Archives for December 2006

Kent Johnson, the operations director for William Ryan Select, the local distributor of AHA TORO Tequila, was pretty pissed off about my post linking alleged sexual predator Larry Corrigan to his company:

Larry Corrigan did work as an outside consultant for us up until April of this year, however he has not been involved in any way with AHA TORO Tequila or our company since we let him go 8 months ago. We are also not involved with his work with the state on behalf of the Tequila industry. I understand that due to his political connections, he was solicited by larger Tequila companies to work on their behalf with the state. We have 0 connection to this campaign.

We are a small business run by 3 lifelong Seattleites, who are all heavily involved in the local community and numerous philanthropies. What we are is a small business trying to succeed. What we are not is a politically entrenched/motivated/connected company on either side of the aisle.

[…] I hope in the future you will see fit to not recklessly tie a small local business trying to succeed to the alledged gross crimes of a former consultant.

My apologies to Kent and his partners. I never intended to imply any connection between their company and Corrigan’s alleged crime. I did however imply a connection between Corrigan’s work on behalf of AHA TORO and his initiative to liberalize liquor sales. I’ll take Kent’s word that his company is not involved in the initiative campaign at all.

So I stand corrected. In sponsoring his liquor initiative, Corrigan was not working on behalf of William Ryan Select. He was working on behalf of the Tequila industry.

And oh yeah… despite some half-hearted attempts from our good friend Stefan to label Corrigan a Democrat, everybody I’ve talked to describes him as a loyal Republican who often boasted of his party ties, and who was integrally involved in several of Dave Reichert’s campaigns. So there.

I don’t generally relish driving traffic to (un)Sound Politics, but since Postman has already linked to Eric Earling’s post on what Republicans need to do to win in the suburbs, well, why the hell not?

Earling thinks Republicans are losing on the issues, specifically, education and transportation. Well, duh-uh. It’s not chicanery or ballot fraud that has led to Democratic dominance in the GOP’s former suburban strongholds, it’s the fact that the Republican Party as a whole has grown increasingly out of touch with suburban voters. But as Earling is discovering in his own comment thread, it’s more than just issues, it’s ideology.

For despite all the complaints from political extremists and unengaged independents about not being offered a distinct enough choice at the polls, the two parties actually sit on either side of a substantive ideological divide: at their core, Democrats believe in government… whereas Republicans don’t. Sure, this is a broad generalization, and the ideological divide does not always manifest itself in practice (hence the Bush administration’s profligate spending and relentless encroachment on privacy,) but it dominates the rhetoric in which the two parties frame the issues.

Earling seems to lament the region’s affection for light rail and other mass transit solutions, but advises his fellow Republicans to accept it as reality and find a way to give the voters what they want. The problem is, the GOP’s stubborn opposition to transit stems not just from a policy dispute or a revulsion to higher taxes, but from a revulsion to big government programs in general… and what could be bigger than the physical and social engineering involved in building a commuter rail system? The free market cannot and will not build the Puget Sound region a modern transit system, and so to the free market ideologues who dominate the GOP base, Sound Transit just reeks of Soviet-era central planning.

Likewise, Earling laments the failure of vouchers and charter schools to catch on with voters in our “blue state,” but once again pragmatically advises his fellow Republicans to just… well… deal. But I think the more interesting question to explore is exactly why vouchers and charter schools hold such a strong appeal to the GOP base? Of course, these are market-based solutions, and as such reveal the party’s fundamental distrust of the government they seek to run.

The fundamental problem for Republicans is not that they picked the wrong issues, but that on issue after issue both their position and their rhetoric reveals an anti-government meme that is simply out of step with the majority of suburban voters. None of this should be news to Earling or anybody else; the trends have been apparent for years. Indeed two years ago, in the wake of the disastrous 2004 election I expounded on this theme in a presciently titled post: “Subdivide and conquer: a strategy for a new Democratic majority.”

Families move to places like Mercer Island for better public schools, cleaner streets, safer neighborhoods, and all the other public services that a higher property tax base provides. These are people who believe in government because they benefit from it every day, and they routinely tax themselves to pay for the services they want.

These are people with whom urban Democrats have common ground, and we have an opportunity to exploit the wedge the neo-cons have provided, to expand our base politically and geographically. For in addition to a shared belief that good government is necessary to maintaining a high quality of life, suburban and city voters have a mutual interest in maintaining an economically and culturally vibrant urban core.

