A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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PAGE 621 of 725
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Life at Fox News became “unsustainable”
From Chris Wallace, longtime Fox News host, on why he finally left the network:
"I’m fine with opinion: conservative opinion, liberal opinion. But when people start to question the truth — Who won the 2020 election? Was Jan. 6 an insurrection? — I found that unsustainable.
....Some people might have drawn the line earlier, or at a different point. I think Fox has changed over the course of the last year and a half. But I can certainly understand where somebody would say, ‘Gee, you were a slow learner, Chris.’”
https://web.archive.org/web/20220328003506/https://www.nytimes.com/202
2/03/27/business/media/chris-wallace-cnn-fox-news.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
His CNN Masters are going to treat him a lot better.
Hey dumbass, you know he's just saying this now because the CNN+ roster is pathetic and they've got to find a way to charge people $6 a month for the service when nobody watches regular CNN. It's called advertising.
--------------------------------------------------
Me: "Remember Covid?"
Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"
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This Is Why It Took More Than 100 Years to Get an Anti-Lynching Bill
The law comes into being after more than 200 failed attempts, over more than 100 years, to pass anti-lynching legislation through Congress.
A lynching is more than a violent act meant for a single individual. Past and present, lynchings are meant to intimidate an entire community — to reinforce hierarchies of race and class through brutal acts of communal violence. Despite its relative rarity, lynching had a singular psychological force, generating a level of fear and horror that overwhelmed all other forms of violence. Lynchings were barbarous, defined by an extreme, often sadistic violence, including burning, sexual mutilation and the removal of limbs.
The South, when voting as a bloc, could kill legislation that threatened white Southern power and autonomy before it reached the floor. Any bill that somehow survived the House could be strangled in the Senate using the filibuster, which is what happened, again and again, to anti-lynching (and other civil rights) legislation. There is something a little funny here, if you have not seen it already.
The reigning justification for institutions like the Senate or rules like the filibuster — or, for that matter, the entire edifice of American federalism — is that they protect the rights of the minority from the depredations of an overbearing majority. But it is in the story of the long and frustrated effort to make lynching a federal crime — to, in Dyer’s words, “protect the lives of citizens of the United States against lynch law and mob violence” — that we see the reverse. We see how the American system can, and often does, protect tyrannical and overbearing minorities, like the architects of Jim Crow, from the only power, the federal government, that can defend and enforce democratic equality across the entire nation.
We should celebrate the passage and signing of an anti-lynching bill. It is, truly, a historic accomplishment. We should also pause to reflect not just on the long struggle to make this law a reality, but on the ways that our system itself was the primary obstacle to protecting the lives and livelihoods of its own citizens.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/01/opinion/anti-lynching-bill-biden.ht
ml
Emmett Till Antilynching Act
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/55/text
Section 249(a) of title 18, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following:
“(5) LYNCHING.—Whoever conspires to commit any offense under paragraph (1), (2), or (3) shall, if death or serious bodily injury (as defined in section 2246 of this title) results from the offense, be imprisoned for not more than 30 years, fined in accordance with this title, or both.
“(6) OTHER CONSPIRACIES.—Whoever conspires to commit any offense under paragraph (1), (2), or (3) shall, if death or serious bodily injury (as defined in section 2246 of this title) results from the offense, or if the offense includes kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse or an attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, be imprisoned for not more than 30 years, fined in accordance with this title, or both.”
There is almost nothing here, but Congress couldn’t pass it for 123 years. Congress finally made it possible to charge people who only watch and cheer a lynching, but refuse to testify against the murderers, as conspirators to a lynching. Those historic photos of lynchings with hundreds of witnesses now can be charged as hundreds of co-conspirators to a lynching.
Lynching of black teenager Henry Smith in Paris, Texas 
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Disney will be crushed for opposing us
When Republicans get back into power, Apple and Disney have to understand one thing: Everything will be on the table, your copyright/trademark protection, your special status in certain states, and even your corporate structure itself…
This is the kind of revenge culture that Vladimir Putin would understand and approve of. Needless to say, Donald Trump also understands and approves of this. It's basically the guiding principle of his life.
