Archives for September 2009

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See, this is what Republicans are protecting when they oppose healthcare reform.

Speaking of which, more than 400 caregivers of seniors and people with disabilities will be rallying this afternoon outside Cigna’s downtown Seattle office, demanding that Cigna end its opposition to a public option.  Demonstrators will meet at City Hall Plaza, 600 4th AVE, and then march to Cigna’s offices at 700 5th AVE.

With the news media’s credibility at an all time low, either the press needs to do a better job of reporting, or it needs a little PR of its own:

Just 29 percent of the 1,506 adults surveyed by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press between July 22-26 said news organizations generally get the facts straight.

Sixty-three percent said news stories are often inaccurate, up from 34 percent in a 1985 study, Pew said.

Whatever the reason for this growing credibility gap, I’m guessing the best solution isn’t to cut back newsrooms even further. But then, I’m just some dumb blogger, so what do I know?

Back in June, I wrote about Change – a medical marijuana dispensary operating in Spokane. Last week they were busted and the dispensary was shut down. A group called the Spokane Regional Dispensary Coalition is planning a protest at the Spokane County Courthouse this morning.

The situation in Spokane is just another exhibit in the case of how our legislature dropped the ball when they had a chance to put together a set of regulations that allowed for qualifying patients to obtain medical marijuana. Patients in Spokane once again have to rely on street dealers.

The dispensary owners are challenging the part of the law that states that a caregiver can only have one patient at a time. I don’t see them succeeding on this point in court. It’s the law that needs to change.

I have the power to make stupid people say stupid things.

Sometime last night vandals spray painted swastikas on the sides of two Seward Park synagogues, on the driveway of one, and on the sidewalk in front of several neighboring houses. Seattle Police are investigating the graffiti as an act of malicious harassment and property damage, and encourages anybody with information to call their Bias Crimes Unit at 206-233-3898.

I live about a block from both synagogues, Sephardic Bikur Holim and Bikur Cholim Machzikay Hadath, and while I don’t remember another incident quite like this in the 12 years I’ve been in the neighborhood, as my own comment threads regularly demonstrate, anti-semitism is alive and well around these parts. Still, this attack seems oddly random, with nothing obvious in the news at the moment to serve as an immediate motivation.

That said, since history has shown that folks don’t need any particular reason to hate Jews, I guess it doesn’t take any particular motivation for these same folks to express their hatred.

Last week’s contest was won by wes.in.wa. It was Bucharest, Romania. Wes also found this Wikipedia page for the pictured monastery.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!

I know a lot of folks around here are pretty excited about the Huskies’ big win over Idaho yesterday, and plenty more are looking forward to the Seahawks’ opening game this afternoon. But for me, the big sporting event of the week was the opening of my daughter’s soccer season, where she and her teammates walloped their opponents 9-0.

Go Supremes!

Watching a bunch of little girls play soccer (well, at 12 to 13, they’re not all that little anymore) is one of the unexpected pleasures of parenthood, but it’s also one of the rarely considered amenities of city life. My daughter’s team practices twice a week at the grass field atop I-90’s approach to the Mt. Baker tunnel, and plays their home games on the neatly turfed and lighted field at Genesee. And during the course of the season they’ll play at half a dozen other fields around the city… all of them built and maintained with our tax dollars.

The anti-tax/anti-government crowd loves to complain about elected officials stealing their money, but in pushing forth their bathtub-sized government agenda, they also love to ignore the many big and little things that government does to improve our quality of life. For example, without a government willing and able to acquire and maintain the land, there would be no public play fields in Seattle, as the demands of the real estate market simply would not allow it. Sure, a handful of private schools might have amenities of their own, but these would be available only to the rare few who could afford it, rather than the thousands of children and adults who enjoy Seattle Parks and Recreation facilities everyday.

There is a reason Seattle voters approve nearly every local levy that comes our way: we want and enjoy the services and amenities these levies provide, and while we all have our quibbles, we generally believe we are getting value for our dollars compared to the alternative. There are simply some things on which we can’t rely on the free market to provide… and my daughter’s soccer game was certainly one of them.

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It’s an open thread, which I don’t know how to say in German.

I just had to watch Glenn Beck here in the 11 AM Pacific Hour, because some in the right-wing Twitterverse were all abuzz about a “big announcement.”

