HorsesAss.Org

I’m not prepared to argue with the main thesis of Alicia Mundy’s piece in the Seattle Times today, which posits that the US Senate Republican caucus is moving even further to the right in the wake of Sen. Trent Lott’s retirement.

This year, when Senate Republicans dropped into the minority, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Lott and their caucus began losing control to four conservative members with clout among several large and vocal interest groups — John Kyl of Arizona, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, Jim DeMint of South Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas.

[…] Coburn, for instance, has held up many bills that involve earmarks and new spending. One, worth about $7 million over the next few years, would increase regulations on pool makers because of accidental deaths of children attributed to pool drains.

Kyl and his allies also strongly oppose issues related to birth control and stem-cell research, infuriating Murray.

On Thursday, Kyl was elected to take Lott’s place in January, as the new No. 2, the enforcer. He told Roll Call that he “can’t be a patsy.”

Are Kyl, Coburn, DeMint and Cornyn really further to the right of Lott, who infamously claimed that “we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years,” had Strom Thurmond been elected president in 1948, running on a segregationist platform? Well, maybe, and Mundy certainly deserves credit for raising the question. But her closer… oy:

That leads to the question: How does a legislative caucus function with an ideologically driven group in the driver’s seat?

Democrats have grappled with that themselves.

Really? The Democratic caucus has grappled with an ideologically driven group in the driver’s seat? And when exactly was that? Surely Mundy’s not implying that Sen. Harry Reid operates as a liberal ideologue, or that the House Democratic caucus under the leadership of Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and Rahm Emmanuel has in any way pandered to the liberal extreme of the party?

Of course, I guess centrism can be as much an ideology as the radical neo/theo conservatism that drives the likes of Kyl and Coburn, but it is this kind of media obsession with equivalency that ends up distorting the political debate, and driving our policies ever further toward the right. If “Democrats have grappled with” the same sort of “ideologically driven group,” readers might logically conclude then that Democrats must be as ideologically extreme. It is in this way that Mundy’s lazy attempt at balance achieves the opposite, branding by inference Reid and Pelosi’s relatively centrist agenda as equally “ideological”.

The fact is, Kyl and Coburn are extremists who don’t represent the mainstream of American political thought, whereas polls show that the majority of voters consistently align with Democrats on the majority of issues. To imply equivalency only serves to enable this right-wing fringe.

Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) gives FCC Chairman Martin hell:

(This and some seventy other media clips from the past week in politics are now posted at Hominid Views.)

My good friend and former Seattle Weekly colleague, Philip Dawdy, writes one of the best mental health blogs in the country over at Furious Seasons. And today Philip is trying to figure out how he’s going to meet January’s rent — and at the same time file a complaint with the state AG office — after Google Adsense cut him off, and apparently stiffed him on $600 in revenue already earned, over an apparent malware incident Dawdy has no responsibility for. The kicker: Philip can’t even get anyone at Google to tell him what he supposedly did wrong, only an anonymous (and probably automated) response instructing him that

…your AdSense account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers.

So this is how bloggers are supposed to monetize the Web?

Turmoil in the Puget Sound housing market receives front page attention in both Seattle dailies today, as the Times and P-I fish the data for dramatic headlines.

The median housing price, we’re told, “has fallen four months in a row,” is “back where it was the previous November,” and “last month fetched nearly 10 percent less than the typical sale in July.” Wow. That sounds like the nationwide housing collapse has finally hit Seattle, except, you know, “it’s typical for monthly house prices to fluctuate,” some of the median price decline is surely from “the influence of condominiums, which have been making up more of home sales and generally cost less,” and of course the well known fact that “home sales are highly seasonal.”

To further complicate the reader’s job this morning, both articles liberally intermix data for detached homes and all housing, as well as trends from Seattle, King County and the surrounding areas. Ironically, the result of all this muddle is probably a fairly accurate picture: the regional housing market is soft — certainly softer than it’s been in years — but exactly how soft, how widespread, and how entrenched, well… we really don’t know. Gone for the moment are the bidding wars and double-digit annual appreciation to which we’ve all grown accustomed, but at least for us Seattle homeowners (and buyers) what we’re witnessing looks more like a return toward normalcy than an actual slump.

