Please joins us this evening for another cocktail-enhanced and conversation-packed edition of the Seattle Chapter of Drinking liberally.
We meet tonight and every Tuesday at the Roanoke Park Place Tavern, 2409 10th Ave E, Seattle. Our starting time is 8:00 pm, but some folks stop by earlier for dinner.
Can’t make it to Seattle tonight? Check out one of the other DL meetings this week. The Long Beach, Tri-Cities and West Seattle chapters also meet tonight. The Lakewood chapter meets on Wednesday. And on Thursday, the Tacoma chapter meets.
There are 190 chapters of Living Liberally, including eighteen in Washington state, four in Oregon and two in Idaho. Chances are excellent there’s a chapter meeting somewhere near you.
Bobby Jindal, like all other GOP hopefuls, has to run on his economic record; and because Louisiana’s economy is terrible, he has no choice but to lie about how his state is doing.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/.....tail=email
Puddy is not excusing the actions of the oldest Duggar child… Butt it is curious how a DUMMOCRETIN law enforcement officer leaked sealed child proceedings of under-aged minor girls to the Arkansas DUMMOCRETINS. The rest is history! So where is the call for Springdale Police Chief Kathy O’Kelley to be fired and put up on charges? And how about Springdale City Attorney Ernest Cate? Shouldn’t a city attorney know better? What about In Touch Weekly? Those were little girls whose names are illegally in the public record now! Just because the libtard left wrong Springdale Police Chief Kathy O’Kelley did this and she’s retiring this month is no excuse to break the law.
Then there is this… http://reverbpress.com/news/us.....sh-duggar/ which all you HA DUMMOCRETINS jumped all over. By law they were minors. This was sealed and was destroyed by law. Is that in the article? No they just claim something is disturbing. By printing this sealed report isn’t this and other sites breaking the law? Butt DUMMOCRETINS care less about the law. It’s attack any conservative at all costs.
Well if you are a DUMMOCRETIN, upholding the law doesn’t matter and the end always justifies the means! Being a DUMMOCRETIN means you always live in the underbelly of the law!
If this was against a DUMMOCRETIN everyone in the left wrong libtard msm and e-rags would be looking for blood!
@2 That’s chickenfeed. For world-class corruption in a criminal justice system, look no farther than California’s conservative bastion of Orange County. http://www.dailykos.com/story/.....tail=email
Chickenfeed? DUMMOCRETINS illegally releasing the names of 5 and 6 year old girls into the public domain is chickenfeed?
Wow early onset senile schismatic IDIOT Wabbit!
Buzzpo on the new Arizona Welfare limits.
Make sure to scroll down for comment lulz.
http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/7472472
It takes $22 an hour to afford a two bedroom apartment in wa.
Oooopsy-daisy.
Conservatives are too fucking stupid to understand that propaganda is nearly always a huge lie, wrapped around a tiny kernel of half-truth. When they do see it, they still won’t give a shit.
You Fascist dumbasses will do anything to reinforce your hatred of anything you already hate, even if you have to openly lie to yourselves.
@Let me see if I can parse puddys argument…
Puddy says he does not condone a homophobic conserative man who abused his underage female siblings or the family members and politicians who covered it up, but disclosure of the abuse and corruption should never have happened since it identified the underage victims.
By his logic, it’s much worse how the information got out, instead of that the abuse and cover up happened. He would rather the abuser and accomplises be held unaccoutable, instead of justice for the abused.
Couldn’t it equally be said then that puddy lives by
“It’s protect any conservative at all costs!”
Does puddy also feels that Denny Hastur should not have his name in the media since disclosure of the abuse and corruption identified the then underage victims.
@4 That’s bad, of course, but imagining yourself lying dead in a pool of blood on a sidewalk for “walking while black” might help your perspective.
The Washington Post and Daily Guardian recently studied police shootings in the USA and came up with some startling statistics.
As expected, cops are more likely to kill minorities than whites, but here’s the stunner: Less than 2% of America’s police departments commit nearly all of the police killings.
Social conditions vary across the country, but not THAT much, so the inescapable conclusion is that some police departments foster or at least tolerate a trigger-happy attitude and a cavalier attitude toward human life among their cops. Obviously, its those departments that should be targeted for reform.
More details here: http://www.motherjones.com/pol.....t-guardian
@6 Yeah, and that’s the whole state, not Seattle, where rents are much higher. Make no mistake, $15/hr. is poverty wages in Seattle, not some kind of windfall.
