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

Had a busy holiday visiting with family? Need a drink to recover? Come join us for some hoppy beer and hopped up political schmoozing.

Not in Seattle? Washington liberals will also be drinking tonight in the Tri-Cities, and a full listing of Washington’s 11 Drinking Liberally chapters is available here.

UPDATE:
Oops. Turns out the Montlake Ale House is closed tonight. So no Drinking Liberally tonight. Oh man… I’m getting the DL DT’s.

I’m filling in this week for Dave Ross and Ron Reagan on 710-KIRO, so tune in from 9AM to 1PM and hear me make an ass out of myself. Or maybe I’ll be good. Who knows?

We’re still working out today’s lineup, and I’ll update this post as the day firms up, but here’s what it looks like now:

9AM: Do the super-rich have an inner life? Thomas Goetzl writes in today’s Seattle P-I about the growing gap between the megawealthy and the rest of us, with top executives getting $40 million bonuses, average folk struggle to get by. But then Goetzl goes on to ponder whether all this money actually makes the rich folk any happier. Hmm.

10AM: Can we end homelessness in Seattle?

11AM: Is America ready for its first Moslem congressman? Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) will be sworn in on Jan. 4, and he’ll be swearing his oath on the Koran. Why is this creating such a controversy in a nation that deliberately separates church and state?

12PM: What’s happening in the other Washington? Former TNT political correspondent Ken Vogel is now an investigative reporter for the new Capitol Hill publication The Politico, and he joins us to talk about the upcoming session. What can we expect from the new Democratic majority? Call in and ask Ken.

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

I’m watching a forum on C-Span from February of this year. It’s moderated by Tim Russert and includes former RNC chief Ed Gillespie, Democratic advisor James Carville, and columnists E.J. Dionne and Peggy Noonan.

You can watch it here.

Merry Christmas. Talk amongst yourselves.

It may be Christmas Eve, but it sure as hell won’t be a silent night on “The David Goldstein Show” from 7PM to 10PM tonight on Newsradio 710-KIRO. I don’t have any scheduled guests at the moment, but I’ve got a number of topics I’m just itching to discuss, including:

• Is it time for a state income tax? Republicans complain that Gov. Gregoire’s new budget will result in budget deficits several years out, but our sales tax heavy tax system would produce long term deficits even if we freeze the size of state government. At what point do we face reality and either reform our tax structure (the most regressive in the nation) or just simply accept our destiny as the Alabama of the West?

• Is this a Christian nation, or just a nation of Christians? And either way, why do so many politically prominent Christians feel so comfortable getting so damn pissy about it? Locally, mega-church preacher and Republican activist Pastor Joe Fuiten describes Jews as a bunch of money-grubbing merchants who should thank Jesus for their yuletide profits… and barely anybody bats an eye. Nationally, Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA) warns that if we don’t reform immigration “there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office.” Heaven forfend.

• Who’s afraid of the big bad Rossi? For two years now we’ve been hearing from the WA GOP about how they’re going to get revenge for the 2004 gubernatorial election, which they claim was stolen, but which actually turned out to be an excruciatingly close tie that broke just barely for Gregoire, in turn breaking the hearts of Republicans who came oh-so-close. First it was Ron Sims who was supposed to pay the piper, and I-912 was supposed to be a shot across the bow. Then Mike McGavick was supposed to benefit from a statewide backlash. (Yeah. How’d that work out for you?) And now a new poll shows Gregoire besting Rossi 51 percent to 40 percent. Ouch. So, is Dino Rossi a one hit wonder, or the next governor of Washington?

• An inhabited island off the coast of India has disappeared beneath rising sea levels. Oops.

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

PROGRAMMING NOTE:
I’ll be filling in for Dave Ross and Ron Reagan all week, from 9AM to 1PM.

The Seattle Times thinks that Gov. Chris Gregoire’s budget is too high because it leaves the state with projected budget deficits out into the future.

