Catastrophe

Like billions of others, our family has been following the mounting death toll from the Asian tsunami with horrified fascination. My wife and I donated to the relief effort last night, and both sons more to the relief effort than the government has, and I'm sure the same is true in the U.S., which is never stingy in cases like this.

As usual, the people are out in front of their leaders. Expect more of the same in future large disasters.

Once was enough

As even folks outside Washington are dimly aware, our state has been in the throes of the closest gubernatorial election anywhere, ever. Republican Dino Rossi led the election-night tally by 261 votes. A mandatory machine recount shaved his lead to 42 votes. Then a statewide hand recount turned up enough new votes in King County (the Seattle area) to tip it to Democrat Christine Gregoire by 129 votes.

While excitable types are calling this another Florida 2000, that's not the case. It's just a very close election. There have been no signs of irregularities, no butterfly ballot, no hanging chads, no dark machinations.

Now Rossi is calling for a Ukrainian-style revote, on grounds that the close outcome will be "shrounded in suspicion." Suspicion of what, exactly? He doesn't say.

I voted for Rossi -- not out of any love for Republican real-estate developers, but because Gregoire has been a sloppy manager as state attorney general and has an ugly tendency to blame underlings for her mistakes -- but he's out of bounds here. This isn't a stolen election, just a very close one. And close doesn't matter: In our system, if you're ahead by one vote, you win.

When Gregoire's final, 129-vote margin is certified today, Rossi should concede ... and try again in four years, if no more attractive Republican emerges. Based on past form, Gregoire will have a few blunders to answer for by then.

Nous desirons un pont nouveau

If you live in Seattle, you know all about the horrible traffic on highway 520, an old floating bridge across Lake Washington, which separates the bright lights of Seattle from the jobs and good schools of its Eastside. The bridge has only two lanes each way, and commuters approaching the bridge back up for miles in stop-and-go traffic.

Everyone knows the 520 bridge needs to be replaced, but in true Seattle fashion, the powers that be can't decide how to do it. Last I heard, they were leaning in favor of a new bridge with three lanes each way that would cost $6 billion or so and couldn't possibly be built before 2012 (not counting lawsuits).

So we can only envy France, which just removed a traffic bottleneck between Paris and the sunny south with a beautiful new bridge at Milau. It's 1,125 feet tall, it's gorgeous, it cost only $400 million ... and they built it in three years.

Hey, France! Can Seattle please borrow your engineers?

Blue city

I think I've discovered a new indicator of red vs. blue neighborhoods: Christmas lights.

Out in the reddish 'burbs of Seattle, where I live, at least every other house is gaily festooned with the latest in Christmas yardwear: white icicle lights (the sure sign of similarly colored yuppies), woven net lights and, God help us, giant inflatable Santas, reindeers and such, now on sale at Home Depot for $39.99.

But when I drive into town to catch the blues, I'm struck by how few houses have Christmas decorations of any kind. Occasionally you'll see a tree in a window, or a modest string of lights on a porch. But most of the houses are dark. There is no joy in Drizzleville this year.

What's going on? Hypotheses:

A. Jim McDermott's constituents are too depressed by Kerry's loss to decorate. Christmas is cancelled for the duration.

B. The houses aren't theirs -- I have to drive on main drags like 85th St. to get to friends' houses, and only renters live on main drags. Renters don't decorate.

C. Houses in Seattle contain no children, and there is a strong correlation between the presence of children and Christmas decorations.

D. Conscientious Seattle greens oppose Christmas decorations because they use electricity and therefore are directly responsible for the death of baby seals in the Arctic, or baby penguins in the Antarctic, or coral bleaching, or something.

While all of the above are probably true to some extent, my money's on C: No kids = no Christmas lights. Many Seattle neighborhoods are amazingly devoid of children. And, as we all know, neighborhoods with no kids are blue -- and neighborhoods with kids are red.

So drive down your street. If tasteful, energy-conserving restraint rules, you are in blue America. If every eave is dripping with candlepower, you are in red America. You read it here first.

Disclaimer: Our front yard is dripping with Christmas lights -- but they're the new, energy-conserving LED lights that consume next to no juice and feature this amazing electric blue that people stop in front of our house to ask us about. So we're closet greens in red country. My! It's a rainbow coalition out here. Would that Seattle were so diverse.

The real world

I posted the following at a blog that asks: How can the left get through to the right? As an erstwhile acid-dropping rad, I suggest this isn't the real issue. Intelligence does not skew left of center. If you think otherwise, you really need to get out more.

I work at a large software company where the average employee is at least as bright and intellectually rigorous as the average tenured professor I encountered during my undergraduate years. The dominant political culture ranges from Republican to libertarian, with nary an evangelical in sight.

I have observed a pronounced tendency for my left-leaning friends to segregate themselves in occupations -- e.g. the public sector, subsidized arts, NGOs, journalism and academia -- where market forces and objective performance standards apply weakly, if at all. The inhabitants of this mystic realm often mistake it for the real world. Not so.

The real world is tougher, works harder and is even more competitive than yours. And it earns the money you spend. I respectfully suggest that you have more to learn from it than it has to learn from you.

Five years later

Back when I was in the news business, I worked for a brilliant editor who detested anniversary journalism: the tiresome rehash of an event n years later. It's artificial and subjective, and generally reveals more about the agenda of those who cover it than about the original event.

So it was with the Seattle Times' coverage of the fifth anniversary of the anti-WTO riots in Seattle: 20 inches or so of meaningless prose -- almost an inch per person who turned out at a tiny rally in Westlake Park. It wasn't even about the WTO -- the face-paint crowd's bogeyman of the moment is, of course, the Iraq war. As one aging boomer, Lisa Morrow, told the Times' gullible Sara Green, "The WTO puts profits ahead of human well-being, and the Iraq war is pretty much doing the same thing."

Pretty much, yeah. The U.S. is easily up a trillion or two on the war so far, right? Oh, Halliburton. Which, as everyone knows, secretly drives our foreign policy through the awesome power of vice-presidential nostalgia. Silly me to have forgotten.

Well, the idiots will never learn, but you'd think a newspaper might. Nope. The Times' story buried the lede -- the humiliatingly tiny turnout -- and instead rehashed attendees' rhetoric. The jump hed said "Past battle honored." The mess here in 1999 wasn't a battle, it was a riot of deluded anarchists, and nothing about it was, or is, worthy of honor.