Please join us tonight for another evening of politics and conversation over a drink at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally.
We meet every Tuesday at the Roanoke Park Place Tavern, 2409 10th Ave E, Seattle. You’ll find us in the small room at the back of the tavern beginning about 8pm.
Can’t make it to Seattle? Check out one of the 242 chapters of Living Liberally, including 23 in Washington state, five in Oregon and three in Idaho. Find, or go out and start, a chapter near you.
Somebody is still betting on the “fast casual” non-full service segment of the restaurant industry.
Arby’s Aquires Buffalo Wild Wings for $2.4B
Full disclosure, I have been to a BWW to watch sports. It was truly awful. I’d give the wings from Domino’s a shot before I returned. But I have a weird like for Arby’s horsey sauce that I can’t really explain.
How the Seattle Times capsulates James O’Keefe’s crash-and-burn:
“‘We weren’t fooled’: The Washington Post caught on to a ruse by a woman claiming that Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama had impregnated her as a teen. Careful reporting revealed the claim was false; the woman apparently worked for a group that uses false cover stories and covert video to try to discredit media outlets. And there you have the difference between fake news and real journalism.”
Yep, that’s it in a nutshell. News reporting and rightwing bullshit are two different things. One is worth your time; the other is toilet paper.
@ 2
Media outlets do an excellent job of discrediting themselves, Roger Dumbfuck Rabbit.
I wonder how Mary Mapes is doing these days?
Cokie Roberts dumping on John Conyers in a panel discussion. All the women knew about him and none reported on him.
This is how we get people like James O’Keefe.
And Trump.
And, seemingly at this point, Roy Moore.
More on women in media who knew, who were in a position to stop it, and yet did nothing.
“I explained (to Vega) how he inappropriately spoke to me during those times,” Godfrey-Ryan told ThePost. “She would just shrug and just say, ‘That’s just Charlie being Charlie.’ ”
Vega, now 52, said in a statement that she regrets not doing more to protect young women working with Rose. “I should have stood up for them,” said Vega, who has worked with Rose since 1991. “I failed. It is crushing. I deeply regret not helping them.”
Yes, Charlie Rose got away with it for so long because you let it happen, lady.
And
Former New York Times editor Jill Abramson also wishes she had done more about Mike Oreskes. NPR recently forced out Oreskes, its senior vice president for news, after two women alleged unwanted sexual contact from Oreskes when he was Washington bureau chief for the Times. It later came out that Oreskes exhibited behavior with several female NPR employees that made them uncomfortable due to the power imbalance.
…
“If I had to do it again, I would have told him to knock it off,” Abramson, co-author of a book about the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill harassment case, told The Post. “Maybe confronting him would have somehow stopped him from doing it to another woman. … I don’t really feel it was in a gray area in retrospect. I should have stopped him.”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/11/28/charlie-rose-sexual-harassment-and-regrets-female-news-managers-alicia-shepard-column/895998001/
Author is a former NPR ombudsman.
Libyan state media is calling reports of open slave trading in their country into question by citing 45 tweets about CNN international.
Well done
It’s becoming clear McConnell doesn’t have the votes to pass the tax bill in its current form. “But the opposition is soft, and GOP leaders have shown a willingness to make whatever change is necessary to get the bill out of their chamber.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/senate-republicans-tax-reform_us_5a1cb40be4b0e2ddcbb22c61?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009
Roger Rabbit Commentary: They’re screwed no matter what they do. To pamper their rich donors, they have to screw the middle class. If they pacify the middle class, they’ll lose their donors. And no matter what they do, they can’t get 50 votes without adorning the bill with Christmas ornaments that will provoke blowback at the polls next fall. With polls showing two-thirds of the public already opposes this monstrosity, they’re between a rock and a hard place.
@3 Reputable media are doing fine, thank you very much. O’Keefe, Fuckabee and Conjob, Trumptweets, Faux Noise, alt-news, and the GOP in general, not so much.
Derp. Mmmkay! Voting for them over and over and over and over and over again has almost nothing to do with it! /s
Trump’s chief of vote suppression, Kris Kobach, claimed voting by non-citizens was “pervasive,” so in 2015 the Kansas legislature gave him power to prosecute illegal voting. Since then, he’s convicted exactly one non-citizen of illegal voting.
http://www.motherjones.com/pol.....n-kansas/#
Roger Rabbit Commentary: Now, Kobach wants to take his crusade national by requiring every voter to prove their citizenship in every election. Furthermore, his system for catching people who voter in more than one state has a 99% false-positive rate and is likely to result in prosecutions of innocent legitimate voters. Republicans care about none of that. They’re willing to throw innocent people in jail and put taxpayers on the hook for millions of dollars of false prosecution settlements to keep Democrats from voting, because they know they’ll never be supported by a majority of the population and can’t win in a fair election.
