Goldy

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.

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.

Susan Hutchison points to a handful of so-called “Democratic” endorsers to bolster her claims of bipartisanship, but delve a little deeper under the scarlet “D” and an interesting pattern emerges:

Former US Rep. Don Bonker (D-WA)… generally considered to be a conservative Dem, who “opposes abortion as a matter of personal philosophy.”

Former US Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-IN)… generally considered to be a conservative Dem, who was widely thought to have lost a shot at the VP spot on Bill Clinton’s 1992 ticket due to his support of restrictions on abortion rights.

Democratic Lt. Governor Brad Owen… widely considered to be one of the most conservative Democrats in the Washington State Senate during his tenure there, and who not surprisingly, is anti-choice.

Notice the pattern? As for Hutchison’s other two “Democratic” endorsers, former Seattle Mayor Wes Uhlman and State Auditor Brian Sonntag, well, I don’t know where either one stands on reproductive rights, though I’ve emailed Sonntag bluntly asking him the question. But, I do know that Uhlman has a history of endorsing Republicans, while Sonntag, given his penchant for conspiring with Tim Eyman, speaking at teabagger rallies and publicly endorsing conservative Republicans like Hutchison… well… I take personal offense at him continuing to call himself a Democrat.

Let’s be clear, when I vigorously opposed the campaign of Republican Dan Satterberg for King County Prosecutor, I was endlessly frustrated by the impressive list of prominent Democrats who endorsed him… but only because he managed to garner an actual impressive list of Democratic endorsements. By comparison, Hutchison’s claim of bipartisan support is a total sham, consisting of three, long-retired politicians, and two of the most conservative and disloyal Democratic elected officials in the state.

Thanks to the bullshit initiative making county elections officially nonpartisan, Hutchison’s chances aren’t handicapped by being forced to put an “R” next to her name, but that doesn’t make her any less of a conservative Republican. And any cooperation she gets from our local media in perpetrating this lie would be a disservice to King County voters.

UPDATE:
According to his 2008 KC Dems candidate questionnaire, Sonntag says he’s pro-choice. But he’s sure as hell wrong about Hutchison.

It should also be noted, by the way, that of Hutchison’s five Democratic endorsers, only Uhlman is a native or resident of King County.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVgOl3cETb4[/youtube]

Folks are poking fun at mayoral candidate Mike McGinn for a press release giving the address of the Columbia City light rail station as Empire Way S and S Edmunds St., pointing out that Empire Way was renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Way after a contentious battle back in 1983.

But I just checked the trusty Map app on my iPhone and it insists that MLK Jr. Way only runs southbound, while the northbound lanes are correctly called Empire Way… and since Google surely would have fixed their maps had they been given two-and-a-half years notice, I can only assume that the Google is right, and everybody else is wrong.

I hate to say it, but I agree with Bruce Ramsey and Rev. Joe Fuiten. Sorta.

In May, the Rev. Joe Fuiten of Cedar Park Church, Bothell, appealed to his fellow conservative Christians not to challenge the state’s new domestic-partnership law for same-sex couples.

Yes, they could collect signatures and put the law on the ballot and hope to overturn it. That is the right of referendum. But the polls, he said, “show us behind.” Fuiten warned: “If we make a referendum effort and fail, the other side will conclude the public is with them.”

Yes, they will — and the fight will be over.

Absolutely.

The bird-in-the-hand side of me would have preferred R-71 hadn’t qualified for the ballot (and in fact, I’m not entirely convinced it legitimately did), but I nonetheless believe that it stands a strong chance of passing. And if it does, it will rightly be perceived as a referendum on full-blown same-sex marriage itself.

How could it not? The anti-gay-rights forces will use the slippery slope argument as they always do, when they’re not outright misrepresenting the measure as doing more than it really does. And by branding the bill as the “Everything But Marriage Act,” the pro-gay-right side has virtually assured that the measure will be conflated with same-sex marriage in the minds of many voters… “don’t think of an elephant,” and all that.

So while R-71 really doesn’t give same-sex couples the same rights the rest of us enjoy, its passage at the polls would likely give legislators the backbone they need to move faster toward that final step. And as a connoisseur of irony, that’s an outcome I sure would enjoy.

I think I may have broken the law. Or maybe not. I’m not sure.

With my daughter vegging around the house Sunday, desperately avoiding her homework, I decided to watch a little bit of the Eagles-Panthers game, the problem being, the game wasn’t on TV. Still, I figured, nearly everything is available streaming online these days, and it didn’t take me too long to find what I was looking for.

Sure, I had to boot up my cranky old copy of Parallels/XP, and download some awkward piece of Windows software, but ten minutes later my MacBook was hooked up to my TV, and I was watching Donovan McNabb getting his ribs fractured in a live, if somewhat pixelated, full-screen picture. I would have paid for an easier, higher quality streaming option, but since the NFL wasn’t offering me one, I joined the thousands of other expatriate football fans willing to do what it takes to follow their out-of-market teams.

