HorsesAss.Org

I suppose you could call it a Draft “Gore” movement…

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

Dan Satterberg was recently quoted as saying “This office should be nonpartisan,” and that he considers entering the world of partisan politics a necessary evil.

Apparently, Mr. Satterberg found it so necessary to partake of that evil that he is jointly headlining a Republican fund raising event…with Jane Hague!

Uh-huh. When “evil partisanship” calls, Satterberg steps up to the plate! He sees no problem associating his good name with Jane Hague, a candidate who is deeply flawed and neck deep in scandal.

Call me cynical, but it sure looks to me like Dan Satterberg has become a Republican fund raising asset. And he hasn’t even been elected to office yet! Democrats who are tempted to vote for Dan because “he is a nice guy, and is really kind-of, sort-of non-partisan” are simply fooling themselves—Dan is now an official tool in the Republican fund-raising arsenal.

But maybe I am misreading this whole thing. Maybe Dan is appearing at the fund raiser in a “non-partisan” role. Maybe Satterberg and Hague will actually be doing some sort of public service announcement. You know, like a Good Cop bad Drunk routine, where Jane tosses back a few, Dan tries arresting her and Jane unleashes a verbal volley. But this version of the tragedy ends differently: Jane takes full responsibility for her abuse and her drunk driving.

Or maybe Dan and Jane will make a joint announcement that, in lieu of a drawn-out investigation and prolonged prosecution, Jane has voluntarily decided to refund portions of her past King County salary—you know, from the job she obtained after lying on her resume about having a college degree. It could happen, I suppose.

Yeah…maybe Dan really is non-partisan, in which case, any day now, I expect to see him headlining a fund raiser for Venus Velazquez.

Well, thanks to the unbelieveably crappy housing market, my wife and I are no longer moving to Kent, unless we win the lottery in the next 10 days and can afford two mortgages and a new car. I will spare everyone the long and ugly details of what actually happened, but this article has some clues.

On the bright side, I will finally have some more time to blog again.

Looking at Seattle’s dailies from across the continent, I’m not really sure what’s in the news today.

It was windy! Or maybe it wasn’t. The Seattle P-I says 280,000 were left without power yesterday, but the Seattle Times says “tens of thousands.” I guess, mathematically, they both could be right. Also, one man was killed kite-surfing in 40 mile-per-hour winds. I’m sure somewhere else in the world a man was killed yesterday sticking a fork in a toaster, but I don’t see any headlines about that.

The War on Christmas seems to come earlier every year. Damn commercialism. Anyway, looks like those pussies at the Port of Seattle have decided to opt out of the annual multicultural debate by clear-cutting their Christmas trees and replacing them with a monoculture of snow dusted birch. Nothing like going out of your way to make all sides unhappy.

“I find the whole thing stupid,” attorney Harvey Grad told the Times. I agree.

Meanwhile, the state has announced it will add a nativity scene to the “Holiday Tree” and Chanukah menorah in the Capitol rotunda. I’m so confused.

Forgive and forget? Seattle City Council candidate Venus Velazquez asks voters to forgive her for her DUI:

“I guess all I can say right now is I hope and believe that voters will see this as a human mistake,” Velazquez said. “At some point you make a judgment call and, clearly, I made the wrong one because — legally — I was impaired. My own judgment of myself not being impaired didn’t match up with the legal definition.”

[…] “It’s for the voters to decide whether this mistake is enough to disqualify me from serving them,” Velazquez said. “So many times, in these situations, we’ve said, ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ “

Will accepts her apology. Joel thinks voters should judge candidates on their ability to serve in office, not their ability to drive. I think she’s finally struck the exact right tone, but it may be a day too late to save her campaign. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, it looks like the state’s leading Republicans would likely accept Velazquez’s apology, what with Rep. Dave Reichert, Attorney General Rob McKenna, and non-candidate Dino Rossi all endorsing Jane Hague, months after her drunken swear-fest with the state patrol.

“Jane Hague… Leadership that works.” You know, when it’s not drinking. And driving.

