A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Nobody cares about the government shutting down. We get to hear about that happening every other year.
Next.
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"My only fear of death is coming back to this bitch reincarnated." ~Tupac Shakur
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Quote:Nobody cares about your mental illness, 6ix. Nearly all Republican Congressmen didn't bend to Trump's mental illness, which is why government will not shut down for Xmas. The Democrats got all they wanted and Trump got nothing because he is nuts. (Congress averts shutdown after House GOP drops Trump’s debt limit demand https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/20/politics/house-senate-vote-shutdown-bil
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nobody cares about the government shutting down. We get to hear about that happening every other year.
Next.
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"My only fear of death is coming back to this bitch reincarnated." ~Tupac Shakur
l/index.html )
Wow, this extract from Wolff’s book is a shocking insight into Trump’s mind:
On his first night in the White House, President 'Frump complained that the TV in his bedroom was broken, because it didn’t have “the gorilla channel”. 'Frump seemed to be under the impression that a TV channel existed that screened nothing but gorilla-based content, 24 hours a day.
To appease Trump, White House staff compiled a number of gorilla documentaries into a makeshift gorilla channel, broadcast into Trump’s bedroom from a hastily-constructed transmission tower on the South Lawn. However, Trump was unhappy with the channel they had created, moaning that it was “boring” because “the gorillas aren’t fighting”.
Staff edited out all the parts of the documentaries where gorillas weren’t hitting each other, and at last the president was satisfied. “On some days he’ll watch the gorilla channel for 17 hours straight,” an insider told me. “He kneels in front of the TV with his face about four inches from the screen, and says encouraging things to the gorillas, like ‘the way you hit that other gorilla was good’. I think he thinks the gorillas can hear him.”
8:07 PM · Jan 4, 2018
https://x.com/pixelatedboat/status/949100087350710272
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Get Ready for Trump’s TV Government
The incoming administration will be chaotic and personalist, not organized autocracy.
By Samantha Hancox-Li | December 20, 2024, 3:00 PM
https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/12/20/trump-fox-news-tv-gorilla-channel/
In 2018, a joke tweet went viral suggesting that then-President Donald Trump spent 17 hours a day watching “the gorilla channel,” a fake TV channel featuring footage of gorillas fighting created by his staffers. In 2024, President-elect Trump nominated Peter Hegseth, whose primary qualification is appearing on Fox and Friends, for secretary of defense. Trump nominated Mehmet Oz (aka Dr. Oz), whose primary qualification is appearing on Oprah, to be Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator.
Since Trump’s election, some on the left have given in to the impulse of doom. They talk as if Trump is a god-emperor who will sweep away the American republic with a wave of his hand. Some on the right believe this too, though in their case, they approve of that course of action. Certainly Trump and his allies have declared their intention to reshape American society in an authoritarian direction.
But what we should expect is not an organized transformation. What we should expect is gorilla channel governance—chaotic, personalist, and based largely on what the president most recently saw on television.
Broadly speaking, there are two models of authoritarianism, one aimed at controlling society, the other aimed at controlling elites. The model of impersonal social control requires large, efficient bureaucracies that penetrate and permeate the masses. Such bureaucracies manage and transform the whole of society.
Stalin and the Bolsheviks are a model here. After they seized power in 1917, the Bolsheviks inherited a country wracked by external war, civil war, and famine—in other words, a mess. Over the next two decades, they would establish governing institutions—Gosplan, the Red Army, the KGB—that permeated every aspect of Soviet life and transformed a messy and dysfunctional imperial system into a superpower capable of mobilizing 17 percent of the population into arms in wartime, 61 percent of GDP into war spending, and—when the party required—killing between 6 million and 20 million of their fellow Soviet citizens. The Soviet state permeated Soviet society, and was able to mobilize the Soviet people to extraordinary ends—for the first several decades, at least.
If this model of authoritarian governance is so effective, why choose anything else? In a word: coup-proofing. Personalist dictators find themselves threatened by the existence of efficient and impersonal bureaucracies. They fear their lieutenants more than their people. Nikita Khrushchev, after all, was removed in a quiet coup by his own lieutenants, who had only to suborn the head of a single security apparatus, the KGB.
