Goldy

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqBVCr_nudY[/youtube]

Well, you gotta give Mike Brown credit for being consistent:

Here’s what I really think is going on. I think they want to raise this level because that gives them more attention, it gives them more, you know, more legitimacy, and allows them to get out there and say ‘oh look at us, we’re in control we’ve got this thing taken care of.’

Of course, in providing his “expert” analysis to FOX News, it’s no surprise that Brownie focuses on appearances rather than on the public health response or, you know, the flu virus itself, for if there’s anything he learned from his years at the helm of FEMA, it’s that the most important part of mounting an effective emergency management effort is presenting the appearance of mounting an effective emergency management effort.  Or at least that’s the way he ran his agency, always assuring an ample supply of FEMA emblazoned tee-shirts and windbreakers at the scene of any major disaster, even if potable water and adequate shelter were lacking.

Indeed, even in his post-Katrina congressional testimony, Brownie made clear that the real disaster in New Orleans didn’t take place until after his press office was overwhelmed with inquiries about his thin resume:

While FEMA was trying to respond to probably the largest natural disaster in the history of this country, a catastrophic disaster that the president has described covering an area the size of Great Britain – I have heard 90,000 square miles – unless you have been there and seen it, you don’t realize exactly how bad and how big it was – but in the middle of trying to respond to that, FEMA’s press office became bombarded with requests to respond immediately to false statements about my resume and my background.

Ironically, it started with an organization called horsesass.org, that on some blog published a false, and, frankly, in my opinion, defamatory statement that the media just continued to repeat over and over. Next, one national magazine not only defamed me, but my alma mater, the Oklahoma City University School of Law, in one sentence alone leveling six false charges.

[snip]

But I guess it’s the media’s job. But I don’t like it. I think it’s false. It came at the wrong time. And I think it led potentially to me being pulled out of Louisiana because it made me somewhat ineffective.

The unnecessary deaths and suffering in Katrina’s wake?  My fault. Because my reporting ultimately made it impossible for Brownie’s press office to do its job.

Small wonder then that a man who views PR flacks as first responders would choose to criticize US and WHO health officials for their public posturing, while failing to engage in even a cursory discussion of the public health crisis itself.  But by accusing officials of “crying the sky is falling,” FOX’s “expert” shows he has even less expertise about pandemic flu than he did about Atlantic hurricanes; indeed, contrary to Brown’s assertions, it’s not the fatality rate per se that has triggered heightened alert levels as much as it is the apparent contagiousness of this novel virus.  For even if the severity of the symptoms prove no worse than those of the typical seasonal flu, a pandemic outbreak will kill many, many more people, if only through the sheer number of those afflicted:

Because there is no natural immunity to this virus, even though clinically it appears to be like garden variety flu to the individual, with respect to the population it has the potential to spread faster and many more people sick than seasonal flu. And remember, seasonal flu is not a walk in the park. It kills an estimated 30,000 people a year.

A bad flu season can fill hospital emergency rooms and in patient beds to the bursting point. We currently have fewer staffed hospital beds per capita than we did in the last pandemic, 1968 (the “Hong Kong flu”). There is no reserve capacity. We can’t just add physical beds. Beds don’t take care of patients. Nurses and doctors do.

Now take a bad flu season and double it. To each individual it’s the same disease but now everybody is getting it at once, in every community and all over the world. In terms of virulence, it’s a mild pandemic. It’s not a lethal virus like 1918. But in terms of social disruption it could be very bad. If twice as many people get sick, the number of deaths could be 80,000 in the US instead of 40,000.

And if three or four times as many people fall ill, well, do the math.  The 1918 pandemic is estimated to have infected one third of the world population; even at a mortality rate of less than one tenth of one percent, a mild yet similarly widespread pandemic would kill over two million people worldwide.

So are public health officials playing the role of Chicken Little?  Hardly. No, unlike FEMA during Brownie’s tenure, they’re focusing on adequately preparing for the worst, ahead of the crisis, rather than just spinning the response afterwards.

Woke up this morning to find Publicola’s posts not loading, from either the website or the admin screen, and after about 10 minutes of investigation discovered that one of its database tables had become "corrupt."  So I held my breath, closed my eyes, and clicked on the phpMyAdmin "repair" button and… all better!

My first corrupted database in five years of using WordPress.  Who knew that Publicola could be such a corrupting influence?

