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PhillyD

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by PhillyD

  1. As someone living in a blue state, this seems like a pretty stupid strategy if they ever want a chance to win a blue state.  It very much reminds me of the "Trump Tax Cuts" where I ended up paying $4000 more in taxes because of whatever changed they made in the tax code that only affected "a few people in high income states."  

    Keep on keeping on assholes.  Your time is coming.

    • Hook 'Em 1
  2. Using Chrome on Android.  When I go to a subscribed thread, it's not taking me to the first unread post.  It scrolls down anywhere from 3 to 10 posts so I have to scroll up to find where to start. This just started this week and has been consistent.  I don't think it's on any particular server.

    • Like 1
  3. I've seen a solution where a second layer of drywall was added over the top of the existing layer on one of the walls separating the rooms.  A very small layer of air (maintained by the drywall epoxy or whatever it is called) was between the two to further help prevent sound transmission.  You need to insulate any outlets on that wall as they are the weak spots where sound comes through.

    Im not a sound engineer or a contractor, but I stayed at a holiday inn Express once.  I've also seen this technique in ceilings between floors to help stop noises between the two floors.  It made a significant difference and was a lot easier than trying to go inside and insulate.

  4. 4 hours ago, Sawbonz said:

     

    I know the list of people who need an ass whipping is long.  This SOB is near the top.  Just by sheer observation, it ought to be obvious this guy should not be anywhere near power, yet, he's most likely the next GOP nominee for prez (and my Fox loving parents think he is awesome).

    I'm just venting here, but for the love of God, Florida, will you wake the fuck up?  What a shitty human being!

     

    • Hook 'Em 5
  5. 38 minutes ago, RPM said:

    I wish there was a way to neg the Judge without negging the post. 8 months? More like 8 years, cocksucker! Why are they not mudstomping each and every one of these deplorables?

    Apparently Justice Dept only asked for 10 months and the defendant asked for community service. I like this quote from the judge regarding community service 

    Screenshot_2022-08-12-14-08-32-85_0b2fce7a16bf2b728d6ffa28c8d60efb.jpg

  6. The absolute best.  I remember listening to him reading a grocery list and being awestruck by his voice.  I know @Sbbruin will share some thoughts and I look forward to them.  I can't imagine a greater voice for baseball or any sport.  I knew this day would eventually come and I have been dreading it.  

    Vin, thank you.  You made listening to a broadcast an experience memorable and your talent will never be duplicated.

    Excuse me if I spend the next few hours searching for recording of him describing Fernando Valenzuela on the mound and repeating it over and over.

    RIP to my favorite announcer ever.  Second only to Harry Caray.  BTW, if you don't think much of Harry. find some old radio recordings, instead of what you heard on WGN after he was well past his prime, then reevaluate. 

    Vin Scully NEVER left his prime.  There will never be anyone better.

    • Hook 'Em 3
  7. 23 minutes ago, Longhorn_Fan68 said:

    Seal Of Approval Thumbs Up GIF

    While he found out, after fucking around, this sentence was quite a bit less than what prosecution wanted.  He had a gun at the Capitol and I understand he had another gun in his car.  I would have like to have seen more but at the same time, I'm grateful the judge didn't give a weak sentence.  I'll take it, but not really satisfied.

    • Hook 'Em 1
  8. 2 minutes ago, Buzzrock said:

    Took the first dose 3.5 hrs ago. The main colon blow seems to be over but I get to do it again at 4:30a for a 10a procedure. I’m hungry. Can’t wait to eat lunch tomorrow.

    The fasting fucked me up way worse than the prep and the procedure.  

    • Like 1
  9. 2 hours ago, bernorange said:

     

    I don't have the pretty bell curve (so far?) like you folks...

    wordle-83.jpg

     

    23 minutes ago, Prepuce of Doom said:

    More birdies than pars is really remarkable. And more eagles than either bogeys or double bogeys is even more impressive. 

    You don't have the pretty bell curve because you blew the curve. As Doom said, the number of Eagles you have in 83 tries is pretty remarkable.  If you stop playing and I play 600 more times, I may have an equal number.

    • Hook 'Em 2
  10. 1 hour ago, Mrs Whiggins said:

     

     

    ALL OF THIS. ALL OF IT.

     

    I teeter around on the ledge a lot, perhaps dependent upon how much gin, beer, or vodka I've consumed, but this is really the slow boil on the stove that few are watching.

