HorsesAss.Org

It is one thing for the Seattle Times to miss a story happening in its own backyard; that sorta thing happens all the time these days, what with the devastating newsroom cutbacks suffered industrywide over the past few years. But it’s another thing to fill that gap by credulously running an AP piece that totally mischaracterizes the underlying story, and under the misleading headline “In Washington, illegal immigrants canvassing for Democrats.”

Hear that…? Those dirty Democrats are at it again folks, this time using illegal immigrants to help steal another election. Or at least that’s the spin that’s prompted news outlets to pick up this provocative headline nationwide.

But in reality, that spin couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, the real story here, the one which truly deserves the headlines, is the story about how Seattle-based OneAmerica Votes has put together a team of enthusiastic volunteers to canvass immigrant voters throughout Washington state. It is an inspiring story about how our region’s newest Americans have passionately embraced their adopted nation’s grassroots democratic traditions.

Instead, the AP cynically cherry-picks its lede:

When Maria Gianni is knocking on voters’ doors, she’s not bashful about telling people she is in the country illegally.

She knows it’s a risk to advertise this fact to strangers — but it’s one worth taking in what she sees as a crucial election.

The 42-year-old is one of dozens of volunteers — many of them illegal immigrants — canvassing neighborhoods in the Seattle area trying to get naturalized citizens to cast a ballot for candidates like Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, who is in a neck-and-neck race with Republican Dino Rossi.

As a writer, I can’t argue with the storytelling; admittedly, that’s a damn compelling lede. But as a journalist, AP reporter Manuel Valdes (or maybe, his editor) has selectively mischaracterized the nature of these outreach efforts, doing both his subjects and his readers a great disservice.

According to director Pramila Jayapal, OneAmerica Votes has recruited a team of over 150 volunteers, only four of whom Valdes interviewed. And of those four only Gianni told the reporter she was undocumented. That’s one out of four out of 150. So I’m not sure where Valdes conjures up the assertion that “many of them” are “illegal.”

“I have my suspicions,” Jayapal told me when asked how many volunteers were undocumented, “but we certainly don’t ask people about their status.” And while she’s “proud” of Gianni for the personal risk she is taking, Jayapal insists that whether it’s one or a handful or a dozen, the media’s focus on undocumented volunteers entirely misses the point.

“The exciting story here,” (and one, by the way, that starkly contradicts the prevailing national narrative), “is that even people who cant vote are energized about this election, because they understand that it’s their future that is at stake.” Indeed, many of OneAmerica Votes’ volunteers can’t vote, not because they are undocumented, or even non-citizens, but because they are simply underage.

“We have an amazing group of high schoolers who are canvassing with us,” Jayapal told me, “who say to me ‘Wow… I just woke up to politics.’ That’s very exciting to watch.”

As are the results. Over the course of this election over 162,000 immigrant voters throughout the state have been contacted by OneAmerica Votes, including over 41,000 homes canvassed by phone and/or at the door by volunteers. That’s a huge chunk of the 230,000 registered immigrant voters who make up over 7.5% of the Washington state electorate.

And far from this being the Democratic GOTV effort the AP headline implies, much of  OneAmerica Votes’ efforts have focused largely on the many initiatives cluttering the November ballot, with the organization translating voter guides into six languages, and inviting proponents and opponents alike to initiative forums in neighborhoods with large immigrant communities. That’s a unique, grassroots voter education effort that should be celebrated, not vilified.

“It’s a shame,” Jayapal lamented. “The way that this whole story has been spun is scary.”

And ironic, especially considering that at the same time the FOX News crowd frets over a 13-year, tax-paying undocumented resident urging her fellow immigrants to exercise a precious right she doesn’t have, our media has for the most part shrugged off as politics as usual the tens of millions of dollars of out of state money pouring in to influence our local elections, many of the contributors undisclosed, and some of them even foreign.

Is it any wonder then that the most intelligent commentary on this latest manufactroversy comes from a satirist, the website Wonkette?

