Archives for May 2010

Don’t get the joke? Here’s the original (which is almost as funny as the parody).

Rep. Dave Reichert’s “conscience-driven independent streak” was on display once again last week in a closed-door meeting with 8th Congressional District Republican PCO’s, where the three-term congressman attempted to defend the strategy behind his handful of pro-environmental votes. But before speaking frankly, he had to make sure that he was amongst friends:

Now, first of all, are there any reporters in the room? Does anybody recognize … are there any people in here that you recognize as strangers? So we know that all of us in here are family, right?

Well, apparently not, hence the leak of this secretly recorded audio from the meeting, which I now provide to you, totally unedited:

[audio:http://horsesass.org/wp-content/uploads/ReichertEnvironment.mp3]

Aren’t full-featured smart phones wonderful?

Rep. Reichert goes on to explain the “certain moves, chess pieces, strategies” he must employ to hold his “50/50 district,” even if it means breaking with his party, and his conscience, to occasionally cast a vote in favor of the environment.

Uh, I just wanted to be honest with you. You know Jennifer Dunn was an environmentalist, uh, in her votes, too. Uh, she was also pro-choice. I don’t know if most of you remember that now. But, but, if you want to hold on to this district, there are certain, there are certain things that you must, uh, do. This is a 50/50 district.

Notice how Reichert distinguishes between being an environmentalist, and being an environmentalist in one’s votes. That’s kinda the whole theme here.

Now if you look at Senator Brown’s race, uh, he took, in order for him to win that race in Massachusetts, it took 60 percent of the independent votes to win. Now you may not get, if you watch Senator Brown’s votes now over the next six years you might say, “What the heck… why did we vote for him?” you know, Massachusetts people. But he’s going to be maybe 70/30, maybe he’s going to be an 80/20, but at least you don’t have a 99 percent/one. You know 99 D, one percent R. Uh, you have a 70/30, 80/20. You have got to pick your battles.

Hear that? You gotta pick your battles. And while Reichert loves to regale his audiences with tales of being shot at, and staring the Green River Killer straight in the eyes (indeed, at almost six and a half minutes, this may be the longest I’ve ever heard Reichert go without mentioning his stint as sheriff), hell if he’s gonna take on those scary, hemp-wearing, granola-crunching, tree-hugging environmentalists.

Uh, if you look at the Pombo race in California – all of you remember Mr. Pombo? – he was a 20 percent. He had 20 percent victory in California. He was a huge roadblock to the environmentalists. They came in – was it two years ago we lost? – two or four years ago he lost. The environmental groups came in with millions of dollars and flipped that 20 percent, 20 points, they flipped that district. He lost.

And Reichert…?

I only have two to three percent to play with, every two years, and I have to raise three to four million dollars to stay in, to do it. I am a 90/10. 90 to 10, if you look at my votes. All the TARP votes are no, all the stimulus package votes are no, the health care I’ve been no all three times.

Let’s be clear: Reichert is no environmental leader, and he sure as hell doesn’t want to be perceived as one, at least not behind closed Republican doors. He votes 90% with his Republican leadership, and that other 10%…? Well, that’s just what he needs to do in order to keep those big, bad environmentalists from kneecapping him the same way they did poor Rep. Pombo.

Wild Sky was a done deal. It was already in its process. It had been worked on for eight years before I even came to Congress. Jennifer Dunn endorsed Wild Sky, and I followed in her footsteps per her advice.

[…] So, uh, you know, it, it, it, was it was a good vote. It was a good move on my part to do that.  … Because I’ve only, I’ve, supported Wild Sky, I’ve supported Alpine Lakes, because of the reasons that I just laid out to you. They are – what I’ve done is taken out I’ve taken them out of the game in this district. They’re out.

Hear that, Washington Conservation Voters and other environmental groups? Reichert has taken you “out of the game” in his district. You’re out.  So… how’s it feel to be played by Dave Reichert?