The problem facing Eastside suburban Republicans is not tactical or strategic, it’s philosophical. The KCGOP was once dominated by “Rockefeller Republicans” (or in the local parlance, “Dan Evans Republicans”)… socially liberal fiscal conservatives who, like their Democratic counterparts, believed in using government as a tool for promoting the public good. But today’s GOP is dominated by ideological purists who would, if given free reign, dismantle and privatize the public services that define suburban life, while imposing the moral strictures of their right-wing, fundamentalist Christian allies.

Okay, again… perhaps I’m generalizing, but the larger point remains. Suburban Republicans are losing elections because suburban voters simply don’t trust Republicans to run a government they clearly profess to despise. Read the comment threads on (u)SP or the righty trolls here. The problem with education? Those greedy teachers and corrupt, incompetent administrators. Transportation? Self-aggrandizing government officials, wasteful civil servants, and self-serving special interests. Crime? Liberal judges who care more about the rights of criminals than the rights of victims. Even when it comes to social issues Republicans have adopted the rhetoric of blame. The gay civil rights bill wasn’t about a class of people demanding the same legal protections as everybody else, it was about a bunch of perverts seeking to impose their disgusting lifestyle on the rest on us.

Meanwhile, at the same time Republicans are putting so much time and effort into maligning government as incompetent, inefficient, and sometimes, downright immoral, suburban voters enjoy the benefits of a functioning local government everyday. They love their schools, their libraries, their parks, their police and their firefighters, and they consistently choose to tax themselves to improve these services. Thus the main problem for suburban Republicans is that the reality of suburban life simply doesn’t match the bulk of Republican rhetoric.

I appreciate Earling’s efforts at introspection. But it’s going to take a lot more than a shift in tactics to revive the GOP on the Eastside.

United Nations Ambassador John Bolton resigned his post today in the face of bipartisan opposition in the US Senate.

Bush had bypassed the Senate in August 2005 by appointing Bolton to the position when the lawmakers were in recess, avoiding the confirmation process and angering senators concerned that Bolton had a temper and intimidated intelligence analysts to support his hawkish views while at the State Department.

The Bushies blame Democrats for Bolton’s failed confirmation, but in fact it was opposition from several key Republican senators that ultimately killed the nomination. And with Democrats preparing to take control of the Senate next month, Bolton’s chances for confirmation slipped from slim to none.

Or will the Democrats take control of the Senate after all?

One rumor flying around the punditsphere has Bush appointing Sen. Joe Lieberman to the UN post. Should Lieberman accept the nomination, Connecticut’s Republican Governor would appoint his replacement, thus swinging control of the Senate to the GOP. Lieberman, who clearly harbors a great deal of bitterness towards Democratic colleagues who in the general election supported Ned Lamont (you know… the Democratic nominee,) couldn’t really devise a bigger “fuck you” scenario.

But it seems doubtful. Lieberman isn’t stupid or suicidal, and after struggling so hard to win reelection it seems unlikely he would throw away a six year Senate term for two years at most as UN Ambassador.

Still, it’s fun to consider the intrigue.

Today the US Supreme Court will hear arguments concerning the Seattle Public Schools assignment policies, specifically the “integration tiebreaker” the district suspended in 2001.

In 1999 the district switched to an “Open Choice” plan in which incoming freshman could name their preferred high schools. Not surprisingly, some schools were preferred over others, with Ballard, Nathan Hale, Roosevelt, Garfield and Franklin getting more applicants than they could accommodate. In order to achieve a racial balance that more close matched the city as a whole, the district used race as one of the tiebreakers in assigning students.

Also unsurprising, many of the district’s high schools have become significantly less diverse since the integration tiebreaker was suspended. Franklin has dropped from 21 percent white to only 10 percent, and both Cleveland and Rainier Beach are now over 93 percent non-white.

I know these figures will elicit a big “so what?” from those on the right who consistently argue against any color of affirmative action or diversity policy, but I think it speaks to a much larger issue, an issue that I believe is at the heart of many of the district’s structural problems: the undeniable disparity between the district’s various schools, an inequity that clearly tracks economic, geographic, and yes, racial boundaries.

A handful of Northend schools are oversubscribed, while Southend schools like Cleveland and Rainier Beach suffer steadily declining enrollment. Why? Because these Northend schools are better. Everybody knows it, and even if it isn’t true in all areas, the very perception is more than enough to make it self-fulfilling. These schools attract better teachers, better students, and many of the most active and engaged families. They provide a safer, more stable learning environment, and their students produce significantly higher test scores. Of course the parents filing the lawsuit that challenged the integration tiebreaker were pissed off when their kids didn’t get their top choice. Who wouldn’t be? It just isn’t fair that your kids get a crappier education and fewer opportunities due to luck of the draw let alone the color of their skin.

