HorsesAss.Org

From today’s Seattle Times:

A previously unreleased report shows that when the state’s Alaskan Way Viaduct project team examined a four-lane-tunnel concept in January, the group thought the tunnel could handle the expected traffic.

Since then, the state Department of Transportation (DOT) reversed course, concluding Feb. 13 that the option nicknamed “Tunnel Lite” — in which cars would use the shoulders as exit-only lanes at peak times — would be unsafe. Gov. Christine Gregoire promptly declared she would only support a $2.8 billion six-lane elevated highway.

The State of Washington studied the Hybrid Tunnel January 8th through the 12th, 2007. They looked at several elements of the plan: cost, capacity, the “flex” lane, the tunnel’s shoulders, freight mobility, and more. The Hybrid Tunnel, the City of Seattle’s official choice for replacing the Viaduct, was to be included on the March 13th ballot. The 50 page study produced showed the Hybrid Tunnel to be not only cheaper than the original tunnel proposal but technically feasible in every respect.

But on January 12th, Governor Gregoire stopped the study.

On February 13th, WSDOT flip flopped, and declared the Hybrid Tunnel unsafe.

While I have not favored building a tunnel on the waterfront for some time, this news strikes me as being incredibly unfair and dishonest. WSDOT, including Doug MacDonald and David Dye, appear to have disregarded the facts with which they don’t agree in favor of facts that fit their goals: building an elevated freeway on the waterfront.

These revelations show that the tunnel never got a fair shake, and it gives me every reason to believe that the ‘surface plus transit’ plan will never get the fair shake either.

If a workable $3.4 Billion Hybrid Tunnel is rejected in favor of a Frank Chopp Fantasy Viaduct, the price of which could easily exceed $3.4 Billion, can Gregoire, Chopp, and other legislators honestly say with a straight face that a “rebuild” is any more financially viable than a hybrid tunnel? Gov. Gregoire demanded that the public have a vote on what is built; she said such a decision should be made by Seattle voters. From that moment on, the State of Washington has done everything it can to rig this March 13th vote.

Seattle voters have been told that no matter which way we vote, the “rebuild” is the winner. Legislators have told Seattle voters that they’ll lose funding if they go with the “surface plus transit” option. Speaker Frank Chopp has declared that he’ll ignore the March 13th vote if Seattle chooses a tunnel. It is political theater that is being staged at Seattle’s expense.

In 2004, Governor Gregoire promised, if elected, that she would “blow past the bureaucracy.” She should start now.

Last week I seriously pissed off at least one local journalist by posting two competing ledes side by side, and pointing out how they guide readers in two different directions. Apparently, because the facts in the articles were mostly correct, I was entirely “wrong-headed” and “fatuous” (and perhaps drunk) to suggest that reporters might suffer from the same inherent bias that afflicts the rest of the species.

Of course the larger point missed in all the personal offense taken where none was intended, was the impact that ledes have on the way readers interpret the news, regardless of whether the actual reports are truthful or accurate. Take for example this lede from an AP story that hit the wire today:

OLYMPIA — More than 176,000 names were removed from the state’s voting rolls last year under a new statewide voter database that was developed to help counties find duplicate registrations and dead voters, Secretary of State Sam Reed said today.

The purge of illegal registrations is the result of the new system that has consolidated all 39 separate county systems into one database in January 2006.

Oy.

What will readers take away from this story? That 176,000 “illegal registrations” were purged from the voter roles. That the body of the article tells a different story comes too late — a large number of readers will only remember their first impression, and an even larger number won’t bother to read beyond the opening paragraphs. You put the most important information near the top of the article; that’s Journalism 101.

As the reporter makes clear a few column inches further down, the vast majority of these 176,000 purged registrations were not “illegal.” 39,814 were duplicate registrations, a common occurrence when voters move and fail to notify election officials. 40,105 were deceased voters who had never been removed from the roles. And 91,954 were inactive registrations and voters who requested cancellation or moved to other states.

To say that these were “illegal registrations” would imply that there was some crime committed by the registrants, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Only the 4,500 canceled felon voter registrations could arguably be considered “illegal”, and even then we’ve seen absolutely no evidence that a single felon registered knowing he was violating the law.

