A thread for Democrats Only by THGRRI

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Sunday, December 13, 2020 11:48 AM

Good post reaver. It's good because it's 100% true.

T

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Monday, December 14, 2020 5:56 AM

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:
81,200,000 people want to know.

Trump's Historically Bad Economic Record

"Trump's economic record ranks near or at the bottom compared with other presidents," concludes Moody's chief economist Mark Zandi, who compared the economic results of all presidents from the last 70 years. "The economy under his watch has performed very poorly."

To be sure, the deadliest public health pandemic in a century has devastated economic activity during this last year of the President's term. But responding to unexpected catastrophe -- from hurricanes to terrorist attacks to civil unrest to financial crises -- represents a big part of the job.

Alone among the presidents since World War Two, Trump will exit the White House with fewer Americans employed than when he started. He will have overseen punier growth in economic output than any of those presidents.

His throwback "America First" agenda has failed to restore the old economic engine that powered an earlier era's prosperity. On Trump's watch, industrial production has fallen. The Federal Reserve says the manufacturing sector fell into recession in 2019 even before the coronavirus pandemic hit.

Holiday-season lines at food banks dramatize this. More abstract measures, such as the US trade deficit and ratio of government debt to the size of the economy, have worsened during Trump's term.

Trump's pre-pandemic record

Trump's record offered little legitimate grounds for boasting before the pandemic.

Growth accelerated in early 2018 following Trump's sole major legislative achievement, the tax cuts he and Congressional Republicans enacted. But that didn't last long with the economy already near full employment, and the budget deficit swelled. A temporary surge in investment resulted mainly from higher energy prices.

"It provided no long-term benefit," Zandi says.

The counter-productive tariff wars Trump initiated quickly offset any short-term benefit from the tax-cuts and the administration's deregulation push. That's why Trump, to avoid further damaging the economy in his re-election year, called a truce with China in January without obtaining the structural reforms he had demanded from Beijing.

Financial markets vs. the real world

Trump can accurately point to above-average financial market gains. Through November the S&P 500 had risen by an average of 14.34% per year during his term, slightly more than the 12.43% under Obama.

But those gains have largely been driven by rock-bottom interest rates, which drive investors into stocks in search of higher returns. And the benefits of those gains accrue largely to the most affluent Americans who own most of the stocks.

The President can also cite a higher-than-average 3.32% annual gain in real per capita disposable income. But that average conceals the extent of those gains that flowed to the affluent, who benefited disproportionately from his tax cuts. As a candidate in 2016, Trump championed the beleaguered blue-collar workers he called "the forgotten Americans." His policies have not closed the gap between them and economic elites.

Through the third quarter of 2020, Zandi says, the least wealthy 50% of Americans own just 1.9% of the nation's net worth, while the top 1% own 30.5%. The surging pandemic will make that disparity worse before Trump leaves office.

www.cnn.com/2020/12/13/politics/trump-economy-record/index.html

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

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Monday, December 14, 2020 12:36 PM

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Monday, December 14, 2020 1:22 PM

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Monday, December 14, 2020 9:56 PM

New report: A record breaking number of journalists arrested in the U.S. this year
https://freedom.press/news/2020-report-journalists-arrested-us/

I can't wait to see Trump's Nazis go to prison en masse. I would bring popcorn if there were executions.

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Tuesday, December 15, 2020 2:25 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.

I hope you hold your breath waiting for Biden* to mothball the data 'storage' facility in Utah, and craft privacy legislation that will make government spying and mass data collection on us citizens illegal.

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

And when Biden* fails to keep his promises - or even promote them - I'll be happy to laugh at his skinny saggy ass parading all over town in his New Clothes™.

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Tuesday, December 15, 2020 8:31 AM

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 1KIKI:

I hope you hold your breath waiting for Biden* to mothball the data 'storage' facility in Utah, and craft privacy legislation that will make government spying and mass data collection on us citizens illegal.

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

And when Biden* fails to keep his promises - or even promote them - I'll be happy to laugh at his skinny saggy ass parading all over town in his New Clothes™.

