The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight (and every Tuesday), 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E.
I won’t be there, but I suspect Goldy and the usual suspects will be.
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.
I have to admit, I haven’t been following this as closely as everyone else, but am I correct in noting that Nick Licata
a) opposes spending $500 million to keep the Sonics from leaving town
b) favors spending $3 billion to keep Ballard Oil from leaving town
Perfect.
That’s Frank’s district.
The DC chatter says that John Edwards is pulling out of the presidential race due to his wife’s health. (She was treated for breast cancer in 2004.) I sure hope not. It would be a shame, on both counts.
They will be holding a press conference at 12 noon (ET). We’ll see.
UPDATE:
From The Politico:
John Edwards is suspending his campaign for President, and may drop out completely, because his wife has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that sickened her in 2004, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, an Edwards friend told The Politico.
“At a minimum he’s going to suspend” the campaign, the source said. “Nobody knows precisely how serious her recurrence is. It’ll be another couple of days before there’s complete clarity.”
“For him right now he has one priority which is her health and the security of the two young children,” said the friend.
As for the campaign, “You don’t shut this machine off completely, but everything will go on hold.”
UPDATE, UPDATE:
The press conference is going on now. Elizabeth Edwards cancer has returned, and has spread to her rib bones. At this stage, once breast cancer has metastasized, it is “treatable but not curable.” Both Edwards and his wife are smiling, and keep expressing their hope.
“The campaign goes on… the campaign goes on strongly.”
Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah) has an interesting relationship with “the truth.”
On Monday Rep. Cannon told a NASA scientist that he was not entitled to free speech — that apparently, he did not have the right to truthfully testify as to the conclusions of his taxpayer-funded research, if those conclusions contradicted White House policy.
“Free speech is not a simple thing and is subject to and directed by policy.”
Rep. Cannon is essentially defending the scientific equivalent of the Downingstreet Memo, only in this case it was the scientific research that was “being fixed around the policy.”
Well today Rep. Cannon shot yet another sophistical broadside through the notion of an open and informed public debate, vociferously arguing against issuing subpoenas that would command top White House aides to testify under oath as to their role in and knowledge of the controversial U.S. attorney firings.
“Let’s get to the truth. Let’s do it in a deliberate, even-handed manner, not in a stampede that will only serve to trample the truth and unnecessarily provoke a confrontation with the president.”
Because, of course, nothing tramples the truth more than, um… sworn testimony.
No, the only way we’re really ever going to “get to the truth,” according to Rep. Cannon, is to have Karl Rove testify behind closed doors, without a transcript, and not under oath. For if the truth, as Rep. Cannon implies, is not a simple thing, and is subject to and directed by policy — and if that policy is largely directed by Rove himself — then surely, anything Rove says must be the truth.
That is the sort of “deliberate, even-handed manner” in which Republicans have exercised their oversight authority these past six years. And that is why voters handed control of Congress over to Democrats this past November.
I have an email correspondence going on with AG Rob McKenna’s office on a number of questions regarding former U.S. Attorney John McKay, and what if any role McKenna might have played in both the dismissal and the search for a replacement. McKenna’s communications people are good. Their response was prompt, concise and deftly worded in a way that does not exactly provide a direct answer to some of my questions. I’ll report back after they reply to my follow-up.
To be fair, McKenna was heading out to Montesano and Grays Harbor this morning, so my answers were provided secondhand by Communications Director Janelle Guthrie. But she did manage to offer one direct quote from her boss:
“We had a good relationship with John McKay. He was an excellent attorney, highly respected by other prosecutors as well. I think President Bush made a mistake.”
Hmm. I didn’t actually ask what McKenna thought about McKay’s job performance or President Bush’s decision to fire him, so the fact that he chose to offer his opinion unprompted is telling. (Not to mention a display of political savvy that is apparently beyond the reach of fellow Republican Dave Reichert.) For by publicly defending McKay and criticizing Bush, McKenna would appear to be separating himself from both the widening scandal, and the slow-motion implosion of the Bush administration itself.
But taken at his word, his statement also does something else that I hope levelheaded voters will take to heart: it hammers yet another nail in the coffin of the oft-repeated GOP meme that Democrats somehow stole the 2004 gubernatorial election.
