A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 179 of 725
Quote:Raising the minimum wage is typically a nonstarter in the Texas Legislature. Democrats keep introducing bills to push the state’s minimum wage above the federal level set nearly a decade ago at $7.25 an hour, and Republicans keep rejecting their efforts.
Originally posted by 1kiki:
Boo!
THUGGER admits it's not about RUSSIA !!! and is, in fact, a witch hunt.
But a recent federal court ruling tying minimum wages to racial discrimination might be the key to higher incomes for lowly paid American workers everywhere.
Several cities have attempted to bypass similarly recalcitrant legislatures, including Birmingham, Ala., whose City Council two years ago passed a bill raising its minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. The Alabama Legislature responded by imposing a uniform statewide minimum wage that effectively voided Birmingham’s law. The city subsequently filed a federal lawsuit whose ripples could touch other states.
Twenty-five mostly Southern and border states, including Texas, have similar laws that prevent local governments from setting their own minimum wages. Many, like Alabama and Texas, have histories of racial discrimination. The Birmingham lawsuit recounts the racist past of that predominately black city and ties it to the decision of Alabama’s majority-white legislature to override its minimum wage increase.
A lower court dismissed the lawsuit, but in July the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta ruled that the lawsuit made a valid argument that should be heard in trial. “A sensitive but thorough examination of the plaintiff’s detailed allegations leads us to conclude that they have plausibly alleged a discriminatory motivation behind the Minimum Wage Act, despite the law’s neutrality and rationale,” said the ruling.
If Birmingham prevails, other cities might use the legal precedent to force their states to allow them to set their own minimum wages.
Two Democratic bills before the legislature last year would have raised the state’s minium wage to $15 an hour. More feasible was Houston state Rep. Senfronia Thompson’s proposal to incrementally increase the wage to $10.10 an hour by 2022. But her idea also fell victim to the same discredited canard opponents trot out whenever a minimum wage increase is mentioned: that employers would have to fire workers.
In fact, with the country now at what economists consider “full employment,” with an unemployment rate under 4 percent, many companies are having a hard time finding workers. They’re not looking for excuses to lay anyone off.
Lawmakers who keep blocking attempts to raise the minimum wage give credence to allegations that their stubbornness is rooted in something other than economic principles. To some of the nearly 200,000 Texans being paid the minimum wage or less, that something may look like racism. Federal judges say that possibility exists in Alabama. The Texas legislature can prove it doesn’t exist in this state by raising the minimum wage without being taken to court.
www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/Racism-keeping-min
imum-wages-down-Alabama-ruling-13172747.php
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Sure would be nice if Trump acted innocent, but he can't do it on Fox & Friends just a day after Michael Cohen reached a plea deal and a jury convicted Paul Manafort:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
Hey Signy
"Trump better be innocent of any wrong doing, anywhere, anytime."
“One of the reasons I respect Paul Manafort so much is he went through that trial,” Trump said. Manafort the convicted felon gets respect from Trump. You know who doesn’t get his respect? Cooperating with the law. It ought to be illegal in Trump's circle of friends, per Trump:
“If somebody defrauded a bank and he is going to get 10 years in jail or 20 years in jail, but you can say something bad about Donald Trump and you will go down to two years or three years, which is the deal he made, in all fairness to him, most people are going to do that,” Trump said of Cohen. “And I have seen it many times. I have had many friends involved in this stuff. It’s called flipping and it almost ought to be illegal.”
Trump continued to say criminals should not cooperate with prosecutors. You wonder if he knows lying to a prosecutor is perjury:
“You get 10 years in jail. But if you say bad things about somebody, In other words, if you make up stories — they just make up lies. ... They make up things and now they go from 10 years to now they are a national hero. They have a statue erected in their honor. It’s not a fair thing.”
More at www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/8/23/17772540/trump-flipping-almo
st-illegal-manafort-cohen
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
In a recent interview, Representative Steve Stivers, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee declared that, given the size of the budget deficit, the federal government needs to save money by cutting spending on social programs. When pressed about whether that included Social Security and Medicare, he admitted that it did.
And he’s not alone in seeing major cuts in core programs for older Americans as the next step if Republicans win in November. Many major figures in the G.O.P., including the departing speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, and multiple senators, have said the same thing. (Meanwhile, groups tied to Ryan have been running attack ads accusing Democrats of planning to cut Medicare funding — but hey, consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. So, apparently, is honesty.)
