REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

A thread for Democrats Only

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Wednesday, July 17, 2019 4:42 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:

Originally posted by captaincrunch:
Quote:

Originally posted by second:
I’m struck at how many people have come up to me recently and said, “Trump’s going to get re-elected, isn’t he?” And in each case, when I drilled down to ask why, I bumped into the Democratic presidential debates in June. I think a lot of Americans were shocked by some of the things they heard there. I was.

Dear Democrats: This is not complicated! Just nominate a decent, sane person, one committed to reunifying the country and creating more good jobs, a person who can gain the support of the independents, moderate Republicans and suburban women who abandoned Donald Trump in the midterms and thus swung the House of Representatives to the Democrats and could do the same for the presidency. And that candidate can win!

But please, spare me the revolution! It can wait. Win the presidency, hold the House and narrow the spread in the Senate, and a lot of good things still can be accomplished. “No,” you say, “the left wants a revolution now!” O.K., I’ll give the left a revolution now: four more years of Donald Trump.

That will be a revolution.

More at www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/opinion/trump-2020.html




Great article from someone I tend to agree with all the time, Thomas Friedman. He would be my Consigliere if I were president - at least on speed dial. He points out many of the problems that come from Trump that aren't even caused directly by him. Namely, hating him so much people want to go to opposite extremes to balance things out.

I don't know how any rational person could argue with:

"I was shocked that so many candidates in the party whose nominee I was planning to support want to get rid of the private health insurance covering some 250 million Americans and have “Medicare for all” instead. I think we should strengthen Obamacare and eventually add a public option.

I was shocked that so many were ready to decriminalize illegal entry into our country. I think people should have to ring the doorbell before they enter my house or my country.

I was shocked at all those hands raised in support of providing comprehensive health coverage to undocumented immigrants. I think promises we’ve made to our fellow Americans should take priority, like to veterans in need of better health care."

Unless it's because Trump. I do it sometimes myself because he's such a loathsome pos. It might take half dozen presidents before we get past the Trump Effect.

Are the Democrats Too Stupid to Beat Donald Trump?
by Martin Longman July 17, 2019

Policies like free health care for undocumented people or abolishing all private health insurance are going to do damage. These things are not popular in general and are especially unpopular with the Democrats’ suburban base. A lot of the Democrats’ rhetoric on border issues is toxic not just in the sticks but also in the communities ringing our cities.

So, yes, the Democrats really could blow this election by running a non-strategic campaign based on abstract values against a campaign that is laser-focused on just the voters it needs to win.

This isn’t an argument for changing values, but it is an argument for not being too stupid to beat a man like Donald Trump.

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/07/17/are-the-democrats-too-stupid-
to-beat-donald-trump
/

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

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Thursday, July 18, 2019 10:40 PM

SECOND

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


America Is Living James Madison’s Nightmare

The Founders designed a government that would resist mob rule. They didn’t anticipate how strong the mob could become.

James Madison traveled to Philadelphia in 1787 with Athens on his mind. He had spent the year before the Constitutional Convention reading two trunkfuls of books on the history of failed democracies, sent to him from Paris by Thomas Jefferson. Madison was determined, in drafting the Constitution, to avoid the fate of those “ancient and modern confederacies,” which he believed had succumbed to rule by demagogues and mobs.

According to classical theory, republics could exist only in relatively small territories, where citizens knew one another personally and could assemble face-to-face. Plato would have capped the number of citizens capable of self-government at 5,040. Madison, however, thought Plato’s small-republic thesis was wrong. He believed that the ease of communication in small republics was precisely what had allowed hastily formed majorities to oppress minorities. “Extend the sphere” of a territory, Madison wrote, “and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.” Madison predicted that America’s vast geography and large population would prevent passionate mobs from mobilizing. Their dangerous energy would burn out before it could inflame others.

Of course, at the time of the country’s founding, new media technologies, including what Madison called “a circulation of newspapers through the entire body of the people,” were already closing the communication gaps among the dispersed citizens of America. The popular press of the 18th and early 19th centuries was highly partisan—the National Gazette, where Madison himself published his thoughts on the media, was, since its founding in 1791, an organ of the Democratic-Republican Party and often viciously attacked the Federalists.

But newspapers of the time were also platforms for elites to make thoughtful arguments at length, and Madison believed that the enlightened journalists he called the “literati” would ultimately promote the “commerce of ideas.” He had faith that citizens would take the time to read complicated arguments (including the essays that became The Federalist Papers), allowing levelheaded reason to spread slowly across the new republic.

James Madison died at Montpelier, his Virginia estate, in 1836, one of the few Founding Fathers to survive into the democratic age of Andrew Jackson. Madison supported Jackson’s efforts to preserve the Union against nullification efforts in the South but was alarmed by his populist appeal in the West. What would Madison make of American democracy today, an era in which Jacksonian populism looks restrained by comparison? Madison’s worst fears of mob rule have been realized — and the cooling mechanisms he designed to slow down the formation of impetuous majorities have broken.

The polarization of Congress, reflecting an electorate that has not been this divided since about the time of the Civil War, has led to ideological warfare between parties that directly channels the passions of their most extreme constituents and donors — precisely the type of factionalism the Founders abhorred.

More at www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/james-madison-mob-rule/56
8351
/


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

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Friday, July 19, 2019 12:28 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by captaincrunch:
Quote:

Originally posted by second:
I’m struck at how many people have come up to me recently and said, “Trump’s going to get re-elected, isn’t he?” And in each case, when I drilled down to ask why, I bumped into the Democratic presidential debates in June. I think a lot of Americans were shocked by some of the things they heard there. I was.

Dear Democrats: This is not complicated! Just nominate a decent, sane person, one committed to reunifying the country and creating more good jobs, a person who can gain the support of the independents, moderate Republicans and suburban women who abandoned Donald Trump in the midterms and thus swung the House of Representatives to the Democrats and could do the same for the presidency. And that candidate can win!

But please, spare me the revolution! It can wait. Win the presidency, hold the House and narrow the spread in the Senate, and a lot of good things still can be accomplished. “No,” you say, “the left wants a revolution now!” O.K., I’ll give the left a revolution now: four more years of Donald Trump.

That will be a revolution.

More at www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/opinion/trump-2020.html




Great article from someone I tend to agree with all the time, Thomas Friedman. He would be my Consigliere if I were president - at least on speed dial. He points out many of the problems that come from Trump that aren't even caused directly by him. Namely, hating him so much people want to go to opposite extremes to balance things out.

I don't know how any rational person could argue with:

"I was shocked that so many candidates in the party whose nominee I was planning to support want to get rid of the private health insurance covering some 250 million Americans and have “Medicare for all” instead. I think we should strengthen Obamacare and eventually add a public option.

I was shocked that so many were ready to decriminalize illegal entry into our country. I think people should have to ring the doorbell before they enter my house or my country.

I was shocked at all those hands raised in support of providing comprehensive health coverage to undocumented immigrants. I think promises we’ve made to our fellow Americans should take priority, like to veterans in need of better health care."

Unless it's because Trump. I do it sometimes myself because he's such a loathsome pos. It might take half dozen presidents before we get past the Trump Effect.

Are the Democrats Too Stupid to Beat Donald Trump?
by Martin Longman July 17, 2019

Policies like free health care for undocumented people or abolishing all private health insurance are going to do damage. These things are not popular in general and are especially unpopular with the Democrats’ suburban base. A lot of the Democrats’ rhetoric on border issues is toxic not just in the sticks but also in the communities ringing our cities.

So, yes, the Democrats really could blow this election by running a non-strategic campaign based on abstract values against a campaign that is laser-focused on just the voters it needs to win.

This isn’t an argument for changing values, but it is an argument for not being too stupid to beat a man like Donald Trump.

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/07/17/are-the-democrats-too-stupid-
to-beat-donald-trump
/

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



Yup. That just about sums up the main reason the Dems are going to lose a lot in 2020, including but not limited to another run for president.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Friday, July 19, 2019 6:44 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Yup. That just about sums up the main reason the Dems are going to lose a lot in 2020, including but not limited to another run for president.

Nope. A few days ago you misinterpreted what AOC means. To the Independent voter, AOC is the Democratic Party, and she is the perfect reason to vote for Republicans. Your comment:
Quote:

Or, yanno, it's their ridiculous Socialist views that are getting them the attention they deserve.

