HorsesAss.Org

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.

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.