Archives for September 2009

First that new-fangled blogging thing, and now Twitter? Apparently, Crosscut contributor Ted Van Dyk is a lot more hip than he seems… check out his new Twitter feed in the sidebar.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n7PKBvLmr8[/youtube]

If you’ve ever wondered why paranoid-delusional righties like the Orb get so angry and/or pants-wetting-frightened at the words of people like me, it might be because they actually believe the hateful demagoguery spewing from the likes of Ann Coulter, who may or may not have been joking when she recently absurdly claimed that “all political violence is committed by the left in this country.”

That’s right, the abortion doctor killer? A lefty. The Holocaust Museum shooter? A lefty. Timothy McVeigh? A lefty. The assassins of President Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Martin Luther King Jr., apparently, lefties all, at least, according to Coulter, who astutely points out that Harvey Milk’s killer was a Democrat. Case closed.

That’s why the same righties who passionately celebrate gun-toting teabaggers as patriotic defenders of the 2nd Amendment, soil their undies at the mere thought of self-avowed liberals publicly displaying firearms. They actually believe we’re dangerous. That’s why they’re arming themselves. To protect themselves against us.

Cowards.

Perhaps, instead of incessantly railing against building light rail here in Seattle, Crosscut contributor Ted Van Dyk might want to take some time to explore the extraordinary success of light rail in his native Phoenix. I’m just sayin’.

Let’s make some connections:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmDqA0sbKaE[/youtube]

Update This video is relevant to the discussion:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P8u4fZTPUQ[/youtube]

Who’s to blame for the news industry’s crappy report card?  The Internet:

My quick take is the Internet and cable news have become places where people can easily seek out journalism that reinforces their political and world views.

Yup, because without the Internet and cable news, public trust in newspapers would be at an all time high.

Last week’s contest was won by Dave in Seattle. It was the Warner Brothers Studio in Burbank, California.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!

In an article in New York magazine, a man operating a small business in New York City made this startlingly honest confession:

I hate to say it, but there’s no way I’m hiring a black guy to work for me.

Is this a good indication of how racism still significantly affects our society and continues to create artificial barriers to success for minorities? Absolutely, but not in the way you think. The business owner who made that statement isn’t a racist at all. He runs one of New York’s marijuana delivery services, and he knows that if he hires a black man to be a delivery person, that person is significantly more likely to get arrested on his route. He then tells reporter Mark Jacobson:

Fact is, pot is legal for white people but not for black people, which is total bullshit.

Recent arrest statistics compiled by Queens College Professor Harry Levine back up this observation:

In this way, the NYPD has arrested tens of thousands of New Yorkers every year for possessing small amounts of marijuana. These arrests are expensive, costing nearly $90 million a year. And there are other costs: an arrest record can result in severe collateral consequences, like loss of employment, or the chance at a college scholarship. Spending the night in one of the City’s overcrowded holding pens or in Riker’s can itself be traumatic.

The most alarming component of these arrests, however, are the racial disparities. Nearly 90% of all those arrested for possession of marijuana are Black and Latino. Whites comprise 35% of the City population, but make up less than 10% of all those arrested for possession of marijuana. These disparities are not indicators of who uses marijuana–over 1/3 of all adults U.S. have tried marijuana, and anyone on a casual weekend stroll through the Upper West Side or Prospect Park will find a number of white people puffing away.

As Gabriel Sayegh also points out in that same post, the number of arrests for low-level marijuana possession have risen from 900 in 1993 to 40,000 in 2008. With nearly 90% of those arrests being of minorities (and most of them young), those arrests tend to erase the kinds of opportunities that would otherwise be available. This trend hasn’t just been with marijuana either. All forms of drug enforcement – especially the long disparity between crack and cocaine sentencing guidelines – have created a gigantic divide between how the drug war affects white communities and how it affects minority communities.

