greg1647545532

It's always been lame and you're just getting old enough to see it now?

That's a car payment tho, or like 4 pairs of shoes for my kids. Won't be worth it until I'm in another tax bracket.

I honestly couldn't figure out what you're trying to say.

Aren't "sanctuary cities" acting entirely within the law? eta: except for those states that have their own laws about it.

It means what it means. It's like the mayor's son getting charged with shoplifting even though the arresting officer knows the charges will be dropped because daddy is friends with the DA. It's the closest thing people without a lot of power have to saying, "This is not OK." You know, I get that you don't think it's a big deal, what Trump did. I'd like to think that we'd be a different place in this country politically if instead of turning this on the Dems, or turning this on Hunter Biden, or all the other things you did in your post, if you and other Republicans would just take 5 minutes to say, "I get it. Trump shouldn't have done that. It was a bad thing, and I can see why you're upset, I just don't think he should be impeached over it." Because your long post really just says, "I don't understand why Democrats impeached Trump so I'm going to assume it's because they're bad people who just hate him," and that's flat not true, and acknowledging that will go a long way. Trump is a divisive fuck, don't take after him. Find the common ground here, man. Presidents shouldn't act like he acts, and I don't want anyone to "just get over" that.

What's an etroup and why are they showing me prejudice?

Your understanding isn't correct, Trump has officially been impeached regardless of what happens from now on, including whether or not the senate ever hears the case. Isn't this a bad thing? You're saying that a Republican president of the US can do something illegal and/or unethical right out in the open and nobody will ever be able to do anything about it. And if anyone does try to do something about it (say, Democrats), it will just backfire and people will hate them even more. This speaks very, very poorly of Republicans in general and Trump voters specifically. What a country we live in!

I've bought booze online, should I not be doing that? Just got a package this week.

To expand a bit now that I'm at a computer, I'm not sure what you mean but this, but Clinton's impeachment was a partisan hit job. Ken Starr's investigation started in 1994, 2 years into Clinton's first term, to investigate accusations of misdealings with the Whitewater real estate venture. Clinton committed perjury in 1998, over 3 years later, after Starr strayed from Whitewater to look at several other issues, including sexual harassment accusations from Paula Jones. Depending on where you're sitting, spending more than 3 years going from potential crime to potential crime, and turning up nothing, was either necessary watchdogging or a partisan fishing expedition. I'd be honestly surprised if, 25 years later, anyone doesn't see it for the latter. Republicans set out in 1994 certain they would find something in the Whitewater scandal to impeach Clinton for, and they didn't stop until Jan 2018, when they finally hit gold. During that deposition, Starr already know about Clinton's affair with Lewinsky, and so set the trap for him. And shortly thereafter, made a recommendation to impeach Clinton for, among other things, Abuse of Power and Perjury. The house picked 2 charges (Perjury and Obstruction) and voted to impeach along partisan lines (only 11 members of the house strayed from their side). It's worth noting that while the Clinton impeachment did at least feature a "crime" as it were, the Perjury case was actually fairly week and destined to get mired in semantics, as it focused on 2 specific statements. "I did not have sexual relations," by which Clinton later argued he meant didn't include BJs, and "There's nothing going on between us," by which Clinton later argued that he meant "at this specific time." That's why Ken Starr recommended 3 other charges for impeachment. Unfortunately for the Republicans, they only had 55 seats in the senate, and they couldn't even get their party to fall in line for a majority vote, yet alone the required 2/3rds. But to think that the Clinton impeachment was any less partisan, or any less premeditated, than the Trump impeachment is to rewrite history. I think there are some important differences between the two, namely the nature of the offense -- Clinton's was a personal matter whereas Trump's involved public money, Clinton was allowed to be investigated via Janet Reno while Bill Barr refused to follow up on the IG complaint, leaving congress to investigate on their own, and the lengths Trump has gone not to cooperate with congressional subpoenas. I think it's a weak hand for the Democrats to play, but I'm honestly not sure what they're supposed to do when the Executive thumbs its nose so flagrantly at the conventions of good conduct. Ever since Clinton, Republicans have slowly been acknowledging that the Clinton impeachment was a political mistake, and some of the same congress-critters are now out there concern trolling the Democrats, "don't make the same mistake we did 20 years ago," but the real lesson we learned from the past 2 impeachments isn't don't impeach, it's don't even pretend to cooperate with congress, because your party will just circle the wagons no matter what you did. Clinton should have just refused to have sat down for the deposition in 1998, he should have said he relationship with Paula Jones was "perfect" and just kept repeating it until people started to believe it. He should have made up cute names for Ken Starr and just declared everything a "witch hunt" or "discredited." Certainly we've learned there's enough rubes in the world who will go along with anything as long as taxes go down.

