Goldy

Apparently, when HA moved servers Friday night, the old server was never shut down. Thus, as the new IP propagated through the various DNS servers over the next day, some of you continued to see the old site, while others (like me) were taken to the new site. Some of you may have seen comments, and at least one post, disappear. To which I say: oops.

Everything should be operating normally now. (Normal, by HA standards, anyway.) If not, let me know.

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

7PM: The Stranger Hour with Erica C. Barnett
The Stranger’s Erica C. Barnett joins me for a recap of the week’s local news, and a preview of what’s coming up in the week ahead. (That’s right, ECB can predict the future!) Josh Feit may also join us to give Postman his take on why reporting matters.

8PM: How did Cary carry the day?
When Cary Moon of the People’s Waterfront Coalition first proposed replacing the aging Alaska Way Viaduct with a surface boulevard, the powers that be said she was crazy. Three years later, the “surface plus transit” option is emerging as the consensus solution. Cary joins us for the hour to talk transportation and urban planning, and to explain how she moved her idea from crazy to consensus. It’s a textbook lesson in effective activism.

9PM: Who is Freewayblogger?
Over the past four years Freewayblogger has put over 4,000 anti-war signs along the roads of California and other western states. His travels bring him to Seattle this weekend, and he joins me in the studio to talk about his unusual odyssey. We’ll also be joined by HA co-blogger and Hominid Views proprietor Darryl. But I’m not sure we’ll let him speak.

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

By now I’m sure most of you have heard the story King County resident Jane Balogh, who thought she was being clever by registering her dog to vote. It was supposed to be a protest against supposedly lax voter registration standards. It’s likely going to get her a misdemeanor conviction.

Our good friend Stefan, normally a fierce proponent of throwing the book at anybody who misses a statutorily required comma on a voter registration form, excuses Balogh’s stunt as “a noble act of civil disobedience to call attention to ineffectual voter registration standards that allow real fraud to occur.”

If it weren’t for the paw print stunt, which she used to deliberately give herself away, she could have gotten away with casting the dog’s ballot.

But she didn’t. In fact, she was caught.

It’s impossible to know how many ballots from non-existent people are cast and counted…

Just like it is impossible to know when Stefan stopped beating his wife.

… but we do know there have been hundreds of illegal votes that were counted for which nobody was ever prosecuted.

Of course, by “hundreds of illegal votes,” Stefan is referring to the infamous felon voters from 2004. They weren’t prosecuted because they didn’t know they were violating the law; they properly filled out registration forms, which elections officials improperly approved, due to incomplete records. (A problem by the way, that has since been largely fixed by the statewide voter registration database, that was well in the works before the notorious 2004 election.)

So what we have here is a woman who fraudulently registered her dog, and was caught, the failure to disprove something that we have no evidence exists, and a problem that has already been solved. And for this, Stefan advocates an overhaul of voting and voter registration systems to make it much more difficult for citizens to cast ballots.

I’m not sure exactly what motivates Stefan. Lingering resentment over Dino Rossi’s incredibly disappointing (for Stefan and Dino) and narrow loss in 2004? A genuine belief that it is better to suppress a thousand legitimate votes to stop a single case of fraud? A cynical program to suppress the vote in order to benefit Republicans?

It doesn’t matter. The fact is, what Stefan and his cohorts continually fail to do is prove that there is a significant incidence of voter fraud in King County or elsewhere in the state. Yes, there is the occasional double voter, or spouse voting the ballot of a recently deceased partner (problems, by the way, also largely fixed by the statewide database) — eight such perpetrators were convicted in King County in 2005. But there is no evidence at all of widespread, endemic or chronic voter fraud.

It’s a clever rhetorical device. Stefan warns that Balogh “could have gotten away” with voter fraud, even though she didn’t. Stefan opines that “it’s impossible to know how many ballots from non-existent people are cast and counted,” while providing no evidence that any such ballots have been cast or counted at all. He constantly uses voter registration irregularities and isolated cases of prosecuted fraud to suggest the possibility that voter fraud is widespread and rampant. But all the real evidence suggests that it is not.

Stefan, the EFF and other right-wing operatives are desperate to fix a problem that doesn’t exist. The question I have is: “Why?”

HA will be down for a few hours tonight as it migrates to an upgraded server. I’m told everything will be back to normal by Saturday morning.

I’m told the Seattle Weekly’s Rick Anderson really isn’t a nitwit — that he’s an experienced reporter and all around good guy. But you wouldn’t guess that from his recent crusade to expose Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels as an environmental hypocrite.

Among those still not heeding Mayor Greg Nickels’ advice to use their cars more sparingly is Mayor Greg Nickels. The mayor’s vehicles consumed more than 1,130 gallons of gas, costing $3,500, in the 12 months since he urged Seattleites last year to find alternative transportation to save the Earth, according to newly released City Hall figures.

The thesis: Mayor Nickels has made a name for himself challenging America’s mayors to have their cities voluntarily meet or beat the Kyoto standards, and yet he still drives a car. A lot.

The figures show the mayor has consumed about three times as much gas since putting his economical hybrid SUV into service last June as he did for a comparable period when his previous car, a 17-mile-per-gallon Cadillac limousine, was in service.

Oh gee. Where to start? Hmm. How about simple math? Or maybe, the English language — for when Anderson calculates gas consumption over “a comparable period,” it is instructive to understand exactly what he means by “comparable.”

The new records show that from Oct. 1, 2006, to April 1, 2007 (the billing period covering the time after the Cadillac was retired), the mayor charged more than 800 gallons of gas, costing $2,400. That compares to 260 gallons at a cost of $870 for the shorter, five-month March 2–Aug. 6, 2006, billing period, when the leased Cadillac was in service.

Uh-huh. Anderson’s spelling is impeccable, but I think he might want to yank out his dictionary and look up the meaning of the word “comparable.” I’m no professional journalist, but if you ask me, “a comparable period” to October, 2006 through April, 2007, might be, gee… I dunno… the same exact seven-month period during the previous year? And when we actually compare these two periods, we find that, oops… the mayor only charged 835 gallons of gas during the hybrid era, compared to 995 for the limo.

Not exactly the “three times as much gas” Anderson rails about. In fact, it’s actually… um… less.

While the hybrid switch … may have helped clear the air in several ways, the mayor wound up using more money and gas than he did when he cruised around exclusively in the limo, according to city records.

No he didn’t. And I know this, because I know how to do math. And, because I acquired additional data. Of course, to be fair to Anderson, he didn’t really have a large enough data set to make any sort of reasonable, vehicle-to-vehicle comparison. But if Anderson wanted to be fair to Nickels, he never would have implied that he did.

(Our good friend Stefan — a self-proclaimed Excel spreadsheet savant — lauded Anderson’s reporting. Hmm. Given the same mathematical expertise he used to so accurately predict the contested 2004 gubernatorial election, you’d think Stefan might have at least taken pause at Anderson’s less than scientific analysis of “comparable” periods.)

Apparently, Anderson had a gotcha story in the works, and he was gonna run with it come hell or bad data.

City officials repeatedly warned Anderson that they didn’t keep the records required to make the sort of calculations Anderson wanted. But that didn’t stop him. Indeed, even in acknowledging his inability to track the hybrid’s gas consumption, he sneeringly blamed the city for any inaccuracies in his futile attempt to do so.

Schubert-Knapp this week said she was referring to her “sincere doubts” about my ability to accurately report the data. That’s maybe understandable, given the confusing mess of records her department released, showing they can’t even track how much gas is used by each of the mayor’s two and sometimes three cars.

And while Anderson makes clear that the seven-month period from October, 2006 through March, 2007 also includes trips made in the mayor’s backup vehicle, “a Ford Explorer SUV that gets 11 miles to the gallon,” he glosses over the fact that the vast majority of the Explorer trips weren’t actually made by the mayor.

“The Explorer is now the backup car, and is also the car the mayor’s security takes home each night.”

That’s right, the Explorer is not just a “backup” car; it’s driven almost every single day, and usually, sans mayor. And all of its fuel receipts are mixed in with those of the hybrid.

