HorsesAss.Org

Last week’s contest was a tough one, but it was eventually won by Cascadian. The correct location was in Manchester, England.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!

Last week, Jeremy Scahill had a huge story detailing the secret operations being conducted in Pakistan by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and the private military outfit formerly known as Blackwater. The operations are primarily assassinations and kidnappings (“snatch and grabs”) of high-value targets. The agreement with Pakistan to allow for this to go on was allegedly done with the Pakistani government reserving the right to deny that they made any type of agreement at all.

Not surprisingly, this story is making things difficult for the Pakistani government. Pakistan’s interior minister has promised to resign if it’s true that Blackwater is operating there. Similar to Mexico, allowing for American troops to operate within the country is a major line that the public is reluctant to see crossed. Hillary Clinton got a taste of this when she last visited there.

Much of the illogic of what we’re doing in Pakistan echoes past failures in waging the drug war. In that “war”, we’ve tended to believe that we can just knock off a bunch of high-value targets and we win. This is how the drug war has been fought overseas for decades. We’ve even tolerated secret operations where American forces have become part of the drug trade in order to capture the head honcho, only to see the whole damn trade re-organize under a new head honcho. The lesson has been that you can’t eliminate the trade unless you deal with the underlying demand that drives the trade in the first place.

When it comes to terrorism, that underlying demand comes from anti-American sentiment. And in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, the enemies we’re fighting benefit from both that and drugs. The idea that we can defeat them by doing things that will increase anti-American sentiment (while doing nothing about the underlying demand for drugs) is dangerously foolish. Any time we take out a high-value target in a way that increases the level of radicalism among the Pakistanis, these organizations will simply re-organize under a new leader and continue the war. But that’s exactly what we’re doing, and it’s exactly what a number of people blindly accept as the ideal foreign policy move.

That’s why so many of these idiots are upset that Obama didn’t talk about “winning” or using the word “victory” in his speech at West Point. Obama, for his faults in this escalation, at least understands that Afghanistan is not a video game that you win after killing all the bad guys. There’s no such thing as “victory” in an occupation, just a long hard slog to improve stability. You “win” by convincing the people of that nation that your presence there is beneficial for them, or that your presence is temporary and that they will soon be autonomous again.

What becomes difficult for politicians in wars like this is that they genuinely fear being seen in conflict with those on the front lines in this war, regardless of its futility. The Obama Administration is no different, and their unwillingness to be seen as rejecting what the military wants is going to override everything else. That’s leading them down a dangerous path, both in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and his intent to continue this conflict without increasing anti-American sentiment will be a significant challenge. And nothing can undermine that challenge more than believing that we can fight it under the cover of darkness. Those days are over.

Over at Publicola, Erica documents Rep. Dave Reichert’s many public statements in opposition to President Obama’s economic stimulus package, which, drawing upon his vast expertise as an economist sheriff, Reichert has repeatedly predicted would fail at its primary goal: creating jobs.

Oops.

This week, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released a report estimating that the stimulus package had created between 600,000 and 1.6 million new jobs, and raised the US gross domestic product by 1.2 to 3.2 percentage points above what would have been without the program.

Moreover, in the New York Times last month, several prominent economists argued that the stimulus had helped the economy, by creating jobs and hastening the end of the recession.

If only Sheriff Dave had the brains to match his brawn.

Two weeks ago, I posted about the directive given by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops that requires hospitals and hospices to override the end-of-life wishes of patients in certain circumstances.

In the comments, Joel Connelly crawled up my ass, telling me that I needed to contact the hospitals and hospices to find out if they’ll really follow the directive. I just sent off an email to every Catholic hospital and hospice in the state I could find a contact email for to see if any of them are planning to ignore it.

Dr. Rachel Maddow with an academic treatise on the origins of “teabaggers”:

(There are some fifty more clips from the past week in politics at Hominid Views.)

It seems that the “Congressman from the Lars Larson show” is being noticed by others, this time for his vote against extending the estate tax.

Let’s review: Heath Shuler, Congress-critter from deepest North Carolina, Yea. Congressman “Lieberman of Vancouver,” Nay. I feel a surge of deeply alienated base coming on.

Props to Jack Bogdanski of Portland, Oregon, who is more clever than I and came up with the satirical terms regarding Rep. Brian Baird, D- Wash.

I don’t have any special insight into what happened to Baird, feel free to make up your own theory involving Washington, D.C., power, hubris, narcissism or whatever. Maybe he just needs to make a change, it happens to the best of folks.

