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Joni Balter warns Susan Hutchison and Jan Drago that they shouldn’t expect an automatic leg up simply by virtue of their gender, arguing that “Washington voters are too smart for that.” And while I only partially take issue with her thesis (gender will help them stand out in a primary field of men, but won’t do them much good in the general), it was this paragraph that caught my attention:

Seattle and King County are politically sophisticated places. As the only state with two female U.S. senators and a female governor, Washington is the most progressive state in the country when it comes to electing women. Year after year, the state ranks near the top of the list for highest percentage of women elected to the Legislature.

True, sorta. But the trend doesn’t look so encouraging for women these days, particularly at the legislative level.

Washington did indeed rank first in the percentage of women legislators from 1993 through 2004, reaching a high of 40.8 percent (60 out of 147) in 1999 and 2000, but has been trailing off ever since. In 2009 Washington is down to only 48 women legislators, or 32.7 percent, still good for sixth place nationally, but our lowest percentage since 1991.

I asked National Women’s Political Caucus of Washington President Linda Mitchell about the drop-off, and she says that the biggest hurdle to electing more women is recruiting more women candidates:

“We still have a long way to go toward equal representation of women in our elected bodies and one of the biggest problems is that more women are not running for office.  Another example, of the nineteen Seattle City Council candidates this year, only two are women. Well-qualified women often choose not to run because they don’t think they are qualified enough, they lack the money networks, and because they don’t have enough support and encouragement.”

And it doesn’t sound like Mitchell thinks Balter’s characterization of the candidates and their races does much to help the cause:

“I disagree with Balter’s assessment of these two candidates.  Hutchison is not “riding on her gender by sitting out public forums”, it’s her huge name familiarity.  Drago is not “counting on gender politics for a win”, but on a different leadership style – and polling indicates she’s not off-base. I give both women credit for running and hope we can find ways to encourage more women to do so.”

There is this commonly repeated notion that being a woman confers some sort of electoral advantage in Washington state—a notion that Balter ironically reinforces through her “voters are too smart” refutation—when in fact the numbers clearly say otherwise. Women make up slightly over half the electorate, and consistently turn out in higher numbers than men, yet now comprise less than one third of our state legislature, and one ninth of our US House delegation.

Sure, as Balter points out, the top three elected statewide offices are currently held by women, but this is the exception, not the rule. Indeed, over our state’s 120 year history, we have elected only two women to the governor’s mansion, two to the US Senate and seven to the US House. And of the seven remaining women to have won statewide executive office, four of these served as Superintendent of Public Instruction, primary education long being a profession stereotypically deemed suited to women.

Forgive me for not showing my math, but I’m pretty damn sure that if “female contenders somehow get a leg up”, we’d be electing more women than men to office, not substantially less. So obviously, Joni, there’s no need to “bristle” at an assumption that clearly doesn’t hold true.

It’s one kind of crazy to believe these sort of things, as many Republicans obviously do, but it’s an entirely whole new level of crazy for a sitting US Senator to come out and say it.

Sen. Jim Inhofe said today that President Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo was “un-American” …

“I just don’t know whose side he’s on,” Inhofe said of the president.

Good thing for Inhofe the Sedition Act was repealed in 1920.

– The Cannabis Defense Coalition is closely following another trial – this one in Mason County. The defendants, Karen Mower and John Reed, were charged after a police raid on their home found 38 plants. Both are authorized patients. Mower is a terminally ill woman in her 40s who’s been given only 2 years to live by doctors, but the judge has disallowed a medical defense. The next pre-trial hearing is on Monday, June 8 at the Mason County Courthouse in Shelton. The CDC will be arranging for carpools so that concerned citizens can attend the hearing.

– Scott Morgan reminds us that despite what the U.S. Attorney’s office in Seattle keeps saying, the initial arrest and prosecution of Marc Emery was motivated by Emery’s politics more than anything else. In Emery’s home province of Ontario, lawyers are preparing a case that will challenge Canada’s marijuana prohibition in court.

– New York Times columnist Nick Kristof recently posted a query about drug legalization to his facebook account, soliciting feedback for a column this week. It’s great to see some of the most well-respected journalists in the country starting to tackle this question. Here are what I consider the 5 most important reasons the U.S. should go down that path right now:

1. Reducing law enforcement/incarceration expenses – You can just peek ahead to the section below on LEAP’s Howard Woolridge for a good rundown on this one. He talks about the law enforcement side of the equation when it comes to marijuana, but the incarceration costs for all drug users is an even more enormous expense that would be greatly diminished if we invested public funds into treatment. We sometimes think of the economic benefits of ending drug prohibition from the standpoint of how much money would be raised from taxing it, but the real savings come from the amount of money we won’t spend trying to put the 20-30 million Americans who either use or distribute drugs through our criminal justice system. We’re in a very serious economic crisis across the country right now, and while ending drug prohibition won’t solve the problem alone, the problem is virtually unsolvable without reducing the amount of public money that we spend incarcerating as many people as we do.

2. Improving the situation in Mexico – The decades long “war on drugs” had one major effect on drug trafficking. It successfully pushed control of the supply chain to a place where American law couldn’t reach it – Mexico. Now, the Mexican government is completely unable to deal with an illegal industry that pulls in tens of billions of dollars per year from American drug consumption. This has had devastating effects on Mexico’s economy and even more dire consequences for its security.

