Goldy–
Right on brother!!! This is fucking America…land of the free, home of the arrogant.
I didn’t see a category for most hideous voice so obviously didn’t get to vote for you on anything of importance.

Goldy: Hope you don’t mind, but I threw you in there for best local celebrity, too.

Is there a spot for Quickest Troll?

I’d have to nominate CYN-IRR for that one…damn! He’s faster than a 7th grade prosti-tot looking for a John on HWY 99!

I wouldnt trash the good people that toss fish for a living with Timmies shit name…I’ll use # 65, ” best reason to leave Seattle”

Goldy: “Vote early, vote often… vote for me.”

Too bad there isn’t a category for most honest Liberal quote.

Too bad there wasn’t a category for most likely to rape his own child, I would have nominated Steffy!

goldy and all libs

Read #11 and tell me where the invective comes from? Left is rude and mean, unable to have a decent debate…

I’m down with all that.

righton I see you jinxed the Mariners last night. Way to go.

Hey Righton, you should start your own blog and call it ‘Anecdotal evidence, because it’s all I have’

Lush @ 11

You’re sick.

Rape of a child — especially one’s own — is NEVER funny.

Idiots like you give Dems/Libs a bad name.

My vote for “Best Washington white wine” was

“I want do-overs!” from Republican Whineries.

See Ya’ prr…don’t let the door hit ya’ on the way out!

51. Best place to get adult videos: RNC or Mayor Jim West’s office

DJ @ 22: Credit where credit is due. Clever.

PRR @ 23: Right on target, too.

But I wish that someone besides righton had pointed out just how offensive Lush’s post @ 11 is. Do you Dems wonder why the Right thinks you’re all insane? Between Howard Dean’s verbal spewings and posts like Lush’s, well…

Mr. C @ 29

I don’t care if he loves or hates Sharkansky… or if he tells the whole world how he feels. My point is that his post is neither funny nor clever nor true and crosses WAY over the line.

I personally know three (unrelated) people who were sexually assaulted as children by a parent or priest. Two of the adults (parents) were definitely not convicted and I’m not sure about the priest. Even hardened prison felons have a code that says if you touched a child, you’re going to be someone’s “wife” or dead. One would think that the Left finds such actions equally offensive (except, of course, for the NAMBLA-defending ACLU).

Lush has a First Amendment right to say what (s)he did. But if Goldy really wants to make progress in this world instead of just venting, he and the other reasonable Lefties will denounce the post @ 11. But DON’T delete it. Let Lush live with his/her words.

28

“Between Howard Dean’s verbal spewings …”

Interesting that you should mention Howard Dean. Here’s what Dick “Fuck You!” Cheney said about Howard Dean today:

“Maybe his mother loved him, but I never met anybody who does.”

Mark @ 33 “Bipartasinship” Is not an option until the repugs get their party back and dump these neo-con fascists to the deepest parts of the ocean.

Hey, Mark —

It’s 3:30 p.m.; don’t you think that perhaps there are all of about five people paying attention to this blog at this hour? After all, most real people are working; even Goldy, who I’d suggest will condemn Post No. 11 too.

33

Mark said, “However, I did find it surprising that everybody else on here let something like that post slide.” Then, without coming up for air, he calls Cheney’s remark “just a statement of fact.” Kettle … hellooooooo … pot calling …

Don @ 35 re: neo-cons

The “neo-con” term is poorly defined and I think the Left is just trying to make it a popular insult like the Right made “liberal.” Try a different term. However, I would also like to see the GOP taken back from the Far Right agenda.

Don @ 36 “Dean is a grassroots money making machine!”

I seem to recall an MSM (NYT?) article pointing out that Dean was acutally having a negative OVERALL effect on Dem fundraising. I’d bet that GOP actions do more for Dem fundraising (and vice versa) than Dean’s road show.

Don: “Fuck them all!”

Are you so lonely and hard up in your retirement that you’re no longer choosy about your partners? ;)

RR @ 39

First, I made NO reference to a horrific act perpetrated against a child — which was what the “let it slide” comment was about.

Second, it may well be a fact that Cheney doesn’t know anyone who loves Dean. I’m sure someone loves Dean. Cheney just hasn’t met them.

Do NOT equate political banter and jabs with the offensive comment @ 11.

Mark, while you work 9on your denouncement of Cheney, I will respond point by point to your ludicrous post @ 41

“The “neo-con” term is poorly defined and I think the Left is just trying to make it a popular insult like the Right made “liberal.””

