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Mark Griswold may not have much talent as a writer, journalist or rhetorician; in fact, he may not have much talent at all. But in his new role as (un)Sound Politics’ most prolific contributor, Griswold has certainly been an upgrade in the crazy department…  and that’s saying something considering the proud legacy of Stefan’s tin foil hat, and the ongoing competition from Pudge.

Take, for example, Griswold’s personal reaction to the tragic shooting of four Lakewood police officers:

Today was not a particularly stellar day for me.

But then, when you’re Mark Griswold, what day is?

While listening to Laura Ingraham this morning (sorry Kirby, Glenn Beck went to commercial) I became infuriated at the story of Michigan abortionist Abraham Hodari, who continues to practice despite countless instances of forced abortions and even, what one might generously label, the negligent homicides of four young girls.

Well, there’s your first mistake, Mark. In your quixotic quest for a stellar day, perhaps you shouldn’t start it off by getting your morning news from Laura Ingraham, Glenn Beck, and Operation Rescue.

And then there’s Maurice Clemmons and his cold-blooded murder of four Lakewood Police Officers, among them a distant cousin but a relative nonetheless, Tina Griswold.

Which of course, ruined Mark’s day. Damn you, Maurice Clemmons!

What do these two tragic cases have in common?

They somehow remind Griswold of himself?

They represent a failure of the system.

Like I said.

I don’t have some grand illusion that life is suppose to be fair.

No, they’re more like grand delusions.

There are some sick folks out there and sometimes really bad things happen to really good people. It may be tragic but it’s life.

And that pretty much sums up the Republican approach to health care reform.

The grand illusion that I do carry around is that, while life may not be fair, government should be.

Because in Grisworld, reality and government have nothing to do with each other.

And by that I mean government needs to uphold and enforce laws that help to prevent tragedies like those I just mentioned.

Just like in the movie Minority Report. All of Griswold’s most deeply cherished beliefs are derived from cheesy action movies.

The crimes committed by Hodari and Clemmons should never have happened.

Tom Cruise should have stopped them.

Hodari should have, at the very least, been stripped of his medical credentials long ago for forcibly aborting pregnancies. In my opinion he should be rotting in a Michigan prison.

And “my opinion” is entirely based on something I read on the Operation Rescue website.

Clemmons should never have been pardoned by Gov. Huckabee and certainly should not have been released on a scant $150,000 bail after being charged with child rape. He, too, should be rotting in prison.

But neither of them are and what are we left with?

Um… a less than stellar day for Mark Griswold?

Who knows how many more young girls may be forced to go through forced abortions? In the case of Clemmons I suspect justice will eventually be served and he’ll be placed behind bars without the possibility of parole but I doubt this will be the last time that innocent people must die at the hands of a felon walking free. So I ask you, what are we suppose to do?

Obviously, we need to establish an elite “Precrime” unit, in which three genetically altered “Pre-Cogs” are used to predict crimes before they happen. Sure, occasionally the Pre-Cogs get their prediction wrong, putting Tom Cruise in peril, but that’s a small price to pay when we’re fighting a war on terror.

Some may say, “Well, we still need to rely on the system. Sure it may have some kinks but it’s still the best on Earth.” Others may advocate reform at the ballot box. I’d certainly hope that whatever idiot judge that granted Clemmons bail be retired as soon as possible, but is any of this really enough?

Well, it depends on how much faith you place in hippie-dippy liberal values like the rule of law.

I’ll add one more name to the list: Khalid Sheik Muhammad.

So just to be clear, Griswold’s list now includes the self-professed 9/11 mastermind, a convicted felon who brutally gunned down four police officers… and a gynecologist. It’s good to see he hasn’t lost any perspective.

What is this guy doing receiving a criminal trial? He’s already admitted to planning 9/11. Why is he not already six feet under?

Apart from that rule of law bullshit, I don’t know. Perhaps there’s a movie from which we can draw an important lesson? Maybe… Death Wish?

All the criminal trial is going to do is serve as an opportunity to plead not guilty on the grounds that either a) only 2800 people died on 9/11, not the 3000 that the government is charging him with or more likely b) everyone that died on 9/11 deserved it because they were infidels. Either way he’ll use the time to rail against the evils of the very country that is allowing him the opportunity to do so.

Judgement at Nuremberg?

This can’t continue indefinitely, folks. We can’t keep relying on “the system”.

Dirty Harry?

I’m not advocating blind vigilantism.

Hmm… no blind vigilantism. So I guess the movie Blind Justice doesn’t help us out much.

