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From The Agonist:

A goodly portion of the reason gas prices have plunged lately, and a 38% decline meets my definition of a plunge, is due to the fact that Goldman Sachs tweaked the weighting on their commodity index. So what, right? Well, all the folks out their running managed futures funds, hedge funds and other various and sundry financial types, all had to go out and change their weighting of actual holdings in gasoline because that’s the benchmark their performance is measure by.

Here’s another analogy. The Dow 30 is composed of 30 stocks. There are a lot of mutual funds that own “the index” as we call it. All 30 stocks. But what happens when the Dow 30 changes the stocks that make up the index like they did in 2002. They removed AT&T, Kodak and International Paper and replaced them with AIG, Pfizer and Verizon. Now, all the stocks the index dumped took a dive, right? Because all the mutual funds, hedge funds and asset managers that hold the index dumped those stocks.

It’s the same with Goldman’s Commodities Index. If they reduce the percentage of gasoline in the index all the folks who follow the index’s weightings do the same and voila! Gas plunges.

Great timing too.

Which leads to three questions: what’s the economic rationale of making gasoline a smaller portion of overall commodoties in such a gasoline centric economy?

Why now?

And finally, who made the call to do so?

Might it have anything to do with the fact that the new Treasury Secretary used to be the Chairman of Goldman Sachs?

October 3, 2006

Congressman Dave Reichert
2737 78th Ave SE
Suite 202, Second Floor
Mercer Island, WA 98040

Dear Congressman Reichert,

I write to you today as a constituent and mother. We cannot compromise the safety of our children and the integrity of the House of Representatives, so we must set partisanship aside and stand together on principle.

The disgraceful acts committed by former Congressman Mark Foley are a black mark on the halls of the people’s House. The inaction of the House leadership in addressing the issue only makes it worse.

Today you released a statement in support of an investigation of this matter. An investigation is called for, but insufficient. An investigation is certainly in order, so is the immediate resignation of those House leaders who knew about Mark Foley’s grossly inappropriate communications with young pages.

Today the editorial board of the Washington Times called on Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert to resign. The paper writes “Either he was grossly negligent for not taking the red flags fully into account and ordering a swift investigation, for not even remembering the order of events leading up to last week’s revelations — or he deliberately looked the other way in hopes that a brewing scandal would simply blow away…. Mr. Hastert has forfeited the confidence of the public and his party, and he cannot preside over the necessary coming investigation, an investigation that must examine his own inept performance.”

Dennis Hastert’s ineffective handling of this issue follows numerous other scandals that have plagued our Congress under his watch, including the indictment of former House Speaker Tom DeLay, the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal and the conviction of Rep. Duke Cunningham. There’s no more room for excuses. We need a substantial change in the leadership of the House of Representatives.

I ask you to join me in calling for the resignation of Speaker Dennis Hastert.

Sincerely,
Darcy Burner

The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight (and every Tuesday), 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. And oh man do we have a busy schedule tonight.

Aaron Toso and Sandeep Kaushik will be urging you to vote No on initiatives 933 (lying developers) and 920 (estate tax repeal)… but they’re sure to be overshadowed by Congressman Jay Inslee, who will be stopping by to plug I-937, the renewable energy initiative. Then later in the evening, after she’s finished speaking at Town Hall, nationally renowned anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan will be joining us for a nightcap and a little bit of chat on the podcast.

And if that lineup’s not enough of a draw, the folks from Foolproof will be stopping by to raffle off a dozen free tickets to the big show Saturday night at Town Hall, in which Jeanine Garofalo, Atrios, the Seattle Times’ David Postman and I will be talking about politics and the press. That’s right… FREE TICKETS. Can’t beat that.

Not in Seattle? Washington liberals will also be drinking tonight in the Tri-Cities. Here’s a full run down of WA’s ten Drinking Liberally chapters:

	Where:	When:	Next Meeting:
Burien:	Mick Kelly’s Irish Pub, 435 SW 152nd St	Fourth Wednesday of each month, 7:00 pm onward	October 25
Kirkland:	Valhalla Bar & Grill, 8544 122nd Ave NE	Every Thursday, 7:00 pm onward	October 5
Monroe:	Eddie’s Trackside Bar and Grill, 214 N Lewis St	Second Wednesday of each month, 7:00 PM onward	October 11
Olympia:	The Tumwater Valley Bar and Grill, 4611 Tumwater Valley Drive South	First and third Monday of each month, 7:00-9:00 pm	October 16
Seattle:	Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Ave E	Every Tuesday, 8:00 pm onward	October 3
Spokane:	Red Lion BBQ & Pub, 126 N Division St	Every Wednesday, 7:00 pm	October 4
Tacoma:	Meconi’s Pub, 709 Pacific Ave	Every Wednesday, 8:00 pm onward	October 4
Tri-Cities:	Atomic Ale, 1015 Lee Blvd, Richland	Every Tuesday, 7:00 pm onward	October 3
Vancouver:	Hazel Dell Brew Pub, 8513 NE Highway 99	Second and fourth Tuesday of each month, 7:00 pm onward	October 10
Walla Walla:	The Green Lantern, 1606 E Isaacs Ave	First Friday of each month, 8:00 pm onward	October 6

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued its much anticipated “Kentucky River Decision” today, and it pretty much went exactly as expected. Voting along party lines, the Republican dominated NLRB gutted long-time federal labor laws by allowing employers to reclassify up to 8 million workers as “supervisors,” thus prohibiting them from forming unions.

That’s right, millions of American workers have just lost their fundamental right to organize. Lost it. Completely. It will now be illegal for them to join unions.

I could spend pages wonkishly boring you with the legal details, but why bother reinventing the wheel when Stephen Colbert has already done such a fine job of summarizing the larger issue?

The labor movement is directly responsible for winning American workers the rights and standards we all enjoy today… you know, little things like a living wage (well, some of us,) workplace safety, the 40-hour work week, um… the weekend. In fact, many historians would argue that the labor movement played a pivotal role in saving our nation from the threat of Communism during the 1930’s — certainly, many Communist historians might argue this, seeing as one of the first thing totalitarian regimes do is ban independent labor unions. (Remember how Solidarity helped bring down the Polish government, and led the way for the rest of the Eastern Block? That’s what they’re afraid of.)

No wonder then that Human Rights Watch lists the US alongside many Third World nations as a violator of basic human rights, due to the degree to which we restrict the freedom of association and the freedom to form unions.

Each year thousands of workers in the United States are spied on, harassed, pressured, threatened, suspended, fired, deported or otherwise victimized by employers in reprisal for their exercise of the right to freedom of association. In the 1950’s, victims numbered in the hundreds each year. In 1969, the number was more than 6,000. By the 1990’s, more than 20,000 workers each year were dismissed or otherwise victims of discrimination serious enough for the government-appointed National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to issue a reinstatement and “back-pay” or other remedial order…

Loophole-ridden laws, paralyzing delays, and feeble enforcement have created a culture of impunity in many areas of U.S. labor law and practice. Employers intent on resisting workers’ self-organization can drag out legal proceedings for years, fearing little more than an order to post a written notice in the workplace promising not to repeat unlawful conduct.

Human Rights Watch found that millions of workers, including farm workers, household domestic workers, and low-level supervisors, were expressly excluded from protection under the law guaranteeing the right of workers to organize. In Washington and North Carolina, Human Rights Watch found evidence of campaigns of intimidation against migrant workers.

Other findings included: one-sided rules for union organizing that unfairly favor employers over workers, allowing such tactics as “captive-audience meetings” where managers predict workplace closures if workers vote for union representation; workers being caught up in a web of labor contracting and subcontracting that effectively denied them the right to organize and bargain with the employers holding the real power over their jobs and working conditions; employers having the legal power to permanently replace workers who exercise the right to strike; and harsh rules against “secondary boycotts” that frustrate worker solidarity efforts.

The Kentucky River Decision is a direct assault on the right to organize that will have an immediate impact on workers nationwide, and will likely lead to disruptive, wildcat strikes. Locally, Virginia Mason has already announced plans to reclassify its 600 registered nurses as “supervisors,” effectively busting the state nurses union. Nationally, as many as 300,000 nurses face a similar fate.

While this is what surely comes from the Republicans’ relentless efforts to permanently tilt the playing field to the advantage of their corporatist sponsors, their primary motivation is actually much simpler.

Democrats, already at a distinct fundraising disadvantage, heavily rely on Labor money to support their issues and candidates. Destroy labor and you defund the Democratic Party. Defund the Democratic Party and you effectively buy yourself a one-party state. To the Republicans on the NLRB, Kentucky River isn’t about workers’ rights, it’s about political domination.

Majorities matter.

