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We had a gay old time at Drinking Liberally last night, celebrating Referendum 65’s demise by packing our panel with gay men. (Um… so to speak.) Helping us rub Tim Eyman’s nose in his latest failure were two of the state’s better known homosexuals, 43rd LD Rep. Ed Murray and The Stranger editor and nationally syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage… plus The Stranger’s lesser known (and lady-dazzled) Eli Sanders.

Joining me (Goldy), Ed, Dan and Eli in nondiscriminatory political discourse were Mollie, Will, and Carl. When Will wasn’t brown-nosing Dan, our topics of discussion included the dramatic collapse of the anti-anti-discrimination movement, prospects for gay marriage in WA state, "An Inconvenient Truth", who we really want to run for president (hint: watch "An Inconvenient Truth") and smelly buses vs. glittering monorail. Did you know Mollie once killed a man on a city bus? It’s true. Give it a listen.

The show is 54:08, and is available here as a 34 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.]

Well, the vast right-wing conspiracy finally succeeded in shutting me up. It took knocking out power to half of SE Seattle, but I’m pretty much shut down for the moment.

UPDATE:
I’m back, but in my absence our good friend Stefan blamed the govmint:

Ah, the advantages of having a government-owned electric utility.

Um… yeah… I suppose it could have been the govmint’s fault. Or perhaps we should blame the guy who knocked down a utility pole?

I suppose it’s possible Stefan was just joking, but either way it shows how tired the right’s anti-govmint rhetoric is getting. I mean, really.

Amen, Rev. Joseph Fuiten:

The lack of signatures, Fuiten said, tells him that “Tim Eyman has a knack for messing stuff up. He’s kind of an interloper on this whole thing, in my opinion. Part of the deal is resistance to him.”

Apparently, initiative profiteer Tim Eyman has failed to produce enough signatures to qualify Referendum 65 for the ballot. More later….

UPDATE:
Andrew Villeneuve of NPI called me from the Secretary of State’s office to report that Timmy made a big show of arriving late, counting petitions in front of reporters, and then… oh no… dramatically announcing that he just fell short with a total of 105,000 signatures. Indeed, I’ve already heard radio reports repeating that number.

But here’s the thing — and this is very important to remember — Tim Eyman is a lying sack of shit. No really… he is. So you cannot believe a single word he says.

The Sec. of State didn’t count the petitions, Tim did. And according to Andrew, he didn’t even count the signatures, just the petitions at hand. So this 105,000 number… it’s total bullshit.

Now that I’ve pointed this out, I expect that no other media outlet will repeat it. And there’s no need to. Eyman failed to qualify R-65 for the ballot. That’s all you need to report. Eyman failed. Once again.

Earlier today the WA state Christian Coalition announced it had collected 14,000 signatures. Big whoop. Sounds to me like Referendum Sunday was dud, and our right-wing Evangelicals have proven themselves to be paper tigers. I mean if you have God on your side and you have our state’s most experienced initiative monger on your side, how can you fail?

I’ll tell you how… it’s what I’ve been saying all along: most people oppose discrimination. Even Republicans. And most people simply don’t think it’s all that American to deny somebody a mortgage just because you think he might be gay. We can’t trust Eyman’s numbers, but from the lack of reports of gee, I dunno… actual signature gatherers, my educated guess is that Tim probably didn’t collect half the signatures he reported. And that, I suppose, is a referendum of sorts, all by itself.

UPDATE, UPDATE:
I guess this is what happens when you dance with the devil:

Leaders of some of the church groups who’d backed the measure, which would have vetoed a ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation, were deeply disappointed and surprised. Some said they were also unhappy at Eyman’s refusal in recent weeks to tell them how many signatures he’d gathered. In the end, the Faith and Freedom Network’s Gary Randall said, Eyman simply stopped replying to his calls.

Um… Timmy didn’t return your calls because he was lying about the signature count all along. Of course, they didn’t seem to mind Tim’s lies when they were repeating them from the pulpit, so I suppose what goes around comes around.

Oh and by the way, as Andrew reminds us, Timmy is not only a liar, but a failure.

This, of course, is simply another failure in a growing list failures for Eyman. Other recent failures include I-892 and I-864 (2004), I-807 (2003) and I-267 (2002).

