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Just got in, only heard snippets of President Barack Obama’s speech on health care. What I heard sounded good. Cesspool?

Yesterday marked the six month anniversary of our state’s Death With Dignity Act. Compassion & Choices of Washington, a group that works to make sure the law works for both patients and doctors, announced that 16 Washington residents have passed away since taking advantage of the new law, 11 of whom actually used the prescription to control the time and manner of their passing. None of these events are cause for celebration, but merely a recognition that the terminally ill in this state have more choices than the residents of 48 other states, and that’s something that we should be proud of here.

Claudia Rowe covered the milestone nicely for the PI, but as she points out, opponents of the new law still aren’t doing a very good job of dealing with reality:

But no number of physician-assisted deaths — however small it may be — is small enough for opponents of the law. Eileen Geller, a hospice nurse and spokeswoman for True Compassion Advocates, believes that merely discussing the issue implies that hastening death is a valid option for the sick and vulnerable.

“It’s not just the few who have used this, but all the other Washingtonians who are receiving the message that they should die prematurely and unnaturally,” Geller said. “I’ve received calls from people who are worried and wondering, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t receive treatment. Maybe I should give up.'”

I have a very simple suggestion for Geller. Tell these people the truth. Tell them that giving people choices is in no way forcing them into a particular choice. Tell them that the law is not meant in any way to encourage people to die prematurely and unnaturally. Tell them that the law is meant for people who have very strong feelings about being able to control the time and place of their passing.

What’s most frustrating about this is that the reason that Washingtonians are “receiving the message that they should die prematurely and unnaturally” is not because of the law, but because people like Eileen Geller spent much of last year misleading people into thinking that that’s what the law was meant to do. It’s as if we pass health care reform this year, and then next year Sarah Palin finds that people keep telling her they’re worried about imaginary “Death Panels” and blames that phenomenon on Obama.

It’s one thing to be – like Palin – dishonest for the sake of your political prospects and potential income streams. It’s another thing altogether to be dishonest out of pure paranoia. If there are large numbers of people in this state having sleepless nights about the Death With Dignity law, it’s not the fault of the law. It’s the fault of those like Geller who act as if they’ll break out into hives if they simply tell the truth about what this law does and doesn’t do.

Another family values conservative gets caught “hiking the Appalachian trail”…and without his boots (ick!):

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n50ZiCFhIyg[/youtube]

As reported yesterday on Publicola, Susan Hutchison has substantially trailed Dow Constantine in the all important money race since the August primary. But Constantine supporters should not grow complacent, nor Hutchison fans too discouraged, because as I reported several weeks back, GOP stalwart John Stanton had been quietly promising to wage a million dollar “independent” expenditure campaign on Hutchison’s behalf.

Hutchison’s inability to keep up with her earlier fundraising pace stems mostly from the fact that the bulk of her money came in the form of double-max donations; she simply can’t legally tap much of her ultra-wealthy base a second time. But there’s no limit to how much one can give to “independent” expenditure campaigns, and that’s the beauty of Stanton’s alleged efforts.

We’ll have no idea how much Stanton and his Republican cohorts really raise until the money is spent, but considering what’s at stake in this race, especially for powerful developers seeking to crawl out from underneath our growth management statutes, a million dollars seems like a small price to pay.

At Crosscut, Bob Simmons eloquently points out a simple historical truth with a contemporary meaning: private enterprise failed to provide electrical service to much of rural America, and it took the REA under Franklin D. Roosevelt (and Truman) to get it done. And the right wingers of the day called FDR a communist and everything else under the sun.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, where we’re even more indebted to government action for the creation of cheap, reliable electrical power, you kind of wonder if the morons proclaiming that they “don’t need the government for anything except defense and law enforcement” are going to stop using their computers, microwaves and flat screens, or if many of them are even aware of the BPA. I suppose the magic market fairy just fires up the PS3 for them.

The ridiculous hysteria of August should cause sensible people to reflect on what the proper role of government is in a democracy that adheres to a well-regulated capitalist system. This is a legitimate area for debate.

