HorsesAss.Org

PBS’s The News Hour had a fascinating story yesterday about how the financial calamity is threatening dozens of transit agencies around the country with extreme financial problems.

The short version is that, with the blessing and encouragement of the federal government, many agencies engaged in what are called “buy-leaseback” arrangements with banks. Since public agencies can’t depreciate purchases of say, rail cars, since public agencies don’t pay taxes, they would sell them to banks. The banks would then get the tax shelter, while the agencies got extra funds, part of which were used to lease the rails cars or whatever from the banks.

But guess what? They needed insurance to do these kinds of deals. And who was the main insurer? None other than global behemoth AIG, and since their ratings are in the toilet, a lot of transit agencies are considered to be in “technical default” on these deals. These kinds of deals eventually were outlawed, but lots of them are still coming due around the country.

Pretty cool how neo-liberals worked things, huh? They insisted the public sector be starved of funds, then they found a way to profit from it by using the tax code and financial shenanigans, and now some of the transit agencies may fail (or at the very least be forced to massively defer maintenance and capital investment,) which will “prove” once again that the public sector is wasteful.

It’s a very funny tale to tell over cocktails for some Banksters. Not so fun for a physically challenged worker in D.C. who depends on transit to get to work, as portrayed in the PBS story.

Damn, I think these people wrecked everything. You kind of expect to go outside every morning and find a banker and a Congress-critter loosening the lug nuts on your wheels.

Only initiatives that wreck government are sacrosanct and represent the will of the people. Initiatives that do non-wrecking things like promoting clean power sources do not meet this definition, and thus can be safely wrecked themselves without fear of a special session being called.

An update to a couple of recent posts about the Homeowner’s Bill of Rights. You can find the previous posts here and here.

First, a reliable source emailed me this afternoon to tell me Senate leadership has made it clear that they are not holding up a vote on the bill.

And now Andrew at NPI reports that the Senate is going to consider the bill tonight.

So there you have it.

UPDATE, the next morning: There was a flurry of activity in the Senate last night, but SB 5895 didn’t come up for a vote best I can tell. I had TVW on in the background last night and the Senate Floor Activity calendar doesn’t show that it came up yet. I think they’re coming back at 9 AM.

Please join us tonight for an evening of politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. We start at 8:00 pm at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Some folks will show up earlier for dinner.

For this week’s activity, we’ll celebrate the liberation of embryonic stem cell research with a harmless dose of eugenics. We’ll begin by designing Mr. and Mrs. Perfect, who will spawn a liberal master race as the Final Solution for dealing with Neocons and Wingnuts.

Or maybe we’ll just share a couple of pints over some beaver talk….

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iP-yflT40f0[/youtube]

Not in Seattle? The Drinking Liberally web site has dates and times for 327 chapters of Drinking Liberally spread across the earth. Join the Master Race in a neighborhood near you.

Goldy may not miss the SuperSonics, but if anyone is missing the spectacle of incredibly rich people getting public guarantees to build their sports playgrounds, Portland seems glad to oblige. The plan is to build a new minor league baseball stadium, probably where Memorial Coliseum now stands, and to refurbish PGE Park for soccer. It used to be called Civic Stadium, and hasn’t been refurbished since way back in 2001. The horror.

As always, there is absolutely no risk to the taxpayers. None. Not possible. Not in a million years.

From Blue Oregon:

Without any apparent sense of irony, the Oregonian this morning offers us up the following in vouching for the deal reached between city negotiators and Merritt Paulson:

Mayor Sam Adams and Commissioner Randy Leonard, who negotiated the agreement, said [the] city is getting solid assurances from a wealthy family. Paulson’s father is Henry Paulson, the former U.S. treasury secretary and Wall Street mogul.

The timing of those “solid assurances” is, well, unfortunate, to put it mildly. On Friday the Congressional panel charged with overseeing the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) released its latest report, and this week the panel’s chairwoman Elizabeth Warren has been making the rounds on tv and radio to discuss their findings.

