Astroturf 2.0: The Changing Climate of Protest
Anon
Heres’s our own Perry Gaskill with some thoughts on why things are the way they are; the best way see where you’re going is to look at where you’ve been. Here’s Perry:
Perry Gaskill
(Author’s note: In order to understand what newly-elected congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is about, it’s probably useful to go back more than just the last couple of years. The following is offered as part biography, and partly to provide political context to supplement some prior TAH commentary. Consider it an attempt at more-or-less objective intel. – PG)
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was sitting in a classroom at Boston University when she got a phone call telling her that her father had died. The date was September 9, 2008 on a Tuesday.
Among other events that same day was increasing turmoil on Wall Street amounting to a slow-motion train wreck. Lehman Brothers, the nations fourth largest investment bank, and one deeply involved in sub-prime mortages, would file for bankruptcy a week later after 158 years in business. And when Lehman went down, it took the rest of the market with it, plunging the country into a deep recession.
Those caught up in the financial chaos included Joe Crowley, a 20-year New York City congressman from Queens who emerged as a key player in pushing for a Wall Street bailout. The efforts of Crowley and others would yield things such as “too big to fail” policy and the TARP program. Political observers at the time also speculated that Crowley’s motives weren’t exactly altruistic; he apparently had received campaign donations from financial firms.
As fate would have it, Ocasio-Cortez and her mother would have additional problems following the death of Ocasio-Cortez’s architect father when it emerged he had died without a will. This meant his estate would get caught up in the Surrogate’s Court system for Westchester County, New York. By any measure Surrogate’s Court is something of a byzantine bureacracy which in Ocasio-Cortez’s case would require four years and very large legal fees to resolve. This at a time the real estate market was in a meltdown. It would also eventually require that Ocasio-Cortez and her mother lose a Westchester house and move downscale. The mom headed to Florida; Ocasio-Cortez wound up in the Bronx and Joe Crowley’s district.
It might also be possible at first blush to assume that Ocasio-Cortez would have been a Hillary Clinton supporter during the last presidential election; one of those sobbing young women seen on election night when the Clinton campaign went down in flames. In reality, Ocasio-Cortez had been a Bernie Sanders supporter which allowed her to make contacts that would prove useful later to her political career.
“The 28-year-old former bartender had been a field organizer for Bernie Sanders, phone-banked for Barack Obama and worked in Sen. Ted Kennedy’s office as a college student, but Ocasio-Cortez was jaded.” according to Rolling Stone.
In late 2016, just around the time the house in Westchester was finally sold, and shortly after being involved in oil pipeline protests in North Dakota, Ocasio-Cortez was contacted by a new political group called Justice Democrats who were wondering if she would be interested in running against Crowley in the 2018 primary. The timing was not a coincidence. The current executive director of Justice Democrats, based in Knoxville, was a woman named Alexandra Rojas who had also worked on the Sanders campaign as an IT data cruncher.
“I first started considering running for Congress, actually, at Standing Rock in North Dakota,” she said in a Guardian interview late last year. “It was really from that crucible of activism where I saw people putting their lives on the line for people they’ve never met and never known. When I saw that, I knew that I had to do something more.”
Opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline would involve thousands of activists and multiple protests over a period of months. Besides Ocasio-Cortez, some of those protesters included members of campus-based fossil fuel divestment campaigns which had been around almost a decade and were already losing momentum. As individual fossil fuel divestment chapters started to shut down, volunteers and donations were directed toward the recently established Sunrise Movement which was created in 2017 to influence the 2018 elections.
Meanwhile, back in the ‘hood, incumbent congressman Joe Crowley appeared to have the borough of Queens in New York locked up. Not only was he the 10-term congressman for the Bronx/Queens district, he was also head of the County Democratic Party which controls the Surrogate’s Court cash cow. Outspending Crowley in a head-on primary race was not an option for Ocasio-Cortez, but using free volunteers courtesy of activist resources was.
As it happened, Ocasio-Cortez was not alone in catching the attention of Justice Democrats; they had put together a list of 79 radical democrats to take on exiting moderate democrats who, apparently, were not quite up to the socialist vision. These new candidates included women such as Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar.
As an example of how things worked, Rojas and others helped Ocasio-Cortez out with such things as the scut work of sending out campaign text messages.
