Archives for December 2010

A quick note to any Republican legislators who might be reading this blog, that as you head into the coming special session in an effort to trim another billion dollars or so from the remaining six months of the current state budget, it is important to remember that “levy equalization” equals Socialism.

There’s no two ways about it. The Local Effort Assistance program is redistribution of wealth, pure and simple, shifting the burden of financing public schools from homeowners in “property poor” districts to homeowners in districts with higher than average property valuations. And that’s Socialism.

Personally, I think assuring educational equity is a worthwhile goal, but then, as a big-city, liberal Democrat, I’m not afraid to embrace Socialistic concepts when and where appropriate, but… um… you are. So I can’t see how, as a matter of principle, Republican legislators like you can oppose slashing or eliminating LEA funding in the face of such a yawning revenue shortfall.

Everything that’s wrong with the public discussion over government funding and spending can be summed up in this Seatte Times editorial seeking charitable donations to help fund Medic One training. (Well, maybe not “everything,” but it sure is indicative of how totally fucked up our tax system is.)

MOST King County voters assume their vote every six years for the Medic One levy covers the full cost of emergency medical service. This levy, reasonably separate from the county’s beleaguered general fund, covers basic operating costs of a service that is the gold standard in the country.

As many county residents readily tell you, this is the best place to have a heart attack; survival rates are higher than any other place, with Rochester, Minn., close behind.

… DONATIONS will be accepted by phone, 206-744-9425 or by e-mail at info@mediconefoundation.org. Quality training and medical research is a worthwhile investment.

So if the service is so valuable and so well run, why should we be reduced to begging for money to help fund it? And by the way, the reason the general fund is so “beleaguered” is that so many essential services like Medic One have been pulled out of it, that there is little flexibility remaining in how to prioritize general fund services, and little popular support left in funding.

Furthermore, if they’re going to insist that tax increases remain off the table, isn’t it time for the budget hawks at the Times to stop writing about all the services they support, and start suggesting what services they think we should cut?

This story is just appalling:

Questions about entrapment have dogged counter-terrorism cases for some time, most recently in the case of the Oregon man charged with trying to blow up a Christmas-tree lighting ceremony. Now, from The Washington Post, comes the story of Craig Monteilh, a self-proclaimed FBI informant who was so aggressive in his quest to find potential terrorists at a California mosque that the community got a restraining order against him.

Unless there’s a known group of aspiring terrorists to infiltrate, fishing expeditions like this are pointless exercises in entrapment. They never catch the kinds of highly motivated terrorists who plan and execute dangerous attacks. They merely target easily-led individuals who are susceptible to this type of coercion, of which there are inexhaustible supplies of – in every race, religion, and nationality.

I think I’ve pointed this out before at this site, but a charismatic undercover FBI agent could easily walk into any number of Christian churches in this country and find a poor sap or two to go along with his imaginary plot to blow up a Planned Parenthood office. That would do nothing to make us safer. The same holds true for our local mosques.

For an editorial board that’s constantly kvetching about government priorities, the Seattle Times certainly has an odd one:

It’s soul-searching time on snowstorm management. Seattle has unique challenges but also can do better by its citizens.

“Soul-searching time”…? Really? Over snow?

To put this in perspective, of the top 101 U.S. cities in average annual snowfall, Seattle ranks… well… Seattle comes nowhere near making the list, which bottoms out at about 45 inches a year, compared to our measly average of only 7.3 inches.

Only 7.3 inches. That’s less than half the annual snowfall in Olympia, less than an inch more on average than Portland, Oregon, 150 miles to the south, and about one-tenth the over 70 inches of snow that annually falls on Portland, Maine. My native Philadelphia averages over 20 inches, New York, 28, Chicago, 38 and Boston, 42. And the other Washington? About 22 inches.

