Seattle Broadband - Not So Silly

As Forrest might say, silly is as silly does. And, Seattle is looking a lot less silly with its recent report from the Broadband Task Force. (See the report here).

As a blog that believes in free markets and private enterprise, you might ask why we are lauding a report that suggests the possibility that the City might get involved in delivering telecommunications services. But, there are good reasons for our enthusiasm for this report.

First, the Broadband Task Force was clear that the first choice would be for private enterprise to take on the challenge. The Task Force suggested that the city look closely at not only how it could promote private enterprise to make the investment, but at how its current policies and regulations might hinder it. The City could learn a lot from an honest examination of these issues.

But, most importantly, Seattle is in a bad spot as far as advanced communications goes. Yes, we have Microsoft and Craig McCaw in the region. But, even with these sorts of technology entrepreneurs, we are coming up very short in the broadband equation.

In many respects, Seattle is a backwater as urban areas go. Worse, we are stuck with one of the worst Regional Bell Operating Companies in the country, Qwest. Qwest (formerly US West) has consistently blundered along ever since its formation after the break up AT&T in the early 1980s. Now, thanks to its purchase by Joe Nacchio’s Qwest – which was originally an inter-city fiber optic network built on mountains of debt – the company has a tremendous debt load that prevents it from doing anything more dramatic than cut costs.

Comcast is not any better. As the nation’s largest cable company, Comcast has several larger urban centers in line before it gets around to making new investment in Seattle. In fact, some of the highest prices Comcast charges for digital cable TV and cable modem Internet service are in Seattle. Metropolitan areas such as Washington DC have much better prices wrapped up in promotions that Seattle never sees.

Seattle was very welcoming to companies that formed out of the telecom boom of the late 1990s. Those companies built out fiber optic rings in the downtown core of the city, which was good for businesses in Seattle, but did nothing to provide competition for residential and small business services.

So, the Broadband Task Force's work is a welcome addition. While the city farts away huge sums of money on the silly monorail project, which likely will never be built and even if it is, will do little to nothing about transportation needs in the city, it could focus one twentieth of the money on developing a true broadband network that would do wonders for it all around.

And, don’t think private enterprise would be shut out. The City could build the infrastructure and allow any number of innovative companies to delivery the services.

It’s a win / win idea for the City.

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It's the Engineering, Stupid

Reading reporters and journalists who make broad statements that are very misleading, or simply wrong, is such a tiresome exercise.

An article in the Seattle Times, written by a New York Times reporter, was interesting for its subject: the spread of consumer culture and tastes from the very wealthy to the middle class and below. It highlighted both the benefits of a mass market for goods as well as the futileness of ever attempting to live the elusive lifestyle of the rich and famous. But, as these reporters so often do, it went astray when getting a plug in for the ignorant belief that the US is exporting jobs overseas.

One thing is certain. The ever increasing availability of goods at lower prices benefits the middle class of all countries. Some snootily reject this as materialism, and certainly materialism is a central theme, but another is improving people’s lives and experiences. Driving a BMW may not do much more than artificially massage your self esteem, but driving a Honda Accord with its amazing crash test performance (not to mention reliability and frugal gas consumption) helps to save the lives of middle class people.

One of the drivers of a larger marketplace with more affordable goods has been globalization. However, except in a few labor intensive industries, not much of the reduction in costs is attributable to the use of cheap labor, as the New York Times reporter asserts:

The pattern is a familiar one in consumer electronics. What begins as a high-end product — a laptop computer, a DVD player — gradually goes mass market as prices fall and production rises, largely because of the cheap labor costs in developing countries that are making more and more of the goods.

Actually, a multitude of factors combine to reduce the costs of most goods. In fact, electronics, such as the DVD player mentioned above, actually decline in price for factors that have very little to do with labor, unless you are throwing expensive (and middle class income supporting) engineering into the equation.

That DVD player, which used to cost $400 and only hold one DVD at a time, now comes with Divo built in, and a compartment that holds several discs, for less than $200. It plugs into a surround sound home entertainment center that produces amazingly clear sound, yet costs much less than a high end stereo from an exclusive audio shop twenty years ago. Also connected to the stereo wirelessly is a small box with so much storage it can hold the songs from every CD you have, want, or could ever have time to purchase. The memory on that little device is several times what a multimillion dollar mainframe had in 1980, but it costs $150.

How is all of this possible? It has little to do with moving production to countries with cheap labor costs. It has everything to do with the advance of technology driven by engineering talent. It has to do with massive investment in production facilities that obtain economies of scale that drive the cost of awesomely powerful computer chips to zero. It has much to do, as well, with marketing genius that packages technologies most of us can’t even begin to fathom into useful devices for everyday people.

Statements such as this one embedded in articles from prestigious papers are dangerous. They run the risk of causing too many people to believe that the expansion of jobs to people who need them is somehow an evil force and should be a source of guilt for the average middle class American who has a richer life due to the amazing products – unthinkable even 10 years ago – available within his price range.

Red pointed out the movie Seabiscuit that his size was pretty much irrelevant, an after thought even, to a horse weighing more than twelve hundred pounds. It’s the condition and heart of the horse that matters. Labor costs are similar. When a plant costs billions of dollars to build, labor costs are a small part of the equation. More important is the ability of the plant to operate in a manner that maximizes its efficiency.

This is something the state of Washington would do well to remember.

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You Enjoy the Holiday Because of Them

While the silly side of Seattle seems to forget what the people in our military have done for all of us, there are still some of us who remember.

Thanks.

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Banana Land

Now we can see evidence of a classic socialist mentality at work in Washington State. (Not that it was not there already for us all to see).

First, raise the cost of gasoline with large tax hikes. Then, hand out vouchers to people to pay for the gas.

There is no better system for making people more dependent on the state.

Such is life in Banana Land.

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Be Careful What You Ask For ....

Today's Seattle PI has a poignant column about a recent spate of teen suicides in King County. It makes you think, but the reporter, Claudia Rowe, refused to dwell on the most important characteristic three recent suicides in the Seattle area shared - they were all boys. Not surprisingly, neither Vagina Warrior Susan Paynter nor the PI Editorial Board deemed it necessary to point out this simple fact in their related columns today.

In an age when politicians are irresponsible enough to make impossible promises like, "Even one ________ is too many," or, "Zero tolerance," it is easy to loose site of the simple fact that we cannot prevent every tragedy. Some kids, as with some adults, will commit suicide. Some will die in car accidents, some will become paraplegics on the high school football field, and others will get involved in drugs or crime.

I suspect many of our readers have crossed paths with suicide. I did a while ago when the son of a family that lived just behind my own family's home committed suicide in high school. He was five years younger than me, and I had already gone off to college by the time this occurred. I came home for the funeral to find his parents and sister lost in the inexplicable.

He seemed to be a happy kid when I last saw him proudly driving by my parent's house in his red convertible Mustang, waving to me. From everything I heard, he was a popular kid in school and I know his parents maintained a stable and comfortable home for him. There were no answers then and there still are none. Sometimes, these things just happen.

To admit this reality of the human condition is not to give up or become complacent in our efforts to avoid tragedy when possible. It does help set the stage for accepting the inevitable when we are unlucky enough to have it cross our paths.

After all, to completely avoid any sort of tragedy involving our children, we would have to coddle them to such a degree that they would never be able to function in the world outside our homes. And, as most parents of teenagers know, a teenager wants to be spoiled, but not necessarily coddled, so efforts you make in that regard are likely not to succeed anyway. But, this does not excuse us from examining the nature of teen suicide and the environment that might promote it.

In so doing, one has to ask why the rate of teenage male suicide is five times that of teenage female suicide. In fact, the media rarely notes this reality, even though the statistic is as cold, hard, and indisputable as a corpse. This is one of the most pressing mysteries of our time.

Any other statistic of such magnitude would surely receive immense attention. Schools were practically turned upside in the early 1990s when Carol Gilligan said that girls "loose their voice" in high school. She had no scientific evidence to support her claim as she based it on nothing more than anecdotal stories. But, with hundreds of women studies programs in universities around the country preaching the gender feminist doctrine, and vocal women's groups hogging media attention, politicians and school officials jumped on cue. This was a sign, said gender feminists, of the point in women's lives where the dreaded patriarchy begins its oppression of women. In your face "girl power" had thus begun.

Now, schools have effectively squeezed many of the things boys need out of the system. School environments as well as curriculums have been feminized and a war has been raging, according to Christina Hoff-Sommers, on boys for years. As a result, boys have dramatically lower grade point averages than girls, are several times more likely to drop out of school, and are now a minority on college campuses.

And, all the while, they have been committing suicide at astounding rates with nary a peep from politicians, school administrators, or the media. Even the PI's article, which focused on three recent suicides of boys, could do no more than note that boys commit suicide at five times the rate of girls. There was no further reflection on why this disparity exists.

Some might say that the world is a gloomier place than it once was, with terrorist attacks, war in Iraq, and the political divide the media so loves to exaggerate and exploit. But, previous generations have faced similarly gloomy and perhaps more ominous times. The 1970's saw Watergate, economic stagnation, accelerating inflation, OPEC cartels, the depths of the cold war, and a hostage crisis in Iran that the US seemed completely incapable of handling. But, the rate of teen suicide tripled only after that gloomy decade as things improved overall for the country in the 1980s. Both girls and boys are affected equally be the ramifications of these events in their daily lives, so the national or global outlook does not explain why the suicide rate for boys is five times higher than it is for girls.

For its part, the PI chose to focus on the pressures high school kids face to succeed. This pressure may be greater than it once was, but that does not seem likely. There is no evidence of that and, again, this does not explain the disparity on teen suicide rates between boys and girls. The PI also alluded to the possibility of a trend, with guys immitating each other. But the rate has been high for several years now and trends move quickly through American youth.

