Goldy

A headline from today’s NY Post:  “Barack Obama doesn’t fear the enraged, impotent Netroots.”

Yeah, well, whatever.

If that’s the sort of self-soothing that makes the old media and political establishment feel better about their own declining fortunes, they’re free to hide their heads in that particular hole, but personally, I don’t feel all that enraged or impotent.  In fact, I’m still a bit amazed at how far we have come in such a short amount of time… and daunted by how far we have yet to go.

This movement we’re part of will take a decade or two to reach full fruition, and we are a lot more patient and pragmatic than most outside observers give us credit for.

I hate to hit on the same editorial twice, but I’m just curious… has the Seattle Times ever editorialized their concerns over Microsoft’s operating system dominance, which peaked at 98% of the market?  And if Google were a local company, would they be concerned over its dominance of online advertising now?

Hmm….

And you wonder why the Seattle Times is dying?

Google is getting rich packaging content owned by magazines and newspapers and not paying for it. At some point, Google should have to pay.

Yeah, that’s right, Frank… it’s all Google’s fault. Your paper’s declining fortunes have nothing to do with your own managment decisions and your inability to adequately respond to a changing marketplace.  So let’s get Congress to pass a law forcing Google to prop up your business by paying a royalty for the privilege of driving you traffic.  And while you’re at it, you better charge me a royalty too, since we parasitic bloggers do nothing but freeload off your content.

The fact is, Google isn’t getting rich linking to content, it’s getting rich selling ads.  And as long as the Times keeps pointing fingers instead of focusing on creating a more compelling product, they’ll continue to lose readers and advertisers.

Looking for the silver lining in our nation’s worsening unemployment numbers?

Citing a decline in donations caused by the slowing economy, Focus on the Family, the Christian advocacy charity in Colorado Springs, has eliminated 202 staff positions — 149 of them filled, 53 that were already vacant.

On the downside, this surely means tough times ahead for Colorado Springs’ burgeoning meth-dealing male hooker industry.

Last night at the 46th Legislative District Democrats monthly meeting, elections activist Jason Osgood announced his intention to run for King County Elections Director… which really didn’t come as much of a surprise considering Jason told me as much Tuesday night at Drinking Liberally.

Hmm.

I like Jason, and I appreciate his activism (if at times I think his focus is misplaced), so I sure hope he hasn’t conflated the 1.2 million votes he received in his recent run for Secretary of State into some sort of base of support.  Sure, Jason ended up pulling in about 41.5% of the vote while barely spending a dime—but that’s still only a few percent of voters greater than those who would pretty much vote for anybody with a “D” next to their name, and not much better than then-Republican Richard Pope, who in the 2000 Attorney General’s race garnered more than 38% of the vote against popular Democratic incumbent Christine Gregoire.  Indeed, Richard actually won 14 of 39 counties, while Jason barely eked out a victory in just tiny San Juan.

Still, if this were a normal election, I’d urge Jason to pursue his bliss, as he’ll certainly add some important issues to the debate.  Unfortunately, it’s not a normal election, and as I told him privately Tuesday night, I hope he’s prepared to bow out if support coalesces around a qualified candidate.

See, the Elections Director will be chosen in a February special election, with no primary, top-two or otherwise, to thin out the field.  And while the office is officially nonpartisan, we all know that true nonpartisanship is a fiction that lives only in the minds of editorialists and idiots.

From all accounts, Republican wingnut State Senator Pam Roach intends to throw her hat in the ring as the culmination of her decades long quest to earn a six figure salary from the government she loves to cut.  And given a crowded field of Democrats on the other side, she very well could win.

This would be a disaster.

A number of other names are being bandied about, but if we want this to be a fair fight they’re going to have to agree to agree to winnow themselves down to one.  The name that intrigues me most thus far is Port Commissioner Lloyd Hara, an uninspiring politician, but an auditor by trade, who would arguably bring the appropriate skill set and temperament to the office.  Despite his best efforts to show up at the right events, Hara doesn’t strike me as particularly progressive or Democratic; in fact, from a partisan perspective, he doesn’t strike me as much of anything.  And isn’t that, combined with competence, exactly what we need from an Elections Director to restore and maintain confidence?

So Jason, good for you for acting on your activism, but if you really care about elections integrity, I’m hoping you’ll step aside if the alternative means handing the election to Roach.

