Archives for April 2009

U.S. Senate Democrats get the coveted 60th seat from…a defection. So Norm Coleman’s odious delaying tactics against Al Franken don’t amount to squat could continue forever and ever and ever.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. The Rumpublican Party continues its shrinkage.

UPDATE [Goldy]:
As a native Pennsylvanian, who proudly voted against Specter way back in 1986, all I can say is “wow.”  Wow. I’m as speechless as the Club for Growth.

UPDATE, UPDATE [Goldy]:
As N in Seattle points out in the comment thread, you have to understand Philadelphia politics to understand Specter’s politics.  Specter was a registered Democrat when he first ran for District Attorney as a Republican, and he built his reputation fighting the corrupt Democratic machine of Mayors Jim Tate and Frank Rizzo.  Specter was a bit of a reformer, more in line with the socially liberal, economically conservative “Rockefeller Republicans” who dominated suburban politics at the time.  Thus as the GOP moved further and further to the right, it was always disappointing to see him toe the party line again and again, out of political expediency.

No doubt this final party switch was driven by political expediency too.  But while he may be the newest member of the Senate Democratic Caucus, he is certainly far from the most conservative.

UPDATE THREE [Jon]: Updated the original post to reflect that some are pointing out Specter’s switch may actually increase the pressure on Republicans to not allow Al Franken to be seated. Whatever. It’s still funny as hell.

UPDATE 4 [Darryl]: Shrinkage, indeed. But Sen. Specter is destroying my narrative of being an independent-turned-Republican. As I explained in my statement of support for Mike Huckabee, in 1998 I voted for Republican Sen. Specter over his “pro-life” Democratic opponent Bill Lloyd.

It’s been regionally popular for some time, across the entire political spectrum, to generally dis outgoing King County Executive Ron Sims, but as the nation faces a potential flu pandemic, it would be a nice going away present from our media-political complex to give him a little credit where credit is due for the county’s extraordinary preparation and foresight.

Under Sims’ watch Seattle-King County has run one of the best public health agencies in the nation, putting its pandemic flu preparations in the capable hands of the widely respected Dr. Jeff Duchin.  And while the rest of the nation is nervously awaiting its allotment of anti-viral drugs from federal warehouses, King County is already sitting on a stockpile of 190,000 courses of Tamiflu, making us one of the few local governments to have invested tax dollars in such precautions.

Chances are still that the Mexican swine flu outbreak will fizzle out before becoming a worldwide health crisis, and if we’re lucky, the county’s supply of Tamiflu will expire long before the next flu pandemic strikes.  But it shouldn’t require a worst case scenario for the citizens of our region to thank Ron Sims for his leadership.

The US Supreme Court has sided with the FCC, upholding its incredibly unreasonable “fleeting expletive” rule.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday said the government could threaten broadcasters with fines over the use of even a single curse word on live television, yet stopped short of ruling whether the policy violates the Constitution.

The court, in a 5-4 decision, refused to pass judgment on whether the Federal Communications Commission’s ”fleeting expletives” policy is in line with First Amendment guarantees of free speech.

Well, fuck that.

[QUICK! How many of you instantly had a sexual image flash through your heads when I used the word “fuck” in a clearly nonsexual manner?  I’m guessing none, yet that notion—that some words are so offensive because they always evoke sexual or execretory images—is at the heart of the Supreme Court’s logic.  Utterly fucking ridiculous.]

I’m not saying the FCC should have no power at all to regulate the public airwaves, but these regulations should not be arbitrary or unreasonable, and the fleeting expletive rule is both, especially in light of how easy it is to cleverly—and legally—subvert the rule’s intent.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NDPT0Ph5rA[/youtube]

UPDATE:
From Justice Stevens’ dissent:

There is a critical distinction between the use of an expletive to describe a sexual or excretory function and the use of such a word for an entirely different purpose, such as to express an emotion. One rests at the core of indecency; the other stands miles apart. As any golfer who has watched his partner shank a short approach knows, it would be absurd to accept the suggestion that the resultant four-letter word uttered on the golf course describes sex or excrement and is therefore indecent. But that is the absurdity the FCC has embraced in its new approach to indecency.

Exactly.

The biggest impact of the Andromeda strain swine flu on Americans so far is to render television “news” shows even more unwatchable than they already were. Swine flu swine flu swine flu swine flu, good morning, swine flu swine flu swine flu, back to you!

Fifty degrees and swine flu, rained out and swine flu.

Maybe the octomom will marry a Somali pirate who got a DUI in So Cal while auditioning for American Idol, it would be a comparative blessing.

Probably the best preparedness for individuals would be a stack of DVD’s and books, and tons of canned soup. Or you could panic and try to hoard things like prescription medicines intended for people who actually get the flu, that would really add to the overall merriment.

I’m pretty sure that this is what leadership looks like:

Eight activists protesting the expulsion of aid groups in Darfur have been arrested in front of the Sudanese Embassy in Washington.

Humanitarian leaders and U.S. lawmakers, including Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison and Maryland Rep. Donna Edwards, were led away from the embassy in handcuffs Monday after crossing a police line.

Civil disobedience from a couple of U.S. Representatives.  What a refreshing contrast to the type of meek politicians we tend to elect here in Washington state, who generally couldn’t get arrested if they tried.

In his Sunday “Smart Bombs” column, Spokane Spokesman-Review Associate Editor Gary Crooks takes on some common budget myths, and comes to a conclusion that might surprise a lot of his readers.

The best way to measure a state’s tax burden is to total up personal income and divide it by how much money the state collects. […] The same holds true for spending, which was about 6 percent of total income for a decade, then declined. That’s probably surprising to most people given the Republicans’ drumbeat on “out-of-control” spending. Spending has increased in recent years, but a lot of that was to make up for budgetary hits after the economic swoon of the previous recession and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The state then began making up for lost funding on voter-approved initiatives on teacher pay and class sizes and had to backfill pension payments that were delayed to help balance the previous budget.

To get an idea how much the “spending burden” has declined, it was 5.9 percent of total income for the 2003-’05 budget. This is the much-ballyhooed “tough” budget shepherded through the Legislature by then-Sen. Dino Rossi. Now we’re looking at 5.18 percent. And, yes, even the “Rossi budget” spent more than the state collected.

HA regulars are well familiar with this analysis, but I can’t tell you how heartening it is to read it in the op-ed pages of a major daily, especially considering that the editors at our own Seattle Times have been so aggressive at spreading the myth Crooks so effectively busts.  But perhaps the Times refusal to accept this reality has less to do with their inability to do the math, and more to do with their refusal to accept Crooks’ inevitable conclusion.

It’s the tax code, stupid. The problem with measuring the affordability of taxes and spending against total income is that the state doesn’t have an income tax. The above calculations help explain why it should. The state is relatively rich, but it has a tax code that’s unsuited to tapping that wealth. The result is that high-income households send relatively large sums to the feds and relatively paltry amounts to the state. Conversely, the state taxes the poor at the highest levels in the nation because of the heavy reliance on our regressive sales tax.

If the state instituted an income tax and lowered the sales tax, it could begin to address its chronic budget deficits and lower the tax burden for most Washingtonians. It’s the same argument that was laid out by the Gates Commission several years ago, but lawmakers failed to act.

The paper of record for Eastern Washington joining me in advocating for a state income tax?  Welcome to the radical fringe.

Reporting for the Tacoma News Tribune, Ian Demsky has the scoop on the State Lottery’s new “enhanced” marketing plan to boost impulse sales of scratch tickets by at least 20 percent, and I’m truly impressed with the expertise of his sources:

Informed of the promotion, one gaming critic called using such tactics during an economic downturn “cruel.”

“They are looking to create compulsion,” Seattle blogger David Goldstein said last week. “That’s how the industry works.”

And I’m not just pulling that critique out of my ass.  As I’ve written on numerous occasions, games like slot machines and scratch tickets are scientifically designed to create compulsion—hence the refreshingly honest name of the scratch ticket vendor designing and testing the Lottery’s enhanced marketing plan: “Scientific Games.”