5,
Kid stuff! Low energy, low power! Not like me. Talk is cheap. I swallow TicTacs and start grabbing pussy! When you’re a star they let you. If I want that pussy I grab it!
@4 Wherein Doctor Dumbfuck gloats over his party being hijacked by the likes of O’Keefe, Trump, and Moore. It’s why we call him a dumbfuck.
@5 Let’s get all the sexual harassers out of positions of power and influence so they can’t exploit women anymore, starting with the White House and working down from there — through Congress, corporate boardrooms, Hollywood, the media, state and local agencies, small businesses, etc.
11,
I trap young adolescent pussy in my car out back by the dumpsters in the dark. Sometimes I have to slap ’em around a little before they calm down and let me do my thing. I get away with it because Republicans care more about votes than about protecting children from rapists.
12,
The piquant irony lies in Dumbfuck and his ilk implicitly disapproving of these people and their antics while simultaneously doing everything conceivable to promote and support them. Only ten months into Russia’s assault on elected public service and already the ignorant, racist, hillbilly base is acknowledging the damage they have done. But they aren’t about to stop doing it.
Oh, and the Dow’s up 200 today.
Senate Budget Committee advances Republican tax bill on party lines
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/senate-budget-committee-advances-republican-tax-bill-on-party-lines-2017-11-28
Rand Paul came out in support on Monday. Today, Corker and Johnson voted to move it forward.
Last week Murkowski stated that inclusion of ACA mandate repeal wasn’t necessarily a deal-breaker for her.
14,
I trap bitches on boats filled with dildos, condoms, and anal lube! I get away with it because the Mercer family keeps right on giving me money and because Republicans approve of sexual assault.
So, Conyers’ first accuser is now represented by Lisa Bloom. And they’re begging for a subpoena from Congress, which would permit the accuser to testify despite the existince of a confidentiality agreement in her settlement with the repeatedly sexually-harassing Democrat.
DJIA up 265 now. On the day in which a North Korean missle test launch occurred.
Contrary to the bloviations @ 7 of always-wrong Roger Dumbfuck Rabbit, the market seems to think that McConnell’s got the votes.
I’d never heard of the Sackler family until today. According to Fortune, they’re worth about $14 billion. The patriarch built the foundation of that fortune by creating the now ubiquitous marketing tactics of the pharmaceutical industry consisting of selling drugs by lavishing expensive meals, vacations, and speaking fees on doctors. The Sacklers have profiteered from America’s opioid addiction crisis on a massive scale, which is how the Sackler millions turned into billions. They are the principal promoters and sellers of Oxycontin. The Sacklers also are major donors to seedy rightwing causes, including anti-Muslim hate groups and GOP vote suppression efforts. They are bad people. They are the mold that forms on stale bread and rotten meat. They will benefit hugely from the GOP tax-the-middle-class bill. Now I know who, and what, they are. Now you know, too.
@19 Yeah, the pros at Oppenheimer know much less about the tax bill’s chances than you do.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/28/dont-count-on-tax-reform-to-give-the-market-rally-a-kick-oppenheimer.html
As for today’s approx. 1% gain in DJIA andS&P (half that in Nasdaq), that’s well within the range of the stock market’s normal daily fluctuations, in anything resembling a normal market.
Btw, if you haven’t shorted GE yet, it’s probably too late now.
@16 Like you, rightwing mouth foamer Jake Novak thinks this highly unpopular POS will pass, after some revisions that will make it even more unpopular, but he isn’t quite as ebullient as you about where things will go from there.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/28/on-tax-reform-democrats-have-already-won-the-battle-commentary.html
It’s why even Republican apologists like Novak would rate you as a dumbfuck. Oh, and btw, I’ll gladly take the thousands of dollars I’m reaping today from the market’s “tax cut bounce.” I’m going to profit from the GOP’s tax cut for millionaires, too, if it passes. Sucking on capitalism’s tits sure beats working for the wages Republicans want to pay for anything resembling honest work.
