Archives for June 2007

Endorsement News:

I’m just gonna come right out and say it.

I’m endorsing Dan Satterberg for King County Prosecutor.

There’s just something about that face I can trust.

Speaking yesterday on KUOW’s The Conservation, Gov. Chris Gregoire stated that she has “no reason to disbelieve that” Sonics owner Clay Bennett is negotiating in good faith.

Uh-huh. Me, I’m more of a cynic. In fact, I’m not convinced that Bennett has actually negotiated at all. Perhaps its a cultural thing, but I’ve always thought of “negotiation” as a back-and-forth process, in which the two sides haggle until they reach a mutually acceptable compromise. Laying out plans for a half-billion dollar hoops palace, and then declaring “I’m out of ideas” upon its inevitable rejection? Well, that sounds to me more like an “ultimatum.”

Whatever. The point is, an Oklahoma City kajillionaire — who has long dreamed of bringing an NBA franchise to his city — bought the Sonics, and from the moment the sale was announced, we all understood how unlikely it was to keep the team in Seattle under his ownership. To look at this as just another business deal would be naive, as bringing the team home has a value to Bennett and his partners that far exceeds simple monetary considerations.

The Storm on the other hand, well, Bennett really couldn’t give a shit about bringing a WNBA team home to Oklahoma City, and from what I understand, the feeling is mutual: Storm star Lauren Jackson has already said she wouldn’t follow the team to Oklahoma, and faced with all the uncertainty, Sue Bird only signed a one-year contract.

For Bennett, the Storm is little more than an afterthought, and likely a money-losing one at that, moved to a smaller market and missing its two biggest stars. But in Seattle, the Storm has built a devoted and profitable following.

So if Bennett really wants to show Washingtonians a little “good faith”, the least he could do is divest himself of the Storm before packing up the Sonics and heading East. Besides, the Storm is worth more to us than it is to him, both monetarily and otherwise, especially in the absence of the Sonics. Rumor has it that a group of local investors is willing to put up the estimated $10 million fair market value of the team, and if Bennett is the “stand-up guy” Gov. Gregoire says he is, he’ll entertain a reasonable offer.

All that’s required is a little good faith negotiation.

King County Councilman Bob Ferguson is not running for County Prosecutor, and that means (a birdy tells me) Bill Sherman definitely is.

Sherman a longtime deputy prosecutor and a former aide to Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit, was one of the most pleasant surprises coming out of last year’s hotly contested 43rd Legislative District race. But don’t listen to me heap praise on Sherman, read what the Seattle Times had to say in endorsing his candidacy:

Sherman is a bright new entrant to elective politics who brings a very promising résumé and set of skills.

[…] Sherman has the right mix of temperament, attitude and résumé.

Sherman was an aide to Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt during the Clinton presidency, so he comes with political savvy and awareness of public-policy issues.

Sherman is currently a deputy prosecutor for King County who focuses on domestic violence, something that always can use extra awareness and voice in Olympia.

Sherman is a solid environmentalist with endorsements from Washington Conservation Voters and the Sierra Club.

He is also supported by Allied Arts of Seattle, and is an advocate for improved public education.

His law-and-order job helped draw support from former Seattle City Attorney Mark Sidran, who describes Sherman as a pragmatist and common-sense Democrat best qualified to work with Democrats, Republicans and suburbanites in Olympia.

[…] Sherman is the best all-around candidate. He is a very strong newcomer who will represent the district admirably.

I don’t mean it as a knock against Ferguson, but the Democrats ended up with a better candidate in Sherman. He’s an experienced prosecutor, who, well, is simply much more qualified for the job. And while he doesn’t have Ferguson’s winning track record at the polls, he came from nowhere to be surprisingly competitive in the 43rd LD race.

Sherman will also match up better in the general, pitting his years in the courtroom against Acting Prosecutor Dan Satterberg’s years as an administrator. This’ll be a great race.

UPDATE:
Bill Sherman has confirmed via email:

I’ve decided to run, and will file tomorrow afternoon. I decided to run because I can bring the perspective of a front-line trial prosecutor, working with victims and offenders every day. The Prosecutor’s office needs to focus on protecting the most vulnerable among us; on leading the way in dealing with criminals with severe mental health problems, and stopping the cycle of crime by probationary offenders. I’m excited to lead that effort, and it starts tomorrow.

Sherman has also confirmed that he will be a guest on “The David Goldstein Show“, Sunday night on Newsradio 710-KIRO.

The Discovery Institute’s own Michael Behe has a new book. I’ll admit I don’t know enough about protein-protein binding to actually understand what the hell he’s talking about. But I do know that scientists are laughing at him.

Behe uses a pitiful number of examples (count’em: four) to attempt to establish a generalization that binding sites can’t evolve, ignores numerous known cases where binding sites are known to evolve, and then concludes that anything involving the evolution of two or more binding sites is impossible without mystical unspecified guidance by a mystical unspecified supernatural force that somehow mysteriously frontloads nonrandom mutations into the beginning of the universe. Or something. Behe even says explicitly that malaria and HIV are intelligently designed in just this fashion. Along the way he repeatedly violates the First Commandment of Competent Argument Against Evolution – Get Thee To A Library and Double-Check Thy Generalizations About Biology Against The Biological Literature Or Thou Willst Look Like A Fool. My biggest problems with Behe are within this last point, but Chu-Carroll shows that the math area is just as bad. And I’m sure the philosophers will jump in at some point. Most amazingly, in The Edge of Evolution, Behe treds onto ground occupied by population geneticists. Behe’s first book talked about stuff like flagellum evolution, which was actually pretty devious because the number of people who know enough about evolution, creationism, and a random obscure biological organelle to give a detailed rebuttal is bound to be pretty small. But vast herds of population geneticists stampede around the evolution meetings, trampling all foolish enough to get between them and another exciting session on Drosophila genetics. So Behe invading that turf is kind of like the “land war in Asia” scenario. Not a good idea.

Or to make it more simple:

Wow, double the irreducible complexity! You can’t build cilia without a functioning IFT, so now you have to explain both the origin of the IFT and the origin of cilia. Except that, as Nick shows, this claim is just plain false. Just as his claim in his earlier book that every single factor in the blood clotting cascade must be present in order to function was easily disproven by pointing to dolphins, which lack Factor XII (Hagemann factor) yet still have blood that clots), this claim is easily disproven by showing that, in the real world, there exist organisms which have cilia but do not have the IFT.

Nick shows a chart and offers a citation showing that there is an existing organism that has a cilium but does not have IFT, an organism in a group called Apicomplexans. Specifically, a parasitic organism in that group. More specifically, a parasite known as Plasmodium falciparum. You might know it by its better known name: malaria. Yes, the very organism that Behe spends much of his book using as evidence of IC actually disproves his claim about the cilia/IFT system being irreducible. Oops.

Hmm. Well maybe a research assistant who deals with infectious diseases can shed some light on the subject.

1. Evolution can be modeled in terms of a static, unchanging fitness landscape.
2. The fitness landscape is a smooth, surface made up of hills and valleys, where a local minimum or maximum in any dimension is a local minimum or maximum in all dimensions.
3. The fitness function mapping from a genome to a point of the fitness landscape is monotonically increasing.
4. The fitness function is smoothly continuous, with infinitessimally small changes (single-point base chanages) mapping to infinitessimally small changes in position on the fitness landscape.

Ouch. I dont talk about my research directly a whole lot here (except for pretty pictures, of course), but like I put in my blurb, I study the evolution of HIV within patients and within populations. Fitness and fitness landscapes are vital to my research. And if Mark has summarized Behes claims properly– Im kinda peeved *fumes*

No one can have a basic, basic, basic understanding of ‘fitness landscapes’ and come out thinking those four points are valid. Just watch, Ill explain fitness landscapes to you all right now in the context of HIV, and you will get it! You, even those of you with zero biological training, will be able to refute Professional Creationist Michael Behe! Yay!

And if you’re like me, you won’t actually get it, but you’ll get closer, so you might as well read go read it.

