I just voted the most liberal ballot I’ve ever cast. Of course, living in Seattle in an off-year election, that’s not saying much; pretty much all the choices are between “liberal” and “more liberal”.

Occasionally, though, we have the opportunity to vote against some neo-conservative type.

So it’s with happiness that I bring you my advisory ballot; here’s how I say everyone should vote this year.

I-1033… this one, on my ballot, was easy to miss. The ballot is divided up into three columns. The first column is all directions on how to fill out the ballot and put it into the super-duper-secret ballot envelope and so forth… except for at the very bottom, in smaller print, is the first actual thing I had to vote on.

Initiative 1033 is yet another brainchild from that asshole Tim Eyman. Eyman has become moderately wealthy by running anti-tax, anti-government initiatives. He got nailed by the state Public Disclosure Commission a few years back for mixing up contributions, not reporting the tens of thousands of dollars he paid himself in salaries, and so forth.

Anyway, this initiative would roll back revenue greatly. It sounds reasonable- it limits tax revenue to that of annual inflation and population growth. Sounds smart, right? Means we spend enough right now.

Except… what if our population changes? For example, our schools exist primarily on state money. What if the percentage of children in the population goes up significantly and we need to spend more money on schools than we do today? Sorry, out of luck, I-1033 would prevent it.

Or what if our state’s infrastructure is crumbling (which it is in many places) or you have to lay out significantly higher amounts of money for a few years or a decade to, for example, build a new 520 bridge? Sorry, out of luck, you can’t spend more money.

I-1033 is a bad idea. Vote against it.

Next up is Referendum 71. This question is simple: Is it okay for gay couples, lesbian couples, and certain senior citizen couples to register as domestic partners? And by doing so, for them to get all the state rights and responsibilities that married people get?

Well, of course it is. It’ll actually promote healthier relationships amongst gay folks, it’ll help protect their children, it’ll help out senior citizens who right now don’t get married because they’d lose a bunch of money in pensions. It’s basic fairness because it gives gay/lesbian couples the same access to the laws as straight couples instead of blocking them out because they’re gay.

The anti-71 forces want you to believe this is about the end of civilization. Gosh, if gays are allowed to marry, then marriage will be ruined!!!!

Of course, when you ask them how that will happen, they don’t have any answer; they just spout that marriage has always been a man and a woman (which is false, by the way) and obviously it’ll be Really, Really Bad if teh gays get to get married.

Yet the last bit of the ballot question says “…except that a domestic partnership is not a marriage.” (Well, it ought to be, but one step at a time.)

Vote for basic fairness and equality. VOTE YES ON R-71.

Next up come a bunch of boring King County shite, a bunch of charter amendments. Vote for all of them and wonder why every goddamn ballot seems to have amendments to the King County Charter. (Answer: It’s terribly written.)

King County Executive. Ahh, finally, a sneaky conservative trying to pretend that she’s just an outsider! Susan Hutchison is a Republican who, thanks to us passing a law making all county offices non-partisan, doesn’t have to admit to it. She got canned from KIRO News some years back. She says it was because they didn’t like her because she was old and not as attractive as the younger babes, and filed a lawsuit over it.

I find this somewhat ironic because she was a relatively shitty newscaster (not bad at reading the teleprompter, but not really much of a news reporter and not well educated) and mostly got her job for her looks when she was younger. Live by the sword, die by the sword, Susan.

Anyway, she donates gobs of money to Republicans, is endorsed by a bunch of them, and is truly a conservative in the George W Bush mold. She sucks.

Vote instead for Dow Constantine. He’s a reasonably nice guy; he can be a bit of a tool sometimes, but so can I, and he’d be a hell of a lot better as County Executive than Susan Hutchison. (So would I, for that matter, but Dow needs your vote more than me.)

County Assessor… one of those jobs nobody really gives a shit about until they get their taxes, at which point they say “WTF? I owe HOW much?” The reality is that the assessor doesn’t have nearly as much latitude to change those taxes as they pretend they do, because it’s mostly a matter laid out in the law with relatively little discretion.

That means that assessor is a job that’s all about running the office well, and Bob Rosenberger is the man. Vote for him. That is all.

The Port of Seattle is probably the most powerful elective body that nobody really gives much of a shit about, and we all should. The commissioners over the years have sucked and the Port is pretty crappily run. Therefore, I encourage voting for anyone who’s different, in the hopes that they’ll fix the goddamn thing.

Unfortunately, since the job of Port Commissioner pays jack squat, it doesn’t draw very good candidates. Here’s who I voted for:
Rob Holland
Max Vekich

I’m not even going to boldface those because the odds are that the Port will run about the same, meaning the staffers who work there will continue to make most of the big decisions early and then influence the commissioners to the point where they are puppets anyway.

