A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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*yawn*
Thanks for another example that the Left can't meme.
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Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus
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This guy could pay every Republican Congressman $1 million per year. No reason to think he isn’t (IRS says it doesn't collect $1 trillion per year and asked Congress for help; IRS didn't get the help. GOP filibustered the IRS.):
Meet the Multi-Billionaire and Rising GOP Mega-Donor Who’s Gaming the Tax System
Investor Jeff Yass has avoided $1 billion in taxes while largely escaping public scrutiny. He’s now pouring his money into campaigns to cut taxes and support election deniers.
Jeffrey Yass and his friends found a way to outwit horse racetrack bookies, according to interviews, records and news accounts. They’d wagered $160,000, gambling that, with tens of thousands of bets, they could nail the exact order of seven horses in three different races. It was a sophisticated theory of the racing odds, honed with help from a Ph.D. statistician who’d worked for NASA on the moon landing, and it proved right. They bagged $760,000, then the richest payoff in American racing history.
Yass and his friends repeated variations of the strategy at horse and greyhound tracks around the country. Then they decided to turn their focus from a world of hundreds of thousands of dollars to a world of billions: Wall Street.
Four decades later, the firm he and his friends founded, Susquehanna International Group, is a sprawling global company that makes billions of dollars. Yass and his team used their numerical expertise to make rapid-fire computer-driven trades in options and other securities, eventually becoming a giant middleman in the markets for stocks and other securities.
One crucial aspect of his ascent to stratospheric wealth has transpired out of public view. Using the same prowess that he’s applied to race tracks and options markets, Yass has taken aim at another target: his tax bill.
Yass paid an average federal income tax rate of just 19%, far below that of comparable Wall Street traders. Yass’ low rate is particularly notable because Susquehanna, by its own description, specializes in short-term trading. Money made from such rapid trades is typically taxed at rates around 40%.
Democratic Congressmen long tried to stamp out widely used techniques that seek to transform profits taxed at the high rate into profits taxed at the low rate. But Yass and his colleagues have managed to avoid higher taxes anyway. (By paying Republican Congressman to filibuster the changes to tax law.)
The tax savings have contributed to an explosion in wealth for Yass, who has increasingly poured that fortune into candidates and causes on the political right. He has spent more than $100 million on election campaigns in recent years. The money has gone to everything from anti-tax advocacy and charter schools to campaigns against so-called critical race theory and for candidates who falsely say the 2020 election was stolen and seek to ban abortion.
Gregg Polsky, a University of Georgia law professor and former corporate tax lawyer who was retained by ProPublica to review Susquehanna’s tax records, said the tax strategies were “very suspicious and suggestive of potential abuse that should be examined by the IRS.”
More at https://www.propublica.org/article/jeff-yass-susquehanna-tiktok-tax-av
oidance
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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How Charles Koch Purchased the Supreme Court’s EPA Decision
Decades of contributions aimed at influencing the judiciary bought the fossil fuel billionaire the ruling he’s always wanted.
June 30 2022, 12:36 p.m.
Today’s 6-3 Supreme Court decision restricting the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon emissions will benefit power plants and fossil fuel companies throughout the U.S. and profoundly hobble the government’s ability to address the worsening climate catastrophe.
The decision, written by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh, finds that the EPA does not have the authority to impose caps on carbon emissions by mandating a shift to cleaner energy sources. The ruling means that Congress, rather than the EPA and its staff of scientific experts, will handle the critical task of curbing greenhouse gas emissions.
“Today, the Court strips the EPA of the power Congress gave it to respond to ‘the most pressing environmental challenge of our time,’” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer. “Whatever else this Court may know about, it does not have a clue about how to address climate change. Yet the Court today prevents congressionally authorized agency action to curb power plants’ carbon dioxide emissions. The Court appoints itself—instead of Congress or the expert agency—the decisionmaker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening.”
A number of energy magnates and fossil fuel trade groups pushed for the case that could kneecap the agency and boost their profits. But perhaps no one did more to bring West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency to the Supreme Court — or ensure that ultraconservative justices would be on the bench to decide in the companies’ favor — than Charles Koch.
The billionaire energy executive who reigns over Koch Industries is known for playing the long game. He bought up pipelines in advance of the fracking boom — and waited calmly until they delivered billions in profits. He invested in obscure, failing companies even though he knew that it would take years before they could add to his bottom line. And he has been cautious as he’s ventured into new markets — his empire now includes glass, pulp and paper, chemicals, agricultural products, and commodities trading — making small acquisitions to see if they’d be profitable before gradually taking over.