Why are the Trump defenders here at fff.net such strange people? A psychologist gives the answer by looking at Trump and his particular mental problem of suing everyone:

What the Science of Addiction Tells Us About Trump (and 1kiki, Signym, 6ix)

It turns out that your brain on grievances looks a lot like your brain on drugs. And that’s a problem not just for the outgoing president, but for the rest of us.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/12/12/trump-grievance-addi
ction-444570

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

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Tuesday, December 15, 2020 8:36 AM

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

A nice and concise explanation of what is attracting a certain kind of person to voting for Republicans. Unfortunately, there is nothing Democrats can do, there is no legislative program that I can imagine, that will fix what is wrong in the heads of Republicans:

When Did Republicans Start Hating Facts? A straight line runs from Reagan to the Trump dead-enders.

Republicans spent most of 2020 rejecting science in the face of a runaway pandemic; now they’re rejecting democracy in the face of a clear election loss. What do these rejections have in common? In each case, one of America’s two major parties simply refused to accept facts it didn’t like.

I’m not sure it’s right to say Republicans “believe” that, say, wearing face masks is useless or that there was widespread voter fraud. Framing the issue as one of belief suggests that some kind of evidence might change party loyalists’ minds. In reality, what Republicans say they believe flows from what they want to do, whether it’s ignore a deadly disease or stay in power despite the voters’ verdict.

In other words, the point isn’t that the G.O.P. believes untrue things. It is, rather, that the party has become hostile to the very idea that there’s an objective reality that might conflict with its political goals.

Notice, by the way, that I’m not including qualifiers, like saying “some” Republicans. We’re talking about most of the party here. The Texas lawsuit calling on the Supreme Court to overturn the election was both absurd and deeply un-American, but more than 60 percent of Republicans in the House signed a brief supporting it, and only a handful of elected Republicans denounced the suit.

At this point, you aren’t considered a proper Republican unless you hate facts.

But when and how did the G.O.P. get that way? If you think it started with Donald Trump and will end when he leaves the scene (if he ever does), you’re naïve. Republicans have been heading in this direction for decades. I’m not sure whether we can pinpoint the moment when the party began its descent into malignant madness, but the trajectory that led to this moment probably became irreversible under Ronald Reagan.

Republicans have, of course, turned Reagan into an icon, portraying him as the savior of a desperate, declining nation. Mostly, however, this is just propaganda. You’d never know from the legend that economic growth under Reagan was only slightly faster than it had been under Jimmy Carter, and slower than it would be under Bill Clinton. And rapidly rising income inequality meant that a disproportionate share of the benefits from economic growth went to a small elite, with only a bit trickling down to most of the population. Poverty, measured properly, was higher in 1989 than it had been a decade earlier.

Anyway, gross domestic product isn’t the same thing as well-being. Other measures suggest that we were already veering off course. For example, in 1980 life expectancy in America was similar to that in other wealthy nations; but the Reagan years mark the beginning of the great mortality divergence of the United States from the rest of the advanced world. Today, Americans can, on average, expect to live almost four fewer years than their counterparts in comparable countries.

The main point, however, is that under Reagan, irrationality and hatred for facts began to take over the G.O.P. There has always been a conspiracy-theorizing, science-hating, anti-democratic faction in America. Before Reagan, however, mainstream conservatives and the Republican establishment refused to make alliance with that faction, keeping it on the political fringe. Reagan, by contrast, brought the crazies inside the tent.

Many people are, I think, aware that Reagan embraced a crank economic doctrine — belief in the magical power of tax cuts. I’m not sure how many remember that the Reagan administration was also remarkably hostile to science.

Reagan’s ability to act on this hostility was limited by Democratic control of the House and the fact that the Senate still contained a number of genuinely moderate Republicans. Still, Reagan and his officials spent years denying the threat from acid rain while insisting that evolution was just a theory and promoting the teaching of creationism in schools.

This rejection of science partly reflected deference to special interests that didn’t want science-based regulation. Even more important, however, was the influence of the religious right, which first became a major political force under Reagan, has become ever more central to the Republican coalition and is now a major driver of the party’s rejection of facts — and democracy.

