A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Supreme Court swing vote Anthony Kennedy to retire; Trump gets 2nd appointment
Part of the genius of Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority leader, is that he not only blocks the Democratic politicians, he frustrates the Democratic voters. Angry and frightened by the prospect of the Supreme Court moving further rightward, much of the progressive voting base is inevitably going to take out their rage not on Trump, McConnell, and vulnerable Senate Republicans like Dean Heller (R-NV) but on Democratic politicians for not being able to block him — just as much of the progressive rank-and-file voters reacted to disappointment with Democratic politicians’ legislative productivity in 2009-2010 by sitting out the midterms.
More about how Democratic voters shoot themselves in the foot, year after year, instead of shooting Republican politicians at www.vox.com/2018/6/27/17511048/mitch-mcconnell-supreme-court-anthony-k
ennedy-retirement
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:Do it, Signym. Do it, 1kiki. Do it now. Please, please, pretty please. There is nothing stopping you, other than you live in Russia and you'd have to hire an American lawyer who will inform you that it is impossible to malign the character or make believable death threats against imaginary persons going by the designations "Signym" and "1kiki". You have to use your real names. Disney couldn't win a suit if Mickey Mouse received death threats. Putin can't win a suit if "Signym" and "1kiki" receive death threats.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:And so, because facts and logic fail you and because you're so immutably wedded to your hate-filled biased POV that you can't POSSIBLY change your mind about anything, you resort to threats.
I am not wasting my time explaining to you, unless I could get my hands on you.
The person who's incapable of discussion, SECONDRATE, is you, not me. If KIKI ever decides to go forward with her lawsuit, I'll be PMing her to add my name to the lawsuit. Maybe we can go for double damages.
Was it Republicans that did the following? Or Democrats? It was Republicans. Signym and 1kiki have aligned themselves with the GOP. You two are to blame, if you actually are Republicans and not Russians. Please sue me. It is a legal way for my lawyers to terrorize you, but only if you live inside the USA. I can't touch you in Moscow. Lucky you.
How trauma surgeons can prevent gun violence
www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/How-can-trauma-surgeo
ns-prevent-gun-violence-13031927.php
R. Mario Vera is a trauma and acute care surgeon at Ben Taub Hospital and director of the surgical simulation programs for the Michael E. DeBakey Department of Surgery at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
Beginning in the early 1990s, researchers examined whether having a gun in the home was more likely to protect occupants from crime (e.g., self-defense) or more likely to increase their risk of violent crime. Several studies showed that individuals with guns in the home were nearly three times more likely to die from homicide or suicide than those who did not.
This research was so damning that the NRA sent lobbyists to strong-arm politicians to stop it. Since several of those early studies had been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the NRA demanded that Congress eliminate all funding for gun violence research from the NIH budget. They succeeded, but only in curtailing NIH research.
CDC continued to fund studies despite pressure from pro-gun groups. Again, the gun lobbyists descended on lawmakers and convinced them to put the industry’s profits first. In 1996, Congress passed the Dickey Amendment, which effectively banned the CDC from funding any research on gun violence as a public health issue. In the 22 years since, more than 600,000 Americans have died from gun violence.
Private organizations have stepped in to fund some research. But these efforts lack the power and reach of NIH and CDC. And they are hampered by a shortage of reliable data. While motor vehicle deaths are carefully researched, there is no equivalent funding for gun deaths. And the NRA has managed to make the work more difficult by pushing Congress to block the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from distributing information from its national database on guns used in crimes.
The inability of legitimate research institutions to weigh in on the public health impact of gun violence has left an information vacuum that has been filled by the NRA and its assertions that a gun in the home is the best protection for families; that arming teachers will protect students; that the best defense against abad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Despite the NIH’s research to the contrary, a recent Pew Research Center poll found that 57 percent of Americans believe that owning a gun protects them from crime while only 38 percent believe that it endangers their safety. Th
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An autopsy of the American dream
Sean Illing: You used the phrase “common good” a couple times, and I think that gets to the core problem. We don’t have a common good anymore — if we ever did have one. We live in country with almost no social capital, no real civic bonds. A generation of Americans have exploited the rules of our system, hoarded all the gains for themselves, and then rigged the game in their favor. And they did it because they feel no obligation whatsoever to the country that provided the opportunities or to their fellow citizens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_capital
Steven Brill: No question. In many cases, the people doing the most damage aren’t breaking any laws or consciously trying to hurt anyone else. They’re simply doing what they were told to do — go to prestigious law schools, get a job at a prestigious law firm, and make lots of money. But the end result of what they’ve done is to create a country that is more unequal and less fair.
