Comments

1

Big tough Donnie had to run away from the mean women. What a little bitch

2

"We have met the moment and we have prevailed."
--Fake "president" meltdown donny

Yeah. If by 'prevailng' you mean
LOSING THE WAR ON Coronvirus.

Worst.
'President.'
EVER.

3

Is that the Great Reckoning coming?

Where trump and his ever-faithful followers
LOSE the Election -- thru Attrition?
Goody.

The question is: how many will
he/they take Down with them?

4

He can't possibly be enjoying any of this. And while serving that office shouldn't necessarily be "enjoyable" per se, he seems abjectly fucking miserable. There was a ton of speculation that he never actually wanted the job in the first place; now that he's got it, he's gotta be desperate to give it up. I see him losing in a landslide this November, then taking advantage of the opportunity to whine incessantly that the fake news media did him in. What an ass.

5

Mission Accomplished!

6

@2
More accurately,
"We have met the enemy, and He is Us!"
Walt Kelly's words are truly immortal

7

@4
Even if the GOP loses in November, I dread the amount of damage they will do from Nov 3rd to Jan 2021.

9

It is really incomprehensible that we have such a tempter tantrum throwing shit bag in the White House. His behavior today was so obscene. I cannot even imagine what the world thinks. He is LOSING IT. He has always been a bully, but this has gone just too fucking far. Don't give him a platform. If all he is going to do is lie, lash out at people asking legitimate questions, and stom off in a huff because his ego is not being stroked, FUCK HIM. IGNORE HIM. DO NOT SHOW UP NO CAMERAS. NO QUESTIONS. NO ATTENTION. I have cared for troubled, angry children who have more emotional capacity to function in the world than this 73 year old skin bag full of shit ENOUGH ALREADY!!!!

10

I submit this for your daily poetry. A lot of people probably forgot about this guy, or are completely unfamiliar with his work.. But he was actually instrumental in helping to establish Seattle as a literary hub, while also laying the groundwork for artist-friendly contracts with local indie labels. He really deserves a lot more love than he gets, god rest his tortured soul.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4w3ztwfLwME

12

"Eviction history is often used by landlords as a determinant for whether a prospective tenant will be good to rent to or not."

Let me rephrase this for you: "whether or not someone paid their previous landlords is often used as a determinant for whether or not they are likely to pay the NEXT one." Yes, whether someone shafted their previous landlord is quite relevant. Would you work for someone who had a documented history of not paying their previous employees? I didn't think so.

This Council just has their heads up their asses. Or maybe their heads are all up Sawant's ass. I don't know. Apparently they have no idea whatsoever about how the world works. Will they now be saying that everyone who even claims to be "unable to pay" due to Covid19 gets to take whatever they want out of the grocery store for free, and fill their tank without paying the gas station?

Coupled with the eviction moratorium which has now been extended to a one-year rent holiday, there is no way in hell a sensible landlord would rent to anyone who is in any way in marginal circumstances. You would LITERALLY risk having a tenant who refused to pay you a dime and could not be removed until next March. Try getting your bank to understand why you are 6-10 months behind on your mortgage payment. I am sure the state will be very understanding about that year of unpaid property taxes.

There is just no way this is going to help tenants. I hear the sound of rental qualifications tightening up even more. Is the next step going to be no using credit scores to screen?

13

@4 - I sure as hell hope he's miserable. If I were a believer, I'd at least be able to take comfort in his soon-to-be-coming eternal stay in the lake of fire. As a non-believer, I can only hope to see karma exact her revenge here on Earth.

14

@8
Your point is well taken.
However the GOP is just that damn evil.

16

It won't be a victory until Trumpty Dumpty, Dencey Pencey, and the entire GOP Evil Empire drops down dead from TRUMPVID-19.
@9 Points well taken, xina. I didn't even watch the Trump video of his meltdown for exactly those reasons, and avoid Twitter altogether.

17

@6, @7, & @14; part L: My thoughts exactly. Agreed and seconded.

18

@2 & @3 kristofarian: I know, right? When Trumpty Dumpty and its Evil Empire go down in flames, the world--what's left of it---will cheer.

19

@17: Dammit! I meant pat L. Sorry.

20

Trump is like Japan declaring Victory in the Pacific during WW II.

We're not even at the halfway point of the first impact.

