Archives for September 2008

The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 504.48 points today, at 10917.51.  That’s only 329.92 points higher than where it stood on January 20, 2001, the day George W. Bush took office.

To put that in perspective, had you invested $100 in a DJIA index fund just before Bush took office, it would be worth about $83 today in inflation adjusted dollars.

But, you know, John McCain says “the fundamentals of our economy are strong,” so there’s nothing to worry about.

That’s John McCain this morning, after a weekend in which investment bank powerhouse Lehman Brothers was forced to declare bankruptcy, while Merrill Lynch was scooped up by Bank of America in a fire sale. Meanwhile, locals like me have gotta be wondering if we should pull our savings out of Washington Mutual, for fear of having our funds frozen in a collapse. But to the man with more houses than he can count, our economy is still strong.

And you can trust McCain on this because he really knows what he’s talking about.  You know, unlike some unknown economist like Alan Greenspan:

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan offered a woeful outlook of America’s economic situation on Sunday, saying the crisis with the country’s financial institutions was as dire as he had ever seen in his long career, and predicting that one or more of those institutions would likely collapse in the near future.

“Oh, by far,” Greenspan said, when asked if the situation was the worst he had seen in his career. “There’s no question that this is in the process of outstripping anything I’ve seen and it still is not resolved and still has a way to go and, indeed, it will continue to be a corrosive force until the price of homes in the United States stabilizes.

Of course, the reason McCain refuses to acknowledge that our economy is in crisis is because to do so would acknowledge the need for government to do something about it… like increased regulatory oversight of the financial industry, something to which McCain is opposed on blind, ideological grounds. To a free marketeer like McCain, admitting that we fucked up, and allowed our financial industry to implode through lax oversight, would be tantamount to renouncing one’s belief in God.

And to think, McCain is actually trying to rebrand himself as an agent of change….

UPDATE:

But then, I suppose, the family featured in this ad… they just made poor choices, so they’ve got nobody to blame but themselves.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the federal reporter shield law the Seattle P-I Times editorializes in favor of today.  And the Thomas Jefferson quote they use to back their position is well worth repeating:

“Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it.”

But I’m more than a little annoyed that in all the debate over state and federal shield laws, my colleagues in the corporate media have never once raised the issue as to whether these laws should extend to bloggers like me.

Like those hoity-toity salaried reporters, I often get tips and quotes from sources who choose to remain anonymous, and I don’t see why I should have to go to jail to protect their confidence, when, say Chris McGann wouldn’t?  (And I will protect my sources, with or without a shield law, because that’s what journalists do.)

These shield laws have been structured so that they really only apply to the corporate media, that is, journalists who have their paychecks signed by Frank Blethen, the Hearst Corporation, or some other master.  Yet as a student of history I’m pretty confident asserting that Jefferson would have recognized my style of reporting as much more analogous to the pamphleteers he sought to protect, than the journalistic anomaly represented by our modern dailies.

While you were enjoying Sunday football, working or whatever else was on your plate, the nationalization of the financial sector ramped up even more. From Calculated Risk:

This is a wild day for the financial markets. Here is a summary post (scroll down for actual posts):

1) Lehman is expected to file bankruptcy before midnight ET.

2) AIG rejected private equity investment and has asked the Fed for help. A restructuring plan will be announced tonight or early tomorrow morning.

3) BofA bought Merrill Lynch for $29 per share in stock.

4) The Fed has expanded its lending facilities, including accepting equities.

So the next right-wing moran who writes a letter to the editor calling Barack Obama a socialist deserves to be flogged with some worthless paper. Maybe someone has some old junk bond certificates.

The invisible hand isn’t confining itself to your pocket any more, folks. It’s all fun and games to have dogmatic stink tanks push privatization and deregulation schemes while times are good. Now we’re all going to reap the bitter fruit of a financial system that was allowed to wallow in corruption.

While the ridiculous and false charge that liberalism is socialism became a form of conventional wisdom in this country, the actual fact of conservative delusions about how to ensure efficient markets has been largely ignored.

The Republican “realists” who are such dedicated experts on sex crimes overlooked a basic fact of human nature: given the opportunity to rob people blind, a certain number of people will do so. And when this leads to a competitive advantage, as it did with the mortgage industry, it should be obvious that the pressures to cut corners will mount even in reputable firms. Throw in some Ponzi-type investment products and inscrutable accounting procedures, and voila, it’s 1987 all over again.

Now we have no choice but to bail the whole thing out. Again. At the same time Republicans put forth their boiler-plate rubbish about smaller government and less regulation, the American people will be witnessing a financial mess of truly epic proportions.

