A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:If I had a dollar for every time a Texas Republican told me he wasn't a racist but he did have a problem with lazy, no good niggers and Mexicans expecting the government to give them free stuff, I'd have enough money to fix 6ix's screwed up life, which is all his fault, not Democrats'.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Fuck Metzl and fuck his racist book.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Lucky for me you got those hundreds of millions in tax breaks from your fake business you lie about about everyday so you have enough money to fix 6ix's screwed up life, which is all his fault, not Democrats'.
I'm sure the check is in the mail.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
I blame the damn russians'. Hell, it's always the russians'.
T
Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals.
And now T has become a parody of himself.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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In 2020 we’re relearning the lessons of 2008 — namely, that America’s right-wingers can’t handle the truth.
www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/opinion/trump-economy-coronavirus.html
Over the weekend Donald Trump once again declared that the coronavirus is perfectly under control, that any impressions to the contrary are due to the “Fake News Media” out to get him. Question: Does anyone have a count of how many times he’s done this, comparable to the running tallies fact checkers are keeping of his lies?
In any case, we’ve pretty clearly reached the point where Trump’s assurances that everything is fine actually worsen the panic, because they demonstrate the depths of his delusions. Even as he was tweeting out praise for himself, global markets were in free-fall.
Never mind cratering stock prices. The best indicator of collapsing confidence is what is happening to interest rates, which have plunged almost as far and as fast as they did during the 2008 financial crisis. Markets are implicitly predicting not just a recession, but multiple years of economic weakness.
And at first I was tempted to say that our current situation is even worse than it was in 2008, because at least then we had leadership that recognized the seriousness of the crisis rather than dismissing it all as a liberal conspiracy.
When you look back at the record, however, you discover that as the financial crisis developed right-wingers were also deeply in denial, inclined to dismiss bad news or attribute it to liberal and/or media conspiracies. It was only in the final stages of financial collapse that top officials got real, and right-wing pundits never did.
Let’s take a trip down memory lane.
The 2008 financial crisis was brought on by the collapse of an immense housing bubble. But many on the right denied that there was anything amiss. Larry Kudlow, now Trump’s chief economist, ridiculed “bubbleheads” who suggested that housing prices were out of line.
And I can tell you from personal experience that when I began writing about the housing bubble I was relentlessly accused of playing politics: “You only say there’s a bubble because you hate President Bush.”
When the economy began to slide, mainstream Republicans remained deeply in denial. Phil Gramm, John McCain’s senior economic adviser during the 2008 presidential campaign, declared that America was only suffering a “mental recession” and had become a “nation of whiners.”
Even the failure of Lehman Brothers, which sent the economy into a full meltdown, initially didn’t put a dent in conservative denial. Kudlow hailed the failure as good news, because it signaled an end to bailouts, and predicted housing and financial recovery in “months, not years.”
Wait, there’s more. After the economic crisis helped Barack Obama win the 2008 election, right-wing pundits declared that it was all a left-wing conspiracy. Karl Rove and Bill O’Reilly accused the news media of hyping bad news to enable Obama’s socialist agenda, while Rush Limbaugh asserted that Senator Chuck Schumer personally caused the crisis (don’t ask).
The point is that Trump’s luridly delusional response to the coronavirus and his conspiracy theorizing about Democrats and the news media aren’t really that different from the way the right dealt with the financial crisis a dozen years ago. True, last time the crazy talk wasn’t coming directly from the president of the United States. But that’s not the important distinction between then and now.
No, what’s different now is that denial and the resulting delay are likely to have deadly consequences.
It’s not clear, even in retrospect, how much better things would have been if right-wingers had recognized economic reality in 2008. Years of deregulation and lax enforcement had already weakened the financial system, and it was probably too late to head off the coming crisis.
Virus denial, by contrast, squandered crucial time — time that could have been used to slow the coronavirus’s spread. For the clear and present danger now isn’t so much that large numbers of Americ
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Anybody need more proof that NYT is a biased Democrat shill farm?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:You don't remember 2008, do you? I do. I clearly remember Bush not doing a damn thing about the crisis until too late to make any difference. Then the clock ran out and Bush and his team were gone from the White House, having not saved the situation and leaving a mess for somebody else to clean up.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Anybody need more proof that NYT is a biased Democrat shill farm?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Texas oil loses when OPEC doesn’t manipulate prices
www.houstonchronicle.com/business/columnists/tomlinson/article/Texas-o
il-loses-when-OPEC-doesn-t-manipulate-15121361.php
Everyone loves a free market on the ride up, but they become socialists on the journey down.
Saudi Arabia, Russia and other oil producers struck a deal two years ago to boost oil prices by cutting production. At the time, I questioned how long this new group, calling itself OPEC+, could connive without some party cheating or rewriting the deal.