Now, Republicans who call for cuts in social spending to balance the budget are showing extraordinary chutzpah, which is traditionally defined as what you exhibit when you kill your parents, then plead for mercy because you’re an orphan. After all, the same Republicans now wringing their hands over budget deficits just blew up that same deficit by enacting a huge tax cut for corporations and the wealthy.
So it might seem shocking that only a few months later they’re once again posing as deficit hawks and calling for spending cuts. That is, it might seem shocking if it weren’t for the fact that this has been the G.O.P.’s budget strategy for decades. First, cut taxes. Then, bemoan the deficit created by those tax cuts and demand cuts in social spending. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I keep reading news analyses expressing puzzlement that men who were strident deficit hawks in the Obama years so cheerfully signed on to a budget-busting tax cut under Trump. To say the obvious: These men were never deficit hawks; it was always a pose.
And the gullibility both of the news media and self-proclaimed centrists remains a remarkable story. Remember, Ryan, who was utterly orthodox in his determination to cut taxes on the rich while savaging programs for the poor and the middle class, even received an award for fiscal responsibility.
More at www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/opinion/obamacare-medicare-social-security-
midterms-republicans.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
In America (and also in other countries), an impressive postwar rise in material well-being has had zero effect on personal well-being. The divergence between economic growth and subjective satisfaction began decades ago. Real per capita income has more than tripled since the late 1950s, but the percentage of people saying they are happy has, if anything, slightly declined.
Why?
In 1990, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain was challenged by a Labour member of Parliament on the subject of growing inequality. “All levels of income are better off than they were in 1979,” she retorted. “The honorable member is saying that he would rather that the poor were poorer, provided the rich were less rich. … What a policy!”
That slap-down was an iconic formulation of a premise of the Thatcher-Reagan conservative revolution: Poverty is a social problem, but inequality is not. Governments should aim to increase the incomes and opportunities of all, especially the poor, but to worry about the gap between the rich and the rest is “the politics of envy.”
Mrs. Thatcher and Ronald Reagan should have been right. As long as I am better off, why should I begrudge your doing better still? Yet something was amiss with this consensus — something that goes far to explain why Reagan-Thatcher conservatism has caved in under pressure from the populisms of President Trump on the right and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont on the left.
. . .
In light of what happiness economists have had to say, the interesting question is not why the Reagan-Thatcher consensus finally failed but why it prevailed for two generations. Partly, I think, because its call to transcend envy is morally appealing, and partly because, in the 1980s and 1990s, pro-growth policies and free-market economics seemed to have turned around a troubled economy. But partly also because there was no viable alternative. Mainstream liberalism worried about inequality but offered only policies that much of the public viewed as discredited or unfair.
Now the Reagan-Thatcherist alternative has crumbled, too. In 2008, the economic meltdown made the system look rigged and ignited a populist backlash. In 2016, the backlash coalesced behind the populisms of Mr. Trump and Mr. Sanders, each of whom had a compelling story to tell those suffering from real or perceived loss of status: We will de-rig the system with radical solutions like trade wars and socialized medicine. Those may not be correct answers to the problem of inequality, but they are answers, and their appeal is evident.
Like it or not, inequality in today’s America drives politics toward rage and polarization, and toward destabilizing populisms of both left and right.
More at www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/opinion/happiness-inequality-prosperity-.ht
ml
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Considering SECOND has no problems at all endlessly talking to itself ...
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Hey KIKI, I have tried my darndest to have a conversation with SECOND, but, sadly, the result is that SECOND really only wants to be a "lying sack of shit" and splatter the board with lots and lots and lots of dung. There is absolutely nothing genuine or honest about SECOND.
The more attention SECOND gets, even if only "I'm not paying attention to you", the more SECOND attempts to capture eyeballs for more and more propaganda. Unless SECOND appears ready to have a discussion, I refuse to respond to SECOND because that simply bumps the thread ... and it only encourages him.
I refuse to let it drive me away from a thread and interesting conversation just because it might take some random words as an excuse to talk to itself some more.
THUGGER admits it's not about RUSSIA !!! and is, in fact, a witch hunt. "Trump better be innocent of any wrong doing, anywhere, anytime."
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:America’s Never-Ending Culture War
Originally posted by 1kiki:
I refuse to let it drive me away from a thread and interesting conversation just because it might take some random words as an excuse to talk to itself some more.
THUGGER admits it's not about RUSSIA !!! and is, in fact, a witch hunt.
