A thread for Democrats Only
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UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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I suspect Trump's done all manner of corrupt business practices. That makes him like every other politician. But Russian collusion? What if they never find any? Will you have enough smarts to feel stupid?
SECOND is a troll because it constantly misrepresents what people post, fails to address their actual positions, and resorts to personal attacks when its brain isn't working (which is most of the time).
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Quote:Trump makes 20 stupid decisions per day. He is not even trying to understand what he is doing and why he made the wrong decisions. But he has been very clear from the beginning that Russia did nothing at all. How did Trump know? Why is he absolutely certain? Putin told him in a phone call. That is another stupid decision Trump made to believe the head of state of the country accused of interfering in elections. Criminally stupid? Yes, even if the GOP controls enough Senators that will say it is not. Trump has already convicted himself of criminal stupidity.
Originally posted by 1kiki:
I suspect Trump's done all manner of corrupt business practices. That makes him like every other politician. But Russian collusion? What if they never find any? Will you have enough smarts to feel stupid?
www.wired.com/story/did-russia-affect-the-2016-election-its-now-undeni
able/
Quote:
For some time, there has been a conflation of issues—the hacking and leaking of illegally obtained information versus propaganda and disinformation; cyber-security issues and the hacking of elections systems versus information operations and information warfare; paid advertising versus coercive messaging or psychological operations—when discussing “Russian meddling” in the 2016 US elections. The refrain has become: “There is no evidence that Russian efforts changed any votes.”
But the bombshell 37-page indictment issued Friday by Robert Mueller against Russia’s Internet Research Agency and its leadership and affiliates provides considerable detail on the Russian information warfare targeting the American public during the elections. And this information makes it increasingly difficult to say that the Kremlin's effort to impact the American mind did not succeed.
The indictment pulls the curtain back on four big questions that have swirled around the Russian influence operation, which, it turns out, began in 2014: What was the scope of the Russian effort? What kind of content did it rely on? Who or what was it targeting, and what did it aim to achieve? And finally, what impact did it have?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Senators and Financial Literacy
Financial literacy is having the knowledge necessary to manage finances efficiently. Financially literate people know how to achieve long-term goals and make healthy financial decisions.
On the other hand, those who are not financially literate have difficulty applying financial decision-making skills to real-life situations. Not only do they tend to make unhealthy money decisions that create financial problems, they have trouble reaching financial milestones. In America today, financial illiteracy has become an epidemic. A study done by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Foundation estimated that nearly two-thirds of Americans can't pass a basic financial literacy test. That's a problem.
www.cnbc.com/2018/06/15/8-great-financial-lessons-i-learned-from-my-fa
ther.html
Financial illiteracy among Senators is even worse than among ordinary Americans. The 2019 military budget was approved by an overwhelming 85 to 10 margin. Why that was illiterate is here:
www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/19/u-s-military-budget-inc
hes-closer-to-1-trillion-mark-as-concerns-over-federal-deficit-grow/?utm_term=.d4e2235b026b
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Is Trump's focus on pipeline cybersecurity a ruse to prop up coal? YES.
More than 300,000 miles of natural gas transmission lines crisscross the United States, fueling electricity and industrial plants and heating homes, while also providing an alluring target for hackers looking to disrupt the American economy.
Now those pipelines are at the center of a debate in Washington about the future of the power grid, as Energy Secretary Rick Perry argues that an increasingly sophisticated cybersecurity threat makes relying on natural gas to the exclusion of coal and nuclear plants a disaster waiting to happen.
“You have a greater reliance on natural gas than you’ve ever had before,” Bruce Walker, assistant secretary of electricity and energy reliability, said in an interview. “Because of the interdependence on the gas infrastructure, if you take out a pipeline you can also take out 10 to 15 [power] generators.”
The administration’s concern about cybersecurity comes as the White House considers next steps in its bid to halt the closure of coal power plants, which have come under increasing economic pressure from the huge glut of cheap gas coming out of shale fields in Texas and other states.
That has set the administration and Perry in direct conflict with natural gas producers, many of whom believe the administration is raising the issue of cyber security of gas pipelines to justify bailing out a coal sector that President Donald Trump has promised to revive.
“They are certainly using every argument they can come up with to try and justify it,” said one pipeline executive, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of talks with the White House. “The challenge is we don’t want to advertise all the measures we're taking to deal with the threat. You’re trapped.”
More at www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Is-focus-on-pipeline-
cyber-security-ruse-to-prop-13006642.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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Quote:Er, no. The refrain that I hear from Trump is that TRUMP did nothing at all. No meetings, no telephone calls, no "collusion", no nothing.
Trump makes 20 stupid decisions per day. He is not even trying to understand what he is doing and why he made the wrong decisions. But he has been very clear from the beginning that Russia did nothing at all.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
As long as you insist that everything is the Republicans'/ Democrats' fault, then you fail to grasp the REAL problem with American politics.