Of course, these are just averages. Last year I’m not sure we had any significant accumulation, while forecasters predict this La Nina winter to be quite a bit whiter. But honestly, considering the more pressing issues facing our city, I have a hard time understanding the need for all this editorial soul-searching over something that inconveniences us for maybe two or three weeks out of every decade.

Besides… snow is beautiful, and it’s a pleasure to enjoy it without having to drive to the mountains. So chill out.

As Andrew Villeneuve reports over at NPI, the King County Democrats held their biannual reorganization meeting this weekend, at which Steve Zemke was elected the new party Chair, and Andrew himself was elected 2nd Vice Chair. Congrats to both of them, along with Chad Lupkes and the rest of the officers.

Steve and Andrew were two of the first Democratic activists I met after filing my horse’s ass initiative, the three of us loosely joined in our efforts to counter Tim Eyman on a 24/7, year-round basis, and so it’s been particularly interesting to watch them ascend the party ranks. There’s nothing particularly glamorous about the jobs they just signed up for, but knowing their passion and energy, I expect good things.

Today was Repeal Day, the anniversary of the official end of America’s brief experiment with alcohol prohibition. On December 5, 1933, the 21st Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, and it once again became legal in the United States to manufacture and sell alcoholic beverages.

I’ve just finished reading Daniel Okrent’s incredibly well-researched book on the subject, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. The history of alcohol prohibition has unmistakeably strong parallels to our current prohibition on marijuana. And that begs the question, will it come crashing down in much the same way?

The end of alcohol prohibition came much quicker than mostly everyone expected at the time. By amending the Constitution to outlaw the production and distribution of alcohol (or, more specifically, “intoxicating liquors”), many people thought – even right up to the end – that it would be nearly impossible to undo. But just as overwhelming popular support for getting rid of the saloon in the 1910s ushered in huge majorities of dry-voting legislatures across the country, the experience of alcohol prohibition – with organized crime, political corruption, and overzealous enforcement – led to similarly overwhelming support for repeal less than two decades later.

In some ways, marijuana prohibition is quite similar to its ancestor. Each prohibition led to significant levels of organized crime and to corruption among government officials and law enforcement. In each case, the attempts to keep adults from engaging in an activity strictly on moral grounds backfired and led to less moderation and riskier behaviors. And even earnest law enforcement efforts were helpless to do anything to prevent black markets from arising, often leading them to more extreme tactics that often put the citizenry at far more risk than the intoxicating substances themselves.

But there are some major differences. One is that much of the organized crime and corruption caused by the current prohibition is based outside of the United States. The rampant official corruption that accompanied the astronomical profits from bootlegging liquor has its strongest parallel today to the drug trafficking organizations of Mexico, who’ve been able to subvert Mexico’s justice system to an amazing extent. I cringe when I hear people claim that Mexico’s corruption problem is a function of Mexico’s culture. That’s bullshit. As Okrent explains, America’s law enforcement mechanisms were just as corrupted during alcohol prohibition as Mexico’s are today. The problem is the policy, not the people.

Another striking difference about the respective eras is how tame the police abuses were that caused widespread outrage during alcohol prohibition. Part of this stems from the fact that the average alcohol consumer was mostly left alone under the legal framework set forth by the Volstead Act. This is very different from today, where hundreds of thousands of mere marijuana users are arrested every year. The fact that even well-liked celebrities are not immune from its enforcement represents a fairly significant difference between then and now. One example given by Okrent was of a Chicago-area woman who was shot to death because her husband was believed to be a bootlegger. As a result, the Chicago Tribune used the incident to rail against prohibition. In today’s prohibition, wrong-door raids and innocent bystanders being killed are not seen as the extraordinary aberrations they were at that time, and are often completely ignored by our media.

