Goldy

But enough about me for a moment; let’s talk about another Seattle media entity of interest to nearly as many people: The Seattle Times.

On his blog, Postman writes about a memo from Executive Editor David Boardman directing staff members to refrain from participating in the upcoming presidential caucus and primary, fearing that it might compromise the Federation’s profession’s prime directive: objectivity. Boardman worries that primary list is a public record, as is which party’s ballot one chooses, and that some jerk might look it up: “Count on The Stranger, the Weekly and the political blogs to do just that,” Boardman frets.

Huh. Actually, the thought never occurred to me. Thanks for the idea Dave. Boardman continues:

“In this age of sharply partisan talk shows and blogs, our credibility and impartiality are more precious than ever. They are the capital we have to carry us into the future, the qualities that most separate us from all of the other places readers and Web users can go for news and information.”

Um, actually, what most separates stodgy old media from all us “other places” is that we generally offer our audience a more compelling and entertaining read. If blogs and other online media continue to gain audience at the expense of newspapers, it certainly isn’t because we have some competitive advantage or marketing muscle. So perhaps, maybe, could it be that we simply provide a better product? And if so, wouldn’t the Times be better served by hiring themselves some edgy new columnists rather than trusting that “credibility and impartiality” will eventually win the day? (FYI, I know of a newly unemployed radio host who would jump at the opportunity for a regular column.)

In fact, since journalists do have opinions and partisan leanings, wouldn’t it be more honest to be up front about it and say “Yeah… I’m a Democrat” and then let readers understand your reporting within that context? I’m not saying journalists shouldn’t strive to be objective or impartial — there’s room for both traditional journalism and the advocacy kind that I practice — it’s just that it’s kinda disingenuous to imply that they actually are.

Just a thought.

Let’s be honest, my comment threads are generally a sewer, and so it was with some surprise and great appreciation that I read the outpouring of support in the thread on the demise of my show on 710-KIRO. For the most part, even those on the other side expressed empathy, and some even professed to liking the show. I’ve received a number of donations via my PayPal and Amazon Honor System links, plus several emails suggesting I launch an online fundraiser. And I will launch a fundraiser, but not quite yet. Because first I want to ask you to support the work of one of my favorite bloggers, Dave Neiwert of Orcinus.

Dave is perhaps the granddaddy of local bloggers, and has played a critical role nationally in tracking the transmission of right-wing hate speech from the political fringe, through surrogates like Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin, and into the mainstream media. He has been a role model, mentor and friend to me and other local bloggers, and an invaluable resource to bloggers nationwide.

Bloggers like Dave and I invest an awful lot of time and passion bringing you the kind of news and analysis the corporate media is no longer willing or able to deliver — time and passion that could be spent doing, you know… paying work. We both need your support, but he’s the one with the active fund drive, so if you’re as big a fan of Orcinus as I am, please help him out however you can.

710-KIRO has canceled my show “for budgetary reasons.” I’m not exactly sure about all the changes to the weekend schedule (I just talked to Bryan Styble, and he too got the ax,) but apparently syndication and reruns better fit the station’s current business model than live, local talk. Ah well.

Coming off a fall book where 710-KIRO weekends placed number three in the market, and a several month streak of jam-packed spot loads, I’d say the weekend shakeup was a bit of a surprise… that is, if Frank Shiers recent fate hadn’t been the handwriting on the wall. Over the past 14 months 710-KIRO has now shed itself of at least 38 44 hours a week of live local programming, and the salaries that go with it. It’s a trend that has been repeated at radio stations throughout the state, and I can’t say it’s one that ultimately better serves the community. For example, I had Gov. Chris Gregoire booked for a half hour this coming Saturday night — where are weekend listeners going to find local programming like that?

