A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Quote:But Trump and Biden will be older fools by then:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
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. :)
Presidential inability hasn’t exactly been a rarity. Beginning with George Washington, who nearly died of a month-long bout of pneumonia a few months into his presidency, a number of chief executives have been incapacitated, from periods ranging from a few hours to several weeks. In 1881, President James A. Garfield, mortally wounded by an assassin, lingered for two and a half months before dying. In 1919, Woodrow Wilson suffered a major stroke, which permanently altered his cognitive functioning. During his final years, Franklin D. Roosevelt was suffering badly enough from cardiovascular disease to cause his top subordinates severe worry before his death, from a cerebral hemorrhage, and in 1981 Ronald Reagan was under general anesthesia for a time following John Hinckley’s assassination attempt. There are many more examples.
Many episodes of disability, such as Wilson’s stroke, FDR’s illness, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1955 heart attack and 1957 stroke, and Reagan’s 1985 cancer surgery, relate to infirmities that are more likely to occur in older populations. But nearly all of these instances were sudden occurrences, unlike dementia, Alzheimer’s, and the generally reduced cognitive functioning that are an almost inescapable consequence of growing older. Presidential advisers have often worried about a chief executive’s deteriorating condition, as in the case of Reagan and even Richard Nixon (though the latter was more a case of depression than age), but no official statement of inability or disability from individual advisers, the Cabinet, or even Congress has ever resulted from such concerns. Yet senescence, the creeping incapacity of an aging presidential brain, is something that could very well lead to a crisis in the coming years.
The Founders, of course, knew that age could affect capacity. Anyone who has dealt with either young children or elderly relatives has learned this from personal experience. But in discussing age qualifications for federal office, the delegates to the Philadelphia Convention never expressly connected advancing age with the Constitution’s standard of “inability.” Instead they limited their age concerns to the dangers of having officeholders who were too young. Representatives must be 25; senators, 30; presidents, 35. (Interestingly, there’s no minimum age for judges, who are supposed to be the repositories of disinterested reason born of mature wisdom.) The convention’s longest discussion of age came in the context of debating requirements for representatives. The Pennsylvania delegate James Wilson argued that minimum-age requirements were undemocratic and could deprive the country of the services of youthful geniuses, citing England’s William Pitt the Younger as an example. In the end he was overruled; George Mason retorted that while people claimed that the Confederation Congress “had proved a good school for our young men,” he himself preferred those youngsters to “bear the expense of their own education.”
More at www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/no-constitution-old-presiden
ts/608206/
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 think they'll all get the virus before the elections are over and all will be dead.
T 
Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals.
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Mortality rate is extremely low, even among old people. Once there are millions of people tested, that will become crystal clear.
My prediction is that not one single person who was running for President is going to die of COVID-19.
Expect to hear about Tom Hanks and his wife recovering shortly.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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The Fantasy of “Paying for” Universal Health Care
One of our most bizarre delusions, manifested in the Democratic presidential primary, is that we can’t have Medicare for All unless we figure out how to pay for it. In reality, Medicare for All would either cost as much as we’re currently paying or save America money.
Between government and private spending, our current monstrous hybrid system spends more than 18 percent of our gross domestic product on health care, twice the average for the other 34 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Even worse, health care costs are going up faster than the economy is growing. That means that if nothing changes, the 18 percent number will continue to increase. This is already a genuine drain on the U.S. and will eventually cause something to break.
The only solution to this problem that any country has ever discovered is universal health care. A unified system that covers everybody has the power and moral authority to bargain with providers and hold costs down. So while Medicare for All would require more spending by the federal government, individuals would spend so much less in premiums, deductibles, and copays that we’d almost certainly come out ahead overall — plus we’d never have to think about paying doctor’s bills again. In other words, in reality, the only question is how we can possibly pay for the status quo.
This total disconnect from the real world was embodied by former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s lament that Medicare for All would eliminate millions of private health insurance jobs. Yes, it would — and that’s the point. At best, these jobs are pointless bureaucratic time-wasting; at worst, they involve preventing patients from getting health care. If Buttigieg thinks that’s a good thing, he should propose hiring millions of Americans to play World of Warcraft all day long and occasionally go to emergency rooms and strangle people.
