HorsesAss.Org

When I first glanced at the headline of today’s Seattle Times editorial opposing pre-ballot review of Tim Eyman’s stunningly unconstitutional Initiative 960 (“Careful, initiative tampering is dangerous“), I was initially pleased. I had predicted this unselfconscious fit of hypocrisy. And there’s nothing I like better than being right, especially at the Times’ expense.

Indeed, the only surprise in this entirely predictable piece of sanctimonious sophistry, was how genuinely angry I got reading it. I was personally offended. And you should be too.

The editorial was sparked by a lawsuit filed by Futurewise and SEIU 775, seeking to keep I-960 off the ballot because it is outside the scope of the initiative process. The Times argues such pre-ballot review is dangerous:

We believe their lawsuit should fail because it would undermine the rights of the people to petition their government.

The courts have an obligation to rule on the law, not policy or public opinion, and the fact that the Times once again attempts to influence a judicial decision tells you everything you need to know about how deeply flawed our system of electing judges really is. But that’s a subject for another post.

What I find most offensive about this editorial is not the arrogant judicial bullying or the inherent hypocrisy, but the fact that the Times chooses to shamelessly lie to its readers in order to score a cheap rhetorical point.

A few initiatives have been tossed off the ballot. […] The only statewide example was an initiative years ago that tried to change the U.S. Constitution.

That is simply untrue. There was another, more recent example of a statewide initiative tossed off the ballot on a scope challenge, and the Times knows it. In fact, four years ago they editorialized in support of using pre-ballot review to deny the people the right to petition their government.

Of course, I’m referring to I-831, my initiative to officially proclaim Tim Eyman a horse’s ass. The Times wrote:

David Goldstein has accomplished something. The Seattle computer programmer has successfully placed the phrase “horse’s ass” into dozens of family newspapers.

As if I held a fucking gun to their heads. But I digress.

Goldstein calls I-831 an attempt to reform the initiative process by highlighting Eyman’s abuse of it. Goldstein abuses it himself. The sort of law that names a citizen and condemns him by proclamation is called a bill of attainder. It has been forbidden for 200 years. Calling someone an animal part may not strictly be called a bill of attainder, but it leans that way. Taken seriously, a court would have to throw out I-831.

The Times knew that I-831 was tossed out on a scope challenge. It was cited as precedent in the Futurewise/SEIU complaint. The Times editorialized in favor of the scope challenge, and reported on the court’s decision. Just last month I even challenged the Times:

I dare you to prove me wrong. Four years ago you editorialized against a joke initiative, urging the court to bar I-831 from the ballot simply because it offended your delicate sensibilities. Do you have the balls to stand by your defense of pre-ballot scope challenges as a legitimate legal exercise?

They knew that I knew that they knew all about Goldstein v. Gregoire — and they surely must have known that I would publicly excoriate them if they pretended it never happened. And yet, they simply didn’t give a flying fuck.

I have in the past attacked Times editorials for lies of omission, but this was an out and out, deliberate lie of fact. They wrote that the “only statewide example” was the Philadelphia case, when they knew that it was not, and they did so because it was more convenient than acknowledging the truth. It was a rather trivial lie, but a lie nonetheless, and in telling it they disrespected me, and they disrespected their readers.

Not that the rest of the editorial is a paragon of virtue, consistency or logic.

There is a contrary idea that initiatives are junk that somebody wrote on the back of a napkin. They may start that way, but all of them go to the Code Reviser’s office, where they are put into legal language. The ballot title comes from the Attorney General’s office, and is subject to challenge in court.

I-831 went through the Code Reviser’s office, without a single change suggested, and its ridiculously non-descriptive ballot title came out of the Attorney General’s office and a court challenge. Yet according to both the Times and the court, my initiative was perfectly ripe for pre-ballot review.

The Times ridiculed me by name for attempting “to reform the initiative process by highlighting Eyman’s abuse of it,” while the AG spent pages warning against the dangers of using the initiative process merely to send messages. Yet that is exactly what the Times now lauds Eyman for with his wildly unconstitutional I-692:

That is how car tabs were lowered: the people voted to lower them, the court threw the measure out, and the Legislature lowered them anyway. The political message got through.

Surely the Times couldn’t be arguing that some people should get to use the initiative process to send political messages, and some should not?

And while the Times now frets that the lawsuit seeks to expand scope challenges “from a narrow set of voter initiatives” to those that “violate the Constitution in other ways,” that was exactly what they urged the court to do in regards to I-831:

The sort of law that names a citizen and condemns him by proclamation is called a bill of attainder. It has been forbidden for 200 years. Calling someone an animal part may not strictly be called a bill of attainder, but it leans that way. Taken seriously, a court would have to throw out I-831.

Hell, the Times didn’t even argue that I-831 should be tossed out because it was unconstitutional, but simply because “it leans that way.”

(And FYI, I never called Eyman “an animal part,” I called him a fool. Anybody who doesn’t know the difference between metaphor and analogy doesn’t deserve to be writing op-eds for a major American newspaper. And anybody who intentionally blurs the difference doesn’t deserve to be either.)

The Times claims to “defend the right of initiative,” arguing that the lawsuit “would expand the power of political groups to shrink the people’s choices before an election.”

Yeah, right. Because apparently, the only people who should have the right to “shrink the people’s choices before an election” are stick-up-their-ass assistant AGs and the sanctimonious serial liars at the Seattle Times.

Glenn Greenwald’s new book is now available for pre-order. The book is called A Tragic Legacy – How a Good Vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency. Anyone who’s ever read Greenwald’s fantastic blog knows that he’s one of the sharpest critics of the Bush Administration, and this book appears to be aimed right at the heart of why this band of fools has done so much damage to the country. From his post today:

The central purpose of the book is to examine what has happened to the United States for the last six years under the Bush presidency. That is the “Bush legacy” — our national character and national identity have been fundamentally degraded, our moral standing and credibility in the world eroded to previously unthinkable depths, our government engaged in the very behavior which, for decades, we have collectively deplored, our trust in America’s governmental and journalistic institutions reduced virtually to zero, and our country placed on a plainly unsustainable course as a result of the militarized, imperial role we are choosing to play in the world.

At the heart of this process lies a binary moralistic view of the world, one which seeks to define every conflict and political challenge, both foreign and domestic, as a battle of Good versus Evil. The crux of this mindset is the continuous identification of an Enemy, one which embodies Evil and which must be stopped, typically destroyed, at all costs. No competing considerations, no rational arguments, no counter-balancing objectives, not even constraints of reality or resources, can compete with the moral imperative of this mission. The mission of destroying Evil trumps all.

In support of this ideology, they’ve been masters of using fear to rally support for their particular causes, regardless of whether that fear is valid. They used 9/11 to get us to fear Saddam and support the most boneheaded military excursion in U.S. history. They use the fear of drugs to fill our jails with minorities and strip away our 4th Amendment rights. They use a fear of “socialism” to try to dismantle government safety nets. They’ve won elections by using the fear of immigrants and gays to rally a nativist base that identifies with the Good vs. Evil mentality. But it’s finally backfiring as the administration is forced to deal with the nuances of the immigration problem and the high percentages of younger voters who are appalled by homophobia and sick of neverending wars. I’m looking forward to seeing how Greenwald put together this narrative.

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

Well… the guests I wanted fell through, so I’m kinda going for a mish-mash of topics tonight including the lack of adequate mental health care for Iraq War veterans, unsafe drugs being imported from China and India without inspections, the Justice Department’s inability to fill vacant US Attorney positions, and a new wave of slightly weird, fringe terrorism.

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

Our favorite conservative blogger, Jesus’ General, took a little break this weekend and turned over the keys to some of us Frenchmen. Darryl and I have both sent out some letters.

