Archives for July 2007

Turkey:

Around 5,000 flag-waving nationalist Turks held a rally Saturday to denounce escalating attacks by separatist Kurdish guerrillas, and the United States for not cracking down on rebel bases in northern Iraq.

Turkey has been pressuring the United States and Iraq to eradicate bases of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, in Iraq, saying it was ready to stage a cross-border offensive if necessary.

“Down with the U.S.A. and their collaborators,” the crowd chanted in Ankara’s Tandogan square.

Lebanon:

Fear that political deadlock may spill into violence is gripping Lebanon, a year after Israel and Shi’ite Hezbollah guerrillas jumped into a war that shattered trust between rival Lebanese camps.

Assassins have slain two anti-Syrian politicians in the past eight months. More than 200 people have died in battles between Lebanese troops and al Qaeda-inspired militants in a Palestinian refugee camp. And a car bomber killed six U.N. peacekeepers in the south last month. Many Lebanese expect worse to come.

Gaza:

About 30 armed men from a Hamas-led security force entered Gaza City’s Al-Azhar University on Saturday and seized 80 bags with chemicals from the agriculture college, the dean said.

It was not immediately clear why the chemicals were taken. The spokesman for Hamas’ Executive Force militia was not immediately available for comment.

Israel:

In a bid to bolster Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, the Israeli cabinet on Sunday, approved the release of 250 Fatah security prisoners, even as rival Hamas accused Abbas of “collaborating” with Israel against them.

West Bank:

Routed in the Gaza Strip, the Fatah party of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is fractured and adrift at a moment when it is viewed by the outside world as the best hope for blunting the militant Hamas movement in the West Bank.

Once dominant in Palestinian affairs, the organization long led by the late Yasser Arafat is beset by a weak and aging leadership, internal schisms and a widespread reputation among Palestinians as corrupt, ineffectual and out of touch. Those troubles have some Palestinians wondering whether Fatah is more likely to lose the West Bank than to recapture the Gaza Strip from Hamas.

Syria and Jordan:

The UN refugee agency has urged the global community to step up assistance for Syria and Jordan, the two countries caring for the biggest proportion of Iraqi refugees, while regretting that they have recieved next to nothing despite the pledges of support.

It is unconscionable that generous host countries be left on their own to deal with such a huge crisis, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) spokesperson Ron Redmond said.

Iraq:

Suicide attacks across Iraq killed at least 144 people and injured scores in an 18-hour period, including a massive truck bombing in a northern Shiite village that ripped through a crowded market, burying dozens in the rubble of shops and mud houses, Iraqi officials said Saturday.

Shattering a relative lull in Iraq’s violence, the attacks raised questions about whether insurgents who have fled an ongoing military offensive in Baghdad and Diyala province are regrouping and assaulting soft targets elsewhere, in less-secure areas with fewer troops.

The violence came as the U.S. military on Saturday reported that eight American troops were killed over the past two days, all in combat or by roadside bombs in Baghdad and the western province of Anbar.

Iraq (2):

For four years, Iraqis have been waiting in lines at gas stations in Baghdad, waiting for their lives to get better. But, as CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan reports, the situation has gotten worse and their government is now in crisis.

That has led senior Iraqi leaders to demand drastic change. CBS News has learned that on July 15, they plan to ask for a no-confidence vote in the Iraqi parliament as the first step to bringing down the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Saudi Arabia:

A religious edict by a prominent Saudi cleric suggesting liberals are not real Muslims has enflamed debate over reforms in the conservative Islamic state, with self-professed liberals fearing they will be attacked.

Saudi Arabia is one of the few countries that rules by strict application of Islamic law, giving clerics a powerful position in society, but Islamists fear that liberal reformers are gaining ground under the rule of King Abdullah.

Responding to an online request for a religious edict, or fatwa, Sheikh Saleh al-Fozan said last month: “Calling oneself a liberal Muslim is a contradiction in terms … one should repent before God for such ideas in order to be a real Muslim.”

