Archives for January 2008

How wrong I was.

Three City Council members who voted to override the planning department on a strip club’s parking-lot rezone turn out to be beneficiaries of some $39,000 in campaign contributions that the club’s owners allegedly funneled through various contributors to get around donor limit laws. The rezone is then revoted and rejected. The council members return the money and pay fines. Two of them are promptly ousted at the next election.

It’s worth noting that the city council people involved never faced any charges for wrongdoing themselves. That said, the whole thing stank to high heaven.

But what struck me about the whole affair is how small ball this was. Seattle is not like Chicago, Miama, LA, or Boston, and certainly not like New Orleans.

Our corruption is nothing like that of those cities. For example, Richard McIver had to pay a fine for allowing former Govenor Albert Rossellini to buy him lunch at Quizno’s. Quizno’s, for God’s sake. McIver got nailed for a six dollar sandwich.

So, suffice it to say I wasn’t blown away by today’s news:

With a touch of defiance, Seattle strip-club owner Frank Colacurcio Jr. and a longtime associate pleaded guilty today to criminal charges related to the so-called “Strippergate” campaign-finance scandal of 2003.

His father, Frank Colacurcio Sr., was also expected to plead guilty to the same charges, but the longtime strip-club magnate, who is 90, did not appear in court due to health problems. His attorney said Colacurcio Sr. will enter a plea by Monday.

In a plea bargain that avoided jail time, Colacurcio Jr. agreed to pay a $10,000 fine and one year of probation. His father is expected to accept an identical deal.

Those penalties are in addition to a $55,000 civil settlement approved Wednesday by the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission.

[…]

Gil Conte, a former lounge singer and longtime Colacurcio associate, also pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor conspiracy charge and agreed to pay a $1,000 fine.

After the sentencing, Conte did a quick soft-shoe dance step for a throng of reporters, and said, “I didn’t do nothing.”

Lame.

“I didn’t do nothing.” What is this, Goodfellas? C’mon.

Amtrak cancels Seattle-LA service temporarily

Who takes a train from Seattle to LA? I’d rather fly some shitty cattle-call airline like Southwest for $49 and be subjected to screaming infants and douchebags in cutoffs reading Joel Osteen books out loud to themselves.

Amtrak sucks, and it’s not because it’s government run. Railway networks in Europe are awesome, and they’re all government run. Why? Infrastructure investment: they invest in theirs, and we don’t invest in ours.

No, Jonah, being bad guys alone doesn’t make them fascists. But holding swastika and Dixie banners aloft, shouting “Sieg Heil,” and ranting ad nauseam about how bestial colored people and queers and the Jewish media are destroying the country, and demanding that we start shooting Mexican border crossers — well, that pretty clearly marks them as fascist, dontcha think?

And for a guy who insists irregularly that we not confuse European liberalism with its American version, Goldberg certainly has little compunction about conflating European fascism with its American variant. In fact, American fascists are fairly variegated in their worldviews and resulting strategies: some, like the Posse and the Freemen, are indeed hyper-local, though their version of local government is a white male supremacist ideation in which minorities have no rights and homosexuals and abortion providers are put to death. Others see themselves as largely regional organizations (particularly the Northwest’s “white homeland” advocates) with a national reach, while still others — the Klan, the Aryan Nations, the National Socialist Movement, Hammerskin Nation — see themselves as national organizations whose ideas for a right-wing authoritarian state do indeed more closely resemble the European model.

The same is true for figures like David Duke, who sees himself as an international role model for neo-Nazism. In recent years, he’s been traveling to places like Russia and the Arab world, spreading his vicious anti-Semitic propaganda. And in both places, it’s clear he’s been gaining audiences and having an impact on the ground. So much for these fascists’ insignificance.

But then, it’s essential for Jonah’s already-shaky thesis that he minimize, downplay, whitewash, and otherwise utterly trivialize these groups, their presence and their activities, because their very existence not only undermines, it completely demolishes his central claim that “fascism, properly understood, is not a phenomenon of the right at all” but that “it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left.” Because clearly, American fascists are now, and always have been, a phenomenon of the right, quite unmistakably so.

It’s all about trivializing the monstrous, all to serve his increasingly dubious claim that conservatives are in no way at all even remotely fascist. Indeed, it’s more than evident that the wish to rebut that “smear” is what has animated this entire enterprise (Goldberg has made this clear in numerous interviews, as well as the book itself).

The problem is that it’s much easier to demonstrate the opposite is true. And over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be discussing that.

But you have to wonder about someone who can so easily whitewash the realities of the Klan, dismiss the social and cultural effects of modern-day fascists, and then compare the Nazi eliminationist program to Hillary Clinton’s day-care initiatives. It is not often you get to see the holes in people’s souls on public display, and it’s never pretty.

The most likely winner of the Appropriations derby will be Rep. Dave Reichert, a former sheriff of King County, Wash., who has not distinguished himself during three years in Congress and gets only a 60 percent rating from the American Conservative Union. His sole qualification appears to be that he is the most endangered Republican House member in 2008 and needs to bring home the bacon to Seattle.

I’m not so sure, but either way it’s not exactly a ringing endorsement. That the GOP leadership would even consider handing the assignment to such an undistinguished and unqualified member shows you just how scared they are of Darcy Burner’s challenge; I guess they figure Reichert will have to buy off WA-08 voters with pork if he’s to have a hope of saving his job. And with yet another vulnerable Republican choosing retirement over humiliating defeat, WA-08 could end up being the most competitive race in the nation.