And this has some obvious real world implications. Namely if you don’t know how malaria works, it becomes very tough to cure malaria. Same with HIV or any other virus. If you’re hoping that God or magic or whatever unseen, unknowable force is acting on these diseases, well, I certainly believe in the power of prayer, but I also believe in knowing how things work. In experimentation. In moving slowly, one piece of data at a time, one experiment at a time, one peer reviewed paper at a time toward the truth.

That’s where the creationists and the intelligent designers bug the fuck out of me. Because even more important than any real world implication, is a basic attack on the truth. We humans believe a lot of crazy things (I certainly believe in the power of prayer). We take shortcuts in our thinking and we all bring in biases and our partial information to whatever we’re trying to discover. So science has taken great pains to figure out ways to minimize these problems so that we can get at the truth. And then these anti-intellectual institutions think they can just yell “nu hu!” and that their argument is just as good as the scientific method. But if evolution isn’t the best explanation, then do what plate tectonics and what quantum physics and every other new discovery in science has done: prove it! Make claims that can be proven wrong with experimentation (as opposed to God might do something, or He might have done something). Then if those claims aren’t proven wrong, you’re on the way. Publish in scientific journals. Repeat like a zillion times so you know it wasn’t a fluke and people will start to believe you. Then, maybe you can write your book.

But if you yell “nu hu!” enough, and let your biases and prejudices interfere with human advancement toward the truth, you create your own world. And that world can be scary to those of us looking at it from outside.

These folks living in their own world give skepticism a bad name. If it’s these creationists or if it’s Exxon scientists. And skepticism is vital to that advancement toward the truth. I’m thrilled that people are questioning even our basic assumptions. I’m disgusted that people think just saying “no” without proving it, or really even trying is the same thing as honest skepticism.

And it is embarrassing that a Seattle institution is getting in the way of finding the truth. It’s horrible to have to read, “Seattle’s Discovery Institute” as if the city had something to do with those freaks.

As a college student in Michigan ten years ago, I went to see Dr. Jack Kevorkian speak. At the end of his talk, people were allowed to ask questions. After a handful of questions over legal issues, a wheelchair-bound man took the microphone and began accusing Dr. Kevorkian of being a murderer and encouraging people with disabilities to end their lives. The old doctor at the podium tried his best to respond to the baseless accusations, but with every attempt to set the record straight, the man in the wheelchair just became more enraged and more belligerent.

I have no idea who it was that gave this disabled individual the idea that Kevorkian had a desire to kill people in his situation, but the media-crafted persona of him as “Dr. Death” allowed for many people to misunderstand him and to avoid the very simple point that he was trying to make – that it’s not the government’s role to tell people how to deal with the reality of terminal illnesses and unmanageable pain. And the hysteria that followed his fame and his brashness sent this gaunt old man to jail soon after.

Upon his release from jail last week, media outlets seemed incredulous that Kevorkian hasn’t changed his mind about his actions. There’s no reason for him to. He’s standing up for a principle that is fundamental to our rights and to what this country is all about. Our government should not have the right to impose a particular morality upon its citizens. If a person with a terminal illness feels that they wish to control the way they leave this earth, the government should have no right to stop them. If a person dealing with pain so excruciating that they can no longer enjoy their existence decides that death is a better alternative, it’s simply unconscionable to force that person to continue to endure the pain. This man went to prison for 8 years in defense of these rights, and for that, he’s a hero.

In America today, our growing tendency to believe that government has a role in making our moral choices for us is sending more and more people to jail who clearly don’t belong there. In Spokane, a 66-year-old woman named Christine Rose Baggett is facing a felony charge. Baggett suffers from arthritis, two herniated discs in her back, and a bad ankle. Why is this clear menace to society being charged?

What the court record shows is that Baggett admitted purchasing an ounce of marijuana from a man on Aug. 23 for $180. But she gave some of it back to him “as payment for delivering the marijuana to her.”

Baggett, like many other people with similar ailments, had discovered that marijuana is very effective and inexpensive pain reliever. But despite the fact that Washington State voters overwhelmingly voted for the legal use of medical marijuana, prosecutors in Spokane still believe that they’re protecting society by hauling this poor old woman through the court system on technicalities.

