A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 511 of 725
They're just going to move the site if they unionize.
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" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher 
PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.
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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is considering putting a $15 minimum wage into the next reconciliation package, which will be focused on infrastructure, multiple sources familiar with the New York senator’s thinking told The Intercept.
Senate Democrats attempted to include the wage hike in President Joe Biden’s Covid-19 relief package, but the Senate parliamentarian ruled it was out of order, and Senate Democrats allowed that ruling to stand. An effort to overturn the ruling, which required 60 votes, garnered just 42.
Schumer has suggested to progressive groups that there is a glimmer of hope that the parliamentarian would rule differently this time: The new legislation is focused on infrastructure, and setting wages is directly related to the budget impact of any infrastructure spending. If there’s even a small chance of it working, he reasoned, it’s worth the fight.
Schumer, though, is encountering resistance from some backers of increasing the minimum wage, who argue that attempting to include it is doomed to fail just as it did last time, and in the process it will trigger another wave of indignation from the public at the failure.
The Senate still needs to lock down 50 votes in support of hiking the wage, however. Of the eight Democrats who voted no last time around on overruling the parliamentarian to enact a minimum wage, most are assumed to be gettable in a clean vote, though doing so could mean giving ground on the tipped minimum wage, a key priority of the National Restaurant Association. That would still leave Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., but there is hope that a package of small business tax credits, which would subsidize the wage increase, could get them there.
To bypass Democratic Senators Manchin and Sinema, could two Republican Senators vote for $15 per hour? Not a chance.
https://theintercept.com/2021/03/29/minimum-wage-senate-chuck-schumer/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Welcome to Day 69.
Today in one sentence: CDC Director Rochelle Walensky warned of "impending doom" as Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths rise throughout the U.S.; Biden announced that 90% of adults will be eligible to get a coronavirus vaccine starting April 19; the Biden administration expects the number of unaccompanied children crossing the border to increase from more than 16,000 currently to as many as 26,000 by September; and Russian hackers gained access to email accounts belonging to Trump's Homeland Security chief and members of the department’s cybersecurity staff, who were responsible for identifying threats from foreign countries.
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Trump giving Putin what he wants, 'til the last.
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Now Is the Perfect Time to Stream the Movies of Preston Sturges. The writer-director’s comedies show how to live in a nation of hucksters and dupes.
The Trump years are over, the pandemic is winding down, and as Americans slowly return to what’s left of our normal lives, many of us are carrying a lot fewer illusions about the nature of our national character. A country where Donald Trump is possible is not a country you can trust, and the same goes triple for its residents. And yet we’ve still got to live here. It would be nice if there were a way to reconcile the knowledge that our society is a series of interlocking scams with some kind of happiness.
Unlike most of America’s ongoing problems, however, this one was solved 80 years ago, by screenwriter and director Preston Sturges. In an extraordinary run of seven films Sturges wrote and directed at Paramount from 1940 to 1944, he mapped out a way to be clear-eyed about the hucksters, hustlers, and horse’s asses that make up our great nation, while somehow loving it anyway. Taken together, these cynical comedies add up to an essential user’s manual for life in these United States, and the Criterion Channel is currently streaming all seven of them, plus 1948’s Unfaithfully Yours, so now is the perfect time to watch them. Here’s where to start.
The Lady Eve
Barbara Stanwyck plays Jean Harrington, a con artist working the card room of an ocean liner who sets her sights on the biggest mark on the ship: Charles Poncefort Pike (Henry Fonda), the exceptionally naïve heir to a brewing fortune. Naturally, Jean falls for Pike, complicating her plans to fleece him. “Couple falls in love under false pretenses” plots are a dime a dozen, but Sturges sprints through the obligatory plot points (deceit-to-love-to-revelation-to-rejection) in the first half of the movie. The usual payoff, in which the mark realizes over the course of a sad montage that he is still in love with the person who deceived him and races to the airport or takes her to the prom or whatever, is a non-starter in a Sturges movie, because a couple learning to be honest with each other is anathema to his vision of romance. Instead, Charles drops Jean cold when he realizes she’s not who she said she was.
That leaves Sturges with half the movie to fill, and he does so by repeating the love-under-false-pretenses plot nearly beat-for-beat. Jean tracks Charles down in Connecticut, where she reintroduces herself with an even more ridiculous fake identity: Lady Eve Sidwich, an Englishwoman visiting the United States who just happens to look exactly like Jean Harrington. Finding a satisfying ending for a romantic comedy with one plot is hard enough; Sturges has to resolve two at once, while sticking to his basic premise that no couple ever solved anything by sitting down face-to-face and being honest. No spoilers here, but the ending is perfect.