For rejecting facts comes naturally to people who insist that they’re acting on behalf of God. So does refusing to accept election results that don’t go their way. After all, if liberals are servants of Satan trying to destroy America’s soul, they shouldn’t be allowed to exercise power even if they should happen to win more votes.

Sure enough, a few days ago the televangelist Pat Robertson — who first became politically influential under Reagan — pronounced the Texas lawsuit a “miracle,” an intervention by God that would keep Trump in office.

The point is that the G.O.P. rejection of facts that has been so conspicuous this year wasn’t an aberration. What we’re seeing is the culmination of a degradation that began a long time ago and is almost surely irreversible.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/opinion/republicans-reagan-disinfor
mation.html

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

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Tuesday, December 15, 2020 1:34 PM

Thom Hartmann on Twitter--The most corrupt Attorney General in American history,
who helped Bush and Reagan cover up Iran Contra and helped Trump
cover up Russia and other crimes, wasn’t corrupt enough for Donald Trump. Amazing.
https://twitter.com/Thom_Hartmann/status/1338617197770358784?ref_src=t
wsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1338617197770358784%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.redditmedia.com%2Fmediaembed%2Fkdmoqp%3Fresponsive%3Dtrueis_nightmode%3Dfalse

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Tuesday, December 15, 2020 2:40 PM

Dr. Jill Biden Had the Perfect Response After Conservative Columnist Urged Her to Drop 'Dr.' From Her Name
https://secondnexus.com/jill-biden-wsj-article-tweet?utm_source=newsle
tter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=GTAK&utm_source=George+Takei+Newsletters&utm_campaign=957acee7da-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_06_29_05_08_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2e6b4c049b-957acee7da-304174341

Together, we will build a world where the accomplishments of our daughters will be celebrated,
rather than diminished.

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Tuesday, December 15, 2020 3:49 PM

1KIKI

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
I hope you hold your breath waiting for Biden* to mothball the data 'storage' facility in Utah, and craft privacy legislation that will make government spying and mass data collection on us citizens illegal.

Quote:
Why are the Trump defenders here at fff.net such strange people?

I post about Biden* the exact same way I've been posting about Hillary* and about democrats* in general since 2015. I point out that they've been handing out jobs overseas, and quietly hiding in the corner when it comes to standing up for the little guy. And all YOU have in your lack-of-critical-thinking-reply is -

BUT TRUMP!!

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

And when Biden* fails to keep his promises - or even promote them - I'll be happy to laugh at his skinny saggy ass parading all over town in his New Clothes™.

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Wednesday, December 16, 2020 8:35 AM

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 1KIKI:

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
I hope you hold your breath waiting for Biden* to mothball the data 'storage' facility in Utah, and craft privacy legislation that will make government spying and mass data collection on us citizens illegal.

Quote:
Why are the Trump defenders here at fff.net such strange people?
I post about Biden* the exact same way I've been posting about Hillary* and about democrats* in general since 2015. I point out that they've been handing out jobs overseas, and quietly hiding in the corner when it comes to standing up for the little guy. And all YOU have in your lack-of-critical-thinking-reply is -

BUT TRUMP!!

How many factories moved from the USA to China before Trump then back to the USA under Trump? None. Americans buy products with labels saying NOT MADE IN AMERICA. I think you are confused about who does not care about the "little guy". American consumers don't care. That is why they seek out the NOT MADE IN AMERICA label, because it is cheaper when not made by a "little guy" who is an American citizen. That's why consumers do not support Unions, because non-unionized labor is cheaper. That's why consumers hire illegal aliens to remodel houses and mow lawns, because illegal is cheaper than hiring a "little guy" who is an American citizen. That's why consumers do not support raising the minimum wage to a living wage for a "little guy", because it is cheaper to pay $7.25/hour than $20/hour.

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

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Wednesday, December 16, 2020 8:37 AM

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 1KIKI:

BUT TRUMP!!

Trump was a corrosive. What he mainly corroded was social trust — the most important element in any successful society.

I was reminded of this again reading an extraordinary essay in The Washington Post by former Secretary of State George Shultz, who turned 100 on Sunday. His central lesson after a life that spanned combat service in World War II, labor disputes in steel plants, the dismantling of segregation and making peace with the Soviets: “Trust is the coin of the realm.”

