HorsesAss.Org

“Surprising findings“…?

A preliminary report on Seattle school closures includes some surprising findings — including that 157 students chose to leave the district entirely when it closed five school buildings this summer. […] Students at the closed schools were expected to merge into designated neighboring schools — but the report found that happened only half the time.

[…] The district didn’t survey parents to find out why their students chose not to enroll in the merged schools, and it’s difficult to draw any conclusions from the numbers alone, said Holly Ferguson, a district manager who has supervised the school closures and who wrote the preliminary report.

“When you look at where the kids went, it was all over the map,” she said. “To me, it says parents just exercised the normal (school) choice process.”

Yeah, maybe. Or, if they had bothered to survey parents, they might have learned that parents were just sick and tired of having their children’s education sacrificed for the sake of political expediency. And they also might have learned that a lot more than 157 children left the Seattle Public Schools in response to the district’s ill advised and mismanaged closure process. Like, for example, my daughter.

The day we learned the shocking news that Graham Hill Elementary was on the preliminary closure list, was the day my ex-wife started looking for houses on Mercer Island. My daughter had attended the Montessori program at Graham Hill since she was 3 years old, and we all loved the school, but middle school was approaching and we weren’t thrilled about our neighborhood choices. We had reluctantly applied to transfer Katie to TOPS for fourth grade, hoping to beat the rush of parents seeking a middle school slot in the popular K-8 program, and while she was high up on the waiting list, it was no sure thing. Then the closure list came out.

Long time readers are well familiar with my obsessive blogging on the topic during the summer of 2006 as we fought to save our school from closure, but despite our eventual victory the process left many of us parents disillusioned with the district and its ability to meet the needs of our children first, and our politicians second. Two days into the start of the 2006-2007 school year Katie was offered a slot at TOPS, but exhausted from the closure fight and emotionally invested in our recently saved school, we turned it down, choosing to keep Katie at Graham Hill for fourth grade. A few weeks later her mother purchased a house on Mercer Island. Katie transferred to the island for fifth grade, so as to ease next year’s transition to middle school.

Katie was fortunate to have at least one parent with the means to make a choice like that, but I know for a fact that we weren’t the only Graham Hill family to leave the district after the emotionally draining closure battle. Several families who had been struggling to make the best of limited middle school choices simply gave up the fight, opting for private school despite the financial hardship. Others picked up and moved out of the city entirely, including one classmate who joined Katie this year at her new Mercer Island school. And I’m sure there are several others I don’t know of, as I’ve never seen such turnover at Graham Hill as I’ve witnessed over the past two years.

Perhaps Graham Hill was unique in that no other school was more misrepresented nor its parents and teachers more bitterly slandered by the district than Graham Hill was in justifying its closure. A handful of administration officials — including a thrice-failed principle with an ax to grind — had concluded that Graham Hill was a racist program, and were determined to cynically use the closure process as a cover for shutting down our neighborhood school. The Citizens Advisory Committee was force fed misleading, cherry-picked, and downright incorrect information, as well as, apparently, a fair amount of innuendo. Our PTSA, arguably the most active in the South End, was wrongly accused of draining resources from the conventional classrooms to benefit a less racially diverse Montessori program, and our school was publicly humiliated for failing to meet the educational needs of our minority and economically disadvantaged children, a charge that was demonstrably untrue.

Just last month Graham Hill Elementary was honored by the state as one of only six Seattle “Schools of Distinction,” recognized for dramatic improvements in reading and mathematics over the past six years — and one of only three such Seattle schools with over 50-percent of students qualifying for free or reduced price lunch. And yet this was the same school the district vociferously argued should be shut down for failing to educate its disadvantaged students… the same school that was held in such disdain by the district for its alleged racism.

And you wonder why parents like me find it so difficult to trust the district?

