The Politics Blog at The Olympian reports that the RNC is targeting Rep. Brian Baird (WA-03) with negative ads over health care reform. And surprise, surprise, the Republican ad has false information in it.

The ad includes an obvious false claim about the extent to which Democrats have recently added to the national debt. That outstanding public debt is $11.6 trillion, according to the U.S. Treasury’s Bureau of the Public Debt — more than $10 trillion of it run up before President Obama took office. (Perhaps the RNC meant deficit, not debt.)

Yeah, right, just another innocent error from the Republicans.

Anyhow, folks should probably be calling their members of Congress to tell them we need health care reform with the public option NOW. The righties are good at working their wingnuts into a lather, so if nothing else folks in the Congressional offices could stand to hear from a wider range of citizens about how we really, really have to fix the health care system, and that inaction is not acceptable.

But I suppose if you want to have some fun while calling you can say “Hi, I’m calling about Obama’s birth certificate” and then go “just kidding!”

Think Progress notes that thousands of formerly classified images that show the impact of global warming on the Arctic and elsewhere, including Washington’s South Cascade Glacier, have been released after a group of scientists filed a declassification request. This is truly unnerving stuff, click through if you wish. The photos of the Beaufort Sea speak for themselves.

And since it’s very hot today, I get to point out to certain unsound pinheads that climate change is real, since they always claim it’s not whenever they see a snowflake.

I suppose now they’ll just start saying that the South Cascade Glacier is actually in Kenya or something.

Republicans are horrified at the thought of the government being involved in your health care. Unless you’re a woman of child-bearing age, or use a non-traditional medicine or face a terminal illness, of course.

Unsurprisingly, it isn’t at all terrible, in fact it’s rather good, if you look at rankings from a wide range of groups that aren’t hired by Boeing.

The first thing that has to happen to our discourse is that people stop equating unionization with “bad for business.” Yes, the bidness guys and gals (and certain newspaper owners) want everyone to think that, but that’s only because it’s easier for management to blame unions than to look in the mirror. A highly trained, skilled and well compensated work force is an asset to any region.

Sounds to me like the Labor Council is perfectly willing to entertain constructive suggestions, but I’m guessing “no strike clauses or else” may not be considered constructive. It’s called “bargaining,” not “the unions should give in because they’re unions.”

I truly do not understand why everyone on the right gets to act in their self interest and celebrate it, while anyone to the left-center who does so is vilified. I guess thirty or so years of neo-liberalism permanently reduced the capacity of traditional media and political leadership to do anything but get down on bended knee when the magic word “jobs” is incanted to protect policies that benefit only the business side of the equation.

For the umpteen millionth time, business should have a seat at the table, but problems inevitably arise as they always want to own the table, the chairs, the room and everyone in it, and then attack anyone who objects. It’s ridiculous, and hopefully labor’s new-found voice will start to plow some new ground in this state.

If you’ve had puppies in your home you know why. Ahh, isn’t she cute? We named her Sarah.

First she bit me, then she peed on my shoe. Later she accused me of attacking her and refused to be our puppy any more. We’re giving her a book contract.

Strange Bedfellows at the P-I reports that labor is coming up with a new way of supporting candidates, although I’m not sure I’d agree with their headline that includes the term “fundraising war.” Sounds more like moving into the more modern, agile internet age to me.

The Washington State Labor Council on Monday said it has created a new political action committee that would funnel money directly to candidates it feels supports their causes and not to House and Senate party funds controlled by party bosses. Washington State Labor Council President Rick Bender said labor had previously given hundreds of thousands of dollars to those funds

Now the Labor Council will urge members and individual unions to give to the ‘Don’t Invest in More Excuse’ (DIME) PAC. Bender also said the Labor Council would change how it evaluates candidates and look beyond individual votes taken. Bender said unions will take a more holistic approach, considering things like action not taken as opposed to how politicians vote on certain bills.