Don’t look now, but Trump, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are publicly spanking Chuck Schuber and Nancy Pelosi in absentia on TV.
@23 In other words, they aren’t deviating from their daily routine.
P.S., if the government shuts down on Dec. 8, wanna guess who’s gonna get the blame?
23,
Not very EEEEN-DEEEE-PEN-DUNCE at all.
Just another treasonous hillbilly working for a shirtless communist dictator.
Look at the bright side. At least the Democrats continued their string of looking irrational and desperate. Without the pink pussy hats, even.
Court decision leaves White House’s Mulvaney in place as acting head of CFPB
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/28/court-decision-leaves-white-houses-mulvaney-in-place-as-acting-head-of-cfpb.html
To Roger Dumbfuck Rabbit, if it’s irrational and desperate, it must be Tuesday.
25 – You’re the treasonous hillbilly, dude.
More evidence that the GOP tax bill is a disguised tax increase on the middle class to pay for tax cuts for the very rich:
“‘We are raising individual taxes in order to pay for a corporate tax rate. So at the end of the day, this is more of a tax rearrangement than a tax cut outright,’ Bianco said Tuesday on CNBC’s ‘Fast Money.'”
The rearrangement, of course, is that the benefit of corporate tax cuts goes mostly to the rich, because they own most of the stock.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/28/gop-tax-plan-is-more-of-a-tax-rearrangement-than-a-tax-cut-says-jim-bianco.html
Roger Rabbit Commentary: McConnell may indeed cobble together 50 votes for this scheme. But the GOP will pay for it at the ballot box next November. I’m sure they must know that. And, of course, if Democrats win control of the government in 2020, they will not allow the middle class tax increases — most of which are postponed for several years — to take effect. This will add massively to the debt. And that increased debt will be the Republicans’ fault.
Fuck reality.
First Trump took back his admission that it was him on the Access Hollywood tape talking pussy-grabbing. Now it’s Roy Moore saying he never knew the molestation victims he already admitted knowing.
“Roy Moore alters story about accusers”
https://www.rawstory.com/2017/11/roy-moore-alters-story-about-accusers/
Truth. Republicans can’t handle the truth! If they could, they’d come out and admit that they are nothing but a bunch of child-molesting fascist traitors eager to push granny and everybody else who isn’t them over a cliff.
26,
It may be noteworthy that the judge ruled that VRA was more specific to this case than Dodd Frank. An argument that the defendant never made in any form. That may spotlight one plaintiff strategy going forward. Setting aside the merit of that ruling, it is outside the purview of this court, ruling on an emergency motion, to consider the legislative history of the two statutes. Suggesting that finding would be a ripe one for reversal.
Speaking of truth…
“Christian apologist who stresses the importance of truth caught lying about himself for years”
“the doctor with no doctorates and the scholar with no scholarly work”
https://www.rawstory.com/2017/11/christian-apologist-who-stresses-the-importance-of-truth-caught-lying-about-himself-for-years/
Huh! Leaves me wondering about Doctor Dumbfuck. Could explain a lot.
Filling The Swamp Dep’t
Another corrupt politician is leveraging his public positions to line his private pockets. Needless to say, he has an “R” after his name.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/kris-kobach-breitbart-columnist_us_5a1daeb9e4b079c1128a4e1f?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009
Roger Rabbit Commentary: To Republicans, public service is just another profit center.
27,
Don’t take it personally. It’s just a statement of manifest fact. Team Fuckface is completely compromised by all the conspiring with Russian FSB/Putin/Russian nationalists. Their administration cannot credibly be said to vigorously and exclusively promote U.S. interests. The conflicts are too extensive, too sweeping, and too carefully concealed and denied to be overlooked. None of you are unwitting in this. Yet you persist in enthusiastically supporting it.
You pimp for a shirtless communist dictator bent on weakening the U.S.
That is treason.
28,
Republicans are responsible for most of our current debt. They only troll debt concern. The ass clown trolls on these comments are in the thick of it. Constantly weeping about too much borrowing while simultaneously, constantly voting exclusively for the lawmakers doing most of the borrowing. People this stupid can’t be reached with reason. They can only be obliterated.
Another good day in the market. Capitalism is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but it may be time to take a little profits here. It’s getting kind of expensive.
There will be another Black Swan event, but nobody knows with any certainty when it will occur. I’m taking some profits now, and I advise others to consider doing the same.
33 – Like you, I did NOT vote for Donald Trump. I also did not vote for Hillary Clinton.
