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[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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Seattle Times science reporter Sandi Doughton has an in depth piece today on the growing body of science that shows sexual orientation to be strongly influenced by genetics and/or prenatal conditions. [“Born gay? How biology may drive orentation.”]

“It’s pretty definitive that biological factors play a role in determining a person’s sexual orientation.”
…
If science proves homosexuality is innate, is there any basis to deny gays equal treatment — including the right to marry?

Hmm. If this were simply a legal question, science would play an important role in determining the answer. But let me rephrase the question into a moral and ethical context.

Marriage is about love and commitment. How is this ever a bad thing?

So how is Air America Radio, and progressive talk in general, really doing? Michael at blatherWatch has the scoop on both the numbers and the politics… and contrary to the doomsayers from the right, it’s looking pretty good.

Here in Seattle, KPTK 1090 continues its very respectable with growth:

Anderson mentioned mention several cities where the format has shown great success. Seattle’s newly talk-formatted KPTK, doubled in the Winter book, Portland’s KPOJ AM grew 1000% in audience share.

I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to 1090 going local.

From the NY Times:

Gov. Jeb Bush asked a state prosecutor on Friday to investigate the circumstances of Terri Schiavo’s collapse, saying a new autopsy report revealed a possible gap between when Ms. Schiavo fell unconscious and when her husband called paramedics.

What an prick. What a vindictive, mean-spirited, conscienceless prick.

Talk amongst yourselves.

I am loath to readdress this issue, but clearly there are those on the other side who intend to continue to try milk the election contest for all it’s worth… which given the facts, really isn’t all that much. There will be efforts made over the coming months to “prove” that Dino Rossi really won the election, only this time there won’t be an impartial judge to separate the evidentiary chaff from the chaff. And so as much as I would prefer to concentrate on real issues, I will continue to refute the misinformation coming from the poor losers over at the GOP, and their surrogates on right-wing blogs and talk radio.

For example, yesterday King County Elections released the names of 91 of the 95 absentee ballots that were left uncounted during the November election, and there has been some effort to spin this into yet another tale of official misconduct and corruption, pointing to the fact that a disproportionate number of these ballots came from pro-Rossi precincts… a fact that is old news.

First, let me repeat that if anybody has the right to be angry at KC Elections, it is the people on this list. Their votes weren’t counted, and however unintentional the error may have been, it is still unacceptable. There will always be errors in every election, but this is one that better processes and controls should largely fix. These voters deserve an official apology.

That said, this error in no way changed the outcome of this election. The number of uncounted ballots was smaller than the margin of victory, and as shall be seen, likely had little or no impact on the final spread. Indeed, these ballots represent only 0.01 percent of total ballots cast in King County. The conspiracy theorists would like you to believe that this relatively tiny number of random errors is evidence of malicious intent… but that theory simply isn’t supported by the facts.

To illustrate this, HA’s very own statistical expert, DJ, has analyzed the uncounted ballots by precinct and gender, and his conclusion couldn’t be more undramatic.

Suppose we can assume that the uncounted absentee ballots are drawn randomly from all ballots in their precinct. If we are happy with this assumption, we can do the equivalent of a proportional reduction Monte Carlo simulation. Instead of removing votes from candidates for each ballot, we flip a coin (weighted by the fractions of Gregoire, Rossi and Other votes in the precinct) and then added to the winners total. This can be repeated multiple times and the following distribution of final margin of victory for Gregoire results (beginning with a lead of 133 votes).

Obviously, Rossi never won any of the simulations as there were only 91 new ballots. The median number of votes for Gregoire is 42 (95% confidence interval: 32 to 51) and the median number of votes for Rossi is 46 (CI: 37.0 to 55), so Rossi gains, on average, about 4 votes. The median final margin of victory drags Gregoire back down to 129 (CI: 111 to 147) votes.

