HorsesAss.Org

Lebanon

The Saudi Arabian embassy in Beirut has called on its nationals to leave Lebanon a day after a US warship was positioned off the country’s coast.

The embassy on Saturday sent SMS messages to Saudis living in Lebanon urging them to leave the country as soon as possible, Al Jazeera’s correspondent said.

Gaza

Israel vowed to press its campaign against militants in the Gaza Strip on Sunday despite an international outcry over the deadly onslaught that prompted even the moderate Palestinian leadership to cut off all peace talks.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert vowed to continue the ground and air operation that has killed 71 Palestinians since Saturday following the death of one Israeli civilian last week and earned the Jewish state international condemnation for disproportionate use of force.

Iraq

President Mahmud Ahmadinejad said in Baghdad on Sunday that the “Iranian and Iraqi nations will always stand by each other.”

In a news conference with his Iraqi counterpart Jalal Talabani, Ahmadinejad called his landmark visit to Iraq “a new page in the history of the relations between the two countries and cooperation in the region.”

The Iranian president arrived in Baghdad on Sunday morning and was received by Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari and national security adviser Muwaffaq al-Rubaie.

Talabani, who grinned broadly and eagerly shook Ahmadinejad’s hand, called the visit “historic”, AFP reported.

Throughout this decade, we’ve been led to believe that the first two stories are examples of freedom being on the march, while the third example is a setback. In reality, they’re all setbacks, with the third story being the indication of the failure of the approach used in the first two.

John McCain’s new chart-topping single:

(And about ninety more media clips from the past week in politics can be found at Hominid Views.)

From the Seattle Times:

School officials in San Francisco and elsewhere are grappling with the difficulty of getting students to accept free or subsidized lunches because of the social stigma.

Or, um… maybe the kids would prefer to eat real food rather than pizza and corn dogs?

On a more serious note, my first thought in reading the article was, why the fuck are the free and reduced price lunch kids being identified as such? It doesn’t work that way in Seattle elementary schools, where kids have accounts from which the cost of meals are deducted. Who’s to know? So why are free and reduced price lunch kids forced to stand in a separate line in San Francisco?

Most of the separate lines came in response to a federal requirement that food of minimal nutritional value not be sold in the same place as subsidized meals, which must meet certain nutritional standards.

Gee, well, I suppose one simple solution might be to eliminate this federal requirement. Or — and I don’t want to get too radical here — perhaps we shouldn’t be serving school kids “food of minimal nutritional value”…? Which of course, gets back to my first comment: corn dogs? Yuch.

We’ll never know exactly how much money Dave Reichert raised from First Lady Laura Bush’s $500 per plate Medina fundraiser — because quite frankly, Reichert and his accountants don’t want us to know — but the Darcy Burner campaign is quite a bit more transparent. We set out to generate a modest 250 new donations in response to this second Bush funder, and proceeded to blow past our target: 432 donations for a total of $21,879, over just three days. Once again, amazing.

Republicans have typically outspent Democrats for years, because they simply have more rich people on their side, and have long been the party that ideologically favored the wealthy. But the growing strength of the netroots is beginning to even the playing field, leveraging the resources of the many to balance the money of the few. The First Lady may have raised more money for Reichert on Wednesday than we did for Burner, but we generated more than three times their turnout, proving once again that there are more of us than there are of them.

Meanwhile, over on the right wing blogs, they generally don’t even bother trying to raise money for their candidates. I’m guessing, it’s because they can’t.

So thank you all for your generous support. And if you didn’t contribute this time around, well, it’s never too late:

Help Darcy Burn Bush: $

Dino Rossi wasn’t a very good legislator:

In 1997-98 – He sponsored 19 bills and he got 1 passed.

In 1999-2000 – He sponsored 14 bills and got 2 passed.

The 2 he got passed? Senate Resolution 8683 which “applauded the dedication and work of all SCORE (Service Corp of Retired Executives) members.”

And the other was Resolution 8720, which recognized the “We the People Program.”

In 2001-2002 – He was 2/18. Rossi introduced 18 bills got 1 passed. One of those bills was another recognition for the “We the People Program.”

In 2003-2004 – He was 5/32. But two of those bills that passed had to do with the operating budget… you know, when he was “Following The Governor’s Lead”? So really he was 3 for 32 that year.