As much as I can empathize with someone who takes the law into his own hands and blows away the guy that raped his daughter, it’s not right. I don’t agree with the guy that murdered abortion doctor George Tiller either. Abortion is still, unfortunately, legal and, to the best of my knowledge Dr. Tiller, while a despicable human being, wasn’t so despicable as to forcibly abort any of his patients’ pregnancies.

Or at least, he hasn’t been accused of such by Operation Rescue. Still, I’m sure there must be some Hollywood blockbuster out there that we can all look to for guidance.

But when “justice has been served” and the verdict is not guilty on account of the guy didn’t get read his Miranda Rights or, as in the case of Dr. Hodari, he laughs at his accusers because he believes he’s above the law (and apparently rightfully so if you go by the State of Michigan’s actions) what must be done?

Wait for it… wait for it…

In the hugely underrated film National Treasure, Nicholas Cage’s character Benjamin Franklin Gates sums up the actions of the founding fathers by saying

If there’s something wrong, those who have the ability to take action have the responsibility to take action.

No truer words have ever been said and what that means to me is that if I have the ability to take action on Clemmons, Muhammad or Hodari, if I am put in a position to take any of these guys out, you’re damn right I will and I won’t regret it for an instant either.

Oh. My. God.

Forget for a moment that Griswold equates an abortion provider with a mass-murdering terrorist and a serial cop-killer, or that he not only advocates for sighted vigilantism, but narcissistically imagines himself in that role. This is a guy who looks to a cheesy action flick like National Treasure for guiding moral principles? What a fucking nutcase.

Good thing for Griswold we don’t have a Precrime unit, or Tom Cruise likely would’ve taken him into custody years ago.

If you disagree then I welcome a better suggestion. I’d encourage you though, before you post, to ask yourself, “if it had been my daughter who’d died at the hands of Dr. Hodari, or my brother who’d been in Forza Coffee Sunday morning about to start his shift, and I came across their killers, what would I really do?”

What would I do? Well, if I had come across Clemmons, I probably would’ve trembled with fear as I frantically dialed 9-1-1… which I’m guessing is exactly what the police would’ve preferred me to do. (The 9-1-1 part. I don’t think they’d care much about the trembling, one way or another.) But I certainly wouldn’t have been stupid enough to imagine that I could single-handedly take on a guy who had just gunned down four police officers. That’s just crazy.

As is, by the way, Griswold’s admission that “if I am put in a position to take [Dr. Hodari] out,” he’d kill him without regret.

Somehow, I doubt that attitude accurately represents the moral philosophy of National Treasure’s screenwriter, let alone our founding fathers. And it’s not exactly a recipe for a prosperous, peaceful and civil society.

For all the drama of yesterday’s manhunt, in the end, suspected cop-killer Maurice Clemmons was shot and killed by a lone police officer on routine patrol in South Seattle.

Assistant Chief Jim Pugel said a Seattle police officer “was patrolling this area when he came across an unoccupied stolen vehicle. The officer radioed the location and license plate, and he then detected some movement behind him and got out of his car.” Then the officer “recognized the person who was approaching him as looking like … the possible suspect of the tragic homicide in Lakewood.” The officer then asked man to show hands his, but, Pugel said, “the person would not show his hands and began to run away… and would not stop.”

“The officer fired several rounds,” Pugel continued. “All indications are that he is deceased.”

Pugel said a gun recovered from the suspect had the “identical serial number” to the one taken from one of the murdered officers.

Assuming all that information is correct, it looks like the police got their man, which should be a huge relief to the family, friends and comrades of the fallen Lakewood officers… as well as anybody who even vaguely matched Clemmons’ description. I don’t know standard police procedures, and I certainly don’t mean to question the officer’s actions, but I wonder if under normal circumstances the officer would have been so quick to shoot just any suspect fleeing from the scene of a stolen car?

Oy…

Officers on the police scanner say that a would-be vigilante flagged down a cop near Cowen Park. The man was carrying a handgun and wearing body armor. He apparently wanted help flush out the suspect from the park.

There’s a part of me that wishes the police had put his armor to the test.

Since I spend an awful lot of time critiquing the press, I think it only fair to point out that the coverage thus far of the tragic murder of four Lakewood police officers, and the ensuing manhunt for the suspect has been pretty damn good. Both the Tacoma News Tribune and the Seattle Times have been on top of the story since shortly after it broke, doing what newspapers do best.

In fact, in this age of instantly updated websites, the newspapers have provided much better coverage than they ever could in the days of their mere print existence.

SeattleCrime.com also deserves a shout-out for its ongoing coverage, and particularly its on the ground reporting from the Leschi police action last night. Kudos all around.

