HorsesAss.Org

A year ago yesterday, based on a tip from a regular reader, I posted a little biographical tidbit about former FEMA Director Mike Brown, revealing that during the decade prior to joining the agency, the man disastrously responsible for directing federal relief operations in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina had sharpened his emergency management skills as the “Judges and Stewards Commissioner” of the International Arabian Horse Association… a position from which he was forced to resign.

Up until that point my impact as a blogger, activist and political crackpot had largely been local, but the Arabian Horse story quickly spread through the national blogs, moved national headlines, and served to frame cronyism as a central theme in the national debate over the Bush administration’s failed response. The story also drove national attention to HA, both through hundreds of links to the original post, and through Brownie’s own Congressional testimony in which he directly blamed “HorseAss.org” by name for both his own downfall, and oddly, FEMA’s inability to respond to the crisis.

As a result of this flurry of attention, HA’s site traffic more than doubled from about 35,000 unique visits during the doldrums of August to over 75,000 visits in September of 2005, largely due to several large spikes in traffic, as many as 8000 visits in a single day. It occurred to me at the time that I could be witnessing the peak of my notoriety, and that HA might never see such traffic levels again.

Well… it’s been a pretty interesting year, a year in which I’m pleased and surprised to report that HA’s traffic has more than doubled from August to August — just shy of matching the level of last year’s extraordinary September, only this time without any one-time bumps or spikes. Sometime over the past few weeks HA recorded it’s 1 millionth visitor since joining Site Meter a little less than two years ago, and earlier this Summer HA served its 2 millionth page view.

Not bad considering I thought my original goal of eventually attracting a couple hundred regular readers was overly ambitious.

I devote an enormous amount of time and energy to HA, with virtually no financial remuneration, but the active participation of my readers makes it the most personally gratifying “job” I have ever had. It is also my steadily growing audience — the HA community — that helps make me relevant in the eyes of the traditional press, enabling me to have what impact I have on shaping local political coverage.

So while I am of course thankful to have characters like Tim Eyman, Mike Brown, David Irons and Mike?™ McGavick around to help make blogging easier, it is you, my readers, to whom I owe the biggest debt of gratitude. It’s always fun to see a big spike in traffic, but it’s much more satisfying to see readers come back for more.

So… thanks.

I’ve had my fun teasing insurance industry lobbyist cum executive cum candidate Mike!™ McGavick about the exclamation point typographically appended to his first name, but his recent fender-benders with the truth suggest that we’ve all been using the wrong punctuation. Indeed, now that the actual police report has been shown to contradict his supposedly “courageous,” “candid” and “Socratic” confession of a 1993 DUI, Mike?™ and his clever campaign consultants seem to be creating more questions than they answer.

There’s a lesson to be learned from Mike?™’s less-than-candid candor: never lie to reporters. Never. Never ever. It just plain pisses them off. And once you’ve blown your credibility, it’s hard as hell to earn it back.

(And oh yeah… lying is just plain wrong.)

At first Mike?™’s preemptive mea culpa seemed to have achieved it’s desired end, airing the worst of his dirty laundry in the dead of August while earning the candidate brownie points for candor. The initial press coverage even prompted the fawning folks over at (un)Sound Politics to kvell that “McGavick’s civility theme is paying dividends while others keep playing politics as usual.”

Uh-huh.

The problem is, it was Mike?™ who was soon proven to be playing politics as usual with the airing of a radio ad that deliberately misrepresented Sen. Maria Cantwell’s position on the sales-tax deduction. Perhaps another candidate in another campaign may have gotten away with such all too typical tactics, but not “Mr. Civility” — and especially not after making such a show out of public regretting a similarly deceptive political ad he ran some 18 years ago.

This new misleading ad was swiftly and roundly condemned in the press, with even the presumptively pro-McGavick Seattle Times editorial board advising the candidate to “pull the ad” in no uncertain terms, calling it “an age-old political trick” and a “politician’s version of highway robbery.” My guess is that many journalists really wanted to believe Mike?™’s civility schtick, and that the Times editorial board’s disappointment is deep and genuine.

But perhaps no other local journalist’s reaction to last week’s events more clearly illustrates the credibility bridge Mike?™ has built and burned than that of Seattle P-I columnist Robert Jamieson, who all but swooned over McGavick’s “refreshing candor” in last Saturday’s column, only to eat his words in today’s:

A week ago, in this column, I praised him for coming clean about a 1993 DUI in Montgomery County, Md.