21

Currently in King County, 0.3178% of the population has gotten COVID according to their own statistics. That's 7007 cases, 2,204,229 population. OK this will go on forever and ever if they have their way. No matter if we open things up now or later, there will be an uptick, it will happen, its just when do we do it. They have chosen the path of the most pain for the most people. Drag it out as long as possible, hurt as many people as you can, you go broke, you get sick or die form something else, you commit suicide, or just leave. A bit stronger use of masks should have been asked for 6-8 weeks ago, but now? We are all adults being treated like children and they love doing it.

22

If you're old or sick, you should protect yourself, don't look to others. We've got a bunch of weak minded people running around these days that just want to be told what to think and do.

23

Oh yes, the "this is making people kill themselves argument. Suddenly conservatives care about suicide.

28

The question is will Fauci be heard? Or will he be ignored and when everything gets 1000X worse than it is now, will people remember we were warned?

ā€œThe major message that I wish to convey to the Senate HLP committee tomorrow is the danger of trying to open the country prematurely,ā€ he wrote. ā€œIf we skip over the checkpoints in the guidelines to: ā€˜Open America Again,ā€™ then we risk the danger of multiple outbreaks throughout the country. This will not only result in needless suffering and death, but would actually set us back on our quest to return to normal.ā€ ~Dr. Fauci

30

DO Fear trump
the one-'man'
Death Panel

31

@15 - Please explain to me why landlords are any different than any other business. The City Council seems to believe that anyone who owns property is obligated to operate in a manner that is completely different from other businesses. Like any other business, we need to understand the risks that we are taking and act accordingly. I assume that you have some kind of credit history. If you had a track record of not paying your credit card bills, would you expect that a bank would give you a new one? If someone got evicted for not paying their rent, why on earth would a landlord not consider that when evaluating them as a tenant? Do you believe that they should not be able to consider that? How about the criminal records check? Do you really believe that someone with a history of thefts or crimes of dishonesty is a good risk? Would you loan your car to them? I didn't think so. As Chrissy Hind said, "never trust a user with your television overnight." But the Council has decided that we can't even consider peoples' history.

As to whether the City Council's recent actions on the eviction moratorium are reasonable, consider this: I recently got an inquiry from someone on a house for rent (not an application) who told me that 1) they were not currently working,cand 2) they "hoped" to be back at work once the pandemic calmed down. Under the new City ordinances, if I were to rent to them, they could immediately refuse to pay rent "because of the coronavirus" and i would not be able to get the apartment back from them until next March whether they paid me a dime or not. What the hell sense would that make?

I've said this 100 times: if the City wants to provide housing for those who can;t pay for it, then build some damn public housing. I fully support raising the taxes to do this and so would the other landlords that I know. Just don't arbitrarily decide that those of us who do own property are obligated to make it available free of charge.

What the Council has done is to completely disincentivize doing business with the poorer segments of the population. It has become an unacceptable financial risk. Mark my words, this will bite the City.

As for rent caps, the (lack of) wisdom of rent control has been discussed here over and over again. Rents are up, but the cost of rental property and costs of operations are too. Anyone who bought a rental property in the last few years (unless they paid cash for it) is likely not making much of anything month over month. Years from now, when wages/rents have inflated to some degree, the cash flow will improve. But no one knows when/if that will happen. If they are fortunate, and we don't have a big economic downturn, they'll make some money when they sell the property years from now. But that is not a given.

None of this is about "leeching." It's not like we're taking the last $20 bills from our tenants and using them to light our cigars. If we are "leechs," then so are the greedy grocery store owners who want to get paid, the greedy sellers of clothing, and the greedy people at City Light (funny how even this socially-owned utility somehow gets away with insisting on people paying their bills). Hell, I bet that even the Stranger will stop running your ads if you stop paying for them.

32

@26 - lots of talk out there about "potential" increases in suicide if we continue the lockdown. No one is coming up with actual numbers. In contrast, the 80,000 + people who have died from the virus are not "potentially" dead. They are not deaths that "could" happen as a result of stress. They are, in fact, actually, completely, permanently DEAD. And BTW, the stock market is doing just fine (I can't figure out why the hell it should be, but it is). So there are going to be no suicides based on that.

Seems to me that it makes more sense to keep things closed down a while and avoid thousands upon thousands of actual deaths, rather than sacrificing all of those people so as to avoid a "possible" increase in suicide. 47,000 Americans died by suicide in 2017. That is awful. It is surely unacceptable. We certainly should work to prevent that. But consider the relative scales of the problems.

Even if the suicide rate doubled, which I have not heard anyone predicting, the number of deaths that would result is far lower than what will happen (and this is not theoretical; listen to the epidemiologists) if we don't get the virus under control.