Parents and their employers better be prepared for an indefinite shutdown of the Seattle Public Schools, because that’s what the district is preparing for, one district insider warned me.  And if Seattle shuts its schools, the surrounding districts won’t be far behind.

The quick and sudden closure of Madrona K-8 in response to a single probable case of swine flu should be viewed as a sign that school officials are taking this potential pandemic very seriously.  While officials initially plan to evaluate closures on a school by school basis, preparations are in place to shut the entire district if cases become more widespread, following the lead of Fort Worth TX, which today became the nation’s first major school district to shutter its doors in response to the flu outbreak.

I’m not saying it’s necessarily gonna happen, just that there might not be a lot of warning if it does.

UPDATE:
Seattle Public Schools announced this afternoon that Aki Kurose Middle School and Stevens Elementary will be closed through May 7, due to reported cases of swine flu.

When 5,000 teabaggers rallied in Olympia, the Seattle Times editorial board warned legislators against even thinking about talking about thinking about raising taxes in the face of such a populist uprising.  But with 5,000 marchers expected to hit downtown streets this Friday in support of immigration reform, what is the Times’ editors’ biggest concern?

“May Day march set for rush hour.”

Oh no… the protesters might disrupt the afternoon commute!

(Hat-tip WSLC Reports.)

Public health officials announced tonight that they have identified six probable cases of swine flu in Washington state: three in Seattle, two in Snohomish County and one in Spokane County. Confirmation is expected over the next couple days.

The Seattle cases include an 11-year-old boy who attends Madrona K-8. No doubt attendance will be a tad sparse at the school tomorrow.

King County Executive Ron Sims released the following statement this evening:

We are now in the type of worldwide health situation that King County has spent years planning and preparing for. The probable cases of swine flu here in Washington serve as a reminder to all of us that we are a community of connected individuals, each with a role to play in keeping each other safe.

Our excellent public health doctors and staff, along with regional hospitals and health care providers are using the comprehensive pandemic flu plans we’ve created to respond and limit impacts and spread as much as possible.

The years of planning are just part of the solution though. We must each help limit potential flu impacts by washing our hands, covering our coughs, staying home when we’re sick, and making sure our families have the supplies they need if the situation gets worse.

King County is better prepared than many regions to deal with these flu cases and we will get through this medical challenge, together.

Here that folks?  Wash your hands and cover your damn coughs.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiWaAdnRJ1o&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

That’s right, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) is actually suggesting that Sen. Arlen Specter’s switch to the Democratic Party is evidence of a coming Republican sweep in 2010.

At first I wondered if Inhofe simply didn’t understand the way primaries work in Pennsylvania, but it turns out that Oklahoma has a closed primary system too, in which voters register and primary by party.  The ultra-conservative Pat Toomey’s 20-point lead over Specter in recent polls isn’t due to the rejection of Specter’s relatively moderate stance by a majority of Pennsylvania voters, or even by a majority of Pennsylvania’s traditionally Republican voters.  Rather, like a vast inland sea, Pennsylvania’s Republican Party has been steadily evaporating away, leaving behind the denser, brackish waters in which only political creatures like Toomey can survive.  Recently, over 200,000 Pennsylvanians have changed their registration from R to D, and that is the main reason why Specter has followed suit.

So if Inhofe’s optimism isn’t due to a misunderstanding over Pennsylvania’s primary system, I can only assume it a symptom of ideological myopia bordering on solipsism. Inhofe’s “first visible evidence” of a GOP comeback is, of course, evidence of the exact opposite, and his party’s utter inability to recognize their collapse for what it is, suggests that it will be some time before such a comeback is even remotely possible.

I suppose that would be more reassuring to Democrats like me if we actually felt reassured that our party’s leaders were prepared to exploit the opportunities presented by the Republicans pathological and precipitous decline.

Via Dan Savage, the Chicago Sun-Times’ Neil Steinberg has a modest proposal of his own, suggesting that if traditionalists object to the use of the word “marriage” to describe same-sex civil unions, shouldn’t the same rigid defense of language be applied to the children of same-sex couples?

How much longer will they allow gays to press their agenda by claiming their children are “born” when of course, by entering the world as part of these lesser civil unions, they could easily be relegated to a similarly lesser state?

Perhaps mainstream America would be happier if couples that can form unions but not marry would have children that are “birthed,” or “whelped” or “emerge.” Instead of a “birth certificate” the couples could be issued a “document of existence.”

