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Mike McGinn made his opposition to the Big Bore tunnel a central theme of his mayoral campaign, so it’s little surprise that the media remains focused on the mayor’s continued opposition as the cost overrun controversy comes to a head. But is this focus misplaced?

That’s what I started wondering after a long conversation with Seattle City Councilmember Mike O’Brien on Friday, in which he emphasized how lonely he was on the council in advocating for a more cautious approach on the tunnel project. According to O’Brien, there are eight firm votes for signing a contract with the state, even with the Legislature’s odious (if possibly unenforceable) cost overrun provision in place. O’Brien remain’s the lone dissenter.

That means, even if the mayor were to refuse to sign a contract, vetoing the authorizing ordinance, there are likely eight firm votes on the council for overriding the mayor… and, well, only six votes are needed. And you wonder why council president Richard Conlin appears so confident?

One of the frequent complaints about former Mayor Greg Nickels was that he acted in a bullying, unilateral manner, but if he did, it was only with the acquiescence of the council. Unlike some other cities, our charter does not create a “strong mayor” system; in fact, power is pretty evenly split between the executive and legislative branches. It just often appeared to be a strong mayor system, partially due to the political attitude and skill of Mayor Nickels (and his consigliere Tim Ceis), and partially due to the individual councilmembers’ inability to work together as a meaningful check and balance.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and all that.

But with Mayor McGinn still learning the ropes, and seemingly so at odds with eight of nine councilmembers, there’s really not much he can do to procedurally monkey-wrench the contract. His cooperation would be preferable, but it’s really not necessary.

I’m not ready to write off Mayor McGinn any more than I’m ready to declare a new councilmanic renaissance; in time, McGinn could still prove to be just as big a bully as Nickels, while this council proves just as incapable of sustaining political coherence as those of our recent past.

But for the moment at least, the political dynamic has changed. We in the media might not have fully recognized it, and neither, possibly, has the mayor, but when it comes to the tunnel contract (and barring an initiative), it is the council who is driving the train, and the mayor this time, who just appears to be along for the ride.

On the one hand, Sarah Palin’s whole “refudiate” tweet fest is kinda funny. On the other hand, George W. Bush’s moronic malapropisms seemed to endear him to voters in that it made him look more like one of us (you know… unqualified to run the nation). Scary.

Mark Kleiman writes in the LA Times that even if voters in California approve Proposition 19 to create a regulated legal market for marijuana, it still won’t be legal:

Now that California’s billion-dollar ” medical marijuana” industry and its affiliated “recommendationists” have made marijuana legally available to any Californian with $75 and the willingness to tell a doctor that he sometimes has trouble sleeping, why not go all the way and just legalize the stuff for recreational use as proposed in Proposition 19 on the November ballot? Then we could tax it and regulate it, eliminating the illicit market and the need for law enforcement against pot growers. California would make a ton of money to help dig out of its fiscal hole, right?

Well, actually, no.

There’s one problem with legalizing, taxing and regulating cannabis at the state level: It can’t be done. The federal Controlled Substances Act makes it a felony to grow or sell cannabis. California can repeal its own marijuana laws, leaving enforcement to the feds. But it can’t legalize a federal felony. Therefore, any grower or seller paying California taxes on marijuana sales or filing pot-related California regulatory paperwork would be confessing, in writing, to multiple federal crimes. And that won’t happen.

From a purely technical standpoint, Kleiman is right. And from a purely technical standpoint, Dick Cheney should be behind bars. The problem with Kleiman’s argument is that when it comes to what the Obama Administration will and will not do, the letter of the law will take a backseat to political considerations. The Obama Administration already demonstrates this by choosing not to go after state medical marijuana providers (both growers and sellers). Despite a few recent raids, marijuana dispensaries are now operating in the open in many more places than they were only two years ago.

Kleiman’s attempt to differentiate this by pointing to international treaties that carve out exceptions for medical use is irrelevant. What the medical marijuana providers do is clearly against federal law, but the Obama Administration chooses not to enforce it. And it’s unrealistic to think that an international treaty that the United States years ago pressured the UN to pass will be used by the international community to force Obama to do something he doesn’t find politically expedient. It’ll never happen. If California passes Proposition 19, the Obama Administration’s hands won’t be tied by anyone or anything. If they think it’s politically expedient to shut it down, they’ll try to do it. If they think it’s not politically expedient, they won’t.

