HorsesAss.Org

So much for the euphoria of last year, when everything went well.

First, the numbers, as of 4:30 AM, skipping uncontested races. Then, some observations. (And I’m sure Goldy will also chime in later this morning.)

I-960: Yes, 476511 (52.4%); No, 432811 (47.6%)
Referendum 67: Approved, 520667 (56.9%); Rejected, 393924 (43.1%)
Substitute Senate Joint Resolution 8206: Approved, 603168 (68.0%); Rejected, 283238 (32.0%)
Senate Joint Resolution 8212: Approved, 532253 (60.1%); Rejected, 352683 (39.9%)
Engrossed House Joint Resolution 4204: Rejected, 472938 (51.9%); Approved, 438815 (48.1%)
Substitute House Joint Resolution 4215: Approved, 464518 (53.0%); Rejected, 411785 (47.0%)
RTID, Proposition One: No, 66549 (55.1%); Yes, 54086 (44.9%)
RTA (Sound Transit), Proposition One: No, 66450 (55.1%); Yes, 54058 (44.9%)
King County Initiative 25: Yes, 81012 (60.4%); No, 53031 (39.6%)
King County Proposition One (Medic One): Approved, 113201 (80.6%); Rejected, 27270 (19.4%)
Prosecuting Attorney: Dan Satterburg (R), 72857 (54.2%); Bill Sherman (D), 61234 (45.6%)
Assessor: Scott Noble (D), 91673 (69.4%); Jim Nobles (R), 40263 (30.5%)
County Council, District 6: Jane Hague (R), 9071 (57.2%); Richard Pope (D), 6395 (40.3%)
County Council, District 8: Dow Constantine (D), 10668 (74.8%); John Potter (R), 3562 (25.0%)
Port of Seattle, Position 2: Gael Tarleton, 61419 (51.3%); Bob Edwards, 57312 (48.1%)
Port of Seattle, Position 5: Alec Fisken, 59502 (50.8%); Bill Bryant, 57194 (48.8%)
Seattle City Council #1: Jean Godden, 29420 (71.8%); Joe Szwaja, 11396 (27.8%)
Seattle City Council #:3 Bruce Harrell, 24845 (60.8%); Venus Velazquez, 15883 (38.9%)
Seattle City Council #7: Tim Burgess, 24311 (61.3%); David Della, 15164 (38.3%)
Seattle City Council #9: Sally Clark, 28814 (74.4%); Judy Fenton, 9758 (25.2%)
Seattle School Board, District #1: Sally Soriano, 25966 (38.3%); Peter Maier, 41593 (61.4%)
Seattle School Board, District #2: Sherry Carr, 37402 (58.2%); Darlene Flynn, 26661 (41.5%)
Seattle School Board, District #3: Harium Martin-Morris, 45366 (72.2%); David Blomstrom, 17082 (27.2%)
Seattle School Board, District #6: Steve Sundquist, 39519 (60.5%); Mari Ramirez, 25612 (39.2%)
City of Seattle Charter Amendment 17: Yes, 31853 (73.9%); No, 11262 (26.1%)
City of Seattle Charter Amendment 18: Yes, 31679 (74.1%); No, 11076 (25.9%)

Thoughts: Ugh. The RTID/Sound Transit Prop. One goes down, putting our region back to square one for transportation planning, with no inkling as to whether voters said “no” because they don’t like roads, don’t like light rail, didn’t like these particular road projects or the routing for light rail, didn’t like the price tag, didn’t like the regressive tax, or didn’t like the legislature tying the fate of two separate measures together. Or any combination of the above.

Eyman wins; repealing our antiquated supermajority for school levies goes down; we’ll get an elected Elections Director on King County’s ballot next year. At least voters (a majority, anyway) weren’t fooled by the insurance industry’s millions, and R.-67 passed.

