Snow and ice continue to linger in the city of Seattle impeding transportation and disrupting businesses in a manner I have never before witnessed. Meanwhile, city officials continue their brilliantly stupid three pronged attack on the situation while congratulating themselves for "responding on all fronts to snow and ice," a direct quote from Mayor Greg Nickels' website.

Let's examine the evidence of their wholly ineffective tactics:

Prong #1: Do not use salt to melt the ice. It will damage the environment.

Prong #2: Fasten rubber blades to the plows with the intention of packing down the snow to create "a hard- packed surface," otherwise known as a sturdy layer of ice. Metal blades will supposedly damage the "cat eye" lane dividers, that is, if you run them over.

Prong #3: Cancel over 50% of the city's bus service for an entire week, completely remove articulated buses from the fleet, and plow ONLY "major arterials" while completely ignoring any other street.

Is this strategy working? Of course not. But the city, in all their ignorance, would have you believe differently.

According to today's Seattle Times article it's all "by design." One look at our roads and one thing becomes obvious: this is clearly the worst and most ineffective design imaginable.

So how does Seattle manage to be so incredibly backwards? With a mix of tree hugging liberals too caught up in their own idealistic idiocy to think reasonably (if snow like this only happens once a decade, what real harm can salting do on such a small scale?) battling a crop of ignorant rednecks shouting "just plow the streets yourself you whining Prius driving fops" we get a perfect storm of do nothing political correctness.

Both sides can yell and scream but the bottom line is the roads are horrible, public transportation is a mess, cars are sliding all over the place, and still the city's best and sadly most effective plan is to merely wait it all out. Pathetic.

Whether or not this sort of weather is fairly common, completely uncommon, or a once a decade occurrence I am not interested in debating. What does matter is that people want and need to get to work and our city is doing almost nothing to help us do that. If maintaining our roads and our transit isn't at or near the top of our public officials' agenda then they all need to go. If taking care of of our transportation system really means so little to them, what the hell are we paying them for?