Please join us tonight for another evening of politics over a pint at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally .
We meet every Tuesday 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 another DL meeting over the next week. Tonight the Tri-Cities chapter also meets. The Longview chapter meet this Wednesday. And for Thursday, the Spokane chapter and Drinking Liberally Tacoma meet.
With 207 chapters of Living Liberally, including fourteen in Washington state, four in Oregon, and two more in Idaho, chances are excellent there’s a chapter that meets near you.
We all know the Constitution, as originally written, was flawed. The fact it’s been amended 27 times proves it. The biggest flaw, of course, was that it permitted slavery — a mistake that later cost half a million Americans their lives. The Second Amendment — or at least the modern Supreme Court’s interpretation of it — is flawed, too, because it says anyone can have a gun and fails to make an exception for jackasses. Like this guy:
“A 20-year-old college student went on a shooting rampage across Orange County, Calif., on Tuesday, killing three people and injuring several others before killing himself, authorities said.”
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_new.....unman?lite
And then there are idiots like that no-legged South African athlete who shot his girlfriend through a closed door. He claims he thought she was an intruder. Either he’s a lying murderer, in which case he’s somewhat clever, or he’s a poster boy for why keeping a gun at home for self-defense is a really bad idea if you’re a brainless jackass. It’s time we added an exception to the Second Amendment for jackasses.
What would your solution be?
@2 Reasonable regulation instead of wide-open purchase, possession, and carrying. Handguns should be harder to get than hunting long arms, and require more justification for possession and carrying. We need different rules for rural and urban areas; i.e., give cities latitude to adopt regulations appropriate for their local conditions — it’s ridiculous to think owning a gun in Okanogan County is the same as carrying a gun on Beacon Hill. And gun rules should be stringently enforced; i.e., if you are an unauthorized person in possession of a gun, or a person in possession of an unauthorized gun, or you commit a crime with a gun, you are going to do serious prison time. Our society blows off misbehavior with guns way too lightly, just as we once did (and still do, to a certain extent) with drunk driving. It’s time to treat guns as the inherently dangerous, human and rabbit life-threatening, and frequently misused instrumentalities they actually are. However, there should be no restrictions on shooting hawks, peregrin falcons, or dogs. Dogs suck! Especially dogs running off-leash in public parks! Dogs who chase rabbits not only should be shot, there should be a bounty on them!
Watched a fantastic show last night, that was tivoed from Feb.12th. PBS Frontline “Cliffhanger” 53mins. Seriously worth watching since it showed what was going on behind the scenes with Obama & Boehner.
At the time it all happened I was yelling at the TV and wondering WHY all the backroom dealing, but this explained so much about how Boehner insisted on secrecy and how all the big deals blew up once Cantor & Ryan discovered what was going on – so they made sure the Tea Party caucus would not go along. Plus, how it all led up to the spot we’re in now.
PBS Frontline – Cliffhanger
http://video.pbs.org/video/2334346348
Republicans are going to take some serious blame for this whole mess. Especially for going off on vacation and leaving only 3-days to deal with such a major impact issue & taking us off the cliff!
From 3,
We send people to prison, and you mentioned serious time for gun offenses. What do you think of using incarcerated individuals to do some public works projects, similar to the old chain gang in the South? It might be a good way, for instance, to reduce illegal immigration if we used prisoners to pick apples and not those entering the country illegally.
Just a thought.
Both the former Illinois congressman and his wife, Sandra, have agreed to plead guilty in deals with federal prosecutors. Jackson is charged with conspiracy and his wife with one count of filing false joint federal income tax returns for the years 2006 through 2011 that knowingly understated the income the couple received.
http://www.stltoday.com/news/l.....26b9f.html
Nine paragraphs of AP reporting. None mention JJJ’s party affiliation.
Maybe they just assume that since he’s another corrupt politician from Chicago, everyone instantly recognizes he’s a Democrat.
# 5: The idea of making prisoners work while incarcerated has created a whole series of other problems in this country, in the various times it’s been implemented. For example, there was recently a show on PBS about how, in Mississipi, they would sentence “vagrants” (young black men) for long prison terms and contract out their work to local farmers, etc. This system existed in quite a few states, where favored farmers/industries would get a labor cost advantage by paying the state pennies on the dollars for convict labor, shutting out their competition and taking jobs which would otherwise go to the unemployed free men.
The road crews, depicted in quite a few movies in the 1960’s (the Steve McQueen one is the most famous) had their own abuses, and were inefficient (relying upon physical labor instead of machinery, and requiring guards to watch over the prison crews). I remember seeing convict road crews all along the Alabama highways when we drove down to visit my grandmother’s farm when I was young.
