On my trip back east last week, I mentioned that I was heading to Philadelphia’s Drinking Liberally with an old high school friend who’d worked in the mortgage industry for most of the past 10 years. We made it down there, met up with Atrios and the rest of their DL crew, and talked a bit about the Big Shitpile, among other things. Over the years, my friend was definitely in the minority as a Democrat in the mortgage industry. In the past, he’s told me stories about meetings where he could do nothing more than shake his head over how much the standard GOP talking points on economic issues were simply treated as a religion there – as a belief system that could not be questioned. He once told me of a conference where a speaker angrily protested against the idea of giving health care to the children of illegal immigrants, as if doing something like that will somehow unravel the delicate balance that keeps our economy going. My friend just got up and checked out the hotel bar.

As we chatted last Tuesday night at Tangiers, we also talked about Jim Cramer, the host of “Mad Money” on CNBC. Networks like CNBC tend to adhere to the free market orthodoxies, and I’ve always assumed that Cramer follows along in that vein. But I shouldn’t have been so sure:

An impassioned and sometimes fiery Jim Cramer, the investing guru and host of CNBC’s “Mad Money,” said Tuesday night that government deregulation was nothing short of a “covert attempt” to eliminate the federal government’s responsibilities to its citizens.

“Do not be fooled by the sirens of laissez faire,” he told a packed audience at Bucknell University’s Weis Center for the Performing Arts in the continuing national speakers series, “The Bucknell Forum: The Citizen & Politics in America.”

“Ever since the (President) Reagan era, our nation has been regressing and repealing years and years worth of safety net and equal economic justice in the name of discrediting and dismantling the federal government’s missions to help solve our nation’s collective domestic woes,” he said. “We call it deregulation … a covert attempt to eliminate the federal government’s domestic responsibilities.”

…

Before embarking on his talk, titled “The Capitalist Citizen and Democracy,” Cramer warned his audience to not be misled by the persona that hosts his popular CNBC program “Mad Money.”

“This is not a ‘Mad Money’ show, nor is this the man you see at 6 and 11 on TV. This is who I really am. And I’m honored to be given a chance to say who I really am and to give you a talk that is heartfelt and is not about entertainment education or making friends and making money,” said Cramer.

Deregulation
He said that deregulation is the equivalent of saying that “private industry will do it better, that volunteers will do it better, that business if left unfettered will produce so many rich people that they will do it better than the government can.”

Even the best of the nation’s private enterprises, Cramer said, citing companies like Wells Fargo, Pepsi, United Technologies, Google, and Costco, can’t meet those demands.

“You, the next generation of corporate and government leaders, should know and understand the limits of what even the best of capitalism and the marketplace can do to promote the general welfare. As future citizen capitalists you must not embrace the unrequited love of the government of the United States for private enterprise,” he said. “Be wise enough to see that government regulation is a necessary evil.”

Atrios remarks:

Perhaps he should put some of those ideas out there a bit more prominently on his cable show.

I’m not a regular viewer of his show, but his remarks certainly betray the fact that he doesn’t say that stuff on his show because his views are seen as blasphemy within the world of economic cable news. And this trend is certainly parallel to the cable news orthodoxies that still write off those who are too stridently anti-war, even though those people have often been much more accurate in their analyses. Many people see Christianity, or more specifically Evangelicalism, as the religion at the heart of the Republican Party. It’s not, and it’s never really been. The religion at the heart of the Republican Party is the belief that government is at its most responsible when it takes responsibility for nothing and becomes a vessel for the empowerment of big business (even if that involves war). That is the orthodoxy that dare not be questioned. Many people today still buy into the lingering divide from the 60s which paints the counter-culture warrior as the irresponsible counterpart to the Cold Warrior, but today the roles are reversed. Those on the right who still see the current geopolitical reality as being a mirror image of those days are the irresponsible ones, unable to come to grips with the fact that the new orthodoxies that arose in the 80s as America de-regulated and became the sole superpower were not an excuse for us to be absolved of any and all responsibility. And this failure has left us with a number of very big problems that the next President will have to fix.

Apparently, Jonah Goldberg has some difficulty figuring out when people are making fun of him.

How bad is the economy in Michigan? Despite having the best record in the NHL, the Red Wings have only sold out a handful of games this year. They had an 11 year long sellout streak that only ended in 2007.