And following my team has been exceedingly difficult since moving to Seattle in 1992, the problem only exacerbated by the Seahawk’s 2002 move to the NFC West. The Eagles, perennial contenders, tend to be featured in a few nationally broadcast games each season, but during the intervening weeks the pickings are slim; even when the Eagles are featured in one of the weekly regional match-ups, Channel 13 tends to opt for something geographically closer.

Two or three times a year I trudge to a local sports bar to root on my Eagles, but I wasn’t about to drag my daughter to a bar, particularly at 10 in the morning. And I’m sure as hell not gonna pay the $1000-plus a year it would cost to both subscribe to DirectTV and purchase its NFL Sunday Ticket package, just for the privilege of watching maybe an additional dozen games at most.

So while Sunday’s stream kinda sucked, if the quality were a tad better I could imagine it becoming a bit of a habit.

Which raises the question… how fucking stupid must the NFL and the media companies be to drive potential paying customers like me into the arms of pirates, hackers and cheats? They certainly could stream games, but I suppose that would threaten Rupert Murdoch’s out-of-market monopoly. So instead, by refusing to address the demand that is already there, they are creating a market for free streaming that is technically impossible to quash, and will be very difficult to compete against once fans become conditioned to paying nothing.

Furthermore, it’s not at all clear that my private viewing of a live stream of an Over-The-Air broadcast from a Philadelphia station is even illegal. The unauthorized retransmission of this broadcast, that can’t be kosher, but my viewing of it on the Internet? I’m not so sure. How is this different from viewing infringing material on YouTube? And as for the ethical issues, it’s hard to feel guilty about watching an otherwise free, OTA broadcast, commercials and all, even if the NFL and News Corp. would rather I not.

I don’t know if I’ll watch another stream like this, but the point is I can, and there’s nothing the NFL can do to stop it. So rather than pretending these new technologies don’t exist, wouldn’t the NFL be better off offering a higher-quality, reasonably priced, paid streaming alternative, that didn’t turn avid fans into avid pirates? Hasn’t the rest of the entertainment industry learned anything from the mistakes of the music industry and its disastrously failed efforts to maintain the status quo?

It doesn’t take more than a few minutes of Googling to realize that nearly everything remotely streamable is available for streaming on the Internet, authorized or not, and yet Hollywood has its panties in a knot over the growing dominance of RedBox and its $1.00 rentals, while consumers in most of the rest of the world are exploiting the anarchy that is the Internet to remove themselves from the sales channel entirely.

If the studios are worried that $1.00 rentals might decimate their DVD sales, just imagine how hard they’ll find it to compete with free. The solution of course is to out-compete both RedBox and the pirates by aggressively putting their libraries online for streaming at competitive prices, before consumers learn habits that they’ll find very difficult to unlearn. Because one way or another, their content, just like the NFL’s is going to find its way online. The only question is who, if anybody, is going to profit from it.

One of the common refrains from those opposing health care reform is that they don’t want a government bureaucrat getting between them and their doctor, but what do an overwhelming majority of physicians prescribe for fixing our nation’s broken health care system…?

Among all the players in the health care debate, doctors may be the least understood about where they stand on some of the key issues around changing the health care system. Now, a new survey finds some surprising results: A large majority of doctors say there should be a public option.

[…]  Most doctors — 63 percent — say they favor giving patients a choice that would include both public and private insurance. That’s the position of President Obama and of many congressional Democrats. In addition, another 10 percent of doctors say they favor a public option only; they’d like to see a single-payer health care system. Together, the two groups add up to 73 percent.

That’s right, nearly three-quarters of doctors support a public option in one form or another, because more than their patients, they know how thoroughly broken the current system is. Support for a public option was “broad and widespread,” occurring at rough equal levels amongst all categories of doctors, and in rural and urban areas alike.

“Whether they lived in southern regions of the United States or traditionally liberal parts of the country,” says Keyhani, “we found that physicians, regardless — whether they were salaried or they were practice owners, regardless of whether they were specialists or primary care providers, regardless of where they lived — the support for the public option was broad and widespread.”

Support was widespread even amongst rank and file members of the AMA, which as an organization has lobbied against a public option. And what explains this surprising consensus?

Keyhani says doctors already have experience with government-run health care, with Medicare. And she says the survey shows that, overall, they like it. “We’ve heard a lot about how the government is standing in between patients and their physician,” Keyhani says. “And what we can see is that physicians support Medicare. So I think physicians have sort of signaled that a public option that’s similar in design to Medicare would be a good way of ensuring patients get the care that they need.”

We trust our doctors to make life and death decisions… to cut us open and reach inside our own bodies to mend or remove our parts. But will we trust our doctors to recommend the best health care reform alternatives?

NOTE:
You can listen to the NPR report below:

[audio:http://public.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/atc/2009/09/20090914_atc_10.mp3]

You don’t need to squint too hard between the lines of yesterday’s Alki Foundation endorsement of Dow Constantine to read a pretty damn stinging rebuke of Republican Susan Hutchison, and her qualifications for King County Executive… or rather, lack thereof:

Alki Chairman Michael Luis said the county exec’s race was a difficult one for the group. But Luis said it boiled down to this: “Susan Hutchison remains sort of a political unknown and just never made people totally comfortable that she was ready to take the reins of a complicated government.”

