Archives for October 2007

The Federal Communications Commission will soon announce the location of the sixth and final public hearing on proposed changes in media ownership rules, and Jonathan Lawson of Reclaim the Media tells me that it will be Seattle. The hearing could take place as early as November, although the date won’t be confirmed until the announcement is official.

Democratic Commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein have previously held two unofficial hearings in Seattle, but this will be the first and only time all five FCC commissioners will attend a hearing in the Northwest. Previous hearings have been held in Los Angeles, Nashville, Harrisburg, Tampa and Chicago.

At stake are FCC rules placing limits on cross-ownership of newspapers and broadcast outlets in a single market, and on how many TV and radio stations a single company can own. The FCC’s 2003 attempt to weaken our already lax ownership rules created a huge public and political outcry, and might have been blocked by Congress had Republican House Speaker Denny Hastert allowed it to come to the floor for a vote. Ultimately, the Third Circuit Court sent it back to the FCC for further deliberation and public hearings. So far, public testimony has overwhelmingly supported maintaining or strengthening rules limiting media concentration.

There aren’t a lot of hot-button issues on which I find myself enthusiastically allied with the likes of John Carlson and Frank Blethen, but I can think of few trends that more threaten the health of our democracy than the ever growing concentration of media ownership in the hands of a few corporations. Media ownership concentration doesn’t just lead to a loss of localism and a decline in the quality and diversity of content, it also directly and indirectly undermines the ability of the press to serve its crucial democratic role as a watchdog of our institutions, both public and private. There is no democracy without a free press, and there is no truly free press in an industry where the only sure path to promotion is to echo the political leanings of your corporatist masters.

It is the inherent inability of anybody to own the blogosphere that makes it so exciting and vital, but do not kid yourself that this revolution in citizen journalism is anywhere close to challenging the corporate media for audience or influence, or that the corporations who own the networks willingly provide us unfettered access to the mass market of content consumers. It is also important to remember that as online consumers increasingly come to expect and demand streaming video and other bandwidth-intensive content, the growing cost of producing and serving this content will require not-insubstantial sums of capital investment if we are to truly compete for audience share. There is plenty of room for individuals and small companies to innovate, but in an environment that allows unlimited ownership consolidation, the traditional venture capital infrastructure that fueled our region’s high-tech boom is not well suited toward the goal of building a robust and independent new media. As evidenced by today’s acquisition of Newsvine by MSNBC, when profit is the only motive of investors, and ownership concentration knows no bounds, the media conglomerates will simply fatten their portfolio and strengthen their market control by purchasing those few public and venture-backed corporations that manage to gain a competitive edge.

There may yet come a day when the Internet is nothing but a content-neutral utility through which nearly all media is distributed, thus making corporate ownership of our airwaves, and even cable, irrelevant. But the growing power and influence of our media conglomerates makes that day a dim and distant vision.

If anyone knows just how important a ‘yes’ vote is this fall, it’s Jim Ellis.

He goes back to the 1968 transit vote that was part of another Ellis legacy, Forward Thrust, and one of his bitterest losses.

“We were ahead in the polls, right up to the last three weeks,” he said. “Then, some very clever ads came out, and one day General Motors showed up with a large trailer-truck. It had a huge window and inside was a chrome-plated jet engine, and the sign said something like, ‘This is the engine of the future. It will make buses faster than trains!’

“No one would ever put a jet engine in a bus, but people didn’t know that and we slowly lost the vote for transit. That was in 1968. If the people had voted for it — eventually it would have been 80 percent paid by the federal government — the system would have been finished in 1985, at three times the size of the one before voters this November. And the last payment for it would have been in 2008.”

Instead of General Motors, we have Ron Sims pushing the “buses instead of rail” idea. To think, we could have a 22 year-old rail system up and running today, if only the folks back in ’68 had had the foresight to make that investment.

My grandfather voted against Forward Thrust’s rail measure back in ’68. Why? It didn’t run a line from his home in White Center to the Renton Boeing plant. Not seeing the big picture, pops said “no” to Senator Magnuson’s free money. There’s still no rail from White Center to Renton. Maggie’s money, and our rail system, was put to good use.

In Atlanta.

Maybe pops thought they’d come back to the voters with another package a year later. Of course, they never did.

