HorsesAss.Org

This isn’t Socialist firebrand Kshama Sawant, or “near insane” zillionaire Nick Hanauer, or tour d’ivoire economist Thomas Piketty, or even some do-gooding liberal thinker at some do-gooding liberal think tank talking—this is Standard & Fucking Poor’s, the non-partisan for-profit ratings service whose job it is to provide reliable research to big-money investors! And they’ve concluded that extreme inequality is hurting the US economy:

Our review of the data, as well as a wealth of research on this matter, leads us to conclude that the current level of income inequality in the U.S. is dampening GDP growth, at a time when the world’s biggest economy is struggling to recover from the Great Recession and the government is in need of funds to support an aging population.

[…] The challenge now is to find a path toward more sustainable growth, an essential part of which, in our view, is pulling more Americans out of poverty and bolstering the purchasing power of the middle class. A rising tide lifts all boats…but a lifeboat carrying a few, surrounded by many treading water, risks capsizing.

Modern capitalists are producing their own gravediggers. The question remains whether mainstream politicians and journalists can admit what mainstream economists have already concluded—that trickle-down economics has failed—before it’s too late to save our economy from steady decline and eventual collapse?

We can argue over the numbers—what kind of rate is too high or too low—but it is now clear that it is in all of our interests to both raise the minimum wage, and to raise the top marginal tax rates on income and wealth, as well as invest in the public infrastructure necessary to support and maintain economic growth.

Seriously not satire. This isn’t The Onion. They mean it:

“Do you think because they’re blind, they’re gonna start shooting in every direction and kill everyone? Fact is it’s been proven that people who lack vision have an increased awareness of their hearing and spatial surroundings.”

“Yeah,” my daughter astutely noted as I played the video, “but they still can’t fucking see!”

It is remarkable how truly lopsided the gun debate is in America, that the NRA feels free to focus on advocacy like this.

[ HAtip: ivoter.net]

This video has been making the rounds, and it’s pretty awful/amazing on a number of grounds. Two young immigration activists approach Republicans Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Steve King at an Iowa fundraiser, offering to let them tear up their Dream Act cards. Rep. King is just the stupid, fucking, immigrant-hating asshole he always is, but watch how Paul—a presidential hopeful—just runs away from the table before he can even swallow his mouthful of food:

Gotta wonder, as president, what else Sen. Paul might run away from if he can’t even look in the face two young Americans he wants to deport to countries they’ve never known?

With the “ballot deadline” just 12 hours away, I thought I’d just string together a few final observations about the dishearteningly dishonest campaign against Proposition 1, which would create a Metropolitan Park District to provide an adequate and stable level of funding to Seattle Parks & Recreation.

• “No on Parks” is a Republican campaign largely funded by Republican donors, being run by a Republican political consultant, and endorsed by the Republican editorial board of the Seattle Times. So if you are a Republican, vote no on Prop 1. But if you are a Democrat, don’t kid yourself that voting “no” would do anything other than advance the Republican agenda of drowning government in a bathtub.
• There is an unspoken class warfare aspect to the No on Parks campaign. In their guest post on Slog, campaign co-chairs Don Harper and Carol Fisher pin their credibility on the fact that they have “volunteered thousands of hours and raised over $2 million for neighborhood parks.” Good for them. And good for their neighborhood parks. But that sort of volunteerism just can’t be relied on in neighborhoods where most folks are working two or three jobs just to scrape by. The same way Southend school children can’t benefit from PTA fundraisers the way more affluent North Seattle school children can. This No campaign just reeks of geographic factionalism—not sure what the particulars are, but opponents sure do seem determined to maintain a status quo that does okay by them.
• Playing dirty works. This has been an incredibly “dirty campaign.” Even Joel Connelly says so, and he’s been covering political campaigns for the PI since the Garfield administration. And if folks are willing to play this dirty in a campaign over how we fund our parks, just imagine how dirty these people are going to play in two years, when all nine city council seats are up for reelection. I warned you about Faye Garneau during last year’s districts campaign, but did you listen, Seattle? No. Speaking of which…
• Our Democratic establishment has totally failed to explain to voters how taxes work, and that has created an uninformed electorate that is an invitingly ripe target for those deliberately attempting to misinform (I’m looking at you, Seattle Times editorial board). If there is a lesson to learn from this campaign it’s that if we ever want to fix our tax structure into something that is both fair and sustainable, educating the public about the way taxes work is a project that our political leaders must pursue at every opportunity—24/7, 365 days a year—and not just during those campaign seasons when we have a tax measure on the ballot. If at that.
• Unforgivable. If you vote No on Prop 1 you are either a Republican or an idiot or regrettably misinformed (not all Republicans are idiots, some are just mean-spirited, selfish, or wrong). That happens. But as for No on Parks’ principals, you have earned my permanent enmity by running such a dishonest and disrespectful campaign. This isn’t about a policy disagreement—I’ve had plenty of those, and have still been able to work with the folks on the other side. This is about tactics and context. You simply cannot be trusted ever again. And any campaign you touch in the future will be tainted by association.

