HorsesAss.Org

A poor economy and, of all things, political wrangling (!) have created an uncertain future for the Columbia River Crossing project, the effort to build a new bridge between Portland and Vancouver.

From The Oregonian:

In an interview with The Oregonian late Thursday, Portland Mayor Sam Adams said he would release a statement today saying he will suspend his support for a bridge of up to 12 lanes, a compromise deal he helped write with Vancouver Mayor Royce E. Pollard in February. That deal helped get Portland City Council agreement for a bridge of up to 12 lanes, something Vancouver wanted in exchange for its support of Portland’s much-desired light rail extension across the bridge.

“I’ll respect the will of the voters in Vancouver and Clark County on light rail,” Adams said. “I just want to make it real clear: No tolls, no bridge. No light rail, no support from me on the Columbia River Crossing.”

Translation: there will be no “grand compromise,” and there likely won’t be a new bridge. At least that’s how I see it. They’ll fool around eliminating interchange improvements and such, but this thing has been leaking water for quite a while, and that’s a shame. Hooking Clark County up to Portland’s already extensive light rail system would be a forward thinking and perhaps vital transportation achievement for the region, especially when oil prices skyrocket again.

As The Oregonian article notes, possible tolls on a new span have become a hot issue in the race for Vancouver mayor, which pits long-time incumbent Royce Pollard against sitting council member and developer-toady Tim Leavitt.

A lot of folks bemoan the duplicity of politicians, so it’s kind of demoralizing to see Pollard receiving such a strong challenge mainly because Leavitt has seized upon populist opposition to tolls to advance his campaign, while Pollard has been intellectually honest about them for years. With state and federal transportation funds drying up, it does seem wildly unlikely a new bridge will be built without them.

I’ve long held that tolls should only be used for construction and maintenance costs, not “traffic demand management,” as a recognition that the public might see TDM as unfairly punitive to low and moderate income folks. Tolling bridges to pay for construction costs is such a common practice historically that you kind of wonder why anyone would even question it, other than this region has little experience with tolls compared to the east coast and midwest.

So here we are about one year after the worst financial shock since the Great Depression, with the official unemployment rate in Clark County at 13.9%, and we can’t build a bridge. What should have happened, of course, was that construction should have started on Jan. 30, and as thousands of construction jobs were created the regional economy would have received a tremendous boost; a jump-start if you will.

That’s not realistic, as it would have taken longer even if any kind of decision had been made, but really. Enough is enough. The region needs to have the I-5 spans replaced, and woe to the region if Leavitt unseats Pollard and has to stick to his anti-tolling position.

Our ancestors built the Golden Gate bridge, essentially putting their own homes at risk to finance it, in the midst of the Depression, but that was another time and place. We can’t build any bridges now, over water, over land or to the same definition of reality.

The ultimate irony to me, as someone who fought for better school funding and for making developers pay their fair share during the housing bubble, is that the nihilistic approach would be to oppose any new bridge, because as congestion continues to mount fewer people will want to endure the hassle of commuting from Clark County. The existing spans become, in effect, a de facto toll measured in hours wasted, which will mean fewer jobs and fewer houses in Clark County.

But silly me, I hope to have a vital, functioning economy in this region for my kids to enjoy, and a big part of that is making sure goods and people can be transported smoothly back and forth across the river, and the current spans simply aren’t up to the job.

Which states have the worst record in reproductive health?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYHJwkWfMTc[/youtube]

Oh man, do I feel dirty. Yesterday I agreed with Seattle Times editorial columnist Bruce Ramsey. And today I agree with (ugh) Katie Riley, as she argues in support of former US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s crusade to end judicial elections.

Washington voters will remember the bruising supreme court justice races in 2006, when the Building Industry Association of Washington targeted the well-respected Chief Justice Gerry Alexander with unseemly and misleading ads. Alexander prevailed but the experience left many observers of Washington’s judicial elections uneasy at the close call — except, interestingly enough, the chief justice himself, who remains strongly in favor of judicial elections.

Advocates argue the system worked, that the nasty campaign spawned a voter backlash that saved Alexander. But I agree with those who argue the conversation would be much different if Alexander had been ousted.

[…]

However, the surprising truth about Washington’s judicial election system is that most judges aren’t elected. They arrive on the bench through a gubernatorial appointment. Of the state’s 218 elected judges on the supreme, appeals and superior courts, 60 percent of them were appointed by the governor, according to a 2009 study by Washington State University professors. And when they come up for re-election, 84 percent of incumbent judges are unchallenged.

Count me with those who think a citizen-based nominating commission, similar to that recommended by the 1996 Walsh Commission, would be a better way. The nominating commission would vet candidates and recommend the best to the governor for appointment. The judges would stand for retention elections.

My recollection is, that’s the way we did it in Pennsylvania, and as irritating as it may be for some folks out here to hear, there are things to be learned from other states… even East Coast ones.

Problem is, one of my rules of political thumb is that nobody ever votes for less democracy, and that’s exactly how such sensible reform would be misrepresented by opponents should it ever come to the ballot. That’s why I don’t find it surprising to hear Justice Alexander voice his support for the current system; he is, after all, subject to it, and any perceived opposition to direct election of judges could be effectively used against him in the next election. So the leadership to address this issue before it corrupts our judicial system must come from the governor and the legislature, as well as the editorial boards and other opinion leaders.

Over the past decade the US Chamber of Commerce alone has spent hundreds of millions of dollars influencing local judicial elections, an effort that has successfully flipped the ideological balance at the Supreme Court and appellate level in several states. I just don’t think that’s what the framers of Washington’s constitution had in mind when they enacted judicial elections as a safeguard against the railroad barons and bankers who had previously dominated the region’s government.

For those of you eagerly waiting for a blogger like me to be financially ruined in a libel suit, all I can say is, this ain’t England:

The libel laws of England and Wales are notorious. Libel cases cost little to bring — you can make a no-win-no-fee arrangement with your lawyer — but a lot to defend. According to a recent report, the average cost of defending a libel case in England and Wales is 140 times greater than it is in most of the rest of Europe.

Moreover, English libel law favors the claimant — the person who says he or she has been defamed — in several ways. For one, the range of defenses is more limited than in other jurisdictions. For another, in English libel cases, the burden of proof is effectively on the defendant. In other words, the defamatory statement is presumed to be false unless the defendant can prove it is true.

[…] The problem the libel laws create is not so much that critical stories can’t be written, but that they won’t be. As the conversations I had this summer show, for many journalists and their employers the potential for a libel case is a powerful deterrent to criticism: the pieces aren’t worth the hassle.

Yup, if you long for our libel laws to be used to slap down a few of us meddlesome bloggers, that’s exactly the type of journalistic climate of fear you obviously hope to create. But unfortunately for you, here in the U.S., we have something called the First Amendment. So eat me.

Oh geebus.

Protesters who attended Saturday’s Tea Party rally in Washington found a new reason to be upset: Apparently they are unhappy with the level of service provided by the subway system.

Rep. Kevin Brady called for a government investigation into whether the government-run subway system adequately prepared for this weekend’s rally to protest government spending and government services.

Seriously.

Please note that the above item is from the Wall Street Journal, that complete communist-socialist-Hawaiian rag.

I’ll type slowly, so conservatives can follow along.

Anti-government protesters and their supporters are complaining about a government service that delivered them to their anti-government protest.

It’s exactly like what happened to the barefoot soldiers at Valley Forge, except the soldiers at Valley Forge couldn’t go home and stock up on frozen meatballs at a Wal-Mart in suburban Virginia.

(Props to Eschaton.)

Susan Hutchison points to a handful of so-called “Democratic” endorsers to bolster her claims of bipartisanship, but delve a little deeper under the scarlet “D” and an interesting pattern emerges:

Former US Rep. Don Bonker (D-WA)… generally considered to be a conservative Dem, who “opposes abortion as a matter of personal philosophy.”

Former US Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-IN)… generally considered to be a conservative Dem, who was widely thought to have lost a shot at the VP spot on Bill Clinton’s 1992 ticket due to his support of restrictions on abortion rights.

Democratic Lt. Governor Brad Owen… widely considered to be one of the most conservative Democrats in the Washington State Senate during his tenure there, and who not surprisingly, is anti-choice.

Notice the pattern? As for Hutchison’s other two “Democratic” endorsers, former Seattle Mayor Wes Uhlman and State Auditor Brian Sonntag, well, I don’t know where either one stands on reproductive rights, though I’ve emailed Sonntag bluntly asking him the question. But, I do know that Uhlman has a history of endorsing Republicans, while Sonntag, given his penchant for conspiring with Tim Eyman, speaking at teabagger rallies and publicly endorsing conservative Republicans like Hutchison… well… I take personal offense at him continuing to call himself a Democrat.