Yes, I have defended Baird quite frequently in the past. You can be assured that will not happen again, and I apologize for being so slow to admit what has been a painfully obvious and disheartening abandonment of both the party and the district by Baird.

As for a Democratic challenger to explore the vast political space now emerging to the left of Baird, a space I believe is inhabited by a majority of his constituents, in my experience truly outstanding insurgent candidates tend to be self-motivating and emerge much to the surprise of party regulars. In short, people can try to recruit candidates, but sometimes candidates need to emerge.

They may be moms in tennis shoes, they may be professors, they may be business folks or labor activists, but somewhere out there could be the person who will give the people of the 3rd District a representative who acts with their interests in mind rather than siding consistently with the ruling kleptocracy.

Amanda Knox found guilty; sentenced to 26 years. Talk amongst yourselves.

Last year, when university presidents lobbied for, the legislature passed, and the governor signed a 30% increase in college tuition over two years, promises were made that this would help keep higher education more affordable, not less. How? By increasing the total amount of financial aid dollars available, and by raising the income levels under which families qualify for financial aid, those who could afford to pay more would pay more, while those who couldn’t would pay less.

That is the high-tuition/high-financial aid model as practiced successfully by many private and some public universities, and it’s a model that can work… as long as public officials keep their promises.

One year later, with the governor and legislature looking to fill an additional $2.6 billion hole in the last year of our current two-year state budget, there’s talk that the state could eliminate financial aid altogether, saving $272 million in the process. But even a partial reduction in financial aid would be both a breach of public trust, and a disastrous public policy.

I understand the temptation to paint a worse case scenario as the governor and other Democratic leaders prepare to rally the troops in favor of a revenue package, but college financial aid must be explicitly taken off the table now, before any further damage is done. Cutting financial aid would surely interrupt the education of thousands of Washington students, but the mere talk of it is disruptive in itself, as many needy students will put off their college plans rather than face such financial uncertainty. Such talk also poisons the well, undermining faith in our elected officials to do right by our state’s young people, and ultimately making it even more difficult to enact further higher education funding reforms.

Promises were made, and they must be kept; our higher education system is simply too important to the welfare and prosperity of our state to do otherwise.

The Seattle P-I’s Chris Grygiel tells it like it is:

How did Dow Constantine beat Susan Hutchison so handily in last month’s King County executive’s race? As a Seattle Times map shows, he won Seattle handily and got more votes in the Eastside suburbs. Constantine’s strong showing in what, until recently, had been GOP territory bodes ill for the Republican Party heading into the 2010 legislative elections.

The emphasis is mine, and it’s not because I believe the GOP won’t pick up any seats in 2010 (I think they likely will), but because Grygiel’s analysis clearly exposes the lie that is nonpartisan elections.

Had Hutchison won, the conventional wisdom would have been that this would have bode ill for Democrats. So how exactly does the outcome of a supposedly nonpartisan race bode anything at all for one party or another? Of course, it was nonpartisan in name only.

I understand why Republicans would want to promote this particular fiction, and I don’t blame them for trying. But civic leaders who endorsed and supported the charter amendment (you know who I’m talking about, Muni League), and opinion leaders who attempted to perpetrate this lie after the fact (you know who I’m talking about, Seattle Times editorial board) should really be embarrassed by their efforts to deceive themselves and others.

Fortunately, the voters saw through this particular charade.

Republicans rooting for the failure of the Obama administration will be disappointed by today’s unexpected jobs report that showed unemployment falling from 10.2% to 10%, while the U.S. economy lost only 11,000 jobs in November.

Not a stellar day for Mark Griswold.

Update [Darryl]: From the Bureau of Labor Statistics report comes this graph (with colors modified to reflect political party):

Notice the November number is practically zero compared to numbers from the past 22 months. The graph highlights the differences under Republican economic policies compared to Democratic economic policies.

It also substantiates the labels: “The Bush Recession” and “The Obama Recovery.”

And of course, the best way to prove you are not a “sleazeball” is to try to get your son’s teacher fired for allegedly calling you one:

Hugh “Skip” McGee, one of Wall Street’s best-paid bankers, has launched an extraordinary attack on staff at his son’s exclusive private school after a teacher allegedly claimed that all investment bankers are dishonest “sleazeballs”.

Mr Mcgee, who is Barclays Capital’s global head of investment banking, penned a rambling five-page letter to the board of trustees of Houston’s Kinkaid School, asking that the teacher and two other staff members be fired.