Iran:

Tehran on Sunday rejected the latest threats of further sanctions by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and said it would not be intimidated in the ongoing dispute over its nuclear programmes.

‘The latest stance by Rice was another sign of US hostility against Iran, but US officials should know that such threats would not intimidate Iran,’ Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad-Ali Hosseini told reporters in Tehran.

Rice said on Friday that Iran was becoming ‘increasingly dangerous’ and that the US and its allies were considering new sanctions to limit further Tehran’s access to the international financial system.

Pakistan:

There are increasing signs, however, that the Bush administration’s decision to build so much of Washington’s Pakistan policy around one man, Musharraf, could backfire. Today, the Army general and self-installed president is facing sustained protests that are being led by the country’s educated middle class-America’s most natural allies in Pakistan. “If the Bush administration continues to support the dictatorial regime, which has completely lost the public confidence, it will further fan extremism and fundamentalism,” says Shameem Akhtar, the dean of management sciences at Balochistan University of Information Technology and Management Sciences in Quetta, Pakistan. “America should learn a lesson from Iran, where it has been paying the price for supporting an unpopular monarchy even after 28 years.”

Afghanistan:

Afghan elders yesterday said that 108 civilians were killed in a bombing campaign in western Afghanistan, while villagers in the northeast said 25 Afghans died in airstrikes, including some who were killed while burying dead relatives.

US and NATO leaders, however, said they have no information to substantiate the reports of civilian deaths, and a US official said Taliban fighters are forcing villagers to say civilians died in fighting — whether or not it is true.

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

7PM: Is the 2008 presidential election already over?
Is Barack Obama inevitable? Is Fred Thompson rising? Is John McCain toast? Is Rudy Giuliani, well… Rudy Giuliani? Prof. Thomas Schaller, author of Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South, joins me for the hour to talk about electoral politics and the state of the current presidential campaign.

8PM: Is Tim Eyman back?
Yeah, well, sure… back with another dumbass, unconstitutional, anti-government initiative, and a broad coalition has formed to oppose it, including the AARP, SEIU, WEA, and Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce. Christian Sinderman from the No on I-960 campaign and Lauren Moughon from the AARP join me for the hour for a fair and balanced discussion of Eyman’s latest piece of self-serving idiocy.

9PM: TBA

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

America’s airwaves have been damaged by a series of rule changes the past two decades that have ushered in an era of bland commercial radio and television.
— The Seattle Times, 7/8/2007

Working for 710-KIRO, the commercial news/talk station with Seattle’s best local news coverage, the most live and local programming, and the most only balanced lineup of talkers in the market, I can agree with the thesis of today’s Seattle Times editorial entirely guilt-free. (You know, except for the part about agreeing with a Seattle Times editorial — it just makes me feel so dirty.)

But as long as we’re talking about “homogenized,” “formula[ic]” and “bland” commercial media, I’m wondering if the Times’ editors have bothered reading their own front page recently?

Saturday’s front page consisted of two soft features and two news stories, both lifted from the Los Angeles Times. Today’s front page is dominated by an infomercial for Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner, a bleak assessment of our military and political failures in Iraq (courtesy of the Washington Post,) and the first installment of a serial novella.

Two days. Two front pages. No hard, local news.

By comparison, every article on the front page of today’s New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Philadelphia Inquirer was written by staff reporters. I’m just sayin’.

To be fair, the Seattle P-I isn’t much better in this regard, and the kind of homogenized, formulaic and bland fare we tend to see in Seattle’s dailies is pretty typical of broadsheets nationwide. While I don’t mean to diminish the Times’ defensible thesis that lax ownership rules and media consolidation have damaged the broadcast industry’s ability (and willingness) to serve local interests, the steady decline in both quality and readership of our nation’s daily newspapers suggests that there are broader forces at work.

This isn’t the first time the Times has editorialized on media ownership rules, and I urge the editorial board to flog this issue with the same sort of zeal they reserve for estate tax repeal. But I would also encourage a little introspection into how staff cuts and a slavish devotion to style-book-over-substance has led to a steady decline in the quality and utility of their own product.

