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It is a special evening for the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally.

Tonight’s meeting will be held at Seattle’s Town Hall for a talk entitled “Barack Obama and the Challenge of the Bush Legacy” by Walter Williams (emeritus professor at the UW’s Center for American Politics and Public Policy) and Bryan D. Jones (professor at the University of Texas, Austin Department of Government). Start time is 7:30pm.

After the talk (around 9:00pm) the Drinking Liberally crowd will migrate to a (currently) undisclosed location for debriefing, drinks and discussion.

Not in Seattle? The Drinking Liberally web site has dates and times for some 320 chapters of Drinking Liberally spread across the earth. There’s bound to be one near you.

This time it’s a Texas banker (yeah, what are the odds?)

Hoping to halt what it called “a fraud of shocking magnitude that has spread its tentacles throughout the world,” the Securities and Exchange Commission charged billionaire R. Allen Stanford and other executives at his massive financial services company, Stanford Financial Group, with operating a multibillion-dollar fraudulent investment scheme.

In a complaint filed early Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Dallas, the SEC alleged Antigua-based Stanford International Bank (SIB) fabricated investment returns in order to market and sell high-yielding certificates of deposits.

The complaint charged SIB with selling approximately $8 billion of CDs to investors by promising improbable and unsubstantiated interest rates.

You kind of wonder what it’s going to take to get Republicans espousing “free-market” solutions to admit that the “market” has not functioned as such. It’s apparently been a non-stop, gigantic crime wave by people using offshore accounts and white collar trickery instead of guns and knives.

The moral decay in our society is widespread and palpable, and it’s not confined to one party. But there is one party that is more intensely and palpably rotten than the other, and most regular Americans know that.

I’m sitting in the Fort Lauderdale airport watching my flight for Seattle via Charlotte board without me.  It was scheduled to depart at 2:55PM ET, it is now 3:45, and there are still about 25 people waiting to board.  There’s no way this flight leaves the gate less than an hour late, which makes it highly unlikely we could catch our 6:10PM connection… the last flight from Charlotte to Seattle tonight.  So we’ve rebooked through Phoenix, scheduled to arrive in Seattle a couple hours late, after having spent an extra couple hours in the airport at FLL.

Flying sucks.  It totally sucks.

Last year it took us a whole extra day to make it home from our annual pilgrimage to visit grandma in Florida, while this October a nonstop flight to Philadelphia turned into an all day ordeal as our plane turned back to Seattle an hour into the flight due to leaky toilets, only to have us reboard the same plane with the same leaky toilets hours later.

And talking to my fellow travelers, my experiences are far from the worst, let alone unique.

Of course, mechanical failures and bad weather happen, but back when I was my daughter’s age—you know, back in the good old days of regulation—the airlines would respond by booking you on the next available flight out, regardless of carrier.

It’s time for a passenger bill of rights that guarantees the same.

Here’s an interesting article from Financial Week that suggests existing law would allow for a faster fix of the insolvent banking system:

The law, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act, was signed into law in 1991. In an interview with Financial Week, Bob Eisenbeis, a former research director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, said the FDICIA contains more than enough tools for regulators to help stem the current financial crisis.

If regulators had applied FDICIA’s provisions once the solvency of major banks was first called into question, Mr. Eisenbeis said, many would already have been taken over by Uncle Sam.

That would mean that their good assets would have been separated from their bad and sold off to healthy institutions or other investors.

This, he claims, would have gone a long way toward solving the credit crisis.

The article quotes a blog post made by at The Big Picture by a financial consultant named Christopher Whalen:

“When the Q1 numbers for the financials come out, the children’s hour in DC will end,” Mr. Whalen wrote in a note posted on the blog, The Big Picture. “The markets will react and Washington will finally be forced to have an adult conversation with the global community as to how much we haircut the bondholders.”

Yes, reading and discussing economic and financial stuff gets old, but to regular citizens it sure appears we are still headed off a cliff in many ways. The stimulus plan is a start, of course, but fixing the financial system is now paramount.

If I understand all this, the argument is that the Paulson-Geithner approach has us in a holding pattern. If existing law can be applied as Eisenbeis claims, it would seem to warrant consideration so that we can get on with things. Whatever name people wish to use can be affixed to the action–temporary nationalization, receivership, or my personal suggestion of “restructuring awards,” we need to just do it. The longer uncertainty prevails, the worse things will get.

