HorsesAss.Org

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert devotes an entire column to how the Republican Party at the national level has become institutionally deceitful, highlighting the recent battle over raising the minimum wage as a classic example.

The GOP has always been a fierce opponent of the minimum wage, which now sits at a paltry $5.15 an hour, a half-century low in real dollars. Yet the Republicans suddenly embraced a modest $2.10 increase in the minimum wage over three years tied to a whopping slash in the estate tax and a change in law that would have actually cut wages for millions of employees who earn tips. The so-called “trifecta” legislation was little more than an election year stunt intended to bend Democrats over a barrel, and Republican leaders made clear that Dems who opposed the bill would be targeted as obstructionist come November. “There’s like 12 30-second ads sitting around in this bill,” one Republican aide told The Hill.

Herbert bluntly calls the GOP’s bluff, and then some:

I’m for an increase in the minimum wage and against a cut in the estate tax. But that’s not the point here. The point is the extent to which the Republican Party is willing to engage in deceit to try and achieve ends it could not achieve any other way. The latest incarnation of the Republican Party has taken deceit in government and politics to dangerous new extremes, and it’s time to call a halt to it.

The war in Iraq will be remembered as one of the greatest exercises in systematic governmental deceit in U.S. history. But the Iraq fiasco is just the most stunning and tragic example of a style of governing and politicking that has become second nature to the Bush administration and much of the national Republican establishment.

At some level all politics is local, so when we talk about the institutional dishonesty of the national Republican leadership we must also consider how they harness their deceit to influence elections at the local level. Herbert continues:

It is in that same deceitful and vengeful spirit that the party is now attacking Democratic senators who managed to hold fast, under the leadership of the minority leader, Harry Reid, to defeat the legislation that cynically tied the estate tax windfall to an increase in the minimum wage.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee declared that Maria Cantwell, a Democratic senator from Washington who voted against the bogus bill, “decided that giving in to pressure from her party’s leadership was more important than voting to raise the federal minimum wage.”

Senator Cantwell, who is up for re-election this year, favors an increase in the minimum wage, as does her party’s leadership. It has been the Democratic Party that has been pushing for years for an increase in the minimum wage, but there is no room for that reality in the G.O.P.’s corrosive culture of deceit.

Which brings us to Sen. Cantwell’s challenger, former SAFECO CEO and insurance industry lobbyist Mike!™ McGavick, a man who has pledged to bring bipartisanship and civility back to the other Washington. And how does he intend to achieve this? By echoing the partisan, divisive rhetoric of his partisan and divisive national leadership, of course. In the very first sentence of a press release issued in the wake of the vote, Mike!™ immediately fell back on the NRSC talking points.

“Simply put, Sen. Cantwell today announced that she will side with her party’s leaders over the interest of our state,”

Simply put, Mike!™ is a politician like all other politicians, and a Republican in the mold of the national Republicans with whom he would caucus if elected.

And you can’t just write off that initial press release as the rushed, knee-jerk reaction of a communications staff desperate to get out in front of the news cycle. Mike!™ issued two more press releases in the following days, continuing to hammer home the NRSC talking points, eventually so riling The Stranger’s Josh Feit that he felt compelled to pick one apart with footnotes:

GOP U.S. Senate candidate Mike McGavick keeps saying he wants to run a “different” campaign. That is: a campaign that doesn’t stoop to the childish, misleading level of partisan attack politics that typically clutters civic debate. I want to believe the guy, but then he sends out childish, misleading, partisan press releases that clutter civic debate.

[…]

What really bugs me about this whole thing is that the GOP trifecta was purely an election-year stunt to neutralize a winning Democratic issue–the minimum wage. First thing Monday morning, McGavick, who claims to be above the juvenile partisan fray, sends out a misleading hack-job press release on Cantwell, trying to blame her. McGavick is just following GOP orders.

And so he is.

Last week, Seattle P-I columnist Joel Connelly accused me of taking part in a “mean, low-down attack” against Mike!™ for my teensy role in the SAFECO shareholder lawsuit. Joel seems to want to believe Mike!™’s call for civility at least as much as Josh, calling him a “stand-up guy“. But given the deceitfulness of his press releases one can’t help but wonder what Mike!™ is willing to stand up for? The people? The truth? Or the larger agenda of his Republican leadership?