Tonight on “The David Goldstein Show”, 7PM to 10PM on News/Talk 710-KIRO:

7PM: Give us your poor…
In the course of any given year, 3.5 million Americans are homeless, and of these, 41% are families, 25% are children under the age of 10, and 43% work. 52% of families are turned away from homeless shelters due to overcrowding. To create awareness of this endemic but solvable problem, Appleseed Records has released a 17-track benefit CD, “Give US Your Poor,” featuring new recordings from the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Pete Seeger, Jon Bon Jovi, Natalie Merchant, Jewel and others. Joining me by phone to discuss the CD and his own experience with homelessness will be Eugene OR-based blues singer Eagle Park Slim. Later, we’ll talk about the local homelessness problem with Rev. Dr. Sandy Brown, Executive Director of The Church Council of Greater Seattle.

8PM: Did the King County Prosecutor’s Office cover up priest sexual abuse?
In successfully winning over $50 million in settlements against priests on behalf of sex-abuse victims, Seattle attorney Timothy Kosnoff has seen the horror stories firsthand, and so during the height of the nationwide scandal he urged the King County Prosecutor’s Office to use its subpoena power to unseal records, and look for evidence of an organized cover-up. Even though similar investigations in other cities uncovered cover-ups and additional abuse nationwide, then Chief of Staff Dan Satterberg refused. Kosnoff joins me in the studio for the hour to discuss the scandal, and what he sees as Satterberg’s conflict of interest, serving as both an advisor to the Seattle Archdiocese, and as the public official with the discretion to subpoena their records.

9PM: The Blogger Hour with Ari Melber
Ari Melber is a regular contributor to The Nation magazine, the oldest political weekly in America, and blogs at both Huffington Post and Campaign Matters, The Nation’s 2008 campaign blog. His commentary and other writing has appeared in over a dozen publications, including The Stranger and the Seattle P-I. Melber joins me in studio to discuss the 2008 presidential race, the worthlessness of polls and why we focus on them, plus the Dems inability to effectively oppose the administration on torture.

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

From San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom:

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom proclaimed the nation’s war on drugs a total failure and insisted the crime rate would go down if the government spent money on treatment as opposed to jailing people with drug problems.

“If you want to get serious, if you want to reduce crime by 70% in this country overnight, end this war on drugs,” he told reporters at City Hall on Thursday. “You want to get serious, seriously serious about crime and violence end this war on drugs.”

…

In a ten-minute tirade about the drug war’s failure, Newsom told reporters that most politicians – including those in his own party – just don’t have the guts to admit the obvious.

“It’s laughable that anyone could look at themselves with a straight face and say ‘oh,we’re really succeeding.’ I mean it’s comedy. And as I say, shame on my party, the democratic party, because they don’t have the courage of their private thoughts, because we don’t want to appear weak on this topic,” Newsom said.

Alcohol prohibition ended when mayors like New York’s Fiorello LaGuardia spoke out about how it was nothing more than a war on minority communities. Drug prohibition will end the same way, as mayors from San Francisco to Newark are all starting to say the same thing.

David Guard has a recap of the incarceration hearing from Thursday.

[Via Pete Guither]

Why did I spend most of last night talking with callers about the explosion in Tacoma, rather than politics?

Tonight on “The David Goldstein Show”, 7PM to 10PM on News/Talk 710-KIRO:

7PM: Eli Sanders goes boom.
We were going to have Eli Sanders joining us for The Stranger Hour, but instead we’ll be covering the big explosion in Tacoma, and asking eyewitnesses to call in with their personal accounts.

8PM: TBA
We’ll see how it goes. Maybe more Tacoma explosion coverage,

9PM: The Blogger Hour with Will
Fellow HA blogger Will Kelley-Kamp joins me in studio to discuss roads & transit, the city council races and other local issues. And maybe a little Tacoma explosion coverage too.

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

Fred refines his message:

(This and some 70 other media clips from the past week are now posted at Hominid Views.)

Are you confused about R-67? Sure you are. The insurance industry is spending a stunning $8 million on deceptive ads to make sure that you are confused… because confused voters almost always vote “no.” Those fake ads from that fake “consumer” group featuring fake lawyers and fake families, represents everything that’s wrong with an initiative and referendum process that is fast becoming an exclusive tool for moneyed special interests to buy their way onto the ballot so they can sell their agenda with lies.

But you all know how I feel about ballot measures, so don’t take my word for it, or even that of the “Approve 67” campaign. Watch CNN’s Anderson Cooper’s in-depth report on the scandal at the heart of R-67, and make up your mind for yourself.

