Please join us Tuesday night for some 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. Look for us in the back room of the pub beginning about 8pm.
Can’t make it to Seattle? Check out one of the 268 chapters of Living Liberally, including 22 in Washington state, seven in Oregon and three in Idaho. Find a chapter near you. Or start a new chapter for your community!
At work this morning. One of The Hump supports began the morning by shooting the shit about how there is a big DACA decision today.
One of our coworker is an Italian Immigrant, who has been living in this Country for many years. He’s been working side by side with me for 3 years. He’s a young kid, probably in his mi 30’s and an estimator. He speaks fluent English with little to no accent, other than his Staten Island, NY accent. He’s been trying to become a Citizen, legally. I say legally because I haven’t really been following his trek to become one. Being in and out of the office, I haven’t been able to follow.
So anyways, The Hump supporter, is talking to one of the other estimators and looking over at the Italian kid, trying to get his attention and bring him into the conversation. But the kid is kind of has no interest in the conversation, he like to focus on his work….he’s working while the other two are carrying on a conversation for 1/2 hour when they should be working. It figures.
The other estimator (a non Hump supporter) brings up the Italian kid because he see that The Hump supporter is kind of making reference to the Italian kid. They get the Italian kid’s attention and ask him if he’s following what is going on, and the kid says, “I don’t care, I am getting married”. The Italian kid legitimately has been dating an American girl for a couple of years and they have been planning to marry for a while now.
The kicker here is I then l learn that The Hump supporter’s son is getting married to a Chinese girl and that he’s flying to China to “make things easier” (what ever that means). He implied that it would be easier for the Chinese girl to be an American citizen.
As I type here, the two idiots are still bullshitting about China. Meanwhile the Italian kid has been deep into his work for the last 15-20 minutes.
I really don’t get Hump Supporters. They don’t have any intention of ever contributing to society.
The Hump supporter just said that China is building Islands, many Islands, and sooner than later they’ll have Islands close to LA……watch out Seattle!
@ 1
You spent a half-hour of work time tattling on others to an audience who gives not one shit about your workplace.
Things that can’t go on forever, don’t.
Almost 80,000 retired public employees in California are drawing pensions in excess of $100,000 per year, according to an analysis of 2018 pension payout data by Transparent California. The $100,000 club members collected 20 percent of the $51.7 billion in total public pension payments made last year in California.
Both the number of six-figure pensions and the total payout were new record highs.
…
In fact, the pensions are sinking the state. California has hundreds of billions of dollars in unfunded pension debt — the difference between what current and retired public workers are promised and the assets available to fund those payouts.
This explains the sudden surge of tax increase proposals in so many cities.
https://www.ocregister.com/2019/11/08/californias-100k-club-grows-as-tax-hikes-mount/
@2 Yeah, he’s a rat. Everyone here is a rat. Except you, of course. We never cease ratting out your bankrupt ideology and your terminally hypocritical fellow travelers. We rat out your bullshit, too.
Where were you yesterday? Hiding from the righteous scorn of America’s real veterans?
@3 Any breakdown on how many of those six-figure-club pensioners are retired cops and firefighters?
Meanwhile, let’s use that as an excuse to go after the $20,000-a-year pensions of retired social workers. Well, let’s not. But I’ll bet your ilk will anyway.
The world has yet to invent a public salary, benefit, or pension that conservatives don’t resent or a CEO pay package they do resent.
The Supreme Court is letting Sandy Hook families sue Remington in state court. Remington complains this will blow holes in the statute protecting gunmakers from lawsuits.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/12/supreme-court-sandy-hook-remington-guns.html
Good.
“Some on the right are even concerned we are on the verge of a new Civil War.”
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2019/11/opinions/fractured-states-of-america/part-one-fredrick/
Roger Rabbit Commentary: They should know. They’re the ones issuing threats of political violence. And sometimes acting it out. You don’t see liberals doing that.
“Concerned” isn’t the right word here. It just doesn’t fit the context. I think the author meant to write, “threatening.” Because it’s conservatives who are arming to the teeth and raising the spectre of civil war (aka “cival war”) if they don’t get their way, to hell with the majority.
Look on the bright side: with Modern Monetary Theory, all the government has to do print money as it needs it. Short a trillion? Just call down to the local printers and have a batch printed up!
