Goldy

Congratulations to the Seattle Times editorial board for finally surprising me with an endorsement, choosing Republican Marcia McCraw for lieutenant governor over the incumbent pseudo-Democrat Brad Owen.

But, uh-oh…

Republican Marcia McCraw has a complicated personal story that gives us pause, but she represents an opportunity for an infusion of new ideas and energy.

Now that’s a red flag if I ever saw one… reminiscent of when Joni Balter obliquely attributed David Iron’s mother’s refusal to vote for her own son to a “different family matter,” but refused to explain any further.  Yeah, the Times admits, McCraw has “a complicated personal story,” but don’t you voters worry your pretty little heads with grownup stuff like that.  We’ve endorsed McCraw, and that’s all you really need to know.

So what is so complicated about McCraw’s personal story?  Could the complication have anything to do with McCraw’s 2006 drunk driving conviction, a serious crime that’s killed almost as many political careers as it has innocent victims? (Which raises the question:  when McCraw and her boss Jane Hague go out for drinks after work, who’s the designated driver?)

Is it really possible that the same paper that turned a questionable parsing of the word “and” in Darcy Burner’s Harvard degree into a front page October surprise, has the balls to dismiss McCraw’s drunk driving conviction as shhhh… “a complicated personal story,” and just leave it at that?

Apparently… yeah.

Personally, I can’t bring myself to cast another ballot for Owen, but I’m sure as hell not voting for McCraw either.  But then, I’m not one of those coveted “low information voters” the Times apparently embraces as its target audience.

Via Ari Melber.

Huh.  Looking at these TV news clips of Dino Rossi, I’m kinda noticing a pattern.

More bad news for McCain:

Florida Governor Charlie Crist, to the shock and dismay of Florida Republicans, just moved to extend early voting hours, a move likely to widen the Democrats’ lead under a program on which the Obama campaign has intensely focused.

“He just blew Florida for John McCain,” one plugged in Florida Republican just told me.

That Gov. Crist “blew Florida for John McCain” by making it easier for citizens to cast their votes, tells you everything you need to know about the Republican Party and the electoral strategies on which they’ve long relied.

A couple days after the primary, Dave Reichert pissed off more than a few members of the press by issuing a media advisory promising a “major announcement,” only to produce delusional fringe “Democratic” challenger Jim Vaughn at the podium, offering his enthusiastic endorsement.

Well, since then, Vaughn and his bride Sally Daugherty have been regulars in the comment threads here on HA, leaving increasingly insulting and bizarre commentary, such as this doozy from earlier today:

7. Jim Vaughn spews:

Go Darcy. Go home. Go away. Better yet Go buy a smoke detector and be a responsible parent.

Jim

Classy.

Then, of course, there’s this piece of cogent analysis from a couple days ago:

Goldy your actions do not help the Democratic Party. The difference between you and pigs and hockey moms is not lip stick. Reason being you have your head so far up your ass that the only thing on your lips and coming out of your mouth is a bunch of SHIT.

Vaughn claims to be a Democrat, but what he really is, is a sore loser and an asshole, and I’m guessing, more than a touch crazy.  But since Reichert called a press conference to announce Vaughn’s endorsement, I can only assume that Vaughn speaks for the Reichert campaign.

I suppose that’s bipartisanship, Dave Reichert style.

Over at Effin’ Unsound, Lee applies a little logic to some of the illogical arguments being thrown against the I-1000 Death With Dignity initiative:

Think about what happened on 9/11 for a second. If you remember, there were people trapped on the highest floors of the second World Trade Center building who instead of perishing in the inferno behind them, decided to jump to their deaths. Should their death certificates say that they committed suicide?

It’s a great analogy I hadn’t heard before.  The Catholic Church, the main backer of the No campaign, considers suicide to be a mortal sin.  So… did the 9/11 WTC jumpers commit suicide?  Or were they murdered by terrorists?

And if choosing one certain death over another is not suicide in that situation, how is it suicide for the terminally ill?

Underestimate us at your peril…

Here’s what too many people still don’t understand — there’s nothing loony about the netroots. This isn’t fertile territory for the McKinneys and Kuciniches of our party. This is fertile territory for the Howard Deans of our party — sensible, pragmatic progressives who aren’t afraid to be Democrats. Why? Because we’re the nation. We’re not clustered in DC and NYC, we’re spread out over all 50 states, and we know better than anyone what it takes to win in our own backyards.

We didn’t rally around Webb, Tester, Schweitzer, Trauner, Brown, Massa, Burner and so many other moderate Democrats because they were little Kucinich clones, but because they were perfectly suited for the states and districts they seek to represent. It’s that simple. Howard Dean wasn’t an anomaly. He was our ideal.

Of course, there are fringe elements to every movement, but there is nothing loony about the netroots, which is merely a revitalized, grassroots progressive movement, distinguished by its highly effective use of new technologies to achieve greater efficiencies in organizing, messaging and fundraising.  And while our style and tactics may sometimes come across as unconventional, our political agenda is not.

No, what our critics miss is that the netroots are above all an exercise in political pragmatism, as embodied in our unofficial rally cry:  “More and better Democrats.”  Our emphasis on more Democrats is a simple recognition of reality:  a two party system in which the electoral success of the Democratic Party currently provides the clearest path toward a more progressive political agenda.  And our emphasis on better Democrats is a recognition that in terms of ideology, competence and ethics, our party is far from perfect.

But our motto also represents a pragmatic compromise… an effort to strike a balance between the need to improve the Democratic majority, and the need to expand it.  And that compromise is reflected in the candidates we embrace, on a district by district basis.

