Goldy

I haven’t yet had the time to study Dino Rossi’s newly unveiled transportation “plan,” but one element immediately leaped out at me:

Rossi proposed funding high-occupancy-vehicle projects on the Eastside by tapping Sound Transit money that would otherwise be used mainly to build a light-rail line from downtown Bellevue to Seattle.

Of course, such a proposal may have a certain appeal to Rossi’s anti-rail constituency, but if he really wants to be governor I suggest he put down those Discovery Institute and Washington Policy Center briefing papers, and take a little time reading the state Constitution:

ARTICLE XI, SECTION 12: ASSESSMENT AND COLLECTION OF TAXES IN MUNICIPALITIES.
The legislature shall have no power to impose taxes upon counties, cities, towns or other municipal corporations, or upon the inhabitants or property thereof, for county, city, town, or other municipal purposes, but may, by general laws, vest in the corporate authorities thereof, the power to assess and collect taxes for such purposes.

Um, see Dino, Sound Transit is a local government with local taxing authority, and the state simply cannot direct it how to use its revenue or its surplus. Local voters authorized ST to raise this money for a specific purpose, and only local voters can redirect these funds. Who is your legal adviser… Tim Eyman?

Promising to do something and having the legal authority to do something are two different things.

Hey local media… I haven’t seen much coverage yet of Reichert’s awful fundraising quarter. Um… FYI… he’s the incumbent.

Just thought you should know.

UPDATE:
As much as I hate to correct Postman — and in this case, I really, really, really hate to correct him — Reichert raised $331K for the quarter, not $240K. It’s confusing, because this time around Reichert reported the take from his Laura Bush funder using a separate joint committee, the way you’re supposed to… and who could possibly have anticipated that?

UPDATE, UPDATE:
Over on (u)SP my new friend Eric seems to get it: “8th CD Fundraising is Troublesome.” Well, it is if you’re Reichert.

The numbers are in, and they don’t look too good for Dave Reichert, with challenger Darcy Burner expanding her lead over “Congressman 401” in the much watched category of cash on hand. Reichert raised only $331,000 in the first quarter, compared to the impressive $517,000 hauled in by Burner, who now leads Reichert $922,000 to $698,000 in cash on hand.

And that’s with a fundraising visit from the First Lady. Pathetic.

I turn 45-years-old today, and yeah, I know some of you righties might find it ironic that this “tax and spend” Democrat was born on the dreaded date of April 15th. (Trust me, I don’t much enjoy cutting the IRS a check either, but well, we all have to do our patriotic duty to help assure a military victory in Iraq, right?) And so to celebrate my birthday on a day most Americans associate with money, I’ve decided to use this opportunity to kickoff my Second Annual HA Pledge Week.

Last year, 106 readers blew past my $3,500 target, contributing $4,043.91 over a week in January, an amazing and gratifying show of support. But this year, with a huge hole in my income left from the loss of my 710-KIRO show, and big plans to build out and expand HA, I’m setting a more ambitious fundraising goal: $6,000 from 150 loyal readers.

That amounts to only a $40 average donation from about 5-percent of my current daily readership, and while I hope those of you who can afford to give more, do, I know some of you can afford less, so any amount is appreciated.

Of course, I can’t afford to live on only $6,000 a year, but there’s a method to my madness, and that’s why I need your support now. Over the coming months I plan to appeal to “big donors” to fund me and my HA expansion plans, and I need you to show them that you have my back, that you value the contribution I make to the public debate, and that you desperately want to see progressive media grow and flourish in Washington state. If you, my readers, collectively cut that first big check, more money will follow. But first, I need you to help me meet or exceed our 150 donor/$6,000 target.

So if HA has become a regular part of your daily routine, and you want to see it continue, let alone continue to grow and expand, please help me build Washington’s progressive media infrastructure by contributing today. And thank you all for your steadfast support.

The momentum continues to build for Democrat Darcy Burner in her race against Republican incumbent Dave Reichert in Washington State’s 8th Congressional District, as she announced today that she raised $516,740 between January and March, a total that likely places among the top five challengers nationwide, and first in the Western states.

“Our record-setting fundraising demonstrates that voters in the 8th District are hungry for more effective representation in tackling the growing list of problems we face as a country, from the endless and costly war in Iraq, to our faltering economy, to the skyrocketing cost of health care,” Burner said. “Our message is already resonating, and this fall we will have the resources we need to make our case for positive change to the voting public.”

This new filing will bring Burner’s totals to $1,374,866 raised over the election cycle, with $921,615 cash on hand. Since declaring her candidacy, Burner has outraised Reichert in three consecutive quarters… and I’m guessing this will make a fourth. And when you dig into the numbers there’s even more bad news for Reichert:

The vast bulk of Burner’s fundraising has come from individuals rather than PACs or political party committees – about $456,500 this quarter, or more than 88 percent of the total raised. Burner received 4,859 contributions from 4,416 individuals in the first quarter. Burner has received 11,615 contributions from 8,817 donors who have given over the course of the current campaign.

That’s only an average of about $156 per donor, leaving Burner plenty of opportunity to reach out to her astoundingly large donor base for more contributions, whereas Reichert has thus far relied on large donations and PAC money to even come close to keeping pace. Ain’t much upside from a double-max donation.

Can’t wait to see Reichert’s numbers.

Real estate salesman Dino Rossi will introduce his transportation plan Tuesday morning, and I can’t help but wonder what it might include. More freeways and wider bridges? Foot-ferries and monorails? An utterly fucking ridiculous deep bore tunnel? Well one thing I’m pretty damn sure it won’t include are HOV lanes, because as he told KUOW’s Ross Reynolds back in January of 2003, Rossi doesn’t believe in rewarding drivers for (gasp) carpooling.

[audio:https://horsesass.org/wp-content/uploads/rossi_hov_2003-1-8.mp3]

REYNOLDS: Wouldn’t opening up the HOV lanes during the middle of the day make it harder for those who have voluntarily decided to carpool or those who’ve decided to ride buses – those who some would argue are being good citizens by not driving on the highways – wouldn’t it make it harder for them to get to their destinations when some would argue they should be rewarded with a single lane that they can use exclusively during that part of the day?

ROSSI: Well, you’re absolutely right that there are tie-ups in the middle of the day and much of that is because there are car accidents during the middle of the day, and the whole point of spacing these cars further – improving the capacity on state 405 – would probably relieve a number of those congestion problems, because people wouldn’t be getting hurt and getting in car accidents. Picking people and rewarding them for what you believe or others believe is the proper way to commute I don’t believe is the right method.

There you have it… transportation expert Dino Rossi pinpoints our congestion problem on too many car accidents! So why hasn’t Gov. Gregoire done anything about that, huh?! (I bet it’s because she’s in the pocket of Olympia’s powerful car accident lobby.)

As for carpool lanes, who needs ’em? After all, according to WSDOT, they only “move approximately one third of the people on the freeways in only 18 percent of the vehicles, and carry approximately 52 percent more people per lane than other freeway lanes during prime commuting hours.” And while a 2004 survey showed that 96% of Puget Sound drivers use HOV lanes, and an overwhelming majority consider them a good idea, convenient, and a fair use of taxpayer money… well… I suppose Rossi and his advisers at the Discovery Institute simply know better than us common folk.

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) inserted a provision in last year’s energy bill that gave the Federal Trade Commission the authority to investigate manipulation of the petroleum market, and now with gasoline expected to top $4 a gallon this summer, Cantwell wants the FTC to use it.

“Their response has been tepid,” Cantwell said in an interview. […] She said she expected the agency would “run out the clock” and leave the manipulation regulations for the next administration to write and implement.

“They didn’t ask for the authority and they’ve never been excited about it,” Cantwell said. “They say they want to work with us. Given the impact on the economy, they need to get started.”

Now I know you knee-jerk free-marketeers will tell me that this is merely the market in action, and that the invisible hand of God will sort everything out just fine as long as we don’t let those damn government regulators interfere. But with crude oil now hovering around $110 a barrel, the supposedly inviolable law of supply and demand appears to have been magically suspended:

Cantwell noted that crude oil prices have doubled over the past year despite adequate inventories, no major disruption in supply and a slight drop in demand in the United States as the economy has cooled.

At congressional hearings over the past several weeks, oil company executives and market analysts have been at a loss to explain the sharp increase in crude oil prices. Cantwell said an Exxon Mobil executive recently told a House of Representatives committee that he thought the price of crude oil should be about $50 to $55 a barrel, given current supply and demand.

It was Cantwell who also authored a law that banned manipulation of the natural gas and electricity markets, and ordered the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to enforce it. Subsequent investigations have resulted in 15 settlements and nearly a half billion dollars in fines. I’d wager the FTC would find similar manipulations in the petroleum market… that is, if it ever bothered to follow the law.

Hey, it turns out US Sen. Jim Bunning is not, in fact, the nuttiest politician in Kentucky. Saturday night, at KY-04’s annual Lincoln Day Dinner, the appropriately named US Rep. Geoff Davis (R-1960) displayed that famous Southern charm, saying of Sen. Barack Obama:

“I’m going to tell you something: That boy’s finger does not need to be on the button,”

And that cracker’s lily white ass doesn’t need to be in the US House.

Tune in to KUOW’s Weekday with Steve Scher this morning at 10AM, when I’ll be joining Eric Earling of (u)SP, Tom Forbes of Palousitics, and Liz Burlingame of SeattlePoliticore for a political blogger roundup. Topics of discussion will surely include how goddamn depressing it must be to be a Republican these days.

UPDATE (9:55AM):
I’m sitting in the green room at KUOW, with Eric Earling, and he seems normal. KUOW is still $25,000 short of their pledge week target, so if folks call in now and put $25K on their credit card you’ll get an extra 20 minutes of me and Eric!

UPDATE (10:01AM):
$19,000 to go. They’d like us to live blog during the interview, which shows you how much they know about blogging. Not likely to happen.