Seattle Mayor. I miss Greg Nickels. He pissed a lot of people off but dammit, some stuff started to get done slightly faster under his reign than normal in everyone’s-gotta-have-their-say-Seattle. Plus he’s a big M’s fan like me.

Unfortunately, Greg got knocked out in the primary. Now we’ve got Mike McGinn running against Joe Mallahan.

McGinn is way better, except that he vowed to try and kill the Alaskan Way Viaduct being replaced by a deep-bore tunnel. I think that’s stupid, we need something there and the tunnel is the best choice and the fact that it’d probably bump my real estate values by a couple hundred grand has NOTHING AT ALL to do with this outlook. Trust me.

But now McGinn, who’s a very lefty-liberal type (he even rides a bike everywhere… seriously) says that since it pretty much looks like the tunnel is a done deal, he’s just going to work to make it the best deal he can for Seattle, even though he still thinks it’s a really bad idea and he’ll kill it if he can.

A lot of people think this position change is flip-flopping pandering to the voters. Who cares, it’s smart and recognizes that the odds are that the big business interests won’t let the tunnel get killed anyway, so he’s making the right call. It’ll happen, even though he doesn’t want it to.

Vote for Mike McGinn for mayor.

After that we have Seattle City Attorney. The present attorney, Tom Carr, is running for re-election. He had a drunk dad and has some serious issues over it, which wouldn’t be worth mentioning except that he’s using the office of City Attorney to work out his daddy issues. In short, he’s a prick and needs to go, so vote for Pete Holmes.

Seattle City Council… Richard Conlin should be running for mayor. He’s not, so vote to re-elect him to council.

Sally Bagshaw is okay. Vote for her.

Nick Licata is a big favorite among Seattle lefty liberals. Personally, I’ll always hold his positions against working to keep the Sonics in town against him, so I’m voting for Jesse Israel, but I could live with it if Licata wins election again; most of his positions are decent. No boldface, pick ‘em yourself on this one.

Robert Rosencrantz is running for city council… again. He’s a conservative prick. Vote for Mike O’Brien.

I actually voted against the low-income housing levy extension. This sounds weird but I don’t think it’s a wise choice right now; instead what we should do is encourage housing density and create/enforce strong regulatory controls on the quality of housing. The reason why is simple: Low-income housing will continue to exist. There’s still a market for it. I think Seattle’s a great city but once in a while we get too liberal and spend too much money on these kinds of projects (and “projects” is the right word for housing); dial it back a notch here and vote no.

For Seattle School Directors, vote for Kay Smith-Blum and Betty Patu.

There you go. Everything you need to know.

Looks to me like something out of a movie plot- a guy is part of a giant scam that apparently nets him billions. Later, he turns up dead in his swimming pool. Foul play?

You read this and tell me it sounds normal…

I think someone decided to take justice into their own hands. We’ll hear more about this, I bet.

Bono, the lead singer of the rock band U2, is a big, big fan of America. U2’s music has often used American themes and their album “Rattle And Hum” was all about America and the blues. Bono has gotten more and more involved in work to relieve suffering in desperately poor parts of Africa and the rest of the world over the past several years, and he writes about the Nobel Prize going to President Obama…

Rebranding America

(by Bono, from NY Times, Oct 18, 2009)

A few years ago, I accepted a Golden Globe award by barking out an expletive. One imagines President Obama did the same when he heard about his Nobel, and not out of excitement.

When Mr. Obama takes the stage at Oslo City Hall this December, he won’t be the first sitting president to receive the peace prize, but he might be the most controversial. There’s a sense in some quarters of these not-so-United States that Norway, Europe and the World haven’t a clue about the real President Obama; instead, they fixate on a fantasy version of the president, a projection of what they hope and wish he is, and what they wish America to be.

Well, I happen to be European, and I can project with the best of them. So here’s why I think the virtual Obama is the real Obama, and why I think the man might deserve the hype. It starts with a quotation from a speech he gave at the United Nations last month: “We will support the Millennium Development Goals, and approach next year’s summit with a global plan to make them a reality. And we will set our sights on the eradication of extreme poverty in our time.”

They’re not my words, they’re your president’s. If they’re not familiar, it’s because they didn’t make many headlines. But for me, these 36 words are why I believe Mr. Obama could well be a force for peace and prosperity ‘ if the words signal action.

The millennium goals, for those of you who don’t know, are a persistent nag of a noble, global compact. They’re a set of commitments we all made nine years ago whose goal is to halve extreme poverty by 2015. Barack Obama wasn’t there in 2000, but he’s there now. Indeed he’s gone further ‘ all the way, in fact. Halve it, he says, then end it.

