Archives for September 2006

8th Congressional District challenger Darcy Burner has a diary up on Daily Kos this morning pledging her support for Net Neutrality, and I urge you all to both read and recommend it:

The Internet has lowered the barrier to political participation and allowed a new civic dialogue to flourish.

No longer are traditional, corporate-controlled media outlets a chokepoint on whose voices will be heard; no longer is access to the tools for high-impact activism limited to consultants and political professionals; and no longer are Democratic candidates hamstrung by establishment control over resources they need to run winning campaigns.

The Internet is an incredible medium for democracy. But its future is threatened.

If elected, there may not be another member of Congress with the technological background to speak with more authority on the issue of Net Neutrality. And from her post, Burner clearly understands the larger societal, economic and political implications.

Please read and recommend Burner’s post.

UPDATE:
And speaking of economics… the end of the quarter is quickly approaching, one of the final benchmarks for determining where money will flow during the final few weeks of the campaign.

If you were ever planning to give to Darcy Burner and Peter Goldmark, now is this time! Remember, the number of individual contributions is just as important as the total dollars contributed when independent committees pour over the FEC filings to determine which candidates really have grassroots support. If you can only give $5.00, give $5.00. But please… give it now.

8th Congressional District Democratic challenger Darcy Burner has run two ads so far, and both feature her family’s history of military service. Both her father and husband have served in the military, and one of her brothers participated in the initial invasion of Iraq.

I’ve heard some criticism from Reichert boosters that this won’t play in her district… that the service of her family members won’t give Burner the credibility she seeks. But I think these critics are wrong. Every soldier we send overseas leaves a spouse and children and parents and siblings behind. There are many more voters in the 8th District who share Burner’s experience than there are who served in combat. Burner understands the incredible burden this war places on military families, because she comes from one.

Curiously, Burner rarely talks about her own service — the years she spent in the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) — even though it was obviously an enormously influential period of her life. Burner started at age 14 and quickly rose through the cadet ranks, becoming the executive officer of the Nebraska wing at age 16, and being named National Cadet of the Year in 1989.

Darryl of Hominid Views was intrigued by this biographical tidbit and has posted a fascinating and candid interview with Burner on the subject. It soon becomes clear that when Republicans criticize her lack of service or leadership experience, they are shooting blanks; Burner displayed extraordinary leadership at a very early age, and it is this experience that gave her many of the skills that have helped her succeed throughout her life.

Her military family background and CAP experience has also given her perspective on politics that I believe explains much of her appeal in a swing district like the 8th:

Most of the members of the Civil Air Patrol that I know are relatively conservative politically

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Way back in May I skewered GOP senate wannabe Mike?™ McGavick for being a foreign policy lightweight. Given the opportunity to pen a major foreign policy op-ed for the national publication The Weekly Standard, McGavick devoted a thousand words to arguing that the best means towards confronting Iran’s nuclear ambitions was to ban its soccer team from World Cup competition.

No… really.

I criticized McGavick’s proposal as simplistic, ill-informed, and contrary to the very ideal of international competition. McGavick cited similar sanctions against South Africa’s rugby team during the 1970’s, but those were aimed at the white, minority electorate who held political control, whereas I argued that McGavick’s World Cup ban would have targeted the Iranian people, only feeding into anti-American sentiment.

But nearly five months later I am now ashamed to admit that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice agrees with me. Ouch.

As the Seattle Times’ David Postman points out over on his blog, Condi gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal editorial board yesterday in which she disses the soccer ban proposal during a discussion on embargoes:

“One of the problems that we have is if indeed you would like not to have a situation in which you reinforce the leadership’s desire to make their people feel that America is anti-Iranian people, then you want to stay away from things that have a bad effect on the Iranian people to the degree that you can. You know, we’ve talked

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The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight (and every Tuesday), 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. The primaries are over and we’re headed into the home stretch, so come on down for some hot debate and some icy cold beer.

Not in Seattle? Washington liberals will also be drinking tonight in the Tri-Cities. Here’s a full run down of WA’s ten Drinking Liberally chapters:

	Where:	When:	Next Meeting:
Burien:	Mick Kelly’s Irish Pub, 435 SW 152nd St	Fourth Wednesday of each month, 7:00 pm onward	September 27
Kirkland:	Valhalla Bar & Grill, 8544 122nd Ave NE	Every Thursday, 7:00 pm onward	September 28
Monroe:	Eddie’s Trackside Bar and Grill, 214 N Lewis St	Second Wednesday of each month, 7:00 PM onward	October 11
Olympia:	The Tumwater Valley Bar and Grill, 4611 Tumwater Valley Drive South	First and third Monday of each month, 7:00-9:00 pm	October 2
Seattle:	Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Ave E	Every Tuesday, 8:00 pm onward	September 26
Spokane:	Red Lion BBQ & Pub, 126 N Division St	Every Wednesday, 7:00 pm	September 27
Tacoma:	Meconi’s Pub, 709 Pacific Ave	Every Wednesday, 8:00 pm onward	September 27
Tri-Cities:	Atomic Ale, 1015 Lee Blvd, Richland	Every Tuesday, 7:00 pm onward	September 26
Vancouver:	Hazel Dell Brew Pub, 8513 NE Highway 99	Second and fourth Tuesday of each month, 7:00 pm onward	September 26
Walla Walla:	The Green Lantern, 1606 E Isaacs Ave	First Friday of each month, 8:00 pm onward	October 6