No the term Neo-con was coined by the Neo-cons themselves. You need to quit listening to the hateful blather from right wing radio, and fox News and get some education.

“I seem to recall an MSM (NYT?) article pointing out that Dean was acutally having a negative OVERALL effect on Dem fundraising.”

No, you don’t recall that at all. Dean has improved OVERALL fundraising two fold over the previous DNC Chairman. Again, you need to quit listening to the people who are repeatedly lyinh to you. (Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, Fox News.)

“Are you so lonely and hard up in your retirement that you’re no longer choosy about your partners? ”

I am gainfully employed, and decades from retirement. And I am never hard up for companionship.

Now Mark, that we have dispenced of your delusions. Please continue working on your denouncement of Cheney.

Donna,

Given the exteme nature of Cheney’s lies, I expect VITRIOLIC comments for the right wing denouncing Cheney as a servent of Satan and the most terrible muderer since Joseph Stalin.

Um, what “lies” are you talking about? The “fabrications” that came from intelligence services for 7 different nations? I think I’ll pass…

Actually, Donna-I-call-Everyone-Who-is-to-the-Right-of-My-Political-Thought-NAZIS, I was quite against the Iraq invasion for selfish reasons, but since it has happened the job needs to be finished. My son agrees, and he safely returned from there three months ago (thank you, God).

I just like to tweak you Pol Potparazzi Dick Durban types to see if you have added the names of any new mass-murderers to your GWB debasement lexicon. Congrats on Stalin (how original)…

And if you can find anyone even holding a candle to Bush/Cheney in keeping Stalin’s memory alive, I welcome your comment.

It may not be original, but it is a very sad fact.

49

You may be able to make a case for Jackson Brown song “Lawyers in Love” . Although it doesnt mention Stalin directly it does have a lot of references to Russia. Check out Lyrics Donna..

Last night I watched the news from Washington, The Capitol
The Russians escaped while we weren’t watching them, like Russians do
Now we’ve got all this bloom, we needn’t got the room
And I hear the USSR will be open soon
As vacation land for Lawyers In Love
Lawyers In Love
Oooo Shalala Oooo
Oooo Shalala Oooo
Oooo Shalala
Oooo Shalala
Lawyers In Love

Yep I have to go with Jackson Brown!!

gbs; yeah Mariners lost to the boys from South Berzerkley (oakland). Of course I took advanatage of tax subsidized entertainment;, plus used free tickets so doubly good. I actualy felt ok paying $10 for great parking since the rest was free.

Donna @ 49: “And if you can find anyone even holding a candle to Bush/Cheney in keeping Stalin’s memory alive, I welcome your comment.”

My relatives suffered under Stalin — including one in Siberia who Nixon personally requested (and got) out (along with a list of others).

Do you REALLY want to go down this path?

Comparing Bush/Cheney to Stalin is a joke unworthy of discussion. In terms of brutality, Hitler and Stalin are in a class by themselves.

But then you have no credibility anymore so fuck your opinion

ya know, Donna, I don’t understand the fuss about the flag drapped coffin thing. Maybe someone can explain WHY it’s such a BAD thing. I seem to recall images similar, if not identical to those from ‘Nam. So why now is it so taboo? Are they more dead than those soliders? Were they less likely to die than the boys from ‘Nam?

Please, somebody RESPECTABLE, please enlighten me on the logic here.

GOLDY!!!???!!!

Your DAMN filter is eating posts again!!!

Is this a trick to buy you beer or something? For crying out loud! I’m going to have to save all my comments to word in case that damn filter dosent like something so I can attempt a re-post. AARRGGGG!

Donna @ 56

Let me get this straight… you actually think that Bush/Cheney are on par with a psychopath that murdered 20 million of his own citizens?

Well, then I guess I could equate you with Stalin because you’re both male, both current or former government employees, both WAAAYYY left of center and both out of your minds.

And as for your comment @ 57, how exactly did I lose my credibility? By not going along with your Stalin comment? I didn’t say Bush/Cheney aren’t without a significant number of faults. I just find it ridiculous to compare them to Stalin.

62

No, compared to Stalin or Hitler, Bush and Cheney are merely small-time liars and con men who’ve killed a few tens of thousands of people with their neo-colonial war in Iraq.

65

Why would you turn a fire hose on “a hippie” burning a flag? If that’s constitutionally protected free speech, what is your justification for using the fire hose, which is a form of violence? Do you have something against protesters? I’d rather see you turn that fire hose on people who smash windows, overturn police cars, or engage in other violent acts.