Frustrated with the slow pace of Bush’s efforts to bring freedom to the Middle East, people in Gaza took matters into their own hands this week.

Mexico is still a mess.

The term libertarian is now one step closer to having no definition at all.

Richard Holbrooke, former ambassador to the United Nations, continues his strong criticism of the Bush Administration’s approach to dealing with Afghanistan’s opium problem:

“I’m a spray man myself,” President Bush told government leaders and American counter-narcotics officials during his 2006 trip to Afghanistan. He said it again when President Hamid Karzai visited Camp David in August. Bush meant, of course, that he favors aerial eradication of poppy fields in Afghanistan, which supplies over 90 percent of the world’s heroin. His remarks — which, despite their flippant nature, were definitely not meant as a joke — are part of the story behind the spectacularly unsuccessful U.S. counter-narcotics program in Afghanistan. Karzai and much of the international community in Kabul have warned Bush that aerial spraying would create a backlash against the government and the Americans, and serve as a recruitment device for the Taliban while doing nothing to reduce the drug trade. This is no side issue: If the program continues to fail, success in Afghanistan will be impossible.

The opium issue in Afghanistan has often been treated as a side issue, and Holbrooke deserves credit for strongly challenging that perspective. The way we’re dealing with the opium production is as central to the difficulties we’re having as anything else commonly cited for why we’re losing ground to the Taliban (targeting civilians in airstrikes, being distracted by the Iraq occupation).

Fortunately, Bush has not been able to convince other nations or Karzai that aerial spraying should be conducted, although he is vigorously supported by the American ambassador, William Wood, who was an enthusiastic proponent of aerial spraying in his previous assignment, in Colombia. Wood, often called “Chemical Bill” in Kabul, has even threatened senior Afghan officials with cuts in reconstruction funds if his policies are not carried out, according to two sources.

Aerial spraying in Colombia (under the plan initiated by Bill Clinton in 2000 and continued by the Bush Administration) has been a complete disaster. It has failed to achieve any of its intended objectives and has caused a significant amount of damage to America’s reputation in that region because aerial spraying has a number of additional consequences that affect far more than just those who grow the prohibited crops. In Afghanistan, unleashing a similar disaster would strengthen the Taliban at an even greater rate than what’s happening today.

The current approach of manual eradication, favored by the British and by the Karzai government, is only slightly less counterproductive. The Taliban provide security for the opium traffickers against the government’s eradication teams for a fee (often paid with weapons). In other words, it’s not the profits from the opium trade by itself that enrich the Taliban. It’s the need for protection from the government’s eradication teams that enriches them. If Chemical Bill and the Spray Man get their way, the need for protection will increase and the Taliban will get paid by the traffickers to shoot down low-flying aircraft (aerial eradication of crops has to be done from a very low altitude). It simply has no chance of working in such a poor security environment.

In a nation where roughly 50 percent of the national economy comes from the opium industry, there’s simply no way to uproot it, either by going after the farmers, the traffickers, or the high-ranking government officials who profit from it (including Hamid Karzai’s brother). As much as it may strike people as being irresponsible, simply doing nothing about the opium farming would actually be better than what we do now. Holbrooke doesn’t hold back in his assessment:

But even without aerial eradication, the program, which costs around $1 billion a year, may be the single most ineffective program in the history of American foreign policy. It’s not just a waste of money. It actually strengthens the Taliban and al-Qaeda, as well as criminal elements within Afghanistan.

According to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, the area under opium cultivation increased to 193,000 hectares in 2007 from 165,000 in 2006. The harvest also grew, to 8,200 tons from 6,100. Could any program be more unsuccessful?

Well, the one favored by Chemical Bill and the Spray Man would be. But otherwise, thank god we still have people like Holbrooke who are speaking up about this.

If you haven’t already seen this over on Slog, Dan Savage filmed a short segment in South Carolina talking with Huckabee supporters for last week’s Real Time with Bill Maher

Some Wyoming transplants have significantly lowered this city’s average IQ.

My Birds Eye View contest this week is a real place, I swear.

UPDATE: Just saw this at Slog, have to post it too:

Once again, Dave Neiwert tears Jonah Goldberg to shreds over his poorly conceived book and his related attempts to equate modern American liberalism to fascism:

No, Jonah, being bad guys alone doesn’t make them fascists. But holding swastika and Dixie banners aloft, shouting “Sieg Heil,” and ranting ad nauseam about how bestial colored people and queers and the Jewish media are destroying the country, and demanding that we start shooting Mexican border crossers — well, that pretty clearly marks them as fascist, dontcha think?

