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In a probable preview of interrupted dinners and kiddie bedtimes this year, the good folks at the NRCC have unleashed a last-ditch effort to stop health reform with that most hated of intrusive tactics, the robo-call, including down here in WA-03.

That’s the seat being vacated at the end of the term by Rep. Brian Baird, D-Wash. The major Democratic candidates running to replace Baird are former state legislator and TVW executive Denny Heck and sitting state Sen. Craig Pridemore, D-Vancouver.

Media Matters has a script of robo-calls going out nationally, but so far I haven’t been able to obtain a recording of one here in the district. I am told by the Pridemore campaign that they received a fair number of outraged calls yesterday from recipients of the robo-calls.

I’m not sure if the same script would work against candidates, but here it is in any case. If you click through you can read Media Matters’ typical and careful deconstruction of the baloney.

Hello, I’m calling from the National Republican Congressional Committee with a code red alert about an impending health care vote in Congress. Even though a majority of the country wants them to scrap it, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Obama are planning to ram their dangerous, out-of-control health care spending bill through Congress anyway.

What’s worse, Congressman XXXXXX might vote for it. XXXXXX votes with Nancy Pelosi XX% of the time and may follow her orders on this bill too. XXXXXX might vote for a bill that will kill jobs, raise the costs of health care, and increase taxes. XXXXXX should be focusing on creating jobs, yet he might be the deciding vote that causes this massive new spending bill to pass.

Please call XXXXXX now at 202-225-5311 before it is too late and tell him to vote no on Nancy Pelosi’s dangerous health care scheme. Visit www.nrcc.org/codered to learn more. This call was paid for by the National Republican Congressional Committee and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. [Plum Line, 3/3/10]

When it comes to the positions of Baird and Heck in the WA-03 race, Brad Shannon at The Olympian notes that:

Baird voted against the House reform bill last year and has sounded equivocal this time around; Heck also has expressed misgivings about last year’s bill.

To which I would like to add this declaration from Pridemore, sent in an email to supporters yesterday evening:

Let me be clear: I believe that Democrats in Congress should pass the bill, include a public option, and clear the procedural hurdles (including using the reconciliation process.)

The time for debating parliamentary procedure is over. And the time for taking action on health care is now.

Shannon, the Olympian reporter, also notes that none of the Republicans have offered diddly squat (obviously I’m paraphrasing, he doesn’t write like that.)

So let’s see: there are four supposedly major candidates for Congress, two from each major party, and only one of them is championing the view of the majority of the voters in the district when it comes to health care. Yeah, that sounds like our broken politics, and it also shows how lucky we are to have Pridemore in the race.

Luckily as well, you can help. This is going to be a race watched closely at the national level, and while it may not have the sizzle of taking out a sitting corporate-Dem in Arkansas, this is also important. Please do what you can.

Bruce Ramsey, the Seattle Times editorial board’s resident libertarian (you know, the one who hates government on principle), chronicles the travails of a would-be gentleman farmer who has given up his dream of tilling 89 acres of Snoqualmie Valley hillside and bottomland due to excessive King County rules and regulations. And while it’s hard to defend the permitting hassles Ramsey cites, at least offhand, there was one paragraph that kinda jumped out at me (the emphasis is mine):

To pave a driveway, the blueprint — one sheet — cost $1,000. The county, which funds its permit department through fees, wanted $22,000 to review the one sheet. Capeder hired a lawyer, and they settled for $10,000.

A thousand dollars for a one sheet blue print? Another $22,000 to review it? That sounds rather outrageous, and it doesn’t take a libertarian to realize how such steep upfront permitting costs can discourage entrepreneurialism.

But this anecdote also demonstrates the delicate balance that government must strike every day in protecting and promoting the commonweal, while levying the costs of the services provided relative to the individual and communal benefits enjoyed, as fairly, pragmatically and efficiently as possible.

Still, setting aside those who would argue for little or no government regulation of private land (there’s no arguing with ideologues), let’s start from the assumption that the community as a whole benefits from land-use regulations and the permitting process it necessitates. After all, even Tim Eyman would object were I to purchase the house next door, knock it down, and propose to replace it with, say, a Hooters, or an auto-wrecking yard or something similarly out of place in the midst of a residential neighborhood… and rightly so.

On the other hand, Tim might also object were I simply to buy the house next door and propose to live in it, though in this case he would have no moral or legal right to stop me. So hyperbole aside, I think most of us can safely agree that there are limits to both the rights of the landowner, and the rights the community to limit the rights of the landowner.

