A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 298 of 725
Quote:The Expanse has 46 episodes, so far. Maybe Firefly would have 46 if Amazon Prime had been financing the show in 2002, rather than FOX.
Originally posted by JO753:
Soundz like a great show! I will woc it.
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DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.7532020.com .
www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B018BZ3SCM/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Odd coinsidens - Saw a commercial for The Expanse today.
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DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.7532020.com .
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Voter Suppression By GOP Isn’t Enough Anymore
From Justin Clark, a top adviser to Donald Trump’s reelection campaign:
Traditionally it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes in places. Let’s start protecting our voters. We know where they are….Let’s start playing offense a little bit. That’s what you’re going to see in 2020. It’s going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program.
Naturally Clark tried to pretend he hadn’t said what he said, but a recording of the entire conversation makes it clear that, in fact, he said what he said. And who knows what this much bigger, more aggressive program for 2020 might be? Whatever it is, I’m sure it will be entirely on the up and up.
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/12/quote-of-the-day-voter-suppress
ion-isnt-enough-anymore/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Uh huh.
Can you whiny little bitches possibly cry anymore?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Two years ago, US president Donald Trump signed into law a sweeping tax cut dubbed “a mighty fine Christmas gift.”
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Uh huh.
Can you whiny little bitches possibly cry anymore?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
The law’s opponents insisted it was a massive giveaway to the super rich — one that would make the federal deficit skyrocket. Who was right?
The early data doesn’t look good for Trump’s top legislative achievement.
“We saw a short-term boost to output and investment that really seems to have largely dissipated. GDP is growing more slowly and investment is actually shrinking over the past two quarters,” said Ben Page, an economist at the non-partisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. “There’s almost no evidence for a big inflow of foreign capital.”
In the meantime, the government now estimates it will lose $600 billion more in tax revenues than it initially thought, bringing the cut’s total cost to $1.6 trillion. Boosting the deficit while the economy is growing and at a late stage in its cycle is irresponsible, Page argues. “Usually at the peak of the economic cycle, that should be when deficits are at their lowest,” he said. “The economy is not going to grow forever, and at that point deficits will boom…stimulus policy will be needed. That’s one of the worries about running those deficits when times are relatively good.”
Big companies are having a field day — with FedEx coming to exemplify corporate America’s response to the cut. The firm’s CEO lobbied hard for the bill on the premise that mass investment by businesses would follow. It then became one of 91 companies, including Amazon and IBM, whose effective tax rates dropped to zero in 2018 — in Fedex’s case, from 34% the year before. The company then cut its capital spending in both 2018 and 2019.
Even those who argued for a big cut are struggling to find enthusiasm for the law. “I don’t think I’m disappointed — I’m just saying don’t give up on the TCJA just yet,” said Aparna Mathur, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. She argued it could take 5 to 7 years before seeing its full effects. Or maybe never will Trump’s promised benefits appear.
https://qz.com/1769421/
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:You think this is some sort of revelation? Gee, I could have predicted this. In fact I DID predict this.
SIX:
Uh huh.Can you whiny little bitches possibly cry anymore?
SECONDRATE, WITH HIS USUAL POO: Two years ago, US president Donald Trump signed into law a sweeping tax cut dubbed “a mighty fine Christmas gift.”
The law’s opponents insisted it was a massive giveaway to the super rich — one that would make the federal deficit skyrocket. Who was right?
The early data doesn’t look good for Trump’s top legislative achievement.
“We saw a short-term boost to output and investment that really seems to have largely dissipated. GDP is growing more slowly and investment is actually shrinking over the past two quarters,” said Ben Page, an economist at the non-partisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. “There’s almost no evidence for a big inflow of foreign capital.”
In the meantime, the government now estimates it will lose $600 billion more in tax revenues than it initially thought, bringing the cut’s total cost to $1.6 trillion. Boosting the deficit while the economy is growing and at a late stage in its cycle is irresponsible, Page argues. “Usually at the peak of the economic cycle, that should be when deficits are at their lowest,” he said. “The economy is not going to grow forever, and at that point deficits will boom…stimulus policy will be needed. That’s one of the worries about running those deficits when times are relatively good.”
