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Well surprise, surprise. It looks like House Ethics Committee Chair Doc Hastings may have to investigate himself.

Rep. Doc Hastings, already under fire as chairman of the stalled House ethics committee, accepted a $7,800 trip to England in 2000 from a company he championed for a multibillion-dollar contract at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, records released by an advocacy group yesterday show.

In addition, other records released yesterday by a political Web site show that Hastings, a Republican from Pasco, did not file a required travel report for a 2004 trip to a resort on Stuart Island, B.C. That was paid for by another company also working at Hanford.

Hastings was cynically installed as ethics chair to protect House Majority Leader Tom DeLay from accumulating ethics charges. Now it appears that both are at the center of controversies regarding improper reporting of privately paid trips.

Word is that the normally low-profile Hastings is not enjoying his time in the spotlight. It wouldn’t be a surprise to see him step down from the chairmanship, and back into the cool, comfortable shadows by the end of the summer.

Ramble on.

I’ll be on the Bryan Suits Show tonight at 6 pm, KVI-570, talking about the Monorail. I assume Bryan wants me on so he can show that yes, even flaming liberals like me oppose the Monorail.

Hmm… this will be a tough one. My position on the Monorail is actually rather nuanced, but as we all know, nuance doesn’t play well on talk radio.

[NWPT55]Even though I voted against it, it really bothers me to criticize the Seattle Monorail, because a) I sorta, really want it, and b) some of its most vocal opponents are vicious, lying bastards, who take great joy in scuttling any public project that doesn’t directly benefit their corporate overseers. But after seeing the SMP’s response to public criticism of the final plan’s financing and less than aesthetic design, I am underwhelmed.

The news today is about the long term interest costs to build the Monorail Green Line.

The newspaper is correct when it adds all of those future interest payments together and gets to around $11 billion. However, the value of these interest payments in 2005 dollars is closer to $1.9 billion, or roughly the same as the total cost of the Project which is just under $2 billion (in 2005 dollars). Keep in mind that most of the dollars added up and presented in the Seattle PI article will be paid 30 or 40 years into the future, when a dollar then is worth about 10 to 15 cents today.

It is similar to when someone buys a home with a 30-year mortgage and the interest payments over the 30 years end up being greater than the initial price of the home.

Well yeah, that’s kinda true… from the financial perspective of the SMP… but not for the individual taxpayers who are being asked to pay off the bonds. Presumably, the SMP will issue bonds with fixed regular payments, similar to a mortgage. So due to inflation, a fixed payment today of $100 might be worth only $0.10 in 2005 dollars, several decades hence. But individual taxpayers’ car tabs will rise with inflation along with the price of cars.

The SMP’s 1.4% car tab tax currently costs me $177.00 a year on my 4 year-old car. Due to wear and tear and changing circumstances, I expect I’ll buy several new cars over the coming decades… and each of those will be purchased in inflation-adjusted dollars. So assuming I buy a new car of similar value every 8 to 10 years, my average annual Monorail tax will remain about $177.00 in 2005 dollars. Thus, at the same time the SMP’s annual bond repayments are worth ten cents on the inflation-adjusted dollar, I’ll be paying $1770.00 a year, not $17.00.

In simple terms, if the car tab is levied for 50 years, not the originally projected 25, the Monorail will end up personally costing me about twice as much… roughly $8500 in 2005 dollars. (Though to be fair, I’ll likely be dead before the bonds are paid off, so my total bill will be somewhat less.)

And that has always been my primary complaint about the Monorail… its financing. We are asking taxpayers to ostensibly pay 1.4% of the value of their cars, every year for the rest of their lives. And I wonder… will taxpayers be willing to pony up additional revenues to fund anything else? Or, as I suspect, will the 14-mile Green Line be the only transportation project Seattle voters build over the next half-century?

The SMP’s response generated one more disappointment. They told us we have only two options:

1) We can move forward with this plan.

2) We can decide to not build the Monorail Green Line at all.

Yes I know… politically, those are likely the only two options. But there is a third, if the SMP board has the patience, fortitude and leadership to pursue it. They could pause from the rush to break ground, go back to the drawing board, and come up with a new proposal that simply makes more financial sense. Lob a few miles off one end or the other, propose a more reliable mix of financing, and give us back the sleek design that will make the Monorail an icon rather than an eyesore. Then come back to the polls for another vote if they have to, but this time with all their ducks in a row, and the fixed price contracts in hand. Sure, it could delay the project a couple more years, and they always risk losing a close vote rather than winning one. But it would be the responsible, creative thing to do given the circumstances.

