HorsesAss.Org

I’m filling in again for Frank Shiers tonight on 710-KIRO from 9PM to 1AM. Call in and give me a piece your mind: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).

Oh man was I jealous yesterday to learn that 710-KIRO colleagues Jane Shannon and Tony Miner had scored an interview with embattled U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, but I certainly wasn’t disappointed with the result. Jane and Tony lobbed follow-up after follow-up as Gonzales ducked and dodged. Give a listen to the proper way to conduct an interview, no matter how important or uncooperative the interviewee.

[audio:http://sea.bonnint.net/2007/0323gonzalesARC.mp3]

Of course, Gonzales knew he was going to be asked these questions, and he had no intention of answering them. The very premise of this PR tour — an educational campaign about online sex predators — was cynically designed to give Gonzales the excuse to evade reporters by accusing them of focusing on the politically trivial, while he was out their focusing on “protecting our children.” So it came as no surprise when Gonzales answered every question by rephrasing it.

Jane: Seattle as you know, is home of former U.S. Attorney John McKay. Mr. Gonzales, why was he fired?

Gonzales: Listen, we made a decision at the department as to the appropriate way forward. And there was nothing improper about the decision here. The president of the United States has the authority to hire and remove political appointees for any reason. Obviously the question here is whether or not, were these political appointees removed for improper reasons?

No… the question here is “Why was McKay fired?” I thought Jane made that pretty damn clear.

Gonzales went on to emphasize that it is “reckless and irresponsible to allege that these decisions were based in any way on improper motives,” an allegation Jane never implied. So she tried to ask the question more specifically:

Jane: Was it a matter of McKay’s performance?

Gonzales: Again, the question is whether or not it was improper. It was not.

And again, no… that was not the question.

Perhaps it was a bad phone connection, so this time Miner steps in and puts the same question another way:

Tony: Mr. Attorney General, as a way to diffuse this controversy now, why not just come out and tell the American people exactly why these prosecutors were fired? What did they do?

Gonzales: Well, of course that’s something we’re engaged with in a dialogue with the Congress.

Yeah… a dialogue they want to have behind closed doors, off the record, and not under oath.

Gonzales: Some of the information is already out there. Some of that information is available in the documents.

And some of the information we’ll never know, because White House and DOJ officials refuse to testify in public, on the record and under oath.

Gonzales: But I want to remind your listeners about one thing, whatever those reasons are, and people have subjective views as to whether that person should go or should that person not go, there may be disagreements about that, but the president has the authority and the discretion to make that decision. And whether or not you agree with it, he has the authority and it is OK for him to do so based on my recommendation.

Well, he may have the legal authority, sure… but, um, once again, that was never the question.

Gonzales: What we should all be concerned about is, whether or not were the firings, the removals, based on improper motives, and I am saying to the American people and to your listeners, that the answer to that is no.

Oh. Well, I guess that answers all our questions. Well, at least that answers the one question Gonzales keeps posing to himself. But wait, there’s more…

Gonzales: And it is irresponsible and reckless to continue to insist that this great Department of Justice was involved in something improper.

Hmm. I think I heard that sound bite somewhere before.

So Jane bravely tries one more time:

Jane: Well you can certainly understand some confusion, sir, when in August of last year one of your deputies recommended McKay for federal judgeship and just a month later McKay’s name was put on a list, basically, of prosecutors to be pushed out. This is according to e-mails obtained from your department. What changed in that short period of time?

Gonzales: Listen, the fact that someone may have had an idea or a discussion, that does not necessarily represent the view of the department or represent my view. These U.S. attorney positions … are on the front lines protecting our kids, they’re out there today talking about this ad campaign that I want to talk with your listeners about with respect of what we can do to further protect our kids from predators. And so this an issue that’s very important for me, and we will continue to focus on the work for the American people, and that’s what I’m focused on as Attorney General.

Translation: “I’m not going to answer your question because I’m busy protecting our children from predators. Hmm. Maybe you’re a sex predator yourself. Are ya Jane? Huh, are ya?”

We all knew Gonzales would show up ready to play dodge ball. Kudos to Jane and Tony for continuing to wing ’em at his nuts.

[And a special thanks to David Postman. I was halfway through laboriously transcribing the interview, when I discovered that he had already done most of the work. You can read a full transcript over at Dave’s place.]

[Update: The AP is reporting:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales approved plans to fire several U.S. attorneys in a November meeting, according to documents released Friday that contradict earlier claims that he was not closely involved in the dismissals.

That’s got to hurt! — Darryl]

Here’s the money quote from a Seattle Times article on West Seattle and the Viaduct:

“People want to put the same thing up there because anything new is different, and people are concerned because it would be different,” said Mark Wainwright, president of the Admiral Neighborhood Association.

Is the Viaduct a roadway or a security blanket?

Leave it to working-class Delridge to provide some common sense:

Paul Fischburg, Delridge Neighborhood Association president, said he personally supports a surface road, as long as there’s an “enormous investment in transit.”

“If I could just wave a magic wand, it would be extending light rail in the southwest and northwest through downtown … that would be the best-case scenario,” he said. But “you know this city’s history on mass transit.”

Long term, I’d like to see a train that connects with the current Sound Transit train at SODO. Until then, there’s the E-3 Busway which can be configured to connect with the Spokane Street Viaduct.

Unfortunately, the light rail planning is concerned with Bellevue and Lynnwood at the moment. Seattle residents have no way to mandate additional transit projects through Sound Transit’s governence structure.

Maybe Ed Murray isn’t on the wrong track after all.

Wow. I guess voters aren’t quite as stupid as Karl Rove took them for, after all:

Public allegiance to the Republican Party has plunged since the second year of George W. Bush’s presidency, as attitudes have edged away from some of the conservative values that fueled GOP political dominance for more than a decade, a new survey has found.

The survey, by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for People and the Press, found a “dramatic shift” in political-party identification since 2002, when Republicans and Democrats were at rough parity. Now, half of those surveyed identified with or leaned toward Democrats, while 35 percent aligned with Republicans.

What’s more, the survey found the public attitudes are drifting toward Democrats’ values: Support for government aid to the disadvantaged has grown since the mid-1990s, skepticism about the use of military force has increased and support for traditional family values has edged down.

Rove is reportedly fond of William McKinley, but when it comes to political realignments, I think the Republican presidency George W. Bush will most closely be compared to is that of Herbert Hoover.

UPDATE:
Andrew Sullivan agrees:

It’s a devastating indictment of the Bush-Rove strategy for conservatism and the Republican party. They may have created the most loyally Democratic generation since the New Deal with the under 25s. […] It turns out that Karl Rove has gone a long way toward securing a permanent majority in American politics … for liberals and Democrats. The collapse of a coherent, freedom-loving, reality-based conservatism is surely part of the reason.

• This is the best AWV comment ever written. From my friend Lee:
  

  I have to admit, I haven’t been following this as closely as everyone else, but am I correct in noting that Nick Licata

  a) opposes spending $500 million to keep the Sonics from leaving town

  b) favors spending $3 billion to keep Ballard Oil from leaving town

  Perfect.

• Elizabeth Edwards has cancer, again. I fully expect the right-wing trolls to attack John and Elizabeth for deciding to continue John’s campaign for president. You see, if John were a Republican, he’d leave his wife, just like Newt Gingrich did.
• A few days ago I described right-wingers as being “retards.” I now know that this may have offended some people. I promise never to compare the developmentally disabled to conservatives ever again.
• Newsflash: most people don’t really care about the WA presidential primary controversy. It won’t award any delegates, so let’s cancel it.
• It’s really stunning to see the P-I’s map of Seattle’s March 13th election. It shows which neighborhood voted for and against which option. The heavy “No Rebuild” area looks almost exactly like a map of the 43rd LD.

  That’s Frank’s district.

  (h/t to Josh Feit)

I’ll be filling in for Frank Shiers tonight and tomorrow night on 710-KIRO from 9PM to 1AM. Sen Brian Weinstein will join me at the top of the first hour to talk about SB 5550, the Homeowner’s Warranty Bill. I’ll post more on tonight’s show later.

Could the Seattle Times editorial board be any more dense or dishonest? Well yeah, of course they could. But that sloppy, wet kiss they planted today on Rep. Dave Reichert’s manly punim is one humdinger of a premeditated prevarication.

The Times celebrates Reichert’s “independence” and congratulates him for speaking out in defense of ousted U.S. Attorney John McKay:

Reichert picked a good cause and a good time to push back on a White House that clearly blew it by firing McKay.

No doubt it’s a good cause and a shrewd (if obvious) piece of political maneuvering. But a “good time”…? Um… wouldn’t a better time to have displayed his “conscience-driven independence” have been way back in December… when McKay was fired?

Let’s look at the time line here. We heard nothing but crickets chirping from Reichert when news of McKay’s ouster broke back in December, and when Reichert was asked to submit candidates for the office, McKay’s name was noticeably absent from the list. Wouldn’t that have been the “occasion where sticking his neck out really counts”…?

It is not until months later, with the scandal threatening to take down Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and drag our nation into a constitutional crisis, that Reichert finally sticks up for McKay. And even then, he didn’t actually submit McKay’s name for consideration, or formally request he be reinstated. No, he just made a statement to a reporter.

