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Can you imagine the howling we’d hear from the Seattle Times editorial page if it was Sound Transit that had flushed 97 million dollars down the toilet, and not the Port of Seattle? Or if it was Sound Transit that was under investigation by the Justice Department and not the Port of Seattle?

Sound Transit was pounded by the Times during last year’s Prop 1 campaign. After Prop 1 failed, the Times editorial page took plenty of cuts at Sound Transit and at light rail. The Port of Seattle, meanwhile, gets the kid glove treatment.

With the Port of Seattle’s recent malfeasance, you’d think the Times would be all over it.

Nope. Nothing yet.

If somebody at Sound Transit so much as palms a twenty from petty cash, they get the third degree from Balter, Vesely and the gang. Port of Seattle under investigation? Doesn’t move the meter.

Is the Oprah & Obama Show coming to Seattle in advance of WA’s February 9 caucus? That’s what the new blog Emerald City Scion wonders after gleaning this interesting little tidbit:

ECS has learned that talk-show queen Oprah Winfrey and Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barak Obama are on the guest list of VIPs invited to a post-swearing in reception for newly-appointed United States District Court (WD. Wash.) judge Hon. Richard A. Jones set for the end of this month. ECS has not been able to confirm whether either will attend the event.

I’ve joked (fantasized?) for some time that the race for the Democratic nomination will come down to WA’s caucus, but with the unsettled state of the race after Iowa and New Hampshire, that’s no longer so unrealistic. Coming just four days after Super-Duper Tuesday, WA could serve as the momentum setter in an otherwise split race. Under that scenario, an Oprah/Obama event in Seattle could pay off huge dividends.

Hmm.

I stopped by the open house at the Vance Building last night, where a bevy of progressive organizations have set up office, proving there’s camaraderie, if not necessarily safety in numbers. There was free food, always an attraction to starving bloggers, and the halls flowed liberally with booze and schmooze; it was kinda like a roaming, multistory Drinking Liberally, but with a less embarrassing ratio of men to women.

Wandering from office to office, each with their own special interests and their own particular agenda, a common theme arose in regard to expectations for the coming legislative session. It will be a busy two months the various activists and organizers told me, hopefully filled with some small victories on important issues. But the really ambitious agenda — the substantive legislation on issues ranging from tax reform to transportation to publicly financed campaigns and more — well, that would have to wait until 2009.

It was like a Passover seder (but with cheese on the crackers, and potable wine,) as a common prayer arose from the Vance Building last night: “Next year in Olympia.” Next year, I was repeatedly told, after Gov. Gregoire wins reelection, and the Democrats hold or expand their legislative majority, that’s when we can expect a truly progressive agenda. Next year, with the burden of electoral politics temporarily lifted from their shoulders, the Democrats would apparently be free to make progress on some of our most pressing issues.

Of course, a lot of things can happen in a year that can lead to an awful lot of disappointment. Voters don’t always behave the way we expect them to behave, and candidates don’t always run the kind of campaign they should. And even if we manage to keep our unchallenged hold on Olympia, the Democratic leadership there has often proven more bold at maintaining and expanding its majority than actually using it. Finally, even if an emboldened Gov. Gregoire does attempt to leave her mark during a second term, her agenda will necessarily be limited; even the most successful legislative session will leave the halls of the Vance Building scattered with winners and losers.

Perhaps I’m wrong, but if I were tasked with pushing a bill, I’d be pushing it hard in 2008, with the Democratic governor and near legislative supermajority we have now, rather than waiting for some political heaven on earth next year in Olympia. But then, I’ve never been a man of faith.

Locally, again, not much going on today. The best local story is a sordid Seattle Times piece detailing the efforts of fanatic UW football boosters to get the Athletic Director, Todd Turner, and football coach, Tyrone Willingham, fired last month after a disappointing season. (Disappointing, but predictable, given the nation’s toughest schedule.) One booster went so far as to offer $200,000 in law school scholarships if UW President Mark Emmert would pull the plug. (He did, but only on AD Todd Turner, presumably gaining the school a tidy $100 k to help offset the contract it had to eat.)