McGavick’s gesture, I wrote, showed that he had examined his life and talked with candor about personal successes and failures.

Boy, was I mistaken.

Who could have known that McGavick’s pre-emptive confession would blast open a Pandora’s box?

In the incident from 13 years ago, McGavick said he was driving when he “cut a yellow light” too closely.

It turns out the light was “steady red,” according to a Maryland police report first obtained this week by The Herald in Everett.

McGavick told my P-I colleague Neil Modie last week that during the DUI incident he received a citation — that’s it.

This turns out not to be the full truth. McGavick was cited — and arrested.

Now that’s a mea culpa I can accept at face value.

Mike?™ made a fool out of Jamieson and his colleagues, but they won’t so easily be fooled again. In fact it only makes sense that a candidate who campaigns on civility — on character — and who demands a higher standard of political discourse, be held to that higher standard himself.

And even though the candidate isn’t talking about his DUI anymore, it’s a standard that Mike?™’s campaign still refuses to live up to.

“There is no effort to hide anything,” McGavick spokesman Elliott Bundy told me Friday. “That was how Mike recalled it at the time. It was an event from 13 years ago.”

What about the traffic light?

“I don’t think that is a large discrepancy,” said Bundy, who called the color of the light “a distinction without a difference.”

The important thing was that McGavick offered a voluntary mea culpa to begin with.

“You said this yourself,” Bundy pointed out to me.

What about McGavick’s citation versus arrest?

“Maybe it’s a terminology issue,” Bundy hedged.

To hear it from the McGavick camp, it would seem facts are “fudgeable.”

The problem for Mike?™ is not that these were big lies on their own, but that he chose to frame his entire confession as an exercise in public candor. “Cutting a yellow” is not the same thing as “running a steady red” — it is a turn of phrase intentionally chosen to soften the offense. Neither is “citation” versus “arrest” merely an issue of terminology, and it’s hard to believe that a man who was arrested, handcuffed, read his rights, and booked could remember the experience as anything but.

For Bundy to attribute the discrepancies to the passage of time is simply laughable… although a more credible excuse — that Mike?™’s supposedly faulty memory is due to the cumulative impact of years of heavy drinking — is probably politically unpalatable.

And besides, the police report itself incontrovertibly documents at least one McGavick lie: when asked if he’d been drinking Mike?™ told the officer he had only “two, maybe three beers,” but his 0.17 blood-alcohol level an hour and a half after the stop suggests he consumed at least 8 or 9 drinks, and possibly more than a dozen.

If a man is going to lie to the police, what’s to stop him from lying to a reporter or a voter?

Apparently, nothing. Which is why news of the newly revealed police report and its contradiction of Mike?™’s supposedly candid confession has made headlines here, here, here, and here.

Sure, it’s the dead of August, the news of the police report breaking on a Friday before Labor Day weekend, perhaps the deadest news weekend of the year. So I guess in that regard, Mike?™’s strategy was a success.

But the campaign only going to get harder for Mike?™ from here on out. And so will the questions.

I’ve known fellow blogger Lynn Allen of Evergreen Politics for well over a year, but though we have spent many hours in deep conversation I never knew until now that she was at Ground Zero on 9/11.

Our reaction to the events of 9/11 is very personal for me. Five years ago, I was at Ground Zero, teaching a class in the Marriott Hotel, WTC 3, the third building on the World Trade Center Plaza.

After what felt like a huge earthquake, we were ushered out of the building by the Marriott staff and stood watching in fascination the fire burning in the upper reaches of WTC 1. It was hard to believe the story that was circulating: A helicopter had crashed into the building on this very clear morning. Then we saw the second plane come in, belly angled slightly toward us, and crash into WTC 2. This was a terrorist attack! We bought water and talked strategies for survival. We decided to head toward the Brooklyn Bridge and began making our way through the people running in every direction.

Just as we began going up the ramp to the bridge, WTC 2 collapsed, sending clouds of debris and hundreds of screaming people in our direction. We continued on, single file, covered in a fine, gray dust, like refugees in a war zone. Eventually, we reached Brooklyn and sunshine, and the beginning of a new phase in our personal and national history.

Lynn has an excellent guest column in the Sunday, September 3 edition of the Seattle P-I [“Is more violence and less safety what we want?“], in which she muses on an alternative way we could have responded to the tragedy of 9/11… a path in which we fought to bring the world closer together instead of tearing it apart.