But no... That would mean that women in America, particular minority women in positions of power, have a voice. That goes against everything that the Democrats stand for.

They're victims because they're women. They're victims because they're not white. They're victims even though they hold great positions of power and get paid the same as every old white male colleague.

They're eternally victims.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

6ix, you really have fallen for the ridiculous idea that AOC is the future of the Democratic Party. AOC believes it, but her beliefs are as ridiculous as yours. If AOC was the future of Democrats, even I would be voting for Republicans. But she is not. But the GOP really, really wants you to think AOC (or Bernie) are. On the other hand, Trump definitely is the future of the GOP. He has infected the party and it won't recover from his disease.

Fox News mentioned AOC more than 3,000 times in a six-week span. Watch this supercut. It’s dizzying:


There’s a reason conservative media focuses relentlessly on Ocasio-Cortez, and to a lesser but still disproportionate extent, Tlaib and Omar. Vilifying nonwhite, female members of Congress electrifies their audience is a way that vilifying, say, Rep. Richard Neal, the powerful but bland chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, does not. The strategy of Fox News and much of the conservative media is to activate white threat in a browning America. Elevating and demonizing extremely liberal, nonwhite, young, female politicians is one way they do it.

This is what House Democratic leadership fears: that Ocasio-Cortez and the Squad, through their dominance of social media and their centrality on conservative media, will become the faces of the House Democratic majority. Centering American politics on the rising power of unapologetically liberal, young, nonwhite politicians is the right’s best hope for holding power: As reams of research show, when white Americans believe themselves losing demographic and political control of the country, they become far more conservative.

More at www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/7/16/20695031/trump-ocasio-cortez
-omar-pressley-tlaib-pelosi-squad


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

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Friday, July 19, 2019 9:44 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


lol... no.

I have not fallen for the notion that AOC is the future of the Democratic party. Look at my other posts around here recently saying that this is a fluke and AOC is on her way out the door during the next election after making zero mark, other than to fracture the Democratic party while she was there.

You've got a broken house. No pun intended, but there it is...



Half the time I think that AOC is on Trump's payroll. He's certainly pitting them all against each other like a pro just by putting out a few stupid tweets per day.

At one point it seemed like the hoopla surrounding AOC had died down and Pelosi was reining everything back in to tow the Corporatist Democrat line, but then last week happened and he's actually put Pelosi in the position where she's got to come out and defend politicians like AOC and Omar. I'll bet she saw what was happening and said "oh fuck!" behind closed doors. Would have loved to have been a fly on that particular wall. She's caught in the middle and she's likely to have a stroke.

Barring the beginning of the 2nd Great Depression or World War III in the next year and a half, the Democrats are dead in the water in 2020.

If Pelosi can't get the AOC's and the Omar's to shut their fucking mouths until then and they keep getting worse, you might even be looking at a GOP supermajority in the house in 2020.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Friday, July 19, 2019 11:11 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

If Pelosi can't get the AOC's and the Omar's to shut their fucking mouths until then and they keep getting worse, you might even be looking at a GOP supermajority in the house in 2020.

You could be right, because most voters don't want to even hear multiple ideas for solving problems, let alone think about the ideas. It disturbs them. Worries them. They feel better with simple ideas. And what could be more simple than Trump's ideas?

Unlike Trump, Democrats have ideas for multiple solutions to problems. Trump mocks them. Democrats argue about which are better. Not Trump. His ideas are the "best" ideas. That is also how it goes with the Republicans I know.

Have you noticed that the GOP speaks with one voice? The "best" idea is the only idea that gets spoken. A vast majority of Americans are like that, you know, that there must be only one "best" way. They want with all their heart simple ideas. Those ideas might have gotten people into trouble, but do they try other ideas, ones that aren't so simple? No, they do not. There is no reason to try a different idea because the GOP already has the "best" ideas.

Solving a problem using two or three or four unusual ideas, like you find in Democratic Party, are too many ideas for the typical Republican or "Independent" voters, who really like simplicity. Maybe if Democrats copied the GOP strategy of only having one idea at time, it would make voters more comfortable. Wouldn't want voters to feel uncomfortable because they will just vote for the GOP.

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

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Friday, July 19, 2019 11:39 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


lol

Nope.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Friday, July 19, 2019 11:43 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


I see SECOND is still on a soapbox.

Hey, SECOND, has the irony of you posting about "factionalism" escaped you? If it has, I just want to point it out.



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

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .

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Saturday, July 20, 2019 6:13 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I see SECOND is still on a soapbox.

Hey, SECOND, has the irony of you posting about "factionalism" escaped you? If it has, I just want to point it out.

Remember what you wanted from Trump? You won't get it for an obvious reason: There is the Trump Show and then there is the Mulvaney administration.

“We’re not going to let Donald Trump dismantle the Bill of Rights,” Mick Mulvaney, a far-right House member from South Carolina said in 2016. “For five and half years, every time we got to the floor and try to push back against an overreaching president, we get accused of being partisan at best and racist at worst. When we do it against a Republican president, maybe people will see it was a principled objection in the first place.”

Today, Mulvaney is White House chief of staff, and people can clearly see that there never was a principled objection at all.

But what many people miss about this turnaround is it’s not a case of Trump over-awing or hypnotizing once-skeptical Republicans. What changed is that conservative movement leaders used to be afraid that Trump would be disloyal to their priorities.

They feared, in short, that his rhetorical gestures of economic populism — he promised a higher minimum wage, a big infrastructure bill, a universal health care plan, and even higher taxes on the rich — would be real. It turns out, however, that Trump was just lying about almost all of that stuff.

In exchange for deciding that he doesn’t care whether or not Trump shreds the bill of rights, Mulvaney now, according to an excellent team of Washington Post reporters, “has built what one senior administration official called ‘his own fiefdom’ centered on pushing conservative policies — while mostly steering clear of the Trump-related pitfalls that tripped up his predecessors by employing a ‘Let Trump be Trump’ ethos.”

Mulvaney stays away from the trade, national security, and immigration portfolios and in exchange has carte blanche to run the bulk of domestic policy for the administration — largely free of any kind of public scrutiny. And imbued with strong ideological convictions while encumbered by few constrains, he’s free to enact consequential and unpopular decisions on a strikingly broad range of topics — from overruling the Health and Human Services secretary’s ban the use of fetal tissue in medical research, to the looming anti-labor agenda at the Labor Department, to reviving a proposal to enact a gigantic tax cut for rich stock market investors through administrative fiat.

The upshot of Trump administration policymaking — beginning with Paul Ryan’s speakership, continuing under Mulvaney’s operation of the executive machinery now that Democrats run the House, and of course extending into the Federalist Society domination of the judiciary — is to completely neuter or dismantle the institutions of government that are supposed to check the ability of the wealthy and powerful to run roughshod over the rest of us. Polluters can pollute more, scamsters can scam more, bankers can go back to running the risks that blew up the global economy, and no legislation that would impair the privileges of the powerful can pass.

More at www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/7/18/20699176/donald-trump-ilhan-
omar-white-collar-crime


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

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Saturday, July 20, 2019 6:18 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Nobody takes anything at Vox seriously.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Saturday, July 20, 2019 6:42 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:

...he promised a higher minimum wage, a big infrastructure bill, a universal health care plan, and even higher taxes on the rich — would be real.
He did?

Well, it's a good thing that isn't why I voted for him, then!


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

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .

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Saturday, July 20, 2019 7:15 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:

...he promised a higher minimum wage, a big infrastructure bill, a universal health care plan, and even higher taxes on the rich — would be real.
He did?

Well, it's a good thing that isn't why I voted for him, then!

You actually voted for Trump? I had the vague notion that you lived in California, so it was pointless to vote for a Republican -- the Democrat would get all California's electoral votes, anyway. Therefore you voted for some third party, but you were cheering for Trump because of your 3 points: www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=63004&mid=1073399#
1073399


I will be voting for a Democrat in 2020, but I won't be saddened if Trump wins because I am the Plutocrat that Mulvaney, White House chief of staff, is enriching. Besides, a Democratic President would be unable to make any headway against the 41 or more Republican Senators in 2021.

