Archives for December 2008

(NOTE–I see Goldy posted below about trying to raise scratch to send Josh to Olympia. I think that’s a fabulous idea.)

The Advance, the relatively new blog of the state House Democrats, notes an Andrew Garber article lamenting the shrinking pool of traditional reporters that will cover the session in Olympia. A key bit from Garber cited by the Dems:

During the past 15 years, the state population has increased by 25 percent and the amount of tax money spent by the state has more than doubled. Yet the number of print, television and radio journalists covering the state Legislature full time has dropped by about 70 percent.

It is a long-term trend that accelerated this decade and finally fell off a cliff this year because of plunging advertising revenue in face of the recession and a changing media landscape.

In 1993, there were 34 journalists covering the Washington state Legislature. By 2007, there were 17. This year, there may be as few as 10 full-time journalists, mostly newspaper reporters.

The Advance chimes in:

For those of us who work in the Legislature, we would add the point that reporters also keep each other honest. When fewer of them are trying to cover the same amount of news, it’s harder for them to make sure their facts are straight and their stories are objective.

So the seasoned, can’t-pull-the-wool-over-my-eyes Dave Ammons is no longer around to drill legislators about the nitty-gritty details of budgets and bills? The Columbian apparently won’t be sending Kathie Durbin up from Vancouver to be embedded in legislative life for the few months of session? How much does it matter? When we see this same trend across the country and in the D.C. press as well, what does it mean about the Fourth Estate’s ability to keep tabs on Congress and the White House?

I don’t know, smells like opportunity to me. And for once I mean that in an earnest rather than a snarky way. Out of destruction comes rebirth and all that, you know.

News gathering is hard work, at least if it’s done well. I’ve done a small bit of it in my time, in college and with an alternative newspaper here in Vancouver, and most folks are not going to do it without getting paid at least something. Plus there is no substitute for having eyes and ears on the ground.

Talking Points Memo is the exemplary national example of an internet site that does news gathering. Other members of this site, especially Goldy and Josh, certainly gather news. Not sure if the TPM model could be adapted to this state, but the need is clearly present.

The internet has paradoxically created the ability for interested citizens to seek out large volumes of information from multiple sources, including media outlets outside their home market, blogs and primary sources such as government documents.

But normal people still expect the news to be delivered to them, and as time progresses I hope we’ll see a move towards building a progressive infrastructure that can do some more grunt work news gathering. Opining is loads of fun, but we need both.

[NOTE:  I’m not sure what happened, but the server burped and I lost this post, and all its comments.  Strange.  So please add your comments to the thread again.]

With a budget battle brewing in what will be one of the most consequential legislative sessions in years, the number of journalists covering our state government has plummeted:

During the past 15 years, the state population has increased by 25 percent and the amount of tax money spent by the state has more than doubled. Yet the number of print, television and radio journalists covering the state Legislature full time has dropped by about 70 percent.

[…] In 1993, there were 34 journalists covering the Washington state Legislature. By 2007, there were 17. This year, there may be as few as 10 full-time journalists, mostly newspaper reporters.

We are facing the prospect of a huge hole in political coverage, with potentially devastating results for our state’s citizenry, but it’s also an opportunity for new media to rise to the task and help fill the void.  I thought about heading down to Olympia myself for the session, or hiring some youngster at slave wages to do it for me, but what’s really needed is a seasoned reporter who knows the ropes.  You know… like Josh Feit, who has been covering the Capitol for years.

The problem, of course, is the money.  It’ll cost HA about $15,000 in salary and expenses to pay Josh to cover this four month session… and that’s on top of the money I ultimately need to raise to support myself.  And I’d like to hear from you, my readers, whether you think it is worth it?

I don’t expect to raise all, or even most of the money in an online fund drive; I’m pursuing larger commitments from individuals and interest groups eager to see more in depth coverage of the coming session while promoting the growth of independent media.  But it all starts with your support.

So let me know what you think about these ambitious plans, and we’ll move on from there.

Here’s this morning’s Washington Post obituary (co-written by Bob Woodward) on W. Mark Felt, aka, “Deep Throat,” the Post’s famous anonymous source on the Watergate story, who didn’t so much mind what Nixon did, as much as he minded how he did it.

