HorsesAss.Org

More details are emerging about the failure of Bank of Clark County. In an interesting development, it appears that the total dollar amount of uninsured accounts will be substantially less than the approximately $39 million that was widely report initially. Reported figures are now more in the $10 million range.

Most press accounts describe Bank of Clark County as a “community bank,” which is accurate enough, but it’s important to understand that this bank was essentially set up by and for real estate developers and builders. The bank’s web site disappeared Friday night, but thanks to the Google cache you can peruse the backgrounds of its board of directors.

News accounts tonight suggest the bank was heavily exposed to a collapsing construction and real estate sector, while at the same time it was reluctant to deal with problem properties. A substantial amount of money was withdrawn in the last four days of operation, according to published accounts.

[Read more…]

How fitting…

I can’t get Willamette Week, who broke this story, to load right now, so I’ll link to this Oregonian article that doesn’t even bother to mention Willamette Week!

Mayor Sam Adams acknowledged today that he had a sexual relationship in 2005 with an 18-year-old man he had mentored. He said he lied when asked about it in 2007 and told the young man, Beau Breedlove, to lie about it, too.

Okay, yeah, another politician, another sex scandal. All the points that will now be made are utterly predictable. On the one hand who cares what politicians do in their private lives? On the other hand, he was doing it with a man far younger than himself while serving on the city commission, and then lied about the relationship, portraying it as “mentoring.”

Oh lord. What is it with politicians and their inability to keep their pants zipped? Adams just took office as mayor this month. Bad news for Portland during a tough patch in history. As if any citizens need this kind of distraction right now.

(And that’s real classy, Oregonian, to not even mention your local competitor that ran circles around you.)

The sudden collapse of our local news industry and the resulting mass exodus of political reporters is a bitter pill to swallow for those of us who believe that maintaining a vibrant Fourth Estate is absolutely critical to maintaining a vibrant democracy… but… well… every crisis also presents an opportunity.

That’s why I’m pleased to be playing my part in the launch of Publicola, Washington state’s newest news and opinion site.  Largely the editorial creation of former Stranger news editor Josh Feit, Publicola strives to help fill the void in state political reporting, while providing the kind of fresh writing and analysis online readers demand, and Josh has made great strides toward that goal by recruiting the likes of Sandeep Kaushik and Glenn Fleishman to help contribute to the site.

Publicola is also the first of a series of new and existing blogs and other websites to join HA under the umbrella of the newly created JOA News Co-op, an ambitious effort to share resources, content, traffic and revenues while creating a sustainable (and ultimately profitable) business model.  This new JOA is less of a business agreement and more of an ecosystem of tools and services… but more on that later.

In the meanwhile, be prepared for some big changes here at HA as I start to roll out the full suite of new features I’ve been developing.  And wish us luck.

Jean Godden: madcap days at The P-I

In short, Godden tells the story of the time she shared a “jazz cigarette” with Duke Ellington, sports columnist Royal Brougham’s penchant for performing back-alley abortions, and the time former editor Lou Guzzo drank a bottle of absinthe and declared himself “Duke of all the West.”

In other (less made-up) P-I news:

My grandmother, Anne Stuart, was a reporter for the Seattle P-I from 1940 to 1947. My grandfather (and Ms. Stuart’s husband) Robert W. Kelley was a photographer for the Seattle Times. (Kelley would later work at LIFE magazine.)

Before the bad-old JOA days, the Times and P-I were in competition with each other, so Mr. and Mrs. Robert W. Kelley couldn’t talk about their work assignments at home.

“I’m going out, and I can’t tell you where,” Bob Kelley would say.

“Well, I’m going out, and I can’t tell you where!” answered his wife Anne.

With the sexual mores of that day, I’m told this kind of exchange was quite scandalous.

Robert Reich has a list of conditions that he thinks should be applied to private sector banks should we wind up creating what he dubs a “Bad Bank” to dispose of all those nasty assets.

Until the taxpayer-financed Bad Bank has recouped the costs of these purchases through selling the toxic assets in the open market, private-sector banks that benefit from this form of taxpayer relief must (1) refrain from issuing dividends, purchasing other companies, or paying off creditors; (2) compensate their executives, traders, or directors no more than 10 percent of what they received in 2007; (3) be reimbursed by their executives, traders, and directors 50 percent of whatever amounts they were compensated in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008 — compensation which was, after all, based on false premises and fraudulent assertions, and on balance sheets that hid the true extent of these banks’ risks and liabilities; and (4) commit at least 90 percent of their remaining capital to new bank loans.

In common parlance, force them to behave like banks rather than criminals, while clawing back illegitimate salaries and other earnings.

Or we could just take over all the banks, clean them out and sell them. Things are so bad we might wind up having to do that anyway.

Only some clergy members are acceptable and thus will be promoted by traditional media, and the DFH must understand which kind is acceptable and which kind is not.