A Republican President will make me richer than a Democrat. The extra money Trump sends my way in reduced taxes and regulations will ease my disappointment that he is reelected. And if Trump causes the economy to crash, like Bush did in 2008, I will be buying American real estate and stocks at a huge discount, just like I did during the Bush crash. Eventually, the economy will turnaround after a Republican caused crash, as it did under Obama and Bill Clinton and, going way back, FDR.

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

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Sunday, July 21, 2019 4:59 AM

1KIKI

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


OOH! I get to try out Jacks' list of SECOND's broken record! (with one small addition)
1. My 600 lb life. (TV show)
2. Donald Trump.
3. Texas Republicans.
4. Ruining people's lives because of their political beliefs.
5. Talking about how much money he has
6. Republicans in general


Quote:

Originally posted by SECOND:
I will be voting for a Democrat in 2020, but I won't be saddened if Trump#2 wins because I am the Plutocrat#5 that Mulvaney, White House chief of staff, is enriching. Besides, a Democratic President would be unable to make any headway against the 41 or more Republican#6 Senators in 2021.

A Republican#6 President will make me richer#5 than a Democrat. The extra money#5 Trump#2 sends my way in reduced taxes and regulations will ease my disappointment that he is reelected. And if Trump#2 causes the economy to crash, like Bush did in 2008, I will be buying American real estate and stocks at a huge discount#5, just like I did during the Bush crash. Eventually, the economy will turnaround after a Republican#6 caused crash, as it did under Obama and Bill Clinton and, going way back, FDR.






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

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Sunday, July 21, 2019 5:03 AM

SECOND

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


Trump acts like a Populist, but his regulatory record consistently favored big businesses over average people.

The regulatory process usually doesn’t involve the opposition party, at least beyond eliciting occasional complaints, and it usually draws little public scrutiny. As a result, the president’s regulatory record provides special insight into his undiluted priorities and beliefs.

The Brookings Institution catalogues all new regulatory moves, and it has reported that Trump and his appointees have taken 175 significant regulatory actions since he took office in January 2017.
www.brookings.edu/interactives/tracking-deregulation-in-the-trump-era/

While Trump’s legislative agenda has focused on building a border wall and lowering taxes for wealthy people and businesses, his regulators have mounted sustained attacks on environmental standards, consumer and worker safeguards, and barriers to discrimination. They have consistently favored big businesses and important interest groups over average people.

Trump appointees have made it materially easier for people to be ripped off: they repealed a requirement that payday lenders determine if a borrower can repay a loan before lending them funds; lessened the performance standards that for-profit colleges have to meet before they can accept federal student loans; issued new rules to increase the hours that truck, bus, and school bus drivers can work without resting; expanded the exemptions from minimum wage and overtime regulations; and nullified people’s rights to stop internet service providers from selling their personal information.

More at https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/07/18/trump-acts-like-a-populist-hi
s-regulatory-record-suggests-otherwise
/


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

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Sunday, July 21, 2019 7:10 AM

SECOND

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


For the fourth season of “The Apprentice,” Donald J. Trump searched for a gimmick to bolster ratings. His idea was simple if explosive — pit an all-white team against an all-black team.

“Do you like it?” he asked, previewing the concept on Howard Stern’s radio show in April 2005.

“Yes,” Mr. Stern said.

“Do you like it?” Mr. Trump asked Robin Quivers, the African-American co-host.

“Well,” she said, “I think you’re going to have a riot.”

That gave Mr. Trump no pause. “It would be the highest-rated show on television,” he exulted.

Over decades in business, entertainment and now politics, Mr. Trump has approached America’s racial, ethnic and religious divisions opportunistically, as openings to achieve his goals, whether they be ratings, fame, money or power, without regard for adverse consequences.

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

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Sunday, July 21, 2019 7:22 AM

SECOND

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


Trump sounded enthusiastic during his appearance on Mr. Stern’s show in 2005. Mr. Stern asked if there would be both light-skinned and dark-skinned contestants on the black team and Mr. Trump said it would be an “assortment.” As for the white team, Mr. Trump said it should include all blonds.

Even as he egged him on, Mr. Stern expressed more concern about the ramifications than Mr. Trump. “Wouldn’t that set off a racial war in this country?” he asked.

“See, actually, I don’t think it would,” Mr. Trump replied. “I think that it would be handled very beautifully by me. Because, as you know, I’m very diplomatic.”

Mr. Stern agreed. “I gotta tell you something, on some level it’s wrong,” he went on. “But I like it. I like it. I would watch.”

“You’d have to,” Ms. Quivers replied, “because you’d want to know when the riot starts.”

www.nytimes.com/2019/07/20/us/politics/trump-race-record.html

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

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Sunday, July 21, 2019 11:25 AM

1KIKI

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


1. My 600 lb life. (TV show)
2. Donald Trump.
3. Texas Republicans.
4. Ruining people's lives because of their political beliefs.
5. Talking about how much money he has
6. Republicans in general
Quote:

Originally posted by SECOND:
2. Donald Trump.
2. Donald Trump
2. Donald Trump
2. Donald Trump.




FIFY
I've helpfully summarized your post so other people can get the gist without having to do any tedious reading.

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Sunday, July 21, 2019 11:27 AM

1KIKI

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


1. My 600 lb life. (TV show)
2. Donald Trump.
3. Texas Republicans.
4. Ruining people's lives because of their political beliefs.
5. Talking about how much money he has
6. Republicans in general
Quote:

Originally posted by SECOND:
2. Donald Trump.
2. Donald Trump.
2. Donald Trump.
2. Donald Trump.



FIFY
I've helpfully summarized your post so other people can get the gist without having to do any tedious reading.

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Sunday, July 21, 2019 11:29 AM

1KIKI

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


1. My 600 lb life. (TV show)
2. Donald Trump.
3. Texas Republicans.
4. Ruining people's lives because of their political beliefs.
5. Talking about how much money he has
6. Republicans in general
Quote:

Originally posted by SECOND:
2. Donald Trump.
2. Donald Trump.



FIFY
I've helpfully summarized your post so other people can get the gist without having to do any tedious reading.

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Sunday, July 21, 2019 2:00 PM

SECOND

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


Republicans want to protect the statues of Robert E. Lee. They describe this man as an American hero, but that requires reducing the sum of human virtue to a sense of decorum and the ability to convey gravitas in a gray uniform.

It also requires ignoring the immense suffering for which Robert E. Lee was personally responsible, both on and off the battlefield.

Lee's own views on slavery were explicated in an 1856 letter that it often misquoted to give the impression that Lee was some kind of an abolitionist. The argument Lee made was that slavery is bad for white people, good for black people, and most importantly, it is better than abolitionism; emancipation must wait for divine intervention.

Lee’s heavy hand on his Arlington plantation nearly led to a slave revolt, in part because the enslaved had been expected to be freed upon their previous master’s death, and Lee had engaged in a dubious legal interpretation of his will in order to keep them as his property, one that lasted until a Virginia court forced him to free them.

During his invasion of Pennsylvania, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia enslaved freemen and brought them back to the South as property. Pryor writes that “evidence links virtually every infantry and cavalry unit in Lee’s army” with the abduction of free black Americans, “with the activity under the supervision of senior officers.”

Soldiers under Lee’s command at the Battle of the Crater in 1864 massacred black Union soldiers who tried to surrender. Then, in a spectacle hatched by Lee’s senior corps commander A.P. Hill, the Confederates paraded the Union survivors through the streets of Petersburg to the slurs and jeers of the southern crowd. Lee never discouraged such behavior. As the historian Richard Slotkin wrote in No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, “his silence was permissive.”

The presence of black soldiers on the field of battle shattered every myth the South’s slave empire was built on: the happy docility of slaves, their intellectual inferiority, their cowardice, their inability to compete with whites. As Pryor writes, “fighting against brave and competent African Americans challenged every underlying tenet of southern society.” The Confederate response to this challenge was to visit every possible atrocity and cruelty upon black soldiers whenever possible, from enslavement to execution.

As the historian James McPherson recounts in Battle Cry of Freedom, in October of that same year, Lee proposed an exchange of prisoners with the Union general Ulysses S. Grant. “Grant agreed, on condition that blacks be exchanged ‘the same as white soldiers.’” Lee’s response was that “negroes belonging to our citizens are not considered subjects of exchange and were not included in my proposition.” Because slavery was the cause for which Lee fought, he could hardly be expected to easily concede, even at the cost of the freedom of his own men, that blacks could be treated as soldiers and not things. Grant refused the offer, telling Lee that “Government is bound to secure to all persons received into her armies the rights due to soldiers.” Despite its desperate need for soldiers, the Confederacy did not relent from this position until a few months before Lee’s surrender.

