HorsesAss.Org

Seattle Department of Transportation officials spread salt on roads last night as snow started to accumulate throughout the city, even as meteorologists forecast warmer temperatures and rain overnight.  This morning, salted or not, Seattle roads are mostly clear, and slushy at worst.

Road salt in this kind of weather is a waste of money and salt; there’s not much chance of anything icing up when the temperature is above freezing.  But you know, this is what the Times and many other media outlets demanded, and this is what we got.

State Rep. Bill Grant (D-Walla Walla) died Sunday morning at the age of 71.  He was diagnosed with a rare form of lung cancer just last month.  My condolences to his friends and family.

Former Columbian editorial writer Elizabeth Hovde, now of The Oregonian, introduces herself to Portlanders.

I supported the Iraq invasion in 2003. Heck, I even voted for George W. Bush — twice.

At the same time, I am against torture.

(Slapping forehead.) Okay then. Hovde was so troubled by torture she went ahead and voted for Bush after the Abu Ghraib scandal had been known for six months or so. That’s quite a commitment to human rights.

Like many people in this great, green, soggy region of independents, I am not partisan.

Other than writing far-right columns at The Columbian for a decade, of course, where her work appeared for years along with the likes of Michelle Malkin. People might have somehow formed the impression the editorial page Hovde worked on was intent on being as right-wing as possible. I know I did. But that is entirely and magically separate from the dirty, dirty world of candidates and parties and ugly, dirty partisanship.

But Hovde is honest about her views, if not their ideological origins and the purposes for which they were used.

I am conservative, however. I’m pro-life. I am anti-bailouts. I think unions are outdated, overly political and that every state should have a right-to-work law ending compulsory unionism. I oppose Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act; I oppose even calling it the “Death With Dignity” Act. I am skeptical of some of Portland’s Smart Growth policies and believe they’ve helped create massive sprawl just across the river.

I worry that many public schools teach sex education in ways that undermine parents. It’s maddening to me that minors can’t get tattoos in Oregon but they can receive abortions without a parent’s knowledge, care or guidance. I grow weary of government safety nets that not only comfort those in true need but also become hammocks for those with an ability to be self-sufficient.

Nope, nothing partisan about any of that. I will agree that Portland can be annoying.

Hovde does sort her garbage, though.

I’ll pack out my Diet Coke cans rather than leave them at my in-laws’ house where they don’t recycle.

So there you have it. Sorting one’s beverage containers is the exact moral equivalent of opposing torture, even if you voted for a guy who was pro-torture.

We should all become non-partisan conservatives, it sounds swell. You don’t actually have to identify with anything icky like a political party everyone now hates, and you don’t have to actually take intellectual responsibility for your past advocacy of that party’s main policy stances and propaganda, simply by declaring yourself non-partisan! Very cool.

I’m a non-partisan progressive, by the way. Thought you should know.

Last week’s winner was ‘yo’ in an impressive 25 minutes. It was Warwick, Rhode Island (link to view here). Here’s this week’s, good luck!

A new year, a new Tim Eyman personal profit making scheme. Turns out a 1% cap probably wasn’t enough, so it’s a good thing we did a special session to re-instate it! Way to teach Timmy a lesson! Now he’s likely coming back for more. Wonder what lesson he learned? My guess is that Dems are chumps.

Local governments should just cease operation, that would seem to be far simpler. The market will provide libraries, fire protection and such. I mean, if I want a book, I’ll just buy one I like. I shouldn’t have to pay for books other people like, and I definitely shouldn’t have to pay for firefighters to put out fires in other people’s houses.

And I’m not 65, so I don’t want people to get Social Security unless I get to vote on it. Every year. If I’m mad, distracted or gullible enough to believe political advertising, sorry grandma.

Maybe one of the remaining journalists can ask Tim whose his daddy? Enquiring minds want to know who is going to foot the bill for this silliness now.

Decline to sign, baby, decline to sign.

Awoke this morning to the sound of the power going out (my carbon monoxide dectector gives out a death shriek at the moment of disconnect), and the chilly thought of the five-day outage two years ago.  About 45 minutes later, the power came back on.

It’s amazing how powerless we modern humans feel in the absence of the power.

I don’t know how I’d even look this up, but this has gotta be the first time that all four road teams in a playoff round are favored in Vegas. Weird season.

Against my better judgment, I think I’ll throw out some predictions.

