A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ixStringJack, you know how the system works. It needs a super-majority of 67 in the Senate to rewrite the Constitution. It even needs a super-majority of 60 to pass ordinary legislation if the opposition party objects. The Federal government was designed to fail on any controversial issue. That’s how Madison and Jefferson put it together. It’s in the basic design. That’s why the US has had centuries of major friction, with the loud screeching of metal against metal, on all big issues.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I don't agree at all with a pure popular vote, but the system as it is designed is over 200 years old and needs to be revamped. Most people who vote for President are just throwing it away entirely because they live in a state that would NEVER go the other way. I'm one of them. I have been in every state I've lived in since I've been old enough to vote. Any presidential vote I've ever made has been entirely meaningless and I might as well have put Daffy Duck for President.
I've said this before, and I'll say it again... Why didn't the Obama administration make this one of the FIRST things on the docket when the Dems had a majority in both the house and senate?
That's another problem I have with the Democratic Party. They'll endlessly bitch and moan when they lose because of the Electoral College, but they seem to get collective amnesia when they win and nobody thinks to even bring it up.
Y'all know that there ain't no way in hell that the Republicans are going to do anything about it. Why don't you demand that something be done about it when the Democrats are in power?
I think the more important question is why don't the Democrat politicians ever think to ever do anything about it themselves?
There have been four efforts to abolish the electoral college. All have been by Democrats. All efforts were thwarted by Republicans. Republicans are always there to stop it from happening in either Congress or at the state legislatures. Until there are 33 or fewer GOP Senators, it cannot happen. Even then it might not happen because there have been three asshole Democrats who also prevented change for the better (Democratic Senators James Eastland of Mississippi, John McClellan of Arkansas, and Sam Ervin of North Carolina) but, thankfully, they are all dead and burning in hell along side of those Democratic Senators who resigned to join the Confederacy in 1860 and 1861. I pray that they all suffer eternal pain for their
My point is that they don't even try. In 8 years of Obama being in office, the question wasn't even brought up once. Not a single Democrat I ever saw online said "hey, we've got a majority in the house and the senate. We should at least put this to a vote and when it gets shot down there is a legitimate conversation about it". I think it would be the proper time to bring awareness to the issue, yanno, when the Democrats are actually "winning" instead of bitching about it years after the fact that they lose again because of it.
I think the problem is that in the past they've tried to outright abolish the Electoral College. I'm 100% against that idea myself. But as I said many times here in the last decade plus, I am 100% in support of starting a real conversation about how this needs to be revamped. I don't know how many people were living in the country when it was first instituted, but I'm half sure that they had no idea there would be 320 million people being represented by this system of voting one day when it was.
One day, the Democrats will have all three positions of power again, though I doubt we'll ever see a super majority in my lifetime. I hope that maybe next time we can bring this to the table and at least make people aware of it when that time comes.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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The blockbuster New York Times report on the Trump family’s history of fraud is really about two distinct although linked kinds of fraudulence.
On one side, the family engaged in tax fraud on a huge scale, using a variety of money-laundering techniques to avoid paying what it owed. On the other, the story Donald Trump tells about his life — his depiction of himself as a self-made businessman who made billions starting from humble roots — has always been a lie: Not only did he inherit his wealth, receiving the equivalent of more than $400 million from his father, but Fred Trump bailed his son out after deals went bad.
One implication of these revelations is that Trump supporters who imagine that they’ve found a straight-talking champion who will drain the swamp while using his business acumen to make America great again have been suckered.
But the tale of the Trump money is part of a bigger story. Even among those unhappy at the extent to which we live in an era of soaring inequality and growing concentration of wealth at the top, there has been a tendency to believe that great wealth is, more often than not, earned more or less honestly. Not true. Tax evasion, almost by definition, doesn’t show up in official statistics, and the super-wealthy aren’t in the habit of mouthing off about what great tax cheats they are. To get a real picture of how much fraud is going on, you either have to do what The Times did — exhaustively investigate the finances of a particular family — or rely on lucky breaks that reveal what was previously hidden. One break was the Panama Papers.
Matching information from the Panama Papers and other leaks with national tax data, researchers found that outright tax evasion actually is a big deal at the top. The truly wealthy end up paying a much lower effective tax rate than the merely rich, not because of loopholes in tax law, but because they break the law. The wealthiest taxpayers, the researchers found, pay on average 25 percent less than they owe — and, of course, many individuals pay even less.
