A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 363 of 725
The world has changed.
All the more reason for Trump to do exactly what he did in 2016.
Any of his aides suggesting otherwise would be the first ones that I'd be investigating for putting out leaks.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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As Mayor of Minneapolis, I Saw How White Liberals Block Change
As the mayor of Minneapolis from 2014 to 2018, as a Minneapolis City Council member from 2006 until 2014 and as a white Democrat, I can say this: White liberals, despite believing we are saying and doing the right things, have resisted the systemic changes our cities have needed for decades. We have mostly settled for illusions of change, like testing pilot programs and funding volunteer opportunities.
These efforts make us feel better about racism, but fundamentally change little for the communities of color whose disadvantages often come from the hoarding of advantage by mostly white neighborhoods.
In Minneapolis, the white liberals I represented as a Council member and mayor were very supportive of summer jobs programs that benefited young people of color. I also saw them fight every proposal to fundamentally change how we provide education to those same young people. They applauded restoring funding for the rental assistance hotline. They also signed petitions and brought lawsuits against sweeping reform to zoning laws that would promote housing affordability and integration.
Nowhere is this dynamic of preserving white comfort at the expense of others more visible than in policing. Whether we know it or not, white liberal people in blue cities implicitly ask police officers to politely stand guard in predominantly white parts of town (where the downside of bad policing is usually inconvenience) and to aggressively patrol the parts of town where people of color live — where the consequences of bad policing are fear, violent abuse, mass incarceration and, far too often, death.
Underlying these requests are the flawed beliefs that aggressive patrolling of Black communities provides a wall of protection around white people and our property.
Police officers understand the dynamic well. We give them lethal tools and a lot of leeway to keep our parts of town safe (a mandate implicitly understood to be “safe from people of color.”) That leeway attracts people who want to misuse it.
Minneapolis historically has some of the worst racial disparities in the country. When I was mayor, despite changes like instituting body cameras and investing more in training, policing outcomes for people of color never improved as much as I hoped. The disparities in arrest rates and use of force, for instance, remained glaringly high.
On Nov. 15, 2015, during my term as mayor, two Minneapolis police officers shot and killed Jamar Clark, an unarmed Black man. An 18-day encampment set up by protesters surrounding the grounds of the Fourth Police Precinct house followed.
But instead of greatly increasing police presence and needlessly arresting people for blocking the street or for having tents on public property, I decided to let the protests and encampment continue while we negotiated with protesters toward a more peaceful conclusion.
Minneapolis police officers, who were worried about the precinct house’s being taken over and burned down (as the Third Precinct station was during last month’s uprising), guarded the building and found themselves frustrated by what they saw as conflicting orders.
“They’ve got fires in the street!”
“They’re out there smoking weed. We can smell it in here.”
“They spray-painted the precinct!”
Acts that they would have arrested people for under normal circumstances. I heard complaints like this at every shift change I attended, shepherded inside by a security vehicle. Before long, I knew that if I didn’t explain to the officers what exactly I was asking of them, we had little hope of safely and effectively saving the city from widespread unrest.
“Look,” I told them. “You know what will happen if I let you go out there and just arrest people. There will be riots.” I told them I wanted them to get home safely at the end of their shifts and to give us time to find a peaceful resolution.
I remember clearly one officer, a middle-aged white man, who is now a sergeant with the department, looking me dead in the eye
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The fragility of America’s political institutions
Masha Gessen: I have spent most of my professional life writing about Russia, where I have constructed all sorts of theories or used other people’s theories about how autocratic rule is conditioned over decades — how it is entrenched in a culture.
And here we are in America, where supposedly this is entirely alien, watching a political party that held a majority in both houses of Congress just falling in line like they are the subjects of a tyrant who rules by terror. That upends all of those theories.
What I write about in the book is that I think there is a difference of political audiences in autocracy and a democracy. In a democracy, a politician’s audience is their voters. They are accountable to their voters. Their voters decide whether they stay in office or lose their jobs. They address their voters whenever they’re speaking publicly, even if it’s ostensibly to someone else.
In an autocracy, a politician’s audience is always the autocrat because it is the autocrat who distributes power and often money. It is the autocrat who decides whether the politician keeps their job or not. And I think somehow, in a matter literally of months, an entire half of our political life changed to the audience of an autocracy. Because it’s Donald Trump who can commit murder by tweet and causes any elected representative probably to lose his or her job.