Better yet – turn that fire hose on corrupt lying politicians who start unnecessary wars, send other people’s children to their deaths in foreign lands on false pretenses, and loot the public treasury – all at the same time. You know who I’m talking about.

Roger @ 68

You mean the Dems who authorized going to war??

67

Right wingers criticized Clinton for intervening in Kosovo, and criticized Clinton for not intervening in Rwanda, which leads me to believe that right wingers would criticize Clinton no matter what he did, not based on principle, but based on raw, naked, unreasoning partisanship. Consequently, the right wing criticisms of Clinton’s Kosovo and Rwanda policies have no credibility and deserve none.

Whether the U.S. should intervene in other countries’ troubles is an excruciatingly difficult policy decision. What happened in Rwanda, and would have happened in Kosovo, offends our moral sense. But there are practical issues that complicate the decision making.

1. Does the U.S. have either the ability or responsibility to police the entire world?
2. Is it worth American lives to keep people in far-away lands from killing each other, when these events have no impact on our own security or national interests?
3. Are there any viable military options, or would intervention merely put U.S. troops into an untenable and dangerous situation, or drag the U.S. into an unwinnable war?

It’s absolutely clear that presidents of both parties pick and choose their interventions. No clear litmus test emerges from a study of the various cases. Turmoil on our own doorstep is likely to draw a U.S. military response (e.g., Haiti). On the other hand, when turmoil is far away and doesn’t threaten U.S. interests, a president is under less political pressure to do something about, and the desire to do good is tempered by fear of a debacle. Every future president will have Reagan’s fiasco in Lebanon and Clinton’s failure in Mogadishu on his mind when weighing whether to commit U.S. forces in a Uganda, Rwanda, or Darfur. This world simply has too many problems to solve, and some of these problems are not amenable to a military solution even if you decide to intervene. All of this things — U.S. interests, the implications for regional or world peace, the potential cost in U.S. lives and treasure, the odds of success or failure — have to be weighed.

Bottom line: Every case is unique, and is a judgment call. Making those calls is what we pay our presidents to do. There will always be second guessing afterward. As Jimmy Carter observed, “In this job, you get criticized no matter what you do.”

Roger @ 72

Thank you for your thoughtful and well-stated reply. As someone with family that benefited from US foreign policy, I tend to lean more in favor of intervention. However, I absolutely agree that it is a tough call. And hindsight is 20/20.

Mark

@65

Not showing the coffins is also editorializing. Let me ask you this – since you’ve worked in the journalism trade (and by the way, I attended one of the country’s leading journalism schools; have a college major in journalism; worked as a journalist; and have a parent who was a career journalist – so I’m quite familiar with the journalism profession) – what is the difference between “news judgment” and trying to “sway” your readers, listeners, or viewers? Certainly, a photographer can shoot a scene in a way to give it more or less drama, and to emphasize certain aspects of the event over others. Let’s take, for example, covering a fire. One photog shoots scenes of the burning building; another shoots a portrait of a weeping tenant sitting on the curb crying over the loss of her home. Is the latter picture less “news” and more “editorializing” than the former? Where, and how, do you draw the line?

Professionals in any occupation have to make judgments, and ask us to trust their judgments. You and I are not going to ask for copies of blueprints of the I-90 floating bridge and pore over them before driving across it; we take it on faith the engineers knew what they were doing, and if they didn’t, we may end up in the bottom of Lake Washington. Generally speaking, we trust journalists to exercise their judgment in deciding what to report, how to report it, and how to depict the events that affect our lives. That is what is meant by “news judgment.” We trust doctors to diagnose our ailments correctly and choose a treatment that will work, even though medicine is an inexact science and doctors are sometimes wrong. And so on.

So – back to the coffins. Our government can be counted on to attempt to sanitize war. The language used by military spokesmen and politicians is designed to depersonalize the violence and distract attention away from the hideous and gory results of war — the horrible mangling of human bodies, the deaths of innocents, and so on. They fill our language with phrases like “friendly fire” and “surgical strike” and “security sweeps.” At some point an editor steps in and says, “Wait a minute, our boys are coming home in coffins” – a fact politicians want us to forget, especially when the war was optional and is going badly.

In my opinion, asking whether a journalist is “patriotic” in deciding what to report or how to depict it is an inappropriate question. Being patriotic is not a journalist’s job. His role is not to rally public support for the politicians or their policy. On the other hand, we expect a journalist to find out what’s going on and tell the story accurately, objectively, and honestly. Those are the standards by which journalists are judged, not whether their reporting is helpful to whichever politicians are currently in power.

