– Yes, it’s an event where vile war criminals like Henry Kissinger are feted and celebrated, but you know where else vile war criminals like Henry Kissinger are celebrated? Literally everywhere they go. The Correspondents’ Dinner is just an awkward roast preceded and followed by depressing parties.

– Screwed straight

– Well, it’s nice to see a few people in the beltway calling them out. But it’s been true for decades that the GOP is the problem.

– The Real McKenna.

– Maple Leaf is getting itself a brand-new art walk

– I denied involvement, so the whistleblower must be lying!

What the hell, Cathy McMorris Rodgers?

The bad news is that Republicans in the House, led by Washington State Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA, 5) are pushing an alternative proposal—which McMorris Rodgers, incredibly, said will protect “the true victims of domestic violence and sexual assault”—that does not provide any of the Senate version’s protections for Native American women, gay women, rural women, and some illegal immigrants. (The latter provision is aimed largely at protecting so-called child and mail-order brides brought into the country illegally and under false pretenses.)

McMorris Rodgers’ statement is worth repeating. “House Republicans are committed to protecting the true victims of domestic violence and sexual assault,” she said. “True” victims—those worthy of protection—in other words, do not include Native American women, women who live in remote rural areas, children and women sold into sex slavery, or lesbians.

I realize this is a few days old now, but Rob McKenna, backed into a corner with his not an answer answer, on the Reproductive Parity Act, finally decided he has an opinion on it after all. Fortunately pro-choice groups see right through it.

McKenna falsely claimed today that the Reproductive Parity Act will “put federal funding of women’s health care at risk” by addressing the Weldon Amendment. However, if he read the current legislation he would see that the Weldon Amendment was raised during the legislative session and is fully addressed in the bill as it stands. Under the Weldon Amendment, states may not “discriminate” against providers who do not offer abortion services.

The Reproductive Parity Act has been drafted specifically to protect insurance carriers in the state of Washington against discrimination and will keep our state compliant with the federal requirements of the Weldon Amendment. Every carrier currently selling in Washington covers abortion, and they have no objection to the RPA. Washington has an existing conscience clause for new providers wishing to be admitted into the state that do not want to include abortion in any of their health plans.

In fact, pro-choice leaders Jay Inslee, then a Congressman in the 1st, and Congressmen Jim McDermott (D-7) and Adam Smith (D-9) already sent this letter that you can download here to President Obama addressing the Weldon Amendment and supporting access to women’s health care coverage and the Reproductive Parity Act (HB 2330).

While so much of the nation is going backwards (h/t to Geov) on these issues, it’s good that Washington has the chance to go in the right direction.

It seems recently the comments in non-open threads have been pretty derailed pretty quickly. And so I’d just like to remind people that there is a comment policy that bans, among other things, “deliberately off-topic comments (except in “open threads”), as well as pointless comments on these comments.” And since that time there has been a greater effort to put up open threads. We have at least 3 open threads a week (Monday, Tuesday and Thursday) and the Drinking Liberally and Friday Night Multimedia threads. There’s usually one near the top, so please use them.

Another small bit of good news, Tacoma only has to fill an $11 million dollar gap.

In essence, the city has spent a bit less and collected a bit more than expected through the first three months of this year. Much of the extra money comes from a surge in revenue from licensing and permits – but it’s a mistake to pick any single trend and call it a cause, according to Bob Biles, the city’s finance director, who relayed the pleasant news to council members.

Obviously, there’s a lot of work still to do, and more cuts after several years of economic shit won’t help the city. I wouldn’t say it’s a sign that things are good, but at least things are moving in the right direction.

– In the get-a-job moment, let’s not lose sight of McKenna campaigning on King County’s dime.

– Patty Murray supporting all of the provisions in the Violence Against Women Act.

– Connecticut ends its death penalty.

– Prostitutey is a word.

– As is Torquemadian.

– This Saturday, April 28, please join your friends at Cascade Bicycle Club, Feet First, and Futurewise for a walking tour of Northgate, the biking, walking, and transit neighborhood of the future.

Darryl already linked to Rob McKenna’s non-answer of the Reproductive Parity Act/ telling someone to get a job because they asked him a question. The news is the get a job part, but the Reproductive Parity Act is reveling too:

First off, he doesn’t seem to know the history of the Reproductive Parity Act. I mean his answer, “I’m a lawyer for the State” doesn’t make sense. He seems to think the question referred to a law his office might have to defend. Does he not know it didn’t pass the legislature? Was he confusing it with the pharmacy regulations? It was one of Washington’s pro-choice community’s biggest concerns in the last session and the fact that he isn’t aware of what happened with it doesn’t signal much of a commitment to women’s health.

