Archives for June 2007

I know some of you were a bit concerned with Goldy’s claim that he was “planning to blow up SeaTac.”

And I understand your concern. It wasn’t about the safety of SeaTac. I mean, really, even the dopiest brainwashed rightwing wackjob couldn’t read Goldy’s post and seriously believe he was out to get SeaTac. Rather, the concern was the possible ramifications for Goldy’s liberties (and, who knows, maybe Goldy will yet announce that he is taking a “break”). It seemed conceivable at first glance that Goldy might get himself into deep trouble, because we now live in an America where “security concerns” are allowed to override common sense. We’ve been hoodwinked into believing that being “safe from terrorism” has a higher priority than our freedoms.

Here’s how it happened. After the initial overreaction to the attacks on 11 September 2001, an insidious erosion set in because the Bush Administration was constantly fear-peddling. America’s collective psyche sank into some kind of post-9-11 cowardly funk. Now some significant portion of our population is actually fooled into believing that their safety is tangibly threatened by terrorist acts. Sure, acts of terrorism very slightly increase ones risk of death or injury in the actuarial tables. But, this risk is trifling compared to every-day risks like crossing a busy street daily or driving an hour a day in a car.

The real injury from terrorism is the fear; the larger tragedy of terrorism is that people limit their life and willingly give up their liberties to accommodate those fears. You know who I am talking about. They’re the cowards who say things like, “I don’t care if they listen to my calls and read my emails—I have nothing to hide.”

Pussies!

I’ve written lots of negative stuff about Mike McGavick, but I completely concur with his statement from two days after 9/11 (Seattle Times, Sep 16, 2001. pg. D.2, [my emphasis]):

“I guess now I know more about the evil humans are capable of than I did before, and I’m sadder for it.”
[…]

“There is nothing a coward can do to change my behavior,” he said, anger filling his voice, “and that’s a rule I’m not going to start to break.”

That’s American Spirit! But the Bush administration will have none of it. It has methodically undertaken the pussification of America (as Jon Stewart might put it)—and they’ve done it to consolidate and hold domestic political power.

Now, in our “post 9/11 world,” every time some group of crackpots, oppressed street persons, or angry youths talk to an undercover FBI agent about “the revolution,” the FBI sets up a sting operation. Someone “offers” funding and support…they bite…a bust is made. The news headlines play up the “thwarted attack” of “horrific proportions” on the skyscraper or an airport.

“But it was more aspirational than operational.” (Doesn’t the idea of an “aspirational crime” have the look and feel of a “thought crime?”)

And a few more persons of color are sent off to jail for a long, long time.

Now, when Goldy makes a point through an outrageous statement, we stop to contemplate whether this might trigger some kind of “security concern” that gets him thrown in jail. A student at Purdue University learned about this the hard way. He is in deep shit because he “threatened” Bush administration officials in a chat room:

A judge refused to throw out a Purdue University student’s indictment on charges alleging he urged the assassination of President George Bush and made threats against other administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife.
[…]

Buddhi, an Indian national who was attending advanced engineering classes at Purdue’s West Lafayette campus, faces an 11-count complaint for alleged comments he made in an Internet chat room in 2005 and 2006.

Oh…and do you think that being a foreigner with a non-Christian-sounding surname had anything to do with it?

What were those egregious threats he made?

“It is now legal under international law to bomb key sites in the USA. Iraqis! Give Anglosaxons the tit reaction for the tat action of Bush and the Republicans,” Buddhi wrote in one posting, according to federal court records.
[…]

For example, on a message board pertaining to defense contractor Halliburton, Buddhi posted that “Bush is a President of Mass Destruction” and “should be electrocuted.”
[…]

[He called for] for someone to “Kill GW Bush” and “Rape and Kill Laura Bush”

So there you have it…”threats.”

In the past, these statements would be dismissed as sophomoric, heated rhetoric, but rhetoric that falls under the protections of free speech:

… a 1969 U.S. Supreme Court case in which an 18-year-old war protester told a crowd at the Washington Memorial, “If they ever make me carry a rifle, the first man I want to get in my sights is LBJ (President Johnson).”

The high court ruled the protester’s comments were simply crude political speech and overturned his conviction.

Unfortunately, the post-9/11 pussification of America means that Mr. Buddhi will lose his liberties for some time until a court throws out the charges.

I look forward to the day that Americans get past this post 9/11 bedwetting-chickenshit-scared phase, take a little advice from McGavick and grow a pair! Because giving up parts of the Constitution out of fear—and fear that is largely manufactured for political gain—is just so…fucking un-American!

