Archives for November 2006

No doubt there are profound problems with the Seattle School District and its management, but it still kinda irks me when some stodgy old white guy starts pontificating about how crappy our schools are without ever spending any meaningful time in them himself:

Seattle has problems but it prides itself on being a living urban center, a city with rich talent and both a creative and entrepreneurial class. Such places do not have the failing school systems of blighted East Coast cities.

And neither does Seattle.

I’ve lived in a couple of those “blighted East Coast cities” (which FYI, Seattle doesn’t hold a candle to in many ways,) and I can’t imagine subjecting my daughter to the typical inner city school there. By comparison, at least at the elementary school level, Seattle has many more good and great schools than it does failing ones, which is why so many of us parents fought so hard to save our neighborhood schools from closure.

Don’t get me wrong, Seattle Public Schools has plenty of problems, from chronic underfunding to an acute lack of leadership — problems complicated by the fact that like all urban school districts it is tasked with educating some of the most difficult (and expensive) to teach students. But lumping Seattle schools in with say, Philadelphia’s educational disaster, is a lazily facile comparison at best and a harmfully misleading one at worst. It is also insulting to teachers and students… and especially to the parents who choose not to abandon their public schools. In fact, it stinks of patrician snobbery.

And while the Seattle Times and other critics are right that the district needs new leadership, I’m not so sure that handing the reigns over to a city government so timid and consensus driven that it puts bathroom breaks out for a public vote would instill much confidence.

Yeah, well, maybe former Mayor Norm Rice would provide the leadership the district has so desperately craved since the death of John Stanford, and maybe appointing a couple school board members might instill a little professionalism into the mix. (Paying them might not be such a bad idea either.) But haughtily pointing towards low WASL scores tells us nothing, and broadly branding schools as “failures” only drives more families away.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the closure process it’s that WASL tests aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on, and that results can be cherry-picked and manipulated to justify nearly any argument. The WASL is transforming our state’s educational system into the public school equivalent of a Stanley Kaplan prep course, and thus the only thing it ends up effectively testing is how well teachers prep students for the test itself. For example, perhaps one of the reasons so many of Seattle’s students do so poorly on the science portion of the WASL is that teachers lack the time and resources to prep for that portion of the test at all?

So far I’m as unimpressed with the creativity and intellectual rigor of most of the district’s critics as I am with the leadership of the district itself. For much of the criticism seems intentionally designed to distract attention away from the elephant in the room — the simple fact that no amount of reform or innovation can give our children the educational opportunity we all profess to want, unless we are willing to adequately fund it.

According to the Seattle P-I, bowling is hip:

Brisk business has prompted the Garage’s owners to propose adding six to eight lanes, plus more lounge space, on what is now their parking lot.

“Fourteen lanes just kind of handcuffs us a lot of the time,” said Mike Bitondo, the Garage’s managing partner, who owns the lanes with Alex and Jill Rosenast. “When people walk up on a Friday night and they have to wait an hour or two hours or three hours for a lane, that’s just as frustrating for me as it is for them.”

Apparently a new wave of trendy, upscale bowling alleys is revitalizing the industry, bringing new life to a sport that’s long been one of America’s most popular. Imagine that. Bowling alley proprietors capturing new business by catering to, um… bowlers.

In reading about bowling’s urban-chic resurgence, I was reminded of a piece I wrote way back in May of 2004 — only my sixth post on HA — in which I abused the state’s bowling alley owners for insisting that legalizing slot machines was the key to their survival. We were in the midst of Tim Eyman’s I-892 campaign, the slot machine initiative that eventually went down to a landslide defeat at the polls. Bowling alley operators had became fixtures on local talk radio arguing that they’d be forced to shutter their doors unless voters approved slots. I was um, dubious.

I remember one particular phone call from a woman who pleaded for slot machines on behalf of the bowling alley that had been in her family for three generations. She claimed she just couldn’t compete against the tribal casinos anymore, and if I-892 didn’t pass, she would probably shutter the family business.

Now, at the risk of sounding unsympathetic, I’d like to impart a bit of wisdom from one small businessperson to another:

YOU’RE RUNNING A FUCKING BOWLING ALLEY!!!

