A thread for Democrats Only
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UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Why I'm skeptical about Reade's sexual assault claim against Biden
During 28 years as a state and federal prosecutor, I prosecuted a lot of sexual assault cases. But as the news media have investigated Reade’s allegations, I’ve become increasingly skeptical. Here are some of the reasons why:
Reade's Compliments for Biden. In the 1990s, Biden worked to pass the Violence Against Women Act. In 2017, on multiple occasions, Reade retweeted or “liked” praise for Biden and his work combating sexual assault. In the same year, Reade tweeted other compliments of Biden, including: “My old boss speaks truth. Listen.” It is bizarre that Reade would publicly laud Biden for combating the very thing she would later accuse him of doing to her.
Reade's Rejecting Biden, embracing Sanders. By this January, Reade was all in for presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Her unwavering support was accompanied by an unbridled attack on Biden. In an article on Medium, Reade referred to Biden as “the blue version of Trump.” Reade also pushed a Sanders/Elizabeth Warren ticket, while complaining that the Democratic National Committee was trying to “shove” Biden “down Democrat voters throats.”
Suspect timing. Biden's string of March primary victories threw Sanders off his seemingly unstoppable path to the Democratic nomination. On March 25, as Sanders was pondering his political future, Reade finally went public with her claim. The confluence of Reade’s support of Sanders and the timing of her allegation should give pause to even the most strident Biden critics.
More at www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/04/29/joe-biden-sexual-assault-all
egation-tara-reade-column/3046962001/
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:
Why I'm skeptical about Reade's sexual assault claim against Biden
Just an FYI, buddy.
I'm skeptical about Reade's sexual assault claim against Biden.
Anybody who has a clear motive for doing so should be met with plenty of skeptisism. #BelieveAllWoman is bullshit. Women are just as capable of lying as men are.
I don't think Biden did anything, except for possibly making her feel uncomfortable with unwanted advances via words he probably shouldn't have said to her. I've been around old-timer politicians when I worked my first real job and they just talked different. Even though they were all old guys, 50% of what they talked about behind close doors was women and in a way that kind of made my young self laugh because I never was around people who talked about women the way that they did.
But calling that "ASSAULT" is bullshit.
I'll defend Biden on this one.
But my gripe isn't about Biden here. It's about your behavior, and the behavior of everyone on this board who was singing a much different tune about a woman's claims of sexual assault when it was about a guy they did not like.
Would you care for me to dig up posts you and everyone else were making while the Kavanaugh fiasco was going down?
It would be another prime example of the one-sided hypocrisy going on around here, and might actually be a little enlightening for you to read.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Survivor advocates say Republicans are mischaracterizing the response to the Kavanaugh allegations, arguing that the effort was always to ensure that Blasey Ford’s accusations were fully investigated by the FBI before his Senate confirmation vote.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
But my gripe isn't about Biden here. It's about your behavior, and the behavior of everyone on this board who was singing a much different tune about a woman's claims of sexual assault when it was about a guy they did not like.
Would you care for me to dig up posts you and everyone else were making while the Kavanaugh fiasco was going down?
It would be another prime example of the one-sided hypocrisy going on around here, and might actually be a little enlightening for you to read.
“The idea that Democrats just reflexively believed Christine Blasey Ford is a completely revisionist version of events,” said Robyn Swirling, founder of Works In Progress, which aims to reduce sexual violence in the workplace. “Democrats called for an FBI investigation, which was obstructed and never thoroughly conducted. All allegations -- whether against a Democrat or a Republican -- should be treated by Democrats and Republicans alike as equally serious matters. Survivors are not political pawns, and shouldn't be used as such to score political points or pursue electoral agendas.”
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/495757-democrats-accused-of-doub
le-standard-on-biden-kavanaugh
As Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh prepares for his second year on the Supreme Court, new reporting has detailed how the limits ordered by the White House and Senate Republicans last year constrained the FBI investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct.
www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-09-16/fbi-investigation-brett-kava
naugh-confirmation
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:Survivor advocates say Republicans are mischaracterizing the response to the Kavanaugh allegations, arguing that the effort was always to ensure that Blasey Ford’s accusations were fully investigated by the FBI before his Senate confirmation vote.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
But my gripe isn't about Biden here. It's about your behavior, and the behavior of everyone on this board who was singing a much different tune about a woman's claims of sexual assault when it was about a guy they did not like.