I’ve locked the crystal ball in a safe deposit box in an offshore bank, but the cognitive dissonance between what Republicans say and what they do could cause a rip in the Sarah-McCain continuum. It’s all moose hockey now.

The big question is whether we ever get a government that will make policy to benefit the entire population instead of a select few. You know, since we’re paying for it and stuff.

From Anchorage Daily News:

A crowd of anti-Sarah Palin protesters gathered in Midtown Anchorage soon after the Republican nominee for vice president left Alaska to resume campaigning in the Lower 48.

The Saturday protest in front of the Loussac Library appeared bigger than any Anchorage has seen in recent memory. The crowd looked to be in the high hundreds at least, and organizers said they counted 1,500. It included roughly 100 counter protesters supporting Palin.

It sounds like a lot of Alaskans have solid American values. From the same article:

“Sarah Palin frightens the hell out of me. I don’t want her anywhere near the White House,” said Marybeth Holleman of Anchorage.

—snip—

Alison Till, a geologist in Anchorage with the U.S. Geological Survey, said issues such as energy and global warming require solid and unbiased science to make good decisions. Palin’s opposition to listing the polar bear as threatened under the endangered species act and her support of teaching creationism in public schools are not the hallmarks of someone who relies upon solid science, Till argued.

“She is unqualified,” Till said.

The Alaskan blog Mudflats has photos and their own account of the rally, including this little tidbit regarding a right-wing talk radio host named Eddie Burke, who tried to intimidate the organizers of the rally by calling them maggots and reading their phone numbers on the air:

Then, the infamous Eddie Burke showed up. He tried to talk to the media, and was instantly surrounded by a group of 20 people who started shouting O-BA-MA so loud he couldn’t be heard. Then passing cars started honking in a rhythmic pattern of 3, like the Obama chant, while the crowd cheered, hooted and waved their signs high.

And I’m sure this spontaneous display of courage in standing up to this twisted man with a microphone will be spun by the right as “not respecting freedom of speech.” You know the drill by now. The right spews its hate and then explodes in phony outrage when people dare to stand up to it.

So while some people might wish to continue the culture wars and attempts to pit rural versus urban, gay versus straight or black versus white, normal people aren’t buying it. I can’t say if the American people as a whole have had enough of Republican lies and hypocrisy, but it’s heartening to see 1,500 Alaskans standing up to the bully-boy tactics of the right. Given the relatively small population of the state, that’s quite a display.

Mudflats also has lots of cool pics of the rally.

I went to Denver intending to do a lot of videoblogging… but drastically underestimated the time it would take to review and edit the couple hours of video I ended up recording.  So over time, I’ll post a few clips here and there, kinda like a documentary in dribs and drabs.

Anyway, here’s a short interview I did with Michelle Gregoire, the governor’s daughter, when they visited the Big Tent where us bloggers hung out.

The last major hurricane made a direct hit on Galveston Island and the Metropolitan Houston area on August 18, 1983. I remember it because I was living in Galveston at the time, working at the University of Texas Medical Branch and living in an apartment two blocks from the Seawall and the Gulf of Mexico. On weekends, I commuted to Houston, where my then-wife was going to graduate school. I still know folks down there. I hope they’re safe. The images of destruction coming out of Southeast Texas today are breaking my heart.

In 1983, during Hurricane Alicia, I evacuated to Houston and spent a long night hunkered down with my wife and a neighbor friend who was bedridden with a bad back. The storm wound up taking 22 lives, causing $2 billion in damage (in 1983 dollars), and leaving me with a profound respect for the havoc our planet can bring.

Alicia was bad. Today, a bullet was dodged when the worst of Ike’s storm surge went east of Galveston and obliterated the sparsely populated Bolivar Peninsula (a sand spit that’s basically at sea level and spent last night on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico). But Ike is still far, far worse than Alicia. Early estimates are that the storm will cost insurers $18 billion. Some 4.5 million people have no electricity; many will remain without power for weeks. Lots of folks also have limited water. And especially in Galveston, though it didn’t get hit with the 20-foot wall of water forecasters feared, rescuers are surely going to find bodies. Perhaps lots of them.

I mention all this because one of the most notable aspects of this storm is the large number of people who refused to evacuate – even though the National Weather Service issued an unusually dire warning yesterday that those in the storm surge zones who live in one- or two-story buildings faced “certain death.” Over a third of the people living in those zones – some 100,000 fools – stayed behind anyway.

