Why does Patty Murray look sad?

CLICK ON PHOTO FOR LARGER IMAGE

Erica Werner (HuffPo):

Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu says she will vote "yes" on a crucial test vote on the health care bill.

The Louisiana lawmaker made the long-awaited announcement in a speech on the Senate floor Saturday. Her comments came just hours before the 8 p.m. EST vote.

Landrieu says her vote is to move forward but that work still needs to be done on the bill.

Landrieu has been one of two Democratic holdouts; the other is Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid needs 60 votes to prevail in the 100-seat Senate. The 40 Republicans are unanimously opposed.

A largely overlooked provision in the Senate bill would send $100 million to Louisiana to help it cover costs for Medicaid, the federal-state health care program for the poor.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

WASHINGTON (AP) – Democrats called a revamp of the nation's health care system long overdue as historic legislation advanced toward a Saturday night Senate showdown, an early test of party unity on President Barack Obama's top domestic initiative

"The country suffers when there is a failure to act on serious challenges that millions of ordinary Americans face in their daily lives," Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said during debate in a rare weekend session.

Democratic leaders are optimistic of success, but they need every Democrat and both independents to vote "yes," and two moderates remained uncommitted ahead of the roll call, which is expected around 8 p.m. EST. The vote will determine whether debate can go forward on Majority Leader Harry Reid's 2,074-page bill to overhaul health care over the next decade.

United in opposition, Republicans cast the bill as a costly government takeover, built on budget gimmicks.

"Move over, Bernie Madoff. Tip your hat to a trillion-dollar scam," said Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., referring to the mastermind of a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme.

Most everyone would be required to purchase insurance under Reid's legislation, and billions in new taxes would be levied on insurers and high-income Americans to help extend coverage to 30 million uninsured. Insurance companies would no longer be allowed to deny coverage to people with medical conditions or drop coverage when someone gets sick.

The two Democratic holdouts are Sens. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. A third centrist, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, announced Friday that he'd be supporting his party on the test vote, while cautioning that it didn't mean he'd be with them on the final vote.

"It is not for or against the new Senate health care bill," Nelson said. "It is only to begin debate and an opportunity to make improvements. If you don't like a bill, why block your own opportunity to amend it?"

If that same reasoning holds with Lincoln and Landrieu, Reid, D-Nev., will have the 60 votes he needs to prevail in the 100-seat Senate. The 40 Republicans are unanimously opposed.

Landrieu has made comments suggesting she'll support the move to debate, but Lincoln, who faces a difficult re-election next year, carefully avoided taking any public position Friday.

Republicans used their weekly radio and Internet address to slam the legislation, calling it a government takeover of health care that would increase taxes and raise medical costs.

"This 2,000-page bill will drive up the cost of health care insurance and medical care, not down," Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, said in the address. "This is not true health care reform, and it is not what the American people want. This bill will result in higher premiums and higher health care costs for Americans – period."

The White House issued a statement late Friday praising the Senate measure.

The action in the Senate comes two weeks after the House approved a health overhaul bill of its own on a 220-215 vote. After the vote Saturday night, senators will leave for a Thanksgiving recess. Upon their return, assuming Democrats prevail on the vote, they will launch into weeks or more of unpredictable debate on the health care bill, with numerous amendments expected from both sides of the aisle and more 60-vote hurdles along the way.

Senate leaders hope to pass their bill by the end of the year. If that happens, January would bring work to reconcile the House and Senate versions before a final package could land on Obama's desk.

The bills have many similarities, including the new requirements on insurers and the creation of new purchasing marketplaces called exchanges where self-employed individuals and small businesses could go to shop for and compare coverage plans. One option in the exchanges would be a new government-offered plan, something that's opposed by private insurers and business groups.

Differences include requirements for employers. The House bill would require medium and large businesses to cover their employees, while the Senate bill would not require them to offer coverage but would make them pay a fee if the government ends up subsidizing employees' coverage.

Another difference is in how they're paid for. The Senate bill includes a tax on high-value insurance policies that's not part of the House bill, while the House would levy a new income tax on upper-income Americans that's not in the Senate measure. The Senate measure also raises the Medicare payroll tax on income above $200,000 annually for individuals and $250,000 for couples. Both bills rely on more than $400 billion in cuts to Medicare.

Howie P.S.: Coincidentally, "Mary Landrieu Wooed To Back Health Care With $100 Million For Her State."

McGinn’s Victory Party: "You talk to People"

Begin the McGinn. The Garfield High School marching band gives it up for the Mayor-Elect.

Josh Feit (Publicola):

I have been covering Seattle politics for a long time, and I have to say: Mayor-Elect Mike McGinn’s victory party tonight was an unprecedented scene.

It was held at the New Holly Gathering Hall in Seattle’s Holly Park mixed-income development (seven blocks from the Othello light rail stop in the minority Southeast Seattle turf that probably made the difference for McGinn in the election). And none of the leaders from the consultant/political class that has been running this town for years showed. None of them.

Lefty state Sen. Adam Kline (D-37, South Seattle) was about as establishment as it got.

Who else was there? Well, for starters, Roberto Maestas, the longtime Latino community/social justice leader of El Centro De La Raza introduced McGinn with a gleeful speech. Otherwise, it was everyday people: White, black, Hispanic, and African immigrant taxi drivers (and longtime, fringe-ish activists from the Sierra Club, the Cascade Bicycle Club, past monorail campaigns, past anti-monorail campaigns, and North Seattle blond moms who took back their neighborhoods with McGinn from lesser-Seattle cranks to fight for density) noshing on fried chicken or veggie stir-fry with tofu, drinking beer and wine out of plastic cups.

If that’s wasn’t enough to make it plain this wasn’t a Mayor Greg Nickels victory party or a Ron Sims victory party or a Dow Constantine (sorry) victory party, how about this? Rahwa Habte, co-owner of the Central District’s Hidmo Eritrean Cuisine, the ground zero of Seattle’s renaissance hip hop scene, was also there.

(If Habte was at Constantine’s establishment-heavy party at Kell’s in the Pike Place Market on Wednesday night along with Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis, Gregoire staffers, and downtown consultants, I apologize for not noticing. But you couldn’t miss Habte at McGinn’s as she was giving high fives.)

The Garfield High marching band upset the place (in a Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers way) with a few raucous numbers (see above), and McGinn himself held court in the hall by the beer and wine table, marveling along with his well wishers at the energy and the possibility of his pending administration.

But McGinn’s speech—the highlight of the night—put the possibility for change in check by laying out the political lines. It was an unprecedented, rabble-rousey call from a soon-to-be-mayor of Seattle:

“The people who still think we have to do things the same old way, they’re still here. And they still have the money.” (Those would be the people I mentioned earlier. The people who didn’t show tonight.)

To get things done McGinn said it would take more than just a new mayor. He said he needed all the people in the room (the community center was packed like a subway car out to the glass doors in the hallway) to stay active and talk to their neighbors, talk to people they don’t know: “I’m a mayor who respects the power of people who organize,” he said to big cheers, noting that the “secret” to his surprise (ahem) win was standard Cesar Chavez organizing. There’s a Chavez quote on the wall of the Sierra Club offices where McGinn has run many of his recent initiative campaigns, he said. “There’s no secret,” McGinn explained, referencing Chavez’s apparent wisdom: “You talk to people. You talk to one person. And then you talk to another.”

Indeed, despite his earlier warning about the entrenched power structure, McGinn couldn’t contain his optimism. After Maestas introduced the Mayor-Elect, McGinn recounted the history of El Centro De La Raza and how Maestas simply got the keys to an abandoned school 37 years ago and invited the community inside to start the now landmark Beacon Hill Latino/Chicano(!) center. “They gave us the keys in this election,” McGinn said, comparing the story to his own campaign victory.

Howie P.S.: One member of the (blogospheric) power structure did show up:

"Health Care Vote: LIVE UPDATES" (with streaming video)

HuffPo, with live streaming video from MSNBC:

Watch the health care debate live through our curated Twitter lists. Do you know a tweeter who's perfect for one of these lists? Email us at twitterlists@huffingtonpost.com!

"Bring Back the 2 Paper Town" (audio)

Sable Verity Commentary KBCS, (audio):

It has been more than 8 months since the demise of the Seattle Post Intelligencer. Sable presents her evaluation of Seattle's print media landscape, including a look at the online site which has arisen from its ashes, the seattlepi.com.

Pro and Con: Obama, Geithner and Guantanamo

"What Geithner Got Right" (David Brooks-NY Times):

In retrospect, their performance during this trial was impressive.

Events also vindicate Geithner’s basic policy instincts. The criticism back then was that Geithner was neither bold nor visionary. He was too cautious, too much the insider and bureaucrat.

But this prudence was the key to his effectiveness. In interviews and testimony, Geithner uses the word “balance” a lot. He talks about finding the right balance point between competing priorities. He also talks like a historian who sees common tendencies in certain contexts, not a philosopher who seeks clear general principles that apply across contexts.

This mentality makes it hard for him to project bold conviction, but it makes him flexible in the face of specific problems. When financial confidence is cratering, Geithner concluded, government should generally be as aggressive as possible, as early as possible. At the same time, it should try not to do things that the market does better, like set prices or run companies.

Geithner’s path was a middling one, but it helped the country muddle toward recovery.

"Empty Promises: Obama Fails to Deliver on Guantanamo" (Scoop/Daily):

...when the president made his initial announcement, few questions were raised as to its viability. And why not? Here was a man who was single-handedly bringing back the concept of hope. He had already made it clear that a black man could enter the White House and be dashing and charming while he did it. When he promised it, millions of people believed he could do anything.

Eleven months in, those dreams haven’t quite materialized. No one is saying that the president has dropped the ball entirely, but many of his goals have yet to be realized. His health care plan lacks support. Racial tensions in America persist. Despite the appearance of an initially overwhelming popular mandate, life for Obama since the election, as Langston Hughes once wrote, “Ain’t been no crystal stair.”

Guantanamo is just another example of unrealistic goals being levied onto a president who, overall, has good intentions. And we, as a country, might face less disappointment if we stopped convincing Obama that that is who he is.

"Obama’s Failure to Close Guantánamo by January Deadline Is Disastrous":

... it remains unacceptable that these men should have to stay in Guantánamo while their petitions proceed to court, just as it remains unacceptable that cleared prisoners should languish at Guantánamo for one minute longer, let alone for months or possibly years beyond the deadline that has proven impossible for the administration to honor.