Read the whole thing.

In a desperate attempt to stay relevant by keeping up with the savvy new management over at the Seattle Weekly, I announced last week a new regular HA feature: Ask a Secular Jew Who Married a Shiksa and Lives Near Two Orthodox Synagogues. Welcome to the first installment.

Dear Secular Jew,

I’m a goy married to a JAP, I need your help. She says that the midrash says that the toilet seat must be down. Is that true?

Harry

Harry… your wife is wrong. Stretching the limits of my Reformed Judaism education, I believe the midrash is actually an irritating fungal infection most frequently caught by inadvertently sitting on the rim of a dirty toilet. (As opposed to a footrash or a headrash.) So I guess in practice, your wife is right: keep the toilet seat down.

Dear Secular Jew,

How come Jewish Guilt Complexes are so, so much funnier than Catholic Guilt Complexes, which are really just kind of sad/scary?

CB

CB… you’re asking the right guy — as a secular Jew who married an Irish Catholic shiksa, I’m a bona-fide expert on guilt.

Indeed the Jews and the Catholics are both very guilty people, the difference being that while Catholic guilt is based on sin, Jewish guilt is based on shame. Sin is derived from God, while shame is derived from… your mother.

For example, take sex. When we first started sleeping together my shiksa and I both felt incredibly guilty about sex. The difference was that she felt guilty because she thought it was wrong, whereas I felt guilty because I thought I was doing it wrong.

So in answer to your question, let me ask you… which one of us really has the sadder/scarier guilt complex?

Hey Secular Jew,

Who do I have to sleep with to get a good bagel in this town?

BL

BL… it doesn’t really matter who you sleep with, as long as the bed is in New York City.

[If you have a question about Jews or Judaism, and you think a secular Jew who married a shiksa and lives near two orthodox synagogues might have the answer, just ask your question in the comment thread of this post. Remember, I will not answer simple, Jew-baiting death rights — it must be posed in the form of a question.]

Jerry Cornfield of the Everett Herald gets the prize for being the first to unearth the police report from Mike!™ McGavick’s 1993 DUI, and it doesn’t paint a pretty picture. And surprise… it also catches Mike!™ in a couple of Lies!™.

Lie number one comes from his misty-eyed mea culpa, where he remorseful explains: “I was cited for DUI when I cut a yellow light too close in 1993.”

Cut a yellow light too close… yeah, right. We all just assumed that was merely a feeble and disingenuous way of saying that he ran a red. (You know, a lie.) Well, now we know that he ran a red light, and a steady one at that.

The police report states the officer observed a car “drive through a steady red signal” at an intersection a couple miles north of the District of Columbia, where McGavick, then 35, worked for the American Insurance Association.

Of course, his defenders might argue that you can’t expect Mike!™ to remember all the details because it happened thirteen years ago and, well… he was Drunk!™. But according to the police report, it turns out Mike!™ has a history of lying about drunk driving.

When McGavick rolled the window down on his white Mazda Miata, a strong odor of alcohol greeted the officer, according to the report. McGavick told the officer he had “two, maybe three beers” during the previous five hours.

Ooops. I guess that counts as lie number two, especially when you consider the fact that in interviews after his surprise revelation Mike!™ admitted that he knew he shouldn’t have been behind the wheel the minute he saw the flashing lights pulling him over. So, either he lied to reporters that he knew he shouldn’t have been driving, or he lied to the police when he said he’d only had “two, maybe three beers” during the previous five hours.

Uh-huh.

As it turns out, he probably had at least a dozen drinks that night as the police report shows he blew a stunning 0.17 at the police station, a full 90-minutes after he was pulled over. That suggests his blood-alcohol level was likely in excess of .20 at the time he climbed staggered behind the wheel.

How Drunk!™ was Mike!™?

When McGavick rolled the window down on his white Mazda Miata, a strong odor of alcohol greeted the officer, according to the report. […] The officer had McGavick get out of the car for sobriety tests. The report described McGavick as having a flushed face, slurred speech and a swaying body. His demeanor was described as polite, cooperative and sleepy.

McGavick failed sobriety tests in which the officer moved his finger side to side and up and down. McGavick did better when he was asked to walk heel-to-toe on a line and stand on one leg.