Postscript:

On a lighter note, and just to demonstrate that I haven’t completely lost my sense of humor this evening, here is an instructional video on the topic of forbidden speech:

Standing Tower Guard on a 6′ scaffold at the Federal Building in downtown Bellingham, Iraq Veteran Evan Knappenberger, 1st BDE, 4th Infantry Division, started a week-long vigil on June 1st to draw attention to the US military’s STOP-LOSS and INACTIVE RESERVE policies, which he submits are being used as a substitute for conscription in a political war.

More…

There’s a poll at Daily Kos on this question:

So is there really a point to having Gravel, in between advocating English as an “official” language and promoting his right-wing flat tax, sit on the debates doing nothing but attack other Democrats?

I voted no.

Partisan presidential debates are not the JV squad, where the policy is “no cut” and everyone gets to play. These debates are a tool for Democrats to advance their message. Democrats should be able to decide who gets to participate in a Democratic debate.

Debates are a great tool for candidates to “break out” from the pack. I don’t think Mike Gravel’s rightwing talking points are going to do him much good, in or out of the debates.

Joel Connelly:

But this week, council members allocated $8.1 million to study the “surface-transit option” in replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct.

Surface transit is a pet idea of those who seem to be forming Seattle’s agenda these days and pushing for a gentrified, politically correct, largely childless, heavily taxed city, a place that embraces bicycles and exiles NBA basketball.

This is almost Falwell-esque:

I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians, the ACLU, People For the American Way — all of them who have tried to secularize America — I point the finger in their face and say “you helped this happen.”

Jesus, we embrace bicycles? And stopped having kids? We have gone too far.

To the hyper-sensitive, sports-hating, condom-using, tax-and-spend, Capitol Hill enviro-fascists, Joel points his finger at you.

Tonight on “The David Goldstein Show”, 7PM to 10PM on Newsradio 710-KIRO:

7PM: Is the Port of Seattle taking on water?
With the Port of Seattle in the midst of an ethical scandal, Port Commissioner Alec Fisken joins me in the studio to answer some blunt questions about the culture at the Port, and what needs to be changed. Should Commissioner Pat Davis resign for authorizing a golden parachute for outgoing Port CEO Mic Dinsmore? Do the Port Commission’s executive sessions violate state “sunshine” laws? Call in and ask Fisken for yourself.

8PM: Is the U.S. becoming a prison state?
Author Sasha Abramsky joins me for the hour to talk about his new book, American Furies: Crime, Punishment and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment. With over 2 million people imprisoned on any given day in a system that emphasizes vengeance over rehabilitation, Abramsky argues that “America’s incarceration infrastructure … has started to eat away at the country’s democratic institutions from the inside out.” Abramsky will be in Seattle doing a book reading and signing on Thursday, June 7, 7PM at the Elliot Bay Book Shop.

9PM: When is a terrorist plot not a terrorist plot?
This week’s high profile foiling of an alleged terrorist plot to blow up New York’s JFK Airport made screaming headlines around the nation, but didn’t even manage to make the front page of the New York Times. Why? Maybe because it was hard for the Grey Lady to get worked up about a plot “so nascent that there was no developed plan for how the plotters would get explosives, let alone gain access to the tanks and pipelines they hoped to target.” Kinda like my threat to blow up Sea-Tac Airport.

Tune in tonight (or listen to the live stream) and give me a call: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).

If you’ve watched TV, listened to the radio, read a newspaper or browsed the InterTubes in the past 24-hours, then you’ve surely heard about the “unthinkable” plot to blow up JFK Airport, that was foiled just in the nick of time:

A retired airport cargo worker and a former member of parliament in Guyana were among four men charged with a plot that officials said was intended to cause mass casualties and cripple one of the world’s busiest travel hubs.

Investigators acknowledged, however, that the scheme was so nascent that there was no developed plan for how the plotters would get explosives, let alone gain access to the tanks and pipelines they hoped to target.

Um… forgive me for being cynical, but we’ve been lied to so many times before, with Bush administration propagandists transforming the angry ramblings of narcissistic pizza-boys into sophisticated, 24-like conspiracies, well… I’m having trouble taking any of these stories seriously. I mean, I suppose I wouldn’t chafe so much at the inconvenience of the enhanced security restrictions put in place in the wake of the infamous “plot” to bring down a jetliner by mixing a high-powered liquid explosive mid-flight, if the would-be terrorists actually had the resources or know-how to carry out their threat, or if the plan was at least, you know, scientifically possible.

“The devastation that would have been caused had this plot succeeded is unthinkable,” Roslynn Mauskopf, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said at a Saturday afternoon news conference in Manhattan to announce the arrests.

Yeah, and one of the things that makes this plot so “unthinkable” is that it couldn’t possibly have worked. Fuel pipeline and storage tank explosions do occasionally happen, and while they can be tragic in their own right, they don’t result in the immolation of entire storage facilities or miles of pipeline. Fuel is volatile, and so engineers tend to build in automatic cutoffs and other safety stuff like that. It’s not like you can just light a fuse and the entire thing goes boom.

Can one imagine a plot like this succeeding in temporarily shutting down JFK? Sure. But then, so can a blizzard or an afternoon thunderstorm. Hell, if disrupting air travel is your goal, I’m guessing a bomb threat could be just as effective as an actual bomb, and much easier to execute. Leave a few identical, unattended bags scattered throughout the terminals, and then just sit back and watch the mayhem.

And while government officials were publicly painting the main suspect as a “self-radicalized New Yorker … plotting to betray his adopted country with a catastrophic attack,” off the record, a federal law-enforcement official admits that the suspect seemed more like a “sad old guy who’s got a lot of spit and vinegar in him.”

Mmm. Add a little salt, pepper and spices, and you’ve got the makings of a low-cal salad dressing.

Defreitas “had some ideas” about what he wanted to do, said the U.S. law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “But he was a long way off from being operational or even coming close to getting explosives or posing a direct threat to JFK.” The official characterized the seriousness of the plot as “a notch below Fort Dix” — the recent case in which a group of Muslim men in New Jersey were charged with planning a sniper attack on the military base.

Uh-huh. And I suppose, as far as serious terrorist threats go, the headline on this post ranks just a notch below the alleged JFK plot. We just don’t know how widely spaced the notches are.

I’m not implying that this story was fabricated or that we shouldn’t maintain our wariness, but while there are crazed religious fanatics out there, seemingly intent on destroying America, none have the means like those who currently occupy the White House. As sure as night turns into day, or our terror alert level turns from yellow to orange in the weeks before an election, the Bush administration routinely trots out hyperbolic accounts of would-be dirty bombers and pizza snipers and other such evil-doers in a transparent effort to frighten the American people into propping up their sagging support for a war in Iraq that is needlessly killing thousands of American soldiers, bankrupting our children’s future, and destroying our credibility overseas.

Ironically, these mini victories in “The War on Terror” prove exactly the opposite of what the Bushies contend: it is not a massive display of military force that disrupted these “terrorist” plots, but good, old fashioned police work. If the JFK and Fort Dix conspiracies really were anything more than just idle, angry fantasies, then they were criminal acts, and our law enforcement officials should be thanked for yet another job well done. But these same officials do themselves and our national security a disservice when they allow their efforts to be manipulated for propaganda purposes by our war-mongering White House.

Tonight on “The David Goldstein Show”, 7PM to 10PM on Newsradio 710-KIRO:

7PM: “The Stranger Hour” with Erica Barnett
We’re kicking off a new feature, in which a writer from The Stranger joins me for the hour to recap the week’s local news, and give a preview of what’s coming up in the next issue. Erica Barnett is my first victim, and topics will include the Sound Transit II and Regional Transportation Improvement District (RTID) plans that have just been finalized, as well as a discussion of Seattle’s controversial nightlife ordinance.

8PM: Do you believe in Obama?
4000 “Obamans” paid $25 to $100 a head, and crowded the WAMU Theater last night to witness presidential Barack Obama “make history.” Or at least, that’s what many in the crowd thought Obama was making. I’ll play clips from the rally, give my own assessment of the candidate and his supporters, then take your calls on what you want in the next president… and what you think you’ll get. It’s an on-air straw poll.

9PM: Questions over choice.
Congresswoman Cathy McMorris announced this week that her 1-month old son has been diagnosed with Down Syndrome. At 38-years-old, McMorris would have surely been advised by her doctors to screen for genetic abnormalities via amniocentesis. One can only assume that her religious convictions led her to decline. Would you abort a Down Syndrome fetus? McMorris made her choice — shouldn’t other women be allowed to make theirs?

Tune in tonight (or listen to the live stream) and give me a call: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).

PROGRAMMING NOTE:
Tune in tomorrow when I’ll be joined by Seattle Port Commissioner Alec Fisken, and Sasha Abramsky, author of American Furies: Crime, Punishment and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment

This morning I thought I might write about the oil stain on my garage floor. Or, perhaps, the blue fuzzy lint I cleaned out of my navel this morning. But I was just a little too lazy to write on a topic of such irrelevance.

Besides, Alicia Mundy beat me to it this morning. In her Letter from Washington column in the Seattle Times, Alicia writes about Rep. Dave Reichert (R-WA-8)…and his utter irrelevance:

The annual power rankings from Congress.org have dropped Reichert, now a sophomore Republican, from 168th among 439 members to 419th. That puts him lower than emissaries from the District of Columbia (100), Guam (177) and Puerto Rico (377), none of whom represent a state or have actual voting rights in the House.