Knowing his long history as a Slade Gorton operative it is hard to take Mike!™’s sudden conversion to civility at face value. Oh sure, no doubt he’s a nice enough guy when you sit down across from him face to face, but then, so am I. And as has been extensively documented by the Seattle Times’ David Postman and on the blogs Hominid Views and Orcinus, Mike!™ has shown an extraordinary willingness to do or say whatever it takes to win an election.

So is Mike!™ just another dirty campaigner, cynically touting civility and bipartisanship as little more than a political convenience? Well, to paraphrase Mike!™’s own defense of a misleading ad against Mike Lowery from 1988: “I have no indication that he isn’t.”

What I do know is that Mike!™ is a Republican and that he is eagerly attacking Sen. Cantwell with the same “deceitful and vengeful spirit” that Herbert has observed nationally. Mike!™ can talk about civility all he wants, but if the Republicans retain control of the Senate we already know what we’re gonna get.

The one real advantage that Rep. Dave Reichert has in his tough reelection battle against Democratic challenger Darcy Burner, is name recognition.

Well… that’s about to end.

Burner hits the airwaves today with her first TV ad, a sixty-second spot designed to introduce the candidate to voters. That Burner can afford to go live so early in the campaign is a testament to her hard work and the enthusiastic support she has generated. It is also an indication of just how tough this race will be for both candidates.

Of course, one of the risks of spending money this early is that it could potentially leave her short of resources during the crucial few weeks before election, but there is one sure fire means of avoiding this calamity: give Burner more money now.

For Burner to win she needs to stay on the air from now until November, getting both her name and her message out in front of voters. And all this costs money.

So if you really care about the 8th Congressional District and the state of Washington, and about the future direction of our nation… if really want to address corruption in Congress and provide real oversight of the most authoritarian White House in recent memory, the most important contribution you can make right now is financial. Give Burner the money she needs to defeat Reichert and take back the House of Representatives for all of us.

And if, like me, you have more spare time than money, Burner can always use more volunteers.

I’ve read a lot of post-election analyses today in the wake of Ned Lamonts historic victory over Sen. Joe Lieberman, but the one that spoke most directly to me was the following from MyDD’s Jerome Armstrong:

I was up in New Hampshire yesterday with college age Sierra Club activists, doing a back and forth debate/discussion with the Sierra Club President, Lisa Renstrom, over the issue of their embracing partisan politics, and advancing the progressive movement ahead of their own single-issue advocacy. I laid out the argument that single-issue advocacy was something that seemed to work in a previous time, but not in today’s partisan atmosphere, and that if a substantive, transformative change in environmental policy was to happen, it would occur because the millions of environmentalists decided to join the netroots/grassroots activists now taking over the Democratic Party. I quoted Krugman’s channel of CTG tough love. Lisa countered that social movements do not make up political parties, but impact them, and she effectively made the case that environmentalists can drive the public debate at the state level in a non-partisan manner. I totally agreed, but believe that that impact can be overtly partisan, and that a distinction must be made between the state, more local level, and the federal races.

Having become just another lobbying group instead of a movement, the Sierra Club and the many single-issue groups like them, NARAL, League of Conservation Voters, Planned Parenthood, AFL-CIO, SEIU, CWA, NALC, NAGE, Food and Commercial Workers, Teamster’s, Firefighters, Carpenters, Postal Workers, IBEW, Human Rights Campaign, etc., found themselves aligned in the minority alongside Joe Lieberman on Tuesday night. Lieberman’s problem wasn’t policy, it’s that he’s not been a part of the solution–the movement of change that forms its base with people of progressive values, not issues.

We are becoming strong enough in primary numbers to defeat the politics of old in the Democratic Party. But we cannot defeat the conservative ideological movement if they are united, and we are not; if they are modern and we are stuck in the methods of the past. In a nutshell, I argued that to win elections and transform the landscape enough to enact a broader environmental policy initiative that addresses issues such as global warming, every progressive individual, group, and organization must work together in the same vehicle. Sure the Democratic Party has been busted and broken in the past, but lets rebuild it and ride it to get there.

