Goldy

Dear Pro-Roads/Anti-Rail Guys,

Fuck you. No really… fuck you.

And I’m not just saying “fuck you” out of anger, though hell yeah, I’m pretty damn pissed right now. No, I want you to remember this post as a threat of things to come, rather than just a cussing out for deeds past, for mark my words, you’ve made an enemy, and I hereby promise to do whatever I can to stick Prop 1 so far up your ass you’ll be wiping shit out of your ears with a Q-tip.

You see, you think you were so clever with your $157 billion lie and your SOV-loving Seattle Times endorsement and the way you used the dupes at the Sierra Club to cover for your selfish, car-fetish agenda. But while you may very well have succeeded in killing light rail expansion for a decade or three by defeating Prop 1, I’m going to do my darnedest to turn lemons into more lemons — bitter, spiteful lemons — and vehemently oppose any and all road or bus proposals that subsequently come down the pike. And you know what, I’m guessing that there are an awful lot of Seattle voters who are with me on this.

See, we didn’t just vote to defeat I-912 and preserve the gas tax increase, we progressives fought like hell to defeat it, because raising the gas tax was the responsible, right thing to do. A year later, when Ron Sims came to us and asked for an increase in our regressive sales tax to fund expanded bus service countywide, we Seattle progressives voted for that too. And even when you insisted on tying a roads package to our light rail package, forcing us to vote for highway expansion we didn’t want, we continued to be our usual pragmatic selves, recognizing that some of these roads projects were structurally necessary, while others were politically necessary, and that in the end, the pros outweighed the cons. And then you fucked us.

We gave you your gas tax. We gave Ron his buses. But you refused to give us our light rail. And you did so believing that despite being dicked over on the one thing we really wanted, we would remain good progressives, pragmatically voting to tax ourselves for good infrastructure projects, whenever they came our way. Well fuck that.

Yes, our transportation needs are great, and in some cases desperate, and I’m sure you’re counting on that reality to incrementally achieve everything you want, piece by piece, outside of a mega-package, all the while denying us the one thing that can’t be built incrementally: rail. For example, 520 is just too important to this region, so push comes to shove, Seattle voters just wouldn’t reject funding a new bridge, right? Don’t be so sure.

See, I’m tired of being reasonable. I’m tired of being sensible. I’m tired of being pragmatic, only to have amoral fuckers like you use my pragmatism against me. As far as I’m concerned, the 520 bridge can sink into the fucking lake, I don’t drive it more than three or four times a year anyway. Traffic on I-405? That’s Kemper Freeman Jr.’s problem, not mine. The Viaduct? Screw the Port, screw DOT, screw the state… just tear the fucker down and be done with it. I live in South Seattle. I’ve got my light rail. Everybody else can fend for themselves.

Really.

You opposed Prop 1 because you figured you’d get most of the roads stuff anyway, if incrementally, but hell if I’m going to reward you for your cynicism. I-5’s Ship Canal Bridge could collapse in an earthquake, and I will fight against any tax or fee increase to replace it, unless… we get light rail expansion with it. So here’s the deal: first, you give us rail, and then we’ll give you some roads money, because we clearly can’t trust you the other way around. And if that’s not good enough for you then have fun watching your precious gasoline excise tax revenues eaten away by inflation and declining per capita consumption, because you can’t pass another increase without us.

Sure, it’s just little old me talking right now, but while most Seattleites are too polite to swear like me, and perhaps aren’t quite as spiteful either, I honestly believe you’ve underestimated the depth of opposition you’ve generated through your cynical maneuvering. In relying on the absolutist “no new roads” meme enunciated by your allies at the Sierra Club and The Stranger, you may very well have laid the seeds of your own destruction. That’s a meme I intend to seize upon without compassion or remorse, consequences be damned.

We had the opportunity to work together on a regional transportation solution, but instead you chose to fuck us. Prepare to be fucked back.

Love,
Goldy

One initiative is born. Another initiative dies. Just days after voters approve Tim Eyman’s blatantly unconstitutional and laughably unworkable I-960, the state Supreme Court throws out Timmy’s laughably unconstitutional and blatantly unworkable I-747. It’s the Tim Eyman version of the “circle of life.”

“A voter reading the text of the initiative could believe that he or she was voting to reduce the property tax limit by 1 percent instead of by 5 percent, a substantially different impact on the public coffers, as well as the perceived benefit to the individual voter’s purse,” the majority, led by Justice Bobbe Bridge, wrote.

To sum up the 5-4 decision, the majority ruled that I-747 technically violated the state Constitution, while the dissenters argued that yeah, sorta, but voters weren’t confused. Personally, I’m a big fan of the rule of law, so I side with the majority.

