A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 250 of 725
The other day The Times published an Op-Ed that used analysis of party platforms to place U.S. political parties on a left-right spectrum along with their counterparts abroad. The study found that the G.O.P. is far to the right of mainstream European conservative parties. It’s even to the right of anti-immigrant parties like Britain’s UKIP and France’s National Rally. Basically, if we saw something like America’s Republicans in another country, we’d classify them as white nationalist extremists.
True, this is just one study. But it matches up with lots of other evidence. Political scientists who use congressional votes to track ideology find that Republicans have moved drastically to the right over the past four decades, to the point where they are now more conservative than they were at the height of the Gilded Age.
Or just compare the G.O.P., point by point, with parties almost everyone would classify as right-wing authoritarians — parties like Hungary’s Fidesz, which has preserved some of the forms of democracy but has effectively created a permanent one-party state.
Fidesz has cemented its power by politicizing the judiciary, creating rigged election rules, suppressing opposition media and using the power of the state to reward the party’s cronies while punishing businesses that don’t toe the line. Does any of it sound like something that isn’t already happening here, and which Republicans will do much more of if they get the chance?
One might even argue that the G.O.P. stands out among the West’s white nationalist parties for its exceptional willingness to crash right through the guardrails of democracy. Extreme gerrymandering, naked voter suppression and stripping power from offices the other party manages to win all the same — these practices seem more prevalent here than in the failing democracies of Eastern Europe.
www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/opinion/socialism-2020.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
People who claim it's a 'white' thing are racist.
Quote:fify
Originally posted by SECOND:
fart
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
tic tac
Yup. Second's an idiot.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Former President Jimmy Carter, on Friday, describing President Donald Trump as an illegitimate president who wouldn’t have won but for Russian interference on his behalf.
“I think the interference, although not yet quantified, if fully investigated, would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016,” the 94-year-old Carter said. “He lost the election, and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.”
The panel moderator, historian Jon Meacham, asked Carter if that means he thinks Trump “is an illegitimate president.” Carter said he does.
Trump indicated that he’s not opposed to the idea of Russia helping him again in 2020. Trump said he’d be willing to accept dirt on his Democratic opponents from a foreign entity — a willingness at odds with the position of FBI Director Christopher Wray, who testified to Congress that candidates should contact the FBI in such a scenario.
“The FBI director is wrong,” Trump proclaimed when Stephanopoulos brought up the position of his own handpicked FBI director.
Just a few hours before Carter called him an illegitimate president, Trump signaled during a photo op at the G20 summit in Japan with Russian President Vladimir Putin that he still doesn’t think Russian interference is a serious matter.
It’s worth noting that Carter has been relatively muted in his criticisms of Trump to date, and has in fact praised aspects of his foreign policy — including his openness to diplomacy with North Korea and his decision not to launch military strikes against Iran — so it’s not as though he’s an outspoken member of the “resistance.”
Trump himself recently drew the results of the 2016 election into question, but for quite different reasons. During an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd that aired last Sunday, Trump suggested he may not have actually lost the popular vote, if you factor in what he claimed was massive voter fraud.
“There were a lot of votes cast that I don’t believe,” Trump told Todd, citing zero evidence for the claim, which elections experts have repeatedly debunked.
www.vox.com/2019/6/28/19127475/jimmy-carter-trump-illegitimate-preside
nt
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Jeff Flake @JeffFlake tweeted:
Words matter, Mr. President. Joking with Vladimir Putin about "getting rid" of journalists is not funny at all. It puts journalists at risk.
4:15 PM - 28 Jun 2019
Jeff Flake offers rare defense of Trump after Jimmy Carter suggests POTUS is 'illegitimate'
www.foxnews.com/politics/jeff-flake-offers-rare-defense-of-trump-after
-jimmy-carter-suggests-potus-is-illegitimate
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Yeah. Nobody should joke about getting rid of journalists when they're being laid off left and right.
Being out on your ass with no prospects of ever getting a comparable wage in your future is no laughing matter.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:It is not about wages:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Yeah. Nobody should joke about getting rid of journalists when they're being laid off left and right.
Being out on your ass with no prospects of ever getting a comparable wage in your future is no laughing matter.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
List of journalists killed in Russia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_Russia
Not everyone who has a quarrel with Russian President Vladimir Putin dies in violent or suspicious circumstances. But enough loud critics of Putin's policies have been murdered that Thursday's daylight shooting of a Russian who sought asylum in Ukraine has led to speculation of Kremlin involvement.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called the shooting in Kiev of Denis Voronenkov, a former Russian Communist Party member who began sharply criticizing Putin after fleeing Russia in 2016, an "act of state terrorism by Russia."
That drew a sharp rebuke from Putin's spokesman, who called the accusation "absurd." Throughout the years, the Kremlin has always dismissed the notion of political killings with scorn.
Here are some outspoken critics of Putin who were killed or died mysteriously:
10 critics of Vladimir Putin who died violently or in suspicious ways
www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/03/23/here-are-ten-crit
ics-of-vladimir-putin-who-died-violently-or-in-suspicious-ways/
At G20, Trump Continues to Excuse and Justify the Murder of Journalists
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/06/28/at-g20-trump-continues-to-exc
use-and-justify-the-murder-of-journalists/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:fify
Originally posted by second:
fart
Meanwhile, actual - yanno - facts from Statista that SLOPPY-SECONDS seems to be allergic to:
Where's Russia on that list, SLOPPY-SECONDS?