Many have spoken about the need for a rebranding of America. Rebrand, restart, reboot. In my view these 36 words, alongside the administration’s approach to fighting nuclear proliferation and climate change, improving relations in the Middle East and, by the way, creating jobs and providing health care at home, are rebranding in action.

These new steps ‘ and those 36 words ‘ remind the world that America is not just a country but an idea, a great idea about opportunity for all and responsibility to your fellow man.
All right … I don’t speak for the rest of the world. Sometimes I think I do ‘ but as my bandmates will quickly (and loudly) point out, I don’t even speak for one small group of four musicians. But I will venture to say that in the farthest corners of the globe, the president’s words are more than a pop song people want to hear on the radio. They are lifelines.

In dangerous, clangorous times, the idea of America rings like a bell (see King, M. L., Jr., and Dylan, Bob). It hits a high note and sustains it without wearing on your nerves. (If only we all could.) This was the melody line of the Marshall Plan and it’s resonating again. Why? Because the world sees that America might just hold the keys to solving the three greatest threats we face on this planet: extreme poverty, extreme ideology and extreme climate change. The world senses that America, with renewed global support, might be better placed to defeat this axis of extremism with a new model of foreign policy.

It is a strangely unsettling feeling to realize that the largest Navy, the fastest Air Force, the fittest strike force, cannot fully protect us from the ghost that is terrorism …. Asymmetry is the key word from Kabul to Gaza …. Might is not right.

I think back to a phone call I got a couple of years ago from Gen. James Jones. At the time, he was retiring from the top job at NATO; the idea of a President Obama was a wild flight of the imagination.

General Jones was curious about the work many of us were doing in economic development, and how smarter aid ‘ embodied in initiatives like President George W. Bush’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief and the Millennium Challenge Corporation ‘ was beginning to save lives and change the game for many countries. Remember, this was a moment when America couldn’t get its cigarette lighted in polite European nations like Norway; but even then, in the developing world, the United States was still seen as a positive, even transformative, presence.
In an asymmetrical war, he said, the emphasis had to be on making American foreign policy conform to that formula.

Enter Barack Obama.

If that last line still seems like a joke to you … it may not for long. Mr. Obama has put together a team of people who believe in this equation. That includes the general himself, now at the National Security Council; the vice president, a former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; the Republican defense secretary; and a secretary of state, someone with a long record of championing the cause of women and girls living in poverty, who is now determined to revolutionize health and agriculture for the world’s poor. And it looks like the bipartisan coalition in Congress that accomplished so much in global development over the past eight years is still holding amid rancor on pretty much everything else. From a development perspective, you couldn’t dream up a better dream team to pursue peace in this way, to rebrand America.

The president said that he considered the peace prize a call to action. And in the fight against extreme poverty, it’s action, not intentions, that counts. That stirring sentence he uttered last month will ring hollow unless he returns to next year’s United Nations summit meeting with a meaningful, inclusive plan, one that gets results for the billion or more people living on less than $1 a day. Difficult. Very difficult. But doable.

The Nobel Peace Prize is the rest of the world saying, “Don’t blow it.”

But that’s not just directed at Mr. Obama. It’s directed at all of us. What the president promised was a “global plan,” not an American plan. The same is true on all the other issues that the Nobel committee cited, from nuclear disarmament to climate change ‘ none of these things will yield to unilateral approaches. They’ll take international cooperation and American leadership.
The president has set himself, and the rest of us, no small task.

That’s why America shouldn’t turn up its national nose at popularity contests. In the same week that Mr. Obama won the Nobel, the United States was ranked as the most admired country in the world, leapfrogging from seventh to the top of the Nation Brands Index survey ‘ the biggest jump any country has ever made. Like the Nobel, this can be written off as meaningless … a measure of Mr. Obama’s celebrity (and we know what people think of celebrities).

But an America that’s tired of being the world’s policeman, and is too pinched to be the world’s philanthropist, could still be the world’s partner. And you can’t do that without being, well, loved. Here come the letters to the editor, but let me just say it: Americans are like singers ‘ we just a little bit, kind of like to be loved. The British want to be admired; the Russians, feared; the French, envied. (The Irish, we just want to be listened to.) But the idea of America, from the very start, was supposed to be contagious enough to sweep up and enthrall the world.

And it is. The world wants to believe in America again because the world needs to believe in America again. We need your ideas ‘ your idea ‘ at a time when the rest of the world is running out of them.

(Bono is the lead singer of the band U2 and a co-founder of the advocacy group ONE.)