Which of course raises a question that seems to be missing from all the typically breathless local coverage of the region’s housing market: is a flattening or modest decline in prices actually a bad thing?

Self-appointed guardians of Seattle’s quality of life have long decried the loss of our city’s middle class heritage, but arguably the number one culprit in this trend has been the dramatic rise in housing prices that created such enormous wealth for those lucky enough to get into the market early. It was a struggle to buy my house for $187,000 back in 1997, but at a likely price of about half a million dollars today, it would be impossible. Average wages have not doubled and tripled over the past decade, but Seattle’s housing values have, pricing many families out of the market.

The equity in my house is my only substantial asset, so I have great empathy for homeowners watching their property value decline… or at the very least, not appreciate nearly as quickly as anticipated. But as someone with the experience of buying in the bidding war era — I joked at the time that I spent more time picking out a head of lettuce than I did deciding to make an offer on my house — I welcome a more rational housing market. And while the Ye Olde Seattle establishment bemoans the threat “vertical density” poses to our neighborhoods, the only realistic and palatable path toward “affordable housing” is to build more condos, townhouses and apartments… that is, short of a regional economic collapse.

So which is it? Do declining housing prices represent a crisis or an opportunity? I look forward to next month’s coverage to learn the answer.

It’s a little more expensive to die in King County now:

A $50 fee for cremations goes into effect Nov. 20.

A Seattle-King County Public Health manager, Gareth Johnson, says the money will help pay for the medical examiner’s office to review all deaths. It will determine if they should be investigated before the body is destroyed.
[…]

…John Rolfstad [director of the People’s Memorial Association] says the fee could be a burden for the poor or discriminate against people who chose cremation for religious purposes.

Sounds to me like a pall tax.

The Yakima Herald-Republic’s article about Tim Eyman being escorted out of the Yakima City Council chamber was pretty amusing. But I found something else to laugh about in it (my emphasis):

In addition, Eyman complained that his request for a guest commentary on the Ensey blogging issue had been denied by the Herald-Republic’s editorial board. He argued that his sympathetic-to-Ensey perspective would be valuable because he once had been nailed for not telling the truth about receiving monetary compensation for his political work on initiatives.

On Wednesday, Herald-Republic publisher Michael Shepard said the paper’s editorial board denied Eyman a guest commentary on the grounds that Eyman was neither a member of the community nor had any special expertise on the subject.

“Tim having been reared in Yakima doesn’t give him standing on City Council issues, nor is he an expert on blogging ethics,” Shepard explained. “We offered him the same letter-to-the-editor opportunity that Bill Lover and Rick Ensey took as well as 98 other readers. We would still consider a letter from Mr. Eyman.”

Wait a minute. Eyman was seriously arguing that he has expertise that warrants a guest commentary because…he was caught lying?

That’s rich!

You may recall that Eyman previously stole money donated to his initiative campaign, and used it to pay himself a handsome salary. Worse yet, he repeatedly said he wasn’t doing this. Essentially, he was lying his ass off to his donors: “The biggest lie of my life,” he finally admitted.

Later on, he was found by the PDC to have violated multiple parts of RCW 42.17 (Campaign finance and disclosure laws). As a result, Eyman was fined $50,000 after stealing over $200,000 from his donors.

So…come to think of it, Eyman actually does have a point. As an admitted liar, he can certainly comment with some authority on the ethical shortcomings of others.

And, apparently, the Herald-Republic came to the same realization. According to a comment left in the Horses Ass comment thread, Mr. Eyman claims that a limited guest commentary has now been accepted.

Unless, of course, Tim is lying again.

Yakima Mayor Dave Edler had a police officer remove Tim Eyman from council chambers Tuesday when Tim refused to shut up after the council voted 5-2 to cut off his rant against Councilmember Ron Bonlender.

Eyman started by arrogantly introducing himself as Yakima’s “highest ranking unelected representative,” and then went on to attack the Yakima Herald-Republic for their coverage of the recent sock puppet scandal in which Republican Rick Ensey’s wife Diane effectively used an anonymous blog to defame Bonlender during the campaign. Diane Ensey’s identity was not revealed until after her husband’s victory, prompting bipartisan calls for his resignation.