How well we’ve managed to strike this balance, we’ll learn in another week.

Speaking of partisan hacks, it looks like the stock market isn’t the only thing slumping these days…

All Washington’s major daily newspapers saw drops in circulation during the six months ended Sept. 30, according to figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, in Schaumburg, Ill.

The Seattle P-I’s average weekday circulation fell to 117,572, down 7.8 percent. The Seattle Times’ average weekday circulation fell to 198,741, down 7.7 percent. Sales of the Sunday paper, which contains editorial content from both newspapers, fell to 382,332, down 9 percent.

It is interesting to note that while circulation is falling at somewhat the same rate at both the Times and the P-I, the Times lost about 16,600 subscribers over the past six months compared to only about 10,000 for the P-I.

Of course, both of our dailies regularly draw over two million uniques to their respective websites each month, or about 75,000 a day.  By comparison, HA has recently been averaging about 100,000 uniques a month.

So let me get this straight… when Dave Reichert and the WSRP shop around the bullshit notion that Darcy Burner is lying when she sometimes describes her Harvard degree in computer science and economics as a “degree in economics,” the fair, balanced and impartial editors at the Seattle Times decide that’s worthy of a front page story.  But when a judge determines that the evidence implicating Rossi in the Buildergate scandal—a fundraising scam the PDC has already determined to be illegal—is sufficient to compel Rossi to testify under oath just days before the election… they bury that story in the B section?

And they have the nerve to call me a partisan hack?

Whether that proves harmful or helpful to Rossi remains to be seen, said Matt Barreto, a University of Washington political-science professor. “It could be a game-changer. But it’s not necessarily a nail in the coffin for Rossi. It depends on how he responds, what comes out and what the media coverage is,” Barreto said.

I don’t doubt that most reporters attempt to be objective, but if you believe in these final days of the election that the Times isn’t writing its headlines, placing its stories, and otherwise shaping its coverage so as to favor the candidates it prefers, well then, I’ve got an 8-lane 520 bridge to sell you.

What the headline says.

That’s good news for Boeing, good news for the machinists, and good news for the region.  And in a gubernatorial election where Dino Rossi has pegged much of his message on exploiting voters’ growing sense of economic insecurity, I suppose that’s marginally good news for Gov. Chris Gregoire.

Happy voters make for happy incumbents.

Joel Connelly does a good job explaining why Tim Eyman’s attack on red light cameras in I-985 would likely end up killing and maiming people.

These are not the cash cows Eyman claims they are, with most of the fines actually going to pay for the cost of installation, operation and maintenance.  If I-985 passes, and these local revenues are directed to the state general fund, the cameras will be removed, as there will be no way to pay the contracters who operate them.  And drivers will once again be free to run lights at these dangerous intersections.

So I-985 means no red light cameras and no red light camera revenue to pay for promised congestion improvements.

Of course, that’s not the only promise Eyman’s made that he cannot deliver.  Timmy’s done a good job hyping up his initiative’s promise to open HOV lanes to single occupancy drivers during non-peak hours, planting visions of zipping through traffic in many voters’ heads, but it turns out that at least on 520, rather than opening the HOV lane to all comers, I-985 will likely result in the lane being closed off entirely.

According to former WSDOT head Doug McDonald, there’s just no way to safely and efficiently bring three lanes of traffic down to two as 520 approaches the floating bridge westbound; attempting to merge three full capacity lanes down to two would actually create longer backups and ultimately slow down traffic more than eliminating the third lane altogether.

Not being a transportation engineer myself, I checked with a WSDOT official who confirmed off the record that this issue has been studied, and that yes, shutting down the westbound HOV lane would be a likely response to I-985’s passage.

Yet more unintended consequences from an Eyman initiative.

The latest Washington Poll of 600 registered voters, conducted October 18 to 26, shows Gov. Chris Gregoire leading Republican challenger Dino Rossi by a 48-43 margin.  When leaners are included, Gov. Gregoire’s lead increases slightly to 51-45.  That’s the second public poll in a row to suggest the race may be breaking toward Gov. Gregoire after months in a virtual deadlock.

Other findings from the poll:  Barack Obama leads John McCain 55-34, I-1000 leads 56-38, I-1029 leads 65-20, Prop 1 leads 50-43, and I-985 remains a toss-up at 45-43.

In the interest of contributing a little fairness and balance to HA’s coverage of Prop 1, the proposed Sound Transit expansion, I am posting this audio message from Kemper Freeman Jr.

[audio:https://horsesass.org/wp-content/uploads/kemper.mp3]

Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, the longest serving Republican in U.S. Senate history, has been convicted on all 7 counts of making false statements on his Senate financial disclosures, involving hundreds of thousand of dollars in unreported “gifts” from friends and political backers.

Stevens was already in a tough reelection battle with Democratic challenger Mark Begich, and I think most analysts would expect his conviction to cost him the election.

Either way, Stevens’ long political career has come to end; if he refuses to resign, the Senate will expel him as a convicted felon.  And under a new Alaska law, Gov. Sarah Palin does not have the power to appoint a replacement.

UPDATE:
Gov. Palin sets the record straight on her relationship with Sen. Stevens, arguing that he “needs to be heard across America” so that Alaska can “lead the rest of the US.”

Nothing up on the SurveyUSA website yet, but the word is that their latest poll has Democratic challenger Jeff Merkley leading Republican incumbant Sen. Gordon Smith, 49-42.  This would be a huge pick-up for the Democrats, in race that most experts considered to be a longshot just 10 months ago.