The desire to avoid a coup produces the second model of authoritarianism, which requires numerous competing centers of power with unclear and overlapping mandates. This forces those lieutenants to constantly compete for the leader’s favor. The chaos and ambiguity of power undermines efficient administration but concentrates power in the leader’s person. In Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, there was a regular police force; the secret police force of the Directorate of General Security; the Iraqi Republican Guard; and finally the Fedayeen Saddam, all of which had the nominal role of controlling domestic dissent, but which operated along completely different lines of command. Men rise to the top of such systems not through competence but through personal loyalty to the boss. Trump’s personal inclinations, as well as the Republican Party’s longstanding opposition to “big government,” suggest that Trump’s second term will be characterized by a strongly personalist administration.
Personalist systems are less effective at managing a society than impersonal bureaucracies. Moreover, they are heavily reliant on the personal abilities of the leader. Trump is not a young, energetic dictato
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Nobody cares about your mental illness, 6ix. Nearly all Republican Congressmen didn't bend to Trump's mental illness, which is why government will not shut down for Xmas. The Democrats got all they wanted and Trump got nothing because he is nuts. (Congress averts shutdown after House GOP drops Trump’s debt limit demand https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/20/politics/house-senate-vote-shutdown-bil
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nobody cares about the government shutting down. We get to hear about that happening every other year.
Next.
--------------------------------------------------
"My only fear of death is coming back to this bitch reincarnated." ~Tupac Shakur
l/index.html )
That's not true.
Democrats originally wanted a 1,547 page bill passed. They got 118 pages.
Trump cut out over 1,400 pages of pork and bullshit and Democrats get to go home with nothing for Christmas.
And when they come back and Trump is inaugurated, we get to start investigating Democrats and figuring out which Republicans we are going to Primary.
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"My only fear of death is coming back to this bitch reincarnated." ~Tupac Shakur
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He Leaked Trump’s Tax Returns. Will Biden Protect Him?
Tax experts say IRS whistleblower Charles Littlejohn’s leaks provided a public service — and fear Trump will take retribution.
By Matthew Sledge / Dec 28, 2024 at 5:21 AM
https://theintercept.com/2024/12/28/trump-irs-billionaire-tax-returns-
leak-charles-littlejohn/
Earlier this month, a group of professors from the normally stodgy world of tax law wrote to President Joe Biden calling on him to free the IRS contractor who leaked the tax returns of Donald Trump and thousands of millionaires and billionaires.
Charles Littlejohn’s five-year sentence was six times the recommended maximum, the professors said, despite the fact that Littlejohn’s disclosures helped shed light on a broken tax system that allows Warren Buffett to pay a lower tax rate than his secretary.
With Biden winding down his time in office, Littlejohn’s advocates, including tax code reformers from the groups Revolving Door Project and Patriotic Millionaires, are worried for the incarcerated IRS consultant. They’re calling on Biden to commute Littlejohn’s sentence before it is too late and he is forced to spend Trump’s second term in prison at risk of retribution.
“Trump has already promised to pardon January 6 insurrectionists who are convicted,” said Kenny Stancil, a senior researcher at the Revolving Door Project. “It would be a perversion of justice if they walk free while Littlejohn spends over four more years in prison.”
Calls for Clemency
Stancil’s Revolving Door Project, Patriotic Millionaires, and the group of tax professors led by Reuven Avi-Yonah of the University of Michigan — who has called Littlejohn a “public hero”— are leading the charge for clemency.
The groups have not called on Biden to pardon Littlejohn, noting that he pleaded guilty, but they did emphasize the civic-minded purpose behind his leaks.
For years before Littlejohn’s leak, and in breaking with decades of precedent, Trump had refused to release his tax returns to the public.
Trump’s Taxes: A Thousand Scandals in One
In response, Littlejohn gave the New York Times years of Trump’s tax returns, which revealed in the run-up to the 2020 election that the real estate developer, entertainer, and politician had paid nothing or next to nothing in federal taxes for years.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-trump-taxes.h
tml
After those leaks, he handed ProPublica the tax documents of thousands of the super-rich, which showed how billionaires such as Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer took advantage of tax breaks to avoid paying millions of dollars to the government.