James Vesely has 1500 words in the Seattle Times this morning on the ST2/RTID rail and roads proposal, and as I breathlessly slogged through it, I couldn’t quite figure out exactly where Vesely stood.

Then, in the very last sentence: “Consider the $18.9 billion a sin tax.”

We seem to like sin taxes in Washington state. So… um… I guess that means Vesely supports the proposal?

Don’t get me wrong, Vesely presents a useful discussion of our region’s woeful history of transportation planning (or lack thereof,) but while he criticizes “the way decisions are made about roads and transit” his rather thoughtful internal dialogue is in fact a perfect example of the sort of endless deliberation and second-guessing that has killed regional transportation projects for decades.

A concluding estimate of costs and benefits written by the sages over at Sound Transit poses unanswerable questions framed as answers, but they are not. The report cites as benefits questions such as, “What is the value of a human life saved from a needless traffic accident? What is the value of having the contribution of senior citizens in community activities?” These and other epistolary questions are, again, about the sins of our fathers in doing so little for 30 years.

The ST2/RTID plan is far from perfect, and includes funding for plenty of projects whose justification relies more on politics than smart transportation planning. But should it collapse, how long will it be before the region reaches a consensus on building the transit infrastructure we should have started constructing thirty years ago?

Sins of our fathers? Sure. And on this Father’s Day it is important to remember that we are fathers too, and if we do nothing, future generations will look back just as critically on our inability — or unwillingness — to plan for the future.

Since filing to run as a Democratic candidate for the King County 6th District seat, Richard Pope has been a big hit with both Democrats and Republicans. Wait…I mean, he has gotten big hits from both parties. Goldy recently shared some of the love shown Pope by the King County Democrats.

Last Wednesday, King County Republican Chairman Michael Young, in a weekly e-news update, offered his own moving tribute to Mr. Pope:

I was a bit surprised to see that Republican incumbent County Councilmember in the 6th District, Jane Hague, drew a rather infamous opponent in gadfly [hey!], Richard Pope. Ever since 2002, Pope has been a Republican PCO, only recently discontinuing this status when he didn’t run for reelection in 2006. You can probably understand my bewilderment when he filed as a Democrat against well-liked and longtime King County and national leader, Jane Hague. But then again, his antics over the last decade have proven his willingness to do almost anything for the purpose of self promotion and adulation. I have great disdain for those who cannot pick a side and stay with it. Richard Pope is no friend of the Republican Party and has only succeeded in further diminishing his reputation with both political parties.

(Come on…is it really possible for anyone to “diminishing their reputation” by dropping out of the Republican party? I mean, ‘specially here in Washington state?)

I think the subtext of Michael’s message is, “Thank you, Richard, for your four years of service as a PCO. And thank you for helping us get our finances in order.”

One thing is absolutely clear: Nobody brings people of all political persuasions together in King County as effectively as Richard Pope.

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

7PM: The Stranger Hour: Will Josh kick Will’s rhetorical ass?
The Stranger’s Josh Feit argues that “anyone who fills in the bubble for 50 new miles of light rail … is also filling in the bubble for sprawl and environmental degradation.” Fellow HA blogger Will thinks that makes Josh an uppity urbanite with “too much passion.” Josh joins me for the hour to talk roads, transit, and the local political races.

8PM: Are the righties gonna get sick over Sicko?
I had the privilege of watching a preview of “Sicko” this week, and when I posted some brief observations of Michael Moore’s new documentary (shorter, shorter Goldy: the film is funny, touching and infuriating,) I got just the sort of bile-spewing, anti-reform comment thread I expected. Why does the thought of universal health care make righties so angry? Does wanting the same sort of health care security available in the rest of the industrialized world really make me a dirty, America-hating commie?

9PM: TBA.

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

Josh Feit:

Supporting the $904 million on I-405 expansion in this November’s regional transportation plan (the same plan that Seattle voters must vote for if they also want to expand Sound Transit light rail) GOP King County Council Member Reagan Dunn told the Seattle Times:

The I-405 project, especially, will improve traffic for people who must “drive until you qualify” for affordable suburban homes, said King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn. “The benefits are real. It will help young people; it will help our future,” he said.

