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The details have yet to be released, but the latest KING-5/Survey USA poll shows Democrat Dow Constantine surging to a 10 point lead over Republican Susan Hutchison in the race for King County Executive.

The poll, conducted over the weekend, shows Constantine leading 53-43; that’s a fifteen point swing from KING-5’s 10/13/09 poll, which showed Hutchison leading 47-42, and is consistent with other public and private polls I’ve seen over the past week and a half. Furthermore, with Constantine leading by 12 points amongst voters who had already cast their ballot, Hutchison would need to carry late voters by a better than 14-point margin in order to win.

What accounts for this stunning reversal of fortune?

Women give a 3-to-2 margin to Constantine over Hutchison. The last poll had the candidates split in that category.

Hutchison has an overwhelming edge among Republicans and conservatives in the non-partisan race, while Constantine leads overwhelmingly among Democrats and liberals.

As it should be.  As Democrats in general and women in particular learned more about the candidates, their positions, and their values, traditional Democratic voters came home to Constantine.

That in the end is the fatal flaw in the Rossi-esque tabula rasa strategy Hutchison pursued. Refusing to define yourself can only work if your opponent fails to define you for you.

Update: Here is a link to the current poll results.

I’m not much into the idea of publishing endorsements, because anybody who reads me regularly should already know where I stand on the races I cover, but I thought I’d make an exception to mention a race I haven’t written much about:  the Seattle City Council contest between Robert Rosencrantz and Mike O’Brien.

Vote for O’Brien.

In the end, it really comes down to values. O’Brien is a progressive Democrat and Rosencrantz isn’t. And while I don’t object to having a couple Republicans on the council to mix things up, it’s not like the council is currently a haven for radical lefties… and it won’t get any more so with the imminent election of Sally Bagshaw.

I’m just sayin’…

Ted Van Dyk makes my job as a snarky blogger so much easier.

Susan Hutchison, through her role as a board member of the conservative Stewardship Foundation, has helped steer nearly $600,000 to anti-choice groups over the past few years. But since she refuses to actually answer Yes or No to questions regarding reproductive choice, I guess that’s something voters don’t need to hear about.

(Most dishonest campaign ever.)

That’s what Susan Hutchison has been running… the most dishonest local campaign ever.  And to a large extent, the local media has been somewhat complicit.

Hutchison is a Republican, and Dow Constantine is a Democrat. That is obvious and indisputable. And yet when Hutchison denies her party identity she large goes unchallenged — this is a nonpartisan race, we’re told, so what does it matter? Meanwhile, when Constantine proudly claims his party identity, he’s abused by the likes of the Seattle Times editorial board.

The ironic thing is, despite all the grandstanding about this being a nonpartisan race, should Hutchison win, the Times and everybody else will trumpet this as a huge victory for Republicans and an even bigger defeat Democrats.

Like I said… the most dishonest campaign ever.

I think the Post Globe has been the best thing to rise out of the former P-I. And I generally like this piece on McGinn’s final town halls (incidentally, I’ve been making calls for McGinn, and the last time I did, we were pushing undecided voters to one of the town halls). Still, this piece of conventional wisdom repeating was a little disappointing.

Surprisingly, McGinn wasn’t asked about what Mallahan in particular has been describing as his flip flop over the viaduct.

Why are you surprised? First off, these are undecided voters. The people who are passionate about the tunnel one way or the other, who would ask that as their only question at a town hall (even in West Seattle) have made up their mind about the mayor’s race. They’ve got better things to do on a Saturday.

More important though, nobody outside of the political class thinks that the tunnel is the issue of the campaign. Sure it’s important, and it’s where one of the biggest distinctions can be drawn. But people are more concerned with, for example, crime and education than they are about a few miles of a state highway.