    Here is an excellent article (*see link below) regarding something that has slipped under the radar lately: Schedule F. While it is talking about Trump, anyone who thinks any other GOP pol in the Oval Office would not use this similarly is delusional. Of course they would. We are watching in real time the secret  service display it from the recent past and they were not alone in their fealty to the cause. You may argue that the cause is Trump and Trump alone, but that is simply fantasy. Any demagogue will do at this point and DeSantis is more than happy to fulfill that role. Read that article very closely and consider what replacing civil servants with sycophants throughout the breadth and depth of government will do to this country. Grim. Very grim.

    Oh, and Jeffery Clark? He makes an appearance in the article, too. While people are thinking, 'oh, he'll cooperate' and 'we've got him!' Yeah, no. That is not going to happen and this is going to get dragged along until it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because many citizens are tuning out the hearings and the subgroup that wasn't going to pay attention anyway are watching yet another Turning Point show. TP has been putting on show after show around the country, keeping the fervor going because that is going to help them to bring these disparate groups together for this fall. No GOP pol is actually working in office for the country right now, they are working on winning power. Corporate seems to be gauging which side to play, and judging by the 'secret' donations, they are betting towards the rw side.

    While the Democrats are working on their power points, the GOP is behind the scenes with their hand on the electrical plug. Good luck with that Democratic Leadership. Try stealing a page from the GOP and have a road show or something...anything...because a few memes of Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz are going to do shit all in November.

     

     

     

     

     

    *https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/07/donald-trump-second-term-purge-plans

    Article here:

      Hide contents

    There are countless reasons why Donald Trump should never be allowed to step foot in the White House again, chief among them is his attempt to overturn the results of the last election, his incitement of an insurrection, and his outright refusal to lift a finger to stop the violence he’d set into motion—violence that ultimately left multiple people dead and was recounted in chilling detail by the January 6 committee on Thursday night. (Also: the fact that he struggles to pronounce the word “yesterday.”) Those reasons, though, are based on things Trump has already done, when in fact, it’s his future plans for a would-be second term that should scare the ever-loving shit out of everyone in this country, and then make them shit some more.

    In a long, terrifyingly specific article published on Friday, Axios’s Jonathan Swan reports that should Trump win in 2024, he’ll unleash an authoritarian rule that will make his plot to steal a second term look innocent by comparison—which is sort of like saying that for his second act, Jeffrey Dahmer was going to do something worse than eat all those people. The “heart” of Trump’s plan, according to Swan, involves reinstating the “Schedule F” executive order he signed in October 2020. If you can’t remember what that was all about because you were too busy trying not to die from a highly contagious disease the then president had lied to the public about, the order gave Trump the power to take government employees’ jobs that were nonpolitical and protected—from, for instance, a president who doesn‘t believe science is real—and make them “at will.” Put another way, it gave him the power to fire thousands of federal workers who actually knew what they were doing and replace them with people who only knew how to pledge their undying loyalty to the 45th president. The former are the kind of people you want, say, working for the Federal Aviation Administration and deciding if a plane is safe to fly. The latter you want on a no-fly list.

    f this all seems really bad to you, know that it really, really is! While Trump had originally signed the “Schedule F” order with the intention of implementing it in a second, consecutive term—and Joe Biden rescinded it after taking office—that plan obviously didn’t pan out. But now, it’s apparently very much at the top of mind should he run a third time and win, and we know this because he literally alluded to it at a rally last March. ”We will pass critical reforms making every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States,” he told a crowd in South Carolina. ”The deep state must and will be brought to heel.” And this is not just something Trump is characteristically blathering on about with no one knowing what he’s talking about. No, this is being carefully plotted by Trump allies who want to ensure the government is filled with loyalists, ready to do his bidding, from the get-go.

    Per Axios:

    Trump remains distracted by his obsession with contesting the 2020 election results. But he has endorsed the work of several groups to prime an administration-in-waiting. Personnel and action plans would be executed in the first 100 days of a second term starting on Jan. 20, 2025. Their work could accelerate controversial policy and enforcement changes, but also enable revenge tours against real or perceived enemies, and potentially insulate the president and allies from investigation or prosecution.

    They intend to stack thousands of mid-level staff jobs. Well-funded groups are already developing lists of candidates selected often for their animus against the system—in line with Trump’s long-running obsession with draining “the swamp.” This includes building extensive databases of people vetted as being committed to Trump and his agenda. The preparations are far more advanced and ambitious than previously reported. What is happening now is an inversion of the slapdash and virtually non-existent infrastructure surrounding Trump ahead of his 2017 presidential transition. These groups are operating on multiple fronts: shaping policies, identifying top lieutenants, curating an alternative labor force of unprecedented scale, and preparing for legal challenges and defenses that might go before Trump-friendly judges, all the way to a 6–3 Supreme Court.

