A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Quote:The next front in the GOP’s war on women:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Nobody's reading any of that shit.
the Republican Party of Texas added language to its platform calling for an end to no-fault divorce.
Like the crusades against abortion and contraception, the GOP is making it more difficult to leave a marriage
Steven Crowder, the right-wing podcaster, is getting a divorce. “No, this was not my choice,” Crowder told his online audience last week. “My then-wife decided that she didn’t want to be married anymore — and in the state of Texas, that is completely permitted.”
Crowder’s emphasis on “the state of Texas” makes it sound like the Lone Star State is an outlier, but all 50 states and the District of Columbia have no-fault divorce laws on the books — laws that allow either party to walk away from an unhappy marriage without having to prove abuse, infidelity, or other misconduct in court.
It was a hard-fought journey to get there. It took more than four decades to end fault-based divorce in America: California was the first state to eliminate it, in 1969; New York didn’t come around until 2010. (And there are caveats: Mississippi and South Dakota still only allow no-fault divorce if both parties agree to dissolve the marriage, for example.)
Researchers who tracked the emergence of no-fault divorce laws state by state over that period found that reform led to dramatic drops in the rates of female suicide and domestic violence, as well as decreases in spousal homicide of women. The decreases, one researcher explained, were “not just because abused women (and men) could more easily divorce their abusers, but also because potential abusers knew that they were more likely to be left.”
Today, more than two-thirds of all heterosexual divorces in the U.S. are initiated by women.
Republicans across the country are now reconsidering no-fault divorce. There isn’t a huge mystery behind the campaign: Like the crusades against abortion and contraception, making it more difficult to leave an unhappy marriage is about control. Crowder’s home state could be the first to eliminate it, if the Texas GOP gets its way. Last year, the Republican Party of Texas added language to its platform calling for an end to no-fault divorce: “We urge the Legislature to rescind unilateral no-fault divorce laws, to support covenant marriage, and to pass legislation extending the period of time in which a divorce may occur to six months after the date of filing for divorce.”
It wouldn’t take a vote of the Legislature to end no-fault divorce in Texas. A motivated plaintiff could bring the case before a sympathetic judge — and there happens to be one sitting on the federal bench in Amarillo. Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk — who has issued rulings attacking access to birth control and mifepristone, a critical component of the abortion pill — repeatedly bemoaned the idea that the “sexual revolution” ushered in a world of “permissive contraception policies,” abortion — and no-fault divorce.
More at https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/stephen-crowde
r-divorce-1234727777/
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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This week it was discovered that Harlan Crow paid on the order of $150,000 in private school tuition for Clarence Thomas's grand-nephew, who Thomas raised "like a son." Needless to say, none of this was reported. A bank statement for the school, buried in unrelated court filings, shows the sneaky tuition payment.
Last month, ProPublica reported that Thomas accepted luxury travel from Crow virtually every year for decades, including international superyacht cruises and private jet flights around the world. Crow also paid money to Thomas and his relatives in an undisclosed real estate deal, ProPublica found. After he purchased the house where Thomas’ mother now lives rent-free, Crow poured tens of thousands of dollars into improving the property. And roughly 15 years ago, Crow donated much of the budget of a political group founded by Thomas’ wife, which paid her a $120,000 salary.
Crow has long been an influential figure in pro-business conservative politics. He has given millions to efforts to move the law and the judiciary to the right and serves on the boards of think tanks that publish scholarship advancing conservative legal theories.
Crow had cases in front of the Supreme Court. Clarence Thomas never recused himself. Neither Crow nor Thomas has admitted to the money exchanges, until after being caught, at which point they dare anybody to do anything about it. Thomas refuses to resign and the Senate can't remove Thomas until there are only 33 or fewer GOP Senators.
https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-harlan-crow-private
-school-tuition-scotus
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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Racist.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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A sub forum of the Communities dot win website called TheDonald . Win, trolling or offensive
Quote:
When the citizen justice part of "Defund the Police" kicks in.
link
https://communities.win/c/TheDonald/p/16b64EyVgB/when-the-citizen-just
ice-part-of/c/
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BlackRock and Vanguard alone control enough assets to buy every company listed in the London Stock Exchange at least three times over?
