Nice try! It must have been one of his disposable doubles because he just submitted a requisition for a few punitive devices. He has been known to use Voodoo in retaliating for whatever you do! ♫ Enjoy yourself, It's later than you think. HAIL GRIMES!!!
I guess I’m alone in this, but this was only funny in the Before Time. Now, I just don’t feel like joking about fascism.
"Older Americans have never been safer. Older Americans have never been wealthier. The latter has been achieved at the expense of the younger -- over the past several decades," Did anyone read this and not go Huh WTF. Several decades ago when JohnR was in Daipers. Roby and I and millions of others were approaching middle age, trying to make sure that when we got older like 70. That we weren't taken out into the tundra and left for the wolves. We actually went out to work instead of living in our parents basement still waiting to be spoon fed by those 70 year olds. . I have contacts and can find out where that basement is.
You tell em buddy. I'll join you as soon as I find my teeth and hearing aids but 1st I gotta find my glasses. Make it on Tuesday cuz it's the only day the Home lets me wander about.
I've ignored your responses for long enough but I have grown sick and tired of the "less government" banality when no clarity follows. You do not favor less government. Please, tell me what current national, state, or local government services you wish privatized. IE, I think NASA should be privatized.
Disclaimer: I'm in my late 40s and after a kind of "lost decade" I managed to land on my feet and, if everything goes according to plan, I would have a comfortable retirement in 15-20 years, after paying my home and putting my 2 kids through college. I'd say that JohnR's statement was a little too broad and generalized a situation that is not shared by all older people, but if you are retired or soon to be retired, you are probably part of the last wave of people that worked in places that offered a defined benefit pension, and that will live long enough to see SS and Medicare full benefits. On top of that, you probably could pay for college with your summer savings, then when you graduated, earned enough money buy a house, and that house didn't demand more than 25% of your monthly paycheck; your employer probably covered most of your healthcare and even the bill that you had to foot for your kids' education was not 6 figures. If you look at people younger than my cohort, they are paying 10k, 15k, 20k or more per year to get an education, without which they cannot get a job, and because a big portion of jobs are now in the "gig economy", they don't know where or when the next check is coming from. Some of them have to settle down to be baristas or uber drivers, don't have health insurance after age 26 and well, the skim paycheck goes to pay for student loans, cellphone bills and uber rides. Can you blame them for staying with their parents if they can't afford to buy or rent their own place? And the question is, not if the millennials work hard, or deserve the benefits that older cohorts took for granted; the question is why have we allowed so much money to flow to the top 1% of the population, that we can no longer pay for the basics, education, health, and retirement. Just look at what Republicans have done during the last 8 years: They were irate because the top 1% tax rate went up like 5% so we could afford healthcare; they fought tooth and nail until they poked enough holes on it, then they went for another tax break that will wreck the economy in a decade or so. In the meanwhile, the infrastructure is crumbling, education at all levels is underfunded and healthcare prices will skyrocket again. Yeah, sure, those lazy millennials.
They don't have a large enough population to justify statehood individually, and are too far-flung to be combined together for statehood. 1) Population: Guam has 165,000 people, which is less than a third of the population of Wyoming. Combining Guam with USVI, the Marianas, and Samoa wouldn't get you there. Since part of the problem today with reapportionment is too many citizens per legislator, that wouldn't do us much good. If we were to do the cubed root rule for the House, and included Guam as a state (on its own), Wyoming would receive 1.22 representatives, which is much better than the 0.77 they get now. But Guam would receive 0.35 legislators. It would be the grossest over-representation in Congress. Adding Puerto Rico as a state would give them 4.4 legislators now, or 7.0 if we expanded to the cube root. 2) The populations of a proposed new super-state would include people across oceans, traversing even the international date line. Even if we created a PR + USVI state and a Pacific Islands state, that would still combine people across an area larger than Alaska. What shared commonality would they possess? How could you campaign for that seat? That said, I'm willing to be convinced.
More like your 21st birthday but yeah. Good post. It's not correct, as the Millennials are paying for your Trump generation, but it was well put.
Then talking about American democracy. We were weren't we? Did anyone wonder after all the talk of "Blue Wave" and the Yuge voter turn out on the left. Why the results weren't as strong as we felt they should have been. This little screen shot of just 4 States. Of popular votes to seats in their State House. Then whisper the word Gerrymandering one more time. The good 'old 'Mercian way.
4 key states in Trump's victory in 2016. I can see scenarios when even a neutral district drawing could have imbalanced results if the popular vote is split 55/45. Not saying that gerrymandering did not play a part, but let's say that is not totally unfathomable.. Wisconsin though.. Man, that's contrary to any democratic principle...
Yeah, that's not even close. Seems like that one should be in the courts. Of course, the Republicans are trying to get their guys in the courts to prevent such justice, but maybe this case would go to a nonpartisan judge.
I'm not sure that partisan gerrymandering, while somewhat odious, rises to the level of being unconstitutional. Of course one might say I'm biased because I live in a state that was gerrymandered by Democrats.
I say do it and worry about it later. PR+ USVI and PIS as 2 new states. I still do not want DC as a State, no city states IMO. (but if it happens, it happens). Think about the Senate, at least at first that would be 4-6 new Democratic Senators, now things would change in the future, but why worry about that now.
This would be interesting in another way in that residents of American Samoa are United States nationals but not United States citizens. I don't think a territory has ever been admitted as a state where its citizens weren't already US citizens.
I think they'd be open to splitting 5 of the 8 wards into new cities for you Plus, all those new mayors and city councils to spread all that PAC money around
Here in NC, the Dem won the governorship in 2016. The legislature had an emergency session to pass a number of kneecapping bills while the GOPer McCrory could still sign them. Most if not all that stuff is currently in litigation. The same thing is happening in Wiscy and Michigan. So what we have is the Republican party has a growing cancer within it of refusing to accept election results. I personally think this is one of the most dangerous things happening. There are two reasons I believe that. One is obvious; election losers have to accept that they ********ing lost. We can't have people Calvinballing their way out of the consequences of being unpopular. The other is that at least in Wiscy and NC, the gerrymandering is so extreme that I can imagine antidemocracy being self-perpetuating. Who's to say that the GOPs in those two states won't retain legislative control after 2020 no matter how unpopular they are, and then drawing more ridiculous lines to retain power at least another 10 years? It's just so dangerous to have a self perpetuating system in which getting more votes doesn't mean dick. How are NC Democrats supposed to feel about getting more votes for the state legislature than GOPs but the GOPs retaining majorities election after election?
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article222227805.html The State Ag commissioner in Florida had authority over concealed carry permits. (Why? Did you miss the part where I said this was in Florida?) There was a scandal because the Ag commissioner stopped doing proper background checks. A Dem got elected as the new Ag commissioner mostly as a result. So Florida GOPs are trying to move this function from someone who won't rubber stamp them to someone who will. The Dems want to move it to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, because they're not a bunch of stupid corrupt ********monkeys.
[IC]What do you mean? We all know that Democrats are as corrupt as Republicans!!!! #bothsidesdoit[/ic]