Sure, we naysayers might point out that doing so would cause discomfort for the affected children, who, when asked where they were born, would have to answer, “Well, I wasn’t technically ‘born,’ but I ‘came into existence’ in Evanston.” But since opposition to gay marriage considers neither the feelings of children nor the concerns of their gay parents, it’s a little late to start caring about them now.

Of course, there already is a common English word to describe children born of unmarried parents; we call them bastards, with all the negative connotation that word intentionally implies.

If—while arguing that the institution is the “gold standard” for raising children—opponents of gay “marriage” insist on defending the traditional use of the word, they should at least acknowledge the traditional meaning associated with its absence.  Steinberg only satirically suggests that the product of “these lesser civil unions” could easily be relegated to a lesser status themselves, but by the inner semantic logic of the traditionalists, that is indeed the inevitable and intentional outcome of codifying this semantic distinction in law. For once the political battle over same-sex marriage is reduced to an argument over the definition of a single word, a linguistically consistent defense of traditional marriage would inherently imply that Dan’s son is a bastard, while my traditionally legitimate daughter is not.

Yes, I know… there are some who might argue that as mores and circumstances have changed over the past half-century or so, the literal meaning of the word “bastard” has become archaic.  English is a vibrant, living language that constantly evolves.

And that is exactly my point.

Back in the fall of 2003, after my horse’s ass initiative but before I started blogging, I shopped a satirical guest column around to the various daily papers.  The Seattle Times and Seattle P-I promptly took a pass, but David Seago at the News Tribune was “sorely tempted … to stir the pot.”

Tim Eyman had been threatening to run an initiative that would have slashed the state school levy by 25%, cutting $800 million from K-12 spending per biennium during an economic downturn in which the state was already struggling to balance the budget.  Inspired by Jonathan Swift’s satirical masterpiece, A Modest Proposal, I proposed that we could indeed cut taxes and while improving academic performance… if only we would harvest our schools’ lowest performers, and feed them to their fellow schoolmates.

I was pretty damn proud of my dry, Swiftian tribute, believing I’d found a way to clearly present some rather wonky data in an entertaining manner.  But alas, after mulling it over for a couple weeks, the TNT declined as well, fearing that too many of their readers lacked the satire gene.

“Sometimes you just have to put a big red sign reading ‘SATIRE’ out there for those people who inevitably won’t get it,” Seago emailed me, a sentiment I found to be incredibly over-cautious considering I was suggesting cannibalism, for chrisakes. Needless to say, the essay went unpublished, and while I ultimately had less entertaining, more solemn guest columns printed in the Times, P-I and TNT, this particular rejection certainly played a role in motivating me to start my own blog.

But… as it turns out, Seago probably knew his audience a helluva lot better than I did, for as a new study from The Ohio State University once again proves, there are a lot of folks out there who just don’t get satire… and most of them are conservatives.

This study investigated biased message processing of political satire in The Colbert Report and the influence of political ideology on perceptions of Stephen Colbert. Results indicate that political ideology influences biased processing of ambiguous political messages and source in late-night comedy. Using data from an experiment (N = 332), we found that individual-level political ideology significantly predicted perceptions of Colbert’s political ideology. Additionally, there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements. Conservatism also significantly predicted perceptions that Colbert disliked liberalism.

That’s right… Colbert actually resonates with conservatives in his audience because they think he’s really one of them. They just don’t get the joke.

Not that, after nearly five years of blogging, I should be the least bit surprised. Here on HA we’ve always dabbled in satire, much to the confusion and dismay of some of our more concrete, righty trolls, who just can’t wrap their rigid little minds around the difference between being serious and being solemn.  Indeed, intentional ambiguity has almost become a hobby of mine, if only for the amusement of watching my trolls get hopelessly mired within the lines while futilely attempting to read between them.

Many conservatives just don’t get satire.  And that explains a lot.

It’s been regionally popular for some time, across the entire political spectrum, to generally dis outgoing King County Executive Ron Sims, but as the nation faces a potential flu pandemic, it would be a nice going away present from our media-political complex to give him a little credit where credit is due for the county’s extraordinary preparation and foresight.

Under Sims’ watch Seattle-King County has run one of the best public health agencies in the nation, putting its pandemic flu preparations in the capable hands of the widely respected Dr. Jeff Duchin.  And while the rest of the nation is nervously awaiting its allotment of anti-viral drugs from federal warehouses, King County is already sitting on a stockpile of 190,000 courses of Tamiflu, making us one of the few local governments to have invested tax dollars in such precautions.

