HorsesAss.Org

This is just one guy.

In a seemingly unprecedented move, President George W. Bush on Wednesday revoked a pardon he had issued just 24 hours earlier for a politically connected real estate developer who defrauded hundreds of low-income home buyers—acknowledging that White House aides had not fully described the scope of the crimes committed and the context of the clemency application.

The unexpected Christmas Eve reversal came after it was discovered that the pardon of Isaac Toussie had not met Justice Department guidelines and that Toussie’s father had donated $28,500 to the Republican National Committee, prompting some of Toussie’s victims to complain he had been bailed out thanks to White House ties.

That legacy thing isn’t going so well.

How many more scumbags are there that we’ll never know about? How many of them are in Washington state? Will the remains of the traditional media here endeavor to tell us? The house building, selling and financing industry needs to be held accountable. You shouldn’t be able to wreck an economy and get away with it, at least if you’re name isn’t Stalin.

Here Bush is trying to pardon a kleptocrat and the only way he gets called on it is because house owners who got screwed called foul. We could use some of that moxie here.

Perhaps it’s because I’m not gay.  Or maybe it’s because I’m not a woman.  But I’ve had a hard time getting all riled up about Barack Obama’s choice of the anti-gay, anti-woman Rev. Rick Warren to deliver the inaugural invocation, and I can’t help but agree with Carla over at Blue Oregon in wondering if this type of symbolic litmus test is really worth our collective energy and outrage:

There are a lot of excellent bloggers who know how to take the fight to the halls of DC and beyond. The ability to stir things up is a hallmark of what some of us love to do. But the ability to do this stirring has its limits. Our political capital is finite. Do we really want to spend it in an attempt to influence Obama to dump Rick Warren’s Inaugural invocation? Really?

I know, maybe it’s because I’m not Christian (or even a theist for that matter), and so I find the whole notion of a religious invocation or benediction at any political event unappealing, regardless of who delivers it, but in answer to Carla’s question, I guess I’d say, um… no.  Actual policy, well that’s worth a fight, but this… well… not really.

Not that my fellow progressive bloggers shouldn’t feel free to express their outrage if that’s what yanks their chain, but as Carla demonstrates, mainstream observers would be mistaken to view the netroots as some sort of group-think monolith, and should avoid mistaking loudness for leadership.  Even the name brand national bloggers speak only for themselves; if you don’t believe me, just read their comment threads.

Meanwhile, Carla is dead-on in pointing out that the political capital of the netroots is finite, though I’d elaborate by saying that it’s also rather limited when it comes to influencing the White House, regardless of the occupant.  Maybe it’s because I’m just a lowly local blogger, but it’s hard to see why I’d bother wasting my time trying to persuade Obama to hire a different preacher?

Or… maybe not.

Yesterday’s Seattle Times piece on Seattle DOT’s salt-free snow removal policy apparently struck a nerve with frustrated readers, at least judging by the four follow-up stories and editorials in today’s edition, plus two more in today’s Seattle P-I.

Huh.  It turns out the lack of salt can cause high blood pressure too.  Who knew?

Mayor Nickels better hope the city thaws out soon, before the nascent Frozenwatergate scandal threatens his reelection prospects.  But for all the calls for the city to change its no-salt policy, it’s likely way too late for the current storm system, if not much of the winter season.  A no-salt policy means that the city stockpiles… um… no salt.  And anybody who’s trekked to their local Home Depot this week in hopes of buying some rock salt knows that it is usually in shortest supply when it is needed most.

With many of the city’s major arterials glaciated over the past week, including much of the downtown, the city will no doubt reevaluate its no-salt policy.  But deciding to use salt, and having it available to use are two different things, so for now we’ll just have to wait for rain and warmer weather to melt our icy streets.

[via The Agitator]

I love snow. I always have. And it’s snowing. Again. It’s beautiful. I should be thrilled.

Instead, I’m just pissed off. We live on a hill, in Fremont, that’s been a skating rink for nearly a week now. I understand when side streets don’t get plowed during an emergency. But impassable for a week?

And it’s not just side streets. The nearest arterial is less than three blocks away. It’s flat. It connects to other streets that are flat (or, in one case, gently sloping). By all appearances, that street hasn’t been plowed, either. Or salted. Or even sanded. The bus, needless to say, doesn’t come.

Read some of the over 250 comments on Joel Connelly’s latest column and you’ll quickly deduce that this situation is happening all over the region, and especially in the cities of Seattle, Bellevue, and Redmond. And there’s no excuse. None.

