A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Did a Queens Podiatrist Help Donald Trump Avoid Vietnam? YES!
It is a long story about Fred Trump paying off doctors with reduced rent on offices and their apartments in exchange for the doctors keeping Donald Trump out of Vietnam by lying on documents signed by the doctors.
More at www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/did-a-queens-podiatrist-help-donald-tr
ump-avoid-vietnam/ar-BBRropb
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez is setting a kind of cover charge to get onstage for the Democratic presidential primary debates, but not just any money will do. In addition to the usual polling metrics required to join the debate, candidates will also have to meet a to-be-determined criteria for “grassroots fundraising.”
It will force potential billionaire self-funders like Michael Bloomberg, Tom Steyer, and Howard Schultz can’t just flash their own cash and buy their way onstage.
This is a remarkable decision for any political party, and it reflects a growing shift in how campaigns are run and won.
More at https://theintercept.com/2018/12/27/dnc-primary-grassroots-fundraising/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Deciphering the Patterns in Trump’s Falsehoods
www.msn.com/en-us/news/factcheck/deciphering-the-patterns-in-trump’s-f
alsehoods/ar-BBRz0ft
Mr. Trump refuses to correct most of his inaccurate claims, instead asserting them over and over again. They become, by sheer force of repetition, “alternative facts” and staples of his campaign rallies and speeches.
Examples abound. He has misleadingly said over 90 times that his promised wall along the southern border is being built (construction has not begun on any new section). He has falsely accused Democrats of supporting “open borders” over 60 times (Democratic lawmakers support border security, but not his border wall). There are many more examples.
Yet Mr. Trump does not rely on repetition alone. He also embellishes talking points to amplify his achievements.
Take his repeated fabrication about the construction of new steel mills. After his administration announced tariffs on steel and aluminum imports in March, the president claimed in June that United States Steel was “opening six new plants.” A month later, the number rose to seven. He has also occasionally cited eight, possibly nine or a vague “many plants,” and he claimed once that plants were “opening up literally on a daily basis.” To date, United States Steel has yet to open or build even one new plant.
Inventing Straw Men
The usual target of this particular strain of falsehoods is the news media, which Mr. Trump suggests purposely underestimates or misinterprets him.
Mr. Trump often lauds strong job growth under his watch and says that the “fake news” would have deemed such numbers “impossible” or “ridiculous” during the 2016 campaign. Yet he neglects to mention that the number of jobs added in the 22 months after his inauguration — 4.2 million — is lower than the 4.8 million jobs added in the 22 months before he took office, undermining the premise of his retrodiction.
More at www.msn.com/en-us/news/factcheck/deciphering-the-patterns-in-trump’s-f
alsehoods/ar-BBRz0ft
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Chapter 4. "Selling A Failing Foreign Policy" from The Hell of Good Intentions: America's Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy, 2018
www.amazon.com/Hell-Good-Intentions-Americas-Foreign/dp/0374280037/
According to the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, for example, there were forty-seven Islamic terrorist attacks in Western countries between 2012 and 2016. These attacks killed 269 people, more than half of them in a single attack in a Paris nightclub in November 2015. By comparison, roughly fifteen thousand Americans are murdered each year by guns, yet the federal government does little to address the problem, even in the wake of such mass shootings as the Sandy Hook massacre in December 2012 or the slaughter of fifty-eight concertgoers in Las Vegas in October 2017. Lightning strikes and bathroom accidents take more American lives than terrorism, yet no politician is declaring a War on Thunderstorms or announcing a National Campaign against Slippery Tile.
To say that government officials, think tank experts, and assorted interest groups inflate threats is not to say that the United States faces no dangers or to imply that hostile powers cannot affect U.S. interests. However, overstating the dangers they pose is still costly when it distracts U.S. leaders from other problems or leads them to act in ways that make the problem worse.
“OUR ENEMIES ARE HOSTILE, IRRATIONAL, AND IMPOSSIBLE TO DETER”
In addition to exaggerating enemy capabilities, threat inflators typically describe potential enemies as irrevocably hostile, irrational, and impossible to deter, which in turn implies that they must be removed. In the run-up to the Iraq War, for example, the Brookings Institution senior fellow Kenneth Pollack’s influential book The Threatening Storm portrayed Saddam Hussein as an inveterate risk-taker who could not be contained — an alarmist portrait that helped convince skeptical liberals that it would be too dangerous to leave Saddam in place.
In much the same way, those who called for tougher sanctions and/or preventive war against Iran routinely portrayed its leaders as fanatical religious extremists who would welcome martyrdom and would therefore be quick to use nuclear weapons. Former CIA director R. James Woolsey described Iran’s leaders as “theocratic, totalitarian, and genocidal maniacs”; the columnist Bret Stephens (formerly of The Wall Street Journal and now at The New York Times) justified preventive war by describing Iran as a “martyrdom-obsessed, non-Western culture with global ambitions”; and Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute suggested that “it is plausible [Iran’s leaders] might believe Islamic interests make Iran’s weathering a retaliatory nuclear strike worthwhile.”