With that established, let’s get back to the woes of our gentleman farmer. $22,000 to review a permit for a driveway sure does sound excessive, though given the size of the property, I’m guessing were not talking your typical, 40-foot residential driveway here, but rather something more akin to a private road through agricultural land, with all the environmental impact that implies. So whether the fee was $22,000, or the $10,000 figure on which the department finally settled, let’s just assume that this represents the actual cost of reviewing the permit in a manner thorough enough to actually meet the intent of the rule that requires the permit in the first place.

Now, who should pay for this?

There is an awfully strong argument to make that developers should pay for the cost of permitting and inspecting their own projects, as they’re the ones who enjoy the most immediate economic benefit from their developments. And make no mistake, that’s what Ramsey’s gentleman farmer is — a developer — for the permits in question are not for farming, but rather for the development he proposed to build processing, retail and tourist facilities on his property, and the private road driveway to get there. Ramsey’s column is titled “Rules and roadblocks make farmland difficult to farm,” but that’s a bit misleading, as it’s the agribusiness related land development that is the subject of permitting, not the farming itself, and the question of whether farming such expensive land is economically viable without this development is still an open question.

I’m not arguing against this guy’s integrated farm/processor/retail/tourism concept; I think it’s a brilliant, creative approach to turning expensive exurban farmland into an economically viable operation, and I’d love to see him succeed here in King County rather than Skagit. But the concept requires building stuff, building stuff requires permitting, permitting costs money… and somebody’s got to pay for it. If it works, our gentleman farmer stands to make a pretty penny off his venture, so shouldn’t he pay for the costs of starting it up, rather than shifting the cost to taxpayers like me and Ramsey?

On the other hand, by requiring the permitting department to recover the costs of its operations solely from its users, perhaps we’ve made the upfront costs of development too high, discouraging such innovative projects that would ultimately prove an economic boon to the surrounding community, while keeping precious farmland in use as such? Perhaps the benefits to the community of such development are so great, that we should all bear the costs? Perhaps by shifting the cost of an essential government service to the individual user, we’ve made the service unaffordable, and tipped the balance too far in one direction?

For example, as homeowners, we all pay a not insubstantial portion of our property tax each year to fund the local fire department, a government service most of us will never use. But were we to shift the cost of firefighting to the individual user, few would be able to afford the service; imagine losing everything you own in a fire, only to have the fire department hand you a $50,000 bill for snuffing out the flames. Yet like the land-use permits, we can’t make firefighting optional, as failing to fight your fire would put my property at risk as well.

That would be ridiculous, of course, and so we socialize the cost of firefighting and other essential services by forcibly collecting it from the community as a whole in the form of taxes. Nobody likes to pay taxes, not even tax-and-spend liberals like me. But we all benefit from the services and infrastructure they fund.

So perhaps, if the cost of permitting a “driveway” through 89 acres of Snoqualmie Valley farmland is too high, and the benefits to the community of such development are so great, then perhaps we should shift some of the costs incurred by the permitting process away from the individual user and onto the community at large… you know, us taxpayers? I’m not arguing for this shift, just that these sort of equations are part of the delicate balance between the needs and rights of the individual and the needs and rights of the community that every functioning government must strike.

And that is the irony of Ramsey calling out the self-funding nature of the permitting department, for while he no doubt would prefer that such permits weren’t required at all, this anecdote only serves to illustrate the broader nature of government and the inherent flaws in the libertarian agenda as a whole. For when we devolve government services and infrastructure, shifting the costs from the community to the individual users, either  through “user fees,” or ultimately through privatization, much of what government provides ceases to be affordable to all but the wealthiest consumers.

The costs of some government services should be borne directly by users, and I’d argue that permitting fees generally fall into this category, though since my position is based on pragmatism not philosophy, I’m willing to consider the alternative. But while Ramsey is happy to lay out the $22,000 driveway permit as an example of government regulation run amuck, judging from his oeuvre I’m guessing he’d be unwilling to consider raising taxes on the rest of us — including himself — to help make such innovative development more affordable. Nor does he even attempt to engage in the question of whether there should or should not be a permitting process for paving a private road through agricultural land, or who, if anybody, should pay for it.

No, as the Times’ resident libertarian, Ramsey is content merely to grab a couple of anecdotes out of context and present them as an example of, well, of government regulation run amuck. And considering how little popular support there is here in King County for the kinda regulation-free, libertarian dystopia that would be the logical conclusion of the philosophy Ramsey appears to espouse, I’m just not sure that this moves the conversation anywhere.

