Archives for February 2010

Dear Airline Industry,

I’m writing this missive from dreary Seattle rather than sunny South Florida, and you only have yourselves to blame.

For years now, Presidents Day weekend has been the time of year I’ve taken my daughter to visit her grandma and pop-pop near West Palm Beach, a welcome respite from the height of our rainy season, and conveniently coordinated with her school’s mid-winter break. But after months of hesitation on your various reservation websites, I just couldn’t pull the trigger.

Part of the problem is that the Mercer Island district where my daughter now attends middle school only offers a four-day weekend off, but that didn’t stop us the last two years. Combine a red-eye with perhaps an extra day off school, and we could enjoy at least four full days in the sun.

The bigger problem is, the last couple years I’ve come home more in need of a vacation than when I left.

Flying has grown increasingly miserable over the past decade, and to be honest, it just isn’t worth it anymore. You airlines expect me to show up at the gate on time, or else forfeit the value of my ticket, but if your airplane isn’t at the gate to greet me, well, fuck me. Or if we do take off some time that day, but you fail to get me to my connecting flight, fuck me again. Perhaps, you tell me, you’ll get me out on a later flight, or the next day, or the day after that, but in the meanwhile I’m left to fend for myself in Charlotte or Atlanta or Dallas or Chicago or Phoenix or some godforsaken hub airport like that. Snow in Boston, you tell me, means delays in Houston, so you don’t owe me a thing but the promise to get me home sometime, you know, if a seat is available.

And while delays like this have always been a part of air travel, your increasingly hostile attitude has not. There once was a time when you treated us like valued customers, but over time we’ve just become those annoying, fragile things you store above the cargo hold. And as your customer service has declined you’ve increasingly resorted to pulling the post-9/11 security card to keep disgruntled passengers in line.

I know. You’ve done it to me. And fuck if I’m going to pay you for the public humiliation.

So this is probably the third or fourth flight I’ve elected not to take over the past couple years, not because your service isn’t inexpensive, but because it’s cheap. Based on personal experience, I just don’t trust you to get me and my luggage to my destination on time, safely, and in a reasonable amount of comfort. And I simply don’t trust your employees to treat me as anything more than just another potential terrorist.

$400 to fly roundtrip from Seattle to Florida is a good deal, but it’s still $400, and so I kinda expect the people I’m forking it over to not to consistently treat me like shit. You don’t even pretend to care about my business anymore, and that makes me feel like a chump every time I give to you.

So in conclusion, fuck you. Fuck your crappy service, your hostile demeanor and your poorly maintained planes. Fuck paying $7 extra for a pillow, $20 to reserve two seats next to each other and $25 for the privilege of having my valuables stolen out of my checked luggage (even sun screen for chrisakes… they’ve stolen fucking sunscreen). And fuck an industry whose standards have fallen so low that passengers now view themselves lucky to end their flight standing hip dip in water on the wing of a plane in the middle of the Hudson River.

Happy Presidents Day,

Goldy

Well, I suppose that’s one way to deal with education funding at a time of record state budget deficits:

In an effort to bridge a $700 million budget shortfall, Republican state Sen. Chris Buttars has put forth a plan to eliminate 12th grade in high school…

Of course, that’s just one Republican state legislator, and yeah, it’s Utah we’re talking about, so I guess it wouldn’t be fair to brand all Republicans with the same crazy stick, but when your party is philosophically opposed to raising taxes under any circumstances, this is the type of, um, creative proposals you’re gonna come up with.

Republican priorities at work.

Last week, I wrote about the story of Kathy Parkins. Parkins was a 51-year-old medical marijuana patient from Washington who was arrested in late 2007 after being pulled over in Arizona with a small amount of marijuana. She was allowed to serve out her probation in Seattle, but ran into some corruption and incompetence within the Washington Department of Corruptions, including being illegally detained and kept in jail for a week in May 2008 without any charges. Following that, she spent over a year trying to get a hold of a document that showed that a corrections officer falsified information in an attempt to have her sent back to Arizona. The document was finally released in the most recent public disclosure request and contained several fabrications – things that clearly could not have been accidental.