I’ve no doubt that the expanded retail displays, the 48 new scratch ticket games and their seductive second chance feature, were carefully designed in consultation with behavioral psychologists, so as to specifically enable problem gamblers and exploit their weaknesses.  Problem gamblers may comprise only 5 percent of their customers, but they can produce over 50 percent of the gambling industry’s profits.  This is no secret, and like any business, the gambling industry has always catered to its best customers.

So what’s the problem?

Goldstein, a blogger who has advocated against gambling expansion, said the program makes sense – if the state’s primary interest is to maximize profits.

“But it’s the state,” he said. “In the end, its purpose is to provide for the welfare of the citizens. The lottery is at cross-purposes with itself.”

Again, I’m not pulling this stuff out of my ass.  Indeed, the Legislative Declaration that prefaces Washington’s gambling statutes is quite specific:

The public policy of the state of Washington on gambling is to keep the criminal element out of gambling and to promote the social welfare of the people by limiting the nature and scope of gambling activities and by strict regulation and control.

Notice that there’s nothing in that opening statement about maximizing state profits.  Nor should there be.  The social and economic costs of problem and pathological gambling are simply too high.

Problem gambling is a medically recognized addictive behavior associated with a much higher incidence of other addictions, including tobacco, alcohol and drugs, as well as other dangerous behaviors.   And even the lottery’s own problem gambling study suggests that scratch tickets often serve as a gateway to other forms of gambling. So why should the state spend money to promote behavior that harms the welfare of its citizens?

It shouldn’t.

The people who stand to profit the most from this enhanced marketing plan are retailers, and the shareholders at New York based Scientific Games, certainly not the customers, and not state taxpayers, who typically see only 20 cents on the dollar flow back into state coffers out of the more than half billion dollars of revenues the State Lottery takes in annually.

Gov. Gregoire did the right thing in 2006 by instructing the State Lottery to scrap plans to market toward teenagers.  She should once again remind lottery officials that they are not in the business of maximizing revenues at any cost.

Perhaps I was dreaming, but I believe my clock radio awakened me this morning to the sound of Rep. Deb Eddy (D-48) telling KUOW listeners that she supported an income tax.  Of course, most Democratic legislators privately support an income tax, but damn few are willing to talk about it publicly, and it was particularly heartening to hear this kind of talk coming from a suburban Dem.  So maybe we made a little progress on this issue after all?

In the meanwhile, it looks like there’s still quite a bit of unfinished business in Olympia, prompting immediate talk of the governor calling a special session to tie up a few loose ends, and opening the opportunity for some mischief making.  Here’s hoping the progressives in the Democratic caucus can get their shit together and make a little mischief.

After confirming 20 cases of the Mexican swine flu in five states, and four more cases in Canada, U.S. health officials declared a national public health emergency today in order to intensify resources toward diagnosis and prevention, and to release funds to purchase and distribute supplies of anti-viral drugs.

So far there have been no known deaths attributed to this new strain of swine flu outside of Mexico, and only one US victim has thus far required hospitalization.  Still…

Officials said they expect more severe cases as reports of infection multiply.

“You don’t know how much it’s spread, but you’ve got to at least make the assumption that there’s a lot more virus in this country than is seen at the moment,” Jeffrey Koplan, the C.D.C. director from 1998 to 2002, said in a telephone interview.

As always, DemFromCT is following the issue closely on Daily Kos.

Last week’s contest was won by 2cents. It was The Rhein Tower in Dusseldorf, Germany. Here’s this week’s, good luck!

Not done yet.

And more foreclosures are looming. One-third of Washington homeowners who financed with adjustable-rate mortgages are still paying low, introductory rates. Those teaser rates, some as low as 1 percent, will jump in the coming year.

In most other states, those low initial rates have already expired, according to the Washington Budget & Policy Center.

“When they reset, it’s not going to be pretty,” said Glenn Crellin, director of the Center for Real Estate Research at Washington State University.

Good, research-based article with human interest by the Seattle Times reporters. When one contemplates newspapers going away, it’s solid efforts like this that would be sorely missed.

The disaster that is real estate in Washington state seems likely to continue for some time. Plenty of blame to go around. Yes, some people bought houses they had no business buying, but in order to do so all they needed was a “heartbeat” and they got the loans, as the article puts it.