Yeah, the days of dumping money into party committees probably should have ended long ago. There’s still a place for that, and there’s no reason the state labor council (or other groups) can’t pump money into party committees as situations warrant. But the system of kissing rings in Olympia has broken down, at least as I see it from SW Washington. Candidates that could have scored major upsets have been sold short, and squishy, milquetoast types get an automatic nod. That’s a sign of institutional sclerosis.

Sizing up political candidates is an inexact science anyhow, and it would be great to see this labor initiative develop into a flexible apparatus that can put pressure on Republicans and Democrats who act like Republicans, and maybe throw some money at supposed long shots now and again. Kind of a “49 district” strategy, if you will. Whether people like it or not, there is a “gamesmanship” aspect to politics, and for too long our side has been hampered by outdated traditions and tactics.

There’s no logical reason that party institutions need to have such overwhelming control, and you can make the argument that a great deal can be done outside normal party channels. Obviously labor is only one (albeit important) constituent part of the party. Could this be the beginning of a new and vibrant era where all progressives support each other to a greater degree?

If there’s one hallmark of progressivism, it’s a hope to wed practical ideas with hopeful ideals. Busting up the business as usual, business lobbyist clique in Olympia is a necessary precondition to advancing all progressive causes, from education to health care to protecting the environment. Sure, there will be differences and bumps along the way, but at long last it appears labor has determined that it should practice a more nuanced and effective form of politics.

Please don’t misunderstand me, it’s quite valuable to have a strong party structure, and the ranks of the Democratic Party in this state are filled with many fantastic, talented individuals. It’s the party leadership that has failed, not the rank and file.

But this seems to represent a fundamental change in how Democrats are going to be elected. I think we’re all going to be better off because of the labor decision.

Reporter Stephanie Rice at The Columbian tells the story of a former police officer who spent nearly 20 years in prison for allegedly raping his own children, and the now the adult children have told a court it never happened and that they made the accusations as children after intense pressure by a former detective. Please click through and read the whole story if you wish.

But the Clark County prosecutor’s office is “not waving the white flag,” as reporter Rice writes, even though the former police officer received a commutation from Gary Locke in 2004. Amazingly, it sounds like prosecutors are actually considering appealing to the Supreme Court if the charges are wiped out.

This story is why we need good reporters, and more of them. The Columbian deserves credit on this story.

There is, of course, a public watchdog function that newspapers perform, as something seems to be seriously amiss at the office of Clark County Prosecutor Art Curtis. Readers may recall that Oregonian columnist Steve Duin had a column on July 2 about a Clark County man wrongly charge with luring of a child, despite having ironclad proof that he was elsewhere. The public has a right to know why Art Curtis’s office is conducting itself in this fashion.

We all want the bad guys to be caught, and have put them away. But our Founding Fathers came up with some pretty amazingly sound rules to follow, like the right to face one’s accuser. While that’s admittedly problematic when it involves children, it places an extra burden on police and prosecutors to make sure they have the right guy. That’s not always easy, and the good cops and the good prosecutors deserve our eternal thanks, but when serious screw-ups occur there needs to be some accountability.

Andrea James, the P-I’s aerospace reporter, has a post concerning the views of Richard Aboulafia, an industry analyst with the Teal Group. I guess it’s not just foul tempered bloggers like me who are amazed at what has become of Boeing and the 787. From James’ post (emphasis mine:)

Boeing’s latest delay — its fifth — and purchase of supplier Vought combine to prove that the company’s strategy of saving money from outsourcing work to suppliers “has been dwarfed by the cost of remedying the damage wrought by that strategy.”

“This is all seriously bad,” Aboulafia said. “As we digested the news, I paused to reflect on just what a tremendous drug-like rush the 787 program once was, and just what a ghastly let down it has become.”

What was supposed to be a category killer has turned out to be even worse than the “commercially irrelevant” Airbus A380, Aboulafia said. Because, at least the A380 flies.

James goes on to quote Aboulafia, there’s some interesting history there about the McDonnell Douglas-Boeing marriage in the late ’90’s. It’s a familiar story for those familiar with late 20th-Century and early 21st Century American “capitalism.”