As a progressive, I believe in the social benefits of public transit, and I’m willing to put my tax dollars where my mouth is. But we should only support those public projects that make sense.

It pains me to write this, because in doing so, I am not living up to my responsibility to parry the rhetorical blows of the right-wing critics who will surely paint any decision by the SMP as the ultimate in bureaucratic bungling and arrogance. The anti-transit crowd is in this battle on purely ideological grounds — they are unwilling to give an inch, and the temptation is to be just as inch-stingy in return. Indeed, if this were a national or even a state-wide issue, I would be much more reluctant to voice my reasoned opposition to a transit project I kinda, sorta want.

But this is Seattle, a bastion of progressivism, and quite frankly the political and rhetorical machinations of a handful of marginal, anti-transit blowhards shouldn’t even enter into the equation. We have the opportunity to build a 21st Century transit system, and the responsibility to build it right.

And I simply am not convinced that the current proposal is the right way to build the Monorail.

There is nothing more un-American than passing a constitutional amendment to outlaw burning of the American flag.

Our flag is a proud symbol to veterans and other patriotic Americans… but a symbol of what? A nation where freedom of speech is amongst our most cherished rights. To contradict this basic human right is both outrageous and absurd.

A few years back I spent $15.00 on an American flag (it was made in China,) and in addition to it being a symbol, it is also a piece of cloth that I own. The day my nation throws me in jail for lighting a match to my flag, while standing on my property, is the day America ceases to be, well… America.

Both the Washington Post and the Seattle P-I report today on the continuing saga of two of Tom DeLay’s croniest cronies with Northwest connections: former Preston Gates & Ellis uber-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and his good buddy, Mercer Island rabbi and vanity talk-radio host, Daniel Lapin. At a Senate hearing yesterday on allegations that Abramoff defrauded Indian Tribes of tens of millions of dollars — some of it funneled through groups connected to DeLay, Ralph Reed and other prominent right-wingers — an e-mail exchange was introduced in which Abramoff asked the good rabbi to phony up some fake awards to help him gain membership at a ritzy D.C. club.

“I hate to ask you for your help with something so silly but I’ve been nominated for membership in the Cosmos Club, which is a very distinguished club in Washington, DC, comprised of Nobel Prize winners, etc.,” Abramoff wrote. “Problem for me is that most prospective members have received awards and I have received none. I was wondering if you thought it possible that I could put that I have received an award from Toward Tradition with a sufficiently academic title, perhaps something like Scholar of Talmudic Studies?”

There were titters in the audience as Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) read aloud the e-mail, then outright laughter as he continued reading: “Indeed, it would be even better if it were possible that I received these in years past, if you know what I mean.”

The rabbi, conservative radio host Daniel Lapin, gave his blessing. “I just need to know what needs to be produced,” he wrote. “Letters? Plaques?”

“The point of all of this,” Dorgan said, “is there’s a lot of deception going on.”

No shit, Sherlock.

Rabbi Lapin’s history of deceit, self-aggrandizement and profiteering is so extensive, he’s even earned his own category over on blatherWatch. It was Lapin who first introduced Abramoff to DeLay, and it was Abramoff who helped Lapin establish his very profitable, theo-con not-for-profit organization, Toward Tradition. Their mutual back-scratching has helped make both men wealthy and politically connected, so really… what’s a fake award or two between friends?

Don’t be confused by the title “Rabbi” before Lapin’s name; it doesn’t automatically make a man moral or wise. Lapin is above all, a self-serving, well-connected, right-wing operative with his fingers in local politics as well as national. He even played a role in drumming up false outrage over last November’s gubernatorial election, using his radio show as a forum for promoting the NW blogosphere’s most famous conspiracy theorist, and even joining Stefan as a featured speaker at January’s ridiculous, Ukrainian-themed “Re-Vote” rally, where he inflamed a crowd already fired up on lies about disenfranchised military voters, by paraphrasing John Merrick: “We are not animals! We are humans touched by the finger of GOD!!”

Oh puh-lease.

Rabbi Lapin shows off “the finger of God.” [photo courtesy (un)Sound Politics]

Our good friend Stefan’s man-crush on Lapin borders on sycophancy (a quick search of (u)SP finds a dozen posts since the beginning of the year mentioning the good Rabbi.) Indeed, not only does Lapin’s angry mix of angry zionism and angry free market determinism appear to drive Stefan’s angry worldview, Lapin has literally driven Stefan himself… chauffeuring “Aluminum Hat Boy” to the Re-Vote rally. (The Rabbi is not only a shrewd political operative who has made himself rich playing the role of the Jewish shill for the Christian far-right, but according to Stefan, he’s also an “excellent driver.”)

