A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:6ix, I am not going to tell you the whole story of the next door family, all who voted for Trump and all of them still admiring him until they died because it is a story about murder and being sent to a mental hospital. Now the house next door is empty because everybody is either dead, in jail, or disinherited. True stories like that, stripped of all the identifying details, are why I depended on Vox to give you a picture of who Trump voters really are.
I sure'd like to hear that story.
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Quote:I gave that now tragically, yet predictably, dead next door neighbor, the Republican, DVDs of Firefly and Serenity. He gave me the key to his house and called me the best neighbor he ever had. I kept hearing that from him and his other neighbors repeating what he had said. It was embarrassing, but as a Democrat in a Republican neighborhood, I really was the best neighbor among a pack of stingy, mean racists. It is kind of weird that Larry had 33 guns in the house. I have 3. "Do you have enough now, Larry?" I asked him when he bought more. "I need the protection," he said. Okay, Larry, but it didn't work out the way he expected. Instead, it worked out the way I expected.
Originally posted by captaincrunch:Quote:
Originally posted by second:6ix, I am not going to tell you the whole story of the next door family, all who voted for Trump and all of them still admiring him until they died because it is a story about murder and being sent to a mental hospital. Now the house next door is empty because everybody is either dead, in jail, or disinherited. True stories like that, stripped of all the identifying details, are why I depended on Vox to give you a picture of who Trump voters really are.
I sure'd like to hear that story.
On the flip side, I didn't give him the key to my house because people who voted for Trump and continue to praise him are untrustworthy in my opinion. I will help them, I will work with them, but when they go crazy eventually I won't die with them. They may appear to be nice, they may be conscientious employees of mine, but you've got to watch them carefully because of how their minds bend. The more they make excuses for Trump, the bigger the mess they make when they finally lose their itty-bitty minds.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Within nine weeks of the Paris climate conference, Donald Trump had won his first primary. Since then the US, the largest carbon emitter since the start of the Industrial Revolution, has withdrawn from the Paris agreement, and the president’s cabinet members are busy trying to revive the coal industry and eliminate effective oversight and regulation of the oil and gas business. The planet’s carbon emissions, which had seemed to plateau in mid-decade, are again on the rise: preliminary figures indicate that a new record will be set in 2018.
This is the backdrop against which the IPCC report arrives, written by ninety-one scientists from forty countries. It is a long and technical document—five hundred pages, drawing on six thousand studies. For most readers, the thirty-page “Summary for Policymakers” will be sufficiently dense and informative.
The takeaway messages are simple enough: to keep warming under 1.5 degrees, global carbon dioxide emissions will have to fall by 45 percent by 2030, and reach net zero by 2050. We should do our best to meet this challenge, the report warns, because allowing the temperature to rise two degrees (much less than the 3.5 we’re currently on pace for) would cause far more damage than 1.5.
The burden of climate change falls first and heaviest on the poorest nations, who of course have done the least to cause the crisis. At two degrees, the report contends, there will be a “disproportionately rapid evacuation” of people from the tropics. As one of its authors told The New York Times, “in some parts of the world, national borders will become irrelevant. You can set up a wall to try to contain 10,000 and 20,000 and one million people, but not 10 million.”
The problem is that action on climate change never follows: the scientists do their job, but even the politicians not controlled by the fossil fuel industry tend to punt or to propose small-bore changes too slow and cautious to make much difference. By far the most important change between this and the last big IPCC report, in 2014, is simply that four years have passed, meaning that the curve we’d need to follow to cut our emissions sufficiently has grown considerably steeper. Instead of the relatively gentle trajectory that would have been required if we had paid attention in 1995, the first time the IPCC warned us that global warming was real and dangerous, we’re at the point where even an all-out effort would probably be too slow. But industry still concentrates on trying to slow the inevitable move to renewable energy and preserve its current business model as long as possible.
After the release of the IPCC report, for instance, Exxon pledged $1 million to work toward a carbon tax. That’s risible—Exxon made $280 billion in the last decade, and it has donated huge sums to elect a Congress that won’t pass a carbon tax anytime soon; oil companies are spending many millions of dollars to defeat a carbon tax on the ballot in Washington State and to beat back bans on fracking in Colorado. Even if a carbon tax somehow made it past the GOP, the amount Exxon says it wants—$40 a ton—is tiny compared to what the IPCC’s analysts say would be required to make a real dent in the problem. And in return the proposed legislation would relieve the oil companies of all liability for the havoc they’ve caused. A bargain that might have made sense a generation ago no longer counts for much.
