In the last issue of ETS!, I wrote about the need to identify candidates for the 2006 US midterm elections who will prioritize both ending the war in Iraq and taking action on global warming in their platforms. How to carry out that lofty agenda? There are a number of progressive websites already keeping track of which particular US House and Senate races could yield pro-peace and pro-environment victories. To begin with, the blog RemoveRepublicans.com has a convenient sidebar on the Senate races, indicating which seats are safe and which are contested.

To choose an example, California Democrat Dianne Feinstein is considered by RemoveRepublicans.com to be a sure victory, with (so far) one very weak Republican opponent. But she's also being challenged by Todd Chretien, an antiwar Green Party candidate who helped launch last year's successful San Francisco ballot initiative banning military recruiting on school grounds. Chretien's not likely to beat Feinstein, but significant support for his candidacy could force Feinstein to reconsider her support for the Iraq War. (And on Jan. 28, Cindy Sheehan announced she's considering running against Feinstein as a Democrat. Go Cindy go!)

Here in Washington, while Maria Cantwell has earned progressive credentials for her recent ANWR victory, she's still unfortunately a hawk: On Jan. 19, Cantwell said publicly she still has no regrets over her vote to authorize the Iraq War. Like Feinstein, Cantwell's being challenged within the Democratic Party for her Iraq stance, in this case by Mark Wilson (votemark.org), who, among other great progressive stances, pledges to "direct 50 percent of weapons spending to conversion from fossil fuels to renewable energy." Like Todd Chretien, such an uncompromising progressive is not likely to go far within the Democratic Party machine, but his presence in the race, if Cantwell's Republican challenger is weak enough, could force Cantwell to support more progressive ideas in her platform as November approaches.

ETS! readers are encouraged to share similar info on key US House and Senate races in the coming months. Send your e-mails to editorial@eatthestate.org. Awaiting your replies... --Jeff Stevens

Tim Eyman has announced that his organization will attempt to put on the fall ballot a referendum to overturn HB 2661, the historic gay rights bill that passed the state legislature Friday and that Christine Gregoire is expected to sign into law on Tuesday.

Calling his measure "Let the Voters Decide," Eyman is studiously avoiding mentioning the content of the bill--only that he wants to overturn it.

With the Washington State Supreme Court set to rule at any time on the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (barring gay marriage), this sets up as a critical season for determining the future of gay rights. Almost a decade ago, in 1997, a state-wide gay rights initiative, I-676, lost badly at the polls. It will take a lot of hard work to ensure that this doesn't happen again. --Geov Parrish

The chief Justice Department investigator in the Jack Abramoff corruption scandal abruptly resigned last week--because he has been nominated for a federal judgeship by President Bush.

Bush, of course, insists it's all routine and has nothing to do with the fact that Abramoff's ties to the White House are a lot closer and more complex than the White House has been willing to admit. It's just a coincidence that Noel Hillman was in a position to make Bush's life very uncomfortable, and that Hillman's removal sets the investigation back while someone new is brought in and brought up to speed in leading the inquiries.

It almost would be believable--if Bush had not done exactly the same thing once before. In 2002, when federal investigators were looking into Abramoff's role in a Guam corruption scandal, Bush replaced the long-time acting US attorney leading the probe, and the investigation died with his removal.

This time, the probe involves Bush himself, as well as Executive Branch figures and a whole barrelful of (mostly Republican) Congressmen and their aides. He's not just flexing his political muscle as a favor--he's trying to save his own ass, and his party's, in a scandal that has the potential to rip the lid off of Capitol Hill.

Bush won't destroy the investigation this time--but he has served notice that he will try. And that should tell us all we need to know about how guilty he and his political patrons are in this mess, morally and legally. --G.P.

Neither of the Seattle dailies covered the state Senate hearing on various anti-initiative bills on 1-26-06, but the Spokane Spokesman-Review did. And in the process, they captured a lovely quote from Seattle's Sen. Ken Jacobsen, who is the sponsor of a bill to ban initiatives and also the sponsor of bills on various burning issues like making the Garry Oak the state's official oak tree and requiring first responders to save pets in case of disaster. In defending his bill to ban initiatives on Thursday, Jacobsen, claiming that initiatives "undermine the republican form of government," added:

"If people don't like decisions I make in a representative form of government, then don't re-elect me."

Say, that's a mighty fine idea, Ken. Someone needs to be held up as an example of what happens when liberal Democratic legislators treat their seats like permanent sinecures, stop caring about the best interests of their constituents, and then have the gall to try to disenfranchise voters who want to do the jobs they've failed to do. You're as fine an example as any.

How 'bout it? Any of you readers live in Jacobsen's district (the 46th, in North Seattle)? Wanna take him on? He's up for re-election this year....--G.P.

Sally Clark is your new Seattle city councilwoman, at least until November if not beyond. I had my money on Clark at the beginning, as just the sort of inoffensive, do-gooder civic Democrat the council would love. The fear of appointing someone who might do something, and the temptation to recruit a white female version of Richard McIver (Clark was the sole Caucasian among the all-female finalists), proved too great.

