A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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PAGE 622 of 725
Quote:The GOP is delusional about climate change.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Delusional.
Republican state leaders are on the warpath against BlackRock, the largest financial asset manager in the nation. The company’s sin? Statements by BlackRock leadership that climate change is a long-term threat, and that the company will pursue investments that promote a reduction in emissions.
In January, West Virginia declared that it was barring the company from managing its state pension funds. Texas passed legislation in February prohibiting any firm divesting from fossil fuels from managing state assets. In March, the Arkansas State Treasurer March withdrew $125 million from money market accounts managed by BlackRock. This followed a letter last year sent by a dozen Republican state treasurers threatening to pull funds from banks that had made commitments in line with the Paris climate accord to stop financing new fossil fuel investments.
Despite Chairman Larry Fink’s bold statement, in his annual letter to CEOs, that “every government, company, and shareholder must confront climate change,” BlackRock pledged in a February letter to Texas officials, “We will continue to invest in and support fossil fuel companies.”
As a company holding investments in nearly every major firm in the nation, BlackRock’s change of tune did not amount to an actual change in policy—since the firm hadn’t actually divested from anything.
The reason red states are scrambling to pass such legislation and make these threats is because fossil fuel firms are facing disinvestment campaigns all over the country.
While pro-fossil-fuel red-state officials tout the $600 billion in pension and other financial assets they oversee, that’s a tiny fraction of the $5.6 trillion in public pension funds and related assets in 6,000 separate public-sector retirement systems across the nation.
“The assets of those who believe in climate change dwarf the assets of those that don’t,” observes David Walleck in dismissing the Texas and West Virginia threats.
Public tantrums by red-state officials reflect the climate change shifts by the financial sector, even if the steps actually taken by BlackRock and others are only the beginning of what is needed.
More at https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/blue-state-divestment-bl
ackrock/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Rep. Katie Porter @RepKatiePorter tweeted:
We have a tax gap because the richest Americans don't pay what they owe while the rest of us do.
In a hearing today, I quizzed the IRS Commissioner: how much have audits of millionaire taxpayers declined in the past 10 years?
For those playing along at home, leave your guess.
Sorry! This was actually a trick question... The correct answer is more than these: 66%.
The IRS Commissioner acknowledged that audits of millionaires have dropped by at least 66% in the past decade.
If the richest 1% of taxpayers paid what they owe, like the rest of us do, we could give every taxpayer $1000.
11:06 AM · Apr 21, 2022·Twitter Web App
https://twitter.com/repkatieporter/status/1517172835252375554
A New York Times investigation shows that President Donald Trump paid just $750 in federal taxes during the years straddling his 2017 inauguration, and none at all for 10 of 15 years before then. Trump dismissed the report as "fake news." But Trump has never revealed what he actually paid, although he promised many times to share his Form 1040 with the public, never keeping that promise.
Trump reported here income of at least $594 million for 2016 and early 2017 and assets worth at least $1.4 billion, in a financial disclosure in June 2017.
HOW THE U.S. BUDGET IS FUNDED
Individuals, whether they are self-employed or earn a paycheck from a small business or a giant corporation, foot most of the federal government’s bills.
Individual income tax funds U.S. federal spending:
Of the $3.46 trillion in receipts taken in by the U.S. Treasury during fiscal 2019, nearly half came from the $1.72 trillion in individual income taxes collected.
In addition, $1.24 trillion in Social Security and Medicare taxes were paid by individuals, bringing their share to 85%.
Taxes paid by corporations last year totaled $230 billion, or just 6.6% of the total in 2019. The remainder of federal revenues are made up from customs duties on imported goods, excise taxes such as those on gasoline, estate taxes and other miscellaneous taxes and fees.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-taxes-revenue-explainer/e
xplainer-the-4-trillion-u-s-government-relies-on-individual-taxpayers-idUSKBN26J30F
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Democrats, You Can’t Ignore the Culture Wars Any Longer
Diana Wolman, a schoolteacher in Brooklyn, was called before a Senate subcommittee to answer questions about alleged Communist membership while she worked for the U.S. Army Signal Corps in New Jersey in 1953.
Almost 60 years ago, the historian Richard Hofstadter described what he saw as the true goal of McCarthyism. “The real function of the Great Inquisition of the 1950s was not anything so simply rational as to turn up spies or prevent espionage,” he wrote, “or even to expose actual Communists, but to discharge resentments and frustrations, to punish, to satisfy enmities whose roots lay elsewhere than in the Communist issue itself.”
Likewise, in a much more recent book, “The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left,” the historian Landon R.Y. Storrs shows how conservatives used loyalty pledges to purge the federal bureaucracy of government officials “who hoped to advance economic and political democracy by empowering subordinated groups and setting limits on the pursuit of private profit.”
Left-leaning New Dealers in the federal government, she explains, “believed that race and gender inequality served employers by creating lower-status groups of workers who supposedly needed or deserved less, thereby applying downward pressure on all labor standards, including those of white men. They saw their mission as sweeping away beliefs and practices that were based on obsolete conditions but defended by those whose interests they continued to serve.”