So what exactly is Anderson’s point? That the mayor’s hybrid gets crappy fuel economy?

The EPA has already lowered the Highlander’s mpg rating from 31 to 27, and some consumer road tests come in at 20 mpg.

And he tells us this twice. But instead of trying to extrapolate the MPG from incomplete data, or implying a worst-case scenario by authoritatively citing “some consumer road tests,” Anderson could have just used his noodle and asked the right question. Like all hybrids, Nickel’s Highlander has an on-board computer that definitively records actual fuel economy. Nickels spokesman Martin McOmber told me it currently reads about 24.5 mpg.

Not quite the EPA rating, but a helluva lot better than the typical, full-sized SUV, and possibly as much as twice the MPG of the limo it replaced. (I’m not sure where Anderson plucked his number, but according to the EPA, the supposedly “17-mile-per-gallon Cadillac limousine” actually rates 11.9 city/18 highway.)

Or maybe Anderson is simply implying that the mayor is driving more miles now than he did a year ago?

Perhaps. I don’t know. Not knowing which receipts were for which car, or the exact fuel economy of each vehicle, or even what percentage of fleet miles were actually driven transporting the mayor, it is impossible to extrapolate from this data an accurate mayoral mileage report. But what we do know is that the mayor’s fleet cut its year-to-year fuel consumption by about 16-percent over a comparable seven-month period.

If every household and business in Washington state were to cut their motor fuel consumption by 16-percent, we’d save about 500 million gallons of fuel annually, putting over $1.5 billion back in our pockets, and 10 billion fewer pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That sounds like a pretty good start to me.

But I suppose what Anderson is really implying is that the mayor simply drives too much: if Nickels wants us to use alternative modes of transportation, he should lead by example, I guess, and hop on the bus himself.

Hmm. How do I best explain Nickels’ driving habits to Anderson? Oh. I know: um… he’s a FUCKING MAYOR! Of a major American city. It’s his job to rack up tens of thousands of miles a year traveling from one constituency group to another, and he couldn’t possibly do it relying on our region’s bus system. You couldn’t ask him to give up his car any more than you could ask a traveling salesman. (In fact, politicians and traveling salesmen have an awful lot in common.)

Still, all of this nitwitpicking is beside the point, because Anderson’s entire thesis — whatever it is — is a complete and utter load of bullshit. It is little more than a local variant on the same intellectually lazy frame that attacks a jet-setting Al Gore as a hypocrite for emitting copious greenhouse gases while advocating that these emissions be cut.

Sure. Gore could stay at home, bicycling around the family farm. But by stingily counting his own carbon emissions he couldn’t have anywhere near the impact he has traveling the world, persuading others to make modest cuts of their own.

The same holds true for Mayor Nickels. He makes an effort, however imperfect, to bring greater awareness to what municipalities can do locally to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and Anderson thanks him by devoting two whole “news” articles and a blog post toward trashing him as a hypocrite.

Apparently it takes a nitwit to ask whether the self-professed “green” mayor is practicing what he preaches – as the records show, he doesn’t.

No, it takes a nitwit to misread a spreadsheet, and totally dismiss the warnings from those who gave you the data. It takes a nitwit to focus your contempt on those who at least attempt to do good, while giving a free ride to right-wing nutcases like Kemper “Transit Equals Communism” Freeman Jr. and his lifelong campaign to kill rail in this region. It takes a nitwit to echo the hate-filled, partisan rants of a science denier like Stefan, and then dare to call it journalism.

At the risk of Postman calling me a meanie, I just want to point out that if Dan Satterberg plans to run on his experience as Norm Maleng’s longtime chief of staff, it is only fair that he take credit for some of the not-so-good things that transpired in the Prosecutor’s Office under his administration.

A former King County Prosecutor’s Office employee who is already serving two years in prison for trying to lure teenage girls on the Internet must now serve three more months for embezzling money from his boss’ re-election campaign.

Larry Corrigan was charged with first-degree theft last week. He quickly pleaded guilty and was given the low end of the standard three- to nine-month sentence, his attorney, John Wolfe, said Wednesday.

