Archives for July 2009

Enjoy the holiday everyone!

She should definitely call Zig immediately.

Imagine, if you will, forcing sending your entire office to see hot motivational babe Sarah Palin live at an arena near you for only $19.95. If your employees little worker scumbags won’t go they can spend the day counting toner cartridges.

Today’s Republican Party is a multi-level marketing scheme that sells faux resentment instead of generic cleaning products. Neither the particular product nor the particular resentment are of any great importance, if each fulfills the desired political objective of fostering yet another wave of profits in the form of anger and donations from the base.

It slices, it dices and it cuts this tomato paper thin, and if you order now you can can look at her legs.

Don’t delay!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucKTJqyobe4[/youtube]

(And there are some 65 other media clips from the past week in politics posted at Hominid Views.)

In my post earlier today, I didn’t mention anything about what the Obama Administration is trying to do inside Pakistan itself, but it’s quite important and extremely disconcerting. Jeremy Scahill has a very good rundown on the extent that we’re operating across Afghanistan’s southeastern border.

Friday before a holiday. From KTUU-TV in Anchorage:

In a stunning announcement, Gov. Sarah Palin said Friday morning she will resign her office in a few weeks.

Speculation has swirled for weeks, perhaps months that Palin would not seek re-election in 2010 as she pursues a political career on the national stage. The former vice presidential candidate has long been rumored to be considering a run at the Republican presidential nomination in 2012.

Palin did not address those rumors at the press conference at her Wasilla home, during which she did not take questions from reporters.

Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell will be inaugurated as her successor at the Governor’s Picnic at Pioneer Park in Fairbanks on Sunday, July 26, Palin said.

How very interesting.

Australia-based writer Gregor Salmon spent the last eight months exploring the world of Afghanistan’s opium trade.

“Poppy is not just a crop… it’s a financial system, a finely-tuned industry,” he said.

“It’s a low-risk crop in a high-risk environment.”

He got used to feeling a “constant sense of unease” and managed to talk farmers, police, government officials and Taliban.

And he found corruption is so rife in the police force and government that Afghanistan isn’t likely to shake its addiction any time soon.

When we invaded Afghanistan back in 2001, this wasn’t the mission we signed up for. We went there to remove a government that provided safe haven for the people who planned 9/11 and to capture the leaders of al Qaeda – who were based there and operating training camps for potential terrorists. We removed the government. The leaders of al Qaeda and the terrorist camps have gone elsewhere. But 8 years later we’re still there, trying to solve a problem that’s only related to terrorism because of how we’re dealing with it.

“There are farmers who I spoke with who will obviously tell you … ‘We don’t have much money, this is a lifeline crop, it’s against our religion and we don’t want to be growing this garbage, but ultimately we have no choice’.”

And Salmon says the Taliban are also finding enormous benefits in opium cultivation.

He says Taliban commanders and officials told him the general rule is the Taliban take a 10 per cent cut of opium income, giving them roughly $500 million per year.

That money, of course, buys a lot of weapons with which to continue their protection racket and attack American troops.

There are government attempts to eradicate the crop, but Salmon is critical of such efforts.

He tagged along with a poppy eradication team, but he says it was all for the cameras.

“It was a sham,” he said.

“The whole eradication [program] is corrupt. The poor people get their crops eradicated because they don’t have the money to pay off the government.

“You pay to have your crops spared.

We’ve known for a long time now that the eradication program has functioned like this. Either farmers and drug lords pay the Taliban to provide armed protection against the eradicators, or they pay off local officials directly to keep the eradicators from their fields. And the poor farmers who have their fields eradicated often just join the Taliban. In the end, the Taliban ranks (and weaponry arsenal) grow and the drug lords and corrupt members of the government get richer. And Afghanistan still produces around 90% of the world’s opium when it’s all said and done. It would be hard to devise a more backwards strategy if one tried.

