Archives for August 2009

Before Saturday’s event with Rep. Jay Inslee and Drug Czar Kerlikowske, a local medical marijuana patient named Ric Smith showed up. Smith, who lives nearby in Shoreline, wanted to ask Kerlikowske a question about why he went from being sympathetic to the medical marijuana community as Seattle’s police chief to amplifying old propaganda as the Drug Czar. Unfortunately, the meeting was closed to regular citizens, so he wasn’t allowed into the rooms set aside for either the roundtable or the media Q&A.

What’s even worse, had Smith been able to ask his question, it’s not clear that Kerlikowske could legally have given him an honest answer. By law, the Drug Czar must oppose any efforts to legalize any Schedule I drug, even for medical use. As drug law reformers have pointed out, that puts Kerlikowske in a position where he’s mandated to distort the truth and deny science. In fact, several commenters from Saturday’s post got on my case for even expecting an honest answer from him.

As a medical marijuana patient, though, the stakes are clearly higher for Smith. For his privacy, I won’t go into details on his medical condition, but it’s possible that he could one day meet the same fate as Timothy Garon, the Seattle man who died last year after being denied a transplant over his medical marijuana use.

Unlike any of the gullible morons who’ve been disrupting town hall meetings this week for the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, Smith actually does have to worry about decisions being made by government officials that could effect whether he lives or dies. If there’s anyone in this country who had a good reason to disrupt a recent town hall and make a scene over the government inserting themselves between patients and doctors, it was him. Yet instead, as the local TV crews started bringing in their cameras, he shook my hand and quietly walked out the door.

Legal documents can be awfully confusing, so as a courtesy to voters, here’s a brief summary of some of the revelations from Susan Hutchison’s discrimination suit against KIRO TV.

Hutchison’s suit charged KIRO with age and race discrimination after she was replaced as evening news anchor by a younger, Asian-American woman, Kristy Lee.

Shorter Susan:  Attractive white women are an oppressed minority.

In a deposition, Hutchison said the late U.S. Rep. Jennifer Dunn, a Republican, had asked her to run against U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, a Democrat. Hutchison also said the head of the Republican Party in King County had asked her to run for Seattle mayor.

Shorter Susan:  Mayor of Seattle is a nonpartisan office, and since I was asked to run for it, that must make me a nonpartisan.

She believed KIRO executives were out to get her when she was suspended for a week without pay in July 2002. The suspension came after Hutchison was denied a vacation request over the Fourth of July holiday, called in sick and went on a vacation to Bend, Ore., with her husband.

“I was deeply humiliated and punished beyond belief for taking two sick days and there was a hatred there among the news director and the general manager,” she said in a deposition.

Shorter Susan: I was deeply humiliated for being treated like, you know, any other employee, when in fact I’m Susan Hutchison.

Hutchison was assigned work she didn’t know how to do, she said, “to make me a spectacle so that they could write me up every day for what I could not accomplish … they wanted me gone, period.”

KIRO officials maintained in the records that they demoted Hutchison because of low ratings.

Shorter Susan:  I was spiritually ready for the job, but I guess I wasn’t professionally ready.

Shorter, Shorter Susan: Nobody can fire the KC Executive for not knowing how to do her job.

She took medical leave Sept. 19, 2002 — and never returned to work before she was fired Dec. 20 — because she was “totally stressed out” by her situation at KIRO.

Shorter Susan:  I didn’t quit; I was fired for not being a young Asian woman.

Hutchison called the mother of a college student who wanted to intern at KIRO and told her the station would be a bad environment for her daughter. The student’s mother, according to a sworn statement, found the call from Hutchison — whom she had never met — “strange.”

Hutchison alleged that John Woodin, then KIRO’s general manager, was a “sexual predator” and had a “drug problem,” according to the mother. Her daughter went ahead and worked at KIRO in the summer of 2002 and told her parents she “had no problems with John Woodin and had seen nothing to corroborate the accusations made by Susan Hutchison.”

Shorter Susan:  I’m strange. I’m also a vindictive, spiteful shrew, who’s not afraid to slander you behind your back if you dare to cross me, so watch out.

