Archives for September 2009

Oh geebus.

Protesters who attended Saturday’s Tea Party rally in Washington found a new reason to be upset: Apparently they are unhappy with the level of service provided by the subway system.

Rep. Kevin Brady called for a government investigation into whether the government-run subway system adequately prepared for this weekend’s rally to protest government spending and government services.

Seriously.

Please note that the above item is from the Wall Street Journal, that complete communist-socialist-Hawaiian rag.

I’ll type slowly, so conservatives can follow along.

Anti-government protesters and their supporters are complaining about a government service that delivered them to their anti-government protest.

It’s exactly like what happened to the barefoot soldiers at Valley Forge, except the soldiers at Valley Forge couldn’t go home and stock up on frozen meatballs at a Wal-Mart in suburban Virginia.

(Props to Eschaton.)

Susan Hutchison points to a handful of so-called “Democratic” endorsers to bolster her claims of bipartisanship, but delve a little deeper under the scarlet “D” and an interesting pattern emerges:

Former US Rep. Don Bonker (D-WA)… generally considered to be a conservative Dem, who “opposes abortion as a matter of personal philosophy.”

Former US Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-IN)… generally considered to be a conservative Dem, who was widely thought to have lost a shot at the VP spot on Bill Clinton’s 1992 ticket due to his support of restrictions on abortion rights.

Democratic Lt. Governor Brad Owen… widely considered to be one of the most conservative Democrats in the Washington State Senate during his tenure there, and who not surprisingly, is anti-choice.

Notice the pattern? As for Hutchison’s other two “Democratic” endorsers, former Seattle Mayor Wes Uhlman and State Auditor Brian Sonntag, well, I don’t know where either one stands on reproductive rights, though I’ve emailed Sonntag bluntly asking him the question. But, I do know that Uhlman has a history of endorsing Republicans, while Sonntag, given his penchant for conspiring with Tim Eyman, speaking at teabagger rallies and publicly endorsing conservative Republicans like Hutchison… well… I take personal offense at him continuing to call himself a Democrat.

Let’s be clear, when I vigorously opposed the campaign of Republican Dan Satterberg for King County Prosecutor, I was endlessly frustrated by the impressive list of prominent Democrats who endorsed him… but only because he managed to garner an actual impressive list of Democratic endorsements. By comparison, Hutchison’s claim of bipartisan support is a total sham, consisting of three, long-retired politicians, and two of the most conservative and disloyal Democratic elected officials in the state.

Thanks to the bullshit initiative making county elections officially nonpartisan, Hutchison’s chances aren’t handicapped by being forced to put an “R” next to her name, but that doesn’t make her any less of a conservative Republican. And any cooperation she gets from our local media in perpetrating this lie would be a disservice to King County voters.

UPDATE:
According to his 2008 KC Dems candidate questionnaire, Sonntag says he’s pro-choice. But he’s sure as hell wrong about Hutchison.

It should also be noted, by the way, that of Hutchison’s five Democratic endorsers, only Uhlman is a native or resident of King County.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVgOl3cETb4[/youtube]

Folks are poking fun at mayoral candidate Mike McGinn for a press release giving the address of the Columbia City light rail station as Empire Way S and S Edmunds St., pointing out that Empire Way was renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Way after a contentious battle back in 1983.

But I just checked the trusty Map app on my iPhone and it insists that MLK Jr. Way only runs southbound, while the northbound lanes are correctly called Empire Way… and since Google surely would have fixed their maps had they been given two-and-a-half years notice, I can only assume that the Google is right, and everybody else is wrong.

I hate to say it, but I agree with Bruce Ramsey and Rev. Joe Fuiten. Sorta.

In May, the Rev. Joe Fuiten of Cedar Park Church, Bothell, appealed to his fellow conservative Christians not to challenge the state’s new domestic-partnership law for same-sex couples.

Yes, they could collect signatures and put the law on the ballot and hope to overturn it. That is the right of referendum. But the polls, he said, “show us behind.” Fuiten warned: “If we make a referendum effort and fail, the other side will conclude the public is with them.”

Yes, they will — and the fight will be over.

Absolutely.

The bird-in-the-hand side of me would have preferred R-71 hadn’t qualified for the ballot (and in fact, I’m not entirely convinced it legitimately did), but I nonetheless believe that it stands a strong chance of passing. And if it does, it will rightly be perceived as a referendum on full-blown same-sex marriage itself.

