 19, 2023 4:36 AM

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

Why it's impossible for right-wing governments to handle a crisis

By Thom Hartmann | Oct 18, 2023

https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/right-wing-government/

Over at The New York Times yesterday, Jerusalem-based reporter Isabel Kershner writes about the horrors of the past two weeks and the worries Israelis have for how the ongoing war against Hamas may go.

“All this is happening,” she notes in the article’s third paragraph, “amid a total breakdown of trust between the citizens and the state of Israel, and a collapse of everything Israelis believed in and relied on.”

She then quotes a Tel Aviv author, Dorit Rabinyan, who speaks of the sobering reality Israelis are facing because they’d chosen Benjamin Netanyahu as their prime minister:

“We have woken to a terrible sobriety about whose hands we put our fate in. … We thought we had military superiority, but there’s a feeling that someone up there forgot why he is there.”

What happened? Instead of taking seriously now-confirmed warnings about a coming Hamas attack shared by Egyptian and, apparently, US intelligence, the prime minister was instead occupied by “months of political and social turmoil over the divisive plans of Mr. Netanyahu’s ultranationalist government to curb the judiciary and undermine the country’s liberal democracy.”

And even now, she notes, one of the great frustrations of Israeli citizens is “Mr. Netanyahu’s refusal so far to openly accept any responsibility for the Oct. 7 disaster.”

Netanyahu’s authoritarianism and corruption are making it more difficult for Israel to deal with the horrific crisis Hamas has inflicted upon them. To deal with the crisis, he had to surrender some power to form a coalition/crisis government.

Here in the US, we had a similar experience, although, unfortunately, nobody moderated the corruption and incompetence of the Bush administration. President George W. Bush and his Vice President, Dick Cheney, were repeatedly warned that Bin Laden was “determined to strike inside the US.”

Bush, however, was busy trying to get Congress to pass a trillion-dollar tax cut for billionaires and Cheney was in secret meetings drawing up maps of the Iraqi oil fields that he and George would pass out to crony companies if they could find an excuse for a war.

Bush got his final and most alarmed warning from the CIA on August 6, 2001, a full month before the attack. Instead of putting the FBI and airport security on full alert, Bush decided to leave DC and take the longest vacation in presidential history, keeping him out of town until after the attack.

This was all just one month after Bush had attended a G8 summit in Genoa, Italy, where the Italian government had mobilized a battery of anti-aircraft missiles to protect the venue because of credible threats that Osama Bin Laden was planning to have his men hijack passenger jets to crash into Bush’s hotel, a threat that was well known to Bush and Condoleezza Rice.

Similarly, Donald Trump was warned by both China and his own scientists in December of 2019 and again in January of 2020 about how deadly and contagious Covid was and how it could potentially kill over a million Americans. He largely ignored the warnings (other than telling Bob Woodward about it), instead attending rallies and doing rightwing media hits non-stop, until hospitals in New York and Connecticut were having to use refrigerated trucks as morgues.

After only one month (March) of paying attention to his scientists and locking down the country, when the April 7th, 2020, New York Times front page headline proclaimed that the majority of non-geriatric Covid victims were Black people in Blue states, Jared Kushner came up with the bright idea that letting people die and blaming it on Democratic governors would be “an effective political strategy.”

Thus, that was the week Trump ended the lock-downs and began pushing people back to work, leading America to suffer the highest Covid mortality rate in the world with at least 500,000-700,000 unnecessary deaths. People who believe Trump continue to get sick and die to this day because of his lies about Covid: citizens today in Red counties are twice as likely to die of the disease as are Americans living in Blue counties.

The common denominator between Bush, Netanyahu, and Trump — and all the unnecessary deaths on all their watches — is that all three are corrupt far-right demagogic politicians who put their own personal wealth and power above the good of their nation.

That is, by and large, the norm for rightwing governments worldwide. Because they generally rule against the will of large parts of their populations, they instead spend their time figuring out ways to raid the public treasury or exploit their position in government to hang onto power.

Examples include:

— Bush’s attempt to hand the 2.6 trillion-dollar Social Security trust fund over to New York banks;

— Cheney’s massive military bailout of the company he’d nearly bankrupted as CEO and his desire to seize Iraq’s oil fields on its behalf;

— Netanyahu’s multiple corrupt deals for which he’s now under indictment,

— Trump’s hustling Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar for billions to be paid out via his son-in-law and the LIV Golf Tour, his kids hustling Trump properties from the White House, his relentless lies while in office, etc.

It turns out that philosophies of governance matter. Hugely.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said, “Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference” and Democratic administrations have taken it to heart ever since that 1933 speech.

When Democrats have control of Congress and the White House they pass all sorts of legislation to advance the public good, aid workers, care for the poor and disabled, strengthen public education, and provide for the needs of ordinary people. Occasionally they overreach or their programs don’t work or even backfire; they then fix them or try something different.

When rightwingers run our government, though, they pass laws like Taft-Hartley that gutted union rights, rip up voting rights, make it easier for fossil fuel companies to pollute and timber companies to clear-cut, and dial back people’s access to welfare and healthcare programs. And, of course, start wars (Grenada, Iraq/Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq) and pass tax cuts for their billionaire patrons.

Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Clinton, Obama, and Biden all proposed and put into law sweeping programs to build America and enhance the public good ranging from Social Security, the right to unionize, the minimum wage, Medicare, food stamps, Medicaid and greater funding for education.

Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Bush, and Trump all went for tax cuts for billionaires and worked to gut or privatize the agencies, infrastructure, and programs Democrats had set up.

There’s a reason for this.

— Leftwing governments believe in democracy, and so try to accomplish what’s best for the majority of people while protecting the rights of the minority; rightwing governments practice autocracy on behalf of the morbidly rich. Sometimes, like the old USSR or modern Venezuela, repressive and authoritarian rightwing governments pretend to be left-wing, but the police state aspects of their governance give the game away.

— Rightwingers don’t see democracy as a benefit or even an ideal; they see it as an impediment to further comforting the already-comfortable while enriching themselves in the process. Instead of building up disaster preparedness through strengthening, for example, FEMA, they work to redirect those government dollars back to their friends through things like $600 billion a year in oil industry subsidies and over $20 trillion (cumulatively) in Republican tax cuts to billionaires since 1981.

