Archives for December 2009

I guess as a Republican member of our “nonpartisan” King County Council, Jane Hague has an obligation to help out the King County Republican Party. But considering her own DUI problems, you gotta wonder if she was drunk at the time she contributed the following item to the KCGOP’s recent 2009 Liberty Dinner Auction:

“You can enjoy these tonight!”…? I mean, come on… I know Republicans tend to lack any sense of irony, but that’s just a setup in search of a punch line.

The estate tax is in the news again, and (surprise!) the Seattle Times is editorializing against it:

The supporters of this tax, which we call the death tax, like to talk about rich bankers, entertainers and other upper crustaceans who die with a moraine of stocks, bonds, cash and title deeds to ten-bathroom palaces. If these were the only payers of this tax, we might heartily support it.

The opponents of this tax, who we call the Blethen family, apparently would have no problem applying this tax to the estates of bankers and entertainers — you know, folks who supposedly earned their fortunes rather than inheriting it through multiple generations — they just don’t want to pay it themselves. So much for ideological consistency let alone the moral high ground. (Oh, and the next time an editorialist accuses somebody like me of advocating class warfare, I’ll be sure to remember that quote.)

The death-tax bill now goes to the Senate. We implore our senators to lighten the load of it, or to pass a one-year extension and save this issue until after the 2010 elections.

Yes, the issue should be put aside until after Republicans have a chance to gain some seats in 2010, and unless Sen. Patty Murray supports this self-serving proposal, the Times will no doubt endorse her opponent, no matter how unqualified.

Personally, if I were Frank, I’d be wary of any delays. Under current law the estate tax temporarily falls to zero in 2010, before rising to 55% in 2011. Assuming the family business is actually worth something (and 49.5% stakeholder McClatchy seems to think it isn’t,) the fifth generation heirs might just off the family patriarch in order to save a bundle on their tax bills.

And if they did, they’d have come by their mercenary ways honestly.

Last week’s contest was a tough one, but it was eventually won by Cascadian. The correct location was in Manchester, England.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!

Last week, Jeremy Scahill had a huge story detailing the secret operations being conducted in Pakistan by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and the private military outfit formerly known as Blackwater. The operations are primarily assassinations and kidnappings (“snatch and grabs”) of high-value targets. The agreement with Pakistan to allow for this to go on was allegedly done with the Pakistani government reserving the right to deny that they made any type of agreement at all.

Not surprisingly, this story is making things difficult for the Pakistani government. Pakistan’s interior minister has promised to resign if it’s true that Blackwater is operating there. Similar to Mexico, allowing for American troops to operate within the country is a major line that the public is reluctant to see crossed. Hillary Clinton got a taste of this when she last visited there.

Much of the illogic of what we’re doing in Pakistan echoes past failures in waging the drug war. In that “war”, we’ve tended to believe that we can just knock off a bunch of high-value targets and we win. This is how the drug war has been fought overseas for decades. We’ve even tolerated secret operations where American forces have become part of the drug trade in order to capture the head honcho, only to see the whole damn trade re-organize under a new head honcho. The lesson has been that you can’t eliminate the trade unless you deal with the underlying demand that drives the trade in the first place.

When it comes to terrorism, that underlying demand comes from anti-American sentiment. And in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, the enemies we’re fighting benefit from both that and drugs. The idea that we can defeat them by doing things that will increase anti-American sentiment (while doing nothing about the underlying demand for drugs) is dangerously foolish. Any time we take out a high-value target in a way that increases the level of radicalism among the Pakistanis, these organizations will simply re-organize under a new leader and continue the war. But that’s exactly what we’re doing, and it’s exactly what a number of people blindly accept as the ideal foreign policy move.

That’s why so many of these idiots are upset that Obama didn’t talk about “winning” or using the word “victory” in his speech at West Point. Obama, for his faults in this escalation, at least understands that Afghanistan is not a video game that you win after killing all the bad guys. There’s no such thing as “victory” in an occupation, just a long hard slog to improve stability. You “win” by convincing the people of that nation that your presence there is beneficial for them, or that your presence is temporary and that they will soon be autonomous again.