Going back to Dr. Kevorkian, do people really believe that by sending someone like him to jail it was going to change his mind? This is a man who already believed that the law was wrong and was expecting to go to jail. Why would following through on the threat have any meaning at all, other than to prove to Kevorkian how dangerous the government has become in following its delusions?

The United States has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners. There are a number of reasons for this, but much of it boils down to our collective belief that prison is an effective tool for enforcing moral conformity, rather than just a way to provide justice for victims of crime. We understand that it’s fair and just to have a system where people who harm others are removed from free society and locked up. But it’s time we recognize that jail is not the place for those who aren’t harming anyone but whose personal moral choices we may disapprove of.

After a decade of producing 5-10 columns a week for various outlets, I’ve been mostly taking a break from writing these past few months, which is why Goldy’s comment the other day about my technically being a poster. But the P-I’s article this morning on city council candidate Joe Szwaja pissed me off sufficiently to post – and then I see Will already got to the article last night.

I really like Will, but his post on Joe Szwaja’s troubles in the past misses a really simple point: Why did the P-I run this story? How did Angela Galloway think to check Wisconsin court and newspaper records, and just happen to have a story on it ready the same week Szwaja’s kickoff event raised over $17,000? And if you’re going to compare Szwaja to Dixon, as Will does – a sort of ridiculous comparison anyway, since this is a non-partisan race and most of the people who have backed Szwaja for this race have nothing to do with the Greens – why did the P-I run only one story mentioning Dixon’s (non-) voting record, and never run any mention of his extensive legal problems, either Dixon’s current misdemeanor ones or his two prison stretches for rather serious crimes in the 1980’s? Somehow, that wasn’t relevant or newsworthy, but Szwaja’s misdemeanor incidents from nearly 20 years ago are.

I’ll tell you exactly why the P-I is running this story: because Godden’s campaign fed it to them. Jean Godden worked at the P-I for many years before jumping to the Times, and she has consistently received glowing, uncritical coverage from both papers during her four years on council despite being its most inert member. When running four years ago, her editorial board interview at Seattle Weekly showed a stunning lack of awareness of civic issues, and she hasn’t improved on the job – treating that powerful $100,000+ a year job as some sort of civic retirement prize for having attended all the right parties during her decades as a gossip columnist. I’ve had several council aides tell me privately the same thing I’ve seen with my own eyes: In four years, Godden literally hasn’t done anything of significance on the council. She’s barely kept the seat warm.

Want to know where the P-I is coming from? Any writer or editor will tell you that the subtle little twists of wording, as well as what’s omitted, are how you lead a reader:

Although he initially declined repeatedly to elaborate about what he said were inaccuracies in Madison newspaper accounts, he was more forthcoming in a later interview Wednesday…

A lot of interview subjects won’t comment on the record, or so do extensively, when first ambushed with questions about, say, their past personal life; when I did a piece on former radio host Mike Webb for the Weekly last year, I spent nearly a month getting him to go on the record with detailed responses, which, to his credit, he eventually did. It’s a standard part of the reporting process to get people to talk. I’ve never seen this sort of caveat dropped into the story itself.

[Szwaja] said he has had a good driving record since moving to Seattle in 1993.

You think the P-I didn’t check this? So why present it as Szwaja’s unsupported claim?

And so on.

Szwaja’s web site has a reasonably good response to these charges (another contrast with Dixon), and I’ve spoken with him about them and am satisfied with his answers. I’ve known Joe (though not well) through any number of activist connections over the years, and have always wished the Greens had more people like him. He’s smart, competent, and principled – and unlike Godden, he won’t treat a council seat as a gold watch. Maybe that’s why Godden’s campaign felt threatened enough to go after him through her former employer.

Rep. Adam Smith will appear tonight on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, as the latest victim in the show’s “Better Know A District” segment. Why? According to Rep. Smith’s press release: “A lapse in judgment on the part of Smith’s communications director.”

No truer words were ever spoken. Or, um… written.

Aaron Dixon was first, and now Joe Szwaja. He ran against Rep. Jim McDermott in ’00 and is now running against Seattle City councilwoman Jean Godden:

Among the driving-related counts Szwaja faced were the following, according to the newspapers: In May 1989, he was found guilty of driving without a driver’s license, and in July was charged with of driving without a license plate. Late that year, he failed to appear at a hearing. In early 1991, he again was charged with driving after his license was revoked.

