Liberty in Decline

Our country has numerous examples of why violation of civil liberties is a slippery slope. The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) unfortunately provides another.

VAWA gained momentum during the early 1990’s after the horror of OJ Simpson’s murder of his ex-wife and her boyfriend. Up to that time, authorities had not addressed family violence with much more than lip service.

Simpson’s trial raised awareness and provided an opportunity to finally address the problem. But, unfortunately, family violence also provided the perfect opportunity for gender feminists to gain traction on something that allowed them to implement their strange and distorted ideology. The entire feminist movement quickly transformed from a movement for equal opportunity and raised awareness about the roles of men and women in society, to one of victimhood obsession. The bogeyman became the “patriarchy” and women were painted as the innocent victims.

The author of the original VAWA bill, Joe Biden, saw an opportunity as well. This legislation could ingratiate him with feminists. The sad result is federal pork legislation designed to promote radical feminist ideology while doing little to help victims of family violence or to help families. Statements like this one from a feminist blog prove the point:

My take on it is this--domestic violence shelters were established as an oasis of sanity for victims of domestic violence, a refuge for the patriarchy's worst victims, a place where male privilege and dominance are not only not respected but openly rebuked. And that pisses them off, because in order for male privilege to maintain its invisibility, it has to be ubiquitious. Shelters do not let men in because women who have been beaten or raped deserve that teeny-weeny break from having to cater to and respect male privilege after they've seen its ugliest side. Frankly, I am flummoxed that anyone would resent that and deny victims their peace.

"Refuge from the patriarchy"? Huh? Something clearly is amiss in the shadowy world of domestic violence response.

VAWA and the local and state laws it has encouraged paint an ugly picture of the worst tendencies of government. They also provide a glimpse of the oppressive world the gender feminist gang would have us live under.

First, hysteria is fomented. Myths like 95% of all domestic violence victims are women and 1 in 3 women will suffer from domestic violence in their lifetime are spread around. Next, ideology is applied. Due process and equal protection under the law are thrown out the window. Soon thereafter, men and fathers around the country loose their economic and even physical freedom. The power of government to implement radical ideology that few people are aware of, much less believe in, thus became an enormous monster.

The curious thing about this is that Democrats often complain about the evangelical controlled Republicans wanting to interfere in the personal lives of people. Republicans complain about Democrats wanting to interfere in their financial lives. It would seem that, for different reasons, both sides of the current political spectrum would have a reason to want to protect the civil liberties of citizens and the limits on government that our founders cared so much about.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Both parties are now obsessed with social control and engineering and are happy to find ways to trick the Constitution, giving them free reign over all Americans.

The problem is that with governments you cannot trust the best intentions the people that run them. Those people sometimes are able to steer violations of our liberties and rights to actually accomplish good. More often, they are not. Worse, governments are institutions that outlast the people that form them, and eventually, usually sooner rather than later, someone in government will come along and abuse the power. More than any other law presently on the books, VAWA shows us that this universal truth about government that are founders warned us about is indeed true.

And, again, our current crop of demagogic politicians is failing us. The Senate has introduced an amendment to their version of VAWA reauthorization that mandates taking DNA samples of all prisoners, regardless of whether they have been charged, whether prosecutors plan to press charges, and obviously before they are convicted of anything. Meanwhile, the House of Representatives has passed it’s version of VAWA reauthorization with Nancy Pelosi lauding it as giving us, “strengthened communities.” Apparently, men and fathers are not legitimately part of their communities. And, a marriage rate of less than 50% while more than 50% of children live without their fathers seems to be Pelosi's gaol.

So, you see, government introduces one deliberate effort at making a run around the Constitution (VAWA) and its success motivates another (mandatory DNA samples). Eventually, the Constitution becomes irrelevant and we are living under an oppressive government regime.

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Pop! Goes the Weasel

Yes, the weasel has indeed popped. As we predicted here, the trinity of the gender feminist victim cult is making its all too predictable voice heard from the pedestals provided it by Seattle’s regressive newspapers just in time to attempt to arouse support for the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA).

The worst legislation since Jim Crow Laws, VAWA is currently in reauthorization proceedings in Congress. This time around ... the fact that a noble cause – reducing family violence – was hijacked by angry feminists looking for a cause to hang their hat on, and hang as many men as possible in the process, is abundantly clear. The unconstitutional aspects of VAWA and the nightmare scenarios that have resulted for so many innocent men are more widely known. This has created so much concern that the author of the soviet-styled VAWA legislation, Senator Joe Biden, actually tried to ascertain during John Roberts confirmation hearings whether the soon-to-be Justice would rule that VAWA is unconstitutional. Roberts skirted the question.

Washington State’s man-fighting super hero Patty Murray has also taken note of the growing dissatisfaction with VAWA and its anti-family legions. She has been holding secret “community meetings” around the state with federal and state funded feminist organizations masquerading as domestic violence advocates. Murray isn’t known for her smarts, but she is clever enough to realize that if the average Joe found out the truth that his tax dollars are going to anti-male, anti-father hate groups whose sole agenda is the destruction of his family, he’d be mightily pissed off.

Murray is surely in Wenatchee today, meeting with 300 other people from the state’s domestic violence and family destruction industry. When it comes to the rights of men and fathers, as well as those of children that deserve fathers, this meeting is like a super-madrassa conference. Worse, these representatives of state-sponsored terror are meeting on your nickel. (Note that at these sorts of conferences, not a single person with a point of view that differs from the feminist hoard is allowed).

The first of the sisterhood trinity from Seattle’s newspapers made her appearance today. Susan Paynter has an emotionally wrought and misleading column in the today’s Seattle PI. Not surprisingly, Paynter lauds the extreme and totalitarian anti-domestic violence laws resulting from VAWA.

She fails to mention that these laws are based on gender feminist ideology and thus are designed to drive fathers out of families. She also fails to mention that VAWA and most local and state laws on the issue are draconian, extend government’s clumsy and oppressive feet into families where they don’t belong, and violate the most basic civil rights of half of the population. When it comes to putting women on a pedestal and attacking men, boys, and fathers, there are no limits to how far Paynter would like to go.

Of course, what Paynter does not fail to do is call for more money. The feminist establishment that has taken over the domestic violence industry is addicted to the pork VAWA provides. They then turn around and use this pork to attack many of the very same Republicans that support this horrible legislation because they like to have a cause in which they can call themselves "bi-partison."

Expect to hear soon from the other two parts of the unholy trinity, amateur columnist extraordinaire Nicole Brodeur and insightful-as-a-door knob Joni Balter. There was a time when feminist victim speech was untouchable. They are used to getting away with lies, made-up statistics, and gross exaggerations. In the past, they were able to propagate feminist myths about men, fathers, and the “patriarchy,” while ignoring female violence.

But, that time is changing. As more men and fathers learn what happened to their most basic rights while they were away at work providing for their families, more are starting to speak up against the injustice. Women too who don’t buy into the victim obsession of gender feminist orthodoxy are also making their voices heard. VAWA may pass yet again in Congress, but justice runs marathons while myths and hate usually collapse after the first few miles.

As the marathon continues, politicians such as David Reichert will pay the price. Running on the Republican ticket, Reichert takes the vote of men and fathers for granted while counting on their silence in the face of gross injustice. Next time around, though, his enthusiastic support for VAWA because it provides pork for the sheriff’s office he used to run will be questioned. He will have to answer.

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Belt Tightening Should Start with VAWA

President Bush asked his budget director to find areas of belt tightening within the federal budget to help pay for hurricane relief.

The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), currently making its way through reauthorization proceedings in Congress, is the perfect place to start.

VAWA attacks men, fathers, boys, and families. William Joseph Christopher, incarcerated for six years without due process or even sensible charges, is just one of thousands of men that have been caught in VAWA's Soviet-styled system.

We should not be taking such a hostile stance towards families at a time when young women, even those in Ivy League universities, are refocusing on the importance of family.

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We Need the UN like a Fish Needs a Bicycle

At one time, I held out hope for the UN. Not anymore.

Carey Roberts sums up the reasons why.

The UN is for the most part an irrelevant organization. When one says this to a UN supporter, they are quick to point out one or two of the things the UN does that actually helps people, such as providing aid to feed the children of impoverished countries. And, occassionally, it fulfills its peacekeeping role.

The fact is that the UN does not even do these few things very effectively. It is hard for an organization to promote peace when it is preoccupied with such nonsense as "gender mainstreaming."

Curing hunger and peacekeeping missions could much better be handled by organizations focused specifically on each function. That way, ideology and corruption would interfere less with purpose driven activities.

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Aten

Did you know that most early Egyptian townships had their own gods?

These were gods that were not shared with other townships or the state of Egypt. In almost all cases, each township had nine gods, with three that were considered of a higher level than the others. Those three were called the Triad, and represented Man, Woman, and Child respectively.

Have you heard of the Egyptian pharaoh named Akhenaten? Reigning over Egypt from 1375 to 1358, he was the first known monotheist. Akhenaten broke with Egypt’s traditional polytheism and focused worship on the sun god Aten, the sole deity in his new cult. In fact, to go further, he focused everything on light as an absolute principle that explained both the natural and the human world.

The Egyptian religious establishment was none too pleased with Akhenaten’s theology. Once he died, Egypt’s priests, political establishment, and pharaohs returned to the old polytheistic regime. But, it defies credulity to believe that not a single township bought fully into Akhenaten’s religious vision.

Those that did and continued to practice the worship of light after the death of Akhenaten would surely have been persecuted. Perhaps some fled to find a land where they could practice their truth.

Light. Trinity. Does any of that ring a bell?

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Pathetic Display of Indecision

What a pathetic display of gutless inaction.

Mayor Nickels first takes a bold stand on the monorail. Then ... when the deadline passes, he just says the SMP board needs to submit an “advisory election.” That means that he wants SMP to go before the voters and ask for advice. Given the display of irrational voting by Seattle voters on the monorail so far, that’s like parents going to their children to ask for financial advice.

Except, in this case, everyone is acting like a child. Adults make tough decisions. In the case of the monorail, it’s not even such a hard decision. Any rational person would have to conclude that the money spent on the monorail, even if it were enough to build the 14 mile line, would be better spent on other transportation projects. And, even a child might be able to figure out that when you don’t have enough money, she can’t buy the toy she wants.

SMP is playing in the sand box with gusto. Now that the Silly Council is actually behaving surprisingly like adults and planning to request that the monorail agency be dissolved by the Legislature, SMP finally decided to do what they refused to do just last night. They have their advisory ballot measure prepared now, just in time to make it to the November election.

The sad thing is that Seattle voters might well vote “for” the monorail saga to continue, even after Seattle voters gave Jim Nobles and Beth Goldberg big leads in the election for a position on the SMP board. They are both running on a simple plan – kill the damned thing already.

Looking for guidance from Seattle voters is pretty silly indeed. But, don’t expect Seattle politicians to be so respectful of voters when it comes to I-912. That’s another initiative that will get a yes vote and $2 billion for Mayor Nickels’ Tunnel of Love will then sink into Puget Sound sludge.

After that, where will the money for rebuilding the Alaskan Way Viaduct come from when Seattle cannot get the time of day from Washington while the only source of local money is tied up supporting a project that is already dead?

In my previous post, I mentioned a recent book called "Indecision," the central character of which is a listless, indecisive man. Salon.com's reviewer of the book believes that many American men fit this profile. Looking around Seattle's political leadership, and seeing Nickels call his punt on the monorail a bold action, one has to suspect she is right.

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Addressing the Listless American Male

Contemporary gender feminist literature sometimes exposes its underbelly in spite of itself. This happens much like in modern physics, where the various versions of string theory cannot be reconciled but nevertheless seem to be describing parts of a larger scientific truth that has not yet been fully revealed.

For example ... a recent plaintive column in Salon.com that criticizes young professional male New Yorkers for being listless, paired with, say, a book by Peggy Drexler extolling the virtues of lesbian couples raising fatherless boys, nips at the edges of a larger truth: something less than positive has happened to the American male. The cultural phenomenon of the listless young adult male is one that deserves attention as it may well point to cultural dysfunction within western society.

The existence of the listless male persona described by Salon’s Rebecca Traister is unfortunately a reality; at least in so much as it is a symptom of a deeper problem. Indecisiveness, lacking in motivation, noncommital, and a generally fatalistic demeanor. These are not unusual traits to see exhibited by single (and married) men in their 20s and 30s. One might go so far as to suggest there is a palpable self loathing among these men.

The evidence is all around us. Just looking at one urban area - King County, Washington - marriage rates have declined so much that nearly 50% of all men in their 30s have never been married. Academic achievement among boys has declined rapidly over the past two decades, with both high school graduation rates and university enrollment among boys falling. Meanwhile, across all age groups, males are several times more likely than females to commit suicide and do so at alarming rates.

Salon’s Rebecca recognizes that a large part of what concerns her is her own lack of success in finding a permanent mate to commit to her. It is tempting, and probably more than a little appropriate, to suggest that she look in the mirror. One of the reasons that men are lackadaisical about committing to her generation of women may well be that these women simply do not inspire them. Worse, this generation of women has a sense of pedestal entitlement and a quickness to the draw on claims of victimhood – key ingredients of man repellant. In other words, some or even a large part of the fault for Rebecca and her sister's man woes may lie with the current crop of single women.

But, that is such an obvious path to follow and, while probably productive, will likely not help to shed light on a deeper cultural sickness that would leave so many single men so apathetic about so many facets of life. After all, what Rebecca really misses is men that behave like men. You can see the men Rebecca complains about all around urban areas like Seattle. They look disheveled and a little lost, and they make statements with the cadence and intonation normally associated with a question. It’s as if they have little solid ground under their feet.

Rebecca’s column is centered on her interview of author Benjamin Kunkel, who recently published a novel entitled “Indecision.” The central character of Kunkel’s novel, Dwight, caught Rebecca’s interest because he seemed to epitomize what she sees among her male cohorts in New York City. In this interview, Kunkel made an interesting observation:

Rebecca: But that has everything to do with feminism and women's roles in this discussion we're having. For a long time, I've been wondering about a crisis of masculinity in our generation, a generation in which opportunities were truly available to at least middle-class women. We weren't just told we could do anything; we were expected to do everything. But we were always told how difficult that would be, that we would confront challenges and pay high prices for our satisfactions. I don't know that men of our generation were sent the same message. So when things get tough, women don't enjoy it any more than men, but they are not surprised. Whereas men -- at least some of the ones I've known -- have been paralyzed by life's hardships.

Kunkel: If what you're talking about is the inculcation in women of a tragic sense of life -- the sense that nothing comes without a price -- that is the sine qua non of masculinity, the masculine tragic attitude that we see in books and movies. "This is gonna hurt, but it's necessary; it ain't gonna be easy, but you're gonna have to suck it up and take it." But what you're saying is very interesting. If the tragic sense of life, this masculine property, should have been transferred to women, [and] men have come to be seen as these cosseted creatures denied any sort of full contact with reality, then this is a really important historical crossover.