3. Keeping drugs out the hands of children – Without a regulated market for recreational drugs, the supply chains are run by criminal organizations who have zero incentive to keep drugs out of the hands of children. This has led to a situation where children have greater access to dangerous drugs, and even worse, often become easily dispensible pawns to be used for risky border crossings and other dangerous situations. You can solve both of these problems by setting up regulated markets for drugs.

4. Improving public health – Drug abuse and mental illness are two very costly health problems that feed off of each other. Our emphasis on incarcerating people in order to combat drug addiction doesn’t work and it makes the problem worse. Decriminalization of personal drug use is a vital first step in reducing the public health costs associated with addiction. Allowing doctors to prescribe drugs to addicts is another necessary step on this path, along with needle exchanges and other effective ways to mitigate the effects of drug addiction on our overall public health. In countries where these tactics have been done, they’ve been extraordinarily successful, both at reducing public health problems and lowering drug abuse rates.

5. Setting an example for how other countries can help reduce global organized crime and terrorism – When it comes to the divide in international drug law reform, the United States is on the same side as countries like Iran, Russia, and China, and opposed to countries like Switzerland, Portugal, and Canada, who’ve had greater success in dealing with drug addiction. The result is that the demand for illegal drugs (primarily heroin) is fueling the resurgence in the power of Islamic radicalism in Pakistan in a very similar fashion to how American drug consumption has been fueling Mexican drug gangs. It’s vital that we switch sides in this debate and start working with the countries that are boldly using reason, compassion, and empiricism to deal with this issue and reduce the demand for heroin. As the numbers of drug users rise dramatically in emerging nations like China, an inability to keep that money from flowing to people who view the western world as their enemy will be truly catastrophic.

– Frosty Woolridge, whose brother Howard is a former Michigan police officer and now the main lobbyist for LEAP in Washington DC working to end drug prohibition, posts some of Howard’s most compelling justifications for treating marijuana the same way we treat alcohol:

“Almost all of you reading this will have either been searched for marijuana or know someone who has. My profession has certainly changed its motto from ‘Protect and Serve’ to ‘Search and Arrest.’ A vehicle search will require two officers. Most officers operate alone, thus a colleague must be brought over from a neighboring district to assist. If a 911 call goes out in that district, the response time will be longer than necessary. Ditto for the district where the officer is searching the car. Reduction in Public Safety!

“The average search will require close to 60 minutes of total police time. So 750,000 possession cases equal only ¾ of a million hours, right? Wrong! According to my colleagues back in Bath Township, Michigan who spent most of their 12 hour shifts looking to bust the next Michael Phelps, they search an average of 15 cars to find one with a baggie. Now we are up to about 11 million hours or the equivalent of 5,500 street officers who do nothing but arrest the Willie Nelson’s of the world. Reduction in Public Safety!

…

Using a conservative figure of five hours per dealer bust, we are adding about 1.5 million more hours wasted. The hard number to calculate is how many hours are spent flying around in helicopters, locate an MJ garden and then spend a day cutting down the plants and airlifting them out….all without busting anyone. Now you have a clearer picture of the horrific amount of police time spent. Reduction in Public Safety!

“Wait! We are not done. These 845,000 MJ cases go to the lab that must show that the green stuff really is pot. Labs around the country are over-loaded with drug cases. Since drugs are the most important, guess what cases are not being processed? Rape kits & their DNA. According to National Public Radio and unrefuted, 400,000 rape kits some years old have never been opened. Rapists are running loose as labs process Willie’s last possession with intent to smoke bust. Reduction in Public Safety!

“Pop Quiz. According to our FBI, which crime receives more agent time: marijuana or child pornography? No brainer, right? And you are wrong! When FBI Director Mueller was asked by a not too happy Congresswoman Wasserman-Schultz last year in a House hearing about the pitiful number of FBI agents (33 full-time equivalent) involved in kiddy porn crimes, his response was no new agents, no shifting of resources, nothing, nada, zip. IMO the expression on his face was ‘let them eat cake.’ Obviously he was never a street cop like me who has gently interviewed 7 year old rape victims and then arrested their tormentors. My blood is boiling as I write this, BTW. Reduction in Public Safety!

“Who else is unhappy with this criminal mis-direction of police resources? Some members of MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. They will admit in private that the millions of street cop hours could be refocused & spent reducing deaths due to DUI by thousands. In public they are forced by funders to support MJ prohibition but in private they told me they support ending marijuana prohibition.

“The No Illegal Entry Into the USA groups are now opening their eyes to the fact that MJ prohibition means millions of extra border crossings. Why? Federal agents like ICE and Border Patrol have as their #1 priority federal (Title 21) drug laws. #2 is the catching of illegal entry. So, they literally will let 100 illegals coming thru without hindrance to stop one guy with a 60 pound backpack of grass. Experienced agents have informed me that absent the smuggling of pot with today’s manpower and technology, they could almost stop illegal entry across the southern border.

The emphasis two paragraphs above is mine. I’m very curious to know who’s actually running MADD and why they have such a strong stake in keeping marijuana illegal.