And it’s not like we all didn’t have a heads up, for this isn’t the first time Reichert has publicly said a little more than he probably should’ve about his brand of pragmatic politics… for example this 2006 speech before the Mainstream Republicans in which he insists on detailing the obvious:

And so when the leadership comes to me and says, “Dave we need you to take a vote over here, because we want to protect you and keep this majority,” I do it.

Of course, less surprising than Reichert’s repeated admission that he blatantly panders to environmentalists in order to maintain his 90% Republican voting record in his 50/50 district, is that the Seattle Times rewarded him for it by outrageously lauding him as a “conscience-driven independent.”

How embarrassing. And not just for the Times. For while environmental leaders may feel like they’ve scored a strategic victory by strong-arming Reichert into compliance, their narrow focus on their own legislative agenda ends up hurting the broader agenda of the progressive community as a whole. WA-08 is a 50/50 district with a congressman who votes 90/10, at least partially because environmental groups have failed to hold Reichert responsible for his hypocrisy.

Were he representing a more conservative district, that might be acceptable, but we could do much better than that in WA-08… if only environmental voters in his district would take Reichert at his word, rather than his vote.

Publicola claims Dino Rossi has finally managed to hire a campaign manager, and will announce his candidacy next week. Huh. We’ll see.

But the speculation gets me thinking.

If Rossi runs, it’s only because he thinks he has a pretty damn good chance of winning, but getting in this late, he’ll have no chance to make this race competitive without an awful lot of independent expenditures on his behalf… you know, 10 to 20 million dollars or so.

So one can only assume that he wouldn’t jump into this race without assurances of substantial independent expenditure campaigns, but, if he already has these assurances, they won’t really be all that independent, now will they?

What they will be is financed almost exclusively by out-of-state interests. National organizations like the ever-meddling U.S. Chamber, or shady, swift-boat-veterans-like groups fronting for wealthy business interests and ultra-right-wing ideologues. You won’t see the Washington Association of Realtors spending big money championing Rossi, or local companies like Boeing or Microsoft. Hell, you won’t even see the lying bastards at the BIAW play much in this race.

Yes, if Rossi jumps in, it’s because he’s damn confident that out-of-state interests will fulfill their promise to spend big money to take out Washington’s senior Senator and the power and influence she brings to the citizens of Washington state. Watch for it.

If Dino Rossi was waiting for yesterday’s long anticipated primaries to augur Republican prospects this cycle, I wouldn’t expect him to jump into the U.S. Senate race anytime soon.

NRSC chair John Cornyn has promised Rossi his full support, but that didn’t work out so well for Kentucky Attorney General Trey Grayson, who got trounced in his Republican senate primary against teabagger candidate Rand Paul. Nobody’s suggesting that Clint Didier or Sean Salazar have much of a chance of clawing past him in our state’s top-two primary, but I wonder if Rossi is up for a spirited challenge from the right, especially when he obviously can’t count on the NRSC to cover his flank?

Meanwhile, if there is a Big Red Wave on the horizon, you sure wouldn’t know it from PA-12, where Democrat Mark Critz beat Republican Tim Burns 53%-45% in a special election to fill the seat of the late Rep. John Murtha. PA-12 is a classic swing district — the only congressional district in the nation to go for Kerry in 2004 and McCain in 2008 — the type Republicans need to easily take away from Dems this November if they’re to produce the big gains they’re promising. Didn’t happen.

And as bad a night as it was for Republicans, it was also pretty good for progressives, with the more progressive Democrat winning senate primaries in Kentucky and Pennsylvania, two states where voters will now have a stark left/right contrast come November, and where arguably, the stronger Democrat was left standing. And in Arkansas, incumbent Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln now faces a June 8th runoff against progressive Lt. Gov. Bill Halter, a race I’d wager Halter stands the better chance of winning.

All in all, I found last night’s election results almost as satisfying as the Philadelphia Flyers 3-0 win over the Montreal Canadiens.

– Specter goes down

– The Korean War – still going on

– Ryan Grim points out that the truly despicable Mark Souder is now seeking forgiveness for moral transgressions after never believing in such a thing as a Congressman.