As a result, Constantine, a liberal Democrat, got the nod over Hutchison, a self-described “moderate nonpartisan” who says Constantine is responsible for the county’s financial problems and beholden to special interests.

Constantine is not perceived as a “business-type candidate,” Luis acknowledged. But he is “well known” and could walk into the exec’s job “knowing how the place works.” The general sense among the Alki group was that Hutchison “hadn’t made the case she could do the job,” Luis said.

Ouch. And that’s putting it lightly.

The exec endorsement was indeed a difficult one for Alki, the political arm of the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, but not in the sense that the final vote was all that close. This was a group strongly inclined to embrace Hutchison on ideological grounds, and she reportedly entered the process with a contingent of supporters at the Chamber. But after flubbing her interviews, she just couldn’t shake the impression that she was both uninformed and unqualified… and by a long shot.

Luis describes Hutchison as a “political unknown,” but then so is Joe Mallahan, and yet that didn’t stop the pro-business Chamber from endorsing the most pro-business of the two mayoral finalists. But when forced to pick between the liberal Constantine—who recently led the fight against Glacier Northwest’s Maury Island gravel mine—and the Cato-spouting, Discovery-Institute-board-sitting ex-newsreader Hutchison, pragmatism trumped ideology, and Alki members felt they had no choice but to endorse the only candidate who is professionally prepared to actually do the job.

Kinda ironic for Hutchison to lose the Chamber of Commerce’s endorsement when a central theme of her campaign has been her promise to declare the county “open for business.”

Hutchison has also pitched herself as the only candidate able to bring all parties to the table, yet it’s Constantine who is managing to put together a coalition of business, labor and environmental supporters, while Hutchison has largely distinguished herself through her union-baiting. If Hutchison does have any consensus building skills, they’ve mostly been utilized building a consensus for her opponent.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4TsaHmtgfA[/youtube]

See, this is what Republicans are protecting when they oppose healthcare reform.

Speaking of which, more than 400 caregivers of seniors and people with disabilities will be rallying this afternoon outside Cigna’s downtown Seattle office, demanding that Cigna end its opposition to a public option.  Demonstrators will meet at City Hall Plaza, 600 4th AVE, and then march to Cigna’s offices at 700 5th AVE.

With the news media’s credibility at an all time low, either the press needs to do a better job of reporting, or it needs a little PR of its own:

Just 29 percent of the 1,506 adults surveyed by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press between July 22-26 said news organizations generally get the facts straight.

Sixty-three percent said news stories are often inaccurate, up from 34 percent in a 1985 study, Pew said.

Whatever the reason for this growing credibility gap, I’m guessing the best solution isn’t to cut back newsrooms even further. But then, I’m just some dumb blogger, so what do I know?

Sometime last night vandals spray painted swastikas on the sides of two Seward Park synagogues, on the driveway of one, and on the sidewalk in front of several neighboring houses. Seattle Police are investigating the graffiti as an act of malicious harassment and property damage, and encourages anybody with information to call their Bias Crimes Unit at 206-233-3898.

I live about a block from both synagogues, Sephardic Bikur Holim and Bikur Cholim Machzikay Hadath, and while I don’t remember another incident quite like this in the 12 years I’ve been in the neighborhood, as my own comment threads regularly demonstrate, anti-semitism is alive and well around these parts. Still, this attack seems oddly random, with nothing obvious in the news at the moment to serve as an immediate motivation.

That said, since history has shown that folks don’t need any particular reason to hate Jews, I guess it doesn’t take any particular motivation for these same folks to express their hatred.

I know a lot of folks around here are pretty excited about the Huskies’ big win over Idaho yesterday, and plenty more are looking forward to the Seahawks’ opening game this afternoon. But for me, the big sporting event of the week was the opening of my daughter’s soccer season, where she and her teammates walloped their opponents 9-0.

Go Supremes!

Watching a bunch of little girls play soccer (well, at 12 to 13, they’re not all that little anymore) is one of the unexpected pleasures of parenthood, but it’s also one of the rarely considered amenities of city life. My daughter’s team practices twice a week at the grass field atop I-90’s approach to the Mt. Baker tunnel, and plays their home games on the neatly turfed and lighted field at Genesee. And during the course of the season they’ll play at half a dozen other fields around the city… all of them built and maintained with our tax dollars.

The anti-tax/anti-government crowd loves to complain about elected officials stealing their money, but in pushing forth their bathtub-sized government agenda, they also love to ignore the many big and little things that government does to improve our quality of life. For example, without a government willing and able to acquire and maintain the land, there would be no public play fields in Seattle, as the demands of the real estate market simply would not allow it. Sure, a handful of private schools might have amenities of their own, but these would be available only to the rare few who could afford it, rather than the thousands of children and adults who enjoy Seattle Parks and Recreation facilities everyday.

There is a reason Seattle voters approve nearly every local levy that comes our way: we want and enjoy the services and amenities these levies provide, and while we all have our quibbles, we generally believe we are getting value for our dollars compared to the alternative. There are simply some things on which we can’t rely on the free market to provide… and my daughter’s soccer game was certainly one of them.