So all of us suckers who played by the rules get to help clean up this stinking mess, and if anyone needs to sell their house because of legitimate reasons like a transfer, an illness or something, the market is all messed up with REO’s and short sales. Luckily our household doesn’t need to move, I’m just sayin’.

So thanks a lot to the wieners who ran Countrywide! We’re likely going to re-finance not only because rates are so absurdly low, but because the thought of writing any more checks to Countrywide makes us want to vomit. I don’t really care who owns them now, B of A is being a bunch of jerks with their credit cards, so they can bite us too.

Strange business strategy if you ask me, hacking off the good customers who pay their bills on time. If B of A wants any money from us they’ll probably need to buy back our loan at a new, fabulously low interest rate. I kind of wish I had a B of A credit card so I could enjoy putting it through the shredder.

Worried yet?

Officials around the world on Sunday raced to contain an outbreak of swine flu as potential new cases were reported from New Zealand to Hong Kong to Spain, raising concerns about the potential for a global pandemic.

Governments issued travel advisories urging people not to travel to Mexico, the apparent origin of the outbreak, where 81 people have died and some 1,300 have been infected. China, Russia and others set up quarantines for anyone possibly infected.

Cases of the Mexico City strain have now been confirmed in California, Texas, Kansas, and New York, with suspected cases in several other states. Thus far the American victims have suffered mostly mild symptoms, but the number of confirmed cases is not yet large enough to be statistically significant, so here’s hoping that Mexico’s mortality rate—consistently running at a stunning 6 percent as new cases are reported and confirmed—turns out to be the anomaly, not the norm.

Of course, it’s too soon to panic, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a run on surgical masks over the next few days.  And this wouldn’t be a bad time for folks around these parts to restock your earthquake survival stores to make sure you have enough food to last several weeks.

– Jim McDermott has added his name to the small but growing list of Congressmen who are finally speaking up about the need to legalize marijuana as part of the response to our nation’s economic mess. Mary Ann Akers at the Washington Post writes about Howard Woolridge, the lobbyist for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. The conventional wisdom has long been that there’s a danger for politicians to embrace McDermott’s position because of the voters, but for some reason, Ron Paul keeps getting re-elected by wide margins in one of the most conservative parts of the country. The problem is not that voters will reject it. It’s that politicians and special interests (law enforcement agencies, prison lobbies, and pharmaceutical firms) have a strong interest in holding it back.

– A major bust in Belltown brought charges against 32 individuals for drug dealing. The answer to the PI’s question is No. Arresting people does not fix an area’s crack problem. Here’s my question: How many more decades will this approach have to fail before we finally recognize that it always fails?

– I’m having a lot of trouble understanding the logic inside Obama’s Justice Department. This week, they recommended that Charles Lynch, the medical marijuana dispensary owner who was raided by the Bush Justice Department, be sentenced to 5 years in prison. This is only weeks after Eric Holder said that Obama would no longer target those in medical marijuana states like Lynch who follow state law. The Times article quotes U.S. Attorney Thomas O’Brien as saying that Lynch was violating state law, which is clearly bullshit. Not only did Lynch have the mayor of the town at his side when he opened his dispensary, but during the trial, the Federal Prosecutors went out of their way to prevent the jury from knowing that he was following state law.

So to sum up the Obama Administration’s DOJ stances: We won’t prosecute people for torture because that’s looking towards the past, but we will honor previously-imposed mandatory minimum sentences for things that we no longer think should be enforced. I’m sorry, but that’s every bit as bad as the Bush Administration was. On issues of civil liberties, Obama and his fellow Democrats need to start getting serious or they’ll start bleeding independent voters before 2010.

– PubliCola writes about how Civil Liberties legislation fared in Olympia this session.

The news coming out of Mexico City is worrying as 61 68 people are now confirmed dead, and more than a thousand sickened from a new variant of the H1N1 flu virus that has apparently jumped from birds to pigs, and is now easily transmissable through human to human contact.  Mexican authorities have closed schools, theaters, libraries and museums in an effort to curb the spread, but with cases now being reported throughout Mexico, and confirmed in both Texas and California, officials at both the US Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization are sounding increasingly alarmed over the possibility of a worldwide flu pandemic.