A new poll conducted on behalf of EMILY’s List shows incumbent Rep. Dave Reichert holding a statistically insignificant 1 point lead over challenger Darcy Burner, 44% to 43% — well within the poll’s 4.9% margin of error. This is the second poll in as many weeks to show the race in a dead heat… and that’s about the best news the Reichert folks can squeeze from these numbers.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that Reichert is vulnerable. His favorable ratings are below 50 percent, and he actually suffers a 6 point deficit in job approval.

And that’s not the worst of it. In a generic congressional match-up, 8th CD voters favor Democrats over Republicans 44% to 34%. Meanwhile, President Bush’s ratings have dropped through the floor, with a 36% to 59% favorable/unfavorable rating, and a stunningly low 28% to 71% job approval rating. This is simply a terrible climate for a Republican incumbent… especially one who has had high-profile visits from President Bush and Karl Rove.

As for Burner, she clearly still has a lot of work to do, but she has tremendous upside. Burner enjoys a 2.5 to 1 favorable ratio, but her name ID still stands below 50 percent. According to the pollsters:

“Burner has significant opportunities to grow in her name identification among younger voters (especially women), parents, the less well-educated, and residents of Pierce County and Legislative Districts 25/33/45 and 41. Introducing her to these voters with a positive message will help boost her performance. Indeed, almost 70% of Congressional undecideds know little about her.”

No doubt the righty trolls will dismissively pooh-pooh this poll, just as they did the previous one, but at some point they’re going to have to move off of the “Darcy isn’t a credible candidate” meme and start arguing this race based on Reichert’s record and the issues. For one thing should be abundantly clear to all but the most partisan Republican boosters: Burner can win this race.

But notice the emphasis on the word “can”. “Can” and “will” are not the same thing, and Burner can’t beat Reichert without your help. The NRCC has already started pulling money out of some hopeless races, but that’s not going to happen in WA-08, for the Republicans have no chance of holding control of the House if they can’t hold seats in suburban districts like Reichert’s. Districts like WA-08 will likely be ground zero in the GOP’s battle to retain their majority, so expect a firestorm of TV ads to blitz the airwaves, attacking Burner and defending Reichert. Burner can survive, but only if she has the resources to respond.

So if you haven’t yet given, or you haven’t given all you can give, now is the time to make a contribution to Darcy Burner and Peter Goldmark. If we can’t take back with House with great candidates like these, we’ll have only ourselves to blame.

Courtesy of FCCFU.com

Reliable sources tell me that a poll commissioned by EMILY’s List will show the race between Rep. Dave Reichert and Republican challenger Darcy Burner at 44% to 43%. They didn’t tell me who got the 44 and who got the 43, but it doesn’t really matter, as either way it’s a statistical dead heat.

The poll will be released tomorrow, and was reportedly conducted by a widely respected polling firm.

Sound unlikely? Well keep in mind that this comes on the heels of a widely pooh-poohed poll two weeks ago that showed Burner leading 49% to 46%. Assuming my sources are correct, we now have two independent polls, two weeks apart, that peg this race within the margin of error. That’s not a good place for an incumbent to be six weeks before the election.

UPDATE:
Oops. Looks like Lynn at Evergreen Politics beat me to it… and with independent confirmation straight from EMILY’s list. She says it’ll be in the P-I tomorrow morning, which means it will likely be up online within the hour.

UPDATE, UPDATE:
Got the details. Here’s the polling memo from EMILY’s List.

Missed last night’s show? Starting last week, 710-KIRO is now podcasting my eponymously named “David Goldstein Show” so you can listen to me rant and rave at your leisure. Each commercial-free hour comes in at a manageable 35 minutes.

Hour 1: Is it time to stop electing judges? Former WA State Insurance Commissioner Deborah Senn joined me to discuss the hundreds of millions of dollars the US Chamber of Commerce is spending to influence local judicial races, and what we can possibly do to stop a corporatist takeover of our courts.

Hour 2: Tunnel, rebuild or no-build… can we afford to replace the Alaska Way Viaduct? The Stranger’s senior political correspondent Erica C. Barnett joined me in the studio to discuss the stunning new cost estimates on the Viaduct and 520 Floating Bridge replacement projects, while represents from the People’s Waterfront Coalition and the Sierra Club phoned in to present the case for a surface-street option.