Ezra Klein: To me, the scariest line in your book is this one: “The first three years of Trump’s presidency have shown that an autocratic attempt in the United States has a credible chance of succeeding.”
The thing that has always been so striking to me about Trump is that he would make his own rejection so easy. He’s crude. He’s not strategic. He alienates potential allies. He’s never had an approval rating above 50 percent. He betrays some of the party’s core principles. He’s not somebody who’s been executing a strategic takeover of either the Republican Party or of American political institutions. So this is the easy case. And even in this case, we’ve proved unable to put strong boundaries on him. He’s taken over a major political party.
To me, the true nightmare scenario here has been not really Trump — I’m not even sure he truly wants a level of responsibility that would come along with being a successful autocrat, even if he were capable of becoming one. Our deep vulnerability is somebody who did want it and who was willing to be just mildly strategic.
More at www.vox.com/2020/7/10/21318625/donald-trump-surviving-autocracy-masha-
gessen-the-ezra-klein-show
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 Chinese Decade follows an American Calamity
It is quite extraordinary that a pandemic originating in a Chinese province, a disease whose initial cover-up briefly seemed likely to deal a grave blow to the Communist regime, has instead given China a geopolitical opportunity unlike any enjoyed by an American rival since at least the Vietnam War.
This opportunity has been a long time building. Across the 2000s and early 2010s, China’s ruling party reaped the benefits of globalization without paying the cost, in political liberalization, that confident Westerners expected the economic opening to impose. This richer-but-not-freer China proved that it was possible for an authoritarian power to make its citizens hardworking capitalists without granting them substantial political freedoms, to buy allies across the developing world, and to establish beachheads of influence — in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, American academia, the NBA, Washington, D.C. — in the power centers of its superpower rival.
Eventually, America responded to all this as you would expect a superpower to react: It elected a China hawk who promised to get tough on Beijing, to bring back jobs lost to China, and to shift foreign policy priorities from the Middle East to the Pacific. But there was one small difficulty: This hawk was no Truman or Reagan, but rather a reality-television mountebank whose real attitude toward China policy was, basically, whatever gets me re-elected works. A mountebank, and also a world-historical incompetent, who was presented with exactly the challenge that his nationalism was supposed to answer — a dangerous disease carried by global trade routes from our leading rival — and managed to turn it into an American calamity instead.
So China has won twice over: First rising with the active collaboration of naïve American centrists, and then consolidating its gains with the de facto collaboration of a feckless American populist. Four months into the coronavirus era, Xi Jinping’s government is throttling Hong Kong, taking tiny bites out of India, saber-rattling with its other neighbors, and perpetrating a near-genocide in its Muslim West. Meanwhile America is rudderless and leaderless, consumed by protests and elite psychodrama and a moral crusade whose zeal seems turned entirely inward, with no time to spare for a rival power’s crimes.
More at www.nytimes.com/2020/07/11/opinion/sunday/china-coronavirus-power.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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Just a thought
Maybe it’s me but I don't understand why people post such lengthy posts. I don't believe for a minute they're read. I’ll post a headline. Then a short paragraph or sentence or two from the article, then the link. I feel if the headline and what follows interests you, you can follow the link for more information. Just an update into current events. These are the type posts that catch my attention.
It’s enough to update what’s being reported on regarding a topic. Enough to give you insights into how others here are spinning or deflecting away from the truth in their posts. No more than that is needed. No more than that will be read.
I and others have checked some of these longer posts only to find they are often manipulate to change the context. They’ve distort the article enough to project a false narrative. Some here go to sites where that is done for them. Then they cut and paste it here.
Now the insulting part. If you read these extended shit posts, you are not too bright.
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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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Just a thought
Maybe it’s me but I don't understand why people post such lengthy posts. I don't believe for a minute they're read. I’ll post a headline. Then a short paragraph or sentence or two from the article, then the link. I feel if the headline and what follows interests you, you can follow the link for more information. Just an update into current events. These are the type posts that catch my attention.
