“under a pile of soggy rubbish”

God help us, Susan Paynter was back in the P-I again yesterday, waxing egocentric about her stolen car and the “nearly” 100 responses she had — “including [from] hardened cops” (though it’s not clear how she knew how hard the cops in question were) — asking about her loss of a child-made ceramic heart in the car theft she’s been obsessing over for more than a week now.

She reports on the odd accounting practices of a man with an unlikely name:

These are people such as Rainier Burgdorfer, who calculates the cost of thievery like this:

“I don’t know how much money you make,” he wrote me. “I can save about $100 per week. So, when the ass(bleep) stole my car, it took me about 15 weeks to make enough money to buy a new ski rack, tire chains, seat covers, music, first-aid kit, fire extinguisher, all-season tires and the rest of the stuff … my insurance didn’t cover.”

The way he sees it, the thief robbed him of 15 weeks of his life.

Come on now, does this really add up to “15 weeks of his life” being stolen? Because he decided he had to apply his savings to things like a “new ski rack”? Sure, something was stolen from him — but jeez, did he really have $1500 worth of “stuff” like seat covers? And is using 15 weeks of savings to buy new stuff really amount to being “robbed” of 15 weeks of your “life”? It’s a shame Enron isn’t hiring accountants anymore.

You know an article is going down a particularly rocky road when vague anti-union suggestions get thrown in there, such as:

“Who would be against stronger penalties?” asked Jack Miller. “The Amalgamated Brotherhood of Crack Heads and Speed Freaks International?”

P-I editors: no, I don’t want a family car to be stolen either. But neither do I want to hear a columnist obsess over it along with others. Yes, it sucks that her car was stolen. But should you really let your legislative agenda be dictated by a personal grievance like this? Come on now.

The article ends on a somewhat revealing note:

Almost every e-mail and phone call brought a bonus of support and sympathy. “I really hope you get the ceramic heart back that was made by your son,” wrote Lonnie McCarron, an auto-theft detective from the Colorado Springs Police Department.

I bet that’s our “hardened cop” right there! From Colorado Springs! And they work in auto-theft themselves.

Then, appropriately enough, this horrifyingly self-involved piece ends with a schmaltzy use of the metaphor of a lost heart.

I did, Detective, and thanks for asking. Even if the mechanical prognosis for my hospitalized Prelude turns out to be bleak, at least my heart is back where it belongs.

Jeezus.

Paulo Freire makes an appearance at seattlepi.com

Someone with the unlikley name of “Paulo Freire” managed to get the first comment in on the P-I online discussion about yet-another eminent domain editorial, this one on the Burien case (which frankly, doesn’t sound like the wisest use of eminent domain around.)

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/soundoff/comment.asp?articleID=295500

Posted by paulofreire at 12/11/06 8:58 p.m.

What’s with the P-I’s recent obsession with eminent domain? Has the Institute for “Justice” kidnapped a member of the publisher’s family, demanding two letters and one editorial a week on eminent domain?

If your editorial board were dedicated to good urban planning with the same dedication you have to property rights, I’d have more sympathy. But come on already, enough with the eminent domain.

A Vanity Publisher?

Has the Hearst media conglomerate transformed the Seattle P-I into a vanity press?

What else are we to conclude from Susan Paynter’s column in the paper today, where she talk at length about how sad it is that her car was stolen. Oddly, she says that the police are doing a good job, as is the city attorney, as is the county prosecutor’s office. Thefts are going down, she reports. But the Legislature needs to take action, she says — because, I guess, *her* car was stolen.

But what action does she want? That, she doesn’t say. No room, I guess, after all the details about how much she liked her poor old car, and how serious a problem car theft is, because, well, her car was just stolen, so it must be very serious indeed.

In Paynter’s defense, she does describe herself as being “like a plaintive holiday caroler” — but remind me again which holiday carols are “plaintive”? I thought they were pretty much all happily describing the birth of Jesus. Oh wait, it’s not the *carols* that are plaintive, it’s the *carolers*. And the carolers are probably plaintive because they got their cars stolen!

What’s next from the vanity-press department of the P-I? Will Joel Connelly eat a moldy strawberry and call for legislative action? Or will Paynter blow all her money on an ebay fraud and beg for the Governor to solve this serious problem? I can hardly wait.

A Tyrannical Communist Majority?