Where's the US?
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
tic tac
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:I see you misunderstood, launching yourself into a defense of Russia as a Russian troll would. What is to be understood is that it was about Trump, the US President, joking with the Russian about killing Trump's personal journalistic enemies. So if the US is killing journalists, has Trump already started killing his enemies? Who knows? That is not in your graphic, but the Russian sure has a dozen dead enemies. The Russian says he did not kill them. Who knows? That, too, is not in your graphic.
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Where's Russia on that list, SLOPPY-SECONDS?
Where's the US?
Dozens of Russian journalists have been murdered since 2000, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Glasnost Defense Foundation. They weren't covering shooting wars or riots but powerful Russian institutions. A surprising number have implausibly fallen or slipped to their deaths.
Why Do Russian Journalists Keep Falling?
www.npr.org/2018/04/21/604497554/why-do-russian-journalists-keep-falli
ng
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Trump presents himself as an alpha male, bigger, badder and sexier than anyone else in the zoo. Threats and insults are his standard operating procedure. People don’t support him because they think he’s nice or sophisticated in his reasoning.
The irony, of course, is that once you get past his mouth he turns out to be an uncommonly weak and ineffectual president. True, his allies and cronies are securing judgeships and eviscerating regulations, but Trump himself is 99% Public Relations. His job is to distract you from what the real movers and shakers in the White House, the Cabinet, and the GOP controlled Senate are doing.
The New York Times, by giving us megadoses of Trump’s mouth, is a megaphone for him. If they secretly want him to be re-elected, they should continue doing more of that and less and less covering what his Cabinet and the Senate are doing. But here’s a better way:
1. Absolutely no front page news on Trump unless he actually does something — and saying stupid or mean stuff doesn’t qualify as doing.
2. Change the ruling meme from “He is upending the world through his threats and insults” to “He is a blowhard who actually does almost nothing.” Treat him not like an alpha but more like an omega with endless vocalizations, best ignored.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
America’s Indefensible Defense Budget
www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/07/18/americas-indefensible-defense-budg
et/
If you have read anything about defense spending in recent years, it was probably expressed as a percentage of GDP. At roughly 3–4 percent (it was more than 40 percent in 1944, 15 percent during the Korean War, and over 10 percent in the early 1960s), it seems eminently affordable.
But this almost universally used measure is close to meaningless, except to make rough international comparisons. It makes no sense to expect that external threats will expand in parallel with a country’s economic growth. A country whose economy has grown by, for example, 30 percent has no reason to spend 30 percent more on its military. To the contrary, unless threats worsen, you would expect that, over time, defense spending as a percentage of a growing economy should decline.
Instead, the valid measure of affordability is defense spending’s share of the federal discretionary budget: that is, of all federal spending other than the mandatory allotments to entitlements and interest on the national debt.
The budget embodies the country’s core political choices: how much government its citizens want, what their priorities for it are, and how large a debt they choose to shoulder and to pass on. Defense spending now accounts for almost 60 percent of the budget: everything else is accommodated in the remaining two fifths. By this measure, defense spending looks anything but easily affordable. Nor, on its projected path of continuing growth, does it look sustainable. What would finally be too much? Two thirds of the total? Seventy percent?
The consequences are huge. At home, defense spending crowds out funds for everything else a prosperous economy and a healthy society need. Abroad, it has led us to become a country reflexively reliant on the military.
Are we actually as threatened as our lopsided spending suggests? Or are we achieving, through a rapidly growing military, valued international aims that are otherwise unattainable? If funds were tight or we were really concerned about deficits — that is, if we were forced to make tradeoffs — could we achieve equal or better security for much less money? In short, do we need to or want to devote three fifths of the government’s discretionary funds to defense? There are no widely agreed-upon answers because the questions aren’t being asked.
The so-called undernourished military against which Republicans railed at the close of the Obama administration was supported by the highest spending in inflation-adjusted dollars since the end of World War II. Under the Trump administration, the budget soared to $700 billion in fiscal year 2018 and $716 billion this year, with a proposed leap to $750 billion for next year. In order to partially pay for these increases, the administration proposed to cut or slash spending for thirteen of the sixteen Cabinet agencies — all but the Department of Defense, the Veterans Administration, and the Department of Homeland Security.
Congress rubber-stamped the FY 2019 defense budget but rejected most of the draconian cuts proposed for everything else, thus enlarging the deficit. Legislators are unlikely to go as high as $750 billion for FY 2020, but they will almost certainly approve another large jump in defense spending, for a total increase of more than $100 billion since Trump took office.
The underlying political dynamics are what drive the money machine year after year. The Pentagon has, by a wide margin, the best long-range planning and budgeting capability in the government. Thousands of people are involved. Even if they wanted to, Congress’s armed services committees couldn’t attempt a zero-based budget of six or seven hundred billion dollars: that is, beginning with an evaluation of asserted threats, followed by an independent assessment of the proposed strategy for meeting them and analysis of the forces and facilities needed to execute the strategy. Mostly, though, they don’t want to. They prefer to protect spending and jobs
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME