Goldy

I don’t mean to sound paranoid or anything, but for some odd reason, it appears the BIAW’s Tom McCabe and Erin Shannon don’t like me very much. Was it something I said?

[audio:http://horsesass.org/wp-content/uploads/goldy2.mp3]

Shannon calls me a “profane, ranting, raving lunatic”… and this from the woman who after the 2004 election gleefully told the Seattle Weekly:

“It was a big ‘Fuck you!’ to all the liberals out there. […] We are kicking their ass.”

Um… pot, meet kettle. (Really. Let’s meet up sometime Erin. I’ve always had a thing for trash-talking Irish women. Gimme a call.)

The whole clip is a hoot, with both Shannon and McCabe alternating between abusing me for my inflated sense of self-importance (apparently I’m one of those pathetic guys who “actually thinks he can make a difference and accomplish things” ) and repeatedly bemoaning the extraordinary influence they apparently believe I wield with the local press. Give a listen to this exchange:

Shannon: Yeah, and so you’re so important Mr. Goldstein, that we’d even waste our time. Here’s a guy who thinks that he’s so important and so influential that you’d actually take the time to go beat the you know what out of him with a baseball bat?

McCabe: That’s why I don’t want to talk about him any more.

Shannon: He’s ridiculous.

McCabe: But he is… he is influential in getting the Seattle PI to publish editorials, Erin, we just mentioned that.

So which is it? Am I “ridiculous” or “influential”? Both? (And Erin, as long as you’re wasting time telling me I’m not worth wasting your time, why not waste time together with me over a couple drinks? I understand a fondness for bars is one thing we both have in common.)

And as for that “baseball bat” thing? According to McCabe…

McCabe: Mr. Goldstein says that he believes that one day I’m going to beat him up with a baseball bat, and maybe I might even kill him. This is what he says about me, Tom McCabe. Very odd, odd thing.

Shannon: Yeah, and so you’re so important Mr. Goldstein, that we’d even waste our time.

Oh. So I guess, in context, Shannon was saying that I’m not important enough to even waste their time… beating me to death with a baseball bat. Not that such beatings are entirely out of the question, I’m just not worth the effort. Charming. Perhaps drinks wouldn’t be such a good idea after all.

In fact, I never said I believed McCabe was going to beat me with a baseball bat, or any other blunt object. Here is the quote to which he refers with the same sort of reverence for accuracy that he usual reserves for Nazi historiography:

And believe you me, the BIAW’s violent rhetoric is intended as a threat, and they fully understand the potential consequences of pumping up the anger. One of these days somebody like me is going to get the shit beaten out them by somebody like them — they’ll be waiting for me late at night with baseball bats, or worse — and when that happens our media elite, who allowed the BIAW’s dangerous rhetoric to go unridiculed, unchallenged and unchecked for so long, will be just as culpable as batshit crazy bastards like Tom McCabe and Mark Musser.

“Somebody like me is going to get the shit beaten out of them by somebody like them…” I never wrote that I believed that McCabe would attack me; I was merely repeating my oft stated belief that violent rhetoric eventually breeds violent actions, and that when such violence occurs, the instigators are as culpable as the violators. And if you take issue with that premise, go tell it to Charles Goldmark and Alan Berg.

But then you can’t really expect McCabe to even understand my words let alone accurately represent them, when he can’t even be bothered to learn my blog’s proper domain name, and bizarrely claims that HA is a blog “devoted to pummeling BIAW.” Talk about an inflated sense of self-importance, only 2.5% of my posts — 106 out of 4203 — even mention BIAW, compared to, say, 295 that reference Tim Eyman or 384 that mention Dino Rossi. Perhaps McCabe was thinking of HorsesAss.com, a site I’m guessing he’s much more familiar with?

Apparently, the BIAW has its own radio show-like-thingy or something, and… well… it doesn’t sound like they’re too fond of Seattle P-I columnist Joel Connelly:

[audio:http://horsesass.org/wp-content/uploads/2008-4-8-biaw-calls-connelly-a-reptile-long.mp3]

Well, Tom McCabe didn’t specifically call Joel a Nazi, but rather a “self-avowed extreme environmentalist.” And since they equate environmentalism with Nazism, I can only assume that they believe that Joel is also a self-avowed Nazi. Meanwhile, foul-mouthed spokeswoman Erin Shannon chimes in with some constructive criticism of her own:

“His blood does run cold because he’s a little reptile. He’s a snake.”