Does this make you feel bad about being a lazy Yuppie/voter? Well it should. Because it’s sort of sad that the only people willing to “get out the vote” are the people who can’t vote and also that these same people are hunted like feral animals by douchey government agents.

In the end, I understand the national media picking up this AP story, and lazily inferring the worst from its misleading headline and selective lede; that’s the way the wire services work.

But the Seattle Times has no such excuse. This is a story unfolding in its own backyard, and they could’ve just as easily picked up the phone and talked to Jayapal as I did. In fact, far from reprinting the AP story unchallenged, as Seattle’s sole surviving daily, and the largest newspaper in the state, I’d argue that the Times has a unique obligation to debunk it, thus setting the record straight.

So yeah, I’d say the Seattle Times owes OneAmerica Votes and our local immigrant communities a followup story… if not an outright apology.

(And there are almost 50 more links to media clips from the past week in politics at Hominid Views.)

… NPR should have fired Juan Williams for being on FOX News. Or more specifically, for being a paid contributor to FOX News.

This has nothing to do with the alleged liberal bias of NPR, and everything to do with FOX News being being more of a political organization than a news organization. Everybody but the most crazy far-right-wingers understands that FOX News is a fraud, but it is a fraud nonetheless, and by being a paid analyst for FOX News while also being a paid employee of NPR, Williams was lending NPR’s credibility to FOX News, while diminishing it in the process.

Simple as that.

As it is, this whole thing has worked out for the best. Williams now gets to make a lot more money shilling for the frauds at FOX News than he ever could at NPR, while NPR no longer has to explain why they have a FOX News shill on staff. So I don’t see why folks are so upset.

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Dino Rossi is getting a lot of media mileage out of his “the President wouldn’t be coming here if Patty Murray wasn’t in trouble” meme, mostly because our media is so heavily invested in this being a close race. So it’ll be interesting to see, when Murray ends up winning by about the same margin as Gov. Gregoire did in 2008, how the media ultimately explains her relatively comfortable victory.

What’s also funny about this meme is that you can be damn sure that the President would have been out here campaigning for Rossi, had John McCain won the 2008 presidential election. Only difference is, rather than a public rally of a couple ten thousand all-comers, McCain’s visit would have been just like all the other Beltway and Wall Street insiders who have come out here to campaign for Rossi: a high-donor, carefully screened fundraising event, held exclusively behind closed doors.

I’ve been meaning to get to this topic for a while, but with the G.O.P. currently predicted to take control of the U.S. House, if not the Senate, I plan to join the folks over at Campaign for America’s Future and focus a bit of my energies over the next week or so talking about Social Security… and what the Republicans and their wealthy patrons plan to do to it, should they be given the chance.

Of course, it’s one thing to be against something — like the privatization “reforms” nearly every Republican congressional nominee in Washington supports, even if they refuse to clearly say so on the record — but I thought it best to start out by stating some core principles that I would hope all of the Democratic incumbents and challengers in this year’s election would support:

Social Security has a surplus of $2.6 trillion, which it has loaned to the federal government. Social Security did not cause the federal deficit. Its benefits should not be cut to reduce the deficit.

Social Security, which has stood the test of time, should not be privatized in whole or in part.

Social Security is insurance and should not be means-tested. Because workers pay for it, they should receive it regardless of their income or savings.

Social Security is fully funded for more than 25 years; thereafter it has sufficient funds to meet 75 percent of promised benefits. To reassure Americans that Social Security will be there for them, Congress should act in the coming few years outside the context of deficit reduction to close this funding gap by requiring those who are most able to afford it to pay somewhat more.

Social Security’s retirement age, already scheduled to increase from 65 to 67, should not be raised further. That would be a benefit cut that places the greatest hardship on older Americans who are in physically demanding jobs, or are otherwise unable to find or keep employment.

Social Security, whose average benefit is $13,000 in 2010, provides vital protection against the loss of wages as the result of disability, death, or old age.  Those benefits should not be reduced, including by changes to the cost of living adjustment or the benefit formula.

