A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 683 of 725
Quote:
Originally posted by Oonjerah:
I'm an actual, registered Democrat.
But I'm not sure what the topic is. Democrats can post in here,
and talk about themselves ... about why they are democrats ...
or what democrats believe in?
My parents were Republicans.
I was an adult in my 40's before I found out I was a democrat.
I didn't really know what the 2 parties stood for, so I asked a
friend who loves politics what I was.
Republicans tend to be conservative. Democrats tend to be liberal.
Can I even say what those words mean? Not very well.
Conservatives stand for law & order. i.e., Authority.
Democrats believe in human rights and equality. i.e., Freedom.
Anarchists believe in every man for himself?
... oooOO}{OOooo ...
Miss ya...
T
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Opinion | An Economics Nobel for Showing How Much Women Matter
Paul Krugman
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/12/opinion/columnists/claudia-goldin-n
obel-prize.html
Technological progress is a key source of economic growth, but its effects aren’t always fully captured by its effects on gross domestic product. Sometimes a new technology changes everything — the way we work, the way we live, the way we relate to one another in society.
Consider, for example, the effects of the birth control pill.
If it never occurred to you that modern birth control was a transformative technology, or more broadly that expanding women’s ability to choose had profound economic as well as social effects, you have plenty of company. There have been innumerable books and articles about the economic impacts of, for example, globalization and information technology.
But in 2002, when Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz published an article titled “The Power of the Pill: Oral Contraceptives and Women’s Career and Marriage Decisions,” they were entering a sparsely populated field.
On Monday, Goldin, a professor at Harvard, received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in recognition of her role in advancing our understanding of women’s labor market outcomes. It was a richly deserved honor.
In fact, if you ask me, the Nobel announcement sold Goldin a bit short by failing to note her hugely important contributions beyond the issue of women’s work. In particular, it didn’t mention her work on inequality more broadly, notably her role in documenting the sudden and drastic decline in inequality that took place in the 1940s, creating the middle-class society I grew up in (which has now been destroyed).
Which is not to say that women’s work is a minor issue. It’s an immensely important subject, one whose study Goldin pioneered.
Put it this way: For most of the 1960s, American women in their prime working years were less than half as likely as men to be part of the paid labor force; by 2000 three quarters of the gender gap in labor force participation had been eliminated.
This represented a large increase in the economy’s labor supply, and hence in potential G.D.P.; my back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the impact of rising female employment on economic growth was comparable to, say, the effects of globalization.
But the effect on G.D.P. was only part of the story.
In 2006 Goldin published an extraordinary, panoramic overview of the history of women at work in America. As she documented, the percentage of women in the paid labor force rose steadily between around 1930 and 1970, a rise Goldin attributed to the combination of the economy’s shift away from manual labor toward clerical work and rising female education, along with the diffusion of household technologies like refrigerators and washing machines that freed more married women to work outside the home.
But these changes, she argued, did not at first fundamentally change the way society and women themselves thought about women’s work. For the most part, women were seen and saw themselves as secondary earners, working to supplement their families’ income but ready to drop out of the work force if they had children or their husbands earned enough that they didn’t need the money.
Around 1970, however, there was what Goldin called a “quiet revolution” in the economic role of women, as women began to view work much the same way that men did. They saw themselves as likely to remain employed even after marriage, which led them to get more education, get married later and, as men always had, see their jobs as an important part of their identity. This was a profound transformation of society — I would say for the better.
And one important enabler of this transformation was the birth control pill, which made it easier for women to delay marriage, which in turn, Goldin wrote, meant that they “could be more serious in college, plan for an independent future, and form their identities before marriage and family.”
That said, you shouldn’t buy into
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Fuck you Paul.
Your party is dead, and you haven't made a correct prediction in at least 4 years.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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VP selections aren’t taken seriously enough
Kamala Harris is the rule not the exception
Matthew Yglesias
Oct 16, 2023
https://www.slowboring.com/p/vp-selections-arent-taken-seriously
Two new profiles of Kamala Harris — one by Astead Herndon in the New York Times, the other by Elaina Plott Calabro in The Atlantic — both add a lot of texture and detail to a pretty well understood situation.