Hour 3: Is torture an American value? National blogger Dave Neiwert joined me to discuss pending legislation that would permit the US soldiers and intelligence officers to commit acts of torture banned by international law and accepted norms of common decency.

We will soon make full archives available online at PodcastingLiberally.com, where you can always find my weekly podcast for the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally.

Hmm. According to PoliticalMoneyLine, as of the end of August, Darcy Burner had actually outraised Dave Reichert in contributions from individuals, $1,084,864 to $1,083,538. And I’m not just talking about the last three quarters… I’m talking over the entire campaign.

That means Reichert’s fundraising advantage comes almost entirely from PACs… and I just think that says something about which candidate has the most grassroots support, and who the candidates might be beholden to: business interests (Reichert) or the people (Burner).

And according to Evergreen Politics and Cool Aqua, the disparity in popular support between the two campaigns as evidenced by the willingness of ordinary people to open their checkbooks has only grown in recent weeks. FEC reports suggest that Reichert may have raised only $3000.00 from GOP evil-mastermind Karl Rove’s recent visit. While part of that poor showing may be due to reporting errata or the fact that most people attending the event had already maxed out, it’s unlikely he came close to raising the $156,000 Burner brought in during a 10-day special fundraising drive promoted to offset Rove’s presence, or even the $43,000 an email from Sen. Maria Cantwell raised in only a few hours.

It’s not that congressional campaigns are simply about the money, or that dollars raised is ever a reliable predictor of ballots cast… but the relative easy in which Burner has raised money from individuals can certainly be read as an indicator of a growing Burner surge.

UPDATE:
I just checked my ActBlue page, and Darcy Burner is sitting there at a total of $99,941.32 raised… and it’s just killing me. Somebody… quick.. make a $60.00 donation and put Darcy over the $100,000 mark.

UPDATE:
Of course, some veterans will never need to rely on the VA. Like the 44 American soldiers already killed in Iraq during the first three weeks of September. Bob Geiger lists them all.

The sun is shining, the Seahawks are demolishing the hated Giants… what better way to celebrate than to kick back with a cold beer and “The David Goldstein Show” tonight on Newsradio 710-KIRO, 7PM to 10PM?

7PM: Is it time we stop electing judges? The Seattle P-I thinks so, and I agree. We dodged a bullet Tuesday in the Alexander-Groen race when WA voters rejected a $2 million smear campaign against a sitting, centrist justice, but that’s just a hint at the kind of special interest and out of state money putting the independence of our courts at risk. Don’t believe me? Former WA Insurance Commissioner Deborah Senn will join me to talk about the $1.5 million the US Chamber of Commerce spent to defeat her (read “The Secret Chamber“,) and the hundreds of millions they’ve spent to elect right-wing judges nationwide.

8PM: Tunnel, rebuild, or no-build? Now that the latest cost estimates have come in, it doesn’t look like we can replace both the Alaska Way Viaduct and the 520 floating bridge for much less than $9 billion, raising the question of whether we can afford to replace them at all. The Stranger’s transportation maven, Erica C. Barnett joins me to discuss our region’s transportation quandary. We’ll also be joined by an advocate of the controversial “surface street” option, which essentially replaces the Viaduct with, um… nothing.

9PM: Is torture an American value? President Bush and the Republican leadership seem to think so, and so far the American people have failed to rise up in protest. David Neiwert of the blog Orcinus says the President is leading our nation into a “moral abyss,” and he pins part of the blame on the “abysmal […] performance of the press.” David will join me in the studio to take your calls.

Tune in tonight (or listen to the live stream) and give me a call: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).

I was in the car yesterday listening to a radio report about how Saudi authorities believe that Osama bin Laden died a couple weeks ago from a severe bout of typhoid, when my 9-year-old daughter chimes in excitedly from the back seat: “Does this mean the war is over?!”

“No,” I had to disappoint her, though I was at a bit of a loss to adequately explain why.

Of course, the “war on terror,” or “The Long War” as some administration officials refer to it, was never really about bin Laden or al Qaeda, and in hindsight it seems clear that the Bush administration would have led us into this war even if 9/11 had never happened. Knowing what we know from the record, it is not paranoid to assume that President Bush was determined to invade Iraq one way or the other — the specter of bin Laden only made it a tad easier. And there is no doubt that it is our occupation of Iraq that now serves as the number one recruiting tool for anti-American, Islamic extremists.

Oh, I know that statements like that will attract the usual vitriolic attacks accusing liberals like me of being soft on terror, of being appeasers and self-blamers, of caring more about the terrorists than their innocent victims… blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Assholes.

