HorsesAss.Org

Campaigning as a Republican in a 2-to-1 Democratic district, I suppose Dan Satterberg thought it clever to make non-partisanship the central theme of his campaign for King County Prosecuting Attorney, but I’m thinking he probably should have read his Lakoff first. For the more Satterberg protests that the office should be non-partisan, the more he raises the issue, thus automatically reminding voters that this is, after all, a partisan race between a Republican and a Democrat. Don’t think of an elephant, and all that.

Of course, the other problem with this meme is that it just isn’t true, and before the editorial boards buy into this inviting notion that a politician can somehow be apolitical, I hope they first read their own editorials… such as the following Seattle P-I op-ed editorial from back in December of 2005. (The emphasis is mine.)

Voting Disputes: Maleng turns it up

King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng is right in saying that it’s time for political parties to “lower their voices” over disputed voter registrations. So why raise his own voice on the issue?

Maleng is a respected public official, but he is a partisan politician. The Republican Party has tried to criminalize election issues by alleging that nearly 2,000 voters violated the law by registering at mailboxes and mini-storage units.

Of the roughly 200 of those challenged voters who cast ballots in the Nov. 8 election, the King County Canvassing Board this week rejected the challenges on 141 of them.

Dan Satterberg, Maleng’s chief of staff and one of three members of the Canvassing Board, voted to accept the challenges but was outvoted 2-1 by Elections Director Dean Logan and Democratic County Councilman Dow Constantine.

Maleng says the board took a “strict construction” view, with which he, like Satterberg, disagrees. Maleng wants to push the point by calling for Attorney General Rob McKenna and Secretary of State Sam Reed to issue opinions on the matter.

The state is already on the way to solving many voter registration issues with next year’s use of a statewide voter database.

If the laws or lines of authority are unclear, the fix is legislation, not executive fiat.

Maleng has actually turned the partisan volume not down, but up.

How partisan were Maleng and Satterberg in support of the KCGOP’s bogus voter registration challenges? While they publicly criticized the Democrats on the Canvassing Board for taking a “strict construction” view, it must be noted that the Board’s legal interpretation was actually adopted on the advise of the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office itself. In a series of memos and emails to the Canvassing Board, Janine Joly — the Sr. Deputy Prosecuting Attorney assigned by Maleng and Satterberg to advise King County Elections — addressed the legal issues in depth, laying out the grounds for dismissing insufficient challenges:

“The challenger’s failure to allege an actual address either in her challenge form or at the hearing is a fatal flaw and should invalidate the challenge. Any other decision would be contrary to the plain language of the statute even if it appears from the other evidence provided that the challenged voter is not registered at a valid residence address.”

Can you get much more partisan than attacking Democrats for following the legal advice given by the attorney you assigned to advise them in the first place?

Don’t get me wrong, I liked and respected Norm Maleng, and I believe he generally carried out his duties in a professional, fair and nonpartisan manner. But as the P-I editorial makes clear, it is absolutely ridiculous to suggest that Maleng was not a political animal, or that he never used his office to turn up “the partisan volume.” And despite his protestations to high-minded editorialists, this is exactly the partisan legacy that Satterberg promised to continue when speaking to fellow Republicans at a Mercer Island GOTV drive back in August:

“I am a Republican office holder in King County. There aren’t many of us – well, actually there aren’t any of us around. We’ve been lucky enough to have a Republican in the King County Prosecutor’s Office for 60 years, and my fear is that there is a little pressure on me if we lose it that it is going to be 60 more years before we get another one.

[…] You’re going to walk up long driveways and knock on doors and there are going to be dogs barking. I just want to warn you about the dogs — they can be dangerous but I would ask you be polite. This is King County so many of them are registered voters.”
[audio:http://horsesass.org/wp-content/uploads/satterberg1.mp3]

The crowd laughed in approval because, you know… we Democrats, we’re all a bunch of cheats and crooks, and KCRE is just laughably corrupt and incompetent. Yeah, that’s the sort of non-partisanship we can expect from Satterberg, should he be elected.

The fact is, the PAO is a partisan office and always has been, and while Satterberg could have run as a Democrat or an independent, he didn’t. Satterberg chose to run as a Republican because that is the party that best reflects his values — values that will inform his prosecutorial judgment, and values that will guide him to use the prestige and influence of his office to help elect more Republicans. That is the nature of politics.

Dan Satterberg is an elephant, and to suggest otherwise, as Satterberg frequently does, is simply disingenuous.

Because you can never have enough bullshit.

*It’s pretty much bullshit that Democratic candidates have to come out in favor of science. Can you imagine that being an issue in 2000? I’m sure that every Democrat will be able to boast something similar, but the fact that it’s even an issue should tell you how far we’ve gone into crazyville these last 8 years.

* It would be bullshit to bomb these people.

* President Bush’s 4th veto of his term pretty much is for the same reason as his last three: he’s for more dead people.

* Not that your mainstream media would dare put it in those terms. Maybe they’re frightened?

* Maybe we should be frightened of Blackwater setting up shop in the States.

* And how about we let military spouses stay, you know, in the states.

Locally,

* I-960 is a bad idea.

* Activists who take time out of their weekend to doorbell in the B’ham area are not a conspiracy. And when that’s the best you’ve got, it’s sad sad sad.

This is an open thread. Enjoy.

That’s the same Jim Horn who was shitcanned by Bellevue and Mercer Island voters back in 2004. He’s also the guy who thought it a good idea to build another six lane freeway east of I-405. The Sierra Club and the teachers worked hard to kick him out of office.

It’s only a rumor, but I hear he’s thinking about going after the guy who beat him in ’04, Sen. Brian Weinstein.

How anemic is the suburban GOP? The Democrats are building a deep, deep bench with candidates like Maureen Judge in Mercer Island and Keri Andrews in Bellevue. Jim Horn’s spending his days carrying water for Dino Rossi and attacking light rail. I don’t know if he’s got another campaign in him. But let’s hope so!

The Federal Communications Commission will soon announce the location of the sixth and final public hearing on proposed changes in media ownership rules, and Jonathan Lawson of Reclaim the Media tells me that it will be Seattle. The hearing could take place as early as November, although the date won’t be confirmed until the announcement is official.

Democratic Commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein have previously held two unofficial hearings in Seattle, but this will be the first and only time all five FCC commissioners will attend a hearing in the Northwest. Previous hearings have been held in Los Angeles, Nashville, Harrisburg, Tampa and Chicago.

At stake are FCC rules placing limits on cross-ownership of newspapers and broadcast outlets in a single market, and on how many TV and radio stations a single company can own. The FCC’s 2003 attempt to weaken our already lax ownership rules created a huge public and political outcry, and might have been blocked by Congress had Republican House Speaker Denny Hastert allowed it to come to the floor for a vote. Ultimately, the Third Circuit Court sent it back to the FCC for further deliberation and public hearings. So far, public testimony has overwhelmingly supported maintaining or strengthening rules limiting media concentration.

There aren’t a lot of hot-button issues on which I find myself enthusiastically allied with the likes of John Carlson and Frank Blethen, but I can think of few trends that more threaten the health of our democracy than the ever growing concentration of media ownership in the hands of a few corporations. Media ownership concentration doesn’t just lead to a loss of localism and a decline in the quality and diversity of content, it also directly and indirectly undermines the ability of the press to serve its crucial democratic role as a watchdog of our institutions, both public and private. There is no democracy without a free press, and there is no truly free press in an industry where the only sure path to promotion is to echo the political leanings of your corporatist masters.

It is the inherent inability of anybody to own the blogosphere that makes it so exciting and vital, but do not kid yourself that this revolution in citizen journalism is anywhere close to challenging the corporate media for audience or influence, or that the corporations who own the networks willingly provide us unfettered access to the mass market of content consumers. It is also important to remember that as online consumers increasingly come to expect and demand streaming video and other bandwidth-intensive content, the growing cost of producing and serving this content will require not-insubstantial sums of capital investment if we are to truly compete for audience share. There is plenty of room for individuals and small companies to innovate, but in an environment that allows unlimited ownership consolidation, the traditional venture capital infrastructure that fueled our region’s high-tech boom is not well suited toward the goal of building a robust and independent new media. As evidenced by today’s acquisition of Newsvine by MSNBC, when profit is the only motive of investors, and ownership concentration knows no bounds, the media conglomerates will simply fatten their portfolio and strengthen their market control by purchasing those few public and venture-backed corporations that manage to gain a competitive edge.

There may yet come a day when the Internet is nothing but a content-neutral utility through which nearly all media is distributed, thus making corporate ownership of our airwaves, and even cable, irrelevant. But the growing power and influence of our media conglomerates makes that day a dim and distant vision.

If anyone knows just how important a ‘yes’ vote is this fall, it’s Jim Ellis.

He goes back to the 1968 transit vote that was part of another Ellis legacy, Forward Thrust, and one of his bitterest losses.

“We were ahead in the polls, right up to the last three weeks,” he said. “Then, some very clever ads came out, and one day General Motors showed up with a large trailer-truck. It had a huge window and inside was a chrome-plated jet engine, and the sign said something like, ‘This is the engine of the future. It will make buses faster than trains!’

“No one would ever put a jet engine in a bus, but people didn’t know that and we slowly lost the vote for transit. That was in 1968. If the people had voted for it — eventually it would have been 80 percent paid by the federal government — the system would have been finished in 1985, at three times the size of the one before voters this November. And the last payment for it would have been in 2008.”

Instead of General Motors, we have Ron Sims pushing the “buses instead of rail” idea. To think, we could have a 22 year-old rail system up and running today, if only the folks back in ’68 had had the foresight to make that investment.

My grandfather voted against Forward Thrust’s rail measure back in ’68. Why? It didn’t run a line from his home in White Center to the Renton Boeing plant. Not seeing the big picture, pops said “no” to Senator Magnuson’s free money. There’s still no rail from White Center to Renton. Maggie’s money, and our rail system, was put to good use.

In Atlanta.

Maybe pops thought they’d come back to the voters with another package a year later. Of course, they never did.

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

7PM: Give us your poor…
In the course of any given year, 3.5 million Americans are homeless, and of these, 41% are families, 25% are children under the age of 10, and 43% work. 52% of families are turned away from homeless shelters due to overcrowding. To create awareness of this endemic but solvable problem, Appleseed Records has released a 17-track benefit CD, “Give US Your Poor,” featuring new recordings from the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Pete Seeger, Jon Bon Jovi, Natalie Merchant, Jewel and others. Joining me by phone to discuss the CD and his own experience with homelessness will be Eugene OR-based blues singer Eagle Park Slim. Later, we’ll talk about the local homelessness problem with Rev. Dr. Sandy Brown, Executive Director of The Church Council of Greater Seattle.

8PM: Did the King County Prosecutor’s Office cover up priest sexual abuse?
In successfully winning over $50 million in settlements against priests on behalf of sex-abuse victims, Seattle attorney Timothy Kosnoff has seen the horror stories firsthand, and so during the height of the nationwide scandal he urged the King County Prosecutor’s Office to use its subpoena power to unseal records, and look for evidence of an organized cover-up. Even though similar investigations in other cities uncovered cover-ups and additional abuse nationwide, then Chief of Staff Dan Satterberg refused. Kosnoff joins me in the studio for the hour to discuss the scandal, and what he sees as Satterberg’s conflict of interest, serving as both an advisor to the Seattle Archdiocese, and as the public official with the discretion to subpoena their records.

9PM: The Blogger Hour with Ari Melber
Ari Melber is a regular contributor to The Nation magazine, the oldest political weekly in America, and blogs at both Huffington Post and Campaign Matters, The Nation’s 2008 campaign blog. His commentary and other writing has appeared in over a dozen publications, including The Stranger and the Seattle P-I. Melber joins me in studio to discuss the 2008 presidential race, the worthlessness of polls and why we focus on them, plus the Dems inability to effectively oppose the administration on torture.

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

From San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom:

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom proclaimed the nation’s war on drugs a total failure and insisted the crime rate would go down if the government spent money on treatment as opposed to jailing people with drug problems.

“If you want to get serious, if you want to reduce crime by 70% in this country overnight, end this war on drugs,” he told reporters at City Hall on Thursday. “You want to get serious, seriously serious about crime and violence end this war on drugs.”

…

In a ten-minute tirade about the drug war’s failure, Newsom told reporters that most politicians – including those in his own party – just don’t have the guts to admit the obvious.

“It’s laughable that anyone could look at themselves with a straight face and say ‘oh,we’re really succeeding.’ I mean it’s comedy. And as I say, shame on my party, the democratic party, because they don’t have the courage of their private thoughts, because we don’t want to appear weak on this topic,” Newsom said.

