Archives for December 2009

Now that the race for King County Executive is long over, it’s interesting to compare this:

[Susan] Hutchison said she solved a significant budget shortfall as chairwoman of the Seattle Symphony board of directors. “I solve problems and I fix things,” she said, “and King County needs a fix.”

With this:

The Seattle Symphony, already beset by immense challenges, including a $4 million debt and vacancies in its two top positions, still has not reached a new contract agreement with its musicians union and could potentially face a musicians strike.

No  doubt the Symphony was already in a heap of hurt when Hutchison took over as board chair, but let’s be clear, she didn’t fix crap. Indeed, the Symphony’s fortunes only deteriorated further during her tumultuous tenure. So tumultuous, that when Leslie Jackson Chihuly took over the reins from Hutchison earlier this year, normally stoic board members erupted in a loud celebratory cheer at the transfer.

The Symphony ended its recent fiscal year running a $1.2 million deficit on a budget that Hutchison approved as chairwoman. In fact, they’ve only managed to keep the lights on by dipping into their endowment, already one of the smallest in the nation for a big city symphony. That’s what’s known as eating your seed corn.

Yet, “I solve problems and fix things,” Hutchison repeated throughout the campaign, pointing to her tenure at the Symphony, a claim that largely went unchallenged in the media. Indeed, the Seattle Times editorial board even lauded Hutchison’s budgetary prowess in attempting to explain its ridiculous endorsement of her in the executive’s race.

But now that the shit has finally hit the fan, I wonder if Hutchison will continue to run on her leadership of the Symphony should she choose to challenge Sen. Patty Murray in November? And if so, I wonder if our media will continue to quietly hum along?

Dick Cheney giving advice on how to fight terrorism is like Charlie Sheen giving advice on how to save your marriage.

Back in November, I posted the following:

Remember the big push a few years back after the Terri Schiavo mess to encourage people to have a living will for such situations? If you were one of the people who did that, make sure you avoid Catholic health care institutions as they’ve been ordered by the United States Council of Catholic Bishops to ignore people’s wishes and keep patients alive regardless of the circumstance.

When I posted this, I didn’t think it was too terribly daring a thing to post about (although I certainly could have been more specific about the relevant circumstances, which are fairly rare), but for Joel Connelly of the Seattle PI, it apparently struck a nerve, as he left this comment for me:

Would you please spare us your anti-Catholic bigotry? It was disgusting during the I-2000 [sic] campaign. It is despicable now.
A simple call to Providence administrators, or the boss up at St. Joseph Hospital in Bellingham, would have given you honest material with which to work. You could have asked about living wills — in which a person’s wishes get laid out — which are strongly encouraged.
You could have asked about the provision for hospice care, available to everyone regardless of ability to pay.
Or you could have delved into what they’d do in the case of a patient wishing to exercise his/her “right” to end life.
Instead, we get an ignorant screech.
Apparently, on Horsesass.org, one form of religious prejudice is not only acceptable but encouraged.

After reading this, I was genuinely worried that the folks at Compassion and Choices might have overstated their case and that maybe I was being a little too harsh in my post. So I tried to contact a number of local Catholic hospitals via email asking if Connelly was right and that they would refuse the directive that C&C was referencing, but I got nothing back. Then I contacted Connelly directly to see if he could point me to a facility who would “give me honest material with which to work”. Oddly, when I did this, Connelly sent me the name of a hospital administrator to contact, then started walking back his claims after I posted an update to HorsesAss.

By this point, though, I was already starting to become well aware that Connelly was full of shit. In fact, the hospital administrator whose name he gave me wasn’t the only name he passed along. He also sent me the name of a hospital administrator in Canada, despite the fact that this directive was from the United States Council of Catholic Bishops. Connelly apparently knew nothing about the updated directive or the legal and ethical issues involved and simply didn’t care. As far as I can tell, he just assumed that Compassion and Choices was full of it because he doesn’t like them. And he was confident enough about this blind assertion to call me a bigot over it.

Barbara Coombs Lee from Compassion and Choices, however, does know what she’s talking about and does understand the issues involved here. Her latest post details more of the legal and ethical issues behind this decree and points to this article, which quotes from someone a bit more qualified than Connelly:

Alan Meisel, founder and director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Bioethics and Health Law, wonders if Catholic hospitals could be compelled by law to respect patients’ advance directives, regardless of the Church’s moral stance. He says it is not clear whether the legally binding power of an advance directive would outweigh the Church’s right to administer medicine in accordance with its beliefs.

…

“[If] the hospital seeks to impose a treatment on a patient which that person does not want, to impose that treatment is battery,” he says,but adds a caveat: “One could say since you’ve admitted yourself to a Catholic hospital, that’s a form of consent.

“If I were a patient with a directive,” he continues, “I would probably add to it that I didn’t want to be taken to a Catholic hospital.”

I’m sure Joel Connelly will get his typewriter out now and send Meisel a little note informing him that he needs to spare us all his anti-Catholic bigotry.

UPDATE: In somewhat related news, the Montana Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that legalizes death with dignity in that state.

Huh.

Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh remains hospitalized in Hawaii after experiencing chest pains similar to a heart attack.

Which I suppose means Limbaugh must have something similar to a heart. Who knew?

A few drug war items of note:

– Yesterday, KUOW’s The Conversation took on the topic of marijuana legalization. State Representative Roger Goodman was a guest, as well as State Senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles, Ethan Nadelmann from the Drug Policy Alliance, and Dave Rodriguez of the Northwest High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas office. As for Goodman’s bill to legalize marijuana in Washington state, Jamie Pederson has also signed on as a co-sponsor.

– Steve Elliott looks into how willing media outlets are to distort scientific studies in order to paint a picture that marijuana is far more dangerous than it really is.

– I finished up indexing the second document dump from the Department of Corrections regarding their attempts to nullify the medical marijuana law for people on probation. I put together a thorough timeline from the roughly 1300 pages of released documents of what was being discussed and acted on within the DOC with regards to medical marijuana patients under their supervision and posted it here. I’ll likely be writing more about this again later, but this controversial court decision out of California really emphasizes how heated a battle this has become throughout every state where medical marijuana is now legal, and how frustrated many people within the criminal justice system are becoming when dealing with this shift away from the “tough on drugs” mentality. It’s forcing them to rethink the role they play in keeping us safe and to rethink the relationship between drugs and crime, which we’ve been getting wrong for as long as I’ve been alive.

– The Wall Street Journal writes about how ending prohibition is the only way to stop the violence in Mexico.