Harris has a job, Vice President of the United States, that essentially everyone who ever gets it ends up finding awkward and unrewarding. But her awkward and unrewarding version of it is unusually high-profile because her boss is unpopular and she is even more unpopular. To make matters worse, he is very old so there is more attention on her than there normally would be, and while she’s a pretty good politician, she’s not a great politician who electrifies every room she steps into. And, crucially, her team is caught between a conviction that many of her struggles are rooted in sexism and racism and a profound desire to avoid the conclusion that this means only white men should be nominated for office.
It’s a sticky situation.
I have, in the past, offered my thoughts on what she should do about it. But reflecting on these pieces, I’m struck by how fundamentally ordinary the problem facing the Biden-Harris administration is.
Joe Biden selected a likely future leader of the Democratic Party, but he did so without ever saying explicitly “I am picking ____ because I believe ____ would be a good future leader of the Democratic Party.” That’s an irresponsible error of judgment on his part, but it’s an extremely common one. In fact, the whole reason he is president is that Barack Obama picked him to be VP because Obama thought Biden wouldn’t run for president in the future.
Because time and again, we see presidents make VP selections for unimportant short-term reasons that underplay the real stakes of the choice.
VP selections matter a lot
There have only been 46 presidents, and nine of them (nearly 20 percent!) took office due to the death or resignation of a predecessor.
Over and above the fateful nine, there are also the cases of John Adams, Martin Van Buren, Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush, and Joe Biden — VPs who used the national platform afforded them by the vice presidency to win election on their own terms.
And then there is the Al Gore / Walter Mondale / Nixon 1960 model where the vice presidency lofts you to a major party nomination but you lose anyway.
The point is that even though the day to day work of vice president is kind of a weird nothing job, the vice presidency is a genuinely huge political prize. And this seems to be more true in contemporary times than it was historically because the more “open” presidential nominating process has in practice advantaged candidates who are already well-known. A Gilded Age nomination process might have looked at Joe Biden and said to themselves “everything you are saying is totally correct and that’s why we’re picking Steve Bullock.” But voters had no idea who Steve Bullock was. Biden, as a former VP, just dominated the brand of “normal Democrat who wins to win and not be too left-wing.” It’s hard to beat the Veep.
That means that picking a vice president is a choice that presidential candidates ought to take very seriously.
Candidates ought to play to win. But I think even the cynical among us (like me) still believe candidates should pay attention to the real world consequences of the things they say and do. And the VP selection has very large real world consequences. What’s more, there’s almost no evidence that a VP pick has ever helped anyone win. You can certainly hurt yourself by doing something bizarre like the John McCain choice of Sarah Palin. But VP selections have minimal upside, so you might as well pick the right person. Unfortunately, this is not how anyone approaches it.
All the wrong reasons
The Herndon profile in particular is really clear on two things:
Biden was facing a lot of pressure from various inside party actors
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Kamala Harris is an idiot.
Everybody knows that she is an idiot.
Democrats are just praying that Biden* doesn't die before the election.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Kamala Harris is an idiot.
Everybody knows that she is an idiot.
Democrats are just praying that Biden* doesn't die before the election.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
Having a niwit VP is a President's term insurance. Can you imagine how fast Biden* would have been out of office if Camel-like Harris was even halfway competent?
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Kamala Harris is an idiot.
Everybody knows that she is an idiot.
Democrats are just praying that Biden* doesn't die before the election.
--------------------------------------------------
Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
Having a niwit VP is a President's term insurance. Can you imagine how fast Biden* would have been out of office if Camel-like Harris was even halfway competent?
