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On April 10, after failing to get ahold of anybody who could answer my questions by phone, I sent the following email to a number of contacts at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration:

Do you have any information regarding the report in the Marin Independent Journal that three varieties of Nutro Max cat food, not currently on the recall list, have tested positive for melamine by an independent lab?

http://www.marinij.com/marin/ci_5630208

Is the FDA aware of this information, is further testing being performed, and do you expect the recall to expand? Does this suggest that the universe of recalled food will be expanded beyond these additional Nutro varieties?

And yesterday, April 16, I finally received the following succinct reply:

We do not have this information at this time.
**************************************
Veronica Castro
Office of Public Affairs
FDA

Um… which is curious, because only hours after I sent my query, the FDA issued a press release expanding the recall to include the Nutro Max varieties and other products. Hmm. Yet six days after recalling the products in question, the Office of Public Affairs still tells me that “we do not have this information at this time.”

Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

I once mocked former FEMA director Mike Brown for suggesting that his agency’s catastrophic failure in the wake of Hurricane Katrina was largely, well, my fault. “In the middle of trying to respond to that,” Brown complained during Congressional testimony on the massive hurricane, “FEMA’s press office became bombarded with requests to respond immediately to false statements about my resume and my background.”

As if the most critical element of any disaster relief effort comes from the press office.

But all snark aside, the press office does play an important role in crisis management, by getting accurate information out through the media and to the public — information that can save lives. And throughout this entire pet food recall the FDA and the pet food industry have repeatedly failed to adequately perform this crucial function.

It was on March 2 that Menu Foods learned that the first of its test animals had died. By March 8, Menu Foods, ChemNutra and the FDA knew that imported wheat gluten was the culprit, knew the name of the Chinese manufacturer printed on the side of the 25 kg sacks, and knew that the gluten was imported and distributed as human food grade. The initial recall wasn’t issued until March 17, and the name of the Chinese manufacturer wasn’t revealed until March 30, prompting three more pet food companies to issue recalls within hours. On April 3, 26 days after first being notified that its gluten was killing animals, ChemNutra finally issued a nationwide recall.

Throughout this unfolding crisis, consumers were consistently reassured that the remaining pet food supply was safe, even as the recall expanded day by day. So I guess it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise when the FDA’s own Public Affairs Office claims to be totally unaware of a week-old recall.

This scandal will surely prompt Congressional hearings focusing on the safety of the food supply, but the FDA’s failure to provide the public with accurate, timely information is as inexcusable as its failure to adequately safeguard our food. We not only have the right to know what the FDA knows — and when they know it — we have the need. For when it comes to both our pets and ourselves, it is far better to avoid products out of unconfirmed fear, than it is to consume unsafe products out of ignorance.

The FDA and the pet food industry had an obligation to inform the public. They failed.

The Times and the P-I have settled their Joint Operating Agreement dispute. Eli Sanders has the scoop over on Slog:

Under the terms of the agreement, announced this morning, the Seattle Times Company will pay $49 million to the Hearst Corporation in order to end Hearst’s right to collect a percentage of Seattle Times revenues in the event that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer closes.

Hearst will pay $25 million to the Times Co. to guarantee that the Times Co. will not try to end their Joint Operating Agreement due to lost revenue, at least until 2016.

That means two daily newspapers will continue to publish in Seattle, for now. At first glance, it also means that Hearst has lost one of its incentives to close the P-I (the guaranteed Times revenue) while the Times Co. has lost one its easy ways to slip out of the JOA (claiming the JOA needs to be ended because the Times is losing revenue under the arrangement) until 2016.

This is great news for Seattle. Slog also has the text of a letter from Frank Blethen to employees.

Over on Slog, Josh Feit picks up on my post about a recent poll that showed substantial support for the Sound Transit/RTID $16.5 billion Roads & Transit package.

The numbers, about 61% in favor after a dose of messaging, are pretty positive, and so Goldy seems to be saying, everybody should stop complaining and fretting about a joint measure.

Hmm. I don’t think I seemed to be saying that, but Josh is a pretty good editor, so maybe I’m wrong. I thought I was only blowing holes in the common wisdom that the Roads & Transit package was politically DOA.