No doubt, local media ownership tends to better serve local community interests. But as the Times has proven by example, it is no panacea on its own.

The media seems surprised that Fred Thompson used to be pro-choice. The LA Times broke the story on Saturday:

Fred D. Thompson, who is campaigning for president as an antiabortion Republican, accepted an assignment from a family-planning group to lobby the first Bush White House to ease a controversial abortion restriction, according to a 1991 document and several people familiar with the matter.

A spokesman for the former Tennessee senator denied that Thompson did the lobbying work. But the minutes of a 1991 board meeting of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Assn. say that the group hired Thompson that year.

His task was to urge the administration of President George H. W. Bush to withdraw or relax a rule that barred abortion counseling at clinics that received federal money, according to the records and to people who worked on the matter.

But Fred Thompson is just another Republican whose views on abortion apparently change with the political winds. I’ve found a number of articles published in the 1990s that suggest Thompson used to be pro-choice.

The New Republic article, published on 10 Apr 1995 (pg. 15) and subtitled “Meet Fred Thompson (R-Hollywood),” pointed out (emphasis added):

On the current Republican hot-button topics, [Fred Thompson] evinces just the right degree of political honesty. He’s pro-choice and is one of the few Republicans willing to broach the subject of cuts in Social Security. But he swaddles his words in soothing balm about not wanting to hurt the “old folks.” Not bad for a beginner. Good enough, even, to make him a distant but conceivable vice presidential pick in 1996.

By 1997, Newsweek (3 Feb, U.S. edition, pg. 30) points out that (emphasis added):

Thompson is hard to pin down politically. He refuses to announce a clear position on abortion (though he consistently votes pro-life).

A few months later, The Economist (July 12, 1997, U.S. edition, pg. 32) writes (emphasis added):

Though he has been in the Senate less than three years, and though the extent of his ambition is uncertain, Mr Thompson is a natural presidential hope. He is six foot six; he has a folksy charm; he is frequently compared to Ronald Reagan. […]

Mr Thompson’s fight against corrupt politics is attractive, to be sure; his open support for abortion choice in a party of abortion foes is politically courageous.

Should he run for POTUS, Fred will have to make up some Romneyesque bullshit story like an epiphany caused by the “obvious” immorality of stem cell research that changed his stance on abortion.

For now, Fred Thompson is just spewing bullshit without the epiphany. Responding to the LA Times piece at the Young Republicans National Convention on Saturday, Thompson said:

“I’d just say the flies get bigger in the summertime. I guess the flies are buzzing,” said Thompson, who is considering running for president as a social conservative. He refused comment on whether he recalled doing the work.

Basically, Fred, like Mitt, has changed his position on abortion. The difference is that Mitt at least made the effort to concoct a bullshit excuse, whereas Fred is just spewing utter bullshit.

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

7PM: The Stranger Hour with Josh Feit
The Stranger’s Josh Feit joins me for the hour to talk about state and local politics, including Dino Rossi’s non-campaign, Dan Satterberg’s non-endorsements, and the Seattle Police Department’s non-accountability.

8PM: TBA

9PM: Are you feeling lucky?
Thousands of couples flocked to Las Vegas to get married today, lucky 7/7/7. Do you believe in luck? What’s the luckiest (or unluckiest) thing that’s ever happened to you?

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

In announcing his candidacy for King County Prosecutor, acting prosecutor Dan Satterberg made a big show of promising to keep his office “above politics,” instructing his staff that he would “not permit members of the office to either contribute money or a personal endorsement to my campaign,” yet when civil division chief Sally Bagshaw emailed attorneys at the region’s top law firms, saying she was “supporting” Satterberg, and asking for their endorsements, Satterberg said he thought it was “an appropriate thing to do.”

Huh. That’s a pretty fine parsing of the meaning of the word “endorsement.” So since I obviously lack his sharp legal mind, perhaps Satterberg could explain to me how his admonishment against staff contributing a “personal endorsement” is consistent with Bagshaw’s name appearing on his own web site’s list of… um… personal endorsements…?

