HorsesAss.Org

Why is one always left with the sense of half a loaf from local reporting? Stories will go on for pages, even for days, without ever connecting the dots or providing a true context. They may beg the Big Picture — the overriding trend or practice that might actually make us care; instead we get the Little Picture. Crackers and cheese instead of the prime rib.

On The Times side, today’s banner is about a humble Sammamish vendor who makes fire-resistant t-shirts for the military. Seeking to expand his business from the Army to the Marines, the guy ran into InSport, a big corporation whose megadollars lobbied an “earmark” for t-shirt contracts — can you believe this — without a bidding process. Welcome to our post-Halliburton, no-bid-contract world…although the story doesn’t actually go all Big Picture like that. What we have instead is the reliance on polite talk for corrupt practices: bribes and kickbacks become earmarks and sole-source contracts. I for one would be interested in this guy’s suggestion about what to do, and how he might vote in 2008. Make me care…heck, make him care about the story.

Of course, even relatively tame investigations like this won’t happen under media consolidation, which is set to go forward today despite near-universal opposition at public hearings, in congressional hearings and from anyone with half a brain. In the hmmm dept., the story got A1 treatment from The Times and nary a Top 10 mention from the P-I. For today’s Reader Quiz and the chance to win a trip on the purple streetcar, can you tell me which newspaper is locally owned?

The P-I does, however, wring its hands over the closing of the Crocodile, days after anyone who cares knew about it (or suspected its imminency), the taxonomy of the scoop (I think it was The Weekly this time) somehow escaping the pit-bullish reportorial skills of the newspaper staff: “Word of the closure spread like wildfire Monday through the city’s music blogs…” Oh come on. I told my daughter about this last Thursday. And no mention of the Big Picture here either: The Showbox gets sold, the Croc shuts down. Other than being small crowded venues for up and coming bands but sitting on prime real estate prized by greedy developers, they have nothing in common.

The Times also takes a stab at relevancy with an update on the let-nature-run-its-course theory of disaster management. Dot not connected: Floods are hardly a “natural” occurrence, as The Times itself showed Sunday with the Chehalis debacle. “Flood risk is only going to get worse, scientists say. That’s because of two converging trends: climate change and development…” How about the trends of “insatiable greed” and “self-destructive stupidity”? Too Big Picture…

Finally, we bring you a new feature, inspired by Goldy’s and my debate yesterday, the Local Headline That Ran Elsewhere. Today’s donor is The New York Times, whose lead Business Day coverage, The Price of Growing Fuel, features a Portland brewery owner looking really disgusted at the skyrocketing price of barley. Also pinched by a hop shortage, some breweries are even going out of business, leaving us HAs with lamentably fewer places to cry in our beer. With that, we provide a radio segue only a true aural rebel like Goldy would ever use, to our weekly reminder for Drinking Liberally…Darryl, take it away!!!

CNN:

BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made an unannounced visit to Iraq on Tuesday and dropped in on the volatile northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, a U.S. Embassy spokesman in Baghdad confirmed.

How long does it take before we stop calling them “surprise visits to Iraq”? At some point, if your Secretary of State has to sneak into the country just to check up on things, the “surprise” is more about the lack of security in Iraq and less about a fun winter visit to Mesopotamia.

[UPDATE]

A fun search to do.

Golly, gee! That’s a lot of surprises! One of these days I’d like to see our diplomats visit the sandy shithole place where all this success is happening without the flak helmets and evasive maneuvers.

Besides, when is the last time Condi has paid a “surprise” visit to someplace like Canada?

It’s Tuesday, so the FCC must be voting on media consolidation:

More on the topic.

Amnesty would stamp a congressional seal of approval on the Administration’s warrantless spying. If Congress immunizes the telecoms for past violations of the law, it will send the message that Congress approves what the Administration did. We would be aiding and abetting the President in his illegal actions, his contempt for the rule of law, and his attempt to hide his lawbreaking from the American people. Voting for amnesty would be a vote for silence, secrecy, and illegality. There would be no accountability, no justice, no lessons learned.

[…] Think about what we’ve been hearing from the White House in this debate. The President has said that American lives will be sacrificed if Congress does not change FISA. But he has also said that he will veto any FISA bill that does not grant retroactive immunity. No immunity, no new FISA bill. So if we take the President at his word, he is willing to let Americans die to protect the phone companies. The President’s insistence on immunity as a precondition for any FISA reform is yet another example of his disrespect for honest dialogue and for the rule of law.

