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

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

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.

A gigantic tanker blew up on a San Fransisco area freeway interchange the other day. Gridlock was predicted for Monday’s commute. But…

It didn’t happen.

I’ll let Dan Savage explain:

How was the disaster averted? Mass transit got a boost—more trains were running, more ferries crisscrossed San Francisco Bay, and some folks opted to telecommute. Now the same people that predicted disaster today are warning us that the disaster—the chaos! oh, the humanity!—will surely come tomorrow. Or Wednesday. Or Thursday. It’s likelier, however, that disaster won’t come because drivers will do what drivers do only when they must: adjust. Find other ways around, switch to mass transit, telecommute, ride a ferry.

But once again freeway addicts deprived of a freeway predicted disaster and disaster failed to materialize.

Tear down the viaduct now.

While I’m not quite ready to tear down the viaduct, Dan has a point. We are often convinced we need the things we have, only to realize that, perhaps, we can live without them. I’m certain the destroyed section of freeway will be repaired, but it goes to show you just how flexible commuters can be if they have options.

NOTE BY GOLDY:
How naive can you be Will? Don’t you know that Seattle is different, and that transit can’t possibly work here? And while other major cities have torn down waterfront freeways, and commuters have managed to adapt, don’t you understand that this just won’t work in Seattle, because… well… um… it just won’t?

Drop a backpack in a garbage can on a Washington State ferry, and you will shut down the system for hours, as officials evacuate the ship and X-ray the suspicious bag for explosives. So what happens when you leave a 40-foot shipping container, unattended by a highway overpass?

This is a Hyundai container, destined either to or from Terminal 5, but is not going anywhere. There is no semi-tractor in sight, and the container is parked next to the highway 99 overpass, just a few hundred feet from the West Seattle bridge, which are two main highways that connect all of south and west Seattle, to downtown via the Viaduct. I find these things from time to time stretching along the main drags that run through Georgetown. This container is sitting on a patch of gravel across the street from Terminal 25 on East Marginal Way, just a stone’s throw from their gate security office.

Perhaps this is the real Port scandal… the 95-percent of containers that go uninspected, and the lax security and lack of accountability throughout our entire shipping and trucking industry?

Over a month ago, I said this about the race among Democrats to take on Reichert in the 8th CD:

Unlike Goldy, I’m not committed to supporting a single candidate. At least not yet.

Today, I announce that I will be supporting Darcy Burner for Congress.

Democrats need an energetic new voice in Washington. We need a voice from Seattle’s Eastside that will advocate for fiscal restraint and personal responsibility. We need someone who understands not only the high-tech businesses of Bellevue and Redmond, but also the VFW halls of Auburn and Buckley. Darcy Burner meets or exceeds all of these requirements.

While some folks question whether Darcy is the candidate who will lead Democrats to victory, I don’t. Darcy fell just 8,000 votes short of victory in 2006. In New Hampshire, Paul Hodes lost to Rep. Charlie Bass by 20 points in 2004. Two years later, Hodes won, 52-45. The truth is, Darcy is much closer to victory in ’08 than many candidates who are giving it second try.

Darcy Burner isn’t the anointed candidate; if there are challengers, she’ll have to beat them. If Dwight Pelz does what Paul Berendt did in 2004 by finding a celebrity candidate to run in the 8th, Darcy will have to beat that candidate, too. No one is owed a seat in Congress, or even a party’s nomination.

Darcy has learned much from her first campaign, and I see no reason why she can’t get another 10,000 votes somewhere in the 8th District.

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.

Ivan Weiss, chair of the 34th District Democrats (and my biggest fan) takes aim at “fair elections” advocates who are working with extremist right wing think tanks.

Rep. Peter DeFazio is out. He won’t challenge GOP Sen. Gordon Smith (OR), who is getting some serious love from Crosscut.

This Sunday, riding the bus will be free. Why? It’s Earth Day. (Or as George W. Bush calls it, “Sunday”) Dan Savage isn’t a fan of the free bus plan:

Earth to Ron Sims: Riding the bus sucks. Earth day, non-earth days (?), free, $1.25—the fucking bus sucks. There’s nothing celebratory about being stuck on a fucking bus.

People don’t ride public transit to be altruistic, do-gooders. They ride public transit to get from Point A to Point B. To compete with cars, Ron, public transit has to be faster, easier, and more reliable than driving. There’s a tiny number of smug, stupid assholes out there that will get on a bus because they get to say, “Hey, look at me! I’m saving the planet!” to themselves. And most of those assholes are already on the bus, content to sit in a pool of urine left on their seat by some bum that got on and off the bus in the downtown “ride free/rolling homeless shelter zone.”

Melamine-tainted corn gluten, imported from China, has been confirmed in South African pet food:

Johannesburg – Tests have confirmed that Vets Choice and Royal Canin dog and cat dry pet-food products contained corn gluten contaminated with melamine, says the manufacturer.

The contaminated corn gluten was delivered to Royal Canin by a South African third-party supplier and appears to have originated from China.

Once again the rumors prove right, and FDA denials prove wrong. On Tuesday, April 17, I informed the FDA that “the word […] is that corn gluten and rice protein concentrate are being recalled” — information they firmly denied.

What we have here is a pattern, and there is absolutely no reason to assume that it is limited to the pet food and animal feed markets. Wheat gluten, corn gluten and rice protein concentrate are all used to supplement the protein content of both animal and human food, and all three have now been found to be contaminated with melamine. Three different Chinese manufactures have now apparently been implicated.

Given the facts, it is now reasonable to assume either massive, industry-wide negligence, or intentional contamination, and that all Chinese produced high-protein food additives are now suspect. Steve Pickman, a VP at MGP Ingredients, the largest U.S. producer of wheat gluten, explores the most likely theory:

“It is my understanding, but certainly unheard of in our experience, that melamine could increase the measurable nitrogen of gluten and then be mathematically converted to protein. The effect could create the appearance or illusion of raising the gluten’s protein level. Understandably, any acts or practices such as this are barred in the U.S. How the U.S. can or cannot monitor and prevent these types of situations from occurring in other parts of the world is the overriding question.”

In grading the quality of these food additives, the protein content is usually extrapolated from measured nitrogen levels. It now seems likely that unscrupulous manufacturers, in an effort to up the grade and price of their product, are intentionally spiking nitrogen levels with melamine, an industrial chemical used in China as a slow-release nitrogen fertilizer.

One would expect the FDA to test this theory by directly measuring protein levels in melamine-contaminated samples to see if they otherwise fall below grade. One would also expect the FDA to release the names of all importers, distributors and manufacturers who are suspected of handling contaminated product. But then, one would expect a lot of things from the FDA that they have thus far failed to deliver.

The truth might be a good place to start.

UPDATE:
During a conference call today, the FDA confirmed that melamine-tainted pet food was reprocessed and fed to hogs. People eat hogs. Figure it out for yourself.

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 good beer and spicy politics. Tonight we’ll celebrate the opening of the 200th chapter of Drinking Liberally, with the arrival of the Pagosa Springs, Colorado chapter.

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.

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?