From the Young Conservative Anthem.

“Phase me, make me, into something that ain’t me

Serious c… can’t nobody shake me

great like the Gatsby, poppin posers like acne

Don’t matter if your gay, straight, Christian or Muslim

There’s one thing we all hate, called socialism.

It’s loathsome, and America ain’t the outcome,

Raise taxes on the people,

And you’re gonna feel symptoms, problems

I gotta message for a young con:

superman that socialism,

waterboard that terrorism”

See the video at HuffPo!

Adding, it’s very novel for students at an Ivy League college to lecture people about hard work and playing the hand one is dealt. Not saying people there don’t work hard, but if you’re going to an Ivy League school you’ve got a pretty good shot at a decent life. As with seemingly all conservatives, the sense of victim hood is palpable, constant and—hilariously absurd.

Likely these two will be installed on Wall Street in a few years, where they can dream up innovative financial products so another generation gets to enjoy the benefits of derivatives.

(Props to Aneurin for noticing this bit of strangeness.)

Hard to re-brand the GOP when its elected officials step in poo like this. From The Columbian:

A proposal by County Commissioner Tom Mielke that Clark County should withhold some public health services from people without valid Social Security numbers has inflamed some Latino civil rights advocates.

At a hearing Wednesday, Mielke said he was “concerned about the service that we give to illegals, and the cost.”

“If we don’t have those Social Security numbers, I would like to know who those individuals are who we are serving that are here illegally, and why we serve them and help them in their health,” said Mielke, a Battle Ground Republican. “I think Sheriff Lucas is very interested in who they are.”

To their credit, Republican Sheriff Gary Lucas and Republican County Commissioner Marc Boldt rejected Mielke’s idea out of hand, as did Democratic Commissioner Steve Stuart.

Tough economic times always put resentments in sharp relief. You could wipe out all public health spending in Clark County and it wouldn’t make much difference to the economy one way or the other. Unemployment is high in Clark County not because of illegal immigration but because the local economy was so heavily depending on construction and endless growth. And coming on the heels of the swine flu stuff, it’s a pretty asinine proposal by Mielke.

This is basically Mielke representing the Limbaugh wing of his party, and the more astute politicians are figuring out citizens are beyond tired of that particular vintage.

A few weeks back I wrote a post arguing that as bad as the fundamentals may be newspaper industry wide, struggling publishers need to take a little personal responsibility for their own poor business decisions:

For while the whole industry is struggling, the financial precariousness of some of our most threatened papers is at least partially due to the awful business decisions of their owners, in particular, the incredibly over-leveraged position they find themselves in as a result of ill-advised acquisitions and other bone-headed ventures.

For The Columbian, it was the construction of a new $40 million office tower that landed a shrunken newsroom back in its old digs, and publisher Scott Campbell in bankruptcy court.  For The Times, it was Frank Blethen’s ill-fated foray into the Maine media market that has left him with a couple hundred million dollars of debt coming due, and no obvious means of raising more capital.  Both papers are currently losing money on their daily operations, but neither would be struggling to survive this particular recession if the bankers weren’t pounding at their doors.

That’s the kind of critical analysis one doesn’t often read from a medium tasked with covering itself, and so it was no surprise to be castigated in my own comment thread for daring to challenge the self-soothing meme that it’s Google and bloggers and various technical and economic macro-trends that primarily threaten the industry, rather than the poor business decisions of industry leaders themselves. But it’s an analysis I stand by based on the available facts.

And, it’s an analysis that just got a dumpster load of support in the form of an incredibly in-depth and well-sourced article in the latest edition of Seattle Business Monthly that details the Blethen family saga, and how their own dysfunction accelerated the Times’ “slide toward insolvency…”

What is remarkable about the Times Co.’s current financial state is not that it is happening—newspaper companies from the august New York Times Co. on down are struggling. But while it is true that the Seattle Times Co. has been hammered by the same forces affecting others, the management performance of the Blethens themselves during the past decade has contributed significantly to the Times’ current troubles.

“We asked questions that any one of our own publishers would have known, and Frank didn’t know the answers,” says Tony Ridder, chief executive of Knight Ridder, which owned 49.5 percent of the Times Co. from 1929 to 2006. “It was,” Ridder adds, “a weak business leadership.”

Ouch. It’s one thing when this kind of critique comes from me, the Times’ self-proclaimed volunteer ombudsman, but it’s another thing entirely when it’s coming from Bill Richards, a former Wall Street Journal and Washington Post reporter who the Times had hired for three years to cover its own JOA battle with the P-I.

Among the many disclosures culled from board meeting minutes, interviews and a Harvard Business School case study:

• In 2005, the Blethens blew off a Knight Ridder offer of $500M+ for their share of the Times Co. This offer, which was never disclosed, was solicited by Frank Blethen, according to Ridder.

• In 1997, Tony Ridder blocked the Blethens from using the Times as collateral to purchase a chain of Maine newspapers.

• The owners of the Maine newspapers manipulated the bidding for the property so that Blethen ended up bidding against himself and overpaying for it, and no one else ever made a formal bid for the chain.

