A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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"No Joe! Joe Biden's disastrous legislative legacy" — Joe liked to reach across the aisle to Strom Thurmond, among others, and tie his name to other horrible GOP ideas. "Despite pleas from the NAACP and the ACLU, the 1990s brought no relief from Biden's crime crusade. He vied with the first Bush Administration to introduce ever more draconian laws, including one proposing to expand the number of offenses for which the death penalty would be permitted to fifty-one. Bill Clinton quickly became a reliable ally upon his 1992 election, and Biden encouraged him to 'maintain crime as a Democratic initiative' with suitably tough legislation. The ensuing 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, passed with enthusiastic administration pressure, would consign millions of black Americans to a life behind bars."
More at https://harpers.org/archive/2019/03/joe-biden-record/
Michael Brooks started his show with clips of Joe Biden making a series of claims about criminals that were not true but sure helped him get that horrible crime bill passed.
Biden starts a 2 minutes:
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Barack Obama rolls into office with Mitt Romney’s health care policy, with John McCain’s climate policy, with Bill Clinton’s tax policy, and George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy. He’s all these things not because the technocrats in his administration think they’re the best possible policies, but because [White House adviser] David Axelrod and company say they poll well.
And [Chief of Staff] Rahm Emanuel and company say we’ve got to build bridges to the Republicans. We’ve got to let Republicans amend cap and trade up the wazoo, we’ve got to let Republicans amend the [Affordable Care Act] up the wazoo before it comes up to a final vote, we’ve got to tread very lightly with finance on Dodd-Frank, we have to do a very premature pivot away from recession recovery to “entitlement reform.”
All of these with the idea that you would then collect a broad political coalition behind what is, indeed, Mitt Romney’s health care policy and John McCain’s climate policy and George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy.
And did George H.W. Bush, did Mitt Romney, did John McCain say a single good word about anything Barack Obama ever did over the course of eight solid years?
No, they did not.
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/4/18246381/democrats-clinton-sa
nders-left-brad-delong
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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If you’re a conservative who wants the Trump agenda to succeed, you want to see the administration win court cases. Except they’re losing, not because nefarious liberals in black robes are being unfair, but because too often Team Trump doesn’t know what it’s doing.
The Post focused particular attention on the relatively obscure Administrative Procedure Act, approved in 1946 to limit the reach of various federal agencies.
The Trump administration has won about 6% of these cases. Other administrations have won APA cases about 70% of the time.
The Post explained why Donald Trump’s team has struggled so badly:
Federal judges have ruled against the Trump administration at least 63 times over the past two years, an extraordinary record of legal defeat that has stymied large parts of the president’s agenda on the environment, immigration and other matters.
In case after case, judges have rebuked Trump officials for failing to follow the most basic rules of governance, including providing legitimate explanations for shifts in policy, supported by facts and, where required, public input. […]
[T]he rulings so far paint a remarkable portrait of a government rushing to implement sweeping changes in policy without regard for longstanding rules against arbitrary and capricious behavior.
Georgetown Law School’s William Buzbee told the newspaper that in regulatory cases, Trump administration officials are “making it very easy for the courts to reject them because they’re not doing their homework.”
Seth Jaffe, a lawyer who represents corporations, said the administration has failed to deliver. Some errors are so basic that Jaffe said he has to wonder whether agency officials are more interested in announcing policy shifts than in actually implementing them. “It’s not just that they’re losing. But they’re being so nuts about it,” he said, adding that the losses in court have “set regulatory reform back for a period of time.”
More at www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/the-real-reason-preside
nt-trump-is-constantly-losing-in-court/2019/03/19/f5ffb056-33a8-11e9-af5b-b51b7ff322e9_story.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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"There is no higher priority for national defense,” the Pentagon declared last year, than for the United States to “replace its strategic nuclear triad and sustain the warheads it carries.” In plain English, this means spending an estimated $1.7 trillion to rebuild every component of the US nuclear arsenal: the entire three-legged strategic “triad” of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and long-range bombers. Military officials claim the existing force has become obsolete and inflexible, and thus unable to deter potential adversaries. In order to eliminate any doubt that America has the will and the capacity to wreak catastrophic retribution, they argue, we need to replace our current atomic weapons with even more terrifying ones. “To remain effective [as a deterrent force],” explained then–Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis in February 2018, “we must recapitalize our Cold War legacy nuclear forces.”
