A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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President Donald Trump reportedly wondered why the country’s first president didn’t name his Mount Vernon compound after himself. Politico reports that when Trump took a tour of the Virginia estate with French President Emmanuel Macron last April, he told Macron that if George Washington “was smart, he would’ve put his name on it.”
“You’ve got to put your name on stuff or no one remembers you,” Politico quoted Trump as saying, citing three sources briefed on the exchange.
The capital city of the United States is named after the first U.S. president. When will Washington, DC become DDT, District of Donald Trump? I hope soon.
More Trump inanity at www.marketwatch.com/story/trump-wonders-why-washington-didnt-name-moun
t-vernon-after-himself-mulvaney-most-dangerous-man-in-dc-senator-says-2019-04-10
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Trump's sister, a federal appeals judge, resigns amid ethics inquiry
www.abajournal.com/news/article/trumps-sister-a-federal-appeals-judge-
resigns-amid-ethics-inquiry
The statute of limitations likely would foreclose any criminal prosecution, but there is no time limit on civil fines for tax fraud.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Roland B. Hedlay Jr. @RealRBHJr
Trump calls Tim Cook "Tim Apple" to "save time". We all do this. If I had a nickel for every time I've said "Mark Facebook," I’d be rich as Donald Russia.
Roland B. Hadley Jr. @RealRBHJr
If $5.6 billion Border Wall becomes reality, Sinaloa Cartel reportedly prepared to counter by investing $56,000 in new tunnel infrastructure.
Roland B. Hadley Jr. @RealRBHJr
Governor Chris Christie would be inspired choice for Chief of Staff. Already soiled by scandal, humiliated by Trump, no future, so could skip those steps.
Roland B. Hedley Jr. @RealRBHJr
To avoid being technically "obese", Trump to use Executive Order to increase height to 6'5".
https://twitter.com/realrbhjr
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Employers are pocketing taxes, and facing few consequences.
Millions of employers are getting away with tax embezzlement each year and that won’t change unless employers face jail time.
Americans are often unaware of how much the US government depends on payroll taxes. Employment taxes are the federal government’s second largest source of revenue. The IRS collected $1.1 trillion in employment taxes in 2017 — about 38 percent of all federal taxes collected.
As of 2017, about 6.9 million employers hadn’t paid those taxes.
There are fewer than 100 criminal convictions per year — a number so minuscule, there is little deterrent effect.
In fact, prosecutions of all tax crimes have fallen in recent years, and the Trump administration’s budget cuts to the IRS have made the problem worse.
Part of the reason people owe more money to the IRS is the agency doesn’t have enough investigators. Don Fort, the chief of IRS criminal enforcement, told Bloomberg in October that the agency has the same number of special agents — about 2,200 — as it did 50 years ago, even though the number of tax filers has increased and financial crimes have gotten more complex, according to Bloomberg. (The Trump administration cut even more positions last year.)
The inspector general’s office had urged the IRS in 2007 to focus on investigating the most egregious cases — businesses that hadn’t paid employment taxes in more than five years, or who owed more than $1 million.
The IRS said that was unlikely to happen.
“The biggest challenge facing both our civil and criminal enforcement of employment tax fraud is the significant and sustained decline in IRS resources ... this is a reality that no strategy can overcome,” wrote Richard Weber, who was the agency’s chief of criminal investigations, in 2017.
Eight years ago, the GOP began aggressively cutting the IRS budget each year, and the agency’s enforcement staff has since dropped by a third.
The Trump administration cut another 140 special agents from the IRS last year, and his proposed 2020 budget, for example, would cut funding for IRS enforcement by nearly $154 million.
That would make it even harder for the IRS to collect unpaid taxes, pushing the US government even further into debt.
For about every 30 taxpayers who file their tax returns each year, there’s one business or household that doesn’t even file a return. The amount of money they would owe if they filed is about $131 billion.
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/4/16/18311366/tax-day-cheating-pr
osecutions-jail
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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70% say we spend too little on assistance to the poor.
20% say we spend too little on welfare.
This is a pretty astounding difference considering that "welfare" and "assistance to the poor" are pretty much the same thing.
So how do people really feel about spending on safety net programs? It’s impossible to say. I doubt very much that 70 percent of whites are truly in favor of spending more, but I also doubt very much that only 20 percent are truly in favor of spending more. I guess it all depends on how you sell it.
It’s also worth noting that these responses are completely divorced from actual spending levels. Spending on poor families has increased by about 300 percent since 1973, but the answer to these questions has stayed rock steady the entire time.
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/04/the-power-of-words-social-welfa
re-edition/
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:
70% say we spend too little on assistance to the poor.
20% say we spend too little on welfare.
This is a pretty astounding difference considering that "welfare" and "assistance to the poor" are pretty much the same thing.
So how do people really feel about spending on safety net programs? It’s impossible to say. I doubt very much that 70 percent of whites are truly in favor of spending more, but I also doubt very much that only 20 percent are truly in favor of spending more. I guess it all depends on how you sell it.
It’s also worth noting that these responses are completely divorced from actual spending levels. Spending on poor families has increased by about 300 percent since 1973, but the answer to these questions has stayed rock steady the entire time.
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/04/the-power-of-words-social-welfa
re-edition/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Somebody better figure it out.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:70% to 100% of Congressional Democrats say we spend too little on assistance to the poor.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
70% say we spend too little on assistance to the poor.
20% say we spend too little on welfare.
This is a pretty astounding difference considering that "welfare" and "assistance to the poor" are pretty much the same thing.
