Archives for May 2010

The new modem arrived late yesterday afternoon, and of course, it doesn’t work either. So yesterday’s tech rep insists he needs to send a technician to my house, which is a load of crap, as my line worked perfectly until they reprovisioned it without my permission Monday morning. If I had known then what lay in store, I would have just canceled my DSL and called Comcast.

UPDATE:
This morning, I lost dial tone again, which was a good sign, as it meant they were finally reprovisioning it back the right way. When dial tone returned, so did my DSL service.

Former FEMA director Michael Brown has been in the news recently for his bizarre insistence that President Obama purposely created the largest oil spill in history… but then, as the video above shows, Brown has a long history of bizarrely blaming others for man-made disasters.

Still, if Brown wants to blame me for exposing his lack of emergency management experience, I’m happy to take the credit, but… well… you can’t eat congressional testimony — not even Brownie’s — so it’s gonna take an awful lot more than accolades like that to keep me blogging. You know… I need money. Cold hard cash.

I haven’t blogged recently on my ongoing $25,000 fundraiser, if only to make a point that when I don’t nag folks to contribute, I don’t get many contributions. In the three weeks since I launched the fundraiser I’ve now received 109 individual contributions totaling $5427.37, or roughly $50 per contribution. Thank you for your generosity.

But that’s still below the total number of contributors and contributions over the one week fund drive I held two years ago, so I know the HA community as a whole can do better.

In addition to the individual contributions, I’ve also now received institutional donations and pledges totaling an additional $5,200, thanks to $2,500 sponsorships from UFCW 21 and SEIU 775, and a $200 donation from the King County Democrats. I hope to announce more sponsorships shortly.

I know $25,000 seems like a lot of money, but it’s really just the bare minimum I need to keep me blogging full time through the end of the year, and living pretty frugally at that. So if you value the work I do and the contributions I’ve made, please give generously today.

I’d like to pose a hypothetical to those of you who oppose new government restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions… a thought experiment if you will.

Suppose for a moment that climate change is not the obvious hoax that it is, perpetrated by Al Gore and 99% of the scientific community to some mysterious, nefarious end. Let’s just pretend that the evidence for climate change is overwhelming, that the earth is warming, that the environmental and economic impact will be devastating, and that it is absolutely conclusive that not only are these changes largely due to the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses, but that an immediate and substantial cut in these emissions could in fact lessen, delay and perhaps ultimately reverse the dramatic climatic shift mankind has set into motion.

Now hypothetically, just for the sake of argument, let us assume that you, being a reasonable and rational person, faced with overwhelmingly conclusive scientific evidence, accept all these (admittedly fantastical) assumptions as fact.

So… would you still oppose government restrictions on carbon emissions? Or, knowing that we are choking ourselves into an environmental disaster, would you still argue that the market should be free to do what the market will do?

Honestly. I want to know whether it is worth even trying to persuade you, or whether you would simply oppose any government interference in the private sector, regardless of the consequences or the facts?

In a bold, visionary editorial today, the Seattle Times strongly condemned the Seattle General Strike of 1919.

Or maybe I misread it, and they’re merely attempting to advise the government of Greece, which I suppose would make sense considering that about as many folks in Athens take the Times’ editorials seriously as we do here in Seattle.

Or perhaps the Times intends the Greek crisis as a cautionary tale for our own budget writers, but that would be stupid considering our own record deficits don’t even come close to the Greeks’ percentage wise, and are temporarily hopped up on the stimulus spending that kept our economy from falling off a cliff.

I dunno. Very confusing.

The invisible libertardian hand has its finger up your ass again. And you thought you could send your kids to college on that money. Sucker.

It’ll be that bankster’s kid going to the Ivy League school, not your kid, who will be lucky to pay $10,000 per to attend a de-funded land grant school.

So who’s waging class warfare in this country anyhow? And why are we supporting a party that is in on it?

If the video Goldy posted last night was the perfect example of why marijuana prohibition needs to end from a civil liberties standpoint, this may be the perfect example of why it needs to end from an economic standpoint:

The Brooks County Sheriff’s Department has a marijuana problem. They’ve got 200,000 pounds of pot, and they’re complaining that it would be too expensive to destroy it.

Even if you assume that this is all cheap Mexican weed, that’s still easily over $100 million worth of marijuana. Yet this Texas police department is worried about blowing their budget trying to destroy it. If they turned around and sold 1% of their looted stash, they could easily destroy the other 99% and probably upgrade their whole fleet of vehicles. Why we can’t do this math as a society (for a drug that makes people giggle and eat junk food) is why we arguably deserve the economic mess we’re living through.

