Goldy

From today’s Seattle Times:

After years of talk, Port of Seattle and King County executives signed a final agreement Monday to put a 42-mile Eastside rail corridor into public ownership.

The deal paves the way for a possible combination of freight rail, commuter trains, and biking and hiking trails, but many details remain to be worked out.

And that’s the way it should be. The important thing here was having this rare remaining corridor acquired for public use, rather than being sold off a parcel at a time and lost forever. Deciding what we’re going to do with the corridor—rail or trail or both—was always less urgent than closing a deal with BNSF.

And by the way, while Ron Sims caught a lot of shit from Eastside rail enthusiasts for his intention to tear up the tracks and replace them with a hiking and biking trail, and from nearly everyone for his complicated proposal to swap Boeing Field with the Port in exchange for the rail corridor, it should be remembered that it was his initiative and vision that set this whole thing into motion in the first place. Without Sims’ leadership on this issue there may have never been a serious public effort to acquire this land.

We have this strange political pathology in Washington state in which we constantly complain about the lack of leadership coming from our elected officials, and yet instantly attack them as arrogant the minute they attempt to display any.  Sims’ initial proposal may have been shot down, and with good reasons, but he still deserves much of the credit for preserving this corridor for public use.

As for the rail vs trail debate, I’d love to see an Eastside commuter line, but from what I know about the geography and demographics of this corridor, as well as the condition of the existing tracks, I wouldn’t expect it to happen anytime soon. But I’d love to be proven wrong.

No, the real solution to our transportation problems is to build more roads.

John McCain is coming to Bellevue tomorrow for a $33,100 per plate dinner. No, that’s not one of my frequent typos… it’s $33,100 per plate. For that kind of money, I expect to eat my dinner off of John McCain’s naked body (or preferably, his daughter Meghan’s.)

$33,100. Yet the federal contribution limit for 2008 remains $2,300 per person in each of the primary and general elections. So how does McCain get around this? According to the invitation:

• For Individuals—The first $2,300 to JM 2008, the next $2,300 to the Compliance Fund, the
next $28,500 to the RNC, and the balance of up to $37,000 will be divided evenly between the
Colorado, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Wisconsin state parties’ federal accounts.
• For Couples—The first $4,600 to JM 2008, the next $4,600 to the Compliance Fund, the
next $57,000 to the RNC, and the balance of up to $74,000 will be divided evenly between the
Colorado, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Wisconsin state parties’ federal accounts.

Of course the RNC as well as the state parties’ federal committees can raise and spend unlimited funds in support of McCain, and at $76,200 per couple, that is exactly what McCain is coming to town to do. So in the end, there really aren’t any federal limits all.

It’s not like the Democrats don’t play by the same the rules, but when you have the guy with his name on the campaign finance laws so blatantly violating the spirit of them, you’d think it would earn him a little cynicism from the press. But no, McCain drives the Straight Talk Express, so if he says he’s for campaign finance reform, I suppose we just have to trust him.

Meanwhile, if folks in Bellevue want to put their money to good work in district, I suggest they drop a little cash in Darcy Burner’s pockets

Historian and author Rick Perlstein will be reading from his new book “Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America,“ tonight at 7:30 PM at Seattle’s Town Hall. Tickets are only $5.00.

Even conservative columnist George Will, reviewing the book for the NY Times, calls Nixonland “compulsively readable.” Should be a fascinating evening.

I’m not so good at remembering or celebrating birthdays and holidays; I pretty much dread special occasions as opportunities to let a loved one down. And just to be consistent, it looks like I missed a special occasion of my own the other day: HA’s fourth blogiversary.

On May 10, 2004 I relaunched HorsesAss.org as a blog by posting a bit of a manifesto: “Comedy is easy, politics is hard.” Looking back, I’m a bit amazed both at how wrong and how right I got it. On the one hand I clearly had no idea how blogging would come to dominate my life to the exclusion of all other pursuits. On the other, it’s encouraging to see the that original spirit of the blog has never been lost, even as its readership and influence have grown beyond my wildest expectations:

I want to have fun with politics, yet I also want to get stuff done. I want to be sarcastic, satirical, irreverent — even silly — and yet I want to be taken seriously. I want to be edgy, out spoken, and occasionally foul mouthed, and yet I want to maintain my credibility with stuffy politicos and even stuffier editorial boards.

[…] So to those upstanding members of the political and media establishment who insist I cannot possibly expect to maintain my credibility as an activist while producing an irreverent and outrageous blog, the Goldy half of me respectfully says: “fuck you.”

I thought maybe I might some day build an audience of a couple hundred loyal readers, but 2.5 million visits and 4.7 million page views later, HA remains a big “fuck you” to those who confuse “solemnity” with “seriousness.”

Thank you all for giving me a reason to write.

