HorsesAss.Org

I guess, what I don’t understand about newspaper editorial boards could fill a book:

We were startled today to get a request for an editorial board meeting with Darcy Burner, the Democratic challenger itching for a rematch next year with Eighth District U.S. Rep. Dave Reichert.

It’s way too early, we told Burner’s eager scheduler. Call us next year.

“Startled”…? Really? They were actually startled? You know, like when somebody sneaks up on you from behind, or like when Jason Michael Myers from Halloween suddenly comes at you with a knife?

I dunno, I’d think it should be pretty obvious that Burner would want to start talking to opinion makers now that she has dispatched her only rival for the Democratic nomination, and I’d also think TNT editors might be eager to talk with her considering that many of the issues at the heart of her campaign are issues they’ll surely be editorializing about over the next fourteen months. If Reichert, a sitting congressman, were to come to them and ask for a meeting, would they tell him to “call us next year” as well? Would they be just as startled? (Well, probably, but only because Reichert carefully avoids unscripted conversations with the press.)

It is not uncommon for journalists to bitch about their lack of access to one public official or another. You’d think TNT editors might want to extend to candidate Burner the same sort of courtesy they’d expect a Rep. Burner to extend to them.

I’m just sayin’.

This is from Kemper Freeman Jr.’s goofball organization, who are lying their asses off in this obviously illegal campaign piece pamplet.

The real number? About 250 bucks a year, per household. To compare, it would take 376 years for this package to cost you anything near $94,000, and that’s total.

I’m no economist, but 250 is a lot less than 94,000.

At last, I have vindication, and oddly enough I somewhat have Tim Eyman to thank for it. Back in 2003 Assistant State Attorney General Jim Pharris priggishly and selectively brought a scope challenge against I-831, my initiative to officially proclaim Tim Eyman a horse’s ass, and got an equally priggish Thurston County Superior Court judge to unconstitutionally bar me from delivering petitions to the Secretary of State. Pharris assumed that I would lack the financial resources to appeal the case, and he was right.

But this morning, in unanimously rejecting a pre-ballot review of Eyman’s clearly unconstitutional I-960, the Washington State Supreme Court made it absolutely clear that it would have rejected the lower court’s “unwarranted judicial meddling” and allowed the people to decide on Eyman’s well-documented horse’s assedness.

Preelection review of initiative measures is highly disfavored. The fundamental reason is that “the right of initiative is nearly as old as our constitution itself, deeply ingrained in our state’s history, and widely revered as a powerful check and balance on the other branches of government.” Given the preeminence of the initiative right, pre-election challenges to the substantive validity of initiatives are particularly disallowed. Such review, if engaged in, would involve the court in rendering advisory opinions, would violate ripeness requirements, would undermine the policy of avoiding unnecessary constitutional questions, and would constitute unwarranted judicial meddling with the legislative process.

That Pharris would selectively and vindictively prosecute a scope challenge against I-831, and then argue the reverse a few years later in defending I-960, just shows what an ethically rudderless, stick-up-his-ass hypocrite he really is. But then, he’s a lawyer, so that’s his job. The Seattle Times editorial board on the other hand has no such excuse for their blatant hypocrisy. They smugly urged I-831 be tossed out, and then bemoaned a similar challenge to I-960. I expect an apology any day now.

I was a bit surprised that the political press didn’t comment more last week on the stunning success of the “Burn Bush” netroots fund drive. $125,000 from over 3,200 donors. 14-months before the election. Over a weekend. In August. Unprecedented.

But with the sudden withdrawal of state Sen. Rodney Tom only seven weeks after he jumped into the race, the pundits are starting to take notice. In a brief post on TIME Magazine’s political blog Real Clear Politics, Reid Wilson describes WA-08 as “a great pickup opportunity for Democrats,” but for “one major problem … a competitive primary.”

Well, it turned out not to be much of a problem for Burner after all, and Wilson puts his finger on one of the reasons why:

One source close to Tom said the decision was made all the easier after President Bush came to the state to raise funds for Reichert. During that time, Burner used her credentials with the netroots to attract 3200 new donors, raising more than $125,000 over three days. A Burner strategist said it was conceivable that she could raise as much — or more — than Reichert did from the Bush visit. Tom raised about $100,000 in a month, though the source admitted Tom couldn’t compete with Burner’s national fundraising potential.

That’s pretty much also the lede from the Associated Press, which credits Burner’s “Internet-fueled” campaign for her “early victory.” And in the Seattle Times, Tom himself puts it quite bluntly:

“You have thousands of people giving twenty, thirty bucks. It’s how campaigns should be run.”

Absolutely.

It may be premature to say that the rules have changed, but there is no doubt they are changing. New technologies now enable progressive candidates with broad netroots support to run a “people-powered” campaign capable of matching a handful of rich folks dollar for dollar. And by so effectively merging the old campaign paradigms with the new, Darcy Burner is fast becoming a model for congressional candidates nationwide.

How did she do it? That’s what a number of bloggers and congressional campaign staffers have asked me after the stunning success of Burner’s virtual town hall and netroots fund drive, and our conversations always seem to devolve into the same question: “Who is handling Burner’s netroots outreach?” But unfortunately for those hoping to quickly replicate formula, the disappointing truth is… nobody. Burner has no “netroots outreach.” The netroots are an integral part of her campaign.

You could almost say that Burner has “gone native,” except that would wrongly imply some sort of personal transformation. In fact Burner has always been smart, driven, progressive, passionate, technically savvy, and well… a bit of a geek who famously installed the phone system herself in her first campaign office. Burner is the netroots, except rather than just blogging about politics and contributing money, Burner decided she could make more of a difference by running for office herself. And had the local and national netroots been as mature two years ago as they are today, I’m pretty damn sure Burner would be running for reelection right now rather than Reichert.

Now, I know there are some, like Democratic state Rep. Deb Eddy, who worry that Burner’s close identity with the netroots might be as much a liability as it is an asset:

Primaries bring out the party faithful, said Eddy, and “Darcy was more left wing than [Tom] is.”

However, the 8th District, which stretches from Duvall to Eatonville, is not as liberal as Burner is, Eddy said, and that could spell trouble in a race against Reichert. While Burner is popular among left-leaning bloggers, that may not translate to the average voter.

“One thing that worries me is she has not naturally gravitated to more nuanced positions,” Eddy said. “Sometimes it’s hard to get perspective or distance from the net roots. They can create a lot of smoke.”

Hmm. The “Burn Bush” campaign generated fire, not smoke; that’s what drove Tom so quickly out of the race. And if Eddy is going to lazily adopt the Republican frame that Burner is somehow out of touch with her district, perhaps she could explain exactly what it is about Burner (and us “left-leaning bloggers”) that is “too liberal”?

Is it “too liberal” to fight for a responsible close to our occupation of Iraq? Is it “too liberal” to support reproductive rights, and the civil rights of all citizens regardless of race, creed, gender and sexual preference? Is it “too liberal” to oppose warrantless wiretapping, torture and suspension of habeas corpus? Is it “too liberal” to offer a quality public education to all our children and affordable health care to all Americans? Is it “too liberal” to consistently oppose drilling in ANWR, to accept the scientific consensus on evolution and climate change, and to reject estate tax repeal?

According to opinion polls and recent initiative tallies, Burner is smack dab in the mainstream of 8th CD voters on these and many other issues, and while I’m sure there must be some issues on which at least a slight majority of district voters side more with Reichert than with Burner, none immediately come to mind. If Burner were so liberal, so out of touch with the needs of her district, she had the perfect opportunity to prove it during a recent live chat on the progressive blog FireDogLake, where she was all but begged to pander to the audience on the issue of H1B visas. She refused. So in the future, when Eddy publicly frets that Burner is “too liberal” for the district, reporters might want to ask Eddy for some specific examples before repeating the claim unsupported. And it is ironic that Eddy would accuse Burner of not gravitating toward more “nuanced positions” when it is not at all clear from her comments that Eddy has studied Burner’s positions at all.

The fact is, it is Reichert who is out of touch with his constituents, who is too conservative for his district on Iraq, on FISA, on children’s health care, on reproductive rights, on Social Security reform, on estate tax repeal and on any number of high profile issues. It is Reichert who refuses to address climate change because the overwhelming scientific consensus somehow threatens his political ideology or religion or both. It is Reichert who only four years ago — in the wake of the invasion of Iraq — was recruited by both parties, yet chose to be a Republican.

Burner’s critics routinely accuse her of being “too liberal,” while never offering a single example to back up their claim, and yet Reichert is demonstrably outside the mainstream of 8th CD voters on issue after issue after issue… not the least of which being his almost sycophantic support of our profoundly unpopular president and his disastrous occupation of Iraq. By comparison to Reichert, Burner may indeed be liberal, but then by that measure, so is the 8th CD.

Last year Karl Rove and the Reichert campaign (with the active cooperation of the Seattle Times editorial board) were somewhat successful at defining Burner, simply by calling her names. This time around it won’t be so easy. Burner is better, smarter, and more experienced than she was two years ago, and so are the netroots who have her back. We’ve already seen everything the other side has to offer, but they clearly have no idea how to parry the growing strength of our people-powered movement. As Burner stated in a recent video, “There are more of us than there are of them.” And in electoral politics, that’s ultimately all that matters.

From The Stranger, who have been putting the screws to city council candidate Tim Burgess over his smarmy guest column in the Seattle Times (printed after the ’04 election):

However, he acknowledges that he would not push his own pastor to perform gay weddings or lobby the leaders of his own denomination to allow them. “I’m just not there yet,” he said, adding: “I’m running for city council, not city theologian.”

To this, “Switzerblog” adds:

Why should he? Same-sex marriage in the church is irrelevant in this conversation; the separation of church and state means that churches can refuse to acknowledge or perform marriages for whoever they want. It’s relevant to the voters what he wants the state to do about the issue – not whether he’ll hassle his pastor.

Right on. I don’t care who churches decide to marry. It doesn’t affect me. What matters is that King County should be able to issue a marriage license to two consenting adults of any sex. Whether a specific church wants to bless the union is all up to them. I’m sure, being that this is Seattle, that there are plenty of “rainbow” churches.

Two items this week have really demonstrated the limitlessness of how inept and clueless those in the traditional media can be.

Lou Dobbs, in his weekly tirade against all things Mexican, says the following [emphasis mine]:

Calderon can’t have it both ways. He cannot fail his citizens at home and then act as the Great Imperialist Protector of his citizens who are driven by poverty and corruption to enter the United States illegally. The United States provides Mexico with an annual surplus of $65 billion in trade, an estimated $25 billion in remittances from Mexican citizens living and working here illegally, and at least another $25 billion generated by the illegal drug trade across our southern border.

Considering that Lou has previously praised Calderon for how he’s gone after Mexico’s drug lords, I know that he has some awareness that the $25 billion he’s talking about there doesn’t go to the Mexican government, but instead to criminals who are fighting the Mexican government. But somehow, he still uses that figure as if its money that the Calderon government is simply wasting. It’s as ridiculous as criticizing Hamid Karzai’s inability to strengthen the Afghan government by pointing out how much money the Taliban makes from poppies. How this man has a TV show is a complete mystery to me.

The second item has been all over the internet already, but it’s a beauty. The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, in what appears to have been an attempt at humor, writes the following:

A survey of political bloggers showed that 94 percent of them had never been out of the country or read anything other than a Harry Potter book.

Something tells me that if every Washington Post columnist was blindfolded, put in a van, and driven 2 hours west of Washington DC and dropped off, 94 percent of them would think they were in a foreign country.

21st Century Democrats will release a new poll later today, showing Democrat Darcy Burner with a 44% to 39% lead over Republican incumbent Rep. Dave Reichert in Washington’s highly competitive 8th Congressional District. 17% of voters remain undecided.

The robo-poll of 509 registered voters was commissioned by 21st Century Democrats (who endorsed Burner in July) and was conducted on August 28, the day after President George Bush came to Bellevue, WA to raise money for Reichert. 85% of Democrats support Burner and 82% of Republicans support support Reichert, but independents break decidedly toward Burner by a 40% to 24% margin.

President Bush remains exceedingly unpopular in the district, with only 30% of respondents rating his job performance as good or excellent. 96% of Democrats and 83% of independents rate the president’s job performance as fair or poor, along with a substantial 36% of Republicans.

Yes it’s early, and yes this is an internal poll from a partisan ally. But it shows that Burner’s message of fighting to bring the occupation of Iraq to a responsible close is resonating not only with Democrats, but with unaffiliated voters as well.

UPDATE:
21st Century Democrats has issued a statement:

“Darcy’s Burner’s phenomenal success in using the web to reach voters with her message about ending rather than extending the war is clearly resonating with Democrats and Independents in the district,” said Mark Lotwis, executive director of 21st Century Democrats. “These poll results and Sen. Rodney Tom’s decision yesterday to drop out of the primary race and enthusiastically endorse Burner demonstrate that Burner’s courageous and principled leadership on progressive issues is not just the right thing to do, it is the smart thing to do.”

Last night was one of my favorite annual events – our fantasy football draft. Our league started out in 1998 with a bunch of recent college grads who relocated here to work for Boeing. Now, we’re starting up our 10th season. More than half of us are now married, and a few have kids, but we still have one night a year where we revert to shameless bachelorhood, talking trash, drinking cheap beer, and picking the players whose successes or failures our hopes will ride on for the next four months.

In the past, I’ve made pretty elaborate NFL predictions at the beginning of the season, only to debate with myself in November whether I can go back and delete the post. Like fellow Philly-native Goldy, I’m a huge Eagles fan, but I’ve also grown to like the local team here, and really enjoy how much the Seahakws’ recent success has brought some excitement to the games at Qwest Field.

As the Saints and Colts get it all started this evening, what do you expect to see this year? Can the Seahawks make it back to the big game? Were the Saints a fluke last year? Can the Colts win it again? Will Donovan McNabb still be healthy when the Seahawks head into Philly in December? Will Joey Harrington make everyone in Atlanta forget about Michael Vick? Can anything possibly happen this season that’s more embarrassing than what happened to my alma mater last Saturday?

Enjoy the games everyone!

In an unusually frank press conference, King County Councilmember Jane Hague finally apologized for driving drunk and berating law enforcement officers…

The arresting officers “did not deserve the rude and abusive behavior. I was very drunk that night,” said Hague, “Stinking drunk. Plastered. Pie-eyed. Totally shit faced. And a mean drunk too… or so I’m told — I really don’t remember. Apparently, I swore a blue streak at the officers, and there is no excuse for that… except for, you know, that I was drunk. Very, very drunk.”

About a week after her arrest, she said, she underwent an evaluation by an alcohol-treatment facility. After several hours of evaluation, she said, “fortunately, there was no problem that was uncovered. Other than the fact that, well… I’m a drunk.“

At least, that was the general spirit of Hague’s apology. I wasn’t taking notes. Or paying much attention. In fact, I may have been a little drunk, for which I’m truly sorry.

From the HA comment threads:

Stefan Sharkansky says:

The Democrat whom you’ll eventually support for Congress in the 8th District, Rodney Tom, also opposes the state death tax.

07/25/2007 at 11:03 am

[…]

Stefan Sharkansky says:

I don’t care who wins the Democrat primary in this race. But I will have a bit of smug satisfaction in fall 2008 when all of you Darcy fans have to eat sh*t and campaign for a formerly nominal Republican turned nominal Democrat who supports photo ID at the polls, opposes the death tax and supports charter schools. tee-hee.

07/25/2007 at 10:11 pm

[…]

Stefan Sharkansky says:

Yes, but you’ll still be supporting disgruntled former Republican legislator Tommy Rod after he cleans Darcy’s clock in next year’s primary

08/24/2007 at 12:06 am

[…]

Goldy says:

Thanks for the prediction, Stefan. I’ll be sure to quote this back at you when Darcy wins the nomination (or perhaps, when Tom withdraws next spring.)

07/25/2007 at 11:17 am

Consider it done.

Rodney Tom announced this morning that he is withdrawing from the race for the Democratic nomination in Washington’s 8th Congressional District, leaving Darcy Burner as the sole declared Democrat.

“Our fundraising was going great, but Darcy Burner’s campaign has been phenomenal”, Tom said. “Darcy has over 3,200 contributors, an incredible statement to her broad base of support. Reichert’s idea of campaign finance reform is having $10,000 dinners. Democracy was never intended to be limited strictly to millionaires. Clearly, he’s out of touch with the common voter.”

“My purpose from the start was to replace the current Congressman with someone whoactually represents the values of the 8th district. Dave Reichert is completely out of step with the values shared in this district. Darcy Burner’s campaign has proven they have the leadership, strength and momentum to win next November.”

Tom will pay off campaign costs from his own pocket, refund all contributors and urge them to contribute to Burner. In Yiddish, we call that being a mensch.

I don’t mean to gloat, especially considering how gracious Tom has been in withdrawing and backing Burner, but you gotta think that our unprecedented $125,000 netroots fundraiser played a significant role in pushing Tom out of the race. And honestly, that was one of our primary objectives.

As I told Tom shortly after he announced, one can make legitimate arguments for why both he and Burner are a good fit for the district, but I didn’t really see his path toward winning a Democrat primary. I also told him that my aggressive support of Burner was nothing personal, and that we would make up after he got out of the race. I guess that reconciliation starts today.

More thoughts and observations later….

UPDATE:
I talked with Tom earlier this afternoon, and thanked him for his graciousness. He is fully behind Burner, and quite impressed with her grassroots appeal. I think there is no question that Burner’s campaign is stronger for Tom having challenged her.

Former WA-08 congresswoman Jennifer Dunn died suddenly this morning of a pulmonary embolism. She was only 66.

My condolences to her family.