“When trust was in the room, whatever room that was — the family room, the schoolroom, the locker room, the office room, the government room or the military room — good things happened,” Shultz wrote. “When trust was not in the room, good things did not happen. Everything else is details.”

What Shultz attests from personal experience is extensively documented in scholarly literature, too. In high-trust societies — think of Canada or Sweden — people tend to flourish. In low-trust societies — Lebanon or Brazil — they generally don’t.

Trump’s presidency is hardly the sole cause of America’s declining trust in our institutions, which has been going on for a long time. In some ways, his was the culmination of that decline.

But it’s hard to think of any person in my lifetime who so perfectly epitomizes the politics of distrust, or one who so aggressively promotes it. Trump has taught his opponents not to believe a word he says, his followers not to believe a word anyone else says, and much of the rest of the country to believe nobody and nothing at all.

He has detonated a bomb under the epistemological foundations of a civilization that is increasingly unable to distinguish between facts and falsehoods, evidence and fantasy. He has instructed tens of millions of people to accept the commandment, That which you can get away with, is true.

Apologists for this president might rejoin that there are also examples of this form of politics on the other side of the aisle, notably in the person of Bill Clinton. That’s true. But it only causes one to wonder why so many of the same conservatives who vehemently objected to Clinton on moral grounds vehemently support Trump on the absence of moral grounds.

It may take Americans decades to figure out just what kind of damage Trump did in these last four years, and how to go about repairing it. The good news: no global thermonuclear war. The bad: a different kind of radioactivity that first destroys our trust in institutions, then in others, and finally in ourselves. What the half-life is for that kind of isotope remains unmeasured.

https://www.statesman.com/story/opinion/2020/12/16/trump-corroded-soci
al-trust-most-important-element-any-successful-society/3902469001/

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

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Wednesday, December 16, 2020 8:58 AM

NYC Medic DOXXED And HARASSED For Making Onlyfans (They Called Her WORK)

Disgusting.

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Wednesday, December 16, 2020 9:05 AM

Yep, here we go again. Comrades’ kiki and sig are back into complaint mode. They’re beginning to break out and dust off all the old grievances they put away while Trump was president.

I’m fucking cracking up while writing this post because kiki in an above post, is feverishly prosecuting some of her Obama complaints again. Bidens not even in the White House, yet to her he’s already doing a catastrophic job.

She’s still Trumps shill. Still a sidewalk hawker trying to sell her goods and wares to unsuspecting dopes. Kiki sig, that ship sunk when you put away those complaints and refused to prosecute your case, any case, against Trump.

Shoo comrades, your presence is like being in a room with people you dislike.

T

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Wednesday, December 16, 2020 9:17 AM

Trumps attempting a coup, an illegal seizure of power, and it's apparently ok with sig kiki jack rappy jsf whozit jonzssong and so on. Not a word from any of them about what where're seeing unfold in plain sight; in real time. Witnessing their silence is like watching the three monkeys. Hear see and speak no evil when it comes to Trump.

Yet they are complaining about Biden. Can you say fraud. I can. I can say fraud.

T

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Wednesday, December 16, 2020 2:28 PM

T

LOYALTY OAF

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Wednesday, December 16, 2020 4:28 PM

1KIKI

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

You just can't quit Trump, can you THUGGER?

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

And when Biden* fails to keep his promises - or even promote them - I'll be happy to laugh at his skinny saggy ass parading all over town in his New Clothes™.

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Thursday, December 17, 2020 6:32 AM

Trump has to pay his bill.

tick tock

T

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Thursday, December 17, 2020 6:44 AM

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

A significant movement of American Christians—encouraged by the president himself—is now directly threatening the rule of law, the Constitution, and the peace and unity of the American republic.

It’s clear now that when many of those people declared Trump to be “God’s anointed” they did not mean that his presidency was “instituted by God” in the same manner as other governing authorities, as described in Romans 13. (By conventional Christian reasoning, Joe Biden’s upcoming presidency is also instituted by God.)

No, they believe that Trump had a special purpose and a special calling, and that this election defeat is nothing less than a manifestation of a Satanic effort to disrupt God’s plan for this nation. They were not “holding their nose” to support him. They were deeply, spiritually, and personally invested in his political success.

