Archives for July 2008

Joel Connelly:

The voice and visage of Attorney General Rob McKenna are much in evidence of late on public service announcements in which McKenna warns about identity theft.

The state Democratic Party has mailed off a complaint to the Public Disclosure Commission, declaring that the corporate-sponsored ads give a backdoor boost to McKenna’s re-election.

“It is properly characterized as an ‘electioneering communication’ and a ‘contribution’ to Mr. McKenna’s campaign. It is therefore subject to the contribution limits and reporting requirements under the Public Disclosure Act,” state Democratic Chairman Dwight Pelz argues in the PDC filing.

The filing indicates that Comcast sponsored a McKenna TV ad on identity theft, the Boeing Employees Credit Union paid for a radio ad on assisting consumers, and the Century Council picked up an ad with McKenna warning about drinking and driving.

The Century Council is a coalition of alcoholic beverage distillers and distributors.

McKenna fired back Friday.

The ads “do not constitute electioneering,” he argued. McKenna said, for instance, that the Century Council approaches attorneys general across the country to appear in ads against underage drinking.

Back when David Goldstein was on the radio, I would listen to the ads while in the studio. McKenna was a regular on the PSA circuit. He’s done far more than any politician I’ve ever heard of. There should be rules about how many ads these guys can do, and how close they can be done to an election.

With a Sound Transit ballot measure looking more and more likely, Sound Transit Board Chair Greg Nickels fires a preemptive shot at the Master Of Asphalt, Kemper Freeman Jr.:

We know who is behind the curtain of the Eastside Transportation Association – the same people whose only answer to the problems of climate pollution and congestion are more freeways, more traffic, and more frustration. Under Sound Transit’s new proposal, light rail would be extended to Bellevue, as well as Lynnwood and Federal Way. Those who are lining up against this common-sense measure are stuck in their own personal Oz, a place where our most pressing challenges can be wished away by laying more asphalt. This November, we look forward to presenting our bus, commuter and light rail solution – a way forward that will cost the average driver the equivalent of one tank of gas a year. Because we know building a better future takes more than clicking your heels and hoping our gridlock will go away.

“Roads and Transit” was a much easier target, and Kemper’s radio ads raised the “tax” argument pretty effectively. But it’s 2008, and gas is even more expensive than it was last year. This time, voter turnout will be huge. This time, the “pro” campaign will be smaller, leaner, and tougher. This press release is just a first shot.

As you may have noticed, HA started experiencing technical difficulties almost the minute I stepped onto the plane to Austin. If I was paranoid, I might have thought it was exquisitely timed.

It turns out we were being assaulted by waves of spam comments, overwhelming our database server from time to time, an attack that escalated some time early this morning to eventually take down the entire server… web, email, DB and all. According to my hosting company HA was being hit with hundreds of comments a second, from multiple, rolling IPs. So they removed the WordPress file that handles comment posting, and everything seems to be functioning normally now.

That is, except for comments.

Right now, if you attempt to post a comment, you should be getting a blank screen. I’m working on a more elegant interim solution until we figure out a permanent one.

As for the motivation of the spammers, I can’t say whether it is political or not, but I’m not seeing similar reports of this happening at other WordPress blogs, except for Darryl’s Hominid Views. Hmm.

UPDATE:
I’ve just flipped a switch requiring you to log in as a registered user in order to post a comment. Of course, there is no registration enabled yet, so it’s merely a cosmetic change that prevents you from seeing a comment form that won’t work.

UPDATE, UPDATE:
My hosting company confirms HA is currently the target of a DDoS attack—”Distributed Denial of Service”—and offers no solution other than disabling comments and riding this out. If there are any server/Wordpress gurus out there with some advice, please feel free to drop me an email.

UPDATE, UPDATE, UPDATE:
My hosting company has clarified that HA is the only site it is serving currently being targeted by this DDoS attack, so I can only assume that Darryl and I have been specifically targeted via a weakness in WordPress. Cowards.

I haven’t seen the movie Walk Hard, but now that I know that Dan Bern wrote most of the songs, I’m gonna hafta.

