Goldy

I’m rested, I’m tanned and I’m back. Okay, I’m kinda jet-lagged, and I’m my usual pasty-white self. But I am back, and I’m talking politics as unusual again tonight on “The David Goldstein Show” from 7PM to 10PM on Newsradio 710-KIRO. I like to go with the flow, so things could change, but here’s what I have lined up for tonight’s show:

7PM: What’s up (or down) with the Viaduct? Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels joins me at the top of the hour to talk about the latest developments in the ongoing debate over how to replace the Alaska Way Viaduct. Is WSDOT trying to bury tunnel? We’ll ask the mayor.

8PM: TBA

9PM: Did you ever get a really big break? And what did you do with it? The man who gave me my break at 710-KIRO is moving on, and I can’t thank him enough. I want to hear from you on how a big break might have changed your life, and give you the opportunity to thank your benefactor. (Or maybe, I’ll just rant about a bunch of stuff.)

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

While sitting on the tarmac in Atlanta, I learned that yesterday was Program Director Tom Clendening’s last day at 710-KIRO.

I suppose you don’t bring in a new program director to leave the programming unchanged, so I have no idea what the future might hold for me at the station, but whatever happens I’ll remain eternally grateful to Tom for giving me the extraordinary opportunity I’ve had so far.

In truth, my brief radio career has been rather charmed. One generally doesn’t break into this business at a 50,000 watt legacy station in a major market. Most aspiring hosts work their way up from small stations in smaller markets, or through various on- and off-air jobs at larger stations. But understanding that a local news/talk audience is best served by hosts who are passionate and informed about local issues, Tom occasionally took a chance trying out raw, local talent like me.

If I have a long career in radio I’ll always have Tom to thank for giving me my start, and… well… if I don’t, then I’ll still have Tom to thank for the amazing run I’ve had. All one can ask for in life is the opportunity to succeed or fail on one’s own, and that’s what Tom gave me.

So thank you, Tom. I hope you land on your feet.

Late, Late Show host Craig Ferguson, explained to viewers why he decided not to mock the clearly troubled Britney Spears after seeing photos of her shaved head:

“For me, comedy should have a certain amount of joy in it,” Ferguson said. “It should be about attacking the powerful – the politicians, the Trumps, the blowhards – going after them. We shouldn’t be attacking the vulnerable.”

Exactly.

Hmm. Perhaps this explains why there are so few truly funny conservatives?

Governor Gregoire seems intent on painting herself into a rhetorical corner with her adamant refusal to seriously consider any option for replacing the Alaska Way Viaduct that doesn’t include a massive, double-decker freeway running through Seattle’s waterfront. Which is really a shame, because the surface-plus-transit alternative is shaping up to be a political compromise in which nearly everybody could claim victory… even the Governor.

Make no mistake, the surface option is gaining ground. The Governor may have successfully torpedoed the political viability of Mayor Nickel’s tunnel, but that has only resulted in rebuild opponents coalescing around a single alternative. A sure sign of this shifting momentum was the raft of public statements made by legislators earlier this week warning that a surface solution could cost Seattle taxpayers a pretty penny.

A rebuild, we are told, would be entirely financed by the state, but the surface option might draw only a fraction of the state funds already committed to the project. This was intended to scare Seattle voters into choosing the devil we know, but it was unintentionally revealing. First, it shows that even Olympia’s rebuild proponents now take seriously the surface option’s political viability. Second, it put forth a lower range — a billion dollars — from which the city can now negotiate the state contribution. Somewhere between $1 billion and $2.8 billion dollars… that’s how much we can expect from the state for a surface-plus-transit solution.

And I’m guessing the final figure would be closer to the middle-to-high end of the range. Rebuild, tunnel or surface, the state still has to tear down the existing structure, modify ramps to and from the Battery St. tunnel, and rebuild both the seawall and the elevated structure from the 1st Ave. ramps to the West Seattle Freeway. We constantly focus on the 2-mile stretch across Seattle’s downtown waterfront, but that’s only part of the project, and thus part of the costs. There is a political argument to be made that state taxpayers should not be expected to pay the bill for all of the local surface and transit improvements such an option would entail, but I’d be surprised if the state could get away with less than a $2 billion contribution.

