A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 79 of 725
A key part of successful personal finance — and successful citizenship — is simply filtering out the baloney. Not being the moron. (Which I can say with some authority, having been the moron more than once myself.)
Who you gonna believe?
The annuity salesman heavily incentivized to sell what’s best for him? Or the advice from a book you can get from the library for free?
The Tobacco Institute? Or the Surgeon General?
The Washington Post? Or the National Enquirer?
Donald Trump? Or the FBI?
Donald Trump? Or the two dozen women he claims are lying?
Donald Trump? Or — on a different day — 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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What Trump’s infrastructure plan was:
The top White House aide focused on infrastructure is leaving in the midst of what’s allegedly a White House push for its infrastructure plan. That is a sign that there is, in fact, no real push for an infrastructure plan.
The really big question about Trump and infrastructure, ever since he won the election, had been whether he actually wanted to get something done on this or if it was just a campaign line. The February proposal answered that question pretty definitively — by mashing up Trump’s vague rhetoric with his staff’s conventional hard-right politics, they landed on a formula with no bipartisan appeal and no actual path forward. And now the person who crafted the plan is heading out the door having accomplished nothing.
Candidate Trump promised a $1 trillion infrastructure plan, and the Trump White House swiftly began talking about a $1.5 trillion plan. But the actual plan rolled out in February is what we would normally describe as a $200 billion federal infrastructure plan, deconstructed into four parts:
More about this Trump plan that will never pass Congress at
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/4/17199034/dj-gribbin-infrastru
cture
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Nothing Trump has said or done since taking office has put to rest any of the doubts that pushed people away from him had — he still seems impulsive, disrespectful, and extremely casual about the line between his personal finances and the public’s business. But at least some people were convinced to vote for him because he seemed “different” from earlier Republicans on important policy grounds. As president, he’s shown no sign of that “different” heterodox campaign persona, driving Trump-curious Democrats back to the fold.
Republicans appear to have no answer to this. They are neither distancing themselves from Trump and his erratic persona nor embracing the occasionally moderate economic policy ideas he ran on two years ago. And no number of electoral losses seems able to deter them from this course.
- from The Wisconsin Supreme Court election shows the blueprint for a Democratic wave
www.vox.com/2018/4/5/17201374/wisconsin-supreme-court
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, the Democratic Party isn’t ‘divided’ or in ‘disarray’
We’ve already seen a fair amount of this type of coverage around the intra-party battles that have taken shape in some primaries. But this pattern is going to be less consequential than it appears. For one thing, as remarkable as the Sanders 2016 phenomenon was, if Sanders 2020 happens it will be a far diminished force. That’s because in 2016 he became the one real alternative to the boring, establishment, seemingly inevitable nominee, which made him fascinating and cool, especially to young people. In 2020 you’ll have a dozen Democrats running, many of whom will be compelling in their own ways. Most of the people who supported Bernie last time around will peel off to other candidates.
Those who remain with him will be in no small part a rump faction of anti-Democrat Democrats, who share Sanders’ conviction that the party is irredeemably corrupt, a collection of neoliberal corporate sellouts. This is the essence of Sanders’ brand, always has been and always will be. No matter how much the party moves left — and it has moved a great deal in the last few years — there will never be a point where Sanders says, “I’m really pleased with where the Democratic Party is right now.” Because once he said that, there would cease to be any need for Bernie Sanders to exist.
www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/04/05/no-the-democratic
-party-isnt-divided-or-in-disarray/?utm_term=.297376b86ea4
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 departure of Trump’s second national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, brought a different sort of indictment. In his final public remarks, he was careful to preserve his ties to the president. But the topic he chose was Russia — particularly Russian cyberoperations against the United States and other NATO countries. And his judgment was harsh: “We have failed to impose sufficient costs” for such actions. The result? “The Kremlin’s confidence is growing as its agents conduct their sustained campaign to undermine our confidence in ourselves and in one another.”