And for a guy who insists irregularly that we not confuse European liberalism with its American version, Goldberg certainly has little compunction about conflating European fascism with its American variant. In fact, American fascists are fairly variegated in their worldviews and resulting strategies: some, like the Posse and the Freemen, are indeed hyper-local, though their version of local government is a white male supremacist ideation in which minorities have no rights and homosexuals and abortion providers are put to death. Others see themselves as largely regional organizations (particularly the Northwest’s “white homeland” advocates) with a national reach, while still others — the Klan, the Aryan Nations, the National Socialist Movement, Hammerskin Nation — see themselves as national organizations whose ideas for a right-wing authoritarian state do indeed more closely resemble the European model.

The same is true for figures like David Duke, who sees himself as an international role model for neo-Nazism. In recent years, he’s been traveling to places like Russia and the Arab world, spreading his vicious anti-Semitic propaganda. And in both places, it’s clear he’s been gaining audiences and having an impact on the ground. So much for these fascists’ insignificance.

But then, it’s essential for Jonah’s already-shaky thesis that he minimize, downplay, whitewash, and otherwise utterly trivialize these groups, their presence and their activities, because their very existence not only undermines, it completely demolishes his central claim that “fascism, properly understood, is not a phenomenon of the right at all” but that “it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left.” Because clearly, American fascists are now, and always have been, a phenomenon of the right, quite unmistakably so.

It’s all about trivializing the monstrous, all to serve his increasingly dubious claim that conservatives are in no way at all even remotely fascist. Indeed, it’s more than evident that the wish to rebut that “smear” is what has animated this entire enterprise (Goldberg has made this clear in numerous interviews, as well as the book itself).

The problem is that it’s much easier to demonstrate the opposite is true. And over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be discussing that.

But you have to wonder about someone who can so easily whitewash the realities of the Klan, dismiss the social and cultural effects of modern-day fascists, and then compare the Nazi eliminationist program to Hillary Clinton’s day-care initiatives. It is not often you get to see the holes in people’s souls on public display, and it’s never pretty.

I’m out in the Philly suburbs right now, celebrating my mom’s 60th birthday. Like Goldy, I grew up in this area. It’s always interesting to come back and observe the numerous subtle differences that make this part of the country unique: the food, the accents, the Wawa’s. It’s like being in another country sometimes.

Our whole weekend was rearranged by the NFL playoffs. After the Giants beat the Cowboys last weekend and the Giants were scheduled to play the Packers for the NFC title at 6:30 on Sunday, we moved my mom’s birthday dinner from Sunday night to Saturday night (my dad and my brother-in-law are both huge Giants fans). My wife, a Seattle native, seemed amazed that we did that. Sports just matter a bit more in Philly. This is a city where the main newspaper’s sports section has its own letters to the editor section (see UPDATE). It’s not a place where this argument would work in order to move the pro basketball team to another city.

For the first game yesterday between the Patriots and Chargers, I went out to a bar in King of Prussia with an old high school buddy who I hadn’t seen in over two years. He’s been working in the mortgage industry for most of the last ten years. He’s had a front row seat for the unbelievable disaster that’s currently unfolding. He told me stories of people who went from having million-dollar salaries to being unemployed in less than a year, of a company that hired him that was clearly doing things that were illegal and was eventually indicted, and of an industry that used to be so lucrative, companies could afford to put him up in $500/night hotels and send him to the Grammy’s, but is now losing employees because people can make more as a cashier at Superfresh. Tomorrow night, he’s probably going to join me as I head out to Philly Drinking Liberally and shoot the shit about the “Big Shitpile” with Atrios.

For the late game, I went back to my sister’s place, expecting to see the Packers crush the Giants, but sadly seeing Tom Coughlin’s crew make it into the big game after Brett Favre’s miracle season ran out of gas. Now I have to brace for being the only person at the Super Bowl party rooting for the Patriots. Damn.

