A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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CHUCK LORRE PRODUCTIONS, #616
www.chucklorre.com/index.php?p=616
For as long as I can remember, I believed that the trajectory of humankind arced toward improvement. Yes, we may have begun in ignorance and brute force, but I fervently believed we were slowly and inexorably evolving into creatures of greater intelligence and compassion.
I was wrong.
It appears as if the only thing that's inexorable is stupidity and violence. Sadly, Nature or God - take your pick - has designed an ecosystem in which intelligence and compassion are anomalies. (Martin Luther King Jr. said the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. He was right about most other stuff.)
Now if you've been reading my vanity cards over the years, you know I rarely end them with words of pessimism and despair. So let me leave you with what I hope is an uplifting sentiment:
While we all know that a person can go mad, so can a small group of people, or a town, or a state, or a nation, or a world. But the madness always begins with one, dark, deranged soul.
Make America Great Again!
1st Aired: 18 Apr 2019
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This may be a fork in the road for the Democratic party.
At a fundamental level, their only purpose iz to oppoze the Republican party. If they fail to win, at least they tried. But if they dont even try, or do a haf assed effort, they are less than useless.
The Republicanz hav perhaps reached the pinnacle uv their efforts to be the party uv crime by putting a con man traitor in the Oval Offis and are actively partisipating in hiz attacks on the nation.
That pinnacle rests on a mountain uv damming evidens.
The Demz need to pick up and uze the defensiv weponz provided by the Constitution and the law. Subpeona, indite, impeach, censure, sue. Not just wun token shot to be able to claim a try.
Sure, McConnell will block everything, but the constant publication uv the facts will wear down the faith the GoP Propaganda Machine dependz on from the gullible Republican voterz. The flimzy webz uv liez they weave will bekum less and less believable.
The Republicanz will do ANYTHING to win. Teaming up with forin adversaryz provez that.
If Pelosi desidez to make it about 'a pozitiv lejislativ ajenda', the Democratic party will be seen az a blind cow stumbling around a battle field.
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DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.7532020.com .
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Quote:
Originally posted by JO753:
This may be a fork in the road for the Democratic party.
At a fundamental level, their only purpose iz to oppoze the Republican party. If they fail to win, at least they tried. But if they dont even try, or do a haf assed effort, they are less than useless.
The Republicanz hav perhaps reached the pinnacle uv their efforts to be the party uv crime by putting a con man traitor in the Oval Offis and are actively partisipating in hiz attacks on the nation.
That pinnacle rests on a mountain uv damming evidens.
The Demz need to pick up and uze the defensiv weponz provided by the Constitution and the law. Subpeona, indite, impeach, censure, sue. Not just wun token shot to be able to claim a try.
Sure, McConnell will block everything, but the constant publication uv the facts will wear down the faith the GoP Propaganda Machine dependz on from the gullible Republican voterz. The flimzy webz uv liez they weave will bekum less and less believable.
The Republicanz will do ANYTHING to win. Teaming up with forin adversaryz provez that.
If Pelosi desidez to make it about 'a pozitiv lejislativ ajenda', the Democratic party will be seen az a blind cow stumbling around a battle field.
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DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.7532020.com .
Well the problem, JO, is that you could virtually flip everything you said here about Republicans to Democrats and it would be just as true as what you wrote.
The choice for Democrats to embrace identity politics above everything else in recent years makes them a party that a large portion of Americans are never going to vote for no matter what happens.
I've said a hundred times before, and I'll keep saying it again, but I have a long post history here of being highly skeptical of the GOP and even hostile toward them during the GWB years. But most of the things that I was against the GOP for are the very same things that the Democrats do today.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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You are mistaken.
I'm not saying the Demz are all good, but for every exampl uv Democrat corruption or stoopidity you find I can show you at least 5 Republicanz doing the same or similar.
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DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.7532020.com .
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When you standardize the stats by getting annual averages, GOP administrations still have 29 times more indictments, 64 times more convictions, and 24 times more prison sentences. And that was before Trump. I tried factoring those in and my calculator just laughed and said "Why bother??" 
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/1/11/1619079/-Comparing-Presiden
tial-Administrations-by-Arrests-and-Convictions-A-Warning-for-Trump-Appointees
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Why does the Federal Government not function well, today? We know it can, for a few years during the Civil War when the Constitution was being amended and during the Great Depression, when the New Deal was being designed. What happens to cause the change that goes back-and-forth between functional and non-functional?
What is Trump’s approval rating? 42%
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/
What about Senators? 53% are Republican, which is surprisingly better than Trump’s 42%.
42% is not enough to get Trump reelected, but 53% is enough to keep him from being removed.
