Archives for September 2009

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1B9Xs2QTmo&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

Of course, Tim Eyman is an economic genius who knows better than everybody else, so you can pretty much ignore what the folks from Colorado are saying.

Meanwhile for all of Tim’s complaints about how our out-of-control government is crushing our state economy, it sure is strange how high Washington ranks in terms of business climate, according to even conservative sources such as Forbes (#2) and the Tax Foundation (#9). But then, as a successful novelty watch salesman, Tim knows better about business climate than these folks too.

The local coroner has confirmed that the federal census worker found hanged from a tree in rural Kentucky did indeed have the word “Fed” scrawled on his chest. The FBI has yet to rule the death a homicide, but considering the circumstances, not to mention the FBI’s involvement, that conclusion seems pretty obvious… as does the likelihood that this was an anti-government hate crime.

It is also obvious that with the extreme level of anti-Obama, anti-government rhetoric coming from the right since they lost last November’s election, violence like this is inevitable. Words have consequences, and those who insist on inciting the violent, teabagging hordes are at the very least morally culpable for the violence that ensues.

Jojo was a man who thought he was a loner…

Well, I guess that’s one way to address growing complaints about King County Animal Control and conditions at its Kent shelter… shut it down:

“This is a transition or evolution for regional animal care and control, not an ending,” said Executive Triplett. “We must phase out the county’s general fund support for animal control and sheltering because although protecting animals and protecting people from animals are both important, providing animal care and control as a contractor for 32 cities is neither a required nor a core business of King County, nor is it self-sufficient.”

Currently, providing animal care and control services requires $1.5 million of the county’s general fund dollars every year above the revenues collected from city contracts for those services.

“In an era where we are mothballing parks, eliminating human services programs and closing health clinics, we can no longer afford to subsidize animal care and control,” said Triplett.

Now if only King County would also get out of the business of providing roads, parks, libraries, courts, law enforcement, jails, elections, social services, buses, public safety, public health, emergency management and a few other things, we might eventually get county government down to the size where Susan Hutchison is actually qualified to run it.

Looks like I’m not the only one calling for an end to Metro’s inflexible 40/40/20 rule. Over on Crosscut, State Sen. Fred Jarrett (D-Mercer Island) echoes my complaint about the rule sacrificing efficiency for sake of political expediency:

There are a number of strategic and tactical steps Metro can take to use the crisis as an opportunity to shape the region’s future. First, the failed “20-40-40” service allocation formula must be scrapped. Originally put in place as a political way to make each region of the county feel there was some degree of equity in the allocation of service, it has instead created an artificial barrier to the county’s ability to shape regional mobility and support our growth management goals.

Meanwhile, Dow Constantine, the Democratic nominee for King County Executive released a reform plan today that also calls for the rule’s repeal. I guess great minds think a like.

Investigative journalist Max Blumenthal will be at Seattle’s Town Hall tonight at 7:30 PM, 8th & Seneca, reading from his new book, Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party. And afterwards, Max and a bunch of us blogger types plan to go out for drinks.

Tickets are $5 at the door. Hope to see you there.

There, I said it — Susan Hutchison opposes a woman’s right to reproductive freedom — and I’ve intentionally said it as a statement of fact. Hutchison opposes reproductive rights as defined by Roe v. Wade, and supports overturning that landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision. No caveats, no prevarication, no couching the assertion as mere opinion or belief or speculation; Hutchison is anti-Choice.

And I’ll go one step further by freely admitting that I am making this statement of fact with the malicious intent of damaging Hutchison’s reputation with King County’s majority Pro-Choice voters. Now that’s a libel case in the making… assuming I’m wrong.  Which I’m not, and which is why Hutchison will never sue me for defamation, despite the fact that all she would need to do to prove me wrong is simply refute my assertion under oath.

The headline in today’s Seattle Times states that Hutchison “steers clear of abortion rights questions,” but that is an understatement to say the least. Hutchison isn’t steering clear of the question, she is lying, both to voters and to the press. It may be a lie of omission, but it is lie nonetheless, and she deserves to be publicly raked over the coals for showing such blatant disrespect for our democratic process.

(And by the way, when I say that Hutchison is lying, I mean that not as my opinion, but as a statement of fact. Susan Hutchison is a liar. And if she thinks such a blunt assertion is defamatory, well, we already know she knows how to hire an attorney, so she should feel free to sue me.)