Obviously I’m deeply disappointed. I really enjoyed doing the show, and the sudden loss of it leaves me in pretty deep financial doo-doo. It would have been nice to have the opportunity to say goodbye to my audience and thank them for listening, but apparently, that’s not how it works in this business. That said, I remain thankful to 710-KIRO for giving me an opportunity I should have had no expectation of receiving. Special thanks go to former Programming Director Tom Clendening for taking a gamble on me, and to my board operator Chris Powell, who has so generously given of his time to serve as an unpaid, acting producer. It was really great working with (almost) everybody at station. And of course, thanks to everybody for listening.

So go ahead trolls… have at it. You’ve been waiting for the day to rub my face in it, and that day is finally here. Just remember that as you gloat, you’re also talking about a real person with a mortgage to pay and a child to feed, who has sacrificed the better part of the past four years to trying to make a difference, however much you disagree with me on the issues. And, remember that we didn’t just lose a local liberal show… we lost another local show, and that can’t be a positive thing for anybody but the most vindictive amongst you.

As for my readers and listeners, I’m not giving up on the dream of local liberal talk, and neither should you. So if you ever thought about lobbying AM-1090 to put a local host on the air, now might not be a bad time to start.

UPDATE:
Word is that they’ve snuffed Carl Jeffers as well, though I’m no longer privy to company emails, so I can’t confirm. (UPDATE: confirmed.)

Now that John Edwards has quit the race for the Democratic nomination, the big question on everybody’s minds is where will his supporters go, Clinton or Obama? But without a doubt the big winner from Edwards withdrawal is Mike Gravel, who now stands to double or even triple his current delegate count. (Do the math.)

As for where this particular Edwards supporter goes… well… I don’t yet know. I’ve never bought in to the “Hillary can’t win” meme, but I do believe that Obama matches up better against John McCain, and will be better for down ticket candidates like Darcy Burner. And I’m torn between Clinton’s hard-edged political savvy, versus Obama’s potential as a transformational leader. They’re both qualified and I believe they’d both make a good president. And they both appear to be smarter than me, one of the only litmus tests beyond party identification I absolutely apply to presidential candidates.

If you too were an Edwards supporter, I’d love to hear from you in the comment threads as to who you plan to caucus for a week from Saturday.

Via Dan…

Hey Dave… how’s that Giuliani endorsement working out for you?

Rudy Giuliani’s stunningly stupid “Florida Strategy” has been the subject of speculation and the butt of jokes for months — a strategic failure of historic proportions that has instantly become a classic case study in how not to run a presidential campaign. It is fitting that a man whose national profile was forged in disaster has run one of the most disastrous campaigns of all time, frittering away his apparent frontrunner status in only a matter of weeks.

But could Giuliani and his high-paid strategists really have been that stupid? Or, is it possible that the Florida Strategy has actually worked exactly as planned?

While the rest of the presidential field were trudging through the snows of Iowa and New Hampshire, trading rhinoviruses with voters in diners and VFW halls throughout the heartland, Giuliani and his team were leisurely soaking up the rays in sunny Florida, making a few appearances, playing a little golf, and all the while laying claim to the Sunshine State’s winner-take-all primary. While Romney, McCain and Huckabee were emptying their campaign coffers duking it out in Nevada and Michigan and South Carolina, Giuliani apparently spent his $50 million-plus campaign war chest on what…? Sunscreen and greens fees? Two percent of the vote, and a single national delegate? According to media reports the Giuliani campaign is so broke his top staffers have foregone their salaries, raising questions of how he could have spent so much money for such poor results? But perhaps the better question might be, did he actually spend the money at all?

Think about it. Giuliani may be arrogant and vindictive and ethically challenged, but nobody’s ever accused the man of being stupid, so perhaps he and his advisers knew all along that he didn’t stand a chance on the national stage once Americans really got to know him. But just because he couldn’t win the White House didn’t mean he couldn’t make a little scratch on the side, and taking a lesson from Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom in Mel Brooks’ legendary The Producers, perhaps Giuliani realized he could make a helluva lot more money from a presidential flop than he ever could from a respectable run?