I was volunteering at the school when Raj Manhas made his final tour of Graham Hill before including it on his final list of recommendations, and I briefly spoke with him, without acknowledging who I was or what I had been writing. There were a lot of things I wanted to say to the superintendent, but instead I simply admonished him for missing a golden opportunity. I pointed toward all the hard work and enthusiasm communities around the district were expending in their efforts to save their neighborhood schools, and suggested that he could have harnessed this energy to fight Olympia for adequate funding, rather than pitching us against each other in a battle over diminishing resources. What a waste. The fight to save Graham Hill and the other schools was a heartbreaking experience that cost the district much more than can ever be quantified on a financial balance sheet. And the balance sheet doesn’t look so good either…

Already, though, the short-term costs have been higher than anticipated. The original plan called for the district to spend about $500,000 over two years on closing schools. The actual general-fund costs over the past year and a half have been $927,364, according to the report — and an additional $500,000 to $700,000 still may be needed.

The extra money was needed to pay for “transition activities,” from hiring moving coordinators to paying staff members at the merged schools to attend team-building retreats.

“I was a little surprised by the actual operating expense of getting the schools closed down and everyone moved,” said board member Michael DeBell, who heads the board’s finance committee. Still, he said, the district expects to see a net financial benefit of about $1.9 million a year because of closures.

But if enrollment continues to slowly decline, district leaders will need to take action, he said.

Future school closures are an option, but not the only one, he said: “I don’t want it to be the first thing we turn to.”

It’s exactly what we argued in the first place, that closures would never save the district anywhere near the money it was estimating, and would inevitably lead to further declining enrollment. Declining enrollment would lead to more closures, which would lead to more declining enrollment, and so on and so on.

Let’s hope we learn from this failed experiment, and reinvest in our neighborhood schools rather than shutting them down.

I was traveling and missed the big Kindle announcement from Amazon, but my initial reaction was: They’re gouging huge holes in South Lake Union for this? I mean, if Amazon really is the “secret” tenant holding the city hostage over further hi-rise development in Allentown, then it should hardly be mired in the vision of yesteryear, foisting on its weary clientele yet another iteration of 1990s technology no one has ever indicated they wanted or would actually use. As anyone who reads books knows, it’s virtually impossible to improve on a book. Think of all the time, for example, you don’t waste booting up. To be fair, I haven’t actually seen a Kindle (and at $399 won’t be putting one on my Wish List). But if Amazon is going to further desecrate one of Seattle’s remaining shapeable people zones, it had better be talking technology that deposits new books directly into my brain via ubiquitous wireless transmission, so I don’t even have to read. (Didn’t you love the New York Times headline, “Amazon Reading Device Doesn’t Need Computer” — to which should have been appended, “Neither Does Moby Dick.”) Maybe Jeff Bezos, who has always reminded me of what a grown-up Harry Potter, having lost his hair and gained contacts (or Lasik), might look like, should get together with one of Puget Sound’s other fun-loving CEOs, Craig McCaw, and hash this out.

The problem with eBooks isn’t technology. “Paperless ink” could read just as well as print (it doesn’t), and a hand-held device could simulate pages so well you’d find yourself automatically reaching for the pen to underline (it’s been done, but you know, the experience just isn’t the same with pixels as really going to town on dead trees). The problem is that people aren’t reading books, and the future leaders of our doomed society don’t seem inclined to reverse the trend. I found morbid irony in Kindle being announced with great fanfare on the same day as results of a depressingly “alarming” National Endowment for the Arts study showing “the percentage of adults who are proficient in reading prose has fallen at the same time that the proportion of people who read regularly for pleasure has declined.” So Jeff, the booming market for Kindle is what, exactly?

That kind of impertinence got me put on Amazon’s “Do Not Call” list almost from the get-go back in the ’90s, although no reporter I know ever had much luck with its Public Irritations department. As The Times’ Brier Dudley pointed out, his paper wasn’t even invited to Kindle’s big New York hoo-hah. It may have been because Brier beat up on Amazon’s MP3 eulas in a recent column. Or maybe because hometown papers don’t have the headcount and cachet of The New York Times and Wall Street Journal. My pet theory is that Amazon wants to drive The Seattle Times out of its South Lake Union headquarters so it can…

Of course, none of the press’ leading lights present at the rollout apparently had the presence of mind to ask Bezos about the decline-in-reading study. It might’ve shown disrespect.

