A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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19 times Trump called jobs numbers ‘fake’
“Don’t believe these phony numbers,” Trump told supporters in February 2016. “The number is probably 28, 29, as high as 35 [percent]. In fact, I even heard recently 42 percent.”
www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/10/19-times-trump-called-t
he-jobs-numbers-fake-before-they-made-him-look-good/
April’s unemployment rate is 14.7 percent, which is excellent compared to 42 percent Trump imagined Obams's unemployment rate was.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Remember when President Trump refused to release his tax returns?
Before his election, Citizen Trump said many times that he would release his income tax returns.
www.cnn.com/videos/business/2020/05/11/trump-tax-returns-subpoena-supr
eme-court-orig-vf.cnn
Today the Supreme Court hears Trump's argument to keep his returns a secret. He lost that argument in six previous court cases, appealed the decisions, and can win this time with 5 Republican Justices deciding his case, two of which he appointed for their loyalty to him.
www.foxnews.com/politics/supreme-court-hears-trump-tax-return-cases
Listen live: Supreme Court hears blockbuster battles over Trump financial records
www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-trump-financial-records-congress-ne
w-york-investigators-oral-arguments-2020-05-12/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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T 
Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals. 
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House passes $3 trillion coronavirus aid bill opposed by Trump
The No. 2 Republican, Steve Scalise, urged the House to defeat the huge bill, calling it a “socialist giveaway” and blaming China, where the coronavirus emerged late last year, for the suffering brought by the pandemic.
www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-congress/house-passe
s-3-trillion-coronavirus-aid-bill-opposed-by-trump-idUSKBN22R1G9
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Republican Foreign Policy
As early as 1965, on his first visit to Vietnam, Kissinger had concluded that the war there was a lost cause, and Nixon believed the same. Yet they conspired to prolong it even before reaching the White House. During the Paris peace talks, in 1968, Kissinger, who was there as a consultant, passed information about the negotiations to the Nixon campaign, which started to fear that Johnson’s progress toward a settlement would bring the Democrats electoral victory. Nixon’s campaign then used this information in private talks with the South Vietnamese to dissuade them from taking part in the talks.
Having won the election promising “an honorable end to the war,” Nixon wanted to appear to be in pursuit of peace while still inflicting enough damage on North Vietnam to achieve concessions. In March, 1969, he and Kissinger began a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia, which was a staging ground for the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese. In four years, the U.S. military dropped more bombs on Cambodia than it had in the entire Pacific theatre during the Second World War. The campaign killed an estimated hundred thousand civilians, hastened the rise of Pol Pot, and irrevocably ravaged large tracts of countryside. It also fell so far short of its strategic aims that more than one historian has wondered whether Kissinger—who personally tweaked the schedules of the bombing runs and the allocation of planes—had some other motive. But, as Grandin writes, “he had built his own perpetual motion machine; the purpose of American power was to create an awareness of American purpose.”
But Kissinger’s argument rested on a disastrous miscalculation of America’s capacities. How would the credibility of the United States be enhanced by dragging out a war against a fourth-rate power? How, to paraphrase John Kerry, do you ask thirty thousand American soldiers to die so that the thirty thousand soldiers before them will not have died in vain?
As it was, each successive American initiative eroded credibility rather than reinforced it. Not even the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam, in 1972, the largest of the war, could convince the North Vietnamese to renegotiate. The young Foreign Service officer John Negroponte offered a wry postmortem, which Kissinger never forgave: “We bombed the North Vietnamese into accepting our concessions.”
Gewen defends Kissinger’s idea that every political event anywhere in the world demands a response somewhere else, a view that, in practice, made every pawn appear to be a threatened queen. When Nixon and Kissinger backed the Pakistani President Yahya Khan’s genocidal campaign against East Pakistan, in 1971, they did so to show the Soviets that America was “tough.” Four years later, Kissinger’s sign-off on the Indonesian President Suharto’s genocidal campaign in East Timor was meant to signal that America would unquestioningly reward those who had decimated Communists within their reach. In retrospect, the notion that everything America did would be duly registered and responded to by its opponents and friends seems like an expression of geopolitical narcissism. At the time, the thirty-three-year-old senator Joe Biden accused Kissinger, at a Senate hearing, of trying to promulgate “a global Monroe Doctrine.”
When Chile elected the socialist Salvador Allende as President, in 1970, Nixon and Kissinger resolved to remove him. The fact that Allende was popularly elected made him only more dangerous in their eyes. “I don’t see why we have to stand by and watch a country go Communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people,” Kissinger observed. Gewen thinks this quip captures the tragic dilemma of Kissinger’s relationship to democracy and power. Gewen lists the sins and foibles of Allende—including “pernicious” wage increases for workers and indoctrinating the young in the “values of socialist humanism”—but withholds such scrutiny from his successor, the right-wing dictator General Augusto Pinochet, whose power the U.S. helped consolidate, and who, if o
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Trump’s reelection strategy is to blame Obama and Biden
His electoral path has narrowed rapidly since the onset of the pandemic, as the growth-and-prosperity theme of his campaign disintegrated. In private, Mr. Trump has been plainly aggrieved at the loss of his central argument for re-election. “They wiped out my economy!” he has said to aides, according to people briefed on the remarks.