Like Josh, I’d prefer to see the transit components separated from the roads components so that I could vote for the former while douching the latter, but given political realities I’m not willing to scuttle transit improvements simply because I don’t like much of the roads package. On the other hand, Josh seems to be saying that the package is fatally flawed, whatever its current support at the polls:

Goldy’s contention that polling looks good doesn’t address my biggest fear—in fact, it confirms it: It’s going to pass, and we’re going to undo the benefits of voting for transit by simultaneously voting to expand roads.

Indeed, here’s the polling I’d like to see: light rail on its own and RTID on its own. I’d bet light rail would pass and RTID wouldn’t.

Well Josh, I’m not sure it provides much consolation, but the survey did indeed poll the individual components of the combined package, and for the most part, transit consistently out-polled roads. In fact, here are the top scoring components within the Sound Transit District:

Disagree with my analysis? Read the full poll results and topline summary for yourself. (Oh, and as it turns out, if you read the poll results from 2005 and 2006, voters have been pretty damn consistent.)

UPDATE (FYI):
The survey was conducted on behalf of Sound Transit to help evaluate the 8000 public comments generated through their public involvement process, and is intended to aid the Sound Transit Board’s deliberations as they finalize details of the Sound Transit 2 package. The survey was designed under a partnership with Evans McDonough and Moore Information, and with input from RTID consultants. Moore fielded the survey to 800 respondents within the Sound Transit district, which gives the survey a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percent.

Washington isn’t a state with a reputation for achieving consensus, but if there’s one thing on which nearly all the political insiders agree, it’s that the $16.5 billion Sound Transit/RTID Roads & Transit package that’s headed to the ballot this coming November is as good as dead.

I’ve heard it from Democrats and Republicans, from liberals and conservatives, from package supporters and package opponents. I’ve heard it from politicians I trust, and from politicians I emphatically don’t trust. And everybody agrees that the package is just too big and too expensive for our skeptical electorate to approve at the polls.

But… um… I guess I should’ve asked some actual voters, because a new poll shows quite solid support for the package, both before and after respondents are informed of the details.

61% of respondents supported the package when presented on an “uninformed basis” with no persuasive messaging:

“A transportation package has been proposed that would increase the sales tax by 6/10 of 1%, and the car license tab by 8/10 of 1%. It would fund $16.5 Billion dollars in road, highway, and mass transit improvements in Pierce, King, and Snohomish Counties”.

When respondents were informed of the package’s costs, but not its elements, support dropped to 49%:

“This package will cost the typical household $150 in additional sales tax each year, plus $80 in license tab tax for every $10,000 of your car’s value.”

Not surprising. But then once voters are informed of the major components of the package, support rebounds to 63%, and remains at this level after positive (66%) and then negative (61%) messaging is presented. (FYI, the poll was conducted by Moore Information and EMC Research, April 1-4, and consisted of 800 registered voters with a 3.5 percent margin of error.)

The imminent, inevitable failure of the Roads & Transit package has become a rallying cry for supporters of creating a new regional transportation commission. “We’ve got to do something to restore the confidence of voters,” I’ve been told on more than one occasion. But if these poll numbers are even remotely accurate, it looks like a substantial majority of voters are confident enough in our current transportation planning to spend $16.5 billion expanding light rail and making other critical transportation improvements.

So much for the common wisdom.

Okay, let’s see if I can explain this without getting too meta.

A few days back, former Seattle Weekly columnist Geov Parrish posted to HA a kinda-sorta expose of an expose of an expose, highlighting a blog post by Real Change executive director Tim Harris, criticizing an anticipated hit piece in the Weekly. Harris wrote:

So this is what journalism at the new Seattle Weekly has come to. The paper owned and staffed by out-of-towners is out to do an expose on the fact that three or four vendors make as much as $24K a year selling Real Change. With no benefits.

At that rate, they can afford a cheap apartment. Hold the fucking presses!

This apparently pissed off Weekly managing editor Mike Seely, who dismissed Harris’s post as a “singularly bizarre pre-emptive diatribe,” and poked fun at the “sheer presumptive idiocy” of an angry letter aimed at an article that had yet to run.

Well, Huan Hsu’s article is now online, and… it’s not so bad. But then, it’s not so good either. In the end, there really isn’t much there there, though despite Seely’s pre-emptive prickliness, it’s pretty much what Harris predicted: “Not All the Peddlers of Seattle’s Homeless Paper Are Homeless.”