Well, yeah… but even a budget that merely keeps pace with growth in demand for public services (which roughly tracks growth in personal income) would result in projected budget deficits out into the future. In fact, even if we ratchet government down and only try to have spending keep pace with population growth plus inflation, we’ll still end up with budget deficits projected indefinitely out into the future.

That is because we have an inadequate and unfair tax structure that simply cannot keep pace with our economy, resulting in a structural budget deficit as far as the eye can see.

For too long the state has dealt with this structural deficit by delaying investment in critical infrastructure. The result is a multi-billion dollar backlog in transportation maintenance and construction, and a higher education system that’s fails to accommodate all our state’s college bound students… and at an ever increasing tuition cost. Spending per K-12 student is amongst the lowest in the nation, and Spokane and Seattle area teacher salaries adjusted for local cost of living are near the bottom of the 100 largest metropolitan areas nationwide.

There is a popular fiction — which the Times editorial board fails to refute — that Washington is a high tax state. It is not. In fact, it’s rather middling. And average state and local taxes as a percentage of personal income have dropped steadily since I moved here in 1992. I pay no state income tax, and while my property taxes have more than doubled since I purchased my home in 1997, they are less than half that of a similar house in the Philadelphia suburb in which I was raised.

A tax structure that heavily relies on taxing the sale of goods simply cannot sustain adequate revenue growth in our 21st Century service economy. It has also created the most regressive state and local tax structure in the nation.

If you earn less than $20,000 a year you live in the highest taxed state in the union. If you earn over $200,000 a year you live in one of the lowest. Unless and until we reform our tax structure so as to tax all families more fairly, we will never adequately address our state’s long term structural budget deficit. And we’ll never have a fair and adequate tax structure until we implement an income tax.

Tune in to a special Saturday night edition of “The David Goldstein Show” from 7PM to 10PM tonight on Newsradio 710-KIRO, as I fill-in for Frank Shiers. Subject to change, here are the topics for tonight’s show:

7PM: What have we learned (if anything) from last week’s power outage? Both the Governor and the Seattle City Council have asked for reports from the powers that be, evaluating our emergency response and suggesting what we might do better. Here’s one idea: mandate backup generators at filling stations. Here’s another: do a damn better job maintaining the existing infrastructure. You’ve got a better idea? Give me a call.

8PM: Is it time to legalize pot? At over a billion dollars a year, marijuana is now Washington state’s number two cash crop, just behind, well, you know… apples. At what point do we finally admit that our silly little War on Drugs is going even worse than our war in Iraq? Wouldn’t it make more sense to just legalize pot, regulate it… and tax the hell out of it?

9PM: Is this a Christian nation, or just a nation of Christians? And either way, why do so many politically prominent Christians feel so comfortable getting so damn pissy about it? Locally, mega-church preacher and Republican activist Pastor Joe Fuiten describes Jews as a bunch of money-grubbing merchants who should thank Jesus for their yuletide profits… and barely anybody bats an eye. Nationally, Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA) warns that if we don’t reform immigration “there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office.” Heaven forfend.

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

PROGRAMMING NOTE:
I’ll be on at my usual 7PM to 10PM time tomorrow night, and then filling in for Dave Ross and Ron Reagan all week, from 9AM to 1PM.

Happy Festivus! Here’s Gov. Jim Doyle (D-WI) with his Festivus pole.

• EFFin’ Unsound is fast becoming a must-read, in large part to it’s author Carl Ballard and contributor TheHim. The both of them never let a stupid post at a conservative blog go unmocked. Here’s a recent gem.
• Public financing of judicial races isn’t enough, says Lynn.
  

  My question is, “Why stop there?” The timing is good to jump on public financing for the judicial races given the insane amounts of money that was spent on the three Supreme Court races between the primary and the general elections. I understand that. Plus, Gregoire is cautious by disposition. But what an opportunity to go all the way and ask for public financing of all statewide and legislative races.

  I’m very interested in any blogger who has a credible arguement AGAINST public finance, as I’m sure one exists.

