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Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza!

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Young Turks: Time for the GOP to shut down the government.

The Joe Biden reality show.

2012 in Hindsight:

Lawrence O’Donnell: Why the fiscal cliff deal is so awesome!

Thom: The battle for 2014 begins in the Senate.

The Republican War on Women:

Ed: Hypocrite-narcissist O’Reilly fails to quit after his taxes go up.

Young Turks: Why did Republicans block Sandy relief?

Sam Seder: Farewell Joe Lieberman. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass….

Orange and Weepy:

SlateTV: States pass laws prohibiting employers from asking for your social media passwords.

Sam Seder: “Conservative” ideology works until THEY are suffering.

Young Turks: Fake fiscal cliff drama.

Guns Don’t Kill Guns…People Kill Guns:

Sharpton: Birfer Republicans try to convince Justice Roberts to refuse to administer the oath of office to Obama.

White House: West Wing Week.

Young Turks: Wiretapping hypocrisy?

Thom: The Good, The Bad, and The Very, Very Ugly:

The Republican War on Kwanza™:

Bill Press flunks the G.O.P. on Hurricane Sandy relief and the fiscal cliff.

Pap: G.O.P. hate knows no bounds!

Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

Documenting the King Tides

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West Seattle Blog passes this along this Department of Ecology request to help document the high tides in the coming month.

The dates for January’s king tides vary slightly depending on location:

· In the Strait of Juan de Fuca, king tides will occur Jan. 8-13.

· Along Washington’s outer coast, they occur Jan. 10-12.

· The Puget Sound dates for king tides are Jan. 14-17.

Follow these steps to participate:

· Use Ecology’s king tide map and schedule to find when and where the highest tides will occur. Go to http://www.ecy.wa.gov/climatechange/ipa_hightide_map.htm.

· Locate a public beach by checking out Ecology’s Coastal Atlas at https://fortress.wa.gov/ecy/coastalatlas/.

· Take photos during a king tide, preferably where the high water levels can be gauged against familiar landmarks such as sea walls, jetties, bridge supports or buildings.

· Note the date, time and location of your photo – then upload your images on the Washington King Tide Photo Initiative Flickr Group at http://www.flickr.com/groups/1611274@N22/.

· Play it safe! While the winter king tides occur during daylight hours, don’t venture out during severe weather and keep a close eye on rising water levels.

I love the citizen participation aspect of this. Hopefully they get a lot of good data.

Jay Walking

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Seattle can’t jay walk. It’s a real problem.

I don’t mean the people who wait at the corner and don’t go no matter what. They’re fine. If that’s what they want to do, God bless. Those people won’t jay walk.

No, I have a much bigger problem with people who seem oblivious to traffic. Maybe they’re out of towners who expect drivers are looking for them. If you’re from a city with more consistent jay walking, perhaps that’s reasonable. But here if you want to to cross in the middle or against the light, you’ve got to follow some rules:

First watch for traffic. I know that sounds like it should be obvious, but enough people just dart out obliviously, that it clearly isn’t. Pedestrians dart into traffic pretty regularly. Watch for it.

Somewhat related to that is emergency vehicles. Give them more room than you’d give other cars. A lot more room. The prompt for this post is that I saw people running to get across the road when a fire engine was coming. They had enough time, but not a lot. If the engine has to slow down it’s a couple more seconds before they can get to the emergency, and they’re going faster than you’re thinking they are. Just don’t do it.

Of course, even when road is clear on the side with the green light, there may be people who are going to make a right turn on the red. They’re looking for traffic, not looking for you. Figure out where the possible right turns are and make sure that nobody is going to make them. DON’T assume that a car without its blinkers on isn’t going to turn: Seattle drivers often forget how blinkers work.

Finally, Seattle police will still stop you for jay walking. It’s not as likely if you’re white as if you’re a person of color. It’s not as likely if you’re well dressed or in a nicer neighborhood. Being on the lookout for police will probably distract from the other stuff, but you probably don’t want to get the world’s dumbest ticket.

Eyman’s paradox

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As many readers know, this blog is named after Tim “Biggest Lie of My Life” Eyman, Washington state’s own professional initiative huckster and admitted liar. Today, that Horsesass submitted signatures for new initiative.

Initiative 517 is supposed to

[establish] protections for citizens exercising their First Amendment rights by participating in the initiative and referendum process

How does the initiative propose to protect First Amendment rights?

By preventing “non-participants” in the initiative and referendum process from exercising their first amendment rights.

Sure…there are a bunch of good things that would be prohibited by the initiative. It would change the RCW to make “pushing, shoving, touching, spitting, [and] throwing objects [at]” a signature gatherer or signer a disorderly conduct. Of course, these things are already assault, a rather more serious crime, so that’s pretty stupid.

Also in the laundry list of disorderly conduct includes: “yelling, screaming, being verbally abusive, blocking or intimidating, or other tumultuous conduct or maintaining an intimidating presence within twenty-five feet of any person gathering signatures or any person trying to sign any initiative or referendum petition.” Blocking, sure. And being “verbally abusive” is already in the RCW as disorderly conduct. But “other tumultuous conduct”? Or maintaining an intimidating presence within twenty-five feet. What the fuck?