And perhaps the most chilling news…

Most of Mexico’s dead were young, healthy adults, and none were over 60 or under 3 years old, the World Health Organization said. That alarms health officials because seasonal flus cause most of their deaths among infants and bedridden elderly people, but pandemic flus — like the 1918 Spanish flu, and the 1957 and 1968 pandemics — often strike young, healthy people the hardest.

It’s times like this when strong, decisive and well-prepared government leaders can make the difference between life and death.  As the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1919 was killing an estimated 50 million worldwide, Seattle Mayor Ole Hanson preemptively shut down schools, theaters, businesses and other public places in a controversial effort to minimize the local outbreak.  Seattle was relatively spared compared to other US cities… and Hanson was literally run out of town by outraged business and civic leaders angered over the loss of revenues and the disruption of the city’s daily routine.

In that tradition, King County Executive Ron Sims has long made the inevitability of another flu pandemic a primary focus of the region’s disaster preparedness efforts, a focus I first learned about back in September of 2005, when I heard Ron talk at a post-Katrina, Red Cross fundraiser.

But rather than talk about New Orleans, he spent most of his time talking about the county’s own disaster preparation efforts. By far their primary focus? Not earthquakes, not terrorist attacks… but avian flu. It was a sobering talk with zero political upside for a man who was in the midst of what was supposed to be a tough fight for reelection, and I came away wishing every voter had the opportunity to talk with Sims one-on-one.

And it wasn’t just talk.  Seattle & King County Public Health has a detailed and informative Pandemic Flu Preparedness page, which includes links to videos, fact sheets, resources… even a 12-page comic book available in 16 languages.  The agency’s 50-page Pandemic Flu Response Plan is available here.

It is ironic that the legislature is about to slash public health spending exactly at a time we might need it most.  And more than a little bit scary.

Earlier this week, this post at Eschaton about a girl being prosecuted for “sexting” made me recall an event that used to take place every year at this time – the Ann Arbor Naked Mile.

As a freshman at the University of Michigan in 1993-94, my roommate was a junior on the crew team. According to his version of events, the crew team started the Naked Mile in the late 80s by streaking across campus at midnight after the last night of class. In the years following, the event grew significantly larger. Throughout the school year, my roommate tried convincing everyone in our hall to run with him. I had a pretty strong anti-authoritarian streak in me by then, but it still took a little bit of coaxing to get me on board.

On the night of the event, there were four of us assembled in our room downing shots (my roommate was over 21 by then, so that was only partially against dorm rules) and drinking Mountain Dews. The route of the Naked Mile went across campus from east to west, basically taking us back to our dorms. Despite it only being in the 40s, I headed across campus wearing only a pair of soccer shorts and sneakers. When I got to the starting area, though, much of the nervousness about doing this was going away. There were hundreds of people there milling about naked, waiting for midnight. It was like a giant co-ed locker room outside in the cold. I took off my shorts and waited for everyone to start running.

The weird thing about the run is that you don’t get to do it as a herd. Because of the massive amounts of people who were now showing up for the event, the runners end up doing much of the race in a single-file line through the crowd on the main part of campus. The run began somewhat uneventfully at first, but as we approached the arch that separates the shops on South University from the campus diag, the route got blocked by the crowd. My roommate, cool as a fucking cucumber, yells out “anybody got a cigarette!” Someone in the crowd hands him a cigarette. He yells out “anybody got a light!” An outstretched hand held a lighter. He smoked it as we all stood around waiting for the path to clear.

We weren’t at the very end of the runners, but we were pretty close. My roommate’s smoke break separated us from the rest of the runners enough so that people in the crowd ahead thought that the run was over. As we finally made our way through the arch and into the diag, we were even more enmeshed in the crowd. By the time we got across the diag to State Street, we were way off course. In order to get to where we knew the end point was, we decided to cut through a small landscaped area just across State Street. After we jumped in, though, we realized that the ground inside that area was lower than the sidewalk we’d just jumped from. After we’d climbed up through a tall hedge to get back onto the sidewalk, I still vividly remember hearing my friend behind me saying, “Damn, I think I scratched my scrotum.” Still makes me laugh to this day.

