A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Thursday, September 17, 2026 18:48
VIEWED: 757901
PAGE 30 of 73
What's your point? That it's within the so-called margin of error now?
Before the impeachment proceedings began the gap in favor of support was 10.4.
It's all bullshit.
And it doesn't matter anyhow.
I can't wait until this goes nowhere, just like I told you it would in the first place.
Dems lose. You lose. Go kill yourself.
Go share that Uplifting Tweet with your friends on Facebook.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:I take William Barr at his word. I believe he looks out at the landscape of contemporary America and sees a country changing into something he doesn’t recognize, that he believes Christianity is under an assault from which it may not recover and Trump, whatever his faults, is their last, best hope. And it’s the support of Republicans like Barr that ensures Trump’s survival.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
What's your point? That it's within the so-called margin of error now?
Before the impeachment proceedings began the gap in favor of support was 10.4.
It's all bullshit.
And it doesn't matter anyhow.
I can't wait until this goes nowhere, just like I told you it would in the first place.
Dems lose. You lose. Go kill yourself.
Go share that Uplifting Tweet with your friends on Facebook.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
This form of Flight 93ism is more widespread on the right than liberals recognize, and it both authentically motivates some establishment Republicans to enthusiastically embrace Trump, and creates coalitional dynamics by which other Republicans feel they have no choice but to defend Trump against the left. Some protect Trump on the merits, others protect Trump as a form of anti-anti-Trumpism, and others protect Trump as a way of protecting their future careers. But all of them protect Trump as a way of protecting themselves, and a future they feel slipping away.
From "The post-Christian culture wars"
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/11/26/20978613/donald-trump-chris
tians-william-barr-impeachment
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Fuck you and fuck Vox.
Vox won't even exist 5 years from now.
They should be doing whatever they can to protect their future.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:I am sure that it is Trump lying to you about the future in order for him to gain votes in 2020:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Fuck you and fuck Vox.
Vox won't even exist 5 years from now.
They should be doing whatever they can to protect their future.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Texas Republican Party plans to build phony campaign websites loaded with negative information about Democrats
AUSTIN — Texas Republicans plan to use a disinformation campaign to help them win back a dozen state House races in 2020, buying up website domains that look like they belong to Democratic candidates and loading the sites with negative information, according to a leaked document from the party.
“Not sure why it’s news that we’re aggressively working to earn the support of all Texas voters for all our candidates,” said Texas Republican Party Chairman James Dickey, who confirmed the authenticity of the document. “This draft discusses just some of the many ways in which we are going to turn out not only our dedicated base, but we’re going to expand that base and attract independent voters as well.”
More at www.houstonchronicle.com/news/politics/texas/article/Texas-Republican-
Party-plans-to-build-phony-14863988.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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Earlier this month, the federal government issued a solicitation for bids from contractors to refurbish a so-called “lethal/non-lethal” fence around a federal correctional facility in Tucson, Arizona. Three bids have so far been submitted, ranging from $3.3 million to about $3.8 million.
A lethal/non-lethal fence is an electrified fence running around the perimeter of a prison. Upon first contact, these fences deliver a non-lethal electric shock, but a second one triggers a lethal high-voltage discharge, typically several times more powerful than a standard electric chair. This is meant to kill the potential escapee on the spot.
Justin Long, a spokesperson for the US Bureau of Prisons, declined to provide the precise number of federal facilities now equipped with lethal electric fences, but said it’s “more than seven.”
The use of firearms or other means of deadly force in a particular situation, by its nature, calls for the application of human judgment or discretion. Fences, unlike humans, cannot think, assess circumstances, or exercise judgment. The fences mean less need for tower guards, who earn up to $70,000 per year at some prisons, with overtime, and generous pensions after they retire. Fences don’t.
Inmates could use the fences against each other or use them to commit suicide. It turns out that inmates aren’t the only ones under threat from these lethal fences. It’s other species that suffer the most. Mostly they kill birds and small animals by the thousands.
More at https://qz.com/1754413/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Yeah....
I'm not comfortable with automatic death fences.
I'd imagine that a few larger animals such as deer have been roasted on these fences already as well.
Although it is possible that in my lifetime we'll see 80% of current jobs available replaced with automation, there's still a ton of bugs to work out of the systems.
I've told my brother that his family needs to be saving money to pay off their debts, because even though his wife makes a great deal of money today, there is a good chance that her job (or at least a significant portion of it) will be replaced in our lifetimes.
Though she has the benefit of being in the position where mixing medications or providing the incorrect dosages could lead to many deaths so there would be a lot of pushback for a long time with steps taken to automate pharmacist jobs, you know that being able to replace pharmacists worldwide is a wet dream of the board members of Big Pharma.
I mean, think about it...
The last two jobs I worked, the highest paid people in the building weren't the store managers. They were the pharmacists.
And there is a LOT of human error already in the entire process of distributing drugs to the people, much of which is before the prescriptions even hit the desks of the pharmacists. It is the biggest reason they get paid as well as they do and why they had to go to specialty schools to learn all about the drugs and how they could interact with each other, or with known allergies of the clients. It's also necessary they keep up with all the new drugs that come out as well. Most people probably don't give it much thought, but pharmacists save lives everyday because of mistakes doctors make by prescribing medication that would be a death cocktail when combined with medications they're already taking.
That being said, there is no reason that this couldn't all be programmed into a system that would automatically make these decisions and dole out the drugs correctly. But they are going to take their time to make sure they're doing it right before they roll anything out. To do otherwise would be a catastrophic mistake. All you would need was a single death due to a computer error for people to become scared and enraged, and you'd have to wait another decade before even proposing it again.
Scary stuff...
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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House Democrats have passed nearly 400 bills. Trump and Republican Senators throw the bills into the trashcan without reading beyond the title.
There’s a pervasive sense of legislative paralysis gripping Capitol Hill. And it’s been there long before the impeachment inquiry began.
For months, President Donald Trump has fired off tweet missives accusing House Democrats of “getting nothing done in Congress,” and being consumed with impeachment.
Trump may want to look to the Republican-controlled Senate instead. Democrats in the House have been passing bills at a rapid clip; as of November 15, the House has passed nearly 400 bills, not including resolutions. But the House Democratic Policy and Communications Committee estimates 80 percent of those bill have hit a snag in the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is prioritizing confirming judges over passing bills.
Congress has passed just 70 bills into law this year. Granted, it still has one more year in its term, but the number pales in comparison to recent past sessions of Congress, which typically see anywhere from 300-500 bills passed in two years (and that is even a diminished number from the 700-800 bills passed in the 1970s and 1980s).
Ten of those 70 bills this year have been renaming federal post offices or Veterans Affairs facilities, and many others are related to appropriations or extending programs like the National Flood Insurance or the 9/11 victim compensation fund.
This has led to House Democrats decrying McConnell’s so-called “legislative graveyard,” a moniker the Senate majority leader has proudly adopted. McConnell calls himself the “grim reaper” of Democratic legislation he derides as socialist, but many of the bills that never see the Senate floor are bipartisan issues, like a universal background check bill, net neutrality, and reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act.
“From raising the minimum wage to ensuring equal pay, we have passed legislation to raise wages. And we have passed legislation to protect and expand health coverage and bring down prescription drug prices,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said in a statement to Vox. “We continue to urge Senator McConnell to take up our bills, many of which are bipartisan.”
More at www.vox.com/2019/11/29/20977735/how-many-bills-passed-house-democrats-
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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lol Vox
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:You either do care about raising your own wages or you must have misunderstood: “From raising the minimum wage to ensuring equal pay, we have passed legislation to raise wages. And we have passed legislation to protect and expand health coverage and bring down prescription drug prices,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said in a statement to Vox. “We continue to urge Senator McConnell to take up our bills, many of which are bipartisan.”
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
lol Vox
Do Right, Be Right. :)
The minimum wage bill has a very straight forward title: "Raise the Wage Act"
It is a bill that the Senate is stalling.
There will be an annual increase in the minimum wage, which rises to $15/hour and then keeps on rising at the same rate as the wages for rich/wealthy professionals rise. (I'm pretty sure the Senate Republicans hate this part, but those Senators are keeping their intentions a secret):
“(B) increased from such amount by the annual percentage increase, if any, in the median hourly wage of all employees as determined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics;
“(2) In calculating the annual percentage increase in the median hourly wage of all employees for purposes of paragraph (1)(B), the Secretary, through the Bureau of Labor Statistics, shall compile data on the hourly wages of all employees to determine such a median hourly wage and compare such median hourly wage for the most recent year for which data are available with the median hourly wage determined for the preceding year.”
More at www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/582/text
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You either do care about raising your own wages or you must have misunderstood: “From raising the minimum wage to ensuring equal pay, we have passed legislation to raise wages. And we have passed legislation to protect and expand health coverage and bring down prescription drug prices,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said in a statement to Vox. “We continue to urge Senator McConnell to take up our bills, many of which are bipartisan.”
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
lol Vox
Do Right, Be Right. :)
The minimum wage bill has a very straight forward title: "Raise the Wage Act"
It is a bill that the Senate is stalling.
There will be an annual increase in the minimum wage, which rises to $15/hour and then keeps on rising at the same rate as the wages for rich/wealthy professionals rise. (I'm pretty sure the Senate Republicans hate this part, but those Senators are keeping their intentions a secret):
“(B) increased from such amount by the annual percentage increase, if any, in the median hourly wage of all employees as determined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics;
“(2) In calculating the annual percentage increase in the median hourly wage of all employees for purposes of paragraph (1)(B), the Secretary, through the Bureau of Labor Statistics, shall compile data on the hourly wages of all employees to determine such a median hourly wage and compare such median hourly wage for the most recent year for which data are available with the median hourly wage determined for the preceding year.”
More at www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/582/text
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
There already is equal pay. Anyone stating otherwise is peddling myths.
I don't really care if they raise the minimum wage or not, and I'm generally at the bottom these days. If it goes to $15/hr. that doubles what minimum wage is in my state. All that will happen then is that the poverty threshold will rise along with it. Wowie!
And explain to me how we're going to pay for expanded health care and lower prescription prices.
If your answer isn't that we're going to force drug companies and hospitals to charge legitimate prices, then there wasn't a bill proposed that will actually do anything to solve the problem.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:If you want to be paid less than minimum wage, I know numerous companies controlled by Republican owners who will pay you in secret and in cash a wage less than minimum, but I don't think that underground/under-the-table/backstreet system solves any poor people's problems. But it sure does help to make business owners richer, so there is that advantage, if you are a poor person wanting to give charity to the wealthy this Xmas season.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
There already is equal pay. Anyone stating otherwise is peddling myths.
I don't really care if they raise the minimum wage or not, and I'm generally at the bottom these days. If it goes to $15/hr. that doubles what minimum wage is in my state. All that will happen then is that the poverty threshold will rise along with it. Wowie!
And explain to me how we're going to pay for expanded health care and lower prescription prices.
If your answer isn't that we're going to force drug companies and hospitals to charge legitimate prices, then there wasn't a bill proposed that will actually do anything to solve the problem.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
There are bills to lower drug prices and healthcare prices, but the GOP will not vote for them. If you don't want those bills to pass, that's good for the GOP. The rich will thank you for your help making them richer by your willingness to pay higher prices and accept fewer medicines and less healthcare in exchange for your voting for a GOP Senator.
"Prescription Drug Price Relief Act of 2019" sponsored by Bernie Sanders, who is NOT a Republican. This bill won't pass the Senate:
www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/102/text
There is also the "Lower Health Care Costs Act". It ain't gonna pass either, but the committee controlled by Republicans is crossing out most of the words in the bill just in case it comes to another vote. You should look at the text:
www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/1895/text
Bernie voted against it. One easy to understand reason why he is against: it would cut funding for federally qualified health centers and the National Health Service Corps, a spokesman said. “This bill includes an absolute cut of nearly 20 percent in both programs,” the spokesman said. “At a time when people are already struggling to afford their health care and access providers in their communities, this was a real missed opportunity to help the most vulnerable people in our country.”
www.rollcall.com/news/congress/health-costs-bill-senate
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Life Expectancy is 4 Years lower in Red States than Blue States
Democratic-leaning areas used to look similar to Republican-leaning areas in terms of productivity, income and education. But they have been rapidly diverging, with blue areas getting more productive, richer and better educated. In the close presidential election of 2000, counties that supported Al Gore over George W. Bush accounted for only a little over half the nation’s economic output. In the close election of 2016, counties that supported Hillary Clinton accounted for 64 percent of output, almost twice the share of Trump country.
www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2016/11/29/another-clinton-trump-div
ide-high-output-america-vs-low-output-america/
The thing is, the red-blue divide isn’t just about money. It’s also, increasingly, a matter of life and death.
In 1990, today’s red and blue states had almost the same life expectancy. Since then, however, life expectancy in Clinton states has risen more or less in line with other advanced countries, compared with almost no gain in Trump country. At this point, blue-state residents can expect to live more than four years longer than their red-state counterparts.