Let’s be clear, when I vigorously opposed the campaign of Republican Dan Satterberg for King County Prosecutor, I was endlessly frustrated by the impressive list of prominent Democrats who endorsed him… but only because he managed to garner an actual impressive list of Democratic endorsements. By comparison, Hutchison’s claim of bipartisan support is a total sham, consisting of three, long-retired politicians, and two of the most conservative and disloyal Democratic elected officials in the state.

Thanks to the bullshit initiative making county elections officially nonpartisan, Hutchison’s chances aren’t handicapped by being forced to put an “R” next to her name, but that doesn’t make her any less of a conservative Republican. And any cooperation she gets from our local media in perpetrating this lie would be a disservice to King County voters.

UPDATE:
According to his 2008 KC Dems candidate questionnaire, Sonntag says he’s pro-choice. But he’s sure as hell wrong about Hutchison.

It should also be noted, by the way, that of Hutchison’s five Democratic endorsers, only Uhlman is a native or resident of King County.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVgOl3cETb4[/youtube]

Folks are poking fun at mayoral candidate Mike McGinn for a press release giving the address of the Columbia City light rail station as Empire Way S and S Edmunds St., pointing out that Empire Way was renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Way after a contentious battle back in 1983.

But I just checked the trusty Map app on my iPhone and it insists that MLK Jr. Way only runs southbound, while the northbound lanes are correctly called Empire Way… and since Google surely would have fixed their maps had they been given two-and-a-half years notice, I can only assume that the Google is right, and everybody else is wrong.

I hate to say it, but I agree with Bruce Ramsey and Rev. Joe Fuiten. Sorta.

In May, the Rev. Joe Fuiten of Cedar Park Church, Bothell, appealed to his fellow conservative Christians not to challenge the state’s new domestic-partnership law for same-sex couples.

Yes, they could collect signatures and put the law on the ballot and hope to overturn it. That is the right of referendum. But the polls, he said, “show us behind.” Fuiten warned: “If we make a referendum effort and fail, the other side will conclude the public is with them.”

Yes, they will — and the fight will be over.

Absolutely.

The bird-in-the-hand side of me would have preferred R-71 hadn’t qualified for the ballot (and in fact, I’m not entirely convinced it legitimately did), but I nonetheless believe that it stands a strong chance of passing. And if it does, it will rightly be perceived as a referendum on full-blown same-sex marriage itself.

How could it not? The anti-gay-rights forces will use the slippery slope argument as they always do, when they’re not outright misrepresenting the measure as doing more than it really does. And by branding the bill as the “Everything But Marriage Act,” the pro-gay-right side has virtually assured that the measure will be conflated with same-sex marriage in the minds of many voters… “don’t think of an elephant,” and all that.

So while R-71 really doesn’t give same-sex couples the same rights the rest of us enjoy, its passage at the polls would likely give legislators the backbone they need to move faster toward that final step. And as a connoisseur of irony, that’s an outcome I sure would enjoy.

From page two of a Politico piece this morning, concerning the Mad Max Blue Cross Defense Act of 2009:

The bill requires individuals to buy insurance, or else face penalties as high as $3,800 for a family. It would not mandate businesses to provide coverage for their employees – as the House bills do – but it would require them to defray the cost of any government subsidies for which their employees would qualify.

So with the lame “co-ops” instead of the public option, meaning no way to control costs or create meaningful competition, many Americans would be forced under threat of monetary fine to hand their money over to the same robber barons who have been ripping them off all along.

Unless progressives hold firm in the House, and start doing some effective work in the Senate, then all regular Americans should stock up on tea bags.

I mean, It’s okay to ask if half of a loaf of bread is better than none, but clearly half of a turd is not a half loaf of bread, it’s just a piece of shit.

The irony is simply rich, and breathtaking. Conservatives got all freaked out by stuff that either wasn’t in legislation or was not what they claimed, and the resulting hysteria has been used to create a Frankenstein monster that has drawn absolutely zero Republican support, not even from alleged moderate Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine. Never, ever take a Democrat with you to buy a car, people, you’ll wind up paying thousands over MSRP and you’ll probably have to fill it with oil and wash it yourself.

Republicans are assailing the Baucus Turd, so forgive my non-D.C. confusion, but WTF? We’re negotiating a compromise that the other side of the aisle is rejecting so we can either play filibuster or reconciliation games?