“Recapitalize,” “modernize,” “replace”: These are the anodyne terms being used by the Pentagon and the Trump administration to describe their exorbitant plans to overhaul America’s nuclear arsenal. With great-power conflict now the defining theme in US military strategy, the administration seeks weapons that can overawe Russia and China. At the same time, White House officials—led by National Security Adviser John Bolton—seek to extinguish any remaining arms-control agreements that might constrain US arms-acquisition efforts. Bolton has already orchestrated the US withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which covers short- and medium-range missiles, and has reportedly set his sights on scuttling the last remaining curb on intercontinental weapons, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), when it comes up for renewal in 2021.
Refurbishing the nuclear arsenal and exiting arms-control agreements are all part of a White House effort to restore the coercive power of the US stockpile. In 2009, President Barack Obama proclaimed his intent to “reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy,” and the following year he signed the New START agreement with Russia, resulting in a 50 percent reduction in the number of deployed US warheads.
While bringing relief to those of us who feared the devastating consequences of nuclear war, the move provoked dismay among hawkish Republicans and military leaders who view nuclear arms as the ultimate tool of national power.
More at www.thenation.com/article/us-nuclear-arsenal-triad/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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An expert explains why the US struggles with modern wars.
www.vox.com/2018/2/15/17007678/syria-trump-war-win-interview
Dominic Tierney: At the heart of the Obama doctrine was “no more Iraq War.” And yet he basically made the same mistake in Libya, where there was very little planning for what would occur after Muammar Qaddafi was overthrown in 2011. In fact, Obama went on the record saying that the Libya intervention was his worst mistake a president.
We don’t learn very well from history. Presidents convince themselves that the next time will be different. The lesson Obama took from Iraq was not to allow any US ground forces to get involved in nation-building. Since Obama was willing to support regime change, the end result was going to be the overthrow of Qaddafi with no real plan to stabilize Libya. If a thoughtful president like Obama — who was very cognizant of the errors of Iraq — can do that, it suggests that any president would be capable of doing that.
Alex Ward: It seems like one of the problems is that we’re involving ourselves in these wars with little preparation. How do we solve that?
Dominic Tierney: We need better language training, cultural training, more resources for special forces — and that would mean less money spent on nuclear attack submarines, for example.
Alex Ward: But then there’s another problem: Sometimes groups like ISIS arise, and US leaders and many Americans want the military to take them out. So when the president is faced with the option to target a group like ISIS with airpower, some would argue that it’s better, politically, to do that.
Dominic Tierney: The US doesn’t think several moves ahead. The US military is good at taking out bad guys. But the removal of the bad guy creates a power vacuum, and that power vacuum is filled by somebody else.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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How flexible should constitutions be?
In 1947, Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote to a member of India’s drafting committee, Sir Benegal Narsing Rau, advising him to delete references to “the due process of law” from the working draft of the Constitution of India.
Justice Frankfurter’s logic was simple. In the so-called ‘Lochner era’ (1897-1937), the US Supreme Court, by utilizing its power of judicial review, had often struck down social welfare legislation enacted by a busy US legislature. The legislature’s social welfare programs were responses to the needs of an economically desperate polity; the court answered by reasserting the needs of the ‘business class’ and the ‘haves’. Such inclinations were arrested only by the ‘switch in time that saved nine’.
That was how Thomas Reed Powell of the Harvard Law School characterized the US Supreme Court’s reversal of its rulings in this domain in the face of President Franklin Roosevelt’s threat to place additional judges more sympathetic to his legislative initiatives on the Supreme Court. Politics, in other words, compelled a historic constitutional transformation.