Is this all about deaths of despair in the eastern heartland? No. Consider our four most populous states. In 1990, Texas and Florida had higher life expectancy than New York and almost matched California; today, they’re far behind.
What explains the divergence? Public policy certainly plays some role, especially in recent years, as blue states expanded Medicaid and drastically reduced the number of uninsured, while most red states didn’t. The growing gap in educational levels has also surely played a role: Better-educated people tend to be healthier than the less educated.
Beyond that, there has been a striking divergence in behavior and lifestyle that must be affecting mortality. For example, the prevalence of obesity has soared all across America since 1990, but obesity rates are significantly higher in red states.
One thing that’s clear, however, is that the facts are utterly inconsistent with the conservative diagnosis of what ails America. Conservative figures like William Barr, the attorney general, look at rising mortality in America and attribute it to the collapse of traditional values — a collapse they attribute, in turn, to the evil machinations of “militant secularists.” The secularist assault on traditional values, Barr claims, lies behind “soaring suicide rates,” rising violence and “a deadly drug epidemic.”
But European nations, which are far more secularist than we are, haven’t seen a comparable rise in deaths of despair and an American-style decline in life expectancy. And even within America these evils are concentrated in states that voted for Trump, and have largely bypassed the more secular blue states.
More at www.nytimes.com/2019/12/02/opinion/life-expectancy-united-states.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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And birthrates among Democrats have plummeted.
Nature always finds a balance.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:As a candidate, Trump was vocally skeptical of climate change regulations but specifically vowed “to promote clean air and water,” which are overwhelmingly popular causes. But Trump has moved to roll back dozens of rules on these subjects without the changes ever becoming a focus of sustained public debate.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
And birthrates among Democrats have plummeted.
Nature always finds a balance.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Most of these rollbacks’ impacts will be felt primarily in the long term, but already, particulate pollution is getting worse, reversing years of progress. A team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon estimates that 9,700 more Americans died due to air pollution in 2018 than in 2016, in part due to regulatory changes.
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/2/20970521/trump-administratio
n-achievements
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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I smoke.
Do you honestly think I give a shit?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:I have heard that Red-state smokers have lowered the life expectancy in their states by four years. I heard they voted for Trump. I heard they use the same brain to smoke and vote.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I smoke.
Do you honestly think I give a shit?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
"America’s Red State Death Trip: Why does falling life expectancy track political orientation?"
www.nytimes.com/2019/12/02/opinion/life-expectancy-united-states.html
I am a Never-Smoker and a Never-Trumper.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I smoke.
Do you honestly think I give a shit?
In Tense Exchange, Trump and Macron Put Forth Dueling Visions for NATO
A once-cordial relationship between President Trump and President Emmanuel Macron of France devolved in a dramatic fashion on Tuesday, as the two leaders publicly sparred over their approach to containing the threat of terrorism and a shared vision for the future of NATO, a 70-year-old alliance facing existential threats on multiple fronts.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/in-tense-exchange-trump-and-macro
n-put-forth-dueling-visions-for-nato/ar-BBXGDbc?ocid=spartandhp
T
Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals.
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Quote:From the article you mentioned: “Would you like some nice ISIS fighters?” Mr. Trump said, crouching forward and claiming that “many” fighters had come from France. “I can give them to you.”
Originally posted by THG:
A once-cordial relationship between President Trump and President Emmanuel Macron of France devolved in a dramatic fashion on Tuesday, as the two leaders publicly sparred over their approach to containing the threat of terrorism . . .
President Macron of France should have rudely said, “France will not take your prisoners from Guantanamo, or Syria. May I suggest you have SEAL team 6 guard your prisoners?” Trump has made himself infamous by pardoning soldiers who kill prisoners, then he fired the Secretary of the Navy for objecting to the pardon of a Navy SEAL.
“Trump grants clemency to 2 Army officers accused of war crimes, restores rank to Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher”
www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-clemency-army-officers-accused-of-war-c
rimes-navy-seal-eddie-gallagher
“Timeline: How Trump intervened in the Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher's war crimes case”
www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/politics/2019/11/27/timeline-gallahers-
war-crimes-trump-intervention/4305986002/
Interestingly, Trump defended Gallagher using the same lawyers defending himself.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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lol
Macron's idea of dealing with terrorism is watching the Muslims invade his country with open arms all while the people who live there can't afford gas to get to work.
Nancy Pelosi regularly polls with a higher approval rating than Macron does.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Half of the French have always been a bunch of whiny babies, much like half of Americans. During WWII, half of the French were cooperative with the Nazis. But the other half, Free France, continued to fight. Just because that war is over does not mean that France is no longer half full of whiny babies who feel kindly toward Nazis. Inside of France they argue about which side is the whiny baby side. Inside America they argue about which side, Democrat or Republican, is the whiny baby side. I know it is the Republicans because they shit their diapers and cry for Trump to protect them from the Democrats.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
lol
Macron's idea of dealing with terrorism is watching the Muslims invade his country with open arms all while the people who live there can't afford gas to get to work.
Nancy Pelosi regularly polls with a higher approval rating than Macron does.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vichy_France
Pétain and Vichy France sound like Trump and the GOP: Pétain blamed la décadence on "political and economic liberalism, with its divisive, individualistic and hedonistic values—locked in sterile rivalry with its antithetical outgrowths, Socialism and Communism". Pétain argued that rescuing the French people from la décadence required a period of authoritarian government which would restore national unity and the traditionalist morality which Pétain claimed the French had forgotten. Pétain argued that la France profonde ("deep France", denoting profoundly French aspects of French culture) still existed, and that the French people needed to return to what Pétain insisted was their true identity. Alongside this claim for a moral revolution was Pétain's call for France to turn inwards, to withdraw from the world, which Pétain always portrayed as a hostile and threatening place full of endless dangers for the French.
It is easy to see why Trump and the children of the Vichy French would dislike Macron.
www.smithsonianmag.com/history/vichy-government-france-world-war-ii-wi
llingly-collaborated-nazis-180967160/
French president Emmanuel Macron gave a speech on France’s role in the genocide, denouncing his political opponents on the far right who dismiss the Vichy government. “It is convenient to see the Vichy regime as born of nothingness, returned to nothingness. Yes, it’s convenient, but it is false. We cannot build pride upon a lie,” Macron said in July.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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I don't need trump to protect me from a bunch of unarmed vegan pussies.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:The vegans will vote for the Green Party, as they did in 2016, which places them on Trump's side:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I don't need trump to protect me from a bunch of unarmed vegan pussies.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Twice, in 2000 and 2016, the Green Party bears responsibility for changing the outcome of a presidential election. Green Party votes were indeed the difference in three Rust Belt states. In Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, President-elect Donald Trump’s margin of victory was less than Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein’s vote count. A difference of about 80,000 votes determined the outcome in these three states.
Ms. Stein’s Green Party voters have been almost exclusively former Democratic voters. The difference in 2016 dwarfs the 537-vote deficit that cost then-Vice President Al Gore Florida and the presidency in 2000, but it is still real.
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/green-party-votes-made-the-difference-
in-the-presidential-election/2016/12/05/68899908-ba38-11e6-ae79-bec72d34f8c9_story.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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Even if a Democrat is President, Medicare-for-all will not pass the House and it will not pass the Senate. “I’m not a big fan of Medicare for All,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said. None of the key Senate Democrats who will write the next health reform bill support Medicare-for-all or believe it could pass.
The primary itself has been evidence of Medicare-for-all’s long odds: A number of the co-sponsors on Sanders’s bill, like Sen. Kamala Harris and Sen. Cory Booker, have made clear they don’t actually support it as written. And a number of other senators the bill would need, like Amy Klobuchar and Michael Bennet, have come out in direct opposition to the legislation. Medicare-for-all would be a difficult lift even if the Democratic Party was united; it’s not going to pass with the party divided.
Democrats are setting themselves up for disillusionment, and possibly disaster. Either they will nominate a candidate who cannot deliver on their central policy promise or they will nominate a candidate whose victory will be a betrayal of liberal activists’ top policy priority.
Medicare has become a which-side-are-you-on test. So what’s the way out? Are you with Sanders and the left, and against insurance companies, squishy moderates, commodified health care, and a politics of preemptive compromise? Or are you afraid that Sanders and the left are going to scare the country into reelecting Donald Trump and set health care reform back for a generation?
The attacks on Medicare-for-all in the Democratic primary are a shadow of what would come in a general election, when the entire Republican Party, the entire health industry, and much of corporate America will devote billions of dollars to a 24/7 campaign of fearmongering and disinformation that dwarfs the genteel debates among the Democrats.
It’d be awful if the Democratic fight between Medicare-for-all and Medicare-for-more ended up empowering the Republican agenda of Obamacare for none and Medicaid for fewer.
More at www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/4/20994485/democrats-primary-2
020-medicare-sanders-warren-kamala-harris
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Are you with Sanders and the left, and against insurance companies, squishy moderates, commodified health care, and a politics of preemptive compromise? Or are you afraid that Sanders and the left are going to scare the country into reelecting Donald Trump and set health care reform back for a generation?
I wouldn't worry about it. Either way, Trump wins.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:I know people who won't quit smoking. All I needed to keep me from smoking was to be told what can happen, but most people wait until it happens to them. The thing that would strongly motivate them to change their behavior is cancer. The thing that will change some Trump voters from voting Republican is if they get cancer from Trump. These are the same dumbasses that won't believe cigarettes are deadly because smoking hasn't killed them, yet. These dumbasses need a few more years with Trump, maybe followed by 8 years of Pence, before they understand what is wrong. Maybe they never will, but their personal problems are no problem for me. And while they are learning about Trump/Pence, I'll have the next 5 to 13 years paying extremely low taxes under a Republican controlled system. It is no problem for me when dumbasses, smokers, and Trump lovers kill themselves slow or fast. Nobody I care about is stupid enough to smoke or believe Trump, especially the rich Republicans I know. They understand Trump the same as I do -- he is an incompetent old fool, but he makes them richer.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Are you with Sanders and the left, and against insurance companies, squishy moderates, commodified health care, and a politics of preemptive compromise? Or are you afraid that Sanders and the left are going to scare the country into reelecting Donald Trump and set health care reform back for a generation?
I wouldn't worry about it. Either way, Trump wins.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Oh. So you mean, nothing new. Just the same mindless bragging that you've been doing about how great you are the last three years.
Nobody gives a shit about you, your money or your opinions buddy.
Have a nice day. 
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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This one goes out to Second, and all of the rich, virtue signalling fools out there.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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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
7. Conservatives
8. Russia
Quote:
2. Donald Trump
6. Republicans in general
6. Republicans in general
6. Republicans in general
6. Republicans in general
2. Donald Trump
6. Republicans in general
6. Republicans in general
5. Talking about how much money he has
6. Republicans in general
2. Donald Trump
2. Donald Trump
2. Donald Trump
5. Talking about how much money he has
FIFY
'Incognito', I've helpfully summarized your post so other people can get the gist without having to do any tedious reading.
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Quote:I care about you. I care that you are a sad, newly sober, rotten-toothed smoker. Don't tell me that is all behind you, just because you are not drunk, smoking, and Jacking off at this moment, 6ixJack. Like most Trump voters, except the rich ones, you've got terrible problems that you fear are unsolvable, but you hope having $100,000 in the bank, owning a house, and Trump are gonna protect you. You know your kind of people are in big trouble that you caused for yourself, just like the Confederates knew in 1863 the South might collapse in the war they started, but you are gonna fight until you decisively win or lose. I will be watching your struggles, but I'm placing my bets on the other side. In the meantime, I will enjoy the Red vs Blue death-match for control of the White House. Go Team Blue!
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Oh. So you mean, nothing new. Just the same mindless bragging that you've been doing about how great you are the last three years.
Nobody gives a shit about you, your money or your opinions buddy.
Have a nice day.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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There's no death match.
Democrats are going to lose huge. Maybe we should give them a participation trophy?
Why so mean, buddy? Resorting to personal attacks again because things aren't going your way and I'm right as usual?
Nothing personal when I insult you about your "wealth", buddy. We all know that you don't actually have any money.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Remember Ebenezer Scrooge in a Christmas Carol? He did not get rich by treating Jim Cratchit to a high salary. Ebenezer saved his philanthropy until the very end of life, when the Ghost of Christmas Future was threatening him. Or Bill Gates. He was a slippery conniving businessman, plotting and planning a monopoly, until he retired and switched to be a philanthropist. John Rockefeller? Who only mellowed when he was old. It was his children who were nice. Henry Ford? Shooting strikers and antisemitic. That guy was not nice. It was his grandchildren and the Ford Foundation who were nice.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
There's no death match.
Democrats are going to lose huge. Maybe we should give them a participation trophy?
Why so mean, buddy? Resorting to personal attacks again because things aren't going your way and I'm right as usual?
