HorsesAss.Org

I understand that the political hoopla over yesterday’s scathing King County performance audit report is inevitable, with executive candidates falling all over themselves calling for government reform, but honestly, I’m not really sure what to make of it.

I don’t doubt that there are problems in county government, that there are some bad managers and messed up or missing procedures that need to be replaced or fixed. That’s true of all large bureaucracies, public and private sector, and that’s why we do performance audits in the first place.

But quite frankly, I’ve lost faith in State Auditor Brian Sonntag’s office to conduct and report performance audits fairly, honestly, and most of all, efficaciously.

As I’ve explained before, a performance audit is not a financial audit, does not come close to adhering to the same sort of strict, unwavering standards, and is neither objective nor irrefutable, even when done well. The primary goal of a financial audit is to keep the books honest and accurate by providing an outside, independent verification of an organization’s financial records, and as such, it is mostly an objective exercise in math. The primary goal of a performance audit is to uncover inefficiencies in procedures and/or execution, and to make recommendations on how to improve an organization’s operations. Performance audits are, by their nature, more subjective and less definitive.

Indeed, for a performance audit to be maximally effective it requires the active cooperation and participation of those being audited; when conducted well, a performance audit is meant to be a collaborative process. Unfortunately, by repeatedly using performance audits as a punitive political weapon—an opportunity to very publicly attack and humiliate state and local government officials—Sonntag has transformed his audits into an adversarial process that puts targeted agencies on the defensive, and thus works against the stated goal of increasing government efficiency.

Oh, Sonntag’s office proudly trumpets the millions of dollars the auditors claim that taxpayers might save if their recommendations were implemented, but how much taxpayers have saved, well, we have no idea. No idea which recommendations officials grudgingly implement after Sonntag’s orchestrated media thrashing, and no idea how effective these recommendations actually are.

I’m not refuting all or even some of the findings in the KC performance audit report; auditors appear to have uncovered some egregious and/or stupid practices. But I put the emphasis on “appear” because honestly, I don’t know that the report can be taken at face value, especially coming from an Auditor with a history of targeting his resources at agencies and programs he dislikes, and who has already compromised his impartiality by endorsing Susan Hutchison, the only Republican in the executive race, and the candidate with the least experience at running anything… other than her mouth.

Like I said, I understand all the hoopla and headlines. Journalists are famously skeptical of government agencies and officials. As they should be. It’s their job, and they wouldn’t be doing it properly if they didn’t jump all over a report like this.

But what really bugs the hell out of me about the coverage of this and previous Sonntag orchestrated hatchet jobs, is the complete and utter unquestioning credulity in which our media approaches the least audited agency in the state… the Auditor’s office itself.

It’s just a blip, things will be like before any day now.

Last month, Oregon’s jobless rate was 12.4 percent, second highest in the nation. Washington saw its rate climb to 9.4 percent, which mirrors the U.S. average. Employment trends in the metro area mirror statewide trends in Oregon and Washington.

In the 12 months through May, construction employment in the Portland-Vancouver metro region has declined by 10,800 jobs, the professional and business services sector is down 11,900 and manufacturing has given up 11,700 jobs, according to the Oregon employment agency. Manufacturing has been particularly hard hit, with losses in primary metal, down 300 jobs, and machinery manufacturing, off 200.

What we should do is lower interest rates about five points, that’ll work.

Huh? Why can’t we have negative interest rates, you some kind of fancy pants professor or something? If we paid people to borrow money to buy things they can’t afford, what could possibly go wrong? We’ll just recast the terms. Er, um, I’ll get back to you on the exact terminology, I don’t want to appear derivative.

Don’t you understand that neo-liberalism requires a steadfast, hands-off government approach that involves The Greenspanian suppression of interest rates at artificially low levels? What could be more hands off than Fed-created negative interest rates?

We also need a steadfast, hands-off attack on unionization, the root of all evil, and a steadfast, hands-off set of trade deals that steadfastly prevents any other governments from being nice to communists unions. And if anyone wants to see a doctor, that little issue must steadfastly be obfuscated (in a hands-off sort of way) in order to keep people healthy because WE’RE NUMBER ONE! WE’RE NUMBER ONE! USA! USA! JON AND KATE! JON AND KATE!