Over on Slog, Josh is worried about the DNC’s lack of fundraising, citing a disturbing paragraph in a front page article in today’s New York Times:

But the Republican National Committee, which is permitted to spend money on Mr. McCain’s behalf, has raised $31 million, compared with just $6 million by the Democratic National Committee.

But Josh makes the classic journalistic error, by failing to heed the creed of journalism consumers everywhere: “Don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers.” Even our nation’s paper of record, the NY Times.

The NY Times was flat out wrong; those are cash-on-hand figures, not dollars raised as stated. According to Open Secrets, the RNC has outraised the DNC $123 million to $73 million for the cycle, but even those figures are meaningless when taken out of context. Overall, between the two parties’ major fundraising committees, we have a virtual tie at about $330 million each, with the Democrats holding a substantial $27 million edge in cash-on-hand.

At all levels, that’s a huge reversal from previous elections, when the Republicans typically out-raised and out-spent the Democrats by wide margins.

But even that only tells part of the story. Bucking complaints from the Beltway establishment, DNC chair Howard Dean has doggedly pursued a “50 State Strategy,” pumping money and infrastructure into states the party has all but ignored for decades, rather than hoarding cash for the general election. This strategy has left the DNC perpetually broke, but paid huge dividends in 2006 when Democrats picked up key seats in traditional afterthoughts like Montana. It has also put Democrats in a position to exploit Republican meltdowns like that happening in Alaska. If you ask me, that’s money well spent.

As for the RNC’s $50 million fundraising lead, $20 million of that has come over the past three months, a time during which McCain had the Republican nomination all wrapped up, while Obama and Clinton continued to fight it out. To put this in perspective, Obama and Clinton have raised a combined $420 million for the cycle compared to McCain’s $77 million — a $61 million to $12 million advantage in March alone. And with the Democratic ticket finally settled, expect the DNC to keep pace with the RNC, if not narrow the gap between the two committees.

So while Josh may be worried, I’m not. Folks can’t let up, but comforted by some actual numbers, rather than a scary paragraph in a newspaper, I remain confident that the Democrats are in a helluva position heading into the fall elections.

Is it actually possible for John McCain to actually be older than his mother?

I suppose the idea was that by sitting McCain next to his mother, he’d appear younger by comparison, but it doesn’t come off that way. Hope they give this ad a lot of play.

Now that the legacy media has acknowledged what most of us have known for some time—Barack Obama is the presumptive Democratic nominee—it’s taken much of the ratings-boosting drama out of covering the conflict between Democrats. So they’ve finally started to focus on the ratings-boosting drama in covering the conflict between Republicans.

Sen. John McCain is sailing toward his coronation as the Republican presidential nominee while the Democratic candidates battle fiercely. But Republicans also are engaged in some infighting that could disrupt the national convention and make it more difficult for him to unite the party in the fall.

And…

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., faces enormous pressure from social conservatives to ignore his repeated commitment to change the GOP’s platform on abortion.

“If he were to change the party platform,” to account for exceptions such as rape, incest or risk to the mother’s life, “I think that would be political suicide,” said Tony Perkins, the president of the conservative Family Research Council, to ABC News. “I think he would be aborting his own campaign because that is such a critical issue to so many Republican voters and the Republican brand is already in trouble.”

In primary after primary, 20 to 30 percent of Republicans have refused to cast ballots for their party’s nominee, a storyline the media has up until now almost completely ignored… as they have ignored the extraordinary movement that’s continued to build behind Ron Paul.  But conflict breeds drama which breeds ratings, so they have to find it somewhere.

One my many sacrifices to the angry god that is blogging was my garden.

Over a period of years I painstakingly built up 175 square feet of raised beds out of the compacted sod, clay and cobbles in my backyard, and one of my greatest joys was eating and sharing the produce of my labor:  raspberries, tomatoes, peas, lettuce, cucumbers, carrots, mustard, kale, radishes, arugula, green beans, herbs, and of course, zucchini… more zucchini than one family can ever eat, and always more than I ever intend to grow.

But between the demands of the blog and the dog, my garden has laid fallow over the past two years.

Well, no more.  This year I vowed to reclaim my yard and garden, and so far have kept my resolution.  And I’m loving it.

So if, occasionally, on sunny days like today, I disappear for a few hours… you’ll know where I am.

Over at Slog, ECB sticks it to Knute Berger for his latest column on Crosscut (you know, that online “newspaper” that has no news and no paper), and while I genuinely like Skip personally… Erica’s kinda got a point. There’s a “Blast From the Past” like quality to the Brewster/Berger/Van Dyk crowd that fails to connect with mere 16-year transplants like myself. Their’s is a Seattle more commonly found in history books than in, um… Seattle.

But I was particularly struck by Erica’s snide comment on Skip’s snide comment about Mayor Greg Nickels’ supposed call for secession:

Nickels’s “call for secession,” as Berger surely realizes, was a joke.