As the New York Times points out in an editorial today, “phony fraud charges” were at the center of the U.S. attorney firings:
In its fumbling attempts to explain the purge of United States attorneys, the Bush administration has argued that the fired prosecutors were not aggressive enough about addressing voter fraud. It is a phony argument; there is no evidence that any of them ignored real instances of voter fraud.
[…] John McKay, one of the fired attorneys, says he was pressured by Republicans to bring voter fraud charges after the 2004 Washington governor’s race, which a Democrat, Christine Gregoire, won after two recounts. Republicans were trying to overturn an election result they did not like, but Mr. McKay refused to go along. “There was no evidence,” he said, “and I am not going to drag innocent people in front of a grand jury.”
So if McKenna, fully aware of McKay’s public comments, is now vouching for McKay’s performance and criticizing his firing… isn’t he also vouching for the integrity of the 2004 gubernatorial election?
McKay refused to drag innocent people in front of a grand jury, which is of course exactly what many Republicans wanted him to do. That is what the EFF’s Bob Williams and the BIAW’s Tom McCabe angrily demanded. That is what all six Republicans on the King County Council demanded when they wrote a letter to U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. That is what our friend Stefan at (un)Sound Politics continues to demand today. When then-WSRP Chair Chris Vance describes speaking with McKay and complaining to the White House, he appears incredulous that good Republicans wouldn’t subvert our supposedly impartial judicial system for partisan political purposes:
“We had a Republican secretary of state, a Republican prosecutor in King County and a Republican U.S. attorney, and no one was doing anything.”
Not to mention a Republican state Attorney General, Rob McKenna. In 2004 the entire investigative, prosecutorial and administrative apparatus was controlled by loyal Republicans, and yet there were no indictments, there were no prosecutions, and there were no grand juries. Why? For the same reason a cherry-picked judge in a Republican county dismissed “with prejudice” all allegations of fraud: there was no evidence.
I believe a sort of mass psychosis set in to our state’s Republican establishment in the wake of Dino Rossi’s incredibly close and understandably frustrating loss to Gov. Chris Gregoire — a mindset of dark thoughts in which party stalwarts cynically determined that absolutely everything and anything was possible at the hands of their enemies across the aisle… and that absolutely everything and anything was permissible in response. Fed by the paranoid fantasies of the right-wing blogs, and the ruthless partisanship of the BIAW and EFF, the state GOP not only pursued a hopeless legal contest, but set in motion a series of events that ultimately led to McKay’s firing. The WSRP made the biggest political mistake possible — it came to believe its own propaganda — and in so doing played a major role in instigating a national scandal that threatens Gonzales himself, and further tarnishes the Republican brand.
“President Bush made a mistake.” Absolutely, and in more ways than one. It remains to be seen if McKenna’s efforts to separate himself from this mistake after the fact are entirely supported by the record of his own actions and statements at the time.
Kos has knocked both candidates on this. Here are both headlines:
Hillary unable to say homosexuality isn’t “immoral”
Obama also can’t say: “Homosexuality is not immoral”
Hillary said “I’m going to leave that to others to conclude,” and while Obama answered “no,” he did so through his press guy, and not in person.
I don’t think it’s important for Democratic candidates to believe homosexuality is “moral.” I think it is more important for Democratic candidates to believe in full civil rights for gays and lesbians.
It’s like Dan Savage said:
No one has to like homos. You can sign off on full civil rights for gays and lesbians without having to think we’re nifty or be all that comfortable with the idea of sharing a locker room with us. (Hell, I’m sometimes not comfortable sharing a locker room with other gay men.) The gay and lesbian civil rights movement would make more strides if we could separate the issue of liking us from the issue of not discriminating against us.
[…]
No one wants to change your mind about homosexuality. You can think we’re naughty, you can think we’re sinful. And you know what? You can sign off on granting us our full civil rights, tolerate our living openly, marrying, having families—and go right on hating us! Heck, you can go right on trying to talk us out of being gay.
So, I think the question put to both Obama and Clinton is a poor one, not to mention irrelevant.
