– Congrats to all of the couples who got married yesterday.
– Bikes galore on the Fremont Bridge.
– I was just goofing on this Christmas card from the Obamas, and apparently it’s part of the war on Christmas.
– You’ve clearly done something right as a team when you force the other team to apologize to their fans.
Dang, I missed Santacon. There is little more surreal and fun than hundreds of variations of Santa and Santa vixens in one place.
Marriage equality. Yah!
Marriage, one of the most conservative of values.
Allen West…
Warrior…nearly court-martialed, drummed out of the Army
Statesman…(snort)…divisive, unaccomplished, good only at spewing epithets at enemies
Pathetic, left desperately clawing his way onto the wingnut welfare circuit with new and unsubstantiated claims of CHEATING!!
Buh-bye!
WTF is up with that AZCentral.com thing? I get this stupid message when I clicked on the Cardinal link (I presume):
“Cookies must be enabled to view articles on azcentral.com”
And no content whatsoever. No, I’m not going to change my settings to read crap sites that think they need to write stuff to my machine in order to work.
I suspect that “Tony Thomas” is a blog that is trying to host AZCentral.com content in a frame and my IExplore is set to not allow third party cookies.
I just had to rant about that.
@4 Same here. There’s nothing at AZCentral.com that I need to read.
Re stand your ground: Some of you humans need to think more like rabbits. When we feel threatened we use our legs for the purpose the Great Mother Rabbit Spirit gave them to us for.
And anyway, I’ve never had an urge to blow anyone’s head off. It’s much more satisfying to blow their dicks off, and them him think about going through life without a dick. So I always aim low.
I took the trouble to temporarily allow AZcentral, and it appears they’ve imposed a paywall where, in theory, you get 20 free views then have to shell out money to read any more.
I love Liberals
It is illegal to smoke a cigarette or cigar inside any bar, or within X feet of the front door, but is is mandatory that marijuana be smoked indoors to be legal.
So let’s all light up a reefer at the dinner table with all the kiddies sitting around eh!
Just did a scrape of November..
Summing up the busy season: in 2012 we saw 10,042 troll comments which is about 25 percent of all comments during that period..
Just about ALL of the troll comments came from 4 trolls: puddyfool, cynicalklown, little maxee wankatansky and the top honors of the most troll comments in the 2012 busy season goes to Bob who edged puddyidiot by about 60 comments..
Hard to believe but it’s true..
How’d it all work out for you trolls?
Once A Republican, Always A Republican
Ex-GOPer Rodney Tom apparently is still a GOPer. He has joined forces with DINO Tim Sheldon to hand control of the state senate over to Republicans.
Democrats won 26 of the state’s 49 senate seats in elections. That makes them the majority party and earns them the right to run the Senate. But thanks to the defection of these two turncoats, Republicans now control 25 seats and Democrats 24.
Typical. This is how Republicans do things nowadays. Voters won’t give them control of our government, so they seize power they couldn’t win at the ballot box through subterfuge and sneak attack.
Republicans are saying they’re going to use their senate “majority” to enforce a no-taxes governance on Gov. Jay Inslee.
Sheldon is something of a known quantity to our state’s Democratic voters. But the GOP couldn’t have pulled off this coup d’etat without Tom, who got elected by lying to voters about where his allegiances lay.
Maybe the voters of his district should have known better. Chances are, when a Republican switches parties, it’s just a stealth tactic to deceive Democratic voters. In retrospect, it’s pretty clear the Democrats in Tom’s district shouldn’t have trusted this guy. The proper response is for them to start the recall process against Tom.
But regardless of whether that happens or not, no Democrat should ever again believe Tom when he calls himself a Democrat, and he doesn’t deserve to get a single vote from any Democratic voter ever again.
http://blogs.seattletimes.com/.....ty-caucus/
@7 There’s nothing in that link I’m going to take the trouble to read. I don’t have time for this.
Okay, I hope everyone here is picking up on the fact that two turncoat state senators just handed senate control to the Republicans. We should all be very, very angry about this.
Roger Rabbit @9
Could be a tough fight for the recall process in Washington State. First a judge has to find reason for a recall, then the appeal, and that is before signatures can be collected.
@11
Yes, I am even more upset by that than the AZCentral.com paywall!
My outrage-o-meter has to be sent in to be rescaled (again) to the next logarithm scale to keep it linear and fitting in a finite scale length.
