HorsesAss.Org

Limbaugh calls CNN’s Henry “butt boy”

by — ,

The de-facto leader of the GOP calls a CNN reporter “butt boy.”

You kind of wonder at what point legacy journalists, um, stop it with the pretending about just reporting what each side said. I mean, how exactly do you report, “Republicans responded that I am a ‘butt boy?'”

Is there even ONE Washington state Republican elected official with the guts to stand up to the psychopath Rush Limbaugh? Frankly I doubt it. The silence speaks volumes. They’re all too damn scared to stand up to this pathetic bully. And you wonder how Joe McCarthy got away with it for so long.

Overeating to Lose Weight

by — ,

The news of Mexico’s drug war violence is finally starting to get the attention it deserves – primarily because it’s starting to affect American (and even Canadian) cities. Much of the response has even been positive, with a number of insightful editorials, and some initial attempts by politicians in border states to begin discussing the connection between drug prohibition and the violence. But not everyone gets it just yet.

At a website called investors.com comes the most confused editorial I’ve seen on the Mexican violence so far this year.

Now that Phoenix has become a kidnap capital, it’s official: Mexico’s drug war is spilling over into the U.S. The administration vows a strong response, but so far seems to be putting special interests first.

Trouble from Mexico is cropping up in the usual place: the border, a nexus of illegal immigration, human smuggling and drug trafficking, all of it interlinked. It’s all about illegal routes into the states. As they grow scarcer, traffickers’ war on the Mexican state intensifies.

The intensification of this war has had nothing to do with border routes. The intensification was a result of a massive effort by Mexican President Felipe Calderon to go after the cartel leaders. The resulting violence was an entirely predictable response to Calderon’s push, based upon the numerous times in the past that Mexico has tried to eliminate the cartel and seen violence skyrocket. The smuggling routes aren’t becoming scarcer, they’re being fought over.

The U.S. seems to recognize the gravity of the problem — or is at least paying it lip service. A recent Pentagon report cited a risk of a sudden collapse in Mexico if cartels win. A Homeland Security report vows to ready a response if Mexico’s war spreads here. Last Friday, the State Department’s global counternarcotics report called the cartels “a significant threat.”

But for a threat this grave, the Obama administration places it below other priorities. Yes, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano calls the violence “a top priority.” But how does that jibe with her response to the Texas governor’s request for more border troops? “We do not want to militarize the border,” she said.

The Obama Administration has been far from perfect in how they’ve discussed what’s happening in Mexico, but this is a foolish criticism. Considering that Mexico doesn’t allow American military personnel on Mexican soil, there’s not much that an increased military presence on the border would do, other than to lead to actual warfare in cities like El Paso.

This editorial is still premised on the archaic belief that the only way to defeat cartels is by killing off the “bad guys.” We know now that this doesn’t work. The only way to defeat the cartels is to cut off their profits. Collectively, the Mexican cartels earn roughly $1 billion per week. Once you kill a “bad guy”, there will be a dozen people fighting each other to be the next “bad guy” and get a piece of that pie.

Human trafficking is a real and serious problem, but it’s one that we’ll never be successful at fighting as long as we continue to maintain a drug policy that helps these criminal organizations remain untouchable.

The editorial goes on to criticize Obama’s attempts at resurrecting gun control legislation, criticisms that I generally agree with, but then it goes off the deep end:

Other Obama officials also send mixed messages. The new drug czar, former Seattle police chief Gil Kerlikowske, stresses “harm reduction” instead of tough action. Sounds humane, but it essentially expands cartel market bases by enabling users and expanding the buyer base for the cartels.

“Harm reduction” distributes new needles, legalizes medical marijuana and puts pot at the bottom of enforcement priorities. Legalization lobbies are happy. But cartels have one more reason to smuggle.

What? And this website gives investment advice?

First of all, if medical marijuana were fully legal, the cartels would easily be pushed out of the market by legal American growers. If marijuana were fully legalized for recreational use, you could massively reduce the amount of money being used to wage this war against Calderon’s government. And you could free up the resources to shut down human trafficking networks, which don’t have the same enormous level of demand that drugs do.

Second, this editorial is assuming that harm reduction techniques for dealing with hard drug addiction increases demand. That hasn’t been true anywhere in the world where it’s been tried. Not in Switzerland. Not in Australia. Not in Canada. Not in Holland. The idea that needle exchanges give cartels “one more reason to smuggle” is an idea so outdated that it would have been laughable a decade ago.