There is one trend that is hard to deny, however. Boys are growing up in a culture that has institutionalized a strong bias against so many things that are natural, even biologically imperative, for them. Schools have taken the action out of their curriculum, favoring subtle and nuanced feelings that are more the world the feminine. Boys, who need to run, test each other, and form hierarchies as a natural course of development, are instead being told to sit quietly through hours of school work they find boring.

If they cannot calm themselves, they are given Ritalin. Seattle public schools even mandate that many boys be given Ritalin before they can enroll.

The indoctrination of boys with the loathing of gender feminists begins early. Boys are barraged with messages that they are naturally inclined to violence and taught to despise themselves by teachers and school administrators who are all too often steeped in the ideology and bizarre theories of women studies programs. They see commercials on TV with little boys being told that they need to recognize their inner male demon before they grow up to be wife beaters. They attend schools were girls wear t-shirts that say, "Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them." And, increasingly, the structure and discipline provided by fathers is not present. Many of these fathers are driven out of their boy's lives by family courts that see them as nothing more than a source of child support.

All the while, as the world has turned against them and the attacks on everything they find natural are formed around them, they are faced with at least the same academic pressures as generations before. Is this the reason for the flurry of teen boy suicides? One cannot say for certain, but it is worth an honest look.

It is also high time for gender feminists to take a step back and take a good hard look at their own culture and what it has wreaked. Women studies departments are in place around every corner and receive state and federal funds. The infrastructure is there, the tenured professors have the time, and eager young college students are there to listen. Women frozen out of gender feminist discourse because of its intolerance for diverse views are doing their own re-examination of feminism in their own organizations, such as the Independent Women's Forum and iFeminists. Gender feminists should do the same.

You asked for it ladies; you got a room of your own. Perhaps that room should be used more wisely. Or, teenage boys may continue to die.

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Varner Crashes Into Her Divide From Reality

Here we go. Lynne Varner, Seattle Times columnist, goes to see a hopped up Hollywood production about race, thinks it relates to real life, and comes out full of white guilt.

Then, she tries to relate her apparently spiritual experience from the movie to CASA Latina’s decision not to move into the Chubby and Tubby on Rainier. The movie helped her have the revelation that CASA Latina’s own decision was somehow due to the racism of an already extraordinarily racially diverse neighborhood.

Well, you’re wrong Lynne. The upset in the area was not about race. The upset was about the fact that CASA Latina has problems with vagrancy in its current location and members of the community around the old Chubby and Tubby on Rainier did not want that exported from upscale Belltown to their own neighborhood, which is struggling to get back on its feet after years of being dumped on by the city.

Concern for vagrancy and concern about race are two different things. The people – who are from all sorts of ethnic backgrounds – in Rainier Valley and surrounding neighborhoods are able to keep those two issues straight, even if two-bit columnists easily overwhelmed by a slick Hollywood production are not.

One has to wonder, though, does Lynne Varner just happen to live in or near Belltown? Maybe what she is experiencing is her own racial divide.

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Grieving Father Crucified by Media

Does anyone else think that it is unusual that now, whenever children disappear, the media immediately either condemns the father or sees the need to announce to us all that he is released of suspicion? This is despite the fact that most cases that hit the media result in the man's name being cleared.

Steve Groene is a simple man distraught over the disappearance of his children. He is a divorced man who, wanting to spend more time with his children, got into an argument with his ex-wife because he wanted them to stay with him an extra night or two.

No one questions the role the ex-wife played in the argument, even though police say she was involved in using drugs. Without the argument, as the father, Groene would be immediately suspect because of the myth that father’s are somehow homicidal maniacs that are just waiting for an opportunity or excuse to harm their children. Add the argument with the ex-wife – the media would never criticize a woman for wanted to spend more time with her children and arguing to that effect, but jump on the father – and Wolfinger is crucified in the media.

This is the result of the pervasive anti-male, anti-father attitude that has crept up in our culture over the past two decades. Somehow, the scholarly research that demonstrates clearly that fathers are less likely to abuse their children than mothers is lost in the hysteria. Peace loving vegetarian mothers in Washington even take their children out into the woods and shoot them.

It harks back to John Mason, of run-away bride fame, who said that, "Statistically, I'm guilty." No, John Mason, statistically you are not guilty. Statistically, you are a hero. Statistically, men and fathers work hard to provide for their families and are willing to lay their life on the line to protect them.

Meanwhile, a poor and suffering innocent man grieving and panicking over the disappearance of his children also must deal with a media and public that has been trained to reflexively point the finger at him.

No wonder so few men in King County want to take the risk of marriage and family.

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Hysteria Nation

It’s sad that our country, which considers itself to be on the cutting edge, is so prone to hysteria. Sometimes the hysteria finds its own path through a bureaucracy that is genuinely concerned about the welfare of those under its charge. Other times, the hysteria is drummed up by people hoping to push a radical ideology and the politicians and media aligned with them.

The latter has been on display for the past decade. The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and its biggest pusher, Hillary Rodham, are the result of mythical statistics made up by gender feminists that have hijacked what started as a legitimate concern for people being abused. The gender feminists goal, of course, is to wage war on this fictional beast called "the patriarchy" while working towards a socialistic vision of government involvement in many more aspects of our lives. Some women's groups that still believe in scholarship have been battling this hijacking of a noble cause for a while. It has taken men and father’s groups far too long to organize against this cancer in our society, but that day has finally arrived.

The former example of hysteria has been on display since Columbine. This is an understable hysteria because the people propagating it really are concerned about protecting kids. But, it has gone more than a little too far, with kids being thrown in jail and charged with felonies because of bad judgment in the use of their big mouths.

A recent case in Virginia highlights this. A girl and a boy teenager are now sitting in jail after drawing stick pictures holding knives and making rather imprudent comments that they would “Columbine” some other students they did not like. These two kids are probably somewhat disturbed, like many teenagers are as new and powerful hormones course through their bodies.

Before Columbine, teachers and administrators probably would have completely ignored such a comment, chalking it up to “kids being kids.” As we learned from Columbine, that is not a good idea. If a teenager is showing signs of emotional or psychological problems, she should be helped.

Unfortunately, we haven’t reached that point of rationality. We are still in a period of over-reaction, when children are thrown into jail at the slightest suggestion of violence. While ignoring the signs is a bad idea, going overboard is also a bad idea. And, it's even worse that we still have not recognized the importance of fathers in the lives of troubled children.

But, it seems we never seem to get it about the true nature of hysteria even though we have multiple examples from which to learn.

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Is this "The Patriarchy"?

Reading the nonsense that comes out of the UW Women Studies department, you’d think that all men are part of a conspiratorial network that operates with the sole objective of oppressing women. Of course, this is utter nonsense. Such a paranoid perspective on the world should receive medical treatment, not state funds wasted on a bizarre curriculum.

There are, however, responsibilities that most boys are taught that they have. One of them is to help others in need. This ethic is taught so strongly to boys of almost all cultures that when they grow to be men, they often risk their own life without thought to help another. We all saw that when the firemen of the NYFD charged into the World Trade Center to rescue people and ultimately were crushed by the collapsing buildings.

Those NYFD men were trained to do that. More recently, some local Seattle heroes without specific training relied on their male instincts to dive into Lake Union to save a man attempting to commit suicide by driving his car into the lake.

Jim Barrett, Jan Bultman, Chris Cavanagh, John Dunato, Jim Dunn, Roger Hinton, Aaron Loehr, Shawn McCain, and Matt Williams, an ad hoc rescue team that did not know each other before, all formed a highly efficient group that risked their own lives in frigid water to save the man. Serious scholarly research shows us that forming teams to solve problems and accomplish goals is a natural skill that boys seem to be born with.

Even “patriarchy” hating Susan Paynter of the Seattle PI hailed the bravery of these men. Of course, she was careful not to mention that men do this all the time. The Seattle Police Department, known for implementing anti-patriarchy laws such as VAWA with gusto, even gave these men certificates of appreciation. Yes, it is hypocrisy for SPD to do that, but it shows that all hope is not lost among our city’s politically correct departments.

The “patriarchy” is not a conspiracy of men to oppress women as contemporary gender feminists would have you believe. If one can say that such a nebulas thing even exists, at the most, you can say that it is a set of responsibilities and a code of conduct that sends heroes like these into precarious waters to save another human.

Do you think you will see anything about that in the cynical and vituperative whining that comes out of such places as the UW Women Studies department or the Eastside Domestic Violence Program?

It will be a sad day when men finally decide, after years of government institutionalized attacks on their most basic rights, that it’s just not worth it to do what comes most natural.

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The Vagina Warrior Chronicles - Update

Eve Ensler, famous for her eulogy to lesbianism called The Vagina Monologues, has called the women who come to commiserate at these performances Vagina Warriors. In a previous column, Silly Seattle highlighted some other Vagina Warriors that seem to be exercising a war on the sexuality of teenage members of the patriarchy.

Well, it’s time to update Silly Seattle’s Vagina Warrior Chronicles. As you might remember, Silly Seattle’s Vagina Warriors 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
Debra Lafave, of Tampa, Florida, 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 a 13 year old boy

The shining example of a double standard in our culture is Mary Kay Letourneau. She courted the victim of her irrepressible pedophilia beginning when he was only 12, and began having sex with him when he was only 13. It didn’t take long before she started having his children, which occurred well before he had the emotional maturity to make such a decision, and obviously before he had the resources to raise them. But, nevermind all that, because Mary Kay made the decision for him.

So, what does she get for her psychotic control over a little boy? Ultimately a million dollar contract from Entertainment Tonight to film the wedding this past weekend. Yes, that’s right, Letourneau now has complete control over her victim as she now is legally married him. According to the DV Divas of the Eastside Domestic Violence Program, control is the locus of abuse. But, you don't hear them chiming in about Letourneau, presumably because their real agenda is going to battle against "the patriarchy," and boys marrying women twice their age fits right in with their objectives.