What becomes difficult for politicians in wars like this is that they genuinely fear being seen in conflict with those on the front lines in this war, regardless of its futility. The Obama Administration is no different, and their unwillingness to be seen as rejecting what the military wants is going to override everything else. That’s leading them down a dangerous path, both in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and his intent to continue this conflict without increasing anti-American sentiment will be a significant challenge. And nothing can undermine that challenge more than believing that we can fight it under the cover of darkness. Those days are over.

Over at Publicola, Erica documents Rep. Dave Reichert’s many public statements in opposition to President Obama’s economic stimulus package, which, drawing upon his vast expertise as an economist sheriff, Reichert has repeatedly predicted would fail at its primary goal: creating jobs.

Oops.

This week, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released a report estimating that the stimulus package had created between 600,000 and 1.6 million new jobs, and raised the US gross domestic product by 1.2 to 3.2 percentage points above what would have been without the program.

Moreover, in the New York Times last month, several prominent economists argued that the stimulus had helped the economy, by creating jobs and hastening the end of the recession.

If only Sheriff Dave had the brains to match his brawn.

Two weeks ago, I posted about the directive given by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops that requires hospitals and hospices to override the end-of-life wishes of patients in certain circumstances.

In the comments, Joel Connelly crawled up my ass, telling me that I needed to contact the hospitals and hospices to find out if they’ll really follow the directive. I just sent off an email to every Catholic hospital and hospice in the state I could find a contact email for to see if any of them are planning to ignore it.

Dr. Rachel Maddow with an academic treatise on the origins of “teabaggers”:

(There are some fifty more clips from the past week in politics at Hominid Views.)

It seems that the “Congressman from the Lars Larson show” is being noticed by others, this time for his vote against extending the estate tax.

Let’s review: Heath Shuler, Congress-critter from deepest North Carolina, Yea. Congressman “Lieberman of Vancouver,” Nay. I feel a surge of deeply alienated base coming on.

Props to Jack Bogdanski of Portland, Oregon, who is more clever than I and came up with the satirical terms regarding Rep. Brian Baird, D- Wash.

I don’t have any special insight into what happened to Baird, feel free to make up your own theory involving Washington, D.C., power, hubris, narcissism or whatever. Maybe he just needs to make a change, it happens to the best of folks.

Yes, I have defended Baird quite frequently in the past. You can be assured that will not happen again, and I apologize for being so slow to admit what has been a painfully obvious and disheartening abandonment of both the party and the district by Baird.

As for a Democratic challenger to explore the vast political space now emerging to the left of Baird, a space I believe is inhabited by a majority of his constituents, in my experience truly outstanding insurgent candidates tend to be self-motivating and emerge much to the surprise of party regulars. In short, people can try to recruit candidates, but sometimes candidates need to emerge.

They may be moms in tennis shoes, they may be professors, they may be business folks or labor activists, but somewhere out there could be the person who will give the people of the 3rd District a representative who acts with their interests in mind rather than siding consistently with the ruling kleptocracy.

Amanda Knox found guilty; sentenced to 26 years. Talk amongst yourselves.

Last year, when university presidents lobbied for, the legislature passed, and the governor signed a 30% increase in college tuition over two years, promises were made that this would help keep higher education more affordable, not less. How? By increasing the total amount of financial aid dollars available, and by raising the income levels under which families qualify for financial aid, those who could afford to pay more would pay more, while those who couldn’t would pay less.

That is the high-tuition/high-financial aid model as practiced successfully by many private and some public universities, and it’s a model that can work… as long as public officials keep their promises.

One year later, with the governor and legislature looking to fill an additional $2.6 billion hole in the last year of our current two-year state budget, there’s talk that the state could eliminate financial aid altogether, saving $272 million in the process. But even a partial reduction in financial aid would be both a breach of public trust, and a disastrous public policy.

