Goldy

Yup, that’s what I’m listening to.  Make of it what you want.

NPR’s Day to Day has been running an excellent series on autism, and I encourage you to listen to it all, but I was particularly struck by the final episode that ran yesterday afternoon, featuring a mother taking her son to a specialist:  “Autism: Helping Children Connect.”

As a parent, it was heart-wrenching listening to this woman receive the diagnosis that her son did indeed suffer from autism, but even more so listening to her recall how hard it was to concentrate on the doctor’s prescribed course of treatment while worrying how she would pay for this single office visit, let alone a lifetime of intensive therapy.  Just listen to this brief, three minute clip, and try to keep the tears from welling up in your eyes:

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

There is a lot at stake in the November election, but perhaps the issue that will have the deepest and most enduring impact on the lives of most American families is that of health care.  Sen. John McCain proposes tax credits to make purchasing private health insurance more affordable, while Sen. Barack Obama promises universal health coverage for all Americans.

No, Sen. Obama’s plan is not the more sweeping single-payer system that many of us would prefer, but it is sweeping nonetheless, bringing all Americans into our health care system, and guaranteeing a minimum level of care.  And yes, we’ve been promised this before, but with a Democratic president and strong Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, we might have our best chance at real reform in more than 40 years.

The difference between the two health care proposals couldn’t be more stark, and it is a difference rooted in a genuine philosophical disagreement.  Sen. Obama believes that there are some problems that are best addressed by a government working to raise the standard of living for all its citizens, whereas Sen. McCain believes that all our problems—including whether a young, autistic boy gets the therapy he desperately needs—are best addressed by market forces.

Sen. Obama’s plan intends to address the needs of all our families, while Sen. McCain’s plan intends to deliver more of the same… which in the case of this particular mother and her autistic son, means delivering nothing at all.

That’s the reason why Sen. McCain would prefer to talk about pigs and lipstick, rather than actually issues.  Because if the majority of Americans truly understood where he stands on the issues—and what his stance ultimately means for all of us—he wouldn’t stand a chance this November.

The only thing green about the anti-light rail “No on Prop 1” campaign are the greenbacks behind it, mostly coming from the deep pockets of the usual pro-roads/anti-transit suspects:  Kemper Freeman Jr., Mark Baerwaldt and the rest of the choo-choos equal communism crowd.  But according to The Stranger’s Erica C. Barnett, that hasn’t stopped the No campaign from attempting a little astroturffing.

Lacking the Sierra Club’s green gravitas, the anti-Prop. 1 campaign has seized on a little-known, 32-year-old political consultant named Ezra Eickmeyer—a self-proclaimed environmentalist whose list of industrial and business lobbying clients outweighs his thin environmental résumé.

Eickmeyer’s clients include a mining company that’s seeking to ship sand and gravel on barges from the Hood Canal, two septic-system manufacturers, and a Seattle real-estate developer. Although Eickmeyer puts an environmental spin on his choice of clients—for example, he argues that barges produce fewer greenhouse-gas emissions than trucks—numerous lobbyists and environmentalists say they either haven’t heard of Eickmeyer or don’t regard him as an ally. … [E]ven folks like the Master Builders’ Scott Hildebrand are skeptical—he notes, “I don’t know exactly who Ezra is associated with“…

Huh.  I don’t know exactly who Ezra is associated with either, but looking at his Tribe.Net profile (via Google’s cache), perhaps his environmental credentials are a product of his “magickal work”?

I live many paradoxes. I am a feral pagan with 9 acres creating an intentional community. I also am a professional contract lobbyist and political operative. I work for a mixture of corporate, small business, political, and environmental interests. I am a global warming activist and dedicated father and husband. I grew up in a very small town and now live outside an even smaller one where we are beginning to farm. I also travel frequently in a fancy car wearing suits and playing politics. I come from the Libertarian arm of the Democratic Party, meaning that I am a fairly anti-authoritarian liberal (except when it comes to the regulation of business). I have a very deep relationship with the creator/spirit and do a lot of praying and magickal work.

My wife and I are dedicated polyamorous and thinking it would be pretty cool if we met another couple interested in poly family-raising . . .