It’s enough to update what’s being reported on regarding a topic. Enough to give you insights into how others here are spinning or deflecting away from the truth in their posts. No more than that is needed. No more than that will be read.
I and others have checked some of these longer posts only to find they are often manipulate to change the context. They’ve distort the article enough to project a false narrative. Some here go to sites where that is done for them. Then they cut and paste it here.
Now the insulting part. If you read these extended shit posts, you are not too bright.
T
Stupid people don't know they're stupid, and they certainly don't realize how obvious it is to others.
LOL
You can't even be bothered to read the articles you post beyond the headlines and the first paragraph. Sometimes I wonder if you read anything past the headline.
If you actually did, you wouldn't post half the shit you do because it doesn't actually say what you think it says.
Also very funny that Ted makes this post in this thread after three lengthy posts by Second.
You're right about that man. I'm far to intelligent to read any of Second's posts. I only attempt to even gloss over them when he quotes me to see if one of these days he actually posts anything relevant to the part of one of my comments that he posts before plagiarizing somebody else's work and passing it off as his own. To this day, not one of his replies to a quote of mine has been relevant.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Poor jack. Because he is a troll he is stuck with having to respond to posts stupidly. I said I post short posts. Not that I don't read for myself the articles I post. Key word being I dummy.
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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White House Goes on the Attack Against Anthony Fauci
Whatever happened to Anthony Fauci? We don’t see much of him anymore. It turns out that President Trump got tired of Fauci’s pessimism about COVID-19 and has mostly sidelined him. In fact, it’s worse than that. When a Washington Post reporter asked about Fauci, the White House dumped their "opposition file" on him:
A White House official released a statement saying that “several White House officials are concerned about the number of times Dr. Fauci has been wrong on things” and included a lengthy list of the scientist’s comments from early in the outbreak. Those included his early doubt that people with no symptoms could play a significant role in spreading the virus — a notion based on earlier outbreaks that the novel coronavirus would turn on its head. They also point to public reassurances Fauci made in late February, around the time of the first U.S. case of community transmission, that “at this moment, there is no need to change anything that you’re doing on a day-by-day basis.”
And there’s this:
Trump is also galled by Fauci’s approval ratings. A recent New York Times/Siena College poll showed that 67 percent of voters trusted Fauci for information on the coronavirus, compared with 26 percent who trusted Trump.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is your president.
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/07/white-house-goes-on-the-attack-
against-anthony-fauci/
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 voter registration surges to 16.4 million, despite the pandemic
The state now has a record 16.4 million voters, 2.1 million more than it had just over four years ago — a 15 percent increase in registrations that is nearly equivalent to the voter rolls of the entire state of Connecticut.
“It is a totally different electorate than it was in 2016,” said Luke Warford, voter expansion director for the Texas Democratic Party.
Texas just isn’t accustomed to this sort of surge.
Texas voter registration rolls historically have grown slowly. From 2002 to 2012, the rolls grew by 800,000. But now, registration is in hyperdrive.
In short, Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston political science professor, said 2020 is setting up as a real shootout in regions of the state that have become more competitive because of the diversification and growth of the electorate.
“It’s another step toward Texas being a true battleground,” Rottinghaus said.
In Texas, voters don’t register by party affiliation like many other states, making it unclear exactly how many Republican or Democratic voters are in the state.
Gov. Greg Abbott holds regular organizing sessions with Republicans he calls Abbott University, where they’re warned that Democratic registration efforts even before 2018 were changing the state’s electorate.
The results in 2018 showed just how real that was. Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke came within 219,000 votes of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican, who six years earlier had won his seat with a 1.2 million vote margin. But it went beyond that. Democrats flipped two Congressional seats in Washington D.C. that had been held by Republicans, two Texas Senate seats and 12 Texas House seats.
www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/Texas-voter-registrati
on-surges-to-16-4-million-15399835.php
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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That's what happens when out of state 3rd parties undermine your electoral system.
https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/nation-world/deceased-cat-gets-vote
r-registration-application-in-mail/507-8c799bfa-c3c5-45ec-a66d-eaf9f6d0fce9
https://chicago.suntimes.com/elections/2020/7/11/21321107/dead-cat-get
s-voter-registration-mail
I keep trying to tell my grandma not to vote for Biden but she won't listen to me because she's dead.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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