Nothing personal when I insult you about your "wealth", buddy. We all know that you don't actually have any money.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
If I ever get around to writing "River Tam and the Problem of Evil" I'll show you how that works in sci-fi. In the comic books, River is passive, only kicking and shooting as a plot twist to save the day at the very last second. Firefly -- The Sting (2019) is a good example of that, but "River Tam and the Problem of Evil" would be one where River is plotting against the whole Alliance . . . and she wins without Malcolm Reynolds even knowing what was going on underneath his nose. He will wonder why the Alliance leaves Serenity in peace. He will never know what River and Kaylee did to make that happen. River and Kaylee didn't kill anybody to do it, either, although they came very close, but the Operative backed down first. River made a deal, but she also planned how to cheat the Alliance. There is no point in River being honest with her enemies, but she has to be subtle about it so they don't know she cheated them.
Free Comics Download | Image Format : JPG | Year : 2019 | Size : 50 MB | 132 Pages
https://getcomics.info/other-comics/firefly-the-sting-2019/
www.boom-studios.com/archives/firefly-the-sting-original-graphic-novel
-first-look/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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U.S. trade law offers Trump more freedom of action — more ability to do whatever he wants — than any other policy area.
The basic story is that long ago — in fact, in the aftermath of the disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 — Congress deliberately limited its own role in trade policy. Instead, it gave the president the power to negotiate trade deals with other countries, which would then face up-or-down votes without amendments.
It was always clear, however, that this system needed some flexibility to respond to events. So the executive branch was given the power to impose temporary tariffs under certain conditions: import surges, threats to national security, unfair practices by foreign governments. The idea was that nonpartisan experts would determine whether and when these conditions existed, and the president would then decide whether to act.
This system worked well for many years. It turned out, however, to be extremely vulnerable to someone like Trump, for whom everything is partisan and expertise is a four-letter word. Trump’s tariff justifications have often been self-evidently absurd — seriously, who imagines that imports of Canadian steel threaten U.S. national security? But there’s no obvious way to stop him from imposing tariffs whenever he feels like it.
And there’s also no obvious way to stop his officials from granting individual businesses tariff exemptions, supposedly based on economic criteria but in fact as a reward for political support. Tariff policy isn’t the only arena in which Trump can practice crony capitalism — federal contracting is looking increasingly scandalous — but tariffs are especially ripe for exploitation.
So that’s why Trump is a Tariff Man: Tariffs let him exercise unconstrained power, rewarding his friends and punishing his enemies. Anyone imagining that he’s going to change his ways and start behaving responsibly is living in a fantasy world.
www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/opinion/trump-trade-tariffs.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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The Russification of the Republican Party
Just how far will Republicans go in following President Donald Trump’s embrace of Russia? An answer may be crystallizing as the GOP mobilizes its defense of the president against impeachment.
Both congressional Republicans and conservative commentators are defending Trump from impeachment partly by accusing Ukraine of intervening against him in the 2016 presidential election—despite repeated warnings from national-security and intelligence officials that those claims are not only baseless, but advance Vladimir Putin’s goal of discrediting Ukraine.
Earlier in Trump’s presidency, many Republicans sought to distance themselves from his warm tone toward Putin. But just this week alone, a number of Republican lawmakers, the official House Republican report rebutting impeachment, and the Fox News host Tucker Carlson have repeated Kremlin lines on Ukraine.
This flurry of GOP rhetoric comes as Democrats are raising alarm about the Republican-controlled Senate’s refusal to take action on the DETER Act, a bipartisan bill that would impose sanctions on Russia if it interferes again in 2020.
Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the act’s sponsor, has been unsuccessfully pressing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to attach the bill to a defense-authorization bill now in conference between the House and Senate, which would ensure its passage.
“Nobody has provided any substantive justification for opposing this measure,” Van Hollen told me in an interview. “All the testimony has been supportive of the DETER Act. And yet when you get behind closed doors, it’s not that anyone says they are opposed to it; they just won’t engage. McConnell would like to see this defeated without any of his fingerprints on it, but his fingerprints are there because he has refused to engage.”
Representative Devin Nunes of California, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, repeatedly insisted during last month’s impeachment hearings that Ukraine had meddled in the 2016 election against Trump. That drew a stern rebuke from one witness asked to testify, the former Trump National Security Council adviser Fiona Hill, who warned that congressional Republicans were spreading “a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.”
But Hill’s words have not stopped Republicans from reprising those arguments. In late November, Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana claimed during a television interview that Ukraine, not Russia, might have hacked the Democratic National Committee’s computers in 2016. After retreating from that claim, he went on Meet the Press on Sunday and equated public criticism of Trump by some Ukrainian officials with Russia’s systematic interference campaign in 2016.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, during its investigation of 2016 election meddling, found no evidence of Ukrainian interference. But when asked about Kennedy’s comments this week, Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, the committee’s chairman, came closer to endorsing rather than repudiating them.
More at www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/12/impeachment-republican-pa
rty-russia/603088/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
The Russification of the Republican Party
Fuck you.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
The Russification of the Republican Party
Fuck you.
Thats your reply. And you gripe wen we say youre a Russian ajent. (ad eyeroll emoji here)
----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.7532020.com .
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Watch the Leonardo Da Vinci uv GoP propaganda paint a picture:
It really iz like a specialized kind uv performans art. He just gets on and riffs. Well worth hiz 30M$ salary to the peepl that pay him.
----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.7532020.com .
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Quote:
The Russification of the Republican Party
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Fuck you.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Quote:
Originally posted by JO753:
Thats your reply. And you gripe wen we say youre a Russian ajent. (ad eyeroll emoji here)
----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.7532020.com .
Yoor lodjik iz rong, JO. U (awl) djust ahdehd Republicans to yoor lihst uv Russians. Yoor dooing hwaht yoov alwaaez bin dooing. Kawling peepl Russians.
Jack wuz obdjekting. :eyeroll:
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Yup.
Somebody brings up Russia, I tell them to fuck off with their red baiting.
Fucking idiots.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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When Democrats last controlled the Senate, one especially important Democrat — Judiciary Chair Patrick Leahy (VT) — took an unusually expansive view of the rights of the minority party.
An informal tradition known as the “blue slip” sometimes gives home-state senators an exaggerated influence over who gets confirmed to federal judgeships within their states (the tradition gets its name from blue pieces of paper that home-state senators use to indicate whether they approve of a particular nominee).
Traditionally, the Senate Judiciary Committee showed some level of deference to senators who disapprove of their home-state nominees, although the level of deference given to these senators varied wildly depending on who chaired the committee and whether that committee chair was politically aligned with the incumbent president.
Leahy, who chaired the Committee for most of the Obama presidency, gave home-state senators a simply extraordinary power to block judicial nominees. Under Leahy, a single senator of either party could veto any nominee to a federal judgeship in their state (although federal appeals courts typically oversee multiple states, each individual seat on these courts is traditionally assigned to a particular state).
Leahy says that he did so to protect the “rights of the minority.” And protect Republicans he did. Red-state Republicans used the power Leahy gave them to keep many judicial seats empty until Obama left office. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) effectively held a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit open for eight years until Trump could fill it.
The blue slip allowed Republicans to drag out negotiations over vacancies until McConnell took over the Senate in 2015 and imposed a blockade on nearly all of Obama’s appellate nominees.
The blue slip also weakened Obama’s hand in negotiations with Senate Republicans, and sometimes forced him to name relatively conservative judges in order to placate senators who could veto judicial nominees. Sens. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) and Johnny Isakson (R-GA), for example, effectively held one of Obama’s Eleventh Circuit nominees hostage until Obama agreed to also name Judge Julie Carnes — a George H.W. Bush district court appointee — to a second vacancy on that same court.
Republicans did not reciprocate when they came to power.
More at www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/9/20962980/trump-supreme-court
-federal-judges
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The Afghanistan Papers show that lots of people knew we were failing in Afghanistan but lied about it in public:
A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.
….Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.
“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”
John Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, acknowledged to The Post that the documents show “the American people have constantly been lied to.”
It’s unbelievable that we’re still in Afghanistan a full generation after we first invaded. Unfortunately, no one has the guts to simply pull out and accept the fact that they will then become the president that lost Afghanistan. So they keep on pretending to fight. And that’s the biggest lie of all.
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/12/afghanistan-papers-reveal-an-18
-year-lie/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The two major political parties in the U.S. really are very different in their policies toward the rich. President Barack Obama was hardly a radical, but when he left office the average federal tax rate on the top 1 percent was 5 percentage points higher than it had been under George W. Bush.
www.cbo.gov/publication/55413
In 2016 Trump claimed that he wouldn’t do the usual Republican thing and cut taxes on the rich while trying to destroy the safety net. But he was lying.
And despite what right-wing pundits like to claim, high-income Americans are in general much more likely than others to support the Republican Party. In last year’s midterms, 52 percent of voters with incomes over $200,000 voted Republican, compared with only 38 percent of voters with incomes under $50,000.
www.cnn.com/election/2018/exit-polls
The rightward tilt is especially strong at the very top; although there are a few high-profile liberal billionaires, most of the extremely wealthy are also extremely right-wing.
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/30/billionaire-stealth-politics-a
merica-100-richest-what-they-want
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Congress to Vote on $22 Billion Defense Increase One Week After Trump Slashed Food Stamps
In June 2017, former Defense Secretary James Mattis and former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford testified that the Pentagon needed a 3 to 5 percent annual increase in its budget each year until 2023, amounting to tens of billions of dollars a year. Dunford said the increases were necessary to “maintain the competitive level” of the armed forces, but such massive hikes would place U.S. military spending in peacetime at historic levels not seen since the World War II.
More at https://theintercept.com/2019/12/10/ndaa-congress-defense-bill/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Three years ago, 3.9 million Americans received a plain-looking envelope from the Internal Revenue Service. Inside was a letter stating that they had recently paid a fine for not carrying health insurance and suggesting possible ways to enroll in coverage.
New research concludes that the bureaucratic mailing saved lives.
Three Treasury Department economists have published a working paper finding that these notices increased health insurance sign-ups. Obtaining insurance, they say, reduced premature deaths by an amount that exceeded any of their expectations. Americans between 45 and 64 benefited the most: For every 1,648 who received a letter, one fewer death occurred than among those who hadn’t received a letter.
In all, the researchers estimated that the letters may have wound up saving 700 lives.
The experiment, made possible by an accident of budgeting, is the first rigorous experiment to find that health coverage leads to fewer deaths, a claim that politicians and economists have fiercely debated in recent years as they assess the effects of the Affordable Care Act’s coverage expansion. The results also provide belated vindication for the much-despised individual mandate that was part of Obamacare until December 2017, when Congress did away with the fine for people who don’t carry health insurance.
“There has been a lot of skepticism, especially in economics, that health insurance has a mortality impact,” said Sarah Miller, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan who researches the topic and was not involved with the Treasury research. “It’s really important that this is a randomized controlled trial. It’s a really high standard of evidence that you can’t just dismiss.”
www.nytimes.com/2019/12/10/upshot/irs-letter-health-insurance-fine-stu
dy.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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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Three years ago, 3.9 million Americans received a plain-looking envelope from the Internal Revenue Service. Inside was a letter stating that they had recently paid a fine for not carrying health insurance and suggesting possible ways to enroll in coverage.
New research concludes that the bureaucratic mailing saved lives.
Three Treasury Department economists have published a working paper finding that these notices increased health insurance sign-ups. Obtaining insurance, they say, reduced premature deaths by an amount that exceeded any of their expectations. Americans between 45 and 64 benefited the most: For every 1,648 who received a letter, one fewer death occurred than among those who hadn’t received a letter.
In all, the researchers estimated that the letters may have wound up saving 700 lives.
The experiment, made possible by an accident of budgeting, is the first rigorous experiment to find that health coverage leads to fewer deaths, a claim that politicians and economists have fiercely debated in recent years as they assess the effects of the Affordable Care Act’s coverage expansion. The results also provide belated vindication for the much-despised individual mandate that was part of Obamacare until December 2017, when Congress did away with the fine for people who don’t carry health insurance.
“There has been a lot of skepticism, especially in economics, that health insurance has a mortality impact,” said Sarah Miller, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan who researches the topic and was not involved with the Treasury research. “It’s really important that this is a randomized controlled trial. It’s a really high standard of evidence that you can’t just dismiss.”
www.nytimes.com/2019/12/10/upshot/irs-letter-health-insurance-fine-stu
dy.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Yup. Now if they could only manage to make it affordable and keep the premiums from raising 30% year over year while also increasing the deductible.
WTF. Do you really think that anybody legitimately believes for a second that having affordable healthcare doesn't save lives?
What a stupid article.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Idaho Republican Labrador Booed Over 'Nobody Dies' Comment on Health Care
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
WTF. Do you really think that anybody legitimately believes for a second that having affordable healthcare doesn't save lives?
What a stupid article.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/idaho-republican-labrador-booed-over-nobo
dy-dies-comment-health-care-n755976
I have heard the same a million times from Texas Republicans. Nobody dies because the ER is available to the uninsured, according to those Texans.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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This generally went unnoticed but I think it's an excellent idea and should be extended. Not only should ALL healthcare providers be required to post standard charges, but ALL healthcare providers should charge ONLY standard charges ... no special rates for Humana v Anthem v BC/BS. The only deviation I would allow would be Medicare rates.
