93 loyal readers have now contributed $4,437 to our HA Fund Drive, an average of almost $48 per contribution. Thank you for your generosity. Combined with a $2,500 sponsorship pledge from SEIU 775, and we’re more than a quarter of the way toward our $25,000 target.
Two years ago, the last time I ran a fund drive, I set a $6,000 target over one week, and a flurry of last minute contributions took us over the top. This year I’m putting no time limit on the drive, understanding that some of the institutional checks I’ll need to hit the target just can’t be written at a moment’s notice. But so far, individual contributions are lagging behind the previous fund drive in both number and dollar total.
At the risk of repeating myself, a blog like HA, if done right, just can’t be done on a part time basis. Nobody paid me to cover today’s I-1077 press conference, and nobody will pay me for the extensive coverage of the initiative I’ll surely provide between now and November. So if this kind of coverage is important to you, I urge you to please give today and help keep me blogging.
Goldy you should see if the I-1077 campaign will hire you.
I’m only half-joking.
Wow, Ted Nugent ad at the top right now. Not sure what ad network you are on Goldy, but I think all of these right wing ads you get are funnier than hell.
Chris @ 2
I noticed that. Ain’t irony great? No better humor than that.
ted nugent..the 10 fingers of doom..lol….
Thanks for all the honest investigation and unabashed opining! I just gave $20 – I know it’s just a drop in the bucket, but it’s what I can spare right now. Keep up the good work!
# 2: If it works like some of the ad networks I’m familiar with, the ad network is probably sending it’s ‘bots through the site, trolling for key words that would indicate a potentially receptive audience. It’s picking up the thousands of Puddy and Cynical posts, and the algorithm calculates that from the sheer number of posts they place on the site, that most of the audience on this site would be receptive to those types of ads. Then it feeds the ads into the script.
If these are pay-per-click ads, we could keep money streaming into Goldy simply by clicking on the ads every time we log in.
On my own website (not politically oriented), sometimes I get strange results even from the Google Adsense ads. Google’s ‘bots can pick up a strange word, apply it into a different context, and create an entirely wrong impression of the content of the page on which it appears. I’ve had to disable it on some pages, at least temporarily, because of that.
Goldy, please let us know how we can potentially drive the ad revenue. If clicking matters, I’d be happy to waste a little time on your behalf.
A reminder: Earlier, I offered to send you a check if you send me an address via email. Haven’t gotten one yet. Except for tickets, I almost never do business with personal / financial data on the tubes… You might want to set up and post an acceptable address here too.
Thanks for all you do…
HorsesAss.org has driven President Obama from -15 a week ago to -10 today. Klynical seems to have disappeared…like he does when President Obama is on a roll. Puddy isn’t around much either. Not surprising. Shove this up your ass Klynical!!
Thursday, April 22, 2010
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Thursday shows that 31% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty-one percent (41%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -10
Actually, it just dawned on me that Bill Gates, Jr. will actually save money if I-1077 passes because of the 20% property tax reduction. Can you imagine the amount of Property Taxes Gates pays on his mega-Mansion.
The old man also has quite an estate.
You’ve got to hand it to the Gates Family….they are gutsy.
Propose an Initiative to Tax Rich Guys….and personally walk away with more money in their pockets. And have folks at HorsesAss and around Seattle cheering them for it.
Brilliant. Totally friggin’ brilliant.
I guess they view us Progressives as easily manipulated and downright stupid.
I want to know the impact on the Gates Family of all this before I vote on it.
That’s a fucking lie.
You are a fucking lying assed concern troll, or even worse, a sockpuppet for one of our pathetic regular trolls.
Go the fuck away.
@9 I’ve thought about that. Let’s assume Bill Gates’ real estate holdings are worth $100 million (that’s a recent estimate I read). Then a 20% tax break will save him about $200,000 per year, assuming 1% property tax presently. I-1077 will tax $30,000 plus 9% of income above a million dollars, meaning that Gates will only come out ahead if he makes less than 2 million per year. I’m guessing he makes more than that in interest on his checking account. There’s no way this initiative will benefit him.
It’s 20% off the 20% of your property tax that goes to the state. In other words, the Gates plan reduces your total prop tax bite by ~4%.
That tiny windfall lasts until 2 years after the initiative is approved. Then it’s mangled by the legislature, which will expand the reach of the taxman until he gets you too.
