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The other day I offered a free beer to the first Seattle elected official to enthusiastically come out in support of pitching a proposal to participate in Google’s experimental fiber network. Well, Mayor Mike McGinn was the first to answer the call.

Seattle will actively seek to partner with Google in creation of a fiber network here. The city itself has many assets to bring to the partnership, including an extensive existing fiber network of over 500 miles connecting every school, college and major government building in the city. In Seattle, 88% of residents have home computers, 84% have Internet access and 74% already have Internet access faster than dial-up. Seattle is a high tech city, with many technology firms both large and small, and a culture of entrepreneurism and innovation.

Fiber-to-the-premise networks will serve as an engine for business and economic development. Seattle would be an excellent place to construct such a network because we already have a high tech industry and population.

I don’t know how much of a chance we’ll have at winning a spot in the project, but at the very least it will help focus the city’s collective mind on what we need to do to provide our residents and businesses with first-rate, high-speed broadband infrastructure… something many of our neighborhoods sadly lack.

Living only a couple blocks from a major Qwest switch, I reliably enjoy better than 5Mbps downstream via DSL, but that makes me one of the fortunate ones, and while new WiMax service from Clear is (spottily) filling the gap in some neighborhoods, there are many Seattle households that are lucky to sustain 1.5Mbps, regardless of the provider.

But 1Gbps… hell, I’d happily settle for the 20Mbps my sister in suburban Philadelphia is getting from Verizon’s FIOS service.

If Seattle wants to remain a high-tech leader, we need to build the ultra-high-speed broadband infrastructure necessary to nurture and sustain our lead. And if Mayor McGinn wants to drop by Drinking Liberally sometime to discuss his broadband plans, the beer’s on me.

As I was putting together Monday’s post on the corruption within the Department of Corrections, there were a few news items related to medical marijuana that I haven’t had a chance to discuss. First and foremost, there was a court ruling that affirmed what most patients in Washington already knew. Our medical marijuana law doesn’t protect authorized medical marijuana patients from arrest, it only allows them to present a medical defense at trial. During the attempts to update the law in 2008, this was a primary objective for patients, yet any language that explicitly protected patients from arrest was stripped from the bill before it passed. Many people laid this failure at the feet of Governor Gregoire, but it’s not clear exactly what happened or who wanted the language removed.

For those in Seattle, this isn’t much of a problem. King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg doesn’t prosecute anyone who has a medical marijuana authorization. This has been true even for more envelope-pushing patients like Mark Spohn, who openly grows for multiple patients (another aspect of the law that is unclear). The Seattle Police generally have no interest in bothering patients – in fact, it’s worth noting the disparity in professionalism that was exposed in Monday’s post. Both Parkins and Cole, despite the actions of the corrections officers, praised the professionalism of SPD on the day that Parkins was arrested. Both Satterberg and Seattle Police recognize that they have better things to do than to send sick people through our court system when all they need to do is show a judge their authorization and they’re found not guilty.

But that hasn’t been true throughout the state. The Cannabis Defense Coalition court calendar continues to track cases of authorized medical marijuana patients going through our state’s courts. After the law was revised in 2008, Governor Gregoire said that if authorized patients were still getting arrested that she’d work with the police chiefs. So far we haven’t seen any indication that she’s willing to back that statement up with action.

A second bit of news is that the State Senate passed a bill to allow medical professionals other than licensed physicians to give medical marijuana authorizations. If passed into law, it isn’t likely to change the overall number of patients in the state, but will likely make it less of a hassle for them to get authorized. The fairly restrictive list of ailments allowed by the law keeps our medical marijuana regulations from looking more like California’s, where you can get a medical marijuana authorization for anything from insomnia to depression. Even as someone who has used marijuana in the past – and has noted how it helped me sleep better and made me a happier person – I never considered myself to be using it for medical reasons. Yet much of our current pharmaceutical industry is driven by “curing” these two afflictions. That’s why discussions over what makes marijuana a medicine and what separates recreational use from medical use are often muddled. The line isn’t entirely clear.

It’s worth noting that the complainant in the recent court case referenced above was found to have an authorization that wasn’t even legal. It was for anxiety and depression, which are not covered by the law. And in going through the released documents from the DOC, it’s very easy to be skeptical about whether or not some of those who were requesting to use medical marijuana would have been found similarly outside of the law. In fact, one of the doctors who authorized several patients, Dr. Antoine Johnson, was arrested in Madagascar this past October after fleeing the country to escape fraud charges.