Rebecca Boicelli is not far behind, having already given birth to the infant son of her rape victim. That poor baby spent the first 6 months of its life in custody in the county jail. I guess that in Redwood City they begin their war on the patriarchy early, jailing males fresh out of the womb. While the police and prosecutors in Redwood City seem to be trying to at least partially hold Boicelli accountable, her lawyer is claiming that she raped her victim outside the county and therefore is asking to have the case dismissed. Rebecca doesn’t have much to worry about even if the case is not dismissed, because the prosecutor has already promised her less than three years in jail if she agrees to plead guilty.

Pamela Turner’s trial is scheduled for November. Her husband has finalized his divorce from her and is leaving his coaching position at the high school where Pamela also found her boy toy. No word yet on whether Pamela is fighting for custody of their two children. Even though she is in jail, with the anti-father climate in the US, one shouldn’t be surprised if she claims she sought out her boy companion because her husband “abused” her in some way.

Not to be outdone, the lesbian member of the Vagina Warrior team, Elizabeth Miklosovic, of Grand Rapids, Michigan, plead no contest at the beginning of her trial on May 3rd. I guess that even for a woman, it gets a little hard to prove yourself innocent when you take your 14 year old girl victim out into the woods and perform a pagan marriage to her. Is that weird, or what?! It will be interesting to see what her sentence is on June 6 – I’m putting my money on less than 2 years, with the possibility of parole in 6 months. The question is, will the judge dissolve the "marriage."

Blonde hottie Deb Lafave was in court in Tampa on May 18, where her attorney said the child rapist is trying to reach a plea agreement with prosecutors. In the meantime, this rapist of a 14 year old boy is sticking to her insanity defense. The maximum sentence Lafave could receive in Florida is 15 years, which surely a man in similar circumstances would get, but we’d be surprised if she got 15 months.

Kathy White of Lumberton, Texas, is still awaiting trial. She has denied the allegations, but the bo’ she bagged says, "Going into her bedroom, I'll be honest, I did think that [I was lucky].” But, he also said, “Coming out of her room, however, was a different story. If I could turn back the hands of time, everybody'd be happy," he said. "It wasn't worth it. I wasn't lucky."

Finally, Harriet Laquette Gordon of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, seems to have dropped off the radar screen. But, heck, her victim was a 13 year old boy that lives in a state operated facility in Southern Alabama. This kid doesn't have parents to make his case for him; instead, he has the state, which is more interested in protecting itself. Not much news makes it out of Alabama, anyway.

So, while justice runs its course to the slap on the wrist most of these rapist women will receive, the mainstream media has been busy finding excuses for them.

Stephen Thompson, sexual aggression services coordinator at Central Michigan University, came up with this beaut:

"[Women] truly believe they've got a relationship being established with that one person. They understand that it's not right, but they can justify it because they are saying they're giving the gift of love."

Then, Janet I. Warren of the University of Virginia showed her support for the Vagina Warriors with some twisted logic. First, she says there is no research on female teachers who have inappropriate relations with male students. Most information, she says, is based on individual case studies and court cases.

"You don't usually have women who are sexually attracted to children," she said.

But, if there is no research, how do you know how often it occurs, Professor Warren? The fact is, you don’t know that.

A U.S. Department of Education report released last year showed that 40 percent of students report some form of sexual misconduct from a female teacher, including about 7 percent reporting unwanted physical contact.

Why is it that society should care about this? While we have spent more than a decade obsessing over a completely imagined problem of girls "losing their voice" in high school, boys have been languishing in the educational landscape. They already are coming out of adolescence two steps behind. Meanwhile, federal "Deadbeat Dad" laws, states, and family courts viciously enforce child support regardless of a father's ability to pay. It is completely unfair to allow adult women in a position of authority to sexually lure innocent boys into impregnating them. These boys do not have the capacity to understand the implications of the lifelong commitment they are being tricked into making.

Wait, uh, maybe the University of Washington Women Studies department can help us understand something. We thought it was the “patriarchy” exerting oppressive control over women that resulted in sexual abuse. So, how do you explain this amount of sexual misconduct by grown women over mere children?

Until Women Studies departments and gender feminist victim cults begin examining the downside of female behavoir, they should not be taken seriously by mainstream society and certianly should not have input on government policies.

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Fraud Methodology

One has to wonder how much longer this farce of an election can continue to be held up. I mean, the Letourneau marriage to the victim of her pedophilia has been surreal enough, but this election debacle, with Logan’s ridiculous excuses, just takes the cake. It seems silly that it even needs to go to trial.

Gregoire, Governor by Fraud, has taken it upon herself to burden the state with the highest gas taxes in the entire country. The legislature also gleefully passed a whole host of ugly legislation that reduces the rights of citizens while chasing out the businesses that employ them.

All of this has occurred in the span of time between Election Day in November and today. Washington State is cursed with holier-than-thou politicians who are on a mission. Politicians on a mission are the worst type. It would seem that they felt that the game they have enjoyed for so many years might come to an end, so they crammed through everything they always wanted but were afraid to do for fear of voter reprisal.

Let’s hope it was their swan song. The evidence of election fraud in King County has become so obvious that even some Democrats are stunned. The latest, of course, is that two officials in King County elections falsified their absentee ballot report by not reconciling the number of ballots returned by voters with the number counted. Instead, thet simply added the total of accepted ballots with the total of rejected ballots from the count and called THAT the total number of absentee ballots received.

Why was this important? The reconciliation was required prior to certification of the election. Thus, the election was certified based on, among other things, a deliberately false report. But, ever on the prowl for arguments to support Gregoire, the Seattle Times focuses today on the felon count instead of the obviously falsified election in King County.

Swan song or not, the tune being played by King County elections is becoming very tiresome, not to mention a little out of tune. The culprits in this latest revelation, Mr. Fell and Ms Way, said that King Count Elections Superintendent Bill Huennekens was in on the act. And the best comment that Dean Logan, KC Elections Director could come up with? The threesome used, “flawed methodology.”

“Flawed methodology.” A little less curl of the tongue and you get fraud methodology. I'm waiting for the fruedian slip by Logan. Such polite terminology is of the sort one says about colleagues when one is in on the act. Criticize them too harshly and they might just implicate you.

Knowingly falsifying a report is not “flawed methodology.” It constitutes an effort to obstruct and deceive. There’s little doubt it goes up the line to Logan, given the way he always chooses his words so carefully. He never finds anything until Stefan Sharkansky of Sount Politics uncovers it in the numbers and forces Logan's hand.

It's obvious all of the people involved so far are Democratic Party hacks, who were stacked up in the King County elections office by the Democratic machine politick. But, this probably goes up to good-house-trained Sims, and perhaps even Gregoire herself.

These two could not be any more obvious about how deliberate they are in avoiding the topic. That’s what guilty politicians tend to do.

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Connelly Hits Right Note, But Not Whole Song

Joel Connelly, the cantankerous, Democratic Party machine loving journalist of the Seattle PI, wrote the first article I am aware of by him that actually touches on a real issue that we should all be concerned about.

Connelly laments the fact that there seems to be little or no interest in helping and protecting the middle class in and around Seattle. He poignantly describes the changes Seattle has gone through in his life, from a decidedly middle class and family oriented city focused on its people, to one obsessed with grandiosity and a decided antipathy towards its own backbone. He describes both good changes, such as keeping the place clean, and not so good changes, including stratification into rich and poor with a middle that is disappearing.

Connelly was dead-on about some of the reasons for this. He notes:

The middle-class, working-family aspect set Seattle apart from the decaying, used-up cities the East and Midwest.

Nowadays, we seem headed in that direction.

The median-priced home in King County sells for $355,000. My weekday Seattle neighborhood, a working-class enclave 30 years ago, is now largely unaffordable for newly arrived co-workers.

Only 15.6 percent of Seattle's population is under the age of 18, compared with 25.7 percent nationwide. We rank second lowest in the country, behind only San Francisco.

Those are the symptoms that have been screaming out for someone to take seriously for years. Unfortunately, Connelly only barely touched on some of the deeper causes, presumably because it would require too much honesty about the entrenched Democrats he so favors.

In fact, it would seem that our “leaders” actually are modeling their vision for Seattle after those “decaying, used-up cities” of the East and Midwest. Already, Seattle is well into stratification. It’s heavy burden of social services and obsession with only low income housing discourages the poor from working and improving their own neighborhoods. Meanwhile, the county is actually attracting more homeless people with idealistic and impossible to achieve programs like “ending homelessness in 10 years.” There is no help in that mix for the middle class, who see high property taxes and outrageous auto registration fees. Combine these facts with extremely bad public schools, and middle class families are being chased out of the area as fast as King County elections can come up those magical mystery ballots.

What Connelly can’t see, won’t admit, or otherwise is afraid to touch, is that the Democratic machine he supports is the cause of these problems. Mega-projects, high taxes, union support that makes government, schools, and business inefficient, fancy new libraries, election fraud, idealistic instead of pragmatic environmentalism – these are the underlying cancers that are ruining the city Connelly once knew.

City and county government is caught up in wild-eyed idealism, which is buttressed by a state legislature that is completely disconnected from Washington families. All of these levels of government have a loathing for the middle class, and seem intent on attacking the them and their values, while they are sycophantic in their pandering to the wealthiest Seattleites and relieve their guilt by handing out “Hip Hop Awards” to kids that would be better served if they received rewards for academic accomplishment.

You can see this in Sims and his CAO, which, for all intents and purposes, takes land from rural property owners who are not among the counties elite. Then, take a look at the “Urban Village” fantasy of Mayor Nickels. Already, 2 out of 5 households in Seattle have a single occupant, the highest rate in the nation. Forget about having roommates, or inviting your girlfriend to live with you in order to save on expenses, because the state’s Supreme Court has declared cohabitation to be under the rule of community property laws. As a notoriously stand-off-ish population, forcing Seattleites into pre-planned “urban villages” is like herding cats. Who is Nickels fooling?

