A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 347 of 725
Odds are calculated by all the bets placed by betters.
The odds have only changed because of an influx of shortsightedness.
You can hardly blame betters here. The last few months have been freakin' Bizarro World, and this would have destroyed any other president.
Assuming somehow George Soros isn't able to instigate WWIII before the election, I fully expect to see Trump rise back to 47 or higher on the RCP polling aggregate and the odds to swing back into his favor.
Then there is always the silent majority, that is going to be larger and more determined than it has ever been.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Trump's reelection strategy includes getting Iran to surrender. Iran called Trump a nut.
Aides to Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Trump declined to explain why, if the United States was negotiating in its own national interest, Iran might get preferential treatment for negotiating with Mr. Trump before the election.
Trump on Friday urged Tehran to “make the Big deal” on its nuclear program, and dangled the possibility that they would get better terms if they negotiated before the presidential election, seeming to invite Tehran to help return him to office.
Mr. Trump’s offer was immediately rejected by the Iranian leadership, which now seems to harbor doubts that he will remain president, and is hunkering down to survive American-led sanctions until they see the results of the November election.
At the same time, hints from inside the International Atomic Energy Agency suggested that a forthcoming report on Iran’s nuclear progress could say that Tehran has boosted its stockpile of low-enriched uranium by about 50 percent in the past three months, and now possesses about eight times as much nuclear fuel as was permitted under the nuclear accord that Mr. Trump abandoned two years ago.
Ever since Mr. Trump chose to leave what he called a “terrible” and “failed” deal, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and others have said that the combination of escalating sanctions, diplomatic isolation and the threat of possible military force would prompt the Iranian government to come to the negotiating table. So far that has failed, and Mr. Trump’s offer on Friday was a remarkably transparent invitation to an adversary to give him a diplomatic win before what could be a close American election.
“Thank you to Iran,” the president wrote in a tweet about the release of a Navy veteran detained in Tehran, Michael R. White. “Don’t wait until after U.S. Election to make the Big deal. I’m going to win. You’ll make a better deal now!”
www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/world/middleeast/trump-iran-nuclear.html
I wonder if Trump will brag to Biden about how much fuel for A-bombs Iran created only because Trump cancelled the Iran treaty? If Trump loses, he will be leaving a problem eight-times bigger than it was, all for Biden to solve. And then there is North Korea's H-bombs that Trump leaves for Biden. And all the cancelled nuclear weapon treaties. Biden can't fix that because Russia, China, N Korea, Iran know that the next Republican President will be cancelling everything again. Those countries know it is futile to negotiate with America so long as another Republican controlled White House or Senate are possible.
(If Trump wins, Trump's choice is either "Fire and Fury" or nothing. I bet it will be "Fire and Fury".)
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Quote:Speaking metaphorically, my business and the businesses run by rich Republicans are killer whales. Poorer Republicans are the seals that businesses eat. If I moved my business to California, to prosper it would have to eat the wealth of mostly Democrats rather than mostly Republican seals. I'd rather not. My business is a Gulf Coast killer whale; moving it to the West Coast would kill it.
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
But speaking of California, why don't you move? Then you won't have to talk to any republicans. And you wouldn't keep being aggravated, and maybe you would even start to recover. I'm sure you could find the perfect location somewhere here. Hollywood sounds like it might do the trick, or San Fran, or Santa Clara Valley (Silicon Valley).
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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lol
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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What America can learn from Nordic police
A documentary series from a few years ago took an American police captain and an American prison superintendent around Nordic facilities, and in both cases they were utterly gobsmacked at the kindly decency they saw all around them. Nordic police departments and prisons are so radically different from American ones that they basically are not the same kind of institutions. Adopting the Nordic police model would be tantamount to abolishing the American criminal justice system as it currently exists — which is why it should happen immediately.
What is to be done about American police? As reporters document continual law enforcement atrocities in response to peaceful protests against police brutality, suddenly the question of how to reform these institutions has gotten close attention. Longstanding calls to at least partly defund the police are being taken more and more seriously, even as some liberals denounce the idea as unrealistic or too radical.
The Nordic countries, as usual, have an instructive example for America. These nations have both enormously smaller police departments and prison systems than the United States, and much less violent crime, especially murders. Emulating their basic approach could allow American cities to cleanse themselves of police abuse and still enjoy lower crime.
A recent study from the University of Helsinki examined the Nordic record on homicide. On the one hand, these countries have some of the lowest murder rates in the world, ranging from about 0.5 per 100,000 people in Norway to about 1.6 in Finland. On the other, Nordic clearance rates (the number of murders that result in an arrest) were as follows: In Iceland, 100 percent; in Finland, 99 percent; in Norway and Denmark, 97 percent; and in Sweden, 83 percent. In the U.S., by contrast, the murder rate is about 5.0 per 100,000, and the most recent clearance rate data in 2018 was a meager 62 percent — which is actually an increase from the prior couple years. These countries also have many fewer police relative to their population than the U.S., and vastly fewer people in prison.