Privately, according to the correspondence collected by his own family, Lee counseled others to hire white labor instead of the freedmen, observing “that wherever you find the negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find a white man, you see everything around him improving.”

Publicly, Lee argued against the enfranchisement of blacks, and raged against Republican efforts to enforce racial equality on the South. Lee told Congress that blacks lacked the intellectual capacity of whites and “could not vote intelligently,” and that granting them suffrage would “excite unfriendly feelings between the two races.” Lee explained that “the negroes have neither the intelligence nor the other qualifications which are necessary to make them safe depositories of political power.” To the extent that Lee believed in reconciliation, it was between white people, and only on the precondition that black people would be denied political power and therefore the ability to shape their own fate.

More at www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-ge
neral-lee/529038
/

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

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Monday, July 22, 2019 6:40 AM

SECOND

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


Eliminate The Debt Ceiling

Several days ago, Catherine Rampell published a reasonable column calling for eliminating the century-old US debt ceiling, something no other nation has ever had. The issue is hot again as once again the debt ceiling is being rapidly approached.
www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2019/07/16/catherine-rampell-abolish/

The latest story is that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi have an agreement to raise the debt ceiling. This is what used to be known as “good government,” but in the current environment, even this apparently reasonable deal, which also has no non-economic sideshows involving abortion or whatever, may yet not pass. Pelosi says it must be agreed to by Monday evening if it will get passed properly by Congress before they all go on leave. Otherwise, the government might run out of money in early September (corporate tax payments have been way down due to Trump tax law). Eliminating the ceiling would avoid all this bs.

When the WH and Congress have been controlled by the same party, it has been no big deal raising the debt ceiling. However, when there has been split partisan control the game has been the WH pushing raising the ceiling while the opposition party in Congress has made lots of complaining noises and often made demands before raising it. The problem this time is the WH, not Congress. Acting WH Chief of Staff Mulvaney was part of the tea party fanatics in the House who when Obama was prez tried to block raising the ceiling. Mulvaney and Trump have indulged in fantasies that if there is a debt default, Trump could personally control which agencies get funded and which do not. This is not true, and maybe they are figuring it out, but Mulvaney has said nothing.

If Trump messes up the deal, it will be all his fault, as his own Treasury Secretary has cut a deal with Pelosi and the GOP-controlled Senate is ready to go along. He may not have figured out that triggering a shutdown did not help him last year. Triggering a debt default this year will be worse.

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

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Monday, July 22, 2019 10:43 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Sure... Fuck it. Spend that credit up like there's no tomorrow.

Because according to most Democrats in 2019, there is no tomorrow.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Monday, July 22, 2019 12:28 PM

THG


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Republicans want to protect the statues of Robert E. Lee. They describe this man as an American hero, but that requires reducing the sum of human virtue to a sense of decorum and the ability to convey gravitas in a gray uniform.

It also requires ignoring the immense suffering for which Robert E. Lee was personally responsible, both on and off the battlefield.

Lee's own views on slavery were explicated in an 1856 letter that it often misquoted to give the impression that Lee was some kind of an abolitionist. The argument Lee made was that slavery is bad for white people, good for black people, and most importantly, it is better than abolitionism; emancipation must wait for divine intervention.

Lee’s heavy hand on his Arlington plantation nearly led to a slave revolt, in part because the enslaved had been expected to be freed upon their previous master’s death, and Lee had engaged in a dubious legal interpretation of his will in order to keep them as his property, one that lasted until a Virginia court forced him to free them.

During his invasion of Pennsylvania, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia enslaved freemen and brought them back to the South as property. Pryor writes that “evidence links virtually every infantry and cavalry unit in Lee’s army” with the abduction of free black Americans, “with the activity under the supervision of senior officers.”

Soldiers under Lee’s command at the Battle of the Crater in 1864 massacred black Union soldiers who tried to surrender. Then, in a spectacle hatched by Lee’s senior corps commander A.P. Hill, the Confederates paraded the Union survivors through the streets of Petersburg to the slurs and jeers of the southern crowd. Lee never discouraged such behavior. As the historian Richard Slotkin wrote in No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, “his silence was permissive.”

The presence of black soldiers on the field of battle shattered every myth the South’s slave empire was built on: the happy docility of slaves, their intellectual inferiority, their cowardice, their inability to compete with whites. As Pryor writes, “fighting against brave and competent African Americans challenged every underlying tenet of southern society.” The Confederate response to this challenge was to visit every possible atrocity and cruelty upon black soldiers whenever possible, from enslavement to execution.

As the historian James McPherson recounts in Battle Cry of Freedom, in October of that same year, Lee proposed an exchange of prisoners with the Union general Ulysses S. Grant. “Grant agreed, on condition that blacks be exchanged ‘the same as white soldiers.’” Lee’s response was that “negroes belonging to our citizens are not considered subjects of exchange and were not included in my proposition.” Because slavery was the cause for which Lee fought, he could hardly be expected to easily concede, even at the cost of the freedom of his own men, that blacks could be treated as soldiers and not things. Grant refused the offer, telling Lee that “Government is bound to secure to all persons received into her armies the rights due to soldiers.” Despite its desperate need for soldiers, the Confederacy did not relent from this position until a few months before Lee’s surrender.

Privately, according to the correspondence collected by his own family, Lee counseled others to hire white labor instead of the freedmen, observing “that wherever you find the negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find a white man, you see everything around him improving.”

Publicly, Lee argued against the enfranchisement of blacks, and raged against Republican efforts to enforce racial equality on the South. Lee told Congress that blacks lacked the intellectual capacity of whites and “could not vote intelligently,” and that granting them suffrage would “excite unfriendly feelings between the two races.” Lee explained that “the negroes have neither the intelligence nor the other qualifications which are necessary to make them safe depositories of political power.” To the extent that Lee believed in reconciliation, it was between white people, and only on the precondition that black people would be denied political power and therefore the ability to shape their own fate.

More at www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-ge
neral-lee/529038
/




All these years posting here and kiki, while attacking you, shows she still doesn't know how to do it. Sad second, it's very sad.

T



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Monday, July 22, 2019 1:13 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:

Originally posted by THG:

All these years posting here and kiki, while attacking you, shows she still doesn't know how to do it. Sad second, it's very sad.

What is fascinating is who didn't get statues honoring them in the South and why modern Republicans do not admire these generals nor raise statues to them:

There are former Confederates who sought to redeem themselves — one thinks of James Longstreet, wrongly blamed by Lost Causers for Lee’s disastrous defeat at Gettysburg, who went from fighting the Union army to leading New Orleans’s integrated police force in battle against white supremacist paramilitaries. But the only statue of Longstreet in the American South is one in his hometown of Gainesville, Georgia. Lee was devoted to defending the principle of white supremacy; Longstreet was not. This, perhaps, is why Lee was placed atop the largest Confederate monument at Gettysburg in 1917, but the 6-foot-2-inch Longstreet had to wait until 1998 to receive a smaller-scale statue that makes him look like a hobbit riding a donkey hidden in the Pennsylvania woods of Gettysburg. It’s why Lee is remembered as a hero, and Longstreet is remembered as a disgrace.

The white supremacists who have protested on Lee’s behalf are not betraying his legacy. In fact, they have every reason to admire him. Lee, whose devotion to white supremacy outshone his loyalty to his country, is the embodiment of everything they stand for. Tribe and race over country is the core of white nationalism, and racists can embrace Lee in good conscience.

The question is why anyone else would.

http://gettysburg.stonesentinels.com/monuments-to-individuals/james-lo
ngstreet
/

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

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Monday, July 22, 2019 1:20 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


lol

Democrats have a long standing tradition of being the racist party in America.

2019 Democrats are no exception. They're more focused on race than they ever were.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Tuesday, July 23, 2019 6:14 AM

SECOND

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


Only 3 Liberal Ideas Are Popular Enough to become law
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/07/liberal-ideas-are-not-as-popula
r-as-you-think
/

A new PBS/Marist poll is out, and it shows that Americans are generally in love with liberal ideas. Hooray!

