Search Results for: vote seattle weekly

The only local editorialist that The Columbian prints, other than members of their editorial board, is one Ann Donnelly, a former county GOP chair. Today she really stepped in poo by making the usual conservative mistake of projection, applying her own limited experiences to the Democratic Party.

In a column promoting the upcoming February Republican precinct caucuses, Donnelly first makes an egregious error of fact by stating both parties will hold them this year.

On Saturday, Feb. 13, in school libraries and other public venues around Clark County, both political parties will hold caucuses open to all registered voters, who with a smidgen of research can determine their voting precincts and assigned meeting places.

Speaking of research, a cursory Google by Donnelly would have revealed that Democrats have decided to eschew the lightly attended precinct caucuses in favor of starting the process in March with legislative district caucuses. That’s some pretty bad journalamism, and some pretty lazy and inept punditry.

But that’s just mechanical stuff. The real outrage comes later in Donnelly’s column, where she makes a baseless jump equating the actions of Ron Paul supporters in 2008 with the actions of Obama supporters the same year.

Meanwhile, at the 2008 Democratic caucuses, I’m told that raucous Obama supporters caused similar havoc for Hillary Clinton supporters, thus eventually enabling a far-left national movement led by a largely unknown candidate with an enticing slogan to defeat a more centrist, experienced candidate. It will be interesting to see if Clark County Democrats achieve a mid-course correction in their caucuses this year.

As you may imagine, that’s just complete bullshit, and a picture-perfect example of conservative projection. Some crazy Ron Paul people hassled her in 2008, so they are the same as Obama people. Geebus.

I was at the Democratic county convention here in 2008, as well as my local precinct caucuses, and Donnelly is flat out uninformed or lying. There were no disruptions on the Democratic side, no havoc and nothing out of the ordinary other than massive numbers of ordinary citizens doing ordinary caucus things. You know, cheering when a chance arises (for all candidates,) being bored, wondering about lunch, buying trinkets, etc.

So while it’s not a surprise that a conservative would tell “projection-lies” about Democrats, the real concern is that The Columbian thinks it’s okay to print such lies, and that it’s okay to give a former GOP chair a weekly local column while offering no alternative local viewpoint.

Frankly, it’s kind of hard to believe that in a county of over 400,000 people they can’t find anyone on the Democratic side to write 700 words of bullshit per week, which is what Donnelly does. Hell, I used to write 700 words of bullshit per hour, before I entered my recent fallow-sanguine period.

We’ve got a big Congressional race down here in WA-03, and until the Democratic Party and other interested allies decide to make The Columbian an issue, we’re fighting with at least one hand tied behind our backs.

There are local folks responding to this crap, and The Columbian will likely print letters and one-time responses, but if The Columbian is going to operate as a small-time Fox Noise outlet, the race in WA-03 is going to be that much tougher. Portland media doesn’t cover us much, and Seattle media just doesn’t reach people here, despite the Internet Tubes. Lots of folks commute to and from Portland, and it leads to a fairly low-information voting populace overall.

A thought I want to get out there is this: just because a bunch of mouth-breathing, Fox-Noise watching morons harass The Columbian on a daily basis does not make The Columbian a liberal outlet. It just means the right yells louder, and has a sympathetic local publisher.

Columbian reporters are not the enemy, of course, because they aren’t writing editorials and columns. But if we want to hold this seat The Columbian and its bizarre editorial arrangements are a huge challenge, frankly nearly as important as which candidate emerges as the nominee.

HA contributors were unusually busy over the weekend, a typically slow time of the week when both posting and traffic generally dips, so here’s a brief summary of the posts you might have missed.

Even business guys befuddled about Baird’s vote
Spiraling healthcare costs is the number one issue for small businesses here and nationwide, which according to Jon, has even U.S. Rep. Brian Baird’s constituents in the business community puzzled over his vote against healthcare reform.

Post-Election Analysis Heresy
In which I make the downright heretical suggestion that, campaign strategery aside, perhaps the results of our recent election indicate that local voters are for the most part satisfied with the performance of our local government, and think both King County and Seattle are headed in the right direction.

The Great Mystery of Afghanistan in 2005-2006
Rather than a long, slow decline into chaos, the situation on the ground in Afghanistan didn’t start to take a sharp turn for the worse until 2005-2006. What changed at that time? Not surprisingly, Lee focuses in on our futilely misguided War on Drugs.

Packing Irony
Wouldn’t it be ironic, I mused, if the guy packing a pistol into the West Seattle Community Center had been shot in the process by another gun-toting civilian? (Because guns make us safer, you know.)

Another Domino Falls
Lee reports that even the stodgy, old American Medical Association has adopted recommendations encouraging the Federal government to reclassify marijuana away from being a Schedule I drug.

Grandstanding Reichert really shows them
Jon reports on U.S. Rep. Dave Reichert’s expanding war on old people, and the congressman’s failed efforts to have the AARP regulated as an insurance company in retribution for their endorsement of healthcare reform.

Times ed board outsources ideas to South Carolina
The anti-union/pro-Republican editors at the Seattle Times absurdly advise organized labor as to what’s good for workers and the general welfare of the Democratic Party. I, of course, make fun of the Times in response.

Bird’s Eye View Contest
Lee’s weekly aerial photo puzzle, which I personally don’t really get, but apparently has a loyal following. Go figure.

