republicans have no shame

[japhy]

If you don't mind me asking, how do you feel about corporations that ask for bailouts?

Hey, hey, hey now.... let's not call them "bailouts". I prefer the term Paycheck Protection Program. I saw the paperwork for one of those loans today. I was seeing an ethical dilemma coming up in the next couple of months; cut employees or cut dividends.

The SBA says I can have my cake and eat it too. Who am I to argue?

And my tax cuts will live for another year. I was wrong about Kushner and Mnuchin, they are the shit.

[PhDhawk]

I do. My question, again, is, if we are already paying for the same services that are available elsewhere in the community, why are we paying for them again, and at the same time using money that could be going toward computers, books, smaller classroom sizes, etc.? I don't think it is a confusing question, but everybody seems to be assuming that I want the school to be full of scared, cold, hungry kids.

I think there are probably lots of reasons.

Logistical ones, a kid can't leave school every day at lunch to go to the grocery store to use his foodstamps.

To fill in the gaps. There are probably a lot of families who are relatively poor but not poor enough to qualify for some other the programs.

Some students may just have bad parents who don't provide for them properly.

You're viewing it as a redundancy when maybe it's more of a fail-safe. And a new textbook or a smaller class might be less important to a kid who isn't eating meals regularly.

I hate government waste, but I'm bothered much more by someone who fakes an injury to get social security disability benefits or lies about their income to get food stamps, and not at all bothered if a kid gets his lunch subsidized even though the catholic church next door has some canned goods he could go get for free.

what psych said. good response!

If you don't mind me asking, how do you feel about corporations that ask for bailouts?

Depends on the corporation and circumstances.

[Shirley]

[Shirley]

[seahawk]

I dont disagree with the point of your post. My issue is with the perceived arrogance of those who think if you dont move to the city you cannot be a valuable, educated person. Your father is an example of that and my story is similar. I did not attend Harvard but I do have a masters. I chose to move out of the city and back to the rural areas because thats where I'm happy and it keeps me sane. I would argue that in this age it is technology, not prisons, that will allow people to live remote and function in some industries. Seahawks act of arrogance and superiority, the omnipotent one, is fucking tiresome.

You changed the argument, TDub, I've said one thing, that the new prisons built in the last 30 years were welfare for dying small towns. You've not disputed that, just changed the subject.

According to federal estimates, the payroll for 184 prison staffers would be about $8,000,00. Please explain what industries a declining small town could attract that would make up for that size payroll. That doesn't include the goods that the community can sell the prison, like milk, eggs, meat, clothing, soap. Or the housing that will be needed for employees and families. Or the costs of upkeep for the prison.

Please detail the technology industries that would provide the same as the Taxpayer Welfare that you believe rural towns deserve by keeping unneeded prisons open. Are you talking about taxpayer investment in broadband technology? Which is just more Welfare for for rural areas?

Just curious, if you or your family have medical needs above those that can be provided in a rural hospital, will you refuse to seek treatment in some city?

From the beginning this is what I have taken issue with

" gave jobs to the Bubbas who were too stupid, ill-educated, or unwilling to move to get other jobs."

You have since reiterated your stance and called me a sick puppy. For a person that has gotten at least 1 elite poster removed for name calling you sure sling a lot of your own name calling shit around.

It's obvious that anything I say will only be misconstrued or misrepresented into a new TDub strawman. It's also obvious that prison overbuilding and costliness is too complex a topic to discuss with you, so I give up, TDub.

But I will state that your last statement is a flat out lie.

[seahawk]

I agree with you that Seahawk's post was a gross generalization of what is happening in small town America. But I do believe that the majority of the brightest, most talented kids in these areas are leaving to pursue larger opportunities. Not all, obviously, but a majority percentage. It has been happening since the GI Bill started offering to send the spouses and children of dead WWII soldiers to college. Even before that, the Depression sent people fleeing for larger cities in anywhere in America where they felt they could find work. There were simply more opportunities.

The GI Bill sent my grandmother from a tiny town in Southern Illinois to college at Southern Illinois University after my Grandpa died serving our country as a fighter pilot trainer. That gave her the skills to leave her small town and move to Denver. Then it sent my Mom to college at CU and then Kansas.

