HorsesAss.Org

– Reform-friendly Gil Kerlikowske was approved in a 91-1 vote by the Senate to be the new head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. A recent Zogby poll showed that a majority of Americans support legalizing marijuana. And Governor Schwarzenegger in California says it’s time for a debate about it. What can go wrong?

This:

A spokesman for U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said Thursday U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., will serve as Crime and Drugs Subcommittee chairman.

…

An unidentified Democratic Party source told CNN the decision to give Specter the chairmanship of the subcommittee was intended to help him get re-elected and to avoid any conflict as the Judiciary Committee considers a Supreme Court nomination.

I’m trying to come up with a positive way to interpret that, but I can’t.

– Mexico is following the lead of Portugal and appears ready to decriminalize low-level drug possession. This won’t affect their war on the cartels since their customer base is up north, but it’s worth noting two things: 1) The Obama Administration isn’t interfering like the Bush Administration did the last time Mexico tried this; and 2) Mexico’s drug policy is now far more progressive than ours.

– After a vanity license plate in Colorado was rejected for potentially being interpreted as obscene, a state Senator lashed out at the ACLU by saying that he wanted a license plate that says ACLUSUX. The ACLU responded by saying that they’d represent him if the plate is rejected. I’ve always wondered why there’s so much animosity towards the ACLU, but I think I get it now. With so many people who demand to have a different set of rules for themselves than for everyone else, the most terrifying thing is an organization that prides itself on intellectual consistency with respect to our rights.

– The medical marijuana community in Seattle lost a very good friend recently. Longtime patient advocate Dennis Moyers passed away. I found Dennis to be one of the most interesting and thoughtful people to discuss medical marijuana with. His years as a patient himself gave him great insight into the battle that’s been waged to deny people from taking a medicine that they’ve discovered to be tremendously beneficial. His latest effort was to encourage the Obama Administration to set up liaison within the Federal government to meet with medical marijuana patients and develop smart policy. The online petition is here.

This morning I received an email from a local attorney, containing a link to a post on HA, with the following request:

Please remove the defamatory, false and libelous post about me on your blog.

Sigh.

And this was my instant response:

[Name redacted]

I have just reread [redacted]’s post, and it appears to be nothing but opinion, block-quotes and links.  I understand if you find his deft refutation of your Seattle Times column injurious to your reputation, but there is certainly nothing false nor libelous about it.  Perhaps a less adversarial approach might have been for you to request an opportunity to post a response on HA in your own defense? I am always happy to facilitate such dialog.

I want to assure you that I take requests like yours very seriously… in fact, apparently much more seriously than you do, judging from its spurious nature.  If you can provide what you believe to be clear examples of “defamatory, false and libelous” statements in [redacted]’s post, I will consider them, but a takedown request requires quite a bit more than a vaguely threatening email from an attorney. For obvious reasons central to the very nature and viability of the medium, [redacted] and I, and the many prominent national bloggers who would surely rally to our defense, do not take these sort of threats lightly.  And neither should you.

For the moment, as a courtesy, I will keep your identity anonymous in any post I might write about this issue.  But please understand that I have limited patience for attorneys who attempt to bully me into surrendering my First Amendment rights.

David Goldstein

I’m not sure what this attorney is attempting to accomplish.  Maybe eliminate critical commentary from the list of hits people might get when Googling the attorney’s name?  Yeah, well, that strategy didn’t work all that well for attorney Bradley Marshall, now did it?

The thing is, the minute bloggers like me start backing down to vague threats like this, merely out of fear of incurring the legal expense, is the minute blogging ceases to be an honest and viable medium.  And I’ve always believed that the day I stop writing fearlessly is the day I stop being a writer worth reading.

So let this post serve as a final warning to the litigiously itchy everywhere: I have a public platform at my disposal, and I’m not afraid to use it.  If you feel we are in error, let us know, and we’ll consider posting a correction.  But you better be damn confident about winning a defamation suit before idly threatening to bring one, or else it will be you who will ultimately regret your error, not the the other way around.