• During the run-up to the disastrous 2000-01 strike, Frank Blethen took such a hard line, anti-union negotiating stance that Times labor relations chief Chris Biencourt, in a post-strike assessment prepared for the Blethen Corp., called the resulting strike “inevitable.”

• Top Times officials were so sure the unions would fold they failed to secure adequate strike insurance before the 49-day walkout.

• Frank Blethen and his cousins have used their dominance of the Seattle Times Co. to attempt to redress wrongs and injustices they felt were done to them by their own parents, including forcing the Times Co. to buy the Blethen Maine chain and providing jobs for any family member who completes college.

Richards concludes:

Blethen’s pride has repeatedly driven him into endeavors and to actions that have undercut the Times’ ability to survive and remain the family’s centerpiece. “Journalistically,” says Tony Ridder, attempting recently to explain this dichotomy, “The Seattle Times was a good newspaper. But Frank absolutely did not make good business decisions.”

Double ouch.

It’s a fascinating and, at times, somewhat sad read. It’s easy to feel empathy for a man like Frank Blethen, who says that he took his first job at the Times at the age of 21, in order to become acquainted with his physically absent and emotionally remote father, a man who never sent him a birthday card or a letter, and never called throughout Frank’s entire adolescence. It’s a tortured tale of Citizen Kane-esque proportions.

And it’s hard not to respect Frank’s goal of building family cohesion, and instilling pride in the newspaper and its values amongst the fifth generation of Blethens.

But as a businessman, that doesn’t let Frank off the hook, and I’m tired of reading his editorial board demand that individuals take the same sort of personal responsibility for our actions that the Blethen family has thus far refused to publicly take for their own.

In writing last week about why a campaign based on process and personality won’t be enough to defeat Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels in November (“Will Voters Tune In to Seattle City Government’s Family Feud?“), I raised a question that’s surely on the mind of his challengers and their self-soothing consultants:

Now some might counter, if Nickels is so strong, why are his polling numbers so weak? But that’s a question for another post…

Well, with retiring City Council member Jan Drago officially announcing her candidacy today, it’s time for that post, and I don’t think it’s one the field of challengers will find any more encouraging or flattering than the last.

Let’s begin with the facts. Every survey out there—the mayor’s, his opponents’, and those from third parties—shows Nickels’ approval rating consistently polling somewhere in the mid-thirties, and anybody who knows anything about electoral politics will tell you that for a two-term incumbent, that’s an awfully bad place to be.  Just falling below 50% is conventionally considered a sign of vulnerability, but 35%…? It’s time to start sending out your resume.

So it’s understandable why Drago and the other challengers might feel buoyed. Up until Drago’s entrance it was a crap-shoot as to who might win the second spot on the November ballot (my sense is that Nickels and Drago are now the clear favorites to make it through the primary), and going up against such an unpopular incumbent, it would be the challenger’s race to lose.

Or so dictates conventional wisdom.

But the the thing about conventional wisdom is that it’s so damn conventional, and as such, tends to obscure the vagaries that surround all candidates and influence all political campaigns.  And as I wrote last week, anybody counting on 35% in April to automatically translate into defeat in November has another think coming, especially since, quite frankly, Mayor Nickels never seems to poll all that well.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen the mayor poll above fifty percent,” one long time Nickels aide told me.  You know, except on election day… the only day that really counts. As to why the mayor polls so poorly, well, that’s hard to say, but I’m guessing it has something to do with his penchant for attempting to do stuff.

Are you an ardent opponent of light rail? Then you probably hate the mayor… likewise for those of you for whom the monorail was the stuff of wet dreams. Prefer the rebuild or surface/transit options for replacing the Viaduct? Well then, screw Mayor Nickels and his gold-plated, faith-based tunnel.

Angry at losing the Sonics?  Convinced the grocery bag tax is nanny-statism gone awry? Think Nickels is anti-business and/or in the pocket of developers? Affordable housing vs. plummeting home prices… transit-oriented development vs. preserving our neighborhoods… service cuts vs. tax increases… whatever side of whatever issue, you name it and you can probably find reason enough to blame the mayor.

Of course, the only alternative to doing stuff is to do nothing, but that’s just not in Nickels’ character, and besides, whatever reputation the mayor has for a willingness to spend political capital (sometimes frivolously), it can’t help but appear exaggerated compared to the how-low-can you-go profile of the city council.

I mean, here’s a thought experiment for you: pull out your stopwatch and see how long it takes you to come up with nine things you don’t like about the mayor and his policies. Pretty easy, huh? Now time how long it takes you to name all nine city council members.

See what I mean?

Yeah sure, there’s something about Nickels’ style that particularly pisses off those establishment types steeped in a lazy political culture that puts every contentious issue up for public vote, and too often confuses leadership for arrogance (all the while whining about the lack of the former), but he’s not the only executive to head into an election year with less than stellar approval ratings. Gov. Chris Gregoire had only just inched up to 45% by April of 2008, yet still managed to win by over six points come November.  And perhaps more relevantly, former King County Executive Ron Sims’ approval rating was likewise mired in the mid thirties in April of 2005, yet he still ran away to a 16-point win in his landslide bid for a third term.

So while no doubt the mayor’s people would prefer to see his approval ratings climb, they won’t start shitting bricks unless and until the coming barrage of campaign advertising fails to budge his numbers.