In the letter, Mr McGee, who is alleged to have an eight-figure salary, claims that history teacher Leslie Lovett has a “leftist invective” which “is neither accurate nor part of the approved curriculum”.

The banker, who was global head of investment banking at Lehman Brothers until its collapse last year, goes on to claim that the teacher told his son John Edward’s 11th-grade class “that somehow both Lehman and Barclays made a bunch of money on the Lehman bankruptcy, and that all investment bankers were ‘sleazeballs’ and dishonest”.

Okay, maybe it was wrong to call him a sleazeball. Asshole might have been the more appropriate epithet.

Here is the photo the media wants you to know about, but not see. I’ve cropped out just a small section, but click on the image above to view the whole thing. Or not. It’s your choice.

We’ve all seen a lot of dead bodies on TV and on film, some of them even real dead bodies, and as far as these kind of images go, this one isn’t particularly brutal or disturbing. I’m not saying it isn’t disturbing, just no more disturbing than any number of other images with which we’re bombarded on a daily basis.

I can understand not plastering this image on a newspaper front page or broadcasting it on the evening news, but once you’re talking about it, what’s the purpose of withholding a link? Respect for the deceased? Respect for the family that tried to help him escape capture?

This is one of those bizarre journalism ethics things I just don’t understand. All over the local media this morning is news of a leaked photo of Maurice Clemmons dead body (here, here and here, for example). Yet nobody’s willing to actually show the controversial image. (Slog provided a link, but that’s as dead as Clemmons now, so it doesn’t really count.)

So if the photo isn’t safe for public consumption, why the hell are you teasing us with it? It’s either news or it’s not news, and since there seems to be unanimity in our local media that it is news, don’t you think you owe it to your readers to treat them like adults, and give them the option of viewing the photo for themselves?

I’ve searched for the photo and didn’t find it in Google’s cache or anywhere else, but I trust my readers. So if anybody has a copy of the photo and wants to pass it along, I’ll post it here to HA and give you all the choice of viewing it for yourselves.

UPDATE:
Several readers have sent me the photo via email. Thanks. Here it is.

Frank Chopp may be getting the message that his opposition to the marijuana decriminalization bill introduced last year wasn’t just misguided and backwards, but also bad politics. There will be a lot of people watching what he does in 2010 to push that bill – and drug law reform in general – forward as we continue to battle with our serious budget problems.

There’s also a heated debate happening now over whether Washington is ready to just leave Frank Chopp and the legislature behind and push for full legalization and regulation through a statewide voter initiative. There have been few, if any, quality statewide polls on the subject, but Gallup’s recent poll on the subject gives us enough data to get a good estimate of where the state’s voters might come down in such a poll.

While the poll linked above only broke the country down into regions (Washington is lumped into “West”, which had 53% support for legalization), it also broke down the percentages among people who self-identify as “liberal”, “moderate”, and “conservative”. Liberals supported legalization at 78%, moderates at 46%, and conservatives at 27%. Using another Gallup poll from this summer that broke down the percentage of each of those groups within Washington state, we can get a reasonably rough estimate of what the overall support might be (and Darryl could probably spend the next two weeks calculating the margin of error by doing it this way).

Liberals – 26% (of Washington residents)
Moderates – 37%
Conservatives – 33%
Other – 4%

Using the percentages Gallup found for the first three groups, of the 96% who identified as liberal, moderate, or conservative, just over 48% of them would support legalization. Certainly, these polls aren’t taking into account likely voters, nor are they taken within the context of a statewide initiative where the subject is being debated very publicly, so I wanted to compare my methodology with one truly reliable statewide poll – the failed 2006 legalization initiative in Nevada. That initiative garnered 44% of the votes. Looking at their political ideology breakdown:

Liberals – 22% (of Nevada residents)
Moderates – 37%
Conservatives – 37%
Other – 4%

The 96% who identified as liberal, moderate, or conservative would theoretically support legalization now at 46%, which is arguably in line with the 2006 result (as you’d expect slight increases over time).

What this means is that Washington truly is on the verge of being able to pass a statewide initiative to legalize and regulate marijuana. 2010 might be a tough year because the mid-terms are likely to draw larger numbers of conservatives to the polls, but it’s hard to imagine one going down to defeat in 2012.

UPDATE: Senator Jim Webb’s effort to create a commission to look into America’s failing criminal justice system has a hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee today.