“But Seattle has hills!” So does Pittsburgh. And Boston. And any number of other cities that get snow regularly. They cope. “But it’s rare here!” I’ve lived in any number of places in the South – Houston, Memphis, South Carolina, Virginia – where it snowed in amounts roughly comparable to Seattle: a couple times a year, maybe, and one big storm a decade. Some of these places have hills, too. They cope. Mind you, we’re talking the South, where local governments are loathe to tax or to provide any services, and where buses are something the black maids use to get to the suburbs each morning. They handle this shit better than Seattle. “Salt hurts the environment!” Once or twice a year? I can live with that. But then, I could live with sand on the roads, too, and I’m not seeing that, either. After seven fucking days.

It’s preposterous that in the 21st century, a metropolitan area of nearly four million people — one of the wealthiest metropolitan areas in the world, I might add — can be nearly paralyzed for a week or more by a few inches of snow.

Oh, speaking of the P-I, one other thought: we haven’t gotten home delivery of our newspaper since Friday, and, guess what? We haven’t missed it. Everything we need is online. Wonder how many other households will reach the same conclusion this week?

Kudos to Arizona’s Attorney General Terry Goddard for starting to figure out how we can defeat Mexico’s drug cartels:

Attorney General Terry Goddard said Tuesday he might be willing to consider legalizing marijuana if a way can be found to control its distribution – and figure out who has been smoking it.

Goddard said marijuana sales make up 75 percent of the money that Mexican cartels use for other operations, including smuggling other drugs and fighting the Mexican army and police.

He said that makes fighting drug distribution here important to cut off that cash. He acknowledged those profits could be slashed if possession of marijuana were not a crime in Arizona.

This is the first time I can recall a state Attorney General publicly – and accurately – commenting on the connection between the power of Mexico’s cartels (which are terrorizing the U.S.-Mexico border) and the fact that marijuana prohibition gives them the billions of dollars that make them so powerful. Figuring out how to regulate the sale of marijuana to adults is a minor challenge for state governments when compared to the benefits from increased tax revenue and the significant drop in money going to armed gangs along our southern border.

UPDATE: A longer version of the same article is here, which contains this classic comment from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Matthew Allen:

“But if we’re going to go down that road, what is the acceptable amount of marijuana that you want a bus driver to have in their system?” [Allen] continued.

“I believe it’s zero,” Goddard said later.

I do too. Just like alcohol, which is legally sold to adults.

The trailer for Joel Connelly’s latest column is out. “Just get me there!”

Mount the studded snow tires, slap on the chains, borrow the neighbor’s Hummer, or strap on your cross country skis. Whatever it takes, please join us for a pre-holiday 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.

If you’re not in the Seattle area, no worries. check out the Drinking Liberally web site for dates and times of a chapter within snowshoeing distance from you.

Apparently, unlike the state Department of Transportation, and transportation officials in most major cities, Seattle refuses to apply salt to city’s icy roads, for fear of runoff into Puget Sound… which is, of course, salty.  Huh.

Whatever.

No doubt our city’s salt-free road clearing policy is an inconvenience to folks like me without four-wheel drive, but there is a side benefit that every car owner enjoys… our cars last longer out here.  A helluva lot longer.

My first car was a 1964 Mercury Comet, which I acquired shortly after moving here in 1992, and it sure wasn’t the oddity it would have been back in Philadelphia or New York, where road salt would have long ago digested its parts into a pile of rust.  Folks simply didn’t drive thirty-year-old cars back East, unless they were well cared for classics, but hunks of steel like the Comet were a pretty common sight back in the 1990’s, before the invasion of the Priuses.  (Prii?)

So I don’t know how much Seattle DOT’s salt-free diet does to save the Sound, but it certainly saves our cars, thus I and my rust-free, 8-year-old Altima have no complaints.

House prices continue in free-fall.

In the past year the median sales price fell 13.2% — the largest decline since data collection began in 1968 and likely since the Great Depression — to $181,300. Separately, the Federal Housing Finance Agency reported that U.S. home prices fell 7.5% over the 12 months ending in October, according to a monthly index that includes prices for houses with mortgages that have been sold to or guaranteed by Fannie Mae… (or Freddie Mac.)

At The Big Picture, Barry Ritholtz observes:

I find the monthly spin from the NAR laughable. They attribute November’s results to a “weak stock market, job losses and low consumer confidence.” They never seem to recall that Real Estate prices remain too high relative to incomes and rental prices. This is the hangover from the credit bubble.

With the always necessary caveat that there are individual real estate agents and builders who are honest, stand-up individuals, the house building and selling industry bears a huge portion of the blame for this hellish economic mess. It strains credulity to think that the absurd loans and absurd prices came about without widespread criminality and malfeasance.

True capitalists will realize that effective regulation is required in the future. Of course, that won’t stop the stink tank denizens from railing against all things governmental, but I still fail to understand why progressives have to be the only pragmatists.

There needs to be a dramatic change in the zeitgeist in this state and country that defines conservatives in terms of their outdated, delusional and dangerous preconceptions about economics. It’s kind of sunk in, but not widely enough. Neo-liberalism was not only wrong, it failed so miserably that I wouldn’t be surprised if historians someday equate it with the demise of Soviet Communism.