We can only hope, in a good way, that the council has misjudged Clark. We should find out soon. Meantime, Clark still must run to fill out the rest of her term in a special election come November (she's already said she will do so), and if she wins that, the term only lasts a year, until 2007. So there will be two chances, in less than two years, to unseat Clark if she turns out to be a disappointment. Put another way: she'll be beholden to potential campaign donors from day one.

Meanwhile, Nick Licata emerged as the compromise for the position of President of the council for the next two years, breaking the previous 4-4 deadlock between Richard Conlin and Jean Godden. Licata was elected unanimously. The move is great news. Licata, in addition to consistently being the most principled and progressive member of council (and the most open to constituent input), has been one of the few council members (along with Conlin) who has been willing time after time to stand up to the proposals and tactics of our bullyboy mayor, Greg Nickels. Unlike Conlin, however, Licata has a flair for getting people to sit down at a table and compromise without giving up any of his principles. Licata's election means the city council will be much more likely in the next two years to not let Nickels run roughshod over the city--something that has been sadly missing in Nickels' first four years. --G.P.

Seattle's pro basketball team, the Sonics, is pressing their case for extending the county-wide hotel and restaurant tax--the same tax used to finance Safeco Field--to underwrite their desired use of public funds to refurbish Key Arena, particularly by building more profitable luxury skyboxes and other amenities for the rich.

That's right, they want to use the money of ordinary taxpayers so that the very rich team owners can extract money from other, very rich, customers.

The Sonics, enjoyable as they occasionally are, can go fuck themselves.

Naturally, liberal Seattle Democrats are leading the legislative charge on the Sonics' behalf in Olympia, introducing bills to extend the tax and to name the Sonics as the beneficiary. Renton's Margarita Prentice, chair of the Senate Ways and Means committee, is sponsoring the Senate version, SB 6849. Seattle Rep. Jim McIntire, chair of the House Finance Committee, introduced HB 3233 for the same purposes.

Taxpayers got stuck with $73.4 million to refurbish the Sonics' playpen a mere 12 years ago, including the building of then-new skyboxes, but now the Sonics are complaining that the skyboxes aren't as good as the ones the Seahawks and Mariners have, and therefore they're losing money. Of course, a decade of sustained and extremely boring mediocrity on the court might have something to do with that, too, but who's counting? Professional sports franchises learned about 15 years ago that it's far more profitable to extort taxpayer money for their playpens, upon threat of moving the team somewhere else, than to actually pay for their businesses' capital expenses themselves.

The Sonics have been dropping hints about building a new arena in Bellevue if Key Arena doesn't work out to their satisfaction--as though a county-wide hotel and restaurant tax extension will fly with the public if the arena is in Bellevue if it doesn't succeed in Seattle. Eastside taxpayers remember getting sucker-punched with the tab for Safeco and Qwest Fields just as vividly as Seattle taxpayers do, and this time the Sonics want taxpayers to pick up all, not just some, of the tab. The Sonics have also coyly noted that Kansas City wants a pro basketball team really badly. The Sonics, no strangers to the adjective "badly," would be a perfect fit.

If you need more ammunition, consider that Wally Walker, the Sonics' much-maligned president and a minority owner as well, is an outspoken conservative Republican--one of the main reasons he hired the disastrous Paul Westphal (a personal buddy of Rush Limbaugh) as coach a while back, and also rumored as a factor in Walker's driving off of the last wildly successful Sonics coach, the politically liberal George Karl. Walker was also the guy behind this week's baffling decision to move Sonics radio broadcasts to conservative talk station KTTH (the "Truth," home of Rush Limbaugh in Seattle).

In other words, the Sonics are being run by a greedy asshole, a guy who talks up free enterprise and free markets while trying to bleed King County taxpayers dry. Pack your bags, Wally. I hear Kansas City is nice in the winter. --G.P.

Reporters Without Borders reports that 63 journalists were killed in 2005. Iraq was the most dangerous country for journalists with 24 deaths and several kidnappings. 76 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the war began--more than were killed during the entire 20 years of conflict in Vietnam from 1955 to 1975.

The Reuters news service has lost five reporters in Iraq. Four of them were killed by US forces.

The next most dangerous nation for journalists is the Philippines. Reporters Without Borders says the threat to journalists in that country stems not from armed groups, but from politicians, businessmen and drug-traffickers who want to silence reporters who have exposed their crimes.

Two leading journalists were killed in Lebanon, and one survived a bomb attack on her car. Violence against reporters has also increased in Africa, notably in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone and Somalia.

The Chinese government has jailed the most reporters. Chinese authorities have also jammed broadcasts of the BBC and Radio Free Asia.

Sixteen hundred cases of official censorship have been reported world-wide, with half of the complaints coming from Nepal where King Gyanendra seized control of the government and declared a state of emergency. He has banned FM radio stations, blocked websites and confiscated broadcasting equipment.