Quote:
TheHill.com
New Trump administration rule will require hospitals post prices online
By Jessie Hellmann - 08/03/18 01:13 PM EDT
New Trump administration rule will require hospitals post prices online
© Victoria Sarno Jordan
Hospitals will be required to post online a list of their standard charges under a rule finalized Thursday by the Trump administration.
While hospitals are already required to make this information public on request, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) said the new rule would require the info be posted online to "encourage price transparency" and improve "public accessibility."
Starting Jan. 1, hospitals will be required to update the information annually.
The CMS said it is also considering how to "allow consumers to more easily access relevant healthcare data and compare providers."
Increasing price transparency has been a priority for the administration as a way to drive down health-care costs.
"This is a small step towards providing our beneficiaries with price transparency, but our work in this area is only just beginning," CMS Administrator Seema Verma said in a speech last month. "Price transparency is core to patient empowerment and making sure American patients have the tools they need so they can make the best decisions for them and their families."
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
I'd nuke a BILLION PEOPLE if it would save the other 7 billion from living under Putin. Hell, I might go all the way to the last 100 people on Earth to keep this planet from being under fascist rule.- WISHIMAY
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Quote:I'm sure it ain't gonna happen because the Health Industry will fight it:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
This generally went unnoticed but I think it's an excellent idea and should be extended. Not only should ALL healthcare providers be required to post standard charges, but ALL healthcare providers should charge ONLY standard charges ... no special rates for Humana v Anthem v BC/BS. The only deviation I would allow would be Medicare rates.
WASHINGTON, D.C. (November 15, 2019) - The American Hospital Association (AHA), Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), Children’s Hospital Association (CHA) and Federation of American Hospitals (FAH) issued the following joint statement on today’s final rule from CMS:
Today’s rule mandating the public disclosure of privately negotiated rates between commercial health insurance companies and hospitals is a setback in efforts to provide patients with the most relevant information they need to make informed decisions about their care. Instead of helping patients know their out-of-pocket costs, this rule will introduce widespread confusion, accelerate anticompetitive behavior among health insurers, and stymie innovations in value-based care delivery. America’s hospitals and health systems have repeatedly urged CMS to work with hospitals, doctors, insurers, patients, and other stakeholders to identify solutions to provide patients with the information they need to make informed health care decisions and know what their expected out-of-pocket costs will be. We continue to stand ready to work with CMS to achieve this goal.
Because the final rule does not achieve the goal of providing patients with out-of-pocket cost information, and instead threatens to confuse patients, our four organizations will soon join with member hospitals to file a legal challenge to the rule on grounds including that it exceeds the Administration’s authority.
www.aha.org/press-releases/2019-11-15-joint-statement-national-hospita
l-and-health-system-groups-public
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
This generally went unnoticed but I think it's an excellent idea and should be extended. Not only should ALL healthcare providers be required to post standard charges, but ALL healthcare providers should charge ONLY standard charges ... no special rates for Humana v Anthem v BC/BS. The only deviation I would allow would be Medicare rates.Quote:
TheHill.com
New Trump administration rule will require hospitals post prices online
By Jessie Hellmann - 08/03/18 01:13 PM EDT
New Trump administration rule will require hospitals post prices online
© Victoria Sarno Jordan
Hospitals will be required to post online a list of their standard charges under a rule finalized Thursday by the Trump administration.
While hospitals are already required to make this information public on request, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) said the new rule would require the info be posted online to "encourage price transparency" and improve "public accessibility."
Starting Jan. 1, hospitals will be required to update the information annually.
The CMS said it is also considering how to "allow consumers to more easily access relevant healthcare data and compare providers."
Increasing price transparency has been a priority for the administration as a way to drive down health-care costs.
"This is a small step towards providing our beneficiaries with price transparency, but our work in this area is only just beginning," CMS Administrator Seema Verma said in a speech last month. "Price transparency is core to patient empowerment and making sure American patients have the tools they need so they can make the best decisions for them and their families."
Meh. How many people would check those prices? And what do you do if you see another provider with better rates? When you're in the ER are you going to review rates while you're bleeding? Are you going to have to apply for arbitration if your splenectomy was too costly in your opinion? How would you know?
I don't need to do MORE work for my health care. Try taking care of a senior - that sh*t is the height of stupidity, "You have now entered the doughnut hole. Your plan will cover 33.5% of the following items on Tuesday." Total BS, complete insult in fact to people paying in. They make us work for them. Dig a hole and throw them in - let's start over.
I'd rather have a watch dog / accountability group that aggressively monitors all health care pricing and applies gov pressure to conform to pricing guidelines on our behalf with penalties for non-compliance. It's not hard - it's math.
Look around your community. Look at all the shiny new HC facilities - they have sh*t tons of money.
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What does it mean for US Democratic Presidential candidates that UK Labor candidate Jeremy Corbyn led Labor to its biggest defeat in decades? For those of you who haven’t been following closely, Corbyn is no neoliberal shill. He is an unabashed lefty socialist who campaigned on an unabashed lefty socialist platform. No triangulating or “Tory lite” for him. He was out to prove that Labor could win by promising the voters a soaring lefty agenda filled with taxing the rich, taking back control of privatized industries, free college, huge infrastructure spending, more money for health care, and so forth.
The result was a mind-boggling defeat. So what does this tell us about American presidential candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders? Corbyn lost because he was a hard left candidate, and the same thing will happen if Democrats nominate one of their own.
The American and British electorates have voted quite similarly for the past several decades, putting in office Reagan-Clinton-Bush-Obama-Trump as against Thatcher-Blair-Cameron-Boris Johnson. Given the similarities between Boris Johnson and Trump, as well as the obvious salience of immigration politics in both countries, I’d be reluctant to blow off the British results as nothing much for US Democrats to worry about.
More at www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/12/too-bad-about-the-brits-but-wha
t-does-it-mean-for-us/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
What does it mean for US Democratic Presidential candidates that UK Labor candidate Jeremy Corbyn led Labor to its biggest defeat in decades? For those of you who haven’t been following closely, Corbyn is no neoliberal shill. He is an unabashed lefty socialist who campaigned on an unabashed lefty socialist platform. No triangulating or “Tory lite” for him. He was out to prove that Labor could win by promising the voters a soaring lefty agenda filled with taxing the rich, taking back control of privatized industries, free college, huge infrastructure spending, more money for health care, and so forth.
The result was a mind-boggling defeat. So what does this tell us about American presidential candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders? Corbyn lost because he was a hard left candidate, and the same thing will happen if Democrats nominate one of their own.
The American and British electorates have voted quite similarly for the past several decades, putting in office Reagan-Clinton-Bush-Obama-Trump as against Thatcher-Blair-Cameron-Boris Johnson. Given the similarities between Boris Johnson and Trump, as well as the obvious salience of immigration politics in both countries, I’d be reluctant to blow off the British results as nothing much for US Democrats to worry about.
More at www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/12/too-bad-about-the-brits-but-wha
t-does-it-mean-for-us/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Quote:
What does it mean for US Democratic Presidential candidates that UK Labor candidate Jeremy Corbyn led Labor to its biggest defeat in decades?
I'll answer that question by pointing out flawed logic in the first sentence of the author's second paragraph.
Quote:
The result was a mind-boggling defeat.
The defeat wasn't mind-boggling. It was easy to predict.
Quote:
I’d be reluctant to blow off the British results as nothing much for US Democrats to worry about.
As well you should.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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It can only be assumed at this point, with Daisy Ridley's recent interview with the The Guardian saying that everyone has a problem with "BoJo", and every "sane" person has a problem with Trump, that the Hollywoodesque elites in the UK behave as poorly in general and talk down to everybody over there the same way they constantly do here.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/dec/07/daisy-ridley-jj-abrams-st
ar-wars-a-religion
People have had enough of that shit.
Anthony Hopkins gets it.
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/anthony-ho
pkins-brad-pitt-actors-stupid-two-popes-once-upon-a-time-a9233926.html
Quote:
The actor, 81, sat down with his Meet Joe Black and Legends of the Fall co-star for a lengthy chat for Interview magazine ahead of the release of his new Netflix film The Two Popes, when he called those in the acting profession “stupid”.
He said: “People ask me questions about present situations in life, and I say, ‘I don’t know, I’m just an actor. I don’t have any opinions. Actors are pretty stupid. My opinion is not worth anything. There’s no controversy for me, so don’t engage me in it, because I’m not going to participate’.”
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Oh...
Sorry Daisy.
This just in (12 minutes ago)
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/world/europe/uk-election-brexit.htm
l
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:You don't remember the 1972 election: Nixon versus George McGovern.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
The defeat wasn't mind-boggling. It was easy to predict.Quote:
I’d be reluctant to blow off the British results as nothing much for US Democrats to worry about.
As well you should.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_McGovern#1972_presidential_campai
gn
McGovern ran on a platform that advocated withdrawal from the Vietnam War, the only correct move according to people who weren't liars or ignorant about military strategy. The Vietnam War was the biggest, most obvious fiasco in history, and yet voters let it run. They were thinking that Peace with Honor was just around the corner in Vietnam. That was NOT true.
More than half of all voters in 1972 and more than half today can't understand a fiasco like Vietnam, nor can they understand a fiasco like Afghanistan, nor global warming, nor the Crash of 2008, nor the American healthcare system. The vast majority of voters will reject Presidential candidates such as McGovern, who actually knew in detail how things need to be changed for the better. Instead, they vote for hardcore liars like Nixon who knew nothing.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You don't remember the 1972 election: Nixon versus George McGovern.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
The defeat wasn't mind-boggling. It was easy to predict.Quote:
I’d be reluctant to blow off the British results as nothing much for US Democrats to worry about.
As well you should.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_McGovern#1972_presidential_campai
gn
McGovern ran on a platform that advocated withdrawal from the Vietnam War, the only correct move according to people who weren't liars or ignorant about military strategy. The Vietnam War was the biggest, most obvious fiasco in history, and yet voters let it run. They were thinking that Peace with Honor was just around the corner in Vietnam. That was NOT true.
More than half of all voters in 1972 and more than half today can't understand a fiasco like Vietnam, nor can they understand a fiasco like Afghanistan, nor global warming, nor the Crash of 2008, nor the American healthcare system. The vast majority of voters will reject Presidential candidates such as McGovern, who actually knew in detail how things need to be changed for the better. Instead, they vote for hardcore liars like Nixon who knew nothing.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
People voted for Obama. Twice.
All of those things got worse under his watch.
I think at this point, people don't know what to do and figure that if everybody is going to lie to them everyday at least vote for the guy or gal who tells them the lies they want to hear.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
What does it mean for US Democratic Presidential candidates that UK Labor candidate Jeremy Corbyn led Labor to its biggest defeat in decades? For those of you who haven’t been following closely, Corbyn is no neoliberal shill. He is an unabashed lefty socialist who campaigned on an unabashed lefty socialist platform. No triangulating or “Tory lite” for him. He was out to prove that Labor could win by promising the voters a soaring lefty agenda filled with taxing the rich, taking back control of privatized industries, free college, huge infrastructure spending, more money for health care, and so forth.
The result was a mind-boggling defeat. So what does this tell us about American presidential candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders? Corbyn lost because he was a hard left candidate, and the same thing will happen if Democrats nominate one of their own.
The American and British electorates have voted quite similarly for the past several decades, putting in office Reagan-Clinton-Bush-Obama-Trump as against Thatcher-Blair-Cameron-Boris Johnson. Given the similarities between Boris Johnson and Trump, as well as the obvious salience of immigration politics in both countries, I’d be reluctant to blow off the British results as nothing much for US Democrats to worry about.
It means that Labor chose the wrong hill to die on.
The Labor Party has a big split in it: It consists of young Londoners who like to vacation in the EU and who think of themselves as "world citizens" (as if there was such a thing! Tell me, oh "world citizen", where do you go to VOTE for your "world government"? The notion is idiotic and undemocratic, just like the EU.), and working class people in the north who deeply resent having to compete with poor Poles and other immigrants in a hollowed-out economy. (As a point of comparison, the DNC stopped representing working people a long time ago. )
And just as an FYI, this "world government" agenda is supported by the most anti-labor faction of all: The City of London, (not London, which is a city, but the City of London Corporation, where all the banks are. One square mile of government entirely onto itself, where banks are citizens and even the Queen doesn't rule. https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/pages/default.aspx )
Labor gave voters the wrong choice: FREE SHIT OR SELF RULE. If they had offered both, they would have won in a blowout.
Why did Labor choose this hill to die on? It was entirely unnecessary because it didn't represent their core mission, which is to represent LABOR. (Their name should have reminded them!)
It's like the Democratic Party shoehorning in the socalled "Patriot Act" into a budget resolution: It was entirely unnnecessary and totally voluntary, but for some reason they thought it extremely urgent to shred your Constitutional protections continuously, without even a 15-day gap. Who the fuck were they representing when they did THAT?
