A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Quote:Perhaps you're too focused on one office.
Originally posted by SECOND:
If Obama had fired 500 of those worthless generals and admirals, it would not have been too many.
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
tic tac
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Quote:Perhaps I am too focussed on the military? Perhaps because it costs a trillion dollars per year and is a constant source of friction between America and the entire world? Republicans love the "troops" too much: President Trump got Navy SEAL (and murderer) Edward Gallagher removed from the brig and transferred to better custody conditions at a Navy hospital before trial.
Originally posted by 1KIKI:Quote:Perhaps you're too focused on one office.
Originally posted by SECOND:
If Obama had fired 500 of those worthless generals and admirals, it would not have been too many.
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
tic tac
The biggest bombshell in the case occurred on June 20 when Gallagher's colleague, Special Operator 1st Class Corey Scott, perjured himself by claiming to have asphyxiated the ISIS fighter back in 2017, contrary to the testimony of at least seven other SEALs who said it was Gallagher who stabbed the ISIS fighter after medics administered treatment to him. Scott had been given immunity from prosecution for his testimony. He then changed the story he told to prosecutors as soon as he got on the witness stand. Because of the immunity, he won't be prosecuted.
If you want to know why America loses wars, despite killing people by the hundreds of thousands, at the cost of trillions, this trial is a model, a work of art, a showpiece on how fucked up the American military is. For that achievement thank the President and half the Generals on the 4th of July. America salutes them for their incompetence serving the nation.
www.foxnews.com/us/navy-seal-edward-gallagher-found-not-guilty-on-murd
er-and-attempted-murder-charges
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:
If Obama had fired 500 of those worthless generals and admirals, it would not have been too many.
Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Perhaps you're too focused on one office.
Quote:fify
Originally posted by SECOND:
something or other
SECOND, YOU are the one who claims I'm hyper-focused on one office. Me, I barely post about Trump, or indeed any president, unless I'm discussing a salient thing they did using the power of their office: for example, Obama, with the stroke of a pen, crowning himself Deporter in Chief, or FDR using the power of the bully pulpit.
Shall we talk about your hundreds, if not a thousand or more, pointless posts hyper-focused on Trump?
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Quote:The Federal government does a million things per day, but who in the government did each one of those things? Just for rhetorical reasons, we might write President FDR fought Hitler, that kind of stuff. But we all know FDR fought nobody from his wheelchair. Presidents are pushed around by external events. Presidents pretend they are in charge, but it doesn't look that way to me. Japan bombs Pearl Harbor. Hitler declares war on America. Then FDR "decides" to fight Hitler. If FDR was really making the decision to fight Hitler, he would have gone to war after Dunkirk, or even before that when Denmark falls, but he would not have waited for Pearl Harbor.
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
fify
SECOND, YOU are the one who claims I'm hyper-focused on one office. Me, I barely post about Trump, or indeed any president, unless I'm discussing a salient thing they did using the power of their office: for example, Obama, with the stroke of a pen, crowning himself Deporter in Chief, or FDR using the power of the bully pulpit.
Shall we talk about your hundreds, if not a thousand or more, pointless posts hyper-focused on Trump?
Imagine if the Iraqis, smarter than George Bush, had not tricked Bush, and the Pentagon, and the State Department into an American withdrawal to end in 2011, after Bush was gone. Trump would still be trapped in Iraq. The Afghans were less clever and that war had not started with promises to free the people from an evil dictator like Saddam Hussein. Afghanistan was pure revenge for 9/11. The American people wanted revenge on somebody, so Bush had to deliver something. Now Trump is trapped in Afghanistan. He can't simply quit and walk away. His party in Congress and his voters make him stay in that stupid war he will never win. The same with Obama, his party and his voters made him stay in a stupid war, because his party and voters had delusions America could win it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S.%E2%80%93Iraq_Status_of_Forces_Agree
ment
Yesterday, Trump said he wants to get U.S. troops completely out of Afghanistan but said Pentagon leaders have convinced him not to, saying the American military presence there is preventing terrorist attacks.
www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2019/07/02/trump-pentagon
-leaders-want-to-keep-troops-in-afghanistan/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Democrats are learning the wrong lesson from Donald Trump. The correct lesson: He ran as a moderate — and it worked.
www.vox.com/2019/7/2/20677656/donald-trump-moderate-extremism-penalty
If Trump is president, the thinking goes among Democrats, it’s the ultimate proof of “lol nothing matters” politics. And if anything does matter, it’s riling up your base to go to war, not trimming and tucking to persuade precious swing voters. The old rules no longer apply, or perhaps they were never true at all.
Activists are pressing candidates to take aggressively progressive stands on broad issues like Medicare-for-all but also narrower ones like including undocumented immigrants in health care plans and providing relief from graduate school debt.
This is, however, precisely the wrong lesson to learn from the Trump era.
It’s true that Trump is president, but it’s not true that Trump ran and won as an ideological extremist. He paired extremely offensive rhetoric on racial issues with positioning on key economic policy topics that led him to be perceived by the electorate as the most moderate GOP nominee in generations. His campaign was almost paint-by-numbers pragmatic moderation. He ditched a couple of unpopular GOP positions that were much cherished by party elites, like cutting Medicare benefits, delivered victory, and is beloved by the rank and file for it.
Far from being a counterexample, Trump’s election is, if anything, a testament to the theory that moderation pays off. The millions of progressives baffled that someone as coarse, ignorant, and scandal-plagued as Trump could win an election should reflect on the fact that he was able to partially recover from those things due to his positions on the issues.
