Archives for January 2010

Scott Horton reveals that the reported suicides of three Guantanamo detainees in June 2006 weren’t suicides at all:

This is the official story, adopted by NCIS and Guantánamo command and reiterated by the Justice Department in formal pleadings, by the Defense Department in briefings and press releases, and by the State Department. Now four members of the Military Intelligence unit assigned to guard Camp Delta, including a decorated non-commissioned Army officer who was on duty as sergeant of the guard the night of June 9–10, have furnished an account dramatically at odds with the NCIS report—a report for which they were neither interviewed nor approached.

All four soldiers say they were ordered by their commanding officer not to speak out, and all four soldiers provide evidence that authorities initiated a cover-up within hours of the prisoners’ deaths. Army Staff Sergeant Joseph Hickman and men under his supervision have disclosed evidence in interviews with Harper’s Magazine that strongly suggests that the three prisoners who died on June 9 had been transported to another location prior to their deaths. The guards’ accounts also reveal the existence of a previously unreported black site at Guantánamo where the deaths, or at least the events that led directly to the deaths, most likely occurred.

This is a giant story by any measure, but not a single major American newspaper has yet to print their own report on it. We often argue about media bias being liberal or conservative, but the bias in our traditional media is that they’re too chickenshit to take on powerful institutions.

UPDATE: It looks like it was covered on Countdown on MSNBC, but there’s still nothing on the MSNBC front page about this.

It’s Tuesday! And an interesting Tuesday at that. Please join us tonight for some election returns under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. We meet at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning about 8:00 pm. Or stop by earlier and join me for dinner.

Not in Seattle? There is a good chance you live near one of the 341 other chapters of Drinking Liberally.

One of my favorite perks of being a progressive blogger is my annual invitation to serve as a VIP judge at one of my favorite events, NARAL/Pro-Choice Washington’s annual Chocolate for Choice.

This year’s celebration of the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision will be held this Thursday, January 21, from 7PM to 9PM at the First Base Club at Safeco Field (take the pedestrian bridge from 5th floor of the garage across Edgar Martinez Drive), and features generous samplings from 40 of Seattle’s finest bakers, pastry chefs and chocolatiers. Admission starts at $40 ($45 at the door).

It’s also one of my daughter’s favorite events; no doubt as I’m filling out my scorecard, Katie will be busy filling up my carry-out box with chocolaty treats. Hope to see you all there.

Of course, I’m not plotting to blow up an airplane, despite the intentionally provocative headline above, and anybody who would believe for moment that such a headline constitutes a threat that should make me the subject of a terrorism investigation, let alone criminal proceedings is a complete and utter idiot.

And yet, that’s exactly what happened to Paul Chambers for venting his frustrations over airport delays with the following harmless tweet:

“Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high.”

And the thoughtful, calm response of British authorities?

He was held under the Terrorism Act on suspicion of conspiring to create a bomb hoax and questioned for seven hours.

Mr Chambers was eventually released on bail until February 11 pending further enquiries.

His Twitter post was deleted and his laptop, iPhone and home computer confiscated.

He also been banned from Robin Hood airport for life and suspended from his job while an internal investigation is launched.

Yeah, because we all know that real terrorists always publicly tweet their intentions before striking.

Now I know that some of you trolls will respond that a bomb threat is a bomb threat, and should be punished accordingly, regardless of whether this poor schmoe actually had the means or intention of carrying it out, but, well… get a life. It’s not even like this guy made the comment while sitting on an airplane, or standing in line at security, or even passing time in an airport bar. Context matters, and both the context and content of the tweet make it clear that there was no threat, implied or otherwise. (Is it actually possible to blow up an airport? And had he said the same thing, or worse, in a comedy sketch, would that have been equally prosecutable?) And yet in the name of security theater, Chambers now finds himself banned for life from his local airport, out of a job, and potentially facing huge legal bills if not an actual prison term.

Feel safer?

Reportedly, when Chambers tried to explain to investigators what Twitter is, and the context behind his tweet of exasperation, the officer merely responded “It is the world we live in.” A shameless cop-out if I ever heard one.

As the wise folks at Gizmodo opined:

Indeed, it’s the world we live in, giving up on all our civil liberties for a sense of false security, and allowing morons to run the world.

Well, if that’s the world we live in, I might just have to blow it sky high.

UPDATE:
The post has been up for four hours now, and I haven’t been arrested yet. I guess there are benefits to being an American.

UPDATE, UPDATE:
24 hours later, and the feds still haven’t busted down my door and hauled me away. What’s up with that?

