A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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At least we can say that David Frum knows who he is.
Whether or not he's genuine? The jury's still out on that.
I recommend that he give all of his money away and live under a bridge a while to contemplate what he's done.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Throughout his time in office, Trump has been his own worst enemy. Any other incumbent president with relative peace abroad, a good economy and a united party would be sitting pretty for reelection. However, he shows the nation every day the immense risks of keeping him in power.
The reason that impeachment is on the table has less to do with the Mueller report than the President's own actions. In the same way that President Andrew Johnson's attacks on Reconstruction fueled the impeachment drive against him, the President's far right agenda is emboldening Democrats to consider voting for impeachment -- even if Senate Republicans will inevitably prevent his removal from office.
The worse that the President behaves, and the clearer the real world impact of his actions becomes, the easier it will be for Democrats to go on record saying that obstructing justice in a serious investigation is unacceptable. He tried to stifle the investigators in ways that President Richard Nixon would never have imagined possible.
We are still far away from that kind of vote. The fears that Pelosi has about a backlash to impeachment in moderate districts are very real and have not disappeared. Until she has the entire Democratic Caucus behind her, she will likely be reluctant to give her full support.
Trump, however, keeps making it difficult to just say no. His presidency is off the rails, and he is playing with a fire of racism, nativism and social division that is dangerous -- if not deadly. His rhetoric keeps getting more explosive as the election heats up.
More at www.cnn.com/2019/08/11/opinions/trump-impeaching-himself-zelizer/index
.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:6ix, the following misfortune happened to you, but your answer is to vote for the GOP:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
At least we can say that David Frum knows who he is.
Whether or not he's genuine? The jury's still out on that.
I recommend that he give all of his money away and live under a bridge a while to contemplate what he's done.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Conservatives have been driven to these fevered anxieties as much by their own trauma as by external events. In the aughts, Republicans held more power for longer than at any time since the twenties, yet the result was the weakest and least broadly shared economic expansion since World War II, followed by an economic crash and prolonged slump. Along the way, the GOP suffered two severe election defeats in 2006 and 2008. Imagine yourself a rank-and-file Republican in 2009: If you have not lost your job or your home, your savings have been sliced and your children cannot find work. Your retirement prospects have dimmed. Most of all, your neighbors blame you for all that has gone wrong in the country. There’s one thing you know for sure: None of this is your fault! And when the new Democratic president fails to deliver rapid recovery, he can be designated the target for everyone’s accumulated disappointment and rage. In the midst of economic wreckage, what relief to thrust all blame upon Barack Obama as the wrecker-in-chief.
The Bush years cannot be repudiated, but the memory of them can be discarded to make way for a new and more radical ideology, assembled from bits of the old GOP platform that were once sublimated by the party elites but now roam the land freely: ultralibertarianism, crank monetary theories, populist fury . . .
When Did the GOP Lose Touch with Reality?
http://davidfrum.com/article/when-did-the-gop-lose-touch-with-reality
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:
When Did the GOP Lose Touch with Reality?
Probably right around the same time the Democrats lost touch with reality.
Anybody who can ask me why I vote GOP after watching the Democratic debates currently going on is not somebody worth debating.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Two things:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
When Did the GOP Lose Touch with Reality?
Probably right around the same time the Democrats lost touch with reality.
Anybody who can ask me why I vote GOP after watching the Democratic debates currently going on is not somebody worth debating.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Why would anybody watch the debates? I never watch them for more than a minute because those have always been ridiculous until after the Convention. The craziest candidates, the ones that never will have a chance, say the darnedest things to get noticed. But it doesn't work. It simply underlines who is not Presidential. They might not even be sane. See Trump. That guy gave off the stink of a crook and a liar from the first time he wrote a book. But to get a whiff of insanity, you had to see him "debate". That guy literally is a nincompoop on taxes, the economy, nuclear weapons, international trade and always has been. But so are the people who voted for him, which explains why they do not do very well, financially.