Anyway, the irony is that Jeremy Corbyn is apparently personally pro-Brexit, but he was forced to represent the Labor MPs who are a bunch of jackasss and twits.
And there's no guarantee that BoJo will bring in a real Brexit.
*****
There isn't a clear parallel to what's happening in the USA, because the parties don't represent the same things. But there IS an overall dissolution of these large non-democratic multinational governing structures and an overall resurgence of nationalism. And a good thing, too, since we have all only gotten poorer and less free under them, seeing as they really represent transnational banks, transnational financiers, transnational manufacturers and transnational tech companies.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
I'd nuke a BILLION PEOPLE if it would save the other 7 billion from living under Putin. Hell, I might go all the way to the last 100 people on Eart
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. . . in just the past 24 hours the response to the British election results has changed a lot. At first there were a fair number of folks who thought the results might hold a lesson or two for American progressives, but over the course of a few hours most of them seem to have been bullied into adopting the view that, hey, Britain is a different country with its own distinct issues. It’s stupid to think it’s similar in any way to what’s happening in America.
And sure, there’s no question that you should be cautious about blithely drawing parallels. At the same time, come on, folks. Britain and the US are both part of the Anglosphere and have related political cultures. What’s more, if you dive even slightly below the surface there enough specific similarities in our current situations that you really have to put your head in the sand not to notice them. The recent victories of Brexit and Donald Trump were both largely driven by white working-class panic over immigration. Trump and Boris Johnson are both buffoonish, ideologically flexible populists who are allegedly unpopular but who somehow get lots of votes anyway. In both countries, the progressive opposition won nice victories recently and were feeling good. Also in both cases, the progressive opposition has been moving to the left for several years: Jeremy Corbyn may have been a uniquely unlikeable party leader, but it’s hard to deny that at least part of the reason for his big loss is that he ran on a manifesto far to the left of the typical Labour leader. This is exactly the same thing that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are trying to do in the US, and both of them share Corbyn’s rigid distaste for any kind of politically useful weaseling.
So . . . yes, centrist types should be careful not to overstate the lessons we might take from Labour’s loss. But to paraphrase Mark Twain, although America in 2020 might not end up as a repeat of Britain in 2019, it will probably rhyme. It doesn’t do much good to close our eyes and pretend there’s just nothing there.
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/12/america-in-2020-will-probably-r
hyme-with-britain-in-2019/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Selling Keynesianism
In the 1940s and ’50s, the general public understood and agreed upon Keynesian economic principles. Today, we can learn a lot from the popularizing efforts that led to that consensus and long-lasting economic success.
As Marriner S. Eccles, chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1934 to 1948, put it, “as mass production economy has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth . . . to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation’s economic machinery.” In Bowles’s formulation, “the redistribution of income is a subject which many people find distasteful to talk about — much less to do something about. But talk about it and do something about it we must, because this is not a matter of taste; it is a matter of national economic necessity.”
The key point is that businesses will only produce when there is demand for their products, otherwise they will shutter their facilities and lay off their workers. Because high-income people spend a smaller share of their earnings than low-income people do, high levels of income inequality result in lower levels of aggregate demand, the forerunner to recession and unemployment. Bowles demonstrated this logic by taking it to its extreme:
Let us suppose that one percent of the population were to receive 95 percent of our entire national income, with the remaining 5 percent spread among the rest of us. Could our system—could any system—work on that basis? One percent of the people couldn’t possibly consume 95 percent of all the goods and services which the rest of us could produce.
The long-lasting prosperity of the 1940s and ’50s thus owed, in large part, to the fact that the general public broadly understood and agreed upon the economic principle that fast-paced growth and high employment could be achieved on the back of consumer demand, but only if purchasing power was distributed widely enough.
Once armed with this information, the general public went about enforcing it. As Lizabeth Cohen documents in A Consumer’s Republic (2003), labor unions cited the importance of maintaining high demand through widely distributed purchasing power to justify their calls for higher wages. As George Meany, secretary-treasurer of the AFL, put it in 1944, “we have the machinery to build all of the automobiles, all of the radios, washing machines and such things; we have the workers to build all of the houses that we could possibly use. But we will not make those things unless there is purchasing power available to buy them.”
More at http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/robert-manduca-selling-keynes
ianism
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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This is something of a misunderstanding of Keynesianism. He wasn't an advocate of wealth redistribution or even government spending as much as increasing the money supply thru lowered interest rates. It was FDR's economic advisor who believed in "pump priming" thru government spending on public works.
In any case, Keynesianism only works in closed systems, where money supply can be efectively corraled into "an" economy. You can see why this is so by imagining that every USA family gets a $10,000 of "helicopter money" ... money dropped on them by government (deficit spending). What happens to that $10,000? Well, some will be spent on goods and services provided by the USA economy leading to an increase in jobs at home, but much will be spent on goods imported from abroad: consumer electronics and housewares manufactured in China; clothes from Haiti, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines; leather goods from Bangladesh etc. So money distributed in the USA would only partially increase jobs in the USA.
Keynes eventually took up the issue of TRADE IMBALANCES. He was NOT a believer of "free trade" but tried to achieve a system where international trade was regulated to eliminate these trade imbalances. This is not the system that we have today, nor i it the one espoused by the proponents of MMT (which is not Keynsianism).
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
I'd nuke a BILLION PEOPLE if it would save the other 7 billion from living under Putin. Hell, I might go all the way to the last 100 people on Earth to keep this planet from being under fascist rule.- WISHIMAY
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Sounds to me like every dollar you own is like stock in a company that is constantly being split, but you're not getting that split and they're giving it to somebody else.
Makes it even worse when you realize that we're just giving it away to places like the Ukraine.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Alex Jones' Sandy Hook deposition
Alex Jones performs live on radio and online three hours a day, five days a week, and two hours on Sundays. Sometimes more. A relentlessly ranting, blustering figure, by turns entertaining, frightening, even mesmerizing, the outrageousness of his claims is only exceeded by the certitude of his delivery and the promise to his more credulous viewers and listeners that what he is delivering is the real deal, the hidden truth behind the lies of the globalists, the deep state and the mainstream media.
It has made what was once a late-night Austin cable access novelty act into the most famous conspiracy theorist on earth.
But to watch the video of his recent three-hour deposition in one of the Sandy Hook lawsuits arrayed against him is to see that persona and its pretensions come undone and to understand how his tangling with the parents of those children whose tragic deaths in the school shooting that occurred seven years ago Saturday — and that he tauntingly denied — could be his InfoWars empire's undoing.
"I cannot emphasize enough how much this man is not taking these lawsuits seriously and has refused to do any preparation to testify," Brooke Binkowski, former managing editor of the fact-checking site Snopes, who is an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the Sandy Hook cases, tweeted after Jones' Nov. 26 deposition, which she attended. "It's an absolute train wreck and honestly gratifying to watch, but the disrespect to the Sandy Hook parents is palpable."
On Dec. 14, 2012, 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot and killed 20 first graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. He also killed his mother and himself.
As Houston attorney Mark Bankston, representing Sandy Hook parents in four suits in Austin against Jones and his InfoWars operation, on Nov. 26 methodically asked Jones to explain how he came to report that tragedy as a hoax supposedly orchestrated as a pretext to crack down on gun rights, a subdued Jones seemed mostly befuddled.
Forty-four times he answered, "I don't remember;" 51 times, "I don't know."
Absent his gravelly and ferocious on-air growls, the various "anomalies" that Jones said made him suspicious of events at Sandy Hook, as recounted one by one by Bankston in the quietude of the deposition room, sounded ridiculous.
Jones' deposition, and those of three InfoWars associates, became public Thursday when they were filed in a Travis County court by Bankston in the case of Neil Heslin, the father of slain 6-year-old Jesse Lewis.
Bankston also filed a 49-page motion asking state District Judge Scott Jenkins, who is presiding over four Sandy Hook suits, to order a default judgment holding Jones and InfoWars liable without even requiring a jury trial, except to determine the size of the damages, as a consequence of what he contends is their flagrant refusal or inability to seriously answer questions.
More at www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/in-alex-jones-sandy-hook-deposition-a-person
a-undone/ar-AAK82Ea
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:What did Keynes really intend to be the key message of the General Theory? My answer is, that’s a question for the biographers and the intellectual historians; I won’t quite say I don’t care, but it’s surely not the most important thing. There’s an old story about a museum visitor who examined a portrait of George Washington and asked a guard whether he really looked like that. The guard answered, “That’s the way he looks now.” That’s more or less how I feel about Keynes. What matters is what we make of Keynes, not what he “really” meant.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
This is something of a misunderstanding of Keynesianism. He wasn't an advocate of wealth redistribution or even government spending as much as increasing the money supply thru lowered interest rates. It was FDR's economic advisor who believed in "pump priming" thru government spending on public works.
www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/keynes_and_the_moderns.pdf
Krugman didn't stop there: I’d divide Keynes readers into two types: Chapter 12ers and Book One-ers. Chapter 12 is, of course, the wonderful, brilliant chapter on long-term expectations, with its acute observations on investor psychology, its analogies to beauty contests, and more. Its essential message is that investment decisions must be made in the face of radical uncertainty to which there is no rational answer, and that the conventions men use to pretend that they know what they are doing are subject to occasional drastic revisions, giving rise to economic instability. What Chapter 12ers insist is that this is the real message of Keynes, that all those who have invoked the great man’s name on behalf of quasi-equilibrium models that push this insight into the background, from John Hicks to Paul Samuelson to Mike Woodford, have violated his true legacy.
Book One-ers, by contrast, see Keynesian economics as being essentially about the refutation of Say’s Law, about the possibility of a general shortfall in demand.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Bankston also filed a 49-page motion asking state District Judge Scott Jenkins, who is presiding over four Sandy Hook suits, to order a default judgment holding Jones and InfoWars liable without even requiring a jury trial, except to determine the size of the damages, as a consequence of what he contends is their flagrant refusal or inability to seriously answer questions.
Tough shit. We do trial by jury here in America. Democrats haven't turned us into China yet.
What damages? The only damages I see are that he pretty much destroyed his own internet presence. He didn't drag anybody's name through the mud except for his own and anybody associated with Info Wars.
I'd ask you to name one single person living or dead involved in Sandy Hook, but I know you'll just Google it.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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The Party That Ruined the Planet: Republican climate denial is even scarier than Trumpism.
. . . A new federal report finds that climate change in the Arctic is accelerating, matching what used to be considered worst-case scenarios. And there are indications that Arctic warming may be turning into a self-reinforcing spiral, as the thawing tundra itself releases vast quantities of greenhouse gases.
Catastrophic sea-level rise, heat waves that make major population centers uninhabitable, and more are now looking more likely than not, and sooner rather than later. . . .
[There are lots of reasons for this,] but one factor stands out above all others: the fanatical opposition of America’s Republicans, who are the world’s only major climate-denialist party. Because of this opposition, the United States hasn’t just failed to provide the kind of leadership that would have been essential to global action, it has become a force against action.
And Republican climate denial is rooted in the same kind of depravity that we’re seeing with regard to Trump.
As I’ve written in the past, climate denial was in many ways the crucible for Trumpism. Long before the cries of “fake news,” Republicans were refusing to accept science that contradicted their prejudices. Long before Republicans began attributing every negative development to the machinations of the “deep state,” they were insisting that global warming was a gigantic hoax perpetrated by a vast global cabal of corrupt scientists.
And long before Trump began weaponizing the power of the presidency for political gain, Republicans were using their political power to harass climate scientists and, where possible, criminalize the practice of science itself.
Perhaps not surprisingly, some of those responsible for these abuses are now ensconced in the Trump administration. Notably, Ken Cuccinelli, who as attorney general of Virginia engaged in a long witch-hunt against the climate scientist Michael Mann, is now at the Department of Homeland Security, where he pushes anti-immigrant policies with, as The Times reports, “little concern for legal restraints.”
But why have Republicans become the party of climate doom? Money is an important part of the answer: In the current cycle Republicans have received 97 percent of political contributions from the coal industry, 88 percent from oil and gas. And this doesn’t even count the wing nut welfare offered by institutions supported by the Koch brothers and other fossil-fuel moguls.
However, I don’t believe that it’s just about the money. My sense is that right-wingers believe, probably correctly, that there’s a sort of halo effect surrounding any form of public action. Once you accept that we need policies to protect the environment, you’re more likely to accept the idea that we should have policies to ensure access to health care, child care, and more. So the government must be prevented from doing anything good, lest it legitimize a broader progressive agenda.
Still, whatever the short-term political incentives, it takes a special kind of depravity to respond to those incentives by denying facts, embracing insane conspiracy theories and putting the very future of civilization at risk.
Unfortunately, that kind of depravity isn’t just present in the modern Republican Party, it has effectively taken over the whole institution. There used to be at least some Republicans with principles; as recently as 2008 Senator John McCain co-sponsored serious climate-change legislation. But those people have either experienced total moral collapse (hello, Senator Graham) or left the party.