Not since the 1919 Black Sox have we seen a more determined effort to throw a game than that of the current Republican leadership. The Keystone Cops routine performed by Hastert, Reynolds and Shimkus seems designed to exacerbate and extend the Foley scandal as much and as long as possible, while the stupidly self-destructive deflections of White House Press Secretary Tony “Naughty Emails” Snow and GOP surrogate blowhard Matt Drudge (blaming Foley’s downfall on “these 16 and 17 year-old beasts”) couldn’t have been more outrageously scripted by the satirical mind of Jesus’ General.

If the GOP wants to ensure a Democratic sweep in November, this is exactly how to do it.

Yet apparently, political ambition knows no bounds, for even in the midst of this unrelenting firestorm, the title of Republican Idiot King continues to draw stiff competition, most notably today from outgoing Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a man who has made a hobby of repeatedly dashing his presidential hopes on the rocks of his own political mediocrity.

Speaking at a U.S. military base in southern Afghanistan, Frist warned that the Taliban guerrillas will never be defeated militarily, arguing that “you need to bring them into a more transparent type of government.”

“Approaching counterinsurgency by winning hearts and minds will ultimately be the answer,” Frist said. “Military versus insurgency one-to-one doesn’t sound like it can be won. It sounds to me … that the Taliban is everywhere.”

That’s the Republicans for you: the party of cut-and-run.

It is quite possible that Frist’s assessment is basically correct — that at this point in the conflict, after the Taliban has been allowed to regroup and rearm while President Bush committed our forces to his personal grudge with Saddam Hussein — that a military solution is no longer feasible in Afghanistan… if it ever was. But that’s besides the point.

The point is that the GOP’s number one man in the Senate could possibly be so stunningly, politically tone deaf.

With the leaked National Intelligence Estimate report suggesting that our war in Iraq has only increased the terrorist threat, and with Watergate “hero” Bob Woodward making headlines by finally joining sixty percent of his fellow Americans in understanding the Bush administration to be delusional, disorganized and fundamentally dishonest, this is exactly the wrong time for “Leader” Frist to tell the American people that the greatest military power in the history of the world cannot defeat the ragged extremists who harbored our al-Qaeda attackers.

Unless, of course, your goal is to convince the American people that the Republican Party is simply incapable of leading: incapable of winning the war in Iraq or in Afghanistan, incapable of fighting the war on terror… even incapable of what should be the relatively routine task of protecting House pages from being groped by a congressman in a Capitol Hill restroom.

It is hard to believe that this is in fact the Republican leadership’s goal… that the people who have “led” our nation for the past six years really want to lose the November election. But the alternative explanation is even more disturbing.

Yesterday I stumbled upon a link on Rep. Dave Reichert’s official website of him and Honeywell CEO Dave Cote gladhanding it with disgraced Rep. Mark Foley of Florida. But I was kinda busy, and thought I’d wait until today to post on it.

http://www.house.gov/reichert/photogallery/Honeywell.CEO.shtml

But, oh no… when I went back to the link today, the page was gone!

For some strange reason, the Reichert camp would apparently prefer that the public not see photos of the smiling congressman rubbing shoulders with a respected colleague known pedophile. Hmm. I wonder why?

Good thing then that Reichert’s staff is about as competent as the House Republican leadership, for while they deleted the index page they forgot to delete the actual JPEGs from their server. Fortunately, I still had the URLs cached in my browser, so here for the public record are links (here and here) to the two pictures Reichert doesn’t want the public to see.

Or, if you want to save time, here’s the moneyshot:

UPDATE:
Apparently, it wasn’t just the URLs that were stored in my browser’s cache, but the JPEGs themselves. So my apologies to Rep. Reichert’s staff — you did a great job of scrubbing the congressman’s website of these embarrassing photos. You just did it about 12 hours too late.

Anyway, I’ve uploaded the photos to my server (here and here) for your viewing pleasure.

UPDATE, UPDATE:
An enterprising commenter offers the Google cache of Rep. Reichert’s deleted web page.

Oy.

I’ll write more on this later — much more — but I just wanted to go out on a limb and say that if the GOP was not guaranteed of losing control of the House of Representatives before Rep. Mark Foley’s sudden resignation, the scandal erupting in the wake of his departure will almost certainly seal the deal. This scandal is big. Big, big, BIG. The repercussions will be felt nationally… and by that I of course mean locally.

As Josh Marshall has already pointed out over on Talking Points Memo, the Page Boy Scandal has effectively “decapitated” the House Republican leadership.