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM
Yeah... but what are they going to do if they run Biden* again? One way or another, whether he dies or deteriorates mentally to the point that it would be impossible for the media to defend him any longer, Joe* would not last another 5 years from now. They'd finally get the first female US President with a big ole' asterisk on her name, and the damage she would cause the nation might keep women from being president for another 100 years after her.
They can't very well replace Harris as VP with anybody else outside of Michelle Obama, and I doubt very much that Barry would allow his "wife" to be the VP for his idiot ex-VP simply on a matter of pride, even if the idea were to only pretend Joe* was President for a year before making Michelle President.
It doesn't matter if they even came up with a media campaign to totally discredit Harris, or if Harris herself were to do something so abominable in the next 13 months that nobody would ever vote for her again. Whoever they tried to replace Harris with, she'd have to be a minority and a woman.
Who does that leave? Stacey Abrams? AOC or anybody else from The Squad?
Outside of Michelle Obama, I can't think of any Democrat they could run with Biden* that isn't white and/or male that would do anything but further harm Biden*'s chances at re-election.
They're running out of time to ditch Joe*, and if they're stuck with him AND Harris in the end they lose 10 times out of 10.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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The Apotheosis of Jim Jordan Is a Sight to Behold
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/apotheosis
No problem in the American system at this moment is as acute and disruptive as the one posed by the Republican Party.
Yes, of course, there are a number of structural problems facing American politics.
Our system of elections — first-past-the-post voting, the Electoral College, single-member districts and partisan gerrymandering — feeds into and amplifies our partisan and ideological polarization. Our system of federalism and dual sovereignty between state and national government allows for laboratories of autocracy as much as testing grounds for democracy. Our counter-majoritarian institutions and supermajority rules stymie democratic majorities and turn stability into stasis, putting terrible stress on our entire political system.
But it’s hard to deal with any of those, or even just live with them, when one of our two major parties is on a downward spiral of dysfunction, with each version of itself more chaotic and deviant than the last.
For years, it has been evident that the Republican Party can’t govern. When Donald Trump was in office, it was revealing to see the extent to which Republican majorities in Congress struggled to write and pass any legislation of consequence. To wit, after an unsuccessful herculean lift trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act and a successful effort to cut taxes (the lowest hanging fruit on the conservative menu), congressional Republicans essentially stopped legislating until they were dislodged from control of the House in the 2018 midterms.
What’s become clear of late, in the midst of the chaos that has left the House without a speaker at a particularly fraught moment in foreign and domestic affairs, is that Republicans are as unable to organize themselves as they are incapable of leading the affairs of state.
The worst of the problem of the Republican Party, however, is evident in the rise of Jim Jordan and the ascendance of the insurrection wing of the party, with only modest opposition from supposedly more reasonable Republican lawmakers.
Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas, for example, has a reputation for being reasonable. He is staunchly conservative, but his feet are mostly planted in reality.
Crenshaw has been publicly critical of the most disruptive and intransigent members of the House Republican conference, especially those in the House Freedom Caucus, and even wrote an essay in The Wall Street Journal condemning the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. A small gesture, all things considered, but still more than most of his colleagues could manage.
Crenshaw seems like the kind of Republican who would oppose Jordan’s bid to be speaker of the House. Jordan, first elected to the House in 2006, is a far-right ideologue and conspiracy theorist whose most notable accomplishment in office was helping to organize his fellow ideologues and conspiracy theorists into the House Freedom Caucus in 2015. Jordan, who represents the Fourth District of Ohio, was one of Trump’s leading supporters in the months leading up to and following the 2020 presidential election, accusing Democrats, repeatedly, of trying to steal the election.
“Jim Jordan was deeply involved in Donald Trump’s antidemocratic efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election,” Thomas Joscelyn, one of the authors of the final report from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol, told CNN last week. “Jordan also helped organize congressional opposition to counting Biden’s certified electoral votes. None of Jordan’s efforts were rooted in legitimate objections. He simply sought to keep Donald Trump in power, contrary to the will of the American people.”
