Goldy

Voters are being presented with a stark contrast in this year’s U.S. Senate race, with incumbent Sen. Patty Murray campaigning on her record of earmarking federal dollars for crucial local projects, while Republican challenger Dino Rossi is campaigning against earmarks… you know, on principle.

And yet…

Emergency repairs made last year to the Howard Hanson Dam have reduced the chance the Green River will flood low-lying areas of Kent, Renton, Auburn and Tukwila, the Army Corps of Engineers said Monday.

Further improvements planned through mid-2012 should allow the dam to be filled to capacity.

Of course, those further improvements are being paid for courtesy of a $44 million earmark inserted into a defense appropriations bill by Sen. Murray. Some, like Rossi, might call that “pork.” But I’m guessing not the tens of thousands of residents and businesses downstream.

Yet another reason why to reelect a senator who has already proven what she can do for our region.

Seattle Times editorial page editor and crown prince Ryan Blethen elaborates on his page’s surprising decision to endorse Rep. Dave Reichert’s opponents:

In the 8th Congressional District, Reichert has had six years to grow. He hasn’t. His being caught on tape glibly talking about taking votes for the environment so he could stay in office was not a great way to start off an election year. That gaffe was compounded by his voting against fiscal reform and showing up for his endorsement interview woefully unprepared and more defensive than I’ve ever seen a candidate.

The two candidates in the 8th we did endorse, Suzan DelBene and Tim Dillon, showed up prepared and were thoughtful in follow-up discussions.

I’m not sure I’ll ever grow tired of reading the Times hurl the same sort of criticisms at Reichert that I’ve been hurling for years, and of course I take great pride in knowing that it was leaked audio exclusively posted on HA that helped flip the Times’ assessment of the three-term Republican incumbent. But this is more than just a delicious “I told you so” moment, for my post, and the broader media coverage it generated, is a beautiful illustration of the sometimes under-appreciated role bloggers now play in the modern, news media food chain.

It is true that much of what I write is derivative, consisting of commentary, analysis and criticism of original reporting and commentary produced elsewhere, mostly from the legacy press; indeed, the first thing I do every morning is scan the Seattle Times for stuff to make fun of. But bloggers like me have also become an important source for “professional” journalists, sometimes in quantifiable ways like the Reichert audio story, but more often in the subtle, less obvious way we tend to steer coverage, create buzz and frame headlines.

Like most of my best scoops, the leaked Reichert audio simply fell into my lap, because my source trusted me to see it for what it truly was, and to frame it in the most damaging way possible, whereas they were concerned that the Times might dismiss it entirely as mere politics as usual. In this sense, my blatant partisanship proved to be a tremendous journalistic asset.

But because my partisanship is so blatant, once the story was out there, other journalists, including the Times’ editorialists, where free to consider it in its proper context, and make their own evaluation. In the end the audio, presented unedited and unexpurgated, speaks for itself, while Reichert’s history of making similar statements establishes that his self-professed cynicism was no slip of the tongue.

The Times recognized that this is information that voters deserve to know, and I have to give them credit for that. But it’s not clear that the Times ever would have recognized this had I not framed the audio in the manner I did at the time I broke the story.

And that gets to another under-appreciated aspect of what bloggers like me do, for the best of us display a talent for seeing in commodity facts a larger truth that sometimes escapes the first round of media coverage. The U.S. Attorney story is a shining example, a major scandal that might have eluded the legacy press had not Talking Points Memo connected the dots that everybody else missed, and then obsessively followed up. Likewise my Mike Brown Arabian Horse Association story, a post that ultimately helped frame FEMA’s failed response to Hurricane Katrina as a debacle of cronyism, leading to Brownie’s resignation, merely highlighted information that was already widely available on his official resume.

It’s not that newspaper and other legacy media reporters don’t engage in the same kind of conceptual journalism, it’s just that our freedom to be passionate, opinionated and yes, partisan, frees bloggers like me to pursue angles that would make other journalists uncomfortable. Plus the sheer number of us energetically plying our trade simply makes it that much harder for important news to escape scrutiny.

While there are some traditional journalists who still dismiss bloggers like me as parasites, the truth is that we’ve been gradually establishing a pretty symbiotic relationship… a relationship from which readers ultimately benefit.

It’s been two months since I first started covering Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna’s refusal to fulfill his statutory obligation to represent Commissioner of Public Lands Peter Goldmark, and six weeks since the dispute (as predicted) exploded into a full blown constitutional showdown. And today the Seattle Times finally covers the story with more than a cursory blog post: “Methow power-line fight turns into Supreme Court showdown.”

Of course, the article comes more than a month after the tiny Wenatchee World became the first (and until now, only) newspaper in the state to assign a staff reporter to cover the story, and it’s kinda frustrating to see environment reporter Craig Welch covering such a complicated legal issue when he easily could have devoted all 1,200 words to the complicated environmental issues surrounding the proposed power-line through virgin Methow Valley land (is there really no full time legal reporter in the entire state?), but the Times did publish the story front page, above the fold, so I suppose beggars can’t be choosers and all that.

Still, the article does serve as a reasonable introduction to the story for those readers who don’t frequent either HA or WW, especially the accompanying graphic that illustrates how the entire proposed line runs less than five miles east of an alternate route along Highway 153, much of it less than a mile from the existing highway right of way.

Hopefully Welch will be given the go ahead to delve deeper into the environmental issues surrounding this controversy, but for the moment, here are a few observations and elaborations on today’s piece:

The fight over the future of the shrub-steppe grasslands above the shimmering Methow River has become what few could have predicted: a constitutional feud between the heads of two state agencies.

Well, at least one person predicted it. Way back on June 16 I warned that McKenna was plunging our state into a “constitutional crisis … that could ultimately lead to a Supreme Court showdown.” Yup, HA readers were once again kept way ahead of the curve.

It’s become a political feud — one that Republicans say Democrats simply have manufactured in hopes of tarnishing a possible GOP contender for the 2012 governor’s race.

To be absolutely clear, I immediately saw this dispute as a tremendous opportunity to tarnish McKenna from the moment the first press release arrived in my inbox — that was in fact what sparked my initial interest — but DNR never proved as cooperative as I had hoped. Goldmark’s goal from the onset was clearly to pressure McKenna into providing an attorney, and his office was never willing to furnish me with potentially damning correspondence from the AG’s office. In fact, I’ve never even managed to get Goldmark to provide me a juicy quote. So whatever the “hopes” of me and other “Democrats,” as the only journalist who has covered this story from day one, I can assure you that Goldmark never showed any interest in playing that particular game.

“I believe it’s squarely the duty of the attorney general to carry out legal issues at my request,” Goldmark said, adding that he believes those duties are spelled out in state law.

McKenna argued his duty extends beyond Goldmark. He said his team of lawyers asked the same questions they do for all appeals: Did the trial judge err? Is there a good legal argument? Could new precedent damage other agencies?

I have extensively analyzed the legal issues surrounding McKenna’s statutory duties, for example here, here and here. It’s worth reading if you’re interested in learning more.

Opponents are represented by wealthy Seattle environmental attorney Peter Goldman, a contributor to Democrats who also happens to be one of Land Commissioner Goldmark’s most outspoken supporters. … Goldmark’s critics contend he took on the battle because it was important to Goldman — a charge Goldmark denies.

Um… Goldman is representing opponents because he’s an environmental attorney, and this is what environmental attorneys do. As for Okanogan County born and raised Goldmark, the Methow Valley is his own backyard, and I’m told he’s walked much of the proposed power-line route with his own two feet. So to imply that Goldmark is fighting to preserve Common School Trust Land in his home county as some sort of payback to Goldman is, well, absurd, especially to anyone who has ever spent any time talking to Goldmark. He is most definitely not your typical politician.

It’s Goldmark’s job to manage state public lands, and it’s McKenna’s job to represent Goldmark in that capacity. And that is what the pending Supreme Court case is all about.