Reporters Without Borders claims 15 nations practice surveillance of the internet, including Iran and Tunisia. Given the latest stories concerning the government's demand for information from Google, AOL and Microsoft, the US has been added to that list. Microsoft and Google are both currently allowing the Chinese government to use their software to censor websites. --Mark Taylor-Canfield

Check out amazing articles in the New York Times of 1-24-06 and 1-25-06 on the secret report assembled by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, depicting, from the secret beginnings of the effort many months before the invasion of Iraq, a reconstruction effort riddled by incompetence and corruption. There are all sorts of juicy nuggets in here, including the scurrilous background on how Halliburton got its controversial $1.4 billion no-bid contract. The Bush administration has appropriated $18.4 billion for reconstruction, to almost no effect, and a few weeks ago decided that it would not appropriate any further money to the effort.

America's breathtakingly poor attempts to rebuild Iraq--oil exports are currently negligible, and electricity is back below pre-war levels--are a major reason there's so much anti-American resentment in Iraq. --G.P.

Despite a UN sanctioned election, the death count in Iraq continues to rise. Approximately 2,200 US soldiers have died and at least 40,000 have been wounded. This estimate comes from a website created by academics. (iraqbodycount.net).

One hundred British military personnel and 94 soldiers from other countries have been killed since the US invasion began in 2003. Reuters news service estimates that between 4,895 and 6,370 members of the Iraqi military have died. Reuters also gives an estimate of civilian deaths--27,592 to 31,115--but these figures are far below the findings of the publication Lancet. Dr. Les Roberts, project leader for the Lancet research project estimates that at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed.

Researchers from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health found that Iraqis are 58 times more likely to die from violence when compared with death rates from before the US-led invasion. Scientists from Johns Hopkins claim that most of the violent deaths were caused by coalition air strikes, and most of the victims were women and children. --M.T.-C.

After last month's announcement of Dec. 15 election results in Iraq that showed Shiite clerics winning big, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the biggest Shiite cleric group, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), announced that the new Shiite-led government would renege on a promise made to Sunni leaders before last October's referendum on the new constitution. That promise, pushed hard by the Americans, was that Shiite leaders would allow the Sunnis to put forward later amendments to the constitution that would mitigate the federalism that gives both autonomy and most of the country's oil reserves to the Shiites and Kurds. Without such amendments, the Sunnis will be effectively shut out of the governing process, and oppressive Islamic Sharia law will become the law of the land. With the promise in hand, many Sunnis had put aside their skepticism and agreed to participate in the electoral process. They were tricked.

Now, that promise is dead, and Sunnis feel powerless and betrayed, virtually guaranteeing all-out ethnic civil war in Iraq. And that grim outcome came yet another step closer to inevitability when Iraq's foreign minister, a Kurd, announced that the scheduled Arab League meeting in February, a follow-up to a successful pre-election November meeting and which had been dubbed a National Accord Conference, would not be held.

That closes off, at least for the foreseeable future, any chance for a negotiated settlement among Iraq's political leadership to the inter-ethnic bloodshed that is increasingly sweeping the country. Make no mistake; most Iraqis still want the Americans out and blame us for the country's present turmoil. But increasingly the violence and guns in Iraq are being turned against each other, in a slow but horrific process that was all foreseen by the Bush Sr. advisors who decided for precisely this reason in the first Gulf War that it would be unwise to invade Iraq and depose Saddam. With the American soldiers being targets themselves, and with Washington refusing to allow any truly international peacekeeping force to intercede, the future in Iraq looks bad indeed.

Oh: and Muqtada Sadr, the militant young Shiite cleric, said on Sunday that his paramilitary Mahdi Army, which fought US troops in 2004 and is now a big part of the Iraqi government to be, will fight alongside Iran's forces if Iran is attacked by the United States over its nuclear program. Which, incredibly, White House officials are quietly, carefully laying the groundwork for. --G.P.

Upstate New York Democratic Rep. Louise Slaughter charged 1-19-06 on the national radio network Air America that:

"...Frist, DeLay and probably others had some day traders working out of their offices." Those working out of the Congressional offices "would find out there's a bill being written by lobbyists, that there would be no asbestos bill ... and when the market opened the next day, the cost of asbestos stock had doubled."

Bill Frist, the Senate Majority Leader, is already under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for insider trading. And, of course, Tom DeLay is in all sorts of trouble. If this newest allegation is true, it could compete with Jack Abramoff's testimony for the potential to blow the lid off Capitol Hill. As leaders of the two branches of Congress, Frist and DeLay were the best-positioned for this sort of thing, but plenty of other Republicans, committee chairs especially, could have been sharing the wealth. This is very, very bad. --G.P.

12 The Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan agency that researches legal matters for Congress, announced late last month that it has concluded the Bush administration "appears to have" violated the National Security Act of 1947 by briefing only the Senate and House party and Intelligence Committee leadership about its warrantless domestic NSA spying program, rather than briefing the full membership of the Intelligence Committees, as required by law.

The report, responding to a query by ranking Democratic House Intelligence Committee member Jane Harman of California, marks the second time the CRS has concluded that White House handling of the spying program was illegal. It already found on Jan. 6 that the program itself was of dubious legality.

Now, the question: what does this supine Congress intend to do about it? --G.P.