A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Quote:6ix, you are a stupid asshole. But that is true for Trump, too. Nothing is true, according to you two, if it wins the argument for the other side. That is why argumentation should be discontinued by Libtards, and violently killing you assholes should start. Obviously, Libtards won't because they believe in their hearts that everyone is fundamentally reasonable when approached with soothing words precisely calibrated to resonate with the Trumptard's psychological needs. From my experience, firing Trumptards and canceling contracts with them are the only methods that work. Also, a bullet in a Trumptard's head is a wonder cure for their mental problems and their abiding disbelief in the existence of Truth.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I'm glad that my being right all the time means that your fake persona always manages to get huge fake tax cuts for the fake company he runs.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Biden dropped his bid for reelection after facing pressure about his age, health and mental fitness.
In May, Biden’s post presidential office announced that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and that it had spread to his bones.
Prostate cancers are graded for aggressiveness using what is known as a Gleason score. The scores range from 6 to 10, with 8, 9 and 10 prostate cancers behaving more aggressively. Biden’s office said his score was 9.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/biden-calls-dark-days-urges-
americans-back-126890069
Why does the Gleason Score start at 6? What kind of dimwit starts counting at 6 rather than 1?
https://www.pcf.org/patient-support/diagnosis/gleason-score/
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:Quote:6ix, you are a stupid asshole.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I'm glad that my being right all the time means that your fake persona always manages to get huge fake tax cuts for the fake company he runs.
I'm still glad that my being right all the time means that your fake persona always manages to get huge fake tax cuts for the fake company he runs.
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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The G.O.P. under Donald Trump, like many reactionary nationalist movements, is disproportionately concerned with demographics
By Jelani Cobb | November 2, 2025
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/11/10/voting-rights-and-immigr
ation-under-attack
Sixty years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed two pieces of legislation that are, to a remarkable degree, animating forces in the most volatile aspects of the current political moment. In August, 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, a crowning achievement of the civil-rights movement which paved the way for the election of thousands of African Americans to political office in states where, previously, they were not even allowed to vote. Two months later, he signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, overturning the Immigration Act of 1924, which, by way of eugenics, had sought to curate an immigrant stock of white Europeans. Taken together, the laws democratized the idea of who could be an American, and also which Americans could freely exercise their rights at the ballot box. The Trump Administration and its Republican allies are now engaged in a concerted effort to return the United States to the landscape that preceded them.
The G.O.P. under Donald Trump, like many reactionary nationalist movements, is disproportionately concerned with demographics. Trump’s anti-immigrant crusade has reached a point where masked federal troops are snatching people from their homes—including an instantly infamous ice raid on Chicago’s South Side that involved a Black Hawk helicopter—their cars, their workplaces, courthouses, and public streets. Further demonstrating the nature of the President’s exclusionary vision, on Thursday the Administration announced that it will slash the number of refugees admitted to the U.S. next year to seventy-five hundred, with priority given to white Afrikaners. In addition, the Administration is insisting that universities accept fewer international students, recognizing that admission to such institutions is often the first step toward citizenship.
The President’s goals were made plain on the first day of his second term, when he issued an executive order defying the Fourteenth Amendment’s birthright-citizenship clause. The clause was written after the Civil War to affirm that emancipated native-born Black people were citizens, as was virtually anyone born in this country. But it has been targeted as a means of insuring that children born here without a parent who is either a citizen or a permanent resident are not automatically granted citizenship themselves. Courts blocked the executive order, so, in September, the Department of Justice asked the Supreme Court to take up the question of its legality. The attorneys general of twenty-four Republican-led states have urged the Court to act in Trump’s favor.
At the same time, the President’s desire to control which Americans’ votes will count has been manifested in the battle over congressional maps. The maps are typically revised every ten years, after the census. But three states—Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina—have redrawn their maps at Trump’s behest, creating potentially six more G.O.P.-held seats, and several others, including Louisiana, have taken steps to do the same. This is a transparent attempt to move the goalposts ahead of the 2026 midterms, when a three-seat shift would give Democrats control of the House of Representatives.