The faces of the new G.O.P. take to the Sunday talk show circuit:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnKR6ztHIIs[/youtube]

Last week’s contest was solved in record time, 4 minutes, by longtime champ milwhcky. It was the Oklahoma State Capitol in Oklahoma City. That record will probably stand for a while because it will be a while before I put up another picture that easy. :)

Here’s this week’s, good luck (and Happy Mother’s Day)!

As a gardener, there are a lot of irritating things about Seattle’s weather, but our mild temperatures ain’t one of ’em. We’re already eating fresh lettuce, arugula and radishes out of the garden, and we’ll be enjoying peas, raspberries, herbs and more in another month.  Tomatoes are always a challenge, but that makes them all the more enjoyable.

Anyway, it’s a beautiful Spring day, so shut down your computer and go enjoy it.  And call your mother.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKCPUD0NXVA[/youtube]

Notice how many media jackals in the audience can’t really process it, although some can.

Limbaugh and Hannity are sick and deserve whatever ridicule they get, although it’s certain that after three decades of relentless and hateful attacks on us by conservatives, some of them will whine and bitch about this being out of bounds. Whatever. What goes around comes around.

Conservatives wanted divisive, bare-knuckle politics on all fronts, they got it and lost, the perverted freaks. Nice permanent majority they got there, BTW.

Elections have consequences, some unanticipated. It’s absolutely delightful to have someone throw everything back in their faces on such a big stage.

Drug addict snit fit in three….two….one…..Whaaaaaaaaah I need my binky and some oxycodone, I’m Rush Limbaugh, the leader of the Republican Party.

Although it’s odd when it’s media personalities who make their livings saying stuff.

Today, Media Matters for America demanded an apology for columnist and CBS golf analyst David Feherty’s assertion that “if you gave any U.S. soldier a gun with two bullets in it, and he found himself in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Osama bin Laden, there’s a good chance that Nancy Pelosi would get shot twice, and Harry Reid and bin Laden would be strangled to death.”

The other odd thing is we all know what would have happened if a liberal blogger had expressed a similar thing about Republican leadership in say, 2004. You would have got to know your local FBI agents quite well.

Conservatives are always complaining about hypocrisy and double standards, because they’re always projecting their flaws onto others. They just don’t seem to get that our first response is not “shoot them” but rather “beat the crap out of them at election time.” It’s called democracy.

If the best you can come up with is a fantasy about someone putting bullets into people, maybe you have no business commenting about politics at all.

And yes, Feherty is protected by the First Amendment if he is not directly expressing the desire that violence occur, but is expressing his opinion (however generalized, inaccurate and absurd) about the feelings of US military personnel. But it’s a reckless, asinine thing to say.

The First Amendment also protects the rights of large corporations to use good judgment in whom they place on the air! Call the PR flacks!

Yesterday, TPM unearthed this gem from 1986. It’s a CBS News report on Jeff Sessions being voted down by the Senate Judiciary Committee because he was considered to be too racially insensitive:

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

Now that Arlen Specter has become a Democrat, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions will become the ranking Republican on that very same Senate Judiciary Committee. TPM has even more:

When it became clear that Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) was poised to become ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, we recalled this 2002 article by Sarah Wildman which addresses some of the controversies that kept Sessions from being confirmed in 1986 as a U.S. District Court judge in Alabama.

Wildman writes in particular that the testimonies of two witnesses–a Justice Department employee named J. Gerald Hebert, and a black Sessions subordinate named Thomas Figures–helped to doom Sessions, then a U.S. Attorney, at his Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings. According to Wildman, Hebert testified reluctantly “that in a conversation between the two men Sessions had labeled the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) “un-American” and “Communist-inspired.” And Figures–then an assistant U.S. Attorney–told the committee that “during a 1981 murder investigation involving the Ku Klux Klan, Sessions was heard by several colleagues commenting that he ‘used to think they [the Klan] were OK’ until he found out some of them were ‘pot smokers.'” [emphasis mine]

That is truly the funniest thing I’ve heard all week. It perfectly captures how entrenched into backwardness the modern Republican Party has become. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sessions was joking when he said that, but the joke’s clearly on the GOP now.

Only 23 percent of Americans self-identify as Republicans today. That may seem like a small number, but believe it or not, it’s actually not much different than what it was during the early 1980s. The bigger differences today lie with independent voters and the social issues that motivated that small Republican base to dominate American politics for so long.