So how do people really feel about spending on safety net programs? It’s impossible to say. I doubt very much that 70 percent of whites are truly in favor of spending more, but I also doubt very much that only 20 percent are truly in favor of spending more. I guess it all depends on how you sell it.
It’s also worth noting that these responses are completely divorced from actual spending levels. Spending on poor families has increased by about 300 percent since 1973, but the answer to these questions has stayed rock steady the entire time.
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/04/the-power-of-words-social-welfa
re-edition/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Somebody better figure it out.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
20% to 0% of Congressional Republicans say we spend too little on welfare.
"Somebody better figure it out." This is how Congress figures it out:
Whichever political party happens to be in majority in both houses of Congress will decide spending on poor people for the two years they are the majority. But if the Senate and the House of Representatives are controlled by opposite parties, spending stays the same as the previous two years.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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When Sessions told the President that a Special Counsel had been appointed, the President slumped back in his chair and said, "Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked." (p. 290 of the PDF)
www.documentcloud.org/documents/5955210-Redacted-Mueller-Report.html
www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook-pm/2019/04/18/the-report-is-out-
trump-tried-to-remove-mueller-426190
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The Best Hot Take on the Mueller Report is from 1796 by George Washington
https://theintercept.com/2019/04/20/mueller-report-george-washington-f
arewell-address/
We should pay attention to the fact that much of Washington’s Farewell Address is devoted to a specific warning: “Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.”
Americans have almost totally forgotten the relevant subsequent history. But the 223 years since the Farewell Address have proven that Washington’s anxieties were justified. Foreign influence indeed has repeatedly and perniciously warped U.S. politics.
The Civil War would likely have ended in a Union victory years earlier if Great Britain hadn’t unofficially intervened on the side of the Confederacy: The South had a minuscule industrial base and needed the British to build their navy and manufacture their guns. After the war, the U.S. forced Great Britain to pay $15 million for damages caused by the ships it had built for the rebels.
The British manipulated American politics with more success 50 years later, via a covert propaganda campaign designed to nudge the U.S. to enter World War I on their side. The head of the effort secretly told the British cabinet, “In the eyes of the American people the quiet and subterranean nature of our work has the appearance of a purely private patriotism and enterprise.”
More recently, Richard Nixon conspired with the government of South Vietnam during his 1968 presidential campaign to sabotage Lyndon Johnson’s attempts to strike a peace deal with North Vietnam and end the Vietnam War. The election was extremely close, with Nixon beating LBJ’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, by just 500,000 votes out of 73 million cast. If Nixon hadn’t scuttled Johnson’s efforts, or if Nixon’s treachery had been revealed, it’s likely that Humphrey would have won. Instead, Nixon took the White House, and in 1973 signed a treaty with North Vietnam on essentially the same terms available in 1968. In the meantime, 20,000 American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians died.
Just 12 years later, in 1980, Ronald Reagan’s campaign almost certainly colluded with Iran’s newborn Islamic Republic. During the chaos of the Iranian revolution the year before, students in Tehran had overrun the U.S. embassy there and seized 52 Americans as hostages. Reagan’s top staff were deeply worried that President Jimmy Carter would strike a politically popular deal just before the election to get the hostages out. The evidence is quite strong that Reagan campaign therefore made some kind of agreement with Iran to keep the hostages until the moment Reagan was inaugurated. As the January 1981 headline in The Onion book “Our Dumb Century” put it: “Hostages Released: Reagan Urges American People Not to Put Two and Two Together.”
The fact that the U.S. government has brutally intervened in the politics of dozens of other countries doesn’t mean that normal Americans can’t legitimately be angry about Russia’s 2016 meddling or the GOP’s response.
Given the unusual circumstances of Trump’s election, it’s also understandable that regular Democrats are maddened by his glee in governing from the far right. His margin of victory was so thin — just 80,000 votes in three states gave him his electoral college victory — that it’s irrational to deny that Russia’s interference, as weak as it was by historical comparison, may have made the difference.
Finally, and most fundamentally, the citizens of all countries have the right to expect their leaders to oppose attempts by foreign nations to influence their politics, even if an attempt benefits them. Instead, the intense factionalism of Trump and the GOP generally has made them incapable of even pretending to care. In a healthy democracy, Trump wouldn’t, even “in jest,” have asked Russia to stea
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To Defend Against a Mercurial Boss, Trump Aides Wield the Pen as Shield
www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/white-house-memo-to-defend-against-a-m
ercurial-boss-trump-aides-wield-the-pen-as-shield/ar-BBW9TvI
Cliff Sims, a former communications aide to Mr. Trump who wrote the book “Team of Vipers” about his time in the White House, said he and others took notes during meetings with the president to “ensure everyone was echoing his messaging” when they went out to speak for him in public.
“But I do think there’s also a pervasive sense in this White House that at some point you’re going to have to set the record straight or give your perspective on events that took place, or actions you took — or didn’t take — as the case may be,” Mr. Sims said on Sunday.
W. Neil Eggleston, who served as a lawyer for President Bill Clinton and as White House counsel to President Barack Obama, said taking notes in such jobs can be problematic because it creates a record that investigators or political foes can try to obtain and then distort for partisan gain.
“I didn’t take notes when I worked with either president,” he said. “But I thought that was protecting the president, not protecting me. This notion of people taking notes to make sure they’re not part of a criminal conspiracy, that’s something I had never considered. That’s the reason they took these notes. They took these notes to protect themselves.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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