HorsesAss.Org

(And there are about 50 more links to the past week in political media at Hominid Views.)

… 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.

Here’s Bob Inglis, South Carolina Republican House member who got slaughtered in his primary for standing up to Glenn Beck and the Tea Party, on CNN:

I believe that this is the definition of the term “freak show”.

UDPATE: And there’s more.

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.

By now it’s a familiar pattern to those who really pay attention. Rep. Reichert (WA-08) equivocates on an issue. He refuses to take a stand on an issue that anyone can really pin to him. And then he votes against the interests of his district—and hopes nobody notices.

This time it is about big oil. Reichert recently voted against the CLEAR Act, that was in response to the BP gulf catostrophy. The act got rid of the $75 million oil spill liability cap and revamped Federal oversight of the offshore oil industry.

And…

…[i]n addition to a number of Gulf Coast restoration and research programs, the bill also fully funds the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) at $900 million, using money generated from oil and gas drilling royalties, and closes a loophole that exempts oil and gas projects from the storm-water runoff regs under the Clean Water Act. Another major onshore reform is the removal of “categorical exclusions” used to exempt some drilling applications from environmental review on public lands.
[…]

“Americans will be asking, ‘Will Senators stand with the people or the polluters?’” Todd Keller, senior manager of Public Lands Campaigns for National Wildlife Federation, said in a release.

We now know where Reichert Stands…with the polluters.

This is precisely the type of vote that Reichert could have used to make a bold statement in favor of his more-environmentally-aware-than-average constituents. Hell…he could have used this vote to do a little damage control following his embarrassing semi-private statement about pandering to the environmentalists. Instead, he voted with the Party of NO!™ (ideas) and against the interests of his constituents. Apparently, Republican obstructionism is more important to Reichert.

Fortunately, Reichert is pretty much impotent as a legislator—the act passed in the House without any acts of courage on Reichert’s part.

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.

PubliCola picks Republican Patrick Reed for the 31st LD House of Representatives Position 2. Here’s what they had to say:

We wanted to hold our noses and endorse incumbent [Christopher] Hurst, but the more we dug in to his record, the less we could justify telling the 31st District (Auburn, Bonney Lake, Buckley, Edgewood, Enumclaw, Sumner) to support this anti-environmental, anti-public-disclosure, anti-jobs, anti-transit, pro-Tim Eyman “Democrat.”

Hurst was the prime sponsor of legislation restoring a Tim Eyman-backed measure limiting property tax growth to one percent a year; supported changing state law that allows criminals to plead not guilty by reason of insanity; voted against transit, clean energy, and green jobs, earning him the ranking of “Green Dud” from the Washington Conservation Voters; supported legislation blocking inmate access to certain public records; and supported a slate of anti-terrorism provisions that were strongly opposed by the ACLU.

Hurst is simply the worst Democrat in the state. And on top of the laundry list above, he’s also used his chairmanship of the Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Committee to kill off even the mildest attempts to reform our state’s draconian drug laws.

When I see bad, or for that matter good, polls I can’t be too worked up. Of course I prefer the Democrat up, and up by a lot. And of course I’d prefer the generic ballot look better. But I’m not staring into the abyss, because the Democrats aren’t in the same place as the Mariners.

Believe me, as a Mariners fan, I’ve slogged through some terrible seasons without being able to change anything. A few years ago at the end of a bear of a season when Seattle and Texas were long eliminated, I was sitting in the first row of an outfield seat. Right in front of me, a Mariner’s popup came near the warning track, and the Ranger’s right fielder went into a dive for the ball. “I got it, I got it!” I yelled, and the Ranger dropped the ball. While I like to think I made him drop it, the truth is he probably just bobbled it because he was an AAA call up without much Major League experience. That’s the closest I’ve come to changing anything on the field.

But it’s often said that politics isn’t a spectator sport. And this year as every year, I’m not going to just sit and watch. I’ve worked the phones, donated, and knocked on doors for candidates I believe in, and will continue through November.

And that’s where the next few months for the D’s can be a lot better than the next few months for the M’s. There are enough fine candidates that we can all make a difference. I don’t know what the polls show for DelBene, but I’ll be making calls and knocking on doors for her. Same with Patty Murray (the poll Goldy cited earlier aside). Those of you who live south of here can do the same for Heck.

If you aren’t inspired by those people, there are plenty of state and local races and initiative campaigns. If you don’t like to talk to strangers about politics, they can all use money. They can all use letters to the editor. They can all use you mentioning them on Facebook and Twitter. They can all use you talking to friends and putting up yard signs. All of those things will change the facts, and matter more than what you see in polls.

Goldy is on the East Coast and I am at a family reunion in the Midwest, but please join a friendly group of Seattle-area liberals, progressives, radicals, and commie pinkos tonight for a Tuesday evening of politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. (Talk about a run-on sentence!) We meet at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning at about 8:00 pm. Some folks will be there even earlier to enjoy dinner before the political fireworks begin.

Not in Seattle? There is a good chance you live near one of the 286 other chapters of Drinking Liberally.

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.

Speaking of going negative, Rep. Rick Larsen has a very effective web video up bashing is opponent, John Koster, for his lavish praise of the Tea Party. “The Tea Party Movement, the Patriot Movement to me is one of the most exciting things to happen to this country for a long time,” the video opens with Koster pronouncing, before proceeding to illustrate the teabaggers’ legacy of racism, stupidity, hate.

Just as disturbing is Koster’s praise of “the Patriot Movement,” long known for its white supremacist and anti-semitic rhetoric, and its close ties to the right-wing militia movement. Either Koster doesn’t really know what the Patriot Movement is, or more frightening… he does.