If a corporation does something conservatives disapprove of, they should expect a conservative president to use the full power of the US government to wage war on them. Your copyrights will be toast. The Justice Department's antitrust division will break you up. Any official levers that we can use to make your life miserable, we'll use them. You should understand that we will treat the government as simply an extension of our own personal rage.
Both parties support policies that have the potential to hurt certain categories of companies. Democrats favor labor unions, for example, which has the potential to hurt any company that hates the thought of being unionized. Republicans oppose abortion, which has the obvious potential to hurt any organization that supplies abortion services.
That's fine. But singling out a specific company for state sanctioned revenge because it said or did something your party opposes? That's banana republic stuff. It's also how many Republicans view politics these days.
https://jabberwocking.com/ingraham-disney-will-be-crushed-for-opposing
-us/
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:
Disney will be crushed for opposing us
When Republicans get back into power, Apple and Disney have to understand one thing: Everything will be on the table, your copyright/trademark protection, your special status in certain states, and even your corporate structure itself…
This is the kind of revenge culture that Vladimir Putin would understand and approve of. Needless to say, Donald Trump also understands and approves of this. It's basically the guiding principle of his life.
If a corporation does something conservatives disapprove of, they should expect a conservative president to use the full power of the US government to wage war on them. Your copyrights will be toast. The Justice Department's antitrust division will break you up. Any official levers that we can use to make your life miserable, we'll use them. You should understand that we will treat the government as simply an extension of our own personal rage.
Both parties support policies that have the potential to hurt certain categories of companies. Democrats favor labor unions, for example, which has the potential to hurt any company that hates the thought of being unionized. Republicans oppose abortion, which has the obvious potential to hurt any organization that supplies abortion services.
That's fine. But singling out a specific company for state sanctioned revenge because it said or did something your party opposes? That's banana republic stuff. It's also how many Republicans view politics these days.
https://jabberwocking.com/ingraham-disney-will-be-crushed-for-opposing
-us/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Wow, they have this twisted.
And it's hilarious watching Democrats stand up for Big Business in the 2020's.
Your party is done.
Finished.
--------------------------------------------------
Me: "Remember Covid?"
Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"
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Quote:6ix, your low income will tragically kill you young. It is statistics. Occasionally, but not too often in my experience, the kind of poor white trash that vote for Trump will live almost as long as the national average of 78.79 years for males, but statistically voting for Trump shortens your life.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Wow, they have this twisted.
And it's hilarious watching Democrats stand up for Big Business in the 2020's.
Your party is done.
Finished.
--------------------------------------------------
Me: "Remember Covid?"
Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"
https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+the+average+male+lifespan+in+t
he+united+states
The inequality of life expectancy by income
It's a well-known fact that in the United States rich people have much longer life expectancy than poor people. Much of this is attributed to our private health care system, which does a lousy job of treating the uninsured and under-insured.
That got me curious: do other countries with national health care systems do better? In a nutshell, not really:
The rich live about ten years longer than the poor in the US. In France it's about 12 years. The UK and Belgium are a little over 9 years. Sweden is around 4 years.
https://jabberwocking.com/chart-of-the-day-the-inequality-of-life-expe
ctancy-by-income/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Surveying the politics around global warming — and what we must do to slow it — hope is often lost as we doom-scroll through dozens of stories a week about each new indicator that humans are haplessly overheating the planet.
If the world can unite to stop growing greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 and manage a 40 percent drop by 2030, we can save the world as we know it, the panel explained. A new book by Rice University professor Dan Cohan provides some ideas on how to break through the political morass.
“Confronting Climate Gridlock: How Diplomacy, Technology, and Policy Can Unlock a Clean Energy Future” dives into how the technologies that will replace fossil fuels can spur economies and boost corporate profits and how game theory could lead to a global climate deal. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300251678/confronting-climate-grid
lock/
An emerging inducement to cooperate on climate is the opportunity for large corporations to profit from reducing emissions. Cohan spends multiple chapters explaining clean energy technologies and whether they are economically superior to carbon dioxide-producing alternatives.
“There is this one camp that is all about R&D and all the new technologies,” he said when I interviewed him in front of a live audience at Rice to celebrate the book’s release. “Then here are the people who say, ‘We have the technologies that we need; we just need the policy, the will, to put them in place.’”
