Two days in a row of seventy-some degree, almost sunny weather? How could we stay inside?
Can’t Bring Yourself to Type the Word “Ass”?
Eager to share our brilliant political commentary and blunt media criticism, but too genteel to link to horsesass.org? Well, good news, ladies: we also answer to HASeattle.com, because, you know, whatever. You're welcome!
Go ahead. Rub it in, while the rest of us are stuck somewhere else all day….
Nice spot! Is that up on Little Si?
Looks Si-ish to me!
Wouldn’t try updating your iPhone to iOS 4 unless you have plenty of free time. I’m 45 minutes in and its still not done.
Greg Sargent finds a nugget of good news for Rossi, and info to give Koster’s WA-2 campaign a sad.
via Barbara Morrill at DK.
My first attempt to up the iHipster failed. Worked the second time, took about 45 minutes.
Goldy–
Which one is you??
Looks like 2 gals…
You must be the white guy with the tail and ears perked.
Mt. Si? That’s barely more effort than a walk around Green Lake.
Of course, the payoff for same effort is several orders of magnitude better.
Actually Mt. Si is a decent hike – but it is too crowded in the summer. The picture, though, is Little Si (having been to that spot many times, I am pretty sure it is the rocky outcropping on top of Little Si). The rest of the more extensive hikes still have a fair bit of snow – so this was a good early season choice.
@4 We can only hope the eight percent are locked up in a psychiatric hospital, or at least under some kind of supervision.
Goldy has boobs? Figures.
Yes, it was Little Si, which generally isn’t too crowded on weekdays, and was very pleasant today. Weekends though, forget about it, unless you arrive shortly after dawn.
Which one is goldy?
Congress Reaches Deal On Financial Reform
House and Senate conferees reached a compromise on financial reform legislation last night after Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln agreed to “looser restrictions on derivatives trading,” AOL News reports.
Democratic Rep. Barney Frank, often maligned by conservatives for everything from being elected in liberal Massachusetts to his personal sexual preference, kept conferees working through the night until a deal was struck.
According to Daily Finance, an arm of AOL News, “At 3:30 a.m. Sen. Lincoln made a deal to soften the derivatives measure in her proposal to the riskiest firms, paving the way for a compromise.”
Compromise with who? Why, with free-market Republicans, of course, who are against any kind of regulation of anything, no matter what! Even though derivatives were at the heart of the financial meltdown that led to the current U.S. and global economic crises.
Not content with having created Great Depressions 1.0 and 2.0, the free-market idiots are striving to make it three straight.
At least they’re consistent. According to a Portland, Oregon, rightwing talk radio host people should have an untrammeled right to own pit bulls. Even when one of these dogs, left free to roam, rips some kid’s face off.
You see, to conservatives, “freedom” is some sort of pagan god to whom we all owe unquestioning obeisance. Freedom, that is, to steal from you; to put your family at risk while texting-and-driving; to do whatever they please with their property even if it makes your property (or whole communities) uninhabitable; to make your kids fight their resource wars for their personal profit.
What a sick, twisted, dysfunctional bunch of people.
http://www.dailyfinance.com/st...../19530673/
GOPers Vote To Make More People Homeless
Not content with putting millions of ordinary Americans out of work, Republicans want to starve them, too. But they’re against taxing CEOs who get huge buyouts after running their companies into the ground!
http://www.businessweek.com/ne.....boost.html
How could any sane person vote for these asswipes?
There will be blood…
The insane party and Ben Nelson blocked extension of unemployment benefits. Despite a vote of 57 to 41 in favor, 1.2 million Americans lost their unemployment benefits today in the midst of the worst economy since the Great Depression.
15, 16: The news this morning, in their usual repition of whatever talking points were given to them, attributed the Republican opposition to concern about the deficit.
But that’s hogwash, and everyone should know it. The only times Republicans are concerned about a deficit is in an election year, when the Democrats are in office. When Republicans are in office, they brush aside such concerns, and even go so far as to play accounting gimmicks to keep spending off-budget so they can maintain deniability.