The P-I on Sunday printed a letter by one Edwina Johnston, responding to my letter (which was responding to their editorial — this is getting a little meta, isn’t it) on eminent domain & community renewal. In this letter, it’s recommended to me that I “read the Constitution” (by which she actually means the Bill of Rights — a pedantic distinction, sure, but she started it). She goes on to make a distinction between eminent domain for “use” and for private benefit, which seems somewhat off-point, both in regard to my letter and the larger debate.

It gets better, though:

The Constitution was written to spell out the rights of citizens and to protect them from the power of the government. A government that elevates the “common good” above “individual rights” is a communist government. In our republic, the individual’s right is protected from the tyranny of the majority.

The tyranny of a communist majority?! Where, exactly, has this been a threat?

A quick google search reveals that Johnston is involved with reactionary property rights groups and even wrote a guest column in the Seattle Times in support of I-933 and her case was cited by John Carlson in the King County Journal. Her issue: she can’t fully exploit the imagined value of the 30 acres she purchased in Preston “to retire on.”

So real estate wasn’t a secure retirement investment for her? Shocker, that.

A good opponent to draw out, I think.

My domain in more eminent, take 2

Update (11/29): The Seattle P-I prints my letter and with only minor edits!

To the editors:
In your editorial opposing the use of eminent domain to keep Southeast Seattle affordable, you suggest there’s a need for community involvement, but don’t suggest how else to make this happen. A blue ribbon panel, perhaps? Or maybe a toothless neighborhood plan?

The basic principle of eminent domain is that the common good can take precedence over private interests. This is hard to object to – unless, I guess, you own blighted property and want to hold on to it. But even then, you’d receive fair compensation. So who loses?

Sure, area property owners may want to take another spin on the real estate roulette wheel, hoping to hit another jackpot. But they’re already benefiting greatly from public funds and attention to the area—from light rail to rezoning, and beyond. The rest of us deserve something in return: to help make sure there’s room for everyone in Southeast Seattle.

A community renewal agency with eminent domain powers is one of the few tools available with the teeth to give the public a real voice in the process, as equals with private developers and property owners. And I suspect that this is at the heart of the objections to the plan.

My domain is more eminent than yours

The P-I on Sunday takes a strong and strongly misguided position on those use of eminent domain for community renewal. No two ways about this:

But the city’s role must be limited. Forget using the power of eminent domain to acquire, assemble and sell properties for redevelopment.

Why such strong objections to the use of eminent domain? There’s nothing more American than property rights, I guess.

“No one should be denied access to the medications they need”

In the P-I today, in an article about the expansion of Wal-Mart’s $4 generic prescription program to Washington State.

“No one should be denied access to the medications they need, and this program is a big step in moving our customers and communities toward access to affordable medicines,” Wal-Mart Chief Executive Lee Scott said in a statement.

Astonishingly, the article fails to mention that the “no one” in Lee Scott’s statement does not include the company’s thousands of employees nationwide who have no health insurance. The piece mentions that “critics” call the $4 program a “publicity stunt” — but what press release isn’t a publicity stunt when you’re the world’s largest private employer? And the article doesn’t get to the heart of more crucial criticism: job one for the company ought to be providing its own employees with health care, including prescription drug coverage.

But heaven forbid the mainstream press talks directly about workers. As usual, it’s all consumers, all the time. (ok, not all the time — sometimes they speak as investors instead.) So the piece is organized around what drugstore competitors will do in response.

The answer: basically, nothing. Confirming that the program in fact is pretty much a publicity stunt.

Against blocking the halting?

Today’s Seattle P-I on Dave Reichert’s win in the 8th Congressional District:

“As the UW’s Jones observed, “He was able to distinguish himself from the Republicans on issues that mattered to that district” by voting for federal money for stem cell research, against Arctic oil drilling and against blocking the halting of life support for the terminally ill Terry Schiavo.”

Read that last clause again:

“against blocking the halting of life support for the terminally ill Terry Schiavo”

There must be a better way to write this instead of the triple or quadruple negative (depending on whether you consider “terminally ill” to be a negative)! I’m not sure if it’s even possible to parse that clause as written at normal reading speed, unless you already know what Reichert’s position on the issue was — in which case all you actually need to read is “Schiavo.”

The issue itself is not what’s complicated. After all, when this was a hot issue, most Americans had strong opinions about it. So no doubt, the issue is completely understandable. The problem is, it’s far easier to understand than it is to write. We think about “halting of life support” as a single concept, but on the page, it’s not so compact.

Complexity is fun to distill, sprawling phrases rewarding to contain. I’d suggest:

“..and opposing efforts by Republican leaders to keep terminally ill Terri Schiavo on life support, against the wishes of her husband.”