The choice of Gil Kerlikowski to head the Office of National Drug Control Policy has generally been positive among drug law reformers, but he will certainly find that various members of the media and the political elite will see no distinction between his moderate support of a public health approach to drug problems and the views of more outspoken legalization advocates. We’ve long been used to Drug Czars who never let anyone take a more authoritarian posture than them. Now that the country at our southern border is in real danger of succumbing to the downstream effects of that legacy, Kerlikowske should find it easier to advocate for a new direction.

Drinking Liberally

by — ,

DLBottle Please join us tonight for an evening of politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. We start at 8:00 pm at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Some folks will show up earlier for dinner.

Tonight’s special topic is cats in the news. Cats…you can’t live with ’em, and you can’t live without ’em. And then there’s this.

Of course we’ll take a little time to write letters of apology to Rush.

Not in Seattle? The Drinking Liberally web site has dates and times for some 330 chapters of Drinking Liberally spread across the earth. Find one in a neighborhood near you.

Darcy challenges Colorado Senator to support EFCA

by — ,

Seattle Times editorial columnist Kate Riley once accused Darcy Burner of being “inauthentic” when in fact, the opposite is true: Darcy is perhaps too authentic, at least to be a successful politician, occasionally saying things she’d gain absolutely no advantage in saying, just because, you know, she believed them to be true.  It’s one of the traits that makes Darcy… Darcy.

So while it was sad to see her lose the November election, it is strangely good to see she hasn’t “learned her lesson,” as evidenced by this video of Darcy over the weekend, speaking out on behalf of the Employee Free Choice Act, and challenging recently appointed US Sen. Mike Bennett to do the same.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPwnZu7_u4I[/youtube]

Of course, this is the kind of spur-of-the-moment, grassroots video that drove her political consultants batty, and prompted media establishment types like Riley to brand Darcy as some kind of wacky, nutroots lefty.  Perhaps it’s not advisable to always speak her mind, if she has any aspirations of running for office again.  Professional politicians just don’t make videos like this.

But then, Darcy has never been a professional politican.

UPDATE:
To sign the petition mentioned in the video, click here.

Deja Vu, Part Deux

by — ,

Norm Coleman attorney James Langdon, in a letter to judges hearing the Minnesota election contest:

Some courts have held that when the number of illegal votes exceeds the margin between the candidates — and it cannot be determined for which candidate those illegal votes were cast — the most appropriate remedy is to set aside the election. In that regard, the Court may wish to review the following cases addressing situations in which the number of illegal votes is large and the margin of victory is small…

So, first Coleman’s attorney’s argue for proportionate reduction, and now they argue that if the number of illegal votes exceeds the margin of victory, the entire election has to be set aside and redone.  Sounds familiar, no?

There are in fact rare grounds for setting aside the results of an election, but as we learned in WA in 2004, closeness sure as hell ain’t one of them.  Of course, what happened here holds no legal precedence for MN, but dollars to donuts the judges there will be looking at Judge Bridge’s decision before writing their own.

Reps. Wallace & Anderson flunk higher-ed interview

by — ,

An email is making the rounds of UW faculty warning of a 20-percent cut in state funding, and an “unsympathetic” and “hard-edged tone” coming from state legislators.  The email points to Austin Jenkins’ TVW interview with Rep. Deb Wallace (D-Vancouver), Chair of the House Higher Education Committee, and Rep. Glenn Anderson (R-Fall City), the committee’s ranking Republican… and it’s the kinda interview that explains why so many people just hate politicians.

Wallace and Anderson are in fact unsympathetic and hard-edged (and at times, clueless), and for all their repetitive talk about reform and efficiency, they offer few if any specifics.  Both Wallace and Anderson affirm that our state colleges and universities should be bracing themselves for cuts in “the neighborhood of 20-percent,” yet both are equally adamant in their opposition to lifting the current 7-percent tuition increase cap.  And in the face of steep funding cuts, both legislators insist that school administrators minimize the impact to student enrollment while maintaining quality, or else, in the words of Anderson, the legislature will “come in with fixes that complicate their lives.”

I guess threats like that are what Anderson means when he talks about the need for everybody to “work together.”

So where’s the fat?  Wallace repeatedly points to a five-year BA/MA program as a model of efficiency (as if five-year BA/MA programs are anything new) while touting the thousands of community college students who now take classes online… even going so far as bizarrely mentioning the in-class nervous breakdown of one of her college professors as an example of the downsides of the traditional classroom environment.  But perhaps the stupidest and most revealing moment of the interview comes from Anderson, who favorably points to the newspaper industry for chrissakes as a positive model for using new technologies to transform our colleges and universities!

