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Jean Godden: madcap days at The P-I

In short, Godden tells the story of the time she shared a “jazz cigarette” with Duke Ellington, sports columnist Royal Brougham’s penchant for performing back-alley abortions, and the time former editor Lou Guzzo drank a bottle of absinthe and declared himself “Duke of all the West.”

In other (less made-up) P-I news:

My grandmother, Anne Stuart, was a reporter for the Seattle P-I from 1940 to 1947. My grandfather (and Ms. Stuart’s husband) Robert W. Kelley was a photographer for the Seattle Times. (Kelley would later work at LIFE magazine.)

Before the bad-old JOA days, the Times and P-I were in competition with each other, so Mr. and Mrs. Robert W. Kelley couldn’t talk about their work assignments at home.

“I’m going out, and I can’t tell you where,” Bob Kelley would say.

“Well, I’m going out, and I can’t tell you where!” answered his wife Anne.

With the sexual mores of that day, I’m told this kind of exchange was quite scandalous.

Robert Reich has a list of conditions that he thinks should be applied to private sector banks should we wind up creating what he dubs a “Bad Bank” to dispose of all those nasty assets.

Until the taxpayer-financed Bad Bank has recouped the costs of these purchases through selling the toxic assets in the open market, private-sector banks that benefit from this form of taxpayer relief must (1) refrain from issuing dividends, purchasing other companies, or paying off creditors; (2) compensate their executives, traders, or directors no more than 10 percent of what they received in 2007; (3) be reimbursed by their executives, traders, and directors 50 percent of whatever amounts they were compensated in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008 — compensation which was, after all, based on false premises and fraudulent assertions, and on balance sheets that hid the true extent of these banks’ risks and liabilities; and (4) commit at least 90 percent of their remaining capital to new bank loans.

In common parlance, force them to behave like banks rather than criminals, while clawing back illegitimate salaries and other earnings.

Or we could just take over all the banks, clean them out and sell them. Things are so bad we might wind up having to do that anyway.

Only some clergy members are acceptable and thus will be promoted by traditional media, and the DFH must understand which kind is acceptable and which kind is not.

After days of controversy and outrage from the religious right, openly gay Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson opened Barack Obama’s inauguration concert on the National Mall today with a request that the nation pray for “understanding that our president is a human being and not a messiah.”

But only the people AT the concert heard that, because HBO did not televise Robinson’s message. Who engineered this blackout of Robinson? I suspect we’ll hear lots about this in days to come.

Yeah, I know. Fighting over Rick Warren, or religion itself, is generally a waste of energy. Still, nobody can really be surprised that anyone who raises questions about Rick Warren’s batshit insane views is condemned as intolerant, even as a gay bishop is excluded from an inaugural broadcast. The more things change…

It’ll be interesting to see how many columnists get in high dudgeon about Gene Robinson.

Folk you, righties. This land was made for everyone.

So if Bank of Clark County was so well run, why did it fail?

“The bank was heavily involved in the development of the community,” (President of the Columbia River Economic Development Council Bart) Phillips said. “The recession hits, and there are casualties. And this is one of the very unfortunate casualties.”

As the article notes, a lot of Vancouver’s top citizens seem to really like the people who ran Bank of Clark County, which is fine. There’s no reason to think they weren’t good at the business of banking itself.

Plus they love puppies, which is very sweet and utterly beside the point. I get that nobody wants to kick any individuals when they are down, but talk about circling the wagons. Nobody even touches on any of the core financial issues.

There’s almost a sense in the article that the economic calamity now striking us is some vague, mysterious outside force like a natural disaster, rather than the highly predictable outcome of neglect by federal regulators in the financial sector combined with pro-sprawl policies locally. Maybe being too heavily exposed to construction and speculative real estate was considered acceptable best bank practice for the last decade, but it sure in the hell can’t be acceptable going forward if we want to avoid a repeat of this mess.

