Get ready for the newest trend in police profiling, driving while erotic.

– As the health care bill gets sliced and diced into a much more corporate-friendly and ineffective skeleton of its previous self in the Senate, I’m struck by how the arguments for still passing it sound like the arguments that were made (by myself and others) to pass the local roads and transit measure in 2007. Back then, I was fairly convinced that we only had a small window of opportunity on getting real transit and that window might close. It turns out that it got done – and got done in a much better way – a year later.

Although, for fear of being wrong twice, I’m still leaning towards the folks who are arguing that this is our last chance on health care for a while. The only thing that leads me to disagree with Drum’s linked post is that the condition of our health care system now is so much worse than in any of those previous years. It’s possible that the demand for reform from the public will not subside like it did in previous years.

And if anyone was on the fence about the willingness of Obama to side with the American public over the interests of the health insurance and pharmaceutical companies, I think Jame Hamsher has definitively put that question to rest right here. At the beginning of Obama’s term, I considered his attempts to keep ties with Joe Lieberman his biggest mistake. But even though it’s turning out exactly as I expected – with Joe Lieberman being a hypocritical jackass and trying to derail real reforms – it doesn’t seem to be bothering Obama too much. It just adds more ammunition to those, like Matt Taibbi, who have come to believe that Obama has little interest in challenging the corporate corruption that continues to dominate our political system.

Passing a health care bill, even a half-assed one, might have one potential benefit that I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere. Once it passes (if it passes), there will be a stronger interest among both Obama and the Democrats in Congress not to have it become a major boondoggle. There will be a clearer sense of ownership of the health care problem, and perhaps that might lead to a more rational discussion within the caucus of how to fix it, rather than simply worrying about the influence and power of the lobbies who are wielding a large amount of influence to simply kill the effort entirely. Or maybe we’re all just fucked, I’m not sure.

– The head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, claims that money laundered by drug gangs saved some the world’s major banks from collapsing during the recent financial crisis. Worldwide, criminal gangs from Afghanistan, Mexico, Colombia, and elsewhere make about $352 billion from the global market for illicit drugs.

– Californians will be voting on whether to legalize marijuana this November. Polls show that support for legalizing marijuana there is over 50%. The initiative that they’ll be voting on also addresses the personal growing question, something that the recently drafted bill here (HB 2401) in Washington’s State House doesn’t. The initiative there will allow for a 25 square foot growing area for personal use. HB 2401 should probably adopt something similar to that.

– I’ve been reading up on the case of Roe v TeleTech, a job discrimination case from Kitsap County where a company (TeleTech) terminated a medical marijuana patient because she failed a drug screening. The woman had actually started the job and worked for a week with no problems before the decision was made to terminate her for violating the company’s drug-free workplace policy. She was authorized by a doctor to use marijuana for her migraines and she did not use the drug at work. Her medical use didn’t affect her ability to work in any way, but the court ruled in favor of TeleTech. Since this occurred, a 2007 revision of the law made it clearer that companies like TeleTech could only terminate a person if they were in a safety-sensitive position or if they wanted to use their medicine within the workplace. The fired woman is petitioning for the State Supreme Court to review the case.

– As part of their attempt to build a downtown entertainment district around the new light rail station, Sea-Tac is using eminent domain to condemn a private surface lot (paying the owners $2 million less than what they recently paid to acquire it) and building a public parking garage in its place. The owners of the lot, James and Doris Cassan, have an uphill battle in fighting the action. The Supreme Court ruled a few years back in Kelo v. City of New London that it was legal for cities to take property like this for large-scale development projects. It also doesn’t help the Cassans that people would really love to have more public parking at the light rail stations rather than having to pay to park in a surface lot (which is why the use of eminent domain worries a lot of people in the first place, because it can become an instrument of mob rule). What I find most interesting about this is that it potentially makes the Evergreen Freedom Foundation and pro-transit groups – who don’t want lots of parking at light rail stops – temporary allies. [via Balko]

– Finally, Dominic Holden ridicules our Attorney General.

Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky. It was Kansas City, MO.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Beck – Not So Mellow Gold
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

– This looks like a potentially interesting discovery that could assist in combating climate change.

– Maricopa County, Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio is a menace to society.

– U.S. Attorney Tanya Treadway isn’t much better.

