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Yesterday the Seattle Times reported on the fiscal crisis in rural Pend Oreille County, where declining tax revenues and stingy voters have forced local officials to seek a bailout from Seattle City Light, which owns and operates the profitable Boundary Dam on the Pend Oreille River in the northeast corner of the state.

Well… maybe “seek a bailout” isn’t the right term.

To compensate Pend Oreille County, Seattle pays an annual fee, which last year was $1.3 million. Now, leaders of this poor, sparsely populated and isolated county want to share in the riches Seattle has found on their river. They’re pressuring Seattle to triple its annual fee.

“It’s kind of like we’re the cow and they’re getting the milk from the cow in our barn,” said County Commissioner Laura Merrill, “and so there is an impact in Pend Oreille County.”

No, it’s kinda like Pend Oreille is a county in which there’s a dairy farm, and the owner of the farm is getting the milk from the cows in their barn. But, whatever.

City Light owns that dam, and took a big risk back in 1964, investing millions of dollars constructing the dam and 300 miles of transmission lines at a time when electricity was relatively cheap.  It’s the kind of public investment and forethought that has long delivered Seattle residents some of the lowest electricity rates in the nation.

And in return, Pend Oreille County got well-paid jobs, a recreational lake and new school buildings… not to mention about $1.3 million in annual impact fees, plus cheap, wholesale electricity that saves county ratepayers about $20 million a year… all told, an average of about $1,615 in direct cash benefits annually for every man, woman and child in Pend Oreille.

That was the deal.  Signed, sealed and delivered.

It’s not that I don’t have empathy for Pend Oreille County’s current predicament—I do, and I wouldn’t necessarily oppose some sort of grant to help them out.  But it’s a predicament they got themselves into, and I’m getting pretty damn sick and tired of rural Washingtonians blaming Seattle residents like me for all of their problems.

In Pend Oreille County, politicians and residents harbor some resentment toward Seattle. They feel the west side of the state doesn’t understand their rural lifestyle or their conservative politics. They’re outnumbered in the Legislature. Regardless, they find themselves somewhat dependent on Seattle.

Seattle paid for the county’s school for grades 7-12 as part of the original deal in the 1960s to build the dam. Since then, enrollment in the Selkirk Consolidated School District No. 70 has fallen by nearly half, and seven bond measures to remodel the school have failed.

It’s not Seattle’s fault that Pend Oreille voters refuse to tax themselves for the services they need, nor that the state has fewer and fewer resources to help them out.  Seattle taxpayer… City Light ratepayer… we’re one and the same… and if Pend Oreille wanted more of our money, perhaps they shouldn’t have voted for I-695 by a better than 2-1 margin, eliminating most of the state car tab, and with it, the hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales tax equalization transfers on which rural communities had long relied to help balance their budgets?  And if they wanted a little sympathy from Seattleites like me, perhaps they shouldn’t have passed I-776 by a 69% margin, an initiative that had absolutely no impact on Pend Oreille taxpayers, but was successfully marketed by Tim Eyman as a “Fuck Seattle” measure that would keep us from taxing ourselves to build the light rail system we wanted.

They harbor resentment toward us? For what… building their infrastructure and subsidizing their public services?  If the Boundary Dam was owned by a corporation, well, that’s capitalism baby, and I doubt you’d see Pend Oreille have much success pressuring shareholders to triple their payments, you know… just because.  But since it’s owned by Seattle ratepayers, we should feel all guilty and everything over how well our investment paid off, and just fork over a share of the profits?  I don’t think so.

Rural governments and the communities they serve are in crisis statewide, many on the verge of insolvency, and it’s a crisis that the state needs to address collectively.  But we’ll never move closer to a lasting solution until elected and civic leaders throughout rest of the state stop lazily blaming Seattle for all of their woes, and start taking a realistic tally of what it actually costs to provide the public services their communities need and want.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlynf–lsxA[/youtube]

It does look like leather at least. Smell the Glove, progressives.

The podcast returns to the Montlake Alehouse after a long winter vacation. And just in time for Goldy and friends to offer fond farewells to King County Executive Ron Sims who is on his way to the other Washington. His former spokesperson, Sandeep Kaushik, offers insight into Sims as number two at HUD.