Parkins, on the other hand, is a legitimate patient with a legitimate need (under 69.51A.010(4)(b)), but whenever there are doctors who are giving marijuana authorizations to anyone who walks into their office, it does cast doubt on everyone. And this was the mindset that many within the DOC were working with. Throughout the internal discussions, there was a common belief that all medical marijuana authorizations were a sham, primarily because they saw many of them coming from a single doctor. But after they defined their process and began denying everyone, a pattern started to become more clear. Most of the medical marijuana requests were coming from only 2-3 doctors, but most of the requests that were clearly within the scope of the state law weren’t. They were coming from a variety of different doctors, and they were the only authorizations coming from each of those doctors. Despite what the DOC convinced themselves, a lot of very real doctors recognize the very real benefits of marijuana for certain serious medical conditions.

If the DOC were smarter about how they handled this process, they could have denied a number of requests for people to use medical marijuana on probation and not caused such a backlash – simply by enforcing the law as it’s written. Several people requested medical marijuana use for things like anxiety, which isn’t even covered. But the Attorney General’s office and the DOC went way beyond that, trying to re-define the law in a way that made it impossible for anyone on probation to qualify. The legality of what they did hasn’t been decided by a court in this state yet, but it’s pretty clear the policy caused far more problems than what would’ve happened had they just followed the voter-approved law.

The apparent suicide of a longtime professional signature gatherer threatens to blow wide open the heretofore hidden world of organized petition fraud in Washington state.

Spokane based Dennis O’Shea had worked for years supervising crews of paid signature gatherers for a number of contractors, most recently Citizens Solutions, the Lacey WA firm that gathers signatures for Tim Eyman’s initiatives. Documented back in 2003 making false statements to signers about the initiative he was hawking, O’Shea had years to learn the ins and outs of the sometimes shady signature gathering business. So when detectives reportedly found his body along with a box of documents labeled to the attention of the police, they had reason to take notice.

Next month, partially as a result of the investigation stemming from O’Shea’s death, a mother and daughter signature gathering team will face charges on 45 counts of forging signatures on petitions for Eyman’s 2008 Initiative 985. And judging from both the suspicious circumstances, and the well documented history of petition fraud in other states, there is good reason to suspect that this case might represent only the tip of the iceberg.

According to court documents recently acquired by the Ballot Initiative Network, Theresa Dedeaux came under investigation in June 2008 after two petition sheets were turned over to Spokane County Elections officers, and subsequently the Secretary of State. An SOS official determined that 37 of the 40 signatures on the sheets did not match the signatures on file, and further forensic work by the Washington State Patrol determined a number of these to be forgeries. Affidavits were sent out to all 40 of the alleged signers, and all 29 of the affidavits returned confirmed that theirs was not the signature on the petition.

When confronted with this evidence by the WSP, Dedeaux made a statement to investigators implicating her supervisor: “Everything we did was at the direction of Dennis O’Shea.” When asked what she meant by “we,” Dedeaux went on to implicate her daughter Mercedes, “My daughter did it too.”

While details remain sketchy, it appears that O’Shea committed suicide sometime during the investigation, and according to sources, he left behind a box of documents directed toward the attention of the police, that included copies of several petition sheets collected by Mercedes Dedeaux. Investigators sent affidavits to 34 alleged signers whose signatures were suspected of being forged; all 29 of the returned affidavits attested that the signature was not authentic.

What else was in the box of documents O’Shea left behind? I have no idea, and I have no idea whether it is currently being investigated by the Spokane County Sheriff, the WSP or the SOS. What I do know, is that O’Shea thought it important enough to set aside for investigators as he prepared to take his own life. And I do know that the kind of fraud perpetrated by the Dedeauxs has proven to be common place in other initiative states, and that there has never been any reason to assume that Washington’s signature gatherers are uniquely clean, especially given the laxness of the laws and procedures regulating our initiative process.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” opponents of initiative reform like to argue, pointing to the absence of evidence of signature fraud in Washington state, but the truth is, we can’t possibly uncover evidence we’re not looking for, and lacking the tools to track signatures to the paid canvassers who gathered them, even evidence of fraud would be unlikely to incriminate the perpetrators.

To that end, there are two bills that are still alive in the current legislative session that attempt to address this issue. The first is HB 2614, which merely closes a loophole created via an opinion by state Attorney General Rob McKenna. Petitions are currently required to contain a declaration identifying the signature gatherer, but bizarrely, McKenna has advised the SOS that the statute does not require the signature gatherer to sign it. HB 2614 would clarify the existing law, explicitly requiring that the signature gatherer sign the declaration before the petition is filed with the SOS.

The second bill, SB 6449, is much more sweeping. In addition to closing the loophole above, SB 6449 would require that paid signature gatherers register with the PDC, and provide evidence of said registration while gathering signatures. Individuals convicted of fraud, forgery, identity theft, elections violations and sexual offenses would be denied registration, and permanently ineligible to work as paid signature gatherers. Volunteer signature gatherers would be exempt from such requirements.