Part I
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5HgfwPtxLw[/youtube]

Part II
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0gen_HoxrM[/youtube]

Portland curmudgeon/blogger Jack Bogdanski on the difference between health care protestors now and anti-war protestors then:

The Democrats were protesting killing people, and the Republicans are protesting healing people.

Sometimes simple observations are good.

You can go with complete idiocy:

AJC columnist Jay Bookman noticed that in the latest Investors Business Daily editorial about how the ‘death panel’ will condemn all handicapped or disabled people to death on some horrid wind-swept mountain, it notes that …

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

Needless to say, Hawking, who is recognized as one of the great theoretical physicists of the 20th and 21st century, was born in the UK and has lived his entire life there.

Andrew at NWPI NPI notes that Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., has embraced a “robust” public option in an appearance last week on The Bill Press Show.

This is good.

Just in case you’re wondering why I haven’t been posting much the past few days…

A conservative activist who opposes health care reform and who claims “union thugs” roughed him up in St. Louis doesn’t have health care insurance. So the righties are taking up a collection, which is nice, because it’s nice to help people.

You just can’t make this stuff up.

(Props to TPM.)

Friday morning I wrote about why numbers matter, castigating my friends in the legacy media for failing to do their math. It was perhaps a nitpicky complaint in focusing on the R-71 signature count, but it was part of a larger pattern of failing to accurately and truthfully represent numbers in the press.

Early news reports claimed that R-71 would likely qualify for the ballot, despite the fact that the numbers, if you bothered to add, subtract, multiply and divide them, clearly said otherwise. As the sample expanded and the full effect of the duplication rate started to be reflected in the daily totals, comment threads started to fill with conspiracy theories about how the Secretary of State’s Office was jiggering the numbers to keep R-71 off the ballot. In my mind, shallow reporting led to misguided expectations that would ultimately further undermine public faith in the integrity of our electoral process.

But of course, all that was written before I learned that the numbers we were getting from the Secretary of State’s Office were total bullshit… a preliminary, half-cocked accounting that didn’t reflect that actual invalidation rate at all. On Friday afternoon I received a call from Darryl telling me that all the numbers had changed and all of our well reasoned conclusions could be tossed out the window. Oh, our equations were still valid, but with the SOS moving over 400 signatures from the bad to the good pile, they now produced dramatically different results.

And to complicate matters, after suddenly adjusting the totals a week into the validation process, the SOS failed to provide the all important breakout of duplicate signatures in the final result, leaving us unable to rerun our equations with the supposedly more accurate data.  I mean… WTF?

From what I know (and at this point, I obviously don’t know much for certain), it still looks like R-71 will likely fail to qualify for the ballot, but that’s actually beside the point. We had just spent a week congratulating the SOS for their timely and helpful daily updates, and the speed at which they responded to public and media inquiries.  And now we learn that the data they fed us was crap, which I guess would’ve been okay, if they had only warned us. So much for defending the integrity of the office.

Bullshit in, bullshit out, and all that.

I just thought the public deserved (and was getting) a little better.

Well said

Last week’s contest was won by wes.in.wa. That’s 3 out of the last 4 for wes, who’s become the man to beat recently. The correct location was Mosaic Stadium in Regina, Saskatchewan, home to the Saskatchewan Roughriders of the CFL.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!

Blue Texan at Firedoglake, after noting that the disruptors at a Texas town hall last week were organized by the Travis County Republican Chair, and how the disruptors seemed also to opposed Social Security and Medicare:

They’re just throwing a temper tantrum over “SOCIALISM!” — which in their wingnut brains applies to everything from TARP to the stimulus bill, and yes — to Social Security and Medicare.

They’re fringe, anti-government nihilists and they’re not interested in the government reforming health care, or anything else. The media, however, continue to frame these events as a referendum on health care reform, which they are not. One side wants to reform health care, the other wants to lynch the federal government.

This kind of sums up the key points we need to understand about the disruptors. It’s not really about health care to begin with, and it’s being inflamed not just by far-right front groups funded by corporations, but the Republican Party itself has deliberately decided to encourage and organize people to throw gurgling, babbling hissy fits.

