HorsesAss.Org

It sure is difficult covering Seattle local news from out of state when the local Seattle newspapers don’t seem to cover Seattle local news themselves. Sitting here next to me is the dead-tree edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer, which has five, count ’em, five front page stories this lazy Monday morning: three local news stories — a feature on yesterday’s Philadelphia Marathon, and an international story from the Washington Post — whereas the Times and the P-I have three headlines each, four of the six, features. The P-I is particularly shameless this morning, actually filling a chunk of its front page with a heartwarming feature about, you know… itself.

The one headline the two dailies share is that of missing ex-WSU and Garfield High basketball star Tony Harris, whose strangled body has apparently been found in Brazil. No criticism there — it is a compelling story, tinged with pathos and intrigue. But it is the only hard news story on the front page of either paper.

As usual, the online editions are much more informative. (Okay, a bit more informative. It’s all relative.)

The P-I’s Neil Modie reports that Dino Rossi has been, um, disingenuous, soliciting donations well before announcing his candidacy. Not exactly news, but it’s nice to see the local media acknowledging the obvious.

Rossi’s campaign finance records show the campaign started accepting contributions Oct. 12 and took in $97,750 even before he announced his candidacy Oct. 25. Of that sum, $86,800 came in donations of $2,800 each, the maximum amount allowed by law for the primary and general elections combined.

An additional $60,873 came in on the day of the announcement, more than half of it in contributions of $2,800 each.

Up until that time, the official line by the Rossi camp was that he hadn’t decided whether to run against Democratic Gov. Chris Gregoire again next year. […] Without specifically saying so, Rossi left the impression last week that he raised money more quickly following his announcement than he actually had.

His campaign reported last week that he brought in “over $463,300 during the month of October. He announced his candidacy for governor on October 25th.” That prompted erroneous news reports that he had raised the entire sum within a week after the announcement.

Republicans have been touting Rossi’s early fundraising success, but $333,600 of the total raised was in “double-max” donations — contributors who have given the maximum $1,400 for both the primary and the general. That’s an awful lot of low hanging fruit, and not exactly an indication of broad, grassroots support.

Also not news is yet another Catholic priest sexual abuse settlement, this time $50 million in hush money in Alaska.

In some villages it is difficult to find an adult who was not sexually violated by the priests, who then used religion and their power to silence hundreds of children, Roosa said.

“Despite all this, no Catholic religious leader has yet to admit that problem priests were dumped in Alaska. For our clients, this settlement represents a long overdue acknowledgment of the truth of their stories of abuse, stories that until today were largely denied and belittled by apologists for the abusers,” he said.

Yeah, it represents acknowledgment of abuse, but by settling, it also prevents full public disclosure of the extent of the problem, just like in Seattle, where Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg has refused to investigate church records. Ah well… what we don’t know can’t hurt us, right?

Also not really news in the true sense of the word, Iraq bombing kills 20 as US reports decline in violence in Iraq, Detroit named America’s most dangerous city, and yet another man dies from a non-lethal taser strike. Shocking.

Al Gore is receiving yet another award. Stephen Colbert recently commented on this major threat to our planet.

Delicious philippic from SFGate: “It is now becoming increasingly easy to actually dare to think that, in less than one year’s time, Dubya will begin packing his bags, jamming into his Spongebob duffel his map of the world coloring book, English-to-English translation dictionaries, mangled pocket edition of the U.S. Constitution, Bibleman action figure set and a “Mission Accomplished!” sweatshirt, and heading off to face his destiny as one of the bleakest, most morally repellent chapters in all of American history…”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently released a final report making a compelling case that human-induced global warming is happening and will have dire consequences. But maybe you don’t find the expertise of scientists trained in climatological science all that compelling. Here is another way of thinking about global warming:

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

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

7PM: The Stranger Hour with Christopher Frizzelle
It’s politics as unusual tonight as we take a break from our usual political discourse for a more arts oriented conversation with Stranger editor Christopher Frizzelle. While other journalists focused on the tabloid intrigue of Washington native Amanda Knox’s involvement with the murder of her roommate in Italy, Frizzelle critiqued her creative writing. Tune in and find out what, if anything, that tells us about our region’s most talked about murder suspect.

8PM: “Changing the World, One Joke at a Time!”
That’s the slogan of local comedian Travis Simmons, who joins us in studio to share his own unique take on the region and current events.

9PM: Regional Blogger Roundup
TJ from Loaded Orygun and Jimmy from McCranium join us for our monthly roundup of news and politics from around the Northwest. Drivers licenses for illegal immigrants and a recap of Jimmy’s write-in campaign for Richland city council, will top the agenda, but first we’ll hear from recently defeated Yakima city councilman Ron Bonlender about the shameless case of sock-puppetry that might have done him in.

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

Courtesy of RawStory, and of course, PBS.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued its fourth and final report, and it ain’t pretty.

Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level.

[…] It is very likely that over the past 50 years: cold days, cold nights and frosts have become less frequent over most land areas, and hot days and hot nights have become more frequent. It is likely that: heat waves have become more frequent over most land areas, the frequency of heavy precipitation events has increased over most areas, and since 1975 the incidence of extreme high sea level has increased worldwide. […] Average Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the second half of the 20th century were very likely higher than during any other 50-year period in the last 500 years and likely the highest in at least the past 1300 years.

The report warns that the impacts of anthropogenic warming could be “abrupt or irreversible”, including “metres of sea level rise, major changes in coastlines and inundation of low-lying areas.”

Contraction of the Greenland ice sheet is projected to continue to contribute to sea level rise after 2100. Current models suggest virtually complete elimination of the Greenland ice sheet and a resulting contribution to sea level rise of about 7 m if global average warming were sustained for millennia in excess of 1.9 to 4.6ºC relative to preindustrial values. The corresponding future temperatures in Greenland are comparable to those inferred for the last interglacial period 125,000 years ago…

Of course, what do they know? They’re just a bunch of Nobel Prize winning scientists. Better we should listen to real experts, like Dori and Stefan.

Ron Reagan was a big hit with the audience at state Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles annual post-election panel and fundraiser last night, and several people came up to me afterwards asking why 710-KIRO dumped his show. I had no answer, except that radio is a tough, tough business. Former KVI host Bryan Suits knows this well, after being unceremoniously dumped from the dial last week, as does former Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman (of O.J. Simpson murder trial fame,) whose show on Spokane’s KGA was suddenly canceled yesterday, probably to make room for cheaper, syndicated programming.

As an occasional guest of both Suits and Fuhrman, I wish them both well. Suits always treated me fairly, and Fuhrman, well, contrary to his popular image as a tough-talking, racist righty, he was perhaps the most polite and patient host I ever worked with, giving me wide latitude to make my case without interruption. My fellow liberals may cheer their demise, but in both cases their cancellation has resulted in less local content, and that’s almost always a bad thing, regardless of the ideological bent.

No doubt, barring a sudden career change or an untimely death, I will eventually lose my radio perch too — it’s a circle of life kinda thing — and when I do I expect my critics to be merciless in their taunting. Whatever. I’m not sure what’s more amazing, that I got my shot at all (and at a legacy station in a major market,) or that I’m still on the air 15 months later. That Reagan has been silenced while I’m still talking is more a testament to the relative value of our respective time slots than talent or competence, but whether my remaining tenure is ultimately measured in months or in years or in decades, I intend to make the most of the air-time I have.

PROGRAMMING NOTE:
Tomorrow night on 710-KIRO, The Stranger’s Christopher Frizzelle will join me at 7PM, local comedian Travis Simmons joins me at 8PM, and at 9PM we’ll discuss news and politics with bloggers from around the region. Phil “The News Junkie” will be filling in for me Sunday night.

Darcy Burner turned 37 this week, and in celebration the campaign is seeking to raise $18,500 in online contributions, $500 for each of her 37 years. Please give what you can.

Speaking of Darcy, she was in the audience at last night’s Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas, and she’s posted her observations over on Daily Kos. It’s a fun read.