In an interview with Fox News that followed his announcement about Guantánamo, President Obama explained, "We are on a path and a process where I would anticipate that Guantánamo will be closed next year. I’m not going to set an exact date because a lot of this is also going to depend on cooperation from Congress."

That last line sums up the problem succinctly, and I can only hope that this cooperation will be forthcoming, although one major problem, clearly, is that Republicans will delight in thwarting the President still further. If it does not happen, however, the failure to close Guantánamo will cast a dark shadow on Obama’s presidency, and an even darker one on the prisoners - whether cleared men, or others still held without charge or trial – who will rightly conclude that, for them, there really is no justice in the United States.

"Gregoire, in the 36th, on the budget." (video)

strangervideo. video (05:34):

Governor Christine Gregoire speaks about the state budget shortfall at a fundraiser for Jeanne Kohl-Welles in Seattle's 36th District.

"GOP Obstruction Goes Unnoticed—and Unpunished"

E. J. Dionne (WaPo):

Normal human beings—let’s call them real Americans—cannot understand why, 10 months after President Obama’s inauguration, Congress is still tied down in a procedural torture chamber trying to pass the health care bill Obama promised in his campaign.

Last year, the voters gave him the largest popular vote margin won by a presidential candidate in 20 years. They gave Democrats their largest Senate majority since 1976 and their largest House majority since 1992.

Obama didn’t just offer bromides about hope and change. He made quite specific pledges. You’d think that the newly empowered Democrats would want to deliver quickly.

But what do real Americans see? On health care, they read about this or that Democratic senator prepared to bring action to a screeching halt out of displeasure with some aspect of the proposal. They first hear that a bill will pass by Thanksgiving, and then learn it might not get a final vote until after the New Year.

Is it any wonder that Congress has miserable approval ratings? Is it surprising that independents, who want their government to solve a few problems, are becoming impatient with the current majority?

Democrats in the Senate—the House is not the problem—need to have a long chat with themselves and decide whether they want to engage in an act of collective suicide.

But it’s also time to start paying attention to how Republicans, with Machiavellian brilliance, have hit upon what might be called the Beltway-at-Rush-Hour Strategy, aimed at snarling legislative traffic to a standstill so Democrats have no hope of reaching the next exit.

We know what happens when drivers just sit there when they’re supposed to be moving. They get grumpy, irascible and start turning on each other, which is exactly what Democrats are doing now.

Republicans know one other thing: Practically nobody is noticing their delay-to-kill strategy. Who wants to discuss legislative procedure when there’s so much fun and profit in psychoanalyzing Sarah Palin?

Yet there was a small break in the Curtain of Obstruction this week when Republican senators unashamedly ate every word they had spoken when George W. Bush was in power about the horrors of filibustering nominees for federal judgeships. On Tuesday, a majority of Republicans tried to block a vote on the appointment of David F. Hamilton, a rather moderate jurist, to a federal appeals court.

Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama explained the GOP’s about-face by saying: “I think the rules have changed.”

That was actually a helpful comment, because the Republicans have changed the rules on Senate action up and down the line. Hamilton’s case is just the one instance that finally got a little play.

Thankfully, this filibuster failed because some Republicans were embarrassed by it. But Republican delaying tactics have made Obama far too wary about judicial nominations for fear of controversy. He is well behind his predecessor in filling vacancies, a shameful capitulation to obstruction. There’s also the fact that the nomination of Christopher Schroeder as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy, which helps to vet judges, is snarled—guess where?—in the Senate.

Republicans are using the filibuster to stall action even on bills that most of them support. Remember: The rule is to keep Democrats from ever reaching the exit.

As of last Monday, the Senate majority had filed 58 cloture motions requiring 32 recorded votes. One of the more outrageous cases involved an extension in unemployment benefits, a no-brainer in light of the dismal economy. The bill ultimately cleared the Senate earlier this month 98-0—yes, that is a zero.

The vote came only after the Republicans launched three filibusters against the bill and also tried to lard it with unrelated amendments, delaying passage by nearly a month. And you wonder why it’s so hard to pass health care?

Defenders of the Senate always say the Founders envisioned it as a deliberative body that would cool the passions of the House. But Sessions unintentionally blew the whistle on how what’s happening now has nothing to do with the Founders’ design.

The rules have changed. The extraconstitutional filibuster is being used by the minority, with extraordinary success, to make the majority look foolish, ineffectual and incompetent. By using Republican obstructionism as a vehicle for forcing through their own narrow agendas, supposedly moderate Democratic senators will only make themselves complicit in this humiliation.

"Naomi Klein & Ryan Grim on FDL Action With Trumka, Stern & Auditing the Fed" (video)

firedoglake, video (04:15):

On MSNBC, Ryan Grim and Naomi Klein discuss FDL letter signed by Andy Stern, Richard Trumka, James Galbraith and others which accuses the Fed of "cronyism" and "massive secret bailouts" and calls for them to be audited.

Howie P.S.: More Naomi Klein--"Bush admin created ‘free-fraud zone’ in Iraq (Raw Story). More video with Naomi Klein (07:44) on The Rachel Maddow Show, discussing corruption in government contracting (see Raw Story, above).

Young Turks: "Ari Melber of The Nation on Newsweek/Obama Controversey" (video)

Young Turks, video (09:38).

"Late Returns" (Seattle mayoral election)

Grant Cogswell (The Stranger):

How Mike McGinn Broke the Seattle Machine—and Why the City Will Never Be the Same--When you've fought every day for 10 years to turn a map you and a friend drew at a kitchen table into a $2 billion transit agency, and volunteered and done strategy for two winning underdog city council campaigns, and then run for city council yourself and nearly made it—to say nothing of half a dozen city and county ballot initiatives you've run, the first of which was called the region's biggest political upheaval of the decade on the cover of the Sunday New York Times—and in the end you lost most of your battles against WaMu or Paul Allen or the state or the Seahawks or the Mariners and had the gain sucked out of those battles you won, you know a couple things, or more precisely one thing: You know that the fix is usually in.

And you get pretty good at calling races.

In the mid-1990s, the city seemed to know the planet was being ruined. Friends complained about the clueless mall-walkers that downtown filled up with once the single-occupancy hotels were pushed out and Nordstrom got its taxpayer-funded garage, but these same friends way too often didn't vote. Meanwhile, many of those who were politically engaged suffered the curse of progressive America, stuck in an outdated cultural rebellion that seemed to lay up indulgences for later compromise. By the time I finally left town three years ago, I thought the stupidity of this city was irrepressible, its progressivism a pose—irony of ironies being Greg Nickels killing a transit system and rubber-stamping a freeway at home as he went junketing with his global-warming crusade and built a career as an environmentalist on the national scene. (Watch him drop this crusade like a hot potato now that he has no future in office- seeking.) The politicos who flew the green banner proudest and still managed to win used it as cover to go along to get along or fight progress (I'm talking to you, council president Richard Conlin, instrumental in putting the knives into the monorail agency and backing the viaduct replacement tunnel right up to leading the 9–0 council approval last month). Saying you "support the environment" was like putting a 100 percent hemp Free Tibet sticker on the bumper of your car. You didn't have to really do a fucking thing.

The mayor's race this year seemed no change, equally hopeless. The characters in the primary: Nickels, under threat for killing the monorail or losing the Sonics, whichever pisses you off most and if it's both call me, we'll have a beer; a no-chance-Charlie named Mike McGinn whom The Stranger was backing—been there, dude; a random sports figure; a city councilwoman who I'd always liked personally because she's fun to drink with but who ran as the Downtown Seattle Association's best friend; and a cell-phone exec who looked like a cell-phone exec and proved to be the most entertaining candidate in the race, a train wreck of pro-business bromides and ill-advised shout-outs (he kept repeating that he proudly hailed from suburban Everett, "the Pearl of the [sic] Puget Sound," without the slightest clue this might be the wrong thing to say). After Nickels's hemorrhage in the primary—the severity of which no one had predicted and which could have been about his grab-it-all style, the Sonics, his relationship with neighborhoods, his faux environmentalism, the two weeks the city spent snowed in last winter after which he comically overrated his performance ("I give myself a B"), or all of the above—the cell-phone exec, Joe Mallahan, became the front-runner and the old establishment lined up to support him. McGinn's lead role in beating the roads-and-transit campaign two years ago was downplayed to invisibility among the people who "matter"—despite the impressiveness of his going up against the mainstream environmental organizations that were crying that transit couldn't win an election without being bundled with more roads, and then proving them wrong.

I came back to Seattle this summer to write and raise money to produce a film, not very interested in the mayor's race. Of course I hoped McGinn would win. But I didn't care much, didn't think it would ever happen, wasn't going to let myself get heartbroken again. I worked on Nick Licata's first campaign 12 years ago, and our post-campaign vacation (courtesy of the candidate) to Mexico was my first journey to the country I would later make my home. Mexico is warm, in every sense of the word. Seattle's uptight Puritan New England/ Scandinavian Protestant soul is intensified by winter depression, cold weather, the rain—all reasons I can no longer live here year-round, and why (I believe) the Northwest has made the greatest doomy art in America since the tales of Hawthorne, and why its cultural heroes die so young. You can't talk about Seattle without talking about the weather, and you can't go away and then come back without noting that it makes everyone here a little crazy.

For a week, I helped prepare for a McGinn fundraiser a friend held in the middle of October. Two years fighting cancer had left him with hundreds of pounds of pine needles in his gutters and walks; rain had rotted the wooden steps. I was doing it for my friend, because he cared, and because he had let me crash in his spare bedroom for weeks—not out of any passion for the cause. I wove a dozen strings of Christmas lights across the shrubbery to lead the hundreds we expected up the dark cul-de-sac from the cross street. The organizers arrived to a ship's canteen of food but booze for only perhaps 70—we could run for more. A dozen people trickled in. Then it was more like 20. Then about 30. After an hour or two had passed and the party was tilting past its peak, McGinn, who had been waiting for more folks to show up, spoke. In the old days, this party (good people, great food, hardly anyone there) would have signified his death as a candidate. He had a muddled message that night (I stopped listening halfway through), one-third of his opponent's war chest, and zero air of inevitability.

Sad and by now drunk, I sidled up to an earnest Licata staffer, and we both spoke at once—whispering so our voices wouldn't echo across the (empty) parquet floor: "It's not gonna happen." Around this time, I had run into a man at a Georgetown bar who was on the board of Yes for Seattle when I was its executive director at the beginning of the decade. Back then, a handful of plucky young enviros from campaign shops and nonprofits considered a short-lived "initiative factory" a viable strategy for greening the city a summer at a time. But things had changed. "Remember how much we cared about this city?" my friend said with a smile. "Isn't that just worlds away now?" I agreed and thought about how we sounded like the old hippies who'd cut their hair and sold out back when we started this war against their complacency.

