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So, even a narrow win in yesterday’s special election to replace Rep. Robert Wexler in FL-19 would have spelled electoral trouble for Democrats nationally, but a comfortable Democratic win is entirely meaningless…?

“A closer race would’ve added to Democratic paranoia about their chances this fall, but the fact that Deutch performed close to the average for a Democrat in the district does not lessen the fact that nationally, GOPers are still likely to enjoy big gains in the general election,” said Tim Sahd, editor of Washington-based House Race Hotline.

Funny how it works out that way, huh? Democratic victories in special elections — even pickups — are ignored by the pundits as foregone conclusions or outliers, whereas Republican victories are hailed as precursors of an electoral earthquake.

Seems to me that our media has something invested in creating a little drama this fall.

Bad news for Republicans hoping to ride a wave of economic discontent into office this November:

A flurry of reports out Wednesday suggested that many Americans are feeling better about the economic rebound.

Retail spending rose sharply and more than expected. Consumer inflation remains all but invisible. Businesses are boosting their stockpiles in anticipation of higher shopper demand.

Still, it’s not all gloom and doom for the Prefers GOP Party. While most economists expect a sustained recovery, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke cautioned that it would not have “enough strength to quickly reduce unemployment much.” That leaves plenty of opportunity for Republicans to exploit the well-justified anxiety of the job-insecure… which perhaps explains why they’re so eager to exacerbate this suffering by opposing an extension of unemployment benefits.

After six years of watching me bask in the fame and fortune of bloggery, my mother has decided that it’s time for her voice to be heard on the pressing issues of the day, sending the following Letter to the Editor, printed today in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Who benefits from charter schools?

My friend, a dedicated, enthusiastic, and highly regarded guidance counselor for 15 years in the Philadelphia School District, has decided to look for a new job. Her school, which she loves, is becoming a charter school. Why in the midst of revelations of mismanagement and fraud is the city establishing at least nine more charter schools and displacing up to 200 teachers, and why does my friend want no part of it?

Charter school staff earn less than comparable staff in public schools. Could these be the real reason that the government is pushing charter schools? Yes, charter schools have the ability to exclude troublesome students and to insist on parental participation. If traditional public schools could exclude students and mandate parent involvement, then they, too, might see improved standardized test scores.

As we funnel money away from traditional public schools to charter schools, we leave our most vulnerable students behind, and see quality teachers fleeing. I ask, who is really benefiting?

Sylvia Goldstein Salvat

Merion

I couldn’t agree more, although I’d add at least one more cynical reason as to why Republicans, at least, support charter schools and vouchers: they want to destroy public education so as to destroy the public teachers unions.

Which brings me to a curious observation. Cynical as I am, I couldn’t help but read my mother’s letter with a cynic’s eye, and wonder how I, as a snarky blogger, might belittle her letter, were I on the other side of the issue. And what immediately jumped out at was the phrase “Could these be the real reason…?”

“Hah!” the righty critic might exclaim. “Learn how to write proper English before pontificating about education!”

Only problem is, that’s not what my mother, a retired Philadelphia school teacher herself, wrote. The Inquirer edited her letter and inserted the error. Here’s the original text my mother emailed me the other day:

My friend, a dedicated, enthusiastic, and highly regarded Guidance Counselor for 15 years in the Philadelphia School District, has decided to look for a new job. Her school, which she loves, is becoming a charter school. Why in the midst of revelations of mismanagement and fraud is the city establishing at least nine more charter schools and displacing up to 200 teachers, and why does my friend want no part of it? Charter school staff earn less than comparable staff in public schools, they have no pension (what a savings for the city and state!), and no union representation. Could these be the real reasons that the government is pushing charter schools? Yes, charter schools have the ability to exclude troublesome students and to insist on parental participation. If traditional public schools could exclude students and mandate parent involvement then they too might see improved standardized test scores as some charter schools report.

As we funnel money away from traditional public schools to charter schools, we leave our most vulnerable students behind, and see quality teachers  fleeing. I ask, who is really benefitting?

Sure, the Inquirer did a reasonable job breaking my mother’s letter up into smaller paragraphs, but look at what they chose to excise in the process. My mother’s stated “reasons” the government is pushing charter schools…

Charter school staff earn less than comparable staff in public schools, they have no pension (what a savings for the city and state!), and no union representation.

In the Inquirer’s editor’s hands became one “reason”….

Charter school staff earn less than comparable staff in public schools.

A much less compelling argument, that fails to document the district’s anti-union bias. Then the editors merely dropped the “s” from the word “reasons” while lazily forgetting to transform “these” into “this.”