Chances are still that the Mexican swine flu outbreak will fizzle out before becoming a worldwide health crisis, and if we’re lucky, the county’s supply of Tamiflu will expire long before the next flu pandemic strikes.  But it shouldn’t require a worst case scenario for the citizens of our region to thank Ron Sims for his leadership.

The US Supreme Court has sided with the FCC, upholding its incredibly unreasonable “fleeting expletive” rule.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday said the government could threaten broadcasters with fines over the use of even a single curse word on live television, yet stopped short of ruling whether the policy violates the Constitution.

The court, in a 5-4 decision, refused to pass judgment on whether the Federal Communications Commission’s ”fleeting expletives” policy is in line with First Amendment guarantees of free speech.

Well, fuck that.

[QUICK! How many of you instantly had a sexual image flash through your heads when I used the word “fuck” in a clearly nonsexual manner?  I’m guessing none, yet that notion—that some words are so offensive because they always evoke sexual or execretory images—is at the heart of the Supreme Court’s logic.  Utterly fucking ridiculous.]

I’m not saying the FCC should have no power at all to regulate the public airwaves, but these regulations should not be arbitrary or unreasonable, and the fleeting expletive rule is both, especially in light of how easy it is to cleverly—and legally—subvert the rule’s intent.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NDPT0Ph5rA[/youtube]

UPDATE:
From Justice Stevens’ dissent:

There is a critical distinction between the use of an expletive to describe a sexual or excretory function and the use of such a word for an entirely different purpose, such as to express an emotion. One rests at the core of indecency; the other stands miles apart. As any golfer who has watched his partner shank a short approach knows, it would be absurd to accept the suggestion that the resultant four-letter word uttered on the golf course describes sex or excrement and is therefore indecent. But that is the absurdity the FCC has embraced in its new approach to indecency.

Exactly.

I’m pretty sure that this is what leadership looks like:

Eight activists protesting the expulsion of aid groups in Darfur have been arrested in front of the Sudanese Embassy in Washington.

Humanitarian leaders and U.S. lawmakers, including Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison and Maryland Rep. Donna Edwards, were led away from the embassy in handcuffs Monday after crossing a police line.

Civil disobedience from a couple of U.S. Representatives.  What a refreshing contrast to the type of meek politicians we tend to elect here in Washington state, who generally couldn’t get arrested if they tried.

In his Sunday “Smart Bombs” column, Spokane Spokesman-Review Associate Editor Gary Crooks takes on some common budget myths, and comes to a conclusion that might surprise a lot of his readers.

The best way to measure a state’s tax burden is to total up personal income and divide it by how much money the state collects. […] The same holds true for spending, which was about 6 percent of total income for a decade, then declined. That’s probably surprising to most people given the Republicans’ drumbeat on “out-of-control” spending. Spending has increased in recent years, but a lot of that was to make up for budgetary hits after the economic swoon of the previous recession and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The state then began making up for lost funding on voter-approved initiatives on teacher pay and class sizes and had to backfill pension payments that were delayed to help balance the previous budget.

To get an idea how much the “spending burden” has declined, it was 5.9 percent of total income for the 2003-’05 budget. This is the much-ballyhooed “tough” budget shepherded through the Legislature by then-Sen. Dino Rossi. Now we’re looking at 5.18 percent. And, yes, even the “Rossi budget” spent more than the state collected.

HA regulars are well familiar with this analysis, but I can’t tell you how heartening it is to read it in the op-ed pages of a major daily, especially considering that the editors at our own Seattle Times have been so aggressive at spreading the myth Crooks so effectively busts.  But perhaps the Times refusal to accept this reality has less to do with their inability to do the math, and more to do with their refusal to accept Crooks’ inevitable conclusion.

It’s the tax code, stupid. The problem with measuring the affordability of taxes and spending against total income is that the state doesn’t have an income tax. The above calculations help explain why it should. The state is relatively rich, but it has a tax code that’s unsuited to tapping that wealth. The result is that high-income households send relatively large sums to the feds and relatively paltry amounts to the state. Conversely, the state taxes the poor at the highest levels in the nation because of the heavy reliance on our regressive sales tax.