@12 Is lying to your constituents adequate cause? Did Sheldon do that? I dunno. I don’t even know which district he is in…going to go look now…
One of the reasons for recall has to be malfeasance or misfeasance of office.
http://www.sos.ca.gov/election.....OQJIXGXVEA
Although Seattle has recalled two mayors, but that was a long time ago. Although I think the reasons I cited are relatively recent, because what lead to Mayor Frank Edwards recall in the 1931, was firing the head of Seattle City Light, because people saw it as an attempt to sell it off.(Back then it was competing with Puget Sound Energy forerunner Puget Sound Traction, Power and Light in the city). Apparently not only was public power very popular in Seattle even then, the head of the utility was even more popular than the mayor, the recall vote was not even close, and the acting mayor quickly rehired Superintendent J.D. Ross.
http://www.historylink.org/ind.....le_id=3548
Dan@12,
Perhaps it’s worth a try. The most recent recall here that I know about was then-Spokane mayor Jim West.
As for lying to constituents being a reason, who wouldn’t be facing a recall in this state!
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ti.....ction.html
I liked this comment
Seems fair. No representation if you are unwilling to pay for it.
I got the wrong link for Washington Recall, it’s Article 1, Section 33 of the State Constitution.
http://www.leg.wa.gov/lawsanda.....ution.aspx
http://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/def.....29A.56.110
By the way, anybody noticing an outage with facebook?
@18 I saw something in the news about today being the last day to vote on Facebook privacy.
Florida ‘Reform School’ Was A Death Camp For Black Kids
“Scientists have found 19 previously unknown grave shafts on the grounds of a notorious Florida reform school, suggesting that many more boys died there amid brutal conditions than had previously been known, the researchers said Monday.
“The Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, which was also known as the Florida State Reform School, closed in June 2011 after state investigators and the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division confirmed widespread abuse over many decades.
“The state attributed its decision to close the school to budgetary reasons. Yet long before then, the institution had been the target of investigations and lawsuits alleging not only physical and mental abuse but also forced labor, rape and even murder of the young charges sent to its care since it opened in 1900.”
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_new.....-says?lite
Roger Rabbit Commentary: We’re not talking 19th century here, this place shut down last year. Who’s been running it recently? People appointed by Republican governors.
This is the future that workers will face in every state if Republicans aren’t stopped.
http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_.....higan?lite
Roger Rabbit Commentary: Don’t be surprised if the Republican “majority” in our state senate that voters didn’t elect tries to ram through a “right to work for less” law in Washington.
12…Yes Yes I’m very angry about the State Senate being handed over to the Republicans. I want all of those goons in Olympia to be able to tax the H outta us!
Looks like the Hostess executives are now admitting they were stealing employee pension funds to finance company operations and their own compensation packages.
Call out the traitors. Turncoat Tim Sheldon 360-786-7668, Turncoat Rodney Tom 360-786-7694 Do it today and let them know recall is on your agenda.
@4 and 5,
It worked fine for me, but I’ve changed the link.
What does it mean to “forfeit” that $1.25B in this case?
Today another rail transit line was opened for commuters, this time, in a Red State, again. The Utah Transit Authority started service on the long-awaited FrontRunner from Salt Lake City to Provo.
http://www.rideuta.com/content/happenings.aspx
http://www.rideuta.com/mc/?pag.....rontRunner
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2.....s-d/191770
Ho ho ho!
Re: Sheldon and Tom,
Frankly it is time the Democratic party went scorched earth on these turncoats. Formally expel them from the Dem Caucus in the Senate, ask Tom to return the party funds he took last cycle. Take them off the invite list for any party sponsored functions. Get people lined up now to run against them next election. As far as any Democrat in good standing is concerned they are persona non grata and should be treated like the Republicans they are.
Also the house should just block anything coming from the Senate it doesn’t like. Even better as a protest to the slimy coup the GOP pulled simply refuse to even bring any bill coming out of the Senate up for a vote.
I’m a lifelong action movie fan..
I will be boycotting “Zero-Dark-Thirty”..
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comm.....ure-awards
Watch the 60 minutes interview with Mark Bissonnette instead…
So audiences expect torture porn? Disgusting. I won’t contribute to it.
@25 It means the bank will keep its charter, stay in business, and none of its bankers will go to jail for laundering billions of dollars for Iran and Mexican drug cartels.
Reminds me of a kid in my high school who made $1000 by selling fake IDs. The judge fined him $500 to teach him that “crime doesn’t pay.”
Today, we learn the Hostess bosses “used employee pension money to stay afloat” before filing bankruptcy and, “It isn’t clear how much money was taken from those pension funds.”
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/sto.....id=8915148
Roger Rabbit Commentary: Probably, at the very least, enough to make sure the execs got their golden parachutes. How many more workers must have their pensions stolen by dishonest bosses before people realize Social Security is the only thing they can count on to keep them from destitution in their old age? And why do so many people trust employers but distrust government? It’s irrational.
