HorsesAss.Org

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been taking some time recently to teach myself how to program the iPhone, and while I can’t say I’ve completely wrapped my mind around Cocoa Touch and the Xcode IDE yet, I can say that I’ve made a ton of progress. I may not always be sure why it works, but I’m at the point where I can reliably build functional UI without banging my head against the wall, and I’m pretty sure I’ve got a good enough grasp of Core Data to build the innards as well. Not that this terminology means anything to most of you, but oddly enough, it means something to me now. I guess I’m a geek.

So my status hasn’t changed. Expect fits of light posting as I continue to obsess on teaching myself how to build a functional app.

Last week’s contest was unnecessarily difficult. Apologies to everyone who spent hours/days looking for that one. Wes.in.wa eventually got the right answer – Port Sutton, Florida.

This week’s shouldn’t be so hard, good luck!

Mark 11:20
The next day as they were leaving Bethany, Jesus was hungry. Seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to find out if it had any fruit. When he reached it, he found nothing but leaves, because it was not the season for figs. Then he said to the tree, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard him say it.

Discuss.

From a Newsweek article in 1995:

After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

[via Reddit]

State Senator Craig Pridemore, D-Vancouver (LD 49,) will formally get the endorsement of the Blue America PAC during am 11 AM PST live chat today at the web site Crooks and Liars.

Pridemore is one of only three US House candidates endorsed by Blue America so far this cycle. The others are Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Florida, who has earned national renown for his blunt criticism of conservative lunacy, and CA-36 candidate Marcy Winograd, who is waging a spirited primary against Rep. Jane Harman, D-War Machine.

Blue America’s official endorsement page describes the group this way:

On this page are the candidates for office– the challengers and a tiny handful of incumbents– who we are recommending that our readers donate to. Each candidate has been interviewed and questioned about a handful of specific items: women’s choice, equality under the law for all Americans, campaign finance reform, issues of war and peace, and the bread and butter issues that seek to re-establish an equitable balance between ordinary working families and powerful Big Business interests. The Blue America PAC is especially looking for strong and independent-minded progressive leaders and critical thinkers, something at least as important as any single position.

The page notes that the national blogs Digby’s Hullabaloo and Down With Tyranny, as well as Crooks and Liars will follow the races.

So what does this mean? In a nutshell it means that regular people get to play, too, not just the wealthy and not just the insider elite. The netroots can be a great equalizer.

This is, in essence, bundling for the little people, and the fact that Pridemore is being mentioned in the same breath as Winograd and Grayson means he’s on the national radar big-time. It couldn’t happen to a better candidate.

Rachael does CPAC:

(And there are nearly fifty more media clips from the past week in politics at Hominid Views.)

At the World Economic Conference in Davos, Switzerland, Microsoft’s chief research and technology officer made a rather startling proposal for dealing with the security issues plaguing the online world: a sorta driver’s license for the Internet.

What Mundie is proposing is to impose authentication. He draws an analogy to automobile use. If you want to drive a car, you have to have a license (not to mention an inspection, insurance, etc). If you do something bad with that car, like break a law, there is the chance that you will lose your license and be prevented from driving in the future. In other words, there is a legal and social process for imposing discipline. Mundie imagines three tiers of Internet ID: one for people, one for machines and one for programs (which often act as proxies for the other two).

Now, there are, of course, a number of obstacles to making such a scheme be reality. Even here in the mountains of Switzerland I can hear the worldwide scream go up: “But we’re entitled to anonymity on the Internet!” Really? Are you? Why do you think that?

What a great idea, I mean, if you’re the government of Iran or China, seeking to track dissidents and discourage public discourse. And I suppose it might be an intriguing proposition to a company like Microsoft, which would be in a great position to profit off the creation and administration of such a government mandated authentication system.

But I honestly can’t think of anything more antithetical to the American spirit.

Anonymity — or at least, pseudonymity — holds a long and cherished place in American history, dating back well before our nation’s founding. Benjamin Franklin honed his skills as a journalist writing under a number of pseudonyms, and Thomas Paine’s highly influential and historically revered Common Sense was originally published anonymously in 1776. And then of course there are the Federalist Papers, which were published under the pseudonym Publius, though authored by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay.

I mean, if anonymity is good enough for the founding fathers, it’s good enough for me.

Yeah sure, there are those who abuse the privilege, as evidenced by the sewer that is my comment thread, but Democracy is a messy thing, especially the nearly inviolable right to free speech that guarantees it.

Yet listening to Ross Reynolds and David Brewster — two journalists — discuss Mundie’s proposal on KUOW yesterday, I was struck by how… well… how damn credulous they sounded. A revocable license to post content on the Internet should be a facially ridiculous and offensive proposal to anybody who cares about the First Amendment, and yet Brewster refused to dismiss it as the absurdity it is, while Reynolds kept coming back to the point that maybe it should be required if you accept money online?

Really? Your right to free speech ends the minute you accept payment for it?