Ocasio-Cortez also didn’t come up with the term Green New Deal on her own. All that Green New Deal stuff dates back to 2007 and a pair of pieces by New York Times globalist Thomas Friedman. Since then, it’s been carried forward by a number of groups including the current Sunrise Movement which is now seeking to spend trillions of public dollars in an effort to halt anthropogenic global warming.
For various reasons, including being the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, and in a political upset at that, the news media has now bestowed on Ocasio-Cortez the kind of fame usually reserved for rockstars and A-list actors behaving badly. Then too, if there’s anything a generally parochial mainstream media likes to do, it’s talking about New Yorkers who are talking about New Yorkers talking about New York.
Even its most loyal supporters consider the Green New Deal to be something ill-defined and evolving. If Ocasio-Cortez is not the main brains behind the Green New Deal, she still has a key role as a public face. Sort of like, without putting too fine a point on it, Joe Isuzu in the old car commercials, only better looking. It’s also useful to think of the Green New Deal as part of a much broader agenda now in play by Justice Democrats. Such an agenda also apparently buys heavily into the popular millennial victim trope that they are the first generation to be worse off than their parents.
A recent list of Justice Democrat demands, according to Wikipedia sources, goes something like this:
– Creating a new infrastructure program called the “Green New Deal”
– Discontinuing arms sales to countries that violate human rights such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt
– Enacting a federal jobs guarantee, which would promise all Americans a job paying $15 per hour plus benefits
– Ending the death penalty
– Ending the practice of unilaterally waging war, except as a last resort to defend U.S. territory
– Ending the War on Drugs in favor of legalization, regulation, and taxation of drugs, and pardoning all non-violent drug offenders and treating all drug addicts
– Ensuring free speech on college campuses and supporting net neutrality
– Ensuring universal education as a right, including free public college and university education
– Ensuring universal healthcare as a right
– Establishing paid maternity leave, paid vacation leave, and free childcare
– Expanding anti-discrimination laws to apply to homosexual and transgender people
– Expanding background checks on firearms and banning high capacity magazines and assault weapons
– Funding Planned Parenthood and other contraceptive and abortion services, and recognizing reproductive rights
– Implementing electoral reform and publicly financed elections nationwide to make irrelevant and obsolete fundraising from large corporations and the wealthy
– Implementing instant-runoff voting nationwide in an effort to make third-party and independent candidates more viable
– Implementing the Buffett Rule, ending offshore financial centers, “chain[ing]” the capital gains and income taxes, and increasing the estate tax
– Making the minimum wage a living wage and tying it to inflation
– Pardoning Edward Snowden, prosecuting CIA torturers and DoD war criminals, shutting down the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and all other extrajudicial prisons, and ending warrantless spying and bulk data collection by the National Security Agency
– Passing the Paycheck Fairness Act
– Abolishing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE)
– Reforming police by mandating body cameras, establishing community oversight boards, eliminating broken windows policing, ending stop and frisk, and appointing special prosecutors to hold police accountable in courts
– Renegotiating other free trade deals CAFTA-DR, and NAFTA and opposing the Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China and the World Trade Organization
– Stopping any reductions to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and establishing single-payer universal healthcare
– Stopping anthropogenic climate change through an ecological revolution and upholding the United States’ participation in the Paris Climate Agreement
– Uncompromisingly rejecting President Trump’s immigration proposals and policies, particularly the Executive Order 13769 and deportation of illegal immigrants, and implementing comprehensive immigration reform which will give non-criminal illegal immigrants a path to citizenship.
And, it’s probably not a leap to imagine, a pony.
Category: Guest Post, Protests/Rallies, SJW Idiocy
And it will ONLY cost us $93.5++ TRILLION, as of last week!
I’m so excited I almost spilled hot tea on my cat over this.
The amount of money is a moving target. What also varies is how to come up with it. The was a Salon story yesterday by a guy named Marshall Auerback which amounted to a long and convoluted explanation about how the federal government could fund the Green New Deal by simply printing more money. I would have included it in the main post but it made my head hurt…
https://www.salon.com/2019/03/03/the-green-new-deal-just-focus-on-what-we-do-not-how-we-pay-for-it_partner/
I heard about that, too. It made me start sneezing, so I didn’t look further. 🙂
Reality is what they say it is, nothing less, nothing more. Nothing said against them is real, nothing refuting them is real. Nothing that goes wrong with their schemes is their fault, ever.
