HorsesAss.Org

Darcy Burner turned 37 this week, and in celebration the campaign is seeking to raise $18,500 in online contributions, $500 for each of her 37 years. Please give what you can.

Speaking of Darcy, she was in the audience at last night’s Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas, and she’s posted her observations over on Daily Kos. It’s a fun read.

Barry Bonds lied about taking steroids, that’s the top story on the front page of the dead tree editions of both of Seattle’s dailies. Well… duh-uh. However, in the online editions, the story about the home run slugger’s grand jury indictment was much less prominent — I actually had to Command-F his name (Control-F for all you Windoze lozers) to find a link on the P-I’s home page. Huh.

That’s the interesting thing about this exercise in reporting the morning headlines. I’d gotten so out of the habit of reading the print editions, I hadn’t realized how old their news was. The morning papers are really yesterday’s news, while the online editions better reflect today’s headlines. No wonder the combined online readership of the P-I and the Times (4 million unique visits) would place amongst the top seven dailies nationwide, while their individual online readership now ranks them 19th and 21st respectively, ahead of many larger dailies in larger markets.

And notice that while the Times continues to kick the P-I’s ass in print circulation, the P-I has jumped ahead in online readership. (You know… the future.) Why? Well it could be that the P-I’s website has done a better job recently of staying on top of breaking news throughout the day. And it could be that absent the distortions of the JOA, the Times loses its competitive advantage. But I’d wager that a measurable part of the P-I’s lead — about 140,000 unique visits in October — is due to the fact that local bloggers like me tend to go out of our way to link to the P-I instead of the Times. This trend started back when the Times was trying to kill the P-I by ending the JOA, but it’s been reinforced by the fact that apart from Postman, there seems to be an editorial policy of refusing to link back to us. Given my druthers, I’d prefer to link to the best article on any particular story, but, you know, it’s a two-way street and all that.

But I digress.

Other duh-uh stories dominate the print editions today, with the P-I informing us that Bosses spy on their workers, and Video rental stores are losing business to NetFlix, downloads, and video-on-demand. Not exactly a couple of blockbuster stories. Meanwhile the Times breaks the shocking news that holiday travelers should Be prepared for flight delays and lost luggage. No shit, Sherlock.

Elsewhere, War funding bills fail in the Senate (NY Times, 17.5 million uniques), Army desertion rate up 80% since 2003, the highest since 1980 (USA Today, 9.5 million uniques), and oh yeah, the Democrats step up attacks in last night’s presidential debate (Washington Post, 8.7 million uniques.)

I’m just sayin’.

Earlier, I wrote:

Really, what the fuck are we doing even considering putting ferries into Lake Washington when King County’s South Park Bridge is deteriorating before our eyes?

I had the chance to chat with Dow Constantine’s legislative assistant Chris, and he explained the ins and the outs of the new King County Ferry District.

Like I said before, I like the Water Taxi and the Vashon-Downtown Seattle passenger ferry service. Since the state of Washington doesn’t want to provide this service anymore, King County has to find the money. Since the property tax is county-wide, the benefit has to be county wide. That’s why they’re studying all those extra routes. Some of them may never become permanent, but some may. The Kirkland-UW route has great promise considering 520 may be severely constricted for years during construction.

Using waterways for transit is something that’s done in many other big cities. The right-of-way is free! King County is right to explore it. Ferries won’t “solve” our transportation situation, but they’ll help move people.

My EffU cohort Carl already noted Bill Virgin’s crazy column on transportation in the PI on Monday, but I have to pull out the most incredibly ridiculous part and share it over here. This is one of his suggestions for how to fix the transportation mess in this city:

Encourage businesses to move out of Seattle and closer to their employees. Actually, the city is doing a fine job of this already, what with tax and land-use policies. Many of those businesses’ employees are in the ‘burbs already, either because of housing prices or schools. As has been pointed out before, congestion is not just a matter of how many cars are on the road but how long they’re on the road and what direction they’re going. Moving places of employment closer to where the employees live would cut the congestion created by putting so many vehicles on a few corridors heading to the same destination at the same time.