– Speaking of unhinged U.S. Attorneys, I neglected to say farewell to a true authoritarian nightmare, Mary Beth Buchanan.

– Washington Post reporter Ashley Halsey III gets caught passing along bogus statistics, yet when this is pointed out to him, instead of issuing a correction, he throws a fit.

– Eric Martin has a post on the secretive war we’re fighting inside Pakistan. With all of the focus on Afghanistan recently, I think we’re overlooking what has the potential to be a greater failure in our overall strategy there.

Barbara Coombs Lee has a follow-up diary at Daily Kos on the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ directive that mandates that Catholic health care facilities employ feeding tubes and other life-prolonging measures even when an individual’s living will specifically prohibits it. When I last posted on this, I’d sent out an email to a number of Catholic hospitals and hospices across the state to see if any of them were planning to ignore the directive.

It’s been five days, and I haven’t heard any responses from any of the 10 contacts I was able to find. In the comments of the original post on this, Joel Connelly claimed to have spoken with an administrator who says her facility will ignore the directive. I got that person’s name from Connelly today and emailed her directly. I’m still waiting for a reply.

UPDATE: Joel Connelly is up to some more shenanigans in the comments. He writes:

After asking for my assistance today, you deliberately distort what I heard up at the Bellingham City Club forum.

Absolutely not. I’ve distorted nothing. Here’s what you said to me, with a link to the comment:

As one with a living will, I’ve been told several times by Catholic hospital administrators that my wish not to be kept alive by artificial means would be fully respected.

I emailed you today with the following request:

I emailed as many Catholic hospitals and hospices as I could find contact emails for and not a single one has emailed me back saying that they will ignore the end-of-life instructions given to them by the bishops. If you have contact info for the person or persons who told you so, please forward that on to me.

You wrote back with the name of the person I then emailed. Either you’re not following what you’re saying to me or you’re deliberately trying to lie. Which is it?

Goldy broke the news earlier this week that 6 co-sponsors in the State House are introducing a bill that will legalize marijuana for adults over the age of 21. The bill will also utilize the existing mechanisms in place for regulating wine and hard liquor to establish a distribution system that makes our existing state run liquor stores the sole distributor. One thing that’s not clear yet is whether there will be any limit on people growing plants for themselves. Ben Livingston has an excellent line-by-line breakdown of the bill here.

Without getting as far into the details of the bill as Ben does, I want to lay out the general case for why the legislature should pass this bill. There are a number of ways in which ending marijuana prohibition will provide benefits for the state.

The Economy

Harvard economics professor Jeffrey Miron has estimated that legalizing marijuana nationwide would reduce overall government expenditures by approximately $12.9 billion in law enforcement and criminal justice expenses. It would also generate about another $6.7 billion if taxes comparably to alcohol and tobacco. As far as I know, there hasn’t been a study of similar scope done just within the state of Washington, but University of Washington professor Dick Startz took numbers from a previous study by Miron and estimated that the state would save about $105 million a year.

On top of that, marijuana is already among one of Washington’s top cash crops, and the state is consistently near the top when it comes to marijuana production. In 2006, it was estimated that the total marijuana crop was worth $600 million. Right now, all of that money is handed over to criminals, many based in Mexico. So beyond the already substantial savings that come with removing the multitudes of marijuana offenses from our overloaded criminal justice system, the economy of this state will also benefit by having those dollars staying here and benefiting legitimate farmers and businessmen who are licensed by the state.

Protecting Young People

One of the most common arguments made against the idea of establishing a legal and regulated market for marijuana is that “it sends the wrong message to kids”. This argument makes absolutely no sense for a number of reasons. First, one could easily say the same thing about hard liquor – the fact that we tolerate sales of liquor to adults tells kids that it’s ok every bit as much as tolerating sales of marijuana to adults will tell them that it’s ok. But we know the damage that was done when we tried to ban liquor in the 1920s, and no one really wants to go back to that.

Second, the experience in Holland tells quite a different story. Adults have been free to purchase marijuana in coffeeshops throughout the country since the 1970s. Did this “send the wrong message” to their kids? Apparently not, since Holland has much lower marijuana use rates among both teenagers and adults than we do (and even less marijuana use than many of their neighboring countries in Europe).

