A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 211 of 725
Quote:About a 110,000,000 Americans approved wholeheartedly of the Vietnam War. Only 2,709,918 Americans served in Vietnam. Fewer volunteered. Even fewer did more good than harm to America. I don't place all the blame on the 110,000,000. Most of the blame goes to Presidents, Generals, Admirals, Secretaries of Defense, Captain Ernest Medina and Lt. William Laws Calley Jr. for that fiasco. But if hundreds of millions of Americans weren't fearful of Commies, there would not have been a Vietnam War. Neither would there be a War on Terror nor an Iraq War if hundreds of millions of Americans weren't fearful of terrorists. The fearful American majority have a BIG influence on which wars get fought.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Yeah yeah. Whatever, SECOND.
Your constant bellyaching about "all Americans" is grotesque.
"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND
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 many ways, climate denialism resembles the tobacco industry’s cancer denialism. Businesses with a financial interest in confusing the public — in this case, fossil-fuel companies — are prime movers. As far as I can tell, every one of the handful of well-known scientists who have expressed climate skepticism has received large sums of money from these companies or from dark money conduits like DonorsTrust — the same conduit, as it happens, that supported Matthew Whitaker, the new acting attorney general, before he joined the Trump administration.
But climate denial has sunk deeper political roots than cancer denial ever did. In practice, you can’t be a modern Republican in good standing unless you deny the reality of global warming, assert that it has natural causes or insist that nothing can be done about it without destroying the economy. You also have to either accept or acquiesce in wild claims that the overwhelming evidence for climate change is a hoax, that it has been fabricated by a vast global conspiracy of scientists.
Why would anyone go along with such things? Money is still the main answer: Almost all prominent climate deniers are on the fossil-fuel take. However, ideology is also a factor: If you take environmental issues seriously, you are led to the need for government regulation of some kind, so rigid free-market ideologues don’t want to believe that environmental concerns are real.
More at www.nytimes.com/2018/11/26/opinion/climate-change-denial-republican.ht
ml
Big Oil & the GOP aren't the problem when it comes to enacting climate change legislation. The problem is American voters who don't want to pay more for energy. Every poll backs this up. The GOP is simply reflecting the desires of their constituents. The point of legislation was always to have oil, coal, and natural gas prices higher than clean energy to force consumers to switch to clean.
Are the majority of Americans willing to pay higher taxes on fossil fuels? No. Will they leave coal and oil assets worth trillions in the ground? No. The GOP and Trump have figured this out. The Democratic Party has not. Technology is an escape from this energy prices vs climate change trap for Democrats. Clean energy prices have to drop to much less than coal and oil, but how likely are hundreds of thousand engineers and scientists able to create that new low price? Probably more likely than hundreds of millions of voters willing to pay higher prices for coal and oil. Let us all pray for the necessary technological miracles and scientific breakthroughs because we ain’t getting a political miracle, except in, maybe, California. It is not yet Zero Carbon day in 2045 and the GOP might return to power in California before then.
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/29/california-electricity-fossil-
fuels-wind-solar-vote (CA goes part way.)
www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/9/11/17844896/california-jerry
-brown-carbon-neutral-2045-climate-change (CA goes all the way. Maybe.)
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
Conservative “trade-offs” are almost never anything but thinly-veiled excuses for not doing anything to upset the current order. The modern Republican Party, in particular, is almost entirely committed to the propositions that tax cuts pay for themselves, wars don’t cost anything, social welfare hurts the poor, climate change doesn’t exist, and the unregulated free market magically solves all problems. If there’s ever been a political party more dedicated to selling itself to the electorate on the basis of no trade-offs or sacrifices ever being necessary, it’s the contemporary GOP.
More at www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/11/human-nature-sucks-become-a-lef
ty/
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
Trump lied when he sold himself as a human hand grenade to blow up a society that isn’t working for big swatches of America. He will tweet, but not explode:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Very disappointed with General Motors and their CEO, Mary Barra, for closing plants in Ohio, Michigan and Maryland. Nothing being closed in Mexico & China. The U.S. saved General Motors, and this is the THANKS we get! We are now looking at cutting all @GM subsidies, including for electric cars. General Motors made a big China bet years ago when they built plants there (and in Mexico) - don’t think that bet is going to pay off. I am here to protect America’s Workers!
