It’s Tuesday…so please join us for an 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 one of the other DL meetings over the next week. The Tri-Cities chapter also meets tonight. On Wednesday, the Burien and Bellingham chapters meet. On Thursday the Woodinville chapter meets. And on Monday, the Aberdeen, Yakima, South Bellevue and Olympia chapters meet.
With 206 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.
Look at the bright side of the sequester thing, libbies:
Federal immigration officials have released hundreds of detainees from immigration detention centers around the country in a highly unusual effort that is intended to save money as automatic budget cuts loom in Washington, officials said Tuesday.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02.....-cuts.html
No money to build the wall.
@1 Kap’n Kornflake – Serial RENEGER,
You keep blowing right wing talking points out your ass, but if it is Tuesday it is time for a Drinking Liberally thread, and if it is Tuesday it marks another week gone by since you lost your bet to me on the presidential election and still have not met your obligation to me.
16 weeks and counting!
So called conservative Republicans, they don’t pay their bills. That’s how they roll.
Turns out it’s not just John Kerry talking about Roger Rabbit today:
http://horsesass.org/?p=49287#comment-1215722
The Washington Post is doing it,
http://horsesass.org/?p=49287#comment-1215791
too:
Not only are most people paying very little attention to the sequester, they also have only the faintest sense of what it would do.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/.....t/?hpid=z2
@2 Kap’n Kornflake – Serial RENEGER,
Glad to see with Uncle Puddles back you are stepping up your game of stupid. Keep spewing knuckle head!
@ 4
Any idea where Rujax went?
The first round of cuts under Gramm-Rudman weren’t so devastating that Congress and the president rushed to repeal them. In July 1986, Congress had the opportunity simply to stop the sequester after the Supreme Court invalidated its triggering mechanism. Instead it voted overwhelmingly to reaffirm the across-the-board cuts. The vote in the Democratic House was 339 to 72, and the Republican Senate approved it by acclamation, not deeming it worthy of a roll-call vote.
In 1987, Congress fixed the triggering mechanism and restored the sequester in Gramm-Rudman II. That deal would have cut nondefense discretionary spending by 8.5% and defense spending by 10.5%, far greater cuts than will be triggered this year. Yet a Democratic Congress and a Republican White House came together to replace that sequester with spending cuts in fiscal years 1988 and 1989 that were larger than those called for by Gramm-Rudman II.
http://online.wsj.com/article/.....on_LEADTop
Written by a guy who knows a little bit about how Gramm-Rudman came into being.
And if liberals can’t argue with him to any effect, maybe they can go after his wife the way
http://horsesass.org/?p=49287#comment-1215732
they went after another guy’s wife.
@6 Kap’n Kornflake – Serial RENEGER,
Are we to understand you are on-board with today’s right wing teabagging talking point that the sequester will have no significant economic impact on people?
Because if you are, I hope you’ll be standing by to go out and meet the Boeing employees who will be getting their warn notices on Friday, March 1st.
Asshole.
@ 6
The first rule of comment posting: never, ever, post a link to the opinion pages of the WSJ. That is, of course, unless you want to look stupid.
You’ll find a better, though sufficiently concise, summary of the “1985 Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act” here.
Of particular note:
Meanwhile, Congress and the president have managed to avoid the across-the-board spending cuts authorized by the original Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act. Only in late 1990 were such cuts ordered, but they were repealed in early 1991 after Congress and President George H.W. Bush reached agreement on a budget that complied with the deficit limit for that year.
But, thank you for proving, rather definitively, that the concept of a “sequester” is really a Republican idea.
@1 The bright side of sequester is (1) defense spending will be cut, and (2) voters living in districts dependent on defense industries will blame Republicans.
Anheuser-Busch is being sued for watering down its beer. Many former AB employees, including high-ranking executives, say the practice became corporate policy after AB was acquired by InBev in 2008. AB denies it violated labeling laws or deceived consumers as alleged in the class-action lawsuit.
Roger Rabbit Commentary: I quit drinking Budweiser years ago. It’s not the Bud I drank in college. Years of corner cutting degraded the quality to the point where it’s barely drinkable. Like millions of other consumers, I’ve totally switched to craft brews and imports, because the domestic mass-produced brands are just tasteless colored water now.
@6 “Written by a guy who knows a little bit about …”
Who are you trying to kid? You’ve repeatedly proved you know nothing about anything.
@10 Roger,
When Bud has its loss leader sales I pick up a six for beer can chicken. What the heck else is it good for?
A new NBC/WSJ poll shows the Obama policy enjoying highest public support is greater restrictions on guns.
Candidate Who Backs Gun Control Wins Race
In the war against the Merchants of Death, score 1 for the voices of reason.
So Chuck Hagel was confirmed as SecDef..
I don’t get it right wingers.. I thought you all said Hagel is anti-Semitic and soft on Iran..
Oh well..