Props to The Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter

The Seattle Times wants to change the deadline for mail-in ballots:

WASHINGTON voters are no strangers to suspenseful elections — but our state has a habit of dragging the suspense out for way too long.

Secretary of State Sam Reed wants to bring elections to more decisive ends sooner. His proposal would require ballots be received in election offices by Election Day. Now, the ballots need only be postmarked by Election Day. That means ballots straggle in throughout election week, often putting off the decisive conclusion for days — given Washington’s propensity for razor-thin margins.

This, of course, is a huge problem for newspaper headline writers who require definitive results by midnight, but for the rest of us… eh, not so much.  In fact, you’d think especially with our state’s “propensity for razor-thin margins” the emphasis should be on counting the ballot of every single registered voter, rather than finishing the counting on election night.

On Election Night in November, Democratic challenger Darcy Burner was leading in her bid to unseat incumbent Republican Dave Reichert for the 8th Congressional District seat. But Reichert pulled comfortably ahead over several King County and Pierce County ballot counts by Friday to win re-election.

Again, apart from the anxiety it caused the candidates and their most fervent supporters, I don’t really see what the problem is.  Speedy results would be nice, but voter participation and tabulation accuracy are what we really should be shooting for when it comes to running an election.  So I just don’t see why we have to make voting more difficult, and inevitably disenfranchise pathological procrastinators like me, just to get things over and done with by Tuesday night.

Think about it.  Right now the deadline is clear, precise and uniform:  postmarked by election day.  That means in the recent special election I dropped my ballot off at the Columbia City post office by about 4PM, a good hour or so under the wire.  But under the new, stricter law Sam Reed and the Times are proposing, the deadline would have been Saturday, or if you’re  lucky, Monday, or maybe Friday or Thursday or even earlier, depending on where you live.  Different voters would effectively have different deadlines, and they would change for every election.

That totally sucks.

No doubt Reed’s “reforms” would make things easier for election officials and the news media, but at the inevitable cost of disenfranchising voters.  The Times looks at Oregon and argues the change would likely invalidate “only” a few hundred ballots… which I guess doesn’t sound like all that many unless one of those ballots is yours.

Sam Quinones writes about Mexico in the Foreign Policy online magazine:

I’d recently lived in Mexico for a decade, but I’d never seen anything like this. I left in 2004—as it turned out, just a year before Mexico’s long-running trouble with drug gangs took a dark new turn for the worse. Monterrey was the safest region in the country when I lived there, thanks to its robust economy and the sturdy social control of an industrial elite.

…

That week in Monterrey, newspapers reported, Mexico clocked 167 drug-related murders. When I lived there, they didn’t have to measure murder by the week. There were only about a thousand drug-related killings annually. The Mexico I returned to in 2008 would end that year with a body count of more than 5,300 dead. That’s almost double the death toll from the year before—and more than all the U.S. troops killed in Iraq since that war began.

But it wasn’t just the amount of killing that shocked me. When I lived in Mexico, the occasional gang member would turn up executed, maybe with duct-taped hands, rolled in a carpet, and dropped in an alley. But Mexico’s newspapers itemized a different kind of slaughter last August: Twenty-four of the week’s 167 dead were cops, 21 were decapitated, and 30 showed signs of torture. Campesinos found a pile of 12 more headless bodies in the Yucatán. Four more decapitated corpses were found in Tijuana, the same city where barrels of acid containing human remains were later placed in front of a seafood restaurant. A couple of weeks later, someone threw two hand grenades into an Independence Day celebration in Morelia, killing eight and injuring dozens more. And at any time, you could find YouTube videos of Mexican gangs executing their rivals—an eerie reminder of, and possibly a lesson learned from, al Qaeda in Iraq.

Of course, when it comes to the traditional media’s coverage of the drug war, the devastation in Mexico isn’t as interesting as whether or not Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane was going to arrest Michael Phelps.

The frog bastards:

In Paris, hot meals are prepared on the premises of each of the city’s 270 public day care facilities. Nothing is mass produced, ingredients are more often fresh than frozen, and the chefs try to use organic products when they can. And the cost of the food is not exorbitant — only about $2 per meal per child.