Soon after he was arrested in an unrelated Internet sex sting in December, Corrigan, 54, admitted to stealing more than $72,000 from the campaign of Prosecutor Norm Maleng.

I fully expect that if I’m ever caught embezzling money from the King County Prosecutor, I’ll get the low end of the standard sentence too.

Corrigan was Maleng’s budget officer, working in his office from 1979 until 2005.

Hmm. A convicted embezzler/sex offender was also Maleng’s budget officer, huh? I wonder if any of those “professional” journalists have bothered to examine the Prosecutor’s Office’s books from those many years during which Corrigan worked under Satterberg?

I’m just sayin’…

The rats are jumping ship:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced tonight that he is quitting the Republican party and changing his affiliation to independent.

The announcement came after Mr. Bloomberg gave a speech denouncing partisan gridlock in Washington, stirring renewed speculation that he is preparing to run as an independent or third-party candidate in 2008.

Bloomberg was a lifelong Democrat before switching parties to run for mayor in 2001. He is also a kajillionaire, with more than enough personal wealth to self-finance an independent campaign. Hmm.

Via The General.

For the past couple weeks I’ve been hearing rumors of Republican wags bragging that Dan Satterberg has a $180,000 head start in the race to replace the late Norm Maleng as King County Prosecutor. Seemed like an awful lot of money to raise so quickly. But now I understand what they were talking about.

According to a press release issued today by the Washington State Democratic Party:

Top Democrats today responded to widespread rumors that the Republican Party is planning to funnel the $194,000 remaining in the campaign coffers of late King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng into partisan attacks intended to influence the special election this fall to name Maleng’s replacement.

Under state law, it is illegal to transfer so-called “surplus” campaign funds – the money left over after retirement, loss, or death – from one candidate’s accounts directly to that of another candidate. It is, however, legal to donate to charity, or to a party organization— but if the funds do go to a political party, any quid pro quo understanding that the funds will then be donated to or spent in support a particular candidate would run afoul of Washington State’s campaign finance laws.

In the case of the prosecutor’s race, State Democratic Party Chairman Dwight Pelz says that if large amounts of cash from Maleng’s campaign coffers are funneled through the Republican Party back to the GOP nominee for the position, Republican Dan Satterberg – as some Satterberg backers have been whispering is likely – it would be tantamount to the sort of illegal and unethical political money laundering that Republicans have become known for on the national level.

“A fair minded leader like Norm Maleng should not have his campaign cash laundered through a Tom Delay-style money machine,” said Pelz, who worked with Maleng during his eight years on the King County Council. “Out of respect for Maleng’s legacy, that money should rightfully go to charity, not to fund attack ads or earmarked to help anoint a partisan replacement.”

Maleng gets a lot of well-deserved credit for having kept politics out of his office, and both Satterberg and Democratic frontrunner Bill Sherman have promised to build on that legacy. But I don’t see how Satterberg can fulfill that pledge if he allows his handlers — such as two-time Bush-Cheney WA State chair Mike McKay — to help him win office by sullying Maleng’s memory through creative accounting.

On the other hand, the rumor I heard may only be just that. Maleng was the co-chair with Gov. Chris Gregoire of the Seattle chapter of the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network (CAN). Seattle CAN is holding a long-scheduled fundraising breakfast next Tuesday, June 26, at the Washington Athletic Club, and I’ve also heard rumors that Maleng’s wife Judy will not only be attending in his place, but will announce a “large donation” in his honor.

Now that would be a non-partisan use of surplus campaign funds worthy of Maleng’s legacy.

FYI, tickets for the Seattle CAN breakfast ($100 to $5000) are still available.

UPDATE:
Mike McKay responds:

“No money will be spent directly or indirectly to help (acting prosecutor) Dan Satterberg,” Seattle attorney Mike McKay said unequivocally Tuesday. He said Judy Maleng, the late prosecutor’s widow, “has made that clear.”

That’s good to hear.