Easy credit allowed for building booms that led to unsustainable sprawl. People have been trying to point out for a very long time in Clark County that we can’t afford sprawl, either environmentally or economically, but nobody ever listens to the DFH. When your economy is based on growth never stopping, when it stops (as it inevitably must) you are in the deep end of the pool with no water wings.

That’s where we are now. Whether it winds up being a teachable moment for at least some of the bidness guys and gals remains to be seen. The irony is that the local BIAW has the county commission locked up for the next four years, and appears to be taking aim at the Vancouver City Council. So they may actually be able to continue their assault on environmental regulations, but with few people buying much of anything, it starts to look like a Pyrrhic victory.

For all you Seahawks die-hards already focused on the NFL Draft, new coach Jim Mora, and the 2009 season, here’s who they’ll be playing next year:

Home
Arizona
San Francisco
St. Louis
Chicago
Detroit
Tampa Bay
Jacksonville
Tennessee

Away
Arizona
San Francisco
St. Louis
Green Bay
Minnesota
Dallas
Houston
Indianapolis

$20 billion in my hand. Feel more sick and dirty…

You hardly ever hear about one group of atheists hurling artillery rockets or dropping bombs into the neighborhoods of another type of atheist. Strange.

Still, be sure to hate on atheists because it’s customary.

Last week’s winner was Andrew Snelling, who got the correct answer of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. And thanks to Daniel K for posting the link, and to Rod for emailing me that the contest name should have an apostrophe. From now on, it will. :)

Here’s this week’s. In order to win, you have to identify the intersection or post the link (to do that, click the Share link after you’ve found it). Good luck!

There’s been a lot going on recently in drug war related news, more than I’ve been able to write full posts about. Here’s a roundup of recent items.

– The case in Kitsap County against medical marijuana patient Bruce Olson is scheduled to start on Tuesday, January 20. Bruce’s wife Pam has already been convicted for the same drug charges that Bruce is now being tried for and the couple now reside in an RV after they were forced to sell their home to pay legal expenses. The Olsons also maintain that members of the WestNET Drug Task Force poisoned their dogs before they conducted the raid on their home. The Cannabis Defense Coalition is encouraging people to come by the Kitsap County Courthouse to provide support for Olson.

– Here’s the bill introduced into the Washington State House this week to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana. A similar measure was passed by the voters in Massachusetts by a wide margin this past November. With the amount of money it would save the state, passing this bill should be a slam dunk. What happens to it should be a good indication of whether or not we still have a completely dysfunctional government in Olympia.

– Once again, the Obama-Biden Transition Team’s internet outreach at change.gov is demonstrating that drug laws are a big part of where we’re demanding change in the next few years. The most popular idea in the Citizen’s Briefing Book is “Ending Marijuana Prohibition.”

– The violence in Mexico has sparked another legalization debate along the border. This time in El Paso, which is across the river from one of the deadliest cities in Mexico, Juarez. It started when the City Council unanimously passed a resolution to suggest legalization as one possible way to stop the violence in Mexico. A week later, they were forced to retract their resolution after federal and state officials threatened to withhold funding. Apparently, even suggesting we do something correctly is too terrifying for our nation’s politicians to behold.

– A half-hour long debate between Radley Balko and David Freddoso on bloggingheads.tv can be seen here.

Lots of government people in suits showed up after the Bank of Clark County closed for business this evening. It’s not good.

The Bank of Clark County became the first locally based bank to fail in recent memory, following a ruling by state regulators on Friday that the Vancouver financial institution did not have adequate cash to stay in business. Its two branches will open Tuesday under the control of Umpqua Bank, which has assumed all of its roughly $209 million in insured deposits.

Sounds pretty serious. According to the Columbian, the state closed the bank and FDIC took receivership. The newspaper reports that there is over $39 million in uninsured deposits.

Several top Bank of Clark County executives, including President Mike Worthy, were relieved of their positions on Friday.