After days of controversy and outrage from the religious right, openly gay Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson opened Barack Obama’s inauguration concert on the National Mall today with a request that the nation pray for “understanding that our president is a human being and not a messiah.”

But only the people AT the concert heard that, because HBO did not televise Robinson’s message. Who engineered this blackout of Robinson? I suspect we’ll hear lots about this in days to come.

Yeah, I know. Fighting over Rick Warren, or religion itself, is generally a waste of energy. Still, nobody can really be surprised that anyone who raises questions about Rick Warren’s batshit insane views is condemned as intolerant, even as a gay bishop is excluded from an inaugural broadcast. The more things change…

It’ll be interesting to see how many columnists get in high dudgeon about Gene Robinson.

Folk you, righties. This land was made for everyone.

So if Bank of Clark County was so well run, why did it fail?

“The bank was heavily involved in the development of the community,” (President of the Columbia River Economic Development Council Bart) Phillips said. “The recession hits, and there are casualties. And this is one of the very unfortunate casualties.”

As the article notes, a lot of Vancouver’s top citizens seem to really like the people who ran Bank of Clark County, which is fine. There’s no reason to think they weren’t good at the business of banking itself.

Plus they love puppies, which is very sweet and utterly beside the point. I get that nobody wants to kick any individuals when they are down, but talk about circling the wagons. Nobody even touches on any of the core financial issues.

There’s almost a sense in the article that the economic calamity now striking us is some vague, mysterious outside force like a natural disaster, rather than the highly predictable outcome of neglect by federal regulators in the financial sector combined with pro-sprawl policies locally. Maybe being too heavily exposed to construction and speculative real estate was considered acceptable best bank practice for the last decade, but it sure in the hell can’t be acceptable going forward if we want to avoid a repeat of this mess.

Easy credit allowed for building booms that led to unsustainable sprawl. People have been trying to point out for a very long time in Clark County that we can’t afford sprawl, either environmentally or economically, but nobody ever listens to the DFH. When your economy is based on growth never stopping, when it stops (as it inevitably must) you are in the deep end of the pool with no water wings.

That’s where we are now. Whether it winds up being a teachable moment for at least some of the bidness guys and gals remains to be seen. The irony is that the local BIAW has the county commission locked up for the next four years, and appears to be taking aim at the Vancouver City Council. So they may actually be able to continue their assault on environmental regulations, but with few people buying much of anything, it starts to look like a Pyrrhic victory.

For all you Seahawks die-hards already focused on the NFL Draft, new coach Jim Mora, and the 2009 season, here’s who they’ll be playing next year:

Home
Arizona
San Francisco
St. Louis
Chicago
Detroit
Tampa Bay
Jacksonville
Tennessee

Away
Arizona
San Francisco
St. Louis
Green Bay
Minnesota
Dallas
Houston
Indianapolis

$20 billion in my hand. Feel more sick and dirty…

You hardly ever hear about one group of atheists hurling artillery rockets or dropping bombs into the neighborhoods of another type of atheist. Strange.

Still, be sure to hate on atheists because it’s customary.

Last week’s winner was Andrew Snelling, who got the correct answer of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. And thanks to Daniel K for posting the link, and to Rod for emailing me that the contest name should have an apostrophe. From now on, it will. :)

Here’s this week’s. In order to win, you have to identify the intersection or post the link (to do that, click the Share link after you’ve found it). Good luck!

There’s been a lot going on recently in drug war related news, more than I’ve been able to write full posts about. Here’s a roundup of recent items.

– The case in Kitsap County against medical marijuana patient Bruce Olson is scheduled to start on Tuesday, January 20. Bruce’s wife Pam has already been convicted for the same drug charges that Bruce is now being tried for and the couple now reside in an RV after they were forced to sell their home to pay legal expenses. The Olsons also maintain that members of the WestNET Drug Task Force poisoned their dogs before they conducted the raid on their home. The Cannabis Defense Coalition is encouraging people to come by the Kitsap County Courthouse to provide support for Olson.

– Here’s the bill introduced into the Washington State House this week to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana. A similar measure was passed by the voters in Massachusetts by a wide margin this past November. With the amount of money it would save the state, passing this bill should be a slam dunk. What happens to it should be a good indication of whether or not we still have a completely dysfunctional government in Olympia.

– Once again, the Obama-Biden Transition Team’s internet outreach at change.gov is demonstrating that drug laws are a big part of where we’re demanding change in the next few years. The most popular idea in the Citizen’s Briefing Book is “Ending Marijuana Prohibition.”

– The violence in Mexico has sparked another legalization debate along the border. This time in El Paso, which is across the river from one of the deadliest cities in Mexico, Juarez. It started when the City Council unanimously passed a resolution to suggest legalization as one possible way to stop the violence in Mexico. A week later, they were forced to retract their resolution after federal and state officials threatened to withhold funding. Apparently, even suggesting we do something correctly is too terrifying for our nation’s politicians to behold.

– A half-hour long debate between Radley Balko and David Freddoso on bloggingheads.tv can be seen here.