If elected president, Paul told me he would continue to pursue such a policy.

“I think the Roe v. Wade situation was a big mistake and the states ought to have the right to decide on the issue, so I would deny jurisdiction to the federal courts on abortion issues,” he said.

Roe v. Wade was decided in large part under the doctrine of substantive due process as an issue of privacy. Paul thinks that basis for the ruling is flawed.

When speaking of liberty, I can think of nothing more important than the right a person has to keep the government out of their own body. If Paul is the libertarian he says he is, he’d agree. If the government edges it’s way into the doctors office, it will get itself into everything eventually, and then it’s all over.

State Sen. Craig Pridemore introduced today SB 6809, a bill that would extend a state sales tax refund to the 350,000 Washington households who qualify for the federal Earned Income Tax Credit, putting an average of $170 annually back into the pockets of working families. Rep. Tammy Green is introducing a companion bill in the House, and word is that the bill has strong support from both Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown, and House Speaker Frank Chopp. A tax cut targeted at those who need it most? Who’d a thunk?

Washington’s lowest income families currently pay 18 percent of their income in state and local taxes, whereas our wealthiest pay just 3 percent. The “Working Families Credit” would offer a maximum rebate of $470 (10 percent of the federal EITC,) effectively reducing the recipient’s sales and consumption taxes by about 30 percent. Other states offer similar extensions to the EITC, but Washington would be the first such state without an income tax. The Washington State Budget and Policy Center has issued a policy paper with more details.

It will be interesting to see the response to this Democratic bill, as the federal EITC generally enjoys broad bipartisan support, and tax cuts tend to be the Republican solution to everything from recession to gout. I’m particularly curious to see on which side the Seattle Times editorial board falls; I suppose it is possible they might argue that the bill’s estimated $60 million a year cost is ill advised in this time of economic uncertainty, but that would seem disingenuous coming from a board that recently argued so vociferously for eliminating the estate tax, thus granting a $100 million a year tax break to the children of multi-millionaires.

I’m not sure how one argues against the Working Families Credit… but I’m pretty sure some folks will try.

Rep. Marilyn Musgrave’s (R-Colo.) entrance into the contentious battle for the open Appropriations Committee seat pits the House campaign committee chairman against two of his most vulnerable members.

And who is the other “most vulnerable” member seeking to plump up his coffers via a lucrative seat on the Appropriations Committee? None other than our own “Desperate Dave” Reichert.

The NRCC spent $1.8 million to defend Musgrave and $2.3 million defending Reichert last cycle. Both members narrowly won reelection and are once again targets for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC).

Musgrave defeated Democrat Angie Paccione 46 to 43 percent. Reichert faces a rematch in 2008 against his 2006 challenger, Democrat Darcy Burner, whom he defeated 51 to 49 percent.

And that $2.3 million doesn’t even include the god-knows-how-much RNC money Karl Rove spent directing 585,164 voter contacts into the 8th Congressional District, a stunning 41,666 on election day alone!

With Musgrave now in contention for the Appropriations seat, Reichert can pretty much kiss his chances goodbye. Both lay equal claim to the need to prop up a vulnerable incumbent, but Reichert’s call for geographical diversity is trumped by Musgrave’s: currently, no Colorado member sits on the 36-seat panel, whereas Washington is well represented on the Democratic side by appropriations-savvy Rep. Norm Dicks.

Which I suppose explains why Reichert is suddenly changing his tune. On Friday he anxiously told reporters that “I need a seat now. Those open seats for people who are in safe seats will come later.” But in the face of Musgrave’s equally desperate challenge, Reichert spokesman Mike Shields is now touting loftier objectives:

“[Reichert] is the person who will help the conference the most … Dave is for more transparency and accountability.”

Yeah… um… ’cause what could be more transparent than admitting on camera that he votes the way his party leadership tells him to vote, because “I have to do that over here … I have to be able to be very flexible in where I place my votes”…? And really, who should be held more accountable for Gary Ridgeway’s 18-year killing spree than the detective who dismissed him as suspect early in the investigation despite an eyewitness account?

“Transparent” and “accountable”… yeah, that’s Dave Reichert. And nothing could be more transparent than Reichert’s desperate effort to prop up his flagging campaign by securing himself a seat on the lucrative Appropriation’s Committee.

UPDATE: From the Oregonian: Clark County GOP taking national ridicule.

In Vancouver, Wash., the Clark County Republican Party is in hot water for a post based on that ridiculous – and thoroughly discredited – hate e-mail about Barack Obama on the home page of its web site.

Once upon a time, this kind of stuff would have been spread in fliers by some of the wacky people who gravitate to local political party meetings. Now it is getting national publicity – Keith Olbermann slammed the county GOP on his MSNBC show – and doing its little bit to drive people away from the Republican Party (just as now-resigned State Rep. Richard Curtis, R-La Center, recently contributed to the impression that the GOP harbors a fair number of sexual hypocrites).

As I said… behold the awesome power of the Internets, and quake before us.

I’m starting my evening at Chocolate for Choice, I won’t be stopping by until a little later. Maybe a nice stout to wash down all that chocolate?

Not in Seattle? Liberals will also be drinking tonight in the Tri-Cities. A full listing of Washington’s thirteen Drinking Liberally chapters is available here.