But that’s nothing compared to what they have say about me. Stay tuned for more, coming up soon…

The Republican version of the Dems’ “Red to Blue” program is called ROMP, which stands for “Regain Our Majority Program.” But whereas Red to Blue funnels resources to Democratic challengers running in Republican held districts, the NRCC is pursuing an entirely different tactic with ROMP, prompting Daily Kos contributing editor brownsox to astutely observe:

Notice that this ROMP program, ostensibly focused on regaining the Republican majority, seems disproportionately tilted towards protecting incumbent Republican Reps. In fact, out of these 10 districts where the elephants hope to ROMP, exactly one is currently held by a Democrat, John Yarmuth of Kentucky’s 3rd District.

I find this to be a novel and fascinating method of Regaining Their Majority; by not targeting Democratic-held seats. I wish them the best of luck with this; I’m sure it’s going to work out just splendidly. Keep avoiding the Dem-held seats, and they oughta have that ol’ majority back in no time flat.

And yes, Dave Reichert is a charter member of ROMP 2008, yet another indication of just how vulnerable his colleagues understand him to be.

As usual, I’m not exactly sure what Danny Westneat is getting at. (That’s just kinda his style: tossing out apparently contrarian tidbits, and then leaving it to readers to impose their own agenda.) Danny interviews Ravenna’s renowned “oceanic garbologist” Curt Ebbesmeyer, who points out that those plastic grocery bags the mayor wants to slap a 20-cent fee on are just “one little battle out of a million.”

“If the mayor really wants to get on the stick, he should go after plastic bottles. Or plastic wrapping of food products. Or how about a tax or a ban on petroleum-based plastic, period?”

For his part, Danny performed his own field… um… beach research, confirming Ebbesmeyer’s remark:

I did my own garbology “dig” at low tide in Seattle’s Myrtle Edwards Park. In half an hour poking along 300 yards of shoreline, I found a demoralizing 173 pieces of trash.

Take out the wood (paintbrush), the metal (beer cans, foil wrappers) and the miscellaneous (earplugs, nicotine patches, ropes, a corncob, an orange traffic cone), and I was left with 137 pieces of plastic.

Top item, by far: Plastic bottles. Followed by plastic bottle caps. Then plastic lids and plastic cups. Plus a slew of plastic food packaging.

Number of plastic grocery or drugstore bags? One.

Sure, we get it Danny… one city discouraging the wasteful use of disposable bags won’t make much of an impact on such a huge problem (the way one individual conserving energy won’t slow global warming). But I know something that would make a difference, and quick: we could all, you know, stop littering!

When I was a kid in the early seventies the most visible element of the nascent environmental movement was a nationwide anti-littering campaign. It was drummed into us at school, it was relentlessly reinforced in PSAs on TV and on billboards. I even saw a state trooper pull over a car for dumping a handful of trash out the window on the Atlantic City Expressway.

Nowadays I witness trash spewing out of car windows or falling out of the hands of defiant teens on a regular basis. Recently I confronted a kid on a neighborhood playground for dropping their empty candy wrapper on the ground, and they just looked at me with one of those expressions of disdain reserved for, well, adults, before indifferently turning around and walking away. If that had been me thirty-some years ago, told to pick up my trash, I would have been mortified.

No doubt the social taboo against public littering was always strongest amongst affluent suburbanites, but it appears to be waning across the board these days, and I don’t see much of a concerted effort to reinforce it. So let’s start drumming it into our kids again, confronting offenders with reproach, and instructing the police to hand out littering tickets on our streets and our sidewalks. And let’s get that crying Indian back on TV again, for chrisakes.

I’m deep in code monkey mode today, so I don’t expect to do much writing unless something really strikes my fancy… though that doesn’t mean my co-bloggers won’t fill in the gap.  Just thought you should know.

You may not notice it — in fact, you shouldn’t notice it — but I’ve just upgrade HA’s installation of WordPress to version 2.5. If anything appears not be working properly, you’ll let me know.

Sen. John McCain has a well earned reputation as a foul-mouthed hothead, having called opponents and colleagues “shitheads,” “assholes” and on at least one occasion, “a fucking jerk.” Personally, I have no qualms with the occasional profane rant, but you gotta admit, it’s not exactly presidential behavior.