The Red Scare is, in this view, less a sudden outburst of reactionary hysteria than a political project aimed directly at dismantling the New Deal order and ousting those who helped bring it into being, both inside and outside the federal government.
Without making a direct analogy between then and now, I think that this perspective is a useful one to have in mind as conservatives pursue yet another witch hunt against those they perceive as enemies of American society, using whatever state power they happen to have at their disposal. Both the crusade against “critical race theory” and the slanderous campaign against L.G.B.T.Q. educators and education are as much about undermining key public goods (and stigmatizing the people who support them) as they are about generating enthusiasm for the upcoming midterm elections.
To be clear, this isn’t some secret. Christopher Rufo, a right-wing provocateur who helped instigate both the panics against “critical race theory” and against L.G.B.T.Q. educators in schools, has openly said that he hopes to destroy public education in the United States. “We are right now preparing a strategy of laying siege to the institutions,” he said last November in an interview with my colleague Michelle Goldberg. In a recent speech, delivered to an audience at the conservative Hillsdale College, Rufo declared that “to get universal school choice you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.”
It’s not subtle.
Republican lawmakers are similarly open about why they ginned up this panic: to dismantle public education for political and ideological reasons. Last year, Republicans in Michigan backed a bill that would slash school funding if educators taught “critical race theory,” “anti-American” ideas about race in the United States or material from The New York Times’s 1619 Project.
More at https://web.archive.org/web/20220423011358/https://www.nytimes.com/202
2/04/22/opinion/red-scare-culture-wars.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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LOL
That's not the lesson Democrats should be learning.
But by all means, do go down that route and see how much worse you make it for yourselves.
I implore you.
--------------------------------------------------
Me: "Remember Covid?"
Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"
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We had our government shutdown in December 2018 and it lasted for over 30 days. I took this list of federal employees who’d been nominated for one of the awards they gave out every year and picked someone at random. Arthur A. Allen. He won the alphabet contest.
This is a guy who spent his whole career as the lone oceanographer in the Coast Guard search-and-rescue division, where he’d started in the late ’70s. There was a particular problem he was working on by himself, and the problem was costing a lot of American lives. It was people being lost at sea. The Coast Guard didn’t know how they drifted in the ocean. And Americans have this unbelievable talent for getting lost at sea, which is a whole other thing. On average, every day, the Coast Guard is saving 10 people who are lost in the sea and losing three. So you’re talking about thousands of people who are getting in this situation every year.
The problem is that if you fall off a boat into the ocean, you’re going to drift differently than if you are in a life raft, or if you’re on top of an overturned sailboat, or if you have a life vest on — you get the point. So if the Coast Guard knows where and when you started, as they often do, they should be able to predict where you are in the ocean four hours later, knowing the currents and the wind and your drift. But they didn’t know the drift, until Arthur A. Allen figured it all out. He spent years of his own free time tossing objects into the Long Island Sound, where he lives, measuring the specific drift of like 80 different categories of objects.
That all sounds boring and tedious, I know. But he reduced the drift to mathematical equations and embedded them in the search-and-rescue software program, and instantly they were able to find people they never would’ve found before. Thousands of Americans are alive because of Arthur A. Allen. And thousands of people are alive around the world because of the work he did here. No one knows who he is. No one pays any attention to him. They furloughed him as if he’s useless.
The punchline to all of this, to your point about the way we treat these experts who save our tails over and over again, is that when I went to go see Arthur to talk to him about what he had done with his life, I spent three days with him, interviewing his family, going to see his old office, going to the Long Island Sound to see where he dropped his objects, asking him every which way the story of his career.
After the three days, I’m going back to the airport to head home and he calls me and says, with real wonder in his voice, “Hey, you’re a published author.” And I said, “Yeah, yeah, I’m a published author.” He says, “You’re like a real deal. You’re a real writer.” And I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Are you going to be writing about me?” And I said, “Yeah, that’s why I spent three days learning how objects drift. Yes. I’m going to be writing about you.” He goes, “Wow. I didn’t expect to get any attention for this.” And I said, “Well, what did you think I was doing for those three days?” He said, “I just thought you were really interested in how objects drift.”
This is the mental world of the government expert. They’re so used to nobody caring about what they do, even when what they do is mission-critical, that they can’t imagine us even taking an interest in them. We so don’t value them that they don’t value themselves.
https://www.vox.com/vox-conversations-podcast/23030205/vox-conversatio
ns-michael-lewis-against-the-rules-experts
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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How the American middle class has changed in the past five decades
The middle class, once the economic stratum of a clear majority of American adults, has steadily contracted in the past five decades. The share of adults who live in middle-class households fell from 61% in 1971 to 50% in 2021.
In 1970, adults in middle-income households accounted for 62% of aggregate income, a share that fell to 42% in 2020.
Among adults overall, the share who were in the upper-income tier increased from 14% in 1971 to 21% in 2021.