My guess is that Mundie and Reynolds/Brewster were focusing on two different issues. Despite the ungenerous headline, I’ll be generous enough to assume that Mundie is merely attempting to address the technical security issues that plague the Internet, to which end I would suggest that Microsoft focus on producing better software, rather than shifting the security burden to the enduser. Reynolds and Brewster on the other hand, seemed to start from the premise that anonymity poses some sort of threat to the world of words and ideas in which they make their living.

Again… really? Do anonymous writers really pose that big a threat? KUOW and Crosscut are free to require registration before allowing a commenter to post; hell, I keep threatening to move to some sort of registration system as a remedy for HA’s chronic troll infestation. But a government issued Internet license? That’s fascism.

What I think we really see here with the type of conversation we heard yesterday on KUOW, and in similar lamentations throughout our news and opinion industry, are the traditional media gatekeepers expressing their discomfort with the way the Internet hasn’t just enabled the rabble to crash through their gates, but has torn these gates from their hinges entirely.

And yes, the inevitable result of this new technology is that there is an awful lot of crap on the Internet. In fact, it’s mostly crap. But to suggest that the credibility of ones words should be so closely tied to the identity of the author, displays both a lack of trust in intelligence and judgment of the reader, and a remarkable disregard for the inherent value of the words themselves.

I don’t write anonymously, but if I did, what would be the difference? Let the unsigned editorialists at the daily newspapers hide behind the presumed credibility of their mastheads; as for me, I’m proud to simply let my writing speak for itself.

Faced with a choice of protecting the interests of oil refineries, and protecting the interests of 40,000 children on Basic Health, I’ll go with the oil refinery every time.

– Another local overzealous prosecution of a medical marijuana patient goes down in flames.

– Olympia’s Mayor Pro-Tem arrested on suspicion of marijuana trafficking.

– California researchers have found that marijuana is effective for controlling neuropathic pain and muscle spasms.

– The Drug War Chronicle has a summary of the rogue DEA agents in Colorado who are ignoring the Obama Administration’s publicly stated policy and going after individuals within the state’s legal medical marijuana framework.

When the state Democratic leadership called the cops on organized labor last year in a ham-fisted effort to get out of voting on the Workers Privacy Act, they sent a couple of strong messages to employers statewide.

First, by killing legislation that would have prevented employers from requiring workers to attend anti-union meetings (or religious meetings, for that matter), and by doing so in such a high profile fashion, the Democratic leadership tacitly endorsed exactly the kind of coercive practices the bill sought to ban. Second, if the Democratic leadership, of all people, were willing to so casually throw organized labor under the bus — one of their most loyal constituencies — well, it was only time before employers started following their lead.

And that’s apparently what is happening with the Korean Women’s Association in their contract negotiations with home health care workers represented by SEIU 775NW.

The video above shows KWA Executive Director Peter Ansara bashing the union at a mandatory meeting held Feb. 1, 2010. “They’re not going to bat for you,” Ansara tells the assembled SEIU members “… but your dues just went up a buck.” Ansara goes on to accuse the union of “not standing up for you,” while KWA Board Chair Sul Ja Warnick reminisces fondly about the pre-union days. All this at a meeting billed as workers’ compensation training, and paid for with Medicaid funds.

So what’s KWA’s beef with SEIU? After years of enjoying a model labor-management relationship with SEIU, KWA has suddenly decided to play hardball. While none of the other eight home healthcare agencies SEIU bargains with in Washington state are seeking cuts in wages or benefits, KWA is demanding substantial concessions from workers whose starting salary is only $10/hour.

Since 2006, all of the state’s home healthcare agencies have covered the full cost of their workers’ compensation premiums, but KWA is demanding that its workers now pay 30 cents an hour, amounting to a 3 percent reduction in take-home pay. KWA is also alone in seeking to eliminate the 45 cents per mile reimbursement for workers driving between clients, during the workday, using their own vehicles… a tremendous potential hardship for such low wage workers, especially those working in more rural communities. And finally, while all agencies receive 10 cents a worker hour from the state to pay for training programs, KWA wants to only spend 5 cents an hour, and keep the other nickel for itself.

And if SEIU won’t budge, then apparently it has to be busted, or at least so seems the philosophy of Ansara, who took over the reins at KWA just before the agency assumed its new, anti-union posture.

“The caregiving business… is really from a business perspective, a numbers game,” Ansara told the assembled workers, though of course, it really is not. The caregiving business should be about providing compassionate, quality care. Indeed, Ansara’s statement reveals exactly the kind of attitude that inevitably leads to the sort of abuses recently documented by the Seattle Times.

But as long as we’re talking about numbers, it’s important to point out that while KWA pays workers $10/hour, it receives a $17.46/hour in Medicaid reimbursement from the state. The other home healthcare agencies are managing to get by on the same gross margins without demanding concessions from their already low-wage workers. Why can’t KWA?