How was Clinton's impeachment any different?

And without any check on this behavior, future presidents would forever think it's A-OK to ask foreign powers to investigate private citizens for their own benefit, and then to stonewall congress and attack anyone who dared to criticize their behavior. For all the anger that Republicans are lobbing at Democrats for daring to exercise their power, there's very little anger being lobbed at Trump for making such an idiotic blunder in leadership. Consider the ways that Trump could have avoided this mess: 1) He could be the kind of person who listens to career intelligence officers and stop buying into conspiracy theories. The Crowdstrike conspiracy that Trump brought up on his call with Zelensky is pretty close to flat-Earth nonsnse. Trump has access to the most sophisticated intelligence agencies on the planet, and he doesn't trust or use them. 2) He could use effective communication to convey his methods and processes to his staff, so that people aren't blindsided by his actions. Time and again we heard from witnesses within the state department who could not explain to Ukraine or their associates why aid was withheld. Trump and his advisers now claim that they did it to ensure that Zelensky was serious about corruption. "Hey state department, I'm withholding aid until I get a good feeling about Zelensky," is all it would have taken to avoid several people reporting things to their respective IGs and lawyers, and Trump didn't take this simple, obvious leadership step. 3) He could own up to the bad optics of asking a foreign nation to investigate a US citizen instead of attacking people who saw this as an obvious concern. "I see now how that looks bad, but I assure you that I only had the best interest of America at heart." Even if that's a lie, acknowledging the ethical concerns of your subordinates is, again, a basic leadership skill that Trump seems not to have employed. 4) He could have cooperated with congress. I know people like Trump because he "tells it like it is," and "doesn't back down from a fight," and "isn't a politician," but sometimes playing the game is better than spending 10x the time and energy fighting it. The way I see it, Trump did everything he could to get impeached, and then everyone acts all shocked and angry that it actually happened. He could have made this go away at any number of stages, first and foremost by not doing something unethical in the first place. The only way I can see not agreeing here is if you don't think he did anything unethical at all, in which case have a nice day.

Better at what, being heavier? Good job, Tesla. Drop 3000 lbs in the bed of the F-150 and the F-150 wins the tug-of-war, today I learned adding weight to vehicles makes them better.

I could say a lot about the design but the reason I hate it so much is that I already know who will buy this. Throw this on the same pile as the G-Wagon, or the X6M, or the Porsche Cayenne Turbo S. It's a giant ostentatious show piece for douchebags who don't actually like cars. It's a car for people who don't even see the need to pretend that they need their F250 King Ranch because of it's towing capacity, or who pretend that they need a huge AWD SUV to handle the rough Ohio winters. It's unapologetic in its appeal to people who just want to be flashy. I will give them points for pushing boundaries, but there's absolutely nothing this does for me that a Model 3 Performance doesn't also do, without the baggage.

I hate it so much.

Firstly, I have no clue what the market wants. Looking around UA, the hottest car to have right now is the Porsche Macan, a badge engineered VW powered turd with absolutely no cargo space that still somehow costs $60k. Why is this car so popular? No clue. What I do know is that EVs are great, and I want one just for the driving experience alone, and I also know that I'm a brokedick who can't afford anything cooler than a Leaf. All the EVs with sub-200 mile range depreciate like rocks, those with more than 200 miles seem to be holding value, even the Bolt. That really does seem to be the magic number where people are willing to treat it like a car and not a novelty. Having slept on it, I think maybe Ford is making the right gamble with the concept. We've got the Model Y (nerd car), the e-Tron and iPace (expensive cars), and the Kona EV (nobody will know it's an EV). It's a small marketplace, and Ford has no reason to target any of those cars as competitors other than to play it safe. Maybe they're trying to make a new market -- the Macan of EVs. An attainable, conspicuous compact CUV EV that people will actually want to buy, and with a name attached that generates conversation.

Seems really dumb to call it a Mustang. I'd forgotten this was a thing until just now. Compact CUV? $40K? Seems like a Kona EV competitor. I was looking at Konas today, I'm gonna need a 200+ mile EV to replace my C-Max in about 4-5 years. It'd be nice if my options weren't all dumb SUVs, but anything that drives the price down is a good thing.