In other words, if you come within 25 feet of a signature gatherer or signer, the law enacted by this initiative would pretty much prevent you from expressing anything negative about the initiative. No more arguing the merits. No more trying to persuade people to not signing a petition. Paid signature gathers could try to persuade people to sign the petition, and you can’t offer counterarguments, or protests, even if the petition is being misrepresented by the signature gatherer.

Because, you know, participating in a public debate about a public petition to our lawmakers, in public is a less important First Amendment right than a signature gatherer’s First Amendment right to ask, beg, plead, trick and coerce people into signing their petition(s).

In other words, “We will ENFORCE The People’s First Amendment rights by suppressing The People’s First Amendment rights! It’s Eyman’s paradox.

The initiative has two other marginally related sections (bringing up questions of multi-topic unconstitutionality, a recurring problem for Eyman initiatives). One section would give signature gathers six more months to collect signatures. This, obviously, reflects the fact that many of Eyman’s initiatives fail to qualify for the ballot because of an insufficient number of signatures.

The other marginally-related section tries to circumvent a court ruling that local governments can ignore petitions that can’t legitimately be put to a public vote under the RCW. Eyman simply cannot stand the fact that courts have told him to fuck off. So now he wants to change the law to force invalid initiatives onto the ballot.

Great use of public resources, huh?

Odds and Ends

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– I find there to be somewhat of a logical inconsistency in the outrage over a newspaper in New York identifying who has handgun permits in their area. We often hear that regardless of how accessible you make guns, people who want them will still have them. To a very limited extent, I agree with that. But if that’s true for guns, why isn’t it true for the information about gun permits? The gun permit information that the newspaper printed was publicly available. Anyone could look it up. They just made it more accessible. Does that additional accessibility make a difference? Particularly to an unstable person who might never have thought to look that up in the first place? For folks who are making that argument, the same logic applies to guns.

– I was going to write up something about how Rob McKenna’s acknowledgement that the GOP needs to work harder to appeal to women, minorities, and young people is an odd realization to have immediately after a career filled with supporting terrible policies for women, minorities, and young people, but after some Googling, I found that Cienna Madrid already wrote it for me.

– It’s cool to see how much interest there is in legal pot farming, but I do worry that some folks are a little too optimistic about how easy it’ll be to hit the jackpot as a pot farmer. The taxes dictated by the initiative are high enough that margins will still be relatively low, and unless the state greatly limits the amount of licenses it gives out, people with no experience growing quality product might have trouble competing with more experienced growers. My advice to people looking to make money from Washington’s newfound liberty is to avoid the supply chain for now and focus on opening places where marijuana users can congregate: an Amsterdam-style coffee shop with an outdoor smoking area, a movie theater with a rooftop patio, video arcade, bowling alley, concert hall, etc, etc.

The Upcoming Session

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As the new year comes, I write the annual what-do-you-want-from-the-upcoming-legislative-session? piece. It starts on the 14th, and I think this year it’s more defense than it has been in the past. Hopefully education won’t be hurt too badly. Hopefully social services won’t get slashed too much. There’s still a Democratic governor (albeit one who campaigned against raising taxes) and a Democratic House, so hopefully the damage won’t be too severe.

I’m planning to be a bit more activist on HA than I have in the past. So I’ll be encouraging y’all to write to or call your electeds. Maybe letters to the editor (do people still do that?) and other ways to get involved.

In that spirit, I’m going to be emailing lefty/civic groups the following questions:

1) What do you want from the next session of the legislature?
2) What are the prospects for making that happen?
3) How can the Horse’s Ass readership help?

I figure most won’t respond, but a few might. If there’s anyone you want me to email, let me know. If there are any issues you’d like me to push, let me know.

Big fucking deal

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Boehner is SEEING ORANGE!

It was only a few days before the nation would go over the fiscal cliff, no bipartisan agreement was in sight, and Reid had just publicly accused Boehner of running a “dictatorship” in the House and caring more about holding onto his gavel than striking a deal.

“Go f[uck] yourself,” Boehner sniped as he pointed his finger at Reid, according to multiple sources present.

Reid, a bit startled, replied: “What are you talking about?”

Boehner repeated: “Go f[uck] yourself.”

You know…I’ll bet Joe Biden suggested Boehner do this—as a strategy to keep his speakership.

And I sure hope it works.

Footnote: Now I am concerned about speaker Boehner. The last time we heard that a powerful Republican told a powerful Democratic Senator to “go fuck yourself,” well…the poor bastard lost his heart!

Turning schools into a Battle Ground

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Perhaps she is going for a dark horse Fucking Idiot of the Year award?

Or maybe this is one of the emotional scars of having attended a school by the name of Battle Ground High School?

It’s Hard to say. But it’s truly idiotic. Washington state Representative Liz Pike (R-18):

…wants to bring up a bill that would let teachers carry concealed guns in the classroom.