I dunno. Perhapas Ansara is just a prick. Or perhaps KWA is particularly poorly managed. Or perhaps, KWA got the message loud and clear from Democrats in Olympia that it’s open season on labor.

What I do know is that I wouldn’t want my loved ones taken care of by a home healthcare agency that shows so little respect and empathy for its own workers.

So unfortunately Rep. Deb Wallace, D-Vancouver, decided to vote “no” when it came to suspending I-960, the noxious Tim Eyman measure that requires an absurd super-majority to raise taxes. Long story short, in order to balance the budget through a combination of cuts and tax increases, Democrats will have to suspend the measure because Republicans won’t agree to anything but cuts.

But you already knew that last part; they’re the Republicans, the party of nothingness, nihilism and nuts.

Ah well, politics is a tough game. I’m sure Wallace’s “no” vote had nothing to do with her candidacy for the WA-03 seat being vacated by Rep. Brian Baird.

Voters in the third district do have other choices on the Democratic side, including my personal pick, Sen. Craig Pridemore, D-Vancouver, who doesn’t shy away from the tough votes. Pridemore voted to suspend 960 in the Senate, because these things impact real people. The GOP will attack any Democrat no matter what they do anyhow, so you might as well do the right thing. I think Craig gets that.

Here’s a web video from the Pridemore campaign. I kind of like it, but I’m biased, because I’ve been supporting him since he first ran for county commissioner in 1998, when he beat a well-financed, pro-developer incumbent. Judge for yourself.

There’s a still photo in the above video that shows Craig walking at sunrise near Yacolt, in northern Clark County, during that first run for commissioner in 1998. He was on a walking tour of the county where he walked all over the damn place to meet people, and he really seemed to thrive on it. The idea of the walking tour had been suggested by someone who threw it out there almost as a joke, and next thing we knew Craig had sent out a news release and was off and um, walking. Obviously the third Congressional district is too big to walk, but please don’t give him any ideas.

Pridemore’s willingness to take a stand is not going unnoticed at the national level. The web site Crooks and Liars is hosting a live chat with Pridemore on Saturday (two days from now, Feb. 20th) at 11 AM Pacific time.

What’s at stake in this race is whether authentic progressives get to offer real solutions to real problems, or if we get a conserva-crat nominated with the aid of the governor (or the incumbent) and the rest of the power elite. I know, that’s often how politics works, and it’s really no great surprise. But I hope what will be a surprise is when Pridemore not only competes effectively, but manages to defeat the establishment forces that desperately want to cling to the status quo.

Howard Dean was on Morning Joe yesterday talking about how voters want solutions, and most of all they want strength. Strength comes from conviction, not sticking a finger up in the air or seeing how many inside-Olympia names one can list. You can view Dean’s segment at Down With Tyranny.

If you’re a progressive in this state, or this country, here in the person of Craig Pridemore is the chance to support someone authentic, even in a winter of some (or more) discontent. Yes, the Obama administration has been a disappointment, and yes, there are certain Democrats in the US Senate who vex us endlessly, but the only path forward is, well, forward. The third district is widely considered to a pure toss-up district, and it’s still anyone’s ballgame at this point, prognostications by careerist Republican hacks aside.

Some Democratic leaders still haven’t seemed to learn the simple lesson that when given the choice between two Republicans, voters will choose the Republican, with apologies to Harry S. Truman (who gave them hell, not heck.) I’m not entirely certain why this is so, but it must change for this country to ever move forward.

If you can, please consider an early donation through Craig’s Act Blue page, every bit helps. If you’re on Facebook, I’ve started a group of supporters that also contains a link to Craig’s official fan page. Come join us as we campaign for an authentic representative of the people.

In covering a Teabagger party in Asotin, the TV newscaster leads off by saying “They say it’s all about traditional values…” — and what exactly are traditional Teabagger values?

“How many of you have watched the movie Lonesome Dove? What happened to Jake when he ran with the wrong crowd? … He got hung. And that’s what I want to do with Patty Murray.”

To which, of course, the crowd laughs and applauds. Yup, nothin’ riles up the spirit of a patriotic American more than a good ol’ fashioned hangin’ of a U.S. Senator.

I’ve already made the personal sacrifice of slashing my employees’ benefits, now so should the governor.

Sensible Washington will be holding a press conference today at 1:30pm at 3161 Elliott Avenue Ste 340 (near the PI building) to announce the start of signature gathering for their ballot initiative to legalize adult marijuana use. They’ve already received an endorsement from former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper and the folks at Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.

Seattle Parks Superintendent Tim Gallagher has banned all forms of tobacco use in Seattle parks. Gallagher made this rule despite protests from the city’s parks board. Even worse, he openly admits that this is being done to protect people from their own decisions, not to protect people from second-hand smoke (even chewing tobacco is banned). As far as I can tell, this rule applies to Seattle’s three municipal golf courses, so if you want to smoke a cigarette while playing a round at Jackson Park, make sure none of Gallagher’s foot soldiers are watching.