Archives for May 2009

My ass hurts.

I fell down the stairs last night. Or more exactly, both feet slid out from under me, landing me hard on my ass.

Anybody who has ever bruised their coccyx knows how painful the initial trauma can be, and as I lay at the bottom of the stairs for a few minutes, gasping for air and attempting to assess the true extent of my injury, I couldn’t help but think about how something as pedestrian as a comfy new pair of woolen socks slipping on the carpet could absolutely change a person’s life.

In a nation where access to health care has traditionally been tied to employment, even a relatively minor illness or household injury can set off a cascade of events that leads from a middle class lifestyle to despair.  Be it a tumble down the stairs, a slip in the bathtub or a torn up knee during a beer-belly softball match, everyday injuries can quickly put white and blue collar workers alike out of a job.  And with the loss of employment so too goes the health insurance… assuming you were fortunate enough to have health benefits in the first place.

One minute you’re kissing your daughter goodnight, and the next minute you’re writhing at the bottom of the stairs, having taken the first clumsy step toward toward economic uncertainty.

We hear a lot in the US about the need for individuals to take personal responsibility for their actions.  “Why should I have to pay for your child’s education?” we’re often asked. “Why should I have to pay for your health care, or your buses, or to regulate the safety of products you’re too stupid avoid?”

“I’ve worked hard for my money,” the familiar conservative refrain goes, “so why should I have to pay for the consequences of your bad choices?”

Bad choices. You know, like choosing to fall down the stairs.

As it turns out I’ve likely suffered little more than a couple of nasty contusions, so I guess I was lucky.  I don’t have statistics in front of me, so I don’t know how often a broken wrist or an injured back or a blown out knee ultimately leads to a person losing everything they’ve worked a lifetime to achieve, but you know it happens, and it happens every day.

So honestly, selfishly resent all you want the notion of a social welfare state, but don’t give me any of that personal responsiblity crap.  It’s a bigger pain in my ass than… well… my ass.

So, let’s say, a few years back, Joni Balter refinanced her house. She got a good, 30-year fixed rate, not one of those adjustable, sub-prime, pieces of crap, but today she gets a letter from the bank telling her that, you know, times are tough, profits are down, and they didn’t do so well on that stress test thing, so, sorry… that 6-percent mortgage we agreed on? We’re canceling that, and your new 7-percent mortgage starts next month.  Have a nice a day.

Or imagine you’re Kate Riley, and you just leased yourself a fancy new Cadillac Escalade, but GM, well, they’re struggling just to make it through the end of the month, so they deliver a Chevy Malibu instead.  But the $800/month lease payment? That stays the same. Oops… sorry.

Or let’s say you’re Frank Blethen, and you’ve got $70 million in loans coming due the end of the year… only the bank now says, on second thought, we need that money today. (You know, tough times, stress test, and all that.) And if you can’t afford to pay up right now, that’s okay, we’ll just take your family newspaper and your real estate holdings and we’ll liquidate them at auction.  C’est la vie.

Yeah, just imagine the howls of righteous outrage we’d hear from the Seattle Times editorial board should anybody unilaterally rewrite a legally binding contract on them.  A contract is a contract is a contract, after all.  Unless, of course, it’s signed between an employer and a labor union.

The letter from Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson states the district cannot renew the 182-day contract, but can offer a 181-day contract. Information on how to appeal the proposal is included.

Response by the teachers union, the Seattle Education Association, has been unhelpful and destructive. Union leaders are being purposely obtuse about the letter’s intent, even threatening legal action.

This strategy of killing the message by maligning the messenger shouldn’t work. This issue is less about the superintendent and more about tough state budget cuts.

Indeed, the letter could have been more artfully written…

Could have been more artfully written? Technically, the district just fired all 3,300 Seattle teachers… during Teacher Appreciation Week, no less!  And rather than attempting to renegotiate a contract that was bargained in good faith, the Superintendent chooses to bypass the union entirely, and go directly to the individual teachers, basically telling them to sign the new contract… or else.

And the union’s “ire is uncalled for and misdirected”…?