When you realize just how many actually believe what I just wrote, you must realize that they are -exactly- what loosed Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and the Khmer Rouge on helpless populations.
Whenever someone tells you their idea works because it is exactly the opposite of what’s being taught in modern economics textbooks it’s almost a guarantee that their idea will absolutely NOT work at all as promised.
The historical data to date doesn’t support any of his claims. Nations that spend like he suggests see their bond ratings drop and their ability to raise capital with it. He is suggesting as the top economy we can just print money and end any new debt because the money is no longer tied to the gold standard it’s whatever we want it to be by fiat…again that flies in the face of reality with respect to how the dollar is valued against foreign currency.
A discussion about the dangers of wealth accumulation by a few families is always appropriate, pretending you can print money to end the disparity of that accumulation is to deny reality and live only in pretense.
Yeah, Keynesian economics has worked out just great for Venezuela, hasn’t it?
I don’t think even Keynes himself thought a country could buy itself into prosperity for all its citizens by printing a virtually unlimited expanding money supply to finance pie in the sky programs. I only took Econ 101, but learned the fundamental principle that when too many dollars are chasing a limited supply of goods and services, the prices of everything inflate. These morons think they can ignore what happened in the Weimar Republic, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela. I would like to know what leftard perfesser taught this stupid scrunt the fundamental principles of economics. Every country that thought they could violate those principles has had massive inflation and financial collapse.
I wonder if her “professor” taught her anything besides what sperm tastes like.
How to lock her ankles behind her head.
Bet she received high marks just like Kamela-toe advanced in her political career via Willie “Brioni suit” Brown, attorney to whores and pimps in the San Fransicko.
Whatever the amount, it’s more than any of us can come up with, which pretty much makes us as individuals consider it an impossible dream.
That says it all, OWB.
No Problem, as long as the printing presses don’t break down. We couldn’t print this much money even if we wanted to? It just don’t work this way, How dumb is the bitch???
Don’t ask. She may take it as a challenge.
Nicely thought out Perry, and quite informative.
The interesting thing about your bullet point list of platform items is that it includes some things that libertarians have been espousing for decades. It has some crazy shit as well, but I could be on board with some of that platform as a libertarian.
I’ve noticed that the libertarian arc overlaps some liberal and some conservative viewpoints on a regular basis. Where it goes off the rails with both the left and right is those components that involve restrictions on liberty and border on collectivist viewpoints.
The longer I sit outside normal political circles the more I come to agree with Mencken and Heinlein that most people are quite happy trying to dictate how other people ought to live. Most people are sincere in their opinions that they are doing what’s best for the bulk of society in wanting to create more controls. In reality true freedom means minding your own business and letting everyone else mind theirs as well.
It’s a concept most Americans today no longer understand. They have no desire to experience Jefferson’s dangerous freedom. They are in fact quite content to remain tax slaves to their government owners.
I would consider most of the list to be basic eco-rad-fem millennial-progressive talking points. What might not have been clear in the post was also that the Justice Democrat agenda is strongly anti-corporate. When Ocasio-Cortez and her minions ran Amazon out of Long Island City, the deeper underlying reason, perhaps not fully articulated, is because Amazon represents an existential threat to small business. I’d agree that’s generally a bad thing, but likely don’t agree with AOC on how to fix the problem.
“Amazon represents an existential threat to small business”
And?
A business that cannot survive on its own deserves to go under, regardless of its size.
Good point, except in Amazon’s case there’s a tilted playing field. You might remember that since it’s early days Amazon’s business model has been partly based on being able to take advantage of an exemption from local sales tax.
So does everyone who moves away from high tax states.
When a large corporate entity has the ability to manipulate national politics it’s not a question who deserves to go under.
If I do everything right, follow the EPA rules for heavy manufacturing with VOCs involved, pay my taxes from labor costs to property cost, then pay my taxes on profit and my taxes on my own salary those are all hard costs associated with the cost of doing business. If my competitor gets a concession that allows him to operate without paying property taxes he gets an immediate advantage that I don’t have. Now depending on the business you’re in that difference might be your profit margin.