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

Our fearless leader Nick tells me that Matt Weinstein from “Washington Won’t Discriminate” and Lisa Noble-Rennick from the “Northwest Energy Coalition” will be stopping by to talk about their ballot initiative campaigns. Also, today is primary day in several states and we’ll be eagerly watching the returns roll in… especially those from the special election in CA-50 to replace the convicted Duke Cunningham.

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.

While we’re slamming school officials, let’s take a little poke at Federal Way School Board Member Charles Hoff, who told an audience in State College, PA (not surprisingly the home of Penn State) that it had “a far better gene pool” than the district he represents. State College is a mostly white, middle to upper middle class community.

Hoff said that because of having several smaller high schools within the Federal Way school district, our test scores are among the highest in Washington State.

Instead of attributing this fact to more one-on-one attention, student’s efforts or stellar teachers, Hoff went on to make the argument that if Federal Way students can achieve high test scores while attending small high school, imagine what the sons and daughters who come from “a far better gene pool” would accomplish.

Since Hoff’s remark came to light, those familiar with Hoff’s views said that this remark was not uncharacteristic for Hoff.

Hmm. So Hoff is suggesting that the real solution to our educational problems is….?

Here is the truth about the Seattle Public Schools plan to close a bunch of elementary schools. It has very little to do with saving money. It has everything to do with increasing revenues.

That’s a fact.

If our local editorialists who have been so quick to back up the district’s plans would actually talk to some district officials — off the record — they will be candidly told that the district never expected to save much money, if any, from this round of closures. What the architects of closure policy will tell you is that if the district complies with demands from state legislators to consolidate schools — thus making a show of fiscal responsibility — they believe the district will be rewarded with a big pile of state money.

Again, that is fact.

Indeed, Superintendent Raj Manhas’ preliminary closure plan has reduced savings estimates to a little over $2 million a year, and it’s fair to be skeptical even of that. With half that money being reinvested in the remaining schools, we have only about $1 million a year towards closing our long term structural budget deficit… barely a drop in the bucket.

Again, facts.

I am being asked to disrupt my daughter’s education and sacrifice my neighborhood school for the good of all the children… when really, from the start, this closure plan has mostly been about providing political cover for gutless legislators who refuse to make the tough choices necessary to fully fund basic K-12 education statewide.

You’d think there was a story there that the local media might be interested in pursuing? Apparently not.

So at the same time the district wants to shut my daughter’s school to save a couple hundred thousand dollars, the billionaire owners of the Sonics want taxpayers to pony up a couple hundred million dollars so that they can build a new arena with even more luxury boxes.

Fuck that.

See that banner behind the picture of DCCC chair Rahm Emanuel in this week’s issue of TIME magazine? Know what it says?

D a r c y
B u r n e r

The article says a lot about Burner too:

Darcy Burner knew that prospective Democratic candidates sometimes left in tears after meeting Representative Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, who heads the party’s efforts to recapture the House and was the one-man screening committee for recruits. Burner, an alumna of Harvard and Microsoft, didn’t cry. But she found the wiry former Clinton Administration official as ruthless as any corporate chieftain she had known, as he went down a checklist of questions, including one at the top he had written to himself: Is she worth the investment of my time and the committee’s money?

“Apparently, it didn’t occur to him that I could read upside down,” Burner recalls. Or maybe he didn’t care. Either way, at the end of all his queries about polls and consultants and budgets, she asked him, “How are we doing on No. 1?”

“The jury is still out,” Emanuel said with studied bluntness.

Burner, who wanted to run in a district that stretches from wealthy Seattle suburbs to farmland at the base of Mount Rainier, passed muster. Now the two are bonded on a historic adventure–the Democrats’ increasingly promising quest to evict Republicans from the leadership suites they have occupied for the past dozen years. “This Microsoft mom is going to be part of us taking back the Congress,” Emanuel said hoarsely at a rally in a Mercer Island, Wash., community center last week.

Equal parts coach, babysitter and disciplinarian, Emanuel, 46, has groomed Burner and 21 other varsity challengers–seven more than the number of seats that Democrats need to take control of the House.

