HorsesAss.Org

AP reporter Dave Ammons retired yesterday after 37 years at the Olympia bureau, and since his colleagues in the Capitol press corps are all paying tribute to him, I thought I’d post a little tribute of my own.

Ammons hasn’t always been a popular reporter amongst my fellow progressive activists, largely due to the lavish attention he’s heaped on Tim Eyman over the years, but even if Ammons played a significant role in making Eyman’s public career, I’ve always held a special fondness for him because, well… he made mine too.

It was Rich Roesler at the Spokesman-Review who first broke the story of my initiative to proclaim Tim Eyman a horse’s ass, but it was Ammons’ relentless coverage that drove the story to statewide and even national headlines for months, long after my fifteen minutes of fame should have expired. It was also Ammon’s AP Olympia bureau that, in the weeks following the 2004 gubernatorial election, anointed me “the liberal blogger” when they needed a partisan counterpoint to the sudden (u)SP juggernaut.

Political reporting can be godawful boring, but Ammons had an eye for characters like me and Tim who could catch the public’s attention, and he was matter-of-fact about the role he and his colleagues play in promoting the agendas of the people they cover. One day, a few weeks into the unexpected chaos of the I-831 campaign, my phone rings and the voice at the other end jovially announces, “Hi, it’s Dave Ammons… your personal publicist.” Of course, promoting me and my joke initiative was never the motive behind Ammons’ attentiveness, but unlike some of his more stuffy colleagues, Ammons never seemed shy about the symbiotic relationship between political reporters and their subjects.

Having a little bit of insight into the sausage factory that is journalism, I have always considered Ammons’ coverage to be fair, even when not particularly balanced, for while the progressive community may rightly complain that our efforts and issues routinely received short shrift compared to Eyman and his follies, it was not Ammons’ bias that was to blame, but rather our failure to give him a good enough story. And in the end, telling a good story is what every genre of writing—even journalism—is really all about.

Best of luck on your new endeavors Dave. And thanks.

Rush Limbaugh calls for riots in Denver at the Democratic National Convention, and says his listeners have a responsibility to make sure it happens.

But, you know, I’m the hate talker.

Michael Ennis at the right-wing millionaire funded Washington Policy Center takes exception to my post about his group’s attempts in Clark County to scuttle light rail.

No one can escape the fact that light rail across a new Columbia River Bridge would add over $1 billion dollars to the project costs. This means adding light rail would increase costs by 40%, but only serve between 2.4% to 9.8% of all bridge crossings by 2030. That presents a significant gap between public costs and public benefits.

There is a better way: maintaining the current transit configuration (rubber-tire buses) across a new bridge would carry just as many transit riders as light rail or BRT, yet cost a billion dollars less.

But of course, DeVore doesn’t address these facts and only engages in an Ad Hominem attack. The people of Clark County deserve to know both sides of an issue when public dollars are used.

Facts are funny things, actually. I mean, Ennis was at this forum on Apr. 10, agitating in our community, when a director of the Columbia River Crossing project put forth a different figure than one billion dollars:

Crossing officials likely will seek up to $750 million in Federal Transit Administration’s grants to pay for construction costs of bringing light rail over the Columbia River and into downtown Vancouver.

Doug Ficco, co-director of the Columbia River Crossing project, said the $750 million figure comes from federal officials and roughly matches how much crossing officials estimate light rail would cost.

But what’s a quarter billion dollar difference when it helps you make your right-wing millionaire funded point? All that Coors (or whatever) money has to be used for something I suppose. Follow me past the jump and we’ll talk about the issues.

[Read more…]

This week’s Birds Eye View Contest is posted.

UPDATE: Dominic Holden lays into Mike Carter and Paul Shukovsky for their horrendous reporting on yesterday’s drug busts.

Really… how could I ignore this story?

KINSHASA (Reuters) – Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.

Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur.

Rumours of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo’s sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.

Apparently, Dori Monson is syndicated on Radio Kinshasa. Who knew?

What I absolutely love about wire stories like this is that no matter how absurd they get, the journalist still apparently feels obligated to write in that familiarly stodgy newswire style, even when they include quotes like this…

“When you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it’s become tiny or that they’ve become impotent. To that I tell them, ‘How do you know if you haven’t gone home and tried it’,”

Or this…

“It’s real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw. What was left was tiny,” said 29-year-old Alain Kalala, who sells phone credits near a Kinshasa police station.

Yeah… right. I’m guessing these penis thefts are particularly common in the locker rooms at unheated swimming pools.

Anyway, I couldn’t possibly touch on this subject without closing with the classic King Missile video. But be forewarned: it’s uncensored, uncut and probably not suitable for the office or young children.

Yesterday, Slog’s Dominic Holden challenged local reporters to ask tough questions about yesterday’s pot busts in South King County. For comparison, he showed how the proposal by Seattle city officials here to implement a $.20 fee for plastic bags got opinions from both sides of the debate over that proposal’s efficacy, but drug busts never do.

The result? Nothing. Both the Seattle Times’ Mike Carter and the Seattle PI’s Paul Shukovsky fail to provide both sides of this story. And yet they wonder why they’re going out of business.

For a city that vows to wipe out homelessness by 2015, and whose anti-density old timers pine for the semi-urban, working-class neighborhoods of yore, it is instructive to look at how the rest of the nation is achieving the laudable goal of assuring an abundant stock of affordable housing. From the AP:

Sales of new homes plunged in March to the lowest level in 16 1/2 years as housing slumped further at the start of the spring sales season.

The median price of a new home in March, compared with a year ago, fell by the largest amount in nearly four decades.

The Commerce Department reported Thursday that sales of new homes dropped by 8.5 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 526,000 units, the slowest sales pace since October 1991.