There are a lot of people in America who don’t realize just how tight net profit margins are for a lot of small manufacturing facilities or small retail operations. We are talking net profit margins in the 3-6% range. A competitor able to get that margin without the cost of property tax or unemployment tax depending on concession from local government is immediately able to discount pricing by that amount to obtain more business or bite into the business of competitors.
Fair competition on a level playing is where the guy who can’t control costs will go under, deserving or not has always been a reality.
The ability of someone like Bezos to manipulate national government rules to reap a benefit no small business can obtain is not at all representative of a level playing field and consequently represents far more than an existential threat, it’s an actual viable, physical threat that will take out your business.
“The interesting thing about your bullet point list of platform items is that it includes some things that libertarians have been espousing for decades.”
That’s why they’re in there, VOV–as bait to pull in wider support from a broader voting base. But as even OC acknowledges, there will have to be a prioritization of such a long list of initiatives and would you care to guess which of them will get pushed toward the bottom?
Leftists may be adolescent in their reasoning but they are anything but stupid. They know Americans won’t approve their far-left agenda so they salt it with proposals that seem perfectly reasonable and desirable.
Don’t let them suck you in.
No worries Poe, I was indeed born at night….but it wasn’t last night.
When it comes to the various forms of “isms” in spite of all its failings capitalism still beats any form of collectivism for me as it’s the one that’s allowed me to change my destiny and my life for the better.
My interest is more esoteric in nature, the philosophical overlaps in platform positions between certain fringe elements and major party positions.
Why do those overlaps exist and are they intended as click bait only, as you suggest, or is there a deeper, fundamental connection between certain aspects of these fringe (libertarians like me for one) elements and left or right party concepts?
The Libertarian conservative overlaps seem obvious to me, and they are indeed basic fundamentals of conservatism and Libertarianism.
Where they overlap the left at times is ending the drug war, ending endless wars, restricting how police operate and interact with the public. Those are limiters on government which any good libertarian favors.
The rest of that platform is a Libertarian’s nightmare Faustian bargain of epic proportion….
“The rest of that platform is a Libertarian’s nightmare Faustian bargain of epic proportion….”
Exactly! Because it requires big government control of every aspect of the economy and our lives–hardly a libertarian outcome.
BTW, I knew you weren’t being suckered–I just used your comment as an intro to making my point.
No matter what you do, $15 an hour plus benefits. That will certainly help pay for your $20 Big Mac and $10 fries.
Right after ordering it from a computer kiosk and having it cooked and prepared by a robot!
Now the Fight For 50 movement is underway which seeks “true middle-class jobs that earn $50,000 or more a year.”
And it’s targeting all the gullible young snowflakes who have never had a real job, time in the real world and have been raised thinking that this world owes them everything because they’re breathing. Whatever happened to wanting to learn and improve yourself to be more valuable in the job market?
$50,00/year? Highway construction crews earn more than that. So do truckers, systems designers, electronics engineers, mechanical engineers.
That “demand” is so off-the-wall uninformed, it is laughable. If you want the good jobs, get the training for them.
Somehow all these educated idiots with multiple degrees in whatever missed the first week of ECON 101, supply and demand.
I gross about double that. Guess what? I still have a difficult time because of the cost of living in California. It’s high not only because of inflated property values, but because of brilliant ideas like a gas tax that keeps the price of regular unleaded north of $3.00 per gallon, driving up the cost of pretty much everything that has to be transported, and the inflated minimum wage, which drives up the cost of services all over the place, and of course the state’s income taxes.
We live within our means. No boat, no trailer, and our one vacation per year is to a Forest Service campground with a tent. I don’t drive a monster truck, just an F-150. My mortgage is a bitch. The state government’s smug assurances that electric providers will pay for major fires just means that we, the consumers, pay out the ass to cover the billion-dollar fines Newsom & co. are so proud of.
Remember when Bill “Asshole Midget” Maher was claiming that the “flyover” states envy California? Yeah, California! Where you can make $100K per year and still have to live paycheck-to-paycheck! If that ain’t success, I don’t know what is.
Without the gutless Moonbeam’s gas tax you would likely be able to buy regular for about $2.10 to $2.20 a gallon. A friend in Utah told me last week that he bought regular at a Sam’s club in Salt Lake City for about $1.97 a gallon. I think Commiefornia now has the highest gasoline taxes in the country.