So now that we’ve settled that—35% approval rating bad, but not fatal—let’s talk about what the challengers can do to exploit Nickels’ obvious vulnerability.  And the answer is… um… not much. For despite the litany of mayoral gripes I’ve outlined above, and the many, many more I’ve neglected, there really aren’t any big, consensus building issues with which to attack the mayor.

Drago and the others can focus all they want on Frozen Watergate, but in a city that experiences major snowstorms every decade or so, snow removal is hardly a top priority, while efforts to spin the icy streets as emblematic will be hard pressed in the absence of evidence of a broader culture of mismanagement. The city failed to clear the streets for a week, and…? They better come up with an “and” or two if they truly want to use this issue to their advantage.

We had the snow as bad as anywhere down in my neck of the woods, but that’s one week out of the 385 or so Nickels has been mayor.  Over that same tenure our crime is down, our streets have been paved, our libraries renovated, and our playfields re-turfed. We’re not too happy about the direction our schools are going or the level of Metro bus service, but somebody should remind Mike and Jan that these two services don’t fall under the mayor’s purview. Meanwhile, we’ve got a shiny new train running through the Rainier Valley that’s driving much needed redevelopment, and is about to make us the envy of the region.

And I live in South Seattle, one of the most neglected areas of the city.

I’m not saying there aren’t failures in the mayor’s administration, there just haven’t been any major failures, and certainly nothing endemic. A couple weeks ago I chatted with a staffer for self-financed candidate Joe Mallahan, who after failing to goad me on snow removal and Key Arena (“Aren’t you angry about the Sonics leaving… or don’t you like sports?” she asked me, I think implying something lacking in my manhood should I affirm the latter), raised the specter of Seattle’s budget deficit as evidence of Nickels’ unfitness to manage city affairs.

The budget? Really?

Seattle’s projected $29.5 million revenue shortfall is nothing compared to that of the state or even King County, and the mayor’s proposed budget adjustments have proven proportionately less painful and controversial, mostly consisting of a mandatory one-week furlough for library employees, the elimination of 59 positions (half of which were already open) and a $5 million transfer from the city’s rainy day fund (leaving another $25 million in reserve, compared to the mere $2 million he inherited in 2001).

All in all, I’d say the city has recently managed its finances quite well, and I don’t get the sense that many voters are convinced otherwise.

Likewise, despite the many opportunities Nickels has had to piss off one constituency or another through positions he’s taken and the policies he’s advocated, it hardly adds up to a throw the bum out consensus, especially considering the utter lack of differentiation his opponents have enunciated on these very same issues. How exactly does Mike McGinn expect to court the environmental vote away from one of the most outspoken environmental mayors in the nation? Does Drago really believe she’ll be embraced as a credible alternative when she’s been the mayor’s most reliable ally on the council?

Yes, opinion polls show the mayor remains unpopular, but it’s not due to any major scandal—personal, ethical, performance or otherwise—and its not due to the stances he’s taken on major issues, which have largely been in step with the vast majority of Seattle voters. The fact is, Mayor Nickels is neither corrupt nor incompetent nor out of sync with our values. Folks just don’t like him.

The dilemma for the challengers is this: how do you defeat a competent, scandal-free mayor whose values you share, and whose policy agenda you largely support?  You beat him by being a better politician.

And that’s why I’m convinced that none of the challengers in this race, not even Drago, can beat Mayor Nickels, for as vulnerable as he is, and as grating as his style obviously can be, none of his opponents possess the force of personality necessary to get voters excited about change. I don’t write this as Nickels booster; I’ve got nothing against the mayor, though I’ve got nothing particularly for him either, and there have been plenty of issues on which we’ve disagreed.

But issues don’t win races, candidates do. Thus the solution to beating a scandal-free incumbent, even one with a pathetic 35% approval rating, is to simply be a better politician. And sadly for them, none of the challengers are that.

As newspapers and other large media corporations struggle to develop new business models for the twenty-first century, I wonder if we aren’t already seeing the future of journalism gradually evolving before our eyes… a future that, from the consumer’s perspective doesn’t really look all that remarkably different from the past?

I was reading the New York Times this morning (online of course), and clicked through on a headline in the Technology section, “Why It’s the Megabits, Not the MIPs, That Matter.” It’s an interesting bit of analysis, at least to a techno-geek like me, but what I found truly fascinating was the fact that the Times had picked up the piece from the GigaOM technology news network.

Of course, this kind of arrangement is nothing new. Newswires like Reuters and the Associated Press have played an integral role in our media since shortly after the invention of the telegraph, and syndicated columnists have long been a mainstay of opinion pages nationwide. Hell, there are often days when less than half the stories on the Seattle Times front page are written by Seattle Times reporters.

What’s different today is the explosion in number and quality of web sites and networks like GigaOM, and their ability to expertly specialize in subject matter far beyond that of traditional news wires like the AP. As the Internet and other related technologies continue to tear down the barriers of entry to the media market, there will be many more, not fewer, opportunities to enter the field of journalism. These opportunities may not always pay well (or, at all), but they are there none the less.

