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berlinerbaer

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Posts posted by berlinerbaer

  1. Now is a terrible time to join the Republican Party. My guess is that if you went to a local party meeting you'd either be afraid to speak up or you'd get shouted down by the wingnuts. If you're lucky, they'd humor you and then blow you off.

    There's no convincing them. They'll only understand one thing: Losing. 2018 was a good start, but they need to lose more. Vote. Them. Out. Their brand of politics needs to be a political loser on a national level or they'll see no reason to change.

    As an aside, you seem to think the Dems are heading to the leftist fringe at warp speed and you couldn't be a voice of moderation. That might be true, but I think we are a decade away, and that's only if the Dems do a lot of winning between now and then and become fat and dumb themselves.

    • Like 4
  2. 15 hours ago, Horn Under a Bad Sign said:

    The chicanery simply doesn't stop with these assholes. Greg Abbott filling courts with GOP judges whom voters rejected:
     


    https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2019/03/07/texas-governor-abbott-courts-gop-judge-rejects/?fbclid=IwAR2PZcu3XQ9IKvW0p5T7M82bbBLKGxoA1qmWuERC9Rb2f2bOAPGLxFTFW0E

     

    So are some Texas state judicial seats by appointment instead of through election, or are these just temporary fills until the next (special) election?

    Either way, Hot Wheels was going to fill them with Republicans. 

    I look at this like I do the McSally appointment to the Senate in AZ after her loss. Seems like some personal back scratching or a mad scramble to fill the seat with someone with a pulse. It's pathetic, really. The fact is that the November election results, big gains for the Dems, still stand.

  3. 11 hours ago, Incredulity said:

    You ever been waiting in aisle to deplane and been crawled over by a person of Asian decent?

    Don’t do that.

    You ever encounter a pile of wadded up fecal soiled toilet paper in a trash bin?

    Don’t do that.

     

  4. 1 hour ago, Anastasis said:

    I have consistently rejected a distributional approach to defining the "middle class", for  reasons that you allude to.  The American Middle Class is defined by a set of lifestyle characteristics common to a certain stratum of the socioeconomic segmentation.  It's not a bracket of the household income distribution. Historically, some of these characteristics were accessible home ownership, accessible secondary education, career professionals with relative job security, the ability to engage in recreation and leisure activities with disposable income after covering their primary needs and setting something aside for retirement, etc. These are the characteristics that define the middle class imo, with a range from lower to upper middle class. If you want to pull down a straight up distributional middle class, "middle is middle", the middle class ranges from 30k to 110k household (25th-75th percentiles).  30k is poverty level for a family of 4. That's not middle class by any realistic measure.  110k in a dual income household with 2-3 kids doesn't check many of the boxes I listed.  I would hardly classify that as upper middle class.  Distributional assessments really break down in this discussion.  I think that we would agree that the middle class is getting smaller and being eroded in this country.  Distributional arguments like "middle is middle" fail to acknowledge this. I am not sure where the lower end of middle income would be, somewhere in 50-60th (60-85k).  But that gets pretty tight on the lower end. I could see a higher cut point. All very dependent on geographic region and number of persons in household and a variety of other factors.  

    I agree with this. I look at "middle class" as meaning earning a living through "work" in the usual sense, that is translating manual labor or a more refined skill into the production of goods or services. This could be flipping burgers, toiling in an assembly line, grading exams, managing someone's financial portfolio, or performing open heart surgery.

    A member of the upper class OTOH is someone able to live purely off the economy, earning the majority of their income through stocks, interest, trust funds, equity, etc. They are a world away from anything resembling a traditional 40 hour work week.

    Actual income doesn't really matter.

    • Like 1
  5. 51 minutes ago, JimmyJames said:

    What you and the Times are calling “upper middle class” I think is more accurately called the “professional” class. You got your doctors, lawyers, university professors, small business owners, architects, accountants, upper management, etc. That’s generally the top 15 percent of income earners. 

    I don’t doubt that this groups income has chugged right along with GDP over the years. It’s in the interest of the top .0001 percent who are currently hoarding the grotesque majority of this country’s new wealth to keep both the professional class relatively happy and give the lower class, including what we used to know as the middle class, someone else to resent instead of the top .0001 percenters.

    Think about it. How much contact does the bottom 90 percent have with the top .0001 percent? None. Never. Zilch. 

    How much contact does the bottom 90 percent have with the professional class? Quite a bit. And the professional class gets to tell them what to do, (watch your weight fatass, study for this test, get me a TPS report, fetch me some coffee, you fucked up your taxes last year, pay me 5k or your’re going to jail for DWI,) while looking relatively wealthy in comparison while the lower and middle class get poorer and poorer. It breeds understandable resentment that is misdirected as to where it should be going, namely the thieves at the top .0001 percent.

    This latest republican tax scame is the perfect example of what is and has been going on for damn near 40 years and is nothing but a money grab by the top .0001 percent at the expense of every fucking other person in the country. It’s obscene and the fact that the republicans support it should doom them to minority status for not just years, but decades. 

    This right here. Each socioeconomic stratum hates the one immediately above and below it. The "middle" (working) class despises the welfare moochers below them and holds their daily credentialed overlords in disdain while giving the top 1% a pass simply due to ignorance.

    IOW the ideal Republican voter.