Both of these bills represent prudent reforms that have been successfully implemented in other states with a history of signature fraud and other abuses. As it stands now, nothing would stop the Dedeauxs from working again as paid signature gatherers. Likewise, convicted identity thieves and sex offenders could be out there in front of the Safeway as I type, collecting the addresses and signatures of prospective victims.

Last year the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center ranked Washington’s initiative laws some of the most permissive in the nation, handing us a big, fat “F” in its nationwide Ballot Integrity Report Card. And yet this year, like in past sessions, the smart money is on the Legislature chickening out of addressing these long overdue reforms.

Opponents insist that there is no evidence of fraud, but the Dedeaux case proves otherwise, while the box of documents O’Shea left behind almost certainly contains additional incriminating evidence. Now is the time for the Legislature to act to protect the integrity of our initiative process.

The Virginia House of Delegates recently passed a bill that prohibits companies from forcing employees to be implanted with tracking devices like RF microchips, an act of legislation that as a civil libertarian I find both obvious and laudable.

But far from acting out of a concern for personal privacy in the digital age, Republican Delegate Mark Cole says he proposed the bill out of fear that the implants could turn out to be the mark of the beast as prophesied in Revelation:

“My understanding — I’m not a theologian — but there’s a prophecy in the Bible that says you’ll have to receive a mark, or you can neither buy nor sell things in end times,” Cole said, as quoted at the Washington Post. “Some people think these computer chips might be that mark.”

Uh-huh. It’s good to see that Republicans have their priorities in order.

Um… huh?

FINALLY someone has stood up to the institutional urge at Seattle Public Schools to adopt constructivist or reform math: Judge Julie Spector of King County Superior Court ruled Thursday that the district’s adoption of the Discovering series of high-school math texts was “arbitrary” and “capricious.”

This is a kind of judicial activism, and as a method of selecting or rejecting math books it makes us uneasy. Normally a judge would defer to the School Board. But … Don’t appeal the ruling.

Shorter Seattle Times: This is a kind of judicial activism, but that’s okay when we agree with it.

Apparently unwilling to wait for U.S. cable and phone companies to catch up with the rest of the world in providing ultra-high-speed Internet access, Google just announced plans to build an experimental fiber network, delivering speeds up to 1 gigabit per second to as many as 500,000 homes. From now until March 26 they will be accepting RFI‘s from government officials interested in participating in the project… and Seattle would have to be absolutely crazy not to make a concerted effort to throw its hat into the ring.

Really. First mayor or council member to come out enthusiastically in support of this, I’m buying a beer.

But of course we can’t rely on our elected officials to do this all on their lonesome. Let’s start brainstorming about how to make the most compelling proposal to Google, and how to organize promoting it. You’d think even the trolls could get on board with this, as it’s one of those public/private things that kinda trumps politics.

UPDATE: Pasco kicks Seattle’s ass
I got an email from Matthew Watkins, Mayor Pro-Tem of Pasco, that he started working on his online application the minute he saw the news on Slashdot, about an hour before I posted. So since I didn’t specifically specify a Seattle mayor or council member, I suppose I owe Watkins a beer. But I’ll still buy a beer for the first Seattle mayor or council member to take the lead.

I mean, come on… do we really want to cede the future to Pasco?

Despite the tough economic times, 20 0f 23 school levy and bond measures in King and Snohomish counties are passing, most by comfortable margins. Of the three that are currently failing, two are bond measures receiving over 50 percent of the vote, but which require 60 percent to pass. The only levy to fail is in Federal Way, and just barely at 49.7 percent.

And Seattle’s two school levies are both passing with over 71 percent of the vote.

That’s right, in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, a comfortable majority of voters in WA’s two most populous counties just voted to raise their own taxes to pay for schools.

Think about it.

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Today is election day (really…it is), so drop off your ballot and join us at Drinking Liberally for an evening of watching election returns under the influence. We’ll be meeting at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning about 8:00 pm. Or stop by early for dinner.

Tonight Clarence Eckerson will join us at Drinking Liberally. Clarence is a contributer to “Street Films” part of the Streetsblog family of websites devoted to documenting and improving urban livability issues. You can read more of his work here.

Not in Seattle? There is a good chance you live near one of the 344 other chapters of Drinking Liberally.

I’m not having an easy time making ends meet, and yet I just voted to raise my own taxes to help pay for schools, as will a comfortable majority of voters in school levy elections throughout the state.

Think about it.

Over on Crosscut, Daniel Jack Chasan asks the question: “Are super-majorities in the legislature unconstitutional?”