– Daniel Jack Chasan in Crosscut claims that Attorney General Rob McKenna’s lawsuit against the health care bill isn’t as ridiculous as most legal experts think it is. But what I found interesting was that on page 2, McKenna tries to address the hypocrisy of being outraged by the new health care bill, despite not being previously outraged by the ruling that set the most recent precedent for interpreting the Commerce Clause, Gonzales v. Raich. In fact, McKenna happily used that ruling to go after medical marijuana patients in this state. Here’s what Chasan reported:

McKenna concedes that five years ago in Raich, Justice Antonin Scalia concurred with the majority ruling that the commerce clause enabled Congress to seize marijuana plants being grown legally — allegedly for medical purposes — under California law. (Talk about strange bedfellows: Scalia concurred in the majority opinion written by John Paul Stevens, while Clarence Thomas joined Sandra Day O’Connor’s dissent.) But pot-growing is activity, not inactivity, McKenna notes, and besides, marijuana is clearly traded in interstate commerce.

Here’s part of the ruling from Gonzales v. Raich:

Cases decided during that “new era,” which now spans more than a century, have identified three general categories of regulation in which Congress is authorized to engage under its commerce power. First, Congress can regulate the channels of interstate commerce. Perez v. United States, 402 U.S. 146, 150 (1971). Second, Congress has authority to regulate and protect the instrumentalities of interstate commerce, and persons or things in interstate commerce. Ibid. Third, Congress has the power to regulate activities that substantially affect interstate commerce. Ibid.; NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., 301 U.S. 1, 37 (1937). Only the third category is implicated in the case at hand.

Our case law firmly establishes Congress’ power to regulate purely local activities that are part of an economic “class of activities” that have a substantial effect on interstate commerce. See, e.g., Perez, 402 U.S., at 151; Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111, 128—129 (1942). As we stated in Wickard, “even if appellee’s activity be local and though it may not be regarded as commerce, it may still, whatever its nature, be reached by Congress if it exerts a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce.” Id., at 125. We have never required Congress to legislate with scientific exactitude. When Congress decides that the “ ‘total incidence’ ” of a practice poses a threat to a national market, it may regulate the entire class. See Perez, 402 U.S., at 154—155 (quoting Westfall v. United States, 274 U.S. 256, 259 (1927) (“[W]hen it is necessary in order to prevent an evil to make the law embrace more than the precise thing to be prevented it may do so”)). In this vein, we have reiterated that when “ ‘a general regulatory statute bears a substantial relation to commerce, the de minimis character of individual instances arising under that statute is of no consequence.’ ” E.g., Lopez, 514 U.S., at 558 (emphasis deleted) (quoting Maryland v. Wirtz, 392 U.S. 183, 196, n. 27 (1968)).

The lines that McKenna is trying to draw here between the two cases simply don’t matter within the context of the Gonzales v. Raich decision. There’s no distinction made between activity and inactivity or any reason to believe that failing to be insured wouldn’t be considered an “activity”. Congress can establish requirements for possessing health insurance because the lack of health insurance by large numbers of citizens would have a substantial effect on interstate commerce. Second, in the Gonzales v. Raich decision, they specifically addressed the case where the marijuana is not sold and never part of any market. What was decided was that even in that case, price fluctuations could theoretically cause the marijuana to enter the market, therefore it was within the scope of the Commerce Clause to regulate it.

That’s the aspect of the decision that never sat well with me, but there isn’t even an equivalent argument to be made for what McKenna is arguing. In a regulated health care system (which not even McKenna is saying Congress can’t implement), if you establish a rule that health care providers can’t reject people with pre-existing conditions, then you have to implement something to keep people from just waiting until they get sick before they buy insurance. Otherwise, the system goes bankrupt. And that’s done through either mandates or taxes. I don’t see any way that the Supreme Court would rule that one method is fine (implementing taxes), but the other is unconstitutional. And neither do most legal experts from what I can tell.