The office I work at is located near downtown Seattle. We have less than 100 employees here, but they live in various places like Renton, Snohomish, Vashon Island, Silverdale, and Shoreline. A good amount of them also live within the city of Seattle too. Exactly where should our company move to in order to be “closer to their employees?”

Many businesses are already located in the suburbs. As I’ve gone job hunting in the past, I tend to find that about 75% of the positions I run across are located on the Eastside. This is already well-reflected in the traffic around here (on 520, the reverse commute from Seattle to the Eastside tends to be much worse than the Eastside to Seattle commute). In fact, as a Seattle resident, I’ve been reluctant to take a job on the Eastside because of the difficulty in commuting across the bridge. If anything, there’s a better argument to be made for having businesses located on the Eastside relocating west of the lake. But it’s still a terrible argument for fixing our transportation woes.

The answer, as it has been since I moved to this city 10 years ago, is to invest in rail transit that connects the main corporate/industrial centers across the greater Seattle region (Seattle, Tacoma, Everett, Bellevue, Redmond). The idea that we can fix our transportation mess by simply having companies relocate closer to their employees is completely absurd, especially in a time and place where people change jobs as often as they do. The infrastructure we have now already limits where anyone in this region can work, unless they don’t mind sitting in a car for 3-4 hours a day. It doesn’t have to be that way, and I’ve run out of patience with the clowns who think that there’s a solution that doesn’t involve some form of rail.

That said, I do sympathize with Virgin’s final suggestion:

Ban from regional transportation planning anyone who has uttered, or even thought, the phrase, “We’ve got to get people out of their cars.”

Here is a truth that, as blasphemous as it may sound within the corridors of officialdom in Seattle, needs to be understood: Many people like having a car.

They like driving, or at least find the convenience and flexibility to be worth the cost and occasional frustrations. So long as transportation planners consider those who favor the automobile as the enemy, to be herded, punished and reviled, the public will return the favor — and will likely shred Son of Prop. 1, the Return of Prop. 1, Prop. 1 Strikes Again, Prop. 1: Next Generation, Prop. 1: The Final Reckoning and all the other ballot-box sequels headed their way.

While I find little in common with the kinds of people who cling to their cars (my wife and I share a single car, but I hardly ever use it), the idea that we can get motorists to give up that lifestyle simply by trying to deny them the roads they want is just as crazy as the notion that we can relieve congestion in this city without rail. I can’t even begin to understand what the hell the Sierra Club was thinking when they actually convinced themselves that siding with Kemper Freeman to kill this plan would somehow lead to less roads (and therefore less global warming, as their “logic” went). The problem is that the roads are going to be built no matter what, because without rail and with suburban-based companies like Microsoft continuing to bring in more and more workers from out-of-state who increasingly have no other choice but to live in the suburbs, the demand for more roads will continue to increase. Granted, the demand for rail will likely continue too, and hopefully we’ll be able to expand on what we’ve already started, but this idea that we can shut down all road construction in this region out of concern for the environment has no basis in reality.

What scares me the most about how the Sierra Club, and certain other anti-roads folks, approached this issue is that it was eerily reminiscent of the neocon mindset. The neocons essentially took their fear of Islamic radicalism and internally rationalized that their fear of this problem allowed for them to react to it with any level of extremism and it was justified. The realities of human behavior, logic, common sense, etc…all of that flew out the window. What mattered was that there was a crisis and anyone who wasn’t part of the solution was part of the problem. Much like the neocons, the anti-roads contingency felt that they could establish their own notion of reality, one where an individual who relies on roads is somehow complicit in destroying the planet, and that people would in turn be completely compelled to alter their way of life. They felt that they could transfer their paranoia to the masses and that they’d have support simply by sheer power of will.

Global warming is a very real problem (as is Islamic radicalism, to continue the parallel), but the fight to stop it does not hinge upon whether or not we widen I-405. The calculus involved here was always way more complicated than that. We need to focus on alternative energy sources and favoring automobile technologies that pollute less. A lot of very cool new technologies exist that represent a path away from the status quo. If the Sierra Club wants to support a gas tax that pushes people towards more fuel efficient cars, I’m there. If the Sierra Club wants to support an initiative to put alternate-energy refueling stations along major highways, I’m there. But if the Sierra Club thinks that someone who lives in Auburn and commutes to Sammamish is going to sell the SUV and buy a bicycle because of global warming, they don’t deserve to be taken seriously.