Both of these politically correct politicians encourage angry radical gender feminists to get into government, who then go on the attack in their war on the so-called “patriarchy,” while propagating myths about men and fathers in order to stir up hysteria and destroy traditional family structure. The only solution these people have to offer to an exaggerated problem is to encourage the dissolution of as many marriages as possible. To top it off, the state legislature decided that the only solution to the “patriarchal institution of marriage” is to tax it and fund “advocates” with a disdain for traditional family structure. What man wants to start a family in such an environment? Clearly not many, as the statistic that 46% percent of men in their 30s in King County have never been married clearly shows.

There is constant lecturing about the value of diversity and multi-culturalism, without ever providing an objective for these “values.” Diversity training is a growth business in Seattle like in no other place. In the end, this alienates people who wonder why they are constantly being lectured about these things even though, as anybody can see, the city is multi-ethnic and, really, everybody gets along just fine without encouragement from holier-than-thou politicians. It usually ends up seeming that Democrats are trying to take credit for something that was already there, as if they attribute the blue sky to their own “10 year plan for blue sky.”

It is the very existence and brutal running of the Democratic machine that causes the problems Connelly describes. This machine treats any opinion other than the status quo as anathema. In a city in which the worse thing any politician can be called is “divisive,” the level of debate is no better than that heard in a group of 3rd graders deciding which video game to play.

The solution cannot be found in another government program. The solution is not in the doing, but in the not doing. There needs to be a place not just for far left Democrats, but true diversity of opinion and thought that welcomes those that hold different views. Government needs to spend less effort trying to multi-cultural-ize the few children left in Seattle. Don’t just spend less effort and money on social engineering, but get out of the business entirely. Seattle and King County government should focus on the basics: good schools that focus on learning, not propaganda; roads that are drivable and have capacity for the population; a single mass transportation system that is cost effective and benefits from state and federal assistance; safe and family friendly neighborhoods.

Thankfully, recognition of a problem is the first step in solving it. So, we give credit to Connelly for at least seeing the symptoms. He was right, as well, to point out some of the things that our beautiful city has done right.

Now, he would do well, and he would help his city, if he admitted to himself and everyone else that the political machine that has for too long run his beloved city is also what’s driving it into the ground. Then, we can get about the work of eradicating and surviving the intolerance for debate and abhorrence for diversity of views that characterizes the current political establishment. In other words, get about curing the cancer that would destroy us.

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Fraud, Fraud, Fraud

Women politicians with a strong ideological bent towards gender feminism, especially those in Washington State, often suggest that women make “different” kinds of leaders.

Well, if anything, the corruption in King County elections demonstrates this is not the case. Gregoire and her merry band of magical mystery ballot stuffers were more than happy to participate in fraud for the sole purpose of gaining power and pushing their agenda. Nicole Way, an absentee ballot supervisor in the King County Elections Department, admitted in her deposition that she worked hand in hand with her manager to falsify the ballot count.

Anyone that knows anything about how organizations work will have to admit that this was done to make people happy up the line. The fraud spans from Way, through Logan, then to Sims, and up to Gregoire. Our Governor-through-fraud must have made it clear to all one way or another that there would be rewards for massaging the vote to her benefit. That's just how the machine works.

Now, you may agree or disagree with the political agendas of Gregoire, Murray, and Cantwell, and whichever way you lean with regard to their policies is perfectly legitimate. But, if you support them, please cease with the nonsense that they are in any way different than male politicians. Corruption knows no gender boundaries, as we can all now see.

Thank God that Stefan Sharkansky of Sound Politics has been showing us the fact that the numbers did not add for months, long before anyone was forced to admit it under oath in a courthouse.

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Judicial Invention - Diluting the Meaning of Marriage

Have you ever heard of a concept called “meretricious relationship”?

Well, don’t look it up in the dictionary, because you are likely to find a definition for “meretricious” like this:

1. Of or pertaining to prostitutes; having to do with prostitutes.
2. Alluring by vulgar or flashy display; gaudily and deceitfully ornamental; tawdry; as, "meretricious dress."
3. Based on pretense or insincerity; as, "a meretricious argument."

Strangely enough (but perhaps not surprisingly, given the institution we are talking about), a couple of decades ago the Washington State Supreme Court used the word “meretricious” to define an entirely new type of relationship over which the state can exert its power.

For historical reasons, Washington State does not have common law marriage. Common law marriage generally refers to the legal status of a couple (heterosexual presumably, unless you live in San Francisco) that has co-habited for an extended period (not necessarily seven years, as conventional wisdom would have it) and has presented themselves to their community as “married” even though they are not officially and legally married. The historical roots of common law marriage go back several centuries in England, when it wasn’t always possible for a couple to have access to an official ordained with the power to declare them married. In that age, before modern transportation, it was a practical solution to a straightforward problem.

Today, in the US, the vast majority of states do not recognize common law marriage. In most states, such a concept, whether it is called “common law marriage” or “meretricious relationship” cannot exist without an explicitly passed law by the state’s legislature. However, two state judicial systems, in fits of judicial activism, decided to create a concept entirely on their own. Unfortunately, Washington is one of those states (Oregon is the other). Yes, the courts have created an intractable problem for a practical solution in our modern world.

It is often tempting for couples to live together before marriage, or even if they never intend to get married. Eventually, most people find that having roommates is untenable or downright disruptive – most of us have our roommate nightmare stories, many more than one. But, because the cost of living in cities such as Seattle is so exorbitant, many unmarried people in their twenties, thirties, or even older, find that cohabiting with a girlfriend or a boyfriend is a pragmatic solution to a cost-of-living problem.

Think twice before you do it, though, because cohabition is exactly what meretricious is designed to cover. If you are in a relationship that a court finds to be “meretricious,” you may find yourself being subjected to community property laws created for the legal divorce of legal marriages. So, after cohabiting with a girlfriend or boyfriend, and accumulating some assets you consider your own, and later breaking up, you are one court filing away from having your former significant other taking you before a judge to get half of what you have worked hard to save.

Ironically, under the nebulous definition of “meretricious relationship” that has come out of Washington State’s Supreme Court, many divorce lawyers contend that you increase your chances of having your period of co-habitation deemed meretricious of you eventually get married to your live-in. If you eventually get divorced, you are likely to end up in a divorce court squabbling not only over assets acquired during marriage, but over those acquired prior to marriage as well.

Of course, this does not follow logically. If a couple gets married, they clearly are making a deliberate change from a non-married relationship to a married relationship. A bright line would seem to exist between “before” and “after” marriage. After all, if a couple does not deem there to be a difference between co-habiting while unmarried, and doing so after being legally marriage, why would they bother to get married? A statement is made by the very act of marriage that makes it natural to assume that, well, you weren’t married before you got married!

But, don’t try to find the logic in this. We are talking about the State of Washington, after all, where feelings take precedence over logic. This can be a huge mess for everyone involved, of course, except the divorce industry. Divorce lawyers routinely encourage claims of meretricious relationships in order to drive up the fees they get from the ensuing legal fight.

This problem has entirely resulted from the sloppy judicial activism of Washington State’s Supreme Court. Whether there should or should not be such a concept is beside the point. The problem is that cohabiting people do not have a clear law that came out of the legislature on which they can make decisions. Most people are hit by surprise with claims of a “meretricious relationship.” This is because most people do not read the obscure case law that comes out of a state’s Supreme Court. And, even if you do, the case law on the matter is limited because, after being depleted of financial resources by a contentious divorce case, so few people can afford to appeal a divorce court’s decision. What case law exists is all over the place (such as this compared to this).

So, what’s the solution? If you want to live with her, you could put together a “co-habitation agreement,” but their relevance in a family court, should you find yourself there, is not clear. The best solution is simply to bear the expense on your own and not live with her, even if that means you, or both of you, must live in a shack(s). If you are a guy, when you add the risk of landing in a divorce court after your break-up (even though you were never married!), to the risk of a false accusation of domestic violence (which happens more than you probably think), you are playing Russian roulette with your economic as well as physical liberty.

One final thought: With the nebulas status of “meretricious relationship,” could you imagine the havoc that would be wreaked if gay marriage were allowed in the state? You would then have to worry about the possibility of every same-sex roommate you ever had hauling you into court, claiming a sexual and “meretricious relationship,” and subjecting you to community property laws! I have never heard this nightmarish scenario mentioned in the debate over same sex marriages, but this would likely be the most egregious result. And, the Washington State Supreme Court is heading in just that direction.

Thus, from a practical standpoint, the concept of “meretricious relationship” should be eliminated by the courts. If not by the courts, then by the legislature. In the meantime, tone down the romance, drop her off at her place, and sleep in your own bed.

Ah, Seattle is such a lonely place for so many singles.

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"Back off"

The results are in. Our readers are decisively against the state’s cynical plow to tax marriage and divorce in order to fund pathological feminist ideology.

It was no surprise that the Washington legislature passed HB1314. This bill started it’s life as a tax on marriage to fund domestic violence “advocates.” Fearful that people of the state would see through our legislators’ disdain for marriage as a “patriarchal” institution, clever legislators decided to shift the tax from marriage to divorce.

But, money is fungible, and the fees on marriage remain. So, all the funds collected by the state to license marriage – as if it has any business being involved at all – as well as “allow” a divorce, will now provide close to $1 million per year to Women Studies graduates with a bone to pick about the phantom patriarchy. A more family supportive legislature might have used funds to support marriage, such as providing free or subsidized marriage counseling to people who cannot afford it on their own. Unfortunately, our legislature has chosen to continue its assault on one of the most natural acts of the human species.

91% of the readers of Silly Seattle believe that the state should “back off.” When people are presented with the reality of what the state is up to, this is the conclusion they generally reach. We can only hope the angry advocates have a back up career plan that puts them into a productive, as opposed to destructive, role in the state’s economy.

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Beware False Prophets

Woa! If you care about the rights of men and fathers, this has been one helluva week.

