HorsesAss.Org

CNN:

Afghan opium kills 100,000 people every year worldwide — more than any other drug — and the opiate heroin kills five times as many people in NATO countries each year than the eight-year total of NATO troops killed in Afghan combat, the United Nations said Wednesday.

About 15 million people around the world use heroin, opium or morphine, fueling a $65 billion market for the drug and also fueling terrorism and insurgencies: The Taliban raised $450 million to $600 million over the past four years by “taxing” opium farmers and traffickers, Antonio Maria Costa, head of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, said in a report.

Not all the money is going into the pockets of rebels or drug dealers; some Afghan officials are making money off the trade as well, he said.

I’m amazed that it even needs to be pointed out that Afghan officials are making money off this trade. It accounts for somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of that nation’s GDP. Here in the US, the financial service and insurance industries account for less than 10% of our GDP, yet they’ve been able to use their financial clout to run our government for the past few decades.

In all of the discussions about what to do in Afghanistan, though, this topic hardly ever comes up. It’s central to how the Taliban have funded their resurgence, yet it’s treated as a sideshow – as if it were irrelevant to our ability to succeed there. It’s not. As long as the Taliban continues to profit from the trade, they will never be “defeated” by any Afghan government that is forced to treat the opium industry as a form of corruption that needs to be eradicated.

Thankfully, this CNN report was done by the excellent Christiane Amanpour, so there was actually a dissenting point of view to counter the “bury our heads in the sand and send in more troops” perspective:

The report offered little new in the way of possible solutions, said Ethan Nadelmann, founding executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, which promotes alternatives to the war on drugs.

“It’s very good at describing a problem,” he said. “But it truly is devoid of any kind of pragmatic solution, and it essentially suggests that the answer is to keep doing more of what’s failed us in the past.”

So long as there is a global demand for opium, there will be a supply, he said.

“If Afghanistan were suddenly wiped out as a producer of opium — by bad weather or a blight or eradication efforts — other parts of the world would simply emerge as new producers, “creating all sorts of new problems,” he said.

And Afghanistan itself would not be helped either, he said.

“You would see in Afghanistan millions of people probably flocking to the cities unable to make a living and probably turning more to the Taliban than they are now,” he said.

He listed three possible options. The first, global legalization and control, “is not happening, not any time soon,” he said.

The second option is to increase drug treatment for addicts who want it and to provide legal access to the drug, as Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, England, Spain and Canada have done, he said.

“In all of these places, there are small, growing programs of heroin maintenance that allow addicts to obtain pharmaceutical-grade heroin from legal sources rather than from the black market,” he said.

But Nadelmann added that more people died of opiate overdose last year involving pharmaceutical opiates than died from illegal heroin.

A third possibility, he said, would be to view Afghanistan as essentially a red-light zone of global opium production and to think about the solution as a vice-control challenge, “which means acknowledge that Afghanistan is going to continue to be the world’s supplier of illegal opium for the foreseeable future and then focus on manipulating and regulating the market participants, even though it is still illegal.”

He added, “That, I think, is in some respects the de facto strategy, even though it cannot be stated openly, for political reasons.”

Dick Cheney can complain all he wants about Obama dithering, but it was his boss and their administration who were dithering about this problem for seven whole years instead of addressing it head on. The Bush Administration was warned repeatedly that trying to aggressively eradicate the opium trade would backfire and hand the country back over to the Taliban (even the European Parliament urged them to consider licensing the production). He didn’t listen and that’s exactly what happened.

Despite the long and storied history of empires meeting their demise in Afghanistan, I don’t believe that a humiliating defeat there is guaranteed. But even the most sophisticated counter-insurgency effort will fail unless we start to understand how the opium industry functions, why it exists, and the pitfalls of trying to remove it as part of that effort. As Nadelmann pointed out, our current strategy is starting to look more like one of tolerating the production while manipulating the participants. In the end, if we seek out some sort of agreement with the Taliban, that’s essentially what it will be – a deal with those who now control the opium trade. It may look like a defeat to people who’ve been conditioned to equate drug traffickers with terrorists, but it was the war itself that joined those two forces. When the Taliban were in power, they were also trying to eradicate the opium harvests. Making a deal with those who control the opium trade in order to isolate those whose main interest is fighting America is how we win there.

The difference between FAUX and the News explained:

(This and forty more media clips from the past week in politics can be found at Hominid Views.)