The truth is that even now I don’t fully understand how things got this bad. But the reality is clear: Modern Republicans are irredeemable, devoid of principle or shame. And there is, as I said, no reason to believe that this will change even if Trump is defeated next year.
The only way that either American democracy or a livable planet can survive is if the Republican Party as it now exists is effectively dismantled and replaced with someth
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You mistake dimocrits' words for actions. Words don't matter. They're just so much - hot air.
HA HA!
And let me point out for at least the 30th time, the only president who measurably reduced greenhouse gas emissions wasn't Obama. It was dubya, and he did by crashing the economy.
And btw, if you think anybody on the dimocrtitc campaign trail is going to measurably change our emissions, yer looney.*
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
* Well, OK - Sanders and Gabbard might. But the dimocratic apparatus is going to be passive aggressive about it the whole way, where they wouldn't be actively torpedoing them, like it is on the campaign trail.
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In 2019 can we stop pretending that all Republicans deny climate change and that Democrats have ever done a fucking thing to fix it or even slow it down.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:What I think is really funny is that SECOND - who pretends to be all about "the numbers" - is suddenly number-averse when it comes to the dimocrat's record, in numbers.
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
You mistake dimocrits' words for actions. Words don't matter. They're just so much - hot air.
HA HA!
And let me point out for at least the 30th time, the only president who measurably reduced greenhouse gas emissions wasn't Obama. It was dubya, and he did by crashing the economy.
And btw, if you think anybody on the dimocrtitc campaign trail is going to measurably change our emissions, yer looney.*
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
* Well, OK - Sanders and Gabbard might. But the dimocratic apparatus is going to be passive aggressive about it the whole way, where they wouldn't be actively torpedoing them, like it is on the campaign trail.
Wealth inequality by the numbers? Something that SECOND strenuously avoids!
Carbon dioxide emissions, by the numbers? MORE numbers that SECOND avoids!
Budget deficit? Homelessness? Manufacturing output? EVEN MORE numbers that SECOND avoids!
It seems to me that the person who avoids looking at numbers (because they tell him a story that doesn't fit his narrative) is SECOND.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
I'd nuke a BILLION PEOPLE if it would save the other 7 billion from living under Putin. Hell, I might go all the way to the last 100 people on Earth to keep this planet from being under fascist rule.- WISHIMAY
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Quote:1kiki, the US decreased its carbon emissions by hundreds of millions of tons because it switched from coal to natural gas. Trump promised to switch it back, but that didn't work because natural gas is cheaper. As usual, you don't know a damn thing.
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
You mistake dimocrits' words for actions. Words don't matter. They're just so much - hot air.
HA HA!
And let me point out for at least the 30th time, the only president who measurably reduced greenhouse gas emissions wasn't Obama. It was dubya, and he did by crashing the economy.
And btw, if you think anybody on the dimocrtitc campaign trail is going to measurably change our emissions, yer looney.*
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
* Well, OK - Sanders and Gabbard might. But the dimocratic apparatus is going to be passive aggressive about it the whole way, where they wouldn't be actively torpedoing them, like it is on the campaign trail.
www.eesi.org/articles/view/u.s.-leads-in-greenhouse-gas-reductions-but
-some-states-are-falling-behind
By the way, the President does not have the power to lower carbon emissions because the Congress never gave that power to a President, unlike Congress giving the President the power to lower or raise tariffs. President Sanders can't do what Congress won't give him the power or the money to do. Which brings us back around to the GOP denying that too much waste carbon in the atmosphere is a problem needing solving.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:Hello Signym. All those numbers you are talking about? The President doesn't control those numbers. It's guys like me, the top 0.1%, that control America's economy, manufacturing output, jobs, the stock market, even how much is spent on defense. Eisenhower famously warned about the Military-Industrial Complex getting rich by selling hugely overpriced weapons. H-bombs, subs, and aircraft carriers will make you richer faster than making anything else. And that is why America has too many H-bombs and not enough of other things.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:What I think is really funny is that SECOND - who pretends to be all about "the numbers" - is suddenly number-averse when it comes to the dimocrat's record, in numbers.
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
You mistake dimocrits' words for actions. Words don't matter. They're just so much - hot air.
HA HA!
And let me point out for at least the 30th time, the only president who measurably reduced greenhouse gas emissions wasn't Obama. It was dubya, and he did by crashing the economy.
And btw, if you think anybody on the dimocrtitc campaign trail is going to measurably change our emissions, yer looney.*
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
* Well, OK - Sanders and Gabbard might. But the dimocratic apparatus is going to be passive aggressive about it the whole way, where they wouldn't be actively torpedoing them, like it is on the campaign trail.
Wealth inequality by the numbers? Something that SECOND strenuously avoids!
Carbon dioxide emissions, by the numbers? MORE numbers that SECOND avoids!
Budget deficit? Homelessness? Manufacturing output? EVEN MORE numbers that SECOND avoids!
It seems to me that the person who avoids looking at numbers (because they tell him a story that doesn't fit his narrative) is SECOND.
www.history.com/topics/21st-century/military-industrial-complex
The American medical profession copied the weapon-builders' overpricing: A CT scan costs $1,100 in the US — and $140 in Holland. America’s health care prices problem, in four charts.
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/17/21024614/us-health-care-cos
ts-medical-prices
Congress can bribe people like me into doing what Congress wants, but the important word is bribe. Being asked politely to patriotically do what is best won't work with people driven to accumulate large sums of money. You know where talking works more powerfully than money? In American science fiction, particularly "The Expanse". Sci-fi is probably where Americans get the idea that the President controls, not the rich.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(TV_series)
What “The Expanse” Can Teach About Macroeconomics!
www.nytimes.com/2019/12/18/opinion/the-macroeconomics-of-the-expanse.h
tml
Earth appears to be suffering from mass technological unemployment. Half the population is unemployed and living on Basic, which apparently consists of in-kind provision of housing, food, and other necessities. (Kind of like a global version of Trump’s idea of replacing food stamps with food boxes.)
But are robots really the problem? For the first three seasons, Mars stands in stark contrast. It’s a mobilized, full-employment society where everyone is working either on supporting a military strong enough to stand up to Earth or on the long-term goal of terraforming the planet, making it suitable for humans.
Over the course of Season Three, however, the cold war was (mostly) resolved, while the protomolecule (don’t ask) seemed to have opened access to hundreds of habitable planets, making terraforming Mars seem pointless. And in Season Four, Martian society is in deep trouble. Unemployment is rife thanks to the winding down of both military spending and terraforming, with some ex-military Martians who can’t find jobs turning to crime.
So, my question: If Earth has mass unemployment because robo
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Soundz like a great show! I will woc it.
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DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.7532020.com .
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Quote:The Expanse has 46 episodes, so far. Maybe Firefly would have 46 if Amazon Prime had been financing the show in 2002, rather than FOX.
Originally posted by JO753:
Soundz like a great show! I will woc it.
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DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.7532020.com .
www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B018BZ3SCM/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Odd coinsidens - Saw a commercial for The Expanse today.
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DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.7532020.com .
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Voter Suppression By GOP Isn’t Enough Anymore
From Justin Clark, a top adviser to Donald Trump’s reelection campaign:
Traditionally it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes in places. Let’s start protecting our voters. We know where they are….Let’s start playing offense a little bit. That’s what you’re going to see in 2020. It’s going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program.
Naturally Clark tried to pretend he hadn’t said what he said, but a recording of the entire conversation makes it clear that, in fact, he said what he said. And who knows what this much bigger, more aggressive program for 2020 might be? Whatever it is, I’m sure it will be entirely on the up and up.
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/12/quote-of-the-day-voter-suppress
ion-isnt-enough-anymore/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Uh huh.
Can you whiny little bitches possibly cry anymore?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Two years ago, US president Donald Trump signed into law a sweeping tax cut dubbed “a mighty fine Christmas gift.”
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Uh huh.
Can you whiny little bitches possibly cry anymore?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
The law’s opponents insisted it was a massive giveaway to the super rich — one that would make the federal deficit skyrocket. Who was right?
The early data doesn’t look good for Trump’s top legislative achievement.
“We saw a short-term boost to output and investment that really seems to have largely dissipated. GDP is growing more slowly and investment is actually shrinking over the past two quarters,” said Ben Page, an economist at the non-partisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. “There’s almost no evidence for a big inflow of foreign capital.”
In the meantime, the government now estimates it will lose $600 billion more in tax revenues than it initially thought, bringing the cut’s total cost to $1.6 trillion. Boosting the deficit while the economy is growing and at a late stage in its cycle is irresponsible, Page argues. “Usually at the peak of the economic cycle, that should be when deficits are at their lowest,” he said. “The economy is not going to grow forever, and at that point deficits will boom…stimulus policy will be needed. That’s one of the worries about running those deficits when times are relatively good.”
Big companies are having a field day — with FedEx coming to exemplify corporate America’s response to the cut. The firm’s CEO lobbied hard for the bill on the premise that mass investment by businesses would follow. It then became one of 91 companies, including Amazon and IBM, whose effective tax rates dropped to zero in 2018 — in Fedex’s case, from 34% the year before. The company then cut its capital spending in both 2018 and 2019.
Even those who argued for a big cut are struggling to find enthusiasm for the law. “I don’t think I’m disappointed — I’m just saying don’t give up on the TCJA just yet,” said Aparna Mathur, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. She argued it could take 5 to 7 years before seeing its full effects. Or maybe never will Trump’s promised benefits appear.
https://qz.com/1769421/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:You think this is some sort of revelation? Gee, I could have predicted this. In fact I DID predict this.
SIX:
Uh huh.Can you whiny little bitches possibly cry anymore?
SECONDRATE, WITH HIS USUAL POO: Two years ago, US president Donald Trump signed into law a sweeping tax cut dubbed “a mighty fine Christmas gift.”
The law’s opponents insisted it was a massive giveaway to the super rich — one that would make the federal deficit skyrocket. Who was right?
The early data doesn’t look good for Trump’s top legislative achievement.
“We saw a short-term boost to output and investment that really seems to have largely dissipated. GDP is growing more slowly and investment is actually shrinking over the past two quarters,” said Ben Page, an economist at the non-partisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. “There’s almost no evidence for a big inflow of foreign capital.”
In the meantime, the government now estimates it will lose $600 billion more in tax revenues than it initially thought, bringing the cut’s total cost to $1.6 trillion. Boosting the deficit while the economy is growing and at a late stage in its cycle is irresponsible, Page argues. “Usually at the peak of the economic cycle, that should be when deficits are at their lowest,” he said. “The economy is not going to grow forever, and at that point deficits will boom…stimulus policy will be needed. That’s one of the worries about running those deficits when times are relatively good.”
Big companies are having a field day — with FedEx coming to exemplify corporate America’s response to the cut. The firm’s CEO lobbied hard for the bill on the premise that mass investment by businesses would follow. It then became one of 91 companies, including Amazon and IBM, whose effective tax rates dropped to zero in 2018 — in Fedex’s case, from 34% the year before. The company then cut its capital spending in both 2018 and 2019.
Even those who argued for a big cut are struggling to find enthusiasm for the law. “I don’t think I’m disappointed — I’m just saying don’t give up on the TCJA just yet,” said Aparna Mathur, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. She argued it could take 5 to 7 years before seeing its full effects. Or maybe never will Trump’s promised benefits appear.
https://qz.com/1769421/
I posted, more than once, that in order to create a manufacturing renaissance Trump would HAVE to do more than tariff incoming goods, repatriate money from abroad with tax cuts, and cross his fingers. I would call tariffs and capital necessary but not sufficient
Trump would have to literally direct investment to steel, chemicals, clothing, chips, energy distribution, infrastructure, consumer electronics, and all of those goods that might be considered critical or which cause a huge drain on our trade balance. Because without those directives, the companies will do what they usually do with spare cash: buy back their own shares, speculate in hedge funds, and give themselves giant bonuses. Unfortunately for Trump he believes in capitalism and assumes that TPTB want to make money by making things instead of thru financialism. He has a libertarian POV, which (so far) has never worked to explain or fix anything.
So ... why are you posting this? Do you think it would sway anyone here from Trump? I still prefer him over anyone except Tulsi Gabbard.
when will the DIMS get onboard with some sort of realistic plan to create a self-sufficient economy that DOESN'T kowtow to big business and that DOESN'T plan onautomating everything? The economy is supposed to be working for us, not the other way around.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
I'd nuke a BILLION PEOPLE if it would save the other 7 billion from living under Putin. Hell, I might go all the way to the last 100 people on Earth to keep this planet from being under fascist rule.- WISHIMAY
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The Cruelty Is the Point
President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear. October 3, 2018
The Museum of African-American History and Culture is in part a catalog of cruelty. Amid all the stories of perseverance, tragedy, and unlikely triumph are the artifacts of inhumanity and barbarism: the child-size slave shackles, the bright red robes of the wizards of the Ku Klux Klan, the recordings of civil-rights protesters being brutalized by police.