The issue here is not about tough state budget cuts; it’s about the complete and utter disregard the district (and the Times) has shown for a legally binding contract, and the collective bargaining rights of teachers. Nobody questions the dire financial straits in which the district now finds itself, but the proper and legal way to address this particular shortfall would be to renegotiate the contract with the union, not unilaterally shove a new contract directly down the throats of teachers.

Did the union refuse to give up that 182nd day? No, they weren’t even asked. The union was never given the opportunity to even earn a little public good will by working with the Superintendent… you know, the same way the Times thinks Bank of America should work with the Columbian to renegotiate its contractual obligations:

What makes the Columbian’s plight so sad is that Southwest Washington could lose its dominant news provider because Bank of America is apparently not willing to work with the company.

Get that? When you have a legally binding contract with a struggling newspaper publisher, you have a civic responsibility to work with the company to renegotiate the terms of the deal.  But when you have a legally binding contract with a labor union… well… screw them, those “unhelpful and destructive” DFH‘s.

Had the roles been reversed, had the union sent an unartful letter to Goodloe-Johnson declaring that teachers would no longer work that 182nd day, but would still be paid for it nonetheless, union officials would have been roundly ridiculed for their temerity. The Superintendent would never honor the demand, and no court would uphold such a unilateral violation of a collective bargaining agreement.  And you can rest assured that the Times would never characterize the district’s ire as “misdirected.”

No, the issue here is not the 182nd day, but rather the Superintendent’s blatant disregard for the collective bargaining rights of the teachers, and her absolute failure to view the union as a constructive partner during these tough budgetary times.  And I’m guessing that the Times’ own disregard for the collective bargaining rights of teachers, tells us everything we really need to know about their stance on education “reform.”

Paul Allen is selling off a couple of radio stations in Portland. From The Oregonian:

Paul Allen is selling his two Portland radio stations to a group led by former radio mogul Larry Wilson, who aims to make a fresh start in the business he left eight years ago.

The stations are talk-radio’s KXL (AM 750) and all-sports KXTG (“The Game,” 95.5 FM). They are among Oregon’s best-known broadcasters by virtue of their association with outspoken radio personalities and popular sports teams, including the Portland Trail Blazers. Wilson said Monday that he plans to maintain the format of each, and in conjunction with the sale signed an agreement to carry Blazers games for eight more years.

So just for the record, according to KXL’s web site, their “outspoken radio personalities” include Lars Larson, Glenn Beck and Michael Savage. There’s an ad for a t-shirt on Savage’s site that says “I’d rather be water-boarding.” Cute.

Larson is headlining an event called “Talkfest 5: Censorship,” which is billed as a discussion of “government censorship on the radio airwaves.” According to the KXL site, it’s sponsored by George Morlan Plumbing, IRA Advantage, Office Furniture Direct, Coors Light, Pilsner Urquell, Broadway Cigars, & Americans For Prosperity. That last one is yet another front group in the stink-tank pantheon, big surprise. I suppose they’ll get together and scream about how the Obama administration is going to shut them down, when declining ad revenues and a changing zeitgeist are their real enemy.

So hey, Paul Allen can buy and sell most things on the planet, that’s nothing new, and it’s not clear what his motivation is for selling the stations. Maybe he had a fit of conscience, or maybe it’s just routine business, as Allen’s spokesman David Postman implies in the Oregonian article.

What is clear is that Allen has had ownership of a station that disseminates the worst kind of paranoid right wing balderdash, which is his Constitutional right. But it sure doesn’t make me inclined to buy Blazers tickets, that’s for sure. The always fascinating and aggravating part of hate radio was that eventually some guy in a suit would say something like “It’s just a business,” as if the only possible niche market is conservative wingnuttery, and as if “business concerns” trump all moral and ethical responsibility for the product one puts out.

So thanks, Paul Allen, for all the years of Lars Larson and his brain-damaging stunts about Christmas trees and the “War on Christmas,” and especially thanks for mega-nuts Glenn Beck and Michael Savage. Rich folks don’t have to endure living in the regular world where actual morons believe the things they are told on stations like KXL, but the rest of us do. Instead of making the world a tiny bit better, you’ve made it just a little meaner and uglier.

Nice legacy.

