A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Quote:Stephen Colbert took a look at journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance and probable murder at the hands of the Saudi Arabian government on Monday, excoriating Donald Trump over his astonishingly cotton-brained solution to the easiest murder mystery in the history of the world. That theory again, in the President of the United States’ own words, just in case you had any national pride left:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
"How much money is Trump is personally getting from the Saudi government?"
"The King firmly denied any knowledge of it. He didn’t really know. Maybe—I don’t want to get into his mind—but it sounded to me like maybe these could have been rogue killers. Who knows!"
Trump’s theory became inoperative later on in the day, when CNN broke the news that the Saudis were preparing to admit they’d killed Khashoggi in an interrogation gone wrong. Colbert was not impressed with anyone involved in the whole fiasco, and said so.
Besides popping another one of Trump’s leaky trial balloons, Colbert does a good job pointing out that the Saudi Arabian “interrogation-gone-wrong” explanation is almost as ludicrous as the president’s Columbo act:
"Let me ask an obvious question: Any interrogation that includes 15 men and a bone saw — how does that go right?"
It’s not easy to wring laughter from the constant grim reminders that we’re ruled by thieves and murderers, so cheers to Colbert and his writers.
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:
Getting voters to the polls was the unspoken theme of Cruz-O’Rourke debate
Cruz painted an image of Texas values being under assault from a socialist wave, with O'Rourke in the mold of Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, billionaire socialist financier George Soros and former first lady Hillary Clinton.
The goal was to cast Beto O'Rourke as a threat to the Texas way of life, said Rice University political science professor Mark P. Jones.
Cruz drove home the point when he told O'Rourke during one exchange that being there for Texans means fighting for them, and "not George Soros, not big liberal interests, but fighting for the values of Texas."
Later Cruz was asked to say something positive about O'Rourke. He responded in terms calculated to fire up his own base.
"Bernie Sanders believes in what he's fighting for, he believes in socialism," Cruz said from the stage at McFarlin Auditorium at Southern Methodist University. "Now I think what he's fighting for doesn't work, but I think you are absolutely sincere, like Bernie, that you believe in expanding government and higher taxes — and I commend you for fighting for what you believe in."
(O'Rourke calls for banning some types of guns, legalizing marijuana, preserving Obamacare and defending athletes who kneel during the national anthem. Polls show a majority of Texans disagree with him on those issues.)
Professor Jones said for O'Rourke it was about presenting himself to black voters as a credible champion on those issues and enough of an ally that it's worth showing up in big — even historic — numbers to vote for him on election day.
Turnout in Texas mid-term elections has generally been among the worst in the nation. In 2014, just 4.6 million of Texas's then 14 million voters cast ballots in the midterm elections. That's just 34 percent of the state's registered voters and 25 percent of the voting age population in Texas. No midterm race has had more than 40 percent turnout since 1998.
More at www.houstonchronicle.com/news/politics/texas/article/Getting-voters-to
-the-polls-was-the-unspoken-13249929.php
T
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
One of the funniest political ads I've ever seen!
That guy needs his own show.
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Quote:A reminder about how Republicans go about the job of being re-elected:
Originally posted by captaincrunch:
One of the funniest political ads I've ever seen! That guy needs his own show.
Chapter 25 from Vietnam, an Epic Tragedy by Max Hastings
‘It Will Absolutely, Totally, Wipe Out McGovern’
(Note that McGovern was running against President Nixon in 1972)
Henry Kissinger achieved superstar status for his role in negotiating the settlement that promised to extricate his country from its quagmire. In October 1972, both the American people and the national security adviser convinced themselves that his brilliant diplomacy had brought the Paris talks close to an outcome. In truth, however, the US eventually settled on the only terms North Vietnam cared about, whereby its own troops remained in the South, while the Americans went home. Almost all the other provisions of the final Accords were such as neither side supposed would be observed. The only change in the communist position, the face-saver that opened the way for Washington to accede, was that Hanoi abandoned its earlier insistence on President Nguyen Van Thieu’s removal as leader of South Vietnam.
