HorsesAss.Org

Here are a few interesting items from this week:

Travel show host Rick Steves is helping to launch an initiative to get more people talking about this country’s marijuana laws, which he’s found in his travels to be incredibly counterproductive compared to how it’s dealt with in other countries. The 30-minute video he produced is available to Comcast Digital Cable On Demand subscribers and will hopefully also be shown on some of the local networks in the state. Scott Morgan and Dominic Holden have more.

With the help of The Daily Show, Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) demonstrates the complete uselessness of the Senate by being more concerned over the destruction of taped football practices than over the destruction of CIA interrogation tapes because the Patriots beat the Eagles in the Super Bowl a few years back. And speaking of New England, Congress, and sports, the only Republican Congressman left in all of New England right now is Christopher Shays, whose district is the closest one in those 6 states to New York City. Now, because of his statements on Roger Clemens, New York City sports radio hosts Mike and the Mad Dog are going after him and trying to help his Democratic opponent, Jim Himes.

Yesterday’s tragedy at Northern Illinois University is being explained to us as a completely normal young person who just stopped taking his medications. Why is it that before we had these medications at all, we didn’t have people going on mass murder sprees all the time? There seems to be something very odd about how we view mind-altering drugs as being one of two extremes – those that make you crazy when you take them and those that make you crazy when you stop taking them.

And finally, I think this is what you get when you elect a president who spent much of the early 80s getting balls-out wasted and playing Space Invaders.

This is an open thread.

Whenever we post anything on the race between Darcy Burner and Dave Reichert for WA’s 8th CD, my comment thread fills up, almost without exception, with nasty trolls belittling Burner and her chances this November. But yesterday’s posts were different. Only one comment out of 50 was even remotely trollish, and even at that expressed an uncharacteristic air of resignation…

So I’m going to have to endure at least 2 years of Dumbass Darcy. Yuck.

Now perhaps our trolls are just hopeless romantics, and as such were too busy serenading their sweethearts on Valentines Day to spew their usual bile into the threads. Nah… that can’t be it. No, I’m guessing that despite their rabid readership of this blog they claim to hate, and their obvious dislike of all things both Darcy and Democratic, that air of resignation is real — for even the whackiest of wingnuts can occasionally sense reality creeping up on them, and man, reality doesn’t look too good for the folks on the other side right now.

The typical defense of Reichert has always been an attack on Burner, but the trolls seem to be losing the heart even for that… and why shouldn’t they, as Reichert’s vulnerabilities as a candidate continue to be exposed outside the careful coddling of a Republican majority? But even more discouraging to local R’s must be the dawning realization that Burner isn’t a one hit wonder, and that her 2008 campaign is gonna be at least as competitive as her come from nowhere challenge in 2006.

Reichert’s fundraising numbers suck; he’s lazy and arrogant and unaccustomed to putting the kind of work into campaigning expected in swing districts, even of incumbents. We all know that. But Burner continues to impress, establishing herself as one of only a handful of Democratic challengers to achieve superstar status amongst both netroots activists like me, and the DC establishment.

“Dumbass Darcy”…? Not so much. Indeed according to Congressional Quarterly, Burner has made the list of Top Ten challengers from either party in both total receipts ($874,000 for 7th place) and cash on hand ($607,000 for 5th place.) And she’s one of only four Democrats to make it onto both lists. And, she’s done all that while garnering over 88% of her money from individual contributors (compared to only 59% for Reichert.)

It’s gonna be a tough reelection for Reichert… and even the trolls are starting to admit it.

Mr. 87 Percent:

In case you can’t read the small type, it says “If you can’t give 100 percent, 87 is just fine.”

Joel:

One feature of the four-year political struggle between Gov. Chris Gregoire and almost-Gov. Dino Rossi has been an abundance of suspect and self-serving opinion surveys.

At last comes a poll, albeit with a few weeks under its belt, that surprised its takers.

[…]

In a trial heat, the incumbent Democrat had 43 percent, her Republican challenger received 41 percent, and 16 percent were undecided. The poll was based on interviews with 588 likely general election voters. It had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.1 percentage points.

Joel quotes a poll that was commissioned back in November, but an Elway poll done much more recently shows the race to not be as close:

Seattle public opinion researcher Stuart Elway has released a good-news, bad-news poll on this year’s gubernatorial election rematch between Democratic incumbent Chris Gregoire and Republican challenger Dino Rossi.

[…]

The good news for Gregoire is that while she defeated Rossi by only 133 votes in the 2004 election, she now has a 13-percentage-point lead over him in voter preference. Only 35 percent of the respondents said they definitely or probably are inclined to vote for Rossi. Eighteen percent said they were undecided.

I’m not knocking Joel. I think the newspapers, to a degree, have a bias in favor of making this race closer than it really is. I’m not saying it’s a shoo-in for Chris Gregoire, but I think local media flacks are going to go out of their way to frame this thing positively for Rossi.

Looking back at ’06, Joel went out of his way to pitch Mike McGavick as an “Evans Republican”, or at least in a much more favorable light. He’s doing the same for Dino:

Republicans used to be big-time greens, passing the state’s first package of environmental laws. They helped forge the Washington wilderness bill and legislation protecting the Columbia Gorge. Lately, however, the party has demanded repeal of the Growth Management Act.

Rossi might do well to get with tradition.

Republicans haven’t been leaders on enviro-issues for decades. Guys like Rossi, totally in league with the looney tune base of his party, doesn’t think global warming is even a big deal:

Q: “Where are you on global warming?”

Rossi: (scoffs) “Where am I on global warming? The uh, I mean it’s clear that the earth, the earth is warming. That is clear, I mean, I think if we were to count how many feet of ice we were under many, many, tens and hundreds of millions of years ago – right where we are standing, right here – the earth has been warming and it will continue to warm. Apparently we’ve hit, we’ve hit the same temperature that it, that it had increased to in about, oh, twelve hundred AD I think it was. So, I mean, it was warmer then too. Uh, there are cycles.

There are things that we can do obviously to, to make sure that the environment is clean. That the air is clean, that the water’s clean, all those sorts of things that need to be done.

I think you also need to make sure that you look at the real science of this too and make sure that it makes sense. And so, uh, well-uh I-uh there’s still a lot of debate going on this, we see it out there and there’s going to be a big debate coming up in the next two, three years. Because there are, you know, I’ve listened to other scientists who disagree with, you know, I know – why are people even bothering about long term planning if Al Gore says the world is going to end in ten years or fifteen years – but there are a lot of scientists that disagree. So, I mean, we’ll see how this debate goes, but I don’t think anyone should panic at this point.” [Rossi at Port Orchard Chamber, 3/08/2007]

The guy’s a lightweight on all sorts of issues, especially the environment. While I understand Joel’s impulse to give Dino an out, it ain’t going to happen. “Evans Republicanism” is as dead as Julius Caesar, and Rossi has absolutely no inclination to run under that banner in ’08.

Even though the Senate sold out America by passing a new wiretapping bill that includes retroactive immunity for telcos that broke the law, the House is standing firm. As a result, the Terrorist-in-chief is not amused. And he is threatening to postpone his trip to Africa in order to sit in a corner and pout:

Leaving aside the problems with the wiretapping portion of the bill, what’s with this telco immunity bullshit? If the telecom companies need retroactive immunity, why the fuck doesn’t Bush simply use his presidential pardon powers to pardon them? I mean, isn’t Bush just throwing a temper tantrum to get Congress to do his dirty work?

Yeah…maybe there has never been a pardon granted to a corporate “person” (I don’t really know), but Bush has played so fast and lose with the constitution that extending the presidential pardon powers to corporate “persons” is no biggie.

Really, what Bush is doing is dodging his own responsibility, and that of his administration, for sweet-talking (or, perhaps, threatening) the telcos into breaking the law. By getting Congress to pardon the telcos, he avoids the scrutiny and scorn that would accompany a presidential pardon.

Lets hope the House stands firm on this and the Senate gets a clue.

I think it’s worth noting to whom exactly they gave the seat on the Appropriation Committee.

Rep. Jo Bonner, Republican, from the 1st congressional district of Alabama. He represents Mobile in the SW corner of the state. His district borders Mississippi and Florida. What’s the most interesting thing about his district?

It has a Cook Partisan Voting Index (what is that?) of R+12. This means that the district is eleven points more conservative than the national average.

Dave-o’s district is a D+2.

Hmmm… So instead of giving the choice seat to the Republican in the “slightly more liberal than average” seat, they gave it to the guy who doesn’t need the help.

Talk about a “fuck you” from the party.

To put that into context, Wasington’s 5th CD (with a R+7) is actually less conservative than the Alabama 1st.

I think the GOP is hunkering down, ready to ride out life in the minority.

Crosscut is on fire today. I don’t know if our readers can handle it, so I won’t link to any of the stories, but here’s the rundown:

Knute Berger picks a coffee shop. (Tully’s)

David Brewster talks about skyscrapers. (A bland topic turned into a… blander topic.)

