HorsesAss.Org

Open Thread Open Thread

by — ,

I don’t know enough about the case to comment one way or the other, but morally the legislature shouldn’t be exempted from public disclosure requirements. It’s 2018, if anything we should make these records available more easily. Maybe all electronic communications go on a searchable database after a certain amount of time to ensure we aren’t giving away personal information, etc. I realize that this sort of thing can be abused, but in general it’s the direction we should be going.

Comments

  1. 1

    When it comes to public affairs, sunlight is the best disinfectant for political and government corruption. There is far too much secrecy in government, and that’s how corruption grows – in secrecy.

  3. 3

    1,
    Fuck You. Release the tax returns or shut the fuck up you silly pimp. How’s that for “transparency”?
    Idiot.

  5. 5

    4,
    Weird. Dumbfuck left out all mention of Rick Gates.
    Hee, hee.

    Also, PSA: don’t answer questions unless you are guilty of committing a crime. Then have your attorney negotiate first. Most of the time FBI agents are fishing. And most of the time it works. Because most of the time, but especially when dealing with Sov Cit idiots like Dumbfuck, people tell themselves they can talk their way out of their crimes.

  6. 6

    …known to be false…

    …but only by Dumbfuck and the 63 million other hapless, drooling Russian-bot victims.

    Don’t worry trolls. We have a reliable source that confirms Rick Gates new attorneys have blown the investigation wide open and Flynn and the rest will be withdrawing their guilty pleas any second now.

  8. 8

    Arming teachers with guns.

    So teachers are having sex with their students. What makes anyone think that some teachers wouldn’t shoot their on students or any student. Not like teachers are immune to being mental.

    Shit – if I had kids I’d be pretty worried.

    But maybe after the sex, and the cell pone pictures a good shooting would take place.

    Brilliant minds these Repukes have – brilliant I say.

  9. 9

    I say make it mandatory that every elected official carry a weapon….with the hope that they start shooting one another. Call it term limits.

  11. 11

    7 of the 21 medals won by Team USA at the 2018 Olympics were won by Gay people.

    I guess the straights are not willing to admit that they are more into water sports than gay people. #prezpeepee

    What’s the percentage of gay people? And they won 33.3333333% of the medals? What’s up with that? Was the USA team comprised of 33.3333% or more gay people? This would be an interesting study. Gay people are more successful!

  12. 12

    I don’t get it why would everyone lie, if there was nothing to hide?

    And Jefferson want’s transparency.

  14. 14

    @4 when you can’t even keep your conspiracy theory straight…

    Sometime after the “some elements of the dossier have been confirmed by intelligence sources” is used, in part, to obtain a new FISA warrant a McCain aid tried to get a copy to feed to the FBI who already had it because….

    According to our true loon troll…

    It was the primary basis of the FBI getting a warrant that was illegal even though it was issued legally by a court and then months later someone was THEN trying to feed it to the FBI and Vince Foster!

  15. 15

    14,
    Who can keep up? Between the daily school shootings, #crisisactors, wife beatings, snake charming, Nazi Torch Rallies, porn actress payoff schemes, amended criminal charges, plea deals, and of course endless rehashing of already debunked NOAA conspiracies you’d need some kind of Cray supercomputer to log, sort, and cross check for continuity. You can’t blame them for fucking up. After all, these stories originate from pale, zit-faced Moldovan teens who grew up amid the ruins of a failed commie empire eating wall paper paste and playing in landfills with broken televisions.

  17. 17

    @3 Don’t need tax returns to know how corrupt this administration is. It’s right out in the open. Never in our history have so many very rich people spent so much taxpayer money on personal perks as one of the privileges of public “service.” But it was to be expected. They didn’t get rich, and don’t stay rich, by living it up with their own money.

  19. 19

    @4 You’re barking up the wrong tree, doc. The right question to ask is: Are there any Trump associates who WON’T be indicted for lying to the FBI? What a dumbfuck.

  20. 20

    This former public employee has seen public disclosure rules abused by the public. Individuals sending multiple emails to government employees then sending a vague disclosure request about his emails, hoping to catch staff in an omission. Folks opposed to a construction project asking for all documents about a project in construction, pulling staff off the job to assemble documents. Then the requester no shows… and does it again three more times.