Moronic UW fans tend to overlook that along with winning, idolized former Husky football coach Don James left one other legacy: cheating. (OK, two: quitting on his team when he got caught.) And that while the wild successes of some of James’ teams mostly left when he did, the culture of lawlessness and a football program run amok pretty much continued up until Willingham, by all accounts, was brought in by Turner to run a clean ship. Obviously, the ugly old ways are dying hard.

Idle thought: what on earth does a football team (or any scholarship athlete, for that matter) have to do with a state land grant university’s mission to educate its state’s residents? Just wondering.

What else? Local TV was all over the dramatic video of a rare tornado in Vancouver, Wash., damaging property and “causing moments of fear” but injuring nobody.

The top world story: a brief moment of silence for Sir Edmund Hillary.

Nationally, American media, embedded in the Middle East with George Bush, continued to credulously report the cruel hoax that is the “Peace Process.” (Overseas, they’re not being quite so sycophantic.)

Meanwhile, the New York Times is once again doing its patriotic duty to whip up war fever this morning. Even as the official Pentagon/White House story of the kayaks and the aircraft carrier, er, “naval confrontation” between Iran and the U.S. unraveled, the Times was busily looking elsewhere for reasons to remind Americans that They are, after all, an obliteration-worthy Axis of Evil.

We now pause for a brief word from our sponsor.

In case you didn’t catch the short story (published in 2001)…now it’s out on video: Jane and the Metro Bus…a silent film.

There’s been a lot of talk about transportation “governance reform” in the wake of Prop 1’s failure this past November, and one of the main arguments repeatedly proffered is that a directly elected board of regional commissioners would be more responsive and accountable than, say, Sound Transit’s current makeup of officials appointed by other elected bodies. This is an assumption that has been left mostly unchallenged by editorialists and other members of our media and political elite.

So I thought it might be constructive to test this thesis by comparing the highly publicized recent audit of Sound Transit with its much maligned federated board ($5 million of potential savings out of a $2.5 billion budget), versus that of the Port of Seattle with it’s directly elected commissioners ($100 million wasted, and a criminal investigation.) Um… ouch.

As Seattle Transit Blog points out, “Sound Transit is ‘definitely’ in the ‘good camp’ when it comes to audits”… at least that’s what Evans Anglin, the Accountability Audit manager for the State Auditor’s office told Sound Transit at a Jan 3 presentation:

“I think that you can give yourselves a small pat on the back for doing a good year, and if I may just step outside my boundaries a little bit and just reflect on the fact that I believe your performance audit also came out pretty well, so I think that we’re all aware of maybe a performance audit that came out recently that maybe wasn’t quite so, um, didn’t go quite so well, so I think you can kind of compare and contrast yourselves between those two audits and maybe get a sense of you know, things are going fairly well here from the perspective of the State Auditor’s office. Obviously a large complex organization, there’s always things, but we’re not seeing the kind of systemic problems that perhaps might exist in an organization like this with the magnitude of construction activity that’s going on.”

“Systemic problems”…? Um… like those at the Port of Seattle, with it’s elected commissioners? Anglin goes on to thank Sound Transit for its cooperation:

“Very roughly you might be able to divide the world of the governments we audit into two camps […] this is definitely one of the entities that fall into the good camp. Our audits are always well received, the recommendations that we make are always taken seriously.”

You know, unlike the folks at the Port of Seattle.

Compare and contrast operations at the Port of Seattle and Sound Transit, and there is absolutely no evidence that a directly elected commission is inherently any more accountable than a federated board. Indeed, anecdotally, one might reasonably conclude just the opposite. And yet “accountability” continues to be a rallying cry of the anti-rail schemers who look to governance reform as a means of lopping the head off of Sound Transit, and with it, the pro-rail/pro-transit aspirations of the majority of Seattle voters.

The folks who really need to be held accountable are the so-called civic leaders and media mucky-mucks who relentlessly malign a well-run organization like Sound Transit in pursuit of their narrow-minded, backwards-thinking, roads only agenda.

Actual voter suppression in the works, thanks to the Bush Court:

There are many ways to lose a Supreme Court case, and by the end of an argument that was before the court on Wednesday, the Democrats who were challenging Indiana’s voter-identification law appeared poised to lose theirs in a potentially sweeping way, with implications for many future election cases.