Yup, you can’t get much more paradoxical than a self-proclaimed “global warming activist” in his “fancy car,” whoring himself out to Kemper Freeman Jr., in an effort to kill our region’s last best chance at expanded clean, electric light rail.

Not that Eickmeyer’s personal life has anything to do with the anti-rail campaign.  But then, neither does environmentalism.

Yet another example of Republican values:

A “culture of substance abuse and promiscuity” existed in the federal agency that handles royalty payments from oil companies, including sexual encounters between government employees and industry representatives, according to a memorandum released today.

[…] “When confronted by our investigators, none of the employees involved displayed remorse.”

FYI, from news accounts, it is unclear whether the drilling occurred on or off shore.

I just got off a media conference call with Obama Campaign National Director of Latino Vote Temo Figueroa, as well as members of the Washington Latino Vote Project and the newly announced Latinos for Obama Steering Committee, where we were promised an unprecedented Latino outreach program in Washington state between now and the election.

“This election will be determined by the Latino vote,” Figueroa told the participants, predicting that a handful of swing states will be decided by a few thousand votes.  If those states are New Mexico, Colorado and Arizona, I’m guessing Figueroa is exactly right, potentially providing Obama a mountain state swing that could rewrite the electoral map.

As for Washington state, I’m guessing we’re not quite as big a priority, even with the recent SurveyUSA poll showing the presidential race here narrowing to within four points… which is shame because a strong Latino turnout would benefit Democrats up and down the ticket.  So far the Obama campaign has been absent from our airwaves, and I haven’t heard any hint of a TV buy, Latino or otherwise, hitting WA markets anytime soon.

That said, the state Dems’ Latino outreach program is “unprecedented,” consisting of a statewide director, four paid field operatives, plus a Latinos for Obama committee populated with an impressive array of elected officials and other civic leaders.

According to Figueroa, Latinos comprise about 4.1 percent of Washington’s eligible voters (and growing), but as many as 102,000 of these eligible Latinos remain unregistered.  If the Dems can leverage the Obama campaign to dramatically increase both registration and turnout, it won’t just cushion the margin at the top of the ticket and generate longer coattails further down, it could result in a substantial electoral shift for years to come, especially in areas of the state that haven’t been kind to Democrats in recent elections.

We’ll see.

Because nothing keeps your family safer than having a gun in the house:

The father of a 4-year-old Cottage Grove boy says his child loaded a bullet into a borrowed gun and accidentally shot himself… Doctors removed the bullet, which had slightly penetrated his skull.

[…]  The gun was unloaded, but the boy found a smaller bullet that was the wrong size, and it still fired when loaded in the gun.

You mean the toddler found a “smaller bullet,” just lying around?  Jesus… doesn’t the boy’s father know that small objects like that can be a choking hazard?

When my daughter was that age, I never let her play with any cartridge smaller than a .308 Winchester.  This father should get a clue.

I suppose, if the American people want Sarah Palin a 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency, that’s up to them, but as for me, I’d fear for my liberty should she ever take the reins of our government.

Nazi Germany banned books.  The Soviet Union banned books.  Saudi Arabia bans books.  But a small town American mayor firing a librarian for her lack of political compliance?  You’d think that would be a career killer for anybody trying to climb the political ladder in, you know… a democracy.

As a blogger, I love to pepper my posts with personal anecdotes, reality being the sharpest rhetorical bolt in any writer’s quiver. But while I usually try to stay as close to the facts as possible, this post’s story has been generously fictionalized, the names and details altered to protect the participants of the real life anecdote I would prefer to tell.

For to do otherwise could get a loved one convicted of murder.

At the center of the story is a family matriarch, let’s just call her Aunt Sarah, a spry old lady, decades a widow, who seemed to cherish her independence almost as much as she did her grand kids, and who one day in her early eighties was suddenly and unexpectedly diagnosed with end-stage cancer.  Her doctor thought it started in her lungs, but we’ll never know for sure, for despite the fact that she had shown few symptoms, it had already metastasized throughout her body, the doctors giving her little more than six months to live.  She would be dead in three.

