After this's all over, I hope the U.S. gov't bills Trump for the damage he's done to our reputation

[Chankgeez]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7VHeazTn_A[/youtube]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7VHeazTn_A

[crochambeau]

When did this thread become about Ceaușescu?

Oh... yeah, right.

[Chankgeez]

Favorite song about Ceaușescu:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a8dNo0w308[/youtube]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a8dNo0w308




Also:

[Dandolin]

[stops listening to Kew. Rhone. Commences Taraf de Haidouks marathon]

[Jwar]

Bernie has lost his fucking mind. As a guy who owns investment properties (this is how I feed my family), his push for anti landlord and free housing is directly going to fuck people like myself. Everyone looks at landlords like they are the big bad wolf. Well, that's just not true. Not all landlords are dickheads and not all of them ignore people or don't fix things. I kill myself doing my business (notice my lack of presence here this last summer). I'm actually so pissed off about it that I'm going to start working toward writing a Fairness Act that would entail equal fairness for renters and landlords alike. Unfortunately 90% of the people I've spoken with about renting have an extremely skewed thought process behind being a renter. They take zero ownership over anything, which is absurd. I recently evicted a tenant for the first time and it killed me emotionally. I cried over it, I fought with myself over it, but ultimately it was out of my hands. I hated it. I HATE IT. I treat people with respect and do what's right and they spit in my face. This has been my experience as a landlord. SO fuck you Bernie Sanders you rich POS. He doesn't know what it's like to struggle and has an idiotic ideology. Here's an idea, let's help people change their situations without giving everything to them for fucking free. How about helping everyone and not just some because guess what? If those laws pass, my family may lose their house, my business, my livelihood...etc. I didn't create this crisis. I didn't help in it either. Why the hell should I be one who suffers it? Because I worked hard and busted my ass for the last 5 years trying to figure out how to make this bullshit business work. Being a landlord fucking sucks for anyone out there thinking it's awesome. I barely make any money and sometimes I make none at all. Depends on what happens. Did I have to replace an ac or 4 this year? A main line? Or other extremely expensive items repaired. Happens all the time.

My brother made zero last year. ZERO. His net is 46k and he made zero. That tells you how this shit can work.

What needs to happen is someone actually kick the shit out of banks and states who constantly raise their interest rates and taxes (also fuck you insurance while we are at it). Did you know that I raise rents 3-5% a year just to keep up with the taxes and insurance raises?

Sorry to ramble and vent. Just...seriously. Fuck you Bernie. Go build it with your wealth you hypocrite douche bag.

[Chankgeez]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sanderss-r ... ge=1&pos=5

[Jwar]

Is there a way to read that without subscribing? Cause I’m not doing that.

[Jwar]

Regardless I’ll never trust him. His view points do not align at all with my political or moral spectrum. I like some of what he wants to do but disagree with a lot of it as well. Change my mind. I’m willing to listen to reason. Even though obviously that last post I made was all emotion.

[Chankgeez]

Weird that you're hittin' a paywall. Worked for me. Have you read some WSJ articles lately? Maybe you've reached their limit of free articles.

You could try clearing your browser history. I could always copy the text of the article and post it here.

[Chankgeez]

Here's the text of the article:

NSFW: show

BURLINGTON, Vt. — Bernie Sanders says that if he is elected president, he will convince skeptics to support his agenda by building a movement so powerful that they will have no choice but to join him.

It is the same thing he says happened when he was mayor here in the 1980s, his only experience as a chief executive to date. “Democrats, Republicans were not stupid,” Mr. Sanders said in an interview in his campaign office. “And they looked around and they said, ‘Oh my God, we thought this guy was a fluke, he’d come and he’d go, [instead he] is further transforming politics in this city’…. So they started working with us in a much more constructive way.”

Mr. Sanders says his opponents came to their senses and joined him. But a close examination of the Vermont lawmaker’s record as mayor shows that at times he also went to them, working with Republicans, police and business on key issues facing the community—sometimes to the frustration of his liberal allies.

“The city was run in the 1980s as a coalition between what you would now call the progressives and the Republicans,” said John Franco, assistant city attorney in the Sanders administration. “Bernie is a fiscal conservative. The saying in Vermont is he’s tighter than the bark on a tree.”

The Wall Street Journal interviewed more than a dozen people who lived and worked in Burlington from 1981 to 1989, including Mr. Sanders and his wife, Jane, at the time the director of the Youth Office. What emerges is a picture of an executive who had the same goals for governance as he does today, but won favor with Republicans when his administration audited the city’s finances, joined with the business community on a controversial development project and once sided with the police and factory workers over protesters.

“He’ll listen to the points of the other person. And as long as the goal is not just to, you know, feather the nests of the wealthy,” he will work with people, Mrs. Sanders said.