Hey Erica… I have it from a very reliable source that you can add the name of my ex-wife, Maureen Judge, to the list of candidates jockeying to replace state Sen. Fred Jarrett in the 41st Legislative District after he steps down to take the number two position in the King County Executive’s office.

“Mo” is a King County Conservation Voters board member and the executive director of the Washington Toxics Coalition, environmental credentials that never hurt in Puget Sound area elections, and as a former manager at Real Networks and Expedia (as well as our own, lesser known, mom & pop software startup), she’s got high-tech/business bona fides to boot. And as my loyal readers might remember, she’s well known to 41st LD regulars from her hotly contested 2007 race for Mercer Island City Council… a race, by the way, in which she earned a rare double endorsement from both HA and the Seattle Times (although I at least managed to get her first name right).

The inside line is that once Jarrett officially steps down, freshman Rep. Marcie Maxwell will seek the appointment to his seat, leaving her House seat open to Mo and the other contenders. 41st LD Democratic PCO’s will nominate three candidates, ranked by preference, from which the King County Council will appoint a successor.

If I had to wager, I’d guess Mo, Vicky Oricco and Randy Gordon have the inside track right now, if in no particular order.

Yikes…

Maurice Clemmons, the 37-year-old Tacoma man being sought for questioning in the killing this morning of four Lakewood police officers, has a long criminal record punctuated by violence, erratic behavior and concerns about his mental health.

Nine years ago, then-Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee granted clemency to Clemmons, commuting his lengthy prison sentence over the protests of prosecutors.

“This is the day I’ve been dreading for a long time,” Larry Jegley, prosecuting attorney for Arkansas’ Pulaski County said tonight when informed that Clemmons was being sought for questioning in connection with the killings.

Perhaps Susan Hutchison should ask for her contribution back?

And the Washington angle doesn’t look much better:

Clemmons’ criminal history includes at least five felony convictions in Arkansas and at least eight felony charges in Washington. The record also stands out for the number of times he has been released from custody despite questions about the danger he posed.

Clemmons had been in jail in Pierce County for the past several months on a pending charge of second-degree rape of a child. He was released from custody just six days ago, even though he was wanted on a fugitive warrant out of Arkansas and was staring at seven additional felony charges in Washington state.

If this is the killer, there’s gonna be an awful lot of explaining to do.

A question for the several disgruntled HA subjects and their attorneys who have threatened me with defamation suits over the past year alone… is this the sort of shameless, disregard for free speech you’d prefer become the norm here in the United States?

Italian authorities have served the parents of Amanda Knox with legal papers notifying them they are under investigation for defamation, an accusation related to their allegations that police brutalized their daughter.

Still jetlagged from their long trip from Seattle, Edda Mellas and Curt Knox were served the papers Friday evening by Italian Caribinieri police officers while at the law offices of their Perugian lawyer, Luciano Ghirga. Both are in Perugia to hear closing arguments in their daughter’s murder trial, which is expected to conclude next week with a jury decision on whether Amanda Knox had a role in the November 2007 slaying of her roommate, Meredith Kercher.

The developments came as a surprise to the family.

“It’s ridiculous,” Knox’s stepfather, Chris Mellas told the seattlepi.com.

“And the timing is very curious,” added Curt Knox. “With this coming five days before a high-profile case is going to come to a close, for an article written 18 months ago.”

I haven’t really followed the Knox drama, and I have no opinion one way or another as to her guilt or innocence. But this defamation investigation is harassment, pure and simple, and a vindictive, anti-democratic effort to crush dissent. The prosecutors have the full weight and resources of the state behind their efforts to convict Knox, and now they’re threatening her parents for daring to criticize their actions? That’s the sort of overreaching exercise of state power that most Americans rightly find repugnant.

Fortunately, here in the U.S., we not only enjoy the protections of the First Amendment, but also perhaps the most restrictive defamation laws in the world. One can still harass critics by threatening to bring suit, and in fact, one can still harass critics by bringing suit, however unfounded. But the kind of free speech the Knox’s exercised (and the kind of free speech I exercise here on HA) is exceedingly difficult to prosecute.

Ain’t it great to be an American?

UPDATE [Lee]: Bumping up to the top.

4 Pierce County police officers shot dead outside Parkland:

The officers were sitting in the coffee shop with their computers out when the shooter came in. The officers were targeted, and it was not a robbery, investigators believe.

[…]

“It looks like a flat-out ambush,” Troyer said. “Some one came in and opened fire.

The baristas who were inside the shop are “stunned and shocked, traumatized,” Troyer said.