But don’t get too excited yet. Americans say they like lots of things when they’re asked out of the blue, but in the real world the other side gets to weigh in before opinions become solidified. Because of this, there’s a rule of thumb that a political proposition doesn’t truly have majority support until it polls at about two-thirds or better. This is a pretty good rule of thumb, and with that in mind here are the results of the poll:

Background checks for gun owners are popular enough to become law. An optional version of Medicare for All is a strong contender, and government control of prescription drug prices is a close call, but probably pretty popular.

And that’s it. There are a few more ideas on the list that might be good campaign fodder depending on how they’re presented, but they aren’t likely to be hugely popular selling points. As for the rest, just forget it.

Only 3 Liberal Ideas are popular enough to become law:

1) Background checks for gun purchases at gun shows or other private sales

2) Medicare for all that want it, that is allow all Americans to choose between a national health insurance program or their own private health insurance (This is NOT Medicare-for-all, which is unpopular because it ends insurance for 180 million people who already have insurance)

3) Government regulation of prescription drug prices

Then there are the Liberal Ideas that would be difficult to sell:

A) A pathway to citizenship for immigrants who are in the US illegally

B) Legalizing marijuana nationally

C) A Green New Deal to address climate change by investing government money in green jobs and energy efficient infrastructure

D) A Wealth Tax, that is a higher tax rate on income above one million dollars

Then there are the Liberal Ideas that are too far ahead of their time, ranked from most popular to least:

A ban on the sale of semi-automatic assault guns such as the AK-47 or the AR-15

A national minimum wage of 15 dollars an hour

Having the United States rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement

Free college tuition at public colleges or universities

A tax on emissions of carbon based fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas

Repealing Obamacare (** Not Really a Liberal Idea, but people were asked **)

Getting rid of the electoral college as part of the presidential election process

Medicare for all, that is a national health insurance program for all Americans that replaces private health insurance

Abolishing the death penalty

A national health insurance program available for immigrants who are in the US illegally

Decriminalizing illegal border crossings

Providing reparations for slavery

A Universal Basic Income of $1,000 per month for each American 18 or older

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

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Tuesday, July 23, 2019 11:23 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


SECOND

The FOUNDING FATHERS ON POPULISM
The Founding Fathers were intitally populist. BEFORE the American revolution, they were rabble-rousers and demagaogues. Think of it SECOND! The Founding Fathers were advocating TREASON ... a violent revolt ... like, with guns and cannons and ships of war, even ... in a civil war against the British monarchy. And they needed "the people" on their side!

PATRICK HENRY "Give me liberty or give me death!"
“Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell; and George the Third — ['Treason!' cried the Speaker] — may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it.”
THOMAS JEFFERSON "What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."
SAMUEL ADAMS founder of the Sons of Liberty, "It does not take a majority to prevail... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men."

The best decription of the Founding Fathers and their use of, and views about, populism can be found here: https://www.quora.com/Why-were-the-founding-fathers-so-concerned-about
-populism
Unfortunately, it won't let me copy the text, but the writer says that the FF knew that their revolt wouldn't work unless their army was supported by "the people" because their army needed to "live off the land" - given food and shelter by farmers and other colonists. However, some of the FF themselves were out to profit from their newly-gained (economic) freedom (no British taxes, no East India Company monopoly, no restrictions on westward expansion) and so once the colonies were freed from British rule, the wealthier among them quickly sought to establish their own rule. Hence, the quick turnaround on the topic of populism.

(SOME OF) THE FOUNDING FATHERS ON POLITICAL PARTIES (FACTIONS)

GEORGE WASHINGTON The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.
JOHN ADAMS "There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution."

Mostly, they were concerned about one party or another gaining such a strong majority that it could oppress the minority, so the construction of a "republic" plus the separation of powers made it less likely that any one party would gain the upper hand it all three branches of government.

ON GENERAL LEE, AND GENERAL SHERMAN
On balance the only differences that I can see between General Lee and General Sherman were that
1) General ("total war" "March to the Sea") Sherman was on the winning side and
2) General Sherman's actions led to the freeing up slaves, altho that was not his purpose for joining the north
3) General Sherman was just as brutal against the native Americans, using his "total war" tactics in the "pacification" of the Plains Indians by eliminating their source of food: the buffalo, and forcing them into reservations

Before the Civil War (1859), General Sherman lived in Louisianna. He was NOT an ardent opponent of slavery,apparently renting one out for a year in Moultrie and POSSIBLY owning one or two in Mobile and Charleston

Quote:

When Sherman was a young officer at Ft. Moultrie, he rented a slave. I want to say he rented him from a cousin who was living there. I can't recall which book I read this in, of course....
MORE AT https://civilwartalk.com/threads/shermans-slaves.13770/

but he was fiercely opposed to the secessionist movement because he thought that taking on the industrialized north was folly, and that it would be BAD FOR THE SOUTH. https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/william-t-sherman

General Sherman was individually polite to the blacks who attached themselves to his army of liberation. But the reality is, he thought black men were simply not up to fighting in the Army because they wouldn't stand and fight.
Quote:

Duing the Atlanta campaign of May-September 1864, General Sherman opposed black enlistment with word and deed. An avowed white supremacist [I can't find any support for this whatsover-SIGNY] and a reluctant liberator at best, Sherman made no effort to conceal his contempt for blacks or to disguise the racist dogma behind his opposition to black soldiers. [I think his objections to blacks in the army were based more on lack of education the effects of slavery, not racism per se-SIGNY] Such phrases as "niggers and vagabonds," "niggers and bought recruits," and "niggers and the refuse of the South" filled his personal letters. Anxious to employ blacks as laborers, Sherman was determined that the forces under his command would remain exclusively white. On June 3, 1864, he issued Special Field Order No. 16 forbidding recruiting officers to enlist blacks who were employed by the army in any capacity.[I have heard these words read from his letters myself, and his disgust with those who followed his army was pretty plain. I believe it was from Ken Burns' CIVIL WAR series- SIGNY]
https://m.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/black-t
roops-civil-war-georgia


BTW, General Grant's wife also owned a few slaves.

I heard a (black) artist speak about the destruction of statues, WHICH HE WAS AGAINST. What he said, and I agree, was that they are part of our history and should be preserved. But he ALSO said, and I agree with this as well, that in order to teach the impact of what these statues and other displays represent would be to create MORE statues and displays ... a statue of a slave auction, for example, a heart rending scene of a mother desperately clinging to her crying child who is being sold away from her, a man and woman being tearfully separated.

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

The ideologue's motto: Never let reality stand in the way of a good idea

America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .

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Tuesday, July 23, 2019 11:58 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Before I went chasing free money for reparations for slavery of people who are long dead, by people who are long dead, I'd be looking for reparations for Clinton's policies that see more black kids being raised my single mothers than ever in history because their fathers are locked up for 25 to life.

I'd also be looking into Kamala Harris' professional career before casting a vote her way.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Tuesday, July 23, 2019 12:49 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


I'd never vote for Harris because she caved to Obama's Federal "settlement" with the too big to fail banks, letting them off the hook with no prosecutions and a slap on the wrist. She's a toady in black skin, like Obama and Booker.

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

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .

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Wednesday, July 24, 2019 7:22 AM

SECOND

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


Health care was a key factor in Democrats’ victory in the 2018 midterm elections, and it should be a big plus in 2020 as well. The shared Democratic position — that every legal resident should have access to affordable care, regardless of income or health status — is popular.

But right now, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are having an ugly argument about health care. There are important differences between the two men’s policy proposals, and it’s fine to point that out. What’s not fine is the name-calling and false assertions. Both men are behaving badly. And for their country’s sake, they need to stop it.

You can think of the Center for American Progress’s Medicare Extra plan as simultaneously trying to answer Bernie’s leftist critique of Obamacare and Biden’s centrist critique of Bernie’s Medicare-for-all.

Like Medicare-for-all — and unlike Obamacare — it’s universal, it uses Medicare’s pricing power to hold down costs, and it rebuilds the entire health system around public insurance. But like Obamacare, it’s designed to minimize middle-class tax increases while stepping gingerly around people’s fear of change and mistrust of the government. And so, unlike Sen. Bernie Sanders’s Medicare-for-all bill, it holds on to much of the employer-based private insurance market and includes means-tested premiums and cost sharing for all but the poorest Americans.