Simple answer: of course they are… except for, you know, those super-majorities specifically prescribed within the constitution.

Think about it. Washington state’s constitution mandates a two-thirds legislative super-majority to place a constitutional amendment on the ballot, an intentionally difficult legislative hurdle. And unlike in California, Washington’s constitution cannot be amended via initiative.

But if constitutionally prescribed legislative majorities, like that required to amend the constitution itself, can be changed through a simple majority vote — either of the legislature or through a citizens initiative — then there’s really no point in having a constitution at all. What sets a constitution apart from, and primary over the rest of our laws is the extra effort it takes to modify it; if the majority provisions can be changed via simple majority, than so can the constitution, making it in essence, just another set of statutes.

The fact that I-960 makes it more difficult to pass legislation, rather than less, is neither here nor there. The constitution is the constitution.

So why has the Washington State Supreme Court never thrown out I-960 or its predecessor I-601 as unconstitutional? Because its never been forced to rule on the issue.

Hugh Spitzer, who teaches Washington constitutional law at the University of Washington law school, says it seems pretty clear that if the state supreme court were somehow forced to vote on the issue, the court would find the two-thirds rule unconstitutional. But so far, the court has managed to duck the question.

“The court is terrified of having to make a decision,” on the constitutionality of a supermajority, Spitzer suggests. “They do everything they can” to avoid it.

Huh. So here’s an idea that I’m confident my friends in the Democratic caucus will never embrace: why not just up the ante on Tim Eyman’s game of constitutional brinksmanship, and fight fire with fire? If Tim is going to insist on repeatedly running initiatives that increase the majority required to pass certain forms of legislation, then the Legislature should pass a bill — on a simple majority vote — that increases the majority required to qualify or pass certain types of initiatives.

You know, we could attempt to increase the number of signatures necessary to qualify an initiative for the ballot from 8 percent of the previous gubernatorial turnout to 12 percent, and/or increase the majority required for passage at the polls from a simple majority to say, 60 percent.

Of course, such legislation would be challenged, and of course, the Supreme Court would strike it down. You just can’t change such constitutionally prescribed majorities through simple legislation.

And that would settle that constitutional issue, once and for all.

WellPoint pays its CEO $10 million a year, and spent over $9.5 million last year lobbying against health care reform. And now with reform all but dead, the company is intent on enjoying the fruit of its labors, hiking premiums on its 800,000 individual policy holders in California by 39 percent.

Ah, the efficiencies of the market.

In a blow to House Republicans who had made him one of their favorite targets of scorn and derision, U.S. Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) died today at age 77 of complications from gallbladder surgery.

Although he’d earned wide renown amongst D.C. insiders for his pork-barrel prowess (you know, the kinda bring-home-the-bacon politics folks here in our Washington like to abuse Rep. McDermott for not plying), Murtha didn’t become a lightning rod for Republican criticism until 2005, when the normally hawkish Democrat prominently came out in favor of withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. A former marine whose honors include the Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts, Murtha was the first Vietnam War veteran to be elected to the U.S. House.

And in a curious historical note, Murtha has now become the third in a direct line of succession to have died in office, joining his immediate predecessor John P. Saylor (1973) and Saylor’s predecessor Robert L. Coffey (1949). So a word of caution to those seeking to succeed Murtha: few who hold this office manage to return alive.

UPDATE:
Speaking of pork, Murtha’s death bumps WA’s own Rep. Norm Dicks to the number two position on the all powerful House Appropriations Committee, where he will likely take over Murtha’s chair of the lucrative Defense subcommittee. Say what you want, but that can’t be bad for the military-industrial complex here in WA state.

A couple of thoughts on Lee’s excellent and provocative post regarding the Department of Corrections’ abuse of probationers’ rights to use medical marijuana.

First, one would think that folks in the legacy media might be all over such a scandalous abuse of state power, if not for A) our media’s tendency to to view medical marijuana patients as a bunch of worthless, lying potheads, and B) their fear of covering any story that might cast media-beloved AG Rob McKenna in an unflattering light.

Second, if there’s anything that illustrates the incredible stupidity and casual cruelty of our drug policy, it’s how it so easily turned a sickly grandmother with a medical marijuana prescription and less than a quarter ounce of pot, into an enemy combatant in our so-called War on Drugs. Read Lee’s post; is there any moral or social justification for this poor woman’s arrest in Arizona, and subsequent abuse at the hands of the Washington DOC? And yet such abuse is the inevitable consequence of our current, twisted system.

What a waste of time and money, not to mention the cost in human suffering. So come on, let’s legalize marijuana already so we can let law enforcement focus on enforcing laws that actually make sense.