A few updates from around the area:

– As the extradition date for Canadian seed-seller Marc Emery approaches (he’s expected to be sentenced here in Seattle on Monday, September 28), a rally to protest his looming incarceration is being organized for this Saturday, September 19 at 10am, starting at the Space Needle.

– Medical marijuana patients protested the raids on Spokane’s dispensaries.

– The Tri-City Herald investigates an incident that shows that storylines from The Wire can happen even out in rural Eastern Washington as well. Wherever you go, the drug war inevitably leads to corruption.

– What’s wrong with Tom Carr? If you care about making sure he’s no longer our City Attorney after this year, his opponent in November, Pete Holmes, is having a fundraiser tomorrow (Wednesday) in downtown Seattle.

Please join us tonight for some politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. The festivities take place at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning at 8:00 pm.

It’s a good night for some scintillating conversation, a refreshing pint of beer, and a plate full of Resolutions of Disapproval.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2jZonQkTiE[/youtube]

Not in Seattle? The Drinking Liberally web site has dates and times for 337 other chapters of Drinking Liberally for you to shoot for.

I think I may have broken the law. Or maybe not. I’m not sure.

With my daughter vegging around the house Sunday, desperately avoiding her homework, I decided to watch a little bit of the Eagles-Panthers game, the problem being, the game wasn’t on TV. Still, I figured, nearly everything is available streaming online these days, and it didn’t take me too long to find what I was looking for.

Sure, I had to boot up my cranky old copy of Parallels/XP, and download some awkward piece of Windows software, but ten minutes later my MacBook was hooked up to my TV, and I was watching Donovan McNabb getting his ribs fractured in a live, if somewhat pixelated, full-screen picture. I would have paid for an easier, higher quality streaming option, but since the NFL wasn’t offering me one, I joined the thousands of other expatriate football fans willing to do what it takes to follow their out-of-market teams.

And following my team has been exceedingly difficult since moving to Seattle in 1992, the problem only exacerbated by the Seahawk’s 2002 move to the NFC West. The Eagles, perennial contenders, tend to be featured in a few nationally broadcast games each season, but during the intervening weeks the pickings are slim; even when the Eagles are featured in one of the weekly regional match-ups, Channel 13 tends to opt for something geographically closer.

Two or three times a year I trudge to a local sports bar to root on my Eagles, but I wasn’t about to drag my daughter to a bar, particularly at 10 in the morning. And I’m sure as hell not gonna pay the $1000-plus a year it would cost to both subscribe to DirectTV and purchase its NFL Sunday Ticket package, just for the privilege of watching maybe an additional dozen games at most.

So while Sunday’s stream kinda sucked, if the quality were a tad better I could imagine it becoming a bit of a habit.

Which raises the question… how fucking stupid must the NFL and the media companies be to drive potential paying customers like me into the arms of pirates, hackers and cheats? They certainly could stream games, but I suppose that would threaten Rupert Murdoch’s out-of-market monopoly. So instead, by refusing to address the demand that is already there, they are creating a market for free streaming that is technically impossible to quash, and will be very difficult to compete against once fans become conditioned to paying nothing.

Furthermore, it’s not at all clear that my private viewing of a live stream of an Over-The-Air broadcast from a Philadelphia station is even illegal. The unauthorized retransmission of this broadcast, that can’t be kosher, but my viewing of it on the Internet? I’m not so sure. How is this different from viewing infringing material on YouTube? And as for the ethical issues, it’s hard to feel guilty about watching an otherwise free, OTA broadcast, commercials and all, even if the NFL and News Corp. would rather I not.

I don’t know if I’ll watch another stream like this, but the point is I can, and there’s nothing the NFL can do to stop it. So rather than pretending these new technologies don’t exist, wouldn’t the NFL be better off offering a higher-quality, reasonably priced, paid streaming alternative, that didn’t turn avid fans into avid pirates? Hasn’t the rest of the entertainment industry learned anything from the mistakes of the music industry and its disastrously failed efforts to maintain the status quo?

It doesn’t take more than a few minutes of Googling to realize that nearly everything remotely streamable is available for streaming on the Internet, authorized or not, and yet Hollywood has its panties in a knot over the growing dominance of RedBox and its $1.00 rentals, while consumers in most of the rest of the world are exploiting the anarchy that is the Internet to remove themselves from the sales channel entirely.