I’ve had some complaints that it’s really not fair to chart the performance of the Dow Jones Industrial Average under George W. Bush compared to other presidents, as the DJIA isn’t all that broad a measure of market performance.  So here’s a chart of the S&P 500… which has done even worse under Bush than the Dow.

FYI, had you invested $100 in an S&P 500 index fund on inauguration day of 2001, it would now be worth less than $46 in inflation adjusted dollars.  So much for the CEO president.

I’m constantly accused by my friends in the traditional media of being way too cynical when it comes to the motives of Republican politicians… you know, like my eye-rolling at Dino Rossi’s alleged civic mindedness in taking his well publicized (and well exploited) minority stake in the Everett Aquasox.  Well here’s a little election day tidbit that totally escaped my attention at the time:

The Everett AquaSox baseball team – the Class A farm team affiliated with the Seattle Mariners – has been sold to 7th Inning Stretch LLP for an undisclosed sum.

The team had been owned by the Carfagna family for the past four years and was sold to the California company headed by majority owner Thomas Volpe. 7th Inning Stretch also owns the Shorebirds, of Delmarva, Md., and the Ports, of Stockton, Calif.

Yup, that’s right… Rossi and his partners waited until Nov. 4 at 5PM—just hours before the polls closed—to announce the sale of the team to out-of-state buyers.  I guess with the election over, he no longer needed the good will or the mailing list his minority stake bought him.

Forgive me for being cynical.

I’m not sure what Bruce Ramsey’s point is?

According to the latest story, the projected deficit in state government finances is $5.1 billion, up from $3.2 billion. The Times said before the election, in our endorsement of Dino Rossi, that the deficit might get to $5 billion by next spring, and we arrive at that figure early, in November.

A progressive blogger accused us of making a deceptive noise about the deficit, which he said did not really exist and was only a projection. Of course, that was before the election, too. Now it’s over, and the big problem is in the lap of Gov. Christine Gregoire and the two houses of the Legislature.

Well, it wasn’t a budget deficit, it was a projected revenue shortfall, and the size of the shortfall really wasn’t the issue.  The next biennium budget will be balanced, one way or the other, regardless of who is governor or which party controls the Legislature.  The issue in the election was always, who do we trust to make the hard choices necessary to balance the budget, consistent with the values of the majority of Washingtonians?

(Hint:  the voters’ answer was Gov. Gregoire.)

As for “deceptive noise,” it certainly was, and still is.  This budget crisis is not the result of overspending; the culprit in Washington, as in every other state in the union, is declining tax revenues.  Gov. Gregoire did not create this shortfall… our crappy national economy did.  And the Times’ efforts to promote Rossi as some sort of punishment or remedy for a revenue shortfall Gregoire didn’t create, was indeed deceptive.

It also serves to distract from the larger issue of Washington’s long-term structural revenue deficit, that when projected through both the good and the bad years, absolutely guarantees that state spending as a percentage of the state economy will steadily and dramatically shrink over the next few decades.

During the final few weeks of the campaign, Rossi and his surrogates relentlessly attacked Gregoire, alleging that she would instate an income tax.  She can’t and she won’t.  But despite its lack of political support, and even though such a dramatic restructuring could not possibly be implemented fast enough to address our current budget crisis, it is past time to start having a serious discussion about how to modernize our state tax system to meet the needs of our 21st Century post-industrial economy.

Our projected, $5 billion shortfall is largely the result of a particularly steep, downward swing in the economic cycle, but given a tax system that year over year taxes an ever shrinking portion of our economy, the long-term deficit will remain, even after the good times return.  Our current tax system is a 75-year-old improvisation, hurriedly constructed in the wake of a controversial court decision that overturned a voter-approved income tax, and it has long since proven itself to be outdated, inadequate and grossly unfair.

Now is the time to start a real discussion about how to modernize our tax structure to meet the needs of our modern economy.  And if the Times is willing to put aside the rhetoric and seriously join this debate, I’ll be more than happy to join them.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed under 8000 today, a five year low, and 24% lower than it stood the day President Bush was inaugurated.  But hey… that’s still better than Herbert Hoover.

Help from above?

The lone survivor of a plane crash that killed seven people in British Columbia is not deeply religious but he must have received help from above to survive against staggering odds, his brother says.

[…] Tom Wilson, 36, walked away from the Sunday morning crash that killed seven others, including the pilot and six of his co-workers. The Pacific Coastal Airlines plane, a Grumman Goose amphibious aircraft, went down on Thormanby Island, off the British Columbia coast north of Vancouver.