Sean Illing: Has America been victimized by its own meritocracy? Have the people who worked or innovated their way to the top used their advantages to engineer what amounts to an aristocracy?
Steven Brill: It’s been victimized by its own failures. The way it was victimized is that the smartest, most driven, most talented people were able to take those values and use them to their own advantage at the expense of the common good.
For a country to work, you have to have balance between personal ambition and personal achievements and the common good.
The way you do that is to have all kinds of guardrails on the system. In finance, you have regulatory guardrails. You have labor laws that produce something like a level playing field between employer and employee. You have consumer protection laws. You do all kinds of things to create these guardrails so that the winners can’t win in a way that hurts everybody else. That’s what we’ve lost.
More at www.vox.com/2018/6/28/17469080/american-dream-steven-brill-inequality-
poverty-tailspin
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Trump’s top economic adviser said Friday that the federal deficit is “coming down rapidly,” contradicting estimates by nonpartisan analysts, Congress's official scorekeeper and a branch of the White House.
Kudlow, director of the White House's National Economic Council, said on Fox Business that stronger economic growth was creating enough new tax revenue to bring down the deficit.
“The deficit — which was one of the other criticisms [of the GOP tax law] — is coming down, and it's coming down rapidly,” Kudlow said. “It's throwing up enormous amounts of new tax revenue.”
https://pic.twitter.com/H375h7rV0a
— FOX Business (@FoxBusiness) June 29, 2018
It's hard to know where Kudlow is getting his numbers. The deficit from January through April was $161 billion, according to Treasury, up from $135 billion at the same point last year. And it will deteriorate further from here, since the Treasury collects a large amount of tax revenue during April when taxes are due for most Americans.
The White House's Office of Management and Budget says the deficit is rising from $665 billion in 2017 to $832 billion in 2018, and will approach $1 trillion annually in 2019.
More at https://goo.gl/WZQewM
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The GOP refuses to be responsible: U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley criticized the UN report for critiquing the United States' treatment of its poor, arguing that the United Nations should instead focus on poverty in Burundi or Congo. The U.N. report also faulted the Trump administration for pursuing policies it said would exacerbate U.S. poverty. http://undocs.org/A/HRC/38/33/ADD.1
10. Defenders of the status quo point to the United States as the land of opportunity and the place where the American dream can come true because the poorest can aspire to the ranks of the richest. But today’s reality is very different. The United States now has one of the lowest rates of inter-generational social mobility of any of the rich countries. Zip codes, which are usually reliable proxies for race and wealth, are tragically reliable predictors of a child’s future employment and income prospects. High child and youth poverty rates perpetuate the inter-generational transmission of poverty very effectively, and ensure that the American dream is rapidly becoming the American illusion. The equality of opportunity, which is so prized in theory, is in practice a myth, especially for minorities and women, but also for many middle-class White workers.
“It is patently ridiculous for the United Nations to examine poverty in America,” Haley wrote in a letter to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Thursday. “In our country, the President, Members of Congress, Governors, Mayors, and City Council members actively engage on poverty issues every day. Compare that to the many countries around the world, whose governments knowingly abuse human rights and cause pain and suffering.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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‘Star Wars: Episode I’ is really about President Trump
We all owe George Lucas an apology.
For a long time, it seemed difficult to come up with a more disappointing way for “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace” to begin than with the words “the taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute.”
It was as if a million voices suddenly cried out in boredom and were suddenly silenced by sleep. Their fandom couldn't repel tedium of that magnitude.
As we're finding out today, though, this might actually be a pretty prescient story about how democracies and the international (or interplanetary) order they've created fall apart. “Episode I,” then, might now be the most consequential Star War movie there is, even if you'd have to get rid of a lot of the acting, most of the dialogue and all the Jar Jar Binks to be able to get through it.
Thanks, President Trump.
More at www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/13/star-wars-episode-i-is-
really-about-president-trump/?utm_term=.a54ab667281b
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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No. It wasn't.
Star Wars - Episode 1 was about GWB.
Not buying your revisionist history, especially when it would necessitate a working crystal ball.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:And a good thing, too! There is nothing "democratic" about the WTO, or other "free trade" deals, or the BIS and it's coterie of central banks, or the Troika and its administration of the EU currency, or the various western military alliances.
