HorsesAss.Org

Tomorrow, Rep. Jay Inslee (WA-01) intends to offer an amendment to the Department of Defense Appropriations Bill (H.R.5631) that would prohibit the use of all such funds to conduct electronic surveillance in contravention to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

More later.

Every time I talk about An Inconvenient Truth, the deniers come out in full force, regardless of whether they have actually seen the documentary. The science is bogus, they tell me. They insist that there is no scientific consensus that climate change is a reality, or that human activities have led to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Um… well… tell that to the insurance industry:

The planet’s most conservative, risk-averse businesspeople now recognize the reality of global climate change.

The insurance industry, which has to pay up if the consensus of scientists is correct, has quite literally bought into the scenario.

[…]

Lloyd’s of London, the oldest insurance market in the world, released a report this month on the threat the industry faces. “Climate Change: Adapt or Bust,” warns, “If we do not take action now to understand the risks and their impact, the changing climate could kill us.” While the report “focuses on adaptation … we recognize that mitigation of the risk itself (i.e., the reduction of CO{-2} emissions) is crucial.”

Marsh, the world’s leading risk and insurance services firm, released a report in April in which it called climate change “one of the most significant emerging risks facing the world today.”

Last month, American International Group adopted a policy that “recognizes the scientific consensus that climate change is a reality and is likely in large part the result of human activities that have led to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere.”

But then, we all know that the insurance industry is nothing but a bunch of wide-eyed, liberal propagandists.

Meanwhile An Inconvenient Truth has already earned over $6.4 million in four weeks, making it the 11th-top-grossing documentary of all time.

The Seattle Times reports that some in the 43rd Legislative District think the State House seat being vacated by Rep. Ed Murray should go to a gay candidate. And with attorney and activist Jamie Pedersen being the only gay candidate in the race, such sentiments should benefit him.

Hmm. Maybe.

But it should be noted that later today, the Seattle Metropolitan Elections Committee, which rates candidates on issues of importance to the lesbian and gay community, will announce that Lynne Dodson has earned both its highest rating, and a co-endorsement along with Pedersen. Whatever that’s worth.

UPDATE:
Will has some further thoughts on this issue.

UPDATE, UPDATE:
Believe it or not, The Stranger’s Dan Savage has some thoughts on this as well.

At least for now we’re calling it “The David Goldstein Show”, every Sunday night from 7PM to 10PM on Newsradio 710-KIRO. But despite it’s rather bland name tonight’s show is jam-packed with interesting guests.

7PM: King County Council President Larry Phillips is going to join me at the top of the hour for an update on the future of vote-by-mail in the wake of Dean Logan’s departure. Then King County Executive Ron Sims will join me for the rest of the hour to take questions from callers.

8PM: 8th Congressional District Democratic challenger Darcy Burner will give us her take on President Bush’s trip to Seattle on behalf of his buddy, Rep. Dave Reichert. Then Seattle P-I columnist Joel Connelly will call in from a phone booth on Whidbey Island to discuss that and other issues of the day.

9PM: It’s “The Blogger Hour” with Podcasting Liberally regulars Will from Pike Place Politics and the Liberal Girl Next Door, Molly. Let’s see if they’re as entertaining and interesting sober as they are drunk.

Tune in or stream live and join the debate tonight from 7 to 10PM. Call me at 877-710-KIRO (5476) or leave a comment here, and I promise I’ll actually try to read the thread.

From the No Shit Sherlock Department, the Christian right has apparently discovered that initiative monger Tim Eyman is a liar.

Gary Randall and Joe Fuiten of the Faith and Freedom Network have posted a detailed chronology of their tortured relationship with Eyman during the Referendum 65 signature drive, and the Mukilteo watch salesman doesn’t come off looking so good. The final blow to FFN was Eyman’s refusal to share the petitions, and his arrogant posturing that he was merely protecting the signers’ privacy. Here are a few of the key excerpts:

Tim Eyman has a demonstrated penchant for not telling the whole truth.

Tim has not been truthful in his telling of the story.