I’d also mentioned that Carla Cole, Parkins’ roommate at the time of the arrest, had been trying to get an explanation from the DOC. In February 2009, DOC Head Eldon Vail sent Cole a reply claiming that the officers didn’t inaccurately fill out paperwork or fabricate anything. At the time, the DOC was still refusing to let Parkins actually see the report in question, an Interstate Compact form that allowed for her to serve out her probation here. So after the report was revealed in the public disclosure request – proving that, in fact, Officer Jeremy Praven made several things up – she sent off another letter to Vail asking for an explanation.

In a letter dated last Wednesday, February 10, the DOC once again tried to claim that there’s nothing to see here, although the letter did not come directly from Vail. It was from Regional Administrator Jim Harms:

I have been asked to respond to your letter dated January 24, 2010 addressed to Secretary Eldon Vail. You wrote about information contained in a public disclosure request response concerning the Washington State Department of Corrections and medical marijuana, and the circumstances of the arrest of your former tenant, Kathleen Merry in May 2008.

We take the concerns of you, and in fact, all citizens very seriously and carefully review all complaints. As Secretary Vail indicated in his February 20, 2009 letter to you, your allegations of misconduct were investigated. Both the Unit Supervisor and the Field Administrator followed up with identified staff.

I apologize for any confusion or frustration this incident caused you, but no indications of misconduct, intended inaccuracies or fabrications have been found in this case.

Once again, you can see the document in question in this PDF file of released documents, pages 20 to 22. As I documented last week, within that report, Praven makes a number of completely fictional claims:

– That Parkins has no family ties to Washington state and only came here because of the medical marijuana laws. In fact, Parkins has lived in Washington state nearly her entire life, only recently deciding to move to California. Her children and grandchild live here, along with 9 aunts and uncles.

– That Cole belongs to an organization called the ‘Marijuana’s Growers Association of Washington’. No such organization has ever existed.

– That Parkins was not authorized to use medical marijuana in Washington state. Parkins had received an updated authorization that morning. She claims that when she offered to show it to Officer Praven, he wasn’t interested in seeing it.

There simply isn’t any ambiguity about this. Anyone with rudimentary critical thinking skills can recognize that these lies showed up in Praven’s report as an attempt to have Parkins sent back to Arizona. Coupled with the fact that Praven illegally detained Parkins before filling out this document – and then left her in jail for a week without any information about why she was being held – there’s no justification at all for claiming that no misconduct occurred. And it’s a clear lie that no intended inaccuracies or fabrications ended up in Parkins’ paperwork.

Last week’s contest was won by Dave Gibney. It was Karlstrup Strand, Denmark.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!

The signature gathering for I-1068, the Marijuana Reform Act, has begun. If you’re on Facebook, Sensible Washington has a page here.

UDPATE: Here are some upcoming kickoff meetings:

Tacoma Meeting: February 16th – 6pm-8pm – Anna Lemon Wheelock Library (3722 North 26th Street)
Seattle Meeting: February 17th – 6:30pm – 7:45pm – Ballard Library (5614 22nd Ave. N.W.)

– A Washington State-Vancouver student is filing an initiative to lower the drinking age to 19.

– Barbara Coombs Lee describes several scenarios where advance directives could potentially be ignored at Catholic hospitals.

– Not too many people showed up to Mike McGinn’s town hall for selecting a new police chief. And there’s two more left.

– The U.S. Department of Transportation has responded to the study showing that state cell phone bans don’t work to reduce accidents with the same logical fallacy that perpetuates the drug war as well:

Unfortunately, a study released by the Highway Loss Data Institute casts doubt on the reality of this epidemic. Not explaining likely reasons for the surprising data encourages people to wrongly conclude that talking on cell phones while driving is not dangerous!

If you question the ban, you’re encouraging the behavior. That’s bullshit, and it’s the same bullshit you hear from drug warriors every time a study shows that drug prohibitions don’t reduce drug consumption. Cell phone bans don’t work because they only discourage the behavior among people who aren’t going to cause accidents in the first place (which is also similar to the dynamics of the drug war).