OK, I’ll give the Amazin crew a benefit of the doubt here. What Kindle is has nothing to do with what it’s meant to be. It’s simply placeholder, spaghetti-on-the-wall technology for Amazon to be a player as reading technology evolves. Note Newsweek’s reference to an iPod of reading. eBooks are the focus simply because to show off anything else would’ve gotten Bezos laughed off the stage. For now, the market is people who have to carry around a lot of books — academics, students, avid readers — and may find convenience in having them on a device, whatever its drawbacks. That isn’t a very big market, and from the study is apparently a dwindling one, but it’ll do while literature and books figure out where they stand in the still-chaotic business model of the Web. Google has an obvious stake in this, so does Apple (the iPod Touch and iPhone make pretty good book readers, too), as does the publishing industry (which includes newspapers, don’t forget, even ones that aren’t invited to the rollout). The more deep-pocketed players, the better the opportunity for someone coming up with the true iPod of reading.

P.S. Did I miss it, or has the mystery tenant for SoLa been announced? It was supposed to happen “within days” in early October…

P.P.S.For an alternative viewpoint, Danny Westneat feels Kindle’s burn.

You return from a couple of weeks in the Bay Area, you expect to have a lot of catching up to do on the news of the day. But sheesh, after a daily diet of oil-spill scandal, Barry Bonds indictment, gas prices passing $4 a gallon and real estate tanking in the one place you’d think was recession-proof (besides Seattle)…well, coming back home is a little like leaving a Quentin Tarantino premiere party for an evening with the Cleavers.

So let’s see…a local former high-school basketball star turns up dead in Brazil. Coming home in the middle of this I was trying hard, reading the updates, to figure out who Tony Harris even was, let alone how he wound up in Brazil, and what in God’s name had happened to him. I do happen to know, however, who his former coach is, and his name is not spelled Al Hairstone, as Q13 had it. Finally, The Times ran a pretty good overview, apparently from a freelancer. I’m still not sure why this is such big news. I guess the answer is, bigger news just ain’t there. Or it ain’t being reported.

I mean, if we want to talk former basketball stars, I found it interesting that John Johnson, or JJ to the many Sonics fans who remember him as one of the best passing forwards basketball has ever produced (at a time when the competition was stiff, what with Larry Bird, Rick Barry, Bill Walton, Magic and other purveyors of that fine art among JJ’s contemporaries)…now where was I? Oh yeah. It turns out JJ was robbed in Redwood City, and it made pretty big news in the peninsula dailies. Robbed by a 74-year-old man, apparently, and robbed of his 1979 championship ring! O the pain, the outrage, the embarrassment! But not a word in the Seattle dailies, from what I can tell using their admittedly lame Web search engines (other than some random forum mention). I mean, you don’t call this news?

Then there’s the case involving, from what I can tell, a UW student who is somehow entangled in the murder of a British college student in central Italy. Whew, can someone do an org chart on this story? Again, I’m not sure what places this convoluted tale, sordid though it be, in the realm of headline buster. Maybe when it’s all investigated and tried it will make a good True Crime report, but without more details right now it’s hard for me to know why I should care. My suspicion is that TV coverage drives the print “make good” factor on stuff like this. I remember when it was all just the opposite.

Then there’s the Fun Forest. Guess it’s time for the old arcade to head off to that great amusement park in the sky. Many fond memories there. But none of them even remotely recent, of course; and there you have the whole problem in a nutshell.

Oh well. At least I was spared even a passing mention of the David Copperfield-aspiring model nastiness in the Bay Area news media.

One measure of how truly significant a piece of news is has to do with its geographic reach. From what I gather, Barry Bonds was a big story up here. The oil spill got a few mentions, too. And California gas prices, outrageous as they are, probably popped into the roundups. As far as the Bay Area’s housing collapse, that probably didn’t get much play up here. We’re not there yet, folks, and let’s hope we don’t get there. Except for the tony legacy neighborhoods (Marin County, S.F. proper), it’s a real meltdown in the making. Of course, down there The Chron doesn’t sugar-coat. The bare hungry cryin’ truth, with corroborating stats, is all laid out. By comparison, the Seattle dailies are kind of tiptoeing around, from what I can tell. At street level here, I’m starting to hear the ugly stories of defaults and flips gone bad and, worst of all, overbuilding in a time of real-estate downturn. When already-constructed condos aren’t moving, why is DPD still rubber-stamping every townhouse and hi-rise development coming in through the door? There’s a real-estate story I’d read.

But somehow, I still expect the next Seattle headline I see on the subject to read, “Housing market showing growth despite national trend.”

