Please join us tonight for an evening of politics and Hanukkah under the influence at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking liberally.
We meet at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Starting time is 8:00 pm, but some folks will show up earlier for dinner.
Ron Paul:
The rise…
and the fall…
Can’t make it to Seattle? The Tri-Cities chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight as well. With 232 chapters of Living Liberally, including twelve in Washington state and six more in Oregon, chances are excellent there’s one near you.
Time for a little comparison:
Robert Preston in “The Music Man”
Mitt Romney leading the orchestra
Speaker Bonner can’t deliver the votes! Tea Party darling Scotty Brown voted for the tax cut. But, The Bonner can’t deliver the votes in the house. What a useless turd.
I think we on the rational, empirical side of the political divide should try to just keep quiet about the trainwreck occurring on the other side. We should not highlight the hilarity, nor note the nuttiness. Let them do it to themselves. Ron Paul winning Iowa would prove God’s existence.
The Newt is crying like a baby with wet diapers over GOP attack ads against him. He just doesn’t have the grit it takes to be president.
@3 “We should not highlight the hilarity, nor note the nuttiness.”
Oh shit, why not? Fun like this comes along only once every four years.
Good news on the environmental front, a whole bunch of land got preserved this week. 10,300 acres outside of Ellensburg, bunches of salmon habitat in Thurston and Mason counties, and some land on the Mashel river outside of Eatonville.
6 – The yd(iot) will be here soon to whine about not buying another thing in this state until every bit of public land is in a right wing millionaire/billionaire’s possession.
@7 He thinks John Paulsen should own the Trident base and lease it back to the Navy?
It’s time for the nightly vocabulary quiz. My score (“RR”) is posted.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/quiz/index.htm
8 – It wouldn’t surprise me. It’s hard to determine who is more obtuse: puddydope, maximus asshat, the montana “friendo” or the yd(iot).
Goobers Are Out Of Touch
“Most Americans believe the biggest problem with taxes is that wealthy people don’t pay their fair share, according to poll results published Tuesday by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. The feeling of outrage over the privileged classes is growing, according to the poll results, which only confirm the widespread anger that has helped fuel this fall’s Occupy protests ….”
http://lifeinc.today.msnbc.msn.....-you-think
Roger Rabbit Commentary: Go for it, Goobers! Defend the special tax privileges of the uber-rich! After all, why should a gazillionaire pay a higher tax rate than the cleaning lady? And see what happens to you next fall …
Rog @ 5
I know it’s fun, but, but, but . . . okay let’s enjoy the circular firing squad that is today’s Republican Party.
Why not just have a flat rate tax and call it a day? Then spend only what we take in from that flat tax, mind our own business, especially when it comes to Middle Eastern countries, and stop trying to be the world’s policeman.
@13 Yes and no. I can go along with a flat-rate income tax if the income needed for basic subsistence (e.g., an amount based on the federal poverty level) is exempt from taxation and capital gains/dividends don’t get preferential treatment. I’m in favor of purging the social engineering from the tax code. No damn mortgage deduction for million-dollar homes! And as long as SCOTUS confers personhood and the right to fuck with elections on corporations, they should be considered persons for the purpose of paying taxes, too.
Limiting federal spending to tax revenues is a superficially appealing idea but sophomoric and ultimately destructive. Households aren’t required to limit their spending to current income — they can borrow — so why should the government, which has much more serious responsibilities, be subjected to such limits?
“Minding our own business” is another one of those sophomoric memes with superficial appeal that doesn’t withstand serious analysis. We stopped a genocide in Kosovo with some bombs and without a single American combat death. Only Republicans were idiotic enough to criticize President Clinton for that intervention. We didn’t intervene in Cambodia or Rwanda, and millions died. Should we have fought Hitler and put an end to his mass exterminations? That’s an academic question, because we did. Whether saving other peoples from the evil that exists in this world is worth American lives and treasure is a question that, I think, has to be answered on a case-by-case basis. But if there is one thing that history has made clear, it is that there is no safety in a policy of isolationism. We have to get involved when someone else’s actions threaten us.
Would you allow Somalia’s pirates to continue to kidnap innocent people and seize ships, and hold them for ever-escalating ransoms, or do you think our government (working in concert with others) should be trying to figure out a way to put the pirates out of business for once and all?
@14 (continued) The world is a complicated place, so beware of simplistic “solutions.” If something seems too easy, it probably doesn’t work.
@9
4000
Even the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal thinks the Republicans are screwing things up:
“GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell famously said a year ago that his main task in the 112th Congress was to make sure that President Obama would not be re-elected. Given how he and House Speaker John Boehner have handled the payroll tax debate, we wonder if they might end up re-electing the President before the 2012 campaign even begins in earnest….”
They can’t (and don’t intend to) fix the economy, they want it to crash for partison purposes. And they are even screwing that up.
Afganistan, Iraq, FEMA, the economy, even partison politics – the Republicans are incompentent at all levels, other than giving more money and power to their ultra-rich financial masters.
Mehgan McCain is attacking Callista Gingrich as a “mistress” and “home wrecker”. Which is rather ironic, since John McCain was dating her own mother more than a year before he divorced his then-current wife.
They could make a soap opera out of Republican politics these days.
After some noticable confusion, the Republicans are now trying to throw this back on the Democrats, arguing that the Democrats in the Senate need to get back to town to open negotiations with the House Republicans. They know this is nonsense, but they need something for Fox News to use as a theme.
The Presidential response was apt: “It is not the President’s role to be a marriage counselor between the Republicans in the House and the Republicans in the Senate.”