The Seattle Times doesn’t much like the rabble calling bullshit on one of their editorials:

Legislators, a local think-tank intellectual and an Internet fulminator all declared we were flat wrong about SB 5498, and that it did not silently transform anything.

By “Internet fulminator” the Times is of course referring to me, and while I wouldn’t mind being derided as an “intellectual” once in a while, if this is the type of fulmination it takes to coax the Times into engaging in a higher level of discourse on complicated issues of tax policy, well then, fulminate I must.

The Times stands by its take on SB 5498, and I stand by mine. At issue is a vaguely worded memo by a midlevel Department of Revenue staffer that seems to interpret one provision of the bill contrary to the stated legislative intent. The Attorney General’s office has been asked to review the DOR memo, and that is the opinion that will ultimately count. But my dismay with the Times original editorial extends far beyond dueling interpretations of a couple paragraphs of obscure legalese.

Coming just days before a handful of crucial levy votes, the Times original editorial was irresponsible in both tone and timing, attempting to speak authoritatively on an issue that was far from settled and on which they apparently lacked much authority. The Times’ efforts to impugn the motives of legislators were unfounded and uncalled for, its discussion of levy lid lifts muddled and contradictory, and its alarmist headline, “Warning: New taxes will be permanent,” was flat out wrong, regardless of the AG’s pending interpretation. A temporary lid lift raises both levy capacity and taxes; even if the new law makes capacity increases permanent — and the legislators who wrote the law continue to maintain that it does not — the tax increase itself would still expire at the end of the levy. District officials (councilmembers, commissioners, etc) could vote to increase regular levies to the limit of the new capacity, but they would be held accountable to voters for any perceived abuse of their taxing authority.

While I applaud the Times for following my lead and presenting a more in-depth discussion of lid lift basics in their new editorial, they still fail to make an adequate distinction between increasing statutory levy capacity and actually raising taxes, and they totally avoid a conversation about permanent versus temporary lid lifts. And perhaps most importantly, they refuse to address the issue that creates the need for frequent lid lifts in the first place, the totally inadequate and arbitrary 1-percent limit on revenue growth… well below inflation let alone growth in demand for government services.

… the law needs to be restored to what it was. In passing Initiative 747, the voters of Washington imposed a 1 percent limit per year on how much a taxing district can increase its gross collections from existing properties.

I-747’s 1-percent limit was vindictive and unsustainable, and a responsible editorial page would point this out instead of sticking to the meme that initiatives to the people, no matter how stupid, are somehow inviolate. The state constitution does indeed grant special status to initiatives, protecting them from being overturned by an act of the Legislature for a period of two years. But once that two years is up an initiative is the same as any other law — and the only thing more irresponsible than a dumb-ass (and possibly unconstitutional) initiative designed to cripple the ability of local governments to function, would be a timid Legislature refusing to address the problems it created out of fear of an editorial backlash.

Danny Westneat is right on with his column about the worst bench in Seattle:

It doesn’t look like much. Just a two-level bench of fiberglass, with legs made from steel plumbing pipes. It was designed to evoke an era when labor halls and working stiffs ruled Seattle’s Belltown. The art bench juts slightly into the sidewalk along Second Avenue, intervening in the right-angle-orderliness of the urban grid. Its goal, says the city’s art Web site, is to “engage passers-by physically and mentally, as well as visually, by providing places to sit and think.”

Yeah, to help passers-by engage with a Mickey’s Big Mouth, maybe.

Even if the art itself isn’t to blame, what irks neighbors is that because it’s art, it can’t be moved without special permission from a city arts panel.

“We’ve been trying to get rid of it for eight years,” Markovich says. “But it’s part of this Belltown art theme, so the city won’t let it go.”

The theory was that art can help design away crime. Make a place interesting and vibrant, it will be safer. Only it turned out drug dealers and pimps appreciate art, too.

The artist, Kurt Kiefer, wrote on the city’s public-art Web site that he placed that bench and other objects on the Belltown sidewalk as a way to “remember the experiments and improvisations that … continue to define the Denny Regrade.”

Corsi says the city must end this art exhibit, or neighbors will do it for them.

“The bench is going to show up one morning on the mayor’s front lawn,” he said.

One day, that bench will disappear. And no one, and I mean no one, will be sorry that it’s gone. I walk by this bench every day, and it’s always a dump. Belltown has other “art” pieces, like the concrete rubble on 1st Avenue, that ought to get the heave-ho. But lets start with that bench.

City Hall needs to stop inflicting crappy public art on the public.

Apparently, car batteries aren’t supposed to last seven years. Who knew?

Half a day and a hundred dollars later, I now know.