Crenshaw’s stated contempt for exactly the kind of rhetoric and behavior exemplified by Jordan has not, however, stopped the Texas Republican from backing his colleague from Ohio for speaker of the House. In an interview on Sunday with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Crenshaw claimed that Jo
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Why it's impossible for right-wing governments to handle a crisis
By Thom Hartmann | Oct 18, 2023
https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/right-wing-government/
Over at The New York Times yesterday, Jerusalem-based reporter Isabel Kershner writes about the horrors of the past two weeks and the worries Israelis have for how the ongoing war against Hamas may go.
“All this is happening,” she notes in the article’s third paragraph, “amid a total breakdown of trust between the citizens and the state of Israel, and a collapse of everything Israelis believed in and relied on.”
She then quotes a Tel Aviv author, Dorit Rabinyan, who speaks of the sobering reality Israelis are facing because they’d chosen Benjamin Netanyahu as their prime minister:
“We have woken to a terrible sobriety about whose hands we put our fate in. … We thought we had military superiority, but there’s a feeling that someone up there forgot why he is there.”
What happened? Instead of taking seriously now-confirmed warnings about a coming Hamas attack shared by Egyptian and, apparently, US intelligence, the prime minister was instead occupied by “months of political and social turmoil over the divisive plans of Mr. Netanyahu’s ultranationalist government to curb the judiciary and undermine the country’s liberal democracy.”
And even now, she notes, one of the great frustrations of Israeli citizens is “Mr. Netanyahu’s refusal so far to openly accept any responsibility for the Oct. 7 disaster.”
Netanyahu’s authoritarianism and corruption are making it more difficult for Israel to deal with the horrific crisis Hamas has inflicted upon them. To deal with the crisis, he had to surrender some power to form a coalition/crisis government.
Here in the US, we had a similar experience, although, unfortunately, nobody moderated the corruption and incompetence of the Bush administration. President George W. Bush and his Vice President, Dick Cheney, were repeatedly warned that Bin Laden was “determined to strike inside the US.”
Bush, however, was busy trying to get Congress to pass a trillion-dollar tax cut for billionaires and Cheney was in secret meetings drawing up maps of the Iraqi oil fields that he and George would pass out to crony companies if they could find an excuse for a war.
Bush got his final and most alarmed warning from the CIA on August 6, 2001, a full month before the attack. Instead of putting the FBI and airport security on full alert, Bush decided to leave DC and take the longest vacation in presidential history, keeping him out of town until after the attack.
This was all just one month after Bush had attended a G8 summit in Genoa, Italy, where the Italian government had mobilized a battery of anti-aircraft missiles to protect the venue because of credible threats that Osama Bin Laden was planning to have his men hijack passenger jets to crash into Bush’s hotel, a threat that was well known to Bush and Condoleezza Rice.
Similarly, Donald Trump was warned by both China and his own scientists in December of 2019 and again in January of 2020 about how deadly and contagious Covid was and how it could potentially kill over a million Americans. He largely ignored the warnings (other than telling Bob Woodward about it), instead attending rallies and doing rightwing media hits non-stop, until hospitals in New York and Connecticut were having to use refrigerated trucks as morgues.
After only one month (March) of paying attention to his scientists and locking down the country, when the April 7th, 2020, New York Times front page headline proclaimed that the majority of non-geriatric Covid victims were Black people in Blue states, Jared Kushner came up with the bright idea that letting people die and blaming it on Democratic governors would be “an effective political strategy.”
Thus, that was the week Trump ended the lock-downs and began pushing people back to work, leading America to suffer the highest Covid mortality rate in the world with at least 500,000-700,000 unnecessary deaths. People who believe Trump
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In an era blessed with unprecedented resources for reasoning, the public sphere is infested with fake news, quack cures, conspiracy theories, and “post-truth” rhetoric.
A Rational Look at Irrationality: Steven Pinker
Download the free book Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters from the mirrors at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Steven+Pinker+Rationality
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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