$2.04 for regular at Sam’s in Tucson. And dropping.
Our new Gov, Bitchy Gretchen Whitmer wants to impose a $.45/gal tax to pay for roads. This on top of increased gas tax we already pay, and increased registration fees. And, she wants to give everyone free college and half a Billion $$$ to K-12 education. And, maybe free day care. But she hasn’t said how she’ll pay for that, even though we all know it’s more and higher taxes.
And we all know that once government gets a tax imposed, its damn near impossible to get rid of it.
Likely the highest in CONUS, according to this the only State with higher average gas prices is HI, and I’m sure that will change because most CA politicritters have NEVER seen a tax increase they didn’t like!
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2018-06-20/the-10-states-with-the-highest-average-gas-prices
You speak truth TOW. Here in the PDR of MA overinflated property values combined with steep property taxes and utility costs makes for a high cost of living. Me and the spousal unit are hoping to sell our house in the next 12 months but the millage rate is so high it scares off a lot of potential buyers. The monthly taxes alone are approaching the cost to rent a small apartment.
And it has second order effects in surrounding states like NH, ME, and VT, on virtually every level.
One can go to school to become a Machinist/Millwright and easily make $80K a year, that or go through a paid internship (about 4 years) and become a power company Lineman making over $60K a year doing things like repairing power lines or disconnecting power service from four year degreed snowflakes due to nonpayment of their bill!
$60k? Triple that and you’d be closer.
When I was with SCE, most of the district office lineman shops had a “200 Club”. To get in, you had to do 200 hours of Double Time.
In one pay period.
One earthquake or windstorm would pretty well guarantee that.
And back then (2001 or so), fully qualified linemen made almost $40/hr. So you can imagine it’s well north of $50-55/hr now, meaning $125k/yr plus OT.
Base pay for Journeymen 80K +. Time & 1/2 kicks in over 40 hr. Double time over 49 hr, X3 @ 60 hr in a pay period. Depending on the state and CDL requirements minimum of 8 hr break for vehicle operators in a 24 hr period. In emergencies as NHSparky pointed out, damages ect, not hard for a qualified Journeyman to be busting $100 + an hour. Trust me, we/they EARN every damn dime of it. Taxes usually take 60% off the top, the guys with dependopotumases will get alot of it back come April. The single ones of us…Not so good. As I got older and more decrepit, I turned down anything but emergency forced O/T. Good times. Most utility companies have a “may and/or may not be required to work with or without reasonable accommodations” clause in the work contract. You may find yourself catnapping in the truck, snacking on whatever is available for a few days. One reason why you see line crews pulled in from all over the countryside when there is major damage, they gotta give the guys a break, and if the power meter ain’t spinning the poco ain’t making no money. Same with Ma Bell. That cell phone is only wireless from your hand to the tower. All kinds of cable running from the cell site back to the central office.
Damn a college degree, the skilled trades are screaming for help.
“Damn a college degree, the skilled trades are screaming for help.”
You’re absolutely right, someone with a Skilled Trade is in FAR more in demand than a snowflake with a four year Degree.
These days a Journeyman’s Card is worth its weight in Gold!
OK, I stand corrected.
Mike Rowe Works is an organization headed by a great guy that has probably saved more lives than anyone in the past decade.
I say that because a lot of kids find themselves believing everything the snowflake universities shove down their throats doesn’t make it easy to find a job that pays enough to let them live in something other than a box and squeegee cars for a living with their useless male lesbian dance studies…..
With that in mind, Mike Rowe fills a real need with his coaching of young people offering them something that they can get their teeth into instead of wandering around screaming at the sky and demanding that their make believe world where nobody is offended and sparkle ponies are free to ride and cow farts turn into real soy burgers and the world is a great place because everything is free and life is just beautiful…
Here in Austin we now are creating a glut of IT professionals and every third person I Uber for are complaining that their lives aren’t being fulfilled as they expected them to.
So thank Mr Rowe, he has helped tons of wayward kids.
Well at least some of your Austinites apparently know how to code. So they have that going for them.
