A thread for Democrats Only
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UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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The G.O.P.’s Long War Against Medicare and Social Security
Feb. 13, 2023, 7:00 p.m. ET
Politically, the most crucial moment in President Biden’s State of the Union address was his declaration that “some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset every five years.” Why did he say that? Maybe because Senator Rick Scott, when he was the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, released a fiscal plan last year with the bullet point “All federal legislation sunsets in five years.”
Seems straightforward, doesn’t it, despite cries of “lies” from the floor? But right-wing news media — well aware that Biden hit a nerve — has gone into overdrive insisting that his claim was false. Even some mainstream media figures have claimed that Biden was “over the top.”
The basis for these denunciations, as far as I can tell, is the idea that calling a plan to sunset legislation a plan to sunset legislation is somehow misleading, because voters don’t know what “sunset” means. Indeed, just because the legislation authorizing a program comes to an end needn’t mean that the program will die; Congress can always vote to reinstate it.
But, of course, many Republicans do want to eviscerate these programs. To believe otherwise requires both willful naïveté and amnesia about 40 years of political history.
First of all, if Republicans had absolutely no desire to make major cuts to America’s main social insurance programs, why would they sunset them — and thus create the risk that they wouldn’t be renewed? As Biden might say, c’mon, man.
And then there’s that historical record. Two things have been true ever since 1980. First, Republicans have tried to make deep cuts to Social Security and Medicare every time they thought there might be a political window of opportunity. Second, on each occasion they’ve done exactly what they’re doing now: claiming that Democrats are engaged in smear tactics when they describe G.O.P. plans using exactly the same words Republicans themselves used.
So, about that history. It has been widely forgotten, but soon after taking office Ronald Reagan proposed major cuts to Social Security. But he backed down in the face of a political backlash, leading analysts at the Cato Institute to call for a “Leninist” strategy — their word — creating a coalition ready to exploit a future crisis if and when one arrived.
To that end, Cato created the Project on Social Security Privatization, calling for replacing Social Security with individual accounts — which George W. Bush tried to do in 2005. By then, however, Cato had quietly renamed its project; “privatization” polled badly, and Bush insisted that it was a “trick word” used to “scare people.”
So there’s a history here, and there’s a similar history for Medicare. Many people probably recall that Newt Gingrich shut down the federal government in 1995. I don’t know how many people realize that Gingrich’s key demand was that President Bill Clinton agree to large cuts in Medicare and Medicaid.
After Republicans gained control of the House in 2010, Paul Ryan began pushing for major cuts in spending. One key element was converting Medicare from a system that pays medical bills to a system offering people fixed sums of money to be applied to the purchase of private insurance — that is, vouchers.
But many though not all supporters of the Ryan plan insisted that calling vouchers “vouchers” was a left-wing smear.
So are people who claim that Biden was over the top unaware of this track record? Do they really not know that Republicans have spent more than four decades trying to find ways to undermine Medicare and Social Security? Are they unaware that there’s a long history of Republicans whining that Democrats are engaged in smear tactics when they describe Republican policies using exactly the same words Republicans used themselves until political consultants urged them to find euphemisms?
Well, I don’t think Biden is going to let up. He knows (as do his hysterical opponents) that his attacks are effective, and he h
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Ronald Reagan predicted that Medicare would destroy freedom.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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How a Black veteran desegregated a Texas medical school
STAT spoke with Gamble about a new paper she published on Herman A. Barnett III, a Black veteran who desegregated the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston in 1949. Technically, Barnett was admitted to the school on a contract basis — to uphold racial segregation, the university leadership planned to build an entirely separate medical school for Black students where Barnett would be required to transfer. But that school was never built, and Barnett graduated from UTMB in 1953.
Texas was the only place where they appropriated the money for the separate medical school. North Carolina wanted to do it. They passed legislation, but they didn’t appropriate the money. So Texas was different.
Even though Barnett was a part of the school, and he did well, there was still segregation. He had to sit at a desk by himself. He could only see patients at the Black hospital.
The other part about Dr. Barnett’s story that’s connected to the broader civil rights narrative is that he was a vet. He had been a Tuskegee airman. So one of the major narratives of the civil rights movement and the medical civil rights movement was: here were these people who had fought, had served their country, and could not get into a veteran’s hospital for whites only.
There’s a quote you found in your research, where somebody joked, “What was the state going to do when a Negro applied for a medical education — build him a whole medical school?” And then that’s exactly what UTMB tried to do. What can we learn today from this story?
More at https://www.statnews.com/2023/02/14/medical-school-desegregation-herma
n-barnett/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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All this talk about desegregation and all I ever hear from Black Democrats is how they don't want any white people around 'em.
Funny that, huh?