A variation on this same theme is to claim that animosity toward the United States does not arise from straightforward conflicts of interest or opposition to specific U.S. policies, but rather from a deep-seated antipathy to what America stands for. As George W. Bush famously explained after the September 11 attacks, the terrorists “hate our freedoms.” Or as he subsequently told a prime-time news conference, he was “amazed that people would hate us … because I know how good we are.” In fact, numerous independent surveys have shown that anti-Americanism around the world is largely a response to U.S. policy — not a rejection of “American values.”
Nonetheless, threat inflators still depict foreign opposition as the result of deep antipathy to America itself. This argument reinforces a key article of faith for proponents of liberal hegemony — the idea that the United States is an exceptional country that is always a force for good in the world — and implies that only misguided or evil people could possibly oppose whatever the United States does around the world. As such, insisting that opponents “hate our freedoms” conveniently absolves Washington of any responsibility for foreign hostility and implies that nothing can be done to reduce it. If America’s enemies are implacably hostil
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Chuck Lorre Productions, #594
www.chucklorre.com/index-mom.php?p=594
I’m developing a new sitcom about a guy who was raised in wealth and privilege by a cold, distant mother and a racist, moneygrubbing father. In a series of flashbacks we learn that the guy’s entire adult life has been maniacally devoted to profit, prestige and sex. No amount of money, attention and orgasms could fill his dark, empty soul. Catching up to him in present time, we’re treated to a fun-filled peek at a man who is completely lacking in moral boundaries, principles, truth and love. What he does have though, and here’s where the show might get a little silly, is an uncanny knack for sensing people’s fears and exploiting them to his favor (in the pilot episode we get to see him use this ability to gain unimaginable power). Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “How can this possibly be funny?” Not to worry. My hope is to find belly laughs in his golf game, which he cheats at, and the people around him, all of whom know right from wrong, but are utterly lacking in common decency and courage. I haven’t settled on a title yet, but I’m playing around with calling it, “Traitor Traitor, Hater Baiter!” (The exclamation point is just to jazz it up, add some energy.)
1st Aired: 27 Sept 2018
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Sounds like a story about every politician that ever lived.
I'll pass.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Trump makes claims about himself that other politicians would not dare to make. There is humor in Trump's Paul Bunyan boastfulness:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Sounds like a story about every politician that ever lived.
I'll pass.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Anyone who's ever dealt with a narcissist recognizes the pattern.
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lol.
Look in the mirror often, don't you Reaverfan?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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The War Before The War – Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul
www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/books/review/andrew-delbanco-war-before-the
-war.html
“The War Before the War” is mainly a straightforward account of events that, although familiar to professional historians, ought to be known by anyone who claims to know anything about American history.
In 1787, Southern delegates to the federal Constitutional Convention obtained a fugitive slave clause that called for (albeit vaguely) the capture and return of successful runaways. Over the following six decades, persistent slave escapes tested the ramshackle machinery put in place to halt them. In time, alarmed but emboldened Northern free blacks and their white abolitionist allies formed vigilance committees to ward off slavecatchers, while Northern legislatures began approving so-called personal liberty laws to shield the fugitives.
In 1850, responding to slaveholders’ outcries, Congress passed a Fugitive Slave Act that strengthened the federal mandate for arresting and returning escapees. In a series of shocking confrontations, antislavery Northerners intervened, either to prevent the capture of fugitives or liberate those already in custody. The uproar of these pitched battles — Delbanco’s war before the war — helped turn Northern moderates into abolitionists and temperate Southerners into fire-eaters; at its height in 1854, it prompted President Franklin Pierce to order 1,500 federal troops to escort a single fugitive in Boston named Anthony Burns back into slavery in Virginia. Enforcing the fugitive slave law put the federal government emphatically on the side of slavery over freedom, which hastened the collapse of the national political system, the rise of the antislavery Republican Party and the coming of the war.
Delbanco aims to balance his antislavery allegiances with caution about the smugness that can come with historical hindsight. In some of his earlier writings, this wariness has led him, by my taste, to be a little too charitable to revisionist interpretations that present the Civil War as a product of political failure, a catastrophe, instigated by malcontents, that a more responsible national leadership could have prevented. This view has arisen from an admixture of pacifism and an insistence on diminishing the moral as well as political disaster of slavery; and it has sometimes led its advocates to demonize the abolitionists as the chief fomenters of an unnecessary war. As Delbanco admires the abolitionists, and slights slavery’s terrors not at all, his occasional revisionist musings seem to stem from his horror at the military slaughterhouse, his wonder at whether it could have been avoided and his wariness of sanctimony, including Yankee sanctimony.
In this book, though, Delbanco sticks to viewing the war as the ghastly but necessary price for abolishing slavery — what Abraham Lincoln described in his Second Inaugural Address as cruel justice meted out by the Almighty.
www.bartleby.com/124/pres32.html
Quote:
One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us juNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME