HorsesAss.Org

– This piece has a cute premise (if not wholly original) that was very well executed. Mostly, I’m linking to it because, what a wonderful opening sentence: “Those sensitive, shrinking violets on the right took a day off from their racist dog whistles and comparing Barack Obama to murderous tyrants to whine about their hurt fee-fees.”

– These pictures are pretty amazing.

– I guess Rick Santorum is also a fan of Langston Hughes. If I ever run for president, I’m blatantly ripping off Freedom Train.

– Goldy is right, Rob McKenna is a dick.

There’s been some big news regarding the medical marijuana bill that appeared ready to be signed into law this week:

The top federal prosecutors in Washington sent a stern warning to Washington State that a medical-marijuana law passed by the legislature this week, which would license dispensaries and growers, could result in a wave of criminal charges against cannabis providers and even state employees. At the same time, in a mixed message, they telegraphed that the Obama Administration’s policy of tacitly permitting states with medical marijuana laws would proceed.

“The Washington legislative proposals will create a licensing scheme that permits large-scale marijuana cultivation and distributions,” wrote US Attorneys Jenny Durkan and Michael Ormsby, respectively representing the Western and Eastern districts of Washington State, in a letter sent today to Governor Chris Gregoire. “This would authorize conduct contrary to federal law and thus, would undermine the federal government’s efforts to regulate the possession, manufacturing, and trafficking of controlled substances. Accordingly, the Department could consider civil and criminal legal remedies regarding those who set up marijuana growing facilities and dispensaries as they will be doing so in violation of federal law. … In addition, state employees who conducted activities mandated by the Washington legislative proposals would not be immune from liability…” including “criminal prosecution.”

The letter was sent in response to an inquiry from Governor Gregoire to Attorney General Eric Holder (The federal prosecutors’ letter is here and Gregoire’s letter is here).

Dominic’s take is that Gregoire sent this letter and received the predictable reply because she intends to veto the bill. There’s a good chance he’s right. Eli Sanders speculates even further:

Someone who works in Democratic politics floated this theory my way last night, and it makes sense: Gregoire is looking at the medical marijuana bill with an eye toward future confirmation hearings—her possible future confirmation hearings.

Think about it. No one expects Gregoire to run for governor again. Everyone knows she’s been brought up as a possible Team Obama member in the past. And, obviously, having signed a medical pot bill that can be seen as flouting federal law would be a liability during any upcoming D.C. confirmation process.

So it’s worth asking: In Gregoire’s political calculus, is it the Washington State medical marijuana bill vs. her future in Washington, D.C.?

The answer here is probably no, and here’s why. Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico championed and signed a medical marijuana bill in 2007 that was groundbreaking in that it was the first to try to involve state agencies in the implementation. And this was at a time when the Bush Administration was still aggressively going after state medical marijuana laws. Here’s what Governor Richardson said:

“So what if it’s risky? It’s the right thing to do,” said Richardson, one of the candidates in the crowded 2008 field. “What we’re talking about is 160 people in deep pain. It only affects them.”

The legislation would create a program under which some patients – with a doctor’s recommendation – could use marijuana provided by the state health department. Lawmakers approved the bill Wednesday. The governor is expected to sign it in the next few weeks.

Despite this very bold flouting of federal law, Richardson was still chosen by Obama to be his Secretary of Commerce (although he later withdrew for reasons completely unrelated to the medical marijuana law). It may be hard for a lot of Democrats in this state to admit, but if Gregoire vetoes this bill because of an imagined conflict with federal law, it’s because she’s a shitty Governor. This bill is not much different from what Colorado already allows and what other states are already planning to implement.

UPDATE: The interesting irony here is that some of the most recent changes to the bill have been causing some medical marijuana advocates to call for the bill to be scrapped as well. The concerns are definitely over different areas though. Gregoire’s main concern is over the licensing of production and distribution, while the CDC is concerned with the extra power that a late amendment from Rep. Christopher Hurst has given to law enforcement to continue to search and arrest authorized patients. I’m not convinced the CDC’s concerns are bad enough to scrap the bill (I think some law enforcement folks will screw over some patients regardless of what the law says), but Gregoire’s concerns over the bill are far less grounded in reality.

Even sadder (or perhaps funnier, depending on your predisposition), folks like Steve Sarich – who’s been fighting this bill since the beginning of the session – would be the big winner if this bill gets scrapped. Sarich, as you’re probably familiar with, is the entrepreneur who holds clinics where a doctor comes in for a fee and authorizes patients (occasionally those patients are 19-year-olds who later try to rob Sarich in the middle of the night) and then supplies them with their “medicine”. This bill pretty clearly shuts down operations like that. That’s just one more of the problems that this bill was meant to solve that reappears if Gregoire takes out the veto pen.

UPDATE 2: While I was writing up this post, Dominic posted a follow-up that makes it clearer that Gregoire intends to veto the bill. Please call her office if you have time: 360-902-4111

Until today, I didn’t realize that this was part of the budget deal.