And perhaps, instead of trying to compete with the tribal casinos, you should spend a little time and effort promoting… gee, I don’t know… bowling?!

Saying that bowling alleys need slot machines to compete with tribal casinos is like saying Chuck E. Cheese’s needs a liquor license and strippers to compete with the Deja Vu.

The point is, if you can’t make ends meet enticing people to chuck balls at pins, then perhaps you’re in the wrong business. Or sadly, perhaps bowling just isn’t a viable industry anymore.

That may sound harsh… but that’s capitalism. And until the tribes start building bowling alleys instead of casinos, I don’t want to hear anymore whining about unfair competition.

And whad’ya know? Two years later, people are waiting in line for three hours to bowl at hip new urban alleys. Ain’t capitalism great?

A few years back I shopped around a satirical guest column in which I suggested we could solve our education funding crisis by slaughtering our worst performing students and feeding them to their classmates. The editorial board of one major daily was intrigued, but after a few weeks of mulling it over they eventually rejected my “modest proposal” with the explanation that their readers “lacked the satire gene.”

I was deeply disappointed at the time by what I felt to be a display of editorial cowardice, but in the years hence I have grown to appreciate the editors’ healthy cynicism towards their readers’ own limits. For as I have repeatedly learned during my two and a half years of blogging, some people simply don’t get satire. Ever.

One might think by now that my regular readers would have grown accustomed to my penchant for persiflage, yet many, of both political persuasions, wouldn’t know irony if I dropped the “y” and savagely beat them around the head and face with it. For example, however outrageous or intentionally offensive my attempts at satire may be, accusing a sitting state senator of “fucking pigs” is most definitely not libel, nor is it fair to characterize as “hate speech” a proposed initiative to exempt Christians from our state’s anti-discrimination laws. And when I urged that all extraordinary efforts be used to save a critically ill Rev. Jerry Falwell, no matter how painful or intrusive — to the point of keeping his brain alive in “a jar of nutrient-rich fluid” — well… that was not, as one angry reader conversely described it in an email purportedly copied to the FBI, a “terrorristic [sic] death threat.”

It was a joke.

And as a connoisseur of humor, I would have hoped that it would not be necessary to appreciate a joke in order to at least acknowledge that it exists. But apparently, some people just don’t get satire.

This sad reality was brought home yesterday when General JC Christian of the satirical blog Jesus’ General joined me on 710-KIRO as I was subbing for Dori Monson. This was without a doubt the funniest hour of radio I’ve ever produced, an experience enhanced for the guys in the booth as the lines lit up with angry callers. One would think that when the General started talking about tazering shopkeepers who refused to say “Merry Christmas” and arming fetuses with tiny in utero handguns that nearly everybody would have realized that he was in fact joking. Yet the overwhelming majority of callers chose to take him at face value.

Of course, talk radio callers, just like blog commenters, are a tiny, nonrepresentative segment of the larger audience, so I remain confident that the majority of listeners got the joke. But if not, who cares?

My job as both a radio host and a blogger is to engage the audience, and it doesn’t really matter how I do it. If the audience is laughing, that’s great. If the audience is enraged, that’s okay too. As long as they’re listening to me, they’re listening to the ads, and that after all is KIRO’s business. And oh yeah, as long as they’re listening to me they’ll come away better informed, whether they like it or not… and that after all is my business.

Everybody wants to be liked. But I’ll settle for people just tuning in.

I’m filling in for Ron Reagan and Dori Monson from noon to 4PM today on Newsradio 710-KIRO, and here’s the lineup as of the moment:

Noon: What really happened on election day? Us “nutroots” claimed the Democratic sweep as a huge win for a revitalized, grassroots progressive movement, while many in the media and political establishment talked about a big victory for Southern “blue dog” Democrats. Thomas Schaller, author of “Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South” joins me to analyze the election and measure the prescience of his thesis.

1PM: Is there really a War on Christmas? Thanksgiving Day kicks off the Christmas Holiday season — are secular humanists/Jews like me trying to de-Christianize it? Michael Johnson, chief legal counsel of the Alliance Defense Fund apparently thinks yes, and he joins me to talk about his organization’s efforts to save Christmas. Personally, I’m a touch dubious.