Rossi also had some run-ins with alcohol. When he was 18, he and a friend got drunk on a bottle of vodka and then, with Rossi behind the wheel, crashed his Pontiac into a house and totaled the car. No one was injured, but Rossi was charged with drunken driving and underage drinking. The charge was later reduced and, instead of jail time, he had to go to a class and pay a fine.

“It’s one of those things that happens when you’re 18 and you know everything there is in the world to know,” Rossi said.

Yup, it’s just one of those things that happens when you know everything there is in the world to know.

Dear Supporters,

Last night, I was cited for driving under the influence. I take this charge very seriously and accept full responsibility for my actions.

Today, I want to apologize to all of you, who have supported me since I began this campaign, given me your trust and invested so much of yourselves in this journey.

I am more sorry about this incident that I can express in words. I am also sorry for the impact this will have on you, my supporters. I would never intentionally put others at risk or violate the great trust so many of you have given me.

And I respect the system that will ultimately judge my actions.

I am committed to serving you, the voters and the city of Seattle. I will continue to talk about the issues that matter and why I decided to seek a place on the city council, but not here. Here I accept responsibility and hope you will accept my apology. And I hope I will continue to have your support on November 6th.

Please don’t hesitate to call me at [phone number redacted -Will] if you would like to talk more about this with me. I welcome your call.

Venus

I have family who are in the drug and alcohol rehab business. People who gets nailed for DUI usually go one of two ways. If they take full responsibility for their actions and avoid blaming others, they have a good chance of not reoffending. If they don’t, well, you know the rest of the story.

I talk trash about Dori Monson on a regular basis, but on alcohol and driving, he’s dead on. Drinking alcohol and driving is entirely unacceptable. Getting behind the wheel after drinking alcohol is gambling with other people’s lives. When I’m driving, I don’t drink. At all.

Other people have different rules. At Drinking Liberally, our Tuesday evening get-together, I know for a fact that many of the fellow participants are drinking, and then driving. Maybe it is only one or two beers spread out over an evening, but alcohol affects fine motor skills even when you don’t feel tipsy. Also, DUI stands for “driving under the influence” of drugs or alcohol. “Driving under the influence” doesn’t necessarily mean a .08 blood alcohol level. You can get nailed for less than an “oh eight”, but it is somewhat harder for the state to prove that alcohol was the cause of your impairment.

Drunk driving isn’t a liberal or conservative thing. As one political operative told me back in ’02 on my 21st birthday, “everyone drives drunk, especially in politics.” Drunk driving isn’t taken very seriously in the USA. Other countries, many of them European, take it much more seriously. One of the reasons I’m such a fan of public transportation is that people should be able to go out and party without having to worry about driving home. When I go to Pioneer Square to “tie one on,” I’m usually walking or riding the bus or cabbing it, but that’s because I live close to downtown.

I really care about my friends who drink alcohol and then, sometime later, drive home. It scares the shit out of me, to be frank with you. I don’t want to seem “holier than thou” about it, because I don’t care about being holier than anyone. I just want the people I know to get home safe.

I have been berated as a hypocrite, from time to time, and in my own comment threads, for not covering Democratic scandals with the same vigor with which I attack those of Republicans, a charge to which I generally provide a twofold answer: 1) I only have time for a couple posts a day; and 2) HA is a partisan, liberal blog… attacking Democrats is Stefan’s job, not mine.

See, it really doesn’t bother me when folks accuse me of being biased, because I’ve never claimed otherwise. What annoys me is when folks like Stefan claim to be “small ‘L’ libertarians” instead of the knee-jerk Republicans they really are.

That said, I do I think I do a better job than the competition at being fair, if not balanced, and today’s post on Venus Velazquez’s DUI is a perfect example. After my inumerable posts castigating both Mike McGavick and Jane Hague for their DUI’s, and their failure to come clean about them, I couldn’t very well ignore a similar indiscretion from a fellow Democrat in a high profile Seattle City Council race. And I didn’t.

But after studiously avoiding discussion of Hague’s more scandalous drunken escapade, and the other infamies that have dogged her campaign, you’d think Stefan might be a tad embarrassed to quickly jump on Velazquez’s DUI arrest. He isn’t.

I’m just sayin’.

I’m blogging from Philadelphia today after grabbing a red-eye through DFW last night. I’m exhausted, headachy, a little disoriented… all the symptoms of a hangover… you know, kinda the way Venus Velazquez must feel right now after driving her campaign off a cliff last night.