Personally, I pay my insurance premiums on time, and I expect my insurance company to pay out my claims accordingly. I’m voting Yes on R-67.

Rep. Jim McDermott (Washington state’s real Doc) addresses another surge in Iraq:

No doubt the anti-rail folks were disappointed to read the report issued today summarizing the independent performance audit of Sound Transit… though that won’t stop them (or bumper sticker writers like Rick Anderson) from attempting to turn an overwhelmingly positive audit into a PR disaster.

Writing at the Daily Weekly (does anybody actually read the Weekly’s blogs if real bloggers like me don’t link to them?) Anderson characterizes the report as “stinging,” before cutting and pasting a list of bullet points under the headline “New Audit: ST Wasted $5 Mil“. By comparison, Mike Lindblom of the Times (bless their hearts) instantly cuts through the crap:

Though significant, that’s a fraction of the project’s overall budget of $2.4 billion, and Sound Transit maintains the losses are actually lower.

Sound Transit may have “wasted” as much as 0.2% of its budget… not exactly the “Big Dig” scenario critics keep warning about. To put that $5 million in perspective, one of the auditor’s primary recommendations is, surprise, annual performance audits — at a YOE cost of nearly $50 million over 50 years! ($500,000 per audit, 2.5% inflation.) And for some reason, Anderson fails to include in his bullet points the approximately $6.5 million the audit says Sound Transit saved during preliminary ST2 design through its “value engineering studies.” Huh.

Whatever. Here is the audit’s actual conclusion, as summarized at the top of the report:

Sound Transit has faced, and continues to face, challenges in delivering capital construction contracts for the Link Light Rail Project. Through the course of initially planning, designing, and building the system, the agency experienced delays and cost overruns.

Before 2002, the agency experienced a lack of expertise, no established practices or procedures relating to ROW acquisition, environmental, or construction management, and limited management oversight. Gaps in best practice tools and procedures created variability in early project delivery success and resulted in project cost and schedule impacts. The agency essentially started as an inefficient and ineffective organization. As a result, the initial light rail project communicated to voters in 1996 ultimately was modified. Its original length, Central Link, 19.7 miles (19 stations) at $1.7 billon (1995 dollars) with an expected completion date of 2006 became the following:

Segment (Expected Completion)	Miles	Stations	Cost
Initial Segment and Airport Link (2009)	15.6	13	$2.6 billion (Y.O.E.)
University Link (2016)	3.2	2	$1.7 billion (Y.O.E.)

However, in the last five years, Sound Transit has responded to its challenges through improvements in construction planning and management processes and implementation of “best practices.” Indications of diligent review of proposed change orders by Sound Transit Project Controls were also identified. From its inception in 1996, the agency has gradually developed management techniques and construction project controls and procedures.

Sound Transit has improved its structure to manage projects and has standardized guidelines on cost estimating, change and cost management, project management, and risk assessments. Sound Transit has also developed procedures for addressing emerging lessons learned.

Although Sound Transit has made great strides in improving its project delivery practices, opportunities exist that will contribute towards its present culture of continuous improvement.

That’s the unedited summary of the auditor’s conclusion, and it is far from the stinging rebuke Anderson makes it out to be. Of course the report highlights things Sound Transit could do better. That’s the purpose of a performance audit: to help an agency improve its performance. But rather than merely focusing on the agency’s shortcomings, the report actually documents a remarkable turnaround, in which Sound Transit overcame its early management woes to grow into a mature and well-run organization that is largely delivering projects on budget and on time. That’s also the conclusion of state Treasurer Mike Murphy, who in enthusiastically endorsing Proposition 1 yesterday, praised Sound Transit’s cost and revenue projections as conservative, while criticizing opponents’ numbers as “bogus.”

Opponents keep reaching back a decade or more to when Sound Transit, then a start-up agency, initially over-promised the Central Link light rail, but they intentionally ignore the progress that’s been made since then. Still, voters are largely getting the same 19 miles of rail first promised (though with fewer stations, and over a longer construction period,) and without raising any additional taxes. Opponents would like this election to be about Sound Transit’s management problems in the late 1990’s, but Murphy — whose condemnation of the Seattle Monorail’s financing package played a huge role in killing the project — succinctly sums up the real issue facing voters:

“Do you want something to happen or not? If you do, vote yes,” he said. “If you don’t, vote no.”