Social Security’s benefits should be increased for those who are most disadvantaged.  The benefits, which are very important to virtually all workers and their families, are particularly crucial to those who are disadvantaged.

You can read more about these Seven Principles at StrengthenSocialSecurity.org.

Also at the website you will find a list of the 136 members of Congress who have already signed on to the Grijalva-Conyers-Maffei Letter to President Obama, pledging their strong support for the principles above. FYI, Seattle’s own Rep. Jim McDermott is the only Washington state representative to sign the letter thus far.

I hope to change that.

But mostly I plan to use these posts to expose our state’s Republican congressional slate’s plans to undermine and weaken Social Security in the cynical name of “fixing” it.

[Disclosure: Campaign for America’s Future is paying me a small stipend in exchange for cross-posting at their site. But everybody who knows me knows that I only advocate for candidates, campaigns and issues that I believe in.]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8y2F8RGzAk&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

I keep hearing that liberals like me are the real danger to America, yet unlike Republican congressional nominee Stephen Broden (TX-30), I don’t hear anybody on our side threatening to win by violence what they can’t win at the polls. Huh.

During the first two weeks of October, Suzan DelBene invested another $1.35 million of her own money into her 8th CD race, bring her total contributions and loans to $2.4 million. The press may not be paying attention, but she obviously believes she has a shot at knocking off Reichert.

More on Slog.

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Watch the current crop of ads from both Democrats and Republicans alike in Washington state, and you’ll find one thing that nearly all of them have in common: they feature either women, or women’s issues.

That’s because both public and private polls show undecided women representing the most coherent demographic chunk still left up for grabs, and thus the campaigns’ best shot at swinging the race in their direction. And you gotta think that this development favors Democrats.

Why? Because I’m not sure there’s a single Republican congressional candidate in the state with a record of supporting women’s issues; they are all anti-choice, anti-equal-pay, and in many cases even anti-family-planning. It’s actually kinda astonishing how the socially libertarian moderate Republicans have been drummed out of the party over the past couple decades, leaving a crop of candidates behind that would probably have made Ellen Craswell proud.

And when women understand this, they’re more likely to vote Democratic.

Nina Shapiro at the Seattle Weekly writes about Tuesday’s protest in Tacoma over the city’s threat to close down eight medical marijuana dispensaries:

Yesterday’s showdown in Tacoma over the city’s medical marijuana dispensaries all but guarantees that the Legislature will finally attempt to resolve the question of whether such business are–or should be– legal. After the city initially threatened to shut the dispensaries down, it agreed last night to hold off until the end of the coming legislative session. Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles (D-Seattle) has already drafted a bill (see pdf) that proposes legalizing dispensaries. A number of fellow legislators, including a former cop and Republican senator named Jerome Delvin, are working with her. “There’s momentum,” says Kohl-Welles.

At the protest I spoke with an older woman who’s authorized to use marijuana to deal with severe muscle spasms that make it difficult for her to walk. I asked her where she’d be able to get her supply of marijuana if her dispensary were to close. She didn’t have an answer. The reality is that our medical marijuana law doesn’t work unless the law provides a safe and legal place for patients to obtain it. The one-patient-per-provider rule has left numerous patients – especially those who are disabled – from being able to obtain medicine. And the opposition to this obvious change is going to come from the same place once again:

On the other side of the spectrum, Rep. Christopher Hurst (D-Enumcluw) says he believes many legislators will oppose any bill that favors dispensaries. “You only need to look south” to California, he says, to realize that the dispensary business is a “sham,” a “nightmare,” and a “disaster.” Instead of serving people with real medical needs, he contends, California’s ubiquitous dispensaries sell pot “to anyone who walks in the door.” He says that’s why Los Angeles, among other jurisdictions, are currently cracking down on dispensaries, even while a broad pot legalization initiative is on the ballot.