And now we have a better idea of where the old Cotex came from. Good post PG, I’ve tried to just ignore her screeching in the hope that it would go away. I realize that’s not going to happen, she and her kind will just continue to multiply and breed more. My original hope was that the Dims would just have a feeding frenzy on one another and we could help President Trump continue to try and save our Republic. Instead we are seeing his own party turning on him, and more dims buying into this whole green thing. These people will destroy this Country in order to hold on to power.
I personally like my freedoms. I do hate being a tax slave to the various gubmint entities. Seems as if more and more of my hard earned money is being taken from me and spent on “programs” that do me no good at all. These sheeple think that they are trading unused “freedoms” for security. They will soon find that they have neither.
Yesterday’s history lesson. On 3 Mar 1791 Congress passed a measure taxing distilled spirits. It was the FIRST internal revenue act for the US. It’s only gotten worse.
Rumor has it the rabble weren’t to keen on the idea.
No we weren’t. Do believe it started the 2nd “Rebellion” of several that we’ve had.
Wasn’t that the impetus for the “Whiskey Rebellion?”
Correct.
All that activism and protesting and campaign work for Bernie explains why she didn’t have a paying job until she worked in a bar. She is causing a rift to widen, one that had already appeared in the Democrats, which may prove beneficial to conservatives in the future.
Be interesting to know just how old she was when she got her first paying job. According to Wikipedia, the median family income in the Yorktown Heights area of Westchester County, where OC grew up, was $137,580 back in the 2000 census, almost twenty years ago.
Like so many of the hippies back in the 60’s, OC comes from a prosperous, solidly upper middle-class, professional family background, although many of the hippies were actually quite wealthy trust fund babies. They used the wealth of their families to reject the system that produced the wealth that enabled them.
“Like so many of the hippies back in the 60’s, OC comes from a prosperous, solidly upper middle-class, professional family background”
What you said Poe, what you said.
“Free childcare”
And here I thought it was irresponsible to have children!
We can always subsidize Planned Non-Parenthood to ensure those squishy little nonproductive ‘clumps of cells’ are taken care of. Hell, let’s get HHS to inject them into mice, maybe use the leftovers to create a meat substitute!
HashtagProgressiveLogic
They are just heading us down the road to everyone’s favorite meal, “Soylent Green.”
That’s the main reason I choke when I hear libertarians tell me that their views never impact anyone else…
We don’t live in a vacuum and what we do affects a lot more people than we realize.
Legalize drugs, oh sure, that’s all we need, look how well that has worked in Europe.
Open borders, another look at Europe.
I have two spare beautiful daughters that are so happy that I am pro-life.
America started turning to the worse when the Roe v. Wade decision let planned baby genocide take root.
Life has gotten increasingly cheap since that happened.
Like it or not, it’s the truth…
Another example of not living in a vacuum.
Those that voted for Ron Paul got us oblowme killary, Benghazi and a million other pieces of bull shit.
By God they were adamant that their way of looking at things was the only way and their votes would show America how they were the only right way to think…..
Yeah, thanks for that bit of history libertarians….
We have Ross Perot to thank for eight years of “Blowjob Willie” as well!
I wonder just how many of the snowflakes supporting the Babbling Bucktoothed Bimbo from Westchester have ever had a real job out in the Real World supporting themselves? When I was a gullible young meathead in college, I was suckered into believing the eco-doomsday bullshit, but after a little bit of time in the real world my eyes got opened!
Likely very few have ever had a real non-government employer. Our own beloved commie cuttlefish, one of AOC’s worshippers, appears never to have had a job that earned something other than a gubmint paycheck. He likes to brag that both his mommy and his daddy were gubmint workers. Remember what Michelle 0bama told a group of DC gubmint workers (aka tax ticks) in one of her speeches: “You are the people that made this country.”
I saw a meme with that bug-eyed nincompoop that sums her up perfectly…
“If money doesn’t grow on trees, then why do banks have branches?”
Here’s an interesting article from the New York Post that shows OC’s organization to be just as thoroughly and contemptibly hypocritical as all the other Democrats. OC is just another lying limousine liberal:
https://nypost.com/2019/03/02/gas-guzzling-car-rides-expose-aocs-hypocrisy-amid-green-new-deal-pledge/
I doubt she cares less about her hypocrisy now that she’s on the taxpayer-funded gravy train!