So while some on the right put on their Chesire cat grin and proclaim that Democrats are somehow against ordinary Americans expressing themselves, it’s pretty clear which side is trying to prevent real debate. Their claims that we did such things to them are false and the result of the fevered imagination born of right wing victimhood, a necessary and ever-present mental contortion they use to justify wrong actions. A few Code Pink and such protestors here and there are simply not the same thing. Anyone can go pick out random incidents and make a false equivalence, a favorite tactic of the right.

Imagine, if you will, that during the lie-up to war the DNC and labor had adopted a deliberate strategy of shouting down Republicans at their district meetings, or anywhere else they appeared. Imagine that they hired tons of lobbyists and spent millions of dollars to do so. Imagine the airwaves, mainstream and not, filled with crazy-ass claims that George W. Bush was actually from another country and thus not the president. You get the idea.

As we all know, not only did that not happen, progressives had to show Democrats that they could win at the ballot box by vigorously defending basic Constitutional principles and at least talking about real problems like health care.

The only protestors I recall, for the most part, were individual Americans forlornly taking to the streets of our cities while many Democrats went along with the madness, and the protestors were often met with pepper spray and derisive cries of “traitors” from the right. What so offended the righties is that anyone would dare to oppose their madness, and they have now conflated peaceful, non-violent protest with their desire to destroy civil discourse once and for all.

As many have noted, it was only a few years ago that some Oregon teachers were removed from a Bush rally for daring to wear pro-Constitution t-shirts. I recall a public lecture series here in Vancouver during the Bush era, held on public property, at which a few anti-war protestors who desired only to silently hold small placards were escorted out of the venue, at the mayor’s insistence, by uniformed police, because their views were “insulting” or some such nonsense. Public resources were used to squash free speech, and the local newspaper didn’t seem to have much problem with it.

Yet here we are being lectured at by some of the same fools who couldn’t stand to have their eyeballs scalded by the searing sight of someone else’s views about the wrong-headed invasion of Iraq. Forgive me if I have had enough of the lies, the double standards and faux outrage.

What we did to the Republicans was beat them at the polls, and they can’t stand it. They can’t stand it so much they are throwing yet another magnificent, reprehensible hissy fit, mostly because it makes us mad. I guess we should get mad easier.

While it’s understandable that individual constituents may be confused and angry because of right wing distortions, or even not confused and angry for good reason, reasonable people will agree that a major political party deliberately shutting down public meetings as a strategy is petulant at best and dangerous to democracy itself at worst.

Leaving aside the real possibility that mentally unstable people will do bad things, here we have the remains of a reactionary conservative movement that built itself on “law and order” in reaction to the excesses of the 1960’s now behaving in the very manner it supposedly found so loathsome. History doesn’t always repeat itself, but it hardly seems like a winning strategy.

Sure, the obvious thing to do would be to shut down Republican town halls at every opportunity, if you can find any, up and down the ticket, but that’s well, too obvious. Far better to find creative ways to have real discussions, with or without the disruptors, and see if we can’t somehow make the health care system less nuts for regular people. I guess people who want to are going to yell and scream no matter what, but after they get done shouting and being rude there will still be the matter of tens of millions of Americans who have no health care insurance.

If this is the path Republicans continue to follow in their struggle to regain even a modicum of respect from most Americans, I’d have to say that in the long run we’ve already won.

Free Viagra.

Conservative impotence is a problem that can no longer be ignored.

I was able to attend the media presser this morning following Jay Inslee’s meeting with Office of National Drug Control Policy head (and former Seattle police chief) Gil Kerlikowske. The meeting was about legislation being pushed by Inslee to promote the safe disposal of prescription drugs, an initiative that I support. During the Q&A, I was able to ask our “Drug Czar” about the situation in Mexico:

Lee: President Obama is going to Mexico this weekend to meet with Mexican officials – and they’re dealing with an enormous organized crime problem fueled in big part by American consumption for marijuana. I’m wondering why is the equation for dealing with the problem different than it was in the early 30s when dealing with alcohol? Why isn’t setting up a regulated market the right way to go?