Ballmer, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos — Littlejohn leaked all their returns, giving the public previously unimaginable insight into how the rich approach paying their taxes. Throughout the process, Littlejohn sought assurances from the news outlets that they would handle the files with care.
https://www.propublica.org/series/the-secret-irs-files
“Littlejohn is a whistleblower, who responsibly disclosed information of interest to the public to reputable news organizations,” Stancil said. “He had nothing to gain personally from this. He was acting in the public interest.”
Littlejohn was able to access wealthy Americans’ tax files as a consultant for the IRS. While he took steps to avoid detection, he quickly pleaded guilty after federal investigators began zeroing in on him. That type of cooperation, along with his spotless record, would normally go a long way toward lenient sentencing.
Instead, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes in January went five times above the recommended maximum 10-month term in federal guidelines to hand Littlejohn the same 60-month sentence recommended by federal prosecutors — the maximum allowable under the law.
Reyes, a Biden appointee, said that Littlejohn’s actions posed a similar threat as the January 6 rioters. By that point, she had already sentenced seven people involved in the events of that day, handing none of them prison sentences, according to an Intercept databas
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How Criminal Justice Helped Break American Democracy
About the Book Criminal Justice in Divided America: Police, Punishment, and the Future of Our Democracy, by David A. Sklansky (Harvard University Press, 2025).
Published December 30, 2024
https://politicsrights.com/how-criminal-justice-broke-american-democra
cy/
Shortly after the recent election, the New York Times reported the results of a new study documenting a deep and pervasive pessimism among the American public, cutting across ideological lines. Only a quarter of Americans think the country’s best days are ahead, only one in ten thinks the government represents them well. This is broadly true both of Trump supporters and of the half of the country that voted against him. “In a sense,” the report concludes, “it is in the deep chords of distrust where Americans seem most united.”
Serge Schmemann, the Times editorial board member who wrote about the study, lamented that it “left unanswered the wrenching question that we must answer if things are to improve: Why? Why has America fallen into the deep malaise quantified by this study? Why are we so down on our country, our government, our prospects? Why is there so much hatred in our civil discourse?”
I offer a partial answer in my new book, Criminal Justice in Divided America: Police, Punishment, and the Future of Our Democracy. Failures of the criminal legal system helped to drive American politics toward populism, polarization, and pessimism. By the same token, the right kinds of reforms can not only make policing, prosecution, and punishment fairer and more effective; they can assist in rebuilding American democracy.
Crime Politics from Goldwater to Trump
It’s hard to think of an area of domestic policy other than criminal justice where American democracy has failed as spectacularly over the past several decades, or with worse consequences. It is hard to be upbeat about the country when you lack confidence that government’s bluntest tools—the police and prisons—will be used fairly and in a way that keeps you safe.
When the Republic party began its long journey toward right-wing populism in the late 1960s, no issue fueled conservative discontent more than the failure of government to provide “law and order.” The politics of crime were the heart of Barry Goldwater’s unsuccessful campaign for president in 1964, and they helped fuel the later victories of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. By the 1980s, Democrats were competing with Republicans to propose the harshest anti-crime policies, and the eventual results were the disasters of mass incarceration and hypermilitarized policing.
More at https://politicsrights.com/how-criminal-justice-broke-american-democra
cy/
Download David A. Sklansky’s books from the mirrors at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=David+Alan+Sklansky
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
How Criminal Justice Helped Break American Democracy
About the Book Criminal Justice in Divided America: Police, Punishment, and the Future of Our Democracy, by David A. Sklansky (Harvard University Press, 2025).
Published December 30, 2024
https://politicsrights.com/how-criminal-justice-broke-american-democra
cy/
Shortly after the recent election, the New York Times reported the results of a new study documenting a deep and pervasive pessimism among the American public, cutting across ideological lines. Only a quarter of Americans think the country’s best days are ahead, only one in ten thinks the government represents them well. This is broadly true both of Trump supporters and of the half of the country that voted against him. “In a sense,” the report concludes, “it is in the deep chords of distrust where Americans seem most united.”