What gives? Undoubtedly one major factor is the generous Nordic welfare state, which both provides material security to almost everyone in Nordic society, and keeps down inequality. Both material deprivation and especially inequality have long been known as contributing factors in crime — it should not be surprising that there is a strong relationship between inequality and violent crime across countries.
More at https://theweek.com/articles/918143/what-america-learn-from-nordic-pol
ice
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Nobody cares.
And two months from now nobody will be talking about this anymore just like they've stopped talking about The Coomph.
But feel free to say all their names, Mr. Virtue Signal.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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How Did Republicans Become a Cult of Trump?
Bret Stephens, a Republican, writes:
Quote:I don’t think this is enough, and that’s not meant as any kind of gotcha. The bigger question is: what kind of party, or ideological movement, ends up nominating a person like this? And not just nominating, but nominating by a landslide against a perfectly competent and ordinary set of conservative opponents. Trump won the nomination with a pure grass roots campaign, during which he lied, insulted people, made up juvenile nicknames, displayed epic ignorance, and just generally acted the buffoon. His supporters knew exactly what they were getting, and they got it.
We are in the midst of an unprecedented national catastrophe. The catastrophe is not the pandemic, or an economic depression, or killer cops, or looted cities, or racial inequities. These are all too precedented. What’s unprecedented is that never before have we been led by a man who so completely inverts the spirit of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address: With malice toward all; with charity for none: eight words that encapsulate everything this president is, does and stands for.
….And at a moment when many Americans, particularly conservatives, are aghast at the outbursts of looting and rioting that have come in the wake of peaceful protests, we have a president who wants to replace rule of law with rule by the gun. If Trump now faces a revolt by the Pentagon’s civilian and military leadership (both current and former) against his desire to deploy active-duty troops in American cities, it’s because his words continue to drain whatever is left of his credibility as commander in chief.
So what has the Republican Party—Bret’s party—been doing that lead it to this point? And what will it do to avoid a repeat in the future? This requires some introspection and some interrogation. It’s not enough to say that Trump is a catastrophe. Anyone who can pour piss out of a boot knows that. But what brought Republicans to this awful point? That’s the more important question.
And please don’t try to pin the blame on awful Democratic candidates forcing you to vote Republican even if you have to hold your nose. I’m talking about the primary campaign here.
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/06/how-did-republicans-sink-into-a
-cult-of-trump/
A lot of themes coalesced in Trump: someone who was not a politician, someone viewed as so rich that they wouldn't be beholden to rich fundraisers, someone who had a reputation for outrageous views, who could chop up the status quo and not care where the chips fell, someone who is a media star who would ramp up excitement and turn out the vote, and someone who could give an exciting, rock star-level campaign rally. Of course, none of these things have much—if anything—to do with being an adequate President of the United States, or even a decent human being, but there's evidently a large group of US voters for whom being an adequate President is not what a presidential election is about.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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lol
Fuck MotherJones.
They'll all be out of jobs soon.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Trump Can’t Just Refuse to Leave Office
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
lol
Fuck MotherJones.
They'll all be out of jobs soon.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
So it’s the morning of Jan. 20, 2021. Trump doesn’t meet President-elect Joe Biden and his wife in the White House driveway, nor does he attend the inauguration on Capitol Hill. Instead, he proclaims, as he has many times by this point, that the election was a fraud (he has set the stage for this with his false claims about mail-in ballots), and at noon, instead of acceding to the transfer of power, Trump proclaims that the swearing in was FAKE NEWS and that he remains the president.
Here is what would happen next.
On the dot of noon, the nuclear codes, which currently allow Trump to order and authenticate a nuclear attack, expire. The officer who has been following him around everywhere with the “football”—which, contrary to popular belief, is not a button or a palm print but rather a book filled with various launch codes—leaves. If Trump and whatever lackeys stay with him prevent the officer from leaving, another officer, holding a backup football, would join Biden at the inauguration ceremony.
Meanwhile, the Secret Service will abandon Trump, as they do every president whose term is up, except for a small detail assigned to protect him and his family for the rest of their lives.
Meanwhile, Biden’s acting attorney general will have drawn up arrest warrants for Donald J. Trump and anyone who remains at his side on charges—at minimum—of criminal trespassing. If Trump calls on the armed forces or militias or the nation’s sheriffs to come defend him, he might also be charged with incitement or insurrection.
More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/trump-election-refusal-lea
ve.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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Fun story, but since Trump is going to win we're never going to find out if it played out that way.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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