Indeed, if there is a lesson to be learned from this performance audit, and the parallel histories of both Sound Transit and the Seattle Monorail Project, it is the inherent danger of starting large transportation agencies from scratch… which ironically, is exactly what we’ll eventually be forced to do should voters reject Proposition 1. The pro-rail critics of the roads and transit package have this pie-eyed idea that we can just come back next year or the year after that with a transit-only package, but they ignore two basic realities: a) polls show that neither roads nor transit would pass on their own, and b) there’s no guarantee Sound Transit will even be allowed to bring a package before voters.

There are many in the Legislature and the pro-roads camp who are just itching for Proposition 1 to fail, so that they have an excuse to finally pass “governance reform,” implementing a multi-county, multi-modal transportation agency intended to dilute the influence of pro-rail Seattle voters, and essentially dismantle Sound Transit as an independent agency. Such a “reform,” whatever its merits, would be so disruptive, and introduce so many delays into any effort to pass and implement a project even remotely based on ST2, that Sound Transit would surely lose the bulk of the management and engineering infrastructure it has so painfully constructed over the past five years, and the expertise that goes with it. We would, in essence, be starting from scratch, ignoring yet another one of the audit’s primary conclusions:

Strong management and mature agency skills are not created overnight. It took five years from start-up to the time Sound Transit had its policies, its systems and its management practices fully in place. The Puget Sound region should be careful to preserve and nurture this knowledge base and not to assume that every new program needs a new agency to manage it.

No doubt Proposition 1 is filled with compromises, and I welcome a debate on its costs vs. benefits. But the measure’s opponents reveal themselves to be fundamentally lazy and dishonest in their persistent efforts to slander Sound Transit itself as corrupt and incompetent.

Given the timing, I had grave doubts that this performance audit would be fair and impartial, but I see nothing in this report to suggest that Sound Transit’s management is not dedicated to constantly improving its internal processes, that its ridership, revenue and cost projections should be held suspect, or that the agency itself is not positioned to deliver ST2 largely as promised. Large capital projects are inherently risky, and in that context the report concludes:

The use of the aforementioned “best practices” in conjunction with input from technical and subject matter experts and FTA oversight demonstrate that Sound Transit’s construction planning and management systems are maturing. This should be understood in the context of the complex and high risk contracts that Sound Transit is delivering, where challenges and risks will always be present. Focus, innovation, and due diligence will always be required to avoid surprises on such projects.

A “stinging performance audit”… my ass.

I am so confused. Is this a pro-Romney ad, or an anti-Romney ad? Either way, it’s hilarious.

Week after week I attend the Tuesday night gathering of the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally, and you’d think occasionally some attractive, thirty-somethingish woman looking for a smart, funny guy with proof-of-concept in the parenting department might sidle up to the bar and start hitting on me… but no. I gotta say, blogging is a lousy way to meet women. On the other hand, it’s apparently a great way to meet four-star generals.

There I was the other night, pint of Manny’s in hand, plotting mischief with a couple of politicos, when who should walk up to us but Gen. Wesley Clark, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander — and I gotta say, perhaps the most energetically outspoken politician I’ve ever met. Within seconds we’re talking Iran, and Gen. Clark didn’t mince words. President Bush is preparing to take us to war with Iran, and the Democratic Congress, Clark warned, is unprepared to stop him. Don’t get too cocky about 2008, Clark told us. The Republican plan is to use the war, and the patriotic fervor that seems to swell up around every new military adventure, to kick ass next November, branding us Democrats as weak, indecisive and obstructionist… if not out-and-out traitors.

It’s so crazy, it just might work.

I’ve heard smart people describe the notion of war with Iran as “unimaginable,” an assertion disproved by the conversation itself. It is in fact easy to imagine Bush launching a “preemptive” strike on an Iranian nuclear facility, or provoking (or fabricating) a Gulf of Tonkin-like incident that absolutely demands immediate retaliation. And it is equally easy to imagine the American people, moved by fear, rewarding the war party for its aggression, despite the growing national disgust over our quagmire in Iraq.

Coming from me, it is easy to dismiss such warnings as the paranoid ravings of the “far-left” “nutroots.” Which is why it is so important to have these warnings come from men of Gen. Clark’s stature and expertise. As Gen. Clark told the Seattle P-I’s Joel Connelly, the chicken-hawks planning and promoting a war with Iran have learned nothing from their disaster in Iraq:

“They know nothing about war,” Clark declared. “Almost none among them has ever seen a battlefield. They don’t comprehend the blood, the mangled bodies. They’ve never seen severed body parts. And they are so absolutely sure that you can predict the outcome.”