The Seattle P-I is up for sale with an uncertain fate. A recent analysis puts the PI in the top 20 for online readership nationally. Will a robust on-line P-I arise from the ashes of the printed product? The panel reflects more generally on the fate of print media and online journalism. Can an online publication support strong local reporting and in-depth investigative journalism?

The panel notices a new administration in D.C. With Change™ come appointments, replacements, and confirmation votes. The panel chews over and through the issues…right down to local repercussions.

Finally, it was election night in King County. With the first ballot drop, the faceless technocrat holds a strong lead over the crazy gun nut and the black belt mother-beater. Apparently the voters prefer professional competence in an Elections Director. And Goldy proclaims this the closing chapter of the 2004 election saga.

Goldy was joined by a reluctant Sandeep Kaushik of PubliCola, Seattle P-I columnist Joel Connelly, Effin’ Unsound’s Carl Ballard and Peace Tree Farm’s N in Seattle.

The show is 47:08, and is available here as an MP3:

[audio:http://www.podcastingliberally.com/podcasts/podcasting_liberally_feb_3_2009.mp3]

[Recorded live at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. Special thanks to Confab creators Gavin and Richard for hosting the site.]

It’s long been in vogue amongst Seattle’s politiscenti to complain about Rep. Jim McDermott’s lack of effectiveness and leadership in Congress.

Of course, what they really mean is that McDermott doesn’t bring home the bacon, and he’s never much bothered to use his safe seat and affluent Seattle district to raise—and spread around—the kinda money generally necessary to climb up the ranks of the party leadership.  No, McDermott often marches to the beat of his own drummer, and he’s certainly no Norm Dicks or Patty Murray when it comes to playing the influence game.

But lack of effectiveness and leadership?  I don’t think so.  And apparently, neither do his colleagues in the House, who have rewarded his tireless work on behalf of expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) by giving him the honor of managing the floor time today during final passage of the bill, and who have asked him to attend the signing ceremony with President Obama later this afternoon at the White House.

Beholden to no one but his own conscience and that of his overwhelmingly liberal constituency, McDermott has provided plenty of leadership on a number of issues, often with little regard for the likelihood of public approbation or short term success.  It was McDermott who famously invited national scorn on himself by going to Baghdad in the days prior to the US invasion to argue against the lies of the Bush administration, and it was McDermott who was ultimately proven right about the facts on the ground and the war’s disastrous cost in blood, treasure and prestige.

And it is McDermott who has qixotically fought for universal health care even as the Republican tide made such reforms an impossible dream.

Well… as today’s passage of SCHIP will show, that tide has finally turned.

At the Democratic National Convention in Denver last summer, I asked the 72-year-old McDermott about persistent rumors (and wishful thinking amongst the many local Dems who covet his job) that this might be his last term in office, and he laughed off the suggestion, telling me that he intends to stay in Congress at least until he sees a major health care reform package signed by the President.  It may not be the single payer system that he prefers, but considering where the other Washington has been on this issue for much of his tenure, any reform that leads us down the slippery path toward universal access would be a huge accomplishment, and a giant cherry on top of McDermott’s long political career.

So those of you ambitious pols eagerly waiting for McDermott to step out of your way (and you know who you are), you better cross your fingers and wish Jim Godspeed on his final challenge.

UPDATE:
Rep. McDermott has issued the following statement on SCHIP:

“We speak for the children who are the most vulnerable in our society, especially during this time of economic crisis.  I cannot imagine how anyone could vote against America’s children.  Approving SCHIP is the most humane thing to do and I mean that in the truest sense of the word.  Yet, some on the other side will vote against it claiming they are fiscal conservatives; please note these very same so-called fiscal conservatives squandered a trillion dollars on a needless war in Iraq, and drove the U.S. economy into a ditch.  And now they want to deny children the ability to go see a doctor when they are sick.”

This is a fascinating story from California about a mortgage broker who is admitting all kinds of fraud.

The seven-page essay by Christopher Warren, 27, replaced the home page of Triduanum Financial which abruptly closed its doors last month.