That half-hour, thousand-point, momentary drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average today? Oops…

In one of the most dizzying half-hours in stock market history, the Dow plunged nearly 1,000 points before paring those losses—all apparently due to a trader error.

According to multiple sources, a trader entered a “b” for billion instead of an “m” for million in a trade possibly involving Procter & Gamble.

During this afternoon’s half-hour ride, P&G fell from $60 to $39.37, then back again, eventually closing at $60.75. But that was nothing compared to Accenture, which over the course of a single minute plunged from $40 a share to one penny. Accenture shot back up to close at $41.09, down 2.6% for the day.

How fucked up is this? Both NASDAQ and the NYSE have announced that they would cancel all trades were a stock moved more 60% from it’s price at 2:40 PM, but there are sure to be parties who will have made or lost fortunes on today’s market… um… “glitch.”

So yeah, I guess the Republicans are right… Wall Street doesn’t just doesn’t need government regulators getting in the way of its smooth operations.

Day four, and I still don’t have my DSL restored.

After several unfulfilled assurances by phone and email, I called Qwest this morning fairly resigned, and the tech support rep I reached wasn’t much more enthusiastic. He didn’t even try to reset my line or reprogram my modem. He just insisted that it was too old and slow to deliver the 7 Mbps service it had delivered reliably up until the moment Qwest fucked with my line Monday morning, and rather than wasting anymore time for either of us, he offered to send me a new one, free of cost.

That means I won’t be back up until tomorrow, or possibly Monday. Assuming the new modem works. But at least that’s better than the status quo, so I accepted.

The main reason I refused to upgrade to 12 Mbps was that I didn’t feel like dealing with the support hassle, and potentially being left without service for a day or more. I guess Qwest showed me.

My trolls like to disparage me as a Darcy Burner fanboy, but I’m much more pragmatic than most folks imagine, for while other local bloggers had quickly lined up behind Darcy by the early fall of 2005, I insisted on waiting until after I saw who else might jump into the race.

In fact, I didn’t merely wait, but rather proactively reached out to then Republican state Rep. Fred Jarrett, urging him to challenge incumbent Dave Reichert… as a Democrat. And Fred’s thoughtful response not only deepened my respect for him, but ultimately convinced me that Darcy’s relative youth was an asset, not a liability:

I’m honored you’d make such a suggestion.  Thanks.  The truth is that I’m too old to run for Congress.  It would be a waste of the state’s time.  We need someone at the oldest in their early 40s (early-to-mid-30s would be best) to be Norm Dicks’ replacement.  Notice what his seniority has done for the state, or better still, look at how the South has been able to dominate national legislative policy through their “seniority strategy.”  All of Robert Caro’s books on LBJ demonstrate this in spades.

I hope that Fred doesn’t mind me publishing our private correspondence these years later, but his words of advice came back to me on news of Rep. David Obey’s retirement, and the likely elevation of Washington’s own Rep. Norm Dicks to the chairmanship of the powerful House Appropriations Committee.

Like it or not, a substantial segment of our state’s economy has long been dependent on our national military-industrial complex. Turn up your nose at such “pork barrel politics,” but that Air Force tanker contract for example, it’s gonna create jobs — either here in blue Washington, or to a lesser extent in red Alabama — and whatever the technical merits of Boeing’s bid, our aerospace workers would be at a severe competitive disadvantage without a powerful congressional delegation to back them up.

Likewise Washington is constantly competing with other states for billions of dollars of federal grants for education, health care, transportation, and other critical services and infrastructure projects. Again, it’d be nice to be more high-minded about it, but that wouldn’t get us very far in such an adversarial appropriations process.

So while Dicks might not be my favorite member of our state’s House delegation, he’s by far its most powerful, and thus we all have a selfish stake in his ascension to the Appropriations chair, and in assuring that Democrats maintain control of Congress. That’s something voters in WA-03 might want to consider as they fill the open seat down in that swing district; if Democrats lose control of the House, Dicks will lose much of his ability to help his colleagues bring home the bacon. And we all love bacon.

The same, by the way, holds true for Sen. Patty Murray. As a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee and the chair of its subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies, Murray has played a key role in securing federal dollars for vital local projects. Billions of dollars for Hanford cleanup? Thank Sen. Murray. $813 million to finish the Link Light Rail tunnel from Westlake to the UW? Sen. Murray has been Sound Transit’s “chief patron.” The federal dollars needed to fix the failing Howard Hanson dam? It’s Sen. Murray who is leading the charge in the other Washington.

It takes years to build up that kind of seniority and power. Decades. Sen. Murray is one of the most powerful Democrats in the U.S. Senate. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that she could even be Majority Leader come January, 2011. So lose Sen. Murray and Washington state stands to lose billions of dollars in desperately needed federal money. That’s just the way the system works.