So what say before our entire state’s political class goes on bended knee to Chicago, promising the sun, moon, stars and no unions, they take a good, hard look at Boeing? Yes, the company is an historic and important part of this state. I can’t even imagine how hard this is for long-time Boeing folks. The company that helped win World War II and build the Pacific Northwest’s industrial base is now a basket case.

Boeing is apparently in seriously deep shit, folks.

But a lot of entities, including households, local governments and educational institutions are also in deep shit, and the people simply can’t afford any ill-considered and hasty offers to a company whose management has so clearly dug its own hole. It would be one thing if Boeing management had a good attitude, but in trying to blame unions for their woes they have revealed just how craven they really are.

The first and non-negotiable starting point should be that Boeing stop demanding no strike clauses and other union-busting tactics, and the second non-negotiable starting point is that Boeing commit to keeping assembly jobs in Washington state.

Absent those two things, there’s really not much to say. Playing the destructive game of pitting locality versus locality is ultimately self-defeating, both for workers here and in South Carolina. This isn’t a basketball team, folks, although the basic technique is the same. Threaten, threaten, threaten, and then threaten some more.

We all know how good Democrats are at giving away the store before negotiations even start, so for once in the history of the universe it would be nice to see some Dems start out strong and maybe even shove management’s face in their failures a little bit. Sure, it would be political grandstanding, but not any worse than say, calling the cops. Just sayin’.

The taxpayers of this state are already subsidizing the faltering newspaper industry with a massive tax break, for no good reason that I can think of, and likely to no useful effect either, as the newspapers still don’t understand the new landscape.

But the titans of industry and their boosters inevitably demand our money when they screw the pooch with bad business decisions. What we’ve seen happen at the national level is that people wake up to a new round of layoffs followed by a new round of executive bonuses. The least our political class here could do is make sure we don’t throw any good money after bad in the aerospace sector, and make sure that any efforts to assist Boeing are done with the interests of all the citizenry in mind, not just executives and stockholders.

If anyone is helping advance the distinctly remote possibility that the United States will ever see any true form of “socialism,” it’s the fine folks at AIG.

Apocryphal or not, Marie Antoinette’s supposed rejoinder “let them eat cake” certainly comes to mind.

Put that in your teabag and smoke it, Rick Santelli!

Robert Reich doesn’t buy that there will be a quick recovery. In fact, in his view, there is a radically re-shaped economy and talking about a “V” shaped recession or a “U” shaped recession probably isn’t accurate.

Personally, I don’t buy into either camp. In a recession this deep, recovery doesn’t depend on investors. It depends on consumers who, after all, are 70 percent of the U.S. economy. And this time consumers got really whacked. Until consumers start spending again, you can forget any recovery, V or U shaped.

Problem is, consumers won’t start spending until they have money in their pockets and feel reasonably secure. But they don’t have the money, and it’s hard to see where it will come from. They can’t borrow. Their homes are worth a fraction of what they were before, so say goodbye to home equity loans and refinancings. One out of ten home owners is under water — owing more on their homes than their homes are worth. Unemployment continues to rise, and number of hours at work continues to drop. Those who can are saving. Those who can’t are hunkering down, as they must.

Eventually consumers will replace cars and appliances and other stuff that wears out, but a recovery can’t be built on replacements. Don’t expect businesses to invest much more without lots of consumers hankering after lots of new stuff. And don’t rely on exports. The global economy is contracting.

Then one comes across stuff like this from Firedog Lake:

Workers returned Tuesday to the job at Stella D’Oro Biscuit Co. in the Bronx after a judge ordered the company reinstate the 136 employees who had remained strong throughout a brutal 11-month strike. But before they could even walk through the doors, they were greeted with the anti-union response by the company’s private equity firm owners, the 21st century’s mutation of the robber barons: Brynwood Partners announced it would shut down operations in October. (“Private equity firms” is the euphemism those leveraged buyout corporations adopted after leveraged buyout got a bad name in the 1980s.)