These would be more correctly described as “invalid” and “inactive” registrations, and yes, the choice of words is important, as it shapes the way readers perceive the integrity of our elections. A lede like this only reinforces the popular misperception that our elections are corrupt and mismanaged, but as the Spokesman-Review’s Jim Camden points out on his blog, there was virtually zero evidence of voter fraud in Washington state in 2006:

So at most, we had one case of double voting out of 2,107,370 ballots cast. Which is a .00004 percent rate of possible fraud.

Secretary of State Sam Reed said he was “pleasantly surprised” with the results. The state is doing a better job of cleaning up its voter records, but added “we really don’t have a history of voter fraud here.”

Which will come as a huge shock to some of his Republican brethren, who still hope to run Dino Rossi in a gubernatorial grudge match against Chris Gregoire to win the seat that was “stolen” from him. It also might give pause to some of their pollsters, who seem to delight in reporting that people don’t have confidence that the problems of the 2004 elections have been cleared up.

On the eve of the November election, one polling firm said its survey showed that 71 percent of the people lacked confidence there’d be no problems in 2006.

Of course, if people keep insisting there are problems, even if they don’t provide any proof, some folks might just conclude those problems exist.

And some of those folks just might include AP reporters who get the facts right, but the lede wrong.

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

I won’t be there… so all the more reason to show up and talk behind my back.

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

Washingtonians unhappy with our state’s inability or unwillingness to pour new concrete should move to Florida, where the state with our nation’s second most regressive tax structure (we’re number one!) seems intent on spending what money it has paving over the Everglades and its surrounding countryside.

For all but one of the past seven years my daughter and I have taken advantage of the Seattle School District’s mid-Winter break to visit her grandparents in Palm Beach Gardens, and each year I am astonished by the amount of new construction. Fueled by the region’s burgeoning population and the MacArthur Foundation’s divestment of its huge land holding’s there, whole cities seem to sprout into existence overnight, where horse farms, forest and citrus groves once flourished. And feeding this development, like the vascular system of some fast growing tumor, is an ever expanding and widening network of roads and highways.

Eight-lane boulevards now flow where two-lane roads once cut a lonely trail only a few years before. In Wellington at what a decade ago was a quiet country intersection, a huge overpass is being constructed to ease thru-traffic past the now chronic backups. And the West Palm Beach International Airport, preparing for yet another expansion, continues to sprout bypasses and overpasses and underpasses in all directions to handle the steadily increasing traffic.

Inside the retirement community where my mother lives the changes are invisible, but on each annual visit, driving out the front gate for the first time is like stepping off an elevator onto a random floor — I never know what I might find on the other side. Possessing neither a sense of direction nor a memory for street names, I would be totally lost attempting to navigate the streets on my own. Landmarks, visual cues, even the footprint of the roadways themselves are as fleeting as our few days of sunny respite from Seattle’s usual Winter dreariness.

This is a region of endless sprawl, aided and abetted by a government that seems to be built on the Democratic principle of “one car, one vote.” New roads spawn new developments, more development generates more traffic, and the government responds by constructing new and wider roads. In my handful of car trips since arriving late Saturday night I must have travelled on at least a half-dozen roads with capacity matching or exceeding the Alaska Way Viaduct — many in the process of being expanded.

And yet, the traffic continues to grow worse.

Of course, the Puget Sound region has traffic problems of its own, but to those who would demand a Department of Transportation as accommodating as that in South Florida, I suggest you visit and closely consider the consequences. If the Southcenter Mall stretched for mile upon mile, dotted with palm trees and the occasional golf course or gated community, that would approximate the main thoroughfares that run through a region recently rich with wildlife and natural splendor. With a few notable exceptions, local developers have literally made a mockery of rational urban planning, building sprawling, new retail complexes with names like “Downtown” and “Midtown” — appellations meant to evoke a mental image of the Northeast cities many of the aging transplants left behind, while totally rejecting the principles of density that enable these cities to function as vibrant urban cores. “Downtown Palm Beach Gardens” is a mall like any other mall, with a Cheesecake Factory, a 16-screen cineplex, $6.00 gourmet ice cream cones and ample parking. It is not however, as its name implies, anything resembling a city.

I spent the first 29 years of my life in Philadelphia and New York City, never owning my own car, and never contemplating buying one. It was a shock moving to Seattle, where even living downtown, regular access to a car is a virtual necessity, especially for families with children. But if you think the Puget Sound region is auto-centric, you ain’t seen nothing compared to this section of South Florida. As the local population explodes, the region is building a sprawling infrastructure that will be impossible to efficiently serve via mass transit should the need or desire ever arise. And it will. As the world hits peak oil production over the next twenty years while struggling to limit carbon emissions, the cost of fueling our cars will surely quadruple or more in real dollars. I wonder how this region, so reliant on automobiles and air conditioning, will continue to prosper in an age of energy scarcity and rising temperatures?

It is no doubt endlessly frustrating — and more than a bit silly — that Seattle should require years of public debate to determine the fate of a single two-mile stretch of roadway, and still not come to a political consensus, but I’m beginning to believe our infamously wishy-washy “Seattle Way” may be as much a blessing as it is a curse. While the governor, a relative newcomer to the debate, has apparently decided that the only possible replacement for an aging, 1950’s-era elevated freeway is a taller, wider elevated freeway through our downtown waterfront, the years of hemming and hawing and political infighting have afforded the local civic leaders and elected officials most familiar with the project ample time to reconsider the basic assumptions that guide our transportation planning.

Critics of light rail and other mass transit initiatives like to dismiss it as social engineering — Soviet-style central planning at its worst. But road-building is also social engineering, subsidizing driving and incentivizing sprawl. In a growing region like ours, new road capacity can never alleviate traffic, it can only just barely meet our seemingly infinite and unfilled, pent-up demand, while at the same time reducing the public support and political will necessary to build the type of mass transit systems that all major cities depend on.

With climate change threatening to reduce our region’s hydro capacity and rising fuel prices making our auto-centric lifestyle less and less affordable, isn’t it time to learn some lessons from our original namesake? Seattle’s first settlers optimistically dubbed their new city “Alki New York” — New York by-and-by. A century and a half later, thanks to its density and unsurpassed transit system, New York is the most energy efficient city in the nation, while environmentally self-conscious Seattle still struggles to match words with deeds.

Actor Dean Malissa portrays our nation’s first president. George W. Bush portrays our 43rd.

Noemie over at Washblog has more on Luke Esser and his two bosses. Goldy first wrote about this growing scandal here.

UPDATE:
Noemie does a great job laying out the issue at hand:

The documentation … does not set this matter to rest, but instead demonstrates need for further investigation. Apparently, Mr. Esser failed to apply in advance for leave from his AGO position to conduct WA-GOP business on 1/29/07. His leave request for the hours he worked on that day is dated 2/16/07, the day I called to ask for the documentation.

Mr. McKenna, Washington’s top legal officer, and Mr. Esser, who represented that office to the public, hold a uniquely high level of responsibility to strictly follow state’s ethics laws — and to appear to the public to strictly follow these laws — both in their letter and their intent.

It may only be a perception of impropriety, but even that should be avoided — though of course, there is no perception of impropriety if the media refuses to inform the public about it. At the risk of pissing off my journalist friends, I’d just like to suggest that had this been a close aide to Gov. Gregoire, on the state payroll, elected party chair, and doing party work during official state business hours, the story might not be totally ignored. In fact, the self-righteous Seattle Times editorial pretty much writes itself.

I’m just sayin’.

[– Goldy]

UPDATE, UPDATE:
David Postman of the Seattle Times followed up on Noemie’s post today, and reports that Esser filed his “leave slip” late. Noemie thanks Postman for his efforts, but points out that Esser didn’t bother to fill out a leave slip until after he was contacted by Noemie on Feb. 16. Huh. And yet…

So I called Esser and asked him if he took Monday off, and he said no, but that he did take off some “personal hours” that day to conduct party business. Hmm. I have no reason to doubt Esser, and assume that if somebody were to request documentation there must be some kind of time card or something… dated prior to our 11AM, 2/1/2007 conversation.

In fact, Esser didn’t bother to fill out his leave slip until two weeks later, when Noemie finally requested official documentation. I wonder, if not for Noemie’s inquiry, whether Esser would have put in a leave slip at all?

Postman also reports that Esser was never on the WSRP payroll while still employed by the AG’s office, so we can’t really accuse him of double dipping. But I don’t really think that’s the main point. The fact is, the chair of a state party should never have been on the state payroll for even a moment. Esser should have resigned immediately. Surely, the AG’s office could have functioned without its “Outreach Director” — I mean, it’s not like Esser was a real attorney or anything.

Still, thanks Dave, for following up.

[– Goldy]

(Hat tip: Aritist Dog Boy)

I wonder when the Joel “Global Warming Is A Problem” Connelly is going to meet the Joel “Let’s Build A New Freeway On The Waterfront” Connelly.

Just askin’.

I ALMOST FORGOT…

Joel’s a friend of the blog, so consider this post just friendly needling.

JOEL RESPONDS:

“When you unleash an additional 50,000 cars a day onto Seattle city streets, and onto I-5, they’re going to spend hours and hours a day belching pollutants into the atmosphere.
How do you square your position with its potential impact on Seattle’s airshed . . . and on Pioneer Square, the first Seattle neighborhood liberated from automobile culture.
‘Suggest you might devote some critical examination to the governor’s talk-it-over position on global warming rather than taking shots at those who have consistently urged action.”

This is what Frank Chopp would like to see on your waterfront. He’s calling up architects, soliciting drawings, gathering ideas, all with one purpose: to convince Seattle voters that a brand-new, gigantic freeway on the waterfront can be good urban design. From what I’ve seen, he’s got his work cut out for him. The sketch above is not my creation; its an honest-to-God drawing by WA-DOT of what they call Option 9.

And it’s Frank’s baby. Too bad its an ugly baby.

The structure goes sidewalk to sidewalk, with Alaskan Way (the surface street you see on the waterfront) put underneath the new viaduct. The entire space on the waterfront is swallowed by concrete. From Ivar’s front door, it’s 25 feet to the concrete wall of the viaduct. This is perhaps the most drastic change in Option 9.

Although it isn’t clear in the drawing, the new viaduct will be fitted with sound barriers on both sides. What does this mean? The view cherished by so many drivers will be history. It’s perhaps the most-liked element of the current structure. The “people’s” view while driving on the thing will be replaced with…

…a new park, or at least that’s the plan. I’m a bit skeptical. The late Jane Jacobs, who had a lot to say about cities, was never a big fan of parks. That is, there is a history of cities building parks that become magnets for crime. Seattle has parks that work, and those that don’t. An expansive lid over a freeway that’s only accessible by skybridge does not seem like the kind of park that will be successful over time.

James Vesely wrote this in the Sunday Times:

In the next few days, there’ll be another bear in the woods. Perhaps a new viaduct design will emerge that will be pleasing to the eye, if not to the mayor.

I bet James has the inside track from the pro-rebuild folks (the Seattle Times is staunchly pro-rebuild). I betcha the new viaduct design will look a lot like the drawing above. WA-DOT and the folks in Olympia will do anything to manipulate voters in the days before the election. They said they’ll pull funding for the ‘surface plus transit’, and they said they won’t fund a tunnel no matter what. They want a ‘re-build’, and they’ll do whatever they can to secure it.

How long will Seattle voters allow themselves to be jerked around? How long will Seattle pols be content to be bullied by committee chairs in Olympia? Will Seattle’s waterfront be subjected to Frank Chopp’s hideous Option 9?

A backlash is brewing in Coffee Town.

The hobos recognize you.

Downtown’s homeless and vagrant population like to hit up tourists for small change. And the business crowd, and party-goers too. Sometimes, they hit up the locals. Like me!

My latest exchange with a hobo went like this:

Hobo to tourists: Hey, got any spare change?

Tourists: (No response)

Hobo to me: Hey got any-

Me: No, sorry.

Hobo: Oh hey, I know you, that’s cool… (continues muttering to himself)

Some downtown hobos don’t even ask me for change anymore. As a downtown resident, I’d like to think I’ve earned it. It took a few years, but it’s an honor nonetheless.

David Horsey has a commentary in Sunday’s Seattle PI on Rep. Jim McDermott, Rep. Jay Inslee, and Rep. Dave Reichert. At one point, while interviewing Reichert, Horsey gives us a telling glimpse into the eyes and soul of Sheriff Hairspray:

[Reichert] described a meeting with anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan during which one of her companions pointedly asked Reichert how many more soldiers’ lives he was willing to sacrifice to the Iraq War.