Hmm. To steal a line from Harris: hold the fucking presses.

It hadn’t occurred to me that some customers might feel cheated to learn that their Real Change vendor was not actually homeless. Personally, I would find it gratifying to know that my occasional purchase helped some unfortunate fellow off the streets. Call me naive, but I thought that was the whole idea.

So I’m not sure I get what Hsu is getting at. Some vendors are successful? A handful actually earn enough money to pay the rent? And that’s a bad thing?

I suppose I didn’t know that Real Change called its turf system a “turf system,” but it was pretty obvious that something like that existed. And I now know that most venders make 65 cents on every 1 dollar sale, but that the three top vendors each month get a nickel discount. Um, all in all, not exactly what one might call an “expose.” I mean, imagine if Real Change had done a 1600-word “expose” on how the Weekly used trucks to drop off bundles of papers at area coffee shops… that would be about as fascinating as this piece was.

Still, I think Geov’s presumptive sentiments hold true:

What pisses me off is when anyone – anyone – tries to make a buck or ingratiate themselves (e.g., with dimwitted readers) by pissing on the powerless. It’s one thing to lampoon the idiocies of Seattle liberalism; I might not agree with it (or think it’s well done), but it’s fair game. But trying to manufacture a “scandal” involving one of the few activist-initiated social service projects in town that truly does help people and change lives, all the time, is pure bullshit. Or, in Harris’ words, “What the Fuck”?

What the fuck indeed.

See, there’s a reason why you never read scathing reviews of small, inexpensive, family-owned neighborhood restaurants. What exactly would be the point? The regular patrons already like it well enough to keep coming back, while few outside the neighborhood are ever going to stop in anyway. So why waste column inches slamming some mom and pop lunch shack?

Likewise, absent a genuine scandal or a profound disagreement over the strategy (or goal) of helping the homeless get back on their feet, why on earth would you ever want to do anything but a fluff piece on Real Change? Maybe — just maybe — the Weekly might have succeeded in getting a handful of readers to think twice before forking over their dollar. But to what end? Hsu clearly set out in search of a controversy, and didn’t find one. That’s okay. Lots of stories don’t pan out. So why run the piece?

There is no shortage of important stories to write about, and plenty of worthy targets out there to skewer, but the Weekly chose to pursue an angle they knew could damage public support for an organization dedicated to helping the homeless. Huh. I have nothing against slaughtering sacred cows, but I’d hope the Weekly would view it as more than a blood sport.

Which brings me back to the springboard of this post, and one final observation. Seely sniped at Harris for his “singularly bizarre pre-emptive diatribe,” but from a PR perspective, there was nothing bizarre or singular about it. If Harris was expecting a negative piece in the Weekly (and from his questions, Hsu clearly wasn’t writing fluff,) why on earth should he wait until after it runs to refute it? Harris successfully got his message out in advance of publication, and quite possibly may even have succeeded in softening Hsu’s final edit.

That’s just smart PR. That’s being proactive.

And considering the fact that Harris’s efforts generated two supportive posts on HA, a handful of presumptive letters to the editor, and a preemptive prepublication post by Seely, I’d say it worked.

UPDATE:
Chuck Taylor chimes in over at Crosscut:

We’ll never know how Harris’ preemptive spin helped shape the article — there’s no way it didn’t. If I was the editor, I’d have made extra damn sure there weren’t any problems with it, that it was factually ironclad and fair.

Exactly. Erica also picks it up over on Slog.

So all in all, a pretty effective “pre-emptive diatribe” on the part of Harris.

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

Come joins us for some hopped up conversation and hoppy beer.

Not in Seattle? Liberals will also be drinking tonight in the Tri-Cities and Vancouver. A full listing of Washington’s eleven Drinking Liberally chapters is available here.

I’ve made a habit of abusing the state’s media recently for constantly repeating the Sonics’ misleading number that they are only seeking $300 million in taxpayer subsidies… when in fact they are really seeking $400 million (not to mention another hundred million or so in road improvements):

The Times continues to repeat that $300 million figure when in fact the Sonics’ plan calls for $400 million in taxpayer subsidies: $300 million from the sales tax, and $100 million from Renton. I’m not sure what the correct answer would be on the math WASL, but the last time I checked, 300 plus 100 still equals 400. (Wait… let me check my calculator. Yeah. 400.)

