Archives for September 2009

Some folks had some other stuff they seemed to want to discuss, so here’s an open thread.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDR0W9SVi48[/youtube]

At the town hall meeting in Centralia on Wednesday night, Rep. Brian Baird turned the tables on a city of Centralia candidate for mayor named Matthew Trent. The Columbian included an account of the exchange in an article this morning:

One of the more contentious exchanges of the evening came when Centralia City Council candidate Matthew Trent approached the microphone.

Trent read quotes from a number of founding fathers, among them Declaration of Independence author and third president Thomas Jefferson.

Trent, who is opposing Centralia Mayor Tim Browning in the November general election, said that he had no doubt Jefferson would consider Baird “an enemy of God and the Republic” for his record on spending and supporting government controls.

Baird responded strongly, refuting the notion that Jefferson would frown upon his record.

“It’s not just my ilk, my friend,” Baird said, noting that there was no budget deficit when former President Bill Clinton left office.

As Chris notes at his blog, Trent is the beneficiary of a public education, attended a public community college and actually works for Lewis County, according to a blog created by Trent.

It’s great that Baird responded forcefully, but with great dignity, and one can hope the lesson he will take back to D.C. to share with leadership is that there is no negotiating with people like this. They’ve concocted a fantasy world of black and white in which they are the sole arbiters of the meaning of the Constitution, and of what the Founders actually intended.

They can puff up their chests and say stuff like this until the cows come home, but until and unless the U.S. Supreme Court agrees with them, they’re simply delusional fringe characters who deserve to be rhetorically smacked down with a vengeance.

It would be laughable if it weren’t so pathetic. Good luck with your campaign, there, Mr. Trent.

One thing to note about yesterday’s pro-health reform rally is that there were no violent confrontations between supporters and counter-protesters… which is really too bad, because with a few thousand of us and only a couple dozen of them, we could’ve really kicked us some teabagger ass.

Oh, it’s not that I advocate violence, it’s just that apparently that’s the only way we’re going to get any media attention, for on the same day that the Seattle Times totally ignores a massive—and peaceful—pro-reform rally in its own backyard, it sees fit to reprint an AP story on the finger-biting incident Los Angeles.

Large, peaceful, pro-reform rally in Seattle: not newsworthy. Isolated and bizarre finger-biting incident in LA: stop the presses! That’s the level of coverage of the health care debate we’re getting in Seattle.

Next time, perhaps I’ll show up at one of these events armed to the teeth and swinging a samurai sword; betcha that’s worthy of a headline.

Author and food activist Jill Richardson will be in Seattle tonight to speak about and sign her new book Recipe for America: Why Our Food System is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It. Sponsored by Drinking Liberally, Northwest Progressive Institute and Sustainable Seattle, the event will be held 8:00 – 10:00 PM at Fx McRory’s, 406 Occidental Ave. S. in Pioneer Square.

Hope to see you all there.

I’ve no idea where I was yesterday afternoon, but it couldn’t possibly have been at an energetic, 3000-person strong pro-healthcare reform rally in Westlake Park, because I couldn’t find even the tiniest mention of it in this morning’s Seattle Times, so apparently, it never happened. And I have absolutely no idea where all those photos and videos on my camera came from.

It’s like my own personal Twilight Zone.

Of course, whatever didn’t happen in downtown Seattle yesterday, the picture above doesn’t even begin to do it justice, with a sea of bodies extending building to curb, and all the way back under the cover of the trees. Aided by a live band and the wafting aroma of food from street vendors, there was a party atmosphere to the rally which made it feel kinda like a Bumbershoot pre-event. Or at least, it would have felt that way, had it actually happened.

There was also, apparently, no counter-protest yesterday. No really, there wasn’t much of one, with only a couple dozen angry teabaggers at most, cordoned off along a four-foot-wide strip of sidewalk in front of the Starbucks across the street.