Recreating the moment, Reichert trained his hardest gaze on me as if I was that upstart activist and said, “That question offends me. Do you know how many partners I’ve lost as a cop?”

What the hell? What does the number of police partners Reichert lost have to do with soldiers dying in Iraq? And where is the offence in a concerned citizen pointing out that (1) soldiers are dying in Iraq and (2) as a Congressman, Reichert shares in the oversight responsibility, and consequences, for our actions in Iraq?

I have several theories about Reichert’s inappropriate (if not bizarre) response. I’ll call them the stupid theory, the fiction theory and the unmanaged anger theory.

The stupid theory is that Riechert simply fucking up his own talking point. He meant to use a talking point along the lines of this one from his DaveReichertForCongress web site:

We may disagree on the timeframe of that, but as a police officer who has lost friends and partners in the line of duty, I do understand how difficult it is for society to make sacrifices in the name of freedom and keeping Americans safe.

Nothing in the written version of the talking point would suggest that Reichert could be offended, per se, by the peace activist’s question. If the web site properly captures the position, Reichert should have sympathetically disagreed—something like this: “I understand your concern about more soldiers losing their life in the line of duty–I’ve experienced the tragedy of losing law enforcement partners. Still, I disagree with you about the best way to achieve a free and safe America in a way that minimizes such sacrifices.” Instead, Reichert forgot or misunderstood the proper response, and invoked faux outrage instead of sympathy.

The fiction theory is that the event didn’t really happen this way at all. Rather, the details given to Horsey constituted a “creative intrepertation” of a more mundane exchange. The purpose was simply to use the interview with Horsey as another opportunity to shape his image as playing the staring role in “Tough Guy Sheriff Goes to Washington.” We’ve seen this before from Reichert…you know, like the bus driver flipping the bird at Bush incident where Reichert bragged before a group of Republicans only to change the story to something more mundane when the “tough guy” version looked damaging.

The unmanaged anger theory is that Reichert really was insulted and outraged, and, therefore, responded irrationally. Reichert is widely known for being sensitive to criticism, being overly defensive when his failures are brought to light, and having a short fuse. In the face of such “insolence,” I can imagine Reichert reacting with a mixture of anger and defensiveness that clouded is thinking, resulting in a response that was a non sequitur. How dare they blame him for deaths in the Iraq war!

We saw this behavior in 2004 when Reichert walked out on a debate and refused future debates with his Republican primary challengers. We saw a little bit of this anger during the 2006 campaign season in his debate with Darcy Burner.

While still King County Sheriff, Reichert sometimes displayed this type of behavior. For example, after an African American man killed a white officer (Deputy Richard Herzog) with his own gun in 2002, Reichert made a series of bizarre media statements. As Geov Parrish put it:

King County Sheriff Dave Reichert bristled last week after the fatal shooting of deputy Richard Herzog—a white officer, allegedly “executed” by a naked, unarmed African-American man with the officer’s own gun. Here’s Reichert: “I’m just going to be blunt about it and get to the point: Race isn’t important. . . . We’re sick and tired of being labeled as racist.”

In other words, Reichert equated discussing race with calling people racists. And then he shut down all discussion.

The sheriff has since backpedaled….

At the time, I was struck by Reichert’s repeated use of the word “execution” to describe the actions of Herzog’s killer. The naked, stoned-out-of-his-gord killer shot Herzog during a struggle after Herzog’s gun fell out of its holster…not particularly the circumstances that go with the word “execution.”

Reichert’s lashing out at the media came on the heals of criticism after Seattle Police shot and killed Aaron Roberts, an African American man. Reichert’s angry, illogical statements prompted the Seattle Times (22 June 2002) to editoralize…

King County Sheriff Dave Reichert irresponsibly lobbed his own grenade when he rushed past an official denunciation of the killing to rail against African- American leaders who have frequently charged law enforcement with using excessive force against minorities. The sheriff’s emotions later cooled to those more befitting a leader, but it was too late. A debate has begun whether the region has seen its first incident of reverse racial profiling: the executing of white police officers by black men….