It has been suggested to me that it was wrong to accuse the Building Industry Association of Washington’s Tom McCabe of smoking crack, especially without giving him the opportunity to put the pipe down long enough to defend himself. So in the spirit of full and fair civic discourse I hereby challenge McCabe to a public debate in which we can discuss any or all of the following subjects:

A.) His bizarre assertion that environmentalists are the direct and sole cause of the the Great Recession;

B.) The BIAW’s even bizarrer assertion that environmentalism has its ideological roots in Naziism, and that the DOE’s storm water regulations are the moral equivalent of the Holocaust;

C.) The BIAW’s even more bizarrer Initiative 1082, that in the name of reform would actually increase workers compensation costs for the bulk of its own members; or

D.) Tom McCabe’s obvious and debilitating addiction to crack.

You and your lovely if potty-mouthed spokeswoman Erin Shannon know how to reach me Tom, so drop me an email and we’ll set up a time and place.

My slightly more tanned toes wriggling in the hot sand of Longport NJ. Hope you’re all enjoying your sixty-something degree Seafair.

Romans 1:26-27
Women no longer wanted to have sex in a natural way, and they did things with each other that were not natural. Men behaved in the same way. They stopped wanting to have sex with women and had strong desires for sex with other men.

Discuss.

The Building Industry Association of Washington’s Tom McCabe is an idiot, an asshole and a liar:

So this is what it looks like when the extreme environmentalists get their way.

For two decades, enviros in our state have been striving to shut down homebuilding.

No-growthers have argued, litigated, legislated, and lobbied for every law, regulation, tax and impact fee designed to stop homebuilders from building homes.

Enviro groups with righteous-sounding names like Futurewise and Earth First! fight against virtually every single development and every single homebuilder.

State and local government agencies such as the Department of Ecology and the Puget Sound Partnership join the fray as well.

All these self-anointed priests of nature want to stop growth. Well, they succeeded.

Growth has stopped. Housing starts in our state have been reduced 67 percent (from 52,000 to 17,000) since 2005.

The enviros won.

McCabe then goes on to list the litany of economic woes allegedly caused by environmentalism run amuck, including skyrocketing unemployment, a ballooning, multi-billion dollar state budget deficit, a decline in charitable giving, and even the collapse of the newspaper industry. Which begs the question: how confident is McCabe in the rationale behind the BIAW’s political and policy agenda that he and his organization seem so keen on aggressively courting the stupid vote?

Really, how absolutely imbecilic or even anencephalic do you have to be to believe that the Great Recession was caused by excessive environmental regulation rather than, say, the catastrophic, nationwide collapse of the housing bubble and the fantasy-collateralized mortgage industry that inflated it? I mean, doesn’t the minimum mental capacity necessary to read McCabe’s column already make one too smart to fall for his laughable line of unreason? Hell, I feel kinda dumb just bothering to refute him.

For years, the BIAW and its members profited handsomely off an unsustainable housing market fueled by cheap-money induced visions of endless double-digit appreciation, and now that they’ve come down from their trippy, mortgage-fraud-huffing high, they blame the enviros? (You know, just like they blamed the enviros for the Holocaust.) No wonder the BIAW is attempting to pad its coffers with a self-serving, workers compensation privatization initiative; all that crack they’ve been smoking must cost a lot of money.

(And for those of you who have trouble discerning the difference between metaphor and allegory… yes, I am accusing McCabe of smoking a lot of crack. He’s a base crazy, crackerjacked, political bag bride. How else to explain his column?)

I’m just sayin’.

… but I told you so:

DIFFICULT times call for more than a capable caretaker of a political seat. The 8th Congressional District needs a representative with vision, a sharp grasp of the issues and the ability to lead. The task is considerable.

With that in mind, The Seattle Times editorial board takes the unusual step of endorsing two challengers to U.S. Rep. Dave Reichert, who is seeking a fourth term in the district spanning eastern King and Pierce counties.

We do not do so lightly. Former Microsoft executive and Democrat Suzan DelBene and Tim Dillon, a Republican and member of the Yarrow Point Town Council, demonstrate a depth of knowledge and have compelling ideas.

On issues ranging from the wars to the economy, three-term Republican incumbent Reichert is unstudied and comes up short. After six years in office, this is unacceptable.