The result — when rightwingers are in charge — is government that’s not paying attention to real threats and, when they come, responds with profound incompetence or cynical exploitation. Bush and “heckofajob Brownie”; Netanyahu and Gaza; Trump and Covid, or his cynically tossing paper towels at hurricane victims.

Bush was not only incompetent in allowing 9/11 to happen despite multiple warnings that he refused to respond to, but when it did happen he tried to use it to his own political advantage and that of his Vice President by lying us into two unnecessary and illegal wars. After all, way back in 1999, as he was still planning his run for the White House, he told his biographer, Mickey Herskowitz:

“One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”

Rightwing governments rarely put the good of the people of a nation first; instead, it’s axiomatic that they achieve and wield power by scapegoating minority groups — usually racial or religious — and suppressing both voting rights and the rights of women to full participation in society.

While there have been a few self-declared left-wing authoritarian kleptocracies in history (most notably the USSR), the vast majority have been rightwing in their origin and nature. And, over time as their corruption becomes evident, their citizens grow to hate them.

In fact, over the past few years Spain, Brazil, and most recently Poland have rejected rightwing, bigoted, kleptocratic governments in favor of a return to normalcy and a progressive democracy. Israel could be next. The United States took a big step in that direction three years ago when we overwhelmingly rejected Donald Trump.

Nonetheless, the hard right here in America has funding from multiple “libertarian” billionaires, social media oligarchs, and a bought-off and corrupt Supreme Court that has legalized political bribery, making it much harder to dislodge authoritarian Republicans.

In fact, here in America, Jim Jordan is about to reboot Donald Trump’s attempt to damage America's readiness and defense of democracies around the world if he achieves the speakership.

A popular meme today, predictive of the dysfunction of the Trump administration and the GOP-run House of Representatives, is: “Elect a clown, expect a circus.”

But a much wider and internationalized perspective could rewrite it as: “Elect a right-winger, expect a poorly-handled crisis and an explosion of great wealth at the top.”

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

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Monday, October 23, 2023 6:22 AM

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

In an era blessed with unprecedented resources for reasoning, the public sphere is infested with fake news, quack cures, conspiracy theories, and “post-truth” rhetoric.

A Rational Look at Irrationality: Steven Pinker

Download the free book Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters from the mirrors at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Steven+Pinker+Rationality

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

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Monday, October 23, 2023 9:59 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Why it's impossible for right-wing governments to handle a crisis

By Thom Hartmann | Oct 18, 2023

https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/right-wing-government/

Pure trash.

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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Monday, October 23, 2023 10:13 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Why it's impossible for right-wing governments to handle a crisis

By Thom Hartmann | Oct 18, 2023

https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/right-wing-government/

Pure trash.

From that same story:

Quote:
Unfortunately, nobody moderated the corruption and incompetence of the Bush administration. President George W. Bush and his Vice President, Dick Cheney, were repeatedly warned that Bin Laden was “determined to strike inside the US.”

Bush, however, was busy trying to get Congress to pass a trillion-dollar tax cut for billionaires and Cheney was in secret meetings drawing up maps of the Iraqi oil fields that he and George would pass out to crony companies if they could find an excuse for a war.

Bush got his final and most alarmed warning from the CIA on August 6, 2001, a full month before the attack. Instead of putting the FBI and airport security on full alert, Bush decided to leave DC and take the longest vacation in presidential history, keeping him out of town until after the attack.

This was all just one month after Bush had attended a G8 summit in Genoa, Italy, where the Italian government had mobilized a battery of anti-aircraft missiles to protect the venue because of credible threats that Osama Bin Laden was planning to have his men hijack passenger jets to crash into Bush’s hotel, a threat that was well known to Bush and Condoleezza Rice.

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

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Monday, October 23, 2023 11:12 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Why it's impossible for right-wing governments to handle a crisis

By Thom Hartmann | Oct 18, 2023

https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/right-wing-government/

Pure trash.
From that same story:
Quote:
Unfortunately, nobody moderated the corruption and incompetence of the Bush administration. President George W. Bush and his Vice President, Dick Cheney, were repeatedly warned that Bin Laden was “determined to strike inside the US.”

Bush, however, was busy trying to get Congress to pass a trillion-dollar tax cut for billionaires and Cheney was in secret meetings drawing up maps of the Iraqi oil fields that he and George would pass out to crony companies if they could find an excuse for a war.

Bush got his final and most alarmed warning from the CIA on August 6, 2001, a full month before the attack. Instead of putting the FBI and airport security on full alert, Bush decided to leave DC and take the longest vacation in presidential history, keeping him out of town until after the attack.

This was all just one month after Bush had attended a G8 summit in Genoa, Italy, where the Italian government had mobilized a battery of anti-aircraft missiles to protect the venue because of credible threats that Osama Bin Laden was planning to have his men hijack passenger jets to crash into Bush’s hotel, a threat that was well known to Bush and Condoleezza Rice.

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

Yeah. Fuck Republicans. Especially warmongering Bushite Republicans.

The article isn't trash because it trashes Republicans. It's trash because it pretends that Democrats are any fucking better.

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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Thursday, October 26, 2023 6:19 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Yeah. Fuck Republicans. Especially warmongering Bushite Republicans.

The article isn't trash because it trashes Republicans. It's trash because it pretends that Democrats are any fucking better.

Pretends? 6ix, you and Trumptards in general truthfully lack understanding of what is going on all around you. Here is something else for your kind to misunderstand:

A new paper by economic historians Richard Hornbeck and Trevon Logan with the thesis that the costs of the slave system greatly exceeded the benefits is more important than you might think.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w31758
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31758/w31758.pdf

The slaveowners among America’s “founding fathers” generally understood the institution to be bad.

George Washington embraced perhaps the most chillingly real version of this in that he freed his slaves upon his death — he knew it was the right thing to do, he just liked profiting from slavery too much to do it until it wouldn’t cost him anything. But there were real ideological and policy elements to this, too.

Slavery in the territories became controversial later in American history, but the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 that prohibited it in the area that became Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin wasn’t particularly controversial at the time. Thomas Jefferson was a major force behind the legislation, and he wasn’t pushing to expand slavery into the northwest. He was extremely racist and not at all prepared to live side by side with a population of free Black people, but the Founding generation was generally not enthusiastic about trying to spread the slave-plantation socioeconomic model.

