A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Was piratenews Responsible for 'Pizzagate'?
maybe there is nothing to that conspiracy yet maybe there is something
or does the old senile guy just look weird and grabby in photos
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Quote:Signym, do you even follow American politics? All of FDR's best legislation got zero votes from Republicans. Republicans are still giving zero votes for worthy programs:
Originally posted by SignyM:
Remember, pity (and many government programs) would be no more (or not so big) if someone were not MAKING someone poor. FDR wasn't supporting "the people" with his government programs, he was trying to save "capitalism" (such as it was) from itself (and the huge wealth inequality it had built up.)
A Climate Bill becomes law despite no Republicans in either House of Congress voting for it
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/inflation-reductio
n-act-passes-house-1396429/
Three and a half years ago, an open letter that more than 3,600 economists eventually signed declared that “climate change is a serious problem calling for immediate national action.” The signatories included 15 former chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers, more than half of whom served under Republican presidents — a display of bipartisanship that contrasts sharply with the lock-step opposition of Republicans in Congress to the national action we’re finally taking in the form of the Inflation Reduction Act (I.R.A. which, despite its name, is mainly a climate bill) that President Biden is expected to sign today.
While we’re getting action, however, that action isn’t taking the form called for in the letter. That huge array of economists agreed that climate change mitigation should take the form of a carbon tax — a fee levied on businesses and individuals who emit greenhouse gases. This, the letter argued, was the remedy recommended by “sound economic principles.” But the I.R.A. doesn’t include a carbon tax, nor does it introduce a system of tradable emissions permits, which would provide similar incentives.
Instead, the act relies almost entirely on subsidies intended to promote clean energy, offering tax credits for renewable energy, aid to keep nuclear plants operating, incentives to buy electric vehicles and make homes more energy efficient and more.
So what happened to the carbon tax idea? Biden administration officials are well aware of the Econ 101 case for emission taxes. Indeed, Janet Yellen, the Treasury secretary, and Cecilia Rouse, the current C.E.A. chair, were among the letter’s signatories. I also understand that logic — in fact, the introductory economics textbook I wrote with Robin Wells makes that argument in some detail. But a few months after the letter was released I made the case in a Twitter thread against being a “carbon tax purist,” arguing that an exclusive focus on carbon taxes was “dubious economics and bad political economy.”
And in practice Democrats ignored the carbon tax route. Why?
More at https://web.archive.org/web/20220817011402/https://www.nytimes.com/202
2/08/16/opinion/carbon-tax.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Brian Schatz @brianschatz
I feel like the media is having a hard time metabolizing the fact that this congress has been historically productive. And acknowledging the size of these accomplishments, and the degree of difficultly, - it’s just hard to do accurately without sounding a bit left leaning.
Like, Postal Reform was such a standing, seemingly unsolvable issue for every congress for a decade it seemed not doable. Done.
We all know the difficulty of passing an infrastructure bill, which while popular and necessary, proved elusive for W and Obama and Trump. Done.
The taking care of veterans who have had toxic exposure, especially burn pits, was also something being pushed for many years with no success. Done.
Violence Against Women Act reauthorization with new provisions for Indian Country. Biggest investment in native communities ever. Done.
We all now know what’s in IRA, and CHIPS, but when you add all of this up, it’s not just a lot of bills. Each one of these was thorny, complicated, difficulty, and ambitious.
4:12 PM · Aug 16, 2022·Twitter for iPhone
https://twitter.com/brianschatz/status/1559649238220300289
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:
it’s just hard to do accurately without sounding a bit left leaning.
Understatement of the year.
Get fucked, Brian. You'll never see Democrats in charge again in your life.
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Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus
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Quote:How would you know, unless you had a violent plan that involved controlling how the votes are counted? But there is a violent plan! ‘It’s going to be an army’: Tapes reveal GOP plan to contest elections
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Get fucked, Brian. You'll never see Democrats in charge again in your life.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/01/gop-contest-elections-tapes-0
0035758
The Republican party is increasingly unwilling to accept defeat and, in fact, is "prepared to win by sacrificing the essential elements of democracy."
https://www.npr.org/2021/12/09/1062683521/journalist-says-republicans-
now-have-more-reliable-ways-to-overturn-election-res
For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220817132701/https://www.theatlantic.com
/magazine/archive/2022/01/january-6-insurrection-trump-coup-2024-election/620843/
6ix, at least on paper, it looks like the Republican Party has stolen control over who gets elected.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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How dangerous is today’s Republican Party? Very, ex-CIA Director Michael Hayden believes
Published: Aug. 17, 2022 at 9:25 p.m. ET at MarketWatch.com
Hayden and other former military leaders warned last month that American democracy ‘is in real peril’
Retired Gen. Michael Hayden, the former director of both the CIA and NSA, has called out the Republican Party as extremist and dangerous, on an unprecedented level.
Hayden, a retired Air Force general who was named director of the National Security Agency under the Clinton administration and CIA director by former President George W. Bush, was among five former top military officials who penned a USA Today op-ed last month warning that American democracy “is in real peril” following the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection and the way the Republican party has embraced conspiracy theorists, 2020 election deniers and extremist elements.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/contributors/2022/06/22/america
n-democracy-former-cia-director/7685947001/
“For those of us focused on domestic security, the forces of autocracy now trump traditional foreign threats, hands down,” they wrote, citing an alarming study earlier this year that found one in three Americans believe violence against the government could be justified.