Here’s a sobering graph:

“Unemployment won’t peak until this time next year, and then it will remain very high through next year,” Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Economy.com, told the Post. “It won’t get back to full employment until 2013 or 2014. This really speaks to the severity of the job losses that have been absorbed by the economy. They were massive.”

So we’ve hollowed out our manufacturing sector even more, our financial sector is a basket case and the cost of higher education is skyrocketing. But if people would just buy more houses and cheap plastic crap to put in their houses it would all be over!

Jobs continue to be the biggest single concern for regular folks, but not for the jet-setting Wall Street thieves who ruined the economy in the first place. In their world nothing has really changed all that much. Forty years of dogma is hard to shake. Trust the invisible hand, my friends, even if it’s reaching into your pocket.

Part 1

Sen. Chris Dodd’s (D-Conn.) decision to support full marriage equality means that embattled statewide politicians can finally run toward marriage equality rather than away from it.

With his op-ed in the Meriden (Conn.) Record-Journal on Sunday, Dodd became the second U.S. Senator to change his mind in recent weeks, joining Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) who announced in May.

Nor should it be ignored that Rhode Island’s former Republican-turned independent Senator Lincoln Chafee also cast his vote for marriage equality with an op-ed in Bay Windows last week. Chafee was voted out of office in 2006–after a 16-point victory in his 2000 election–because Rhode Island voters couldn’t stomach the notion of having anyone associated with the Republican Party representing them in Washington. Now Chafee is positioning himself for a gubernatorial run.

It starts with a few states.

Part 2

Chris Dodd, with a strict emission standards and carbon tax proposal that won over the likes of Al Gore, had arguably the best energy plan out of the entire 2008 Democratic presidential field.

He was an early and forceful voice on FISA and has since discussed the idea of Bush administration torture trials. Plus he had the balls to endorse Ned Lamont over his long time colleague and King Rat Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) in 2006.

Now Dodd stands up for marriage equality in the middle of a re-election race that the Republicans are salivating all over.

He deserves more love from the left. If you know someone in Connecticut, where Dodd’s polling has been dismal all year, I suggest you call them.

A few weeks back I taunted the Seattle P-I for exploring the future of tolling on Washington state roads, by essentially printing a debate between two conservative analysts, Matt Rosenberg of the Discovery Institute and Michael Ennis of the Washingon Policy Center. To which the article’s author, Aubrey Cohen, responded in my comment thread:

While the Discovery Institute surely is as conservative as can be when it comes to teaching evolution, the Cascadia Center is progressive with regard to transportation policy. Tarring the Cascadia Center as conservative because of the Discovery Institute’s views on evolution makes no sense and is a disservice to progressives.

Cascadia Center is “progressive” with regard to transportation policy? Oh really, Aubrey?

So I guess it’s progressive to advocate taking money away from Sound Transit’s light rail to spend on a privatized, regional monorail? It’s progressive to demand $30 billion for more freeways, but nothing for street cars, bike lanes or light rail? An expensive Sounder station under Benaroya Hall, and an untested deep bore tunnel… these are progressive policies?

I’m not saying that all of Cascadia’s proposals are conservative (mostly, they’re just kinda nutty), or that transportation issues even tend to neatly line up along a progressive/conservative divide, but to describe either Matt Rosenberg or Cascadia as “progressive” is, quite frankly, ridiculous. And to suggest, as Cohen does, that a vehemently and cynically conservative organization such as Discovery has room within its ranks for a “progressive” transportation policy center, strains all credulity.

I mean, how twisted is the transportation debate in Washington state when the Discovery Institute is portrayed as representing the progressive side of the debate, and nobody bats an eye? And honestly, what does Bruce Chapman have to do in his advancing years to convince the Seattle establishment of his political dotage? What, seeking to destroy science education in our nation’s schools and replace it with Christianist hocus-pocus isn’t enough? Does he have to actually instigate pogroms? Burn witches at the stake? Wander naked through the halls of the Rainier Club, talking to angels?