But by ignoring the growing momentum towards a surface solution the Governor risks blowing political capital on a fight that at best, might earn her a Pyrrhic victory, for as much as she now pooh-poohs the public vote she once called for, voters in this state take their plebiscites seriously. A close vote might be easily dismissed as inconclusive, but should voters overwhelmingly reject a rebuild, the Governor’s tough stance puts her in the position of either appearing to cave to Seattle bullies — exactly the perception she’s apparently trying to avoid — or alienating her political base.

Not exactly where she wants to be heading into a contested election.

So how does the Governor turn this into a win-win situation? The Governor has repeatedly drawn a line in the sand, demanding that any Viaduct replacement must maintain capacity. The key to accepting the surface option as both a transportation and political compromise rests on how we define the word “capacity.”

In recent months, WSDOT has insisted on defining capacity in terms of moving vehicles, but that’s not always been the focus of transportation planners. Indeed, the Environmental Impact Statement sets forth a broader vision of the project’s purpose:

Purpose of the Proposed Action

The purpose of the proposed action is to provide a transportation facility and seawall with improved earthquake resistance that maintains or improves mobility and accessibility for people and goods along the existing Alaskan Way Viaduct Corridor.

Hard-nosed rebuild supporters have mocked King County Executive Ron Sims as some kind of enviro-whacko hippie for stating that we should be focused on moving people, not cars — but that’s exactly the stated purpose put forth in the EIS. And that’s exactly the language the Governor needs to join former tunnel supporters in support of a surface compromise.

It’s not a matter of redefining the word capacity — “mobility” was always the definition from the start, and accepting an alternative that improves mobility, while perhaps decreasing vehicle capacity, is perfectly consistent with Gov. Gregoire’s line in the sand. That is, as long as she doesn’t paint herself into a rhetorical corner by insisting otherwise.

Last week I seriously pissed off at least one local journalist by posting two competing ledes side by side, and pointing out how they guide readers in two different directions. Apparently, because the facts in the articles were mostly correct, I was entirely “wrong-headed” and “fatuous” (and perhaps drunk) to suggest that reporters might suffer from the same inherent bias that afflicts the rest of the species.

Of course the larger point missed in all the personal offense taken where none was intended, was the impact that ledes have on the way readers interpret the news, regardless of whether the actual reports are truthful or accurate. Take for example this lede from an AP story that hit the wire today:

OLYMPIA — More than 176,000 names were removed from the state’s voting rolls last year under a new statewide voter database that was developed to help counties find duplicate registrations and dead voters, Secretary of State Sam Reed said today.

The purge of illegal registrations is the result of the new system that has consolidated all 39 separate county systems into one database in January 2006.

Oy.

What will readers take away from this story? That 176,000 “illegal registrations” were purged from the voter roles. That the body of the article tells a different story comes too late — a large number of readers will only remember their first impression, and an even larger number won’t bother to read beyond the opening paragraphs. You put the most important information near the top of the article; that’s Journalism 101.

As the reporter makes clear a few column inches further down, the vast majority of these 176,000 purged registrations were not “illegal.” 39,814 were duplicate registrations, a common occurrence when voters move and fail to notify election officials. 40,105 were deceased voters who had never been removed from the roles. And 91,954 were inactive registrations and voters who requested cancellation or moved to other states.

To say that these were “illegal registrations” would imply that there was some crime committed by the registrants, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Only the 4,500 canceled felon voter registrations could arguably be considered “illegal”, and even then we’ve seen absolutely no evidence that a single felon registered knowing he was violating the law.

These would be more correctly described as “invalid” and “inactive” registrations, and yes, the choice of words is important, as it shapes the way readers perceive the integrity of our elections. A lede like this only reinforces the popular misperception that our elections are corrupt and mismanaged, but as the Spokesman-Review’s Jim Camden points out on his blog, there was virtually zero evidence of voter fraud in Washington state in 2006:

So at most, we had one case of double voting out of 2,107,370 ballots cast. Which is a .00004 percent rate of possible fraud.

Secretary of State Sam Reed said he was “pleasantly surprised” with the results. The state is doing a better job of cleaning up its voter records, but added “we really don’t have a history of voter fraud here.”

Which will come as a huge shock to some of his Republican brethren, who still hope to run Dino Rossi in a gubernatorial grudge match against Chris Gregoire to win the seat that was “stolen” from him. It also might give pause to some of their pollsters, who seem to delight in reporting that people don’t have confidence that the problems of the 2004 elections have been cleared up.