The first version of the due process clause in the constitution of India had read: ‘Nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty and property without due process of law.’ Soon, the word ‘property’ was deleted. Moreover, to prevent the broad interpretation of ‘liberty’ that the US Supreme Court had shown in Lochner v New York, when it had struck down minimum-wage legislation, ‘liberty’ was qualified as ‘personal liberty’—not corporate. Lastly, to minimise the expressive impact of “due process of law,” that phrase was replaced by “procedure established by law.”
Finally, Article 21 of the Constitution of India read: ‘No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law.’ India’s land reforms went through partially helping a newly independent democracy, the world’s largest, move beyond feudalism.
More at https://qz.com/india/1579673/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Michelle Obama's best-selling memoir, "Becoming," has sold nearly 10 million copies, the parent company of publisher Penguin Random House announced Tuesday.
The candid memoir, released in November, quickly became a best-seller and is one of the most popular books of the decade.
"We believe this could be the most successful memoir in history," said Thomas Rabe, the chief executive of Bertelsmann, a parent company of Penguin Random House, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The book had the longest streak at No. 1 for any book since "Fifty Shades of Grey" came out in 2012, according to Amazon.
www.cnn.com/2019/03/26/politics/michelle-obama-memoir-10-million-copie
s/index.html
I’m looking forward to Melania Trump’s book, but in the meantime, here is Michelle Obama’s:
Becoming by Michelle Obama (.epub)
https://1337x.to/torrent/3379919/Becoming-by-Michelle-Obama-epub/
March 2017
When I was a kid, my aspirations were simple. I wanted a dog. I wanted a house that had stairs in it—two floors for one family. I wanted, for some reason, a four-door station wagon instead of the two-door Buick that was my father’s pride and joy. I used to tell people that when I grew up, I was going to be a pediatrician. Why? Because I loved being around little kids and I quickly learned that it was a pleasing answer for adults to hear. Oh, a doctor! What a good choice! In those days, I wore pigtails and bossed my older brother around and managed, always and no matter what, to get As at school. I was ambitious, though I didn’t know exactly what I was shooting for. Now I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child—What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.
So far in my life, I’ve been a lawyer. I’ve been a vice president at a hospital and the director of a nonprofit that helps young people build meaningful careers. I’ve been a working-class black student at a fancy mostly white college. I’ve been the only woman, the only African American, in all sorts of rooms. I’ve been a bride, a stressed-out new mother, a daughter torn up by grief. And until recently, I was the First Lady of the United States of America—a job that’s not officially a job, but that nonetheless has given me a platform like nothing I could have imagined. It challenged me and humbled me, lifted me up and shrank me down, sometimes all at once. I’m just beginning to process what took place over these last years—from the moment in 2006 when my husband first started talking about running for president to the cold morning this winter when I climbed into a limo with Melania Trump, accompanying her to her husband’s inauguration. It’s been quite a ride.
When you’re First Lady, America shows itself to you in its extremes. I’ve been to fund-raisers in private homes that look more like art museums, houses where people own bathtubs made from gemstones. I’ve visited families who lost everything in Hurricane Katrina and were tearful and grateful just to have a working refrigerator and stove. I’ve encountered people I find to be shallow and hypocritical and others—teachers and military spouses and so many more—whose spirits are so deep and strong it’s astonishing. And I’ve met kids—lots of them, all over the world—who crack me up and fill me with hope and who blessedly manage to forget about my title once we start rooting around in the dirt of a garden.
Since stepping reluctantly into public life, I’ve been held up as the most powerful woman in the world and taken down as an “angry black woman.” I’ve wanted to ask my detractors which part of that phrase matters to them the most—is it “angry” or “black” or “woman”? I’ve smiled for photos with people who call my husband horrible names on national television, but still want a framed keepsake for their mantel. I’ve heard about the swampy parts of the internet that question everything about me, right down to whether I’m a woman or a man. A sitting U.S. congressman has made fun o
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8 posts in a row here by Second in the last 10 days.
Just posting to say nobody cares. 
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Erdogan loses control of Turkish capital in local elections setback
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/erdogan-loses-control-of-turkish-
capital-in-local-elections-setback/ar-BBVtM9z?ocid=spartanntp
T 
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Joe Biden’s Creepiness Problem
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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