More about The Dangerous Idolatry of Christian Trumpism at https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/the-dangerous-idolatry-of-christ
ian

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

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Thursday, December 17, 2020 6:59 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Trumps attempting a coup, an illegal seizure of power, and it's apparently ok with sig kiki jack rappy jsf whozit jonzssong and so on. Not a word from any of them about what where're seeing unfold in plain sight; in real time. Witnessing their silence is like watching the three monkeys. Hear see and speak no evil when it comes to Trump.

Yet they are complaining about Biden. Can you say fraud. I can. I can say fraud.

T

Trump was a victim of a non-violent coup.

Ted remains silent to this day about this fact.

Ted is Anti-American.

Ted is too retarded to fix his fucking signature.

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

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Thursday, December 17, 2020 10:26 AM

Send Trump some more money, sucker! He's broke! Defend your god!

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Thursday, December 17, 2020 10:27 AM

‘We want them infected’: Trump appointee demanded ‘herd immunity’ strategy, emails reveal
Then-HHS science adviser Paul Alexander called for millions of Americans to be infected as means of fighting Covid-19.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/16/trump-appointee-demanded-herd
-immunity-strategy-446408

Trump and his minions purposely wanted to infect as many people as possible with COVID.

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Thursday, December 17, 2020 12:37 PM

A new report highlights 2021’s most pressing humanitarian crises and perhaps no surprise to many, victims of US wars and regime change efforts top the list.

https://www.mintpressnews.com/report-2021-humanitarian-crisis-victims-
us-war-regime-change/273666/

Despite the devastation, humanitarian support to the country has actually been decreasing, thanks to the work of the Trump administration. Throughout 2020, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been successfully pressuring the United Nations and its donor nations to scale back aid to Yemen in an attempt to starve the Houthi Rebels into submission.

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Thursday, December 17, 2020 12:39 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
A new report highlights 2021’s most pressing humanitarian crises and perhaps no surprise to many, victims of US wars and regime change efforts top the list.

https://www.mintpressnews.com/report-2021-humanitarian-crisis-victims-
us-war-regime-change/273666/

So, of course, you voted for a guy that has always wanted MOAR WAR!

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

#WEARAMASK

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Thursday, December 17, 2020 12:55 PM

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:

So, of course, you voted for a guy that has always wanted MOAR WAR!

Biden is old enough to remember the Vietnam fiasco and cynical enough to know that the Pentagon is run by liars and incompetents who couldn't perform a real job: On Afghanistan, the then-vice-president has been proved right. Mr Biden was an ardent advocate for drawing down American troops and focusing instead on a counter-terrorism strategy that would abandon the kind of nation-building that the Afghanistan Papers indict.

“He fought it tooth and nail,” a former senior military official who allied with Mr Gates in the debate grudgingly acknowledged to me recently, recounting Mr Biden’s opposition to a “surge” of increased forces in southern Afghanistan during a war strategy review early in the Obama administration.

“Biden really loudly opposed, visibly opposed in the review, the surge. . . . I’m certainly willing to give him that he got Afghanistan right.”

This is not to say that Mr Biden’s record as a foreign policy player in the Obama years is unblemished. Far from it. Mr Obama put him in charge of what was a largely politically-motivated withdrawal strategy in Iraq that ended up costing the US most of its Bush-era gains in the country. And a fuller accounting of his role in the disastrous policy decisions that led to chaos in both Libya and Syria is warranted.

But on Afghanistan, Mr Biden pushed long and hard for a lighter footprint and far more reliance on special operations forces, advanced surveillance and targeting technologies — particularly increasingly sophisticated drones — to root out terrorist networks that continued to threaten US interests.

“In the Afghanistan policy review process, Biden served as a contrarian in a room full of people who were more aligned with military leaders and their ‘go-big’ proposals,” a former Biden aide recalled to me. “Biden was very sceptical of their promises and the idea that the Taliban could be defeated militarily.”