Now, Rob McKenna is an ostensibly pro-choice politician, and that would be great if that was a simple binary. But this brings up that state government does a lot of things that — even if the governor isn’t trying to outlaw abortion — can have an impact on women’s access to health care including abortion. We’re seeing trap laws in Mississippi and other states that are making it tougher for doctors to perform abortions. While I doubt we’d go that far in Washington, the governor can enact many regulations that might make it tougher for abortion providers. States are pulling or considering pulling funding for Planned Parenthood. In tight budget times, we don’t know if he’ll look to pull that sort of funding even if ostensibly he supports their mission.

Closer to home, the Reproductive Parity Act that he seems not to know anything about passed the state house and looked destined to pass the state senate until the budget shenanigans. It seems reasonable to ask if he’d veto or sign it if it made it to his desk. In the previous session, the legislature passed a bill expanding family planning services to women from 200% of poverty to 250%. While this doesn’t turn on abortion since it’s taking federal money, it’s easy enough to see McKenna using his line item veto on it in a bid to save money (it’s penny wise and pound foolish, but that hasn’t stopped other GOP ideas).

Finally, Republican politicians go from pro-choice to anti when going from a liberal state to trying to get the GOP nomination. Ronald Reagan signed the law that legalized abortion in California before opposing abortion when he ran for president. George Herbert Walker Bush was pro choice until he needed to be anti-choice to be selected as the Vice President. Mitt Romney used to be pro-choice in Massachusetts but he’s anti-choice now. This wouldn’t be too much of an issue if McKenna were adamantly pro-choice and willing to answer all choice questions. But since he isn’t, you have to wonder if this position is here to stay.

A few weeks ago The Nordstrom Rack downtown moved from Second Avenue to Westlake Center. I popped into the store yesterday for the first time looking for shoes and maybe a summery shirt that’s still acceptable to wear to work or a nice hat. There’s nothing in the entire goddamn store that was made in America.

Made in America isn’t necessarily a deal breaker for me, but I look for it and I happily pay a premium for it. And I don’t think just because The Rack is a discounter, that’s enough of a reason to assume all of the clothing I looked at the tags should have been made overseas. The shoes I’m wearing right now were made in America and purchased at The Nordstrom Rack on Second a few years ago. I don’t know if it’s worse in recent years/ at the new location or just a coincidence, but I could usually find Made in America at the old location.

Also, the location of men’s shoes was hard to find.

Look, the Ron Paul dead-enders are super annoying. I have a cousin whose goal seems to make Facebook unreadable by linking to every bit of Ron Paul nonsense ever written on the entire Internet. So I understand the urge to try to push them out of your Legislative District Caucus. But seriously this is the second most pathetic thing Lori Sotelo has done as KC GOP Chair.*

Over the weekend, Republicans in the 37th Legislative District gathered to choose delegates to the state convention.

The caucus started out Saturday morning inside Dimmitt Middle School. But it didn’t end inside the building.

After supporters of Texas Congressman Ron Paul elected one of their own to chair of the meeting, the gathering was booted to an outside basketball court by King County Republican Party Chairwoman Lori Sotelo.

The move came after attendees irritated Sotelo by rejecting her choice to run the caucus – former King County Councilman David Irons.

Instead, the group voted for Tamara Smilanich, a Paul supporter.

That prompted Sotelo to declare the meeting was no longer a Republican Party event – but a Ron Paul campaign event.

Seriously, if you can’t control your caucus even after you basically have a nominee, it isn’t the Paul people who are the problem. The GOP are poised to nominate someone nobody is excited about. And they have seemingly no core values except whatever Obama does, do the opposite. And so someone who has values (often terrible ones, but that’s not the point here) came in and got more delegates in this district. And rather than say fine, whatever they said go outside? Pathetic.

And look, I’ve been to precinct caucuses where LaRouchies showed up. I can’t imagine what would happen if they’d won enough votes to have a serious impact on the next level.** But the best way to prevent that is bringing out enough people to vote for someone else.

[Read more…]

– Well here’s a bulletin on this dog and pony show. Window dressing isn’t going to hack it. Women, the ones to hold families and communities together, are major casualties in the ongoing economic crisis. They and people of color have lost the most jobs, homes, savings and social services.

– Seattle is the coolest city ever, you guys.

– I’m glad to see what they’re doing to improve One Bus Away. And I appreciate the digitizing analog music metaphor.

– The EEOC says you can’t discriminate based on gender identity.

– Baseball in Portland

– Norse faith: 1 Atheists: 0

Reading and watching much of the 2 year anniversary coverage of the BP spill in the Gulf, I’m left with the grating feeling that we don’t know what we’re doing as a society when it comes to big problems that we make. I don’t mean to suggest that these problems are inherently unsolvable, only that we don’t have the solutions going in. We have plans* for what to do when the deep water spills leak, but we don’t have a good job of figuring out what to do when those plans fail.