You would have a hard time getting her cemented ass out of that office with an E tool. What she ‘maybe’ lacks in smarts she makes up with her conniving personality. The dumbass routine may not be genuine.
“She listed 1,049 transactions for Uber, Lyft, Juno and other car services, federal filings show. The campaign had 505 Uber expenses alone.
In all, Ocasio-Cortez spent $29,365.70 on those emissions-spewing vehicles, along with car and van rentals — even though her Queens HQ was a one-minute walk to the 7 train.
The campaign shelled out only $8,335.41 on 52 MetroCard transactions.”
She keeps tripping over her own rhetoric. In addition to all of this specious nonsense of hers, she seems to have no clue about real wages in the work world for full-time jobs, not the ridiculous stuff she’s been throwing out at people.
I do hope that she runs into someone who does take the wind out of her sails, and sends her sailing backwards. She’s doing a fine job of pissing off people like Pelosi and Feinstein, too, so there is hope.
I was just about to post that, Poe.
Like most of our “betters” on the left, she’s a raging hypocrite. She is so stupid (or expects to get away with it, I don’t know which is worse) that she posts videos of herself that show she might not live where she’s supposed to.
https://nypost.com/2019/03/02/ocasio-cortezs-home-cooking-video-contradicts-address-claims/
She’s previously claimed to live in her father’s condo, but nobody in the building saw her coming and going and mail piles up for weeks. She was supposed to have moved, but the video she posted cooking in her kitchen is the same kitchen as months ago.
Hey, at least she’s not an openly anti-American, anti-Semite. Of the freshman class of congressmen, she’s not the worst.
EVERYONE! If you have not made out a living trust by now … DO IT! In the event you die (or your spouse), all of EVERYTHING (house, car, bank accounts, etc.) will automatically transfer to your designated next of kin WITHOUT having to go into probate. The $1500 or so is certainly worth it.
Peace of mind is worth the money.
$1500?
I did a Will, POA, and Advanced Directive (living will) through Legal Zoom.
All for about $150. Took it to the bank and had everything testated and put into power for free.
I have my will all made out and filed, my wife has to cremate me, put my ashes in a duesch bag and run me thru one last time!
I requested to be mummified and placed in giant Tupperware for future generations to study. The lawyer did not think I was funny. I was not joking.
I requested to have my remains scattered at Disneyworld, no cremation!
What did you pick for your “last ride” where your ashes will be scattered. Hopefully, not one of those indoor thrill rides. I wouldn’t want some six year old getting a snoot full of API. Oh, you said “no cremation;” that could make your scattering a hazmat event.
P.S. No one is going to want to traipse around the “happiest place on earth” with some API stuck to the bottom of their shoe.
Disney gets -very- annoyed with folks scattering cremains in their parks. They even have special cleanup teams and processes for such events.
Funny. I can just see a chopper at 200 feet over Disney with a wood chipper sticking out the door and someone shoving API into the intake chute.
Each of my kids gets to pick one lure out of my tackle box. I will then be cremated and my ashes stored in it and buried.
My other thought was to be loaded into a spring loaded casket filled with confetti so that I can surprise the hell out of some future archeologist.
Sparky:
“I did a Will, POA, and Advanced Directive (living will) through Legal Zoom.”
Active duty and retired personnel can usually go to their base legal office and they will make a will for no cost. My large base wouldn’t do a trust, though; I had to pay a lawer to make one for the Russian and I. Do your heirs a favor … get a will and living will. It will make their life easier as you assume room temperature.
Also remember to update your Designation of Beneficiary forms for your investment accounts (IRA, 401K, etc.) DoB forms supersede wills in most if not all jurisdictions. Especially important if you’ve divorced, had children, re-married, etc.. Get the money into the hands of the people you think most deserving.
Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer and have never played one on TV or in the movies.
Did, did you just tell us to update our DD93s and SGLI?
I had a flashback, thanks for that.
I pissed of S1 once putting myself down, I’ve had a will since I was 18, update every 5 years.
An intervivos family trust with a companion will that can cover anything not part of the trust estate is the best way to avoid probate proceedings and their attorney’s fees and probate fees. The “living” will stuff is what will control your healthcare directives in case you are declared non-compos mentis (like in a coma).
