A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 577 of 725
Your time is up.
No more tick tocks.
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Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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Quote:Now you are predicting the future, but you are no psychic. Psychotic? Maybe you are. 6ix, no matter how many times you complement yourself for having vision and being frugal, wonderful, superior, knowledgeable, intelligent, wise, sane, etc., you aren't. Trump has the same problem.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Your time is up.
No more tick tocks.
See for an example of 6ix patting himself on the back: http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=61954&mid=11410
39#1141039 but there are thousands of other examples. 6ix just can't stop bragging about himself. Trump does the same. That could be what is so attractive about him to GOPer voters.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The wealth lobby is buying up Democrats to defeat Biden’s tax reform
Last week, Democratic senator turned anti-tax lobbyist Heidi Heitkamp, who represented North Dakota for one term before losing in 2018, appeared on CNBC to make a surprisingly emotional appeal against President Biden’s plan to close a notorious loophole for the wealthy. The loophole, called “stepped-up basis” or “the angel-of-death loophole,” allows capital gains to escape any tax at all as long as the owners pass the asset on to their heirs before they sell it.
Heitkamp’s thoughts were with the victims of this reform. She did not invoke the tax implications for the handful of extremely wealthy families that have been financing a lobbying effort to preserve their tax advantages, including the group that currently employs her as its public face. Instead, she cited the burden of an imaginary working-class man named “Sam.”
The scenario that troubled Heitkamp was that Sam, or people like him, would inherit a family-owned cabin that had become extremely valuable and now have to pay tax on the estate. “The truck driver — let’s say truck-driver Sam, who let’s say makes $100,000 a year — all of a sudden now has a tax that he owes on inheriting that property,” she complained.
In fact, the original Democratic proposal allowed for a $1 million exemption per spouse, and it allowed heirs a 15-year period to spread out the payments. So poor Sam would only have to pay tax on whatever value his cabin had over $2 million, which seems like a rather lavish spread for a working-class fellow, and he would have enjoyed a comfortable period over which to make those payments.
Even so, the pleas made by Heitkamp and other moderate Democrats on behalf of the rural petite-bourgeoisie heirs to landowning fortunes exceeding $2 million were felt. Democrats in Congress proposed to raise the exemption to $5 million per spouse. Surely, now that truck drivers inheriting cabins worth less than $10 million would be spared, Heitkamp would have softened her opposition.
But when I reached her on the phone, Heitkamp explained that these adjustments did not satisfy her. When you look at the polling, she told me, people “didn’t believe these exclusions” would really apply. The problem was public opinion. Democrats couldn’t run the risk of taxing extremely large fortunes because working-class folks like “Sam” think they would be targeted.
The fact that this belief was completely false seemed to be beside the point to Heitkamp. She likewise seemed untroubled by the possibility that the reason working-class people would get this false impression in the first place was that groups like hers would spread it. Heitkamp’s group is currently running ads making the case that Biden’s plan to tax the fortunes of the wealthy would hit regular folks. Heitkamp is arguing that even if the proposal won’t hit regular folks, the regular folks won’t believe them. Therefore, Democrats can’t take the risk of raising taxes on the wealthy people who are paying her.
It is probably true that enacting a big tax hike on the wealthy runs a political risk: The wealthy will fund a lot of television ads attacking you over it. The trade-off is that for every dollar in tax hikes Democrats give up, they have to give up a dollar in spending on popular programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and a universal child tax credit. Some of those programs serve social needs more serious than the travails of an imaginary working-class truck driver who inherits a cabin worth more than $10 million.
More at https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/09/wealth-lobby-buying-up-democra
ts-to-kill-bidens-tax-reform.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Now you are predicting the future, but you are no psychic. Psychotic? Maybe you are. 6ix, no matter how many times you complement yourself for having vision and being frugal, wonderful, superior, knowledgeable, intelligent, wise, sane, etc., you aren't. Trump has the same problem.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Your time is up.
No more tick tocks.
See for an example of 6ix patting himself on the back: http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=61954&mid=11410
39#1141039 but there are thousands of other examples. 6ix just can't stop bragging about himself. Trump does the same. That could be what is so attractive about him to GOPer voters.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Yeah. I'm awesome.
At least I brag about stuff that's true.
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Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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Americans become two separate peoples, one long-lived and one short-lived
The divergence in life expectancy is stunning. A 2015 study by the National Academy of Sciences found that life expectancy at age 50 for men born in 1960 was almost thirteen years higher for those in the highest quintile of the income distribution than for those in the lowest quintile, while for women born in 1960, it was almost fourteen years higher.
A 2021 study by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the authors of "Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism," found that the life expectancy of college-educated Americans has continued to rise over the past two decades, while that of non-college-educated Americans has been falling since 2010. This was true for the population as a whole, for both men and women, and for both Blacks and Whites.
Not so long ago, the United States was among the rich world's longevity leaders. Today, it is its longevity laggard, with a lower life expectancy at birth than any other high-income member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development except Hungary, Poland, and the three Baltic States.
