Archives for June 2008

This week’s Birds Eye View Contest is posted

Also, Jonathan Gardner longs for the days of slavery

Not a problem:

Putting commuter trains on the Interstate 90 bridge will require protecting the structure against damage from stray electrical current and may require innovative ways to attach the rails to avoid damaging the span, a panel of experts told state lawmakers Wednesday.

A Sound Transit project manager said the trains would likely have to slow for a few seconds while crossing joints between the floating bridge and its approaches. And who would pay for what part of the project is still being worked out.

“This is very new to us, the idea of putting light rail on a floating bridge,” said state project manager Theresa Greco.

I think the idea of transit in general is new to our state’s Department of Highways Transportation. These guys see that center span as theirs, and they look at any project that doesn’t rely on cars or buses as suspect.

During the meeting, Rep. Judy Clibborn compared installing light rail on I-90 with The Big Dig. Really? Putting rails on a floating bridge is the same as the most ambitious public works project in American history? Making “Big Dig” comparisons is a sort of “Godwin’s Law” of transportation arguments: every project you oppose is the same as the “Big Dig.”

How can something be a “Big Dig” when we’re not even digging?

The Government Accountability Office has granted Boeing’s challenge of a lucrative refueling tanker contract, citing numerous errors by the Air Force.

Officially challenging the contract was widely considered to be a risky move on Boeing’s part, as the GAO is not known for lightly granting challenges, and Boeing risked its relationship with military officials. But the GAO decision now gives more ammunition to members of Congress seeking to overturn the $40 billion contract that largely went Europe’s Airbus.

I guess John McCain has some further explaining to do to WA voters.

Jim Webb (D-VA) is once again showing that he’s in a league of his own in the U.S. Senate. Tomorrow, he’ll be convening a hearing on the drug war and exploring the damage it’s doing to our country.

Via The Other Side Online, a photo of the Rossi signs that have been popping up all over Eastern Washington.  Notice there is no “paid for” notice as required by law, allowing Rossi to deny responsibility, but really… we all know these professionally printed signs are as much a part of the Rossi campaign as the BIAW’s multi-million dollar media blitz.

But you know, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.  If it’s okay for Rossi to stoke anti-Seattle passions in Yakima, while the media covers for him back here, then I think Seattle voters deserve to see the same message, paid for by equally anonymous benefactors.  So I’m going to anonymously check out what it costs to put up this sign on a prominent billboard in downtown Seattle, and then anonymously launch an anonymous fund drive to pay for it.

I made it out to last night’s debate between Goldy and Grover Norquist at the South Lake Union Outback Steakhouse. The event was videotaped by the Evergreen Freedom Foundation (EFF) and will be available sometime next week. I was hoping to live-blog as it was happening, but there was no available wi-fi for me to use. So instead I drank some Toohey’s and enjoyed the spectacle.

My take on the debate was that Goldy had an advantage in that he knows Norquist much better than Norquist knows Goldy (and Washington State politics). Goldy used this edge to provide some local examples of why Norquist’s ideas of taxation being antithetical to freedom don’t quite match up with the history of this region, while Norquist could only respond with some lame strawman arguments and occasional outbursts of yelling that gave his appearance an unhinged quality at times.

I imagine the EFF folks who were in attendance saw things differently, but Norquist looked bored and annoyed while Goldy generally made his points and easily responded to the wild accusations from Norquist that people on the left are parasites.

Probably the most striking point that Goldy made was pointing out that Norquist’s support for having government provide money to families to use towards school choice seemed to fly in the face of his overall opposition of wealth re-distribution. Even following the debate, a group of EFF members continued to argue this point, totally unable to grasp it. One man in his twenties finally tried to make the point that educating kids could conceivably be a matter of national security. Thankfully, none of the EFF people stuck around long enough to ride that train of thought to its logical conclusion and watch their entire ideology unravel in front of them.

Norquist was also there to plug his new book “Leave Us Alone.” The title of his book certainly sounds like a political sentiment I can go along with. I strongly feel that government at all levels in this country has gotten too big and has accrued far too much power for its own good. I worry that we don’t exercise enough oversight over how government spends our money and that we’re starting to believe in false choices between security and freedom that will end up with us having neither. But Norquist sees both demons and virtue where none of either exist. It’s hard to take seriously a man who helped elevate the current Bush Administration into power but is still convinced that the threat of big government is unique to the political left.

Even during the debate, there were a number of issues that Norquist brought up that I agreed with (and even Goldy made it clear that he agrees with Norquist on our sugar policy), but by seeing those on the left as “parasites,” he remains lost in a world that exists only in his own mind. Yes, there are unions backed by the left that don’t act in the best interest of the greater public and screw taxpayers. But there are corporations backed by the right who do it as well. And in recent years, corporations that have acted irresponsibly have screwed taxpayers out of far greater sums of money that every single welfare recipient in the country combined.

