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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is speaking at the moment at Netroots Nation, and got a surprisingly warm welcome. The crowd’s favorite line thus far:

“I know at sometimes I get on your nerves. And I can tell you, that you get on mine.”

And thats the way Democracy is supposed to work.

Coming up, Seattle’s own Joan McCarter (Daily Kos’s McJoan) will be moderating questions from the audience.

With all but the toughest census work done, we’ll soon start the process of redistricting. And I’d like to make a small suggestion when we start to redistrict here in Washington: For goodness sake, name the districts, don’t number them.

Watching the British elections recently, I was struck at how you can get a sense of where the constituencies are just based on names like Wimbledon, Exeter, or Belfast East. Names get right to the point and are clearer than numbers. In fact, when the newspapers do use the number of state or federal districts here, they are so unhelpful that they often times have to add a location anyway. (Occasionally with misleading results. When reading about my old district, I sometimes hear that Ruth Kagi represents Shoreline, Darlene Fairley represents Lake Forest Park, and Maralyn Chase represents Edmonds despite the fact that they represent the same district.)

Naming the districts would be easy enough to do here. Instead of discussing the 32nd District that has no inherent meaning, why not a name like North King County and Edmonds? Jim McDermott would represent Seattle and Vashon, not the number 7.

I understand that the boundaries of the districts will matter more over the next decade than their names, but naming the districts just makes more sense than the current system.

I checked in to the Rio hotel in Las Vegas at around 3:30 PM Wednesday, and I’m proud to say that I haven’t walked outside since. 112 degrees? You gotta be kidding. And since the only thing outside the hotel is more hotels, I don’t really see the point.

Anyway, the big problem with these blogger confabs from a blogger’s perspective is that they leave so little time for actual blogging, which is why my posting has been so light these last few days. That said, I’ve got a lot of great posts in my head that will hopefully work their way out through my fingers over the coming weeks, and have started plotting a couple of new schemes to further our socialist takeover of America. Well worth the trip.

But that doesn’t mean there haven’t been some disappointments. Carla (from Blue Oregon) and I had high hopes for our Pub Quiz team, “The Dirty Fucking Liberal Bloggers,” especially after recruiting the Seattle P-I’s encyclopedic Joel Connelly as a ringer. But unfortunately, Joel let us down with his total lack of pop culture knowledge, leading to our team’s worst performance ever in our long and glorious two-year career. Maybe next year we’ll try recruiting a journalist from a print publication.

Check out Jane Hamsher on MSNBC today, finally pointing out the elephant in the room on our immigration drug war problem in Arizona:

As Cienna reported yesterday on Slog, $98 million dollars has now been pledged toward the $131 million cost of replacing the South Park Bridge:

King County ($30 million), Washington state ($20 million), city of Seattle ($15 million), State Transportation Improvement Board ($10 million), Port of Seattle ($5 million), Senator Murray’s Federal DOT-HUD funding bill ($3 million), and PSRC ($15 million).

On the one hand, it’s terrific news to see the region finally getting its shit together on replacing such an absolutely essential, if unglamorous piece of local infrastructure. On the other hand, our political leaders should be absolutely ashamed that it took the bridge’s closure to finally get them to act. How many small, local businesses in the district surrounding the bridge are going to fail during the couple year closure? Or does it not really matter when it’s the wrong type of businesses closing?

Put perhaps more importantly, from a pure public policy perspective, what an incredibly fucked up way of funding local infrastructure!

$20 million here, $15 million there, $3 million in loose change from under the cushions on the couch… really? That’s how we fund road construction around here? I mean, since when did the Port of Seattle become a road-building agency? And yet the Big Bore tunnel, let alone the South Park Bridge wouldn’t be possible without hundreds of millions of dollars from the port. The port, for chrisakes. How fucked up is that? And honestly, how dishonest?