No, it’s not Hutchison who’s been steering clear of abortion rights questions, but members of the media, who while gingerly pointing out her obfuscation, refuse to follow my lead by calling her bluff.  I mean honestly, what reasonably honest and intelligent person wouldn’t firmly conclude from Hutchison’s consistent lack of forthrightness that she opposes legal abortion, opposes your right to a legal abortion, and if elected Executive cannot be trusted to support unrestricted family planning services to low-income women at county funded health clinics?

Specifically, Mitchell said that Hutchison filled out the group’s questionnaire, but gave an incomplete response to a key question. It asked if she supported a woman’s right to reproductive freedom as defined by Roe v. Wade, Hutchison replied that she would uphold the law of the land, according to Mitchell.

Does she really think voters are that stupid, let alone members of the National Women’s Political Caucus of Washington?

“We then told her we would need a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on that queston if she wanted an endorsement. When we made it clear that’s what was required, she declined to answer. We left on a positive note,” Mitchell said. “She didn’t say she wasn’t pro-choice but didn’t say she was, which is what we need to happen.”

Which is why Hutchison refused to answer, because she knows very well that she couldn’t possibly get the organization’s support if she honestly answered no.

Hutchison said she didn’t “want to make their litmus test an issue in this race.”

Though Hutchison has absolutely no problem with speaking openly on other litmus tests, that don’t hurt her standing with the electorate. What a dishonest, disingenuous, disrespectful liar. And she’s been lying about herself and her politics since the day she and her phony smile got into this race.

No, one’s standing on issues and one’s party affiliation don’t tell you everything you need to know about a candidate, but so-called “litmus tests” and party labels do give the average voter a good idea of whether or not the candidate generally shares their values. That’s why despite giving thousands of dollars to Republican candidates (and only Republicans), despite receiving contributions and endorsements almost exclusively from Republicans, and despite nearly running for the U.S. Senate as a Republican, Hutchison, running in an overwhelmingly Democratic county stridently refuses to acknowledge that she is a lifelong and active member of the GOP. And a member of its conservative wing at that.

That there is a large segment of voters who don’t know this is a disgrace, and that there are surely many Democrats who will cast a vote for the nice lady from TV, unaware of her conservative Republican bona fides, is a corruption of our electoral process. Whatever you may think of her as a person, and her careers in TV and philanthropy, Susan Hutchison the candidate is a lie. And it’s a lie that can only succeed in November if our local media remains complicit in their polite silence.

So… former Seattle Times senior political reporter David Postman, perhaps the most respected and influential political journalistic in the state not too long ago, a man who once took umbrage at my relentless (and sometimes mean-spirited) critique of his profession, and who now pays the bills as a spokesman for Paul Allen’s Vulcan Inc., has an article up on Crosscut of all places, criticizing the never-for-profit opinion and sorta-news site for running misleading and “demonstrably false” articles about the Mercer Mess, and of course, his employer’s role in it.

Sorry about the run-on sentence, but… that’s just plain weird.

At the time Postman announced his change of careers, I quipped that if many more journalists left the profession to pursue jobs in media relations, pretty soon there wouldn’t be any media left to relate to, so it doesn’t really surprise me to see the PR/journalism ecosystem collapse to the point where PR flacks, once confined to the sphere of influencing journalists, are now directly posting newsish pieces to newsish sites in an effort to get their bosses’ message out. Sure, he and the Crosscut editors repeatedly disclaim Postman’s obvious conflict of interest, so in some ways, it’s not all that much different from a more traditional guest column or a letter to the editor, but promoted out there on the Crosscut home page with the rest of their journalistish headlines, it just doesn’t feel like a guest column or a letter to the editor. It feels, like I said, weird. I mean, this is David Postman, for chrissakes.

Not that I’m all that sure that there is anything ethically wrong with the piece, disclaimed as such, or even all that different from what I do here at HA (which I once jokingly described as a one-man, pro bono PR firm for Washington state’s progressive community). But then, unlike Crosscut, I’ve never pretended HA deserved any more inherent respect than its content merited, and I’ve certainly never enjoyed the credibility of a David Postman. And perhaps more importantly, while I congratulate Postman for wearing his bias on his sleeve and trusting readers to judge his words in that context, as I have always done, my readers have always been able to rest assured that my bias is at least my own, rather than being bought and paid for by, say, Paul Allen, while Postman’s newfound Crosscut audience… not so much. That may strike some as a subtle difference, but one which, nonetheless, gave me the willies.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that Postman and Crosscut have done anything wrong, just that by giving him a byline, they’ve done something very, very different… so different journalistically, that it at the very least deserves a collective, reflective pause. Crosscut has long claimed to be an “online newspaper” (an oxymoron considering the intrinsic absence of paper, not to mention the dearth of, well, news), and with all the inherent perceptions and expectations that word implies. But at a traditional newspaper, Postman’s response would have been clearly published as a guest column under the byline of say, Paul Allen or some other Vulcan executive, or perhaps a pro-Mercer-fix public figure willing to serve as a surrogate. It may still have been ghostwritten by Postman — that’s a pretty damn common arrangement (hell, even I’ve ghostwritten a handful of Seattle Times guest columns over the years, and nobody’s been the wiser) — but it sure as hell wouldn’t have had Postman’s byline on it.

