I did find this: “Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings”.

So the Senate Parliamentarian can say this until the Senate overrides the rule which requires only a majority vote. They do this whenever they want–when it’s to confirm judges the press calls it “the nuclear option”. It’s been done by both parties.

So this statement is cover, plain and simple, for the Dems who don’t wish to anger their voters by not passing this. It’s the same service Sinema and Manchin (and John McCain when he was alive) provide but there’s a non-elected official they can point to when they throw up their hands and say “we tried”.

I’m not “lost on some tangent.” I’m not “lost” at all. I’m merely pointing out that a very disproportionate number of the Poles who were killed were actually Polish Jews who were killed because they were Jews rather than because they were Poles, and that the jury is out on whether Stalin was singling out Jews to a certain extent for persecution, or was planning to do so in a bigger way.

I was addressing you, but sometimes when I write a comment I’m also addressing people in general, just for informational purposes. That was true here, as well.

The post-war Communist governments were cruel in a dozen different ways. They just weren’t slaughtering people in job lots of six, seven, or eight digits. Alanc709’s response was to point out there weren’t many Jews left in Poland in 1945, as if there weren’t ample populations of non-Jews to put to the sword (as in fact they were in Stalinist Russia and Nazi-occupied Poland). You’re lost on some tangent which assumes I’m making some point about comparative losses, which of course I am not.

I don’t read alanc709’s mind, but my interpretation of his comment was not that it was about Stalin targeting Jews (although, to a certain extent, he did persecute them – at least, he did to a certain degree and there is evidence that he planned more right before he died). It was about the fact that in Poland – which suffered greatly during the war, and that very much included the non-Jewish Poles – the bulk of that 1/4 of the population who died were Jews.

As I said, Poles suffered greatly, and certainly not just the Jews. It’s hard to estimate war deaths and to differentiate between the numbers under the Nazis vs. the numbers under Stalin. Here are some numbers:

The official Polish government report on war damages prepared in 1947 put Poland’s war dead at 6,028,000; 3.0 million ethnic Poles and 3.0 million Jews not including losses of Polish citizens from the Ukrainian and Belarusian ethnic groups. This figure was disputed when the communist system collapsed by the Polish historian Czes?aw ?uczak who put total losses at 6.0 million; 3.0 million Jews, 2.0 million ethnic Poles, and 1.0 million Polish citizens from the other ethnic groups not included in the 1947 report on war damages.[2][3] In 2009 the Polish government-affiliated Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) published the study “Polska 1939–1945. Straty osobowe i ofiary represji pod dwiema okupacjami” (Poland 1939-1945. Human Losses and Victims of Repression Under the Two Occupations) that estimated Poland’s war dead at between 5.6 and 5.8 million Poles and Jews, including 150,000 during the Soviet occupation.[ Poland’s losses by geographic area include about 3.5 million within the borders of present-day Poland, and about two million in the Polish areas annexed by the Soviet Union. Contemporary Russian sources include Poland’s losses in the Polish areas annexed by the Soviet Union with Soviet war dead In Poland this is viewed as inflating Soviet casualties at Poland’s expense. Today’s scholars of independent Poland believe that 1.8 to 1.9 million Polish civilians (non-Jews) and 3 million Polish Jews were victims of German Occupation policies and the war, resulting in a total population loss of 23% to 28% compared to Poland’s pre-war population in 1939.”

So well over half of the Polish dead were Jews, most of them killed because they were Jewish. Poland’s prewar Jewish population was about 10%, and by the end of the war there were almost no Jews in Poland, and most of those Jews had been murdered. According to most of the statistics, about 60% of the Polish war dead were Jews. So Polish Jews were killed way disproportionately to their numbers.

When you write that “the overwhelming majority of Stalin’s victims were Gentiles” – well, yes. The real question, though, is whether Jews were disproportionately targeted. But Stalin, unlike Hitler, certainly did not perpetrate a Holocaust in which he planned to exterminate all the Jews. His attitude and plans for the Jews before he died are subject to a lot of discussion and disagreement, with some saying he had mass deportation plans and others denying it. Also see this.

?

About 15% of the gentile population died during the war in Poland. The overwhelming majority of Stalin’s victims were gentiles. No clue why you fancy eastern Europe’s Communist regimes would only be motivated to abuse the Jewish population.

The satellite countries had governments which were grotesquely abusive. I don’t think any of them generated death tolls on the order of those of the Stalin regime (in terms of proportions) or those of Nazi occupation governments either. North of 1/4 of Poland’s pre-war population died during the war. Nothing like that happened in post-war Poland.

Tangential to this, the post WWll division of Europe provided a good test of capitalism vs communism, specifically looking at E vs W Germany. Both nations having a common culture, language, ethnicity, etc.
It was clear by 1960 – if not sooner – which form of govt. provided superior results for the average citizen. It was also clear that the ruling denizens of the left really could not care less about the ordinary citizen.

Of course, all of this is meaningless for the demokrats here in the USA (and about half of the voters) as they inexorably move the USA closer and closer to an E.Germany or Cuba or former USSR.
If the demonkrats cannot legislate using methods delineated in the Constitution, they will just do an end-around that pesky, “anti-government” piece of toilet paper written by white-privileged, slave owning, misogynist, imperialist pigs.
I guess the demonkrats believe that “real” communism has never been tried and/or if only they were in charge, the Utopian fantasy they envision will come to pass (with them in charge, of course).

I am still awaiting any sort of real reaction by the Republicans to what is occurring in our country.
No wonder Trump called several Republicans morons , dumb and losers. Frankly, the republicans do not even rise to the level of losers or morons and the adjectives /adverbs (don’t know which; grammar was never my strong suit) that should be applied to them even Trump would not utter.

But Trump lost many voters due to his choice of words (and his in your face attitude), yet the real world results of a politician’s policies apparently do not play a role in many a voter’s decisions.

For the umpteenth time; the greatest danger in a representative democracy is the voters – freely and willingly – voting for a national suicide.