How bad must a guy be for the rest of the Congressional Black Caucus to want to expel him? They circled the wagons around the likes of Dollar Bill Jefferson, after all.
But will Conyers take their hint? ’cause Rangel didn’t take Obama’s hint.
@30 It does look a little bit like a brand new judge, appointed by Trump, and perhaps not quite feeling secure in his position yet, upon finding himself getting a high-profile and highly politicized case dumped into his lap may simply be playing it safe by siding with the administration and letting an appellate court sort it out. Or maybe he’s just a lousy lawyer. Or maybe he’s right. Who knows? I’m sure Doctor Dumbfuck thinks he knows, and feels sure of what he thinks he knows about legal issues in the same way an amateur looks at an x-ray and feels confident of being right about what he thinks he sees on the film.
@31 You’re suggesting he got his MD from a fake diploma mill? I was thinking more of a Caribbean medical school. Such as maybe he even was one of those medical students who kissed the tarmac in Florida after being fished out of Grenada by the Marines. The timeframe of that event seems about right for this hypothesis.
@27 Most countries shoot traitors. Russia does. As @33 says, it isn’t personal. Just sayin’.
@35 You don’t need to look hard to find Black Swan events. They’re all over the place. Rarely has our country been so egregiously mismanaged as it is right now.
To expand upon @41, although several GOP senate votes are still in play, most of those senators want to make the tax bill even worse than it already is, so this may not be too steep a hill for McConnell to climb. Plus, they’re desperate to pass something, anything, to make it look to the folks back home like they’re doing something for their salaries. So it’s possible this tax bill will go through.
If it does, here’s what they’ll be bestowing on the citizenry: Most of the tax cut benefits will inure to the rich. It will be paid for by a combination of (1) adding to the debt, (2) taking health care away from 13 million mostly poor Americans, and (3) raising taxes on the middle class.
Now, getting back to @35, there’s absolutely no rational reason to take profits by reason of final consummation of this legislation, because we capitalists are going to make out like bandits for years to come. This is definitely a long-term hold situation.
Unless, of course, you think the Republicans will get their asses kicked in the 2018 and 2020 elections, and the Democrats will then reverse everything they did and slap new taxes on capitalists to pay for the damage.
In which case, you might want to be unloading your portfolio before the market reacts to that possibility. In fact, I see your point. If this thing passes in the next couple weeks, the big institutional investors might not wait around to collect their dividend increases, and the reaction might set in almost immediately.
Listen to this short audio, and get a belly laugh. (You may need to click on the speaker icon to turn on the sound.)
http://handbill.us/2017/11/28/protecting-the-deer/
A few years ago, you would’ve concluded this is a put-on. But now, it comes across as all too real. Yes, some of our fellow Americans really are this stupid. So it’s plausible this woman is serious. Sad.
There’s more! This You Tube audio has gotten over 35 million clicks, and “Donna the Deer Lady” (who works as a receptionist at a health clinic in Fargo ND) is now a world famous celebrity! She eventually realized her phone call to the radio station, in her own words, was “stupid” and she admits “I should just stand up and own this.” Here’s her mea culpa:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JB1yEcdomt0
It’s funny, I guess, because the now-famous deer crossing dialogue is emblematic of what’s wrong with America. Our biggest problem is not Donald Trump. It’s this: People don’t think anymore. If they did, Donald Trump wouldn’t happen, and a lot of the other bad things happening right now would be taken care of.
The greatest threat to America’s survival in the twenty-first century is not North Korea. Or Putin. Or repeal of Dodd-Frank followed by another banking crisis and stock market crash. It’s the dumbing down of America. It’s people who believe in all seriousness that climate change is a hoax, dinosaurs roamed the earth with Adam and Eve, black people were better off under slavery, and opioids will make you feel better in an age when everything feels bad. Above all, it’s the collapse of the Republican Party into a cabal of gropers and child molesters who think authoritarian government and mass murder of liberals is what our future should look like. We will not be destroyed by external enemies. We’re doing it to ourselves.
@ RR @ 45:
Why are some liberals so condescending toward Trump supporters? Do they really feel they are superior?
It isn’t difficult to answer. The GOP is the party that openly equates honest wages with communism. It is the party that openly expresses its hostility toward citizens of non-European ancestry. It is the party that promotes foreign propaganda while simultaneously denouncing our own intelligence services. It is the party that promotes unfettered ownership of battlefield weapons amongst the population while demanding that the press be controlled by the Federal Government and specific religion be a qualification for office.