But facts are facts. We now know through official documents and interviews with administration officials that Bush was looking for an excuse to invade Iraq from the moment he assumed office, and days after the 9/11 attack he had to be talked off of Iraq and onto Afghanistan as the first battlefield in his war. And what has been intuitively obvious to all but the most partisan observers — that replacing Saddam Hussein with a foreign occupation and a bloody civil war is creating a generation or more of anti-American extremists — has now been confirmed by our own intelligence agencies.

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

[…]

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

Republicans use the war on terror to vilify Democrats, to accuse us of being weak on defense and homeland security… but even its own intelligence agencies now admit that the administration’s policies have made us less safe, not more. And yet the Bush administration and the Republican leadership in Congress hold steadfast to their failed policies.

When our state’s editorial boards consider their endorsements in the Senate and House races it would be irresponsible of them not to take into consideration the stark assessment of our nation’s intelligence agencies, and weigh heavily the fact that a vote for a Republican — any Republican — is a vote for policies that endanger all Americans. Only a change of leadership will change our nation’s course, and without a change of course it’s going to be a long war indeed.

I have an odd affection for Richard Pope.

Sure, his long and futile record as a perennial candidate and his obsessive posting in the comment threads here and on (un)Sound Politics have painted a picture of a man who is rather, well, unbalanced — a perception unrefuted by a 2005 court document in which Richard bluntly admits: “Frankly, counsel thinks his own mental health situation is terrible.”

I’m also a bit unsettled by Richard’s mean streak, especially his well worn habit of trolling through court records for dirt on public and private individuals, a dubious exercise that is almost acceptable behavior for partisan political bloggers, but totally unbefitting a supposedly impartial judicial candidate.

That said, unlike most of my righty trolls, Richard does sometimes make useful contributions to the occasionally lucid debate that somehow manages to survive the toxic wasteland of HA’s comment threads. And he’s also one of the few righties here who has the integrity and humility to back down when confronted by irrefutable facts. (Usually.)

Furthermore, as a divorced father myself, I have genuine empathy for Richard as he struggles to raise his daughter through what must be some very difficult and trying times.

But… what I absolutely don’t know about Richard, is whether he is in any way qualified to serve as a District Court judge.

An editorial in today’s Seattle P-I suggests “no”, citing his “poor” and “not qualified” ratings from groups such as the King County Bar Association, and his “unprofessional conduct,” some of which I have documented here. But Richard ably defends himself:

Yes, I have made some mistakes during the 15 years that I have practiced law. [M]ost lawyers have. On a few occasions, I have paid monetary sanctions to the other side to compensate them for the harm caused by mistakes. On other sanctions, opposing lawyers have paid monetary sanctions to me to compensate for the harm their mistakes have caused for my clients.

However, I have NEVER been disciplined by the Washington State Bar Association or the state Commission on Judicial Conduct. Very few lawyers or judges have ANY sort of disciplinary record at all, much less an extremely serious disciplinary record like Ottinger does.

The Seattle P-I points out that the “King County Bar Association” has rated myself as “Not Qualified” for this position. But the Seattle P-I completely fails to mention that Ottinger

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From yesterday’s Seattle Times:

Safeco plans to lay off or reassign at least 240 employees as part of a restructuring program meant to cut $75 million from the company’s annual expenses by the end of 2006.

Most of those employees will lose their jobs, spokesman Paul Hollie said. The nationwide cuts are across all departments and affect about 80 employees in the Puget Sound area, he said.

Hmm. Let’s see now. Safeco plans to lay off about 240 employees to save about $75 million annually. That’s a savings of about $312,500 per employee.

And yet, Safeco’s board renegotiated Mike?™ McGavick’s exit package — after he’d already announced his resignation — to give him a $28 million golden parachute.

How much is $28 million really worth to Safeco? Well apparently, that’s about equal to 90 jobs that otherwise wouldn’t have to be cut. Or to put it into starker perspective, the $2 million of McGavick’s “own money” that he’s already put into his campaign might have saved at least 6 Safeco employees their livelihood.

I’m just saying.

In his primary night victory speech, Mike?™ McGavick went on the attack.

With Social Security going broke already, I don’t think paying benefits to illegal workers makes sense. And yet Sen. Cantwell voted to keep that practice in place.

But as Josh Feit points out over on Slog, that’s just plain uncivil:

These are direct attacks on Cantwell’s opposition to an amendment that would have prevented former illegal immigrants (who had paid into the Social Security system) from getting those payments back when they become legal.

Social Security does not pay benefits to illegal residents; what McGavick wants to do is deny legal residents from drawing benefits based on what they paid into the system when they were illegal.

Hey… you know what’s illegal Mike? Driving with a 0.17 blood-alcohol level. Maybe we should deny Social Security benefits to you and your family?

The amendment in question failed 50-49 with 11 Republicans voting with 39 Democrats. So much for McGavick’s claims of bipartisanship.