A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 674 of 725
Democrats want everyone to be slaves.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Quote:That's another one I constantly hear from East Texas voters for Trump. I have never known one of them who could get the relationship correct so I won't try to inform them. Trying makes them act crazier than they naturally are. They just gotta go to their early graves being wrong-headed, never understanding yet absolutely certain they understand everything.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Democrats want everyone to be slaves.
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:That's another one I constantly hear from East Texas voters for Trump. I have never known one of them who could get the relationship correct so I won't try to inform them. Trying makes them act crazier than they naturally are. They just gotta go to their early graves being wrong-headed, never understanding yet absolutely certain they understand everything.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Democrats want everyone to be slaves.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
What you need to do is stop projecting all of your own shortcomings on everyone around you.
You are the lowest common denominator in all of your failures and unhappiness.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Quote:That's still another one I constantly hear from East Texas voters for Trump. These guys never read "Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free" by Charles P. Pierce. If I were to mention this book, those Trump voters' rejoinder will be simpler than 6ix's: "You're the idiot, not me!" They've got to say it or else they will feel bad about themselves.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
What you need to do is stop projecting all of your own shortcomings on everyone around you.
You are the lowest common denominator in all of your failures and unhappiness.
The three Great Premises of Idiot America:
- 1) Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units
- 2) Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough
- 3) Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it
With his trademark wit and insight, veteran journalist Charles Pierce delivers a gut-wrenching, side-splitting lament about the glorification of ignorance in the United States. Pierce asks how a country founded on intellectual curiosity has somehow deteriorated into a nation of simpletons.
https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/idiot-america-how-stupidity-became-a-vir
tue-in-the-land-of-the-free_charles-p-pierce/272427/
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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A Tragically American Approach to the Child-Care Crisis
Elliot Haspel
https://web.archive.org/web/20230604175536/https://www.theatlantic.com
/family/archive/2023/06/child-care-united-states-employer-based/674269/
The U.S. is returning to a tired old playbook: If at first you fail to make something a universal right, try making it an employee benefit.
For a brief moment, it looked like America could get a real child-care system—one that wasn’t defined by lengthy waitlists, sky-high fees, and crossed-fingers quality. When the House of Representatives passed the Build Back Better Act in 2021, it included $400 billion in funding, part of which would have paid programs enough to boost providers’ wages, in turn increasing the supply of available slots. The act also would have capped all but the wealthiest families’ child-care bills at 7 percent of their income. This overhaul would have put child care squarely in the same category as Social Security, Medicare, and other guaranteed supports: It would have, in other words, become a right. Since Joe Manchin and 50 Republican senators killed the bill, however, many policy makers have started following a tired old playbook: If at first you fail to make something a universal right, try making it an employee benefit.
The instinct to make for any policy port in a storm is understandable, and the American child-care system is stuck in a years-long hurricane. At its core is a financial paradox. Child-care providers have very high fixed costs due to the need for low child-to-adult ratios, so they can’t pay their staff well without significantly increasing parent fees (many child-care workers make less than parking attendants). In other words, child care simultaneously is too expensive for parents and brings in too little revenue for programs to operate sustainably. In fact, the industry is still down more than 50,000 employees from pre-pandemic levels. Centers have shut down for want of staff, long waitlists have stretched to the point of absurdity, and the rising cost of care continues to exceed inflation.
The system desperately needs a large infusion of permanent public money so that programs can compensate educators well, parent fees can be slashed, and supply can rise to meet demand. As Annie Lowrey wrote last year, “The math does not work. It will never work. No other country makes it work without a major investment from government.”
In his public remarks and his proposed budget for the 2024 fiscal year, President Joe Biden is certainly insistent about the need for a permanent answer to child-care funding. Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Patty Murray, along with their House counterparts, have each submitted a major child-care bill in recent months. Yet in the face of congressional gridlock, Democrats and Republicans alike are turning to employers as a salve.
At the federal level, the Biden administration is nudging companies to offer employees child-care assistance, embedding such encouragement in the semiconductor CHIPS Act and a recent executive order on care. Red states such as Oklahoma and Missouri have proposed—along with other actions, like tax credits for donors to child-care programs—sweetening the incentive pot for employer child-care benefits. States such as Michigan and Kentucky are piloting programs in which child-care costs can be split among the employer, the employee, and the government.
The problem is that these are quarter measures at best. Millions of gig workers who don’t receive benefits will be left out by default. And employer-sponsored benefits are unreliable because people may switch or lose their job—and because employers can simply change their mind. According to a recent Care.com survey of 500 companies, nearly one-third said they might cut child-care benefits if a recession takes hold. Even putting all of that aside, none of these programs can ever hope to help even the barest fraction of the millions of families who want and need care.