Barry Bonds lied about taking steroids, that’s the top story on the front page of the dead tree editions of both of Seattle’s dailies. Well… duh-uh. However, in the online editions, the story about the home run slugger’s grand jury indictment was much less prominent — I actually had to Command-F his name (Control-F for all you Windoze lozers) to find a link on the P-I’s home page. Huh.

That’s the interesting thing about this exercise in reporting the morning headlines. I’d gotten so out of the habit of reading the print editions, I hadn’t realized how old their news was. The morning papers are really yesterday’s news, while the online editions better reflect today’s headlines. No wonder the combined online readership of the P-I and the Times (4 million unique visits) would place amongst the top seven dailies nationwide, while their individual online readership now ranks them 19th and 21st respectively, ahead of many larger dailies in larger markets.

And notice that while the Times continues to kick the P-I’s ass in print circulation, the P-I has jumped ahead in online readership. (You know… the future.) Why? Well it could be that the P-I’s website has done a better job recently of staying on top of breaking news throughout the day. And it could be that absent the distortions of the JOA, the Times loses its competitive advantage. But I’d wager that a measurable part of the P-I’s lead — about 140,000 unique visits in October — is due to the fact that local bloggers like me tend to go out of our way to link to the P-I instead of the Times. This trend started back when the Times was trying to kill the P-I by ending the JOA, but it’s been reinforced by the fact that apart from Postman, there seems to be an editorial policy of refusing to link back to us. Given my druthers, I’d prefer to link to the best article on any particular story, but, you know, it’s a two-way street and all that.

But I digress.

Other duh-uh stories dominate the print editions today, with the P-I informing us that Bosses spy on their workers, and Video rental stores are losing business to NetFlix, downloads, and video-on-demand. Not exactly a couple of blockbuster stories. Meanwhile the Times breaks the shocking news that holiday travelers should Be prepared for flight delays and lost luggage. No shit, Sherlock.

Elsewhere, War funding bills fail in the Senate (NY Times, 17.5 million uniques), Army desertion rate up 80% since 2003, the highest since 1980 (USA Today, 9.5 million uniques), and oh yeah, the Democrats step up attacks in last night’s presidential debate (Washington Post, 8.7 million uniques.)

I’m just sayin’.

Earlier, I wrote:

Really, what the fuck are we doing even considering putting ferries into Lake Washington when King County’s South Park Bridge is deteriorating before our eyes?

I had the chance to chat with Dow Constantine’s legislative assistant Chris, and he explained the ins and the outs of the new King County Ferry District.

Like I said before, I like the Water Taxi and the Vashon-Downtown Seattle passenger ferry service. Since the state of Washington doesn’t want to provide this service anymore, King County has to find the money. Since the property tax is county-wide, the benefit has to be county wide. That’s why they’re studying all those extra routes. Some of them may never become permanent, but some may. The Kirkland-UW route has great promise considering 520 may be severely constricted for years during construction.

Using waterways for transit is something that’s done in many other big cities. The right-of-way is free! King County is right to explore it. Ferries won’t “solve” our transportation situation, but they’ll help move people.

My EffU cohort Carl already noted Bill Virgin’s crazy column on transportation in the PI on Monday, but I have to pull out the most incredibly ridiculous part and share it over here. This is one of his suggestions for how to fix the transportation mess in this city:

Encourage businesses to move out of Seattle and closer to their employees. Actually, the city is doing a fine job of this already, what with tax and land-use policies. Many of those businesses’ employees are in the ‘burbs already, either because of housing prices or schools. As has been pointed out before, congestion is not just a matter of how many cars are on the road but how long they’re on the road and what direction they’re going. Moving places of employment closer to where the employees live would cut the congestion created by putting so many vehicles on a few corridors heading to the same destination at the same time.

The office I work at is located near downtown Seattle. We have less than 100 employees here, but they live in various places like Renton, Snohomish, Vashon Island, Silverdale, and Shoreline. A good amount of them also live within the city of Seattle too. Exactly where should our company move to in order to be “closer to their employees?”