He said he has had a good driving record since moving to Seattle in 1993.

Ironic how Joe Szwaja drove without a license plate, while Jean Godden’s job was to take note of funny license plates when she worked at the Seattle Times.

Pat Robertson fooled me once, but I…I…I can’t get foolded again. This one’s for real…

So relax…let’s not get too worked up about things like this (via Think Progress):

…when the fact is, Federal Way’s own climate expert and modern-day Nostradamus, Frosty Hardison, has foreseen that the world, as we know it, will end today. The rapture is upon us.

He made his prophecy on KIRO 710’s Dave Ross Show on January 24th, 2007.

Dave promised to have ’em back on if the world doesn’t end, which it will. Really. Frosty said so.

(Hat tip: mercifurious.)

I don’t believe this. Forty years to the day after the beginning of the Six-Day War, and we have a massive buildup of warships off the Iranian coast along with a Category 5 hurricane approaching the Persian Gulf. I have no idea what the hell’s going to happen, but I’m sure that some people will be blaming God.

Last night I posted a rant about how, in a “post-9/11 world,” common sense has surrendered in the pursuit of pseudo-security. I used an example from an Indian student at Purdue University who is on trial for his inflamed political rhetoric on an internet chatroom.

Twelve hours later, Kos diarist chiniqua posted this diary detailing her experience of being the target of an investigation based on her perfectly legal web page.

Apparently, her MySpace page elicited concern when, using her handle China, she said:

China’s Interests:

The eventual destruction of the capitalist system and the military industrial complex, revenge, culty TV shows, narcotics trafficking and naps.

Wow. Terrorism, drug trafficking, pop culture and sinister siesta speech all in one brief sentence!

She also linked to the New York Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) Underground, after getting a myspace friend request. The CCRB investigates complaints against the police department, and chiniqua used to work as an investigator for the CCRB.

Clearly this woman is a terrorist who presents a clear danger to those around her. Well…she presents a danger if you’re a cowardly, bed-wetting, irony-impaired idiot!

So she was being investigated by an NYPD-FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force team:

The detective pulled out a folder and took out a piece of paper. It was all the pictures from my myspace page printed out. He pulled out some more papers and (basically) said this:

Some ‘concerned citizen’ was trolling myspace and came across CCRB Underground. Somewhere on [the CCRB underground page] there was the quote from Back to the Future about how Doc got the uranium to power the time machine by stealing it from some Libyan nationalists: “They wanted me to build them a bomb, so I took their plutonium and in turn, gave them a shiny bomb-casing filled with used pinball machine parts.” This citizen took it upon his or herself to look at who the friends were on this site and found me. […]

He or she then sent an email through the NYC.gov site saying (as far as I can tell) CCRB Underground was some sort of terror group and I advocated armed revolution and narcotics trafficking. Somehow this ended up on the Mayor’s desk the Commissioner got upset and then the gears went into motion. A priority investigation was launched and, they said, the original CCRB Underground guy had his computer confiscated.

The detective proceeded to ask me if I traffic in narcotics, if I am involved in terrorist activities or armed violence, what is my primary email address, who do I live with, where do I work, what do I do, how long have I been there, whether I had travelled outside the country in the last ten years, who the other people in the pictures on my page were, if I knew anyone involved with CCRB Underground, or recognized any of the people from the page.

Investigated for a fucking MySpace page? Computers confiscated for quoting Back to the Future? (But…but…but isn’t Libya a partner nation in the War on Terror™ now?) Yeah…this kind of thing is making us safer.

I wonder if this is how it happened to the Roman Empire, too?

Join us tonight for another exciting edition Drinking Liberally (Seattle Chapter).

This is your chance to falsify the rumor that Goldy’s “break” is a polite way of saying he’s been incarcerated. We meet at 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E.

If you find yourself in the Tri-Cities area, check out their chapter of Drinking Liberally. Jimmy will have the details. For dates and times elsewhere check out the Drinking Liberally web site to find a chapter near you.