– Blackwater: not exactly the best face we’ve ever shown to the world.

– I haven’t seen Avatar yet, but this is a pretty interesting indication of the global reach of our pop culture.

Mark 10:25
“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

Luke 12:48
“From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.”

Karl Marx
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

Discuss.

Colorado DEA agent and legendary crazyperson Jeff Sweetin is at it again, ignoring the Obama Administration’s promises not to interfere with state medical marijuana laws. Sweetin is already well-known for his drug war extremism, once saying “our job is to protect democracy, not to practice it”. Hopefully, we can “hope and change” this asshole to the unemployment line where he belongs.

UPDATE: Jeralyn Merritt has more about this case.

In America, we’ve come to accept these sorta things as the cost of living in a free society where the Supreme Court gives more weight to the vague caveats of the Second Amendment than it does to the unqualified imperatives of the First, so the only thing really surprising about yesterday’s tragic shootings at the University of Alabama was the identity of the shooter: a woman.

Not some disaffected teenage boy looking to kill himself, and take a few classmates with him, or some crazed homophobe with a grudge against Unitarians. Not a Timothy McVeigh or a Seung-Hui Cho or a Nidal Malik Hassan or a gangbanger, a skinhead, a terrorist or something like that. You know, not a man.

I’m no criminologist, but from anecdotal experience, I’m guessing that Prof. Amy Bishop just doesn’t fit the profile.

Yet, she had a loaded gun. And in America, that’s all you really need to make a mark on the world.

(And there are fifty-five more clips from the past week in politics over at Hominid Views.)

It’s not like we don’t have any QFCs, Walgreens, 7-11’s or McDonalds in our neck of the woods, storefronts where Redbox co-locates its dollar-a-day DVD rental vending machines. It’s just that our QFCs, Walgreens, 7-11’s and McDonalds don’t have any Redboxes.

Hmm.

The other day I offered a free beer to the first Seattle elected official to enthusiastically come out in support of pitching a proposal to participate in Google’s experimental fiber network. Well, Mayor Mike McGinn was the first to answer the call.

Seattle will actively seek to partner with Google in creation of a fiber network here. The city itself has many assets to bring to the partnership, including an extensive existing fiber network of over 500 miles connecting every school, college and major government building in the city. In Seattle, 88% of residents have home computers, 84% have Internet access and 74% already have Internet access faster than dial-up. Seattle is a high tech city, with many technology firms both large and small, and a culture of entrepreneurism and innovation.

Fiber-to-the-premise networks will serve as an engine for business and economic development. Seattle would be an excellent place to construct such a network because we already have a high tech industry and population.

I don’t know how much of a chance we’ll have at winning a spot in the project, but at the very least it will help focus the city’s collective mind on what we need to do to provide our residents and businesses with first-rate, high-speed broadband infrastructure… something many of our neighborhoods sadly lack.

Living only a couple blocks from a major Qwest switch, I reliably enjoy better than 5Mbps downstream via DSL, but that makes me one of the fortunate ones, and while new WiMax service from Clear is (spottily) filling the gap in some neighborhoods, there are many Seattle households that are lucky to sustain 1.5Mbps, regardless of the provider.

But 1Gbps… hell, I’d happily settle for the 20Mbps my sister in suburban Philadelphia is getting from Verizon’s FIOS service.

If Seattle wants to remain a high-tech leader, we need to build the ultra-high-speed broadband infrastructure necessary to nurture and sustain our lead. And if Mayor McGinn wants to drop by Drinking Liberally sometime to discuss his broadband plans, the beer’s on me.

As I was putting together Monday’s post on the corruption within the Department of Corrections, there were a few news items related to medical marijuana that I haven’t had a chance to discuss. First and foremost, there was a court ruling that affirmed what most patients in Washington already knew. Our medical marijuana law doesn’t protect authorized medical marijuana patients from arrest, it only allows them to present a medical defense at trial. During the attempts to update the law in 2008, this was a primary objective for patients, yet any language that explicitly protected patients from arrest was stripped from the bill before it passed. Many people laid this failure at the feet of Governor Gregoire, but it’s not clear exactly what happened or who wanted the language removed.