@8 Heh, I should’ve known Putz was conflating a thinly-veiled defense of a conservative evildoer into fake outrage dressed up as concern for the well-being of little children.
It’s always “
wonderful” disgustingly sad to read the BULLSHITTIUM from worserhomophobic conserative[sic] man Josh Duggar is a homophobic conservative man? Got proof?
family members and politicians who covered it up Where has Puddy commented on this worser? What politician covered this up worser? Display the details! When you read this BULLSHITTIUM it’s the standard DUMMOCRETIN guilt by ASSociation! http://readersupportednews.org.....r-cover-up Which of those politicians knew and therefore condoned those actions worser? Put up or shut up!
Yet all those peeps who hugged Bill Clinton during his Arkansas years while Bill was abusing those seven women under Hillary’s nose and probable approval are also condoning rape worser? How about when the news was out during his presidential run. The Clinton War Room? Sidney Blumenthal (hero of the early onset senile schismatic IDIOT Wabbit) in action? How about Monica Lewinsky? Sidney Blumenthal (hero of the early onset senile schismatic IDIOT Wabbit) in action again! So Sidney Blumenthal (hero of the early onset senile schismatic IDIOT Wabbit) was condoning Bill’s rape peccadilloes! Hmmm…? Well…? That’s the standard DUMMOCRETIN attack. Feckless and insipid!
Go on grow some marbuls and ask the HA DUMMOCRETIN screen scraping creep, the crazed database deala and determine where Puddy commented on that worser! Go on!
but disclosure of the abuse and corruption should never have happened since it identified the underage victims. IT IS ILLEGAL worser! The court documents were sealed and that’s why the judge ordered the destruction of the material. Hence any web site continuing to display the material is breaking the law. Butt to a moronic twit like you, law breaking to further DUMMOCRETIN ends always is acceptable!
The rest of your illogic is illogical as ever worser!
Anything from the early onset senile schismatic IDIOT Wabbit is hilariously wrong as evah!
@13 A nice example of puddy’s squid ink logic
According to puddy, since President Clinton had consensual sex in the 90s, abuse of siblings should get a pass now.
Two time lines
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...../28066229/
http://www.vox.com/2015/5/27/8.....ggar-abuse
Best I can tell, Puddy is upset with this: “InTouch obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request a sealed 2006 police report that detailed the accusations against Josh Duggar.”
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...../27837149/
And I think puddy’s argument is that since a judge ordered the record destroyed, we should retroactively pretend we never heard about it?
So what say the room? Does puddy have a point? Should that sealed document have been released that seemed to have started this whole thing? Now that it’s been “expunged” should we just all pretend it didn’t happen?
Was it ethical for a judge to expunge Josh Duggar’s police record?
http://starcasm.net/archives/316819
“Just hours after Josh Duggar’s police record was revealed last week, Arkansas Judge Stacey Zimmerman agreed to expunge the 2006 police investigation information at the request of one victim.
“As far as the Springdale Police Department is concerned this report doesn’t exist,” Springdale Police spokesman Scott Lewis told USA Today, explaining Josh’s criminal history is now entirely clean.
According to a 2012 Arkansas Legal Services Partnership pamphlet, sexual offenders whose victims were younger than 18 are not eligible to have their records expunged. Although Josh’s situation was different because he wasn’t convicted of any crimes, Officer Lewis said records similar to Josh’s are often kept indefinitely.”
“There are a few noteworthy pieces of information complicating the situation. For one, Radar Online reports Judge Zimmerman was personally selected by former governor Mike Huckabee to two different committees. Huckabee is a close friend of the Duggar family and already expressed his support of Josh. Furthermore, the accused or convicted offender is typically the one who asks for a record to be expunged. In this case, there were five victims identified in the police report — which makes you wonder how the other four felt when Josh’s slate was wiped clean.”
Similar business owners have responded by raising tuitions, asking parents to provide lunches and supplies, or simply closing down, says Richard Winefield, head of the child-care referral agency known as Bananas.
So while Oakland’s new higher minimum wage may lure some stay-at-home parents back into the labor force, the irony is that they may face higher prices and fewer options when searching for child care.
http://www.latimes.com/busines.....story.html
Irony. I guess that’s one way of putting it.
This article, in the LA Times, isn’t a message to the self-assured progressives in Seattle, which is currently enjoying a 3.3% (April) unemployment rate and is eagerly beginning its grand ‘experiment’ with increasing minimum wage to $15. Nor is it directed to across-the-bay SF, which in February had an unemployment rate of 3.8%.