More at https://web.archive.org/web/20210330112527/https://slate.com/culture/2
021/03/preston-sturges-movies-lady-eve-streaming-criterion-channel.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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Fuck Slate.
I already knew I couldn't trust people like you, and I didn't need some two bit shill website to tell me to think that.
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" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher
PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.
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Quote:Tell us the names of the sites you trust.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck Slate.
I already knew I couldn't trust people like you, and I didn't need some two bit shill website to tell me to think that.
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Mitch McConnell Terrified because Republican Voters LOVE Democrats' Voting Rights Bill
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Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Mitch McConnell Terrified because Republican Voters LOVE Democrats' Voting Rights Bill
No they don't.
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" 'You're like the Nazis' is the new 'I don't like you'. That disqualifies her from marching around planet Who-Gives-a-Shit in a helmet? ~Bill Maher
PSA: Don't click on any links in Second's posts. He's trying to fish your private information out of you.
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Quote:How do you feel about the Christian Science Monitor? This article is from there:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck Slate.
I already knew I couldn't trust people like you, and I didn't need some two bit shill website to tell me to think that.
www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2021/0329/If-you-can-keep-it-Where-next
-for-a-strained-democracy
There are four tests to determine whether a democracy is under threat. For the first time in its history, the U.S. meets all four.
The great machine of governance established by the Constitution in 1788 has long been beset by underlying problems such as partisanship, gridlock, and disinformation. Then in November 2020 an incumbent president threw a match on this tinder: a false claim that the election was stolen, and that despite certified counts electing his opponent, in fact he had won.
This lie has since rooted itself in part of the nation’s body politic, drawing support from hundreds of elected Republican officials. A mob smashed into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 to stop the purported “steal.” Former President Donald Trump’s evidence-free assertion about the election was a dangerous seed that can no longer be unplanted – a little over a third of U.S. voters, and three-quarters of Republicans, say they don’t think President Joe Biden won legitimately, according to one recent poll.
That false belief endures despite more than 60 court cases heard by more than 90 judges, including Trump appointees, and despite Trump administration officials, including the attorney general and the top cybersecurity official, saying the elections were secure and there was no credible evidence of widespread fraud. One of the most vocal boosters of the lie, lawyer Sidney Powell, is defending herself against billion-dollar libel lawsuits, saying “no reasonable person” would believe her “wild accusations” and “outlandish claims.”
An American coup d’état in 1898, not 2021
White supremacists powered the mob. They were angry about the demise of the world as they had known it, including a loss of political power they felt rightfully theirs. Their leaders called on them to take it back. So they planned something that could only be called a coup d’état and attacked a citadel of their opponents.
The year was 1898, not 2021, and the place was Wilmington, North Carolina. But the similarities between the 19th-century insurrection, in which a mob of white men overthrew an elected biracial government in Wilmington, and the Jan. 6 insurrection, in which a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol to stop the counting of Electoral College votes, are inescapable, says Suzanne Mettler, professor of American institutions at Cornell University.
That’s what she kept thinking while watching scenes of the Capitol riot. “There are so many parallels,” Professor Mettler says.
The most obvious similarity is the refusal to accept an election. President Trump’s unwillingness to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 presidential vote, and his months long effort to overturn the results, were “among the most abnormal and important events of the Trump presidency,” according to Bright Line Watch, a group of experts that monitors U.S. democratic practices.
This denial was clearly anti-democratic. “Democracy is a system in which parties lose elections,” according to a pithy definition from New York University political scientist Adam Przeworski.
Another similarity between the events of 1898 and 2021 is the extensive planning involved in operations. While some organization took place at the grassroots, it was political leaders in both cases who rallied and aimed the crowds at their destination. At least a dozen Capitol rioters facing federal charges have said they stormed the building because their president told them to.
Race was also a driving factor in both events. It was more central to Wilmington, but white supremacist symbols, signs, and supporters were present in Washington as well.
Democracy survived past sieges
These are the book’s four threats, which separately
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Quote:Funny, mail-in voting was used more by Republicans than Democrats before 2020. They didn't mind it then, since, as all the evidence shows, there is no fraud.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Mitch McConnell Terrified because Republican Voters LOVE Democrats' Voting Rights Bill
No they don't.
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