In response, at least five states with Democratic majorities are considering redrawing their maps. To counter Texas’s move, California put redistricting on its November ballot, which could give the Democrats five more seats, and voters appear set to approve the measure. In a perverse mirroring of a provision of the Voting Rights Act, the Justice Department is dispatching federal election monitors to some California districts.
But the potential impact of state efforts would likely pale in comparison with the one presented last month at the oral arguments in the Supreme Court case Louisiana v. Callais. In January, 2024, following
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Trump Is Right: Ditch the Filibuster
By Jonathan Chait | November 5, 2025, 1:05 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2025/11/trump-filibuster-democrat
s-senate/684826/
The one Republican elected official who has a serious and workable plan to end the government shutdown is, surprisingly enough, Donald Trump. The president’s idea is for the Senate to change its rules to allow the chamber to keep the government open with a majority vote, rather than to permit 41 senators to shut it down.
To be sure, Trump has not always framed his argument in the most cogent way. In a recent post on X, he wrote, “TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER, NOT JUST FOR THE SHUTDOWN, BUT FOR EVERYTHING ELSE.” By way of explanation, he added, “THE DEMS ARE CRAZED LUNATICS, THEY WILL NOT OPEN UP OUR COUNTRY NO MATTER HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE IRREPARABLY HARMED!”
Generally speaking, depicting your opponents as “crazed lunatics” and yourself as the voice of reason is easier when you are not using all caps and exclamation points. Still, in this case, Trump’s position is correct. The filibuster is a deformed anachronism. Its demise would benefit the whole country, and Democrats especially, given the bills and Senate procedures that this tactic tends to block. If Trump’s impulsive, short-horizon leadership style is what finally does the filibuster in, then Democrats should help make it so.
The Senate filibuster, which allows lawmakers to halt action on most bills unless 60 of the 100 senators in the chamber vote to move forward, is not in the Constitution. The Founders considered, and rejected, a supermajority requirement for either chamber, imposing one only for treaties and constitutional amendments. The practice evolved out of an arcane accident of parliamentary rules in the 19th century and has changed form many times, becoming a requirement for 60 percent of the chamber starting in 1975.
The filibuster used to be employed as a rare tool of strong dissent, such as by southerners to block civil-rights legislation. Most laws otherwise passed with a simple majority until the late 1990s, when the norm against minority parties using the filibuster gave way. As filibusters grew more frequent, lawmakers created more carve-outs to escape them. The Senate now needs only 51 votes to appoint judges (including to the Supreme Court), confirm appointees to the executive branch, and pass annual budget-reconciliation measures, which include changes to taxes and spending. Other bills, including those that fund the government, still need 60 votes to pass the Senate. The perverse upshot of these Swiss-cheese exceptions is that senators can far more easily confirm a lifetime appointment to the high court or pass Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill than they can keep the lights on in the federal government.
The filibuster has a devoted following among senators, who often describe the chamber as the “world’s greatest deliberative body” and treasure its clubby customs and culture. Some senators credit the filibuster with encouraging compromise and bipartisanship, as the parliamentary tool forces lawmakers to draw votes from across the aisle to pass major legislation. Yet most states and democratic countries have banned the procedure, arguing that it tends to make legislative bodies more dysfunctional, not less.
Part of the problem is that, contrary to its pop-cultural image as a forum for debate, à la Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the filibuster does not consist of speeches. Instead, it’s become a tool to preempt a discussion about a bill, which means that it is actually more likely to prevent floor debate than to enable it. The filibuster also lacks a strong record of encouraging bipartisanship: The past few decades have seen greater use of the filibuster and diminishing levels of bipartisan cooperation.
Support for the filibuster used to be thoroughly bipartisan. In recent years, Democrats have mostly abandoned it, even as it retains its Republican backing. The reason for this is simple: Republicans have fewer ambitions for government, and most of the
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Why Is Healthcare Expensive?
