A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 60 of 725
Quote:Don't ever stop being stupid, 6ix. And on to the new: Trump could have taken the DACA-for-border-security deal with the Democrats. He would have gotten his $25 billion for a wall from the Democrats even if most of the Republicans (not all) in Congress would refuse to pay for Trump's wall. But now the Dreamers are still here and Trump got nothing.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Do your own research, Second.
The Supreme Court handed President Trump a significant defeat Monday, turning down the administration's plea for a quick ruling on the president's power to end special protections for so-called Dreamers. Trump wanted this to beat the Congressional Democrats into submission.
The court's decision not to immediately hear the administration's appeal could keep in place a legal shield for nearly 700,000 young immigrants for the rest of this year, and perhaps longer.
The Justice Department had sought to leapfrog the U.S. appeals courts in California and New York. The department had asked for an "immediate review" of a nationwide order by U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco that required the government to maintain for now the Obama-era program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.
The action the administration sought was rare. It has been nearly 30 years since the Supreme Court granted review of a district judge's ruling before an appeals court could weigh in. And the court said Monday it had no interest in following that course in the DACA case.
www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-court-daca-20180220-story.html
This removes a lot of Trump’s leverage. Democrats have no pressing reason to make a bad deal over DACA if they’ve got at least a year before it can be terminated. Why not wait until after the midterms and see what happens? That’s what Republicans did with Scalia’s Supreme Court seat after he died.
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Question: Why do you and the people on your "side" here feel the need to start every reply with a personal attack?
Answer: That is what people who are losing the argument do.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:I can't even figure out what is the tangential connection between the first dozen words of second's quoted topic, and the diversionary topic he shoehorns in next.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Question: Why do you and the people on your "side" here feel the need to start every reply with a personal attack?
Answer: That is what people who are losing the argument do.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Half the time I assume he thinks he's in a different thread.
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Quote:6ix, this is not about me persuading you. I am not into saving souls like a door-to-door minister who is distributing literature for the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Question: Why do you and the people on your "side" here feel the need to start every reply with a personal attack?
Answer: That is what people who are losing the argument do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watch_Tower_Bible_and_Tract_Society_of_P
ennsylvania
Do you remember that story I told you about me being raised as a Jehovah's Witness, but I vote while they don't? You said you didn't understand that story either. They are the finest people on Earth and I am not. There is a little key in that story to unlock what is going on here. It boils down to Armageddon. The bible version of Armaggedon has the bad people (the Republican voters) and the lukewarm people (the Independent voters) outnumbering the good (the Democratic voters). In the Bible the lukewarm people think they are good. Unsurprisingly, the bad people think they are good, too. www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation3:15-17 You might need to read the book of Revelations to find out how that movie ends, but the bad and the lukewarm people truly can't understand why God would judge them harshly.
Quote:Dear JewelStaiteFan, I disrespect you too much to belabor the obvious. Look around. The wealthiest society on earth is currently subjected to the chaotic rule of a mean and vulgar charlatan who refined the manipulation of humanity through a TV show that was a ratings smash in its first season, continued under his guidance for more than a decade, and relied on the cruelty of whimsical humiliation for its frisson. Donald Trump had a solid education in the power of images, the flimsiness of objective reality, and the magnetism of authority.
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
I can't even figure out what is the tangential connection between the first dozen words of second's quoted topic, and the diversionary topic he shoehorns in next.
Half the time I assume he thinks he's in a different thread.
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, O.K.?” he declared during the campaign. Let’s hand it to Trump: he was right. Americans voted him into office after he said that. They were ready to roll the dice, even on nuclear war, if the alternative was to be bored. They were mad.
There’s not much new under the sun. Long before Facebook and Twitter and Russian trolls on social media, the potential to combine the bombardment of visual media, the “genius” of an individual (Trump’s word), and mass disorientation to forge dystopian madness had been imagined.
So here’s a little test. The following three passages are not in chronological order. Which came first, and when do they date from?
“We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you.”
Here’s the second: “This whole country’s just like my flock of sheep! Rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, hausfraus, shut-ins, pea-pickers — everybody that’s got to jump when somebody else blows the whistle….. They’re mine. I own ’em. They think like I do. Only they’re even more stupid than I am, so I gotta think for them.”
And finally: “The stresses set up by the social changes wrought by the advent of technology are straining the structure of civilization beyond the limits of tolerance. The machine does our work for us and meekly comes and goes at our bidding. But it inexorably demands its wages.”
The answers are: the first dates from 1976 and is from the extraordinary Sidney Lumet movie “Network,” written by Paddy Chayefsky. The second, from 1957, appears in the equally prescient Elia Kazan movie “A
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, this is not about me persuading you. I am not into saving souls like a door-to-door minister who is distributing literature for the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Question: Why do you and the people on your "side" here feel the need to start every reply with a personal attack?
