Please join us tonight our last meeting of the year at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally. The following two Tuesdays fall on Christmas day and New Year day.
We meet every Tuesday (except certain holidays…) at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Starting time is 8:00pm. Some people show up earlier for Dinner.
Can’t make it to Seattle tonight? Check out one of the other DL meetings over the next week. Tonight the Tri-Cities chapter also meets. The Longview chapter and South Seattle chapter meet this Wednesday. The Spokane chapter and Drinking Liberally Tacoma meet this Thursday.
With 230 chapters of Living Liberally, including fourteen in Washington state, four in Oregon, and three more in Idaho, chances are excellent there’s a chapter that meets near you.
The NRA has broken it’s silence – sort of.
Why not outlaw planes, none of the 9/11 terrorists had even an automatic Pea shooter!
It dawns on the Irish that austerity is crap:
The economic return of Iceland has proved that the joke was on us
@2
Finally!
Boener has proposed what is being called, for some reason, “Plan B”. It’s not a plan, it’s simply a bargaining position, much like the President’s proposals.
But that’s the whole point. These guys aren’t talking about programs, loopholes, or entitlements. They are talking in very round numbers, as in “I will agree to cut added revenue from 2.6 trillion over so many years to 2.4 trillion, and agree to 580 Billion in budget savings, of which some will come from entitlements”. That’s a goal, not a proposal, and it sure isn’t federal tax or spending policy. And both sides are playing that game.
If they were playing the game back in August, and talking about specific programs and tax loopholes in November, then we might be well on the way to an agreement. But we aren’t.
Which leads me to believe that both sides will continue to talk generalities until they get to the point where they can say that there is an agreement in the foreseeable future, and kick the can down the road again.
The heck with that. Let’s see that cliff up close. And make sure the Republican leadership sees what’s down at the bottom of that cliff.
How do you guys propose to fund your Utopian state? I’m gonna go out on a limb here and state that I don’t believe it will be a self-funded workers’ paradise!
@5
WTF are you even talking about?
This is just stupid. Whatever the solution to gun violence is, arming kids isn’t it.
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_new.....-says?lite
@6 Ass. Methane. Match. All heat, no light. Comment #5 contains no more intelligent content than farting in a toilet bowl then dropping in a lit match to blow it up.
The Irish are finally waking up about this too:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new.....rtion.html
Very modest step to my view but way better than more women dying.
The Catholic Church should be ashamed of itself if it in any way opposes this.
@4 The proposals leaking to the press are actually more detailed than that, and the broad outlines of the deal are more than bargaining positions. Yes, they negotiate in big numbers and broad frameworks, but when you say “$1.2 trillion of revenue” you’re going a long way toward defining where the revenue will come from; and when you say “$1.2 trillion of spending cuts,” you’re fixing crosshairs on specific programs.
Right now, the biggest dispute on the spending side is whether to count interest savings as “spending cuts.” Boehner is complaining that the interest saved by lowering the deficit isn’t a spending cut, therefore Obama isn’t proposing equal amounts of revenue and spending cuts.
On the revenue side, Obama appears to be giving up some revenue by agreeing to a higher threshold for tax rate increases. On the spending side, Obama is screwing senior retirees, on top of the screwing they’re already taking from his administration’s monetary policies via Bernanke’s Federal Reserve. We all knew Medicare would get dinged, but it’s hard to see what the justification for cutting Social Security COLAs is, because Social Security has positive cash flow and isn’t contributing a penny to the deficit. The combination of chained CPI and raising the tax rate hike threshold is nothing less than making senior citizens subsidize low taxes for people making over a quarter million a year.
That isn’t going to sit well with the senior lobbies, but it plays to Obama’s youthful voter base, who like every generation of young people before them think they’re getting ripped off by their grandparents. (I felt that way, too, when I was 21.)
Overall, the two groups who are going to bear the brunt of deficit reduction are the very rich and senior citizens. And once again, the Underwater McMansion crowd will come out smelling like a rose. I’m not against helping them to help the economy, but there’s tons of moral hazard here.
As this discussion progresses into the magical realm of “tax reform,” it wouldn’t surprise me very much to see them keep the mortgage deduction and toss the medical expense deduction, which will make seniors who lived under their means, paid off their houses, and saved for retirement but now have costly medical problems look like damn fools — they should have bought mansions and Porsches, lived it up while the getting was good, then committed suicide and left behind a bankrupt estate for the creditors to sort through.
Thank you, teahadists, for making Republicans unelectable.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/18/.....?hpt=hp_t3
Roger Rabbit Commentary: I couldn’t have done it better myself.