But the main difference – and the one that has allowed marijuana prohibition to continue to such an absurd point – is that unlike alcohol prohibition, there’s no “before” for people to draw comparisons to. With alcohol prohibition, people were able to compare the world of alcohol prohibition to what it was like before it was outlawed. People could see the organized crime, violence, and corruption that existed in 1930 and they knew that all of that didn’t exist in 1918. We don’t have that 20/20 hindsight today. When marijuana was outlawed at the federal level in 1937, very few Americans used it or even knew what it was. The tremendous growth in its popularity occurred entirely within the confines of prohibition, so the negative effects of that policy seem far more “normal”.

So today, we face a battle with some historical parallels, but also some fairly significant differences. Al Smith, the losing Presidential candidate of 1928, was against prohibition. He lost handily to the Republican Herbert Hoover, but the fact that he took that position in the first place shows how different the two prohibitions were from a political standpoint. Not a single U.S. Senator of either party has come out in support of ending marijuana prohibition, and only a handful of House members have. For an issue that polls at over 40% support nationwide (and over 50% along the west coast), this is an extraordinary disconnect between the people and our politicians.

So how will it end? If Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson (D-36) is reading the political climate correctly, it will end right here in Washington this year:

State Representative Mary Lou Dickerson (D-36, Queen Anne and Ballard) wants to go all the way—RIGHT NOW.

According to a bill she intends to pre-file this month for the 2011 legislative session, “We would legalize it, regulate it, and tax it,” she says. “I am serious. We have been wasting scores of millions of dollars on arresting and jailing people who have done nothing more than smoke marijuana recreationally. That has ended up harming people and costing taxpayers tremendously. So it’s a very high cost to individuals and to taxpayers—it’s a wrongheaded policy that simply needs to be changed. People need to stick their neck out and say enough already and people are starting to do that. You will see that we will have a very good sponsor [for a companion bill to legalize marijuana] in the senate, someone who is very well respected. I am dead serious about this.”

Dickerson expects the bill will pass—she was unflinching when faced with my skepticism based on the failure of less aggressive pot bills—because polling this year showed 54 percent support to legalize marijuana in Washington, she says. She’s working with the ACLU and she plans another round of polling before the session begins in January. “If we don’t pass it this year, there’s a possibility we will take our case to the people in the initiative process in 2012,” she says.

We’ll find out if Dickerson’s optimism is warranted. There have been a number of signs recently that do point in this direction. California’s initiative was the first statewide initiative on ending marijuana prohibition that failed not because of general opposition to the idea, but to the specifics of the proposal. We’re now at the point where state legislators are understanding that this is a reality, and that either they regulate it, or an initiative will regulate it for them, perhaps not in a way the legislature would consider ideal.

And that leads to what might end up being the most interesting parallel in how both prohibitions end. What likely accelerated the demise of alcohol prohibition the most was the state of the economy. As the boom of the 1920s led to the Depression of the 1930s, that revenue that had been lost by enacting the 18th Amendment loomed much larger. Today, the parallel is obvious, and the precarious economic situation that Washington state finds itself in may bring about a political sea change on a issue that was once thought untouchable.

Last week’s news-related contest was won by wes.in.wa. Two in a row for wes. The location was Tallahassee, Florida, the home in the middle the location of a grisly murder scene last month.

Here’s this week’s, which is just a random location somewhere on Earth. Good luck!

Genesis 2:25
Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.

Discuss.

(And there are some 40 more links to political media of the past week now posted at Hominid Views.)

We keep hearing from pundits and politicians that, what with the passage of I-1053 and I-1107, and the failure of I-1098, new revenue sources are off the table as legislators seek to close a $5.7 billion gap in the next biennial budget, and a $1.1 billion additional shortfall just between now and June, but of course, that’s a load of bullshit. It is possible for legislators to raise new revenue this session, and it would be both cowardly and irresponsible of them not to consider this option.

Yeah, I know, I-1053 requires a two-thirds supermajority in both houses to raise any tax or eliminate any of our billions of dollars in tax preferences exemptions breaks loopholes. But a two-thirds majority would be a slam dunk with Republican support, a not unreasonable if unlikely scenario, in order to, say, raise the money to restore school levy equalization funds.