Dr. John Reid was at a loss to explain how the man could not only survive, but suffer only burns to his face, hands and right thigh. There were no broken bones or internal injuries.

[…]  “There’s no way he could have went through that and come down without some sort of help,” Michael Wilson told a news conference Tuesday at Vancouver General Hospital.

Huh.  So if Wilson survived the crash thanks to divine intervention, it begs the question:  what did the other seven do to so piss off God?

Republican incumbent Commissioner of Public Lands Doug Sutherland has finally conceded the race to Democratic challenger Peter Goldmark.

In a phone call to The Daily World this morning, Sutherland said he was disappointed with the loss, which he blamed on the voters of King County.

“At this juncture, the people of King County have spoken,” Sutherland said. “As a rule of thumb for Republicans, you do well in the rest of the state and do at least 40 percent in King County and you can win. It’s been that way for the last couple of decades and it’s just getting worse.”

Yeah, well, it’s an odd thing about America, but we tend to apportion votes by the person rather than the square mile, and, well, King County is where the largest chunk of the people live.  In fact, while Goldmark only won five of 39 counties, those five counties still account for about 45% of the electorate, so it wasn’t nearly as narrow a win as Sutherland bitterly makes it out to be.

Still, to Sutherland’s credit, he did concede only two weeks after the election, which is about three years, eleven and a half months quicker than Dino Rossi.

So… when are folks going to start heaping the ridicule on Michael Dunmire that he so richly deserves?

In 2008, Dunmire personally contributed $285,000 to I-985, plus another $100,000 to Tim Eyman’s personal compensation fund, and in return bought himself an initiative that lost by a better than 60-40 margin, going down to defeat in all 39 counties.  And that’s on top of the $530,000 he paid Eyman in 2007.

Any idiot could get an initiative onto the ballot given a half million dollars to buy the signatures, and over the past few years it’s been Dunmire’s millions that have kept Eyman’s name in the headlines.  So doesn’t Dunmire deserve the same sort of scrutiny?

I mean, really… I-985 was perhaps the stupidest, most incoherent and ill conceived Eyman initiative yet (and that’s a pretty high bar), so doesn’t Dunmire deserve a little bit of the credit for personally financing this train wreck?  Or do really rich people retain unquestioned credibility regardless of how incredibly stupid they act?

I was listening to an NPR report on the recently convicted Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, who appears to be headed toward a narrow defeat against Democratic challenger Mark Begich, and the question arose:  “What’s next for Ted Stevens?”

Well, considering today is Stevens’ 85th birthday, I’m guessing death, political and otherwise.  In fact, even had he won reelection—and not been convicted of multiple felonies—the Social Security Administration’s actuarial tables suggest that Stevens would have been unlikely to have survived the coming term.

By the way, the latest batch of ballots have widened Begich’s lead to 2374.  Happy birthday, Ted.

I haven’t written much about last week’s “stakeholder meeting” on Internet lobbying, because I came away confident that the PDC had listened to our concerns, and is unlikely to make the mistake of attempting to regulate the political blogosphere.  In fact, my hope is that in any new rule making, the PDC actually clarifies its current stance by explicitly exempting from reporting requirements bloggers like me.

The PDC’s current media exemption reads as follows:

“Persons who are working members of the print or broadcast media preparing news reports, feature articles or editorial comment.”

Obviously, both times and technology have changed to the point where this definition needs to be expanded to included “print, broadcast or electronic media,” and I doubt there would be any opposition to such a change.  But there is also a need for the PDC to clarify what they mean by “working members,” and I would hope that they would construe this term as liberally as possible, for to do otherwise would create an untenable and unfair legal disparity between traditional and new media.

For example, consider my dual role as both an independent blogger and a paid talk radio host.  Does it make any sense that my direct advocacy in one medium would be exempt from PDC reporting requirements while the same advocacy in the other might result in a reporting violation and a fine?  No, of course not.  But unless the PDC explicitly grants bloggers a media exemption, our status will eventually be challenged via a complaint, or before the courts.

The PDC can avoid this hassle and expense for all parties, by proactively expanding the old media exemption to fit the new media reality.  And my hope is that this is exactly what they will do.

I wonder if the Bush administration and their Republican allies in Congress would be more supportive of bailing out the US auto industry, if it wasn’t such a union stronghold?  Hmm…