I know it is cliche to say that with every crisis comes opportunity, but cliches have a habit of ringing true, as with our worst ever budget crisis facing Olympia, now in its second year of a three to four year run. Unfortunately, while Republicans are prepared to take advantage of this opportunity, Democrats apparently are not.

The all-cuts approach of last year’s budget, and the mostly cuts, plus more federal bailout, plus maybe a hundred million or so in odd revenue increases the governor is pushing in this year’s supplemental, is nothing if not a recipe for permanently shrinking the size and scope of state government. We’re not talking about merely squeezing out waste or cutting the fat or reprioritizing, although we’ll get a little of that too; we’re talking about redefining the role of government in Washington state… ensuring that not only does state government come out of this recession smaller as a percentage of the total economy, but that it will continue to shrink in such regards for perhaps decades to come.

This is, of course the Republican agenda, an agenda that they have been unable to win with at the polls, but which they will inevitably achieve nonetheless as long as our highly regressive and inadequate tax structure remains at status quo. And faced with an opportunity to at least move the debate forward, if not immediately enact substantial reforms, the Democrats have opted to cede the debate to the opposition, pretty much accepting their terms unchallenged.

Republicans and their surrogates in the legacy press (you know who I’m talking about, Seattle Times editorial board) have insisted that a down economy is the exact worst time to raise taxes, an assertion that many economists would challenge, but which our state Democratic leadership will not. So… um… when is the right time to raise taxes? When the economy is good? Does anybody really believe that there will be political support in the Legislature to raise taxes once state revenue starts to recover?

Of course not. But the problem is, barring another unsustainable economic bubble, state revenue will never recover to pre-recession levels compared to growth in demand for public services, and will certainly never grow as fast as the overall economy. Without substantial tax restructuring — without a shift away from our over-reliance on regressively taxing the sale of goods, a tax base that has been steadily shrinking for the past half century as a percentage of the total economy — our government can never grow fast enough to keep up with the economic, infrastructure and human investment and services our state needs to prosper in the 21st century.

Without substantial tax restructuring, our state government, the investments it makes and the services it provides, will be gradually dismantled, piece by piece by piece.

This was our inevitable future before the Great Recession, and it will be our inevitable future after. Which is a shame, because with their large majorities in both houses of the Legislature, and their control of the governor’s mansion, the Democratic leadership had an opportunity to use this crisis to guide us down the road toward the reforms necessary to at least sustain our current quality of life, if not enact a truly progressive agenda.

Unfortunately, it looks like we’ve had the wrong Democrats in leadership.

Is it even necessary to point out the irony of Ted Van Dyk remarking on other people having outlived the politics of their youth?

Kennedy’s death, Dodd’s withdrawal, and Sen. Robert Byrd’s perilous health have drawn attention to the fact that the Senate that existed when they arrived has dramatically changed.

An astute observation which of course demands immediate, anecdotal references to Hubert Humphrey, Everett Dirksen, Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater, as if to illustrate his point by example.

Um… could Van Dyk be any less self-aware?

Those leaders all knew that no major policy change would be lasting if passed on a one-party basis. This stands in contrast to the path taken over the past year by Obama and Democratic congressional leaders with stimulus, cap-and-trade, and health-care legislation. All were drafted and passed on a Democrats-only basis.

So, Van Dyk’s point is, what? That the Senate that existed at the time Humphrey reached across the aisle to Dirkson has “dramatically changed,” but that Obama and the Democratic leadership should behave as if it hasn’t?

What a load of crap. The Dems did reach across the aisle to “moderate” Republican Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snow, and even to more conservative Republicans like Sen. Chuck Grassley and others, but the Republican caucus, determined to see President Obama fail, refused to concede an inch. Yeah sure, I suppose we could have gotten Republican support for something called “health care reform,” that severely limited the ability of patients to sue for malpractice, while eliminating the ability of states to regulate insurance within their own borders, all the while continuing to allow insurance companies to deny you coverage for preexisting conditions, and cancel your coverage when you get sick. But what would have been the point of that? Short of total capitulation, the Republicans were intent on denying Obama a legislative victory.

That is the new Senate, that exists today, which is indeed very different from the Senate of Van Dyk’s youth, and as much as he may bemoan the decline of bipartisanship, that’s the reality that President Obama et al have to deal with. Times change, something even Ted Kennedy didn’t fully realize until it was too late, for despite his reputation as a liberal lion, he was also one of the Senate’s consummate practitioners of the sort of bipartisan collaboration that Van Dyk now mourns. Stuck in the mindset of the Senate of his youth, Kennedy ended up playing the role of Roosevelt at Yalta when it came to education reform, becoming little more than a Republican tool in garnering bipartisan support for No Child Left Behind, an act that promised to invest in and improve public education, but which ended up punishing those schools that needed the most help, while turning our classrooms into the public school equivalent of a Stanley Kaplan prep course.

