– Can’t wait to give the Rainier Vista portion of the Burke-Gillman Trail a try.
– Donald Trump is really innovating here, in that he seems to be actually conning himself
– Also, speaking of Trump, it is interesting that people are finally calling his bullshit.
– Bill Kristol is such a problem.
– Oh hey, 25 Years of Tomorrow looks pretty great.
So I guess we can all agree that it was really inconsiderate of Greece to go and run up a big debt right before global banking collapsed under the weight of all that criminally concealed risk. And maybe it might have turned out better for Greece and their creditors if their debt had been spent on things other than old people.
But at least they didn’t run up a huge sovereign debt building up a military infrastructure used to destroy half the globe and murder 17 million people.
Republicans do con themselves. To them, reality and fantasy are fungible. It’s whatever feels like the facts and not the actual facts that matter. Take for example DNA. They will sit on a jury and easily convict somebody who matches the DNA. But tell them that DNA proves evolution, and they swear that can’t be true. They feel that can’t be true. They’ve convinced themselves it’s not. They’ve conned themselves. It’s what they do about everything. Every issue. And, really, Donald Trump is just following a long tradition for Republicans. Spreading fear wins them votes. Every time. Remember the fear of gay marriage? It got Bush the votes he needed. Roosevelt was right about fear.
The problem I have with Greece debt crisis is that it seems like blind men describing an elephant. Each group explains, exaggerates, conflates or lies about the problem from their point of view trying to leverage political advantage from casting the blame. The workers are lazy, the banksters are crooked, the rich aren’t paying their taxes, it’s austerity that is the problem. There doesn’t seem to be one real truth to that mess.
Paul Krugman sees the Greek choice as a positive, unless you are a creditor, “A “yes” vote in Greece would have condemned the country to years more of suffering under policies that haven’t worked and in fact, given the arithmetic, can’t work: austerity probably shrinks the economy faster than it reduces debt, so that all the suffering serves no purpose.”
“Greece’s debt problem reflected irresponsible lending as well as irresponsible borrowing, and in any case the Greeks have paid for their government’s sins many times over.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07......html?_r=0
@1 It’s all explained here. http://handbill.us/?p=55690
Looks like Gov. Scotty Walker has found a scapegoat for his miserable job-creation performance. http://tinyurl.com/posshrc
@5. You mean he’s blaming the Wisconsin economy on Greece?
I thought this was an interesting part of the article.
Immigration does not have a lasting lag on the economy but they tend to vote democratic.
“Economists have generally found that immigration has little to no effect on wages over the long term.
Immigrants favor Democratic candidates and liberal policies by a wide margin, surveys show, and they have moved formerly competitive states like Illinois firmly into the Democratic column and could turn Republican strongholds like Georgia and Texas into battlegrounds in the years to come.”
Cynically, I can see why conservatives want to fan the flames of xenophobia.
And if we don’t want illegals, require increasingly long jail time to any and every person who knowingly hires an illegal, from CEOs down to homeowners, and the demand for their labor will dry up and they won’t come here. We could put THOSE law breakers in the private prison system.
@4 Thanks. Why isn’t that being talked in the mainstream press?
Notice that the vacuous, babbling jackass troll really loves The Intercept to make the feckless point that TWO TERM President Obama’s NSA has totally PW3D the jackass’ butt electronically after the jackass “told us” to be so sceeeered of google and apple.
(btw, the jackass was caught using an apple product red-handed to troll HA, but I digress..)
So what’s the latest in The Intercept?
Damn! Republicans really LOVE Bernie Sanders’ socialist Health Clinics!
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/06/gop-senators-support-sanders-obamacare-expansion/
OMG! What will Breitbart and the Daily Caller say? Who’d a thunk it? The babbling jackass’ beloved Republicans have praised socialism..
Thanks Intercept!
@5 No, he’s blaming it on legal immigration, even though Wisconsin doesn’t have a lot of immigrant workers.