Warren said his career in the mortgage industry began when he was still a teenager and took a job with the now-defunct Ameriquest in 2001. Warren claimed he manipulated loan applications to secure financing and eventually hacked into the Ameriquest computer system to approve loans himself with no oversight.

Warren said he left Ameriquest three years later with the personal information of 680,000 Ameriquest customers to start his own mortgage banking operation in Sacramento called WTL Financial.

“At the ripe old age of 22, a fraudster trained by the best corporate environment for fraud, I built a company modeled after the movie Boiler Room,” Warren wrote.

Warren said WTL Financial faked credit scores and W-2s to peddle loans to investors who failed to scrutinize the files.

And now he’s very sorry.

In his essay, Warren said he helped ruin the nation’s economy and hopes his experiences can help reform the mortgage and banking systems.

“Almost a billion dollars of toxic assets came from me,” he wrote. “Looking back at the life I have led, I beg a higher power for forgiveness.”

I guess what we really don’t know is how many of these people are still out there, working in the industry. (And yes, there are many honest mortgage brokers! I’m glad we had one in the early part of this decade, it worked out well.)

But the outright fraud and theft has yet to be reckoned with, and it’s still damaging the economy. When people talk about “fixing the housing market” you rarely hear much discussion of making sure more fraud cannot occur, other than in an abstract, “we’ll get to real reform at some point” fashion.

Meanwhile, gimme another $20 billion, suckers, and don’t tell us how to pay our executives. It may be your taxpayer money but it’s our town.

(Props to The Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter.)

Incumbent Sherril Huff easily won yesterday’s special election for King County Elections Director, garnering an impressive 44% of the vote in a six-person race.  And our good friend Stefan’s spin on Huff’s solid victory?

In 2007 56% of the voters said that it would be a good idea to elect the Elections Director. 44% said it would be a bad idea.

Again in 2008 56% of the voters said that it would be a good idea to elect the Elections Director. 44% said it would be a bad idea.

In 2009 56% of the voters voted for a reform candidate. 44% of the voters voted for a candidate who thought it would be a bad idea to elect the Elections Director; who has repeatedly covered up and lied about problems in the Elections office under her watch; and who wasn’t even eligible to run for the office in the first place.

Perhaps the 44% who voted for her were the same 44% who said it was a bad idea to elect the Elections Director to begin with and were trying to prove to the other 56% that they were right all along!

Yeah, well, Stefan is nothing if not a poor loser.

I’m one of those 44% who voted against electing an Elections Director (and for the only qualified candidate in the race) because I’d rather have somebody who knows how to run elections in the office than somebody who knows how to run for them—but bizarrely picking an elections director in a wide-open, low-turnout, no-primary, special election?  Well that’s just plain stupid and irresponsible.

Yet that’s the gamed system that Stefan and his band of bitter, inconsolable Dinophiles pushed for in an effort to sneak a partisan Republican past voters, and so I find it particularly ironic to hear him whining about the outcome after the fact.  I mean, if Stefan really believes that a mere 44% plurality of voters just thwarted the will of a 54% majority, perhaps he and his fellow “reformers” should have fought for a primary that would have separated the wheat from the chaff?

But then, who am I to question Stefan’s motives, let alone his statistical prowess?

The voter-approved Death with Dignity Act takes effect on March 4. Robb Miller of Compassion & Choices of Washington writes in the Bellingham Herald about the kinds of questions that patients should be asking their care providers now if they are considering using this new law.

The University of Washington and Harborview Medical Centers have already decided to participate in the program, but other care facilities around the state likely won’t. Either way, I’m optimistic that Washington will experience the same improvements in terminal care that Oregon has had. As Robb writes:

The act’s benefits will extend well beyond the terminally ill. In Oregon, the law spurred conversation, education and improvements in end-of-life care across the board. Oregon experienced dramatic increases in those who died at home rather than in hospitals — something almost all of us prefer. More patients were referred to, and entered, hospice care, and did so earlier, receiving benefits that are helpful to all facing the end of life. Better use of pain medication resulted from more open and frequent conversations with physicians about end-of-life care.

This is one benefit of allowing the choice of death with dignity that I didn’t touch on much during the campaign. For organizations that oppose this choice for moral or other ethical reasons, they’ll be motivated by seeing their patients going elsewhere to choose this option to focus more energy towards improving end-of-life care.