My Dad's father did the opposite and chose to come back to his tiny town in Kansas despite his undergrad degree from Kansas and a Masters from Harvard. But of his three children, the only one who didnt move away to a larger city was his only kid that didn't go to college and even he moved to the rural outskirts of Kansas City. Of that kid's four kids, the only smart one moved away and became a pharmacist. The other three are all educated to at most a high school level and are a rural postal carrier with a string of bad marriages, a handy man/construction worker who has his work opportunities limited by a collection of DUI's and a moron who moved to Vegas to be a poker player.

So of those three generations of my family from two different small towns, there is a grand total of one person left in those two original small towns and that was my aunt, who after moving away to go to KU, took early retirement from her job as a teacher in KC to move back home to the family farm to care for my grandparents and who is still staying in the family home waiting to die from the end stages of 50 years of smoking.

It doesn't feel like this life story is out of the ordinary. It feels like most really small (less that 1k) towns are facing the same issue with the last three generations of families.

I dont disagree with the point of your post. My issue is with the perceived arrogance of those who think if you dont move to the city you cannot be a valuable, educated person. Your father is an example of that and my story is similar. I did not attend Harvard but I do have a masters. I chose to move out of the city and back to the rural areas because thats where I'm happy and it keeps me sane. I would argue that in this age it is technology, not prisons, that will allow people to live remote and function in some industries. Seahawks act of arrogance and superiority, the omnipotent one, is fucking tiresome.

i could be wrong, but i think you, my folks, and the like are in the minority of those that live rurally

in my experience, most are not as well-educated

I don't personally have any answers to dying small towns and have probably have come to think that maybe the best we can do is to give greater support to those towns that are of a larger size, but are not in the "City/Metroplex" designation. My background working on prison overcrowding led me to visit all the prisons in one state, write legislation to get people with non-violent records out, and I've worked with corrections folks and chaired the board of a small town juvenile facility, written grants for small communities to get funds to set up substance abuse programs and drug courts to keep people out of jail and prison.

You've mentioned private prisons and while they're still a small percentage, they have powerful lobbyists that try to extort funding for facilities, especially those in declining small towns. They're often badly run and try to keep up numbers of inmates to keep their contracts. The big change in privatization has largely been in local jails, where many people serve sentences that are under a year and that are misdemeanors. Private contractors also try to get food service contracts, health service contracts, and telephone contracts--and all need those numbers to stay high. Add the private prison lobbyists to the corrections workers union lobbyists and you have a pretty big lobby group that has a large vested interest in keeping people in prison even though crime rates have gone down.

I'd rather see money spent on scientific research, on lowering tuition at state colleges, on supporting college students, and on public schools than on creating a geriatric prison population because some people in the 1980s based their elections on changing to determinate sentencing.

And, as I said early on, I think that Coronavirus may cause a reversal of the trend to lengthy sentences even though Trump and his minions have said their intent is to keep ramping up those long sentences.

I supported Kamala Harris because I think that reducing prison populations and prison expenditures is such a high priority, but it's such a tricky area that it takes someone who's been on the prosecution side to be able to lobby for the changes required.

[TDub]

You changed the argument, TDub, I've said one thing, that the new prisons built in the last 30 years were welfare for dying small towns. You've not disputed that, just changed the subject.

According to federal estimates, the payroll for 184 prison staffers would be about $8,000,00. Please explain what industries a declining small town could attract that would make up for that size payroll. That doesn't include the goods that the community can sell the prison, like milk, eggs, meat, clothing, soap. Or the housing that will be needed for employees and families. Or the costs of upkeep for the prison.

Please detail the technology industries that would provide the same as the Taxpayer Welfare that you believe rural towns deserve by keeping unneeded prisons open. Are you talking about taxpayer investment in broadband technology? Which is just more Welfare for for rural areas?

Just curious, if you or your family have medical needs above those that can be provided in a rural hospital, will you refuse to seek treatment in some city?

From the beginning this is what I have taken issue with

" gave jobs to the Bubbas who were too stupid, ill-educated, or unwilling to move to get other jobs."