Angry Bear | November 15, 2025 7:30 am
https://angrybearblog.com/2025/11/healthcare-in-the-united-states-2
With the government shutdown largely over the future of Obamacare, it is a good time to say a bit about the ridiculous cost of healthcare in the United States. While Republicans blame high healthcare costs on Obamacare, as with most of the things they say, it has nothing to do with reality.
In fact, healthcare costs were rising far more rapidly before Obamacare came to be in 2010. In the decade before Obamacare passed, healthcare costs increased 4.0 percentage points as a share of GDP, the equivalent of more than $1.2 trillion in today’s economy.
By contrast, in the 15 years since its passage, healthcare costs have increased by just 1.4 percentage points of GDP. If healthcare costs had continued to rise at the pre-Obamacare rate, we would be spending another $1.4 trillion a year, $11,000 per household, on healthcare.
Obamacare was not the only factor in slowing healthcare cost growth, but it surely contributed to it. In any case, there is zero doubt. If healthcare cost growth had increased after 2010, Obamacare would be blamed. Given the reality, Republicans have their directions wrong;
Obamacare slowed, not raised, the rate of healthcare cost growth.
But even if Obamacare slowed healthcare cost growth, we still pay a ridiculous amount for healthcare. We pay twice as much as the average for other wealthy countries, with little to show in the form of better outcomes. Our total healthcare costs will come to over $5.4 trillion this year, more than $40,000 per household, or $16,000 per person.
By comparison, Germany and the Netherlands both spend around $6,000 per person for their healthcare.
The Costly Trinity: Drugs, Insurance, and Doctors
The reason we pay more for healthcare than everyone else is not a mystery. We pay twice as much for everything, and we have an enormously wasteful private insurance system.
The best place to start in the waste category is prescription drugs. We will spend over $700 billion this year for drugs that would likely cost around $150 billion in a free market. The difference of $550 billion comes to $4,400 per household annually.
This is a case where it really is the fault of the government that drugs are expensive. We grant drug companies patent monopolies. These monopolies allow pharmaceutical companies to sell drugs for thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, when they would likely be available for tens or hundreds of dollars if they sold in a free market without these government-granted monopolies.
The patents monopolies do serve a purpose: they provide an incentive to innovate and develop new drugs. But there are alternatives to granting patent monopolies. We can pay people. The National Institutes of Health and other government agencies used to spend over $50 billion a year on biomedical research.
We can triple this sum and make all findings a fully open source. New drugs can then be produced as generics the day they are approved. This would both make drugs cheap and also eliminate most of the motivation for corruption in the pharmaceutical industry.
Drug companies have a huge incentive to lie about the safety and effectiveness of their drugs when they can sell a prescription for $3,000 that costs them $30 to manufacture and distribute. They would have much less incentive to push false stories that jeopardize people’s health if the drug was selling for $50 or $60 per prescription.
Some of us had hopes that RFK Jr., with his complaints about corruption in the pharmaceutical industry, would look to alter the system of patent monopoly financed research, which is the obvious source of this corruption. Instead, he has pushed an incoherent agenda, attacking Tylenol and generally cheap vaccines, that have a proven track record for safety and effectiveness.
Anyhow, when it comes to lowering the cost for dru
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Yap, yap, yap.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick. 
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Quote:Shorter version for dumber people:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Yap, yap, yap.
Charlie Munger Said Single-Payer Is the Fix America Needs. 'Having a Basic Level of Care for Everybody' Should Be a Right, Even With No Insurance
By Jeannine Mancini | Mon, November 17, 2025 at 10:45 AM
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/charlie-munger-said-single-payer-1
64535950.html
Charlie Munger looked at the American healthcare system and gave the kind of diagnosis that does not come with a gentle bedside manner.
The longtime Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman, Republican and Warren Buffett's closest business partner thought the cure was simple, politically explosive, and inevitable.