2PM: Is this guy for real? We’ll stick to the religious theme for another hour when Gen. JC Christian of the nationally renowned blog Jesus’ General joins me to present his own far-right views on the Holiday season and politics in general. No stranger to controversy, it was the General who challenged fellow Republicans to join the military via his Operation Yellow Elephant, and who has made a career out of championing the rights of Blastocyst-Americans. It should be an, um… interesting hour.

3PM: Not quite sure yet. Maybe we’ll just beat the crap out Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin? Or maybe I’ll surprise my family back East by calling them up without telling them I’m on the air. (Oops. Hope they don’t read my blog.)

Tune in today as you’re cooking your Turkey (or listen to the live stream) and give me a call: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).

On this Thanksgiving Day — as on all days — I am thankful for the greatest run-on sentence in human history:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

(Yeah sure… I did this same post last year. But since there’s nothing more American than dissent, I thought it was worth repeating.)

Black Press of Victoria B.C. has purchased the King County Journal, it’s printing facility in Kent, and nine other local papers owned by the Horvitz family. It’s unclear what plans, if any, the new owners have for the Journal, which has been losing money and readers since 1994.

I’d heard some speculation that the Journal‘s printing facility in Kent might be attractive to the Hearst Corporation should the Seattle P-I lose it’s arbitration with the Seattle Times, and choose to continue publishing outside of the Joint Operating Agreement. Apparently, that option is now off the table.

Looking for something to do tomorrow afternoon while you’re preparing your Thanksgiving turkey? Tune in to 710-KIRO, where I’ll be filling in for Ron Reagan and Dori Monson from noon to 4PM.

Oh… and if you’re a prominent politician or controversial public figure who’s looking for an excuse to get away from your family for a little while — or who just wants to take pity on me — I’m still looking for some compelling guests. Barring that, I’m always open to suggestions for topics to discuss.

In the days since the Democrats took control of Congress there has been increased criticism of the war in Iraq from prominent members of both parties. Sen. John McCain has called our current efforts “immoral”, saying we either must step up our commitment or pull out, and the legendarily calculating Henry Kissinger has suggested that the war is no longer winnable.

Of course the war still has its supporters inside and outside the Bush administration, and you still can hear daily attacks from the right accusing Democrats of undermining our efforts to win the war. Which got me thinking. Assuming we did decide to recommit our ourselves towards winning the war in Iraq, exactly what would that victory look like? Surely it wouldn’t look like this:

The United Nations said today that 3,709 Iraqi civilians were killed in October, the highest monthly toll since the March 2003 U.S. invasion and another sign of the severity of Iraq’s sectarian bloodbath.

The U.N. tally was more than three times higher than the total The Associated Press had tabulated for the month, and far more than the 2,866 U.S. service members who have died during all of the war.

The report on civilian casualties, handed out at a U.N. news conference in Baghdad, said the influence of militias was growing, and torture continued to be rampant, despite the government’s vow to address human rights abuses.

“Hundreds of bodies continued to appear in different areas of Baghdad handcuffed, blindfolded and bearing signs of torture and execution-style killing,” the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq report said. “Many witnesses reported that perpetrators wear militia attire and even police or army uniforms.”

Perhaps there was a path to victory way back in 2003, where we could have left a relatively pacified Iraq a better place than we found it, both for its own citizens and its neighbors in the region. Perhaps not.

But with violence growing by the day despite (or because of) our continued military presence, it’s hard to see us imposing a stable, democratic government by force. Assuming that’s what we’re shooting for.

So I’m just wondering… for those of you who think we should stay in Iraq until we win the war, could you please share your concept of what winning might look like? After all, how can we ask our military to devise and execute a strategy for achieving a victory we’ve failed to define?

The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight (and every Tuesday), 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Perhaps we’ll even do another podcast tonight after a several week lapse.

If you’re finding it hard to stay interested in politics now that the election is over and the Holiday season is upon us, the least you can do is stay interested in beer.