Eyman’s explanation … cannot be true,

He is just making up that completely fabricated charge…

Joe Fuiten … has tried to get Tim Eyman to honor the agreement he made with FFN. Eyman has not been willing to do so…

Of course the real reason Eyman won’t share the signatures is that he doesn’t want anybody to know how few he really collected… which I’m guessing is less than half the 105,000 claimed. If that’s not the case then Timmy shouldn’t have any problem letting a reporter go in there and count the signatures for himself. Yeah, like that’s gonna happen.

Of course, FFN’s chronology shows Fuiten and Randall to be pretty cynical themselves. Consider this passage:

On the first day that petitions were available for Referendum 65, Faith and Freedom published petitions. The FFN Referendum petitions had the FFN name on them as a return address and avoided the controversial titles of the Eyman version. Eyman’s version said “no quotas” even though there was nothing about quotas in the bill and the phrase alienated African American leaders. Eyman’s version was also titled “no gay marriage” even though the bill was only very obliquely related to gay marriage. FFN was concerned that the misleading titles might be used by opponents in a legal challenge to overturn the Referendum as they have done to other Eyman initiatives. FFN printed thousands of their version of the Referendum petition but without the questionable titles and without Eyman’s name attached. Eyman was upset and wanted all the petitions to come through his office and to bear only his name. In conversations that first weekend, Tim Eyman and FFN agreed that if FFN would withdraw its petitions, Tim Eyman would give copies of all petitions that came in to FFN. It was a simple agreement. That was the full agreement. There were no other conditions to it.

So what they’re telling us is that they knew the headlines on Eyman’s petitions were “misleading” (i.e. lies) but that their primary concern was that this might be used as legal grounds to overturn the referendum. And despite being fully cognizant of this blatant dishonesty, they cut a deal with Eyman anyway, knowingly permitting misleading petitions to be distributed in their churches.

During the whole “Referendum Sunday” spat I had strongly criticized ministers for repeating Eyman’s lies from the pulpit, suggesting that there might be a Commandment against that. Now it seems clear that Fuiten and Randall at least tacitly endorsed such lies.

As far as I’m concerned, when you deal with the Devil you get what you deserve.

I’ve been busy today having a life or something. So here’s another open thread.

Hey… I finally posted again over at Huffington. Hmm… wonder what was on my mind today?

Betcha this is a picture we see over and over again in campaign literature come November. Democratic campaign literature that is.

“Everything I know tells me we need to change course… I am going to defeat Dave Reichert because he will never stop George Bush. But together, we will.”
— Darcy Burner, Westlake Center rally, 6/16/2006

Are you a Safeco shareholder? Are you pissed off by the $17 million golden parachute Safeco gave Mike McGavick after he announced his resignation? If you’re both, send me an email.

President Bush is coming to Seattle today to raise a stunning $800,000 for Rep. Dave Reichert, and I urge all of you to join a rally 11:30 AM at Westlake Center (400 Pine St., Seattle) to send a message to Bush that his failed policies and his rubber-stamp Congress are not welcome in Washington State!

Democratic challenger Darcy Burner will be there to fire up the crowd, along with a host of other local elected officials. Please show your support.

Sen. Maria Cantwell gave a 15-minute address on the floor of the US Senate yesterday, which the Seattle P-I describes as “largely a restatement of her earlier positions.” That’s mostly true, though I’m guessing most of her critics on the angry left would prefer a pithy statement of values, rather than the wordy policy speech she gave.

I urge you to read the full text of Sen. Cantwell’s speech for yourself, but the P-I article did include some very savvy expert analysis:

Much of the critical conversation about Cantwell’s Iraq stance has been conducted on the Internet. The creator of a prominent political blog in Washington state, David Goldstein, said he doubts Cantwell’s comments Wednesday would change many minds.

“Many on the left in Washington state have latched on to Senator Cantwell as the local symbol of this war, and I’m not sure if anything could dissuade them of that notion,” Goldstein, who runs the blog HorsesAss.org (www.horsesass.org), said in an e-mail.

