A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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I’m not one of those liberals who believe that corporate greed is the root of all evil. It’s the root of only some evil; there are other dark forces, especially white nationalism, stalking the U.S. body politic.
But corporate money is surely the villain behind the latest roadblock to President Biden’s agenda: Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s opposition to any rollback to Donald Trump’s big 2017 corporate tax cut. Until recently, Sinema was FOR rollback.
After all, Sinema, who was in the House of Representatives at the time, voted against that tax cut. And she attacked the tax cut the next year during her run for the Senate. Given that raising taxes on corporations has overwhelming public support, it’s hard to see any reason for her flip other than the corporate lobbying blitz against Build Back Better.
It’s a distressing story. But here’s what you need to know: While the Trump tax cut was bad and should be reversed, reclaiming the lost revenue isn’t essential right now. If the key elements of the Biden agenda — investing in children and in protecting the planet against climate change — have to be paid for in part by borrowing, that’s OK. It would certainly be better than not making those investments at all.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/21/opinion/corporate-taxes-deficit-spe
nding.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Shut up, idiot.
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The Paranoid Style in American Politics
By Richard Hofstadtert
Harper’s Magazine, November 1964, pp. 77-86.
Perhaps the central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise. The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular social interest—perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands—are shut out of the political process. Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power—and this through distorting lenses—and have no chance to observe its actual machinery. A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him—and in any case he resists enlightenment.
We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.
More at https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-pol
itics/
The Paranoid Style in American Politics Is Back
By Thomas B. Edsall
Sept. 8, 2016
Seth Masket, a political scientist at the University of Denver, emailed me his thoughts:
A narrow Trump loss could be problematic in that some significant percentage of Republican activists would believe Trump’s claims that the electoral system was rigged against him.
“This is a potentially dangerous outcome for the country,” Masket added.
Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute warned that if the outcome is a close win for Hillary Clinton:
It will reinforce the view among Trump populists that the election was stolen and he was stabbed in the back, which will make the task of party leaders that much harder, while creating further delegitimization of the process.
At a rally in Columbus, Ohio, on Aug. 1, Trump told the crowd, “I’m afraid the election’s gonna be rigged, I have to be honest.” Honest?
More at https://web.archive.org/web/20210513165837/https://www.nytimes.com/201
6/09/08/opinion/campaign-stops/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics-is-back.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Mail-in fraud election was fraud.
Funny... I don't see you calling out McAuliffe or Abrams right now, twat.
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Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. was once known as Wall Street Chuck. But thanks to small donors, he now serves as Senate majority leader. Schumer’s donors are now rank-and-file Democratic activists throwing in $27 at a time.
Schumer knows that raising corporate money is not actually that efficient, because each one of these lobbyists or rich people requires coddling, demands intimate access, wants internships for their kids, wants a dinner and a speech and photo, and on and on. Small donors just want you to win and then deliver what you promised. They don’t expect to ever meet you unless they’re volunteering at a headquarters where you happen to stop by.
Over the summer, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema D-AZ showed just how much work it is. For the past few months, we were treated to endless stories about Sinema skipping important events in Washington to be at this or that fundraiser and even leaving the country to go to Paris to raise money. For all that trouble, Sinema reported $1.1 million in fundraising in third quarter. Back in the third quarter of 2018, when Democratic voters thought she was a progressive and wanted to help her flip a Republican seat — she raised almost $7 million.
Kyrsten Sinema might be on the young side for a senator — less than half the age of some of her colleagues — but she represents the Democratic Party’s past. Think of her and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., as the dead hands reaching out of the grave, grabbing at the party as it tries to move on from them. They managed to claw back spending on the Build Back Better Act, but the reality that their time has passed is clear. And the way you can measure this most directly is in terms of dollars.
For Sinema in particular, her approach to the negotiations — to push against social spending and tax hikes on the rich and corporations — has cost her badly in the polls at home and hasn’t had much of an upside when it comes to campaign cash.
