– Oh, that Glenn Greenwald guy thinks governments can abuse their authority. Hey, we’ll show him by detaining his partner for 9 hours.
– In case you want to know what the SPD Doritos at Hempfest look like, Mike O’Brien has a picture.
– The fraudulent signature gatherer has been charged.
– I’m not quite sure how I feel about Kitzhaber’s veto of a loophole to Oregon’s law opposing Native American school mascots. Basically, the school could ask a tribe for permission. On the one hand, I suppose with having to do that, they could figure out how to be sensitive. On the other, it seems like just asking one tribe if a thing is offensive is maybe not a substitute for actually being sensitive.
– Oh, look what’s coming to Cinerama.
You know, I love these times of quiet – those blessed months when cheapshotBob disappears, after he’s been schooled – HARD – by Darryl.
Food for thought.
For me, it keeps coming back to paying the workers a living wage. It can be done, they just choose not to.
The Ed Show is moving back to Monday thru Friday, taking over one of Chis Mathews’s Hours, The 5Pm Eastern/3PM Pacific hour.
@3 Good. I will tape it.
Heh….For what it’s worth, I seem to recall that Clark Kimmerer (who goes to our church) is a long-time Pink Floyd fan.
Officials in Snohomish County and Everett have been working together for several months to make Everett the next production site of the 777X. Currently Boeing has a boat warehouse in Arlington where it is testing new production methods on the 777X (presumably including more auotomated fastner assembly). The governor is working on the project as well, and all have agreed to fast-track any permitting process for building new facilities.
Of course, it’s not a guarantee. The Chicago mob currently running Boeing seems pretty determed to be anti-union, which puts N. Charleston, S. Carolina in play. And Boeing has already agreed to expand it’s facilities there, paid for largely by S. Carlina money.
Amtrak ridership is up on the Hiawatha Corridor despite Governor Walker’s best efforts. An extra frequency or two, an express run, and a second Empire Builder between Chicago and MSP are in the works. I would prefer running Second 8(2nd Frequency of the Empire Builder) as far west as the North Dakota/Montana border, to take advantage of the extra ridership thanks to the oil boom.
http://www.todaystmj4.com/news.....71081.html
The expansion is in it’s early planning stages, so it’s not going to happen overnight, and if it is less than 750 miles the states have to pick up the tab. Of course one idea for the Empire Builder, rerouting it via Madison, is out of the question. The current westbound departure for Amtrak 7 leaves in the late afternoon(8 leaves King Street Station@4:45PM) from Union Station. I was thinking, the new second run to the Twin Cities, would be a day trip. There are two trains that would be perfect for that, sitting in a warehouse in Milwaukee.
http://www.jsonline.com/news/w.....33441.html
“schooled – HARD – by Darryl”
Yeah, so I noticed. That was one hell of a comment by Darryl, literally the “last word”. I’m glad I caught that but, damn it, I should have saved what Darryl wrote for future reference. Do you recall which thread that was?
If you didn’t see it already, the Hempfrst Doritos were fetching $35 on eBay. Probably not the first time someone has traded chips for weed or money to buy weed.
Goopers are playing defense..
In TexASS????
http://trailblazersblog.dallas.....kers.html/
Please let it be so! Yeeeeeee haaaaaaa!
Pat Caddell, the kind of Dem that Faux News loves to use as a total tool, once said in a lucid moment that there’s nothing dumber than a California Republican (are you lurking ChristmasGhost?)..
So after the Dems took supermajority status in the State Legislature they’re inviting Scary Rick Perry to speak at their convention..
The same asshole who tried to steal jobs from California.
Of course that failed.. Jerry Brown, in his ripe old age, doesn’t bother to pull punches..
His comment on the Scary Rick Perry job-stealing tour?
Barely a fart…
I noticed that Dr. Dimbulb (Bob) was lurking earlier..
Got good news for him..
Australia is a sponge…
Sometimes certain weather systems above the Indian Ocean bring torrential rains to Australia and Australia’s topography keeps all the water inland.. So much so that the oceans recede MEASURABLY..
https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=128842&org=NSF&from=news
I’m way ahead of the right wingers on this one..