Pissed off that the Herald-Republic wouldn’t give him a guest column, Eyman called the Herald-Republic’s coverage of the Ensey’s admitted deception a “witch hunt,” bizarrely comparing it to that of the media storm surrounding the Duke Lacrosse rape case — only the Herald-Republic’s offense is apparently much worse, because….

“… that was about an alleged rape; the Ensey thing involves a few lines on a blog that maybe six people read. For years I’ve been libeled, denigrated and insulted by anonymous people on blogs, but blogs are little stray comments like you’d hear in any lunchroom, they’re mosquitoes in the alligator infested swamp of politics.”

Uh-huh.

In fact, Tim is lying as usual. Yes, he’s been insulted and denigrated by me and other liberal bloggers, but not a single one of us is anonymous, and, if he really believes I have libeled him, I urge him to sue me before I sue him first for making such a slanderous allegation. Eyman hopes to diminish our credibility and influence, but what “the Ensey thing” makes clear in the exception is that the blogosphere does indeed subscribe to a set of ethical standards… standards the Ensey’s shamelessly violated to the detriment of both the blogo- and political spheres. As a blogger I do not shy away from using strong language, but I never lie, and I certainly don’t hide behind a pseudonym like those cowardly Enseys. I have standards. Folks like Eyman and the Enseys obviously don’t.

Given that he too is a fraud and admitted liar, Eyman’s impassioned defense of the Enseys is not surprising. That some newspapers still give him valuable free space on their op-ed pages, is.

The P-I just posted a pretty good rundown of the latest stats, cheerily buoyant if you really believe the realtor “now is the time to buy!” malarkey that the story’s author does little to countermand, grimmer if you check out the better-informed Soundoff section. The reality, as we’ve noted before, is that our trailing-edge market is just catching up with other meltdowns, notably the Bay Area. Subprime numbers are not as relevant here because a lot of the boom was fueled by actual wealth. Example: A townhouse on the market for nearly three months here is owned by a guy living in Arizona who bought it two years ago with no intention of ever living in it. Purchase price then: $420,000. Selling price now: $590,000.

Sure, he’s dreaming. He may unload the thing, but if I was negotiating, my pitch would be, Hey, I can only go $450k. I know that’s low, but I’m taking it off your hands and you’re gonna take a bath if you don’t flip it now. Etc etc. Would such a sale translate into housing values going down? Not really. But from a perception standpoint, oh yeah. And that cycle is just as potent downward as the boom cycle was upward.

Fasten your safety belts, we’re in for a ride. Still to be addressed: Now that the crash has begun, why is so much building still going on???? Might be a story there…

I know you HAs aren’t techie but this was too good to resist…

Pimp yo iRide

King County Executive Ron Sims and former Transportation Secretary Doug MacDonald are both in favor of congestion pricing.

Sims seems to be vacillating on whether congestion pricing is designed to reduce throughput of vehicles, or increase it. Doug MacDonald definitely believes in the latter. After all, would Kemper’s White Guys and the Discovery Institute support the idea if it cuts down on driving? (My guess: no) I don’t think the Sierra Club has thought this through. If variable tolling makes the existing freeways work more efficiently, doesn’t that mean you get more volume and more throughput? Add in the issues raised in that Willamette Week article (linked below), where environmentalists are raising red flags on charging per mile instead of per gallon (because of how each system might affect vehicle choice) and you have an even weaker “green” case for tolling.

This raises some fundamental issues and contradictions – which may explain why both greens like Ron and roadwarriors like Doug, Kemper and others all seem to like the congestion pricing concept – it can be all things to all people. The fact Discovery has attached themselves to it should be the first warning sign…

Ron Sims:

Sims: That’s really interesting. We have tolls on the Narrows bridge. We’re going to have hot lanes on 167, that goes through the Kent Valley. One thing we know is that traffic… it really affects traffic. When we have congestion pricing, it reduces traffic volume 15 to 20 percent, because people begin to use those roadways smartly. And it’s also complemented by increasing the transit service that we’re going to have there. So we expect that people are going to move much better. You know our goal is to have an average speed of 45 miles per hour, which is a lot faster than they’re going now.

