Archives for December 2010

I know I’m a couple of days late on this, but anyone else notice that there were absolutely zero column inches in the Sunday Seattle Times on the failure of the DREAM Act in the US Senate? I mean zilch, bubkes, nada. Not a word.

I’d provide a link, but there’s nothing to link to.

A couple folks have asked me recently if I’ve heard anything about Rep. Dave Reichert stepping down. A couple other folks have asked me if I’ve heard anything about Reichert challenging Sen. Maria Cantwell in 2012. Unless Reichert’s head injury is giving him more trouble than he admits, the latter seems more likely, but it has me thinking that perhaps the two rumors might be conflated.

What does seem clear is that WA-08 will very likely become a bit bluer in 2012, losing a chunk of its Republican-leaning southern part of the district, as WA-10 inevitably squeezes its northern neighbors from the south. So it might not be a bad time for Reichert to make an honorable exit.

The U.S. Census Bureau released its latest numbers this morning, confirming that Washington state is in line to gain a tenth congressional district, starting in 2012.

That’ll be fun. Not only will this create a brand new open seat, likely in a swingy district carved out of Southwest Washington, it will also squeeze the boundaries of the other seven western districts, possibly shifting the red-blue balance here and there.

Unlike most other states, Washington’s got a relatively reasonable redistricting process, led by a bipartisan commission and a fairly strict set of guidelines, so we won’t get the sort of blatantly partisan gerrymandering we’ll surely see elsewhere. That said, it was heartening to see the Senate Dems recently select former Mayor Nickels henchman Tim Ceis as their representative on the commission. Whatever you think about Ceis, he’s about as Machiavellian as they come around these parts, so it’s good to see him part of the mix.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, Washington’s population grew 14.1 percent over the past decade, to 6,724,540… well off the blistering 21 percent growth rate between 1990 and 2000.

I know you have a busy schedule of trying to figure out ways to kill Washingtonians for want of basic social services. Still, I can’t believe that you aren’t speaking to the Mayor of the largest city in the state? Really? Because he said the untrustworthy things you did made it tough to trust you?

I mean, the man has said he’s willing to meet you much more than half way on the Viaduct replacement. He has said OK to a deep bore tunnel that he hates. He’s said OK to the loss of downtown exits. He’s said OK to figuring out how to pay for the city’s portion of the costs. He’s said OK to everything except the cost overruns on the state portion of the project. The fact that you can’t meet him there, and refuse to talk to him at all strike a terrible cord.

And look, I understand your disagreements. I certainly didn’t like his opposition to Roads and Transit. Yes, it worked out in the end, but I agreed with you: the risks were too high. But he said he’d be back with a transit only proposal, and by God he was. And that’s the rare thing that I think a lot of people miss about McGinn, he’s shockingly honest. He’s put out what he’d want and what he’s willing to compromise to, and it’s pretty far. He’s told you exactly how you can get this tunnel that you want done, and there’s no reason to believe that if you go along with him on the cost overruns and find ways that it doesn’t clog up city streets, that he’d be right there with you like he says.

And I know you feel like you’ve compromised too. Your favorite position was to replace the Viaduct with another, much larger, viaduct. So you feel that this tunnel and the money you’ve already appropriated to Seattle is enough. But you punted on replacement, called a vote, and lost. So now you’re stuck with a backup that I know you moved to, but it’s not the best way to move people around Seattle.

Maybe I and people like me are a bit to blame here too. After the quake, my main concern was to do something, almost anything, because I don’t want to die in an earthquake. Like McGinn, I preferred a surface/transit/I-5 option, but unlike him, I thought I would have been fine with whatever emerged. It turns out that despite my assumption that y’all in Olympia are out to get Seattle, I didn’t think you would go with whatever Bruce Chapman pulled out of his ass and then demand that we pay for any cost overruns, no matter if they were the state’s fault.

And this plan was so bad for Seattle that the city voters dumped our mayor in the primary and ultimately supported the person who was skeptical of it. There were other reasons Nickels lost, of course: It snowed a lot the year before the election. People didn’t like his support of light rail or opposition to the monorail. But his championing of an unpopular tunnel and saying trust Olympia that it would all work out gave a lot of people a reason to give him the boot. Seattle doesn’t trust the state.

We don’t trust Olympia when you take more money from Seattle than we put into state coffers and then tell us how generous you are. We don’t trust Olympia when you pander to people who hate Seattle by putting in a bullshit cost overrun provision. We don’t trust you when you take away all downtown exits, and tell us how the project is for Seattle drivers. We don’t trust Olympia when you go out of your way to pander to a car culture when many of us take the bus or take light rail or bike.