For those in Seattle, this isn’t much of a problem. King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg doesn’t prosecute anyone who has a medical marijuana authorization. This has been true even for more envelope-pushing patients like Mark Spohn, who openly grows for multiple patients (another aspect of the law that is unclear). The Seattle Police generally have no interest in bothering patients – in fact, it’s worth noting the disparity in professionalism that was exposed in Monday’s post. Both Parkins and Cole, despite the actions of the corrections officers, praised the professionalism of SPD on the day that Parkins was arrested. Both Satterberg and Seattle Police recognize that they have better things to do than to send sick people through our court system when all they need to do is show a judge their authorization and they’re found not guilty.

But that hasn’t been true throughout the state. The Cannabis Defense Coalition court calendar continues to track cases of authorized medical marijuana patients going through our state’s courts. After the law was revised in 2008, Governor Gregoire said that if authorized patients were still getting arrested that she’d work with the police chiefs. So far we haven’t seen any indication that she’s willing to back that statement up with action.

A second bit of news is that the State Senate passed a bill to allow medical professionals other than licensed physicians to give medical marijuana authorizations. If passed into law, it isn’t likely to change the overall number of patients in the state, but will likely make it less of a hassle for them to get authorized. The fairly restrictive list of ailments allowed by the law keeps our medical marijuana regulations from looking more like California’s, where you can get a medical marijuana authorization for anything from insomnia to depression. Even as someone who has used marijuana in the past – and has noted how it helped me sleep better and made me a happier person – I never considered myself to be using it for medical reasons. Yet much of our current pharmaceutical industry is driven by “curing” these two afflictions. That’s why discussions over what makes marijuana a medicine and what separates recreational use from medical use are often muddled. The line isn’t entirely clear.

It’s worth noting that the complainant in the recent court case referenced above was found to have an authorization that wasn’t even legal. It was for anxiety and depression, which are not covered by the law. And in going through the released documents from the DOC, it’s very easy to be skeptical about whether or not some of those who were requesting to use medical marijuana would have been found similarly outside of the law. In fact, one of the doctors who authorized several patients, Dr. Antoine Johnson, was arrested in Madagascar this past October after fleeing the country to escape fraud charges.

Parkins, on the other hand, is a legitimate patient with a legitimate need (under 69.51A.010(4)(b)), but whenever there are doctors who are giving marijuana authorizations to anyone who walks into their office, it does cast doubt on everyone. And this was the mindset that many within the DOC were working with. Throughout the internal discussions, there was a common belief that all medical marijuana authorizations were a sham, primarily because they saw many of them coming from a single doctor. But after they defined their process and began denying everyone, a pattern started to become more clear. Most of the medical marijuana requests were coming from only 2-3 doctors, but most of the requests that were clearly within the scope of the state law weren’t. They were coming from a variety of different doctors, and they were the only authorizations coming from each of those doctors. Despite what the DOC convinced themselves, a lot of very real doctors recognize the very real benefits of marijuana for certain serious medical conditions.

If the DOC were smarter about how they handled this process, they could have denied a number of requests for people to use medical marijuana on probation and not caused such a backlash – simply by enforcing the law as it’s written. Several people requested medical marijuana use for things like anxiety, which isn’t even covered. But the Attorney General’s office and the DOC went way beyond that, trying to re-define the law in a way that made it impossible for anyone on probation to qualify. The legality of what they did hasn’t been decided by a court in this state yet, but it’s pretty clear the policy caused far more problems than what would’ve happened had they just followed the voter-approved law.

The apparent suicide of a longtime professional signature gatherer threatens to blow wide open the heretofore hidden world of organized petition fraud in Washington state.

Spokane based Dennis O’Shea had worked for years supervising crews of paid signature gatherers for a number of contractors, most recently Citizens Solutions, the Lacey WA firm that gathers signatures for Tim Eyman’s initiatives. Documented back in 2003 making false statements to signers about the initiative he was hawking, O’Shea had years to learn the ins and outs of the sometimes shady signature gathering business. So when detectives reportedly found his body along with a box of documents labeled to the attention of the police, they had reason to take notice.