According to an analysis the Center for American Progress commissioned from the independent health care consulting firm Avalere and provided exclusively to Vox, Medicare Extra would achieve universal coverage — adding 35 million people to the insurance rolls — while cutting national health expenditures by more than $300 billion annually.

More at www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/7/23/20699958/medicare-extra-cent
er-american-progress-single-payer-health-reform


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

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Saturday, July 27, 2019 5:50 AM

SECOND

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


What if the dominant discourse on poverty is just wrong? What if the problem isn’t that poor people have bad morals – that they’re lazy and impulsive and irresponsible and have no family values – or that they lack the skills and smarts to fit in with our shiny 21st-century economy? What if the problem is that poverty is profitable? These are the questions at the heart of Evicted, Matthew Desmond’s extraordinary ethnographic study of tenants in low-income housing in the deindustrialized middle-sized city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

You might not think that there is a lot of money to be extracted from a dilapidated trailer park or a black neighborhood of “sagging duplexes, fading murals, 24-hour daycares”. But you would be wrong. Tobin Charney makes $400,000 a year out of his 131 trailers, some of which are little better than hovels. Sherrena Tarver, a former schoolteacher who is one of the only black female landlords in the city, makes enough in rents on her numerous properties – some presentable, others squalid – to holiday in Jamaica and attend conferences on real estate.

More at www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/07/evicted-poverty-and-profit-in-th
e-american-city-matthew-desmond-review


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

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Saturday, July 27, 2019 8:15 PM

JAYNEZTOWN


Nancy not just age or dementia, sounds trashed!

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Sunday, July 28, 2019 8:03 AM

SECOND

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


“On the Clock: What Low-Wage Did to Me and How it Drives America Insane” is the first nonfiction book that ever gave me a nightmare.

www.houstonchronicle.com/entertainment/books/article/On-the-Clock-is-a
-horrifying-look-at-14188366.php


Something about it was triggering, and I woke up after reading it in a cold sweat convinced I had just been fired from a warehouse job for taking a break one minute over the allotted time while I was desperately trying to save money for a surgery. It was the classic “I have a test and didn’t study” dream for an adult in late-stage capitalism.

“A bunch of people have told me that, actually,” author Emily Guendelsberger says. “Especially the Convergys chapter. They told me it gave them anxiety dreams. Good. I did my job.”

Guendelsberger is a journalist who found herself out of work after her newspaper folded. She decided to spend a year investigating some of the biggest low-wage-employment options in America, including working for Amazon during the holiday season, fielding customer-service calls at Convergys for AT&T and the old standby, McDonalds.

It’s a book that could have come across as terribly elitist, as if Guendelsberger were an anthropologist studying the lower classes like Jane Goodall studied the chimps.

What makes “On the Clock” work is how careful she is to never fall into that mindset. In fact, she goes out of her way to highlight those who have contributed to the grueling plight of the wage worker and their lack of empathy or basic consideration toward workers. Titans such as Ray Kroc and Henry Ford get mentioned, but it’s a little-remembered man named Frederick Taylor who truly started the ball rolling in the 19th century. Taylor began using a stopwatch and promises of bonuses to convince ironworkers they were capable of working much harder, while also somehow paying them less to do it.

His techniques have been expanded into the modern workplace in frightening ways. Guendelsberger describes the omnipresent cataloguing of every movement from her Amazon scanner, how any deviation from the expected schedule is blared in forms of countdowns and loss of points. She describes the red glare of counters on her customer-service screens as badly integrated systems boot up and she is expected to sell rather than aid, and she asks people to listen at our next fast-food trip to the sheer number of alarms going off, goading the employees to move Move MOVE.

“It’s been interesting to see the disparity in the reactions between people who haven’t worked jobs like this in the last 10 years or so and people who have,” Guendelsberger says. “That is what I was trying to accomplish. To build a bridge. They weren’t aware. It’s people in power from good families with good jobs who tend to have the most power in politics. When you’re working jobs like this, oftentimes you can’t even take a Tuesday off to vote.”

More at www.houstonchronicle.com/entertainment/books/article/On-the-Clock-is-a
-horrifying-look-at-14188366.php


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

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Sunday, July 28, 2019 10:48 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
“On the Clock: What Low-Wage Did to Me and How it Drives America Insane” is the first nonfiction book that ever gave me a nightmare.

www.houstonchronicle.com/entertainment/books/article/On-the-Clock-is-a
-horrifying-look-at-14188366.php


Something about it was triggering, and I woke up after reading it in a cold sweat convinced I had just been fired from a warehouse job for taking a break one minute over the allotted time while I was desperately trying to save money for a surgery. It was the classic “I have a test and didn’t study” dream for an adult in late-stage capitalism.

“A bunch of people have told me that, actually,” author Emily Guendelsberger says. “Especially the Convergys chapter. They told me it gave them anxiety dreams. Good. I did my job.”

Guendelsberger is a journalist who found herself out of work after her newspaper folded. She decided to spend a year investigating some of the biggest low-wage-employment options in America, including working for Amazon during the holiday season, fielding customer-service calls at Convergys for AT&T and the old standby, McDonalds.

It’s a book that could have come across as terribly elitist, as if Guendelsberger were an anthropologist studying the lower classes like Jane Goodall studied the chimps.

What makes “On the Clock” work is how careful she is to never fall into that mindset. In fact, she goes out of her way to highlight those who have contributed to the grueling plight of the wage worker and their lack of empathy or basic consideration toward workers. Titans such as Ray Kroc and Henry Ford get mentioned, but it’s a little-remembered man named Frederick Taylor who truly started the ball rolling in the 19th century. Taylor began using a stopwatch and promises of bonuses to convince ironworkers they were capable of working much harder, while also somehow paying them less to do it.

His techniques have been expanded into the modern workplace in frightening ways. Guendelsberger describes the omnipresent cataloguing of every movement from her Amazon scanner, how any deviation from the expected schedule is blared in forms of countdowns and loss of points. She describes the red glare of counters on her customer-service screens as badly integrated systems boot up and she is expected to sell rather than aid, and she asks people to listen at our next fast-food trip to the sheer number of alarms going off, goading the employees to move Move MOVE.

“It’s been interesting to see the disparity in the reactions between people who haven’t worked jobs like this in the last 10 years or so and people who have,” Guendelsberger says. “That is what I was trying to accomplish. To build a bridge. They weren’t aware. It’s people in power from good families with good jobs who tend to have the most power in politics. When you’re working jobs like this, oftentimes you can’t even take a Tuesday off to vote.”

More at www.houstonchronicle.com/entertainment/books/article/On-the-Clock-is-a
-horrifying-look-at-14188366.php


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



Oh good. Second read a book.

Does that mean I can expect you to stop giving me shitty comments about my current work situation when you've lost an argument then?

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Sunday, July 28, 2019 12:15 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Oh good. Second read a book.

Does that mean I can expect you to stop giving me shitty comments about my current work situation when you've lost an argument then?

Do Right, Be Right. :)

No. My advice to you is to kill any boss who fucks you over, steal his money, and don't get caught. You'd be making the world a better place. The author Emily Guendelsberger was earning money and hoping she made the world better by writing about it, but she would have actual done far more good for the world by murdering her bosses. It's kind of like a slave uprising: if you don't kill the slave owner, the slaves will end back in slavery. See the American Civil War. That problem of slavery was solved with cold steel and hot lead fired at slave owners, not by writing books or talking about the hardships of slavery. Slave owners knew they had a good thing for themselves back then and bad bosses know they have a good thing for themselves now and neither bosses nor slave owners will change unless violently forced.

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

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Sunday, July 28, 2019 12:24 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Oh good. Second read a book.

Does that mean I can expect you to stop giving me shitty comments about my current work situation when you've lost an argument then?

Do Right, Be Right. :)

No. My advice to you is to kill any boss who fucks you over, steal his money, and don't get caught. You'd be making the world a better place. The author Emily Guendelsberger was earning money and hoping she made the world better by writing about it, but she would have actual done far more good for the world by murdering her bosses. It's kind of like a slave uprising: if you don't kill the slave owner, the slaves will end back in slavery. See the American Civil War. That problem of slavery was solved with cold steel and hot lead fired at slave owners, not by writing books or talking about the hardships of slavery. Slave owners knew they had a good thing for themselves back then and bad bosses know they have a good thing for themselves now and neither bosses nor slave owners will change unless violently forced.