The bidness guys and gals have sneered at everyone for so long, with such utter contempt, that this is the perfect time to teach certain corrupt industries that the government is there to protect all the people, including consumers of major purchases like houses. I mean, you buy a car you get a warranty, you buy a house, well, you know, good luck with that! You should have known the plumbing contractor hired summer help and inspected each pipe yourself before you bought it, and you should have waited out the housing bubble even though you like, needed a place to live.

When the corrupt industry starts its facile whining that they are being “punished” and promise doom and gloom forever, as they do with any proposed regulation whatsoever, they can be sternly reminded that basic consumer rights are not a punishment, they are a normal way to regulate industries that have proven they can’t be trusted. And right now there is no industry more untrustworthy than the house building, selling and finance industry. If restoring the house market requires restoring consumer confidence, reform at both the state and national level is urgently required, seeing as we’re throwing trillions of our dollars at the problem.

Bernard Avishai writes about Hebron and the difficulties that lie ahead in negotiating peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

In Afghanistan, it appears that we are dead set on starting a full-fledged civil war. I’m working on a much longer post about how much of a disaster we’ve made there. It should be posted late January.

We often pick on the Seattle Times here for being comically out of touch, but that’s nothing compared to what Scott Henson found in the Dallas News.

It looks like child-rapist Kenneth Freeman will be spending a long time behind bars (some background on my coincidental connection to this case here).

It’s been an adventure riding the buses through the snow this past week. My total commuting time today was 3 1/2 hours. I especially want to give a big fuck you to the 67 driver who refused to stop for me at 78th and Roosevelt this morning. Buses were stopping across the street (on the very slight downhill slope) all morning. But on the other hand, I also want to thank the 271 driver who waited for me as I ran from two blocks away. And to the guy who I bumped into at 50th and Roosevelt this evening who’d walked all the way there from Westlake Center, please feel free to vent in the comments if you see this. You deserve free bus fares for life.

Just spoke with Will, who reported with pride the SUVs braving Belltown’s icy streets to buy crack from the dealers in the alley behind his building.  I guess all it takes to keep our local economy going through this wintery mess is a little motivation and a good, old fashioned, American entrepreneurial spirit.

While one needn’t design a transit system to deal with weather conditions that occur once or twice a decade, it’s important to note the failure of our region’s bus system to operate anywhere near full capacity during our week of snow and sub-zero temperatures.  Light rail and street cars, on the other hand, they can handle nearly anything our Puget Sound climate can throw at them, as long as trains are run frequently enough to prevent the overhead power lines from icing over.

I don’t point this out as some sort of I told you so, or as a bit of advocacy for even more rail, but rather as an observation about differing attitudes toward transit in cities with rail versus those without.  Those of us who grew up in cities with extensive rail systems expect transit to be reliable, because… well… it generally is.  In cities like Seattle however, we merely expect transit to be somewhat reliable, conditions permitting.  Snow, floods, traffic jams and accidents… that sorta shit happens, and bus commuters learn to deal with it.  (Whether your employer is willing to deal with you missing a week or more of work because your bus route was canceled, well, that’s another story.)

I think over time, as more rail comes online, and more commuters grow accustomed to its comfort and reliability, attitudes toward transit in this region will gradually change.  No longer looked down upon as mostly an alternative for folks who can’t afford to drive, we will eventually become both more appreciative of our transit system, and more demanding.  And that’s a good thing.

I just watched a bit of 60 Minutes for the first time in God knows how long, and I learned that Andy Rooney is still alive.  Sorta.

Who knew?

I parked my car by my house Wednesday afternoon, not really believing the weather would live up to the dire forecasts, and there it remains for at least a couple more days, if not a week. Silly me.

Coming from Philadelphia, I know how to drive on ice and snow, and therefore I also know when not to drive.  I have no four-wheel-drive, no traction control, and no ABS, and while I might be able maneuver down my hill without fish tailing into the cars parked on either side… I might not.  The relatively passable Rainier Ave. tantalizingly beckons only a couple blocks away, but for now I can only reach it on foot.

I can’t say I’m bored, but I’m certainly a little stir crazy, so this afternoon I’ll pass some time by hiking a couple miles back and forth to the Viet Wah to pick up a few supplies.  (I’m out of goddamn garlic, and I’m craving fresh ginger.)  And I imagine tomorrow, I’ll take the bus somewhere… anywhere… if only for a change of scene and some face to face conversation.

I suppose I could get me one of those four-wheel-drive trucks or SUVs to get me off my hill on those handful of days every few years when the roads actually demand traction… and, you know… I actually need to go somewhere… but I’ve got a better solution.  A few years from now, the next time one of these big storms hit, I intend to be living walking distance from a light rail station.  Sure, I’ll miss the view from my hill, but I’ll love the year-round convenience.