Rep. Cathy McMorris-Rodgers (R-WA5) likes to pitch herself as a family values candidate. In fact, she values her family so much that she’s paid her brother and father almost $60,000 out of campaign funds over the past two elections. Sweet.

That’s according to a new report, “A Family Affair“, issued by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which found that 41 Democratic and 55 Republican representatives have put family members on their campaign payroll over the past three election cycles.

Although it is illegal for members of Congress to hire family members on their official staff, nothing stops them from paying them from campaign funds. So I guess it’s okay because, like, everybody’s doing it, right? Just take a look at the Washington state delegation, where Rep. Dave Reichert (R-Sheriff) paid his nephew Todd $4,281 out of campaign funds, and… um… well… that’s it, apparently. Just McMorris and Reichert.

Yeah, so when I ask for contributions to help pay for the enormous amount of time I put into this blog, I’m a deadbeat. But when McMorris’s father gets paid to work on his own daughter’s campaign, well, I guess he’s just being entrepreneurial.

I suppose that’s the difference between being a Democrat and a Republican.

When I first glanced at the headline of today’s Seattle Times editorial opposing pre-ballot review of Tim Eyman’s stunningly unconstitutional Initiative 960 (“Careful, initiative tampering is dangerous“), I was initially pleased. I had predicted this unselfconscious fit of hypocrisy. And there’s nothing I like better than being right, especially at the Times’ expense.

Indeed, the only surprise in this entirely predictable piece of sanctimonious sophistry, was how genuinely angry I got reading it. I was personally offended. And you should be too.

The editorial was sparked by a lawsuit filed by Futurewise and SEIU 775, seeking to keep I-960 off the ballot because it is outside the scope of the initiative process. The Times argues such pre-ballot review is dangerous:

We believe their lawsuit should fail because it would undermine the rights of the people to petition their government.

The courts have an obligation to rule on the law, not policy or public opinion, and the fact that the Times once again attempts to influence a judicial decision tells you everything you need to know about how deeply flawed our system of electing judges really is. But that’s a subject for another post.

What I find most offensive about this editorial is not the arrogant judicial bullying or the inherent hypocrisy, but the fact that the Times chooses to shamelessly lie to its readers in order to score a cheap rhetorical point.

A few initiatives have been tossed off the ballot. […] The only statewide example was an initiative years ago that tried to change the U.S. Constitution.

That is simply untrue. There was another, more recent example of a statewide initiative tossed off the ballot on a scope challenge, and the Times knows it. In fact, four years ago they editorialized in support of using pre-ballot review to deny the people the right to petition their government.

Of course, I’m referring to I-831, my initiative to officially proclaim Tim Eyman a horse’s ass. The Times wrote:

David Goldstein has accomplished something. The Seattle computer programmer has successfully placed the phrase “horse’s ass” into dozens of family newspapers.

As if I held a fucking gun to their heads. But I digress.

Goldstein calls I-831 an attempt to reform the initiative process by highlighting Eyman’s abuse of it. Goldstein abuses it himself. The sort of law that names a citizen and condemns him by proclamation is called a bill of attainder. It has been forbidden for 200 years. Calling someone an animal part may not strictly be called a bill of attainder, but it leans that way. Taken seriously, a court would have to throw out I-831.

The Times knew that I-831 was tossed out on a scope challenge. It was cited as precedent in the Futurewise/SEIU complaint. The Times editorialized in favor of the scope challenge, and reported on the court’s decision. Just last month I even challenged the Times:

I dare you to prove me wrong. Four years ago you editorialized against a joke initiative, urging the court to bar I-831 from the ballot simply because it offended your delicate sensibilities. Do you have the balls to stand by your defense of pre-ballot scope challenges as a legitimate legal exercise?

They knew that I knew that they knew all about Goldstein v. Gregoire — and they surely must have known that I would publicly excoriate them if they pretended it never happened. And yet, they simply didn’t give a flying fuck.

I have in the past attacked Times editorials for lies of omission, but this was an out and out, deliberate lie of fact. They wrote that the “only statewide example” was the Philadelphia case, when they knew that it was not, and they did so because it was more convenient than acknowledging the truth. It was a rather trivial lie, but a lie nonetheless, and in telling it they disrespected me, and they disrespected their readers.