Not in Seattle? Washington liberals will also be drinking tonight in the Tri-Cities. Here’s a full run down of WA’s eleven Drinking Liberally chapters, including our newest chapter in the former Republican stronghold of Mercer Island:

	Where:	When:	Next Meeting:
Burien:	Mick Kelly’s Irish Pub, 435 SW 152nd St	Fourth Wednesday of each month, 7:00 pm onward	November 22
Kirkland:	Valhalla Bar & Grill, 8544 122nd Ave NE	Every Thursday, 7:00 pm onward	November 23
Mercer Island:	Roanoke Tavern, 1825 72nd Ave SE	(Starting January) Second and fourth Wednesday of each month, 6:00-8:00 pm	January 10
Monroe:	Eddie’s Trackside Bar and Grill, 214 N Lewis St	Second Wednesday of each month, 7:00 PM onward	December 13
Olympia:	The Tumwater Valley Bar and Grill, 4611 Tumwater Valley Drive South	First and third Monday of each month, 7:00-9:00 pm	December 4
Seattle:	Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Ave E	Every Tuesday, 8:00 pm onward	November 21
Spokane:	Red Lion BBQ & Pub, 126 N Division St	Every Wednesday, 7:00 pm	November 22
Tacoma:	Meconi’s Pub, 709 Pacific Ave	Every Wednesday, 8:00 pm onward	November 22
Tri-Cities:	O’Callahans – Shilo Inn, 50 Comstock, Richland	Every Tuesday, 7:00 pm onward	November 21
Vancouver:	Hazel Dell Brew Pub, 8513 NE Highway 99	Second and fourth Tuesday of each month, 7:00 pm onward	November 28
Walla Walla:	The Green Lantern, 1606 E Isaacs Ave	First Friday of each month, 8:00 pm onward	December 1

(And apparently there’s also an unaffiliated liberal drinking group in Olympia that meets every Monday at 7PM at the Brotherhood Lounge, 119 N. Capital Way.)

Apparently, quite a few people thought my piece on comment spam was disrespectful to Milton Friedman… which kind of surprised me because I didn’t really think the post was about Milton Friedman. It was about comment spam, and those free market ideologues who would oppose nearly all government regulation. (And who happen to look to Friedman as some sort of hero, whether they’ve actually read him or not.)

In any case, I’m guessing the free market folk might be displeased as well by the following editorial in Tuesday’s Seattle P-I:

In all the shock surrounding the Bellevue crane collapse, there’s one aspect for lawmakers to remember. The public seemed deeply surprised that no special effort is made to oversee the huge equipment that daily operates above construction sites and nearby traffic, pedestrians and office and housing complexes.

[…] With construction booming, the region is seeing more cranes. But the state has no license for crane operators and no training or testing requirements. A group formed to improve standards statewide in the aftermath of a 1994 accident at the Kingdome fell into inactivity.

[…] State certification of crane operators ought to be enacted quickly. With so many construction projects under way, the public deserves reassurance the state is exercising serious oversight, not waiting for more deadly surprises.

I’m curious to hear the arguments against inspections and certification of construction cranes, but my knee-jerk reaction is to come out in support of such legislation, if only to piss off the BIAW.

UPDATE:
The Seattle Times chimes in:

Self-regulation is perfectly adequate if the public is willing to accept the risk, or, if not, the concentric rings of expense if tougher governmental requirements are imposed.

[…] Beyond the ultimate lessons learned from this fatal accident, the Legislature might wonder if exhaustive investigations after the fact are sufficient.

That’s a reasonable analysis. Regulations cost money, and society needs to make a cost benefit analysis of whether the money saved (by industry and/or taxpayers) in not requiring licensing and inspection is worth the risk of having a giant crane fall on your head.

Um… how will we know which is which?

The Seattle Times editorial board seems to like Gov. Christine Gregoire’s “Washington Learns” proposal, but…

The elephant in the room, however, is education funding. Sidestepping this massive beast threatens the very underpinning of reform efforts. Gov. Christine Gregoire promised a new way of looking at education and investing in it. The smart, holistic proposals from her committee give us the former. Now, where’s the latter?

[…] Pressure is growing to address the funding issue. Lawsuits are being prepared challenging disparities in state money among districts and over the inadequacy of basic education funding.

The time to tackle the funding beast is now.

Hmm. The Times is editorializing in favor of increased funding for education. Great. But… um… didn’t they just spend most of the past year shilling for an estate tax repeal initiative that would have cut $100 million a year from education spending?