It’s all taxpayer dollars after all; the county and the port, for example, share district boundaries and tax exactly the same people. So why do we have to go through this incredibly stupid charade of raising money from seven — count ’em — seven different taxpayer funded governmental entities?

Why? Because our region has become paralyzed by the politics of something for nothing.

There was a time when the county and city had the taxing authority to maintain their own roads without resorting to begging or special levies or, well, laundering taxpayer dollars through the Port of Seattle. But no more. Not since Tim Eyman’s I-747 vindictively capped property tax revenue growth at an absolutely ridiculous one percent annual growth, a limit our cowardly governor and legislature ridiculously reimposed after it was thrown out by the courts.

One percent! Not enough to keep up with inflation, let alone our region’s growth. Are we really that stupid and irresponsible? (Are we, Seattle Times editorial board? Are we?)

I’ve got no problem with state and federal contributions to local projects — it’s always worked that way — but here’s a novel idea: how about giving the city and county sufficient taxing authority to take on the primary responsibility of maintaining city and count roads, instead of relying on such an incredibly convoluted and stupid-ass funding goulash? Wouldn’t that be more efficient? And since the money is all coming from the same people, wouldn’t it be dramatically more honest and transparent?

Or are we really better off sacrificing the South Park business district for the sake of hiding from taxpayers what basic services really cost?

I was sitting with the Alaska bloggers during last night’s opening keynote addresses (they were all great, but Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer simply kicked ass) and when we got to talking about Dino Rossi, Jeanne Devon (AKMuckraker) of The Mudflats mentioned that he had come to Alaska in 2006 to headline a fundraiser for Sarah Palin’s gubernatorial run.

Really? I hadn’t heard of that before. But a quick bit of Googling found confirmation straight from the horse’s mouth:

Dino Rossi, Republican candidate for governor: “I think it’s a perfect fit for John McCain. I flew up and did a fundraiser for her in 2006. I was very impressed with her. The conservatives will be happy. She’s bright and articulate … America is just going to have to get to know her.”

Yup, she’s “bright and articulate,” Rossi insisted, a gushing assessment Palin has certainly done nothing to refudiate.

And how does Palin return the favor? By coming to Washington and endorsing Clint Didier, of course. Man, that’s gotta sting.

But then, what should Rossi expect from such an impressively bright and articulate woman?

For some time now, Goldy and I have been harping on how The Seattle Times, especially their ed board, is out of step with Seattle. Their endorsements don’t sway people and they don’t feel the same way as most city dwellers on many issues. They represent a conservative, old guard elite that simply doesn’t have the truck that it once did in Seattle. But perhaps we’ve been wrong.

So stay with me a little bit. The Seattle Times certainly disagrees with city residents on taxes, sure. While city residents understand that things cost money, and are generally willing to pay for them (roads and stadiums aside), The Seattle Times seems to think any tax increase for any reason is always bad. And they want more roads. And for Seattle to pay for those roads, even state roads that Seattle is at best ambivalent about.

And even when they say they want something lefty like health care, they change their mind when that lefty thing might actually pass.

And on candidates, oh my. The Seattle Times thinks all candidates for all offices should abide by the above crazy. So they often pick candidates very different from who Seattle picks.

But it isn’t just politically: the ed board is (aside from Ryan Blethen) quite old in a youthful city. How many columns and posts by Bruce Ramsey mention something Carter did that he didn’t like, as if it relates to the experience of most people in Seattle today? They have an attitude of respect for conservative institutions, giving the likes of Bruce Chapman a fair hearing while the typical Seattle resident doesn’t care that you were in the Reagan administration. The adoration of bland institutions is downright strange. They’ve written multiple anti Google rants in a tech friendly city. Finally, they’ve, mostly (all?) people who grew up here despite the large number of people who’ve come here more recently either from other countries or other parts of America.

So the point is, Goldy, The Seattle Times was here long before the current iteration of Seattle politically and culturally. But The Seattle Times isn’t out of step with Seattle: if anything, Seattle is out of step with The Seattle Times.