Eyman has passed six initiatives since achieving celebrity status in 1999, four of which have now been thrown out by the courts in whole or in part… with I-960 sure to make number five. And while it would be fun to tease Tim about his woeful inability to write laws that are, you know, legal — and I’d absolutely love to poke fun at the legal eagles who share credit for crafting I-747, state Attorney General Rob McKenna and state Supreme Court Justice Jim Johnson — I think I’d rather take this opportunity to post a more constructive commentary.

Eyman has arrogantly challenged the Legislature to respond to today’s court ruling, and I think they should do exactly that, by reimposing I-747, but at a more realistic limit factor on revenue growth of 4% or inflation, whichever is lower. This would allow local governments to continue to provide services at current levels without being forced to go to voters every couple years for special purpose lid lifts, while providing the kind of budgeting stability afforded the private sector. With energy and health care costs continuing to skyrocket, I-747’s 1% limit factor is simply unsustainable.

At the same time, Democrats in Olympia need to take the lead on providing targeted and meaningful property tax relief to those who need it most, without bankrupting the local governments that provide the bulk of our essential public services. I have long championed a revenue neutral Property Tax Homestead Exemption tied to median county home prices, that would partially reverse a decades long trend in which tax burden has gradually shifted from commercial property and the very wealthy to working and middle income homeowners. But the folks at the Washington State Budget & Policy Center have a better, if more complicated, proposal: a Property Tax Circuit Breaker.

Circuit breakers provide targeted, revenue neutral relief by providing a graduated tax credit that kicks in when property taxes exceed a certain percentage of household income, and unlike a homestead exemption, the credit can be made available to renters and homeowners alike. In a state that earns the dubious honor of having the most regressive tax structure in the nation, a well-designed circuit breaker would not only provide substantial relief to low- and middle-income households — say, a 15% reduction in property taxes — it would also restore a bit of fairness and equity. Lower income households would still pay a higher share of income in property taxes than wealthier households, but the size of the imbalance would be lower.

This is a smart and progressive proposal that lowers property taxes on the majority of voters while raising those on the wealthiest households by only about 2 percent. It is time for Democrats to seize control of this debate from demagogues like Eyman and the GOP leadership, by offering real leadership and real solutions. It is time to approve a property tax circuit breaker.

“Fox News shows more sexualized violence and humiliation than probably any other network — all in the name of condemning it — while under-showing violence in Iraq, all in the name of supporting it.”
— Gloria Steinem

Hell if the family values party would condemn the network that leads the charge in spreading their lies and propaganda. But you can. Sign the petition telling the FCC that you should not be forced to pay for FOX’s smut. Demand a la carte cable.

Is this what Bush means when he talks about supporting our troops?

Veterans make up one in four homeless people in the United States, though they are only 11 percent of the general adult population, according to a report to be released Thursday.

And homelessness is not just a problem among middle-age and elderly veterans. Younger veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are trickling into shelters and soup kitchens seeking services, treatment or help with finding a job.

[…] Some advocates say the early presence of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan at shelters does not bode well for the future. It took roughly a decade for the lives of Vietnam veterans to unravel to the point that they started showing up among the homeless. Advocates worry that intense and repeated deployments leave newer veterans particularly vulnerable.

“We’re going to be having a tsunami of them eventually because the mental health toll from this war is enormous,” said Daniel Tooth, director of veterans affairs for Lancaster County, Pa.

Not to worry; compassionate conservatives assure me that most of these people want to be homeless.

Yeah sure, I’m depressed over yesterday’s election, but when I sat down to write a thorough race-by-race analysis and looked for a clear message in last night’s results, two things immediately jumped out at me: A) a thorough race-by-race analysis would take me days to write; and B) there is no clear message in last night’s results. So I think I’ll discard with A), opting instead for a series of individual posts analyzing individual races and issues. As for B), I suppose that’s the silver lining to the dark clouds filling my head today, for while yesterday’s election certainly sucked — and sucked hard — I see nothing to suggest any long term good news for the folks on the other side.

In purely partisan terms, yesterday’s election says very little. Republicans won the only truly contested partisan race in King County, but they did so on a bullshit theme of non-partisanship, so while they certainly keep the tactical advantage of holding the PAO, it’s kinda hard to argue that this is in anyway an embrace of Republican values. (As for my friend Jim Nobles… how does it feel to draw a substantially smaller percentage of the vote than Richard Pope?) Meanwhile, across the county line to the north, Democrats romped in high profile Snohomish County council races, while Democrat John Lovick appears to be squeaking by in the nominally non-partisan sheriff’s contest.