Next month, partially as a result of the investigation stemming from O’Shea’s death, a mother and daughter signature gathering team will face charges on 45 counts of forging signatures on petitions for Eyman’s 2008 Initiative 985. And judging from both the suspicious circumstances, and the well documented history of petition fraud in other states, there is good reason to suspect that this case might represent only the tip of the iceberg.

According to court documents recently acquired by the Ballot Initiative Network, Theresa Dedeaux came under investigation in June 2008 after two petition sheets were turned over to Spokane County Elections officers, and subsequently the Secretary of State. An SOS official determined that 37 of the 40 signatures on the sheets did not match the signatures on file, and further forensic work by the Washington State Patrol determined a number of these to be forgeries. Affidavits were sent out to all 40 of the alleged signers, and all 29 of the affidavits returned confirmed that theirs was not the signature on the petition.

When confronted with this evidence by the WSP, Dedeaux made a statement to investigators implicating her supervisor: “Everything we did was at the direction of Dennis O’Shea.” When asked what she meant by “we,” Dedeaux went on to implicate her daughter Mercedes, “My daughter did it too.”

While details remain sketchy, it appears that O’Shea committed suicide sometime during the investigation, and according to sources, he left behind a box of documents directed toward the attention of the police, that included copies of several petition sheets collected by Mercedes Dedeaux. Investigators sent affidavits to 34 alleged signers whose signatures were suspected of being forged; all 29 of the returned affidavits attested that the signature was not authentic.

What else was in the box of documents O’Shea left behind? I have no idea, and I have no idea whether it is currently being investigated by the Spokane County Sheriff, the WSP or the SOS. What I do know, is that O’Shea thought it important enough to set aside for investigators as he prepared to take his own life. And I do know that the kind of fraud perpetrated by the Dedeauxs has proven to be common place in other initiative states, and that there has never been any reason to assume that Washington’s signature gatherers are uniquely clean, especially given the laxness of the laws and procedures regulating our initiative process.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” opponents of initiative reform like to argue, pointing to the absence of evidence of signature fraud in Washington state, but the truth is, we can’t possibly uncover evidence we’re not looking for, and lacking the tools to track signatures to the paid canvassers who gathered them, even evidence of fraud would be unlikely to incriminate the perpetrators.

To that end, there are two bills that are still alive in the current legislative session that attempt to address this issue. The first is HB 2614, which merely closes a loophole created via an opinion by state Attorney General Rob McKenna. Petitions are currently required to contain a declaration identifying the signature gatherer, but bizarrely, McKenna has advised the SOS that the statute does not require the signature gatherer to sign it. HB 2614 would clarify the existing law, explicitly requiring that the signature gatherer sign the declaration before the petition is filed with the SOS.

The second bill, SB 6449, is much more sweeping. In addition to closing the loophole above, SB 6449 would require that paid signature gatherers register with the PDC, and provide evidence of said registration while gathering signatures. Individuals convicted of fraud, forgery, identity theft, elections violations and sexual offenses would be denied registration, and permanently ineligible to work as paid signature gatherers. Volunteer signature gatherers would be exempt from such requirements.

Both of these bills represent prudent reforms that have been successfully implemented in other states with a history of signature fraud and other abuses. As it stands now, nothing would stop the Dedeauxs from working again as paid signature gatherers. Likewise, convicted identity thieves and sex offenders could be out there in front of the Safeway as I type, collecting the addresses and signatures of prospective victims.

Last year the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center ranked Washington’s initiative laws some of the most permissive in the nation, handing us a big, fat “F” in its nationwide Ballot Integrity Report Card. And yet this year, like in past sessions, the smart money is on the Legislature chickening out of addressing these long overdue reforms.

Opponents insist that there is no evidence of fraud, but the Dedeaux case proves otherwise, while the box of documents O’Shea left behind almost certainly contains additional incriminating evidence. Now is the time for the Legislature to act to protect the integrity of our initiative process.