How could it not? The anti-gay-rights forces will use the slippery slope argument as they always do, when they’re not outright misrepresenting the measure as doing more than it really does. And by branding the bill as the “Everything But Marriage Act,” the pro-gay-right side has virtually assured that the measure will be conflated with same-sex marriage in the minds of many voters… “don’t think of an elephant,” and all that.

So while R-71 really doesn’t give same-sex couples the same rights the rest of us enjoy, its passage at the polls would likely give legislators the backbone they need to move faster toward that final step. And as a connoisseur of irony, that’s an outcome I sure would enjoy.

From page two of a Politico piece this morning, concerning the Mad Max Blue Cross Defense Act of 2009:

The bill requires individuals to buy insurance, or else face penalties as high as $3,800 for a family. It would not mandate businesses to provide coverage for their employees – as the House bills do – but it would require them to defray the cost of any government subsidies for which their employees would qualify.

So with the lame “co-ops” instead of the public option, meaning no way to control costs or create meaningful competition, many Americans would be forced under threat of monetary fine to hand their money over to the same robber barons who have been ripping them off all along.

Unless progressives hold firm in the House, and start doing some effective work in the Senate, then all regular Americans should stock up on tea bags.

I mean, It’s okay to ask if half of a loaf of bread is better than none, but clearly half of a turd is not a half loaf of bread, it’s just a piece of shit.

The irony is simply rich, and breathtaking. Conservatives got all freaked out by stuff that either wasn’t in legislation or was not what they claimed, and the resulting hysteria has been used to create a Frankenstein monster that has drawn absolutely zero Republican support, not even from alleged moderate Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine. Never, ever take a Democrat with you to buy a car, people, you’ll wind up paying thousands over MSRP and you’ll probably have to fill it with oil and wash it yourself.

Republicans are assailing the Baucus Turd, so forgive my non-D.C. confusion, but WTF? We’re negotiating a compromise that the other side of the aisle is rejecting so we can either play filibuster or reconciliation games?

A few updates from around the area:

– As the extradition date for Canadian seed-seller Marc Emery approaches (he’s expected to be sentenced here in Seattle on Monday, September 28), a rally to protest his looming incarceration is being organized for this Saturday, September 19 at 10am, starting at the Space Needle.

– Medical marijuana patients protested the raids on Spokane’s dispensaries.

– The Tri-City Herald investigates an incident that shows that storylines from The Wire can happen even out in rural Eastern Washington as well. Wherever you go, the drug war inevitably leads to corruption.

– What’s wrong with Tom Carr? If you care about making sure he’s no longer our City Attorney after this year, his opponent in November, Pete Holmes, is having a fundraiser tomorrow (Wednesday) in downtown Seattle.

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.

It’s a good night for some scintillating conversation, a refreshing pint of beer, and a plate full of Resolutions of Disapproval.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2jZonQkTiE[/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.

I think I may have broken the law. Or maybe not. I’m not sure.

With my daughter vegging around the house Sunday, desperately avoiding her homework, I decided to watch a little bit of the Eagles-Panthers game, the problem being, the game wasn’t on TV. Still, I figured, nearly everything is available streaming online these days, and it didn’t take me too long to find what I was looking for.

Sure, I had to boot up my cranky old copy of Parallels/XP, and download some awkward piece of Windows software, but ten minutes later my MacBook was hooked up to my TV, and I was watching Donovan McNabb getting his ribs fractured in a live, if somewhat pixelated, full-screen picture. I would have paid for an easier, higher quality streaming option, but since the NFL wasn’t offering me one, I joined the thousands of other expatriate football fans willing to do what it takes to follow their out-of-market teams.

And following my team has been exceedingly difficult since moving to Seattle in 1992, the problem only exacerbated by the Seahawk’s 2002 move to the NFC West. The Eagles, perennial contenders, tend to be featured in a few nationally broadcast games each season, but during the intervening weeks the pickings are slim; even when the Eagles are featured in one of the weekly regional match-ups, Channel 13 tends to opt for something geographically closer.

Two or three times a year I trudge to a local sports bar to root on my Eagles, but I wasn’t about to drag my daughter to a bar, particularly at 10 in the morning. And I’m sure as hell not gonna pay the $1000-plus a year it would cost to both subscribe to DirectTV and purchase its NFL Sunday Ticket package, just for the privilege of watching maybe an additional dozen games at most.

So while Sunday’s stream kinda sucked, if the quality were a tad better I could imagine it becoming a bit of a habit.

