My latest Mutinyblogging post is up. It’s about the recent experiment by BBC reporter Nicky Taylor to get stoned every night for a month and why it turned into such an utter disaster for her.

Previous posts in the Mutinyblogging series can be found here:
Mutinyblogging Pours the First Drink
Seattle vs. Jakarta: The Monorail Challenge – Part 11
The Mutiny
Rising Up Against Captain Santa Claus

Just a quick note to our friends at Slog. I’m totally fine with building fences along the Aurora Bridge, but can we cut out the nonsense that it’s going to save the lives of the suicidal? Fencing off the Aurora Bridge will not save those lives for the same reason that fencing off the Mexican border will not stop illegal immigration.

This week’s Birds Eye View Contest is posted.

Barney Frank has introduced his “Make Room for the Real Criminals” bill

It hasn’t been talked about much, but this is really bad news for McCain.

April 17, 2008 – LOS ANGELES – Fox News channel is debuting a new show next week called “Fox’s PC Police.” The half-hour show will be a daily recap of all the groups who have recently been offended by Barack Obama. Hosted by Michelle Malkin, the first week of shows covers how Obama has offended Amway salesmen, CPAs, the University of Utah field hockey team, John Wayne’s ghost, KLM stewardesses, and Brit Hume’s cat “Whiskers.”

The show will also feature several other daily and regular segments.

John Gibson will frequently join Malkin in the studio in order to show clips of Jeremiah Wright’s sermons and to explain how Bill Cosby would lecture Wright on how to be a civilized black person.

Brent Bozell III will host a segment called “Panties in a Bunch” where he will point out how Satan’s influence is destroying your children through your television set.

And finally, Charles Krauthammer and Bill Donohue will have a daily debate called “The Victim-Off,” where the two men argue over whether American Jews or American Catholics are the most persecuted people on the planet. The only thing they will agree on is that African-Americans, Palestinians, and gays have absolutely no reason to be angry and should stop playing the victim card all the time.

Now that the show has been previewed by select members of the press, the show already has a higher viewership than The Glenn Beck Program.

The Seahawks regular season schedule is out:

Sun Sept. 7 at Buffalo Bills – 10:00 a.m.
Sun Sept. 14 San Francisco 49ers – 1:05 p.m.
Sun Sept. 21 St. Louis Rams – 1:05 p.m.
Sun Sept. 28 BYE
Sun Oct. 5 at N.Y. Giants – 10:05 a.m.
Sun Oct. 12 Green Bay Packers – 1:15 p.m.
Sun Oct. 19 at Tampa Bay Buccaneers – 5:15 p.m.
Sun Oct. 26 at San Francisco 49ers – 1:15 p.m.
Sun Nov. 2 Philadelphia Eagles – 1:15 p.m.
Sun Nov. 9 at Miami Dolphins – 10:00 a.m.
Sun Nov. 16 Arizona Cardinals – 1:05 p.m.
Sun Nov. 23 Washington Redskins – 1:15 p.m.
Thu Nov. 27 at Dallas Cowboys – 1:15 p.m. (Thanksgiving Day)
Sun Dec. 7 New England Patriots – 5:15 p.m.
Sun Dec. 14 at St. Louis Rams – 10:00 a.m.
Sun Dec. 21 N.Y. Jets – 1:05 p.m.
Sun Dec. 28 at Arizona Cardinals – 1:15 p.m.

At the beginning of this weekend, I posed a challenge for blogger Pat Rogers concerning Barack Obama and his drug policy positions:

Recently, I’ve been debating with Pat Rogers from A Left Independent. Pat and I generally agree on most matters of drug policy, but we have some pretty stark disagreements in our outlook for the 2008 election. While both of us have been critical of Obama over his flaky drug policy positions, I’m not convinced to vote for a third-party candidate, even though the Libertarian and Green nominees – and even Ralph Nader – will all have better drug policy platforms this year.

In the past, I’ve voted for third-party candidates with no chance for that reason, but I can’t this year. While I’m definitely disappointed in his positions, I also recognize that being honest about drug policy is difficult for Obama, and that McCain, who has vowed to continue fighting medical marijuana laws, will certainly be worse. The perceptions and prejudices that exist in this country about drugs and the African-American community make it especially tough for Obama to be bold on this front. This is why I think we have this disconnect between someone who claims The Wire as his favorite TV show, but as a politician has often promoted the drug war in ways that the show has been critical of. I tend to be more sympathetic to these political realities than Pat, so I want to lay out a challenge to him:

Write up a speech that Obama could make on drug policy that would…

a) Win your vote
b) Not wreck his chances in November to beat John McCain

Pat was already one step ahead of me, as he’s already worked on such a speech. He sent it to me and I’ve posted it here. He’s welcoming feedback on it. I’m very impressed with it, but I’m not yet convinced that Obama could make that speech and not find it to be a political landmine. What do you think?