On the eve of the November election, one polling firm said its survey showed that 71 percent of the people lacked confidence there’d be no problems in 2006.

Of course, if people keep insisting there are problems, even if they don’t provide any proof, some folks might just conclude those problems exist.

And some of those folks just might include AP reporters who get the facts right, but the lede wrong.

The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight (and every Tuesday), 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E.

I won’t be there… so all the more reason to show up and talk behind my back.

Not in Seattle? Liberals will also be drinking tonight in the Tri-Cities and Vancouver. A full listing of Washington’s eleven Drinking Liberally chapters is available here.

Washingtonians unhappy with our state’s inability or unwillingness to pour new concrete should move to Florida, where the state with our nation’s second most regressive tax structure (we’re number one!) seems intent on spending what money it has paving over the Everglades and its surrounding countryside.

For all but one of the past seven years my daughter and I have taken advantage of the Seattle School District’s mid-Winter break to visit her grandparents in Palm Beach Gardens, and each year I am astonished by the amount of new construction. Fueled by the region’s burgeoning population and the MacArthur Foundation’s divestment of its huge land holding’s there, whole cities seem to sprout into existence overnight, where horse farms, forest and citrus groves once flourished. And feeding this development, like the vascular system of some fast growing tumor, is an ever expanding and widening network of roads and highways.

Eight-lane boulevards now flow where two-lane roads once cut a lonely trail only a few years before. In Wellington at what a decade ago was a quiet country intersection, a huge overpass is being constructed to ease thru-traffic past the now chronic backups. And the West Palm Beach International Airport, preparing for yet another expansion, continues to sprout bypasses and overpasses and underpasses in all directions to handle the steadily increasing traffic.

Inside the retirement community where my mother lives the changes are invisible, but on each annual visit, driving out the front gate for the first time is like stepping off an elevator onto a random floor — I never know what I might find on the other side. Possessing neither a sense of direction nor a memory for street names, I would be totally lost attempting to navigate the streets on my own. Landmarks, visual cues, even the footprint of the roadways themselves are as fleeting as our few days of sunny respite from Seattle’s usual Winter dreariness.

This is a region of endless sprawl, aided and abetted by a government that seems to be built on the Democratic principle of “one car, one vote.” New roads spawn new developments, more development generates more traffic, and the government responds by constructing new and wider roads. In my handful of car trips since arriving late Saturday night I must have travelled on at least a half-dozen roads with capacity matching or exceeding the Alaska Way Viaduct — many in the process of being expanded.

And yet, the traffic continues to grow worse.

Of course, the Puget Sound region has traffic problems of its own, but to those who would demand a Department of Transportation as accommodating as that in South Florida, I suggest you visit and closely consider the consequences. If the Southcenter Mall stretched for mile upon mile, dotted with palm trees and the occasional golf course or gated community, that would approximate the main thoroughfares that run through a region recently rich with wildlife and natural splendor. With a few notable exceptions, local developers have literally made a mockery of rational urban planning, building sprawling, new retail complexes with names like “Downtown” and “Midtown” — appellations meant to evoke a mental image of the Northeast cities many of the aging transplants left behind, while totally rejecting the principles of density that enable these cities to function as vibrant urban cores. “Downtown Palm Beach Gardens” is a mall like any other mall, with a Cheesecake Factory, a 16-screen cineplex, $6.00 gourmet ice cream cones and ample parking. It is not however, as its name implies, anything resembling a city.

I spent the first 29 years of my life in Philadelphia and New York City, never owning my own car, and never contemplating buying one. It was a shock moving to Seattle, where even living downtown, regular access to a car is a virtual necessity, especially for families with children. But if you think the Puget Sound region is auto-centric, you ain’t seen nothing compared to this section of South Florida. As the local population explodes, the region is building a sprawling infrastructure that will be impossible to efficiently serve via mass transit should the need or desire ever arise. And it will. As the world hits peak oil production over the next twenty years while struggling to limit carbon emissions, the cost of fueling our cars will surely quadruple or more in real dollars. I wonder how this region, so reliant on automobiles and air conditioning, will continue to prosper in an age of energy scarcity and rising temperatures?