It is unclear whether he has been referring to China, where the virus originated, or health experts who have urged widespread lockdowns, but his frustration and determination to place blame elsewhere have been emphatic.
Ken Goldstein, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco, said that Mr. Trump and his campaign were going on the offensive in nasty ways in an attempt to shift the attention of the public away from him and onto other targets, and ultimately onto Mr. Biden.
“If this election is about Trump, he probably loses,” Mr. Goldstein said. “Trump’s only hope is to make the election about Biden.”
A number of Republican operatives believe Mr. Biden’s advantage is soft and that his penchant for gaffes will at least make the race more competitive than it would otherwise be amid a pandemic and an incipient economic depression.
“We have a very good story to tell on him and we’ve got to do it,” said Corry Bliss, a Republican strategist, of the negative narrative his party aims to generate about Mr. Biden.
Still, Mr. Trump’s behavior has rattled even some supportive Republicans, who believe it is likely to backfire and possibly cost them the Senate as well as the White House. It has also further alarmed Democrats, who have long warned that Mr. Trump would be willing to use every lever of presidential power and deploy even the most unscrupulous campaign tactics to capture a second term.
In many respects Mr. Trump’s approach to the 2020 election looks like a crude approximation of the way he waged the 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton, attacking her personal ethics, often in false or exaggerated terms; taking Mrs. Clinton’s admitted errors and distorting them with the help of online disinformation merchants; and making wild claims about her physical health and mental capacity for the job. Given that the 2016 campaign — the only one Mr. Trump has ever run — ended in a razor-thin victory for him, it is perhaps not surprising that the president would attempt a kind of sequel in 2020.
Mr. Trump has instruments available to him in 2020 that he did not have as a candidate four years ago — tools like a politically supportive attorney general, a Republican-controlled Senate determined to defend him and a vastly better financed campaign apparatus that has been constructed with the defining purpose of destroying his opponent’s reputation.
His attacks over the last week on Mr. Obama have showcased Mr. Trump’s persistent determination to weaponize those tools to bolster a favorite political narrative, one that distorts the facts about Mr. Flynn, the president’s former national security adviser, in order to spin sinister implications about the previous administration.
But Mr. Trump also appears to genuinely believe many of the conspiratorial claims he makes, people close to him say, and his anger at Mr. Obama is informed less by political strategy than by an unbending — and unsubstantiated — belief that the former president was personally involved in a plot against him.
More at www.nytimes.com/2020/05/15/us/politics/president-trump-coronavirus-pan
demic-response.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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Suppose that the epidemiologists are right, and that premature reopening leads to a second wave of Covid-19 infections. What we’ll need in that case is a second lockdown. But all indications are that Republicans are totally opposed to extending unemployment benefits in order to force employees back to work sooner. Republican also want to decrease the amount paid in unemployment benefits for the same reason.
What Republicans want, instead, is legislation that would protect businesses from liability if their employees get sick.
That is, they want to force Americans to go to work even if it kills them.
https://web.archive.org/save/https://www.businessinsider.com/gop-prepa
res-bill-to-shield-companies-from-coronavirus-liability-2020-5
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Support for QAnon has grown as Trump has consolidated control over the Republican Party
In winning the Oregon GOP primary for the US Senate Tuesday, Jo Rae Perkins became the seventh Republican congressional candidate who openly supports QAnon, a pro-Trump conspiracy theory that maintains the president is secretly fighting “deep state” operatives and Democratic pedophiles.
Perkins highlighted QAnon in her victory speech, pointedly repeating the group’s most used catchphrase before thanking fellow supporters. “Where we go one, we go all,” she said. “I stand with President Trump, I stand with Q and the team. Thank you, Anons, and thank you, patriots. Together, we can save our republic.”
At its heart, QAnon supporters believe that a secretive network of government officials, Democratic politicians, and liberal elites are running an international pedophile ring and conspiring to bring down the president because he’s close to bringing them to justice.
The theory began circulating in October 2017, as Vox’s Jane Coaston explained:
QAnon is a conspiracy theory based around an anonymous online poster known as “Q” — a pseudonym that comes from the Q-level security clearance, the Department of Energy equivalent of “Top Secret.” Beginning on October 28, 2017, Q began posting on the 4chan message board /pol/ about Hillary Clinton’s imminent arrest. Followers of Q became known as QAnon, and they began awaiting “The Storm,” during which all of Trump’s enemies, including Rep. Adam Schiff and others, would be arrested and executed for being murderous child-eating pedophiles.
Celebrities like actress Roseanne Barr and former athlete turned conservative activist Curt Schilling have shown support for the theory, as have right-wing media figures Alex Jones and Sean Hannity.
President Trump has not publicly embraced the conspiracy theory, but he hasn’t been shy about retweeting its supporters. At its core, Q is about supporting Trump’s power over the federal government. And it allows its adherents to create order out of a chaotic administration. Under this conspiracy theory, instead of Trump being incompetent, he becomes beleaguered in his fight against evil, monstrous people. It’s a mass self-soothing exercise.