The rest of the bank’s 91 employees, based at two branches, will continue to work for Umpqua Bank, which still plans to open a branch next to Esther Short Park this summer.

“Employees heard the news that their bank has inadequate capital and their bank was declared closed, and we walked in the room five minutes later to tell them were taking over,” said Sullivan.

He entered with a phalanx of bankers and regulators in suits and ties that converged on 1400 Washington St. just after the 6 p.m. close of business on Friday.

Bank of Clark County was basically a local bidness guys and gals bank, started by some local movers and shakers in the late 1990’s.

The bank grew quickly as it aggressively courted business borrowers and developers during Clark County’s building boom. But when the housing market soured, so did its finances, as did the finances of most other banks in the region.

Until recently, it was clear that the Bank of Clark County had lost money on construction and development loans, but not how bad things had become.

“The last number of months they saw tremendous decreases in some of the values in their loan portfolio,” said Brad Williamson, director of the state Department of Financial Institutions banking division. “That requires a bank to make tremendous loan loss provisions. If the bank does not have enough in earnings, it comes out of its capital.”

This is quite the blow to certain aspects of the Clark County economy. The credit crunch and housing bubble deflation were already putting a severe strain on developers, and now their main local bank had to be seized by regulators.

It’ll be interesting to see what details emerge.

If you care about transit oriented development, you may have resigned yourself to the idea that state policymakers in Olympia will never be a major player on the issue. The state doesn’t invest in light rail, and doesn’t do much to assist localities in providing transit service. Sometimes they can be downright hostile. Which makes this proposed legislation such a welcome change:

Transportation Choices and Futurewise are running a bill that seeks to capitalize on the ST2 investment. The bill which will be sponsored by Rep. Sharon Nelson (D-Vashon Island) and Senator Chris Marr (D-Spokane) will encourage transit oriented development around transit stations across the state. The bill is entitled “Creating Transit Communities” and will create land use guidelines and incentives to ensure that dense, walkable, and accessible development takes shape around light rail and BRT stations.

The state does some heavy lifting on land-use issues. Things like passing, then defending, growth management. Encouraging transit oriented development is something usually left to counties and municipalities. Some of the goals of this legislation:

Encourage walkable compact communities with an average density of 50 units per acre within a half mile radius around high capacity transit stations.

Provide local jurisdictions the resources and a framework to grow in a sustainable way.

Offer incentives for development in transit oriented communities.

Allow for transit oriented development in our urban centers that encourages a reduction in vehicle miles traveled and helps Washington achieve its emissions reductions goals.

Strengthen existing provisions to ensure that low-income housing is available within the transit accessible communities.

Things are getting interesting as once local housing activist (who also is a die-hard light rail opponent) is spreading disinformation about the bill.

Read more about this here and here.

Turns out firing all your experienced sales people doesn’t work out so well in the end as a business model. At least it didn’t for Circuit City.

Americans put up with a remarkable amount of shitty service, but even we have limits. The free market works well when it comes to discretionary items in sectors with numerous competitors. You don’t like a store, you don’t go back.

Not as simple, of course, when it comes to things like Enron. Hard to shop around for electricity during brownouts caused by criminals. This key difference is often overlooked by conservatives touting free market solutions to every last damn thing. Consumer choice in cheap and mid-priced electronics? Great! Handing Social Security funds over to Wall Street? Not great.

We all know that Hearst intends to shut down the Seattle P-I within 60 days, but it looks like their coverage of the legislative session has already ended :

Chris McGann, our outstanding state government reporter, resigned this morning to go to work as Communications Director for State Treasurer James McIntire.

As I quipped at the time of David Postman’s departure from the Seattle Times, if many more reporters quit the business to go into media relations, pretty soon there won’t be any media left with whom to relate.

Of course there are political reporters available, and I could hire them for relatively little money.  So if you believe that independent political reporting is absolutely essential to our democracy, and you’ve got some money to help support it, drop me an email.