The Seattle P-I headline asks the rhetorical question, “Will Dino Rossi run again for governor?” — and then pretty much provides the answer in the lede:
As Dino Rossi ponders a possible 2008 election rematch against Gov. Chris Gregoire, he’s doing everything, at a state level, that a Republican candidate for president might do at the national level.
Everything, that is, except actually talk about issues.
For a man who promised to bring bold new leadership to the governor’s mansion, and whose 2008 campaign essentially kicked off in December of 2004, Rossi has been resolutely silent on absolutely every single contentious issue that has wracked the state these past few years.
The gas tax, I-912’s effort to repeal it, gay civil rights, the inheritance tax, the Viaduct, I-933’s attempt to dismantle land use regulation, and nearly every other editorial inducing issue… Dino Rossi, the titular leader of Washington Republicans, has refused to weigh in by publicly lending his voice of authority to one side or the other. You’ve got to admire his discipline and consistency.
But then, we shouldn’t really expect anything less from a man whose 2004 campaign was long on the promise of new leadership but short on any prior history thereof. After a legislative career distinguished mostly by the nastiness of his campaigns, Rossi adopted as his singular accomplishment his personal authorship of the 2003-2005 state budget, a bit of GOPropaganda repeatedly echoed by his patrons on the Seattle Times editorial page, though clearly contradicted by the Times’ own contemporaneous reporting:
The Republican budget has much in common with the all-cuts plan that Democratic Gov. Gary Locke unveiled in December. In fact, Rossi opened a press briefing yesterday with a PowerPoint presentation titled: “Following the Governor’s Lead.”
Yes, Rossi’s budget was a tad more draconian, eliminating health care for 46,000 children, but as Rossi made perfectly clear at the time, the fiscally conservative budget adopted that session was largely authored by a Democratic governor.
Apart from his business-friendly pronouncements and promise to shake up the state bureaucracy, Rossi’s 2004 campaign was short on substance, while his personal beliefs and political ideology were intentionally obfuscated. Even on abortion, the emotional issue that most vividly defines our nation’s Red/Blue divide, Rossi, a devout Catholic, refused to take a public stand. “None of us are running for the U.S. Supreme Court,” Rossi quipped, brushing aside the thorny issue by insisting that the governor had little power over Roe v. Wade.
That kind of non-denial denial is simply not going to fly in 2008 — and not just on the issue of abortion, which a far-right-wing Supreme Court is preparing to throw back to the states. Rossi and his advisors are relying on resentment over his narrow 2004 loss and the circumstances surrounding it, to cement his Republican base and bring back many of the independent and crossover voters who almost carried him to victory. But his bitterly fought election contest also gave rise to what is perhaps the most active, organized and influential local political blogosphere in the nation, and while our tactics may not always be appreciated by our friends in the legacy press, our reporting and our media criticism cannot be ignored.
The media landscape has changed — somewhat thanks to Rossi himself — and he simply will not be allowed to run the same sort of tabula rasa campaign that almost snuck him into the governor’s mansion in 2004. The danger in attempting to be all things to all people is that if you leave yourself undefined, your opponent will define you for you. The Gregoire campaign failed to do that in 2004, but I doubt they’ll make the same mistake twice. And this time around she will be aided by a maturing progressive media infrastructure that will push the political press corps to force Rossi to take a stand on substantive issues, or look foolish refusing to do so.
The 2004 Rossi campaign provided the boilerplate strategy for how Republicans might run and win in Washington State — specifically, try not to look so much like Republicans. That David Irons and Mike McGavick failed to successfully ride this strategy to victory is not necessarily due to the fact that they are inferior salesmen (though, they are,) but rather, an indication that both reporters and voters have grown hip to the strategy.
But even given a media time-warp Rossi would be hard pressed to duplicate his 2004 near-success in a 2008 campaign governed by an entirely new set of political dynamics. This time around Governor Gregoire has a record, and in attacking the specifics, Rossi will be forced to specifically enunciate what he would have done differently. Would he have brokered a gas tax increase, or allowed our transportation infrastructure to languish without it? Would he have vetoed the gay civil rights and domestic partnership bills? Would he have fought to put more money into education and children’s health care, or argue that fiscal constraints just don’t allow it? Would he have supported repealing the estate tax, and if so, what would he have cut from the budget to offset the loss of revenue?