This was the most flattering picture I could find, and it’s pretty anemic:

But like I said, since our paper of record didn’t bother to report on it, none of this actually happened. 3000 people of all ages, races and walks of life didn’t crowd into Westlake Park to rally in support of health care reform. A congressman didn’t join business, labor and civic leaders in encouraging the crowd to make their support known. And a well-organized effort by counter-protesters couldn’t muster up much more than a bullhorn and a handful of signs.

None of this happened yesterday in downtown Seattle because no ex-marine angrily yelled down a congressman and nobody got the tip of their finger bitten off and nothing apparently is going to get the media to move from the well-entrenched meme that support for reform is steadily slipping as the public turns against Obama and the Democratic Congress… not even a show of force by the public itself.

UPDATE:
Apparently, I wasn’t the only one imagining yesterday’s health care reform rally, and like me, they managed to capture their hallucinations on camera too.  Weird.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouYXq5tSXb0&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

The war in Afghanistan is probably the biggest pitfall for President Obama and for US foreign policy in general. It’s past time we got out, and two of the blogs I read regularly had some important posts that you should go read now.

Glenn Greenwald:

Does that sound like a stirring appeal to urgent national security interests? Why should we continue to kill both Afghan civilians and our own troops and pour billions of dollars into that country indefinitely? Because “there’s a reasonable chance the counterinsurgency approach will yield something better than stalemate.” One can almost hear the yawning as the Post Editors call for more war. We don’t need to pretend any more that war, bombing and occupation of other countries is indispensable to protecting ourselves; as long as “there’s a reasonable chance it will yield something better than stalemate,” it should continue into its tenth, eleventh, twelfth year and beyond.

Of course, the reason the Post editors and their war-loving comrades can so blithely advocate more war is because it doesn’t affect them in any way. They’re not the ones whose homes are being air-bombed and whose limbs are being blown off. That’s nothing new; here’s George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia, describing (without knowing) Fred Hiatt in 1938:

The people who write that kind of stuff never fight; possibly they believe that to write it is a substitute for fighting. It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours.

Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.

And Shaun at Upper Left (emphasis in the original):

How, I wonder, can you be in favor of having any force, necessary and/or reasonable, if you don’t first know what victory is and how we will achieve it. Isn’t the size of the force, it’s need and rationality, dependent on the goal, the definition of victory?

They say the memory is the second thing to go, and I’m getting on, but as I remember we entered Afghanistan with three identifiable and arguably defensible goals. The first was to destroy it’s capacity as a training and operational base for Al Qaeda. We accomplished that swiftly and handily. The second was to punish the Taliban government that had given them safe harbor by deposing them. That, too, was the matter of a brief and decisive battle. Finally, in the wake of an unconscionable attack on American sovereign territory and the death and destruction attendant to those attacks, we set out to kill or capture as much of the Al Qaeda high command as possible, and in particular their spokesman, strategist and financier, Osama Bin Laden.

The second goal, though apparently swiftly achieved, continues to be a stumbling block for adherents of the disgraced former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn rule.” The rule fails in Afghanistan, though, because we didn’t break it. It’s been broken for centuries, and centuries of outside interference have caused the debris to spread far beyond Afghani borders. Some of it spilled into ours, and we swept it out of our path. If Afghanistan were to organize itself in such a way that it could accept and distribute humanitarian aid, it would certainly be a candidate with other countries that receive American largesse, whether publicly or privately provided. The level of American military force that would be required in order to effect and enforce such an organization of Afghanistan, though, in time, treasure and blood, would defy any possible conception of “within reason.” Its impossibility, by the same token, renders its need moot. We didn’t break it. We needn’t buy it. And we’re only making it worse.

And while you’re over at Shaun’s place, you ought to read all the posts he’s been doing on Afghanistan.

So, while flipping through the channels I stopped on 33, where I noticed for the first time the slogan for ION Television: “Positively Entertaining.”

Get it? Ion… positively… it’s a pun. A scientific pun.

See, ions are electrically charged atoms or molecules. Sure, some are negatively charged, depending on the number of protons and electrons (CATION Television, now that would be positively entertaining, assuming it’s entertaining at all), but let’s not pick nits. It’s still a pretty damn clever pun.

Except… what with the woeful state of science education in the U.S. these days, who the hell would know?

For example, take the Pew Research Center Science Knowledge Quiz… no really, take it. And in my opinion, if you don’t get a perfect 12 out of 12, you’re a fucking idiot. But don’t you worry, a less than perfect score would put you in the company of 90-percent of your fellow Americans who couldn’t answer basic science questions like are the continents moving, or which is smaller, an atom or an electron?

And if you didn’t get that last one—and only 46-percent of Americans did—how the hell are you going to get the pun in ION TV’s slogan?

Or more importantly, how is our nation going to maintain itself as a scientific, technological and economic leader when, say, only 32-percent of Americans accept evolution as true? 32-percent. That’s pathetic.

So when Susan Hutchison and her supporters insist that her service as a director at the anti-science Discovery Institute has absolutely no bearing on the race for King County Executive, I say we positively can’t afford that kind of dumbed down political leadership.

There are two key indicators today in the brewing battle between the House and the administration over health care reform, and while they don’t represent any kind of change in position, they indicate progressives are holding their ground.

Earlier today, Greg Sargent reported that House progressives sent a letter to the White House stating that they will not support a bill lacking a so-called public option, and demanding a meeting with President Barack Obama.

Late this afternoon, TPM quotes a statement from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as saying that a bill without the public option will not pass the House.

While progressives and the Speaker are reiterating already stated positions, it’s an encouraging sign that the right-wing clown shows (and one left wing finger-biter) have not changed the basic fact that there are more progressives than Blue Dogs, and there are far more Democrats than Republicans in the House.

So while the traditional media (and we bloggers) have duly watched, been outraged, been disgusted and been doubled over in laughter at different times by the circus, it’s worth noting that the House, the most representative body, is poised to actually represent the interests of all Americans, absurd lies about death panels, the 10th Amendment and so on notwithstanding.

Yes, nothing is perfect, but millions of Americans voted in November 2008, and the Democratic Party was handed the majority in Congress and the White House. Extremists who claim some special exemption from the results of elections, making up bizarre theories to suite their own purposes, need to be eyed with suspicion. If a health care plan finally emerges, there will be another set of elections only 14 months from now, and the people will get to vote again. That’s how it works. Elections have consequences, as the Bushites reminded us so frequently.

We are talking about figuring out a way to help our fellow citizens, people. Nobody from the government will show up at people’s houses unannounced to administer prostate exams, indoctrinate children or whatever other nonsensical (and excessively paranoid) claims have been made. Frankly, the fact the right wing puke funnel insists on regurgitating all manner of idiotic bullshit only shows how little love they have for real democracy. It’s all about democracy with them, until they lose a couple of elections, then they unleash the crazy in hopes of intimidating Democrats into backing down.

If people wish to object to certain ideas, like mandates, great. I have qualms about that myself. But the impotent rage of the right has contributed little of value, unless you’re the CEO of a private insurance company.

And then there’s the Senate. Ah, the Senate. There’s talk of using the relatively arcane reconciliation process to pass a bill without 60 votes, but it would smack of a parliamentary trick, which it would be. Not that righties will ever concede one inch no matter how legislation is passed, but they might be able to make the case to others that Democrats did something underhanded.

It’s become nearly conventional wisdom that one needs 60 votes to pass a bill, but this is because nobody ever calls anyone’s bluff on the filibuster. Frankly it is about time that somebody is actually forced to filibuster, it would be political theater on a grand stage.

Cable tee-vee news needs programming anyhow, and since trying to provide health insurance coverage to all Americans has now been portrayed by opponents as being like the Alamo, Pearl Harbor and Armageddon at once, it might be good for the American people to be exposed to the fine minds that would engage in a filibuster.