Of course, as the Democrats’ expert witnesses proved — to the satisfaction of Judge Bridges, if not (u)SP’s self-appointed expert

Sen. Maria Cantwell’s proposal to reduce our nation’s dependence on foreign oil by 40 percent over the next 20 years was narrowly defeated on a mostly party-line vote. The proposed amendment to the Senate’s energy bill failed 53-47, with only three Republicans joining all but one Democrat.

Cantwell, D-Wash., expressed disappointment with the outcome, noting that Democrats, Republicans and President Bush have all agreed that the nation should move to lessen its dependence on foreign supplies. The United States currently imports 58 percent of the 21 million barrels of oil it consumes every day.

“Unfortunately, the concern we’ve been hearing from the president and Republican leaders about America’s dependence on foreign oil is just empty rhetoric,” Cantwell said. “They had a chance to throw a strike for the economic and national security of our nation, and they balked.”

Yeah, well… that’s because Bush’s financial patrons make a butt-load of money importing oil… so we wouldn’t want to do anything to upset the status quo. Besides, without all that foreign oil to protect, how would we ever justify the trillions of dollars we spend on the military industrial complex?

Whatever. Kudos to Sen. Cantwell for calling the administration’s bluff.

KING 5 has posted the names of the 95 voters whose absentee ballots were left uncounted in King County. The list was obtained through a public records request… not by guestimating.

Now these are people who deserve to be angry at King County Elections. If I were Dean Logan, I’d send them each a personal apology.

That said, looking at the precincts, it is likely that the votes were fairly evenly distributed between the candidates, so they would not have changed the final margin by more than a handful of votes.

The Seattle Times today reports on a proposal that would allow the University of Washington to become more like a private university, allowing tuition to rise towards market rates, while dramatically increasing need-based financial aid.

The idea would be to increase financial aid to students on a sliding scale based on income to help offset a large increase in tuition.

There are skeptics wary of such a move, but university officials pitch it as a kind of Robin Hood plan, where the families of rich students pay more to help subsidize tuition for students from middle- and low-income families.

I have long supported such measures — indeed I think it is inevitable — but I need to correct a mischaracterization in the above statement. Right now, taxpayers subsidize all students equally… even the children of the wealthy. Under the proposal, it is not fair to say that “the families of rich students pay more to help subsidize tuition for students from middle- and low-income families;” rather, the rich will simply be less subsidized than the poor. No tuition covers the full cost of a college education, and all students are subsidized to some degree, through taxes, endowment, research grants and other revenues.

I expect that many will have a knee-jerk reaction against this proposal, as low tuition is uniformly appealing. But Washington state is in the midst of an education funding crisis, where we simply do not have enough four-year slots to meet the growing needs of our expanding population. If taxpayers and legislators are unwilling to pay the cost of expanding our current system of across-the-board subsidies, then means-testing is really the only solution. The alternative is to let our university system decline, while denying access to an ever-growing number of applicants. This would not only be disastrous for our children, but in the long run, a disaster for our economy as well.

Another nit to pick in the article is that the reporters didn’t include comments from Reps. Fred Jarrett (Mercer Island) or Skip Priest (Federal Way), Republican legislators who deserve a lot of credit for a similar proposal that was part of their broader, education package, HB 1434. Due to the partisan nature of the previous legislative session, and the sponsors’ minority status, the bill got little consideration. Gov. Christine Gregoire sounds serious about exploring the UW tuition proposal, and I hope her education task force considers the entirety of the forward-thinking Jarrett/Priest bill… she may be surprised to find some strong bipartisan support.

Gregoire said she knows some lawmakers are worried about the idea, but said she wouldn’t endorse any approach that reduces access or hurts the middle class.

Still, something needs to be done, she said. “When I talk to companies about coming to Washington state and staying in Washington, not one of them has talked to me about the B&O [business and occupation] tax. Every employer has talked to me about education and whether the state is committed to education.