A $10,000 reward has been offered for information in the killings. The amount is expected rise, Troyer said.

“The first one to call with information gets it,” he said.

Sorry to use so much of the Trib’s post without adding much but I thought there ought to be a thread.

… The tip line if anyone reading has any information: (253) 591-5959

Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky. The correct answer was St. Paul, MN. As always, you can click the picture to go directly to the Bing maps site. They’ve hidden the Bird’s Eye View link a bit, but you can get to it by clicking the ‘Aerial’ flyout menu.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!

I guess value can be rather subjective, but if Mike McGinn’s recent mayoral campaign is any indication, it looks like Seattle may have snagged itself a deal that would put any Black Friday shopper to shame.

McGinn spent only $224,241 to win 105,492 votes in this year’s general election, about $2.13 per vote. Compare that to New York’s Michael Bloomberg — the only mayoral candidate in the nation to receive more votes than McGinn — who spent at least $102 million of his own money to win 557,059 votes, an astounding $183.10 per vote.

Such a bargain.

[via Pete Guither]

Who will die for a color TV?

Bold leadership…

Gov. Chris Gregoire is “seriously considering” legislation that would allow four-minute Keno games as a way to help deal with a projected $2.6 billion budget shortfall.

The games could bring in an estimated $30 million a year. That’s not much money compared with the budget gap, but lawmakers are hunting for any cash they can find.

Or, you know, we could try a high-earners income tax, or even a temporary, broad-based tax increase, rather than raising revenue primarily on the backs of the poor and the gambling addicted.

Senate Ways and Means Chairwoman Margarita Prentice, D-Renton, said she may sponsor the Keno legislation. “We wouldn’t be doing this if it weren’t an absolute necessity,” she said.

Absolutely necessary? I’m sure Sen. Prentice could find other creative ways to raise an additional $30 million. Just taxing the contributions of payday lenders to her own campaign could get us a significant portion of the way there.

Another idea: eliminate the discriminatory tax break granted last session to print newspapers.

Oh, and a tip to the broad based coalition of bizarrely allied activists and interests groups opposed to expanding gambling in Washington state… as much as I sympathize with their needs and concerns, perhaps tribal leaders are not our most effective spokespeople?

Ron Allen, chairman of the Washington Indian Gaming Association, opposes the move. Allowing the expanded Keno game would take away money from casinos run by the tribes, he said. “The market is only so deep, and we’re close to saturation now,” he said.

Such a proposal also would lead to a large increase in gambling in the state, he said, noting that’s something Washington residents have indicated they don’t support.

Uh-huh.

Gee, I dunno, now that Norm Maleng is no longer with us to coherently make the anti-gambling argument from the respectable middle, maybe it would be more effective to have a religious conservative like Jeff Kemp publicly speak against the moral and social harm of gambling rather than having the chair of the Washington Indian Gaming Association pontificate about how much Washington voters oppose its expansion?

Just a suggestion from an ally who has spent much time and though effectively framing this issue.

This won’t be as polished a response as I’d like, because, frankly, it’s a holiday, I’ve got better things to do, and Joel Connelly’s column yesterday — Seattle’s WTO riots were loud — and ineffective — is so inaccurate, idiotic, and simply factually wrong that it demands some sort of response. Not because anybody much reads seattlepi.com these days, but because, with a series of local events over the next several days commemorating the 10th anniversary of the anti-WTO protests (full disclosure: I’m one of the many organizers), we’re going to be hearing this meme a lot in the next week from local civic opinion leaders whose only real takeaway from the protests was that they gave Seattle a bad name for a while at certain cocktail parties they favored.

Technically, of course, Joel is correct — the “riots” were loud and ineffective. Except that the only people who “rioted,” in the sense of inciting violence, were a few dozen self-proclaimed “anarchists” (really, nihilists) who broke some windows, and law enforcement that spent four days trying to clear the streets by indiscriminately attacking protesters and bystanders alike — everyone, really, except the vandals. That was loud. But the 40,000 peaceful labor marchers (which Connelly acknowledges) and the separately organized, 20,000 or so peaceful people blockading downtown streets (which Connelly ignores) on November 30, 1999 made their point and changed history. The police riot was also ineffective; it didn’t stop the 1999 protests from being the most effective US street protest in at least a generation. Instead, it amplified the protesters’ message, by astonishing people around the world that American citizens would be so willing to take a stand against a neoliberal agenda that they’d provoke, and withstand, that kind of a state response.