Would you care for me to dig up posts you and everyone else were making while the Kavanaugh fiasco was going down?
It would be another prime example of the one-sided hypocrisy going on around here, and might actually be a little enlightening for you to read.
“The idea that Democrats just reflexively believed Christine Blasey Ford is a completely revisionist version of events,” said Robyn Swirling, founder of Works In Progress, which aims to reduce sexual violence in the workplace. “Democrats called for an FBI investigation, which was obstructed and never thoroughly conducted. All allegations -- whether against a Democrat or a Republican -- should be treated by Democrats and Republicans alike as equally serious matters. Survivors are not political pawns, and shouldn't be used as such to score political points or pursue electoral agendas.”
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/495757-democrats-accused-of-doub
le-standard-on-biden-kavanaugh
As Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh prepares for his second year on the Supreme Court, new reporting has detailed how the limits ordered by the White House and Senate Republicans last year constrained the FBI investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct.
www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-09-16/fbi-investigation-brett-kava
naugh-confirmation
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Nothing you just posted here changes anything.
Your behavior, and that of Democrats in general is hypocritical. You and other Democrats can deny the double standards you live by all day long, but it doesn't change the fact that they are the only standards you have.
And, once again, I'll follow this up with I support Biden on this.
I felt the need to state that again since you didn't quote that part of what I wrote.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:"I'll follow this up with I support Biden on this." - Your support is worthless.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Nothing you just posted here changes anything.
Your behavior, and that of Democrats in general is hypocritical. You and other Democrats can deny the double standards you live by all day long, but it doesn't change the fact that they are the only standards you have.
And, once again, I'll follow this up with I support Biden on this.
I felt the need to state that again since you didn't quote that part of what I wrote.
"Your behavior, and that of Democrats in general is hypocritical." -
Your accusations of hypocrisy are hollow, empty, unsupported. Worthless.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Trump parallel to Slobodan Milosevic, the Serb leader who in died in 2006 in the Hague while on trial for genocide and crimes against humanity committed in the 1990s in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo:
Trump’s Nationalism Advances on a Predictable Trajectory to Violence. His Supporters Will Kill When They’re Told To.
Ever since Donald Trump declared his presidential candidacy and rank racism in 2015, those of us who’d witnessed the nationalist undoing in the Balkans at the end of the last millennium have found the subsequent rise of Trumpism frighteningly familiar. We quickly recognized a host of nationalist pathologies: the tactical importance of bigotry, since enemies must be ceaselessly identified and hated; a profusion of lies, conspiracy theories, and plain nonsense, since reality is controlled by the enemies (fake news, deep state, etc.) and must be perpetually undone and redone; the coalescing of a diverse political field around a leader and a stupidly conceptual goal (Greatness! Capitalism! Freedom!); loyalist cabals who are vetted, validated, and eliminated by the leader’s whims; and rampant venality combined with a criminal reconfiguration of the economy.
But the most important and troubling symptom is the open and ceaseless commitment to conflict meant to culminate in transformative, cathartic violence; this marks the beginning of collective self-actualization. As we bear witness to armed white American militias storming or protesting outside government institutions, it is clear that the chaos and tragedy of Covid-19 are being used by Trump and the GOP to enhance the conflict and accelerate the birth of a new, greater America. At the heart of every nationalist mythology is some kind of a rebirth, usually bloody and requiring sacrifices, preferably of the weak and the doubtful.
Because those who experienced the bloody undoing of Yugoslavia have already seen the havoc nationalism wreaked in their own lives and countries, it is hard not to worry about its symptoms in America.
The conflictual essence of Trumpism was made fully evident very early, in the course of the Republican primaries in 2016. While all the other GOP candidates tried to validate their garden-variety bigotry by importing fancy reactionary ideas and referring gratuitously to the Bible, the Framers, or some historical figure or another, the only thing Trump consistently offered was his pathological narcissism (exactly matching the popular belief in American exceptionalism) and his penchant for conflict and aggression. He promised, implicitly and explicitly, revenge and punishment for those who wronged white America.