Read the whole thing, but that block quote is the gist of it.

This is of course a call for more partisanship and an end to the single-issue politics that has characterized progressive organizations up until now… a theme that I’ve been hitting on for the past few days. I know that some may argue that this isn’t exactly the most reliable path towards good government, but this is the path the other guys have chosen, so what choice do we really have? (That is, if we care as much about winning as we do just being right.)

It is fair to say that challenger Ned Lamont’s dramatic victory yesterday over incumbent Senator Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut Democratic primary pivoted almost entirely on the war in Iraq — an issue that has dogged Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell throughout her reelection campaign. But it may come as a surprise to anti-war Democrats — and perhaps to Sen. Cantwell herself — to learn that she and Lamont essentially share almost identical positions on the war.

Lamont supported the Reed/Levin Amendment which called for the administration to start redeploying troops out of Iraq starting in 2006. Sen. Cantwell voted for it.

In speaking about Iraq, Lamont has firmly argued that “America should make clear that we have no designs upon their oil and no plans for permanent bases.” Sen. Cantwell co-sponsored an amendment on this exact issue, helping to push passage through the U.S. Senate.

Lamont believes that “Our best chance of success requires that the Iraqis take control of their own destiny.” In supporting the Levin-Reed Amendment Sen. Cantwell stated that it would “encourage the Iraqis to take complete control of their own future.”

And throughout his campaign Lamont has argued that it is time for us to “change course” and bring the troops home. In a letter to President Bush sent on August 4, Sen. Cantwell twice told the president that we must “change course” to help the Iraqis find a political solution and take over its own security.

I know many Democrats who cite Sen. Cantwell’s vote to authorize the war along with her refusal to vocally criticize the President in its aftermath, as the primary reason they can offer her only grudging support at best. And yet both she and Lamont — who earned the enthusiastic support of anti-war Democrats in yesterday’s primary — apparently share the same position on what to do about the war now.

Just thought you all might want to know.

UPDATE:
Not much of a surprise, but Sen. Cantwell has endorsed Lamont:

“I congratulate Ned Lamont on his victory last night. I respect the decision of the Connecticut Democrats in choosing their nominee and I will support him.”

It was a battle so big only four of us could fit around the table. Will and Mollie teamed up with me to take on Seattle P-I bruiser Joel Connelly in a no-holds-barred, steel cage match debate over political civility. I thought we held the upper hand until Joel blindsided me with a broken bottle of Maker’s Mark, but my logical analysis and impressive command of the facts eventually won the day when I knocked the old curmudgeon to the ground and beat him senseless with his own cane. In between blows we civily discussed the McGavick shareholder lawsuit, my role in it, the pros and cons of negative campaigning, and how all this relates to Sen. Joe Lieberman’s defeat last night in the CT Democratic primary.

The show is 46:25, and is available here as a 31.9 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.]

Only one of the Democratic candidates for president represents the American center, which is where the Democratic Party needs to be if it is to be trusted with national power.

That candidate is Sen. Joe Lieberman. He is not doing well with the Democratic faithful, but in the opinion of this page, he would make the best candidate for a return to centrist politics.

He is experienced on foreign affairs, which Sen. John Edwards is not, and on domestic affairs, which Gen. Wesley Clark is not. He is calm, which Howard Dean is not. He waffles, but not as much as Sen. John Kerry.

Lieberman is a mainstream Democrat on favoring abortion rights and benefits for gay partners, affirmative action and civil liberties, and on opposing drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This page agrees with him on all those things, as well as his realism in foreign policy. He voted for the war resolutions of 1991 and 2002.

He is also a fairly strong advocate of free trade, which best fits the economic interests of this region and, we believe, the United States. Lieberman supported free trade with Canada and Mexico, WTO membership for China and fast-track negotiating authority for further trade agreements. This year, these have become minority positions in his party.

Lieberman was one of the founders of the New Democrats, a group that calls for “progressive ideas, mainstream values and innovative, market-based policy solutions.”

Bill Clinton, whom this page endorsed twice, was that sort of Democrat, and he carried this state.

