A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Quote:Wrong, again, 6ix. I'd make a great Trump loving One-Percenter, stripping the bottom 50% of most all their money, but it is the criminal incompetence and the pointless belligerence of GOP Presidents (Nixon, Bush II, Trump) that makes me a Democrat.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
lol.
Democrats are more like you than you think.
Trump (so far) hasn’t done anything even remotely as pernicious as the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
It’s easy to snark about the conspiratorial thinking of Trump and the relentless dishonesty of his press operation, but the Bush-era conspiracy theories about Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda were about as ridiculous, and also got way more people killed.
In its main phase from 2003 to 2011, this war led to the deaths of thousands of American soldiers, plus what appears to be around 400,000 Iraqis. And that was only the beginning. The regional destabilization the invasion touched off led directly to the rise of ISIS and a whole new round of fighting in Iraq in which many thousands of people have died.
More broadly, the extremely deadly civil war in Syria likely also counts as a knock-on consequence of invading Iraq. This is to say nothing of the extent to which the war undermined the global non-proliferation regime by convincing North Korea to go for broke in its quest for nukes.
At a certain point, trying to calculate the proliferating consequences of the decision to invade Iraq is impossible. But what we can say for sure is that the direct cost of war — $1 trillion in narrow fiscal terms — was high, and it brought about essentially none of the promised strategic or humanitarian benefits.
More at www.vox.com/2018/12/5/18126573/weekly-standard-neoconservatives-trump-
iraq-casualties
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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I'm not going to defend Republicans when it comes to money or war. It's not my party, and those are my two biggest oppositions to them.
All I'll say is that everything you're accusing Trump of right now you would be just as in the right for accusing Obama of, or Hillary had she been elected.
I don't understand why you think the Democrats are so great. You're certainly using poor examples here.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Democrats aren't particularly great. They evolved from the same monkey-men 3 million years ago that Republicans came from. But you've got to admit the Democratic monkeys are very different from Republicans. I'd make a guess that Democrats will get very different results. It is like the difference between LBJ and Nixon. One guided America to the Moon and the other shutdown the Apollo program. One resigned because the Vietnam War was going badly and his V.P. Humphrey was running against the War and the other escalated the war, bombing Laos and Cambodia, and his V.P. Spiro Agnew was super-for-the-war.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I'm not going to defend Republicans when it comes to money or war. It's not my party, and those are my two biggest oppositions to them.
All I'll say is that everything you're accusing Trump of right now you would be just as in the right for accusing Obama of, or Hillary had she been elected.
I don't understand why you think the Democrats are so great. You're certainly using poor examples here.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
One thing LBJ and Nixon had in common was that they both lied, but Nixon was not embarrassed about his lying. And there was that thing about Nixon cheating on his taxes and obstructing justice Watergate-style. LBJ could not match that. But Trump can!
President Nixon's Troublesome Tax Returns
www.taxhistory.org/thp/readings.nsf/cf7c9c870b600b9585256df80075b9dd/f
8723e3606cd79ec85256ff6006f82c3?OpenDocument
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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We tend to think that the smarter we are, the more capable we are of seeing through people’s lies and the more capable we are of finding the truth. But that’s absolutely not the case. Humans are social animals, and if our group will benefit from seeing the world a certain way, we’ll use our intelligence to see the world that way.
It’s easy to see how these impulses explain so much of our politics and how willing so many of us are to believe what is false but convenient, as opposed to what is true but inconvenient. I think it also explains why the internet has not made us more intellectually honest; instead, people are just better at finding the information they need to confirm what they need to be true, which is what we’ve always done.
Our intelligence didn’t evolve to solve abstract problems and complex ways of dealing with the environment. Our intelligence evolved to deal with each other more effectively and to leverage the skills and abilities we have when we work together.
More about Evolutionary Psychology at www.vox.com/2018/12/6/18115586/evolution-psychology-william-von-hippel
-social-leap
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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House Speaker Paul Ryan’s legacy can be summed up in just one number: $343 billion.
That’s the increase between the deficit for fiscal year 2015 and fiscal year 2018 — that is, the difference between the fiscal year before Ryan became speaker of the House and the fiscal year in which he retired.
If the economy had fallen into recession between 2015 and 2018, Ryan’s record would be understandable. But it didn’t. In fact, growth quickened and the labor market tightened — which means deficits should’ve fallen. Indeed, that’s exactly what happened in each of the five years preceding Ryan’s speakership; from 2011 to 2015, annual deficits fell each year.
Ryan says that debt reduction is one of those things “I wish we could have gotten done.” Ryan, the man with the single most power over the federal budget in recent years, sounds like a bystander, as if he watched laws happen rather than made them happen.