Of course, I suppose Bush-defenders would dismiss Gen. Clark’s words as those of a “phony soldier.” But Democrats would do well to heed his advice, and prepare for the unimaginable.

UPDATE:
As RonK points out, Gen. Clark was in Seattle on a book tour, so it’s only courtesy to plug the book: “A Time to Lead.”

Thursday morning, Virginia Senator Jim Webb, New York Senator Chuck Schumer, and New York Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney are holding a hearing to discuss our country’s incarceration crisis.

The United States has experienced a sharp increase in its prison population in the past thirty years. From the 1920s to the mid-1970s, the incarceration rate in the United States remained steady at approximately 110 prisoners per 100,000 people. Today, the incarceration rate is 737 inmates per 100,000 residents, comprising 2.1 million persons in federal, state, and local prisons. The United States has 5 percent of the world’s population but now has 25 percent of its prisoners. There are approximately 5 million Americans under the supervision of the correctional system, including parole, probation, and other community supervision sanctions.

With such a significant number of the population behind bars, expenditures associated with the prison system have skyrocketed. According to the Urban Institute, “the social and economic costs to the nation are enormous.” With 2.25 million people incarcerated in approximately five thousand prisons and jails, the combined expenditures of local governments, state governments, and the federal government for law enforcement and corrections personnel totals over $200 billion.

The JEC will examine why the United States has such a disproportionate share of the world’s prison population, as well as ways to address this issue that responsibly balance public safety and the high social and economic costs of imprisonment.

One of the witnesses will be Dr. Glenn Loury, an Economics and Social Sciences Professor from Brown University, who recently wrote about the forces behind this trend.

[Nod to David Borden at the Speakeasy]

Professional curmudgeon Ken Schram asks:

So what do you get when you mix arrogance, alcohol and a really savvy lawyer who knows how to stall for time and manipulate the system?

The answer is…You get a Schrammie!

That’s right. Jane Hague may not have earned that BS degree in “Business and Economics,” but she certainly has earned a bobble-head achievement award.

It wasn’t just for being caught drunk driving—even combined with abusing the arresting officer. It wasn’t about falsely claiming she had a college degree—for years. It wasn’t about her inability to properly manage her campaign finances and contributions. It wasn’t about her penchant for blaming others. And, hell, I doubt Ken even knew that, at one time, Jane couldn’t even be bothered to license her dog.

Naaaa…it took more than that. (They don’t just hand out these Schrammies willie-nillie, you know!) It was for successfully delaying the pre-trial hearing until November 28th (after the election) that gave Hague the kind of distinction needed to earn a Schrammie:

So, for playing voters like pawns in some sleazy political chess game; for dragging out the legal process to the point where it doesn’t overtly interfere with political ambition and for being just plain smug about it all, take a bow, Jane, because this “Schrammie” is for you.

(* APPLAUSE TRACK *)

Please join me in congratulating Ms. Hague for her Schramalicious success story.

The good news for Republican King County Councilmember Jane Hague is that she managed to get her drunk-driving hearing postponed until after the November election, avoiding in the weeks leading up to the vote, the potential embarrassment of pleading guilty to, you know, drunk driving. The bad news for Hague is that in doing so, she’s only managed to generate a whole new controversy to keep the bad headlines coming.

When the going gets weird, well, King County Council Democratic candidate Richard Pope keeps it moving right along. He has succeeded in at least temporarily removing the judge who yesterday ruled that Pope’s Republican opponent Jane Hague could delay arguments in her drunk-driving trial until after the November election, Seattle Weekly has learned.

King County District Court Presiding Judge Barbara Linde said this afternoon she has already notified pro tem judge Richard Llewelyn Jones of his removal for failing to report his own criminal background.

The removal could also lead to nullification of Jones’ ruling to delay arguments over Hague’s so-far successful attempt to have blood-alcohol results thrown out. “I’ll leave it up to the two sides to decide” whether the delay stands, Linde says, indicating Hague and prosecutors could end up in court again before the election after all.

If Pope loses (and notice I don’t say “when”,) the two parties should start a bidding war to see who can hire him to do opposition research on the other side. Or, they should have him killed. Man, he’s good.