HorsesAss.Org

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.

James L at the Swing State Project noticed something interesting:

MO-06 and WA-08: So get this. Despite being the beneficiary of a high-profile fundraiser hosted by Republican Lord & Savior George W. Bush, Dave Reichert was out-hustled by Democrat Darcy Burner. Compare Reichert’s haul with the total posted by Sam Graves, a Missouri Republican who received a fundraising visit from Dick Cheney. Graves raised a very impressive $500K+ for the quarter. I guess the President’s star power isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be anymore.

Reichert’s fundraising last quarter was damn anemic for an incumbent, not to mention an incumbent who had the President come to town to help.

Looking more closely at the FEC paperwork reveals how truly anemic the Bush fundraiser was. The FEC rules require that joint fundraisers, like the event held for the Washington State Republicans and Reichert, be handled independently of either group. The Bellevue Bush fundraiser was handled by an entity known as The Reichert Washington Victory Committee.

This FEC form 3x documents the donations and disbursements from the Bush fundraiser. What the form clearly shows is that the event only raised $135,025! That was $127,025 from individual contributions and another $8,000 from a political action committee.

A grand total of $127,025 in individual contributions at a Bush fundraiser in Bellevue, Washington??? That’s fucking pathetic! But…there you have it (maybe—see below).

Somehow or another, the media got the wrong estimate from this event. This KOMO report cites a slightly higher figure:

President Bush, deeply unpopular in Washington state, still raised more than $500,000 Monday for Republican U.S. Rep. Dave Reichert and the state GOP, just hours after the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Where would the media get a figure like one-half a million? Perhaps it came from Reichert’s spokesperson, Mike Shields, who is quoted as claiming:

“It’s a huge cash injection before the actual election cycle begins,” Shields said. “An event doesn’t get much bigger than this. This is a huge help.”

Yeah…nice spin, Mike. The truth is a little less “big.” The FEC form shows the loot was mostly split three ways. The Washington State Republican Party got $26,166.73, Friends of Reichert took $35,754.80, and the big winner was the Hyatt Regency, Bellevue that earned $63,146.88 for hosting the fundraiser.

While Reichert was busy raising $35,755, Darcy Burner raised $125,000 from over 3,200 donors. In other words, Darcy Burner kicked both Reichert’s and Bush’s asses.

But these figures are only as good as the accountant filling out the FEC paperwork. We learned yesterday that there was a strange $47,100 refund in the FEC filing for Friends of Dave Reichert this quarter. Mike Shields offered a perfectly opaque explanation to the AP:

Shields said the difference – some $47,000 in refunds to donors – was an accounting technicality that sprang from the Bush fundraiser.

Those refunds had to be issued because of mistakes in dividing the Bush money between Reichert’s re-election campaign and the state Republican Party, which shared the more than $500,000 raised by the president.

The refunded contributions will be repaid, so Reichert is counting those contributions toward his third quarter total, Shields said.

Putting two and two together, it appears that Friends of Dave Reichert illegally processed some of the contributions that were all supposed to be handled by The Reichert Washington Victory Committee. If so, and if the money goes back to The Reichert Washington Victory Committee, it means that the Bush fundraiser only brought in $182,125. That’s still a far cry from the half million being hawked to the press.

Oh…and if The Reichert Washington Victory Committee takes the refunded money and returns it in full, it means Dave Reichert only took in about $84,000 from the event.

Darcy Burner still kicked his ass!

(Thanks to N in Seattle and Daniel Kirkdorffer for their help in untangling Reichert’s mess)

Just a quick note to Lou Guzzo. Lou, if you want us to take you seriously when you claim that Al Gore’s collective works on global warming “constitute the worst collection of misjudgments and outright lies the world has witnessed in a long time”, you might not want to also claim that Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini won the Nobel Peace Prize in the next paragraph.

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

One of tonight’s activity will include taking bets on when Rep. Dave Reichert’s spokesperson Mike Shields gets back to David Postman with an explanation for his incorrect claim that Reichert out-fund-raised Darcy Burner last quarter. (My prediction is 5:30 pm this Friday.)

Tonight’s theme song: Going Down by Jeff Beck, in honor of the recent deflation of Rep. Reichert’s already lackluster fundraising totals for the quarter. Oh…and in anticipation of his probable fate in 2008.

If you find yourself in the Tri-Cities area this evening, check out McCranium for the local Drinking Liberally. Otherwise, check out the Drinking Liberally web site for dates and times of a chapter near you.

Apparently, absolutely nothing happened in Seattle yesterday… at least nothing important enough to make the front pages of the dead tree editions of either daily newspaper.

Seattle Times:

World comes to Seattle to fight malaria
Invitation-Only Forum
Because nothing screams top story like a report on a scientific conference, to which none of us are invited, that hasn’t even happened yet.

Local travel agency’s pitch: 2 hours in space for $200,000
Very, very wealthy travelers are bored of Earth, because, you know… “Everybody’s been to Iceland.”

The first baby boomer applies for Social Security
Breaking news about a staged PR event symbolizing a “long-anticipated stampede.”

He’s fast, not afraid of a challenge:
Deaf Bothell football player shines
It’s always nice to have a heart-warming human-interest story balance out the day’s hard-edged news… assuming you bother to print any hard-edged news.

Seattle P-I:

Sellers trying it all to hook choosy buyers
Apparently, the key to selling your home quickly is to clean it up and price it right. Who knew?

Mutants? Saviors? Modified trees eat poisons
No kidding. UW scientists have crossed a poplar tree with a rabbit, setting off a nationwide search for an effective punchline.

Small farmers seek a slice of institutional markets
Cheesy headline, worthy installment in the P-I’s special report on where our school lunches come from.

If Republicans breathed a sigh of relief last Friday when Dave Reichert announced he would lead Darcy Burner by about $36,000 in the 3Q money race, they better take a deep breath before reading his actual FEC report. For hidden in his $342,639 of total receipts, is a whopping $47,100 in refunded excess contributions… money he couldn’t legally receive.

Subtract those ill-gotten gains from his contribution totals, and Reichert actually trails Burner for the quarter, $295,539 to $306,784 — and that’s after Reichert’s high-roller funder with President Bush. And again, subtracting the refunds, Reichert only reported $171,134 in individual contributions. So, either our $123,000/3,200 donor netroots fundraiser actually raised more money than the President… or Reichert raised less than $49,000 in individual contributions on his lonesome.

Either way, the President of the United States got his ass kicked by a bunch of bloggers, but rather than acknowledge this simple reality, Reichert chose to cook the books. The bulk of the excess contributions were recorded on 9/30, the last day of the quarter (and then somehow refunded two days earlier.) This is the type of accounting that made Enron famous, allowing Reichert to inflate his quarterly results by simultaneously booking the $47,100 in excess contributions as both a receipt and an expenditure. And since Burner announced her totals early, Reichert’s accountants knew exactly how much they’d have to pad his numbers to convincingly beat her mark.

And for Reichert fans, the news only gets worse. Daniel Kirkdorffer has a thorough breakdown of the two campaigns relative performance, and it presents a stunning contrast:

More impressively, 89% of Burner’s contributions this election cycle came from individuals, while Reichert’s contributions from individuals made up only 57% of his totals, the rest, over $340,000, coming from PACs and campaign committees. Just about half of Burner’s contributions are unitemized, i.e. less than $200 a donation. Only 7% of Reichert’s contributions from individuals are categorized as unitemized. As much as anything that tells so much of the story regarding the breadth of Burner’s support and how much Reichert is having to rely on wealthier donors.

Yeah, you want a really amazing number? Over her two campaign cycles, Burner has raised money from over 22,000 unique contributors — more than some presidential candidates — a donor base she can go back to again and again over the next year. Meanwhile, a sizable chunk of Reichert’s contributions have come from individuals and PACs that have already maxed out. Indeed, unless he turns things around, Reichert faces the very real possibility of recording a quarter-to-quarter decline in cash on hand at the end of the next reporting period.

If the Reichert camp isn’t nervous yet, they better stop believing their own math.

Attacking kids edition.

*It’s sad whenever anybody dies. But holy shit, what kind of a lie was Jerry Falwell’s compatriot living? I can’t decide if on top of being tragic, it’s funny or creepy.

* But I do know that smearing a 12 year old boy’s family, is definitely on the creepy side. So knock it off, crazies. And while I wouldn’t call Michelle Malkin a terrorist, it is certainly true that her tactics are probably more about putting the fear of speaking out to other people than it is about having a sane reasonable debate. The next time someone who was helped by a program thinks they might want to speak out, they’ll be a bit more reluctant because she might send her flying monkeys after them.

* But at least conservatives are still compassionate toward injured Iraq war vets. Oh.

* The media do like to de-bunk some people.

* And John Gibson can tell the color of your skin by how your murderous rampage ends.

Locally:

* Jane Hague has a funny way of taking responsibility. I think maybe she feels responsible for getting caught?

* Jesus will ungay Washington and America if only conservative crazies let Him.

If you were driving through Bellevue this morning and noticed firefighters waving signs for city council candidate Keri Andrews, get used to it: the firefighters plan to be out there every day between now and the election.

Why the passion and effort behind Andrews and her race against two-term incumbent Phil Noble? Chronic under-staffing has made Bellevue response times some of the worst in the nation, putting lives at risk and threatening the department’s accreditation. And that could mean huge premium bumps for residents and businesses should the insurance industry lower Bellevue’s Public Protection Classification.

“We are very concerned about our ability to provide a timely response to fire and medical emergencies,” Bruce Ansell, president of Bellevue’s firefighters union, said, “If the people of Bellevue really understood how serious this problem is, they would be asking the City Manager some very pointed questions.”

But rather than fixing the problem the city council keeps lowering the bar. In 2001 the council rejected the national standard of 5 minutes or less for emergency response time as too stringent, adopting instead a target of 6 minutes, 90% of the time… a goal they have not met since 1997. Now, in preparation for review of its accreditation, the city is setting a standard of 8 minutes, 80-percent of the time… almost twice as long as Seattle’s average response time of 4 minutes, 19 seconds.

If Bellevue voters want to continue electing conservative, anti-tax councilmembers like Noble, they could pay with their lives. Or they could elect a progressive like Andrews and get the kind of public service they demand.

Of course, I always expected the Seattle Times editorial board to endorse a “No” vote on Proposition 1… they’ve been smearing the Roads & Transit package for weeks. But I was a bit surprised by the curious logic that underpins their argument to reject the package: apparently, rail simply doesn’t work.

Light rail replaces buses, and at a much higher cost per rider. Rail soaks up money buses might have used. Rail funnels transit. Buses extend it. And most rail riders will be people who were already riding the bus.

[…] Seattle may deny this, but the surest way to reduce congestion on roads is to build more lanes.

Damn right Seattle denies it — recent polls show that as many as 80-percent of Seattle voters support extending light rail. So… um… is the so-called “Seattle” Times calling 80-percent of Seattle voters stupid? Huh. That can’t be good for business.

As for the Times assertion that “the surest way to reduce congestion… is to build more lanes”… um… you mean like that twelve-lane section of Arizona’s I-10 that has done such a good job reducing congestion, they’ve decided to double it to twenty-four lanes?

Arizona’s “Freeway to Heaven”

Yup, can’t argue with “human experience” like that.

Indeed, the Times seems to argue that rail has absolutely nothing to do with reducing congestion, but is rather some sinister exercise in social planning.

It is about increasing density, levering us into apartments around rail stations. If we live next to rail, we will drive less and help save the Earth. It is a fetching, utopian vision, but it is not so easy to change the way Americans live.

A “fetching, utopian vision”…? But wait… what about Portland, where the Times’ own Danny Westneat recently found that city’s transformative rail system to be “fast,” “cheap,” “reliable,” “quiet” and “mostly pollution free”…?

Consider Portland. That city opened its first light-rail line two decades ago, and has built several of them, all of which replaced bus lines. Overall, Greater Portland is no less car-dependent than Seattle. Its congestion has gotten worse, just as it has here.

Oh… so there’s the logic. Portland built rail. Portland’s congestion has gotten worse. So therefore, according to the brilliant logicians at the Times, rail does not reduce congestion. In fact, one might argue, it actually increases congestion.

Huh. New York City is incredibly congested, and I guess, the Times would argue, that its extensive subway and commuter rail system is at least partially to blame. Chicago’s nightmarish traffic? Must be that damned El. Same goes for Boston and its “T”, London and its Underground, Paris and its Metro, and hundreds of other gridlocked cities that also, stupidly, clog up their transportation systems with subways, elevateds, streetcars, trolleys and rail systems of all types and gauges. If only these cities had followed the sage advice of the transportation experts at the Seattle Times, and invested in roads rather than rail, traffic congestion would be a thing of the past.

No wonder you can’t drive anywhere in NYC, what with all these damned colored lines getting in the way.

After all, who needs rail, when like Frank Blethen and Jim Vesely, you live on Mercer Island and have SOV access to I-90’s HOV lanes speeding your commute to and from Fairview Fanny?

And that’s what this editorial really comes down to: selfishness. Ron Sims opposes Prop. 1 because he’s wrong. The Sierra Club opposes Prop. 1 because they’ve sadly succumbed to their Naderite demons. But the Times editorial board opposes Prop. 1 because damn if they ever intend to ride a train, and goddamnit all to hell if they’ll ever be caught dead on a bus. I mean, just look at the disdain these folks hold for mass transit, arguing that the better (ie cheaper) alternative to rail is buses… you know… “if people will ride them.”

But then, what do you expect from the editors of our city’s largest newspaper when most of them can’t even bring themselves to live in the city they write about? When your perspective of Seattle comes from driving through it at 60 miles-per-hour, of course SOV and Lexus Lanes are your preferred transportation solutions. And of course you resent paying for a rail system that 80-percent of your readers are apparently too stupid to oppose.

Carl and Lee at EFFin’ Unsound rejoice: WhackyNation’s Mark Gardner is blogging again after two weeks in Hawaii, and he picks up right where he left off:

Got to meet Donald Rumsfeld and hear him speak to a small group. In person, he is an incredibly gentile, humble human being, a great public servant.

So Donald Rumsfeld is an incredibly “gentile” person. Or as Ann Coulter would say: “perfect.”

On Tuesday we kicked off a netroots fund drive for Bill Sherman, with an ambitious, five-day target of $5,000 in online donations, and once again our region’s progressive community came through. 101 of you donated a total of $5,335. I personally thank all of you.

I spoke with Bill early last night, after we had passed our target but before the tally was final, and I can’t tell you how grateful he was. We didn’t just raise enough money for a targeted mailing, we created a whole lot of excitement and buzz, prompting more well-heeled donors to open up their checkbooks and help close the money gap between Bill and Republican Dan Satterberg. Bill might still be outspent nearly two-to-one, but if he can raise enough money to get his message out, he’s in a great position to be our first Democratic King County Prosecuting Attorney in over sixty years. So if you haven’t already given, please give now.

And while we didn’t hit my personal target of 200 new donors, 101 represents an amazing response rate relative to the few thousand readers who hit the participating blogs on a daily basis. By comparison, earlier this month Satterberg held his last big fundraising event of the campaign, attracting about 60 donors. By that measure, we kicked his ass, and with only a handful of blog posts. Not bad at all.

What we are witnessing both nationally and locally is an emerging progressive movement with the potential to challenge the dominance of both party’s political money machine. When Darcy Burner and I first met back in 2005, and talked about the role the blogs might play in supporting her campaign, the first thing I told her was “don’t expect us to raise you any money.” We can create buzz, I said, help frame the debate and debunk media coverage, but we just can’t raise money. And so nobody was more surprised than me when HA readers contributed over $30,000 to Darcy Burner and Peter Goldmark over a ten-month period in 2006.

Then came Darcy’s astounding $125,000 national netroots funder — over a weekend in August — and now Bill’s $5,335, which relative to the size of the audience is at least as impressive, if not more so.

The point is, that by helping Bill win we are not just gaining a progressive perspective on the administration of justice in King County, we are sending a message to the local political establishment that the rules are changing. As the Democratic Party and other progressive organizations have increasingly relied on local bloggers to get their message out, we have necessarily played an important role in helping to shape their message. And now, in a campaign finance system where most races have contribution limits, our growing ability to harness the financial resources of a diffuse netroots community, and focus it on a handful of very local races, has the potential to transform our movement into one of the most sought after “endorsements” in the state. When a union or corporate PAC or wealthy individual can only give $700 to a race, but we can bring in thousands — in $50, $25, $10 increments — our broader progressive voice becomes louder than any individual special interest.

This is a slow process; it will move forward in fits and starts. But together, we have the potential to transform the face of local and national politics.

Send a message — help elect Bill Sherman.

My posting has been a little sparse as of late. Why? I don’t think I ever really announced it, but as of the end of September, I’m a full time student at Seattle Central Community College. I have one year to go until I can transfer to UW. I’m excited to be back, but the workload is more than I was prepared for.

With full time school and a very interesting part time gig, I’ll be super busy for the near future. Some things I will be looking out for:

Roads and Transit. The latest polling puts the measure at the mid fifties, which is decent, but not great. I get the sense that Seattle’s great civic tradition of screwing the pooch on transportation will pay us yet another visit this fall. Already, the whispers of “vote this down, we’ll come back with something next year” can be read in the blogosphere.

If this this is voted down, I’ll tell you what is coming:

Last January, a commission led by former Seattle Mayor Norm Rice and telecommunications billionaire John Stanton called for a new agency of members who would plan and finance road and transit projects for central Puget Sound. The new Puget Sound Regional Transportation Commission would take functions from the Puget Sound Regional Council, the Regional Transportation Investment District (RTID), and Sound Transit.

The Rice-Stanton report [2.5 MB PDF] concluded that there are 128 agencies who manage aspects of transportation in the four-county area. “Our current system of transportation governance delivers inadequate results and will need fundamental systemic change to meet our region’s transportation needs in the future,” they declared.

Sound Transit and others fought the proposal, which passed in the state Senate but died in the House.

If ST2/RTID doesn’t pass, the punishment will not be doled out equally. Sound Transit, an organization with no friends in Olympia, will get the lion share of the blame. The Rice/Stanton plan will likely pass both the Senate and the House. (Some ask, “why would Democrats shitcan Sound Transit?” Remember, we’re not talking about regular Democrats. We’re talking about Olympia Democrats. This blogger was once told the story of a Sound Transit community meeting in north Seattle, where state Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson showed up in a t-shirt that read “Mag-Lev Mama.” That’s how out to lunch they are on this issue.)

If Rice/Stanton passes, Sound Transit will be folded into a larger agency which will, in all likelihood, be governed by an elected board. Seattle, home to transit loving liberals, will have its political clout diluted by the new governance scheme. A transit board member in, say, Gig Harbor will have the right to veto transit funding in Seattle. And that, ladies and gentlemen (and Sen. Ed Murray), is bullshit.

Don’t forget that even if Prop 1 goes down this fall, roads will still get built. Why? Gov. Gregoire won’t allow 520 to plunge into Lake Washington. Expansion of the south portion of 405 is popular on the Eastside (and already partially funded), and with traffic congestion statistics showing this stretch of road to be the most congested in the state, it will be an easy call for legislators. Roads spending, unlike light rail, has sometimes be handled by the legislature without a vote of the people. Initiative 912 notwithstanding, two gas tax increases came out of Olympia without public votes. This could very well happen again, but this time to fund the projects that RTID funds.

The “Let’s Wait ‘Til Next Year” crowd sometimes cites Sound Transit’s success at the ballot box in 1996 as proof that light rail can do a quick turnaround to be approved by voters. What they don’t tell you is that Sound Transit’s failed measure in 1995 was paired down significantly to gain approval in 1996. The package in ’95 included light rail north to Lynnwood, south to Tacoma, and east across the lake to Bellevue. The package voters approved in 1996 was much smaller in scope. In fact, Sound Transit 2 greatly resembles the original Sound Move of 1995. Even with the much-publicized blunders made by Sound Transit during the 90’s, approval of the original Sound Move plan would have put the region in a great position today.

People who want more high capacity transit are rolling the dice by voting “no” on Prop 1. Don’t assume you’ll get another chance to vote for visionary transit investment like this in the near future.

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

7PM: The Stranger Hour
Erica C. Barnett and Josh Feit from The Stranger join Goldy to talk politics, Erica’s new iPhone, and maybe some sex.

8PM: Drinking Liberally
Justin Krebs, founder of Drinking Liberally, will join Goldy to talk about the liberal grassroots, drinking and being liberal. [Update: Nicholas Beaudrot, Seattle Chapter co-founder is there, too.]

9PM: Perfection, Ann Coulter style
Goldy discusses wacky topics like disenfranchising women and perfecting Jews.

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