Reichert opposed financial reform, but was unable to explain what he did or did not like about the legislation. The 8th District deserves someone who is faster on their feet.

It is with some satisfaction, and perhaps an even greater degree of bitterness, that I read the Seattle Times’ endorsement in the 8th Congressional District primary, in which they dis Republican incumbent Rep. Dave Reichert as cynical, simplistic, unstudied, unknowledgeable and unacceptable. Well… duh-uh. Yet this is a paper, both news and editorial, that has propped up Reichert against his opponents for years.

As our state’s largest daily, the Times played a crucial role in creating the myth of Sheriff Dave as the man who caught the Green River Killer (he most emphatically did not), and who refused to reexamine this oft-exploited, career-defining claim even after he’d creepily taken to framing nearly every utterance with heroic tales of his encounters with Gary Ridgway. It was the Times who virtually refused to cover Darcy Burner’s inspiring, come-from-nowhere, 2006 campaign until spectacular fundraising and tight polls forced their hand, only to cynically and viciously brand her as a “spinmeister” who would make “Karl Rove proud,” while laughably lauding Reichert for his “conscience-driven independence streak,” even in the face of his own public admission that he voted how the Republican leadership told him to vote.

And it was the Times who, when polls showed Burner with both momentum and the lead heading into the final weeks of the 2008 election, intentionally torpedoed her campaign with a bullshit, front page, above-the-fold expose accusing her of lying about earning a degree in economics from Harvard (she earned a degree in computer science with a concentration in economics, a course load that is equivalent to a double major at some colleges, Harvard’s nonstandard terminology notwithstanding), while willfully ignoring the many years Reichert’s own resume claimed a bachelors degree, when he in fact only earned a two-year associates degree from a Lutheran high-school-cum-barely-junior-college.

And now they bemoan that Reichert is “unstudied” …? Um, no shit, Sherlock!

Indeed it’s the Times, who after years of defending and praising the obviously unqualified Reichert, who now appears unstudied.

Dillon says a turning point for him was Reichert’s “willingness to trade core principles on the environment.” He was referring to Reichert’s appearance before a gathering of Republican precinct committee officers when he explained that while he toes the party line most of the time, a few select environmental votes were “certain moves, chess pieces, strategies” he used to keep environmental groups from trying to defeat him. The moment was revealing. This page’s response then and now is “how cynical.”

Damning audio that was leaked to me, by the way, and first posted here in an HA exclusive, because my source assumed from their record of toadery, that the Times simply wouldn’t be interested in exposing Reichert as the conscienceless dependent he really is. So would it be ungrateful or ungenerous of me, now that the Times cites my reporting (without attribution, of course) as the turning point in their own reassessment of Reichert, to respond with a big, fat “FUCK YOU” …?

I mean, it’s not like Reichert hasn’t been caught on tape before, saying nearly the exact same thing! Only back in 2006, rather than calling Reichert on his cynicism, the Times chose to attack Burner for allowing the DCCC to excerpt TVW’s video without permission.

So yeah, I suppose I should congratulate the Times’ editors for finally coming to their senses, or thank them for putting aside their own pathologies for a moment in the interest of the greater good. But their paper’s reporting and commentary on past 8th CD races has been so galling — so utterly and inexcusably insulting — that it’s just hard to let go. For how do we reconcile the Times’ revisionist take on Reichert with this:

The Auburn Republican deserves re-election. The former King County sheriff has an impressive record of public service and has shown a conscience-driven independent streak that reflects his moderate district.

Or this:

[Reichert] has matured in the job and his voting on complicated issues reflects that. His experience as a first-responder has been a strength. … Opponent Darcy Burner criticizes him for changing some positions, but Reichert shows a capacity for appreciating nuance and an appetite for seeking answers himself and making up his own mind.

Or this:

He surprised many recently by saying he’s not convinced about how much global warming is caused by human action. We are convinced it’s a substantial contributing factor.

But Reichert says he’s skeptical, so he’s investigating. That’s a better approach than adopting a ready-made ideology.