Well, it looks like the Times finally took my criticism to heart and whipped out their calculators, for in today’s edition we finally see the number change:

The Sonics still are not sure if state lawmakers will support a bill that would provide $200 million toward the new arena.

Oops. You were supposed to add $100 million onto the public cost, not subtract.

Unless… maybe the Times knows something about the Sonics’ rumored new financing plan they weren’t supposed to tell us?

Dino Rossi was interviewed by Liz Mair at the oxymoronically titled GOPProgress.com. And Rossi is sure sounding like a 2008 gubernatorial candidate.

Two things struck me about the interview. First, Rossi is no moderate. He is a typical voter-disenfranchisin’, truth-twistin’, anti-guvmint, gimmicky Republican. All tricks and no leadership—just like we’ve come to expect from Washington state Republicans.

But what struck me most of all is that Dino is still a sore loser:

We won 34 out of 39 counties, all the non-Seattle, King County ones, Snohomish County–first time in 20 years for a Republican, Pierce County–first time in 40 years for a Republican, and we were certified the governor-elect–first Republican governor-elect in 24 years, twice, actually…[laughs] Apparently, as a Republican, you have to win three times.

Yeah…34 out of 39 counties…as if it was counties that voted instead of, you know…voters!

The other bit of sore loserism is the suggestion that he had to win “three times.” As Judge Bridges so elegantly put it, Rossi led after the initial count, he led after the first recount, and Gregoire led after the manual recount. There was only one person declared the winner of the 2004 gubernatorial election, and that was Christine Gregoire.

Does Rossi really not understand the election process? Or is he intentionally being disingenuous? Either way, man…what a sore loser!

Later on, Rossi offered this remarkable claim:

In the end, we ended up with hundreds more votes that were counted in King County than they could attribute to human beings who actually voted. Which is why we said, and I don’t think I was going too far out on a limb by saying this, but that maybe each vote should have a voter. I don’t think that’s asking too much.

I mean, yeah, we expect this kind of bullshit from a blatant propagandist like Stefan Sharkansky. But Rossi is supposed to be a real politician. To make such an outrageous claim suggests that either Rossi is such a sore loser that he would knowingly perpetuate a blatantly dishonest statement to undermine the electoral process that hurt his feelings in 2004, or else he suffers from delusions.

Rossi was whining about the voter crediting process. During the election contest trial, it became amply clear that the voter crediting process has a higher error rate than the ballot counting process. As Bridges stated in his oral opinion (pg. 6):

The crediting system in Washington is not an accurate reflection of the number of persons who actually voted.

Presenting a credible challenge will be tough enough for Rossi in 2008 if only because many of the issues that gave his campaign strength in 2004 won’t even be relevant anymore. (And the tarnished Republican brand name won’t help.) But could it be true? Will Rossi Mk II be running on a “we wuz robbed!” platform?

Yes! Please, go for it, Dino! I want to see the Rossi 2008 “We Wuz Robbed” campaign tour!

Look out! The sore loser express is coming through, and you better get out of the way. Whooo woooo!

Hey…I hear that Mike!™ McGavick even has a mobile home available for the tour.

The Food and Drug Administration doesn’t keep epidemiological data on dog and cat illnesses and deaths… but the nationwide veterinary chain Banfield does. And according to an extrapolation of data from its 615 veterinary hospitals Banfield estimates that as many as 39,000 cats and dogs may have been sickened or killed by contaminated pet food.

The hospital chain saw 1 million dogs and cats during the three months when the more than 100 brands of now-recalled contaminated pet food were sold. It saw 284 extra cases of kidney failure among cats during that period, or a roughly 30 percent increase, when compared with background rates.

“It has meaning, when you see a peak like that. We see so many pets here, and it coincided with the recall period,” said veterinarian Hugh Lewis, who oversees the mining of Banfield’s database to do clinical studies.

There are an estimated 60 million dogs and 70 million cats nationwide.