Ukraine Latest: Zelenskiy Meets BlackRock Executives in Kyiv
https://news.yahoo.com/ukraine-latest-russia-wagner-renews-083841559.h
tml
'Is Ukraine being privatised': Netizens fume over President Zelensky's meet with BlackRock management
https://www.businesstoday.in/latest/world/story/is-ukraine-being-priva
tised-netizens-fume-over-president-zelenskyys-meet-with-blackrock-management-380295-2023-05-06
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Quote:Every Trumptard I know says that they are not racists. It is the Democrats that are the real racists. I have told a few of those dimwit Trumptards that that is the reason I am firing them. Not because they are racist, but because they get simple concepts upside down and backward. They confuse the colors of wires, get left/right mixed up, install filters backward that have flow arrows printed on the filter, etc. Here is dimwit Clarence Thomas getting confused about simple ethical ideas:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Racist.
Clarence and Ginni Thomas: Politics, Power and the Supreme Court (full documentary) | FRONTLINE
Over the past three decades, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has risen to the center of power in Washington, impacting issues affecting millions of Americans — from abortion to affirmative action. By his side has been his wife and best friend, Ginni Thomas. Together, the Thomases have left an indelible mark on America — in the legal realm and in conservative politics. But what has fueled their rise and expanded influence, and what have been the consequences?
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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Democrats are the racists.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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The War on Poverty Is Over. Rich People Won
The sociologist Matthew Desmond believes that being poor is different in the U.S. than in other rich countries.
By Annie Lowrey
Why do so many Americans live in poverty? Because so many rich people benefit from it.
This is the thesis of the lauded sociologist Matthew Desmond’s new book, Poverty, by America. The best seller is at once a careful exploration of poverty statistics; a deeply reported depiction of the lived experiences of the poor; an examination of the ways America’s wealthy exploit the masses; and a case for ending poverty. Desmond shows how the country’s employers, financial institutions, and landlords extract money from low-income families while rich families hoard opportunity for themselves. He also demonstrates how America’s safety-net programs are not just too stingy but poorly designed.
Desmond is a professor at Princeton. His previous book—Evicted, about the low-income rental market in Milwaukee—won a Pulitzer Prize. We discussed how the rich came to win the War on Poverty and what’s necessary to end poverty.
This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230514122550/https://www.theatlantic.com
/ideas/archive/2023/05/poverty-in-america-book-matthew-desmond-interview/674058/
Annie Lowrey: How is poverty different in America than in its peer countries?
Matthew Desmond: We have more of it. We have double the child-poverty rate of Germany and South Korea. We have a lot less to go around with, in terms of fighting poverty. We collect a much smaller share of our GDP in taxes every year.
It’s different because it’s so unnecessary. We have so many resources. Our tolerance for poverty is very high, much higher than it is in other parts of the developed world. I don’t know if it’s a belief, a cliché, or a myth. You see a homeless person in Los Angeles; an American says, What did that person do? You see a homeless person in France; a French person says, What did the state do? How did the state fail them?
Government programs obviously work. I’ve been with people when they receive a housing voucher. They praise Jesus. They fall on their knees. They pray and weep and cry. We have massive amounts of evidence about the benefits of government spending on anti-poverty programs. But poverty is also about exploitation. We have all these anti-poverty programs that accommodate poverty without disrupting it. They’re not eliminating poverty at the root.
Lowrey: Who benefits from that exploitation? Who benefits from a person being homeless?
Desmond: A lot of us benefit from it. I don’t just mean the guy that’s a little richer than you or a lot richer than you. I mean a lot of us, those who have found security and comfort in America consuming the cheap goods and services that the working class produces for us.
Half of us are invested in the stock market. Many times, we see our savings going up and up and up when someone’s pay is going down and down and down. Those two things are related. Or think about the housing crisis: Many times, it’s not just corporate landowners who are benefiting from high rents. It’s homeowners whose housing values are propped up and kept high by a scarcity of housing that they contribute to.
Lowrey: Let’s drill down on housing. Talk me through how something wealth-generating for some families is wealth-sapping for others.
Desmond: This is a unique feature of American life. If you go to Germany, a lot of professionals live in social housing. It’s not stigmatized. They’re living shoulder to shoulder with folks that might be in a very different place than they are economically.