It’s election night! So, please join us tonight for an evening of electoral politics the way God intended it: over a pint of ale. We meet at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E.. The fun officially starts at 8:00 pm, but earlier works too.

The polls have closed in tonight’s three primary states. A teabagger has upset the mainstream Republicans in Kentucky. Pennsylvania has a very exciting Democratic primary Senate race that too close to call.

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

Well, if Dino Rossi doesn’t end up running for the U.S. Senate, don’t assume it’s because he’s afraid of losing to three-term incumbent Sen. Patty Murray. It may just be that he’s too busy profiting off of the misfortune of others:

Ex-state Sen. Dino Rossi (R), a possible NRSC recruit to take on Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), can’t catch a break these days. The latest: He’s a featured guest next week at an event teaching real estate investors how they can profit off of foreclosures.

An invitation for the May 25 event hosted by Steven Marshall, a partner in the Homeowner Conference, begins thusly: “With the current financial and real estate meltdown an opportunity has been created like never before in history.” So Rossi, touted both as the ’08 GOV nominee and principal of Coast Equity Partners, and a panel of other investors are teaming up for a dinner at the Bellevue Maggiano’s to teach real estate investors some tricks about the market.

Among the tips you’ll learn from Rossi and friends: “How to consistently earn over a 50% ROI per year buying and selling foreclosures.”

Yup, while most of us are just struggling to pay our mortgages and keep our homes, Rossi is leading a seminar on how to get rich quick off the foreclosure crisis. Can’t get much more populist than that.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the Washington Association of Realtors endorsed Sen. Murray?

… Fuck you!

I mean honestly, what an incredibly rude and an uncivil act, to dump your garbage on somebody else’s property. Why don’t you just take a shit on my front steps well you’re at it.

It’s also, by the way, a great metaphor for capitalism and the wonders of an unregulated free market. It was of course in this asshole’s economic self-interest to dump his garbage on somebody else, as he is now free of his own waste, and at no personal cost. And if we lived in the teabaggers’ libertarian dystopia, there would be no city provided illegal dumping hotline for me to call to deal with the matter.

I hope the city rifles through your garbage and finds something to track you down, so they can stick you with a big, fat, socialist fine.

Speaking of conservative Republican hypocrisy, check out the Seattle Times’ profile of Tea Party senatorial candidate Clint Didier:

A former NFL player turned farmer, Didier has repeatedly called the federal government “a predator.” He vows to oppose the “Marxist utopia” he says Democrats want to create — “where everyone is taken care of from womb to tomb.”

But Didier himself has cashed in on one big government aid program. He has received nearly $273,000 in federal farm subsidies since 1995, according to a database of U.S. Department of Agriculture subsidies maintained by the Environmental Working Group (EWG).

In fact Didier’s entire way of life, and that of his parents, was made possible by that federal predator and the massive irrigation and hydro-electric projects that came out of the New Deal era. “Without water from the Grand Coulee, we would be nothing more than a desert,” Didier acknowledges, but that doesn’t stop him from trying to stop government from making the kind of investments that might lift other families out of poverty.

It’s amazing. Nobody has benefited more from government investment and subsidies than farmers like Didier, yet come tax day, all they can do is bitch.

Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN) and his congressional aide Tracy Jackson discuss the virtues of abstinence-only sex education, and what makes this video unintentionally hilarious, instead of, you know, just plan boring, is that Rep. Souder, one of those “family values Republicans,” just resigned after it was revealed that he and Jackson were having an affair.

I guess he should’ve known better, but as Woody Allen famously said, “The heart wants what the heart wants…” or more accurately, the penis. Kinda demonstrates in a nutshell the problem with abstinence-only sex education. I mean, if a pudgy, middle-aged, holy roller with a family and a political career to protect, can’t abstain from sex outside of marriage, what can we honestly expect of a hormone-enraged teenager?

In his resignation statement, Souder complains about “the poisonous environment of Washington D.C.,” but in the end, the thing that poisoned both his career and his marriage was his own hypocrisy.