According to this article at HuffPo, Sen.Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., will vote for a plan that includes the public option if it gets to the floor using reconciliation. The article says she is the 35th senator to so pledge.

UPDATE 10:7 AM PST–According to Open Left, 45 senators (this includes Cantwell) say they are “open to using reconciliation to finish health reform,” while 35, also including Cantwell, have signed a letter asking that the public option be included in a reconciliation bill.

The upshot is both of our U.S. Senators are listening to regular people and doing the right thing.

– It’s not talked about much, but one of the biggest reasons to end marijuana prohibition is because of the environmental damage that’s done by having the crop grown illegally in our national forests and parks.

– Governor Gregoire has the rare chance to sign a truly progressive drug law reform bill.

– A reader pointed me to this post from Geoff Baker on the Mariners Blog at the Seattle Times. Towards the end of the post, he talks about new Mariner Tom Wilhelmsen, a one-time hot prospect who left the game in 2005 after being sent to a treatment program by his former club, the Brewers, for marijuana use. As someone who writes about sports and not drug policy, Baker’s thoughts came across as honest, insightful, and indicative of how people are having trouble accepting the long-unquestioned idea of treating marijuana the same way we treat other drugs. When some of the best athletes in the world – from Michael Phelps to Tim Lincecum to Santonio Holmes to countless NBA players – have all been exposed as occasional marijuana users despite excelling in what they do, it just doesn’t compute any more why a team like the Brewers would piss away their investment in Wilhelmsen the way they did. Now that he’s a Mariner and joins what might be their strongest pitching staff in years, let’s hope they’ll be rewarded for giving him a second chance.

– Last week, I was watching a rerun of The Chappelle Show and it was the sketch where they juxtaposed how an upper-class white criminal who committed a financial crime gets treated with how a lower-class minority criminal who committed a drug crime gets treated. The sketch contains a very graphic scene where the white criminal’s dog is shot by raiding police officers. It had been a while since I’d last seen this and it hadn’t occurred to me how similar this was to what happened to Berwyn Heights, Maryland mayor Cheye Calvo – except for one major difference – Calvo was completely innocent of any crimes and this fact should have already been obvious to the Prince George County Sheriff’s Office.

Calvo is still fighting back against the reckless officers who invaded his home that day and shot his two dogs. And the latest development is even more sickening. One of the officers tried to get the charges against him dropped because he claims he shot one of Calvo’s dogs after it was already dead. The judge rejected the plea. How disturbed does one have to be to shoot a dead dog in the head? And how out-of-control is the Prince George County Sheriff’s Office that not only do they have psychos like this guy their police force, but that they continue to insist that their officers did nothing wrong during the raid?

Oh fer Chrissakes. Now the nation gets to endure more clap-trap from Rep. Brian Baird, D-Wash., from my own district right here in WA-03.

As with many narcissistic politicians, he just can’t help himself. From Salon:

“We had a series of briefings in the Democratic caucus,” he said. “At the final briefing before the vote, there were — I would guess — 30 staffers, most of them master’s or Ph.D’s, many of whom spent their entire life on healthcare; experts in the arcanery of this bill, and they would stand up one by one and answer questions as they arose from the caucus… You have to say, so what’s the average person supposed to do to make sense of this if it takes 30 Ph.D career staff members to explain it? And that’s after months of prior explanation.”

Translation: I’m smarter than you. Yeah, it may be a very good thing this guy isn’t running again.

I had a sneaking suspicion we’d be hearing from Baird once people started trying to count votes in the House again, and sure enough, the professor doesn’t miss the opportunity.

The time for this kind of self-indulgence ended a long time ago; in retrospect it ended when the House failed to act ahead of the August recess last year. The summer recess ended for people who live in D.C., but those of who us actually live here got to enjoy the smoking rubble and delectable wingnut odor for months.

The best thing to do would be to ignore Baird, as he is a lame duck, rendering him even more ineffective than he has been over his career. (You have to scroll down to number 212 in the House column!) But it doesn’t look like he’s going to go quietly.

Of course Baird is going to fuck this up if he can, it’s who he has become. Sure, he’ll pretty it up with some more “smarter than you” talk, but in the end it’s his last hoorah, and a chance to show D.C. just what a very serious person he is. There are jobs to be had in the future, you know.

Last year, when an internal labor email surfaced threatening to cut off contributions to Democrats if they failed to pass the Workers Privacy Act, the Democratic Governor, House Speaker and Senate Majority leader literally called the cops on the unions, and very publicly killed the bill out of fear of even the remotest appearance of impropriety. So you’d think legislators would be equally sensitive to the appearance of a quid pro quo relationship with business interests.

