A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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As much as the United States was founded on ideals, it was also established in response to the manifold failings of King George III. The British monarch is, in fact, the defining bad leader of American history. He and the system over which he presided were so dire that they fundamentally shaped our idea of what a leader should and shouldn’t be.
The Declaration of Independence was primarily a denunciation of George III. The crux of the document is a section devoted to his wrongs — “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States” — a litany of twenty-seven separate complaints about his rule.
George is condemned for, among other offenses, having refused to approve laws that are “necessary for the public good,” for bullying governors, for blocking reasonable legislative progress, for blocking immigration to the states, for “obstructing the Administration of Justice,” for bending the judiciary to his will, for seeking to make the military “independent of and superior to the Civil Power,” for conspiring “with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution,” “for cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world,” and for having “excited domestic insurrections amongst us.” Any of those grievances sound familiar?
We would need a list of more than twenty-seven complaints if we were to enumerate Trump’s misdeeds, from defrauding US tax authorities to obstructing justice. He has invited our enemies to interfere with our elections to help him win, then sought to do it again. He has misused federal resources, inappropriately elevated his own family members, and enriched his own businesses. He has repeatedly attacked the First and the Fourteenth Amendments. He has had infants thrown in cages and denied relief to Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria at the cost of thousands of lives. He has gutted environmental protections and attacked alliances that the US spent decades building and maintaining. And now he has mismanaged the worst public health crisis in a hundred years, overseen the greatest economic crisis since the Depression, and attempted to use the US military to crush legitimate protests on the streets of the capital.
Lately, in the space of just a few days, he was revealed to have endorsed concentration camps in China and to have again sought the assistance of a foreign adversary in winning a US election, was quoted as calling for the deaths and imprisonment of US journalists, defended the slave power traitors of the Confederacy, admitted that he suppressed testing during the pandemic because true data about the rate of infections would harm him politically, sought to fire more truthtellers in the administration and had his attorney general remove an official in charge of investigations into him and his supporters. He was reportedly briefed about a Russian scheme to place bounties on American and allied troops in Afghanistan, and not only did nothing about it but continued to act as an advocate for Putin. And so it goes on . . .
www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/07/03/the-most-ignorant-and-unfit-what-made
-americas-worst-ever-leader/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Russian democracy is a farce. Putin and Trump want the same fate for America
Opinion by Garry Kasparov
"Garry Kasparov is the chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative. The views expressed in this commentary are his own."
Updated 1:10 AM ET, Sun July 5, 2020
The Kremlin bullied and bribed Russians to the ballot box again on Wednesday, the latest episode of what long ago became a painful mockery of democracy. Democracy means choices, and there has been no real choice in Russia for many years. All roads, all votes, lead to Vladimir Putin.
The plebiscite was on changing the Russian constitution to, among other things, allow Putin to stay in power until 2036. Of course, "allow" is a silly word to use when Putin was always going to rule the Kremlin until he's carried out, no matter what any piece of paper says. Even this formality was a foregone conclusion; the new constitution was available for purchase on newsstands and bookstores for days ahead of the vote. Early analysis from statistician Sergey Shpilkin shows an estimated 22 million fake votes out of a reported 74 million cast. www.newsweek.com/ballot-fraud-gave-russias-putin-22-million-extra-vote
s-says-expert-1515314
It's fair to ask, why bother with the pretense of democracy? Dictatorships are obsessed with the superficial trappings of legitimacy and democracy, both as distraction and to sully the meaning of these terms. And after decades of liquidating the opposition and crushing all dissent, a despot might even enjoy thinking that he's as popular as the worthless polls, elections and state media say he is.
These sham votes aren't only to provide Putin with cover in Russia, where civil society barely exists, but to give foreign leaders the pretext of treating Putin like an equal instead of confronting him like the autocrat he is. It also allows foreign media to continue calling him "president," putting him on par with the leaders of free countries. As with every tyrant before him, Putin thrives partly due to the cowardice of those who could deter him but choose not to.
These aren't just semantics. It would be awkward, even outrageous, to make deals with dictator Putin, to trust him, or to speak fondly of him the way President Donald Trump does. The title feeds the hypocrisy, and so the myth of Putin the elected, Putin the popular, must be perpetuated.
This is a choice to be made by every foreign official and every media organization. They could make sure to mention in their coverage that Russian elections are neither free nor fair. They could strip Putin of the democratic title of "president," of which he is unworthy -- and they should.
With Russia's disastrous coronavirus response exposing the myth of Putin's competence and weakening the economy further, it's no surprise that he's looking abroad again. In an interview for a recently-aired documentary, Putin talked about "historical Russian territories" and condemned former Soviet republics, saying they should have "left with what they arrived, rather than taking with them gifts from the Russian people" when the USSR broke up in 1991. Considering that Putin has already invaded two former Soviet republics, Georgia and Ukraine, this must be taken as a clear threat.