Later, though, as slavery came under more severe criticism from abolitionist and Free Soil types, the ideological currents in the South shifted.

During the 1820s, southerners started instead articulating the “positive good” theory of slavery. Or, as governor Stephen Miller of South Carolina put it in 1829, slavery was really awesome. Not just convenient for the slaveowners or an alternative to racial equality, but “a national benefit” that drove the prosperity of the whole country:

“Slavery is not a national evil; on the contrary, it is a national benefit. The agricultural wealth of the country is found in those states owning slaves, and a great portion of the revenue of the government is derived from the products of slave labor—Slavery exists in some form everywhere, and it is not of much consequence in a philosophical point of view, whether it be voluntary or involuntary. In a political point of view, involuntary slavery had the advantage, since all who enjoy political liberty are then, in fact, free.”

This was an important shift in American political discourse in the first half of the 19th Century. Free Soilers and the early Republican Party had developed the concept of the “Slave Power,” a mechanism by which a group of plantation owners who were a numerical minority even in the South, managed to drive national policy to serve their interests. The Positive Good theory was designed to debunk this. Over time, it failed to convince the majority of northerners, but it did convince the majority of southerners, leading to political fracturing and the American Civil War.

You would think that 160 years later this would be a definitively settled issue. But in a weird way the old Positive Good idea keeps ricocheting around as people look for cute history theses to advance, and most oddly of all as leftists try to indict capitalism by agreeing with Positive Good theorists’ exaggeration of slavery’s benefits.

So a new paper by economic historians Richard Hornbeck and Trevon Logan with the thesis that the costs of the slave system greatly exceeded the benefits is more important than you might think.

The bleak economics of slavery

I think the most straightforward way to think, economically, of enslavement is that it functions like theft. If I take something of yours, that is good for me and bad for you, but no wealth or income has been generated. There’s no prosperous society created — the wealth is just being shifted from victims to perpetrators.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/slavery-was-bad

In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation. A couple of years before he was convicted of securities fraud, Martin Shkreli was the chief executive of a pharmaceutical company that acquired the rights to Daraprim, a lifesaving antiparasitic drug. Previously the drug cost $13.50 a pill, but in Shkreli’s hands, the price quickly increased by a factor of 56, to $750 a pill. At a health care conference, Shkreli told the audience that he should have raised the price even higher. “No one wants to say it, no one’s proud of it,” he explained. “But this is a capitalist society, a capitalist system and capitalist rules.”

This is a capitalist society. It’s a fatalistic mantra that seems to get repeated to anyone who questions why America can’t be more fair or equal.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capita
lism.html

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

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Tuesday, October 31, 2023 5:59 PM

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

Tommy Tuberville, the moron senator from Alabama, has been holding up hundreds of military promotions for months. This weekend the commandant of the Marine Corps collapsed after suffering a heart attack, which leaves the Corps leaderless since Tuberville has blocked the confirmation of Lt. Gen. Christopher Mahoney as assistant commandant. So now we have this:

On Tuesday, Tuberville began circulating a petition, which would need signatures from at least 16 senators, to force the chamber to consider the nomination of Mahoney....That maneuver is the same one that lawmakers used in September to vote to install Gen. Charles Brown Jr as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

wtaf? Tuberville is now trying to force a confirmation vote for a man whose confirmation he's blocking?

This whole affair is crackers. It's preposterous that a single senator can hold up nominations on a whim, and in any sane world the Senate would ditch this rule. But they won't. Why? Because every single one of them wants to retain this power in case they themselves want to use it someday. Idiots.

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/tuberville-pushes-to-confirm-marin
es-no-2-after-commandant-hospitalized-feaade86?st=ubfmtb8wczkr3mr&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

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

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Tuesday, October 31, 2023 8:21 PM

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

Yeah. Fuck Republicans. Especially warmongering Bushite Republicans.

The article isn't trash because it trashes Republicans. It's trash because it pretends that Democrats are any fucking better.
Pretends? 6ix, you and Trumptards in general truthfully lack understanding of what is going on all around you. Here is something else for your kind to misunderstand:

I'm done reading any of your propaganda or bothering to even have a real discussion with you. You're borderline retarded with a God complex.

Get some help.

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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Monday, November 6, 2023 5:35 PM

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

The GOP playbook, since Reagan:

1. Run up the debt with tax cuts.

2. Blame socialism for the debt.

3. Wait for a Democratic president.

4. Blame them for the debt.

5. Block their attempts to fix it.

6. Call them failures.

7. Use it to win next election.

8. Repeat.

https://www.investmentnews.com/tax-cuts-vs-debt-reduction-gop-presiden
tial-debate-illustrates-conundrum-241496

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I'm done reading any of your propaganda or bothering to even have a real discussion with you. You're borderline retarded with a God complex.

Get some help.

6ix, you are the guy who misunderstands everything, knows nothing, and never will, but you cannot stop running your mouth, just like Trump, and pretty much every Trumptard I have ever known. Here is 6ix on his money difficulties:

“Yeah, I'm going to end up paying about $650 more over the next two years than I would have before the housing market went out of control in BidenFlationLand, and that increase will persist every year from here on out, but if I didn't fight this it would have cost me close to $2000 above that over the next 2 years, and about $1,350 per year every year after that instead of only about $360 per year.

And when you're managing to track on living with only spending $7k for an entire year in 2023, saving around $1k per year on taxes is cutting your future cost of living by over 14%.”
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65350&mid=11833
48#1183348

“the fact that the cold unheated basement is wide open it is quite expensive to heat this place. That's why I had the thermostat at only 52 degrees all winter last year with the insane gas prices. The only time I ever turned it higher than that was when it got so cold I was worried the pipes in the crawl might freeze.”
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65350&mid=11833
84#1183384

“It was just miserable here though because of the high cost of natural gas and how cold I kept my house. I'm not hearing any horror stories about natural gas prices this year, so hopefully they've stabilized and gone down. But maybe they're just not reporting on it anymore because we're all conditioned for the high prices and/or they don't want to make Biden* look any worse than he already does.”
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65350&mid=11834
35#1183435

Tell me more about your political beliefs, 6ix. I want to know why your life is so impoverished. I have found that boneheaded political beliefs and personal financial problems go together in most people. The principle is that stupidity in one thing will manifest itself in everything you do, especially money. Trump, supposedly rich, has abundant money problems because he is the poster child for boneheadedness, a mental disorder even high-income people can have.

