HorsesAss.Org

Open Thread 5/13

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– I love Seattle’s dedication to fair play. But maybe we give less time to Sacramento media on Hansen.

– The free market isn’t always the best way to make health care decisions.

– At least it’s a bit more transparent now.

– Bicyclists are helpful to bicyclists.

– This piece on swear words was interesting.

– Congrats to Thomas Friedman on being beyond satire.

– An Open Letter to White Male Comedians

HA Bible Study

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Luke 19:23-27
Why didn’t you put my money in the bank? On my return, I could have had the money together with interest.”

Then he said to some other servants standing there, “Take the money away from him and give it to the servant who earned ten times as much.”

But they said, “Sir, he already has ten times as much!”

The king replied, “Those who have something will be given more. But everything will be taken away from those who don’t have anything. Now bring me the enemies who didn’t want me to be their king. Kill them while I watch!”

Discuss.

Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza!

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Geoff Tate: Fixing the economy.

Ann Telnaes: Life begins at conception.

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

Maddow: Heritage Foundation, “Low IQ immigrants are parasites & their ‘unborn’ children will be too!”.

White House: West Wing Week.

Heavyweight Governor:

Maddow: Obama’s IRS scandal in context.

Sam Seder: Judge slams Obama administration over their right wing Plan B stance.

ONN: The week in review.

Susie Sampson’s Tea Party Report: Another state falls to gay marriage.

Lush Rimbaugh:

The Point: Justice Sandra Day O’Connor regrets Bush v. Gore in 2000.

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

Maddow: Alarming ineptitude revealed in care of U.S. nuclear arsenal.

Jon on the Jodi Arias coverage.

Sam Seder: Republican warmongers beating the war drums.

South Carolina is Still Crazy:

Young Turks: Elizabeth Warren wants students to get bank rates on their loans.

Ann Telnaes: America the armed.

Maddow: G.O.P. war on student voters violates the law.

Mark Fiore: iEvade.

Thom: Should Obama send troops to Texas?

Benghazi Brouhaha:

Young Turks: Enron CEO to get reduced prison term.

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

Happy blogiversary to me!

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It was nine years ago today that I relaunched HorsesAss.org as an “almost daily blog on Washington State politics and the press.” You can read my very first post here. It is a touch fascinating to look back on how I managed to preserve the original vision of HA without at all anticipating how it would ultimately take over my life.

Anyway, in celebration of this milestone (and prodded Darryl) here is a list of some of my nine favorite and/or most influential posts, in chronological order. Thank you all for the past nine years, especially to all my co-bloggers who have carried on the HA tradition in my absence. And enjoy.

Stick a Foulkes in it, this case is done! (02/23/2005)
I’ve always been particularly proud of my legal analysis. In this early post, I explained exactly why Dino Rossi would lose his election contest, months before the court ultimately ruled.

FEMA director Mike Brown, a “total fucking disaster” (09/02/2005)
You know that Arabian horse story that hastened the demise of incompetent FEMA director Mike “Heckuva Job” Brown? This is the post that started it all, and first brought HA to a national audience.

Raging Bullshitter: the sad twisted tale of the Irons family feud (10/20/2005)
The day before this post hit, explaining why his own mother wouldn’t vote for him, King County Council member David Irons Jr. had a small lead in the polls in his bid to unseat Executive Ron Sims. After the media storm I generated, Irons ended up losing by 17 points.

Luke Esser fucks pigs (10/17/2006)
It is a sad irony that one of my funniest and most outrageous posts was written in defense Rodney Fucking Tom.

HA EXCLUSIVE: Seattle Times election day redesign revealed! (10/23/2006)
A rare display of my extraordinary Photoshop skills.

Falwell That Ends Well (An Ode To The Mortal Majority) (05/16/2007)
For a change of pace, some poetry!

Goldy’s Adventures in Muniland (04/25/2008)
In which I masquerade as David Postman and accept his Municipal League award.

Young woman quit DNR after being sexually harassed by Commissioner Sutherland (07/15/2008)
And election-changing bit of muckraking that all the other papers had, but refused to run with. Until after I did.

A layman’s refutation of Rob McKenna’s bullshit lawsuit (03/29/2010)
More than two years before the US Supreme Court surprised pundits by upholding Obamacare on Congress’s taxing power, I explained why the court would uphold Obamacare based on Congress’s taxing power.