For many of my fellow ex-Yugoslavs, it was instantly clear that once the GOP and Trump committed to conflict, they could never afford to quit, for that would constitute a tactical error leading to an irreversible defeat. They now have no choice but to follow their trajectory to its logical extreme.
When armed Trumpists pretend to be a happening of good people who demand the end of the lockdown, anti-fascist ex-Yugoslavs don’t see an American version of murderous Serbian paramilitaries. What we see with heart-clenching clarity is that the familiar nationalist strategy of perpetually inciting conflict is advancing along a predictable trajectory.
What is even more frightening is the hankering across the political range for a magical national correction, the indulging of a persistent fantasy that some essential American quality (decency, reasonableness, checks and balances, etc.) will finally kick in and halt the Trumpist madness, thus allowing the country to snap out of its nightmare and revert to its good old national essence. That was never going to happen.
What the actual resolution might look like, I fear to envision, but I know it will not resemble anything Americans can remember or dare to imagine.
More at https://theintercept.com/2020/05/02/trump-nationalism-violence-yugosla
via/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Fi
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:"I'll follow this up with I support Biden on this." - Your support is worthless.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Nothing you just posted here changes anything.
Your behavior, and that of Democrats in general is hypocritical. You and other Democrats can deny the double standards you live by all day long, but it doesn't change the fact that they are the only standards you have.
And, once again, I'll follow this up with I support Biden on this.
I felt the need to state that again since you didn't quote that part of what I wrote.
Maybe it is.
But I'm not a hypocrite. You are.
Quote:
"Your behavior, and that of Democrats in general is hypocritical." -
Your accusations of hypocrisy are hollow, empty, unsupported. Worthless.
No there's plenty of it on display in the media, in politics and by you, yourself.
I do agree on that last part though. You are worthless.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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“Capital In The 21st Century”: Finally, A Movie That Tells The Story Of How We Got Into This Mess
https://theintercept.com/2020/05/05/capital-21st-century-documentary-t
homas-piketty/
“The way the elite stays in power, and passes on their privilege to the next generation, is by shaping the way that we think.”
“Capital in the 21st Century” understands that the daily facts about capitalism seem boring, irrelevant, etc., to most people because they’re not part of a story. They’re like baseball scores when you don’t know anything about baseball’s rules or teams or history. But understanding the story of capitalism is like understanding all of that about baseball, plus having a team to root for, and realizing that, if your team loses, you’re going to die. This makes the business section much more exciting.
While no one remembers this, even the Communist Manifesto in 1848 acknowledged the accomplishments of the business class. “The bourgeoisie,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote, “has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals.”
The problem was that in the pursuit of profit, capitalism also generated spectacular new forms of exploitation. “Capital in the 21st Century” spends time on examples such as the massive expansion of slavery, the murderous rampages of European colonialism, and “master and servant” laws in the United Kingdom that made it illegal for workers to quit. The movie’s key point about this time is that unbound capitalism made countries richer overall, but there was nothing inherent in it that improved life for regular people. In fact, it was in many ways worse for them than when they were governed by lords and ladies.
Piketty explains that by 1914 in Paris, the top 1 percent owned 70 percent of all wealth, and two-thirds of the population died with nothing. In the face of this raw brutality, all kinds of alternatives, from communism to socialism to Georgism, gained adherents across Europe. Capitalists were petrified. What could they do that wouldn’t require them to share any wealth or power?
“You have this rise in nationalism and competition between European countries,” Piketty says. “Nationalism is often used by elites to make people forget class conflict and instead focus on national identity.”
It can be debated the degree to which berserk nationalism was consciously stoked by Europe’s rulers to distract from their failures. If present-day politics are anything to go by, they likely knew exactly what they were doing. A recent GOP memo for Republican officeholders on how to deal with their coronavirus faceplant told them “don’t defend Trump” — since he’s indefensible — but “attack China.”
In any case, when World War I came, Europe’s leaders thought it was exactly what they needed. A British politician declared England was “at war quite irrespective of party or class.” Germany’s Kaiser was just as happy, proclaiming, “I see no parties anymore, I see only Germans.”
The war was such a catastrophe that it generated exactly what Europe’s elites feared most: a communist revolution. Germany’s cunning plan to send Vladimir Lenin back to Russia in 1917 was history’s greatest own goal, leading directly to the Soviet army occupying Berlin 28 years later.