    Make no mistake I absolutely see the value of fopen government and disclosure. There are also times when limits may be appropriate.

  21. 21

    The market has been on quite a wild ride for the past two weeks. It is volatile times like this when the long term investor can really get some good buys. I did a little buying on Tuesday, but I could have received better prices for my purchases on Wednesday. Oh well, sometimes it doesn’t work out as well as we might hope, but it certainly is no reason to not invest. Stewing over past decisions is a waste of time if an investor does not analyze why things didn’t work out perfectly. Learn from mistakes is what I say.

  24. 24

    @20 The public has every right to see those files. Planning departments already treat neighbors of development projects badly enough without also denying them access to the permit applications and supporting documentation so they can determine whether zoning ordinances and building codes are being complied with.

  25. 25

    @21 “Stewing over past decisions is a waste of time if an investor does not analyze why things didn’t work out perfectly.”

    Stewing over past decisions is worse than a waste of time, it clouds your judgment, causing more mistakes. Post-mortem analysis usually isn’t useful. Rarely is the past instructive. If an investment doesn’t work out, get rid of it, and direct your energies to your next move. Don’t cry over spilled milk and never look back. That’s unhealthy. Stay focused on what you’re doing now and what you’re going to do next.

    You should have a plan and stick to it. That plan should include these three basic strategies: Diversifying, reinvesting, and compounding. You can’t time markets, so don’t try. If something doesn’t look right or make sense, don’t do it.

    It’s simple, really. All you’re trying to do is invest a dollar and get $1.05 back, reinvest that $1.05 and get $1.05 x 1.05 back, ad infinitum. This kind of compounding starts slowly, gradually builds up, and eventually snowballs into an avalanche of money if you do it long enough.

  27. 27

    @25 – Expecting a compounding effect with the securities market is only partially achievable. Markets don’t go straight up or straight down all the time. While you might have 1.05 X 1.05 X 1.05 X 1.05 = 2.207625, you could just as easily have 1.05 X 0.85 X 0.95 X 2.25 = 1.9077. A couple of bad years can really take its toll, even if the last year represents a more than doubling of the previous years’ values. The volatility requires discipline. Diversity spreads risk, and delayed gratification keeps the investor grounded. Having realistic expectations is imperative, too. Nobody is going invest a small amount and be a millionaire over night. Always take the long view.

  29. 29

    18,
    It’s “conservatives” who are on a roll.

    I merely describe what is happening in plain sight, before our eyes, that the media are simply too shell shocked to properly report. The other major political party in the United States has devolved into a dumpster fire of raging, violent, corrupt, ignorant meat heads too beer drunk to notice when they are double dutch ruddering a tranny hooker.

    It really wan’t all that long ago that it was perfectly normal to impute a relatively average level of intelligence to “conservatives” in general. After what we have all witnessed in the last 24 months, and that we continue to witness in horror every day, what rational mind would do that now? This era will be studied by sociologists and political scientists for decades, and perhaps even centuries to come. It’s like some kind of Z Virus swept over them, rendering them too stupid to even recognize obvious forgeries being perpetrated by uneducated bot-slaves with laughably poor English skills laboring for moldy beets and firewood.

    Republicans have become literally the dumbest people in America. Proudly so, apparently.

  30. 30

    “A woman close to the Parkland, Florida, school shooter called an FBI tip line in early January to describe a young man with an arsenal of knives and guns who was ‘going to explode’ and said she feared him ‘getting into a school and just shooting the place up.’

    “‘I just want to, you know, get it off my chest in case something does happen and I do believe something’s going to happen,’ the woman said, according to a transcript of the January 5 call reviewed by CNN. The FBI admitted last week that it had failed to act on the tip.”

    https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/23/politics/florida-school-shooting-fbi-tip-line-transcript/index.html

    Roger Rabbit Commentary: The FBI fucked up big. And because the fuckup happened on Jan. 5 of this year, when the FBI was run by Christopher Wray, who was appointed by Trump in June 2017, this is a fuckup by an agency run by a Trump appointee and which Trump was responsible for supervising. In short, this is Trump’s fuckup, not a fuckup by Obama. It’s just one more in a parade of miscues that says Trump and his minions who don’t know what they’re doing. We haven’t seen something like this since Shrub’s FBI ignored warnings about the 9/11 hijackers. As these incidents show, voting for Republicans gets you a barrel of incompetence and stupidity, but the dummies who keep voting for Republicans don’t seem to learn anything from experience.