Also, Hillary isn’t president and never will be!
Moar cops don’t just endanger us all, they even threaten to bankrupt us!
@9 Last time I checked, MMT’s biggest fan base is on your side of the partisan fence, and deficits don’t matter to Republicans anymore. Also, you’re still a blathering idiot; that hasn’t changed either, and probably never will.
8,
“Some on the right are even concerned we are on the verge of a new Civil War.”
And yet, consistently for months now, the framing from corporate media, CNN in particular, is that there is “radicalism” and “extremism” on the left which, if allowed to go unchecked, threatens to fracture the Democratic Party and destroy our democracy.
While it grows increasingly common for mainstream Republicans including the senior-most elected officials to conjure violent uprisings and “sivul” war, while every single Republican elected member of Congress is actively invested in obstructing a lawful investigation of criminal wrongdoing by their president, while the most powerful offices of our government are being sold in exchange for personal private gain and those same Republicans argue that “this is normal and very cool”, the media backed by a billionaire plutocracy is busy calling for “moderation” from the left.
The gaslighting is monumental. And if people don’t wake up to it we will lose democracy.
@10 I’m okay with cops and firefighters — at least the true professionals who do the job right and protect the public instead of endangering it — getting comfortable retirements at the end of their service.
I’m not okay with ideologues like our doctor misusing those comfortable pensions as an excuse to attack the measly pensions of retired librarians, dog license issuers, etc., which they earned as part of their overall compensation.
A conservative is someone who resents anyone else having a liveable wage or pension. This is plainly visible in Doctor Dumbfuck’s mean-spirited attacks on the $15 wage, whether it’s required by law or not.
He wouldn’t dream of living on that income himself, but demands that others live on less. When you get down to the nubbins, 116 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, conservatives still resent having to pay for labor at all.
You eagerly voted in a Russian SlutPuppet who has not gone a single day in office without pleading for the Fed to pour more money into the economy, and whose only legislative accomplishment will be a corporate billionaire tax cut that adds $2.3 trillion to the debt during an economic expansion.
Look on the bright side…
…your angry white dude consensus of stupidity will never, ever win another election.
@14 “…your angry white dude consensus of stupidity will never, ever win another election.”
Unfortunately, it will. Educationally, America is going backwards. Thanks to the likes of Fox, Hannity, Pirro, Limbaugh, etc., the ignorance level in this country is higher than it’s been since the days of traveling tent revivals and medicine men. Conspiracy theories are enjoying boom years. The average teabagger will believe anything except the truth. Trump is living proof that gullibility is a major constituency now.
We now have a number for how many kids are being detained in cages by this immoral administration: 69,550.
To put this in perspective, that’s more than double the entire population of Wenatchee.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/u-s-has-held-record-69-550-migrant-children-government-n1080486
13,
More than 80 of the police officers currently in service in the state of California have serious criminal offenses on their records. More than 630 in the last decade. California cops are convicted of crimes at a rate of about one a week. That is the baseline normal. The Acting Chief of Riverside has a seven year old DUI conviction for crashing his city issue SUV with a BAC over twice the legal limit.
These are all misdemeanor convictions. In CA you can not hold an LE certificate with a felony. But many of these offenses are incredibly serious crimes based on the fact sets either proved or allocuted to. Serious off-duty assaults resulting in death. On duty recklessness and misbehavior under color of authority resulting in death or crippling injury. All negotiated down to simple misdemeanors.
You know how the system works. Everyone else ought to. The criminal justice system runs on guilty pleas. Only a tiny fraction of criminal charges are brought to trial. If every criminal charge were to be fully adjudicated the system would collapse. Prosecutor’s main tool in obtaining pleas is the charging sheet “loaded up” with as many serious, felony charges as possible. “Good” cops and investigators know all this as well. Prosecutors work closely with police and investigators to produce as many bogus charges as possible to assist with plea negotiations.
But in the case of a cop who gets white-gurl wasted and drives into a crowd of elite bicyclists killing a few in the process, BAC results are somehow never obtained. Or if they are they are mysteriously lost. Or in the rare instance that they have them the prosecutor inexplicably opens with minimal charges. Every cop in California knows this is how it works. They know that city and county prosecutors have their back. They know that they can get away with damn near anything and never face more than a misdemeanor.