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



Should all those Republicans you fired based off of their political views have risen up and killed you then?



I'm fine with where I'm at in life. I'm certainly not going to let somebody as mentally unhinged as you make me feel otherwise. It was a rhetorical question anyhow, since I already knew the answer. Thank you for posting more of your insanity for everybody to see though.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Monday, July 29, 2019 5:43 AM

SECOND

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


Fox News Anchor Confronts Trump Chief of Staff Mulvaney Over Ballooning Deficit, Pointing Out It Began Decreasing Under Obama

Although then-candidate Donald Trump promised in 2016 to eliminate the national deficit if he was elected president, the deficit has actually ballooned significantly since he took office and is projected to grow substantially moving forward. Fox News anchor Chris Wallace confronted acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney about this fact Sunday, pointing out that the deficit had begun decreasing under former President Barack Obama before Trump took over.

"After dealing with the Great Recession in his first term, the deficit under Obama dropped by an average of 11 percent a year in his second term," Wallace pointed out to Mulvaney — who also serves as Trump's director of the Office of Management and Budget — on Fox News Sunday.

"The deficit has increased by 15 percent a year in President Trump's first two years. Under President Trump, our national debt has increased by more than $2 trillion," Wallace continued. He pointed out that estimates project that the amount will "top $4 trillion," if a bipartisan budget supported by the president goes through.

Wallace asked how Mulvaney and the Trump administration could support such significant increases to the deficit, particularly when the president had promised to do precisely the opposite.

Trump's 2020 budget proposal contradicted a key 2016 campaign promise made to voters by the president. It aimed to spend $1.5 trillion less on Medicaid and $845 billion less on Medicare, despite Trump promising as a presidential candidate that he was "not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid" like "every other Republican." That White House proposal, despite Mulvaney's claims, would have also been the largest federal budget in U.S. history, calling for $4.75 trillion in spending.

More at www.newsweek.com/fox-news-anchor-confronts-trump-official-deficit-decr
easing-under-obama-1451474


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

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Tuesday, July 30, 2019 6:29 AM

SECOND

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


Trump's attacks on the Federal Reserve are about to get worse

President Trump has shown his hand. Over two years into his presidency, he has proven that he governs in the model of the 21st-century populists who have taken office across the world. As the 2020 election draws closer, he will intensify his attacks on the Federal Reserve and its chairman, Jerome Powell. And his pressure will become far more determined if economic growth shows signs of slowing.

We know this because Trump is following the playbook of other authoritarian populists: embracing nationalist rhetoric and policies, developing an us-vs.-them narrative ahead of the elections and undercutting the independence of the Central Bank.

Populist leaders have caused economic mayhem in the past, and they see political benefits in lower interest rates to stoke short-term economic growth, even if the long-term impact is harmful to the economy, spiking inflation and killing off a recovery.

American democracy has deep roots; it is stronger than in other countries where it has come under assault. But we can see many of the same patterns replicated by other nationalist populists with authoritarian tendencies. The model requires discrediting independent media, demonizing critics, politicizing the judiciary and assaulting the very notion of truth.

Attacking the independence of the central bank is a more arcane element of the strategy, but it's also vital. And precisely because it is less "sexy," it attracts less attention than, say, calling the media the "enemy of the people," or suggesting that opposition critics of color should "go back" to their countries.

More at www.cnn.com/2019/07/29/perspectives/fed-independence-powell-trump-auth
oritarian-populists/index.html
about
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi
botching the banking systems of their countries.

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

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Tuesday, July 30, 2019 7:05 AM

SECOND

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


One of the few qualified, well-respected and scandal-free members of President Donald Trump’s administration is on his way out. Dan Coats plans to resign next month as director of national intelligence, apparently to be replaced by a House member who has few obvious qualifications for the job – unless we count strong partisanship and loyalty to Trump.

Trump has been feuding on and off with U.S. intelligence agencies since his presidency began, and we’re told that Representative John Ratcliffe, his proposed replacement for Coats, is going to “clean house,” which presumably means rooting out those more interested in getting the intelligence right than in demonstrating fealty to the president.

Perhaps the Senate will insist on someone with more experience in these matters than Ratcliffe. But it’s a good reminder that Republican senators have flubbed this process from the get-go. They could’ve used their power of confirmation to insist that Trump run a professional White House and executive branch. They’ve largely chosen otherwise.

To be sure, Trump has had an unusually high number of failed nominations. Republican senators have been willing to block some of his poor choices; that’s why Herman Cain and Stephen Moore aren’t on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and why Judy Shelton, who still hasn’t been formally nominated, may not wind up there either. The Senate is able to block choices when it collectively chooses to, usually by convincing the president to withdraw a nominee before a hearing is held or even before he makes the nomination. But if anything, the process of finding, selecting, and vetting executive-branch nominees seems to be getting worse, considering that it took about seven months and two selections to find a secretary of defense and there’s still no nominee for secretary of homeland security more than three months after the position was vacated.

More at www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-07-29/john-ratcliffe-is-not-a-
qualified-replacement-for-dan-coats


Among other things, the Director of National Intelligence gives the president his daily intelligence briefing, and in those reports, as well as in his testimony to Congress, Dan Coats has concluded that Iran no longer had a nuclear weapons program, that North Korea was unlikely to get rid of its nuclear arsenal, that ISIS was still an active terrorist organization, and that top Russian officials interfered in the 2016 election — all of which contradicted Trump’s views. At times, Trump has even publicly sided with assurances from Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un over the findings of the intelligence community.

By contrast, Ratcliffe has been a hangdog defender of Trump during the various inquiries into Trump’s collusion with Russia. In last week’s hearing, he grilled Mueller on his legal theories and asserted that the real colluders were Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, claiming that the Steele dossier — which Ratcliffe incorrectly said had triggered the Mueller probe — was filled with misinformation planted by the Russians, with the intent of harming Trump’s bid for the White House.

Retired intelligence officers and several of their associates who still work in the agencies are concerned that the nation’s top spymaster might be someone who has such scant experience, entertains such wacky conspiracy theories, and seems so eager to please the president.

More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/07/dan-coats-dni-john-ratclif
fe.html


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

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Tuesday, July 30, 2019 1:28 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Another good story ruined by an eye witness...

https://www.macrotrends.net/2015/fed-funds-rate-historical-chart

Why don't you go ahead and read that chart to me, Second.

Tell me what the average fed rate was the entire time Obama was in office and tell me where it's at now.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Wednesday, July 31, 2019 7:46 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Another good story ruined by an eye witness...

https://www.macrotrends.net/2015/fed-funds-rate-historical-chart

Why don't you go ahead and read that chart to me, Second.

Tell me what the average fed rate was the entire time Obama was in office and tell me where it's at now.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

I know numerous examples of real Trump voters from the middle classes with the reverse Midas Touch -- everything they touch turns to lead. They fuck up their financial lives because they fundamentally don't understand what the hell is going on around them. Their investments of time and money are mindbogglingly stupid, but they think they are brilliant and their personal problems were caused by the Democrats.

But, anyway, there were perfectly good reasons why the interest rates were at zero during Obama's term and there were perfectly stupid reasons why Trump voters complained. I remember them whining about how Obama was about to set off hyper-inflation because of zero interest rates and trillions of dollars in "quantitative easing". I didn't believe them because I have seen these same Trump-voters making fools of themselves in their financial lives. Inflation stayed at 2% or less.

The Immorality of the Interest Rate Hawks
March 1, 2013 11:50 am March 1, 2013 11:50 am

Business Insider reports on a Bloomberg TV interview with hedge fund legend Stan Druckenmiller that helped crystallize in my mind what, exactly, I find so appalling about people who say that we must tighten monetary policy to avoid bubbles — even in the face of high unemployment and low inflation.

More at https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/01/the-immorality-of-the-int
erest-rate-hawks
/

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

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Wednesday, July 31, 2019 7:49 AM

SECOND

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


Republicans see Israel as a model for what they want America to be

If you listened earlier this month to Republican responses to Donald Trump’s call for Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley to “go back” to the “places from which they came,” you noticed something odd. Trump’s defenders kept mentioning Israel.