Huh. Perhaps the Inquirer’s editor is a graduate of one of those charter schools? Or perhaps this is just the kind of editorial sloppiness that comes from being so hasty to cover up the inherent anti-union bias of the charter school movement?

Happening tomorrow morning in the House Domestic Policy Subcommittee, chaired by Dennis Kucinich.

Join us tonight for an evening of politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. We meet at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning at about 8:00 pm. Stop by even earlier and enjoy some dinner.

Not in Seattle? There is a good chance you live near one of the 352 other chapters of Drinking Liberally.

There’s a raccoon in my garage. Actually, four of them: a mother and three, hairless newborn babies.

Very cute, but raccoons nonetheless, and raccoons can be nasty, and thus a threat to both our dog and our cat, not to mention my daughter and myself.

It’s not much of a garage so to speak, just a rotting, ivy-covered shed with most of the roof missing, barely big enough to fit a Model T, and we don’t use it for much more than storing a ladder and a few yard tools. So the raccoons aren’t really in our way or anything, tucked into a corner of an aging loft I haven’t had the nerve to step foot on in years. But still, they’re there. For at least three days now.

I suggested calling animal control, but my daughter says no, as they’ll only kill them, and she’s not much into killing cute looking things.

What would you do?

Yet more teabaggers who haven’t gotten the message to tone down the crazy:

Frustrated by recent political setbacks, tea party leaders and some conservative members of the Oklahoma Legislature say they would like to create a new volunteer militia to help defend against what they believe are improper federal infringements on state sovereignty.

Tea party movement leaders say they’ve discussed the idea with several supportive lawmakers and hope to get legislation next year to recognize a new volunteer force. They say the unit would not resemble militia groups that have been raided for allegedly plotting attacks on law enforcement officers.

“Is it scary? It sure is,” said tea party leader Al Gerhart of Oklahoma City, who heads an umbrella group of tea party factions called the Oklahoma Constitutional Alliance. “But when do the states stop rolling over for the federal government?”

Imagine. Anti-federalist violence. In Oklahoma City of all places. Who’d a thunk?

I gotta admit, there’s a part of me that hopes they do form their secessionist militia, and do manage to provoke an armed confrontation with the U.S. military. (You know, the small part of me that values irony over human life.)

It’s disturbing to admit it, but on at least one subject, GOP state Sen. Don Benton and I think alike:

Washington state Sen. Don Benton says he doesn’t expect Republican Dino Rossi to enter the race for U.S. Senate this year, citing his personal friendship with the two-time gubernatorial candidate.

Benton, who has already entered the race against Sen. Patty Murray on the Republican side, told POLITICO Monday: “Dino’s a good friend of mine. I’ve talked to him many times. I don’t believe Dino would allow me to sacrifice my family time and my business if he was going to run for U.S. Senate. “

“If he had serious plans, I really believe he would have told me that,” Benton said. “I just don’t see it.”

Yeah, I know, the conventional wisdom is that Rossi wouldn’t be going through all this public preening if he weren’t at least seriously considering a run for the U.S. Senate, but like Benton, I  just don’t see it, and for many of the same reasons:

“He doesn’t have any money in the bank, he doesn’t have any money raised. He doesn’t have the foundation. The talent pool is pretty much committed for this election cycle. It’s too late for him to become a viable candidate in this race…”

Of course, with only $130,000 dollars in the bank, little statewide name ID, and almost zero support from his own party’s establishment, it’s pretty much “too late” for Benton to become a viable candidate as well, but that shouldn’t detract from his appraisal of Rossi’s own bleak senatorial prospects. Sen. Patty Murray would be a difficult target even in a red wave election, and while there’s no reason to suspect this won’t be a painful midterm for congressional Democrats, the generic polling just doesn’t show a tsunami on the horizon.

Yes, Rossi’s fundraising prowess and name ID could at least make this contest a race, hence the NRSC’s aggressive recruitment, but barring a double-dip recession or some other dramatic shift in the political climate, he’d still be little more than a sacrificial lamb. The NRSC is looking for a candidate who can draw Democratic money, energy and focus into Washington state and out of contests where Republicans have a better shot at making gains — the 50-state strategy, and all that — and Rossi would play that role well. But it’s not at all clear that Rossi is selfless enough to sacrifice his own political career for the greater good of his beloved Prefers GOP Party.

“I said, ‘Hey Dino, you know as long as you’re in limbo, it does make it a little more difficult for those of us out here doing this,’” Benton recalled. “He said, ‘I’m sorry for that, but I’m on nobody’s timetable but my own.’”

Not exactly the sentiment of a guy willing to take one for the team. And as for the “timetable” Rossi’s on, I’m still guessing it’s for an express bus to the 2012 gubernatorial campaign.

That would explain Rossi’s months-long political striptease, for while the clock’s quickly running out on a serious 2010 challenge, all this hemming and hawing only serves to keep Rossi’s name in the news and in front of voters in advance of one last shot at the governor’s mansion. And it would also account for Attorney General Rob McKenna’s inexplicable public lurch to the right, for how else to explain McKenna willfully ripping that carefully crafted mask of moderation from his face, if not to position himself for gubernatorial primary battle against Rossi?

Rossi ran for governor for nearly five years straight, and now he’s contemplating an impulse run for U.S. Senate? I don’t think so. He’s raised no money, he’s hired no consultants and he’s assembled no staff. In fact, his usual cast of staffers and advisors are already committed to other candidates and races. So a last minute run at Murray would just strike me as somewhat out of character.

And foolhardy. Murray is no pushover, and she not only enjoys enthusiastic support from our state’s Democratic majority, her well-earned reputation for both bringing home the bacon and defending our state’s economic interests has endeared her to business interests who more typically find themselves in the Republican camp. Hell… I even think Murray stands a good shot at winning the Seattle Times endorsement… even in a head to head with Rossi.

So yeah, I’m with Benton on this one. I just don’t see it.

The only “will of the people” that counts in this state is if you’re Tim Eyman or a Republican. If you voted for smaller class sizes some years back, tough cookies.

The budget cuts millions from K-12, higher education and other state services. It directs state agencies to save around $50 million through furloughs or other pay reductions for some state employees.

For K-12, the budget cuts mean $120 million less for the state’s public schools. Education advocates say those cuts, on top of the ones made last year, are going to hurt.

Lawmakers, for example, eliminated $79 million in funding for the class-size reduction initiative, I-728.

“That was one of the last pots of discretionary money that districts had,” said Dan Steele of the Washington State School Directors Association.

OTOH, if you’re a coal fired power plant “the people” are with you. The Republicans keep carping on the meme that state government is broken and doesn’t respond to the will of the people. Yeah, no shit. People voted by a large margin to tax themselves to get smaller class sizes, yet here we are again. But we have to call special sessions to deal with certain initiatives, lest the editorial board fainting couches collapse.

As usual the GOP-editorial board complex has it bass ackwards–the biggest problem is a viciously regressive tax system that relies far too heavily on revenue that crashes and burns during economic downturns. Then we cut education, rinse, repeat, seemingly at least once a decade. Way to compete in a global economy!

I’m sure all those candidates out there wandering around claiming they are about “job, jobs, job,” will acknowledge all this. Or not. Easier to start screaming about sex offenders I suppose.

I don’t even really bother following the session that much any more, it’s all so predictable. Fuck you, Washington students and teachers, you eat it again. Maybe the coal mine will reopen.

I just finished answering a rather lengthy opinion poll conducted by McGuire Research out of their Las Vegas office, and while the woman on the other end was awfully nice, I couldn’t stop chuckling at the some of the questions, as well as the fact that she continually referred to Sen. Patty Murphy. It was also rather amusing when she got to the section reading back statements of what some of Dino Rossi’s critics had said of him, and two of them could have been lifted directly from my blog.

But the best part was when I not only answered questions on health care reform, but went on to elaborate when the pollster expressed surprise. For example, she didn’t know that HCR eliminated pre-existing conditions, or that it didn’t cover 100% of all Americans, or that it didn’t reduce Medicare benefits. Now she does.

Anyway, needless to say, Sen. Murray came out on top with at least one respondent.

I just got finished listening to 25 minutes of Rep. Dave Reichert recorded at his recent campaign kickoff fundraising breakfast, and from his rambling, pointless and incoherent speech, one might think his head injury was more serious than was first let on… that is, if we didn’t already know Reichert for his rambling, pointless and incoherent speeches.

In fact, what’s most striking about Reichert’s comments is not what he says, but what he doesn’t say. Mostly he talks about his head injury, his hospitalization and his hair, with a sprinkling of platitudes about how he stands with Americans and for freedom. But what he doesn’t talk about are any issues. Nothing about the economy, nothing about unemployment, nothing about the environment or immigration or  Wall Street regulatory reform or any of the many other problems we send our representatives to the other Washington to solve.

In fact, the only policy issue Reichert even remotely addresses is health care, and even then, only to regale his audience with tales of his own brush with our health care system, and to reassure them that he took advantage of every opportunity he had to vote against extending health care access to millions of under- and uninsured Americans.