Across the region Republicans continue to hold their own in so-called “non-partisan” races, though that’s always difficult to analyze when candidates refuse to cop to their party allegiance and our local media plays a complicit role in perpetrating the charade. Still, progressive candidates appear to be making gains in both Whatcom County and Tacoma, while Gael Tarleton’s win means control of the Seattle Port Commission now hinges on the outcome of the nail-biter between incumbent reformer Alec Fisken and pro-business lackey Bill Bryant. We’ll see.

Looking to the ballot measures for trends is equally fruitless. Prop 1 infamously split the progressive community, so there’s no clear message from voters there, other than the usual “we want more, but we don’t want to pay for it” crap, while I-960’s public policy disaster is emblematic of the same muddled thinking. R-67 was simply a battle between good and evil, and the failure of Simple Majority… well… um… I’m just stumped.

Of course, all this took place within a national context, and there Democrats have reason to be optimistic. Dems lost the governor’s mansion in the southern state of Louisiana, but picked up one in a bloodbath in the border state of Kentucky. Dems also picked up Senate majorities in Virginia and Mississippi, while expanding legislative majorities in Maine, New Jersey and New York. As for Ohio, that continues to be a disaster in the making for Republicans, where Dems now hold the mayor’s office in the once red state’s ten largest cities. Ouch.

So what does this all say about our local prospects for 2008? Not all that much. But if you’re a “no news is good news” kinda person, then I suppose that might take a bit of the sting out yesterday’s very disappointing election.

UPDATE:
Of course, I didn’t even mention turnout. Turnout sucked. Yet another reason not to read too much into these results. Apparently, Republicans turned out a bit better than Dems, but I’m told the real fall off was with independents… who tend to vote with the Dems on many issues.

Go ahead, all you trolls, get it out of your system. It was an utterly crappy night for folks like me, and while I wouldn’t say any individual race was a surprise in itself, the fact that they nearly all went the wrong way (from my perspective) was a huge disappointment. Off the top of my head I think I only voted for three winners yesterday: the two Port Commission races and R-67. (And Alec Fisken’s victory isn’t entirely in the bag yet.)

A more thorough analysis later.

The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight (and every Tuesday), 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E.

Of course, tonight is election night, so expect a greater flow of folks in and out of DL this evening. I’ll be arriving a little late, and leaving a little early, party hopping, depending on results, and how happy or depressed I am.

I’m really at a loss to predict how things will turn out. Money has played a huge role in a number races which would have easily been one-sided without the huge influx of cash on the other side (some of it illegal.) R-67 shouldn’t even be close, but $12 million bucks buys you an awful lot of votes, and of course Bill Sherman should have had a comfortable win in this 2-to-1 Democratic district if not for the $300,000 in unopposed TV selling Satterberg as the non-partisan he’s not. And then there’s Prop 1, where months of lying ads have convinced untold voters that the Roads and Transit package has a $157 billion price tag. We’ll see.

Either way, I don’t expect to live blog tonight unless something extraordinary happens (and I have access to a computer,) but I’ll post a full wrap-up in the morning.

Not in Seattle? Liberals will also be drinking tonight in the Tri-Cities. A full listing of Washington’s thirteen Drinking Liberally chapters is available here.

… And worse than Nixon:

Meanwhile, Bush reached an unwelcome record. By 64%-31%, Americans disapprove of the job he is doing. For the first time in the history of the Gallup Poll, 50% say they “strongly disapprove” of the president. Richard Nixon had reached the previous high, 48%, just before an impeachment inquiry was launched in 1974.

The only politician with lower approval ratings than Bush is Vice President Dick Cheney, hovering somewhere near absolute zero, which I suppose might explain why 165 House Republicans just voted in favor of impeaching Cheney. Um… no it doesn’t. They were just playing a stupid political game. Republicans apparently want 2008 to be about impeachment, because they think it will somehow help their cause, whereas Democrats are too pussified to challenge their logic. Thus, despite the fact that Cheney most certainly deserves to be impeached (and probably tried for war crimes,) it’ll never happen. That’s what really makes this administration’s crimes “worse than Watergate”… we allow them to go unpunished.

BONUS:
Enjoy this peek at one of the Republicans who wants to succeed Bush:

The Stranger’s ECB hates Prop 1. ECB’s favorite mayor, Austin’s Will Wynn, speaks out in support of it.