American teenagers repeatedly tell pollsters that it’s easier for them to obtain marijuana than it is for them to obtain alcohol. It’s this fact that’s starting to motivate more and more parents (like Rick Steves) to take a stronger stand against marijuana prohibition. The policy we have in place now is actually detrimental to our young people. Establishing a regulated system that forces you to prove your age in order to purchase it provides an extra barrier. It won’t completely prevent young people from getting it (just as it doesn’t prevent it entirely with alcohol), but it will make it harder.

And even beyond that, we’ve seen far too often where young people become involved in the distribution themselves. For a lot of them, it leads to an arrest, a conviction, and a lifetime of trying to overcome having a criminal record. Yet none of that benefits our society in any way. Everyone in the state of Washington who wants to buy marijuana will always be able to find someone to take that risk to sell it to them. Undercover marijuana drug busts in local high schools have done nothing but waste taxpayer dollars, limit the options of non-violent young people who are guilty of only bad choices, and foster a greater sense of mistrust of the police. If you regulate marijuana sales, the marijuana dealers aren’t in the schools any more; they’re in the liquor store, and they’re checking your kid’s ID.

Improving Drug Treatment

One of the nice features of this bill is that it specifically dictates that the tax revenue from the sale of marijuana goes towards drug treatment. It’s well-established by now that you save money in the long run for every dollar that you put towards drug treatment. Incarceration is the most costly and ineffective way to deal with drug problems, yet it often remains the default position of most politicians.

In addition, treating marijuana the same as alcohol will eliminate another problem with drug treatment centers; that people are sometimes sent there solely because they were arrested for marijuana and choose to go to treatment over jail, even if they have no real need for treatment. Marijuana is nowhere near as addictive as drugs like heroin and methamphetamines. Focusing on people with real problems and not wasting money and beds on the people who don’t need to be there will yield far more effective results in an area where effective results can have pretty significant downstream benefits in helping people become productive members of society again.

Ending our Contribution to Mexico’s Violent War

How bad is the violence in Mexico right now? On October 30, a newspaper in Juarez celebrated the first day in 10 months without a murder with a giant headline announcing that fact on the front page. As we here in Washington were shocked by the murder of 4 police officers, that’s a fairly regular occurrence down there.

This war is being entirely fueled by the money that criminal organizations in Mexico make from marijuana. Even the drug czar’s office admits that over 60 percent of the billions being made by Mexican drug cartels comes from marijuana. Their reach extends well into Washington state, as the illicit marijuana industry brings large numbers of illegal immigrants to the area to tend to plants. Just as when it came to the criminals gangs who ran Chicago during alcohol prohibition, the only way to defeat these cartels is to eliminate the black market that fuels them.

Environmental Protection

The article linked just above gives another good reason to shift to a regulated market for marijuana – the environment. The Mexican drug gangs who supply a large amount of the marijuana in this state will often set up their operations in parks and other wildlife areas, doing a lot of damage to the ecosystem along the way. The cat and mouse game that our law enforcement officials play to try to avoid this is futile and unnecessary when we can be licensing real farmers to grow this crop safely.

Despite all of this, not many people expect this bill to pass. Last session, the legislature couldn’t even pass a decriminalization bill that would have merely made the penalties for low-level marijuana possession more in line with Ohio’s. But this is not for a lack of public support. Roughly half of Washington state residents would support a system of regulated sales for marijuana. So this is a challenge for those who oppose it, whether in the media or in elected office. Lay out your argument against it. Let us know why this bill shouldn’t pass. Marijuana prohibition has continued for decades now without any real coherent explanation for why it should continue. If it’s not time to end it, at least explain to the citizens of Washington why it’s not.

In the comments of this EffU post, our friend Pudge is insisting that AirTran is lying about the Tedd Petruna email. This is an open thread.

Last week’s contest was a tough one, but it was eventually won by Cascadian. The correct location was in Manchester, England.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!

Last week, Jeremy Scahill had a huge story detailing the secret operations being conducted in Pakistan by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and the private military outfit formerly known as Blackwater. The operations are primarily assassinations and kidnappings (“snatch and grabs”) of high-value targets. The agreement with Pakistan to allow for this to go on was allegedly done with the Pakistani government reserving the right to deny that they made any type of agreement at all.