“They hate Israel,”replied Lindsey Graham when asked about Trump’s attacks on The Squad. Republican Congressman Lee Zeldin called Omar and Tlaib “anti-Israel.” Trump himself responded to the controversy by declaring that Omar “hates Israel.”

This is strange. As reprehensible as it is to demand that an American politician leave America for allegedly expressing insufficient patriotism, the demand is at least familiar.

“America, love it or leave it,” has been a conservative slogan since the 1960s. What’s virtually unprecedented is demanding that an American politician leave America because they’ve expressed insufficient devotion to a foreign country. Can anyone imagine Republicans defending Trump’s calls for expelling Omar and company by accusing them of hating Canada, India or Japan?

Of course not. The reason is that Republicans no longer talk about Israel like it’s a foreign country. They conflate love of Israel with love of America because they see Israel as a model for what they want America to be: An ethnic democracy.

Israel is a Jewish state. Trump and many of his allies want America to be a white, Judeo-Christian state. Israel, despite its free elections and parliamentary institutions, structurally privileges one ethnic and religious group over others. That’s what many Republicans want here.

In the press, commentators often overlook the right’s affinity for ethnic democracy in favor of other explanations for GOP support of Israel. But those other explanations are at best incomplete. One common argument is that Republicans love Israel because of its commitment to democracy and human rights.

But in the Trump era, democracy and human rights are not Republican foreign policy priorities. It’s not just Trump who admires authoritarian leaders. Rank and file Republicans do too.

More at https://forward.com/opinion/428488/the-real-reason-so-many-republicans
-love-israel-their-own-white-supremacy
/

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

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Wednesday, July 31, 2019 11:30 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:

But, anyway, there were perfectly good reasons why the interest rates were at zero during Obama's term and there were perfectly stupid reasons why Trump voters complained. I remember them whining about how Obama was about to set off hyper-inflation because of zero interest rates and trillions of dollars in "quantitative easing". I didn't believe them because I have seen these same Trump-voters making fools of themselves in their financial lives. Inflation stayed at 2% or less.



So, in other words, when my guy does it it's cool. When your guy does it it's the end of the world as we know it.

Gotcha.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Wednesday, July 31, 2019 11:40 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Republicans see Israel as a model for what they want America to be

If you listened earlier this month to Republican responses to Donald Trump’s call for Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley to “go back” to the “places from which they came,” you noticed something odd. Trump’s defenders kept mentioning Israel.

“They hate Israel,”replied Lindsey Graham when asked about Trump’s attacks on The Squad. Republican Congressman Lee Zeldin called Omar and Tlaib “anti-Israel.” Trump himself responded to the controversy by declaring that Omar “hates Israel.”

This is strange. As reprehensible as it is to demand that an American politician leave America for allegedly expressing insufficient patriotism, the demand is at least familiar.

“America, love it or leave it,” has been a conservative slogan since the 1960s. What’s virtually unprecedented is demanding that an American politician leave America because they’ve expressed insufficient devotion to a foreign country. Can anyone imagine Republicans defending Trump’s calls for expelling Omar and company by accusing them of hating Canada, India or Japan?

Of course not. The reason is that Republicans no longer talk about Israel like it’s a foreign country. They conflate love of Israel with love of America because they see Israel as a model for what they want America to be: An ethnic democracy.

Israel is a Jewish state. Trump and many of his allies want America to be a white, Judeo-Christian state. Israel, despite its free elections and parliamentary institutions, structurally privileges one ethnic and religious group over others. That’s what many Republicans want here.

In the press, commentators often overlook the right’s affinity for ethnic democracy in favor of other explanations for GOP support of Israel. But those other explanations are at best incomplete. One common argument is that Republicans love Israel because of its commitment to democracy and human rights.

But in the Trump era, democracy and human rights are not Republican foreign policy priorities. It’s not just Trump who admires authoritarian leaders. Rank and file Republicans do too.

More at https://forward.com/opinion/428488/the-real-reason-so-many-republicans
-love-israel-their-own-white-supremacy
/

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



I can only assume that Forward allows Peter Beinart to post his crap in the OPINION section so they can't be accused by anybody of not having any representation of the self-hating Jewish demographic at their publication.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Wednesday, July 31, 2019 11:57 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

So, in other words, when my guy does it it's cool. When your guy does it it's the end of the world as we know it.

Gotcha.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

You are out of your mind, pissant. For one, Obama let the Federal Reserve Board make the decisions and they made 'em professionally and correctly for conditions where unemployment is high and the economy is in deep trouble. Low interests rates, in other words. But when unemployment is low and the economy is not in trouble, the Federal Reserve does not lower interest rates. But Trump is nominating people who, like you, are out of their minds and do the opposite of what is correct: Stephen Moore and Herman Cain. Both of them had their names withdrawn because the Senate won't confirm those nutjobs. So Trump nominates another complete wacko, Judy Shelton. Trump wants her on the Federal Reserve board because she knows nothing, gets things backwards, and can't correct herself, just like 6ixStringJack.

"Trump's bizarre Federal Reserve nomination"
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/453371-trumps-bizarre-federal-rese
rve-nomination


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

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Wednesday, July 31, 2019 12:09 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


lol

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Wednesday, July 31, 2019 1:10 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
lol

Do Right, Be Right. :)

Clearly, you must be laughing at Trump:

Normally a person would be in favor of either an easy monetary policy to stimulate the economy or a hard monetary policy to exert discipline on the government. Either way, one would not expect her to hold both views at the same time. Yet Ms. Shelton does exactly that.

She does so by fully supporting Trump’s repeated calls for lower U.S. interest rates while at the same time advocating the urgency of returning soon to the gold standard. She promotes the gold standard as a means to discipline budget policy and to prevent financial market bubbles.

A generous interpretation of Shelton’s simultaneously holding contradictory monetary policy views is not that she is intellectually confused but rather that, in order to win the president’s nomination, she is simply pandering to Trump’s desire for low interest rates in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.

If that is the case, the Senate should not go along with her nomination on the grounds that if confirmed she would be more inclined to please the president than to make the difficult interest rate decisions that would be in the nation’s long-term interest.

The less generous interpretation is that Shelton is confused and does not see the contradiction between advocating low interest rates while also supporting the gold standard. If that is indeed the case, the Senate should block her confirmation on the grounds that she lacks the intellectual rigor to properly fulfill her role as a Fed governor.

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/453371-trumps-bizarre-federal-rese
rve-nomination


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

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Thursday, August 1, 2019 7:36 AM

SECOND

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


Buttigieg is right about why Democrats keep failing to pass their big plans. He said:

This is the conversation that we have been having for the last 20 years. Of course we need to get money out of politics, but when I propose the actual structural democratic reforms that might make a difference — end the Electoral College, amend the Constitution if necessary to clear up Citizens United, have DC actually be a state, and depoliticize the Supreme Court with structural reform — people look at me funny, as if this country was incapable of structural reform.

This is a country that once changed its Constitution so you couldn’t drink and changed it back because we changed our minds, and you’re telling me we can’t reform our democracy in our time. We have to or we will be having the same argument 20 years from now.

www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/7/30/20748078/pete-buttigieg-demo
cratic-debate-cnn


Policy isn’t Democrats’ problem. They’ve got plenty of plans. Some of them are even popular. What they don’t have is a way in which they can pass those plans into laws. Buttigieg, to his credit, has a clear theory on how to fix this.

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

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Thursday, August 1, 2019 8:10 AM

CAPTAINCRUNCH

... stay crunchy...


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Buttigieg is right about why Democrats keep failing to pass their big plans. He said:

This is the conversation that we have been having for the last 20 years. Of course we need to get money out of politics, but when I propose the actual structural democratic reforms that might make a difference — end the Electoral College, amend the Constitution if necessary to clear up Citizens United, have DC actually be a state, and depoliticize the Supreme Court with structural reform — people look at me funny, as if this country was incapable of structural reform.



He is the clearest and least political thinker running. He thinks of Problems as things to be solved and defeated, and not "who will gain?" Trump is the exact opposite. If Trump wins we'll have 20 more years of reality tv presidents and 20 years of media over coverage. Buttigieg is the other direction.

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Thursday, August 1, 2019 8:26 AM

SECOND

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


The Democratic Debates came to the Motor City this week, and Detroit's finest hit the studio to celebrate with an album of political mega hits.



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

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