The Discovery Institute isn’t just crazy-conservative, it’s downright crazy. Perhaps Cohen and others think people like me are crazy too, but “progressive” and “crazy” are not one and the same thing.

After eliminating the also-rans, and tossing Speaker Frank Chop as an outlier, the qualifying round wasn’t even close, with long-time incumbents Sharon Tomiko Santos, Mary Lou Dickerson and Phyllis Gutierrez Kenney topping the field, so now it’s time for a loser-takes-all, sudden death runoff in our efforts to determine the Seattle Democratic state representative most deserving of a serious challenger in 2010.

In making your choice, I urge you to consider three main criteria.  1) How well does the incumbent represent the progressive values of her district? 2) How effective is the incumbent in representing our interests. 3) How vulnerable is the incumbent to a serious challenge? (Please don’t forget number 3; that’s one of the reasons why I eliminated Chopp.)

Of course, there’s nothing scientific about these polls, and I don’t mean them to be a personal attack on anybody. But there is this sense in the local Democratic community that not only are such intra-party challenges futile, even discussing the possibility is somehow disloyal and wrong… an attitude that I believe leads to complacency and ineptness, and ultimately threatens the Democratic Party’s hold on the reigns of state government.

The poll is now live at the top of HA’s home page; cast your vote while you can.

According to the financial experts at the Seattle Times, Washington state’s economy is on the cusp of recovery, and Gov. Gregoire deserves all the credit:

Gov. Chris Gregoire made a tough decision this year not to ask for a tax increase, and legislators, some of them reluctantly, backed her up. That was the right decision, and it will soon begin to pay off.

Yeah… sure… the “tough decision” is always to not raise taxes. Man do they disrespect their readers.

So, our economy has almost-maybe bottomed out, and that’s evidence that holding the line on taxes worked its magic? Of course, had Gregoire and the legislature chosen the opposite course, that lede would have been rewritten thusly, even given the exact same economic circumstances:

Gov. Chris Gregoire broke a campaign promise not to ask for a tax increase, and legislators, some of them reluctantly, backed her up. That was the wrong decision, and Washington’s economy is already paying the price.

But then, given the Times’s history of crappy business decisions, why would anybody take its economic advice seriously?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW7OPByRGDY&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

[via C&L]

Here’s the case of an actual small business owner (as opposed to the apocryphal small business owners so frequently cited by large corporate interests) who supports the public option on health care and is speaking out.

Taylor, part-owner of TNT Software, will be a featured speaker at a major health care reform rally June 25 near the Capitol Mall. Sponsored by Health Care for America Now, a coalition of a thousand groups representing small businesses, health care providers, community organizers and labor unions, the rally will advocate for a government-run “public option” modeled on Medicare as part of national health care reform.

“Our message is that we need to support President Obama’s plan for a public health insurance option,” Taylor said last week. “Our feeling is that a public option should be available to every person in the U.S. As small business owners, that will give us another option, rather than having to rely on a single health care option.”

Funny, once you get outside the Chamber-AMA-right-wing-noise-machine nexus people actually like the public option. I’ve been wondering when more business folks would make the argument that health care must be dealt with in some practical fashion, this is great.

Cue the slime machine in three…two…one.

Last week’s contest was won by mlc1us. It was Santa Maria del Mar in Barcelona.

Here’s this week’s, good luck and happy Father’s Day!

Ryan Blethen joins the rest of his editorial board in taking issue with the anti-Referendum 71 folks’ “Who Signed?” campaign.

What I, and this page, take issue with is the Web site called whosigned.org. The site will list everyone who signed Referendum 71. On the Web site it says this is being done so voters can make sure the public record is correct.

We all know that is not the case. The real purpose of whosigned.org is intimidation. People who sign petitions should understand that it is public record.

No, we don’t all know that this is not the case, for while intimidation, to some extent, is certainly part of the purpose of the whosigned.org web site, the strategy is a lot more subtle and nuanced than the Times admits (or understands).