Two factors were in play here: during the summer the Northerners recognized that Nixon was assured of re-election. Not only could they not hope to negotiate with a different and more sympathetic US government, but once polling was over, the White House might play rougher. Moreover, Hanoi made the pragmatic calculation that getting rid of the Americans was the only objective that mattered: once the ‘imperialists’ quit Indochina, destruction of their Saigon clients should neither prove difficult, nor take intolerably long. This perception was shared by the government of South Vietnam.
The exchanges at the White House between Nixon and Kissinger about Vietnam are chronicled in an incontrovertible detail unprecedented in history, because tape-recorded. The two men cherished few illusions about what they were doing, though bent upon ensuring that the American people did. Kissinger professed to regard Hanoi’s shift about Thieu as a diplomatic victory, because it opened the way for a ‘decent interval’. He told Nixon on 3 August: ‘If a year or two years from now North Vietnam gobbles up South Vietnam, we can have a viable foreign policy, if it looks like it’s the result of South Vietnamese incompetence. If we now sell out in such a way that, say, within a three- to four-month period, we have pushed President Thieu over the brink’, he thought that even the Chinese would be dismayed by American clumsiness and cynicism. Everything in the later negotiations was about timing outcomes to make things look right.
More at
https://1337x.to/torrent/3251690/Vietnam-An-Epic-Tragedy-1945-1975-by-
Max-Hastings-epub/
In this URL, the final / is important, although fff.net does not properly forward to the address.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Will Trump continue to pretend nothing really happened?
Horrendous screams were heard by a witness downstairs, Turkish source said. "The consul himself was taken out of the room. There was no attempt to interrogate him. They had come to kill him,” the source told MEE.
The screaming stopped when Khashoggi - who was last seen entering the Saudi consulate on 2 October - was injected with an as yet unknown substance. Tubaigy began to cut Khashoggi’s body up on a table in the study while he was still alive, the Turkish source said.
http://susiemadrak.com/2018/10/17/horrific/
Unconfirmed speculation: The Netanyahu—bin Salman—Trump plan is to have the US and the West boycott Iranian oil beginning in early November in order to collapse Iran’s economy and cause regime change.
Somebody didn’t like the plan and decided to make it known to Khashoggi, a journalist.
Before Khashoggi published the plan, we all know what happened next.
On October 2, Khashoggi was killed and then dismembered inside the Saudi Arabian Embassy.
On October 9, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley suddenly resigned without explanation.
But, where the 3-Stoogies—-Netanyahu, bin Salman and Trump—-went wrong was in believing that after Khashoggi’s Mafia-style hit (greenlighted by Kushner) occurred nobody would take notice or even care.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke was the subject of 14 separate government investigations. (A new record!) But that number could soon be zero. That’s because Zinke just fired the Department of the Interior’s acting inspector general.
The news doesn’t stop there. Not only did Mary Kendall, the acting inspector general, not learn she was being replaced until The Hill broke the news this morning, but her replacement will likely be able to fill the role without needing to go through Senate confirmation.
Kendall—who’s served as acting inspector general at the DOI for ten years, and previously spent a decade as deputy inspector general—is being replaced by Suzanne Israel Tufts, a Republican lawyer who worked on the Trump campaign.
One way to get those annoying ethics pests off your back is to fire the inspector general and replace her with a party hack. That should do the job nicely.
No Republican in Congress will see anything wrong with this.
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/10/ryan-zinke-fires-annoying-inspe
ctor-general/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Donald Trump claims he only licensed his name for real estate projects developed by others. But an investigation of a dozen Trump deals shows deep family involvement in projects that often involved deceptive practices.
by Heather Vogell, ProPublica, with Andrea Bernstein and Meg Cramer, WNYC, and Peter Elkind, ProPublica
October 17, 2018
The Trumps were typically way more than mere licensors or bystanders in their often-troubled deals. They were deeply involved in these projects. They helped mislead investors and buyers — and they profited handsomely from it.