It’s Election Day today, though you wouldn’t know it by reading the front page of the Seattle Times, which devotes its biggest chunk of column-inch real estate to telling us that 784 people are waiting for a copy of Khaled Hosseini’s “A Thousand Splendid Suns” at the Seattle Public Library. (That the library has long waitlists for popular books, would only come as news to folks who don’t use it.)

Of course, library books are paid for with taxes, you know, those things the Times constantly rails against, but which voters here seem to constantly pass because they like things like library books… taxes that are more likely to pass in high turnout elections. Which may explain why the Times is so hush-hush about Election Day (shhh… don’t let the voters know,) whereas the P-I fills two-thirds of its front page with an article on controversial Prop 1. Hmm… trains, cars, bikes and buses… you mean all those commuters depend on public investment? Who knew?

Yup, even low-impacting biking requires building infrastructure, and both papers agree that Seattle’s new 10-year Bycycle Master Plan is front page news, calling for 118 miles of new bike lanes and 19 miles of trails.

David Hiller, advocacy director for the Cascade Bicycle Club, which worked with the city to develop the plan, said it isn’t perfect but deserves an “A.”

Not perfect, huh? Then I fully expect Hiller and his friends at the Sierra Club to dress up as polar bears and picket the council. In that spirit, I’ve decided to vehemently oppose the plan because despite its goal of tripling bicycling in Seattle by 2017, it won’t do anything to relieve congestion. Of course, nothing short of The Rapture™ would relieve congestion, and in Seattle, even then not so much.

And speaking of The Rapture™, the WA state Republican House Caucus is beginning to look like some pre-Tribulation prophesy come true, with yet another member leaving his stunned colleagues behind screaming “Jesus Christ!” Rep. Jim Dunn (R-Frat House Row) reportedly made an “explicit” and “inappropriate” remark to a young female staffer, prompting House minority leader Richard DeBolt to take the unusual step of asking Democratic speaker Frank Chopp to strip Dunn of all committee assignments and travel reimbursements. Wow. That must have been some remark. A pitcher of beer and a muckraking post against the political enemy of your choice to the first of the 30 or so witnesses to forward me a direct quote.

In other signs that the End Times are upon us, supposed fringe candidate Ron Paul raised a GOP record $4.3 million dollars in online contributions in one day, despite the fact that he is, you know, Ron Paul. Or, I suppose, because he is Ron Paul, and thus the only Republican presidential candidate running on an anti-war platform. The media and political establishment can try to dismiss this if they want, but this is historic. I’m not sure that Paul even knows what the Internet is, but his supporters sure do, and his burgeoning grassroots campaign is a sign of things to come. One of these days a not-batshit-crazy longshot will discover the magic formula, and turn national politics upside down.

But for the moment, I’d just settle for some really high voter turnout. It’s Election Day, so put down the Times, walk away from your computer… and VOTE!

Hey… it turns out not all “extreme right-wing” Republican state legislators are closeted homosexuals. Who knew?

State Rep. Jim Dunn will be stripped of his committee assignments and denied travel reimbursement after the 17th District lawmaker made what even Dunn acknowledged was an “inappropriate” remark to a woman at a legislative function in the Tri-Cities last month.

“We want to have zero tolerance for our members for inappropriate comments,” said House Republican leader Richard DeBolt. “We asked (Dunn) to go get sensitivity training. Until he does that, he won’t be serving on any committees.”

Dunn told Postman that he can’t remember exactly what he said to the “young lady”…

He was buying her a drink and said something like, in his words, “I’m buying you this so I can take you home, something like that.”

Yeah. Something like that. Though judging from Dunn’s photo, I’m guessing he’d have to buy an awful lot of drinks before he’d ever have a chance of a young lady coming home with him. Maybe a fifth of Everclear and roofie. And a paper sack over his head.

Dunn says he didn’t really mean it, which is of course what we all tell ourselves after we strike out, but that’s not really the point. Rep. Sharon Tomiko Santos (D-37), who was at the table, says the remark was far more explicit and inappropriate than Dunn recollects, and describes a Republican sitting next to her as “absolutely mortified.”

How explicit? Well, Dunn claims that DeBolt actually asked him to resign, potentially putting this rare, Republican, swing-district seat into Democratic hands. It beggars the imagination.

Nah… no it doesn’t. Post in the comment thread your guess of what Dunn actually said, and we’ll vote on the most creative suggestions in a later post.

Holy shit! Ron Paul is holding an online fundraiser today, and he’s already raised over $4 million!!! Really. No joke. 4 million bucks in one day. Infuckingcredible.

To put that in perspective, that’s almost twice what Mike Huckabee has raised all year, and closing in on John Kerry’s record $5.7 million nomination day haul. Not Rudy Guiliani. Not Mitt Romney. Not Fred Thompson. But Ron fucking Paul!