Nine years of HA trolls

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Today is the 9th anniversary of HA. So I thought I would celebrate by remembering the top nine most memorable trolls who have lurked in the comment threads.

Any such list is necessarily subjective—trolls are memorable for may different reasons, sometimes rather personal ones. Some have invoked anger, some have provided “entertainment,” some were just very, very…VERY different. Okay…so here goes:

  1. Mr. Cynical was Goldy’s first real troll. He showed up during the Great Election Contest of 2005, and loudly and boldly tried telling us how things would come out. Cynical was largely a propagandist for Republicans, so his many, many prognostications almost always came out dead wrong. Cynical was so wrong over the Great Election Contest of 2005, that the took on the moniker, “Mr. Irrelevant after his side lost. At least he had a sense of humor. An example of a Cynical long term political prediction, from the summer of 2005:

    Santorum and Rice will win in 2008 and 2012….
    Then Rice will become the first African-America and first woman President of the United States in 2016 and 2020.

    Mr. Cynical occasionally returns to the comment thread to offer his opinions on important events, like presidential elections. During the 2012 election, Cynical came back as Ryanistheman, Jody, and likely other commenters. A little know fact is that Cynical was the first troll to really get under Goldy’s skin…until Goldy got toughened and jaded into the troll-aloof person we know and love day.

  2. Another of HA’s early trolls, JCH, was hell-bent on simply being disruptive. And he left lots of comments in attempts to disrupt. He was also a racist, spewing anti-Semitic slurs ad nauseum. It’s hard to know what drove him. He admitted that he lived in Hawaii, and I was able to deduce that he had previously lived in California, where he actively wrote letters to the editor of his local newspaper, pushing wingnut causes, of course.

    JCH has the distinction of being the first troll to be banned from HA. It was largely for his unwillingness to stop the barrage of anti-Semitic insults. And even his banning came after a long spell of having his comments moderated.

  3. Chardonnay was HA’s first “concern troll,” but really stood out for being an (apparent) female in a largely male-dominated field. Something else that stood out about Chardonnay: she was excessively stupid. Now, whether this was an act or real is hard to tell. But she specialized in taking Republican talking points and re-framing them as “concerns” that were promptly demolished by other commenters. Here is a fun Chardonnay comment that came during the Ron Sims, David Irons, Jr. King County Executive election:

    oh ya Ivan, King Ronny is toast he’s as wacked as algore if not more. ronny f’d up with his trumped up enviro BS. and his election dept debacle. stick a fork in him.

    I’ll tell ya what ivan, if ron wins I’ll donate money to Goldy’s beer fund. You ‘buddy’ get zip unless Goldy wants to share his beer with you. If David Irons wins you buy Goldy a beer.

    I cannot say whether she ever donated beer money to Goldy. Chardonnay disappeared (under that name, anyway) after that election in late 2005. She made one more appearance in 2007.

  4. Christmas Ghost is notable as another female commenter. She was much brighter than Chardonnay but, perhaps, crazier. A notable characteristic of her comments was an absence of upper case characters. Eventually, she moved to the Bay area and quit commenting on HA, but not before EFFin’ Unsound had some fun with her.

    Interesting, odd facts: She was a raging asshole to Goldy in the comment threads, but he reports that she was a nice and reasonable person in her emails to him. Goldy once posted a missing person piece on behalf of Christmasghost. The niece was eventually found, though I don’t know any of the details.

  5. Piper Scott makes this list, because no commenter was more full of himself than was Piper. He was seriously insufferable and really did take himself seriously. Everyone else…not so much. In fact, Lee started a series of posts about him called The Crackpiper Chronicles (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4).

    Part one highlighted one of my favorite protracted exchanges with any troll. It’s still a fun read that shows, in the end, underneath all the pretense, Piper was reacting emotionally like a very typical reality-challenged wingnut.

  6. Puddybud. Ahhhh, yes. What can we say about our beloved Puddybud. First, he gets kudos for longevity, having first posted back in 2005. Puddybud is a smorgasbord of illogical thoughts, nonsense, child-like arguments, illiteracy, hatred, bigotry, and right wing tripe, oddly mixed, on occasion, with pious religious fervor. And to add to it all, Puddybud has some deep insecurities as evidenced by his need for silly bragging. (Anyone remember the conversation about Puddybud serving in the military?)

