A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 309 of 725
It's been three years since I've been of sound mind and paying any attention and it hasn't happened yet.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Well, I guess SECOND isn't about to break his losing streak just yet.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
Happy New Year, WISHY. I edited out your psychopathic screed!
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Seventy-five years into the nuclear era, we still haven’t come to grips with the destructive force we’ve put in the hands of Donald Trump.
Absent a nuclear attack upon the United States or our allies, no one human being should have the power to unilaterally unleash the most destructive forces ever devised by humankind. Yet under existing law, the President of the United States can start a nuclear war without provocation, without consultation, and without warning. It boggles the rational mind. I fear that, in the age of Trump, the cooler heads and strategic doctrine that we once relied upon as our last best hope against the unthinkable seem less reassuring than ever.
On Oct. 30, 2017, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing on whether the president needed new congressional authorization to use military force against terrorists around the world. When his turn came to ask questions, Democratic Sen. Edward Markey asked the witnesses whether Trump could launch a nuclear first strike without consulting anyone from Congress.
At first, the witnesses, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, hesitated, calling the question “hypothetical,” but Markey wouldn’t relent, and finally, Mattis allowed that the president could order a first strike if an adversary was seen “preparing” to launch an attack.
Markey, a longtime advocate of nuclear arms treaties, knew the answer before asking the question, but some of the senators were surprised. Among them was the Republican chairman, Bob Corker. A businessman from Tennessee, Corker was deeply conservative, but he was also agitated by stories he’d been hearing about Trump’s mental state. Recently Corker had made a stir by likening the White House to an “adult day center” and warning that Trump’s reckless threats toward other countries could pave a “path to World War III.”
After the hearing, Corker told his staff that he was “riled up” by Markey’s exchange with the two secretaries and that he wanted to hold a separate hearing on the subject as soon as possible—“something real sober,” as he put it, “pointing out that the president has the power to basically destroy the world.”
The hearing was held just two weeks later, on Nov. 14, the first such hearing on the subject in 41 years. The staff assembled three witnesses—one Democrat, one Republican and one retired four-star general. The general was C. Robert Kehler, former head of U.S. Strategic Command, which is in charge of plans and policies on nuclear weapons.
Kehler testified that the president did not have a completely free hand. “The United States military does not blindly follow orders,” he said. “A presidential order to employ U.S. nuclear weapons must be legal. The basic legal principles of military necessity, distinction, and proportionality apply to nuclear weapons, just as they do to every other nuclear weapon.”
Sen. Benjamin Cardin, the ranking Democrat on the panel, asked who would decide whether the order was illegal.
“Well,” Kehler replied, “that is one of the things that would be on the plate of the commander of Strategic Command.” If he thought the order was illegal, he would be “obligated to refuse to follow it.”
But on further questioning, Kehler’s bold assurance turned wobbly. Republican Sen. Ron Johnson asked him how, as Stratcom commander, he would have gone about refusing to follow an illegal order.
Kehler replied, “I would have said, ‘I have a question about this,’ and I would have said, ‘I’m not ready to proceed.’ ”
“And then what happens?” Johnson asked.
“Well,” Kehler said. He paused, and nervous laughter flitted through the hearing room. “As I say,” he went on, with a slight grin, “I don’t know exactly. Fortunately, we’ve never—these are all hypothetical scenarios. I mean, they’re real, in terms of—”
Johnson interrupted: “We are holding a hearing on this, so—”
“Exactly,” Kehler replied. “This is the human factor in our system. The human factor kicks in.”
And that opened the door to the question of what happens to the legal
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Quote:
So, government as a control room.
Part of the problem is that we have to decide what we want this control room TO DO. With production plants it's easy: maximize propylene, or maximize gasoline, or maximize GWH given particular feedstocks/ fuels.
But what do you want government TO DO? Some people think our government should sweep in and right all wrongs and "help" people around the world. Other people think our government should make capitalism or the banking system stronger. Some people think we should enhance international trade, or fix global warming.