Answer: That is what people who are losing the argument do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watch_Tower_Bible_and_Tract_Society_of_P
ennsylvania
Do you remember that story I told you about me being raised as a Jehovah's Witness, but I vote while they don't? You said you didn't understand that story either. They are the finest people on Earth and I am not. There is a little key in that story to unlock what is going on here. It boils down to Armageddon. The bible version of Armaggedon has the bad people (the Republican voters) and the lukewarm people (the Independent voters) outnumbering the good (the Democratic voters). In the Bible the lukewarm people think they are good. Unsurprisingly, the bad people think they are good, too. www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation3:15-17 You might need to read the book of Revelations to find out how that movie ends, but the bad and the lukewarm people truly can't understand why God would judge them harshly.
I don't need an anecdote of yours to know that you're a dick. You prove that here everyday without needing to know anything about your background.
Don't be so hard on yourself though. Nothing you've done in here is going to lead to God judging you harshly man. FFF.net is child's play compared to what they say to each other on Facebook and Twitter, and those idiots are saying it to people they know and even care about. And any vitriol we have toward each other here can't hold a candle to "/b/" over at 4chan.
If God sends you to hell for your behavior here, he's having a shitty week.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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A Snake Responds To Trump's 'Snake' Poem.
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 passed an anti-nepotism law in the wake of John Kennedy's appointment of his brother, Bobby, as attorney general.
Here's what the law says:
"A public official may not appoint, employ, promote, advance, or advocate for appointment, employment, promotion, or advancement, in or to a civilian position in the agency in which he is serving or over which he exercises jurisdiction or control any individual who is a relative of the public official."
www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/3110
How did Trump get around this statute to hire his daughter, Ivanka, and her husband Jared Kushner? Because "agency" in the law above is interpreted by Trump's lawyers (and why distrust them?) to not include the White House. So, Trump couldn't make Ivanka the Treasury Secretary. But, according to the current interpretation of the law, he is fine with having her in a senior role within the White House.
Which is OK (I guess, if you can trust Trump's lawyers), legally speaking. But, as a practical matter, it simply doesn't work -- as this latest Ivanka response to NBC's question makes clear. You can't be both a daughter and a senior presidential adviser. The rules of engagement -- and response -- that cover one simply don't apply to the other.
Unless Congress updates the anti-nepotism language to clear up the legal questions as to whether it applies (or does not) to the White House, we will have this Ivanka Trump situation again sometime -- and it won't end any differently (or better).
www.cnn.com/2018/02/26/politics/ivanka-trump-accusations/index.html
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The rich support Trump because they knew it would make them even richer. That’s paid off for them.
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/surprise-corporate-tax-cuts-are
-making-the-rich-even-richer/
Republicans fully expected this, and all their blather about “$4,000 in wage growth” was just the usual smokescreen to justify a giveaway to the rich. Back in October, Council of Economic Advisers head Kevin Hassett said “I would expect to see an immediate jump in wage growth.” Today he’s singing a different tune: “Right now we’re going to have an adjustment where you see probably more dividends and share buybacks than wage increases.” Wage growth will come later.
You betcha. You will be seeing those fat paychecks any day now.
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Bonuses and Bogosity
Paul Krugman FEB. 27, 2018
www.nytimes.com/2018/02/27/opinion/bonuses-and-bogosity.html
On Feb. 19 Walmart, America’s largest employer, announced broad-based pay hikes. In fact, it announced that it would be raising wages for half a million workers. The Trump tax cut is working! Oh, wait. That announcement was three years ago – it came on Feb. 19, 2015. And as far as I can tell, nobody gave the Obama administration credit for the move.
Why did Walmart raise wages? Partly because the labor market was tightening: unemployment had fallen more than 40 percent from its peak in 2009 (a decline for which the Obama administration’s stimulus and other policies actually do deserve some credit.) This tightening labor market meant that Walmart was having trouble attracting workers.
Walmart was also in the midst of a change in business strategy. Its policy of always low wages, always, was starting to look problematic: low pay meant high turnover and low morale, and management believed that moving at least partway to the Costco strategy of paying more and getting better performance as a result made sense.
The moral of this story is that unless the economy is deeply depressed, there will always be some companies, somewhere, raising wages and offering bonuses. Which brings me to the Trump tax cut and the very bad, no good job much of the media initially did of covering its effects.
Every card-carrying economist agrees that cutting corporate tax rates will have some trickle-down effect on wages – in the long run. How much of a trickle-down effect depends on a bunch of technical factors: what share of corporate profits represents monopoly rents rather than returns to capital, how responsive inflows of foreign capital are to the U.S. rate of return, what share of the capital stock is even affected by the corporate tax rate. Enthusiasts claim that the tax cut will eventually go 100% to workers; most serious modelers think the number is more like 20 or 25 percent.