Big companies are having a field day — with FedEx coming to exemplify corporate America’s response to the cut. The firm’s CEO lobbied hard for the bill on the premise that mass investment by businesses would follow. It then became one of 91 companies, including Amazon and IBM, whose effective tax rates dropped to zero in 2018 — in Fedex’s case, from 34% the year before. The company then cut its capital spending in both 2018 and 2019.
Even those who argued for a big cut are struggling to find enthusiasm for the law. “I don’t think I’m disappointed — I’m just saying don’t give up on the TCJA just yet,” said Aparna Mathur, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. She argued it could take 5 to 7 years before seeing its full effects. Or maybe never will Trump’s promised benefits appear.
https://qz.com/1769421/
I posted, more than once, that in order to create a manufacturing renaissance Trump would HAVE to do more than tariff incoming goods, repatriate money from abroad with tax cuts, and cross his fingers. I would call tariffs and capital necessary but not sufficient
Trump would have to literally direct investment to steel, chemicals, clothing, chips, energy distribution, infrastructure, consumer electronics, and all of those goods that might be considered critical or which cause a huge drain on our trade balance. Because without those directives, the companies will do what they usually do with spare cash: buy back their own shares, speculate in hedge funds, and give themselves giant bonuses. Unfortunately for Trump he believes in capitalism and assumes that TPTB want to make money by making things instead of thru financialism. He has a libertarian POV, which (so far) has never worked to explain or fix anything.
So ... why are you posting this? Do you think it would sway anyone here from Trump? I still prefer him over anyone except Tulsi Gabbard.
when will the DIMS get onboard with some sort of realistic plan to create a self-sufficient economy that DOESN'T kowtow to big business and that DOESN'T plan onautomating everything? The economy is supposed to be working for us, not the other way around.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
I'd nuke a BILLION PEOPLE if it would save the other 7 billion from living under Putin. Hell, I might go all the way to the last 100 people on Earth to keep this planet from being under fascist rule.- WISHIMAY
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The Cruelty Is the Point
President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear. October 3, 2018
The Museum of African-American History and Culture is in part a catalog of cruelty. Amid all the stories of perseverance, tragedy, and unlikely triumph are the artifacts of inhumanity and barbarism: the child-size slave shackles, the bright red robes of the wizards of the Ku Klux Klan, the recordings of civil-rights protesters being brutalized by police.
The artifacts that persist in my memory, the way a bright flash does when you close your eyes, are the photographs of lynchings. But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. There’s the photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, in which a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend. There’s the undated photo from Duluth, Minnesota, in which grinning white men stand next to the mutilated, half-naked bodies of two men lashed to a post in the street—one of the white men is straining to get into the picture, his smile cutting from ear to ear. There’s the photo of a crowd of white men huddled behind the smoldering corpse of a man burned to death; one of them is wearing a smart suit, a fedora hat, and a bright smile.
Their names have mostly been lost to time. But these grinning men were someone’s brother, son, husband, father. They were human beings, people who took immense pleasure in the utter cruelty of torturing others to death—and were so proud of doing so that they posed for photographs with their handiwork, jostling to ensure they caught the eye of the lens, so that the world would know they’d been there. Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another.
The Trump era is such a whirlwind of cruelty that it can be hard to keep track. This week alone, the news broke that the Trump administration was seeking to ethnically cleanse more than 193,000 American children of immigrants whose temporary protected status had been revoked by the administration, that the Department of Homeland Security had lied about creating a database of children that would make it possible to unite them with the families the Trump administration had arbitrarily destroyed, that the White House was considering a blanket ban on visas for Chinese students, and that it would deny visas to the same-sex partners of foreign officials. At a rally in Mississippi, a crowd of Trump supporters cheered as the president mocked Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who has said that Brett Kavanaugh, whom Trump has nominated to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, attempted to rape her when she was a teenager. “Lock her up!” they shouted.
Ford testified to the Senate, utilizing her professional expertise to describe the encounter, that one of the parts of the incident she remembered most was Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge laughing at her as Kavanaugh fumbled at her clothing. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” Ford said, referring to the part of the brain that processes emotion and memory, “the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.” And then at Tuesday’s rally, the president made his supporters laugh at her.
Even those who believe that Ford fabricated her account, or was mistaken in its details, can see that the president’s mocking of her testimony renders all sexual-assault survivors collateral damage. Anyone afraid of coming forward, afraid that she would not be believed, can now look to the president to see her fears realized. Once malice is embraced as a virtue, it is impossible to contain.