Alternatively, if both houses were to pass a revenue measure by a simple majority, and Gov. Gregoire were to have the balls to sign it into law, we could finally have that legal showdown over the highly questionable constitutionality of the two-thirds supermajority requirement… a showdown most of the constitutional attorneys I’ve talked to think Tim Eyman’s and his measure would likely lose.

Finally, legislators could always put a revenue package on the ballot, and ask voters to voice yay or nay on, say, a two-cent per can tax on soda pop in order to raise the money to restore school levy equalization funds. I-1107 failed in King County; give much of the rest of the state a good reason to support such a tax, and perhaps the beverage industry won’t be quite so successful snowing voters next time around. (And it sure would be fun to force Coke and Pepsi to spend yet another $16 million. In fact, we could make an annual game of it, padding the earnings of local radio a TV stations in the process.)

New revenue is an option. It simply is. Not an easy option, but an option nonetheless. So don’t you let a cowardly pundit or politician tell you otherwise.

While the process-hawks at the Seattle Times get all high and mighty about the budget crisis by demanding that Democrats call a special legislation session—you know, without sticking their necks out and making any concrete suggestions on how to cut the budget—I boldly propose a way of living up to the Times’ professed “Reset 2010” ideals, saving $165 million in the process: eliminate school levy equalization.

Read the whole thing over on Slog: “It’s Time to Give Rural Republicans the Government They Demand.”

I’m hoping to get a chance on my day off tomorrow to look through the leaked documents from Wikileaks about the Mexican drug war, but in the meantime this quote made me laugh:

Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice presidential candidate, likened Assange to an al-Qaida propagandist and accused him, without offering any proof, of having “blood on his hands.”

“Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaida and Taliban leaders?” she asked in a message posted on her Facebook page.

Probably because they want to catch him.

And if they do catch Assange, we might want to look through those cables on the Mexican drug war to understand why someone else from within Wikileaks will just assume his leadership role (or a different group of folks will open a competing website). That’s what happens when organizations exist out of popular demand for a service or product. Cutting off the head doesn’t kill it. It just causes it to grow a new head.

Yup, that’s budget hawk Reagan Dunn, more than five and a half years into his tenure on the King County Council, showing that he still doesn’t know how to read a budget.

More snark from me, over on Slog.

Today’s op/ed page is about as clear an illustration as you can get of the Seattle Times editorial board’s schizophrenic politics: socially liberal, fiscally, well, not just conservative, but profoundly anti-worker. I mean, if repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” could only be achieved via a modest hike in the estate tax, you can be sure that the Times ed board would be vehemently opposed.

A freeze on federal pay is an acceptable part of a larger strategy.

I guess, maybe, depending on the strategy. Problem is, there is no larger strategy. In fact, now that President Obama has unilaterally proposed the freeze, it’s totally lost as a bargaining chip to force concessions from Republicans, so even if there is a strategy, this won’t be part of it. That’s kinda dumb.

As for the Times, I’m pretty sure, based on past editorials, that forcing wage and benefits concessions from public employee unions pretty much is their only strategy toward addressing government budget woes. At least, I don’t remember hearing any other suggestions.

Federal workers have not shared in the financial sacrifices made by other employment sectors.

You mean, sectors like Wall Street?

Federal wages have increased during the recession…

You mean, like Wall Street? I mean honestly… the Times’ editors even go so far as to call for a freeze on “bonuses” to federal workers, as if these are the bonuses that represent the real moral outrage. Forget about a sense of decency… at long last, have they no cognitive dissonance?

These are tough economic times, and like I said, I would be willing to at least consider government employee wage freezes and concessions as part of a larger strategy… but one that truly involved sharing the burden amongst all Americans. And if the Times ed board is really as concerned about budget deficits as they claim, I look forward to reading the editorial in which they oppose extending the Bush-era tax cuts to the top two percent of households.