Wednesday, April 6, 2005

Blessed Readers I love my readers. All five of you. I get a lot of random readers from Google searches that never cease to amaze me. But my favorite, favorite, favorite search of all was the one for Ken Salazar fucker. Lots of articles popped up for Ken Salazar fucker. You could make a poem out of the stories that appeared. Zebulon Pike? Cousin-fucker. John Denver? Too many Muppets appearances. I was going to post the NYT article about Fucker Carlson, but someone beat me to it. Fucker deserves a funeral pyre fueled with pig shit. Please refrain from using the words fuck, fucking, fucker, or fuck-up. ... (1) Senator Ken Salazar (Colorado). (2) Senator Joseph Lieberman (Conn.). ... Nimoy song about Bilbo Baggins stuck in my head for days you evil fucker. ... "I wish that little fucker would just bite it," I said to Benjie... ...I'll allow it because you had to take that poor Michalski fucker... ...the Fox-news Republican talking points the way this fucker framed the story... As our Ben Franklin would have said, "The fucker's really know how to fuck things up." (Fuck - that last one was great. I might have to change the name of this blog.) Somehow, Ken Salazar fucker led some reader to my nasty little entry on Ken Salazar, the top candidate for Nighthorse Campbell traitor of the year. But this particular combination of words is just amazing to me. Google searches are just great, aren't they? People slap together any combination of terms and the combinations are endless. "Democrats suck." "I like food why." "Blue sky cheaters baseball." Then someone plugged in "Mother's day without a mother" and found my blog. I want to know who this person was. They need a hug, and a card, and a nice Sunday brunch. 8:20:13 PM     Speak up!  []

Seattle Law Firm Dragged into Tom Delay's Mudslide Seattle (and worldwide) law firm Preston Gates Ellis is getting lots of free press this week. Unfortunately, the press is coming from their entanglement with Tom Delay and a mysterious trip to Russia.  (If you haven't been watching the Delay death spiral spinning through the blogosphere, catch up here, here, and here.)  The law firm in particular has been maligned in the press before, of course.  They're a gigantic, multinational law firm with their thumbs in a lot of pies around the world.  Just take a look at the clients of their Seattle office here:  blue chip corporations like Starbucks, T-Mobile, and Labor Ready.  It's hard to represent guys like this and keep your sneakers clean.  In a 1999 piece about slave labor connected to Nordstrom, Ben Jacklet wrote in the Stranger: Think of a huge and costly project in Seattle, and chances are Preston Gates was on the inside--whether it was the new Mariners stadium, the RTA light-rail plan, the failed attempt to build a Seattle Commons, or the successful conversion of Pacific Medical Center into headquarters for Amazon.com. Back then, the firm was accused of lobbying against enforcing minimum wage and immigation laws in the Marianas Islands, on behalf of a high-powered client (the Seattle landmark Nordstrom.)  Earlier this year, Rick Anderson of the Seattle Weekly wrote about PGE's squishy connections to D.C. lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who is under investigation for shady lobbying tactics.  Mr. Abramoff also worked for PGE for several years, and besides being involved in the whole Marianas Islands affair, he's also getting a lot of interest for his role in a trip by Mr. Delay to Britain that seemed perilously close to influence peddling.  (I don't have the time to review all of the details, and Rick Anderson does such a better job of untangling the connections than I would.  So go read his article instead.  If you want more background, read this too.)  It gets better.  If Tom Delay ends under investigation for the Britain trip (this man's getting more attention than Barry Bonds these days), he would be in front of the House ethics committee chaired by eastern Washington Republican Doc Hastings.  Hastings has also received money from Delay's much-investigated TRMPAC.  7:54:20 PM     Speak up!  []