A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
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Quote:Trump stands head and shoulders above the average American politician in his willingness to take things to the edge, flout the law, and act with reckless disdain for the consequences.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Orange Man Rad.
Trump will be fine, little dick.
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:Trump stands head and shoulders above the average American politician in his willingness to take things to the edge, flout the law, and act with reckless disdain for the consequences.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Orange Man Rad.
Trump will be fine, little dick.
If the sane population of America wasn't witnessing criminal Democrat politicians get away with criminal behavior daily and people like you running defense for them while they get rich in office, people might take you seriously.
The economy is in shambles and we've been in a recession for over a year that they won't admit is a recession.
Nobody cares about your obsession with Trump or Russia.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Quote:6ix, I live around Trumptards and I can see that their lives are, shall we say, sub-optimal because they are fucking crazy. But I expect that a well-functioning society will not treat crazy people well whereas the crazy people think they deserve the same or better than sane people. It has never been about a clash of values between Democrats and Trumptards but always a clash between sane and crazy. That is the reason why certain people who are Democrats in name only do not prosper in America. They are every bit as crazy as Trumptards. Likewise, certain Republicans in name only (in Trump's opinion) who are sane will prosper while the crazy Trumptards do not.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Trump stands head and shoulders above the average American politician in his willingness to take things to the edge, flout the law, and act with reckless disdain for the consequences.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Orange Man Rad.
Trump will be fine, little dick.
If the sane population of America wasn't witnessing criminal Democrat politicians get away with criminal behavior daily and people like you running defense for them while they get rich in office, people might take you seriously.
The economy is in shambles and we've been in a recession for over a year that they won't admit is a recession.
Nobody cares about your obsession with Trump or Russia.
Six, smoke a pack of cigarettes today. The cigarettes represent your freedom to be as crazy as you want and the smoke is good for your lungs. Just ask Rush Limbaugh. He "knew" smoking equals freedom was true. (Rush also "knew" that coal burning equals freedom since Climate Change is a Hoax.) Trump gave Rush the Medal of Freedom as Rush was dying from lung cancer, proving that insanity will win a Medal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush_Limbaugh#Health_problems_and_death
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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The Right’s Desperate Push to Tank ESG and Avoid Disclosing Climate Risks
Pro-business politicians embraced the idea of so-called green investing — until the SEC suggested companies should report their full emissions.
Amy Westervelt
July 2 2023, 6:00 a.m.
https://theintercept.com/2023/07/02/esg-investing-sec-climate/
The House of Representatives released the first report from its ESG Working Group in late June, highlighting priorities for the rest of the 118th Congress and making clear that Republicans won’t stop “investigating” environmental, social, and governance investing while there’s still a chance to save polluting companies from having to report their actual emissions.
At its core, ESG is about information: When companies report on their environmental, social, and governance risks, which can range from high greenhouse gas emissions to particular hiring practices, investors use that information to determine whether they think a company is a good investment.
The Republican-led House isn’t the only entity that’s become obsessed with ESG investing over the past two years. From political advocacy organizations like the Texas Public Policy Foundation to state treasurers, the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Republican Attorneys General Association, the right wing has been on fire about this issue since the Securities and Exchange Commission made what seemed like a pretty boring announcement back in 2021: The SEC was going to help provide some stability in the ESG space by laying out parameters for how companies could disclose climate risk to investors that care about such things.
Absent those proposed guidelines, due to be finalized this year, it’s doubtful that an anti-ESG movement would exist. It only emerged after the SEC made its intentions known, despite the fact that ESG investing has been around for more than 20 years.
In fact, the same polluting industries and pro-industry politicians screaming about ESG as “woke capital” today previously embraced the idea. It was a handy greenwashing tool that also helped unlock easy capital for corporations that could lay claim, however spurious, to reducing emissions or improving the diversity of their workforce. The SEC’s suggestion that companies should disclose their Scope 3 emissions — the emissions associated with the entire supply chain of their product, including its ultimate use — set off the current frenzy.
To date, fossil fuel companies have preferred to report only on Scope 2 emissions — those associated with their own operations — which account for less than 10 percent of their overall emissions. Scope 3 reporting would require a full accounting, from upstream to downstream, with no way to distract from a company’s actual climate impact.