It’s a warning to Los Angeles, which in February was struggling with an unemployment rate of 8.1%.
As bright-eyed college freshmen arrive on campus, they can look forward to accruing knowledge, independence, lifelong friendships—and serious bills. In the 2012-13 school year, first-year, on-campus tuition averaged $43,000 at four-year, private schools and $21,700 at in-state public schools.
It wasn’t always like this: The cost of undergraduate education is 12 times higher than it was 35 years ago, far outpacing inflation. While the indexed price of college tuition and fees skyrocketed by more than 1,122 percent since 1978, the cost of medical care rose less than 600 percent, and the cost of housing and food went up less than 300.
http://www.motherjones.com/pol.....since-1978
Somehow I don’t think it’s because of all those greedy faculty members.
It might have something to do with all of those administrators that didn’t use to exist.
Bickle, what should they have done instead of raising the minimum wage, with the requirement that do nothing was not an option?
18 where are your numbers? what percentage of the cost now goes to administrators? Whats the decrease in public subsidies to higher education?
Humm, according to this site and graph, conservative’s lack of spending on the future is several times a factor in the price of eduction over the cost of admins.
http://blog.credit.com/2015/03.....up-111295/
“How about Monica Lewinsky?”
Takes me back to the days when I learned that Republicans have a projection problem.
“If I understand the history correctly, in the late 1990s, the President was impeached for lying about a sexual affair by a House of Representatives led by a man who was also then hiding a sexual affair, who was supposed to be replaced by another Congressman who stepped down when forced to reveal that he too was having a sexual affair, which led to the election of a new Speaker of the House who now has been indicted for lying about payments covering up his sexual contact with a boy.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/.....correctly/
But I see there is a full court press going on, to explain school costs are solely a factor of admin, and not a decrease in public subsidy.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.c.....p?page=all
“If you have any remaining doubt about where colleges and universities have been spending their increasing tuition and other revenues, consider this: between 1947 and 1995 (the last year for which the relevant data was published), administrative costs increased from barely 9 percent to nearly 15 percent of college and university budgets.”
Does that pencil? Does a 6% increase equate to a 1,122% in cost, or is this a scapegoat?
This is interesting
“Universities today have an elaborate IT infrastructure, enhanced student services, a more extensive fund-raising and lobbying apparatus, and so on, than was common thirty years ago. …When push came to shove, colleges chose to invest in management rather than in teaching and research. ”
I wonder why?
I thought this comment was a good counterpoint.
“I agree that the cost structure of higher ed is broken, but blaming tuition inflation on administrators, rather than the obscene movement to treat students as “consumers” completely misses the real causation.
If you don’t have the $5million overhaul to your food court, or your dorm furniture is shabby, or you don’t have 500 channels of cable TV in every room, if you don’t have shiny new brochures, the best performing arts center, perfectly manicured lawns, full medical/counseling services, etc… you risk falling behind the recruiting curve of your peer institutions.
Colleges cost more because students and parents demanded the amenities and services that make it more expensive. The best illustration of this is the difference in fringe benefits between a typical community college and a typical 4 year school. Check it out sometime.”
There does seem to be a common thread of accepted greed at the top levels, they expect to live like a kings, like any and all CEOs. They cannot have any respect if they lived on on a church mouse pauper’s salary. So everyone agrees that they get paid more.
@22. Brilliant!
@ 23
When push came to shove, colleges chose to invest in management rather than in teaching and research. ”
I wonder why?
That might have happened about the time that colleges decided that their priority should be on compensating management and not on educating students, Better.
You should wonder why.
“higher minimum wage”
Figures that our radiologist, who probably pulls in $500K/Year, always wants to to warn us about how those at the bottom of the economic ladder are going to make too goddamned much money if the minimum wage goes up and how that will be a very bad thing!
“In his classic book Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman describes the American Medical Association (AMA) as the “strongest trade union in the United States” and documents the ways in which the AMA vigorously restricts competition.”
“If we had 130 law schools (instead of 200) and 200 medical schools in the U.S. (instead of 130), it would probably go a long way to solving our “health care crisis.” More MDs at much lower salaries along with fewer lawyers and lawsuits would be a good thing, wouldn’t it?”
http://wallstreetpit.com/5769-.....s-so-high/
@25. Yes, I get that. But what changed in the American culture that colleges decided that their priority should be on compensating management and not on educating students? Don’t we have the same trend in compensating upper management instead of workers at the same time? Why do YOU think that was?