Warren minces no words: she accuses then Secretary Paulson of lying to her and the panel about the ways in which they used public funds to bail out the banks. Warren had asked Paulson whether, in purchasing assets from the troubled banks, they were receiving assets “at par” – and he answered yes. But the panel’s own investigations revealed that Treasury was receiving them often far below equivalent value – on average a third below.

Nope, everything should work out just fine for Portland.

Vancouver residents will be magically transported to games at the new facilities via an organic bio-fuel flying carpet, as the aging Interstate Bridge spans will be converted to a fixed-gear velodrome.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s days are numbered, but there’s still time for their editorial board to set the record straight on the new domestic partnership legislation being debated in Olympia, and the blatantly misleading, anti-gay TV ads that are using the P-I to validate their lies.

Of course, the legislation does not “redefine marriage” as the ad claims, nor does it require schools to teach that homosexuality is normal; it merely extends to domestic partnerships the same rights and responsibilities under state law that are currently available to married couples.  The bill does not legalize gay marriage, so all you gay-bashers out there can rest assured that same-sex couples will still be denied the 1,138 rights and protections enjoyed by married couples under federal law.

Yeah, sure, these are the types of lies and exaggeration we’ve come to expect from social conservatives on issues concerning gay rights, but this ad goes one step further, deliberately misquoting a state legislator in a smear campaign that borders on libel.

The sponsor of this law says, those who disagree with homosexual marriage should “face being fined, fired, and even jailed until they relent.”

The sponsor of this bill is Sen. Ed Murray (D-Seattle), and he said no such thing.

The alleged quote comes from a May 20th, 2008 guest column in the Seattle P-I from David Benkof, a vocal opponent of same-sex marriage.  Benkof wrote:

Openly gay Washington state Sen. Ed Murray, D-Seattle, and a representative of the largest Michigan gay-rights group, the Triangle Foundation, have both told me that people who continue to act as if marriage is a union between a man and a woman should face being fined, fired and even jailed until they relent.

This is, of course, not a direct quote, and as Sen. Murray complained five days later in a letter to the editor, it was a “deliberate misrepresentation” of his views on the issue:

In an e-mail exchange, Benkof posed to me numerous hypothetical scenarios in a world where same-sex marriage was legal. One such scenario was of a business owner who “was just stubborn and wouldn’t treat wife-wife couples equally” to heterosexual couples for religious reasons. What should be made of their “principled stand,” Benkof asked me.

[…] I wrote to Benkof: “The law should be enforced, just as it was when either King or Gandhi engaged in civil disobedience. Both ended up in jail despite the righteousness of their cause.”

A state legislator urging that state laws be enforced… who’d a thunk?

So how does Sen. Murray’s reasonable statement get transformed into a fascistic call for jailing people who oppose homosexuality?  It is tempting to blame the lying, amoral scaremongers who put together that ad… but that’s kinda like blaming a pig for wallowing in mud. It’s what they do.

No, it’s the P-I who really deserves the blame here.

Benkof was entitled to his opinions—that’s the whole purpose of publishing guest columns—but the editors at the P-I had an obligation to at least make an effort to verify his statements of fact, and anybody who is at all familiar with Sen. Murray would have been immediately suspicious of such an uncharacteristically impolitic assertion on such a sensitive subject.  A simple phone call would have sufficed… you know, the kinda basic fact-checking the legacy media so often accuses us of bloggers of neglecting.

Now, as is often the case in political campaigns, the lie, which first appeared in print, is being compounded and exaggerated on TV, and given even more weight by the bogus claim that the alleged statement appeared in a “Seattle P-I Editorial,” as opposed to a mere guest column.

The P-I failed in their obligation to fact-check Benkof’s column, but they still have time to make amends.  I’m sure there are plenty other topics on which they’d probably prefer editorializing during their final days, but it would serve them well to acknowledge their error, correct the public record, and demand that this misleading ad be pulled.  As this incident proves, newspapers do matter.  It would be nice to see the P-I prove that they matter in a good way.