How many states had slavery in 1860? 44% or 15 states out of 34.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_states_and_free_states
How many Senators were pro-slavery? 44%
44% was more than enough to prevent any compromise about slavery.
But how could slavery end when any change in law for the better would be blocked in the Senate?
How many states had slavery in 1864? How many pro-slavery Senators? 17% or 4 states out of 23.
The only reason slavery ended was because 11 pro-slavery states lost their obstinate Senators.
www.history.com/topics/black-history/thirteenth-amendment
How many Senators voted against the 13th Amendment? 14% or 6 out 44, which is almost the same percent of states where slavery remained legal.
The only way slavery could end is with 33% or fewer Senators being pro-slavery. Thank the Civil War for removing those pro-slavery Senators. Their pro-slavery revolt got them kick out of the Senate, which made legislative progress possible in the Senate.
There are other occasions when obstinate Senators were outnumbered.
In 1930 Republicans had 48 Senators or 50% and the New Deal would have been impossible even if FDR was President rather than Herbert Hoover.
Then in the next election the GOP had a disaster, mostly because its solution to every problem of the Great Depression was to wait and see if the economy gets better on its own, without any help from government.
In 1932 Republicans had 36 Senators or 38%, FDR could only do what the GOP allowed. But at this point even some of the less obstinate Republican Senators were thinking that waiting for the problems to solve themselves would get the GOP Senators removed from office in the next election.
In 1934 Republicans had 25 Senators or 26%, FDR had what he needed: obstinate Senators couldn’t stop progress although they did try.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1932_United_States_Senate_elections
Today, America is in a much worse situation than Lincoln and FDR faced at the worst. Nothing much can be accomplished when more than 33% of Senators oppose it.
We are now in a situation where 53% of Senators oppose everything, including impeachment of Trump. Nothing will be accomplished in this situation. It is as decreed by the design of Jefferson and Madison in the US Constitution.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Do try to keep in mind that by comparison, Obama was usually somewhere in the 20s and 30s, percentage-wise for most of his time in the hot seat.
Maintaining a 42% even though he has been attacked relentlessly by the media every single day for 2 1/2 years is pretty impressive.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:6ix, look again at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Do try to keep in mind that by comparison, Obama was usually somewhere in the 20s and 30s, percentage-wise for most of his time in the hot seat.
Maintaining a 42% even though he has been attacked relentlessly by the media every single day for 2 1/2 years is pretty impressive.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Down at the bottom of the page there is a comparison between popularity of previous presidents and Trump.
6ix, you are kind of right: Obama wasn't particularly popular. He was a little more than Trump.
The bigger thing to notice, which isn't on that page, is that when the most obstinate political party has more than 33% of the seats in the Senate, that party can obstruct the functioning of the Federal Government.
There have only been a few times in history when the obstinate party didn't have more than 33%: The Civil War and The Great Depression. These two major disasters caused the obstinate party to lose elections. Only then could the Federal Government function effectively. As soon as the most obstinate Senators got up to 34%, all progress was dragged to a halt by the friction from obstinacy. It is the way the US Constitution was designed. It is full of friction as was intended by Jefferson and Monroe.
The obvious solution to Trump's tax cheating and general incompetence is to replace him with Mike Pence, but the Republican Senators won't do it because they are obstinate. Same reason why they couldn't replace Obamacare and couldn't build Trump's Wall and a hundred other things they won't do out of obstinacy.
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 Should Liberals Fight a Citizenship Question on the Census?
Let’s suppose, as seems likely, that the Supreme Court lets Donald Trump go ahead with adding an obviously partisan citizenship question to the 2020 census. How should liberals react?
1) Mount a big educational campaign telling non-citizens not to be afraid of telling census takers that they aren’t citizens.
2) Mount a big educational campaign telling non-citizens to just go ahead and lie about being citizens.
This is what makes the cynicism of modern conservatism so toxic. The best bet for liberals is almost certainly the second one, but that merely fights cynicism toward governance with yet more cynicism. When does it end?
The Census Case Will Define the Roberts Court
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/04/census-case-roberts-court-
legacy.html
The court’s conservative wing disregarded the fact that both the original Constitution and the 14th Amendment require the Census to count all persons — citizens and non-citizens alike.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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No matter the current political battle, whether it’s NFL players kneeling, Brett Kavanaugh getting on the bench, or cap and trade, the right-wing base is unified and furious. The left has no such machine (and even if it did, it is too demographically and economically heterogeneous to maintain a simple common narrative). No matter how broadly supported the left’s tax, health, or climate policies, it can rarely match the right’s depth of intensity. And in politics, intensity wins.
www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/4/26/18512213/climate-change-r
epublicans-conservatives
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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