Beck complained about accusations that he is a McCarthyist, because he’s “not a Senator” and doesn’t have subpoena power, which of course is utterly true and utterly beside the point as he and the rest of the right continue their smear campaigns. Beck and the right have decided to repeat ad nauseam that there is some kind of secret “socialist” agenda at work by defining those who disagree with him as commies or whatever, so his crocodile tears are pretty transparent.

Beck then gave a rambling, nearly twenty minute speech in which he essentially compared Washington, D.C. to the swine flu and called for a “quarantine” of the city. I use the qualifier “essentially” because Beck goes all over the place in his little talks, earnestly professing his love for country and insisting that it’s not about partisanship, when in fact Beck has become the de facto leader of the kind of insane right wing partisanship that was last dominate when Bill Clinton was president.

It was all pretty awesome, with Beck standing in front of a big-screen graphic as the swine-flu-corruption disease spread across a map of the U.S, with Beck asking the computer controller to go back and start at the beginning of the outbreak for dramatic effect. He’s standing in front of a graphic! OMG!

Beck really wasn’t clear about his proposed “quarantine” of the seat of government, although at one point he seemed to be repeating something like “nothing in, no legislation out.” So it appears he’s not actually calling for a physical quarantine of D.C. Whew!

Then Beck moved into something of an Elmer Gantry act, promising redemption to members of both parties who would expose corruption, and asking for 56 “re-Founders” of the Republic, the same number as originally signed the Declaration of Independence. I’d imagine he might just get that number, seeing there are at least that number of far-right Republicans left in Congress who would likely have no compunction about hitching their wagon up to Beck.

Beck hit the corruption theme hard, naming mostly Democrats and liberal organizations but also at least one Republican. Beck promised his viewers (always leave them wanting more!) that on Monday he would tell members of Congress how to become a re-Founder, and promising to forgive members if they did the right thing. It’s a fascinating amalgam of populist rhetoric, Christian-like redemption talk and high-tech blinky lights that Beck uses.

Oh, it’s worth noting that Beck delivered his emotional appeal against corruption on the Rubert Murdoch-owned Fox Noise Channel, on the day that the 9-12 event Beck created was being sponsored by the following earnest grass roots organizations: (admittedly selective list, you can click through to see all of them)

Freedom Works
National Taxpayers Union
Grassfire.Org
The Club for Growth
The Ayn Rand Center
NARLO
Americans for Tax Reform
Senate Conservatives Fund
etc.

So yeah, corruption is bad, Glenn. Definitely bad.

The deal to make Microsoft the exclusive search provider for Yahoo received much attention around these parts (as nearly everything surrounding Microsoft does) but according to a report on CNET, by consolidating the lucrative search/online advertising market from three to two major players, the deal might not pass Justice Department muster as is:

In this case, the Justice Department is likely looking at two different aspects of the deal. On one hand, regulators are expected to probe whether advertisers will be harmed by the loss of an outlet for their ad dollars, as well as whether Google has less incentive to compete for searchers now that there’s only two fish in the pond. … “This deal is going to eliminate a competitor in search in a market that has high barriers to entry and only has three players,” [antitrust lawyer Matthew] Cantor said. He compared it to the reaction that would have arisen in the 1960s if two of the three major television networks had decided to merge amid a far-smaller media landscape.

[…] Cantor thinks the Justice Department will force Microsoft and Yahoo to put Yahoo’s search technology assets up for auction to let the deal go through. That would allow a third major player to enter the business, although that new entrant would still have the burden of attracting searchers: Yahoo has said that an overwhelming majority of the people using Yahoo search are already doing so from a Yahoo Web page, the combination of which are among the most visited pages on the Internet.

However, that might not be as appealing to Microsoft and would at least throw the deal into question. The company has spent millions on the development and launch of Bing, but it likely is interested in retaining certain aspects of Yahoo’s search technology, not to mention some of its engineers.

It’s interesting that with all the focus in the Seattle Times about Google’s supposedly crushing monopoly, little has been written about the anti-competitive aspects of Microsoft’s own search initiative. Huh. Good thing, at least, there’s plenty of competition in the tech news and analysis business.

– Blogger Andrew Sullivan appears to have gotten some very favorable treatment from prosecutors after being busted for pot possession in Cape Cod. Sullivan is particularly enlightened on the drug war and certainly understands how lucky he was to escape more serious consequences. Hopefully, he’ll share some thoughts soon at his place.

– Grits For Breakfast has a roundup of links on Cameron Todd Willingham, a man who was executed in Texas for arson, but may have been innocent.