Tell you what Frank, I’ll trade the estate tax for an income tax, and that way we all come out ahead. What say?

Tonight’s lineup on “The David Goldstein Show” Newsradio 710-KIRO, from 7PM to 10PM:

7PM: What can we expect from the new Democratic majority in Congress? Ken Vogel joins me to answer that question and others. Ken is a former political reporter for the Tacoma News Tribune, and is currently and investigative reporter for a new Capitol Hill paper, the Capitol Leader.

8PM: Unfazed by Tasers? UCLA campus police repeatedly Tasered at student in the school library this week for being uncooperative and talking back? Is this appropriate use of force, or just another example of our nation’s newly relaxed attituded towards torture?

9PM: Is it time to reinstate the draft? The Democrats just took control of Congress, and now Rep. Charles Rangel, one of their most senior House members, has come out in favor of reinstating the draft. Is this the best way to keep Americans out of senseless wars, or the best reason to prepare to move to Canada?

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

Famed economist Milton Friedman died this week, and in pondering how best to eulogize the Andy Warhol of post World War II economics, I was reminded of another recent death — that of the comment spam that plagued HA on and off for most of the past two years. For if Friedman is a father figure to free market advocates everywhere, then spammers, comment or otherwise, are surely his rightful heirs — the logical online manifestation of a selfish and mean-spirited ideology that looks to Friedman for its economic scholarship and Ayn Rand for its moral philosophy (such as it might be.)

From the moment the blogosphere exploded into existence, harnessing the power of the Internet to create an historically unparalleled marketplace of ideas, the spammers descended, guided by pure, individual self-interest, aggressively seeking to exploit this new market for personal, economic gain. This is in many ways a perfect illustration of an unregulated free market at work, a market in which comment spammers seeking to up the Google ranking of say, a bukkake video website, would willingly bring the entire blogosphere to its semen-drenched knees… if only they could find a way around the latest anti-spam measures.

In upgrading HA last week I effectively stopped the spammers… for now. But this isn’t the first time I’ve managed to achieve the upper hand, and it won’t be the last time I’m forced to do so. I have spent untold hours filtering, deleting and combatting spam — hours I once billed out at lucrative rates to lavishly funded dot.coms, before that market collapsed under the weight of its own manipulations. The spammers have cost me time, they have cost me money, and they have caused me much hard work and frustration… all in pursuit of a vocation for which I receive little or no monetary reward. This is a war of escalating innovation, in which spammers relentlessly develop increasingly sophisticated techniques to evade bloggers’ increasingly sophisticated defenses.

Now some might argue that this “competition” is an example of perfectly balanced forces at work creating a more efficient market, but then these are the same sort of people who would ridicule me for complaining about the volume of email spam I receive, arguing that if I’m foolish enough to publish my address then I “get what I deserve.” (As if encouraging my readers to communicate with me privately reveals some sort of Darwinian weakness.) Yes, these are same sort of people who deride victims of identity theft for not being more responsible with their personal information.

But the main problem with the notion that competition always leads to greater efficiency is that it is wrong. Blog software developers could be devoting all of their energies to creating better platforms for engaging in public debate, but instead must divert valuable time and resources towards fighting the thousands of spam-bots that threaten to flood our threads with ads for payday loans and penile enhancement products. And there is absolutely nothing efficient about the fact that during the time it’s taken me to write these first five paragraphs, 47 new comments have been snagged by my filter, and that I must now manually scan through a list of spam hawking “big black cocks” and “online Texas hold’em” in order to rescue the occasional legitimate comment that gets inadvertently caught in the dragnet.

Comment spam should be illegal, whatever the prospect of actually enforcing such laws. Hell, if anybody deserves to be handcuffed and repeatedly tasered it’s the sick, vicious bastards seeking the top Google ranking for the phrase “dad fucking daughter.”

