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As long as we’re obsessing on personal resumes, I thought I’d share a little biographical tidbit of my own.  I graduated college intending to pursue a career on Broadway, and while I guess most people might write off my dreams as a failure, I still managed to get further than most, having co-written the book and lyrics for a musical that opened Off-Broadway at the well respected Vineyard Theatre in December of 2001.

It was in many ways a personal disaster, four years of hard work dissipating in a three-week run and a series of scathing reviews, but I’ve always lived by the philosophy that I’d rather fail big than succeed small, and so I’ve often proudly (if self-deprecatingly) described myself as the co-author of an Off-Broadway musical flop.

Problem is, the program, and thus the subsequent nasty review in our nation’s paper of record, the New York Times, doesn’t give me credit for co-writing the book, so I guess, given recent precedent, our local media would accuse me of lying, or at the very least exaggerating my failure.

But I did co-write the book.  For four years I collaborated on that script, writing and rewriting and re-rewriting the book and lyrics, but after a falling out with the artistic director over a series of last minute cuts that I vehemently opposed, he retaliated by removing my name from the book credit… and that’s how the NY Times and other papers credited the show in their reviews.

So while I’ve got no documentation to back up my claim, the truth remains:  I co-wrote the lyrics and book of an Off-Broadway musical flop.

The point is, in reporting, “the facts” don’t always equate to the “the truth.”  At most other universities, Darcy Burner’s degree might have been recorded as a B.A. in computer science with a minor in economics, but that’s just not the terminology used at Harvard.  Still, the truth remains that Darcy did at least enough work for a minor, having completed five economics courses at one of the top business schools in the nation, along with two related mathematics courses, earning what her Harvard dean agrees is accurately described as a degree in computer science and economics, even if that is not exactly what is written on the diploma.

To parse a conjunction in an effort cast Darcy as a liar is thus absurd, especially in light of the very real and pressing issue in which this bogus charge was raised:  our nation’s unprecedented economic crisis.  The question voters should care about is, given Darcy’s extensive economics education at one of the finest schools in the nation versus Reichert’s two-year social work degree from a small Christian college, whose education leaves them better prepared to understand and address this crisis?

Darcy earned a degree in computer science and economics, as Dean Lewis attests, but whatever the so-called facts, I think the truth is obvious.

King County Superior Court Judge Paris Kallas ruled today that the lawsuit alleging illegal coordination between Dino Rossi and the BIAW’s fundraising efforts can go forward. 

Kallas will decide on Monday if Dino Rossi will be deposed. Rossi’s deposition could be scheduled next Wednesday.

From an April 2008 Congressional hearing in which Rep. Robert Scott introduces Rep. Dave Reichert:

“Our second witness will be the gentleman from Washington, Congressman David Reichert, who currently is in his second term in Congress. In addition to his notable work on the Green River task force, he has over 35 years of public service to the people of Washington. He has a bachelor’s degree from Concordia Lutheran College.”

Of course, Reichert only has a two-year Associate’s degree, and fitting his pattern, he never corrects this mistake, thus enshrining it in the Congressional Record.

[Hat-tip Dan Kirkdorffer.]

Turns out the highest paid member of Sarah Palin’s campaign staff, at over $11,000 a week, is Amy Strozzi, Palin’s traveling makeup artist.  Which kinda makes sense, as it’s the one party of Palin’s campaign that consistently looks good.

Obama	McCain
100.0% probability of winning	0.0% probability of winning
Mean of 376 electoral votes	Mean of 162 electoral votes

Yesterday’s analysis showed Sen. Barack Obama leading Sen. John McCain by (on average) 370 to 168 electoral votes. There were 26 new polls representing 17 states released today to weigh in on today’s analysis. For the most part, the polls strongly favored Obama.

Now, the outcome of 100,000 simulated elections is that Obama wins them all. Obama receives (on average) 376 to McCain’s 162 electoral votes—a gain of six. In an election held now, Obama would win with near certainty.

