On The Road To 2008: 2005 - A Year In Review

Well the year is almost over, and so far I've kept my pledge to maintain this blog for 25% of its expected life, which will eventually take us through 2008. At that time I'll have to rename it if I consider continuing on.

But to get to 2008 we had to first get through 2005, and this is an opportune time to reflect on the journey so far.

A year ago today we were all calling on Dino Rossi to concede that he had lost the election for Washington governor so that the state could come together and move on. No such luck. Instead Rossi took the matter to the courts and we had to deal with it for the next six months - until the case was dismissed with prejudice against Rossi.

That didn't stop Governor Chris Gregoire from still being effective and helping turn the legislative session into a landmark one. In April, with a large assist from Gregoire, the state House and Senate passed an $8.5 billion transportation funding package promised to over 270 statewide projects. The bill included a 9.5 cent gas tax increase to be phased in over the next 4 years.

The gas tax was too much to take for angry Republicans already smarting at Rossi's loss, and I-912 was born. Championed by wingnut talk radio hosts Kirby Wilbur and John Carlson, the initiative received a lot early support and made it on the ballot with just a few weeks to spare. In the next 5 months I wrote over 40 blog entries on this one topic alone, somehow finding something new to say in each one. The matter was simply too important to sit idly by and do nothing about, and it became my main focus running up to the November elections. Perhaps my most involved entry came in late October as I literally addressed a rightwing argument posted by Steve Neighbors line by line in a piece that a few have cited as the best post on the issue they had read. I remember it well because it took me literally hours and hours to write, spread out over three days. I guess I could have just said Steve was a wanker like Atrios at Eschaton always does - but that's always smacked of just another form of wanking to me.

Of course, the great outcome of the I-912 campaign was how it was resoundingly defeated at the ballot box. The final numbers gave the anti-I-912 vote a 9% margin despite the fact I-912 supporters were predicting at least a 15% victory. There were many lessons to be learned from this, with perhaps the biggest one being the need to counter fiction with fact. Once voters had a chance to read about the facts involved regarding the transportation bill and the gas tax, they logically defeated the initiative that would have eliminated the latter, thereby killing the former. Bloggers like myself had a part to play in the education of the masses. Lead by the Northwest Progressive Institute, and HorsesAss.org, we led a daily battle to deconstruct the arguments and put a spotlight on the facts. Our themes were then picked up by the mass media organizations that began running regular stories about the issues. Late polling emboldened others to not roll over and opponents took heart that their targeted mailing campaigns and TV ads could make a difference. In the end it all did, and I'm glad to have been a small part of it.

Of course 2005 offered much to write about besides Washington state issues.

There was the aftermath of the Asian Tsunami's devastation.

We had the confirmation processes for a number of controversial Presidential nominees, including Alberto Gonzales, supporter of torture for Attorney General, and John Bolton, as a most undiplomatic of U.N. ambassadors.

The Iraq war, unsurprisingly continued to be in the headlines. In February I took a look at what might happen this year and it appears that little has deviated from the path we seemed to be headed along 11 months ago. Meanwhile the bad news keeps piling up, while more people are calling for a pullout or reduction in U.S. troops. This will definitely be a huge issue next year as we head into mid-term elections in November.

2005 also saw the Republican party in complete disarray. After trying to get him to resign (of course he never would), Tom Delay was indicted on multiple charges. Cheney's right hand man Scooter Libby broke his leg then got indicted as well. Bill Frist's investments came under scrutiny. Right wingers lost the support of moderates on many issues and senior nuthead Ted Stevens picked one fight too many with rising Democratic star Senator Maria Cantwell, as her efforts defeated his ANWR rider. At the very top, Bush's approval ratings took a nose dive that he's going to be struggling to get out of for the rest of his term. All of this bodes ill for Republicans in 2006.

When Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast and caused flooding in New Orleans the Republican leadership just wasn't prepared to deal with it. Bush put a guy with no experience in charge of the relief effort, and he lasted only for as long as it took for Goldy at HorsesAss.org to uncover the truth about his background.

Another tragic event occurred in London the day after I left the city during a European trip. The bombings of July 7 came the day after the city celebrated being awarded the 2012 Olympic Games. No matter how the U.S. and British administrations spun it, their battle against violent terrorists was always going to result in such attacks. We fool ourselves that fighting fire with fire will solve these problems.

There were many more stories this past year that drew my attention, from the growing pains in China, to the local fate of the Seattle Monorail Project. From David Irons' abuse of his mother to the rise and fall of gasoline prices.

In 2005 we saw the passing of Pope John Paul II the ascendency of Pope Benedict XVI, and the crazy brouhaha over Terri Schiavo. It was a year of ups and downs, the incredible and incredulous, the absurd and inane, and the outrageous and sublime. Through the hyperbole and noise I hope that anyone that read what I put my heart into writing at least came away with a thought or two that made them think about an issue in a manner they hadn't previously.

In between all this I somehow managed to live a life of my own, working a day job and such. I particularly reveled in a couple of sporting event highs with the Chicago White Sox World Series win in October, the first in 88 years, and Liverpool's unexpected Champions League Cup win in May. I still read the sports section of the paper first, and while this is undeniably a political blog my rare forays covering these sporting event moments can hardly distract from the road I'm on any more than the incessant catblogging that goes on elsewhere.

So little of what happened in the past year could be predicted, which is what makes being a blogger a daily unknown. More often than not, I have no idea what I'm going to write about until I actually sit down and do so. Yet in the process I've found that this experience, while time consuming as all heck, has been immensely educational. You just cannot truthfully write about a topic without doing the requisite amount of homework on it first. Along the way I came into contact with a number of other local bloggers, and what at first I envisioned as a solitary activity suddenly became a collaborative one. Andrew at NPI produced the important and ever improving NW Portal, and my blog became a highlighted syndicated blog there early on. Energized by his lead I worked on a service of my own called the PNW Topic Hotlist that I have been enhancing regularly throughout the year. Easily placed in anyone's sidebar, the Hotlist now enjoys about 100,000 displays each month on various NW blogs, and has proven to be a relatively popular tool for visitors looking for content organized as it is by topic. The emergence of a more unified NW blogosphere is perhaps as big a local story as any this year, even if it has been under the radar. Yet I believe this year we've simply laid the groundwork and foundations for bigger and better things to come in the near future.

So what actually will the coming year bring with it? I'm no soothsayer, but in an upcoming blog entry I'll pretend I'm one and try to look ahead at the speed bumps along this long and winding road to 2008. In the meantime, I'd like to thank all of you that have stopped by in the past year, and I hope you stay with me throughout the full journey ahead.