Not exactly a profile in courage.

The only thing accurate about the Times editorial is the headline: “Reichert reacts.” A real leader — a real independent — would have been proactive in defense of John McKay and our justice system, instead of sticking his finger in the political winds and spitting out a sound bite after the fact.

The DC chatter says that John Edwards is pulling out of the presidential race due to his wife’s health. (She was treated for breast cancer in 2004.) I sure hope not. It would be a shame, on both counts.

They will be holding a press conference at 12 noon (ET). We’ll see.

UPDATE:
From The Politico:

John Edwards is suspending his campaign for President, and may drop out completely, because his wife has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that sickened her in 2004, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, an Edwards friend told The Politico.

“At a minimum he’s going to suspend” the campaign, the source said. “Nobody knows precisely how serious her recurrence is. It’ll be another couple of days before there’s complete clarity.”

“For him right now he has one priority which is her health and the security of the two young children,” said the friend.

As for the campaign, “You don’t shut this machine off completely, but everything will go on hold.”

UPDATE, UPDATE:
The press conference is going on now. Elizabeth Edwards cancer has returned, and has spread to her rib bones. At this stage, once breast cancer has metastasized, it is “treatable but not curable.” Both Edwards and his wife are smiling, and keep expressing their hope.

“The campaign goes on… the campaign goes on strongly.”

Nobody really expects Tom DeLay to actually have written his own book. But you think at least he would have bothered to read it.

I’ve had some fun at Rep. Dave Reichert’s expense in recent posts, mocking our nation’s 419th most powerful congressman for his lack of influence and his ham-fisted recommendations to replace ousted U.S. Attorney John McKay. But it looks like our state’s juniorest congressman could become a much more formidable force in both Washingtons now that Reichert seems to be following the savvy lead of a crack new political advisor: me.

Just last week I advised Reichert that the whole brouhaha was a rare opportunity to combine good policy with political expedience by nominating the eminently qualified John McKay to replace himself. And today we read in the Seattle Times that he’s kinda, sorta doing sorta, kinda that:

Rep. Dave Reichert has come to the defense of fired U.S. Attorney John McKay, whom he praised for pushing the federal government to work more closely with law enforcement in the Seattle area.

“It doesn’t seem to me that John’s being treated fairly,” Reichert, R-Auburn, said Tuesday.

He suggested the Justice Department reinstate McKay as U.S. attorney while the agency and Congress investigate “why they fired him.”

Sure, it’s a couple months late and more than a few dollars short, but it does at least show that somebody on Reichert’s staff is attune to the political danger — and opportunity — inherent in this growing scandal. Reichert’s newfound public skepticism follows that of Rob McKenna, who last week said that President Bush “made a mistake.” But McKay was fired months ago, and both McKenna and Reichert were actively involved in naming his replacement, thus their sudden willingness to speak out in his defense should be viewed in the context of the prior failure to do so.

Perhaps if Reichert and his staff continue reading my column, they can get out in front of the next inevitable scandal. I’m always eager to help.

Update: That’s swell of Reichert to take Goldy’s advice and ask the Justice Department to reinstate McKay as U.S. attorney. Before doing so, I’m sure Reichert listened to all the complaints against McKay, investigated the facts (as he’s inclined to do), and weighed all of the evidence. In the end, it seems Reichert has rejected Stefan Sharkansky’s theories about election fraud and the suggestion that McKay didn’t properly investigate the 2004 election. I’m just sayin’… [—Darryl]

Why isn’t Sound Transit doing any transit planning on the west side of Seattle? The story, I’m told, is that the Seattle Monorail Project folks told ST to stay out of Ballard, West Seattle, and other neighborhoods because that’s where the Green Line was going to be. Now that the Green Line is toast, why doesn’t ST get it’s ass in gear and start serving the whole city?

Yes, yes, I understand that Sound Transit is a regional organization. But folks in Seattle don’t have much choice about who they want to build rail. King County Metro won’t, and the citizen’s initiative route was a disaster with the SMP. Sound Transit is the only game in town.

Sound Transit should do more for the folks who want more. That’s me and other Seattlites. Seattle supports transit in election after election.

My message to Sound Transit: You gotta dance with the one what brung ya’, and that’s Seattle voters.

Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah) has an interesting relationship with “the truth.”

On Monday Rep. Cannon told a NASA scientist that he was not entitled to free speech — that apparently, he did not have the right to truthfully testify as to the conclusions of his taxpayer-funded research, if those conclusions contradicted White House policy.

“Free speech is not a simple thing and is subject to and directed by policy.”

Rep. Cannon is essentially defending the scientific equivalent of the Downingstreet Memo, only in this case it was the scientific research that was “being fixed around the policy.”

Well today Rep. Cannon shot yet another sophistical broadside through the notion of an open and informed public debate, vociferously arguing against issuing subpoenas that would command top White House aides to testify under oath as to their role in and knowledge of the controversial U.S. attorney firings.

“Let’s get to the truth. Let’s do it in a deliberate, even-handed manner, not in a stampede that will only serve to trample the truth and unnecessarily provoke a confrontation with the president.”

Because, of course, nothing tramples the truth more than, um… sworn testimony.

No, the only way we’re really ever going to “get to the truth,” according to Rep. Cannon, is to have Karl Rove testify behind closed doors, without a transcript, and not under oath. For if the truth, as Rep. Cannon implies, is not a simple thing, and is subject to and directed by policy — and if that policy is largely directed by Rove himself — then surely, anything Rove says must be the truth.

That is the sort of “deliberate, even-handed manner” in which Republicans have exercised their oversight authority these past six years. And that is why voters handed control of Congress over to Democrats this past November.

Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah) arguing that taxpayer-funded NASA scientists are not entitled to free speech:

“Free speech is not a simple thing and is subject to and directed by policy.”

Yeah… I guess if the White House pays for the research, it gets to determine the results.

The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight (and every Tuesday), 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E.

I’ll be bringing a special date who I hope to take home and get into bed at a reasonable hour, so come by early if you want to say hello.

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

This morning on KUOW’s Weekday the topic of discussion was “Who Won in Iraq?” Steve Scher’s first guest was Neocon posterchild David Frum. While Frum was discussing Iraqi deaths, he rather casually threw out the statement (at 8:14) that “the Lancet study [of Iraqi mortality] has been pretty thoroughly discredited.”

No, Mr. Frum, it hasn’t.

The Lancet study has been widely misunderstood, but not discredited. There are many batshit crazy neocons like Mr. Frum who wish, in their heart of hearts, that the grim reality uncovered by the Lancet study wasn’t so. But, if wishes were horses, neocons could ride…in a new crusade to world dominance….

The Lancet study [Burnham et al. (2006) Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq:a cross-sectional cluster sample survey, Lancet 368(9545):1421-8.] found that there were 654,965 excess Iraqi deaths (with 95% confidence that the true number falls between 392,979 to 942,636) in the post-invasion period. The study used a standard epidemiological method of cluster sampling—methods that have been used in thousands of studies without controversy.

What is largely misunderstood about the Lancet study is that the estimates reflect a change in all forms of mortality between the pre-invasion period to the post-invasion (July, 2006) period. The excess deaths are mostly violent, but they also include non-violent excess deaths, like those resulting from increases in disease or resulting from destroyed health care infrastructure, etc. Other estimates, like counting media reports of deaths (i.e. the Iraq Body Count project) are not only attempting to measuring a subset of the mortality of the Lancet paper, but the IBC project method vastly underestimates all war-related mortality, just because every fatality is not reported in the Iraqi press. (In other words, because the estimates are substantially biased downward, the IBC body count would never be considered valid scientific estimates of total mortality in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.)

Frum’s statement is just another wingnut talking point that was directly disseminated by George W. Bush the morning the Lancet article was covered by the media. Bush came out swinging: (hear it here) “Six hundred thousand or whatever they guessed at is just, it’s not credible.” And then he defined the administration-approved wingnut talking point that the study was “pretty well discredited.”

Uh-huh. A newly published paper in one of the top scientific and medical journals in the world, “pretty well discredited” within hours of publication? Not!

You see, the opinions of politicians and pundits are irrelevant—they have no bearing on the validity of a scientific study. It is scientific review by the people who are qualified to evaluate the work (you know, people with PhDs in statistics, demography, or epidemiology) that determine whether or not the science is valid.

So far, there has been little scientific controversy over the findings. Because science is a constant game of oneupsmanship, a number of skeptical scientists have probed the methods for potential flaws and biases. Scientists consider this kind of skepticism extremely healthy—no paper is above scrutiny and there are large rewards in the community of science for uncovering fundamental flaws in a published paper. As a result, every now and then flaws are found that lead to the retraction of a paper.

Not so in this case. Despite a number of spirited attempts by qualified scientists to uncover scientific flaws in the paper, nothing of substance has been demonstrated that substantially challenges the scientific findings. If and when flaws in the paper can be demonstrated, the paper will be retracted. But for now, the scientific community considers that the paper’s findings are valid.

I just thought I would help clear up Mr. Frum’s misunderstanding…even if it means kicking the legs out from under his warrior horse.