    An interesting thing about Puddy is the he has actually engaged with some of us in person by coming to Drinking Liberally. In person, he is a friendly, articulate, and intelligent person—really, the antithesis of his online persona. How could this be? The answer is that Puddybud is a character. The person producing the character is engaging in performance art. This explains everything about Puddybud. Think about it…if your objective is to maximize disruption and “make liberal heads explode,” then debate using emotional arguments, use bad logic, be inflammatory while saying stuff that is barely comprehensible, misuse data. Hell…just blatantly lie—it’s the character Puddy, not the God-fearing person playing Puddy lying to you.

  7. Mark the Redneck is a typical, if once prolific, propagandist/troll. What puts Mark the Redneck on this list is an infamous bet he made with Goldy…and reneged on.
  8. Marvin Stamn was a prolific, nearly robotic troll. He had commenting down to an art:
    1. Open up Drudge and find an “outrage”
    2. Excerpt a quote from the piece
    3. Write just enough commentary so that it constitutes “fair use”.
    4. Go to 1

    Marvin eventually did himself in when he admitted to getting paid for his propaganda. It is hard to know if he was serious or joking, but since he lived in Southern California, commented for many hours a day, and had nothing to say about local politics, it seems more plausible than not. I don’t miss him.

  9. I had a hard time picking just one last troll to memorialize. I considered pbj, chuck, manoftruth, howcanyoubePROUDtobeanASS, Max, YO, josef, and so on. But I choose Klake. What I remember about Klake was his long, rambly, semi-coherent comments, with random parts of the text in bold. Like here and here. Classic stuff.

So those are my “top” nine. How about you? Who are the trolls you would memorialize and why?

Pay for That?

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Dominic Holden has a pretty amazing piece about the fact that The Seattle Times is charging its employees to use the Seattle Times online archive.

As a reporter, I frequently have to search our website’s online archives for linking, providing context, or developing backfill on articles. It didn’t seem possible that a newspaper would actually charge its reporters for an essential function of their jobs. That would be like installing payphones on everyone’s desk and pocketing the money.

At first, when I read that last sentence, I thought don’t give them any ideas. Giving Frank Blethen ways to screw his employees over is like giving Frank Blethen a gun and a puppy: nothing good can come out of it, yet Frank Blethen will be full of smiles. But then I thought fuck it, and came up with a list of other ways he can screw his employees:

  • Charge reporters for pens and notepads
  • Force delivery drivers to pay for routine maintenance on their trucks, or at least to paint them over
  • Reclassify all employees as interns, and don’t pay them
  • Instead of paying writers per word, charge them per word for proofing and editing
  • Force freelancers to buy ad space
  • Force columnists to sell ad space
  • Give ad space away free to candidates and causes, thus devaluing the pretense of neutrality that the paper strives for
  • Make nepotism hires for important jobs

The Women in Trades Career Fair

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I didn’t know about it until a little while ago, but this seems like a great thing if it might be helpful for you.

Many women have never considered career options such as welding, electricity or carpentry, but these opportunities are available, and even more so as baby boomer workers are nearing retirement. Who WILL keep our lights on, our bridges safe, our water running and our roads paved? These are jobs that cannot be outsourced.

As the oldest women’s trade organization in the Puget Sound, it is WWIT’s job to educate and inspire our youth, as well as steer work-ready women toward these high paying, mentally challenging, and self-empowering careers in the trades.

Thwarted by a Bottle

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The other day I was riding the Link Light Rail, and at Columbia City. The doors started to close and then re-opened with the train not going anywhere. Then it happened again. And again. And again. I didn’t see anything wrong, and assumed it was someone holding the door, or something else happening in another car.

But then the person in the seat next next to mine got up, and grabbed a plastic bottle, and said that it had been blocking the way. And with that the doors closed, and the train got on its way. All told, probably less than a minute, but given the way Seattle can be, who knows how long it would have been if he hadn’t done something.

So this post is mostly just thanks to whoever it was who picked it up.

Open Thread 5/9

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– I’m still opposed to spending money beyond bonding capacity on a stadium, but now I hope some hiccup means Sacramento doesn’t get to keep their team just out of spite.

– “This was a step forward for justice,” Inslee said after the bill signing ceremony. “We can’t return people their lost years, but we can take a step that gives them a measure of respect and dignity.”

– Councilwoman Godden writes a fairly mild piece saying we should work on fixing the fact that Seattle is the worst big city for pay inequality, the comments are unhelpful.

– We’re still pretending Benghazi is some uniquely awful thing.