So he's literally out there sealioning?

Do you remember the wheel width? 15x7?

Cool.

Saying "No, sorry" is literally quicker and more efficient than that. #facts

Damn, wish I would have known. I knew the AutoBody Specialists RX-7 was going to be there because I talked to someone named Tim at C&C a few months back, but I only popped over there briefly and only because I was looking for an OBD scanner (spoiler, teams that run carbs don't typically have OBD scanners). Even though the event went "well" for us we still spent pretty much every minute of daylight in the garage working on the car, so I didn't have much time to socialize. I figured the HoundDog E36 was Columbus related but I hadn't seen it before. I used you guys to benchmark our performance, not that we were anywhere in the same league but I needed a way to see where we'd be if we got serious about pit stops and driver changes, and your team seemed like a pretty consistent, non-cheaty E36 to judge against. I told the team that now, having finished a race, I don't really want to come back and shoot for "last but finished" again. We never even got that far with our old Prelude so I figure, now we're at that point, I want to start streamlining the process and shoot for something like you describe, top 20 or something. But it's tough, we immediately got down to "what needs fixed, what needs upgraded" and I was like, whoa whoa whoa guys, that's $5k in work, let's settle down here. Stupid racing drugs.

Yeah, I'm not sure what else needs to be said. Give them money or don't, I don't care, but anything beyond being a pleasant human being and then going about your business is overthinking it.

We saved these wheels for day 2 because the tires were technically illegal. Slight rain off and on but overall not a bad day weather-wise. Little bit of damage on the left rear from day one, couple of our drivers were extremely rusty. By the time I got in the car the clutch was all but gone and I could only manage about 6 or 7 laps before I got stuck at the bottom of Pitt's big hill and had to get dragged off the track. But as you can see I was still happy with the weekend. Thanks for reading!

I've talked some about my ChumpCar (now ChampCar) experience here before -- tl;dr, my friends and I bought a former Lemons car for $2200 (with trailer!) and proceeded to spend 3 races blowing the turd up over and over again before eventually being told we would no longer be welcome at future Chump events unless we completely redid the garbage roll cage that was in it. So my cousin went rogue and bought an E36, it took us 6 years to finally get it together and enter another race. And we finished one! Full disclosure since this comes up a lot, this is now a $15,000 car and it's still a turd. Racing is expensive, even if you come in last in the slowest racing series you can find. I figured out that every successful ChampCar team follows the same formula of 4 guys -- 1) A wealthy financier 2) The wealthy financier's slightly less wealthy friend who is still willing to pay way too much to race a turd 3) An ace mechanic 4) A hotshot driver In our case, our wealthy financier and his friend aren't that wealthy, our ace mechanic never worked on BMWs before, and I'm our "hotshot" driver, so... we're starting on the back foot in all areas. On Saturday, despite doing 4 superfluous pit stops just to get used to cycling drivers, we somehow managed to come in 31st (out of 74) overall, 11th (out of 29) in class, just due to attrition and staying running. On Sunday we completely burned out the clutch with 1 hour to go. Anyway, here's some pictures: We only got 20 minutes of track time on the test-n-tune Friday due to a leaky output seal in the differential. This seal is a special order for every parts store, including BMW parts departments, so we would not have even started the first race if we hadn't happened to be garaging next to another E36 team with a very generous group of guys and a spare differential. They donated a seal to us, along with all of the screwy BMW specific tools we needed to change it. I cannot overstate how fucked we would have been, time and time again, if those guys hadn't been there. The racing community is the best. One thing we did learn from our 20 minutes of testing was that we couldn't hear a goddamn bit of exhaust note from the bone stock exhaust. After literally 2 hours of arguing, I snuck under the car and solved the problem. If it's stupid and it works, is it really stupid? Sunrise at Pitt Race. Last minute checks on Saturday morning. Note our stupid-ass 18" style BBSes that came on the car. I hate those wheels, I think 3 of them are bent. Nerves were high waiting for the race to start. My cousin after taking the checker. You can see the Safety 3rd guys in the background there, they're the ones who donated diff parts to us. During post race inspection, we found this. I guess the pads sometimes get hung up on the caliper bracket. Never seen that before. Glad it was an 8 hour race and not a 9 hour race.

The unibody itself needs to be reinforced. Call TC Kline? I bet they do it.