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Quote:You heard blacks complaining about "angry poor white trash Trumptards" but misinterpreted what you heard.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
All this talk about desegregation and all I ever hear from Black Democrats is how they don't want any white people around 'em.
Funny that, huh?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You heard blacks complaining about "angry poor white trash Trumptards" but misinterpreted what you heard.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
All this talk about desegregation and all I ever hear from Black Democrats is how they don't want any white people around 'em.
Funny that, huh?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
I suppose there are a lot of "Trumptards" at Uni, huh?
Forbes: Black And Brown Students Are In Need Of Safe Spaces On Campus!
https://www.forbes.com/sites/civicnation/2021/08/11/black-and-brown-st
udents-are-in-need-of-safe-spaces-on-campus/?sh=47fa10936000
The Atlantic: The Fine Line Between Safe Space and Segregation
Schools want black students to feel welcome, but sometimes their attempts go awry.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/08/finding-the-line
-between-safe-space-and-segregation/496289/
Diverse Issues in Higher Education: Creating Antiracist Spaces Where Black Students Can Breathe and Thrive
https://www.diverseeducation.com/demographics/african-american/article
/15107570/creating-antiracist-spaces-where-black-students-can-breathe-and-thrive
The Washington Post: A group demanded a space for students of color. Now they say they’re being called racists.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/03/01/a-group-
demanded-a-space-for-students-of-color-now-they-say-theyre-being-called-racists/
The Fire: Trend of racially segregated campus events is putting institutions on dangerous legal ground
https://www.thefire.org/news/trend-racially-segregated-campus-events-p
utting-institutions-dangerous-legal-ground
I don't think any Trumptards were lining up to see Wakanda Forever, for that matter...
This dumb college brainwashed racist bitch wasn't talking to Trumptards here. She knows goddamned well they wouldn't even see the movie, let alone listen to her speak for 10 seconds. She was giving marching orders to all the college "educated" pink haired twitter weirdos and their soy-cucked, virgins-for-life, friend-zoned, future rapist, chemically castrated, feminist, white, "male" friends.
FYI... WesSideLive is not a Democrat retard and he just earned himself another subscriber here.
And you, Second... Get fucked, you idiot. Every time we talk I end up destroying you.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Assume the Worst: The Graduation Speech You’ll Never Hear
This commencement address will never be given, because graduation speakers are supposed to offer encouragement and inspiration.
That’s not what you need. You need a warning.
After an uncommonly long career observing and writing about misbehavior, I have one piece of advice as you launch yourselves from college: Assume the worst.
Based on the last six thousand years of human history, it’s the only sensible way to proceed. Lowering your expectations will inoculate you against serial disappointments. It will also set you up for heart-lifting surprises on those occasions when someone you meet turns out to be unexpectedly honorable, generous and selfless.
If I were actually standing at a podium, looking out at a sea of young hope-filled faces, I’d begin with a raw appraisal of the real world: It’s pretty fucked up.
It was fucked up when I graduated, too, but not this bad. Our vernacular contained no such terms as “active shooter,” “ISIS-inspired” or “viral cat video.”
Still, I’d bet that even the brightest of you would sit there thinking—as past generations have—okay, it’s got to get better.
I’m here to say: No, it doesn’t.
And where did you get such a tender idea?
The day I got out of college, in 1974, a vainglorious paranoid was in the White House, shredding the U.S. Constitution for toilet paper. There was a futile and tragic overseas war, hatred and bloodshed in the Middle East, dissent and injustice on the streets of America.
Ring a bell?
The forces of indifference, incompetence and evil — yup, it exists — are thriving in the twenty-first century. No matter what good things you try to do, you’re in for a slog.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t dream of making an impact. Just understand that the odds are stacked against you.
One key to meaningful achievement is disregarding the lame platitudes you’ll hear in real commencement speeches, group therapy and self-help podcasts:
1. Live each day as if it’s your last.
As wise and appealing as this might sound, it’s actually terrible advice. If you live every day as if it’s your last, you won’t accomplish a damn thing.
Spending all your waking hours doing only what feels good is a viable life plan if you’re a Labrador retriever, but for humans it’s a blueprint for unemployment, divorce and irrelevance.
Download the book for free from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.bio/search.php?req=Roz+Chast
or https://www.amazon.com/Assume-Worst-Graduation-Speech-Youll/dp/0525655
018/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Letters from an American
February 22, 2023 https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-22-2023
Heather Cox Richardson
Feb 23
Last week’s court filing in the Dominion Voting Systems case proved that Fox News Channel personalities knew full well that Joe Biden had won the 2020 presidential election. They pushed Trump’s Big Lie of voter fraud anyway, afraid they would lose viewers to right-wing networks that were willing to parrot that lie.