It isn’t just the oil spills. We’re more than a year into a slow motion disaster in Fukushima. And while these are, of course, a failure of regulation, they’re also a failure of corporate power. I don’t know what the solution is short of shutting down corporations that behave as badly as BP.

[Read more…]

– I’m already excited for Atlas Shrugged VIII the interminable nonsenseing.

– First class of female combat Marines

– It’s hard to feel sorry for the GOP when the Tea Party they nurtured turns against them.

– Map of the day

– Narwhals

– It’s lucky your kids don’t have oil under their skin

Just in case you’re looking for things to do this weekend.

This is usually Lee’s beat, but I’m at Seattle City Hall and I’ll be live blogging a debate between John Toker of Sensible Washington and Alison Holcomb of New Approach Washington. They’ll be debating if I-502 is the right way to legalize marijuana. Also, a quick note about the link: it says to come in at 4th Ave, but the only entrance that was open was 5th; come on down if you’re interested.

6:58 We’re a few minutes away, and the room has a couple dozen people. More empty chairs than people. I don’t see Licata (who is moderating). Toker isn’t sitting at the table up front, but I wouldn’t recognize him if he is in the room.

7:01 Licata is here, and someone has come up to the podium and said we’ll be 10 to 15 minutes late for “hippie time.” Good to get the nonsense stoner jokes out of the way before the debate starts.

7:10 Looks like 40 or so people now and the room is fairly full in front. We’re going to start soon.

7:16 Each side will do opening arguments and then a response. Licata will then ask questions of the presenters that came from people and then audience questions.

7:25 Holcomb is first: Could be an incredibly historic moment. The debate isn’t about how we’re going to legalize marijuana. We only get the choice of yes or no on I-502. There is always a process and evolution, and we’re at a moment in time where we can sling a sledgehammer at the wall of marijuana prohibition and crack it open. The discussion of how do we legalize is academic until one state actually passes one. We can continue talking about it or we can continue talking about it. We can debate the specific compromises and provisions, but it is important that we not lose sight of the forest while we’re examining the trees. We’ve had an explosion of incarceration in the war on drugs in the country. Washington has moved in the right direction: Hempfest, the King County Bar, Sensible Seattle have pushed toward legalization. There will not be a marijuana legalization initiative in California, so it isn’t going to be an option this year. It did better than Meg Whitman at the ballot. Exit surveys discovered that had it been on the ballot this year, it would have been statistically tied. We have to think about why that is and we need to vote yes on 502 to take a step forward.

7:34 John Toker: yes that’s my name. I really wanted to support I-502. How can you come out against legalization? The simple answer is that it doesn’t legalize [corrected later, the original said legalizes, Carl] cannabis in Washington state. When you legalize, you can have as much as you want, you can share it, you can plant it. But I-502 decriminalizes without penalty. If you pass a joint to a friend, it’s still a class C felony. Pseudo legalization is better than what we have, but it’s not a good foundation. We’re not going to have storefronts. The federal government is going to come in and make storefronts stop. I don’t anticipate a single license being issued or see a dime. DUI provision is a problem. There isn’t a clear connection between THC in the blood and impairment, so we don’t want to put that into law. Your crash risk at 5 nanograms is the same as 0. This is bad for patients, but also for heavy users. You’re not going to get an impairment standard off the books once it’s on the books.

7:37 Holcomb’s rebuttal: If you have a proposal where I as an adult will be able to use, and buy that’s legalization. We can talk about Gregoire and we can talk about Arizona where the federal government has never said they’d arrest state workers. On the DUI issue, when you get to 5 nanograms or higher, you are at a higher risk to crash, and the reality is nobody wants impaired drivers on the road, and the voters are not going to ignore that.

7:40 Toker: please read up on the science. Alcohol effects the body in clear ways, and with marijuana we don’t know. Until we know how to measure that, we shouldn’t be going to courts. I’m not going to vote for 502 because I can’t look at patients and take away their driving privileges so I can feel safe with my ounce at home. I would love to come to a store and buy a tin of doobies, but we have attorneys from the US Government who say it isn’t going to happen. Let’s not tell the rest of the nation this is how you get it done.

7:42 Licata is asking questions on the DUI. New Approach WA fact sheet says there’s no impairment at 5 nanograms. Holcomb says it’s more to do with the way the graph looks like, but less than 5 nanograms is the same crash risk, and it goes up at 5 nanograms. This is better than 0 tolerance laws. Toker says evidence is not as good for a numerical limit as for alcohol.

7:48 There was a question about informed consent of a blood or breath test and if that’s going to change under the law. Holcomb says now if officers think impairment is alcohol they can’t do a blood test. We’ll probably move from blood tests to saliva swabs either way as they’re doing in other countries.