Many businesses are already located in the suburbs. As I’ve gone job hunting in the past, I tend to find that about 75% of the positions I run across are located on the Eastside. This is already well-reflected in the traffic around here (on 520, the reverse commute from Seattle to the Eastside tends to be much worse than the Eastside to Seattle commute). In fact, as a Seattle resident, I’ve been reluctant to take a job on the Eastside because of the difficulty in commuting across the bridge. If anything, there’s a better argument to be made for having businesses located on the Eastside relocating west of the lake. But it’s still a terrible argument for fixing our transportation woes.

The answer, as it has been since I moved to this city 10 years ago, is to invest in rail transit that connects the main corporate/industrial centers across the greater Seattle region (Seattle, Tacoma, Everett, Bellevue, Redmond). The idea that we can fix our transportation mess by simply having companies relocate closer to their employees is completely absurd, especially in a time and place where people change jobs as often as they do. The infrastructure we have now already limits where anyone in this region can work, unless they don’t mind sitting in a car for 3-4 hours a day. It doesn’t have to be that way, and I’ve run out of patience with the clowns who think that there’s a solution that doesn’t involve some form of rail.

That said, I do sympathize with Virgin’s final suggestion:

Ban from regional transportation planning anyone who has uttered, or even thought, the phrase, “We’ve got to get people out of their cars.”

Here is a truth that, as blasphemous as it may sound within the corridors of officialdom in Seattle, needs to be understood: Many people like having a car.

They like driving, or at least find the convenience and flexibility to be worth the cost and occasional frustrations. So long as transportation planners consider those who favor the automobile as the enemy, to be herded, punished and reviled, the public will return the favor — and will likely shred Son of Prop. 1, the Return of Prop. 1, Prop. 1 Strikes Again, Prop. 1: Next Generation, Prop. 1: The Final Reckoning and all the other ballot-box sequels headed their way.

While I find little in common with the kinds of people who cling to their cars (my wife and I share a single car, but I hardly ever use it), the idea that we can get motorists to give up that lifestyle simply by trying to deny them the roads they want is just as crazy as the notion that we can relieve congestion in this city without rail. I can’t even begin to understand what the hell the Sierra Club was thinking when they actually convinced themselves that siding with Kemper Freeman to kill this plan would somehow lead to less roads (and therefore less global warming, as their “logic” went). The problem is that the roads are going to be built no matter what, because without rail and with suburban-based companies like Microsoft continuing to bring in more and more workers from out-of-state who increasingly have no other choice but to live in the suburbs, the demand for more roads will continue to increase. Granted, the demand for rail will likely continue too, and hopefully we’ll be able to expand on what we’ve already started, but this idea that we can shut down all road construction in this region out of concern for the environment has no basis in reality.

What scares me the most about how the Sierra Club, and certain other anti-roads folks, approached this issue is that it was eerily reminiscent of the neocon mindset. The neocons essentially took their fear of Islamic radicalism and internally rationalized that their fear of this problem allowed for them to react to it with any level of extremism and it was justified. The realities of human behavior, logic, common sense, etc…all of that flew out the window. What mattered was that there was a crisis and anyone who wasn’t part of the solution was part of the problem. Much like the neocons, the anti-roads contingency felt that they could establish their own notion of reality, one where an individual who relies on roads is somehow complicit in destroying the planet, and that people would in turn be completely compelled to alter their way of life. They felt that they could transfer their paranoia to the masses and that they’d have support simply by sheer power of will.

Global warming is a very real problem (as is Islamic radicalism, to continue the parallel), but the fight to stop it does not hinge upon whether or not we widen I-405. The calculus involved here was always way more complicated than that. We need to focus on alternative energy sources and favoring automobile technologies that pollute less. A lot of very cool new technologies exist that represent a path away from the status quo. If the Sierra Club wants to support a gas tax that pushes people towards more fuel efficient cars, I’m there. If the Sierra Club wants to support an initiative to put alternate-energy refueling stations along major highways, I’m there. But if the Sierra Club thinks that someone who lives in Auburn and commutes to Sammamish is going to sell the SUV and buy a bicycle because of global warming, they don’t deserve to be taken seriously.