California’s system is constantly held up as an example of how medical marijuana leads to “chaos”, but the only evidence of this is that unscrupulous doctors often authorize recreational users for profit. And even with that, California isn’t negatively affected in any way by its dispensary system. In fact, crime rates continue to drop across the state – to levels far lower than in the years before medical marijuana became legal.

That’s the root of the issue here. The more we legitimize this economic activity and bring it out of the shadows, the less violence there is surrounding it. Mexican drug cartels operate in Washington state. When locally-operated dispensaries are prohibited from forming, that just means more of the money goes towards those less afraid to break the law. Whether Representative Hurst understands it or not, what he’s doing is benefiting these organized crime groups.

It may seem hyperbolic to say that Hurst “stands up for the drug cartels”, but that’s unquestionably what’s occurring here. There’s no other way to characterize his position. The experience in Los Angeles, if anything, is an argument to craft realistic regulations for dispensaries (as Oakland and many other California cities did) rather than to follow Hurst’s lead and pretend everything would be better if they didn’t exist. If Los Angeles had set up a smarter method for licensing dispensaries, they’d have a small number of well-regulated dispensaries (again, like Oakland) rather than hundreds of unregulated ones that they’re now having difficulty shutting down.

Well… um… yeah… this is my idea of flirting.

I’ve always had a thing for potty-mouthed Irish women, so I gotta confess to a kinda schoolboy crush on the BIAW’s profanatory, trash-talking PR maven, Erin Shannon. (Really. So give me a call Erin, and lets hook up sometime for a drink or five. Don’t worry; I’ll drive.)

But when it comes to her politics, Shannon is just plain awful. You know, in that batshit-crazy Hitler-was-the-first-environmentalist/DOE’s-storm-water-regulations-are-worse-than-the-Holocaust sorta way that defines the ideological crack-house that is the BIAW.

The rest of my daily Slog post actually makes a point, but I just so enjoyed dipping Erin’s ponytail in the inkwell, that I just had to repost it over here.

Seattle Times home subscribers found this helpful cheat sheet stuck to the front page of their Sunday edition, but when one of the initiative campaigns the Times opposes called to purchase something similar, they were told no, political advertisers can’t buy these sort of stickers, at any price.

It can only be given. Because ownership has its privileges.

Once again proving my point that it’s not bias that is the problem with modern media, but ownership. For as long as our media continues to be dominated by wealthy corporations and individuals, it will continue to largely reflect and serve their own selfish interests.

No, I didn’t end up going to the Obama rally today, as I just couldn’t give up that many hours of the day, so I can’t share my first hand observations. But Andrew at NPI was live blogging and tweeting it, and from all accounts it was a lively, overflow crowd at the Hec Pavilion. You know…  no sign of an enthusiasm gap, at least here in Seattle.

I’ll look for coverage elsewhere, but if you were there, I’d love to read your personal observations in the comment thread.

The Seattle Times editorial board routinely posts video of its endorsement interviews with political candidates. They posted video of the Patty Murray/Dino Rossi interview, and they recently posted video of the interview with Jay Inslee and his Republican opponent (whose name escapes me at the moment, but is not really worth the effort to Google).

Unfortunately, there were no camera’s present at the recent Suzan DelBene/Dave Reichert interview, which explains the lack of video there, but the Times did record audio, which as far as I know, has never been publicly released. Which is a shame, because I hear that Reichert threw a bit of a fit at the end, pounding his fist on the table when pestered about his unwillingness to debate.

I’m not sure why the Times won’t release this audio, but given that this is the only time during the entire campaign that the two candidates have answered questions face to face, they are surely doing 8th CD voters a disservice by withholding it. And, assuming the audio disproves my assertion that the incumbent is brain-damaged and/or stupid, they are doing Reichert a disservice as well.

I’ll be on KOMO-1000 this morning at about 9:35, talking with John Carlson about my feature in this week’s Stranger on Dave Reichert’s Brain. No doubt John will attempt to defend Reichert.

In the meanwhile, for a second opinion on just how serious a chronic subdural hematoma can be, you might want to check out this recent case study in the New York Times.