And if you don’t find a chapter near you, start one!

I know I said I was stepping back, but as far as statements from public officials go, this has got to be the best press release ever.

Today, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said the use of the words “fuck” and “shit” by Cher and Nicole Richie was not indecent.

I completely disagree with the Court’s ruling and am disappointed for American families. I find it hard to believe that the New York court would tell American families that “shit” and “fuck” are fine to say on broadcast television during the hours when children are most likely to be in the audience.

The court even says the Commission is “divorced from reality.” It is the New York court, not the Commission, that is divorced from reality in concluding that the word “fuck” does not invoke a sexual connotation.

[…] If ever there was an appropriate time for Commission action, this was it. If we can’t restrict the use of the words “fuck” and “shit” during prime time, Hollywood will be able to say anything they want, whenever they want.

That was FCC Chair Kevin Martin responding to yesterday’s ruling that the networks could not be fined for inadvertently airing blurted expletives on live broadcasts.

As my regular readers know, I am fond of foul language. And there is no better example of how expressive and powerful these words can be than the fact that Martin chose to illustrate his point by using the words “fuck” and “shit” ten times during the brief course of a two-page press release.

Ironically, despite Martin’s foul-mouthed objections, even he acknowledges that this ruling might push the FCC towards a more First Amendment friendly, free market solution.

Today’s decision by the Court increases the importance of Congress considering content-neutral solutions to give parents more tools and consumers generally more control and choice over programming coming into their homes. By allowing them to choose the channels that come into their homes, Congress could deliver real power to American families.

Permitting parents to have more choice in the channels they receive may prove to be the best solution to content concerns. All of the potential versions of a la carte would avoid government regulation of content while enabling consumers, including parents, to receive only the programming they want and believe to be appropriate for their families. Providing consumers more choice would avoid the First Amendment concerns of content regulation, while providing real options for Americans.

Hmm. Given an a la carte option, I might actually subscribe to cable. For example, I might subscribe to educational programming like the History Channel and Animal Planet, while shielding my daughter from the obscenity that is FOX News. Sounds fuckin’ good to me.

I’m gonna be stepping back from HA for a couple weeks, to give me time to work on some other pressing projects. I’m kinda addicted, so I’ll still post, but not with same frequency or loquaciousness to which we’ve all grown accustomed.

To help fill the gap, please welcome TheHim and Carl Ballard to my growing community of co-bloggers, which also includes Darryl and Will (and technically, Geov.) TheHim posts at Blog Reload, and both he and Carl post at Effin’ Unsound. Given their pedigree, I’m pretty sure we can expect a little snark from time to time.

So remember, before you post your vicious, dimwitted, anti-semitic responses in the comment threads, please double-check the name of the author first. Only one of my co-bloggers is Jewish. And only half Jewish at that. Please save the Jew-baiting for us purebreds.

Albert Einstein famously defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

So four years into a preemptive occupation that has seen US casualties escalate as Iraq descends into a bloody civil war, it is interesting to explore how Congressman Dave Reichert’s position has evolved in response to changing conditions on the ground:

“I support the troops and the president’s decision to go to war in Iraq.”
— Seattle Times, 10/22/04

“Reichert says the invasion of Iraq is part of the broader war, and he would back the invasion again, even with information now showing there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”
— Seattle Times, 10/22/04

On national security, Congressman Reichert says, “I put my trust in the president.” — KCTS Connects, 1/8/06

“I would have voted to go to war with the majority of Congress and support the president’s decision. After September 11th we were attacked and people must remember that. We are at war! We are at war!”
— Speech to Seattle City Club, 1/23/06

“And what I do is that when you ask me, as a sheriff, should there be a timeline? It is clear to me: no.”
— Speech to Seattle City Club, 1/23/06

“I see us being in Iraq for a while.”
— Speech to Bellevue Chamber of Commerce, 8/16/06

Hmm. With Bush administration officials preparing the American people for a 50-year military presence in Iraq, it is time to ask Congressman Dave Reichert if he still puts his trust in the president, and if he too supports a permanent presence in Iraq?

8th District voters need to know if a vote for Reichert is a vote for insanity.