@15 YLB,
The wingers got confused. The Senate Republicans saw that Hagel was a former Republican Senator and just assumed he was as big a HorsesAss as they all are.
From 10,
I don’t drink the national beers very much. I prefer Mac & Jack’s African Amber most of the time. Budweiser sometimes puts out American Pale Ale, and I tried it once and found it really good – not just the lager that is Budweiser’s flagship brand.
Budweiser’s hard task is to make the Bud made in Norfolk, VA taste the same as the Bud made in Fairfield, CA. That’s a tough act to pull off!
@17 It’s even tougher when they put water in it to boost profits. That’s equivalent to putting sawdust in bread.
Time magazine just ran the longest story in its entire publishing history. The subject? How medical providers rip off American health consumers. If you want to know why American health care costs are so damned high this article explains why.
http://www.nbcnews.com/video/n.....8#50966615
Roger Rabbit Commentary: Would you be surprised if I told you this article says a lung cancer patient’s $348,000 bill included 4 boxes of ordinary gauze pads at $77 per box?
“In hundreds of small and midsize cities across the country — from Stamford, Conn., to Marlton, N.J., to Oklahoma City — the American health care market has transformed tax-exempt “nonprofit” hospitals into the towns’ most profitable businesses and largest employers, often presided over by the regions’ most richly compensated executives.
“And in our largest cities, the system offers lavish paychecks even to midlevel hospital managers, like the 14 administrators at New York City’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center who are paid over $500,000 a year, including six who make over $1 million.”
“Taken as a whole, these powerful institutions and the bills they churn out dominate the nation’s economy and put demands on taxpayers to a degree unequaled anywhere else on earth. In the U.S., people spend almost 20% of the gross domestic product on health care, compared with about half that in most developed countries. Yet in every measurable way, the results our health care system produces are no better and often worse than the outcomes in those countries.”
Let me ask you a question. If there was only one grocery store in your town, and they charged you $45.00 for an egg, would you write a letter of complaint to your congressman, asking the government to step in and regulate that business?
How about if that grocery store wouldn’t even tell you what they charged for your groceries? Let’s say you go through the checkout line with one small bag of canned and boxed goods, a couple of bunches of fresh lettuce and carrots for your pet rabbit named Roger, and a half gallon of milk? And then, a month later, when you got your bank statement you found they had debited your account for $16,850?
That’s what the American health care racket is like today. So don’t you think it’s time Congress did something about it?
Dogs shouldn’t have guns.
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_new.....e-say?lite
The Court of State Security slammed the door today on lawsuits against the Commissariat of Domestic Surveillance for spying on lawyers, journalists, and civil rights groups. The usual suspects made up the 5-4 majority.
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_new.....ogram?lite
In Snohomish County yesterday, a 50-year-old road raging man dragged a woman out of her car, repeatedly slugged her in the head, and choked the woman’s daughter when she tried to intervene to protect her mother.
http://www.heraldnet.com/artic.....ldNetMSNBC
Roger Rabbit Commentary: Let’s face it, there are times when people need a gun. Not often, but sometimes.
Recession? What recession? The well-to-do are doing well:
“Sales of properties worth between $750,000 and $1 million are up 38.7 percent over a year ago; $1 million-plus property sales are up 25.7 percent, according to the National Association of Realtors.”
http://www.nbcnews.com/busines.....-1C8573250
Roger Rabbit Commentary: I’ll bet a lot of these expensive luxury homes are being sold to health care providers who buy boxes of gauze at Fred Meyer for $1.49 each and resell them to captive patients for $77. At 4 boxes per patient, 500 patients later you’ve got yourself a $1.5 million mansion, just from the gauze. Imagine what you could do with the money you can make off aspirins, X-rays, and blood draws!
See right wingers can learn a lot from communists..
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new.....creek.html
If libruls won’t “shut up” like BillO commands, then it’s simple..
Beat up the liberals.. That’ll teach em’!
It’s official: most Americans judge the Republicans as whacko and disconnected from reality, oops, make that “extreme” and “out of touch”.
It’s a nice touch that even HALF of Republicans disapprove of their representatives in Congress..
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.....65432.html
Maybe they should vote Losertarian or something.
Another Republican caught “birthing”…
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.....69715.html
Damn.. Why do people vote for these cretins? I guess if you think these politicians are bad – just look at their constituents!
@ 25
Roger Rabbit Commentary: Let’s face it, there are times when people need a gun. Not often, but sometimes.
Good thing we have you around to make those decisions for people, after the fact, RR.
Thanks anyway, but I’ll continue to defend the right of a private citizen to carry, inconspicuously and lawfully, for personal protection.
@30, George Zimmerman thanks you…
# 25, 30: Of course, you don’t need an AR-15 with thirty round magazines in a case like that. Heck, three rounds should be more than sufficient (one for the warning shot, then two in center mass if he doesn’t get down on his knees and beg for his life).