When we arrived at the Cube sculpture where the “Mile” (it’s not even close to an actual mile) ends, we met up with some of the clothed members of our co-ed hall. And despite the fact that the run was over and I was hanging out with the girls from the room next door, I didn’t even feel the need to get dressed again. It’s something that you’d never expect, but once you’re naked in public with a good excuse, you can begin to feel very comfortable with your nakedness very quickly.

I wound up running it all four years I was in Ann Arbor, but I never had as much fun as I did that first year. In subsequent years, I began to notice the things that would eventually bring an end to the city’s and the University’s tolerance of the event. The major problem was that despite there being about 8 to 10 male runners for every female one, the event brought out the perverts in full force. Even in that first year, the size of the crowds amazed me. Then, with each year, the amount of video cameras just multiplied. One year (I believe my junior year), I let my drunkenness get the best of me and got thrown to the ground by a man whose very expensive video camera I’d just broken.

In my senior year run, some runners around me ran while also chanting “PER-VERTS” to the assembled gawkers. Unfortunately, gawking wasn’t the only thing going on. My girlfriend ran with me that year and said that she nearly got groped by some guys along the way. Several other girls who ran said the same thing, and some had actually been grabbed and pulled to the ground. We tried to find a police officer (Ann Arbor police tolerated the event and even did crowd control), but couldn’t find one interested in helping. Within a few years after that, the University tried to shut the whole event down.

I was thinking back on this history when I read the original post above, where a young girl who’d taken revealing pictures of herself with her phone found herself in a courtroom where a bunch of old men were planning to review the evidence and potentially punish her for doing so. On the one hand, I recognize the desire to keep teenage girls from doing this, as many of them have no fucking clue how populated this country is with sexually repressed and psychologically disturbed individuals who might do them harm. On the other hand, though, attempting to charge them with a crime is arguably the dumbest possible way to dissuade them from doing so. As the girl in the article realized, the biggest punishment that could occur is for creepy old men to see her naked.

It’s been tempting to conclude that the overeager prosecutor in this case, George Skumanick Jr., is focusing on these cases simply because of his own perverted desire to see revealing pictures of teenage girls. It’s certainly possible. But it’s also possible that he’s just another product of a justice system that far too often sees its role as moral nanny, and refuses to acknowledge the dangers of taking a heavy handed approach to getting teens not to make risky personal choices. It’s also kind of interesting that this case is happening so close to where the recent scandal over funneling young people to jail for money took place.

Another major concern here is that unless we clearly push back against the idea that anyone who doesn’t guard their own nakedness with sufficient zeal as a child pornographer, we’ll continue to expand the ranks of “sex offenders” beyond the point where it makes sense. The term sex offender should refer to actual dangerous people, who have victimized other people in a sexual way (like the perverts who grabbed and assaulted female runners at the Naked Mile). When we start trying to label people as sex offenders who make moral choices that sexually repressed members of our justice system are offended by, we completely undermine the purpose of having that distinction in the first place.

A few years after the Naked Mile was shut down, they made an American Pie movie that was based on the tradition. Not surprisingly, it was the same kind of idiotic overly-sexualized view of the event that wound up bringing hundreds of perverts out of the woodwork to line the streets of Ann Arbor every April. Back in the early-to-mid 90s, pictures posted from the Naked Mile on University of Michigan student websites were some of the first instances of web porn out there (which probably didn’t stay up for very long). On today’s internet, it probably wouldn’t even pass for porn, just blurry pictures of naked people running.

Today, the trend of “sexting” is the new thing, and a lot of kids simply haven’t been smart enough to realize that when they send a photo to their friends, it’s a short journey to the internet where the whole world can see it. As cases like that become more and more common, more and more kids will be smarter about not doing it. It doesn’t require that law enforcement officials spy on our teenagers’ phone traffic. It doesn’t require that District Attorneys threaten them with a “sex offender” tag that would haunt them their whole lives. It just requires explaining that there are a lot of freaking weirdos out there and expecting kids to be smarter.