In 2005, just after the devastation of Katrina, nearly 100% of folks evacuated for Hurricane Rita. The evacuation turned into a gridlocked fiasco, and more people died from it than from the storm (which then veered east and mostly missed the area). Listening to Houston radio last night, caller after caller cited the Rita experience, and distrust of government, as the reason they chose to stay behind. Hopefully, with the diminished storm surge, it wasn’t a fatal decision.

Which brings us to Seattle. We don’t get hurricanes, but we are more than vulnerable to a major earthquake or the lesser chances of, say, a terrorist bioattack or Mount Rainier erupting. Evacuation from Seattle, with only three major roads out of the area (I-90 and I-5 north and south), any of which could be badly damaged in a big quake, is a serious issue. So is the probability that without the sobering local experience of a Katrina in mind to encourage compliance, a lot of people wouldn’t leave. Plus, in a real-time event, you have folks who’d first want to get their kids from school or loved ones from work, folks who’d refuse to go without their pets, and the usual subset of people who fear looters more than a government warning of “certain death.”

What is Seattle’s disaster evacuation plan? Does anyone (outside a few planners at FEMA and City Hall and the King County Courthouse) even know? Would folks leave? What would you do?

As grim images emerge from my old home town of Galveston this weekend, now is a good time to consider what Seattle would, and should, do in a similar event.

Josh Farley at the Kitsap Sun provides another recap of the Robert Dalton case. Dalton was arrested after WestNET, a local drug task force, searched his property in August of last year and found 88 marijuana plants, which he says he was growing for his own personal supply of medical marijuana. Dalton is an authorized medical marijuana patient. Prosecutors tried to claim that he was supplying others, but the judge, Anna M. Laurie, threw out the “with intent to deliver” charge because of a lack of evidence.

Laurie will give her ruling on this case Friday. The case has boiled down to a man with a doctor’s authorization being accused of growing marijuana for medical reasons. Washington voters first said in 1998 that this should be legal, and the percentage of the state’s residents who support it has only grown since. In the comment section of Farley’s report, there are 27 comments, not a single one supportive of this prosecution. Why is it still happening?

For one, you can definitely blame Rob McKenna, the state’s Attorney General, who appears to believe that the Federal laws on marijuana should trump our state laws (and that putting sick people in jail is more important than protecting consumers from fraud). At a meeting I attended in April with patients, there was nearly unanimous agreement that McKenna and his office’s attitude towards them was a large step backwards from when Christine Gregoire was in that position.

But Christine Gregoire and the state Democrats are not without blame here either. Gregoire derailed the Department of Health’s efforts to establish good limits, leaving us in limbo past the original deadline and with a lesser likelihood of ending up with guidelines that can protect patients like Dalton. The legislature, which should have no reason to be tentative about this issue – considering the widespread support for medical marijuana – caved to law enforcement pressure to water down the original bill that was meant to provide better protections for patients under the initial voter-approved law.

The polling from the end of this week should be a wake-up call for the Gregoire campaign. I obviously don’t think that the Dalton case, or even medical marijuana in general, is having this effect on the polls, but the lack of courage that has been demonstrated by her in this area is something that we’ve seen across the board, especially the infamous cave to Eyman on I-747. And this perception is having a profound effect on the Governor’s chances for re-election. Right now is not the time for timid leadership that’s constantly worried about perceptions, or worse, completely beholden to special interests (the state’s law enforcement union in this case). Maybe it’s too late to do anything about this. It likely is for trying to win my vote.

The saddest thing is that if Gregoire’s terrible handling of this situation was based upon the fear of public perception alone, her fear is unfounded. The public’s attitude towards the drug war is not what it used to be. This is one topic that often brings policy wonks on both the left and right together, and it’s one that finds almost no support from people under the age of 40. The marijuana decriminalization initiative in Massachusetts has polled at over 70%. Taking a stand against the wastes and abuses of the drug war is a smart move in a state like Washington, but only a handful of politicians here have figured this out. Christine Gregoire is not one of them.

The rematch of the Washington state gubernatorial race has seen Gov. Christine Gregoire (D) holding a small, but consistent, lead over Dino Rossi (“G.O.P. Party”) from early in the year through August. Now, with less than two months to go to the general election, Rossi has “surged” to a modest September lead.

A new Rasmussen poll gives Ross a 52% to 46% lead. The poll of 500 likely voters was taken on September 10 and has a margin of error of ±4.5%.

This is the second consecutive polling lead for Rossi. A few days ago, a SurveyUSA poll gave Rossi a 48.2% to 47.4% lead over Gregoire.

The +6% lead in this new poll is Rossi’s strongest performance since November, 2006:

What is the probability that either Rossi or Gregoire would win an election held now? As usual, I’ll use a Monte Carlo approach to address the question.