That Rabbi Lapin should be assumed to have any moral authority is a joke, given his record of lies, deceit and political machinations. If his career is not actually destroyed by the Abramoff scandal, whatever is left of his credibility should be.

One of the big political issues in Washington state for 2006 will surely be an Oregon style “takings” initiative, that requires state and local governments to compensate property owners for potential value lost due to land-use restrictions. On a somewhat related topic, today a divided US Supreme Court broadly reaffirmed the Fifth Amendment power of eminent domain.

In a closely watched decision the court ruled 5-4 that local governments have the right to seize private property for private development in the interest of the common good. The court said that local officials, not federal judges, are best capable of determining whether a development project benefits the community.

“The city has carefully formulated an economic development that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the community, including

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An editorial in yesterday’s Olympian discusses a proposal to elevate multiple drunk driving convictions from a gross misdemeanor to a class C felony. HB 1451, introduced by Rep. John Ahern (R-Spokane), would make a third such conviction punishable by as much as 17 months in jail; under current law the maximum penalty is a $1000 fine and 90 days.

213 peopled died as a result of drunk driving accidents in 2004. That this was the lowest number of such fatalities since 1961 does not lessen the tragedy.

But while I’m certainly not going to argue against getting repeat drunk driving offenders off the roads, I was struck by the cost of the Ahern proposal:

Locking DUI defendants up in prison is a costly proposition. According to officials with the National Highway Traffic Safety Commission, approximately one-third of those people arrested for DUI are repeat offenders. Putting three-time offenders behind bars for up to 17 months would force the state of Washington to build another 1,000-bed prison. That would cost about $225 million over a two-year budget cycle.

And that figure doesn’t include the $60-plus million per biennium to house the extra prisoners.

That’s more than $350 million of state expenditures over the next 6 years — all to lock up a thousand or so drunk drivers — and I can’t help but wonder if maybe the problem couldn’t be addressed at less financial and personal expense? That’s not the bleeding heart liberal in me talking, it’s the calculating utilitarian. Certainly there are incorrigible drunks who will never stop drinking and driving, and they need to be locked up to protect the public. But there are others who might be stopped if proper resources were made available for treatment, education and technology. For example, repeat offenders could be required to have their cars installed with devices that require the driver to pass a breathalyzer before engaging the ignition. Such technology is expensive… but a helluva lot cheaper than incarceration.

So while I agree with the Olympian that the bill deserves “additional consideration and refinement,” I hope that lawmakers make a proper cost-benefit analysis, and consider all the options, before passing expensive legislation on what is undoubtedly a very emotional issue. It may be that a little prevention is more effective and less costly than the cure.

My good friend Stefan and I agree on very little, but we have equal disdain for the dumb-ass Top-Two primary. This is a rare issue that crosses party lines, which I suppose explains why both major parties are suing to have I-872 tossed out.

Another example of this curious bipartisanship is today’s guest blog on Northwest Progressive Institute, by Dr. Reed Davis, a former chair of the King County GOP, and the runner-up in last September’s Republican primary for US Senate. Dr. Davis is also an Associate Professor of Political Science at Seattle Pacific University, and he presents a very cogent defense of political parties, and their partisan primaries.

Read the whole thing.

You don’t get the Seattle Weekly to name you “Best Activist/Hell-Raiser” just by sitting on your ass. No sirree… last year I earned my award by rolling up my sleeves, getting my hands dirty, then washing my hands, scrubbing under my nails, and typing up an email to 700 people asking them to vote for me for “Best Activist/Hell-Raiser.” Yes it was a petty, self-centered, egotistical thing to do… but if it kept Tim Eyman from grabbing the honor two years running, then it was well worth the sacrifice.

Well it’s “Best of” season again, and this year I’ve got some real competitors who are at least as petty and egotistical as I am, but have an even bigger list. The children over at (un)Sound Politics have already posted, asking their 7000 readers a day to cast ballots for their preferred ticket, and well… I just don’t want those lying SOBs to enjoy the tiniest bit of pleasure from this bogus accolade… do you? And so I ask you, my loyal readers, to fill out the Weekly’s online ballot, and mindlessly vote the following slate:

3. Best local talk radio host: David Goldstein
9. Best local blog: HorsesAss.org
11. Best activist/hell raiser: David Goldstein

Um, no… I’m not actually a local talk radio host, but I’d like to be. So this award would look pretty damn good on my resume. The other two should be pretty self-explanatory.