More at https://theintercept.com/2021/10/22/kyrsten-sinema-corporate-democrats/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Liberalism and Its Discontents by Francis Fukuyama
A lot of today’s populist backlash is due to this neoliberal economic world, where if you could squeeze the slightest couple of cents out of the supply chain by moving your production out of North America into some Asian country, you would immediately do it. And if you could squeeze your workers, you could insist that they not join a union, and then you could nibble away at their benefits and so forth. You were justified in doing this because there were economists who said, “Well, that's what makes capitalism efficient.”
That was one of the versions of neoliberalism, and I think it has made a lot of young people really dislike capitalism. Today, they associate capitalism with this extremely ruthless and competitive version of neoliberalism, and that has had a lot of dire political consequences for all of us.
So if one way in which liberalism has become misshapen over the last decades is economic—with the rise of neoliberalism—the other is more cultural: A doubling-down on an emphasis on autonomy. Individualism, which is core to the liberal tradition, is undermining itself in a way. What does that mean?
More at https://www.persuasion.community/p/fukuyama?r=17uk7
Francis Fukuyama free books: https://libgen.unblockit.kim/search.php?req=Francis+Fukuyama
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
So if one way in which liberalism has become misshapen over the last decades is economic—with the rise of neoliberalism—the other is more cultural: A doubling-down on an emphasis on autonomy. Individualism, which is core to the liberal tradition, is undermining itself in a way. What does that mean?
What it means is that the Democrat Party has become the party of the rich and the party that the multi-national corporations back.
Not coincidentally, it has also become the party of censorship and the party of actively stifling free speech whenever and wherever it can, and enabling, emboldening and celebrating others who do so where it can't (yet).
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Deep in the fever swamp:
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DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
The real pandemic solution: http://uvpk.net/
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West Virginia - the historic roadblock to US climate policy
The clean electricity program that Senator Joe Manchin (WV) has turned against is the cornerstone of the Biden climate program. Driving first coal and then gas out of the US electricity system, combined with a big push on EV, were the twin mechanisms through which the administration hoped to meet its objective of cutting greenhouse-gas emissions by 50 relative to 2005 levels by 2030. It was always feared that Manchin might dig in on gas. It now seems that his position has hardened to one of outright opposition to any form of clean energy provision in the spending package. Without the clean electricity program it is hard to see how the United States can make good on its climate promises. Unless Manchin flips, America will go to the global climate talks at COP26 at Glasgow with nothing to offer.
Manchin is the senior senator for West Virginia, commonly described as “coal country”. He is a Democrat in a massively Trump-voting state. As the NYT reported, West Virginia’s other senator, the Republican Shelley Moore Capito, “said she was “vehemently opposed” to the clean electricity program because it is “designed to ultimately eliminate coal and natural gas from our electricity mix, and would be absolutely devastating for my state.””
The power that West Virginia’s two Senators wield is astonishing considering that the state has a total population of 1.79 million - as compared, for instance, with the New York borough of Brooklyn which numbers 2.89 million inhabitants. West Virginia’s swing votes in the Senate are another demonstration of the warped constitution that the 21st-century United States has inherited from the eighteenth century.
By way of their influence in Washington, West Virginian politicians have repeatedly stymied not just American, but global climate policy. As Lee Harris reminds us in a timely piece in American Prospect, in 1997 it was West Virginian Democrat Robert Byrd who, along with Chuck Hagel, blocked American ratification of the Kyoto climate protocol negotiated by the Clinton administration.
West Virginia’s identity is deeply tied up with coal. So too is Joe Manchin’s personal fortune. . . .
Democrats make a fatal mistake in taking on policy choices that appeal to liberal educated voters at the expense of working-class voters. As Klein reports:
Shor showed me, as an example, a set of environmental talking points he’d tested, in which the ones that mentioned climate change performed worst. “Very liberal white people care way more about climate change than anyone else,” he said. “So when you talk about climate change, you sound like a weird, very liberal white person. This is why policy issues matter more than people realize. It’s not that voters have these very specific policy preferences. It’s that the policies you choose to talk about paints a picture of what kind of person you are.” . . .