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

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Monday, November 6, 2023 10:10 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
6ix, you are the guy who misunderstands everything, knows nothing, and never will, but you cannot stop running your mouth, just like Trump, and pretty much every Trumptard I have ever known.

Hehe. Have fun at work today honey?

Quote:
Here is 6ix on his money difficulties:

“Yeah, I'm going to end up paying about $650 more over the next two years than I would have before the housing market went out of control in BidenFlationLand, and that increase will persist every year from here on out, but if I didn't fight this it would have cost me close to $2000 above that over the next 2 years, and about $1,350 per year every year after that instead of only about $360 per year.

And when you're managing to track on living with only spending $7k for an entire year in 2023, saving around $1k per year on taxes is cutting your future cost of living by over 14%.”
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65350&mid=11833
48#1183348

Yeah. I just saved $1,350 per year going forward on my property tax and severely lowered the base from which they will make future increases. All without a lawyer or any legal advice. For the second time since I've lived here.

My property taxes when I first bought the house were going to be $2400 per year. I lowered them to $900 the first time, and even after the super inflation of Joe Biden and the out of control housing prices I'm still only paying $1,550 next year.

I've lived here 12 years now. On property taxes alone I've saved over $20,000 because I'm smart and stubborn enough to fight them instead of just rolling over like a pussy and getting fucked in the ass by Uncle Sam like you apparently do.

It costs me less than $20 per day to live, even with that tax increase.

I don't have any money issues.

Quote:
“the fact that the cold unheated basement is wide open it is quite expensive to heat this place. That's why I had the thermostat at only 52 degrees all winter last year with the insane gas prices. The only time I ever turned it higher than that was when it got so cold I was worried the pipes in the crawl might freeze.”
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65350&mid=11833
84#1183384

Again. I chose to do that. It costs me less than $20 per day to live.

Quote:
“It was just miserable here though because of the high cost of natural gas and how cold I kept my house. I'm not hearing any horror stories about natural gas prices this year, so hopefully they've stabilized and gone down. But maybe they're just not reporting on it anymore because we're all conditioned for the high prices and/or they don't want to make Biden* look any worse than he already does.”
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65350&mid=11834
35#1183435

Yeah. Bidenflation raised natural gas prices 125% over the course of two years. I chose not to pay it.

It costs me less than $20 per day to live. I don't have any money issues.

Quote:
Tell me more about your political beliefs, 6ix. I want to know why your life is so impoverished. I have found that boneheaded political beliefs and personal financial problems go together in most people. The principle is that stupidity in one thing will manifest itself in everything you do, especially money. Trump, supposedly rich, has abundant money problems because he is the poster child for boneheadedness, a mental disorder even high-income people can have.

I'm not impoverished. I chose to live this way because I'm a real man and not a little pussy born with a silver spoon up his ass.

Meanwhile, I haven't worked a day since July of 2019 and I'm still getting work done on my house when I feel like it, at my own pace.

Have fun at work tomorrow bitch.

I'll be napping.

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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Friday, November 10, 2023 3:13 PM

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

The UAW won pay hikes for everyone in the auto industry
Honda boosts pay for workers

Hey, look what's happening in the auto industry:

Honda Motor is giving many U.S. factory workers an 11% pay bump and making other improvements for these employees, a move that follows major gains secured by the United Auto Workers union in Detroit last month.

The base wage increase is effective in January, according to a memo viewed by The Wall Street Journal. The Japanese automaker is also cutting the time it takes to reach the top wage in half to three from six years, a change that is similar to one won by the UAW in its negotiations with General Motors, Ford Motor and Chrysler-parent Stellantis.

Unions have long been important not just because of the gains they win for their members, but because even non-union shops are forced to keep pace. Toyota raised its pay scales a week ago, and even Tesla is going to have to raise pay if they want to stay competitive for assembly line workers.

Now all we have to do is revive unions throughout the country.

https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/honda-gives-u-s-factory-workers-11-
pay-bump-following-uaw-wins-in-detroit-eb484398?st=rhj3u0buc192jnt&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

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

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Wednesday, November 22, 2023 5:03 PM

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

Inside the $1.5-Trillion Nuclear Weapons Program You've Never Heard Of

By Abe Streep | December 1, 2023
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/inside-the-1-5-trillion-nuc
lear-weapons-program-youve-never-heard-of/

This article is part of “The New Nuclear Age,” a special report on a $1.5-trillion effort to remake the American nuclear arsenal.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/report/the-new-nuclear-age/

Whether the U.S. is turning the screw a little tighter to assure allies in the wake of Russia's newly aggressive stance and rising Chinese power or merely furthering a profitable, decades-old militarized political agenda depends on whom you ask. Either way, the upshot is clear. “I expect the coming decades are going to be a boom time for the nuclear weapons industry,” says Jeffrey Lewis, a nonproliferation expert and professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, Calif.

Robert Webster, deputy director of weapons at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, told me that Americans have lost their fluency in nuclear weapons — that is, because of decades of relative stability, we've forgotten how to think about them. “You need everybody in the world to be on the same level of understanding so you can maintain this deterrence,” he says. But global powers treat nuclear weapons as bargaining chips, and history shows that one country's escalation follows its rivals'. The worst-case scenario is apocalyptic.

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

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Thursday, November 23, 2023 8:00 AM

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

If someone at your Thanksgiving table wants an administration that will ban abortions
and cut rich people’s taxes, it absolutely is true that Trump wants to do those
things and Biden doesn’t. But if the big concern you’re hearing from your more
conservative family members is that radical leftists want to curb American energy
production without regard to the economic consequences, that doesn’t reflect the
actual existing policy stakes.