But of course, reporters who drive into Belltown from all across the region and leave before the crackheads come out probably put a higher emphasis on traffic on 99 than on crime in the city. And if they’re sending their children to Bellevue or Edmonds public schools, they probably don’t care as much about education as a parent worried about the quality of their neighborhood school. In fact, they’re more likely to laugh off McGinn’s education plans as unrealistic or someone else’s job.

Still, reporters, in these last few days of the campaign, please don’t be surprised that people care about more than just the tunnel. Don’t be surprised that Seattle voters care about rising crime, or that we care about the cultural institutions of the city, and dealing with the dropout problem. Please consider that whoever we support, we might care about parks and neighborhoods. Please also understand that we think transportation is more than just the Viaduct: that we want improved bike lanes, better mass transit, and a road system that works throughout the city.

Last week’s contest was a tough one, but it was eventually solved by wes.in.wa. It was the Greeley Independence Stampede Grounds in Greeley, Colorado.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!

This should satisfy a frightening need for an open thread….

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

KING-5/SurveyUSA have one last poll in the field regarding the county executive race, and this time they’re asking about party identity… whether we identify Susan Hutchison as a Democrat or a Republican, and whether party affiliation makes a difference in determining our choice.

It’ll be interesting to see the results.

Earlier this week, the New York Times unloaded some big news about Afghanistan:

KABUL, Afghanistan — Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.

The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.

I won’t excerpt the entire article here, but it’s an enlightening read. Karzai, of course, denies both the payments and his role in the drug trade. But while the payments are a revelation, it’s long been a not-so-well-kept secret that he profits from Afghanistan’s opium production. As I’ve mentioned before, when an industry accounts for over a 1/3 of nation’s GDP, the powerful are either part of that industry or they risk losing their power. This is the dilemma we continue to face in Afghanistan and it’s the reason why the Taliban has been resurgent.

In order to really understand the depths of this clusterfuck, it helps to go back to another piece in the NYT from last summer, by former State Department anti-narcotic official Thomas Schweich. Schweich’s piece was a masterpiece of utter delusion, which I’d initially discussed here. Even then, I only scratched the surface of how clueless this man was in describing his genuinely earnest efforts to rid Afghanistan of opium plants. Here he is discussing a 2006 meeting with Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice:

I emphasized at this and subsequent meetings that crop eradication, although claiming less than a third of the $500 million budgeted for Afghan counternarcotics, was the most controversial part of the program. But because no other crop came even close to the value of poppies, we needed the threat of eradication to force farmers to accept less-lucrative alternatives. (Eradication was an essential component of successful anti-poppy efforts in Guatemala, Southeast Asia and Pakistan.) The most effective method of eradication was the use of herbicides delivered by crop-dusters. But [President Hamid] Karzai had long opposed aerial eradication, saying it would be misunderstood as some sort of poison coming from the sky. He claimed to fear that aerial eradication would result in an uprising that would cause him to lose power. We found this argument perplexing because aerial eradication was used in rural areas of other poor countries without a significant popular backlash.

I’m not entirely sure how Schweich could’ve believed this considering that it was in December 2005 that a former coca grower named Evo Morales was elected president in Bolivia – the first country aerial eradication was ever conducted – as a backlash against America’s drug eradication efforts. And President Karzai, a man who’d already survived several assassination attempts, wasn’t about to do anything that would guarantee that he’d have even more guns fixed on him. Unfortunately there was already a push within the Bush Administration to give Schweich the green light on carrying out his drug warrior fantasies. Part of that push was to send former Colombian Ambassador Anne Patterson to Afghanistan:

Even before she got to the bureau of international narcotics, Anne Patterson knew that the Pentagon was hostile to the antidrug mission. A couple of weeks into the job, she got the story firsthand from Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, who commanded all U.S. forces in Afghanistan. He made it clear: drugs are bad, but his orders were that drugs were not a priority of the U.S. military in Afghanistan. Patterson explained to Eikenberry that, when she was ambassador to Colombia, she saw the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) finance their insurgency with profits from the cocaine trade, and she warned Eikenberry that the risk of a narco-insurgency in Afghanistan was very high. Eikenberry was familiar with the Colombian situation, but the Pentagon strategy was “sequencing” — defeat the Taliban, then have someone else clean up the drug business.