During Reichert’s entire career as a cop, only five King County officers died in the line of duty. Herzog’s death was the only non-accidental death of an officer in the line of duty under Reichert’s administration. (The only other death was of Deputy Mark W. Brown who died in a motorcycle accident in 1999.)

No doubt, Reichert took Herzog’s death hard. But there was more to it—the King County Sheriff’s office (i.e. Riechert) was taking some heat in Herzog’s death. His death was avoidable. Herzog was killed with his own handgun, in part, because he was allowed to carry a holster not designed for his weapon. The result was that his weapon fell out of the holster during the struggle. Later the state Department of Labor and Industries investigated the incident and fined the King County Sheriff’s Office for safety violations. The root of the problem was mismanagement and a failure to follow established procedure (Seattle Times Sep 9, 2005, B3). (Reichert appealed the Labor and Industries decision and lost.)

Reichert’s statements to the media following Herzog’s death were made under a cocktail of sorrow, some guilt, and denial. And he reacted angrily and irrationally.

My hunch is that Reichert’s reaction to the peace activist involved that same cocktail of sorrow, guilt, and denial. By pointing out the Congressman’s shared responsibility for the death of American soldiers in Iraq, the activist triggered the same kind of angry, illogical, and embarrassingly inappropriate retort.

A new wrinkle in the Viaduct story:

If the viaduct is torn down and replaced with surface streets and transit, the state might contribute just over $1 billion for construction work, said Senate Transportation Chairwoman Mary Margaret Haugen, D-Camano Island.

That’s less than half of what the state has pledged for replacing the viaduct with another elevated highway, and could leave the city on the hook for nearly $1 billion to complete a surface-street project, based on some projections.

Amazing. I have no idea where Sen. Haugen gets $1 billion for the ‘surface plus transit’ option as opposed to over $2 billion for the Mistake On The Bay. The money is there for ‘surface’, it’s just a matter of greedy suburban Democrats keeping their paws off Seattle’s infrastructure money appropriating it.

What a cynical, arrogant move by Olympia lawmakers. First they demand we vote on two options (one of which they say they won’t accept) and then they pull the purse strings in a show of power.

“Build what we want, or no money.”

Voters may well approve the Viaduct rebuild, but they may not. In fact, I hope Seattle citizens send a double barreled message to the Olympia by voting “No, and Hell No.”

I’m heading off to Florida for a week to take my daughter to visit her grandma. Expect light posting from me, but maybe Darryl, Will and Geov will pick up some of the slack.

Likewise, I won’t be on 710-KIRO this weekend. Frank Shiers will be filling in for me tonight, and Turi Ryder will be filling in on Sunday.

As I’ve stated before, I tend to agree that a tunnel option for replacing the Alaska Way Viaduct is politically dead… but I can’t help but thinking. The state rejected Mayor Nickels’ recent four-lane hybrid tunnel-lite proposal, arguing that using the shoulders as exit lanes during peak traffic would be unsafe. So… why not just eliminate the exits altogether?

Stick with me here.

We keep hearing that 99 is a vital North/South thruway, and thus the governor insists that she won’t support any option that reduces capacity. Yet if the Viaduct is bounded by a surface street to the South and the four-lane Battery St. tunnel to the North, then obviously much of the traffic must be local.

So instead of talking about a “viaduct” why not consider a “bypass” — a two-mile, four-lane tunnel through the downtown waterfront that eliminates the northbound exits and southbound entrances at Seneca and Western? This way all that vital N/S traffic can continue to flow N/S, while local traffic is diverted to improved surface streets.

Without the need for extra wide shoulders, or the cost of building four ramps, the “hybrid bypass” solution would be even cheaper than Nickels’ tunnel-lite, while ensuring that thru-traffic travels along the waterfront faster than it does today. And local drivers that would have used the existing exits would be served by improved surface streets and transit options, unburdened by the need to accommodate existing N/S thru-traffic.

Yeah, maybe I’m just talking out of my ass. But one of things that has always annoyed me about the current debate is the total lack of imagination. Surface-plus-transit option? That’s just for hippy-dippy whackos. A “gold-plated” tunnel? It’s an unaffordable gift to developers. We’ve had a double-decker freeway running through our waterfront since the earth was created, and if it’s good enough for God then it’s good enough for me, by golly. Or at least, that seems to have been the intellectual process.