In any case, getting back to my original point (two weeks away perhaps has given me a mild bout of blogorrhea)…Cali headlines made it all the way to Seattle, but I have to say I cannot recall a single Seattle headline making it down to the Bay Area. Even the sensational, and sensationally covered, FCC hearing on media consolidation failed to raise a 2/18bi (ancient newsie talk for filler). So perhaps our mild, gray climate bespeaks a certain news temperament as well. Or maybe it’s that our news outlets are failing to find and report the real good stuff. A wise editor once told me a reporter’s job was to “tell me what happened, and make me care.” It’s so much easier to just leave off that second part.

The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight (and every Tuesday), 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Stop on by for some hoppy beer and hopped up conversation.

As for me, I’m headed out to Drinking Liberally Philadelphia tonight, so I won’t see you at the Ale House.

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

Yesterday the WA State Dems filed an FEC report alleging “serious violations” in Rep. Dave Reichert’s third quarter campaign finance report. Amongst other things, Democrats complained that it is impossible to figure out how much money Reichert raised from President Bush’s August visit because of how totally fucked up the accounting was, to which Reichert chief of staff Mike Shields responded:

“There is a fictional idea that somehow you can glean how much an event raised” by looking at an FEC report filed by the Reichert Washington Victory Committee.

Yeah… it’s totally unreasonable to expect to “glean how much an event raised” by looking at an FEC report of the, um, money the event raised. If this is how our campaign finance and disclosure laws work these days, the “fiction” is that we actually have any campaign finance and disclosure laws at all.

But Shields wasn’t finished. When asked how much he now believes the event raised, Shields prevaricated:

“I have given estimates that turned out to be wrong, so I am not doing that anymore.”

Well, he might try actually telling the truth, but then, I’m not “a veteran political operative” like Shields is, so what do I know?

I suppose Gov. Chris Gregoire thought she was dodging a political bullet by calling a special session to reinstate I-747’s 1-percent revenue cap on regular levies, but…

In the meantime, Republicans, Eyman and Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi criticized Gregoire for her response to the high court’s ruling.

“The incumbent is not leading — she is reacting and slowly,” Rossi said.

Well, how the fuck did she think they would respond? Did she really think she’d earn brownie points with the anti-tax crowd? Does she really believe Republicans will vote for anybody but a Republican, regardless of how much she panders to them? Does she really take the Democratic base this much for granted?

The sad thing is, this is one of the few times Rossi is actually right… well, sorta. Gregoire is reacting rather than leading on this issue, but if anything she’s moving too fast. Calling a special session to reimpose I-747 is not only bad policy, it is bad politics, and it will cost Democrats in both the short and long term. As much as I hate to write it, Gregoire’s response to the recent court ruling is as ill-conceived and irresponsible as the initiative itself.

Now I suppose it is possible that this is not just a monumental political miscalculation, but rather, that Gov. Gregoire really does believe that calling a special session to reinstate I-747 is the right and prudent thing to do. But if so, I would hope she could explain how capping local tax revenue growth below the rate of inflation is in any way an act of responsible governance? If the initiative had imposed a similar cap on state revenues, forcing state budgets to steadily shrink year to year in real dollars, even as energy and health care costs soar, would Gov. Gregoire fight so hard to reinstate it? I kinda doubt it.

Yet that’s exactly the fate to which she is condemning local governments, the end result being an endless parade of lid lifts and special levies on the ballot that will ultimately lead to voter fatigue, if it hasn’t already done so. If you want to undermine the ability of government to govern — if you want to set up the Democratic majority for failure — this is exactly the way to do it.

I just can’t tell you how disappointed I am with both the governor and the Democratic leadership. (I could try, but it would involve an awful lot of swearing, even for HA.) This was an opportunity to impose a reasonable cap — say, four-percent or inflation, whichever is lower — while enacting progressive property tax reform. Instead they’ve chosen to cave to Eyman and Rossi, while offering a half-measure in the form of tax deferrals. I suppose I’ll have to wait until I see the details to comment more fully, but a deferral is generally little more than that, and would do absolutely nothing to address our most regressive tax structure in the nation.

I guess Gregoire and her people are trying to play it safe in an election year, but playing it safe is how she almost lost in 2004. And it’s a terrible way to kick off 2008.