A recent poll showed that support for gay marriage, legalizing marijuana, and easing immigration restrictions are all at record highs. For years, the Republicans rallied their base around these social issues, and the backfiring of this strategy is now at full blast. The young people who grew up in the 80s and 90s have grown up seeing the Republican Party as a threat to social justice and in many cases a direct threat to their own freedom and security. And it’s perfectly fitting that as a black Democrat sits in the Oval Office, the main Republican to oppose his first Supreme Court nomination is someone who in 1986 was a harbinger of the extremism that would eventually befall that party.

In 1986, the leaders of the Republican Party undoubtedly saw themselves as a party of small government principles. But that’s not what got people to the polls. In order to do that, it became a party that played upon a fear that within 25 years, there would be a black President nominating a Puerto Rican woman to the Supreme Court; that gay people would be considered equals in our society; and that pot really isn’t that scary and is ready to be as socially accepted as alcohol. Now that their fears have become a reality, and the fact that no one else seems to share that fear, they’ve just become a bizarre lunatic fringe.

Okay, so… let me get this straight.  The Seattle Times has long editorialized against building light rail “because it would cost so much and do so little.”  But now that East Link has been approved by voters, against their repeated objections, they’re embracing as “creative” and “innovative” the most expensive route through Bellevue?

THE Eastside has emerged as a strong, enthusiastic proponent of light rail, joining innovative ideas and long-range visions of the region’s development, making civic leaders’ call for a tunnel under downtown Bellevue worth serious consideration.

Sound Transit officials estimate a tunnel would add between $500 million to $600 million to the overall cost of the regional transit expansion between downtown Seattle and downtown Redmond. The added cost shouldn’t be taken lightly. Nor should it be discounted as economically out of reach.

I am soooo confused.

From Political Buzz:

The Society of Professional Journalists national ethics committee is calling foul on the Washington News Council for conducting an online poll on a complaint against KIRO TV.

The Washington Secretary of State had complained to the News Council, a self-appointed watchdog group, about KIRO’s pieces on voter registration irregularities. KIRO declined to participate in a hearing. So the News Council posted an online poll, which turned out lopsided against KIRO.

“A hearing can be worthwhile if all parties voluntarily participate and work toward a common understanding,” the SPJ said in a news release. “The committee strongly objects to having a public online vote, or virtual hearing, on journalism ethics.

Now, the KIRO stories were suspect and full of factual errors, basically part of the noise machine crap about ghost voters and such. You can read all about it at the Washington News Council web site. KIRO did eventually pull the stories down, so that was good.

Still, I’m amazed that the Washington News Council, this self-appointed collection of rich people and formerly powerful traditional journalists, could make such an error in judgment by conducting an on-line kangaroo court.

Many readers likely recall that the P-I refused to appear before WNC in 2006 concerning an expose of the King County sheriff’s office, citing, among other reasons, the fact that WNC director John Hamer was married to a district director for Rep. Dave Reichert. (By way of clarification, Reichert used to be sheriff, and I have no idea what Hamer and his wife currently do, nor is that the point.) The P-I stood by its reporting in the face of the attempts by WNC to intimidate them.

The point is that the Washington News Council has little credibility, and deservedly so. But I’m not all that worked up about it, frankly, because this blog isn’t a “real” journalism outfit, and thus doesn’t fall under WNC’s self-defined jurisdiction, as far as I can tell.

And that’s just fine with me, because every time I hear the word “ethics” and “journalism” I flash on Commander Codpiece, and that’s something I really don’t like popping into my brain.

Yeah, let’s talk some more about ethics, guys. Here’s a topic: let’s say a reporter falsely accuses a candidate of lying about her education, writes a story full of half-truths and distortions spoon fed to reporters by the other side, and the candidate then loses by a cat’s whisker.

What should happen? Or more to the point, what did happen? As we all know, the answer is: nothing at all. Ethics, yeah, Uh-uh.

100 days of Michael Steele:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K08k3maGGVM[/youtube]

(There are some sixty other media clips from the past week in politics posted at Hominid Views.)

Republicans are very, very sorry they lost two elections in a row, and if the American people will just please give them another chance, the same people will do the same things.