His point is: People can’t afford to live (“live” meaning big houses, big yards, two car garages) in the city and so, to provide affordable housing we have to provide roads for them.

Josh must not get off the “Hill” much. “Drive Until You Qualify” is not some GOP trick. It’s exists. My folks bought land in what was rural King County, built a house, and raised two kids. My parents weren’t rich; my mom was working in social services, and my dad worked at the gas company. Even back then, gas company wages didn’t get you a house in Seattle. Or Bellevue. Or lots of other places. If they wanted a safe places to raise children, they had to look further away to unincorporated King County.

More Josh:

It’s a clever bit of demagoguery because it plays to the truth that yes, housing is becoming more and more expensive in Seattle. However, the GOP solution is a Catch-22. The more you drive people out to the ‘burbs, the more you keep Seattle from addressing its housing and transportation crisis, because suburban development takes dollars and developers away from transit and in-fill density.

No matter how much Josh Feit protests, young families are not going to buy “in-fill density” in Seattle. Maybe some will, but they are the exception that proves the rule. You can’t force young families into condos. Not when they can buy a house in Algona for the same price.

You can, however, give people options. Let’s build transit- lots more- in the city and elsewhere. Let’s expand HOV lanes. Let’s spend a little less time telling people what they should want and more time giving them options.

Josh has too much passion for correcting other people’s behavior (except when it comes to smoking indoors, in which case Josh is a flaming libertarian!). If Josh thinks the winning strategy is to lecture suburban folks, and to accuse them of defiling the environment, then he’s got another thing coming. People can only be “lectured to” so much. They can, however, be convinced. Perhaps we should try to convince people instead of just pointing fingers at them.

UPDATE (Goldy):
Josh will be joining me on “The David Goldstein Show” tonight at 7PM on 710-KIRO. Will knew that when he posted this. But I guess Will’s not man enough to come down to the studio and say to Josh’s face. He’s afraid of Josh’s passion.

The rumors from Washington are that Rep. Dave Reichert (WA-8) is absolutely miserable, being a bit player in a fractious, fractured, and demoralized minority party. Perhaps Reichert has aspirations for bigger and better things…

This fall, voters in parts of King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties will vote on the largest transportation package in state history. The measure funds both Sound Transit’s Phase Two and RTID, or Regional Transportation Investment District, and it’s roads improvement package. The taxes involved are diverse. They include MVET, sales taxes, a license fee, tolls, and an optional local gas tax. See the update below, folks.

Though no one likes taxes, these tax increases are small and don’t fall disproportionately on any one group. Unlike the tragically flawed Seattle Monorail Project, people who own cars will not alone bear the burden of funding our transportation investments. During the monorail years, people who owned cars but rarely drove were nailed with big motor vehicle excise taxes. Talk about resentment! Thankfully, the ST2/RTID package won’t be funded on one tax. Now, angst-ridden, car-less, Capitol Hill emo kids will be able to fund transportation improvements.

Every Morrissey record, every jar of pomade, and every half rack of PBR will make a difference.

UPDATE:

I received an update from Julia Patterson’s office:

It looks like you are referencing an old RTID web page in your recent post on the taxes used to finance the Roads and Transit Plan. It does not reflect the proposed projects or taxes included in the Roads and Transit plan that will be before voters this November.

The most up to date website is www.rtid.org and www.roadsandtransit.org.

The tax sources proposed to finance the Roads and Transit plan are a .8% MVET and a .6% sales tax increase. There is no license fee included in the plan, nor a local option gas tax. You will also notice a number of Seattle road projects in the current plan, that are not reflected in the 2004 plan that is discussed on the old web page.

Pardon my goof, folks.