What do I mean by decapitated? […] Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-NY) is in a tight race for reelection and he’s chairman of the NRCC, the Republican House campaign committee. He’s in charge of the effort to keep the majority.

What’s the number one thing on his mind right now? I doubt it’s the NRCC or even his race for reelection. I think Reynolds is, to put it mildly, distracted right now.

How about Denny Hastert and John Boehner? I don’t see them going on shows or making any public appearances for a while. They’ll get asked awkward and possibly unanswerable questions about Foleygate. I’d say they’re out of commission for fundraisers too.

And pretty much any campaign joust or jab at the Democrats from one of these guys, on whatever issue, will be instantly transformed into some sex-with-pages snark. “How can we trust them to protect America when they can’t even protect the summer interns on Capitol Hill.”

[…]

The simple fact is that to the extant campaigning determines the outcomes of elections, the race goes to the side that can remain on the offensive most consistently and define the national debate on its own terms. Foleygate has made it very hard for the leaders of the House GOP to go on the offensive on anything relevant to the election. For political purposes they’re basically out of commission. And they’ve given Democratic challengers in every district around the country a slew of questions with which to pummel GOP incumbents or any Republican, for that matter, who puts his head up on television. This is in the context of an election that was already going very badly for House Republicans. Foleygate has now made them all but politically defenseless in the final stretch of the campaign. And that is a very big deal.

It certainly is.

And as always… it’s the coverup, stupid.

Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan will be speaking at Town Hall tomorrow night, and afterwards she’s going to stop by Drinking Liberally and join us on our weekly podcast. We’ll save her a seat next to Congressman Jay Inslee, who will also be joining us for the evening.

Wow. What a jam-packed evening. First, Cindy Sheehan at Town Hall (Tues., Oct. 3, 7:30 PM… tickets only $5 bucks,) then Sheehan and Inslee at Drinking Liberally (8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E.) Hope to see you all there.

If the current House Page Scandal isn’t enough to convince you that the GOP leadership values its own political fortunes over the welfare of the nation (let alone the youth placed directly in their charge,) take a look at this article in today’s Washington Post about how our legislative agenda was gerrymandered in the interests of vulnerable incumbents just weeks before the November election.

The effort to achieve such successes went to extraordinary lengths last week, even almost bringing down a major defense policy bill. House and Senate negotiators nearly failed to reach agreement on the defense bill, not because of issues such as the prohibition on torture that held up the bill last year, but because of an issue that had nothing to do with national defense — a measure to clamp down on illegal immigrant gangs.

During a rare news conference, House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) publicly challenged Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.), saying he would not bring the defense policy bill to the House floor without the gang provision. Asked why Hastert had singled out the gang measure for his stand, one senior House leadership aide pointed to the person standing next to the speaker: freshman Rep. David G. Reichert (R-Wash.), the provision’s author, who is running neck-and-neck with Microsoft executive Darcy Burner.

In the end, Hastert relented, but he offered Reichert a promise to be used on the campaign trail. The gang measure will be one of the first revisited when Congress returns after the election.

Yeah, that’s right. Reichert is so vulnerable that he and Hastert were willing to hold hostage a major defense policy bill in a cynical effort to throw Reichert a campaign bone. Nice priorities.

Of course, the uncomfortably well-biceped Reichert didn’t even have the political muscle to get the bone he so desperately needed, and Hastert doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of delivering on his promise. Regardless of Reichert’s reelection prospects (getting dimmer every day,) Hastert will be out of the Speaker’s chair by the start of the new session, if not the end of the month… and that’s a prediction I invite the folks at (u)SP to tease me about come January.

The Seattle Times David Postman gets invited to all the most exclusive events.

McGavick held a press conference this morning at his Seattle headquarters. It was attended by me and a camera operator from KIRO TV.

Man… you can just feel the buzz building up around the McGavick campaign, huh? A reporter and a cameraman.

Of course, reading Postman’s blog, Mike?™ was probably better off not getting too much coverage. According to McGavick:

“This will be a Congress that will be well-known for it’s failure to make progress and the rank partisanship that it displayed. I mean, we went from having a member of Congress sent to jail, a member of Congress found with bags of money frozen in the freezer, to a congressman now sending X-rated messages to pages, all in one congress.

“And I think the American people have to be saying to themselves, ‘What in the heck is going on back there?'”

And, um… McGavick thinks the American people’s answer to his question is going to be to send even more Republicans to Congress?