Since the 1980s, Republicans have relied on a false narrative to win voters. To get rid of the active government put in place after 1933 to put guardrails around the unfettered capitalism that had led to the Depression, they argued that government regulation, the social safety net, civil rights, and investment in infrastructure were socialism and were undermining traditional America.
Their argument was that business regulation gave the government control over the way a man ran his business, and that taxes to support government bureaucracy, social services, and public investments redistributed wealth from white men to minorities and women. Real Americans, they suggested, must be willing to defend themselves and the country against the “socialist” national government.
Lately, this determination to get rid of the New Deal government has taken the shape of cutting Social Security and Medicare, which led to the brouhaha over President Biden’s charge during the State of the Union address that Republicans would cut those programs. After Republicans booed him and called him a liar, he backed them into agreeing they would take cuts off the table.
But former vice president Mike Pence brought it up once more this morning on CNBC, saying, “While I respect the speaker’s commitment to take Social Security and Medicare off the table for the debt ceiling negotiations, we’ve got to put them on the table in the long term,” because they were facing “insolvency.”
Reversing 40 years of Republican tax cuts would also address financial shortfalls, but that approach does not fit the Republican narrative that cutting taxes promotes growth and raises revenue.
As their policies became increasingly unpopular, Republicans ramped up that narrative until we have the extraordinary scenario we saw last night: former president Trump telling a campaign audience that the United States has blown right past socialism and is now a communist, Marxist country. That, of course, would mean that the people’s government owns the means of production: the factories, services, and so on.
Instead, as President Biden pointed out today in response to right-wing attempts to blame his administration for the Ohio derailment, deregulation has moved money upward and compromised Americans’ safety. He noted that he has committed the federal government to make sure Ohio has all it needs to address the crisis. Then he added: “Rail companies have spent millions of dollars to oppose common-sense safety regulations. And it’s worked. This is more than a train derailment or a toxic waste spill—it’s years of opposition to safety measures coming home to roost.”
That narrative has also enshrined the idea that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, originally intended to limit the federal government’s power over state militias but now interpreted to mean that individuals have a right to own whatever weaponry they want, defines the nation. After a number of right-wing congressional lawmakers have taken to wearing assault rifle lapel pins, Representative Barry Moore (R-AL) this week introduced a bill to make the AR-15 the “National Gun of America.” Moore claims that “The anti–Second Amendment group won’t stop until they take away all your firearms.”
From February 17 through February 19, there were ten mass shootings in the United States. According to Grace Hauck of USA Today, there were “two mass shootings in Georgia and Missouri and one each in Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee, Louisiana, South Carolina and Mississippi.” Thirteen people were killed and 46 injured. At least 15 of the victims were under 20.
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Tucker Carlson Deserves a Raise for His Shameless Lies
Carlson’s job is to make money for Fox, not tell the truth.
By Jon Schwarz
By now you probably know about the filing by Dominion Voting Systems in its $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News. It includes a vast trove of communications to and from various Fox hosts — including Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham — as well as Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott and Rupert Murdoch, chair of the parent corporation of Fox News.
The most wonderful part of the filing is Carlson’s inspiring, principled stand against telling the truth. On November 12, 2020, nine days after the election, Carlson flagged a tweet for Hannity and Ingraham by Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich. In it Heinrich had accurately pointed out that there was “no evidence” for then-President Donald Trump’s preposterous claims about the election being stolen by Dominion’s voting machines.
Heinrich’s reference to reality understandably enraged Carlson. He texted his fellow hosts: “Please get her fired. Seriously… What the fuck? I’m actually shocked. It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.” Heinrich didn’t lose her job, but her tweet soon disappeared.
Carlson’s concern was that Fox’s viewers simply wouldn’t accept the facts and, if presented with them, would flock to competitors who would tell them the comforting lies for which they yearned. At about the same time, Carlson texted his producer that “we’re playing with fire, for real … an alternative like newsmax could be devastating for us.”
It’s easy and fun to jeer at Carlson for his hilarious deceit, and I wouldn’t want to dissuade anyone from doing so. It’s especially enjoyable to find out Carlson believes Trump is “a demonic force” (page 43 of the filing), yet has never told his audience this. In fact, Carlson still enjoys sharing a hearty guffaw with the demonic force at Saudi golf tournaments.
But once we’re done pointing and laughing at Carlson, we have to think more seriously about this if we’d like to have a society that’s based — at least a little bit — on rationality and evidence. Because in the society we have now, Carlson should logically be rewarded for everything he’s done.
Fox Corporation has shareholders who expect it to make as much profit as possible. According to one of Fox Corporation’s recent fillings, its “competitive strengths” include “premium brands that resonate deeply with viewers.” In particular, “FOX News is among the most influential and recognized news brands in the world.”