Two bastions of pathological contemporary feminist thought, the New York Times and National Public Radio (NPR), are covering father’s rights in divorce? That would have been unthinkable even a year ago. But, after a lot of hard work by people such as Glenn Sacks, and organizations including the Children’s Rights Council, and the National Coalition of Free Men, and the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, all in the US, and the blockbuster success of Fathers 4 Justice in the UK, it seems that the systematic injustice against men, fathers, and boys is now impossible to ignore.

The New York Times kicked off the week with a long article in its Sunday magazine about the father’s movement in both the US and the UK (this article is already archived and costs $2.95 on the NYT web site). The reporter, Susan Dominus, struggled at points in the article with some of the deeper Constitutional issues involved, but overall gave a surprisingly honest and fair portrayal of the desperate circumstances in which divorced fathers find themselves. NPR then interviewed Dominus, and while the NPR host gave us her obligatory victim obsessed feminist lines when she had a chance, Dominus handled the interview as well as she did her article.

Then, after reading the Times article and listening to the NPR interview, I fell out of my chair upon hearing Glenn Sacks on Air America. He was interviewed by Charles Goyette and, as usual, did a good job of representing the plight of men and fathers in a system that has become completely hostile to them. Listen to that interview here.

Turning to Seattle, the most misandrist city in the nation, Thursday’s Seattle Times featured an article by Joni Balter, who most recently has been doing free public relations work for Senator Maria Cantwell in cooperation with her employer, The Seattle Times. Balter expressed concern about boys in our feminized education system.

Of course, in the process, Balter couldn’t resist getting her digs in at little boys with lines like, “It is true some girls still are reluctant to raise their hands and talk in a classroom filled with antsy, aggressive boys.” This one harks back to Carol Gilligan’s ridiculous early-90s claim that girls “loose their voice” in high school, which of course had no supportable basis and was laughed at by most serious scholars. But, that claim, and its embrace by the media, emboldened gender feminists to put their anti-boy agenda into overdrive in our public school system. We are seeing the sad results today. Boys do worse in school than girls, have drop out rates several times that of girls, and commit teen suicide at a rate that is several multiples that of girls.

While we are at it, let’s not leave out Friday’s article in the Seattle PI about men “finally speaking out” about prostate cancer. Actually, men have been talking, but you can not hear them over the cacophony. It is, you see, hard to get a word in edgewise when angry gender feminists scream at the top of their lungs for more spending on women specific illness, even though the National Institute of Health spends much more of it’s budget on illnesses only suffered by women than it does on male-only disease. Breast cancer research at the National Institute of Health, for example, has long received twice the research funding spent on prostate cancer. Meanwhile, colon cancer, a disease that affects men and women in equal proportions, receives only half the research money spent on breast cancer. In fact, cervical cancer receives the highest research spending per death for all types of cancer. But, I guess we can all feel heartened that the Seattle PI has discovered that survivors of prostate cancer are finding their voices. Thanks to Gilligan, we know the dire consequences of loosing one's voice.

These media outlets seem to be belatedly jumping on the bandwagon now, as if they are the first to realize that there is a crisis among men, fathers, and boys. But, beware of false prophets on this topic.

Balter, for example, made no mention of Christina Hoff Sommers’ book, The War Against Boys, that was published five years ago and exposed the terrible consequences for boys in a feminized learning environment full of loathing for them. It’s impossible to take a journalist seriously that would not be caught dead ever having uttered Sommers’ name (who also wrote Who Stole Feminism), yet claims to have personally discovered the plight of boys. At any rate, having Joni Balter cheer for boys is like having Saddam Hussein cheer for democracy, Edward Kennedy cheer for the military, or Christine Gregoire cheer for clean and accurate elections in King County.

And, one has to wonder what prompted the New York Times to publish its piece. Perhaps they have seen the commotion created in the UK by Fathers 4 Justice and thought they could stir up some good stories for the dog days of summer. More likely, though, a member of the editorial staff of the Times found he was stripped of rights he took for granted in a family court system completely stacked against him. Eventually, after all, these things do tend to come full circle.

Don’t trust NPR either to provide a balanced perspective on our country’s hostility towards men and fathers. The host of NPR described the father’s movement as “a small number of angry men,” even though Dominus suggested in her article that she could not turn a corner without bumping into a divorced father who had been pummeled by false accusations and was left desperate for access to his children. The numbers are not small and the people involved are increasingly organized.

Worst of all, none of these newly minted sympathizers made mention of the pinnacle of pathological feminist policymaking - the Violence against Women Act (VAWA). As we described here before, VAWA is based on the patriarchy model dreamed up in Women Studies, which is the cornerstone of gender feminist ideology. In this quackery “theory,” all of the ills of women are the result of the control exerted over them by a patriarchal social club of privilege all boys are supposedly born into. And, since this model says that all males can be summarily described as existing on a continuum of violence, violence against women bleeds out of patriarchal control. The way to solve this problem, according to victim obsessed organizations that use a silly thing called the Duluth Model, such as the Eastside Domestic Violence Program, is to harshly condition the patriarchy out of the male species. What better place to start than with little boys in the public school system?

No, those of us in the Men and Father’s Movement know who our leaders are and we won’t find them among journalists at the New York Times, the Seattle Times, the Seattle PI, NPR, or Air America. We won’t find them among Democrats hoping to co-opt a cause which exists primarily because of their hostile policy making. And, we won’t find them among Republicans and elected officials such as Dave Reichert, Washington State Representative from District 8, who leveraged the hysteria of domestic violence to get elected. After all, none of these opportunists are calling for reform of VAWA, the most devastatingly destructive government policy in the history of this country. In reality, what the two major parties have to worry about is which one will ultimately get blamed for the huge mess they have jointly made.

The Men and Father’s Movement voting block is forming and it is still up for grabs. The true leaders in this area, such as Christina Hoff Sommers, Glen Sacks, and the women of both iFeminists.com and the Independent Women’s Forum are the people we will look to for leadership and guidance.

But, what is going on here? Is Hillary Rodham trying to cover her tracks, which lead back to the most anti-male, anti-father, anti-marriage legislation in history while Bubba was under her direction? Perhaps she is directing her legions, which obviously include most of the Seattle media, to put up a head fake towards men’s and father’s issues. Or, maybe the media is getting its obligatory comments about men’s issues out of the way before its campaign for reauthorization of VAWA in September of this year.

I expect many of the paparazzi of contemporary victim culture are alarmed that men have finally figured out what was done to them while they were away at the office working to support their families. Perhaps they see their social engineering house of cards about to come crumbling down.

I don’t give them that much credit, though. While Dominus seemed genuinely moved by what she learned when researching her article, most of the rest of the recently bogusly enlightened chattering class take a patronizing tone towards these issues. They would like to approach men as victims in order to get that one last shot in at the male ego they so despise.

This explains Balter’s urgent waffling back and forth between the virtues of “girl power,” and what she, in a fit of political correctness, called her “generalizations” (for which she asked forgiveness), about the plight of boys. She wraps it up with, “Of course, empowering girls is a good thing. But now we also have to find the time and energy to push, encourage and cheer for the boys.”

The thought of people like Balter dedicating energy to boys is frightening, to say the least. So, no, Ms. Balter, stay out of the picture. What boys need is for you and your victim cult sisterhood to stop putting time and energy into trying to feminize them.

If you and the WEA get out of the kid’s faces with your male loathing, they will do just fine.

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Visiting from MensNewsDaily.com?

Thanks for stopping by. Since we are all avid readers of MenNewsDaily.com, and we are probably interested in some of the same issues, we here at Silly Seattle thought we should highlight some of our past articles on Men's and Father's rights.

Yes, we cover Seattle and Washington State primarily. But, if you care about Men's and Father's issues and rights, you should keep an eye on Seattle and Washington State because, as Glenn Sacks says, Seattle is the most anti-male city in the most anti-male state in the country. From courts that routinely remove fathers from the lives of their children based on false accusations, to a state legislature that uses junk science straight out of Women Studies departments to impose a Napoleonic legal system on men, you can find the worst of misandry in its most concentrated form right here in the upper left corner of our country. Are your city and state heading in this direction?

First, our favorites:

May 02 - John Mason, MSI Victim
March 05 - The Violence of VAWA
March 01 - Shackles for Every Man
February 23 - VAWA Say Nada
February 18 - Calling on the Police
February 13 - Alpha Vagina?
February 13 - Vagina Predators
February 12 - Vagina Warriors
February 02 - Ready for V-Day, Guys?
January 27 - Blaming Brame

And, now, all the rest:

May 11 - Liberals for Men?
May 07 - Wrestling the Irrational
May 04 - Clint Made My Day
May 02 - John Mason, MSI Victim
April 30 - Surreal Seattle
March 29 - Wonder Where that Tax Levy for Schools Went?
March 28 - Be Scared If You Hate the "Patriarchy"
March 28 - Screwed Up Priorities
March 17 - Mother's Little Helper
March 05 - Equity vs. Gender Feminism
February 14 - A Liberal for Fathers?
February 12 - Selling Victimhood
February 6 - Senator Jim Kastama is Brave
January 31 - What's a Gal to Do?
January 28 - The Politics of Psuedo-Science
January 26 - Update: Coan
January 25 - Coan, A Con or a Victim?

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Who's Your Daddy?

Paternity fraud is finally making the news, at least in Los Angeles.

The American Association of Blood Banks reported that of 280,000 paternity tests conducted in 1999, 28% showed the man tested was not the father of his presumed child. Worse, in many states, a woman can pick a man at random out of the phonebook and put his name on her child’s birth certificate. If the man does not somehow gain extra sensory perception and does not quickly realize what has been done to him (he has 6 months in California), he can be ordered to pay child support of more than half of his income by a family court.

In many, if not most cases, once the poor guy finds out what has happened to him, he can’t even get out of the court enforced child support with DNA evidence. Not that getting that evidence is easy, because all the woman has to do is apply for a permanent restraining order against the man she is perpetrating fraud against, and he will find himself in jail if he goes anywhere near the child (who is supposedly his) in order collect a hair sample. Getting a court to order such a test usually involves many thousands of dollars in court fees.