I mean, Jesus Fucking Christ… talk about attempting to turn a turd into a tiara. And they accused Darcy of being a Rovian spinmeister? Look in the goddamn mirror, Frank!

Yeah sure, I know the Suzan DelBene campaign would prefer I focus on her qualifications over Reichert’s lack thereof, and she’s certainly smart, thoughtful, well-informed, accomplished and progressive enough to serve the 8th CD well. A helluva an upgrade over Reichert. A Democrat I can proudly support, without reservations. And I damn well know that it doesn’t serve my agenda to reward this editorial gesture by sticking the ed board’s own words in its collective face .

But… well… I have every right to be bitter, so fuck ’em.

Perhaps I’ve underestimated the ideological cravenness of the Seattle Times editorial board, what with their refusal to endorse any Democratic legislative incumbent even remotely tied to organized labor, regardless of their accomplishments or the lack of qualifications of their opponents… but I still think they’re going to endorse Sen. Patty Murray in November.

Why? Well, the more than $500 million she just won for our state in additional federal aid for Medicaid and public schools is just one of many examples of how important she is to our local economy. That’s $500 million  to be spent right here in state. That means thousands of jobs that won’t disappear due to even further draconian cutbacks. That means smaller class sizes, and more kids getting preventative health care.

Had Dino Rossi been senator, he would have stuck to his ideological guns and voted with the Republican leadership to block the amendment. But not only did Murray fight hard to pass the amendment, she’s the one who sponsored it.

Sen. Murray is just too valuable an appropriator, too powerful a defender of Boeing and the thousands of high paying jobs it brings to our region for Frank Blethen to have the balls to instruct his ed board to endorse the light weight Rossi. I mean, he wouldn’t sacrifice the best interests of our local economy just to score an ideological victory, would he?

UPDATE:
In the comment thread, classic HA troll Mr. Cynical poops out some classic GOP bullshit:

Goldy–
All she did was increase the National Debt.
It’s a shell-game the Dems are using.
In the end, the credit card bill will come due…for our grandkids.

Uh-huh. Except, it’s not true. The cost of the Murray amendment is actually paid for through closing several tax loopholes, including one that rewards companies for moving jobs overseas. In fact, the Murray amendment actually reduces the deficit by $1.4 billion.

Which, of course, Rossi opposes, because you know… anything to avoid closing corporate loopholes.

By now I expect you’ve already heard the big news that federal district Judge Vaughn Walker today ruled California’s Prop 8 unconstitutional:

“Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples. Because California has no interest in discriminating against gay men and lesbians, and because Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis, the court concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.”

Yippee, and all that, but of course the fight for marriage equality doesn’t end there. The ruling is already being appealed to the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is, you know, our circuit… which raises the question: if the Ninth Circuit upholds Judge Walker’s ruling that Prop 8 is unconstitutional, wouldn’t that make WA’s Defense Of Marriage Act unconstitutional too? And considering the absolutely compelling logic in Judge Walker’s decision, why didn’t WA’s marriage equality proponents file suit in federal court too?

I’m sure there’s a good reason, but I just thought I’d ask.

There has been a lot of talk recently about the future of newspapers, and how the iPad and other tablet computers might prove to be the savior of the legacy press.

Um… I’m not so sure.

No doubt the iPad will prove profitable for some publications, enabling new subscription models neither culturally nor technically well suited to the web, while Apple’s fledgling iAd service and the competitive innovation it will foster offers at least the hope of creating new forms of advertising better suited toward the particular strengths and weaknesses of the medium. As tablet, smartphone and other always-connected handheld mobile computing devices become the dominant tool for news consumption, new business opportunities are being created for advertisers and content providers alike.