After the tests, the officer handcuffed McGavick and drove him to the Bethesda, Md., police station. McGavick fell asleep while waiting to have his blood alcohol level measured, according to the police report.

I would imagine that if I were being arrested and processed, I’d be pretty stresed out. But Mike!™ actually fell asleep. Man… that’s pretty damn Drunk!™

Looks like the only thing with more spin than his calculated, preemptive confession, was Mike!™’s head that drunken evening back in 1993.

UPDATE:
Here’s a PDF of the police report courtesy the Rich Roesler and the Spokesman-Review.

Sources have confirmed to HA that Safeco Insurance is indeed the unnamed “Firm 1” in a Washington Insurance Commissioner’s Office study of the abusive use of credit scoring to cancel auto-insurance policies. As first reported in the Seattle Times, Safeco has asked the Thurston County Superior Court to block release of the information.

According to sources familiar with the investigation, the controversial practice was initially pioneered in WA state by Progressive Insurance. Sources say that Safeco was actually late to embrace the practice, but did so aggressively under former CEO Mike!™ McGavick’s leadership, far and quickly exceeding the scope and impact of its competition. As the Times initially reported:

The study cited “Firm 1” for relying on credit scoring to cancel auto policies, as opposed to simply raising rates, which the other companies did. It said Firm 1’s decisions disproportionately impacted minorities, divorced women and low-income residents.

Many of those terminated by Firm 1 had clean driving records.

“Over one-quarter of those cancelled for low credit scores” by Firm 1 “had no ‘incidents’ in the insurer’s records, though some had been with the insurer for more than 10 years,” the 2003 study said.

“Seventeen percent of apparently accident-free cancelled policyholders were minorities.”

When the story first broke Monday I thought it would be easy to find a cooperative source inside an office Democrats have held for years, but extracting relevant information turned out to be harder than squeezing blood from a stone. Commissioner Mike Kreidler has called credit scoring “a form of redlining” and thinks it “should have been banned,” yet he has adamantly refused to disclose the identity of the firms in question until the legal issues are resolved.

This has apparently led to much consternation in and outside his office by those who complain that Kreidler is not doing enough to help fellow Democrats. But while I personally wouldn’t mind if Kreidler were a bit more partisan, I fully admire the respect he has shown for his office, and am somewhat reminded of similar complaints from GOP stalwarts who attacked Secretary of State Sam Reed for not doing more to help fellow Republican Dino Rossi come out on top of our excruciatingly close 2004 gubernatorial election.

Still, this was a study conducted by a public agency, paid for with taxpayer dollars, and so the public has a right to know its details. Thus if you are one of those Insurance Office insiders who think Kreidler should be more partisan, I urge you to act on your convictions and please leak me any relevant documents. I promise to maintain your anonymity, and once again affirm my pledge to go to jail before ever revealing a source.

Perhaps you’ve heard about it, but if you haven’t yet seen Keith Olbermann’s commentary yesterday on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, watch it now.

And about Mr. Rumsfeld’s other main assertion, that this country faces a “new type of fascism.”

As he was correct to remind us how a government that knew everything could get everything wrong, so too was he right when he said that — though probably not in the way he thought he meant it.

This country faces a new type of fascism – indeed.

Finally, a journalist with a large national audience courageous enough to say out loud what many of us have been warning for years. It’s almost enough to make me call up Comcast and order cable. Almost.

Instead, I sent an email to MSNBC thanking them for putting Olbermann’s Countdown on the air.

On Tuesday, at around 5:00 PM, I donated $100.00 to Peter Goldmark’s campaign, and challenged you all to give what you could to Peter and Darcy Burner by the midnight, August 30th reporting deadline. I’m thrilled to report that over the past 55 hours, 55 of you answered my call and donated a total of $3,535.00.

While we fell a bit short of yesterday’s goal of doubling the number of contributors to my ActBlue page, we far exceeded my expectations for total dollars raised. I’d only hoped to average about twenty bucks per donation, and maybe a couple thousand dollars tops. But your generosity blew that target away.

Netroots fundraising is still in its infancy, but it’s obviously more mature here than virtually anywhere else. 120 HA readers have now contributed a total of $6,778.36 to Goldmark and Burner via my ActBlue page. With average daily traffic of about 2400 unique visits a day, that’s an astounding response rate of 5 percent… a response rate most direct marketers wouldn’t dare dream of.