It was painful to watch McGinn campaigning, because his agenda was exactly the one I fronted when I ran for city council in 2001 (plus consultants and savvy calculation). I hung back at the McGinn event, moved chairs, dimmed the lights when asked, ate sitting down, drank heavily. The candidate and I found ourselves going for the red beans and rice at the same time—we had never met before—and he recognized me, grinned broadly, and shook my hand. He said, "You've been through all this" or "You kind of laid the template for this" or "You helped us get here"—I would like to remember what exactly, but I could barely concentrate on what he was saying. I kept thinking about energy and idealism and hope and young hearts being thrown against this immovable thing. Wasted time. I could barely speak. He was nice. He was going to lose.

But there were things going on that I did not see.

The Tunnel (it should be capitalized, because if it goes through it will be the crowning disaster of this city for the next generation) is a monster born of compromise: $4.2 billion authorized by the state legislature would remove the viaduct and rebuild the seawall and Alaskan Way, replacing the state highway underground—on the condition that cost overruns are paid by the citizens of Seattle. Megaprojects, especially ones underground, always have cost overruns, Boston's Big Dig being the chief recent American example. But in Boston's defense, that project undid a snarl of highways to open up a most unique city's divided heart, on arguably the most vital road corridor in the world, I-95. The Alaskan Way Viaduct, by contrast, according to the Washington State Department of Transportation, carries only double the volume of traffic that runs every day on North 45th Street. That's all! To transfer a small ribbon of harborside roadway deep underground, everything else the city taxpayers cover—buses, libraries, parks, bond issues for schools and low-income housing, habitat restoration, parades, the arts, the homeless—is to be put at risk.

The rural GOP state reps—with the compliance of most of their ludicrously retrogressive Democratic state colleagues from Seattle—are willing to put up billions for the highway but not one cent for the reclamation of what might be the most scenic urban shore in America. We are on the hook for that, because the city's consensus- by-default in last year's election was to remove the viaduct without replacing it on the shore. And two weeks before the election, breathing the thin air of the Nickels administration, the city council voted unanimously to approve the deep-bore tunnel (in terms of engineering, the same technology that connects, say, Denmark to Sweden, or Manhattan to New Jersey) without opposition even from my old ally Nick Licata: His patch-up idea for the viaduct—strong on wishful engineering—was neither lovely enough for those wanting an open waterfront nor lucrative enough for the unions and construction lobbyists who finally got their way with Nickels and the council. (Steadfastly progressive on all other issues, Licata is understandably devoted to traffic separation due to an accident in which his stepson, a pedestrian, was tragically injured several years ago, and perhaps, in his unwavering allegiance to the less fortunate, believes the mad myth that the "poor" or "working class" depend on cars. Only 800 million of the six billion people on earth have access to a car: They're not the poor ones.)

And renowned environmentalist and new council president Richard Conlin? Except for his rare foray into real environmental advocacy on the ill-fated plastic-bag tax, Conlin, a characteristic light-green Seattle politician, has always been careful not to expose his flanks to conservative attacks or provide more than scant justification for his self-applied green label. While priding himself on deck-chair-rearranging legislation like the ordinance legalizing pygmy goats within city limits, he was instrumental in the slow assassination of the monorail project by Nickels, developer Martin Selig, and WaMu CEO Kerry Killinger—along with a rich supporting cast of real-estate barons; crypto-racist NIMBYs from Crown Hill block-watch groups, carefully phrasing their opposition to "outsiders" coming into their neighborhood; and well- intentioned light-rail true believers happy to let transit take a lifetime to get built. I suspect—after prolonged exposure to these people—Conlin's soft-enviro supporters are attracted more to what they hope he might be than what he is, with scant evidence beyond a yogic poise and goateed, unflappable calm that he is one of them. This year, a campaign as strong as council member–elect Mike O'Brien's would have dusted him.

It remains to be seen how hard the new council president will fight for the tunnel. You have to hope that McGinn's promised acquiescence to the council's decision begs a movement like the one that stopped plans for the Arboretum-destroying R.H. Thomson Expressway in the 1960s. No project since then here has been so stupid. There is no other word for it. It's not just the tunnel's concrete and the cars, the lack of exits downtown, the sprawl-multiplying effect, and the elitist gold-plated highway for drivers and the slow bus for the poor. If this were a transit system—$2 billion for 1.7 miles, not even counting the inevitable overruns—it would be a bad idea. In fact, it would be laughed out of existence. My darkest mind says if McGinn won only after accepting the eventuality of a tunnel, then what I decided four years ago after Nickels undermined the monorail is true: There is not a majority of voters in Seattle serious about sprawl; salmon-killing, orca-poisoning runoff; social justice; and climate change—and our "eco-consciousness" will continue as a back-and-forth shuffle of half-measures and corrections, a sham of image and self-regard. And something else: As I've aged, I've changed a little. I understand my Republican friends from high school who want to hunker down in their suburban homes in Texas and Florida, make their kids comfortable and safe, cook really good dinners, and ignore the fate of the world—but they don't act like they are any better than they are.

Of course, the state legislation promising to hold Seattle responsible for any cost overruns is still fungible: Conlin—elevated to quite undeserved hero status in a recent feature in The Stranger—is on the record, along with McGinn, calling it unacceptable. They may get out of it just by treading water while this nightmare project kills itself. A tunnel entirely on the state's tab is hardly, as the conventional wisdom would suggest, a "done deal." Mayor Nickels has characteristically done his best to hide the bad news. Studies show drivers—maybe up to 40 percent of them—will avoid the tolls the tunnel will have and take surface streets, in the absence of fixes to the downtown street grid, which won't have been made because of the cost of the tunnel. People's Waterfront Coalition chair Cary Moon says, "There is unlikely to be a single bomb that sinks the deal, but an accumulation of risks and negative impacts that may capsize it at any time." And that infamous breeding ground of lawsuits, the environmental impact statement, hasn't been done yet, and it'll be a doozy—probably a decade of construction shutting down either end of the city center, a tunnel mouth under a national historic district, and more traffic on the roads (because planners are finally discovering increasing road capacity in turn creates traffic to fill it). All for twice the traffic on 45th, people.

The 9–0 council vote boggles the mind, but I was not surprised when McGinn gave a brief sidewalk interview immediately thereafter, expressing his intention to enforce the laws of the City of Seattle or some such soft capitulation. This was business as usual. What was the point of playing nice if you were just going to get the pants beaten off you anyway? The mayor-elect's hired consultants, the Mercury Group—who came out of nowhere two years ago to strategize McGinn and O'Brien's campaign against the roads-heavy, transit-light RTID—might have known what they were doing all along, or perhaps were just lucky, or perhaps were the beneficiaries of a late pivot on McGinn's part that no one on the outside saw coming. McGinn's politically unwise opposition to the deep-bore tunnel under downtown was turned to his benefit with a parsing Mallahan could not only not have made but probably didn't understand either. It allowed McGinn to sound reasonable (We won't drag this out forever Seattle-style) without stepping away from his principled opposition. It was no longer the viability of that opposition that was the focus, but the heart, the sense—sort of like the monorail movement without the agency, the contractors, the condemned blocks, the weirdos for and the wackos against—minus the unpleasant and messy difficulty, the endless dead-end corridors of Nickels's vaunted "Seattle Way" itself.

The election of a mayor here is as much about theme as city business: Norm Rice (mayor from 1990 to 1997) proved to America that a nice African American without too much style could win a white-majority town's approval; developer Paul Schell (1998 to 2001) was the perfect regent for the city's dot-com gilded age and wore the finest suits I've ever seen on a man; Nickels, who came after Schell, was fat and bought his suits from JCPenney or something, his election largely a reaction to the caviar scent of his unlucky predecessor. Nickels was a pure pol, dropping out of college to work for Rice on the council and hailing from West Seattle, where the 1950s seemed to last to the final years of the century. His Seattle Way was an elevation of process and a bow to thousands of volunteers who had spent years negotiating never-to-be-followed neighborhood plans and bought his bullshit hook, line, and sinker. His execution of this style took place in classic backroom deals and bullying, a Machiavellian level of information control: Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis was quickly nicknamed "the Shark" and reveled in the moniker. The theme by 2009, however, was that process had ruined our chance to build the West Coast's Central Park, instead ceding the whole neighborhood to billionaire Paul Allen; had lost us the Sonics; had worn everybody down until the establishment got the answer it wanted on the monorail; and didn't show up when it snowed for two weeks and business froze to a standstill.

Nickels rose through the system on the hidebound and conservative Democratic district organizations—in a city as Democratic as Seattle, power seekers who would be Republicans anywhere else learn to wear the costume. But the Howard Dean campaign in 2004—and then the Barack Obama campaign in 2008—brought out young and earnest people eager to learn the organizational ropes, people for whom (bless their little hearts) it was fresh. A bland establishment candidate like Mallahan found no safe purchase there. Before Facebook, the pyramid scheme of campaign influence involved mostly political consultants and PR firms and boards of not-too-concerned citizenry and economic development groups and the unions. When I ran, the radical, immigrant-driven unions that have reenergized the labor movement for the past decade had just begun their resurgence. McGinn won the support of the upstarts representing the truly low-income service industry, grocery and hotel workers and janitors, who have nothing to lose.

A decade ago, in Seattle politics, union meant the middle-class unions: the building trades and longshoremen, the firefighters, the police, teachers, and the umbrella (shifted left by recent chair and McGinn supporter Steve Williamson) of the King County Labor Council. Campaigns were afraid to print their own materials—which makes the most sense for a low-budget grassroots campaign—because a crucial secret handshake was the tiny union "bug" on campaign literature printed by a union shop, a matter of protocol that rendered labor's true ideological allies indistinguishable and gave accreditation to anyone who could afford it. Most of these organizations, it goes without saying, endorsed McGinn's opponent this year, as they endorsed mine.

The Municipal League does not endorse but gives individual assessments: Ludicrously, Mallahan, an irregular voter with a nearly nonexistent history of real civic engagement, got top marks ("Outstanding"), while McGinn rated "Good" (the "fuck you" of Muni League rankings). The spineless Washington Conservation Voters has consistently hedged its bets and threw its strong name recognition behind establishment candidates, while the Sierra Club, from which both McGinn and O'Brien sprang, was usually willing to take the risk of supporting candidates who backed an actual pro-environmental agenda, and for this it was considered "fringe." At the top of the power pyramid, fed credibility from below, lay the papers: the Seattle Times and the late Seattle Post-Intelligencer. When they were both still in physical existence and were both making endorsements (the online remnant of the P-I no longer does), they bolstered the authority of each other, the Times' suburban-oriented right-wing editorial board tipping city folk to listen to the P-I, the presence of which softened the umbrage with which the Times' views are now received.

What the papers gave to all this was a daily check-in on the conventional wisdom, and most of what made a candidate win was whether the establishment believed as a whole that he or she could or would win. Without the counterbalance of the P-I this time, the Times' pro-Bush, pro-Hutchison editorial page had no credibility with the voting public. Its editorial writer covering city races, the haughty Joni Balter, is the apotheosis of the Seattle false liberal, making ad hominem attacks on individual council members for their riskier efforts (Licata is a favorite target) with a strongly discernible scent of classism. It is refreshing to see the power of Balter—whom I have witnessed use the presence of her children as a human shield from being taken to task in a public forum—diminish to a shrill sound in the wilderness as far as city politics are concerned. The papers came out every single day; now, sources of information have scattered and require heightened attention.

Information moves faster these days, but is polyglot: Judgment comes slow. The surprising development in this age when high schoolers call handwriting "cursive" is that noncentralized information spurs independent thought. And pollsters still don't reach cell phones. As the actress Parker Posey has pointed out, the crucial thing to remember about the internet is it is not real: When it throws a bad vibe, gets dirty or smelly, insults you or shouts too much, you can click it into oblivion and drown the offending opinion in the fulsome flood of its worldwide web. But you cannot close out a recurring mood or a common dream, and this is why the internet has changed the way democracy works—maybe for the rest of human history.

Like Nickels in 2001, McGinn was in Southeast Seattle late in the campaign, speaking to community groups and churches, his words being translated into Vietnamese and Spanish, Lao and Amharic, the languages of Seattle's newest newcomers. The presence of volunteers drawn aboard during these pit stops gave the venue of his very brief acceptance speech, at the campaign's secondary headquarters off Rainier Avenue and Othello Street, a truly international flavor the night the final results came in. One senses that this actual contact and received help, rather than the usual name-check pandering, will bring these communities deeper into the city's social fabric and power structure. McGinn—and this is perhaps why the pundits as well as most casual observers rated his chances of victory so low—has a way of doing three or four things at once when it looks like he's doing nothing at all.

Among the people in the room for McGinn's acceptance speech that night was Aaron Pickus, the 23-year-old media-relations coordinator for the mayor-elect. A recent college grad (double major in linguistics and political science), he fell into the campaign when he found himself with extra time between his part-time shifts at a radiology clinic. He is so far from the ordinary portrait of an inner-circle city staffer— which he will almost certainly become, after landing a job in McGinn's transition team—that it's wonderfully, joyously laughable. (Pickus was once an intern at The Stranger.) When he returned my call on the weekend before the final tally came in, he was polite and humble. He confirmed for me what I believed had a crucial role in this campaign—the presence, early and wide, McGinn established on Facebook and Twitter. I am a Facebook junkie, but I have never explored Twitter. Tweets were effective for announcing volunteer opportunities and keeping people abreast of developments in the race. But Facebook, Pickus says, "took on a life of its own, with people commenting, tossing up ideas. It was a kind of nonscientific, rolling poll, a 24-hour town hall."

The primary, from a distance, appeared to be a fluke when McGinn came out on top. But look a little deeper: Mallahan, after dropping more than two hundred grand of his own money into his coffers, spent $12.03 for every one of his primary votes; McGinn spent $2.03. Which was a good thing, because Mallahan was poised from the start to raise the big money. He ended up laying down three times McGinn's total expenditure, and losing: McGinn's cost per vote in the general election only went up two cents, to $2.05. Cleve Stockmeyer, an attorney and activist I befriended in the monorail fight and a founder of the nascent Transit Riders Union, puts it this way: "Here's the new math: Mallahan had about 400 $700 donors on average"—the maximum legal individual contribution. "McGinn had about 700 volunteers, 300 of them hardcore. You spend about six months with a Colby Underwood [Mallahan's fundraiser, formerly Nickels's fundraiser] on the phone, massaging those checks out of the people who write them. Everybody knows who they are—there are only about 4,000 of those people. Seven hundred dollars buys you about 2,000 pieces of mail. Or you can just go on Facebook and rely on networks that already exist, that will respond or not to your ideas, and reach at least that many people. So one volunteer is worth one maxed-out donor." Except more than that, because Pickus tells me that McGinn had only about 250 active volunteers.

Election night I ended up—briefly—at McGinn's party on the corner of Pike Street and Harvard Avenue at the Cold-War- nostalgia-themed nightclub the War Room. Most of the people there, 200 perhaps, were in their early and mid-20s. I saw Marco Lowe, Nickels's one-time campaign manager and aide—also 23 when he ran Nickels's first mayoral run but the opposite of an Aaron Pickus. Lowe was wandering alone through the McGinn victory party, unrecognized by most. He must have been there as a supporter. If so, good for him. But the look on his face said he saw the destruction of all that a few thousand people—comfortable, well-connected people who had long compromised themselves and fed great swaths of their lives to the machine—had once planned.

Two nights later, I attended an art opening at Lawrimore Project in the International District for the ingenious and extremely civic art collective SuttonBeresCuller. Walking through the crowd—which felt more like a house party, as events at Lawrimore always do—I did an unscientific poll. Everyone I spoke to was for McGinn, some ecstatic with hope for the city's future. Even the less politically engaged were drawn to him: Eric Fredericksen, curator of the Sodo gallery Western Bridge, said he didn't have time to pay very much attention to the campaign, but saw "a man on a bike, and that really said something to me."

My business partner, the film director Daniel Gildark, told me once—about the worst of the monorail opponents—that there are some people who simply thrive on destroying things, on tearing good and careful efforts down. I recall these foaming goons when they would stalk into the Seattle Monorail Project offices to testify at the agency's public hearings, moving with spitting contempt past the models and images of our dream. That energy—a version of it—will serve the fight against the tunnel. But it is a destructive energy, souring all it touches, and even if and when a groundswell rises to carry their critique of the tunnel project into the mayor's mouth and onto the TV and computer screen (Nickels worked this against the monorail—merely repeating its opponents' distortions catapulted them to the front page), it is vital that the mayor's agenda avoids being swept up in a negation. The possibilities now are too great, and to lose them to a huge distraction—well, it would be better to stand apart, let the fools build their tunnel and let them take the blame when it's half-done and the bill come due.

Of course, the question under every progressive campaign from Obama down to McGinn is when and to what degree will those brave challenges be compromised, played game to larger goals or mere tenure. Let's hope that's not what happens. My heartbeat is steady. As the artist Ben Beres said to me the Thursday after the election, when the outcome of the mayor's race was still uncertain (though not Mike O'Brien's victory, or Pete Holmes's, or Dow Constantine's, to say nothing of Tim Eyman's long-due trouncing or Nick Licata's win of a fourth term over his strongest challenger yet): "This is kind of the greatest thing ever for Seattle."

Under McGinn, Seattle might actually become what it has long liked to think of itself as: a grassroots democracy; a city dedicated to environmental stewardship; young, smart, progressive. I would like to think—it would help me to feel better about the course my life has taken—that McGinn's victory is an aftereffect, at least in part, of the years of work Moon, Stockmeyer, Licata, Dick Falkenbury, Peter Sherwin, Pam Johnson, Knoll Lowney, and I put in. Except that, thanks to time, circumstance, technological change, and a new generation to whom the crisis at hand is plain as day, McGinn actually pulled it off. It might be possible that in the next 8—or 12, or 24—years, we could see a network of bike lanes and paths more extensive than any in the world; sidewalks in the North End; covered bus stops and public restrooms; affordable housing; sustainable jobs; less glitzy shit and more places that honor the pedestrian; a waterfront for human beings where we can look out on the finest urban sunset on earth, hearing and smelling the Salish Sea and meeting its denizens; a rail network connecting with fast buses to form a comprehensive and regular system of regional and local public transit; schools that are the envy of the nation (and a courthouse that doesn't send nonviolent offenders into that darkest stain on our national conscience, the privatized American gulag); clean runoff and plentiful, healthy salmon in Lake Washington; pleasant density here and wild country outside the city; street life (music, street food, arcades for shelter from the rain, skateboarders, etc.).

I'm only back in town long enough to pull together a budget for a feature film—a dark romantic comedy I wrote about Ukrainian internet brides slated to shoot this winter in Kiev and the Crimea. McGinn says one of his first orders of business is to get a rail line along the old monorail alignment from Ballard to West Seattle on the ballot and to build it within the decade. I'm not back in the game: Being an artist is more satisfying than politics ever was, win or lose. But I am suddenly optimistic, after so long believing there was no cause for hope here, and happy for my friends who live in a city that might now begin to match their great dreams.

Howie P.S.: I'm with #15 in the comments.

Climate change: "Let's agree to agree to delay" (with Horsey cartoon)

Chris in Paris (AMERICAblog):

To some degree this is to be expected. The left let this issue completely slip away into the hands of the deniers. Even in the comments of David Horsey's latest, you can see the countdown and then the nutcases who start their usual denier rants.

"Don't Get Palin's Appeal? Try a Little Harder" (Updated)

UPDATE: "If Sarah Palin were running for president..." (Ben Smith):

this is where she’d come: The outskirts of a second city in the conservative heartland of Western Michigan, where thousands gathered Wednesday to see her, shake her hand and have her sign their copies of “Going Rogue.”

And if she were running for president, she’d be doing about what she did Wednesday, under the watchful eyes a half-dozen capable advance hands, veterans of the White House and the McCain campaign, who herded the press and the public into even lines. She had a VIP list for key local conservatives, shuttling them discreetly to the front of the line. She had a few talking points, tailored for the local area, to deliver after she stepped down with a big smile from her big bus, handing baby Trig off to an aide after her four-inch heels hit the sidewalk outside a shopping mall Barnes & Nobles, where she held her first book signing.

“They deserve more credit than they’re getting for the level of early organization that they have,” observed John Yob, a Grand Rapids political consultant who served for a time as political director of John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Jeffrey Feldman (Kos):

Each time I read a diary or a comment that wonders out loud how someone as "stupid" as Sarah Palin could be appealing to anyone, I shake my head in disbelief.

In 2004, this website was clogged up with comments and diaries about another politician most people believed to be "too stupid," to succeed. "How can anyone be a supporter of someone so stupid? Someone who sounds so dumb and has done so many stupid things?"

Then, after that "stupid" guy was re-elected, the Democratic Party went into an identity crisis tail spin.

Have we forgotten all this? Apparently we have.

Still don't get Sarah Palin's appeal? Try a little harder and you will.

"Elites"
Most people who like Sarah Palin have a very strong and well-developed story in their heads about "elites" ruining their lives.

These people see the country as being run by powerful, wealthy, Liberals who maintain their power by giving away opportunity and resources for free to lazy people, poor people and foreigners. According to the story in their heads, these people are "hard working" and "normal," but they have not found success or happiness because the rewards they deserve have been given to someone else.

When these people with this story in their heads hear Sarah Palin they react positively.

When they hear Sarah Palin stumble on her words, botch a policy statement, or otherwise sound unprepared, they do not hear "stupid," they hear "normal."

When they hear Sarah Palin complain about being trashed by the elite liberal media, they do not hear complaining, they hear their own story of being defrauded of their success by powerful people.

These people see Sarah as the kind of person they want to be--a person who is just normal and trying to succeed. And the more Palin gets attacked, the more they feel she understands them and speaks for them.

"Stupid"
Most of the people who flock to Sarah Palin view outward signs of education or intelligence from politicians as weapons used to victimize and defraud them. They do not respect or admire well-spoken Senators, Governors or Presidents--they resent them.

These kinds of people do not follow, understand, nor are they interested in the kind of complexity or subtlety required to discuss policy issues, either domestic or foreign--but not because they do not care about policy. The issue is simply that these kinds of Americans view well-spoken people as manipulators, tricksters, hucksters. When they hear an intelligent elected official, they feel angry, not assured--they feel judged, not informed.

Sarah Palin makes them feel the opposite. When she speaks, she makes them feel included, welcome, accepted.

By speaking as an uneducated policy outsider, Sarah Palin reassures these people that speaking with authority on issues is just a gimmick. What matters--what's really important--is that our leaders do not act like they know more or are better than us.

"Common Sense"
When Sarah Palin says that she believes in "common sense" policy, her supporters hear someone saying that she would do things for the country the way they do things for their family.

"Common sense" to these people is code for "like I do it." What they hear is someone who is against the overly complicated, overly intellectualized ways that Liberal elites force on them. To these people, the reason elected leaders sound complicated when they talk is not to explain complex issues, but to hide the truth.

What is the truth powerful elites are trying to hide that Sarah Palin reveals? The truth is that powerful elites are against them--normal people who work hard--and they are for lazy people, poor people, and foreigners. When Palin talks "common sense," she is saying that she is form the normal people--the people who see themselves as victimized by elites.

Influence
Now, this exact formula was used successfully by George W. Bush to win a governorship and two presidential elections. Sarah Palin has used it, so far, to turn a VP spot on one of the worst GOP Presidential tickets of all time into an A-List political celebrity status.

Whether or not Palin is able to use this formula to win another elections is doubtful, but she can use it to become influential.

While Palin's controversial status makes it very difficult for her to build the coalitions she would need to win an election, she can use her status and her ability to communicate effectively to people in order to endorse or anoint less controversial candidates.

And that is why we cannot afford to waste any more time forgetting what we learned from almost two decades of George W. Bush style communications and electioneering.

If you are one of the people obsessing over how "stupid" Sarah Palin is and how "dumb" her supporters are, then take a step back and force yourself to remember the lessons of 2000 and 2004.

Remember,in particular, that there is a large swath of the American public who sees themselves as victims of the very kind of force you embody when you attack Sarah Palin for lacking intelligence. And those people have money to spend and votes to give.

Sarah Palin probably won't win another election, but we cannot let her lull us into amnesia and forget the kind of political success a person with her attributes and skill set can achieve.

Sarah Palin probably won't win another election, but we cannot let her lull us into amnesia and forget the kind of political success a person with her attributes and skill set can achieve.

Al Gore in Seattle: The Conversation (with audio)

KUOW, with audio:

He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007; today he focuses on global climate change, sustainable investing and a company called Current TV. His new book, "Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis," is a practical guide that calls for us to change the way we think. We'll talk about upcoming Copenhagen climate summit and the sustainable investment company he co–founded.

"Rep. DeFazio: Fire "Timmy" Geithner" (with video)

Sam Stein (HuffPo) with video from MSNBC-ED Show (04:27):

Rep. Peter DeFazio called for the firing of President Barack Obama's top two economic aides on Wednesday for pursuing a recovery plan skewed too heavily towards Wall Street's favor.

The Oregon Democrat told MSNBC's Ed Schultz that he was dismayed with the administration's lack of focus on job creation and insisted it was time to dismiss both White House economic adviser Larry Summers and Treasury Secretary "Timmy Geithner."

"We think it is time, maybe, that we turn our focus to Main Street -- we reclaim some of the unspent funds, we reclaim some of the funds that are being paid back, which will not be paid back in full, and we use it to put people back to work. Rebuilding America's infrastructure is a tried and true way to put people back to work," said DeFazio.

"Unfortunately, the President has an adviser from Wall Street, Larry Summers, and a Treasury Secretary from Wall Street, Timmy Geithner, who don't like that idea," he added. "They want to keep the TARP money either to continue to bail out Wall Street...or to pay down the deficit. That's absurd."

Asked specifically whether Geithner should stay in his job, DeFazio replied: "No.

"Especially if you look back at the AIG scandal," he added, "and Goldman and others who got their bets paid off in full...with taxpayer money through AIG. We channeled the money through them. Geithner would not answer my question when I said, 'Were those naked credit default swaps by Goldman or were they a counter-party?' He would not answer that question."

DeFazio said that among he and others in the Congressional Progressive Caucus, there was a growing consensus that Geithner needed to be removed. He added that some lawmakers were "considering questions regarding him and other economic advisers" -- though a petition calling for the Treasury Secretary's removal had not been drafted, he said.

"[Obama] is being failed by his economic team," DeFazio concluded. "We may have to sacrifice just two more jobs to get millions back for Americans."

Neither the White House or the Treasury Department immediately returned a request for comment.

MSNBC--"CBO: Senate bill covers 94 percent of Americans" (with video) (Updated)

UPDATE: Joel Connelly (seattlepi.com) gets the reaction of our Senators--"Murray and Cantwell: Just Mild About Harry."

MSNBC, with video (02:02):

The Congressional Budget Office now estimates that the Senate health care bill would cover 94 percent of Americans, and reduce the federal deficit by $127 billion in the first 10 years. Msnbc's Tamron Hall reports.

Howie P.S.: The bill contains the "opt out" option for individual states. According to NPR: "The CBO estimated the Senate's legislation would cover 94 percent of eligible individuals. Under the House bill, about 96 percent are covered."

"The Other Mike"

Erica C. Barnett (Publicola):

For all the talk of Mayor-Elect Mike McGinn’s grassroots-driven victory over Joe Mallahan this year, the real story of this year’s local elections is that Seattle voters put not one but two grassroots environmentalists in power. When he takes the oath of office next January, McGinn will be joined at City Hall by City Council Member-Elect Mike O’Brien, an ideological ally, fellow roads and transit crusader, fellow bicylist, and close family friend (their kids often sleep over at each other’s houses).

Together, the two Mikes have the potential to push a strong environmental agenda—light rail expansion, transit-oriented development, density, and green waterfront development—in tandem from within the executive and legislative branches. How well they succeed will be determined not just by each man’s own political prowess, but by their ability to work together and with the council. In some cases—when they disagree, for example, or when O’Brien allies with McGinn against others on the council—their close relationship could actually prove a hurdle.

Although O’Brien is best known locally for his activism in the Sierra Club and his advocacy, with McGinn, against the 2007 roads and transit ballot measure (which would have tied light rail expansion to 182 new miles of highways), nothing in his early biography suggested he would eventually run for a job like city council member.

Apart from a run for school treasurer in the eighth grade (he lost), O’Brien—a Seattle native with the windblown good looks of a ‘70s tennis star—took almost no interest in politics. “I never worked on a campaign. I voted”—for Ross Perot in 1992 and Bill Clinton in 1996—”but I just wasn’t involved or engaged.”

O’Brien recalls that he had one friend in particular who would try to engage him in political arguments, but that he would mostly “repeat my dad’s [Republican] talking points, whereas [my friend] would actually have intelligent, progressive things to say.” That high-school friend, Nick Straley, is still a friend, and actually helped O’Brien with his campaign this year.

Although he cared about the environment—at grad school (UW), he earned a certificate in environmental management along with his MBA, and worked for years as a river guide—O’Brien says his political activity was limited to reading articles about politicians and saying, “I could do better than that.”

All that changed, however, when he took a job as chief financial officer at the Seattle law firm Stokes Lawrence, where Mike McGinn was working his way toward becoming partner, in 1998.

At the time, O’Brien recalls, he was serving as volunteer treasurer on the board of the Pat Graney Dance Company, a well-known local modern dance troupe. When McGinn told him the Sierra Club needed a treasurer, “I thought, ‘The Sierra Club—that would be a lot more interesting than modern dance,” he says. “I told him, ‘I don’t know anything about politics, but I’m happy to sit around the table and make sure the checkbook balances.”

Pretty soon, O’Brien was inviting himself along to candidate endorsement interviews—“I was one of the guys who just sat there and pretended like I was taking notes,” he recalls. Over time, he worked up the confidence to start asking questions, and eventually he was elected to a series of Sierra Club offices, including political chair of the local group and chair of the state chapter.

Around the same time, McGinn pulled out of the Sierra Club to start his green-urbanist group, Great City. In the subsequent roads and transit battle, Great City didn’t take a position, forcing McGinn out of the spotlight. “He was busy doing Great City stuff, and he was like, ‘OK, I need to take a back seat on this,’” O’Brien says. The Sierra Club emerged as the staunchest opponent of the measure, and O’Brien suddenly became the face of the anti-roads and transit campaign.

“For me, just getting up before the cameras—that was pretty weird at first. [McGinn] would give me advice, tell me what worked and what didn’t.”