Not surprisingly, this story is making things difficult for the Pakistani government. Pakistan’s interior minister has promised to resign if it’s true that Blackwater is operating there. Similar to Mexico, allowing for American troops to operate within the country is a major line that the public is reluctant to see crossed. Hillary Clinton got a taste of this when she last visited there.

Much of the illogic of what we’re doing in Pakistan echoes past failures in waging the drug war. In that “war”, we’ve tended to believe that we can just knock off a bunch of high-value targets and we win. This is how the drug war has been fought overseas for decades. We’ve even tolerated secret operations where American forces have become part of the drug trade in order to capture the head honcho, only to see the whole damn trade re-organize under a new head honcho. The lesson has been that you can’t eliminate the trade unless you deal with the underlying demand that drives the trade in the first place.

When it comes to terrorism, that underlying demand comes from anti-American sentiment. And in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, the enemies we’re fighting benefit from both that and drugs. The idea that we can defeat them by doing things that will increase anti-American sentiment (while doing nothing about the underlying demand for drugs) is dangerously foolish. Any time we take out a high-value target in a way that increases the level of radicalism among the Pakistanis, these organizations will simply re-organize under a new leader and continue the war. But that’s exactly what we’re doing, and it’s exactly what a number of people blindly accept as the ideal foreign policy move.

That’s why so many of these idiots are upset that Obama didn’t talk about “winning” or using the word “victory” in his speech at West Point. Obama, for his faults in this escalation, at least understands that Afghanistan is not a video game that you win after killing all the bad guys. There’s no such thing as “victory” in an occupation, just a long hard slog to improve stability. You “win” by convincing the people of that nation that your presence there is beneficial for them, or that your presence is temporary and that they will soon be autonomous again.

What becomes difficult for politicians in wars like this is that they genuinely fear being seen in conflict with those on the front lines in this war, regardless of its futility. The Obama Administration is no different, and their unwillingness to be seen as rejecting what the military wants is going to override everything else. That’s leading them down a dangerous path, both in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and his intent to continue this conflict without increasing anti-American sentiment will be a significant challenge. And nothing can undermine that challenge more than believing that we can fight it under the cover of darkness. Those days are over.

Two weeks ago, I posted about the directive given by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops that requires hospitals and hospices to override the end-of-life wishes of patients in certain circumstances.

In the comments, Joel Connelly crawled up my ass, telling me that I needed to contact the hospitals and hospices to find out if they’ll really follow the directive. I just sent off an email to every Catholic hospital and hospice in the state I could find a contact email for to see if any of them are planning to ignore it.

Frank Chopp may be getting the message that his opposition to the marijuana decriminalization bill introduced last year wasn’t just misguided and backwards, but also bad politics. There will be a lot of people watching what he does in 2010 to push that bill – and drug law reform in general – forward as we continue to battle with our serious budget problems.

There’s also a heated debate happening now over whether Washington is ready to just leave Frank Chopp and the legislature behind and push for full legalization and regulation through a statewide voter initiative. There have been few, if any, quality statewide polls on the subject, but Gallup’s recent poll on the subject gives us enough data to get a good estimate of where the state’s voters might come down in such a poll.

While the poll linked above only broke the country down into regions (Washington is lumped into “West”, which had 53% support for legalization), it also broke down the percentages among people who self-identify as “liberal”, “moderate”, and “conservative”. Liberals supported legalization at 78%, moderates at 46%, and conservatives at 27%. Using another Gallup poll from this summer that broke down the percentage of each of those groups within Washington state, we can get a reasonably rough estimate of what the overall support might be (and Darryl could probably spend the next two weeks calculating the margin of error by doing it this way).

Liberals – 26% (of Washington residents)
Moderates – 37%
Conservatives – 33%
Other – 4%

Using the percentages Gallup found for the first three groups, of the 96% who identified as liberal, moderate, or conservative, just over 48% of them would support legalization. Certainly, these polls aren’t taking into account likely voters, nor are they taken within the context of a statewide initiative where the subject is being debated very publicly, so I wanted to compare my methodology with one truly reliable statewide poll – the failed 2006 legalization initiative in Nevada. That initiative garnered 44% of the votes. Looking at their political ideology breakdown:

Liberals – 22% (of Nevada residents)
Moderates – 37%
Conservatives – 37%
Other – 4%

The 96% who identified as liberal, moderate, or conservative would theoretically support legalization now at 46%, which is arguably in line with the 2006 result (as you’d expect slight increases over time).