This may be a bit of a Hillary Clinton centric post. If you don’t like it get your own spot on HA and have a repetitive shtick. Then it can focus on your favorite presidential candidate. Or whatever, I’ve tried to support all of the Democrats against bullshit, but this week has been mostly directed at Clinton (because she’s winning and because she’s a woman, I suspect).

* Andrew Sullivan really doesn’t like Hillary. I happen to prefer the political environment of the 1990’s to that of the Bush era.

* Anyhoo, she’s probably got girl cooties.

OK, not too Clintonie, that’s it.

* Mitt Romney is push polling himself.

* Fox News Porn banned by digg.

* I’m sure we totally have the resources to invade Pakistan.

* The new media laws seem to still be up in the air.

* Last year when the Republicans didn’t pass a budget, it didn’t have any earmarks. So the Republicans are good fiscal stewards.

Locally:

* Goldy touched on this, but Rick Ensey’s wife Diane is giving us pseudonymous bloggers a bad name.

* He also touched on this like two posts ago, but Dave Reichert‘s inability to do basic FEC reporting is the gift that keeps on giving.

* You may have missed it, but I guess there was a tax revolt in King County.

* I hope one day we can figure out what the anti-war protesters want.

Awww, gee…I hate calling someone a liar.

Even as a degenerate “far left” liberal who grew up in a household colluding with Satan to destroy America (i.e. with a divorced parent), my mother taught me to give the benefit of the doubt. I call someone a liar only after other possibilities become implausible.

I can, in good conscience, call Tim Eyman a liar. I mean, he admitted to lying about taking donor money as personal compensation. Mike McGavick earned the moniker through a whole series of fibs and “parables” offered as fact (discussed here and here).

I’m not yet ready to pronounce Mr. Rossi a serial liar—even considering that he is (1) a Republican, (2) a Washington state Republican and (3) a real estate broker salesman. Not yet…but, man, Rossi and his campaign are sure trying my good will.

Yesterday Neil Modie at the PI reported on the misleading rate of fundraising that the Rossi campaign was boasting about.

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.”

Curt Woodward of the AP adds:

In that fundraising statement, spokeswoman Jill Strait bragged about Rossi raising nearly $500,000 “in roughly one week.” The campaign refused to offer any supporting documentation.

So reporters from the mainstream media were duped into writing about the spectacular rate of fundraising—for example, take this post from, umm…Mr. Modie:

Rossi bursts rapidly out of the fund-raising gate

A lot of checkbooks were waiting to open once Dino Rossi declared his long-expected 2008 candidacy for governor Oct. 25.

In the week between his announcement and the end of October, the Republican raised more than $463,000 for his race against Democratic Gov. Chris Gregoire, his campaign reported Thursday. And he raised an additional $110,000 the first two days of November.

Or, as Woodward explains:

Based on Strait’s statement and interviews, The Associated Press and other news organizations reported that Rossi’s initial fundraising burst began with his Oct. 25 campaign announcement.

The campaign never raised any issues of accuracy about those reports. But campaign officials knew, and never clarified, that Rossi had been collecting campaign donations for about two weeks by the time he officially announced his gubernatorial bid.

After examining the Rossi’s campaign finance records, Neil Modie learned that:

…[Rossi’s] 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.

The campaign, seemingly coming to the realization that it’s not nice to fool political reporters, has now issued an apology.

“I apologize to you if you feel like you were misled,” Strait told the AP. “I agree that we could have clarified that the first check came in on the 12th.”

Yep…you could have, but you didn’t. Instead, in issuing the apology, the Rossi campaign lied to reporters again (my emphasis):

After apologizing, Strait claimed that “there was never a secret” that Rossi decided to run for governor on Oct. 11, the day before he collected his first donations.

That statement is untrue: when asked about an impending Rossi campaign shortly before the official Oct. 25 announcement, Strait refused to offer any details of Rossi’s plans, saying only that he would be talking about his political future.

Ouch! The publicly-disclosed Rossi campaign is less than a month old (or the not-secret-unless-you-asked campaign is just over a month old) and already the media is insinuating that the Rossi campaign is a pack of liars.