Doug MacDonald, who sponsored a competition to put the transpo-nerd term “through-put maximization” into regular-person language:

Haase wrote in his winning entry: “The physics of car-flow in a highway resemble those of rice poured through a funnel. If you pour slowly, you get little out, but if you pour too fast, the rice clogs and you get little — or nothing — out either. Car-flow involves similar thinking. For any highway there’s a particular in-between speed that moves the most vehicles under typical conditions.”

[snip]

While “through-put maximization” — moving the maximum number of vehicles through a stretch of highway at the maximum speed — might sound good to transportation technophiles, much of the public doesn’t understand it, said MacDonald.

The Willamette Week did a story on Oregon’s consideration of congestion pricing:

Environmentalists question why the state would switch to a system where a Hummer owner would be treated the same as a Prius owner. And civil libertarians raise alarms about the mileage tax’s underlying technology—an electronic collection system that uses a global positioning system to count the number of miles driven. That information would get uploaded and recorded at service stations.

“We must be cautious and understand how information can be linked and how information can be used in a way that is not intended or foreseen,” says Andrea Meyer, legislative director of ACLU of Oregon.

I wonder how much it would cost to equip every car in Seattle, King County, or Washington state with the “homing beacons,” or if that would even be possible to do in the next few years? I’m a fan of the Logan’s Run-style bar codes on human beings, but without the ritual killing on your 21st birthday. You know, because that seems at least plausible to achieve within the next few years.

I hate to keep picking on the P-I, but really, does anyone edit that thing? Today’s story on the SLUT’s impending debut contained a gem of a non-sequitur:

Why did we build this thing? The answer isn’t quite as clear as, say, the monorail, which promised to whisk people over city traffic until it was scuttled in 2005. But at least the streetcar got built.

OK, if the answer isn’t as clear, then it would follow that the monorail should have gotten built and the streetcar shouldn’t. So where are you going with this? A clearer-headed friend from West Seattle had a more utilitarian assessment. The streetcar buys him nothing, whereas the monorail would have gotten him all the way home, completely plastered, from a night at the Tractor.

Redeemingly, the story contains a great quote: “Right now, it just seems like a toy for tourists.” Now why would someone say that? The car I saw yesterday on a test run was purple, just like Barney. The other one is reddish orange, like Boober Fraggle’s hair. Come to think of it, has anyone tested those paints for lead?

Anyway, real soon now SLUTs will become official, even if the nickname Nazis keep up their censorship campaign. My take: SLUT will stick, and not only because of the streetcar. Think about Hutchinson & Others (including Group Health) being the hos, and the Mayor and city council being Vulcan’s bitches, and the whole mix starts to resemble an upscale First & Pike. Anything that costs $40M or so per mile to build is paying off a lot of people, let’s face it. Even the P-I is sniffing that coffee: “Some residents are also concerned that Vulcan may be allowed to move forward with 12-story buildings before a neighborhood-wide discussion about taller buildings, view protection and urban design occurs.” Here’s a little tip, passed along from a lawyer friend in commercial real-estate: The stuff already built isn’t selling. Could be a story there.

So here’s a PR inspiration: Invite all the folks around the city complaining about flooding (especially those whiners in Madison Valley, where someone actually died in another one of those 100-year-floods just last year) up to SLU to ride the trolley during its grand debut…for free! Then they’ll understand exactly why it’s more important to build a 1.3-mile amusement-park ride than waste valuable taxpayer dollars on expanded storm sewers. The latter, after all, would be pointless: “The city is not going to spend ‘billions and billions of dollars’ to construct a larger system, Nickels said.” If they did, there might not be anything left over for purple streetcars, developer kickbacks and the grand corrupt miasma of SLU, aka Allentown.