But no, there are those free market purists — those who lionize Friedman as some mythic hero — who would argue against any sort of government regulation or interference, however economically distorted or dehumanizingly cruel the market may be. Multinational corporations market powdered baby formula to new mothers in nations that lack a safe drinking water supply. RJ Reynolds, fully aware of the toxicity of its product advertised that “doctors prefer Camel.” My local filling station drops the price at the pump by 75 cents a gallon in the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s election, only to raise it 20 cents in the days after, even as crude oil prices fall. If there’s something wrong here, we’re told, the market will sort it out. The market is always more efficient than the government, and always corrects itself in the end. Or so the theory goes.

I’m sure there are those who are prepared to argue that my analysis is a gross misreading of Friedman’s work, but… well… I’ve hardly read Friedman at all. The truth is, it doesn’t really matter what Friedman wrote or what sort of economic policies he actually advocated, for in striving to become the most famous economist of the latter half of the Twentieth Century, Friedman’s influence has been mostly symbolic. Indeed, if we were to judge Friedman’s impact purely by the lasting economic policies he directly shaped rather than those he merely advocated, history would long remember Friedman primarily from his Keynesian days, as “the father of federal tax withholding.”

But that’s not the Friedman eulogized by his most ardent admirers, many of whom have never directly read his work either, and who would lack the economics training to properly understand it if they did. No, the Friedman they eulogize is the one of popular culture, the Prometheus of free market ideology… the patron saint of Enrons everywhere.

It is this Friedman that free marketeers look to for inspiration as they fight government regulations of all stripes. It is this Friedman a comment spammer might point to in defending his right to grind my blog to a halt if a buck can be made in the process.

Our nation’s Calvinist ethos survives today in a cult of the market that seems to equate individual economic prosperity with the will of God. But it must be remembered that the unfettered “free market” these ideologues passionately advocate is in theory amoral at its very best, and often deeply and disturbingly immoral in practice.

It is this ethos that fills our mail boxes and comment threads with spam, and as such, is as appropriate a tribute to Milton Friedman as any.

Great news for WA state Democrats: 21 of the 36 remaining members of the recently diminished state House GOP caucus voted Friday to retain Rep. Richard DeBolt (R-Chehalis) as minority leader.

Why is this good news? Democrats picked up six seats last Tuesday, increasing their hold on the state House to a commanding 62-36 majority, and I think it’s fair to lay at least some of the blame for the GOP’s electoral failure at the clay feet of DeBolt and his ham-fisted, hardball tactics.

House Majority Leader Lynn Kessler, D-Hoquiam, was unsure of what to expect from the Republican leadership team in the 2007 session.

She noted the DeBolt-led GOP’s fiery tactics on the 2006 session’s opening day, when the minority tried to bypass protocol and force a vote on a sex-crime bill. The caucus’ political committee later issued mailers criticizing Democrats for their positions on sex offenders.

“In 2004, [DeBolt] was really great to work with. I enjoyed working with him,” Kessler said. “In 2006, not so much.”

If you’re looking for a reason why an Iraq-war-fueled national Democratic wave managed to sweep so many local Republicans out of office, I think you have to look at the mean-spirited, Rove-like tactics of the state and local GOP over the past couple years. The fake sex offender mailings, 2005’s last minute voter registration challenges, the vicious, gay-bashing demagoguery before and after historic passage of WA’s gay civil rights bill… all this helped to make our relatively defanged, homegrown sub-species of Republican virtually indistinguishable in the eyes of average voters from the corrupt, feral and politically rabid breed that inhabits the other Washington.

Thanks in part to DeBolt and his caucus’s efforts to mimic the tactics of their national Party, voters concluded that a Republican is a Republican. And in 2006, that wasn’t a very good thing for a politician to be.

Now the Republican caucuses in both state houses are so small that Democrats don’t really need their votes or input on anything but a constitutional amendment. (And we’re only a few votes shy of not needing them on that either.) Given this disparity of power it would be awfully tempting to dis the GOP caucus the way their Congressional leadership dissed Democrats for most of the past 12 years, but Kessler says she plans to work with DeBolt.

“Because we have this big majority, we feel an extra responsibility to work with the Republicans and keep them engaged,” she said. “I’m hoping he will accept that from us.”

If DeBolt is smart he’ll accept Kessler’s olive branch, though personally I don’t think he deserves it. Considering the geographic divide between the two parties it is in the best interests of all of the state’s residents if the two sides can manage to work together… at least during the session.