Alcohol prohibition ended when mayors like New York’s Fiorello LaGuardia spoke out about how it was nothing more than a war on minority communities. Drug prohibition will end the same way, as mayors from San Francisco to Newark are all starting to say the same thing.

David Guard has a recap of the incarceration hearing from Thursday.

[Via Pete Guither]

Why did I spend most of last night talking with callers about the explosion in Tacoma, rather than politics?

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

7PM: Eli Sanders goes boom.
We were going to have Eli Sanders joining us for The Stranger Hour, but instead we’ll be covering the big explosion in Tacoma, and asking eyewitnesses to call in with their personal accounts.

8PM: TBA
We’ll see how it goes. Maybe more Tacoma explosion coverage,

9PM: The Blogger Hour with Will
Fellow HA blogger Will Kelley-Kamp joins me in studio to discuss roads & transit, the city council races and other local issues. And maybe a little Tacoma explosion coverage too.

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

Fred refines his message:

(This and some 70 other media clips from the past week are now posted at Hominid Views.)

Are you confused about R-67? Sure you are. The insurance industry is spending a stunning $8 million on deceptive ads to make sure that you are confused… because confused voters almost always vote “no.” Those fake ads from that fake “consumer” group featuring fake lawyers and fake families, represents everything that’s wrong with an initiative and referendum process that is fast becoming an exclusive tool for moneyed special interests to buy their way onto the ballot so they can sell their agenda with lies.

But you all know how I feel about ballot measures, so don’t take my word for it, or even that of the “Approve 67” campaign. Watch CNN’s Anderson Cooper’s in-depth report on the scandal at the heart of R-67, and make up your mind for yourself.

Personally, I pay my insurance premiums on time, and I expect my insurance company to pay out my claims accordingly. I’m voting Yes on R-67.

Rep. Jim McDermott (Washington state’s real Doc) addresses another surge in Iraq:

No doubt the anti-rail folks were disappointed to read the report issued today summarizing the independent performance audit of Sound Transit… though that won’t stop them (or bumper sticker writers like Rick Anderson) from attempting to turn an overwhelmingly positive audit into a PR disaster.

Writing at the Daily Weekly (does anybody actually read the Weekly’s blogs if real bloggers like me don’t link to them?) Anderson characterizes the report as “stinging,” before cutting and pasting a list of bullet points under the headline “New Audit: ST Wasted $5 Mil“. By comparison, Mike Lindblom of the Times (bless their hearts) instantly cuts through the crap:

Though significant, that’s a fraction of the project’s overall budget of $2.4 billion, and Sound Transit maintains the losses are actually lower.

Sound Transit may have “wasted” as much as 0.2% of its budget… not exactly the “Big Dig” scenario critics keep warning about. To put that $5 million in perspective, one of the auditor’s primary recommendations is, surprise, annual performance audits — at a YOE cost of nearly $50 million over 50 years! ($500,000 per audit, 2.5% inflation.) And for some reason, Anderson fails to include in his bullet points the approximately $6.5 million the audit says Sound Transit saved during preliminary ST2 design through its “value engineering studies.” Huh.

Whatever. Here is the audit’s actual conclusion, as summarized at the top of the report:

Sound Transit has faced, and continues to face, challenges in delivering capital construction contracts for the Link Light Rail Project. Through the course of initially planning, designing, and building the system, the agency experienced delays and cost overruns.

Before 2002, the agency experienced a lack of expertise, no established practices or procedures relating to ROW acquisition, environmental, or construction management, and limited management oversight. Gaps in best practice tools and procedures created variability in early project delivery success and resulted in project cost and schedule impacts. The agency essentially started as an inefficient and ineffective organization. As a result, the initial light rail project communicated to voters in 1996 ultimately was modified. Its original length, Central Link, 19.7 miles (19 stations) at $1.7 billon (1995 dollars) with an expected completion date of 2006 became the following:

Segment (Expected Completion)	Miles	Stations	Cost
Initial Segment and Airport Link (2009)	15.6	13	$2.6 billion (Y.O.E.)
University Link (2016)	3.2	2	$1.7 billion (Y.O.E.)

However, in the last five years, Sound Transit has responded to its challenges through improvements in construction planning and management processes and implementation of “best practices.” Indications of diligent review of proposed change orders by Sound Transit Project Controls were also identified. From its inception in 1996, the agency has gradually developed management techniques and construction project controls and procedures.

Sound Transit has improved its structure to manage projects and has standardized guidelines on cost estimating, change and cost management, project management, and risk assessments. Sound Transit has also developed procedures for addressing emerging lessons learned.

Although Sound Transit has made great strides in improving its project delivery practices, opportunities exist that will contribute towards its present culture of continuous improvement.

That’s the unedited summary of the auditor’s conclusion, and it is far from the stinging rebuke Anderson makes it out to be. Of course the report highlights things Sound Transit could do better. That’s the purpose of a performance audit: to help an agency improve its performance. But rather than merely focusing on the agency’s shortcomings, the report actually documents a remarkable turnaround, in which Sound Transit overcame its early management woes to grow into a mature and well-run organization that is largely delivering projects on budget and on time. That’s also the conclusion of state Treasurer Mike Murphy, who in enthusiastically endorsing Proposition 1 yesterday, praised Sound Transit’s cost and revenue projections as conservative, while criticizing opponents’ numbers as “bogus.”

Opponents keep reaching back a decade or more to when Sound Transit, then a start-up agency, initially over-promised the Central Link light rail, but they intentionally ignore the progress that’s been made since then. Still, voters are largely getting the same 19 miles of rail first promised (though with fewer stations, and over a longer construction period,) and without raising any additional taxes. Opponents would like this election to be about Sound Transit’s management problems in the late 1990’s, but Murphy — whose condemnation of the Seattle Monorail’s financing package played a huge role in killing the project — succinctly sums up the real issue facing voters:

“Do you want something to happen or not? If you do, vote yes,” he said. “If you don’t, vote no.”

Indeed, if there is a lesson to be learned from this performance audit, and the parallel histories of both Sound Transit and the Seattle Monorail Project, it is the inherent danger of starting large transportation agencies from scratch… which ironically, is exactly what we’ll eventually be forced to do should voters reject Proposition 1. The pro-rail critics of the roads and transit package have this pie-eyed idea that we can just come back next year or the year after that with a transit-only package, but they ignore two basic realities: a) polls show that neither roads nor transit would pass on their own, and b) there’s no guarantee Sound Transit will even be allowed to bring a package before voters.

There are many in the Legislature and the pro-roads camp who are just itching for Proposition 1 to fail, so that they have an excuse to finally pass “governance reform,” implementing a multi-county, multi-modal transportation agency intended to dilute the influence of pro-rail Seattle voters, and essentially dismantle Sound Transit as an independent agency. Such a “reform,” whatever its merits, would be so disruptive, and introduce so many delays into any effort to pass and implement a project even remotely based on ST2, that Sound Transit would surely lose the bulk of the management and engineering infrastructure it has so painfully constructed over the past five years, and the expertise that goes with it. We would, in essence, be starting from scratch, ignoring yet another one of the audit’s primary conclusions:

Strong management and mature agency skills are not created overnight. It took five years from start-up to the time Sound Transit had its policies, its systems and its management practices fully in place. The Puget Sound region should be careful to preserve and nurture this knowledge base and not to assume that every new program needs a new agency to manage it.

No doubt Proposition 1 is filled with compromises, and I welcome a debate on its costs vs. benefits. But the measure’s opponents reveal themselves to be fundamentally lazy and dishonest in their persistent efforts to slander Sound Transit itself as corrupt and incompetent.

Given the timing, I had grave doubts that this performance audit would be fair and impartial, but I see nothing in this report to suggest that Sound Transit’s management is not dedicated to constantly improving its internal processes, that its ridership, revenue and cost projections should be held suspect, or that the agency itself is not positioned to deliver ST2 largely as promised. Large capital projects are inherently risky, and in that context the report concludes:

The use of the aforementioned “best practices” in conjunction with input from technical and subject matter experts and FTA oversight demonstrate that Sound Transit’s construction planning and management systems are maturing. This should be understood in the context of the complex and high risk contracts that Sound Transit is delivering, where challenges and risks will always be present. Focus, innovation, and due diligence will always be required to avoid surprises on such projects.

A “stinging performance audit”… my ass.

I am so confused. Is this a pro-Romney ad, or an anti-Romney ad? Either way, it’s hilarious.