The challenge now is the shrinking timeline to avoid disaster. President Joe Biden wants to neutralize emissions by 2035, which does not allow emerging technologies such as small nuclear reactors, fusion or even carbon capture to reach maturity in time.
“If we are serious about doing this quickly, and moving quickly is what we have to do, we have to move quickly to electricity,” he said.
Political scientists often use game theory to understand diplomatic negotiations. A classic game is the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
The game begins with police interviewing two co-conspirators separately, offering both a deal if they flip on their accomplice. The prisoners can stand pat and hope their ally doesn’t confess, or they can save themselves. If both confess, neither gets a deal.
If you play the game like a tournament with many rounds, game theorists say a winning strategy emerges. Keep quiet and if you lose, then confess in the next round to win. By always doing what the other prisoner did in the previous round, a player can encourage cooperative behavior in a few rounds of the game.
The steps to success are simple: In the first round, be nice, then retaliate, if necessary, and ultimately forgive betrayals to foster future cooperation. If the strategy is clear, prisoners learn always to cooperate.
Nations that have taken steps to slow climate change, though, generally do not retaliate against those that refuse. They create a free-rider problem, where some countries bear most of the burden. Cohan explains that European Union proposals to impose carbon tariffs on imports from noncomplying countries are emerging as the retaliation necessary to encourage cooperation.
One of Cohan’s key observations is that successful international climate deals typically ratify existing U.S. legislation. Conversely, presidents who cut a deal overseas first and then try to pass it at home often fail.
The Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer, for example, was signed only after the Environmental Protection Agency banned the dangerous chemicals at home. Passing climate bills through Congress then becomes the best way to make international deals that will hit emission reduction goals.
“If we ever get our act together domestically, we could have a better hope of driving things globally,” Cohan said. “And when we do act, we want to make sure everyone else comes on board.”
Unfortunately, in a deeply divided body politic, Republicans have made opposition to climate legislation a litmus test. Even the conservative clean energy advocacy groups I follow such as the Conservative Energy Ne
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Bernie Sanders @SenSanders
The Congressional Budget Office, run by a Republican, estimated that Medicare for All could save the American people $650 billion each year while Yale estimated that Medicare for All could save 68,000 lives each year.
1:05 PM · Apr 12, 2022·Twitter for iPhone
https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/1513941301972119556
But every Republican is opposed, just because.
https://i.imgur.com/CYC4wpZ.jpeg
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Why is the G.O.P. the enemy of any policy that might help its many working-class supporters?
To understand the puzzle, consider the policy positions of Marine Le Pen, who has a serious chance of becoming France’s next president. Her party, National Rally — previously called the National Front — is often described as right-wing. And on social issues it is; in particular, the party is largely defined by its hostility to immigrants and the alleged threat they pose to France’s national identity. On economic policy, however, Le Pen is if anything to the left of President Emmanuel Macron.
Now, it’s important to understand the context. France provides social benefits on a scale beyond the wildest dreams of U.S. progressives: universal health care, huge family benefits and more. Macron isn’t challenging the fundamentals of that system. He is, however, trying to trim some benefits, notably by raising the retirement age. Le Pen, by contrast, actually wants to reduce the retirement age for some workers.
I am not making a case for Le Pen. But there is some genuine populism — advocacy of policies that might actually help workers — in her platform.
Compare that with the positions taken by prominent U.S. Republicans. I can’t tell you what the official Republican economic program is, because the party doesn’t have one — in fact, it has made a point of not saying what it will do if it regains power.
We do, however, know what the party did when it was last in power: It gave huge tax cuts to the wealthy, while almost succeeding in repealing the Affordable Care Act, which would have caused tens of millions of Americans to lose health insurance. There’s no reason to believe it won’t once again pursue anti-worker, pro-plutocrat policies if it regains control.
At the state level, the debacle in Kansas has apparently done nothing to shake Republicans’ faith in the magical power of tax cuts for the affluent. Mississippi — America’s poorest state, with the lowest life expectancy and facing a collapse of its rural hospitals — is slashing income taxes.