Or does he? This is the second column in a row in which Skip has raised this canard, to which I previously (and sarcastically) responded:

Berger dismisses Nickels’ assertion that his call for secession was “tongue-in-cheek” because apparently, journalists are much more capable of climbing inside the heads of their subjects than their subjects themselves, and no politician could ever be subtle enough to deliberately suggest an absurdity purely for dramatic effect.

In writing that sentence I was very conscious of my own recent run-in with the joke police, when the Times’ David Postman rejected my explanation that my intent was satirical when I responded in kind to BIAW charges of eco-Nazism. In his headline, Postman put the word “satire” in quotes, clearly refusing to accept my explanation as anything but an ex post facto excuse.

So I feel Nickels’ pain. Nickels denies that he really supports secession, in the same way that I denied that I really think the BIAW are Nazis. (Compare that to the BIAW, who passionately defend their assertion that our state’s stormwater regulations are the environmental equivalent of the Nuremberg Laws.) In both cases, journalists have concretely taken our original comments at face value, while stubbornly refusing to do the same when we explain that we were speaking tongue-in-cheek. Apparently, they did not find it funny, so it couldn’t possibly have been joke… a standard by which the bulk of sitcoms would be properly classified as reality television.

Years back, before I started blogging, I responded to yet another Eyman tax-cutting initiative by writing an update to Jonathan Swift’s classic satire “A Modest Proposal,” in which I proposed slaughtering students who failed the WASL, and using their flesh to supplement our school lunch programs. My column was instantly rejected by the Times and P-I, but the editors of the TNT mulled it over for weeks, eventually declining due to the consensus opinion that their readers “lacked the satire gene.”

I’m beginning to wonder if our journalists suffer from the same genetic defect?

On May 8 the Washington State Republican Party reported a $30,000 contribution from the Republican Governors Association, which in itself wouldn’t be all that extraordinary except for the fact that the check was cut on January 24th.

That’s four months late in reporting a pretty substantial chunk of change, and I’m told even then they only filed after being prompted by the Public Disclosure Commission in response to an inquiry from a watchdog following up on the RGA’s own federal reports.

I suppose it was most likely an accounting screw-up rather than a deliberate attempt to evade our public disclosure laws, but if they can’t audit their own books it doesn’t give much credence to the GOP’s tired old saw of being the party of fiscal responsibility.

Perhaps I just missed it, but I don’t remember seeing anything about this in the Times or P-I:

Microsoft stirred some controversy last week by announcing that it would no longer issue DRM keys for defunct MSN Music after August 31. This effectively will prevent former customers from transferring their songs to new devices after the deadline. Customers could potentially lose their music if they get a new computer or if the hard drive crashes on their current one

[…] “MSN Music customers trusted Microsoft when it said that this was a safe way to buy music, and that trust has been betrayed,” Corynne McSherry, an EFF attorney, said in a statement. “If Microsoft is prepared to treat MSN Music customers like this, is there any reason to suppose that future customers won’t get the same treatment?”

Um… no.

Microsoft’s Rob Bennett said that continuing to support the DRM keys was impractical…

Because that would require maintaining and operating these strange things called “servers,” something Microsoft has absolutely no experience with whatsoever.

… that the issue only affects a small number of people…

How many exactly is a “small number of people” to a behemoth like Microsoft? A couple dozen? A couple hundred thousand? A couple million?

… and focusing exclusively on Zune was the best way to go.

Well, the best way to go for Microsoft.

He also noted that it wasn’t Microsoft’s decision to wrap music into digital rights management.

They were just following orders.

I know Microsoft is a mainstay of our local economy and has made a lot of people here very wealthy… but this is simply a crappy way to treat your customers, and you’d think our local media would have called them on it.

I’m filling in for Dave Ross this morning for the final two hours of his show, from 10AM to Noon on News/Talk 710-KIRO. Here’s the show as it’s shaping up right now:

10AM: How do you fix a failed state?
And is it possible? Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart join me in studio to talk about their new book, “Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World.” What can be done to save the 2 billion people living in collapsing or collapsed states, and is it the United State’s responsibility to solve their problems?

10:45 AM:  Will the Democrats seat the delegates from Florida and Michigan?
David McDonald is a Democratic National Committee member from Washington state, an uncommitted superdelegate, and a member of the all important Rules Committee that will make the decision whether to seat the delegates from Florida and Michigan.  We’ll ask him what he expects to happen on May 31st, what the options are, and why he first proposed stripping Michigan of their delegates.

11 AM: Can (should?) government do anything about rising gas prices?
Senate Democrats have introduced their plan to combat higher energy costs: roll back tax breaks for big oil, invest in renewable energy, and temporarily halt government purchases of crude for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve… but Republicans say this plan won’t work, arguing instead for drilling in ANWR and (surprise) more tax cuts! Here’s my proposal: increase the gas tax, dramatically, and invest the revenues in a massive transit infrastructure program nationwide.

Tune in to 710-KIRO, or stream online at MyNorthwest.com.