Is there a good online reference for reading up on this prior to seeking out the pro to make it so? (This is actually a timely and helpful topic for me)
Just google intervivos trust. You could also go to any law school’s library and peruse the treatises on trusts. Some even have forms in them. I also bet LegalZoom has a form they would like to sell you. I have one, but I hired an estate planning attorney to do mine, as she shared office space with a lawyer friend. I crafted a complicated one once for my guy I bought hay from but he refused to give me the input to finalize it.
Send an email to AW1Ed. I hereby authorize him (AW1Ed) to send you my email address. Then I can PM you, and pass on some of what I know. (Plus, I would like to chat with you about CAS.)
Email sent as requested, RGR769.
Cool, I’ll check my email.
I checked my email. Nothing received yet. Also, my handle here is lower case, but that has nothing to do with my email address.
I stand corrected.
*grin*
The blonde in the photo above appears to be searching for a clue.
That isn’t a real blonde. Roots are showing.
Kinda long read but it will let you trudge through the depths of the NDS movement. Bring boots.
Mostly cigs and grand disorganized planning meetings, includes don’t worry bout paying for it.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/socialism-and-young-socialists.html
A sample of the level of discourse.
“Who knows how many years out of the last 50 years have the Democrats had the majority?” she asked. A middle-aged guy in a green pullover held up three fingers in A-okay formation. He was correct, but she wasn’t pleased. “I see you’re trying to answer that question, but that is a white-supremacist hand signal.”
The other take away.
Don’t mess with 4chan.
I couldn’t read that whole thing, name-dropping insider nonsense.
A thing occurred to me thought, it seems a lot of the movers and shakers of the DSA are inteligencia. According to Mr. Bezmenov they’re the first to be liquidated because they’ll become disillusioned and begin to question the revolution.
Somebody has to be the guard when they dig their own graves in the hinterlands and I look good in a uniform on a horse.
Extended read.
Had to do in small bites.
The circular logic is excruciating.
The COMPLETE lack of understanding of how the world works is junior high level.
Typically after you start working a couple entry level jobs you move past the rainbows and unicorn phase and look for constructive ways to contribute and, get paid for it.
The sniveling about college expenses is a good example. Pick a degree that pays. Compare colleges and costs, not just prestige. And, don’t just pile on loans. Work study, summer jobs and even the military.
It’s the f**king entitlement.
“I work in NYC, I made an app/worked for x/went to blah-blah. I make $100k+, everyone else is just lazy or stupid so we MUST redistribute money! The Sex in the City d*ke and Uncle Bernie said it’s good!”
You have to be part of The Cult to make it there. I’ve had friends and family that’ve worked for or with some nonprofits or unions. Twilight Zone.
Ditto. I have often dreamt of being in the position of General Strelnikov of Dr. Zhivago fame. And I still have a horse that is calm during gunfire (from my re-enactor days).
That’s a great role-Pascha Antipov is the courageous young idealist who is corrupted and becomes the murderous Strelnikov, but you can’t expect a prog to appreciate that kind of lesson-they are above anything like that.
I was drawn to the photo in the NY Mag piece. The angry young hipster in the lower right channelling his inner Vladimir Ilyich was particularly poignant. And those limp-wristed raised-fist power salutes kinda make you want to hide under the bed, don’t they?
It also strikes me that the kind of people involved are desperately hoping history will repeat itself. Which it never does. What they’re going to wind up with instead is a beat-to-shit ’60s counterculture with new paint and radial tires.
My advice, purely gratuitous, for those younger members of the TAH cohort who might find themselves at such a party is that when they start throwing around “proletariat” and the big zinger of “come the revolution,” your best option is to drink heavily, and try to not yield to the temptation to pee on young Vladimir Ilyich’s shoes…
Even “old” Vladmir had Beria to deal with anyone who tried to pee on his shoes. That is always the way tyrants roll; ask anyone who survived Pol Pot’s killing fields.
So it’s basically socialism as a fashion statement. With a googly-eyed twit on t-shirts instead of Che. Brilliant. Some greedy capitalist is gonna make a killing.
What the little snowflakes (and Lars) fail to recognize is that invariably, socialism becomes less about bullet points and more about bullets.
And, sooner or later, you run out of other peoples money!!!
“The problem with Socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” – Lady Margaret Thatcher
Remember – they’ll get it “right” the next time…