It’s natural following devastating scientific reports like this one to turn to our political leaders for a response. But in an era when politics seems at least temporarily broken, and with a crisis that has a time limit, civil society may need to pressure the business community.
More at www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/11/22/global-warming-very-grim-forecast/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Noam Chomsky Calls Trump and Republican Allies "Criminally Insane"
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/noam-chomsky-calls-tr
ump-and-republican-allies-criminally-insane/
Question for Chomsky: Why did you recently call the Republican Party “the most dangerous organization in world history”?
Answer: Take its leader, who recently applied to the government of Ireland for a permit to build a huge wall to protect his golf course, appealing to the threat of global warming, while at the same time he withdrew from international efforts to address the grim threat and is using every means at his disposal to accelerate it. Or take his colleagues, the participants in the 2016 Republican primaries. Without exception, they either denied that what is happening is happening – though any ignorance is self-induced – or said maybe it is but we shouldn’t do anything about it. The moral depths were reached by the respected “adult in the room,” Ohio governor John Kasich, who agreed that it is happening but added that “we are going to burn [coal] in Ohio and we are not going to apologize for it.” Or take a recent publication of Trump’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a detailed study recommending an end to regulations on emissions. It presented a rational argument: extrapolating current trends, by the end of the century we’ll be over the cliff and automotive emissions don’t contribute very much to the catastrophe – the assumption being that everyone is as criminally insane as we are and won’t try to avoid the crisis. In brief, let’s rob while the planet burns, putting poor Nero in the shadows.
This surely qualifies as a contender for the most evil document in history.
There have been many monsters in the past, but it would be hard to find one who was dedicated to undermining the prospects for organized human society, not in the distant future -- in order to put a few more dollars in overstuffed pockets.
And it doesn’t end there. The same can be said about the major banks that are increasing investments in fossil fuels, knowing very well what they are doing. Or, for that matter, the regular articles in the major media and business press reporting US success in rapidly increasing oil and gas production, with commentary on energy independence, sometimes local environmental effects, but regularly without a phrase on the impact on global warming – a truly existential threat. Same in the election campaign. Not a word about the issue that is merely the most crucial one in human history.
Hardly a day passes without new information about the severity of the threat. As I’m writing, a new study appeared in Nature showing that retention of heat in the oceans has been greatly underestimated, meaning that the total carbon budget is much less than had been assumed in the recent, and sufficiently ominous, IPCC report. The study calculates that maximum emissions would have to be reduced by 25% to avoid warming of 2 degrees (C), well above the danger point. At the same time polls show that -- doubtless influenced by their leaders who they trust more than the evil media -- half of Republicans deny that global warming is even taking place, and of the rest, almost half reject any human responsibility. Words fail.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Trump proposed retaliation against Congressional oversight
A Democratic House means an end to the impunity Trump has enjoyed on Capitol Hill. Administration scandals and Trump’s conduct are finally going to be subject to investigation, a prospect that Trump greeted with wildly inappropriate threats.
No president enjoys congressional oversight, but rather than do something normal like issue a routine statement about how he’ll comply with legitimate requests, Trump lashed out with a wild scheme to try to intimidate Democrats out of investigating him:
"I keep hearing about investigations. Fatigue, like from the time, almost from the time that I announced I was going to run, they have been giving us this investigation fatigue. It has been a long time. They have nothing. Zero. You know why? Because there is nothing. But they can play that game, but we can play it better. Because we have a thing called the United States Senate. And a lot of very questionable things were done between leaks of classified information and many other elements that should not have taken place. And all you are going to do is end up in back-and-forth and back-and-forth."
What's more, in response to a later question, Trump clarified that his hope for a bipartisan infrastructure deal was contingent on Democrats agreeing not to do investigations.
“If they do that,” Trump said, “then all it is is a warlike posture.”
Trump defies the basic logic of the separation of powers. It’s not unusual for divided government to produce compromise legislation, but Trump's idea that Democrats should unilaterally abdicate their constitutional obligations in pursuit of some kind of totally unspecified legislation deal with him is totally ridiculous.
www.vox.com/2018/11/7/18072284/donald-trump-midterm-press-conference-m
edia-abortion
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:Quote:6ix, I am not going to tell you the whole story of the next door family, all who voted for Trump and all of them still admiring him until they died because it is a story about murder and being sent to a mental hospital. Now the house next door is empty because everybody is either dead, in jail, or disinherited. True stories like that, stripped of all the identifying details, are why I depended on Vox to give you a picture of who Trump voters really are.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Seriously, Second...