• If you have iTunes, download this now, while it’s still free.
• There’s been excessive spinning over whether or not the Governor actually made a decision regarding the Viaduct. Dan’s satisfied:
  

  The fact is, if she had decided to take it upon herself alone to decide a matter that’s more a Seattle concern than anyone else’s, she would have been lambasted for overstepping her authority and power.

  If she had chosen in favor of a replacement viaduct, she would have pissed off one half of the people, and if she had decided on a tunnel she would have pissed off the other side.

  Count me as one of those that thinks she made the correct decision[…]

  If the replacement option is “financial viable”, and the tunnel option isn’t (according to the Governor herself), why vote between the two? Why present voters an option that isn’t paid for? No, I think the real “punt” the Governor made was by advocating that Seattle vote between two options, only one of which is feasable. As Josh Feit says, this will result in selection of the rebuild option. The Seattle City Council, which lists another Viaduct as its third choice, ought to be sharpening their knives over the Governor’s actions.

• How to replace a popular county executive: Pierce County Edition.

Business is booming:

Washington is among the top five pot-producing states, producing a $1 billion-a-year crop that is second in value only to the state’s famed apple harvest, according to an analysis released this week by a public-policy researcher.

Hmm. If the state legalized and taxed pot at the same rate it taxes non-cigarette tobacco products (75 percent of the retail price,) that would produce about $750 million in revenues a year.

Yeah, yeah… I’m making a lot of bogus assumptions there, but the point is that our embarrassingly ineffective war on drugs has only succeeding in creating a burgeoning black market, costing the state hundreds of millions of dollars in lost tax revenues… not to mention the many millions more spent interdicting, prosecuting and jailing pot offenders. This is money that could not only be spent on important public services like health care and education, but also on treatment and prevention programs that couldn’t possibly be any less effective than our existing efforts at interdiction.

There’s absolutely no way to prevent people from growing, selling and consuming pot. It isn’t just climate or an abundance of hippies that makes WA a prime pot-growing region — hell, Tennessee and Kentucky rank second and third respectively, for a combined $9.4 billion crop that makes WA look like a community pea-patch. So if we can’t stop farmers from growing reefer in the heart of the old Confederacy, how are we going to stop it here in the liberal-tarian Northwest?

Of course, we can’t.

Prohibition just doesn’t work, and at least when it comes to the relatively innocuous social harm caused by marijuana — arguably less harmful than alcohol — it just doesn’t make sense. That’s reality. I’m not saying we should encourage or promote our local pot industry, but it’s far past time we legalize, regulate and tax it.

As for those who continue to attempt to make rational arguments in favor of marijuana prohibition, well… I don’t know what they’re smoking.

DISCLAIMER:
I did occasionally smoke pot during college, but no longer do because it now makes me physically uncomfortable. So I have no dog in this fight.

Because relatives are visiting from New York this week, the cellulose-based legacy media is finding its way into my house. I spotted this interesting introduction to an Op-Ed piece by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann in today’s New York Times:

HERE is the redacted version of a draft Op-Ed article we wrote for The Times, as blacked out by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Publication Review Board after the White House intervened in the normal prepublication review process and demanded substantial deletions. Agency officials told us that they had concluded on their own that the original draft included no classified material, but that they had to bow to the White House.

Indeed, the deleted portions of the original draft reveal no classified material. These passages go into aspects of American-Iranian relations during the Bush administration’s first term that have been publicly discussed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; former Secretary of State Colin Powell; former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage; a former State Department policy planning director, Richard Haass; and a former special envoy to Afghanistan, James Dobbins.

These aspects have been extensively reported in the news media, and one of us, Mr. Leverett, has written about them in The Times and other publications with the explicit permission of the review board. We provided the following citations to the board to demonstrate that all of the material the White House objected to is already in the public domain. Unfortunately, to make sense of much of our Op-Ed article, readers will have to read the citations for themselves.

The term redacted is, of course, a euphemism for censored. The Times printed the Op-Ed with the censored sections of text blacked out.