In the end, Mr Obama sided with Mr Gates and the military commanders over Mr Biden, agreeing to send 30,000 additional troops to General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan — though that was fewer than Gen McChrystal had sought, and they were deployed for a shorter time than he wanted. Analysts continue to disagree on the effectiveness of that deployment, but the fact remains that nearly 20 years after the war started, Washington is now negotiating a peace deal with the same Taliban movement it was then fighting to destroy.
https://www.ft.com/content/0c3a069c-2245-11ea-b8a1-584213ee7b2b

The war in Afghanistan shattered Joe Biden’s faith in American military power
‘I am not sending my boy back there to risk his life on behalf of women’s rights!’ the vice president shouted.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/18/biden-afghanistan-m
ilitary-power/
Vice President Joe Biden decided to make one more last-minute push to convince President Obama that the advice his generals were giving him was disastrously wrong. It was Thanksgiving weekend 2009, and Obama was on the verge of committing 30,000 new troops to Afghanistan.
Biden was in Nantucket, Mass., with his family for the holiday. He pulled out a legal pad and began writing a memo for Obama in longhand that he hoped might limit the damage from the president’s decision.
The memo summarized the arguments he had been airing for months to the growing irritation of the military’s top brass. The Pentagon’s strategy was too broad, too expensive, and too focused on the Taliban insurgency, instead of al-Qaeda.
The vice president fed the handwritten pages into a classified fax machine — he wanted Obama to know these were his unfiltered thoughts — and sent them to the president.
There was little in Biden’s past that could have predicted that he would stake out such a hard position in his first months as vice president.

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

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Thursday, December 17, 2020 1:22 PM

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Thursday, December 17, 2020 1:22 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
A significant movement of American Christians—encouraged by the president himself—is now directly threatening the rule of law, the Constitution, and the peace and unity of the American republic.

It’s clear now that when many of those people declared Trump to be “God’s anointed” they did not mean that his presidency was “instituted by God” in the same manner as other governing authorities, as described in Romans 13. (By conventional Christian reasoning, Joe Biden’s upcoming presidency is also instituted by God.)

No, they believe that Trump had a special purpose and a special calling, and that this election defeat is nothing less than a manifestation of a Satanic effort to disrupt God’s plan for this nation. They were not “holding their nose” to support him. They were deeply, spiritually, and personally invested in his political success.

More about The Dangerous Idolatry of Christian Trumpism at https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/the-dangerous-idolatry-of-christ
ian

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

They are the radical Christians. Another term that accurately describes them would be wacko's.

T

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Thursday, December 17, 2020 2:01 PM

José Andrés responds to Ann Coulter calling him 'some nut foreigner'

Celebrity chef José Andrés responded to criticism directed toward him by conservative pundit Ann Coulter, who called him "some nut foreigner" after he advocated for stronger hunger relief programs in the U.S.

"I'm so proud you called me a Nut," Andrés replied to Coulter. "Nuts are fruits where the ovary walls become hard so I can be Protector of my people and everyone else. Nuts like me? energy-dense,nutrient-rich, what we need to feed USA. Nuts? You right girl, 'foreigners' like almonds+pistachios!Happy holidays!"

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/jos%C3%A9-andr%C3%A9s-responds
-to-ann-coulter-calling-him-some-nut-foreigner/ar-BB1c0Vdz?ocid=msedgntp

T

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Friday, December 18, 2020 6:50 AM

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Friday, December 18, 2020 2:07 PM

'An evil family': Sacklers condemned as they refuse to apologize for role in opioid crisis
House committee is investigating Purdue Pharma and billionaire family’s role in epidemic that has killed almost 500,000 Americans
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/17/sackler-family-purdue-
pharma-congressional-hearing-apology

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Friday, December 18, 2020 2:08 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
José Andrés responds to Ann Coulter calling him 'some nut foreigner'

Celebrity chef José Andrés responded to criticism directed toward him by conservative pundit Ann Coulter, who called him "some nut foreigner" after he advocated for stronger hunger relief programs in the U.S.

"I'm so proud you called me a Nut," Andrés replied to Coulter. "Nuts are fruits where the ovary walls become hard so I can be Protector of my people and everyone else. Nuts like me? energy-dense,nutrient-rich, what we need to feed USA. Nuts? You right girl, 'foreigners' like almonds+pistachios!Happy holidays!"