Which raises the question… how fucking stupid must the NFL and the media companies be to drive potential paying customers like me into the arms of pirates, hackers and cheats? They certainly could stream games, but I suppose that would threaten Rupert Murdoch’s out-of-market monopoly. So instead, by refusing to address the demand that is already there, they are creating a market for free streaming that is technically impossible to quash, and will be very difficult to compete against once fans become conditioned to paying nothing.

Furthermore, it’s not at all clear that my private viewing of a live stream of an Over-The-Air broadcast from a Philadelphia station is even illegal. The unauthorized retransmission of this broadcast, that can’t be kosher, but my viewing of it on the Internet? I’m not so sure. How is this different from viewing infringing material on YouTube? And as for the ethical issues, it’s hard to feel guilty about watching an otherwise free, OTA broadcast, commercials and all, even if the NFL and News Corp. would rather I not.

I don’t know if I’ll watch another stream like this, but the point is I can, and there’s nothing the NFL can do to stop it. So rather than pretending these new technologies don’t exist, wouldn’t the NFL be better off offering a higher-quality, reasonably priced, paid streaming alternative, that didn’t turn avid fans into avid pirates? Hasn’t the rest of the entertainment industry learned anything from the mistakes of the music industry and its disastrously failed efforts to maintain the status quo?

It doesn’t take more than a few minutes of Googling to realize that nearly everything remotely streamable is available for streaming on the Internet, authorized or not, and yet Hollywood has its panties in a knot over the growing dominance of RedBox and its $1.00 rentals, while consumers in most of the rest of the world are exploiting the anarchy that is the Internet to remove themselves from the sales channel entirely.

If the studios are worried that $1.00 rentals might decimate their DVD sales, just imagine how hard they’ll find it to compete with free. The solution of course is to out-compete both RedBox and the pirates by aggressively putting their libraries online for streaming at competitive prices, before consumers learn habits that they’ll find very difficult to unlearn. Because one way or another, their content, just like the NFL’s is going to find its way online. The only question is who, if anybody, is going to profit from it.

One of the common refrains from those opposing health care reform is that they don’t want a government bureaucrat getting between them and their doctor, but what do an overwhelming majority of physicians prescribe for fixing our nation’s broken health care system…?

Among all the players in the health care debate, doctors may be the least understood about where they stand on some of the key issues around changing the health care system. Now, a new survey finds some surprising results: A large majority of doctors say there should be a public option.

[…]  Most doctors — 63 percent — say they favor giving patients a choice that would include both public and private insurance. That’s the position of President Obama and of many congressional Democrats. In addition, another 10 percent of doctors say they favor a public option only; they’d like to see a single-payer health care system. Together, the two groups add up to 73 percent.

That’s right, nearly three-quarters of doctors support a public option in one form or another, because more than their patients, they know how thoroughly broken the current system is. Support for a public option was “broad and widespread,” occurring at rough equal levels amongst all categories of doctors, and in rural and urban areas alike.

“Whether they lived in southern regions of the United States or traditionally liberal parts of the country,” says Keyhani, “we found that physicians, regardless — whether they were salaried or they were practice owners, regardless of whether they were specialists or primary care providers, regardless of where they lived — the support for the public option was broad and widespread.”

Support was widespread even amongst rank and file members of the AMA, which as an organization has lobbied against a public option. And what explains this surprising consensus?

Keyhani says doctors already have experience with government-run health care, with Medicare. And she says the survey shows that, overall, they like it. “We’ve heard a lot about how the government is standing in between patients and their physician,” Keyhani says. “And what we can see is that physicians support Medicare. So I think physicians have sort of signaled that a public option that’s similar in design to Medicare would be a good way of ensuring patients get the care that they need.”

We trust our doctors to make life and death decisions… to cut us open and reach inside our own bodies to mend or remove our parts. But will we trust our doctors to recommend the best health care reform alternatives?

NOTE:
You can listen to the NPR report below:

[audio:http://public.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/atc/2009/09/20090914_atc_10.mp3]

You don’t need to squint too hard between the lines of yesterday’s Alki Foundation endorsement of Dow Constantine to read a pretty damn stinging rebuke of Republican Susan Hutchison, and her qualifications for King County Executive… or rather, lack thereof:

Alki Chairman Michael Luis said the county exec’s race was a difficult one for the group. But Luis said it boiled down to this: “Susan Hutchison remains sort of a political unknown and just never made people totally comfortable that she was ready to take the reins of a complicated government.”

As a result, Constantine, a liberal Democrat, got the nod over Hutchison, a self-described “moderate nonpartisan” who says Constantine is responsible for the county’s financial problems and beholden to special interests.