Susan Hutchison has made much hay in recent days about an email from County Councilmember Reagan Dunn that allegedly shows he was concerned that he would lose funding for projects within his district if he didn’t vote for a ferry district tax sponsored by Dow Constantine.

In his Nov. 5, 2007 e-mail to County Council attorney Jim Brewer, Dunn asks if “vote-trading” is legal in Washington, and asks whether council members can legally “remove projects located in one Councilmember’s district when that Councilmember refuses to vote in favor of tax increases.”

Dunn said today he was worried that senior centers and other programs in his district would lose funding if he voted against the tax to fund passenger-only ferries.

At first I just wrote off Dunn’s alleged concerns to woosy naivete, or perhaps naive woosiness. I mean, horse trading in politics? Heaven forfend!

But as it turns out, Dunn is just a shameless hypocrite, as evidenced by how proud he is over his councilmanic arm-twisting to restore funding to the King County Fair in Enumclaw:

King County Councilman Reagan Dunn is pushing the issue in Seattle, urging his fellow council members to include at least $318,000 in the 2010 budget to make the fair a reality.  … Dunn said he’s working on the rest of the county council, calling in favors when necessary.

“This is budget politics at its best,” he said, referring to the give-and-take that occurs when nine elected officials must come together to pass a working budget.

So let’s see… when Republican Dunn twists arms and calls in favors to save projects in his own district, that’s “budget politics at its best,” but when Democrat Constantine allegedly does the same, well, that’s a clear sign of corruption.

Uh-huh.

To absolutely nobody’s surprise, PDC complaints have started flying in the race for mayor of America’s Vancouver. It’s standard operating procedure for conservatives in Clark County to throw bogus charges right about this time in a campaign, you can practically set your clock by it.

And lo and behold, challenger Tim Leavitt’s campaign is making accusations but not actually filing formal complaints, according to the Columbian. Way to have the courage of your campaign handlers, Timmy. Just like he’s against tolls on a new bridge unless he’s for them, Leavitt is being wronged but he isn’t actually filing a complaint, he’s just complaining.

A friend has started calling this “the Don Benton playbook,” and that’s about right. Equal parts pugnaciousness and victimhood, with a soupçon of “free market,” government-is-a-business seasoning, the playbook demands accusing one’s opponent of all sorts of unseemly associations and intentions during the crucial ballot marking period, counting on the local newspaper to deliver the accusations in such a way the opposition cannot respond quickly. And what better way to do that than by using an agency that conservatives don’t even believe should exist?

Fortunately incumbent Royce Pollard’s campaign seems ready to fight back, most likely because Pollard isn’t running for the state Senate as a Democrat, he’s running for the non-partisan mayoral spot again, thus freeing him to anticipate entirely predictable moves that conservatives have made in campaigns around here since the last century.

Next up from the Leavitt-Benton playbook: more conserva-whining. Without their victim status, conservatives are nothing.

Susan Hutchison continues to deny that she’s ever given money to the far-right-wing BIAW, even though PDC records show she’s given $1000.00 to BIAW’s ChangePAC. I guess in Hutchison’s mind, ChangePAC isn’t BIAW because BIAW isn’t mentioned anywhere in the name.

Likewise, I guess, by this same dishonest standard then, BIAW isn’t funding robocalls in support of Hutchison’s campaign for King County executive:

[audio:http://horsesass.org/wp-content/uploads/msg0029.mp3]

Yes, that message is paid for by the Affordable Housing Council, which sounds like an advocacy group with a positive enough agenda, until you learn that it’s really just a PAC for, you guessed it… BIAW.

So see… Hutchison has not given money to BIAW, and BIAW is not spending money in support of Hutchison… you know, per se. And if you believe that, I’ve got a deep bore tunnel to sell you.

UPDATE:
As Steve Zemke reports in the comment thread, this is just one of at least two different robocalls BIAW is busy tying up the lines with this week:

I got another call on Wednesday with a different message that she has been endorsed by Rob McKenna and Wes Uhlman also paid for by the “Affordable Housing Council”. I also received the one you have yesterday.

Also, I’m hearing that the calls are going out countywide, both Eastside and within Seattle.

I’ve got a longer fisking in the works, but I just needed to pause for a moment to call out Susan Hutchison for a particularly infuriating piece of hypocrisy that local righties always seem to get away with:

Paula Hammond, the state transportation secretary and Sound Transit board member, said “I was surprised it (the 520 proposal) came up. I don’t understand it.”

“The voters have decided. It makes it a bit moot.”