Well… apparently not.

The video clip above is from last Saturday’s Senate Ways and Means Committee hearing on HB 1329 — a bill which would permit child care workers to bargain collectively — and it stunningly shows Sen. Cheryl Pflug (R-Maple Valley) calmly reminding her colleagues that they had promised to kill the bill in exchange for $70 million of funding from Boeing, Paul Allen and the McCaw family for the public/private “Thrive by Five” partnership:

“Not doing this bill was the bright-line promise that we made to the Paul Allen Foundation, The Boeing Company and the McCaw family that contributed the funding for this.  This was the agreement:  that was that we would not unionize child care centers. This was the bright line that we would not do, and I think that we need to remember that when we make a commitment to somebody that gives us $70 million, we might want to keep it.”

So when, say, the Boeing Company gives legislators a big chunk of change (and let’s be clear, that’s $70 million legislators get to spend in their districts without raising their constituents’ taxes), not only is it okay to to promise to kill a piece of legislation in return, Pflug argues that it would be downright dishonorable not to honor the promise. But when organized labor talks amongst itself about whether it should continue contributing money to Democrats who vote anti-labor… well… book ’em Danno!

The message is clear when it comes to influencing legislation: business money good, union money bad. And since this meme is so pervasive in our local media, you can be sure that you’re not going to read about this particular outrage on the pages of, say, the Seattle Times.

Washington state’s jobs numbers rebounded in January showing the biggest one-month gain in nearly three years, and many economists are now predicting Washington to lead the nation in jobs growth throughout the year.

Good news for workers. But if these projections hold up, and if our economy shows significant signs of recovery over the next eight months, and if Democrats nationally manage to get voters to give them a little credit for the stimulus packages they pushed through in the face of unified Republican opposition, that can’t be good news for the GOP’s prospects come November, can it?

Of course, those are a handful of huge “ifs.” One month’s uptick does not a recovery make, and unemployment levels are predicted to remain at generational highs, even as our economy pulls well out of recession. And of course, relying on the Democrats to effectively message their successes is like relying on France to successfully defend its border with Germany. But still, it does illustrate a larger point: for a party that relies primarily on fear and anger to motivate its base and gain traction with independents, good economic news is bad news for the GOP.

This weekend should be a big one for I-1068 signature gatherers. Not only is Snoop Dogg playing two shows this weekend at Showbox SoDo, but Doug “Super High Me” Benson is also in town, across the lake at the Parlor Live in downtown Bellevue, doing stand-up shows Thursday, Friday, and Saturday as well. I reached out to the management of Parlor Live this week and they’re supportive of having Sensible Washington hang out and collect signatures. If you’d like to see Benson perform, buy your tickets through the Parlor Live website and use the “ADVANCE” promo code to receive a $5 discount. If you’d like to volunteer to help collect signatures, shoot me an email.

Please join us tonight for an evening of politics under the influence at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally. We meet at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning at about 8:00 pm. Stop by even earlier and enjoy some dinner.

Not in Seattle? There is a good chance you live near one of the 345 other chapters of Drinking Liberally.

In case the ad rotation changes for this video, right now it’s an ad for a certain fiber supplement you mix with water, followed by a clip of U.S. Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Kentucky, again refusing to talk to a reporter. (Note: you may have to go here to see the scintillating ad.)

At least Bunning is incredibly regular at being an asshat. He’s executed a triple play for the party of nothingness, nihilism and nuts. It would be funny, except for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who need to buy stuff like food for their kids and flood insurance for their homes.

When people talk about how “our system” is broken, nothing is as broken as the U.S. Senate, when one crazy old fool can hold the entire country hostage. It’s an absurd situation, one that curiously enough never seemed to happen when the dirty hippies were being taught lessons about codpieces and illegally invading countries and stuff. Funny how that always works.

UPDATE 3:53 PM PST–Stupid deal reached for stupid vote to end stupid temper tantrum.*

*Props to Pandagon (via Twitter) for pointing out that it’s all stupid.

One of the pleasures of reimmersing myself in programming these past few weeks is that I haven’t had as much time on my hands to fisk the Seattle Times op-ed page. Unfortunately, I haven’t quite been able to break the nasty habit of reading it, so I’ve accumulated quite a backlog of Blethenesque  pontifinuggets just begging for ridicule.