So....?
What should our government's essential function be? Until you answer that question, you can't possibly start designing anything.
Just, yanno, putting that essential question out there again: WHAT DO YOU WANT OUR GOVERNMENT TO DO? WHAT ARE IT'S ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS?
Until you can figure that out, you can't possibly fix anything.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
Happy New Year, WISHY. I edited out your psychopathic screed!
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Quote:
Originally posted by Oonjerah:
I'm an actual, registered Democrat.
But I'm not sure what the topic is. Democrats can post in here,
and talk about themselves ... about why they are democrats ...
or what democrats believe in?
My parents were Republicans.
I was an adult in my 40's before I found out I was a democrat.
I didn't really know what the 2 parties stood for, so I asked a
friend who loves politics what I was.
Republicans tend to be conservative. Democrats tend to be liberal.
Can I even say what those words mean? Not very well.
Conservatives stand for law & order. i.e., Authority.
Democrats believe in human rights and equality. i.e., Freedom.
Anarchists believe in every man for himself?
... oooOO}{OOooo ...
T
Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals.
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:Quote:
Originally posted by Oonjerah:
I'm an actual, registered Democrat.
But I'm not sure what the topic is. Democrats can post in here,
and talk about themselves ... about why they are democrats ...
or what democrats believe in?
My parents were Republicans.
I was an adult in my 40's before I found out I was a democrat.
I didn't really know what the 2 parties stood for, so I asked a
friend who loves politics what I was.
Republicans tend to be conservative. Democrats tend to be liberal.
Can I even say what those words mean? Not very well.
Conservatives stand for law & order. i.e., Authority.
Democrats believe in human rights and equality. i.e., Freedom.
Anarchists believe in every man for himself?
... oooOO}{OOooo ...
T
Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals.
All due respect to OONJ, but that is not a legitimate assessment of what Democrats and Republicans are in 2020 by a long shot. It certainly wasn't ever a legitimate assessment of what an Anarchist is.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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T
Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals. 
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Trump on Coal
The International Monetary Fund makes regular estimates of worldwide subsidies to fossil fuels — subsidies that partly take the form of tax breaks and outright cash grants, but mainly involve not holding the industry accountable for the indirect costs it imposes. In 2017 it put these subsidies at $5.2 trillion; yes, that’s trillion with a “T.” For the U.S., the subsidies amounted to $649 billion, which is about $3 million for every worker employed in the extraction of coal, oil and gas.
Without these subsidies, it’s hard to imagine that anyone would still be investing in fossil fuels.
I still often find people — both right-wingers and climate activists — asserting that sharply reducing emissions would require a big decline in G.D.P. Everything we know, however, says that this is wrong, that we can decarbonize while continuing to achieve robust growth.
Given all this, however, why are people like Mnuchin and his boss Trump so adamantly pro-fossil fuel and anti-environmentalist?
Part of the answer, I believe, is that conservatives don’t want to admit that government action is ever justified. Once you concede that the government can do good by protecting the environment, people might start thinking that it can guarantee affordable health care, too.
The bigger issue, however, is sheer greed.
Given the scale of subsidies we give to fossil fuels, the industry as a whole should be regarded as a gigantic grift. It makes money by ripping off everyone else, to some extent through direct taxpayer subsidies, to a greater extent by shunting the true costs of its operations off onto innocent bystanders.
And let’s be clear: Many of those “costs” take the form of sickness and death, because that’s what local air pollution causes. Other costs take the form of “natural” disasters like the burning of Australia, which increasingly bear the signature of climate change.
In a sane world we’d be trying to shut this grift down. But the grifters — which overwhelmingly means corporations and investors, since little of that $3-million-per-worker subsidy trickles down to the workers themselves — have bought themselves a lot of political influence.