The result may be that journalism is gradually transformed from a profession dominated by generalists to one of specialists, each focused on their own particular field of expertise. And as traditional media outlets grow increasingly comfortable with the notion of outsourcing their content to a growing number of third party sources, we may see an end to the kind of duplicate efforts that have long characterized certain types of coverage.  (For example, do we really need four TV cameras at the same press conference, when the same sound bite inevitably ends up on all four evening newscasts?)

Under such a model one could imagine an entrepreneurial journalist setting out to provide in-depth coverage of Seattle city government, a notebook computer and compact high-def camera in hand, serving as a one-person, city hall news pool for any and all media outlets wishing to subscribe. The fact that the same footage might appear simultaneously on KING-5 and KOMO-4 has little downside considering that few viewers watch both broadcasts at once, and if properly done, the only thing keeping the Seattle Times from supplementing their city hall coverage with this wire-like reporting might be a misplaced sense of pride.

Neighborhood sites like West Seattle Blog could fill a similar role, distributing hyperlocal coverage to regional, state and national outlets. On the flip side, a political site like Publicola could serve as a sorta Capitol news bureau for West Seattle Blog and other neighborhood sites.

Yes, such a model would surely lead traditional news outlets to hire fewer full time reporters, and produce less and less original content, but that’s already happening as it is. And as the Internet continues to tear down barriers to market, those newspapers and broadcasters who transition to a more portal-like product while failing to provide a richer and more varied experience to their audience will inevitably face serious competition from upstarts who will.

All that’s lacking now is a standardized distribution and payment network… a kinda AP representing bloggers and other journalists that allows media outlets of all sizes to reproduce content in print, on air and online, without having to negotiate a hundred different contracts. Ideally, this would take the form of a cooperative owned by the content creators themselves, but I suppose the market will have a say in the final details.

Or maybe not. This model of distributed journalism is clearly playing a larger and larger role in the news industry. The only question remaining is whether the journalists themselves will reap a fair share of the profits.

The NY Times reported on Saturday about the first Washington State patient to die under the death with dignity law. I’m going to ignore the headline that erroneously calls it “assisted suicide” and focus instead on this paragraph:

In November, voters approved the Death with Dignity Act, 58 percent to 42 percent, making Washington the second state — after Oregon — to allow assisted suicide. The laws in both states have been deeply controversial, particularly among religious groups. Washington passed its law after the United States Supreme Court in 2006 rejected an effort by the Justice Department to block Oregon’s law, which took effect in 1998.

It passed with 58% of the vote. You’d be hard pressed to get 58% on a vote to declare puppies adorable. Yes, the initiative had it’s critics, and I have no problem with the Times getting their point of view. But to characterize something that passed with a significant majority of the vote “deeply controversial” implies that the opposition was more widespread than it actually was.

Anybody who has followed the dramatic collapse of the newspaper industry knows that publishers have blamed much of their woes on Craigslist for stealing away the lucrative classified advertising revenues on which the dailies had grown fat for decades. And so it strikes me as more than a bit ironic to learn that when the Seattle Times has a job for hire, they wisely choose to spend their advertising dollars where else, but Craigslist:

Executive Assistant for Top Media Co! (Seattle, WA)

Reply to: hr.resumes@seattletimes.com
Date: 2009-05-11, 2:55PM PDT

Do you enjoy the challenge of working in a fast-paced, ever-changing, results-driven environment? Can you juggle ten projects effortlessly while exhibiting professional savvy and poise? Are you the go-to person who is in charge of making it all happen?

Then The Seattle Times Company, the region’s largest and most trusted print and online destination for news, information and advertising, seeks you as our new Executive Assistant.

Yup, we’re the region’s most trusted destination for “news, information and advertising”… except, you know, classified advertising.  For that, even we go to Craigslist because, we may be fifth-generation inbreds, but hey, we’re not stupid.

It sounds like a demanding job. Amongst the many prerequisites you must have well-honed “email etiquette” skills, the “ability to exercise discretion,” and be a “technical guru who is proficient on PC systems such as Outlook, Excel and PowerPoint.”

Huh. If proficiency in Outlook, Excel and PowerPoint is all that’s needed to qualify one as a “technical guru” at the Times, I think that explains a lot as to why they’re now advertising on Craigslist rather than the other way around.

Oh… and one word of caution:

We offer a dynamic, drug-free work environment…

Really? I guess Nicole Brodeur must work from home.

Goldy declares it “Line Item Veto Day” in Washington, and the panel rips into the state’s electeds for treating progressives like a cheap date. Yeah, there were some progressive victories—the ones that didn’t cost anything!

A domestic partnership bill was signed into law this week, giving registered same-sex and senior partnerships legal near-equality to marriage. The panel, including Equal Rights Washington’s Josh Friedes, discusses the law, the referendum it spawned, and the future prospects for same-sex marriage in Washington state and elsewhere.

Journalist and Blogger Dave Neiwert discusses his most recent book The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right (2009, Polipoint Press). The panel ponders today’s crop of racists, haters and right-wing extremists.

Goldy was joined by SeattlePI.com columnist Joel Connelly, author and managing editor of Crooks and Liars Dave Neiwert, advocacy director of Equal Rights Washington Josh Friedes, and Seattle Drinking Liberally host and donkeylicious contributor Nicholas Beaudrot.