Toker says field sobriety test is still the best way to measure impairment. But this is problematic because it assumes you can see impairment from the blood.

8:00 Another question on DUI: Why not include an exclusion for patients. Holcomb: The science doesn’t support that distinction. Not all patients use cannabis the same way, and since not every patient is a heavy user. The political reality is The Seattle Times, The Tacoma News Tribune will say it’s a get out of jail free card for DUI.

Toker: The reason you see the inclusion is in the aftermath of prop 19 where the fear mongering around drug driving sunk it. It’s a political appeal to the middle. This is polls trumping policy. As patients, and as advocates when we’re explaining, we’re winning.

8:03 There are access questions, and Holcomb is making the point that the law doesn’t change medical marijuana, just people selling to adults. Toker says it doesn’t matter because licensing won’t happen. Holcomb says we will have dispensaries at the state, and even if Gregoire could do away with them, we’ll have licensing at the local level even if the state doesn’t.

8:12 We’re having audience questions. Wouldn’t repeal be better? This is a narrow decriminalization. Why cling to the idea that misinformation is the best way to write the law. Holcomb: The short answer is you have identified the problem: we have a culture that has been misinformed for decades, and that’s the population we have to ask to do something new. Most voters in 2006 didn’t realize we had a medical marijuana law and they didn’t know we had misdemeanor laws on the books. We did education all up until this year, and voters have moved a great deal, but where we are right now 55% support ballot title for 502. That’s not 70%, and the voters aren’t ready for full repeal. That’s how we did alcohol, but that’s not the culture. We’re not in the same place as we were with alcohol.

8:21 Chuck from Cannabis Defense Coalition. Asking about taxes. With the tax structure that 502 builds, the state will collect twice as much as the grower, and there will be a raise in price. You’re going to have 2 price points for medical and recreational marijuana. Holcomb: the tax structure is by percentage. The cost is high because there’s a risk cost so the prices will come down. You’ll see growers adjust their prices down because we’re in a capitalist society. Toker: I don’t think this means prohibition goes away, so prices won’t go down.

8:32 Mimi asked about patients who wants to drive. I am not impaired. I will be over the limit, but I am not impaired. A lot of patients don’t have bus service, and can’t walk. What’s the plan for people who aren’t allowed to drive? Holcomb: There have been marijuana users for a very long time. The law is that you can’t be pulled over if you’re not exhibiting impairment, and that won’t change with 502. A police officer can’t look at you to see your THC count. They’ll still have to have reasonable suspicion. People are in prison for less than 5 nanogram per millimeter. We have had 0 tolerance THC laws in this country. If we could expect a rash of people for cannabis DUI, we would have seen that by now.

8:42 Why is it a felony for two adults to pass a joint if it’s legalization? Holcomb: when is the last time you heard of someone arrested for passing a joint in Washington? The delivery offense is already on the books because people are selling marijuana. No police officer is going to waste time on people passing a joint.

8:47 A patient who was raided in 2010. The laws are not applied in the same manner in East and West in this state. Why should we believe it will be any different? Holcomb: Right now medical marijuana doesn’t make it legal to poses. After you’ve spent a night in jail, you can present an affirmative defense. It doesn’t play that way in Seattle, but it does in Okanogan County. The code needs to change, so people can posses anywhere in the state.

8:51 Closing arguments. Holcomb: These issues are going to be continued to be debated up to and after November 6. But ask yourself will you be in a better position to advocate your point of view if Washington State has said yes to legalization or not. There isn’t another option after 502.

Toker: It’s pretty clear we’ve already lost if you vote yes or no with the DUI clause. We’re not going to get the chance to really change things. It’s prohibition 2.0. You’re going to have to say to patients you’re going to have to sacrifice your driving rights for me to have an ounce. Alison has put out a good faith effort: There are good steps forward, but there is a step backward.

9:02 Hopefully I did a good job conveying this. I’m glad we’ve been able to have the conversation. A quick reading back over this, I think I gave Holcomb more time than she took, and that’s not me editorializing but the fact that she often spoke first, and I can’t type as fast as they spoke. I came in leaning toward the initiative, and I’m still there.

Another advantage of mass transit.

Since the opening of Beacon Hill Station, many people who ride bikes have figured out that for a couple bucks, Link Light Rail will make one of Seattle’s mightiest hills disappear. Just hop on at Pioneer Square Station and two stops and an elevator later you are at the top of the hill.

Michael van Baker at the SunBreak asks: Will University Link do the same to Capitol Hill?

It is another thing that makes bike riding easier. I’m more a tootle around town person than a go for a 40 mile ride person. So I can usually get up the hills. But it is another nice option to have. Also, if you get caught in a storm, you have aren’t stuck in the middle of the rain.