– I hope the Colbert Busch loss doesn’t mean Democrats write off the deep South.

– The Lake Forest Park farmers market opens on Mother’s Day.

Sounds Right

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Joel Connelly snarks on McGinn’s anti-violence stuff. But I think it’s good. Mostly on the teach kids not to be violent aspect.

“Weapons to Words” will ask Seattle schoolchildren to come up with a short quotation about gun violence. The best of their quotations, on what a violence-free future means to them, will be inscribed on plaques made from the 760 weapons collected earlier this year in the gun buyback program. Schnitzer Steel is making the plagues. Chihuly Studio is “shaping the aesthetics” in the words of Leslie Jackson Chihuly, its president.

“The plaques will be placed across Seattle so they can leave a lasting legacy,” McGinn said.

Sounds like a good idea. Teach kids to think about what a violence free world would look like. And it’s a nice metaphor to use the returned guns for that. It seems like a win-win. Except that it gives Rush Limbaugh a sad, so he doesn’t win.

When he got back to the office, McGinn found himself a politician doubly blessed. The “Weapons to Words” program was promptly lampooned over the air by that rhinoceros of right-wing talk radio, Rush Limbaugh. Liberal Seattle doesn’t boast many of the followers Limbaugh calls “Ditto Heads.”

If this was a bad idea, the fact that Rush Limbaugh doesn’t like it wouldn’t improve it. But the fact that it’s a decent lesson for children that he’s upset about means that it’s really icing on the cake.

And the fact that Limbaugh is upset about it is probably all you need to about if compromise is possible. Taking guns that people voluntarily turned in, and making them into quotes about not being violent is too much for these fuckers.

Maybe I oughta check the card at Emerald Downs

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Yesterday afternoon, David Jarman of the DailyKos Elections group posted SC-01 special election benchmarks and predictions, presenting background information about the district and asking commenters to make their prognostications about the Sanford-Colbert Busch battle.

I offered my thoughts at 12:36pm, many hours before the polls closed in Charleston and Hilton Head:

sad to say … 54-45-1

Sanford in the majority.

And in the House, he’ll have plenty of free time for hiking.

As of this morning, the unofficial results from the South Carolina Secretary of State read:

Mark Sanford (REP)                     54.04%
Elizabeth Colbert Busch (DEM)       41.86%
Elizabeth Colbert Busch (WFM)        3.35%
Eugene Platt (GRN)                       0.48%
Write-in                                      0.27%

Summing Colbert Busch’s Democratic and Working Families lines — SC, like New York and Oregon, uses fusion voting — we get 45.22% as her total percentage. Rounded to integers, that comes to 54-45-0; had the Green picked up 27 more votes, his total would have rounded up to 1%.

So… who’s running in the Hastings Handicap this Sunday?

Stand. On. The. Right.

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No, this isn’t the first rant on this subject on HA. Unlike Will, I don’t think this is just a not getting it thing or a lack of basic politeness thing. And it’s not some inherent flaw among the escalator users of Settle. I think its signage.

Namely, most cities have signs on at least their public transit saying to stand on the right. They don’t trust it to chance, or whatever. They don’t think you should just know. Ideally it would go beyond just public transit. It could be for multiple story malls, or for the Convention Center. Basically, anywhere with escalators wide enough that you can pass someone.

Yes, you should know to clear a path for people who want to go. It’s common decency. On a busy time of day, it helps people who need (or want) to rush somewhere. Sometimes it just feels claustrophobic to not be able to get through. But I bet most of the people bunched up just don’t know that there can be a system.

I emailed the King County Metro customer service and asked if there is a rule even if it isn’t posted and if there might be signage at some point in the future since trains will be coming in from East Link and University Link. No response.

I feel like this is the sort of thing that’s about the right size for some HA activism. So I’m going to start bugging public officials. I assume King County is responsible for the Bus Tunnel, and ST for the rest of the off grade escalators along the system? [Late Update, KC responded, and said it was a Sound Transit issue. I’ve emailed them.]

But until then, please stand on the right.

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It may be hard to believe from the vile nature of the threads, but yes, we have a commenting policy. Comments containing libel, copyright violations, spam, blatant sock puppetry, and deliberate off-topic trolling are all strictly prohibited, and may be deleted on an entirely arbitrary, sporadic, and selective basis. And repeat offenders may be banned! This is my blog. Life isn’t fair.