The folks at (u)SP have also posted nominations in other categories, so we need to crush their hopes there too. Feel free to vote your conscience, but if you all vote mine instead, we’re much more likely to come out winners:

8. Best local website: Pacific Northwest Portal
14. Best scandal: Dino Rossi’s meritless election contest
15. Best local cause: ending homelessness
16. Best reform we need: a state income tax

And finally, for old time’s sake, I strongly encourage you all to vote in the following category:

42. Best fish market: Tim Eyman

That’s only eight categories; vote in two more and you’ll be entered in the Weekly’s prize drawing.

Anyway, you have until July 11, so please, please join me in my childish efforts to deny gratification to others while shamelessly pandering to my own inflated sense of self-importance. Vote early, vote often… vote for me.

As Californians get to know Arnold Schwarzenegger a little better as a bad governor, instead of just another bad actor, his poll numbers continue to slide.

According to the Field Poll released Tuesday, 37 percent of registered California voters approve of Schwarzenegger’s job performance, a drop of 18 percentage points since February.

Continuing a trend that began in January, 53 percent of registered California voters said they do not approve of Schwarzenegger’s performance. That’s a jump of 18 percentage points since February.

The biggest decline came among Democrats and nonpartisan voters, but the poll also found Schwarzenegger’s support among Republican voters has fallen.

To all those California voters disappointed with “The Governator’s” job performance, I’d just like to politely point out that he’s Arnold Schwarzenegger, for Christ’s sake! What the fuck did you expect?!

[NWPT55]While I hate to disappoint the knee-jerk righties over at (un)Sound Politics, I have to say that I’m not a huge fan of the Seattle Monorail. But as long as they continue to lead their coverage with the headline “Die, Monorail, Die”, it’s hard not to oppose the opposition, despite my misgivings. Monorail opponents seem to have a one-track mind, and that mind has long be set on derailing the project, whatever the final proposal might be.

I voted for every monorail initiative, except for the one that authorized the final project. As much as I believe in public transit, and as much as I believe a fancy new monorail will become an instant symbol of 21st century Seattle, when I saw the details, it just didn’t seem worth the cost, especially given the means of financing it. Still, the people had spoken — however narrowly — and when the incredibly cynical “Monorail Recall” initiative hit the ballot last fall, I voted against it. If we’re going to allow opponents of public projects unlimited opportunities to kill them by plebiscite, we’ll never build anything.

I know, I know… nuance is a weakness progressives simply can’t afford, and with the anti-tax, anti-government, anti-infrastructure crowd attacking the gas tax and the monorail on purely ideological grounds, somebody on our side has to be just as reactionary if we’re going to have a hope of maintaining an informed debate in the middle. From what I’ve seen the Seattle Monorail Project (SMP) board is more than up to the task, so I don’t have to be. That’s why I’m going to take a long, hard look at the final proposal released yesterday, before voicing my opinion one way or the other.

But one detail already has me worried. My main reason for voting against the monorail was the huge chunk it took out of voters’ car tabs… this year I’m paying a $177.00 monorail tax on my four-year-old Nissan Altima (the older, anemic model, not the newer fancier one.) My concern was that during the 25 years it took to pay off the bonds, voters would never approve a similar tax for other important transportation projects… you know, like the other half of the financing for replacing the dangerously crumbling Alaska Way Viaduct.

Now we’re told that due to rising costs and lower revenues, the car tab will be needed until 2050… nearly twice the number of years originally estimated. Ouch.

If I were a Seattle City Council member, I would be loath to overturn the will of the voters and reject this proposal… but I would still need to be convinced that it delivers something reasonably close to what voters were promised. I urge the Council to explore the details very carefully, and vote their minds not their hearts.

I’ll come back to this issue with a more informed opinion after I’ve had the opportunity to digest the facts.

As a top diplomat in Britain’s UN mission, Carne Ross was responsible for liaising with UN weapons inspectors. In an interview with the Guardian, he describes his own government’s claims about Iraqi weapons programs as “totally implausible.”

“I’d read the intelligence on WMD for four and a half years, and there’s no way that it could sustain the case that the government was presenting. All of my colleagues knew that, too”.

Note, he’s not saying the claims were implausible in hindsight, he’s saying he and his colleagues knew they were implausible at the time. And his criticisms don’t stop there.

“There was a very good alternative to war that was never properly pursued, which was to close down Saddam’s sources of illegal revenue”, he says.