This morning saw some bad news. My dad got an email that his old co-worker’s son was the police officer killed in this SWAT drug raid in southeastern Virginia. He was a father of 3, killed by a 28-year-old man with no criminal record who shot through the door because he thought he was about to be robbed for the second time that week. As you might imagine, my dad isn’t quite sure what to make of my strong opinions on the drug war. Many people of his generation are so far entrenched in the mythology that has built up around the supposed dangers of drugs, that they don’t even question the methodology that has grown up over the years to fight it. While my parents saw raising a child out here in the sleepy suburbs of Montgomery County as a way to keep my sister and me from being caught up in the drug culture, it did no such thing. Drugs and corruption are everywhere, even here among the cul-de-sacs and strip malls. And the senseless tragedies that go along with it keep piling up.

UPDATE: In comments Piper says the Seattle Times also has a letters section in the sports page. Thanks for the correction.

It looks like after 6+ years of being in Afghanistan, we may have finally come across something that can end their domination of the opium industry…

Competition

This week’s Birds Eye View Contest is posted.

According to Bloomberg.com, it looks like Boeing is going to announce another delay for the 787 Dreamliner:

Boeing Co., the world’s second- largest commercial airplane maker, today may announce a delay in its 787 Dreamliner program that could jeopardize the company’s plans to deliver the first jetliner by the end of the year, according to people familiar with the program.

The 787’s maiden flight, already moved to the end of March from last August, may now be pushed back to June, said the people, who didn’t want to be identified because they aren’t authorized to disclose the information. Boeing will announce a revised Dreamliner delivery schedule before U.S. stock markets open, the people said.

Already six months behind schedule, Dreamliner production has been hurt by parts shortages and assembly delays. Boeing has racked up 817 orders valued at more than $120 billion, making the Dreamliner its most successful new aircraft in sales. Boeing last month reiterated its goal for first delivery to All Nippon Airways Co. before the end of 2008.

“Compressing the test program to six months for a December delivery is dangerous,” said Michel Merluzeau, an aviation consultant at G2 solutions in Kirkland, Washington. “Boeing needs to do a very necessary mea culpa and delivery to All Nippon has got to be reset to spring 2009.”

Back in the late 90s, when I worked for Boeing (my first job after college), I saw some discontent within the engineering team I worked in. There was a lot of anxiousness over how the company was spreading out so much of its engineering work to places all around the globe. I worked with some hard-headed older guys who’d been working in the same place for a while and weren’t really known for their ability to change, and some of them had been down to the newly acquired McDonnell Douglas facilities in California and saw a preview of how this kind of outsourcing approach affects a flight control group.

I left the company during the engineering strike in 2000 and never really looked back. I can only wonder if some of the concerns my ex-co-workers had about the new direction of the company have been realized and are what’s causing the parts shortages and assembly delays today. Whatever is really causing the problems, it does concern me that they might rush their deliveries. This is ultimately why I find myself at odds with the popular libertarian notion that government regulation only results in a negative outcome. There are just times when companies have significant financial incentives to cut corners on safety. As much as I was impressed by how strongly Boeing did care about safety, it was impossible to ignore the fact that the work of the FAA was part of that equation. My experience there definitely moved me away from more extreme notions of having government “leave us alone.”

Then again, if the Far East keeps sending us toys with lead in them, maybe we should send them planes that aren’t fully tested yet.

[Note to trolls: That was a joke]

[UPDATE]: Commenter rhp6033 posts his thoughts on the delays and what’s been causing them.

A week ago, I posted about the case of Marc Emery, the Vancouver-based marijuana seed entrepreneur who was facing an extradition hearing on the 21st of this month. I planned to follow the hearings pretty closely, but it looks like there might not be much to follow. Emery appears to be taking a plea bargain:

Marc Emery, Vancouver’s self-styled Prince of Pot, has tentatively agreed to a five-year prison term in a plea bargain over U.S. money laundering and marijuana seed-selling charges.

Facing an extradition hearing Jan. 21 and the all-but-certain prospect of delivery to American authorities, Emery has cut a deal with U.S. prosecutors to serve his sentence in Canada.

I was a little surprised to see Emery do this, as he seemed to be really looking forward to the publicity that would’ve surrounded his trial in a U.S. court. But the deal was apparently done in the interest of sparing his two co-defendants, one of whom is a medical marijuana patient who fears she will die in an American prison. Still, Emery is clearly ticked off by what happened:

“I’m going to do more time than many violent, repeat offenders,” he complained. “There isn’t a single victim in my case, no one who can stand up and say, ‘I was hurt by Marc Emery.’ No one.”

Of course, there are some out there who would argue that this isn’t true. A number of people think that flouting our drug laws to the extent that Emery has hurts everyone, and “sends the wrong message to children.” And many of these people, unfortunately, still have prominent jobs in our government. Only recently have we started to see them as the radical extremists that they really are.

In Canada, Emery’s business was technically illegal, but ultimately tolerated. He paid his taxes and forged good relations with the Canadian government. But in the end, America’s zealousness in fighting the drug war has always been able to trump such trivialities. Marc Emery, a man who hasn’t even visited in the United States in many years, will be sent to a Canadian prison for 5 years solely for being the supply that matched up to the American demand for the seeds of a plant that humans have used recreationally for thousands of years.

In other news out of Canada, Glenn Greenwald posts about another set of unjust laws, hate speech laws. Unlike the laws that are sending Emery away to jail, these laws don’t come out of pressure from the American government. Instead, they come from those who take an extreme view of multiculturalism and protecting minorities. Greenwald writes:

Ezra Levant is a right-wing Canadian neoconservative who publishes Western Standard, a typical warmongering, pro-Likud journal — a poor man’s Weekly Standard for Canadian neocons. In February, 2006, he published the Danish Mohammed cartoons, which prompted an Islamic group’s imam to file a complaint (.pdf) against Levant with the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission, charging Levant with “advocating hatemongering cartoons in the media,” and the imam specifically accused Levant of “defaming me and my family because we follow and are related to Prophet Mohammed.”

Rather than dismiss the complaint as a blatant attempt to punish free thought and free speech, the Alberta Human Rights Commission announced that it would investigate. To do so, they compelled Levant to appear before a government agent and be interrogated about the cartoons he published, his thoughts and intent in publishing them, and the other circumstances surrounding his “behavior.” Under the law, the Commission has the power to impose substantial fines and other penalties on Levant.

As much as I would probably find Levant’s politics to be a mixture of hysterical and terrifying, his actions should never, ever be considered a crime for any reason. This is one thing that nearly all of us in this country tend to get right. We understand the value of free speech and that restricting it will always unleash unintended consequences. However, as Greenwald points out, these laws are more common in both Canada and Europe.

Whether we’re talking about U.S. drug laws or the hate speech laws in Canada, any time you make laws which aim to protect the public’s peace of mind by restricting the liberty of others, you start down the path of totalitarianism. You chase an unattainable utopia that eventually alienates the public it aims to protect. Both the United States and Canada can look across our common border to take the first steps towards backing away from our extremist tendencies.

Enjoy the game today, everyone. I’m kind of torn. It’s hard not to root for Brett Favre to keep his season going, but I’d love to see a Giants-Seahawks NFC Championship game at Qwest Field next week.

This week’s Birds Eye View Contest is still unsolved. I think I have to give a clue since it’s such a tough one. The clue it’s that this town is so plain and conservative that there just weren’t any views that stood out for me to use.

Finally, after way too long of a wait, the third edition of the Crackpiper Chronicles is now posted (as always, keep sending me your favorite stupid comments, although I already have some good material for Part 4).

Jerry Cornfield writes about the effort by former Governor Booth Gardner to bring Oregon’s assisted suicide law to Washington. His “Death with Dignity” initiative will be filed this morning at 10am.

Oregon’s law has functioned as expected since its inception 10 years ago. Despite the howling of those who claimed that the law would lead to mass suicides, only a tiny fraction of Oregonians take advantage of this law each year to legally end their lives on their own terms. Unfortunately, as David Postman reports, this initiative will have opposition from the Governor’s office:

Gov. Chris Gregoire is talking to reporters in Olympia. She was just asked her position on the assisted suicide initiative that former Gov. Booth Gardner will file tomorrow. Gardner, who has Parkinsons, has been a mentor to Gregoire. Gregoire’s voice cracked when she answered the question:

“I love my friend Booth Gardner and my heart goes out to his condition and what he’s had to face. He was my motivation for the Life Sciences Discovery Fund. I pray every day that we will find a cure. But I find it on a personal level, very, very difficult to support assisted suicide.”

That’s interesting, because back in 2004, when she was running for governor, the following appeared in the Seattle PI:

State Attorney General Christine Gregoire, the leading Democratic candidate for governor, said she does not see a conflict between her Catholic faith and protecting abortion rights, said Morton Brilliant, her press secretary.