No one intends to force physicians or care organizations to participate in this program, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t benefit from it. Giving people greater choice over their own medical decisions ultimately forces all health care providers to get better.

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

It’s a special election night in King County. So we’ll spend some time driving Seniors to the polls watching returns on TV driving from polling-place to polling-place stuffing the ballot boxes just drink beer and taking bets on how long it will take to get those envelopes opened and ballots counted.

Rumor has it that the podcast will return from its long winter vacation.

If you’re not in Seattle, no worries…stop by the Drinking Liberally web site for dates and times of a chapter within skeetching distance of you.

Joe Turner at Political Buzz reports there will be a special, preliminary state revenue forecast on Feb. 19, at the request of Sen. Craig Pridemore, D-Vancouver, and several other lawmakers, including Sen. Joe Zarelli, D-Ridgefield. Apparently Pridemore thinks lawmakers need to get an early look ahead of the scheduled March 19 forecast, so they can well, be more worried.

Tough times. What’s the over-under?

Not pure as driven snow.

Tom Daschle, President Barack Obama’s choice to head the Department of Health and Human Services, withdrew his name from consideration for the post after being dogged for days by disclosures that he didn’t pay his taxes on time.

Along with revelations about Tim Geithner and Nancy Killefer, this is now officially a problem for the Obama administration.

Let’s face it, at a time when many ordinary Americans are petrified about job losses and losing their homes, nominating Democrats who somehow manage to not pay the taxes they owe looks mighty bad. There may be reasonable explanations for some of these cases, but what will hit the late night shows and right wing talk radio will be a distilled version that amounts to “what a bunch of hypocrites.”

Having experienced hands on deck is an admirable goal. The problem is that a lot of the DLC-Clinton types were part of the same money-grubbing, corrupt Washington D.C. establishment that we need cleaned up.

The Obama administration has seemed to take pains to court the DC mandarins, charming them personally and making a visit to the House to speak with the GOP leadership. But this ain’t beanbag. The Republican Party will fight, scratch and claw above or below the belt to carry out the directives of their putative leader, Roach Lumpenbaugh, who has decreed that Obama must fail, even if it damages the country. They will take full advantage of any ethical lapses on the part of Democrats, and we simply cannot afford that.

Americans need reform starting now, in all sorts of areas: the financial industry, health care, energy and the way government itself operates. Might as well bring in some real reformers at this point.

Oh, and check their taxes. It’s hard being pure as the driven snow, but it’s not that hard to pay your taxes.

I’m not sure that I’ve ever voted by mail before, and so like a lot of inveterate poll voters it was hard for me to approach this election day any differently than previous ones.  But it is different, and if I don’t get my ballot postmarked today, my vote just won’t count.  And considering the subject of today’s special election, if my vote doesn’t count today, it just may not in the future either.

This is an election for Elections Director, and if you need any evidence of how stupid it is to elect a position that requires very specific technical expertise, just look at some of the names on the ballot:  gadfly, a liar, a right-wing gun nut looking for a six-figure salary….

And then there’s our friend David Irons Jr., the Republican front-runner, a raging bullshitter with a documented history of financial mismanagement and abusive behavior.  But even more pertinent to this election, he’s also a man with a documented history of violating our state’s election laws:

From: Mark Banks
Date: January 25, 2009 1:12:43 pm PST
To: letters@redmond-reporter.com, letters@sammamish-reporter.com, letters@seattleweekly.com, letters@woodinville.com, letters@bellevue.com, letters@duvall.com, letters@covington.com, letters@seattletimes.com
Subject: Special Election of King County Elections Director

Dear Editor,

I am extremely disturbed to see that David Irons, Jr. is running for the important position of King County Elections Director.  David Irons is a thief who I personally caught red handed steeling campaign signs in Sammamish in 2002, when he was running for King County Commissioner.  I was driving by when I saw him dressed in his Sunday best climbing over the road barrier to pick up his opponent’s signs and throwing them in the ditch.  I had heard stories of him steeling signs and loading up his van with them in a previous election, but this was the first time I saw it for myself.  I stopped and talked with him and demanded that he climb down the gully to retrieve the signs from the blackberry bushes, which he finally did.   Do we honestly want a man who would stoop so low to achieve personal political gain in a day and age when election fraud is rampant?