Too often in our “national discourse,” such that it is, income inequality is discussed in solely moral terms. There’s also a utilitarian side, in that consumers who are under economic pressure are not going to spend freely. All those traders who cheered Rick Santelli in the spring might want to stick that in their cigar and smoke it.

If a rising tide lifts all boats, as the old aphorism goes, then maybe we really do need a major reform of labor laws, as the author at Firedog Lake suggests, so that the playing field is less slanted towards corporations and ultra-wealthy investors. For some reason trying to destroy unions is considered a good business practice in this country, and it creates an irrational distortion in the labor marketplace.

The right to form unions and bargain collectively is not only the law, it is a birthright to all Americans that was paid for in blood. Somehow many other industrial democracies manage to have large unions and still make great stuff. You kind of wonder if some of the Wall Street types ever stop to consider whether unionized workers built their fancy sports car. Probably not is my guess.

As long as right-to-starve states and anti-union ideologues at major corporations are allowed to relentlessly attack wages and benefits, the nation faces a zero-sum game where producing quality products and services takes a back seat to screwing over regular folks, usually to the sound of cheers from Wall Street. While this system benefits a relative few in the financial sector, it’s been a disaster for wide swaths of the economy.

If Reich is correct that there will be a “new economy,” the shape that it takes is a legitimate topic for debate for all Americans.

Just a quick follow-up on the community response down here in Clark County to the racist graffiti incident. From The Columbian:

A couple of members of the Scott family watched as technicians first sprayed an alcohol-based mixture to dissolve the spray paint and then power-washed it away.

The cleanup effort was the first in a YWCA campaign to respond to all incidents of hate graffiti in Clark County, said YWCA social change program director Jay Atwood.

The project was financed by community donations; the remaining money will go into a hate-incidents fund to cover future cases.

“When you have intense hate, we feel the community should really rally around,” Atwood said.

And rally, they did. Following media coverage of the incident, Vancouver City Councilman Tim Leavitt drafted an anti-racism resolution for the city, which council members unanimously passed, and local blogger Chris Bassett, the YWCA and Clark County Sheriff’s Office partnered to set up the fund.

The Columbian also reports that the Vancouver City Council unanimously passed a resolution denouncing racism, drafted by council member Tim Leavitt.

I’ve learned that there are many fine community leaders, including some Legislators and other current and past elected officials, as well as non-profit leaders, who worked behind the scenes to develop this response. If this sort of thing keeps happening, there is now a more permanent fund in place to deal with it. Thanks again to everyone who donated last year and this to the ad-hoc fund set up by Bassett, it’s great that some folks in the Puget Sound region would also take the time and trouble to donate some bucks.

Sure, you can’t cure the world of all its ills, but you can make sure that the spray paint is cleaned up and tell everyone that spray-painting swastikas and other hateful messages aimed at a high school girl (or anyone) is just an awful thing to do.

Not being silent is sometimes the best thing to be done.

If people standing up against racism upsets some people, that’s their problem.

From the headquarters newspaper of Boeing (that would be The Chicago Tribune:)

Unless Boeing Co. can win a long-term contract that bars strikes by its largest union, the aerospace company will build a second production line for its new 787 jetliner outside of Washington state, members of the state’s congressional delegation say.

Because, you know, the 787 has become an international punch line, because of, er, um, stuff that kind of happened.

On Tuesday, Boeing said it would pay $580 million for a Vought Aircraft Industries plant in North Charleston, S.C., that makes large sections of its much-delayed 787.

Deliveries of the 787 have been postponed by nearly two years partly because of problems with components made by suppliers and work that suppliers didn’t complete. Those problems are expected to cost Boeing billions of dollars in added expenses and penalties.(emphasis mine)

Boeing is using suppliers from around the world to build large sections of the plane that are later assembled at the company’s commercial aircraft plant in Everett, north of Seattle. Boeing has booked orders for a record 850 of the planes, though some 60 orders have been canceled so far this year.

