Goldy

Ever go out on a hard drinking binge and wake up from a blackout with no memory of what you did over the previous 24 hours? Well that’s kinda what happened to HA over the weekend, when my hosting company accidentally deleted my account. HA’s back up online, but it has absolutely no idea what it did on Sunday.

Though, considering HA mostly just collected comments from trolls, it’s hard to consider it much of a loss.

It is both amazing and instructive to remember that the democratic revolution in Tunisia, that has now spread to Egypt, all started with one, disgruntled citizen lighting himself on fire.

Hey teabaggers… think about it.

Once again, I spent the morning with my head buried in a spreadsheet, and once again, you can see the results over on Slog. (For example, did you know it costs $46,202 to educate one K-12 student in the tiny Benge school district, but only $11,839 here in Seattle.)

YOU don’t need to be one of the science or math whizzes President Obama hopes to mint by the thousands to understand that his State of the Union Speech, themed “Winning the Future,” very likely carried a double meaning.

And apparently, you don’t need to be science or math whizzes to write editorials for the Seattle Times. Why anybody would take fiscal advice from the publisher of a struggling newspaper is beyond me.

I spent much of yesterday with my head buried in spreadsheets. Go see the results over on Slog.

More on Slog….

Anyone notice that Cynical hasn’t been hanging around in the comment threads lately, relentlessly flogging Rasmussen’s presidential approval poll numbers? Hmm… I wonder why?

Of course, most of the fluctuation in Obama’s approval rating has come at the hands of independents, which is in itself a sad commentary on the state of American politics. These independents are the ones politicians have to appeal to in order to win elections… you know, the exact same voters who can’t seem to make up their fucking minds. That explains a lot.

In reading the New York Times coverage of today’s tragic bombing at a Moscow airport, I found the summation by former Department of Homeland Security official Stephen A. Baker to be rather curious:

“They’d like to be bombing planes and they can’t, so they’re bombing airports,” he said, adding that the attack “validates the focus that the U.S. has had on security at airports.”

Um… really? And how exactly would our focus on airport security have stopped a determined suicide bomber like the one who struck in Moscow today? As I wrote back in December:

In fact, if I were a dedicated suicide bomber (and just to be clear to federal authorities, I’m not), I’d pack a rolling, carry-on suitcase with as much explosives as possible, pick the busiest time of the day, wheel it through the snaking security line until I was in the very middle of the crowd, and then… BOOM!

Depending on the sophistication of the device, such an attack would kill and injure dozens, possibly hundreds, and achieve the same catastrophic impact on the airline industry without having to devise a way to sneak a weapon through security. And since the target is created by the screening process itself, such attacks would be virtually unstoppable, as any attempt to expand the security perimeter would merely create more targets.

I wasn’t prescient at all. Just stating the obvious.

As a 13-year-old visiting London in 1976, during the height of the IRA’s bombing campaigns, I was somewhat amused by the repeated announcements at Heathrow Airport that unattended baggage would be “removed and destroyed.” Less amusing were the armed soldiers who patrolled the halls, a sight that seemed incredibly incongruent to a sheltered, American suburbanite. But suicide bombings were not the IRA’s schtick, and so heightened security and vigilance had obvious rewards.

But in the age of the suicide bomber, not quite so much. There’s simply no practical way to screen passengers and their suitcases prior to arriving at the airport, and as today’s Moscow bombing illustrates, no amount of TSA screening can protect the crowds amassed outside the security perimeter. So if anything, I’d say today’s tragedy invalidates our focus on patting down 13-year-old girls… unless, of course, TSA’s real mandate is to protect the airplanes, not necessarily the people flying on them.

Isaiah 45:7
I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.

Discuss.

Anybody who says that media consolidation isn’t the greatest threat to our democracy, is either a liar, a fool… or somebody who wants a career in media.

Following up on Carl’s post yesterday, calling for a downtown legislative district, I’d like to join him in raising my voice in favor of also changing the way Seattle elects city council members.