But none of this would be an issue if all our high schools were equally good. Or at least, good enough. But they’re not. So it is.

When John Stanford was superintendent he made it clear that he was willing to sacrifice integration to some extent, in the interest of promoting neighborhood schools. The trick was to take away from parents the incentive to bus their children cross-town in search of a better education, by bringing some degree of equity to all of the district’s schools. If Rainier Beach for example, was pretty much as good and as safe as any other high school in the district, why on earth would I want to bus my daughter all the way from South Seattle to Ballard?

As it stands, the district now spends millions of dollars a year busing students from one part of the district to another, money that could be invested in the classroom rather than transportation. But we can’t in good conscience move to a neighborhood school model at the elementary, middle or high school level until we guarantee a greater degree of equity between all our schools.

Yes, there are many, many complicated factors that make one school better than another, but some of them are quite tangible, and thus can be tangibly addressed. For example, at some high schools there simply aren’t enough text books to go around, so students share. At other high schools each student has two copies of each textbook, one for school and one for home, so they don’t have to lug them back and forth.

How is this disparity even possible, let alone tolerated?

Coming up, our education funding system’s dirty little secret.

Goddamn Seahawks. Goddamn NBC “Sunday Football Night.” Goddamn preemption.

You’d think by now that 710-KIRO management would realize that most Seattlites would rather listen to me talk politics than listen to the Seahawks and the post-game coverage. But no.

Anyway, I won’t be on the air tonight, but I’ll be back next Sunday in my usual 7 to 10PM slot. And mark your calendar, as I’ll be filling in for Dave Ross and Ron Reagan during Christmas week. That’s 10AM to 1PM, December 25th through 29th.

Here are a few links (most local, some not) for your evening pleasure.

• Whose side is Larry Corrigan on? thehim sets the record straight:
  

  According to Stefan, he’s a Ron Sims Campaign contributor, which is true, but kind of like describing Lou Gehrig as a famous cripple.

  From what I remember, Lou Gehrig hit a few homeruns too.

• Here’s the question. My answer? Yes, absolutely. Why? Because it works pretty well for Seattle. We have a not only a “strong mayor” system but a “big mayor” system.
• If you like comedy and protecting a women’s right to choose, go here. If you don’t like comedy or protecting a women’s right to choose, go hunting with Dick Cheney.
• Some ballots from just east of Issaquah to be recounted. Cue frothy rightwing post decrying non-existent election fraud.
• There are lots of reasons to question a potential Barack Obama candidacy in ’08. His age or his middle name ain’t one of them.
• Here’s a post that shows why zoning and environmental laws are actually good things. Imagine if that absolutely piece of garbage, I-933, had passed? How worse could it have been?

To reiterate, I agree with Seattle Times publisher Frank Blethen in opposing proposed FCC rule changes that would permit greater media consolidation. But…

The changes would have increased the number of TV stations a company can own in one market, and repealed the cross-ownership ban, which blocks a company from owning a TV station and newspaper in the same town.

You know, like the owners of KING-5 or one of the other local TV stations buying the Seattle P-I and making a competitive run at the Times by consolidating their news gathering operations. That, according to Frank, just wouldn’t serve our local community interests as much as, say… driving the P-I out of business and turning Seattle into a one-newspaper town.

Of course, what the current regulations don’t do is prevent a local TV station from expanding its news operations and transforming its website into an online Seattle Times killer.

I’m just saying.

The US Supreme Court is preparing to hear the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” case:

The controversy erupted in 2002 after Joseph Frederick, then a senior at Juneau-Douglas High School, displayed a banner proclaiming “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” while standing across the street from the school as the Winter Olympics torch was passing through Juneau.

Then-Principal Deborah Morse confiscated the banner and suspended Frederick from school for 10 days.

Well, I’m pretty sure you can all guess where I stand on this issue, but I just enjoy hearing the righty trolls coming to my blog and argue for repressing the First Amendment rights of others.

I’ve pretty much pooh-poohed Viaduct retrofit proposals, mostly because WSDOT engineers had insisted it wasn’t a cost effective option. No doubt we can extend the life of the Viaduct — we’re doing that now — but at some point it just becomes safer, less disruptive and cheaper over the long haul to replace the thing than it is to constantly repair it. Damn entropy.