When you’re the 419th 401st most powerful member of the House of Representatives, chances at the national limelight are few and far between. You must carefully weigh which, of the many pressing issues facing the body politic, you can expend your limited political capital advocating for. You don’t get many chances to shine; you gotta make ’em count.

So it’s sorta fascinating, in a gruesome car wreck kind of way, to see Rep. Dave Reichert (“Conscience Driven Independent™”-WA) in the pages of The Hill’s Congress Blog on Friday, taking a bold stance against the impeachment of President Bush:

As one of the nine Republicans crossing party lines yesterday on the vote moving Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s impeachment resolution to the Judiciary Committee, I cast my vote not to hold hearings, but to move the bill off the House Floor so the House could focus on more important issues….

There are less than 30 legislative days left in the Congressional calendar. And this is what we are voting on? No wonder the country has lost faith in Congress. There are so many things that we need to take action on and impeachment votes that are guaranteed not to pass is not one of them.

Now, it’s pretty hard to argue with the assertion that members of the House of Representatives should, you know, do stuff. Although a reasonable observer might add that, with fewer than 30 legislative days left in his fourth year of Congressional service, Sheriff Dave has thus selected as good a time as any to start. Had he actually started to do anything.

Plus, to be sure, no matter how many high crimes and misdemeanors the Bush cabal has committed — and they are undoubtably legion — genuine impeachment, based on a full accounting of those crimes, at this point isn’t even physically possible; Republicans and Democrats alike have so run the clock out on Bush’s second term without mounting any sort of serious investigation of their crimes that at this point none could be conducted in time. Politically, it’s preposterous to think it could or would happen anyway. Neither party’s leadership is interested in turning over that rock.

So why is Reichert wasting his time writing about it?

More to the point, why is Reichert wasting his miniscule influence defending a widely reviled administration he’s supposed to be independent of? (Except for fundraisers.) (And his voting record.) And why does he think it’s a waste of time to investigate some of the crimes that have helped create those crises (illegal wars, soaring energy costs, an economy crippled by deregulated and corrupt financial dealings) he’s failed to help address for four years?

And if crimes leading to multiple crises crippling the country aren’t worth tying up the House’s time, why did his party think impeachment over lying about a blow job was worth bringing Congress to a full stop for over a year?

You’d almost think Reichert was using a meaningless vote to try to score exactly the sort of cheap political points he was allegedly deploring, on behalf of an administration he is allegedly independent of. But then, that’s exactly the sort of expediency-driven political hackery we’ve come to expect from the Seattle Times’ favorite “moderate.”

I didn’t get to bed too late last night, my head hitting the pillow by 1AM, but once again awoke a few hours later, this time sick as dog. (Actually, it was more like sick as a cat, if you know what I mean.)

Perhaps it was the free margaritas at the Daily Kos party (contrary to the name of my weekly social event, I don’t really drink all that liberally, and I didn’t last night either, but I almost never drink liquor, so who knows?), or perhaps it was the rare ahi tacos I had at dinner (yeah… order raw fish in Texas… that’s a great idea), but whatever the culprit, five hours later my sweat glands are my only orifices with anything left to spew.

(If you want to see a little of me in a less peaked state, Bill Scher has a brief video interview with me up on Liberal Oasis.)

Fortunately, today’s schedule was delayed, pushing my 10:30 panel back to 11:05, so I’ve got a little extra time to recover, sip a little green tea, and listen to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gamely take questions from a crowd comprised of a couple thousand folks who have never been shy about pointing out our many disappointments with the 110th Congress. The first question, from moderator and Netroots Nation executive director Gina Cooper, regarded when Karl Rove might find his way into that little jail cell on Capitol Hill for refusing to comply with a subpoena? Pelosi didn’t exactly answer the question, but she did say “He certainly deserves to be there”, much to the appreciation of the audience.

Anyway, I don’t plan to live blog the event, but I may post an update if anything particularly interesting happens. Now where’s that bathroom…?

UPDATE:
As expected, Pelosi just introduced “surprise” guest Al Gore. And as expected, he was greeted by an enthusiastic standing ovation.