As for what will happen when the ballots drop tonight, I’ve no idea, but I’m bracing myself for disappointment. That said, unless it’s a decisive margin one way or another, who the fuck knows which way the late ballots might break, so it’s likely we won’t be able to confidently call this election for at least a few more days.

Hey…it is primary election day in Washington state. So, you know…don’t be an asshole: vote. Fill out that ballot, drop it in the mail or a drop box, and then join us for an evening of electoral politics and conversation over a pint at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally.

We meet tonight, and every Tuesday evening at the Roanoke Park Place Tavern, 2409 10th Ave E, Seattle. The starting time is 8:00 pm, but some folks show up before that for dinner and the election returns.

Can’t make it to Seattle? Check out another Washington state DL over the next week. The Tri-Cities chapter also meets this Tuesday. The Lakewood chapter meets this Wednesday. And on Thursday, the Tacoma chapter meets.

With 204 chapters of Living Liberally, including eighteen in Washington state three in Oregon and three more in Idaho, chances are excellent there’s a chapter near you.

Fuck me I have to do math again. Another Republican state legislator complaining about how Washington’s pollution shouldn’t count when we talk about reducing Washington’s pollution. This time State Sen. Ann Rivers’ opinion piece in the Columbian. I’m not going to do metacommentary on the whole piece, but I will draw you to this paragraph.

Washington is already a low-carbon place — especially when compared to a carbon giant such as China, which produces around 8,000 million metric tons annually compared to Washington’s 96 million. And while China’s carbon emissions are on the rise, Washington continues to find ways to reduce our carbon footprint without layering on new costly and intrusive regulations.

Seems dishonest to say we’re a low carbon state because we pollute as one state less than the most populous and one of the most polluted countries in the world. First because China isn’t a benchmark in that anything below them is somehow inherently good. Also, comparing one state to an entire large country doesn’t seem like a useful metric. It’s like comparing a couple apples to a crate. Or to an orchard.

But again we can do some easy math* to see where we are per capita. When we last checked in with dishonest Republicans we discovered that there are 6,971,406 Washingtonians as of 2013 according to the Census. The above paragraph gives us a number we can use to divide! 96,000,000 tons divided by 6,971,406 humans gets that Washingtonians on average are responsible for about 13.77 tons of carbon per person yearly. China, according to Wikipedia, has a population of 1,363,950,000 humans. Divide that into the 8,000,000,000 tons of carbon in the above paragraph and you get about 5.86 tons of carbon per person.

Each Washingtonian makes more than twice as much carbon than a person in China. So we probably have twice the obligation to fix the problem. Maybe? I’m not sure it works that way. And again, the comparison was facile to begin with. You can’t really compare Boeing workers with a long commute in a single occupancy vehicle to Gobi nomads. But that was the comparison Senator Rivers made hoping to make Washington look like it wasn’t much of an emitter of carbon pollution.

It is also something the Columbian thought was fine having in its opinion pages. I don’t know what the process of getting into the paper is, and I suppose if a local legislator wants some room, you probably give it to them. But surely there must be an editorial process to weed out things like this that are so glaringly obviously obfuscation that even I can see it.

[Read more…]

Yesterday morning I tweeted out a photo of an overflowing trash can at a neighborhood park, admonishing my fellow Seattleites to hike out your own garbage when the park trash can is full. Because honestly—be a mensch. Well, this morning my dog and I arrived at the park to see a Seattle Parks & Recreation pickup truck driving away, and the weekend’s mess completely cleaned up.

Your tax dollars at work!

I mention this because one of the memes in every anti-tax campaign is that government needs to prove that it can be less wasteful with taxpayer money before we give them any more of it—and when we hear that relentlessly coming from the likes of the Seattle Times editorial board, what they really mean is “fuck those lazy, overpaid, unionized public employees.” You know, the lazy, overpaid, unionized public employees whose job it is to pick up our trash.

The problem with increasingly relying on voter-approved levies to run our parks is that these levies must be written in a way to attract voters, and “Pick up the trash after voters’ lazy asses” is not exactly a winning bullet point. Yet routine maintenance is the bulk of what the parks department does. And so rather than writing budgets based on what our parks really need, we’ve been writing them based on what might appeal to voters at the polls—and that, along with our city’s structural revenue deficit, is what has led to the parks’ $270 million deferred maintenance backlog.