Petitions are a public record, in the sense that should R-71 qualify for the ballot, I would have the right to go to the Secretary of State’s office and spend days examining the petitions by hand. But in reality, that’s not very public at all.

Personally, I would love to see petitions for all initiatives and referenda go online, both a computer searchable list of the petitioners, and PDFs of the actual petition sheets. Petitions are not a secret ballot, and were never intended to be. We have the right to petition our government, and our neighbors have the right to know who the petitioners are. Furthermore, with all petitions online and publicly searchable, I have no doubt that a significant amount of heretofore unknown signature fraud will be uncovered by citizen watchdogs.

We constantly hear from Eyman and his cohorts that there is no signature fraud in Washington state, and thus no need for reforms to identify and correct the problem, but really, how would we know when we’ve never looked for it? And honestly, why should we believe that WA is magically immune from signature fraud when it has proven to be endemic in Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Kansas, Colorado and every other state with an initiative process?

But Ryan continues…

But just because somebody signs a petition does not mean they support the referendum. People sign referendums for all sorts of reasons. It is not hard to believe that someone who supports marriage equality will sign it because they firmly believe the voters, not the Legislature, should have the final say.

People sign petitions because somebody asks them. That’s the number one reason. I know. I’ve been there, both collecting signatures, and as part of a coordinated “decline to sign” effort.

Watch the professional signature gatherers, particularly the ones collecting signatures on a number of unrelated petitions. They’ll make the case for the most sellable measure—more often than not, with lies—and then after you sign the top page and fill in your address information, they’ll quickly flip another clipboard in front of you and ask you to “please sign this one…” and “this one…” and “this one…” and so on.  And more often than not, the signer will. You don’t even always have to fill in the address information on the subsequent petitions, the signature gather will sometimes offer to copy it over for you.

On the other hand, decline to sign campaigns are incredibly effective. Merely shadowing a signature gatherer, politely refuting his misinformation, and asking people not to sign, was enough to motivate most folks to walk away entirely. After a couple hours of such efforts the signature gatherer would sometimes offer to hand over the Eyman petition I was opposing, or dump them in trash, if I would only leave him alone to conduct the rest of his business unencumbered.

Yeah, Ryan’s right, that some people will sign nearly any petition because they believe that everything should come before the people, but that’s a stupid and lazy abrogation of one’s responsibilities as a citizen. It’s supposed to be difficult to get an initiative or referendum on the ballot, lest public policy billow in the fickle winds of public opinion, and thus folks should be encouraged to put a little thought into the issue before blindly signing. (Nobody, but nobody, will read the text of R-71 before signing, I can guarantee you that.) If knowing that one’s signatures will indeed become a public record—that is, a record easily searched by the public—then perhaps more folks would think twice before affixing their names to a petition that calls for taking away rights from a class of citizens?

And that, I believe… a more thoughtful electorate… can only improve our democracy, right?

Scott Morgan asks a fundamental question that needs to be asked when discussing our prison problem. How many people in jail for drug crimes are completely innocent, and are there solely because of how easy it is to convict an innocent person of drug crimes? He references the recent case of two men in New York City who were able to find video evidence proving that they were framed by the police. Had they not uncovered that evidence, there’s no question they would have been sent away to jail. Rarely, if ever, do juries believe the testimony of defendants over the word of the police. And in fact, many people just accept plea deals after their attorneys tell them there’s no way to win.

Morgan writes:

If it were only possible somehow to reveal the full scope of wrongful, fraudulent convictions in the war on drugs, I don’t doubt that the entire nation would be stunned and sickened. Yet, for anyone who’s paying attention, it’s not necessary to fantasize about the true extent of injustice and corruption that the drug war has unleashed on innocent people. You can read about it in the newspaper all the time.

In Ohio, we saw a DEA agent indicted for helping frame 17 innocent people. In Atlanta, we saw police plant drugs in the home of an innocent 88-year-old woman after shooting her to death. In Tulia, TX we saw a rogue narcotics officer frame and arrest most of the black people in town. In Hearne, TX we saw the same damn thing. And across the country, we’ve seen dozens of innocent people who might well have ended up in prison if they hadn’t been killed first by the police who raided their homes.