Steve Haver (aka diarist ‘Red No More‘ at Daily Kos) discusses how Pennsylvania police attempted to confiscate his home after police responded to a burglar alarm and found 5 pot plants.

As reported by both Postman and the PI’s Politics Team, Congressman Dave Reichert is challenging his Democratic colleagues in the state to join him in opposing House Speaker Pelosi’s attempts to prevent a vote on the Colombian free trade agreement this year. Reichert was one of 7 Republicans and 2 Democrats who traveled to Colombia with US Trade Representative Susan Schwab this past weekend. Here’s what he sent out:

Many times when Republicans were in the majority, my colleagues would call on me to go to my leadership to help the state, for instance when we learned of language that would allow supertankers onto Puget Sound. Today, I urge all of my colleagues in the Washington delegation – including Governor Gregoire – to join together and reject the Speaker’s effort to shelve this vital measure.

Reichert’s premise is that this trade agreement specifically helps the state of Washington because of how dependent we are on global trade. But this appears to be a questionable premise at best. Boston University International Relations Professor Kevin P. Gallagher, who has written a book on NAFTA, takes a look at this agreement:

The U.S.-Colombia Free Trade deal is one of the most deeply flawed trade pacts in U.S. history. It will hardly make a dent in the U.S. economy, looks to make the Colombian economy worse off and accentuate a labor and environmental crisis in Colombia. The Democratic majority in Congress is right to oppose this agreement and call for a rethinking of U.S. trade policy.

According to new estimates by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America, the net benefits of the agreement to the U.S. will be a miniscule 0.0000472 percent of GDP or a one-time increase in the level of each American’s income by just over one penny. The agreement will actually will make Colombia worse off by up to $75 million or one tenth of one percent of its GDP; losses to Colombia’s textiles, apparel, food and heavy manufacturing industries, as they face new competition from U.S. import, will outweigh the gains in Colombian petroleum, mining, and other export sectors, it concludes.

There’s a lot more that could be added to this that Gallagher doesn’t mention. Anything that weakens the Colombian economy to this extent will end up with more migrants in search of work and an increase the number of people willing to participate in illegal coca production. The failures of NAFTA in Mexico are likely to be repeated in Colombia, as both nations remain mired at the sharp end of America’s failed drug war, a no-win situation that no trade agreement will ever rectify and will continue to end up with more people fleeing here to find work.

But he does delve into another problem with this agreement, one that many people here in Washington State are likely to find troubling:

The deal amounts to a rollback of previous environmental provisions in U.S. trade agreements. Unlike past U.S. trade pacts, this deal doesn’t provide any new funding for cooperation, clean up, or compliance.

Finally, the deal has a little secret also not allowed under the WTO. It leaves open the possibility that ad hoc investment tribunals will interpret social and environmental regulations as “indirect expropriation.” Under such interpretations, multinational firms themselves (as opposed to states filing on a firm’s behalf such as in the WTO) can file suit for massive compensation from foreign governments. Under NAFTA such suits have been filed against the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. Indeed, Methanex Corp. filed a $1 billion suit against the state of California for banning a gasoline additive that was polluting water sources.

The Sierra Club has a page here on the Methanex suit and others that have been initiated within the NAFTA agreement. As Congressman Reichert continues to make efforts to demonstrate his “green” credentials, I’m curious whether he has concerns over whether environmental regulations that come out of Olympia could trigger lawsuits from corporations that are affected by them.

Finally, Reichert spokesman Mike Shields has some words defending our desired trading partner, Colombia:

Is it perfect? No. But it has made improvements and it is our friend and ally in that part of the world, particularly when they have a neighbor who is fashioning himself to be a Fidel Castro for that part of the world.

This is true. Chavez is most certainly fashioning himself as a Castro-like anti-American protagonist, but this gets back to what my main concern over this agreement is. The policies of the Bush Administration, both economic and military, are slowly isolating our Colombian ally while strengthening the hand of Hugo Chavez. And this trade agreement will likely move us further down that path as long as President Bush sees it as a reward for a government whose recent military encroachment on Ecuadorean soil earned widespread condemnation across the region.