Washington voters have elected such New Democrats as Sen. Maria Cantwell, Reps. Rick Larsen, Jay Inslee, Adam Smith and Brian Baird; Gov. Gary Locke and Snohomish County Executive Aaron Reardon.

The center is not where most of the presidential candidates are this year. Their favorite theme has been the evil rich. Edwards calls it the “Two Americas”

People are going to be talking about the Lamont-Lieberman race in CT, so you might as well do it here. Polls close at 8PM Eastern, 5PM Pacific, and I plan to follow the results on MyDD.

The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight (and every Tuesday), 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Come on by and watch me and Joel Connelly come to fisticuffs over campaign civility.

And if you happen to be a liberal drinker on the other side of the mountains, the Tri-Cities chapter of DL also meets Tuesday nights, 7 PM, Atomic Ale, 1015 Lee Blvd., in Richland. Go ask Jimmy for more details.

I don’t much like making bold political predictions, but I’ve got one in the 26th LD: Republican legislative candidate Ronald Boehme will soon return a $300.00 contribution. Either that, or the Port Orchard Church of the Nazarene may soon see a challenge to its IRS tax exempt status.

Of course, churches are free to contribute whatever they want to political campaigns — they’re just not free to do so while continuing to enjoy tax exempt status as a religious institution. The rationale for this legal restriction should be obvious to folks on both sides of the political aisle: if you can claim a deduction for a donation to your church, and then your church can turn around and give that money to a political candidate or campaign, well then that’s like getting a tax deduction for a political contribution. And that’s just plain wrong.

And it’s such a basic violation of IRS code that you’d think churches would be damn wary about any perception of impropriety. But apparently not, for a quick search of the word “church” in the Public Disclosure Commission’s contribution’s database found a number of similar violations in the 2006 election cycle alone.

The Cornerstone Bible Church of Enumclaw gave $500.00 to LetTheVotersDecide.net — Tim Eyman’s committee to repeal the state’s gay civil right’s bill — while the North Shore Baptist Church of Bothell reported $300.00 of in-kind contributions to the campaign. Meanwhile, the Lynnwood Church of the Nazarene gave $150.00 to the Snohomish County Republican Central Committee. Naughty, naughty.

And it’s not just Republican campaigns and causes that are stealing from the collection basket. Democratic State Senator Paull Shin reports receiving $1350.00 in contributions from the Korean Presbyterian Church in Elizabeth NJ. What’s up with that?

I know it might be tough on Boehme to have $300.00 less to spend on political consultants (his number one expense,) but look on the bright side — the Port Orchard Church of the Nazarene will now have $300.00 more to spend on saving souls and feeding and clothing the poor. And from my limited reading of the New Testament, I vaguely remember that charity, not politics, was supposed to be the church’s primary work.

Um… so I guess, when Initiative 933 supporters wax eloquently in defense of property rights, they’re really only talking about defending their own property. Posted this afternoon to the “proprights” Yahoo group:

No on I-933 Signs

All you wonderful proprights folks:

If you see those lying I-933 signs, take them down. They are full of lies and morally should not be up. If you don’t want to do that, tell me where they are and I will do it. Those people put those signs up in clusters of five or six and they are full of those suggestive, lying questions to put fear into people.

Edwina Johnston

Edwina Johnston is a member of Citizen’s Alliance for Property Rights, and was a signature gathering captain on the I-933 petition drive. She’s apparently so passionate about defending what she sees as her right to use her property in any way she sees fit, that she has absolutely no qualms about destroying other people’s property in the process.

Hypocrisy from the backers of a right-wing initiative? Who’d’ve thunk?

UPDATE:
Just to clarify, a reader forwarded me the relevant statute:

RCW 29A.84.040 Political advertising, removing or defacing.
A person who removes or defaces lawfully placed political advertising including yard signs or billboards without authorization is guilty of a misdemeanor punishable to the same extent as a misdemeanor that is punishable under RCW 9A.20.021. The defacement or removal of each item constitutes a separate violation.

In case you’re counting, Edwina, that means you face up to 90 days in jail and a $1000.00 fine for each sign you remove. So you go girl.

A leak and corrosion in a pipeline has forced BP to shut down it’s Prudhoe Bay oil field, forcing oil prices to surge today.