Yes, this does make sense. So, what then happened to the “inculcation” of men with a masculine sense that life is a bitch, so get over it, and get out there and do something good anyway? When asking that question, Peggy Drexler’s new book “Raising Boys Without Men: How Maverick Moms Are Creating the Next Generation of Exceptional Men” comes to mind.

Glenn Sacks recently reviewed Dexler’s book and made these observations about its contents:

According to Drexler, lesbian moms are “more sophisticated about how they teach their sons right from wrong” than heterosexual couples, and there are “real advantages for a boy being raised in this new type of family.” Heterosexual mothers don’t measure up in “moral attitude,” and are less likely than lesbian moms to “create opportunities for their sons to examine moral and values issues.” This in turn slows the “moral development in their sons.”

Furthermore, Drexler asserts that boys raised by lesbians “grow up emotionally stronger,” “have a wider range of interests and friendships,” and “appear more at ease in situations of conflict” than boys from “traditional” (i.e., father-present) households. Fatherless boys “exhibit a high degree of emotional savvy…an intuitive grasp of people and situations.” Best of all, sons of lesbian couples are much more willing to discard traditional masculinity than boys trapped in heterosexual households.

For example, Fiona’s son paints his nails, while both of Maria’s sons dance ballet. Ursula’s son chose sewing and cooking for his electives in 7th grade. Kathy's son has rejected playing baseball as being “too competitive”—no surprise, because in their local, father-led baseball league, “the better players get more playing time.”

Perhaps lesbian raised boys are the answer to the problem of listless young adult men. Then, again, perhaps not. Channeling masculine energy into painting nails and emotional adroitness would seem to have little relationship with inculcating the tragic sense of life in men. For a boy, a father is the source of that life lesson.

Again, Sacks:

While Raising Boys is being promoted as a harmless, feel-good affirmation for “maverick moms,” it is in fact an attack on the institution that research shows is the best-suited to raising children—the family. Drexler encourages women thinking of having fatherless children to make that “leap of faith.” But the rates of all major youth pathologies, including juvenile crime, teen pregnancy, teen drug abuse, and school dropouts, are tightly correlated with fatherlessness. Drexler waxes poetic about the nebulous benefits of fatherless parenting, but makes little attempt to explain why fatherless families produce so many troubled and pathological children.

From the complaints of a 30-ish urban single woman to the idealized world of lesbian run households - men and boys in both scenarios are footballs to be kicked about and experimented with, but never understood and, God forbid, appreciated.

Thanks to Salon’s Rebecca and lesbian-advocate Drexler, we now inadvertently have a bit more of the picture than we had before. Too many boys are growing up without the daily involvement of their fathers. Sometimes this is due to fathers that truly can be described as Deadbeat Dads; but more often fatherless-ness is due to institutionalized bias, even hostility, toward the nuclear family and the American male’s place in it.

This generation of boys is learning much about self-indulgence and little about discipline. They are not taught to channel their natural masculine energy into doing positive, instead leaving a chaotic mess of indecision on steroids. Their natural state of high energy engagement with their environment is treated as anathema while pseudo-scholars suggest that teaching them to paint their fingernails and to participate in communal emotion-fests is preferable. They see example after example of masculine decisiveness being met with cultural disdain. They hear the constant negative messages about masculinity that pervade our culture: men have a propensity to violence against women, their heterosexual urges are akin to rape, and the patriarchal role of fatherhood within a family is passé.

In other words, boys, men, and fathers have been inculcated, actually bombarded, with negative messages about the very essence of what they are. Is it really any wonder that Rebecca would find that men in an urban setting – where these messages are the most intense – would seem to be lost and behave as if they are powerless?

The results are obvious for anyone that cares to look. Something clearly set this destructive process in motion. It is well past time we stop allowing hysterical accusations of “turning back the clock” paralyze us as we seek to address it. It's happening in the UK and it can happen in the USA, even in Seattle.

Indeed, there have been times when turning back the clock would have been preferable to allowing history to play out – Hitler’s genocide of European Jews and Stalin’s mass murders provide a couple of examples. Unwinding the negativity and hatefulness of contemporary orthodox feminism in favor of rewinding that movement’s egalitarian roots is another.

[By the way, there are some interesting and witty letters in response to Traister's Salon column here. It's also fun to read Amanda go apoplectic about these letters here.]

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Interesting Election Results So Far

Watching the early returns from today's primary election, there are at least three notable results so far.

First, Republican voters are very disciplined in their backing of David Irons. Of course, the first step in that was to have only David Irons on the Republican ballot. But, if there were any lack of support for him among Republicans, the write in total would be higher. As of 10:00 PM, only 35 write in votes have been counted.

This compares to both Nickels and Sims who have 54% and 66% of the votes from Democrats. There are challengers to these two, so it would be a little unreasonable to expect them to be polling in the 80 or 90 percentiles. But, in Nickels case in particular, only 54% for a sitting Mayor is pretty sad.

The really interesting result so far is for the monorail board. First, Cindy Laws is trailing far behind Beth Goldberg. I guess those paranoid comments about Jewish property owners being against the monorail took its toll on Laws, as well they should.

And, the most satisfying result is that Jim Nobles is far ahead in the race for Position 9 on the monorail board. Jim Nobles, remember, is running on a very simple platform. His intent is to shut down the silly monorail!

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Election Day

Well, today is another test of the corrupt King County elections office. We will have to wait and see what twists and turns Dean Logan has in store for us this time around, although I suspect he is saving the real fun for the general election when it will be imperative that he find a way to get his boss King Sims reelected.

In the meantime, it is still important to vote. Stephan Sharkansky of Sound Politics advises that if you are voting by absentee ballot and have not already mailed it in, you should not assume that your ballot will be post-marked today. He advises that you either drop off your ballot at a polling station or take it to the post office and ask them to post mark it in front of you.

We have a couple of recommendations for the primary election:

Vote for anyone but Mayor Nickels. Of course, he will make it to the general election, but it’s important to send a message that we don’t want a Mayor that develops a “strategic plan” to attack men and fathers. We especially don’t like it when he calls that “creating strong families.”

Vote for Greg Schmidt for King County Sheriff. The acting Sheriff Sue Rahr was appointed after David Reichert won a seat in the US Congress. She represents the politically correct gender feminist perspective of King County and Seattle politics.

Rahr was not even able to get the endorsement of the deputies in her own department and is known for playing the gender card. You can get a sense of her personality by the comments she has made about how she would find it “difficult” to work under either Greg Schmidt or Jim Fuda if she were to loose to one of them. In particular, she bristled at the idea of working under Greg Schmidt, who has challenged the gender feminist dogma that permeates Seattle and King County.

The other candidate, Jim Fuda, seems like a descent enough guy, but his educational background leaves something to be desired.

Schmidt is an exceptionally intelligent and well educated man who also has a keen sense of how misguided political ideology can impact law enforcement and the justice system for the worst. Vote for Schmidt in order to have a King County Sheriffs Department that is focused on solving real crime while also respecting the basic rights of King County citizens.

Finally, while Richard Conlin is often prone to pursuing some silly liberal causes, he is still one of the few people on the Seattle Silly Council that actually cares about protecting our tax dollars. He called bull shit on the monorail early on and stuck to his position. He was proven to be right. He also helped to get renovation of the Northgate Mall unstuck. We can’t afford to loose Conlin’s maturity considering the make-up of the rest of the Silly Council and the Mayor’s office.

So, there you have it. Schmidt, Conlin, and anybody but Nickels are our recommendations in this primary election.

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Depressing Monday

Watching the transportation and energy quackery in Seattle would be fun if it were not my home town.

Mayor Nickels punts on the monorail while Gregoire threatens a deadline on replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct. Meanwhile, the 520 bridge replacement plan adds no new capacity except for bicycles. And, Nickels is sticking to his Tunnel of Love plan which also adds no new capacity.

All of this while I-912 looms on the horizon. According to Gregoire, the new gas tax is the only way to pay for transportation “improvements.” It’s sure to pass, though. So, what is Gregoire’s plan once it does? “I don’t have a back-up plan.”

Well, she does have one plan: biofuels. Biofuels have been hailed as our savoir for 30 years. The reality is that making fuel from agricultural products is expensive and consumes a lot of energy. Even if the net energy that resulted were higher, it would be nearly impossible to grow enough ingredients to make a dent in our energy supply.

To be fair, we should also mention Mayor Nickels new order to plant 2 trees to replace every 1 tree removed from city land. He even forked up $170,000 to pay for this "bold" plan. Next we will hear that this has something to do with transportation. It would be nice if he carried this philosophy over to the Viaduct, where 2 lanes are needed for every 1 lane.

There are many things Gregoire could do right now, instead of holding every transportation project hostage to her gas tax. She could start by reducing state government employment instead of increasing it. She could support real government audits in order to find millions if not billions of dollars in savings. She could face down the corrupt unions that have taken over much of government and education. And, she could reduce or eliminate social services programs that do more harm than good.

Those are all untouchables for Gregoire and her crowd. I-912 will pass, Gregoire and Nickels will blame the problems they created on the voters, and nothing will happen until we get a new governor. A new governor that is duly elected, that is, which seems like a long shot while the same gansters are in charge of King County elections.

In the meantime, the best we can do is to elect David Irons to replace King Sims. Again, a long shot since Sims controls KC elections and is not afraid to tinker with the way votes are counted (or not counted). But, electing Irons would send a message and could get some things moving before a new governor does.

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Nickels Two Years Late and We are $200 Million Short

Here is a quote from the end of Mayor Nickels' e-mail announcing his supposedly "get tough" plan on the monorail:

I believe it is our responsibility as elected officials to come together and make the hard decisions necessary to ensure we build the best transportation system possible for the region.

To that end, I will be calling on my fellow elected leaders in the area to put aside the turf battles and the historic vested interests that led to this flawed approach. We must examine the options for a more efficient and more accountable regional structure to prioritize, fund and build a transportation network that works for all of us.

One has to ask why Nickels did not take such action before the monorail wasted close to $200 million dollars and a lot of time. It was obvious to all rational thinkers that the monorail was a flawed project with an extremely flawed funding plan.

Perhaps if someone were running against him, this question might have been asked and he might have been forced to answer it. So far, the only Seattle politician that refused to drink the cool aid and has consistently called bull shit on the monorail is Richard Conlin.

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Nickels Punts on Monorail

Predictably, Mayor Nickels, who is more interested in protecting the nipples of table dancers than he is in protecting your tax dollars, has punted on the monorail.

He says he will force the monorail to a revote. He says that it should be up to the voters as to whether or not Seattle spends $11 billion in a senseless project. Ironically, he also called himself bold in the same e-mail.

Bold would have been to take the issue out of the hands of Seattle's irresponsible and idealistic voters. Actually, that is exactly what Nickels and his fellow Democrats consistently advocate when it comes to initiatives to reduce or eliminate taxes.

Nickels' e-mail follows:

******************************************************

Thank you for taking the time to send me your thoughts on the Seattle Monorail Project. As you know, I have been a strong supporter of building a modern monorail system from the beginning. Like so many others in this city, I voted in favor of this project four times. As mayor, I worked closely with the monorail to move the Green Line toward construction. And I personally looked forward to boarding the monorail train on its inaugural trip.

But as mayor, it is my job to act in the best interests of the city.

By now, most are aware of the monorail’s problems. The monorail staff earlier this year proposed a risky $11 billion dollar financing plan that the board rightly rejected. In the wake of that decision, I said it was necessary to give the monorail board time to restore public confidence in the project and develop a new plan for moving forward. But, as that time wore on, it became clear that the board had to present a new plan to voters this November to either shorten the line or ask for more money. And that is why I set a Sept. 15th deadline.

For me, the pivotal issue is whether the monorail has sufficient revenue to support the project. To that end, I asked four questions to be answered before a spade of dirt is turned.

* Can the monorail finish building what it starts?
* Is the project financially viable now and in the future?
* Is the estimated $7 billion financing cost an acceptable price to pay?
* And does this protect the tax payers of Seattle from undue risk?

I appreciate the efforts the agency has made in recent weeks to meet my request. Unfortunately, the recommendation approved by the Monorail Board on Wednesday, and presented to me yesterday, does not meet those tests. My staff, including Chief Financial Officer Dwight Dively, sat down with agency representatives yesterday to go over the financial plan in detail. Put simply: the monorail does not have enough money to pay for the project. The financing plan presented to me is not prudent. It relies on a risky assumption that money from car tabs will grow faster than expert economists consider reasonable or prudent. You can’t solve a real revenue problem with rosy projections.

What that means is there is a much higher risk that the monorail will be forced to ask for higher taxes in the future, or extend the length of the debt to an unacceptable 40, 50 or even 60 years. It means we are back to the original flawed financial plan the board rejected.

Two other areas also concerned me. First, the financial plan sets aside no money for monorail operations after 2020. It assumes 100 percent revenue recovery from operations, which is something no other public transit agency in the country has achieved. Second, cost cuts forced by the monorail’s revenue problem have significantly compromised the design and functionality of the system. It is no longer the Green Line promised to voters.

In light of these concerns, I’m taking several steps that I feel are necessary to protect city taxpayers.

First, I am canceling the agreement that grants permission for the monorail to use city streets. Exercising my authority to cancel the Transit Way Agreement is the most direct method for preventing this flawed plan from going forward.

Second, I believe it is fundamentally important that the voters of Seattle have the final say in this project. The people of Seattle know I’m a mayor willing to make tough decisions. In this case, the people have a decision to make, too. The people created the monorail authority and I respect the people’s right to have the final say in its fate. It should not be decided in City Hall and it certainly should not be decided in Olympia.

So I have asked the City Council to meet in emergency session on Thursday for the purpose of putting an advisory measure on November’s ballot. The measure will ask whether or not the public still believes the monorail should be built in light of the risks now known.

That gives the Monorail board one more opportunity at its Wednesday meeting to do the right thing and put its own measure on the ballot for voters to decide this November. If they are unwilling to do that, then the city will do it for them.

The question before all of us now is where do we go from here?

On my direction, the Seattle Department of Transportation is developing transit alternatives to serve the Ballard and West Seattle corridors. If the monorail is not in Seattle’s future, we must find new ways to move people around the city.

But we must do more. It is time for the region to face the fact that the way we fund, prioritize and build transportation projects no longer works.

We have seen successes lately. Sound Transit has turned the corner and the Link light rail line is nearly one-third complete. Earlier this year, the state passed the largest transportation funding plan in its history. That money will pay for half the cost of replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct with a tunnel. It also provides $500 million to replace the 520 floating bridge.

But for too long cities, counties, the state and other agencies have competed against each other for money, priority and access to the ballot. Indeed the creation of the Seattle Popular Monorail Authority as an independent new government was a result of Seattle voters’ frustration with transportation decision-making gridlock. We need to use this moment to reexamine how we as a region meet our transportation needs.

I believe it is our responsibility as elected officials to come together and make the hard decisions necessary to ensure we build the best transportation system possible for the region.

To that end, I will be calling on my fellow elected leaders in the area to put aside the turf battles and the historic vested interests that led to this flawed approach. We must examine the options for a more efficient and more accountable regional structure to prioritize, fund and build a transportation network that works for all of us.

Thank you again for your time and your concern on this issue.

Sincerely,

GREG NICKELS
Mayor of Seattle

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Kyoto or Katrina?

Mayor Greg Nickels finally stepped up to the plate to help organize Seattle’s response to the natural disaster in New Orleans. Even the Seattle Silly Council is in on the act.

Interestingly, Nickels seemed to suggest in an e-mail he sent out today to his mail list that the planned "day of giving" is in response to so many of Seattle’s citizens asking him what our city planned to do.

“The phone in my office has been ringing consistently, with calls from citizens and employees wanting desperately to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina.”

Well, I guess all those phone calls were interrupting Nickels’ irrelevant work on signing the Kyoto Agreement, so he finally decided to do something to help put an end to the distraction. Or, perhaps the calls were getting in the way of his strategic plan to attack fathers in the name of "strong families."

Mayor Nickels’ response to fellow Americans suffering from such a devastating disaster has been under-whelming. This late and lackluster response provides perhaps the best example of why much of the country considers Seattle to be self-absorbed and, well, silly in its pursuits of such things as signing the Kyoto Accord.

It may also support Seattle PI columnist Robert Jamieson's contention that liberal Seattle has a strong undercurrent of racism. The faces visible on TV were mostly black. Is that a little too much diversity for Seattle?

If we want more federal tax dollars for the many projects we want to conduct around here – and we definitely should be getting more money – we need to change our country’s view of our city. We should have started by being a leader in responding to the needs of New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf Coast. Going forward, Mayor Nickels should stop thumbing his nose at the very people that control the purse strings.

Maybe then we could do things like build the monorail using a more appropriate mix of federal and local tax money instead of straddling ourselves and future generations with outrageous MVET fees.

Mayor Nickels likes to present himself as bold. He set a deadline of tomorrow for the ill-fated monorail debacle to find a solution or get off the crapper. We'll see if he is any better at responding to his own deadlines than to natural disasters and thousands of fellow Americans in need.

At which point, assuming he lives up to his own deadline, the obituary for the monorail will be lost among many others for people who perished in New Orleans.

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Frivolity in the Mail

Glenn Sacks skewers a book about the virtues of raising boys in single mother households, while George Will provides a picture of the actual results of fatherless households.

It is hard to take seriously any of the propaganda from Seattle politicians hitting my mailbox lately when probably the single most important issue of our age is not even mentioned.

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Mythical Income

The Seattle PI recently perpetuated the myth that women are paid less than men.

The calculation used to determine the relative incomes of men and women is simple enough. Take the total income earned by each sex and then divide by the number of people.

The problem is, it aint so simple.

In a free economy such as ours, the incomes that people earn are based on a large number of factors. Years on the job, past experience, education, and especially hours worked, are all key determinants of income. Thus, a valid comparison of income levels between men and women, blacks and whites, or between any two groups, cannot be made without factoring in these variables.

An appropriate analysis should also consider who receives the benefit of these incomes. For example, the income of a man working to support a stay-at-home Mom and their children should be allotted to everyone in the family, not just the man. After all, any good marketer will tell you that women purchase the vast majority of consumer goods in our country. If the income of women is so much lower than that of men, how exactly is that happening?

Equally important, a good analysis should take into account the recipients of wealth redistribution. Our country’s combined tax rates are close to (if not over) forty percent of individual income. This income is taken from the hands of the person that earned it and redistributed throughout the economy. Women receive far more of this income redistribution than do men. For example, many federal programs are far more generous to women than they are to men. The Violence Against Women Act provides billions of dollars to women only, while the National Institute of Health provides several times more research funding for female-only disease than it does for male-only health issues.

Finally, a good analysis would consider the relative performance of men and women in different types of employment. Often, the obvious differences in the ability of each each sex to perform a particular job are considered too politically incorrect to even mention. Men, for example, are much more capability of performing some jobs because of their greater physical strength. It doesn't stop there though: a female friend recently told me that whenever she calls a company's customer service line, she hangs up if she gets a woman on the line. According to her, men customer service agents are more helpful and courteous, so she will continue calling until she gets one. That example is just anecdotal, of course, but science finds numorous and impossible to ignore biological differences in the brain structure of men relative to women that go well beyond our obvious difference in physique.

But, if these issues were taken into account, gender feminists would ultimately have one less thing to be hysterical about. A responsible newspaper would clearly caveat these studies before allowing their results to be printed. In fact, these bogus studies would have been long ago dismissed on the pages of our country’s newspapers if they cared much about truth.

They don’t, though. Perhaps this is why so many Americans are now looking to each other for sources of news instead of traditional sources.

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Companies Fathers Should Boycott

StandYourGround.com has compiled a list of companies that are unfriendly to men and fathers. These companies include:

Ford Motor Company
Progressive Insurance
Reebok
Hefty Trash Bags
American Furniture
Red Lobster
J.C. Penney
Lifetime TV
Dish Network
Hummer
Heinz Soup
Post-it Notes
Budweiser
Heineken
The Body Shop
Walls Ice Cream (UK)
Factory Mattress
FluMist
Washington Mutual
Subway
David and Goliath
Dairy Queen
Capital One
Cooper Tires
Trident
Liz Claiborne
Mikes Hard Lemonade
Mass Mutual
Toys R Us
Verizon
Purrell Sanitizers

Men, fathers, mothers with boys, and the people that care about them, should not purchase from these companies. In many cases, they are major financial sponsors of gender feminist organizations focused on destroying fatherhood and families.

For more information on why StandYourGround.com put each company on their boycott list, please go here.

This iguana is canceling his Verizon account today. Nextel service is better anyway and none of my dollars will go to hateful anti-father organizations.

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Iguanas, Sun, and the Impending Gray

Yes, things have been slow here in Silly Seattle this past week.

But, as you may know, Iguanas like to soak up the sun. Since these have been the last few weeks of sun before the long, gray winter, we have been out on a rock in the glorious sunshine. Soon, we will be inside, munching on Prozac, and back on the case.

This time has not been spent with idle minds, however, and so we shall have many words of lizard wisdom soon.

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The Politics of Ambulance Chasing

In a highly partisan column, Westnut of the Seattle Times shows us why so many people - even those like me that are not Republican - shake there heads at the Democrats.

Westnut says the federal government has responded too slowly to the disaster in New Orleans. Predictably, he blames it on Iraq and the Bush amdministration's focus on combating terrorism. Among those fixated on self-realization in the present, the attacks of 9-11 are a lifetime away.

In the meantime, Mayor Nickels - Protect of Nipples, still refuses to take time away from his quest to sign the Kyoto agreement and focus on mobilizing Seattle to help the Gulf Coast region. In the usual self-absorbed Seattle way, though, he is talking about disaster preparedness for his city.

It's senseless to argue the reality of the time it takes to organize and mobilize an effective effort like what is needed for New Orleans. People like Westnut and most of the politicians in Seattle will crow at every opportunity about their hatred of Bush. They especially do not miss a chance to show their self-absorbtion and focus on their idealistic world of personal creature comforts. After all, one of their favorites terms is "livability."

But, nobody likes ambulance chasers.

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Come On Nickels!

If you can prance around the country selling your Kyoto for cities agreement, you ought to be able to lead Seattle in helping New Orleans.

Still not a peep out of you.

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Connelly Catches a Clue

Joel Connelly earned his pay with this column:

Hell hath no fury like a bureaucracy defending itself, a truism demonstrated every time backers of consolidation pit themselves against turf-defending Puget Sound-area transportation agencies.

Even though Connelly and several other pundits in the Puget Sound region have come down squarely against the monorail debacle and most are finally beginning to question why this area has such a transportation mess, don't expect the entrenched transportation elite to offer up their own heads. We need to do chop them off. I-912 does just that.

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Challenge for Mayor Nickels

The home page of Mayor Nickels’ web site is covered with propaganda about the US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement on which he has spent much time, energy, and resources. In particular, it’s clear that he loves the attention he is getting in Europe.

Back up for a minute and think about how this fits into the larger scheme of things. This “agreement” is primarily for show. There is not much a mayor can do about climate. Debate that if you want, but cities can only nip around the edges of environmental issues, if that. And, there is not much to the argument that a city like Seattle is “leading the way” and “setting an example” for everyone else. American cities like Seattle have little credibility, even in the suburbs that surround them.

The implications for Seattle of its Mayor thumbing his nose at the Bush Administration on this and many other issues does have a very real impact on our daily lives. With multi-billion dollar needs for basic transportation infrastructure, such as replacement of the Alaskan Way viaduct, we received a paltry $231 million commitment from the federal government in the most recent transportation bill.

In federal and transportation terms, $231 million is peanuts. And, this is the price of positioning yourself as the archrival of the party in power in Washington. Seattle has few friends around the country, except in governments of cities that are themselves falling apart and poorly managed. Seattle in particular is seen as a city of self-absorbed idealists that would happily secede from the US and join Canada.

There is something Mayor Nickels could do to change Seattle’s bad image, however. In doing so, he need not impact the “progressive” image he so carefully cultivates at the expense of our city.

Mayor Nickels could lead a city-wide effort to help New Orleans. In a Seattle Times article about the Puget Sound area mobilizing to help New Orleans, there is no mention of Nickels and nary a mention of Seattle. Seattle could and should be a leader in helping a city that it has little relationship with, except that both are part of the greater America. Talking about diversity and multi-cultural commitment. Along the golf coast, Nickels would find a climate that really is in need of repair. If he wants national attention, this would be a way to garner some that would only inspire.

And, it could help us get back into the good graces of the rest of country. After all, if the big earthquake ever hits or, perhaps worse, Mount Rainier ever blows, we might need it.

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