So in total what is Rossi’s legislative success rate? What does he have to show for seven years in Olympia? What track record to we have to go on when he says he is going to shake things up? Eighty-three bills introduced and seven that passed.

That is an 8% success rate. Pretty good for the football coach at the “Secondary School for Hemophiliacs,” but not so great for a legislator.

I got an anonymous tip earlier today, claiming a “100% reliable source” within the US Air Force let slip that Boeing has won the lucrative $40 billion refueling tanker contract. I didn’t run with it because, well, it was an anonymous tip — not just anonymous to you, but anonymous to me — so it could have been any joker. And good thing I didn’t run with it too, because now the Seattle Times reports that Airbus has won the tanker deal, citing “a respected and well-connected defense analyst close to the Air Force tanker deal.”

Man, that sucks. Yet another poke in the eye from the Bush administration.

UPDATE:
From the P-I:

In its quest for new tankers, the Air Force in 2002 negotiated a $23 billion deal with Boeing for a hundred 767 tankers, but it quickly came under fire in Congress as a financial handout for Boeing. The critics were led by Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who was on the Senate Armed Services Committee at the time and is now the likely Republican presidential nominee.

Gee, thanks Sen. McCain. Maybe some folks on the 767 assembly line will remember that next November as they ponder their future.

Big head, little arms:

I’m filling in for Dave Ross this week (and next week, March 4th through 6th) on News/Talk 710-KIRO. Here’s the show as it’s shaping up so far:

9AM: Are we becoming prisoners to the War on Drugs?
According to a new study by the Pew Center on the States, 1 in 100 Americans are now behind bars, the highest of any Western nation. Here in WA state, we now spend 55 cents on corrections for every dollar spent on higher education, compared to only 23 cents on the dollar only two decades ago. We’ll ask the question whether this dramatic shift in priority is really making us safer, and how much of this cost is due to our so-called War on Drugs? But first, we’ll chat with Seattle P-I political columnist Joel Connelly reemerging Democratic prospects in formerly one-party Republican states like Alaska, and what lesson this might hold for Democrats in their virtually one-party strongholds like Seattle.

10AM: Will Tim Eyman call in and defend his for-profit initiative business?
Once again efforts to impose transparency and accountability on professional signature gatherers were met with howls of outrage from professional initiative sponsor Tim Eyman and his enablers on our state’s editorial boards, and once again minor reform legislation died quickly in the legislature. Joining me for the hour will be Kristina Wilfore, Executive Director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, an organization that seeks to reinvigorate the initiative process while safeguarding it from corruption and fraud. Eyman, who rarely turns down an opportunity to use the media for self-promotion has yet to respond to our calls and emails, but we’re still hoping he’ll have the balls to engage me. We’ll see. He never agreed to come on my show, so I don’t see why he’d talk to me when I’m subbing for Dave.

11AM: Budget crisis? Potential tax hikes? Then why are we still giving away billions in dubious tax breaks?
After the Seattle P-I’s Chris McGann exposed a $1 billion tax giveaway to Microsoft and Yahoo that was quietly making its way through the Legislature, the bill dropped dead in its tracks, but this is only one of the tens of billions of dollars of special interest tax breaks, loopholes and exemptions that drain state coffers, reducing services and shifting the cost of government to the rest of us. Some of these tax “preferences” might make economic sense, though there is currently no audit process to determine if they are delivering on their promises. Marilyn Watkins of the Economic Opportunity Institute joins me for the hour to discuss the extent of the problem, and what we can do to bring greater accountability and efficiency to our tax system.

Tune in this morning (or listen to the live stream) and give me a call: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).

I wish the kids at The Stranger cared half as much about light rail as they do car sharing.

I’m a Zipcar member too, and I’ve had plenty of access to cars since their switch-over. But they’re a private company trying to make money in this dog-eat-dog world. I feel bad for all of you balloon-headed PCC members who got your special rate eliminated, or you college kids who lost your special UW rate…

You got issues, I got tissues.

Ten and a half bucks an hour is not a sin against God. It’s still cheaper than buying a car, fixing it, and parking it. I loved Flexcar, and I like Zipcar too. That said, carless folks aren’t entitled to car sharing at cheap rates any more than folks with cars are entitled to cheap gas and parking. If you don’t like your options, do a couple of things:

1.) Expand mass transit in the city.