If the state instituted an income tax and lowered the sales tax, it could begin to address its chronic budget deficits and lower the tax burden for most Washingtonians. It’s the same argument that was laid out by the Gates Commission several years ago, but lawmakers failed to act.

The paper of record for Eastern Washington joining me in advocating for a state income tax?  Welcome to the radical fringe.

Reporting for the Tacoma News Tribune, Ian Demsky has the scoop on the State Lottery’s new “enhanced” marketing plan to boost impulse sales of scratch tickets by at least 20 percent, and I’m truly impressed with the expertise of his sources:

Informed of the promotion, one gaming critic called using such tactics during an economic downturn “cruel.”

“They are looking to create compulsion,” Seattle blogger David Goldstein said last week. “That’s how the industry works.”

And I’m not just pulling that critique out of my ass.  As I’ve written on numerous occasions, games like slot machines and scratch tickets are scientifically designed to create compulsion—hence the refreshingly honest name of the scratch ticket vendor designing and testing the Lottery’s enhanced marketing plan: “Scientific Games.”

I’ve no doubt that the expanded retail displays, the 48 new scratch ticket games and their seductive second chance feature, were carefully designed in consultation with behavioral psychologists, so as to specifically enable problem gamblers and exploit their weaknesses.  Problem gamblers may comprise only 5 percent of their customers, but they can produce over 50 percent of the gambling industry’s profits.  This is no secret, and like any business, the gambling industry has always catered to its best customers.

So what’s the problem?

Goldstein, a blogger who has advocated against gambling expansion, said the program makes sense – if the state’s primary interest is to maximize profits.

“But it’s the state,” he said. “In the end, its purpose is to provide for the welfare of the citizens. The lottery is at cross-purposes with itself.”

Again, I’m not pulling this stuff out of my ass.  Indeed, the Legislative Declaration that prefaces Washington’s gambling statutes is quite specific:

The public policy of the state of Washington on gambling is to keep the criminal element out of gambling and to promote the social welfare of the people by limiting the nature and scope of gambling activities and by strict regulation and control.

Notice that there’s nothing in that opening statement about maximizing state profits.  Nor should there be.  The social and economic costs of problem and pathological gambling are simply too high.

Problem gambling is a medically recognized addictive behavior associated with a much higher incidence of other addictions, including tobacco, alcohol and drugs, as well as other dangerous behaviors.   And even the lottery’s own problem gambling study suggests that scratch tickets often serve as a gateway to other forms of gambling. So why should the state spend money to promote behavior that harms the welfare of its citizens?

It shouldn’t.

The people who stand to profit the most from this enhanced marketing plan are retailers, and the shareholders at New York based Scientific Games, certainly not the customers, and not state taxpayers, who typically see only 20 cents on the dollar flow back into state coffers out of the more than half billion dollars of revenues the State Lottery takes in annually.

Gov. Gregoire did the right thing in 2006 by instructing the State Lottery to scrap plans to market toward teenagers.  She should once again remind lottery officials that they are not in the business of maximizing revenues at any cost.

Perhaps I was dreaming, but I believe my clock radio awakened me this morning to the sound of Rep. Deb Eddy (D-48) telling KUOW listeners that she supported an income tax.  Of course, most Democratic legislators privately support an income tax, but damn few are willing to talk about it publicly, and it was particularly heartening to hear this kind of talk coming from a suburban Dem.  So maybe we made a little progress on this issue after all?

In the meanwhile, it looks like there’s still quite a bit of unfinished business in Olympia, prompting immediate talk of the governor calling a special session to tie up a few loose ends, and opening the opportunity for some mischief making.  Here’s hoping the progressives in the Democratic caucus can get their shit together and make a little mischief.

After confirming 20 cases of the Mexican swine flu in five states, and four more cases in Canada, U.S. health officials declared a national public health emergency today in order to intensify resources toward diagnosis and prevention, and to release funds to purchase and distribute supplies of anti-viral drugs.

So far there have been no known deaths attributed to this new strain of swine flu outside of Mexico, and only one US victim has thus far required hospitalization.  Still…

Officials said they expect more severe cases as reports of infection multiply.

“You don’t know how much it’s spread, but you’ve got to at least make the assumption that there’s a lot more virus in this country than is seen at the moment,” Jeffrey Koplan, the C.D.C. director from 1998 to 2002, said in a telephone interview.

As always, DemFromCT is following the issue closely on Daily Kos.