This table shows the electoral vote total for different criteria for the probability of winning a state (Safe=100%, Strong=90%+, Leans=60%+, Weak=50%+):

Threshold	Safe	+ Strong	+ Leans	+ Weak
Safe Obama	189
Strong Obama	177	366
Leans Obama	12	12	378
Weak Obama	0	0	0	378
Weak McCain	3	3	3	160
Leans McCain	15	15	157
Strong McCain	105	142
Safe McCain	37

Detailed results for this analysis are available at Hominid Views.

Methods are described in the FAQ. The most recent version of this analysis can be found on this page.

[EDITOR’S NOTE:  As long as the Reichert campaign is bringing up the issue of resume padding, isn’t it time the media address the real elephant in the room… the simple fact that Reichert’s entire political career is based on the out and out lie that he caught the Green River Killer?  Of course, he didn’t, and most everybody in the media understands that, but nobody is willing to say it publicly because it was the media after all, that willfully gave life to this self-aggrandizing myth.

So in the spirit of full disclosure, I am reprinting this October 2006 special post by Michael Hood, originally titled “It’s the Green River, Stupid.”  And you can read Part II of Michael’s report over on his blog, BlatherWatch. In the meanwhile, please help Darcy refute the lies, by generously giving to her one last time. — GOLDY]

I am not afraid, I’ve had people point guns at me.
— Rep. Dave Reichert

“He desecrated the victims. The public ought to know that.” Tomas Guillen is describing Republican 8th District Congressman Dave Reichert and his manipulation of the Green River murder investigation and the arrest of Gary Ridgway to climb up into party politics.

Guillen’s no political firebrand, he’s a respected Seattle University journalism and criminal justice professor. But as a Seattle Times reporter, he covered the Green River story from its beginnings and has written two books on the subject.

His academic text, Serial Killers: Issues Explored Through the Green River Murders, and Ridgway attorney Mark Prothero’s Defending Gary, both written after Reichert’s 2004 election, tell a starkly different story than does Reichert’s ghost-written autohagiography, Chasing the Devil, My Twenty-Year Quest to Capture the Green River Killer.

Reichert’s record as sheriff was exposed in last week’s devastating reporting by the P-I’s Lewis Kamb who found plenty of former colleagues who’d reveal him to be “an ambitious self-promoter, an inexperienced manager prone to poor decisions, even a close-minded detective more obstacle than asset to a serial murder investigation.”

Reichert refused to be interviewed in person for the P-I’s piece, preferring to answer the reporter’s questions in writing. He did not return our attempts at contact.

(The written material, and people we’ve talked to use some strong adjectives to describe the former Sheriff’s professional behavior: manipulative, self-serving, amateurish, ambitious, creepy, bungling, inappropriate, opportunistic, egotistical, voyeuristic, and stubborn. These are quite different from the descriptives we’ve been hearing for years: heroic, gracious, sensitive, muscular, chivalrous, well-mannered, brave, clean and reverent. You decide).

Sheriff Reichert became the public face of the sensational arrest of the serial killer by elbowing his way in front of the cameras on November 30, 2000 when the sensational collar was announced.

Everyone knows Reichert is the guy who caught the Green River killer- Why? Because he reminds us in every introduction; every speech, interview, and on his website.

It helped get him elected in 2004 in his race against KIRO radio host, Dave Ross; and he still flogs it every time he opens his mouth in his race against Darcy Burner.

Recently, on KUOW’s Weekday with Steve Scher, (in a rare appearance in a venue where he might be seriously questioned) he referenced serial killers no fewer than three times in one hour on the local NPR talk show despite being asked no questions on the subject by Scher, who’s unused to politicians who drop blood instead of names.

Here’s an example: Why is Reichert against abortion? He told a interviewer recently, “I have a great respect for life. I’ve seen a lot of death in my career, worked Green River, seen lots of dead bodies.”

Back in Washington, the Honorable Mr. Reichert is known as the Man from Green River- his longest speech on the House floor during his lackluster first term was about “capturing” Gary Ridgway.

The release of Chasing the Devil, in late July, 2004 was exquisitely synched-up with his primary campaign which was a difficult one with a crowded Republican field anxious to replace the retiring Jennifer Dunn.