In a 2018 interview with CNBC, he called the U.S. system "shot through with rampant waste" and that some of what he saw as a hospital trustee was "deeply immoral."
"A lot of the medical care we do deliver is wrong" and "so expensive and wrong," he argued, and he accused parts of the industry of artificially prolonging death to make more money. This was not just a budgeting issue for him. It had crossed into an ethical one.
Munger also tied healthcare costs directly to the broader economy. Buffett had famously warned that rising medical expenses were a "tapeworm" on American business. He agreed and pushed the point further, arguing that U.S. manufacturers carry a "huge competitive disadvantage" compared with companies in Europe, where governments shoulder far more of the health tab.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:An Anatomy of the MAGA Mind
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Yap, yap, yap.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
In Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, the political theorist Laura K. Field organizes the ideas that have coalesced around Donald Trump
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2025/11/how-trump-corrupted-intellec
tual-right/685021/
The American experiment in egalitarian, multiethnic democracy fills MAGA intellectuals with anxiety, if not loathing. As Field notes, they often express undisguised hostility toward women, sexual minorities, the “woke Marxists” of the left, and the cultural elites of the “soulless managerial class.”
. . . Her exodus, as she tells it, began in 2010, when she was a fifth-year graduate student, during a lavish banquet at the University of Virginia where she was seated next to an important member of the host organization’s staff, who described meeting First Lady Michelle Obama: “Very tall, very impressive. I’d really like to fuck her.” Field excused herself to go to the restroom. Gazing in the mirror, she wondered: “What on earth am I doing here?”
She didn’t flee entirely. In the ensuing years she lingered as a sort of spy, attending conferences where speakers took turns denouncing liberalism, secularism, feminism, and modernity itself—until, in 2024, she became persona non grata. By then something had happened to the sober, pious minds of the new right. That something was Trump.
Beginning with his election in 2016, anti-liberal intellectuals made a Faustian bet that this coarse real-estate developer and reality-TV star would be the vehicle for realizing the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. “Trump was the strongman brought to bring liberalism to heel,” Field writes. But in attaching themselves to MAGA, they did less to influence the new regime than Trump did to corrupt them. Field shows, for example, how the Claremont Institute became a nest of conspiracy theorists and election denialists, with one of their own Straussians—the constitutional scholar John Eastman—providing Trump with a bogus legal justification for overturning the 2020 presidential election. Or take Deneen, a serious philosophical mind whose widely influential 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed, was a kind of 95 theses nailed to the front door of the Enlightenment. “Whereas in 2012, in addition to disdain and skepticism, Deneen showed some sensitivity to the attractions of elite modern urban life,” Field writes, “ten years later he was naming the American elite ‘one of the worst of its kind produced in history,’ calling to ‘replace’ them, and advocating for ‘regime change.’”
Subverting the establishment is a lot more thrilling than defending it. Many of those who trade in ideas that overturn the status quo are drawn to power and have a particular weakness for extremism. Whether the likes of Steve Bannon, Michael Anton, Stephen Miller, and Tucker Carlson are driven by conviction, opportunism, personal grievance, or some combination of these motives is never easy to say. What’s clear is that MAGA ideologues—including the prize recruit to the anti-liberal right, J. D. Vance—have entered a downward spiral of ever cruder language and thought, usually with notes of bigotry and xenophobia, and sometimes blatant ugliness, as if to show their bona fides. They’ve abandoned tradition for radicalism, careful scholarship for vulgar discourse, reason for the irrational, universal truths for narrow identities, and philosophy for partisanship.
Read: The intellectual vacuity of the national conservatives
A few obscure figures—I wasn’t familiar with the name Julius Krein—recoiled and withdrew from the magnetic sphere around Trump. Others, such as Rod Dreher, have very recently begun to voice concern over the hateful trajectory of the American right. But reading Field, you can see something like the current wave of MAGA anti-Semitism coming from a long way off. Moral and intellectual descent is inherent in a political proj
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Your party is dead.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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