Right now, all nine city council members are elected at-large, running in, and allegedly representing, the city as a whole, the result being, as Carl points out, that we are all represented by “everyone and no one.” It has also resulted in a relative lack of diversity on the council, not just in terms of race and gender, but in style and ideology. Combine the at-large system with the contrived way in which challengers jockey with each other to face off against the weakest opponents, and we tend to fill the council with citywide compromises.

On the other hand, there are obvious disadvantages to moving to district elections, which might inevitably create rifts in the council along neighborhood lines at the expense of the greater city good. If only there were a system that incorporated the best of both worlds.

Of course, there is, and a lot of other cities use it: a hybrid system in which some council members are elected by district, and others are elected at-large. And that’s exactly what I propose for Seattle in order to elect a council that is both responsive to the divergent needs of its constituent communities, while reflecting the larger needs of the city as a whole.

Specifically, I’d propose electing five council members by districts—central, northeast, northwest, southeast and southwest—and four at large. And if anybody wants to put up the money to put such a charter amendment on the ballot, I’d wager you’d have a damn good chance of getting this passed at the polls.

Future co-worker Lindy West and I sat next to each other at the judges table at last night’s Chocolate for Choice, and I couldn’t help but notice a disparity in our name tags. Lindy, by virtue of her tenure at The Stranger, is identified as a “journalist,” whereas me… well… they weren’t sure how to describe what I do (Blogger…? Writer…? Crackpot…?), so they just left it blank.

But soon, thanks to the magical, instant credibility of a newspaper masthead, I can only assume that I will be a real journalist too!

My mother will be so proud (though not as proud as if I were a real lawyer, but at her age, you learn to take what little joy from life that you can get.)

Winston Churchill once quipped that “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried,” and nothing bears that out more than Seattle Public Utilities’ packed workshop at the Rainier Community Center last night, where angry citizens gathered to loudly voice their (sometimes ill-informed) concerns over the North Henderson Combined Sewer Overflow Reduction Project.

That’s right, over sixty citizens gathered on a Wednesday night to debate storm water overflow reduction alternatives, a heartening and surprising display of grassroots democracy in action. Unfortunately, a handful of attendees quickly disrupted the meeting out of misplaced fear that SPU was intent on seizing their private property (by far the least likely outcome of any project of this sort), and/or in staunch opposition to spending any rate payer dollars to reduce the 100 million gallons of raw sewage contaminated storm water Seattle dumps into its waterways every year. One woman even angrily stormed out of the meeting after being informed that yes, she would be required to pay for this citywide project whether she wanted to or not. Sigh.

I suppose it’s unfair to refer to these angry citizens as “teabaggers,” as I did in a tweet last night, for there didn’t seem to be anything organized or overtly political about their actions. But in their knee-jerk assumption that government was out to get them and their wallets, and in their willingness to disrupt the proceedings for everybody else, in the service of loudly voicing their own personal objections, they sure did appear to embody the spirit of the Tea Party movement.

And, just like the teabaggers, they didn’t seem to want to let any facts get in the way of their outrage. This was the fourth such meeting with SPU I’ve attended in my efforts to help safeguard the interests of tiny Martha Washington Park, and it was more than a little frustrating to waste so much of my time on some angry newcomer yelling about tunneling and soil conditions, when by this point in the process it is already clear that the preferred alternative for North Henderson is unlikely to include any tunnels at all. As for that angry woman and the others who objected that Lake Washington was already “clean enough,” had they bothered to listen to what the SPU reps were telling them, they might have understood that yes, their objections were being heard… but they were objecting to the wrong people. SPU didn’t establish the policy to reduce storm water overflow to one event per year per outlet—the EPA and the state legislature did—and SPU must meet this mandate or risk legal and financial consequences.

I guess the point is, democracy is hard. It’s complicated. It’s messy. It’s inefficient… perhaps, especially at the community level. But it becomes nearly impossible when citizens enter it so profoundly skeptical and distrustful of the democratic process itself.

More on what this chart means, over at Slog.