One of the big problems I have with folks who cry “vote fraud” is that it isn’t nearly as common as voter suppression. Requiring voter ID at the polls, which is what Indiana has done, creates greater barriers to voting, and Republicans push for these laws because they know that Democrats are more likely to not have proper ID with them on election day. Another trick is to put fewer (or broken) voting machines in black neighborhoods. Mix in the occasional purge of the voter rolls in Democratic neighborhoods and you have a recipe for actual, honest-to-God voter suppression. All of this is far, far easier to pull off than some sort of big voter fraud conspiracy.

As John Amato says:

Get off the voter stuff in NH and focus on a real threat to our democracy. With huge turnouts more than likely this election, what will happen at the polling stations when Americans are turned away because of these new rules? We’ve had to fight for our right to vote and we must continue to do so.

When congressional candidates release their fundraising numbers ahead of the federal reporting deadline, it’s almost always good news, and that’s no exception for Darcy Burner, who just announced record numbers for the fourth quarter of 2007. Burner raised $339,494 — more than $290,000 (86-percent) coming from 1495 individuals. That’s the most ever for a Washington state challenger in any quarter of an off year, topping the $305,000 raised in the previous quarter when Burner benefited from an unprecedented $123,000 netroots fundraiser.

Burner’s 2008 campaign has now raised $858,125 total, finishing the year with an impressive $607,144 in the bank… more than half a million dollars more than at the same point during the last campaign. These results will put her in the top tier of Democratic challengers nationwide, and are a clear sign of a strong campaign and a thirst for change in WA’s 8th Congressional District.

No peep out of the Reichert camp yet on his 4Q numbers. I wonder why?

Mighty slim pickins this a.m., mostly followups on earlier news, such as the Port scandal (plus ca change…) and UW student stabbing (the cops got bupkus). The guv has yet another highway proposal, this for a “520 Lite,” (yeah, that’ll work) and another case of Catholic sexual abuse has hit, this time at O’Dea High School (“O they will know we are Christians” link to Dan Savage TK). The Times lead story is original, about alumni blackmailing the UW to fire the AD and football coach. Somehow I’m not shocked. That’s it, folks, I hereby offer up today’s theme song.

As for extracurricular headlines, fur continues to fly over New Hampshire vote fraud, with MSM like The Dallas Morning News maybe perhaps starting to get interested. My $.02 continues to be data mining. It’s early in this game for conclusion-jumping. I will say that partisanship has nothing to do with voter fraud, which is simply about rigging results to ensure it can be done better next time, and that no one disputes Diebold at all levels (not just touchscreens) is easily hacked. No one with any brains thinks Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 were clean, so why not keep an overzealous eye on the 2008 campaign as it plays out? If you dismiss all voter fraud as conspiracy nuttery, then you’re just another plutocratic patsy. More fodder here and from our own Bev Harris’ Black Box Voting.

Vote fraud in New Hampshire: “Major allegations of vote fraud in New Hampshire are circulating after Hillary Clinton reversed a mammoth pre-polling deficit to defeat Barack Obama with the aid of Diebold electronic voting machines, while confirmed votes for Ron Paul in the Sutton district were not even counted…”

To their credit, some of the normally self-assured TV pundits are saying they don’t know what the hell is going on any more. Until a more believable assessment of the polling disparities is provided, I’ll stick with this.

UPDATE [–Goldy]:
Or maybe, the polls were right… on Sunday. Unfortunately for Obama, the election was held on Tuesday.

UPDATE, UPDATE [–Goldy]:
Or maybe, of course, the electronic voting machines couldn’t have been hacked because, um, there weren’t any.

Gov. Chris Gregoire released a statement late this afternoon, clarifying her position on former Gov. Booth Gardner’s assisted suicide initiative:

“The initiative filed today by Governor Gardner offers a very personal, individual decision for Washington voters to consider should it qualify for the November ballot. I want to clarify that I will not actively oppose this initiative. It is not my place to impose my morality on others.”

So I guess in the battle between me and Lee in parsing the governor’s words, I win. So there.

UPDATE [Lee]: Goldy, you win this round. But everyone here’s a winner when Crackpiper says things this dumb:

By stepping aside, she is imposing her ammorality.