I mean honestly what the fuck?

In the genteel world of bridge, disputes are usually handled quietly and rarely involve issues of national policy. But in a fight reminiscent of the brouhaha over an anti-Bush statement by Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks in 2003, a team of women who represented the United States at the world bridge championships in Shanghai last month is facing sanctions, including a yearlong ban from competition, for a spur-of-the-moment protest.

At issue is a crudely lettered sign, scribbled on the back of a menu, that was held up at an awards dinner and read, “We did not vote for Bush.”

By e-mail, angry bridge players have accused the women of “treason” and “sedition.”

“This isn’t a free-speech issue,” said Jan Martel, president of the United States Bridge Federation, the nonprofit group that selects teams for international tournaments. “There isn’t any question that private organizations can control the speech of people who represent them.”

Not so, said Danny Kleinman, a professional bridge player, teacher and columnist. “If the U.S.B.F. wants to impose conditions of membership that involve curtailment of free speech, then it cannot claim to represent our country in international competition,” he said by e-mail.

It only gets more insane. These women make their living playing bridge. They are some of the best in the world, and they’re being threatened with a years’ banishment because they held up a menu that said “We did not vote for Bush”? Seriously.

I’m super pissed off that there’s honestly any discussion of people losing their livelihood because they held up a menu that said how they voted. These are mothers and they held up a sign during a victory celebration. While waving American flags and singing the National Anthem.

And by the way, the French team got the American ideal better than our country:

“By trying to address these issues in a nonviolent, nonthreatening and lighthearted manner,” the French team wrote in by e-mail to the federation’s board and others, “you were doing only what women of the world have always tried to do when opposing the folly of men who have lost their perspective of reality.”

Anyway, next up is my expose on Pinochle: what do they do with all the low value cards, anyway?

Simple Majority is now up by almost 15,000 votes, and Tim Eyman is still a horse’s ass.

Not doing anything this evening? Then stop by the Hales Ales Brew Pub, 5-8PM, for state Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles annual post-election panel and fundraiser. A distinguished panel of pundits and insiders will hash out last week’s results, including Dave Ross, Ron Reagan, Dwight Pelz, James Kelly, Kelly Evans, Rep. Helen Sommers… and me. (I didn’t say distinguished at what.)

We all remember the images from the civil rights movement of the 1960’s, the local sheriff turning fire hoses and dogs on peaceful marchers, many just kids. It was these images of police using violent force against nonviolent protesters that helped turn the tide of public opinion nationally, eventually leading to the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 respectively.

That era seems so far away now, a time when tear gas was used indiscriminately against anti-war protesters, and police seemed to take pleasure bashing in the heads of the hated “hippies.” Perhaps no incident of American-style police state violence is more iconic than that which occurred on the campus of Kent State University on May 4, 1970, when members of the Ohio National Guard opened fire on students protesting the US invasion of Cambodia, shooting 13 and killing four, some of whom were just watching or walking by.

Student photographer John Filo, who took the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of 14-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling over the dead body of Jeffrey Miller, describes the inevitably chilling consequences that come from a state sanctioning violence against its own people:

The bullets were supposed to be blanks. When I put the camera back to my eye, I noticed a particular guardsman pointing at me. I said, “I’ll get a picture of this,” and his rifle went off. And almost simultaneously, as his rifle went off, a halo of dust came off a sculpture next to me, and the bullet lodged in a tree.

Whatever it is that allows a citizen-soldier, sworn to protect his fellow Americans, to fire live ammunition at an unarmed photographer, that state of mind is not arrived at overnight. The Kent State Massacre was the culmination of a divisive decade in which the government not only refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of public dissent against an increasingly unpopular war, but relentlessly branded the dissenters as enemies of the state. It was the culmination of a decade in which the state routinely relied on illegal wiretapping, domestic spying, and physical force to achieve its political ends.

Three and a half decades later, is history preparing to repeat itself?