Perhaps you can earn back Seattle’s trust. I guess the next session is a good place to start. Fix the problems with the tunnel, talk to the mayor who respects the city and its citizens; don’t pretend that Richard Conlin is a reasonable substitute. I’m proud to have voted for you twice, but please stop bashing my city.

Love,

Carl Ballard

Having digested the remains of the Seattle P-I’s print audience, the Seattle Times is bleeding readership again, its paid circulation dropping 4.51 percent over the previous six month period, pretty much in line with the industry average. If worse for the industry is the decline in advertising revenue, down another 8.7 percent to $16.3 billion… less than half the industry total only two years ago.

Personally, I have serious doubts as to whether print remains a viable medium for delivering daily news in all but the largest markets. But I guess time will tell.

I’m a bit preoccupied this morning reading the sweet, sweet anguish of the New York media over my Philadelphia Eagles stunning, come-from-behind, 38-31 victory over the hated New York Giants. Michael Vick’s fourth-quarter performance was so amazing, even my dog is becoming a reluctant fan.

Trailing 31-10, and having been manhandled by the Giant’s aggressive defense all day, Vick simply took over the game, throwing two touchdowns and running for ninety-some yards and another touchdown, all in a seven minute span, just before DeSean Jackson scored the final tally with a 65-yard punt return TD with no time remaining. And while I’m sure Seattle fans would have been thrilled by a similar Seahawks performance, I’m not sure if folks here can quite grok the sense of absolute joy that swept through Philadelphia as Jackson (eventually) crossed the goal line. Yeah sure, we’d just witnessed one of the greatest comebacks in NFL history, but more importantly, we’d come back against the hated Giants, not just crushing the hearts of their fans, but grinding the bloody pulp into the sidewalk.

Is there a sports rivalry in Seattle that comes anywhere close to rivaling the palpable animosity between the teams and fans of the NFC East? I don’t think so.

Which means you underprivileged Seahawks fans just can’t possibly enjoy football as much as we Iggles fans do. Or… suffer from it.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the death of Jeff Roetter, a medical marijuana patient who died of an epileptic seizure the night of June 18, 2010. His death came as Snoqualmie Police were putting pressure on him to assist in their efforts to prosecute Bryan Gabriel, the man who insists he was Roetter’s medical marijuana provider. Even after chatting with a couple of Jeff’s friends and acquaintances, as well as Gabriel, his attorney, and one of the Snoqualmie officers, there’s a lot still unknown about what really happened. Adding to that, several people were simply afraid to talk to me, for fear of retribution from the police. Trying to pin down exactly what happened has been a challenge, and my post ended up not drawing a lot of solid conclusions.

In an attempt to get to the bottom of this, I put in a public records request for the police reports on both arrests. This week, I obtained 22 pages of police records from the November 2009 arrests of both Roetter and Gabriel and some additional reports from the week in June when King County Judge Sharon Armstrong ordered that the marijuana taken during the initial arrest should be returned. It was during that week when Roetter died.

Even with this extra documentation, much of the disputed points of the story remain a he said/she said situation between Gabriel and the Snoqualmie Police. In my initial post, I left a number of these conflicts out or only briefly addressed them, partially because I felt I’d be able to get better information later with some additional documentation. Now that I’ve read through the more complete police records (as Sgt. Sylvain of Snoqualmie Police encouraged me to do), I want to elaborate on some of the points of contention.

[Read more…]

Last week’s contest was won by waguy. It was Carlo’s Bakery in Hoboken, NJ, where the show Cake Boss takes place.

This week’s contest is a random location in Washington state. Good luck!

Matthew 21:18-19
Early in the morning, as Jesus was on his way back to the city, he was hungry. 19 Seeing a fig tree by the road, he went up to it but found nothing on it except leaves. Then he said to it, “May you never bear fruit again!” Immediately the tree withered.

Discuss.

Via Raw Story:

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange denounced “business McCarthyism” in the United States after the Bank of America halted all transactions to the website Saturday.

The Australian, who was spending his second full day on bail, vowed the whistle-blowing site would carry on releasing controversial leaked US diplomatic cables as he insisted his life was under threat.

Bank of America, the largest US bank, halted all transactions for WikiLeaks, joining other institutions that have refused to process payments for the website since it started to publish the documents last month.

“Bank of America joins in the actions previously announced by MasterCard, PayPal, Visa Europe and others and will not process transactions of any type that we have reason to believe are intended for WikiLeaks,” it said in a statement.