Whatever the number, however, it’s about the long run. It requires a chain of events: lower taxes -> higher investment -> higher stock of capital -> higher demand for labor -> higher wages. And this chain of events should take a number of years, probably decades, to fully work itself through. Even in the most favorable analyses, there is no reason to expect any wage gains in the first few months after a tax cut.
Yet for a while there the news was full of stories about companies announcing that they were giving their workers bonuses thanks to the Trump tax cut. Why were they doing this?
Well, the tax cut provided no immediate incentive to raise wages. It did, however, give companies that benefited from the tax cut a strong political incentive to claim that the tax break was the reason for bonuses or wage hikes they would have given in any case. Why not? They want the tax cut to look good, since it’s good for them. And hyping its benefits is a cheap way to make a de facto campaign contribution to an administration that can do a lot to help companies it likes, say by removing pesky safety or environmental regulations.
In other words, the whole “bonuses thanks to tax cut” story was bogus, and obviously so. Yet much of the media fell for it.
There was also a big element of innumeracy involved. Most people have no idea just how big the U.S. economy is; if you say “company X just hired 1000 workers” or “company Y just gave 5000 workers a $1000 bonus” they imagine that these are big stories, when in reality they’re just noise in an economy where around 5 million workers are hired – and an almost equal number quit or are fired – every month.
The numbers we have so far show that the much-hyped bonuses are trivial – less than $6 billion, or 0.03% of GDP – while stock buybacks have been more than $170 billion. And many of those bonuses would probably have happened anyway, whereas stock buybacks are running far above historical levels.
Furthermore, the surge in stock buybacks suggests that the long run effect of the tax
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The President Doesn’t Matter (As Much As You Think)
https://bostonreview.net/mark-schmitt-all-about-barack-obama-books-rev
iew
A month before the 2008 presidential election, the cover of The American Prospect, which I edited at the time, depicted an empty Oval Office and the headline, “The President Doesn’t Matter (As Much As You Think).” Inside we ran articles about the institutions of Washington, such as the Senate Finance Committee—and its chairman, lacking both initiative and strength of character, Montana Democrat Max Baucus—and the Federal Reserve, explaining the limits they would impose on the scope of change that might be possible under an Obama administration.
The issue fell flat on the newsstand, and the Prospect’s board of directors was apoplectic about the cover. Even if my colleagues and I were right, the publisher complained, the cover “wasn’t appropriate to the moment.”
It’s true that it wasn’t an appropriate moment to make that point, because no one wanted to hear it. In that moment, many liberals forgot an insight that they should have learned in the Bush era: conservative dominance was not just a matter of electing a president, but of building a stable pyramid of organizations focused on policy development, grass-roots mobilization, and media, at the top of which you’ll find the president. That president could be almost anyone—even, as if to prove the point, dopey George W. Bush—because the ideological and organizational infrastructure is more important. Democrats invert the pyramid, vesting all hope in individual presidential candidates, who are expected to build their entire infrastructure from scratch. . . .
Eric Alterman’s Kabuki Democracy: The System vs. Barack Obama delves deeply into the failed-state culture of American politics that makes it impossible to be a transformational president.
“Kabuki” is not Alterman’s invention, but a word we often used when I worked on Capitol Hill in the 1990s to describe the rituals and outright frauds that make up the day-to-day life of America’s democratic institutions. It’s the whole world of fake votes; pandering to lobbyists who in turn trick their clients; constructed showdowns, such as the game over the debt ceiling; and a dozen other gimmicks that have spun wildly out of control in the years since. Alterman defines kabuki as something that “resembles a democratic process at great distance but mocks its genuine intentions in substance.” And he goes on, in his short book, to fill out that wise definition with solid accounts of the multiple debacles of the Bush era, the capture of Congress by lobbyists, the poisonous role of the right-wing media, the unrepresentative nature of the Senate in particular, and the failure of the left to mobilize.
If there is a flaw in Alterman’s excellent book it is that, in his focus on the right, he lets congressional Democrats off the hook. Aside from Senator Charles Schumer, hardly the worst of the lot, he has little to say about the many Democrats who made a hash of Obama’s agenda. When I think back to the two erroneous predictions that I made after the 2008 election—that Obama would succeed in splitting off a few cooperative Republicans and that Congressional Democrats would stand with him rather than throw him overboard as they had Clinton and Carter—it’s the second that upsets me most. It was only a matter of weeks before Democrats in both houses started insisting on scaling back the stimulus and hedging their bets by establishing a record of voting against the president, and it was some of Obama’s earliest Senate supporters, such as Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson and Claire McCaskill of Missouri, who were the most mercenary and stabbed Obama in the back when it was to their advantage. Even after the 2010 election showed Democratic Congressmen that voting against Obama initiatives was no insurance against defeat, Obama’s “frenemies” were still at it.
The fearful, hyper-cautious culture of learned helplessness among congressional Democrats and their staffers is every bit as crippling to an
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