It’s become fashionable to claim that racism in America is largely over and that the folks who claim it isn’t are attempting to exploit the gullible. The numbers from America’s drug war emphasize how false that belief is. Wherever one goes in America, the racial disparity in drug arrests is only becoming more extreme. In California, blacks are only 7% of the population, but make up 33% of marijuana felony arrests. There are six times as many whites and blacks in the state, but more black men are picked up for marijuana felony offenses than whites, even though whites and blacks use marijuana in equal percentages and there are six times as many whites in the state. From coast to coast this occurs, giving us a massive disparity in our prison population and creating a huge wealth gap between white and minority communities.

What’s interesting to note about this phenomenon is that throughout the criminal justice system, from prosecutors to police officers to judges, the individuals within the system will be adamant that they’re not racists themselves. And I think most of them are telling the truth. The system itself really isn’t the root of the racism. The racism tends to come from what the community expects of this system and pushes politicians to do with it. When it’s understood that way, as the manifestation of lingering American eliminationism, the results we have start to make more sense.

A perfect illustration of this phenomenon occurred a few years back in an exchange I had with a blog commenter from the Bay Area. She first left a comment agreeing with me that marijuana prohibition is stupid and that people shouldn’t be arrested for using it. Then, when I mentioned the racial disparity, her attitude changed. She became defensive of law enforcement and falsely claimed that blacks get arrested because they commit more drug crimes (they don’t). Finally, I posted a video of an old episode of COPS, where several black men where being tackled and arrested after buying small bags of weed from an informant. She quickly went from being against marijuana prohibition to expressing gratitude to the police for getting these dangerous people off the streets. To this day, I guarantee you that she doesn’t think of herself as a racist, and if you ever accused her of it, she’d flip out just as she did in the comments of that post.

This is the difficulty in understanding the real level of racism that infects our political debates today, and more specifically, the extent to which racism drives the “teabagger” movement. I sympathize with genuine small government conservatives who have been consistent in their opposition to both Republicans and Democrats. But I also get the sense that they don’t recognize how miniscule they are within the ranks of those who are waving tea bags and calling Obama a Communist.

On the other hand, I think Jimmy Carter is wrong when he says that the reason for such heated opposition is because Obama is black. It’s not simply because Obama is black (one could easily see the same protests if Hillary Clinton was President), it’s because Obama is a Democrat, and the Democrats are seen as the party that represents the interests of black America. The reason we’re seeing such an intense backlash to government spending all of a sudden is not because government is being more irresponsible with its spending than it was during the Bush era, it’s because the perception is that the money is being spent on the undesirables within our society, the same people who always seem to bear the brunt of our nation’s drug war.

As Glenn Greenwald points out in this post, it makes absolutely no sense to be more concerned about the tiny sums of money that we dish out to ACORN for the relatively minor scandal that they’ve been caught up in after years of being disinterested in the vast sums of money that we’ve given to war profiteers like Blackwater, or various war-crime-committing nations, or to the financial services companies that drove our economy into the ground. The only explanation is that ACORN is representative of black America, and therefore is seen as a threat disproportionate to their actual influence. But don’t dare call that phenomenon racist.

Rachel Maddow continues her investigation of the state of health and politics in South Carolina:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIihBgxa6GQ[/youtube]

(There are some 70 other media clips from the past week in politics posted at Hominid Views.)

Let’s see how many facts Crosscut’s Ted Van Dyk can get wrong in a single sentence:

Whoa! The present light rail plan, narrowly passed in 2008, calls for $23 billion, and probably more, in tax increases for a three-county light rail system — the largest local-level tax increase in U.S. history.

Um, the package actually cost $17.9 billion by the same accounting standards used to calculate the cost of similar projects; the “largest local tax increase ever” meme is totally unsupported rhetorical bullshit originally fabricated for the previous year’s “roads and transit” measure; and “narrowly passed”…? Really Ted? Narrowly passed? Yeah, I guess, if by “narrow” you mean 57% within the Sound Transit taxing district as a whole, 61% in King County, and a whopping 68% within Seattle.