GK: Well, because they’re criminals and they’re terrorists. And they are creating huge amounts of havoc.

Lee: What I’m saying is…

GK: Let me finish. [One part is that anyone looking] at prohibition doesn’t realize the crime suddenly ended or changed drastically before or after. The other part is, we see with these criminal narco-terrorists and the violence that they’ve done that suddenly they’re not going to change and say “you know what? I think I’ll get a job out in the field growing potatoes”. They’re going to continue to be criminals and terrorists.

Lee: But how are they going to, can I follow up to this? How are they still going to still make money if we’re not buying marijuana from them?

GK: Extortion. Kidnapping. Theft of auto parts. Etc.

I was relying on my MP3 recorder, so I missed a few words of Gil’s second answer, so the part in brackets is a paraphrase from memory, but there were a number of video cameras there, so I’ll try to update as soon as I can. The general point he’s making here is clear though. And he’s making an invalid assertion. Crime rates did change drastically as a result of alcohol prohibition. Homicide rates steadily increased throughout the 1920s to much higher levels than before, and then began decreasing again within a few years after prohibition was repealed in the early 1930s. What makes these statistics even more extraordinary is that you’d think that the Great Depression would have had the opposite effect on those numbers.

Kerlikowske is right that the criminal organizations in Mexico aren’t going to just give up. But neither did the other criminal organizations that once benefited from alcohol prohibition. During the 1920s, they used their position in charge of Chicago’s thousands of speakeasies to control city government:

Chicago was a “wide-open” town. Police and judicial corruption were so widespread that the Better Government Association petitioned the United States Congress to intervene in the internal affairs of the City, stating that its leaders were in league with gangsters and that the city was overrun with protected vice (Woody, 1974:136). The alliance between corrupt government and organized crime was made clear by Big Bill Thomspson’s return to City government. Promising that he “was as wet as the Atlantic Ocean”, Thompson was returned to the Mayor’s Office in 1927 with strong support from Chicago’s criminal element (Nelli 1970:232). In fact, a number of Capone gangsters reportedly worked in Thompson’s campaign headquarters (Wendt and Kogan, 1953:269). It is also said that Capone, himself, donated $260,000 to Thompson’s reelection fund (Hoffman, 1989:2). With the advent of Thompson, Capone returned to the Levee, setting up headquarters in the Metropole Hotel at 2300 S. Michigan and in 1928 one block north at the Lexington Hotel. Speakeasies and vice again flourished in the First Ward, but they were not under the control of Hinky Dink Kenna and Bathhouse John Coughlin (Wendt and Kogan, 1974:351). Vice remained strictly in the hands of the Capone syndicate. In fact, the Aldermen were called into Capone’s office and told that their future would depend on their usefulness to the Capone organization (Nelli, 1976:191). To this Coughlin was said to have replied, “We’re lucky to get as good a break as we did.”

After alcohol prohibition ended, these groups didn’t just disappear either. But without the ability to control a commodity as popular as alcohol, they had to resort to prostitution, racketeering, and other narcotics, trying to maintain this level of influence they had during the prohibition era. I’ve never encountered anyone who believes that ending alcohol prohibition didn’t allow for law enforcement to have more success in fighting these groups and to weaken their grip on our government.

Well, maybe I just did. Kerlikowske seems to think that ending marijuana prohibition won’t help in our effort to defeat Mexico’s drug cartels. And he appears to justify it by saying that ending alcohol prohibition didn’t help in our efforts to fight organized crime syndicates. It certainly did, even if it took a number of years for the power of those groups to diminish. Mexico’s drug gangs make billions of dollars per year from American marijuana consumption. There’s simply no way they can recoup that level of income through extortion or stealing car parts. Setting up a regulated, legal market for marijuana will be a major blow to these groups, and it’s time that the Obama Administration start to seriously consider it.

The real implication of this story is that we’ve most likely uncovered another illegal felon vote for Dino Rossi.

Sheesh…will it ever end?