If you pass 1077 you will give our lunatic legislature a blank check that it will cash in 2012 or 2013 to prop up the extortionate pension plans of Goldy’s chums at SEIU. But Democrats like Daddy Love will tell you that you’re being swallowed by the fat-cat tax to pay for “education” and “services” for the “people.”
As Governor Carlson told you yesterday, 1077 differs from the 1970’s attempt to cram and jam an income tax designed to make us as progressive as California. The previous attempt was designed as an amendment to the constitution that would have codified the count and amount of the new tax. Rates and income floors could not have been changed at the crazy whim of crazy Democrats in Olympia to prop their drunken Democrat Gregoire spending binge.
1077 removes constitutional protections. Two years after enactment, 1077 gives no protections at all. A new tax is emplaced and all safeguards are removed. Just like progressive California.
And speaking of progressivity: Didn’t Gates Sr posture and preen as a selfless defender of us commoners when he told us how we were being jacked by our regressive sales tax? Didn’t he tell us that our poor and wretched refuse were bleeding almost 20% of their life’s blood for WA’s extortionate revenues?
So isn’t it peculiar that old Gates leaves the sales tax vampire intact in 1077? What’s with that?
Old Gates made big bucks back in the day helping fat cats with designer tax avoidance. Then he started to shout about rich people not paying their fair share for the maintenance and upkeep of enlightened liberal civilization. Then he stood by mute while his little boy set up a tax-shelter foundation that, while doing good work, takes away tax revenue from liberal civilization.
How deep does liberal hypocrisy have to get before you liberals start choking on it?
Christ you know it ain’t easy cranking out an unappreciated quality product day after doo-dah day, working gnarly fingers to the bone to get the perfect mix of piquant snark and almost-libelous batshit, suffering insufferable free-riding trolls who suck up my bandwidth to beat me up about being a whiny trustfund baby who can’t get a real job …
so c’mon. Give it up. Give me some overdue respect and a lot of cash.
Thank you, liberals, from the bottom of my bleeding heart. I appweciate your pwatwonage.
The Tennessee stud, Mr. Know It All @6, comes through again, dammit.
6033: Can’t live with him, can’t ***** him. Dammit.
@12 I read your rant twice, but failed to see any evidence of hypocrisy. It’s the same argument many made against health care. Do too little, and it’s not worth doing. Do too much, and we’ll pass it over my dead body.
Old Man Gates, Rabbit tells often, ‘proved’ that WA’s poor are gouged by regressivity. 17% of the income of the least among us is skimmed off the top by sales taxes, while a mere proportional pittance is taken from rich bitches like Old Man Gates.
All the low rollers I know, and I know lots of low rollers, are paying maybe 0% of their, um, income to the Governor. Or, for a few who bob up from the black market to buy state liquor store liquor or buzz beer in Pioneer Square, maybe one or two percent of their crazy checks go to regressive sales tax.
Of course my anecdotes don’t cut it against a Gates regression analysis, so maybe the poor population I know skew and screw a rock-solid Gates sample. Or maybe Gates, being filthy rich, defined poor as anything under, oh, let’s say $200,000/year. $400,000 for a married couple. (And what about our domestic partners?)
Or maybe Old Gates took his data from Real Change, our Stalinist street paper. About the time Gates laid his regressive tax analysis on us, Real Change published the true confessions of a Poor People’s poster girl who whined bitterly about her low low income and her high high sales taxes. The problem: even if she lived in the corner of King Cnty with the highest sales tax, she’d have spent about four times her stated income on taxable purchases to equal her stated tax bite.
An impossibility unless, of course, she had an unstated trust fund like goldy.
Real Change: Change we can believe in while hooking for spare change.
Hypocrisy: Gates howling in the wilderness about the unfairness of our more-or-less 10% sales tax while leaving the unfair sales tax untouched in a Gates initiative.
Get it now?
Arguments against Gatesgate are totally different from the arguments against Obamagate.
What the Fox is your problem, LWC? And does your problem, whatever it is, perhaps explain why you’d send $20 to a wanker like Goldstein?
(Rabbit tells often = Rabbit tells us often)
“And does your problem, whatever it is, perhaps explain why you’d send $20 to a wanker like Goldstein?”
As I give in many multiples of that amount, so it is with my problems. Oh so sad, but true, but I get by with a little help from friends like you!