There’s poor evidence that overcharging people and obtaining easy convictions does much of anything to improve public safety. But there is a metric shit ton of evidence that telling one entire class of very well armed citizens that they can basically do whatever the fuck they want and they’ll never face any serious legal consequences dramatically reduces public safety.
Would you let your daughter marry a cop? Think about it.
There’s Ukraine corruption, alright. Look no farther than Rick Perry to find it.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2019/11/11/after-boost-from-rick-perry-political-backers-got-huge-gas-deal-ukraine/LtyrvLiZAVEf9gMbQhh9aL/story.html
Roger Rabbit Commentary: Show me a Republican, and I’ll show you a corrupt lying hypocrite.
@ 18
There’s Ukraine corruption, alright. Look no farther than Rick Perry to find it.
In the last administration you found it looking no further than Joe Biden’s little boy.
The miserable failure in the white house has proved two things:
1. The evangelicals never were concerned with values or morality; and
2: the tea party was never really concerned with deficits or debt.
@ 20
2: the tea party was never really concerned with deficits or debt.
This is incorrect.
The Tea Party was eliminated by the rest of the GOP. It’s the rest of the GOP that is not concerned with deficits or debt.
19,
Where’s your grand jury?
Where’s your indictment?
Senate investigations?
Any investigations?
Special Counsel?
Bueller? Mueller? Anyone?
Please list now for all of us the names of all the Trump DOJ DEEEEEP STAAAATE “Never-Trumpers” who prevented these Very Serious Crimes® that you continue to allege from ever being investigated even once in the last thirty four months.
Not even one?
I mean, for Republicans to have allowed this to go uninvestigated until now, when the Very Serious Crimes® you claim to have taken place would have happened nearly four years ago, and in full public view, there must have been one helluva conspiracy to prevent the law from following its natural course. Honestly, even if the FBI, the DOJ, and the four different senior level Trump appointees acting in the capacity of Attorney General were as you claim, completely in-the-bag for Obama, it’s still seems super duper weird that not one single committee in either house of Congress ever, even once, held so much as a brief hearing. GOOD GAWD! Don’t tell us Devin Nunes is part of the conspiracy too? And Trey Gowdy? IT CAN”T BE!!!!!!
This is that moment Teh Dumbfuck. Draw an X through it on your NAMBLA wall calendar. This is that moment when you publicly shit your pants, dropped ’em in full view of everyone, reached down and scooped up a generous handful of Extra Chunky, and proceeded to smear it all over your face.
There are in fact some criminal defenses not worth making. Your elected members of Congress can perhaps be excused. They now live in a world where they are compelled to perform these kinds of deeply humiliating acts in order to keep their lucrative no-work jobs. Your only excuse is that after three years of Trump, you’ve acquired the habit.
@19 Really? Into debunked conspiracy theories now? Of course you are. Wilted straws are what bullshitters grasp at when they have nothing else.
Since when has it been a crime to serve on a corporate board of directors and get paid for it, doc? You’re going to need more than that to make your case.
@22 Well, he does have the still-tenative, still-pending, official Ukrainian quid-pro-quo investigation to fall back on, if it ever gets off a launching pad. And if it doesn’t, they’ll make shit up, which was the original purpose of this proposed investigation anyway.
24,
Let’s look at that.
A “criminal” investigation undertaken at the specific direction of the President and under the exclusive control of the “latest” Trump appointee acting in the capacity of Attorney General.
There is no precedent.
There is a reason why we still have a Special Counsel statute. And primarily it is because an investigation of this nature, undertaken in this way, and overseen by these people lacks any credibility. Where is Trump/Barr’s transparency? What has Barr been up to? Who has he been meeting with while flying around the globe? When will Barr convene his public hearings? And more than anything else, why on earth would they not have appointed an independent Special Prosecutor as the law requires?
But really, all of that begs the larger question: Why now and not four motherfucking years ago?
The Senate could have taken this up at any time. The Republican controlled House had three years and never made a sound. And where was the Trump DOJ starting in Jan of 2017?
This bullshit is so transparent and stupid I find myself feeling a little embarrassed refuting any of it. If these intellectually crippled Trumpublican dunces need to thumb-suck their way out of the dead end of corruption they’ve now stumbled into that’s their problem.