After one million simulated elections, we find that Gregoire wins 166,063 times and Rossi wins 825,788 times. If the election was held now, we would expect Rossi to have an 83.3% probability and Gregoire a 16.7% probability of winning.

Here is the distribution of electoral votes resulting from the simulation.

Given that we have two polls taken back-to-back, it is worth combining the SurveyUSA poll (taken 5-Sep to 7-Sep) with the Rasmussen poll (taken on 10-Sep).

The resulting analysis gives Gregoire 226,762 wins to Rossi’s 766,697 wins. The combined polls suggest that, if an election was held now, Rossi would win with at 77.2% probability and Gregoire would win with a 22.8% probability:

Is the lead real? There is a reasonable possibility it is—the probability of two consecutive statistical outlier polls is pretty small.

On the other hand, consider this: both recent polls also show McCain doing better against Obama than anyone could have reasonably expected. The Rasmussen poll in Washington state gives Sen. Barack Obama a narrow 49% to 47% lead over Sen. John McCain, and A few days earlier, a SurveyUSA poll offered Obama a 49% to 45% lead over McCain:

Both of these polls show a surprising decline in Obama’s standing against McCain—a post-convention decline that is larger than anything I’ve seen in other blue states. So…maybe the lead is real. (More polls, please.)

In any case, given that the polling now has him ahead, can somebody please ask Dino to wipe that sublime grin off of his face? It’s just looking creepy these days.

(Cross posted at Hominid Views.)

I don’t have any personal anecdotes to explain why I support I-1000, the Death With Dignity Initiative. Unlike Geov, I’ve never been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Unlike Goldy and Michael, I’ve never been beside a loved one whose once vibrant life was replaced by something barely recognizable in the time before their passing. And unlike Jesse, I’ve never had a job that put me so close to death and dying.

But I-1000 is personal for me. It can be personal for anyone. End of life situations can be complicated – they can be heart wrenching. And they are always unpredictable. Even as a healthy person in his 30s, I know that if I’m ever at a point where my death my imminent, the biggest tragedy for me might not be the death itself – death is inevitable and mostly out of one’s own hands – but finding out that the government is limiting the options I have because it doesn’t trust me with the ability to make my own choices.

We talk a lot about liberty when we discuss politics. Regardless of one’s particular orientation, we all tend to think that we’re coming from the standpoint of maximizing our own liberty. But while many talk about their liberty, not everyone follows the famous advice from Thomas Paine:

He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from opposition; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself.

This truism extends to a number of our political debates today, as we often see politicians and partisans hold two completely opposing viewpoints on a subject depending on whether or not they or someone else is affected by it. When it comes to the opposition to I-1000, what many people see as government protecting their liberty is nothing more than a restriction on the liberty of others. What they desire is a system where government makes our choices for us because the decisions are difficult and potentially painful. This is the real slippery slope of I-1000.

I-1000 opponents will often come up with scary stories within a law like this. They imagine scenarios of being coerced into taking one’s own life or being overcome by the feelings of being a burden. These types of scenarios exist, but I-1000 does not create them, nor would it make them more common. I-1000 does not cause the insurance companies to do the wrong thing or a relative to lust after your inheritance. But I-1000 does prevent those people from dictating the choices you make at the end of your life. I-1000 ensures that the decision about how you die can be made by you, and no one else. Anyone who says otherwise is either lying about the law or does not understand it.

Many people desire a higher authority who protects them from themselves. I have no problem with such beliefs. But where I do have a problem is when the people work to make their own personal higher authority the higher authority for everyone. Government should exist to create systems that protect people from the things that we can’t control as individuals – the environment, natural disasters, unexpected health problems, the shifting winds and complexities of the economy. But government should not exist to tell us what decisions we make at an individual level that relate to our own moral compass – unless of course those decisions directly impact the public at large. The opponents of I-1000 are crossing that line – attempting to make choices that should be left up to individuals and their loved ones, without government interference and without having to submit to anyone else’s religious doctrines.

This is why I-1000 is personal for me. I’ve seen a growing desire in this country to have government take on the role of moral nanny in many ways. The end result of such a movement is undoubtedly a loss of liberty and a loss of our desire to be free adults, fully responsible for our own choices. This is why I feel compelled to speak up and this is why I’m working so hard to make sure I-1000 is passed – even though I’m far from being in a situation where the law would ever apply to me. As Thomas Paine knew, and as we still understand today, protecting liberty is not just about protecting your own freedom, but making sure that you live in a society where everyone’s is protected.

Please vote Yes on I-1000.