HorsesAss.Org

“Uh-oh,” I thought as I saw the headline in the Seattle Times: “Sound Transit light-rail train kills man on tracks in Seattle.” All those anti-rail zealots will crawl out of the woodwork disingenuously arguing that at-grade light rail (traveling at the same speed as the surrounding cars and buses) is an inherently unsafe technology. And then I read the article…

The victim, identified only as an adult male, was struck along a transit corridor between Fourth Avenue South and Sixth Avenue South a few blocks south of Safeco Field. Police spokeswoman Renee Witt said early information from traffic-collision investigators indicates that as the southbound train approached, the man — for unknown reasons — climbed over a concrete Jersey barrier south of South Holgate Street and “jumped into the path of the train.”

That’s right… the man was struck along the non-pedestrian transit corridor after climbing over a barrier and jumping in front the train. The headline implies “train kills man,” when in reality it should have read “man kills self.”

And for this, John Niles and his so-called Coalition for Effective Transportation Alternatives argues Sound Transit should be legally and financially liable?

UPDATE:
Clearly, rendering trucks are an inherently unsafe technology:

Washington State Patrol troopers say a rendering truck that lost its load scattered dead animal parts across the northbound lanes of Interstate 5 in Tacoma.

Of course, I suppose that’s preferable to scattering the freeway with live animal parts—that would have been eerie—but icky nonetheless.

UPDATE, UPDATE:
Souped up 1974 Chevy Novas are an inherently unsafe technology.

UPDATE, UPDATE, UPDATE:
Merce Cunningham dead at 90. Clearly, modern dance is an inherently unsafe technology.

The Politics Blog at The Olympian reports that the RNC is targeting Rep. Brian Baird (WA-03) with negative ads over health care reform. And surprise, surprise, the Republican ad has false information in it.

The ad includes an obvious false claim about the extent to which Democrats have recently added to the national debt. That outstanding public debt is $11.6 trillion, according to the U.S. Treasury’s Bureau of the Public Debt — more than $10 trillion of it run up before President Obama took office. (Perhaps the RNC meant deficit, not debt.)

Yeah, right, just another innocent error from the Republicans.

Anyhow, folks should probably be calling their members of Congress to tell them we need health care reform with the public option NOW. The righties are good at working their wingnuts into a lather, so if nothing else folks in the Congressional offices could stand to hear from a wider range of citizens about how we really, really have to fix the health care system, and that inaction is not acceptable.

But I suppose if you want to have some fun while calling you can say “Hi, I’m calling about Obama’s birth certificate” and then go “just kidding!”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RADPnKE2Uak[/youtube]

If you want to know why this state’s Republican Congressmen (and Congresswoman) can’t just laugh off the conspiracy theories surrounding Obama’s citizenship status, take a look at the comment threads of Sound Politics.

UPDATE: More insanity from our trolls:

Its so neat you tards have a cute little name to cover up for a guy born in Kenya. Even the Ambassador himself said his birthplace in “KENYA” was an national attraction for their citizens.

I love this conspiracy theory. There’s simply no lie too outrageous for these clowns to believe. It’s a remarkable study in willful ignorance.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1o1p_ly7Yw[/youtube]

Mike Stark is at it again, this time ambushing Republican congresspersons to ask them whether or not they believe Barack Obama is a natural born citizen of the United States, and thus constitutionally eligible to be president.

Some of them, like our own Dave Reichert (WA-08), simply obfuscate (his inarticulate and poorly illustrated response is particularly amusing), while others, like Cathy McMorris Rodgers (WA-05) actually run away from the camera… though not before admitting “We’re all going to find out… I’d like to see the documents.”

Huh. She sure does sound like a birther to me. Even while Ann Coulter, of all people, is calling the birthers “cranks.”

When Coulter has become the GOP’s voice of reason, you know the party is in trouble.

One story I never got around to covering over the weekend was Saturday’s signature gathering deadline for R-71, the church-backed referendum to repeal Washington’s recently expanded domestic partners statute. R-71 backers claimed they turned in about 138,000 signatures, almost 18,000 more than the 120,577 needed to qualify for the ballot, but as Sec. of State spokesman Dave Ammons says, that slight cushion still only puts this measure in the “iffy range.”

On average, about 18% of signatures are disqualified due to duplicates, mismatched signatures, incorrect address information, or simply because they didn’t come from registered voters; historically, invalidation rates in Washington have ranged from as low as 8% to as high as 25%. (In some states, blatant acts of signature fraud have driven invalidation rates well over 50%.)

Assuming the 138,000 signature estimate is accurate, that means R-71 would fail to qualify for the ballot if a mere 12.7% of signatures are ruled invalid.

So what are R-71’s chances? Tim Eyman recently qualified I-1033 with a 12% invalidation rate, but that’s unusually low for him, and he does have more than a decade of experience running professional petition drives. Perhaps the R-71 petition drive was more centralized and organized than I thought, but I’d be slightly surprised to see them pull this one off with such a small cushion.