But it will be called something else, although I’m relatively certain Harry S. Truman would have called it “bullshit.”

Over on Slog, Paul Constant remarks on how sadly difficult it is for conservative critics like the execrable Jonah Goldberg to put  politics aside and just enjoy Star Trek for what is, and it reminded me of my only real conversation with Michael Medved.

We were chatting about holiday films, and while we both agreed that it was beautifully animated, it turns out we equally hated the film Happy Feet.  Medved, who of course originally made his name as a movie reviewer, went on and on about the film’s preachy, environmental message, complaining about the unproven science of global warming, and how the movie distorted facts to its young audience. I, who made my name as a political crackpot, complained about the movie’s boring, meandering, and disjointed script.

It turns out that Medved hated Happy Feet because of its message, while I just hated it because it was a crappy movie.  Huh.

Speaking of performance audits, somebody should conduct one on the Seattle Times editorial board, who in the absence of competition from the Seattle P-I, seems all the more eager to just make stuff up as they go along.

The authority for performance audits was created by the people, through initiative. Legislators did not do it, and were never going to do it. Key legislators did not want to elevate Sonntag into a power that could affect their programs.

Yeah, but the problem is, the Legislature did pass performance audit legislation back in 2005, by a 75-22 margin in the House, 30-19 in the Senate, some three months before I-900 even qualified for the ballot.  And while it didn’t give the State Auditor the autocratic control and dedicated funding source of I-900, Brian Sonntag and his office enthusiastically supported the bill at the time, testifying on its behalf.

I know.  So did I.

Quibble if you want over the details of which legislation was more effective—one that gave the Auditor sole discretion over which agency gets audited, or one that has the priorities and agenda set by a Citizens Advisory Board—the Legislature did in fact give up JLARC’s control over performance audits, and it did so by an overwhelming margin.

Furthermore, the very notion that performance audits would never take place without a dedicated funding source and an all powerful Auditor, totally ignores reality.  Indeed, 23 performance audits were conducted at WSDOT alone, between 1991 and I-900’s passage in 2005.  23!

Performance Audits at WSDOT: Inventory (as of April 2005)

• Washington State Ferries (WSF) Vessel Construction Audit, Booz Allen, 1991
• Environmental Organization Study, WSDOT, Transportation Commission, 1994
• Environmental Cost Savings and Permit Coordination Study, Legislative Transportation Committee, 1994
• Procurement Audit WSF, Federal Audit, 1995
• Department of Transportation Highways and Rail Programs Performance Audit, Joint Legislative Audit and Review Committee (JLARC), 1998
• Department of Transportation Ferry System Performance Audit, JLARC, 1998
• Public Private Initiatives Audit, Transportation Commission, 1999
• WSF Risk Assessment, Blue Ribbon Commission on Transportation 1999
• Standards Review Team Report to Governor Locke, Transportation Commission, 2000
• Triennial Review WSF, Federal Audit, 2000
• Performance Audit of the Washington State Ferry System Capital Program, Office of Financial Management, 2001
• Washington State Legislature’s Joint Task Force on Ferries, 2001
• Washington State Ferry System Capital Program, OFM-Talbot, 2002
• WSDOT Aviation Division Study, JLARC, August, 2002
• Statewide Agency Capital Construction Practices (limited scope performance audit), OFM – KPMG, January, 2003
• Statewide Agency Performance Assessment, OFM-KPMG, January, 2003
• Personal Services and Purchased Services Contracting, (limited scope performance audit), OFM, January, 2003
• Department of Transportation Highways and Ferries Programs Performance Measure Review , TPAB-Dye Management Inc (November 2004)
• Department of Transportation Capital Project Management Pre-audit, TPAB-JLARC: Gannet-Fleming (January 2005)
• Environmental Permitting for Transportation Projects Pre-audit, TPAB-JLARC (January 2005)
• Business Process Review of Environmental Permitting for Transportation Projects, TPAB-JLARC; currently underway, April 2005
• Business Process Review of Accountability Oversight Mechanisms and Project Reporting for WSDOT TPAB-JLARC, April 2005
• Review of Port Angeles Graving Dock Project TPAB-JLARC; planned as of April 2005

And those are just the pre-900 performance audits at a single state agency; that list doesn’t include the regular (but much less sexy) financial audits that have always been the primary responsibility of the State Auditor’s Office.  Which raises another serious question about the Times editorial and the media coverage of this issue in general:  if the Times actually understands the difference between a “performance audit” and a “financial audit,” they don’t seem willing to share that information with their readers.