The Obama Administration has inherited this mess, and have shown signs that they can do something the previous administration didn’t… deal with reality:

“We are downgrading our efforts to eradicate crops-spraying, a policy we think is totally ineffectual,” [Richard] Holbrooke, the special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said in his testimony.

The money spared would be devoted to stopping trafficking, pursuing drug lords and helping farmers grow other crops, he added.

“Hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars we’ve spent on crop eradication has not done any damage to the Taliban. On the contrary, it’s helped them recruit,” Holbrooke said.

“In my experience,” the veteran US diplomat and negotiator said, “this is the least effective program ever.”

Holbrooke deserves credit for shattering that illusion, but what happens now that we’ve launched another major military offensive there? What exactly are we trying to accomplish? We’re not fighting quite the same kind of ideologically driven religious fanaticism that had overtaken Kabul in the 90s and welcomed Arab religious extremists to use their land as a safe haven. We’re fighting an illegal industry, one that through our attempts to stop it has become a new and far more potent threat to our occupation.

The new strategy appears to be aimed at the titans of that industry, the drug lords themselves. Can it be done? We can’t do it in Mexico, although the industry became concentrated in Mexico after we spent years trying to eradicate it in Colombia. It’s worth noting that while most of the cocaine in still grown in Colombia, the people who are now making the vast majority of money off of it are in Mexico. It’s entirely within the realm of possibility that we’ll end up with a similar dynamic along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where the crops are grown in Afghanistan, but the huge profits end up being shifted to the border area of Pakistan.

This is another situation where government officials continue to believe their own drug war propaganda. A person making money by producing heroin is not a terrorist. You may not agree with what they’re doing, but they’re not the same level of threat as a group of people training to kill civilians within the United States. We’ve made this shift in our objectives in Afghanistan to something completely different from what our original mission was. And the new mission is something that has only ever succeeded by moving the targeted problem elsewhere. Drug trafficking never goes away, it just shifts to different routes.

What’s even more odd about what’s happening right now in Afghanistan is that it’s causing reporters at The New York Times to completely make shit up:

With a nationwide election only weeks away, the paradox of President Hamid Karzai has never seemed more apparent: He is at once deeply unpopular and likely to win.

The article cites data from a survey conducted by the International Republican Institute which can be found here. On page 36, you can very clearly see that the “deeply unpopular” Karzai is in fact the most popular politician in the country, with a favorability rating of 69%

What exactly is going on here? And it’s not just the New York Times who’s been selling this lie, even while referencing the same polling data.

I know I shouldn’t be surprised when public officials get journalists to lie for them, but what’s the motivation for it? American officials have long been complaining about Karzai’s unwillingness to crack down on the corruption, but it’s also long been true that if he really cracked down the corruption, he’d be dead within a week. This is what happens in a country where an industry that’s roughly 1/3 to 1/2 of their GDP is made illegal. Even Karzai’s brother is making money from it. Does the Obama Administration really think that an election is going to change all of that? That it’s just a matter of motivation and will to stop it?

Afghanistan remains a place where our soldiers (and the soldiers of a number of our NATO allies) continue to fight a very real war – while our politicians appear to be fighting a propaganda one to convince us that this war is still the war we started there in 2001. It’s not. It’s a drug war now, and it’s one that makes no sense for us to fight and one that we have no hope of actually winning. Even if we recognize that there’s a more real terrorist threat next door in Pakistan, all we’re doing is handing those groups more and more of the profits that once went to people all throughout Afghanistan, some of whom were eager allies of the United States.

Another page (14) in the IRI survey showed the results when Afghans were asked to rate the overall performance of various entities on a scale of 1 to 5. Scoring dead last, below “The president”, “The police”, “The government”, “The Afghan National Army”, and even “The opposition”, was the “International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)”. The Obama Administration and Richard Holbrooke deserve some praise for ending our truly idiotic five-year attempt to wipe out Afghanistan’s opium trade by plowing the fields of poor farmers, but we still deserve a much better explanation for why we’re still there and what we think we can accomplish.

I’m on the road to Brownsville, OR for our annual 4th of July beer and wood fired pizza fest, and I’m traveling sans laptop. So don’t expect much posting from me this weekend apart from an occasional iPhlog. Um, like this one.

Maybe we should encourage Republicans not to fill out census forms. From the Federal Eye blog at WaPo, in regards to wild statements made by Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., concerning the census.

Republican colleagues have now called her boycott illogical and illegal.

“Every elected representative in this country should feel a responsibility to encourage full participation in the census. To do otherwise is to advocate for a smaller share of federal funding for our constituents,” Reps. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.) and John Mica (R-Fla.) said in a statement. The trio is members the House Census Oversight Subcommittee.

It only took them two weeks to figure out Bachmann’s crazy ideas would hurt them.

Your modern Republican Party at work. Well, not work so much, more like hiking alone.

Assuming his numbers can be trusted (and that’s a huge assumption), Tim Eyman has apparently turned in enough signatures to qualify Initiative 1033 for the November ballot, his most vindictive, dangerous and mean-spirited initiative yet.

I-1033 is a “TABOR” initiative, one of many, similarly constructed spending-cap measures that have been peddled in the initiative states nationwide, and have been funded by a shadowy network of ultra-wealthy, right-wing extremists. Thus, unlike most of Eyman’s initiatives, don’t be surprised to see a fair amount of out of state money flooding into Washington to fund the “Yes” campaign.

The Washington State Budget and Policy Center has a great analysis of I-1033 and its consequences, and I encourage you to watch their slideshow, but don’t think it an exaggeration to summarize the measure as the end of Washington state government as we know it.

I-1033 caps government spending at the previous year’s spending, plus population growth and inflation, and while that may appear to be a formula for fiscal stability, it is in fact entirely and intentionally the opposite.

As I’ve previously explained, Implicit Price Deflator (IPD) for Personal Consumption Expenditures, the inflation index I-1033 uses, comes nowhere close to measuring the rising costs of providing government services. For example, according to the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis, the cost to consumers of durable goods has plummeted 14 percent since 2000, while the cost of consumer services has risen 29 percent.  Over that same period of time the IPD (generally accepted to be the most accurate measure of inflation) has risen 21.6% for Personal Consumption Expenditures as a whole, but over 42% for State and Local Government.

So why has the inflation rate for state and local government services risen at nearly twice the rate as that for consumer expenditures?  According to a report compiled by the Washington D.C. based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, it mostly comes down to productivity:

Proponents of TABOR-type tax and expenditure limits sometimes contend that a growth formula based on population plus inflation would be adequate to maintain public services at a roughly constant level. But researchers long have recognized that the services provided in the public sector, such as education, health care, and law enforcement, tend to rise in cost faster than many other goods and services in the economy in general. This analysis was first put forward by economist William Baumol, who pointed out that technology and productivity gains may make goods cheaper to produce, but the services that government provides are different. Baumol said public services typically rely heavily on well-trained professionals — teachers, police officers, doctors and nurses, and so on — and technology gains do not make these services cheaper to provide. It may take far fewer workers to build an automobile than it did 30 years ago, but it still takes one teacher to lead a classroom of children. (In fact, as education has become increasingly important, the trend is toward more teachers per pupil, not fewer.) Doctors generally still see patients one by one, and nursing care remains labor intensive despite technology.

Even in a stable economy, population plus inflation just can’t keep up with the rising costs of providing government services, resulting in government spending power dropping year after year after year (as is already happening in WA state under our current unfair and inadequate tax system these past fifteen years). But of course, our economy is not stable, and here is where I-1033’s true destructiveness comes into play.

I-1033 would limit annual spending to that of the previous year adjusted for population growth plus IPD, which means that during every economic downturn, the base level of spending from which future increases are calculated will be ratcheted down to the lowest revenue point, creating an ever widening gap between projected spending increases, and those actually allowed under I-1033.