11:05 AM - 27 Nov 2018
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1067494680416407552
The Business Idea that Led to Trump
In the summer of 2017, Lynn Paine and Joseph Bower, two Harvard Business School professors, published a piece in the Harvard Business Review arguing that the idea that profits are all that should matter to a company’s leadership is a relatively new one. They trace it to an essay by the free-market economist Milton Friedman, which ran in the Times Magazine in 1970. In the piece, Friedman outlined what he called the “Friedman business doctrine,” which holds that ideas of corporate social responsibility, which had become popular in the business world, were undermining the American way of life. “The businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned ‘merely’ with profit but also with promoting desirable ‘social’ ends; that business has a ‘social conscience’ and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers,” he wrote. Instead, he went on, “They are preaching pure and unadulterated socialism. Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these last decades.” The article caused a sensation, and Friedman’s idea that managers of companies were nothing more than “agents” of shareholders was taken up by economists and business school professors, who helped build it into the dominant attitude in the United States and beyond. In their article, Paine and Bower argue that this theory is “rife with moral hazard.” Stock owners have no public accountability for what the company does, and no responsibility, as executives do, to place the company’s interests above their own. The costs of prioritizing shareholders’ interests are borne by the company, and by society as a whole, which is robbed of innovations, jobs, and tax revenue.
The tension between long-term and short-term economic interests has become a favorite topic in policy circles in recent years, but the election of Donald Trump, in 2016, brought the implications into clearer focus. Much of Trump’s base is made up of white, rural voters; many of them have seen jobs disappear from their communities, while wages have stagnated for those still working. In the midterm elections, Republicans performed better than many people expected; high-school-educated voters came out, once again, strongly in favor of the party of Trump. According to Shaich, the resentment that these voters feel is a direct result of the quick-profits-over-all ethos that dominates economic thinking. “When we live in a world where we view stockholder value creation as the end, and not as a by-product, which is what short-term thinking lends itself to, we end up doing great damage to every other constituency, and that’s what ultimately drives back to the kind of ‘let’s rip down the establishment’ nihilism that in my view is at the core of Trumpism,” he said. “A Trump voter says, ‘Hey, this isn’t serving me. I’ve been sitting here in Michigan and Wisconsin and Ohio, I thought I’d have a middle-class life if I went to work, and my kids can’t pay their student debt. I lost my manufacturing job and I’m making twelve dollars an hour in a service job.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Trump’s full Washington Post interview transcript, annotated
www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/11/27/president-trumps-full-washi
ngton-post-interview-transcript-annotated/
In an interview published Tuesday evening, Trump simply said: “I’m not happy with the Fed. They’re making a mistake because I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.” I could walk him through some arguments in favor of this position. That way, the next time he’s asked about this by reporters he could say something that makes some kind of sense.
The entire interview is littered with pronouncements that are bizarre (“oceans are very small”), nonsensical (“We lose $800 billion a year with trade.”), or so incoherent that when he comes out and just tells a lie (like that in the past there were many articles worrying about global freezing) it comes almost as a relief. Reality has fundamentally outpaced satire in the Trump era.
This is Trump’s answer to a question about whether it’s appropriate for him to blame the Fed for the GM layoffs announced this week:
"And I’m not blaming anybody, but I’m just telling you I think that the Fed is way off-base with what they’re doing, number one. Number two, a positive note, we’re doing very well on trade, we’re doing very well — our companies are very strong. Don’t forget we’re still up from when I came in 38 percent or something. You know, it’s a tremendous — it’s not like we’re up — and we’re much stronger. And we’re much more liquid. And the banks are now much more liquid during my tenure. And I’m not doing – I’m not playing by the same rules as Obama. Obama had zero interest to worry about; we’re paying interest, a lot of interest. He wasn’t paying down — we’re talking about $50 billion lots of different times, paying down and knocking out liquidity. Well, Obama didn’t do that. And just so you understand, I’m playing a normalization economy whereas he’s playing a free economy. It’s easy to make money when you’re paying no interest. It’s easy to make money when you’re not doing any pay-downs, so you can’t — and despite that, the numbers we have are phenomenal numbers."
I’m pretty sure Trump doesn’t have any idea what he is talking about here.