It’s painfully clear what the President’s request for retroactive immunity is really about. It’s a self-serving attempt to avoid legal and political accountability and keep the American public in the dark about this whole shameful episode. Like the CIA’s destruction of videotapes showing potentially criminal conduct, it’s a desperate attempt to erase the past.

Via Crooks and Liars.

In perhaps the richest area of Washington state, a new type of road material is being tested.

the state Department of Transportation (DOT) is testing materials there designed to turn down the din of traffic.

The DOT calls them “quieter pavements.”

Those who drive the highway or live nearby call it a huge improvement: “People who live along 520 are like, ‘You are a godsend,’ ” Scott said.

Some folks complained about the proposed bridge replacement for 520, because it included a Mercer Island-style lid to shield the rich folks’ neighborhoods from the noise. “Blah blah rich people, blah blah fancy freeway” was the common refrain from my left ‘o’ center friends. Now I’m starting to hear “blah blah quiet asphalt.” Maybe with this new pavement we won’t have to spend so much on mitigation in the form of concrete lids and more on this new asphalt.

As an aside, I’m always amazed that this region is able to gin up so much general animosity from things. Should people in gigantic houses be subjected to freeway noise because they’re rich? Should anyone? Of course not.

The battle over the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement will look like an Easter egg hunt compared to what’s in store on 520. The neighborhoods on both ends of the bridge have a lot in common- they’re rich, white, and can hire an army of lawyers. But I wouldn’t want the State of Washington forcing some awful freeway design through my neighborhood. (Oh wait, they already did try once already!)

I predict that this new technology is going to let a thousand flowers bloom. At least that’s my hope.

I cannot believe Goldy missed the headline about our latest constitutional crisis: “Of White House stonewalling on the investigation, Harman says, ‘We have a system of checks and balances and it’s broken. We’re in Constitutional crisis because of the arrogant view of some in this administration that they can decide what the policy is, write the legal opinions to justify that policy and be accountable to no one’.” Wow, might be a story there somewhere. Wait a minute…looks like the P-I missed it too. And The Times. Page after page of “The Nation” and “The World” and somehow our lying, lawbreaking administration didn’t merit a single line of coverage. Even searching on the phrase “constitutional crisis” in both papers yields scant hits in recent weeks (and nothing on tape destruction). Goldy, I forgive you! Sometimes it’s easy to miss the little ones, there’s so much real news out there…

We are, after all, in a noisy roads crisis. A1, top of the fold…and here you are complaining about no local news. For shame, Goldy, for shame….

UPDATE (– Goldy):
Of course, Paul, I was referring to paucity of local news headlines. But here’s one local news story I did miss, the one about the Seattle Symphony and its messy courtroom drama. But, um, isn’t it a little embarrassing to the folks at the P-I that they had to pick up this local story, day-old off the pages of the New York Times?

Andy Pettitte: “If what I did was an error in judgment on my part, I apologize.” If lying repeatedly about using performance-enhancing drugs until confronted by irrefutable proof in an official congressional document was a miscall, I am sorry. If continuing to lie — because, hey, other than that one little incident they got bupkus on me — is wrong, then go out and prove it buster. I’m a big league baseball player, not some athletic version of freakin George Washington. I can tell all the lies I want.

Roger Clemens: I am not a juicer. I am a victim of juicing culture. If juicing had not been so easy to do, if juicing were not such a snap to cover up, and if it hadn’t help me extend my career beyond believable limits and pull in the big bucks while non-juicing chumps labored in the minor leagues, I would never have juiced. Not that I’m saying I did juice, mind you, and you can print that last part. Like you did whenever I told you about my superhuman workout regimen and dedication to keeping my incredible body in shape, you bunch of drooling bozos. I can’t help it if you never consulted a single medical expert or physical therapist about the likelihood I was actually telling the truth instead of taking steroids. It’s not my fault you never once even suspected I was on the needle. I mean, give me a break. I can’t help it if I was born white the same as all of you.

Vancouver pig farmer: If skinning my victims alive somehow caused them pain or embarrassment, I deeply apologize. I only did it to get my jollies so I could continue to be a productive upstanding member of Canadian society. I had a farm to run, after all, and if grinding human flesh in with pig meat and selling it to supermarkets was an error in judgment, I am truly sorry. Although I did not believe it to be against the law, since these were despicable whore scum whose mere breathing presence was a blight on Christian beliefs, I felt bad about doing it and stopped right after the last one I killed. Now will you please absolve me of any illegal behavior and let me go scot free like you do all those big-name sports figures?