You want an ineffective protest? Fifty thousand people marched in Seattle on February 15, 2003, against an imminent US invasion of Iraq. That was ineffective. As are most such marches. But WTO was different, and Connelly couldn’t be more wrong when he writes:

Left activists have scheduled panels to celebrate the 10th anniversary. They will doubtless dance around a basic question: What, if anything, did all the chaos accomplish?

Those panels — at a conference this weekend at Seattle University — will be more focused on the future than the past. But, no dancing:

Fact: Economic elites were looking to the 1999 WTO Seattle ministerial to vastly expand the neoliberal agenda of removal of trade barriers, labor and environmental protections, and global financial regulation (a plank called the “Multilateral Agreement on Investments). Local poobahs like Pat Davis dreamed that the whole package would be known worldwide as the “Seattle Round.”

Fact: Those negotiations failed because African and other global South delegates walked out toward the end of the week, angered that the proposals represented another attempt by the global haves to steal from the have-nots, and, they said, inspired by the actions of the people on Seattle’s streets.

Fact: The global reputation of the WTO, and the facade that such organizations had any sort of broad public support, was shattered by the Seattle demonstrations, which in turn helped catalyze an already existing, vibrant opposition worldwide. The WTO never recovered. Throughout subsequent ministerials in Qatar, Cancun, and Hong Kong — three militarized islands beseiged by demonstrators — the WTO has become a ghost of its former self. The proposals brought to Seattle, and subsequent attempts to expand multilateral neoliberal instruments, have never been enacted.

Fact: If those Seattle proposals had been enacted, the past year’s global economic meltdown, triggered mostly by the unilateral deregulation of US (and to a lesser extent European) markets, would have been far, far, far worse — a global economic catastrophe that would have particularly hammered the world’s poor. As it was, because most global South markets weren’t deregulated as the “Seattle Round” would have had it, those economies were mostly spared the brunt of the meltdown (excepting a spike in food prices caused by commodities deregulation in the North).

[As a side note, in the wake of Seattle, popularly elected governments in Latin America have largely rejected the neoliberal “Washington consensus” in the last decade — South America now represents only one percent of IMF debt, whereas it was once the bulk of it.]

In other words, there’s a fairly straight line between what Connelly sneers at as “chaos” of Seattle in 1999 and the prevention of a global depression in 2009. That chaos helped save thousands, if not millions, of lives.

It’s not bad for a week’s work. But not for Joel:

Seattle voters did unseat Mayor Schell. But WTO organizing committee co-chair, Seattle Port Commissioner-for-life Pat Davis, was twice reelected before (mercifully) retiring this year….

But nothing has stopped or really slowed conditions that the protesters were protesting.

The United States has continued to bleed manufacturing jobs. Some of those jobs go over the border to Mexico, where unchecked pollution — heavy metals, PCBs, etc. –in the New River flows back over the border into California.

Human trafficking for child labor continues. Annual reports submitted by former Seattle Rep. John Miller, who became State Department ambassador under President Bush, are harrowing.
China, Indonesia and Brazil have demonstrated the ugly side of economic development.

China has doubled its emissions and recently passed the U.S. as the world’s greatest emitter of greenhouse gases. Indonesia and Brazil have risen to third and fourth place respectively. The two countries account for more than 60 percent of today’s world deforestation, clearing and burning tropical forests that are the earth’s lungs.

Well, shit, all that is true. And the Seattle protests didn’t cure cancer, either. Economic policy is only now, and only fitfully, catching up to the notion that unchecked corporate greed is not an inherent good, and in fact could kill us all (c.f. climate change).

But no protest organizers were planning, or even dreaming, of solving all those problems. The goal was to flag these policies, then (but not now) broadly supported by elected Democrats and Republicans alike, as contested terrain. The organizers actually accomplished far more – and far more than any other similar US protest I’m aware of in the last 40 years (at least). And in the wake of what we’ve seen in the last ten years, and especially the last year, it’s pretty hard any more to argue the basic point of the protesters, that radical deregulation was dangerous and wrong.

But since some teenagers were rowdy, and a few windows got broken (to be replaced three days later), and Seattle’s reputation as a World Class City ™ was besmirched, don’t expect any local civic or media leaders to give credit where rightfully due this week, just as they didn’t in 1999. They were wrong. We were right, and a lot of people (mostly in other countries) are alive today because we took to the streets in 1999.

Connelly has one thing right:

Someday, a band of moderates should march from Seattle Central Community College down to Westlake Mall, chanting as they go: “Hey, hey, Ho, ho, futile protest has to go.”

I don’t share Joel’s lifelong fetish for political “moderates” (whatever the hell that means), but I am really tired of futile protests. He just picked the worst possible example.

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