The median price of a home sold in March dropped by 13.3 percent compared with March 2007, the biggest year-over-year price decline since a 14.6 percent plunge in July 1970.

And from Reuters:

Falling U.S. home prices and a lack of available credit may result in foreclosures on 6.5 million loans by the end of 2012, according to a Credit Suisse research report on Tuesday.

The foreclosures could put 12.7 percent of all residential borrowers out of their homes…

The new forecast includes 2.7 million subprime loans whose risky characteristics sparked the worst housing market since the Great Depression. Subprime foreclosures, on top of the 676,000 already in or through the process, will hit 1.39 million in the next two years alone, an upward revision from the 730,000 predicted by Credit Suisse in October.

Falling home prices have made an increasing number of U.S. homeowners more vulnerable to default, they said. Nearly a third of subprime borrowers owed more than their home was worth at the end of last year, and that figure will double to 63 percent in 2009, they said.

[…] Credit Suisse expects home prices will fall by 10 percent in 2008 and 5 percent in 2009, before rebounding.

That’s about a 25% drop from peak prices (a projection many analysts consider very conservative), which puts a lot more than just subprime borrowers at risk. While Credit Suisse projects an astounding 50 percent or more of subprime loans could ultimately end up in foreclosure, Alt-A and prime mortgages represent a much larger pool of borrowers, and as many as 4 million of these are also at risk, including many young couples who had the poor judgment to come of age and start families during a real estate bubble.

Yup, that’s one way to address our shortage of affordable housing, but I’m not sure that knocking the bottom out of our local market is a palatable solution, or that dumping millions of families out of their homes and onto the streets is a constructive step toward ending homelessness. Nor do I think we should embrace the BIAW’s dream of make WA state a zero regulation zone, were they can freely perfect their innovative new black-mold-and-kindling building technology.

It is a complicated issue, and any attempt by one side or the other to claim that they have the solution should be met with skepticism. As our region has grown, and congestion has grown with it, the days when homebuyers could reasonably trade commute time for square footage has come to an end.

If we want to maintain the natural splendor that makes our region so attractive, while accommodating the hundreds of thousands of new jobs and residents that continue to prop up our housing market above the rest of the nation, then both consumers and builders are going to have to change their expectations. And judging by the dozens of condo towers continuing to sprout throughout the downtown, and the thousands of townhouses and apartments being built along Sound Transit’s light rail route, it looks like expectations are starting to do exactly that.

The Seattle-based Washington Policy Center planted an anti-light rail article in The Columbian this morning under the headline “Local Views.”

So um, welcome to Clark County, Seattle. It was awesome when the Discovery Institute (of Seattle ) went around spreading its right wing baloney in my home state of Kansas, although the good and just people of that state have come to their senses and rejected their nonsense. Still, I kind of feel like I’m being stalked by right wing Seattle think tanks, which is kind of weird given how progressive Seattle is supposed to be.

You figure the Washington Policy Center is coming into Clark County not just to mess with us, but to mess with you? If I were them I would screw with the relatively modest Columbia River Crossing transit portion in hopes of derailing (pun intended) further light rail hopes in the Puget Sound region. Because what you may not hear up there is that the probable CRC proposal for light rail involves extending the line only about three miles, from the Portland Expo Center to Clark College.

I’m sure studies by right-wing think tanks conceived by talk radio hosts and funded by Republican millionaires are quite objective.

What’s interesting is that there will likely be a vote at some point regarding whether the Clark County transit agency, C-TRAN, will be funded to provide operating expenses for the light rail line. So while it’s entirely predictable that the conservative noise machine has sprung into action, what I’m wondering is whether our side has the capability to respond?

Because we’re all in this together now.

Did Sen. Hillary Clinton win the Pennsylvania primary in any meaningful way? Does cutting a fighter jet into little pieces make for good art? And who is the single most conservative member of the house on foreign policy? These questions and more are raised, pondered, re-examined, synthesized, refined, interrogated, beat to death, waterboarded, and stacked on the floor in neat little pyramids by Goldy and friends.

Yes…it was another evening of Podcasting Liberally.

Joining Goldy was a panel of the blogosphere’s finest: Will, Ray, mcjoan, and Daniel .

The show is 50:07, and is available here as a 47 MB MP3.

[audio:http://www.podcastingliberally.com/podcasts/podcasting_liberally_april_22_2008.mp3]

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

Oops.

The government is scrapping a $20 million prototype of its highly touted “virtual fence” on the Arizona-Mexico border because the system is failing to adequately alert border patrol agents to illegal crossings, officials said.

The move comes just two months after Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced his approval of the fence built by The Boeing Co. The fence consists of nine electronic surveillance towers along a 28-mile section of border southwest of Tucson.

So Boeing loses yet another high-profile government contract. Or has it?

Boeing is to replace the so-called Project 28 prototype with a series of towers equipped with communications systems, new cameras and new radar capability, officials said.

Um… isn’t that what the existing virtual fence is, a series of towers equipped with communications systems cameras and radar? Is there any penalty for failure? I’m confused.

Either way, it’s a pretty sweet deal. I need to get myself one those $860 million government contracts, because I’m pretty damn sure I could build a virtual fence that doesn’t work, and still have enough money left over to make these pledge drives a thing of the past.

Anybody notice that John McCain only got 72 percent of the vote in Pennsylvania yesterday, where Ron Paul supporters spent heavily to air ads like this?

There’s going to be a press conference at 1pm at the federal building in Seattle to discuss “Operation Green Reaper.” Can someone from the media please ask them whether the “green” in the operation name is supposed to refer to the pot plants they found or to the taxpayer money that was wasted?