Saturday 1:30pm: Atlanta over Arizona – 38-28

Saturday 5:00pm: Indianapolis over San Diego – 24-21

Sunday 10:00am: Miami over Baltimore – 13-10

Sunday 1:30pm: Philadelphia over Minnesota – 22-6

The story of the young man shot by police at UW is starting to look more and more like a tragic mistake. While it’s still far too early to make any real conclusions, the incident does seem eerily similar to the shooting of Everett man Dustin Willard in November. In both cases, friends and family were shocked to find out that the person they knew to be a law-abiding citizen would point a gun at police. Were they affected by alcohol or drugs? Did they not realize that the people yelling at them were police? Or is there some other explanation? These cases far too often come and go, fading into the oblivion without these questions being answered.

UPDATE: This post at Sound Politics is very disturbing. Regularly following news reports on the drug cartels, incidents like these are happening in greater numbers across the United States…not just in Mexico any more.

Trouble, trouble everywhere, not just with notorious big cases like Madoff.

Today’s wave of dubious deals is more pervasive and grass-roots in nature than the S&L debacle, which primarily involved thrift executives and their borrowers. Developers, mortgage brokers, appraisers, bankers and borrowers alike are under the microscope of state securities regulators and federal prosecutors.

“We’ve always had people fudging the numbers on their loan application to buy the home they wanted to live in,” said Joe Boyer, supervisory special agent for the FBI in Portland. “During the boom, we had people trying to do 50 homes. It was all about the real estate appreciation.”

Boyer is a key member of a mortgage fraud working group in Portland formed among local, state and federal investigators to combat real estate and mortgage fraud.

It’s good that law enforcement is finally taking action, I guess. The horses are out of the barn, down the road and on a plane to an offshore location, sipping tropical drinks and laughing, but hey, it’s something. Basically huge portions of American society became a kleptocracy, and with nobody enforcing existing laws or lending standards to any great extent, it seems like it became socially acceptable to do wrong.

Thus shall the disastrous neo-liberal epoch of 1980-2008 be remembered. Both parties shared in this, and to a certain extent many politicians seem not to have learned a great deal. This is TWICE in the last twenty years this has happened. It’s inexcusable, and more importantly, downright stupid and unnecessary.

While it’s true that proper regulation must be neither too burdensome nor too lax, we’ve lived through an age where the reflexive attitude of most bidness guys and gals, especially in the house building, buying and selling industry, is to oppose regulation just ’cause they wanna. It makes ’em mad and so they run lying third party expenditure ads and so on, kind of like a child holding its breath. And like a naughty child, they are now very, very sorry that they got caught and everything is all messed up.

Babbling about the invisible hand is all fine and dandy, but it’s neither realistic nor much of a policy. The automatic response to anyone still claiming markets will police themselves should be a belly laugh.

Even the Wall Street Journal has taken notice of Washington DOT’s innovative, home brew road de-icer:

The mix consists of molasses from a local supplier, calcium chloride and brine donated by a local dairy company. Mr. Simonsen had been experimenting with the right proportions and ingredients for several years, blending them in a 1,000-gallon vat and dispersing the liquid with the same salt trucks. He first used it last year on a busy mountain pass in southwest Washington.

This season, the state’s department of transportation has been spreading the solution throughout 11 counties, up from one last winter, with the help of a new automated system that can churn out 5,000 gallons of it in an hour. It has come in handy during a particularly heavy winter.

DOT is brewing the concoction at a Darigold farm in Chehalis, and the savings to taxpayers have been significant… only about $0.48/gallon for the home brew mixture compared to $1.30/gallon for commercially available de-icer.  Transportation officials are new considering building production facilities in each of the state’s six regions.

But wait… is de-icer production really the proper role of government?  Isn’t the private sector always more efficient than the public sector, and doesn’t this amount to unfair, taxpayer subsidized competition to the hard working folks in the de-icing business?  Perhaps all you free marketeers out there can explain this to me?

I slept in this morning, emptied my bladder, brushed my teeth, let the dog and cat out, made myself a pot of green tea, let the dog and cat back in, mixed up a yeast dough, ate a banana, fed the dog and cat, started cooking a split pea soup, drank some more tea, and wrote this post.

So far, that’s about it.

UPDATE:
I just updated this post.  Not much else is doing.

Okay then. Sounds like the northwest Nazis are kind of losing it (as if being a Nazi isn’t a sign in and of itself of insanity.)

The New Year was scarcely two hours old when Seattle police were forced to shoot an apparent neo-Nazi wearing a German military uniform in the Ravenna-University District.