Kleiman makes the case – based on the RAND study from earlier this week saying that marijuana prices in California might plummet – that the Obama Administration would find it politically expedient to shut down any regulated market in California. As he sees it, people will flock to California to buy marijuana on the cheap and re-sell it for higher profits across the country. And as a result, the Obama Administration will have no choice but to shut it down.

On the other hand, California still happens to be the biggest state in the country, and one that Obama would need to win in 2012 to stay in the White House. Having the federal government come in to forcibly overturn a voter-initiative wouldn’t be the smartest move on his part, and it’s one I personally have trouble believing he’d do.

My daughter and I are sitting in the 310 section at Qwest Field, enjoying our first Sounders game, and clutching our open bottles of coke. Open, because they don’t let you keep the fucking caps.

I mean, what the fuck is up with that?

When I was a kid we had season tickets to the Philadelphia Eagles, and used to bring sandwiches, thermoses (thermi?), whatever into Veteran’s Stadium. Now it’s routine to frisk you at the door for illicit food items.

Okay, I get it. No glass or other potential projectiles. And I guess with the Great American Sports Concessions Renaissance, I can almost accept the argument that bringing food into one of these fancy new stadia is like bringing food into a restaurant.

But no plastic bottle caps? That’s almost as insulting as it is inconvenient.

In a nation where so many believe it’s their God-given, dick-swinging right to open carry, where’s the outrage at The Man taking away our bottle caps?

Last week’s contest was won by Bax. It was the Fruitvale BART Station in Oakland, where Oscar Grant was killed by police officer Johannes Mehserle on New Year’s Day 2009. Last week, Mehserle was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter, but not guilty of voluntary manslaughter and second-degree murder.

As always, each picture will be related to something in the news from the past week. Here’s this week’s, good luck!

Last week, the NAACP called on Tea Party groups to repudiate the racism within its ranks. Dave Weigel, writing at The Daily Dish, dismissed the idea as foolish, while elsewhere at the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote several good posts explaining why the NAACP was right to raise their concerns about some of the racially charged things that have been seen and heard at Tea Party rallies.

What this exchange reminded me of was a post from a couple of weeks ago from Weigel’s former colleague at Reason Magazine, Radley Balko, at his personal blog The Agitator:

Dear Tea Partiers,

Ask Joe Arpaio to be your keynote speaker, and you’ve lost me.

He’s a power-mad thug with a badge, the walking, mouth-breathing antithesis of the phrase “limited government.”

Yes, this is but one state chapter in your movement. So distance yourself from them.

It’s one thing to have a few idiots and nutjobs show up at your rallies.

It’s quite another to invite one to speak.

John Cole has written a few times about the effort among the staff at Reason to continually dismiss the idea that there’s racism in the Tea Party movement. Balko’s post above should be a clue that what the Tea Partiers are about isn’t quite what the folks at Reason imagine them to be about. Polls on Tea Party members illustrate this:

While big government is a favorite tea party target, several bloggers were surprised by the results of the poll question about whether the benefits of government programs such as Social Security and Medicare are worth the costs to taxpayers. Sixty-two percent of tea party supporters said yes. In follow-up interviews, they favored a focus on “waste” instead of slashing the programs.

“Some defended being on Social Security while fighting big government by saying that since they had paid into the system, they deserved the benefits. Others could not explain the contradiction,” the Times reported.

The Tea Party movement isn’t a movement about limited government and it never has been. They may make signs and shout slogans against “socialism”, but as surveys like that one show, they have no problem with things like Medicare or Social Security, or tightly regulating Wall Street. When they talk about socialism, they’re talking about something else. They’re expressing their anxieties about multiculturalism. They’re expressing a belief that our increasingly diverse society is becoming an economic burden to what they perceive as “real Americans”. To them, socialism is the idea that America is becoming more and more inundated with those who will mooch off the rest of us. And their reaction to that is to decry the kinds of government expenditures that many of them continue to rely on:

Liberal pundits like Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen seized on a comment by Jodine White, 62, of Rocklin, Calif., as evidence that tea partiers are “a confused group of misled people.”

“Maybe I don’t want smaller government. I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security. I didn’t look at it from the perspective of losing things I need. I think I’ve changed my mind,” White told the Times.

“These folks claim to be motivated by concerns over taxes, but tea partiers tend not to know anything about the subject. … They claim to hate expensive government programs, except for all the expensive government programs that benefit them and their families,” Benen charged.

The staff at Reason have had a natural desire to believe that the Tea Party folks are their fellow travelers – intellectually consistent free-market libertarians whose opposition to big government comes from a firm understanding of the writings of Bastiat and Hayek. But that’s just not who most of the Tea Partiers are.

They’re more often than not folks who think that Barack Obama is cynically trying to steal their money and give it to people who refuse to work hard and who don’t care about America as much as them. They’re more often than not willing to believe that illegal immigrants are coming here because our government entices them to come with endless giveaways, rather than because of free market forces of supply and demand in the labor markets. And this is why they’re demanding to hear from big government authoritarian thugs like Joe Arpaio at their meetings and not from Reason staff members.

Even a politician like Rand Paul, who’s considered a free-market libertarian, knows that he can’t keep Tea Party support without rejecting that philosophy when it comes to illegal immigration. Sharron Angle, the Tea Party candidate for Senate in Nevada, once expressed support for the reinstatement of alcohol prohibition. This only happens because the Tea Partiers are far more concerned about the culture war than about economic philosophy. They’re for limited government when it comes to things they perceive as encouraging our multicultural society and they’re for big government when it comes to things they perceive as threats from that multicultural society.

Racism has changed a bit since the 1960s. Racism was overt back then – a belief in the necessity of segregation and for preserving separate sets of rules for people of different groups. Today, racism is somewhat different and more subtle. It’s a belief that certain groups of people are an economic burden on society due to our cultural differences. It’s a belief that it’s wasteful when government does things to improve the lot of poor minority groups or to help immigrants assimilate into American society, but not wasteful when it does things that benefit the more privileged classes. Media charlatans like Glenn Beck are masterful at transforming these types of nationalistic impulses into economic theories with fully-developed alternate American histories to go along with them. And it’s foolish to believe that the Tea Party movement isn’t being driven in a significant way by this sleight of hand.

1 Kings 11:1-3
King Solomon, however, loved many foreign women besides Pharaoh’s daughter—Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians and Hittites. They were from nations about which the LORD had told the Israelites, “You must not intermarry with them, because they will surely turn your hearts after their gods.” Nevertheless, Solomon held fast to them in love. He had seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines, and his wives led him astray.

Discuss.

– Tom Schaller has a post at FiveThirtyEight comparing the 1994 midterm election with the 2010 midterm election. This chart tells a very interesting story:

It seems hard to fathom that only 16 years ago the South had a higher percentage of Democrats than the Northeast.

– I’ve started watching the recent National Geographic series on the drug war, Drugs Inc. The first episode was about cocaine. It’s a timely topic since this week marks the 10th anniversary of the launch of Plan Colombia. The Drug War Chronicle discusses the successes and failures of our attempts to stop the flow of cocaine from Colombia. We’ve managed to weaken organizations like FARC that have long profited from the trade, but the overall amount of cocaine coming from that part of the world remains unchanged.

– Mike Konczal points out the inherent contradiction between the Broken Windows philosophy and the libertarian view on marijuana laws.

– Dave Weigel calls out Megyn Kelly’s race-baiting.

– Another ugly Taser incident.

– Someone posted Mr. Cynical’s old schoolwork on the web.

Seattle City Councilmember Mike O’Brien has a blog post up on the likelihood of cost overruns on the Big Bore tunnel. The conclusion?

40% chance of any cost overrun

30% chance of a cost overrun greater than $90 million

20% chance of a cost overrun greater than $150 million

10% chance of a cost overrun greater than $290 million

5% chance of a cost overrun greater than $415 million

And these are WSDOT’s estimates, not O’Brien’s.

So I guess the question is, are you comfortable with these odds? And if not, do you feel lucky?