The corruption isn’t subtle; on the contrary, it’s cruder than almost anyone imagined. It also runs deep, and it has infected our politics, quite literally up to its highest levels.
More at www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/opinion/donald-trump-fred-taxes-fraud.html
Are you curious about how the NYTimes found out about Trump's scam? It was only because Trump's sister referenced "All County Building Supply & Maintenance" on a disclosure form when she became a federal judge. That was it. If not for that, nobody would ever have known about any of this. More at www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/10/heres-a-name-to-remember-all-co
unty-building-supply-maintenance/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Wow. The unintelligent dupes like 6 just slurp this shit right up.
It's sad that so many people are willing to be fleeced by carnival barkers like Blumpy.
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There are roughly three competing visions within the party about how to move forward: 1) Go the way of Bernie Sanders and appeal to working-class voters with progressive policy ideas; 2) go the centrist route in a bid to grab moderate, suburban independents and Republicans who might have voted for Trump but can be persuaded to jump ship; or 3) double down on the 2008 and 2012 strategies and hope to recreate the Obama coalition of women, minorities, and young people.
These are all nonstarters.
No policy platform is going to win three or four consecutive national elections for Democrats because we know policy isn’t what decides elections; that’s not how most voters make decisions.
There are no policy changes that are going to reverse the overall trajectory that this society is on right now. A lot of people still think there’s some meaningful connection between policy outcomes and voter decisions, but there’s a good bit of political science research to suggest that’s just a fantasy. (Most voters don’t have anything like coherent preferences. Most people pay little attention to politics; when they vote, if they vote at all, they do so irrationally and for contradictory reasons.)
The idea that we deliver benefits to people and they’re going to be like, “Thank you for everything that you’ve done, let me return you with a larger majority next time,” is just nonsense. It’s the wrong way to think about politics.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do things for people, but we’ve got to be serious about how elections are won. And they’re not being won on the basis of policy proposals or policy wins.
The Constitution is a shockingly short document, and it turns out that it’s extremely vague on some key procedures that we rely on to help government function at a basic level. For the government to work, cooperation between parties is needed. But when that cooperation is withdrawn, it creates chaos.
We’ve seen a one-sided escalation in which Republicans exploit the vagueness or lack of clarity in the Constitution in order to press their advantage in a variety of arenas — from voter ID laws to gerrymandering to behavioral norms in the Congress and Senate. What the Republicans did to Merrick Garland was one of the most egregious examples ever seen. They essentially stole a seat on the Supreme Court — a swing seat, no less. But they correctly argued that they had no clear constitutional obligation to consider the president’s nominee for the seat.
This is the sort of maneuvering and procedural warfare the Republicans have been escalating it for two decades. And they’ve managed to entrench their power through these dubious procedures.
The result is that the structural environment is biased against Democrats and the Republicans have engineered it that way.
More about how a Democrat controlled Congress and state legislatures can fight back at
www.vox.com/2018/5/1/17258866/democratic-party-supreme-court-republica
ns-trump-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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It takes a special kind of guts to press ahead with a nominee as unpopular as Kavanaugh. Republican were sloppy and poor at vetting him.
Obama and the Democrats showed political skill in managing to select Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, two well-liked and scandal-free Supreme Court nominees.
Meanwhile, during that same period of time, Democrats actually seemed extremely ruthless and effective in getting laws passed while Republicans were curiously poor at stopping them. Democrats crafted a vast expansion of federal health care spending, raised taxes on corporations and the rich, and nationalized the student loan industry — and that was just in one bill.
Separate legislation completely overhauled federal financial regulation. They passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (“the stimulus”), plus a couple of extra smaller stimulus bills and then a couple more during the lame-duck period. They repealed “don’t ask, don’t tell,” ratified a landmark arms control treaty, passed federal hate crimes legislation, and reformed and expanded the federal school lunch program.
Congress for the first time allowed the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco products, forced new disclosure on credit card companies, established a small national public service initiative, passed the biggest public lands bill in generations, expanded the Children’s Health Insurance Program, made it easier for plaintiffs to pursue pay discrimination claims, and even passed some kind of shark conservation law.
This is actually a lot more than Republicans have gotten done in 2017–’18. You could chalk it up to Democrats being more ruthless, though I think it more likely shows that Democrats are simply more interested in policy activism. More to the point, Democrats had bigger congressional majorities, so they could get more done. Vote counts matter.