Clark County Commissioner Tom Mielke and other state Republicans are grumbling about Dino Rossi’s endless dawdling, but not me. No, I urge Rossi to take a much time as he wants.

Kittitas County Republican Party chair and crazy-ass blogger Mathew Manweller (known around these parts as “the nutty professor“), defends his man by insisting that Rossi still has “a week or so” to make his decision before “the milk is going to sour,” but there are still 23 days before the June 10 filing deadline and I hope Rossi makes every one of them count.

In fact, why should a state leader like Rossi live his life by other people’s schedules? Screw the deadline… he could still run in the August primary as a write-in candidate, and I say he should reserve that right, just in case Sen. Patty Murray’s numbers plummet between now then. Good things come to those who wait. Lamentations 3:25, and all that.

Yeah, sure, I suppose Rossi’s Hamlet-like indecisiveness must be pretty frustrating to the field of Republican extras longing for their moment in the spotlight, but Hamlet was a noble character, so I applaud the role Rossi has chosen to play. Of course, by the end of Hamlet, just about everybody ends up dead, but it sure does make for some entertaining theater.

– The Q13 Fox news director who declined to air the recent police brutality video has resigned.

– 40 years of failure in the drug war. Now that legalization appears to be around the corner, this is where the next battle is likely to occur.

– A mysterious disease has infected the poppy harvest in Afghanistan, although I’m not on board with any wild conspiracy theories involving Joe Biden, who helped introduce this bill in 2006.

– Dominic Holden catches another Seattle Times reporter failing to do her job properly when covering a drug bust.

– Ezra Klein on the gap between young liberal Jews and older Zionists.

– As a fairly frequent Facebook user, I’ve been trying to follow the backlash against the company over its privacy concerns. One thing I certainly agree with the anti-Facebook camp about is that the application is buggy – as hell. It’s probably the buggiest web interface I’ve ever used, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the security is just as bad. But what I’m not sure I fully grasp yet is the actual threat posed by having the information we put on Facebook shared with third parties.

I deal with issues like this in my day job (I’m an IT manager at a financial services company), so I tend to see a distinction between the importance of keeping something like financial information private and not letting a marketing person determine which demographics are most likely to say they like The Jonas Brothers and Lost. If Facebook is not properly securing user passwords, or collecting enough information from people that identity theft becomes easy for a hacker, that’s one thing (and that may be true, but I haven’t seen that alleged yet). But I tend not to put anything on Facebook that I wouldn’t say out loud on a Metro bus. Someone who had access to my profile could learn a bit about me, but I don’t see how they’d have anything of any real value besides a few data points for doing large scale analytics.

Maybe I’m just different from most people in that respect. It doesn’t bother me much if people I don’t know see my pictures, but others probably do. Facebook very blatantly defaults to having things public rather than the other way around. But I think we should recognize that this approach is why Facebook succeeded. When people began setting up their networks, it was remarkably easy to find your friends and get hooked up with people you haven’t seen in years. A community web site that tried harder to protect people’s privacy just wouldn’t have taken off the way Facebook did.

State Sen. Ken Jacobsen (D-Dogs in Bars) unexpectedly announced his retirement today, setting in motion a sudden reshuffling of the legislative races in his 46th Legislative District.

State Rep. Scott White, a first-term Democratic incumbent quickly announced that he would run for Jacobsen’s senate seat, with the instant backing of much of the Democratic establishment. Meanwhile, political newcomer David Frockt, who had been challenging Jacobsen, will switch races and go after White’s newly vacated state House seat.

Dizzying.

With so little time remaining before the June 10 filing deadline, I’m guessing White might end up running unopposed, and certainly unopposed by any serious challenger. Frockt, on the other hand, I’d be surprised if he didn’t draw an opponent or two now that he’s in a race for an open seat. Perhaps Gerry Pollet, who bitterly contested White for the seat in 2008? Perhaps some energetic, young activist type?

Should be interesting.

Authorities don’t yet know what sparked this weekend’s tragic shooting by an off duty Pierce County deputy of his in-laws and himself. But we do know what enabled the shootings:  a gun.