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:
Originally posted by second:
Trump’s full Washington Post interview transcript, annotated
www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/11/27/president-trumps-full-washi
ngton-post-interview-transcript-annotated/
I’m pretty sure Trump doesn’t have any idea what he is talking about here.
Written by:
Aaron Blake
Senior political reporter, writing for The Fix
Education: University of Minnesota
Aaron Blake is senior political reporter, writing for The Fix. A Minnesota native, he has also written about politics for the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the Hill newspaper.
No mention of economics credentials. I'm pretty sure Aaron doesn't have any idea what he's talking about either.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Trump is so in the tank for the House of Saud that he thinks the Saudis are doing us a favor when they sell us oil, and doing us another favor when they buy our military equipment.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
No mention of economics credentials. I'm pretty sure Aaron doesn't have any idea what he's talking about either.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Trump said, "We have an ally that’s investing billions and billions of dollars in our country. They could very easily invest $110 billion, $450 billion overall over a period of time, fairly short period of time. $110 billion in military. Russia and China would love to have those orders and they’ll get them if we don’t. They’ll have no choice, but they’ll get them if we don’t. So I take everything into consideration, and again, he totally denies it, and he denied it to me on three different occasions, on three different calls, and a lot of other people deny it, too. Did he do it? As I said, maybe he did and maybe he didn’t, but in the meantime Saudi Arabia’s spending billions and billions of dollars in the United States, and I want them to spend it here."
Trump's economics are incredibly shoddy. He is making up baloney numbers as he goes along in the interview. But it’s also just extraordinary crass to say that it’s okay for the Saudis to murder a US resident who is a father to US citizens because the Saudis give us money.
Trump explaining that he’s not taking Saudi bribe money:
"But they’ve been a great ally. Without them, Israel would be in a lot more trouble. We need to have a counterbalance to Iran. I know him. I know him well, the Crown Prince. And, by the way, never did business with them, never intend to do business with them. I couldn’t care less. This is a very important job that I’m doing right now. The last thing I care about is doing business with people. I only do business for us. Somebody said, well, maybe they’re an investor in one of his jobs. The answer is no. But I just feel that it’s very, very important to maintain that relationship."
Trump is not, of course, prepared to demonstrate that his hands are clean by releasing tax returns or any other personal financial information. He just has this huge network of opaque business interests that he has repeatedly broken promises to provide transparency about and he wants us to just trust that there’s nothing shady happening there. His reasons for wanting to keep it all totally secret are completely above board. As Trump says, "Believe me" all the time.
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:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
No mention of economics credentials. I'm pretty sure Aaron doesn't have any idea what he's talking about either.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Here was my post that you quoted.
If you're going to make a relevant reply, I invite you to try again.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:6ix, you weren't going to be convinced by economics credentials because there is nobody you trust. But do you trust yourself? If do trust yourself, and if you do read what Trump said, I think you could decide that Trump's economic knowledge and judgment can't be trusted.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
No mention of economics credentials. I'm pretty sure Aaron doesn't have any idea what he's talking about either.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Here was my post that you quoted.
If you're going to make a relevant reply, I invite you to try again.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
At one point during his latest interview with the Wall Street Journal, President Trump mixes up tariffs (a kind of sales tax imposed on imported goods) with interest rates, which are the extra money you owe when you take out a loan. Bob Davis, the journalist conducting the interview, corrects the president. It’s the kind of verbal slip that could happen to anyone. Except that Trump, after acknowledging the error, flips back around and makes it again later in the interview.
It’s the kind of mixup that would get a first-term House member flayed in the right-wing press, but Trump is the president of the United States. See here for example: www.vox.com/2018/8/31/17763462/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-criticism-fact
-check
But it’s not just some random issue where he can’t keep the words straight. Trade policy is, along with immigration, one of his signature issues where he personally has really made a mark. And Trump has made it very clear he does not understand what he is doing. If you want to understand trade much better than Trump does, read about it here: www.vox.com/2018/11/27/18114141/trump-wall-street-journal-interview
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:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
No mention of economics credentials. I'm pretty sure Aaron doesn't have any idea what he's talking about either.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Here was my post that you quoted.
If you're going to make a relevant reply, I invite you to try again.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME