Archives for April 2005

It always struck me as odd, the Bush administration’s vehement opposition to the reimportation of American-made pharmaceuticals from Canada, where they are often available for as little as half the U.S. price. The administration cites “safety concerns” as the reason it blocks Americans from buying drugs from other countries… a truly absurd notion when we’re talking about Canada for christsake.

Yeah sure, Canadians are technically foreigners… in the same way that the Scottish aren’t British and the Taiwanese aren’t Chinese. But to paint Canadians as “the other” is kind of like saying that North Dakotans are somehow less Dakotan than South Dakotans. I mean, let’s be honest… here in Seattle, we have a helluva lot more in common, culturally and politically, with our neighbors in Vancouver, British Columbia than with our fellow countrymen in say, Columbia, South Carolina.

It is thus laughable to “protect Americans” from half-priced statins, while a truly noxious Canadian import like Alan Thicke is permitted to freely cross the border.

Like most Democrats, I had simply dismissed the Republicans’ hard stance on Canadian drug reimportation as payback for millions of dollars in political contributions from a U.S. pharmaceutical industry eager to protect its huge profit margins. But recent events have suggested an ulterior, more devious motive.

Pharmacists across the nation are now refusing to fill prescriptions for morning-after pills and other forms of birth control, saying that dispensing such medications violates their personal religious beliefs.

An increasing number of clashes are occurring in drugstores across the country. Pharmacists often risk dismissal or other disciplinary action to stand up for their beliefs, while shaken teenage girls and women desperately call their doctors, frequently late at night, after being turned away by sometimes-lecturing men and women in white coats.

“There are pharmacists who will only give birth control pills to a woman if she’s married. There are pharmacists who mistakenly believe contraception is a form of abortion and refuse to prescribe it to anyone,” said Adam Sonfield of the Alan Guttmacher Institute in New York, which tracks reproductive issues. “There are even cases of pharmacists holding prescriptions hostage, where they won’t even transfer it to another pharmacy when time is of the essence.”

That is what happened to Kathleen Pulz and her husband, who panicked when the condom they were using broke. Their fear really spiked when the Walgreens pharmacy down the street from their home in Milwaukee refused to fill an emergency prescription for the morning-after pill.

“I couldn’t believe it,” said Pulz, 44, who with her husband had long ago decided they could not afford a fifth child. “How can they make that decision for us? I was outraged. At the same time, I was sad that we had to do this. But I was scared. I didn’t know what we were going to do.”

Legislatures in twelve states have already passed or are considering passage of “conscience clauses” to protect pharmacists who refuse to dispense medication they find personally objectionable. In many areas of rural America, where a trip to the next closest pharmacy might entail a 100-mile drive, this exercise of conscience on the part of the pharmacist can effectively trump the medical decision of doctor and patient. And with giant retailer Wal-Mart displacing small town pharmacies throughout the nation, millions of Americans could find their access to birth control and other medications resting in the hands of a single corporation… a corporation that has already proven itself sympathetic to, and easily cowed by, pressures from the extreme, religious right.

Make no mistake… the right-wing Christian fundamentalists who have seized control of the Republican leadership are not only intent on outlawing abortion, but most, if not all forms of birth control as well. And so it occurred to me… what is the use of limiting access to birth control in this country, if it can be easily purchased from our neighbors to the North?

Now some might think it a paranoid reach for me to conjecture that the current ban on reimportation of drugs from Canada is somehow connected to the religious right’s war on birth control. But it would be naive to believe that the Dobsons and Perkins and DeLays of this world aren’t at least as devious as me. It is hard to say to what degree the right’s moral agenda drives its unshakeable opposition to drug reimportation, but you can be sure that the thought has certainly crossed their minds. These are people, after all, who have shown themselves to be exceedingly imaginative at devising ways to impose their world view on others.

And so, while Bush is clearly a shill for the pharmaceutical industry, it is fair to wonder if there is more to his firm opposition to drug reimportation than meets the eye. This is a religious war… and as in all wars, it is of paramount importance to secure one’s own borders.

From the day it was launched, Pacific Northwest Portal instantly became a must-have bookmark for anybody interested in perusing progressive news and views from the Pacific Northwest. The Portal aggregates feeds from dozens of blogs in Washington, Oregon and Idaho (including yours truly,) and serves as a one-stop-shop for progressive news and information resources.

Andrew at the NW Progressive Institute has been hard at work making the portal even better, including a new Highlights section and the addition of fourteen new blogs, for 106 in all. You can read about the changes on the NW Progressive Blog… which by the way, has received some significant updates of its own.

UPDATE:
As TJ points out, Andrew has posted a diary about Pacific NW Portal to DailyKos, and it needs only a couple more “recommends” to make the hot list:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/4/25/11208/6109

If you haven’t already done so, please read Frank Rich’s column on Justice Sunday in the New York Times: “A High-Tech Lynching in Prime Time.”

Anyone who doesn’t get with this program, starting with all Democrats, is damned as a bigoted enemy of “people of faith.” But “people of faith,” as used by the event’s organizers, is another duplicitous locution; it’s a code word for only one specific and exclusionary brand of Christianity. The trade organization representing tonight’s presenters, National Religious Broadcasters, requires its members to “sign a distinctly evangelical statement of faith that would probably exclude most Catholics and certainly all Jewish, Muslim or Buddhist programmers,” according to the magazine Broadcasting & Cable. The only major religious leader involved with “Justice Sunday,” R. Albert Mohler Jr. of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has not only called the papacy a “false and unbiblical office” but also told Terry Gross on NPR two years ago that “any belief system” leading “away from the cross of Christ and toward another way of ultimate meaning, is, indeed, wicked and evil.”

Another great column by Rich. Read the whole thing.

In a rare fit of frankness, our good friend Stefan over at (un)Sound Politics recently posted the following comment:

The P-I is almost as eager to expose King County corruption as is that blog with the veterinary proctology fetish.

This is an admission that, by comparison, Stefan is “eager to expose King County corruption.” So eager, that it clouds his judgment.

For example, in reporting on the depositions of Dean Logan and Bill Huennekens, Stefan concludes that King County “fraudently [sic] certified” the November election, constituting a “Class C felony.” Of course, Stefan hasn’t actually seen the depositions, but that’s okay, because he got the information directly from a totally reliable, objective source: GOPolitburo Chair Chris Vance. Um… Vance hasn’t actually seen the depositions either (nobody has… the court reporter hasn’t made the transcripts available yet,) but you can be sure his information is rock solid… because it came directly from Rossi’s attorneys. And as we all know, a lawyer representing a client in a legal case is always the best place to go for objective, spin-free, totally reliable information.

Not!

Yes, Stefan is so eager to uncover corruption, that he bases his conclusions on Vance’s spin of Rossi’s attorneys’ selective presentation of Logan’s recollection. And then he has the gall to follow up this exercise in irresponsible journalism by attacking the P-I for not covering these “damaging revelations”…? You know, revelations like….

3) there was inadequate accounting on blank ballots. How many were printed, how many were returned unused; how many ballots were printed “on demand” in the office, or which of the office staff even had the access and ability to print ballots on demand

4) polling place inspectors (who were appointed by the Democrat Party this year) got blank ballots to take home on Friday before the election; the number is known only to the nearest 20. The inspectors were not asked to account for and return any remaining unused ballots after the polls closed. They were simply instructed to destroy them.

Wow… Democrats printed blank ballots on demand, took them home, and never accounted for them! I can see how one might easily conclude that this damaging revelation is evidence of Democratic corruption… but since neither Stefan nor I are experts at election procedures, I decided to ask somebody who is… the always helpful Lawyer X. And as he explains, there’s no revelation here at all.

[The inspectors] get a shrink-wrapped package of sequentially numbered ballots in a quantity estimated to be what they need, rounded up to the next 20. On election day they bring the shrink-wrapped ballot to the polling place where they join the democratic and republican judges and observers. There have been no complaints that anyone showed up with the shrink wrap broken. The election workers are required to write down the ballot stub number they start with and the one they end with, to return all unused ballots to king county and to account for all ballots used or spoiled. There is no news here.

There are records of the purchases of the ballots, which are printed by Diebold and come shrink wrapped. It is correct that the software for the ballot on demand system does not record the number of ballots printed but the ballots are only printed at the counter in the main election office, in response to over the counter absentee ballot requests or at MBOS in order to make a replacement ballot.

I’m still not exactly sure what the “ballot on demand” system is, but I understand that King County is not the only county to use it. So what we’re talking about here are standard procedures which may sound suspicious to people who don’t know what the fuck they are talking about, but which in the end are really unremarkable, um… standard procedures.

Still, if you’re eager to find corruption, even standard procedures look pretty damn suspicious.

As I said in my interview on Up Front with Robert Mak, Stefan started with the conclusion that Democrats stole this election, and he has gone about desperately trying to twist the evidence into supporting his thesis. That’s fine. That’s a lot of what partisan bloggers do. And that’s why he’s perfectly comfortable drawing conclusions from third-hand accounts of depositions on election procedures he knows nothing about.

But real journalists, like those at the P-I, see their job as reporting the facts. And my guess is that they’ll continue to refrain from reporting on the depositions until they actually see them. Even then, it wouldn’t surprise me if the P-I got a few of the facts wrong… but at least it would be an honest effort, as opposed to the kind you get over on (u)SP.

I’m not kidding… these theo-fascists are scary, scary folk, intent on establishing God’s dominion over earth… which of course really means their dominion over us. They despise our Constitution as a document of the Enlightenment, and seek to replace it with a theocratic republic. But short of a military coup, they cannot achieve their Dominionist agenda without first undermining the independence of the judiciary, destroying a check and balance crucial to keeping America the world’s oldest functioning democracy.

However as the Los Angeles Times reports, impeaching judges apparently takes too damn long, so Evangelical Christian leaders and top Republican lawmakers — impatient to reach the end of times — are plotting a short cut: shutting down the courts entirely.

Evangelical Christian leaders, who have been working closely with senior Republican lawmakers to place conservative judges in the federal courts, have also been exploring ways to punish sitting jurists and even entire courts viewed as hostile to their cause.

An audio recording obtained by the Los Angeles Times features two of the nation’s most influential evangelical leaders, at a private conference with supporters, laying out strategies to rein in judges, such as stripping funding from their courts in an effort to hinder their work.

Both Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay participated in the conference, which was led by Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, and Focus on the Family founder (and certified nutcase) James C. Dobson. The conference discussed all sorts of creative ways of punishing, hindering or removing judges who don’t strictly adhere to biblical orthodoxy.

“There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and there’s more than one way to take a black robe off the bench,” said Perkins.

Man… what is this thing religious extremists have against cats?

Perkins said that he had attended a meeting with congressional leaders a week earlier where the strategy of stripping funding from certain courts was “prominently” discussed. “What they’re thinking of is not only the fact of just making these courts go away and re-creating them the next day but also defunding them,” Perkins said.

He said that instead of undertaking the long process of trying to impeach judges, Congress could use its appropriations authority to “just take away the bench, all of his staff, and he’s just sitting out there with nothing to do.”

For his part, Dobson was even more focused and sinister in his approach. He doesn’t much like the composition of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, but unfortunately, judges take way too long to die. (By natural causes.) His solution?

“Very few people know this, that the Congress can simply disenfranchise a court,” Dobson said. “They don’t have to fire anybody or impeach them or go through that battle. All they have to do is say the 9th Circuit doesn’t exist anymore, and it’s gone.”

That’s right, just click your heels together and we’re all in Kansas.

These people have no respect for man’s law. They hate secularism. They hate the Constitution. They hate America.

The right-wing Evangelical extreme is taking over the Republican party, and for all you economic conservatives out there who look at your alliance with these people as a cost of maintaining a Republican majority, I have a warning for you: when they’re finished with people like me, they’ll be coming after you next.

Time for the weekly sandbox. Here’s a starter for the culture of life crowd… felinicidal maniac Bill Frist isn’t the GOP’s only cold-blooded killer. Tom DeLay killed his father, and Laura Bush ran over and killed a boyfriend. (That should get things rolling, but please feel free to rant on whatever you want.)

On a lighter note (well… unless you are a cat,) I point you to an amusing image posted over on Upper Left, that reminds all Americans that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is a cold, heartless cat killer.

No, really. As UPI Science and Technology Editor Dee Ann Divis reported back in December of 2002, Frist is a kind of kitty-cat Dr. Mengele, carving up kitties he fraudulently adopted from animal shelters.

Frist acknowledged in a 1989 book that he routinely killed cats while an ambitious medical student at Harvard Medical School in the 1970s. His office said it had no record on how many cats died. Frist disclosed that he went to animal shelters and pretended to adopt the cats, telling shelter personnel he intended to keep them as pets. Instead he used them to sharpen his surgical skills, killing them in the process.

Well so much for the “culture of life.”

Yeah, I know, you self-righteous, knee-jerk Frist defenders are going to whine that such actions are moral because cats don’t have souls… but then, neither apparently does Frist. These are kitty cats, and if not for their fraudulent adoption by Dr. Death, they may have lived out their lives as somebody’s beloved pet.

But what I find most disturbing about this little biographical tidbit is not that it shows what a heartless, unfeeling prick he is. We already knew that. It’s that it shows a pattern in Frist’s life of sacrificing ethics in the name of his personal ambition.

A man who could so callously carve up a cute little kitty is capable of anything.

UPDATE:
Reading the comments in the thread, it seems to me that a lot of you righties miss the point, so let me spell it out for you:
“F R A U D”

It’s not that he dissected cats, it’s that he fraudulently adopted them from shelters. The guy is a total puke, with no moral or ethical compass. (And… he hates cats.)

The local story that’s making national headlines is the tale of the pansy-ass hypocrites at Microsoft who withdrew their longtime support for HB 1515, the gay and lesbian anti-discrimination bill, after pressure from a Redmond-based, Evangelical mega-church.

Sandeep Kaushik apparently broke the story in The Stranger, before it swept through the national blogosphere (Slashdot and AMERICAblog, and landed on the pages of the New York Times: “Microsoft Comes Under Fire for Reversal on Gay Rights Bill.”

While I’ve been pretty darn loud in expressing my personal disgust over the defeat of HB 1515, I totally missed the boat on Microsoft’s role — or lack thereof. Fortunately a lot of other local bloggers have provided excellent coverage, including Evergreen Politics and Pacific Views. But the best local commentary I’ve seen thus far comes from Columbian Watch, both on the Microsoft debacle and on yesterday’s defeat of the bill.

This is a really important issue, and not just because HB 1515 was a deserving bill, or because it’s fun to stick it to Microsoft. It is important because it demonstrates how powerful the right-wing religious extremists have become, and how dangerously close they are to establishing their neo-fascist theocracy. That a powerful company like Microsoft, with a long history of supporting gay rights… or a politician like Sen. Finkbeiner, who has previously supported the legislation… would feel compelled to bow to pressures from the Dominionist forces, should scare everybody who naively believes that our basic human rights are somehow protected by that yellowed scrap of parchment on display at the National Archives.

I need to run out, but I have a lot more to say on this issue. And I intend to say it while I still can.

Tim Eyman’s career as a grassroots initiative sponsor ended a couple years ago. (Actually, it probably ended with I-695, but let’s not get too technical.)

And so, when on election night, in an effort to deflect attention away from the spectacular defeat of his gambling industry backed Initiative 892, Tim announced to the media his plans for a performance audits initiative, I was more than comfortable predicting that he didn’t have a snowball’s chance of qualifying for the ballot without the financial support of a sugar daddy.

Well, as David Ammons of the AP reports, Timmy’s pinched his pigeon:

Michael Dunmire, 60, a wealthy investment executive from the Seattle suburb of Woodinville, has contributed nearly $240,000 to Eyman’s Initiative 900 and says more could be on the way. The initiative, now circulating for signatures, would require regular performance audits of state agencies and programs.

The Dunmires have also given $20,000 to Tim’s personal compensation PAC “Help Me Help Myself” (or whatever he calls it.)

Oh, I could go on and on about how Tim hasn’t qualified a grassroots initiative for the ballot in over two years, and about how people need to get it through their heads that he is just a shill for wealthy special interests, and about how Dunmire is just propping him up. But I think the expert quoted in the AP story sums it up best.

Eyman critic David Goldstein, a Seattle software designer and blogger, said Dunmire is “basically propping up Eyman. People should finally get it through their heads that Eyman is not some grassroots guy. He is a front for the monied special interests.

“It’s not scary. It’s disappointing. There is no way he gets on the ballot without a Sugar Daddy. Clearly, Eyman is no longer a grassroots activist in any way whatsoever. For two years running, he couldn’t get a grassroots initiative on the ballot.”

Now that guy knows what he’s talking about.

I hate to give incredibly wealthy right-wingers, eager to distort our political system, any free advice, but the Legislature just passed a very thorough performance audits bill, so perhaps you could have marshaled your resources a little more efficiently, huh? Hey, I know… how about financing a bill that legalizes discrimination against gays and lesbians!

Anyway, so now we know why Tim chose this dog of an initiative in the first place: Dunmire told him to… and the customer is always right. Sure, I-900 generates about as much excitement as a Pam Roach Pin-Up Calendar… and yeah, it’s almost totally superfluous now that the Legislature has passed its own performance audits bill. But Timmy knows a meal ticket when he sees one, and Dunmire is his a free pass to, um… less irrelevance.

My only hope is that Dunmire is as sharp a businessman as he claims to be, and eventually realizes what a crappy investment Tim Eyman really is.

The Washington state Senate narrowly approved a procedural move to bring HB 1515 to the floor for a vote, only to see the bill defeated by a 25-24 margin. The bill would have added “sexual orientation” to the state’s anti-discrimination laws.

All 23 Republican senators voted against the bill, along with conservative Democrats Jim Hargrove and Tim Sheldon. Hargrove says he opposed the measure for religious reasons.

“I believe adultery is wrong, I believe sex outside marriage is wrong, I believe homosexuality is wrong. Therefore, I cannot give government protection to this behavior,” Hargrove said.

I suppose then, that Jim would support legislation permitting discrimination in housing, employment, lending and insurance against straight couples having premarital sex? (And if he thinks he’s gonna get a blow job from me tonight, he’s got another thing coming.)

So there you have it… the entire Senate Republican caucus has gone on the record sanctioning discrimination against gays and lesbians.

Seattle Times publisher Frank Blethen must not be feeling well this morning. How can I tell? Well, every time Frank catches a cold, he blows his nose all over the editorial page with yet another op-ed attacking the estate tax.

A new death tax, rising to 16 percent of assets, is levied on children who inherit businesses and property from parents who have died, which will unfairly force heirs to sell family businesses they had hoped to operate.

Translation: Frank, and the rest of his family, are mortal.

The Times likes to remind us that it is a “family owned” newspaper, implying that the extended Blethen family’s 50.5 percent stake (the rest is owned by media giant Knight-Ridder) somehow makes it a more honest guardian of community interests than the apparently evil, corporate drones over at the Hearst-owned Seattle P-I. But their unrelenting obsession with the estate tax shows that the community they care most deeply about is that which gathers around the Blethen family’s Thanksgiving Day dinner table.

Indeed, in a February 2003 interview in the Seattle Weekly, Frank was quite blunt about the family’s priorities:

“We have–and this is part of the governing documents–equal responsibility for perpetuating the family ownership and for practicing independent journalism.”

And what happens when these responsibilities conflict with each other? Well for one, you get the Time’s cynical adoption of the term “death tax.” A truly independent journalist would wince at the thought of using such a shamelessly loaded piece of Republican sloganeering. And then there’s the Times’ OCD-like focus on the issue itself, editorializing against the death estate tax six times in the past six months.

The Times’ eligiac lament for the days of family-owned newspapers is also misleading… evoking a romanticized image of three generations of Blethens bravely pounding away at their Underwoods as they fend off the sudden assault of a faceless, out-of-state, modern media giant. The 142-year-old Seattle P-I has been published by Hearst since 1921, and the paper’s editorial board and staff are just as much a part of our community as that of the Times. Indeed, the Blethen family’s holding company is no mom-and-pop shop itself; its assets include a number of online news, information and advertising web sites, printing and distribution subsidiaries, plus nine newspapers in Washington and Maine, including the Yakima Herald-Republic, the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin, The Issaquah Press, and Maine’s largest circulation papers, the Portland Press-Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram.

While the Blethen family’s holdings are dwarfed by those of Hearst, both the Times and the P-I are in fact, family-owned newspapers… the Hearst Corporation having been privately held by the Hearst family for its entire 118-year history.

I actually empathize with the Blethens, and wish them the best of luck in transferring the business intact to their fifth generation. But it is arrogant of them to ask us to eliminate a century-old tax, shifting burden to the already over-burdened poor and middle-class, in the interest of easing the Blethens’ selfish — if admirable — goal of maintaining their family legacy. While millions of American children are forced to get by in substandard schools, and without adequate health care, it is hard for me to squeeze out a few tears for the children of wealth and privilege.

Three generations of Blethens have managed to keep their inheritance in the family despite a much higher estate tax than the Times now rails against. If the current generation proves unwilling to make the same kind of sacrifices as their elders, then the Blethen family should blame itself, not the tax code.

The Seattle P-I reported yesterday that according to a GOP statistical analysis, Dino Rossi won by about 100 votes, when accounting for ballots cast by felons, dead voters and non-citizens. How convenient.

How very, very convenient.

Indeed, to achieve this stunning reversal of fortune, several extremely convenient events would have to take place. First, the Republicans would have to prove that the number of illegal votes is anywhere near the thousand-ish they have alleged (not likely considering their track record thus far.) Second, the court would have to ignore offsetting errors from pro-Rossi counties… like the 1793 provisional ballots that were improperly counted without matching signatures. Third, the court would have to accept a statistical analysis. And fourth, the court would have to adopt the rather unscientific methodology the Republicans are proposing for their analysis.

As the P-I explains, Republicans are relying on a precinct level analysis to pad Rossi’s numbers.

For example, if Gregoire received 60 percent of a vote in Precinct A and Rossi 40 percent, and there were 100 improper votes from that precinct, Gregoire’s total would be reduced by 60 votes and Rossi’s by 40.

In most cases, the number of improper votes traceable to a single precinct is very small — often, as few as one. In that case, using the same percentages, Gregoire would lose 0.6 votes and Rossi 0.4.

The problem is, a single illegal vote per precinct is not a statistically significant sample. This results in what statisticians call an “ecological fallacy,” a logical flaw whereby aggregate statistics collected for a group are used to make inferences about an individual member.

For example, Democrats have argued that the majority of felons are male, and men tend to disproportionately favor Republicans, thus complicating any statistical analysis of the felon vote. One could also argue that felons tend to be, um… felons, and as such, would be less likely to vote for the state’s leading law enforcement officer.

Republicans, on the other hand, argue that such a demographic analysis would be absurd… that the only accurate means of deducing a voter’s behavior is to simply look at the totals for his precinct. But the absurdity of the Republican’s favored methodology can be clearly illustrated by using it to infer the ballot of a single voter: Stefan Sharkansky. If right-wing poster-blogger Stefan were an illegal voter casting a ballot in his heavily Democratic Greenlake precinct, the Republican analysis would subtract .78 votes from Gregoire, and only .19 votes from Rossi.

Of course, Stefan is not your typical Greenlake voter… but then, neither is a felon. And that’s exactly the point. The fact that Stefan is an angry, selfish, right-wing, extremist prick a Republican, is a helluva lot more predictive of his voting behavior than his precinct.

Thus any court judicially active enough to read statistical analysis into a contest statute that clearly doesn’t envision it, would be faced with a quandary: if statistical analysis is to be used to determine the winner of this election… which statistics should be analyzed?

No court is going to put itself into that kind of a quandary.

I tuned in late to catch the score of a World Series game back in 1989, only to find coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake. I was somewhat confused by overhead footage of what reporters kept describing as a massive freeway collapse, that to me appeared to show an elevated freeway still standing. Unfamiliar with the Bay area, I had no idea that this was the remnant of a double-decker freeway, the top deck having collapsed onto the bottom, crushing cars and their occupants underneath tons of steel and concrete.

Since moving to Seattle a couple years later, I have always been wary of this doomed freeway’s kissing-cousin, the Alaska Way Viaduct. Whenever I drive across the Viaduct or walk beneath it, I do so speedily, with images vividly in my mind of the dead being pried from between the decks of San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway. While I know my chance of being in the wrong place at the wrong time is exceedingly small, my discomfort is not the product of irrational paranoia. A major earthquake will hit the Seattle area, and left as-is, the Viaduct will collapse, killing dozens or even hundreds, depending on the time of day.

And if this tragedy occurs due to the partisan bickering currently transgressing in Olympia over funding the Viaduct’s replacement, I will personally blame these deaths on the petty, heartless legislators who are clearly willing to risk sacrificing the lives of innocents in exchange for a few extra dollars of spending in their own districts.

This exploitation of regional tensions is politics at its most disgusting… and incredibly stupid and shortsighted. House Transportation Committee Chair Ed Murray (D-Seattle) sums it up bluntly:

Murray said complaints that state spending is too concentrated on Seattle-area projects were misguided. “We’ll come back here in two years when that thing falls down and we’ll get all of it.”

Lives are at stake. The Viaduct is a human and economic tragedy waiting to happen… as is the 520 floating bridge, one of the oldest structures of its kind in the world. In a region that has witnessed not one, not two, but three major bridges collapse or sink, it is absurd to pretend that it could not happen a fourth time, especially with a structure so in need of repair or replacement.

To oppose this transportation package because the spending is too “Seattle-centric” is an arrogant, absurd and dangerous fiction. Transportation spending is Seattle-centric because Washington state is Seattle-centric. Seattle is our cultural, economic and population center… it produces the lion’s share of the tax dollars, and currently has the most immediate transportation needs. If Republicans want more money for projects outside of the Seattle area, then they should propose raising additional tax dollars to pay for them.

Like most Seattle voters, I’m willing to pay my fair share to fund needed transportation projects in the rest of the state. But personally, I’m not willing to die to save a couple pennies on a gallon of gas.

Congratulations to Rep. Mark Miloscia (D-Federal Way) for finally, finally getting a performance audits bill through the Legislature, after years of trying. HB 1064 passed the House today by a 75 to 22 margin, after having passed the Senate 30 to 19 earlier in the month. Gov. Christine Gregoire is expected to sign the bill into law.

(A curious note… the always luscious Sen. Pam Roach voted against the bill, while her son Dan voted for it. Hmmmm.)

Of course, professional initiative sponsor Tim Eyman is still pushing his bullshit performance audits initiative, I-900, but then… he wouldn’t be Tim if he didn’t. I imagine it’s kind of hard to feign outrage about the need for performance audits, when we already have them, but I suppose Tim will find a way.

Anyway… it’s a kind of boring topic I’ve written about on way too many occasions, so if you’re interested in my take on performance audits, you can find my previous blogs here.

I haven’t spent much time dwelling on papal politics, but the choice of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany wasn’t much of a surprise to anybody.

Of course, if the Irish Catholic family I married into had any say in the matter, it would have been somebody else. Judging from the dinner table conversation the other night, the only choice less acceptable to the extended family (only slightly smaller than the College of Cardinals) would have been Cardinal Law.

Personally, I could care less. Though I am a bit disappointed he adopted the name Benedict XVI instead of sticking with Ratzinger. It would have been amusing to have a Pope Ratzinger.