That’s right, Seattle voters went for Prop 1 by an overwhelming two to one margin, and Van Dyk attempts to dismiss Mike McGinn’s ambitious rail expansion proposal by claiming that the previous one only “narrowly passed.” My ass!

Is Van Dyk an idiot, or does he just think everybody else is?

Successful leadership requires both vision and execution, and judging from the bold, light rail expansion proposal he announced Wednesday, mayoral wannabe Mike McGinn appears to be getting the first part down pat. As for the second part… well, that’s the question, isn’t it?

You can read the instant analysis from the transit geeks at Publicola, Seattle Transit Blog and elsewhere, though to be honest, there isn’t all that much in the way of detailed analysis because the announcement itself is pretty thin on details.  But that’s okay, because rather than etching a light rail plan in stone, McGinn appears to really just be saying, “hey… we’ve been studying these neighborhood extensions since 1920… now let’s get our shit together and build it!” Though, not exactly in those words.

McGinn’s proposal calls for developing a plan within his first two years as mayor to connect high density neighborhoods — Wallingford, Fremont, Ballard, Queen Anne, Belltown and West Seattle — to our existing regional light rail system using compatible technology. The plan and all taxes to fund it would be put before Seattle voters, and construction and operations would likely be handled by Sound Transit.

And as we all know from previous transit debates and controversies, there’s nothing new about the idea of these neighborhood extensions. Indeed, much of it has already been extensively studied by Sound Transit as part of its long range planning process.

You’ll notice the West Seattle to Ballard route is not included in this 2005 map, because ST had basically backed off the Monorail’s bailiwick, but they’ve studied that route too. Somewhere in the archives you’ll find plenty of estimates, however preliminary, of both ridership and cost, along a number of possible routes. In fact, the only truly novel idea in McGinn’s proposal is the suggestion that we might actually build it, and sometime in the first half of this century.

So can we?

Given the political will and the money, of course we can. And that’s where part two of the leadership equation comes in.

McGinn suggests that we “use existing city and/or Transportation Benefit District taxing authority” to finance the project (voters permitting, of course), but as Ben at STB points out, that doesn’t raise very much money. Or perhaps McGinn is thinking of the MVET authority previously granted the Monorail? Maybe, but the problem is, we don’t appear to have the authority to use that authority in the way that McGinn proposes, so Seattle would first have to receive permission from the legislature to tax itself to build the neighborhood extensions it wants. That’s a little political reality McGinn should keep in mind should he butt heads with Olympia over the deep bore tunnel he so feverishly opposes… a political reality complicated by the fact that the powers that be covet what little unused taxing capacity remains within Seattle as a means of funding highway improvements throughout the rest of the region. That’s largely why they opposed putting ST Phase II on the ballot.

Even then, it’s not clear that the MVET alone would provide enough revenue to build out the full neighborhood system in any sort of a  timely fashion — say, fifteen years versus fifty — especially if multiple costly water crossings are included. Annual revenues determine how much you can bond, and the amount you can bond determines how fast you can build… and that, after all, was the final nail in the Monorail’s coffin: a 30-percent shortfall between the revenues needed to properly bond the project and the revenues actually being collected. So how does McGinn get from here to there?

As Ben points out, one approach would be to build a lower cost system more along the lines of Portland’s MAX and ST’s Rainier Valley alignment, mostly at grade, with little in the way of fancy stations. Such a system would be cheaper and faster to build, much of it running along existing city right-of-way, but it would also be slower and provide less maximum capacity than the grade-separated route along much of the Central Link. Topography won’t allow this approach in some places, but one can certainly imagine an at-grade alignment down Elliot AVE and and 15th AVE W, for example.

But another comparison to Portland also needs to be made, in that, unlike the doomed Monorail, MAX’s various lines have been built with as much as 83% federal funding, along with a steady stream of dollars from the state, whereas the Seattle Monorail was budgeted to receive virtually zilch in state and federal money. You can pretty much rule out state funding from a legislature that has determined that fucking Seattle is always an effective election-year strategy, but it’s hard to imagine such an ambitious build-out being achieved without a substantial infusion of federal funds.