How would the scam work? Simple. Raise tens of millions of dollars while you’re riding high in the national polls, but stay out of the expensive media wars in the early primaries to “focus on Florida.” Then when your Florida strategy inevitably fails, you bow out of the race, having spent all your cash on high-priced “consultants” for, well, who knows what? Once out of the national spotlight, Giuliani and his “consultants” just split the loot and fly off to Rio, just in time for Carnival.

Sure, Bialystock and Bloom are fictional characters, but then, in many ways, so is “America’s Mayor.” And while it may seem a fantastical fit of Truther-worthy paranoia to suggest that the entire Giuliani campaign was never anything more than an elaborate con, well… it’s as reasonable an explanation for Giuliani’s mind-numbingly idiotic Florida Strategy as anything else we’ve heard thus far.

Entirely devoid of compelling candidates or, you know, ideas, the GOP just sent out a fundraising email offering a free, plush toy elephant with every $35 donation. The email reads in part:

“Meet Maxine, the newest member of the Republican National Committee.

Embroidered with the official logo of the RNC, Maxine proudly shows off her allegiance to the Republican Party’s principles of lower taxes, a strong national defense, limited government and personal responsibility.”

And judging from the state of the GOP these days, it looks like Maxine is the member of the RNC who is making most of the day to day decisions.

My inbox is inundated with Democratic and progressive fundraising emails talking about ending the war in Iraq, combating climate change, protecting our privacy and personal freedoms, promoting health care security and economic justice, and touting the qualities of various candidates. But the Republicans, they’ve been reduced to hawking toy elephants.

Hmm. I wonder if these toys, like the GOP’s consumer protection policies, are made in China?

It rained last night in Seattle. Who knew?

I was watching the “storm coverage” last night on KIRO-7, and actually burst out laughing a couple times… you know, like at the shot of a reporter in Bonney Lake standing in a dusting of snow, in front of a bare road, talking about hazardous driving conditions… or the shivering driver exclaiming that the temperature dropped all the way down to thirty degrees! And I couldn’t help thinking… what a bunch of fucking pussies.

For a region with one of the most temperate climates in the world (it could be 58 degrees and drizzling virtually any day of the year,) we sure do spend an awful lot of time talking about the weather.

Jesus… if John McCain makes Pat Buchanan “nervous”, the rest of us should be shitting bricks.

Presidential candidate John McCain shocked observers on Sunday when he told a crowd of supporters, "There’s going to be other wars. … I’m sorry to tell you, there’s going to be other wars. We will never surrender but there will be other wars."

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough asked old-line conservative Pat Buchanan about McCain’s remarks, saying, "He talked about promising that more wars were coming. … Is he so desperate to get off the economic issue?"

Pat Buchanan replied that McCain never used the word "promise" but simply said there would be more wars, and that from McCain’s point of view, "that is straight talk. … You get John McCain in the White House, and I do believe we will be at war with Iran."

"That’s one of the things that makes me very nervous about him," Buchanan went on. "There’s no doubt John McCain is going to be a war president. … His whole career is wrapped up in the military, national security. He’s in Putin’s face, he’s threatening the Iranians, we’re going to be in Iraq a hundred years."

I’m pretty sure that Pat Buchanan and I agreeing on stuff was prophesied as a sign of the impending End Times. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if John McCain wins the Republican nomination, this election won’t be about the war in Iraq, it will be about war with Iran.

WhackyNation’s eminently whacky Mark Gardner accuses me of “smearing” Assistant State Treasurer Allan Martin, by describing him as a licensed mortician. But… um… Martin is a licensed mortician:

Martin, 54, is a former funeral director who says he has kept his license current for doing funerals and embalming.

Because as State Treasurer, you never know when that might come in handy.

Ironically, in his zeal to brand me as unworthy of serving in a profession that includes such beacons of journalistic integrity as Michael Savage, G. Gordon Liddy and Bill O’Reilly, Gardner overlooked a genuine factual error in my original post, that could actually rise to the level of constituting a “smear” had I known the information to be incorrect. But since the error concerned one of the Democrats in the race, Gardner apparently couldn’t give a shit.