The show is 59:09, and is available here as an MP3:

[audio:http://www.podcastingliberally.com/podcasts/podcasting_liberally_may_19_2009.mp3]

[Recorded live at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. Special thanks to Confab creators Gavin and Richard for hosting the Podcasting Liberally site.]

“He’s definitely destroyed his working relationship with the council,” Seattle City Council member Jan Drago insisted to Publicola’s Josh Feit when asked about her apparently imminent plans to challenge Mayor Greg Nickels.

“One of my motivations,” she said, “is that he [Mayor Nickels] has destroyed every relationship—with citizens and neighborhoods, with regional leaders, with state leaders … I’m the one who was sent down to lobby in Olympia [for the tunnel]. They’re [Team Nickels] toxic down there.”

It’s a theme I’ve heard repeatedly from politicos, politicians and pundits over the past year or so.  Nickels is arrogant and autocratic, a political tyrant who forces his will on the Council, fires popular agency heads, and who seems intent on creating a political vacuum that sucks the air out of all voices outside the gravitational pull of his immediate orbit. Deserved or not, he has earned a reputation, at least in the eyes of many fellow elected officials and their aides, for not working and playing well with others. And whatever Machiavellian instincts the Mayor lacks are more than made up for by the amoral political machinations of Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis and the rest of his ruthless henchmen.

Or so I’m told.

Quite frankly, there are a lot of political insiders who just can’t stand the Mayor’s style, and more than a few who don’t like the man himself.  Okay, I get it.  But the question remains: is process and personality really an effective platform for mounting a challenge to a scandal-free, two-term incumbent?

Perhaps Mayor Nickels’ style truly is as destructive and divisive as his critics allege, I dunno, but the rub for Drago and the other challengers is that the biggest insider issue in the mayoral race isn’t really an issue at all, at least not from a practical, electoral prospective.  The typical voter neither knows nor cares whether Nickels is buddy-buddy with Nick Licata as long as he’s getting the job done; and as for being “toxic” in Olympia, well, after the recent legislative session I’d be tempted to wear that scorn as a badge of honor.

Does he share our values? Where does he stand on the issues? Has he delivered bread and butter services? What is his political agenda, and can we trust him to successfully implement it? Those are the kind of questions voters ask of incumbent executives.

And the answer?

“You can’t win a race against this mayor based on delivery,” Drago said. “It’s hard for me to conceive of running a campaign based on process and personality if you have a good record. I think that’s the dilemma.”

That was the dead-on political analysis of Drago herself, back on March 2. Huh. Before deciding to challenge the mayor, perhaps she should hire herself as a consultant?

The truth is, Seattle city government has long been at least a tad dysfunctional, and never the idyllic setting for a Norman Rockwell painting. Nor should it be. Democracy is by its very nature a messy endeavor in which conflict is a necessary if painful part of the political dialectic. Does Nickels’ aggressive style piss off council members and other stakeholders? No doubt. But if anything, the problem is not that the Mayor is too mean, but rather that the Council is too nice!

How may times have we heard council members whine about the Mayor’s unilateral style… then vote to approve his proposals by 7 to 2 or better margin? Seattle government isn’t a “strong mayor” system by charter, it’s just appeared that way during the Nickels regime, partially due to his forceful style, and partially due to the endemic weakness of the council members themselves. You want a more effective and politically inclusive city government, and a more responsive mayor, Jan? Then why haven’t you stood up to Nickels while you’ve had a chance?

In the absence of forceful leadership on the Council it has been the Mayor who has largely set the agenda over the past seven years, and for the most part, achieved it. Nickels embraced light rail; we got light rail. He turned his back on the monorail; the monorail died. He fought hard for a Viaduct tunnel, while a new, taxpayer-funded Sonics arena, not so much… and we all know how those two battles turned out. On issue after issue, and levy after levy, the Mayor tends to get his own way. Disagree with him if you want—and I often do—but if you deny him credit for his political acumen you have to acknowledge the incredible weakness of the opposition.

In truth, it’s a combination of the two. Mayor Nickels’ style can seem relatively autocratic and abrasive, but only by the passive-aggressive standards of our frustratingly sclerotic “Seattle Way.” Plunk Nickels down in the midst of a real political machine, like that in Chicago or Philadelphia, and I wonder if he’d survive past sundown before being eaten alive by the Morlocks?

Now some might counter, if Nickels is so strong, why are his polling numbers so weak? But that’s a question for another post… and another opportunity to lambast the mayoral challengers for failing to enunciate a winning message.

But for the moment, anybody expecting a 35% approval rating in April to automatically translate into defeat at the polls in November should heed Drago’s circa March 2nd warning. With few notable exceptions, Mayor Nickels does have a track record of delivering services, and of clearly enunciating and enacting a policy agenda. And like him or not, voters will choose competence over process, if that’s their only choice.

I can’t find any editorials on the Seattle Times web site with a publication date more current than May 15, so naturally, I have absolutely nothing to blog about. Who knew shutting me down could be that easy?