Meanwhile, American oil executives, those conservative paragons of capitalism, hypocritically cheered the price-fixing scheme. After all, they know they can’t compete in a truly free market, where oil flows without someone, somewhere manipulating the market.
What OPEC+ gives, though, OPEC+ can take away.
Dozens of times over the past two years, energy consulting firms have confidently predicted oil prices would skyrocket and generate enormous profits for investors. They assumed OPEC+ was going to subsidize Texas shale drillers, who cannot turn a profit for less than $55 a barrel.
I repeatedly warned the world had too much supply. Why would Saudi Arabia and Russia allow U.S. oil companies to leech market share? OPEC+ has 2 million barrels a day of spare capacity, most of it cheaper to produce than West Texas Intermediate.
The deal lasted longer than I expected and fell apart last week.
For the first time in two years, we have a free market in crude, and the price is about $35 a barrel. In a note released Monday, Bank of America expects the price to remain below $50 for the rest of the year.
Big Oil’s cries of betrayal would be hilarious if they were not so cynical. The American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s lobbying arm, sent an email to journalists calling the price drop “Putin’s War on America’s Shale Oil Industry.”
“Russia has a history of using energy policy to advance geopolitical goals,” advises Scott Parker, an API spokesman. “Ultimately, it’s helpful to remind readers that this may be a foreign policy decision by Russia to reclaim its geopolitical leverage and undermine a key U.S. strategic asset.”
Who cares if the policy decision creates a competitive market where consumers pay only the marginal cost for petroleum instead of a rigged price that benefits oligarchs and dictators? I guess nothing sets Big Oil’s hair on fire like a 50 percent drop.
President Donald Trump called Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman on Monday, presumably to get him to resume price-fixing. The Trump administration’s chest-pounding is pitiful.
“These attempts by state actors to manipulate and shock oil markets reinforce the importance of the role of the United States as a reliable energy supplier to partners and allies around the world,” Energy Department spokeswoman Shaylyn Hynes said in a statement.
OPEC and Russia are not manipulating the market; they just stopped colluding. Not long ago, Republicans in Congress were promoting an anti-trust law to make OPEC’s quota-setting punishable in U.S. courts. Now they want OPEC to rig the game and force American consumers to pay more?
A few years ago, American oil executives bragged that shale oil companies were the new swing producers, ready to raise or lower production depending on global demand. They claimed they would make OPEC irrelevant because they would guarantee energy independence.
The oil and stock market’s behavior over the last 10 days proves that energy independence is a fairy tale told (by Trump and) by nationalists who do not understand how markets work.
The truth is that Texas shale drillers can’t compete on an even playing field with Saudi or Russia, where production costs are half of those in the Permian Basin. They do not have to drill horizontally. They don’t have to hydraulically fracture the well. Their oil always will be cheaper.
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:Quote:You don't remember 2008, do you? I do. I clearly remember Bush not doing a damn thing about the crisis until too late to make any difference. Then the clock ran out and Bush and his team were gone from the White House, having not saved the situation and leaving a mess for somebody else to clean up.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Anybody need more proof that NYT is a biased Democrat shill farm?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
I also remember back in 2008 when the NYT at least held up the pretense of being non-partisan as well.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Last week, five Democratic senators sent disturbing missives to three Trump administration officials about secret forces transforming the US courts and about one very powerful American lawyer in particular, Leonard Leo.
www.whitehouse.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Barr Letter.pdf
United States Senate
WASHINGTON, DC 20510
March 4, 2020
Attorney General William Barr
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530
Dear Attorney General Barr,
As members of the United States Senate, we have witnessed an unprecedented rise in anonymous funding which now pervades the process for selecting federal judicial nominees, confirming them, and advancing cases and legal theories that serve special interests to the detriment of the American people. We believe this anonymous funding, likely from entities that have interests before the federal courts, is undermining the rule of law and the bedrock American principle of equal justice under law.
Investigative reporting has brought attention to Leonard Leo’s leading role in these efforts, including his service with the Trump Administration advising its judicial selection and nominations process.1 In March 2016, Mr. Leo, who was then Executive Vice President of the Federalist Society, met with Don McGahn and then-candidate Donald Trump to provide a list of possible Supreme Court nominees. After President Trump’s election, Mr. Leo reportedly also served on his transition team, took leave from the Federalist Society to advise the Trump Administration on Supreme Court nominations, and continues to serve as an advisor on nominations to federal district and appeals courts. To date, over 85 percent of President Trump’s appellate court nominees, including both of his nominees to the Supreme Court, are current or former members of the Federalist Society.