The obstructionism, obfuscation and dissembling that would be on display is hard to envision, but you can bet it would be both mighty in its rage and absurd in the extreme. For once Democrats need to dare the GOP to put itself on full and unfiltered display before the American people, and let folks compare the ideas of the two parties.

The Cannabis Defense Coalition has adopted a highway (SR 169 in Maple Valley):

Their court calendar is pretty busy as well. Here are the upcoming court dates they’re observing:

Tuesday, September 8 – 9am
Douglas County vs. Hubert Mangum

Wednesday, September 9 – 9am
Grant County vs. David Hagar

Monday, September 14 – 9am
Mason County vs. John Reed & Karen Mower

Monday, September 21 – 9am
Kitsap County vs. Lloyd Stillson

Some background on two of the cases here. Please contact the CDC if you’d like to be an observer for any of these court dates.

About an hour before the scheduled start, this is about the best the teabaggers could put together.

The other day, when I opined on defamation law and the vindictive and authoritarian way some establishment types would like to see it used to rein in bloggers like me, one of the examples I used was that of my friend Carla and the way she infuriated the pusillanimous pantywaists that patrol the comment threads at Blue Oregon. Carla had merely suggested, after laying out supporting evidence, that “it’s my belief” that a well known lobbyist was involved in feeding negative stories to the press, and it was for this act of subjective speculation that a handful of trolls relentlessly warned her about crossing a line that could lead to financial ruin.

In truth, they didn’t just warn Carla, they gloated over the notion that she might be dragged into court on defamation charges. It was, at least for some of the trolls, an attempt at intimidation, pure and simple. It was also laughable, as proven once again this week by a real life defamation suit in which a jury determined that even honest to God false statements didn’t rise to the very high standard needed to prove defamation under U.S. law.

Metropolitan King County Councilmember Jane Hague’s 2007 re-election campaign made a false statement about a supporter of her opponent but didn’t defame him, a jury has determined.

A King County Superior Court jury decided Aug. 28 that Hague doesn’t owe damages to Bellevue electrician Paul Brecht because a flier mailed by her campaign didn’t meet the legal standard for defamation.

Although the flier erroneously said Brecht had “at least one assault conviction,” the jury determined Hague and her campaign consultants either didn’t know the statement was false or didn’t act with “reckless disregard” to whether it was true or false.

A judge ruled earlier that Brecht’s public support for County Council candidate Richard Pope made him a public figure in the case, requiring that he prove defamation under a higher standard than is required for other citizens.

“I would characterize it as an overwhelming victory for the defendants,” Hague attorney Scott Ellerby told the press, apparently celebrating his client’s right to use baseless lies to impugn the reputation of an opponent’s supporters. But, you know, that’s the way our defamation laws work. As Erica explains over at Publicola:

[A]lthough the jury did determine that Hague had defamed the supporter, Paul Brecht, it did not rule that she had made the false statements [in] actual malice or “reckless disregard” for the truth, and so did not require her to pay compensation. Brecht had to meet a higher-than-usual standard to prove defamation because he was determined to be a “public figure” for the purposes of the campaign—in part because, as a 2008 deposition makes clear, he frequently defended Pope in the comments on political web sites and was interviewed about the campaign on KING5 and KUOW.

Participating in comment threads makes one a public figure? That’s a high standard indeed. As it should be.

There is a healthcare reform rally scheduled for 6PM tonight at Westlake Park in downtown Seattle, and I urge everybody to take the time to visibly show your support. In addition to a list of speakers including Rep. Jim McDermott, I’m told there will also be a live band.

Word is that teabaggers are organizing an effort to disrupt the event, and plan to start showing up between 4PM and 4:30PM. It’s time to show them and the media that there are many more of us than there are of them, and that we refuse to give in to their tactics of intimidation. I plan to be there, camera in hand, just in case.

