jmowreader
jmowreader's JournalI was asked for a joke describing the difference between D's and R's...
This is what I sent.
A hurricane caused a billion dollars in damage to public infrastructure like bridges, roads and parks. The Republican president called a special session of Congress to discuss how to fix it.
A Democratic Congressman stood up. “Mr. President, I recommend we send the 10th Mountain Division, a fleet of dump trucks and loaders, and a team from the Army Corps of Engineers to the disaster area. While the 10th Mountain is busy running refugee camps and removing debris, the Corps of Engineers will decide what needs to be fixed and how much it’ll cost. Then we fund the reconstruction effort using tax dollars. It’s simple and efficient, and we’ve done it before so we know exactly how. I estimate the total outlay to be $1.2 billion and it’ll take a year to completely recover.”
A Republican Congressman then took the podium. “Mr. President, I recommend that instead of sending Government Welfare to the disaster area, we set up a Faith Based Private Sector Disaster Relief Charity and cut taxes on the population segment earning more than $500,000 per year by $5 billion. The people who receive this tax cut will be so grateful, they will donate all of it to the charity. It will only take six months to recover under my plan.”
Because the president is a Republican, he naturally selects the second option. Six months later, roughly $75 million has been donated to the charity. It took 75 percent of the donated total as “administrative costs” and the rest of the money was embezzled. None of the money ever made it to the disaster area. Eight months after the disaster happened, the 10th Mountain and the Corps of Engineers were finally deployed. The report from the Engineers commander was grim: “Due to inexplicable delays in starting work and subsequent damage due to weather conditions in the relief area, construction costs will likely be at least triple what they would have been if reconstruction would have started immediately after the hurricane.” It took three years to rebuild. The total bill for recovery came to $7 billion, in addition to the $5 billion tax cut, and 25 percent of the population of the area moved away because they couldn’t stand to live there any longer.
Wait. That’s not a joke. That’s how Republicans really do business.
Need advice on high-end DSLR purchase
Before we start: NO I am not giving up film! I'm shooting film on my summer vacation, I'll shoot film next year, I'll shoot film until there's no more film left to shoot and no more me left to shoot it - and considering that Kodak is on the verge of re-introducing 120 Ektachrome film is here to stay.
Given that, I work for a newspaper and I'm starting to get a lot of pictures published. The first couple pictures I took were on my iPad. The second two were on my iPhone. (Strangely enough, I was coming back from shooting film when I found those pictures.)
Not really liking what I was getting from i-stuff, I bought a Nikon D2X. So far I've done three parades and one high-school Renewable Energy project with it. It's working pretty well, but I really need better low-light sensitivity; the D2X only goes to ISO 800.
I own pro glass - 28-70/2.8D and 80-200/2.8D Nikon ED lenses, and it gets used for film work - so I'm only interested in Nikon SLR bodies. I don't shoot video. (If I did, I would want to be able to sync audio with video using time code, which you can't do on a DSLR.)
I see three cameras that would do great: the Nikon D3S, D4S and D5. (The first two I would buy used, naturally.) The D4S has a stop more low-light sensitivity than the D3S does, and the D5 gives two stops over the D4S.
Now for the important question: Which camera will give me the best-looking photographs?
The real reason Trump wants the citizenship question on the census
He is trying to suppress the response rate in California.
Trump’s handlers know the census decides the apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives. If he can suppress California out of four or five of its seats, they can be moved to red states.
Of course, if that happens California will retaliate by gerrymandering their state down to maybe four Republican seats.
Always remember how unbelievably evil Trump is.
If we are going to impeach, it's got to be this year
I’ve seen some comments floating around here that we should wait till after Trump loses the election next year to impeach him.
No. One of the reasons to impeach is to stop his group from damaging the Republic any further. We need to open an impeachment inquiry NOW. We have the numbers, folks: we need 20 Senate Republican votes to get rid of the bastard and there are 22 Senate Republicans who do not want to have to explain to their voters why someone who supports a criminal traitor like Trump needs to stay in office.