America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Er, no. The refrain that I hear from Trump is that TRUMP did nothing at all. No meetings, no telephone calls, no "collusion", no nothing.
And that may be true or, at least not that can be proved. He is old enough and smart enough and selfish enough to know that you get someone else to be the mule.
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Quote:Since when did Trump's responsibilities get that small? When will he start doing his job on Russian interference with the election? Or when will he start taking responsibility for even this extremely simply to understand example: Trump is ignoring the corruption of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, an extraordinarily wealthy man who, according to blockbuster reporting out this week from Forbes’s Dan Alexander, has never divested from major financial conflicts of interests.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:Er, no. The refrain that I hear from Trump is that TRUMP did nothing at all. No meetings, no telephone calls, no "collusion", no nothing.
Trump makes 20 stupid decisions per day. He is not even trying to understand what he is doing and why he made the wrong decisions. But he has been very clear from the beginning that Russia did nothing at all.
The whole story is worth your time and much, much simpler than Russia interfering in American elections. But to highlight, Ross spent most of 2017 in office while maintaining partial ownership of, among other things:
a) Chinese state-owned enterprises
b) shipping company tied to Russian oligarchs
c) Cypriot bank that’s involved in Robert Mueller’s investigation
d) major player in the auto parts industry with a direct stake in Commerce’s trade policy decisions
Ross then passed off his assets to a family trust, meaning that the conflicts of interest are still present. When will Trump react? On this or on Russia? There is nobody that can force Trump to do the actual job of being President, a job that includes both controlling Wilbur Ross and preventing interference in elections by Russia and other specific responsibilities that Trump has not responded to.
www.vox.com/2018/6/20/17479170/wilbur-ross-corruption
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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In the mid-19th century, the Methodists and Baptists were (as they still are) the nation's largest Protestant churches. Two decades before the Civil War, these two denominations wrestled with the most controversial social issue of the day: slavery.
1845 proved to be a crucial year for both groups. In the Methodist case, antislavery leaders voted to suspend a bishop who held slaves; in the Baptist case, antislavery members attempted to bar slaveholders from missionary work. In both churches, antislavery activists attempted to limit slavery by making it morally unacceptable and geographically constrained. By 1845, all neutrality and all compromises were off the table. Although antislavery forces won crucial votes and changed important church policies, aggrieved proslavery church members left -- forming the Southern Baptist Convention and the Methodist Episcopal Church South.
At the time, clergy, politicians and journalists noted that the schisms were a blow to the Union. Most historians believe these actions were the prelude to the Civil War and, in many ways, contributed to the nation's further political fracturing.
Is something similar happening now? Does this ecclesiastical tumult foreshadow an even larger political crisis awaiting us?
The answers are, yes and maybe.
As difficult as this moment seems, I think that historian Jon Meacham is correct when likening our time to a "Dred Scott" moment, referring to the Supreme Court decision that people held in slavery were denied the rights of full citizenship. Meacham, like many other historians, has insisted the primary divide was between those who recognized enslaved people as fully human and those who did not.
As the rights of citizenship were at stake in Dred, during the 1845 schisms the rights of church membership were the basic question. Did fully baptized people held in slavery have the same freedoms -- in theological language, "freedom in Christ" -- as slaveholders? The churches argued about the Bible's moral teaching regarding slaves and territorial expansion of slavery (as related to Western mission work), in effect struggling with whether black people in slavery were fully human. These Methodist and Baptist ecclesiastical arguments would re-emerge as secular issues at the fore in the Dred Scott case. The churches argued these concerns a full decade before the courts did. And the results were strikingly similar: divides and schism.
Today, the Methodists and Baptists are not really fighting over mere "issues." They are fighting about whether women, people of color, immigrants, and LGBTQ people should, on the basis of human dignity and worth, have full rights, responsibilities and respect in their church communities.
We are in the run-up, that time of uncertainty when a whole lot of people are making terrible decisions that eventually result in an even worse conflict. To have both Methodists and Baptists echoing their past slavery fights now is stunning. History, however, is not predestination.
www.cnn.com/2018/06/20/opinions/methodist-and-southern-baptists-church
-issues-opinion-bass/index.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:So, you concede that your "big point" about Trump "knowing" that "Russia did nothing at all" was 100% hooey?
Trump makes 20 stupid decisions per day. He is not even trying to understand what he is doing and why he made the wrong decisions. But he has been very clear from the beginning that Russia did nothing at all. - SECOND
Er, no. The refrain that I hear from Trump is that TRUMP did nothing at all. No meetings, no telephone calls, no "collusion", no nothing.- SIGNY
Since when did Trump's responsibilities get that small? - SECOND
Let's get THAT point clear before we move on to the rest of your "argument" (which isn't really yours but yet another second-hand opinion).
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
As long as you insist that everything is the Republicans'/ Democrats' fault, then you fail to grasp the REAL problem with American politics.
America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876
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