The rapid progress of her illness was quite stunning, even to a family that had been ravaged by cancer.  My father, his only sibling, three out of four grandparents (the fourth having died young of a bum heart), and a  plurality of great aunts and uncles have fought the disease, some successfully, some not. But never have I seen such a precipitous decline, from diagnosis to death, as that of Aunt Sarah.

Only three weeks after stubbornly driving herself to the doctor’s office to receive her own death sentence, Aunt Sarah was mostly bedridden, the pain of the advancing tumors almost unbearable, and by six weeks the cancer had clearly started to eat away at her brain.  Aunt Sarah, in her fashion, defiantly insisted that she wanted to die in her own home, and her children dutifully obliged.  Home hospice care was arranged, round the clock aides hired, and a rotating vigil of sorts informally organized, family members coming to sit by her side and pay their last respects to the living, while Aunt Sarah’s body and mind withered away before our eyes.

By the third month Aunt Sarah appeared gone, although her body continued to linger on.  For days she had lay there, mouth ajar, eyes slightly open but apparently unseeing, her body motionless but for her long, labored breaths and an occasional, wracking shudder that seemed to start at her toes and exit through her mouth in a low, pleading groan.

I was there that afternoon when a doctor (or perhaps a hospice nurse) came by on a routine visit, and pronounced that Aunt Sarah would soon pass on—maybe a few days, or a week at most.  Aunt Sarah’s daughter, who by this point was staying with her around the clock, was concerned that she appeared to be in pain, and so the doctor carefully instructed her in the use of a morphine drip, providing ample medication to last the week.

On the recommended dosage he was quite specific.  “This much,” he instructed, “should ease any suffering, but if you notice any changes in her breathing, please feel free to give me a call.”  Clear enough.  “But this much,” he warned, indicating a significantly larger dosage, “Well, you have to be careful not give her too much, or else her breathing will gradually slow and eventually stop, as she peacefully drifts off into a gentle, quiet and painless death.”  There was a brief pause, the silence broken only by Aunt Sarah’s gasps for air.  Nobody said anything, nor needed to.   We thanked the doctor, and gave our goodbyes.

That night, Aunt Sarah died in her sleep.

No, that story did not actually happen, at least not exactly in that way, but something like this did occur in my family, as it does in many other families every day, and throughout the nation.  Some doctors choose to provide the information and the medication necessary to humanely terminate the life of a dying patient, and some families choose to act on it.  If “Aunt Sarah’s” daughter did indeed up the dosage, easing her mother off into a peaceful death, it was an act of love and compassion.  And it was most certainly illegal.

And it would still be illegal under the terms of I-1000, the controversial Death with Dignity initiative on Washington’s ballot this fall, despite the dire exhortations of its opponents.

I-1000 does not authorize euthanasia or physician assisted suicide; it merely allows physicians, under certain narrow circumstances, to prescribe a lethal dose of medication to terminally ill patients for self-administration.  And it is not, as Oregon’s decade old measure has proven, a slippery slope toward legalizing the very common practice that shortened “Aunt Sarah’s” suffering, let alone a path toward Soylent Green style suicide centers.

To argue that one inevitably leads to the other ignores two realities, the first, a political reality in which I-1000, as limited as it is, will barely pass if it passes at all, a context within even the thought of a successful euthanasia initiative is a political fantasy.  The second reality is that individuals, families and physicians already make these difficult and painful decisions everyday—as was made in the case of “Aunt Sarah”—unregulated, un-talked about, and totally outside the law.

We cannot prevent terminally ill patients from choosing to end their own lives, we can merely make this option more difficult and more painful for them and their families.  Likewise, while our current legal prohibition on mercy saves no lives, it does promote suffering, discouraging some doctors from prescribing adequate pain relief out of fear of legal consequences should the patient or family choose to administer a lethal dose.  It is a prohibition that simply does not work, and as such, if the goal is to protect the vulnerable, it is a goal that would be better served by pragmatic regulations than by moral platitudes.