Mark Banks
Redmond WA

You want your elections managed by an unethical, partisan hothead?  Vote for Irons.  But if you want a dispassionate, experienced professional in the office of Elections Director, vote for Sherril Huff.

And by all means, get your ballot in the mail today.

Thanks to everyone who read through my series last week. Just as a followup to the last part, where I talked about the botched police raid on a small town mayor’s residence in Maryland, the Washington Post has a far more in-depth look at the case.

Here are some more updates on stories I’ve been following, and some other news of note:

[Read more…]

Of all the things I’ve read by The New Yorker‘s Hendrik Hertzberg, easily his most influential was a Talk of the Town piece from 2006 called “The ‘ic’ Factor” where he rips apart misuse of the word Democrat to describe things that are, in fact, Democratic by Republicans and lazy or misguided journalists.

For instance, Barack Obama is a Democrat, but he is also the Democratic president who was democratically elected by the American people.

The Washington state House of Representatives is mostly full of Democrats who make up a Democratic majority.

The word Democratic, as Hertzberg explains, is an adjective, and when Republicans use the noun Democrat in lieu of the adjective, it is a slur of sorts.

It is also just plain ignorant.

Now, with my my humble Stadium High School eduction and Wesleyan government degree, I am hardly a walking AP Style Guide, but I have sense enough to properly use the word Democratic when referring to the party that had the right mixture of substance and style to deter George W. Bush from its ranks.

With that said, I’ll be taking it upon myself to call out journalists who make the “ic” flub in the name of public notice. I invite HA readers to do the same.

Our inaugural offender is a wise and talented fellow Stadium grad, the Tacoma News-Tribune‘s Peter Callaghan who today referred to the “Democrat” majority on the King County Council.

Get it right, Pete.

Who’s next? Hopefully no one.

A number of the players who were heavily invested in last year’s gubernatorial rematch between Gov. Chris Gregoire and Republican Dino Rossi subscribe to the notion that the beginning of the end for Rossi, who had appeared to have closed the gap on Gregoire in September polling, was the night he said, during a debate hosted by the Association of Washington Business in Blaine, that he was open to considering a scaling back of the minimum wage for teenagers in Washington state.

Two weeks later the Rossi campaign suffered an embarrassing setback when Kittitas County Republican Party Chair Matt Manweller, a CWU political science professor, unleashed a tirade outside of an Ellensburg campaign rally, calling supporters of Washington state’s minimum wage “dumber than a post.”

Well, even without their guy Rossi in the governor’s mansion, the good politicians of Central Washington aren’t giving up on it.

State Rep. Mike Armstrong (R-Wenatchee) introduced a bill today that would allow state employers to pay 15 year olds 85% of the Federal minimum wage. Today that wage is $6.55, which would make the Armstrong’s proposed 15-year old wage $5.57.

Washington state’s current minimum wage is $8.55, making this would-be $3.00 decrease even steeper than the $1.50 proposed by Rossi last fall.

“When I was a teenager, I worked in the orchards around Wenatchee picking apples, cherries and other fruit,” Armstrong said in a press release, recalling the halcyon days of the early 1970s. “A training wage would help to further expand these opportunities for your young people and be a savings to farmers struggling to pay for harvest and stay in business.”

In other words, think of the children!

The bill was referred to the House Commerce and Labor Commmittee, where one can assume it will die a slow death. Committee chair Rep. Steve Conway (D-Tacoma), whose House website lists his top legislative priority as “family wage jobs”, did not return a call seeking comment about the bill’s fate.

Ironically, this was only one of two bills introduced today regarding 15 year olds, whose political stock is at an all-time high on this Groundhog’s Day. Sen Jeanne Kohl-Welles (D-Seattle) brought a bill to the Senate floor that would ban children under the age of 16 from hunting in Washington state without adult accompaniment.

Poor kids.

If the Democrats get their way, they won’t be able to work or hunt. How will they ever feed their families? Good thing they can still get their contraceptives without much hassle, right?