Why the White House feels so threatened by a series of facts contained in the original draft—all drawn from public sources— that they would engage in such gratuitous censorship is beyond me.

I suppose it could be because the article documents how Bush double-crossed Iran after a period of fruitful cooperation in the early years of the war in Afghanistan. I suppose the White House was a little miffed by being exposed as squandering opportunities to get Iran’s help in fixing the Iraq civil war quagmire. But neither of these reasons justifies government censorship of the press or the free speech rights of the authors. It is clear from numerous sources—the censored Op-Ed, the authors’ statement, the statement of CIA Publication Review Board, and the cited sources—that the Op-Ed contained no classified information or information that compromised national security.

Simply put, the only rationale the White House had for censoring this article was to save the Administration a little embarrassment. And that is outrageous. Every American, regardless of political persuasion, should be alarmed by the realization that the White House even bothers to intervene in newspaper Op-Ed pieces, not to mention that they gratuitously censor embarrassing material.

Gov. Christine Gregoire has ordered the head of WA’s Emergency Management Division to review how the state responded to the recent wind storm and power outage. My guess is that the report will be mixed.

There are of course a lot of things we need to do better, but I’ve got a suggestion that’s pretty straight forward, and would surely ease the crisis in the wake of future disasters: require the installation of backup generators at filling stations.

Residents throughout the Puget Sound region faced an artificial fuel shortage in the days following the wind storm due to power outages that left filling stations unable to pump gas. Had this been a major disaster — like a massive earthquake — this fuel shortage would have greatly magnified the human misery, preventing residents who had lost their homes from leaving the region. And in the end, it’s not much good installing a generator at your home or business if you are unable to purchase the fuel to run it during a prolonged power outage.

Gas stations are a critical part of our transportation and economic infrastructure, especially in such an automobile-centric region. It only makes sense that we attempt to keep them operating during future emergencies.

I’m not sure what the costs would be, but it’s hard to imagine that a backup generator and hookup sufficient to run the pumps would cost much more than a few thousand dollars per station. And it is very hard to argue that a state law mandating and/or heavily incentivizing such installations would not be in the public interest.

I dunno… just seems like common sense to me.

Apparently, it’s A-okay for a politically connected mega-church preacher to say shit like this:

“Even Jewish merchants ought’a be gathered around their cash registers singing ‘what a friend we have in Jesus.'”

Silly me. I guess I should just learn my place.

The Stranger’s Eli Sanders has more on Seattle’s “Jewish Problem.” It’s a must read.

King County Executive Ron Sims supports a public vote on the future of the Alaska Way Viaduct, but apparently thinks it should initially be limited to an up or down vote on the rebuild option alone. Or so says Sims spokesman Sandeep Kaushik, who joined me last night on 710-KIRO to discuss Gov. Chris Gregoire’s proposal to hold a public vote pitting the rebuild vs a tunnel.

At first glance a lot of observers thought the Governor had punted on the Viaduct, but a closer look makes it clear that she’s really made most of the decision, eliminating the retrofit and surface options, and setting up a vote that strongly tilts towards a rebuild. The rebuild is by far the furthest along in the design phase, and comes closest to a fixed price tag, with the Governor promising that the state will pick up any cost overruns. So if the Governor gets her way, Seattle voters will be faced with a choice between the devil we know (a 50-percent wider Viaduct with a fairly fixed cost range to local voters) and the devil we don’t know (a tunnel that could end up looking like anything and eventually cost us $5 billion or more.) I think the Governor is fairly confident that given that choice, voters will choose the rebuild.

Sims however thinks it’s too soon to give up on a “surface-boulevard-plus-transit” option, especially since we haven’t fully explored what such an alternative might look like.

“Governor Gregoire’s announcement today that the public should vote between two Viaduct replacement options – a tunnel or a rebuild – is too limited. While I can support the idea of a public vote, and strongly prefer the tunnel over the rebuild, I disagree with the governor’s call for excluding a surface-boulevard-plus-transit option from public consideration.