Well, a new book, The Real McCain by Cliff Shecter, documents an outburst so shocking, even I winced at the senator’s choice of words:

Three reporters from Arizona, on the condition of anonymity, also let me in on another incident involving McCain’s intemperateness. In his 1992 Senate bid, McCain was joined on the campaign trail by his wife, Cindy, as well as campaign aide Doug Cole and consultant Wes Gullett. At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain’s hair and said, “You’re getting a little thin up there.” McCain’s face reddened, and he responded, “At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt.” McCain’s excuse was that it had been a long day.

As Shecter points out, McCain would have many long days if elected President.

The Seattle Times editorial board urges Gov. Gregoire to be “careful” regarding the state budget…

Its additions were modest, and the $0.015 billion the governor vetoed was helpful in that regard. So was the $0.85 billion ending savings account. But these changes were on the top of a total — $33.7 billion in a two-year cycle — that was not modest. In four years, state spending has risen by 33 percent. […] Some of this spending was necessary. But the across-the-board spending has meant the state was not able to lower taxes in any substantial way.

Yeah, well, there are reasons to be careful regarding the state budget in the face of an antiquated tax system that virtually assures a longterm structural deficit, but not for the reasons the Times suggests. Indeed, every time they trod out Rossi’s intentionally misleading “33 percent” number — without offering readers the appropriate budgetary context — the Times does a great disservice toward the cause of fiscal stability.

Yes, the state budget has grown by about a third over the past four years, and no, that rate is not sustainable when compared to longterm budget forecasts, but our state government’s growth has absolutely been “modest” by any meaningful economic measure. In fact, a January 2007 analysis by the Washington State Budget & Policy Center clearly shows that general fund spending under Gov. Gregoire has merely followed the same trend established during the 1990s.

The Times would have you believe that it was the spending increase under Gov. Gregoire’s watch that is the anomaly, when in fact it was the slower spending growth during the national recession and tepid recovery that actually fell below historical growth levels. Gov. Gregoire’s budget merely returned the state to the established trend.

Indeed, as a share of the total state economy, Gov. Gregoire’s budget actually represents a reduced investment — a smaller share of state resources than any of the six budgets that directly precede it.

Anti-government/anti-tax critics can spout all they want about rising spending and per-capita tax increases, but those numbers are entirely meaningless when taken out of context… as they usually are. Read the academic literature and you will find that the most common metric used in comparative studies of government spending, and for analyzing the relative growth of both expenditures and revenues, is spending/taxation as a percentage of personal income.

The reason is twofold. First, the economic metric that most closely tracks long term growth in demand for government services is growth in total personal income. That is because many of the services provided by the government are commodities, and as personal income increases, so does consumption. As our state grows wealthier, demand for government services increases faster than population plus inflation.

The other reason to focus on personal income is that it is the only metric that tracks individual taxpayers’ ability to pay. The state invests in things like transportation and education and law enforcement — investments that provide the infrastructure necessary for our economy to grow and for all our citizens to prosper. Thus a spending increase, even when accompanied by an increase in marginal tax rates, does not increase the real burden on individual taxpayers if it results in a corresponding increase in personal income.

So how does our state stack up in terms of state and local taxes as a percentage of personal income? Again, according to the Budget & Policy Center, Washington currently ranks 36th nationwide… and falling.

There is a legitimate debate to be had over the proper size and scope of government, and the priority in which we make public investments, but it is fundamentally dishonest to enter this debate by reinforcing the common misconception that our state government is out of control, when by the most meaningful measure — the government’s total share of our state’s economic resources — even a four-year 33-percent increase represents a decline from historic trends. And it is equally dishonest to profess a concern for fiscal responsibility by focusing solely on budgetary expenditures while refusing to address the revenue side of the equation.

Washington state not only boasts the most regressive tax structure in the nation — one in which the bottom 20% of wage earners pay a whopping 17.6% of income in state and local taxes while the wealthiest pay only 3.1% — our tax system is also based on an antiquated, early 20th century model that over-relies on an ever shrinking portion of our 21st century economy: the manufacture and sale of goods. Economic booms can mask this structural deficit in the short term, but because our economic growth is increasingly occurring in sectors that remain un- or under-taxed, longterm revenue growth simply cannot keep pace with growth in demand for public services… at least not without raising marginal tax rates, shifting an ever greater burden on exactly those families who can least afford it.

