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– 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!

Leviticus 20:13
If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them.

Discuss.

When people blithely talk about how only a “moderate” can win down here in WA-03, I feel like pulling my hair out. But then I’m reminded that the machinations of politicians often mean little compared to what the public actually thinks.

From The Columbian’s newly revived political blog, concerning a poll commissioned by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and done by Research 2000:

In a follow-up question, voters were asked whether they would favor or oppose “the national government offering everyone the choice of buying into a government-administered health insurance plan — something like the Medicare coverage that people 65 and older get — that would compete with private health insurance plans.” A whopping 66 percent favored the idea; 24 percent opposed it, and 10 percent were undecided.

Presumably, using today’s commonly accepted definitions of what constitutes a “moderate,” nobody in their right mind would campaign in favor of government involvement in health care, because the Tea People hate the gubmint. It’s a scary year, at least to the easily scared, and we should just cower behind the pants leg of any sugar daddy we can find. (Note: this strategy is properly known scientifically as “The Democratic Party Formula for Failure Before Howard Dean Came Along.)

The problem with pat conventional wisdom is that, er, it’s pat conventional wisdom, passed around the tribe until it either becomes a fait accompli or is proven to be wrong. Hopefully the sillly notion that one can even define “moderate” in a multi-faceted district like WA-03 dies a swift death.

“Moderate” doesn’t even mean anything, it’s just a bit of pablum that indicates one member of the tribe prefers a certain member of the tribe. Do you know many Democratic Party politicians who, these days at least, conceive of themselves as immoderate? We’re talking about delivering a vital social service, health care, not starting a vegan commune in the woods with lots of naked people running around creating a vastly different consciousness (nothing against the latter if that’s your thing, though.)

But if a strong majority in in WA-03 likes the idea of a “Medicare for everyone” type plan, then I guess the sensible course would be to favor single payer, huh? Imagine that, the people in backwoods-y, hicksville WA-03 actually get it. I guess the Uncle Sam billboard on I-5 isn’t a majority down here after all!

Please do yourself a favor, and cast any remaining assumptions about WA-03 provided to you by certain Democratic Party illuminati and a certain Seattle alternative newspaper overboard. I try to shy away from absolute predictions, so I can only predict this: Craig Pridemore isn’t going to shy away from this race, and if more voters get to know Craig and his compassion for regular citizens, he’ll stand a great chance of winning in November.

I’ve been busy this week helping out the Sensible Washington folks with their signature gathering efforts. They now have their donation page set up, so please visit and throw a few pennies their way. This is a huge statewide volunteer signature gathering effort and they could use all the help they can get.

– The arrest and prosecution of Olympia Mayor Pro-Tem Joe Hyer for somewhat petty marijuana charges has given rise to a number of questions. There are tens of thousands of transactions like the one that Hyer was busted for happening in the state of Washington every month. Why was he specifically targeted despite clearly not being a large-scale dealer? Who was the confidential informant that Thurston County Narcotics Task Force used to bust Hyer? The Cannabis Defense Coalition is now trying to find these things out – and to highlight the fact that this arrest was likely politically motivated.

– In addition to being a high ranking political official who has both enemies and a pot plant, there’s one other thing that makes you far more likely to be busted for marijuana in this state: being black.

– I recently posted on the rogue DEA agent in Colorado, Jeff Sweetin, who openly violated the Obama Administration’s policy towards medical marijuana. Colorado Congressman Jared Polis is now fighting back. Last Thursday, President Obama was met by protests in Denver.

– Amanda Knox is not the only American being fucked over by the Italian legal system.

– As bad as the Italian legal system is, Utah might be worse.