They may both have the word “audit” in their name, but performance and financial audits are not the same thing.  The latter is an objective endeavor conducted according to commonly accepted accounting standards.  If a financial audit finds that there is $90 million missing on the books, somebody surely needs to be fired and/or prosecuted.

But a performance audit is a much more subjective, complex and less exact affair that may include the following elements:

(i) Identification of programs and services that can be eliminated, reduced, consolidated, or enhanced;

(ii) Identification of funding sources to the state agency, to programs, and to services that can be eliminated, reduced, consolidated, or enhanced;

(iii) Analysis of gaps and overlaps in programs and services and recommendations for improving, dropping, blending, or separating functions to correct gaps or overlaps;

(iv) Analysis and recommendations for pooling information technology systems used within the state agency, and evaluation of information processing and telecommunications policy, organization, and management;

(v) Analysis of the roles and functions of the state agency, its programs, and its services and their compliance with statutory authority and recommendations for eliminating or changing those roles and functions and ensuring compliance with statutory authority;

(vi) Recommendations for eliminating or changing statutes, rules, and policy directives as may be necessary to ensure that the agency carry out reasonably and properly those functions vested in the agency by statute;

(vii) Verification of the reliability and validity of agency performance data, self-assessments, and performance measurement systems as required under RCW 43.88.090;

(viii) Identification of potential cost savings in the state agency, its programs, and its services;

(ix) Identification and recognition of best practices;

(x) Evaluation of planning, budgeting, and program evaluation policies and practices;

(xi) Evaluation of personnel systems operation and management;

(xii) Evaluation of state purchasing operations and management policies and practices; and

(xiii) Evaluation of organizational structure and staffing levels, particularly in terms of the ratio of managers and supervisors to nonmanagement personnel.

A thorough financial audit requires an accountant, but to achieve its intended goal a performance audit requires professionals with some degree of familiarity and expertise in the functions being audited (that’s why, lacking such broad expertise in house, Sonntag contracts out performance audits to private firms), and perhaps most importantly, the full cooperation of the agency being audited.

Did a performance audit really uncover $90 million in wasteful spending at the Port of Seattle?  Maybe. Hell, knowing the way the Port had been run, the auditors likely even missed a lot of potential savings.  But these findings aren’t worth much more than a bullet point in a slanted editorial if the target agency perceives the audit as an adversarial process, and thus resists both the auditors and their recommendations.

Oh… and as for this hypocritical piece of tired, old rhetoric:

Under cover of recession, they have now erased the people’s vote on Initiative 900 and hobbled the auditor’s office.

The Times has no problem defunding the teachers pay and class size initiatives, and has advocated in favor of gutting I-937’s overwhelmingly popular renewable energy requirements.  But “the people’s vote on Initiative 900” should somehow be inviolable?  Gimme a fucking break.

I don’t see the Times shedding even crocodile tears for the tens of thousands of Washingtonians who will be denied basic health care under the recently passed draconian budget, or for the thousands of students who now won’t find a slot in our state colleges and universities.  But force Sonntag to put off for a couple years yet another audit of Sound Transit, and we get an editorial crying for Gov. Gregoire to whip out her veto pen.

Personally, I’m a big supporter of performance audits.  I blogged extensively on the subject in 2005, and slogged down to Olympia to testify on their behalf.  (I also blogged and testified on behalf of performance audits for tax exemptions, a good government measure the Times couldn’t give a shit about.)  But unlike the Times, I understand their limits.

Budgets are all about priorities.  And if Sonntag really believes that investing in education or preventative health care produces less of a long term financial return to the state than investing in performance audits, he should save up his pennies and conduct the next performance audit on himself.

Aneurin catches a Forbes article about Spokane. It’s um, not flattering, unless being called “the scam capital of America” is a compliment.