And what was the second thing? The Democrats did not lose touch with reality and did not crash the economy in 2008. It was the Republicans who crashed it. Signym tried to blame the Democrats today, here:
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=63212&mid=10809
47#1080947
Warren Buffett pointed out to 6ix that between 1945 and July 2016 that the S&P 500 fell 5% to 9.9% 56 times, 10% to 19.9% 21 times, 20% to 39.9% nine times, and 40% or more three times. Yet Buffett has made billions in the stock market. He is pointing to the fact that 6ix understands nothing useful about the stock market, much like Trump knows nothing useful about, well, any subject. Go vote for Trump, 6ix. As for me, if the market crashes because of Trump, it will be a wealth creating opportunity to buy low. Much later, sell high, making a fortune.
www.fool.com/slideshow/warren-buffetts-advice-stock-market-crash/?slid
e=2
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 Great Land Robbery
The shameful story of how 1 million black families have been ripped from their farms
“The telling factor, looking at it from the long view, is that at the time of World War I there were 1 million black farmers, and in 1992 there were 18,000,” Fraas told me. The settlements stemming from the Pigford v. Glickman lawsuit of 1997 cover only specific recent claims of discrimination, and none stretching back to the period of the civil-rights era, when the great bulk of black-owned farms disappeared.
In Pigford v. Glickman, thousands of black farmers and their families won settlements against the USDA for discrimination that had occurred between 1981 and the end of 1996; the outlays ultimately reached a total of $2 billion. The Scotts were one of those families, and after a long battle to prove their case—with the assistance of Scott-White’s meticulous notes and family history—in 2012 the family was awarded more than $6 million in economic damages, plus almost $400,000 in other damages and debt forgiveness. The court also helped the Scotts reclaim land possessed by the department. In a 1999 ruling, Judge Paul L. Friedman of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia acknowledged that forcing the federal government to compensate black farmers would “not undo all that has been done” in centuries of government-sponsored racism. But for the Scotts, it was a start.
Through a variety of means—sometimes legal, often coercive, in many cases legal and coercive, occasionally violent—farmland owned by black people came into the hands of white people. It was aggregated into larger holdings, then aggregated again, eventually attracting the interest of Wall Street.
A war waged by deed of title has dispossessed 98 percent of black agricultural landowners in America. They have lost 12 million acres over the past century. But even that statement falsely consigns the losses to long-ago history. In fact, the losses mostly occurred within living memory, from the 1950s onward. Today, except for a handful of farmers like the Scotts who have been able to keep or get back some land, black people in this most productive corner of the Deep South own almost nothing of the bounty under their feet.
More at www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/this-land-was-our-land/59
4742/
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:Quote:Two things:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
When Did the GOP Lose Touch with Reality?
Probably right around the same time the Democrats lost touch with reality.
Anybody who can ask me why I vote GOP after watching the Democratic debates currently going on is not somebody worth debating.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Why would anybody watch the debates? I never watch them for more than a minute because those have always been ridiculous until after the Convention. The craziest candidates, the ones that never will have a chance, say the darnedest things to get noticed. But it doesn't work. It simply underlines who is not Presidential. They might not even be sane. See Trump. That guy gave off the stink of a crook and a liar from the first time he wrote a book. But to get a whiff of insanity, you had to see him "debate". That guy literally is a nincompoop on taxes, the economy, nuclear weapons, international trade and always has been. But so are the people who voted for him, which explains why they do not do very well, financially.
And what was the second thing? The Democrats did not lose touch with reality and did not crash the economy in 2008. It was the Republicans who crashed it. Signym tried to blame the Democrats today, here:
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=63212&mid=10809
47#1080947
Warren Buffett pointed out to 6ix that between 1945 and July 2016 that the S&P 500 fell 5% to 9.9% 56 times, 10% to 19.9% 21 times, 20% to 39.9% nine times, and 40% or more three times. Yet Buffett has made billions in the stock market. He is pointing to the fact that 6ix understands nothing useful about the stock market, much like Trump knows nothing useful about, well, any subject. Go vote for Trump, 6ix. As for me, if the market crashes because of Trump, it will be a wealth creating opportunity to buy low. Much later, sell high, making a fortune.
www.fool.com/slideshow/warren-buffetts-advice-stock-market-crash/?slid
e=2
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
I'm going to guess that a post full of more feels and baseless assumptions is not made on fff.net today.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:The Final Report of the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis of the United States says that Republicans were responsible for the 2008 Crash.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I'm going to guess that a post full of more feels and baseless assumptions is not made on fff.net today.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-FCIC/pdf/GPO-FCIC.pdf
According to the Final Report, between 2001 and 2007, mortgage debt rose nearly as much as it had in the whole rest of the nation's history. Around the country, armies of mortgage salesmen hustled to get Americans to borrow more money for houses—or even just prospective houses. Many salesmen didn’t ask borrowers for proof of income, job or assets. Then the salesmen were gone, leaving behind a new debtor holding new keys and perhaps a faint suspicion that the deal was too good to be true.
www.history.com/news/2008-financial-crisis-causes
Ronald Reagan signed a law allowing banks to engage in trading profitable derivatives that they sold to investors. These mortgage-backed securities needed home loans as collateral. As more and more banks got familiar with what the law allowed, the derivatives slowly at first, then very quickly, created an insatiable demand for more and more mortgages.