However, the WSRP’s (probably illegally earmarked) last-minute infusion of cash stole the Prosecuting Attorney’s election for Ken Satterburg over Bill Sherman. And the last-minute infusion of self-inflicted stupidity doomed the Steinbrueck-anointed Venus Velazquez and incumbent David Della, giving us two more regressive new voices on city council instead. (And note that over two percent – a very high number – opted for write-ins in the Hague/Pope race.) We’re stuck with Jean Godden for four more years, too. Oh, and the downtown establishment/Seattle Times campaign to vilify the school board paid off handsomely: “they” have “their” board back, with two incumbents being bounced handily and the progressive (Maria Ramirez) losing out in the only other truly contested race.

Eccch.

In other news:

Pakistan is going to hell in a handbasket as Bush watches helplessly, having backed yet another unpopular dictator;

Republicans joined a House vote to override President Bush’s veto of a water spending bill, handing Bush his first veto-proof majority. On the flip side, two Democrats joined all Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee to approve Michael Mukasey’s nomination as Attorney General; he’s expected to sail through the full Senate shortly.

And finally at the national level, the House spent a good deal of time yesterday debating Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s bill to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney. Improbably, a move to table the measure, backed by the Democratic leadership, failed when Republicans started voting to debate the measure — calculating, as did the Dem leadership, that such debate would serve to embarrass the Democrats. (Or maybe not. After all, several polls have suggested that a majority of Americans favor impeaching Cheney.) In any event, Steny Hoyer did the next best thing by referring the measure back to the House Judiciary Committee, where John Conyers Jr. has already sat on it for seven months.

And over at the Seattle Times, once you work your way past the election coverage, there’s this classic lede from an AP story:

A Chelan County fire chief says a couple were lucky they weren’t killed by a cow that fell off a cliff and smashed their minivan.

I guess someone should mention them as of 10:45. A better round-up to come tomorrow, I think:

* Well Roads and Transit failed, so maybe we can address public transit in 2009 if we’re very lucky. In the mean time, busses. Yippie.

* In Seattle city council, it’s everybody you expected, and Burgess in the only really contested race. 159 write-ins. Could they all be Heidi Wills?

* Tim Eyman is a horses’ ass who just passed an unconstitutional ballot measure, presumably to tie up the Democratic legislature next year before being tossed.

* In suburbia, having married Goldy seems not to help your political career, but it’s too close to call, I think. Being my buddy is better luck for Maren Norton for Shoreline Schools.

* Being a blogger (and a write in candidate) didn’t help Jimmy at all for Richland City Council. Still 10% for a write-in ain’t bad.

* In Oregon, Measure 49 to do something to Measure 37 that I don’t really care about because I’m not from a state that passed that stupid initiative in the first damn place looks like it’s failing (.pdf) but I am having a hell of a time navigating their elections web page.

Dem landslide in Kentucky:

Beshear & Mongiardo D 619,654 58.7% percent of the vote
Fletcher & Rudolph R 435,857 41.3% percent of the vote

The ethically challenged Gov. Ernie Fletcher gets tossed by a big margin. Democrats also win/retain AG, Treasurer, Auditor.

Kos says:

Also, State Auditor Crit Luallen is cruising to reelection with around 62% of the vote. All eyes will be on her soon to see if she jumps in the KY-Sen race against Mitch McConnell.

The Kentucky GOP had fought hard to dump Fletcher in favor of a former Rep. Anne Northup (who was canned in ’06). Now, what was previously unthinkable is now plausible: Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell will face a top-shelf Democrat in ’08, and the Kentucky Dems will be fired up.

And in Virginia, Dems are poised to take the state senate.

Mississippi: GOP Gov. Barbour wins big. Unlike everyone else, Barbour held it together during Katrina. Benefit of low expectations to be sure, the race was never close.

That’s it for now. SF Mayor Gavin Newsom will likely win, as will Houston Mayor Bill White. I like both of them, especially Bill White. He’s going places. He’ll make a great Secretary of Commerce for the next Democratic president.

I won’t update for the rest of the night, so that’s it. Stay safe and don’t drive drunk.

The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight (and every Tuesday), 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E.