O’Brien viewed McGinn as a “mentor,” he says—and, as the Mikes’ wives, Julie and Peggy, became personal friends, so did they. “My oldest is a year younger than McGinn’s youngest, so they go to each other’s birthday parties and have sleepovers at each other’s houses,” O’Brien says. “It’s a little scary” to think what will happen to the friendship if the two become political adversaries in the future, he adds. “That’s something that may change.”

McGinn wasn’t available to comment on his relationship with O’Brien, but Transportation Choices Coalition director Rob Johnson says O’Brien developed, both politically and as a public speaker, over the course of the 2007 roads and transit campaign, where Johnson—in a thorny split in the environmental community—was O’Brien’s (and McGinn’s) most frequent public adversary. Johnson (who would teasingly make fun of O’Brien’s ability to get audiences “all misty-eyed” during the campaign) says O’Brien “found his voice, particularly on why he cared so much about the issue, along with the statistics and the confidence to back that sentiment up.

“One of the great things about having Mike on the other side of that campaign,” Johnson adds, “was that we also knew that while we disagreed with each other, it was a purely professional disagreement, not a personal one. I can think of some other folks on the other side of the roads and transit campaign who took our position personally and are still holding on to those grudges.”

•••

After roads and transit was defeated, many, including McGinn, encouraged O’Brien to run for office. “I thought, you know, this was kind of fun, and maybe I’m kind of good at this, and most importantly, I think I made a difference,” O’Brien says. At the time, he had no idea that his campaign mentor would run for mayor—and if he had, he says, he wouldn’t have put much stock in it. “I would have thought, at least I’m viable, and you’re just, you know, good luck,” O’Brien says of McGinn’s chances early on.

Of course, things didn’t turn out that way. Within a few weeks of announcing his run for mayor, O’Brien jokes, “McGinn steals all my volunteers! I was like, ‘You’re the one who talked me into running, now you’re going to jump into the mayor’s seat? I was going to get all this Sierra Club support, and they’re all hanging out with him because mayor is way more interesting.”

Did O’Brien feel overshadowed by his more prominent mentor?

“There was definitely some overshadowing,” he says. “There were days when I’m like, ‘This sucks,’ but I’m also rational. … The rational Mike would say this is a good thing. If I had to pick between me winning and McGinn winning, I would pick McGinn winning.”

At the Central District primary-election forum

In the early days of the campaign, it was far from clear that O’Brien—who, like McGinn, made his opposition to the waterfront tunnel a key issue in the primary—would make it to the general, much less win election to the council. With five opponents, including much-improved three-time candidate Robert Rosencrantz, son-of-Charley Jordan Royer, and Bobby Forch, the only black candidate in the race to succeed the council’s longest-serving black council member, O’Brien’s chances seemed slim at times.

On more than one occasion before the primary, O’Brien remarked that McGinn’s emergence was “sucking all the air out of the room,” making it hard to get media play and contributions. However, by primary night, August 18, O’Brien had pulled far ahead of all the other contenders, with 35 percent to second-place finisher Robert Rosencrantz’s 20 percent. Christian Sinderman, a local consultant who worked for O’Brien opponent David Miller before the primary, attributes O’Brien’s impressive showing in the primary to his association with McGinn; his “ground game,” particularly get-out-the-vote calls from the Sierra Club; and the fact that he was campaigning on a “single compelling issue.”

O’Brien went on to win the general election by a similarly impressive margin—58 to 42—despite (like McGinn) being outspent nearly three to one by Rosencrantz, who piled on with deceptive attack mailers (like the one above) accusing O’Brien of wanting to put 240-foot residential towers in every neighborhood; proposing tolls on neighborhood streets; and wanting to double electric rates.

“One day I was at the farmer’s market, and this woman asked me, ‘Are you Mike O’Brien?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And she said, ‘I don’t know anything about you, but I’m voting for you because I got this mail piece, and it was just disgusting,” O’Brien says. “I think supporters and random people were more disturbed by it than I was.” Sinderman’s theory about why O’Brien won so big, in fact, is that people saw O’Brien’s face all over Rosencrantz’s mailers, thought he looked like a nice guy, and felt sorry for him.

The dirty tactics did cause a rift between Rosencrantz and O’Brien, who had (somewhat famously) made friends during the campaign, frequently carpooling to campaign events and expressing admiration for each other at forums even as they disagreed.

In the end, Rosencrantz’s attack ads didn’t work. He was also widely perceived as more conservative than O’Brien (true: Rosencrantz supports conscience clauses, favors law-and-order tactics, and isn’t a fan of light rail).

At the Great City campaign potluck

Perhaps most important for O’Brien, though, he benefited from his association with McGinn. In addition to their long history, the pair shared a campaign consultant (the Mercury Group). Mercury polled and pushed a similar message (pro-transit, against the waterfront tunnel), while the Mikes had a joint get-out-the-vote effort that energized young and infrequent voters and linked the two as the progressive candidates in their races.

•••

Council freshmen are always at a disadvantage compared to their more seasoned colleagues. O’Brien, like many freshmen who came before him, will head up the public-utilities committee, which isn’t as sexy, powerful, or high-profile as committees like transportation and public safety. However, he does come into office with a distinct (and apparently unprecedented) advantage: His close relationship with the incoming mayor, an office whose relationship with the council has historically ranged from cool to outright hostile.

O’Brien acknowledges that he’ll have a unique in with the mayor’s office. “We’re pretty tightly aligned,” he says. Although that could be an advantage to the council as a whole, which has frequently clashed with McGinn’s predecessor Greg Nickels, “There’s certainly potential that the other eight council members could see me as part of the executive branch and shun me,” O’Brien acknowledges.

However, none of the council members we spoke to said they were worried that the mayor would have a representative in the legislative branch. “Mike is a very thoughtful, reasonable guy, so I don’t think that’s going to be an issue,” council member Tim Burgess says. “I’m hoping we’re all going to have a closer relationship” with the mayor, he adds.

One area where O’Brien’s close relationship with McGinn could help him on the council is a proposal by Burgess to outlaw certain kinds of aggressive panhandling, an idea both Mikes oppose.

“I would like to see fewer panhandlers, for sure, so the question is, what approach do we take? I don’t believe, from an economic perspective, that the law and order thing works.”

O’Brien will join the council with a clear to-do list and a game plan.

The priorities: Expanding access to affordable housing (through density and other land use changes, not new subsidies); redirecting police resources away from petty-crime crackdowns like Burgess’ anti-panhandling proposal; and putting a proposal to expand transit service on the ballot in Seattle.

The game plan: Enlist support from the community before proposing legislation to the council. It’s a strategy O’Brien shares with McGinn, whose campaign relied on volunteer support to spread the word widely about their candidate.

“The thing I do believe in is the kind of grassroots organizing that both our campaigns did and that the Sierra Club did during the [roads and transit] fight,” O’Brien says. “That’s going to be a big component of what I want to do on the council. It’s not going to be trying to get four votes—it’s going to be trying to get 4,000 people in the community to rally around what I want to do.”

Another Seattle Election Autopsy (Updated)

UPDATE: As promised, here are the dets (Publicola-Josh Feit): "Mallahan vs. McGinn: The Inside Story":

Sure, you can go to lots of forums and listen to reporters and random consultants give their 20,000-foot analysis of this year’s mayoral campaign.

But we’ve rounded up the political strategists who actually helped come up with and execute this year’s campaign game plans—Team Mallahan and Team McGinn—to face off one more time.

Come to the Del Rey in Belltown on Monday night November 23 and hear McGinn’s gonzo strategist Bill Broadhead (from the Mercury Group) and sharpshooter Mallahan spokeswoman Charla Neuman explain their strategies, Monday-morning quarterback themselves and each other, and fill you in on how they were reading, playing, and trying to outsmart one another.

What did Team Mallahan think when McGinn made his tunnel reversal? What did Team McGinn think when Mallahan—with the much bigger bank account—dumped another $100K into his own campaign? Why did Mallahan decide to go negative? How did McGinn orchestrate his now-famous field game?

Seattle Channel’s C.R. Douglas moderates. Our own Erica C. Barnett will sit on the panel to give a reporter’s perspective. And the former rival campaigns will tell their own stories and answer your questions.

Del Rey. 2332 1st Ave. in Belltown. Doors open at 5pm. Show starts at 6pm. Free. Cash bar.

MORNINGFIZZ (Publicola):

...Speaking of calendars, mark yours for 6:00 next Monday evening (11/23), when PubliCola will bring in representatives from both sides of this year’s contentious mayoral election (including Joe Mallahan’s indomitable spokeswoman Charla Neuman) for a panel discussion of what strategies (and ads) worked, what didn’t, and what the candidates themselves did right and wrong in the days leading up to the general election.

C.R. Douglas of the Seattle Channel and PubliCola’s Erica C. Barnett will moderate, asking the campaign brains themselves to analyze their two-month showdown.

Downtown location to be announced later today.

GRITtv: "Changing the Jobs Debate, Hendrik Hertzberg, and Revisiting Maine" (with video)

GRITtv with video:

The unemployment number officially hit double digits recently, though the actual truth is that it’s been in double digits for a while. The Nation’s John Nichols , author of Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy calls the unemployment crisis a “social, economic and political threat,” writing of the growing sense of urgency within an administration facing a purported recovery that hasn’t extended to everyday people. Economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy agrees, noting that unemployment is still a crisis for the families affected, who struggle to pay the bills and put food on the table.

Since Obama is convening a jobs summit and soliciting suggestions on how to put people back to work (that don’t involve the dirty word “stimulus”), we had Baker and Nichols put their heads together and talk about ways to create good, meaningful, well-paid jobs and rethink the way Americans look at work.

Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker describes himself as being “aboard the Obama express,” and his new book, ¡OBÁMANOS!: The Rise of a New Political Era, collects his essays on the Obama generation and the way the campaign changed politics. A year into the administration, Hertzberg is still hopeful, though like many progressives he offers criticisms of the way the health care reform fight and others have been conducted.

In Maine, advocates of marriage equality suffered a setback in this past election, where voters overturned a decision by the state legislature to legalize gay marriage. Chase Whiteside and Erick Stoll of New Left Media brought us an inside look at the No On One campaign, from get-out-the-vote training to a rally and candlelight vigil the night before election day. Watch for Part 2 tomorrow!

Though the Bush administration and many other insiders claimed that no one could’ve seen the financial collapse coming, construction workers, whose own pension funds were invested in these companies, knew that there was a housing bubble and feared for their own retirement money. We have video from the Huffington Post Investigative Fund that takes a look at the rating agencies and their future.

16 workers a day die from work-related injuries, according to this latest video from Brave New Films.