I know you're capable of having an original thought. I haven't seen it yet, but there must be something in there that Vox or MotherJones didn't put in there.
I believe in you, man.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Need I say that I will forgive Trump voters for how they voted, but I don't forgive them for how they really act, not just who they pretend to be, in the non-political realm?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
lol. CaptinCrunch is going to believe every word of it is true, but he doesn't believe in my figures on health insurance premium increases since the ACA was enacted when all he has to do is look at how much he paid in 2008 compared to now.
These are the type of people we're dealing with here.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
Originally posted by second:
half of Republicans deny that global warming is even taking place, and of the rest, almost half reject any human responsibility. Words fail.
tic tac
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Quote:Don't ever comment again, 1kiki, if you cannot remember Obama and his EPA setting rules on CO2. Don't comment again, 1kiki, if you cannot remember what the GOP did next or you cannot remember Trump pulling the USA out of all agreements to reduce CO2.
Originally posted by 1kiki:Quote:And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
Originally posted by second:
half of Republicans deny that global warming is even taking place, and of the rest, almost half reject any human responsibility. Words fail.
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:"lol" back at you, 6ixStringJack. You are a type I deal with all the time. They think they understand, but anybody knowledgeable would recognize you don't know shit from Shinola.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
lol. CaptinCrunch is going to believe every word of it is true, but he doesn't believe in my figures on health insurance premium increases since the ACA was enacted when all he has to do is look at how much he paid in 2008 compared to now.
These are the type of people we're dealing with here.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/know_shit_from_Shinola
I wonder if 6ix can understand this? Probably not, but there is really no way for me to test his understanding, other than if he did, he would know he elected a crook and would declare that himself:
Yesterday, Trump said he can’t share any of his tax returns because he is being audited. Trump had 10 tax returns in the last 10 years. And 20 returns in 20 years. Did the IRS finish an audit on any of those returns? Trump says no, but I say yes, there are Trump tax returns that aren’t being audited. Trump gives a dumb explanation in "The 10 Most Dumbfounding Moments From Trump's Post-Election Press Conference", item #10, Trump says he won’t release his tax returns—for now. Trump’s answer is pure dementia.
www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/11/most-notable-moments-trum
ps-press-conference/575188/
The complexity of Trump’s tax returns only underscores why the public should have a chance to see them. In October, the New York Times published a blockbuster report that revealed how Trump had used sketchy schemes to avoid paying taxes on his income and the wealth he inherited from his father — nearly $413 million in today’s dollars. The reporters’ analysis and tax experts suggested that the antics the Trump family used could possibly be criminal, though the statute of limitations would have long since passed.
www.nytimes.com/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-wealth-fred-trump.
html
The fact that the president appears to have been involved in serious financial crimes in the past finally puts a very heavy finger on the most likely reason for his unprecedented lack of transparency — he didn’t magically stop committing crimes in the mid-1990s, he’s just been getting away with it in an era of reduced enforcement and he fears his documents wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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After losing to a Democrat, Harris County Juvenile Court Judge Glenn Devlin released nearly all of the youthful defendants that appeared in front him on Wednesday morning, simply asking the kids whether they planned to kill anyone before letting them go.
"He was releasing everybody," said public defender Steven Halpert, who watched the string of surprising releases. "Apparently he was saying that's what the voters wanted."
The longtime Republican jurist — whose seat was among 59 swept by Democrats in Tuesday's election — is one of two juvenile court judges in Harris County whose track records favoring incarceration contributed heavily to doubling the number of kids Harris County sent to the Texas Juvenile Justice Department in recent years, even as those figures fell in the rest of the state.
A Houston Chronicle investigation last month found that Devlin and Judge John Phillips accounted for more than one-fifth of all children sent to the state's juvenile prisons last year. The two jurists not only sent more teens to juvenile prison, but they also sent them younger and for less-serious offenses than the county's third juvenile court, where Judge Mike Schneider presides.
More at www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/article/Promise-not-to-kil
l-anyone-After-losing-election-13371485.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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