A leak in an oil pipeline? In Alaska? Why, that could never happen should we drill in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), because… well… the oil industry and the Bush administration would never do anything that might endanger such a fragile ecosystem. Um… right?

From pollster John Zogby:

Let’s just look at the numbers from my most recent national poll (July 21). Overall, only 36% of likely voters told us that they agree that the war in Iraq has been “worth the loss of American lives”, while 57% disagree. But the partisan splits are more revealing: only 16% of the Democrats polled said the war has been worth while 82% disagree and only 26% of Independents agree the war has been worth it while 72% disagree. On the Republican side, 64% said the war has been worth it, while 23% disagree. The war has been the principal cause of the nation’s polarization in the past three years. The polling evidence shows the degree to which Iraq has become a Republican war. And these latest numbers are also noteworthy in that they show that about one in four Republicans have now pretty much given up on the war.

There are a number of ways to look at this poll, though I wonder what percentage of the 64% of Republicans who still think the war was worth it interpret the poll to mean that 57% of their fellow citizens are cowards and traitors who hate America?

Oh no! Mike!™ McGavick has become a victim of negative politics! Heaven forfend!

According to the Seattle P-I’s Joel Connelly:

Vilification of McGavick, the most talented Senate candidate recruited by Republicans in 2006, stands as a model for the bipartisan tactics of debasement infecting American politics.

I like and respect Joel, and often agree with his analysis, but this time… not so much.

First of all, I don’t believe that by contemporary standards Mike!™ has been all that vilified. (Yet.) We’ve called him a “lobbyist” — he was one. We’ve ridiculed him for prevaricating on several controversial issues — and he has. We’ve characterized the $28.3 million golden parachute he negotiated after announcing his resignation from SAFECO as “obscene” — I think many shareholders, policyholders and laid-off employees would agree that it is.

What we haven’t done is accused him of killing one of his best friends, or of being a coward and a traitor who hates America. We haven’t morphed him into a terrorist or accused him of caring more about sex offenders than about innocent children. We haven’t publicly debated the unusual shape of his penis.

What we haven’t done is lied. And we haven’t delved into his divorce or other areas of his personal life… not that it should necessarily be off limits. So I don’t quite understand Joel’s characterization of a handful of snarky press releases and a shareholder lawsuit as a “mean, low-down attack.” These are political attacks… which is exactly what you expect to see against a guy running for political office.

My second point of contention with Joel is the notion that in discussing the “debasement” of American politics he could possible talk about my blog in the same breath as he talks about the tactics of the US Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the past half-decade (yes, hundreds of millions) running smear campaigns in local elections. In 2004 they spent $1.5 million torpedoing Deborah Senn’s run for Attorney General, and just this past week they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on TV ads thanking Dave Reichert for a bill that passed before he was elected to Congress.

Meanwhile, I’m just some local blogger with a couple thousand readers who can barely pay my own bills. Sure, when it comes to influencing politics I get more bang for my buck, but let’s keep this in perspective: I don’t have any bucks. If I manage to have more of an impact than the folks over on the right-wing blog, well that’s an accomplishment of which I’m pretty damn proud. But don’t lump me in with Karl Rove or the US Chamber. Even if I aspired to embrace the dark side I don’t have the resources or the opportunity to even begin to make the impact these Republican sleaze masters achieve with a simple wave of their hands.

My only contribution to the shareholder lawsuit was a brief post that helped hook up the attorney with the plaintiff, and hell… Craig’s List probably would have gotten a larger response. It was no different from a similar query over on (u)SP (other than the fact that I didn’t attempt to sneakily hide my tracks by deleting the original text,) and hardly a poisonous, Rovian tactic of political debasement.

Finally, I have to take issue with Joel for calling me out in his closing paragraphs:

On the horsesass.org Web site, which helped spawn the lawsuit, founder David Goldstein held forth last Thursday: “McGavick’s midlife conversion to ‘civility’ is a joke to anyone who remembers the vicious campaign he ran on behalf of Slade Gorton.”

Not true, Goldie, and you didn’t even live here then.