“Instead, what we get are reasonable speeches like this in which she lays out a very pragmatic, if emotionally unsatisfying, approach,” Goldstein wrote. “While she does not explicitly say so, I read this speech as setting a goal of being ready to substantially withdraw within 18 months, and considering the security concerns, again, that seems rather pragmatic and even optimistic. But again, that won’t come anywhere near satisfying those who are demanding an immediate withdrawal.”

Man… that Goldstein guy really knows what he’s talking about.

Now before anybody jumps down my throat I want to reiterate that I do not believe we should have invaded Iraq, and I do not mean to be dismissive towards those who call for an “immediate” withdrawal. There is a legitimate debate to be had as to whether our military presence in Iraq causes more problems than it solves, and whether our objectives (assuming we have any) are desirable or achievable.

But to those who attack Sen. Cantwell for being pro-war or for having no plan to withdraw, I have to say that this simply is not true. Sen. Cantwell is clearly not for immediate withdrawal; she’s for making the best of a very bad situation by attempting to stabilize the Iraqi government, build its security forces, and internationalize the intervention so as to permit the US to largely reduce its military presence over the course of the next year and a half or so.

Whether this is possible or not, I do not know, but it is grounds for a reasonable debate. Unfortunately, the sense that I get from some people in my own party — people I largely agree with on many issues — is that they do not want a debate. They want Sen. Cantwell to apologize for her vote, to aggressively criticize the Bush administration, and to call for an immediate withdrawal. I understand this, but well… life is full of disappointments.

Anyway, I urge Sen. Cantwell’s critics to hold their fire for a moment, read her speech, and then come back and tell me what exactly is so unreasonable or immoral about her approach to what is a very difficult problem. (I mean, apart from her failure to criticize the Bush administration for its stunning dishonesty and incompetence, which would have been satisfying, but not particularly productive.)

Hey… why’d they feed Slog the scoop? Oh, never mind, for the point is Darcy Burner has some poll numbers and it doesn’t look so good for Dave Reichert.

Reichert’s job performance rating stands at a paltry 39 percent, while his reelect numbers have wobbled down to 33 percent. And he does even worse with independents.

And if you Reichert supporters want to comfort yourselves by dismissing this as the distortion of a Democratic pollster, have at it, but you won’t be in very good company. A few weeks ago a local GOP insider confided that he’d be surprised if Reichert’s reelects were much above the mid-thirties, and Burner’s poll merely confirms his intuition.

One thing you’ll notice missing from the polling information posted on Slog is the result of a direct head-to-head. I suspect that would likely show Reichert with a lead, but it’s too early in the campaign for such a comparison to be meaningful. Burner has dramatically raised her name ID from 18 percent to 46 percent without the benefit of any paid media, but that’s still too low to get a solid read on where she stands with voters compared to Reichert.

So all in all this is good news for Burner, if not surprising. Reichert is vulnerable and Burner is surging. The 8th Congressional District is in play.

Is the “mainstream” media ignoring Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s expose on vote fraud and suppression in Ohio? Well, as far as local political writers go, you can’t get much more mainstream than the Seattle P-I’s Joel Connelly. (And I mean that in a good way, Joel.)

When President Bush touches down in Seattle tomorrow to headline a high-donor fundraiser for Rep. Dave Reichert, it will mark a historic first for both the President and his uber-political advisor Karl Rove: Democratic challenger Darcy Burner now has the honor of being the first “Netroots endorsed” candidate to be targeted with a presidential visit.

Don’t underestimate the significance of this event. Rove is nothing if not clever (well… maybe “evil”,) and he knows a political danger when he sees it. In the past the Netroots have focused on supporting progressive underdogs, campaigns where our financial and media resources could have the most relative impact. But Burner is different. Burner has the opportunity to give the Netroots our biggest victory to date. Burner is in a strong position to win.

But no candidate can be expected to compete in a media intensive market like the 8th CD while being dramatically outspent by their opponent, and Bush’s visit tomorrow is intended to be a financial sledgehammer that Rove can use to smash the Burner campaign and the Netroots strategy. We can’t let that happen.