UPDATE:
Lacking fodder from my favorite smorg-ed-board, I’ve been reduced to dumpster diving in the op-ed pages of some our region’s smaller papers, finding this tasty tidbit in last week’s TNT, which warns South Sounders to “keep a hand on their pocketbooks” in the face of King County’s rapacious appetite for digging tunnels:

Seattle’s transit taxes, plus federal grants, are covering its Beacon and Capitol Hill tunnels. No problem there. The Legislature has committed to pay $2.8 billion for the underground Alaskan Way replacement. That’s OK, too, as long as the Legislature continues to insist that Seattle – which demanded the tunnel – cover any cost overruns.

Yeah, except, just to be clear, Seattle did not demand that tunnel; in fact voters rejected a tunnel option when it was put to the ballot for an advisory vote.  Had the governor and the rest of the Olympia leadership embraced the much less expensive surface/transit option at the time it was fast building consensus on the ground in Seattle, that is the alternative that would have been chosen, and happily so.

And one other quibble:

[T]here must be an understanding going in that Bellevue itself will have to find either the money or economies needed to pay for a tunnel without delaying or jeopardizing rail expansion into Snohomish County and Federal Way.

The impression given, that extravagances in King County have come at the expense of Snohomish and Pierce County residents is simply false.  For better or worse, thanks to “sub-area equity,” what’s been raised in the South Sound has stayed in the South Sound… which of course is why Sound Transit told Bellevue on Friday that if it wants a tunnel, it’s gonna have to come up with the extra money itself.

Sound Transit yesterday released its preferred alignment for East Link light rail. (Click the image to enlarge.)

The plan includes the possibility of a Bellevue tunnel, but leaves it up to the folks in Bellevue to find the extra money. And as Ben at Seattle Transit Blog notes:

There is no money for section E. Money Bellevue might find for section C will not make section E affordable – that’s the city’s choice to fund their own tunnel, and has no bearing on Sound Transit’s budget. Also note that section D ends smack in the middle of Microsoft campus, at Overlake Transit Center.

Meanwhile, only 64 days to go before the first segment of Link Light Rail opens between Tukwila station and downtown Seattle.

Fascinating and somewhat long article from New York Times economics reporter Edmund L. Andrews about how he and his wife managed to run up tons of mortgage and credit card debt.

While one has to applaud Andrews’ courage in writing the article, certain bits have an almost surreal quality.

Between humongous loan balances and high rates, we had hung ourselves with the rope they gave us. In the previous December alone, we charged $2,845 on the Chase card for Christmas gifts, food, gasoline, clothing and other expenses. The charges included almost $350 for groceries, $700 in clothes from J. Crew, $179 at GapKids and $700 for airplane tickets for two of Patty’s children to visit their father in Los Angeles. Our balance climbed from $14,118 to $17,135, and in January 2006 we maxed out at our $19,000 credit limit. And there were other expenses on other cards: $1,200 in dental work for Patty’s son Ben; $1,600 to rent a beach house the previous year for us and all the children. Granted, the beach house was an embarrassing mistake. But given that Patty had landed a solid job, it seemed like an indulgence we could work off later.

Obviously this man has been coming to terms with stuff, so good for him.

Everyone knows stuff costs money, and lots of circumstances can cause difficulties. Andrews was divorced and paying alimony and child support, but people have difficulties due to illness and all sorts of other life events as well.

But good lord, if you spent $700 at J. Crew while drowning in debt, you had a problem. My kin ate squirrels, catfish and possum during the Great Depression, and while I’ve managed to avoid that particular experience, the wisdom my ancestors passed on about not wasting things and living within one’s means does come to mind. Somehow my kids have been clothed just fine at Fred Meyer and Target.

The key point to take away from the article is that the banksters became societal faith healers, temporarily solving problems with suspect mortgages and HELOCS. Whether it was lust for a woman or lust for material goods, the banksters could rub that out for you.

Tons of people needed to make their self-worth about material things that they couldn’t afford. It’s sad, but it’s true.

Don’t get me wrong, our family has stuff, we like our stuff, and many times I try to impress upon our kids how lucky we are to have stuff. But in the end it’s just stuff. Well, it’s stuff we paid for either with cash or with a credit card that is paid off monthly, excluding the mortgage and one car loan at a time.

If you’re buying tens of thousands of dollars of other stuff on credit, you have a problem. And the banksters will gladly give you a lap dance in hopes of making you feel better about yourself.

The speculative orgy wasn’t, in the end, about capitalism, economics or any other “rational” endeavor, it was about selling the supposed good life to anyone who would fall for it. Never mind that the granite counter tops are too expensive, or that the BMW adds too much to the monthly budget. The banksters were gyrating, the music was loud and tomorrow was for the suckers who play by the rules.

For some reason, many otherwise rational people needed to scratch an itch, and the time period coincided with the reign of George W. Bush. The excessive materialism and condescension towards us were part of the same social malignancy that yielded the invasion of Iraq, the Schiavo madness and the indifference to massive suffering after Hurricane Katrina.

A society doesn’t go mad in one little corner, it goes mad everywhere. The mindset that excuses torture can easily excuse a few little financial excesses, can’t it?

Interestingly, those who were conservative in their personal lives and finances probably didn’t get hit so bad. Funny how that works out.

(Props to Atrios for noticing the article.)