Police say he aimed a rifle attached with a bayonet at them and refused to put it down.

The wounded man was taken to Harborview Medical Center with life-threatening injuries but was still alive shortly before 7 a.m., police spokesman Jeff Kappel said.

—snip—

Inside the residence from which the armed man emerged to confront police was Nazi regalia and alcohol, Kappel said.

It all happened shortly before 2 a.m. when a call from alarmed residents was made to 911 about five men in their 20s with guns, dressed in military uniforms and other dark clothing, who were firing shots in the west end of the alley on the 5200 block of 17th Avenue Northeast.

Police reached the caller and talked to witnesses who said two of the men had been firing guns. One was believed to be carrying a rifle and the other a shotgun.

According to the article, police are still on the lookout for a second man who might be armed and also wearing a similar uniform.

Happy New Year! And watch out for those Seattle Nazis, that’s just flipped out.

UPDATE Fri. Jan. 2 11:20 AM– At Slog, Jonathan Spangenthal-Lee reports that the man who was shot (and later died) was a University of Washington student majoring in German studies and a WWII buff. Some of the deceased’s friends are saying the Nazi aspect “is being blown out of proportion.”

A sad situation anyhow you slice it.

Seattle area house prices continued to fall:

House prices in King, Pierce and Snohomish counties dropped 1.4 percent from September and 10.2 percent from October 2007, according to Standard & Poor’s S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices. Area prices now have fallen 11.4 percent from the July 2007 peak and are back to where they were in the spring of 2006.

The year-over-year decline was the first double-digit annual drop for S&P’s Seattle index, which goes back to the start of 1990, and put Seattle eighth among the 20 areas S&P tracks. The monthly drop was unchanged from September’s and good for fifth place.

The Portland area seems about the same:

The Portland-Vancouver area saw housing prices decline an average of 10.1 percent in the 12 months ending in October, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index report Tuesday.

The region’s price decline was not as bad as many other parts of the U.S. with urban areas such as Phoenix, Detroit and Las Vegas down more than 20 percent. Prices in the 20-city index have plummeted more than 23.4 percent from their peak in July 2006.

It’s good that our region might not be facing the kind of insane declines in value as some other places, but high inventory and economic uncertainty means more bumpy sledding lies ahead. It may be a “great time to buy a house,” as industry advertising suggests, but only for those with stellar credit. Not sure there are enough of those folks left to really stabilize things right now.

I would like to use my extra second to note that Samuel J. Wurzelbacher is an uninformed, hypocritical right wing douche and he can eat me. Just for the record.

God bless 2009.

No doubt the snow storms and sub-freezing temperatures that iced over our roads for much of last week were frustrating to a region unaccustomed to and unprepared for ice and snow, but in the end, it was only a week, and it was only the first time since 1990 that such wintry conditions survived for more the a few days, before being melted away by our typically warmer and rainier weather. So while I was as inconvenienced as anybody—not even the Postal Service was willing to brave it up and down my hill for seven days—I’m not particularly angry or concerned about the way the city responded to the mess.

Shit happens, and as Mayor Nickels acknowledged today, the city is ready to reevaluate its snow clearing procedures and work with Metro to provide more reliable service during future storms.  But if it’s another 18 years before shit like this hits the region again, I’ll be neither surprised nor disappointed if the city’s performance isn’t any better.

But those of you demanding truckloads of salt and an army of steel-tipped snowplows to scrape the streets clean the next time a couple of inches of white stuff blankets the region better be prepared to deal with the consequences, because even the city’s minimal response has created or exacerbated damage that will take months, and hundreds of thousands of dollars to repair.

Case in point, the hundreds of reflective “turtles” lying dead and dismembered on the sides of our roads, their shells cracked and broken in the wake of even rubber-tipped plows.  As a transplant, I’ve learned to love these turtle markers, visible even on rainy nights, and ready to provide a rumbling warning when you  stray over the line.  We had plenty of salt and snowplows back in Philadelphia, but few turtles, as few would survive a typical winter of frequent plowing.  Given the rarity of extended snow events here in Seattle, I’d choose the turtles over the plows, and while I don’t have any numbers to support my assertion, I’m guessing so would traffic safety statisticians.

You don’t get something for nothing, and there are costs to salt and plows beyond the cost of the actual salt and the plows.  Of course we could do a better job clearing the roads, but I’m just not sure it’s worth the tradeoffs.