I see two themes, fiscal conservatives gutted subsidies to higher ed and schools succumbed to the Greed is Good culture of the Reagan years and beyond.
“The GI Bill was an unexpected success, enrolling just under 8 million veterans — 10 times the number the authors of the bill had predicted. This sudden, enormous demand could have pushed college costs higher — but didn’t, because states embraced the idea. The booming postwar economy allowed them to spend unprecedented sums of money to expand higher education. While states were investing, the federal government was carving out a new role for itself: helping families pay for college.
But a turning point arrived around 1970. College tuition and fees climbed as much or more than the inflation rate. Private loans, heavily subsidized by the federal government, gradually replaced federal grants as the main source of money for both poor and middle-class college students.
“So it’s not that colleges are spending more money to educate students,” Baum says. “It’s that they have to get that money from someplace to replace their lost state funding — and that’s from tuition and fees from students and families.”
http://www.npr.org/2014/03/18/.....o-sky-high
Students now pay more of the cost of attending public universities than state governments, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report, and the federal agency says it’s making college unaffordable.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.....11998.html
@19 Still looking forward to your answer bickle.
There’s also been a massive hiring boom in central offices of public university systems and universities with more than one campus, according to the figures. The number of employees in central system offices has increased six-fold since 1987, and the number of administrators in them by a factor of more than 34.
One example, the central office of the California State University System, now has a budget bigger than those of three of the system’s 23 campuses.
“None of them have reduced campus administrative burdens at all,” said King, who said he is particularly frustrated by this trend. “They’ve added a layer of bureaucracy, and in 95 percent of the cases it’s an unnecessary bureaucracy and a counterproductive one.”
Centralization has been promoted as a way to reduce costs, but Vedder points out that it has not appeared to reduce the rate of hiring of administrators and professional staffs on campus—or of incessant spikes in tuition.
“It’s almost Orwellian,” said Vedder. “They’ll say, ‘We’ll save money if we centralize.’ Then they hire a provost or associate provost or an assistant business manager in charge of shared services, and then that person hires an assistant, and you end up with more people than you started with.”
In higher education, “Everyone now is a chief,” he said. “And there are a lot fewer Indians.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.....38584.html
Decreases in funding by the feds are only part of the problem. Bureaucratic bloat is a major contributor.
Notice how fast worser ran from these:
homophobic conserative[sic] man Josh Duggar is a homophobic conservative man? Got proof?
family members and politicians who covered it up Where has Puddy commented on this worser? What politician covered this up worser? Display the details! When you read this BULLSHITTIUM it’s the standard DUMMOCRETIN guilt by ASSociation! http://readersupportednews.org.....r-cover-up
Yet all those peeps who hugged Bill Clinton during his Arkansas years while Bill was abusing those seven women under Hillary’s nose and probable approval are also condoning rape worser? How about when the news was out during his presidential run. The Clinton War Room? Sidney Blumenthal (hero of the early onset senile schismatic IDIOT Wabbit) in action? How about Monica Lewinsky? Sidney Blumenthal (hero of the early onset senile schismatic IDIOT Wabbit) in action again! So Sidney Blumenthal (hero of the early onset senile schismatic IDIOT Wabbit) was condoning Bill’s rape peccadilloes! Hmmm…? Well…? That’s the standard DUMMOCRETIN attack. Feckless and insipid!
Go on grow some marbuls and ask the HA DUMMOCRETIN screen scraping creep, the crazed database deala and determine where Puddy commented on that worser! Go on!
but disclosure of the abuse and corruption should never have happened since it identified the underage victims. IT IS ILLEGAL worser! The court documents were sealed and that’s why the judge ordered the destruction of the material. Hence any web site continuing to display the material is breaking the law. Butt to a moronic twit like you, law breaking to further DUMMOCRETIN ends always is acceptable!
It seems worser condones exposing the names of minor children illegally. So if that was your child that’s A-OK worser? It seems laws to protect the identity of minors means nothing to worser. It seems only the ends justifies the means to worser!
Meanwhile worser… if you can’t answer those questions above talk to the hand. No moving the train to another set of tracks with post #16!
FACTS and laws suck eh worser? So you want an answer to #16, deal with the above first!!!!
@2,
instead of preoccupying yourself with how to exploit these victims in order to score political debate points, why not dig real deep and spend some time contemplating whether that kind of family structure is healthy for the children?