“We can’t allow budgets that are being consumed by skyrocketing health-care costs and unfunded mandates to lead our institutions to mediocrity. That’s what I see, stepping back, is happening.”

It’s comforting to know that Gov. Gregoire clearly understands one of our state’s most pressing problems. She’s got three years and five months to prove to voters that she can fix it.

Equal Rights Washington is planning to run an ad in the Eastside Journal, targeting State Senators Bill Finkbeiner and Luke Esser for their votes against HB-1515, the Anti-Discrimination Bill. They are asking for your help to choose the ad that sends the right message. (And while you’re there, you might as well contribute a few bucks as well.)

If Microsoft really wants to make amends for spinelessly pulling its support for the bill during the last legislative session, I’d suggest they pay for this ad campaign themselves.

For those who read (or write) the blogs and wonder, “why bother?”… well, here’s another great example of how persistent blogging can move the MSM: “Web puts ‘Downing Street Memo‘ in spotlight.”

The issue of the “Downing Street Memo,” as it has come to be known — and what it does or does not prove about the actions of the Bush administration before the 2003 invasion of Iraq — burst suddenly into the open last week.

President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were asked about it at their joint news conference in London. The topic was raised by interviewer Gwen Ifill when Blair appeared on PBS’ “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” show. Tim Russert, the host of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” asked Republican Party Chairman Ken Mehlman on June 5.
…
The story has been kept alive in the United States largely by Internet sites. Organizers of the sites say the memo proves Bush lied to Congress and the American public when he denied having made a decision to go to war.

I blogged on the topic way back on May 2, and again several times since. While I don’t claim to have been personally influential in forcing the MSM to address this issue, I was part of the larger cacophony of dissent that did.

Tomorrow, amidst growing media scrutiny, Rep. John Conyers (MI), the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, will hold a “forum” on the memo. Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) has not only refused to hold a formal hearing, he’s refusing to allow Democrats to use any committee hearing rooms. This is exactly the sort of arrogance of power that led the Bush administration to invade Iraq on a lie.

We all need to keep up the pressure on both the MSM and Congress, so that circumstances behind this war can be properly investigated, and the truth revealed to the American people.

Terry Schiavo’s autopsy report is being released at this moment, and the AP has the first few details:

Terri Schiavo did not suffer any trauma prior to her 1990 collapse and her brain was about half of normal size when she died, according to results released Wednesday of an autopsy conducted on the severely brain-damaged woman.

Pinellas-Pasco Medical Examiner Jon Thogmartin concluded that there was no evidence of strangulation or other trauma leading to her collapse. He also said she did not appear to have suffered a heart attack.
…
“The brain weighed 615 grams, roughly half of the expected weight of a human brain. … This damage was irreversible, and no amount of therapy or treatment would have regenerated the massive loss of neurons.”

The autopsy also concludes that Schiavo was blind, due to the fact that the vision centers of Schiavo’s brain were destroyed.

I’m guessing the autopsy report will settle the issue as to Schiavo’s condition… except for those people who choose to believe otherwise. For example, one “Pro-Life” blog prepared readers for the report by predicting it would be “outlandish:”

While I don’t know what the autopsy report will say, I’m going to go out on a limb here: I predict that the autopsy report will, in at least a tentative way, offer a conclusion that Terri was in a PVS.

I say this for three reasons:

Firstly (and perhaps this is just my cynicism coming out), it would fit the generally unfortunate and dishonest way that the rest of the Terri Schiavo saga has played out.

Secondly, doctors with whom I have discussed the Schiavo case share my pessimistic outlook. Dr. Peter Morin, a Boston neurologist interviewed for my March 16 NRO article, said that he anticipated “gross overstatements regarding the implications of the neuropathology.”

Yes, well… that’s the kind of open mindedness that we’ve come to expect.

This was a private, family tragedy in which cynical politicians shamelessly exploited a brain-dead woman for political advantage. Many, many people owe both Michael and Terri Schiavo an apology.