But those old media empires looking to newer media for the sustainable business model they failed to find in the not-so-new, continue to ignore perhaps the must transformational aspect of the Internet revolution: the obsolescence of the “newspaper” itself, and with it, the vertically integrated institutional structure of the organizations that publish them.

newspaper (ˈnjuːzˌpeɪpə)
— n
1. A weekly or daily publication consisting of folded sheets and containing articles on the news, features, reviews, and advertisements

A newspaper is, at its essence, nothing more than the aggregated product of various reporters, columnists, photographers, editors, etc., collated together in a relatively easy to distribute and consume bundle of printed pages, a format which may seem obvious or inevitable, but which is largely dictated by two peculiar demands of the medium: the need to print and the need to distribute paper. The capital and operational expense this entails is substantial, but the large, vertically integrated monopolies and duopolies that have come to dominate the newspaper industry are more than just the consequence of the need to achieve economies of scale. Rather, it is the print medium’s physical inability to accommodate a many-to-many distribution model that plays the fundamental role in defining both the daily newspaper, and the institutional structure of the organizations that publish them.

Try to imagine a model in which dozens of local print journalists attempt to publish their daily product independent of each other, and it is easy to see why the newspaper became so necessary. Even if the costs were not prohibitive, print media consumers simply could not or would not endure the chore of browsing and acquiring their daily news from such a multitude of sources, one or two pages at a time. Now imagine disseminating national and international news along such a model, and it is easy to understand why, when print was the dominant or only medium, working journalists had no choice but to publish collectively. Whatever the broader economic factors, the medium itself demands a few-to-many or even one-to-many distribution model.

While there are many additional layers of institutional overhead necessary to publish a daily newspaper — news gathering, editorial, advertising sales, subscription sales, administration, etc. — it was this need to print and distribute paper that created the economic pressures from which this organizational structure evolved, and for which it is uniquely specialized. Born of the industrial age, and organized along its principles, the daily newspaper as an institution was built for print. And that is why the ongoing shift from print to digital presents such an existential crisis, for while the new media paradigm does not necessarily preclude the survival of large, vertically integrated news organizations, neither does it demand it… and there is absolutely no reason to expect that such organizations that do survive will look anything like those that publish the newspapers of today.

The problem for the industry is that, when newspaper executives talk about finding a sustainable new media business model, they are not as focused on the survival of the “newspaper” per se, electronic or otherwise, as they are on the survival of the institutions that publish them. And that is exactly the wrong starting point for re-imagining the future of newspapers in the Internet age.

To understand the profoundly subversive impact the Internet has on the newspaper industry, imagine again a model in which dozens of local journalists attempt to publish their daily product independent of each other, only this time in a market dominated by digital media rather than print. In fact, there’s no need to imagine it, it already exists.

While few working journalists would willingly surrender the comfort and security of a paycheck to pursue the entrepreneurial chaos of your typical full-time blogger, that sort of independence is now at least possible. Gone are the artificial constraints of the print medium: the few-to-many distribution model, and the enormous capital and operational expense. Indeed, these artifacts of the physical world no longer apply in a media universe where, with a click of a button, an independent journalist can post an article to a web site or an iPad app as easily as he might submit it to his editor for final approval. But the new opportunities the Internet makes possible for journalists are nothing compared to the newfound power of digital consumers to instantly search and browse humanity’s collective intellectual product from nearly anywhere in the world. And as for their impact on the future of newspapers, neither development compares to the revolutionary new ability of electronic media to target and distribute advertising in a way that was never imaginable in print.

Lacking a more precise vocabulary, we have come to refer to the web and app versions of our familiar dailies as “online-” or “electronic newspapers,” but this is clearly an oxymoron not just from a material perspective (“electronic” negates the need for “paper”), but arguably from an organizational one as well. For without the need to print and distribute physical paper, the newspaper as we know it is no longer necessary. And when the newspaper is no longer necessary, neither is much of the institutional structure of the organizations that publish them.

—

Coming up in Part II, we will examine the role of other segments of the traditional newspaper’s institutional overhead — editors, advertising, subscription sales, etc. — and explain why these too will wither away in the face of new technologies and changing patterns of media consumption. We will also briefly consider what kind of new institutions might replace the old.

Murray 47, Rossi 33? Now that’s the kinda stuff I like to read on the beach.

Yes, those are my toes, wiggling in the warm, white sands of Longport NJ, even as I tap this out on my iPhone. Enjoy the rain currently forecast for Seafair weekend.