A rider in the budget bill to keep the federal government in operation has triggered fury among some wildlife groups because it would remove certain wolves from the endangered species list.

I’m not sure what Obama’s side got for it, and I didn’t want the government shut down, so I won’t comment on if it’s good as part of the budget package. But on its own, it stinks. It’s a bad idea, and a worse precedent.

Instead of letting the best science prevail, or forcing the states with dwindling wolf populations to come up with a reasonable recovery plan, it just bypassed the whole process. Even if you agree with the bill’s proponents about the merits of wolf recovery in the Northern Rockies, and you accept that legislation singling out one species is a good idea, it’s only reversible through legislation, so if populations do decline, this law will still be on the books. And surely in the future, with this on the books, we’ll have more states demanding stupid exceptions.

In any event, what right wing Republican nut job thought this would be a good idea?

“Right now, Montana’s wolf population is out of balance and this provision will get us back on the responsible path with state management,” Sen. Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat, said in a written statement. He said he wrote the language together with Republican Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho.

Awesome. John Tester is so far out there, he has Ron Fucking Paul making sense.

Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, said the inclusion of such a rider “doesn’t make any sense.”

“And it really shows how out of touch so many people are here in Washington and how unlikely it is that we will get to the bottom of our problems,” Paul said in an interview this week with CNN.

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This is an open thread…

State legislators are trying to pass liquor privatization. I’ll leave it to other people to point out that liquor privatization initiatives failed last year, as well as the pros and cons of this particular measure.

There is one thing I do find interesting about last year’s results: how poorly it did in Eastern Washington. Maybe there’s some moralizing and concern for the budget that compelled the rest of the state (myself included) to oppose liquor privatization. But there’s something else unique to rural Washington.

You see, in many rural parts of the country, capitalism doesn’t work very well. There aren’t enough people in the market for various goods and services, so they don’t get there. In some cases, that’s just how they want things. I think most people who chose to live 50 miles from the nearest stop sign wouldn’t trade with me, no matter how much I’m glad to have a few bakeries within walking distance, and the ability to go out on my bike anywhere I want. Still, rural people want some things that the market can’t provide. So we as a society have set up things like rural electrification, farm subsidies and public radio.

Surely, there are places in rural Washington where there would be less hard alcohol sold if we privatize the system. For a lot of people the selection and hours may not be all they want, but they know they would get less if the state stores went away.

Starting soon…

Here is the text. Discuss.

– Somehow, I doubt very much that my father will ever say, “Boy do you have smart commenters.”

– I’m not quite as pessimistic as Oliver about what would happen if there isn’t an extension of the debt ceiling but I imagine some terrible things.

– In part, I think this is the best strategy to deal with the debt ceiling. (h/t)

– Bikes for Books at the Lake City Library. Sounds like a great thing for 4th and 5th graders.

Please join us tonight for an evening of electoral politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. We meet at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Starting time is 8:00 pm, but feel free to join some of us for an earlier dinner.

Not in Seattle? There is a good chance you live near one of the 222 other chapters of Drinking Liberally.

Today marks the 50th anniversary of manned space flight and the 30th anniversary of the first Space Shuttle launch. Among other events, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden Jr. is just announcing which museums will receive each of the five retiring Space Shuttles.

The Pacific Northwest, with its abundance of aviation museums, has two strong contenders among the 21 in the competition.

The first is, of course, the Museum of Flight at Boeing Field. I don’t need to say much about this, because if you have any interest in aviation, you’ve been there. (And if not, well…you’ve probably stopped reading.)

Another not-quite-so-well-known regional finalist is the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon. This is the place where Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose is housed. If you like aviation museums, Evergreen is fantastic. In recent years, the museum has expanded to two main buildings, one for aviation, one for space. They are currently building a water park with an unusual water slide. Here’s a photo I recently took on a dreary March afternoon…

Bolden choked up a few times during his introductory speech. Here is the list of awardees:

• Discovery will go to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
• Endeavor go to California Science Center.
• Atlantis, whose last flight is in June, will go to the Kennedy Space Center.
• Enterprise, the prototype that currently at the Smithsonian Institution, will go to the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum

Bummer.

I’m going to have trouble holding back the snark on this one. As the State House today passed the medical marijuana bill (which is not perfect, but a step up from the mess we currently have) this quote somehow managed to come out of the mouth of a legislator:

Opponents argue that this moves the state one step closer to full-blown legalization and doesn’t set up enough safeguards to keep marijuana out of the hands of children.

“It fosters ambiguity,” said Rep. Kevin Parker, R-Spokane. “We are confusing kids, we are confusing the law, and we are making it harder on law enforcement when the budgets we’re writing are reducing law enforcement in this state.”