Susan Hutchison points to a handful of so-called “Democratic” endorsers to bolster her claims of bipartisanship, but delve a little deeper under the scarlet “D” and an interesting pattern emerges:

Former US Rep. Don Bonker (D-WA)… generally considered to be a conservative Dem, who “opposes abortion as a matter of personal philosophy.”

Former US Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-IN)… generally considered to be a conservative Dem, who was widely thought to have lost a shot at the VP spot on Bill Clinton’s 1992 ticket due to his support of restrictions on abortion rights.

Democratic Lt. Governor Brad Owen… widely considered to be one of the most conservative Democrats in the Washington State Senate during his tenure there, and who not surprisingly, is anti-choice.

Notice the pattern? As for Hutchison’s other two “Democratic” endorsers, former Seattle Mayor Wes Uhlman and State Auditor Brian Sonntag, well, I don’t know where either one stands on reproductive rights, though I’ve emailed Sonntag bluntly asking him the question. But, I do know that Uhlman has a history of endorsing Republicans, while Sonntag, given his penchant for conspiring with Tim Eyman, speaking at teabagger rallies and publicly endorsing conservative Republicans like Hutchison… well… I take personal offense at him continuing to call himself a Democrat.

Let’s be clear, when I vigorously opposed the campaign of Republican Dan Satterberg for King County Prosecutor, I was endlessly frustrated by the impressive list of prominent Democrats who endorsed him… but only because he managed to garner an actual impressive list of Democratic endorsements. By comparison, Hutchison’s claim of bipartisan support is a total sham, consisting of three, long-retired politicians, and two of the most conservative and disloyal Democratic elected officials in the state.

Thanks to the bullshit initiative making county elections officially nonpartisan, Hutchison’s chances aren’t handicapped by being forced to put an “R” next to her name, but that doesn’t make her any less of a conservative Republican. And any cooperation she gets from our local media in perpetrating this lie would be a disservice to King County voters.

UPDATE:
According to his 2008 KC Dems candidate questionnaire, Sonntag says he’s pro-choice. But he’s sure as hell wrong about Hutchison.

It should also be noted, by the way, that of Hutchison’s five Democratic endorsers, only Uhlman is a native or resident of King County.

Good staff don’t let candidates look this stupid:

There may be a reason why Seattle mayoral candidate James Donaldson, is one of the seven dwarves in the race against Mayor Greg Nickels.

This, a tweet from White Center’s Full Tilt Ice Cream:

James Donaldson came to WC yesterday, askin folks to vote for him. I asked him if he knew that we were not in Seattle. He looked confused.

Political advice from the Blathering One: the city limits, man, the city limits!

You know, some of the most important decisions an executive makes involve hiring the folks who work under him. So honestly, who would you rather have running the show as Deputy Mayor… Tim Ceis or Cindi Laws?

The initiative campaign against the new jail, I-100, fell short of its signature goal. I-100 wouldn’t have directly prevented the jail from being built. It would have only forced the city to analyze alternatives, examine the racial disparity in the prison population, and then put the question up for a vote. In the failure, however, there appears to be one potential bright spot [emphasis mine]:

The deadline for turning in the signatures is Thursday and theoretically the campaign could ask for a 20-day extension, said campaign manager Natalie Novak.

However, Novak said the campaign raised an issue “no one really knew about before.” Additionally, the county has said it would allow cities to bring people to the jail for misdemeanors beyond 2012. The county had said the cities had to stop before 2012, setting off the debate over building a jail.

I’m not entirely sure what that means for the overall jail debate now. If anyone has more specifics, please feel free to share in the comments or email me directly. I still remain puzzled that with our economy in the condition it’s in that we’re considering such a costly infrastructure investment that hardly anyone wants and is not necessary. And despite what many I-100 opponents have insisted, we’re not diverting anywhere near as many people as we should be. This was made abundantly clear in a report from Nina Shapiro at Seattle Weekly back in January [again, emphasis mine]:

While liberal groups have fought for years for more lenient drug policies, our state’s financial woes are helping accomplish what their arguments alone could not. This is true at the county level as well. Faced with a $5 million budget cut to his office, King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg in October started kicking felony cases involving less than three grams of narcotics down to District Court, where they are prosecuted as misdemeanors. He says the move affects two-thirds of his caseload.

Meanwhile, the King County jail is already nearly full, and the county has said it will no longer have room for misdemeanor prisoners from the cities as of 2012. So Seattle and several suburban cities have started planning to build a new multimillion-dollar jail of their own.

There just isn’t any ambiguity about this. When two-thirds of our county prosecutor’s caseload involves people with less than .003 kg of drugs or less, our local court systems are being clogged with low-level drug offenders. If you hear any local politician talking about how we already do a good job of diverting these folks out of the system, they’re lying. We don’t. In fact, we shouldn’t be arresting any of them in the first place, which is what Portugal decided to do in 2001, and it’s been an unquestioned success.

This problem is understood in the most morally bankrupt light when we see the affect that aggressively prosecuting low-level drug offenses has on the African-American community:

While African-Americans are represented in King County average daily jail population by six times their percentage of population, five Seattle public schools that primarily serve African-American communities were closed this year to save the school system a meager $3 million.

Somehow, the city of Seattle had $110 million for a new jail, but couldn’t seem to locate $3 million to save some schools. I think that says everything you need to know about how Seattle’s city leadership views its minority communities.

Right Wing Nut House proprietor Rick Moran writes at American Thinker:

No one is saying that the Democrats are trying to steal the Minnesota senate race between GOP incumbent Norm Coleman and Democratic clown Al Franken – yet

And after citing an article comparing the Minnesota Senatorial election to the Florida 2000 debacle, Moran goes on to suggest that the election is being stolen, but in a slightly different way:

This is shaping up more and more like the transparent way the Washington state governor’s race was stolen by Democrats in 2006 when hundreds of ballots were suddenly “found” in Democratic King County – many of them coming from people (it was later determined) with unverifiable addresses.

Here we see the seeds of the type of propaganda effort, based on twisting of the truth and downright factually incorrect information (what is called, in less polite company, fucking lies), that occurred during the previous Washington state gubernatorial contest.

Interestingly, the the previous bullshit propaganda is cited as “evidence” to bolster the new propaganda efforts. I guess this is what Bush meant by “catapult the propaganda.”

Let’s ignore the first error—the race in question was 2004, not 2006. That’s an honest mistake that any out-of-state Wingnut could make.

The propaganda begins by the suggestion that ballots were “suddenly ‘found,'” in King County, as if nobody had any idea where the ballots came from. The implication, of course, is that they were manufactured after the election and thrown into the mix to change the outcome

There were several batches of “found” ballots in King County. The first batch resulted when elections workers put aside ballots from people whose signatures had not been previously scanned into the computer system. The workers were supposed to check the signatures against the paper records, but they didn’t. This was only discovered because King County Councilman Larry Phillips was one of the victims. A total of 561 absentee ballots were “found” this way.

The other source of found ballots came from the insides of secured voting machines and trays stored in a secure warehouse. There were 723 ~160 of these ballots literally found. But they were valid ballots cast during the election, and the voters who cast them were entitled to have them counted. The Republicans sued to prevent these ballots from being canvassed. The state Supreme Court rejected that idea.

The other implication in Moran’s statement is that, somehow, King County stood out as the source of “found” ballots. There were other counties that also “found” ballots. In fact, King County did not have the highest “error rate” in the state—there were four counties with higher rates. King County did have errors, but only at a rate slightly higher than the background rate for the whole state. King County also had a substantially higher voter load, with the same amount of processing time as other counties, so this is hardly surprising. The Republicans lost the election contest lawsuit in every way—except for the propaganda wars.

The final bit of propaganda in Moran’s statement is an irresponsible falsehood. He states that the “found” ballots in King County had “unverifiable addresses.” Um…no.

I don’t know where this notion came from. Perhaps Moran is confusing the 2004 election contest with a 2005 Republican scandal in which the senior vice president of the King County Republican Party, Lori Sotelo, challenged 1,944 voters days before the election, based on some sloppy attempts to find voter addresses that were not real residences (mailbox outlets or storage facilities). The challenges were potentially perjurious, fradulent, and hugely error prone (only 58 ballots of 1,944 challenges were disqualified). The episode had nothing to do with the contested 2004 election.

In sum…Moran doesn’t know what the fuck he is talking about.

He probably doen’t care…truth and accuracy are not what it is all about. It’s the early stages of a shameless propaganda effort.

Let’s hope the politicians, the political parties, the media, and the bloggers do a better job with fighting Republican bullshit about election-fraud in Minnesota in 2008–2009 than they did with Washington state in 2004–2005.

In 1969, when I was in fifth grade, my parents moved from the West Coast to Columbia, South Carolina. In their infinite wisdom, my parents decided that Columbia’s freshly desegregated public schools were no place for a nice white boy. Instead, they put me in one of the new white-only “Christian” private schools that had sprung up to cater to alarmed white parents.

My first week in class, I made an offhand remark to one of my new classmates that I didn’t understand what the difference was supposed to be between white people and black people — they were all just people. He immediately went to the teacher, who promptly had me stand before the entire class and repeat the comment – not to educate them, but to publicly humiliate me for my profound ignorance concerning the inferiority of n****rs.

We’re about to elect an African-American to become President of the United States.

In 1982, my new wife and I moved to Houston, Texas, where she wanted to go to graduate school. I was white, and she was not, a marital arrangement that until fairly recently had not been legal in Texas (or most other Southern states). In Houston, fourth largest city in the country, there were (and probably still are) places that would not serve us.

We’re about to elect an African-American to become President of the United States.

Seattle is different. But not very. In the late ’90s there was a rash of killings of unarmed black men by SPD, and the African-American community was in an uproar. The NAACP, Urban League, and other black moderates joined in the call for meaningful civilian review of police actions. I wrote columns for Seattle Weekly echoing that call. The explicitly racist letters that came in response should not have been surprising.

We’re about to elect an African-American to become President of the United States.

My memories are not remarkable; they’re snapshots of a reality tens of millions of people continue to experience in America each day. A colorblind society would be great. We’re not there yet. Like most of my African-American friends, I have a hard time believing this is happening; but I’m sure glad it is. Whatever one thinks of Obama’s policies — and as I noted yesterday, I’m not thrilled by them — this election will go a long way toward reestablishing America’s moral credibility in the eyes of the world. Race does matter, here and elsewhere. So does class. And Obama is correct to note that his inspiring, improbable story is only possible in America.

Unlike 2000 or 2004, this year I’m proud of the American electorate — and it has nothing to do with ideology.

Tonight, regardless of what’s going on in the other races you care about, take a moment to witness history. This is an election that will be taught in civics textbooks for a long, long time.

Remember early on in the campaign, when white pundits were fretting that Obama might not be “black enough” to attract the black vote? Non-white pundits knew better. Beyond being secure in the knowledge that Obama’s white opponents would make damned sure everyone was aware that Obama was The Other (as John McCain and Sarah Palin have predictably done), they also knew that if he got this far, his African-American support would be near-universal. Not because of his policies or the tactics of the McCains of the world, or even solidarity with Obama’s skin color, so much as the future possibilities for those voters’ children, and their skin color.

In the comment thread of another blog a couple of weeks ago, a commenter offered what I think captures the phenomenon of Obama’s (probable) triumph nicely:

Rosa sat, so Martin could march.
Martin marched, so Barack could run.
Barack ran, so our children could fly.

There are rumors that Rob McKenna is a Podcasting Liberally aficionado. Go figure!

The rumors have come to light following a smear campaign against Democratic Secretary of State candidate Jason Osgood, who is running against Sam Reed. The tale is long and somewhat convoluted, but I have an unimpeachable source for the rumor: me. And the source of the smear campaign? Well…as the producer of Podcasting Liberally that rumor traces it back to…me. Or, stated more concisely, the smear originated from Rob McKenna’s misunderstanding of a podcast I produced, which McKenna is rumored (by me) to regularly enjoy.

Allow me to explain.

Last Friday, Washblog front-paged a diary by jeffuppy that traces the origins of the smear, so we begin our rumor/smear adventure last Wednesday at, of all places, a meeting of the 34th District Democrats:

Part of the night’s agenda included approval of proposals to donate money to Democratic candidates for statewide office.

…I stood and introduced a motion to contribute to Democratic Secretary of State candidate Jason Osgood. I expected little or no opposition….However, to my surprise, King County Council Member Dow Constantine stood to speak in opposition. Constantine was clearly upset with Osgood, and proceeded to trash him before the group. His anger was focused on public statements he claimed Osgood has recently been making to the effect that King County uses bar-codes on ballots which allow votes to be tracked back to voters. King County uses no such system….
[…]

…Jason Osgood has never said any of the things about King County ballots that he was accused of saying. In fact, Osgood has consistently and publicly said the exact opposite – that King County does not use bar-codes and that this is a good thing.

The donation motion did not pass, likely on account of the information rumor that Constantine had been so helpful in sharing spreading.

Afterward Jeffuppy asked Constantine about the rumor, and he produced an email to the King County Council from Sherril Huff, the King County Director of Elections:

…misinformation has been shared at local public meetings as well as editorial boards regarding how timing marks on ballots are used in King County. Unfortunately a candidate running for office publicly misstated that King County ballots can be traced back to the voter using a bar code on the ballot.

Not fully satisfied by this email that was all spiced-up in bureaucrateese, Jeffuppy asked Huff for a plain-language translation including when and where she had heard Osgood make these statements. But she had not actually heard the statements. Rather, Nick Handy, State Director of Elections (an office that under the Secretary of State’s office), had shared this information with her.

So Jeffuppy asked Handy the same “when and where” question. Remarkably, Handy didn’t have firsthand knowledge either.

He had simply been told about them, he said, by Attorney General Rob McKenna and by Eastside State Representative Fred Jarret. They had in turn been told about them by unnamed citizens.

That adds two more generations to the rumor.

Chad Shue writing at the Seattle Examiner summarizes the chain rumor thusly:

So there you have it. Based on unchecked statements by “unnamed citizens” allegedly passed on by Republican office holders to the chief deputy of the incumbent Republican candidate for the office that oversees state elections, the Director of Elections for King County has (hopefully unwittingly) aided in the effort to undermine the credibility of the Democratic candidate for that office.

Or, more succinctly: it was a “he said that she said that he said that they said that people said that Jason Osgood said…” chain rumor.

Last June 10th, just as his campaign was starting up, we had had Jason Osgood on the weekly Podcasting Liberally panel. If he was going to make a misstatement on the record, this early appearance would be the place. I’ve pulled out the relevant segment where Jason discusses King County and the bar code controversy (which is really about San Juan county):

[audio:http://horsesass.org/wp-content/uploads/secretballot2.mp3]

Osgood does mention King and San Juan counties in the same breath. I can see how someone might mistakenly think that Jason was flagging King county as one of the problem counties…particularly, if that someone is a closeted Podcasting Liberally buff secretly listening to the podcast in the privacy of men’s room stall in one ear while maintaining vigilance with the other ear. (As an aside, the “men’s room” stuff isn’t officially part of the rumor…I just threw that in as a hypothetical.)

Such an interpretation of Osgood’s words would be mistaken, as is clear from the transcript:

You know, I have studied King County the most, and Washington to a lesser extent. And nationally, I’m not very interested in Florida, New Mexico. I know that there are problems, but we are looking at King County. We’re looking a San Juan county and the issues that we’re facing here.

We have a constitutional right to a secret ballot. That means no one can determine how we vote—should not be able to determine—not possible. And in San Juan county and other counties using the same system, they have a unique bar code that is linked to your voter ID which is tracked—your mail ballot is tracked—all the way through to tabulation.

Jason mentions King county in passing but only before he raises the secret ballot issue, after which he only mentions San Juan county.

As long as politicians blissfully pass along unverified, fifth-generation rumors that tangibly cost a candidate money and support, I’d like to get in on the game. So, based on a simple plausibility argument (i.e. with no violations of the laws of physics), I offer a new rumor that sheds shocking new light on the fifth generation rumor about Osgood. My rumor is that Rob McKenna is a huge fan of Podcasting Liberally. That explains everything, because he obviously listened to our podcast, and simply misunderstood what Osgood was saying. McKenna started the Osgood rumor chain by passing his misunderstanding on to Handy and Huff.

Yeah, sure…I’ve got no real proof that Rob McKenna really enjoys the podcast—perhaps that is a stretch. By the standards of our esteemed politicians, however, spreading a rumor that McKenna enjoys the podcast is pretty tame stuff. And let me say, it is a real honor to have Rob as a fan of the podcast…I appreciate the patronage, even if it occasionally catalyzes a false rumor.

Oh…and Rob McKenna is a Muslim.

Goldy was joined in political punditry by a diverse panel: Seattle P-I columnist Joel Connelly, initiative specialist Laura McClintock of McClintock Consulting, the newest Seattle Weekly online contributor (and former Sound Politics front-pager) Don Ward, and Eat the State, KEXP and occasional HorsesAss contributor Geov Parrish.

The conversation begins with a Netroots Nation debriefing. Goldy observes that Darcy Burner was welcomed to Austin as a veritable rock star. Do voters in the eighth notice? Should they? The topic turns to Tim Eyman, his so-called anti-congestion initiative, and the media’s failures to scrutinize his initiatives and claims.

The panel then takes a bite out of Attorney General Rob McKenna. Are his PSAs being used as a campaign tool in violation of the law? Are the words followed up by actions? The podcast closes with a round of speculations about vice presidential running mates.

The show is 52:01, and is available here as an MP3:

[audio:http://www.podcastingliberally.com/podcasts/podcasting_liberally_july_22_2008.mp3]

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

I don’t mean to sound paranoid or anything, but for some odd reason, it appears the BIAW’s Tom McCabe and Erin Shannon don’t like me very much. Was it something I said?

[audio:http://horsesass.org/wp-content/uploads/goldy2.mp3]

Shannon calls me a “profane, ranting, raving lunatic”… and this from the woman who after the 2004 election gleefully told the Seattle Weekly:

“It was a big ‘Fuck you!’ to all the liberals out there. […] We are kicking their ass.”

Um… pot, meet kettle. (Really. Let’s meet up sometime Erin. I’ve always had a thing for trash-talking Irish women. Gimme a call.)

The whole clip is a hoot, with both Shannon and McCabe alternating between abusing me for my inflated sense of self-importance (apparently I’m one of those pathetic guys who “actually thinks he can make a difference and accomplish things” ) and repeatedly bemoaning the extraordinary influence they apparently believe I wield with the local press. Give a listen to this exchange:

Shannon: Yeah, and so you’re so important Mr. Goldstein, that we’d even waste our time. Here’s a guy who thinks that he’s so important and so influential that you’d actually take the time to go beat the you know what out of him with a baseball bat?

McCabe: That’s why I don’t want to talk about him any more.

Shannon: He’s ridiculous.

McCabe: But he is… he is influential in getting the Seattle PI to publish editorials, Erin, we just mentioned that.

So which is it? Am I “ridiculous” or “influential”? Both? (And Erin, as long as you’re wasting time telling me I’m not worth wasting your time, why not waste time together with me over a couple drinks? I understand a fondness for bars is one thing we both have in common.)

And as for that “baseball bat” thing? According to McCabe…

McCabe: Mr. Goldstein says that he believes that one day I’m going to beat him up with a baseball bat, and maybe I might even kill him. This is what he says about me, Tom McCabe. Very odd, odd thing.

Shannon: Yeah, and so you’re so important Mr. Goldstein, that we’d even waste our time.

Oh. So I guess, in context, Shannon was saying that I’m not important enough to even waste their time… beating me to death with a baseball bat. Not that such beatings are entirely out of the question, I’m just not worth the effort. Charming. Perhaps drinks wouldn’t be such a good idea after all.

In fact, I never said I believed McCabe was going to beat me with a baseball bat, or any other blunt object. Here is the quote to which he refers with the same sort of reverence for accuracy that he usual reserves for Nazi historiography:

And believe you me, the BIAW’s violent rhetoric is intended as a threat, and they fully understand the potential consequences of pumping up the anger. One of these days somebody like me is going to get the shit beaten out them by somebody like them — they’ll be waiting for me late at night with baseball bats, or worse — and when that happens our media elite, who allowed the BIAW’s dangerous rhetoric to go unridiculed, unchallenged and unchecked for so long, will be just as culpable as batshit crazy bastards like Tom McCabe and Mark Musser.