Charles Jeffress, former Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration), notes that there are hardly any consequences to employers for failing to comply with guidelines–and with four million injuries on the job each year, it seems that employers have decided that it’s easier to flout the law than to comply.

WSS Cascade Post-Election Media Panel

WSS Cascade:

Post-Election Media Panel--The Washington State Society Cascade invites you for an evening of networking and recapping the 2009 elections! Light appetizers will be provided.

Join local political reporters from Publicola, Seattle Times, Post Globe & Twitter as they share about the local election results, and on how it was covered.

Members $4, non-members $6

November 17th, 2009, 6:30pm - 8:30pm

Del Rey (backroom)

2332 1st Avenue
Seattle, WA 98121-1617
(1st & Battery) (map)

Howie P.S.: The reporters scheduled to attend are Erica C. Barnett, Emily Heffter and Kery Murakami.

"Naomi Klein in Conversation With Michael Moore" (with audio)

The Nation, with audio (33:00):

How is President Obama handling the economic crisis? Who is taking on Wall Street? And who is letting Wall Street take advantage of us? Find out in this exclusive podcast conversation between The Nation's Naomi Klein and documentarian Michael Moore.

Howie P.S.: This conversation was recorded in late September, 2009. Full text here.

Jon Stewart: "Lou Dobbs Goes Rogue" (video)

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Lou Dobbs Goes Rogue
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

vodpod, video (04:44).

Howie P.S.: Amanda Terkel reports "CNN paid Lou Dobbs $8 million to quit."

"The Shock Doctrine" - Official Trailer (video)

E1FilmsCanada, video (01:56):

Drawing surprising connections between market methods and CIA torture techniques developed in the 1950s, the film explores how well-known events of the recent past have been theaters for the shock doctrine, from Pinochet's coup in Chile, to the Tiananmen Square Massacre, to the war in Iraq today.

MSNBC: "ED's Seattle Town Hall" (video)

MSNBC-ED Show, video (08:08).

Howie P.S.: Highlights from Schultz's visit to Seattle's Town Hall. Katrina vanden Heuvel joins ED to discuss the fight for health care reform.

"Wanda Sykes Takes On OBAMA CARE Fear Mongers!" (video)

Crooks and Liars, video (08:58):

November 15, 2009 FOX Wanda Sykes Show---In a hilarious monologue on her second installment of The Wanda Sykes Show, Wanda takes on the Health Care Reform fear mongers and republicans in general... "The only way Republicans will read the Health Care Bill is to rest it on the back of the hooker they're banging down at C Street House!"

"Got a question for Mayor-elect Mike McGinn?"

Andrew (NPI Advocate):

KCTS 9 has just announced that it will be airing the first in-depth post-election interview with newly elected Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn a week from today (Friday, November 20th).

KCTS Connects host Enrique Cerna will be asking McGinn about who he plans to tap for key administrative positions like Deputy Mayor and Police Chief, as well as his plans for tackling the range of challenges he'll face after taking office.

Cerna will also ask McGinn questions sent in by KCTS viewers. Questions may be submitted online at KCTS' website now.

Meet The New Mayor: A KCTS 9 Connects Special will start at 7:30 PM next Friday. For those who can't tune in then to watch, the program will also be made available for streaming and downloading online afterwards.

Incidentally, as of this afternoon, McGinn's lead over Joe Mallahan stands at 6,475 votes (51.04% to 47.84%). It's not a blowout, but it's a much stronger position than the tenuous lead McGinn had on Election Night.

Mallahan conceded the election to McGinn on Monday.

McGinn's win remains the only outcome that the usually-reliable Washington Poll failed to accurately predict. (Last year, the poll got Sound Transit Proposition 1 wrong, but was otherwise correct in forecasting who the winners would be).

Howie P.S.: I missed the above when it first appeared last Friday. Publicola's post about "Vulcan’s Presence" in the McGinn administration is prompting the first pushback to the McGinn takeover. From the comments:

"McGinn is a proponent of cranking zoning while eliminating requirements for on-site parking. That translates into major profits for developers. McGinn was never about neighborhoods, that was just a slight of hand."

"Vulcan has not taken an equitable stance on zoning issues that strive to accommodate affordable housing such as incentive zoning; in fact they have been less-than accommodating in South Lake Union on that issue.

Given that 66 percent of Seattle voters just affirmed their commitment to affordable housing with the passage of the Housing Levy, getting deeply involved with Vulcan folks in city operations really opens McGinn to backlash. His upcoming town hall meetings could get quite interesting.

The McGinn volunteers I’ve met don’t seem like corporate handmaidens – I hope they have the backbone to warn McGinn off on multiple Vulcan appointments no matter what hos personal connections are."

"More than anything else, Mayor McGinn needs to hire people with experience and skills. He got elected on the vision thing. The people he appoints need to do the implementation thing – which requires experience. Management experience. Experience in not only working in local government, but experience in leading.

Of the names listed so far, there aren’t many with experience in managing people and moving parts of an organization."

"That McGinn would even consider placing Vulcanite foot-soldiers McGrady, Fuji or Postman within his administration is a surprise and an affront to everyone who supported him. It would be a clear reversal from his grass roots/anti-establishment campaign and leave the door wide open to criticism that he (McGinn) misled the voters from the onset."

"Why are you all so surprised that McGinn is close to major developers such as Vulcan? I tried to tell a number of voters that McGinn was a friend to powerful development interests and City officials. Sounds like some of you who believed his stance on issues of neighborhood interest and grassroots pose are experiencing some regrets. A number of individuals in the City warned of this outcome, but they were dismissed as NIMBYs and old farts. Enjoy McGinn’s reign all you McGinn voters."

"McGinn is a windy prick. I hope he surrounds himself with some folks who aren’t.

Voluntary furlough for Seattle Council? --"it’s time to wrap it (press conference) up."

Dominic Holden (SLOG):

After accounting for projects saved from the guillotine, the Seattle City Council had an awkward moment at its press briefing on the 2010 budget when council budget chair Jean Godden trumpeted her sacrifice of 10 days pay—and the 10 days pay of her staff—as a voluntary two-week furlough. Standing next to a bubblegum sow of a piggy bank, Godden was making a particularly generous gesture in the downtown library, which barely got back its funding. But what about the other council members, asked Seattle Times reporter Emily Heffter—would they also return some of their salary?

“I would not want to put them on the spot like that,” Godden deflected, but if someone wanted to ask the council members, who were in a phalanx behind her, they could ask them. “I think she just asked them,” I said. Someone else shouted from the back. A long, very silent pause among the people reading and checking out books was broken when City Council Member Jan Drago stormed the podium, took the mic from Godden, and her voice echoed across the floor, “Council Members McIver and I are not taking a furlough, and I think it’s time to wrap it up.”

Indeed, it was probably time to finish. Council members, who make over $100,000 a year, can give back some of their salary, but they probably shouldn’t make their staffers—who make a fraction of that—find out they’re getting a pay cut by reading it in the paper. But if the council wants to bring it up, expect someone to ask the question. Right?

The meat of the press conference was about all the great stuff the council saved from the mayor’s clutches. Mayor Greg Nickels’s proposed budget would have maintained severe cuts to the library, but the council restored 12 branches of the Seattle library system to seven days a week and 60 hours a week. Nickels had proposed only six would go back to week-round service, many of the branches only staying open 35 hours a week. The council also provided $100,000 for homeless services for women, and $950,000 for three progressive anti-crime programs, Communities Uniting Rainier Beach (CURB), Get Off the Streets (GOTS), and Co-STAR, the Court Specialized Treatment and Access to Recovery Services.

"Every time we added something, we had to cut something," said Coucil Member Richard McIver. The council cut from the Office of Policy and Management—originally intended for the council and the mayor but usurped by Nickels—which will be folded in with the next mayor budget's with reduced staff. The council also cut two park rangers.

But the new budget also raises the city's revenue, Council Member Sally Clark pointed out after the press briefing. They restored funding to two parking enforcement officers that Nickels proposed cutting, added five more parking patrol officers—for a total of seven more meter maids next year—and increased the penalty for parking tickets by $4 a pop.

KCTS 9: "Bob Santos, Roberto Maestas and Larry Gossett recall their activism in Seattle" (with video)

KCTS with video (17:31):

They are known as the “Gang of Four”. While one has passed on, three remain as active as ever pushing and prodding for social justice and civil rights. Bob Santos, Larry Gossett, Roberto Maestas and the late Bernie Whitebear will be honored with the YMCA of Greater Seattle’s A.K. Guy Award for their activism, leadership and unique efforts to bring diverse communities together. Enrique Cerna talks with the three living honorees who came together in the late 60s. They recall their activism and remember their friend and fellow activist, the late Bernie Whitebear, who for 30 years headed the United Indians of All Tribes Foundation.

Howie P.S.: H/t to SeattlePostGlobe. KPLU's Florangela Davila produced "Honoring Seattle's Four Amigos," with audio (04:54).

NY Times--NO FAUX: "MSNBC Presses Obama on Campaign Promises"

UPDATE: John Avarosis points out that MSNBC operates much differently than FAUX:

The very fact that Rachel calls her show "liberal" is far more than FOX has ever admitted about its network being conservative. That's the difference - Rachel and Keith are honest and up front about where they're coming from. FOX is not.

But it's far more than that.

1. Rachel and Keith don't routinely lie.
2. They're not bat-shit crazy.
3. Rachel's and Keith's liberal views are not echoed in MSNBC's news coverage. On FOX, the "news" hosts push the same conservative talking points as the "opinion" hosts.
4. MSNBC doesn't just have three hours of liberal programming in the evening. The NYT fails to tells its readers that MSNBC also has three hours of conservative programming in the morning, with former arch-Republican congressman Joe Scarborough. Kind of relevant, since it means that MSNBC splits its partisan programming 50-50. FOX has no liberal hosts, period, and when they did have one, for one hour (Alan Colmes), he had to share his show with an outspoken conservative who wouldn't shut up.

NY Times:

If President Obama happened to glance at “The Rachel Maddow Show” last Monday, he might have winced.

Ms. Maddow pretended to celebrate the passage of a health care overhaul bill in the House, calling it “potentially a huge generational win for the Democratic Party” — but then halted the triumphant music and called it an “electoral defeat.”

The Stupak amendment, she said, was “the biggest restriction on abortion rights in a generation.” Then she wondered aloud about the consequences for Democrats “if they don’t get women or anybody who’s pro-choice to ever vote for them again.” She returned to the subject the next four evenings in a row.