“That option, which could potentially open up the waterfront while providing an affordable, environmentally friendly means of moving traffic through the city, has not yet been studied. The surface option that WSDOT briefly examined contained no transit element and bears little resemblance to what surface-transit advocates are proposing.

“If we are going to position Seattle as a vibrant world-class 21st century metropolis, we need to proceed with boldness and vision. We need to think beyond present-day categories, with an eye to the long-term. How we decide on the Viaduct today is a profound test of our commitment to a better, more enlightened future. The right sort of transit-friendly surface proposal could meet that test.”

I agree.

If the Viaduct wasn’t already in place, nobody in their right mind would propose constructing a massive, double-decker freeway through Seattle’s waterfront, and our transportation planners’ inability to envision options beyond a rebuild or a tunnel is a failure of imagination and vision. By all means, let the voters decide if they want a rebuild. But let’s not set up a false choice where a tunnel is the only other option.

So, well… I guess my friends in the local media are just going to give Pastor Joe Fuiten a free ride on this one, huh?

“Even Jewish merchants ought’a be gathered around their cash registers singing ‘what a friend we have in Jesus.'”

The statement, broadcast Sunday on Up Front with Robert Mak, is even worse in context, coming in the wake of Sea-Tac Airport’s Christmas tree fiasco and the torrent of anti-semitic comments it generated on KING-5 TV’s own blog. So it strikes me as more than a little bit insensitive for a prominent public figure to go on the air and say that the Rabbi deserved the condemnation he was getting, that nobody travels for Hannukah anyway, and that Jews are basically a bunch of greedy merchants who should be satisfied enough to just celebrate their profits.

I don’t get it. Seattle has a reputation for political correctness ad absurdum, and yet this clearly insensitive if not downright anti-semitic comment from a major public figure doesn’t even generate a yawn.

Joe Fuiten is the pastor of our region’s largest mega-church, Bothell’s Cedar Park Church. He is also an influential player in Republican Party politics, a close advisor to Mike McGavick during his failed senate campaign, and a publicity hound who actively seeks to interject himself into controversial political and social issues. Fuiten gets air time exactly because he is perceived to be credible.

So I guess in this town, it must be credible to perpetuate anti-Jewish sentiment in pursuit of one’s political agenda. Huh. Who knew?

As a kid, whenever the power was out, I learned how to play the piano. I re-learned during each power outage. We never had a generator, but my father was smart enough to install a wood stove in the center of the first floor of our house. Because of this we were never cold. The house is in rural King County, an area where folks are still a bit tougher than regular suburban people. While outages were never fun, we got through it.

Not everyone has a wood stove. Or a generator. Or, it would seem, a practical understanding of the dangers of carbon monoxide. Folks, if this event had really been serious, we would be in a world of trouble. What if this was an earthquake? I saw one lady walk into a drug store downtown and ask if they had flashlights. They didn’t. Why didn’t she have one? Everyone should. Getting supplies won’t be so easy in a worst-case scenario.

This storm really hurt people in the immigrant community. Of those deaths caused by carbon monoxide, several were immigrants. Perhaps instead of the dull programming on government cable channels, maybe we should be showing programs on the dangers of CO in languages other than English.

People have to stop whining. After listening to Goldy’s show on Sunday, I was irritated by how people have a sense of entitlement during these tough times. There was lots of complaining about Puget Sound Energy and Seattle City Light by folks with little understanding of how the electrical grid works. Amazing. With just a little preparation, you can make life a lot easier on yourself.

You’d all be surprised to find that you can buy a generator for 600 bucks. It’s a small one, but you can run a refrigerator, a heater, and some light bulbs, maybe more. If you own a house, it’s a good investment. Also, you’ll be the neighborhood’s hero as everyone will look to you to save their salmon steaks and buffalo burgers.

A few suggestions:

Listen to this guy. Do this stuff. Don’t panic, complain, or put a generator in your living room. If all else fails and you find yourself in the dark after the next storm, grab a sleeping bag and a duffle. I’ll probably still have power.