For example, take this gem from a recent editorial castigating the governor for signing the bill repealing Initiative 960’s blatantly unconstitutional two-thirds supermajority requirement for tax increases:

Surely the people wanted it that way. Over the years they have voted three times for the two-thirds rule. They still favor it. In a poll of 500 adults done for KING-TV, 74 percent favored the two-thirds rule, and 68 percent said the Legislature and the governor had done the wrong thing to suspend it.

Huh. I suppose we could run our government along the (small “r”) republican principles laid out in our constitution, or, as the Times suggests, we could just craft our policies based entirely on the latest KING-5/SurveyUSA poll.

And as for its provisions’ alleged support at the ballot box, it might be instructive to remember that I-960 just barely passed in 2007, with only 51% of the vote… and in a relatively low-turnout, off-year election. By comparison, the measure’s 816,000 Yes votes would have amounted to only 27% of the vote in 2008, when turnout was nearly double, and voters handed Democrats overwhelming control of both the legislature and the governor’s mansion.

Perhaps the Times thinks Washington would be better off if we were more like California, where citizens initiatives, of both the tax-cutting and money-spending varieties, are nearly impossible to overturn or amend by anything less than another citizens initiative, thus handcuffing lawmakers in a nearly perpetual state of fiscal crisis. But personally, I prefer a system where our elected officials are forced to make the tough choices we elected them to make, and then face the consequences at the polls.

And you know, the real polls… not the bogus ones conducted by TV stations.

Back in September, when two to three thousand people swarmed Westlake Park in support of health care reform — specifically, a greatly expanded federal government role in the health care market — the Seattle Times didn’t think the event merited even a mention in the following day’s paper. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

Yet when maybe a couple hundred teabaggers show up to celebrate the anniversary of their faux movement, the Times apparently feels the need to devote a political reporter, a photographer and twenty column inches:

An anniversary “tea party” rally drew about 250 people to a rainy corner in Northgate on Saturday afternoon. Not bad for Seattle, or as one participant called it, “Lib-Ville.”

Really? This is news, and the ten-times-bigger pro-HCR/pro-government rally was not? You gotta be fucking kidding.

This is the type of shit that drives media critics like me absolutely nuts. It’s “false equivalency” taken to the Nth degree, with the Times not only covering the teabaggers totally out of proportion to their actual numbers, but entirely ignoring the much larger and more energized pro-reform movement on the other side. And more coherent as well, especially compared to the “keep government out of my Medicare” logic of your typical teabagger:

They oppose abortion because of their religious beliefs, and they attended their first tea-party event last year after paying their taxes, they said. But they’re perhaps most passionate about the tea-party movement’s common ground: the size of government.

“Government is too big and it’s too intrusive,” said Doug Larsen.

That’s right… government is too big and too intrusive… which is why they want it to tell women what they should or should not do with their bodies.

But, you know, the Blethens have been in the newspaper business for four generations, so if they tell me that this idiot babbling in the rain is newsworthy, while several thousand people rallying in support of health care reform is not, I suppose I’ll just have to bow to their superior journalistic expertise.

Via Adam Green of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, posted at Huffington Post:

In the wake of last week’s “bipartisan summit” — which proved that no Republicans in Congress will vote for health care reform — an avalanche of Democratic senators are announcing today that they will vote YES for the public health insurance option if it is brought up in “reconciliation.”

Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL), Patty Murray (D-WA), Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), Ben Cardin (D-MD), and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) are the latest to announce their support, raising the number of senators on record from 0 to 30 in under 2 weeks.

Here’s the quote they put up from Murray:

“I’ve been consistently supportive of a public option so that Washington’s families and businesses have choices in their health care options and so insurance companies are finally forced to compete for the business of the American people. Nothing has changed that support. I don’t know whether the votes exist in the Senate right now, but if the public option came up for a vote as we move ahead with reform, including under reconciliation, I would vote yes.”

The patience of the American people has limits, and it’s time to get this done. Let the Tea People and their corporate puppet masters throw their hissy fits, they aren’t anything close to a majority.

There are several reasons to explain why last month’s 7.0 earthquake in Haiti killed over 200,000 people, while the death toll from Chile’s much more powerful 8.8 magnitude quake is not expected to rise much above a thousand or two, but part of the credit surely goes to the tough building codes the Chilean government has enforced for the past few decades.

You know, the sort of intrusive, government regulations that drive up costs in the private sector.

I’m just sayin’.

Last week’s contest was won in near-record time by Brian. It was Brunswick, Victoria, Australia.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!