Putin's apparent desire for fresh conquest brings us to his most successful operation yet, the ascension of Donald Trump as US president. The degree of influence Russian operations had on the 2016 election can never be known for sure, but whatever Putin invested, it's paid off a thousandfold. Even aside from Trump's bizarre loyalty to Putin personally, America's role as a global champion of democratic values has evaporated in a cloud of quid pro quos thanks to a president who is more likely to criticize traditional American allies than dictators like Putin and Xi Jinping.
For Putin to cross another border, he needs to know he won't face any serious opposition from the US, or from a NATO that is toothless wit
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lol
That one was SOOOOOOOO good you had to post it all over the place, huh?
Nobody cares what your American-Hating Marxists have to say Second.
If you hate America so much, it's about time you get out.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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T 
Stupid people don't know they're stupid, and they certainly don't realize how obvious it is to others. 
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The anti-slavery symbolism of the Statue of Liberty is an overlooked part of the monument’s history.
The real saga of the Statue of Liberty — the symbolic face of America around the world, and the backdrop of New York’s dazzling Fourth of July fireworks show — is an obscure piece of U.S. history. It had nothing to do with immigration. The telltale clue is the chain under Lady Liberty’s feet: she is stomping on it. “In the early sketches, she was also holding chains in her hand,” Edward Berenson, a professor of history at New York University, told me last week. The shackles were later replaced with a tablet noting the date of America’s independence. But the shattered chain under her feet remained.
The statue was the brainchild of Edouard de Laboulaye, a prominent French expert on the U.S. Constitution who also headed the French Anti-Slavery Society. After the Civil War, in 1865, he wanted to commemorate the end of slavery in the U.S., enshrined in the new Thirteenth Amendment, which, in theory, reaffirmed the ideals of freedom — this time for all people — first embodied in the Declaration of Independence. The now famous line—“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” from a poem by Emma Lazarus — wasn’t added until 1903, Berenson noted. The poem had been donated as part of a literary auction to raise funds for the statue’s pedestal. France donated the statue; the Americans had to raise the funds to pay for its pedestal. Long after Lazarus’s death, a friend lobbied to have the poem engraved on a plaque and added to the base. It has since associated the Statue of Liberty with a meaning that Laboulaye never intended.
One has to wonder what Laboulaye would think of America today, amid one of the country’s gravest periods of racial turmoil since the Civil War. Last month, a poll by Ipsos found that an overwhelming majority of people in fourteen countries, on six continents, support the protests that erupted across the United States after the murder of George Floyd. Russia, the fifteenth country in the survey, was the only place where a minority — about a third — backed the demonstrators.
On the eve of America’s anniversary — our two hundred and forty-fourth — much of the world believes that the country is racist, battered and bruised. “Europe has long been suspicious — even jealous — of the way America has been able to pursue national wealth and power despite its deep social inequities,” Robin Niblett, the director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, also known as Chatham House, in London, told me. “When you take the Acela and pass through the poorest areas of Baltimore, you can’t believe you’re looking at part of the United States. There’s always been this sense of an underlying flaw in the U.S. system that it was getting away with — that somehow America was keeping just one step ahead of the grim reaper.”
The flaw, he said, is reflected in the American obsession with the stock market as the barometer of national health — economically, politically, socially. The reaction to Floyd’s murder exposed the deep injustices in the American economic model, as well as in the police and judicial systems, Niblett said. Europeans, he added, are no longer so envious.
America’s standing worldwide has sunk before, although usually over foreign-policy decisions, such as the invasion of Iraq, in 2003. The mood globally feels different now, Richard Burkholder, who was the director of Gallup’s international polling for decades, told me. Criticism is now focussed on American practices at home. “The United States was once a beacon,” he said. “I don’t see people looking up to us as they did before.” Fintan O’Toole, a columnist for the Irish Times, was blunter. “Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and conte
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Russian democracy is a farce. Putin and Trump want the same fate for America
Opinion by Garry Kasparov
"Garry Kasparov is the chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative. The views expressed in this commentary are his own."
Updated 1:10 AM ET, Sun July 5, 2020
The Kremlin bullied and bribed Russians to the ballot box again on Wednesday, the latest episode of what long ago became a painful mockery of democracy. Democracy means choices, and there has been no real choice in Russia for many years. All roads, all votes, lead to Vladimir Putin.