In other news, one person has died and more than three hundred have fallen ill in two separate incidents in China, after eating porridge suspected of containing rat poison. According to Wikipedia:

[…] canned and jarred gluten is commonly eaten as an accompaniment to congee (boiled rice porridge) as part of a traditional Chinese breakfast.

Hmm.

Last week, I was actually invited to a house party for Barack Obama. Twenty freakin’ months before the election. Out of curiosity and loyalty to the friends who were hosting it, I went. It was a great discussion. But amidst all the earnest expressions of Seattle liberalism, one topic remained completely, curiously absent.

Before Barack or anyone else matters, we’ve got an election here, this year.

You would never know it from either the headlines or the local political chatter, much of which already seems obsessed with next year’s presidential race. But we have five city council seats, plus four seats on county council, two Port of Seattle commissioners, four Seattle School Board members, lots of suburban positions, and a host of ballot measures, including some critical transportation votes, coming up this summer and fall. Yes, summer; the primary has been moved back to August (when fewer people will be paying attention), and the filing deadline for candidates is now June 8, exactly two months away.

Why hasn’t there been more attention? Well, local media never does a very good job of covering local elections. (Quick: When was the last time you saw a Port of Seattle race discussed on TV? And why not? It’s a countywide election for a position that will oversee $442 million in public revenue in 2007.) But beyond that, in the marquee races -– the citywide votes for five Seattle City Council members -– 2007 is not shaping up so far as a very competitive year.

Of the five seats, incumbents are defending four; Peter Steinbrueck is leaving his seat open as he moves on to waterfront advocacy and, perhaps, a 2009 mayoral bid. Four candidates have already announced for Steinbrueck’s vacated position, but there’s a distinct lack of drama elsewhere. Only one candidate has announced against any of the four council members running for reelection (Tim Burgess, running against David Della). The other three incumbents –- Jean Godden, Tom Rasmussen, and appointee Sally Clark –- are thus far unopposed.

At first glance this seems mystifying. There’s plenty of neighborhood dissatisfaction over the way Seattle is being run, and the way its middle and working class residents are being run off. And the incumbents are beatable. Clark was appointed to her seat in 2006 and has never run any electoral race, let alone a citywide one; she has no electoral base and has done little in her year on the council. Godden is in her first term, having won in 2003 on her name recognition from years as a local gossip columnist. She’s famously clueless on civic issues and has done little beyond attending all the right parties and keeping a seat warm -– if that –- in her four years on council. And Rasmussen is also in his first term (as is Della). Three council incumbents lost in 2003. Why isn’t anyone stepping forward to challenge incumbents this year?

More pointedly, why aren’t any progressives running? Steinbrueck’s departure leaves only one council member (President Nick Licata) who consistently stands out from the dull, establishment consensus that is the Seattle City Council: all good liberal Democrats, tolerant on social issues and always quick with a corporate handout. Two of the challengers for Steinbrueck’s open seat, Venus Velasquez and Bruce Harrell, portray themselves as progressive, but both are very much part of establishment Seattle. (The other two announced candidates for the seat are moderate Republican Jim Nobles and the execrable John Manning, who resigned a council seat a decade ago after his third domestic violence complaint.) Progressives are losing one of their only two strong allies on council, and it’s been years since there’s been a credible progressive challenger campaigning for city council.

There are any number of reasons for this state of affairs, but the most obvious is money. It takes a lot of it to run a citywide race for Seattle’s exclusively at-large city council seats. As of late March, Rasmussen had already raised a whopping $112,501 for his reelection bid; Godden was not far behind at $100,629. By contrast, Velasquez, the first to announce for Steinbrueck’s seat when he withdraw from the race (and the most progressive of his would-be successors to date), leads her rivals in donations with “only” $27,275. Incumbency is clearly a major advantage this year, and any successful challenger had better spend most of her or his time raising money between now and August.

That said, it can be done: Della, Godden, and Rasmussen all beat incumbents in 2003. There’s still two months before the filing deadline. Godden and Clark in particular could be vulnerable to a well-organized challenge. Goodness knows that as Seattle densifies the council needs principled members who will listen to the neighborhoods and don’t sell out to every developer-backed scheme that comes along. There’s still time. Anyone willing to step up to the plate?