Let’s be clear: voter-approved levies represent a relatively new way of funding our parks. Seattle’s first parks levy wasn’t until 2000, and that maintenance backlog has exploded since. So how’s all that “direct democracy” working out for you, Seattle?

If anything, Seattle voters have had too much of a say in how we run our parks, not too little. Give our parks department the stable revenue it needs to do the unsexy everyday work of maintaining our parks. Vote “Yes” on Prop 1.

Omigod, really, Seattle Times editorial board…?

The zoo receives many tens of millions of dollars from public coffers but resolutely refuses to explain how it spends the money. Tax dollars disappear into a void with no transparency or accountability. …

The zoo would be a beneficiary of Proposition 1’s Park District, which only compounds the taxpayer-provided free lunch, and builds the wall of secrecy higher.

The zoo has three unhappy female elephants in cramped space. … How bad are things at the Woodland Park Zoo for elephants? What does cramped space really mean? One of the poor creatures has suffered from urine burns, scalded by her own waste water.

There are no good arguments against Prop 1 other than “we don’t want to pay higher taxes,” so instead the opposition has resorted to, well, anything.

It’s hard to believe that a campaign over parks funding for chrissakes, could turn into one of the most dishonest and fear-mongering campaigns ever. But don’t be fooled. Vote “Yes” on Prop 1. (And mail in your goddamn ballot!)

– Did your bus survive the first round of Metro cuts?

– Why does Ted Cruz hate the Special Olympics?

– In the last few months, Seattle’s chattering class has become enamored of the idea of “regressive taxation,” which they are now tossing off in argument as often as possible, regardless of whether or not it actually applies.

– Corporations are people. The type of people who don’t have to be held accountable for environmental or workers rights violations. Or for paying off death squads.

– What to do if you see a hit-and-run

Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky. It was Synagogue Don Isaac Abravanel in Paris, where angry protests over the war in Gaza took place. Last week’s contest was also the 300th, so the stats for contests 201 to 300 are down below this week’s image.

This week’s is another random location, good luck!

Wins between contests 201 and 300:
milwhcky – 37
wes.in.wa – 14
Geoduck – 11
Liberal Scientist – 8
Seventy2002 – 6
zzippy – 4
Theophrastus – 2
waguy – 2
Dan Robinson – 2
poster child – 2
Ted – 2
10 winners with 1 (Two dogs, Deathfrogg, ChefJoe, Brian, don, BA1959, Jay S, Ludicrus Maximus, Darryl, Clara)

A special Pastor Mark Driscoll edition of HA Bible Study:

Jeremiah 23:30
Therefore, behold, I am against the prophets, declares the Lord, who steal my words from one another.

Discuss.

“Join us, the League of Women Voters, and the Seattle Times,” the almost certainly illegal anti-Parks 911-robocall closes. So you’d think the Seattle Times would want to protect its reputation by disassociating itself from such irresponsible tactics. But so far, crickets from our paper of record.

KOMO News, however, they ran with the story. Because it’s news:

No doubt the Seattle Times will finally cover this story once charges have been filed. You know, after it’s too late to impact the election.

Mental Floss: 26 unusual occupations.

Sam Seder: Dick “I’m Never Right” Morris wants you to trust him with your money.

Honest Political Ads: Kentucky, my new home:

Jimmy Dore gets a call from Rick Perry.

Do-nothing Obstructionist, Litigious Congress:

• Jon: Who has armed the Middle East?
• Steve Kornacki :Borderline INSANITY in the House
• Sharpton: G.O.P. toddlers stuff themselves with Obama lawsuit
• Ann Telnaes: Congress is on break AGAIN.
• Lawrence O’Donnell: House Republicans bail on their border vote
• Jon: Congress is the ‘Sharknado 2’ of government.
• Sharpton: Dazed & confused GOP bails on border bill
• David Pakman: The Republican lawsuit against Obama backfires.

ONN: The Onion Week in Review.

Sam Seder: Ewwwwww….Ben Stein has a sexting scandal.

Jon: A Midsummer News Dream.

Chris Christie stars in Minor League.

White House: West Wing Week.

Jonathan Mann: Ridiculous Laws.

Farron Cousins with Howard Nations: Cliven Bundy ignited a hellstorm of right wing hate.

Ed: Why Republicans have zero credibility on the U.S. Economy.

Impeach!

• Young Turks: Whose idea is it?
• Sharpton: Ridiculous Republican claim on impeachment.
• David Pakman: Boehner rules out impeachment, claims impeachment talk is a Democratic scam.
• Ed: The GOP’s miserable ‘Impeachment PIT’
• Chris Hayes: The GOP’s stupid denials echo 2013 government shutdown.
• Sam Seder: The insane push to impeach Obama.
• Sharpton: The Republican ‘comical’ Obama impeachment whiplash

A Congresswoman’s poem: “Do I dare be interviewed by Dr. Colbert?”.