And that’s why, for example, I expect the Seattle Times to endorse Sen. Murray this November, regardless of her opponent. And I’ve proven pretty uncanny in predicting Seattle Times endorsements.

Yeah, sure, the economy sucks, and it’s always cathartic to send politicians a message. But Washington state simply does not have that luxury when it comes to senior congressional leaders like Rep. Dicks and Sen. Murray, and the Democratic majority that grants them their power. Thus wherever you stand ideologically, it is hard to argue that a Republican wave this November would be in the interest of Washington state.

Just to be clear, the police only found a small amount of marijuana, enough for a misdemeanor, but prosecutors tacked on a charge of child endangerment just to be assholes. Of course, what isn’t child endangerment apparently, is having a SWAT team kick down a front door in the middle of the night and shoot a kid’s dogs in front of him.

This is crazy. Absolutely crazy. How can anybody defend a national drug policy that leads to this?

Last week KING-5/SurveyUSA had Dino Rossi leading incumbent Democratic Sen. Patty Murray by a stunning 52-42 percent, a margin both camps dismissed as an outlier. Well, now that the latest Elway Poll has Murray leading Rossi by an even more impressive 51-34 percent margin, it’s easy to understand the insiders’ reluctance to accept SurveyUSA numbers at face value.

SurveyUSA had Murray only garnering 73% of both self-identified Democrats and Liberals, and a paltry 46% of metro Seattle voters… unimaginably low numbers come November. By comparison, Elway found Murray enjoying the support of 92% of Democrats, and 73% of Seattleites.

Further, Elway examines Murray’s job performance ratings, a number often looked to as an indicator of electoral strength, and while incumbents never want to come in under 50%, Elway points out that “Murray’s ratings have historically been mediocre,” and that her current 48% rating falls only slightly below her 17-year average. So Republicans shouldn’t take much encouragement from that either.

What does this all mean for Rossi, who was widely expected to announce his candidacy by the end of April, and who we know to have had lengthy meetings and conversations with consultants and fundraisers in recent weeks? Well, there’s simply no strong evidence that Murray is quite as vulnerable as Republicans would wish her to be. Sure, this is just one poll amongst many, and the election is still a long ways off, but as Elway concludes:

The world is going to turn a few times before voters actually cast ballots, and campaigns make a difference. But no matter how these findings are sliced, Patty Murray appears to be in a formidable position.

No doubt Rossi is still getting a lot of encouragement to enter the race from the NRSC and the Republican consultancy class, even in the face of these daunting numbers, so I hope he takes seriously a bit of free advice from someone with nothing to gain from his decision one way or the other. Nobody has ever profited from underestimating Patty Murray… except, you know, the dozens of pollsters, fundraisers, consultants, media buyers and other political professionals who have made millions off previous failed attempts to unseat her, and who would make millions more off of your campaign.

Remember, politics is just as much a business as real estate, so don’t trust their salesmanship any more than you would trust your own.

Update: [Darryl] I’ve done some further analyses here, including a combined analysis of the two polls today and last week’s SurveyUSA poll.

Dan Savage has been bringing us the latest anti-gay zealot to be exposed as having a secret gay lifestyle.

I’ve always wondered (and may have even asked this question before at HA), is there an equivalent to this when it comes to being fervently anti-drugs? Have any hardcore drug warriors ever been exposed as secret drug users? Off the top of my head, I can only think of this one, but that guy was neither a politician, nor all that zealous a drug warrior. What’s the difference, then? Obviously, the major difference between homosexuality and drug use is that homosexuality is in-born, while drug use is a choice, but I’m not sure that difference alone explains why the phenomenon of self-loathing only happens with homosexuality.

UPDATE: In the comments, Troutski points out that Elvis was made an honorary narcotics enforcement official by Nixon. That also made me think of an obvious example of this, Rush Limbaugh, whose love of Oxycontin and frequent railing against druggies certainly qualifies.

I’ve now gone over 48-hours without DSL at my house, and seem nowhere closer to getting this fixed. The good news is that Qwest’s automated tech support line reports that I actually have an open ticket. The bad news is that it reports that I’m scheduled to have it resolved by January 1. After 45 minutes on hold, I gave up waiting for a live representative.

Technical breakdowns happen, but the most annoying thing about this outage is that there is nothing technical about it. My line and my modem were fine until somebody at Qwest reprovisioned me to faster, more expensive service without my permission. And despite support’s promises, they’ve been unable to reset my line to the where it was prior to 9:30 am Monday.

I’ve probably wasted five hours over the past two days attempting to deal with this, and many more hours traveling about in search of open WiFi networks. This sort of customer service is inexcusable.