Serge Schmemann, the Times editorial board member who wrote about the study, lamented that it “left unanswered the wrenching question that we must answer if things are to improve: Why? Why has America fallen into the deep malaise quantified by this study? Why are we so down on our country, our government, our prospects? Why is there so much hatred in our civil discourse?”
I offer a partial answer in my new book, Criminal Justice in Divided America: Police, Punishment, and the Future of Our Democracy. Failures of the criminal legal system helped to drive American politics toward populism, polarization, and pessimism. By the same token, the right kinds of reforms can not only make policing, prosecution, and punishment fairer and more effective; they can assist in rebuilding American democracy.
Crime Politics from Goldwater to Trump
It’s hard to think of an area of domestic policy other than criminal justice where American democracy has failed as spectacularly over the past several decades, or with worse consequences. It is hard to be upbeat about the country when you lack confidence that government’s bluntest tools—the police and prisons—will be used fairly and in a way that keeps you safe.
When the Republic party began its long journey toward right-wing populism in the late 1960s, no issue fueled conservative discontent more than the failure of government to provide “law and order.” The politics of crime were the heart of Barry Goldwater’s unsuccessful campaign for president in 1964, and they helped fuel the later victories of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. By the 1980s, Democrats were competing with Republicans to propose the harshest anti-crime policies, and the eventual results were the disasters of mass incarceration and hypermilitarized policing.
More at https://politicsrights.com/how-criminal-justice-broke-american-democra
cy/
Download David A. Sklansky’s books from the mirrors at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=David+Alan+Sklansky
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Good.
Now maybe we can stop pretending that it's only Trumptards that don't trust our government.
I think I've had to hear that dumb bullshit out of you a dozen times in the last week.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Unfortunately for Texas, Trumptards act like they are having a constant mental breakdown which feels normal to them but it is not healthy. Texas Trumptards won't be able to comprehend that Trump deliberately breaking the law is a mentally unwell stance to be knee-jerk approving.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Good.
Now maybe we can stop pretending that it's only Trumptards that don't trust our government.
I think I've had to hear that dumb bullshit out of you a dozen times in the last week.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Trump already planning to break the law
The Wall Street Journal explains why Donald Trump is going to have trouble carrying out his immigration agenda and then tells us what he plans to do about it:
Trump’s advisers have said that he hopes to test the limits of the law by issuing policies he knows to be unlawful, or even unconstitutional, in a bid to persuade the Supreme Court, which is dominated by conservatives, to come to different decisions.
Republicans relentlessly referred to both Obama and Biden as lawbreakers because they enacted policies that were in gray areas and ended up being adjudicated in court. It was always ridiculous because every president does this.
But Trump isn't going after gray areas. If the Journal is right, he plans to enact policies that he flat out knows to be illegal. He's just hoping that his hand-picked Supreme Court will let him do it.
The Five Biggest Roadblocks to Trump’s Immigration Agenda
By Michelle Hackman and Tarini Parti | Jan. 1, 2025 12:10 am ET
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/the-five-biggest-roadblocks-to-tru
mps-immigration-agenda-5bf75c43
President-elect Donald Trump has promised to deport millions of immigrants in what would be the largest deportation operation in U.S. history.
President-elect Donald Trump has promised a crackdown on illegal immigration and significant changes to immigration laws. Now his advisers will contend with long-existing headwinds to turn Trump’s campaign rhetoric into policy.
Here are five major roadblocks the incoming administration will face:
Immigration-court backlog
Most immigrants in the U.S. illegally can’t be deported without a hearing in immigration court, where they have a chance to ask for asylum or another avenue to stay in the country. But immigration courts are so backlogged that hearings are being scheduled as far into the future as 2029.
While immigrants wait for their hearings, they are given work permits, allowing them to find legal employment inside the U.S. Trump and his allies argue this process is an important factor attracting migrants to come to the U.S. to seek asylum—even if they don’t win their court cases.
Outside experts estimate that Congress would have to hire about 5,000 immigration judges—the system now has roughly 500—to efficiently sort through all existing cases as well as new ones.