Seattle City Council candidate Venus Velázquez was arrested Wednesday night on suspicion of driving under the influence, according to the Seattle Police Department.

“I take the charge very seriously. I take the process very seriously,” Velázquez said this morning. “I don’t feel good about it.”

No Venus, I bet you don’t. And neither do a lot of people who have invested an awful lot of time and money into helping Velazquez get elected. Time and money, I’m guessing, that will totally go to naught.

Velázquez said, “I was not impaired, I had drinks at dinner, as many of us do. I don’t even have a speeding ticket.”

Reminded that according to court records, she was cited for speeding in Seattle in 1995, she responded, “Well, that was a long time ago.”

Oy. Have our local politicians learned nothing from the whole Jane Hague affair?

The correct response might have been “I’m mortified. It was a terrible, terrible lapse of judgment, that will never, ever happen again. We all make mistakes, and I promise to learn from mine…” or something like that. But to try to make excuses on something as serious as a DUI…? That’s just plain dumb.

Truth is, Velazquez is both petite and buff — not an ounce of excess fat on her — and it is very possible that two drinks with dinner could put her over the legal limit while it might take more than twice that for a seasoned pro like Mike McGavick. But she refused to submit to the breath test, so we’ll never really know, which quite frankly doesn’t work in her favor.

And besides, that’s not really the point. Maybe she was .11. Maybe she was .05. But she never should have been behind the wheel of a car, let alone speeding — not as a candidate in a high profile city council race, not on the day the absentee ballots started arriving in the mail, and certainly not after a couple drinks. There is no excuse, and any attempt to make one just adds one more lapse of judgment to the list.

I like Velazquez, and she may still get my vote. But I think she just cost herself the election.

UPDATE:
Velazquez has issued a formal statement. I think it hits most of the right notes. We’ll see if it helps.

It’s not expected: The Stranger is voting “no” on Prop 1. Why?

For roads, this package is the last gasp. No one in his right mind looks at the environmental realities we’re currently facing and says, “Let’s build hundreds of miles of new roads!”

I don’t think most voters consider “environmental realities” when voting on things. People think mostly about things they think affect them directly. Things like the length of time they have to be in their cars between their job in Seattle and their house in Federal Way. That’s why expanding light rail outside of Seattle makes so much sense. Deliver dependable, speedy transit to the places that don’t have it and you will change things for the better.

But not so says The Stranger:

The light rail in this proposal would be paid for with a regressive sales tax instead of user fees (like tolls). The line itself (through a low-density area) may feed sprawl in south King County, instead of promoting the dense urban development that will grow alongside light rail stations in North Seattle.

What, like this?

The city of Federal Way is remaking it’s downtown. They are turning parking lots into housing and shops and parks. They are doing everything Erica C. Barnett and Josh Feit would have them do, yet The Stranger tells them to “fuck off,” and that they don’t deserve light rail.

If we’re trying to convince people to embrace density, urbanism, and transit, wouldn’t it make sense to bring all of these things to the people who don’t have them?

Let’s look at that last quote again:

The line itself (through a low-density area) may feed sprawl in south King County, instead of promoting the dense urban development that will grow alongside light rail stations in North Seattle.

First, Federal Way is inside the urban growth boundary. That’s where growth is supposed to happen! Second, does transit really create sprawl? Of course not, (unless your name is Knute Berger, in which case transit creates “vertical sprawl,” which is not even a thing). Light rail creates density. That’s the whole point! You put light rail where you want people to live or work! That’s why Ron Sims fought so hard to put light rail down MLK and not Rainier Avenue South. (You are forgiven if you don’t remember that, some years ago, Ron Sims was a die hard champion of light rail.)

I do respect some of the people who are against Roads and Transit. But to play the “useful idiot” for Kemper Freeman Jr. by killing our first chance in 40 years to create a regional mass transit system, that’s too much.

It’s still going to be windy today.

And every (non-)story is careful to note that WindStorm 07 (cue catchy graphic and sounder) won’t be nearly as bad as last December’s storm. But that doesn’t prevent any of them from playing on people’s fear of a repeat.