Ridicule me, a man with no engineering or traffic expertise, for suggesting a hybrid bypass. But at least I’m trying to think creatively.

Two months after John McKay was fired as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Washington, the reason for his dismissal remains a mystery.

One of the most persistent rumors in Seattle legal circles is that the Justice Department forced McKay, a Republican, to resign to appease Washington state Republicans angry over the 2004 governor’s race. Some believe McKay’s dismissal was retribution for his failure to convene a federal grand jury to investigate allegations of voter fraud in the race.

Ohmygod… “persistent rumors.” Of course, the occasional time I base a post on rumors, I’m slapped down in the comment thread for being unserious, uncredible and irresponsible. But who am I (a wrong-headed, fatuous drunk) to question the journalistic rigor of the Seattle Times?

Truth is, that is the scuttlebutt buzzing through Republican circles, and it certainly is worthy of reporting in a major daily, for while I think it more likely the product of wishful thinking than actual fact, the rumor does provide a window into the mean-spirited, vindictive and Machiavellian mindset that permeates much of the GOP establishment and its right-wing base. Remember, this is a party that took its rhetorical cues from the likes of Evergreen Freedom Foundation president and aspiring-fascist Bob Williams (who throughout the controversy emphatically called for King County Elections Director Dean Logan to be summarily jailed,) and our good friend Stefan over at (un)Sound Politics, who when he wasn’t foisting his paranoid fantasies on an insufficiently critical press corps, chose to fan the flames of inter-party hatred by repeatedly comparing KC Executive Ron Sims to brutal African dictator Robert Mugabe. (A comparison, I suppose, that had nothing to do with their mutual skin color.)

Given the vehemence in which some in the GOP would brand all Democrats as crooks, thieves and enemies of the state, it becomes difficult to discern insincerity from sheer nuttiness. Take, for example Building Industry Association of Washington executive vice president Tom McCabe, whose organization financed and conducted much of the crackerjack detective work that misidentified hundreds of citizens as illegal felon voters, and then offered no apology for their victims’ public humiliation.

In a column titled “Good Riddance,” McCabe said McKay “had a disastrous six years as U.S. Attorney. Two years ago, he steadfastly refused to investigate voter fraud despite overwhelming evidence.” McCabe also said he had “urged the President to fire McKay.”

Overwhelming evidence of voter fraud, huh?

We had two recounts under extraordinary public scrutiny, five months of hearings and depositions, and a two-week trial before a cherry-picked judge in a Republican county… that ended with all allegations of fraud being “dismissed with prejudice.”

Overwhelming evidence? Republican Secretary of State Sam Reed repeatedly vouched for the integrity of the election and election officials, while KC’s own Republican County Prosecutor Norm Maleng not only failed to find enough evidence to launch a local investigation, he had his own representative on the Canvassing Board vote to certify the election results.

We had a gubernatorial election that ended in a statistical tie, but which Chris Gregoire won fair and square under the bipartisanly adopted statutes that govern elections and election disputes. But some Republicans were willing to take the governor’s mansion by hook or by crook, and when McKay, Reed and Maleng refused to abuse the power of their offices to steal this election on behalf of Dino Rossi and his corporatist patrons, McCabe, Williams and others set out to purge their party of the traitors, and destroy both their reputations and careers.

The celebratory rumors surrounding McKay’s departure — unsubstantiated as they are — present an unsavory image of a party seeking solace in retribution. And the propensity for threatening opponents and heretics alike with criminal, civil and vigilante justice provides a revealing glimpse into the psyche of a party whose Manichean world view quickly devolves even the most stolid policy debate into a battle between good vs. evil. I suppose it might have been merely a feeble attempt at a jest when during the heat of the gubernatorial election controversy my good friend Stefan twice accused me via email of “abetting a government cover-up,” but his use of a legalistic term clearly implied wishful thinking, if not an actual threat, that I should be criminally punished for exercising free speech. That is the sort of vengeful spirit that welcomes McKay’s departure.

Was McKay really fired for refusing to misuse his office to pursue trumped up allegations of election fraud? I’ve got no idea. But the very fact that so many local Republicans clearly wish the rumor to be true is both disturbing and revealing.