Not that the rest of the editorial is a paragon of virtue, consistency or logic.

There is a contrary idea that initiatives are junk that somebody wrote on the back of a napkin. They may start that way, but all of them go to the Code Reviser’s office, where they are put into legal language. The ballot title comes from the Attorney General’s office, and is subject to challenge in court.

I-831 went through the Code Reviser’s office, without a single change suggested, and its ridiculously non-descriptive ballot title came out of the Attorney General’s office and a court challenge. Yet according to both the Times and the court, my initiative was perfectly ripe for pre-ballot review.

The Times ridiculed me by name for attempting “to reform the initiative process by highlighting Eyman’s abuse of it,” while the AG spent pages warning against the dangers of using the initiative process merely to send messages. Yet that is exactly what the Times now lauds Eyman for with his wildly unconstitutional I-692:

That is how car tabs were lowered: the people voted to lower them, the court threw the measure out, and the Legislature lowered them anyway. The political message got through.

Surely the Times couldn’t be arguing that some people should get to use the initiative process to send political messages, and some should not?

And while the Times now frets that the lawsuit seeks to expand scope challenges “from a narrow set of voter initiatives” to those that “violate the Constitution in other ways,” that was exactly what they urged the court to do in regards to I-831:

The sort of law that names a citizen and condemns him by proclamation is called a bill of attainder. It has been forbidden for 200 years. Calling someone an animal part may not strictly be called a bill of attainder, but it leans that way. Taken seriously, a court would have to throw out I-831.

Hell, the Times didn’t even argue that I-831 should be tossed out because it was unconstitutional, but simply because “it leans that way.”

(And FYI, I never called Eyman “an animal part,” I called him a fool. Anybody who doesn’t know the difference between metaphor and analogy doesn’t deserve to be writing op-eds for a major American newspaper. And anybody who intentionally blurs the difference doesn’t deserve to be either.)

The Times claims to “defend the right of initiative,” arguing that the lawsuit “would expand the power of political groups to shrink the people’s choices before an election.”

Yeah, right. Because apparently, the only people who should have the right to “shrink the people’s choices before an election” are stick-up-their-ass assistant AGs and the sanctimonious serial liars at the Seattle Times.

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

Well… the guests I wanted fell through, so I’m kinda going for a mish-mash of topics tonight including the lack of adequate mental health care for Iraq War veterans, unsafe drugs being imported from China and India without inspections, the Justice Department’s inability to fill vacant US Attorney positions, and a new wave of slightly weird, fringe terrorism.

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

James Vesely has 1500 words in the Seattle Times this morning on the ST2/RTID rail and roads proposal, and as I breathlessly slogged through it, I couldn’t quite figure out exactly where Vesely stood.

Then, in the very last sentence: “Consider the $18.9 billion a sin tax.”

We seem to like sin taxes in Washington state. So… um… I guess that means Vesely supports the proposal?

Don’t get me wrong, Vesely presents a useful discussion of our region’s woeful history of transportation planning (or lack thereof,) but while he criticizes “the way decisions are made about roads and transit” his rather thoughtful internal dialogue is in fact a perfect example of the sort of endless deliberation and second-guessing that has killed regional transportation projects for decades.

A concluding estimate of costs and benefits written by the sages over at Sound Transit poses unanswerable questions framed as answers, but they are not. The report cites as benefits questions such as, “What is the value of a human life saved from a needless traffic accident? What is the value of having the contribution of senior citizens in community activities?” These and other epistolary questions are, again, about the sins of our fathers in doing so little for 30 years.

The ST2/RTID plan is far from perfect, and includes funding for plenty of projects whose justification relies more on politics than smart transportation planning. But should it collapse, how long will it be before the region reaches a consensus on building the transit infrastructure we should have started constructing thirty years ago?

Sins of our fathers? Sure. And on this Father’s Day it is important to remember that we are fathers too, and if we do nothing, future generations will look back just as critically on our inability — or unwillingness — to plan for the future.