Mr Ross also says sanctions imposed against Iraq were wrong. “They did immeasurable damage to the Iraqi civilian population. We were conscious of that but we did too little to address it”, he says.

Whether the Blair government was lying or stupid, doesn’t matter… the point is, they misled the British public in making the case for war. Can anyone really argue that the Bush administration didn’t mislead the American people as well?

Joe Turner of the Tacoma News Tribune writes breathlessly today about the role of the Internet in the campaign for the incredibly myopic and cynically misnamed, “No New Gas Tax” initiative. [“Internet could play key role in No Gas Tax signature push“]

“With the short time span, we know how difficult it’s going to be,” said Brett Bader, a veteran political consultant and spokesman for the No New Gas Tax campaign. “The Web has certainly made it easier to organize. I don’t know what we would have done without it.”

On its Web site, initiative supporters can download copies of the petition, print them out and start collecting signatures. They also can make electronic campaign contributions with their credit cards and volunteer to do more campaign work.

All true… but so what? As Joe points out, “none of this is new”; the Internet has become an integral part of political campaigns of all sorts. Hell… way back in 2003, it was the focal point of I-831, my initiative to proclaim Tim Eyman a “horse’s ass.” (FYI… volunteers gathered over 50,000 signatures with little money and no organization during the few short weeks before the Attorney General got an injunction to shut me down.)

So by focusing on the Internet, Joe is kind of missing the point. It’s not the Internet that’s playing an special role in I-912… it’s right-wing talk radio. This is really the “John Carlson / Kirby Wilbur Initiative”, and I-912 would be absolutely nowhere without them. After all, a website is totally worthless if you don’t have a way of driving traffic to it, and the only thing special about NoNewGasTax.com is the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of free media promoting it… courtesy of John and Kirby.

The Internet is just a tool, available to all political campaigns, to be used on any candidate or issue. Likewise, local talk radio has become an important political tool… though for the moment, it is a tool only made available to the Republican Party and conservative causes.

It is time we even the playing field.

Yeah sure… I know the righties will yell back that conservative talk doesn’t even begin to balance the mythical “liberal media,” but that’s a load of shit not even worth arguing in this context, as it sets up a false comparison. You can’t compare KVI with, say… NPR, because John and Kirby are not journalists. They are propagandists… they are political operatives… they are GOP activists. And they are using their enormously powerful platform to execute a political agenda.

That is why now, more than ever, progressives need people just as shamelessly partisan as John and Kirby to promote their own causes and candidates on local talk radio. AM 1090 is planning to deliver local programming, but in choosing their hosts they can’t just choose any old liberal loudmouth. They need hosts who are willing and able to use their loud mouths as an organizing tool for local progressives. And not just because this will be good for Democrats or the progressive movement… it will also be good for 1090.

For politics aside, talk radio is still a business… and smart politics as it is, John and Kirby’s I-912 campaign is an even smarter business strategy. Launched as interest peaked around the election contest trial, the I-912 campaign is designed to rile up the faithful and hold as much audience as possible during the inevitable post-trial decline. Furthermore, volunteering time — and especially money — creates a much stronger affinity between listeners and the host than the mere act of tuning in. Supporters aren’t just giving to the campaign, they are personally giving to John and Kirby… and in doing so they become emotionally invested as part of the “KVI community.”

I would argue that the political activism coming out of conservative talk is not just a byproduct of the format’s success… it is an integral part of the format itself. There is a symbiotic relationship between the hosts and the causes they promote; in the minds of supporters, John and Kirby don’t just promote the campaigns, they become part of them. Their shows not only feed off of the emotional fervor and passion political campaigns create, they also become organizational focal points… an on-air gathering place for campaign supporters and like minded voters.

There simply is no liberal media equivalent. That’s why local progressives need 1090 to survive… and it won’t unless it does local programming, and it does it right.

UPDATE:
For those interested, blatherWatch expounds on KVI’s role in promoting I-912. Michael thinks their oughta be a law against such blatant abuse of the public airwaves for partisan political purposes. I’m not sure that you can write a law that could stop this, so I say, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

I hope the Seattle Times doesn’t mind too much if I violate their copyright and reprint the following editorial in its entirety.

NEVER, ever expect an apology from the creeps and ghouls who eagerly exploited the life and death of Terri Schiavo for their own political purposes.

Her autopsy report released last week was one final, vulgar invasion of her privacy by a Republican Congress willing to use the Florida woman’s tragic circumstances to pander to a yowling mob. Her death after years in a persistent vegetative state had to be explored for all manner of foul play suspected of her husband

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