For a national security adviser to make this statement in an administration where the president has been equivocal, even exculpatory, in his language about Russia is the most serious critique of all. In McMaster’s view, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is engaging in a type of hybrid warfare that is “deliberately designed to achieve objectives while falling below the target state’s threshold for military response.” This has been enabled by some who “glamorize and apologize” for Russia’s actions, and by nations that “have looked the other way.”
In his farewell statement, McMaster — one of our country’s deepest thinkers on the nature of warfare — described a sustained attack to which the United States has not responded with sufficient seriousness. This could be interpreted only as an implicit criticism of a president who has brought no urgency to the task and has a history of apologizing for Russian actions. (“Well, you think our country is so innocent?”)
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/departing-trump-officials-leave-a-damn
ing-image/2018/04/05/85e5bf02-38fb-11e8-9c0a-85d477d9a226_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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Quote:Shirley the Statewide Hazardous Weather storm, where the populace was urged to stay off the roads, had no possible effect on this Election.
Originally posted by second:
Nothing Trump has said or done since taking office has put to rest any of the doubts that pushed people away from him had — he still seems impulsive, disrespectful, and extremely casual about the line between his personal finances and the public’s business. But at least some people were convinced to vote for him because he seemed “different” from earlier Republicans on important policy grounds. As president, he’s shown no sign of that “different” heterodox campaign persona, driving Trump-curious Democrats back to the fold.
Republicans appear to have no answer to this. They are neither distancing themselves from Trump and his erratic persona nor embracing the occasionally moderate economic policy ideas he ran on two years ago. And no number of electoral losses seems able to deter them from this course.
- from The Wisconsin Supreme Court election shows the blueprint for a Democratic wave
www.vox.com/2018/4/5/17201374/wisconsin-supreme-court
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Quote:Are Republican voters afraid of snowflakes, more so than Democrats? I'm old now and get my ballot by mail, so I never miss an election, rain, snow or shine. But when I was younger, I voted by mail, too. I was always out of town grasping for more money, and even when I was not, I claimed in writing I was to the Chief Elections Officer of Harris County. Hell, I might be out of town. Never knew for sure. Thus I could always vote by mail. And the Postal Service's motto: "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds." That motto does not leave Republicans any room for saying they lost because of bad weather on election day. Either vote early or vote by mail, but don't use weather as an excuse for losing the election.
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
Shirley [Surely] the Statewide Hazardous Weather storm, where the populace was urged to stay off the roads, had no possible effect on this Election.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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A Valediction to Power
LBJ's 1968: Power, Politics, and the Presidency in America's Year of Upheaval
By Kyle Longley
Cambridge University Press 361pp £23.99 order from our bookshop
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-valediction-to-power
Everyone has a favourite president, but I’m suspicious of anyone who says it’s Lyndon Baines Johnson. Yes, he was the politician’s politician – one of the greatest legislators in US history – but he was also a monster. Kyle Longley recounts an episode when journalists were badgering Johnson to explain America’s war in Vietnam. LBJ unzipped his fly, pulled out his sizable member and said, ‘This is why!’ They say the personal is political, but that’s taking things too far.
Longley’s new book examines a year in Johnson’s life – his final one as president – in microscopic detail. On 30 January, the Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive. For the first time, Americans really contemplated defeat in Vietnam. Johnson’s plans fell apart. [Or his dick fell off.]
Realizing that running for re-election in 1968 would likely kill him, and that he might not win anyway, Johnson went on television to announce, ‘I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another year as your president.’ The speech transformed Johnson’s image: the public was elated by this rare act of political self-sacrifice. Now that he was liberated from campaigning, maybe Johnson would actually bring peace to Vietnam.
On the night of 28 August, the police assaulted anti-war protesters and made Chicago look like Prague, which had been invaded by Soviet troops the previous week. The president spent the rest of the year chasing a peace that never came.
There are plenty of reasons why 1968 became Johnson’s annus horribilis. South and North Vietnam were resistant to negotiating with each other; Nixon’s crew secretly urged the South Vietnamese to wait until he was in office in order to get a better deal. Who could have predicted the murders of King and Kennedy? The rise of popular conservatism, moreover, meant that the public was more interested in fighting crime than eliminating poverty.