Burner just posted a “diary” to Daily Kos, and I urge all my readers with active DKos accounts to go there and recommend it NOW. We need to get her struggle out in front of the national Netroots so that they can respond immediately with their support.

I also urge all of you to go and read Burner’s diary on Daily Kos, for no other news article or post or piece of campaign literature I have seen so clearly lays out the candidates, the issues and what is at stake for our region and our nation in this election.

President Bush’s visit tomorrow will pump a startling half million dollars $800,000 or more into Reichert’s coffers, and is clear confirmation that both Rove and Bush believe that the silver-haired, leaden-tongued first term congressman is a loyal Bush Republican. We cannot allow Reichert to be coddled by the White House and the GOP House leadership on the one hand, and to claim independence on the other. We cannot allow this enormous influx of presidential money to come without a political cost.

If you have any plans to give to the Burner campaign at any time this year, now is the time to do it. And if you can afford to max out your contributions, now is the time to max out. Burner has set a modest goal of raising $75,000 in response to President Bush’s visit… but I’d like to see us blow past this target. So please, give directly to Darcy Burner today. Or if you prefer, you can give to Burner via my Act Blue page, and we’ll add the Netroots contributions into her total.

We can take back Congress. But we need your help.

The Republican House leadership has worked hard to help Rep. Dave Reichert craft an image as an independent moderate… an image he needs to maintain if he’s to have a hope of winning reelection in Washington’s moderate, independent-leaning 8th Congressional District. Indeed, Reichert publicly admitted as much:

“Back in Washington, there are lots of games played. […] Sometimes the leadership comes to me and says, “Dave, we want you to vote a certain way.” Now, they know I can do that over here, that I have to do that over here. In other districts, that’s not a problem, but here I have to be able to be very flexible in where I place my votes. […] That’s where I need to be in a fifty-fifty district.”

The fact is Reichert has never cast a single vote against the White House or the House leadership when it really mattered, and now Karl Rove is rewarding him for his loyalty by sending President Bush on a rare visit to campaign for a House Republican in his home district. On Friday, the President will appear at high-donor fundraiser in Medina, where he expects to raise over half a million dollars on behalf of Reichert. And if the media does its job explaining the context of this visit, it should come at a political price.

Make no mistake: President Bush is making an extraordinary effort on behalf of the 8th CD’s freshman congressman because he knows that Reichert is a reliable vote. And Reichert is welcoming Bush into his district because he is a staunch supporter of the President and his policies.

As November approaches, the Republicans will attempt to localize the election by trying to make it a race between the silver-haired sheriff and an unknown, untested newcomer. But voters need to understand that this race in this district is about whether we want to leave our nation’s future in the hands of President Bush and the GOP leadership, unchecked and unbalanced. A couple weeks ago Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told a local audience that the Democrats cannot take back the House without winning WA-08.

If you had any doubt that Reichert is little more than just one more rubber stamp in our Republican controlled rubber stamp Congress, President Bush’s visit Friday should put it to rest. Reichert is as loyal a Republican as they come.

President Bush’s visit also makes one other important statement about this race: that it is incredibly tight and that Republicans are incredibly worried. Few GOP candidates are willing to appear with such an unpopular President, but well… Reichert desperately needs the money. Darcy Burner shocked both the GOP and the Democratic establishment by outraising the incumbent in the first quarter, and Reichert needs a huge second quarter to reassure his base. The President’s visit will do that for him.

Rather than despair, Democrats are turning lemons into lemonade. The Burner campaign is asking you to give as much as you can in the days before and after Bush’s visit, to help offset Reichert’s presidential-visit cash advantage. The campaign has set an ambitious $75,000 goal, and I urge you to contribute directly. The campaign has set up a special donation page where you can track the progress.

I also urge you to share your voice. A rally will be held Friday at Westlake Center, starting at 11:15 AM. President Bush’s very public embrace of Reichert is big news, and we want to give the media every reason to cover it.