The most important reason for the slide in US life expectancy rankings has been the deteriorating health of the US population. The United States as of 2017 had the third-highest obesity rate in the OECD (only Mexico and Chile were higher) and the third-highest incidence of diabetes (only Mexico and Turkey were higher). As for substance abuse, the US opioid-related death rate was not only the highest in the OECD as of 2016, but was also at least double that of every other member country except Canada and Estonia.
America is usually quick to take action in response to immediate threats, as it did with Pearl Harbor. It finds it harder to act when faced with slow-motion crises which only become apparent over the course of many years. Yet such crises may be every bit as threatening to the nation's future.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/13/opinions/life-expectancy-covid-socioeco
nomic-status-jackson/index.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Bad news for you since old people vote Republican.
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Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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Quote:There is no fool like an old fool.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Bad news for you since old people vote Republican.
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/there-is-no-fool-like-an-old-fool.
html
Non-insane Republicans need to bite the bullet and vote D
I'm a little late to this, but George W. Bush gave a speech on 9/11:
"We have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders but from violence that gathers within ... they are children of the same foul spirit and it is our continuing duty to confront them."
This is all very fine, and I'm glad to see Bush denounce the violent Trumpist wing of the Republican Party even if he didn't actually name them. Unfortunately, this is nowhere near enough.
The actual Trumpistas themselves I can almost feel some empathy for. They are largely old, poorly educated, and feel like they have genuine grievances. They are wide open to being conned, and Trump, Fox News, and the rest of the right-wing media machine is happy to oblige them. To a large extent, these folks oppose vaccines and believe the election was stolen because that's what they're being told—over and over and over.
The people I have a real problem with are the non-insane Republicans. These are the ones who don't like Trump and understand that he's dangerous. But they aren't willing to do the only thing that might rid the party of Trumpism: vote for Democrats.
Not forever. Just temporarily until their party gets the message that it needs to purge Trump and his influence if they want to win elections.
I don't expect anyone to become a liberal. Or to like Democrats. I just want them to hold their noses and vote D for a little while on the grounds that a few years of liberal governance is better than allowing the Republican Party to permanently become a party of Trumpism. The old notion that Trumpism is bad but fundamentally harmless was never really justified, but after "Stop the Steal" and January 6 and now the season of vaccine madness, it should be obvious that it's not harmless at all. It's dangerous and will likely get more dangerous over time.
But there's no way to clean up the Republican Party by words alone. As long as they're winning elections, they'll keep doing what they're doing. So vote D. Just for a little while.
https://jabberwocking.com/7757-2/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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7 ways men live without working in America
Almost one-third of all working-age men in America aren’t doing diddly-squat. They don’t have a job, and they aren’t looking for one either.
As a business journalist for a good portion of those 70-plus years, I’ve looked at thousands of charts and graphs in my life, and I have to say this one is as jaw dropping as it is vexing:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=GLT5
Economists, sociologists, politicians, and cable news pundits each have their pet factors to explain the groundswell of non-work. But after digging down here, I’ve concluded there are many different forces at play. That’s what I want to explore today, which is: how men can live in America without working.
And speaking of charts, another striking one came to mind when I was writing this, which I put here below. It shows U.S. GDP over the same time period as the labor participation rate:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=Gn1O
Of course, the line on this GDP chart is inversely correlated with the line on the labor participation graph. And I think there is a relationship between the two. Which is to say, the wealthier our nation has become over the decades, the less men are working. Fact is there is just a ton of money sloshing around in our country. And men seem to be able to get their hands on it, whether obtained legally, borrowed, leached off of or stolen.
It seems like working legally to provide for yourself in America is really just one option these days.
More at https://finance.yahoo.com/news/7-ways-men-live-without-working-in-amer
ica-092147068.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
I don't expect anyone to become a liberal. Or to like Democrats.
Good for you. Because neither of those things are going to happen.
Democrats are cancer.
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Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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Quote:Republican rhetoric has gotten unhinged.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Democrats are cancer.
South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster:
"The American Dream has turned into a nightmare under President Biden and the radical Democrats. They have declared war against capitalism, thumbed their noses at the Constitution, and empowered our enemies abroad. Rest assured, we will fight them to the gates of hell to protect the liberty and livelihood of every South Carolinian."
Where can McMaster now go if he wants to further ratchet up this rhetoric? Hearing Republican politicians speak about The American Dream while voting against a livable minimum wage and undermining consumer protection, is always, well, a little rich.
For decades the Republican game has been to claim that liberals and progressives are out to ruin the country with their unholy desire to see a bit more sharing of wealth and resources. But the rhetoric they're employing lately seems truly biblical, end-times unhinged, of the "If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore" variety.
"If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore." -- Trump
https://www.npr.org/2021/02/10/966396848/read-trumps-jan-6-speech-a-ke
y-part-of-impeachment-trial
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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