This reporting also places Mr. Leo at the center of a complex network of nonprofit groups and shell entities funded largely by anonymous donors. Between 2014 and 2017 alone, Mr. Leo’s network collected more than $250 million in donations, the sources of which remain unknown. While much of this money has been directed toward advocacy spending in support of judicial nominees through advertising and other means, it appears that Mr. Leo also has a financial interest in these anonymous donations. Although he has regularly received upwards of $400,000 in annual compensation from the Federalist Society, Mr. Leo has declined to disclose his total compensation received through other entities in his network, including from the BH Group, which contributed $1 million to President Trump’s inaugural committee. In addition, he has recently indicated that he is forming a new venture which plans, among other things, to raise and spend millions on issue advocacy campaigns focusing on judges in the 2020 election cycle.
1 Robert O’Harrow & Shawn Boburg, A Conservative Activist's Behind-the-Scenes Campaign to Remake the Nation’s Courts, THE WASHINGTON POST (May 21,2019).
Mr. Leo’s prominent role in the Trump Administration’s judicial selection and nominations process while maintaining a financial interest in advocacy efforts related to this process has raised questions regarding his potential status as a federal employee and compliance with accompanying laws and regulations. By outward appearances, Mr. Leo may have engaged in the performance of a federal function that must be conducted by government employees authorized to act on behalf of the United States by leading the Administration’s efforts to identify and select judicial nominees, and press for their confirmation.2
As a federal employee, Mr. Leo would have been responsible for complying with federal records retention and financial disclosure requirements, as well as the criminal financial conflict of interest statute, 18 U.S.C. § 208. If he was not deemed a federal employee, Mr. Leo’s role in the Trump Administration may have violated legal limitations on the federal government’s acceptance of voluntary services or restrictions on access to
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Trump Can’t Cancel the Election. But States Could Do It for Him.
There’s a perfectly legal shortcut around a free and fair presidential election.
If the pandemic gets so severe that we cannot responsibly hold in-person elections, Congress should require states to allow no-excuse absentee balloting. But if Trump does not want to risk a loss at the polls, he can exploit a constitutional shortcut around free and fair elections. The president can ask Republican-controlled state legislatures to assign their electoral votes to him—without allowing any citizen to cast a ballot for president. This maneuver would constitute an appalling assault on democracy. But it would be legal.
As the 2016 election reminded the country, the president is chosen by the Electoral College, not the popular vote. There are 538 electors, and a candidate needs 270 of them to win. Currently, every state assigns electors to the candidate who won the popular vote statewide. (Two states add a twist that’s irrelevant here.) But the Constitution does not require states to assign their electors on the basis of the statewide vote. It does not even require a statewide vote. Rather, it explains that each state “shall appoint” its electors “in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” In other words, each state legislature gets to decide how electors are appointed—and, by extension, who gets their votes.
Today, every state legislature has delegated this task to the people. But at first, state legislatures just did it themselves. In the first presidential election, for instance, the legislatures of Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, New Jersey, and South Carolina appointed electors directly. Eventually, every state moved toward the modern system. But the Supreme Court confirmed in 1892’s McPherson v. Blacker that states were free to revert to the old method, and in 2000’s Bush v. Gore, the court reiterated this point. The majority declared that the state legislature “may, if it so chooses, select the electors itself,” and retains authority to “take back the power to appoint electors” even after switching to a statewide vote.
Put simply, it is perfectly constitutional for a state legislature to scrap statewide elections for president and appoint electors itself. It would also be constitutional for a state legislature to disregard the winner of the statewide vote and assign electors to the loser. And because the Constitution grants legislatures the authority to pick electors this way, Congress cannot stop them.
Due in part to partisan gerrymandering, Republicans control the legislatures of 28 states. Collectively, these states have 294 electoral votes. (Only 270 votes needed to win.) Trump himself could not cancel the entire presidential election. But he could ask these GOP-dominated legislatures to cancel their statewide presidential elections and assign their electors to him. It’s doubtful that we will face this situation in November. But imagine a worst-case scenario: The election is approaching, and the coronavirus remains rampant in our communities. States are unsure whether they have the personnel and resources to hold an election. Congress has failed to mandate no-excuse absentee balloting, and many states have declined to implement it. Or the postal service is so hard hit that it cannot reliably carry ballots to and from voters’ residences. It’s not difficult to envision Trump’s allies in state legislatures assigning their states’ electoral votes to the president, insisting that these dire circumstances justify pulling a constitutional fire alarm.
More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/03/trump-cancel-election-day-
constitution-state-electors-coronavirus.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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I seriously doubt this is going to happen.
November is a LONG way away and this will have all died down by then and we'll be left with the economic fallout.
The WORST thing we can do is absentee ballots on a wide scale. It's bad enough we do as many as we do today.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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