That’s an overwhelming amount of stupid right there, so I’ll break this up into three parts:

We are confusing kids

In a word, no. It’s not confusing to any child anywhere in this state that there are stores that sell a plant product to sick people any more than it confuses kids that there are pharmacies that sell drugs to sick people. We tell kids not to use prescription drugs, yet those drugs are still sold in pharmacies to people whose doctors tell them they can have it. Is that confusing to kids? No. Our kids aren’t that stupid, and our legislators shouldn’t be either.

We are confusing the law

What? The reason that this bill came about was because the existing law was really unclear and confusing about what was allowed when it came to supplying medical marijuana patients. What SB 5073 represents is an attempt to make the law less confusing, and it’s impossible to look at the bill today and claim that it’s more gray than the status quo. I still have concerns with it, but it’s a big clarification of what had been very unclear up until now.

We are making it harder on law enforcement when the budgets we’re writing are reducing law enforcement in this state

This is just award-winning stupid. Every time we have a case where a patient or provider is clearly getting screwed over, we hear the same exact excuse from law enforcement, “We just want the rules to be clear, until then, we have to arrest people.” This bill does that. This bill makes the rules clear so that law enforcement can stop wasting money and time trying to figure out who’s supplying medical marijuana for people suffering from MS, cancer and other ailments and finally focus more of their time on real criminals and real crime. This bill will save law enforcement and our criminal justice system a significant amount of money by making it clearer who’s following the law and who isn’t. Anyone who says otherwise is either clueless or being stupid on purpose.

It might shock you to learn that an editorial in The Seattle Times pissed me off. But here we go:

PROTEST is a venerable American right. Sleep in the state Capitol building. Camp out on the Capitol grass. Carry signs. Chant, march, yell, make your point.

It is all part of the political process.

Here are a list of things that The Settle Times Editorial Board finds acceptable: Sleep, camp, carry signs, march, yell, and make a point. You may do these. Yes, the people who you want to persuade will probably ignore you. So will the Seattle Times.

But a protest becomes something else when a group of rowdy people storm or try to force their way into the relatively small foyer in the governor’s office in Olympia, which creates a safety hazard.

OH NO LOUD PEOPLE IN A FOYER! Save us from the Rowdy Foyer People!

So it was last week when a large group of protesters from the Service Employees International Union, upset about looming budget cuts, gathered outside Gov. Chris Gregoire’s office. They had earlier marched around the Capitol campus and demonstrated inside the legislative building.

Thank God less than 1% of them were a bit rowdy (and one probably more serious). Otherwise we might have to spend this prime editorial space talking about the issues they protested. Now we can harrumph.

These protesters wanted to talk to the governor. A lot of people do. A pushing match ensued with State Patrol officers who closed the governor’s door and stood guard outside her office to ensure her safety.

Look, they should be an editorial board. Governors call you up if you’re an editorial board. Senators. Legislators. Business leaders. If you were more polite like our editorial page, then more people would call you up.

Anyway, it goes on like this for a while. And it mentions that one of the people was charged with assault and are accused of elbowing and kicking State Patrol officers. Of course, don’t do that. If the entire editorial was, “hey please don’t kick police officers” it would have been fine. And left them space to debate what the actual budget maybe should look like.

This is what U.S. military spending looks like over a little more than 2 decades:

(Data soure: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.)

So much for the Peace Dividend that followed the end of the Cold War. Apparently, fighting a rag-tag bunch of cave-dwellers requires the same level of funding as keeping up with mighty Soviet Union.

If we want a return to the glory days of a balanced federal budget–you know, like we saw during the last year of the Clinton administration, we should

1. Let the budget busting Bush tax cuts expire. The second major experiment with Trickle-Down economics proved to be an abject failure. It is time for grown-up economic principles to be used for tax policy.
2. Cut military spending to late 1990s levels. The proposed Ryan budget would, literally, cause higher death rates for the most vulnerable Americans, who would no longer be able to afford some types of health care. Quality of life would go down drastically for Seniors and people with disabilities.

   It’s immoral to allow military spending to increase far greater than inflation, and ask seniors and the disabled to pay for it with their life!

And if you believe that military spending pays us back by stimulating the economy, think again. A study by University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee political scientist Prof. Uk Heo finds:

…a 1 percent increase in the defense spending share of GDP in the United States is expected to lead to a 0.019 percent increase in economic growth over two years. This result indicates that the economic effects of defense spending on growth in the United States are meaningless because the size of the effects is virtually zero.

Military spending, at least at today’s levels, turns out to be a really, really lousy investment.

Last week’s contest was won by wes.in.wa for his third in a row. It was Leipzig, Germany. And for the second week in a row, others were guessing really close to the actual location before wes found the exact spot.

Here’s this week’s, related to a movie or TV show. Good luck!

Leviticus 25:44-46
Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly.

In honor of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, discuss.

– Dennis G’s posts at Balloon Juice on the Confederate Party are consistently excellent, but this one is his best yet.

– The images from the Olympia rally are really inspiring.

– There are other states with even more fucked up nonsense.

– Well played, Rational Wiki. (h/t)