More at https://theintercept.com/2020/03/18/stock-market-coronavirus/
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 Buttigieg thinks that’s a good thing, he should propose hiring millions of Americans to play World of Warcraft all day long and occasionally go to emergency rooms and strangle people.
Pretty hilarious, if quite dated reference.
I can't tell if that was a Boomer comment or an OK Boomer comment.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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3 Rules for the Trump Pandemic
One: Don’t trust the president.
www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/opinion/trump-coronavirus.html
March 19, 2020, 4:58 p.m. ET
So Donald Trump is now calling Covid-19 the “Chinese virus.” Of course he is: Racism and blaming other people for his own failures are the defining features of his presidency. But if we’re going to give it a nickname, much better to refer to it as the “Trump pandemic.”
True, the virus didn’t originate here. But the U.S. response to the threat has been catastrophically slow and inadequate, and the buck stops with Trump, who minimized the threat and discouraged action until just a few days ago.
Compare, for example, America’s handling of the coronavirus with that of South Korea. Both countries reported their first case on Jan. 20. But Korea moved quickly to implement widespread testing; it has used the data from that testing to guide social distancing and other containment measures; and the disease appears to be on the wane there.
In the U.S., by contrast, testing has barely begun — we’ve tested only 60,000 people compared with South Korea’s 290,000, even though we have six times its population, and the number of cases here appears to be skyrocketing.
The details of our failure are complex, but they all flow ultimately from Trump’s minimization of the threat: He was asserting that Covid-19 was no worse than the flu just last week (although true to form, he’s now claiming to have known all along that a pandemic was coming).
Why did Trump and his team deny and delay? All the evidence suggests that he didn’t want to do or say anything that might drive down stock prices, which he seems to regard as the key measure of his success. That’s presumably why as late as Feb. 25 Larry Kudlow, the administration’s chief economist, declared that the U.S. had “contained” the coronavirus, and that the economy was “holding up nicely.”
Well, that was a bad bet. Since then, the stock market has more or less given up all its gains under the Trump presidency. More important, the economy is clearly in free-fall.
I’ll leave health policy to the experts. On economic policy, I’d suggest three principles. First, focus on hardship, not G.D.P. Second, stop worrying about incentives to work. Third, don’t trust Trump.
On the first point: Many of the job losses we’ll experience over the next few months will be not just unavoidable but actually desirable. We want workers who are or might be sick to stay home, to “flatten the curve” of the virus’s spread. We want to partly or wholly close large business establishments, like auto plants, that could act as human petri dishes. We want to close restaurants, bars and nonessential retail establishments.
Now, there will surely be additional, unnecessary job losses caused by a plunge in consumer and business spending, which is why we should be engaged in substantial overall stimulus. But policy can’t and shouldn’t prevent widespread temporary job loss.
What policy can do is reduce the hardship facing those who are temporarily out of work. That means that we need to spend much more on programs like paid sick leave, unemployment benefits, food stamps and Medicaid that aid Americans in distress, who need far more help than they’ll get from an across-the-board cash drop. This spending would also provide stimulus, but that’s a secondary concern.
Which brings me to my second point. The usual suspects are already objecting that helping Americans in need reduces their incentive to work. That’s a lousy argument even in good times, but it’s absurd in the face of a pandemic. And state governments that have been trying, with encouragement from the Trump administration, to reduce public assistance by imposing work requirements should suspend all such requirements, immediately.
Finally, about Trump: Over the past few days state TV, I mean Fox News, and right-wing pundits have abruptly pivoted from dismissing Covid-19 as a liberal hoax to demanding an end to all criticism of the president in a time of national emergency. This sh
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
3 Rules for the Trump Pandemic
One: Don’t trust the president.
LOL
As if anybody trusts the NYT.