So for those of you sitting down this Thanksgiving with moderately conservative
relatives who are not professional Republicans, but who do get most of their
information from right-leaning sources, here are a few points about America in 2023
that they might actually be open to hearing.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/17-points-to-raise-with-center-right?utm_
source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&action=share

1. The United States has had the strongest inflation-adjusted recovery from the pandemic
of any major global economy and has the lowest inflation rate in the G7 this year.
Since the pandemic, wages have risen faster than prices.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/7-reasons-the-u-s-economy-is-
among-the-strongest-in-the-g7/#:~:text=In%20fact%2C%20the%20U.S.%20economy,are%20still%20performing%20below%20trend.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1374823/inflation-g7-forecast/
https://x.com/JustinWolfers/status/1724440766255145354?s=20

2. The price of a Thanksgiving dinner is lower this fall than it was in 2022.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/15/thanksgiving-dinner-turkey-is-cheaper-
this-year.html

3. American crude oil and natural gas production are both at all time highs,
as are American energy exports.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-natgas-output-demand-hit-re
cord-highs-2023-eia-2023-10-11/#:~:text=EIA%20projected%20dry%20gas%20production,to%2088.38%20bcfd%20in%202024.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-natgas-output-demand-hit-re
cord-highs-2023-eia-2023-10-11/#:~:text=EIA%20projected%20dry%20gas%20production,to%2088.38%20bcfd%20in%202024.

4. After a huge increase during Donald Trump’s administration,
murder has fallen since Biden’s inauguration.
We are on track to have about 15 percent fewer murders this year than
during the final year of the Trump administration.
https://www.ahdatalytics.com/dashboards/ytd-murder-comparison/

5. The Trump administration proposed cuts to state and local law enforcement in
every budget submission, while the Biden administration has invested in local law
enforcement.
https://pascrell.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=4444
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/03/0
9/fact-sheet-president-bidens-budget-makes-our-communities-safer-and-combats-crime/

6. The budget deficit for Fiscal Year 2023 is $1.4 trillion lower than it was
in Fiscal Year 2020.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/national-defici
t/#:~:text=In%20FY%202023%2C%20the%20federal,referred%20to%20as%20deficit%20spending.
https://www.gao.gov/blog/larger-federal-deficits-higher-interests-rate
s-point-need-urgent-action#:~:text=At%20%242.8%20trillion%2C%20the%20FY,2020%20deficit%20of%20%243.1%20trillion.

7. Donald Trump ran and won in 2016 promising to have Medicare negotiate
the price of prescription drugs with pharmaceutical companies,
only to flip-flip and abandon this in office.
Democrats passed a law to do this, and it’s now actually happening.
https://ashpublications.org/ashclinicalnews/news/4842/Trump-Backs-Off-
Medicare-Drug-Price-Negotiations
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-administration-names-10-prescrip
tion-drugs-medicare-price/story?id=102643930#:~:text=%22Today%20is%20the%20start%20of,said%20at%20the%20White%20House.&text=The%20Biden%20administration%20on%20Tuesday,lower%20rising%20health%20care%20costs.

8. Beyond price negotiation and its well-known climate provisions,
the Inflation Reduction Act also finally closes the “donut hole” on
Medicare pharmaceutical coverage.
https://medicare-365.com/medicares-donut-hole-the-inflation-reduction-
act-impact/

9. The Biden administration has a proposal to extend the life of the Medicare Trust
Fund and avert looming insolvency. Trump has no such plan
(he’s not really a plans guy), and repealing the Inflation Reduction Act
would slightly accelerate insolvency.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/07/politics/biden-medicare-trust-fund-cris
is/index.html

10. More people are employed today than at any previous time in American history,
and the share of working-age people with a job is higher than at any point
in the Trump administration.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1bvxg
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1bvxq

11. New small businesses have been forming at a record pace during the Biden administration.
https://www.census.gov/econ/bfs/current/index.html

12. The Biden administration is moving forward with planned expansions of
the southern border wall and is fighting court battles with leftists as it tries
to crack down on people who pass through Mexico and Central America en route
to claiming asylum in the United States.
https://www.npr.org/2023/10/08/1204545880/the-biden-administration-is-
building-a-controversial-part-of-the-border-wall-in-
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/federal-appeals-court-grants-stay-
in-biden-asylum-ban-case

13. Historically, though, illegal immigration has always risen during times of
high labor demand in the United States, including when Trump was president.
Illegal immigration crashed not when Trump took office, but when Covid crushed
the economy and there were no jobs to be gained by moving here.
https://www.alexnowrasteh.com/p/the-us-labor-market-explains-most?utm_
source=post-email-title&publication_id=1229135&post_id=138926730&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=j385f&utm_medium=email

14. Deportation orders are being issued at record levels,
but the immigration court system is overwhelmed by sheer numbers,
which is leading to expanding waiting lists.
https://twitter.com/SteveRattner/status/1725488767937454342

15. Congressional Republicans have been refusing to appropriate more funds to
address the issue, because they believe border chaos embarrasses Biden
and helps them win elections. By the same token, they keep encouraging more migrants
to come with reckless and false claims that the border is “open,” because
it’s a good hit on Biden and they know they benefit from chaos.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/conservative-group-urges-republicans-
to-reject-border-trap-in-biden-admin-funding-request

16. If you’re torn between thinking Democrats are too far left and
Republicans are too far right (understandable), consider that the senate map
puts a heavy thumb on the scale for Republicans, and they have an entrenched 6-3
majority on the Supreme Court, so a GOP president is dramatically more likely,
in practice, to go off the rails.

17. Republicans are committed to enacting over $3.3 trillion in new tax cuts
if they win, which will either cause inflation and interest rates to surge or else
force the cuts to Social Security and Medicare they have promised to avoid.
https://www.crfb.org/blogs/tax-cut-extensions-cost-over-33-trillion

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

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Thursday, November 23, 2023 10:29 AM

I don't share Thanksgiving day with cunts that talk politics.

Everybody hates you already, Second. If you actually are invited anywhere tonight, don't be that guy.

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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Thursday, November 23, 2023 10:49 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I don't share Thanksgiving day with cunts that talk politics.

Everybody hates you already, Second. If you actually are invited anywhere tonight, don't be that guy.

In the real world, I never talk politics or religion because I am a Democrat who is surrounded by Republicans and I am an atheist surrounded by Christians. But I do listen to other people's beliefs and correlate that with what happens to them. The faux Christians thank me for my "Christian" virtues and tell me I am blessed by God. Meanwhile, God (or the Devil) is testing the faux Christians' faith by sending them wave after wave of troubles. I never correct them by truthfully telling them trouble follows them because they don't act in any way like authentic Christians. I know how real Christians act because there are some in the family. Their lives run very smoothly, lacking the drama of the faux Christians who don't know how to behave. The funny thing is the real Christians detest Trump and faux Christians love him.