It is no doubt endlessly frustrating — and more than a bit silly — that Seattle should require years of public debate to determine the fate of a single two-mile stretch of roadway, and still not come to a political consensus, but I’m beginning to believe our infamously wishy-washy “Seattle Way” may be as much a blessing as it is a curse. While the governor, a relative newcomer to the debate, has apparently decided that the only possible replacement for an aging, 1950’s-era elevated freeway is a taller, wider elevated freeway through our downtown waterfront, the years of hemming and hawing and political infighting have afforded the local civic leaders and elected officials most familiar with the project ample time to reconsider the basic assumptions that guide our transportation planning.

Critics of light rail and other mass transit initiatives like to dismiss it as social engineering — Soviet-style central planning at its worst. But road-building is also social engineering, subsidizing driving and incentivizing sprawl. In a growing region like ours, new road capacity can never alleviate traffic, it can only just barely meet our seemingly infinite and unfilled, pent-up demand, while at the same time reducing the public support and political will necessary to build the type of mass transit systems that all major cities depend on.

With climate change threatening to reduce our region’s hydro capacity and rising fuel prices making our auto-centric lifestyle less and less affordable, isn’t it time to learn some lessons from our original namesake? Seattle’s first settlers optimistically dubbed their new city “Alki New York” — New York by-and-by. A century and a half later, thanks to its density and unsurpassed transit system, New York is the most energy efficient city in the nation, while environmentally self-conscious Seattle still struggles to match words with deeds.

Actor Dean Malissa portrays our nation’s first president. George W. Bush portrays our 43rd.

I’m heading off to Florida for a week to take my daughter to visit her grandma. Expect light posting from me, but maybe Darryl, Will and Geov will pick up some of the slack.

Likewise, I won’t be on 710-KIRO this weekend. Frank Shiers will be filling in for me tonight, and Turi Ryder will be filling in on Sunday.

As I’ve stated before, I tend to agree that a tunnel option for replacing the Alaska Way Viaduct is politically dead… but I can’t help but thinking. The state rejected Mayor Nickels’ recent four-lane hybrid tunnel-lite proposal, arguing that using the shoulders as exit lanes during peak traffic would be unsafe. So… why not just eliminate the exits altogether?

Stick with me here.

We keep hearing that 99 is a vital North/South thruway, and thus the governor insists that she won’t support any option that reduces capacity. Yet if the Viaduct is bounded by a surface street to the South and the four-lane Battery St. tunnel to the North, then obviously much of the traffic must be local.

So instead of talking about a “viaduct” why not consider a “bypass” — a two-mile, four-lane tunnel through the downtown waterfront that eliminates the northbound exits and southbound entrances at Seneca and Western? This way all that vital N/S traffic can continue to flow N/S, while local traffic is diverted to improved surface streets.

Without the need for extra wide shoulders, or the cost of building four ramps, the “hybrid bypass” solution would be even cheaper than Nickels’ tunnel-lite, while ensuring that thru-traffic travels along the waterfront faster than it does today. And local drivers that would have used the existing exits would be served by improved surface streets and transit options, unburdened by the need to accommodate existing N/S thru-traffic.

Yeah, maybe I’m just talking out of my ass. But one of things that has always annoyed me about the current debate is the total lack of imagination. Surface-plus-transit option? That’s just for hippy-dippy whackos. A “gold-plated” tunnel? It’s an unaffordable gift to developers. We’ve had a double-decker freeway running through our waterfront since the earth was created, and if it’s good enough for God then it’s good enough for me, by golly. Or at least, that seems to have been the intellectual process.

Ridicule me, a man with no engineering or traffic expertise, for suggesting a hybrid bypass. But at least I’m trying to think creatively.

Two months after John McKay was fired as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Washington, the reason for his dismissal remains a mystery.

One of the most persistent rumors in Seattle legal circles is that the Justice Department forced McKay, a Republican, to resign to appease Washington state Republicans angry over the 2004 governor’s race. Some believe McKay’s dismissal was retribution for his failure to convene a federal grand jury to investigate allegations of voter fraud in the race.

Ohmygod… “persistent rumors.” Of course, the occasional time I base a post on rumors, I’m slapped down in the comment thread for being unserious, uncredible and irresponsible. But who am I (a wrong-headed, fatuous drunk) to question the journalistic rigor of the Seattle Times?