We could probably train a monkey to keep us this entertained, but we’d still have to feed it. Thank you so much, Crackpiper. Everyone else, keep an eye on EffU this weekend.

What?! Lee voted for Dino Rossi?!!! I never knew. I guess that’s just one of those uncomfortable questions that never comes up in polite society… you know, like, “Do you find your sister sexy?” or “Who’s your favorite actor on the sit-com Two and a Half Men?”

As for his anti-Gregoire screed, Lee warned me last night that he had this particular post in the hopper, giving me the opportunity to edit or nix it in advance, but I chose not to even read it before it went live. Lee has the same deal here as the rest of my HA co-bloggers: he can write on whatever he wants whenever he wants, and in exchange, I can yank his posting privileges without warning. Nobody edits me, and I’m not about to edit them. I always knew Lee was one of those weird libertarianish kinda guys, and I never expected to agree with everything he posted, but he’s a sharp analyst and an entertaining writer, and that’s exactly what we shoot for here on HA.

But, you know, it is possible to go too far.

The impetus for Lee’s post is Gov. Gregoire’s comment on former Gov. Booth Gardner’s proposed assisted suicide initiative: “I find it on a personal level, very, very difficult to support assisted suicide.” To Lee, the governor’s position is hypocritical or worse:

I find it extremely difficult to understand how a person can see abortion as a fundamental right, but also see the right for a terminally ill individual to control their own death as being subject to other people’s moral qualms.

[…] As I was researching this post and looking for Gregoire’s past statements on abortion, you’ll find that it’s nearly impossible to find statements directly from her that affirm her support for a woman’s right to choose. In fact, this page reports that she told Archbishop Brunett in the meeting referenced above that as a Catholic, she was “against abortion.” At this point, I have no idea who’s really telling the truth. But what I do know is that if she really is pro-choice, her stance on assisted suicide clearly makes her a hypocrite. If I had to guess, I’d say her stance on assisted suicide is the real Gregoire and her pro-choice position is a pander.

I wholeheartedly agree with Lee in supporting assisted suicide legislation, but I think he jumps to conclusions regarding Gov. Gregoire’s position, and in general fails to display his usual sense of nuance. Gov. Gregoire told reporters that “on a personal level” she finds it difficult to support assisted suicide — but that doesn’t necessarily mean she would actively oppose Gov. Gardner’s initiative. Likewise, I find no hypocrisy in an elected official personally being “against abortion” yet fully supporting a woman’s legal right to choose. In fact, I’ve always assumed that as a practicing Catholic Gov. Gregoire accepts her church’s teaching that abortion under any circumstance is a sin. The significant difference between Rossi and Gregoire on this issue is that he would seek to impose his own morality through force of law, whereas she would not.

Without a doubt, the modern American politician I admire most is former Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York, a liberal icon and a devout Catholic who spoke thoughtfully and eloquently on this very issue. It has been well over a decade since I last read the text of the speech he gave at the University of Notre Dame on September 13, 1984 — “Religious Belief and Public Morality: A Catholic Governor’s Perspective” — but with the GOP having since transformed itself into the Pro-Life Party and the defender of a Christianist America, Gov. Cuomo’s remarks are more pertinent now than ever. In this speech the governor reveals himself to be profoundly reverent of unborn life, and yet he distinguishes between his private role as a Catholic and his role as a public official:

As Catholics, my wife and I were enjoined never to use abortion to destroy the life we created, and we never have. We thought Church doctrine was clear on this, and – more than that – both of us felt it in full agreement with what our hearts and our consciences told us. For me, life or fetal life in the womb should be protected, even if five of nine Justices of the Supreme Court and my neighbor disagree with me. A fetus is different from an appendix or a set of tonsils. At the very least, even if the argument is made by some scientists or some theologians that in the early stages of fetal development we can’t discern human life, the full potential of human life is indisputably there. That – to my less subtle mind – by itself should demand respect, caution, indeed…reverence.

But not everyone in our society agrees with me and Matilda.

[…]The Catholic public official lives the political truth most Catholics through most of American history have accepted and insisted on: the truth that to assure our freedom we must allow others the same freedom, even if occasionally it produces conduct by them which we would hold to be sinful.

