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Looking around at photos and video from the SoCal wildfires, I don’t see too many black faces. In fact, I don’t recall having seen a single black face. Which makes me wonder if all the comparisons of the fires with Katrina, from the headcounts to the Bush Administration’s (supposed) response, are missing a singular point.

Not to minimize the plight of the wildfire evacuees, it needs to be pointed out that they are (appear to be, till statistical analysis is done) mostly white (undoubtedly Latino will tally as well), mostly politically conservative (with at least a tinge of religiosity), and mostly well to do (especially contrasted with Katrina victims) if not rich by general American standards. There’s some grim irony, too, in the “we take care of our own” pledges emerging from wildfire coverage. The caretakers and the caretakees look a lot alike.

Where are the stories of widespread looting? Where are the paramilitary and outside police forces called in to maintain law and order? How many bands of wildfire refugees have been blocked from crossing bridges into neighboring jurisdictions, or turned away by bayonetted soldiers from returning to the site of their homes? Where are the bulldozers, scraping down houses that might be rebuilt?

And the pets. Any pet owner (I’m one) was sickened by the wrenching site of animals wandering around lost after being forcibly abandoned by their owners. Remember the video of the little white dog jumping up to the closed doors of the evacuation bus? Cut to San Diego, where entire “pet evacuation centers” have sprung up.

You had people dying in the Superdome, while Qualcomm Stadium abounds with stories of Starbucks’ lattes and human kindness. You had repeated suggestions that Katrina victims would simply have to relocate elsewhere, that New Orleans could — even should — never be rebuilt in its former image.

In a way, it’s too bad that the SoCal inferno didn’t happen a couple of years before Katrina. Then the “lessons learned” mantra (which, of course, has yet to be proven sincere) would have a truer test, and more meaningful execution. As it stands, the still unwhole citizens of New Orleans must be viewing the collective response to their supposed brethren halfway across the continent with a mixture of envy and disgust.

With less wind & cooler temps, things are settling down: The wildfires in Los Angeles & San Bernardino Counties have come under control. Farther south in San Diego, things look better, but it’s still a battle. Preliminary damage estimate: over $1 billion.

But in Northern Iraq, things are heating up: the Turkish military yesterday attacked Iraq border regions. The British newspaper The Independent profiles both anti-Kurdish nationalism sweeping Turkey in anticipation of war and the Kurdish fighters the Turks are after.
And the P-I today is carrying an AP story on Iraqi Kurds getting ready to fight Turkey when it invades. Meanwhile, the U.S. is telling its puppet Iraqi government (over which it has little remaining influence) to tell the Kurdish provincial government (over which the Iraqis have zero influence) to curb the Turkish Kurdish rebels in mountainous rural areas (over which the provincial Iraqi Kurds have no influence). That’ll fix it.

The big local story is a business story: Microsoft had plowed plowed $240 million into buying 1.6 percent of the social networking site Facebook, beating out Google & Yahoo in negotiations. Most stories on the transaction spent a few quality seconds with a calculator and announced that this prices Facebook’s overall value at a preposterous $15 billion; scroll down for Paul’s perceptive HA comments on why it just ain’t so.

Elsewhere in the dailies, in the same year that 70% of Seattle voters rejected a waterfront tunnel as too expensive, the P-I’s front page today is floating (so to speak) the idea of an SR 520 tunnel (of indeterminate cost) under Montlake Cut, and/or Portage Bay, and/or even all of Lake Washington. Their upshot: heck, a little studying never hurt anyone, right? Especially when it mollifies wealthy Montlake and Laurelhurst residents and enviros concerned about the Arboretum. Then why are voters already being asked to approve money for SR 520 construction in the current Prop One “Roads & Transit” vote? Who’s paying for these probably-to-be-ignored studies, why weren’t these options considered earlier in the process, and how much are these nods to community process belatedly costing taxpayers now?

A moose bit my sister once.

Meanwhile, a day after profiling Richard Pope on its front page, the Seattle Times returns the favor for troubled incumbent Jane Hague.

And Boston crushed Colorado in the first game of the World Series, 13-1. And the Red Sox Nation rejoices.

I’m testing my new ability to embed video with one of my favorite ever Daily Show clips. It’s Steve Carrell riding the “Straight Talk Express” with Senator John McCain in 1999. I think the bit at the 3:12 mark is priceless.

Seattle Times’ Brier Dudley: “Zillow is emerging as the latest big threat to newspapers, which are watching a series of Internet companies go after their dominant share of advertising and undercutting them with free services.”

As someone who worked 38 years for newspapers, it’s tough to watch a hallowed industry melt to a puddle. If papers saw themselves as a service rather than a product, they might have a chance in the online game. Brier makes several good points about the changing marketplace, not all of them consistent: He goes from a header warning “Watch out, newspapers!” to a concluding sentence: “It’s hard to compete with free…but the site also has a long, long way to go before it has papers’ reach and market penetration.” (I guess Brier didn’t need a disclosure statement there!)

And that’s just the problem. If newspapers simply take the money while letting “free” services compete on price (or non-price), they’ll lose mindshare and brand value when, inevitably, critical mass shifts. Craigslist would not exist (in its current popularity) if papers had simply started giving away classifieds. But they couldn’t leave the revenues on the table.

(Another debate is whether, particularly in a down market, the Internet is changing the business of real-estate. I know three people who sold their homes via Craigslist and were much happier doing so — starting with, no seller’s commission. Dudley rightly notes the “channel conflict” Zillow faces as well in doing brokerage deals: Whose interests is Zillow defending, buyers or sellers?)

Dudley ID’s the progression here: Craigslist, Google, Yahoo, Zillow. I’d add Facebook to the list as well. But the real threat to newspapers began with the World Wide Web. The Web is the newspaper. Everything else is just a tweak in the machine.

This hilarious study somehow reminded me of an old feminist joke my wife likes to tell:

A man is feeling ill and goes to his doctor. The doctor asks to see his wife. “Your husband is very, very sick,” the doctor tells her, “and he’s going to die, unless he has a clean house, hot dinners and sex every night.” The wife goes back to her husband and he asks her what the doctor said. “He says you’re very, very sick,” she tells him, “and you’re going to die.”

It’s been rumored for several weeks, so may be anticlimactic, but AP is reporting that Microsoft is putting $240 million into Facebook for a 1.6 percent stake. (Local papers have versions on Web sites as well.)

There was a time when this kind of thing would have been suicidal for a young tech company. Microsoft would come on board, throw its weight around, take over projects, look at the code…then develop its own competing software. So times have really changed. Now you can view it as Microsoft simply trying to get in on an action it has no hope of branding on its own, as well as a jamming in a wedge against Google. You could certainly view this deal as a turning point in the Evil Empire stigma of Microsoft.

“Culminating weeks of negotiations, the investment announced Wednesday values Palo Alto-based Facebook at $15 billion — a stunning figure for an online hangout started in a Harvard University dorm room less than four years ago.” Well, it does and it doesn’t. No sound economic valuation based on P/E or any other existing index (revs of $100M to $150M, give me a break) would put Facebook anywhere near that. This is all on the come, an act of faith that social networking technology won’t commoditize or be usurped by some new technology. But what both Microsoft and Facebook want to do in cases like this is pump the appearance of value, so why not go along with the hype?

Don’t believe the stenographic line that Microsoft “beat out” Google, however. Google would not have let Facebook slip if it really wanted it. Similarly, though, suggestions that Google let Facebook slip because it is developing its own social-networking site are probably off base. My view is that Google has little incentive to do a social-networking site, because that would cannibalize its own advertising market. Besides, with Blogger, YouTube, Google Pages and other powerful pieces, the Google sum is greater than any SN’s parts.

When Postman asked his readers “What should Rossi say?” when he officially announces his campaign for governor tomorrow, commenters found it awfully damn hard to take the task seriously. Democrats could barely hold back the snark, while Republicans were at a loss for words.

