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While Dino Rossi and his fellow Republicans travel the state bemoaning our hostile business climate and out-of-control government, Gov. Christine Gregoire’s administration keeps racking up top grades from impartial national observers. First Forbes Magazine (hardly a bastion of liberal propaganda) lauds Washington as “the big story” of its annual Top States for Business survey, documenting our rise from 12th to 5th place under Gov. Gregoire’s leadership, and now the Pew Center on the States grades Washington an A- for performance in its 2008 State Management Report Card… the top score awarded this year, shared by only Virginia and Utah. (Hat tip Andrew.)

How are those campaign themes working out for you, Dino?

Washington receives an A- or higher in three of four categories; only in Infrastructure does our state drop to a B+, and that less than stellar mark is largely due to a decades long deficit in public investment that the Gregoire administration is only beginning to turn around. And like the Forbes survey, the Pew report not only shows top performance, but progress under the current administration, with Washington improving from a B+ the last time the survey was conducted back in 2005:

Washington has been a consistent leader in results-based governance. It was ahead of nearly all other states in controlling spending by keeping track of where investments were and were not paying off. Under Governor Christine Gregoire, Washington’s government has, if anything, moved further ahead on this front.

Of course, Rossi’s dire warnings of administrative mismanagement and looming crisis are just the usual political bluster; after three years of ducking questions on nearly every contentious issue that has confronted our state, Rossi has little option but to attack Gov. Gregoire’s leadership. But as empty and misleading as the Republicans’ anti-Gregoire rhetoric has been, we can’t assume it won’t ultimately resonate with voters, for I’m guessing the governor’s top grades likely come as a surprise even to some of her most ardent supporters.

No doubt a lot of the blame for this public perception gap falls on the governor herself, for as good an administrator and negotiator as she’s proven to be, she’s not always been the best communicator. (Recent communications staff changes look awfully promising, but Gov. Gregoire could still learn some lessons in self-promotion from Attorney General Rob McKenna.) Whenever I have the opportunity to speak to top Democratic elected and party officials I always tell them that if the public doesn’t understand their accomplishments — if voters don’t appreciate the value they’re getting for their tax dollars — it’s because these officials are doing a crappy job of telling their story. 99 percent of political life is exceedingly dull, and the bureaucratic process is duller still, so crafting a narrative that reaches beyond the occasional crisis or partisan food fight yet still manages to shape the public debate, requires both creativity and relentlessness on the part of public officials and their staff.

Yet I couldn’t touch on this topic without also blaming our local press, for it is, in the end, their job to inform and educate the public on what is really happening in Olympia and the impact it has on families throughout the state, an assignment they routinely fail when it comes to reporting on our government’s successes. Oh, I’m not blaming the rank and file political reporters; I think they generally do a pretty good job with what limited resources they have… and it’s not their fault that “State Government Program Operates Smoothly” doesn’t exactly make for a compelling headline. Their job is to tell a story too, and crisis, corruption and mismanagement, when it occurs, makes for a helluva a better read than a tedious tale of government doing what, in fact, it is supposed to do.

No, I blame the editorial boards, for not only failing to place our government’s flaws in their proper context, but for occasionally, maliciously doing the exact opposite. Of course the op/ed pages are the place for publishers and editors to express their opinions, but the gatekeepers of the Fourth Estate have public obligations that should run deeper than those of a mere blogger. As purveyors of a journalistic paradigm that aspires toward impartiality and objectivity, editorial writers and columnists have a unique responsibility to reassert a sense of proportion unavoidably lost in the daily rush of headlines. I don’t expect newspapers to attempt to balance the bad news with good news — that would be pointless and boring — but if they are to strenuously avoid editorializing within their news reporting, then they have an obligation to balance the news on their editorial pages by providing a little context. At least, they should have this obligation if they expect to be taken seriously.

Take for example Kate Riley’s column today in the Seattle Times, “When it comes to open government, a sledgehammer is sorely needed“, a dire headline if there ever was one. According to Riley our public disclosure laws have “utterly eroded,” and much of the blame falls on Gov. Gregoire who has allegedly “slapped open-government advocates in the face.” Uh-huh. And what does the Pew report say on this subject in comparing Washington to the 49 other states?

Bottom line: No state in the nation is better at developing and sharing information than Washington.