Under Pike’s proposal, teachers at schools like Salmon Creek Elementary could volunteer to go through mental evaluations and week-long gun training at their own expense. They would also buy their own guns to bring into their classes and wear on a belt or in a holster – not in a purse or drawer.

A good way to protect students and teachers? Hmmmm.

You may have read, just last week, about an “incident” in a New Jersey police station:

A shootout broke out in a suburban New Jersey police station on Friday when a 39-year-old man who had been taken into custody attacked a police officer, stealing her gun and shooting her and two other officers before he was killed.

I’ve been told numerous similar stories from my father and step mother, who were both Chicago police officers for most of their working lives. Fortunately, the cops usually win these spontaneous altercations without losing control of their guns. But police officers are rigorously and recurrently trained in self defense, weapons handling, and dealing with aggressive persons.

Teachers? Not so much.

Additionally, teachers work, day in and day out, with a much higher proportion of crazy people than do the cops. By, “crazy people”, I mean most adolescent males who need at least a decade to learn how to handle the new phenomena of being constantly hepped up on sex hormones. And I’m just talking naturally produced stuff….

What we definitely don’t need in schools is to provide impulse-control challenged adolescent males new opportunities to exercise their testosterone-induced aggression instincts with the temptation of a loaded gun for victory! Doing so is a recipe for more gun-related deaths in schools—not fewer.

So, yes…Rep. Liz Pike does gets my vote for the 2012 Fucking Idiot of the Year award.

Bird’s Eye View Contest

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Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky. It was the dental office in Fort Dodge, Iowa that was at the center of a recent court case involving a dental assistant who was fired for being “too sexy”.

This is the last contest of 2012 and since it’s the fifth Sunday of the month as well, I’m going to do a special year end contest. Normally when I do the month-end contests related to a news item, I try to avoid particularly sad events like shootings. Unfortunately they dominated the news this year, especially in the past month. Far too often, we saw some unbalanced jackass with a gun end the lives of random, innocent people. The six pictures below are all from tragic mass shootings within the past year. Good luck, happy New Year, and may there be far fewer of these in 2013.

Two notes:
1 – All views are default orientation (up is north) and a mass shooting is defined as any event where a gunman kills multiple people indiscriminately
2 – The “no political comments” rule will be strictly enforced in this thread – feel free to send me an email if I don’t peel myself away from watching football quickly enough

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The House I’m Destined To Live In

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Mark Kleiman accuses Eugene Jarecki, director of the anti-drug war movie “The House I Live In”, of engaging in some truthiness:

I saw a screening of the anti-incarceration documentary The House I Live In some months ago. The film is right that prisons are horrible places and that we have vastly too many people in them. And it’s right that the “war on drugs” causes untold needless suffering. But the film strongly implies that the mass-incarceration problem consists mostly of non-violent drug dealers serving ludicrously long terms. False.

In fact, only about 20% of U.S. incarceration is on drug charges, and by no means are all of those folks non-violent. That’s still way too many drug prisoners; have drugs-only incarceration rate higher than the total incarceration rate of anyplace we’d like to compare ourselves with. But if we let them tomorrow, we’d still have four times our historical incarceration rate and four times the incarceration rate of any other OECD country, instead of five times.

I haven’t seen the movie yet, so I can’t say for sure that Kleiman is misrepresenting Jarecki’s viewpoint, but his use of “strongly implies” rather than “says” makes me very suspicious that he is. If Jarecki is merely saying that the drug war is primarily responsible for our mass incarceration problems, he’s correct. And Kleiman’s response that only 20% of those incarcerated are there for drug charges misses the bigger picture by a mile.

The most widespread damage done by the drug war isn’t necessarily that low-level drug offenders go to jail for a long time. The damage is done by the downstream effects of having that in your criminal record for the rest of your life. Even if someone arrested for simple drug possession never goes to jail, they often take plea deals that leave them with a criminal record. And that follows them everywhere, making it extremely difficult for many of them to get money for school, get into public housing, or find employment. People caught in this situation often become destined to a life of more serious and more violent crime.

So to imply that 80% of America’s prisoners would still be there regardless of the war on drugs is incredibly off-base. A significant number of those prisoners had their first contact with the criminal justice system as a result of the drug war and – as a result of that contact – were set on a path of likelier criminality. This phenomenon is explained very well by Michelle Alexander in “The New Jim Crow”. And with over 1 million drug arrests occurring annually, we’re putting enormous amounts of Americans down this path, particularly minorities and the poor.

In addition, this analysis doesn’t even take into account the fact that many of the violent offenders in the criminal justice system are there because of the prohibitionist policies that lead to violent confrontations within black markets in the first place. As one of the commenters to the post pointed out, the Global Commission on Drug Policy points out quite simply that “Drug Policy and the incarceration of low-level drug offenders is the primary cause of mass incarceration in the United States.” I have trouble believing that Kleiman would dispute that, but his post “strongly implies” that he does.

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