– Reform-friendly Gil Kerlikowske was approved in a 91-1 vote by the Senate to be the new head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. A recent Zogby poll showed that a majority of Americans support legalizing marijuana. And Governor Schwarzenegger in California says it’s time for a debate about it. What can go wrong?

This:

A spokesman for U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said Thursday U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., will serve as Crime and Drugs Subcommittee chairman.

…

An unidentified Democratic Party source told CNN the decision to give Specter the chairmanship of the subcommittee was intended to help him get re-elected and to avoid any conflict as the Judiciary Committee considers a Supreme Court nomination.

I’m trying to come up with a positive way to interpret that, but I can’t.

– Mexico is following the lead of Portugal and appears ready to decriminalize low-level drug possession. This won’t affect their war on the cartels since their customer base is up north, but it’s worth noting two things: 1) The Obama Administration isn’t interfering like the Bush Administration did the last time Mexico tried this; and 2) Mexico’s drug policy is now far more progressive than ours.

– After a vanity license plate in Colorado was rejected for potentially being interpreted as obscene, a state Senator lashed out at the ACLU by saying that he wanted a license plate that says ACLUSUX. The ACLU responded by saying that they’d represent him if the plate is rejected. I’ve always wondered why there’s so much animosity towards the ACLU, but I think I get it now. With so many people who demand to have a different set of rules for themselves than for everyone else, the most terrifying thing is an organization that prides itself on intellectual consistency with respect to our rights.

– The medical marijuana community in Seattle lost a very good friend recently. Longtime patient advocate Dennis Moyers passed away. I found Dennis to be one of the most interesting and thoughtful people to discuss medical marijuana with. His years as a patient himself gave him great insight into the battle that’s been waged to deny people from taking a medicine that they’ve discovered to be tremendously beneficial. His latest effort was to encourage the Obama Administration to set up liaison within the Federal government to meet with medical marijuana patients and develop smart policy. The online petition is here.

This morning I received an email from a local attorney, containing a link to a post on HA, with the following request:

Please remove the defamatory, false and libelous post about me on your blog.

Sigh.

And this was my instant response:

[Name redacted]

I have just reread [redacted]’s post, and it appears to be nothing but opinion, block-quotes and links.  I understand if you find his deft refutation of your Seattle Times column injurious to your reputation, but there is certainly nothing false nor libelous about it.  Perhaps a less adversarial approach might have been for you to request an opportunity to post a response on HA in your own defense? I am always happy to facilitate such dialog.

I want to assure you that I take requests like yours very seriously… in fact, apparently much more seriously than you do, judging from its spurious nature.  If you can provide what you believe to be clear examples of “defamatory, false and libelous” statements in [redacted]’s post, I will consider them, but a takedown request requires quite a bit more than a vaguely threatening email from an attorney. For obvious reasons central to the very nature and viability of the medium, [redacted] and I, and the many prominent national bloggers who would surely rally to our defense, do not take these sort of threats lightly.  And neither should you.

For the moment, as a courtesy, I will keep your identity anonymous in any post I might write about this issue.  But please understand that I have limited patience for attorneys who attempt to bully me into surrendering my First Amendment rights.

David Goldstein

I’m not sure what this attorney is attempting to accomplish.  Maybe eliminate critical commentary from the list of hits people might get when Googling the attorney’s name?  Yeah, well, that strategy didn’t work all that well for attorney Bradley Marshall, now did it?

The thing is, the minute bloggers like me start backing down to vague threats like this, merely out of fear of incurring the legal expense, is the minute blogging ceases to be an honest and viable medium.  And I’ve always believed that the day I stop writing fearlessly is the day I stop being a writer worth reading.

So let this post serve as a final warning to the litigiously itchy everywhere: I have a public platform at my disposal, and I’m not afraid to use it.  If you feel we are in error, let us know, and we’ll consider posting a correction.  But you better be damn confident about winning a defamation suit before idly threatening to bring one, or else it will be you who will ultimately regret your error, not the the other way around.

The faces of the new G.O.P. take to the Sunday talk show circuit:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnKR6ztHIIs[/youtube]

Last week’s contest was solved in record time, 4 minutes, by longtime champ milwhcky. It was the Oklahoma State Capitol in Oklahoma City. That record will probably stand for a while because it will be a while before I put up another picture that easy. :)

Here’s this week’s, good luck (and Happy Mother’s Day)!

