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Right. How many of the 'Back the Blue' or "Blue Lives MATTER!!!" crowd are willing to pay higher taxes? I just paid my annual property taxes last week. The Assistant City Clerk is a friend, and she and I always chat just a bit. She sort of complains how unhappy people are to pay the taxes, and she always laughs when I'm not. I've always said: My garbage gets picked up every week. The snow is plowed. And, most importantly, if I dial 911, the cops & fire trucks are there in about 3 minutes. That stuff costs money. I wouldn't be thrilled to pay more, but if necessary, I'd be willing. I guess that makes me one of those dirty 'Socialists'.

In a tight contest for RNC Chairperson, Ronna McDaniel narrowly edges out Mike Lindell, 111votes to 4 votes. "It was STOLD, I tell you! I have the evidence! My IT experts will be revealing it next week!"

Absolutely right. Body Cams were supposed to be the solution, instead they have become entertainment for asshole cops who know they can get a pass from their unions. This shit will never stop until our police can be fired that day for recorded on camera offenses. No paid leave, no early retirement, no none of the bullshit that exists now. That all means that they can then be charged. Our Police do not need to be defunded, they need to be defanged.

Ditto

That's fair. I should have said that she wished she had been armed. Sorry Lisa.

Larry Finegold 279065.mov

McNally.. hijacking-suspect-mcnally-in-custody.106055.mp4

I'm with you. The goal and only sensible thing, in my view, is the removal of any and all artificial barriers to those that want to vote.

Compelling people to vote could be as simple as a $100 refundable tax credit given to anyone who does.

My first reaction is to oppose it; I don't think someone so apathetic they don't want to vote, would be making rational decisions. But on the other hand, it might stymie the GOP's effort to stop people from voting.

Kind of like teachers -- we want to pay the least for the minimum "meets requirements." And it shows. Freedom isn't free, neither are good service workers -- and teachers, fire fighters, and police really ought to be good. And they're all public servants. Wendy P.

A lot of people with brass ones don't necessarily act like badasses. Many people in adventure sports - skydivers, base jumpers, extreme skiers, big wave surfers, big wall climbers, aerobatic pilots... and the like, even some extremely badass military people I've met, people with balls and nerves of steel, don't act like badasses. A lot of them are pretty chill, have great senses of humor, laugh a lot like giddy kids having too much fun.

No, it isn’t….regardless of what Fox tells you.

Something like 1.3 million people have a TS clearance. Only codeword level TS information is tracked. Spillage has been a well known problem for quite some time. Most are very innocent, some are not.

Bill, I generally tend to agree with most of what you post on here, including the general point of this post. That said, I think the above is a bit of a misrepresentation of what she posted. It seems like she’s taken a disproportionate amount of shit for one post she made about what was an undoubtedly traumatic experience.

I have an XM radio in the car, and the other day I heard "I don't like Mondays" by the Boomtown Rats playing on First Wave, a station dedicated to the new wave of the 80s and 90s. Bob Geldorf wrote the song about a mass shooting in San Diego where a 16 year old girl shot up a school, killing 2 and wounding 9. (I was in New York at the time.) The song hit #1 in the UK for a few weeks and made it onto the charts here in the US as well. The song was so popular, I think, because it summed up everyone's shock at the shooting. A 16 year old girl took a .22 rifle her father had given her and just started shooting. What stopped her was the police parking a garbage truck in front of her house. After she was arrested (by being offered some Burger King) she said the reason was "I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day." All the signs we now consider usual were there. Alcoholic father, some brain damage, evaluated for both depression and as a suicide risk, caught several times shooting out school windows and shooting squirrels in her neighborhood. She expressed hatred for cops and talked about doing something big to get on TV. Then one day she started shooting. Bob Geldorf was doing an interview in a newsroom in Atlanta and was next to the teletype machine when the story emerged. He stopped the interview and read it, being shocked at the shooter's answer to a reporter's question - "I don't like Mondays." And that experience became the song. And of course one of the reasons it became so popular is that almost never happened back then; it really shocked people. It was a once-a-year, at most, occurrence. Nowadays it's just Tuesday. A big part of this, of course, is the availability of guns. There are no hard stats on how many guns there are in the US for obvious reasons, but while the US was making and selling about 3 million guns a year in the 1980's, in 2021 that number was up to 13 million a year. Best estimates put the number of guns as greater than the number of adults in the US. And when there are more guns around, a kid who snaps is going to have a much easier time getting one and shooting up the local school (or gay bar, or synagogue etc.) So why are there so many guns? A big part of this, of course, is the gun industry, which like every other industry tries to sell more of their product. But another big part is how the right has adopted gun fear as a political tool. Democrats will take away your guns, so buy more. The country is going to hell because of those democrats, so buy more. SHTF so buy more. Hillary Clinton runs a child sex ring under a pizza parlor in Washington, DC so you better get a gun and save them! Live near the border? MS13! Get more guns! Like your gun? Now you can Stand Your Ground(tm) against those evildoers! The gun industry understands and welcomes this. Ten years ago Ruger agreed to donate $1 to the GOP for every gun they sold. So if the GOP wanted to make their fundraising targets, they had to push that fear for all it was worth. And it has worked. We now have a society so fearful that many people feel they need guns just to survive. A poster here feels she needs a gun in her shower to defend herself. And as a result, guns are readily available for the taking for anyone who feels like shooting up a school. Sure, sometimes they have to get them from a parent or a friend, but that has posed no problems in the past - and that is getting progressively easier as time goes on. This is, unfortunately, just going to get worse. Now that a political party has associated their party's platform with guns, half the politicians in the country are going to be pushing for more guns with fewer controls and less oversight. And if the problem does get worse? That WORKS for both republicans and gun manufacturers - the more people get shot in schools, the more people will be afraid, and the more people will translate that fear into a $799 AR-15 and a vote for a pro-gun republican. To protect themselves, of course, from another shooter with an AR-15 - wouldn't want to be outgunned! We really are getting closer and closer to the Ameristan that Neal Stephenson described in Fall. I wish there was a way to turn this around, but I just don't see it.

Ceiling was 5000 ft,, broken clouds and intermittent rain.. the jump was at 10000 feet but the terrain range was about 500-1200 ft. elevation. He probably could not see the ground but could see the brightest lights. He would know if he was over Vancouver/Portland. Titanium/Antimony balls,,, but the witnesses said he wasn't a bad ass type. An unmemorable geeky guy.. not mentally ill either,, most hijackers were mentally ill. It sure sounds like it was something done by somebody who didn't really care about himself any longer, a jump right into the blind unknown... maybe at late 40's he was extremely desperate for money or had a terminal disease.