Woop! There it is! Right at the top of goldy’s very own homepage: Mad Dr. Obama with a caption about stopping Obamacare before it’s too late.
Once upon a time New York had a good and competent governor. Republican George Petaki, despite three terms of howling from the Jayson Blair Times, gave New York three good terms.
Then New York got stuck on stupid Democrats. Eliot Spritzer. Little David. Sort of like New York City and Democrat David Dinkins all over again.
Well Petaki’s back, thank God, leading the fight for repeal of Obama’s Democrat Obamacare monster. Petaki starts his good fight in Iowa. Send him money. Before it’s too late.
Welcome home, Steve. As usual, none of the prevailing pathology rubs off on you because, unlike LWC, you’re a good man.
Your donations, even to bad causes, will yield good fruit. LWC’s will yield intestinal gas.
(Read a review this week of a recent book about Jane Jacobs v. Robert Moses. Suspect that you and I see I to I on the goodness and greatness of Ms. Jane.)
Check @3 in the obligatory obsessive compulsive Times thrashing thread for more about Preston-Gates hypocrisy.
Somewhat hypocritical, too, is fanatic foundation mania. Have heard that Michael Moore pimps a Michael Moore Tax Avoidance Foundation so he can keep more more more for himself.
The Gates Foundation, abetted by Buffet, helps shelter Gates assets while helping the world. Am totally in tune with Bill and Melinda’s neo-Borlaug Green Revolution II, but something about depriving federal bureaucrats of foundation-sheltered funds, while Dad’s weeping about our stinginess toward government bureaucrats, seems vaguely dishonest.
A 10,000 gun salute for the Ted, White, and Blue, @4.
I think of the RH Thompson Expressway and what that would have done to Seattle. And what I-5 did do to Seattle. Also, Goldy’s, um, vision for my beloved Rainier Valley.
I was inspired to find a review. This is the last paragraph posted on SFGate.com (hmm, sounds like some kind of commie org).
I really am kind of conflicted about this. My resistance to change leads me to readily conclude “Jane good, Moses bad”, but unless cities change, including my city, growth would seem destined to continue it’s homogenized sprawl out to the boonies where I now live. You see, now that I’m here, I don’t want others moving out here and spoiling it for me. Hmm, I don’t mind hypocricy and selfishness as long as it’s my own.
Wearin’ my Thelonious T-shirt and thinkin’ of Steve. Apologize for an earlier remark about wishing that you and Rabbit were here for comic relief. Was actually thinking of YLB & Rabbit, the new Cheech & Chong.
Speaking of funny, Blagojevich is going to subpoena Obama. Reader’s Digest used to pay money for stuff that was less hilarious than that.
Excellent discussion. Superior appreciation, as usual, of complexity and ambiguity filtered through a lens of rational self-interest.
Bis spa:ter …
Steve – Sorry. Was more distracted than usual. Felt guilty about freeloading here, about bogarting bandwidth and free-riding on your dime, so I selflessly tried to help Mr. Goldstein raise $$. Tried and tried.
Was looking for slightly used NPR hemp totebags, any that hadn’t been smoked by Lee, to distrubute to HA doners and bundlers. Then my fundraising letter, which whimsically redirected Goldy’s paypals to Orbusmax, got knocked down. Tried about a dozen times to post it on this thread and others, but no go. Tried and tried. My machine must be viral.
Will need more time to give your thoughts about Jacobs and Moses the attention they deserve, but am seeing unsuspected depths beneath the surface. Rather like Hoffman’s astonishing cold-blood Capote movie. It was initially two-dimensional and tidy. Then, quickly, dimensions multiplied. I’m awed.
I’ve had one distraction after another all day long. It’s difficult to focus on conversation. I don’t want to just throw out surface thoughts here. You deserve better. I must go deeper! Oh hell, I see that I’m about to be distracted again.
SEIU: I don’t see any hypocrisy. I see them taking it one step at a time. A 10% sales tax is regressive. They’re pushing for Washington’s first progressive taxing scheme. If they were trying to fix the sales tax instead, you’d dig up some quotes about how we need a high-earner’s income tax. If they were doing both, you’d gripe about the unprecedented scale of the overhaul.
Like I said before… it’s either too much or not enough. You’ll find a way to complain either way.
http://www.kickstarter.com/pro.....Journalism