@ 31
There probably are a few Florida bus drivers
http://www.examiner.com/articl.....suspension
resting a little more easily as well, Ekim.
For the fact-impaired, like Roger Rabbit, who yesterday
http://horsesass.org/?p=49287#comment-1215766
was claiming that the sequester would affect Social Security, here’s a pretty nice list of items not subject to sequester cutbacks:
http://www.nationaljournal.com.....e-20130227
Note the first item on the list, RR:
Here’s a selection, courtesy of CRS, of the government functions that will be spared when the cuts take effect on Friday:
Social Security benefits (old-age, survivors, and disability) and Tier 1 Railroad Retirement benefits.
@30 “I’ll continue to defend the right of a private citizen to carry, inconspicuously and lawfully, for personal protection.”
How about dogs? Will you continue to defend the right of dogs to carry? If you don’t think dogs should have guns, then what about people who get shot by their dog with their own gun? Do you think people like that should be allowed to carry inconspicuously for personal protection? Against what? Their own dog? Or someone else’s heat-packing dog? I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to sit on a bus or in a movie theater next to someone like that if he has a gun I don’t know about. You may have a death wish, but I don’t.
@34 Ever heard of “chained CPI,” jackass?
@34 (continued) You tilted at this windmill in a previous thread. You had your head up your ass then, and still do. This debate isn’t about sequester, it’s about what Republicans want to replace sequester with. Here’s an executive summary of what Republicans are still demanding even though voters refused to give it to them last November:
Increased defense spending
Deep cuts to entitlements including Social Security and Medicare
Fluffy tax breaks for millionaires and corporations
Of course, you still don’t get it, and you never will. You’re too stupid to be teachable.
@ 35
Any dog more capable than you of carrying on an intelligent conversation should be permitted concealed carry. So yes, RR, I believe dogs should be permitted concealed carry. That’s my dog whistle for the day. Good boy.
@34 (continued) A couple days ago, we had a discussion (if you want to call it that) about whether General Electric pays federal corporate income taxes. I said they didn’t, you claimed they did. I wasn’t able to post a reply that day because the HA website was having problems and I couldn’t get back in. Here is the reply I drafted then. But first, let’s recap: You pointed out that GE pays federal, state, and local taxes. That’s off topic, because the subject of discussion was federal corporate income taxes. Period. The big picture is that total federal corporate income tax collections have fallen to a post-WW2 low of under 10% of all federal revenue, and many giant corporations — including General Electric — pay no federal corporate income tax whatsoever. I repeat: General Electric paid zero federal corporate income taxes in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics.....d=13224558
http://www.weeklystandard.com/.....09137.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.....51823.html
These links make a liar out of you. I’m sure GE does pay, as you pointed out, property taxes and other state and local taxes. But, I repeat — morons like you need a lot of repetition, and even then you still don’t get it — we’re discussing the federal budget and federal revenue, numbnuts, so those taxes have nothing to do with this discussion and your reference to them is completely off topic.
God, please send us some competent trolls, or at least one. Pretty please? I guess we’ll eventually find out whether prayer works.
Now, being an opportunistic capitalist, needless to say I own a substantial block of GE stock. I know a good thing when I see it. GE has over 10 billion shares of stock outstanding, and at no time since 1998 have GE’s profits fallen below $1.00 per share, according to Value Line. Now it’s true that GE did cut its dividend during the financial crisis to preserve cash, but they’ve been rapidly raising their dividend recently and GE’s dividend should regain all its former glory and then some within the next year or two. Meanwhile, people who bought GE stock for $6 a share in 2009, as I did, have seen their shares more than triple since then. And GE never completely quite paying a dividend, so their shareholders — meaning me, among others — have been getting dividend income, too. Know how much taxes I’ve paid on all this free money? Zip, nada, nothing. (Don’t bother reporting me to the IRS; this is perfectly legal.) And I’ve already told you that GE paid zip, nada, nothing in federal corporate income taxes on the profits that support those dividends. (My capital gains are still unrealized, because I haven’t sold my GE stock.) Republicans like to whine about “double taxation” of corporate profits, but in the real world, “zero taxation” is much more common. So, now that we have a cash-strapped federal government that got that way through aggressive tax-cutting, not aggressive spending, how about instead of slashing food stamps, Medicaid, Social Security, and Medicare, we reinstate some of those corporate taxes that Republicans got rid of? Doesn’t that seem like a more fair and sensible solution to deficits, assuming you really care about deficits? (And whether Republicans really care about deficits, or just use them as a smokescreen to gut programs that benefit the American citizens who do all of this country’s work and produce all of its wealth, but get substantially less than half of the wealth they produce for their hard work, is another subject fit for incisive debate.)
@38 Yes, go ahead and make snarky remarks about my intelligence, after getting your ass kicked around the block by a rabbit. My fellow HA readers can use a good laugh at your expense.