Regardless, there should be some fun coming out of Olympia later this week as the Sec. of State’s office goes through the tedium of matching every signature to the voter registration rolls. First they’ll count (and recount) the signatures to give them a starting point, and then they’ll go through the petitions line by line, reporting the number of valid signatures versus the number of invalid ones, giving us a running total of the invalidation rate up to that point, and thus the ever shifting odds on R-71’s ballot prospects. Once enough signatures have been qualified or disqualified to determine the outcome, the counting stops.

Stay tuned.

Think Progress notes that thousands of formerly classified images that show the impact of global warming on the Arctic and elsewhere, including Washington’s South Cascade Glacier, have been released after a group of scientists filed a declassification request. This is truly unnerving stuff, click through if you wish. The photos of the Beaufort Sea speak for themselves.

And since it’s very hot today, I get to point out to certain unsound pinheads that climate change is real, since they always claim it’s not whenever they see a snowflake.

I suppose now they’ll just start saying that the South Cascade Glacier is actually in Kenya or something.

A lot of other blogs and newsy sites tend to shut down over the weekend, but not HA, because we’re writers, and write is what we do. So in case you missed it, here’s a summary of the some of the more important stories, commentaries and observations posted over the weekend:

Is the public option a “slippery slope” to single-payer?
Gov. Howard Dean spoke about healthcare reform at Town Hall Friday night, and as he was finishing signing books, I asked him if Republican critics are right when they claim that the public option is merely a slippery slope to a single-payer system. And his answer…? Listen to the audio for yourself.

Stars and Steel Bars
King County Initiative 100, whose aim was to prevent the building of a new jail, fell short of the number of signatures needed to qualify for the ballot. But as Lee reports, the campaign did raise an important question as to why “we’re considering such a costly infrastructure investment that hardly anyone wants and is not necessary”…?

U.S. Rep. Rick Steves?
Those righties who just hate travel writer Rick Steves for his outspoken advocacy for ending our prohibition on marijuana, and who spit up bile watching his humanizing PBS travelogue of Iran, will go absolutely nuts at the thought of Steves running for Congress. But word is, that’s exactly what Steves plans to do when Rep. Jay Inslee steps down to run for governor.

Inslee announces agreement on Medicare reimbursement
And speaking of Rep. Inslee, the WA-01 Democrat held a sparsely attended press conference Saturday to announce a major healthcare agreement he helped broker, that nobody in our local press seems interested in covering. I’ll have more later today.

I went looking for my usual Monday morning fodder on the Seattle Times editorial page, only to be confronted with these headlines from the Times’ home page:

Huh. I suppose that’s one way to deal with the Nightmare on Fairview. If only it were that easy.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7684tTVUeI[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAkg6G8iXQI[/youtube]

Rep. Jay Inslee (WA-01) held a press conference this afternoon at Seattle’s Childrens Hospital to announce an agreement struck to correct the dramatic regional disparities between Medicare reimbursement rates, disparities that have penalized Washington’s relatively efficient healthcare delivery system to the tune of tens of of millions of dollars a year. It is also an agreement that, as I will explain later, helps pave the way to a public option.

Above is raw footage of Rep. Inslee’s announcement. Stay tuned for additional footage, selected clips and further analysis.

For some non-local news, there’s an interesting scandal brewing in Alabama. It involves a janitor named Lorenza Hooks at the State House in Montgomery who was busted in 2006 after video footage showed him carrying a backpack (which he admits was his) containing two pounds of marijuana (which he claimed was not his) into a legislator’s office. Not only was Hooks not charged, but he kept his job. Eighteen months later, in May 2008, he became a suspect in a shooting and was put on leave from his job. This May, as the Legislative Council debated whether to reinstate Hooks, a legislator learned about the backpack incident and raised it as an issue, causing him to receive death threats. No reference to the incident was found in his personnel file. After failing to be given his job back, Hooks was arrested earlier this month on drug charges.

Loretta Nall is trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

Last week’s contest turned out to be a tough one. It wasn’t solved until Tuesday afternoon when wes.in.wa came up with the correct location of Auburn, Alabama. The building pictured was Cater Hall, on the campus of Auburn University. That’s two in a row for wes.

I’ve generally been treating these posts as open threads, but last week got way out of hand, so I’ll be deleting any off topic nonsense from the threads from now on.

For those new to the contest, you can click the picture below to go to the bing.com map tool. Click the ‘Bird’s eye’ button to switch to Bird’s Eye view and search away.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!

Everybody knows that Democratic U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee (WA-01) has long had his eye on the governor’s mansion, and is widely expected to give up his House seat to run for our state’s top office in 2012. But who of note has his eye on Rep. Inslee’s coveted House seat, once it becomes vacant?