Rossi’s conservative legislative record and political ideology puts him outside of the mainstream of Washington voters — and outside of the mainstream of many of the independents and so-called “Dinocrats” who voted for him last time around. I look forward to playing a small role in finally introducing the real Dino Rossi to Washington voters.
Hmm. And all this time I thought people like Zell Miller were angrily opposed to abortion because they thought it was morally wrong.
“How could this great land of plenty produce too few people in the last 30 years?” Miller asked. “Here is the brutal truth that no one dares to mention: We’re too few because too many of our babies have been killed.”
Miller claimed that 45 million babies have been ‘killed’ since the Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade in 1973.
“If those 45 million children had lived, today they would be defending our country, they would be filling our jobs, they would be paying into Social Security,” he asserted.
Some upcoming events of interest:
Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign sent out a press release this morning touting support from seven state attorneys general, including our very own Rob McKenna.
Both McCain and McKenna are often portrayed in the media as the kind of straight-talking, moderate Republicans who tend to appeal to WA’s independent and cross-over voters… when in fact they are both ruthlessly partisan political opportunists whose conservative credentials are well established with all but the most far-right-leaning elements of their already far-right-leaning party.
Take for example the quote McKenna provided for McCain’s press release:
“Senator McCain continues to garner support among legal and law enforcement leaders because of his stances on state rights and his role in brokering the confirmations of Justices Roberts and Alito,” said McKenna. “I’m honored to give John my support and I appreciate his leadership on the issues that count.”
The issues that count.
No, it’s not campaign finance reform that McKenna lauds — the issue that originally earned McCain his faux-maverick status — it’s his role in confirming Justices Roberts and Alito, two of the most far-right-leaning justices ever to serve on the Supreme Court… justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, uphold the President’s suspension of habeas corpus, and vastly expand executive power. These are partisan, right-wing, Republican justices — darlings of the Federalist Society. And McKenna thinks they’re just grand.
I suppose coming from a state GOP that includes the likes of Val Stevens, and has nominated Ellen Craswell and John Carlson for high office, McKenna might come off as a relative moderate. But while our state’s editorialists seem intent on talking up the carefully crafted McKenna and his prospects for governor or the US Senate, they willfully ignore the shrewd realpolitik that has defined his career. How can McKenna be constantly lauded for bipartisanship without mentioning his extraordinarily close relationship with the viciously partisan political thugs at the BIAW? And how can the media continue to accept McKenna’s mildly pro-choice statements at face value, when he applauds McCain’s efforts to confirm Supreme Court justices who would take that choice away?
McCain is the most conservative candidate running with a shot at the GOP nomination, and McKenna has enthusiastically endorsed him because he is the viable candidate who best represents his own values. And what are McCain’s self-proclaimed values?
“I am confident that this nation is not a center — I think they’re right. I think they’re basically conservative, the majority are basically conservatives, and I think that if we get back on our message, get back to the principles, philosophies and messages of Ronald Reagan and others, I think we’ll do just fine. But first we have to get over our state of denial.”
WA’s media has to get over its state of denial too. Rob McKenna is a conservative. That is how he would legislate. That is how he would govern. And as such, he is out of step with the mainstream of WA voters.
UPDATE:
Erica Barnett slogged that McKenna’s “no moderate” back on Feb 23, when the AP first reported he would endorse McCain. In that article, the AP matter-of-factly describes McKenna as “a moderate.”
That’s my point. It is not just the editorialists who should be held accountable for how they are misreporting McKenna’s politics, but the supposedly objective reporters. It is not an undisputed fact that McKenna is a moderate, and thus McKenna should not be described as such in a news report without attribution or citation.
From Talking Points Memo:
More bombshells: Rep. Doc Hastings’ (R-WA) then chief of staff called Seattle U.S. Attorney John McKay to inquire about whether the feds were investigating allegations of voter fraud in the 2004 Washington governor’s race, McKay testified. McKay said he stopped the chief of staff before he went too far with his questions, but was troubled enough by the call to discuss it with his top assistant.
Ongoing coverage on the hearings from TPM Muckraker.