Why does that matter? Because by putting his name on the piece, Postman, widely known and rightly respected by the media and political establishment as one of our state’s best reporters, hasn’t just sold his employers his skills as a writer, he’s implicitly imbued his critique of Crosscut’s reporting with his own well-earned journalistic credibility. In this brave new world of media relations, where it is now both possible and preferable to skip the relations part entirely, and pump one’s unfiltered message straight into the media, Vulcan didn’t just buy themselves a capable spokesman or mere PR flack… with Postman, they bought themselves their very own journalist.

And that’s different… at least from the kind of media familiar to American consumers for much of the past century, and ironically, from the kind of media Postman used to vigorously defend. PR flacks have always been hired guns, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But when they start directly writing our news and commentary themselves, and under their own bylines, we’re looking at an entirely different kind of gunfight.

Which may or may not be a bad thing for both the media and its consumers. It’s just that coming from Crosscut and David Postman of all people, this sort of journalistic innovation (in lieu of a less neutral word) simply struck me as awfully damn weird.

AP reporter Gene Johnson has an article on the conflict brewing over Washington’s medical marijuana law:

Unlike some states, Washington requires patients to grow marijuana themselves or designate a caregiver to grow it for them. For many, that’s unrealistic: They’re too sick to grow cannabis themselves and don’t have the thousands of dollars it can cost for a caregiver to set up a proper growing operation.

So they’ve devised their own schemes, claiming to meet the letter of the law in establishing collective grows or storefront dispensaries – methods that are making police and prosecutors increasingly uncomfortable.

If one wants to take a conspiratorial stance about what happened in 2008, he or she could easily conclude that the police (through a willing legislature) intentionally fought for an overly restrictive law that was too difficult for patients to comply with in order to keep arresting authorized patients and those trying to establish ways to provide them with marijuana. In fact, I’ve heard a number of activists and patients claim this both during and after the process.

I’m not sure what the real motivations were, but the outcome is clearly a failure. When I got a chance to ask Governor Gregoire a question at Drinking Liberally last fall, I asked what she’d do if authorized patients and caregivers continued to get arrested. She said that if it happened, she’d work with the local police chiefs to address it. It doesn’t appear that she had any interest in keeping that promise, and I’d be surprised if she even remembers saying it. Police and prosecutors across the state continue to haul authorized patients and providers into court, and outside of the very progressive King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg and a few other county prosecutors, the emphasis remains on finding ways to prosecute people rather than finding ways to respect the spirit of the 1998 voter initiative that initially legalized medical marijuana use in this state.

One problem right now with the law remains the fact that patients either have to grow for themselves (which for most people who have cancer or multiple sclerosis – or are confined to a wheelchair – is a challenge) or find a provider. An even bigger problem is that, according to the law, the provider cannot be someone who already provides for other patients. Because it’s much easier for someone who is already a provider to take on another patient than for a completely new person to learn how, the law is often violated. This is what happened in Spokane, as Johnson explains:

Washington’s law says that a caregiver can only provide marijuana to one patient at any one time. In Spokane this year, medical marijuana activists focused on that language in setting up a for-profit dispensary called Change.

Lawyer Frank Cikutovich said the business met legal requirements: A lone patient would enter the store, sign a document designating the shop as his or her caregiver, and buy marijuana. The agreement expired when the patient left and the next customer came in.

The business, raided on Sept. 10, rendered the “one patient, one caregiver” rule meaningless, Spokane police spokeswoman Jennifer DeRuwe said. She said there was peripheral crime associated with the dispensary, including robberies at grow sites and street sales from people who had purchased pot there.

“They’re dispensing to hundreds and thousands of people,” DeRuwe said. “The police department’s stand is, we want to get some guidance on this. We know it’s going to be up to the court system to provide us with that.”

Sadly, it should have been the legislature that provided that guidance. In last year’s attempts at revising the law, it could have been clarified to allow for patient co-ops or even dispensaries. DeRuwe’s concern about “peripheral crime” is nothing short of an absurdity, but it was one that appears to have influenced the debate in the legislature and led to the shortfalls we have today. Robberies at grow sites don’t happen because dispensaries exist. They happen because marijuana is illegal for recreational use. If DeRuwe was really concerned about the problem of grow site robberies – instead of just using it as a red herring for political cover – she’d be demanding that we establish regulations for the production and sale of marijuana for all adults who want to use it, not just the ones for whom a doctor has certified a medical need.