It's 2020 dude. There's more truth on the front page of The Onion than an entire NYT paper.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:I knew people like you - knew because they died in their forties since they would not listen to warnings about cigarettes, seat belts, alcohol, guns, etc. declaring that the dangers were exaggerated. One particularly memorable death involved a warning to not bypass an interlock. His lasts words to me were "I've done this hundreds of times." It has been 26 years, but whenever I remember him my first and last thoughts are "Never could tell him anything. The world is better with him dead." That will be engraved on your tombstone, 6ix.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
3 Rules for the Trump Pandemic
One: Don’t trust the president.
LOL
As if anybody trusts the NYT.
It's 2020 dude. There's more truth on the front page of The Onion than an entire NYT paper.
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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The Romans Tried to Save the Republic From Men Like Trump. They Failed.
by Joy Connolly
January 17, 2017
A man stands before a crowd, trawling for votes. He’s rich and the son of a rich man, though his personal finances are tangled, he’s saddled with debt, and his career to date has been studded with scandal. Far from pretending to be good, he makes a virtue out of his lack of pretense, and plays up his excesses as extravagantly as he stokes the crowd’s resentment of his own class.
Call him Donald Trump. But this man is also Julius Caesar, Catiline, Clodius, and a legion of other men who lived in ancient Rome, from which the American Founders drew inspiration for the political system we have today. Long before Max Weber studied “charismatic authority” or Adorno the “authoritarian personality,” Alexander Hamilton, unexpected darling of today’s Broadway, would have recognized the type instantly from his knowledge of Roman history.
He’s a man of wealth and power, but he tells the people he is an outsider, just like them. He insists the system is rigged against them by the influential few. He rails against the people, too: “You’ve given up everything in exchange for laziness and apathy, thinking you’ve got freedom in abundance because your backs are spared the lash. The elite will fight and enjoy their victory, and regular people will be treated like a conquered nation: This will be more the case every day, so long as they work harder for total power than you do to get your freedom back.”
That’s not Trump, though it sounds like him. It’s a politician called Licinius Macer, haranguing a crowd in Rome in 73 BCE. It was with men like Macer in mind that in the first of the Federalist papers, Hamilton identified the claim to fight for popular freedom as the demagogue’s most insidious and effective tactic. “Dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people,” he wrote. Far from the innocent meaning of the original ancient Greek word, “leader of the people,” for Hamilton the demagogue paves a “much more certain road to the introduction of despotism.”
Trump now takes office on the strength of his demagoguery. A student of little else, Trump is an intuitive expert in popular fantasy, and he plays his American audience like a well-worn instrument. What to the pundits seemed like outrageous rhetorical excesses (“total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the U.S.,” “She has to go to jail,” and so on) turned out to be the notes roughly half the country wanted to hear.
Since the election, the excesses have continued, in speeches, casual asides, and tweets at all times of day or night. The professional classes marvel that Trump summarily dismisses advice (“I know a lot about hacking”), jabs at perceived enemies in the press, and tweets bellicose threats to foreign governments. But this is par for the course. Both as candidate and president-elect, Trump has invited the elites to bring it on, rubbing raw the weakest point of the republican constitution: the relationship between the people and their elected politicians, or as the Romans would put it, “plebs” and “pauci,” the many and the few.
More at www.villagevoice.com/2017/01/17/the-romans-tried-to-save-the-republic-
from-men-like-trump-they-failed/
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:I knew people like you - knew because they died in their forties since they would not listen to warnings about cigarettes, seat belts, alcohol, guns, etc. declaring that the dangers were exaggerated. One particularly memorable death involved a warning to not bypass an interlock. His lasts words to me were "I've done this hundreds of times." It has been 26 years, but whenever I remember him my first and last thoughts are "Never could tell him anything. The world is better with him dead." That will be engraved on your tombstone, 6ix.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
3 Rules for the Trump Pandemic
One: Don’t trust the president.
LOL
As if anybody trusts the NYT.
It's 2020 dude. There's more truth on the front page of The Onion than an entire NYT paper.
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 know that smoking is bad for me, dummy. I just don't give a shit is all.
You know the character of a man by what he does when he knows nobody is watching him. If we had any clue at all about the real you, then we could have equally stupid and unrelated arguments to any of yours based off of your bad habits.
That being said, shut the fuck up dude. You're an idiot.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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