No Joel, I didn’t live in the state back then, and even if I did I wouldn’t pretend to have the impressive institutional memory you possess. But you know me well enough to know that I am curious and inquisitive about my adopted state’s political history, and I’ve heard enough stories and read enough newspaper accounts to convince me that Mike!™ was no angel.

Civility isn’t a campaign theme. It’s an excuse. A shield. A feeble attempt to ward off all criticism or unfavorable analysis or probing questions as poisonous political debasement, all the while freeing his own surrogates to attack at will. But on this point I’m more than happy to agree to disagree.

See, I can forgive Joel for conflating unflattering facts and snark with character assassination. I can forgive Joel for lumping me in with some of the evil masters of the Republican attack machine. I can even forgive Joel for publicly accusing me of being wrong about Mike!™’s reputation as a political operative.

But there’s one final transgression for which I’m not quite sure I can ever forgive Joel.

It’s spelled “Goldy” with a “y.”

“Goldie” with an “ie” is the feminine spelling, and as a nom de guerre for an evil, political muckraker like me, that would just plain look silly.

Are you feeling a bit dizzy from watching the hydroplanes spin round and round, or from craning your necks to catch a glimpse of the Blue Angels soaring by, or simply from a weekend of too much sun and too much beer? Then turn down the lights, turn up the radio and tune in to “The David Goldstein Show tonight on Newsradio 710-KIRO, from 7PM to 10PM.

7PM: Is centrism for suckers? That’s the opinion of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman who wrote this week that, in this age of ruthless partisanship, the most important thing you need to know about a candidate is whether there’s a “D” or an “R” next to their name. And speaking of partisanship, I’m going to talk a little bit about my role in the shareholder lawsuit against Mike!™ McGavick, and why it says absolutely nothing at all about the merits of the case itself.

8PM: Hey… there are a couple congressional races East of the mountains too. Who knew? Spokane blogger Gerald Toompas of EWpolitics.com joins me to talk about some surprising poll numbers in the 5th CD race between incumbent Republican Rep. Cathy McMorris and Democratic challenger Peter Goldmark, while Tri-Cities blogger Jim McCabe of McCranium.org calls in to complain about his local media’s refusal to admit that Rep. “Do Nothin’ Doc” Hastings even has a Democratic challenger. Then in the second half of the hour I’ll be heading back west with long time (and disgruntled) conservative Republican activist Phil Spackman, who’s gonna tell us exactly what’s wrong with the WA state and King County GOP.

9PM: What’s the right-wing, Christian Evangelical extremist perspective on state and national politics? Gen. JC Christian, Patriot, joins me to discuss the most important issues of the day, including Intelligent Design, stem cell research, the Iraq war and of course… The Passion of the Mel Gibson. “The General” blogs at the nationally renowned Jesus’ General, which bills itself as “The Official Online Organ of the Glorious Conservative Christian Cultural Revolution.” And a very manly organ it is.

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

Hey, Dave Reichert made it into The New Republic… though not exactly in a good way:

Dissing Bush can be trickier than it might seem at first. There is, after all, the little matter of fund-raising, where the president, despite his sagging popularity, is still the party heavyweight. The trick for vulnerable GOP candidates is to somehow get Bush money without being in any way associated with Bush or the other radioactive members of his administration–a predicament that is tying Republicans into pretzels from coast to coast.

[…]

For some, the best approach may be simply to ask Bush to stay away. When the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recently unearthed the fact that Bush would be raising dough for David Reichert, who represents an increasingly Democratic district in Washington state, the news generated a wave of negative coverage about his coziness with the White House. When Reichert joined the pariah-in-chief at the event anyway, it seemed to do him more harm than good: The visit pumped anti-Bush money into the coffers of his opponent, who ended up out-raising him for the quarter. Indeed, the event provided so much fodder to tie Reichert to Bush that it’s widely seen as the reason Reichert reversed his position on stem-cell research last month.

Word on the street is that Reichert continues to struggle to raise money, particularly from individuals, a category of donors with whom challenger Darcy Burner has been going gangbusters.

The DCCC has made this race one of its top targets with a $1.5 million TV ad buy during the final three weeks of the campaign. Who wants to wager that some of those ads show Reichert standing arm in arm with the President at Boeing Field?