The plebiscite was on changing the Russian constitution to, among other things, allow Putin to stay in power until 2036. Of course, "allow" is a silly word to use when Putin was always going to rule the Kremlin until he's carried out, no matter what any piece of paper says. Even this formality was a foregone conclusion; the new constitution was available for purchase on newsstands and bookstores for days ahead of the vote. Early analysis from statistician Sergey Shpilkin shows an estimated 22 million fake votes out of a reported 74 million cast. www.newsweek.com/ballot-fraud-gave-russias-putin-22-million-extra-vote
s-says-expert-1515314
It's fair to ask, why bother with the pretense of democracy? Dictatorships are obsessed with the superficial trappings of legitimacy and democracy, both as distraction and to sully the meaning of these terms. And after decades of liquidating the opposition and crushing all dissent, a despot might even enjoy thinking that he's as popular as the worthless polls, elections and state media say he is.
These sham votes aren't only to provide Putin with cover in Russia, where civil society barely exists, but to give foreign leaders the pretext of treating Putin like an equal instead of confronting him like the autocrat he is. It also allows foreign media to continue calling him "president," putting him on par with the leaders of free countries. As with every tyrant before him, Putin thrives partly due to the cowardice of those who could deter him but choose not to.
These aren't just semantics. It would be awkward, even outrageous, to make deals with dictator Putin, to trust him, or to speak fondly of him the way President Donald Trump does. The title feeds the hypocrisy, and so the myth of Putin the elected, Putin the popular, must be perpetuated.
This is a choice to be made by every foreign official and every media organization. They could make sure to mention in their coverage that Russian elections are neither free nor fair. They could strip Putin of the democratic title of "president," of which he is unworthy -- and they should.
With Russia's disastrous coronavirus response exposing the myth of Putin's competence and weakening the economy further, it's no surprise that he's looking abroad again. In an interview for a recently-aired documentary, Putin talked about "historical Russian territories" and condemned former Soviet republics, saying they should have "left with what they arrived, rather than taking with them gifts from the Russian people" when the USSR broke up in 1991. Considering that Putin has already invaded two former Soviet republics, Georgia and Ukraine, this must be taken as a clear threat.
Putin's apparent desire for fresh conquest brings us to his most successful operation yet, the ascension of Donald Trump as US president. The degree of influence Russian operations had on the 2016 election can never be known for sure, but whatever Putin invested, it's paid off a thousandfold. Even aside from Trump's bizarre loyalty to Putin personally, America's role as a global champion of democratic values has evaporated in a cloud of quid pro quos thanks to a president who is more likely to criticize traditional American allies than dictators like Putin and Xi Jinping.
For Putin to cross another border, he needs to know he won't face any serious opposition from theNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The anti-slavery symbolism of the Statue of Liberty is an overlooked part of the monument’s history.
The real saga of the Statue of Liberty — the symbolic face of America around the world, and the backdrop of New York’s dazzling Fourth of July fireworks show — is an obscure piece of U.S. history. It had nothing to do with immigration. The telltale clue is the chain under Lady Liberty’s feet: she is stomping on it. “In the early sketches, she was also holding chains in her hand,” Edward Berenson, a professor of history at New York University, told me last week. The shackles were later replaced with a tablet noting the date of America’s independence. But the shattered chain under her feet remained.
The statue was the brainchild of Edouard de Laboulaye, a prominent French expert on the U.S. Constitution who also headed the French Anti-Slavery Society. After the Civil War, in 1865, he wanted to commemorate the end of slavery in the U.S., enshrined in the new Thirteenth Amendment, which, in theory, reaffirmed the ideals of freedom — this time for all people — first embodied in the Declaration of Independence. The now famous line—“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” from a poem by Emma Lazarus — wasn’t added until 1903, Berenson noted. The poem had been donated as part of a literary auction to raise funds for the statue’s pedestal. France donated the statue; the Americans had to raise the funds to pay for its pedestal. Long after Lazarus’s death, a friend lobbied to have the poem engraved on a plaque and added to the base. It has since associated the Statue of Liberty with a meaning that Laboulaye never intended.
One has to wonder what Laboulaye would think of America today, amid one of the country’s gravest periods of racial turmoil since the Civil War. Last month, a poll by Ipsos found that an overwhelming majority of people in fourteen countries, on six continents, support the protests that erupted across the United States after the murder of George Floyd. Russia, the fifteenth country in the survey, was the only place where a minority — about a third — backed the demonstrators.
On the eve of America’s anniversary — our two hundred and forty-fourth — much of the world believes that the country is racist, battered and bruised. “Europe has long been suspicious — even jealous — of the way America has been able to pursue national wealth and power despite its deep social inequities,” Robin Niblett, the director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, also known as Chatham House, in London, told me. “When you take the Acela and pass through the poorest areas of Baltimore, you can’t believe you’re looking at part of the United States. There’s always been this sense of an underlying flaw in the U.S. system that it was getting away with — that somehow America was keeping just one step ahead of the grim reaper.”