Gregoire is “deeply faithful and also strongly committed to a woman’s right to choose,” Brilliant said. “And she believes a woman’s right to choice is a fundamental right.”

Directly bucking [Seattle Archbishop Alex] Brunett’s edict, he added that Gregoire does not believe abortion is immoral.

“(Gregoire) does not see her role as governor as requiring her to impose her faith on the entire state,” he said. “Washington is clearly a pro-choice state, Gregoire will not shy away from that belief and will not waver in her support of that right.”

[Emphasis mine]

I find it extremely difficult to understand how a person can see abortion as a fundamental right, but also see the right for a terminally ill individual to control their own death as being subject to other people’s moral qualms.

I catch some grief from my friends for having voted for Dino Rossi in 2004, but it’s days like this (and there have been many recently) that remind me why I just couldn’t fill in that circle next to Gregoire’s name. She ran a hollow campaign with no ideas and has since become a governor that nearly always reverts to the most authoritarian solutions, rather than being concerned with the state constitution, the rights of Washington State citizens, or even the foreseeable results of her actions. In almost everything we’ve seen, she seems more interested in doing the symbolic than the sensible.

As I was researching this post and looking for Gregoire’s past statements on abortion, I found that it’s nearly impossible to find statements directly from her that affirm her support for a woman’s right to choose. In fact, this page reports that she told Archbishop Brunett in the meeting referenced above that as a Catholic, she was “against abortion.” At this point, I have no idea who’s really telling the truth. But what I do know is that if she really is pro-choice, her stance on assisted suicide clearly makes her a hypocrite. If I had to guess, I’d say her stance on assisted suicide is the real Gregoire and her pro-choice position is a pander.

Dino Rossi is the only openly anti-choice politician I’ve ever voted for in my life, and as the election was unimaginably close, I became overly concerned about casting what was essentially a protest vote over Gregoire’s lethargic campaign that could’ve been the deciding vote in the entire election. After watching the entire Republican Party establishment act like a bunch of toddlers in the months after the election, I seriously doubt I can vote for Rossi again – but at this point, I can’t vote for Gregoire either. As the Bush era collapses into itself and gives Democrats incredible gains in Washington DC, we’re heading into a new progressive era where civil liberties actually matter again to voters, but this November Washington State residents won’t have anyone on the ballot who reflects these values.

UPDATE: Back in October, the Seattle Times had a nice story of someone in Oregon who took advantage of their right to choose.

Blogger and soldier Andy Olmsted lost his life in Iraq.

This weekend, HBO’s The Wire kicks off its final season. After living in relative obscurity throughout much of its run, the show is finally getting a lot of attention for telling amazing true-to-life stories from the inner-city that have long gone untold. The show’s material is based on the experiences of its two creators, former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon and former Baltimore PD Detective and public school teacher Ed Burns. As one of those who found out about this show too long after it began, I’m still catching up on the last few seasons. While the show deals with various aspects of inner-city life, the drug war and its downstream effects are everywhere, demonstrating in full detail the damage being done by a policy that far too many Americans have been fully content to ignore. The final season will focus on the role of the media, and how it fails to tell this story.

Last weekend, I posted a response to a column from the Longview Daily News, written by editor Cal Fitzsimmons. The column was describing a case from rural Cowlitz County where a confidential informant, 40-year-old Tina Rivard, tricked federal drug agents into arresting a man, 21-year-old Bo Jeremy Storedahl of Kelso, on felony drug trafficking charges. The original article on the Longview Daily News site is no longer there, but the Seattle Times article on the case is still up (and another article from The Daily News Online is here).

According to Mike Carter’s account in the Times, Rivard was first arrested in May for forging prescriptions. In return for leniency, she agreed to become a confidential informant (or “snitch”) in order to help build cases against others involved in dealing prescription drugs. After successfully helping to convict one person, she helped the police nab Storedahl, a 21-year-old with no criminal record. She did this in part by tricking the drug agents who were listening in to her calls by quickly re-dialing a different person (her husband) and convincing the agents that they were listening to Storedahl when in fact they weren’t. After Rivard managed to carry the charade further and stage a drug buy at Storedahl’s house, the young man was arrested and charged with a five-count felony indictment. Now that Rivard has admitted to what she did and plead guilty, she faces up to 20 years in jail, while Storedahl was only charged with misdemeanor drug possession for the four pills he had in his pocket when he was arrested.