It is a period that the senator doesn’t often discuss on the campaign trail. His deal-making past could help him reach out to centrist voters but could also alienate supporters who are looking for an uncompromising candidate to upend the system. (On a recent episode of “The View,” Mr. Sanders struggled to name a Republican he worked with who wasn’t dead or retiring.)

Louie Manno, a radio host here in the 1980s, said Mr. Sanders did a “pretty good job” as mayor because his governing was less radical than his campaigns.

Mr. Manno is a supporter of President Trump, but he said he isn’t worried about a Sanders presidency upending the country: “If he became the president of the United States, we’d still be a free-market economy, we would still have an army, we’d still have a Second Amendment.”

Shortly after Mr. Sanders, an independent who identified as a Democratic socialist, was first elected mayor, by just 10 votes, Mr. Franco and Sandy Baird, a progressive activist and lawyer who later became a state representative, were standing in the city’s courthouse. Ms. Baird remembers Mr. Franco turning to her and proclaiming: “Welcome to the revolution.”

But in his first term in office, one key initiative of Mr. Sanders’s administration was more quotidian: Cleaning up the city’s finances, a move that earned trust from some Republicans. Mr. Franco said they wanted to prove to skeptics they knew how to govern.

The Sanders administration audited the city’s finances and found a surplus of nearly $2 million, which it invested into capital improvements.

Mr. Sanders also formed some alliances with the business community over the Burlington waterfront, which local developers wanted to revamp. Mr. Sanders said during his campaign that the city wasn’t for sale. But once in office, he decided to back a commercial development plan.

After that idea fell apart amid progressive resistance, the Sanders administration pivoted to a development vision focused on public access, the basis for the current waterfront, which includes a bike path and dog park.

Mr. Sanders considers the waterfront a significant piece of his legacy and held his 2016 presidential kickoff rally in a spot framed by Lake Champlain and the mountains.

Peter Clavelle, who succeeded Mr. Sanders as mayor and oversaw the final stages of waterfront development, said Mr. Sanders’s involvement with the business community helped make it happen.

“Bernie was not just the rabble rouser,” said Mr. Clavelle, who was the first director of the Community and Economic Development Office under Mr. Sanders.

David Thelander, a GOP-aligned independent on Burlington’s Board of Aldermen at the time, said he found Mr. Sanders receptive to economic development proposals.

But some progressives never got over Mr. Sanders’s support for a more commercial waterfront.

“One of the things that really bugs me about him is that he always claims he never changes his position, that he is consistent in everything that he does. This is one of the really big inconsistencies about Bernie,” said Rick Sharp, who runs Burlington Segway tours and opposed commercial development of the waterfront.

Mr. Sanders again found himself on opposite sides of progressive activists in June 1983, when hundreds of antiwar activists protested General Electric Co. for making military weapons at a plant here. Greg Guma, a progressive journalist who was involved in the antiwar movement, remembers telling Mr. Sanders of the plans to protest.

“He was very upset with us,” said Mr. Guma, who wrote a book about Mr. Sanders’s tenure as mayor. Mr. Sanders told the group to demonstrate at congressional offices instead, Mr. Guma said.

Mr. Sanders followed up with a call to tell Mr. Guma that if he protested at the plant, he would be arrested. Mr. Guma went anyway. Eighty-eight people were arrested, including Mr. Guma, who went back to the protest after getting out of jail and was arrested again. Mr. Sanders observed the arrests and didn’t intervene, Mr. Guma said.

“My view was you had hundreds and hundreds of jobs that were decent-paying union jobs. You shut them down here, they’re just going to move someplace else,” Mr. Sanders told The Wall Street Journal.

Some of those same protesters who stood outside the General Electric plant more than three decades ago now stand outside Mr. Sanders’s Senate office on Church Street to protest his support for basing F-35 fighter jets at the Burlington Airport. As with GE, Mr. Sanders says he supports the F-35 program because of the local jobs involved.

While Mr. Sanders did occasionally make surprising alliances, he still had plenty of critics—especially establishment Democrats. Mr. Sanders beat an incumbent Democrat for the post and that first year the Board of Aldermen attempted to block his every move and his cabinet. Despite working with Republicans on occasion, he had a GOP opponent every election cycle.

Ernie Pomerleau, a Republican developer, said he worked with the Sanders administration at times. But he always tried to sink Mr. Sanders when election time came around. Mr. Pomerleau said that one campaign cycle, he informed Mr. Sanders that his friends had been encouraging him to be Mr. Sanders’s campaign manager.

“Why?” asked Mr. Sanders.

“Everybody I have supported has lost,” Mr. Pomerleau replied.

Mr. Sanders laughed.

[Chankgeez]

[Gone Fission]

What happens when someone realizes that a turd can’t be gilded and turns to spray tan instead.

[Chankgeez]

[Dandolin]

This thread is decorative-gourd-season-appropriate, motherfuckers.

[TraceItalian]

Everytime i lower the bar of expectations, Orange Skull slides under it