The flaw, he said, is reflected in the American obsession with the stock market as the barometer of national health — economically, politically, socially. The reaction to Floyd’s murder exposed the deep injustices in the American economic model, as well as in the police and judicial systems, Niblett said. Europeans, he added, are no longer so envious.
America’s standing worldwide has sunk before, although usually over foreign-policy decisions, such as the invasion of Iraq, in 2003. The mood globally feels different now, Richard Burkholder, who was the director of Gallup’s international polling for decades, told me. Criticism is now focussed on American practices at home. “The United States was once a beacon,” he said. “I don’t see people looking up to us as they did before.” Fintan O’Toole, a columnist for the Irish Times, was blunter. “Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love aNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
National Review Is Trying to Rewrite its Own Racist History
Black Americans’ drift away from the GOP began long before the Civil Rights Act. A majority of Black voters went for virulent racist Woodrow Wilson in 1912, attracted by his progressive economic platform, the first time since winning the right to vote that Black voters had cast it for a Democrat for president. That trend continued over the next several decades. In 1948, Harry Truman insisted on including a strong civil rights plank in the party’s platform. Southerners walked out of the Democratic National Convention in protest and ran Strom Thurmond as their “Dixiecrat” nominee.
Voters, even white ones in the South, reacted to Thurmond with a yawn. He won 2.4 percent of the vote, just over a million, which was roughly what the Populist Party’s candidate had won in the 1890s. Truman won Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas and the rest of the South and border states other than the four most hardcore: South Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. The Dixiecrat revolt was crushed.
It was clear that the South couldn’t win the fight alone, and for that, needed conservative allies in the North. The problem was that the rest of the country, Northern Republican conservatives included, wanted nothing to do with the explicit, raw racism on display in the South, preferring the more subtle kind that is more familiar today.
But those Republicans did want something else: an end to the New Deal. In order to forge the alliance between the racist Democrats in the South, then, and the business wing of the Republicans in the North, they had to fuse two, unlinked political movements — the drive for segregation and the rollback of the New Deal. That required the South to go along with attacking programs that were extremely popular with the people of the South, and for Northern Republicans to get behind segregation and the preservation of the white Southern way of life.
Getting each to accept the other was not inevitable, nor was it easy. That’s where the National Review comes in.
The move was made by linking the New Deal to a big, overreaching government that, yes, had electrified the country, built Social Security, dug the country out of the Depression, and so on, but also wanted to forcibly integrate society and ensure the franchise for Black voters. Buckley was primarily against all the former insults upon the Constitution, and Southern segregationists were primarily against the latter. Buckley argued to Southerners that their defense of Jim Crow through the rhetoric of states’ rights was too often “opportunistic” rather than principled — inarguably true — and that if they didn’t embrace a broader ideology of limited government, they wouldn’t find the allies they needed to succeed.
With Southerners willing to break from the New Deal, the Northern Republican elites were open to some level of compromise on segregation that would allow white supremacy to continue without party leaders needing to endorse white supremacy. They satisfied their own consciences by pretending that their new allies weren’t racist; rather, they simply deeply believed in the principle of local democracy and states rights. That game of pretend is still going on in the National Review today.
The magazine was founded in 1955 as a project to undermine the New Deal, with the famous motto, “It stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” It invested extraordinary amounts of time and resources into building an intellectual edifice for segregation that could be bandied about in polite society.
More at https://theintercept.com/2020/07/05/national-review-william-buckley-ra
cism/
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:Preet Bharara: Do you see any echoes of that Russian strategy of attacking the very concept of truth going on in the United States?
Originally posted by captaincrunch:
Also good:
https://cafe.com/stay-tuned/stay-tuned-putin-pawns-and-propaganda-with
-garry-kasparov/
Garry Kasparov: Oh, absolutely. So, it seems to me that now they already succeeded in spreading doubts among American public. It’s more about partisanship than about facts. If one sort of American public is not sure whether to believe a special prosecutor, or Russia Today, that’s already a victory for Kremlin. When I say Russia Today, of course, we can cite American media outlets that are simply repeating RT’s stories. But it’s hard now to convince people pointing at facts. That’s a big victory of Putin’s propaganda machine.
Preet Bharara: And is this a clever strategy because at base, many people, they want to believe what they want to believe, and they have an inclination towards a particular belief? And so, if you provide them with something that they hope to be true, they’ll believe it, or is it something different from that?
Garry Kasparov: You’re right. There are natural instincts of people, who are addicted to certain political views, to stick with the heroes. And if you feed them with information that satisfies their interest about the outside world, they can buy it. But while you have partisans on both sides, they have many people in the middle. And I think Putin’s propaganda is most effective for this middle, because it’s about doubts. You don’t want these people to actually look at the facts and take them at a face value. You want them to doubt.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Gross.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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