SNIDE ASIDE:
On a tangential note, in her controversial June 9 email, Bagshaw stated that “Our goal is to get the top lawyers in King County to endorse Dan early, and I would like to place 1000 lawyers’ names onto the website this week.”

One month later she seems to be about 700 lawyers short of her goal.

Giuliani has a fascinating new ad (via Crooks and Liars):

By the way, if you enjoy political audio and video clips, check out Hominid Views every Saturday morning for a recap of the week’s best political media. That is…if you can break away from those cartoons.

Joel Connelly mounts his high horse today and launches some invective at anyone and everyone who’s been pointing fingers at Chief Kerlikowske over police oversight issues. Josh Feit has already responded, easily swatting down Connelly’s lazy accusation that The Stranger has been hypocritical when it comes to dealing with the accuracy of police reports. But the real hypocrite here is Connelly, who actually writes the following two paragraphs in succession:

The loudmouths should allow Hizzoner’s panel to do its work. Our 1960s-era activists should recognize that “this due process thing” (as a media colleague calls it) applies to police chiefs, even to police officers.

Overseers of our law enforcement agencies ought to appreciate the requirement that complaints get acted upon quickly, or dismissed. Our cops have a pretty tense job, filled with judgment calls. It makes no sense to leave a line officer, working under pressure, hung up in the city’s preoccupation with “process.”

So we should recognize that due process applies to police officers, but when dealing with police officers, we shouldn’t be preoccupied with “process?” Huh?

I caught a lot of grief for my post last week calling for Kerlikowske to resign. Since then, another group, the Minority Executive Director’s Coalition (MEDC), has also called for the chief to be replaced. And James Kelly of the Urban League, who was originally defending Kerlikowske, now also agrees that the chief should be explaining himself in writing when he fails to act on the recommendations of the existing police oversight panel.

The evidence that there’s a problem with oversight at SPD has been pretty substantial since the beginning of this story and has been well documented by both The Seattle Times and The Stranger. So when Connelly invokes the idea of this just being about “1960’s-era activists”, that’s when I tune him out. As someone who was born after the end of the Vietnam War, I don’t carry any of that baggage. Instead, I’ve seen a different set of civil rights issues – the Rodney King trial, “Driving While Black”, record numbers of African-Americans being hauled off to our prisons, many of them for doing things that well-off white kids get away with every day. In my lifetime, I haven’t seen the racial divide in this country disappear as much as I’ve seen it ignored. Progressives proclaim that affirmative action is saving the black community but then bury their heads in the sand about why we have 6 times the percentage of African-Americans in jail than South Africa ever had of their native population under Apartheid. And some of the worst states in this trend are blue states like California, Illinois, and New York.

As I mentioned in last week’s post, according to a survey from 2000-2001, Seattle’s racial disparity in drug arrests is higher than any other city of comparable size in the United States. It shouldn’t be a surprise then that this case is focused on two cops (one with a long history of problems with the black community) who made a drug arrest this January of a black man in a wheelchair who claims that the cops planted drugs on him and later roughed him up while in custody. After video of the arrest surfaced showing some inaccuracies with the officer’s report (and not showing any clear evidence that drugs were taken from the suspect), the charges against the man were dismissed. This case, and the way that both the chief and the mayor have been quick to defend the police involved, have been at the heart of the calls for Kerlikowske to resign. There simply isn’t an excuse for the mayor and the chief to be so incurious as to what really happened to George Patterson that night.

Newark, NJ mayor Cory Booker, a Rhodes’ Scholar who came into office determined to fix the endless violence that has plagued that city, is now pointing his finger at the drug war and calling it an economic genocide against black communities. But here in Seattle, where the black community has less clout, the mayor and the chief happily continue the war. This case obviously goes well beyond just drug law enforcement, as The Stranger continues to find new instances of general police brutality against people of color here. But the guise of keeping drugs out of the black community is the mandate that problem officers like Greg Neubert have in order to treat every person in the black community as a suspect. It’s a recipe that begs for situations to escalate.

