Goldy

The Democratic Senate Campaign Committee this morning challenged Republican senatorial wannabe Dino Rossi to name two policy differences between him and former President George W. Bush, but I think the more interesting challenge might be to ask Rossi to simply explain the details of two pieces of policy. For judging from his recent statements, our state’s best known real estate speculator/perennial candidate just doesn’t come across as all that well informed.

For example, at Sunday’s conservative meet-up Rossi was asked how he could possibly overcome the combined forces of ACORN and SEIU, a stupid question to say the least. But even stupider was Rossi’s reply:  “SEIU and ACORN, they, they’re mean. They’re really evil in some respects.”

The SEIU slur aside (does Rossi realize he just equated 1.2 million nurses, lab technicians and home health care workers with the likes of Hitler and, well, Satan?), both Rossi and his questioner are apparently clueless that ACORN no longer exists, and regardless, was never really a player here in Washington state. So what’s there for you to overcome Dino, no matter how evil you think ACORN is/was?

At the same meet-up, Rossi was also asked whether he supported full repeal of healthcare reform, or only parts of it. Rossi insisted that he supported full repeal. But as the purity police at The Reagan Wing point out, that’s not what Rossi says on his own website, forcing the self-appointed guardians of true conservatism to wonder aloud if Rossi even knows his own position on healthcare?

To what can we attribute Rossi’s alleged change of position? Might it be that he was speaking to a conservative audience instead of to the  Evans-Gorton wing of the Washington State Republican party?

How Reichertesque. Or perhaps that’s why Rossi was so reluctant to post an issues section on his website: it would require him to actually read it.

Indeed, a better question might be to ask if Rossi actually knows what’s in the healthcare reform bill he wants to either repeal in full or in part, depending on the day and the audience. For example, in his recent, hyperbolic fundraising letter (the one in which he says that Barack Obama and Patty Murray are bigger threats than the terrorists), Rossi describes the new law as “a partisan, ill-conceived health care bill that requires 16,500 new IRS agents to administer and pay for it…”

16,500 new IRS agents? Really? That might strike some as a frightening number if it weren’t, you know, total bullshit.

This was a GOP talking point totally refuted way back in March by the nonpartisan FactCheck.org:

Q: Will the IRS hire 16,500 new agents to enforce the health care law?

A: No. The law requires the IRS mostly to hand out tax credits, not collect penalties. The claim of 16,500 new agents stems from a partisan analysis based on guesswork and false assumptions, and compounded by outright misrepresentation.

In it’s full answer, FactCheck.org dismisses the claim as “wildly inaccurate,” and yet there it is as a central argument in a Rossi fundraising letter… four months later. Either Rossi gets all his facts on healthcare reform from FOX News and GOP press releases, or he’s just plain lying to supporters.

Forget about pressuring Rossi to take a clear stance on major issues; reporters need to ask him if he’s actually capable of explaining the issues. Does he know the major provisions of the health care bill, let alone what his bogus “16,500 new IRS agents” claim is based on? Or how about the Wallstreet reform legislation Rossi opposes on grounds that it leaves taxpayers on the hook for another bailout, even though Sen. Murray included a provision to specifically make sure that it doesn’t…? Can Rossi explain in context what a “derivative” is, or “exchanges” or “clearinghouses” or  “aggregate position limits”…? (If not, he might want to ask Sen. Maria Cantwell.)

Is that too much to ask for? A candidate who actual has the intellectual curiosity, capacity and inclination to the study the issues on which he’ll be asked to pass judgement? Or are our media really just going to let Rossi’s ideological laziness slide by once again as mere tit for tat politics as usual?

Yeah… Republicans need to campaign on the exact same agenda as President Bush. That sounds like a great idea.

On Sunday, different-kinda-Republican Dino Rossi attended a Puget Sound Conservative Underground “Coffee with Conservatives” meet-up at the Bothell public library, at which he was asked how he could possibly overcome the combined forces of ACORN and the SEIU. To which, a source who attended tells me, Rossi responded:

“SEIU and ACORN, they, they’re mean. They’re really evil in some respects.”