But, to repeat, Johnson was a monster – one of those interesting, three-dimensional monsters that occasionally does good, for sure, but very definitely the author of his own misfortunes.
He humiliated Humphrey, for example, a loyal vice president who backed the Vietnam War despite his own misgivings. To stand any chance of winning the general election, Humphrey needed to reconcile the doves and hawks of the Democratic Party, and he favored an election platform that would appeal to both. Johnson nixed it. He was too obsessed with defending his war to compromise. And it was his war. As Longley writes, the president often talked about Vietnam as if it were something he’d inherited or had thrust upon him and as if all he’d done from day one was try to end it. Hogwash. When Johnson became president, the USA’s involvement in Vietnam was limited. He escalated it. He was in effect an imperial president, yet he adopted the persona of a powerless civil servant. Yes, his generals assured him of progress and pushed for more men, but there were other voices who told him it wasn’t working, men to whom he should have listened, and the Tet Offensive splashed the writing right across the wall.
Without Vietnam, LBJ’s reputation might well be titanic: he secured the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, launched a war on poverty and signed more than three hundred conservation measures into law. But Longley’s perceptive and unflinching study concludes that Vietnam is inseparable from Johnson. The fact is that he committed America to a gruesome war in defense of its own metaphorical manhood and determined the manner in which it was fought, which was neither total war nor a surgical intervention.
There is a story that tells of a young man trying to guide Johnson to the presidential chopper. ‘There’s your helicopter, sir,’ he said. The president replied, ‘They’re all my helicopters, son.’ It was an answer typic
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The right-wing rabble-rouser Ann Coulter recently declared at a talk at Columbia University that the President was a "shallow, lazy ignoramus" and that she's now a former Trumper. "If he doesn't have us anymore, that's what he should be worried about," Coulter later told The New York Times. "He's not giving us what he promised at every campaign stop."
Coulter's defection is significant because she was an early Trump supporter and has long been a leading voice on the fringe where the President's most ardent followers reside. But now she's fed up with his incompetence and feels betrayed -- principally on his failure to build the wall.
The most noteworthy aspect of Coulter's comments has been the sense of exasperation behind it. Other True Trumpers have expressed the same feeling. Tucker Carlson of Fox News, to name one, said the President's waffling on immigration issues left him wondering "what was the point of running for president?"
Carlson is a rabid partisan, but he's not a blind one. What he and Coulter both seem to recognize is that the man who ran for president on the basis of slogans really had no firm idea about how he was going to advance what little agenda he claimed.
Trump sold himself mainly on his status as an outsider who was going to "drain the swamp" and an anti-immigrant crusader who was going to deport millions of undocumented immigrants and build a wall the length of the southern border. What Coulter, Carlson, and no doubt others are experiencing are the deficiencies Trump long exhibited as a businessman. After his renovation of a hotel at Grand Central Terminal and success with Trump Tower, in the late 1970s, Trump failed at operating a string of complex businesses -- an airline, various casinos, the Plaza Hotel in New York -- because he just wasn't a very good executive.
Because he had never developed an actual set of detailed policy ideas or, for that matter, a political philosophy, the promoter who became President attempted to bluff his way along. Even if he intended to make good on promises, his poor choices of confederates has translated over and over into scandal and ethics investigations that distract from and derail his agenda.
Trump is treating many of his friends the way he treated the investors who bought the securities that collapsed when he went bankrupt. It's all good until the winds change and an ally has served his or her purpose.
It's only natural that Trump, an opportunist who sees everything in transactional terms, makes for an untrustworthy ally. He once told me that with billions of people on Earth, he's not worried about alienating anyone. With a friend like him, Trumpers are bound to be disappointed.
www.cnn.com/2018/04/06/opinions/how-trump-lost-ann-coulter-dantonio/in
dex.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:
Are Republican voters afraid of snowflakes, more so than Democrats?
Did you just ask if Republicans are more afraid of Democrats than Democrats are afraid of themselves?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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