Of course, Eyman chooses the trough of our worst economy since the Great Depression on which to base future revenue increases, but even if he hadn’t, the inevitable result would still be a dramatically smaller government, and in short time. For example, had I-1033 been implemented in 1995, revenues during our current, already squeezed biennium, would have been $6 billion lower than they are now.

How much is $6 billion? That’s the current state budget for higher education, natural resources, public health, early learning, corrections and the Basic Health plan… combined!

Like I said, it’s not an exaggeration to describe I-1033 as the end of state government as we know it. In fact, the consequences would be so unbelievably dramatic that there is almost a sense of complacency amongst the opposition—we simply can’t believe that the majority of voters could be so stupid as to pass such an incredibly irresponsible measure.

But it’s ignorance, not stupidity that frightens me.

If I-1033 draws in national money from the usual pro-TABOR suspects, this could be an awfully tough fight. The TABOR camp has spent years honing their rhetoric and talking points, and Eyman has been dutifully aping their instructions since filing. It’s going to take a lot of voter education to defeat this measure, and with the weakened state of our local media, and the generally timid demeanor of our political leaders, I’m not entirely confident that we’re properly prepared to defend against this latest assault on our quality of life.

My Fuse Sizzle Award didn’t come with a large cash prize, but I did receive a free beer and a framed caricature of myself. And oddly, it wasn’t my first caricature of the day.

I occasionally meet with foreign journalists through the World Affairs Council, and yesterday I met with a group of visiting political cartoonists from Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait. And afterwards, several of the cartoonists presented me with drawings they sketched up during our conversation… all focusing on my apparently largish forehead.

The drawing above is from Imed Ben Hamida of Tunisia, a cartoonist for numerous publications, and a university professor.

Columnist Steve Duin at The Oregonian recounts the troubling tale of a Clark County man falsely charged with luring a child. The kid later recanted his accusation. It’s a little involved so if you wish please click through and read Duin’s column.

The story raises many questions about the conduct of the Clark County Sheriff’s Department and the Clark County Prosecutor’s office. I mean, if a “person of interest” (or whatever he was termed) has telephone records and presumably co-workers that can prove he was at work at the time of the alleged incident, it shouldn’t be that hard to figure out. If this individual was indeed formally charged, as Duin’s column seems to state, then that’s pretty bad, even if he was eventually exonerated.

Unfortunately for taxpayers, it sounds like Clark County may wind up getting to explain itself in federal court. So while we all want to protect kids, there are some basic things that have to be done in the process. Otherwise you wind up with a Wenatchee Witch Hunt sort of situation.

One thing Duin’s column doesn’t touch on is that this incident occurred in the wake of the horrifying murder of an area seventh grader. That wouldn’t excuse sloppy investigative work, but I do recall that the number of “stranger danger” alerts coming home from the school district spiked after that. People were understandably on edge, but it’s the job of professionals to seek facts.

The other notable thing about Duin’s column is where it appears, ie, in The Oregonian. While The Columbian has some good reporters, there are far too few of them to adequately cover a county of around 430,000 people, and it’s really starting to show. In a normal place such a story would have been dug up by a beat reporter who was asking basic questions like “Who is this guy you charged with luring?”

Oregon media is kind of hit and miss on this side of the river, to tell the truth. They’ll pick up big stories, but the day to day stuff doesn’t usually interest them that much. I’ve been informed by a reliable source about some armed robberies in Clark County that are not even being reported upon. God help us if we ever have a major disaster here, we don’t really have a functioning media infrastructure.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1uOOujRTVg&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

HA shared a Fuse Sizzle Award last night with Publicola, honoring our two sites for our political reporting and analysis.