Impeaching Trump after he loses the election is like shooting down an enemy plane after it bombs your headquarters: fun, but too late to do any good.
If it looks like we really will impeach Trump, he'll resign
There are a few very good tactical reasons why he'd go the Nixon route.
First...to paraphrase Samuel L. Jackson's character from "Jackie Brown," Trump ain't got a doin'-time disposition. If he resigns Pence can pardon him - and probably will pardon him the hour he's sworn in. If he's impeached, the Constitution makes that impossible.
Second, there are 207,800 reasons why Trump will not allow himself to be impeached. All of them have George Washington's portrait in the middle. $207,800 in annual pension, plus a staff and an office, are what a former president receives under the Former Presidents Act. Donald Trump is the kinda guy who wraps duct tape around his shoes glue-side-out to pick up pennies off the sidewalk. There's no damn way he's leaving $200,000 a year on the table.
Third, Trump knows Nixon ultimately became sort of an elder statesman in the years after his resignation. (That Nixon was one of the best foreign-policy experts we've ever had in the White House is why.) Trump knows he'll never be an elder statesman if he's the first man to ever be kicked out of the White House. And the sick thing is, there are people who believe Trump is the greatest president this country has ever had. If he resigns because he's "tired of the bullshit" they will still listen to him. If he's fired because he's the worst crook to have ever drawn a paycheck from the Secret Service expense account, they probably won't.
Fourth, an impeached president probably loses the right to build a monument to himself called a library. Trump really wants a library. It'll be full of exhibits on the grandeur of the Trump Administration and Trump's life before politics. Everything in it will be gold-painted, there'll be 50-foot-high portraits of The Great Man, and his display of golf paraphernalia will dwarf the collection at the World Golf Hall of Fame. All that goes away if Trump gets kicked out of office.
When the going gets tough, the tough get going and Trump gets the hell out of Dodge. There's a reason he has a plane with transoceanic range.
Mueller Report, Page 9, second paragraph...
"Second, WHILE THE INVESTIGATION IDENTIFIED NUMEROUS LINKS BETWEEN INDIVIDUALS WITH TIES TO THE RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT AND INDIVIDUALS ASSOCIATED WITH THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN, the evidence was not sufficient to support criminal charges." (Caps Lock turned on for a reason.)
"No collusion," my ass.
The GOP is headed toward Decree 770
Decree 770 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_770) was Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s anti abortion law. It required every woman to submit to a gynecological exam every month, tracked all detected pregnancies, banned both contraception and abortion, and forced a police investigation (by a special abortion police force that consumed half the country’s GDP) for miscarriages, which were treated as illegal abortions.
Incidentally, after the Ceausescus were executed (by a firing squad for which over 3000 soldiers volunteered) the first act of the new government was to repeal Decree 770. Its second act was to abolish capital punishment.
With news Texas wants to execute women who receive abortions, we’re headed right back down that road here in America.
The world is about to end
There’s no other explanation. The best team in baseball right now is the Mariners. I am very happy, but also confused: they’ve never been this good for this long, and 2019 was billed as a “rebuilding year.”
Best parody MAGA hat I've seen to date
I was in downtown Spokane on Friday when a guy crossed the street in front of me wearing a ball cap. It was blue, and it said "Make Weed Great Again" on it.
Police: Teen shot herself in mouth with hands cuffed behind back
Today's entry in the "are you shitting me?" file:
https://idahonews.com/news/nation-world/police-woman-killed-herself-with-gunshot-through-her-mouth-while-hands-cuffed-behind-back?utm_source=taboola&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=internal
While officers tried to get control of Medlin, Wilson was left alone and reportedly was able to get a gun, possibly from inside the car where she was a passenger, "contorted" her body and shot herself through the mouth while still wearing handcuffs, according to a police spokesman.
The gun in question was a pistol, and not one the police in Chesapeake, VA, issue.
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