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

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Thursday, November 23, 2023 11:28 AM

You should just stay at home, you miserable piece of shit.

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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Monday, November 27, 2023 8:55 AM

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

Why America Abandoned the Greatest Economy in History

Was the country’s turn toward free-market fundamentalism driven by race, class, or something else? Yes.

By Rogé Karma | November 25, 2023, 6:30 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/new-deal-us-economy-
american-dream/676051/

If there is one statistic that best captures the transformation of the American economy over the past half century, it may be this: Of Americans born in 1940, 92 percent went on to earn more than their parents; among those born in 1980, just 50 percent did. Over the course of a few decades, the chances of achieving the American dream went from a near-guarantee to a coin flip.

What happened?

One answer is that American voters abandoned the system that worked for their grandparents. From the 1940s through the ’70s, sometimes called the New Deal era, U.S. law and policy were engineered to ensure strong unions, high taxes on the rich, huge public investments, and an expanding social safety net. Inequality shrank as the economy boomed. But by the end of that period, the economy was faltering, and voters turned against the postwar consensus. Ronald Reagan took office promising to restore growth by paring back government, slashing taxes on the rich and corporations, and gutting business regulations and antitrust enforcement. The idea, famously, was that a rising tide would lift all boats. Instead, inequality soared while living standards stagnated and life expectancy fell behind that of peer countries. No other advanced economy pivoted quite as sharply to free-market economics as the United States, and none experienced as sharp a reversal in income, mobility, and public-health trends as America did. Today, a child born in Norway or the United Kingdom has a far better chance of outearning their parents than one born in the U.S.

This story has been extensively documented. But a nagging puzzle remains. Why did America abandon the New Deal so decisively? And why did so many voters and politicians embrace the free-market consensus that replaced it?

Since 2016, policy makers, scholars, and journalists have been scrambling to answer those questions as they seek to make sense of the rise of Donald Trump — who declared, in 2015, “The American dream is dead” — and the seething discontent in American life. Three main theories have emerged, each with its own account of how we got here and what it might take to change course. One theory holds that the story is fundamentally about the white backlash to civil-rights legislation. Another pins more blame on the Democratic Party’s cultural elitism. And the third focuses on the role of global crises beyond any political party’s control. Each theory is incomplete on its own. Taken together, they go a long way toward making sense of the political and economic uncertainty we’re living through.

“The American landscape was once graced with resplendent public swimming pools, some big enough to hold thousands of swimmers at a time,” writes Heather McGee, the former president of the think tank Demos, in her 2021 book, The Sum of Us. In many places, however, the pools were also whites-only. Then came desegregation. Rather than open up the pools to their Black neighbors, white communities decided to simply close them for everyone. For McGhee, that is a microcosm of the changes to America’s political economy over the past half century: White Americans were willing to make their own lives materially worse rather than share public goods with Black Americans.

From the 1930s until the late ’60s, Democrats dominated national politics. They used their power to pass sweeping progressive legislation that transformed the American economy. But their coalition, which included southern Dixiecrats as well as northern liberals, fractured after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” exploited that rift and changed the electoral map. Since then, no Democratic presidential candidate has won a majority of the white vote.

Crucially, the civil-rights revolution also changed white Americans’ economic attitudes. In 1956, 65 percent of white people said they believed the government ought to guarantee a job to anyone who wanted one and to provide a minimum standard of living. By 1964, that number had sunk to 35 percent. Ronald Reagan eventually channeled that backlash into a free-market message by casting high taxes and generous social programs as funneling money from hardworking (white) Americans to undeserving (Black) “welfare queens.” In this telling, which has become popular on the left, Democrats are the tragic heroes. The mid-century economy was built on racial suppression and torn apart by racial progress. Economic inequality was the price liberals paid to do what was right on race.

The New York Times writer David Leonhardt is less inclined to let liberals off the hook. His new book, Ours Was the Shining Future, contends that the fracturing of the New Deal coalition was about more than race. Through the ’50s, the left was rooted in a broad working-class movement focused on material interests. But at the turn of the ’60s, a New Left emerged that was dominated by well-off college students. These activists were less concerned with economic demands than issues like nuclear disarmament, women’s rights, and the war in Vietnam. Their methods were not those of institutional politics but civil disobedience and protest. The rise of the New Left, Leonhardt argues, accelerated the exodus of white working-class voters from the Democratic coalition.

Robert F. Kennedy emerges as an unlikely hero in this telling. Although Kennedy was a committed supporter of civil rights, he recognized that Democrats were alienating their working-class base. As a primary candidate in 1968, he emphasized the need to restore “law and order” and took shots at the New Left, opposing draft exemptions for college students. As a result of these and other centrist stances, Kennedy was criticized by the liberal press — even as he won key primary victories on the strength of his support from both white and Black working-class voters.

But Kennedy was assassinated in June that year, and the political path he represented died with him. That November, Nixon, a Republican, narrowly won the White House. In the process, he reached the same conclusion that Kennedy had: The Democrats had lost touch with the working class, leaving millions of voters up for grabs. In the 1972 election, Nixon portrayed his opponent, George McGovern, as the candidate of the “three A’s” — acid, abortion, and amnesty (the latter referring to draft dodgers). He went after Democrats for being soft on crime and unpatriotic. On Election Day, he won the largest landslide since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936. For Leonhardt, that was the moment when the New Deal coalition shattered. From then on, as the Democratic Party continued to reflect the views of college graduates and professionals, it would lose more and more working-class voters.

McGhee’s and Leonhardt’s accounts might appear to be in tension, echoing the “race versus class” debate that followed Trump’s victory in 2016. In fact, they’re complementary. As the economist Thomas Piketty has shown, since the’60s, left-leaning parties in most Western countries, not just the U.S., have become dominated by college-educated voters and lost working-class support. But nowhere in Europe was the backlash quite as immediate and intense as it was in the U.S. A major difference, of course, is the country’s unique racial history.

The 1972 election might have fractured the Democratic coalition, but that still doesn’t explain the rise of free-market conservatism. The new Republican majority did not arrive with a radical economic agenda. Nixon combined social conservatism with a version of New Deal economics. His administration increased funding for Social Security and food stamps, raised the capital-gains tax, and created the Environmental Protection Agency. Meanwhile, laissez-faire economics remained unpopular. Polls from the ’70s found that most Republicans believed that taxes and benefits should remain at present levels, and anti-tax ballot initiatives failed in several states by wide margins. Even Reagan largely avoided talking about tax cuts during his failed 1976 presidential campaign. The story of America’s economic pivot still has a missing piece.