Hutchison believes voters were really just approving a general endorsement of extending rail to the Eastside rather than of a specific route.

Get that? According to Hutchison, voters didn’t really know what they were voting on last November when Sound Transit put forth very detailed plans for Eastside rail expansion, so as county executive it would be her prerogative to change the plans as she saw fit.

Now to be fair, I happen to agree that voters often don’t fully understand the ballot measures on which they’re asked to vote, and that many, many such issues would be better decided through a deliberative legislative process rather than a thumbs up or down at the polls. But at least I’m consistent in my cynicism towards so-called direct democracy.

But not so our political and media establishment which almost uniformly stands up for the inviolability of tax-cutting, government-restricting ballot measures like those peddled by Tim Eyman, yet seems almost eager to second guess voters when it comes to their support for actually spending money and other policy priorities.

Car tab slashing initiative I-695? Well yeah, it was unconstitutional, but we better implement it via legislation anyway because that’s what the voters say they want, whatever the consequences. But the teacher pay and class size initiatives? Oh those silly voters… they were so irresponsible in not specifying a revenue source, so we’re pretty much free to suspend those whenever budgets get tight.

The renewable energy initiative overwhelmingly approved at the polls? Voters didn’t really understand the specifics and the consequences we were told, so legislators felt free to try to loosen the terms last session. But I-747’s arbitrary and unreasonable one-percent cap on revenue growth from regular levies? Again, unconstitutional measure, but we better call a special session to reimpose it because, damn, it was the will of the people you know.

Voters reject a baseball stadium, we get a baseball stadium. Voters reject replacing the Viaduct with a tunnel, and local and state leaders get together and compromise on, you guessed it, a tunnel. And hell, then there’s the Monorail. Boondoggle or no, it took five separate ballot measures before voters finally rejected the Monorail, but only that last vote was somehow considered definitive. Yet even dare to question the tax and revenue limits already in place, and an elected official is virtually guaranteed a scathing attack from our state’s opinion leaders, not to mention the usual, bullshitty, angry email-cum-fundraising-scam from our friend Timmy.

Huh?

I mean, if Dow Constantine were to imply voters didn’t understand what they were voting on in approving I-747 (which by the way, failed in King County), just imagine how he would be castigated by Eyman and the Seattle Times ed board for his arrogance. Yet Hutchison implies the same about last year’s excruciatingly deliberated, negotiated, debated and hard fought Sound Transit Phase II expansion — a measure that passed in King County with an extraordinary 63% of the vote — and nobody bats an eyebrow.

What a bunch of fucking hypocrites.

Well you can’t have it both ways. Either a vote of the people is carved in stone by the invisible hand of God, or it isn’t. And since after two years our state constitution gives initiatives the same standing as any other law, I’d say it is clearly the latter.

But either way, popular ballot measures like last year’s Prop 1 simply shouldn’t be abrogated via executive fiat, and any suggestion to the contrary should be roundly greeted with ridicule. It is Hutchison, not the voters, who clearly hasn’t been paying attention when it comes to regional transportation planning, and she desperately needs to be called on the table for her ignorance, if not her arrogance.

Dick Cheney giving advice on how to have an effective foreign policy is like Kayne West giving advice on proper etiquette at awards ceremonies.

Ted Van Dyk is voting for Susan Hutchison, not because she’s qualified to run anything more complicated than Charles Simonyi’s social calendar, but because Van Dyk thinks Dow Constantine is too partisan:

Democrats enjoy a huge registration edge in the county. Constantine, therefore, has based much of his campaign on his long partisan affiliation, in contrast to former TV anchorwoman Susan Hutchison’s uncertain affiliation. (Hutchison says she is a genuine independent who has voted for both Democrats and Republicans and who is endorsed by both Democrats and Republicans). More recently, Constantine’s allies have attacked Hutchison on the basis that she might not be pro-choice.

As the general-election campaign has proceeded, Constantine has diminished himself with his low-politics tactics. (Neither partisan leaning, in a nonpartisan office, nor presumed position on a social issue has anything to do with the duties of the King County executive).

Uh-huh.

But then, I guess such an attitude shouldn’t be surprising, coming from a man who clearly pines for the high-minded bipartisanship of a long lost era, when even a Democratic stalwart like Van Dyk could be counted upon to deliver suitcases full of $100 bills to President Richard Nixon’s private attorney.

[…]

Now that’s what I call bipartisan cooperation.