The essential position of progressives, as I understand it, is that if you don’t have a referee in key sectors the cheaters will prosper. This has been proven countless times in our history, from the railroads and oil companies of yore to Enron and the housing bubble in our own time. From time to time government action has been required to preserve capitalism, not destroy it. Notice nobody wants to centrally plan production of toilet paper or iPods, we’re only talking about essential services, health care being rather essential at times to not being dead.

One can argue for or against regulation in a given sector, and how little or what type of regulation will work best, but the far right has simply decided to hurl whatever insults it can muster instead, and is being egged on by corporate America acting in lockstep with the GOP. These are the folks who supposedly hate class warfare, but ruthlessly wage it against the most vulnerable Americans in order to harvest vast profits from the sick, the working poor and anyone else that gets sucked into the monstrosity known as health insurance.

We’re still waiting on that GOP plan to fix health insurance, and my bet is they’ll never produce one. The GOP and the insurance industry are essentially one and the same thing, and just because there are also a lot of Democrats who display similar whorishness does not excuse any of it.

The health insurance companies have become the new Enrons, and they must be refereed. Obama must indeed welcome their hatred, just as FDR did, or nothing much will be accomplished.

We’ve been experiencing technical difficulties this morning, which may result in scattered down periods throughout the day.  Please be patient.

In the comments from Sunday morning’s post, commenter Roger Rabbit posted a link to another tragic drug war story that I haven’t covered here. It comes out of Kansas, where in late 2007 a pain doctor named Stephen Schneider and his wife Linda (a nurse) were rung up on a 34-count indictment related to prescribing more pain medication than the DEA allows. As Harvey Silverglate explains, this is an all-too-common occurrence:

When pain doctors administer too much of a controlled substance, or do so knowing that they will be diverted to narcotic addicts, they are deemed no longer engaged in the legitimate practice of medicine. But the dividing line is far from clear and not subject to universal agreement even within the profession. Any patient in need of relief can, over time, develop a chemical dependence on a lawful drug–much like a diabetic becomes dependent on insulin. And, once a treatment regimen begins, many patients’ tolerance to the drug increases. Thus, to produce the same analgesic effect, doctors sometimes need to increase the prescribed amount, and that amount varies from person to person.

It is notoriously difficult even for trained physicians to distinguish an addict’s abuse from a patient’s dependence. Nonetheless, federal narcotics officers have increasingly terrorized physicians, wielding the criminal law and harsh prison terms to punish perceived violators. Since 2003, over 400 doctors have been criminally prosecuted by the federal government, according to the DEA. One result is that chronic pain patients in this country are routinely under-medicated.

One notorious case along these lines was the prosecution of Richard Paey, a wheelchair-bound attorney in Florida who was originally given a 25-year prison sentence for forging prescriptions (he was pardoned by Governor Crist in 2007). Prosecutors tried to paint him as a drug dealer, but could never prove that he sold any of the drugs he obtained. Ironically, in prison, he was finally given the amount of pain medication he’d been trying to obtain for himself all that time.

Another person affected by this crusade against pain doctors is Siobhan Reynolds, whose husband died after spending years trying to find a doctor willing to treat his pain. Reynolds founded the Pain Relief Network in 2003. She’s been heavily involved in trying to raise awareness of the prosecution of Dr. Schneider, and because of that she found herself a target of the Kansas prosecutors as well. Silverglate writes:

When Reynolds wrote op-eds in local newspapers and granted interviews to other media outlets, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tanya Treadway attempted to impose a gag order on her public advocacy. The district judge correctly denied this extraordinary request.

Undeterred, Treadway filed on March 27 a subpoena demanding a broad range of documents and records, obviously hoping to deter the peripatetic pain relief advocate, or even target her for a criminal trial of her own. Just what was Reynolds’ suspected criminal activity?