Nobody could have predicted.

The Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) of Seattle said it didn’t meet a regulatory capital requirement at the end of last month because of the declining value of mortgage-backed securities.

The FHLB of Seattle, a government-chartered cooperative, said in a statement Monday that because of the capital deficiency it is disallowed from paying a dividend or repurchasing capital stock.

The Seattle bank in January became the second FHLB, after San Francisco, to warn of a potential capital shortage and take steps to guard reserves. As many as eight of the 12 banks may fall short of capital requirements after writing down holdings of so-called nonagency mortgage securities, Moody’s Investors Service predicted.

As Atrios relays:

Awhile back I met someone in the mortgage broker business who had, unsurprisingly, seen his business decline and seen many of his coworkers laid off. At the time he told me, ominously, that all the action had just moved to the FHLB system…

Round and round it goes.

Richard Roesler at Eye on Olympia notes the Washington House of Representatives has approved a bill that would prevent cities and counties from prohibiting recreational vehicles in parks, an apparent attempt to provide people with a residence of last resort.

And of course a growing tent city in Sacramento has drawn international media attention.

Wall Street gets the TARP, everyone else gets a blue tarp. Pass the beans.

Hoop Dreams
The Seattle Times editorial board, one of our state’s biggest cheerleaders for a cuts-only approach to our $8 billion budget gap—even if it means a 20-percent cut in funding to the UW and the rest of our colleges and universities—devotes scarce op-ed space today to cheering on the Huskies’ men’s basketball team.  It’s good to see the Times editors have their priorities straight.

The Oklahoma Mariners?
Oops… I guess it’s time to build a new baseball stadium…

For the first time since moving into Safeco Field in 1999, the Mariners reported a financial loss last season, according to documents filed by the team Monday with the Public Facilities District.

The club reported a $4.5 million deficit, owing in large part to having the highest player payroll in franchise history at the same time that attendance dropped during the 101-loss season.

I mean, after all, how can we really expect the Mariners to make ends meet, playing in an antiquated, 10-year-old facility? If Seattle really wants to be a big league city, it’s time for us taxpayers to play ball.

Feet of Clay: Insert Directly in Mouth
And speaking of teams leaving for Oklahoma City, I don’t really miss the Sonics Thunder, but as a blogger, I surely do miss owner Clay Bennett:

Bend It Like Bennett, one of the most hilarious basketball blogs out there, has a glimpse inside of Un-Sonics/Thunder owner Clay Bennett’s household. Bennett’s 16-year-old son, Graham, has the following listed as one of his favorite “quotations” (with “Dad” assumed to be Clay):

I guess in Bennett’s defense, he didn’t call anybody a nigger.

Dear driver of the big white van who decided the perfect time to suddenly move from the middle lane to the left lane (and of course, without using blinkers), was just at the moment I was merging into traffic from the left lane on-ramp at Island Crest Way and I-90… fuck you!

I’m preparing to move HA to a new server to better handle some of the changes coming up, so please be prepared for some downtime.  I’m just sayin’.

The conventional wisdom in political circles is that incumbents like Dave Reichert should become more secure the longer they hold office, but it’s beginning to look like the third-term Republican is becoming even more of a DCCC target than he was the previous two elections.  Reichert already has a challenger in the form of a female, ex-Microsoft executive (and no, her name isn’t Darcy Burner), and now finds himself one of only five Republican incumbents being targeted with radio ads for his vote against President Obama’s economic recovery package.

[audio:http://aufc.3cdn.net/38715940c2c9fd0336_odm6b6426.mp3]

The ad is paid for by Americans United for Change, a labor group, and it asks whether Reichert will continue to embrace Rush Limbaugh and his partisan divisiveness, or whether he’ll work with President Obama to enact real change.  (My guess is, the majority of his constituents would prefer the latter.)