What this means is that Washington truly is on the verge of being able to pass a statewide initiative to legalize and regulate marijuana. 2010 might be a tough year because the mid-terms are likely to draw larger numbers of conservatives to the polls, but it’s hard to imagine one going down to defeat in 2012.

UPDATE: Senator Jim Webb’s effort to create a commission to look into America’s failing criminal justice system has a hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee today.

Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky. The correct answer was St. Paul, MN. As always, you can click the picture to go directly to the Bing maps site. They’ve hidden the Bird’s Eye View link a bit, but you can get to it by clicking the ‘Aerial’ flyout menu.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!

[via Pete Guither]

The recent execution-style murder of Officer Timothy Brenton has justifiably shaken the residents of Seattle. The suspect, Christopher Monfort, is most certainly the culprit. His car was seen at the crime scene, and when discovered at his apartment a few days later, police claim to have found DNA and ballistics evidence that links him to the crime. Monfort openly talked of waging war against the police, having previously sent threatening letters and is likely also responsible for firebombing several police cruisers. He’s expected to stand trial for these crimes, but I must strongly disagree with that decision. He should be permanently held as a war criminal and not given a trial at all.

There are a number of reasons why I’ve come to this conclusion. For one, a trial is exactly what Monfort wants. He wants to be given a stage to air his views and be seen as a Che Guevara-type figure. He’ll be able to speak freely and criticize the police. And this will fulfill his desire to go down as a martyr for his cause. In addition, the independent media, who are generally anti-police in their perspective, will never present his trial in the proper light. And finally, the city of Seattle simply shouldn’t be subjected to the painful sight of watching a defense attorney try to downplay the seriousness of Monfort’s crimes.

Obviously, I’m being facetious with this argument. It seems odd to consider not trying Monfort in a criminal court, even for crimes that we’re fairly certain he committed. But each of the reasons that former 9/11 co-commissioner Tom Kean gave in the links above are just as true for Christopher Monfort as they are for Khalid Shiekh Mohammed. The distinctions we make in order to separate the two are purely technical – he’s not an American citizen, we’re “at war” with the terrorists. Neither excuse changes the overall logic of having trials for people who’ve committed even the most heinous of crimes. And the excuses for not giving Mohammed a trial for his crimes are just as invalid and absurd as they are when applied to Monfort.

I’d still imagine that there are some who’ve thought (or maybe even still think) that whenever a crime like the murder of Officer Brenton is committed, that we can just do away with our centuries old system of due process and just hang the accused in the public square. But that impulse is usually blunted by the reality that we have a system here that works, and has worked for hundreds of years. Yet when the accused is from another part of the world or when the circumstances feel like a “war”, it gives people an excuse to follow that impulse, regardless of how illogical the rationale becomes. That’s how we end up with someone who was once considered your typical “moderate” Republican making extremist arguments like the ones Kean makes in that interview.

Trying Khalid Sheik Mohammed in an American court for his crimes is no more a danger than trying Monfort for his. We don’t fear the possibility that Monfort will have a trial in which he’ll have the right to representation and can speak only in court. Even people like me, who write about the kinds of police abuses that Monfort became agitated over, have no interest in listening to what that jackass has to say about it. The belief that this dynamic is somehow different in the Muslim world, in that a coward like Mohammad has the ear of large numbers of people, is rooted solely in prejudices about the Muslim world. There are certainly large numbers of people in the world who are agitated by some of the same things that Mohammed was agitated about (the plight of the Palestinians, brutal dictators propped up by the U.S.), but the vast majority of them know that killing 3000 civilians in New York is not the right way to respond to it.

The foundations of our justice system work for a reason. They don’t just work because America is great. America is great because those foundations work. They establish a basic set of rights that allow people to feel a basic sense of security that their liberty is protected – that we won’t wake up one day being tortured in a secret prison, accused of a crime that we didn’t commit and have no platform for refuting. And as some recent pieces of good reporting have shown, the fact that we don’t make assurances like that to the rest of the world is precisely what feeds the extremism against us. The idea that denying trials for the Khalid Sheik Mohammeds of the world is what will make us safer has it exactly backwards. If our struggle against terrorism is a battle of ideals, then abandoning our ideals is how we lose that struggle.