From 7,
Well, any other ideas to reduce the cost of incarceration?
@ 7
rhp, I really must object. You consistently fail to cite your references.
WHICH Steve McQueen movie? And was it any more memorable than, say, prison work crews in the original The Longest Yard?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-ONpCHQ1RQ
The opening scene in 48 Hours? The Shawshank Redemption?
GOP Hypocrite Of The Day
Ex-GOP Sen. Pete Dominic admits he has a love child with the daughter of ex-GOP Sen. Paul Laxalt and kept it secret for 30 years.
Some employers are exploiting high unemployment to demand college degrees even for minimum-wage donkey jobs.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/100474974
Roger Rabbit Commentary: It’s easy to see why the United States is headed for permanent depression: Young people are expected to go $100,000 in debt to get a degree required for a $10-an-hour file clerk job. They still won’t have their student loans paid off at age 90. They won’t get married and have children, won’t buy houses, won’t be consumers at any life stage. They’ll have to supplement their meager salaries by raising food in P-Patches, standing out in the sun doing stoop labor with hoes and rakes. America will resemble a backwater farming valley in the Phillipines.
I have a better idea. Give up on the job market. Just push the whole idea of working out of your mind. Take that $100,000 and invest it. Be a capitalist, live off stock winnings! If everyone becomes a stock flipper, the demand for stocks will push the stock market higher and higher, and we’ll all be millionaires! No work will get done, but so what? Let bosses do their own goddam filing. It’s time they learn how to hold a real job and do real work, instead of just flipping businesses and dreaming up new ways to rip off workers and consumers.
From 10,
You must mean former Senatro Pete Dominici. I think he was the Senator from New Mexico some years ago.
From 11,
Well, it does actually matter what a student majors in when attending college. A fine arts major may not have the same employment potential as a comp sci major.
I’m watching some guy say that “securitized lending” is a good thing. Seems to me that this sounds like collateralized mortgage obligations or collateralized debt obligations, and that’s the same stuff that caused all the problems bacK in 2008 and 2009. There are too many opportunities for crooked people to put together bad loans in one or more of these instruments. I would avoid these things like the plague!
Heh.. Those Republicans are (groan) blaming Obama for the sequester:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/.....sequester/
The right wingers in Congress refuse to name cuts they’d make.. So they blame Obama.. They’re scum.
This is fun. Florida could be waking up!
http://www.motherjones.com/pol.....ott?page=1
All it takes is a little Florida Tea, i.e. shit in your drinking water..
@ 15
YLB, I suspect the GOP has named the cuts in the two bills they already passed:
By contrast, House Republicans have twice passed plans to replace the sequester with common-sense cuts and reforms that protect national security.
http://online.wsj.com/article/.....on_LEADTop
They’re sitting on Harry Reid’s desk right now.
# 9: I mis-spoke (mis-wrote?). It wasn’t Steve McQueen. It was Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke to which I was referring.
And no, when making a general statement about a broad range within a historical context, I don’t bother to go back and list my sources. If I have them readily available, I do so. But I don’t have time to make every comment a research project, nor does the speed at which posts become outdated allow us to do that.
If necessary, I will mention that a lot of my comments originated with about an hour-long interview with the warden of the Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Tennessee in the winter of 1978 – I was doing a research paper for an undergraduate class. I no longer have a copy of that paper, so my original sources are lost, and it would take some work to collect them together again.
But really, the problems were well discussed in the 1960’s, when much of the prison work details were abolished or restricted to work at the penitentiary itself. During the Reagan administration it was brought back to some extent as they trained inmates to be telemarketers on contract to companies – but there was that little inconvenient problem that they were getting customer’s credit card info in the process and passing it to accomplices outside.
Jesse Jackson, jr. just pled guilty to conspiracy. He faces five years in prison.
Ten Years After prediction: he won’t serve any time. It will be fines and probation.
@ 15
YLB, I think the GOP House named their cuts in HR 6684, passed in December:
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/112/hr6684
Maybe read beyond your left-wing rag once in awhile.
@ 19
He’ll serve time. I believe it’s stipulated in the plea bargain agreement.
Under the terms of a plea deal Jackson Jr. signed last week, he will leave the prison sentence he’s expected to serve up to U.S. District Judge Robert L. Wilkins. Prosecutors have asked for a sentence between 46 to 57 months, and Jackson will be sentenced June 28.
http://chicagoist.com/2013/02/.....guilty.php
@ 18
I believe the correct term is mis-spewed.