At La Margeride day care, delicious smells waft out of the kitchen. By 9 a.m., the preparation of lunch is well under way. Chefs Elizabeth Morel and Martine Belaud have been happily working together for the past 14 years.

Literally hell on earth. Fresh foods, people working proudly in food preparation for over a decade, kids learning to eat healthy. No wonder conservatives hate the French.

It would be so much better if they fed their kids salmonella-laced frozen peanut butter sandwiches with the crusts cut off.

The Seattle P-I’s Joel Connelly asks “Is there no one to challenge Mayor Nickels?” — to which I answer:  why not you, Joel?

Really… why not?

Of course, you likely wouldn’t win, but there’s no shame in losing, and while you may not qualify as a “front-rank foe,” you’d certainly provide a better rhetorical challenge than your run of the mill also-ran.  And if you did win, well, you could probably use the job…  and wouldn’t you prefer being the mayor rather than working for the mayor like nearly every other ex-journalist in Seattle?

But seriously, Joel’s got a point:  why is there no one to challenge Mayor Nickels?  I don’t dislike Mayor Nickels, and considering Seattle’s endemic indecisiveness, a little Chicago-style politics isn’t always such a bad thing, but come on folks, it’s not like he’s Richard Friggin’ Daley.  Third terms are never an easy win for executives out here, where even our political establishment easily tires of itself, and a serious challenge would be good for both the city and Nickels.  (Unless, of course, he loses.  Then it’s not so good for Nickels after all.  But you get the point.)

So with Burgess and Smith out, and Licata and Steinbrueck dithering, I say run, Joel, run.  At the very least it would give your friends on the Seattle Times editorial board conniptions come endorsement season.

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

I’m guessing there are a lot of folks who had expected to support Larry Phillips, who now don’t know what they’re going to do.

Larry is a good, reliable progressive who’s done a good, reliable job letting us know how good and reliable he is.  I don’t think there’s a single, substantive issue on which we disagree.

Dow’s pretty progressive too, I think, but he’s less of a politician than Larry, so I’m not quite as sure.  In fact, a lot of Dow’s appeal comes from the fact that he comes across as less of your typical politician and more of an ordinary guy.  (If only he hadn’t declared for the office, he’d have the Seattle Times endorsement all sewn up.)

Me… I don’t know who I’m going to support, and there are still more candidates to come.  (Rep. Ross Hunter has gotten his name in the news a lot recently.  Hmm.) It’s gonna be an interesting race.

Last week’s winners were YLB, who first guessed that it was Oslo, Norway and Don Joe, who found the link.

And to clear up a question that arose last week in the comments, the reason that I don’t select locations in places like Africa is because there are no views there yet. And as wes.in.wa points out, if they ever do get views for cities like Kampala, this contest gets a lot more interesting.

Here’s this week’s view, good luck!

The Seattle Times editorial board urges the King County Council to appoint a “noncandidate” to serve out the end of Ron Sims’ term as Executive:

The best plan is to name an individual who is a noncandidate for the job in November. A candidate likely will be too distracted by the coming primary and general elections to really hunker down and fix the county’s undeniable budget problems.

Nonpartisan noncandidates.  Because, you know… the last person you’d ever want to fill a political office is a… um… politician.

Reading the Times’ editors write about politics is kinda like reading a movie reviewer who hates going to the movies.

I found this glossy flier while going through my pile of mail this week. It came from the Timberlake church in Redmond…

“No weird stuff”?

That a church would place such a comment at the top of their advertisement is telling about the public perception of religion in America.

A couple of decades ago, Christians were just…Christians. But this changed with the rise of televangelism. A relatively small segment of the fundamentalist Christian right proclaimed themselves the “moral majority” and openly pushed a political agenda. To the majority of Americans this unholy commingling of religion and politics was uncomfortable at best, bordering on weird.

Over the last couple of decades the weirdness has accelerated to the point that it seems everything we hear about “religion” in the mainstream media now comes off as weird. If there isn’t something criminal being discussed then there’s probably politics involved. The “revolutionary suicides” of Jonestown and the Branch Davidians showdown were specular specimens in their day.