UPDATE:
Perhaps those more knowledgeable on the subject can correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe since Washington is an open carry state, and Mayor Nickels proposed gun ban has never gone into effect, it would be perfectly legal to proudly carry and display one’s firearms at today’s rally. And since this is the West, where gun ownership transcends the political spectrum, it would be awfully interesting (and even amusing) to see how the teabaggers might react when confronted with gun-toting liberals.

Just thinkin’ out loud….

Cue the world’s smallest violin, those crybabies at the Seattle Times are at it again, whining about Google making all the money off of their, um, meat:

When criticized for appropriating the work of others for its shelf, Google notes that Google News has only headlines and the first few lines of a story. To read the whole story, the reader has to click through to the newspaper, and then the traffic is the newspaper’s.

It sounds all so very fair. Google provides the bun and the newspaper provides the meat. But the result is that most of the money goes for the bun and not the meat. The bun people prosper and the meat people don’t.

First off, what a stupid metaphor, no doubt prompting many of us over the age of thirty to cry out “Where’s the beef?”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug75diEyiA0[/youtube]

But poor choice of metaphor aside, it’s time for the Times to come clean about what it is arguing for: a wholesale rewriting of our copyright laws, and what does and does not constitute “fair use.” Think about it… if Google can’t reprint a headline, a link and a brief excerpt without permission, then neither can I, and if that sort of basic linkage can be broken without the express written approval of corporate lawyers then we’ll have cut the threads that tie together what we now call the world wide web. It’s both a selfish and self-destructive proposal that shows a totally lack of understanding of what makes the Internet useful.

It also completely misses the obvious reality that Google drives to the Times hundreds of thousands of readers a month who have no interest whatsoever in Seattle news and opinion, and who would otherwise never even know the paper existed, let alone read one of its articles. You’d think a company that makes its money selling ads at exorbitant prices would understand how this business works. The Times doesn’t sell content; like Google, it sells eyeballs, and that’s what advertisers are paying for. In that sense, it’s Google that is delivering the beef, not the Times. Indeed rather than demand that Google pay them for the privilege of driving them traffic, the Times should be damn thankful that they’re not being charged for inclusion in Google News.

There was a time when, if you were a local merchant looking to reach local customers, you had little choice but to pay the Times the asking price for that privilege, and the Blethen family grew fat off their near monopoly. But the Times delivered as promised, and if the merchant couldn’t figure out how to monetize these eyeballs and profit from their ads, well, that was their problem, not the Times’.

And that is the situation in which the Times finds itself today, with the glaring exception that they pay nothing for the valuable service that Google provides. How valuable? Note that the Times admits that it could ask to have its pages excluded from Google News, but it doesn’t want to be “cut off.” And with good reason, for without the traffic that Google drives their way, the Times’ claimed 1.7 million readers a month would surely dwindle to a mere few hundred thousand, and that would diminish the Times’ ability to deliver a valuable service to their real customers… their advertisers.

They’re all heart, I tell you. The Daily Astorian reports on Brian Baird’s town forum in Ilwaco, and state GOP executive board member Nansen Malin reveals what Republicans actually think:

“We want everyone to have quality healthcare, “Malin said, “But I am against universal health care.”

But how can everyone have quality health care if everyone doesn’t have…oh never mind.

Personally, I want everyone to have Twitter, but I am against universal Twittering.

– Radley Balko discusses the lawsuits against Seattle-area police agencies by Somali immigrants who were targeted in an effort to crack down on the use of khat, a mild plant-based stimulant popular in East Africa and the Middle East. Charles Mudede wrote about the war on khat back in 2007.