34

Well, then your hypothetical suicide victims were also going to die "from stuff," so they don't matter either. Apparently you don't really care how many people die from coronavirus. How very sociopathic of you. I personally would prefer not to run the risk of a much wider epidemic.

35

@21:

They're being treated like children because they're ACTING LIKE CHILDREN: selfish, spoiled, entitled little snots who believe the world revolves around them and that they are entitled to have every their self-gratifying impulse satisfied on-demand.

As to your statistics, you fail to mention that of the 7,068 diagnosed cases in King County as of Sunday there have been 506 deaths (cit ref: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/coronavirus-daily-news-updates-may-12-what-to-know-today-about-covid-19-in-the-seattle-area-washington-state-and-the-nation/) ; that translates into a fatality rate of more than 7% of diagnosed cases in the county, which represents 53% of all state-wide fatalities (not surprising given our larger population) and about 53 TIMES the average fatality rate for most common flu strains (cit ref: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html) - and we KNOW the number of reported cases is probably being undercounted for a variety of reasons. The only reason the number of fatalities are as low as they are is because King County was very aggressive in implementing stay-at-home orders even before Governor Inslee's proclamation.

Premature re-opening is going to cause both the number of cases and consequently the number of fatalities to RISE, so my question to you is: who do you know personally that you are willing to sacrifice in order to get your hair cut or sit down in a restaurant? Then ask THEM if they're willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of your privilege and convenience.

36

@31:

The reason landowners aren't being "treated like other businesses" is because they don't operate like other businesses. Right now many businesses are closed, their employees laid-off or furloughed or working on reduced schedules - at commensurately reduced wages - and unable to generate revenue. Meanwhile landowners are still demanding rent from those same businesses and individuals and EXPECTING it to be paid. Owning property is literally the only business out there - that I can think of at least - demanding their revenue-stream be maintained even while nearly everyone else's is severely curtailed or cut off completely. And even if they can't evict someone NOW because of the moratorium, at some point that will be lifted and they'll be able to resume evicting anyone who doesn't make up the back-rent. So, while there may be a bit of a delay they're still going to get theirs or else they'll be able to kick their tenants out into the street. Sure, they'll have lost that income in the interim, but hey guess what? That'll just put them in the same boat everyone else is in already.

37

@33:

But those 80,000 (oops, sorry 81,779 as of a couple of days ago, so figure maybe 83,000 as of today given current trends) DIDN'T die of "something else" nor is there a shred of evidence to support your callous, idiotic assertion they were "dying anyway from something else". THEY FUCKING DIED OF C-19. And you would be perfectly fine if a few tens or hundreds of thousands MORE DIE so you can get your fucking hair cut and eat your fucking sit-down hamberder.

39

@36 - the issues with what our City Council has been doing go far beyond the pandemic. Most of the changes were adopted before Covid19 came along. The first in time (i.e., the dude with the right credit score, the KKK tattoos and 12 assault rifles, and who scares the crap out of all the other tenants gets the apartment if he happened to get there first) law and the ban on checking criminal records (in other words, I have no control over whether I rent to the serial burglar, the guy with the assault conviction, or the check forger, and you have no control over whether you wind up living next to him) are huge disincentives to rent to less well-qualified tenants. It will make the cheaoer end of the housing market much less attractive as a business, and will ultimately result in less affordable housing being available.

The year-long eviction ban is just the icing on the cake. And I don't see any evidence that grocery stores, Verizon, Puget Sound Energy, etc. don't "expect to be paid" either. Landlords are no different from other businesses in that respect. If a grocery store wants to cut customers some slack, they will. If a landlord is willing to work with tenants so they don't have to move, they can (and many are). My suspicion is that large real estate companies are going to be less willing to do that than smaller ones - we'll see. But realize that what the eviction moratorium does is essentially say that you get to keep the merchandise even if you don't pay for it. Yes, there may ultimately be some evictions after the moratorium expires next year. We all know that the back rent will never be paid in those cases.

Realize that no one wants to evict tenants. It's not some sport rich people play when its raining and they can't use the polo field. It's expensive and takes time. I have never done it & hope never to have to. I can't imagine not being willing to work with good tenants on this. But the City is giving a green light to tenants (the good ones and the not-so-good ones) to not even try to make good on their obligations. And it is completely one-sided. Wanna guess what will happen if the landlord claims that they can't afford to fix the hot water because of the coronavirus pandemic?

Again, if we want to declare that housing is a right, fine. But that makes it society's responsibility, not just the responsibility of those who happen to own property. So let's come up with some public $$ and build housing.


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