I’m not sure exactly what to make of this, but dollars to donuts the GOP establishment isn’t rejoicing. A) Ron Paul is an ultra-libertarian nutjob; B) Ron Paul is the only Republican presidential candidate running on an anti-war platform; and C) Ron Paul is an ultra-libertarian nutjob. That Paul is able to marshal this kind of grassroots support should send shivers up the spines of his fellow Republican hopefuls, not because he can win the nomination, but because it signals how out of touch the GOP leadership is with its own base, at least on the topic of the war in Iraq. It also makes one wonder if out of the ashes of the failed neocon experiment we might see a resurgent libertarian movement emerge? Hell, something’s gotta take its place.

Over $4 million in one day, from over 35,000 contributors — and for a “fringe” candidate. This isn’t just big, this is goddamn historic. And I just can’t see how it’s good news for Republicans in 2008.

To the asshole who keeps calling my home phone and hanging up every 10 minutes or so, the ringer is off, and has been since yesterday afternoon, and anybody who really needs to get in touch with me knows my cell phone number. So you’re wasting your time.

That’s the local news media for you; always looking for the pony… before, you know, shooting it in the head and leaving it to rot on the side of trail.

Don’t get me wrong — I love ponies — and I hope whoever capped those two ponies in North Bend are brought to justice for their cruel and inhumane act. But you’d think if the region’s news media was going to spend an entire weekend obsessing on yet another high profile case of animal cruelty, they might want to focus a little on the race for the office of the guy whose job it is to prosecute the evil doers, and report the obvious fact that Dan Satterberg and his Republican cohorts are cheating. I suppose if Bill Sherman was found shot through the head on the side of a trail, lying dead in a pile of Skip Rowley’s business cards, our objective media would want to wait until after the election to report all the facts.

Yeah sure, I know, that’s a pretty violent image, but I’m feeling pretty violent right now. Must have been all those Bugs Bunny and Road Runner cartoons I watched as a kid:

Preschool boys who watch violent television become markedly more aggressive and anti-social as they grow older, according to a study by Seattle researchers in one of the largest examinations so far of such connections.

At the same time, girls appear impervious to the effects of television violence, a finding that has the researchers puzzled.

Hint to researchers: testosterone. Hint to media: you know what else causes violence? War. The media dutifully reports President Bush’s latest upbeat update on the war, at the same time 2007 is headed toward becoming the deadliest year yet in Iraq. How do we explain the constant contradiction between the news in the headlines and the facts on the ground? Um…

The Iraq war represents the end of the media as a major actor in war. … [I]n Iraq the number of journalists killed (now at least 138) means that this war is near private – the images and people who might make the horror of this war real don’t reach our screens. It’s no longer a war that is accessible to public scrutiny or to democratic engagement.

Perhaps if there were more images of dead ponies, Americans might finally take to the streets in opposition to the war.

And you know what else isn’t being made accessible to public scrutiny or democratic engagement? The fact that Skip Rowley, Bruce McCaw and Martin Selig illegally earmarked $100,000 in excess contributions to Dan Satterberg’s campaign. You’d think, maybe, a scandal like this coming in the final days of a high profile race might garner at least a little interest from working journalists. You’d think somebody might sit down and try to connect the dots instead of just taking Satterberg at his word that he is above politics. But apparently they’re all too busy focusing on King Tut’s mummified face, or the man who lost his penis in prison, or gee, I dunno… wild mustangs being offered for adoption.

That’s the local news media for you; always looking for the pony.

Tonight on “The David Goldstein Show”, 7PM to 10PM on News/Talk 710-KIRO:

7PM: Are Skip Rowley et al buying the KC Prosecutor?
Eastside developer Skip Rowley, Seattle developer Martin Selig and cellphone billionaire Bruce McCaw illegally launder $100,000 through the WSRP and into Dan Satterberg’s campaign… and the local media shrugs with indifference. Is this what Satterberg meant when he said he would keep his office out of politics and politics out of his office? Democratic candidate Bill Sherman joins me in studio. I expect him to speak bluntly.

8PM: Who is the father of the two-party system?
In his book American Creation, Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic, historian Joseph Ellis wrote of the founding fathers: “they created political parties as institutionalized channels for ongoing debate, which eventually permitted dissent to be regarded not as a treasonable act, but as a legitimate voice in and endless argument.” The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner joins me by phone to discuss his book.

9PM: TBA
More liberal propaganda.

Tune in tonight (or listen to the live stream) and give me a call: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).