Seems like probably not so much.
But then again, I’ll never really know. Because this is about as close to this story as I care to get. I feel sorry for all of them. And I’d like to help them if I thought I could. But at this point they are surrounded by the crazy. And they are doomed.
@31,
Where did Puddy exploit these children to score political points? Do you read this blog regularly? Go back and review the last week. HA DUMMOCRETINS have been trying to score three-pointers, score football touchdowns, hit grand salamis, slap pucks into the net, ring horseshoes on the pole, etc. since this story was illegally leaked. In fact you should Google the basic story and watch the Google hits on the right hand side!
@30 Josh Duggar is a homophobic conservative man? Got proof?
Josh Duggar takes a job with anti-gay Family Research Council.
FRC has been classified as an anti-gay hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and has a long history of attacking the LGBT community and their friends, family and allies.
http://www.glaad.org/blog/josh.....ch-council
http://hollywoodlife.com/2015/.....-arkansas/
FRC has been classified as an anti-gay hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center
HAHAHAHAHAHA! Just like they attacked Ben Carson worser and then had to eat their words!
Pffffffffffffft! Try again! Puddy knew you’d try that SPLC attack! They are as feckless as most HA DUMMOCRETINS here!
@26 bravo. You notice the dick face couldn’t respond. Yet he wants Hillary to talk. Meet one republican, you meet them all, all hypocrites.
“In his classic book Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman describes the American Medical Association (AMA) as the “strongest trade union in the United States” and documents the ways in which the AMA vigorously restricts competition.”
Yeah the AMA a big Obummer and ObummerCare jockstrapper!
http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pu.....obama.page
Well well well… AMA and Obummer two peas in a pod! SooooooooPuddy bets the AMA will be jockstrapping Hillary too. So why should Travis respond to a group that leans DUMMOCRETIN?
teabaggin buttbusting BULLSHITTIUM buttbigot gorilla calling someone a dick face?
How hilarious from the one who bragged about being on knee pads.
Rick Santorum says the pope should leave science to the scietists. Perhaps he should do the same. Oh, that’s right, he’s a moral authority greater than the pope. Just leave religion to the politicians. Derp.
@34. You ask for proof and when provided, you deny the source is valid. A simple web search will show the FRC advocates for anti LGBT positions. You know that. You probably sent them money in the past for that very reason. I have better things to do with my time today than have a one sided conversation with a person who condones sexual abuse of siblings because it’s politically embarrassing to his pet ideology. Have fun squirting ink.
P.S. Southern Poverty Law Center took Ben Carson OFF their list AFTER he apologized for his bigoted hateful comments. They weren’t wrong, Carson reformed and they removed him.
A simple web search will show the FRC advocates for anti LGBT positions.
Because they are a Christian organization. That doesn’t make the FRC a homophobic organization because they disagree with you!
This is how progressive libtard left wrong FASCISTS act. Call them a name and then attack attack attack!
EPIC FAYLE worser!
Ben Carson apologized first? Not from their press release http://www.splcenter.org/sites.....eb2015.pdf
PROVE IT!
Remember that dude who went to the FRC offices and he later said he got the idea of shooting up FRC from the SPLC hate list? NO? 24 hour moronic moonbattic memory malady mastery!
This is fully condoned by leftists!
Meanwhile… https://www.yahoo.com/politics/hillary-clinton-more-americans-distrust-than-120530067591.html Oh now it’s not Fox News…!!!!!
Did the Ape say something?
@34,
Really? The other kid’s did it too?
For fuck’s sake, if you are going to flaunt your inhumanity, at least do it with some hint of intelligence. Projecting your faults on to others will never lead you any closer to addressing them. Face it. You are a pig. You chose to exploit the tragic predicament of child victims to lay blame on your enemies in the worst possible way. Whoever “leaked” the information did the world, and those poor victims a good deed. They need real help. The kind of help that isn’t generally available at the local chapter of the invisible sky buddy club. Perhaps now that the truth about this family is in the public sphere, they’ll have a shot at getting it.
But I doubt it.
Anyone seen my Bible?
Oh boy Obummer’s sadministration flying planes over many cities like Seattle. Maybe they were trying to look for HA DUMMOCRETINS? They wanted to visually document the most vile looonatic left wrong libtard peeps known to man!
Another name for Lib NotScientist @44.
Really? The other kid’s did it too?
Where did Puddy write that Lib NotScientist?