What should give anyone pause is how frequently we encounter law enforcement officials – and especially narcotics officers – who act as if they’re above the law. It should certainly give us pause to reflect upon how this points to the high likelihood that there are large numbers of completely innocent people behind bars in this country due to the drug war.

A number of people have been accusing Obama of not being forceful enough in his statements on Iran. The point has already been covered by bloggers far more knowledgeable on Iran than I, but it’s worth repeating: anything that allows for the Iranian regime to paint these protests as being influenced by external powers the more it helps them. Underscoring this fact comes this interesting tidbit from earlier today:

12:43 pm: Iranian state media reportedly lying about what Obama is saying:

This morning a friend of NIAC who gets Iranian Satellite TV here said that state-run media showed President Obama speaking about Iran this morning. However, instead of translating what he actually said, the translator reportedly quoted Obama as saying he “supports the protesters against the government and they should keep protesting.

Assuming this report is correct, it shows the Iranian government is eager to portray Obama as a partisan supporting the demonstrators.

In order to support their attempts to quell the uprising, the Iranian government is pretending that Obama is saying the things that John McCain, Charles Krauthammer, and Paul Wolfowitz have criticized him for not saying. This may be the best illustration to date for why the people who see the world as they do should be kept as far away from the White House as possible. They continually play into the hands of extremists, and they will never learn from their mistakes.

Obama’s response today was a little more pointed in the criticism of the Iranian government’s crackdown, but he still makes it clear that Iran’s future is up to the Iranians.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKUZuv6_bus[/youtube]

My understanding is that Persian culture reveres poetry. If this doesn’t cause a lump to form in your throat, maybe nothing will.

(Props to HuffPo.)

UPDATE 10:16 AM Sat. June 20–There are disheartening accounts from the BBC and elsewhere of protesters being shot and beaten. On an intellectual level I understand why Barack Obama needed to play things close to the vest.

On an emotional level it’s beyond appalling what is happening in Iran.

OC Weekly has a fascinating look at one Dr. Orly Taitz, the “queen bee” of the anti-Obama “birthers.”

The problem is most of the above facts aren’t true.

For starters, the Pakistan “travel ban” is a complete fabrication based on zero evidence and completely contradicted by State Department records and a 1981 New York Times article. The full transcript from Obama’s grandmother shows that she never said he was born in Kenya—in fact, she repeatedly said he was born in Hawaii. The law allowing foreign-born children to obtain Hawaiian COLBs didn’t exist until 20 years after Obama was born, while Obama’s published COLB says his birth information was recorded four days after his birth in 1961. And those “forensic experts” who say Obama’s document is phony? There have only been three of them: Two haven’t published their real names or any verifiable credentials (one went by the moniker “TechDude”), and the other merely said that she can’t make a determination of a document’s authenticity based solely on a JPEG.

Oy. It’s all so pathetic, it’s both hilarious and very sad.

(Props to Eschaton.)

The polls have closed and it wasn’t even close, with Sen. Ken Jacobsen capturing a commanding 40% of the vote in a five-way race to determine the incumbent, Seattle state senator most deserving of a serious challenge in 2010.  And once again an anti-incumbency sentiment appeared to guide the results.

	Votes	Pct.	Years
Ken Jacobsen	78	40%	26
Jeanne Kohl-Welles	51	26%	17
Adam Kline	38	19%	12
Joe McDermott	18	9%	8
Ed Murray	11	6%	14

The table above shows total years of service in Olympia, both House and Senate. And once again the top vote getters are those who have served the longest.

How the sentiment of HA’s rather insular audience translates into broader public opinion, I’m not sure, but I think it’s safe to speculate that it does show a growing frustration with the performance of the Seattle delegation as a whole.

That said, good luck challenging Sen. Jacobsen, who despite his reputation for being a little out there is perhaps the king of Seattle retail politics, with an unsurpassed lifetime D/Y ratio (Doorbells rung to Years of service).

Coming up, the final House runoff between Sharon Tomiko Santos, Mary Lou Dickerson and Phyllis Gutierrez Kenney.