In my post I pointed out that the name of the state’s chief economist, Dr. ChangMook Sohn, appears as a signatory to an online petition from the libertarian Cato Institute, calling for Social Security privatization, and technically, this true — Dr. Sohn’s name does appear on the petition. But Dr. Sohn assures me via email that he has “never signed or been asked to sign a petition to privatize Social Security,” and has no idea how his name got on the Cato petition. Furthermore, when asked specifically about his stance on the issue, Dr. Sohn writes:

As a principle, I do not comment on the Federal government policy issues. I am a state government official. As a private citizen, however, I oppose Social Security privatization. Given its expected negative cash flow situation within 10 years, the overhaul of the current system is inevitable, I believe.

I raised the issue in the first place because Social Security privatization doesn’t strike me as a Democratic value, and I am pleased to clarify that Dr. Sohn does not support it. I have contacted the Cato Institute, asking them to explain how Dr. Sohn’s name came to be attached to their petition, but have yet to receive a reply.

As for Martin, if he wants to send me an email denying that he is a licensed mortician, I’d be happy to post that correction as well.

Standing four-foot-something with a metal hook in the place of a left hand, Oregon US Senate hopeful Steve Novick certainly doesn’t look like your typical candidate… and he certainly isn’t running your typical campaign ads. I don’t know if these ads are effective in terms of actually getting votes, but damn do I love ’em.

Huh. The polls were off big time again in South Carolina, predicting 38-percent of the vote for Barack Obama, when he actually pulled in over 55-percent. And yet nobody is leveling charges of election fraud, like the did in New Hampshire. Hmm. I wonder why?

Tonight on “The David Goldstein Show”, 7PM to 10PM on News/Talk 710-KIRO:

7PM: Are you wonked out Daily Kos?
Joel Silberman from Daily Kos joins me for the hour to talk about the tension between political wonkery and emotional generalism, and how it’s playing out in the current electoral cycle.

8PM: Is it time to reform mortgage lending?
Home foreclosure rates are rising, as more and more homeowners are falling victim to adjustable rate mortgages they can no longer afford, with many claiming they were misled by mortgage brokers and lenders. Maya Baxter from the Statewide Poverty Action Network joins me for the hour to discuss the crisis, and two bills that have been introduced in the state legislature to address this issue.

9PM: TBA
The usual liberal propaganda

Tune in tonight (or listen to the live stream) and give me a call: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).

So, the Seattle Times has endorsed Sen. Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination. Big deal. Next week they’ll also endorse Sen. John McCain on the Republican side. If the Times really embraces the kind of change they believe Obama represents, they wouldn’t endorse anybody for the Republican nomination, least of all a warmonger whose idea of straight talk is promising crowds “there will be other wars.”

Personally, I doubt many Washington state Democrats are looking to the op-ed pages for advice on who to caucus for on February 9, but if they are, I’m guessing the most influential endorsement of the primary season may have come today in the New York Times, and I’m not talking about an unsigned editorial. No, the big news following Obama’s impressive 29-point rout of Hillary Clinton in yesterday’s South Carolina primary was the moving op-ed column written by Caroline Kennedy, “A President Like My Father“:

OVER the years, I’ve been deeply moved by the people who’ve told me they wished they could feel inspired and hopeful about America the way people did when my father was president. This sense is even more profound today. That is why I am supporting a presidential candidate in the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama.

My reasons are patriotic, political and personal, and the three are intertwined. All my life, people have told me that my father changed their lives, that they got involved in public service or politics because he asked them to. And the generation he inspired has passed that spirit on to its children. I meet young people who were born long after John F. Kennedy was president, yet who ask me how to live out his ideals.

Sometimes it takes a while to recognize that someone has a special ability to get us to believe in ourselves, to tie that belief to our highest ideals and imagine that together we can do great things. In those rare moments, when such a person comes along, we need to put aside our plans and reach for what we know is possible.