According to the economic historian Gary Gerstle’s 2022 book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, that piece is the severe economic crisis of the mid-’70s. The 1973 Arab oil embargo sent inflation spiraling out of control. Not long afterward, the economy plunged into recession. Median family income was significantly lower in 1979 than it had been at the beginning of the decade, adjusting for inflation. “These changing economic circumstances, coming on the heels of the divisions over race and Vietnam, broke apart the New Deal order,” Gerstle writes. (Leonhardt also discusses the economic shocks of the ’70s, but they play a less central role in his analysis.)

Free-market ideas had been circulating among a small cadre of academics and business leaders for decades — most notably the University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman. The ’70s crisis provided a perfect opening to translate them into public policy, and Reagan was the perfect messenger. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” he declared in his 1981 inaugural address. “Government is the problem.”

Part of Reagan’s genius was that the message meant different things to different constituencies. For southern whites, government was forcing school desegregation. For the religious right, government was licensing abortion and preventing prayer in schools. And for working-class voters who bought Reagan’s pitch, a bloated federal government was behind their plummeting economic fortunes. At the same time, Reagan’s message tapped into genuine shortcomings with the economic status quo. The Johnson administration’s heavy spending had helped ignite inflation, and Nixon’s attempt at price controls had failed to quell it. The generous contracts won by auto unions made it hard for American manufacturers to compete with nonunionized Japanese ones. After a decade of pain, most Americans now favored cutting taxes. The public was ready for something different.

They got it. The top marginal income-tax rate was 70 percent when Reagan took office and 28 percent when he left. Union membership shriveled. Deregulation led to an explosion of the financial sector, and Reagan’s Supreme Court appointments set the stage for decades of consequential pro-business rulings. None of this, Gerstle argues, was preordained. The political tumult of the ’60s helped crack the Democrats’ electoral coalition, but it took the unusual confluence of a major economic crisis and a talented political communicator to create a new consensus. By the ’90s, Democrats had accommodated themselves to the core tenets of the Reagan revolution. President Bill Clinton further deregulated the financial sector, pushed through the North American Free Trade Agreement, and signed a bill designed to “end welfare as we know it.” Echoing Reagan, in his 1996 State of the Union address, Clinton conceded: “The era of big government is over.”

Today, we seem to be living through another inflection point in American politics — one that in some ways resembles the ’60s and ’70s. Then and now, previously durable coalitions collapsed, new issues surged to the fore, and policies once considered radical became mainstream. Political leaders in both parties no longer feel the same need to bow at the altar of free markets and small government. But, also like the ’70s, the current moment is defined by a sense of unresolved contestation. Although many old ideas have lost their hold, they have yet to be replaced by a new economic consensus. The old order is crumbling, but a new one has yet to be born.

The Biden administration and its allies are trying to change that. Since taking office, President Joe Biden has pursued an ambitious policy agenda designed to transform the U.S. economy and taken overt shots at Reagan’s legacy. “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore,” Biden quipped in 2020. Yet an economic paradigm is only as strong as the political coalition that backs it. Unlike Nixon, Biden has not figured out how to cleave apart his opponents’ coalition. And unlike Reagan, he hasn’t hit upon the kind of grand political narrative needed to forge a new one. Current polling suggests that he may struggle to win reelection.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party struggles to muster any coherent economic agenda. A handful of Republican senators, including J. D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and Josh Hawley, have embraced economic populism to some degree, but they remain a minority within their party.

The path out of our chaotic present to a new political-economic consensus is hard to imagine. But that has always been true of moments of transition. In the early ’70s, no one could have predicted that a combination of social upheaval, economic crisis, and political talent was about to usher in a brand-new economic era. Perhaps the same is true today. The Reagan revolution is never coming back. Neither is the New Deal order that came before it. Whatever comes next will be something new.

The Sum Of Us - What Racism Costs Everyone And How We Can Prosper Together
By Heather McGhee
https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Heather+McGhee

The Rise And Fall Of The Neoliberal Order
By Gary Gerstle
https://libgen.is//search.php?&req=Gary+Gerstle

Ours Was The Shining Future - The Story Of The American Dream
By David Leonhardt

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

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Saturday, December 2, 2023 11:06 AM

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

GOP Senators wish to keep Federal judgeships vacant until 2025 to cause malfunctions in the Federal Court System. There are only 890 Federal judges, which is not enough for 50 states. 2,500 judges (50 per state) are needed, but Congress won't pay for them.
https://www.uscourts.gov/judges-judgeships/judicial-vacancies
https://www.uscourts.gov/judges-judgeships/judicial-vacancies/current-
judicial-vacancies

GOP Melts Down As Dick Durbin Uses Its Tactics For Advancing Biden Judges

"It's called precedent," the Senate Judiciary Committee chair said of violating the same rule that Republicans ignored to move forward with judicial nominees.

By Jennifer Bendery | Nov 30, 2023, 09:18 PM EST

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dick-durbin-judiciary-committee-biden-j
udges_n_6568fef4e4b066e398b6fb64

Durbin was giving Republicans a taste of their own medicine.

“The two preceding chairs of this committee violated the letter and spirit of Committee Rule IV,” he said, referring to a committee rule that requires at least one member of the minority to vote with the majority to end debate on a matter before moving to vote on it.

Durbin said one former chair, Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), violated this rule with a vote on Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination, and Graham was chair when he broke the rule to advance a partisan immigration bill without Democratic input.

“In doing so, Republicans established a new precedent that I followed on one occasion last Congress and will follow again today,” said the Illinois Democrat. “I’ve said time and again there cannot be one set of rules for Republicans and a different set for Democrats.”

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) suggested it was petty for Durbin to break rules just because previous chairmen did it, too.

“So Mr. Chairman, you’re saying because you think Sen. Grassley violated the rule, you’re going to violate the rule?” he asked.

“It’s called precedent, senator,” replied Durbin.