Ted Van Dyk talks about the caucus. (Light rail is not mentioned, but “blacks” are. As is Hubert Humphrey.)

It’s like they have the pulse of the city. Seriously, I haven’t been this tuned-in since Steve Scher dropped an f-bomb tirade on the rain barrel lady for talking through his bumper music. It’s like the Weekly, but before they got rid of everybody.

And what’s up with Crosscut having a blog? ‘splain that one to me. Department of Redundancy Department.

A hotly contested Republican seat on the House Appropriations Committee will go to Rep. Jo Bonner of Alabama, rebuffing a desperate plea from a cash-starved Rep. Dave Reichert that “I need a seat now.”

Coming off a disappointing pathetic fundraising quarter in which the two-term incumbent now trails challenger Darcy Burner $607K to $463K in cash on hand, Reichert had hoped an Appropriations seat would fill his campaign coffers with earmark goodies, while bringing home some bacon to hungry 8th CD voters, and argued that he needed the assignment to help secure his slipping hold on the district. Apparently, House Republican leaders don’t think he’s worth saving.

Also jilted in a bid for appropriations was NRCC chair, Rep. Tom Cole, the man Reichert will have to rely on for party cash. We’ll see if Cole, rumored to be miffed at Reichert’s challenge, comes through for Dave in the clutch, the way the NRCC did big-time back in the closing weeks of both the 2004 and 2006 campaigns.

Initiative whore Tim Eyman has so little respect for the government that he routinely refuses to comply with even the most basic campaign disclosure requirements. Back in 2004 I joined a complaint alleging Eyman routinely violated state law by filing late and misleading disclosure reports; Tim eventually agreed to a small fine, and was warned never to let happen again.

Well… he’s let it happen again, this time filing no contribution or expenditure reports for his latest for-profit initiative. Steve Zemke has filed a fresh PDC complaint, and dollars to donuts this costs Tim some money.

House Republicans, pissed at the Dems for planning to vote today on contempt citations against Harriet Miers and Josh Bolton, have been disrupting proceedings throughout the day by calling a series of procedural protest votes that do absolutely nothing but eat up time. Childish, huh? Well earlier today Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balert (R-FL) called a motion to adjourn, right in the middle of the memorial service for the late Rep. Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in Congress, forcing members to file out of the service and onto the floor to cast their vote, or risk having the House shut down for the day.

CSPAN provided split-screen coverage of the memorial service continuing, as House members filed into the chamber to cast their votes on this purely obstructionist maneuver. (Hat tip Mother Jones.)

Really… how petty and disrespectful can you get?

And yes, it does matter what the rest of the world thinks about our presidential election.

Check out these two stories, and connect the dots.

Seattle Times:

An intriguing new analysis by a University of Washington economics professor argues that home prices have, perhaps inadvertently, been driven up $200,000 by good intentions.

Between 1989 and 2006, the median inflation-adjusted price of a Seattle house rose from $221,000 to $447,800. Fully $200,000 of that increase was the result of land-use regulations, says Theo Eicher[…]

This is a popular talking point for some conservative or liberatarian think tanks, and it is often employed when attacking a certain landmark 1990 bill:

A key regulation is the state’s Growth Management Act, enacted in 1990 in response to widespread public concern that sprawl could destroy the area’s unique character. To preserve it, the act promoted restrictions on where housing can be built. The result is artificial density that has driven up home prices by limiting supply, Eicher says.

I want to sidestep the politics here and take you to Erica C. Barnett’s recent column in The Stranger:

Growth management—which calls for concentrating growth in areas that are well served by transit, encouraging people to live close to where they work, and discouraging or banning new sprawl that promotes driving and harms the environment—isn’t working.

[…]

Growth management needs teeth to work. That means smaller growth-management boundaries, real limits or even a ban on growth outside those boundaries, affordable housing incentives in cities and inner-ring suburbs, sensible policies to encourage trip reduction, and land-use decisions that encourage tall, dense developments in cities and already dense suburban areas.

First, a few thoughts about that UW study:

The nearly 200k they reference includes lots of things you’d hate to see eliminated from your neighborhood. Without money for sidewalks, parks, or schools, our neighborhoods would suffer. Without a design review, folks would go nuts at the idea of another condo building and no means to influence its design, adn that’s something we value. Growth is supposed to pay for growth, even if it bumps up the sticker price on one of those crappy Quadrant homes.