Cienna’s got the scoop over at Slog:

This week, the bar was raised for eight projects hoping to move into the Seattle Center’s Fun Forest site—raised so high that all but three proposals may be out of the game.

On July 13, the review panel charged with choosing a project sent a letter (.pdf) to the eight proposers requesting more information about the project. The panel is honing in on where the money’s at: how many visitors each project expects to attract and their “financial readiness and sustainability” moving forward. The letter also points out that the chosen proposal “cannot result in a net negative budget impact to Seattle Center.”

The groups now have two weeks to firm up their financial plans, compared to, say, the year and half the Wright family had to put together its proposal for a for-profit, paid-admission, Chihuly-themed gallery/gift-shop/catering hall. But, you know, there was a public process right? So it’s all kosher.

Cienna’s conclusion? “Goldy is right; we are being humored.”

First rule of blogging, Cienna: Goldy is always right. Even when I’m not. If an opinion is not worth being blogged with absolute confidence, it’s probably not worth being blogged at all.

And that’s why I’m so confident in restating my opinion that the best proposal for the remaining two-acre patch of the Fun Forest is, well, the Fun Forest. Extend their contract another year, and the $250,000 in annual revenue it already brings in. That will give the Seattle Center the time to hold a fair bidding process — instead of the PR sham we’ve been witnessing — while giving competing proposals the time to get their financial plans in order.

When I first saw the numbers in Publicola, that Clint Didier had raised $593,000, my initial thought was wow… that’s not bad for a fringe candidate polling in the single digits. But when I read the details elsewhere, that this represents his total to-date, that he raised a not so spectacular $220,000 in the previous quarter even with Sarah Palin’s endorsement, and that he only has about $100,000 cash on hand, I wasn’t so impressed.

Even assuming he’s in the midst of another gangbuster quarter — you know, by Didier standards — that means he’ll only have a couple hundred thousand dollars or so to spend between now and the August primary… and yet the ballots drop in another couple weeks. Let’s just say, when it comes to insurgent Tea Party campaigns, Didier is no Rand Paul.

And, if his goal really is to get through to the November election, shouldn’t he be campaigning against fellow Republican Dino Rossi instead of Democratic incumbent Sen. Patty Murray?

Throughout his six-page fundraising letter, apparently sent cold to a Seattle address, Didier focuses almost exclusively on attacking Sen. Murray, with only 38 words dedicated to “my Republican opponent” (who, in case you’re wondering, is an “establishment” “RINO,” “recruited by D.C. power brokers,” who “fails to tell people where he is on the issues”). That’s not much of a strategy for defeating Rossi in August, let alone raising money in Seattle.

It is, however, a good strategy for raising money from the teabagger crowd, to be spent helping establishment Republicans elect Rossi.

I’m not saying that’s Didier’s D.C.-P.O.-Box-based strategy. I’m just not saying it isn’t.

I’ve been following a sad story out of Las Vegas this week. A man by the name of Erik Scott, a 38-year-old (some articles say 39) highly-respected West Point graduate and businessman, was gunned down by police outside a suburban Costco.

It appears to have started when Scott, who has a concealed weapons permit, was taking metal water bottles out of their packaging to see if they’d fit in his cooler. After a store employee confronted him about taking merchandise out of the packaging and noticed his gun, he called 911 and the store was evacuated. Police arrived at the store as it was being evacuated and shot Scott to death while yelling at him to drop his weapon.

There’s a very wide discrepancy between what the police are saying, what witnesses are saying (including Scott’s girlfriend), and what people who know Scott are capable of believing. The police claim that Scott was acting erratically in the store and then pointed his weapon at them. But a number of witnesses say that Scott never pulled his weapon and that the police just started shooting as they yelled commands. Las Vegas police are withholding the surveillance video and the 911 recordings until September, after the coroner’s inquest.

Proponents of gun permits are quick to argue that carrying a gun makes you safer. But this incident highlights an important counterargument to that. Sometimes carrying a gun makes you a target as well. Anyone who has read my thoughts on this subject know that I’m not some radical gun control proponent. In fact, I was happy to see the Supreme Court rule that Chicago’s gun ban was unconstitutional. Too often, cities with a lot of crime use gun bans as feel-good fixes that don’t actually address the underlying causes of violence within their communities.