So, um, first Rossi tells the National Journal that “the saints are with us, the sinners are not.” Then he sends out a fundraising letter declaring that America’s “greatest threat … rests not on foreign soil,” but in Democrats like Patty Murray and Barack Obama. And now Rossi declares that ACORN and SEIU (a union representing 2.2 million members, including 1.2 million health care workers) are “evil.”

Hear that, all you wicked nurses, lab technicians and home health care workers? You are evil!

Um, I suppose it’s possible that Rossi doesn’t really view the world in stark contrasts of good-vs.-evil/saints-vs.-sinners/Republicans-vs.-Democrats… but you wouldn’t know it from how he’s talking.

City Councilmember Nick Licata just told KUOW that he believes he has the votes to pass his ban on displaying the Bodies Exhibit in Seattle, yet his colleague Mike O’Brien can’t seem to get another councilmember to join him in aggressively protecting city taxpayers from a potential billion dollars in cost overruns on the Big Bore tunnel.

Huh. Make of that what you may.

In a recent fundraising letter, Republican real estate speculator and senatorial wannabe Dino Rossi lays out the real threat to the American Dream. Not Al Qaeda terrorists. Not the Taliban. Not our old Russian enemies or the growing might of China. But Sen. Patty Murray and her fellow Democrats:

“Somewhere along the way, liberal Democrats like Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Patty Murray corrupted the American Dream.

The result is that today, the greatest threat to the American Dream rests not on foreign soil, but in a broken political system and failed public servants who reward everything the American Dream promises to prevent.”

Leaving aside his notion that one of the things “the American Dream promises to prevent” is universal access to affordable health care, those soft Dems and independents who still think Rossi might be a different kind of Republican should take note of the divisive, hyperbolic rhetoric he’s using to reach out to his own base. According to Rossi, our “greatest threat … rests not on foreign soil.” No, our greatest threat is the enemy that lies within. You know, like the President of the United States.

This is teabagger talk, pure and simple.

So my question for Rossi is, if “the greatest threat to the American Dream rests not on foreign soil,” and if, as he writes elsewhere in his letter, “our national debt threatens everything we’ve worked so hard to achieve”… why would he have voted to explode our debt by approving a trillion dollars in new spending on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to fight threats that don’t hold a candle to a five foot tall, sixty year old woman?

Mike McGinn made his opposition to the Big Bore tunnel a central theme of his mayoral campaign, so it’s little surprise that the media remains focused on the mayor’s continued opposition as the cost overrun controversy comes to a head. But is this focus misplaced?

That’s what I started wondering after a long conversation with Seattle City Councilmember Mike O’Brien on Friday, in which he emphasized how lonely he was on the council in advocating for a more cautious approach on the tunnel project. According to O’Brien, there are eight firm votes for signing a contract with the state, even with the Legislature’s odious (if possibly unenforceable) cost overrun provision in place. O’Brien remain’s the lone dissenter.

That means, even if the mayor were to refuse to sign a contract, vetoing the authorizing ordinance, there are likely eight firm votes on the council for overriding the mayor… and, well, only six votes are needed. And you wonder why council president Richard Conlin appears so confident?

One of the frequent complaints about former Mayor Greg Nickels was that he acted in a bullying, unilateral manner, but if he did, it was only with the acquiescence of the council. Unlike some other cities, our charter does not create a “strong mayor” system; in fact, power is pretty evenly split between the executive and legislative branches. It just often appeared to be a strong mayor system, partially due to the political attitude and skill of Mayor Nickels (and his consigliere Tim Ceis), and partially due to the individual councilmembers’ inability to work together as a meaningful check and balance.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and all that.

But with Mayor McGinn still learning the ropes, and seemingly so at odds with eight of nine councilmembers, there’s really not much he can do to procedurally monkey-wrench the contract. His cooperation would be preferable, but it’s really not necessary.

I’m not ready to write off Mayor McGinn any more than I’m ready to declare a new councilmanic renaissance; in time, McGinn could still prove to be just as big a bully as Nickels, while this council proves just as incapable of sustaining political coherence as those of our recent past.

But for the moment at least, the political dynamic has changed. We in the media might not have fully recognized it, and neither, possibly, has the mayor, but when it comes to the tunnel contract (and barring an initiative), it is the council who is driving the train, and the mayor this time, who just appears to be along for the ride.