When editors decided to publish the coffins photo, they were reminding their readers this is a real war and our kids are dying in it. That fact is germane to the discussion of whether our leaders’ Iraq policy is wise or unwise, and the public has an interest in that discussion. Our government does not have a right to hide either the numbers of combat deaths or the fact they’re occuring. The photo violated no one’s privacy because none of the casualties in those flag-draped aluminum boxes were identifiable from the photo or identified by the accompany cutlines or news stories. It simply showed the cost of war. We, as citizens, have a right to know, to see, to think about this cost of war and ask ourselves whether it’s worth it. The government leaders who sent those young men to Iraq work for us. The consequences of their decisions is news, and is information we have a right to have. When the journalists cut through or bypass the government bullshit and tell us the facts and show us the images, they are working for us.

75

Pictures undeniably can make immensely powerful and moving statements. The film clip of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima. The photo of the firefighters raising the American flag over the smoldering wreckage of the WTC. The firefighter carrying the dead child in Oklahoma City. The film clips and photos of bulldog-faced, cigar-chomping Winston Churchill flashing the “V” for victory sign when no rational person would have found anything to feel optimistic about. That’s why there’s a Pulitzer Prize award for news photographers who capture the essence of an important or moving story in a striking and memorable way.

Rog @ 73

Nahhh… you don’t have to go back to the 13th and 14th. As I said before, try the 19th. Do you consider 1964 not “modern times?”

Suppressing minorities by keeping the poor dependent on welfare and limiting school opportunities is a PRESENT DAY Democratic strategy.

71

I think we are now justified in calling Iraq a neo-colonial war. It’s clear that Bush entered office intending to invade Iraq and would have done so regardless of whether Saddam complied with UN resolutions, had WMDs, or anything else. The reasons for the war, the intel, the diplomacy — all were gamed. The real motivation of this war is to assure U.S. access to Mideast oil on American terms. Let’s not forget that under George W. Bush the U.S. government is being run by oilmen. Bush is anticipating an intensifying competition among nations for the world’s dwindling oil supply and wants the U.S. to be first in line at the spigot. The planners of the Iraq invasion expected the U.S. to obtain a dominant position in the Persian Gulf vis-a-vis Russia, China, and other competitors by establishing large, permanent, U.S. military bases in the region which obviously would intimidate the governments of the other Persian Gulf countries and make them think twice before bucking U.S. desires. The fact Iraq has the world’s second largest oil reserves was a bonus, and U.S. occupation policy clearly is designed to give American companies control over Iraq’s oilfields and pipelines. It’s no accident that when U.S. forces rolled into Baghdad, the first thing they secured was the Oil Ministry building.

What the U.S. war planners didn’t anticipate was that U.S. forces might get thrown out of Iraq, as now seems probable.

“Neo” implies “new” or “contemporary.” Bush is most definitely pursuing a colonial policy toward Iraq, but it has a 21st century flavor, and is not a replication of 19th century colonialism. The objective is still economic, but this time the economic objective involves control of resources, not of territory or populations. So it is different. But it’s still colonialism, because it involves using military force to violate another country’s sovereignty and impose our control over that state.

To Roger R. —

Excellent and thoughtful comments. I hope you stay around.

Mr. C @ 86

Say it ain’t so! Roger is the same as Don? That would mean that he is/was a journalist, a judge and who knows what else. What about Donnageddon? DamnageD? Is he having self-congratulatory conversations with himself on here?

One would wonder if he has multiple personality disorder.

Mark @ 87 Rest assured Donnageddon is always Donnageddon. And ne’r shall be anything else.

As for Mr Cyn-Irr, He is irrelevant and, as even the casual observer can discern, absolutely void of content. If his CAP KEY, and the words “leftist” and “pinhead” did not exist, he would be as vacuous as the ether.

A journalist knows he’s objective when both Democrats and Republicans are calling to cancel their subscriptions.

Or he sucks. ;-)

Roger @ 90

Just wondering your opinion of the CSM. Journalism prof once told me that was one of the few publications that could be relied on to be more objective.

Funny thing about Lush…I guess he got banned fron (u)SP for being an asshole.

Damn dude…take it easy, or the only person who you’ll be able to talk to will be yourself (if it isn’t already).

Goldy, shame on you for not removing Lush’s #11 post. That’s well beyond the pale, even for this blog!

Nice work on getting some press for yourself… but Andrew’s quote in the AP was respectfully slightly better than yours. Eyman fired one real bullet – 892 – and we deflected it.

My .02

Josef