More at www.vox.com/2018/10/9/17948408/kavanaugh-republicans-ruthless
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 only thing I applaud in that long list of things Democrats under Obama got passed is the Shark Conservation Act that the idiot at vox glossed over.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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It is always, for me, a special privilege to address the women of this Party. First of all, for a very practical reason, they tell me there are more women in the United States than there are men. But secondly, I have the most deep conviction that a political party can be called such only if its whole purposes are soundly based in some moral and spiritual values.
The women of this nation are more concerned in their day by day work, I think, than are men with these values. They have the job of rearing our young, those youngsters who are so dear to all our hearts, and they want them to grow up with the right kind of values embedded in them so that as they meet the problems of life they will always have a certain kind of principle, or doctrine, or belief to fall back on that will help guide them through the rough spots.
I think the women, therefore, must be concerned with these values, and I return to my statement that if a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.
www.snopes.com/fact-check/eisenhower-political-party-moral/
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.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Are you gonna "uh huh" the immoral part of this one? How much money is Trump is personally getting from the Saudi government?
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Uh huh.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
It’s not the only instance of a foreign state putting money directly into Trump’s pockets with disturbing implications for the conduct of US foreign policy. The only way to find out how often it happens or what policy choices it’s linked to would be to get a Congress that bothers to care.
A foreign government — an American ally, no less — probably just murdered a US resident with impunity while he’s on the soil of a NATO member state because they didn’t like his newspaper columns. And yet, Trump explained to reporters on Thursday that he does not want to respond to the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi because “I don’t like stopping massive amounts of money coming into our country” and “I don’t like stopping an investment of $110 billion in the United States.”
Trump’s nonchalance is getting some pushback from Congress, which is welcome, including some actual action from Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), who has often complained about Trump but rarely done anything. While a little tension between a Senator and the White House on this subject is welcome, it leaves unexamined the elephant in the room. Why is Trump so willing to let the Saudis slide? Is Trump getting paid by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman? Is his son-in-law, Jared Kushner?
Normally, these would be absurd questions to raise about a president. But Trump has commented before on his business ties to Saudi Arabia, bragging at a campaign rally in Alabama about how much business he did with Saudi interests. And he’s never fully aired the extent of his vast business and financial ties.
Now, as the White House is preparing to make policy (or not) in a crucial moment, how can the public have any confidence that the president isn’t immorally looking out for just his own interests and not the country’s?
Trump told reporters that because Khashoggi disappeared in Turkey, and because he is a permanent resident of the US but not a citizen, it’s no big deal. US intelligence agencies are leaking like sieves trying to make the opposite point, getting word out to the American public that the American government has solid evidence that things are exactly as they appear, and that the Saudi government was behind the mysterious disappearance and likely murder of Khashoggi.
More at www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/10/12/17964884/trump-saudi-money-
khashoggi
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 much money is Trump is personally getting from the Saudi government?"
Quote:
Julian Assange: Isis and Clinton Foundation are both funded by Saudi ...
https://www.independent.co.uk › News › People
Nov 4, 2016 - Wealthy officials from Qatar and Saudi Arabia who donated money to Hillary Clinton’s charitable foundation also provided financial support to Isis, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has claimed. ... Representatives from the Clinton Foundation have repeatedly denied accusations Ms
The Clinton Foundation's History of Controversy - Pacific Standard
https://psmag.com/news/whats-going-on-with-the-clinton-foundation
Jan 24, 2018 - The FBI's latest probe into the foundation may seem like a political witch hunt, but there ... It has since grown from an organization to raise funds for the Clinton ... Saudi Arabia alone has contributed $10 million to $25 million
Arms Sales OK'd by Hillary Clinton's State Department Raise Questions
https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/.../arms-sales-ok-d-by-hillary-clin
ton-s-state-depart...
In the years before Clinton became secretary of state, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia contributed at least $10 million to the Clinton Foundation, while Boeing ...
4 experts make the case that the Clinton Foundation's fundraising was ...
https://www.vox.com/2016/8/25/12615340/hillary-clinton-foundation
Aug 25, 2016 - Money in politics experts say Hillary Clinton's ties to the Clinton Foundation's ... Saudi Arabia gave the foundation up to $25 million, and Clinton ..
tic tac
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