Connelly ends his column by making a comparison to the oversight of road repair and wondering why people who are angry at the Department of Transportation can’t stir up the kind of shitstorms that people who are angry at the police can. I’ll explain that to him in more detail the next time I see him at DL, but it helps to look at the very last paragraph:

Leaving rubber behind on Second Avenue, a fiendish thought flashed across my mind: “If only I were a street drug dealer, protesting a bust, I could raise hell in this town.”

He’s referring to Patterson, the man arrested in January. There’s only one problem. Patterson insists he’s not a dealer, and the charges were dropped. And basic common sense tells you that a man in a wheelchair isn’t a very effective person to have as a street dealer in a business where people steal from and shoot each other. But for Joel Connelly and much of Seattle’s “progressive” community, due process may not be for everyone. And sometimes, the relationship between Democrats and the black community can be eerily similar to the relationship between Republicans and the military.

Impeach Dick Cheney, or invade Iran. Your choice.

Erica C. Barnett, from an article attacking Mayor Nickels for not going far enough in reducing Seattle’s carbon footprint:

If Seattle is serious about reducing emissions, Baker continued, it needs to reassess its plans for major road projects, including SR-520 (which the mayor and council want to expand to six lanes) and the Alaskan Way Viaduct (which Nickels wanted to expand into a wider underground freeway).

What Erica fails to mention is that, while SR-520 would go from four to six lanes, the added lanes would be for High Occupancy Vehicles (or HOV). You know, for people who carpool or ride the bus. People who, according to every environmental group I’ve ever heard of, are doing the right thing by the environment.

These same environmental groups used their political moxie to prevent Eastside developers, Republicans, and the Seattle Times from getting an eight lane, or even ten lane, SR-520 bridge. Instead, we’re getting HOV lanes, bike lanes, and big fat pontoons for future light rail expansion. Pretty good for a bunch of gutless, caving sellouts.

There will be some gnashing of teeth by the Washington State Republicans to this July 3rd press release from Governor Gregoire:

Governor Chris Gregoire today designated the Washington Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) as a voter registration assistance agency and directed the agency to appoint a voter registration assistance officer, efficiently help citizens register to vote and work with the Secretary of State’s office to ensure compliance with established voter registration procedures.

“It is one of the primary duties of government to make available to all citizens the opportunity to register to vote and, if needed, provide registration assistance,” said Governor Gregoire. “Our social service agency serves a diverse group of people every day and therefore is an ideal place to help more Washingtonians register to vote.”

Governor Gregoire also encouraged all state agencies to provide on their web sites a link to the Secretary of State’s voter registration page and to consider other ways in which they might support and promote voter registration.
[…]

This is the way government ought to work. It should take concrete steps to maximize opportunities for all eligible citizens to exercise their constitutional right to vote. It is curious, then, that over the last decade the Republican Party has increasingly become the party of voter suppression and disenfranchisement. (Luke Esser looks prescient with his 20-year-old disenfranchisement satire.)

We saw the Republican vote suppression in action days before the 2005 election when Lori Sotelo (apparently inspired by a Karl Rove briefing, filed an error-prone series of voter challenges. Subsequently, the Washington State laws were changed to prevent such abuse.

Under the worst of circumstances, the Republican-sponsored disenfranchisement becomes operational through a Republican-controlled government…. In 2000, we saw a massive, and error prone disenfranchisement operation undertaken in Florida, under the supervision of Secretary of State Katherine Harris—an operation that almost certainly swung the presidential election by inappropriately purging thousands of African Americans from the voter rolls. A US Commission on Civil Rights report summarized it this way:

…poorly designed efforts to eliminate fraud, as well as sloppy and irresponsible implementation of those efforts, disenfranchise legitimate voters and can be a violation of the VRA. Florida’s overzealous efforts to purge voters from the rolls, conducted under the guise of an anti-fraud campaign, resulted in the inexcusable and patently unjust removal of disproportionate numbers of African American voters from Florida’s voter registration rolls for the November 2000 election.
[…]

African American voters were placed on purge lists more often and more erroneously than Hispanic or white voters. For instance, in the state’s largest county, Miami-Dade, more than 65 percent of the names on the purge list were African Americans, who represented only 20.4 percent of the population. Hispanics were 57.4 percent of the population, but only 16.6 percent of the purge list; whites were 77.6 percent of the population but 17.6 percent of those purged.
Florida easily could have, and should have, done much more to protect the voting rights of African Americans and other Floridians.