Apparently, non-union jobs pay less than union jobs. Who knew?

And, when you clear cut a steep mountain slope fronting onto a stream, you dramatically increase the chance of a devastating landslide during heavy rains. Oh. My. God.

Oh, and guns… don’t get shot by one. They can kill you. Same with pit bulls; sometimes they’re mean.

As for hard local news on a Monday morning? Now that would be news.

Tonight on “The David Goldstein Show”, 7PM to 10PM on News/Talk 710-KIRO:

7PM: Radio Kos: Church and/or State?
Rev. Forrest Church is an author and theologian, the son of former Idaho Sen. Frank Church, and the Minister of Public Theology at All Souls Unitarian Church in New York. In her review and interview posted today on Daily Kos, Joan “McJoan” McCarter describes Rev. Church’s latest book, So Help me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle over Church and State, as “an engaging, beautifully crafted and meticulously researched history of our nation’s first culture war over what role religion was to play in government.” Rev. Church and McJoan join me for the hour.

8PM: Will WA state ferries sink or swim?
An 80-year-old section of our state highway system was essentially allowed to disintegrate, when four steel-electric class ferries were pulled out of service due to serious corrosion. Washington State Transportation Commissioner Bob Distler joins me by phone for an update on the current plans to serve the effected routes, and a discussion what got us to this situation in the first place.

9PM: TBA
Liberal propaganda.

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

I don’t want to top Goldy’s tasty diatribe below, a must read, so just quickly will point to Danny Westneat’s column about John Fox today in The Times. And don’t forget the Seattle Displacement Coalition’s big fundraiser tomorrow night, 7 p.m. in University Temple United Methodist Church.

You’ve got to give credit to the folks at the Discovery Institute; when they put their “minds” to something, they never seem to let little distractions like public opinion, science or, you know, reality get in their way.

As political momentum grows for a highway-free Seattle shoreline, some would-be visionaries want to help traffic move by digging a deep tunnel from Sodo to north of downtown. […] Costs are unknown, but would be in the billions of dollars. Even if a suitable tunnel path exists, Seattle’s loose, watery soils present a challenge in places, and there’s not much room at the surface for ramp connections at I-5.

That hasn’t stopped the Cascadia Center, a branch of the Discovery Institute think tank, from promoting a tunnel.

No, no… of course it hasn’t, because the folks at the Discovery Institute are a bunch of fanaticist nutcases “visionaries”… you know, if by “visionary” you mean promoting Intelligent Design, seeking to overthrow the scientific method and “replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions,” and ignoring both voter sentiment (“No/Hell No” vote on the Viaduct; Prop 1’s crushing defeat) and economic reality in proposing a multi-billion dollar big dig through downtown Seattle.

I mean, Jesus H. Christ… what does it take to tarnish the Discovery Institute’s reputation? Does Bruce Chapman actually have to strip himself naked and go on a shooting rampage through the Tacoma Mall before our local media and political elite finally accept the fact that he might not be the same reasonable city councilman they remember from the 1970’s? Is there nothing he can do or say to destroy his credibility?

I once proposed building a gigantic rollercoaster along the West Seattle to downtown portion of the Monorail’s abandoned Green Line, and you didn’t see my joke of a transportation proposal picked up by the MSM, let alone labeled “visionary”. And yet the Seattle Rollercoaster Project is no less technically challenging nor politically, well, utterly fucking ridiculous than Discovery’s deep bore, crosstown tunnel. Engineering and economic feasibility aside, God himself could descend from the heavens with a blueprint in one hand and an infinite supply of cash in the other, only to be greeted by polar bear clad environmentalists and angry Eastside developers complaining that He isn’t doing enough to ease congestion on I-405. In a city where completion of a 1.3 mile vanity trolley line is feted like some transportation miracle, the very notion that local voters might commit more than a half billion dollars a mile to an untested technology is a dramatic tribute to Discovery’s primary mission of promoting the exercise of faith over reason.

Of course, it’s not merely faith in God that ultimately drives Discovery’s transportation planning, but more specifically faith in the Invisible Hand of God and the inherent efficiency of the free market. No doubt Seattle’s “Big Bore” would be pitched as a public/private partnership… you know, one of those sweetheart deals in which tax dollars are used to subsidize the privatization of a public asset. Sure, taxpayers would probably be better off financing our transportation improvements through payday loans, but then, who the hell am I to question the wisdom and motives of such an upstanding civic leader as Bruce Chapman?