“Obstruction of justice” is the subpoena’s listed offense being investigated, but some of the requested records could, in no possible way, prove such a crime. The prosecutor has demanded copies of an ominous-sounding “movie,” which, in reality, is a PRN-produced documentary showing the plight of pain physicians. Also requested were records relating to a billboard Reynolds paid to have erected over a busy Wichita highway. It read: “Dr. Schneider never killed anyone.” Suddenly, a rather ordinary exercise in free speech and political activism became evidence of an obstruction of justice.

Last Friday, after Silverglate’s editorial was printed, the judge in the case fined Reynolds for refusing to turn over the documents. She plans to appeal the ruling.

A few weeks back, I posted about my skepticism of what’s been happening with the investigation of Michael Jackson’s death and the attempts to charge his doctor with manslaughter. Cases like the one in Kansas are what formed my initial reaction to that news. The circumstances of the Michael Jackson case are quite different and bizarrely unique, but they also boil down to a prosecutor deciding that a doctor has done something so improper that it’s not only bad medical practice, but is actually a criminal act. And as this case out of Kansas has shown, it’s often the prosecutors who are a greater threat to the general public.

Please join us tonight for some politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. The festivities take place at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning at 8:00 pm.

And if you can’t make it tonight, please stay in school, work hard for your goals, and listen to your parents. (I hope nobody’s offended.)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSNQpEbtlP4[/youtube]

Not in Seattle? The Drinking Liberally web site has dates and times for 336 other chapters of Drinking Liberally for you to shoot for.

In scolding Kent teachers to get back to work, the always anti-union Seattle Times argues that “Defying court order teaches the wrong lesson.” Uh-huh. Really?

Putting aside the issues of this particular strike (I haven’t paid them much attention, and don’t plan to), teachers, like nearly all workers, have a moral right to strike, even if in Washington state they may not have that legal right, and standing up for one’s rights, even in defiance of the courts, is never the wrong lesson to teach our children, especially in a nation like ours with such a strong authoritarian streak to its national character… a character quickly revealed in the first couple comments in the Times’ comment thread:

davidfelder
anderson island, WA
Why should any Kent student EVER believe another thing his/her teacher tells them?  A teacher willing to disobey a lawful order is a teacher who has no right to expect his/her students to follow the teacher’s rules. A national disgrace.

onein81
moses lake, WA
great first message. mine it to fire every single one of them. take the union leadership and lock them away in jail. am i being to hard. no. back in 1981 Patco members and union leadership were hauled off to jail in handcuffs and chains. fire each and every single one of them.

Whatever the Times editors thought they were saying, surely they must have understood that this is the kind of sentiment their headline would inspire. And while no doubt Times publisher Frank Blethen would be cheered at the thought of union members being hauled away in handcuffs, America in fact has a proud history of civil disobedience… a history lesson conveniently ignored by those who would use the power of the state to trample the rights of others.

The headline in the Seattle Times sounds awfully hopeful, “Wash. lawmakers take next step toward ed reform.” So what exactly is that next step?

They haven’t found a single new dollar to pay for their ideas, but state lawmakers and education officials are pushing ahead with plans to start implementing education reform.

A new education reform committee recently held its first meeting. It is chaired by the superintendent of public instruction and counts among its members the speaker of the House and the chair of the Senate Education Committee, so the political will to move on is there.

No money to pay for their ideas, or any idea how to raise the money, but at least they started a new committee.  Can’t get much bolder than that.

But some of the faces around the table have sat at similar meetings, battling similar issues for years.

Oh. That’s not an encouraging sign.

First came the governor’s Washington Learns task force that published an ambitious plan to improve education in 2006. That report led to the state’s new Early Learning Department, but the Legislature could not find the money to implement most of the other ideas.

There’s that pesky money problem again.

Then came the reinvented State Board of Education, which moved ahead on some related ideas, including new high school math requirements and a proposal to require high school students to earn 24 credits instead of 19 to graduate.

Next, the Basic Education Finance Task Force, wrote a road map last summer for completely changing the way the state distributes its education dollars. The task force’s ambitious plans would cost an estimated $3 billion to $4 billion a year, on top of the $7 billion a year the state already spends on education.

And the money…?

