HorsesAss.Org

A few weeks back I teased the Seattle Times editorial board for its amazing “psychic powers” regarding public opinion on the deep bore tunnel.

“State lawmakers approved the project, the governor favors it and the region — save for one activist mayor — considers the matter settled,” the Times confidently wrote. To which I bemusedly replied:

Hear that? Except for Mayor Mike McGinn, the entire region favors the Big Bore tunnel, even me! Wow. The Times must know me better than I do. Amazing.

Well, it turns out, not so much.

Indeed, according to a new KING-5/SurveyUSA poll, public opinion is rather split, with only 47% of respondents supporting the tunnel compared to 46% opposed. Furthermore, 48% of respondents are “very concerned” about the costs of the tunnel, and33% “somewhat concerned”, while respondents say that they agree with Mayor Mike McGinn that construction should wait until the state agrees to pay for cost overruns, by a whopping 63% to 31% margin.

I guess the Times’ editors aren’t all that psychic after all. In fact what they are, is totally out of touch.

But confidently so. And in the op-ed business, confidence is apparently the only thing that matters.

UPDATE:
Fixed post to correct my understatement of respondents’ concern.

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.

Mark Kleiman writes in the LA Times that even if voters in California approve Proposition 19 to create a regulated legal market for marijuana, it still won’t be legal:

Now that California’s billion-dollar ” medical marijuana” industry and its affiliated “recommendationists” have made marijuana legally available to any Californian with $75 and the willingness to tell a doctor that he sometimes has trouble sleeping, why not go all the way and just legalize the stuff for recreational use as proposed in Proposition 19 on the November ballot? Then we could tax it and regulate it, eliminating the illicit market and the need for law enforcement against pot growers. California would make a ton of money to help dig out of its fiscal hole, right?

Well, actually, no.

There’s one problem with legalizing, taxing and regulating cannabis at the state level: It can’t be done. The federal Controlled Substances Act makes it a felony to grow or sell cannabis. California can repeal its own marijuana laws, leaving enforcement to the feds. But it can’t legalize a federal felony. Therefore, any grower or seller paying California taxes on marijuana sales or filing pot-related California regulatory paperwork would be confessing, in writing, to multiple federal crimes. And that won’t happen.

From a purely technical standpoint, Kleiman is right. And from a purely technical standpoint, Dick Cheney should be behind bars. The problem with Kleiman’s argument is that when it comes to what the Obama Administration will and will not do, the letter of the law will take a backseat to political considerations. The Obama Administration already demonstrates this by choosing not to go after state medical marijuana providers (both growers and sellers). Despite a few recent raids, marijuana dispensaries are now operating in the open in many more places than they were only two years ago.

Kleiman’s attempt to differentiate this by pointing to international treaties that carve out exceptions for medical use is irrelevant. What the medical marijuana providers do is clearly against federal law, but the Obama Administration chooses not to enforce it. And it’s unrealistic to think that an international treaty that the United States years ago pressured the UN to pass will be used by the international community to force Obama to do something he doesn’t find politically expedient. It’ll never happen. If California passes Proposition 19, the Obama Administration’s hands won’t be tied by anyone or anything. If they think it’s politically expedient to shut it down, they’ll try to do it. If they think it’s not politically expedient, they won’t.

Kleiman makes the case – based on the RAND study from earlier this week saying that marijuana prices in California might plummet – that the Obama Administration would find it politically expedient to shut down any regulated market in California. As he sees it, people will flock to California to buy marijuana on the cheap and re-sell it for higher profits across the country. And as a result, the Obama Administration will have no choice but to shut it down.

On the other hand, California still happens to be the biggest state in the country, and one that Obama would need to win in 2012 to stay in the White House. Having the federal government come in to forcibly overturn a voter-initiative wouldn’t be the smartest move on his part, and it’s one I personally have trouble believing he’d do.

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?

Last week’s contest was won by Bax. It was the Fruitvale BART Station in Oakland, where Oscar Grant was killed by police officer Johannes Mehserle on New Year’s Day 2009. Last week, Mehserle was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter, but not guilty of voluntary manslaughter and second-degree murder.

As always, each picture will be related to something in the news from the past week. Here’s this week’s, good luck!

Last week, the NAACP called on Tea Party groups to repudiate the racism within its ranks. Dave Weigel, writing at The Daily Dish, dismissed the idea as foolish, while elsewhere at the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote several good posts explaining why the NAACP was right to raise their concerns about some of the racially charged things that have been seen and heard at Tea Party rallies.

What this exchange reminded me of was a post from a couple of weeks ago from Weigel’s former colleague at Reason Magazine, Radley Balko, at his personal blog The Agitator:

Dear Tea Partiers,

Ask Joe Arpaio to be your keynote speaker, and you’ve lost me.

He’s a power-mad thug with a badge, the walking, mouth-breathing antithesis of the phrase “limited government.”