According to transcripts from the Watergate hearings (yes, the Watergate hearings… Van Dyk’s name comes up surprisingly often in the transcripts), the amount of money funneled to the Nixon administration from this milk industry co-op was closer to $900,000, not the $100,000 originally reported in the New York Times, but who am I to quibble? The point is, according to Van Dyk (who later served as a milk industry lobbyist), bipartisanship is a good thing that always leads to better and less corrupt government than that nasty partisan stuff Constantine practices.

I’m just sayin’….

Down here in Vancouver the hotly contested race for mayor is providing the lamest example of conservative victimology I’ve ever seen during a campaign, and that’s quite a low bar to crawl under. If you’ll recall, long-time incumbent Royce Pollard is squaring off against sitting council member and mayoral candidate Tim Leavitt in the race.

Today Leavitt is complaining that people are canvassing (!) and that someone out on the east side, um, didn’t feel comfortable about it. A Columbian article details the non-staggering revelations, including this hilarious tidbit:

Another call came last weekend from a resident of the Fircrest neighborhood, who called to complain of what his wife described as odd behavior by a door-beller.

The wife, who declined to give her name, told The Columbian that the man asked her whether she was a Leavitt supporter. She said yes. “He asked if we’d voted, if we’d gotten our ballots. I said yes. He asked if I’d filled them out and if we needed help filling out the ballots. I said, ‘I think we can handle it.'”

She said the man was not aggressive, but she felt uncomfortable as the conversation continued. “I know enough to know you can call a campaign office and ask for assistance, but people don’t go door to door and offer to fill out your ballot.”

Please excuse me for a moment, I’ve been on the fainting couch for a while now, this kind of outrageous canvassing caused me to reach for the smelling salts.

Notice that the person making the claim won’t even put their name in the local newspaper, which tells you all you need to know.

Lots of people get uncomfortable about people knocking on doors in their neighborhood, often because they are selling cleaning sprays, conservative ideology or some other scam.

What’s even more interesting is that the big money for canvassing appears to be in the form of a third-party expenditure on behalf of Leavitt. According to PDC documents provided by the Pollard campaign, the labor union Unite Here, Local 9, is spending $30,000 on behalf of Leavitt for canvassing and printing expenses. So you kind of wonder why the Leavitt campaign is trying to stir the shit about canvassing, other than as a cover for their “union thugs.” (Snark alert!) That way if any of their people get out of line, they’ve issued a preemptive justification for all the petty sign destruction and other baloney that accompanies campaigns.

And let’s face it, in all campaigns people get all worked up and accuse the other side of stuff, and conservatives seem to do it in rote fashion as standard operating procedure. From national tickets down to the most modest races, conservative are never accountable for their own actions, they’re being wronged by the wrong kind of people! It’s always someone or something–the media, the gays, the black people, the unions, the terrorists, the environmentalists, the people ringing doorbells, whatever. You kind of wonder what happens when a conservative needs car repairs, because it must be exhausting trying to figure out which group to blame for that bad muffler.

It’s all so utterly predictable. This may be a non-partisan race, but Leavitt is running the classic GOP Clark County campaign perfected by folks like Sen. Don Benton, R-Vancouver. They try to stir up the conservative base through resentment and claims of being wronged, while campaigning as hard as anyone else. Frankly I’m expecting a ginned-up PDC complaint from the Leavitt camp any day now, it’s what Benton always does. It usually drops on a Friday, so that by the time a reporter can reach someone at the PDC, nobody cares and the public sees a headline about some supposedly nefarious action which is promptly forgotten when the election is over.

If people wonder why regular folks get disgusted by politics, it’s partly because of the stupid antics. It’s too bad Leavitt has thrown in with the local BIAW types and will apparently do or say anything to get elected, but then, that’s how the BIAW rolls. For strictly ideological reasons, the people who build houses apparently don’t want a new bridge that would make their customers’ lives better.

At least Pollard is a stand-up individual, even if one doesn’t agree with him on every last thing. It’s fascinating to watch a moderately pro-business mayor be exposed to the same tactics Democrats have to put up with on a routine basis.

I’m in a Machiavellian mood today, so as long as I’m giving free advice to Democrats and Democratic constituency groups, I thought I’d offer my own prescription for countering the BIAW and the millions of dollars of workers compensation money they spend each year on right-wing candidates and causes. (You know, like the big bucks they’re investing in Susan Hutchison’s campaign.)

Put Retro reform on the ballot.