So begins a post yesterday in the personal blog of Real Change publisher Tim Harris, and it’s easy to understand why. Apparently the Weekly is getting set to print a story next week that “exposes” Seattle’s homeless newspaper as employing, among its 250 vendors, a few people who are not entirely homeless, and even a handful who, by working countless hours, can make as much as $20,000 a year (without benefits)! The horrors!

Please don’t misunderstand. This sort of thing doesn’t piss me off because I once wrote for a paper with the same name. (I almost wrote “the same paper,” but, well, it’s not.) I don’t even care that Managing Editor Mike Seely would rather take personal potshots at me than address the indisputable fact that most Seattleites I hear from feel like his paper is now a pile of shit. I don’t know the reporter working on the Real Change story, Huan Hsu, who only came to Seattle two months ago. (Raising the question of who in the Weekly food chain thought up this story; the paper’s new owners, Village Voice Media (ne: New Times), have a history of kicking the homeless in some of their other cities.) I really don’t care about personal history or personalities here.

What pisses me off is when anyone – anyone – tries to make a buck or ingratiate themselves (e.g., with dimwitted readers) by pissing on the powerless. It’s one thing to lampoon the idiocies of Seattle liberalism; I might not agree with it (or think it’s well done), but it’s fair game. But trying to manufacture a “scandal” involving one of the few activist-initiated social service projects in town that truly does help people and change lives, all the time, is pure bullshit. Or, in Harris’ words, “What the Fuck”?

I guess the idea is to create buzz for the “new” Weekly by being bold and provocative (and irresponsible). Whatever. What Hsu and the Weekly will find is that Real Change’s vendors are often the downtrodden and powerless (“92% homeless or formerly homeless. 63% reporting a disability. 83% over 40. Illiterates. Addicts. Felons. Disabled people. Mentally ill people. Etcetera.,” writes Harris.) But Real Change as an institution has a lot of admirers in this community, and for an obvious reason: it has a better track record than any other media outlet in town (including the Weekly, and during my tenure there as well) in walking the talk and making this a better city.

We’ll see what the Weekly’s story is next week. But if it follows the arc that Tim Harris anticipates, Seattle Weekly will have only succeeded in further marginalizing itself.

The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight (and every Tuesday), 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. (I’ll be leaving early, so come by early if you want to say hello.)

Tonight is “Dine for Darfur” night around town; the Montlake Ale House, along with dozens of other restaurants in Seattle, will donate 25% of their proceeds to Mercy Corps. So drink up. It’s for a good cause.

Also, if you’ve been to the Ale House recently, you may have noticed some politically tinged paintings on display from local artist Mary K. Johnson. She’ll be on hand to mingle and take questions about her work.

Not in Seattle? Liberals will also be drinking tonight in the Tri-Cities. A full listing of Washington’s eleven Drinking Liberally chapters is available here.

In a surprise announcement on Saturday evening, Congressman Dave Reichert declared that he has switched political parties. “The time is right for me to switch to the Democrat Par…I mean, the Democratic Party,” said Riechert who represents Washington’s 8th congressional district. “This is a move I’ve considered seriously since early last November, when I suddenly realized my independent-minded values were more in line with those of the Democrats. As my critics have pointed out, I’ve increasingly become indecisive, and that is a reflection of the inner conflict.”

When asked why he waited nearly six months to make the change, Reichert responded, “I was waiting for the right time. Today is Joel Connelly’s birthday, and I guess I saved it as a birthday surprise for him.” Also, my investigations of global warming are now complete. I’m convinced that Al Gore is right—we really do need to be manufacturing and dropping giant ice cubes into the ocean.”

Reichert’s former spokesperson Kimberly Cadena resigned last week fueling speculation that the Congressman might be considering a jump to the Democratic party. Reichert announced that Cadena will be replaced by Sandeep Kaushik, currently the part-time Deputy Communications Director for King County Executive Ron Sims.

When asked about the reaction of his former Republican colleagues Reichert replied, “Let me make one thing perfectly clear. I’ve stared down the barrel of a loaded pistol and saw my name inscribed on the tip of the bullet…you can believe I can stare into the eyes of any disgruntled Republican colleague without flinching.”