And recently Senator Rick Scott of Florida, who heads the Republican senatorial campaign, released a “Rescue America” plan that called for tax increases on the half of Americans whose incomes are low enough that they don’t pay income taxes (even though they pay payroll taxes, sales taxes and so on). He also warned, falsely, that Social Security and Medicare are headed for bankruptcy, without offering any suggestions about how to preserve them.
Senior Republicans have said that they don’t support Scott’s agenda, but haven’t explained what their actual agenda is — and have left Scott in his key campaign position, suggesting that his views have wide support within the party.
So everything suggests that the Republican Party is as pro-wealthy, anti-worker as ever. Unlike right-wing European parties, it hasn’t made any gestures toward actual populism. Why?
The answer, presumably, is that the G.O.P. caters to plutocrats, even as it attacks “elites,” because it thinks it can. After all, being nice to plutocrats and crony capitalists can yield tangible rewards, not just in the form of campaign contributions but also in the form of personal enrichment.
And the Republican Party doesn’t believe that it will pay any price for pursuing these rewards. It believes that its supporters will focus on denunciations of critical race theory and buy into conspiracy theories — almost half of Republicans agree that top Democrats are involved in child sex-trafficking — while not even being aware of what the party is doing for the very rich. After The Times revealed Jared Kushner’s highly questionable $2 billion deal with the Saudis, Fox News simply ignored the report, while harping endlessly on Hunter Biden.
I wish I could say with any confidence that this cynicism will backfire. But I can’t. In particular, Democrats who want to campaign on bread-and-butter issues are assuming that voters will understand who’s actually buttering their bread. And that doesn’t look
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Tax exempt charity’s goal is to prevent the approval of all Biden Administration nominees.
Mudslinging is not new to American politics. Adams’s supporters predicted that if Jefferson were elected President he would unleash a reign of “murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest.” Yet the American Accountability Foundation’s (A.A.F.) approach represents a new escalation.
Rather than attack a nominee, the A.A.F. aims to thwart the entire Biden slate. The obstructionism, like the Republican blockade of Biden’s legislative agenda in Congress, is the end in itself. The group hosts a Web site, www.bidennoms.com , that displays the photographs of Administration nominees it has targeted, as though they were hunting trophies.
The A.A.F., which is run by conservative white men, has particularly focused on blocking women and people of color. As of last month, more than a third of candidates it had publicly attacked were people of color, and nearly sixty per cent were women.
Late last year, Saule Omarova—a leading academic in the field of financial regulation, who is a law professor at Cornell and holds doctorates in law and political science—withdrew her name from consideration as Biden’s Comptroller of the Currency. She did so, she told me, because an opposition-research campaign against her, which the A.A.F. took credit for, had, among other things, falsely portrayed her as a secret communist.
Born in Kazakhstan, in what was then the Soviet Union, Omarova received an undergraduate degree from Moscow State University, but she became a naturalized American citizen in 2005. Yet, during her confirmation hearing, in a moment reminiscent of the Joseph McCarthy era, the Republican Senator John Kennedy, of Louisiana, declared that he didn’t know whether to call her “professor or comrade.” Omarova replied, “Senator, I am not a communist. I do not subscribe to that ideology. I could not choose where I was born.” Omarova’s résumé is hardly anti-capitalist: she worked at the corporate law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell and served in George W. Bush’s Treasury Department.
Omarova told me, “There were so many accusations. A.A.F. was at the forefront of making my life extremely and unnecessarily difficult.” The group discovered that Omarova, after she’d read an article in The Economist about potatoes, had tweeted fondly about a time she helped farmers harvest potatoes outside Moscow. The A.A.F. proclaimed that the Biden Administration had “nominated a woman who waxes nostalgic for the good ole days of poverty, hunger, and forced labor in communist Russia.” Conservative outlets pounced on similar tweets about her past. “The A.A.F. made it into this big deal,” she told me. “They said, ‘She wants to make America into the Soviet Union.’ It was a complete absurdity. But people who have no idea who I am jumped in and said, ‘Go back to the Soviet Union!’ ”
More at https://web.archive.org/web/20220416165930/https://www.newyorker.com/n
ews/a-reporter-at-large/the-slime-machine-targeting-dozens-of-biden-nominees
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Delusional.
--------------------------------------------------
Me: "Remember Covid?"
Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"
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