Republicans hope to use a special budget process to advance Trump’s immigration program without needing Democratic votes.
Barring a large infusion of cash to hire more judges, the Trump administration could shuffle around whose hearings happen first, giving priority to people from certain countries or those with criminal histories. They could make it tougher for immigrants to delay their final hearings, which judges sometimes allow in some cases, to give immigrants more time to find lawyers to represent them.
Without a change in the law, most of the migrants who entered the country illegally during President Biden’s term won’t be legally deportable for years.
Lack of ICE agents
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is responsible for arresting immigrants in the country illegally, detaining them and deporting them. It has roughly 6,000 agents on staff and funding to jail about 40,000 immigrants at any given time. It doesn’t have nearly the fleet of planes needed to deport million
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The fact that Biden got 100 times more scrutiny for ending a failed war than any of his predecessors got for continuing it will never cease to infuriate me. https://t.co/FnIoP5vB5Z
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) January 2, 2025
Read the accompanying op-ed from the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction. We knew for years and years that we were accomplishing nothing in Afghanistan, but we lied about it over and over. And yet it's the guy who finally had the guts to admit it that gets all the brickbats.
America, Afghanistan and the Price of Self-Delusion
By John F. Sopko
Mr. Sopko has been the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction since 2012.
Jan. 2, 2025, 1:00 a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/opinion/afghanistan-audit-reconstru
ction-us.html?unlocked_article_code=1.mE4.9uuB.fTgcimSaQNH5&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&tgrp=on
The collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan on Aug. 15, 2021, revealed what little American lives and money had purchased over 20 years there. It also laid bare a gaping disconnect between reality and what senior U.S. officials had been telling Americans for decades: that success was just around the corner.
As the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction since 2012, my staff and I have audited and investigated U.S. programs and spending to rebuild Afghanistan — a mission that, it was hoped, would turn the theocratic, tribal-based “Graveyard of Empires” into a modern liberal democracy.
In hundreds of reports over the last 12 years, https://www.sigar.mil/ we have detailed a long list of systemic problems: The U.S. government struggled to carry out a coherent strategy, fostered overly ambitious expectations, started unsustainable projects and did not understand the country or its people. American agencies measured success not by what they accomplished, but by dollars spent or checklists of completed tasks.
As our own agency winds down and we prepare to release our final report this year, we raise a fundamental and too rarely asked question: Why did so many senior officials tell Congress and the public, year after year, that success was on the horizon when they knew otherwise? For two decades, officials publicly asserted that continuing the mission in Afghanistan was essential to national interests, until, eventually, two presidents — Donald Trump and Joe Biden — concluded it was not.
The incoming Trump administration, Congress and the long-suffering American taxpayer must ask how this happened so that the United States can avoid similar results in Ukraine, Gaza, Syria and other war zones.
We should start with what “success” in Afghanistan was ever supposed to mean. I believe many Americans who worked there over the years wanted to not only achieve important U.S. strategic interests — such as eliminating a haven for terrorists — but also secure a better future for the Afghan people.
But a perverse incentive drove our system. To win promotions and bigger salaries, military and civilian leaders felt they had to sell their tours of duty, deployments, programs and projects as successes — even when they were not. Leaders tended to report and highlight favorable information while obscuring that which pointed to failure. After all, failures do not lead to an ambassadorship or an elevation to general.
They also aren’t good business for the contractors on which the U.S. mission relied to manage and support programs and projects. For contractors, claiming success, whether real or imaginary, was vital to obtaining future business. So spending became the measure of success. (The same, of course, is true in Washington, where unspent allocations are tantamount to failure, leading to budget cuts.) Accountability for how money was spent was poor. One general told us that he faced a challenge: How to spend the remaining $1 billion from his annual budget in just over a month? Returning the money was not an option. Another official we spoke to said he refu
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Unfortunately for Texas, Trumptards act like they are having a constant mental breakdown which feels normal to them but it is not healthy.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Good.
Now maybe we can stop pretending that it's only Trumptards that don't trust our government.
I think I've had to hear that dumb bullshit out of you a dozen times in the last week.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Shut up, faggot.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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