Bolstered by both his publisher’s marketing and his own political campaign, it was a perfect PR storm. Reichert’s face was thrust onto the front pages of local papers. He was interviewed on CNN and Court TV in full dress uniform (and every hair present and accounted for) talking about “capturing” the killer.

“Reichert used the serial murder case to move forward,” Guillen told BlatherWatch. “It was a travesty.” Photos released when Ridgway was arrested show Reichert in a suit posing in the bottom of a ravine near the Des Moines Highway.

“He used the grave site of a murder victim for personal ambition,” he says.

Meanwhile, his opponents, Bellevue Councilman Conrad Lee, State Sen. Luke Esser and (now GOP State Chairman) Diane Tebelius were lucky if they made page B-1 with their little coffee klatches, blah-blah press releases, and cheesy meet & greets.

(Chasing the Devil was neither a literary nor a popular success. P-I books critic, John Marshall wrote that Reichert painted himself as “muscular, charismatic, devoutly Christian, a dogged mix of Dudley Do-Right and the Lone Ranger.” Not exactly a bestseller: you can now buy a like new copy on Amazon for $1.74.)

Although otherwise a failure, his book as a political instrument was inspired. Media was flooded with pictures of the sheriff in a hunky muscle shirt sifting for bones at a body dump site, or in full Sheriffian regalia sternly leaning into and staring down the cowering serial killer from across a table. Reichert won the primary easily and got a tremendous knee-up in the November election.

(There’s his hair. It’s magnificent. Dave Ross told us: “He’s got great hair, he’s acknowledged he’s got great hair.” He’s known in legal circles as “Sheriff Hairspray.” [Reichert’s hair]… is always ready for the next photo opportunity,” says Prothero).

“My standing orders were that we were going to campaign on issues,” says Dave Ross. “Rumors I got about Dave or the Green River killer or the release of the book- we weren’t going to touch them.”

But there’s more than a little resume inflation going on in Chasing the Devil. There’s some obfuscatin’. Reichert had been “lead detective” in 1982 as the first bodies surfaced in and around the Green River. His book, however, would let you believe he held the title until 1990, never mentioning that several other detectives led in later murders.

The book is more than three quarters done before he makes passing reference to the fact that the task force had commanders over the “lead detectives.” Former Detective Bob Keppel told the P-I, Reichert was “one detective among many,” and never led discussions about the direction of the task force as a true leader would have.

Actually, he had little to do with the investigation having left the task force in 1990 to climb the bureaucratic ladder in the Sheriff’s Department. What’s more, these new accounts show how Reichert’s tremendous ego was responsible for early police blunders that stalled the investigation and let Gary Ridgway continue killing for decades.

But great hair or not, “He got elected based on Green River, when in fact, he didn’t solve it and he didn’t win against Gary Ridgway,” says Guillen.”

The fact is: technology caught the killer, not Detective Reichert’s dogged shoe-leather sleuthing as his press so dramatically implies. Even then, on Sheriff Reichert’s watch, the saliva sample that could have busted Ridgway as early as 1996 when the DNA technology became available, was not tested until 2001.

Women died in that interim.

[Click through to read It’s the Green River, Stupid: Part 2, including the really creepy parts.  And please don’t forget to give to Darcy.  Thanks.]

I hope everybody understands the fraud the Seattle Times perpetrated on voters this morning.  Yesterday, the NRCC shopped around this bullshit gotcha story, fishing for media validators to back up attack ads they already planned to run, and despite serious reservations about the reporter’s ignorance of degree requirements at Harvard, the Times’ editors chose to comply.  Now, regardless of any forthcoming retraction or apology or continued backtracking (and there’s been a ton of backtracking since the story first hit the website,) you can expect the airwaves to be plastered with ads until election day, citing the Times accusing Darcy of lying to voters.

The Times delivered Reichert a steaming pile of shit, neatly tied up in a ribbon.

So now, the only way for Darcy to counter these baseless lies is with more advertising of her own, ads for which she’ll need to raise a lot money if she hopes to keep up with the barrage of attack ads Reichert is airing, courtesy of an unprecedented and illegal loan from his media buyer.  That of course, is where you come in.