The cruelty of the Trump administration’s policies, and the ritual rhetorical flaying of his targets before his supporters, are intimately connected. As Lili Loofbourow wrote of the Kavanaugh incident in Slate, adolescent male cruelty toward women is a bon
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You haven't managed to disprove a single thing Signy posted.
Why do you think anyone should bother reading anything you post if you can't use logic on facts, and instead have to rely on an ever-shifting gish-gallop of nothings?
FLIES SHIT.
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Why Fascism is the Wave of the Future
From 25 years back: 7 April 1994
Neither the moderate Right nor the moderate Left even recognises, let alone offers any solution for, the central problem of our days: the completely unprecedented personal economic insecurity of working people, from industrial workers and white-collar clerks to medium-high managers. None of them are poor and they therefore cannot benefit from the more generous welfare payments that the moderate Left is inclined to offer. Nor are they particularly envious of the rich, and they therefore tend to be uninterested in redistribution. Few of them are actually unemployed, and they are therefore unmoved by Republican/Tory promises of more growth and more jobs through the magic of the unfettered market: what they want is security in the jobs they already have – i.e. precisely what unfettered markets threaten.
A vast political space is thus left vacant by the Republican/Tory non-sequitur, on the one hand, and moderate Left particularism and assistentialism, on the other. That was the space briefly occupied in the USA by the 1992 election-year caprices of Ross Perot. And that is the space that remains wide open for a product-improved Fascist party, dedicated to the enhancement of the personal economic security of the broad masses of (mainly) white-collar working people. Such a party could even be as free of racism as Mussolini’s original was until the alliance with Hitler, because its real stock in trade would be corporativist restraints on corporate Darwinism, and delaying globalisation. It is not necessary to know how to spell Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft to recognise the Fascist predisposition engendered by today’s turbocharged capitalism.
More at www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n07/edward-luttwak/why-fascism-is-the-wave
-of-the-future
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Public company CEOs heavily favor Republicans.
Researchers at Harvard Law School and Tel Aviv University found that CEOs of the 1,500 largest US public companies donate “disproportionately more” to the Republican party and its candidates, with the median CEO directing 75% of his or her political contributions to Republicans. They also found that Republican-leaning CEOs lead companies with almost twice the asset value of companies led by Democratic-leaning executives.
The study looked at campaign contributions by more than 3,800 CEOs of S&P 1500 companies between 2000 and 2017. To be classified as “Republican” or “Democratic,” at least two-thirds of the executive’s donations had to go to either party; otherwise they were classified as “neutral.” Overall, roughly 57% of the CEOs were classified as Republicans, and about 19% as Democrats.
The researchers also looked at how CEO political preferences differ by geography, based on the location of the company headquarters. In the Northeast and in the West, Republican CEOs outnumber Democratic CEOs by less than 2-to-1, while Republican CEOs are about seven times as numerous as Democratic CEOs in both the Midwest and South.
Indeed, the Republican tilt was evident in all regions and sectors. The industries with the strongest Republican preference were the energy, manufacturing, and chemical sectors.
More at https://qz.com/work/1772370/
The Politics of CEOs
Journal of Legal Analysis, Vol. 11, 2019, pp.1-45
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3355690
2. THE POLICY STAKES
This section discusses the importance of the political preferences of CEOs for public policy and politics. The CEOs of S&P 1500 companies are a very small group, numbering less than 0.001 percent of U.S. voters. However, as this section explains, public-company CEOs are likely to have a disproportionate influence over American policymaking and politics, and understanding their political preferences is therefore important for understanding the inner dynamics of the U.S. democracy.
Although public companies represent only 0.06 percent of the total number of U.S. firms, they account for 31.3 percent of private-sector employment, 41.3 percent of sales, and 51.1 percent of pretax profits. As key decision-makers within their firms, CEOs thus preside over a significant portion of the nation’s economy. Their decisions can have an enormous impact on jobs, wealth, tax revenues, and even the social fabric of local communities. These facts naturally make public-company CEOs important agents in the economy. Most importantly for the purposes of this article, however, their positions enable CEOs to influence policymaking and politics through two important channels.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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