Taron James, of Los Angeles, was hit with a default paternity judgment for a child that was not his. He proved that he was not the father with DNA evidence, but only after Taron James was forced to make child support payments for over a decade. Amazingly, even though it ruled that James was not the biological father of the child, the court would not reverse the child support judgment against James!

The court’s excuse? If they reversed the child support judgment, many women who have fraudulently extorted child support money from hapless men would loose their child support payments. Yes, you read that right – the courts of California are promoting and protecting fraud and extortion. Watch the news report here.

Watch for this to become an issue in Washington State, the country’s leader in single mothers. Men in Washington have learned that marriage and family are sure fire ways to loose their most basic constitutional rights. In King County, for example, 46% of men in their 30’s have never been married. So, women in King County that want children often have to resort to getting pregnant without the consent of the men they are sleeping with.

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My Universe or Yours?

Perhaps time travel is not possible after all.

A professor at MIT named Sendhil Mullainathan organized a Time Traveler Convention that occurred on May 7, 2005. Mullainatha is apparently a genius, but his plan for the convention was not all that smart.

The convention came and went, without confirmed evidence that any time travelers attended. Why did it fail in its expressed purpose (although it was a fun party, nonetheless)? Maybe time travel simply is not possible in this universe. Perhaps the open invitation, which even made its way into the Economist magazine, did not make it all the way into the distant future in which time travel is possible. That could be the result of a large number of scenarios, the worst of which involves the demise of mankind before it overcomes the technological hurdle of time travel. (Well, that would be the worst outcome for most of us, but not all).

Most likely, though, the convention’s own success in the present day resulted in its failure. The response to the party was apparently so overwhelming that Professor Mullainathan required an RSVP in order to attend. An RSVP from the future would be difficult to achieve, because the very act of doing so, according to some theories, would change the future from which the RSVP came. In other words, a time traveler might well put him or herself out of existence, or at least substantially change his or her circumstances (such as from a time traveler to, say, a Martian hairdresser), by sending an RSVP. Thus, it would have been best for the time traveler to just show up at the party.

Problem is: the time traveler would not have been able to get into the Convention without the RSVP. So, Professor Mullainathan inadvertently created a paradox for the time traveler. On the other hand, perhaps the time travelers that wanted to attend the convention did RSVP, creating a parallel universe in which this version of Silly Seattle and it’s readers simply are not in.

That is an unsatisfying answer to the failure of Professor Mullainathan to attract a time traveler to his convention, but at least it would explain the surreal nature of politics in Seattle and Washington State in our universe. Better yet, maybe a parallel universe is where all those magical mystery ballots in King County came from. Unfortunately, though, we did have to get stuck in the universe in which a circus ride is being built as a transportation solution.

Could Gregoire even have come from a parallel universe?

Can we send her back?

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Liberals for Men?

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Visiting from mensnewsdaily.com? Check out Silly Seattle's main page, which contains a large number of articles about the status of men and fathers in Seattle and Washington State - the most misandrist city in the most misandrist state in the country. Why should you care? Because, as the avowed "leader in women's issues," Washington and Seattle provide a good indicator of just how low your state might go.

Check it out HERE !

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As we have talked about here before, the men and father’s movement is growing and becoming more organized. This is what tends to happen when a group is under continuous and unfair assault.

With the men’s voting block growing, the question now is which political party will pick up on this movement? We have thought that it would not be one of the major parties. The Democrats seem far too beholden to the feminist victim cult. Republicans seem afraid to overtly align themselves with men’s and father’s issues and, anyway, they are far too distracted by issues such as abortion to take notice of the plight of fathers at the hands of government. So, we have believed that it might be a third party that picks up on the growing anger among men.

But, perhaps we are wrong. Air America, the self-avowed liberal radio network, recently had Glenn Sacks on the air. The host of the program, Charles Goyette, seemed relatively sympathetic to the problems faced by men and fathers.

You say that’s hard to believe? Well, listen to it here!

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CASA Latina: El Jardín Alla

For once, we have an example of a good decision coming out of a plan that involved Seattle City Government: CASA Latina will not be moving into to the Chubby and Tubby site on Ranier Avenue after all.

Of course, in the process, the “race card” has been played by all concerned. The race card, after all, is intended to immediately disarm critics and suspend thinking. But, perhaps it has been so over-used that it is loosing its intended effect.

Chief among those bemoaning the decision within the mainstream media is Robert L. Jamieson of the Seattle PI. He blames the CASA Latina decision on the racism of both whites and blacks in South Seattle. In particular, he beats up on an aging black minister who has long had a church next to the old Chubby and Tubby site.

There may, indeed, have been some people in the area that applied stereotypes to latino men. Some of these people may have been among those that were complaining that the Chubby and Tubby site is not an appropriate place for CASA Latina. But, Jamieson provided no evidence of that.

On occasion, Jamieson takes a refreshing perspective that does not follow the party line. More often, though, he makes assertions based on his own stereotypes of white people (and black people, for that matter) that are not supported by the evidence. And he rides high and mighty on his horse of self-righteousness while he does it.

Here is an example:

Some middle-class whites did not like the idea of the day workers moving in and played the fear card. They worried about the safety of their kids who would have to walk past the day center to go to school. They fretted about plummeting values of $300,000 homes in a community turning into a Fremont of the future.

Hey, since when is worrying about kids and the value of real estate not a valid concern? Are kids and property values things that only middle class white people care about? If so, perhaps non-middle-class-white-people should worry more about kids and real estate. But, Jamieson is full of crap on this point. Of course, these are valid concerns that whites, blacks, Asians, and yes, even Latinos all share. There is no evidence that anyone was applying a negative stereotype to Latinos generally.

Quite the contrary. They were applying facts to CASA Latina specifically. The neighbors of CASA’s current Belltown site have plenty of complaints about vagrancy, drinking, trash, and harassment of women. These are simply facts. Another fact is that the sycophants of Seattle city government were kissing up to the wealthy liberals living in the Belltown area by working with CASA to move them to South Seattle. These white people like to the talk the talk, but when it comes to living what they preach they prefer a Disney Land of fantasy liberalism instead of dealing with the real world. That’s Silly Seattle’s stereotype of white people that live in Belltown. Do you want to argue with that, Jamieson?

(Be careful when answering that last question. We here in Silly Seattle have plenty of background when it comes to Latin America. As you can see here, nobody cares more about the plight of poor Mexicans, and there are few in Seattle who know more about the historical reasons for their struggle.)

City Government’s arrogance about relocating CASA Latina to an area that it thought would not complain is at the top of the list of what has made people in South Seattle angry. If CASA Latina is such a noble enterprise, why shouldn’t it remain in Belltown? Why does the city assume it can relocated organizations with a history of causing problems for a neighborhood into a location that already has struggled for years to recover?

And, how about the massive senior housing complex that is less than a block away from the Chubby and Tubby site? I was driving past both with a friend from out of town, and pointed the two sites out to her. She said, “Oh, so this is what your city’s Urban Village concept is all about? Hundreds of seniors packed together here, and a supply of unemployed men just over there with higher than average crime statistics available to cause problems for them.” Again, if it were not a fact that CASA Latina has had problems in it’s current location, nobody would be concerned about the problems it will have in a new location.

Jamieson laments that NIMBY has turned to “How About My Neighbor's Yard Way Over There.” Well, on that point he is right. El jardín alla en Belltown seems just fine to the people of South Seattle, so let’s just keep CASA Latina in Belltown. Not only is it a nice and pleasant area for those who use CASA Latina’s services, but it also serves to remind the white people of Belltown of their own humanity.

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Tunnel of Love

It’s humorous to watch the Seattle Silly Council and Mayor Nickels in their quest to commission “studies” that give them the “right” answer. A study by the Property Counselors of Seattle did just that, coming up with magical dollars much like the King County elections machine finds magical mystery ballots. But, we all already knew that if valid and objective research is what you are after, the last place you look is Seattle or King County government.

It’s sad, though, when the state’s Department of Transportation so gleefully gets in on the act. Based on pretty much nothing other than its love of big projects, the WSDOT decided that a tunneling project is exactly what they need too. We should expect WSDOT to next waste millions paying Bruce Springstein for the rights to his song, Tunnel of Love, so they can post it on their web site. In fact, the lyrics seem to be made for Nickel’s, Gregoire, and WSDOT:

Fat man sitting on a little stool
Takes the money from my hand while his eyes take a
walk all over you
Hands me the ticket smiles and whispers good luck
Cuddle up angel cuddle up my little dove
We'll ride down baby into this tunnel of love

(emphasis added by us)

Unfortunately, WSDOT was long ago taken over by environmental extremists and transportation idealists. This is the same department that spends millions “upgrading” highways, slowing traffic for its multi-year snail pace projects, and upon completion we find that a free-flow traffic lane has been replaced with an HOV lane. Everywhere WSDOT goes, it seems, traffic congestion seems to get worse.

The latest study focuses on the so-called benefits of a tunnel. At the top of the list are the increased land values for the Seattle waterfront and increased commerce in the area. Property Counselors enthusiastically points to similar projects, such as “The Big Dig” in Boston, and claims the project increased land values there. (It seems just as likely that, if there was higher relative appreciation around the big dig, it was due to the property recovering from years and years of having depressed market values due to constant construction all around).

No mention is made of the fact that Boston’s tunnel was billions over budget, took years longer than anticipated, and today is a leaky nightmare requiring billions more to fix. That’s assuming it can be fixed, of course, and will not eventually better serve Boston as the world’s largest sewage pipe. It is ominous that project planners for the $15 billion dollar and growing Big Dig originally estimated the cost would be $4 billion. Does that sound eerily familiar?

Well, we have an idea here at Silly Seattle. If these benefits are so great, the people realizing the benefit ought to pay. Let’s target the taxes so that commercial property owners along the waterfront pay for their own “benefits.” That makes more sense than, say, charging people who live in South Seattle to build a monorail that they will never have reason to ride.

If waterfront property owners are not willing to pay those taxes, which would be reflected in a decline in the property values along the waterfront after the taxes are imposed, we would all have incontrovertible evidence from the market that a tunnel is not a money making proposition. Conversely, if property owners are willing to pay, build them their damn tunnel.

But, this makes a little too much economic sense to ever expect Mayor Nickels and the Seattle Silly Council to consider.

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Wrestling the Irrational

While the Seattle Silly Times glorifies a father that wants to sue his middle school aged daughter’s way into wrestling matches against unwilling boy opponents, we should pause for a moment to reflect. Since the mainstream media will only focus on the so-called “civil rights” and politically correct aspects of this story, we should focus on the rational reasons for why it is not always acceptable to force little boys to wrestle with little girls. In fact, we should focus on the basic rights of our boys.

In her landmark book on the plight of boys in our public schools entitled The War Against Boys, Christina Hoff Sommers documented the hostile environment boys encounter in public education (and private universities, for that matter). Hoff Sommers, a recognized and serious scholar, was moved to write her book after the ridiculous mid-1990’s claim that girls “loose their voice” in high school. She wanted to learn more, but found that the claim was baseless. Worse, she found that boys show very tangible evidence that the feminized public school environment is having a real and very negative effect on their development.

The problems she found included the fact that teen boys are several times more likely than teen girls to drop out of high should or commit suicide. Moreover, the boys that remain in school are far underachieving girls. If anything, she concluded, boys have their voice deliberately muzzled in schools that are dominated by the politically correct and feminized agenda of our nation’s public school system.

And then there is Title IX, which mandates that equal money be spent on male and female sports in all publicly funded schools. The number of opportunities created for women athletes has increased and that is very positive, but the irrational implementation of Title IX has demolished an even greater number of athletic opportunities for boys and men. Within college sports, for example, there is no adjustment made for the money raised by men’s football and basketball, which financially support all of the other programs in a school's athletic program.

Because football has so many players, the only way to have equal numbers of male and female athletes in many universities is to eliminate male sports programs. For example, many men’s wrestling programs in universities across the country have been eliminated in order to reduce the number of men in sports and balance them with the number of females. Often, this is done because colleges just cannot find enough young women that want to participate in sports.

With that backdrop, it is not hard to believe that Meaghan Connors’ father would be threatening law suites simply because boys on the wrestling teams of private schools choose to forfeit their matches to her instead of wrestle a girl. The “offending” private schools are all Christian and they claim that it is inappropriate for girls and boys to be making such close physical contact. Why it is that Meaghan Connors’ father believes that he can force a little boy to wrestle his daughter when his beliefs, and those of his parents and his school forbid it, is anybody’s guess.

Any rational person would have to say that Mr. Connors’ is wrong. In fact, we would go even further. No boy in a public school should be forced to wrestle Meaghan, period. Even though the radical feminists that run our public schools will never admit it, there are major developmental differences between boys and girls. Girls tend to physically mature much more quickly than boys. In fact, walk around any middle school and you will find that girls on average are taller and larger than boys.

Is it fair to match up smaller boys against larger girls in a wrestling match? They don’t do that in high school or college for the opposite reason - boys have matured by this time and it would not even be a match up. But, the humiliation a boy would feel (and the subsequent ribbing) seems not to be a concern for the feminists that run public schools. In fact, they seem to enjoy the idea of bashing an adolescent male’s ego while it is in its formative years. Indeed, they hope it will have a lasting impact on the poor kid.

No, forcing middle school boys to wrestle girls is not a good idea. The fact that Seattle area public schools routinely do this is an indication of the destructive pathology of contemporary feminism. And, it shows that boys are second class citizens in our public schools. In a system that seems to believe that self-esteem is more important than learning the 4 R’s, you would be reasonable to expect that school administrators would care about the awkward position they are putting middle school boys into.

But, in fact, they relish it.

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Slim Chance Mexico Will Change

In the wake of massive protests in Mexico City over the ousting of a corrupt mayor by the Mexican Congress, one has to wonder why it is that so many countries in Latin America are perpetually poverty-stricken.

Lopez Obrador, former mayor of Mexico City and member of the far left PRD, was widely believed to be the front runner for President of Mexico in 2006. Obrador is a favorite of the poor as well as elderly widows because his city government hands out small monthly stipends to them. But, evidence of the level of corruption in his administration was in clear view for all Mexicans when one of his cabinet members was caught on video tape taking bribes from a construction company. Like the mafia, it was impossible to make the obvious link of this corruption directly to Obrabor's Swiss bank account.

Hoping to prevent yet another episode of massive corruption from a false prophet, Mexican prosecutors indicted Obrador for ignoring a federal court order that the city abstain from constructing a road. (Mexican officials are immune from prosecution unless the Congress votes to remove their immunity.) The Mexican Congress, of which the PRD is a small minority, did just that. Shortly thereafter, nearly a million protestors crowded the Zocalo, the main square of the seat of the Mexican government, for days of protest.

It is easy to see why such large numbers of poor people would show up to protest on behalf of someone they see as their savior. They are stuck in hopeless circumstances and believe that Obrador, who promised to bring up trade barriers and vastly expand government welfare, would make their lives a little easier. What is harder to understand is why a country such as Mexico, with such immense resources, has been mired in perpetual poverty since the Spanish conquest almost 500 years ago.

When asking a Mexican scholar about how this could be, one is usually given complicated answers about the psychology of a defeated people. A large portion of the Mexican population derives from the indigenous peoples that Hernando Cortez encountered and conquered 1519. As the story usually goes, the defeated Mexican people were never able to fully regain confidence. Somehow, though, these sorts of explanations seem more obfuscation than answer. A more satisfying explanation comes from looking at a single individual - telecommunications magnate Carlos Slim.

Slim is the wealthiest person in Latin America. His business career paralleled and then surpassed the political career of Carlos Salinas, former President of Mexico, who now lives in exile. Working with Salinas in a corrupted process, Slim gained control of Telefonos de Mexico (Telmex) when it was privatized in the early 1990s. He also owns major companies in practically ever segment of industry in Mexico, and the public shares of his companies constitute more than half of the total value of the Mexican Bolsa.

Slim is widely recognized in Mexico as having enormous influence over the government. Slim was a major sponsor of the PRI during its rule and was left somewhat devoid of his previous influence when Vicente Fox and his PAN party won a surprising victory. But, this did not last long and Slim quickly managed to get Fox into his camp. But, Slim’s modus operandi is to have Presidents that are completely beholden to him. So, he has been grooming and financially supporting Lopez Obrador during his reign as Mayor of Mexico City.

To see such an ardent and successful capitalist (albeit a protect capitalist) supporting a far left politician like Obrador may seem a contradiction in terms, but Slim did not gain his vast wealth by playing the game according to the rules that we are used to in the US. Mexico has a history of granting virtually exclusive monopolies to private companies in each sector of its economy. The alliance that held the PRI in power for 71 years was actually a triad of power shared between wealthy Mexican families, corrupt politicians, and labor bosses from primarily government operations, such as Pemex. Obrador promises a return to the old days when these companies did not have to compete. (Of course, Obrador never bothers to explain how this will help poor people).

The stranglehold Slim and the rest of the Mexican oligarchy have held over the country is the reason Mexico has been and continues to be poor. They operate behind closed doors like the mafia - unfortunately, a mafia that runs a country. Examining the way that Telmex under Slim has literally held the technological advance of the entire country at bay provides an example of his selfish and destructive power.

For example, competition was belatedly introduced into the Mexico telecom market in the mid-1990s. Such US companies as AT&T and MCI (in their heyday) promptly set up companies in Mexico in the hope of competing in the long distance market there. But, what they found was that the industry regulator called COFETEL (the equivalent of the FCC in Mexico) made every decision with the objective of protecting Telmex from competition. In the complicated world of telecom regulation, there are myriad methods for a regulator to abuse authority and favor one company over another.

As a result of this regulatory abuse in favor of Carlos Slim and his Telmex, practically every telecommunications carrier that was established in the mid-1990s in Mexico has gone bankrupt, some more than once. At the same time, however, Telmex has been the most profitable telecommunications company on the globe.

Technology continues to advance, of course, and Carlos Slim and his Telmex have experienced new threats that are not as easily stemmed through asymmetrical regulatory protection. The latest is Voice Over Internet Protocol, or VoIP in industry jargon. Examples of this type of service are Vonage and Skype. VoIP sends voice calls over the Internet, thereby bypassing the traditional communications infrastructure.

But, to use VoIP, you need a broadband Internet connection. As the only provider in Mexico able to offer DSL broadband to homes, Telmex has a monopoly in the residential broadband Internet market. These same customers are also tired of paying high rates for voice calls and have begun using VoIP. VoIP is great for individuals and businesses in Mexico, who need to lower their costs in order to compete in the global market. It also extends unhindered and low cost calling to people that might not otherwise be able to afford it. But, the sin of this technology is that reduces Telmex’s revenues as people increasingly utilize VoIP at low rates instead of Telmex’s over priced network.

So, what does Carlos Slim and his Telmex do? They implement restrictions on their Internet service that literally block the flow of voice packets. This sort of activity has been deemed illegal by the FCC in the US. But, the Mexican regulator COFETEL actually encouraged Telmex to do this, or at least that is what they say publically. Behind the scenes, few people in Mexico doubt that the leadership of COFETEL is on the payroll of Carlos Slim.

The end result is that Mexico continues being behind technologically, with higher cost telephone service, all for the benefit of one extremely wealthy man – Carlos Slim. It is a modern form of feudalism. This is why Mexico is a poor country.

