A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Quote:
Originally posted by captaincrunch:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Buttigieg is right about why Democrats keep failing to pass their big plans. He said:
This is the conversation that we have been having for the last 20 years. Of course we need to get money out of politics, but when I propose the actual structural democratic reforms that might make a difference — end the Electoral College, amend the Constitution if necessary to clear up Citizens United, have DC actually be a state, and depoliticize the Supreme Court with structural reform — people look at me funny, as if this country was incapable of structural reform.
He is the clearest and least political thinker running. He thinks of Problems as things to be solved and defeated, and not "who will gain?" Trump is the exact opposite. If Trump wins we'll have 20 more years of reality tv presidents and 20 years of media over coverage. Buttigieg is the other direction.
Yeah. It's too bad the 8 of them polling lower don't drop out. He'd probably get a decent amount of the percentage of that and maybe he could get into the double digits finally.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/us/2020_democr
atic_presidential_nomination-6730.html
I think that Trump would destroy any one of them in the debates, but there's really not a need to speculate on that. There's almost zero chance that anybody but Biden is going to get the nomination. Something that I called many months ago.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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The Democrats Need to Get Their Act Together
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-democrats-need-to-get-their-a
ct-together
I found the first two series of Democratic presidential debates painful to watch, and I don’t think it was simply the result of the format or of the questions asked. It was because in their preoccupations, I don’t think the Democratic candidates have developed the message and the language that can win the White House for the party.
Medicare for All has all the problems of past plans: it threatens higher taxes; and it comes across as another welfare program in which the middle class will have to subsidize the non-working poor….Trump’s nativist attacks against immigrants from South of the Border and his administration’s inhumane treatment of asylum seekers has had the perverse effect of pushing the Democrats toward a virtual endorsement of open borders….Senator Elizabeth Warren and several candidates, while bemoaning growing economic inequality, called for increases in legal immigration based on family reunification, which in the past has brought millions of unskilled workers into the labor market who compete for jobs with unskilled native-born and first-generation Americans.
….Trump has played upon a politics that could be described as “white supremacist.”…But in responding to Trump’s racism, Democrats have been using these terms in every other sentence – and add to that Senator Gillibrand’s high-toned blast against “white privilege.” In doing so, they are implicitly attacking not merely Trump but his past supporters and — even more important — people who are queasy about the Democrats for one reason or another. The terms also suggest that white voters have little to complain about, a message that won’t play very well in November 2020.
I also fear they think that in reiterating these terms — or in promoting reparations — the Democrats think they are courting black voters. In my experience — and I hope this won’t seem like some kind of weird racism — black adult voters are among the most sophisticated in the electorate. You could see it in Virginia after the various Democratic presidential candidates fell over each other to call for Governor Ralph Northam’s resignation for a 36 year old yearbook photo of questionable origin that had been publicized by a rightwing website angry about the governor’s stand on abortion. Virginia’s black Democrats, cognizant that Northam had not run a racist administration, or had a record of racism as a legislator, continued to back him. You see it in the continued African-American support for former Vice President Joe Biden in spite of Senator Kamala Harris’s attack against him for his decades-old stances on busing. Biden’s support might disappear, but again I think it is based currently on a reasoned assessment of who among the candidates is best equipped to get rid of Trump.
More at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-democrats-need-to-get-their-a
ct-together
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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It’s like we’re living in the 19th century again:
The White House has instructed newly installed Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper to reexamine the awarding of the military’s massive cloud-computing contract because of concerns that the deal would go to Amazon, officials close to the decision-making process said….The president’s directive represents a departure from what is usually a scripted bureaucratic process. Trump on several occasions has spoken out against Amazon and its chief executive, Jeff Bezos.
….Oracle has lobbied Trump aggressively on the matter, hoping to appeal to his animosity toward Amazon as well as former defense secretary Jim Mattis, who angered the president when he resigned last year over the administration’s foreign policy decisions. Oracle Executive Vice President Ken Glueck, who runs the company’s policy shop in Washington, said he created a colorful flow chart labeled “A Conspiracy To Create A Ten Year DoD Cloud Monopoly” that portrayed connections among Amazon executives, Mattis and officials from the Obama administration. That graphic made it to Trump’s desk and led to a discussion between the president and his aides, people familiar with the matter said.
This is like a hellscape mashup of kindergarten temper tantrums with vindictive adult corruption. Trump doesn’t like the Washington Post, so he takes revenge on its owner by lashing out at Amazon and telling the Pentagon he doesn’t want them to get any big contracts. Meanwhile, the Oracle folks, obviously having taken the measure of our moron-in-chief, know exactly what buttons to push. Hell, they’re so proud of it — and so sure that Trump will never catch on — that they brag about it publicly.
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/08/trump-takes-his-revenge-on-jeff
-bezos/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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What if Fox News covered Trump the way it covered Obama? It would look like this:
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 molten core of right-wing nationalism is the furious denial of America’s unalterably multiracial, multicultural national character
The question of who “we” are as “a people” is the central question on which we’re polarized. High-minded calls to reunite under the flag therefore tend to take a side and amount to little more than a demand for the other side’s unconditional surrender. “Agree with me, and then we won’t disagree” is more a threat than an argument.