I protect my right to be a Catholic by preserving your right to believe as a Jew, a Protestant, or non-believer, or as anything else you choose.

We know that the price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that they might some day force theirs on us.

I do not ask Gov. Gregoire or any other politician to endorse my moral perspective or keep silent on their own, I only expect that they respect my right to act on my perspective freely. Likewise, I don’t expect Gov. Gregoire to hold the same legislative priorities as I do, and given the political reality, even a legislative attempt at codifying assisted suicide would not only be unlikely, it would almost certainly come back to voters in the form of a referendum. Gov. Gregoire was asked about assisted suicide and she honestly answered that “on a personal level” she would find it very difficult to support. I have no problems with that as long as she does not use the power and influence of her office to oppose the initiative.

As for Lee’s further critique, that Gov. Gregoire ran “a hollow campaign with no ideas,” and “nearly always reverts to the most authoritarian solutions”… well… I think he overstates the situation. She did not run a very compelling campaign in 2004 (hence Rossi’s near victory) and she’s not the kind of progressive champion most of us bloggers would prefer. But overall, within the pragmatic scheme of things, she’s been a good governor… and certainly far, far better than the alternative.

Lee voices regrets over his protest vote for Rossi, but says that at this point he can’t vote for Gregoire either. On this point and others, Lee is wrong. But as long as he doesn’t try to impose his beliefs on me, I’ll gladly permit him to continue posting his wrong beliefs here on HA.

Following up on yesterday’s post re Richard Conlin seeking to renew the Pro Parks Levy over the mayor’s dead body, a newly formed coalition is organizing to promote funding of a broad range of green initiatives, from bicycling to tree preservation. The idea behind the Green Legacy for All Levy is to set up a formal citizens committee to oversee financing of green projects including but extending beyond parks, while making the process far less volatile and unilateral than Parks Department jurisdiction of the past. It’s early for details, including the amount sought (Pro Parks was just shy of $200 million), but several community groups have endorsed the spirit of the endeavor and it will get further airing at a number of upcoming events, including a public forum moderated by Open Space Seattle 2100’s Brice Maryman at the downtown library at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 17th. For now the effort is coordinating with Council member Tom Rasmussen, chair of the newly rejiggered Parks and Seattle Center Committee. The vice chair: None other than Richard Conlin.

Jerry Cornfield writes about the effort by former Governor Booth Gardner to bring Oregon’s assisted suicide law to Washington. His “Death with Dignity” initiative will be filed this morning at 10am.

Oregon’s law has functioned as expected since its inception 10 years ago. Despite the howling of those who claimed that the law would lead to mass suicides, only a tiny fraction of Oregonians take advantage of this law each year to legally end their lives on their own terms. Unfortunately, as David Postman reports, this initiative will have opposition from the Governor’s office:

Gov. Chris Gregoire is talking to reporters in Olympia. She was just asked her position on the assisted suicide initiative that former Gov. Booth Gardner will file tomorrow. Gardner, who has Parkinsons, has been a mentor to Gregoire. Gregoire’s voice cracked when she answered the question:

“I love my friend Booth Gardner and my heart goes out to his condition and what he’s had to face. He was my motivation for the Life Sciences Discovery Fund. I pray every day that we will find a cure. But I find it on a personal level, very, very difficult to support assisted suicide.”

That’s interesting, because back in 2004, when she was running for governor, the following appeared in the Seattle PI:

State Attorney General Christine Gregoire, the leading Democratic candidate for governor, said she does not see a conflict between her Catholic faith and protecting abortion rights, said Morton Brilliant, her press secretary.

Gregoire is “deeply faithful and also strongly committed to a woman’s right to choose,” Brilliant said. “And she believes a woman’s right to choice is a fundamental right.”

Directly bucking [Seattle Archbishop Alex] Brunett’s edict, he added that Gregoire does not believe abortion is immoral.

“(Gregoire) does not see her role as governor as requiring her to impose her faith on the entire state,” he said. “Washington is clearly a pro-choice state, Gregoire will not shy away from that belief and will not waver in her support of that right.”

[Emphasis mine]

I find it extremely difficult to understand how a person can see abortion as a fundamental right, but also see the right for a terminally ill individual to control their own death as being subject to other people’s moral qualms.