Of course, tonight is election night, so expect a greater flow of folks in and out of DL this evening. I’ll be arriving a little late, and leaving a little early, party hopping, depending on results, and how happy or depressed I am.

I’m really at a loss to predict how things will turn out. Money has played a huge role in a number races which would have easily been one-sided without the huge influx of cash on the other side (some of it illegal.) R-67 shouldn’t even be close, but $12 million bucks buys you an awful lot of votes, and of course Bill Sherman should have had a comfortable win in this 2-to-1 Democratic district if not for the $300,000 in unopposed TV selling Satterberg as the non-partisan he’s not. And then there’s Prop 1, where months of lying ads have convinced untold voters that the Roads and Transit package has a $157 billion price tag. We’ll see.

Either way, I don’t expect to live blog tonight unless something extraordinary happens (and I have access to a computer,) but I’ll post a full wrap-up in the morning.

Not in Seattle? Liberals will also be drinking tonight in the Tri-Cities. A full listing of Washington’s thirteen Drinking Liberally chapters is available here.

… And worse than Nixon:

Meanwhile, Bush reached an unwelcome record. By 64%-31%, Americans disapprove of the job he is doing. For the first time in the history of the Gallup Poll, 50% say they “strongly disapprove” of the president. Richard Nixon had reached the previous high, 48%, just before an impeachment inquiry was launched in 1974.

The only politician with lower approval ratings than Bush is Vice President Dick Cheney, hovering somewhere near absolute zero, which I suppose might explain why 165 House Republicans just voted in favor of impeaching Cheney. Um… no it doesn’t. They were just playing a stupid political game. Republicans apparently want 2008 to be about impeachment, because they think it will somehow help their cause, whereas Democrats are too pussified to challenge their logic. Thus, despite the fact that Cheney most certainly deserves to be impeached (and probably tried for war crimes,) it’ll never happen. That’s what really makes this administration’s crimes “worse than Watergate”… we allow them to go unpunished.

BONUS:
Enjoy this peek at one of the Republicans who wants to succeed Bush:

The Stranger’s ECB hates Prop 1. ECB’s favorite mayor, Austin’s Will Wynn, speaks out in support of it.

I was the 12th voter this morning at St. Andrew’s Church in North Seattle. As I put my ballot into the machine, it registered it, but there was a flashing ***POWER FAIL*** message on the display. Remembering rudimentary Murphy’s Law, I followed the extenstion cord back behind the voting tables until I saw the other end of the cord lying on the floor. A woman asked me, “Can I help you?” I replied, “You might want to plug that in.” She plugged it in and then the main dude came over and patted the machine a few times. This entire episode did not make me regret voting against I-25 in any way.

It’s Election Day today, though you wouldn’t know it by reading the front page of the Seattle Times, which devotes its biggest chunk of column-inch real estate to telling us that 784 people are waiting for a copy of Khaled Hosseini’s “A Thousand Splendid Suns” at the Seattle Public Library. (That the library has long waitlists for popular books, would only come as news to folks who don’t use it.)

Of course, library books are paid for with taxes, you know, those things the Times constantly rails against, but which voters here seem to constantly pass because they like things like library books… taxes that are more likely to pass in high turnout elections. Which may explain why the Times is so hush-hush about Election Day (shhh… don’t let the voters know,) whereas the P-I fills two-thirds of its front page with an article on controversial Prop 1. Hmm… trains, cars, bikes and buses… you mean all those commuters depend on public investment? Who knew?

Yup, even low-impacting biking requires building infrastructure, and both papers agree that Seattle’s new 10-year Bycycle Master Plan is front page news, calling for 118 miles of new bike lanes and 19 miles of trails.

David Hiller, advocacy director for the Cascade Bicycle Club, which worked with the city to develop the plan, said it isn’t perfect but deserves an “A.”