Peter Callaghan of The News Tribune notes that Dwight Pelz sometimes uses baseball analogies when talking politics. And sometimes they’re tortured baseball analogies:

So, Pelz said, having the state’s primary on Feb. 19 is akin to having a ticket to the fifth game of the series – it’s not too late and it’s not too early and it might be just right. Maybe you had to be there. And to think that Republican Party Chairman Luke Esser, not Pelz, is the former sportswriter.

Ahhh…yes, Luke “The Truth” Esser. He began his sports journalism career writing for The Daily, the student newspaper at U-Dub. One of my favorite columns was from 1986, where Luke used an interesting sort of political analogy metaphor allusion in describing a national championship football team:

A prominent associate editor of a great big Seattle paper as much as wrote my name in the loss column after the Husky football team lost to B.Y.U. on national television 31-3. According to Columnist ‘X’ and various B.Y.U. players, some unsavory comments I made about the Cougars the season before (when those polygamists won a national championship there was no way in hell they deserved) were responsible for the 28-point win.

Does this mean Luke isn’t going to be a Mitt Romney supporter?

The King County Democrats have just issued a brief press release, disavowing themselves of HA regular Richard Pope.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

June 15, 2007

The King County Democrats would like to go on record opposing the candidacy of a former Republican PCO who filed as a Democrat in the King County Council District 6 race. He is not a Democrat and we will not embrace him as such. In fact, he denied the Democratic Party the right to do a party file during the week of June 11 – 15, 2007 and we had a candidate ready to file.

We do have a write-in candidate for King County Council District 6 – BRAD LARSSEN, 45th LD Democrats Vice Chair and an elected Democratic PCO in KIR 45-2923. Brad is a committed, dedicated Democrat and will launch a write-in campaign early next week.

BRAD LARSSEN, DEMOCRAT
For King County Council District 6

Susan C. Sheary
KCDCC Chair

A little advice to Susie. You may not consider Richard a Democrat, but for the moment at least, Richard does. So that means you better be awfully careful with your PDC filings this season.

As for the race itself, all I’ll commit to at the moment is to support whoever ultimately wins the Democratic nomination.

Matt Manweller, an associate professor of political science at Central Washington University, recently wrote an editorial in the Seattle Times. There are some interesting insights and some conclusions I agree with, but overall, I think he sees a lot of evidence for what he’s saying that doesn’t really exist. His overall point is that as we stumble about trying to modernize the third world, we’re not understanding that capitalism is the root of liberty, rather than democracy. He posits that if we just help people recognize the benefits of limited government, de-regulation, and free market principles, they will more quickly attain liberty. I agree with that to a point, but I think Manweller is avoiding a much more basic reason why true liberty has been so elusive to much of the third world, especially the Middle East.

He starts off with an interesting observation:

I want to start with a relatively controversial premise. Despite the continual barrage of attacks from the blogging left, the neoconservatives got one core argument correct: Killing Osama bin Laden will do nothing to stop terrorism. If we want to stop terrorism, they correctly argue, we need to bring hope, social and economic mobility, and the rule of law to the places that foster terrorism. The mistake the neocons made was assuming that democracy would foster such an environment in the Middle East.

I agree that just simply killing Osama bin Laden from on high would do little on its own to stop terrorism, but bringing the rule of law to a place like Afghanistan would have certainly benefitted by apprehending bin Laden and putting him on trial. He’s also right that democracy alone can’t transform the Middle East, but I think he ignores how much the Bush Administration agrees with his notions of capitalism and thought that it would be a transformative force in the region. It just failed as well.

Where I think Manweller is really getting it wrong is right here:

The neocons were correct to start with their initial premise: Liberty will nurture an environment hostile to radical Islam. From there, however, they should have done a better job finding the variable that actually creates liberty. If they had looked harder, they would have found capitalism, not democracy.

Although there are always exceptions to the rule, history has shown that capitalism (more so than democracy) does an excellent job of fostering property rights, independent courts, the rule of law, and dispersing power to multiple stakeholders — particularly in countries that have few cultural predispositions toward civil society.