Compare that to the National Netroots ActBlue page, which has leveraged a combined readership of over 600,000 readers a day to raise about $620,000 from 7,600 donors. That’s respectable, even impressive, but on both a donor and dollar per reader comparison, HorsesAss readers kick ass.

I want to thank you all for your generosity and support. With your help we can take back Congress this November, and finally bring some accountability back to the other Washington.

24 hours ago I challenged my readers to double the number of donors to Peter Goldmark and Darcy Burner from my ActBlue page by today’s midnight reporting deadline, and while I’m blown away by the $2505.00 raised thus far, I’m a touch disappointed that with 6 hours remaining, only 39 of you have responded to the call, bringing us little more than halfway towards our 72-donor target.

Perhaps I was too ambitious. Or perhaps I didn’t make myself clear.

The more individual contributors each candidate can report, the easier it will be for them to attract big-money donors and independent expenditures during the final weeks of the campaign. That means even a FIVE BUCK donation, if that’s all you can afford, can be leveraged to help raise the cash Peter and Darcy will need to get their message out and win this November.

That’s all I’m asking — a $5.00 donation. I’ll probably log another six to eight hundred readers between now and midnight… surely, 33 of you can afford to pony up five bucks each?

Please give now. Thanks.

UPDATE:
Still don’t know much about Peter Goldmark? Lynn has a typically excellent interview with Peter up on Evergreen Politics.

Let the caption contest begin.

Since launching my challenge late yesterday afternoon, 33 readers have donated $1945.00 to the Goldmark and Burner campaigns via my ActBlue page. That’s fantastic, but still 39 donations shy of my target of 72 by midnight tonight.

Peter and Darcy need you to prove your grassroots support, and the more contributors they have, the easier it will be for them to pull in the big donors. Just a 5 buck donation can make a huge difference come November. So please give now.

KING5/SurveyUSA: Sen. Maria Cantwell 56%, Mike!™ McGavick 39%. Check out the crosstabs. Just a robo-poll, but nothing for the McGavick folks to cheer about.

Oh, and on a somewhat related topic, TPMmuckraker reports that the US Senator who put a secret hold on a bill that would have created a public, searchable database of all federal grants and contracts (you know, making it easier for taxpayers to figure out how their money is being spent,) turns out to be none other than Mike!™’s good friend, Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska.

Hmm.

Just this past week Mike!™ wrote on his own campaign blog:

This is a sad state of affairs when a senator (or senators) secretly prevent legislation to remove secrecy. The American people have a right to know how their money is being spent. We need senators who are willing to hold their colleagues accountable for this sort of thing, regardless of party.

So… the best way to hold Sen. Stevens accountable is to, um, elect his friend Mike!™ to the Senate?

Ted Drinks!™ to Mike!™ at Alaska fundraiser

UPDATE:
Fixed the numbers. It’s 56-39, not 53-36.

Man, us lefties sure are a bunch of pussies. Sure, we’re liberal. And yeah, most of us drink. But last night not a single one of us managed to get what the kids these days call Mike!™ McGavick drunk. (Or the popular shorthand: Drunk!™)

Joining me in an all too sober discussion of the issues of the day were Will, Mollie, Geov and Carl. Topics of discussion included the relatively warlike tendencies of the various world religions, the Katherine Harris crazy comments of Katherine Harris, what the hell the Democrats are going to do if they actually take back Congress, the human, political and military disaster that is Iraq, the human, political and non-military disaster that was Hurricane Katrina, the Seattle Weekly’s transition from Mossback to Wetback… and Republican US Senate candidate Mike!™ McGavick’s curious revelation that he once got pulled over for driving Drunk!™

The show is 51:33, and is available here as a 38.7 MB MP3. Please visit PodcastingLiberally.com for complete archives and RSS feeds.

[Recorded live at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. Special thanks to Confab creators Gavin and Richard for producing the show.]

Late yesterday afternoon I challenged my readers to double the number of donors on my ActBlue page from 72 to 144 by midnight tonight. Since then, 17 generous readers have donated $935.00 to the Goldmark and Burner campaigns.

That’s great, but we can do better. Candidates are judged not just by the money raised, but by the number of individual contributors, so even a $5.00 donation can make a big difference in attracting big donors during the final, crucial few weeks of the campaign.

Let’s show the nation that WA’s netroots are doing their part to take back Congress and bringing accountability to the other Washington. Please give now.