2.) Start a non-profit alternative JUST for Capitol Hill.

3.) Buy a plug-in hybrid for the neighborhood, and then charge people to use it.

If Zipcar is living too high on the hog, then maybe they need competition.

Some links to share…

Thanks to the extraordinary success of the drug war, for the first time in this nation’s history, more than 1% of Americans are in prison. Dominic Holden and Eli Sanders add their thoughts.

Washblog has some thoughtful posts on the same topic, including the frustration from the state’s black community over House Bill 2712 and the real effect of shipping prisoners out of state.

Dan Kirkdorffer posts about Dave Reichert and the environment.

Earlier this week, I responded to a column in a Virginia newspaper that attacked those who are demanding answers about the botched drug raid that left Chesapeake, VA Detective Jarrod Shivers dead. The man who shot him, Ryan Frederick, was incorrectly targeted by the police based upon faulty info from an informant, but Frederick may still face capital murder charges, even though most of his neighbors believe him when he says he thought he was in danger for his life. His supporters held a rally at the jail last weekend.

Finally, this week’s Birds Eye View Contest is up.

…because he has little T-Rex arms.

T-Rex arms, with bloaty, pasty sun-damaged skin. A sure thing, America!

Dino Rossi takes credit for the 2003 state budget:

Ultimately, Dino became a leader on state budget issues and was the Chairman of the Senate Ways and Means Committee in 2003 when the state faced the largest dollar deficit in history.

In this leadership position, Dino worked across party lines to balance the state budget without raising taxes, while still protecting the most vulnerable.

…but wasn’t he just following the Governor’s lead?

The Republican budget has much in common with the all-cuts plan that Democratic Gov. Gary Locke unveiled in December. In fact, Rossi opened a press briefing yesterday with a PowerPoint presentation titled: “Following the Governor’s Lead.”

So when some liberal interest groups attack Rossi’s 2003 budget for cutting teacher COLAs and poor kids off Basic Health, how far will some go to apologize for it?

Funny thing, they refer to a Rossi budget, rather than a Rossi-Locke-Chopp-Reardon budget.

If the budget ain’t Rossi’s, then he can’t take credit for it. If he takes credit for the budget, then he gets some of the blame as well. It would be cool if the press looked in to this. Until then, more flip floppin’ from Dino is expected.

Bush’s new environmental initiative…

Had enough? You know what to do….

Help Darcy Burn Bush: $

I’m filling in for Dave Ross this morning (and through March 6) on News/Talk 710-KIRO. Here’s the show as it’s shaping up so far:

9AM: Are our elected officials hanging on too long?
In this morning’s Seattle Times, editorial columnist Joni Balter complains about the “stacked up” skies and crowded runways of our local political landscape, where our elected officials keep running for reelection, leaving little opportunity for younger leaders to move on up. We’ll debate the pros and cons of seniority and experience versus new blood, after a brief political roundup.

10AM: Are you predictably irrational?
Why do we splurge on a fancy restaurant yet cut coupons for a can of soup? Why do we go back for seconds (or thirds) at an all-you-can-eat buffet, even though we’re uncomfortably full? And why on earth do folks pay $4.15 for a cup of coffee when a few years ago they used to pay about a buck? (I don’t lump myself into that category.) Author Dan Ariely joins us for the hour to talk about his book, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions.

11AM: How do you motivate kids to do well in school?
All the money in the world and all the latest education reforms won’t amount to hill of beans toward educating our kids, if our kids simply aren’t motivated to learn. In Brooklyn, 2,500 middle school students are receiving free cell phones with 130 free minutes, and additional minutes awarded based on good behavior, homework, test scores and grades… this in a district that bans cell phones in school. Are free minutes or monetary rewards the key to inspiring students these days… or is good old fashioned fear of a crappy job and a crappier life more than enough motivation. I’ll be asking you how you motivate your kids to succeed to school, but first we’ll take a brief look at the so-called “Colbert Bounce.”

Tune in this morning (or listen to the live stream) and give me a call: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).

SHAMELESS ASK:
The national blogs are still kicking our ass. We need 20 more local donors to hold up our end of the bargain in support of our candidate, Darcy Burner. Just $5 or $10 is enough to send the message that Dave Reichert won’t be rewarded for his loyalty to the Bush administration, so if you haven’t already given, please give today.

Help Darcy Burn Bush: $