Reichert told reporters that his first priority as a new Democrat will be to “figure out how they want me to vote.” Reichert also expected he might be called upon to personally provide security for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA-08). “I moonlighted a bit as a Republican in protecting her footwear. Now, if she wants me to, I’ll be acting more as a personal sheriff for the Speaker. And let me be clear, here, that school bus drivers are on notice—you respect the Speaker because this sheriff is watching.”

Rep. Pelosi was not available for comment.

Rev. Jesse Jackson today denounced the Congressional Black Caucus Institute’s planned presidential debate partnership with FOX, and called for candidates to boycott the debate.

“I am disappointed by the Congressional Black Caucus Institute’s partnership with FOX, and strongly encourage them to reverse that decision. Why would presidential candidates, or an organization that is supposed to advocate for Black Americans, ever give a stamp of legitimacy to a network that continually marginalizes Black leaders and the Black community? FOX moderating a presidential debate on issues of importance to Black Americans is literally letting the Fox guard the henhouse – FOX should be rejected.”

In a press release issued by ColorOfChange.org, Jackson and other Black leaders launched a petition campaign, accusing FOX of “smearing” the Black community.

“The CBC cannot claim to represent Black Americans and at the same time legitimize a network that calls Black churches a cult, implies that Senator Barack Obama is a terrorist, and uses the solemn occasion of Coretta Scott King’s funeral to call Black leaders ‘racist,’” said James Rucker, head of ColorOfChange.org. “The CBC Institute’s decision is shamefully out of step with most Black voters — and now Black voters will hold our leaders accountable and demand they end their partnership with Fox.

What kind of “smears” are they talking about? The folks at FoxAttacks.com provided the following clips:

Yesterday the Seattle P-I published a list of nearly 100 reader-nominated candidates for this year’s Jefferson Awards, which supposedly honor service “by ordinary people who do extraordinary things.” It really does warm the heart to read through this list of volunteers and citizen activists, and learn how much some of our neighbors are contributing back to the community. But fortunately, green tea doesn’t permanently stain a computer monitor, because I did an actual spit-take when I stumbled across the following nominee:

RICHARD DeBOLT

CHEHALIS

As the communications and external relations manager for TransAlta in Centralia and the 20th District Republican representative for Lewis and Thurston counties, DeBolt’s legislative priority is to create an open and honest flow of communication between his constituents and government. He is a devoted champion of safer, more prosperous communities in the South Puget Sound area. His loyalty and caring attitude for his community while working to solve problems on a statewide basis make him the caring man he is today.

Hey, thanks for the nomination, Kevin.

Hmm. Compare that commissioned piece of ass-licking puffery with what The Olympian’s editorial board had to say about DeBolt last year, in the wake of the House Republican Caucus’s bogus sex offender postcard scam:

Rep. Richard DeBolt owes his legislative colleagues and his South Sound constituents an apology. His feeble attempt at rough-and-tumble politics has backfired, making him look foolish and disingenuous.

[…] His actions are bad for public discourse, and his reliance on falsehoods does not speak well of DeBolt’s character.

[…] Yes, the public is now aware how low Rep. Richard DeBolt and his political action committee will stoop to stretch the truth and sling a little mud at the opposing party.

Guess what? DeBolt never apologized. But he did have Kevin or some other unprincipled staffer write in to the P-I and nominate him for working “to create an open and honest flow of communication between his constituents and government.” (Dollars to doughnuts we read that manufactured quote in DeBolt’s campaign literature next year, attributed to the P-I.)

If you want to know what the Jefferson Awards are really all about, just take a look at the nomination of the only other name I immediately recognized on the list:

MARK BOYAR

SEATTLE

Boyar created Middle Fork Outdoor Recreation Coalition and began raising awareness about problems in the environment. He also encourages the construction of trails by public landowners while kindly pressuring private landowners to either sell or develop trails on their land. He also writes grants for the private landowners to help them receive a fair monetary trade for the land. He has been a strong and relentless advocate with a gentle touch and successful record.

I know Mark Boyar and how hard he works — and how often he lets others take credit for his remarkable accomplishments because quite frankly, that’s sometimes the most politically expedient way to get things done. So it particularly irks me to see DeBolt so selfishly pollute an awards process that might honor Mark for his quiet and selfless work to clean up our precious wilderness.

But I guess that’s the sort of conniving, amoral, political machination that makes DeBolt “the caring man he is today.”