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/jos%C3%A9-andr%C3%A9s-responds
-to-ann-coulter-calling-him-some-nut-foreigner/ar-BB1c0Vdz?ocid=msedgntp

T

The irony of her calling anyone a nut.

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Friday, December 18, 2020 2:12 PM

Agreed...

T

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Saturday, December 19, 2020 2:29 AM

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Saturday, December 19, 2020 7:35 AM

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 reaverfan:

Sign that reads: "The only minority destroying America is The Rich"

The Rich minority could not destroy America if the majority would stop believing in the magical powers of confident men. There certainly are many Americans that believe Rich and Confident men such as Donald Trump have magical powers to solve the nation’s ills. This idea presented itself to me while reading about a high school scene in a documentary. The Confidence-Man was being discussed in an American classroom.

“The Confidence-Man” 1857, is the ninth book and final novel by American writer Herman Melville
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Confidence-Man

In making his movies, Wiseman explained, he’d witnessed both immense kindness and unbelievable cruelty. “If somebody asked me for a generalization about human behavior, I’d say, ‘Watch my films,’” he went on. “If you can say in 25 words or less what they say about human behavior, well, good luck to you. I can’t do it.”

Which, I suppose, also applies to any attempt at summarizing what his films have to say about the life of the American institution. I thought of the bracingly dark lecture on Melville delivered by a high school English teacher in “Belfast, Maine” (1999), which had a funny moment along the lines of those Morris loves, when the teacher, recounting to the stunned-looking teenagers a horrific drowning scene from “Moby-Dick,” seems to be confronting his own existential abyss. Then he moves on to another Melville book, “The Confidence-Man,” a bizarre, difficult novel and a surprising choice for a high school English class. To Melville, the teacher explains, everything in America is a confidence game. “They’re always telling you to believe,” the teacher says, “but anytime you believe in anything, it’s only setting you up to be the fool, to be the gull, to be the victim of the game.” He tells the class the title character of the novel was a huckster on a steamboat selling people what they wanted to hear. (Trump is that huckster.)

“What does this tell us about the American dream?” he asks.

“It’s false!” one of the kids responds.

“It’s false,” the teacher repeats. “It’s a confidence scam.”

The scene comes more than three hours into a four-hour film, which, to that point, seems to have been a complicated but sympathetic portrait of a quaint coastal town near where Wiseman bought an old barn in the early ’70s, and where he frequently spends summers. The lecture changes the atmosphere, forcing the viewer to rethink everything that’s come before and all that remains. When I brought up the scene with Wiseman, he told me “The Confidence-Man” was one of his favorite novels.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/15/magazine/frederick-wiseman-document
aries.html

Download a free copy of “The Confidence-Man” at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21816

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

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Saturday, December 19, 2020 9:18 AM

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Saturday, December 19, 2020 12:41 PM

I hope no one finds this too controversial...

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Saturday, December 19, 2020 2:17 PM

Republicans strategize for next elections: 'Their plan is to make it harder for voters to participate'
Backlash following the 2020 election underscores how severely the party is willing to cut off access to the ballot amid signs of a changing electorate
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/19/republicans-strategize
-future-elections-harder-to-vote

“I am not at all surprised to see this happening in Texas and Georgia that I think are on the cusp of a big shift,” Pérez said. “You have some dinosaurs who are not going to stay in power much longer trying to suppress votes.”

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Saturday, December 19, 2020 6:49 PM

Who Is Kelly Loeffler? Narrated by Natalie Portman

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Saturday, December 19, 2020 8:27 PM

Watched the video; good.

T

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Sunday, December 20, 2020 8:56 AM

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Sunday, December 20, 2020 4:30 PM

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Sunday, December 20, 2020 4:31 PM

Hakeem Jeffries: "GOP Tax Scam increased the federal debt by $2,000,000,000,000 (two trillion). 83% of the benefits went to the wealthiest 1%. Senate Republicans are now lecturing us about fiscal austerity. During a pandemic. GET LOST."
https://twitter.com/RepJeffries/status/1340306493581750272

On The Deficit, GOP Has Been Playing Us All For Suckers
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stancollender/2018/04/15/on-the-deficit-g
op-has-been-playing-us-all-for-suckers/?sh=4f30af5f4694

The Congressional Budget Office last Monday released a report that for the first time officially projected the federal deficit rising to almost $1 trillion in 2019 and then staying at or well above that previously unfathomable level every year through 2028.