The Times and other critics have repeatedly cautioned about unsustainable budget growth while refusing to articulate which programs and services they would see slashed, or displaying an ounce of willingness to discuss the kind of fundamental tax restructuring that might allow state and local government revenues to reliably keep pace with both economic growth, and with the growth in demand for public services. If the Times editorial board wants a smaller state government — if they want to see less per capita real dollars spent on education, transportation, law enforcement, children’s health care, and other essential services — they should just come out and say it; we would all benefit from an honest debate. But the sort of disingenuous budgetary “concern trolling” they display in today’s editorial adds absolutely nothing to the discussion.

And what has Reichert done recently ever that’s captured the imagination of national pundits?

Um, I guess it’s finally time to take Chuck’s gun away from him…

I’ve struggled at times to explain exactly what “net neutrality” is, and why it is so important to the future of the Internet. But Damian Kulash Jr., the lead singer for the band OK Go, has no such problem; read his op-ed in today’s NY Times: “Beware the New New Thing.”

Most people assume that the Internet is a democratic free-for-all by nature — that it could be no other way. But the openness of the Internet as we know it is a byproduct of the fact that the network was started on phone lines. The phone system is subject to “common carriage” laws, which require phone companies to treat all calls and customers equally. They can’t offer tiered service in which higher-paying customers get their calls through faster or clearer, or calls originating on a competitor’s network are blocked or slowed.

These laws have been on the books for about as long as telephones have been ringing, and were meant to keep Bell from using its elephantine market share to squash everyone else. And because of common carriage, digital data running over the phone lines has essentially been off limits to the people who laid the lines. But in the last decade, the network providers have argued that since the Internet is no longer primarily run on phone lines, the laws of data equality no longer apply. They reason that they own the fiber optic and coaxial lines, so they should be able to do whatever they want with the information crossing them.

[… O]utright censorship and obstruction of access are only one part of the issue, and they represent the lesser threat, in the long run. What we should worry about more is not what’s kept from us today, but what will be built (or not built) in the years to come.

We hate when things are taken from us (so we rage at censorship), but we also love to get new things. And the providers are chomping at the bit to offer them to us: new high-bandwidth treats like superfast high-definition video and quick movie downloads. They can make it sound great: newer, bigger, faster, better! But the new fast lanes they propose will be theirs to control and exploit and sell access to, without the level playing field that common carriage built into today’s network.

They won’t be blocking anything per se — we’ll never know what we’re not getting — they’ll just be leapfrogging today’s technology with a new, higher-bandwidth network where they get to be the gatekeepers and toll collectors. The superlative new video on offer will be available from (surprise, surprise) them, or companies who’ve paid them for the privilege of access to their customers. If this model sounds familiar, that’s because it is. It’s how cable TV operates.

That’s net neutrality in a nutshell: do you want an Internet that operates like the one we have today, or one that operates like cable TV, where Comcast decides which content to carry, and offers it to you only in bundles of its own devising? Most folks simply aren’t going to subscribe to two internets, and those who choose the one with the high definition video on demand, very well may not have access to voices like mine. (Or for those on the other side of the ideological divide, voices like yours.)

You would think this is one issue on which we could all agree.

AND WHAT’S MORE:

Damian Kulash knows ping-pong, too:

From the Seattle Times: “Home prices declining, inventory building around Puget Sound.”

From the Seattle P-I: “Seattle single-family homes prices stay steady in March.”

I’m so confused.

US House minority leader Rep. John Boehner sees a ray of hope in the ongoing nomination fight between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton:

“When you start to look at the fallout from the Democratic nomination process – the Democrats not showing up to vote – you are starting to create a scenario where we are in better shape than people think,” said Mr. Boehner. “You are going to have people voting for McCain or not voting at all. The picture is not as bleak as people want to paint it.”

That’s right, the House Republicans’ only hope to avoid disaster at the polls in November is for voters not to show up. I guess you gotta appreciate his honesty, though it doesn’t really say much his party when the opposite of “bleak” is low voter turnout.

Um, not really political news here, but I just really loved the headline: “Clue to early Americans lies in origin of the feces.” (Not to mention the slug in the URL: “oldpoop04m.html”. And to think… they criticize me for my potty mouth.)

Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens gives us a little historical perspective on the much maligned practice of “earmarking”:

[audio:http://horsesass.org/wp-content/uploads/stevensearmarks.mp3]

Again, you can listen to the whole interview, unedited and in context, here.