    • Like 1
  6. 1 hour ago, David Dennison said:

    You answered your own question.

    As for the other people, not enough taxes were withheld from their paychecks. The dumbass Republicans wanted to get credit in the short term with bumps in pay without really thinking ahead to tax day 2019 when people would notice their refunds were lower or they actually owed money.

    Is the too little withholding thing something Trump can "fix" by EO, or will it require passing a new bill in congress?

  7. 3 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

    Lubbock to Amarillo.  

    Geographically, this is the most accurate, or maybe Lubbock to Abeline with the intention of eventually making it to Dallas.

    1 hour ago, tucker said:

    Caltran and BART are infested with homeless people and drugs. They also only go North to South not East and West.

    Um... every BART line serves the East Bay. To get there, you have to travel east from SF. Pittsburgh/Bay Point and Danville lines make it quite a ways inland, in fact.

    You should go back since it seems you've forgotten a lot.

    16 minutes ago, Lobo said:

    Ah yes, the oil industry's fault that trains can't be built efficiently.  Nothing to do with private property acquisition.  It's the train's fault our country is one of two that has subsurface mineral rights.  That does cover the hyperloop though, so let's go with underground pneumatic tubes man!  everybody wins! 

    Los Angeles had an extensive system of rail lines back in the 40s. The land was bought by the auto industry and the lines were closed down and built over into freeways and new roads.

    Roger Rabbit was based on a true story, brah.

  8. 4 hours ago, GRHorn said:

    Pretty clear to me that Shultz helps Trump. 

    It isn't obvious to me. I don't think any partisan voters will be fazed, and the Dems will have the numerical advantage in 2020.

    Among the middle, I see Schultz peeling away more right-leaners from Trump than left-leaners from the Democrat. There is already one popular policy proposal, taxing the super-rich, to which he has publicly stated opposition. The Dem should be able to check that box.

  9. 17 hours ago, Js1 said:

    I don't think the candidates on the bottom tier (Gabbard, Ojeda, that other random House member) will get much traction.  Gillibrand is getting some, but not much.

    It's going to Biden-Harris-Warren-Beto-Bernie. 

    Cross off one of either Bernie or Warren. I'm not convinced there is enough space on the Left for two heavyweights, and it gets even worse when you throw Tulsi in there. 

    What do the leftists on this board make of this? Who stands out? My take is that Bernie would destroy Trump but I think Warren has more of a mainstream Democrat feel to make it out of the primary.

    Sanders and Warren need to bring along a couple staffers each to meet in a DC coffee shop and draw straws or some shit. I think a lefty stands a good chance of making it out of this thing if the space is cleared early.

  10. On 1/14/2019 at 12:29 PM, Hugo Stiglitz said:

    So many red flags.  She will run for President and get a nice gig on Fox News afterwards as the voice on "the Left". 

    Punctuation added

    • Like 1
  11. 4 hours ago, burntorangebongos said:

    The investigations that they have that will actually not be sabotaged by house Rs will inform them on when to start the impeachment process. I don't think they should wait for the Mueller report and they won't have to with the information that they can dig up on the motherfucker. On Emoluments alone, that will have people howling to impeach. There are so many ways to go that I think they need to pick the lowest hanging fruit that is most digestible for the public to consume and understand. I think impeachment needs to arise out of what they uncover in the committee hearings. If shit is as bad as it appears to be, Pelosi will be shot if she doesn't start the process then.

    But I agree, they shouldn't wait on the Mueller report necessarily. As you point out, that could be folly.

    I agree with most of this. Clearly, House investigations need to begin in earnest on multiple fronts, in multiple committees, with Russia being the focus of only one or two of them. All of the other avenues toward eventual impeachment, such as emoluments or obstruction, can be handled separately from the House Russia investigation. The Dems need to start messaging that these other investigations are important in their own right and fight back against the media narrative that it's all Russia, Russia, Russia. This way, there is enough dirt on Trump to hurt him politically in case Mueller lets him off the hook re. collusion or other serious activities.

    Where I differ is I would hold off on impeachment until one of two events occurs: 1) the Mueller report comes out and is reasonably serious or 2) further obstruction occurs by Trump or the GOP, such as by effectively torpedoing the Mueller investigation or through Trump pardoning someone from his inner circle. If the Mueller probe does not reveal Russia collusion but instead widespread corruption, this would qualify as impeachable.

    Bottom line, the Dems need to keep their eye on the prize: an electoral blowout in 2020. I do not think impeachment proceedings are necessary between now and then for the Democratic base to remain fired up and to keep independents on their side of the fence. By resisting Trump legislatively, of course, as well as through multiple Congressional investigations, the Dems can keep the heat on and should be in good shape.

    I'll go on to add, perhaps controversially, that I don't want Trump removed from office before the next election. I'll risk the small existential threat to democracy life as we know it to ensure that further damage is done to him and the GOP in the minds of as many American voters as possible. I'll happily let him keep fucking around for two years if it means total Democratic control of the executive and the legislature for 2021.

    • Like 1
  12. 12 hours ago, SuingToGetAMessageBoard? said:

    Pat Roberts gonna retire.  Maybe Kobach can run for that too and Ds can pick up one more. 

    Maybe, but the Senate is a different ballgame than a statehouse. Because SC justices.

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