On the one hand, Sarah Palin’s whole “refudiate” tweet fest is kinda funny. On the other hand, George W. Bush’s moronic malapropisms seemed to endear him to voters in that it made him look more like one of us (you know… unqualified to run the nation). Scary.

My daughter and I are sitting in the 310 section at Qwest Field, enjoying our first Sounders game, and clutching our open bottles of coke. Open, because they don’t let you keep the fucking caps.

I mean, what the fuck is up with that?

When I was a kid we had season tickets to the Philadelphia Eagles, and used to bring sandwiches, thermoses (thermi?), whatever into Veteran’s Stadium. Now it’s routine to frisk you at the door for illicit food items.

Okay, I get it. No glass or other potential projectiles. And I guess with the Great American Sports Concessions Renaissance, I can almost accept the argument that bringing food into one of these fancy new stadia is like bringing food into a restaurant.

But no plastic bottle caps? That’s almost as insulting as it is inconvenient.

In a nation where so many believe it’s their God-given, dick-swinging right to open carry, where’s the outrage at The Man taking away our bottle caps?

1 Kings 11:1-3
King Solomon, however, loved many foreign women besides Pharaoh’s daughter—Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians and Hittites. They were from nations about which the LORD had told the Israelites, “You must not intermarry with them, because they will surely turn your hearts after their gods.” Nevertheless, Solomon held fast to them in love. He had seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines, and his wives led him astray.

Discuss.

Seattle City Councilmember Mike O’Brien has a blog post up on the likelihood of cost overruns on the Big Bore tunnel. The conclusion?

40% chance of any cost overrun

30% chance of a cost overrun greater than $90 million

20% chance of a cost overrun greater than $150 million

10% chance of a cost overrun greater than $290 million

5% chance of a cost overrun greater than $415 million

And these are WSDOT’s estimates, not O’Brien’s.

So I guess the question is, are you comfortable with these odds? And if not, do you feel lucky?

Cienna’s got the scoop over at Slog:

This week, the bar was raised for eight projects hoping to move into the Seattle Center’s Fun Forest site—raised so high that all but three proposals may be out of the game.

On July 13, the review panel charged with choosing a project sent a letter (.pdf) to the eight proposers requesting more information about the project. The panel is honing in on where the money’s at: how many visitors each project expects to attract and their “financial readiness and sustainability” moving forward. The letter also points out that the chosen proposal “cannot result in a net negative budget impact to Seattle Center.”

The groups now have two weeks to firm up their financial plans, compared to, say, the year and half the Wright family had to put together its proposal for a for-profit, paid-admission, Chihuly-themed gallery/gift-shop/catering hall. But, you know, there was a public process right? So it’s all kosher.

Cienna’s conclusion? “Goldy is right; we are being humored.”

First rule of blogging, Cienna: Goldy is always right. Even when I’m not. If an opinion is not worth being blogged with absolute confidence, it’s probably not worth being blogged at all.

And that’s why I’m so confident in restating my opinion that the best proposal for the remaining two-acre patch of the Fun Forest is, well, the Fun Forest. Extend their contract another year, and the $250,000 in annual revenue it already brings in. That will give the Seattle Center the time to hold a fair bidding process — instead of the PR sham we’ve been witnessing — while giving competing proposals the time to get their financial plans in order.

When I first saw the numbers in Publicola, that Clint Didier had raised $593,000, my initial thought was wow… that’s not bad for a fringe candidate polling in the single digits. But when I read the details elsewhere, that this represents his total to-date, that he raised a not so spectacular $220,000 in the previous quarter even with Sarah Palin’s endorsement, and that he only has about $100,000 cash on hand, I wasn’t so impressed.

Even assuming he’s in the midst of another gangbuster quarter — you know, by Didier standards — that means he’ll only have a couple hundred thousand dollars or so to spend between now and the August primary… and yet the ballots drop in another couple weeks. Let’s just say, when it comes to insurgent Tea Party campaigns, Didier is no Rand Paul.

And, if his goal really is to get through to the November election, shouldn’t he be campaigning against fellow Republican Dino Rossi instead of Democratic incumbent Sen. Patty Murray?