Yes, this is but one state chapter in your movement. So distance yourself from them.

It’s one thing to have a few idiots and nutjobs show up at your rallies.

It’s quite another to invite one to speak.

John Cole has written a few times about the effort among the staff at Reason to continually dismiss the idea that there’s racism in the Tea Party movement. Balko’s post above should be a clue that what the Tea Partiers are about isn’t quite what the folks at Reason imagine them to be about. Polls on Tea Party members illustrate this:

While big government is a favorite tea party target, several bloggers were surprised by the results of the poll question about whether the benefits of government programs such as Social Security and Medicare are worth the costs to taxpayers. Sixty-two percent of tea party supporters said yes. In follow-up interviews, they favored a focus on “waste” instead of slashing the programs.

“Some defended being on Social Security while fighting big government by saying that since they had paid into the system, they deserved the benefits. Others could not explain the contradiction,” the Times reported.

The Tea Party movement isn’t a movement about limited government and it never has been. They may make signs and shout slogans against “socialism”, but as surveys like that one show, they have no problem with things like Medicare or Social Security, or tightly regulating Wall Street. When they talk about socialism, they’re talking about something else. They’re expressing their anxieties about multiculturalism. They’re expressing a belief that our increasingly diverse society is becoming an economic burden to what they perceive as “real Americans”. To them, socialism is the idea that America is becoming more and more inundated with those who will mooch off the rest of us. And their reaction to that is to decry the kinds of government expenditures that many of them continue to rely on:

Liberal pundits like Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen seized on a comment by Jodine White, 62, of Rocklin, Calif., as evidence that tea partiers are “a confused group of misled people.”

“Maybe I don’t want smaller government. I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security. I didn’t look at it from the perspective of losing things I need. I think I’ve changed my mind,” White told the Times.

“These folks claim to be motivated by concerns over taxes, but tea partiers tend not to know anything about the subject. … They claim to hate expensive government programs, except for all the expensive government programs that benefit them and their families,” Benen charged.

The staff at Reason have had a natural desire to believe that the Tea Party folks are their fellow travelers – intellectually consistent free-market libertarians whose opposition to big government comes from a firm understanding of the writings of Bastiat and Hayek. But that’s just not who most of the Tea Partiers are.

They’re more often than not folks who think that Barack Obama is cynically trying to steal their money and give it to people who refuse to work hard and who don’t care about America as much as them. They’re more often than not willing to believe that illegal immigrants are coming here because our government entices them to come with endless giveaways, rather than because of free market forces of supply and demand in the labor markets. And this is why they’re demanding to hear from big government authoritarian thugs like Joe Arpaio at their meetings and not from Reason staff members.

Even a politician like Rand Paul, who’s considered a free-market libertarian, knows that he can’t keep Tea Party support without rejecting that philosophy when it comes to illegal immigration. Sharron Angle, the Tea Party candidate for Senate in Nevada, once expressed support for the reinstatement of alcohol prohibition. This only happens because the Tea Partiers are far more concerned about the culture war than about economic philosophy. They’re for limited government when it comes to things they perceive as encouraging our multicultural society and they’re for big government when it comes to things they perceive as threats from that multicultural society.

Racism has changed a bit since the 1960s. Racism was overt back then – a belief in the necessity of segregation and for preserving separate sets of rules for people of different groups. Today, racism is somewhat different and more subtle. It’s a belief that certain groups of people are an economic burden on society due to our cultural differences. It’s a belief that it’s wasteful when government does things to improve the lot of poor minority groups or to help immigrants assimilate into American society, but not wasteful when it does things that benefit the more privileged classes. Media charlatans like Glenn Beck are masterful at transforming these types of nationalistic impulses into economic theories with fully-developed alternate American histories to go along with them. And it’s foolish to believe that the Tea Party movement isn’t being driven in a significant way by this sleight of hand.

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.

– Tom Schaller has a post at FiveThirtyEight comparing the 1994 midterm election with the 2010 midterm election. This chart tells a very interesting story:

It seems hard to fathom that only 16 years ago the South had a higher percentage of Democrats than the Northeast.

– I’ve started watching the recent National Geographic series on the drug war, Drugs Inc. The first episode was about cocaine. It’s a timely topic since this week marks the 10th anniversary of the launch of Plan Colombia. The Drug War Chronicle discusses the successes and failures of our attempts to stop the flow of cocaine from Colombia. We’ve managed to weaken organizations like FARC that have long profited from the trade, but the overall amount of cocaine coming from that part of the world remains unchanged.

– Mike Konczal points out the inherent contradiction between the Broken Windows philosophy and the libertarian view on marijuana laws.

– Dave Weigel calls out Megyn Kelly’s race-baiting.

– Another ugly Taser incident.

– Someone posted Mr. Cynical’s old schoolwork on the web.

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?