Over on Daily Kos, Markos is just as outraged as I am, and he’s asking his readers to do something about it:

Look, here’s the deal: The local media and the local political establishment see themselves as kingmakers. They get to decide who sinks or swims in their areas of influence. Then along comes Darcy Burner, thinking she can crash the gates and get elected for office in the district, and the local elites are pissed. So they conspire with Reichert, a supposed local hero, to dish all sorts of crap about Darcy and bury Reichert’s dirt.

We’re winning this race, but they’re throwing EVERYTHING plus the kitchen sink at Darcy. If we want to win this thing, we’ve got to get her back and push back. We’ve got to leave everything on the road.

Right now Darcy is about $350,000 behind Reichert. I’m not going to pretend that we can raise that kind of money quickly, but can we cover $50,000 of that? Can we help Burner fight against the smears from the state and national GOP?

Darcy has far more in-district and in-state contributors and money than Reichert, and you all deserve tremendous kudos for your strong support, but with election day less than two weeks away it is our responsibility to do our part in this latest national netroots fund drive.

Markos himself has personally donated an addtional $2200, and while I can’t afford to max out given my meager earnings, I just contributed another $200.  That’s an awful lot of money for me, but with victory within our grasp, I hope you all join me in reaching as deep into our collective pockets as we can to put Darcy Burner into office.

Please give to Darcy today.

Rasmussen just released its latest poll in Washington’s gubernatorial race, showing Gov. Chris Gregoire leading Republican challenger Dino Rossi by a 50 to 48 percent margin.

These numbers are nowhere near the recent Elway Poll that showed Gregoire with 51-39 lead, but suggests a steady trend in Gov. Gregoire’s favor from Rasmussen’s previous two surveys, that showed the race tied 48-48 on October 2, and a 52-46 Rossi lead on September 10… this despite the unprecedented millions of dollars in relentless attack ads from Rossi’s allies over the past few weeks.

So all in all, I’d rather be in the governor’s shoes right now than Rossi’s.

Darcy Burner does indeed have a B.A. from Harvard in computer science and economics; that is an established fact.

So, when Reichert, the NRCC and their enablers at the Seattle Times argue that claiming a degree in “economics” is misleading because it fails to mention the “computer science,” wouldn’t the opposite be equally true?  Wouldn’t it be just as misleading to claim a degree in “computer science” while failing to mention the emphasis on economics?  Are they really implying that anything less than spelling out “a degree in computer science and economics” is a deliberate misrepresentation?

Hmm…

Let’s see if this, Rep. Dave Reichert’s official Congressional biography, makes the front page of the Seattle Times:

REICHERT, David G., .a Representative from Washington; born in Detroit Lakes, Becker County, Minn., August 29, 1950; graduated, Kent Meridian High School, Renton, Wash., 1968; B.A., Concordia Lutheran College, Portland, Oreg., 1970; U.S. Air Force Reserve, 1971-1976; U.S. Air Force, 1976; police officer, King County, Wash., 1972-1977; sheriff, King County, Wash., 1997- 2004; elected as a Republican to the One Hundred Ninth Congress and to the succeeding Congress (January 3, 2005-present).

Problem is, Reichert never earned a B.A. from Concordia in 1970, because they didn’t even grant their first bachelors degree until 1980.  In fact, the year Reichert started was Concordia’s first year as a Junior College; before then, it was merely a Lutheran high school.

What Reichert has is a two-year Associates degree from a small, Christian, Junior College.  (And possibly, not even that; has Heffter bothered to ask Concordia’s registrar for Reichert’s records?)  Thus Reichert’s official bio, which he has allowed to go uncorrected for four years, and which has been picked up by numerous news organizations and other web sites, is an undisputed lie.  Gonna print that on your front page Mr. Blethen?  I didn’t think so.