UPDATE:
TPM Muckraker has streaming video of McKay’s testimony, describing how he was “pressed” by Hastings’ chief of staff Ed Cassidy on investigating WA’s 2004 gubernatorial election. As Jimmy (from McCranium) points out in my comment thread:
Ed Cassidy was the same guy Hastings tried to install as the Ethics Chief legal council which of course led to the complete shutdown of the committee itself because it violated committee rules. Looks like Doc doesn’t like to follow the rules and neither does his chief of staff.
Tonight on “The David Goldstein Show” on Newsradio 710-KIRO, from 7PM to 10PM:
7PM: Is John Edwards a faggot? That’s what cuddly, conservative pundit Ann Coulter said at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) conference, where she was the featured speaker:
“I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot–so….’”
The audience at this preeminent conservative event of the year gave Coulter an enthusiastic ovation. Does Coulter (who has endorsed GOP hopeful Mitt Romney) really represent, as Andrew Sullivan suggests, “the heart and soul of contemporary conservative activism”…? And if so, what does this say about contemporary conservative activism?
8PM: Should Reichert and McMorris give back their terrorist money? 22 Republicans representatives have benefited from money the NRCC raised from indicted terrorist financierAbdul Tawala Ibn Ali Alishtari — including WA’s Dave Reichert and Cathy McMorris-Rogers — and yet none have offered to give the money back. Republicans talk tough on terrorism, but I guess even a federal indictment doesn’t make your money not good enough for the NRCC.
9PM: Is it wrong to boo? Apparently.
Tune in tonight (or listen to the live stream) and give me a call: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).
If like me, you love politics and you love chocolate, than you don’t want to miss NARAL Pro-Choice Washington’s annual fundraiser, Chocolate for Choice:
Chocolate as far as the eye can see—and all for the right to choose! While our guests eat chocolate to their hearts’ content, our panel of celebrity judges determines the winning dessert entries in various categories. The evening also features a silent auction of fun chocolate-themed items and a live auction of exquisite chocolate creations.
Celebrity judges include such political luminaries as Darcy Burner, Ron Sims, Greg Nickels, Sally Clark and, um… me! Cathy Sorbo is the Master of Ceremonies.
Tickets are still available! Thursday, March 8, 6-8PM at Safeco Field’s Ellis Pavilion.
In the comment thread on an earlier post, Steven writes:
Somebody around these parts had a pretty good suggestion a while back. If you want to see what the surface option looks like, let’s close the Viaduct for a month and see how traffic responds. Then let’s vote.
The implication being that with the Viaduct closed, I-5 will slow to a permanent crawl while the city’s side streets are choked with drivers seeking alternative routes.
Of course, that’s a completely bullshit analysis, no matter how many times people repeat it. First of all, the surface-plus-transit option is not the do-nothing option — it is the s u r f a c e – p l u s – t r a n s i t option, which means it includes a number of surface and transit improvements to move additional vehicles and people through our existing surface streets. Improvements which would presumably include, um, a new, multilane boulevard in the shadow of the existing Viaduct.
Replacing the Viaduct with $2.4 billion worth of transit and street improvements is not the same thing as simply closing it. Would the surface-plus-transit option, whatever it entails, match the vehicle capacity of the existing elevated structure? Probably not. But it would provide a helluva lot more capacity than doing nothing.
The second problem with Steven’s thought experiment is that one month isn’t nearly enough time for local commuters to change their driving habits, especially knowing that things will return to normal after 30-days. But faced with years of Viaduct closure and disruption, well, that’s when all that seemingly superfluous grey matter tucked behind our foreheads really starts to kick into gear. It may not seem like it while they’re blindly cutting you off in traffic, but the average driver is smarter than your average bear, and will eventually adjust their driving habits to fit the new reality. Just as new freeway capacity attracts more traffic, reducing capacity will discourage some trips and reroute others.
So, how long would it really take to conduct Steven’s thought experiment under objective, real-world conditions? Well, according to WSDOT, if we end up rebuilding a new elevated structure, SR 99 will be shut down in whole or in part for up to 10 to 12 years.
That’s right, drivers will be forced to live without the existing capacity for over a decade.
