A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Originally posted by second:
America’s student loan crisis
According to the nonprofit organization Student Debt Crisis, our collective student debt as a nation is currently at $1,740 billion. Education, the theoretical equalizer, has turned into yet another way that deep inequality remains entrenched in our country—as well as a partisan flashpoint. After Bernie Sanders dropped out of the presidential race, Joe Biden announced a proposal for expanded student loan forgiveness in a bid to reel in Sanders supporters. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump vetoed a major student loan forgiveness bill in May, dealing a blow to students who seek debt cancellation because they say colleges defrauded them. As we head into an election amid a massive economic downturn in a global pandemic, the stakes of this debate have never been higher.
More at https://slate.com/business/2020/07/debt-nation-the-faces-of-americas-s
tudent-loan-crisis.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Good post second...
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 Next Disaster Is Just a Few Days Away
Millions of unemployed Americans face imminent catastrophe.
Two months have gone by since the House passed a relief measure, The Heroes Act, that would, among other things, extend enhanced unemployment benefits through the rest of the year. www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/6800 But neither Senate Republicans nor the White House has shown any sense of urgency about the looming crisis. Why?
Part of the answer is that Trump and his officials are still talking about a rapid, V-shape recovery that will bring us quickly back to full employment, making special aid to the unemployed unnecessary; they’re apparently oblivious to what everyone else sees — an economy that is stumbling again as the coronavirus surges back.
Delusions about the state of the economic recovery, in turn, allow conservatives to indulge in one of their favorite ideas — that helping the unemployed in a depressed economy hurts job creation, by discouraging people from taking jobs, but those jobs temporarily don’t exist because the pandemic is keeping customers at home, not out shopping and dining and taking airplane trips.
Worrying about employment incentives in the midst of a pandemic seems to be at the core of White House “thinking” about economic policy right now.
Republicans don’t seem to realize that they, not the Democrats, will be blamed if millions are plunged into penury because unemployment relief is delayed; to the extent that they’re willing to act at all, they still imagine that they can extract concessions like a blanket exemption of businesses from pandemic liability.
Maybe the prospect of catastrophe will concentrate Republican minds, but it seems more likely that we’re heading for weeks if not months of extreme financial distress for millions of unemployed Americans, distress that will hobble the economy as a whole. This disaster didn’t need to happen; but you can say the same thing about most of what has gone wrong lately.
www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/opinion/coronavirus-economy-unemployment.ht
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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Funny that congress always seems to be on spring break at times like these...
They're writing something up. They don't go back to work until the 20th, and that means they've got a little over a week to get something passed before payments for the week ending the 25th go out.
The systems are largely in place so it shouldn't be 2 to 3 months to get everything up and running for everyone. That being said, there are always bugs, and there are always hiccups.
My predictions:
1. There will be a "back to work" incentive added this time that will give several hundred dollars per week above your paycheck at your new job that would last at least a month, but likely as long as any FPUC extension.
2. They're going to cap the FPUC for unemployed people to 100% of their pay when they got laid off.
3. Although Number 2 sounds like that would be hard to do, it really isn't. Your monetary determination varies, state by state, but it ends up being a percentage of your average weekly pay for your base period. I believe in Illinois and Indiana for instance, your weekly unemployment payouts are 47% of what your average weekly pay was.
All that would need to be done in those states is an additional 53% FPUC payout per week to make that whole.
That being said, these are only 2 examples out of 50. There is probably a pretty wide variety in how different states handled this. But I can't imagine a scenario where the data isn't already there and easily plugged into a process that would make this 100%.
4. There will be bugs, and as a result, some states will be paying out the additional federal funds immediately while others will see their unemployed only getting their regular state level UI for a month or more until the system is implemented, at which time they will get a retroactive payment for the weeks of federal funds missed.
4. Additional FPUC benefits will be extended to December.
I seriously doubt that the extra full $600 is going to continue, but 100% of previous pay is pretty likely.
Eventually, somebody is going to have to revisit this once again late in the year if the Mask Karens get their way and we're just shutting down everything forever.
52 weeks of unemployment isn't going to be enough if we're still talking about this next spring.
I have a feeling that one way or another come November 4th it's going to disappear from the news cycle though.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Trump’s Efforts to Distort the Census Have Started Back Up
At the end of last month, the White House and the Commerce Department placed two new political appointees at the Census Bureau, renewing fears that the Trump administration was again seeking to interfere with the census, a sprawling operation whose results will shape the distribution of political power and federal funds for the next decade. One of the roles went to Adam Korzeniewski, a Marine Corps veteran who consulted for the unsuccessful congressional campaign of Joseph Saladino, a controversial YouTube prankster who once wore a swastika to a Trump rally and claimed in one of his videos that “the Black community is very violent towards Trump and his supporters.” The other position went to Nathaniel T. Cogley, a radio commentator and assistant professor at Tarleton State University in Texas, who will be the deputy director for policy—the highest post a political appointee has held at the bureau for decades (besides the director, who is also a political appointee).