In reality, it’s hard to see McGinn realizing his vision without some combination of all of the above. He’s going to have to cajole the legislature into giving Seattle additional authority, convince Seattle voters to tax themselves while tamping down expectations in terms of the type of system and/or time of delivery, and effectively work the state’s congressional delegation into doing their all to squeeze a substantial contribution out of the federal budget. Meanwhile, he’ll have to do all that in the face of a Seattle Times editorial board hostile to both rail and taxation, and a city council that may actually attempt to finally reassert itself against a novice mayor. And all that’s assuming that Sound Transit is willing and able to take on the project. That makes for a lot of ifs.

And, oh yeah… he first has to defeat Joe Mallahan in November.

Is McGinn up to the leadership challenge? I dunno. That’s the conundrum voters are going to have figure out for themselves.

A poor economy and, of all things, political wrangling (!) have created an uncertain future for the Columbia River Crossing project, the effort to build a new bridge between Portland and Vancouver.

From The Oregonian:

In an interview with The Oregonian late Thursday, Portland Mayor Sam Adams said he would release a statement today saying he will suspend his support for a bridge of up to 12 lanes, a compromise deal he helped write with Vancouver Mayor Royce E. Pollard in February. That deal helped get Portland City Council agreement for a bridge of up to 12 lanes, something Vancouver wanted in exchange for its support of Portland’s much-desired light rail extension across the bridge.

“I’ll respect the will of the voters in Vancouver and Clark County on light rail,” Adams said. “I just want to make it real clear: No tolls, no bridge. No light rail, no support from me on the Columbia River Crossing.”

Translation: there will be no “grand compromise,” and there likely won’t be a new bridge. At least that’s how I see it. They’ll fool around eliminating interchange improvements and such, but this thing has been leaking water for quite a while, and that’s a shame. Hooking Clark County up to Portland’s already extensive light rail system would be a forward thinking and perhaps vital transportation achievement for the region, especially when oil prices skyrocket again.

As The Oregonian article notes, possible tolls on a new span have become a hot issue in the race for Vancouver mayor, which pits long-time incumbent Royce Pollard against sitting council member and developer-toady Tim Leavitt.

A lot of folks bemoan the duplicity of politicians, so it’s kind of demoralizing to see Pollard receiving such a strong challenge mainly because Leavitt has seized upon populist opposition to tolls to advance his campaign, while Pollard has been intellectually honest about them for years. With state and federal transportation funds drying up, it does seem wildly unlikely a new bridge will be built without them.

I’ve long held that tolls should only be used for construction and maintenance costs, not “traffic demand management,” as a recognition that the public might see TDM as unfairly punitive to low and moderate income folks. Tolling bridges to pay for construction costs is such a common practice historically that you kind of wonder why anyone would even question it, other than this region has little experience with tolls compared to the east coast and midwest.

So here we are about one year after the worst financial shock since the Great Depression, with the official unemployment rate in Clark County at 13.9%, and we can’t build a bridge. What should have happened, of course, was that construction should have started on Jan. 30, and as thousands of construction jobs were created the regional economy would have received a tremendous boost; a jump-start if you will.

That’s not realistic, as it would have taken longer even if any kind of decision had been made, but really. Enough is enough. The region needs to have the I-5 spans replaced, and woe to the region if Leavitt unseats Pollard and has to stick to his anti-tolling position.

Our ancestors built the Golden Gate bridge, essentially putting their own homes at risk to finance it, in the midst of the Depression, but that was another time and place. We can’t build any bridges now, over water, over land or to the same definition of reality.