Not perfect, huh? Then I fully expect Hiller and his friends at the Sierra Club to dress up as polar bears and picket the council. In that spirit, I’ve decided to vehemently oppose the plan because despite its goal of tripling bicycling in Seattle by 2017, it won’t do anything to relieve congestion. Of course, nothing short of The Rapture™ would relieve congestion, and in Seattle, even then not so much.

And speaking of The Rapture™, the WA state Republican House Caucus is beginning to look like some pre-Tribulation prophesy come true, with yet another member leaving his stunned colleagues behind screaming “Jesus Christ!” Rep. Jim Dunn (R-Frat House Row) reportedly made an “explicit” and “inappropriate” remark to a young female staffer, prompting House minority leader Richard DeBolt to take the unusual step of asking Democratic speaker Frank Chopp to strip Dunn of all committee assignments and travel reimbursements. Wow. That must have been some remark. A pitcher of beer and a muckraking post against the political enemy of your choice to the first of the 30 or so witnesses to forward me a direct quote.

In other signs that the End Times are upon us, supposed fringe candidate Ron Paul raised a GOP record $4.3 million dollars in online contributions in one day, despite the fact that he is, you know, Ron Paul. Or, I suppose, because he is Ron Paul, and thus the only Republican presidential candidate running on an anti-war platform. The media and political establishment can try to dismiss this if they want, but this is historic. I’m not sure that Paul even knows what the Internet is, but his supporters sure do, and his burgeoning grassroots campaign is a sign of things to come. One of these days a not-batshit-crazy longshot will discover the magic formula, and turn national politics upside down.

But for the moment, I’d just settle for some really high voter turnout. It’s Election Day, so put down the Times, walk away from your computer… and VOTE!

Hey… it turns out not all “extreme right-wing” Republican state legislators are closeted homosexuals. Who knew?

State Rep. Jim Dunn will be stripped of his committee assignments and denied travel reimbursement after the 17th District lawmaker made what even Dunn acknowledged was an “inappropriate” remark to a woman at a legislative function in the Tri-Cities last month.

“We want to have zero tolerance for our members for inappropriate comments,” said House Republican leader Richard DeBolt. “We asked (Dunn) to go get sensitivity training. Until he does that, he won’t be serving on any committees.”

Dunn told Postman that he can’t remember exactly what he said to the “young lady”…

He was buying her a drink and said something like, in his words, “I’m buying you this so I can take you home, something like that.”

Yeah. Something like that. Though judging from Dunn’s photo, I’m guessing he’d have to buy an awful lot of drinks before he’d ever have a chance of a young lady coming home with him. Maybe a fifth of Everclear and roofie. And a paper sack over his head.

Dunn says he didn’t really mean it, which is of course what we all tell ourselves after we strike out, but that’s not really the point. Rep. Sharon Tomiko Santos (D-37), who was at the table, says the remark was far more explicit and inappropriate than Dunn recollects, and describes a Republican sitting next to her as “absolutely mortified.”

How explicit? Well, Dunn claims that DeBolt actually asked him to resign, potentially putting this rare, Republican, swing-district seat into Democratic hands. It beggars the imagination.

Nah… no it doesn’t. Post in the comment thread your guess of what Dunn actually said, and we’ll vote on the most creative suggestions in a later post.

Holy shit! Ron Paul is holding an online fundraiser today, and he’s already raised over $4 million!!! Really. No joke. 4 million bucks in one day. Infuckingcredible.

To put that in perspective, that’s almost twice what Mike Huckabee has raised all year, and closing in on John Kerry’s record $5.7 million nomination day haul. Not Rudy Guiliani. Not Mitt Romney. Not Fred Thompson. But Ron fucking Paul!

I’m not sure exactly what to make of this, but dollars to donuts the GOP establishment isn’t rejoicing. A) Ron Paul is an ultra-libertarian nutjob; B) Ron Paul is the only Republican presidential candidate running on an anti-war platform; and C) Ron Paul is an ultra-libertarian nutjob. That Paul is able to marshal this kind of grassroots support should send shivers up the spines of his fellow Republican hopefuls, not because he can win the nomination, but because it signals how out of touch the GOP leadership is with its own base, at least on the topic of the war in Iraq. It also makes one wonder if out of the ashes of the failed neocon experiment we might see a resurgent libertarian movement emerge? Hell, something’s gotta take its place.