[…] I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president — not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans.

I suppose I might have a reputation for being a hard-edged cynic, but my eyes actually teared up a bit when I first read Kennedy’s words. I so desperately want to believe what she believes, that Obama really does have that “special ability” to inspire and to lead and to bring us back together as a nation. I fully understand her father was just a man, as flawed as any, but that doesn’t diminish President Kennedy’s impact as a leader, however symbolic, and I too long for a president who can inspire me the way so many of my parent’s generation were inspired by him.

As both a liberal and an American, I have long felt cheated by history… robbed of a promising future by a handful of assassins’ bullets. Had President Kennedy lived to complete his terms, might we have avoided the mistakes that led to an all out involvement in Vietnam, a war that divided our nation and drained us of precious blood and treasure? Had Bobby Kennedy survived to win the White House, would American liberalism have survived to finally achieve the vision of economic justice and security first enunciated by FDR, and wouldn’t Americans have retained the faith in government that carried us through the Great Depression and World War II, rather than seeing that faith shattered by the betrayal that was Watergate? Had Martin Luther King Jr. lived to guide our nation to the Promised Land, rather than just glimpsing it from some far-off mountain top, would the Republican Party have been free to so ruthlessly exploit Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” to advance their selfish, conservative agenda?

My critics like to characterize me as some wide-eyed, lefty moonbat, but I’m nothing more or less than a 1970’s-era centrist who has been radicalized in style if not in substance by a decades-long, right-wing campaign to defile the proud legacy of American liberalism, and to brand its adherents as idiots, ideologues, traitors and worse. The radicalized middle from which I come did not lightly seize on unbridled partisanship as our political weapon of choice, but that is the weapon that has been used to cudgel us into submission for far too long. That the fierceness of the netroots and the new progressive movement to which it belongs frightens the political and media establishment, is understandable, but there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that our aggressive rhetoric and tactics have not played a significant role in our recent electoral victories. Only now that a netroots-powered Democratic majority is on the verge of seizing unchallenged control of the federal government, do we hear a renewed call for bipartisanship… and that is why I wince every time I hear Obama echoing their frame.

When Obama talks about reaching his hand across the aisle, the cynic in me envisions the other side leaping at the opportunity to lop it off. When Obama talks about bipartisanship, I fear it means willingly sacrificing the very political advantages we have fought so hard to achieve. It’s not that I don’t trust Obama, it’s just that I don’t trust the Republican leadership to reciprocate in kind… not these Republicans… not the party that so joyously swiftboated a war hero, and took a man who left three limbs on the battlefield and morphed him into Osama bin Laden. Hardened by decades of partisan, political war, I admit to finding a certain degree of solace in the more calculating nature of Hilary Clinton — the very same quality that appears to turn off so many other voters. Better to be calculating than naive.

That said, I want to believe, like Caroline Kennedy, in the promise of Obama. I want a president who I don’t simply admire, but one who I find truly inspirational. I want my eyes to fill with tears, not at the thought of what might have been, but what can be. And not since Mario Cuomo ended his flirtation with a White House bid back in 1991 have I found a presidential candidate who offers me this hope.

Tomorrow, Sen. Ted Kennedy will appear with his niece at a rally in Washington D.C., to announce his endorsement of Barack Obama, and to personally pass the torch of Camelot on to a new generation. No doubt the right will take the opportunity to vilify Sen. Kennedy in the hope that some of their ridicule might rub off on the man he supports, but in doing so they perilously dismiss the power of symbolism, for even Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” was a reference to Camelot, and an attempt to co-opt the aura of the Kennedy era as his own.

Perhaps Camelot was always only a dream, but that doesn’t mean it can’t someday come true. Tomorrow, Barack Obama, surrounded by his beautiful wife and young children, standing beside the daughter and brother of the fallen king, has an unprecedented opportunity to rekindle this dream in the hearts of Americans. It is an opportunity to restore the faith of even hardened cynics like me.