A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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There's no death match.
Democrats are going to lose huge. Maybe we should give them a participation trophy?
Why so mean, buddy? Resorting to personal attacks again because things aren't going your way and I'm right as usual?
Nothing personal when I insult you about your "wealth", buddy. We all know that you don't actually have any money.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Remember Ebenezer Scrooge in a Christmas Carol? He did not get rich by treating Jim Cratchit to a high salary. Ebenezer saved his philanthropy until the very end of life, when the Ghost of Christmas Future was threatening him. Or Bill Gates. He was a slippery conniving businessman, plotting and planning a monopoly, until he retired and switched to be a philanthropist. John Rockefeller? Who only mellowed when he was old. It was his children who were nice. Henry Ford? Shooting strikers and antisemitic. That guy was not nice. It was his grandchildren and the Ford Foundation who were nice.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
There's no death match.
Democrats are going to lose huge. Maybe we should give them a participation trophy?
Why so mean, buddy? Resorting to personal attacks again because things aren't going your way and I'm right as usual?
Nothing personal when I insult you about your "wealth", buddy. We all know that you don't actually have any money.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
If I ever get around to writing "River Tam and the Problem of Evil" I'll show you how that works in sci-fi. In the comic books, River is passive, only kicking and shooting as a plot twist to save the day at the very last second. Firefly -- The Sting (2019) is a good example of that, but "River Tam and the Problem of Evil" would be one where River is plotting against the whole Alliance . . . and she wins without Malcolm Reynolds even knowing what was going on underneath his nose. He will wonder why the Alliance leaves Serenity in peace. He will never know what River and Kaylee did to make that happen. River and Kaylee didn't kill anybody to do it, either, although they came very close, but the Operative backed down first. River made a deal, but she also planned how to cheat the Alliance. There is no point in River being honest with her enemies, but she has to be subtle about it so they don't know she cheated them.
Free Comics Download | Image Format : JPG | Year : 2019 | Size : 50 MB | 132 Pages
https://getcomics.info/other-comics/firefly-the-sting-2019/
www.boom-studios.com/archives/firefly-the-sting-original-graphic-novel
-first-look/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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U.S. trade law offers Trump more freedom of action — more ability to do whatever he wants — than any other policy area.
The basic story is that long ago — in fact, in the aftermath of the disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 — Congress deliberately limited its own role in trade policy. Instead, it gave the president the power to negotiate trade deals with other countries, which would then face up-or-down votes without amendments.
It was always clear, however, that this system needed some flexibility to respond to events. So the executive branch was given the power to impose temporary tariffs under certain conditions: import surges, threats to national security, unfair practices by foreign governments. The idea was that nonpartisan experts would determine whether and when these conditions existed, and the president would then decide whether to act.
This system worked well for many years. It turned out, however, to be extremely vulnerable to someone like Trump, for whom everything is partisan and expertise is a four-letter word. Trump’s tariff justifications have often been self-evidently absurd — seriously, who imagines that imports of Canadian steel threaten U.S. national security? But there’s no obvious way to stop him from imposing tariffs whenever he feels like it.
And there’s also no obvious way to stop his officials from granting individual businesses tariff exemptions, supposedly based on economic criteria but in fact as a reward for political support. Tariff policy isn’t the only arena in which Trump can practice crony capitalism — federal contracting is looking increasingly scandalous — but tariffs are especially ripe for exploitation.
So that’s why Trump is a Tariff Man: Tariffs let him exercise unconstrained power, rewarding his friends and punishing his enemies. Anyone imagining that he’s going to change his ways and start behaving responsibly is living in a fantasy world.
www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/opinion/trump-trade-tariffs.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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The Russification of the Republican Party
Just how far will Republicans go in following President Donald Trump’s embrace of Russia? An answer may be crystallizing as the GOP mobilizes its defense of the president against impeachment.
Both congressional Republicans and conservative commentators are defending Trump from impeachment partly by accusing Ukraine of intervening against him in the 2016 presidential election—despite repeated warnings from national-security and intelligence officials that those claims are not only baseless, but advance Vladimir Putin’s goal of discrediting Ukraine.
Earlier in Trump’s presidency, many Republicans sought to distance themselves from his warm tone toward Putin. But just this week alone, a number of Republican lawmakers, the official House Republican report rebutting impeachment, and the Fox News host Tucker Carlson have repeated Kremlin lines on Ukraine.