Such patience and strategic use of his enormous wealth have benefited Koch handsomely. His net worth has steadily climbed to more than $60 billion. Koch Industries, which makes more than half of its money from fossil fuels and owns refineries, petrochemical plants, and thousands of miles of oil and gas pipelines, is now the second-biggest privately held company in the country.
To ensure further growth of his riches even as science showed that the continued use of fossil fuels would accelerate climate disaster, Koch has funneled some of his vast fortune into an extraordinary network of political front groups, lobbying efforts, think tanks, and activist networks that aim to stifle climate action.
More at https://web.archive.org/web/20220630235944/https://theintercept.com/20
22/06/30/supreme-court-epa-climate-charles-koch/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Nightmare Scenario SCOTUS is Plotting For the 2024 Election Takeover
This scenario isn’t just plausible: it’s probable. GOP-controlled states are already changing their state laws to allow for it, regardless of how their people vote
Six Republicans on the Supreme Court just announced — a story that has largely flown under the nation’s political radar — that they’ll consider pre-rigging the presidential election of 2024.
Here’s how one aspect of it could work out, if they go along with the GOP’s arguments that will be before the Court this October:
It’s November, 2024, and the presidential race between Biden and DeSantis has been tabulated by the states and called by the networks. Biden won 84,355,740 votes to DeSantis’ 77,366,412, clearly carrying the popular vote.
But the popular vote isn’t enough: George W. Bush lost to Al Gore by a half-million votes and Donald Trump lost to Hillary Clinton by 3 million votes but both ended up in the White House. What matters is the Electoral College vote, and that looks good for Biden, too.
As CNN is reporting, the outcome is a virtual clone of the 2020 election: Biden carries the same states he did that year and DeSantis gets all the Trump states. It’s 306 to 232 in the Electoral College, a 74-vote Electoral College lead for Biden, at least as calculated by CNN and the rest of the media. Biden is heading to the White House for another 4 years.
Until the announcement comes out of Georgia. Although Biden won the popular vote in Georgia, their legislature decided it can overrule the popular vote and just awarded the state’s 16 electoral votes to DeSantis instead of Biden.
An hour later we hear from five other states with Republican-controlled legislatures where Biden won the majority of the vote, just like he had in 2020: North Carolina (15 electoral votes), Wisconsin (10), Michigan (16), Pennsylvania (20) and Arizona (11).
Each has followed Georgia’s lead and their legislatures have awarded their Electoral College votes — even though Biden won the popular vote in each state — to DeSantis.
Thus, a total of 88 Electoral College votes from those six states move from Biden to DeSantis, who’s declared the winner and will be sworn in on January 20, 2025.
Wolf Blitzer announces that DeSantis has won the election, and millions of people pour into the streets to protest. They’re met with a hail of bullets as Republican-affiliated militias have been rehearsing for this exact moment.
Just as happened when Pinochet’s militias shot into crowds as he took over Chile, Mussolini’s volunteer militia the Blackshirts killed civilians as he took over Italy, and Hitler’s volunteer Brownshirts did the same in Germany, their allies among the police refuse to intervene.
After a few thousand people lay dead in the streets of two dozen cities, the police begin to round up the surviving “instigators,” who are charged with seditious conspiracy for resisting the Republican legislatures of their states.
After he’s sworn in on January 20th, President DeSantis points to the ongoing demonstrations, declares a permanent state of emergency, and suspends future elections, just as Trump had repeatedly told the world he planned for 2020.
Sound far fetched?
Six Republicans on the Supreme Court just announced that one of the first cases they’ll decide next year could include whether that very scenario is constitutional or not. And at least 5 of the Republicans on this Court will almost certainly say that it is.
Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution lays out the process clearly, and it doesn’t even once mention the popular vote or the will of the people:
“Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress... [emphasis added]
“The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons … which List they shall sign and
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America Is Growing Apart
It may be time to stop talking about “red” and “blue” America. That’s the provocative conclusion of Michael Podhorzer, a longtime political strategist for labor unions and the chair of the Analyst Institute, a collaborative of progressive groups that studies elections. In a private newsletter that he writes for a small group of activists, Podhorzer recently laid out a detailed case for thinking of the two blocs as fundamentally different nations uneasily sharing the same geographic space.
“When we think about the United States, we make the essential error of imagining it as a single nation, a marbled mix of Red and Blue people,” Podhorzer writes. “But in truth, we have never been one nation. We are more like a federated republic of two nations: Blue Nation and Red Nation. This is not a metaphor; it is a geographic and historical reality.” . . .