Both sides of the political divide in this country are driven by interests that – when left unchecked – can end up with attempts to curtail our freedom or to divert taxpayer money towards foolish or dangerous things. Believing that a desire to use taxpayer money in the first place is inherently foolish is the false notion that leads Norquist (and not to mention Jonah Goldberg in his recent laughable book) to conclusions that fall far outside the realm of common sense. Norquist wants to equate the desire for 51% of the population to enact a levy to the desire for 51% of the population to strip individuals of a particular moral choice or to subjugate a subset of the population. When it comes to regulating an economic system that everyone must share, the system’s rules must be determined by the aggregate of the population’s moral outlook, whether that means more government involvement or less. However, when it comes to individual liberty, that should never be subject to a “tyranny of the majority.”

This distinction is crucial for understanding why those, like Norquist, who view taxation as being akin to prison, seem unconcerned and oblivious to the fact that the people who’ve been promising lower taxes for years have now built up the largest prison system in the world. I’m sure he’s convinced himself that the people being locked up are just parasites and need to be taken out of society. When one believes that only the other side is a threat to our freedom, it just makes it easier for his side to become the greater threat to our freedom. This is Norquist’s legacy, and it’s why he’s gone from being a key political player in this country to getting slapped around by a local blogger in a small room at the Outback Steakhouse.

The BIAW plans to spend a shitload of cash, circumventing campaign finance laws in an attempt to open up a second front against Gov. Chris Gregoire’s re-election campaign. But don’t take it from me:

If you’ve listened to drive-time radio in recent weeks, you’ve doubtless heard an anti-Gov. Chris Gregoire radio spot sponsored by an outfit called “ChangePAC.” It’s really the BIAW in disguise.

On a June 2 report, ChangePAC reported a $245,000 donation from the BIAW, enough to more than pay for a radio campaign that to date has totaled just over $200,000.

The BIAW has since brought that number up to $500,000. That’s a half million in radio ads in June. I haven’t heard much about this from the legacy media; I know that “pointing things out” and “drawing conclusions” is icky icky blogger stuff, but when a special interest group flaunts campaign finance rules, I expect to read about it. You know, in the paper.

Yesterday I was driving back to Seattle from the Eastside. I hopped on SR-520 at north Bellevue, and immediately took my place in the line of cars waiting to cross the bridge. The freeway was at a total standstill.

Without AC, my ’88 Chevy POS was getting hotter and hotter. At the same time, I was getting more and more pissed off. I never got this pissed off when riding the commuter bus across the lake. The longer I waited in traffic, the more my mind started to wander.

Right-wingers see transit as an attempt by the “elite” to “force” people into making choices they wouldn’t otherwise make. In the Puget Sound region, our two options are bus or car (or commuter train, for some people). Since our transit system is built on buses which get stuck in traffic, there is little incentive to leave your car at home. Because of this, I’ve been “socially engineered” back into my Chevy. So it’s really the anti-transit folks who take away my choices, and limit my freedom.

We lose productivity and efficiency when we have people in hour-long backups on our freeways. The absence of real alternatives to driving takes away freedom from hardworking folks. Looking at the Sound Transit maps of East Link, I would have been 3/4 of a mile away from a train station, easily in walking distance from my Eastside starting point. Studies show that people will walk much further to a train station than they will a bus stop. From that still-only-on-paper light rail station, it would have been a scant 20 minutes to downtown Seattle.

When we spend big bucks on transit infrastructure, we increase freedom, not decrease it. And you know who understands this better than any Seattle lefty? Try a born-again culture warrior:

Various free market think tanks state that Americans love their automobiles and do not desire rail systems as an alternative. Really?

Each year Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), D.C.’s subway and bus system, reaches a new high in ridership. I have an employee who drove to work. He often was upset upon his arrival. He now lives less than one block from a Metrorail station. He comes to work smiling and continually points to the virtues of the Metrorail system. Metrorail carries close to 600,000 riders per day. Some are tourists but most are workers. If these riders were stranded on the streets of Washington there would be gridlock beyond comprehension.

Many of Free Congress Foundation’s visitors live in the suburbs and take Metrorail and Metrobus. They sing the praises of mass transit. Sure, Americans love their cars. But cars are only good when they are moving.

I’m heading down to Vancouver for a day, and hope to use the train ride to write up a few observations on last night’s debate with Grover Norquist. No doubt my co-bloggers will help fill the void during my travels.

UPDATE:
BlatherWatch has a review of last night’s debate.

Early Sunday, on Father’s Day, my daughter and I awoke to a distressing break from our normal morning routine, which typically begins with a changing of the guard at the kitchen door as our dog and our cat tentatively pass each other in opposite directions. The dog went outside as usual, but Wompus, our smallish, nine-year-old black cat, was nowhere to be seen, failing to return from his usual nocturnal rounds.