Today the weirdness has become a lot more normalized, so that “weirdness” seems to underly most of the media’s coverage of religion. We learn about the Westboro Baptist Church’s “God hates fags” protests, Sarah Palin receiving a blessing of protection against witchcraft, Rev. Hagee’s holocaust comments, Rev. Wright’s damnation of America, Rev. Rick Warren’s anti-gay crusade, Pastor Ted Haggard’s male prostitute problem, almost everything coming out of William Donohue’s mouth (like the evils of a Chocolate Jesus last year). The list goes on and on. Locally, we’ve even had our own special strain of weird in a homophobic Rev. Ken Hutcherson and his “Prayer Warrior” communiqués.

So we get “no weird stuff” from a church apparently trying to distance itself from the contemporary stereotype of American religion. And some Christians are becoming sensitive about how they are labeled.

I don’t think the labels are the real problem. Rather it’s the commingling of religion and politics that has nudged the image of religion out of the mainstream.

A local pol, via email, rightly rants about our media’s googly-eyed infatuation with bipartisanship:

What the stupid media don’t realize is that it’s a tactic, not a goal. The goal is to get something accomplished. If that something requires bipartisanship to do it, so be it. If it doesn’t, who cares. They’ve made the classic mistake of not caring what the goal is, as long as it’s bipartisan. It’s not a surprising conclusion, really, as long as you frame in the media’s so-called “objectivity” frame. That frame forces themselves to gravitate to the holy grail of bipartisanship, because they are too lame to call some actual goals bullshit, or praise some as actually being worthy. Thus their choices comes down to partisan=bad, bi-partisan=good. No wonder why people have stopped reading their drivel.

And in my opinion, it’s even worse than that, because good or bad, the very notion of “bipartisanship” is usually as illusory as that whole “objectivity” crap.

For example… Obama goes to the Hill.  He meets with Republicans on their turf.  The Dems compromise, making the stimulus package smaller, less progressive, and less effective.  And then House Republicans still vote unanimously against it, including our own local, conscience-driven independent, Dave Reichert.  Bipartisanship my ass.

See, the problem is, even as a tactic, bipartisanship is pointless if not counterproductive if you don’t have an honest, trustworthy partner across the aisle.  And currently, the Dems don’t.

I’m reading Jared Diamond’s latest book, Collapse:  How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, and I was struck by this passage regarding forest fires in Montana:

Many homeowners sue the Forest Service if their house burns in a forest fire, or if it burns in a backfire lit by the Forest Service to control a much bigger fire, or if it doesn’t burn but if a forest providing a pretty view from the deck of their house does burn.  Yet some Montana homeowners are afflicted with such a rabidly anti-government attitude that they don’t want to pay taxes towards the costs of firefighting, nor to allow government employees onto their land to carry out fire prevention measures.

And I couldn’t help but think of our current public debate over raising taxes to help offset our state’s expanding revenue deficit, or rather, the complete and utter lack of such a debate at all.  Nobody likes taxes, but we sure do like the services they buy, and it is simply irresponsible for the governor and the legislature to attempt to balance this budget without even considering targeted tax increases, because, you know… they’re unpopular.

What the P-I said:

If a government utility discovers it has been underbilling a resident for electricity, the homeowner can expect to pay, perhaps with a bit of extra time. Everyone sympathizes with the homeowner, but no one expects the government to give away something valuable without payment.

The state constitution forbids it, in fact.

A Building Industry Association of Washington program apparently has been receiving state overpayments of millions of dollars. The state’s course should be to get the money back.

Due to a programming error, the BIAW has been reaping retro-rebate overpayments since 1994, and then using the money to back right-wing causes and candidates.  And now they argue they should be allowed to keep most of those overpayments because, you know, it wasn’t their fault.

Well fuck that.

BIAW and other retro programs should pay back the entire amount—the first few years worth immediately, and then the remainder deducted from future retro payments over a reasonable term… say, the next five years.  This isn’t their money, and they have no right to keep.

Which of course raises a broader issue:  this isn’t their money.  And particularly now, during this economic crisis, it is time for the legislature to consider reforms that put more of the money back into the pockets of workers and small business owners, where it belongs, rather than into the coffers of partisan political organizations like BIAW.