  31. 31

    The new Manafort charges are a treasure trove. Millions in debts to suspected Russian mob and pleading for employment and just a few months later he’s running the Trump campaign.

    And our trolls will keep pointing out “no collusion.”

    Remember when they called Democrats Pinkos? The Presidency is every day looking more like an offshoot of ex KGB and Russian oil money.

    You own that.

  32. 32

    @31 that’s essentially what Rachel Maddow once said on her show, well before Drumpf even became President.

    Man that Woman is so smart.

  33. 33

    @27 “Expecting a compounding effect with the securities market is only partially achievable.”

    Compounding is what makes the whole thing work. You can’t do without it. Well, you can, but you’ll do far less well.

    “Markets don’t go straight up or straight down all the time.”

    Buy the corrections and dips, and sit out the euphoric times, or use them to sell your trash.

    “While you might have 1.05 X 1.05 X 1.05 X 1.05 = 2.207625, you could just as easily have 1.05 X 0.85 X 0.95 X 2.25 = 1.9077.”

    This isn’t true. If you own 20 stocks, this is extremely unlikely to happen with all 20 stocks, unless you really screw up when picking stocks. You’re far more likely to get 1.05 X 1.05 etc. than 1.05 X 0.85 etc. That’s another thing that makes the whole thing work.

    “A couple of bad years can really take its toll”

    If your investment horizon is a couple years, buy CDs, not stocks.

    “The volatility requires discipline.”

    This is where many people fail. They aren’t tough enough for this game. You need ice water in your veins.

    “Diversity spreads risk”

    It’s been said that diversifying is the only free lunch on Wall Street. It reduces risk and costs you nothing.

    The most common reason for failing to diversify is mindlessly accumulating your employer’s stock. Some Enron employees whose portfolios consisted 100% of Enron stock were looking forward to retiring as millionaires. Where are they now? I’ll bet some GE employees and retirees are in this boat, too, except it’s not quite as bad for them because GE is still afloat and has some recovery prospect; but if they had all their eggs in GE stock, it’s bad.

    ” … delayed gratification keeps the investor grounded.”

    Bullshit. The only thing delaying gratification does is make money available to invest. It contributes nothing to how well or poorly you invest it.

    This is not to understate the value of delayed gratification. You have to get investable funds somewhere. Lacking an inheritance or other windfall, all you can do is rip it out of the household budget. No new kitchen, no new car, no vacation …. good investors are people and rabbits who say no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no to their families a lot.

    “Having realistic expectations is imperative, too.”

    Exactly. If you don’t, you’ll get discouraged, and quit the game. How many times have I said on this blog swing to hit singles? Invest to make 5% a year? Statistically, the S&P 500’s inflation-adjusted return has averaged 7% a year since 1928. That’s enough, when coupled with compounding, to make out very well over time. And it’s damn near a sure thing. It doesn’t require genius or special skills. Kids can do it.

    “Nobody is going invest a small amount and be a millionaire over night. Always take the long view.”

    Accumulating $1 million of stock is within reach of anyone willing to devote a few thousand dollars and 30 or 40 years of patient reinvesting and compounding to the project. It goes much faster if you keep adding more money as you go along.

  34. 34

    @28 There was never any argument here about GE.

    GE is Doctor Dumbfuck’s pinata.

  35. 35

    @29 Actually, I think quite a few conservatives aren’t cars on the Trump train. They’re worse — they know better than to get on board, but they let it roll. Kind of like the Germans who weren’t Nazis but silently watched the trains to Auschwitz roll by and did nothing.

  36. 36

    @32 Or maybe the treason was so blatant that anyone who cared to look couldn’t help seeing it.