Truth is, that is the scuttlebutt buzzing through Republican circles, and it certainly is worthy of reporting in a major daily, for while I think it more likely the product of wishful thinking than actual fact, the rumor does provide a window into the mean-spirited, vindictive and Machiavellian mindset that permeates much of the GOP establishment and its right-wing base. Remember, this is a party that took its rhetorical cues from the likes of Evergreen Freedom Foundation president and aspiring-fascist Bob Williams (who throughout the controversy emphatically called for King County Elections Director Dean Logan to be summarily jailed,) and our good friend Stefan over at (un)Sound Politics, who when he wasn’t foisting his paranoid fantasies on an insufficiently critical press corps, chose to fan the flames of inter-party hatred by repeatedly comparing KC Executive Ron Sims to brutal African dictator Robert Mugabe. (A comparison, I suppose, that had nothing to do with their mutual skin color.)

Given the vehemence in which some in the GOP would brand all Democrats as crooks, thieves and enemies of the state, it becomes difficult to discern insincerity from sheer nuttiness. Take, for example Building Industry Association of Washington executive vice president Tom McCabe, whose organization financed and conducted much of the crackerjack detective work that misidentified hundreds of citizens as illegal felon voters, and then offered no apology for their victims’ public humiliation.

In a column titled “Good Riddance,” McCabe said McKay “had a disastrous six years as U.S. Attorney. Two years ago, he steadfastly refused to investigate voter fraud despite overwhelming evidence.” McCabe also said he had “urged the President to fire McKay.”

Overwhelming evidence of voter fraud, huh?

We had two recounts under extraordinary public scrutiny, five months of hearings and depositions, and a two-week trial before a cherry-picked judge in a Republican county… that ended with all allegations of fraud being “dismissed with prejudice.”

Overwhelming evidence? Republican Secretary of State Sam Reed repeatedly vouched for the integrity of the election and election officials, while KC’s own Republican County Prosecutor Norm Maleng not only failed to find enough evidence to launch a local investigation, he had his own representative on the Canvassing Board vote to certify the election results.

We had a gubernatorial election that ended in a statistical tie, but which Chris Gregoire won fair and square under the bipartisanly adopted statutes that govern elections and election disputes. But some Republicans were willing to take the governor’s mansion by hook or by crook, and when McKay, Reed and Maleng refused to abuse the power of their offices to steal this election on behalf of Dino Rossi and his corporatist patrons, McCabe, Williams and others set out to purge their party of the traitors, and destroy both their reputations and careers.

The celebratory rumors surrounding McKay’s departure — unsubstantiated as they are — present an unsavory image of a party seeking solace in retribution. And the propensity for threatening opponents and heretics alike with criminal, civil and vigilante justice provides a revealing glimpse into the psyche of a party whose Manichean world view quickly devolves even the most stolid policy debate into a battle between good vs. evil. I suppose it might have been merely a feeble attempt at a jest when during the heat of the gubernatorial election controversy my good friend Stefan twice accused me via email of “abetting a government cover-up,” but his use of a legalistic term clearly implied wishful thinking, if not an actual threat, that I should be criminally punished for exercising free speech. That is the sort of vengeful spirit that welcomes McKay’s departure.

Was McKay really fired for refusing to misuse his office to pursue trumped up allegations of election fraud? I’ve got no idea. But the very fact that so many local Republicans clearly wish the rumor to be true is both disturbing and revealing.

“Record for hottest January isn’t broken … it’s smashed“

Huh. Our good friend Stefan takes every report of a snow flurry or a chilly breeze as an opportunity to derisively mock incredibly stupid people like me for believing the overwhelming consensus of the world’s climatologists. So I suppose if he’s intellectually consistent, we should be seeing a post from him today acknowledging that January’s weather proves beyond a shadow of a doubt — and entirely on its on, in isolation of all other evidence — that the earth is warming, and that man-made carbon emissions are a contributing factor.

I look forward to reading that post.

WSRP Chair Luke Esser

There’s a press release on domestic violence up on Attorney General Rob McKenna’s web site that isn’t all that interesting in itself until you scroll down to the bottom and read the contact information: “Luke Esser, AG Outreach Director.”

Um… exactly how long is Washington State Republican Party Chair Luke Esser going to continue to collect a state paycheck while also being on the payroll of the state GOP? How long does it take to finish up his existing business in the AG’s office, and how hard would it be for the office to temporarily function without an Outreach Director? I mean, either way he reports directly to McKenna, so I’m pretty sure McKenna could still get his job done while only paying Esser once.

And doesn’t Esser’s double-dipping — a state party chair also receiving a state paycheck — raise the eenciest bit of concern?

I dunno. Just askin’.