Also, further proof that news media get wet just thinking about flooding: More, so much more, coverage. Good thing this only happens once every year or two. That’s all for now, I’ve got a trolley to catch…

Hillary’s video, the funniest with the best production value:

Edwards’, decent video, good art and narration:

Obama’s video has that “3-2-1 Contact” vibe I remember back from elementary school, and is the most informative:

The Swift Kids for Truth strike again:

The Justice Policy Institute released a report [PDF] today on the racial disparities in drug law enforcement, and their findings are some of the most comprehensive I’ve seen on this subject. Here’s the report introduction:

Over the course of the last 35 years, the rate at which the U.S. places its citizens in jails and prisons has risen dramatically. For the first 70 years of the twentieth century, U.S. incarceration rates remained relatively stable at a rate of about 100 per 100,000 citizens. Since 1970, the U.S. has experienced a large and rapid increase in the rate at which people are housed in federal and state correctional facilities. Currently, the U.S. incarceration rate is 491 per 100,000.1

The exceptional growth in the prison population has been driven in large part by the rate at which individuals are incarcerated for drug offenses.2 Between 1995 and 2003, the number of people in state and federal prisons incarcerated for drug offenses increased by 21 percent, from 280,182 to 337,872.3 From 1996 to 2002, the number of those in jail for drug offenses increased by approximately 47 percent, from 111,545 to 164,372.4 This does not include people imprisoned for other offenses where drugs, the drug trade, or other drug activities were a feature of the offense.

The increase in incarceration of drug offenders translates directly to an increase in prison expenditures. The American Correctional Association estimates that, in 2005, the average cost of incarcerating one person for one day was approximately $67.55. The cost of incarcerating drug offenders in state or federal prisons amounts to a staggering eight billion dollars per year.5

There is little evidence to suggest that high rates of incarceration affect drug use rates or deter drug users. Researchers have previously found that decreases in crime in the 1990s were not attributable to an increase in the number of prisons or the increase in the incarceration rate.6 A Justice Policy Institute (JPI) study further substantiated these findings by investigating the relationship of incarceration to the rate of drug use in states. In fact, when observed over a three-year period, states with high incarceration rates tended to have higher rates of drug use.7

The growing rate of incarceration for drug offenses is not borne equally by all members of society. African Americans are disproportionately incarcerated for drug offenses in the U.S., though they use and sell drugs at similar rates to whites.8 As of 2003, twice as many African Americans as whites were incarcerated for drug offenses in state prisons in the U.S.9 African Americans made up 13 percent of the total U.S. population, but accounted for 53 percent of sentenced drug offenders in state prisons in 2003.10

The report uses data from 2002 from across the entire United States and discovers that a staggering 97% of large-population counties in this country have racial disparities in drug law enforcement, despite the fact that the evidence collected shows no disparity between the races when it comes to involvement with drugs. The report specifically discusses the work done by UW Professor Katherine Beckett:

A recent in-depth analysis of drug enforcement patterns in Seattle57 indicates that African Americans are disproportionately arrested for drug delivery offenses, and that these disproportions are not due to any extraordinary characteristics of those African American arrestees, the behaviors they engaged in, or the communities in which they were arrested. In other words, although African Americans in Seattle were not selling drugs at a higher rate than whites, they were targeted more frequently for drug arrests. Given the racial disparities in drug enforcement practice highlighted in this in-depth Seattle study, it is not surprising that the drug imprisonment rate in King County, WA, was 23 times higher for African Americans (465 per 100,000) than it was for whites (20 per 100,000) in 2002.

What’s even more alarming than the fact that an African American in this county is 23 times more likely to go to jail for a drug crime than a white person (despite similar numbers of people violating these laws) is that King County is only the 49th worst large county in the United States. The grim statistics are in this Excel spreadsheet.

Join us tonight for a fun-filled evening of politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. We meet at 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E.

For tonight’s theme song, we’ll scramble to the roof of the Montlake Ale House, raise a toast to rescue and emergency relief workers everywhere and sing Rescue Me by Aretha Franklin Fontella Bass¹.

Oh…and come prepared with your own ideas for this Comedy Central photo caption contest.

Not in Seattle? Check out the Drinking Liberally web site for dates and times of a chapter near you.

¹Thanks to N in Seattle for the correction.