“Amid calls for tighter restrictions on guns following last week’s deadly rampage in Connecticut, Texas Republican Gov. Rick Perry said at a tea party event Monday that anyone with a concealed handgun license in the Lone Star State should be able to take guns on public property – including schools.”
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/?hpt=hp_t2
Roger Rabbit Commentary: This guy is too stupid to be president, but we already knew that from his debate performances last spring.
Had the Roman Catholic Church any shame it would have done something about priest abuse of children. So don’t hold your breath.
A little more on the loss of Senator Inouye, his Medal of Honor citation:
http://www.homeofheroes.com/mo.....nouye.html
UBS Fined $1.5 Billion For Fraud
UBS Bank will pay a total of $1.5 billion fines, including $1.2 to the U.S., for its role in rigging the London Interbank Overnight Rate (LIBOR) for years and years.
“In a press release issued by the bank, UBS said it had agreed with the U.S. Department of Justice ‘to enter a plea to one count of wire fraud ….'”
One count of wire fraud, uh, yeah … okay. LIBOR affects trillions of dollars of loans, including the interest rates on mortgages and student loans in the United States, and this went on for years and years. One count.
“UBS said it will post a fourth-quarter net loss, primarily as a result of provisions for litigation and regulatory matters.”
A one-quarter loss. That’s the bank’s (and its shareholders’) punishment. I’m sure they made a hell of a lot more than that in illicit profits over the six, seven, eight — who knows, ten or twelve or fifteen or thirty? — years this went on. Hell, they probably made more than that per quarter. Remember, this fraud ripped off billions of consumers on trillions of dollars of loans.
“The U.K.’s Financial Services Authority said … ‘the misconduct was extensive and widespread … at least 2,000 requests for inappropriate submissions were documented – an unquantifiable number of oral requests, which by their nature would not be documented, were also made … manipulation was also discussed in internal open chat forums and group emails, and was widely known,’ the FSA added.”
Well, if it was in the open and widely known, why did it take governments so long to catch them? Is it possible our government (and maybe others) just winked and looked the other way until our former ruling party was overthrown at the ballot box and a Democrat took over? If that’s what happened, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/100326489
Roger Rabbit Commentary: This plea bargain sucks. The Justice Department gave away the store. Not one banker is going to jail. Hell, they probably won’t even lose their bonuses! But I’m not saying bankers should be jailed for this. No, I’m not. Jail is too good for them.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve not advocating these bankers should be given a choice between being hung or shot. That’s too good for them, too.
First, let’s do this to their expensive toys: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MTVn8GAHtU
And then, let’s do this to them: http://tinyurl.com/bqp6xfg
Barbaric, you say? Yeah, I used to think that way, too. Medieval, and all that. But then I thought some more, especially about what these guys did — they ripped off millions of people for billions of dollars! Probably almost everyone in our country, not to mention all the other countries. How can you punish someone enough for that? You can’t. Therefore, by definition, no punishment is too harsh or cruel.
Yeah, burn the fuckers at the stake!
Man, I can get evil when I’m mad and drunk at the same time. I’m surprised at myself.
Here’s another idea. Make the bankers pay our taxes for a whole year. The rest of us get a one-year tax holiday. It’ll do wonders for the economy and we’ll get something resembling restitution and justice.
Roger wants to disembowel a bank. EVIL!
I was just thinking…..
If Teddy Kennedy hadn’t Borked Bork, there would be a US Supreme Court opening for Obama to fill this morning.
Jus’ sayin’.
Who needs a triple AAA credit rating anyway
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/s.....9-07-44-20
For thos of you Owebamma lovers, the continued degrading of the US credit rating is going to drive interest rates up, and the cost of servicing a 20+ trillion dollar debt is going to skyrocket!
“Gun control advocates today are not so foolish as to openly promote racist laws, and so the question might be asked what relevance the racist past of gun control laws has. One concern is that the motivations for disarming blacks in the past are really not so different from the motivations for disarming law-abiding citizens today. In the last century, the official rhetoric in support of such laws was that “they” were too violent, too untrustworthy, to be allowed weapons. Today, the same elitist rhetoric regards law-abiding Americans in the same way, as child-like creatures in need of guidance from the government. In the last century, while never openly admitted, one of the goals of disarming blacks was to make them more willing to accept various forms of economic oppression, including the sharecropping system, in which free blacks were reduced to an economic state not dramatically superior to the conditions of slavery.”
@ 21
That’s an awfully long quotation without attribution there, JC.
@ 2
Is Iceland tied to Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal the way Ireland is?
I’m guessing that Ireland had made commitments to the EU that effectively prevented it from doing what Iceland did.
Otherwise, would Greece not have already done the same thing Iceland did?