    And if that sounds scary, just wait! According to Swan, Trump is likely considering Jeffrey Clark for his next attorney general. If that name sounds familiar to you but you don’t know why, perhaps it’s because he’s the guy Trump wanted to make head of the Justice Department in a last-ditch attempt to stay in power, as Clark was the only one at the agency willing to help him overturn the election. As a former DOJ official testified last month, Trump was only convinced not to go through with it after being told there would be mass resignations. “Mr. President,” acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue told Trump, “you’re talking about putting a man in that seat who has never tried a criminal case, who’s never conducted a criminal investigation. He’s telling you that he’s going to take charge of the department—115,000 employees, including the entire FBI—and turn the place on a dime and conduct nationwide criminal investigations that will produce results in a matter of days. It’s impossible. It’s absurd. It’s not going to happen and it’s going to fail.”

    Yet while Trump could temporarily, momentarily be reasoned with, and Clark did not get the top job at the time, that’s unlikely to happen again. Per Axios, asked at an event in April at Mar-a-Lago what Trump would do with the DOJ if he won in 2024, the attorney—whose home was raided by the feds in June—said that he believed Trump had learned his lesson. Clark, according to Axios, “predicted, Trump would never appoint an attorney general who was not completely on board with his agenda [again].”

    Who else could get a top job in a second term? Well:

    Trump has…praised Kash Patel, [an attorney and former Trump administration official], who would likely be installed in a senior national security role in a second term, people close to the former president said. If Patel could survive Senate confirmation, there is a good chance Trump would make him CIA or FBI director, these sources said. If not, Patel would likely serve in a senior role in the White House.

    Who is Kash Patel?

     

    Patel…enjoyed an extraordinary rise from obscurity to power during the Trump era. Over the course of only a few years, he went from being a little-known Capitol Hill staffer to one of the most powerful figures in the U.S. national security apparatus…. In one astonishing but ill-fated plan, Trump had wanted to install Patel as either the deputy director of the CIA or the FBI late in his administration. He abandoned this only after vehement opposition and warnings from senior officials including [CIA director Gina] Haspel and former Attorney General Bill Barr, who wrote in his own memoir that he told then-chief of staff Mark Meadows that Patel becoming deputy FBI director would happen “over my dead body.”

    Patel has only grown closer to the former president since he left office. Over the past year, Patel has displayed enough confidence to leverage his fame as a Trump insider—establishing an online store selling self-branded merchandise with “K$H” baseball caps and “Fight With Kash” zip-up fleeces.

    He hosts an online show and podcast, “Kash’s Corner,” and he is a prolific poster on Trump’s social media network, Truth Social. In May, Patel re-truthed (the Truth Social equivalent of re-tweeting) a meme of himself and special counsel John Durham “perp walking” a handcuffed Hillary Clinton. He also set up the Kash Patel Legal Offense Trust to raise money to sue journalists. He recently authored an illustrated children’s book about the Russia investigation in which “King Donald” is a character persecuted by “Hillary Queenton and her shifty knight.”

     

    Meanwhile, angel of darkness Stephen Miller is reportedly also hard at work “identifying and assembling a list of lawyers who would be ready to fill the key general counsel jobs across government in a second-term Trump administration.” Trump, you see, didn’t like the lawyers he had around last time because they were always telling him his demands “were illegal and could not be implemented.” Can’t have any of that! Miller, according to Axios, “has his eye out for general counsels who will aggressively implement Trump’s orders and skeptically interrogate any career government attorney who tells them their plans are unlawful or cannot be done.” In other words, he’s looking for people who would possibly break the law for Trump. Elsewhere, the ex-president has apparently been spending “significant amounts of his time talking to luminaries of the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement, including attorney Boris Epshteyn and the pillow entrepreneur Mike Lindell, who has spent at least $25 million of his own money sowing doubts about the 2020 election result.”

    In other words, we should all be very, very afraid, and perhaps try to ensure this guy is never allowed to have an inch of power again.

     

     

    You just pushed me onto Brisket's ledge. 

  11. 18 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

    Eh, I look at it more as being brought to a slow boil. Russia has been sitting in the pot not realizing how hot it has gotten. I think our approach has generally been very good. The idea that we could have gone all in at the very beginning and had the same timid Russian response is fanciful and pure speculation. 