As a gardener, there are a lot of irritating things about Seattle’s weather, but our mild temperatures ain’t one of ’em. We’re already eating fresh lettuce, arugula and radishes out of the garden, and we’ll be enjoying peas, raspberries, herbs and more in another month.  Tomatoes are always a challenge, but that makes them all the more enjoyable.

Anyway, it’s a beautiful Spring day, so shut down your computer and go enjoy it.  And call your mother.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKCPUD0NXVA[/youtube]

Notice how many media jackals in the audience can’t really process it, although some can.

Limbaugh and Hannity are sick and deserve whatever ridicule they get, although it’s certain that after three decades of relentless and hateful attacks on us by conservatives, some of them will whine and bitch about this being out of bounds. Whatever. What goes around comes around.

Conservatives wanted divisive, bare-knuckle politics on all fronts, they got it and lost, the perverted freaks. Nice permanent majority they got there, BTW.

Elections have consequences, some unanticipated. It’s absolutely delightful to have someone throw everything back in their faces on such a big stage.

Drug addict snit fit in three….two….one…..Whaaaaaaaaah I need my binky and some oxycodone, I’m Rush Limbaugh, the leader of the Republican Party.

Although it’s odd when it’s media personalities who make their livings saying stuff.

Today, Media Matters for America demanded an apology for columnist and CBS golf analyst David Feherty’s assertion that “if you gave any U.S. soldier a gun with two bullets in it, and he found himself in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Osama bin Laden, there’s a good chance that Nancy Pelosi would get shot twice, and Harry Reid and bin Laden would be strangled to death.”

The other odd thing is we all know what would have happened if a liberal blogger had expressed a similar thing about Republican leadership in say, 2004. You would have got to know your local FBI agents quite well.

Conservatives are always complaining about hypocrisy and double standards, because they’re always projecting their flaws onto others. They just don’t seem to get that our first response is not “shoot them” but rather “beat the crap out of them at election time.” It’s called democracy.

If the best you can come up with is a fantasy about someone putting bullets into people, maybe you have no business commenting about politics at all.

And yes, Feherty is protected by the First Amendment if he is not directly expressing the desire that violence occur, but is expressing his opinion (however generalized, inaccurate and absurd) about the feelings of US military personnel. But it’s a reckless, asinine thing to say.

The First Amendment also protects the rights of large corporations to use good judgment in whom they place on the air! Call the PR flacks!

Yesterday, TPM unearthed this gem from 1986. It’s a CBS News report on Jeff Sessions being voted down by the Senate Judiciary Committee because he was considered to be too racially insensitive:

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

Now that Arlen Specter has become a Democrat, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions will become the ranking Republican on that very same Senate Judiciary Committee. TPM has even more:

When it became clear that Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) was poised to become ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, we recalled this 2002 article by Sarah Wildman which addresses some of the controversies that kept Sessions from being confirmed in 1986 as a U.S. District Court judge in Alabama.

Wildman writes in particular that the testimonies of two witnesses–a Justice Department employee named J. Gerald Hebert, and a black Sessions subordinate named Thomas Figures–helped to doom Sessions, then a U.S. Attorney, at his Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings. According to Wildman, Hebert testified reluctantly “that in a conversation between the two men Sessions had labeled the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) “un-American” and “Communist-inspired.” And Figures–then an assistant U.S. Attorney–told the committee that “during a 1981 murder investigation involving the Ku Klux Klan, Sessions was heard by several colleagues commenting that he ‘used to think they [the Klan] were OK’ until he found out some of them were ‘pot smokers.'” [emphasis mine]

That is truly the funniest thing I’ve heard all week. It perfectly captures how entrenched into backwardness the modern Republican Party has become. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sessions was joking when he said that, but the joke’s clearly on the GOP now.

Only 23 percent of Americans self-identify as Republicans today. That may seem like a small number, but believe it or not, it’s actually not much different than what it was during the early 1980s. The bigger differences today lie with independent voters and the social issues that motivated that small Republican base to dominate American politics for so long.