Initiative opponents scoff at a “right to die,” but what they’re really telling us is that there is only one right way to die: apparently, of natural causes, no matter how long or how painful the death.  Personally, having watched close family members suffer through exactly that, I know what decision I would make in a similar situation, with or without my government’s blessing.

A terminally ill patient, under current law, can legally buy themselves a handgun and ammunition, but not a lethal dose of medication.  Go figure.  And then go out and vote Yes on I-1000.

See, a video like this… this is exactly the kind of race-baiting dirty trick you’d expect from the Republicans… and we’d never want to stoop to their level, even if it meant the difference between winning or losing an election… so whatever you do, do NOT, under any circumstances, pass it along.  Do not email this link to friends or coworkers, and do not embed this video in your own websites.  Because if you do, this video might go viral, especially in southern toss-up states like Virginia and North Carolina where it might do the most damage, and we just wouldn’t want that to happen.  Because it would be wrong.  Very, very wrong.

And while you’re at it, that email that’s been going around containing the list of books Sarah Palin tried to get banned from the Wasilla library? It’s not true. Sure, Palin did repeatedly ask the city librarian how one would go about banning books, and when she replied to the mayor that she would not be all right with such a request, Palin demanded her resignation.  But as far as we know, Palin never issued any written list of the books she wanted banned.

So please, please, if you’ve received this damaging, slightly misleading email, delete it, and absolutely positively do not pass it on. (And if you haven’t received the email, under no circumstances should you conveniently copy it from here.) Indeed, the very worst thing you could do would be to forward this email to your entire address book—repeatedly—because to do so would be dishonest, irresponsible and politically effective… you know, just like that bogus “Obama is a Muslim” email that’s likely cost him untold numbers of the “I believe anything I read in my email” vote.  And we’re better than that.

So the black dude fathering Bristol’s baby and the banned book things…?  Shhhh.

I’m just sayin’….

The Seattle Times reports today that the US Chamber of Commerce is lying on Dave Reichert’s behalf in radio ads that falsely accuse Darcy Burner of supporting “higher taxes on families with children.”  Imagine that.

The radio spot, which started airing Friday in local markets, is part of a $20 million national ad buy with which the U.S. Chamber is supporting some House and Senate candidates.

And that’s on top of the hundreds of millions of dollars the Chamber has spent over the past half decade or so, backing conservative, pro-business candidates in local judicial, executive and legislative races nationwide.  We’re talking maybe half a billion dollars from the US Chamber alone.

One of the criticisms I’ve heard of Darcy’s 2006 campaign was her failure to effectively fight back against the many lies that were told by Reichert and his surrogates, but the 2008 campaign seems much more responsive.  In fact, they’ve already cut a new radio ad that will start running tonight on both KOMO and KIRO:

[audio:http://horsesass.org/wp-content/uploads/burner_special_interest_friends_v2.mp3]

It’ll take of lot of work for Darcy to win in November, but job one is refuting the lies before they have time to take hold.

There is a remarkable guest column in the Seattle P-I from the Colorado state trooper charged with driving Gov. Chris Gregoire around Denver during the Democratic National Convention… a first person evaluation of the Governor from a self-described Republican.  While he doesn’t necessarily agree with Gov. Gregoire on every issue, he was impressed with her both as a person and a politician:

Gregoire may be a strong advocate for her party, but she is not a “partisan” in the way the term has recently become defined.

[…] I’ve spent much of my 28 years in law enforcement as an investigator, interacting with thousands of people and making judgments on their truthfulness and character.

My conclusions after spending time as a “fly on the wall” with Gregoire is that she is a person of integrity who has the interest of her state at heart and puts that interest above her own.

I too have had the opportunity for a little face time with Gov. Gregoire, and I too don’t agree with her on all the issues (particularly tax issues, where she has failed to take the lead on moving toward a more progressive and sustainable tax structure).  And I have drawn the exact same conclusions.

Indeed, my biggest criticism of the Governor and the way she has run both her office and her campaign is that she has not been partisan enough. At times it feels as if she thinks that she is above politics, reluctant to dirty her hands in what at times can be a very dirty business… a reluctance that can be a terrible liability when facing an opponent who clearly has no compunction about about wallowing in the mud.