Australia is a sponge.. No need to do anything about climate change.. Burn every last molecule of fossil fuel! Let the ice caps melt. Feed the ice melt to Australia.. Australia will drink everything!
You can be happy now Bob. Go celebrate at “Watts up with that??”..
12 – Before the trolls attack, that second paragraph was a bit rushed..
It’s the dumber than rocks California Republicans who’s inviting the job stealing Perry to their convention..
@12 This all would be assuming Rick doesn’t get lost and wind up speaking to a Shriners’ convention in Cleveland instead.
The Conservative Social Safety Net
“Conservatives worry that government programs aimed at addressing public problems tend to acerbate those problems. Take Social Security. We’ve long known that providing a public pension system through government tends to make people more dependent on government pensions and less likely to have children, which undermines the viability of the pension system. A conservative approach would replace this system with one that depended less on government payments and more on intergenerational family income.”
http://www.cnbc.com/id/100972180
Roger Rabbit Commentary: The author of this screed, which I plucked from CNBC this morning, is unbelievably tone-deaf. Basically he’s saying you should depend on an inheritance to keep you out of poverty in your old age. That works for, who, maybe 5% of the population? And screw the rest. This illustrates why conservatives will never have a voting majority in this country and have to resort to voter suppression to win elections.
@16. I read that so differently. I read that as the old fashioned method where you have to have several kids who will take care of you in your old age. They want you to rely on your kids for direct aid. They will pay for you or you travel from child to child every month or so to spread out the burden of your care. God help you if you don’t have any kids, or they are broke also, or in jail, or they are republicans and dump you in a the pauper’s hall with a fake name pinned on you, so the state can’t track them down and bill them. It seems a variation on “Die Quickly”
Even the conservatives are laughing at the National Republican Party’s declaration that NBC and CNBC cannot cover their party’s primary debates.
From an editor of the Chattanoogan, which is about as conservative a paper as it comes:
Roy Exum: You Can’t Whip CNN And NBC
One of the things which is hillarious about this is the GOP insistence that ABC, CBS, NBC, and even MSNBC must for some reason remain “neutral” in it’s reporting – even though it’s own party was the one which set aside the “fairness doctrine” and even set up it’s own cable TV network (Fox News) which is clearly not neutral.
So now they want to cut out all reporting of their primary debates (and possibly their conventions, later) unless the networks and CNBC are sufficiently chastened and intimidated to give a “slant” toward the GOP in it’s own coverage.
But as the author of the editorial pointed out, you shouldn’t start an argument against anyone who buys their ink by the barrel (or by extension, owns the mikes and camerages sufficient to cover news events).
@16
Interesting corollary to that is this piece on the push for reverse mortgages.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/.....ass-wealth
The very serious people like Fred Thompson suggest you leave nothing behind. My father, self employed, built a business and did well for us. But the bulk of his estate is the house he bought in 1968 in a soon to be wealthy enclave of California for $97k. After one addition in the 80s the current market value according to zillow is $1.05m. Of course it is still possible that a long stint of 24hour care before the end of their lives will suck that well dry but they’re the poster children of leaving something for their children through strictly middle class income.
In a reverse mortgage, should either of them outlive the payment window the bank offers, I have no claim on the house. Under most Reverse mortgages, I would be able to repay, with interest, any amount paid to them and retain the property. So in other words, the Republicans are suggesting that you stay afloat through inheritance while suggesting you require your heirs to have a large sun of cash to retain a significant assert to inherit all the while claiming taxing inheritance is evil. People who aren’t financial processionals or with no access to estate planning take the advice of Fred Thompson because they don’t recognize predatory capitalism when its sold by a smiling TV D.A.
See if you sign away your estate to Bank of America while you’re still alive, your heirs won’t have to pay that ‘death tax.’ Never mind that there won’t be an estate for then at all.
(side note, I’m doing O.K., have good credit and a decent net worth for my age group. I doubt I could come up with cash to save the estate from going over to the second mortgage but I could probably get it financed. But Fred Thompson would have me indebted to a bank for the privilege of splitting an inheritance with my siblings.
# 12: I doubt Perry will provide much of an opportunity to submit to questions from reporters. So he will rely upon a basic stump speach, where he will preach to Californians that things are better in Texas and they should follow his example and steal jobs from other states (Washington, Oregon, etc.).