The failure of this state’s supposedly progressive majority to address what should have been a rather easy problem is a good warning to progressives about what could happen at the national level. Instead of using these majorities to enact real progressive legislation, the leaders in Olympia, from Frank Chopp to Governor Gregoire, have continuously pandered to special interests (in this case, the police unions) and dared the voters to kick them out for it. And they’ve generally been successful because outside of a few outliers like Toby Nixon and Dan Satterberg, most of the Republicans in this state are still too batshit to be taken seriously.

Vice President Joe Biden is starting to rattle some cages over the 2010 midterms. The Obama Administration and our Democratic Congress have a number of difficult tasks where the interests of the general public are pitted against more powerful interests – from health care to the environment to the regulation of our financial sector. I’m finding myself conflicted between the belief that many of the Republicans we still have in Congress are simply not in the fight for the general public at all and need to be defeated, and the worry that a growing Democratic majority will start acting like the complacent, useless one we have here in the other Washington and simply shy away from those difficult tasks.

Please join us tonight for some politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. The festivities take place at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning at 8:00 pm.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmE7tuR0364[/youtube]

Not in Seattle? The Drinking Liberally web site has dates and times for 337 other chapters of Drinking Liberally for you to shoot for.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha. From HuffPo:

The congressional legislation intended to defund ACORN, passed with broad bipartisan support, is written so broadly that it applies to “any organization” that has been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency. It also applies to any of the employees, contractors or other folks affiliated with a group charged with any of those things.

In other words, the bill could plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex. Whoops.

And HuffPo goes on to report that Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Florida, is soliciting suggestions from the public about helping him find fraud. Feel free to offer your suggestions.

If the righties want to talk about fraud, let’s talk about fraud, and not any puny $3.1 million a year, folks. We’re talking billions.

It would be delicious irony if this legislation either has to be vetoed or is found unconstitutional for singling out a specific corporation, which after all is actually a person.

Reading Slog’s account of Sen. Maria Cantwell’s supposed conversion on healthcare reform, it’s like deja vu all over again regarding perhaps the most enigmatic member of Washington state’s congressional delegation. First Cantwell was under attack for not taking a forceful position on the public option and other reforms, and now she’s being praised for her sudden burst of leadership.

And the conclusion?

And the bottom line for those, like Moon, who were raising a ruckus over Cantwell’s apparent wavering on the public option: the pressure worked.

Yeah, well, maybe. But this sort of scenario has played out so many times over the past few years, you’ve gotta wonder if what frequent critics consider to be her “apparent wavering,” really isn’t just an artifact of Cantwell’s methodical, deliberate and relatively effective legislative style? I mean, keeping up the political pressure doesn’t hurt, but the raft of amendments Cantwell has offered to the Baucus bill suggest that she’s been neck deep in the details for quite some time, and an active participant in the thorny, behind-closed-doors negotiations within the Senate Finance Committee.

So could it be that the type of public podium-rattling many of us progressives demand, just isn’t a good fit to Cantwell’s wonkish personality, or to the brand of quiet, insider leadership she seems to prefer? And do we make a mistake by assuming she’s less progressive than she really is?

In fact, Cantwell’s reputation as a bit of a pro-business centrist seems to be distorted by a genuine streak of pro-business centrism that fails to extend itself to nearly any other issue. Indeed when examining her voting record, you may be surprised to learn that Cantwell proves just as progressive as her more high-profile colleague, Sen. Patty Murray, and the presumably progressive stalwart Rep. Jay Inslee.  And on healthcare issues? Cantwell ranks the most progressive of the three, scoring an impressive 98.54% over her lifetime in office.

So did Cantwell cave to constituent pressure by coming out strong for the public option in the end, or did she hold steady in the face of mounting criticism from the left, by refusing to publicly say anything that might jeopardize her private negotiations?

I don’t know. But knowing how stubborn Cantwell can be, and her lack of passion for retail politics, I don’t think it’s safe to assume the former.

Just to be clear, there are some things on which the Seattle Times editorial board and I agree, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. (Okay, maybe a little ashamed, but I’ve learned to cope.)

For those who reflexively argue that government regulation is always a bad thing, the FCC’s decision to codify the principle of net neutrality must be a bit disturbing. But those who primarily rely on the Internet to make these arguments should be quietly relieved.