Hedge funds and other financial institutions around the world owned the mortgage-backed securities. The securities were also in mutual funds, corporate assets, and pension funds. The banks had chopped up the original mortgages and resold them.
Why did stodgy pension funds buy such risky assets? They thought an insurance product called credit default swaps protected them. A traditional insurance company known as the American International Group sold these swaps. When the derivatives lost value, AIG didn't have enough cash flow to honor all the swaps.
The first signs of the financial crisis appeared in 2007. Banks panicked when they realized they would have to absorb the losses. They stopped lending to each other. They didn't want other banks giving them worthless mortgages as collateral. No one wanted to get stuck holding the bag. As a result, interbank borrowing costs, called Libor, rose. This mistrust within the banking community was the primary cause of the 2008 financial crisis.
www.thebalance.com/2008-financial-crisis-3305679
The Federal Government had the power to stop banks from selling very risky securities that were falsely rated as safe as AAA bonds, but because Republicans controlled the government for 8 years, the banks were not stopped until it was too late -- trillions of dollars in mortgage backed derivatives were defaulting.
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:I see you're flogging your favorite "Hate the GOP" meme but you never addressed this (from another thread)
The Final Report of the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis of the United States says that Republicans were responsible for the 2008 Crash.
www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-FCIC/pdf/GPO-FCIC.pdf
According to the Final Report, between 2001 and 2007, mortgage debt rose nearly as much as it had in the whole rest of the nation's history. Around the country, armies of mortgage salesmen hustled to get Americans to borrow more money for houses—or even just prospective houses. Many salesmen didn’t ask borrowers for proof of income, job or assets. Then the salesmen were gone, leaving behind a new debtor holding new keys and perhaps a faint suspicion that the deal was too good to be true.
www.history.com/news/2008-financial-crisis-causes
Ronald Reagan signed a law allowing banks to engage in trading profitable derivatives that they sold to investors. These mortgage-backed securities needed home loans as collateral. As more and more banks got familiar with what the law allowed, the derivatives slowly at first, then very quickly, created an insatiable demand for more and more mortgages.
Hedge funds and other financial institutions around the world owned the mortgage-backed securities. The securities were also in mutual funds, corporate assets, and pension funds. The banks had chopped up the original mortgages and resold them.
Why did stodgy pension funds buy such risky assets? They thought an insurance product called credit default swaps protected them. A traditional insurance company known as the American International Group sold these swaps. When the derivatives lost value, AIG didn't have enough cash flow to honor all the swaps.
The first signs of the financial crisis appeared in 2007. Banks panicked when they realized they would have to absorb the losses. They stopped lending to each other. They didn't want other banks giving them worthless mortgages as collateral. No one wanted to get stuck holding the bag. As a result, interbank borrowing costs, called Libor, rose. This mistrust within the banking community was the primary cause of the 2008 financial crisis.
www.thebalance.com/2008-financial-crisis-3305679
The Federal Government had the power to stop banks from selling very risky securities that were falsely rated as safe as AAA bonds, but because Republicans controlled the government for 8 years, the banks were not stopped until it was too late -- trillions of dollars in mortgage backed derivatives were defaulting.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Quote:http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=63212
The 2008 Financial Crisis
Before the financial crisis of 2008, there was more money invested in credit default swaps than in other pools. The value of credit default swaps stood at $45 trillion compared to $22 trillion invested in the stock market, $7.1 trillion in mortgages and $4.4 trillion in U.S. Treasury. In mid-2010, the value of outstanding CDS was $26.3 trillion.
Many investment banks were involved, but the biggest casualty was Lehman Brothers investment bank, which owed $600 billion in debt, out of which $400 billion was covered by CDS. The bank’s insurer, American Insurance Group, lacked sufficient funds to clear the debt, and the Federal Reserve of the United States needed to intervene to bail it out.
Companies that traded in swaps were battered during the financial crisis. Since the market was unregulated, banks used swaps to insure complex financial products.
The most important sentence is that quote is
Before the financial crisis of 2008, there was more money invested in credit default swaps than in other pools. The value of credit default swaps stood at $45 trillion compared to $22 trillion invested in the stock market, $7.1 trillion in mortgages and $4.4 trillion in U.S. Treasury
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OOPS.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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