Here, the housing market is bifurcated. For two-thirds of the country — people who own homes — the housing market is almost miraculous. Homeownership is not a winning proposition for everyone — that was a resounding lesson of 2008. But for a lot of folks, it is their biggest source of wealth creation. It’s one of the biggest carve-outs in the tax code, with the mortgage deduc
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The Two Constitutions by David W. Blight
James Oakes’s deeply researched book argues that two very different readings of the 1787 charter put the United States on a course of all but inevitable conflict.
June 8, 2023 issue
Reviewed: The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution
by James Oakes
Norton, 256 pp., $26.95; $17.95 (paper)
Download all of James Oakes books for free from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.asia/search.php?&req=James+Oakes
Historians can and do change their minds about interpretations of events and the uses of evidence. We may be dead certain, or even mildly sure, about facts and the stories we tell about them, but our craft requires us to remain open to new persuasions, new truths. James Oakes used to believe that the United States Constitution was essentially proslavery in its foundations, and that any attempt to breathe antislavery meaning into it was strained or rhetorical and not textually supported. But no more. In his remarkable and challenging book The Crooked Path to Abolition, he makes the case that there were effectively two constitutions written in Philadelphia that summer of 1787, one proslavery and one antislavery, which would be in conflict with each other for more than the next fourscore years.
Oakes, a distinguished professor of history at the CUNY Graduate Center, is not the only historian to have changed his view on this matter. In my first book, in 1989, I treated Frederick Douglass’s development of an antislavery interpretation of the Constitution as a slowly evolving perspective on his road to becoming a pragmatic political abolitionist and as a form of wish fulfillment in the absence of alternatives. I called his antislavery constitutionalism “dubious”—a search for political and moral ground on which he could stand to avoid embracing violent revolution by the 1850s. But I have come to see him as a deeply committed political thinker who argued his way, through what he called “careful study,” using legal and moral logic, to a vision of an antislavery Constitution. Guided by the natural rights tradition, Douglass found the core meaning of the American crisis. “Liberty and Slavery—opposite as Heaven and Hell,” he wrote in 1850, “are both in the Constitution.” What divided the nation was a Constitution “at war with itself.”1
It has long been understood that without the compromises that were struck to bolster the interests of the slave states, there might have been no constitution achieved in 1787, and the thirteen original states might have careened off into regional coalitions at best. With the publication in 1840 of James Madison’s notes from the Constitutional Convention, more information emerged about pivotal crises and compromises in those famous debates. The notes fueled the endless arguments over the meaning and intent of the “founders,” a term that defies any unified definition, as Oakes argues. For instance, the notes record a dispute over a proposed tax on future slave imports, to which Roger Sherman of Connecticut fiercely objected “because it implied that they [slaves] were property.” Madison agreed and, in what may seem rather startling language for a Virginia slaveholder, declared it “wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.”
The original Constitution reeked of complicity with the peculiar institution. It contained prominent proslavery features: a fugitive slave clause requiring retrieval of escaped bondspeople (although ambiguous about adjudication), the provision that the end of the foreign slave trade would be postponed until at least 1808 (both sides claimed victory in this matter), and the numerous elements that embedded federalism deeply into the document, enabling the doctrine of states’ rights to flourish. Above all, the three-fifths clause counting enslaved people in such a robust fraction for the purpose of representation in Congress and the Electoral College, which enhanced significantly the slave states’ power in the legislative branch an
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During oral arguments, this Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority viewed the 14th Amendment as merely promoting a theory of “color blindness” — in which race is simply ignored. The newest justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, made headlines at one of her first oral arguments, when she took pains to debunk this historically dubious theory.
In the voting rights case, Allen v. Milligan, the first Black woman to hold a seat on the Supreme Court explained that the drafters of the 14th amendment intended that its vision be applied “in a race-conscious way” so that freed former slaves “were actually brought equal to everyone else in the society.” She went on to urge “that’s not a race-neutral or race-blind idea.”
Unfortunately, Justice Jackson will likely be raising these points again as the Supreme Court is poised to end the term by using the “color blind” formulation to gut affirmative action in higher education and weaken a key part of the Voting Rights Act.
More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/06/supreme-court-term-william
-rehnquist-segregation.html
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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