Constantine is not perceived as a “business-type candidate,” Luis acknowledged. But he is “well known” and could walk into the exec’s job “knowing how the place works.” The general sense among the Alki group was that Hutchison “hadn’t made the case she could do the job,” Luis said.

Ouch. And that’s putting it lightly.

The exec endorsement was indeed a difficult one for Alki, the political arm of the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, but not in the sense that the final vote was all that close. This was a group strongly inclined to embrace Hutchison on ideological grounds, and she reportedly entered the process with a contingent of supporters at the Chamber. But after flubbing her interviews, she just couldn’t shake the impression that she was both uninformed and unqualified… and by a long shot.

Luis describes Hutchison as a “political unknown,” but then so is Joe Mallahan, and yet that didn’t stop the pro-business Chamber from endorsing the most pro-business of the two mayoral finalists. But when forced to pick between the liberal Constantine—who recently led the fight against Glacier Northwest’s Maury Island gravel mine—and the Cato-spouting, Discovery-Institute-board-sitting ex-newsreader Hutchison, pragmatism trumped ideology, and Alki members felt they had no choice but to endorse the only candidate who is professionally prepared to actually do the job.

Kinda ironic for Hutchison to lose the Chamber of Commerce’s endorsement when a central theme of her campaign has been her promise to declare the county “open for business.”

Hutchison has also pitched herself as the only candidate able to bring all parties to the table, yet it’s Constantine who is managing to put together a coalition of business, labor and environmental supporters, while Hutchison has largely distinguished herself through her union-baiting. If Hutchison does have any consensus building skills, they’ve mostly been utilized building a consensus for her opponent.

The Columbian editorial board just goes off on the BIAW Clark County Commission for delaying implementation of new stormwater rules for fat cat political donor/developers.

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

Peace in the Valley and thank you to all the members of the armed forces, especially those serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. The situation in Afghanistan is particularly worrisome, and our thoughts are with you.

It looks like this is going to be a busy week for me. There are a number of drug war related stories happening across the state that I want to follow, but I definitely want to address this editorial that appeared on the Tacoma News-Tribune editorial page last week. Specifically this part:

California was already becoming notorious for effectively legalizing recreational dope-smoking through its extremely lax medical marijuana law. Washingtonians were offered their own loophole-riddled marijuana initiative in 1997, and they resoundingly rejected it.

The one they did pass the next year, Initiative 692, was explicitly designed to forbid the California-style dispensaries that operate like commercial marijuana shops. Its sponsors touted its safeguards, including a provision that let a “primary caregiver” provide limited amounts of marijuana to a patient under conditions that precluded drug-dealing.

The key language required a caregiver to “possess no more marijuana that is necessary for the patient’s personal, medical use” and “be the primary caregiver to only one patient at any one time.”

The meaning seems crystal clear: No multi-customer operations. But McCrea and other dispensary advocates have seized on those last four words. In their view, it sounds like, “any one time” means any time a buyer walks through the door.

Accept that logic, and Washington takes a long step toward the wide-open drug-dealing now rampant in California, where some compliant doctors hang out their shingles near dispensaries and pass out marijuana cards to anyone with a vaguely plausible physical complaint.

There’s one point I can’t argue. Marijuana is essentially legal in California right now. The list of qualifying conditions that a person can obtain it for in that state is long enough that any recreational user can become a medical user. Depression, insomnia, whatever, there are doctors throughout the state that will – for a fee, of course! – certify you as a medical marijuana patient. And just about anyone who has used marijuana recreationally discovers that it has some side medical benefits as well, so it’s not hard to tell a doctor, “Yeah, it helps me sleep”, or “Man, it really gets rid of my stomach aches”.

People can complain all they want that this full-scale legalization happened under the guise of ensuring that sick people can have access to a medicinal plant that they find extremely valuable, but that’s irrelevant now. What we see now is that nothing really changed. All of the reasons that were given for not simply legalizing it for recreational use in the first place weren’t valid. Marijuana is legal there, and it has made no difference in how that state functions (or malfunctions). We haven’t seen any huge spikes in use, and in fact the percentages of teenagers who use marijuana in California have been dropping sharply since the medical marijuana laws were put in place.

That point aside, the major flaw with the News-Tribune editorial is that it just assumes that implementing a dispensary system in Washington will turn us into California. There’s no basis for that observation. Washington has a far more limited set of ailments that allow a person to become an authorized patient. I could easily become a medical marijuana cardholder in California, but would not be able to here. Without that long list of accepted ailments, recreational users in Washington would still have to obtain marijuana from criminal organizations. And for reasons that make absolutely no sense to anyone, this appears to be the way that the idiots at the Tacoma News-Tribune want it.