Personally, I’m not sure what Rossi can or should say at his campaign kickoff, but I’m pretty damn sure what he will say tomorrow… the same thing he said back in 2004, and the same thing he’s been saying over and over again on the non-campaign trail this past year or so:

Yup, it’s hard to argue with 210,000 new jobs, the lowest unemployment rate in state history, and one of the best business climates in the nation… but that doesn’t mean Rossi won’t try. How? Well, just like in 2004, he could just try making shit up:

At pancake breakfasts and candidate forums across the state, Dino Rossi has invoked his nephew’s name as an emblem for what ails Washington.

Rossi blames Washington’s unfriendly business climate for driving his nephew, Kenny, and his business to Arizona. The gubernatorial candidate also has cautioned that the next Microsoft or Boeing founder could leave for Arizona, just as Kenny did.

What Rossi doesn’t say is that Kenny was a self-employed car detailer and that he left for personal reasons as much as business, according to his nephew.

Oops.

In politics, the truth doesn’t always hurt, but as Rossi is discovering, it doesn’t always much help, either.

Canadian Marc Emery is facing extradition to the United States for running a mail-order marijuana seed business. If extradited, he could spend the rest of his life in prison here, even though what he’s charged with is only a fine in Canada. The effort to extradite him has been led out of Seattle’s US Attorneys office previously run by John McKay. What’s making this case very interesting is that Emery isn’t a dummy, a slacker, or even a remotely threatening human being, and this fact is getting a lot of attention. He started his first business at his parents’ home at the age of 14 in London, Ontario and has long been a champion of entrepreneurship and self-sufficiency. He has used this case to highlight the incredible absurdity of the laws that are being used by the Bush Administration and the DEA to go after him, and sees himself as a martyr representing a country where 55% of the citizens support the legalization of marijuana, even as their current government slavishly obeys the Bush Administration on drug issues.

Last night on CBC, a documentary on Emery called “The Prince of Pot” was aired and it’s already available in its entirety on YouTube. You can see each of the 5 parts here (and you may want to be somewhat careful watching if you’re at work).

This was delayed for about a week due to my house situation, but it’s finally up. I give you the first edition of the Crackpiper Chronicles. I’m not sure if anyone will ever give us as much to laugh at as our old friend Marvin, but the Crackpiper has been balls out recently. If you have any comments or exchanges that belong in part 2, feel free to drop me a mail.

The Southern California wildfires are fast becoming one of the biggest natural disasters in modern U.S. history (certainly in terms of people evacuated and property affected, if not lives lost). Today’s headlines reflect it. In this morning’s New York Times an article poses the burning (sorry) question:
“Victims in Wildfire’s Path Say, ‘Why Me?'” (It’s an unanswerable question, of course, unless you’re Glenn Beck.)

The Washington Post has a good piece on why the nearly one million evacuees (as of last night) have it a lot better than Katrina’s survivors in 2005. At the football stadium in San Diego where some 20,000 refugees are camped, it’s no Superdome. It’s orderly, food and Starbucks (gag) is plentiful, the National Guard is on hand (and not threatening to shoot the victims of the natural disaster). What are the differences? The fires are capricious, hitting here and there in neighborhoods rather than destroying the whole region; the region itself is wealthy, the suburban hillside neighborhoods in the fires’ paths often more so; the National Guard was already nearby, guarding the Mexican border against, um, Mexicans. Oh, and, as a separate N.Y. Times article points out, this time the White House and the federal government have scrambled to respond. But, according to the L.A. Times, the locals are already grumbling that the region was woefully unprepared for the cataclysm.

Locally, Neil Modie at the P-I (as well as a story in The Olympian) confirm that Dino Rossi will announce his campaign for governor Thursday in dual appearances in Issaquah and Spokane. (We know, (u)SP reported this Monday, and it’s not like we don’t trust their accuracy, but, well, we don’t.) The Bothell Times reported yesterday that Rossi was “expected to” announce Thursday, and leaves it at that today. In this season of surprises, no word yet as to whether Dino’s stump speech will differ one iota from his Forward Washington Foundation “nonprofit” days.

A KING-5 poll shows the “Roads & Transit” Proposition One in a dead heat. Oddly, KING-TV didn’t make the obvious connection with another of its own stories (which KIRO-TV and the Times also had): while Prop One contains ballyhooed maintenance money for local bridges and infrastructure, that doesn’t include Tacoma’s 11th Street Bridge east of downtown — a 92-year-old bridge that WSDOT abruptly shut down permanently on Tuesday because, according to state engineers, it’s in such a state of disrepair that it could fail at any time. The city charges that it’s the state which has been responsible for maintenance, or lack of it, on the bridge.

For some reason, both dailies think it’s a big deal this morning that a Metro bus driver is going to be fired for causing a fatal accident last April.

The Times takes an almost sympathetic look at the oddly viable candidacy of Richard Pope.

And, in the category of “The Treacle Gets Earlier Each Year,” the P-I today has a heartwarming syrupy Mary Swift column (does she do any other kind?) on a retiree who makes Christmas more cheerful for homeless kids. A. Week. Before. Halloween. Diabetics, it’s going to be a long season.

The SoCal wildfires are showcasing emerging Web 2.0 technologies — the first “Web 2.0 disaster” as Paul Kedrosky puts it.

Google Maps, courtesy of KPBS, has a mashup of fires, evacuations, response sites and so on. I like the idea of mashups but sure wish the map interface were snappier and a bit more sophisticated graphically.

KPBS, the San Diego NPR affiliate (someone knows what they’re doing there), also has a continuous Twitter feed (ticker). A great application for software in search of one.

The San Diego Union-Tribune has a Blogspot (Google) blog instead of an in-house blog. I’m not as surprised as Kedrosky by this. In-house newspaper blogs for the most part aren’t even an echo chamber because there’s so little sound to begin with, leaving aside the issue of clumsy UIs. The U-T blog shows how a newspaper’s resources can really shine online when put to good use. Few services could assemble this kind of clearing house on such short notice.

Jim Forbes, a retired tech editor, is ‘fire-blogging’ the disaster from an evacuation shelter in Escondido with a Lenovo X60 tablet and integrated cell modem. A guy who can actually write, reporting in real time. What a treat.

Web 2.0 generally refers to the burbling “social networking” and digital-collaboration technologies all the rage now. It’s fine to call the wildfires a made-to-order Web 2.0 catastrophe, but networking technology proved its utility under societal duress long ago with the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco when The Well kept onliners in touch and informed.

What’s particularly intriguing, as Forbes notes, is how much more effective the Web is than cell phones, especially voice usage. The forced brevity and directness of IM, its multithreading capability and durability of communication all really come in handy during emergencies, and 802.x Wi-Fi apparently is carrying the day better than cell nets. If only the kids didn’t have to IM while they drive (thereby creating emergencies).

Yeah, sure… I’m a hate talker. But Glenn Beck, apparently not so much:

I think there is a handful of people who hate America. Unfortunately for them, a lot of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today.
[audio:http://horsesass.org/wp-content/uploads/beck.mp3]

For the past week, Geov, Paul and myself have been posting our take on the morning headlines, attempting to provide a little context to the daily news. And in a way, that’s exactly what Beck tried to do in referencing the wildfires ravaging Southern California.

California wildfires, view from space

There are a lot of stories within the story of the devastating fires that have now forced half a million people from their homes, but for Beck, the story that leaps off the page is that some of the victims “hate America.” That’s the context Beck chooses to bring to this tragedy… a tragedy Beck doesn’t view as simply unfortunate, but unfortunate “for them.” It’s almost as if he’s gloating.

What sort of person looks at a natural disaster, and instantly sees the political ideology of the victims? What sort of person chooses to bring this sort of context to this story? Glenn Beck.

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

All candidates are welcome. We’ll just be sure to call you a cab.

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

Wanna learn more about Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens? Check out RetireTed.com.