The artifacts that persist in my memory, the way a bright flash does when you close your eyes, are the photographs of lynchings. But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. There’s the photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, in which a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend. There’s the undated photo from Duluth, Minnesota, in which grinning white men stand next to the mutilated, half-naked bodies of two men lashed to a post in the street—one of the white men is straining to get into the picture, his smile cutting from ear to ear. There’s the photo of a crowd of white men huddled behind the smoldering corpse of a man burned to death; one of them is wearing a smart suit, a fedora hat, and a bright smile.
Their names have mostly been lost to time. But these grinning men were someone’s brother, son, husband, father. They were human beings, people who took immense pleasure in the utter cruelty of torturing others to death—and were so proud of doing so that they posed for photographs with their handiwork, jostling to ensure they caught the eye of the lens, so that the world would know they’d been there. Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another.
The Trump era is such a whirlwind of cruelty that it can be hard to keep track. This week alone, the news broke that the Trump administration was seeking to ethnically cleanse more than 193,000 American children of immigrants whose temporary protected status had been revoked by the administration, that the Department of Homeland Security had lied about creating a database of children that would make it possible to unite them with the families the Trump administration had arbitrarily destroyed, that the White House was considering a blanket ban on visas for Chinese students, and that it would deny visas to the same-sex partners of foreign officials. At a rally in Mississippi, a crowd of Trump supporters cheered as the president mocked Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who has said that Brett Kavanaugh, whom Trump has nominated to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, attempted to rape her when she was a teenager. “Lock her up!” they shouted.
Ford testified to the Senate, utilizing her professional expertise to describe the encounter, that one of the parts of the incident she remembered most was Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge laughing at her as Kavanaugh fumbled at her clothing. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” Ford said, referring to the part of the brain that processes emotion and memory, “the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.” And then at Tuesday’s rally, the president made his supporters laugh at her.
Even those who believe that Ford fabricated her account, or was mistaken in its details, can see that the president’s mocking of her testimony renders all sexual-assault survivors collateral damage. Anyone afraid of coming forward, afraid that she would not be believed, can now look to the president to see her fears realized. Once malice is embraced as a virtue, it is impossible to contain.
The cruelty of the Trump administration’s policies, and the ritual rhetorical flaying of his targets before his supporters, are intimately connected. As Lili Loofbourow wrote of the Kavanaugh incident in Slate, adolescent male cruelty toward women is a bon
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You haven't managed to disprove a single thing Signy posted.
Why do you think anyone should bother reading anything you post if you can't use logic on facts, and instead have to rely on an ever-shifting gish-gallop of nothings?
FLIES SHIT.
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Why Fascism is the Wave of the Future
From 25 years back: 7 April 1994
Neither the moderate Right nor the moderate Left even recognises, let alone offers any solution for, the central problem of our days: the completely unprecedented personal economic insecurity of working people, from industrial workers and white-collar clerks to medium-high managers. None of them are poor and they therefore cannot benefit from the more generous welfare payments that the moderate Left is inclined to offer. Nor are they particularly envious of the rich, and they therefore tend to be uninterested in redistribution. Few of them are actually unemployed, and they are therefore unmoved by Republican/Tory promises of more growth and more jobs through the magic of the unfettered market: what they want is security in the jobs they already have – i.e. precisely what unfettered markets threaten.
A vast political space is thus left vacant by the Republican/Tory non-sequitur, on the one hand, and moderate Left particularism and assistentialism, on the other. That was the space briefly occupied in the USA by the 1992 election-year caprices of Ross Perot. And that is the space that remains wide open for a product-improved Fascist party, dedicated to the enhancement of the personal economic security of the broad masses of (mainly) white-collar working people. Such a party could even be as free of racism as Mussolini’s original was until the alliance with Hitler, because its real stock in trade would be corporativist restraints on corporate Darwinism, and delaying globalisation. It is not necessary to know how to spell Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft to recognise the Fascist predisposition engendered by today’s turbocharged capitalism.
More at www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n07/edward-luttwak/why-fascism-is-the-wave
-of-the-future
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Public company CEOs heavily favor Republicans.
Researchers at Harvard Law School and Tel Aviv University found that CEOs of the 1,500 largest US public companies donate “disproportionately more” to the Republican party and its candidates, with the median CEO directing 75% of his or her political contributions to Republicans. They also found that Republican-leaning CEOs lead companies with almost twice the asset value of companies led by Democratic-leaning executives.
The study looked at campaign contributions by more than 3,800 CEOs of S&P 1500 companies between 2000 and 2017. To be classified as “Republican” or “Democratic,” at least two-thirds of the executive’s donations had to go to either party; otherwise they were classified as “neutral.” Overall, roughly 57% of the CEOs were classified as Republicans, and about 19% as Democrats.
The researchers also looked at how CEO political preferences differ by geography, based on the location of the company headquarters. In the Northeast and in the West, Republican CEOs outnumber Democratic CEOs by less than 2-to-1, while Republican CEOs are about seven times as numerous as Democratic CEOs in both the Midwest and South.
Indeed, the Republican tilt was evident in all regions and sectors. The industries with the strongest Republican preference were the energy, manufacturing, and chemical sectors.
More at https://qz.com/work/1772370/
The Politics of CEOs
Journal of Legal Analysis, Vol. 11, 2019, pp.1-45
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3355690
2. THE POLICY STAKES
This section discusses the importance of the political preferences of CEOs for public policy and politics. The CEOs of S&P 1500 companies are a very small group, numbering less than 0.001 percent of U.S. voters. However, as this section explains, public-company CEOs are likely to have a disproportionate influence over American policymaking and politics, and understanding their political preferences is therefore important for understanding the inner dynamics of the U.S. democracy.
Although public companies represent only 0.06 percent of the total number of U.S. firms, they account for 31.3 percent of private-sector employment, 41.3 percent of sales, and 51.1 percent of pretax profits. As key decision-makers within their firms, CEOs thus preside over a significant portion of the nation’s economy. Their decisions can have an enormous impact on jobs, wealth, tax revenues, and even the social fabric of local communities. These facts naturally make public-company CEOs important agents in the economy. Most importantly for the purposes of this article, however, their positions enable CEOs to influence policymaking and politics through two important channels.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The Cruelty Is the Point
It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.
Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.
More at www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572
104/
Wow and Damn - so well written and so accurate. I am reminded of that quick video clip of Trump with Epstein at a party as they discussed women dancing. It was very buddy buddy, kids having a laugh at the expense of others. Of course that's not where those thoughts end. Reducing people to things for your amusement while feeling completely untouchable and unrepentant, that is got to be one heck of a power trip.
I am also reminded of another Atlantic writer that summarized a lot of Putin's behavior as "an immature sense of masculinity." You can see that in Trump supporters and political allies, so it's not hard to see why Trump and Putin get along so well.
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Medicare-for-all
Ezra Klein said:
If you really dig into what is happening in this debate there are two different views of what the constraint is on political change. One version is more or less the one that we are articulating here: public opinion constraint — people don’t like change and that dislike is catalyzed by campaigns run by insurance companies and Republicans.
But there’s the more left view that the public is led by elites. And the problem is really that it’s people like Paul Krugman and Ezra Klein making these arguments, saying that people have this small-c conservatism. If every elite was actually onboard Medicare-for-all, then people wouldn’t be afraid anymore. This side believes that public opinion is only a constraint insofar as it reflects where elite opinion already is. I’m curious how you parse that argument.
Paul Krugman said:
It’s hard to test. But polling says that a public buy-in to Medicare is very popular, but a replacement of private insurance that is not voluntary is not nearly as popular. How many people in all of that do you think are really taking their cues from me or you?
The international evidence is that it’s just very hard for to make radical changes in social programs. The shape of them tends to be fixed for a really long time. US Social Security is widely held up as a role model of doing it right because we got it right at a time when things were still pretty amorphous and uninformed. On the other hand, our health care system is a mess because of decisions we made around the same time that left us with bad stuff entrenched in the system.
So, I think the notion that this whole thing is extremely plastic — that if only the big shots would line up behind radical change, then the public would come around behind it as well — is a hell of a risky bet.
More at www.vox.com/podcasts/2019/12/26/21011830/paul-krugman-obam-climate-med
icare-robots-single-payer-andrew-yang
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Trump’s economic policy is basically a lefty one:
From trade to spending, from the Federal Reserve to paid parental leave, Trump has embraced policy changes that historically are more in line with the approach of Democrats — establishing a forceful role for government in setting the terms of the economy — than of Republicans.
….On trade, Trump has reached a “phase one” trade deal with China that reportedly includes promises to buy far more in U.S. exports. He has completed a revamp of the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada that some liberals are cheering for labor protections and pharmaceutical policies. Trump co-opted a demand from the left to urge the Fed to cut interest rates despite the relatively strong economy, a position the central bank ultimately adopted after seeing signs the economic expansion might waver.
The president has blown away traditional GOP concerns over the rising federal deficit, cutting bipartisan deals to expand government spending and even extend a new paid-leave benefit to the federal workforce. He unilaterally implemented a farm bailout that could prove more expensive than the auto bailout was a decade ago — a move that conservatives had criticized as wasting taxpayer dollars.
Not everything Trump has done is out of the lefty playbook. Progressives favor trade deals with stronger labor and environmental protections, for example, but they don’t generally favor massive trade wars that are mostly aimed at reducing trade deficits. At the same time, conservatives don’t favor massive trade wars either. For the most part, Trump’s trade policy is purely born out of his own id.
More at www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/12/donald-trump-is-a-keynesian/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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No matter how loud or organized they have been in the past couple of years, Democrats and progressives are still conforming to a historic pattern; they are more politically energized when they are obviously losing. Democrats are a movement of losers—a movement that has practically forgotten what winning means. The Democratic national leadership of the last thirty years has embodied this. The likes of Joe Biden and Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer seem actually averse to defeating Republicans. Unlike their opponents, they don’t appear to think that the job of Team Blue is to take on the other side as forcefully as possible. On the contrary: to this day, they apparently believe that the very idea of a Team Blue is distasteful and that Democrats should, whenever possible, bolster the GOP’s standing as a good-faith party with goals and principles as valid as their own. Their core mission is to practice a ceremonial innocence about the unshakable virtue of American conservatism—and to do so even as the worst, full of passionate intensity, are cleaning their clocks.
Recall, for example, the 2016 nomination of Merrick Garland to fill the Supreme Court seat that had been held by Justice Scalia. A sixty-three-year-old centrist, Garland was the most elderly and GOP-friendly candidate that President Obama could have chosen. When the Republican Senate, led by Mitch McConnell, announced that it would block any nominee, Obama lamented that it “defies the Constitution, defies logic.” He added, “I understand the posture they’re taking right now. I get the politics of it, I’m sure they’re under enormous pressure from their base and their constituencies around this issue. I’ve talked to many of them, and I’ve told them I’m sympathetic.” As late as July 2018, Schumer, the Senate minority leader, advised President Trump to renominate Garland “as a way to unify the country.” After McConnell learned of Schumer’s advice, @TeamMitch (an official Twitter account of the senator) posted a GIF that showed Michael Jordan rocking with laughter. Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh.
When ordinary people are emptying their wallets, getting arrested, and putting their careers on hold to fight for the Democrats’ cause, the least they expect of the well-paid professional politicians they have worked to elect is that they will conduct themselves with equal determination and will side with them, not Republicans. Republican politicians, some Democratic officials seem not to grasp, are not guys in a bar with opinions different from your own. They are people who have chosen to devote their lives to undermining the core interests of your supporters and their families and communities. When Representative Peter King, a Republican from Long Island and a loud Trump fan, recently announced his retirement, he was lauded by Schumer for being “principled” and having “stood head & shoulders above everyone else.” If the Democratic Party is to remain viable, that kind of thing has to stop.
Joe Biden, like so many other Democratic leaders of a certain age, possesses sensibilities, strategic instincts, and values shaped by decades of losing ground to the GOP. He asserts that, once Trump is gone, Republicans will have an “epiphany” and discover inner moral resources. You could call Biden and his ilk Charlie Brown Democrats. They believe, against all the available evidence, that Lucy van Pelt, from the GOP, will one day let them kick the football. This generation of whiffers views Republican dominance as natural and, ultimately, acceptable. That won’t cut it.
More at www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/12/19/no-more-nice-democrats/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by captaincrunch:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The Cruelty Is the Point
It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.
Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.
More at www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572
104/
Wow and Damn - so well written and so accurate. I am reminded of that quick video clip of Trump with Epstein at a party as they discussed women dancing. It was very buddy buddy, kids having a laugh at the expense of others. Of course that's not where those thoughts end. Reducing people to things for your amusement while feeling completely untouchable and unrepentant, that is got to be one heck of a power trip.
I am also reminded of another Atlantic writer that summarized a lot of Putin's behavior as "an immature sense of masculinity." You can see that in Trump supporters and political allies, so it's not hard to see why Trump and Putin get along so well.