Trust me, when a private business runs into financial difficulty, the first thing they do is raid the employees’ pension fund. I’ve seen it happen many times. The business owners who do this think nothing of it, and see nothing wrong with it. They don’t even think it’s dishonest or immoral. If you confront them about it, they’ll justify it by claiming they were trying to save the employees’ jobs. Usually these same people didn’t pay taxes, either, so there’s nothing to save because the IRS will take everything that isn’t already gone.
I’ll just throw this question out to start a discussion topic. Should Congress institute the death penalty for employers who raid pension funds? Not as a vindictive thing, but as a deterrence measure. Juries, of course, would have the option of alternative sentencing (i.e., life without parole), and the guilty also could petition for executive clemency. To keep it fair, maybe the law also could delegate the clemency authority to the labor representatives on the NLRB. I’m not saying we should do this; I’m only tossing it out there to get a discussion started. It does seem existing laws aren’t working very well to protect workers’ pensions and there’s a need for Congress to revisit that topic.
‘Choose Life’ License Plate Unconstitutional
“A federal judge ruled that North Carolina’s new ‘Choose Life’ license plates are unconstitutional because the state does not offer a pro-choice alternative. ‘The State’s offering a Choose Life license plate in the absence of a pro-choice alternative constitutes viewpoint discrimination in violation of the First Amendment,’ U.S. District Court Judge James Fox wrote in the ruling Friday. The … American Civil Liberties Union… filed a lawsuit in 2011 to stop the specialty plates.”
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/.....?hpt=hp_t1
Roger Rabbit Commentary: Viewpoint discrimination is a well-established constitutional doctrine that is based on free speech. It is easier to illustrate than explain. An example would be if a DMV sold vanity license plates that say “Vote Democrat” but vehicle owners could not purchase a “Vote Republican” plate. The federal court ruling against North Carolina’s “Choose Life” vanity plate is equally simple in principle. Note that North Carolina did not require all drivers to sport “Choose Life” plates. That would be a different (and more egregious) case of a state coercing drivers to display a political message they disagree with. There would not be a legal problem with the “Choose Life” plate if the state also offered a “Support Choice” plate.
Inouye Hospitalized
Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI) is hospitalized for “oxygen uptake” problems but says he expects to return to work soon. Inouye, 88, has been using a portable oxygen tank.
Sen. Inouye has already announced he plans to run for re-elected in 2016. He is in line to become the longest-serving U.S. Senator in American history in June 2014.
Inouye, a Japanese-American, was interned after Pearl Harbor but went on to serve in the U.S. Army and win the Medal of Honor.
@36
Really? Run for reelection?
He will be 92, uses an oxygen tank, failing health. He has accomplished great things, and witnessed good and terrible about this country, but there comes a time to step aside, before they have to pry cold stiff hands from the Senate seat.
At some point this becomes about ego, and inertia. I find it hard to believe that he is really capable of meeting all the rigorous requirements of that job, though there have been many other frail and infirm persons in that chamber who stayed far too long.
Maybe he’s holding on to prevent Linda Lingle from appointing herself.
@ 32 RR
Geez Rabbit, where you been? I posted that at #22.
They looted the pension funds after using the value of those funds and the value of the company to borrow Billions of dollars, which they then pocketed instead of using the money for improving the business, which was a stated requirement for aquiring those loans.
If a man borrows $25,000 from a bank, and tells the bank that he’s going to use it to add a bedroom and bathroom on to his house, and instead pockets that money or spends it on a car, and then takes a second mortgage out on the house to gamble that money on the stock market,
THATS FRAUD!
They put people in prison for that shit all the goddamn time. It’s actually sort of a common crime, especially amongst the higher level white collar “keep up with the Jonesers” set.
The last time I was in California, several years ago, one of my brothers co-workers who came out with us to the Nuthouse (fancy bar in Palo Alto) to drink single-malt scotch and smoke cigars, was complaining about how high his taxes were and such. Barack Obama was just beginning to talk about running for President. He talked about that a bit, bitching about how if the Democrats get into the white House his taxes are going through the roof again. He then went on to describe how that little house in Cabo san Lucas that he’d bought a few years earlier needed work, and his wife’s Mercedes just cost him $6000 to repair, and his house in Los Altos Hills needed a new roof and the custom sofas and other furniture cost a fortune etc etc etc. Braggadocio of course. It was sort of a mark of personal pride that his credit card bills were in the upper tens of thousands of dollars. All that while ordering whisky that was costing him about $25 a glass.