UPDATE (10:20AM):
Apparently, according to Tom, Democrats are the party of the wealthy elite. Who knew?

UPDATE (10:38AM):
Wow… Dino Rossi is about “change.” I should talk to Republicans more often.  If this is the best they have in defense of Dino, it’s not gonna be much of a campaign. 

Welcome to HA v3.0, only the third major update since I started blogging almost four years ago, and HA’s first total redesign ever. It’s slick. It’s feature-packed. And it may even be a tad annoying until you get used to it — or I fix the annoying bits — whichever comes first.

But the best thing about the HA v3.0, is that unlike the previous versions, it won’t be another two years until I dive back into the code. As big a change as this may look on the surface, the big news is what’s going on underneath the hood, where I’m laying the groundwork for an ambitious development roadmap intended to greatly expand and diversify HA’s content and features. This is very much a work in progress, so if you see something you don’t like, or don’t see something you think you should, you’ll let me know.

So what’s new, apart from the strikingly, um, different site layout? Well, some whiz-bang features for starters, including…

[Read more…]

From an editorial in today’s Seattle Times:

From the day Seattle owners sold the Seattle Sonics to Oklahoma businessmen, we should have known.

Yes, they should have. As should have the editors at the Seattle P-I:

We’ve often faulted political leaders for passivity and lack of creativity about the Sonics. Well, it appears that if the out-of-town owners were going to keep the team here, it would have been only because they got a too-lucrative-to-refuse deal. More than creativity, that’s about cash — oodles of taxpayer cash.

That’s pretty much all the gloating I’m going to do today, except to say “Hey Tom and Erin… read my post, then read the two editorials, and tell me… who’s influencing whom?”

From today’s Seattle Times:

If money is any indication, this year’s race for governor is going to make the 2004 contest look like a low-key affair.

You have no idea.

The article focuses on money, which both Gov. Chris Gregoire and real estate salesman cum motivational speaker Dino Rossi are raising at a record clip — over $7.5 million combined thus far, with some observers predicting a $20 million-plus race.

“This is one of those things that never ceases to amaze me, the amount of money in politics,” [former state Dem Party chair Paul] Berendt said. “Certainly the rematch is a factor here. But it’s not the dominant factor. There’s just more money in politics.”

But money is only part of the reason the 2008 campaign will be a helluva lot different than the last time around. The big difference, in my opinion, will be the lessons learned from 2004, a race in which an overconfident Gregoire allowed Rossi to get away with running as an amiable tabla rasa, on to which voters could project a fanciful image of the Rossi they’d like him to be.

First rule of political campaigning: if your opponent refuses to define himself… define him for him define your opponent. And you can be damn sure that a substantial chunk of Gregoire’s (and her surrogates’) war chest will be spent doing exactly that. Rossi is simply too conservative for WA state, on both social and economic issues, and this time around he’s not going to get away with refusing to talk about issues that don’t poll well for his campaign. There are also character issues regarding Rossi — his dubious business ethics and his documented reputation as a downright mean spirited campaigner — and in 2008, voters are going to be informed of that too.

Since Rossi’s near miss in 2004, David Irons, George Nethercutt and Mike!™ McGavick have all tried to duplicate the Rossi model — a low-key, likable, issue-less run toward the middle — and all with disastrous results. That strategy simply won’t play here anymore… at least not if your Democratic opponent is awake. And I don’t believe even Rossi is willing or able to duplicate the Rossi Strategy in 2008.

Sure, Rossi’s going to attempt to avoid those many issues where he’s clearly out of step with WA voters, but we’ve seen a different Rossi — a meaner, angrier Rossi — on the campaign trail thus far. No doubt he truly believes he was cheated out of the governor’s mansion four years ago (cognitive dissonance is a powerful drug) and thus he’s understandably pissed off. And it shows. He likes to joke that at the start of the last campaign most folks thought that “Dino Rossi” was a brand of wine. Add an “h” after the “w” and you’ve pretty much described Rossi’s 2008 campaign thus far.

The point is, it’s going to be a much nastier campaign from both sides, which in this particular race, I think is a good thing, because it will leave voters much better educated about who the candidates are, and what they stand for, than in 2004. And as little influence as Rossi uber-patron BIAW wants you to believe bloggers like me have, in their heart of hearts they know that a lot has changed since 2004 in the way the media covers political campaigns, and that the emergence of the blogs as media watchdogs has a lot to do with it. Perhaps I give them a little shit, but there isn’t a single political reporter I have met who is not a dedicated professional, and while they may chafe at our criticism (and the tone in which we offer it), as long as it is substantive, well-supported and relevant, it generally doesn’t go unheeded for long. Much of what I do as a blogger is the media equivalent of complaining to the refs, a time honored sports tradition that yields real, if hard to quantify results.

So hold onto your hats. This won’t be the same Rossi. This won’t be the same Gregoire. And this won’t be the same passive media environment in which the 2004 campaign played out into a virtual tie.

Sometime this weekend I’ll upgrade HA with an all new look and a handful of the new features I’ve been working on.  Just thought you should know.

Other than that, talk amongst yourselves.