I understand the temptation to paint a worse case scenario as the governor and other Democratic leaders prepare to rally the troops in favor of a revenue package, but college financial aid must be explicitly taken off the table now, before any further damage is done. Cutting financial aid would surely interrupt the education of thousands of Washington students, but the mere talk of it is disruptive in itself, as many needy students will put off their college plans rather than face such financial uncertainty. Such talk also poisons the well, undermining faith in our elected officials to do right by our state’s young people, and ultimately making it even more difficult to enact further higher education funding reforms.

Promises were made, and they must be kept; our higher education system is simply too important to the welfare and prosperity of our state to do otherwise.

The Seattle P-I’s Chris Grygiel tells it like it is:

How did Dow Constantine beat Susan Hutchison so handily in last month’s King County executive’s race? As a Seattle Times map shows, he won Seattle handily and got more votes in the Eastside suburbs. Constantine’s strong showing in what, until recently, had been GOP territory bodes ill for the Republican Party heading into the 2010 legislative elections.

The emphasis is mine, and it’s not because I believe the GOP won’t pick up any seats in 2010 (I think they likely will), but because Grygiel’s analysis clearly exposes the lie that is nonpartisan elections.

Had Hutchison won, the conventional wisdom would have been that this would have bode ill for Democrats. So how exactly does the outcome of a supposedly nonpartisan race bode anything at all for one party or another? Of course, it was nonpartisan in name only.

I understand why Republicans would want to promote this particular fiction, and I don’t blame them for trying. But civic leaders who endorsed and supported the charter amendment (you know who I’m talking about, Muni League), and opinion leaders who attempted to perpetrate this lie after the fact (you know who I’m talking about, Seattle Times editorial board) should really be embarrassed by their efforts to deceive themselves and others.

Fortunately, the voters saw through this particular charade.

Republicans rooting for the failure of the Obama administration will be disappointed by today’s unexpected jobs report that showed unemployment falling from 10.2% to 10%, while the U.S. economy lost only 11,000 jobs in November.

Not a stellar day for Mark Griswold.

Update [Darryl]: From the Bureau of Labor Statistics report comes this graph (with colors modified to reflect political party):

Notice the November number is practically zero compared to numbers from the past 22 months. The graph highlights the differences under Republican economic policies compared to Democratic economic policies.

It also substantiates the labels: “The Bush Recession” and “The Obama Recovery.”

And of course, the best way to prove you are not a “sleazeball” is to try to get your son’s teacher fired for allegedly calling you one:

Hugh “Skip” McGee, one of Wall Street’s best-paid bankers, has launched an extraordinary attack on staff at his son’s exclusive private school after a teacher allegedly claimed that all investment bankers are dishonest “sleazeballs”.

Mr Mcgee, who is Barclays Capital’s global head of investment banking, penned a rambling five-page letter to the board of trustees of Houston’s Kinkaid School, asking that the teacher and two other staff members be fired.

In the letter, Mr McGee, who is alleged to have an eight-figure salary, claims that history teacher Leslie Lovett has a “leftist invective” which “is neither accurate nor part of the approved curriculum”.

The banker, who was global head of investment banking at Lehman Brothers until its collapse last year, goes on to claim that the teacher told his son John Edward’s 11th-grade class “that somehow both Lehman and Barclays made a bunch of money on the Lehman bankruptcy, and that all investment bankers were ‘sleazeballs’ and dishonest”.

Okay, maybe it was wrong to call him a sleazeball. Asshole might have been the more appropriate epithet.

Here is the photo the media wants you to know about, but not see. I’ve cropped out just a small section, but click on the image above to view the whole thing. Or not. It’s your choice.

We’ve all seen a lot of dead bodies on TV and on film, some of them even real dead bodies, and as far as these kind of images go, this one isn’t particularly brutal or disturbing. I’m not saying it isn’t disturbing, just no more disturbing than any number of other images with which we’re bombarded on a daily basis.

I can understand not plastering this image on a newspaper front page or broadcasting it on the evening news, but once you’re talking about it, what’s the purpose of withholding a link? Respect for the deceased? Respect for the family that tried to help him escape capture?