A number of prominent Republicans have joined Hayden in decrying the state of the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s degree of influence in it.
Former Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday pleaded with fellow Republicans to tone down their rhetoric against the FBI following last week’s search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home.
Law enforcement officials have warned in recent days that angry words from Trump and his allies are putting agents, officers and federal employees at risk of violence. Violent rhetoric may have contributed to at least two deadly encounters with law enforcement over the past week.
More at https://web.archive.org/web/20220818014944/https://www.marketwatch.com
/story/how-dangerous-is-todays-republican-party-very-ex-cia-director-michael-hayden-believes-11660785930
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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What every single Republican in the House and Senate opposed.
They don’t want seniors’ out-of-pocket prescription drug costs capped at $2,000 a year — not if it means Amazon has to pay a 15% tax on its profits. They don’t want us to join the world in confronting climate change — not if, to pay for it, the IRS will be given the resources to assure greater compliance by corporations and the wealthy. They don’t want the deficit reduced — not if it means a 1% excise tax on corporate stock buy-backs.
Republicans rejected it all, unanimously.
But we won.
What Biden Has — and Hasn’t — Done
Aug. 18, 2022, 7:00 p.m. ET
At this point Biden is arguably benefiting from the soft bigotry of low expectations. His policy achievements are big by modern standards, but they wouldn’t have seemed astounding in an earlier era — the era before the radicalization of the Republican Party made it almost impossible to pursue real solutions to real problems.
So, what has Biden accomplished?
As I see it, he came into office with three main domestic policy goals: investing in America’s fraying infrastructure, taking serious action against climate change and expanding the social safety net, especially for families with children. He got most of two and a bit of the third.
Last year’s infrastructure bill gets remarkably little media attention; only about a quarter of voters even know that it passed. But we should remember that Barack Obama wanted to invest in infrastructure but couldn’t; Donald Trump promised to do it but didn’t (and “It’s infrastructure week!” became a running joke); then Biden got it done.
By contrast, the Inflation Reduction Act, which is mainly a climate law, has received a lot of attention, and deservedly so. America is finally taking action against the biggest existential threat of our times. Energy experts believe that it will have large direct effects in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
These are significant achievements, and a big contrast with the last administration, whose only major domestic policy change was a tax cut that had almost no visible positive effects.
But when I see news reports describe these laws as “massive” or huge, I wonder whether the writers have done the math. The infrastructure law will add roughly $500 billion in spending over the next decade. The Inflation Reduction Act will increase spending by roughly an additional half trillion. A law to promote U.S. semiconductor production will add around $50 billion more. Overall, then, we’re talking about a bit more than $1 trillion in public investment over 10 years.
To put this in perspective, the Congressional Budget Office expects cumulative gross domestic product to be more than $300 trillion over the next decade. So the Biden agenda will amount to around one-third of one percent of G.D.P. Massive it isn’t.
True, some of what Biden has done may have effects much bigger than the dollar sums might suggest. There are reasons to hope that the climate law will have a sort of catalytic effect in promoting a transition to clean energy. And some economists believe that boosting the budget of the resource-starved Internal Revenue Service will greatly reduce tax evasion and hence increase revenue.
And can we say a word about foreign policy? Biden got immense flak over the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, although the critics offered few suggestions about what he should have done differently. But the narrative on foreign affairs has changed, too; I’m no expert, but it looks to me as if the Biden administration has done a remarkable job assembling and holding together a coalition to help Ukraine resist Russian aggression.
OK, I can already hear people yelling in response to any citation of Biden’s achievements, what about inflation? Indeed, the Biden administration failed to appreciate the risks of an inflation surge. However, so did many others, including the Federal Reserve (and yours truly). And it does seem worth pointing out that other countries, notably Britain, are also suffering from high inflation, even thoug
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Fuck your Newsspeak. Only Democrat voters are dumb enough to believe anything in that wall of text you wrote above.
Good thing for Americans that Democrats will never be in power again once November rolls around.
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Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus
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Quote:Back in Texas, Trumptards make all kinds of optimistic predictions about the future of Trump and the Republican party. But when the predictions fail, they claim "Fake News" and that Democrats cheated Republicans out of their winnings. That is pretty much why the Democrats I know are at least twice as rich as the Trumptards. Trumptards accusing Democrats of stealing what Trumptards think is theirs is why Trumptards aren't rich. You Trumptards never understand that your relative poverty compared to white Democrats is because Trumptards are stupid, lazy, obnoxious, drunken, poor white trash.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Fuck your Newsspeak. Only Democrat voters are dumb enough to believe anything in that wall of text you wrote above.
Good thing for Americans that Democrats will never be in power again once November rolls around.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Ah, the old strawman- ad hominem "Trumptards believe" shtick.
Originally posted by second:Quote:Back in Texas, Trumptards make all kinds of optimistic predictions about the future of Trump and the Republican party. But when the predictions fail, they claim "Fake News" and that Democrats cheated Republicans out of their winnings. That is pretty much why the Democrats I know are at least twice as rich as the Trumptards. Trumptards accusing Democrats of stealing what Trumptards think is theirs is why Trumptards aren't rich. You Trumptards never understand that your relative poverty compared to white Democrats is because Trumptards are stupid, lazy, obnoxious, drunken, poor white trash.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Fuck your Newsspeak. Only Democrat voters are dumb enough to believe anything in that wall of text you wrote above.
Good thing for Americans that Democrats will never be in power again once November rolls around.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Really, SECOND, be the best troll you can be.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake
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