UPDATE: Reichert has a column on this in today’s Seattle Times.

In my earlier post on the backdrop for Dave Reichert’s trip to Colombia, I neglected to cite one of the best sources for information on that part of the world, The Center for International Policy’s Plan Colombia and Beyond blog. There they have a couple of recent posts that provide even more background on the free trade agreement that the Bush Administration wants to see passed, as well as the ever-present anti-drug arrangements we have with that country.

Some recent posts:

A summation of how both Obama and Clinton have found some political landmines when it comes to Colombia and free trade in general.

A story about what happened when 6 FARC representatives (including the recently assassinated Raul Reyes) travelled to Europe to discuss peace in 2000.

A closer look at Colombia’s still very poor human rights record.

And finally, this one was particularly fascinating to me. They point to a website which shows on a map of Colombia which military and police installations are qualified for U.S. assistance. If you click through to that website, you can then click on each of the Google Maps pushpins to see where your taxpayer dollars go – largely in the effort to keep cocaine from coming into the United States. An effort which is not working, and will never work.

Dave Reichert (AKA Congressman 401) traveled to Colombia this weekend with US Trade Representative Susan Schwab and 8 other lawmakers. The reason for the trip is that the folks who tell Congressman Reichert how to vote are eager to pass a Free Trade Agreement with our strongest South American ally.

One of the things making the passage of the agreement complicated for the Bush Administration is what recently happened in the region. In March, the Colombian military attacked and killed a high-ranking FARC official in Ecuadorean territory along with 22 others. FARC is a left-wing Colombian rebel group that has financed its operations through drug trafficking and actively fights Alvaro Uribe’s government. However, by attacking them on Ecuadorean soil, the Colombians triggered a regional crisis, with both Venezuela and Ecuador sending troops to the border and the Uribe government receiving condemnations from nearly every country in the region. The Colombians were forced to apologize for their actions.

In the wake of this incident, however, President Bush made a speech where he emphasized that passing the free trade agreement was a matter of national security because it was important to send a message to the Colombians that we stand by them in their fight against terrorism. You read that right: following an action by the Colombians that was condemned by nearly every country from Chile to Mexico, the Bush Administration told us that it’s in our national security interests to reward the Colombians. You couldn’t even script a fictional scenario about how the Bush Administration’s foreign policy has been an epic failure better than how that episode actually played out.

But this being a free trade agreement being proposed, it doesn’t just have to do with rewarding the Colombians with more of our military might under the auspices of fighting “narco-terrorists.” It’s largely about eliminating tariffs on the goods that we exchange with them. And these agreements have become a major point of contention, especially within the race for the Democratic nomination. The Democratic candidates are finding it necessary to take strong stands against free trade agreements as the economy worsens. The latest casualty of this backlash against free trade is Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist Mark Penn, who met with the Colombians in support of the agreement, and is no longer working on the Clinton campaign, while his PR firm is no longer working with the Colombian government. It’s a fitting end for the man who made it impossible for many people on the left to support Clinton in the primaries and certainly helped give the nomination to Obama through his own arrogance.

As for Obama, he’s focused on what I also find to be a serious problem with this trade agreement:

Free trade has become an emotional election issue, especially for Democrats. Both Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama, contending for the Democratic nomination, oppose the legislation. On Wednesday, Sen. Obama reiterated his opposition, saying that Colombia wasn’t doing enough to stop the killing of Colombian trade unionists.

“The violence against unions in Colombia would make a mockery of the very labor protections that we have insisted be included in these types of agreements,” Mr. Obama said at a meeting of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO in Philadelphia.

…

“We have made a big effort, and the number has fallen to 26 last year from 205 in 2001,” Mr. Uribe said, speaking of assassinated union members and teachers. “So far this year, there have been 11 murders.”

Human Rights Watch disputes the number. Mr. Vivanco says 17 unionists have been killed so far this year.

Blaming the effects of free trade agreements for the loss of jobs throughout America is an oversimplification that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. The more serious problems with free trade agreements occur when we use them as a way to reward bad behavior, or as a way to promote our own failed policies. Both of these things are occurring in Colombia. There’s little difference between the actions of Colombian right-wing paramilitaries and the actions of left-wing rebels. Both groups have a history of using terrorist tactics and funding themselves through drug trafficking. But the left-wing rebels are the “narco-terrorists” who threaten our national security. Why? Because they’re on the same side as those who are demanding labor reforms and other restraints on the corporations that wish to do business there. This administration still equates dissent over their economic philosophy with the threat of terrorism. And because of this, Colombia finds itself increasingly more isolated for their willingess to be our close ally as the rest of South America grows more and more anti-American and anti-capitalist.