But in this incident, Scott likely became a victim because the gun he was carrying made him appear to be a threat. Even if Scott did absolutely nothing wrong (and from what I’ve read so far, that’s likely true), his not-quite-concealed weapon was likely the reason he ended up the victim of trigger-happy cops. I’m still comfortable with the idea of registered citizens having the ability to carry guns in public, but the added security of doing so is not without its risks.

Watching the recent fireworks in the Minnesota gubernatorial race, where presumptive Republican nominee Tom Emmer is under increasing fire for supporting a lower minimum wage for restaurant workers, I can’t help but be reminded of Washington state’s 2008 gubernatorial contest, in which a similar statement by Republican nominee Dino Rossi arguably proved to be the turning point in a race that had appeared to be tilting in his favor.

By the end of September 2008, in the midst of the short-lived Palin bounce, polls showed challenger Rossi closing the gap on incumbent Democratic Governor Chris Gregoire, and perhaps even taking a small lead. Republicans were ebullient and Democrats more than a little nervous as the rematch of our bitter, statistically-tied 2004 contest headed into the homestretch.

And then everything changed.

As evident in his current senate campaign, Rossi rarely makes the mistake of clearly addressing issues on which he is out of step with voters, but during a candidate debate near Blaine WA, and perhaps flush with overconfidence from recent events, Rossi finally tripped up.  As first reported by Josh Feit in his pre-PubliCola, exclusive election coverage here on HA, the candidates were asked if the minimum wage was supposed to be a “living wage,” and whether either candidate would consider scaling it back.

“I don’t know of anybody getting rich on the minimum wage,” Gregoire told the hostile crowd (the debate was sponsored by the Association of Washington Business and the questions came from their membership). “The people of Washington are struggling. They go to the gas pumps and can’t afford to fill up the car, they go to the grocery and can’t afford to put food on the table…Washingtonians need to be able to provide for their families. Plenty of people are working minimum wage jobs that need to provide for their families, and I want to stand with Washingtonians.”

She said she supported the voter-approved minimum wage, $8.07 an hour. She also said she supported training programs for teen workers.

Rossi took the opposite point of view. Touting his Washington Restaurant Association endorsement (the most adamant opponents of the minimum wage), he said:   “The minimum wage was not meant to be a family wage. It’s meant to be an entry level wage.”

Josh went on to write about a conversation he’d had that night with a Blaine convenience store clerk who had just sold Rossi a can of beans, some Certs and a Red Bull. “I’m a Republican. I like the Palin thing,” the clerk told Josh, explaining why he planned to vote for Rossi. But when Josh recounted the candidates’ exchange over the minimum wage, the suddenly not-so-star-struck clerk got pissed off:

“If he lowers it,” he said, “I don’t want to vote for him. I’d be cutting my head off. I don’t want to demote myself.”

Suddenly, WA’s highest in the nation minimum wage became one of the hottest issues in the campaign, and within days, the governor had cut a new ad bashing Rossi with it.

It didn’t take a convenience store clerk or a focus group to tell you that this was a bad issue for Rossi. Washington’s minimum wage was tied to inflation via a citizens initiative that passed by a two to one margin only a decade earlier, a policy that remains widely popular with nearly everybody except, well, restaurant owners and other low-wage employers. But rather than attempting damage control, Rossi’s people only stepped in it deeper.

When the state Dems sent an operative to stand outside a Rossi rally in Ellensberg, holding a sign criticizing Rossi’s support for slashing the minimum wage, Rossi’s top economic adviser, Kittitas County Republican chair Matt Manweller (known here on HA as “the Nutty Professor”), simply went ballistic. Prof. Manweller vehemently defended Rossi’s position while angrily attacking the young protester and the 300,000 minimum wage workers he claimed to represent.

“You and those 300,000 people are dumber than a post,” Manweller yelled. Go ahead, watch it. It’s kinda stunning.

The minimum wage remained a focal point throughout the remainder of the campaign as Gregoire gradually pulled into a commanding lead. When the ballots were tallied, Gregoire had won by a comfortable 195,000-vote margin (6.5%), compared to her disputed 133-vote victory in 2004.