Civil disobedience can be a disruptive tool for creating awareness and effecting change, but in a civil society we should always expect our law enforcement officers to respond proportionately. If I disobey a lawfully given order, and choose to peacefully occupy an area from which I am instructed to disperse, I should have every expectation of being handcuffed and arrested, but as long as I do not actively resist arrest or threaten violence, I expect the police — whose salaries I pay — to treat me respectfully and humanely.

But as has been repeatedly demonstrated during the anti-war protests at the Port of Olympia, “nonlethal violence” has apparently become the preferred response to disobedience of any kind, no matter how peaceful. Tear gas and pepper spray are routinely used to disperse and subdue the crowd; unarmed civilians are methodically lined up and maced. Perhaps lulled by the marketeers of these “nonlethal” weapons, physical force is fast becoming the first resort of law enforcement officials everywhere, apparently oblivious to the fact that violence breeds violence, and that it is a short step from a taser to a billy club to a loaded rifle.

Of course, police prefer to use these “nonlethal” weapons because they are efficient, effective and economical. But they are not always nonlethal. Dramatic amateur footage was released yesterday of a recent incident at Vancouver Airport, were a confused and distraught Polish man died shortly after being tasered by police. Police had claimed the man fought back, but the video proves otherwise, and clearly shows the taser being used as a tool of convenience.

Eventually, such policy will backfire, as individual citizens and mass protesters begin to understand that their peaceful actions are routinely answered with physical — sometimes deadly — force. There is only so much abuse that the average person is willing to take before they respond in kind. It may be inconvenient to tolerate the protests in Olympia. It may be downright disruptive to the Port. But if the police continue to ratchet up the violence, lethal or not, they will eventually find their batons soaked in blood.

Is anybody else getting bored with the Times super congratulatory coverage of “Media ownership crisis! 2008!” because frankly, I am. In my circles, dissing the whole “indymedia” thing is akin to saying that Radiohead is underrated. (And they are! OK Computer was the last thing I listened to and liked from them.) Today, I looked at the Times homepage and was overwhelmed:

Read about it here…

and here…

here…

and here.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the Times anti-media consolidation stance. But it’s reeks of “people who own newspapers covering things that are important to people who own newspapers.” There’s this “eat your vegetables” vibe to the whole thing that is starting to bug me.

If the Times put half the effort into having a basic understanding of light rail instead of that stuff above, I’d be happy.

Big congratulations to Sherman Alexie, who won the prestigious National Book Award last night for his children’s book The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian. Alexie, a Seattle resident, is (in addition to being an amazingly talented artist) a good guy who lends himself to innumerable worthy causes. It’s nice to see him get the recognition. (This is the second year in a row that a Seattle resident has won the National Book Award; former New York Times correspondent Timothy Egan won it last year.)

As for serious hype, the Dalai Lama will visit Seattle next April. Let the human interest stories begin.

I highlighted it yesterday when they lost, so fair’s fair: last night your their Oklahoma City Sonics (0-8) clashed with the Miami Heat (1-6) in an alleged NBA game: the resistable object meeting the movable force. (When these two teams meet, you can throw out the records…and everything else…) Someone had to win (I guess), and it was your their Sonics, 104-95, breaking a 13-game losing streak and ensuring at least one win for the month of November. Next up: the underwhelming Atlanta Hawks, Friday. Oh, and UW beat Utah Wednesday night, 83-77, sending the 2-0 Huskies to New York for the final round of the preseason NIT next week.

One last election tidbit: the school levy simple majority measure (EJHR 4204) is now up by 11,000 votes and certain to win. But you knew that.

Elsewhere in the news, 50 or so more people were arrested at the Port of Olympia yesterday trying to block shipments of military gear coming in to a Stryker brigade at Fort Lewis. This has been going on for a week now, and why both the P-I and our state’s supposed newspaper of record (the Seattle Times) have been relying on wire reports for what is by any reckoning a major local story escapes me. The Iraq war is something a lot of people are interested in, and so, whether you agree with or loathe the Olympia folks, it’s hard to read the essential ignoring of this story as anything other than a political choice by our allegedly objective local media.