– A man in West Virginia was busted with a sophisticated marijuana grow room (over 100 plants) in his attic. What makes this pot bust story different than the dozens of other busted grows every month around the country? The man tending the plants had been appearing in commercials and on YouTube promoting his labor union’s drug free policies.

– The Drug War Chronicle took a week off from compiling their corrupt cop roundup and wound up with a pretty big list this week.

Hey… check out my new ringtone:

[audio:http://horsesass.org/wp-content/uploads/SuziePalin.mp3]

That’s Republican activist Peggy Boze, wife of right-wing KTTH talker David Boze, on her husband’s show telling Susan Hutchison exactly what she thinks of her. And of course, that’s Suzie, laughing appreciatively at the compliment.

With a little audio editing magic it sounds great on my iPhone, and it’ll sound great on your phone too. Just download the MP3 (or iPhone m4r) and copy it to your phone.

You can almost feel the Seattle Times editorial board gloating after a King County judge levied sanctions on Kent teachers—an onerous $200 per day, per teacher, retroactive—but if I were a Kent teacher, rather than go back to work, as the district, court and Times demand, or stay on strike and pay the fine, I’d simply quit my job.

Really. I know myself, and I simply couldn’t do my job to the best of my ability, knowing that I was working for an employer who disrespected me. And in asking for sanctions while rejecting a contract offer below it’s own original proposal, the Kent School District has shown its teachers an incredible amount of disrespect.

When the Kent teachers union made an offer Thursday morning that was $200,000 less than the Kent School District’s own bottom line yet would still reduce class sizes, teachers thought they had a solution that would bring an end to the now 16-day strike.

They were hoping to reach a tentative agreement before a 1 p.m. hearing before the judge who had issued an injunction Sept. 1 ordering the teachers back to the classroom on Sept. 8.

So when the district rejected the union’s offer — and made no plans for future bargaining sessions — the teachers were stunned. […] Then came King County Superior Court Judge Andrea Darvas’ sanctions — $200 a day per teacher, retroactive to Sept. 8, and $1,500 a day for the teachers union if teachers are not in class and ready for students on Monday.

Rather than bargaining in good faith the district obviously chose to use the courts to force teachers back to work on the district’s terms, leaving the union with little or no bargaining power.  Well fuck that.

Just because the district can use the courts, doesn’t mean it should, and given the choice between breaking my union or paying a fine I can’t afford, I’d simply choose neither. I mean, why the hell would I want to work for bastards like that?

Of course, this contract dispute will be settled in the end—they always are—and few if any teachers will quit their jobs in the process. But the bitterness will remain, and it will surely exact a toll on the district, the teachers and the students for years to come. So while the Times vindictively celebrates the district’s victory in court, in the end, everybody loses.

As reported on BlatherWatch, KIRO-FM’s “Too Beautiful To Live” was in fact eponymously named, ending its on-air run about a year and nine months after it started. That’s about as long as my show lasted on KIRO, and while I’ve got nothing against TBTL or its host Luke Burbank, I gotta say, in the radio business, what goes around comes around.

While it was never explicitly stated, it seemed clear at the time that I and most of the rest of my weekend and late-night colleagues were axed at least partially to make room on the payroll for the somewhat pricier TBTL. I was of course disappointed at the time, and a lot of inside-radio folks reassured me that KIRO was making a big mistake dumping me… but then, none of these radio-insiders have since offered me a show on their stations, so it was really hard to argue with KIRO’s decision from a business perspective.  In the year and a half since, the switch to FM, the advent of the PPM, and the declining radio market in general have hit KIRO hard, so despite my full spot load, and my relatively low costs, I don’t know if my show would have survived regardless.

Replacing TBTL in the slot will be the familiar (and I assume, much cheaper) voice of Frank Shires, who is nearly always wrong and incredibly uninformed, but who happens to be perhaps the nicest and most gracious person I’ve met in radio, so I wish him the best of luck. Also my best wishes to Luke, Sean and Jen… especially to Jen, who is as friendly in person as she comes off on the radio, and to the ever so easy-going Sean, who as my first board-op made my baptism-by-fire radio debut so much less frightening and disastrous than it should’ve been.

And finally, here’s my fervent wish that KIRO and its newsroom survives this economic and audience downturn and eventually comes back stronger than ever.  I came to KIRO merely to do my own liberal thing, but it was when I had the privilege of keeping listeners company and informed during the 2006 wind storm and power outage that I learned what an incredible resource a radio station could be to a region. We would all benefit to see KIRO return to its live and local glory, regardless of who is behind the mic.

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