. . . what is at stake in Manchin’s stand, is less the economics of fossil fuels or the costs and benefits of decarbonization for West Virginia, but the trajectory of party political and class realignment. It is that history that persuades Manchin to cling to the totems of coal and gas, whilst rejecting billions in investment. As the senior representative of one of the poorest states in the Union, he declares himself to be the last bastion against a new culture of entitlement. As Jamelle Bouie concludes it is a “dispute over values as much as — or even more than — a dispute over policy.” Ironically, what an enquiry into the West Virginia roadblock exposes is less the defining importance of actual producer interests - insofar as we can measure them - than the perverse grip of conservative “producerist” ideology over American politics.
Charts, graphs and much more to "explain" why West Virginia is a roadblock at https://web.archive.org/web/20211023182308/https://adamtooze.substack.
com/p/chartbook-46-west-virginia-the-historic
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https
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If you have five minutes, watch it all.
Otherwise, just the last 90 seconds, addressing her Republican colleagues.
Transcript: Bannon’s Actions Suggest Trump was “Personally Involved” in Capitol Riot
https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/liz-cheney-transcript-bannons-act
ions-suggest-trump-was-personally-involved-in-capitol-riot
Rep. Cheney: (00:00)
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. On January 6th, a mob breached the security perimeter of our capitol, assaulted and injured more than 140 police officers, engaged in hand-to-hand violence over an extended period, and invaded and occupied the United States Capitol building, all in an effort to halt the lawful counting of electoral votes and reverse the results of the 2020 election. The day before this all occurred, on January 5th, Mr. Bannon publicly professed knowledge that quote, “All hell is going to break loose tomorrow,” end quote. He forecast that the day would be quote, “extraordinarily different than what most Americans expected.” He said to his listeners and his viewers quote, “So many people said if I was in a revolution, I would be in Washington. Well,” he said, “this is your time in history.” Based on the committee’s investigation, it appears that Mr. Bannon had substantial advanced knowledge of the plans for January 6th, and likely had an important role in formulating those plans.
Rep. Cheney: (01:19)
Mr. Bannon was in the war room at the Willard on January 6th. He also appears to have detailed knowledge regarding the president’s efforts to sell millions of Americans the fraud that the election was stolen. In the words of many who participated in the January 6th attack, the violence that day was in direct response to President Trump’s repeated claims from election night through January 6th that he had won the election. The American people are entitled to Mr. Bannon’s firsthand testimony about all of these relevant facts, but as the chairman noted, Mr. Bannon is refusing to provide it. Preserving our Constitution and the rule of law is a central purpose of this investigation. The plain fact here is that Mr. Bannon has no legal right to ignore the committee’s lawful subpoena. So far, Mr. Bannon’s excuse is that former President Trump wishes to invoke some form of executive privilege for a subset of the relevant topics, President Trump’s direct communications with Mr. Bannon regarding the planning for January 6th.
Rep. Cheney: (02:39)
This information should not be subject to any privilege at all, and certainly there is no basis for absolute or unqualified privilege for presidential communications. More important now, there is no conceivably applicable privilege that could shield Mr. Bannon from testimony on all of the many other topics identified in this committee’s subpoena. Because he has categorically refused to appear, we have no choice but to seek consequences for Mr. Bannon’s failure to comply. Those consequences are not just important for this investigation, they are important for all congressional investigations. Mr. Bannon’s and Mr. Trump’s privilege arguments do however appear to reveal one thing. They suggest that President Trump was personally involved in the planning and execution of January 6th, and this committee will get to the bottom of that.
Rep. Cheney: (03:44)
Let me add one further thought, principally from my Republican colleagues. We all agree that America is the greatest nation on the face of God’s earth. Truth, justice, and our Constitution have made America great. Almost every one of my colleagues knows in your hearts that what happened on January 6th was profoundly wrong. You all know that there is no evidence of widespread election fraud sufficient to have changed the results of the election. You all know that the Dominion voting machines were not corrupted by a foreign power. You know these claims are false, yet former President Trump repeats them almost daily, and he has now urged Republicans not to vote in 2022 and 2024. This is a prescription for national self-destr
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