@9 Good on ya! Only 200 to go. That’s a mere 1 second faster per answer.
@18
That Mehgan McCain even has a public voice just goes to prove my point that the Republican’s are the Neo-Feudal Party. As a senator’s daughter she’s seen as nobility.
I’m choking on this King Obama running off to Hawaii on yet another tax payer paid 4 million dollar rent the whole island bring all the military boondoggle. He has the debt and deficit spending at near 100% of GDP, and we are close to Greece and a few other bankrupt european countries.
22 – The broken record whines on..
@22
Bush, Bush, and Reagan never went of vacation?
Home Prices in the tank
Interest Rates in the Tank
CD Rates in the Tank
Municipalities in the Red
States in the Red
Stock market flooping like a dead fish
47% on food stamps
13 million unemployed
15,250 National Debt
Where’s the damn beef!
Largely from lack of regulation that happened mostly under Bush and the Republicans are still pushing the same deregulation BS.
Won’t be coming back until at least 2015 and by then progress wont look like what progress looked like in 2005.
BS, this Bush crap has got to end, OweBummer has been in for over 3 years now, nothing is getting a damn bit better, if anything it’s getting worse, and he’s out lounging in Hawaii on the taxpayers dime.
Lead by example or leave the office
Yes he has and the fact that the largest finical bubble in the history of mankind was caused in large part by lack of proper regulation of the finical markets by the Bush admin has not changed in that time nor will it change. Nor will going back to more Bush policies, which is all that the Republicans want to do help us out of the mess we’re in.
That’s not to say that Obama and his folks couldn’t have done a lot to help out that they haven’t done. I and others on here have been critical of the lack of prosecutions and holding people who’ve committed finical crimes accountable. But, if the Democrats are slow on this one, the Republicans are going backwards. They don’t seem to think any crimes have been committed.
I could go on, but it’s late and I’m headed for bed so I’ll leave it at that.
Maybe if they quit pissing away trillions, and adding mega trillions to our childrens and grandchildrens debt, it would be a great start, all that interest is going to choke the very life out of government and it’s ability to even afford to be.
# 29: If you are so mad at the Republicans (“pissing away trillions, and adding mega trillions to our childrens and grandchildrens debt…”, then why aren’t you complaining about them, instead of the Democrats?
Republicans started the fire which just about burned down our fiscal house – tax cuts for the rich, ignoring warnings of 9/11, two unfunded wars, no-bid contracts to political cronys for both wars and Katrina response, ignoring oversight & regulatory duties which resulted in the real estate and wall street and banking crisis and then the TARP bailout. And note that I’m only talking about what’s happened while George W. Bush was in office.
After starting the fire, Republicans are now complaining about the cost of the water being used to put out the fire. More than that, they are poking holes in the fire hoses, hoping that the fire consumes the house during the Obama administration so they can claim the ultimate collapse was his fault.
If it’s federal spending and debt you are concerned about, you should support Democrats who actually perform government in a rather boring but responsible way, completely avoiding the crisis which occurs later on.
This idiot sounds like the stupid fucking Mr. Cynical, doesn’t it?
Note to yd…you have a point…or does the world just get to watch you jerk off?
@27 “nothing is getting a damn bit better, if anything it’s getting worse”
Obviously you don’t have a dime to your name to invest, because if you did, you’d know the stock market is going up, up, up … and the reason it is, is because the economy is getting better. Building new apartments is putting unemployed construction workers back to work, new cars are moving off dealer lots, retail sales are up, unemployment claims are down, growth is getting stronger, etc. — nearly every economic indicator is pointing upward. The blue-chip stocks I follow are now anywhere from 10% to 30% above their August – October lows. The domestic economy and financial markets look very upbeat to me. YOu have to go to Europe now to find beaten-down stocks. But what would a dork like you know, anyway?
The improving economy is, of course, terrible news to Republicans — who are doing everything possible to kick it back into the doldrums before the election catches up with them.
Micron, a stock I already own, is up over 17% today alone. Or it was the last time I looked.
@25 “Stock market flooping like a dead fish”
All indications are stocks will end 2011 with gains, and many market observers are predicting further gains in the 10% – 12% range for 2012. I’m not having one of my best years — I probably won’t hit double digits this year — but I’m in positive territory for the year, even though two-thirds of my investable funds have been sitting in zero-interest cash for two-thirds of the year. I would have done really well if I had jumped back into stocks at the October lows, but nobody else can time markets, and I can’t either. At this point, there’s just no doubt that the U.S. economy is pulling out of its malaise and is moving into recovery mode.
There are still some drags on the economy, but I feel sure things are going to steadily improve from here. It always takes longer to recover from financial collapses because the unwinding process is a slow and tortuous one. We’re going to see an accelerating economy from here on forward, though, unless Republicans succeed in sabotaging the recovery for selfish partisan reasons.
36 – I wouldn’t be so sure. Japan is STILL unwinding from their credit bubble popping.
Debtors like Iceland and Argentina told the banksters to shove it and they’re doing just fine.
@37 We’re not Japan. (But we could end up like Japan if we get the wrong peole making the wrong policy choices.)
he’s out lounging in Hawaii on the taxpayers dime.
Please list where you were outraged by bush’s unending vacations in Texas.
@27 “he’s out lounging in Hawaii”
Aren’t you jumping the gun a bit with this manufactured talking point? The president is still in D.C. You ought to at least wait until he gets on a plane before you start spitting out the Fox bumper sticker slogan of the day. Fucking moron.
You can’t do much with trolls who don’t even read the fucking newspaper.