And if that doesn’t put to rest the righties’ wishful thinking that Burner isn’t a top tier challenger, perhaps President Bush’s upcoming trip to raise money for the struggling Reichert will. Not too many House Republicans get (or want) that type of attention, but Reichert’s getting desperate.

Our good friend Tim Eyman showed up at the Secretary of State’s office this morning with only a “thin handful” of R-65 petitions. A veteran Capitol press corps reporter tells me that Timmy basically just used the assembled print journalists and TV cameras as an opportunity to plug his other initiative. He says he’ll be back tomorrow at 4pm. Uh-huh.

UPDATE:
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

I’d been predicting R-65’s failure for weeks, and told anybody who asked that I thought today’s event was a stunt along the lines of I-864. My reporter friend acknowledged: “Good call on your part.” Yet, the reporters still showed up and gave Timmy the forum he wanted.

Over on Slog, The Stranger’s Eli Sanders is justifiably outraged over being lured down to Olympia on a lie. The assembled reporters were furious, Sanders reports, but Eyman was unapologetic. “There’s no such thing as bad press, that’s the reality,” Eyman told Sanders.

So to my friends in the media I’d like to suggest that you take Timmy at his word one last time, and refuse to give him any coverage at all. Zero. Zilch. Nada. No clips on the news, no column inches in the paper… not even to curse him out. The guy just dissed you. (Again.) Don’t reward him.

Can the press resist? Sanders wonders the same thing:

Bottom line: This was one of the most unprincipled press conferences I’ve ever seen, and my sense is that the reporters whose time was wasted this morning are furious. I hesitate to even write about it, given Eyman’s “no such thing as bad press” mantra, but I do think it’s important to give a sense of how dishonest he’s willing to be in order to get a camera in front of him. It will be interesting to see how the dailies and the television stations handle this stunt

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According to an AP story in today’s Seattle Times, 17 percent of Ivy Leaguers practice “self-abuse“:

Nearly 1 in 5 students at two Ivy League schools say they have purposely injured themselves by cutting, burning or other methods, a disturbing phenomenon that psychologists say they are hearing about more often.

Hmm. I think that way back when I was an Ivy Leaguer, “self-abuse” was still a euphemism for “masturbation” (which of course is a euphemism for “jacking off.”)

For some young people, self-abuse is an extreme coping mechanism that seems to help relieve stress;

Again, isn’t that what masturbation is for?

I think what young people need today is some good, wholesome, old-fashioned sex, drugs and rock-and-roll.

Will from Pike Place Politics will join me in the studio to talk about the state GOP convention, immigration policy, and Dave Reichert.

Darcy Burner will join us a little later on.

In the first hour I’ll be trying not to make a fool of myself. We’ll be talking about “An Inconvenient Truth” and global warming. And then an update on the state Democratic Convention.

I’ll be subbing for Turi Ryder tonight on 710 KIRO, from 7pm to 10pm. I just got the call, and thus am a tad unprepared.

So… what do you want to talk about?

With the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s imminent demise, the Seattle Times will soon become our city and our state’s undisputed “paper of record,” and as such it has a unique responsibility to credibly represent the interests of all our citizens. Unfortunately, publisher Frank Blethen seems determined to use his personal bullhorn to promote his own personal interests.

The Times‘ editorial arrogance is never more apparent than on a day like today, when Frank has his op/ed toadies print yet another editorial attacking the inheritance tax. Of course, it’s the usual divisive, propagandistic bullshit, but I was struck by the sentiments of one particular paragraph:

In our highly partisan world, the death tax has given Republican candidates a perennial bogeyman with which to raise funds from owners of family businesses. Why the Democrats donate this issue to the opposition we cannot fathom.

No, I suppose you can’t fathom this Frank, as in your dollar-and-sense world you apparently can’t comprehend why anybody would take a stand on principle over interest.

There are innumerable exigent matters facing our region and our nation, but I would hazard a guess that there is no other issue over the past few years to which the Times has devoted more editorial space than the dreaded death inheritance tax. And yet the editorial board can’t seem to manage to scrape up a couple of column inches to acknowledge the impending worldwide catastrophe that is global warming, or to apologize for viciously ridiculing Ron Sims 18 years ago when he attempted to show some leadership on this issue.

I guess it’s all about priorities. Frank’s priorities.