Whoever “leaked” the information did the world, and those poor victims a good deed. Yes, those girls now have to relive the incident again… This is the problem with freakazoids like you Lib NotScientist. The ends always justifies the means. Yes, you should face yourself in the mirro. You really are a pig. You don’t care about the victims only castigating conservatives. If these children were DUMMOCRETIN bred, you’d be up in arms. You see Lib NotScientist the morons at
We love our DUMMOCRETIN crooks
and
We ignore our DUMMOCRETIN liars
got it wrong. http://crooksandliars.com/2015.....-cop-fired… The people in the report were minors in the report. So they are now older. They were still minors.
Meanwhile in real news… https://officialwmas.wordpress.com/2015/06/02/alton-towers-update-3/
@17 Like all conservative deep thinkers, Bickle has concluded that the solution to every economic problem is lower wages for someone else.
@18 “Somehow I don’t think it’s because of all those greedy faculty members. It might have something to do with all of those administrators that didn’t use to exist.”
Actually, it has a lot more to do with Republican legislators slashing state support for public colleges. See, e.g.,
http://www.usnews.com/news/art.....ed-funding
Why anyone who hopes to send their children to college someday votes for these shits is a mystery. I chalk it up to the stupidity and ignorance of Republican voters.
@28 Don’t expect an answer that makes any sense. He’s just farting.
@36 I don’t doubt that your buddy and fellow traveler Bickle is one of those socialist doctors who voted for Obama. Too cheap to contribute to his campaign, though.
@26 Doctors like him are why nobody can afford health care in this country. We’ll have universal health care, and decent health care too, when 500k/yr. radiologists are replaced by $29.95 software programs.
@47,
if your invisible sky buddy were really as omnipotent and omniscient as you believe could defense mechanisms like denial, projection, and semantics help you escape his mighty judgment?
Good thing for your sake he doesn’t really exist. Deep down, I suspect that’s what you think too.
Dayam…you guys are kicking the shrieking harpie HR nightmare ‘can’t be fired unless he’s caught with a car trunk full of tied-up white kids, ultimate affirmative action baby’ warmongering prick and shameless uncle tom puddyfuckwad’s worse than usual tonight!!!
Funfunfun!!!!
@43 No. See #51.
@55 Don’t you think he deserves it?
Oldish news, but the MKUltra program is popping up again as a news item. It seems that he program was much more extensive and widespread than anyone previously believed. Using addicts and convicts as guinea pigs, and rewarding them with the narcotics they were addicted to, to maintain their compliance.
Most were young black men who were convicted in the war on drugs. Smoke a little weed, get 20 years in prison, and then get your mind twisted up by constant dosages of LSD and whatever else, then get released back into the streets after serving out the sentence.
There are some very interesting tidbit clues in this article, about North Korea, Alan Dulles etc.
Old Joe Mengele would be proud of this legacy.
Oops, here we go again, our state’s Republicans don’t want to pay taxes for prisons, so we don’t have room for all the people scooped up by their expensive war on drugs, so DOC is turning to a private, for-profit, prison contractor to handle the overflow. Here’s how privatizing our prisons works in practice:
1. The private contractor only takes model prisoners, so if you’re been behaving yourself in the lockup, your reward for good behavior will be getting shipping 2,000 miles away from your family, friends, and visitors.
2. DOC pays the contractor a flat rate of $60/day per prisoner, so to maximize profits, the contractor cuts corners by, for example, being stingy with medical care. Which means prisoners are dying of medical neglect in the contractor’s facilities.
3. Because they’re private, the only way to hold them accountable for how they spend taxpayers’ money and treat the state’s prisoners is by suing them. Which is what people do: “According to The Huffington Post, The Geo Group has been faced with hundreds of lawsuits … one former Geo Group employee claimed First Amendment violations to inmates, improper training for staff, and abuse to both inmates and employees.” Yeah, well, you know how it goes: In Privatization World the profit motive trumps everything else.
So why is Washington abusing its prisoners by handing them over to a private, for-profit, contractor with a sordid history of abusing and neglecting prisoners? Because, “For several years DOC has been pushing state lawmakers to allocate funds to build another prison,” and getting nowhere, because Republicans and their taxes fetish.
Hey, if you don’t want to pay taxes for prisons, why not just let them go? In the long run, it’ll be cheaper than paying the lawsuit judgments and other costs, direct and indirect, flowing from prisoner abuse.
At least DOC didn’t hire Joe Arpaio to warehouse our state prisoners.
http://www.seattletimes.com/se.....-facility/