This in itself would not have been so alarming if not for the evidence of a commotion throughout our property. A jerry-rigged section of fence had been pushed over from the outside, apparently ripped from its posts; paw marks were clearly visible where the moss appeared to have been scraped at high speeds from what passes for a front lawn; and the “bee cooler” had been knocked several feet from the side of the house, the lid having slammed shut on the angry hive inside. (Yes, we have Coleman cooler filled with bees… but that’s another story.) For her part, the dog sniffed ferociously throughout the crime scene, occasionally peeing on invisible scraps of evidence, an obvious sign of unwanted canine intruders.

All this, combined with recent news of cat-killing coyotes in Seward Park, led us to immediately fear for the worst. I kept reassuring my daughter that it was too soon to jump to conclusions, that the cat would sometimes come home a little late, but that hadn’t really happened in years, and I never really believed it. I followed the dog for a while, hoping at least she might sniff out the remains, but nothing. By noon my daughter had dug a small grave for the cat’s spirit, and tearfully marked it with a stone.

When you adopt a cat from the animal shelter they make you promise to keep it indoors, sternly repeating the grim statistic that the life expectancy of outdoor cats—exposed to disease, cars, and wild animals—is fully half the 14-year average span of those that live their lives entirely indoors. Wompus was a Christmas kitty, and I honored my promise through the winter and spring, but as the sun came out during the early days of summer, so gradually did the cat. At first he just joined us in the garden, before eventually enjoying longer yard adventures on his own. But his annoying, relentless, door-side yowling, and growing proficiency as a mouser, soon earned him permanent in-and-out privileges.

We loved Wompus, and always understood that our permissiveness would likely cut his life short, but it seemed to me a reasonable quality of life trade-off. I had previously owned an indoor cat, from ages 11 through 25, a beautiful calico who proved as neurotic and bored as she was pampered and beloved. As affectionate and playful as cats can be, they are also natural born killing machines, thus locking them indoors condemns them to a life that runs counter to their very nature. I found it impossible to do this to Wompus, especially against his very loudly expressed will.

Wompus had a job—to rid my garden of rats and other rodents—and he joyfully executed his mission with brutal efficiency. On one fall morning alone, after setting the clocks back for daylight savings, we let the cat in to discover five rats laid out by the back door… an incident that came to be mythologized in our family as the “Fallback Massacre.”

And now the predator had become prey, which I told myself was a more noble death for a hunter—a circle of life kinda thing—than being crushed by a car… and far quicker than that of my childhood cat who at the ripe old age of fourteen simply stopped eating, slowly starving herself before dying in my arms, a veterinarian’s needle stuck in her leg. Nine years old—two years past the average life expectancy of an outdoor cat. But at least it was a happy, productive, cat-like nine years, we consoled ourselves.

And so depressed and wracked with guilt (I could have heeded the coyote warnings, though I don’t live all that close to the park, and we’ve heard rumors of coyotes before), I sat down at my computer to write Wompus an appropriate memorial… when in he walks through the open back door, disheveled and agitated and six hours late, but surprisingly, very much alive.

What really happened in those early morning hours we’ll never know, though the physical evidence, the cat’s sudden reluctance to head outdoors, and his renewed nervousness around our dog (who has a more than passing resemblance to a coyote) suggest that our original supposition might not be far off the mark. For now Wompus will remain indoors, at least at night, but once his PTSD wears off and his late-night demands for egress once again escalate into a struggle between life and sleep deprivation, no doubt he’ll return to his usual nocturnal routines, perhaps wiser and more wary, but with every passing year a little slower and less agile. Some might argue with my decision to let him choose life over longevity… but not my cat.

After the jump, the memorial I had planned to post in celebration of Wompus’ life and death, a poem he had inspired me to write for my daughter back in 2002: “The Little Black Cat’s Big Catch.”

[Read more…]

Mark Baerwaldt, creepy Belltown millionaire/Monorail supporter/Sound Transit hater weighed in on KUOW the other day with this gem:

“The relief cannot be provided by Sound Transit; it takes decades to complete their mission”

See, this is the trouble with weirdo rich guys. They spend their way into the public debate, and onto our public airwaves, into the studio of KUOW, only to give out totally bullshit information. It takes years to build new infrastructure, that’s true, but Sound Transit had had commuter trains up and going for years now. If voters pass Sound Transit 2 (if it gets to the ballot), a great many projects will be implemented within only three or so years.

Add service to existing 11 bus routes serving the north, south, and east side corridors

Start new bus route between downtown Bellevue, Overlake and Redmond

Expand the bus fleet (obviously)

Break ground on Tukwila Sounder station

Break ground on expansion of Sumner, Puyallup & Everett Sounder stations

Fund Burien park & ride expansion

Finalize agreement with BNSF to expand Sounder service between Seattle and Tacoma

* Open Link light rail between Seattle and SeaTac Airport*

* Break ground on Link from downtown Seattle to UW via Cap Hill*

* And get going on design & engineering of the LRT extensions*

* Currently funded under phase 1

Compare this to Mark’s plan, which is…

Does Mark even have a plan?