Neither Cogley’s nor Korzeniewski’s job descriptions have been made public—the roles did not even exist prior to the announcement—and neither man has sustained experience with census operations. Adding political appointees in the middle of the count is virtually unprecedented, not to mention doing so right at the start of what is sure to be one of the most difficult in-person counting operations in the bureau’s history. The American Statistical Association decried the news as creating “the perception—if not reality—of improper political influence.” The inspector general has asked the bureau to provide additional information about the positions, and Democratic lawmakers recently accused the Trump administration of failing to explain why political appointees are “running what should be an ideologically neutral count of the people in our country.”
More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/07/donald-trump-census-citize
nship-question-executive-order-scotus.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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Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Throw the Bums Out
America is in the midst of a world-historic failure of governance. Why isn’t anyone in charge acting like they are responsible for it?
Earlier this month, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo unveiled the Covid-19 mountain, a three-dimensional foam mound representing the pandemic’s toll on his state. He had used the “mountain” metaphor before and had apparently decided to make it tangible. Referring to the chart of daily new infections statewide, he said that New Yorkers had climbed the “mountain.” Now, with that number declining to seemingly manageable levels, he turned the chart into a monument to the state’s collective achievement.
In a functional democracy with any standard of democratic accountability — a country where elected officials expect to be held responsible for outcomes they could have controlled or influenced — a governor would only have unveiled such a bloody monument if he needed an explanation for his immediate resignation. Cuomo, instead, had the mountain recast as a commemorative poster, which he revealed at a press conference on Monday afternoon.
The “mountain” is a triumphalist materialization of an overwhelming pile of bodies. It is a manifestation of a horrific and avoidable failure. New Yorkers did not set out to climb the mountain; they were led to its peak by their government.
That very much includes our federal government, which clearly signaled by early March that it was neither willing nor able to do what was necessary to contain the pandemic nationwide. Months into the crisis, we still face inexplicable and inexcusable testing delays, evidence that the federal government never addressed its earliest and most catastrophic failure. Here in New York, where Cuomo would have us believe that we have made it to the other side of the mountain, where tests are ostensibly available to anyone who wants one, I would face, according to one of the city’s main swab test sources, a seven-day wait for results, severely limiting the test’s effectiveness as a way of tracking the spread of the virus.
The United States has the highest Covid-19 death toll in the world, and it is rapidly adding a staggering number of new cases every day. These are conditions that would lead to widespread resignations of public health officials in a functionally democratic country. Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown resigned less than a month after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana. So far, most of the people who’ve been forced out of public health jobs since the pandemic began have been those advocating for more forceful and effective government action.
While our federal government’s catastrophic and ongoing failure to prepare for or mitigate the pandemic rightfully earns most of the blame for the explosion of cases, an exclusive focus on the federal response obscures the total extent of our national failure. Our federalist system may deny governors all the resources the federal government can marshal, but it still gives them plenty of power. Most American states have resources small nations can only dream of, and most governors have as much power as the heads of any number of foreign governments. If it was clear by March that the federal government would simply not be containing Covid-19 (and I certainly think it was clear), it was the responsibility of governors like Cuomo to try to contain it themselves.
Western media sometimes claims the successful containment of the virus in Asian countries like South Korea is due to their populace’s high trust in government, their conformity, and their willingness to submit to authority. In reality, it has only been three years since South Koreans took to the streets by the hundreds of thousands to overthrow their government for corruption. That President, Park Geun-hye, is jailed for 25 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Geun-hye#Arrest_and_detention
Is America’s only recourse to negligence and misfeasance truly to wait for a chance to vote the bums out? Unless and until the people in charge i
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Yes. Throw the bums out.
All the Democrat leaders of Democrat shitholes that are burning to the ground all need to be removed from office and put in prison.
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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Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump tweeted yesterday:
So we catch Obama & Biden, not to even mention the rest of their crew, SPYING on my campaign, AND NOTHING HAPPENS? I hope not! If it were the other way around, 50 years for treason. NEVER FORGET!!!!
12:14 PM • Jul 19, 2020 • Twitter for iPhone
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1284899438591451137
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump tweeted in 2013:
Leadership: Whatever happens, you're responsible. If it doesn't happen, you're responsible.
1:01 PM • Nov 8, 2013 • Twitter Web Client
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/398887965302091776
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Wow.
Which genius at Vox trolled 7 years of Trumps tweets to find another post that used the word happens?
That sounds like an easy job. One that robots will be doing soon.
Better learn to code.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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