So the problems from “suppliers around the world,” many of them presumably non-union, mean the Boeing lapdogs in this state should um, er, do something.

Gregoire said that before Boeing decides on where to place a second 787 line, she plans to go to company headquarters in Chicago and make the case for the Puget Sound region before Boeing’s board.

Gregoire said a no-strike agreement is an ambitious goal for Boeing, and is something that cannot be achieved through legislation. Dicks said any such agreement would have to involve some kind of binding independent arbitration of disputes between Boeing and the Machinists.

Yeah, because nothing would make more sense than for Boeing to move production to right-to-starve states where inferior parts were made, or in some cases, not made. You know, the places that screwed things up for the 787 in the first place. Somehow, in Boeing-logic-land, this is the fault of unions.

Nobody wants to see Washington state workers lose jobs, but there should be limits to this kind of pathetic and transparent corporate blackmail. A “no strike clause” is in reality a “no union clause;” they might as well just dissolve the machinists’ union.

Which is, obviously, the point. Good luck with this, elected Dems. You’re going to need it.

Victoria Jackson, who made a career out of acting stupid on SNL, serves up something that is rather hard to characterize.

Obama legally kills babies and now he can legally kill Grandmas!

Hitler did this. He killed the weak, the sick, the old, and babies and races/religions he didn’t like. Hitler also controlled the media. (Where’s the public debate between scientists on “Climate Change/Global Warming?”) Hitler had the VW bug invented as the state car. What will O’s nationalized car be? So… kill off the weak. That’s the plan. Tax the workers to death. Erase the middle class. Sounds like the evil governments we studied in high school long ago. The evil governments were : kings, oligarchies, facist, socialist, and communist. Now it’s called the Obama Administration. Sounds like candy or a rock band.

Believe it or not, the piece gets better (or worse, depending of course on your point of view and mood) from there, as Jackson goes on to harass an innocent Burbank gift shop owner with wingnut ramblings, then wonders why she is met with silence.

I wonder if Jackson and Dennis Miller hang around Burbank together, worrying about nationalized cars? The burdens these folks carry, I tell you. My heart aches for Jackson, who is certainly old enough to be a grandma and is clearly rather frightened by it all. She should get out of her comfort zone and drive over to Malibu or something.

(I saw it here.)

Robert S. McNamara, chief architect of the Vietnam War, is dead at 93.

At Hullaballo, dday has an interesting post up called “The Lessons of Robert McNamara,” discussing the 11 causes and lessons from Vietnam that McNamara laid forth in his later years.

We have so frequently bungled into conflicts, presuming our role in them when the other participants see it differently, making shortcuts while rationalizing ourselves as heroic, changing the rules if found to violate them, and controlling the message of moral rectitude rather than the actions. I find these cautions from McNamara to be crucially important, but even in my most optimistic moments I don’t believe America is even wired to live up to them.

Not only did we ignore them in 2003, we somehow managed to make most of the same mistakes in Iraq. It may seem a long time ago, but in the summer of 2003 people who thought we were making a colossal blunder were being called traitors. I suppose the trolls are still calling us traitors, but these days jingoism isn’t much of a selling point politically.

And while things may be less bad in Iraq, that crucial fact is that we are still there, and are likely to remain there indefinitely, despite what any politicians promise.

She should definitely call Zig immediately.

Imagine, if you will, forcing sending your entire office to see hot motivational babe Sarah Palin live at an arena near you for only $19.95. If your employees little worker scumbags won’t go they can spend the day counting toner cartridges.

Today’s Republican Party is a multi-level marketing scheme that sells faux resentment instead of generic cleaning products. Neither the particular product nor the particular resentment are of any great importance, if each fulfills the desired political objective of fostering yet another wave of profits in the form of anger and donations from the base.

It slices, it dices and it cuts this tomato paper thin, and if you order now you can can look at her legs.

Don’t delay!