Comments on The Stranger News Hour. Tonight on KIRO. 710 AM.

1.Please ask Sen. Prentice why she is pandering to the sonics, payday lenders, and Eyman. What is she trying to ecome, "Pandering Prentice"?

2. Please ask Goldy if he is having more fun insulting pro rail folks who voted no on Prop. 1, or in working together to build a coalition to get a new rail proposal.

Goldy: is it smart politics to say your prospective coalition members are stupid and shit in their own sandbox, etc.? To insist they first agree you were right before you deign to start working on a new proposal? OR before you agree anything was wrong with Prop. 1? Aren't you being a horses ass?

BTW that poll you are critiquing says a strong majority would support rail expansion and a bare majority would agree to fund it with MVET.....

3. On Eyman: please discuss how Eyman can keep saying over and over it was the voters will, when in fact his initiative took away voter's will at the local level (to elect county and local officials to set the tax level at whatever the voters want)?

Why can't the Democrats stand up for voters' will? Why do they always kowtow to the main argument of the right wing?

Here in Seattle it may be our will to have higher property taxes and more services -- how is it that voters in other places get to limit our will?

Why are the Democrats reducd to name calling and claiming that nothing can be cut, boo hoo, when the real issue is who sets local property taxes -- your local voters' will, or voters statewide whom you never met and who don't even pay your local taxes?

Un - local property tax increases are not part of the 1% increase limit. Look at your property tax bill and you'll see where the 1% of the houses value goes in taxes.

The poll has a 48% for transit and 38% against - hardly a strong majority. Considering who paid for the poll and did the poll those numbers are surprisingly small.

The HA bloggers are so bitter that they can't think straight.

For a reasoned analysis of that poll, see:

http://www.sightline.org/daily_score/archive/2007/11/29/train-tracking-poll

Scotto - I think those HA commenters are really only 2 or 3 guys using different names. They do it on the Slog and Soundoff - it was funny when they accused you of using two names.

Without crosstabs we can't tell if the 20% that put GW in the 4 and 5 grouping also put other issues in them as well. As it stands it would appear GW had a small part in the vote.

LR fanatics refuse to even run the numbers on what impact LR will have on GHGs and when.

Whatever: Agreed.

I'll add that, when you're running razor thin margins, small is plenty big.

The Sierra Club poll asked more specific questions than this poll, and it demonstrated that people who would have voted for Prop 1 voted against it for global warming reasons. If these almost-certain YES votes had not voted NO because of global warming, Prop 1 would have passed.

The folks who are willing to pay for transportation are the same folks who are concerned about global warming; if the next transportation plan is to pass, it will have to pencil out in two ways: financially, and on greenhouse gas emissions.

48-38 isn't a big margin? WTF??

anyway page two of the summary of the moore/emc poll says 65% favor light rail expansion and 51% favor paying for it with mvet.

Ah UN, you said a strong majority. 48-38 is not a majoriy it is a plurality and generally undecideds break on the negative.

A Mcdonough poll is pretty much the numbers the buyer askes for anyway.

Remember the polls before the vote? Holy railers dissed every one that said P1 would lose and pointed at the much better ones that said it would win.

The 65% in favor question wasn't neutrally worded - a $10 billion cost when even ST has acknowledged $23 YOE and it implied that there would be a 30 minute commute from Bellevue if we built it but not clear that that would only be by train. Read the set-up and the question - it is clearly implied that LR will reduce congestion which, of course, people want.

Here's the question:

People are talking about ways we can address traffic congestion in the Puget Sound. I’m going to read
you some proposals. For each one, please tell me if you strongly support, somewhat support, somewhat
oppose, or strongly oppose that proposal.
SCALE: 1. Strongly Support 2. Somewhat Support
3. Somewhat Oppose 4. Strongly Oppose 5. (Undecided/DK/(Refused)
46. One option expands the light rail which is already being built between the airport, downtown
Seattle, and the University of Washington by adding 50 more miles to connect Northgate,
Shoreline, Mountlake Terrace, Lynnwood, Federal Way, and Tacoma. It also shifts bus service
to feed into light rail, and puts new bus service in areas not covered by light rail. When
completed, commute times from Bellevue to Seattle would be a half hour, and it would be an
hour from Lynnwood or Tacoma to Seattle. It would cost about ten billion dollars
Strongly Support 35%
Somewhat Support 30% 65%
Somewhat Oppose 14%
Strongly Oppose 15% 29