The big story remains that blue states are benefiting more as the nation transitions into a high-productivity, 21st-century information economy, and red states (apart from their major metropolitan centers participating in that economy) are suffering as the powerhouse industries of the 20th century — agriculture, manufacturing, and fossil-fuel extraction — decline. (Biden-voting counties equal 70% of America’s economy. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/11/09/biden-voting-coun
ties-equal-70-of-americas-economy-what-does-this-mean-for-the-nations-political-economic-divide/ )
The gross domestic product per person and the median household income are now both more than 25 percent greater in the blue section than in the red, according to Podhorzer’s calculations. The share of kids in poverty is more than 20 percent lower in the blue section than red, and the share of working households with incomes below the poverty line is nearly 40 percent lower. Health outcomes are diverging too. Gun deaths are almost twice as high per capita in the red places as in the blue, as is the maternal mortality rate. The COVID vaccination rate is about 20 percent higher in the blue section, and the per capita COVID death rate is about 20 percent higher in the red. Life expectancy is nearly three years greater in the blue (80.1 years) than the red (77.4) states. (On most of these measures, the purple states, fittingly, fall somewhere in between.)
Per capita spending on elementary and secondary education is almost 50 percent higher in the blue states compared with red. All of the blue states have expanded access to Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, while about 60 percent of the total red-nation population lives in states that have refused to do so. All of the blue states have set a minimum wage higher than the federal level of $7.25, while only about one-third of the red-state residents live in places that have done so. Right-to-work laws are common in the red states and nonexistent in the blue, with the result that the latter have a much higher share of unionized workers than the former. No state in the blue section has a law on the books banning abortion before fetal viability, while almost all of the red states are poised to restrict abortion rights if the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority, as expected, overturns Roe v. Wade. Almost all of the red states have also passed “stand your ground” laws backed by the National Rifle Association, which provide a legal defense for those who use weapons against a perceived threat, while none of the blue states have done so.
The flurry of socially conservative laws that red states have passed since 2021, on issues such as abortion; classroom discussions of race, gender, and sexual orientation; and LGBTQ rights, is widening this split. No Democratic-controlled state has passed any of those measures.
Lilliana Mason, a Johns Hopkins University political scientist, told me that the experience of Jim Crow segregation offers an important reference point for understanding how far red states might take this movement to roll back civil rights and liberties—not that they literally would seek to restore segr
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
After he’s sworn in on January 20th, President DeSantis points to the ongoing demonstrations, declares a permanent state of emergency, and suspends future elections, just as Trump had repeatedly told the world he planned for 2020.
Trump NEVER once said this.
Also, Trump will be your next President.
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Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus
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Quote:Not if DeSantis kicks Trump's fat ass. By the way, Trump did say it and DeSantis can use it to kick Trump's fat ass. DeSantis can also blame Trump for the Supreme Court, which destroyed some very popular policies:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
After he’s sworn in on January 20th, President DeSantis points to the ongoing demonstrations, declares a permanent state of emergency, and suspends future elections, just as Trump had repeatedly told the world he planned for 2020.
Trump NEVER once said this.
Also, Trump will be your next President.
The supreme court adjourned on Thursday, after a week of decisions that blew up much of the framework of American policy and politics. The court’s targets were adopted in a few short years in the 1960s and 1970s.
Roe v Wade dates to 1973, the fruit of many year’s work by committed feminists. Thursday’s attack on the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate greenhouse gases guts the Clean Air Act, which in its strong form dates from 1970 – indeed, both that law and the EPA itself were the result of the first Earth Day protests in April of that year, which drew 20 million Americans (10% of the country’s population in those days) into the streets demanding action. Even firearms sanity, badly weakened once more in last week’s decision on concealed carry permits, reached its zenith in 1968 with the passage of the Gun Control Act in response to the assassinations of that turbulent year.
It’s pretty clear that some on the high court have other gains from that era in their sights: Justice Clarence Thomas singled out the 1960s protections for contraception, and the drive for equal rights for LGBTQ+ people that broke into the open at the Stonewall protests in 1969. And the court and conservative legislatures have worked steadily to undermine the protections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, restricting the franchise that the civil rights movement had once worked so powerfully to extend.
This attack on the political and cultural transformations of that remarkable period should remind us that with committed effort change really can come fast. All who witnessed these transformations now watch as they are washed away.