I initially took issue with Fitzsimmons’ column because despite the tremendous example he had right in front of him that the use of confidential informants can be fraught with problems, he brushed all of that off in order to reassure his readers that snitches are good. There was no desire to explore the world of confidential informants, to look into the role they’ve played in our prison overcrowding problems, or to look at the larger issue of why these drug war tactics are failing – both in large cities and small towns – to actually prevent people from using drugs, while also undermining the level of trust in law enforcement. A few days after my post went up, an interesting comment appeared:

Hey, sometimes it pays to Google your name. I suppose I could complain about your reprinting my column here, though in chunks, but I won’t.

I won’t even engage in an argument about snitches. (Love ’em). But I would suggest you lighten up. Cheers.

Cal | 01.02.08 – 4:45 pm

I wasn’t sure what was more amusing, the fact that the editor of a newspaper had such a poor understanding of Fair Use in the internet age, or that I was being told to lighten up by someone who still fervently believes that we’re achieving something by sending as many people to jail as we can for drug offenses. A second comment, however, was even more interesting:

FYI – Your assumptions about this case are largely wrong. Bo plead because he confessed to the crime and there were other witnesses willing to testify they bought dope from him (without any compensation by LE). Tina wasn’t simply forging prescritions, she was entrenched in the sale/distribution network. You can spin this however you want but you can’t change the facts – Bo was dealing – Tina was dealing – both faced a judge for their behavior. That’s the way its supposed to work.

KT | 01.02.08 – 6:40 pm

KT’s comment was directed at me, but his/her opinion was that I was getting some facts wrong both by accepting what Fitzsimmons had written about this case and through a couple of assumptions I made myself. At this point, I have no way of knowing who’s telling the truth (KT declined to leave any contact info), but some of what he/she says actually makes a bit of sense: if Rivard was just some lone addict forging prescriptions to get her pills, it wouldn’t make much sense to make her an informant. She was likely involved in some larger network of people forging prescriptions and selling oxycodone tablets.

As for Fitzsimmons, his belief that this case represents some grand departure from the normal use of confidential informants has no basis in reality. This outcome is often what happens when people snitch in order to get more lenient treatment. In theory, it’s supposed to yield some kingpin, but that’s rarely what actually happens. What often happens is that the informant rolls over on some easy target like Storedahl. The story here is not that this case is an aberration, it’s that messes like these have become commonplace.

As for Storedahl, commenter KT is not the only person who believes that he wasn’t just some random innocent target, but was just as involved in dealing prescription drugs as Rivard (see the comments at the end of the Daily News Online article). None of this is proof of anything, but it is interesting that Storedahl is a son of a local businessman. There are still a lot of questions in this case that have still gone unanswered. How did the Rivards know Storedahl and had access to his house? Was he a customer? A friend? Who was the first person sent to jail by Rivard and what were the circumstances of his arrest? Why was law enforcement using Rivard as a snitch even though with prescription drug fraud there’s not likely a “kingpin” to take down anyway? Is Rivard getting the book thrown at her because she really tricked the police or because she targeted the wrong person? It seems like the only thing I really know about this case is that the editor of the Longview Daily News wants to me to “lighten up” when it comes to my concerns over what can go wrong when confidential informants are used by law enforcement.

I can only guess at the plotlines in the upcoming season of The Wire, but I’ve gained a very clear picture of how the media has failed to tell us the bigger story behind the drug war. Whether we’re talking about inner-cities or small towns, heroin or OxyContin, young black men dealing on a street corner or wealthy white kids dealing out of their parents’ suburban house, newspapers across the country seem uninterested in doing anything more than parroting the view from law enforcement that the war is necessary, the victims deserve what they get, and the tactics should not be questioned. It’s time for someone to tell this story with the kind of honesty and insight that will finally break down the illusions that have been mistaken for reality for so many years.

This week’s Birds Eye View Contest is not likely to be unsolved for very long.

Dominic Holden has an article in The Stranger this week that deserves as wide an audience as possible.

Also, Jim Miller is not clear on why no Democrats have responded to his request. I think my colleague Carl already covered this when he explained, “Maybe it’s Because You’re An Idiot?.”