Understand, I’m not saying you need to actually pass Retro reform, just put it on the ballot — year after year after year after year — thus forcing BIAW to spend their kitty defending their cash cow.

Preferably, the Democrats in the legislature would have the balls to muster enough votes to put a Retro reform measure before voters, because that essentially costs our side nothing. But for about half a million dollars or so, and a little bit of union organizing, it could easily be done by initiative.

The money it skims from Retro comprises the bulk of the money BIAW spends on political campaigns, thus any year in which BIAW is forced to defend its livelihood is another year in which it is taken out of the game. And following the Eyman model, our side doesn’t have to spend anything pushing the measure. If it fails, we just run it again. If it passes, bye-bye BIAW.

Or, of course, Democrats and their progressive constituency groups can continue doing what we’ve been doing for years, spending millions of dollars annually on the defensive, exhausting our resources fighting right-wing measures in lieu of pushing forward our own agenda.

Doesn’t seem like a very tough choice to me.

Apparently, negotiations have been hot and heavy over a Boeing demand that the Machinists union agree to a no-strike clause, or risk the company moving 787 assembly to South Carolina. But…

… less than a week ahead of a Boeing board meeting to discuss the choice, the labor talks are deadlocked and hindered by distrust on each side, according to a high-level person close to the negotiations.

Really? The Machinists distrust Boeing? Could it have anything to do with the company’s demand that the union give up the only real collective bargaining lever it has?

Anyway, given the tone and tension of the negotiations, here’s my carefully considered recommendation for how to settle this seemingly intractable dispute. The Machinists union should agree to Boeing’s ridiculous demand for a no-strike clause. And then, if as feared, Boeing refuses to negotiate the subsequent contract in good faith, they should strike anyway.

Some might argue that such an approach would be dishonest and disrespectful, but, well, Boeing set the tone for these negotiations, so why should the Machinists treat the company with any more sincerity than the company has treated them?

And besides, this way everybody wins. Boeing executives get to save face and claim victory in beating down the unions, all the while keeping production where economically it makes most sense… the Machinists get to keep their jobs while giving up nothing substantive in return… and in the end, nothing really changes but the bragging rights.

I’d make a helluva diplomat, wouldn’t I?

Susan Hutchison says she supports light rail… but not the one we’re building out to the Eastside, and certainly not the light rail approved by 62 percent of King County voters last November.

In supporting Kemper Freeman’s lawsuit to block Sound Transit’s access to I-90, and in arguing against crossing I-90 but for choosing a 520 route instead, Hutchison is clearly stating her intent to obstruct ST’s efforts to build the line approved by voters. And with the county Executive appointing 10 of the 17 seats on ST’s board, don’t think she can’t do it.

Now I know there are many folks who would prefer a 520 alignment (for example, Darryl commutes from Redmond to the UW, so it would work out great for him), but if wishes were horses beggars would ride and all that… and they certainly wouldn’t be riding the train. I myself would have preferred a South Seattle alignment that went down Rainier AVE, and included a stop at S. Graham ST, but, well, you know, screw me.

The point is, as the transit wonks at Seattle Transit Blog explain in their usual wonky detail, the cross-lake issue has already been studied, debated and deliberated ad infinitum, and no amount of wanting or wishing would make the 520 alignment any more feasible. It would be more expensive, would take longer to build, and would generate less ridership and revenue than the I-90 route. And, the University Link tunnel simply wouldn’t have the capacity to handle all the extra north-south traffic.

But most importantly, moving light rail to a new 520 bridge span would put off construction by years, dramatically raising costs, and potentially killing the project altogether. A project, by the way, that voters overwhelmingly approved, knowing it would cross I-90.

After Sound Transit’s initial birth pains, its early mismanagement and poor projections, the Central Link line nearly died on the drawing board too. And it would have, if not for the willingness of elected officials like Ron Sims, Greg Nickels, Larry Phillips and yes, Dow Constantine to stick their necks out and spend political capital in defense of what many others at the time had already written off as a doomed vision.

Leadership matters, and in speaking out against the I-90 alignment while endorsing the Washington Policy Center’s anti-transit prescriptions and embracing the patronage of racist, anti-light-rail xenophobe Kemper Freeman, Hutchison has clearly signaled her intent to lead the effort in undermining ST’s voter-approved Eastside expansion.

So if you supported last year’s transit measure, and support building rail to the Eastside, vote for Constantine. Otherwise, a vote for Hutchison is clearly a vote to kill East Link, whether she’s willing to come out and say it or not.