I’m not pointing this out as an argument for gun control. The guy was a police officer after all, so it’s kinda unrealistic to expect him not to have a weapon.

But I would argue that this tragedy once again points out that generally, guns do not make us safer. Had this man not had easy access to a weapon, he would not have shot his in-laws or himself. He might still have gotten physically violent, but the result would likely not have been nearly as tragic.

I mean, honestly, how many shootings do we read of that are the result of horrible accidents or crazed crimes of passion? And how many are legitimate acts of self defense?

So own a gun if you want. It’s your 2nd Amendment right, the current Supreme Court tells us, and both hunting and target shooting can be reasonable pastimes, and even downright fun. Just know that your number one risk factor for being involved in a shooting is to own gun.

My friend Carla at Blue Oregon faced an interesting quandary over the weekend. Land use is her issue in the wonky/passionate way that tax restructuring is mine, and she thought she’d found her dream candidate for Washington County Commission:

I’ve been very supportive of the candidacy of Greg Malinowski, a farmer in District 2 who very much reflects my own concerns about Washington County. Malinowski has been an ardent defender of farmland and is extremely knowledgeable about county decisions and their impact on the community. Greg is very thoughtful and smart on this issue as well.

Then she caught wind of the soon to be released Oregon Family Council’s Voter Guide, in which Malinowski had filled out the questionnaire checking anti-choice and anti-marriage equality positions. As Carla described it, the news hit her “like a punch in the stomach.”

As it turns out, she finally had a chance to meet with Malinowski on Sunday, and came away comfortable with his positions, which while a touch inarticulate, come across as neither particularly anti-choice nor anti-marriage equality. Chalk it up to being a political novice or perhaps just not fully understanding the issues, but his values appear to be in the right place.

Still, Carla’s quandary raises a broader question about the limits of both litmus tests and political pragmatism.

For example, as Carla points out, while land use is by far the most pressing issue facing the county, there was no record of abortion services or marriage equality ever coming before the commission. So wouldn’t it be the pragmatic thing to support a candidate who was good on land use, no matter how repugnant you might find his stance on reproductive rights?

Maybe. But electoral politics is a lot more complicated than that, and a county commission win could also be a stepping stone to higher offices where these other issues would surely come into play. So wouldn’t it be equally pragmatic for Carla, a staunch defender of both reproductive and marriage rights, to take the long view, and withdraw her support, rather than help to launch the political career of a social conservative?

Not so simple is it?

We heard the argument from both Susan Hutchison and Dino Rossi, for example, that abortion shouldn’t be an issue in races for offices that have no impact on abortion policy: “I’m not running for the Supreme Court, nor do have an appointment there,” Rossi famously retorted during the governor’s race. But both Hutchison and Rossi have been named as possible U.S. Senate candidates, an office from which they could have a huge impact on the issue. Furthermore, these values are often a proxy for a larger set of values that impact policy decisions in numerous and often nuanced ways.

And most of us would agree that there are some litmus tests that are absolutely justified, regardless of the candidate’s other qualifications. For example, Carla noted “how difficult it is to find people who have the depth and breadth of knowledge on land use” and who won’t hand out zoning permits “like they’re bubble gum.” Yet most voters on either side of the land use issue would have zero quandary rejecting a candidate, no matter how knowledgeable, if he were, say, an avowed white supremacist.

So yeah, there are litmus tests in politics, and they are completely defensible, even if that means that we sometimes end up with the otherwise less qualified candidate. The perfect is the enemy of the good, and all that. But the same holds true in defense of pragmatism, for example, supporting a Blue Dog Democrat in a conservative district where a true progressive couldn’t possibly prevail. Or perhaps even supporting an anti-choice county commissioner who would do a kick-ass job on the issues that matter most at the local level. Perhaps.

In the end, Carla didn’t have to make a choice, because Malinowski turned out not to be as anti-choice as she briefly feared. But had she been forced to, she would have been justified either way.