Now comes a new WSDOT report that suggests a retrofit might be possible, though it doesn’t yet project the cost or the serviceable years added to the life-span of the structure.

Does this change my assessment of the various options? Well, sorta.

Money aside, there’s absolutely no doubt that given the choice between a tunnel and a bigger, wider rebuild, the former is by far the preferable option… and anybody who tells you different is either lying or crazy. The current Viaduct is a gaping wound through our city, a hunk of crumbling concrete that physically separates the downtown from the waterfront. It is a dirty, noisy, ugly monstrosity that lowers property values and offends both the physical and the aesthetic senses. It is an embarrassment to Seattle’s aspiration towards being a world-class city.

One can forgive city planners a half-century ago. I mean… who knew? But absent the existing Viaduct from our current city landscape, nobody in their right mind would ever seriously propose building one today. Such a proposal would be a nonstarter.

The only serious argument against a tunnel is the cost — at least an extra couple billion over the $2.8 billion estimate for a rebuild. But even that calculation is shortsighted. The tunnel option would dramatically increase property values in the area, and with more than double the serviceable life-span of an elevated replacement, a tunnel could end up saving future generations many billions of dollars in early replacement costs.

If we can afford the tunnel — if we can find the extra money to pay for it — we would be nuts to pass up this once in a half-century opportunity to reshape our downtown and waterfront for the better.

Which brings us back to the retrofit option.

If in fact we can safely extend the life of the Viaduct for another couple decades at the relatively bargain-basement price of say, only a billion dollars… given our region’s unique consensus-driven political culture, perhaps such a half-assed stopgap measure is the best solution we can come up with at this time. It would not only be less expensive, but less disruptive, as a retrofit is presumably the only option that doesn’t require tearing the damn thing down.

And best of all, it would give us the twenty years we obviously need to make a major decision in this town.

With a retrofit temporarily preventing the Viaduct from toppling over onto the waterfront, we would now have several years to develop complete engineering plans for the tunnel, rebuild and no-build options, which can then be put out for a public referendum by 2011… and again in 2013, and 2017. It’ll take a few more years to get the contract bids in place before voters approve the final project in 2021 and again in 2023, before repealing it only one year later in 2024. At which point the Legislature will finally step in and override the will of the voters. At this rate we can expect construction to begin sometime shortly before we’re all eaten by the Morlocks.

I know that’s not much of an endorsement of the retrofit option, but if the perfect is the enemy of the good, that’s about as good as you’re going to get from me.

If I’ve learned anything from my Republican friends, it’s that trial lawyers are ruining the country. Junk lawsuits with little or no merit, malpractice suits that push good doctors out of work, and litigation against business, the result of which increases costs for all of us. Just ask Senator Trent Lott (R-MS):

“The Democrats seem to think that the answer is a lawsuit. Sue everybody.”
– Sen. Trent Lott, 7/20/01

“I’m among many Mississippi citizens who believe tort reform is needed.”
– Sen. Trent Lott, 5/8/02

“You know, obviously we should [enact tort reform]…Someday it will happen, and the sooner the better.”
– Sen. Trent Lott, 1/24/01

“If their answer to everything is more lawsuits, then yes, that’s a problem, because I certainly don’t support that.”
– Sen. Trent Lott, 8/2/02

“It’s sue, sue, sue… That’s not the answer.”
– Sen. Trent Lott, 8/4/01

Suing isn’t the answer… That is, unless you’re Trent Lott:

“Today I have joined in a lawsuit against my longtime insurance company because it will not honor my policy, nor those of thousands of other south Mississippians, for coverage against wind damage due to Hurricane Katrina,” said Lott, R-Miss. “There is no credible argument that there was no wind damage to my home in Pascagoula.”

What a douche bag!