(They also found other ways that African American voters were disproportionately disenfranchised in Florida in 2000.)

On the face of it, the Republican problem seems to be paranoia, with the biggest cheerleader of paranoia being Karl Rove. Don’t you believe it. If there is anything that Republican strategists learned from the 2000 election is that disenfranchising voters works for Republicans! Karl Rove almost certainly knows he is feeding the Republican masses a load of horseshit.

Republican voter fraud “paranoia” is really theatre in two acts, designed to disenfranchise subpopulations that vote Democratic.

The first act shakes the confidence of ordinary voters in the election system—that is, it spreads paranoia through unfounded fears of widespread (presumably Democratic) election fraud.

We certainly saw this fear-mongering played out in Washington State in 2004. During the election contest trial, Republican lawyers opened with a bold statement about how they would prove election fraud. The trial proceeded without any evidence of election fraud being offered. Judge Bridges Oral Decision stated:

There is no evidence that anybody associated with any of the candidates in the governor’s race had anything to do with causing the errors. There is no evidence that has been produced in this Court to suggest that the errors resulted from partisan bias. During the 2004 general election, the various polling sites across the State were populated by inspectors, judges, Accuvote judges, observers, attorneys and the media. No testimony has been placed before the Court to suggest fraud or intentional misconduct. Election officials attempted to perform their responsibilities in a fair and impartial manner. There is no evidence before the Court to question ballot security as to those ballots actually counted.

The second act in the G.O.P. theatre is to make registration and/or voting more difficult for “certain voters.” That would be the poor, people of color, and people living in urban environments. You know, various schemes to cancel registrations, laws to require photo IDs at the polls, that sort of thing. These gimmicks particularly hit poor people of color—people that some Republicans believe shouldn’t even have a right to vote.

That is why Gregoire’s memo will cause some political consternation and constipation among state Republicans. We all know who uses DSHS: the same people Republicans build gated communities to keep out.

My latest at EffU. Bring it on, wingnuttia.

Before I left my Belltown apartment, I checked the Metro Trip Planner to find out exactly which route to take and where to catch it. It told me to catch the 26 at 4th and Blanchard. The 26 never showed up. I had taken the 16 to the same Wallingford address, so I rounded the block to the 16’s stop. The 16 was there in less than a minute.

After the fireworks ended, I walked down to Stoneway Ave to put myself in the path of either the 16 or the 26 (or any bus headed for downtown). I lucked out, and the 16 arrived within a few minutes. Thankfully, it wasn’t jammed full of people. But when my bus neared the Seattle Center, the whole operation came to a halt. The bus was jammed, stuck in the same traffic as folks driving their SOVs. The bus driver had trouble getting from the right lane to the left lane to merge onto 5th Ave (under the monorail). It was a good 15 minute slog to go about 10 blocks.

All in all, taking public transportation to and from the event was okay. The biggest hassle was the Seattle Center area. When folks I respect, like Joel Connelly, talk about eschewing light rail in favor of more buses, I wish he’s riding the bus with me so he can see what I see. When Ted Van Dyk and Richard Morrill (two old guys who haven’t relied on public transport since the Eisenhower administration) talk about how light rail is a waste of money, I just smile. They’ll be eating dirt while the next generation rides the rails.

What is your idea of patriotism on this most extraordinary 4th of July?

Our friend Shaun, a true patriot of the Pacific Northwest, shares what Independence Day means to him.

(Via Crooks and Liars.)