“Somebody like me is going to get the shit beaten out of them by somebody like them…” I never wrote that I believed that McCabe would attack me; I was merely repeating my oft stated belief that violent rhetoric eventually breeds violent actions, and that when such violence occurs, the instigators are as culpable as the violators. And if you take issue with that premise, go tell it to Charles Goldmark and Alan Berg.

But then you can’t really expect McCabe to even understand my words let alone accurately represent them, when he can’t even be bothered to learn my blog’s proper domain name, and bizarrely claims that HA is a blog “devoted to pummeling BIAW.” Talk about an inflated sense of self-importance, only 2.5% of my posts — 106 out of 4203 — even mention BIAW, compared to, say, 295 that reference Tim Eyman or 384 that mention Dino Rossi. Perhaps McCabe was thinking of HorsesAss.com, a site I’m guessing he’s much more familiar with?

Why is one always left with the sense of half a loaf from local reporting? Stories will go on for pages, even for days, without ever connecting the dots or providing a true context. They may beg the Big Picture — the overriding trend or practice that might actually make us care; instead we get the Little Picture. Crackers and cheese instead of the prime rib.

On The Times side, today’s banner is about a humble Sammamish vendor who makes fire-resistant t-shirts for the military. Seeking to expand his business from the Army to the Marines, the guy ran into InSport, a big corporation whose megadollars lobbied an “earmark” for t-shirt contracts — can you believe this — without a bidding process. Welcome to our post-Halliburton, no-bid-contract world…although the story doesn’t actually go all Big Picture like that. What we have instead is the reliance on polite talk for corrupt practices: bribes and kickbacks become earmarks and sole-source contracts. I for one would be interested in this guy’s suggestion about what to do, and how he might vote in 2008. Make me care…heck, make him care about the story.

Of course, even relatively tame investigations like this won’t happen under media consolidation, which is set to go forward today despite near-universal opposition at public hearings, in congressional hearings and from anyone with half a brain. In the hmmm dept., the story got A1 treatment from The Times and nary a Top 10 mention from the P-I. For today’s Reader Quiz and the chance to win a trip on the purple streetcar, can you tell me which newspaper is locally owned?

The P-I does, however, wring its hands over the closing of the Crocodile, days after anyone who cares knew about it (or suspected its imminency), the taxonomy of the scoop (I think it was The Weekly this time) somehow escaping the pit-bullish reportorial skills of the newspaper staff: “Word of the closure spread like wildfire Monday through the city’s music blogs…” Oh come on. I told my daughter about this last Thursday. And no mention of the Big Picture here either: The Showbox gets sold, the Croc shuts down. Other than being small crowded venues for up and coming bands but sitting on prime real estate prized by greedy developers, they have nothing in common.

The Times also takes a stab at relevancy with an update on the let-nature-run-its-course theory of disaster management. Dot not connected: Floods are hardly a “natural” occurrence, as The Times itself showed Sunday with the Chehalis debacle. “Flood risk is only going to get worse, scientists say. That’s because of two converging trends: climate change and development…” How about the trends of “insatiable greed” and “self-destructive stupidity”? Too Big Picture…

Finally, we bring you a new feature, inspired by Goldy’s and my debate yesterday, the Local Headline That Ran Elsewhere. Today’s donor is The New York Times, whose lead Business Day coverage, The Price of Growing Fuel, features a Portland brewery owner looking really disgusted at the skyrocketing price of barley. Also pinched by a hop shortage, some breweries are even going out of business, leaving us HAs with lamentably fewer places to cry in our beer. With that, we provide a radio segue only a true aural rebel like Goldy would ever use, to our weekly reminder for Drinking Liberally…Darryl, take it away!!!

Scanning dozens of headlines as we do here daily so that you don’t have to, I’m struck by how vacant the once-distinguished calling of headline-writing has become. I scan my news with an RSS reader, which displays articles by header only in a long scrolling queue, all in the same typeface, with no content-based prioritization, graphic or otherwise. On this kind of laundry list, a great headline will really jump out. With an occasional exception, though, the art seems to have died — somewhat curiously, since the strictures of font size, column width and number of lines no longer constrain creativity.

Anyway, in today’s sampling we have zingers like Lewis County farmers moving forward after floods, Better bus service coming to South Lake Union, and Compromise reached on South Lake Union plan, none of which make you want to even click, let alone go thumbing through inky pages of Christmas ads. It’s not like the stories themselves demand a dull headline. That second one in particular seems pregnant with possibilities, although as Will noted we may have already OD’d on SLUT. Still, one yearns for even a hint of the wit present in “Headless Body in Topless Bar,” or “Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29,” or the one above the lonelyhearts columnist’s advisory that size doesn’t really matter: “Sum of Man Is Greater than his Parts.”

Some earnest stabs at pithiness sprinkle today’s roundup: Ho-ho-no: McDermott votes against Christmas gets a B (grading on the curve here), and A green light for rules on emission output (greenhouse gases, get it?) could’ve been a lot better. But here’s the one that really missed: To the tune of ‘Love Train,’ streetcar goes on a roll. Even Will would acknowledge an opportunity lost.