Uh huh. That's completely one sided. lol
Watch any of the Antifa protests on the streets of Portland or the college campus riots and tell me who's enjoying the suffering of others. Hell, just look at Wishy's posts here. No need to leave your house.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:You must not hang out with Trump lovers for hours, make that days, at a time like I do. (I am an undercover Democrat.) The conversations about killing queers, niggers, Mexskins and that fuckin' Nancy Pelosi I find highly entertaining. And please don't mention Jew Soros because then the talk gets really angry and crazy. (I'll start laughing at how out-of-their-minds crazy these Trump lovers are and that will ruin my cover.) But that is how East Texas Trump lovers are.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Uh huh. That's completely one sided. lol
Watch any of the Antifa protests on the streets of Portland or the college campus riots and tell me who's enjoying the suffering of others. Hell, just look at Wishy's posts here. No need to leave your house.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
"Poll: Almost a third of US voters think a second civil war is coming soon" June 2018
www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2018/06/27/civil-war-l
ikely-voters-say-rasmussen-poll/740731002/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You must not hang out with Trump lovers for hours, make that days, at a time like I do. (I am an undercover Democrat.) The conversations about killing queers, niggers, Mexskins and that fuckin' Nancy Pelosi I find highly entertaining. And please don't mention Jew Soros because then the talk gets really angry and crazy. (I'll start laughing at how out-of-their-minds crazy these Trump lovers are and that will ruin my cover.) But that is how East Texas Trump lovers are.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Uh huh. That's completely one sided. lol
Watch any of the Antifa protests on the streets of Portland or the college campus riots and tell me who's enjoying the suffering of others. Hell, just look at Wishy's posts here. No need to leave your house.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
"Poll: Almost a third of US voters think a second civil war is coming soon" June 2018
www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2018/06/27/civil-war-l
ikely-voters-say-rasmussen-poll/740731002/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
OK. Sure.
When, exactly, are you an undercover Democrat?
Would it be when you are firing all of your non-Democrat employees for their political beliefs?
Nobody I know goes around talking about wishing death on other people, let alone committing the act themselves.
Honestly, the only two that I know who do that are right here in the RWED. It's you and Wishy.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:It is impossible to get to know a Trump lover well if you are reminding them that they are dishonest, lazy ignoramuses with far too many misunderstandings about simple things such as smoking causes cancer and drinking causes liver damage and adultery causes divorce and stealing from me will get them a felony conviction.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
OK. Sure.
When, exactly, are you an undercover Democrat?
Would it be when you are firing all of your non-Democrat employees for their political beliefs?
Nobody I know goes around talking about wishing death on other people, let alone committing the act themselves.
Honestly, the only two that I know who do that are right here in the RWED. It's you and Wishy.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Maybe Trump lovers you know aren't as bad as the ones I know, the ones who believe that if they haven't been convicted they haven't done anything wrong, kind of like Dear 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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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:It is impossible to get to know a Trump lover well if you are reminding them that they are dishonest, lazy ignoramuses with far too many misunderstandings about simple things such as smoking causes cancer and drinking causes liver damage and adultery causes divorce and stealing from me will get them a felony conviction.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
OK. Sure.
When, exactly, are you an undercover Democrat?
Would it be when you are firing all of your non-Democrat employees for their political beliefs?
Nobody I know goes around talking about wishing death on other people, let alone committing the act themselves.
Honestly, the only two that I know who do that are right here in the RWED. It's you and Wishy.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Maybe Trump lovers you know aren't as bad as the ones I know, the ones who believe that if they haven't been convicted they haven't done anything wrong, kind of like Dear Donald Trump.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
To be honest, I don't even know any Trump "lovers".
60+ Million people voted for him, and 60+ Million people are going to vote for him again. I seriously doubt there are a huge number of people who are in love with the guy though. I think the amount of people that go around wearing MAGA hats is pretty low too. I've actually never seen anyone wear one in real life.
I'm pretty sure on the flip side, there's not really any Democrats who are in "love" with any of the Democrat candidates either. Except maybe some Socialist lefties who are for Sanders and Tim Pool who's head over heels for Gabbard.
I'd imagine most people who vote for Trump are doing so because the alternative is just so amazingly awful.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Biden is an Idiot: Democratic contender Biden says he would consider a Republican running mate
Joe Biden, a leading contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, said on Monday he would consider choosing a Republican running mate if he is the party’s nominee next year. “But I can’t think of one right now.” In the primary, I am not voting for fucking moron Biden. He can't even decide what side he is on ... D? Or R?
www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-biden/democratic-contender-bid
en-says-he-would-consider-a-republican-running-mate-idUSKBN1YZ025
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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To be fair, Biden doesn't even remember what he ate for dinner tonight.
That's your front-runner.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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What Should The Distribution Of Wealth Be?
A 2011 survey by Michael Norton and Dan Ariely, of Harvard’s Business School, found that the average American thinks the richest 25% of Americans own 59% of the wealth, while the bottom fifth owns 9%. In fact, the richest 20% own 84% of the wealth, and the bottom 40% controls only 0.3%. An avalanche of studies has since confirmed these basic facts: Americans radically underestimate the amount of wealth inequality that exists – and the level of inequality they think is fair is lower than actual inequality in America probably has ever been. As journalist Chrystia Freeland put it, “Americans actually live in Russia, although they think they live in Sweden. And they would like to live on a kibbutz.”
Thomas Piketty ramped up the inequality debate, a couple of years later, with “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, a massive 250-year survey of wealth inequality. He discovered that r > g. That is, the rate of return on investment is always greater than growth rate of the economy. (For the USA, g was 2.1% for GDP while r was 28.5% for S&P 500 in 2019) The rich really are getting richer – and the poor? Well, not so much. The post-war middle-class, Piketty warned, may well have been a historical anomaly. Economic inequality is likely to get worse – and never get better – without coordinated political action. The good news is that not one, but two, serious candidates in the current Democratic Presidential Primary are endorsing versions of Piketty’s “Wealth Tax” – Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
More at www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2019/12/what-should-the-distribution
-of-wealth-be.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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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
What Should The Distribution Of Wealth Be?
A 2011 survey by Michael Norton and Dan Ariely, of Harvard’s Business School, found that the average American thinks the richest 25% of Americans own 59% of the wealth, while the bottom fifth owns 9%. In fact, the richest 20% own 84% of the wealth, and the bottom 40% controls only 0.3%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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6ix, "Preferential Attachment" (intuitively, "the rich get richer" or "success breeds success") fits the data describing wealth inequality far better than Zipf's Law. And the math for preferential attachment is simpler than Zipf's Law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment
Also see the "Matthew Effect", a term coined by sociologist Robert K. Merton in 1968. Its name is from the Parable of the Talents in the biblical Gospel of Matthew. One person invested money and another hid his in a hole in the ground. The one who invested was praised and became wealthy while the one who dug a hole had his money taken away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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According to a report, Global Waves of Debt, pre-published by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development:
Waves of debt accumulation have been a recurrent feature of the global economy over the past fifty years. In emerging and developing countries, there have been four major debt waves since 1970. The first three waves ended in financial crises—the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, the Asia financial crisis of the late 1990s, and the global financial crisis of 2007-2009.
A fourth wave of debt began in 2010 and debt has reached $55 trillion in 2018, making it the largest, broadest and fastest growing of the four. Global Waves of Debt has done a signal service by reminding us that this time may be no different.
https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/32809
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
6ix, "Preferential Attachment" (intuitively, "the rich get richer" or "success breeds success") fits the data describing wealth inequality far better than Zipf's Law. And the math for preferential attachment is simpler than Zipf's Law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment
Also see the "Matthew Effect", a term coined by sociologist Robert K. Merton in 1968. Its name is from the Parable of the Talents in the biblical Gospel of Matthew. One person invested money and another hid his in a hole in the ground. The one who invested was praised and became wealthy while the one who dug a hole had his money taken away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
The math might be easier, and in the case of money specifically it might explain the causality of why, but Zipf's law can be applied almost universally to any situation.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:I have actually seen this play out in real life many times. For one example, I have a cousin, a Trump lover if there ever was one, who I offered a business deal to, along with a bunch of other people back when I was poor. The cousin would NOT invest, no damn way, but he has been angry for years that he did not get a "fair" share of the money. He will NEVER comprehend that because he did no work, was no help, invested nothing, all he did was run his big mouth and make stupid comments that showed he knew nothing, that his fair share was NOTHING. I gave him a few shares for his nothing contribution, but now he is angry that I didn't give him more. What a greedy dumb-ass he is, but then again, he voted for Trump and will do it again.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
The math might be easier, and in the case of money specifically it might explain the causality of why, but Zipf's law can be applied almost universally to any situation.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The 2020 election will be unprecedented, no matter what. Either President Donald Trump’s victory will shatter expectations and academic theories, or his defeat will. If Trump wins in 2020, he will be the first and only impeached president to win reelection. Barring a major change in national polls, he will also be the first president to be elected twice without once winning the popular vote. And if he loses? It would mark “the greatest presidential fumble of economic and market tailwinds in modern history,” according to Michael Cembalest of J.P. Morgan. A traditional formula for predicting modern presidential elections goes like this: The national economy determines the national vote. Strong economies have historically favored the incumbent candidate or party. Weak economies, or even brief dips, have helped the challenger.
…As for 2020, unemployment is at its lowest point in more than 60 years. The S&P 500 has tripled in the past decade. Wage growth, while still somewhat disappointing, is rising fastest for full-time low-income workers. In a vacuum, this would augur a reelection landslide for the sitting president. According to Cembalest’s index of economic strength—combining data on unemployment levels, home prices, per capita GDP, stock-market growth, and inflation—“Trump as an incumbent benefits from the strongest tailwinds” since 1896. (Bill Clinton’s reelection year of 1996 comes close, but unemployment and inflation were higher, and home values and the stock market were only on the cusp of their late-’90s boom.)
www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2020/01/the-2020-election-will-break
-history.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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William Greider obituary
William Greider tackled gigantic subjects: the Federal Reserve (“Secrets of the Temple,” 1987), the evaporation of American democracy (“Who Will Tell the People,” 1992), globalization (“One World Ready or Not,” 1997), society’s deformation by the military-industrial complex (“Fortress America,” 1998), whether we can reinvent the U.S. economy (“The Soul of Capitalism,” 2003), and what to do when the people running this country seem determined to destroy it (“Come Home, America,” 2009).
Each of these books is still completely relevant — something that almost never can be said about aging political writing. Pick up, say, “Game Change,” the bestseller by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin about the 2008 election, and you’ll find it’s now as fascinating as gossip about the Harding administration.
Greider pulled this off because he didn’t care about the daily political garbage tornado. Instead, his focus was always on the huge subterranean battles that actually determine our lives, i.e., capital vs. labor, creditors vs. debtors, marketing vs. people, and capitalism vs. democracy.
The message running through his work is that, for decades, one side in these fights has been absolutely beating the shit out of the other. But Greider didn’t spend his life diagnosing America’s disease to make us despair. It was the opposite — he did it because he believed we can develop the cure, if we put in the work. He thought that normal humans were capable of understanding the world, and governing ourselves.
Greider made the case that the people in charge have no more idea what they’re doing than anyone else, and often less. During his career in journalism, he wrote in “Who Will Tell the People,” “I have seen up close the frailties of power. At the pinnacles of political command, whenever I have been able to peer behind the veil of platitudes, I have usually glimpsed a scene of confusion … trial and error, folly and misapprehensions.”
Meanwhile, Greider wrote, “this is a nation of people who are mostly smart and capable and, on the whole, generously disposed.” Even in the most brutalized parts of the country, “I frequently came away thinking to myself: Those people would be running things if they had been born with a bit more luck. … There is a vast pool of unrealized ability dwelling in the American population.”
Toward the end of his life, Greider was overjoyed to see the burgeoning movement behind Bernie Sanders and the rise of young politicians and activists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. His case had never been that something like it would happen, but just that it could, that it was within the capability of Americans to do this and much more. As he put it, “Power can accumulate in mysterious ways, if citizens believe they possess this right.”
More at https://theintercept.com/2020/01/01/william-greider-obituary/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real
The inventor of “cyberspace” turned his attention to a strange new world: the present.
Two years ago, in December of 2017, I e-mailed Gibson to ask if he’d consent to being profiled, since his new novel was to be published that spring. He replied, explaining that the election of Donald Trump had forced him to delay the book. “I’ve had to get an extension,” he wrote. Extrapolating from current events, he had already written into his novel “a nuclear crisis involving Syria, Russia, nato, and Turkey”:
Quote:In March, 2018, I e-mailed Gibson again, but he had delayed the book a second time. “Cambridge Analytica now requires a huge rethink, major revisions,” he wrote. “This is very comical in a way, but still a huge problem.”
But then Trump started fucking with N Korea, here, so how scary can my scenario be? He keeps topping me, but I think I can handle it in rewrite. And if there’s a nuclear war, at least I won’t have to turn in the manuscript! . . .
Crazy times,
Bill
Earlier this year, we finally met, in Vancouver, to talk about the novel, “Agency,” which comes out January 2020.
More at www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/how-william-gibson-keeps-his-sci
ence-fiction-real
www.amazon.com/Agency-William-Gibson/dp/110198693X
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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