In other news:

To nobody’s surprise, Seattle City Council member Richard McIver entered a plea of not guilty yesterday to fourth degree assault in connection with a drunken late-night fight with his wife last week that landed the councilman in jail for two days. He has been absent from council chambers since, but will return to work today.

McIver’s wife, Marlaina Kiner-McIver, was in court for the hearing, and told the judge both that she wanted the two-week no-contact order with her husband lifted (the judge kept it in place, but allowed third-party contact) and that she did not wish to press charges. Interestingly, none of the multiple local TV and print stories on the hearing mentioned what any social worker will tell you: that when a partner in a domestic abuse case doesn’t want charges filed, it’s no real indicator one way or another as to what happened.

Greg Nickels has quietly proposed to city council a reform that, if enacted, would ensure his re-election for life: a city government call system that, rather than dumping citizens into impenetrable jungles of voice mail, would be answered by live operators 24/7. No more publicly popular administrative idea is imaginable.

Of course, there’s no word as yet as to which country the live operators will be answering from.

The state capitol announced that it will allow a nativity scene in the rotunda this year, joining a menorah and a “holiday tree” (whatever the hell that is) that were displayed last year. A “War On Christmas” type advocacy group complained after being denied a nativity scene last year (the capitol says they simply filed their application too late), and this year they get to set up their display as well.

Most curious is the last sentence in the P-I’s article on this, which addresses the rather salient question: is any religion-specific display in the capitol legal? The “answer”:

[The General Administration Department] vetted the idea [of the nativity scene] with the state Attorney General’s Office because of the religious content of the display and was told there was not enough time to research the issue.

The holiday displays have been a controversy for a year, and religion displays on public property are a perennial issue across the country, and Rob McKenna’s office didn’t have time to look up whether it was legal? So the bureaucrats are assuming it is legal.

Doug Honig. ACLU of Washington. Lawsuit. Bill O’Reilly wet dream. Tempest in holiday teapot. You read it here first.

In D.C., it looks like the Democrats have sold us out again on warrantless domestic spying, giving the Bush administration its desired legal immunity for telecom companies now being sued for secretly turning over customer records to the illegal program. News flash: Congressional approval numbers just dropped another point.

Internationally, Turkey’s parliament voted 507-19 Wednesday to authorize military force in Northern Iraq. While Turkish leaders say they have no immediate plans to act on the authorization, Turkish troops are already massed at the border and the Turkish military has already struck across the border in recent weeks against Kurdish rebels operating from Iraqi Kurdistan. The confrontation pits Turkey, a key US ally and NATO member, against the Kurds, America’s most reliable ally in Iraq, in yet another complication to the Iraqi clusterfuck. And say, whatever happened to the George W. Bush dictum that we won’t tolerate governments (like the government of Kurdistan) that harbor terrorists?

Has anyone else noticed that there’s been virtually no meaningful local news stories in our local news this week? Which raises the imponderable question: if a tree falls on a slow news week, does the gust of wind that caused it qualify as a natural disaster?

From a KING 5-commissioned poll:

SurveyUSA polled 520 likely voters in King County; the poll has a margin of error of 4.4%:

Dan Satterberg (R): 43%
Bill Sherman (D): 49%
Undecided: 8%

Among males, Satterberg leads Sherman 51% to 40%. But among females, Sherman leads Satterberg 58% to 35%. Oh…and females make up 52% of voters.

Sherman leads in all age, generation and race groups except for the 65+ crowd who prefer Satterberg.

The crosstabs are available here.

Update: I want to preempt the inevitable right wing spin about the fact that the poll results are slightly “within the margin of error.”

Statistically, the meaning of these results is this: if the election were held today, Sherman would win with a 93% probability and Satterberg would win with a 7% probability.

On Friday, Dave Reichert campaign spokesman Mike Shields told Postman that they raised $340,800 for the 3rd quarter, beating Darcy Burner’s $306,784. Yesterday, after questions were raised about $47,100 in refunds, Shields insisted that the refunds would be repaid, and thus should be counted in the 3rd quarter. Well, he issued a press release this afternoon, and now… not so much.

“Late last week and earlier this week I made a mistake in representing the amount of money Friends of Dave Reichert (FDR) raised in the third quarter of 2007. FDR had to return some of the funds that were deposited in its account and I misunderstood the accounting surrounding those refunds.

“The correct numbers, as reported to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) show the Reichert campaign raised $294,888 in the 3 rd quarter of 2007. So far this cycle the campaign has raised $766,703. The campaign has $339,460 cash on hand.”

Okay, now that we’ve cleared that up (I think,) maybe Shields can come clean and tell us exactly how much money was raised at that big Bush fundraiser? Was it a half-million bucks? Or a measly $127,025?

UPDATE:
Now that’s the headline I wanted to see! From the AP: “Reichert: Fundraising numbers wrong, Burner ahead.”

The truth will out.

Well, you knew it would happen sooner or later — a blogger running for public office — but I didn’t think it would happen across the mountains in Richland, WA.

Yep… you read that right. Complete with PDC filings (coming soon). I am officially running for Richland City Council. Butterflies in my stomach and all. Needless to say I didn’t sleep well last night.

I’m not a reluctant candidate. I always figured I would run for something besides ‘Internet loudmouth’ someday. But I wasn’t exactly expecting to announce a run for anything today!

That’s Jim McCabe, proprietor of McCranium, declaring his write-in campaign for Richland city council, after Mayor Bob Welch’s surprise announcement that he will be stepping down… shortly after his reelection. (Welch is running unopposed this November.)

I hope that when Jim becomes a powerful politician, he remembers us little folk. And buys us drinks.

It turns out, Dave Reichert isn’t one of your typical House Republicans after all…

Although House Republicans currently face a tough national political environment, most of their vulnerable members enjoy a substantial lead in the money race over their Democratic challengers at this early point in the 2008 election cycle.

Federal Election Commission (FEC) financial filings for the third fiscal quarter of 2007, which ended Sept. 30, reveal that the 22 Republican House members in races ranked by CQ as “No Clear Favorite” or “Leans Republican” lead more than two to one in cumulative cash on hand versus their nearest Democrat opponent.

[…] The Republicans in these two categories that CQPolitics.com regards as competitive reported a total of $12.7 million cash on hand as compared with $5.2 million in total for the nearest challengers.

Of these 22 vulnerable Republican incumbents, only five currently trail their opponents in cash on hand, putting Reichert in such rare company as Ohio’s embattled Jean Schmidt (who trails not one, but three challengers,) and soon to be indicted John Doolittle of California. Reichert’s poor performance is even more remarkable when you consider that he was the only House member last quarter to benefit from a high-profile, high-dollar fundraiser with President Bush. Ouch.

Reichert spokesliar Mike Shields, the man behind the campaign’s Enron-style accounting, attempts to put a ridiculous spin on Reichert’s disappointing results, arguing that he’s just too busy being a congressman to do what congressmen notoriously do… raise money.

“That’s one of our challenges: Dave actually has a job,” Shields said. “He has to come serve the people, and he takes that very seriously.”

Yeah, right… unlike nearly every other member of Congress. But as CQ points out, incumbents are not only expected to hold a money advantage, it is absolutely critical for vulnerable Republicans given the current political environment.

The Republicans’ overall fundraising edge in these competitive districts, though expected for incumbents, is critical given that the party has few other advantages going into the election season. In addition to the weaknesses of individual candidates, Republican members as a whole also are saddled with the party baggage of an unpopular war and president. And they cannot count on a boost from the party’s fundraising committee for the chamber, the National Republican Congressional Committee, which badly trails its Democratic counterpart in money raised and cash on hand.

Shorter CQ: Reichert’s in deep doo-doo. The NRCC has to be putting together its budget with the expectation that Reichert, now a two-term incumbent, starts carrying his own weight. And with party resources scarce, Reichert just can’t rely on the same sort of huge infusion of party cash that put him over the top in 2006.

If Reichert can’t out-raise Darcy Burner in a quarter that included a presidential fundraiser, there can be only two explanations: he either has the wrong message, or he’s just not working hard enough. And in Reichert’s case, it is clearly both.

It’s always sad when one must displace Lou Guzzo at the top of the page, but a new day beckons. Welcome to what Goldy and I hope — if we can overcome our natural tendencies to laziness — will be a daily (at least on weekdays) feature: a brief overview of a few of the day’s top stories, as determined by our friends in the local corporate media, blogs and various other sources, and our own quirkiness, offered to You The Reader first thing in the morning.

Today, in case you hadn’t noticed, is Wednesday. It’s a slow news day.

Local pundits are already gushing over Hillary Clinton’s visit to valued donors supporters in Seattle next Monday. Yet someone who’s done far more good in the world — 2006 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus — visited the Seattle area yesterday, and local media, with one exception, could not have cared less. Local TV ignored Yunus’s visit to speak at the Microsoft campus. So did the P-I. The only local story appeared in the Seattle Times.

Why is Yunus a big deal?

Yunus, 67, developed the system of microcredit, helping poor people improve their standard of living by using tiny loans to start businesses. Since giving out its first loans in 1983, the Grameen Bank he founded has reached more than 7 million borrowers who would have no access to credit through traditional banks. About 97 percent of them are women.

So why would Microsoft care?

“Microsoft is realizing that in the future a lot of their growth is going to have to come from poorer people of the world, so they’re interested from both a business and a philanthropy perspective,” [ex-Microsoft executive Paul] Maritz said.

More to the point, because their competitors care.

The ideas are starting to receive a warm reception from some corporate giants, too. Intel Chairman Craig Barrett last month visited Yunus in Dhaka and signed an agreement to help Grameen expand technology, broadband Internet access and education programs. IBM this week announced it would throw its support behind a new software system for microcredit institutions around the world.

And tellingly, Yunus sees a lot of parallels between the predations of capitalism in his native Bangladesh and the economy of George W. Bush’s America.

“Seattle has lots of pawn shops,” he said. “I see it in every city. Payday loans, check cashing. … It’s an indication the financial system doesn’t work here.”

Well, it works for some people. Comcast announced yesterday — in public notices quietly placed in newspapers around the state — a statewide $3/month hike in its cable rates, and a story in The Olympian (of all places) gives a clue as to why rates are rising (hint: it’s not the cost of the company’s commitment to outstanding customer service):

In counties where Comcast faces more competition, monthly cable TV rates tend to be lower…

Like where? Certainly not Seattle.

In Pierce County, Comcast faces competition in the form of the Click! Network, a fiber-optic cable TV service offered through Tacoma Power…

Ah, that evil, government-run Pierce County TV service we hear so many bad things about! Well, at least the free market offers superior content, right?

TV Tacoma, the City’s 24-hour government information channel, took home four national programming awards recently at the 22nd annual National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors (NATOA) video awards…

Right. Meanwhile, back in the world of commercial television, last night NBC deviated from its usual parade of reality TV freaks to present us with, um, a reality TV freak: an exclusive interview with disgraced Idaho Senator Larry “Happy Feet” Craig. The interview is likely to be commented upon mostly for Craig’s shot at the presidential candidate he until recently worked for, Mitt Romney: “He not only threw me under his campaign bus, he backed up and ran over me again.” (A line Craig stole directly from Keith Olbermann.)

But my favorite Craig line from the interview was a different one: our studly senator’s assertion that

“I go to bathrooms to use bathrooms.”

Uh, to do what, Larry? With his stony-faced wife also in the interview, he could hardly say…

Locally, Muhammad Yunus didn’t make the quality cut because it’s time instead for TV to trot out a perennial favorite story fetish this time of year: It Might Get Really, Really Windy Soon! Like, blowing leaves into a big swirling pile windy! Like, sustained winds of 20 mph windy! Like, whipping rippling the hair of the poor junior reporter stuck on the roof reporting live that it’s really gusting out here windy! Expect this “story” to dominate local media for the next three days.

To its marginal credit, KING-5 noted at the very end of its story that

There are two systems in the Pacific that are moving in, so what happens with those could lead to a change in the forecast.

In other words, stay tuned for updated forecasts! Or, as National Weather Service Johnny Berg put it in the PI’s nearly-as-breathless top story this morning,

“If the storm goes north toward Vancouver Island, we may not see anything out of the ordinary in Seattle.”

And that’s the news for Wednesday morning.