I’m guessing that one of the first things you learn in Becoming a Politician 101 is “Never, ever, ever piss off the press by getting caught lying to them.” (Lying to the people? Probably okay…but not the press.)

The rest of Woodward’s article sure reads like someone who feels betrayed:

The “nearly half a million dollars” raised in “roughly one week” actually referred to the approximately $365,000 Rossi collected in the last week of October, combined with some $110,000 the campaign says Rossi raised on the first two days of November.

The most recent campaign finance reports do not include November donations, making it impossible to immediately confirm whether Rossi actually raised that much money in the first two days of the month.

And Neil Modie seems a little peeved, too. In yesterday’s article deflating Rossi’s fundraising hyperbole, Neil meanders to the topic of a PDC investigation of illegal campaigning on the part of Rossi:

[Lori] Anderson [Spokeswoman for the state Public Disclosure Commission] said the commission is also investigating a Rossi campaign Web site, telldino.com, because it was registered Sept. 8, before Rossi says he decided to run. Strait, his spokeswoman, said a Rossi campaign volunteer, Thomas Swanson, registered it on his own without telling Rossi so that the Web address would be available if the candidate did decide to run.

Strait said Swanson took the action after he and J. Vander Stoep, a Rossi campaign adviser, discussed the idea of creating telldino.com to enable citizens to give Rossi their suggestions for improving government.

Wait a minute! That sure has the look and smell of a tenny-weeny little fib.

If Rossi had not decided to run by September 8th, what purpose would there be in discussing a new web site for folks to offer Rossi “suggestions for improving government?” Isn’t that exactly what The Washington Idea Bank (a wholly owned subsidiary of Forward Washington Foundation) was created for? The site has a web form for offering ideas…to Rossi’s pre-campaign organization.

Are we really to believe that on September 8th (three days before Rossi secretly resigned from Forward Washington Foundation) a (future?) campaign adviser had discussed creating a new “Rossi Idea Bank” site, but that was all “before Rossi says he decided to run,” and the site was registered for non-campaign purposes? Right.

Now the needle is pegged on my implausiometer.

One of two things is going on here: either Dave Reichert and his campaign staff are incompetent or they initiated a deliberate effort to mislead the public about their disastrous fundraising in recent months.”
— WA State Democratic Party Chair Dwight Pelz

You know, or both. Three months after President Bush came to town for what we were told at the time was a half million dollar fundraiser, we still can’t make heads or tales of Rep. Dave Reichert’s numbers, and so the WA State Dems filed an FEC complaint today alleging serious violations of federal election laws.

Proceeds from the $1,000 a head fundraiser were supposed to be placed in a special joint account, and then divided between the Reichert campaign and the WA State Republican Party, but most of the money appears to have been deposited directly into Reichert’s campaign account, a serious violation of federal law. One experienced campaign treasurer tells me he’s never seen such a sloppy FEC report, a report that has made it impossible to figure out exactly how much Reichert raised. Which may of course have been the point.

First the campaign claimed Reichert raised $500,000, then $230,000, and ultimately $185,000. The report itself claims the joint fundraiser raised only $135,000, but it is now unclear how much of that represents Reichert’s share. After all expenses are accounted for it is possible that Reichert may have actually lost money on the event, but we’ll never know for sure until the report is properly revised.

This is all the more embarrassing for Republicans considering the astounding success of the national netroots fund drive we held to help Democratic opponent Darcy Burner offset Reichert’s expected presidential windfall, raising $126,000 from over 3,400 contributors… over a weekend in August. Burner ultimately beat Reichert in Q3 in both dollars raised, and cash on hand; it is clear now that we kicked the president’s ass. No wonder no other Republican incumbent has dared to bring the president into town since the debacle in Bellevue.

In the comments down below, Daddy Love points to an article that debunks much of the conventional wisdom on what effect our military footprint is having in Iraq.

The British army says violence in Basra has fallen by 90% since it withdrew from the southern Iraqi city earlier this year.

Around 500 British soldiers left one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces in the heart of the city in early September and stopped conducting regular foot patrols.

A spokesman says the Iraqi security forces still come under attack from militants in Basra, but the overall level of violence is down 90% since the British troops left.

Britain is scheduled to return control of Basra province to Iraqi officials next month, officially ending Britain’s combat role in Iraq.

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.