HorsesAss.Org

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

7PM: Radio Kos: What really happened in New Hampshire?
Daily Kos contributing editors DemFromCT, DHinMI and MissLaura join me for a wrap up of Iowa and New Hampshire, and a look ahead to the remainder of the primary season. Did Clinton simply have a better ground game? Was Obama torpedoed by the “Bradley Effect”? Or were the pollsters just plain wrong? And what kind of bump will this give Clinton heading into the heart of season? Join the conversation.

8PM: Will Washington voters approve “Death With Dignity”?
Former Gov. Booth Gardner has filed a controversial initiative based on a similar Oregon law that would allow doctors to prescribe a fatal dose of barbiturates to terminally ill patients diagnosed with six months or less to live. Some oppose this measure as “assisted suicide.” Proponents call it “death with diginity.” Gov. Gardner joins us to discuss his initiative and take your calls.

9PM: Will Gov. Gregoire’s 520 bridge proposal float in Olympia?
Gov. Chris Gregoire has proposed early tolling on the 520 floating bridge to help pay for its replacement, touching off a debate on how we pay for our critical infrastructure.  Rep. Judy Clibborn, chair of the House Transportation Committee joins us to share her view of whether the proposal will float in the Legislature, and what else we might see on the transportation front in the coming legislative session.
Tune in tonight (or listen to the live stream) and give me a call: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).

At the last Drinking Liberally, somebody asked me how much a post at Horse’s Ass would cost.

To answer, it costs this much:

But from anyone else, it might cost more. FYI.

Seahawks coverage is going late, so please tune in to an abbreviated “The David Goldstein Show” tonight, from 7:30PM to 10PM on News/Talk 710-KIRO:

7:30PM: TBA
The usual liberal propaganda

8PM: The Stranger Hour with Josh Fiet
The Stranger’s Josh Feit joins us for the hour for our regular look back at the week’s news, and a peek ahead toward what’s coming up. Did the “Bradley Effect” sink Barack Obama in New Hampshire? Will Gov. Gregoire’s 520 bridge proposal float? Can former Gov. Booth Gardner breath life into his death with dignity intiative? All that, plus a look ahead toward the coming legislative session.

9PM: Saturday night comedy with Julie Mains
If you enjoy my Saturday night chats with local comedians, you’ve got Julie Mains to thank for hooking me up with guests. Julie is the proprietor of the Mainstage Comedy & Music Club and an accomplished performer in her own right, an actress, singer and songwriter familiar to Seattle audiences. Julie joins me for the hour to make it full night of fast-talking, East Coast Jews.

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

Enjoy the game today, everyone. I’m kind of torn. It’s hard not to root for Brett Favre to keep his season going, but I’d love to see a Giants-Seahawks NFC Championship game at Qwest Field next week.

This week’s Birds Eye View Contest is still unsolved. I think I have to give a clue since it’s such a tough one. The clue it’s that this town is so plain and conservative that there just weren’t any views that stood out for me to use.

Finally, after way too long of a wait, the third edition of the Crackpiper Chronicles is now posted (as always, keep sending me your favorite stupid comments, although I already have some good material for Part 4).

Brit Hume has a fireside chat with Dick Cheney:

(This and over 80 other media clips from the last week in politics are now posted at Hominid Views.)

From The Stranger, who quote Grist:

On Monday, Clinton named Joy Philippi, the former president of a the National Pork Producers Council, the main trade group representing confined animal feeding operators, as co-chair of Rural Americans for Hillary.

You known who’s in change of rural outreach for the John Edwards campaign?

John Edwards.

I was listening to some music, when iTunes automatically played the next file in the cue: an old episode of Podcasting Liberally from June 6, 2006, with me, Molly, Will, Carl, Ed Murray, Dan Savage and Eli Sanders. It was kinda a blast, and I especially enjoyed listening to us make our presidential predictions. (Hey Will… how’d Mark Warner work out for you?) Feeling nostalgic? Tune in and enjoy the fun:

[audio:https://horsesass.org/wp-content/uploads/drinking-liberally-june-6-2006.mp3]

[FYI, I believe this was recorded the day before 710-KIRO offered me my show.]

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.