Erica does get a lot of things right. Cities should build more within their own boundaries, so that the ‘burbs look a bit more like the good neighborhoods of Seattle. Anti-density NIMBYs here in town shouldn’t get to hog the housing agenda. Also, transit isn’t a panacea for sprawl. Then again, nothing is.

The people buying houses in and moving to places in Snohomish and Pierce counties are doing so because that’s where they can afford to buy a house. (I’m guessing that King County is omitted because even the shitty parts of it are getting pricey.) It’s supply and demand; not enough of the former and too much of the latter. Adam Smith is biting us in the ass.

We have constricted our housing supply. I don’t think constricting it further would have the effect Erica is looking for. People have proven to us that they will drive for hours (with the price of gas not a limiting factor until it nears 10 bucks a gallon) just to get a three bedroom ranch-style for less than 250k. Some folks will want to live in the city in a townhouse or condo, and some will want the picket fence. Can’t help that.

[As an aside: I’ve noticed that some NIMBY-types from Seattle lash out at sprawl in the ‘burbs while at the very same time complaining about condos in our neighborhoods. As a person who’d like to live in the city and NOT drive miles to my job, I find it odd that Seattle’s urban closed mindedness could be just another cause of sprawl.]

For the past three years Progressive Majority of Washington has been bringing Camp Wellstone to Seattle, a three-day candidate, activist and campaign manager training program conducted in cooperation with Wellstone Action. And during that time, twelve Camp Wellstone alum have gone on to win public office in Washington state:

• Island County Commissioner John Dean
• South Prairie Mayor Peggy Levesque
• State Representative Marko Liias (21st LD)
• Tacoma Parks Commissioner Ryan Mello
• State Senator, Eric Oemig (45th LD)
• Shoreline City Councilmember Cindy Ryu
• Issaquah City Councilmember Joshua Schaer
• Shoreline City Councilmember Terry Scott
• Snohomish County Councilmember Dave Somers
• Seattle Port Commissioner Gael Tarleton
• Kent City Councilmember Elizabeth Watson
• Shoreline City Councilmember Janet Way

I attended that first, Seattle-area Camp Wellstone back in June of 2005, and I recognize the names of at least two camp mates from the list above: State Rep. Marko Liias and State Sen. Eric Oemig. It was also there where I first met Darcy Burner, who clearly learned an entirely different lesson out of the inspiring session on campaign fundraising. (I learned I didn’t have what it takes to raise the money to run for office. She learned that she did.)

I can’t recommend Camp Wellstone highly enough, but this year Seattle area prospective candidates and campaign managers have an even better opportunity to hone their skills, when Progressive Majority brings Wellstone Action’s Advanced Candidate and Campaign Management School to Federal Way, April 25-27. Slots are limited, so in order to be considered, hurry up and send your resume and/or a letter explaining why you wish to participate, by March 15 to dkelley at progressivemajority.org.

A nominal fee of $150 helps cover the cost of a hotel room and meals during the training; a small number of scholarships are available to low-income or unemployed participants.

This week, as I’ve tried to wrap my head around what the hell actually happened at the Republican caucuses on Saturday, the most important person in helping me understanding it all was Pudge from Sound Politics. He was heavily involved in the process and he’s managed to clear up a few misperceptions I had. First, and most importantly, the primary purpose of the Republican caucus on Saturday was not to select their preferred Presidential candidate. It was to select people to be delegates for the next level in their multi-tiered caucus system. That last part sounds a lot like what we did in the Democratic caucuses, but in ours, the number of delegates to be allotted for each candidate was apportioned according to the numbers of people supporting each candidate in the caucus. In the Republican caucus, there was no such criteria at all. They could’ve sent whichever delegates they wanted, regardless of who they were planning to support. Second, because the delegate form had no indication for presidential preference, many of the precinct captains across the state didn’t report their results correctly, which is what ultimately resulted in Boss Esser throwing up his hands Saturday night and just saying, “Fuck it! McCain wins!” and why it’s Wednesday and they’re still only at 96%.

Now as someone who tends to be a stickler for things like democracy and fairness, I prefer the way the Democrats did things. Pudge, on the other hand, does not:

In the Republican Party, the precincts decide for themselves on what basis to elect their delegates. In the Democratic Party, the precincts are required (by the “elite” “party bosses”) to select delegates based on presidential preference.

You see, by being forced to use a system that democratically allots the number of delegates for each candidate, we’ve completely limited our freedom to be able to send delegates based upon who’s the best dressed, or the tallest, or who can play the meanest harmonica. What the hell is wrong with us?