“Spotlight on the Shadows” to Josh Feit and David Goldstein, for journalism that matters. Josh Feit provides the state’s sharpest political reporting on his new Publicola political blog. David Goldstein and his friends at HorsesAss provide the snarkiest progressive muckraking and political analysis in Washington. Feit and Goldstein keep legislators honest and provide the information and analysis we all need to recognize great leadership and hold legislators accountable.

I’m the Jewishy looking one with the big forehead.

And speaking of sizzle, after collecting my award (a framed copy of my caricature) at a reception at the Rendezvous, I walked next door to Publicola’s open house at the Rob Roy, and man was it packed with the political and media elite. Either Publicola has fast become a fixture in the local media scene, or folks just like free drinks. (Or maybe a bit of both.)

I came home to find two new phone books sitting on my steps, just a few feet away from my recycling bin… which I guess was convenient, because the recycling bin was where I immediately tossed them.

What a waste. I mean honestly… who the hell still uses a phone book for anything more than an improvised booster seat anymore? And what the hell does it take to get Dex and their competitors to stop dumping their trash on my doorstep?

I’m as big a supporter of light rail as anybody, but I gotta admit that businesses and residents down here in my little corner of Southeast Seattle kinda got screwed.

First, the station originally planned for MLK and S. Graham got scrapped for cost cutting and other reasons, making the years of construction just a little less bearable. And now that the construction is done and the trains are running (if only for testing), the realignments have made crossing MLK on S. Graham a hazard and an annoyance.

S. Graham is the main route to and from I-5 for miles around, and as such, has long made its intersection with MLK an attractive, if relatively low rent, business district. And anchoring this business district is a somewhat decrepit strip mall featuring a Viet Wah supermarket and a Union 76 station on the northeast corner.

Living just a block south of S. Graham, and a couple blocks east of Rainier, the Viet Wah (or the Red Apple before it) has always been my closest supermarket, and its reasonable prices on a large selection of produce, seafood and asian ingredients have kept me a loyal customer. But like many customers, my stops there are usually on the way home from somewhere else… a convenience that, thanks to Sound Transit and SDOT alas, no longer exists.

As the Rainier Valley Post reports, SDOT is responding to growing traffic problems at this intersection by installing C-curbs in the median on S. Graham, to physically prevent left turns into and out of the corner properties. Combined with the tracks running down the center of MLK, this will serve to severely limit access to the affected businesses.

For example, heading south on MLK, I can no longer access the Viet Wah at all. No left from MLK, no left from S. Graham; southbound traffic simply can’t get there from here.  And while I can still make a right into these businesses from westbound S. Graham and northbound MLK, upon leaving, I can no longer make a left onto S. Graham to head home. I have to make a right onto MLK, a right onto Juneau or Orcas, and then circle back through residential streets and past the playfields behind Aki Kurose.

From my perspective, you might as well just pick up these businesses and move them half a mile north. Problem for them is, I tend not to patronize the businesses half a mile north, because I rarely drive by them.

Now, you may find this complaint petty, and maybe in the larger scheme of things it is, but it is also human nature. “Location, location, location” is the mantra of real estate, and for good reason. And for many of the intersection’s businesses, the corner of MLK and S. Graham is no longer nearly as good a location as it once was. Think about how often you’ve circled a half-mile out of your way to choose one gas station over another just down the road, and then think about the predicament of independent Union 76 franchisee Gurdev Mann, in the midst of $400,000 worth of improvements on his property, suddenly learning that a quarter of the traffic driving by the corner no longer has access to his establishment.

I’m not sure what the solution is.  The backups on S. Graham are more than just an annoyance to thru-traffic; it’s a hazard that at times threatens to trap cars in the intersection, and perhaps in the path of the train. And the affected businesses have been complaining about the problem for months, the manager of the Viet Wah going so far as to stand out in the street and direct traffic himself at times.

But by unilaterally installing C-curbs without buy-in from local businesses, SDOT has only inflamed the ire of local business owners against itself and Sound Transit.