You’ll note that Fox does not claim that one of its strengths is, say, “exposing its viewers to the cold, pitiless light of reality.” That’s because its viewers don’t want that. Imagine you’ve created an extremely profitable business by getting 5-year-olds to tune in every night to hear about how much Santa Claus loves them, and also that the world is full of terrible people trying to assassinate Santa Claus. You wouldn’t switch things up all of a sudden and tell your 5-year-olds that there is no Santa Claus. They’d immediately switch channels to Santamax.
This fact about television “news” was explained cogently in a 1970 memo produced by the Nixon White House that illuminates the thinking behind Fox in embryonic form. Titled “A Plan for Putting the GOP on TV News,” the memo explains that television news was popular because “People are lazy. With television you just sit — watch — listen. The thinking is done for you.” (Emphasis in original.) The last thing you want to do is drive viewers away by forcing them to think.
Viewer loyalty is especially important to Fox because of the structure of its revenue stream. According to the New York Times, Fox Corporation’s cable segment, which mostly consists of Fox News, took in $283 million in ad revenue in the first three quarters of 2021. But licensing fees — what cable and satellite companies pay to carry Fox News — were $1.07 billion. This explains why Fox’s top concern must n
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Yellowstone’s Politics Are Left. And Right. And American.
Why Taylor Sheridan’s Dutton saga continues to confuse.
By Tyler Austin Harper
Feb 28, 2023, 9:00 AM
Yellowstone, Taylor Sheridan’s immensely popular neo-western prestige drama, has emerged as one of America’s most beloved television shows in recent years. Yet, despite its soaring popularity—which has led to an evolving universe of spinoffs, including 1923, whose first season concluded this Sunday—the show has been snubbed by major awards and has often received lukewarm treatment from the media. Perhaps not unrelatedly, Yellowstone has gained a reputation, including in this very publication, as a “conservative” series, one targeted toward viewers who also voted for a certain former president. However, notwithstanding its reputation as a cowboy soap opera for Trumpists, it is not always clear what, if anything, about Sheridan’s work is actually right-wing.
In an interview in November 2022 that touched on accusations that Yellowstone and its spinoffs are aimed at Republicans, Sheridan responded incredulously. “The show’s talking about the displacement of Native Americans and the way Native American women were treated, and about corporate greed and the gentrification of the West, and land-grabbing. That’s a red-state show?” On those rare occasions when he has discussed his politics, it is clear enough that Sheridan—who infamously referred to Trump as “that motherfucker” in 2017, calling for the former president’s impeachment—seems to view his work as an ongoing critique of structural racism, misogyny, and the economic status quo. These are not exactly popular Republican talking points.
Why do both red-staters and blue-staters want so desperately to see their politics in Sheridan’s vision of Montana?
This tension between the show’s “red-state” aesthetics (big hats, handguns, horses) and its left-of-center messaging has confounded critics and viewers since the show’s release in 2018, as evidenced by a revolving door of articles that can never seem to agree as to where exactly Sheridan’s work falls on the political thermostat. This yearslong debate exploded again last week after a critic at IndieWire declared that the newest Yellowstone spinoff, 1923 (the second of two, after the miniseries 1883), is not simply progressive—its unflinching look at the Indigenous boarding school system is “critical race theory” embodied. Responding to that article in the New York Times on Friday, Ross Douthat asserted that the IndieWire piece represented a fundamental misreading; Sheridan is producing conservative content that is squarely aligned against “blue-state outsiders,” the columnist insisted. For viewers like Douthat, the Yellowstone universe is one big traditionalist romance, offering the ranch’s “masculine freedom … as an alternative to the crowded suffocations of the city.”
Yet, for my money, what is most interesting about this interpretive fracas is not which political reading of Sheridan’s series—conservative or progressive—is correct. (For what it’s worth, I see all three of the Yellowstone shows as being deeply left-leaning). Rather, what is most interesting, or at least most revealing, about the cultural reception of Yellowstone is that pundits and critics of all political persuasions are increasingly eager to claim it as their own.
Sheridan’s series are those rare birds in our deeply polarized media environment: they are politically ambiguous. To this end, perhaps the real question critics should be asking is not whether Yellowstone and its spinoffs are “red-state” or “blue-state.” The real question is this: Why do both red-staters and blue-staters want so desperately to see their politics in Sheridan’s vision of Montana?
In my view, the answer to this quandary is straightforward. Sheridan’s world offers something that the mainstream American left and the mainstream American right each sorely lack: a positive conception of human purpose that is tethered to an equally coherent conception of authority. Sheridan’s protagonis
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