    A couple of thoughts I have.  Had we gone all at the very beginning, would Germany be doing even less than they are now?  Would Sweden and Finland still be applying for NATO?  I know Ukraine is in great pain, but I'm not sure there was a better way to play things with the information we had available.  The reality is, we screwed up years ago in Crimea by not acting appropriately.

    • Hook 'Em 6
    • Like 3
  12. Now that I completely distrust the Secret Service, I came across this article on the spokesperson.  Seems he has some experience covering up for corrupt law enforcement.

    The Secret Service spokesperson defending the agency’s deleted Jan 6. texts previously misled reporters about the police cover-up on Laquan McDonald’s killing | Media Matters for America

    Spoiler

    This is not the first time Guglielmi has argued that the suspicious disappearance of crucial evidence whose emergence could have hurt the credibility of his employer was simply due to a technical snafu. In a similar role with the Chicago Police Department, he previously claimed that missing audio from five different police dashcam videos that recorded the notorious 2014 police killing of Laquan McDonald was due to “software issues or operator error.”

    Spoiler

    Guglielmi furiously denied the report on Twitter, taking issue with what he claimed were “categorically false claims,” and later issued a statement arguing that the mass deletion of Secret Service texts was not undertaken “maliciously” but rather as part of a preplanned replacement of staff cell phones. Then on Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that after the January 6 select committee issued a subpoena for Secret Service communications during that period, the agency “determined it has no new texts to provide Congress relevant to its Jan. 6 investigation, and that any other texts its agents exchanged around the time of the 2021 attack on the Capitol were purged.” That mass deletion reportedly occurred after Congress repeatedly asked the agency to preserve its records related to the January 6 insurrection.

    Reporters attempting to assess Guglielmi’s credibility should consider Guglielmi’s past work as top spokesperson at the Chicago Police Department, where he worked from 2015 to 2020, according to his LinkedIn profile. Guglielmi was in that role when the city was compelled to release dashcam videos of the police killing of McDonald, a 17-year-old Black youth who was shot 16 times by Jason Van Dyke, a white police officer. The video disproved Van Dyke’s claim that he fired because McDonald was threatening him with a knife, and the officer was later found guilty of second-degree murder and 16 counts of assault.

    But that video — and videos taken from the dashcams of four other police cars present at the scene of McDonald’s killing — lacked audio. That means that the sounds of the bullets Van Dyke fired, as well as any and all conversations he had with other officers on the scene after McDonald was killed, were lost.

    Why would all five videos of a police killing be missing sound? Guglielmi explained to reporters at the time that there was nothing suspicious about it. “As with any technology, at times software issues or operator error may keep the cameras from operating as they normally should," he told The Associated Press in December 2015.

    Experts told the AP that “they could not imagine how an entire fleet of cars would ever lose audio at the same time and place by mere happenstance” and called the missing sound a “red flag.” 

    The experts’ suspicions were validated. As Chicago reporters followed up on the story over the following weeks, they discovered that CPD dashcam videos habitually lacked audio — including in the recordings of 22 different police shootings that year. Guglielmi himself acknowledged that “more than 80 percent of the cameras have non-functioning audio ‘due to operator error or, in some cases, intentional destruction,’” the Chicago Sun-Times reported. 

    That was the case with regard to the McDonald videos. The dashcam in Van Dyke’s squad car appeared to have been repeatedly sabotaged, according to a review of police maintenance records by DNAInfo Chicago. And four officers present that night were ultimately suspended over the dashcam issue after an investigation reportedly determined they had tried to “withhold and shield video evidence establishing what actually transpired between Van Dyke and McDonald.”

    The Justice Department later assessed “officers’ efforts to conceal by mishandling video and audio equipment or by retaliating against civilians who witness misconduct” as part of its investigation of the CPD in the wake of McDonald’s killing. 

    “Not until the public release of the McDonald shooting video—captured on only two of the five car cameras and excluding all related audio—has CPD made much effort to ensure that cameras and microphones entrusted to officers are working properly and are not tampered with,” the DOJ’s final report stated. “Shortly after our investigation began, the CPD Superintendent warned beat officers that they would be disciplined for failure to follow proper dash-cam protocol. The reminder that officers should follow this policy was probably needed: prior to the McDonald case, it is hard to find any inquiry into the suspicious failure of most of CPD vehicles’ dash-cams."

     

    Bottom line, the secret service needs an enema to purge itself of the dirty shit inside.

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