Word is that noted travel writer and TV and radio personality Rick Steves is seriously considering giving up his globetrotting ways for an extended stay in the other Washington, and is already working the local Democratic circuit in preparation for a potential run. The latest evidence? Steves jumped at the offer to be the keynote speaker at the Snohomish County Dems’ Annual Gala fundraiser on Sept. 12.

Yes, I know, 2012 is quite a ways off, but it wasn’t so long ago that Inslee was a top candidate for the number one or two position in President Obama’s Department of Energy, giving Steves a more immediate opportunity to explore his own political ambitions. And it was during this time, with a potential special election looming, that Steves reportedly firmed up his intention to run.

Through his popular guidebooks, website, radio and TV shows, the ever likable and seemingly unflappable Steves has expanded his Edmunds WA based tour business into a low-key, travel empire, making himself a nationally known public figure in the process. And in recent years, Steves has increasingly leveraged his national audience and stature to insert his own unique experiences into the public debate.

While his website is still largely devoted to his tour business and travel guides, it now contains an entire section devoted to “Social Activism,” including commentary arguing for a “European perspective” on drug control policy (he urges America not to be “hard” or “soft,” but rather, “smart on drugs”), and a link to his controversial ACLU-sponsored video urging the end of our nation’s failed “prohibition on marijuana.” Steves has also recently earned himself the unbridled hatred of many on the knee-jerk right for his thoughtful documentary on traveling through Iran, in which he shows the Iranian people as anything but an axis of evil.

But rather than protect his business by pulling back from his activism in the face of increasingly strident attacks, Steves chose to respond to his critics with a new book, “Travel as a Political Act.” Indeed, it appears that the harsh reaction from the right has only served to further politicize Steves.

For the life me, can’t understand why Steves would want to give up what appears to be one of the best jobs in the world for one which often appears to be one of the worst (I once phrased the same question to KIRO radio host and former WA-08 contender Dave Ross, who genuinely, it seems, believes in something he calls “public service”), and with 2012 such a long ways off, Steves still has plenty of time to come to his senses. But if he doesn’t, I think he’d make a great candidate, and while not everybody will be as thrilled as fellow HA blogger Lee, I know a lot of folks who would welcome Steves to the race.

The initiative campaign against the new jail, I-100, fell short of its signature goal. I-100 wouldn’t have directly prevented the jail from being built. It would have only forced the city to analyze alternatives, examine the racial disparity in the prison population, and then put the question up for a vote. In the failure, however, there appears to be one potential bright spot [emphasis mine]:

The deadline for turning in the signatures is Thursday and theoretically the campaign could ask for a 20-day extension, said campaign manager Natalie Novak.

However, Novak said the campaign raised an issue “no one really knew about before.” Additionally, the county has said it would allow cities to bring people to the jail for misdemeanors beyond 2012. The county had said the cities had to stop before 2012, setting off the debate over building a jail.

I’m not entirely sure what that means for the overall jail debate now. If anyone has more specifics, please feel free to share in the comments or email me directly. I still remain puzzled that with our economy in the condition it’s in that we’re considering such a costly infrastructure investment that hardly anyone wants and is not necessary. And despite what many I-100 opponents have insisted, we’re not diverting anywhere near as many people as we should be. This was made abundantly clear in a report from Nina Shapiro at Seattle Weekly back in January [again, emphasis mine]:

While liberal groups have fought for years for more lenient drug policies, our state’s financial woes are helping accomplish what their arguments alone could not. This is true at the county level as well. Faced with a $5 million budget cut to his office, King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg in October started kicking felony cases involving less than three grams of narcotics down to District Court, where they are prosecuted as misdemeanors. He says the move affects two-thirds of his caseload.

Meanwhile, the King County jail is already nearly full, and the county has said it will no longer have room for misdemeanor prisoners from the cities as of 2012. So Seattle and several suburban cities have started planning to build a new multimillion-dollar jail of their own.

There just isn’t any ambiguity about this. When two-thirds of our county prosecutor’s caseload involves people with less than .003 kg of drugs or less, our local court systems are being clogged with low-level drug offenders. If you hear any local politician talking about how we already do a good job of diverting these folks out of the system, they’re lying. We don’t. In fact, we shouldn’t be arresting any of them in the first place, which is what Portugal decided to do in 2001, and it’s been an unquestioned success.

This problem is understood in the most morally bankrupt light when we see the affect that aggressively prosecuting low-level drug offenses has on the African-American community:

While African-Americans are represented in King County average daily jail population by six times their percentage of population, five Seattle public schools that primarily serve African-American communities were closed this year to save the school system a meager $3 million.

Somehow, the city of Seattle had $110 million for a new jail, but couldn’t seem to locate $3 million to save some schools. I think that says everything you need to know about how Seattle’s city leadership views its minority communities.