That’s not to say that Trump ran a sober-minded, issue-oriented campaign. Far from it. His main themes were dedicated to mobilizing ugly racial sentiments. But racism is not new to American politics. Had Trump ran on a conventional Republican platform of cutting Social Security and Medicare, Democrats would have hammered him for it — just as they hammered McCain and Romney — and won the votes of many older non-college whites who are racist enough to like Trump but sufficiently non-racist to have voted for Democrats in the past.
The research case that moderation matters for electoral wins, meanwhile, remains pretty solid. Lots of other things matter too, and it would be foolish to label any particular position or candidate as categorically “unelectable.” But overall, moderate candidates are more likely to win; more precisely, candidates who take popular positions on the issues are more likely to win than candidates who take unpopular ones.
Of course, politics matters because policy matters, so taking a calculated risk on an unpopular position for the sake of getting something important does make sense. But adopting an unpopular position that you won’t be able to deliver on even if you win the election is not just costly, it’s reckless — jeopardizing the interests of the people you’re supposed to be helping.
Remember: nothing will become law when there are 41 GOP Senators or more opposing it. There will be 50. Then why sacrifice getting elected by taking liberal positions that can't pass into laws?
More at www.vox.com/2019/7/2/20677656/donald-trump-moderate-extremism-penalty
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 1KIKI:
fify
SECOND, YOU are the one who claims I'm hyper-focused on one office. Me, I barely post about Trump, or indeed any president, unless I'm discussing a salient thing they did using the power of their office: for example, Obama, with the stroke of a pen, crowning himself Deporter in Chief, or FDR using the power of the bully pulpit.
Shall we talk about your hundreds, if not a thousand or more, pointless posts hyper-focused on Trump?
Quote:And yet Obama and FDR did those things, despite your confabulations to pretend they didn't.
Originally posted by SECOND:
The Federal government does a million things per day, but who in the government did each one of those things?
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
tic tac
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Quote:I have doubts that you will ever understand that Democratic Presidents are restrained in what they can do by what the Constitution will allow, while guys like Trump and Nixon have got their own little area that they move freely around in and it is smaller and only partially overlaps the one in the Constitution. I could draw you Venn Diagrams of what the Constitution allows, what Democrats allow, what Republicans allow, but you won't understand those, either.
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
And yet Obama and FDR did those things, despite your confabulations to pretend they didn't.
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
tic tac
Venn diagram showing the uppercase glyphs shared by the Greek, Latin, and Cyrillic alphabets
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e4/Venn_diagram_gr_la
_ru.svg
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:I'd like to see you try to make that case, SECOND.
Originally posted by SECOND:
I have doubts that you will ever understand that Democratic Presidents are restrained in what they can do by what the Constitution will allow, while guys like Trump and Nixon have got their own little area that they move freely around in and it is smaller and only partially overlaps the one in the Constitution.
It's easy to pretend you have knowledge by pretending to be superior - harder to prove it, with quotes and links.
Let's get specific with two close-in-time presidents, under the same operational frameworks and Constitutional decisions: What did Bush do OUTSIDE OF THE CONSTITUTION that Obama didn't?
And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?
tic tac
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A $15 federal minimum wage won’t cost Americans jobs, new study says
www.vox.com/2019/7/2/20678821/15-federal-minimum-wage-increase-study
In January, House Democrats introduced the Raise the Wage Act, which would eventually raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2024. The law would also tie future changes to changes in median workers’ pay. So if middle-class wages go up — or down — so would the minimum wage.
The bill, which has more than 200 co-sponsors (all Democrats), would also phase out the lower minimum wage for tipped workers such as restaurant servers and valets, which has been $2.13 an hour since 1996.
Big business groups are not happy about the fight for $15. Neither are their Republican allies in Congress, who have long pushed back against any effort to raise the federal minimum wage.
They’re planning to vote in July or August.
The bill would more than likely die in the Senate, or, as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer calls it, Mitch McConnell’s “legislative graveyard.” But if things turn out well for Democrats in 2020, there’s a good chance the next president will sign a bill to double the federal minimum wage, giving 28 million workers a raise.
And based on the latest research, the pay raise won’t lead many workers to the unemployment line.
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:The Constitution lets the the Supreme Court decide what is unconstitutional, but there is a big butt: The Supreme Court will make no decision until Congress brings the case to them. I assume that in the 18th Century they couldn't imagine that Congress wouldn't. The most straightforward example of Congress not following the Constitution: the President has gone to war many times since 1943 without a declaration of war from Congress. Not once has Congress taken a case to the Supreme Court about the President unconstitutionally going to War. I guess your typical Congressman has shrugged off that responsibility to decide and let the Pentagon make the decision about what is possible with the budget they have been given by Congress, then the Pentagon informs the President what he could be doing next with the troops. But who knows anymore who is making the decisions about wars? I don't know. But the Constitution, when it was written, clearly stated who makes the decision.
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Let's get specific with two close-in-time presidents, under the same operational frameworks and Constitutional decisions: What did Bush do OUTSIDE OF THE CONSTITUTION that Obama didn't?
www.senate.gov/pagelayout/history/h_multi_sections_and_teasers/WarDecl
arationsbyCongress.htm
https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/when-congress-once-used-its-powers
-to-declare-war
The people making unconstitutional decisions about where to invade next are very unlikely to die if they make the wrong decision. Being unafraid of dying for their mistakes could explain why America is constantly at war: www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28669943
"Gen Greene is not only the highest ranking US military official to have been killed since the start of the war in Afghanistan, his death also marks the first time in more than 40 years that a general has been killed in combat." Except he was NOT in combat. He was at Camp Qargha's Marshal Fahim National Defense University in Kabul, Afghanistan, making a routine visit to the training facility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_J._Greene#Death
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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