Patterns of deceptive practices occurred in a dozen deals across the globe, as the business expanded into international projects, and the Trumps often participated. One common pattern, visible in more than half of those transactions, was a tendency to misstate key sales numbers.
In interviews and press conferences, Ivanka Trump gave false sales figures for projects in Mexico’s Baja California; Panama City, Panama; Toronto and New York’s SoHo neighborhood. These statements weren’t just the legendary Trump hype; they misled potential buyers about the viability of the developments.
Another pattern: Donald Trump repeatedly misled buyers about the amount (or existence) of his ownership in projects in Tampa, Florida; Panama; Baja and elsewhere. For a tower planned in Tampa, for example, Trump told a local paper in 2005 that his ownership would be less than 50 percent: “But it’s a substantial stake. I recently said I’d like to increase my stake but when they’re selling that well they don’t let you do that.” In reality, Trump had no ownership stake in the project.
The Trumps often made money even when projects failed. And when they tanked, the Trumps simply ignored their prior claims of close involvement, denied any responsibility and walked away.
The cycle is exemplified in Panama City, where the Trumps were involved in a project to build a massive tower and complex known as the Trump Ocean Club. The project’s unfortunate turns included bankruptcy, then, years later, the forcible ejection of the Trump Organization from managing the hotel.
There, as elsewhere, the Trump Organization disclaimed responsibility. It emphasized that it had merely licensed the Trump name to developers who handled everything from construction to marketing. “The Trump Organization was not the owner, developer or seller of the Trump Ocean Club Panama project,” it said in a statement last year. “Because of its limited role, the company was not responsible for the financing of the project and had no involvement in the sale of units.”
That was false. For starters, Trump arranged financing — his promised commission: $2.2 million or more — by bringing in investment bank Bear Stearns, which issued the bonds that paid for the Panama project’s construction.
More at https://features.propublica.org/trump-inc-podcast/trump-family-busines
s-panama-city-khafif/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Mitch McConnell Admits That the GOP Doesn’t Actually Want to Fix the Deficit While It’s in Charge
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/10/mitch-mcconnell-deficit-li
es.html
Mitch McConnell says that Republicans will not take any serious steps to reduce the deficit, unless they can also share blame for unpopular entitlement cuts with Democrats.
He didn’t use exactly those words during his Tuesday interview with Bloomberg. But the Senate Majority Leader came close, admitting that changes to programs like Medicare and Social Security might be “impossible to achieve” as long as Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the White House. It was a quietly refreshing moment, in which McConnell effectively dropped the entire charade that Republicans are a party that prioritizes fiscal prudence—making explicit what has long been obvious to anyone who has paid the faintest bit of attention to Washington over the past decades.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Inside Ted Cruz's Brain During The Texas Debate
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:
Mitch McConnell Admits That the GOP Doesn’t Actually Want to Fix the Deficit While It’s in Charge
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/10/mitch-mcconnell-deficit-li
es.html
Mitch McConnell says that Republicans will not take any serious steps to reduce the deficit, unless they can also share blame for unpopular entitlement cuts with Democrats.
He didn’t use exactly those words during his Tuesday interview with Bloomberg. But the Senate Majority Leader came close, admitting that changes to programs like Medicare and Social Security might be “impossible to achieve” as long as Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the White House. It was a quietly refreshing moment, in which McConnell effectively dropped the entire charade that Republicans are a party that prioritizes fiscal prudence—making explicit what has long been obvious to anyone who has paid the faintest bit of attention to Washington over the past decades.
Yeah. No shit.
One of the reasons that GWB was the worst president we ever had, at the time, and then Obama came in and made him look miserly.
It's gotten slightly better in the last two years, but I'm fairly sure the American Dollar is doomed now after the leadership of the last two decades.
At least you've found a left voice that is discussing something legitimate again. Though I think this is just people beginning to hedge their bets if the blue wave doesn't come through and they're preparing to shift back into blame-everything-on-republicans-mode until the 2020 election. A tactic that is only going to work if the economy does get worse in the next 2 years.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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