As I first pointed out in this post, these projections almost certainly underestimate the actual deficit that will occur because CBO assumes that current law will be followed. In this case, that means assuming that the individual cuts put in place by last year's tax bill that are set to phase out will, in fact, expire as scheduled. As Catherine Rampell noted in the Washington Post last Friday, if, as seems likely, the cuts are extended, the budget deficit will be an additional $2.6 trillion higher than what CBO estimated.

Just a few months after the tax bill was signed, the GOP-controlled Congress agreed to increase federal spending and the budget deficit by another $130 billion or so.

Think about this. The same congressional Republicans who over the previous eight years wanted everyone to believe they were fiscal conservatives hell-bent on balancing the budget and not increasing the national debt, sponsored, passed and then danced around the fire because of legislation that will result in a permanent $1 trillion deficit and a debt that will soar to close to 100 percent of GDP by 2028.

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Monday, December 21, 2020 12:56 AM

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Monday, December 21, 2020 2:05 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
T

Why rush?

Nobody is getting what they think they're going to get.

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

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Monday, December 21, 2020 9:51 AM

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:

Why rush?

Nobody is getting what they think they're going to get.

If it requires Republicans to get something done, they'll make sure it doesn't get done. For Christmas, without the cooperation of any GOP Congressmen, the Democrats got rid of traitor Robert E. Lee. The Texas Republicans I know want to put Lee back on a pedestal. There is a Lee College in Baytown Texas. It's that Lee, the one who should have been executed by hanging. Instead, he has a college. I'm thinking that Baytown needs a Trump College to show what the white people want.

A statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee was removed from the U.S. Capitol overnight.

The statue has stood with one of America's first president, George Washington, as the state of Virginia's contribution to the National Statuary Hall Collection at the Capitol for more than 100 years.

Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, a Democrat, announced on Monday the state will seek to have it replaced with a statue of civil rights icon Barbara Johns.

“We should all be proud of this important step forward for our Commonwealth and our country,” Northam said. “The Confederacy is a symbol of Virginia’s racist and divisive history, and it is past time we tell our story with images of perseverance, diversity, and inclusion. I look forward to seeing a trailblazing young woman of color represent Virginia in the U.S. Capitol, where visitors will learn about Barbara Johns’ contributions to America and be empowered to create positive change in their communities just like she did.”

A representative from Northam's office was present for the removal along with Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Rep. Jennifer Wexton (D), who represents a large swath of Northern Virginia in Congress.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called the development “welcome news.”

“The Congress will continue our work to rid the Capitol of homages to hate, as we fight to end the scourge of racism in our country,” she said in a statement. “There is no room for celebrating the bigotry of the Confederacy in the Capitol or any other place of honor in our country.”

Earlier this year, a state commission tasked recommended the removal of the statue from the Capitol.

The commission, led by State Sen. Louise Lucas (D) voted unanimously to remove it.

“Confederate images do not represent who we are in Virginia, that’s why we voted unanimously to remove this statue,” Lucas said in a statement. “I am thrilled that this day has finally arrived, and I thank Governor Northam and the Commission for their transformative work.”

More at https://thehill.com/homenews/531103-robert-e-lee-statue-removed-from-u
s-capitol

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

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Monday, December 21, 2020 10:24 AM

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

Why rush?

Nobody is getting what they think they're going to get.
If it requires Republicans to get something done, they'll make sure it doesn't get done.

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Monday, December 21, 2020 11:19 AM

CAPTAINCRUNCH

... stay crunchy...

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Nobody is getting what they think they're going to get.

Please tell us what "we" think we're going to get, because I have no idea what I think.

Also, tell us what you KNOW we're going to get so we can laugh when it doesn't happen. "Trump in a landslide" is getting old.

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Tuesday, December 22, 2020 8:40 AM