I won’t argue with Van Dyk as to whether America might be better served by the more collegial Senate atmosphere of the 1960’s, though it was no doubt easier to reach across the aisle when both sides were populated almost entirely by white, Christian men. My dispute with Van Dyk is over his repeated accusations that the current partisan rancor is entirely the fault of the Democrats — a bizarre assertion after a decade during which Republicans have taken to vilifying their opponents as morons, traitors or worse — and his apparent conclusion that the necessary prescription to our nation’s political woes is unilateral Democratic disarmament.

Not only would the Republican minority laugh at us as we ceded to them the national agenda, voters would laugh at us too. Indeed, I’d argue that the Democrats’ greatest political weakness is the popular perception that Democrats are in fact weak. That’s not a trait that voters tend to seek in their national leaders… hence the two terms of that idiot cowboy, Bush.

But that is exactly the posture that Van Dyk, calling upon his personal experience with a Senate that no longer exists, so vociferously advocates.

Here’s a question… if Republican Scott Brown defeats Democrat Martha Coakley tomorrow in the special election to replace recently deceased Democratic icon Sen. Ted Kennedy, will some name-brand Republican in Washington state grow balls big enough to challenge Sen. Patty Murray here in Washington?

By this time two years ago, Mike! McGavick had already held like his twentieth campaign kickoff event. So it’s kinda amazing that, ten months before a mid-term election, Murray still has no serious challenger.

Back in the 2009 City Attorney’s race, in a response to a question about pursuing low-level marijuana cases, Tom Carr replied:

You’re apparently reading from the Stranger. You’re talking about relatively small numbers. We do between a hundred and 200 cases a year. Whether we prosecute depends on the report that’s in front of us; whether or not it’s a case. Most of our marijuana cases are cases that come in when we’ve got another crime, so someone gets in a bar fight and they have marijuana in their pocket. That’s pretty much all we do.

So now that Pete Holmes has taken over Carr’s office and announced that he’s no longer prosecuting people for marijuana possession, what’s he finding out?

As PubliCola reported (via Twitter) from our Town Hall event with City Attorney Pete Holmes last night, Holmes’ new criminal division director Craig Sims is in the process of reviewing all outstanding marijuana prosecutions pursued by former City Attorney Tom Carr.

…

Interestingly, although Carr insisted repeatedly that he was only prosecuting cases with associated crimes (e.g., resisting arrest with pot in your pocket), Mulady says most of the cases Sims has reviewed so far are “stand-alone marijuana cases”—the sort of cases the city attorney and police were explicitly instructed not to pursue after the passage of Initiative 75, which made marijuana possession the city’s lowest law-enforcement priority.

No kidding! So an overzealous law enforcement official with a penchant for nanny crusades was lying about what his office was doing? Who could’ve seen that coming?

In 2008 a group of “political reformers” ^* placed a successful measure on the November ballot to make King County government non-partisan. Fourteen months later that “reform” has failed its first three tests — filling two vacancies (Sims and Constantine) and a weird election for County Executive. Three pitches, three groundouts, inning over.

(* The non-partisan ballot measure was financed by the same special interests who backed Susan Hutchison’s Executive race.)

Choosing Leaders

Succession of office is an important test of our democracy. When a government official resigns or passes away, provisions are made for that position to be filled and for government to continue.

For partisan offices, state law assigns the political parties a role which has allowed vacancies to be filled in an orderly, timely, and predictable fashion. The Precinct Committee Officers (PCO’s) from the affected jurisdiction meet and choose three member of the party of the departed official, and forward that list to the County Council or County Commissioners, who pick one person.

That process took place thirteen years ago when the Democratic PCO’s met at the gym of Nathan Hale High School to designate a list of three Democrats to fill the last year of the term of then-County Executive Gary Locke, who was departing to be Governor. On that day, Ron Sims was chosen over the very able Greg Nickels to lead the County as the next Executive. On that day no one called for a “caretaker” or a “placeholder”. Sims served for ten months as the appointed Executive, then was elected to the post three times.

I was chosen the next month by the PCO’s to fill Sims’ seat on the County Council, just as Constantine was chosen to succeed Nickels in 2002 when he was elected Mayor. Sims, Pelz, and Constantine were chosen by the PCO’s, then rubber stamped by the County Council, and provided strong leadership for many years.