The way the nationalist sees it, liberals always throw the first punch by “changing things.” When members of the “Great American Middle” (to use the artfully coded phrase of Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri to refer to non-urban whites) lash out in response to the provocations of progressive social change, they see themselves as patriots defending their America from internal attack.
The attackers — the nature-denying feminists, ungrateful blacks, babbling immigrants, ostentatiously wedded gays — bear full responsibility for any damage wrought by populist backlash, because they incited it by demanding and claiming a measure of equal freedom. But they aren’t entitled to it, because the conservative denizens of the fruited plain are entitled first to a country that feels like home to them. That’s what America is. So the blame for polarizing mutual animosity must always fall on those who fought for, or failed to prevent, the developments that made America into something else — a country “real Americans” find hard to recognize or love.
The practical implication of the nationalist’s entitled perspective requires submission to a vision of national identity flatly incompatible with the existence of America’s urban multicultural majority. That’s a recipe for civil war, not social cohesion.
The author of “The Virtue of Nationalism” and impresario of the “national conservatism” conference argued that America’s loss of social cohesion is because of secularization and egalitarian social change that began in the 1960s. “You throw out Christianity, you throw out the Torah, you throw out God and within two generations people can’t tell the difference between a man and a woman. They can’t tell the difference between a foreigner and a citizen. They can’t tell the difference between this side of the border and the other side of the border.”
“The only way to save this country, to bring it back to cohesion,” Mr. Hazony added, “is going to be to restore those traditions.”
Mr. Hazony gave no hint as to how this might be peacefully done within the scope of normal politics. “It’s not simple,” he eventually conceded.
More at www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/opinion/national-conservatives-republicans-
trump.html
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:
Originally posted by second:
What if Fox News covered Trump the way it covered Obama? It would look like [the way the rest of the MSM covered Obama].
FIFY
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The Democrats Need to Get Their Act Together
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-democrats-need-to-get-their-a
ct-together
I found the first two series of Democratic presidential debates painful to watch, and I don’t think it was simply the result of the format or of the questions asked. It was because in their preoccupations, I don’t think the Democratic candidates have developed the message and the language that can win the White House for the party.
Medicare for All has all the problems of past plans: it threatens higher taxes; and it comes across as another welfare program in which the middle class will have to subsidize the non-working poor….Trump’s nativist attacks against immigrants from South of the Border and his administration’s inhumane treatment of asylum seekers has had the perverse effect of pushing the Democrats toward a virtual endorsement of open borders….Senator Elizabeth Warren and several candidates, while bemoaning growing economic inequality, called for increases in legal immigration based on family reunification, which in the past has brought millions of unskilled workers into the labor market who compete for jobs with unskilled native-born and first-generation Americans.
….Trump has played upon a politics that could be described as “white supremacist.”…But in responding to Trump’s racism, Democrats have been using these terms in every other sentence – and add to that Senator Gillibrand’s high-toned blast against “white privilege.” In doing so, they are implicitly attacking not merely Trump but his past supporters and — even more important — people who are queasy about the Democrats for one reason or another. The terms also suggest that white voters have little to complain about, a message that won’t play very well in November 2020.
I also fear they think that in reiterating these terms — or in promoting reparations — the Democrats think they are courting black voters. In my experience — and I hope this won’t seem like some kind of weird racism — black adult voters are among the most sophisticated in the electorate. You could see it in Virginia after the various Democratic presidential candidates fell over each other to call for Governor Ralph Northam’s resignation for a 36 year old yearbook photo of questionable origin that had been publicized by a rightwing website angry about the governor’s stand on abortion. Virginia’s black Democrats, cognizant that Northam had not run a racist administration, or had a record of racism as a legislator, continued to back him. You see it in the continued African-American support for former Vice President Joe Biden in spite of Senator Kamala Harris’s attack against him for his decades-old stances on busing. Biden’s support might disappear, but again I think it is based currently on a reasoned assessment of who among the candidates is best equipped to get rid of Trump.
More at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-democrats-need-to-get-their-a
ct-together
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
It's too late for any of them now. Biden is going to be the "safe" choice since he's largely just kept his mouth shut while the rest of them are extolling the virtues of socialism, open borders, "free" healthcare for all that is anything but free and White Man Bad, but not as much as Orange Man Bad.
Biden is the only one even worth paying any attention to now, unless you're in it for the yucks. And he's not even saying anything. He's letting the other clowns destroy each other.
Biden's nomination is going to be the easiest nomination ever secured. And then Trump is going to destroy him.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Trump’s Trade Quagmire. He keeps escalating as his strategy fails.
Why is Trump doing this? A lot of center-right apologists for Trump used to claim that he wasn’t really fixated on bilateral trade balances, which every economist knows is stupid, that it was really about intellectual property or something. I’m not hearing that much anymore; it’s increasingly clear that he is, indeed, fixated on trade balances, and believes that America runs trade deficits because other countries don’t play fair.