Applying this conclusion to Iraq and the greater Middle East relies on a number of bad assumptions. For one, it assumes that those involved in the invasion and occupation of Iraq didn’t try hard enough to introduce capitalism. That’s crazy. The CPA tried very hard to emulate the kinds of anti-regulatory small government principles that Republicans cherish back home. It just didn’t work. The reason is because Manweller’s underlying assumption is completely wrong. Capitalism, like democracy, is not the root of what eventually leads to liberty. The element that has been missing in Iraq (and other parts of the third world) is a sense of trust in the overall system of justice. Manweller dances around this point here:

Democracy does not cultivate liberty because democracy trades tyranny of the one for tyranny of the 51 percent. It does nothing to limit the power of government, protect the rights of minorities, or establish the rule of law. Democracy ends up looking just as ruthless as a dictatorship because it transfers ultimate and unchecked power from one to anyone who can create a coalition of 51 percent. In such a democracy, the other 49 percent usually pick up a gun.

But how is capitalism the cure for this? Just like democracy, capitalism also doesn’t work if there isn’t a certain level of faith in the system. For many of the poorest nations of the world, the problem isn’t one of too much government regulation over commerce, it’s a matter of too little. People in other countries often fear capitalism because they don’t have faith that their government can provide economic justice within the system. They see capitalism as a way for the rich nations of the world to get richer and they reject it and fend for themselves. Even when this is a misperception (and a lot of times it is), it’s what happens in the real world. The more basic element that leads to liberty is a sense that a government can provide justice for the weak against the powerful. This is difficult, especially when the authorities take power by force and certain subsets of a society feel like outsiders. In Iraq, we believed that it was more important to get the stock exchange running than the court system in order. That was a mistake. The most important tasks were to convince the Iraqis that we could keep them safe and prove that the government represented everyone. Capitalism alone couldn’t accomplish either thing.

Even in the greater Middle East, the idea that small-government capitalism is the missing element from having them achieve liberty is misguided. The Middle East has a long history of engaging in trade and many Arab countries have lax regulations on industry. But they are also very authoritarian when it comes to issues of personal liberty. Saudi Arabia is one of the worst. It’s hard to argue that radical Islamism would disappear in Saudi Arabia if they just stopped regulating industry so much. In fact, an argument can easily be made that the country in the Middle East that we consider to be the most free, Israel, is also the most socialist.

I agree with the concept that Tom Friedman discusses in his latest book – that as the world economy becomes more intertwined that we’ll find it harder and harder to sever those bonds for the sake of war. In that sense, capitalism does play a very big part in promoting liberty and generating opportunity. But those bonds aren’t forged until people both here and elsewhere feel that their economic interests can be protected by those who govern them. Capitalism is not some magical powder that we need to bring to the Middle East and spread over the land to sprout freedom. It is no more the magic elixir than was having the Iraqis dip their fingers in purple ink and vote for a civil war. The Middle East doesn’t need our economic system as much as they need our justice system, so that they can more easily count on their governments to protect their rights. Unfortunately, the current occupants of the White House don’t have a lot of respect for our own justice system, so it was kind of useless to expect that they’d be able to export it over there.

Michael Moore was in Seattle tonight previewing his new documentary Sicko, and I was privileged to be there in the audience. I sat next to Postman, who took copious notes, so I’ll leave it to him to describe Moore and his movie in objective detail. But I did want to briefly pass on my immediate impression.

The film was funny, it was moving, and yes, at times it was uplifting. I laughed out loud throughout, which those who know me well will tell you is a huge compliment indeed. The film also brought tears to my eyes on a number of occasions. (Postman was busy taking notes, so I don’t think he noticed. Good. I wouldn’t want him to see through my fierce facade.)

But as I sat there watching the film, I just found myself getting angrier and angrier and angrier. Angry at our health care industry, our political leaders, my nation… and myself.

Sicko opens June 29th. Watch it.