Anyway, you’ve probably gathered by now that pickings are indeed slim in the meaningful news this a.m. Most of today’s stories are simply revisitations of last week this same time. The P-I has a big hand-waver with the revelation that some roundball fans here actually could buy the Sonics (aren’t they gone yet?). And it’s true, Steve Ballmer loves basketball, to the point he at one time at least kept a framed “So glad to have met you” letter from Isiah Thomas hanging in his office. Of course, if you follow the orange rubber globe you also know that Ballmer might not be eager to walk in Thomas’ sneakers these days. So we leave you with this sodden thought: Seattle business groups apparently are pushing the city to lower taxes, arguing that Seattle is “less economically competitive.” Hey wait a minute. My taxes buy you a new purple trolley and this is the thanks I get? I’m moving to Portland!

Postscript: How did I miss this one?

No doubt the anti-rail folks were disappointed to read the report issued today summarizing the independent performance audit of Sound Transit… though that won’t stop them (or bumper sticker writers like Rick Anderson) from attempting to turn an overwhelmingly positive audit into a PR disaster.

Writing at the Daily Weekly (does anybody actually read the Weekly’s blogs if real bloggers like me don’t link to them?) Anderson characterizes the report as “stinging,” before cutting and pasting a list of bullet points under the headline “New Audit: ST Wasted $5 Mil“. By comparison, Mike Lindblom of the Times (bless their hearts) instantly cuts through the crap:

Though significant, that’s a fraction of the project’s overall budget of $2.4 billion, and Sound Transit maintains the losses are actually lower.

Sound Transit may have “wasted” as much as 0.2% of its budget… not exactly the “Big Dig” scenario critics keep warning about. To put that $5 million in perspective, one of the auditor’s primary recommendations is, surprise, annual performance audits — at a YOE cost of nearly $50 million over 50 years! ($500,000 per audit, 2.5% inflation.) And for some reason, Anderson fails to include in his bullet points the approximately $6.5 million the audit says Sound Transit saved during preliminary ST2 design through its “value engineering studies.” Huh.

Whatever. Here is the audit’s actual conclusion, as summarized at the top of the report:

Sound Transit has faced, and continues to face, challenges in delivering capital construction contracts for the Link Light Rail Project. Through the course of initially planning, designing, and building the system, the agency experienced delays and cost overruns.

Before 2002, the agency experienced a lack of expertise, no established practices or procedures relating to ROW acquisition, environmental, or construction management, and limited management oversight. Gaps in best practice tools and procedures created variability in early project delivery success and resulted in project cost and schedule impacts. The agency essentially started as an inefficient and ineffective organization. As a result, the initial light rail project communicated to voters in 1996 ultimately was modified. Its original length, Central Link, 19.7 miles (19 stations) at $1.7 billon (1995 dollars) with an expected completion date of 2006 became the following:

Segment (Expected Completion)	Miles	Stations	Cost
Initial Segment and Airport Link (2009)	15.6	13	$2.6 billion (Y.O.E.)
University Link (2016)	3.2	2	$1.7 billion (Y.O.E.)

However, in the last five years, Sound Transit has responded to its challenges through improvements in construction planning and management processes and implementation of “best practices.” Indications of diligent review of proposed change orders by Sound Transit Project Controls were also identified. From its inception in 1996, the agency has gradually developed management techniques and construction project controls and procedures.

Sound Transit has improved its structure to manage projects and has standardized guidelines on cost estimating, change and cost management, project management, and risk assessments. Sound Transit has also developed procedures for addressing emerging lessons learned.

Although Sound Transit has made great strides in improving its project delivery practices, opportunities exist that will contribute towards its present culture of continuous improvement.

That’s the unedited summary of the auditor’s conclusion, and it is far from the stinging rebuke Anderson makes it out to be. Of course the report highlights things Sound Transit could do better. That’s the purpose of a performance audit: to help an agency improve its performance. But rather than merely focusing on the agency’s shortcomings, the report actually documents a remarkable turnaround, in which Sound Transit overcame its early management woes to grow into a mature and well-run organization that is largely delivering projects on budget and on time. That’s also the conclusion of state Treasurer Mike Murphy, who in enthusiastically endorsing Proposition 1 yesterday, praised Sound Transit’s cost and revenue projections as conservative, while criticizing opponents’ numbers as “bogus.”

Opponents keep reaching back a decade or more to when Sound Transit, then a start-up agency, initially over-promised the Central Link light rail, but they intentionally ignore the progress that’s been made since then. Still, voters are largely getting the same 19 miles of rail first promised (though with fewer stations, and over a longer construction period,) and without raising any additional taxes. Opponents would like this election to be about Sound Transit’s management problems in the late 1990’s, but Murphy — whose condemnation of the Seattle Monorail’s financing package played a huge role in killing the project — succinctly sums up the real issue facing voters:

“Do you want something to happen or not? If you do, vote yes,” he said. “If you don’t, vote no.”

Indeed, if there is a lesson to be learned from this performance audit, and the parallel histories of both Sound Transit and the Seattle Monorail Project, it is the inherent danger of starting large transportation agencies from scratch… which ironically, is exactly what we’ll eventually be forced to do should voters reject Proposition 1. The pro-rail critics of the roads and transit package have this pie-eyed idea that we can just come back next year or the year after that with a transit-only package, but they ignore two basic realities: a) polls show that neither roads nor transit would pass on their own, and b) there’s no guarantee Sound Transit will even be allowed to bring a package before voters.