Reichert ranks lower than most Republicans, and every Democrat except Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA-2), who has been marginalized ever since the FBI filmed him taking bribes.

In short, Reichert has no recent accomplishments (well…he did successfully pretend to get a school bus driver fired). Furthermore he has shown no capacity to adapt—to find some kind of functional niche—in a House controlled by Democrats.

“But…but…but, what do you expect, Reichert is only a sophomore!” Sophomore, indeed…but, Reichert ranks 38th out of the 41 Representatives in his class of 2004.

So I guess Ms. Mundy was having one of those “I think I’ll write about something completely irrelevant” days, and she reported irrelevant old news about Washington’s 8th Congressional District’s irrelevant Representative.

If Ms. Mundy had been in the mood for a little more relevancy, she might have written about, say, sophomore Rep. McMorris Rogers (R-WA-5), with a ranking of 231 of 439, or 12th of 41 in the class of 2004 (and she spent the session pregnant until giving birth last month and missed much of May as a consequence).

Ms. Mundy could have done that…but, then again, McMorris Rogers doesn’t have that head of rich, silvery hair, bulging biceps, and those washboard abs….

From Eric Schwartz….

Discuss.

Microsoft CEO and kajillionaire Steve Ballmer wants the state to spend more money on education:

“If you’re the CEO of the state of Washington, the first thing that you have to do is recognize that there is a capacity problem in our four-year institutions,” Ballmer said, when asked what he would do to help more people take advantage of job openings in high-skill fields here.

[…] “We have some issues about traffic … but at the end of the day, the most important thing in the context that we’re talking about here is education.”

Wow. Great minds think alike. In fact, way back in July of 2004 (before HA became a must-read blog) I lamented the UW’s decision to stop accepting community college transfers due to lack of capacity, warning that higher education is the economic engine that drives local economies.

Cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and even rust-belt poster-child Pittsburgh, survived the collapse of their manufacturing industries — and prospered — due largely to the influx of talent attracted to their prestigious colleges and universities. The best and the brightest don’t just grab their degrees and leave; many settle in their adopted cities, creating new businesses and industries, or attracting existing ones to the growing pool of qualified workers.

My question is, which schools are going to be the economic engines for Washington, when we won’t even spend the money to educate our own children, let alone attract talent from out-of-state?

I moved to Seattle as an adult about 12 years ago, so I don’t have the same provincial pride in local institutions as most of you natives. And I’m not ashamed to admit that from my snobbish, east coast, elitist perspective there is not a single undergraduate program in the state that I could brag to family about my daughter attending.

Or rather, I am ashamed to admit this, because I’m a Washingtonian now, and I’m embarrassed to see my neighbors talk about how hard it is to get into the UW — like it’s some kind of west coast Harvard — when in fact increased admissions competition is due to declining funding not rising academic standards.

The state Labor Market and Economic Analysis Branch projects about 4,400 new job openings a year for computer specialists through 2014, while Washington is graduating fewer than 700 a year in this field.

“The state does not need to produce 4,400 computer and math occupation workers every year,” Weeks said. “The state needs to hire that many every year. … Some of them are going to come from Ohio or overseas.”

Yeah, or, some of those jobs might eventually move to Ohio or overseas. It’s not like you need to invest in a multi-billion dollar factory to hire a keyboard jockey. This is an industry with a lot of inherent mobility, and if I understand my Adam Smith, our region’s high-tech industry might easily move these jobs to where the qualified labor is.

And don’t put it beyond companies like Microsoft to do exactly that. Indeed, Ballmer’s statement is more than a touch ironic considering that Microsoft already maintains a corporate headquarters in Nevada — presumably for some tax advantage — and while it’s not really fair to single out Microsoft for its tax avoidance strategies (apparently, that’s what wealthy corporations do,) I wouldn’t mind hearing Ballmer talk a little about how we might raise the extra dollars he advocates investing in education.

That said, Ballmer’s insight should not be lightly dismissed. When the CEO of our state’s most prolific millionaire mill says that increasing capacity at our four-year institutions is more crucial to the region’s economy than increasing capacity on SR-520, lawmakers might want to take notice. Washington state has a lot of amenities that makes it uniquely attractive, but our university system is not one of them. As I concluded back in 2004:

The UW is a good state university… but it is only that.

And it is not going to get any better unless we fund it properly. That doesn’t simply mean more tax dollars. We also need to build the kind of multi-billion dollar private endowment that all the best schools rely on. And we need to move away from subsidizing all students equally, towards a means-tested system where tuition approaches market prices, and students receive generous financial aid based on need.

Either that, or we can continue exporting our best and brightest out-of-state.

Not to mention our best paying jobs.