The 2009 Legislature adopted some of the task force’s ideas and put a new group, the Quality Education Council, in charge of implementing the plan, but with a new twist. This time, the task force is also in charge of finding the money to pay for the changes.

Rep. Skip Priest, R-Federal Way, has sat around many education reform tables, including Washington Learns and the Basic Education Finance Task Force.

“I think it’s time we have a sense of urgency about this issue,” Priest said after the Quality Education Council held its first meeting at the end of August.

No shit, Sherlock.

Honestly, there is no substantive education reform without the money to pay for it, and all the committees and commissions in the world won’t change that. So in a state facing its deepest fiscal crisis perhaps ever, and a long term  structural revenue deficit as far as the eye can see, the real “next step” to education reform in Washington state is an honest debate about tax restructuring, and unless Republicans like Skip Priest are willing to push for that debate, they really aren’t approaching education reform with any sense of urgency at all.

I’m just sayin’.

In the spirit of this post at EffU, I’d like to see who can come up with the funniest set of hypocritical statements from a wingnut blogger when it comes to the “George Bush is our President and we should respect him and everyone should shut up” and “Barack Obama should not be telling our schoolchildren to work hard” brain malfunction.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofxVMlU97yA[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yUMQR_Bo7s[/youtube]

In Part II of my “Talkin’ with Teabaggers” adventure, I chat with an elderly gentleman protesting last Thursday’s pro-healthcare reform rally (you know, the one that never happened).  No snarky subtitles or silly inserts this time, just a few minutes of unedited conversation about healthcare, and why us whippersnappers don’t need or deserve it.

In what has become an ironic cliche that typifies the inanity of the current healthcare reform debate, this eighty-ish-year-old man may be opposed to government run health insurance, but he sure does love him some Medicare. When asked if he’s happy with Medicare he says “yes.” When asked if he’d want it taken away, he says “no.” When asked if the government has done an “okay job” running Medicare, he says “As far as I’m concerned, it’s been okay with us.”

In fact, his high degree of satisfaction with his government-run Medicare seems to form the basis for his opposition to any plan that might include a government-run public option for the rest of us. “Why mess it up for old people?” he asked me.

Good question. Perhaps we should give up on this “public option” thing and just allow everybody to buy into Medicare, regardless of age? I know he thinks young folks don’t need it (hell, he didn’t have health insurance until he was 40, so why should anybody else?) but if that’s true then they’d sure be cheap to insure. Meanwhile, they’d still be subsidizing his Medicare coverage through their payroll taxes, just like they’re doing now, so how could that possibly mess anything up for him?

Yeah, sure… under that scenario, Medicare would be the public option. But shhhh, don’t call it that, and we might get his support.

I mostly have a reputation as a foul-mouthed, partisan muckraker and agitator, and with a brand name like HorsesAss.org, why shouldn’t I? But I think it of interest to note that in the wake of Friday’s WTO ruling that EU nations illegally subsidized Boeing rival Airbus, I actually took the time to interview a US congressman, and write a thoughtful, objective analysis of the decision, whereas the Seattle Times—our region’s paper of record—relied solely on reporting and analysis from the Associated Press and Bloomberg News.

A ruling in a controversial international trade dispute that directly impacts one of our region’s most important employers, and the Times couldn’t even be bothered to assign a reporter to cover the story and attempt to get a richer local angle. Kinda pathetic.

Now, I don’t mean to pat myself on the back. It was Rep. Jay Inslee’s staff who deserves the credit for reaching out to me and offering a few minutes with the congressman—an opportunity I jumped at—but if Inslee was making himself available to foul-mouthed bloggers like me, you can be sure he was making himself available to the Seattle Times. In fact, I can’t help but wonder if Inslee only had the time to talk with me because most of the rest of our local media simply weren’t interested in putting the effort into such an admittedly wonky story?

Perhaps I was too harsh in implying some sort of bias in our local media’s refusal to cover last week’s pro-healthcare reform rally? Maybe our local media is just lazy?