As “Capital” explains, it was only with the worldwide slaughter of the Second World War that capitalism was willing to make some changes. First of all, the upper class had literally blown up much of its capital, and its power was at a low ebb. Moreover, as Stanford political science professor Francis Fukuyama points out, they were genuinely concerned about losing everything: “The existence of the communist alternative scared the capitalist world into thinking if it didn’t at least address some of the basic inequality issues that they would lose the battle of ideas. … Unless the state tried to do something about jobs, and do enough redistribution to keep people from starving, you wouldn’t have basic social stability.”
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What the Health Care Debate Still Gets Wrong
A decade ago, Harvard surgeon Atul Gawande helped popularize the idea that U.S. health care spending is high because we use too much medicine. He was wrong: it’s the prices, and who pays them.
McAllen, Texas, a poor city at the southern tip of the state, has some of the highest health care spending in the nation.
What was the root of McAllen’s high costs—and, by extension, of all of ours? Gawande quickly cracks the case. “There is overutilization here,” a general surgeon tells him during the trip, “pure and simple.” Patients went to the doctor too often, had too many operations, spent too much time at the hospital, and received too many days of home care. “The primary cause of McAllen’s extreme costs,” Gawande concludes, “was, very simply, the across-the-board overuse of medicine.”
More important than confronting the question of who paid for health care, Gawande argued, was reforming a reckless and inefficient entrepreneurial ethos on the part of medical providers that led to excessive provision of services. His observations squared with decades of research from a group of scholars at Dartmouth. In a slew of influential studies, these investigators demonstrated that health care use (and spending) varies greatly from region to region, and that the people in places that get the most care did not have better health as a consequence. McAllen, Gawande argued, was a microcosm of a whole nation awash in excess health care.
But it turns out that the real cost problem, all along, has been the other half of the spending equation: not the quantity of medical services rendered, but the prices paid by insurers for each unit of care provided. This simple but crucial insight is most frequently attributed to the legendary health economist Uwe Reinhardt, who died two years ago. Reinhardt’s final book, Priced Out: The Economic and Ethical Costs of American Health Care, was published in May, and it provides a cogent synthesis of all the reasons why, as he and his colleagues put it in a celebrated paper in Health Affairs from 2003, “it’s the prices, stupid”—not the quantity of care we receive—that drives our high health spending.
Priced Out provides a useful guide to the U.S. health care system as we head into the 2020 presidential election, and the “price hypothesis” that Reinhardt has injected into health policy conversations has one big advantage over the old “quantity assumption”—namely that it is, roughly speaking, true. And yet it, too, may send us down a garden path again if we are not vigilant to keep the whole system in view. For as Reinhardt’s larger body of work makes clear, we cannot separate high prices from the structural failings of our dysfunctional and regressive health care financing system. Indeed, until we transform who pays for health care, cost containment—and more importantly, health care justice—will remain a distant mirage.
Reinhardt never shied away from issues of ethics or distributive justice in his work, a fact that may owe something to his early life. Born in the German town of Osnabrück around two years before Hitler’s blitzkrieg on Poland, he spent his childhood in a postwar European landscape of “utter misery and desolation,” as the historian Tony Judt once described it. He grew up in an office-sized “tool shed” within a factory that he shared with his mother, grandmother, and four siblings, he recalled in a 1992 interview with the Journal of the American Medical Association. They lacked running water, and stole fuel and food when they needed it. Yet amidst this poverty, there was one thing that his family never went without. “When we needed medical care,” he said in the interview, “we got it at the local hospital, no questions asked. When you were sick, society was there for you.” At that time Germany already had a nearly universal health care system.
More at https://bostonreview.net/science-nature/adam-gaffney-what-health-care-
debate-still-gets-wrong
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190page
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Twenty-five million workers or more could lose employer-based health insurance due to COVID-19-related unemployment.
How the COVID-19 Recession Could Affect Health Insurance Coverage
www.rwjf.org/en/library/research/2020/05/how-the-covid-19-recession-co
uld-affect-health-insurance-coverage.html
Does the GOP have an answer? No. Do the Democrats? Yes. So does the GOP: the GOP Senators will block the Democrats.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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