Throughout his six-page fundraising letter, apparently sent cold to a Seattle address, Didier focuses almost exclusively on attacking Sen. Murray, with only 38 words dedicated to “my Republican opponent” (who, in case you’re wondering, is an “establishment” “RINO,” “recruited by D.C. power brokers,” who “fails to tell people where he is on the issues”). That’s not much of a strategy for defeating Rossi in August, let alone raising money in Seattle.

It is, however, a good strategy for raising money from the teabagger crowd, to be spent helping establishment Republicans elect Rossi.

I’m not saying that’s Didier’s D.C.-P.O.-Box-based strategy. I’m just not saying it isn’t.

Watching the recent fireworks in the Minnesota gubernatorial race, where presumptive Republican nominee Tom Emmer is under increasing fire for supporting a lower minimum wage for restaurant workers, I can’t help but be reminded of Washington state’s 2008 gubernatorial contest, in which a similar statement by Republican nominee Dino Rossi arguably proved to be the turning point in a race that had appeared to be tilting in his favor.

By the end of September 2008, in the midst of the short-lived Palin bounce, polls showed challenger Rossi closing the gap on incumbent Democratic Governor Chris Gregoire, and perhaps even taking a small lead. Republicans were ebullient and Democrats more than a little nervous as the rematch of our bitter, statistically-tied 2004 contest headed into the homestretch.

And then everything changed.

As evident in his current senate campaign, Rossi rarely makes the mistake of clearly addressing issues on which he is out of step with voters, but during a candidate debate near Blaine WA, and perhaps flush with overconfidence from recent events, Rossi finally tripped up.  As first reported by Josh Feit in his pre-PubliCola, exclusive election coverage here on HA, the candidates were asked if the minimum wage was supposed to be a “living wage,” and whether either candidate would consider scaling it back.

“I don’t know of anybody getting rich on the minimum wage,” Gregoire told the hostile crowd (the debate was sponsored by the Association of Washington Business and the questions came from their membership). “The people of Washington are struggling. They go to the gas pumps and can’t afford to fill up the car, they go to the grocery and can’t afford to put food on the table…Washingtonians need to be able to provide for their families. Plenty of people are working minimum wage jobs that need to provide for their families, and I want to stand with Washingtonians.”

She said she supported the voter-approved minimum wage, $8.07 an hour. She also said she supported training programs for teen workers.

Rossi took the opposite point of view. Touting his Washington Restaurant Association endorsement (the most adamant opponents of the minimum wage), he said:   “The minimum wage was not meant to be a family wage. It’s meant to be an entry level wage.”

Josh went on to write about a conversation he’d had that night with a Blaine convenience store clerk who had just sold Rossi a can of beans, some Certs and a Red Bull. “I’m a Republican. I like the Palin thing,” the clerk told Josh, explaining why he planned to vote for Rossi. But when Josh recounted the candidates’ exchange over the minimum wage, the suddenly not-so-star-struck clerk got pissed off:

“If he lowers it,” he said, “I don’t want to vote for him. I’d be cutting my head off. I don’t want to demote myself.”

Suddenly, WA’s highest in the nation minimum wage became one of the hottest issues in the campaign, and within days, the governor had cut a new ad bashing Rossi with it.

It didn’t take a convenience store clerk or a focus group to tell you that this was a bad issue for Rossi. Washington’s minimum wage was tied to inflation via a citizens initiative that passed by a two to one margin only a decade earlier, a policy that remains widely popular with nearly everybody except, well, restaurant owners and other low-wage employers. But rather than attempting damage control, Rossi’s people only stepped in it deeper.

When the state Dems sent an operative to stand outside a Rossi rally in Ellensberg, holding a sign criticizing Rossi’s support for slashing the minimum wage, Rossi’s top economic adviser, Kittitas County Republican chair Matt Manweller (known here on HA as “the Nutty Professor”), simply went ballistic. Prof. Manweller vehemently defended Rossi’s position while angrily attacking the young protester and the 300,000 minimum wage workers he claimed to represent.

“You and those 300,000 people are dumber than a post,” Manweller yelled. Go ahead, watch it. It’s kinda stunning.

The minimum wage remained a focal point throughout the remainder of the campaign as Gregoire gradually pulled into a commanding lead. When the ballots were tallied, Gregoire had won by a comfortable 195,000-vote margin (6.5%), compared to her disputed 133-vote victory in 2004.