A guy who took a lot of hits for being a trial lawyer is Sen. John Edwards. He made his name in North Carolina’s courtrooms by winning verdicts and negotiating settlements for regular people hurt by the actions of others. When Republicans attack trial lawyers, I like to think of the folks Edwards has helped:

In 1993, a five-year-old girl named Valerie Lakey had been playing in a Wake County, N.C., wading pool when she became caught in an uncovered drain so forcefully that the suction pulled out most of her intestines. She survived but for the rest of her life will need to be hooked up to feeding tubes for 12 hours each night. Edwards filed suit on the Lakeys’ behalf against Sta-Rite Industries, the Wisconsin corporation that manufactured the drain. Attorneys describe his handling of the case as a virtuoso example of a trial layer bringing a negligent corporation to heel. Sta-Rite offered the Lakeys $100,000 to settle the case. Edwards passed. Before trial, he discovered that 12 other children had suffered similar injuries from Sta-Rite drains. The company raised its offer to $1.25 million. Two weeks into the trial, they upped the figure to $8.5 million. Edwards declined the offer and asked for their insurance policy limit of $22.5 million. The day before the trial resumed from Christmas break, Sta-Rite countered with $17.5 million. Again, Edwards said no. On January 10, 1997, lawyers from across the state packed the courtroom to hear Edwards’ closing argument, “the most impressive legal performance I have ever seen,” recalls Dayton. Three days later, the jury found Sta-Rite guilty and liable for $25 million in economic damages (by state law, punitive damages could have tripled that amount). The company immediately settled for $25 million, the largest verdict in state history. For their part, Edwards and Kirby earned the Association of Trial Lawyers of America’s national award for public service.

I’m sure it would have been easier for John Edwards to take a small settlement, collect his percentage, and leave the Lakey’s to figure out how to make ends meet. But he didn’t. If Edwards is a greedy trial lawyer, we need more like him.

If you’re interested in meeting the guy, he’s going to be in town this weekend promoting his new book.

University Bookstore
4326 University Way, NE
Seattle, Washington
Saturday, December 2 at 1:30 p.m.

Hope to see you there!

(This is my first post here at HA. I’d like to give a big ‘thank you’ to Goldy for passing the megaphone and allowing me this opportunity. Read more at my blog, Washington for Edwards.)

Darryl’s already hit the story, but I wanted to come back to it after reading this snippet in the Seattle P-I:

A former longtime employee of the King County Prosecutor’s Office was caught in an Internet sting this week, when police say he arranged to meet someone he thought was a 13-year-old girl for sex.

[…] The Seattle P-I is not publishing the man’s name or details about his work on local political campaigns because he has not been formally charged.

We shall call him “Pervert X.” Although his real name is Larry Corrigan, a GOP operative and former Director of Operations and Budget for King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng. Why the P-I thought it should protect his identity and political affiliations I don’t know, especially after KIRO-TV had already shouted his name all over the airwaves.

The Seattle Times was less discrete. It not only described him as the deputy treasurer for Dave Reichert’s 1997 and 2001 runs for King County sheriff, and as a “supporter without an official role in Reichert’s congressional campaigns,” they also went on to get comments from Reichert and a Maleng spokesman.

So, should Corrigan’s identity have been revealed? It strikes me that either the Times or the P-I must have erred in judgement, and reluctantly, I’m leaning towards the P-I. After all, Corrigan’s political pedigree is the only thing that makes this story rise above the usual din of dirty old men propositioning teenagers, so if it was too soon to reveal his identity, it was certainly too soon to publish the story. But then, who am I to question the journalistic decision making of our local media? I’m just some unschooled blogger.

Now I suppose it’s unfair to use yet another scandal involving yet another GOP mucky-mucky to make some assertion about Republicans in general. So I won’t. Instead I’ll just leave the implication dangling out there without comment.

But it is fair to note that Corrigan wasn’t just some low-level party loyalist. He was incredibly well connected. “Very wired,” I’m told. “Unbelievably so.” And apparently, got along great with folks on both sides of the aisle. I mean, for a Republican.

He was also in the process of using his political connections for personal gain. KIRO reported that Corrigan had left the Prosecutor’s Office two years ago to pursue private business interests… and that business is apparently the local distributorship for Aha Toro Tequila. (Go to the Contact page and you’ll find some other state GOP loyalists. And click on the address for “Kent Johnson” and you’ll find your email addressed to “larry_corrigan”.)

Which explains why Corrigan was also leading the effort to run a statewide initiative in 2007 that would liberalize WA’s liquor laws so as to allow big box and other stores to sell liquor. You know… like Aha Toro tequila.

Of course, we’ve come to expect the character of our initiatives to reflect the character of their sponsors. Here’s hoping this particular initiative is dead.

OK, so apologies for the fact that my first post here is both kind of boring and somewhat contrarian. I’ll try not to let the former happen again.

I was also at the FCC hearing last night, and beyond Goldy’s (and Andrew’s) posts below, and Frank the Dog-Shooter’s self-aggrandizing introductory remarks, I came away with another take.