Commenter ‘Undercover Brother’ made a mention of this in a previous thread, and I think it’s an overlooked point in the battle against Wikileaks. Wikileaks had been considered a serious threat to our government’s secrecy for quite some time already. They released the Apache Helicopter video back in April. They released the Afghanistan War logs in July and the Iraq War logs in October. And even though the release of the diplomatic cables only started recently, our government has known that Wikileaks had them for over six months.

But it wasn’t until the first week in December that major pressure was applied to them from private industry, specifically folks in the financial services world. And it happened shortly after Julian Assange said this in an interview printed in Forbes:

These megaleaks, as you call them, we haven’t seen any of those from the private sector.

No, not at the same scale as for the military.

Will we?

Yes. We have one related to a bank coming up, that’s a megaleak. It’s not as big a scale as the Iraq material, but it’s either tens or hundreds of thousands of documents depending on how you define it.

…

What do you want to be the result of this release?

[Pauses] I’m not sure.

It will give a true and representative insight into how banks behave at the executive level in a way that will stimulate investigations and reforms, I presume.

Usually when you get leaks at this level, it’s about one particular case or one particular violation. For this, there’s only one similar example. It’s like the Enron emails. Why were these so valuable? When Enron collapsed, through court processes, thousands and thousands of emails came out that were internal, and it provided a window into how the whole company was managed. It was all the little decisions that supported the flagrant violations.

When discussing Wikileaks and the intense backlash against them, it’s easy to fall into a conspiratorial mindset. But when dealing with America’s financial sector in a world economy that’s so interconnected, they may indeed have more power to silence people than any single government by itself.

But… but… if gays can now serve openly in the military, next thing you know we’ll be letting dogs serve openly too!

Oh… wait.

In case you already didn’t know it, the latest census numbers confirm that Seattle has one of the lowest rates of households with children in the nation. Which is why, over on Slog today, I make the argument again for not just building a playground at the Seattle Center, but a Really Kick-Ass Playground.

Um…

Anyone looking for Central Park can walk Seattle’s numerous other parks — Seward, Lincoln and Discovery parks.

Jesus… could the Seattle Times editorial board get any more condescending? Or stupid?

I mean, I’m not particularly advocating that Seattle Center should or even could be the Seattle equivalent of New York’s Central Park, but as far as parks go, it is Seattle’s most central, whereas Seward, Lincoln and Discovery… not so much. And Central Park’s centrality, well, that’s kinda its point.

So perhaps the Times’ editors should leave the snark to the professionals. Either that, or they should fuck off.

I don’t want to make excuses for Gov. Christine Gregoire; she fought for our state’s top job, so the buck surely stops at her desk. But she certainly doesn’t seem too happy about balancing the budget primarily on the backs of the poor, the sick and the young:

“I hate my budget,” she said, tearing up. “I hate it because in some places, I don’t even think it’s moral.”

Can’t argue with that. But the Republicans…?

Sen. Joe Zarelli of Ridgefield, the Republican’s chief budget expert in the Senate, called the budget a step in the right direction…

What Gov. Gregoire calls immoral, Sen. Zarelli calls a step in the right direction… you couldn’t ask for starker ideological contrast. And you also couldn’t ask for a better opportunity for Republicans to ultimately prove that they are not the heartless, Social Darwinist bastards that I think they are.

I mean, it sure does appear that, unlike Gov. Gregoire, Sen. Zarelli really does want to cut a couple billion dollars from education, and 100,000 people or so from the health care rolls… that he believes it’s a step in the right direction to impose a couple more years of double-digit tuition inflation, and to zero out funding for state parks. In fact it sounds like he would have preferred the governor gone even further.

But if he doesn’t, well, there is something he can do about it. It wouldn’t be easy, but with enough support from Zarelli and his fellow Republicans, the legislature could pass a bipartisan revenue package intended to soften the harshest blows, and the governor would sign it. Unconstitutional as I-1053 may be, its supermajority requirement does put control of revenue proposals in the hands of the Republican minority, so let’s be absolutely clear: regardless of who is its putative author, this immoral all-cuts/no-new-revenue budget is a Republican budget.

This is the kind of budgeting philosophy that they campaign on, and thanks to Republican-backed I-1053, this is the kind of budget that we’ll get. 35 kids in a kindergarten classroom? That’s a Republican kindergarten. Tens of thousands of children with no health insurance? That’s Republican health care. College tuition rising out of reach of the middle class? That’s a Republican university system.

Or if it’s not, Republicans know exactly what to do to prove me wrong.