More at www.nytimes.com/2020/01/27/opinion/greta-thunberg-mnuchin.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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Why We’re Polarized
People have always disagreed about politics, passionately and sometimes even violently. But in certain historical moments these disagreements were distributed without strong correlations, so that any one political party would contain a variety of views. In a representative democracy, that kind of distribution makes it easier to accomplish things. In contrast, today we see strong political polarization: members of any one party tend to line up with each other on a range of issues, and correspondingly view the other party with deep distrust. Political commentator Ezra Klein has seen this shift in action, and has studied it carefully in his new book Why We’re Polarized (out Jan. 28). We talk about the extent to which the apparent polarization is real, how we can trace its causes, and whether there’s anything we can do about it.
Polarization was not as high in the ’60s, in part that’s because, well, if you were a kind of moderate Democrat looking at the Republican Party, you saw a lot of people like yourself in it. Richard Nixon, domestically at least, did a lot of quite moderate and, even now looking back, liberal things. And conversely, Bill Clinton did some quite conservative things. But now, you look at the other side and they’re much more different from you demographically, they’re much more different than you ideologically. And so, the threat they pose to you and to your view of the good life is much more severe.
Some examples from many: The Republic Party’s overwhelmingly Christian. It used to be that both parties were. Now, the single largest religious group in the Democratic Party is people who are religiously unaffiliated. The Democratic Party is a coalition of a lot of different religious groups, liberal Christians, Buddhists, atheists, etc. On race, the Democratic Party is, I believe it is 44% non-white, at least in its 2016 primary vote, or in its 2016 vote. The Republican Party is over 90% white. You don’t have a ton of union members who are Republicans, you don’t have a ton of rural Southerners who are Democrats. And so, as that happens, and there’s a lot of evidence on this from outside of politics too, when you begin to stack identities the nature of disagreement becomes much deeper, it becomes much more threatening.
My background is in policy reporting, and so I have a lot of models for what happens when Congress starts working on a bill, and why it always collapses into total omni-shambles, but I didn’t have a model about why politics had seemingly gone off the rails in the way it had. And so this book was an opportunity for me to try to rebuild my understanding of politics from the ground up in a way that could help explain what was happening for me, and then hopefully for an audience.
More about Polarization, Politics, and Identity at
www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/01/27/81-ezra-klein-on-polar
ization-politics-and-identity/
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:No health care system can say yes to every desired treatment, in every context, at any price. All systems have to tell somebody no: Either providers cannot charge what they want, or patients cannot have what they want, or taxes are going to be much higher than anyone wants.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Just, yanno, putting that essential question out there again: WHAT DO YOU WANT OUR GOVERNMENT TO DO? WHAT ARE IT'S ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS?
Until you can figure that out, you can't possibly fix anything.
The American health care system is uniquely cruel in its approach to saying no. It says no through prices — but not, as in most other countries, by limiting the prices pharmaceutical companies and hospitals can charge for treatments. Rather, it says no by letting them charge whatever prices they want and denying care to those who can’t afford the cost.
The paradox of the American health system, then, is that it poses as a system with no limits — there is no centralized authority rationing care or negotiating treatments — even as it turns tens of millions of people away from services they need. But the system works quite well for those who can afford all that it has to offer. They can be mobilized by the health industry. When reformers threaten the profitable status quo, the health industry blankets airwaves with ads warning that under a different system, there will be someone who says no to you.
The US health care system has been designed as if, with enormous intelligence and intent, it was to be as resistant to cost control as possible.
The UK is the opposite of the US in how it says no. It has embraced the idea Americans fear most: rationing. There is, in the UK, a government agency that decides which treatments are worth covering, and for whom. It is an agency that has even decided, from the government’s perspective, how much a life is worth in hard currency. It has made the UK system uniquely centralized, transparent, and equitable. But it is built on a faith in government, and a political and social solidarity, that is hard to imagine in the US.
More at www.vox.com/2020/1/28/21074386/health-care-rationing-britain-nhs-nice-
medicare-for-all
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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