The ultimate irony to me, as someone who fought for better school funding and for making developers pay their fair share during the housing bubble, is that the nihilistic approach would be to oppose any new bridge, because as congestion continues to mount fewer people will want to endure the hassle of commuting from Clark County. The existing spans become, in effect, a de facto toll measured in hours wasted, which will mean fewer jobs and fewer houses in Clark County.

But silly me, I hope to have a vital, functioning economy in this region for my kids to enjoy, and a big part of that is making sure goods and people can be transported smoothly back and forth across the river, and the current spans simply aren’t up to the job.

Which states have the worst record in reproductive health?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYHJwkWfMTc[/youtube]

Oh man, do I feel dirty. Yesterday I agreed with Seattle Times editorial columnist Bruce Ramsey. And today I agree with (ugh) Katie Riley, as she argues in support of former US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s crusade to end judicial elections.

Washington voters will remember the bruising supreme court justice races in 2006, when the Building Industry Association of Washington targeted the well-respected Chief Justice Gerry Alexander with unseemly and misleading ads. Alexander prevailed but the experience left many observers of Washington’s judicial elections uneasy at the close call — except, interestingly enough, the chief justice himself, who remains strongly in favor of judicial elections.

Advocates argue the system worked, that the nasty campaign spawned a voter backlash that saved Alexander. But I agree with those who argue the conversation would be much different if Alexander had been ousted.

[…]

However, the surprising truth about Washington’s judicial election system is that most judges aren’t elected. They arrive on the bench through a gubernatorial appointment. Of the state’s 218 elected judges on the supreme, appeals and superior courts, 60 percent of them were appointed by the governor, according to a 2009 study by Washington State University professors. And when they come up for re-election, 84 percent of incumbent judges are unchallenged.

Count me with those who think a citizen-based nominating commission, similar to that recommended by the 1996 Walsh Commission, would be a better way. The nominating commission would vet candidates and recommend the best to the governor for appointment. The judges would stand for retention elections.

My recollection is, that’s the way we did it in Pennsylvania, and as irritating as it may be for some folks out here to hear, there are things to be learned from other states… even East Coast ones.

Problem is, one of my rules of political thumb is that nobody ever votes for less democracy, and that’s exactly how such sensible reform would be misrepresented by opponents should it ever come to the ballot. That’s why I don’t find it surprising to hear Justice Alexander voice his support for the current system; he is, after all, subject to it, and any perceived opposition to direct election of judges could be effectively used against him in the next election. So the leadership to address this issue before it corrupts our judicial system must come from the governor and the legislature, as well as the editorial boards and other opinion leaders.

Over the past decade the US Chamber of Commerce alone has spent hundreds of millions of dollars influencing local judicial elections, an effort that has successfully flipped the ideological balance at the Supreme Court and appellate level in several states. I just don’t think that’s what the framers of Washington’s constitution had in mind when they enacted judicial elections as a safeguard against the railroad barons and bankers who had previously dominated the region’s government.

For those of you eagerly waiting for a blogger like me to be financially ruined in a libel suit, all I can say is, this ain’t England:

The libel laws of England and Wales are notorious. Libel cases cost little to bring — you can make a no-win-no-fee arrangement with your lawyer — but a lot to defend. According to a recent report, the average cost of defending a libel case in England and Wales is 140 times greater than it is in most of the rest of Europe.

Moreover, English libel law favors the claimant — the person who says he or she has been defamed — in several ways. For one, the range of defenses is more limited than in other jurisdictions. For another, in English libel cases, the burden of proof is effectively on the defendant. In other words, the defamatory statement is presumed to be false unless the defendant can prove it is true.

[…] The problem the libel laws create is not so much that critical stories can’t be written, but that they won’t be. As the conversations I had this summer show, for many journalists and their employers the potential for a libel case is a powerful deterrent to criticism: the pieces aren’t worth the hassle.

Yup, if you long for our libel laws to be used to slap down a few of us meddlesome bloggers, that’s exactly the type of journalistic climate of fear you obviously hope to create. But unfortunately for you, here in the U.S., we have something called the First Amendment. So eat me.