This is not a difficult question.
Republicans are pure evil.
The end is near. Grab your ankles and kiss your asses goodbye!
@45 I’m been saying that. The problem are the people. But Drumpf is the perfect leader to lead all out chaos. It’s just getting started.
People wake up. The next 8 years and more will be the most transformative. The pendulum may swing back but it is swinging with crazies at the moment.
The collapse of the Repuke Party is just the start and exactly what the crazies need to create chaos. It’s only Luke warm right now. When you have a bunch of politicians that don’t speak out about the crazies then what can you expect of the dumb fuck people.
Grab your ankles. Never mind live on your knees.
I’m sure the pukes will politicize Matt Lauer.
Men are pigs. Face it. The same men that run police departments, fire department and every business imaginable.
This doesn’t end well. Because of people. The piggish men. Sexual assault isn’t the only injustice going on here. It’s piggish failure.
Kaboom.
@24 Chuck and Nancy. Yes the empty chair thing looks childish, but it’s about framing. My Don is learning.
@30 No that is a question of law. The judge in the case decided one statute trumps another. Nothing to do with the defense having to defend or argue as it’s a question of law, Of course the decision can be appealed, but the appeals court may not be persuaded the judge made the wrong call. There is that thing called the CONSTITUTION, and ultimately it’s logical that the President can choose the temporary head of an agency, and then appoint a head. Which is the normal way the Executive branch works.
@36 Of course you did not vote. You are a dead President. You are om the nickel, and the two dollar bill.
@40 Only Russia has not executed anyone since August 1996. There is a moratorium. And being a traitor is not one of the 5 crimes that in theory one can be executed for in Russia. That is why there is a gulag.
See the following from WikiLeaks.
The current Penal Code[11] permits death penalty for five crimes:
murder, with certain aggravating circumstances (article 105.2)
encroachment on the Life of a Person Administering Justice or Engaged in a Preliminary Investigation (article 295)
encroachment on the Life of an Officer of a Law-enforcement Agency (article 317)
encroachment on the Life of a Statesman or a Public Figure (article 277)
genocide (section 357).
No crime has a mandatory death sentence; each of the five sections mentioned above also permit a sentence of life imprisonment as well as a prison term of not less than eight or 12 (depending on crime) nor more than twenty, years. Moreover, men under the age of 18 or above the age of 65 as of the time the crime was committed, and all women, are not eligible for a death sentence.[2]
The Penal Execution Code specifies that the execution is to be carried out “non-publicly by means of shooting”[12]
Now you might have an accident in prison or oops just disappear, but Russia does not shoot traitors.
@49 The Republicans speak out abut crazy people all the time. They just seem to be fascinated by the crazy Democrats and liberals in the Democratic party.
36,
in light of your ongoing habit of coming to these comments and pimping for the Russian Puppet, I’m going to refuse to believe you. As would any other rational being. Aside from that, regardless of your voting, it’s your ongoing support for Fuckface Von Russian Puppet that seals the deal.
He’s in bed with a communist dictator. And you pimp for him.
Makes you a fucking traitor. That’s just the way it is until you clean up your act and atone.
45,
These are people with absolutely no faculty for critical analysis. None at all. They shop around for a position or “ideology” based largely on affiliation. They look for other people “like them” and pay attention to whatever “those” people believe. The read some sources in order to “recruit” rational reasons to agree with those people. And then they go along. At other times they identify people that are different from them. They study what these “others” believe and then try to choose the opposite position. This is why social media networks, like Facebook, are so powerful at duping these morons. The power lies in how these networks are self-creating through a process of self-affiliation. There’s almost no chance of being exposed to competing ideas or ideologies.
As cities, urban areas, and coastal states have become the engines of entrepreneurship, innovation, education, and economic growth many declining rural and once industrial “heartland” areas have seen a significant out-migration of education, talent, and intelligence. This leaves behind zip codes, counties, and Congressional districts increasingly made up of concentrations of very white, very old, very stupid people. The communities in which these dumb-asses live are becoming less diverse, more insular, less intellectually engaged, and more reflective of themselves. The only people they are routinely exposed to that they can identify as being “like them” are relatively low income, low education, low intellect, fearful, superstitious dumb-asses. They adopt similar views and then go to Facebook and radical right media to recruit “reasons” in support of those views.