A recent poll showed that support for gay marriage, legalizing marijuana, and easing immigration restrictions are all at record highs. For years, the Republicans rallied their base around these social issues, and the backfiring of this strategy is now at full blast. The young people who grew up in the 80s and 90s have grown up seeing the Republican Party as a threat to social justice and in many cases a direct threat to their own freedom and security. And it’s perfectly fitting that as a black Democrat sits in the Oval Office, the main Republican to oppose his first Supreme Court nomination is someone who in 1986 was a harbinger of the extremism that would eventually befall that party.

In 1986, the leaders of the Republican Party undoubtedly saw themselves as a party of small government principles. But that’s not what got people to the polls. In order to do that, it became a party that played upon a fear that within 25 years, there would be a black President nominating a Puerto Rican woman to the Supreme Court; that gay people would be considered equals in our society; and that pot really isn’t that scary and is ready to be as socially accepted as alcohol. Now that their fears have become a reality, and the fact that no one else seems to share that fear, they’ve just become a bizarre lunatic fringe.

Okay, so… let me get this straight.  The Seattle Times has long editorialized against building light rail “because it would cost so much and do so little.”  But now that East Link has been approved by voters, against their repeated objections, they’re embracing as “creative” and “innovative” the most expensive route through Bellevue?

THE Eastside has emerged as a strong, enthusiastic proponent of light rail, joining innovative ideas and long-range visions of the region’s development, making civic leaders’ call for a tunnel under downtown Bellevue worth serious consideration.

Sound Transit officials estimate a tunnel would add between $500 million to $600 million to the overall cost of the regional transit expansion between downtown Seattle and downtown Redmond. The added cost shouldn’t be taken lightly. Nor should it be discounted as economically out of reach.

I am soooo confused.

From Political Buzz:

The Society of Professional Journalists national ethics committee is calling foul on the Washington News Council for conducting an online poll on a complaint against KIRO TV.

The Washington Secretary of State had complained to the News Council, a self-appointed watchdog group, about KIRO’s pieces on voter registration irregularities. KIRO declined to participate in a hearing. So the News Council posted an online poll, which turned out lopsided against KIRO.

“A hearing can be worthwhile if all parties voluntarily participate and work toward a common understanding,” the SPJ said in a news release. “The committee strongly objects to having a public online vote, or virtual hearing, on journalism ethics.

Now, the KIRO stories were suspect and full of factual errors, basically part of the noise machine crap about ghost voters and such. You can read all about it at the Washington News Council web site. KIRO did eventually pull the stories down, so that was good.

Still, I’m amazed that the Washington News Council, this self-appointed collection of rich people and formerly powerful traditional journalists, could make such an error in judgment by conducting an on-line kangaroo court.

Many readers likely recall that the P-I refused to appear before WNC in 2006 concerning an expose of the King County sheriff’s office, citing, among other reasons, the fact that WNC director John Hamer was married to a district director for Rep. Dave Reichert. (By way of clarification, Reichert used to be sheriff, and I have no idea what Hamer and his wife currently do, nor is that the point.) The P-I stood by its reporting in the face of the attempts by WNC to intimidate them.

The point is that the Washington News Council has little credibility, and deservedly so. But I’m not all that worked up about it, frankly, because this blog isn’t a “real” journalism outfit, and thus doesn’t fall under WNC’s self-defined jurisdiction, as far as I can tell.

And that’s just fine with me, because every time I hear the word “ethics” and “journalism” I flash on Commander Codpiece, and that’s something I really don’t like popping into my brain.

Yeah, let’s talk some more about ethics, guys. Here’s a topic: let’s say a reporter falsely accuses a candidate of lying about her education, writes a story full of half-truths and distortions spoon fed to reporters by the other side, and the candidate then loses by a cat’s whisker.

What should happen? Or more to the point, what did happen? As we all know, the answer is: nothing at all. Ethics, yeah, Uh-uh.

100 days of Michael Steele:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K08k3maGGVM[/youtube]

(There are some sixty other media clips from the past week in politics posted at Hominid Views.)

Republicans are very, very sorry they lost two elections in a row, and if the American people will just please give them another chance, the same people will do the same things.

But it will be called something else, although I’m relatively certain Harry S. Truman would have called it “bullshit.”