It’s somewhat entertaining to watch the Republican party working to re-position itself, all while individual Republicans are positioning themselves for a potential 2016 run for President.
Side note: we have apparantly entered the point where campaigning is suspended only for three months after a presidential election, and then resumes).
As reported a week or two ago, Karl Rove is raising PAC money with the avowed purpose of defeating Tea-Party type candidates in the Repblican primaries who don’t have a chance of winning the general election. It seems Karl Rove understands that you actually have to win an election in order to implement your ideology.
Now enter from stage right: perinial presidental candidate Newt Gingrich, who sees this as a chance to gain Tea Party favor for his next run for President, as he trashes Karl Rove as a guy supported by billionaires. Funny, coming from a guy who’s last run was financed by the billionaire Adelson to the tune of some $20 million dollars.
Gingrich Hammers Karl Rove Over Effort To Define GOP
And McCaine faced a hostile crowd of Tea-Partiers in his home state, who were angry over his attempts to forge an immigration compromise in the past.
McCain faces backlash at home over immigration issue
And polling shows that Rubio has a long way to go to define himself as a national contender. He’s popular among the Tea-Party folks, but independents are split roughly 1/3 favorable, 1/3 undecided, and 1/3 unfavorable. Overall, of those who have an opinion, Rubio has a net negative favorability rating.
Poll reveals mixed views toward Rubio
Finally, Romney is making his first public appearance since his defeat in the 2012 election, appearing as a featured speaker at the annual C-Pac convention in March (along with Santorium and Paul Ryan). Surely he’s not thinking of running again, is he?
Romney to make first public appearance at CPAC
From 21,
Wow! He could actually go to jail! How long before somebody starts challenging the sentence as racist?
The Washington Post??
How many times have you quoted the WAPO Bob?
% b l -t bob -D –summary | grep washingtonpost
| 30624*21 | 2010-10-26T08:38 | washingtonpost | 73 |
73 times! Wow Bob.. Never took you for a “lefty”..
@ 25
Yeah, ya got me. Apologies. I went a little too fast and saw the Mother Jones reference in the wrong comment. My bad, YLB.
Glad to know that if I ever need to know how many times I do anything around here I’ve got you to answer the question.
Hmmm.. What “lefty” wrote this??
http://washingtonexaminer.com/.....le/2522040
First Bob now this guy.. We’re all reading and/or writing left wing rags now.
I predict the next screech from the right wing:
SAVE THE PENNY!!!
If Obama is for it, they have to be against it.
@5 It’s not cost effective because you have to transport them to the work site and guard them while they’re there, and if they’re conscripts instead of volunteers, you’ll have a bunch of slackers who require heavy supervision and don’t produce much.
@6 You afraid that if the media doesn’t paste a “Democrat” label on him everyone will assume he’s a Republican? After all a lot of Republicans behave like this.
@8 Why do we have to reduce the cost of incarceration? Why not pay taxes to keep criminals off our streets? Seriously, do you believe no one in DOC works on cost savings, that the state hasn’t already thoroughly plowed this ground? Prisoners aren’t hotel guests getting waited on hand and foot; a lot of the daily work in our prisons is done by inmates who work in the kitchen, laundry, etc. But all things cost — buildings, food, supplies, medical care, guards and other staff, etc. — and at some point there is an irreducible minimum costs involved in incarcerating people.
Some states have toyed with charging prisoners for their “guest” stays. But slapping somebody with a bill and collecting it are two different things. Most convicts are indigent and they obviously don’t have garnishable wages. You can charge them $100 a day for “room and board” and bill them for medical services, but how will you get money out of people who have no money, no jobs, no property, and are locked in cages?
At some point you have to pay the reasonable costs of public or private consumption. The alternative is to shut the prisons and let the criminals go free to prey on us again.
@15 “The right wingers in Congress refuse to name cuts they’d make”
Because they know what will happen to them in the next election if they come out and say they want to take away Grandma’s Social Security and Medicare so billionaires can keep their tax cuts.
The Skeletonator of Florida does that most classic of right wing moves, classic in that it’s so, well, uncharacteristic:
Why did he do this?
Awwwwww.. So it was an emotional decision.. Aren’t all right wing decisions that way? Hatred of the poor, love of the rich, love of wars of choice and people other than them dying in those wars, sad over mom dying..
From 31,
We need to reduce the cost of everything in government. We are in a situation, nation-wide, where the private sector cannot produce enough wealth to pay for government.