What Schweich fails to mention about Colombia (and Patterson pretends isn’t true) is that the overall amount of cocaine coming out of Colombia hadn’t changed much over Patterson’s time there. Instead, what happened was that pro-government right-wing paramilitaries just took over more of the trade as they were also gaining more influence within the Uribe government. The reason that FARC was losing out on drug profits was because the Colombian government was so utterly powerless to stop the corruption within the ranks of their own paramilitary supporters.

In Afghanistan, we’ve ended up with the same dynamic. Ahmed Wali Karzai’s paramilitary fights against the “narco-terrorists” in the Taliban for his brother’s government and NATO forces shrug off the fact that he’s just as involved in supplying the rest of the world with heroin. But as Schweich mentioned in his piece, the debates between Secretary of State Rice (who favored a stronger anti-drug push) and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld (who didn’t want to get more involved with anti-drug efforts) were being won by Rice (with Bush being “the decider”). And despite continued push back from the Defense Department, more and more emphasis throughout Bush’s second term was being placed on trying to eradicate the opium plants.

One of the more puzzling moves in our time in Afghanistan was our prosecution of Haji Bashar Noorzai. Noorzai was an ally in southern Afghanistan who’d turned against the Taliban, but was lured to America (he believed he was coming to volunteer his help for American forces) and arrested for being a drug trafficker. He’s now serving a life sentence in an American jail. Nothing about this case ever really made sense, until the New York Times report from this week, which ended with this bit of information:

Some American counternarcotics officials have said they believe that Mr. Karzai has expanded his influence over the drug trade, thanks in part to American efforts to single out other drug lords.

In debriefing notes from Drug Enforcement Administration interviews in 2006 of Afghan informants obtained by The New York Times, one key informant said that Ahmed Wali Karzai had benefited from the American operation that lured Hajji Bashir Noorzai, a major Afghan drug lord during the time that the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, to New York in 2005. Mr. Noorzai was convicted on drug and conspiracy charges in New York in 2008, and was sentenced to life in prison this year.

Habibullah Jan, a local military commander and later a member of Parliament from Kandahar, told the D.E.A. in 2006 that Mr. Karzai had teamed with Haji Juma Khan to take over a portion of the Noorzai drug business after Mr. Noorzai’s arrest.

Even with this knowledge, the rationale behind our arrest and prosecution of Noorzai still makes no sense from a strategic standpoint, but it demonstrates how much power Ahmed Wali Karzai has that he could get us to undermine our nation building efforts in order to expand his own illegal activities – all while still being paid by the CIA. Either he’s a criminal mastermind of epic proportions or the people who were making decisions about how to wage that war were morons (and yes, I know which one it is).

Going back to Schweich’s article again, there’s one passage that’s just infuriating beyond belief:

By late 2006, however, we had startling new information: despite some successes, poppy cultivation over all would grow by about 17 percent in 2007 and would be increasingly concentrated in the south of the country, where the insurgency was the strongest and the farmers were the wealthiest. The poorest farmers of Afghanistan — those who lived in the north, east and center of the country — were taking advantage of antidrug programs and turning away from poppy cultivation in large numbers. The south was going in the opposite direction, and the Taliban were now financing the insurgency there with drug money — just as Patterson predicted.

It’s called a self-fulfilling prophecy, dumbass. When you take the largest industry in the country and make it illegal, you end up with a well-financed insurgency. And as you try harder and harder to eliminate that industry, a higher percentage of the profits will end up being concentrated among the people most unwilling to submit to your authority. And if you do it for long enough, those insurgents will eventually start taking over parts of the country, which is why thanks to our attempts to eliminate the opium trade, the Taliban have once again recaptured large parts of Afghanistan and record numbers of coalition troops are being killed.