More at www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/12/10/17929460/paul-ryan-speaker-
retiring-debt-deficits-trump
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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House of Representative gerrymandering was not enough to save the GOP majority in 2018, but the extent to which gerrymandering “mattered” remains striking:
In 2010, Republicans won 51.7 percent of the vote and got 242 seats.
In 2014, Republicans won 51.2 percent of the vote and got 247 seats.
In 2018, Democrats won 53.4 percent of the vote and got 235 seats.
It’s not, in other words, that gerrymandering makes it impossible for Democrats to win. But it puts a consistent skew on the political system. Narrow majorities of popular support translate into big majorities of seats for Republicans, while a larger majority of votes translates into a narrower majority of seats for Democrats.
In the Senate, things are much worse, and Democrats would need to win an enormous landslide of votes to secure even the barest majority of seats.
More at www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/12/10/18126132/trump-populism-dem
ocracy-threat-minority-rule
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:
House of Representative gerrymandering was not enough to save the GOP majority in 2018, but the extent to which gerrymandering “mattered” remains striking:
In 2010, Republicans won 51.7 percent of the vote and got 242 seats.
In 2014, Republicans won 51.2 percent of the vote and got 247 seats.
In 2018, Democrats won 53.4 percent of the vote and got 235 seats.
It’s not, in other words, that gerrymandering makes it impossible for Democrats to win. But it puts a consistent skew on the political system. Narrow majorities of popular support translate into big majorities of seats for Republicans, while a larger majority of votes translates into a narrower majority of seats for Democrats.
In the Senate, things are much worse, and Democrats would need to win an enormous landslide of votes to secure even the barest majority of seats.
More at www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/12/10/18126132/trump-populism-dem
ocracy-threat-minority-rule
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
The more governorship's the dems have the more they can change gerrymandered districts.
T
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Quote:There’s another way to solve gerrymandering. It’s as simple as cake.
Originally posted by THG:
The more governorship's the dems have the more they can change gerrymandered districts.
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/theres-another-way-to-solve-gerrymande
ring-its-as-simple-as-cake/2018/02/15/69e47508-0531-11e8-94e8-e8b8600ade23_story.html
There are more elaborate solutions that are not a piece of cake:
www.policymap.com/2017/08/solutions-to-gerrymandering/
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:There’s another way to solve gerrymandering. It’s as simple as cake.
Originally posted by THG:
The more governorship's the dems have the more they can change gerrymandered districts.
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/theres-another-way-to-solve-gerrymande
ring-its-as-simple-as-cake/2018/02/15/69e47508-0531-11e8-94e8-e8b8600ade23_story.html
There are more elaborate solutions that are not a piece of cake:
www.policymap.com/2017/08/solutions-to-gerrymandering/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
This is interesting.
I don't agree at all that a 3rd party is a good idea because I don't believe that any 3rd party could ever be non-biased... but the cake idea?
Could it work?
I'm not a mathematician, but it does sound like it could possibly end up being the match game.
Maybe a coin flip is in order to determine who divides up the first 8 districts? But who do we trust to flip the coin?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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“In the last few years, it was really frustrating,” said Pam Reicks, a former manager at the IRS who, until she retired at the end of last year, oversaw a program to audit wealthy taxpayers with undeclared offshore bank accounts. “It’s like in the fall when you bob for apples,” she told us. “You’ve got a tub of apples and can’t use your hands to grab them. You can see all this abuse and fraud, and people not paying their taxes, but can’t use your hands to get it.”
Will the American public realize how weak the IRS has become? The effects of an explosion in tax cheating would be dire. The nation’s already soaring budget deficit would surge by hundreds of billions of dollars more.
As of last year, the IRS had 9,510 auditors. That’s down a third from 2010. The last time the IRS had fewer than 10,000 revenue agents was 1953, when the economy was a seventh of its current size. And the IRS is still shrinking. Almost a third of its remaining employees will be eligible to retire in the next year, and with morale plummeting, many of them will.
The IRS conducted 675,000 fewer audits in 2017 than it did in 2010, a drop in the audit rate of 42 percent. But even those stark numbers don’t tell the whole story, say current and former IRS employees: Auditors are stretched thin, and they’re often forced to limit their investigations and move on to the next audit as quickly as they can.
Without enough staff, the IRS has slashed even basic functions. It has drastically pulled back from pursuing people who don’t bother filing their tax returns. New investigations of “nonfilers,” as they’re called, dropped from 2.4 million in 2011 to 362,000 last year.
Corporations and the wealthy are the biggest beneficiaries of the IRS’ decay. It takes specialized, well-trained personnel to audit a business or a billionaire or to unravel a tax scheme — and those employees are leaving in droves and taking their expertise with them. For the country’s largest corporations, the danger of being hit with a billion-dollar tax bill has greatly diminished. For the rich, who research shows evade taxes the most, the IRS has become less and less of a force to be feared.
More at www.propublica.org/article/how-the-irs-was-gutted
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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