Over $4 million in one day, from over 35,000 contributors — and for a “fringe” candidate. This isn’t just big, this is goddamn historic. And I just can’t see how it’s good news for Republicans in 2008.

* Finally, we’re winning the war in Iraq. I swear to God this month.

* It’s bullshit how little we spend on rail in this country.

* John Fund stepped away from beating his girlfriend long enough to pretend 8 of the 9/11 hijackers would have voted for Democrats.

* Before Hillary Clinton, nobody ever tried to get people to vote for them based on their gender. Just ask the NASCAR dads.

* General Petraeus’ spokesman is a liar.

* Vote on your favorite wingnut post of all time! Sadly, my favorite crazy post, that will be burned in my skull for ever, My Sharia is losing.

Locally:

* The Seattle Times’ Ed Board is shall we say, wrong-o on Prop-1.

* And speaking of the Times’ Ed Board. Yikes.

* Representative Curtis‘ story made the national blogs.

This is an open thread.

To the asshole who keeps calling my home phone and hanging up every 10 minutes or so, the ringer is off, and has been since yesterday afternoon, and anybody who really needs to get in touch with me knows my cell phone number. So you’re wasting your time.

Because if this guy doesn’t need 60 percent of the vote to get approved…

…then neither should Washington school levies.

If you want to get involved…

Sign up to phonebank here. If you want to do some rush-hour sign waving, contact the campaign here.

That’s the local news media for you; always looking for the pony… before, you know, shooting it in the head and leaving it to rot on the side of trail.

Don’t get me wrong — I love ponies — and I hope whoever capped those two ponies in North Bend are brought to justice for their cruel and inhumane act. But you’d think if the region’s news media was going to spend an entire weekend obsessing on yet another high profile case of animal cruelty, they might want to focus a little on the race for the office of the guy whose job it is to prosecute the evil doers, and report the obvious fact that Dan Satterberg and his Republican cohorts are cheating. I suppose if Bill Sherman was found shot through the head on the side of a trail, lying dead in a pile of Skip Rowley’s business cards, our objective media would want to wait until after the election to report all the facts.

Yeah sure, I know, that’s a pretty violent image, but I’m feeling pretty violent right now. Must have been all those Bugs Bunny and Road Runner cartoons I watched as a kid:

Preschool boys who watch violent television become markedly more aggressive and anti-social as they grow older, according to a study by Seattle researchers in one of the largest examinations so far of such connections.

At the same time, girls appear impervious to the effects of television violence, a finding that has the researchers puzzled.

Hint to researchers: testosterone. Hint to media: you know what else causes violence? War. The media dutifully reports President Bush’s latest upbeat update on the war, at the same time 2007 is headed toward becoming the deadliest year yet in Iraq. How do we explain the constant contradiction between the news in the headlines and the facts on the ground? Um…

The Iraq war represents the end of the media as a major actor in war. … [I]n Iraq the number of journalists killed (now at least 138) means that this war is near private – the images and people who might make the horror of this war real don’t reach our screens. It’s no longer a war that is accessible to public scrutiny or to democratic engagement.

Perhaps if there were more images of dead ponies, Americans might finally take to the streets in opposition to the war.

And you know what else isn’t being made accessible to public scrutiny or democratic engagement? The fact that Skip Rowley, Bruce McCaw and Martin Selig illegally earmarked $100,000 in excess contributions to Dan Satterberg’s campaign. You’d think, maybe, a scandal like this coming in the final days of a high profile race might garner at least a little interest from working journalists. You’d think somebody might sit down and try to connect the dots instead of just taking Satterberg at his word that he is above politics. But apparently they’re all too busy focusing on King Tut’s mummified face, or the man who lost his penis in prison, or gee, I dunno… wild mustangs being offered for adoption.