Earlier today, I leapt into the abyss and signed up for a Twitter account. I only have time to write about a small number of the articles that interest me, so Twitter seems like a great format for all those posts and news items that I want to share but don’t have time to write full posts about. As you’d imagine, I’ll be posting a lot about drug policy and civil liberties, but probably also about sports, working in the high-tech world, TV, and some other mundane shit I don’t often write about here.

A website has been set up to vote on ways to cut Washington’s budget.

Remember back in 2009 when Susan Hutchison tried to deny she was a Republican while cynical moralists like the editors at the Seattle Times got their undies in a knot over Democrats slinging partisan labels in a nominally nonpartisan King County executive race? Well it shouldn’t surprise you then to learn that Hutchison has maxed out to Republican Dino Rossi, with a $2400 contribution to his senatorial primary campaign.

Those who advocate for nonpartisan elections claim they are trying to remove partisanship from politics, when in fact all they’re really doing is removing valuable information from the voting public. And most of the nonpartisaniks damn well know it.

We’ve all heard about the alleged “enthusiasm gap” that’s supposed to presage doom for Democrats this November, but you wouldn’t know it from the crowds here at Netroots Nation.

Conference organizers tell me that over 2100 attendees have registered for this year’s event, compared to about 1800 last year. (Perhaps that helps explain the collapse of the convention center’s WiFi network?) Only the 2007 event was bigger, when about 3000 bloggers and activists descended on Chicago for the featured faceoff between the Democratic presidential primary candidates.

And yet the oh-so-enthusiastic teabaggers had to cancel their Tea Party Nation convention, which was to have been held here in Las Vegas last week, due to lack of interest. (They claimed the heat scared away attendees; I guess us lefties must be a heartier lot.)

I mean honestly… if 2000 teabaggers had gathered here last week with their conspiracy theories and poorly spelled signs, that’s a story that would have led the network news. But a similar number of liberals? Crickets. Because, I guess, it just doesn’t fit into the standard narrative. Or something.

I enjoyed decent Internet access on the airplane of all places, but here at the Rio, crushed under the weight of a couple thousand bloggers, the Intertubes are proving as sclerotic as Dick Cheney’s arteries. Even AT&T’s 3G network has slowed to a crawl, so I’m not even sure that this small post from my iPhone will get through.

Anyway, just thought I’d give you a heads up in case you don’t here hear much from me.

Each year Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) puts together its annual “Most Corrupt Members of Congress” report a bipartisan list of the House and Senate’s 15 most ethically challenged members. But this year CREW is also producing a report on the most Crooked Candidates of 2010, and look who made the initial list: Dino Rossi!

Makes you proud to be a Washingtonian, doesn’t it?

Over at the TNT’s Political Buzz, Rossi spokesperson Mary Lane Strow angrily denounces CREW as “a big ol’ lefty front group” that gets funding from George Soros, and predominantly targets Republicans:

“It’s another one of those things where (Democrats) have some quote-unquote independent group put it out there that Dino’s sleazy,” Strow said. “Then the Murray campaign can reference it in a future ad.”

And Strow’s accusations of rank partisanship might be an effective comeback, if not for the fact that like most of the Rossi campaign’s assertions, it’s totally unsupported by the facts. Indeed, of CREW’s current list of “The 15 Most Corrupt Members of Congress,” eight of them — more than half — are Democrats, including liberal stalwarts like Rep. Maxine Waters, Rep. Charlie Rangel and Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.

Huh. That’s some lefty front group, Mary.

The fact is, and has been well documented here on HA, Rossi has spent his business and political career hanging out with some awfully shady company, from Mel Heide to Michael Mastro to the conniving, mean-spirited, campaign-finance-cheating BIAW. Perhaps it is all just “guilt by association,” as the TNT headline implies. But there are some awfully strong associations.