I just spent the evening gossiping with a friend over cosmos and another chi-chi drink that tastes like an alcoholic Sunny-D, in the newly remodeled Lower Level at CHAC.

The space—complete with a vegetarian tapas menu—is sponsored, I believe, by Art Patch. So it’s entirely smoke free.

While I don’t have anything against those who smoke, it’s nice to not stink. My clothes aren’t in need of fumigation.

It’s wonderful.

Less than 24 hours after geologists led Washington State legislators through the various reasons why the Pacific Northwest is “unprepared for a major disaster, and how we’ve financially gutted out the very departments that could help us out” (as KING 5 reports), Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels rolled himself onto CNN’s Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, where he answered Blitzer’s primary query—”Are you ready for floods, earthquakes, or another 9/11?”—thusly:

NICKELS: “Wolf, yes we are.”

This is getting spooky. You can read the original, mayor-contradicting KING 5 report here.

From Salon.com’s War Room:

“The Hurrieder President Bush Goes, the Behinder He Gets,” SurveyUSA reports after reviewing the results of three days’ worth of polling that followed Bush’s speech. SurveyUSA says the number of Americans who approve of the way Bush is responding to Katrina has shrunk since his speech: Forty-two percent approved before and 40 percent approve now. The disapproval numbers have moved up more sharply: Fifty-two percent disapproved of Bush’s handling of the hurricane before the speech, while 56 percent disapprove now.

In the print version of the paper we suggest attending an event at the Triple Door tonight. The Director’s Label Series preview screening is long over and no one should attempt to go to it. Thankyouverymuch.

When the unacceptable $11 billion monorail finance plan came to light, The Stranger called for a revote. So, why are we so upset with Nickels? Isn’t he just calling for a revote too?

Well, we called for a revote on the finance plan. Nickels has basically put I-83 back on the ballot, calling for a revote on the monorail itself. We don’t support that, and do not support calling for a revote as the mayor has framed it: Denouncing the actual scope of the plan (this from a guy who recently supported scrapping the planned light rail station at First Hill) and announcing that the City has withdrawn its support. That’s like taking the wheels off a car and then asking someone if they want to buy it.

Rather, we support, as we wrote on June 30, a revote asking for a new finance plan to support elevated rapid transit.

Nickels has taken a political bet, siding with I-83, anti-monorail crowd. We’ll see how that goes for him and Tim Ceis and Ron Sims and Martin Selig.

The Seattle Times this morning has a very good article asking, in the wake of Katrina: Who’ll be to blame if the viaduct and the 520 bridge collapse? Just like the New Orleans levees, the viaduct and the 520 bridge are huge safety hazards likely to collapse during a natural disaster. But, for lack of money they haven’t been fixed. Instead, they’re just getting more deadly. The Seattle Times says:

Politicians, clerics and ethicists agree we have a moral obligation to fix infrastructure such as highways and levees that we know pose a risk to the public.

Who disagrees with this? The people who are backing I-912, the anti-gas-tax initiative. The money to fix the viaduct and the 520 bridge is coming, unless I-912 passes. Then the gas tax will be gone, and so will the money to fix these huge safety hazards.

How is a bad idea like I-912 being marketed as a good idea? With the same appeal to knee-jerk tax resentment, and anti-big-government sentiment, that Republicans at the national level use to win elections (and then, once in power, to gut public safety programs like, say, FEMA). So who will be to blame when the viaduct and the 520 bridge collapse? The anti-tax demagogues and the dopes who, against their own best interests (not to mention their moral obligations), follow them.

But…

Who will also be to blame? Politicians who, out of fear of alienating the state’s large anti-tax constituency, are now failing to frame the upcoming vote on I-912 as a vote to essentially defund Seattle’s levees. Katrina provides a huge opportunity to re-frame the debate on I-912, but, channeling my colleague Josh Feit here, politicians like Gov. Christine Gregoire aren’t taking advantage of the opportunity. In the Seattle Times article, under the ironic sub-header “Urging action,” Gregoire says:

“There’s no question in my mind — you’re either going to fix it or somebody’s going to die.”

But she doesn’t make the link to I-912. She doesn’t say: If you vote for the gas tax repeal, you’re voting to let people driving on the viaduct die in the next earthquake. If Gregoire really wants to urge people toward action, she should urge them to vote against I-912. Again, channeling Josh Feit: Why won’t she?

After city council candidate Casey Corr realized he had an image problem—the mayor’s office is running his campaign and people think he’ll be a rubber stamp for Nickels—Corr came up with a Nickels policy to criticize. Corr claims he doesn’t like Nickels’s South Lake Union Trolley Plan. That’s funny: Here’s Corr talking about the South Lake Union Trolley on a May 7, 2004 King 5 report titled “South Lake Union: Building Seattle’s urban model.”

Because congestion in the area is unlikely to disappear, the goal is to build a community where a car is less of a necessity.

“Our goal is to make transit very attractive,” said Casey Corr of Mayor Greg Nickel’s office. “With Monorail and light rail coming, which will both serve Westlake Center, the streetcar will go south to Westlake so we’ll have a transit hub.”

Corr pointed out that a streetcar can be built within two years. The first phase of the streetcar would connect Westlake Center with the South Lake Union neighborhood. Eventually it could reach the University of Washington.

“The waterfront park is profoundly important - with a streetcar you can be shopping at Nordstrom and sailing on Lake Union in 15 minutes,” said Corr.

Gee, it’s Monday already and I don’t have my money back from Greg “Gridlock” Nickels. (I asked for my $300 campaign contribution back on Friday afternoon when Greg moved to kill the monorail.)

If the SMP is expected to come up with a multi-billion dollar finance plan in four weeks, surely the Nickels campaign can manage to cut a $300 check in four days.

So where’s my check, Greg?

By saying he’s pulling or canceling the monorail transit way agreement, Mayor Nickels’s monorail advisory ballot asks the same question that voters took up last year w/ I-83—should the city refuse to grant the monorail city right of way? The voters trashed that question last year with 63.5% saying build the monorail.

Now, given the bad news about the finance plan, Nickels (cynically, I think) is rolling the dice that siding with the anti-monorail crowd is politically smart. He may be in for a surprise. Here’s an e-mail that came in from longtime Seattle activist Curt Firestone that frames this November pretty accurately:

Not everyone agrees with having a monorail constructed from Ballard to West Seattle. But, we all know that the voters approved the idea of a monorail on four different occasions.

Now the mayor wants you to vote on it once again. This is a lame answer to a financing crisis. Instead, if he was sincere about ending grid-lock, he would be helping to resolve the crisis.  What could he do? Here are just a few thoughts:

1. Direct as much City money to the monorail project as the city is directing to the light rail project. This is at least $50 million.

2. Fund a monorail instead of a South Lake Union street car. Monorail moves Seattle’s commuters and residents. The street car will move downtown workers to restaurants for lunch. 

3. Cancel the requirement that the monorail must pay $ 1 million a year to run its rail though the Seattle Center.

4. Forgive all city sales taxes during construction.

I fear that our mayor may want to be remembered as Mayor Gridlock. What a shame when he could have given real leadership to our mass transit problems. 

Curt