No doubt there were other factors that led to Gregoire’s victory, but the minimum wage provided an invaluable toehold at a time when she was quickly losing ground, and proved a potent message for differentiating the two candidates on economic issues at a time of great economic uncertainty.

And it provides a lesson you’d think that Emmer and his fellow Minnesota Republicans might want to learn.

As the image and the tweet make clear, Dino Rossi ran into Ben Stein at the Spokane airport last week, and got him to contribute some money.

Good for you, Dino. And I’m sure the support of one of Richard Nixon’s speechwriters will go a long way toward persuading both teabaggers and independents that you’re a different kind of Republican, rather than, you know, the run of the mill corporatist hack you generally come off as.

But apart from the rather desperate sounding plea for more money (“Anyone else? Anyone? Anyone!!!!?“), the tweet got me thinking: in addition to airports and money, what else do Rossi and Stein share?

For example, the Wall Street reform bill on which Rossi finally broke his monk-like, issue-related silence… where does Stein stand on that? Rossi opposes it, erroneously saying that would leave taxpayers on the hook for another financial bailout; he even calls on Murray to “stand up to big banks” and vote it down.

And Stein? Well it turns out that Wolf Blitzer recently asked him about the bill on CNN’s The Situation Room:

BLITZER: Do you like this bill, Ben?

STEIN: I like it pretty well but it doesn’t really — it isn’t really needed. This recession was caused largely by fraud on Wall Street. There are already antifraud laws all over the place. They’re just not being enforced. This law doesn’t end too big to fail. It just has an orderly process for it. You know what? Too big to fail is not a bad idea. Lehman Brothers was too big to fail. By letting it fail the former secretary of the treasury Henry Paulson created this recession. So I mean I don’t even — I don’t even see what the problem is with too big to fail frankly. I think we’re operating from a lot of false premises here. Too big to fail is not a bad idea.

BRAZILE: Ben, at least use their money to fail and not the taxpayers’ money to bail them out.

STEIN: Well, maybe sometimes you do need to use the taxpayers’ money to bail them out. If we had bailed out Lehman Brothers we wouldn’t have had this colossal recession. It would have cost 10, 15, $20 billion to bail them out. Instead we’ve lost trillions because of this recession. A stitch in time as they say saves nine. We should have saved Lehman Brothers. It was too big to fail. We let it fail anyway and we got a catastrophic recession that hurt the smallest and weakest among us.

So Rossi opposes Wall Street reform because he says it leaves taxpayers on the hook for another bailout — even though the bill includes a Patty Murray sponsored amendment that prohibits exactly that — at the same time he’s touting a contribution from Ben Stein, who likes the bill “pretty well,” but opposes it because “Too big to fail is not a bad idea… sometimes you do need to use the taxpayers’ money to bail them out.”

Uh-huh. So which candidate is it exactly who voters can best rely on to “stand up to big banks”…? It’s hard to imagine it’s a Ben Stein Republican like Dino Rossi.

With the support of Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, the U.S. Senate has finally put together the bare minimum 60 votes needed to break the Republican filibuster on Wall Street reform, making passage a sure thing.

Meanwhile, Republican real estate speculator Dino Rossi has finally taken a position on an issue, telling the Seattle Times that he would have voted with his fellow Republicans to block the measure, because, apparently, preventing banks and other financial firms from doing the same sort of things that recently cost millions of Americans their jobs would “stifle job growth,” or something.

And if that sounds confused, just watch Rossi step in it when he attempts to dig into the details:

Rossi depicted Murray’s planned vote in favor of the measure — which could come as early as Thursday — as akin to putting taxpayers on the hook for another possible bailout of financial firms. He contends that it does little to discourage future risky behavior and called on Murray to “stand up to big banks” and vote it down.

[…] Murray’s campaign swiftly derided Rossi for overlooking the fact that Murray co-sponsored a successful amendment explicitly prohibiting using tax dollars to bail out troubled financial companies.

“It seems strange that Dino Rossi took weeks to take a position on this bill without apparently having read it,” said Julie Edwards, a Murray campaign spokeswoman.

But, you know, why bother reading something as big and as complicated as the actual bill when your heart’s not really in this campaign anyway?