As we're finding out today, though, this might actually be a pretty prescient story about how democracies and the international (or interplanetary) order they've created fall apart. - SECOND
What voting booth is that, where we elect the bureaucrats and technocrats that administer this "international order"? Where are those venues where we can have our complaints adjudicated according to democratically- written laws? Where do we have representation of our national economic interests?
Oh, nowhere, you say?
That's right: Nowhere.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
As long as you insist that everything is the Republicans'/ Democrats' fault, then you fail to grasp the REAL problem with American politics.
America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876
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Quote:I worked as an engineer and we never put anything to a vote by the people. We didn't poll citizens for input on how to design petrochemical plants or who we buy equipment from or who we hire directly or subcontract with. And you know damn well why: Americans don't know a fucking thing about technical questions and they won't even try to learn. And I know perfectly well that Signym knows nothing, nothing at all. But sadly, she believes she does. Prove you are not completely a black hole of ignorant opinion once in a while, Signym.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:And a good thing, too! There is nothing "democratic" about the WTO, or other "free trade" deals, or the BIS and it's coterie of central banks, or the Troika and its administration of the EU currency, or the various western military alliances.
As we're finding out today, though, this might actually be a pretty prescient story about how democracies and the international (or interplanetary) order they've created fall apart. - SECOND
What voting booth is that, where we elect the bureaucrats and technocrats that administer this "international order"? Where are those venues where we can have our complaints adjudicated according to democratically- written laws? Where do we have representation of our national economic interests?
Oh, nowhere, you say?
That's right: Nowhere.
https://bigthink.com/praxis/why-are-americans-so-ignorant
www.nationalobserver.com/2017/11/15/opinion/are-americans-just-stupid
www.macleans.ca/society/why-americans-have-come-to-worship-their-own-i
gnorance/
Besides engineering, Americans don't know a fucking thing about banking, finance, trade, manufacturing, engineering, design, etc. They know their favorite TV show. Big damn worthless deal. Their gigantic ignorance and their misplaced self-confidence in their judgment is why they get their asses kicked by the top 1% -- people like me.
I guess in theory the government will look after the people's interests, but when the UN pointed out that Trump was not, I repeat not, looking after the people's interests, the American ambassador to the UN threw a temper tantrum when she read this report: http://undocs.org/A/HRC/38/33/ADD.1
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:WOW! And THUGR thinks that I attack democratic institutions! What a huge dis of Americans! That was an undemocratic screed worthy of Nietzsche. And gee, it puts you in the driver's seat as an oligarch .... how convenient, for you!
As we're finding out today, though, this might actually be a pretty prescient story about how democracies and the international (or interplanetary) order they've created fall apart. - SECOND
And a good thing, too! There is nothing "democratic" about the WTO, or other "free trade" deals, or the BIS and it's coterie of central banks, or the Troika and its administration of the EU currency, or the various western military alliances.
What voting booth is that, where we elect the bureaucrats and technocrats that administer this "international order"? Where are those venues where we can have our complaints adjudicated according to democratically- written laws? Where do we have representation of our national economic interests?
Oh, nowhere, you say?
That's right: Nowhere. - SIGNY
I worked as an engineer and we never put anything to a vote by the people. We didn't poll citizens for input on how to design petrochemical plants or who we buy equipment from or who we hire directly or subcontract with. And you know damn well why: Americans don't know a fucking thing about technical questions and they won't even try to learn. And I know perfectly well that Signym knows nothing, nothing at all. But sadly, she believes she does. Prove you are not completely a black hole of ignorant opinion once in a while, Signym.
https://bigthink.com/praxis/why-are-americans-so-ignorant
www.nationalobserver.com/2017/11/15/opinion/are-americans-just-stupid
www.macleans.ca/society/why-americans-have-come-to-worship-their-own-i
gnorance/
Besides engineering, Americans don't know a fucking thing about banking, finance, trade, manufacturing, engineering, design, etc. They know their favorite TV show. Big damn worthless deal. Their gigantic ignorance and their misplaced self-confidence in their judgment is why they get their asses kicked by the top 1% -- people like me.
I guess in theory the government will look after the people's interests, but when the UN pointed out that Trump was not, I repeat not, looking after the people's interests, the American ambassador to the UN threw a temper tantrum when she read this report: http://undocs.org/A/HRC/38/33/ADD.1
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
As long as you insist that everything is the Republicans'/ Democrats' fault, then you fail to grasp the REAL problem with American politics.
America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876
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