I don’t disagree with Riley that the Legislature needs to act to address the potentially frivolous use of attorney-client privilege as an end-run around our public disclosure laws (though her column might have been more useful had it come before this session’s legislative cut-offs,) but the tone and tenor of her piece suggest a system that has fallen into complete disrepair at the hands of a secretive governor. It is, through its utter lack of context, a mean spirited and misleading column, perhaps appropriate to the pages of a partisan blog, but unworthy of the weight of credibility assumed the pages of our state’s largest newspaper. The Times will run few articles trumpeting the everyday successes of our public disclosure laws, and understandably so. But the least they can do when criticizing our government’s failures on their op/ed page is to present those failures within the proper context of its established record of success.

That the majority of Washingtonians don’t understand how well managed our state government is compared to other states is a failure of our local press. But grading on a national curve, I guess I have to bump their report card up to a C.

FYI, Dave Ross is back in town today, and back on the air at 710-KIRO, but I’ll be back filling in for him Tuesday through Thursday. I’m particularly looking forward to Wednesday when I’ll have the opportunity to do some post-election coverage of tomorrow’s big primaries in Ohio and Texas. Talk to you then.

Stop by the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally to meet the local bloggers, and you’ll find that several of us originally hail from Philadelphia… though in fact, I don’t think that any of us technically grew up within city limits. I was 3 years old when my family moved out to the burbs for the usual reasons — better schools, safer streets, a little plot of land — but like most of the region’s natives, even those growing up across the river in New Jersey, I’ve always self-identified as a Philadelphian. We rooted for the same teams, consumed the same media, enjoyed or suffered the same local economy, and relied on “Center City” Philadelphia as our cultural and economic core. Of course, I could be more accurate and cop to growing up in Bala Cynwyd, but that sort of geographic specificity would actually be less useful to most folks from outside the region. Besides, which of the many Philadelphia suburbs I grew up in defines me a helluva lot less than the city these suburbs grew up around.

And so a couple of headlines in today’s Seattle Times op/ed page got me thinking about what I’ve long felt to be one of the greatest weaknesses of my adopted region: its determined resistance to establishing (or admitting to) a regional identity. In a column titled “The Eastside’s edge“, Lynn Varner lavishes praise on the booming economies of Bellevue, Kirkland, Redmond, Issaquah and Renton, daring to hope for a “geographic shift of the region’s power center”, while at the same time an unsigned editorial looks less favorably on the city proper, opining “A changing Seattle, and not for the better“.

Uh-huh. This sort of neeter-neeter-neeterism not only does little to encourage the kind of regional “rapprochement” for which Varney claims she hopes, but actually distorts our understanding of the local economy, for the changes taking place both in Seattle and its surrounding suburbs are not only integrally linked, but are actually quite typical of growing metropolitan regions nationwide. Indeed, if not for Lake Washington’s geographic barrier it is likely that much of the Eastside would have been annexed long ago — just as Seattle did to neighboring communities to the North and the South — thus this supposed competition between cities would mostly be taking place within city limits. As if that really mattered.

City lines may determine school district boundaries, tax rates, land use regulations and other errata of modern life, but we are all one metropolitan region with shared cultural, economic, and increasingly, political interests. That Boeing lost that big Air Force tanker contract is a blow to the entire region, not just to the folks on the 767 assembly line up in Everett. If the Sonics sneak out of town in the middle of the night it will be a loss to sports fans throughout Western Washington. Those “music halls, sports stadiums, parks, [and] open space” the Times writes about are enjoyed by families in Ravenna and Renton alike, regardless of where these public amenities are located — hell, I even once ran into Tim Eyman and his Mukilteo-based family enjoying the taxpayer subsidized facilities at Seattle’s Children’s Museum. And then there’s the Times itself, a newspaper printed in Bothell and published by Mercer Islanders, but that still claims the place name “Seattle” in its masthead. We are the world.

Yet folks from around here are more likely to tell you that they’re from Bellevue or Kirkland or Redmond than to admit to being citizens of goddamn Seattle, despite the fact that you old timers all seem to worship the same TV clown and apparently share the same savant-like ability to distinguish between a 737-500 and a 737-600 by the distant sound of its engines. (Not to mention the regional, one-week obsession with hydro races. What’s up with that?) I mean, really… to this 16-year transplant, you natives all look alike.

Let’s be honest, like my home town of Bala Cynwyd, nobody outside of the region even knows how to pronounce Issaquah, let alone cares where it is; hate to tell ya folks, but as far as the rest of the world is concerned, Issaquah is just another Seattle neighborhood. The first step toward working together to solve our region’s problems is self-identifying as one, so let’s drop all this petty localism, recognize our shared interests, and march arm in arm toward achieving a common goal on which we can all agree: kicking the spandex-clad asses of those bike-worshiping, bastards down in God forsaken Portland. Go team.

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!