Strange to say, however, despite all those new tariffs the U.S. trade deficit is getting bigger, not smaller, on his watch. Why aren’t tariffs shrinking the trade deficit? Mainly the answer is that Trump’s theory of the case is all wrong. Trade balances are mainly about macroeconomics, not tariff policy.
This article, by the way, while not very technical, is going to make use of a number of charts and even a few terms of art.
To preview, I’m going to make five points:
1. The trade war is getting big. Tariffs on Chinese goods are back to levels we associate with pre-1930s protectionism. And the trade war is reaching the point where it becomes a significant drag on the U.S. economy.
2. Nonetheless, the trade war is failing in its goals, at least as Trump sees them: the Chinese aren’t crying uncle, and the trade deficit is rising, not falling.
3. The Fed probably can’t offset the harm the trade war is doing, and is probably getting less willing even to try.
4. Trump is likely to respond to his disappointments by escalating, with tariffs on more stuff and more countries, and — despite denials — in the end, with currency intervention.
5. Other countries will retaliate, and this will get very ugly, very fast.
I could, of course, be wrong. But that’s how it looks given what we know now.
More at www.nytimes.com/2019/08/03/opinion/trumps-trade-quagmire-wonkish.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Bosses can fire you for your politics. The First Amendment does not apply.
Updated: Aug. 5, 2019 6:32 a.m.
The public mingling of politics and work are just a hint of what we can expect as the 2020 campaign season kicks into high gear after Labor Day. Politics will soon seep into every crevice of our lives, presenting challenges for workplace supervisors.
The first and most important lesson for every worker is that your employer has no legal obligation to respect your freedom of speech. The First Amendment does protect people from government censorship, but your boss is the undisputed dictator at work, especially in Texas.
With the 2020 races likely to raise tempers and emotions, many bosses will decide a total ban makes sense. But he or she should be prepared for the hothead who storms their office questioning whether the boss can censor speech.
“The blunt answer would be, ‘Oh, yes, I can. Get out of my office,’” said Chip Babcock, a First Amendment lawyer at Jackson Walker.
Where it becomes more disturbing is that your boss can punish you for off-duty political activities. As long an employment or union contract does not specify otherwise, Texas employers can fire any employee who engages in politics they don’t like.
“If you’re an at-will employee, and the employment action is based on the speech you give out in the community, and that’s not just a pretext or something else, then sadly the employer can terminate,” Babcock explained.
www.houstonchronicle.com/business/columnists/tomlinson/article/Bosses-
can-fire-your-for-your-politics-the-First-14188340.php
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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How the Republican Majority Emerged
Fifty years after the Republican Party hit upon a winning formula, President Trump is putting it at risk.
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/emerging-republican-majority
/595504/
In July 1969, Kevin Phillips, a 28-year-old staffer in the Nixon White House and special assistant to Attorney General John Mitchell, published a book boldly titled The Emerging Republican Majority. For nearly four decades, the Democratic Party’s New Deal coalition had dominated American politics. But in the book, Phillips argued that the old order had come to an end, and that a new conservative era was in the offing.
Quote:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Phillips_(political_commentator)
From now on, Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote, and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.
Phillips’s projection was grounded in his assessment of recent Republican strategies. At the same time, he asserted that his analysis offered the best hope for the party’s future: pitting racial and ethnic groups against one another and capitalizing politically on the competitions and resentments that followed. “The whole secret of politics,” he told the journalist Garry Wills during the 1968 presidential campaign, is “knowing who hates who.”
Fifty years later, the GOP has come to dominate every part of the Sun Belt, just as Phillips predicted, and President Donald Trump has mobilized the politics of division in a way no modern president has before.
Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater famously declared that the GOP should “hunt where the ducks are” by writing off “the Negro vote” and pursuing southern whites instead. Capitalizing on the white southern backlash against civil rights was central to his strategy. In making federal involvement in social, cultural, and economic issues the ostensible focus of his opposition, rather than race itself, Goldwater managed to reassure the South that he would protect the status quo.
As the political scientists Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields chronicle in their new book, The Long Southern Strategy, the old “coded racism” continued, but in concert with social appeals to religious conservatism and anti-feminism. Taken together, these approaches solidified the South for the Republicans and, as a result, secured their victories in national races.
The Republican majority that emerged did so largely on the terms set forth by Phillips. Appeals to racial resentments, handled lightly, did much of the work, but the broader social issues ultimately played an even more important role. Striking a delicate balance between the two proved to be the winning strategy for the GOP.
The risk for Republicans today, of course, is that President Trump has upset this balance, rejecting old dog whistles on race for full-throated racism. Unlike Nixon, who disastrously tried such a strategy in his first midterm but then dialed it back considerably in his reelection run, Trump has doubled down on the race-based themes that failed to work in his own first midterm. In doing so, he runs the risk of reversing decades of work and rendering the Republican majority a thing of history.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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