The ESG backlash has included the introduction of 165 anti-ESG bills across 37 states in 2023 alone, according to a report from Pleiades Strategy; a coordinated push by Republican state treasurers to kick investment firms that consider ESG factors out of state finances; and a legal strategy that has Republican attorneys general alleging that ESG investors are “colluding” against the fossil fuel industry. Now Congress has gotten in on the action, with the House Oversight Committee hosting two hearings on ESG in May and June, Finance Committee hearings expected in July, and proposed legislation in the works.
Just as remarkable as the speed with which this coordinated movement came together is the lack of support for it among Republican voters. According to a poll conducted by Penn State’s Center for the Business of Sustainability and the communications firm ROKK Solutions, Republican voters are even more opposed to limiting ESG investing than Democrats are. The Pleiades report found that out of the 165 anti-ESG bills proposed this year, only 22 were approved by state governments.
That hasn’t stopped GOP allies from ramping up the fight as the SEC inches closer to finalizing its climate risk disclosure guidelines. In the Oversight Committee hearing last month, Jason Isaac, who focu
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I Worked With Anita Hill to Fight Clarence Thomas’ Confirmation. Our Worst Fears Came True.
As I sat on the steps of the Capitol with a colleague after the narrow confirmation of a man who opposed much of the legacy of Thurgood Marshall, the great American civil rights lawyer who Thomas was being tapped to replace, we both came to the same conclusion: This appointment was going to shape the rest of our lives.
Unfortunately, history has confirmed our fears. As national commitments to racial justice and basic civil rights continue to unravel, under what is functionally regarded as the Thomas Court, the very health of our multiracial democracy is a long-term casualty of that day.
Thomas bet that he could obscure his well-established hostility to antiracism and the anti-civil rights agenda of the party that nominated him, and it yielded a big payout, for him and the conservative movement.
And there is perhaps no one figure who more singularly symbolizes the cyclical nature of racial progress and retrenchment than Thomas, who is at once a beneficiary of every hard-fought civil rights advancement in this country and an arsonist of the very policies that set the conditions of his possibility.
Voting rights, bodily autonomy via abortion rights, and now affirmative action — these policies are all hallmarks of a functioning multiracial democracy and also the ones that Thomas himself has been eager to burn, leaving a trail of ash in his wake instead of clear pathways for others to walk where he has.
His confirmation to the Court in 1991 was a turning point for our country, not only because of the conservative views he would infuse into the architecture of federal law but also because of how he challenged the general public’s understanding of race and racism: Thomas showcased how a Black man who consistently opposes measures that would benefit Black Americans can in fact be a perpetrator of systemic racism despite the color of his skin.
It is in this way that Thomas’ long standing opposition to affirmative action has played a significant role in setting the tone for today’s culture wars. Thomas gave a high-profile platform to the central idea of modern conservative politics — that any policy or action that levels the playing field for those who have been traditionally marginalized, like Black Americans, is punitive against White people.
The idea that righting historical wrongs for Black Americans “takes away” from white Americans is as old as Reconstruction. But it found new oxygen in our contemporary politics with the fight over affirmative action and the framing that universities “took away” spots from white students by acknowledging historical barriers to admission for diverse students. That democratic progress is a blow to white Americans is the corrosive lie that animates nearly every fight we see, from the attack on the Capitol in 2021 to the nascent 2024 presidential election.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/06/30/anita-hill-clarence-
thomas-supreme-court-affirmative-action-00104387
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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Keep crying about it bitch. It's done.
Meritocracy might just be saved after all.
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How you do anything is how you do everything.
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The Court’s GOP-appointed majority is settling old grudges
Until very recently — as in, less than 10 days ago — the right of universities to pay limited attention to race when admitting students was grounded in well-settled law. The Court first ruled that affirmative action is legal, albeit subject to significant constraints, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978).
The Court, moreover, reaffirmed Bakke in its 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger. It did so again in 2013. And again in 2016.
And yet, despite the fact that the Court had time and time again rejected efforts by racial conservatives like Edward Blum — the white activist behind many lawsuits challenging affirmative action — Blum and similarly minded advocates continued to hold a grudge. They were joined in holding onto that grudge by many of the justices themselves, and by powerful groups like the Federalist Society, which played an outsize role in selecting former President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees.