Yeah, that’s the ticket… model reforms on the brilliant newspaper industry business model.  If only we could break the unions, fire the professors, and shut down all the campuses, we could finally get skyrocketing higher education costs under control.  What a maroon.

And Wallace doesn’t come across much better when she argues for maintaining the 7-percent tuition increase cap by pointing to our current low rate of consumer price inflation:

“What do we say to families? Well, we’re going to raise your tuition beyond 7-percent even though inflation is 1.6? The question is, well, why are we going to do that?”

Um… maybe… because you’ve cut higher education funding by 20-percent?

Wallace insists on making a rhetorical argument in response to a policy question, and that doesn’t bode well for those hoping to have a responsible debate on education funding.  Likewise both her and Anderson’s knee-jerk rejection of a high-tuition/high-aid model—she, supposedly because “the math doesn’t work,” he because “well, we’re not a class society”—belies their stated goal of exploring real reform.

If I were a college administrator/instructor/student I’d come away from this interview disappointed, offended and awfully damn wary about the ability of this committee to lead our higher education system through these tough economic times.  In fact, I don’t see Wallace or Anderson offering much leadership at all, apart from warning  administrators to do more with less… or else.

Perhaps that makes for good politics in their home districts.  I dunno.  But it also pretty much guarantees a second-rate college and university system that ultimately balances its budget by exporting our best and our brightest.

The GOP at war–with itself

by — ,

Don’t miss Kos’s front pager on the hilarious spectacle of Michael Steele and Rush Limbaugh engaging each other for control of the GOP. As Markos says about Steele:

When you have to proclaim that “I’m the leader of the Republican Party”, then you are not.

Limbaugh is apparently going to respond to Steele on the radio, which should be hilarious. While most of the news these days ranges from terrible to awful, the Republican Party base genuflecting to Rush Limbaugh is awesomely awesome.

Limbaugh may be the king of AM conservative radio, but that’s not exactly a winning coalition. In fact, it’s not even a coalition, it’s just the tattered remnants of the “angry white male” devotees from twenty years ago. The country has moved on, and normal people want to confront the economic crisis in a meaningful way.

My crystal ball is at the Teletype office having new, lower stock ticker numbers installed, but could this be the true beginning of the end for the Republicans? Hard to see how any “moderates,” meaning in the case of the GOP anyone who isn’t certifiable, can survive in the Limbaugh Party.

UPDATE–Kos points to this post at The Plum Line, where Greg Sargent has some of Limbaugh’s response. Oh, and make sure you’re not drinking hot coffee. Like with this bit:

I’m not in charge of the Republican Party, and I don’t want to be. I would be embarrassed to say that I’m in charge of the Republican Party in a sad-sack state that it’s in. If I were chairman of the Republican Party, given the state that it’s in, I would quit. I might get out the hari-kari knife…

Today in spam

by — ,

I usually don’t give much thought to the spam that makes it through my filter, and most of it is also boring and predictable (whoever knew there were so many dead people with unclaimed millions running around Africa and Asia?). But one that popped in today, sent with malicious intent and undoubtably toxic attachment by someone in the Eastern Hemisphere, is both pretty clever and unintentionally hilarious:

From: Delta Air Lines

Thanks for the purchase!

Booking number: 3LSMXK

You will find attached to this letter PASSENGER ITINERARY RECEIPT of your electronic ticket.
It verifies that you paid the ticket in full and confirms your right for air travel and luggage transportation by the indicated flight Delta Air Lines.

On board you will be offered:
– beverages;
– food;
– daily press.
You are guaranteed top-quality services and attention on the part of our benevolent personnel.

We recommend you to print PASSENGER ITINERARY RECEIPT and take it alone to the airport. It will help you to pass control and registration procedures faster.

See you on board!
Best regards,

Delta Air Lines

Aside from the telltale misuses of American English (“daily press,” “control and registration procedures”), it’s pretty clear the author is not only not a Delta employee, but has never experienced domestic American air travel (and probably can’t even imagine it). I mean, really: Food? Top-quality services? Benevolent personnel?

Drago a no-go in November

by — ,

As expected, four-term Seattle City Councilmember Jan Drago announced this weekend that she will not be running for reelection this November, leaving at least two open seats in what is shaping up to be our most interesting council election in years.

Whether “interesting” equals “quality” when it comes to the final slate of candidates remains to be seen.

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!

Follow Goldy

[iire_social_icons]

HA Commenting Policy

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.