But more important than the parsing of the word “and” in Darcy Burner’s degree, or the substitution of the letter “B” for “A” in Reichert’s, should be their actual education, and how well that prepares the two candidates to deal with our nation’s unprecedented economic crisis.  Reichert has a two-year degree from a small, ultra-conservative Christian school.  (And by “ultra-conservative” I mean Missouri Synod Lutheran, whose positions on reproductive rights and the societal role of women leaves them far to the right of most fundamentalist Evangelicals.)  Meanwhile, Darcy earned a B.A. in computer science and economics, in the process completing five courses in economics plus two related math courses at Harvard, one of the most prestigious and rigorous universities in the world.

Isn’t that what should really be important to voters instead of these stupid gotchas?

UPDATE:
Looks like somebody is covering their tracks.  After four years of allowing an erroneous biographical entry on congress.gov tout a four-year B.A. degree when he only earned a two-year A.A., Reichert’s entry is miraculously updated, but only after being publicly scolded for his resume padding.  Of course, the lie still lives on in the Google cache.

After interviewing former Harvard Dean Harry Lewis, here is what reporter Emily Heffter chose to print in the Seattle Times:

Harry Lewis, a Harvard computer science professor and former dean of the school, confirmed that Burner did study economics at Harvard.

“She doesn’t have a degree in economics,” he said. “It’s a specialty within the computer science degree that she has.”

And here is Dean Lewis in his own unexpurgated words (the emphasis is mine):

I’m the professor and ex-dean who was quoted in the story, and as it happens, also the guy who wrote the CS degree requirements. At the time Darcy was at Harvard, she would have needed, as part of her CS degree requirements, several courses in a technical specialization area related to CS. She fulfilled that CS degree requirement by specializing in Economics (which meant, by the way, that she couldn’t have taken just the easy, non-mathematical Ec courses). So it’s not exactly a minor (which we didn’t have then, though we do now), and it’s also not anything that the registrar would be able to certify (because it’s an internal requirement of the computer science faculty). But it’s something everyone getting a degree in CS had to do (though other students would have other specialties). The way Darcy is describing herself is accurate.

And here is Dean Lewis’ account of his interview with Heffter:

Talked to her and told her you had a degree in CS with a specialization in Ec. She said you were claiming to have a degree in Ec and I just repeated myself. She asked me what that consisted of and I said a block of Ec courses. She started to ask me if that would make you qualified … and I cut her off, saying I couldn’t judge economics qualifications. She thanked me and said that was helpful.

Darcy Burner does indeed have a degree from Harvard in computer science and economics, and it is utterly outrageous that the Times would choose to turn the NRCC’s parsing of the word “and” into a front page gotcha story defaming Darcy’s character.

They owe her an apology.

Three former Washington State Governors have endorsed the Death with Dignity Initiative I-1000, Republican Dan Evans and Democrats Booth Gardner and Gary Locke. A fourth, Republican John Spellman, is opposing the measure. I’d been planning to write a final post about all of the myths and lies being spread by the I-1000 opposition, but Spellman’s recent editorial in the Seattle PI contains enough of them that it serves as the perfect springboard for this post anyway.

It is not often I publicly disagree with my former gubernatorial colleagues, Booth Gardner and Daniel Evans. While I respect them both, I must firmly disagree with their support of the assisted suicide initiative, I-1000.

Both frame the issue as one of strictly personal choice. But what’s at stake is actually much broader. Derek Humphrey, co-founder of the Hemlock Society, has asserted repeatedly that euthanasia and assisted suicide will inevitably prevail in our society because they make economic sense.

Think about that for a second. What on Earth is he saying? Obviously it’s cheaper to have people with serious illnesses die sooner rather than later. But when economics enters the picture, it’s no longer a matter of strictly personal choice. Do you really think that, once implemented, assisted suicide will remain merely a “personal choice,” isolated from not-so-subtle coercions of everyday life and magically protected from health care rationing?

Yes, I do, and we can look at Oregon for the proof. Oregon’s law has been on the books for 10 years now, and there’s absolutely no evidence that it’s moving any closer to being anything other than a personal choice. No one anywhere wants coercions, and no one anywhere is talking about coercions. As in Oregon, only the terminally ill individual makes the choice under I-1000, not doctors, not health care providers, not family members, not the government. The belief that I-1000 will lead to an end where people have less choices has no basis in reality.

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