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

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Saturday, December 2, 2023 3:42 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
GOP Senators wish to keep Federal judgeships vacant until 2025 to cause malfunctions in the Federal Court System. There are only 890 Federal judges, which is not enough for 50 states. 2,500 judges (50 per state) are needed, but Congress won't pay for them.
https://www.uscourts.gov/judges-judgeships/judicial-vacancies
https://www.uscourts.gov/judges-judgeships/judicial-vacancies/current-
judicial-vacancies

GOP Melts Down As Dick Durbin Uses Its Tactics For Advancing Biden Judges

"It's called precedent," the Senate Judiciary Committee chair said of violating the same rule that Republicans ignored to move forward with judicial nominees.

By Jennifer Bendery | Nov 30, 2023, 09:18 PM EST

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dick-durbin-judiciary-committee-biden-j
udges_n_6568fef4e4b066e398b6fb64

Durbin was giving Republicans a taste of their own medicine.

“The two preceding chairs of this committee violated the letter and spirit of Committee Rule IV,” he said, referring to a committee rule that requires at least one member of the minority to vote with the majority to end debate on a matter before moving to vote on it.

Durbin said one former chair, Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), violated this rule with a vote on Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination, and Graham was chair when he broke the rule to advance a partisan immigration bill without Democratic input.

“In doing so, Republicans established a new precedent that I followed on one occasion last Congress and will follow again today,” said the Illinois Democrat. “I’ve said time and again there cannot be one set of rules for Republicans and a different set for Democrats.”

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) suggested it was petty for Durbin to break rules just because previous chairmen did it, too.

“So Mr. Chairman, you’re saying because you think Sen. Grassley violated the rule, you’re going to violate the rule?” he asked.

“It’s called precedent, senator,” replied Durbin.

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

Oh. We're going to pretend that this never happened before Kavanaugh was on SCOTUS and this was the first time this rule was violated by Democrats now, huh?

OK

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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Thursday, December 7, 2023 6:39 AM

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

America’s White Evangelical Problem

Sarah Jones reviews the book The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory | Dec 6. 2023

When the journalist Tim Alberta’s father unexpectedly died, another ordeal awaited Tim. His father had pastored the Cornerstone Evangelical Presbyterian church in Michigan, where the Alberta family now gathered to honor his life alongside the congregation the father had nurtured.

In his eulogy, Alberta urged the Christians before him to seek out “discipleship and spiritual formation.” They could listen to his father’s old sermons, perhaps, or the pastors of the church could help them. “Why are you listening to Rush Limbaugh?” he asked them. “Garbage in, garbage out.” Hours later, a woman handed him a note from a church elder. In it, the elder expressed his disappointment. “I was part of an evil plot,” Alberta recalls, “to undermine God’s ordained leader of the United States.” He was guilty of something “tantamount to treason” against both God and country. If he investigated “the deep state” instead, he “would be restored.”

How did his father’s congregation get to this point? In Alberta’s new book, he tries to answer that very question. His journey spans the United States, taking him from Cornerstone to the sprawling campus of Liberty University with various stops at other churches.

What distinguishes The Kingdom from other entries in the genre is Alberta’s dual role as a person of faith and a political journalist. He is a product of the church who became a critic from within. That’s fraught territory, and there’s much to explore.

Nationalism always had a grip on the white Evangelical church. When I attended a conservative Evangelical college, I realized just how deeply those hatreds ran. Barack Obama’s election disturbed my classmates, maybe even frightened them. Here was a Black liberal with a suspicious name, and here was the loss of power they abhorred. In The Kingdom, Alberta reflects on the Obama years after speaking with Robert Jeffress, a megachurch pastor and prominent Trump supporter. White Evangelicals “had spent Obama’s presidency marinating in a message of end-times agitation. Something they loved was soon to be lost. Time was running out to reclaim it. The old rules no longer applied. Desperate times called for desperate — even disgraceful — measures,” he writes. Jeffress, he adds, “was inviting an obvious question: Once a person becomes convinced that they are under siege — that enemies are coming for them and want to destroy their way of life — what is to stop that person from becoming radicalized?”

You will know them by their fruits, the Bible says. Behold: conspiracy theories, prejudice, and fear; eventually, Donald Trump.

To his credit, for all the time Alberta spends with the radical Evangelical right, he is not desensitized to what he uncovers. Instead, he is scandalized. “Would a serious Christian see fit, I wondered, to condone this brutish behavior in any other area of life?” he writes of the Road to Majority conference where Trump had spoken to an enthralled audience. “Would they condone vicious ad hominem attacks if they were launched at the office? Would they condone the use of vulgarities and violent innuendo inside their home? Would they condone blatant abuses of power at their local school or nonprofit or church?” A “serious Christian” might not, as Alberta defines the term. He goes on to ask why these Christians accept a certain brutality in politics that they may not accept in other areas of their lives. “This compartmentalization of standards is toxic to the credibility of the Christian witness,” he writes.

More at https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/12/tim-alberta-book-review-americ
as-white-evangelical-problem.html

Download Tim Alberta’s free book The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory from the mirrors at https://libgen.is//search.php?&req=Tim+Alberta

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

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Saturday, December 9, 2023 11:14 AM

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

They try to hide what they are deep down inside but then they blurt it out to surveyors:

The Republican Worldview
Recent survey results

Watched Fox News this month
Voting machines hacked in 2020
Barack Obama not born in US
Lots of discrimination against white people
No human-caused climate change
Will not get future COVID shot
Abortion should almost always be illegal
We are in a recession
Christians face a lot of discrimination
Inflation had big impact
Trump cannot get a fair trial
Education worse than ten years ago
Government lying about UFOs
Trump treated harshly by justice system
Biden didn’t win legitimately
See fake news frequently
Should send troops to the border
China is a serious military threat
COVID originated in Chinese lab
Biden is dishonest
Country is out of control
Illegal immigration is a serious problem

https://jabberwocking.com/the-republican-worldview-in-one-chart/

To me, all this explains why Trumptards struggle, suffer, and die early, never knowing how crazy and stupid they are. I sure wish American politics was truly about Republicans having different values than Democrats because political compromises would be possible, but it comes down to Republicans aren't capable people and that makes them angry at the complete unfairness of being a dullard. Trumptards lament, "Why doesn't America treat us (the retarded) to the easy life that normal people have?" Since Trumptards think of themselves as smart, the apparent unfairness of their lives infuriates them, driving them crazy.

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

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Saturday, December 9, 2023 1:27 PM