You have since reiterated your stance and called me a sick puppy. For a person that has gotten at least 1 elite poster removed for name calling you sure sling a lot of your own name calling shit around.

It's obvious that anything I say will only be misconstrued or misrepresented into a new TDub strawman. It's also obvious that prison overbuilding and costliness is too complex a topic to discuss with you, so I give up, TDub.

But I will state that your last statement is a flat out lie.

"Too complex a topic to discuss with you". Youre proving my point while calling me a liar.

[seahawk]

Well, yes, it is a lie that I got anyone removed for name calling. I've not asked for anyone to be banned. I did object to someone with moderator powers altering a post of mine to insert a video making fun of Hillary Clinton. I have no idea who that was, but a less stupid person might have noticed that at that time I never entered videos in any of my posts.

As for talking about Corrections and Prison Policies, it is quite complex to try and figure out how to reduce prison populations as people are often sentenced under different laws and trying to get them out on the back end of their mandatory minimum sentences can be difficult to unravel. I believe that Oregon currently has lawsuits trying to undermine legislation that would free some folks earlier. But, you haven't seemed to want to discuss anything like that.

Trying to get Corrections leaders to change from prisons to drug treatment is seemingly too complex and difficult for anyplace but Texas, where the regular Corrections folks just hated it when Ann Richards insisted that they build drug treatment facilities instead of more prison beds. Now they brag about being ahead of other systems.

Currently, I'd think that all kinds of small communities that wanted a prison would be terrified, because they are basically incubators for COVID-19. The fact that inmates often have to buy their own soap and use communal showers, don't have the chance to wash hands that much during a day and are in confined close quarters makes prisons perfect places for the virus, that Correction Officers will then bring home to the rest of the community. Which will overwhelm rural hospitals with one ICU bed and pretty awful care apart from Virus times.

[Deleted User 289]

Not too sure if Trey understands that the economy doesn't really matter much if/when you're dead.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/in ... e-n1184036

[chiknbut]

[Deleted User 89]

is she really that unintelligent, or does she have to try to appear so?

[chiknbut]

is she really that unintelligent, or does she have to try to appear so?

I think she's actually very intelligent. Draw your own conclusion.

[twocoach]

is she really that unintelligent, or does she have to try to appear so?

She is intelligent but she is pitching a dumb sales pitch to unintelligent consumers.

[Deleted User 62]

is she really that unintelligent, or does she have to try to appear so?

She is intelligent but she is pitching a dumb sales pitch to unintelligent consumers.

Pretty spot on assessment here.

[Shirley]

I wonder what Trump's trying to distract us from now?

[chiknbut]

[seahawk]

I think Dr. Birx explained yesterday that the private labs weren't making enough money from testing--which must explain the decline over the past week or two.

[Deleted User 62]

I think Dr. Birx explained yesterday that the private labs weren't making enough money from testing--which must explain the decline over the past week or two.

If only the Stimulus packages in some way could help.

[PhDhawk]

I think Dr. Birx explained yesterday that the private labs weren't making enough money from testing--which must explain the decline over the past week or two.

If only the Stimulus packages in some way could help.

I heard her say that. She said at $50 a test it wasn't economical, but at $100 a test it was, because that was what was needed to pay the technicians.

There's something completely fucked up about those numbers if the testing is at all fast or high-throughput.

Now, finding and hiring enough qualified people to administer the tests, I could believe that to be a bottle-neck. But the numbers she quoted seem like complete nonsense to me.

[Deleted User 62]

I think Dr. Birx explained yesterday that the private labs weren't making enough money from testing--which must explain the decline over the past week or two.

If only the Stimulus packages in some way could help.

I heard her say that. She said at $50 a test it wasn't economical, but at $100 a test it was, because that was what was needed to pay the technicians.

There's something completely fucked up about those numbers if the testing is at all fast or high-throughput.

Now, finding and hiring enough qualified people to administer the tests, I could believe that to be a bottle-neck. But the numbers she quoted seem like complete nonsense to me.

Depends on who in the administration/cabinet/donor list is and what their ROI needs to be.