The absence of a stable partisan majority keeps our domestic conflicts on a persistent burn. Richard Nixon’s victory in 1968 and his landslide re-election four years later tore apart the New Deal coalition that had dominated national politics, with barely a pause, since the early 1930s. Of the 11 presidential contests from 1976 to 2016, Republicans have won six and Democrats five.
Control of one or both houses of Congress has swung back and forth too. In 1951, the eminent political scientist Samuel Lubell observed that the Democrats were like the sun, the Republicans the moon. “It is within the majority party that the issues of any particular period are fought out,” he explained, “while the minority party shines in reflected radiance of the heat thus generated.” But for the past half-century, the major parties have been more akin to asteroids that occasionally collide but whose gyrations move neither of them much closer to the center of the political solar system.
Since the late 1960s, officeholders have sought to gain an advantage for their side by stoking the fires of conflict. This has been a consistent habit more on the right than among liberals. “Dividing the American people has been my main contribution to the national political scene,” acknowledged Spiro Agnew, who served as Nixon’s vice president until he resigned in disgrace in 1973. “I not only plead guilty to this charge, but I am somewhat flattered by it.”
The harsh divisions among Americans in 1968 have largely endured. They are rooted in profound disagreements based on culture and creeds that are impervious to compromise. If one thinks abortion is murder or that L.G.B.T.Q. people deserve every right that heterosexuals have, the very idea of finding a middle ground is abhorrent. The mutual hostility between religious conservatives and liberals — and nonbelievers — that emerged in the 1960s also fuels these seemingly irreconcilable differences. Each side is convinced it represents a majority — and a moral one at that.
More at www.nytimes.com/2018/08/24/opinion/sunday/chicago-protests-1968-cultur
e-war.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
So far, the strength of the US economy and lack of real crisis has shielded the public from Trump’s inexperience and unseriousness. But at any moment, he may be plucked from a golf course and asked to choose life or death for millions of people.
Earlier in 2018, Trump said North Korea was no longer a nuclear threat after he held a summit with Kim. The summit produced no lasting agreement. Before and since, the prediction was that Trump would use any positive signals to declare that he had solved the problem of North Korea’s nuclear threat, and that North Korea would not give up its nuclear weapons. When these two realities collide, Trump will have to lose face, or blame the North Koreans. Or nuke Kim.
More at https://qz.com/1370887/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Boo!
THUGGER admits it's not about RUSSIA !!! and is, in fact, a witch hunt. "Trump better be innocent of any wrong doing, anywhere, anytime."
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
We’re very close to becoming another Poland or Hungary. Why is America, the birthplace of democracy, so close to following the lead of other countries that have recently destroyed it?
What Freedom House calls illiberalism is on the rise across Eastern Europe. This includes Poland and Hungary, both still members of the European Union, in which democracy as we normally understand it is already dead.
In both countries the ruling parties — Law and Justice in Poland, Fidesz in Hungary — have established regimes that maintain the forms of popular elections, but have destroyed the independence of the judiciary, suppressed freedom of the press, institutionalized large-scale corruption and effectively delegitimized dissent. The result seems likely to be one-party rule for the foreseeable future.
And it could all too easily happen here. There was a time, not long ago, when people used to say that our democratic norms, our proud history of freedom, would protect us from such a slide into tyranny. In fact, some people still say that. But believing such a thing today requires willful blindness. The fact is that the Republican Party is ready, even eager, to become an American version of Law and Justice or Fidesz, exploiting its current political power to lock in permanent rule.
Why is America, the birthplace of democracy, so close to following the lead of other countries that have recently destroyed it?
Don’t tell me about “economic anxiety.” That’s not what happened in Poland, which grew steadily through the financial crisis and its aftermath. https://goo.gl/EE69j1
And it’s not what happened here in 2016: Study after study has found that racial resentment, not economic distress, drove Trump voters.
www.vox.com/identities/2017/12/15/16781222/trump-racism-economic-anxie
ty-study
The point is that we’re suffering from the same disease — white nationalism run wild — that has already effectively killed democracy in some other Western nations. And we’re very, very close to the point of no return.
More at www.nytimes.com/2018/08/27/opinion/trump-republican-party-authoritaria
nism.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Today Trump tweets to complain that Google’s news service is “rigged” against him and has pledged to address this “very serious” situation.
The US president said the existing system was biased and hiding positive stories about his administration. Google response? "You're full of shit up to your eyeballs."
More at www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/28/donald-trump-google-news-servi
ce-is-rigged-against-me
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME