Stick a Needle in Sims Eye

Martin Durkan, the guy that loves to stick pins in the eyes of Ron Sims, claims he has poll results that show that Sims would loose if he ran for King County Executive again.

Sims claims this poll is being misinterpreted by Durkan. Not sure yet if Sims accused Durkan of not having “good house training.”

Silly Seattle contends that Sims will be a casuality of the black widow Alpha Vagina currently occupying the governor’s office. Let’s get to the definitive source, our readers. Do you believe that Sims will win fair and square, through fraud, or that he would loose?

Do the poll! It's at the top of the right column on this web site.

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Pass the Butter

We have yet another example of how pathetic Seattle’s city-state government is.

In this one, we learn that the city-state sold 12 acres of Seattle Center land to the Gates Foundation for $50 million, which by the city’s own admission is at least $20 million less than its market value. The Seattle Times notes that the city will net $22 million in cash in the deal. What will happened to the rest of the money? The city credits it back to Gates for doing things such as moving a skateboard park.

The land was sold without a bidding process in a backroom deal with the Gates Foundation. This reminds one of the sort of bidding process the Seattle Silly-Rail is using to get the “best price” for construction of that circus ride. Somehow the basic laws of economics must not apply in Seattle, where competition for a scarce resource does not drive up the price and competition between vendors bidding for a large project does not drive down costs. If Adam Smith only had known. Unfortunately, that sort of logic is also what has been used to drive the city-state's economy into the ground and put it on the black list for most corporations looking for a place to set up shop.

I have no problem with the city-state selling off some of its drastically under-used land. As a tax payer in the city, though, I want to see them get top dollar for it. We already know that neither the Seattle Silly Council nor our fat boy Mayor thinks in those terms. They are too busy currying political favor with the Gates family to care about protecting the fiscal interests of the average city-state citizen.

And, so, this mentality leads to the following quote indicating a complete lack of regard for taxpayers:

"The city does not own that land in order to sell it to the highest bidder. It is trying to find a use ... that fits the Seattle Center and meets a private developer's goals …" [said Adrian Moore, an urban density type that makes a living developing twisted economic logic to justify the stupid things cities do]

How did this deal get through the Silly Council?

Councilman Nick Licata acknowledged that the deal went through the City Council like "a knife through warm butter."

Sort of reminds me how new taxes and expensive dumb projects pass through the same council. Worse, its how their hands pass into our wallets.

It would take a Seattle Silly Council member to come of with a grease related analogy. After all, they seem to know plenty about it.

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Monorail Should Be Hacked

Unfortunately, someone managed to hack the monorail poll. Before it was hacked, there was not a single respondent who believe that monorail would deliver what was originally promised and voted for. About 25% believed something would be built, but it would be less than promised. And, 75% of you believe that the monorail will never be built.

I suppose it is no mystery where I come down on this. The monorail is a bad idea and it is only getting worse as the management of SMP goes further in over their level of competence.

If only the monorail could be hacked out of existence like the poll about it was. But, it is fitting that a supporter of the monorail would also be a hacker.

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VAWA Say Nada

Valentine's Day has come and gone, complete with the Mayor of Eugene starring in the Vagina Monologues, with a few sweethearts still in love.

Perhaps a few old fashioned couples did make it through the holiday-turned-acerbic with their love still intact. But, never ones to rest, the Vagina Warrior forces are in full swing for a new drama - the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA).

For those of you not familiar with VAWA, it is a federal law passed on the wave of hysteria following the OJ Simpson trial debacle. The premise of this law is that men exist on a continuum of violence, from not-very-violent to very-violent. For most feminists groups, this axis of violence is all that one needs in order to measure a man. Of course, they say, women need protecting from this primal evil that exists in all men.

Another term for this is - and you should hear this with an echoing voice like God in that old movie about Moses starring Charleston Heston: "The Patriarchy." I could go on and on about this, but lets suffice it to say that this patriarchy thing is very evil, it oppresses women, and it needs to be beaten out of society and culture. VAWA seeks to do this, under the pretense of protecting women, by funding a lot of anecdotal research that proves, once and for all, that men are bad, women are good, and the former should ALL be in jail. Of course, if the dollars were limited to a few going to the departments of ill-repute on college campuses, there would not be too much to worry about. Unfortunately, that is not the case.

Now, this is not the way contemporary feminist ideology is presented in open, public discussion. The anti-patriarchy talk is saved for the hunkered down victim cults that live within Women Studies departments on college campuses around the nation. To get traction in the mainstream, however, what you do hear is a never-ending victim song within the news media. Leading this charge, at least in the public policy forum, is the National Organization of Women.

VAWA is up for reauthorization in the US Congress. You can bet that our state's Senators and Representatives will be falling over themselves to vote for it. But, never missing a chance to stir up some drama, NOW is orchestrating the anti-patriarchy chorus. They have sent out the message that all "activists" should go to arms.

This, of course, means that the Women Studies graduates and other indoctrinated "true believers" working in the media will begin the assault with articles about how every marriage is a guy's own private Idaho of unchecked violence. And, by golly, something needs to be done about it.

The Rocky Mountain News led the pact with a series of columns highlighting domestic violence. Don't bet on the Seattle Times and Seattle PI holding back. Susan Paynter, always quick with an opinion column that feeds the hysteria mill, will surely chime in. Our legislature is doing its part, working on a bill that further penalizes marriage with money dedicated to battered women's shelters that can be used once the new brides figure out they are participating in one of the patriarchy's favorite institutions, marriage.

But, every-so-often ..... well, actually, quite often, but with the roar of a caged mouse, there are news reports about the violence women are capable of inflicting and often do. Recently, we had the news of the ex-wife who, after repeatedly falsely accusing her ex-husband of domestic violence in a divorce proceeding which resulted in him having sole custody of their child, hired a hit man to off the ex-husband and his father. What has her defense been? Why, domestic violence again, of course.

Just today, we learn of a woman so callous that she tried to burn her husband and son alive in Kent. Amazingly, she has been charged with domestic violence, among other things. What did the husband do once he realized the family's house was on fire? Well, let's allow the PI to tell us:

He rescued the boy and helped his wife escape, then left the house and began to put out the flames by spraying a garden hose through a window.

And, what is the woman's excuse? She has psychiatric problems. But, we are now getting used to hearing this. After all, every single one of the famous and growing tribe of women who rape teenage boys has claimed temporary insanity.

Alaska is now in on the act (not that it wasn't) with another story about a woman cutting off a man's penis. In this case, it was a classic example of the "control" that women's groups are so obsessed with. The woman lured the unsuspecting guy into letting her tie him up for sex play, after which she pulled out a kitchen knife, gave a brutal wack, then flushed the dismembered organ down the toilet. Don't look in the Seattle newspapers for this article as there was nary a comment. I'm not sure where the patriarchy can be found in this story, but women's groups will find it, trust me.

There is one small bright ray of light in our state. State Senator Kastama is sponsoring a bill that mandates shared parenting as a presumption in divorce cases. Before you get your hopes up, though, you should realize that poor Senator Kastama is fighting a lonely fight. He is sponsoring this bill all by his lonesome, as not a single colleague, not even from his own Democratic Party, is willing to step up to the plate and do what is right.

There are other rays of hope, such as the Independent Women's Forum , Tammy Bruce, and iFeminists. Don't mention these organizations and people in the wrong crowd, though, because the hisses will be deafening and the crosses and garlic will be pulled out.

The most important thing that anyone can do is learn what has been happening while you have been working away to build a better life for your family. I know, there aren't many of you left, at least not in King County, where 46% of men in their 30's have never been married. I guess one could make a valid argument that these 46% are the smart ones; but all of us should be questioning things like VAWA and the rabid victim cult that supports it. With the exception of TABS, our legislature only hears the point of view of the loudest of contemporary victim oriented feminists.

After all, what does VAWA say about women who commit violence? VAWA say Nada.

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Young? Baby-arians are at the Gate!

Mark Trahant, the “editor of the editorial page” of Seattle Silly PI, ought to stick to editing the work of others when it comes to economic and demographic issues.

He makes the most ridiculous argument I think I have heard yet concerning social security. His logic is as follows:

- An aging population is retiring quickly.

- Young people will be in a sellers market for their services.

- As a result, young people will make a lot of money.

- And, therefore, he seems to imply, we should not worry about increasing their social security tax burden as the ratio of retired people to working age people increases.

This is typical baby boomer logic. The baby boomer generation is the most selfish in the history of this country and perhaps of the world. That generation has been happy to take from every other generation and never willing to take responsibility. Now, Trahan, a member of this generation, is rationalizing leaving a legacy of highway robbery.

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Don't Bogart that Joint

We criticize the Seattle city-state for it’s over indulgence and impracticality, but there is one thing that it has gotten right: under criminalizing marijuana.

Froma Harp, who I agree with on many issues, has a great opinion column on this topic. She visited the border towns of Mexico and saw the devastation that recent drug turf battles have raught. She goes a little too far and blames all the other problems of kidnappings, murders, and disappearances on drugs. In reality these problems owe more to the economic stranglehold the oligarchy of Mexico has on the country, which perpetuates mass poverty for the benefit of a small number of families. But, she’s right that because the country already lacks economic opportunity for most of its population, the drug trade is too lucrative to stop.

So, what are we to do? $70 billion per year in our “war on drugs” has little effect. Yes, the occasional drug entrepreneur is jailed. More often, though, we jail our own kids and others who are either small time dealers, recreational users who got unlucky, or addicts. This is just for the drugs that are considered illegal in any context. Even “legal” drugs produced by Purdue Pharmaceuticals are lucrative enough in the black market to put the children of Republican state senators in jail. And, President Bush has admitted to past marijuana use in addition to his drinking problem; by todays War on Drug standards, he would have spent time in jail if he had been caught (and his pop couldn't pull some strings). Meanwhile, the drug trade continues unabated.

None of this is logical. Those from the hard right make this into a moral issue. Their reasoning, when there is any reason expressed, seems to be that since drugs are immoral, it would be immoral not to wage war against them, regardless of whether that war has had or ever will have success. Collateral damage is irrelevant. Too often, politicians across the political spectrum go along with this, even fall over themselves to appear anti-drug, out of fear that they will be labeled with the L word.

While I don’t think it is a good idea to legalize hard drugs, like heroin or cocaine, certainly marijuana is harmless enough that it could be legal and managed no differently than alcohol is today. In fact, federal and state governments already have the regulatory bodies, legal framework, and enforcement apparatus created to manage the ills of drinking that could be leveraged to do the same for marijuana. The “gateway” theory usually used as an argument against legalizing marijuana is spurious; it’s the environment in which marijuana is found, precisely because it is illegal, that creates the gateway. As with so many other things government does, the “cure” is worse than the sickness.

So, if we keep the hard dope illegal, does that mean that we need to wage war against it? I don’t think so. It seems much more consistent from a moral point of view to focus on helping those that are suffering from drug abuse. $70 billion spent on communities could do an enormous amount of good. Perhaps even better, the price of drugs would drop precipitously, the corrupting influence of its money would decline, and the focus of blame in countries like Mexico would go to where it belongs – the ruling oligarchy.

Seattle made a small step in this direction by mandating that police focus their effort and resources on other types of crime. This is one of the rare examples in which we actually lead, thanks to the enlightened citizenry that approved I-75. It passed, and more than a year later, the sky has not fallen.

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Ms. Rodham

The spin for Hillary is in full force.

Marianne Means, on the payroll of Hearst Newspapers and as for sale as any columnist ever was, is testing the waters for Hillary Rodham by highlighting her supposedly not-so-liberal attributes.

According to Vagina Warrier Means, Hillary:

“…..serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee and has been active in
work for veterans, which should help to defuse the old notion that a woman is unfit to be commander in chief. She has a moderate-left voting record, which should undercut the GOP charge that she is too liberal. The new National Journal vote rankings give her a composite liberal score of 71 this year, with a lifetime ranking of 80.7. By comparison, Kerry's lifetime score is 85.7. (He was given no rating for last year, because he missed so many votes while away campaigning.)

In the past year, she has sided with conservatives on several key economic and foreign-policy votes, lowering her composite vote ratings toward the center. She also voted to confirm Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state and recently reached out to anti-abortion conservatives in a search for 'common ground,' although she did not back away from her basic pro-choice stance.”

Yes, I take Ms. Rodham seriously. She is ruthless and driven by a deep hatred. Most Democrats are more honest about their positions and have a hard time pretending to be something they are not. Ms. Rodham is willing to say and do anything for power and feels no degree of self-consciousness when she plies the political water. The fact that she was able to so solemnly pretend to be at one with evangelicals should scare anyone watching.

She is polarizing, but Americans are easily bamboozled. And, she plays the victim game better than anyone in the victim oriented feminist movement. Americans are conditioned to seeking victim status and she is the perfect matron to lead them there.

So, while we all laugh at Howard Dean running the DNC, we ought not take our eye off Ms. Rodham. Every move from the first day Buba stepped into the Oval Office has been leading to her 2008 bid for the Presidency.

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Calling on the Police

If you are a police officer, I want to hear your story.

Since the David Brame murder-suicide, the Seattle media has suggested that all police officers have an inner violent abuser just waiting to get out.

This fits with the victim oriented feminist “theory” that all men are somewhere on a continuum from less violent to very violent. For them, violence is THE axis to use when discussing men.

In this “theory,” if you are a police officer and a man, combined with the fact that you wear a uniform and carry a gun, you are even more susceptible to the violent urges that surely percolate inside you. So, naturally, in order to save any woman a police officer might actually share a tender relationship with from this beast that lurks inside him, the legislature passed a set of onerous laws that inserts hysteria “advocates,” the state, social workers, and the courts into his personal life.

But, let’s remember that, according to the indoctrination given these advocates of hysteria, heterosexual sex is actually rape. So, if you are a police officer, you are literally one misunderstanding away from having your life ruined by self-righteous and sanctimonious drama queens with a bone to pick.

Many of you that are police officers have probably put men in jail following the mandatory arrest law and were left shaking your head at a system run amuck. You probably also have personal experience, or know of the experiences of colleagues in your department, with the busy-body “advocates” scurrying about looking for a career to ruin. And, while you have to talk about it in whispers, many of you also suspect that there is something more to the Brame case than is ever discussed.

I WOULD LIKE TO HAVE YOUR STORIES. You can submit them to me anonymously to the following e-mail address: budaiguana@hotmail.com. I will condense and combine these stories and publish them on Silly Seattle from time to time. I will do so with utmost concern for maintaining anonymity. I will never publish specifics that could be used to identify you. Of course, you may also avoid these in the reports you make in order to be doubly sure.

So, please send me your stories. The only way for reason to prevail over irrational hysteria (and the industry that benefits financially from it) is to spread the light of day.

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Eunuchs for Police Officers

Oh, give me a break!

The Seattle “Silly” Times is concerned that police officers are getting a little tail. On the front page, they have a picture of a solemn and concerned Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske. They say that police officers are embracing and “passionately” kissing dancers in the parking lot of Ricks. Oh, the horror.

But the Silly Times reports that Sgt. Kevin Haistings, “the president of the Seattle Police Officers' Guild, yesterday questioned the department's punishment of an officer over a personal relationship.” They quote him saying police officers, "do not give up their constitutional rights" when they join the force.

He’s only partially right, though, because if the girlfriend of a police officer so much as accuses him of “domestic violence,” he will loose his Second Amendment right to carry a gun. That means he cannot be a police officer. Next, he’ll have all manner of fanatical “advocates” nosing around in his personal life and, of course, he will be found guilty no matter what really happened.

The brouhaha over a police officer getting a little face action from a hot dancer is the worst of John Ashcroft crossed with radical feminism designed to harass men and any woman that doesn’t follow the "agenda." It's a good thing, though, that we have vigilent citizens reporting on the kissing behavior of our police officers.

Next, the Seattle Silly Council will pass a resolution that all police officers need to be Eunuchs.

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Silly-rail: To be or not to be?

Oh my, the readers of Silly Seattle are optimistic.

Seventy three percent of you believe that the Chelan County Court will throw out the illegitimate election of Christine Gregoire. I tend to agree, but I doubt the Supreme Silly Court of the state will stand for letting their Alpha Vagina pal loose her crown.

But, we can only hope.

In the meantime, let’s try a new one: How many of you think the monorail will be built? And, if it is built, will it be less than what was promised to tax payers?

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Seattle Silly-rail

You heard it here and here first - the Seattle Silly-rail is unrealistic and will never be built. As our readers would expect, it’s time for Silly Seattle to chime in again about the Seattle Silly-rail.

Surprisingly, The Seattle “Silly” Times had an article bordering on critical of the project. We finally, and not surprisingly, learn that the only bidder competing for the project is at least $200 million above SMP’s budget. That’s before cost overruns.

Snaking its way through the legislature is SB 5534, a bill that blesses SMP’s plans to issue bonds with a term of up to 40 years. Check Section 6 to see the exact wording of this horribly irresponsible bill.

The management and board of SMP are in well over their level of competence. This is a risky project and it lacks the discipline of market forces to keep it in check. It is not funded based on a business plan, but rather a socialist theme ride fantasy. If it were required to follow the rules of a business, there would be nothing to secure its debt but assets and prospects for future revenues. Obviously, if those criteria were applied to the silly-rail, it would never get funding. But, in the case of the silly-rail, outrageous taxes that last forever provide the security. At least that is what they think.

But, there is still a mechanism that even a government sponsored bond cannot avoid. Except during periods of extreme over-exuberance (read, 1999), the bond market is very disciplined about making risky projects – e.g., those that have a low probability of generating the revenue and profits required to pay the bonds back – pay higher interest rates. The more risky the project, the higher the interest rate.

With the legislature’s A-OK, SMP may indeed issue these bonds. The issuer will set a face value and an interest rate to be paid on the face value of the bond, but ultimately the market will decide how much it is willing to pay for the bonds. A skeptical market will offer less than the face value for each bond, thereby raising the effective interest rate being paid. A think it is a pretty safe bet that if SMP unwisely goes so far as to issue bonds, the market will price them extremely low. The end result: SMP will get even less money than it anticipated. So, instead of being $200 million shout (based on their current expectations for the price they can get for the bonds), they may well be $400 million in the hole, or worse.

Why should the state care. Because any bonds issued in the state impact that ratings of all other bonds issued by the state. The SMP bonds will lower the states credit rating, raise the cost of the states debt, and further crunch a bloated budget that legislators already find impossible to cut.

A responsible legislature would refuse the spoiled and rooky silly-rail team’s request to mortgage the city’s future generations.

Oh, and Matt, make that a triple shot soy mocha. I’ll be driving over to meet you in my 12 year old, V8, oil-burning, eye-soar of a Buick.

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Sam, I Am

Silly Seattle is first to report .....

Secretary of State Sam Reed participated in a live, on-line question and answer session on the Olympian web site this afternoon.

Many of his answers to very specific questions were general in manner; others were answered pretty specifically. For example, he stated, in so many words, that the King County elections office has major problems. Of course, we already knew that, but at least he came out and said it.

But, just when he was getting ahead and seemed to be redeeming himself after he certified clearly flawed election results, he came out with this statement when asked if he had anything else he wanted to say:

“A frustration of mine as a person with considerable experience in the field of elections is that some of the rumors of errors, mistakes, illegalities, were absolutely incorrect, but because of the Internet, blogs and talk radio, they were circulated rapidly and extensively and helped contribute to the loss of confidence and trust in the system. I would hope in the future that the people who operate these blogs and the talk radio hosts will exercise the caution and ethics of the journalism profession, and that will help the citizery understand what really happened in the election process.” [emphasis mine]

I am sorry, Sam, but in reality, the mainstream media has been way behind the ball. It has been the blogs, particularly Stefan Sharkansky of Sound Politics, that have been doing the intense analysis and investigation that the established media has eventually been forced to report on.

The problem is not the integrity of blogs, but the lack of integrity of newspapers like the Seattle PI.

The marketplace votes on the blogosphere, and if a blog is consistently wrong or outright lying, people stop using that blog. There is no possibility of election fraud in this area. With only two major newspapers in King County, combined with pathetic local TV media, and long established ties between them and government officials, there is little incentive for them to report anything that rocks the boat.

People read newspapers out of habit. That habit is changing, though. So, all of you in government should get used to us finding out the things you would rather not have reported.

Soon enough, we will have video web logs. When that day arrives, the Seattle Silly Council, the Martin Luther King County Council, and all of you down in Olympia better be prepared for some up-close and personal scrutiny.

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Crooked

Well, call me slow, but after reading Stefan Sharkansky’s explanation of why Dean Logan is completely full of shit for the tenth time, I finally get it.

Dead voters, felon voters, and all the rest are bad enough. The 1,800 or so ballots without voters was enough to convince me that some funny business occurred in King County. But, now I realize that the situation is much, much worse than I knew.

Let’s see if I can shed a little light on this if there is anyone out there as confused as I was (and I didn’t know I was confused, which makes it worse!).
There were 1,853 more ballots cast in King County than there were registered voters. This is the official number that even Dean Logan admits to. But, the point that he and the MSM in Seattle don’t clarify is that 1,853 is NET.

Let’s explain that. In reality, looking at the situation on a per precinct basis (the county is divided up into several smaller areas called precincts), there were 5,845 ballots cast that did not have a corresponding voter registration. Wow! But, this is where things get really fishy – on the other side of the coin, there were 3,751 voters who showed up at the polls and voted, but there is NO VOTE RECORDED FOR THEM. Logan gets his magic number of by subtracting the number of ballots without voters (5,845) from the number of voters who showed up and voted, but for which there is no vote recorded for them (3,751). Those numbers should be added together!

So, the total number of voters and ballots that do not match up is 9,596 !!!!
I have to say, I know the newspapers and local TV stations in Seattle are in bed with their pals in government, but I am still amazed that this is not a scandal that dominates everything in the media. Or, is this too complex an issue for the fuzzy types who work in the media to handle?

Look at that second number. 3,751 ballots are just plain missing. What do you suppose is the percentage of those votes that were for Rossi? 80%? 90%? 100%?
Do you think maybe it was the union employees of the King County elections office, and cronies of Ron Sims, that conveniently lost those ballots? You ask, why would Ron Sims arrange that? Well, the guy is at a dead end in his career. He needs Gregoire to appoint him to a position, or his party to appoint him to some sort of job, or he will be on the streets soon.

This is simply amazing. Meanwhile, the meek of Seattle do nothing.

Gregoire is the governor like a fish will win the Tour de France.

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A Liberal for Fathers?

Who says that Europe lags behind America?

In the UK, Alby Shultz, a member of Parliament, has taken the country’s abusive Child Support Agency to task. Among the statements he made:

"The information that I have proves conclusively that the actions of the Child Support Agency have had a significant impact on male suicide.”

"I believe that in most cases it is abusing its powers and is misusing the act under which it operates.”

"It has certainly had an impact on bankruptcies.”

"It has caused breakdown, heartache and pressures for new families where payers of support have tried to get on with their life and create new relationships.”

"It has pursued the illegal and abusive use of its powers by accessing people's bank accounts."

Alby Schultz is a LIBERAL member of Parliament, no less!

Are men’s issues, particularly the bias in family courts that literally rape men, take their children, and leave their reputations permanently scarred due to false allegations of domestic violence, an opportunity for Democrats?

Whoever picks this issue up can be a winner in local, state, and national politics in the US. The harassment of men has reached such epic proportions that it is hard to believe that there are not riots in the streets. As Lisa Scott, founder of TABS and a Seattle area family law attorney says, with domestic violence laws run amok, "Police are one date away from loosing their jobs." If there are riots, it might just be the police that are leading them.

But, for the time being, the UK is light years ahead of the US in recognizing that radical feminist driven laws have created government, agencies, media and a culture that is hostile towards men and fathers.

Feel sorry for the X.

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2k Down, More to Go

Talking about hockey sticks, the number of visits to Silly Seattle just passed 2k!

From meager beginnings, we are, well, still meager. But 10k is not far away.


What is she wondering?

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Ice Melts Under Hockey Stick

The credibility gap for Democrats and so-called progressives is growing ever wider.

Instead of being patronized by the two Seattle silly papers, most of the readers of Silly Seattle want to be intellectually stimulated when reading a newspaper. So I am confident that many of you opt for the Wall Street Journal over our pathetic local rags and, therefore, have read that the primary “evidence” waved about by environmentalists to prove the theory of global warming has been completely and entirely debunked.

For those of you who have not read about this, I will give you a brief summary. Professor Michael Mann, of the University of Virginia, used tree ring information to estimate average annual temperatures for the past 1000 years. This information was combined with thermometer readings from the past 100 years, some fancy statistical “grooming” was added, and then the results were charted on a graph. Well, I’ll be damned if that graph didn’t show a hockey stick spike upwards in the last century of the data.

This hockey stick result was of course grabbed by every worshipper of the global warming hypothesis on the planet and promptly used to drum up maximum hysteria. Governments purchased special studies; academics held conferences; ELF members torched SUVs; public television created documentaries; and the United Nations met in Kyoto. To top it all off, the Seattle Silly Council debated the matter.

The problem was that nobody bothered to question Professor Mann’s analysis. But, then, along came Stephen McIntyre, a mining industry consultant from Canada, of all places. Mr. McIntyre, no slouch of a statistician, decided to examine the underlying methodology employed by Professor Mann. Mr. McIntyre put his analysis into an easy to read report (click here to see it).

Turns out that mathematical technique used by Mr. McIntyre not only produces hockey sticks for the tree ring data, but it also does the same thing for randomly generated data. In fact, one could take the results of the vote recounts in King County and, using Professor Mann’s technique, come up with a hockey stick for the total number of votes for Gregoire. Wait …… maybe that is what really happened.

I don’t think you still need to sign up the city-state of Seattle to the Kyoto Protocol, Mayor Nickels.


Hee Haw.

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Reprint: V-Day

Valentines Day is here! Some of you asked that I reprint my piece on V-Day, and here it is:

Yes, it’s the time of year to hear all the moaning and groaning about how the “Patriarchy” conspiracy has oppressed women. Eve Ensler’s V-Day “play,” ripe with appeals to the inner-lesbian in all women, will be paraded around by her “Vagina Warriors” and praised by the arbiters of opinion in the mainstream news media. Meanwhile, the victim statistics that appear like so many magical ballots in a King County election will be splashed across our newspapers. The message of both: Mothers, don’t let your daughters marry cowboys .... or any other man, for that matter.

This year’s celebration was kicked-off by Donna St. George of the Washington Post, who pumps up the hysteria about the horribly dangerous state of all pregnant women IF they choose to have the male that impregnated them around. It’s even got a catchy name, ready for a jingle: Momicide. Gentlemen, a brand new victim group has been born!

St. George’s triumph of opportunism (in the wake of the Scott Peterson trial) was soundly demolished by Jack Shafer, an editor of Slate Magazine and someone who knows a thing or two about editorial integrity, who called Ms. St. George to task here and here. In fact, based on the very blood numbers Ms. St. George splattered all over the Washington Post for three days, Mr. Shafer, through sound use of addition and a scoatch of multiplication, determined that the safest person in the United States is a pregnant woman.

It is curious that within the gender feminism victim cult there is absolutely no talk of the number of pregnant women that are routinely saved by men from all variety of dangerous people and situations. But, I digress, so I’ll save that discussion for another day. Instead, let’s turn to a member of our local hysteria mill, The Everett Herald. This paper is also in on the act during this year's Valentine season, dutifully reminding us of “love’s dark side,” with prose like this:

“More often than we’d ever want to admit … love goes hand-in-hand with danger.”

Of course, no article about domestic violence would be complete without citing some or another of the oddly enormous statistics, such as, “In the United States, women have a 50-50 chance in a lifetime of getting into an abusive, violent relationship. That has stayed steady in our training for at least a decade." We can add this to the fiction that “1 in 3 women on college campus will experience either rape or domestic violence before graduating,” and a veritable shelter-full of other incendiary myths.

Glenn Sacks has debunked all of these drama queen favorites by identifying their source and explaining for the statistically impaired why they are wrong, so I’ll leave that a click away for you. (Personally, if I were the Everett Herald, I’d be a little more concerned about the fact that children are most often abused by the women in their lives.)

All of these statistics are manufactured by the domestic violence industry grown up around the Violence Against Women Act of 1994. The federal money that came out of this “Act” supports anecdotal studies and research that is literally pregnant with a rich variety of statistics to prove that men are bad, woman are good, and the former should ALL be in jail. Of course, the conclusions of these studies are always “more funding is needed.” Funny how that works.

If the hysteria were directed towards such matters as female circumcision, basic women’s rights, and the otherwise horrible state of women in many Islamic countries, there would be nothing but support. But, alas, the same vocal proponents of the horribly suffering women of the US are also the multi-cultural, culturally sensitive, and seemingly parochial bunch who protest against taking action to support the democratization, and hence liberation, of the Middle East.

So, all this manufactured anger gets vented through fatuous spectacles like V-Day, and solemnly poignant newspaper series warning of eminent danger for every woman within radar contact of a man. Not to be outdone, our State Legislature then gets to work discouraging marriage through bills like HB 1314, which adds a surcharge to marriage licenses which then goes to fund abused women’s shelters. Well, heck, since the guys are going to beat their women in the future anyway, they may as well start paying for it from day one.

No wonder a whopping 46% of the men in King County in their 30’s have never been married. I suppose that for Eve Ensler and her Vagina Warriors, that sad statistic is a victory. Apparently it is for eHarmony.com as well, who is making record profits targeting desperate women in their 30’s and 40’s.

So, guys, enjoy your Valentines Day. Just remember to watch your back.

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Oh So Tantalizing

I don’t know about you, but I just love the wonderfully mysterious little trailers at the end of each of Nicole Brodeur’s columns.

I mean, I just find them so fascinating! My friends and I spend considerable time trying to decipher them. There are e-mail flurries between us as we work away at cracking the secret code. The days that Nicole does not put a message are even more exciting. “Why would she NOT put a message today?” we ask in utter disbelief.

Here are her last three:

Gentlemen prefer Betty.
Kristopher. She won't forget.
She doesn't have the patience.

I’m sure there is something profound here, if we could just find that one little bit of information that would tie it all together for us.

“She doesn’t have the patience” must refer to Betty, who is clearly preferred by gentlemen of all makes and types. Betty is not forgetful, even after shagging the night away with these gentlemen, and Kristopher needs to know this. But, alas, how does it all fit together? There must be something more to it.

Well, because Nicole - who wonders about all the things I do - has brought such joy to us with these little messages, I’ve decided I will start doing them in my own columns. Starting today!


She looks like a donkey.

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Oh, the Irony

The Seattle Times, in a fit of righteousness, is making a big fuss about its plagiarism policy.

I thought that providing sources for information and, especially, actual words, has been understood as a requirement in pretty much every communications and media circle on the planet for years and years. But, things must be moving fast, because this is apparently not the case. The Seattle Times needed to set up a committee (acting a bit like a part of the Seattle Silly Council … oh, they are?) to study the issue for about a year.

They asked themselves these pressing questions:

What does a reader need to know about the sources of information we report? What is fair to those sources in how we attribute information to them?

And, what did they come up with?

“Plagiarism, we decided, is the representation of others' language or creative work as one's own. It's wrong, we determined …”

Why, thank you! I’m glad we cleared that one up.

Meanwhile, within the past month, The Seattle Times was reporting information that was discovered by Stefan Sharkansky of Sound Politics without giving him credit.

You know, I think all of this just gets back to “good house training.”

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Alpha Vagina?

Chief Vagina Warrior or Black Widow?

Some of you asked me why I left Christine Gregoire off the Vagina Warrior mug shot collection (here and here). Well, dang, it was oversight!

She portrays herself as a moderate, but the people that have encountered her in official settings are well aware that she is the state's Chief Vagina Warrior.

She will stop at nothing in her Vagina War. She has used her own political capital, that of her party, Ron Sims, and even poor Dean Logan (yes, the guy of the Whitewash Affair).

She has even been spending the State Patrol's political capital, by blaming them for the fact that she will not publish her schedule, saying that they warned her about death threats. Stefan Sharkansky of Sound Politics has talked to the State Patrol and found out otherwise.

She has gone so far as to try to spend the political capital of talk radio, blaming them for stirring up death threats against her. That's right, the death threats that actually don't even exist. These are mystery threats that come from the same place as those mystery ballots.

And, with that, we find the Alpha Vagina Warrior using the favorite weapon of radical feminists - cloak yourself in victimhood and find someone to accuse.

Yes, Gregoire is a Vagina Warrior. But, she is also a black widow, with so many political deaths following in her wake that the entire state is starting to reek. Some of her “allies” are now so dead that political rigor mortis has set in even before they leave office.

And, that brings us to the guy in Oregon who was arrested for trying to set up a suicide pact for Valentines Day with people over the Internet. Now that Eve Ensler has turned V-Day into just another reason to shop for your bride in some other country, I could see how some guys might be driven to extreme measures.

But, are we sure that the real suicide pact, at least politically, isn’t between Gregoire and the rest of the state’s Democrats?

(I started out with "alfa," but decided the sarcasm was a little too cryptic).

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Vagina Predators

Vagina Warriors or Vagina Predators?

Above are three more of Eve Ensler’s Vagina Warriors that did not make my previous report. Perhaps Eve should consider renaming her troops Vagina Predators. These Predators, in order of appearance, include:

Pamela Smart of Derry, New Hampshire, who raped a 15 year old boy, then convinced him to kill her husband
Sarah Suzanne Bench-Salorio of Orange County, California, who raped a 13 year old boy and authorities believe she had several other victims
Amber Jennings of Boston, Massachusetts, who raped a 16 year old boy

On the rare occasion the mainstream media touches on these cases, they are talked about as if this were a recent epidemic. In reality, women commit child rape more often than men do and always have.

The typical profile of a woman who rapes boys has two major components. First, these predators are usually obsessed with control; who is easier and better to control than a 13 year old boy? Second, often these are women that regret not getting the attention they wanted in high school, such as dating the star football player or the “tough guy,” and so they return as an adult and seek out fulfillment.

If you think these are harmless examples of teenage boys having their sexual fantasies fulfilled, you might want to talk to Pamela Smart’s victim, Billy Flynn. He is now serving a life sentence for murder, after having been manipulated by Pamela Smart into committing an act a healthy adult mind usually knows not to do, not even for love. Pamela Smart used her vagina to convince young Billy Flynn to kill her husband.

Teenage boys this age are easily manipulated into doing things they would never do if they were not under the influence of a sexual predator. They can even become the favorite weapon of violent women – a male that can be manipulated into killing another male.

Should Eve Ensler, who has cynically manipulated Valentines Day in order to perpetrate violence on our culture, start calling her troops Vagina Predators? Will you find anything about these women in the Women Studies department at the University of Washington?

Should the Seattle Times be worried about "coaches who prey" (which focused exclussively on male predators and girl victims) or "women teachers who prey on boys"? Oh, but wait, the two women that pass themselves off as reporters who wrote this male bashing "series" in the Seattle Times - Maureen O'Hagan and Christine Willmsen - were indoctrinated on Women Studies departments.

Hmmm ... I guess we need to rely on real scholars like Christina Hoff Sommers and non-victim oriented women such as those in the Independent Women's Forum.

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Vagina Warriors

Are these Eve Ensler's Vagina Warriors?

Above is a roster of Vagina Warriors who, facilitated by public schools, preyed on teenage boys. In order of appearance, they include:

Rebecca Boicelli of San Mateo, California, who raped a 16 year old boy
Pamela Turner of Warren City, Tennessee, who raped a 13 year old boy
Elizabeth Miklosovic, of Grand Rapids, Michigan, who raped a 14 year old girl
Mary Kay Letourneau of Seattle, who raped a 13 year old boy (and lives here and you can find her here)
Debra Lafave, of TampaFlorida, who raped a 14 year old boy
Kathy White of Lumberton Texas, who raped a 17 year old boy
Harriet Laquette Gordon of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, who raped 13 year old boy

Some guys joke that “bagging” your teacher is the dream of every teenage boy. But, the same can be said of teenage girls, who also have crushes on male teachers, and occasionally bag one.

But, if the guy gets caught, he is summarily sentenced to a long prison term, and rightfully so. If a woman is caught, she pleads insanity. In addition to all being sexual predators and teachers, all of these women are also using an insanity defense.

Christina Hoff-Sommers and many others have clearly documented how our public schools are failing our boys. But, who could have known it was THIS bad.

Are these the Vagina Warriors that Eve Ensler, the heroine of V-Day, talks about?

Parents of teenage boys are advised to keep them home and under guard this Valentines Day.

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Selling Victimhood

Two days ago, I appealed to Democrats to find their inner-Jackson in order to revive their party.

Some would say that the coronation of Howard Dean as the Chairman of the DNC carries the Party much further to the left than it already was. Given Dean’s moderate record as Governor of Vermont, I am not entirely sure I agree with this position. In fact, he sometimes sounds surprisingly Jacksonian, and he even asserted in his failed 2004 presidential campaign that the party needed to attract southern white males (which, unfortunately, he stated using the stereo-type of guys in pick-up trucks with confederate flags).

So, if someone can stand by to keep Dean’s foot out of his mouth, he might have more success than Republicans are expecting. I wouldn’t be as quick to dismiss him as the GOP appears to be. But, there are two HUGE problems faced by the Democrats that I have not seen a single one of them address: first, their credibility gap and, second, the victim fatigue of the average citizen. Dean’s problem: the people he likes to whip up into a frenzy are the very people that perpetuate these two problems.

The credibility gap suffered by Democrats stems from the ever more ridiculous claims they make and positions they take that have no basis in reality. Some examples include:

95% of domestic violence perpetrators are male
There is no future financial crisis for Social Security
Reducing taxes hurts the economy
Trail lawyers are good for healthcare

It used to be the case in this country that you could get things done by generating hysteria and grossly exaggerating an issue. You could even do this with complete myths. The idea was that if you repeated something enough times, whether it was based in reality or not, it became true, even without any basis in fact. This worked when media information was much more limited and tightly controlled by a particular ideology. But, people have wised up, they know spin when they see it, and they are much better at deciding for themselves what has a basis in fact and what does not. And, 9-11 bought us all back to the harsh reality of the world in which we live. Moreover, our generally cynical attitude towards politicians leaves us not believing much of what we hear from them. So, the hysteria method does not work nearly as well as it used to.

Victim fatigue stems from the past 15 years of people racing to seek power from victimhood. The Democrats seem to feed this victim engine, all too eagerly manufacturing one victim group after another. Few Democrats make speeches that do not, as a central theme, appeal to the inner victim in most of us. If you are a woman, you are a victim of the so-called “patriarchy.” If you are black, Latino, Asian, American Indian, or anything but white and protestant, you are a victim. If you are old, you are a victim. And, so on, and on, and on …...

In both of these areas, Democrats present themes that seem to work at cross-purposes. For example, they say that all men are part of the patriarchy and that all men are violent towards women; then, they go up in arms when someone, like the President of Harvard, states that men and women might have some differences. Well, which is it? Men and women are all the same; or, there are some biological differences? The fancy-pants argument here is to say that sex is really just “gender” that is defined by culture and society, and the differences are not more innate than that. But, scientific research says otherwise. Any parent with both boys and girls can tell you otherwise as well.

Their entire position on “gender,” female victim cultish-ness, and the “patriarchy,” is just one of the many contradictions within the Democratic Party that makes it hard to take them seriously. They inspire fear because nobody wants to be left in an unprotected class or category and therefore the object of institutionalized government hostility. But, fear is the sort of response anyone has when near a person acting irrationally. Unfortunately for Democrats, a normal reaction is to reject that which you fear.

If Dean found his inner-Jackson, latched onto it, and found constituents for it, the Democrats might have a fighting chance to make up some lost ground. But, if he makes the mistake of forming the core of his army with “grass-roots” radicals, the downward spiral will continue.

Just listen for a few minutes to Howard Schultz, the aspiring Rush for "Progressives", and you will hear that callers love to say, “We are just not getting our message out.” Well, we’ve heard your message and we are tired of it. We don’t believe that there really are so many victims in this country. There are enough real threats in the world that we don't need to manufacture them.

You are selling victimhood and hysteria, and we aren't buying it any longer. Until you change your message, we aren’t coming back.

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Size Matters

A Cuban rancher working on a collective farm has breed miniature cows. Yes, this is real!

Raul Hernandez quietly worked away at shrinking the cows over several years. He calls them “patio cows” because of their tiny size and general docility (see a photo here!). Cubans must not eat much meat, at least not red meat, because killing a cow is apparently illegal. So, Cuban cows are raised for milking and, according to Hernandez, these cows provide enough milk to feed a family and perhaps even a neighbor or two. All of this on grazing pastures the size of typical suburban backyards.

Now, if this can be achieved in less than the span of single man’s lifetime, one must ask, well, how about humans? Naturally, this brings to mind the urban density objectives of the city-state of Seattle. If people were half their current size, twice as many of them could fit in the same space!

Will the Seattle Silly Council pass a resolution requiring that all residents be miniaturized? This could help meet many of the Seattle city-state’s objectives. As an added plus, the Seattle Monorail might actually be able to contain enough people to provide meaningful transportation capacity.

Zoning rules could be changed with-in the city-state so that every household can have a backyard miniature cow. The resulting methane might somehow be captured and used to heat homes.

But, with miniaturazation, what will become of the political career of that fat heifer, Mayor Nickels?

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Jackson, Where Art Thou?

There sure is a lot of hand wringing going on with Democrats these days.

One day, Joel Connelly of the Seattle PI complains that the leftward tack of his party will spell its doom. A few days letter, the PI editorials state, “Here’s a cheer …. for Howard Dean." Nationally, Hillary Clinton begins her four year trek to gaining some traction as a religiously sensitive moderate, while Nancy Pelosi screams away about her latest outrage.

What on earth is going on?! Democrats seem so lost that it’s hard to believe they are all still on the same planet, much less in the same party. They seem more like individual media figures all going in their own directions, marching to their own drummers.

Jeff Jarvis says in his blog (The Buzz Machine), “My fear is that the takeover by Dean and the Deaniacs cements our unfortunate position as The Angry Party." Jeff, who keeps an interesting blog, sounds like a voice coming from deep in the history his party. That past was rooted in, indeed born of, Jacksonian Democracy, which was all the rage in the 1830’s. You know how Republicans often hark back to the Reagan Revolution? Well, for close to 30 years during and after his Presidency, Democrats did the same with Andrew Jackson. It’s a past that the Democratic Party would do well to remember.

From today’s over-sensitive, “feel your pain,” self-esteem conscious, and compulsively self-censured perspective, Jackson seems like a fairly brutal man. He led grizzly campaigns against Indians in Kentucky and other parts of what was then considered the American West (which was a lot further east than today's left coast). He fought in duels and was a white supremacist. But, in his time, he was a hero.

Jackson does not appear to have had much of an ideology before he became President. He won the spot from John Quincy Adams in 1928 mostly through leveraging his powerful presence. But, he quickly formed one and, like it or not, it is, or at least was, at the core of the Democratic Party for 150 years. His ideology was egalitarian and his targets were wealthy elitists who controlled financial markets and the government, both to their favor.

This may come across as a rather soporific “revelation” for me to share with you as if it were profound. But that is only because you read this from our modern age. In Jackson’s time, it wasn’t at all clear whether our country would be ruled by an elite class through right of birth, or based on merit. These favored classes had already become adept at enriching themselves further by commandeering, enlarging, and then plundering public institutions. You can still see wealthy elite doing the same thing today in countries like Mexico, in which a powerful oligarchy rules over the country for its own benefit while locking out the vast majority of the population from any sort of economic benefits, much less power.

Jackson epitomized self-made “merit” in every early 19th century sense of the word. His exploits as a general in the Indian Wars were legendary. Moreover, he appeared to come from a humble background (not entirely true, but close enough). So, his triumph in obtaining the Presidency was a statement in itself. Contemporary detractors dismiss him because of his harsh treatment of Indians and his alignment with the South and the institution of Slavery. But, in reality, his particular brand of meritocracy and egalitarianism was a necessary precursor to emboldening the anti-slavery movement. And, his approach to American Indians was much different as President than it had been while in the military.

So, then, what policies did Jackson implement? Believe it or not, he believed that the people's best weapons were equal rights under the law and limited government. Jackson expressed a social vision in which any men could obtain economic independence, would be free to live as he saw fit, and “under a system of laws and representative government utterly cleansed of privilege.”

What about his philosophy of white supremacy? If you think the opposition was roudy with Bush, try facing down reactionary southern planters, worried that the egalitarianism promoted by Jackson might endanger their own prerogatives—and perhaps the institution of slavery—if southern nonslaveholders carried them too far. Indeed, only 5% of white males in the South actually owned slaves, so they had plenty to fear.

Jackson seems lost to the Democrats today. Unfortunately, while they should trust contemporary Americans to understand that Jackson was a man rooted in his time, they impulsively refrain from talking positively about him because he is too politically incorrect for them now. Even worse, few people calling themselves Democrats these days know the first thing about Jackson. Their knowledge typically only goes back as far as Franklin D. Roosevelt (and often not even that far).

“Economic independence”? “Limited government”? These do not sound like the stuff of today's Democratic Party. Although they would have us believe that they are primarily interested in equality under the law, their method of getting there is exactly the opposite of Jacksonian Democracy. And, that is exactly the problem.

(There are several good books on Andrew Jackson, and whatever your political views, I encourage you to read one)

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Way to Go, Mulatto!

Just want to give a quick “HURRAY” to The Mulatto Advocate, which has this piece about the silly monorail project in Seattle.

This is a great blog done by someone who clearly is not taking Prozac or living on the street on Capital Hill.

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The Low Down on the Chop Off

I seem to have caused some confusion with my story about the penis snatchers of British Columbia.

The crux of the story is true. Someone really did de-penis a statue of a nude man that was standing an British Columbia, Canada park. However, I embellished the story with an assumption that the only sort of people who harbor enough anger to do such a thing are victim oriented feminists with a bone to pick with the “patriarchy.”

I came up with this in response to a column by Susan Paynter of the Seattle PI, in which she suggests that clearly the only people that would have done such a thing are right wing evangelicals. She is seeing the world through her own victim-oriented prism.

From my perspective, it seems much more likely that angry gender feminists hacked off the poor statue’s genitals. After all, this is what they have been doing through the family courts now for over a decade. Read NOW’s web site for a while, or check out textbooks from Women’s Studies departments in major universities, and you will know what I’m talking about.

I apologize if I caused some confusion among my readers. The column was meant to be facetious and sarcastic, although my scenario of what really happened to the stone guy's schlong is just as likely as the one Paynter would have you believe.

Silly Seattle endeavors to bring you an accurate review of the news. We know that you depend on us for that and so we would never intentionally attempt to deceive you. We will be more careful next time about clarifying when a column is written in jest as opposed being actual news or intelligent analysis of it. We know that you are wondering who you can trust after reading the bogus report from the King Elections Office, and we do not want to add to your strife.

Oh, and for all of you asking when I am going to write my view on Harvard President Lawrence Summers’ comments about sex differences in science aptitude, my take on that will be coming soon. So, stay tuned to this silly channel!

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Report?

Silly Seattle feels it is our civic responsibility to continue to chime in about the illegitimate election of Christine Gregoire for governor of Washington.

And, on that front, this was a very newsworthy day!

Ron Sims, King of the County, and Elections Director Dean Logan had a press conference this morning in order to release Mr. Logan’s “report” on the election. The press conference itself must have been a grueling affair for these two gentleman, as they had nothing new to report about the huge error rate in the election, while concerned citizens were there to keep them honest. (“Reporters” from the local media cannot be trusted for that).

Silly Seattle’s hero, Stefan Sharkansky of Sound Politics, was there. Read all about his correction of Ron Sims’ difficulties with mathematics at the Sound Politics blog.

After a thorough reading of the report, we are left with almost no specifics. There is no accounting for the 348 provisional ballots that were not matched up with registered voters. Logan admits that he only referred 2 people who filled out ballots in the names of dead people to the prosecutor’s office. 100 felons who voted were reported to the prosecutor.

Amazingly, the report states that all of the fraudulent votes were uncovered by the “media,” not by election officials. Of course, there is no mention of the King County Elections Office doing its own investigation to uncover any additional fraudulent votes. Making sure all votes are legal is not part of their job.

Logan claims that military ballots were mailed out on time, but he refuses to share information on this topic with Republican members of the King County Council, because he is too busy! And, this after repeatedly accusing people of being "partisan" in the report. He tries to obfuscate this issue by stating that, “out of 15,000 military ballots issued, only 16” were rejected because they were returned too late. How many were mailed out too late, Mr. Logan? And, if you wont answer that question honestly, how about telling us exactly how many military ballots were returned?

Most disturbing is that this “report” did not address specifics on the huge disparity between the number of votes cast and the number of registered voters. Logan even tried to fool people with this statement in the report:

“The issue has been knowingly misrepresented to the public as if there were more ballots counted than there are voters in King County. This is not the case.”

The operative word that Logan left out is "registered.” People are up in arms because there were more votes counted than REGISTERED voters."

Why would Logan and Sims present such a bogus report to the media lapdogs? The report itself provides the answer, “The solution is not to the throw away the people …” of the elections office. Probably not most of them, but Logan and Sims have got to go.

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Dying by the Numbers

Prepare for the onslaught of whining feminists outraged by yesterday’s ouster of Carly Fiorina from the top spot at HP.

They will say that Ms. Fiorina was just the latest woman victim of the “patriarchy” (see third paragraph from bottom), their screwy theory about legions of men conspiring to create all the evils in the world. But, Carly Fiorina is no victim, except perhaps of her herself.

HP’s acquisition of Compaq, which Ms. Fiorina bet her tenure at HP on and the Hewlett and the Packard families fought, was another in the long epic of failed mergers and acquisitions in the annals of American business history. Feminists promised us a “different way” once women ran companies. In reality, women run companies the same way men do – over-done financial engineering, acquisitions for ego instead of based on logic and sound strategy, and primarily for their own personal financial benefit.

These were the sorts of things that were Ms. Fiorina’s undoing. I doubt we will see her complaining on her on behalf though. Even though I thought that the acquisition of Compaq was an exercise in stupidity, I developed a certain respect for Carly Fiorina because she refused to play the contemporary feminist game of screaming about being a victim from the rooftops. She said herself that what she appreciated about business was that performance is measured objectively and by the numbers. A 50% decline in stock price during the tenure of a CEO speaks for itself.

On the other hand, perhaps we will not see much complaining from feminists. Carly Fiorina did not fit their mold and did not participate in their victim cult. Among this crowd, those that do not follow the party line are usually quite harshly torn down. Condoleeza Rice is no hero for Kim Gandy, President of NOW.

There may be some arguments here for those that oppose affirmative action, however. Ms. Fiorina was manufactured in Lucent by executives intent on playing the gender equity game. She shot up to the top as fast as Lucent’s stock price dropped (once pushing the century mark, Lucent’s stock price has been mired at less than $4 per share for the past four years). She had the charisma but perhaps lacked the wisdom and analytical capacities gained from the trial and error and dogfights of climbing in the business world the hard way.

Microsoft is currently in its own “gender equity” program. Perhaps it’s time to sell Microsoft stock?

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Mayor on Meth?

In his recent State of the City-State Address, Mayor Nickels took credit for a number of startling things, pretended to have made progress in areas he has not, set a bold agenda of changing the world, and completely ignored some of the most pressing problems of the city. Mostly, though, he completely avoided saying anything specific. In fact, as I think about it, I can’t remember the man ever saying anything specific.

Well, here’s the review you wont get from the obsequious mainstream media:

The underlying theme of his speech was that “Seattle is back.” Back from where? I thought we were in glory-land already, what with all the talk about being a “livable” city and all. No, Seattle is not back and really is not even in a much different position than it was 3, 5, or 10 years ago. It is still hostile to business, burdened with bureaucracy, and shooting at the moon.

Mayor Nickels claims to have “created jobs.” I am not familiar with any government that has ever created jobs. A government can stand in the way of private enterprise, and therefore limit job growth, but it can’t create jobs. I suppose Nickels believes that his favorite mega-project (well, at least for now, until he starts building a tunnel with funny money), Light Rail, created jobs. In reality, for every person hired, someone probably lost a job, because that’s just what taxes do – eliminate jobs.

Mayor Nickels also takes credit for “building strong families.” I could not find anything specific in his speech, so could someone please explain to me how Seattle is building strong families? First, there aren’t many families in Seattle. 46% of men in their thirties in King County have never been married. That number includes rural areas of the county, so surely the percentage is much, much higher within the city limits of Seattle.

If these single guys are forming families, I think we can all agree that they are not the sort of families we would hope for. On the other hand, maybe those are the types of families Nickels wants. Or, maybe what he is referring to is his own procreation with God knows who and what. In any case, saying that Seattle in any way contributes to strong families is like saying river channels in a desert contribute to water flow -- there is not much water to flow in a desert, just as there are not many families in Seattle to make “stronger.”

Don’t expect help from the State Legislature, Mr. Mayor, because they are raising the cost of getting married in order to fund programs that are sure to increase the percentage of men opting out and the profits of eHarmony.com as desperate women in their 30’s and 40’s search for a man. The fact is, the imperial district of the state (Seattle and King County), as well as the state legislature, are downright hostile to families.

The Mayor then points out a statistic that he ought to be deeply embarrassed about: Less than half of school-aged children in North Seattle attend public schools. Why did he focus on North Seattle? Is it because that statistic is even worse in other parts of the City? Well, just waking up to the fact that public schools in Seattle TOTALLY SUCK, Mr. Mayor?! And, have you considered that parents don’t like the city-state wieners busing their kids across town to meet “diversity” quotas?

Not wanting the blame pinned on him, Nickels followed with, “the State of Washington should be ashamed that we now rank 42nd …in the amount we invest in our children’s schools.” As usual, more money is needed. Oh, and by the way, it’s the state causing the problem, not Seattle itself.

In reality, Seattle has blown its wad on all sorts of stupid projects, while its schools crumble. Super-sized football and baseball stadium, light rail, and the monorail circus ride all suck up tax dollars that could have gone toward improving schools. Worse, if Nickels is hoping the state will help, he’s got a long wait. The best our legislature has is lowering test standards and pushing “multi-culturalism” in our schools. (See SB 5638 and HB 1659). The problem is that Seattle makes choices like Nickels selects desert, “Give me everything on the menu.”

So, then Nickels says he is getting traffic moving. What type of traffic is he talking about? The most onerous problem the city has is a bottleneck on I-5 in downtown (under the Washington State Convention Center -- see that little pinhole traffic goes through? That’s the problem) and limited access to this major traffic artery. But, of course, it’s politically incorrect to point at the real source of the problem, because the Seattle City-State is going to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, bringing snow to the mountains, and leading the world to the promise land.

No, Seattle isn’t back. Actually, it’s being left behind by the cities and communities on the east side of Lake Washington. If the state is smart (which is asking for a lot, I know), it will invest its transportation dollars in upgrading and expanding I-405. There are real families over there, real businesses, and nobody is permanently limiting the size of it’s major highway.

Let sclerotic Seattle wither. But, pass the meth first, Mr. Mayor.

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Bye Bye Penis

Well, looks like angry feminists in British Columbia are at it again. They have emasculated men in Canada by taking away their most basic rights. But, this is taking things a step too far.

You see, a BC artist named Michael Hermesh created a statue of a man doing the full monte. That's right, the statue was flashing its penis and gonads at gawking crowds in Penicten, where the statue was sited after being completed.

But, it didn't take long before the penis of the statue was hacked off with a large hammer.

Local news papers are blaming the usual suspects, thinking that it was the work of either sophmorish teenage boys, or the big schlong on this thing was knocked off by religious right groups that were offended by the nudity.

But, recent information that has come to light suggests that the penis was actually hacked off by angry divorced women living in a nearby shelter for abused women. They had just viewed Eve Ensler's V-day play and decided the world would be better off with one less penis, at least as a start.

If nothing else, says the Mayor of the town, "the brutal removal of the statue's penis signifies the policy of our government to ensure that men have no rights in our family courts. Perhaps the feminists who removed this penis are on to something. Perhaps we could start demanding that men part with their penises as a matter of course in divorce settlements."

In the meantime, the artist asks that if anyone has seen his penis, to please return it. The women who stole it have claimed that they no longer have it. But others report that the women have been seen more happy than normal. Some have requested that the entire statue be installed at the women's shelter.

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CASA Latina My Ass-a

CASA Latina, the organization that gives illegal immigrants a home while being financially sponsored by your tax dollars – thanks to the Seattle Silly Council – is looking to relocate from its downtown Seattle digs.

CASA Latina plans to purchase the former Chubby and Tubby site on Rainier Avenue for a whopping $1.4 million, subsidized by $250,000 from the City.

Fighting the plan are several community organizations, including the Rainier Valley Chamber of Commerce, Mount Baker Community Club, Southeast Crime Prevention Council, SEED and Powerful Schools. It’s not that these groups have anything against Latinos; it’s just that they do not want the City’s problems pushed once again into a neighborhood they have worked hard to rejuvenate.

Rainier Valley is a prime example of what happens when the City of Seattle focuses on an area for “economic development.” For over 30 years, the city has been supposedly working to promote development along Rainier Avenue. In reality, “development” is a code word for “dumping.” Whenever the city wants to tuck away something it doesn’t like, doesn’t want you to see, or wants to house a horde of easily bought voters for Mayor Knucklehead and the mini-mayors on the Seattle Silly Council, it is put along either Rainier Avenue or MLK Avenue.

The worst of the on-street light rail will be along both of these roads. Thinking that all cities should have them, the city is building massive public housing projects in the area. Police presence is woefully absent while the QFC and Safeway parking lots on Rainier are “traverse at your own risk.”

Despite the City’s effort to create a shinning example of all that is wrong with city planning, there are signs of entrepreneurial life on Rainier Avenue. Columbia City, for example, is in the first stages of developing a unique and bordering-on-pleasant ambiance.

But, one would have to assume, the Seattle Silly Council believes that no private enterprise progress should be left to itself. It needs to be reversed, by golly.

So, in the name of “diversity,” CASA Latina and the City are arguing that relocating to the former Chubby and Tubby will inject some much needed culture into the neighborhood. One would think that Rainier Valley is lily white and needs some diversity training and a general re-education on the virtues of multi-culturalism. But, in reality, promoting “diversity” in Rainier Valley is like suggesting the Silly Council needs more Democrats. It’s there and bumping into itself.

This plan has nothing to do with “diversity.” It is yet another example of the city dumping unwanted elements in Rainier Valley so that it can create a blue wonderland for the million dollar apartment dwellers downtown and in Belltown. Rainier Valley has been home to much of the city’s black population, more recently to immigrants from Asia, and not far away are synagogues and mosques. Al of these groups have worked hard to lift and re-build the area.

The budding signs of life and business activity in Columbia City already suffer from access that scares the blue pants off the enlightened city-dwellers downtown.

As the Seattle Times points out:

[CASA Latina´s] worker center has been a magnet for some belligerent behavior.

Unemployed people who don't want to abide by CASA Latina's rules stand near the center and try to get potential employers to hire them before they get to the worker center.When they don't get jobs, some men hang out nearby, drink beer, urinate, litter and ogle women.

"It's really just problems that you'd call uncomfortable, particularly for single women walking down the street.

CASA Latina should remain in Belltown. Afterall, the Mexican Consulate, which has pamphlets produced by the Mexican government explaining to illegal immigrants how to live in the shadows of American society, is just up the street. Plus, that area of the city is so stark white with righteous environmentalists and “save-the-world” types that, if any place needs some diversity, it is needed there.

Rainier Valley is in the process of saving itself; the residents of downtown and Belltown should save CASA Latina.

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A $1 Billion Plan

Mayor Knucklehead has a plan.

His plan is to build a $5 billion tunnel to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct. How will we pay for it? Why, with magical mystery money, of course.

Listen folks, this is not unprecedented. Governor Gregoire set a shining example for us all. If she can win the governor’s office with magical mystery ballots, why can’t we build a tunnel with funny money?

Senator Patty Murray says that there are no federal dollars available for Seattle’s fantasies. The state is running a budget deficit due to out-of-control spending. All other sources of revenue are tied up into perpetuity by sports stadiums and monorail circus rides. But, there is yet an option available: the city-state of Seattle could just print its own money!

Or, we could implement my less than $1 billion plan. It’s really quite simple. Tear down the monstrosity called the Washington State Trade and Convention Center and increase the number of lanes on I-5 through downtown to ten in each direction. In the process, give every other East-West street in downtown it’s own entrance/exit onto the highway. Need more? Build a second deck.

Then, tear down the Alaskan Way Viaduct and sell all the land that becomes available as a result to private developers.

My plan would get traffic moving again, give us back the waterfront, put billions of dollars into the city’s treasury, and increase employment, all without adding to the bureaucracy of an out-of-control city government.

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What We Tolerate for Commercials

While watching the Super Bowl hype this morning, I contemplate the history of professional sport largesse in Seattle.

Two new stadiums built on the backs of taxpayers for teams owned by eccentric billionaires. A basketball team following the predictable path of threatening to leave if it too is not given a new stadium. I read with envy about the so-called athletes, pumped up with designer steroids, who complain constantly that their easy money is not enough.

I think of the schools that could have been built with that money. And, I wonder how it could be that taxpayers are stupid enough to buy the argument that none of this was done with their money. How it could it be that people do not realize that all sources of taxes are connected, all part of the same pool from which the state and localities can draw funds to build schools, highways, subways, libraries ….. and prisons.

I wonder how politicians that seem to blame corporations for all the evil in the world could be so complicit in corporate welfare. I think of the egos they carry knowing that being “leaders” of an NFL, MLB, and NBA city and region gives them a certain prestige. I envision them hobnobbing with powerful businessmen and the sports stars they trade like playing cards.

Then, I think of my alma mater, which built a beautiful new stadium entirely from charitable contributions. And, the student athletes who will play in this new stadium for nothing more than a scholarship and a love of their sport.

So, who is playing in the Super Bowl? I’m not sure. But, I can’t wait for the commercials!

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Unanimous Belief In Election Fraud

It’s time to post the results of two of Silly Seattle’s polls!

First, our poll on your opinions on the gubernatorial election. SS asked if you believed that Gregoire just got lucky and the “error” in the count went her way; or, if you believed that she won because of election fraud in King County.

An amazing 100% of you believe that election fraud is how Gregoire gained her “victory.” With results like that, it’s hard to believe that even the Supreme Silly Court of Washington well let this election stand.

Second, SS asked if you believed that the mainstream media was one-sided in its coverage of the David Brame case. 75% of you believe that it was.

David Brame’s sister has a completely different portrayal of events that lead to David Brame’s murder suicide than what the mainstream media presented to you. In his sisters testimonial, we can see a Crystal Brame that terrorized David and his parents while creating a very unstable environment for their children.

There is no excuse for murder, but is there any excuse for the mainstream media ignoring the events that lead up to it?

Our new poll asks if you believe that Gregoire’s election will be thrown out by Judge John Bridges of Chelan County Superior Court. SS hopes you will participate.

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Whiningford

Silly Seattle usually refrains from commenting simply in response to local newspaper articles.

However, today’s Seattle Times article about the out-cry from Wallingford residents because King County plans to sell a portion of Gas Works Park to a developer is just too hard to resist.

Wallingford is home to some of the most die-hard environmental fanatics in the county. These are the same people that have imposed laws that literally steal away the economic value of rural properties. They are also major advocates of “urban density.”

Now they scream bloody murder when the county sells a piece of property to a developer who plans to put up a tall building that will block their oh-so-precious views? Does not this development contribute to urban density?

Seattle environmentalists are happy to impose their extreme views on everyone else. But, they don’t much like it when someone hurts the economic value of THEIR property.

This type of selfish arrogance is a large part of why secession from King County is such a hot item right now.

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Senator Jim Kastama is Brave

Men and father’s have been in the political wilderness for at least two decades.

Radical feminists have conducted an all-out assault on fathers. Now, men and fathers are harassed with numerous laws and government policies designed to push men out of their family’s lives. This has been true even though numerous studies show that children do best with both parents in their lives.

However, one Washington State Senator seems to be interested in helping children. Senator Jim Kastama is the lonely sponsor of SB 5350, entitled Providing a presumption of shared parental responsibility after a dissolution of marriage.

This is not the sort of bill that gets the gratuitous attention of, say, defending the right of a woman to divorce while she is pregnant. While any law that further alienates men and fathers seems to meet with the joyous praise of the mainstream media, there is little attention, other than negative attention, paid to legislators who help fathers and children.

The purpose of this bill is to change the current bias against fathers in family courts. Today, family courts assume that mothers should have sole custody of children and that men are naturally violent and negative influences on families. They assume that the only positive contribution a man can make is to send money. Predictably, NOW is against a father's right to participate in the life of his children.

With SB 5350, family courts would be forced to presume join custody. Yes, it is amazing that legislation needs to be passed in order to allow divorced fathers to participate in the lives of their children. But, it is needed. Radical feminists and the disgusting politicians who support them have managed to label all fathers as “Dead Beat Dads.”

In reality, very few divorced fathers who are able to remain in their children’s lives are behind on child support payments. In fact, women that are required to make child support payments have a much worse record. I bet you never heard these facts in the mainstream media.

So, thank you Senator Kastama. You are making a brave effort and some of us do notice.

Next, let’s do something about Move-Away-Moms.

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Go Ahead, Admit It

Good Lord, I am so tired of Democrats and their hand wringing over tacking leftward.

Joel Connely of the PI made the point that liberals in the State of Washington, and Seattle in particular, are leading the death march of the Democratic Party. If this really is something to fear, you better prepare yourself Mr. Connely, because with Howard Dean in charge, voices like Dennis Kucinich and Rev. Al Sharpton are going to have center stage.

I don’t want the Democratic Party to die. Really. On occasion, they make a good point or two. I think it would be far healthier for them, and for the country, if they were honest with themselves and the rest of us about being socialists and their desire to slow the country down to meet their pace. There is nothing about such a position to hide from or feel bad about. After such an admission by the Democrats, the Republicans would expedite their trip to the far right.

On the way to self-actualization, Democrats should learn to be forthright about the wars they choose to conduct. Where Republicans have Democrats beat is on the fact that people really do know where the GOP stands on issues. Just the mere fact that Republicans stake out clear territory earns them respect, even though some of those stands are not supported by the majority.

Democrats should come right out and talk about their War on Marriage. They could announce that they are conducting a War on the “Patriarchy.” They could brag about their War on Free Enterprise, sing from the rooftops about the War on Free Speech, and bellow dramatically about the War on Attractive Women, and War on Healthcare Providers. Right now, Democrats wage these as stealth, covert wars. They should bring them out into the open.

With the two parties racing to opposite poles, perhaps the country could finally break out of the two party system that has held it back for so long. The duopoly of the two parties is really no different that the 70 year rule of the PRI in Mexico. It has stifled creative solutions, caused politicians to talk in sound bites, made presidential debates into spin events, and left political debate just plain boring.

With Democrats admitting socialism, and Republicans evolving to the obvious destination of evangelical dictatorship, a new party could take up the business of individual freedom that our founders cared most about, but contemporary politicians have completely forgotten.

I know. It’s a whacky idea. But, it was fun to write about anyway.

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Talk Radio Blowhards a Threat to Gregoire?!

This is another: You have GOT to be kidding me !!

Now, Silly Seattle can fully understand that the Governor of the state needs to have security, especially after a mentally ill man makes a threat. There may also be other threats floating around out there due to the controversy surrounding our recent mess of an election.

But, get an eye-load of this quote from Christine Gregoire:

The level of discussion on some of this talk-show radio is believed to be a bit
concerning.

What a slippery statement. When she says, "is believed," she is suggesting that conservative talk radio is under monitoring by law enforcement and they are concerned. Not her. Law enforcement.

To simply admit that SHE is concerned about the anger expressed on conservative radio would have been more honest. Because of it, she knows that people are not willing to simply drop the issue and let her be Governor.

Conservative talk radio is blamed for just about everything by Democrats, except perhaps the Tsunami. The blowhards of talk radio are even more diabolical (Democrats love their bogeymen) than the initiative process. But, this is the first time I have heard anyone go so far as to suggest that talk radio, as obnoxious as it can be (and I am no fan), constitutes some sort of threat to the life of an elected official.

Does the timing of the press conference show you anything? Perhaps she wants to distract your attention from that pesky court case? And, is Gregoire also implying that, since Rossi has also been the subject of death threats, conservative talk radio is part of a vast right wing conspiracy to threaten HIS life?

This should show us two things:

First, the knee-jerk victim impulse is deeply ingrained in Gregoire's character. She knows that playing the victim card, especially when wrapped with gender, often gets a woman what she wants. So, here we go. Next, she will be accusing Rossi of violence against her. And, to think that I was actually gaining a certain degree of respect for Gregoire for not resorting to the tried and true gender card. Actually, she was just saving it for an opportune moment.

Second, if anything shows that Gregoire, and her fellow Democrats in Olympia, King County, and Seattle, are totalitarian by nature, this comment does. She has now equated anger at her stolen election to threats against her person. In other words, she does not believe in freedom of expression, at least not expression that does not suite her purposes.

Folks, this is truly scary. I am not sure what is going to happen with the election challenge currently being heard in court. I am not even sure that is relevant now.

I would complete my thought by stating that Gregoire ought to be impeached for making such an anti- First Amendment statement, but alas, I do not want to be accused of exercising my freedom of speech in the State of Washington.

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Tired of Dancing!

OK, folks. I’m really sick and tired of PC Seattle and its status quo media dancing around the issue.

Magically appearing ballots, large numbers of unverified “provisional” ballots, dead voters and double voters, they all add up. All of this happened in the one county that nobody doubted the liberal Democrat would win. As a result, Gregoire comes out ahead after the third re-count. Stefan Sharkansky has it all well documented in SoundPolitics.

I mean, come on. Who are we kidding!

Let’s just call it what it is. And here’s your chance to participate in a poll and do just that. Do you think Gregoire won just because she got lucky and the “error” went her way, or do you think there was deliberate election fraud in King County?

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Kilo-stone

Amazingly, this blog has now surpassed 1,000 visits!

It’s not a huge number, but it’s not bad for less than a month of operation. I doubt Silly Seattle would have had half this many visits if SoundPolitics and Matt Rosenberg had not given it an honorable mention. So, thanks guys.

I suspect that some of the themes of this blog are becoming apparent to my readers. Of course, the title is not without reason. I find politics in Seattle, King County, and even the state of Washington, to be hilarious. This region has unprecedented potential, with great companies and highly educated people. Somehow, though, it has been hijacked by something that I haven’t quite put my finger on, but I’ll keep searching. In any case, the gap between the potential and actual Seattle is enormous and laughable and sad. And, I'm not the only one that thinks so. (So does this guy).

Some have asked why I maintain anonymity. I do this because I want to present ideas and a different way of looking at the issues than one would typically find in the Seattle media. But, unfortunately, the status quo is so important to various interest groups that politics cannot seem to be discussed without being personalized. By maintaining anonymity, my hope is that my readers will focus on the message, not the messenger.

Plus, I might just have a coming out party at some point. (Don’t hold your breath though).

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Ready for V-Day, Guys?

Valentines Day is just around the corner.

Yes, it’s the time of year to hear all the moaning and groaning about how the “Patriarchy” conspiracy has oppressed women. Eve Ensler’s V-Day “play,” ripe with appeals to the inner-lesbian in all women, will be paraded around by her “Vagina Warriors” and praised by the arbiters of opinion in the mainstream news media. Meanwhile, the victim statistics that appear like so many magical ballots in a King County election will be splashed across our newspapers. The message of both: Mothers, don’t let your daughters marry cowboys .... or any other man, for that matter.

This year’s celebration was kicked-off by Donna St. George of the Washington Post, who pumps up the hysteria about the horribly dangerous state of all pregnant women IF they choose to have the male that impregnated them around. It’s even got a catchy name, ready for a jingle: Momicide. Gentlemen, a brand new victim group has been born!

St. George’s triumph of opportunism (in the wake of the Scott Peterson trial) was soundly demolished by Jack Shafer, an editor of Slate Magazine and someone who knows a thing or two about editorial integrity, who called Ms. St. George to task here and here. In fact, based on the very blood numbers Ms. St. George splattered all over the Washington Post for three days, Mr. Shafer, through sound use of addition and a scoatch of multiplication, determined that the safest person in the United States is a pregnant woman.

It is curious that within the gender feminism victim cult there is absolutely no talk of the number of pregnant women that are routinely saved by men from all variety of dangerous people and situations. But, I digress, so I’ll save that discussion for another day. Instead, let’s turn to a member of our local hysteria mill, The Everett Herald. This paper is also in on the act during this year's Valentine season, dutifully reminding us of “love’s dark side,” with prose like this:

“More often than we’d ever want to admit … love goes hand-in-hand with danger.”

Of course, no article about domestic violence would be complete without citing some or another of the oddly enormous statistics, such as, “In the United States, women have a 50-50 chance in a lifetime of getting into an abusive, violent relationship. That has stayed steady in our training for at least a decade." We can add this to the fiction that “1 in 3 women on college campus will experience either rape or domestic violence before graduating,” and a veritable shelter-full of other incendiary myths.

Glenn Sacks has debunked all of these drama queen favorites by identifying their source and explaining for the statistically impaired why they are wrong, so I’ll leave that a click away for you. (Personally, if I were the Everett Herald, I’d be a little more concerned about the fact that children are most often abused by the women in their lives.)

All of these statistics are manufactured by the domestic violence industry grown up around the Violence Against Women Act of 1994. The federal money that came out of this “Act” supports anecdotal studies and research that is literally pregnant with a rich variety of statistics to prove that men are bad, woman are good, and the former should ALL be in jail. Of course, the conclusions of these studies are always “more funding is needed.” Funny how that works.

If the hysteria were directed towards such matters as female circumcision, basic women’s rights, and the otherwise horrible state of women in many Islamic countries, there would be nothing but support. But, alas, the same vocal proponents of the horribly suffering women of the US are also the multi-cultural, culturally sensitive, and seemingly parochial bunch who protest against taking action to support the democratization, and hence liberation, of the Middle East.

So, all this manufactured anger gets vented through fatuous spectacles like V-Day, and solemnly poignant newspaper series warning of eminent danger for every woman within radar contact of a man. Not to be outdone, our State Legislature then gets to work discouraging marriage through bills like HB 1314, which adds a surcharge to marriage licenses which then goes to fund abused women’s shelters. Well, heck, since the guys are going to beat their women in the future anyway, they may as well start paying for it from day one.

No wonder a whopping 46% of the men in King County in their 30’s have never been married. I suppose that for Eve Ensler and her Vagina Warriors, that sad statistic is a victory. Apparently it is for eHarmony.com as well, who is making record profits targeting desperate women in their 30’s and 40’s.

So, guys, enjoy your Valentines Day. Just remember to watch your back.

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Don't Stop Now, Nanny

Where is the nanny-state when you need it?

A group, including the American Cancer Society, has launched a signature drive for I-901, which would ban smoking in all indoor public facilities. Matt Rosenberg of SoundPolitics (and Rosenblog) wrote about his support of the initiative yesterday. Afterwards, the comments forum lit up like the smoking lounge in an airport after the arrival of a 747 from Asia, as regular visitors to SoundPolitics debated whether the ban was good for our health, or an excessive infringement on our rights. Essentially, the debate came down to the pros and cons of the nanny-state.

I have little doubt that this initiate will get the signatures it needs and that it will ultimately pass. Seat-belt laws, smoking laws, and intense DWI enforcement are all legacies of the uber-success of MADD, and the slow, silent demise of the libertarian hopes and dreams of our Northwest predecessors. The authoritarian Democrats must be proud, even though I-901 is that nasty little thing called an Initiative, which after all is the last smidgen of democracy they have yet to wring from the state. But, will Democrats impose discipline on the problem children of Seattle?

The Seattle Monorail Project (SMP) is working to get Olympia’s stamp of approval to issue bonds that will exceed forty years to maturity (Senate Bill 5534). This reminds me of the inter-generational mortgage loans that were issued in Japan during its real estate bubble. Now, unborn Japanese great-grandchildren will be born into debt with an underlying asset worth less than half the total amount of the loan principal they will inherit.

If there has ever been a spoiled child that needed a good sharp slap on the buttock, surely the city of Seattle qualifies. The monorail is a pipedream passed while the city was throwing temper-tantrums because it couldn’t get everything it wanted, right away. It goes from nowhere to nowhere (in a transit sense), is less than originally promised, and at least 30% short of the funds required for even a scaled down version of what was originally presented to the voters.

My dear Legislators, if this farce of a plan is not enough to compel you to vote “no,” perhaps the reality of future continuous begging for more transportation funding that you are sure to see from Seattle will. Already, Mayor Nickels is demanding a tunnel to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct. Sound Transit is deciding on locations of stations for an extension of light rail while the funding for the approved line is still in question. I-5 bottlenecks at a point in downtown Seattle where 20 lanes are needed. Sen. Patty Murray has informed us that the federal trough is dry. From where will the money come?

Well, the answer is obvious. Seattle could pay for more of the essential transportation infrastructure it and the entire state needs IF the monorail were to go the way of percolated coffee. Jonathan Buchter, the Seattle monorail’s finance director, says they want “as much flexibility as we can get." SMP is even willing to sign over all future tax receipts as a guarantee on those forty plus year bonds, leaving nothing to subsidize the ride. Eventually, it could sit idle for lack of operating funds. What a lovely monument to irresponsibility those overhead rails would make.

Isn’t all of this just a little scary? We benefit from the bought, built, and paid-for investments of our grandparents. Nobody knows better than the Nanny that all children need boundaries. Are we really willing to trade the serious infrastructure required of a major metropolitan center for a circus ride and, worse, put the responsibility to pay for it on our grandchildren?

Now is no time to stop being our Nanny.

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