If the studios are worried that $1.00 rentals might decimate their DVD sales, just imagine how hard they’ll find it to compete with free. The solution of course is to out-compete both RedBox and the pirates by aggressively putting their libraries online for streaming at competitive prices, before consumers learn habits that they’ll find very difficult to unlearn. Because one way or another, their content, just like the NFL’s is going to find its way online. The only question is who, if anybody, is going to profit from it.

One of the common refrains from those opposing health care reform is that they don’t want a government bureaucrat getting between them and their doctor, but what do an overwhelming majority of physicians prescribe for fixing our nation’s broken health care system…?

Among all the players in the health care debate, doctors may be the least understood about where they stand on some of the key issues around changing the health care system. Now, a new survey finds some surprising results: A large majority of doctors say there should be a public option.

[…]  Most doctors — 63 percent — say they favor giving patients a choice that would include both public and private insurance. That’s the position of President Obama and of many congressional Democrats. In addition, another 10 percent of doctors say they favor a public option only; they’d like to see a single-payer health care system. Together, the two groups add up to 73 percent.

That’s right, nearly three-quarters of doctors support a public option in one form or another, because more than their patients, they know how thoroughly broken the current system is. Support for a public option was “broad and widespread,” occurring at rough equal levels amongst all categories of doctors, and in rural and urban areas alike.

“Whether they lived in southern regions of the United States or traditionally liberal parts of the country,” says Keyhani, “we found that physicians, regardless — whether they were salaried or they were practice owners, regardless of whether they were specialists or primary care providers, regardless of where they lived — the support for the public option was broad and widespread.”

Support was widespread even amongst rank and file members of the AMA, which as an organization has lobbied against a public option. And what explains this surprising consensus?

Keyhani says doctors already have experience with government-run health care, with Medicare. And she says the survey shows that, overall, they like it. “We’ve heard a lot about how the government is standing in between patients and their physician,” Keyhani says. “And what we can see is that physicians support Medicare. So I think physicians have sort of signaled that a public option that’s similar in design to Medicare would be a good way of ensuring patients get the care that they need.”

We trust our doctors to make life and death decisions… to cut us open and reach inside our own bodies to mend or remove our parts. But will we trust our doctors to recommend the best health care reform alternatives?

NOTE:
You can listen to the NPR report below:

[audio:http://public.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/atc/2009/09/20090914_atc_10.mp3]

You don’t need to squint too hard between the lines of yesterday’s Alki Foundation endorsement of Dow Constantine to read a pretty damn stinging rebuke of Republican Susan Hutchison, and her qualifications for King County Executive… or rather, lack thereof:

Alki Chairman Michael Luis said the county exec’s race was a difficult one for the group. But Luis said it boiled down to this: “Susan Hutchison remains sort of a political unknown and just never made people totally comfortable that she was ready to take the reins of a complicated government.”

As a result, Constantine, a liberal Democrat, got the nod over Hutchison, a self-described “moderate nonpartisan” who says Constantine is responsible for the county’s financial problems and beholden to special interests.

Constantine is not perceived as a “business-type candidate,” Luis acknowledged. But he is “well known” and could walk into the exec’s job “knowing how the place works.” The general sense among the Alki group was that Hutchison “hadn’t made the case she could do the job,” Luis said.

Ouch. And that’s putting it lightly.

The exec endorsement was indeed a difficult one for Alki, the political arm of the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, but not in the sense that the final vote was all that close. This was a group strongly inclined to embrace Hutchison on ideological grounds, and she reportedly entered the process with a contingent of supporters at the Chamber. But after flubbing her interviews, she just couldn’t shake the impression that she was both uninformed and unqualified… and by a long shot.

Luis describes Hutchison as a “political unknown,” but then so is Joe Mallahan, and yet that didn’t stop the pro-business Chamber from endorsing the most pro-business of the two mayoral finalists. But when forced to pick between the liberal Constantine—who recently led the fight against Glacier Northwest’s Maury Island gravel mine—and the Cato-spouting, Discovery-Institute-board-sitting ex-newsreader Hutchison, pragmatism trumped ideology, and Alki members felt they had no choice but to endorse the only candidate who is professionally prepared to actually do the job.

Kinda ironic for Hutchison to lose the Chamber of Commerce’s endorsement when a central theme of her campaign has been her promise to declare the county “open for business.”

Hutchison has also pitched herself as the only candidate able to bring all parties to the table, yet it’s Constantine who is managing to put together a coalition of business, labor and environmental supporters, while Hutchison has largely distinguished herself through her union-baiting. If Hutchison does have any consensus building skills, they’ve mostly been utilized building a consensus for her opponent.