There are 70 million Americans over the age of 60 (and 10,000 more every day). They vote in huge numbers, and they have most of the wealth – about 70% of the country’s financial assets. So both Washington and Wall Street would need to worry if they re-emerged as a force for progress.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/03/us-supreme-court
-term-roe-v-wade
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Not if DeSantis kicks Trump's fat ass. By the way, Trump did say it and DeSantis can use it to kick Trump's fat ass.
Originally posted by second:Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
After he’s sworn in on January 20th, President DeSantis points to the ongoing demonstrations, declares a permanent state of emergency, and suspends future elections, just as Trump had repeatedly told the world he planned for 2020.
Trump NEVER once said this.
Also, Trump will be your next President.
No. Trump didn't say it.
DeSantis won't kick Trump's ass. He's a hopeful for a future President, but the best thing he can do for himself is support Trump's reelection.
Trump WANTS the job. DeSantis has no interest filling that seat with all of the problems that Democrats will be laying in his lap. He's still young. He's got plenty of time to let Trump and maybe even one other person fix all the shit that Democrats have been destroying before he gets the job.
I do find it hilarious that both you and Cap'n now have started talking positive about DeSantis. That's exactly what your Leftist Media Masters have been telling you to think and say.
I wonder if you even notice it when they do it anymore, or if it's just automatic?
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Every day just spells out more doom for Democrats.
Ba da ba ba ba..... I'm lovin' it!
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July 4, 2022 -- There is currently a documentary series on HBO Max called, The Way Down, which chronicles the religious (cult?) leader, Gwen Shamblin Lara. She founded and became wealthy from a large, evangelical church in Tennessee with a strange emphasis on weight loss. It’s a good series if you’re into the anthropological study of how so many seemingly normal people can fall for an obvious charlatan, but all that aside, you have to see her hair. It’s the biggest thing you’ve likely ever seen growing out of a living person’s head.
It’s difficult not to notice how many people in positions of dubious authority wear big, crazy hair. I’ve not made a scientific study of this but it seems to me that TV evangelists are traditionally the most famous for this and, since that group grew from the rural American faithful, the early ones were likely imitating a group that rural Americans already adored, country-western singers. But I think there is something deeper at work here than simple celebrity impersonation. I’ll get to that in a minute.
First, if you tune into any number of Christian preacher shows on TV, you’ll likely see the men strutting around with pompadours of power, while their wives are parading an imposing tower of protein above their pates as well. I’m not sure if this is a trick we borrowed from other species or if it is also evolutionarily ingrained in us, but it works. We see it in politicians of late, too. I think it is no coincidence that Donald Trump and Boris Johnson both sport absurd cockscombs.
Is it a coincidence that the leader of a troupe of apes is the male with the biggest, most colorful or bulbous face? . . . I think a similar concept is at play with politicians.
I’ve also noticed this trick works better with conservatives than with liberals and, not surprisingly, I have a theory about that, too. If you’re looking for a leader who is intelligent, well-educated, compassionate, who embraces science, honors the environment, and cares about making the world a better place, you’re going to go for the nebbishy guy with glasses, or the sensible, well-spoken woman with a sophisticated style. But if you’re looking for an authority figure, someone who will take charge and protect you from the myriad things you are afraid of (modern conservative politics are all about “fear of other”) you want the person who is in your face and can physically dominate and intimidate others. It’s also a common animal response when threatened to puff themselves up and make themselves look larger. Giant hair achieves this, too. It is intimidating to others, aggressive even. If you’re face-to-face with a person whose weird hairdo towers above you and you are a normal, polite person, you are at their mercy. They can say and do whatever they want because you’re using all your energy not to stare at their crazy hair or comment on it. You have no idea what they’re saying because you can’t stop thinking, Is this person serious?!
Additionally, outlandish costumes are a traditional sign of authority. Big hair can be seen as a tonsorial substitute for a uniform with a disco mirrorball of medals and brass buttons, and a big Napoleon hat or a crown. And the same subconscious assumption is at work here as it is in the animal kingdom: if this guy can rise through the ranks of successful powerholders looking like a complete idiot, and not get laughed out of the room, he must be a real badass! Plus, he’s easy to spot in a crowd, so I’ll have no trouble following him.
If America continues on its collision course with theocracy, and if Gwen Shamblin had not perished in a plane crash, she may have been its first female president. I suppose there is some small consolation in knowing we’ve dodged at least that bullet.
Happy Independence Day! -- https://www.bizarro.com/blog/2022/7/4/hidden-meanings
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