Trump has of late embarked on a series of attacks on government oversight and operational norms. Over recent weeks, Trump has purged inspectors general he perceives as disloyal, many of whom were simply doing their jobs by investigating the administration’s actions.
To many outside observers, such actions look like authoritarian power grabs. But to Q supporters, these actions are emblematic of the ways the president is fighting the “deep state.” Essentially, everything Trump does easily fits into this conspiracy theory, meaning there’s no need for its adherents to question his actions.
This means that, in many ways, belief in QAnon is the ultimate show of loyalty, something Trump has made clear he values greatly. The president has never been afraid to use the bully pulpit — and Twitter — to call out those whom he perceived to be disloyal Republican lawmakers. Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr, and even occasional close confidant Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) have found themselves on the receiving end of Trump’s wrath.
In highlighting their support for QAnon, then, candidates like Perkins are signaling to the president that he does not need to worry about them raising his ire as Romney so often does. Instead, he can trust them to be allies and to support his governing style, even if it includes brazen power grabs.
More at www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/5/20/21264925/jo-rae-perkins-qano
n-us-senate-oregon
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 confirms US is withdrawing from another major arms treaty, the Open Skies Treaty
"This is insane," tweeted Gen. Michael Hayden.
The Trump administration has already pulled out of an Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and has set out conditions to renew the last remaining nuclear arms pact with Russia -- the NEW Start Treaty -- that experts and analysts say all but guarantee it will not be extended.
The President, and many officials in his administration, are pushing to develop new nuclear weapons, even as they insist they are not starting a new arms race with Russia. At the same time, they have criticized the idea that the United States should be bound by international agreements. But analysts and former officials say discarding another agreement could deepen global instability.
More at www.cnn.com/2020/05/21/politics/us-open-skies-arms-control-treaty/inde
x.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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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Support for QAnon has grown as Trump has consolidated control over the Republican Party
In winning the Oregon GOP primary for the US Senate Tuesday, Jo Rae Perkins became the seventh Republican congressional candidate who openly supports QAnon, a pro-Trump conspiracy theory that maintains the president is secretly fighting “deep state” operatives and Democratic pedophiles.
Perkins highlighted QAnon in her victory speech, pointedly repeating the group’s most used catchphrase before thanking fellow supporters. “Where we go one, we go all,” she said. “I stand with President Trump, I stand with Q and the team. Thank you, Anons, and thank you, patriots. Together, we can save our republic.”
At its heart, QAnon supporters believe that a secretive network of government officials, Democratic politicians, and liberal elites are running an international pedophile ring and conspiring to bring down the president because he’s close to bringing them to justice.
The theory began circulating in October 2017, as Vox’s Jane Coaston explained:
QAnon is a conspiracy theory based around an anonymous online poster known as “Q” — a pseudonym that comes from the Q-level security clearance, the Department of Energy equivalent of “Top Secret.” Beginning on October 28, 2017, Q began posting on the 4chan message board /pol/ about Hillary Clinton’s imminent arrest. Followers of Q became known as QAnon, and they began awaiting “The Storm,” during which all of Trump’s enemies, including Rep. Adam Schiff and others, would be arrested and executed for being murderous child-eating pedophiles.
Celebrities like actress Roseanne Barr and former athlete turned conservative activist Curt Schilling have shown support for the theory, as have right-wing media figures Alex Jones and Sean Hannity.
President Trump has not publicly embraced the conspiracy theory, but he hasn’t been shy about retweeting its supporters. At its core, Q is about supporting Trump’s power over the federal government. And it allows its adherents to create order out of a chaotic administration. Under this conspiracy theory, instead of Trump being incompetent, he becomes beleaguered in his fight against evil, monstrous people. It’s a mass self-soothing exercise.
Trump has of late embarked on a series of attacks on government oversight and operational norms. Over recent weeks, Trump has purged inspectors general he perceives as disloyal, many of whom were simply doing their jobs by investigating the administration’s actions.
To many outside observers, such actions look like authoritarian power grabs. But to Q supporters, these actions are emblematic of the ways the president is fighting the “deep state.” Essentially, everything Trump does easily fits into this conspiracy theory, meaning there’s no need for its adherents to question his actions.
This means that, in many ways, belief in QAnon is the ultimate show of loyalty, something Trump has made clear he values greatly. The president has never been afraid to use the bully pulpit — and Twitter — to call out those whom he perceived to be disloyal Republican lawmakers. Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr, and even occasional close confidant Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) have found themselves on the receiving end of Trump’s wrath.
In highlighting their support for QAnon, then, candidates like Perkins are signaling to the president that he does not need to worry about them raising his ire as Romney so often does. Instead, he can trust them to be allies and to support his governing style, even if it includes brazen power grabs.
More at www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/5/20/21264925/jo-rae-perkins-qano
n-us-senate-oregon
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
lol
Let's keep going on pretending that Democrat Liberal Elites aren't a bunch of dirty kid fuckers and call it a conspiracy theory.
Here's hoping I'm right abou
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