Republicans: continued

[pErvinalia]

Where's your proof that Sanders and Biden got rich via "legal corruption"?

[Hermit]

One of our two new Qanon Republican congresswomen.

What an ignorant chauvinist. Just looking at the first two claims:

Electricity was not invented. Ever. If anyone had "invented" how it could be generated and used, it would be Alessandro Volta, who was born in Italy in 1775 and lived there all his life. Volta invented the electric battery. He also discovered how electricity could be generated chemically. The electric unit Volt is derived from his name.

The horseless carriage aka automobile aka car was invented by Carl Benz. The Benz Patent-Motorwagen, built in 1885 by Karl Benz, is widely regarded as the world's first production automobile. Benz was born in Germany (German Confederation for the pedants) in 1844, and lived there all his life.

[Cunt]

Where's your proof that Sanders and Biden got rich via "legal corruption"?

A lifetime of work in government, and fabulous wealth are just a coincidence, I guess. My mistake.

[JimC]

They are just filthy capitalist swine like all the rest, no need to invoke specific "Democrat" or "politician" corruption other than that which pertains to all such swine in general...

[Cunt]

They are just filthy capitalist swine like all the rest, no need to invoke specific "Democrat" or "politician" corruption other than that which pertains to all such swine in general...

That phrase 'legal corruption' wasn't mine, I heard it from that interview.

It is exactly what he meant by it.

[Sean Hayden]

Where's your proof that Sanders and Biden got rich via "legal corruption"?

A lifetime of work in government, and fabulous wealth are just a coincidence, I guess. My mistake.

Yes, it is another mistake of yours. --shocking

[Sean Hayden]

Jim: In a piece about how they became millionaires,

The bulk of the Bidens’ income came from payments for the memoirs they’ve each written since the former vice president left office in January 2017.

--from another piece

Dr. Biden, who started her career in the 1970s, has worked as an English teacher at an adolescent psychiatric hospital, high schools and community colleges, while earning two master’s degrees and a doctorate in education along the way.

She didn’t quit teaching when her husband served as vice president, returning to the classroom just days after the inauguration.

It's safe to assume at this point that if Cunt posts it, then it's probably a lie or misleading at best.

[JimC]

I did have my tongue firmly in my cheek in the capitalist swine post...

[Sean Hayden]

--I guess with all the loons foaming at the mouth right now my humor meter is off.

[pErvinalia]

Where's your proof that Sanders and Biden got rich via "legal corruption"?

A lifetime of work in government, and fabulous wealth are just a coincidence, I guess. My mistake.

So no proof.

[Hermit]

Of course, that might be because of all the legal corruption that allows most of them to get rich in public service (I'm talking about Sanders, Biden, and any other asshole who got rich at the public teat for decades)

Parler must more of an echo chamber than I feared. And you read not much else. Not even here.
Last February I replied to you with this post about Sanders:

How did Bernie allow himself to become a millionaire?

1. Sanders has earnt a six-digit salary sine he became a member of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1991. Now he is in his 13th year of serving the country as a Senator. He started on an annual salary of $165k in 2007. Since 2009 Senators are paid $174k per annum. I guess that helped a bit.
2. Sanders published a book titled Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In. It reached number three on The New York Times Best Seller list and is still selling reasonably well today. The following year he published another book that sells reasonably well. I guess the royalties from them helped.
3. When his wife's last parent died the couple inherited their property. I guess that helped their net worth along too.

Bernie currently speaks out about billionaires.

In April last year Forbes published an article titled "How Bernie Sanders, The Socialist Senator, Amassed A $2.5 Million Fortune". FFS, with $2.5 million you are well off, but you are not sitting on a fortune, especially when you are 77 years old by the time you get there. Compared to billionaires it's chickenshit. Imagine being worth a billion dollars. That's 1000 million. Bloomberg's net worth is $65,200 million. If he gave you $652 million of it you'd be happy as Larry, and Blooms would hardly notice being 1% poorer. So stop going on about Sanders's $2.5 million.