In defending his efforts to achieve a local monopoly, Times publisher Frank Blethen long promised that freed from the financial drain of the JOA, his newspaper would emerge stronger and more vibrant, but most observers would agree that the Times’ local coverage has continued to shrink since the P-I ceased print publication. Here’s hoping that once this economy turns around, Blethen actually attempts to fulfill his civic promise.

Then.

Capitalizing on his war record, McCarthy narrowly defeated the overconfident Senator Robert La Follette in the 1946 Republican senatorial primary and assailed his Democratic opponent, Howard McMurray, as a man so desperate for election that he would accept communist support. The baseless charge worked. McCarthy trounced McMurray and, in 1947, became the junior U.S. senator from Wisconsin. He quickly alienated his colleagues (especially after he tried to court the German-American vote by criticizing the prosecution of Nazis accused of slaughtering American troops during the Battle of the Bulge) and he soon feared that he could not be re-elected without a major issue to improve his political standing. Consequently, on February 7, 1950, he told a group of Republican women assembled in Wheeling, West Virginia, that there was serious “communist influence” in the Truman administration, declaring, ” I have here in my hand a list of 205 . . . names that were known to the Secretary of State and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.” Even though no such list existed, McCarthy’s accusations gripped the media and he soon became a national figure, promoted on the covers of national news magazines.

Now.

The defining accomplishment of Van Jones’s life was his founding of the Ella Baker Freedom Center. While the controversy over his appointment was going on I meant to look into who she was, but didn’t get it done. Ron Radosh, an expert on the hard left of which he was once a member, has the answer:

[T]he name of Jones’ Oakland group, The Ella Baker Freedom Center, is most appropriate. Most people have referred to the late Baker as simply a civil rights activist. I am writing from vacation in Nantucket, without benefit of my files at home. But in my book, Divided They Fell: The Demise of the Democratic Party, 1964-1996, I point out that the late civil rights lawyer Joe Rauh had noted that everything Baker said in the 60’s might as well have been taken verbatim from The Daily Worker, the Communist Party newspaper. Baker was so pro-Communist that she attacked Hubert Humphrey and other liberal anti-Communists as ultra reactionaries. Known as the “grandmother of SNCC,” Baker was aligned with those in the movement who were trying to push the organization to the far left.

I think that sums up the Obama administration pretty well. If you think Hubert Humphrey was an ultra-reactionary, this administration’s for you!

Red-baiting never goes out of style.

This is just the beginning, unless someone with a really big megaphone decides to fight back. No, not the president, he’s too busy making sure bankers, health insurance executives and the rest of Wall Street are mollified.

You know who I mean. [ed. note update-I messed up my original link, the link is now to whom I am talking about. Congratulations to all who guessed “KO.” Sorry about the bad link.] Yeah, this is war. Either the far right puke funnel is brought to heel by utterly destroying its undeserved credibility, something that should have happened long ago, or our democracy plunges into neo-McCarthyite darkness for who-knows-how-long. Which obscure administration or member of Congress will be next? Will it it be a third under-secretary for African affairs, or will it be, um, YOU?

Throw in a still shaky economy and two foreign wars that seemingly have no end, and it’s difficult to predict what might happen.

How’s that post-partisanship civility working out? Yeah, I know, regular people get sick and tired of the clown shows, but the clown shows are not a bug, they’re a design feature. They show that many Democrats won’t fight for their principles, or that many Democrats are unprincipled whores, and in either case weakness and whorishness is exposed.

The clowns clown, the pundits pontificate and the “reasonable” Republicans chortle while they watch the polls and congratulate each other on what a great monkey wrench they possess. Next up will be a set of “promises” from the GOP, probably with some grandiose name only a Colbert could appreciate, that will list the requisite demands for lower taxes, bashing of immigrants, fear-mongering against gays and any clever phraseology Frank Luntz crafts to make a shit sandwich look like Pan-bagnat.

Democrats, please feel free to win this fight on policy grounds by carefully arguing your position, giving away the store to your opponents and then attempting to win over the public with excuses, that’ll work well.