Thanks in part to the complicity and/or laziness of our local media, Reichert has done a good job in recent years portraying himself as a “moderate” (whatever that means) while continuing to vote the Republican party line whenever his vote really counts.  A relentless campaign over the next two years to educate voters about the real Reichert could pay off handsomely in 2010.

And now a follow up on this post from yesterday, which had its genesis in a Joe Turner article about the Senate killing an asbestos lawsuit bill in retaliation for newspaper ads runs by the firm employing former state senator Brian Weinstein.

Readers may recall that not only did Senators kill the asbestos bill, it looks like they also killed off the Homeowner’s Bill of Rights, something that Weinstein worked on very hard when he was in office. Here’s a nugget from Turner’s article yesterday, because scrolling down is so difficult:

In four years, he (Weinstein) never really learned a thing about how this place works,” Sen. Brian Hatfield, D-Raymond, said Saturday. Hatfield was supporting a couple changes that Kastama and Haugen wanted to make to the original bill, changes that Weinstein’s firm did not want.

How “this place” works is this: Not only did the senators kill SB 5964, they also killed the so-called Homeowners Bill of Rights, a measure that Weinstein had championed for most of term in the Legislature and which he nearly got passed. It passed the Senate, but died in the House.

I talked to Weinstein this morning, and he sounded pretty incredulous at the turn of events, especially when it comes to the current Homeowner’s Bill of Rights.

“I’ve never lobbied for the current bill, I didn’t go testify, I haven’t even read the bill,” said Weinstein.

Over at Publicola, Josh reports that an “insider” offered the “conjecture” that a vote on the HBR is being put on hold because they “Just gotta wash the Weinstein off.” To which one can only offer a shake of the head, and the all too frequent observation that a lot of politicians have their heads where the sun don’t shine if this is how they view things that impact regular citizens. Talk about losing sight of why they were elected in the first place.

Weinstein pointed out this moring how nuts this all has become. “It’s totally absurd for the Senate to be punishing homebuyers by trying to punish me when I had nothing to do with this (current) bill.”

Indeed. We all know what needs washing, and it’s ain’t Brian Weinstein. The insider, frat-boy-sorority girl behavior may be acceptable and common in OIympia, but frankly given the economic calamity facing this state it’s pretty offensive.

Now tell me why I need to support a tax increase, Legislators. Or are you going to kill that bill to teach me a lesson?

Yet another name once bandied about as a potential challenger to Mayor Greg Nickels has officially dropped from contention, with Nick Licata announcing that he will instead seek another term on the Seattle City Council:

“After considerable reflection on how to best serve the community I love, I am happy to announce that I will run for re-election to the City Council.  A number of you urged me to run for Mayor, but I feel my role as a legislator, writing the laws that govern our city, is the one that suits me best.”

Greg Smith, Richard Conlin, Tim Burgess and Licata had all floated the idea of challenging Nickels, and all have backed down. According to the local rumor mills, that leaves only one potential serious contender left with a chance of unseating Boss Nickels this November:  popular former City Councilmember Peter Steinbrueck, who reportedly beats Nickels in at least one private poll… for whatever that’s worth.

Now that would be an interesting race.

UPDATE:
Of course, just as I hit the publish button, Publicola posts that former Sonics star, and current city council candidate James Donaldson is about to jump into the mayor’s race.  I dunno.  Doesn’t seem like a smart political move to me, and while I’ve never met him, everybody tells me that Donaldson is smart.

McClatchy is laying off the equivalent of 1,600 workers, and others are having salaries cut as part of a restructuring.

The four McClatchy newspapers in Washington state are The Olympian, The News-Tribune, The Bellingham Herald and Tri-City Herald.

Some well-known papers owned by the firm around the country include The Kansas City Star, The Sacramento Bee and The Miama Herald.

McClatchy has some very fine reporters here, around the country, and in its DC bureau. This is a shame.