For instance, two years after its inception, Michigan’s well-intentioned Tri-Sha
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:That's still another one I constantly hear from East Texas voters for Trump. These guys never read "Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free" by Charles P. Pierce. If I were to mention this book, those Trump voters' rejoinder will be simpler than 6ix's: "You're the idiot, not me!" They've got to say it or else they will feel bad about themselves.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
What you need to do is stop projecting all of your own shortcomings on everyone around you.
You are the lowest common denominator in all of your failures and unhappiness.
The three Great Premises of Idiot America:
- 1) Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units
- 2) Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough
- 3) Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it
With his trademark wit and insight, veteran journalist Charles Pierce delivers a gut-wrenching, side-splitting lament about the glorification of ignorance in the United States. Pierce asks how a country founded on intellectual curiosity has somehow deteriorated into a nation of simpletons.
https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/idiot-america-how-stupidity-became-a-vir
tue-in-the-land-of-the-free_charles-p-pierce/272427/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
I'd say he did a great job exploiting premise #1, but people like you don't pay for anything.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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In a 5 to 4 Supreme Court decision, John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh Saved the Voting Rights Act (VRA)
It is difficult to overstate the impact of Milligan on voting rights law. For several years now, many progressive attorneys have assumed that the VRA is pretty much dead, and the only question was when SCOTUS would deliver the final blow. Alabama wanted to play that role; it failed. Republican Justice Clarence Thomas’ dissent — joined by Republican Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett — described the court’s decision as a “disastrous misadventure.” But the real disaster here was white Alabama Republicans’ crusade to obliterate the VRA based on arrogant certainty that they had five or six justices in their pocket. Their miscalculation wound up reaffirming Congress’ constitutional authority to combat state assaults on our multiracial democracy.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/06/john-roberts-brett-kavanau
gh-save-voting-rights-act.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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It's fine. Every election cycle more blacks vote against Democrats anyhow.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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The central political fact of our era is that Donald Trump is a total piece of shit and scumbag. It long ago became “cringe” to center one’s politics on this point, but it remains fundamentally true.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-orange-man-is-bad
That, more than anything else, is what his recent indictment by Special Counsel Jack Smith reminds us. When the matter of the missing classified documents improperly stored at Mar-a-Lago first came to light, it raised the specter of a politically motivated inquiry or an effort to hang charges on Trump that others had been allowed to slide on. In particular, it raised the question of whether other former high-ranking officials of the United States
government had brought documents home and never returned them. And the answer turned out to be yes — both former vice president Mike Pence and current president Joe Biden (though, as I understand it, in his capacity as a former vice president) did something structurally similar on a smaller scale. But they both said sorry, they cooperated fully with investigators, they returned the documents promptly, and that was that.
In an earlier iteration of Trump scandals, I would have leapt to the conclusion that his refusal to follow the Pence/Biden model is a clear sign that he’s guilty of something darker and more nefarious.
Which he might be. But having seen a few of these play out now, I’m open to the possibility that he’s just a piece of shit scumbag. He’s stubborn, he doesn’t think the rules apply to him, he doesn’t like other people telling him what to do, and he thinks that being charged helps him stay at the center of attention and neuter his intraparty rivals, so fuck it. Trump simply stands head and shoulders above the average American politician in his willingness to take things to the edge, to flout the law, and to act with reckless disdain for the consequences his actions will have for anyone. The law is important, and the fact that this particular act of scumbaggery is apparently illegal gives it a special significance. But for my money, the most morally shocking thing about Trump’s post-presidency is still the extent to which he sullenly refused to be a constructive player in promoting Covid vaccination in 2021.
A very large number of people — Trump voters — got sicker than they might have because of this, and a bunch of them died. And I think that’s a crucial fact about Trump that tends to be overlooked despite the volume of coverage he attracts. His efforts to supposedly own the libs mostly involve deceiving and betraying his own supporters.
Trump markets himself as a down-and-dirty fighter who champions the right’s causes through his refusal to play the game with kid gloves. In truth, he’s a sub-par politician who’s not good at winning elections or advancing a legislative agenda or convincing people of conservative ideas.
He’s a con man, and conservatives are the marks.
You can’t con an honest man
I used to enjoy a BBC show called “Hustle” about a team of high-end con artists. One of the structural challenges of a series like that is how to make a gang of criminals seem sympathetic. Scamming lonely and confused old people out of their meager savings wouldn’t make for a very entertaining show.
So they introduce the idea that you see in this clip, that the best marks are people who are themselves shady and dishonest. The mark’s own dishonesty makes them less likely to go to the authorities and less likely to ask questions about why the setup they’re involved in is so unorthodox. The whole premise is that you are participating in a shady scheme, so when it starts to seem like you’re enmeshed in a shady scheme, you don’t notice that you are the victim.
And that, to me, is Trump.
His con is not that he’s convinced conservatives that he’s honest. It’s that he’s convinced conservatives that his lying and shamelessness is a superpower that he deploys on behalf of their issues and causes. And it is true that he has at times deployed d
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Orange Man Rad.
Trump will be fine, little dick. 
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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