There are many in the Legislature and the pro-roads camp who are just itching for Proposition 1 to fail, so that they have an excuse to finally pass “governance reform,” implementing a multi-county, multi-modal transportation agency intended to dilute the influence of pro-rail Seattle voters, and essentially dismantle Sound Transit as an independent agency. Such a “reform,” whatever its merits, would be so disruptive, and introduce so many delays into any effort to pass and implement a project even remotely based on ST2, that Sound Transit would surely lose the bulk of the management and engineering infrastructure it has so painfully constructed over the past five years, and the expertise that goes with it. We would, in essence, be starting from scratch, ignoring yet another one of the audit’s primary conclusions:

Strong management and mature agency skills are not created overnight. It took five years from start-up to the time Sound Transit had its policies, its systems and its management practices fully in place. The Puget Sound region should be careful to preserve and nurture this knowledge base and not to assume that every new program needs a new agency to manage it.

No doubt Proposition 1 is filled with compromises, and I welcome a debate on its costs vs. benefits. But the measure’s opponents reveal themselves to be fundamentally lazy and dishonest in their persistent efforts to slander Sound Transit itself as corrupt and incompetent.

Given the timing, I had grave doubts that this performance audit would be fair and impartial, but I see nothing in this report to suggest that Sound Transit’s management is not dedicated to constantly improving its internal processes, that its ridership, revenue and cost projections should be held suspect, or that the agency itself is not positioned to deliver ST2 largely as promised. Large capital projects are inherently risky, and in that context the report concludes:

The use of the aforementioned “best practices” in conjunction with input from technical and subject matter experts and FTA oversight demonstrate that Sound Transit’s construction planning and management systems are maturing. This should be understood in the context of the complex and high risk contracts that Sound Transit is delivering, where challenges and risks will always be present. Focus, innovation, and due diligence will always be required to avoid surprises on such projects.

A “stinging performance audit”… my ass.

The good news for Republican King County Councilmember Jane Hague is that she managed to get her drunk-driving hearing postponed until after the November election, avoiding in the weeks leading up to the vote, the potential embarrassment of pleading guilty to, you know, drunk driving. The bad news for Hague is that in doing so, she’s only managed to generate a whole new controversy to keep the bad headlines coming.

When the going gets weird, well, King County Council Democratic candidate Richard Pope keeps it moving right along. He has succeeded in at least temporarily removing the judge who yesterday ruled that Pope’s Republican opponent Jane Hague could delay arguments in her drunk-driving trial until after the November election, Seattle Weekly has learned.

King County District Court Presiding Judge Barbara Linde said this afternoon she has already notified pro tem judge Richard Llewelyn Jones of his removal for failing to report his own criminal background.

The removal could also lead to nullification of Jones’ ruling to delay arguments over Hague’s so-far successful attempt to have blood-alcohol results thrown out. “I’ll leave it up to the two sides to decide” whether the delay stands, Linde says, indicating Hague and prosecutors could end up in court again before the election after all.

If Pope loses (and notice I don’t say “when”,) the two parties should start a bidding war to see who can hire him to do opposition research on the other side. Or, they should have him killed. Man, he’s good.

Over at the Seattle Weekly (yeah, the Weekly,) Aimee Curl has been digging through recent PDC filings, and they don’t look so good for state House Republicans. Sixteen months before the next election, the House Dems’ official campaign committee already has over $450,000 in the bank, compared to the Republicans’ measly $40,621. Wow.

The organizing committees are the party machines that give campaign funds directly to candidates. “It’s amazing how big the disparity has become,” marvels former state Republican Party Chairman Chris Vance. […] Vance credits this year’s Democrat cash explosion in part to House Speaker Frank Chopp’s machine. “In terms of Olympia that’s the shadow that looms over everything,” he says, adding that Republican challengers are as good as on their own in 2008.

“The financial advantage is so massive it will put the Republicans completely on the defensive,” Vance says. “The Democrats can force the Republicans to have to worry about their incumbents. Now you have to take whatever money you’ve got and defend them and you’ve got no other money to help challengers.”

Progressives like me sometimes question Chopp’s willingness to use his near-super majority, but we have no qualms about his ability to build and maintain it. Folks smarter than me about these things tell me that House and Senate Dems have stretched the limits of attainable majorities given current electoral realities, but I wouldn’t expect a GOP comeback in 2008.

Still, I’m not entirely comfortable with Chopp’s incrementalist approach, and can’t help but wonder if he took away the wrong lesson from the Republican landslide of 1994. Conventional wisdom asserts that voters punished state Dems for overreaching during the previous session, and it is hard to argue that this didn’t play some role, at least in the rhetoric of the 1994 campaign season. But I think that the important lesson to learn from the “Republican Revolution” of 1994 — and the Big Blue Wave of 2006 — is that electoral politics can shift dramatically, seemingly overnight, and sometimes for reasons apparently beyond your control.

If Chopp thinks Dems can sustain a working majority indefinitely, he’s deluding himself. And even if he does maintain control of the House, that’s no guarantee that the Senate or the Governor’s mansion won’t suddenly fall into GOP hands. Sure, there’s no compelling reason to toss out Gov. Gregoire in 2008, but in this notoriously fickle and ticket-splitting state, voters don’t need one. The Dems are always just one bad campaign away from finding themselves mired in gridlock… or worse.

I suppose one can imagine a rosier political scenario than the one currently facing state Dems. But one would be foolish to expect it.