I remember having come out of the March 2003 FCC hearing on ownership deregulation, held at UW’s HUB Ballroom, feeling euphoric. A huge crowd showed up to give the FCC an earful on its destructive rulemaking proposal to allow greater deregulation of media ownership, specifically, crossownership in the same city of radio/TV stations and newspaper and cable companies.

After an unexpected sea of public comment and Congressional criticism, the inevitable decision by the Commission’s Republican majority was overturned in federal appeals court. And, so, last night, the FCC was back in town, for a virtually identical hearing on a virtually identical rulemaking proposal. So either I’ve changed a lot politically in three years (which I doubt), or the expectations that now come with a new and remarkably powerful media democracy movement are vastly higher, which I think is more the case. Because even as 400 plus people braved a frigid, slushy night to turn out and give the FCC another earful, I came away this time with a slightly sour taste.

Despite the turnout, and the overwhelming opposition to media deregulation by the crowd, progressives reading themselves into the public record did themselves few favors last night. The two most compelling speakers on the night, IMO, were John Carlson (KVI talk show host and the night’s sole self-identified Republican), who made the conservative case for regulating media ownership, and UW President Mark Emmert, who made an educator’s pitch for media diversity as necessary for fostering critical thinking skills in a democracy. In a sea of progressives, the standout critics were a conservative talk show host and (essentially) the CEO of one of the region’s biggest employers.

Granted, Carlson and Emmert are both polished public speakers, and both are familiar with how to couch arguments that make sense to lawmakers and regulators. But that’s just the point: with few exceptions, the several dozen mostly left-leaning public speakers that followed in testimony weren’t. Many were lost in a sea of abstract theory; a number made the repetitive case that concentrated media ownership is bad – completely true, but also tangential and in important ways irrelevant to the proceeding, since that question was settled (for the FCC’s purposes) by Congress with the abysmal Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Remarkably few progressives specifically addressed the actual issue at hand: whether having different big corporations owning your newspapers and your radio/TV outlets is better than having the same corporate monolith owning both. Only one speaker addressed that issue head-on in those terms, and several compelling progressive arguments against cross-ownership went entirely unmentioned. (For example, addressing the pro-business argument that Internet diversity makes distinctions between regulated broadcast stations and unregulated newspapers irrelevant — an argument Carlson skewered — by noting either that many Americans still don’t have home Internet access, let alone broadband, or that while diverse information is widely available on the Internet, citizens must seek it out — through search engines, links, or URLs — whereas turning a dial, flipping through a remote, or dropping quarters in a box gets you radio, TV, and newspapers, a far more general mass audience.) While these arguments and others went asking, two speakers somehow felt that it would be helpful to do satirical presentations in a federal hearing, as though it were yet another Seattle School Board hearing. Another plugged her socialist newspaper (sigh…) as running the sorts of stories corporate media ought to but won’t.

At least nobody sang.

In other words, it was a few former professional journalists and current media management types (a working journalist would never testify at such a hearing), plus a fairly representative cross-section of our region’s progressive Left, flakes included. The two FCC Commissioners who came to Seattle and who are holding these hearings around the country must have the patience of saints.

The flakes worry me less than the relative absence of compelling and on-point testimony from progressives – and I say this as someone who founded a broadcast trade company whose bread and butter was covering FCC rulemaking proposals. (The company is now owned by Clear Channel. Big sigh.) Few speakers were polished. Few dressed nicely — a detail that doesn’t matter much in a Seattle public hearing, but very much does in D.C.

Few seemed to understand what sorts of testimony might move the FCC, particularly (as Carlson grasped) how to frame issues in a way that would speak to at least one of the three Republican commissioners not present. (After all, the point is to win, not just to ratify the views of the two Democratic commissioners on hand.) Failing debate tactics, few even spoke from the heart as to what media diversity meant to them. And on a related note, excepting Jan Strout of NOW, the only speakers who addressed how lack of diverse ownership affects minority ownership were non-whites.

The FCC hearing was a microcosm of a larger problem. Progressives have been out of power so routinely that when we do have power, far too often we have no idea how to use it. The media democracy movement now has power; anyone doubting it should consider that despite a $200 million lobbying campaign by big telecommunications firms, that movement stopped Congress this session from ending net neutrality. That’s power. But in this case, when local grass roots progressives had the opportunity to publicly put their views on federal record, by and large they whiffed.

Something to ponder now that, at both the state legislative and congressional levels, progressives now have unprecedented power.