“What in the heck is going on back there?” The Republicans are unfit to lead, that’s what. And if McGavick wants to make that his new campaign theme, he should invite me to his press conferences — I’ll be more than glad to give him all the coverage he wants.

It sure is tempting to pour through the numbers from last week’s primary for tell-tale signs of what’s to come in November’s general, but as others have pointed out, past primaries have not proven to be predictive, and it’s impossible to compare our new pick-a-party primary with results from previous open ballots.

But Jim Camden makes some interesting observations in today’s Spokesman-Review by not just exploring the vote totals in Spokane County, but by also looking at the undervotes… those ballots in which voters do not mark any preference in a particular race.

Undervotes are the reason that vote totals for different contests in the same city, county or legislative district don’t match, because nobody ever gets through an election without somebody refusing to vote for him. In most elections, the farther down the ballot one goes, the more likely for casual voters to say, “Forget it!” and stop marking the ballot.

But not in this year’s Spokane County’s Republican primary.

The race with the fewest GOP undervotes was the sheriff’s primary between Ozzie Knezovich and Cal Walker. Of the 56,510 voters who marked a Republican ballot, only 1,794, or 3 percent, left the sheriff’s race blank.

That’s pretty amazing, considering it was second from the bottom of the partisan ballot. By comparison, one voter in 10 didn’t mark a choice in the U.S. Senate race at the top of the ballot featuring Mike McGavick and five other choices, and one in six didn’t fill in the circle for the next race, Cathy McMorris’ uncontested House primary.

Comparing the House primary, which was about average for undervotes, to the sheriff’s primary, there was a steady drop-off in votes throughout the cities of Spokane and Spokane Valley and heavy drop-offs in a few traditionally Democratic precincts and in the rural southern precincts of the county. In only a few isolated precincts were there more undervotes in the House race than the sheriff’s race.

OK, so the sheriff’s primary was one of the hottest in the county

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Whatever you do, don’t tune in to “The David Goldstein Show” tonight on 710-KIRO… because I won’t be on. However, feel free tune in to KIRO for the Seahawks game and post-game coverage.

It’s a shame really. There is so much to talk about.

I just had my home heating oil tank topped off with 242 gallons of B30 biodiesel. With the recent pre-election plunge in oil prices, it ended up costing me a few pennies a gallon more than regular oil, but it’s worth the small premium to cut emissions and shift some of my energy consumption to renewable fuels. (For most of the past year, biodiesel has actually been cheaper.)

I know that’s not much of a personal sacrifice, but it’s a start. If you’re interested in shifting to biodiesel, check out Laurelhurst Oil. They also deliver B99, but considering how little oil I use (I last filled my tank in December of 2004) I couldn’t financially justify the $285.00 to put a compatible pump on my furnace. Perhaps when my finances improve.

On Thursday afternoon I put a challenge to my readers: I asked for 34 new donors to Darcy Burner and Peter Goldmark via my Act Blue page by the end of quarter fundraising deadline midnight tonight.

I’m pleased to report that we surpassed that target in slightly less than 48 hours.

Over the past two days 35 of you generously donated $3,746, bringing HA’s total since March to an amazing 201 donors and $14,122.38. To put that in perspective, the folks at ActBlue suggest that over the course of a year, a typical blog might expect to raise about one dollar per average daily visit. Together, we’ve already raised over six times that. Wow.

Of course, just because we’ve met our target doesn’t mean we have to stop giving. Right now we’re less than $878.00 shy of the $15,000 mark, and it would be awfully gratifying to reach that plateau by midnight. So to those of you who haven’t yet given, I ask that you please give now. And to those of you who have already given, I thank you so much for your generosity and support.

UPDATE:
Final tally: 204 donors for a total of $14,352.38 raised thus far. Thank you all.

In his new book, “State of Denial,” Bob Woodward describes a White House in disarray, and a deteriorating war in Iraq that is going much worse than the Bush Administration portrays it. But there was also this tidbit I found interesting:

The book also reported that then-CIA Director George Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black, grew so concerned about a possible al-Qaida attack in summer 2001 that they abruptly decided to drive straight to the White House to get high-level attention.

Tenet called Rice, then the national-security adviser, from his car to ask to see her in hopes that the surprise appearance would make an impression.

But the meeting on July 10, 2001, left Tenet and Black frustrated and feeling brushed off, Woodward reported. Rice, they believed, did not feel the same sense of urgency about the threat and was content to wait for a policy review.

Never before as an administration been so wrong on so many things with such devastating consequences. This is what comes from governing on belief rather than knowledge.