– The Spokesman-Review writes about the legal troubles that two medical marijuana providers from the Spokane area are facing. These two men are openly defying the one-patient-per-provider statute of the medical marijuana law, but this restriction can make it very difficult for new patients to obtain marijuana (as Dale Rogers put it at the patient Hempfest panel, if you’re 70 and you’re diagnosed with cancer, you don’t have time to learn how to be a gardener). And not everyone can find someone willing and able to grow for them. People who are told by their doctors that marijuana might be beneficial still have to resort to the black market – especially when the people who are willing and able to provide for multiple patients are arrested.

Despite the arrests in Spokane, a group in Richland is requesting the ability to open up a dispensary, but were told by the City Attorney to take it to the Legislature, which failed miserably in its attempt to improve the law in 2008.

– Gene Johnson from the AP writes about the world of helicopter smuggling along the Washington-British Columbia border.

– John H. Richardson from Esquire talks to a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition and outlines the argument for legalizing drugs from the standpoint of saving lives and keeping communities safe. Predictably, Mark Kleiman takes the bait and makes a fool of himself. Pete Guither hammers him pretty good here, but Kleiman responds with an update where he writes:

My objection is to the claim that there’s a hideous monster out there called “prohibition,” and that the main drug policy task is to slay that monster with the magic sword of “taxation and regulation.” That claim is just as stupid as the drug-warrior claim that there’s a hideous monster out there called “drugs” and that the main drug-policy task is to slay that monster with the magic sword of a “a drug-free society.”

First of all, both “prohibition” and “drug abuse” are “hideous monsters”. Prohibition is such because it takes a commodity that has significant demand from both responsible adults and people with addictions and hands it to criminals who have significant income with which to fight over their share of the marketplace. Drug abuse is a “hideous monster” because human beings are flawed creatures who often make mistakes and end up without the control to help themselves overcome an addiction. Both are things that we need to deal with as problems in our society, but the important difference is that one of the two is a basic human tendency that we can’t stop while the other is a creation of government that we most certainly can stop.

Second, one only needs to look at the example of alcohol prohibition to see where the “magic sword of taxation and regulation” has slayed the monster of prohibition. No one is arguing that people will never die from overdoses or from driving while intoxicated if we end prohibitions on other recreational drugs. What’s being argued is that the collateral damage of the cat and mouse games we play with the criminal enterprises who distribute and sell them (our massive murder rates and our unsustainable and self-perpetuating prison overcrowding problems) far outweigh mild upticks in drug addiction rates. And there’s absolutely no clear evidence that drug addiction rates would even go up, especially if you enact smart regulations.

Yes, alcohol kills many, many people every year – from drunk driving accidents to liver diseases – but liquor distributors don’t get shot by the police or by competing liquor distributors, and law enforcement officers don’t get shot while raiding speakeasies and backwoods stills. This is because of the magic sword of “taxation and regulation”.

And finally, the latter part of the analogy doesn’t even make sense. “Taxation and regulation” is a means for achieving an end, while “a drug-free society” is an end with no realistic means for achieving it. Mark can keep pretending that the people who advocate for drug legalization collectively envision some spiritual nirvana that can only be achieved by legalizing drugs, but the reality is that the people who advocate for legalizing the use and regulating the distribution of currently illegal drugs – whether they be law enforcers like the folks in LEAP or computer geeks like me – do so because it appears to be the most progressive, most cost-effective, and most humane solution to the problem of drug abuse in our society. All of us recognize that even when you do it, people will still have drug problems and people will still die of drug overdoses. But as we’ve already seen in places that have taken incremental steps toward legalization – especially in places that have stopped treating heroin addicts as criminals – we tend to see fewer deaths from overdoses, not more. And the collateral damage from people who decide to buck the regulations tends to be negligible, and don’t usually end with people being shot.

At this point, I don’t know if anyone still considers Kleiman an authoritative source on this subject. I’d be curious to know how the panel he was on at Netroots Nation ended up, but it’s just sad to see him repeatedly breaking out this obnoxious strawman in order to belittle those who have come to a very reasoned and very rational conclusion that prohibition is an ineffective government solution for drugs that have an established level of popular demand.