And here’s the conclusion from my review of Bob Woodward’s The Secret Man, Woodward’s account of the Deep Throat saga published in 2005, which explains what I mean about Felt:

The going criticism of Woodward’s book, though, is that he doesn’t really shed any conclusive light onto Felt’s motivations—he simply ponders the whys and hows. And despite a later section of the book where, indeed, Woodward does burden the reader with his own existential (and boring) discussions with his wife about the ethics of it all, I actually got a perfect sense of what Felt was up to. Woodward sums it up in his conclusion: “The crimes and abuses were background music. Nixon was trying to subvert not only the law but also the Bureau. So Watergate became Felt’s instrument to reassert the Bureau’s… supremacy.” It wasn’t what Nixon did that bugged Felt. It was how Nixon did it.

Woodward is right on two counts. Not only did the White House derail the FBI’s investigation into Watergate and, more importantly, cut off the investigation into related White House espionage, but it created—through the ratfucking squad of Nixon’s Plumbers—a B-movie, surrogate version of the FBI. Nixon’s paranoia about the Democrats compelled him to create his own “intelligence” agency.

Felt, who Woodward shows to be a consummate counterintelligence agent dating back to his work outing Nazi spies in WWII, was obviously offended at both Nixon’s clampdown on the FBI (shredding files of the FBI’s investigation into Howard Hunt, for example) and at the slimy decision to pay thugs like G. Gordon Liddy to do secret agent work against the Democrats that it couldn’t ask the FBI to do.

I think, ultimately, super-spy Felt was offended at what has long been the bottom line analysis of Watergate: It was just a “third-rate burglary.”

At the top of the Obama Transition Team’s change.gov website is the following quote from the President-elect:

“Today we begin in earnest the work of making sure that the world we leave our children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today”

The website allowed for users to submit questions through the site about the incoming administration’s agenda. After visitors to the website were able to vote for or against the submitted questions, the following question was the most popular:

“Will you consider legalizing marijuana so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and create a billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.?”

One could easily argue that this isn’t the most pressing issue facing America right now, but it’s certainly the one for which the continued lack of a sane answer from politicians confounds the highest number of people. Obama’s response was predictable:

President-elect Obama is not in favor of the legalization of marijuana.

While I never expected Barack Obama to simply end maijuana prohibition from the Oval Office, there are potential situations for which his role in drug policy will be interesting to watch. During the Democratic primary campaign, he vowed to stop the federal raids in medical marijuana states (then again, so did Bush in 2000, but that certainly didn’t happen). If Obama follows through on that promise, it’ll be a good start. But what happens if a state takes the next step and moves towards regulated and taxed sales as a budget-boosting measure? Will Obama use federal government resources to fight it, or will he also view that as a states’ rights issue?

The reason that these questions matter is because much of the reluctance at the state level to move forward on drug policy is because they fear coming in conflict with federal law. If we have an incoming administration that accepts the right of the states to decide these issues for themselves without interference – even if its something that Obama doesn’t necessarily support – we may start seeing states finding that ending a costly and counterproductive prohibition is a smart move in these tough economic times (remember that alcohol prohibition ended very quickly in the early 1930s after the economy went south).

This morning, President-Elect Barack Obama defended his decision to have Rick Warren deliver the invocation at the inauguration (video here): 

 It is important for America to come together even though we may have disagreements on certain social issues.

And I would note that a couple of years ago I was invited to Rick Warren’s church to speak, despite his awareness that I held views entirely contrary to his when it came to gay and lesbian rights, when it came to issues like abortion.

Nevertheless, I had an opportunity to speak, and that dialogue, I think, is a part of what my campaign’s been all about, that we’re not going to agree on every single issue. What we have to do is create an atmosphere where we can disagree without being disagreeable, and then focus on those things that we hold in common as Americans. So Rick Warren has been invited to speak, Dr. Joseph Lowery—who has deeply contrasting views to Rick Warren about a whole host of issues—is also speaking.

During  the course of the entire inaugural festivities there are gonna be a wide range of view points that are presented and that’s how  it should be because that’s what America is about. Part of the magic of this country is that we are diverse and noisy and opinionated and so that’s the spirit in which we have put together what I think will be a terrific inauguration.

Here’s what bugs me about O’s “logic”: He cites an admirable political goal—diversity—as the reason to prioritize someone who totally rejects that goal.