And underneath all of this is still Plan Colombia, the multi-billion dollar drug war initiative first unleashed by the Clinton Administration in 2000 and continued by the Bush Administration. The Colombian drug war has always been a ready excuse for the excesses of right-wing paramilitaries, but the complete failure to even make a dent in South American drug production is making it clear what drug policy experts understood all along – it was destined to be a major boondoggle. The Bush Administration may still be able to convince themselves that bombing FARC outposts in the jungles of northern Ecuador will somehow stop the billions of dollars of cocaine from coming into the United States, but people like that should be sitting in rooms with padded walls and not in charge of our military.

As for Congressman 401, his excursion to Colombia was probably a good way to take his mind off of the fact that Darcy Burner is getting a lot of very good press for her work on the Responsible Plan to get out of Iraq. We need a Responsible Plan for Colombia too, but it doesn’t involve rewarding the Colombian government with a free trade agreement at a time when they’re moving the region closer to conflict. It doesn’t involve using the drug war as an excuse for political persecution. And it certainly doesn’t involve the failed drug control strategies like aerial eradication that have done nothing to curb the flow of drugs into this country while devastating the lives of an increasing number of people.

I make fun of Eric Earling’s pathetic attempt to defend the BIAW here and here.

Margaret Talev in McClatchy has a dispatch from a wingnutty corner of Pennsylvania that is hard to believe:

“I like her backup man,” said retired machinist Ronald Duser, referring to former President Bill Clinton. “And her family’s from Scranton. She seems to be an honest person, just like my wife.”

Of Obama, Duser said: “I’m not crazy about voting for a colored guy, but that’s not why I don’t support Obama. I’m not prejudiced. I just like Hillary.”

A couple tables over, Jean Fetterman, a foster grandparent, said of Clinton: “Oh, I love her. She’s a very intelligent person, and she has her husband who went through this.”

She scoffs at the idea of voting for Obama: “I don’t want to be a Muslim!” She looks dubious when told Obama is Christian. “Then why did he go see what’s-his-name over in Iraq, that Lama?”

She isn’t clear about whom she means. She may have seen a photo of Obama wearing traditional clothing during a visit to Africa. “I don’t care what color he is, I don’t care if he’s pink,” she said. “I don’t think he’s got the same education Hillary has, and he’s so young. He’s arrogant, too.”

In the past, people haven’t believed me when I’ve told them that during the years my family lived in rural Chester County, Pennsylvania, we met people who still believed that Jewish people actually had horns. Hopefully, we’re all closer to understanding how that’s even possible.

The latest news out of Vancouver is that the plea agreement that would have sent Marc Emery to a fixed jail sentence and spared his co-defendants has fallen through:

But now there is a fresh wrinkle in the proceedings, one that even those most hostile to Emery’s cause should be able to see the absurdity of. Earlier this year Emery was able to arrange a plea bargain with U.S. prosecutors that would see him accept a 10-year sentence on their charges, of which he would serve half. Under the deal his co-accused colleagues would go free and Emery would serve the first 45 days of his sentence in the U.S., after which he would be returned to Canada to finish his stretch in a more comfortable Canadian prison.

All that was needed was the agreement of Canada’s department of justice. But last week, after a month of pessimistic media reports, they gave a final “No.” The Americans insisted on guarantees against Emery being released before his five years was up, and such arrangements are forbidden in Canadian law, so no Canadian judge can order the application of such a sentence. That means Emery will have to go ahead with the extradition proceedings that were held over in the face of the plea-bargain, and face a possible life sentence down south. Catch-22: because Canada is too humane and liberal to apply the punishment that the Americans would like — a punishment Emery has voluntarily agreed to — there appears to be no option but to hand him over to the Americans without protection against much worse treatment!

Now it looks like the April 9 extradition case will happen as planned. Emery thinks the Canadian government could do more to protect him from America’s justice system, where he could spend his entire life behind bars for running a business that the Canadian government collected taxes on for years. If Marc Emery and his co-defendants end up on trial here, I think all of Canada should go on strike.

I’m heading out now to Safeco Field for the opener. How do you like the M’s chances this year?