# 20: Unfortunately, my wife’s father fell for this as a way to pay for his supplemental medical insurance. He used to own his own landscaping business but had a hard time getting by on just Social Security or Medicare – his savings gave out when he was in his mid-70’s and his wife was in the hospital.
The cash from the reverse mortgage didn’t last long, especially now that he’s suffering from a bit of demintia( sp?). Now he has no cash, no equity in his house, and increasing medical bills and expenses – he’s in his mid-80’s.
That’s certainly a novel notion that Social Security causes people to have fewer kids. I could have sworn it had more to do with social responsibility (remember when we were kinda concerned about overpopulation?) but more than anything that the cost of living is now so much higher than the average working schlub’s income that hardly anyone can afford to birth, diaper, feed, raise and educate as many of ’em as they could a half century ago.
@20 Reverse mortgages are one of the last remaining frontiers for turning people into “debtcroppers”. Now you get to watch your 401(k) or even what’s in your checking account “invested” in dicey bets against whether or not your Mom and Dad are going to croak before they’re broke. If they do, the bank wins. If they don’t, you lose.
@19 What if all the major networks walk away from the Republican National Convention and there’s a coverage blackout by everyone except Fox?
@20 Don’t sign a reverse mortgage. Don’t vote for conservatives. Problem solved.
Of course, a reverse mortgage may be a great idea if you’re serious about screwing your heirs out of receiving anything and you don’t mind paying monster loan origination fees and usurious interest rates.
26)About the only good thing about the conventions, in my opinion, is the Call of the Roll of the States, and maybe the acceptance speech. I liked the Roll Call, because the states and territories are basically doing a sales pitch for their states, in addition to casting their votes.
The Real History Of Fracking
“Credit for working out the final engineering solution usually goes to George P. Mitchell of Mitchell Energy Co., who invested about a decade and $6 million of his own money to create the first complete replicable technical protocol for successful shale exploitation. …
“Mitchell richly deserves his honors for making shale exploitation a practical business, but the conventional account usually leaves out the role played by the federal government in the development of the essential technologies.
“In the midst of the oil price crisis of the 1970s, President Gerald Ford launched the Eastern Gas Shales Project to develop shale gas extraction technologies through demonstration contracts. In parallel, the agency that is now the Department of Energy joined the industry in funding research and demonstrations by the industry-sponsored Gas Research Institute.
“The government’s Morgantown Energy Research Center (now the National Energy Technology Laboratory) was already involved in a substantial coalbed methane program, which contributed to the same technologies that enabled shale exploitation.
“The essential three-dimensional seismic imaging technology … was developed at the Sandia National Laboratory, originally for use in coal mines, while researchers at Morgantown made important contributions to drill bit construction and directional drilling technology.
“Mitchell himself was a leader in pressing the case for government support, and his successful 1991 well was partially funded with federal research and development money.”
Charles R. Morris, “Comeback,” Public Affairs (New York: 2013),
pp. 21-22.
Roger Rabbit Commentary: Well waddya now, the hugely successful fracking industry got its start as a socialistic enterprise.
Another thing I learned from that book is that one of the reasons fracking fluid is so toxic is because shale contains a lot of radioactive uranium, fracking releases it, and the used fracking fluid that comes up from the well is radioactive.
Ignorant conservatives who are clueless about how the world really works love to bash the Obama administration for the Solyndra debacle. They’re overlooking the fact that many of the key industries comprising America’s contemporary economy originated from government-funded R&D.
Government funding comes into play when a project is too big or risky for private enterprise to handle. It’s precisely because government takes on big risks that government-funded R&D produces big payoffs like the semiconductor and fracking industries. Of course, any entity taking big risks is bound to have some big failures. Any capitalist understands that. With risk goes occasional failure. That’s okay if you succeed more than you fail.
But conservatives don’t understand this. Under their risk-taking model, which tolerates no failures, we’d still be chipping away at pieces of flint to make mastadon spears, because with a proven fail-proof technology like that you don’t need new technologies.
Of course I don’t vote for conservatives. I’m only a rabbit, but even a rabbit understands that you don’t put idiots in charge of something as important as the economy. (Look what happened when other voters — not me — did.)