The PCO’s now play no role in filling King County vacancies. The County Council, freed from the shackles of the political parties, now makes the decision based on in-house politics and personalities. Rather than choosing strong leaders to replace Sims and Constantine, the County Council twice appointed Lois – Lois Common Denominator. Both Kurt Triplett and Jan Drago (fine public servants in their previous roles) effectively ran saying they would not provide leadership for the County in future years. The test of succession of office failed as a “caretaker” was inserted.

[Read more…]

Last week’s contest was won by Aneurin. It was San Jose, CA.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!

Ezekiel 23:19-20
Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.

Discuss.

Video of the hearing can be seen here.

The Wall Street Journal discussed the hearings here. The Seattle PI covered it here.

Coverage of marijuana in the traditional media has certainly improved in the past few years (with some exceptions, of course). Reporters recognize that the massive chorus of voices demanding that we change our drug laws is far more than just people who want to get high. Groups like Law Enforcement Against Prohibition have driven home this point about as well as anyone.

That said, I wanted to make a few comments about the columns linked above. Starting in the WSJ:

Still, there is deep opposition to legalizing marijuana in Washington state from law-enforcement groups and chemical-dependency organizations, many of which argue it would make the drug even more accessible to teenagers than it is currently. Also many argue that marijuana is a “gateway drug,” meaning it will lead those using it to moveon to other drugs.

“What message does legalizing marijuana send to the youth of Washington?” asked Riley Harrison, a ninth-grade student, before a packed committee hearing this week in Olympia. “That you’re willing to gamble our future for a little tax revenue?”

The central claim being made by these groups is that legalization would make marijuana more accessible to teenagers than it is currently. Not surprisingly, they found a student who was willing to miss a day of school to help them reinforce that notion. Yet the Journal fails to point out that this claim makes no sense. The system we have now makes marijuana extremely accessible to teenagers. Moving marijuana sales out of schools and into the state’s liquor stores, where an individual will have to produce ID in order to buy it, will make it much less accessible to teenagers than it is currently.

The PI also lets a very similar claim stand unchallenged:

Opponents said any loosening up of the laws would be harmful to children.

“If you believe that it is OK for kids in school to use marijuana and be high, then you should pass either one or both of these,” said Don Pierce, executive director of the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs.

This is complete nonsense, but Rachel La Corte at the AP fails to point that out, or to present the other side. One of the primary reasons for passing the legalization bill is precisely because it’s not OK for kids in school to use marijuana and be high, and therefore we should take the distribution out of the schools and move it to a place where people under 21 can be prevented from buying it. The effectiveness of this approach can be verified by looking at the Netherlands, where tolerating marijuana distribution to adults in coffeeshops has led to reductions in teen use rates over the past few decades, and fewer adult marijuana users than even the rest of Europe, which itself has fewer marijuana users (by percentage) than the United States.

One can argue that La Corte is just presenting both sides of an argument, but it’s certainly incumbent upon a reporter to point out when one side’s arguments don’t make any sense. Even worse, both the Wall Street Journal and the PI fail to point out that there’s even a challenge to this argument from the other side, let alone that the argument itself has no basis in reality. I don’t think La Corte – or Nick Wingfield and Justin Scheck in the Journal – do this maliciously, I just think that these debates are new and reporters who cover a large number of different topics aren’t as familiar with drug law reform as they should be. But as long as that’s the case, propagandists like Don Pierce will continue to get away with making ridiculous statements that go unchallenged.

From the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

Dear Pat Robertson,

I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I’m all over that action. But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I’m no welcher. The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished. Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth — glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake. Haven’t you seen “Crossroads”? Or “Damn Yankees”? If I had a thing going with Haiti, there’d be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox — that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it — I’m just saying: Not how I roll. You’re doing great work, Pat, and I don’t want to clip your wings — just, come on, you’re making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep blaming God. That’s working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.

Best, Satan

It’s always good to set the record straight.

The headline says, “President Obama needs to focus on jobs,” but the 624 words of this latest Seattle Times editorial can be summed up in this single paragraph:

The time, energy and political capital Obama invested in creation of a national health plan would have been better spent on promoting job creation and helping U.S. employers compete internationally.

What’s that, the fourth time in as many weeks the Times has advocated scuttling health care reform, each time using jobs as the main rationale?

And how exactly would Obama create more jobs? Here’s an idea: raise taxes on the rich and spend the money on a massive investment in public infrastructure, like building rail and green energy production, or maybe something less controversial like making a dent in the trillion dollars worth of deferred maintenance and investment in our aging drinking water and sewage treatment infrastructure?

Nah… that would require tax increases, and we all know how the Times feels about that.

So come on, Team Blethen… let’s hear some suggestions of your own on how a president might create jobs.

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