This flurry of GOP rhetoric comes as Democrats are raising alarm about the Republican-controlled Senate’s refusal to take action on the DETER Act, a bipartisan bill that would impose sanctions on Russia if it interferes again in 2020.
Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the act’s sponsor, has been unsuccessfully pressing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to attach the bill to a defense-authorization bill now in conference between the House and Senate, which would ensure its passage.
“Nobody has provided any substantive justification for opposing this measure,” Van Hollen told me in an interview. “All the testimony has been supportive of the DETER Act. And yet when you get behind closed doors, it’s not that anyone says they are opposed to it; they just won’t engage. McConnell would like to see this defeated without any of his fingerprints on it, but his fingerprints are there because he has refused to engage.”
Representative Devin Nunes of California, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, repeatedly insisted during last month’s impeachment hearings that Ukraine had meddled in the 2016 election against Trump. That drew a stern rebuke from one witness asked to testify, the former Trump National Security Council adviser Fiona Hill, who warned that congressional Republicans were spreading “a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.”
But Hill’s words have not stopped Republicans from reprising those arguments. In late November, Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana claimed during a television interview that Ukraine, not Russia, might have hacked the Democratic National Committee’s computers in 2016. After retreating from that claim, he went on Meet the Press on Sunday and equated public criticism of Trump by some Ukrainian officials with Russia’s systematic interference campaign in 2016.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, during its investigation of 2016 election meddling, found no evidence of Ukrainian interference. But when asked about Kennedy’s comments this week, Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, the committee’s chairman, came closer to endorsing rather than repudiating them.
More at www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/12/impeachment-republican-pa
rty-russia/603088/
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:
The Russification of the Republican Party
Fuck you.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
The Russification of the Republican Party
Fuck you.
Thats your reply. And you gripe wen we say youre a Russian ajent. (ad eyeroll emoji here)
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DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.7532020.com .
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Watch the Leonardo Da Vinci uv GoP propaganda paint a picture:
It really iz like a specialized kind uv performans art. He just gets on and riffs. Well worth hiz 30M$ salary to the peepl that pay him.
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DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.7532020.com .
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Quote:
The Russification of the Republican Party
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Fuck you.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Quote:
Originally posted by JO753:
Thats your reply. And you gripe wen we say youre a Russian ajent. (ad eyeroll emoji here)
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DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.7532020.com .
Yoor lodjik iz rong, JO. U (awl) djust ahdehd Republicans to yoor lihst uv Russians. Yoor dooing hwaht yoov alwaaez bin dooing. Kawling peepl Russians.
Jack wuz obdjekting. :eyeroll:
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Yup.
Somebody brings up Russia, I tell them to fuck off with their red baiting.
Fucking idiots.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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When Democrats last controlled the Senate, one especially important Democrat — Judiciary Chair Patrick Leahy (VT) — took an unusually expansive view of the rights of the minority party.
An informal tradition known as the “blue slip” sometimes gives home-state senators an exaggerated influence over who gets confirmed to federal judgeships within their states (the tradition gets its name from blue pieces of paper that home-state senators use to indicate whether they approve of a particular nominee).
Traditionally, the Senate Judiciary Committee showed some level of deference to senators who disapprove of their home-state nominees, although the level of deference given to these senators varied wildly depending on who chaired the committee and whether that committee chair was politically aligned with the incumbent president.
Leahy, who chaired the Committee for most of the Obama presidency, gave home-state senators a simply extraordinary power to block judicial nominees. Under Leahy, a single senator of either party could veto any nominee to a federal judgeship in their state (although federal appeals courts typically oversee multiple states, each individual seat on these courts is traditionally assigned to a particular state).
Leahy says that he did so to protect the “rights of the minority.” And protect Republicans he did. Red-state Republicans used the power Leahy gave them to keep many judicial seats empty until Obama left office. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) effectively held a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit open for eight years until Trump could fill it.
The blue slip allowed Republicans to drag out negotiations over vacancies until McConnell took over the Senate in 2015 and imposed a blockade on nearly all of Obama’s appellate nominees.
The blue slip also weakened Obama’s hand in negotiations with Senate Republicans, and sometimes forced him to name relatively conservative judges in order to placate senators who could veto judicial nominees. Sens. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) and Johnny Isakson (R-GA), for example, effectively held one of Obama’s Eleventh Circuit nominees hostage until Obama agreed to also name Judge Julie Carnes — a George H.W. Bush district court appointee — to a second vacancy on that same court.
Republicans did not reciprocate when they came to power.
More at www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/9/20962980/trump-supreme-court
-federal-judges
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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