In the Seattle Times today, Alicia Mundy reports on Senator Patty Murray’s newfound power: 

Murray has just been named secretary of the Democratic caucus, a nebulous title that makes her part of the Senate Democrats’ leadership quartet.

More important, Murray is poised to become chairwoman of the Appropriations subcommittee for transportation and other areas.

God help us all. Putting this woman in charge of appropriations can only mean more pork-barrel spending. While I live in the state of Washington, that doesn’t mean I look forward to still more pork. Especially when it’s transportation money that the state will only abuse by forcing more mass-transit solutions that won’t do much to help most of the people that travel over our roadways onto us.

Even Republican lobbyist Tony Williams, who just ran Mike McGavick’s failed campaign for the U.S. Senate, said, “This is only good news for the state.”

After watching the debate on www.soundpolitics.com the past few days, I recommend the Evergreen Freedom Foundation video about education spending, starring "man-in-the-street" and bigwigs like the gubernatorial policy director, Ann Daley the Director of Washington Learns and three state legislators.

I have watched the video several times and feel rather tempted to get a copy of the latest Skagit Valley College budget to do some per student calculations.

Since I am snowed in for all intents, I might as well blog some interesting links.

The big story is the major source used by the AP and other news sources has been shown to be a phoney.  What make this particularly troubling is this particular source, Jamil Hussein is the primae source in the story of an alleged massacre, the burning alive of six Sunnis.  This takes on particular importance when you find out that NBC based their decision to officially declare Iraq a civil war on this story.

Stop the ACLU notes that:

It’s not just NBC. Since the Adnan Hajj/Reutersgate/fauxtography scandal during the Israeli/Hezbollah war led to grave questions about the current state of Western journalism, it has become increasingly obvious that there is something basically wrong with the way the major media companies are covering events in the Middle East.

Indeed. Hot Air provides some interesting twists.

It was a sloppy game. I missed the first half and about 7 minutes of the third quarter driving home in the snow. Listening to the game was painful. Interceptions, missed tackles, it was pretty bad. When I finally got home to watch the game things still didn’t look too good.

The game was ugly, but Matt Hasselbeck appeared to get his act together in the second half, and Shaun Alexander ran for 201 yards, only the fourth player to rush for 200 yards on Monday night.

The defense was still missing tackles, and the offense was still dropping passes. Green Bay fell apart in the fourth quarter, and the Seahawks managed to squeak by with another win. I had a lot of fun watching the second half, and I’m glad that Matt Hasselbeck and Shaun Alexander managed to pull the team out of a funk.