For those of you that are interested in stemming the tide of illegal immigrants, the best strategy to acheive your goal is to reform the Mexican economy. If jobs are available in Mexico, Mexicans will stay in Mexico. But, for those jobs to be in Mexico, the feudalistic economy that Mexico maintains for the benefit of a small oligarchy of protected capitalists, such as Slim, must change.

This means real competition in every industry and pressure applied on people like Carlos Slim to change their business practices. But, with Lopez Obrador now back in his office as Mayor, having attained an even more vaulted status as a hero after fighting off the Fox administration, he is back on track to gain the Presidency. Of course, he will do so with the financial backing of Carlos Slim.

It seems that for every step forward Mexico makes, it needs to take three backwards.

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Clint Made My Day

Here is a great interview of Clint Eastwood where he talks about his generally libertarian views.

Eastwood makes a point that we have made several times in this blog. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats seem to be much interested in liberty and freedom now. As Clint says, the Republicans were once a party of libertarians, but are clearly evangelical at their core now. Democrats, who were once concerned about civil liberties, are now clearly much more interested in micro-managing our daily lives, balkanizing us and punishing groups that are out of favor (such as men), and making us as dependent on the government as possible.

A viable third party could easily form in today’s extremist environment. Most Americans hold views that overlap about equally with the positions of the two major parties. There are even views that the majority of Americans hold that neither party seems to be interested in.

All it might take is a catalyst. One possible catalyst could be among increasingly organized men’s and father’s rights groups. Both major parties ignore these groups with a vengeance. Democrats because of their alignment with socialist women’s groups, such as NOW; Republicans because their major preoccupation is with religious issues, such as abortion.

But, the plight of men and fathers in Western countries with governments that have institutionalized bigotry against them is increasingly a political opportunity for a third party to pick up on. Their voices are growing, becoming increasingly organized, and change will come.

Even the press is starting to reluctantly pay attention. Keep an eye out for an article in the New York Times this Sunday on the UK men’s group Fathers4Justice.

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John Mason - MSI Victim

Mass hysteria is a dangerous social pathology. It even has a medical term: Mass Sociogenic Illness or MSI. History provides a number of examples of MSI, ranging from the Salem witch hunts to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. We have a modern form of MSI infecting society today: domestic violence hysteria.

Run-away bride Jennifer Wilbanks provides the segway into examining this societal illness. While the cable TV networks slice and dice the Wilbanks story, presumably to fill the space they set aside for their hoped for Scott Peterson redux, they seem to miss the point entirely. News analysis focuses on whether she is guilty of something for her bizarre exodus. That’s a waste of time. Jennifer Wilbanks treated her family with utter disrespect and she will have to answer to them. Outside that fact, adult women are free to come and go as they please. The real story here is in what happened to John Mason, Jennifer’s fiancée, and how that relates to feminist mythology.

Contemporary feminist theory holds that we live in a patriarchal society in which women are oppressed. As a consequence, men are prone to physically abusing their wives and intimate partners. In fact, according to this ideology, every marriage is a patriarchal institution in which a man creates his own private Idaho of spousal abuse. This has inspired the Duluth model, which proports to explain how patriarchal "control" manifests in domestic violence against women (with its ridiculous "wheel of control"), and is used by such places as the Eastside Domestic Violence Program.

This is a load of hooey, of course, and would be easy to ignore as a view held on the margins of society. But, somehow, this odd and extreme ideology was given credence not long after the OJ Simpson trial. The passage of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) marked the government institutionalization of this view. VAWA is like a turbo-charger for the spread of the baseless belief that men are innately dangerous to women.

Through VAWA, the federal government spends billions of dollars per year to fund local governments in a full-scale assault on the most basic rights of men. Scholarly research before and after VAWA has shown clearly that men and women are equally likely to instigate violence within a relationship. The brutal murderer Clara Harris, who ran over her husband with his daughter in the car, and a series of Vagina Warriors raping adolescent boys, provide further evidence that violence and sexual misconduct are not a problem resulting from the patriarchy, but a human problem. This doesn’t matter, though, because when an MSI takes hold, reality and facts mean little.

This brings us to poor John Mason. Mason had to suffer the unthinkable horror of believing that his fiancée had been abducted. Even the most hopeful possibility, that Jennifer Wilbanks had simply gotten cold feet before their wedding day, was only a source of humiliation for him. But, in this age of exaggerated and usually made-up statistics about the behavior of men in a relationship, the cold comfort John received was to be named Suspect #1.

The police and the FBI were not willing to say it. But, after demanding a lie detector test and several intense interrogations, everyone knew that Mason was being blamed. The FBI began building their case against Mason before anyone even knew what had happened to Jennifer. The news networks set up shop in Duluth, GA and began what they hoped would be a long ratings boon of another man being lynched and hung. They were all accusing Mason (here and here for example) and salivating at their ratings prospects. When Jennifer finally phoned home, you could almost here the collective sighs of disappointment from news organizations across the country. Even Jennifer’s father said poor John Mason was, “being crucified by the media.”

How did this happen? Well, according to contemporary wisdom, when a woman disappears her intimate male partner is most likely the culprit. Sadly, even John Mason bought into the mythology, commenting, “Statistically I was guilty.”

The problem with this is that belief in such a statistic becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. By immediately assigning guilt to the man in the equation, and building a case against him before anyone even knows what happened, more men are falsely accused and as a result, falsely found guilty. This, of course, feeds the statistic that everyone points to, substantiating the myth. Could you imagine where innocent John Mason would be now if Jennifer had not turned up?

These sorts of events happen every day and out of the sight of media. When government becomes the chief agent for spreading MSI, as it has with VAWA, the results are devastating. Family Courts, particularly in Washington State, routinely strip a man of access to his home and his children on trumped up charges of domestic violence. These charges are more often than not baseless and are used by women as a tactic in divorce proceedings, usually with devastating results for the man. King County routinely hauls large numbers of men into jail each night on charges of upsetting their wives; these men end up in DV gulag, a soviet style re-education system that is designed to beat the “patriarchy” out of them.

Medical textbooks prescribe a cure for MSI:

The most powerful tool is for a calm authority figure to give clear and accurate information repeatedly, and to remain visible and available to provide updates and reassurance.

One would be reasonable to expect that leaders in government would stand up and be the authority figure that quells the irrational tide. But, with few men until recently connecting the dots on what has happened to them, there has been little political pressure for a cure to the disease. The Washington state legislature just perpetuated and exacerbated it, cynically assigning new fees to the cost of acquiring a marriage license and putting the money into an account for “domestic violence advocacy.” These “advocates” are usually social workers steeped in Women Studies ideology who find domestic violence in their morning coffee.

Recognizing a problem is the first step in solving it. Since the people we entrust with our governance do not step-up to the plate to cure the MSI plaguing our society, men will need to stand up and make it clear that this an issue on which they will vote. Groups like Fathers4Justice have had success fighting back in the UK and hero’s like Glenn Sacks have had some success fighting for father’s rights in the California legislature. The next step should be the repeal of VAWA.

Washington State is far behind on coming to its senses. But, with a particularly viral form of MSI hysteria gripping this state, and men increasingly up in arms, it won’t be long before our voices are heard. In the meantime, whenever false charges are raised, we should all be yelling, “Remember Mason!”

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Maybe Only Felons Should Vote

Washington state is looking more and more like the PRI-run Mexico of old. The PRI maintained power through an election system that was a sham. They controlled the media and essentially decided among themselves who the President of the Republic of Mexico would be.

In Spanish, PRI stands for Partido Revolutionario Institucional. In English, that is the Institutional Revolutionary Party. Of course, the very name of the party that ran Mexico for more than 70 years is an oxymoron. And, it appears that election reform in the state of Washington is itself a contradiction in terms.

The trial for the Republican legal challenge of the fishy election of Christine Gregoire to the Governor’s office is set to begin on May 23. Before the trial can begin, however, Judge John Bridges must determine what the standard will be for proving that the alleged fraudulent voting of felons and others occurred.

The Democrats, who substantially designed the last so-called election reform are claiming that election law requires that anyone challenging an election must prove that fraudulent votes changed the outcome of the election. In other words, the challenger needs to show the candidate each fraudulent vote was cast for, and based on that, show that the election was thrown.

Well, anyway, that's what the Democrats say. Maybe you can decipher the poorly written law for yourself:

No election may be set aside on account of illegal votes, unless it appears that an amount of illegal votes has been given to the person whose right is being contested, that, if taken from that person, would reduce the number of the person's legal votes below the number of votes given to some other person for the same office, after deducting therefrom the illegal votes that may be shown to have been given to the other person.

Of course, this is a Catch 22 that the Democrats who set up the election law built into the system in order to protect their King County election machine. It is impossible to say who each person cast a vote for, because once a ballot as identified, the voter’s ballot is sent forward for counting and forevermore the connection between the ballot and the name of the voter is lost. So, if the Democrats win on this argument, they have managed to build a conundrum into any effort to challenge an election. Think that was contemplated when the law was written?

In order to get around this seemingly insurmountable obstacle, Republicans are proposing a simple system that would deduct fraudulent votes based on the proportion of votes each candidate won per precinct. So, if a precinct in King County voted 60% for Gregoire and 40% for Rossi, and there were 100 fraudulent votes cast in that precinct, 60 votes would be deducted from Gregoire’s total and 40 from Rossi’s.

That seems straightforward enough. But, the Democrats insist that Republicans must say exactly who each fraudulent vote was cast for. In the case of the hundreds of felons who voted illegally, this would mean that each felon would need to come into court and testify as to who they voted for. Yes, each felon voter would need to come into court, testify that she committed another felony, and then tell Judge Bridges who they voted for.

Pedophiles, rapists, thieves, drug dealers, con artists and the like, will again decide the election. In other words, the Democrats are proposing that an election that was thrown by felon voters by fixed by felon voters! Perhaps next time around, we should juxtapose our election law and allow only felons to vote, since they seemed to have controlled the election this time around, and still are.

The PRI would be proud.

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