@23 My parents raised six kids on one income, and they were better off than Mrs. Rabbit and me with both of us working and only one bunny. Kinda looks to me like the average American’s standard of living is going down not up.
Looks like Cumulus worked out a deal with Premier. They are keeping Limbaugh and dumping Hannity from Cumulus stations.
http://www.politicususa.com/20.....-show.html
Second Amendment Reports
Report #1: “An Australian baseball player out for a jog in an Oklahoma neighborhood was shot and killed by three ‘bored’ teenagers who decided to kill someone for fun, police said.”
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_new.....s-say?lite
Report #2: “A man is fighting for his life after he was shot several times outside of Temple University Hospital. Police say the 28-year-old man was on the sidewalk in front of the hospital … when an unknown gunman opened fire. The victim was shot seven times by the large caliber gun, according to investigators. He is currently in critical condition.”
http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com.....92061.html
Roger Rabbit Commentary: Still wanna argue that having a gun should be an unqualified right instead of a regulated privilege?
These are the Ron Paul republicans.
The mainstream republicans were glad to see them go.
In researching the maine storye, I found this nugget of comment fascinating!
Apparently, the commenter is convinced that nobody in his family tree will ever do anything wrong.
#34. Rabbit, you forget. To conservatives, any white person who does something bad with a gun is an outlier, a blip, an anomaly. You know, like rising temperature statistics.
IIRC, the last time cheapshotBob posted his smarm around here, it was silly misinformed/misleading posts about climate change.
One thing he said was that he was waiting for the next iteration of the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to publish its next report. (Now, Darryl shot down what Bub was trying to say about the IPCC – he was essentially trying to hide behind it in a nonsensical way – it remains a valuable resource and compendium of the latest thought from scientists on the state of the science, and the policy going forward)
Ta da! From the latest IPCC….
That was published in the NYTimes, and included this…
Cheapshot often makes me think of that Inigo Montoya quote…”I do not think that word means what you think it means.”
Here we go again…
Republican operative in Georgia gets cancer, now finds that Obamacare is actually a good thing.
From Atlanta Journal-Constitution (via TPM)…
and…
There is something genetic, I’m sure, going on…there must be an empathy center somewhere in the brain, and people with little tiny ones become libertarians and Republicans, and people with robust empathy centers become socialists and Democrats.
Over and over and over we see this – these greedy, stingy, don’t give ‘those people my stuff!!11!!’ Republicans, when it’s their gay son, or their Alzheimer’s-riddled husband, or their own testicles, once they see something good for everybody being good for them – they jump on board.
That doesn’t mean they’ve discovered empathy, just that they realize that something done for the good of all now benefits them – I’m tired of seeing them feted – like Portman, who now thinks that discriminating against his son is bad, DUH! – rather, we should hold them up as object lessons for mean-spirited Republican neofeudal thinking.
# 39: Sometimes a GOPer will have the nerve to admit they were wrong. Wait until some guy who hates lawyers in general and contingency fees in general gets into a serious accident, and then watch him do a quick 180 degree turn.
But then, you have some who will never admit they were wrong. That doesn’t mean they will forgo the benefits, just that they will find a way to blame somebody else for their predictament.
@22 & 26
“it’s not like we marketed this to seniors whose grasp of their finances was a little shaky. Why if they had just read the 37 page agreement they knew what they were getting into. it’s time to take personal responsibility. Fred Thompson didn’t hold a gun to their head…blah…blah…blah.”
Sound familiar?
“Sure, you can totally afford an interest only loan on your salary. We can get you that house for $100 less a month than you rent and zero down. And I guaran-god-damned-tee you that when the interest only loan is up in three years you’ll have so much equity and increased value we can refinance you just like you had a 30% down payment. Trust us, we’re experts.” Bank of America, Countrywide, WaMu…
#39. The theme of Empathy deficit is repeated over and over in this blog. It’s ickky to think about messing with people’s brains, but at times I wish there was a way to infect conservatives with an empathy virus that would boost their empathy cells.
Course if we could do that, those same people would clamoring to use that technology in reverse to make this an Ayn Rynd paradise (and change the brain chemistry of gay people).
Now THERE would be a depressing sci fi story. The last compassionate man in a world of empathy less people.
Funny the topic came up….