And before anyone in the media gives even a split second of attention to these absurd allegations they must first answer at least that one painfully fucking obvious question first.
Why now and not four years ago?
A “criminal” investigation undertaken for a corrupt purpose at the specific direction of the President and under the exclusive control of the “latest” Trump appointee acting in the capacity of Attorney General to foreclose any possibility of interference from an independent prosecutor free of political influences.
ftfy
@ 25
Why now and not four years ago?
Four years ago you would have been asking Obama’s DOJ to investigate the son of his Vice President.
Four years ago the GOP-led Senate and House would have investigated and made criminal referrals that the DOJ would not carry out.
@2 I am sure Steve very much appreciated it for no other than not having to have seen you open with a Pro Putin Hashtag.
Besides you took the time to read – you are a moron.
27,
Stop. This is getting gross. First you were smearing your shit all over your own face. And now you’re going to make us watch you eat it?
Four years ago you would have been asking Obama’s DOJ to investigate the son of his Vice President.
Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and no fewer than a dozen authorized committees empowered to hold hearings, swear witnesses, subpoena documents.
Four years ago the GOP-led Senate and House would have investigated and made criminal referrals that the DOJ would not carry out.
The Vice Presidency is an impeachable office you stupid, oily dunce.
But I notice you are now doubling down on the Trump Deep State Conspiracy.
So you are now insisting that Sessions, Rosenstein, Whittaker, Rosen, and Dana Boente are all in on your conspiracy. As well as Nunes, Gowdy, Ryan, McConnell, and Burr.
There’s a whole page in the DSM-5 covering paranoid delusions that “everybody else” is conspiring against you.
Now would be a very good time for you to stop.
BREAKING NEWS
This just in: Steaming, filthy, ignorant racist in the White House is a steaming, filthy, ignorant racist.
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2019/11/12/stephen-millers-affinity-white-nationalism-revealed-leaked-emails
Republicans are shocked! Shocked, to find that Nazism and racism are going on inside the White House!
@27 You’re imputing Republican behavior to Democrats. Now, I’ve said for years Democrats should behave more like Republicans, but I meant that in the sense of fighting fire with fire, not that copy the GOP’s penchant for corruption, criminality, coverups, etc. The fact is, Democrats aren’t Republicans, and extrapolating Trump’s and Barr’s behavior to Obama is more than a stretch, it’s complete and total bullshit. But that’s normal for you, isn’t it?
https://www.chron.com/news/us/article/Top-Democrat-assails-Trump-s-16B-trade-bailout-14828947.php
Right out of Putin’s Playbook.
Wha’t not to love about the fascist pussy grabbing Hump…ehhh Bob.
Sure. Lower everyone’s taxes….who gives a fuck about the grandchildren!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/11/12/trump-advisers-exploring-tax-proposal-that-would-lower-middle-class-rate-percent/
Winnnnnning!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-organization-ordered-to-pay-290000-after-losing-battle-against-scottish-wind-farm/2019/11/12/3657cdd4-0561-11ea-ac12-3325d49eacaa_story.html
After watching the video it all comes together – it explains why Bob is so hateful.
Bob stop masturbating the horse…..it doesn’t count.
Poppycock. You haven’t spoken much about the deficit yourself in the last 3 years….the GOP silence you, you coward?
And the rest of the GOP that is also not concerned about Fascism, just you Bob, right?
And since when do they stop when they know that it’s a feeble attempt.
Deficits? We,don’t need no stinkin’ deficits! We’ve got Modern Monetary Theory!
We just print it up as we need it.
37,
The United States House Select Committee on Events Surrounding the 2012 Terrorist Attack in Benghazi
Eleven hours of interrogation.
Two years.
800 pages.
$7 million.
According to Teh Dumbfuck a pointless waste of time and money.
“The Tea Party was eliminated by the rest of the GOP.”
Tea Party = New Coke.
Welcome to the 21st century in which aggrieved white privilege can be re-branded, re-packaged, and hyper-personalized into every gated country club enclave or stinking, fetid trailer park in Heartlandia©. (Brought to you by “Doctor” Seb Gorka’s Amazing Fish Oil Dick Pills)
@40.
Exactly. They’ve moved on, probably even only temporarily, from fiscal responsibility to get the Mexicans out of the Country. As you said led by the monster Gorka.