(Personally, I sympathize with both the aims of the Olympia protesters and their apparent frustration at their seeming powerlessness, but their tactics mystify me. When they were trying to block shipments of gear going out to Iraq earlier this year — in advance of the troops themselves, so it wasn’t endangering anyone — there was a certain logic to their protest. But this comes off more like a tantrum.)

This tidbit, meanwhile, concerning an actual national security threat, should piss anyone off: a new GAO report reveals that while you were getting cavity-searched for rogue toothpaste tubes at the airport, and three-year-olds were being kept off flights by the no-fly list,

Undercover investigators carried all the bomb components needed to cause “severe damage” to airliners and passengers through U.S. airport screening checkpoints several times this year, despite security measures adopted in August 2006 to stop such explosive devices…Agents were able to smuggle aboard a detonator, liquid explosives and liquid incendiary components costing less than $150, even though screening officers in most cases appeared to follow proper procedures and use appropriate screening technology…

Your tax dollars at work. At least the Saudis are getting a bunch of nice new jet fighters from us, right?

Oh, and even though he hasn’t been charged with anything (yet), a new defense fund has been set up for former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Send your sacks full of small, unmarked bills to…

I saw this at Washington Outsiders.

The Simple Majority majority is now over 11,000 votes, with about 43,000 ballots left to count, over half from King County. But you know, voters sent an anti-tax message last Tuesday, so what do I know?

…and he’s not excited about paying for a ferry in Kirkland either:

Cook is a South Park computer geek who, through her front window, has a commanding view of what ought to command the attention of King County: the South Park Bridge.

It’s a drawbridge over the Duwamish. It’s 77 years old and feels twice that. With a safety rating of 4 out of 100, it’s the most dangerous road around (the Alaskan Way Viaduct is a 9). Twenty thousand cars and trucks cross it daily.

King County owns this bridge. Engineers say they will shut it in a few years if nothing is done. Money to fix it was in the Roads and Transit plan that failed last week. Now the county has no plan for what to do.

“We aren’t going to be able to come up with the money for that by ourselves,” says Dow Constantine, the councilman who represents South Park.

So it rankles Cook that there the council was Tuesday, approving new taxes for ferries. For flood levees. For mental-health services. Worthy causes all, she said. But what could be more basic, more utilitarian than a neighborhood bridge?

“I don’t understand their priorities,” she said. “How can they just abandon a bridge?”

You know, it’s not like the county hasn’t seen this coming for years. It’s all a matter of setting funding priorities. King County should shelve the ferry to Ballard/Kirkland/Des Moines, cancel plans to remodel Seattle Center (which isn’t their’s to remodel in the first place) and focus on the South Park bridge.

First impressions count, and so the election night meme of a nascent tax revolt continues to hold sway over our political class, despite all evidence to the contrary. Or does it?

Yesterday the King County Council raised three new taxes: property taxes of 10 cents and 5.5 cents per $1000 of assessed value respectively for flood control and expanded foot ferries, and a tenth of a cent per dollar sales tax increase to fund mental health services. That’s about $90 a year in new taxes for the median county household… plus, a 25 cent hike in Metro bus fares. Meanwhile, after a contentious campaign season in which its public subsidy became a major issue, the Port of Seattle yesterday voted to increase its tax revenues by $10 million over 2007, levying 23 cents per $1000… about $92 annually on a $400,000 home.

Opponents of Prop 1 argued that we simply couldn’t afford Sound Transit’s proposed 50 mile light rail extension, and the half cent per dollar sales tax increase that would fund it at a cost of about $150 per year for a typical household. And yet just one week after voters soundly rejected the package at the polls, the council tacks another $90 a year onto our annual tax bill, without raising an eyebrow… or a public vote. Taxes equal to 60-percent of the cost of ST2 got raised just like that, with hardly any public debate. Doesn’t sound like the council fears an anti-tax climate to me. Indeed, I’d wager that Prop 1’s defeat made it easier for the council to raise taxes, as it left more of the tax base available.

So if you voted against Prop 1 thinking you were going to save yourself money, think again. Somehow, someway, you’re going to pay for RTID’s major roads projects, and without Sound Transit competing for your tax and toll dollars, probably a few more projects to boot. Tax revolt, my ass.