During this decade of disruption, a Downtown Seattle Association comparison matrix shows that SR 99 would close nights and weekends for 5 to 7 years, and be reduced to two-lanes in each direction for 7 years. Various southbound segments will be closed for periods of time ranging from 6 to 21 months, while the entire structure would be closed in both directions for as long as 9 months.
And that’s if everything goes according to plan.
So when surface critics talk about how Seattle’s economy is going to completely collapse if we lose the Viaduct’s current vehicle capacity, I wonder how they think we’re going to survive the decade or so it will take to rebuild it?
Last week I publicly fretted that Governor Chris Gregoire might eventually paint herself into a rhetorical corner via public comments over replacing the Alaska Way Viaduct. I worried that the Governor’s increasingly adamant insistence that a rebuild is the only viable option could put her in the unenviable position of either defying the will of the voters, or appearing to cave to big, bad Seattle just as she prepares to head into what could be a tough reelection campaign. But in an exclusive interview with Lynn Allen of Evergreen Politics, the Governor has allayed my concerns.
[Is there] any way the surface and transit option would be entertained by the state?
Gregoire: Absolutely. We did entertain it earlier but couldn’t make it work. We have a set of criteria we have to meet. We have to maintain safety. We have to meet capacity for both moving freight and people in that corridor.
We’re not accommodating increases in capacity if we either rebuild the viaduct or build a new tunnel. There won’t be an increase in today’s capacity. It’s now somewhere in the neighborhood of 110,000 per day.
So, no matter what we do, we still have to maximize transit and surface. No matter what happens, there has to be a comprehensive transit component. We will need to be able to increase the capacity for moving the increase in population we are expecting.
Then, too, what we decide to do has to be fiscally responsible and friendly to urban design.
That’s why we’re working with Ron Sims. The state is saying, “Show me what you’re talking about here”. We’d like to see what the possibilities are.
As HA co-blogger Will points out, Gov. Gregoire appears to contradict herself in her use of the word “capacity” — but that’s the sort of verbal nitpicking I choose to reserve for Republicans. Taken as a whole, and in the context of the entire debate, the Governor is clearly leaving the door open to a surface solution. And I tend to agree with David Postman that this interview is entirely consistent with her prior statements, representing at most a clarification rather than a shift in position.
The Governor has repeatedly drawn a line in the sand, demanding that any Viaduct replacement must maintain capacity, a criterion some have supposed to rule out a surface alternative. But the key to accepting the surface option as both a transportation and political compromise rests on how we define the word “capacity.” WSDOT’s Environmental Impact Statement describes the purpose of the project as one that “maintains or improves mobility and accessibility for people and goods” — language the Governor clearly echoes in talking to Lynn about capacity.
As I wrote last week:
Hard-nosed rebuild supporters have mocked King County Executive Ron Sims as some kind of enviro-whacko hippie for stating that we should be focused on moving people, not cars — but that’s exactly the stated purpose put forth in the EIS. And that’s exactly the language the Governor needs, to join former tunnel supporters in support of a surface compromise.
It’s not a matter of redefining the word capacity — “mobility” was always the definition from the start, and accepting an alternative that improves mobility, while perhaps decreasing vehicle capacity, is perfectly consistent with Gov. Gregoire’s line in the sand.
That is what the Governor essentially told Lynn — she is focused on moving “freight and people,” and she is willing to work with Ron Sims “to see what the possibilities are.” I had been concerned that in championing a rebuild Gov. Gregoire might eventually paint herself into a corner, but by her own words, she has clearly reiterated that she is willing to consider a surface option, if she can be convinced that it maintains mobility. I can’t see how one can read this any other way. And no, it doesn’t represent a shift in position.
No doubt a rebuild overwhelmingly remains Gov. Gregoire’s preferred option. But if in the wake of a No/No March 13 vote Mayor Nickels can abandon the tunnel he’s championed, and campaign for a surface option without losing face (and the smart money is on exactly that,) then surely the Governor can give surface proponents the opportunity to persuade her that they can develop an alternative that meets the criteria set forth in the EIS.
And once Seattle voters speak, and the political food fight comes to an end, that’s exactly what I expect the Governor to do.
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