The New York Times article from this week tends to make the CIA look incompetent or even reckless, but the story is more complex than that. It’s probably because when I think of CIA agents, I get a mental image of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character in Charlie Wilson’s War, but I can easily see them getting angry to the point of punching a wall over having to deal with people like Schweich and Patterson, whose boundless naivete drove the mission in Afghanistan into a hole. When I write about Afghanistan and what’s still possible to accomplish there, it’s easy to approach it from far too theoretical a perspective, without taking into account the damage that’s already been done. I’m done doing that. We’ve managed to fuck things up so spectacularly that anything other than a rapid withdrawal is a mistake. We simply don’t understand what we’re doing well enough to justify keeping a single soldier in that country.

One of the things that irritates me most about Seattle Times editorial columnist Kate Riley is the way she writes so authoritatively about things she knows absolutely nothing about.  For example…

But Constantine really stepped outside the lines of propriety, not for nastiness, but for violating the copyright of a revered institution, the nonprofit TVW, Washington’s version of CSPAN — and for refusing to cut it out. TVW has asked that it be taken down, and Constantine’s lawyers have refused. Constantine’s spokesman Sandeep Kaushik told seattlepi.com that the use is justified.

Riley is just flat out wrong about the basic legal facts. Once again, in utilizing clips from TVW, neither the Constantine campaign nor myself have violated TVW’s copyright. We may have used their material without their permission, and contrary to their stated policy, but we were totally, 100-percent within our legal rights to do so under the Fair Use doctrine of U.S. copyright law.

Indeed, in all their public statements and interviews, not even TVW has gone so far as to claim that the Constantine campaign has violated its copyright. In fact, TVW President & CEO Greg Lane himself appears to acknowledge Constantine’s legal right, even while abusing him for daring to exercise it, complaining to Publicola, “They’re hiding behind a fair use legal argument and ignoring the greater public interest.”

Hear that Kate? Lane is accusing Constantine of “hiding behind” copyright law, not violating it.

Which raises an interesting aside. The courts have previously determined that copyright holders must make a good faith effort to consider the Fair Use doctrine before issuing DMCA takedown notices. Thus if Lane acknowledges Constantine’s usage is Fair Use, then, under the DMCA TVW has legally perjured itself in issuing a takedown notice to YouTube. (The same would be true of the takedown notices TVW issued to YouTube and Vimeo regarding my videos). Huh.

Riley insists that Constantine should pull the ad and apologize, but if you ask me, it is Constantine who deserves the apology from TVW, after Lane’s organization knowingly issued a bad faith takedown notice in its efforts to enforce a policy it has no legal right to enforce.

And in fact personally, if I had the money to hire attorneys, that’s exactly the argument I’d be making in court Monday morning.

As usual, I’ll be dressed up in my scary Tim Eyman costume, trick or treating with my daughter, and frightening the neighborhood kids, but if you don’t have plans and are looking for a fun and productive way to celebrate the holiday, I suggest you check out this year’s Trick or Treat canvassing party thrown by the Washington Bus:

This year, we’re partnering with the Approve Referendum 71 campaign and the No on 1033 campaign to present Trick or Vote in both Seattle and Spokane. For the Seattle event, Trick or Voters are meeting up at the Old Rainier Cold Storage in Georgetown (5840 Airport Way S) at 2:00 for a brief training before heading out to all corners of the city to talk to voters about turning in their ballots, voting yes on Referendum 71 and against Initiative 1033. In Spokane, attendees will gather at the Community Building Warehouse (17 W Main Avenue) before fanning out across town.

And of course, there’s an afterparty. It’s going down at Old Rainier Cold Storage, with free food, drink (for those of age), music by Selector Tang, and dancing by everyone. All free, all ages, all good.

Have fun!

And Go Phillies!