Including Warren isn’t tantamount to holding a world peace conference that includes adversaries like America and Iran (that’d be cool), it’s the equivalent of inviting the aliens from Independence Day , who are committed to destroying earth, to the same conference. They don’t believe in the overarching goal at hand, just like Warren doesn’t believe in the overarching goal of diversity.

Obama’s allowed to tap Warren to kowtow politically, but saying he’s doing it to support diversity doesn’t make much sense.  

Meanwhile, Obama’s comparison between Warren inviting Obama to speak at Warren’s private Saddleback Church in California to Obama inviting Warren to speak at the inauguration of the next American President is insane.

Paul Weyrich, one of the founders of the Heritage Institute, and a leading force in the modern Conservative movement, died this morning at age 66.  No cause of death was reported, but I’m guessing it was of a broken heart.

… at least by Seattle standards.  I’m guessing in Erie, PA, not so much, but here in Seattle, who could argue?  It’s just a shame to have canceled school yesterday based on the possibility of snow.

Now let’s see if the various districts have the common sense to just call off tomorrow in advance, and let everybody officially start Winter break early.

Your liberal media: Juan Williams NPR sound file.

Very rough translation, with liberties: ideology is bad, so it’s good Obama is working with moderates who hate ideology, because today the term “ideology” is a cudgel used without any analysis of the beliefs any particular ideology actually embraces.

The implicit assumption is that progressive are an exact and opposite force to movement conservatives and hence equally loathsome, no matter the evidence. Torture, universal health care, whatever. Ideology ideology ideology! Regular Americans hate all of them, even the ones that are for them!

And BTW, Rick Warren supporting Prop. 8 is not at all ideological. Obama is, in fact, a genius for reciprocating! Rick had Obama over and now Village decorum dictates Obama have Rick over, like it’s the PTA or something.

They’ll probably just talk about the weather and pie and stuff, maybe how the brain dead can smile.

Obama must reach out to people who will never vote for him in a million Pleistocene epochs, because it angers the left.

These are the defined, clinically insane parameters of American politics, and within such confines we must confront the greatest economic challenges (perhaps) of all time.

If making hippies and the gays mad were money, problem solved!

School let out about an hour and half ago, and the first few drops of rain are starting fall.  But still no sign of snow.

What do you think the chances are that Seattle schools will be open tomorrow, when the roads will be considerably icier than today?

Although tech blogs from both the civil liberties left and the free market right  have supposedly debunked Monday’s hot Wall Street Journal article about Google reversing its long standing pro-Net Neutrality position, other irksome (and locally relevant) revelations in the article remain standing: Two major Seattle tech-culture companies, Microsoft and Amazon, also longtime advocates of Net Neutrality, are getting squishy on the issue. 

Net Neutrality is the James Madison-y idea that all content is created equal. Practically speaking, it means this: Internet companies like AT&T cannot give preferential treatment to content companies, or any website for that matter. Walmart.com cannot get better treatment than Hel-Mart.com, for example.

The concept has been contested by transmission companies like AT&T who want the option of offering better delivery for companies willing to pay more. They argue that big content companies should get better service (and pay more) because they use more bandwidth. But that’d be like Seattle Public Utilities giving a wealthy family living in North Seattle faster and hotter water than someone living in South Seattle just because the fancy family used more water and paid more. 

While the tech blogs went after the Journal article, defending Google’s honor by pointing out that Google was only promoting a long standing concept called edge-caching— which apparently doesn’t jeopardize net neutrality  — the accusations that Seattle’s own Microsoft and Amazon are reversing themselves on Net Neutrality remains in question.   

 

In the two years since Google, Microsoft, Amazon and other Internet companies lined up in favor of network neutrality, the landscape has changed. The Internet companies have formed partnerships with phone and cable companies, making them more dependent on one another.

Microsoft, which appealed to Congress to save network neutrality just two years ago, has changed its position completely. “Network neutrality is a policy avenue the company is no longer pursuing,” Microsoft said in a statement. The Redmond, Wash., software giant now favors legislation to allow network operators to offer different tiers of service to content companies.

Microsoft has a deal to provide software for AT&T’s Internet television service. A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment whether this arrangement affected the company’s position on network neutrality.

Amazon’s popular digital-reading device, called the Kindle, offers a dedicated, faster download service, an arrangement Amazon has with Sprint. That has prompted questions in the blogosphere about whether the service violates network neutrality.

“Amazon continues to support adoption of net neutrality rules to protect the longstanding, fundamental openness of the Internet,” Amazon said in a statement. It declined to elaborate on its Kindle arrangement.