UPDATE, UPDATE:
The quote of the day thus far from Gore (slightly paraphrased):

“Responding to today’s high gas prices by drilling new wells that won’t come online for 10 to 15 years, and most of which will be sold to China anyway, makes as much sense as responding to a threat from Afghanistan by invading another country.”

From the folks who brought you I Can Haz Cheezburger, it’s Failblog:

I’d barely shut my eyes for three hours when I found myself inexplicably awake, watching the sun attempt to crawl above the early morning Austin haze, the first tentative rays of light glinting off the endless rows of air conditioning units that neatly grow like cabbages across the flattop roofs of the surrounding buildings.

Kinda incoherent poetic metaphors, huh? Yeah, well, just be glad you’re not getting a fucking haiku from me, considering my accumulated sleep deficit over the past few days.

I had planned to get to bed relatively early last night, but somehow found myself at 1:30 AM, sitting in an IHOP with Darcy Burner and a bunch of veterans. Vote Vets co-founder and chairman Jon Soltz sat across the table, passionately detailing the Veteran Administration’s many bureaucratic nightmares as he relentlessly made his way through an enormous, whipped cream topped stack of chocolate chip pancakes. On his own unexpected politicization Soltz described heading to Iraq a true believer, only to have reality—political, military and otherwise—rip the veil from his eyes. “It was like learning that your parents are not really your parents,” Soltz explained as he tried to relate the sense of betrayal that accompanied his own disillusionment.

Perhaps the biggest surprise for those who don’t know squat about the liberal blogosphere might be that while 20-year-old slackers in bathrobes are in short supply here at Netroots Nation, veterans and military personnel are out in full force. At last night’s keynote, Gen. Wes Clark called out various groups one by one to stand up and be acknowledged… teachers, medical professionals, candidates, first responders, social workers, etc…. but by far the largest group in attendance were the veterans, and it was for them that the crowd reserved its loudest and longest round of applause.

It is an inside netroots joke that we sometimes refer to ourselves as “dirty fucking hippies,” the inherent punchline being that this description couldn’t be further from the truth. If we are radicals, we are the radicalized middle, a segment of the population historically loathe to forsake economic security for the sake of a mere cause, yet somehow provoked into producing a populist uprising. That veterans like Soltz and Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga provide two of our most outspoken voices should come as no surprise from a broad movement that draws support from nearly every corner of American life.

For those who hope or imagine that Darcy’s close connections with the netroots will ultimately prove to hurt her standing with her district’s suburban voters, well, you should have been at IHOP last night, where Darcy was literally embraced by veterans who trust that she will deliver the kind of leadership, respect and support that they deserve. Yet more evidence that we are in fact a netroots nation.

Gov. Gregoire has a diary up at Daily Kos right now. Here’s a slice:

Why are they attacking me so early? Because they know there is something happening in our country – people are hungry for a new direction, away from the Bush Administration.

They are so aware of this fact that my opponent filed as a member of the “GOP Party,” hiding the fact that he is a Republican. And what is on my opponent’s website? The word “Change” in the largest font you have ever seen.

We all know that voters are desperate for change in our nation, ready to turn around the failed policies of the Bush Administration. But voters are smart. They know the kind of change they are looking for.

Republican Dino Rossi can spend millions on attacks, pretend he isn’t a Republican and even give lip service to change, but he can’t hide his George Bush record.

No comment…

[via The General]

I get email:

For someone who doesn’t want to be tied to Bush, Rossi is doing a shitty job of defense. Sending out press releases talking about the Governor talking about how you named your dog after Bush?!?! Are you fucking serious?

The emailer is referring to a press release sent by the Rossi campaign in response to this quote by Gregoire:

“In fact, he is so enamored with George W. Bush he has named his dog [Dubya]. I feel sorry for the dog.”

When Rossi should be trying his best to show voters that he’s not in league with Mr. 28 Percent, this release shows he’s not taking taking that advice. What a bunch of whiners.

And this photo above, well… let’s just say that campaigns pay people 4k a month to keep them from happening.