You can become a millionaire almost accidentally. Bear with me. It's story time.

I was a surf bum until I got tired of my hand to mouth existence at the age of 33. So I got a fulltime job delivering cartonned meat. After a bit over two years I had a few thousand dollars in my savings account. I used that, and a few thousand more that I borrowed from a finance broker to buy an old, clapped out truck with work. Wohoo, subcontractor. Three months into the new job that truck had cost me so much in repairs that my bank account balance had dropped to 64 dollars. Merry Christmas 1988. But I persevered. Two years later I replaced the hill detector by leasing a brand spanking new truck with a 6 ton payload. No more unscheduled expenses. Hooray. Come 1992, I started wondering what I should do with the money now idling in the savings account. It finished up as the $48k deposit on a house I bought for $154K.

The house was a tiny, single story, 2½ bedroom thing, one in a row of similar ones, each with a 5 metre street frontage and sitting wall to wall on about 45m² of land. The neighbourhood was, shall we say, somewhat Bohemian, but that was precisely what I liked about it. Luckily for me it had dual street frontage, and the back street was considerably wider than the front. That's where I parked my truck. The truck was almost twice as long as each house was wide, but the neighbours were OK with that (until the husband of one of them burnt his brains out with alcohol and went mad, but that's another story).

Then I got tired of living in the Big Smoke and looked to settle in a smaller town. Almost moved to Newcastle, but finished up in South Australia two years after that. The price I got for my little abode had me utterly amazed, but all the other houses in my street that were sold around that time went for very similar amounts, so, it sold for "the going rate", I suppose.

I just had a look at what houses like mine were sold for in that street since 2019. Turns out you can't get a two bedroom, single story, unrenovated house on 45m² of land for under $1.25 million, and you'll need at least $1.5 million for a three bedroom version. So, yeah, had I staid put, you could have called me a millionaire, but calling me rich you could not. I would have just been this bloke who lived in a house he bought for $154k. I would have become a millionaire without even trying.

Oh, and my daughter's mother is in a similar position in Auckland. You wouldn't believe the offers she gets now for the tiny two bedroom semi-detached home she bought circa 1980 for around $27k.

Six weeks ago I posted the following about Biden:

According to a Forbes estimate Joe Biden and his wife's net worth is $9 million. The couple’s fortune is mostly tied to public speaking engagements and book royalties, according to tax returns and financial disclosures released by the Biden campaign and published on the campaign’s website. (Link)

More detailed info on the Bidens' income between 1998 and 2019 here.

While the Bidens are undoubtedly very well off, it is absurd to speak of their wealth in conjunction with Jeff Bezos. Forbes estimates his net worth to be 186,000 million dollars. (Link). That's 20,666 times the Bidens' net worth.

Your repeated claims about reading or listening to various points of view look increasingly unbelievable.

[Svartalf]

Her message seems to be that any act, however violent, if done "in the name of the people" is always allowed...

Not sure I get that, but she sure is a moron, because, while she states that all greatness in America came from the people, she seems not to notice that those were exceptional people, and generally not hooligans.

[L'Emmerdeur]

There's some genuine dark humor in the vacuous astonishment and paranoia of Republican personalities confronting the marked tendency of Republican politicians to come down with the killer bug. Some US Representatives were hunkered down in an undisclosed location inside the Capitol as the Trumpists had their day. It was fairly tight quarters, preventing social distancing. One of the representatives tried to hand out masks to her fellow congresscritters. All the Republicans in the video refused them. It's a clip from CNN--I didn't find the raw video.

'Watch GOP lawmakers refuse masks during Capitol riot'

[JimC]

Wearing a mask is a sure sign that you have become a crypto-Marxist...

[Brian Peacock]

The virus doesn't care who you vote for. It just needs you to be wet and warm.