David Pakman: K-K-Krazy-ass Michele Bachmann believes Obama wants migrant kids for medical experiments.

The Koch Bros’ Anti Obama “Care”nival.

Maddow: Mississippi GOP Gov. Phil Bryant sabotages ObamaCare then blames Obama!

Sam Seder: Sorry conservatives, polls show US is center-left.

Thom: The Good, The Bad, and The Very, Very Ugly.

Stephen: On the Sarah Palin Channel.

Barely Political: The Washington Redskins new name revealed.

David Pakman: More undocumented immigrants came into the U.S. under Reagan than Obama.

Ana Kasparian and friends: ‘Modern Family’ actor stands up to anti-gay Rick Santorum.

Conflict in Gaza:

• Mark Fiore: Not equal—Gaza in over 1000 frames.
• Jimmy Dore calls Peter King to talk about the war in Gaza:

• Stephen: Why it’s so difficult to cover Israel-Gaza conflict
• Jimmy Dore gets a call from Bibi “Eat it Gaza” Netanyahu

Kimmel: This week in unnecessary censorship.

Young Turks: Meet Seattle’s #1 anti-pot cop.

Sam Seder: Rand Paul lies about his support for Civil Rights Act.

David Pakman: Crazy-ass Republican equates EPA rules with “Terrorism”.

Thom: Will the GOP sabotage of ObamaCare backfire?

Liberal Viewer: Neil deGrasse Tyson and Maher on anti-Neil deGrasse Tyson article.

Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

If the No on Parks folks think it was just clever gamesmanship to spoof “911” in the caller ID of their recent robocall, they’re gonna have to make their case to the police. From SPD Blotter:

Dozens of confused Seattle residents have called Seattle police over the last 24 hours after receiving hangup calls, which appeared as if they came from 911.

In fact, these calls—which appear on caller IDs as “911-9111″—are the result of caller ID fraud, or “spoofing,” and are not coming from SPD’s 911 Communications Center.

The 911 Communications Center is researching the origin of the calls and is referring the case to detectives for investigation.

SPD blogger Jonah Spangenthal-Lee confirms that emergency operators saw a surge in volume yesterday as worried residents called 911 in response to these spoofed caller IDs. He was not familiar with the apparent connection to the No on Parks campaign. But now SPD is. According to an internal email sent out to volunteers yesterday, No on Parks committee co-chair Carol Fisher claimed “100,000 robo calls went out today.”

So, hey, thanks, Carol Fisher, Don Harper, Jon Hansen, Faye Garneau, Alyne Fortgang, Jim Coombes, and the rest of you anti-tax lying liars for creating a public safety hazard in the service of spreading your lies.

If your phone rings today and you see “911-9111” in the caller ID, don’t worry that it’s a reverse 911 call warning you about a toxic gas leak or an armed fugitive or something in your neighborhood. In fact, don’t pick it up at all. It’s just those lying liars from the “No on Parks” campaign attempting to trick you into listening to their robocall.

I’ve heard from several people who’ve picked up this call, initially alarmed that this might be coming from 911. One annoyed recipient posted a screen shot from his phone to Reddit. Pretty damn shady.

Also shady are the robocall’s now familiar claims that a Metropolitan Park District can “sell our parks, build stadiums, [and] fund development.” Bullshit scare tactics. All the evil that opponents claim the mayor and city council could do with parks money, they can already do now. But they don’t. Because they answer to voters.

But there’s one more subtle bit of trickier in this robocall. Near the end, before identifying who has paid for the call, the speaker says: “Join us, the League of Women Voters, and the Seattle Times.” Of course, that first comma can be read one of two ways—it could be understood to separate “us” from “the League of Women Voters,” or it could be understood to describe “us” as “the League of Women Voters.” The speaker glides through it in an intentionally* ambiguous manner.

Clever. But also incredibly dishonest. Just like the opponents entire lying lie-filled “No” campaign.

So don’t let bullshit win. Vote “Yes” on Prop 1.

UPDATE: To be clear, 206-911-9111 is not a valid phone number, and it has been suggested to me that such caller ID spoofing may in fact be illegal, punishable by a fine of up to $10,000 per violation. I won’t speculate further, but I’ve been told that this call went out to 100,000 voters, so if the courts were to interpret it as fraud, it could potentially add up to a $1 billion fine!

 

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* And yes, the starting point is to assume that every detail in a political campaign is intentional. If it wasn’t, then the campaign’s Republican political consultant, Sharon Gilpin (who likes to tout herself as a “savvy political operative”), wouldn’t be doing her job.