That’s the local news media for you; always looking for the pony.

The “Commission,” in this case, is the Federal Communications Commission, and if this sounds familiar, it’s because it is.

Twice before — on March 7, 2003, and just last year, on November 30, 2006 — hundreds of area residents jammed auditoriums to testify overwhelmingly in opposition to a Republican-dominated FCC’s attempts to further weaken ownership limits on broadcast television and radio properties. In each case, the crowds testified only before the two Democratic commissioners; the three-person Republican majority was MIA. But those crowds were broadly representative of a national movement for media democracy that in only a few years stymied former FCC Chair Michael Powell’s deregulation bid, preserved net neutrality, and stopped a telecommunications lobby “reform bill” widely expected to pass the Republican Congress in 2006. In last year’s hearing, local testifiers against deregulation spanned an unlikely ideological range, from Reclaim the Media’s Jonathan Lawson to Seattle Times owner Frank Blethen, from KVI Radio host John Carlson to UW President Mark Emmert.

This time, FCC Chair Kevin Martin, architect of the latest (big) industry deregulation scheme, is bringing the whole Commission to town to “prove” to them that Seattle really doesn’t care all that much about this arcane stuff. Which is why, despite the entreaties of local Congresspeople (who wanted four weeks), he has given exactly five business days’ notice for this unprecedented local hearing. The hearing was announced late in the day Friday, November 2, timed for the least-read and -viewed news time of the week. The hearing itself will also be on a Friday night, from 4-11 PM November 9 at Town Hall, 8th & Seneca near downtown Seattle.

For the first two hearings, a significant number of people traveled from throughout the region, from California to Montana to Alaska, to make their opinions known to the FCC. The short notice and inconvenient time seem particularly designed to suppress regional testimony. Seattle area supporters of media democracy will need to stand in their stead. The FCC is hoping for a sedate dog and pony show that will ratify its ideological desire to give the public’s airwaves to the biggest companies and highest bidders (think Murdoch), regardless of content. They are looking to ram this through before opponents can get organized.

Our job is to be organized. And show up.

In a significant way, we already are organized. Much has changed since 2003, when the FCC first came to town. Nationally, the media democracy movement that barely existed five years ago is now a potent political force. Locally, newspaper lovers dodged a bullet when an ongoing court bid to dissolve the Times’ and P-I’s Joint Operating Agreement was going so badly for the Times (which initiated it) that the JOA was extended instead. But King County’s other daily paper, the King County Journal, was dissolved in the last year, and the 2006 purchase of the Seattle Weekly by the country’s largest “alternative” weekly chain led to the effective dismantling of its news department. Among the companies owning the 30 or so major local radio and television stations, only Fisher Broadcasting (KOMO TV/radio, KVI and Star 101.5 radio) is locally owned.

I have a personal stake in this, of course. I was a columnist and editorial board member at the Weekly for eight years, until its shift in editorial direction. Plus, a media company I started over 20 years ago is now owned by Clear Channel, which is also the nation’s largest owner of radio stations, with over 1,200. When Clear Channel started, the FCC allowed a maximum of 14 stations per company nationally.) Now Clear Channel, CBS, Entercom, and Sandusky own five radio stations each in the Seattle area alone.

Ultimately, though, my personal stake is the same as everyone else’s: I want to know about decisions being made that might affect my life, and I don’t trust Clear Channel or CBS or Belo or Entercom or any of the other companies controlling our TV and radio dials to tell me what I need to know. I don’t like the idea of media monopolies on information. The same is true of the music I listen to or the entertainment programs I watch. The number of people who access radio or TV programming through satellite or their computer is still minimal. And so the FCC’s proposed ruling — which would, for the first time, allow radio, TV, cable, and newspapers in the same cities to all be co-owned by one company — is a recipe for a media monopoly on local news, entertainment, and culture.

November 9 is our chance to tell the FCC what we think of the idea. If you care about a free flow of information in our democracy, please turn out, and let them know what you think. Whether they want to know or not.