For example, during the 1980 election, Republicans were wringing their hands and crying tears about the budget deficit and the federal debt levels. As soon as they came in office, they cut taxes, but couldn’t even get enough support on their own side of the aisle to make any significant budget cuts. Ultimately they ended up playing stupid games like trying to call ketsup a “vegitable” for the purposes of the school lunch programs. Meanwhile the federal budget deficit trippled, and then quadrippled. It took twenty years and tax increases during both the Bush Sr. and Clinton administration to wipe out the damage caused by that catastrophie. But in the meantime, Republicans insisted that the federal debt incurred under their administration was no longer a big danger, because “we just owe it to ourselves”.
Fast-forward to the Bush Jr. administration, and you have a repeat. Big tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans as soon as they come into office, then huge deficits, compounded by 9/11 and the resulting rescession. They tried to conceal the extent of the deficit by keeping all Afganistan and Iraqi spending “off budget”. At the time, they still insisted that the budget deficit wasn’t a big problem.
13. If your not Dutch, then your not much spews:
The white guy with fur and a wet nose!!
Management 101 strategy for the past twenty years or so is to insist that each department cut costs by 5% to 10% – every single year. Department heads who can’t do it are sacked, so they have to find ways to cut corners. But if cutting corners causes noticeable problems, the department heads get sacked anyway.
Of course, eventually these multiple little cuts end up causing a big problem. The BP situation is just an example. It wasn’t just one thing, it was a series of cost containment measures and hurry-up schedule which resulted in the current envionmental catastrophie.
So when the whole system blows up, the end result is that the company – or government – has to throw a lot more money at the problem. With companies and the Republican party, they are masters at throwing huge amounts of money to solve the public relations problem caused by the disaster, even while parsing pennies to prevent or solve the problem itself.
Lots of examples of this, the BP situation is just one. Katrina is another – the Bush administration dismantled FEMA prior to the hurricane into an agency capable of doing little more than out-sourcing contract work, then threw millions of money to homeless New Orleans residents while also complaining about how the money was spent (previous SOP with accounting controls had been discarded in the rush towards out-sourcing).
The economic collapse of 2008 is, of course, the big daddy. The utter lack of regulatory oversight and controls were a principle factor in the domino-effect as the collapse of the housing market spread through wall street and banking. In the face of an election year, the Republicans were willing to throw a trillion dollars at the problem in the fastest and least accountable way possible – by just giving it to the banks and brokerage houses, no questions asked.
When Democrats balked, the Republicans insisted that if they didn’t vote for the plan – within days – they would be held responsible for creating the second Great Depression. With few choices (it was the only plan on the table), they angrily consented, only to see the Republican leadership order their minions to vote against the plan at the last minute – not enough votes to actually kill the bill, but enough votes so they could then try to avoid any responsibility for it.
So a trillion dollars was allocated for TARP funding in a process that was rife with problems – but the Republicans hoped it would avoid enough of an economic collapse that the voters would keep them in office. Good luck with that one.
But now, with the Obama administration in office, suddenly they are very concerned about the deficit again?????
So why want the Republicans vote for the extension of unemployment benefits?
As we’ve seen, it’s not an overriding concern over the deficit. For them, deficits are not a problem when they are in office. They are only a campaign issue to raise when they are out of office, and only in an election year.
Their real motivation? They know that the best thing for Obama and the Democrats is for the economy to continue to improve up through election day in Nov. 2010. So they are trying everything they know to make sure that doesn’t happen. As the Republicans see it, more families losing their homes and hungry, more small business failing, more state and local governments collapsing as vital workers are laid off, libraries closed, just improves their prospects for getting back in power. And they are willing to pay that price (well, not them personally, they are willing to let YOU pay that price) so they can get back in power.
They call Mt. Si “The Vertical Green Lake” for good reason.
Dang… I was hoping to come over the mountains and hike that this year. But if it’s that crowded I think I’ll pass.