  38. 38

    3 – I have never been, am not now and will not be a Trump supporter in the future. I voted for another candidate in 2016. So, if anyone needs to be fucked, good and hard, it’s YOU, troll!

  39. 39

    @38 Oh, I see, you were one of those opt-out jellyfish who cast an abstention vote for a third-party candidate.

  40. 40

    39,
    Don’t fall for it.
    Go back and review 3. Nobody called this trailerbilly a “Trump supporter”. And yet comes the unbidden declaration of innocence.

    At least he’s demonstrating some degree of shame for what he’s done.

  41. 41

    35,
    I wish it were so. For if it were our circumstances wouldn’t be as dire.

    If they knew better they would be laying down on the tracks. Trumpism is an utter calamity for us all. But it is a death sentence for conservatism. If there were yet any shreds of ideology still supporting the movement, and if any significant number of these perverts still clung to those ideals, they would be defending them. Instead they cheer or at least remain silent when their leader mocks John McCain, brags about rape, threatens to dismantle NATO, blows up the debt, denigrates law enforcement, and casually dismisses the slaughter of children, all while selling our national sovereignty to a failed commie empire.

    As a perfectly natural consequence of five decades of effort, rapidly advanced with the nomination of Fuckface, they have become a U.S. version of Europe’s Identitarian movement. But with a very crucial and ultimately fatal difference: almost no significant youth involvement. The polling data and voter file data don’t lie about this. Even if the media do. A few thousand pimply douchebags in white Fred Perry polo shirts is not a groundswell. And unlike the true Trumpanzees, the Charlottesville Trustifarian Nazis don’t stick around. Half of them scuttled off to Hungary to avoid prosecution.

    That essentially leaves the movement representing little more than an embarrassing red sports car impulsively purchased to compensate for a bald spot, declining libido, and overall lack of attention among an aging Reagan coalition. Trump is a calamity for conservatism because it is an irreversible dead end. In precisely the same way that an impulsive office affair with a much younger co-worker is an irreversible dead end. It costs them everything. It leaves them sobbing into the phone from rehab. And it’s obvious to everyone else who watches it unfold. It certainly doesn’t take a genius to see it. If significant numbers of them were anything other than profoundly stupid comb-overs and Festrunk Brothers clamoring for one last moment in the sun we’d know it by now.

    And truly, therein lies the challenge. Sixty three million voters this deeply stupid will not be an easy problem to solve. The Resistance alone won’t do it. #MeToo alone won’t do it. #BLM alone won’t do it. #NeverAgain won’t do it. And even all those organized responses and more combined may not be enough. In another decade or so the Trumpanzee idiot numbers will decline steeply due to mortality. Mitt Romney will be dead or dying, leaving his daughter trying to reinvent herself as a “conscientious conservative” and whisper the lie to anyone who will listen. But even if Mitt Romney is for now content to sing along and wait that out, Democrats really can’t afford to. The work begins by admitting what we are up against. This isn’t a momentary blip in conservative politics. It did not come about unexpectedly or suddenly. And these people aren’t going to become reasonable again two years from now.

    There are 63 million of them. And they won’t be just as stupid in 2020. They will be more stupid than ever. That’s two whole years for Moldovan teens to work their magic. Two years of pizza parlor kiddie slave dungeons, crisis actors, DeepFakes, Buttery Males, Derp State, and #FREECARTERPAGE!. They have doomed themselves. But if we aren’t careful and we aren’t willing to admit it, they may take the rest of us down with them. Which at this point is probably their intent, at least subconsciously.

Can’t Bring Yourself to Type the Word “Ass”?

Eager to share our brilliant political commentary and blunt media criticism, but too genteel to link to horsesass.org? Well, good news, ladies: we also answer to HASeattle.com, because, you know, whatever. You're welcome!

Follow Goldy

[iire_social_icons]

HA Commenting Policy

It may be hard to believe from the vile nature of the threads, but yes, we have a commenting policy. Comments containing libel, copyright violations, spam, blatant sock puppetry, and deliberate off-topic trolling are all strictly prohibited, and may be deleted on an entirely arbitrary, sporadic, and selective basis. And repeat offenders may be banned! This is my blog. Life isn’t fair.