Amazon had withdrawn from the coalition of companies supporting net neutrality, but it recently was listed once again on the group’s Web site. It declined to comment on whether carriers should be allowed to prioritize traffic.

Microsoft kinda sorta denied that they’re backing away from Net Neutrality in this follow-up article, but they don’t address the specifics of the WSJ’s accusations. 

Sidenote: The WSJ article also indicates that Obama—who was a loud advocate of Net Neutrality during the campaign—may also be reversing course.

I’ll be on KUOW’s The Conversation today at around 1:30PM, talking about the most underreported news stories of the year.

My contribution?  Well, it’s an underreported aspect of a heavily reported story: the long term structural revenue deficit at the heart of our state’s current $5 billion-plus budget shortfall.

Good economies mask the problem while bad economies, like our current one, merely exacerbate it.  But no matter how you futz the numbers, long term tax revenues simply cannot keep pace with economic growth or growth in demand for public services.  That’s a fact.

So what we’re getting by default is an ever shrinking government by the only metric that really matters, and we’re getting it without any public debate.

What Dan said…

Once again here’s my surefire plan for saving daily papers: scare away the old folks once and for all. Those readers are killing you. Go tab, charge a lot more for home delivery, offer papers for free in boxes downtown, put “fuck” in a headline on the front page above the fold (if you haven’t gone tab), identify with the cities you’re freakin’ named for (and the not the freakin’ suburb your publisher lives in), and stop swimming with one anvil tucked under your left arm (“family newspaper”) and another tucked under your right (“objectivity”). Papers are for adults, not children, and mincing around about profanity turns off adult readers; people prefer openly biased media because letting your bias hang out there is, at least, honest; and, once again, catering to old timers and making sure there’s nothing in your paper that can’t be read to a six year-old at bedtime turns off adult readers.

And do all this now.

I’d add to that: think of your reporters as writers.  And as such, allow your writers to express their personalities in their writing.  Readers want to trust your reporters, but it’s much easier to develop that sort of personal relationship with a real person than it is with a faceless, disembodied byline.

Do the folks in the Seattle school district responsible for closing schools due to snow actually live in Seattle, because down in my SE Seattle neighborhood we’ve seen barely a flake, and the roads are clear and dry.  Same holds true for a friend in the Mt. Baker neighborhood, who left an angry rant on my voicemail this morning: no snow, clear roads, and clamoring kids without childcare arrangements.

The kid in me still reflexively cheers at the mere prospect of a snow day, but the adult in me understands what an incredible burden it is on single- and two-working-parent families… the vast majority of households with school age children here in the 21st Century.  By closing the schools out of fear it might, just might snow a little later today, the Seattle, Mercer Island, Bellevue and other school districts have not only disrupted our children’s education, they’ve created an unnecessary hassle for thousands of parents, in some cases costing them a day’s wages, or even their job.

It’s pretty damn ridiculous.

The weather’s not going to get any better between now and the end of the week, so if this is all it takes to twitch their itchy school closure finger, they might as well just cancel Thursday and Friday now, and let us all start the Winter break a few days early.  At least that way we could plan ahead.

The chair of the Oregon GOP says he is surprised at the accusations against one of the accused Woodburn bank bombers. Two law enforcement officers were killed and another gravely wounded in last Friday’s explosive attack. From The Oregonian:

And the arrests of two members of the Turnidge family — which decades ago helped start the Salem Academy Christian schools — have left those who know the family incredulous.

“I would be very surprised if Bruce Turnidge was involved in that,” said Vance Day, the Oregon GOP chairman and a Salem attorney who has known brothers Bruce and Pat Turnidge for several years. “I know him to be strong, very pro-American. He doesn’t believe in violence of that sort whatsoever.”

Marion County prosecutors arraigned the son Tuesday on six counts of aggravated murder, which, if Turnidge is convicted, could carry the death penalty. He also faces two counts of attempted aggravated murder, manufacture of a destructive device, possession of a destructive device, first- and second-degree assault and conspiracy to commit all of the crimes with one or more unidentified persons.

To be clear, the persons accused by authorities in the case are Joshua Turnidge and his father Bruce Turnidge.

People are presumed innocent in this country until proven guilty. Still, with law enforcement yet to offer a possible motive, it’s one hell of a strange and disturbing case.