I just looked at him and wondered to myself, what the fuck are you doing. You’re spending more than you make in a year on stupid shit to make yourself pretty and feel comfortable, and you’re complaining about fucking taxes?
Next time I talk to my brother on the phone, I’m gonna ask him about that dude.
@34
You get at the problem of corporate capitalism.
I think an essential role of incorporation is to allow amoral and societally-destructive actions under the pretense of fiduciary responsibility. It seems as long as you’re acting in the narrow interests of your master/owner, any sort of theft or environmental degradation, or greater destruction of societal good is allowed, even expected and enforced.
Capitalism can do great things in an organizational and efficiency standpoint, but we’re learning about its essential destructiveness when taken to merely logical non-extremes and without the temporizing effects of regulation.
37, the current Governor of Hawaii is former US Rep. Neil Abercrombie, a Decocrat.
With the end of the fall quarter and the winter break coming up, Eastern Washington University’s marching band usually disperses. With a playoff football game, the semifinals, coming up this weekend, Eastern is in a bind. Well, the last time they had this situation, they called for volunteers to take up the slack. Worked then, I think it will work again.
http://seattletimes.com/html/l.....cation=rss
The next mayor of Los Angeles is a Stanford Graduate, worked at Goldman Sachs, worked on the Obama-Biden transition team and Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.
He’s currently the Chief Strategy Officer of Spokeo, a thriving dot com startup..
He’s the child of Mexican and Salvadoran immigrants..
He’s 29 years old.
If I was still living there I’d vote for him in a heartbeat.
Whatever happened to that little Nazi Phuddydud? Poor guy, the last election must have been just too much for him to bear.
43 – He was gone the first three months of this year.. No doubt recovering from a psychotic break due to Obama Derangement Syndrome..
He obviously had a relapse.
The “community organizer” he HATED with unhinged, white hot intensity failed to be deposed by his beloved right wing bullshit.. Reality spoke: the “community organizer” is not and never will be “the next Jimmy Carter”..
All, like me you are probably very busy at the end of the year. But there is something important that needs to be done, and I’m asking for your help.
We have an Austerity Bomb that needs diffusing. The Republican House Leadership [I’m looking at YOU, Cathy McMorris-Rodges!] is hell bent on allowing Middle Class Taxes to rise. You can help prevent this idiocy by calling our Republican House reps …ASAP.
Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler (R – 03): 202-225-3536
Representative Doc Hastings (R – 04): 202-225-5816
Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R – 05): 202-225-2006
Representative Dave Reichert (R – 08): 202-225-7761
Please find time to give these folks a call, and if you have friends and/or relatives who have the misfortune to live in one of these poorly represented districts, bring them along.
thank-you!
Today, Amtrak, always opposed by Republicans(even though President Nixon signed the legislation creating it), restored service to another destination within a red state, Norfolk, Virginia. THis is an extension of another Northeast Corridor regional train(with locomotive change at Washington D.C) funded by the state government in Richmond.
http://www.wavy.com/dpp/news/l.....ak-service
I am not sure if the service to Newport News will continue, and if so, for how long. Service was recently added to Lynchburg, and service to Roanoke is projected by the end of the decade.
Union Maid – Pete Seeger
Although I disagree with them on everything else, the Michigan Government did not turn down federal high speed and intercity passenger rail money, in fact, I believe they got some of the rejected money from canceled projects in Wisconsin and Ohio. This year, some portions of the Chicago-Kalamazoo-Detroit-Pontiac Wolverine Corridor, mainly Kalamazoo-Indiana state line(track owned by Amtrak by the way), are not running at 110MPH. They are now transfering the title of 135 miles of Norfolk Southern track from Kalamazoo to Dearborn to the state of Michigan ownership. NS is downgrading the line to 25MPH, which they say is all their freights need. Michigan will increase this section to 110MPH for passenger trains, and shorten a terrible 8 hour ride to 5 hours(the Wolverine does make intermediate stops, by the way).
http://www.michigan.gov/mdot/0.....1;,00.html
Mike@47
THanks for posting that. Wished it got more play in the mainstream media, but then again, mostly corporate control. And for the record, my post at 48 was just passing the story along, I don’t endorse what the Snyder Administration and the state legislature in Lansing just did on the Union Rights front. FOr a party that complained about the Democrats ramming things through during period from 2009-11, they sure don’t act like they were any better.
Which Side Are You On – Florence Reece Original
@ 38 & 39,
Another good reason for term limits!
Oops, my post at 42, I noticed I misspelled it, Governor Abercrombie is a member of the Democratic Party. Forgot to mention, he has had to deal with a couple crisis while in office, 2 Tsunamis so far.