I catch some grief from my friends for having voted for Dino Rossi in 2004, but it’s days like this (and there have been many recently) that remind me why I just couldn’t fill in that circle next to Gregoire’s name. She ran a hollow campaign with no ideas and has since become a governor that nearly always reverts to the most authoritarian solutions, rather than being concerned with the state constitution, the rights of Washington State citizens, or even the foreseeable results of her actions. In almost everything we’ve seen, she seems more interested in doing the symbolic than the sensible.

As I was researching this post and looking for Gregoire’s past statements on abortion, I found that it’s nearly impossible to find statements directly from her that affirm her support for a woman’s right to choose. In fact, this page reports that she told Archbishop Brunett in the meeting referenced above that as a Catholic, she was “against abortion.” At this point, I have no idea who’s really telling the truth. But what I do know is that if she really is pro-choice, her stance on assisted suicide clearly makes her a hypocrite. If I had to guess, I’d say her stance on assisted suicide is the real Gregoire and her pro-choice position is a pander.

Dino Rossi is the only openly anti-choice politician I’ve ever voted for in my life, and as the election was unimaginably close, I became overly concerned about casting what was essentially a protest vote over Gregoire’s lethargic campaign that could’ve been the deciding vote in the entire election. After watching the entire Republican Party establishment act like a bunch of toddlers in the months after the election, I seriously doubt I can vote for Rossi again – but at this point, I can’t vote for Gregoire either. As the Bush era collapses into itself and gives Democrats incredible gains in Washington DC, we’re heading into a new progressive era where civil liberties actually matter again to voters, but this November Washington State residents won’t have anyone on the ballot who reflects these values.

UPDATE: Back in October, the Seattle Times had a nice story of someone in Oregon who took advantage of their right to choose.

Once again, the affairs of the world ground to a halt yesterday in solemn observance of a small American state voting for presidential nominees. The results (with 96% of precincts counted):

Democrats

Hillary Clinton 39.2%
Barack Obama 36.4%
John Edwards 16.9%
Bill Richardson 4.6%
Dennis Kucinich 1.4%
Others 1.4%
Mike Gravel 0.1%

Republicans

John McCain 37.2%
Mitt Romney 31.6%
Mike Huckabee 11.2%
Rudy Giuliani 8.6%
Ron Paul 7.6%
Others 2.0%
Fred Thompson 1.2%
Duncan Hunter 0.5%\

Me, I’m getting kind of sick of media’s attempt to create instant, sweeping generalizations on the basis of first Iowa, now New Hampshire. Clinton led NH polls all last year, and McCain was expected to win; now, somehow, they are the “comeback kids.” Clinton “escapes to fight another day” with her “return from the political dead,” even though only an idiot thought that her $100 million campaign would have been finished off by a second-place finish — just as nobody should write off Obama now. And Edwards is now the one being written off, for having finished pretty much exactly where the last year’s worth of polls had him. Bollocks. Same thing on the Republican side, where the Beltway punditocracy has been desperate to portray a McCain “surge” since the barbarian (i.e., Mike Huckabee) won in Iowa. Now that McCain (aka “Lazarus”) has performed as expected, someone, somewhere, will opine that his nomination is inevitable. (One thing’s for sure: Fred Thompson sure doesn’t seem like much of a threat.)

And establishment journalists wonder why the public hates them.

In other, lesser news yesterday, President Bush quietly attempted to remind people that he’s still relevant.

Locally, beyond you-know-what, the P-I brings us the shocking news that area home prices have dropped (shocking, that is, if you’ve been relying on the local dailies for your information for the last six months), and asks the burning question: “Have prices hit bottom?” (The P-I doesn’t risk an answer, so here’s one: No.) The Times also has the story, natch. Bothell’s Best also gives us Nicole Brodeur, with the sort of incisive analysis she’s renowned for: Sometimes pit bulls bite people. Sometimes they don’t.

Local TV is, unsurprisingly, even worse. KING-5 set the standard last night; their top four stories were about crime.

Give the P-I credit, though, for a priceless photograph of Port Commissioner Pat Davis in the blandly titled “Port of Seattle enacts reforms.” Nothing like a criminal investigation to perk ’em up, huh?