The briefs in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, the case that the Court’s GOP-appointed majority used to end affirmative action at nearly all universities last month, raised few, if any, new legal arguments that weren’t heard before by the Court in Bakke.
Nor has there been some triumphant victory over racism in the United States that eradicates the case for affirmative action. Though incomes and college graduation rates have risen for all racial groups within the United States since Bakke, the median Black household still earns at least $33,000 less in annual income than the median white household.
No, the Supreme Court did not strike down affirmative action because of any change in the law. It struck it down because racial conservatives organized. They recruited powerful institutions like the Republican Party and the Federalist Society to their cause. And then they made a deal with the devil, as Trump-skeptical legal conservatives agreed to back his bid for the presidency in return for a small army of Federalist Society judges.
Men like Ed Blum held a grudge. And they held onto it for decades. Until they won.
This is, of course, the same story that played out in the last Supreme Court term, when the Court eliminated the constitutional right to abortion, and when it drastically expanded the rights of gun owners. Again, there were no important new insights in any of the briefs filed in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) or in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022).
Those cases were decided the way they were because abortion foes and gun rights advocates organized, took over the Republican Party, and held onto their grudges. They have nothing whatsoever to do with “the law.”
Much more at https://www.vox.com/scotus/2023/7/8/23784320/supreme-court-2022-term-a
ffirmative-action-religion-voting-rights-abortion
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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Is the ERA already the law of the land?
Here is the full text of the ill-fated Equal Rights Amendment:
Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled (two-thirds of each House concurring therein), That the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven ten years from the date of its submission by the Congress:
"ARTICLE —
"Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
"Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
"Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification."
The ERA was passed in 1972 and needed ratification from 38 states before its 10-year deadline expired. It got only 35. However, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Representative Cori Bush of Missouri have proposed a three-step strategy to declare that the ERA has, in fact, passed already and only needs to be recognized. It goes like this:
The 10-year deadline is part of the preamble, not the actual text of the Amendment, so it doesn't count.
During the Trump administration three more states ratified the ERA: Illinois, Nevada, and Virginia. That brings the tally to 38.
Six states have repealed their ratification, but there's no constitutional mechanism for doing that. Once ratified, always ratified.
This means that the required 38 states have legally ratified the ERA and the national archivist merely needs to announce it. Done and done.
But can it work? Gillibrand plans to introduce a joint resolution that codifies her theory, but Republicans will never support it:
Ms. Gillibrand conceded that she did not think Republicans would ever support the amendment, “largely because the pro-life movement has co-opted this argument,” she said. She said her hope was to compel Mr. Biden to call on the archivist to take action, or to change the filibuster rules in the Senate so that civil rights measures like the amendment would need only a simple majority — not 60 votes — to move forward.
This is doomed. Biden won't act unilaterally; the Senate won't pass an enabling resolution; and no court would back Gillibrand's plan.
“This is a political rather than a legal struggle,” said Laurence Tribe, the constitutional scholar and professor emeritus at Harvard Law School. “It would succeed only in a different environment than we have. It’s not going to pass. The real question is what political message is being sent. In a political environment like this, you throw at the wall whatever you can.”
If Gillibrand were a Republican making a weird new legal argument for something like, say, overturning the 25th Amendment** as a Deep State coup, there's a tolerable chance the Supreme Court would stroke its collective chin, make up some shiny new doctrine, and rule in favor. But a Democrat with a weird new legal theory for a liberal cause? Fuhgeddaboudit.
https://jabberwocking.com/is-the-era-already-the-law-of-the-land/
** 25th Amendment
https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/amendments/amendment-x
xv
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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and Commiefornia?
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Trump vows to end evils of child trafficking, implement death penalty for traffickers
https://www.rsbnetwork.com/news/trump-vows-to-end-evils-of-child-traff
icking-implement-death-penalty-for-traffickers/
FBI Corroborated Parts of Document Showing Bidens Accepted $10 Million Bribe, Source Says
https://timcast.com/news/fbi-did-corroborate-parts-of-document-showing
-bidens-accepted-10-million-bribe-source-says/
Vivek Ramaswamy details how he will ‘SHUT DOWN THE FBI’ hours after tying with DeSantis in a new poll
https://www.rsbnetwork.com/news/vivek-ramaswamy-details-how-he-will-sh
ut-down-the-fbi-hours-after-tying-with-desantis-in-a-new-poll/
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