Tonight on “The David Goldstein Show”, 7PM to 10PM on News/Talk 710-KIRO:

7PM: The Stranger Hour with Josh Feit
The Stranger’s Josh Feit and Jonah Spangenthal-Lee join us for a recap of the week’s news, and a look ahead to what’s coming up. Do Seattle police tase first and ask questions later? Are Eastside Republicans a dying dead breed? Will the Legislature once again ignore Josh’s advice? All that and more, plus your calls.

8PM: Did Brian Boshes have a Ha Ha Hanukkah?
Brian Boshes says he grew up in a stable household with parents who still love him, and yet he grew up to be a stand up comic. Go figure. He’s performing in the Ha Ha Hanukkah show at the Mainstage this week (Dec 20-22), and joins us in studio for the hour. We’ll be chatting, and giving away tickets.

9PM: HA rides/derides the SLUT!
HA has always been fair and balanced, as evidenced by bloggers Will and Paul opposite take on the South Lake Union Trolley. Both Will and Paul join me in studio for a no holds barred review/debate of Seattle’s idea of a mass transit system.

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

This week’s Birds Eye View Contest is still unsolved. This is an open thread…

Yes it’s Saturday morning, and yes, it’s ugly-raining outside, and it’s the season of peace and goodwill and you only have single-digit days left to do your Christmas shopping. You rightfully expect it to be one of the softest news days of the year. But we know all you HA addicts out there cannot help yourselves. On the off-chance one of us tireless scribes has somehow seen fit to post a new set of calumnies, buffoneries and outrages, you just have to click. Doncha…

We will try not to disappoint. There actually is a lot of stuff happening out there, for a Saturday in December. Maybe the ever-cynical powers that be are trying to slip things by us during the holidays, the way the Bushies like to disclose illegal initiatives and unconstitutional policies on Friday afternoons.

The Times trumpets an $8 million proposal by Gov. Gregoire to actually do something about physician/counselor sexual misconduct, a courageous act typical of a politician entering a re-election year. In one of those mercilessly cold-eyed observations that only hardened journalists have the guts to print, the story notes “Gregoire said several of her initiatives are in response to a 2006 Seattle Times investigation, ‘License to Harm,’ which brought the registered-counselor loophole to light.” Yes, let’s close that gaping loophole nearly two years after the fact while patting ourselves on the back without even the meekest challenge over why it took so damn long to do anything. After all, Gregoire’s failure to act last year might well have cost The Times a Pulitzer. We still eagerly await a newspaper investigation that does something to warn and protect readers from society’s ills in time to be meaningful, rather than react with high dudgeon to the damage done. But then, that might mean getting on the guv’s bad side, or the legislature’s, or…remind me, how did that “loophole” get into law in the first place?

Not that the P-I can’t wring hands with the best of them. Its lead story has to do with the mortgage-induced plight of an Iraq war veteran. (As if to provide a helping hand, the paper also offers a companion piece, 7 Tips to Sell Your Home. Tip No. 1: Have the local rag write a Page 1 story about it.) Nothing surprising, but give the P-I credit: Iraq war, mortgage crisis. D’ya think there could be a connection? We are left to connect the dots ourselves, of course, while marveling over riveting prose like: “For a soldier, the mortgage crisis is the same as for civilians, but also quite different.” Wow, who edits this stuff?

Lines like that kept folks like Will Durst from becoming a journalist, more’s the pity. One pimp-slap of Gov. Gregoire and he’d be back at the Eastlake Zoo, scanning the help-wanted ads. Local cynics of the Durst cloth will note the quiet resurrection of the waterfront tunnel boondoggle now that tunnel-basher and surface-option-backer Peter Steinbrueck is leaving the City Council. Yes, the public voted down a tunnel, but wait, that one was different. This one “would not follow the shoreline and would be deeper beneath downtown.” Jan Drago for one is on the case: “We need to make better use of the real estate we have … including our subterranean assets.”

What makes this all ironic as only Seattle’s incestuous little political circle can be is that Drago just last night, at Steinbrueck’s going-away party at City Hall, was singing paens to his “tireless passion” for preserving Seattle’s civic and environmental integrity: “Many times I would go into my office on weekends, and who would already be there but Peter,” she effused. No doubt trying to figure out how to counteract Drago’s latest Big Development rape-n-pillage scheme. Steinbrueck will, however, continue as one of Seattle’s biggest above-ground assets, teaching at the U.W. and writing a column for Crosscut.com, Drago having handed him a great initial topic.

(This and nearly 90 other media clips from the past week in politics can be found at Hominid Views.)