No doubt there were other factors that led to Gregoire’s victory, but the minimum wage provided an invaluable toehold at a time when she was quickly losing ground, and proved a potent message for differentiating the two candidates on economic issues at a time of great economic uncertainty.

And it provides a lesson you’d think that Emmer and his fellow Minnesota Republicans might want to learn.

As the image and the tweet make clear, Dino Rossi ran into Ben Stein at the Spokane airport last week, and got him to contribute some money.

Good for you, Dino. And I’m sure the support of one of Richard Nixon’s speechwriters will go a long way toward persuading both teabaggers and independents that you’re a different kind of Republican, rather than, you know, the run of the mill corporatist hack you generally come off as.

But apart from the rather desperate sounding plea for more money (“Anyone else? Anyone? Anyone!!!!?“), the tweet got me thinking: in addition to airports and money, what else do Rossi and Stein share?

For example, the Wall Street reform bill on which Rossi finally broke his monk-like, issue-related silence… where does Stein stand on that? Rossi opposes it, erroneously saying that would leave taxpayers on the hook for another financial bailout; he even calls on Murray to “stand up to big banks” and vote it down.

And Stein? Well it turns out that Wolf Blitzer recently asked him about the bill on CNN’s The Situation Room:

BLITZER: Do you like this bill, Ben?

STEIN: I like it pretty well but it doesn’t really — it isn’t really needed. This recession was caused largely by fraud on Wall Street. There are already antifraud laws all over the place. They’re just not being enforced. This law doesn’t end too big to fail. It just has an orderly process for it. You know what? Too big to fail is not a bad idea. Lehman Brothers was too big to fail. By letting it fail the former secretary of the treasury Henry Paulson created this recession. So I mean I don’t even — I don’t even see what the problem is with too big to fail frankly. I think we’re operating from a lot of false premises here. Too big to fail is not a bad idea.

BRAZILE: Ben, at least use their money to fail and not the taxpayers’ money to bail them out.

STEIN: Well, maybe sometimes you do need to use the taxpayers’ money to bail them out. If we had bailed out Lehman Brothers we wouldn’t have had this colossal recession. It would have cost 10, 15, $20 billion to bail them out. Instead we’ve lost trillions because of this recession. A stitch in time as they say saves nine. We should have saved Lehman Brothers. It was too big to fail. We let it fail anyway and we got a catastrophic recession that hurt the smallest and weakest among us.

So Rossi opposes Wall Street reform because he says it leaves taxpayers on the hook for another bailout — even though the bill includes a Patty Murray sponsored amendment that prohibits exactly that — at the same time he’s touting a contribution from Ben Stein, who likes the bill “pretty well,” but opposes it because “Too big to fail is not a bad idea… sometimes you do need to use the taxpayers’ money to bail them out.”

Uh-huh. So which candidate is it exactly who voters can best rely on to “stand up to big banks”…? It’s hard to imagine it’s a Ben Stein Republican like Dino Rossi.

With the support of Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, the U.S. Senate has finally put together the bare minimum 60 votes needed to break the Republican filibuster on Wall Street reform, making passage a sure thing.

Meanwhile, Republican real estate speculator Dino Rossi has finally taken a position on an issue, telling the Seattle Times that he would have voted with his fellow Republicans to block the measure, because, apparently, preventing banks and other financial firms from doing the same sort of things that recently cost millions of Americans their jobs would “stifle job growth,” or something.

And if that sounds confused, just watch Rossi step in it when he attempts to dig into the details:

Rossi depicted Murray’s planned vote in favor of the measure — which could come as early as Thursday — as akin to putting taxpayers on the hook for another possible bailout of financial firms. He contends that it does little to discourage future risky behavior and called on Murray to “stand up to big banks” and vote it down.

[…] Murray’s campaign swiftly derided Rossi for overlooking the fact that Murray co-sponsored a successful amendment explicitly prohibiting using tax dollars to bail out troubled financial companies.

“It seems strange that Dino Rossi took weeks to take a position on this bill without apparently having read it,” said Julie Edwards, a Murray campaign spokeswoman.

But, you know, why bother reading something as big and as complicated as the actual bill when your heart’s not really in this campaign anyway?