Meanwhile, the share of aggregate income accounted for by upper-income households has increased steadily, from 29% in 1970 to 50% in 2020.
There is a sizable and growing income gap between adults with a bachelor’s degree and those with lower levels of education.
More at https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/04/20/how-the-american-midd
le-class-has-changed-in-the-past-five-decades/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Almost from the beginning, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” has presented a dominant narrative, recasting American racism to present white Americans as an oppressed caste. The ruling class uses fentanyl and other opioids to addict and kill legacy Americans, anti-white racism to cast them as bigots, feminism to degrade their self-esteem, immigration to erode their political power. Republican elites, however improbably, help to import the voters Democrats require at the ballot box. The United States, Mr. Carlson tells his viewers, is “ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule.”
He leaves little doubt who these mercenaries are. Among the most frequent recurring characters on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” are Black politicians like the Democratic congresswomen Maxine Waters and Ilhan Omar and Vice President Kamala Harris, whom Mr. Carlson has portrayed, against the available evidence, as a kind of shadow president. He regularly disparages Black women as stupid or undeserving of their positions. “No one outside of her own neighborhood had ever heard of Kamala Harris before she showed up as Willie Brown’s girlfriend,” Mr. Carlson said last November, referring to Ms. Harris’s long-ago relationship with the California politician. “Then a few years later, she became Montel Williams’s girlfriend. Interesting.” When President Biden nominated Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, Mr. Carlson demanded that the White House release her law school admissions test scores to prove she was qualified.
Seemingly every social ill is laid at the feet of immigrants and refugees — not just working-class unemployment, but rising home prices, out-of-wedlock births among native-born Americans, even the supposedly sorry state of his favorite Beltway fishing spots. With pastoral care, Mr. Carlson reassures his viewers. “It’s OK for you to say: ‘What is this?’ and ‘Maybe I don’t want to live in a country that looks nothing like the country I grew up in,’” Mr. Carlson told a guest in 2017. “Is that bigoted?”
Like his counterparts on the fringe, Mr. Carlson obsesses over Somali immigrants, who represent a tiny fraction of first-generation Americans but are at once Black, Muslim and foreign-born. One of the largest communities of Somali Americans, numbering several thousand people, lives less than an hour from his home in Maine, in the old mill city of Lewiston. In Mr. Carlson’s hands — as on sites like American Renaissance, which promotes “the biological reality of race” — Lewiston is a parable of replacement. Mr. Carlson has repeatedly depicted Somalis as threatening strangers deposited in a small, struggling city without the consent of its citizenry. “Go to Lowell, Mass., or Lewiston, Maine, or any place where large numbers of immigrants have been moved into a poor community, and it hasn’t become richer,” Mr. Carlson lectured a guest in 2017. “It’s become poorer. That’s real.”
In fact, according to Maine’s Labor Department, Lewiston’s unemployment rate has generally tracked that of the rest of the state, and the city has experienced neither a significant drop nor a surge in economic growth since the first Somalis arrived. And economists broadly reject Mr. Carlson’s central argument that immigration to the United States “drives down wages for low-skilled workers nationwide,” as he said in a 2019 segment. As one review of the relevant literature put it, “Decades of research have provided little support for the claim that immigrants depress wages by competing with native workers.” Immigrants compete for jobs but also help generate new ones, not only by raising demand for goods and services but also by helping fill out workplaces as they expand to hire native-born workers with different skills. While some studies have found that earlier waves of low-skill immigration may have had short-term impacts on the wages of one relatively small group — high school dropouts — other studies have found “small to zero effects,” as a landmark analysis by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine stated in
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Save it.
Nobody wants to hear from the racists at the dying NYT.
Pathetic.
--------------------------------------------------
Me: "Remember Covid?"
Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"
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Quote:Tucker Carlson has been calling blacks niggers all his life. Tucker gets angry that anyone would think he is a racist just because he hates niggers. Niggers earned Tucker's hatred according to Tucker. To Tucker, the real racists are the people who call Tucker a racist in Tucker's opinion. Whatever, but Tucker is a complete nutjob on the subject of race, which appeals to certain Americans who watch his show.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Save it.
Nobody wants to hear from the racists at the dying NYT.
Pathetic.
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:Quote:Tucker Carlson has been calling blacks niggers all his life. Tucker gets angry that anyone would think he is a racist just because he hates niggers. Niggers earned Tucker's hatred according to Tucker. To Tucker, the real racists are the people who call Tucker a racist in Tucker's opinion. Whatever, but Tucker is a complete nutjob on the subject of race, which appeals to certain Americans who watch his show.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Save it.
Nobody wants to hear from the racists at the dying NYT.
Pathetic.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Hey look.
Not black Second decides yet again that he's virtue-signaled enough this week to earn him the right to throw the word around half a dozen times.
Archived.
NOTE: There's a special place in your archive for these moments.
--------------------------------------------------
Me: "Remember Covid?"
Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"
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