Meanwhile, using Greece as an example (see my article on another blog linked @4 above), conservatives everywhere blame economic difficulties on too much wages, pensions, and health benefits, while justifying the growing number of billionaires and accelerating concentration of wealth at the top as the best way to create jobs that somehow fail to appear. Their cure for that failure, of course, is more billionaires and more wealth concentration, not paying better wages so consumers have more spending power.
http://time.com/3946544/donald.....h-twitter/
The babbling jackass totally supports this racist rhetoric. Ben Carson drops out, Trump’s its man!
@4,
perhaps Chancellor Merkel and President Hollande might consider repayment terms similar to those offered to Germany in the London Debt Agreement of 1953, wherein German repayments were only due in periods of German trade surplus and could not exceed 3% of export earnings. But of course that’s ridiculous. After all, a big country like Germany can’t continue to run massive trade surpluses by allowing the littles a piece of the action.
And just to add another example of fear keeping us down is hemp. Hemp can do wondrous things. Money making things. Things that are environmentally friendly. But fear of Mexicans was used to stop it dead and create a ridiculous , absurd, nonsensical prohibition. And Republicans still fear it, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. (Mountains of evidence never gets in their way.)
@7 Are you referring to the corporate lackey press? The journalists who are paid to write that banksters should get their junk loans repaid because writing off bad debt leads to moral rot and the collapse of civilization?
@11 What does he expect Jeb! to do, ship his wife back to Mexico?
@12 You’ve nailed it.
Remember the notorious Occupy incident in 2011 when New York cops penned 6 women inside a net and then pepper sprayed them? The city agreed today to pay those women $332,500 for violating their constitutional rights.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/oc.....rotesters/
Roger Rabbit Commentary: Cops do whatever they like. Lawyers sue. Taxpayers pay the victims. That’s how the system works in this country. As a taxpayer,* I’m tired of underwriting police misbehavior. I think they should start taking it out of the cops’ salaries and pensions.
* I don’t pay New York City taxes, but this shit goes on everywhere (Seattle no exception), and we all pay for it when it happens where we live.
Believe it or not, Seattle hasn’t fired a cop since 2007. Has the new chief, Kathleen O’Toole, fired Officer Cynthia Whitlach yet? She’s the cop who harassed, physically abused, arrested, and falsely charged an elderly black man who had done absolutely nothing wrong or illegal. Whitlach, who also was caught posting racist comments in social media, has been on leave since January, collecting her full salary. The Seattle-King County NAACP, among others, has demanded her termination. We should all want her terminated, because she’s a bad cop. At least she’s not on the street, but why are our taxes still being used to pay her? What’s taking so long to get rid of her? This Stranger article explains. (Yes, the police union is part of the problem, but it’s more complicated than just that.)
http://www.thestranger.com/new.....s-bad-cops
I would go farther. Cops who physically abuse innocent citizens, violate citizens’ rights, lie in police reports, file unjustified charges, coerce confessions, plant fake evidence, or give perjured testimony should go to PRISON like this guy:
http://www.lohud.com/story/new...../28065473/
and this thug:
http://www.unionleader.com/art.....=mobileart
and this witch:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/.....story.html
17,
That’s why it should be the cops who are involved n such incidents that pay, not the taxpayers. Just a couple of instances where a few cops lose their new Ford F-150s, their boats, homes and retirement accounts, will do a world of wonder in correcting bad cop behavior.
He’s baaaack!!!! Timeh turns in signatures for his latest initiative. I’m not an attorney but doesn’t the “more than one subject” rule apply here?
http://mynorthwest.com/194/278.....iative-yet
@20 Yep. Give cops a free pass to behave badly, they will. With skin in the game, they’ll think twice.
The slow train wreck. Rather like the outset of WWI the continuing crises in Greece continues. It’s not likely that there will be guns in August. I mean what do you do when a country defaults. Come to a deal, do nothing or invade. Meanwhile all the stock markets are all a bit higgly piggly over what is frankly a small amount of money that will go poof in the worst case scenario. It’s all part of real Capitalism under a system of rules that actually don’t apply to nation states. The IMF is not going to show up in Greece and take away the Parthenon…or at least not the part already in the British National Museum, or raid the government buildings for anything valuable. Though the Greeks may have a wooden horse for the. Still under Capitalism your supposed to take the lumps as well as the profits.