Speaking of which, here is a clip of one of the biggest crowd pleasers of the morning, an anecdote where he compares the removal of medical tape to waterboarding:

[audio:http://horsesass.org/wp-content/uploads/Reichert-Torture.mp3]

Hey, I was tortured while I was at the hospital. Uh, have you ever been in the hospital they put this tape on , for IVs and stuff like that. They use super glue. You know that? I’m not kidding. It’s super glue. I had six IVs: one on the top of my left hand, one on the top of my right, one in each wrist and one on each elbow, and they use super glue.

And uh, so when I’m being released, you know, they got to rip this stuff off. I mean I think I’m tough… am I tough Jon? I thought I was tough. The guy told me, the nurse came in and said, “Hey this is going to hurt.” I said okay, I think I can handle that. And he goes rip. And I go “Holy —!”  Sorry. I said, then he goes, he goes, “I’m sorry.” Yeah right, so he does another rip and I said “Shit…!” You know, I say “Why don’t you just water-board me? What do you want to know? I’ll tell you anything you want to know!”

That’s a joke everybody. I mean, if anybody’s got, if you got your, you got your little video phone or somehow, and post this on Google… I’m against torture. Except if you’re in the hospital, I guess it’s the same. Yeah that hurts, man I’ll tell ya.

So I guess there was a policy statement in there after all, as I suppose we can deduce from this anecdote that Reichert apparently believes that waterboarding is indeed torture. But then, he also believes that ripping off a Band-Aid is torture too, and he’s not afraid to say so, even at the risk of somebody posting it “on Google.”

Oh man… can’t get enough of those torture jokes. Hah, hah!

State Senator Don Benton, R-Vancouver, has been talking to Drudgico:

Benton warned that Rossi might find the 2010 campaign a less hospitable environment than he expects.

“Democrats have already attacked Dino. He doesn’t have any money in the bank, he doesn’t have any money raised. He doesn’t have the foundation. The talent pool is pretty much committed for this election cycle. It’s too late for him to become a viable candidate in this race,” Benton said, adding: “I think he would make an excellent governor and hope he decides to run for governor again.”

Okay then, Benton has spoken, Dino. Your move!

Maybe another Moore poll, followed by a Rasmussen poll, followed by a Chris Grygiel post at Strange Bedfellows? You guys seem to have that all worked out, you might as well try it once again. It got Rossi to the brink of not running and having no money.

As has been the case throughout most of our nation’s history, the public debate on immigration is fueled by emotion a helluva lot more than it is by logic. But former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich cuts through the heat to suggest how our immigration policy can have a significant impact on our efforts to assure long term solvency for Social Security and Medicare:

Forty years ago there were five workers for every retiree. Now there are three. Within a couple of decades, there will be only two workers per retiree. There’s no way just two workers will be able or willing to pay enough payroll taxes to keep benefits flowing to every retiree.

This is where immigration comes in. Most immigrants are young because the impoverished countries they come from are demographically the opposite of rich countries. Rather than aging populations, their populations are bursting with young people.

Yes, I know: There aren’t enough jobs right now even for Americans who want and need them. But once the American economy recovers, there will be. Take a long-term view and most new immigrants to the U.S. will be working for many decades.

Get it? One logical way to deal with the crisis of funding Social Security and Medicare is to have more workers per retiree, and the simplest way to do that is to allow more immigrants into the United States.

Immigration reform and entitlement reform have a lot to do with one another.

But then, why be logical about such things when there’s so much to gain politically by blaming brown people for our economic woes.

According to an article on TPM, the teabaggers are attempting to rebrand their “movement” as less violent, less racist and less, well crazy. But judging from Eli Sanders’s coverage of a Tea Party rally in Yakima over the weekend, they still have a ways to go.

Whether it’s explaining that “the only difference between Barack Obama and Adolf Hitler” is the Jew killing thing, or inexplicably attempting to vilify Patty Murray by magic-markering a yarmulke on the Senator’s head, the Yakima teabaggers haven’t quite internalized the kinder/gentler message yet. The crazy/racist/anti-semitic stuff though, now that they have down pat.

And yet these are the folks to whom Rob McKenna has chosen to pander in attempting to solidify his position as the GOP frontrunner for governor in 2012. Go figure.

Some breaking news this morning:

BOTHELL, Wash. — The Seattle Times printing facility in Bothell was evacuated this morning due to a strange odor that made some workers feel sick.

The incident happened around 6:30 a.m. just off 120th Avenue NE, near NE 195th Street. At this point, officials don’t know what the odor is or where it is coming from.

They have not activated a full hazmat response.