This is how it looks to have a television network pressuring President Obama from the left.

While much attention has been paid to the feud between the Fox News Channel and the White House, the Obama administration is now facing criticism of a different sort from Ms. Maddow, Keith Olbermann and other progressive hosts on MSNBC, who are using their nightly news-and-views-casts to measure what she calls “the distance between Obama’s rhetoric and his actions.”

While they may agree with much of what Mr. Obama says, they have pressed him to keep his campaign promises about health care, civil liberties and other issues.

“I don’t think our audience is looking for unequivocal ‘rah-rah,’ ” said Ms. Maddow, who calls herself a liberal but not a Democrat.

The spectacle of Democrats sniping at one another is not new, but having a TV home for it is. MSNBC — sometimes critically called the “home team” for supporters of Mr. Obama — has even hit upon the theme with a promotional tagline, “pushing back on the president,” in commercials for “Hardball,” Chris Matthews’s political hour.

“Our job is not to echo the president’s talking points,” said Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC. “Our job is to hold whoever’s in power’s feet to the fire.”

But is it good business? MSNBC is projected to take in $365 million in revenue this year, roughly the same amount as last year, when the presidential election bolstered its bottom line. Three years ago, before making a left turn, it had revenue of about $270 million a year. MSNBC’s parent company, NBC Universal, is on the verge of being spun out of General Electric in a deal that would make Comcast its controlling entity.

Gary Carr, the executive director of national broadcast for the media buying agency TargetCast, said the opinions matter less than the ratings they earn. With cable’s prime-time opinion shows, “you’re reaching a lot of people,” he said.

It is certainly reaching the White House. Anita Dunn, the departing White House communications director, calls Mr. Olbermann and Ms. Maddow “progressive but not partisan,” and in doing so, distinguishes them from Fox News, which she considers a political opponent. The MSNBC hosts, she said in an e-mail message last month, “often take issues with the administration’s positions or tactics and are never shy about letting their viewers know when they disagree.”

Ms. Maddow said that apart from an off-the-record meeting between Mr. Obama and commentators that she attended last month, she has heard little from the White House.

Mr. Griffin said, “We heard a whole lot more from the Bush White House.”

MSNBC’s liberal points of view have made the channel an occasional thorn in the side of G.E., but the channel has also fostered a diversity of opinions that people like Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Campaign Change Committee, say were lacking in the past.

“There’s been a huge market void for a long time,” Mr. Green said. Speaking of the MSNBC hosts, he said, “They are creating an environment where progressive thinkers and activists can thrive.”

Ms. Maddow, not surprisingly, agrees. “What looks like the middle of the country ought to look like the middle on TV,” she said in an interview this month.

She paused and added, “Maybe that would have helped us make better policy decisions in the country in the past.”

Sitting down to a midnight dinner in the East Village after her program on a recent Thursday, Ms. Maddow had shed her suit for a T-shirt. Four minutes in, a fan asked for an autograph. “You’re doing great work,” he said while she signed her name.

MSNBC’s political tilt — and Ms. Maddow’s ascension to one of the most influential positions in progressive America — are still starkly new phenomena. A Rhodes scholar with liberal radio roots, Ms. Maddow started to host MSNBC’s 9 p.m. hour on the eve of last year’s presidential election, at a time when MSNBC was wrestling with its political identity. New viewers materialized overnight, peaking at nearly two million a night in October 2008. Without an election to drive viewership, her program averaged 880,000 viewers last month.

As her objections to the Stupak amendment (so named for Representative Bart Stupak, Democrat of Michigan) indicate, much of her work these days involves the Democratic health care overhaul. Ms. Maddow, Mr. Olbermann and Ed Schultz, the channel’s 6 p.m. host, formerly of Air America, have all exhorted Democrats to keep the public option.

Mr. Schultz started a broadcast last month by asking, “Where is the president? I think it’s time to be clear — crystal clear. What does Barack Obama want when it comes to health care in this country? What does he want in the bill?”

Topics often tackled on Ms. Maddow’s program include the relationship between the United States military and politics (something she is writing a book about) and the repeal of the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy toward gays in the military.

Representatives for two gay members of the military, Dan Choi and Victor Fehrenbach, approached Ms. Maddow’s producers about coming out on her show, in March and May respectively. Introducing Mr. Fehrenbach, Ms. Maddow intoned that he was about to be fired “in the shadow of these political promises left unfulfilled.”

Asked why she thought the two men had contacted her producers, Ms. Maddow said, “Maybe it’s because I’m gay; maybe it’s because we’ve covered this issue before on our air.”

Other MSNBC hosts have also objected to some of the president’s policy decisions. In April, Mr. Olbermann, the channel’s best-known voice, urged Mr. Obama to hold members of the Bush administration accountable for what he called the “torture of prisoners.”

“Prosecute, Mr. President,” he said. “Even if you get not one conviction, you will still have accomplished good for generations unborn.”

Ms. Maddow, however, contrasts her channel’s advocacy with the activism conducted, she says, by others on cable news. “We’re articulating liberal viewpoints,” she said at dinner, “but we’re not saying ‘Call your congressman, show up at this rally!’ ”

On her show, she has criticized Fox News for seeming to promote tea party rallies denouncing the administration this year, and the Fox host Glenn Beck, who has promoted a “9/12 Project,” intended, he says, to restore the values that Americans sensed immediately after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“I don’t have a constituency,” she said. “I’m not trying to form a — what would it be? — a ‘9/10’ movement.”

Howie P.S.: I guess MSNBC really doesn't want to be the lefty's FAUX; it says so in The New York Times. The article is wrong about one thing though: Ed Schultz has never been part of Air America and if you listen to his show today, I'll bet you ten bucks he says so.

Naomi Klein: "Copenhagen: Seattle Grows Up" (Updated)

,
UPDATE: More Naomi Klein: "Climate Rage--The only way to stop global warming is for rich nations to pay for the damage they've done - or face the consequences" (Rolling Stone).

Naomi Klein (The Nation):

The other day I received a pre-publication copy of The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle, by David Solnit and Rebecca Solnit. It's set to come out ten years after a historic coalition of activists shut down the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle, the spark that ignited a global anticorporate movement.

The book is a fascinating account of what really happened in Seattle, but when I spoke to David Solnit, the direct-action guru who helped engineer the shutdown, I found him less interested in reminiscing about 1999 than in talking about the upcoming United Nations climate change summit in Copenhagen and the "climate justice" actions he is helping to organize across the United States on November 30. "This is definitely a Seattle-type moment," Solnit told me. "People are ready to throw down."

There is certainly a Seattle quality to the Copenhagen mobilization: the huge range of groups that will be there; the diverse tactics that will be on display; and the developing-country governments ready to bring activist demands into the summit. But Copenhagen is not merely a Seattle do-over. It feels, instead, as though the progressive tectonic plates are shifting, creating a movement that builds on the strengths of an earlier era but also learns from its mistakes.

The big criticism of the movement the media insisted on calling "antiglobalization" was always that it had a laundry list of grievances and few concrete alternatives. The movement converging on Copenhagen, in contrast, is about a single issue--climate change--but it weaves a coherent narrative about its cause, and its cures, that incorporates virtually every issue on the planet. In this narrative, our climate is changing not simply because of particular polluting practices but because of the underlying logic of capitalism, which values short-term profit and perpetual growth above all else. Our governments would have us believe that the same logic can now be harnessed to solve the climate crisis--by creating a tradable commodity called "carbon" and by transforming forests and farmland into "sinks" that will supposedly offset our runaway emissions.

Climate-justice activists in Copenhagen will argue that, far from solving the climate crisis, carbon-trading represents an unprecedented privatization of the atmosphere, and that offsets and sinks threaten to become a resource grab of colonial proportions. Not only will these "market-based solutions" fail to solve the climate crisis, but this failure will dramatically deepen poverty and inequality, because the poorest and most vulnerable people are the primary victims of climate change--as well as the primary guinea pigs for these emissions-trading schemes.

But activists in Copenhagen won't simply say no to all this. They will aggressively advance solutions that simultaneously reduce emissions and narrow inequality. Unlike at previous summits, where alternatives seemed like an afterthought, in Copenhagen the alternatives will take center stage. For instance, the direct-action coalition Climate Justice Action has called on activists to storm the conference center on December 16. Many will do this as part of the "bike bloc," riding together on an as yet unrevealed "irresistible new machine of resistance" made up of hundreds of old bicycles. The goal of the action is not to shut down the summit, Seattle-style, but to open it up, transforming it into "a space to talk about our agenda, an agenda from below, an agenda of climate justice, of real solutions against their false ones.... This day will be ours."

Some of the solutions on offer from the activist camp are the same ones the global justice movement has been championing for years: local, sustainable agriculture; smaller, decentralized power projects; respect for indigenous land rights; leaving fossil fuels in the ground; loosening protections on green technology; and paying for these transformations by taxing financial transactions and canceling foreign debts. Some solutions are new, like the mounting demand that rich countries pay "climate debt" reparations to the poor. These are tall orders, but we have all just seen the kind of resources our governments can marshal when it comes to saving the elites. As one pre-Copenhagen slogan puts it: "If the climate were a bank, it would have been saved"--not abandoned to the brutality of the market.

In addition to the coherent narrative and the focus on alternatives, there are plenty of other changes too: a more thoughtful approach to direct action, one that recognizes the urgency to do more than just talk but is determined not to play into the tired scripts of cops-versus-protesters. "Our action is one of civil disobedience," say the organizers of the December 16 action. "We will overcome any physical barriers that stand in our way--but we will not respond with violence if the police [try] to escalate the situation." (That said, there is no way the two-week summit will not include a few running battles between cops and kids in black; this is Europe, after all.)

A decade ago, in an op-ed in the New York Times published after Seattle was shut down, I wrote that a new movement advocating a radically different form of globalization "just had its coming-out party." What will be the significance of Copenhagen? I put that question to John Jordan, whose prediction of what eventually happened in Seattle I quoted in my book No Logo. He replied: "If Seattle was the movement of movements' coming-out party, then maybe Copenhagen will be a celebration of our coming of age."

He cautions, however, that growing up doesn't mean playing it safe, eschewing civil disobedience in favor of staid meetings. "I hope we have grown up to become much more disobedient," Jordan said, "because life on this world of ours may well be terminated because of too many acts of obedience."

Howie P.S.: Naomi Klein talks about the current economic crisis
with two other authors @ the 2009 Brooklyn Book Festival, video (10:14).