In all of the arguing over the law and hyperbole about what’s happening in California, it’s the folks who use medical marijuana for truly serious ailments who are once again forgotten. Today, I spoke on the phone with the woman at the center of the Grant County case, Rosa Dossett. Living in a very rural part of the state, obtaining supplies of marijuana is not a trivial task, so she relied on her son to grow for her. Her son, David Hagar (who Dossett says does not even use marijuana himself), has been raided twice by Grant County police (he’s also accused of theft). Grant County police also allegedly told Dossett that even with her authorization, she’s still not allowed to use marijuana. If that happened as she said, the police simply lied to her.

Dossett is a cancer survivor and suffers from osteo-arthritis. Her main medical use for the drug now is to manage the constant pain from osteo-arthritis. Unlike a lot of other drugs, the effectiveness of a pain reliever is pretty clear to people. If a pain reliever doesn’t work, you know damn well that it doesn’t work. That’s why I’m always amazed when I see people questioning the efficacy of this drug. Dossett has found that she prefers marijuana to drugs like Hydrocodone because it’s natural, more effective, less chemically addictive, and it can be grown for far less money than what prescription pharmaceuticals cost. Unfortunately, the language of the medical marijuana law allows a judge to decide whether pain patients can use marijuana instead of a pharmaceutical alternative.

It shouldn’t be up to judges or the police to decide which medicines we choose to use. That should be left up to doctors and patients. Some of the leading researchers when it comes to using marijuana for medicinal purposes are based right here at the University of Washington. Here’s a recent study from the Journal of Opioid Management by six UW researchers on the numerous studies showing the efficacy of marijuana. The question of whether or not people in this state with a legitimate medical need should have access to this plant for medical uses has been settled in the minds of the electorate for over ten years. It’s the responsibility of both the Legislature and the Governor to finally translate that legitimacy into a system that works.

UPDATE: It appears that SeattleJew decided to check in from his land of merry make-believe in an attempt to discredit the authors of the Journal of Opioid Management report linked above. One of the researchers, Dr. Sunil Aggarwal has responded with a comment here listing out references to 33 separate clinical trials that have demonstrated the value of marijuana as medicine.

UPDATE 2: Attorney Douglas Hiatt emails me to say that the law does not allow a judge to substitute their medical opinion for a doctor’s, and he expects the court ruling I linked to above to be overturned.

Last week, Central Washington University professor, conservative writer and state Republican executive board member Mathew Manweller had a guest editorial published in the The Seattle Times in which he argued that Republicans should not target Blue Dogs in the 2010 election. It hardly seemed like a controversial idea, since Blue Dogs support the Republicans so much anyhow.

And at any rate, Manweller’s piece was a Republican strategery/tactical debate, so I didn’t pay much attention. Whatever, they’ll do what they’ll do.

But it seems that some on the right have um, taken offense. Like some dude posting at Red State named Martin Knight, who thinks that Manweller might be a Democratic plant.

He’s also an idiot, notwithstanding his obvious self-regard as some sort of intellectual. Or a Democratic plant. I don’t believe there is any other explanation for what he’s proposing that the Republican Party do to itself in 2010.

Notice the “some kind of intellectual” dig. Nice! Now they’re even turning on conservative professors. Funny how anti-intellectualism gets out of hand, isn’t it, Professor Manweller? The title even calls Manweller a “sleeper agent.”

Considering some of Manwellers embarrassing right wing antics, like the time he called supporters of the minimum wage “dumber than a post,” it’s pretty darn funny that there’s a little internecine warfare going on at the WSRP.

Why do I think it’s internecine conflict? Because the attacks against Manweller are being cheered by fellow WSRP executive board member Nansen Malin of Pacific County, who at last sighting was relentlessly attacking Brian Baird because he wouldn’t have a town hall in her living room.

Malin is the “Queen of the Twitterverse,” you know. Professor Manweller better get himself a Twitter account pronto, if he doesn’t already have one, and start tweeting back immediately, because Malin has over 100,000 followers, and the ones that aren’t spambots seem pretty pissed. Sure, it’s hard to make an intellectual argument using 140 characters, and once you use up the obligatory five characters required to type in “ACORN” you’re down to 135, but you can always link to stuff. I’m looking forward to the debate.

PS: I’ll be sitting on the patio.

Seriously, I have proof that I am sitting on the patio.