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Over at News Junkie, Sandeep’s hearing rumors of yet another round of layoffs at the Seattle Times, and when asked for comment, Times spokesperson Jill Mackie gave this non-denial denial:

“We have no announcements to make at this time regarding further layoffs,” Mackie wrote back. “Generally speaking, we try not to comment on rumors, and, out of respect to our employees, were we to have an announcement to make, we would certainly want to discuss it first with employees before commenting in the media.”

Huh.  I guess that makes Sandeep “media.”  Welcome back, Sandeep.

Meanwhile at Publicola, Josh talks to Seattle P-I managing editor David McCumber, who fears that Seattle could be on its way to being a no-newspaper town.

By any measure, Washington state Dems have done well under Dwight Pelz’s chairmanship.  Under his leadership WA Dems have won high-profile US Senate and gubernatorial races, taken back the Commissioner of Public Lands office in a closely contested race, and built near supermajorities in both house’s of the state legislature. Meanwhile, party coffers have been relatively flush, and voter registration rolls have swelled.

You can argue whether Pelz deserves much (or any) of the credit for his party’s success in recent years, but if you’re keeping score, you can’t argue that times have been pretty damn good for WA’s donkeys.

At the same time, the Washington State Republican Party has continued its decline under the chairmanship of Luke Esser.  Sure, they managed to hold on to WA-08 (in a district that has never elected a Democrat) and they picked up a couple seats this year in the otherwise lopsided legislature, but they’ve had some awfully big losses, including a spanking in a governor’s race that just a couple years ago was widely considered to be a gimme for ex-party-savior Dino Rossi.

So how’d the two party chairs do in their respective bids for another term?  Well, they both won, but…

Pelz won by 98-64 over former Snohomish County Democratic Chairman Mark Hintz. […] Esser was re-elected without opposition at a GOP meeting in Tukwila.

That’s right, Pelz is rewarded for his winning ways with a serious challenger, whereas Esser—Rob McKenna’s cabin boy—faces zero opposition in the wake of the losingest record in recent party history.

I think that tells you everything you need to know about the personality of the two parties… and perhaps, a bit about their relative success and failure.

Click for Part 1

Cocaine was first discovered in 1860 by Albert Niemann, a German chemist who identified it as the active chemical compound in the coca leaf. Before 1914, when cocaine was still legal in the United States, it was consumed primarily as an ingredient in tonics, ointments, wines, and other products. It was the original “Coca” in Coca-Cola. Vin Mariani, a well-known coca wine, had the face of Pope Leo XIII on its label. Leo and his successor, Pope Pius X, were both fans of the drink. During the temperance movement, however, cocaine was banned along with other drugs in the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914. Over the next few decades, its use dropped significantly in America as amphetamines started to become more popular.

In the late 1970s, however, the use of cocaine began to rise again. Instead of being an ingredient in various products, though, people were ingesting the drug straight up their noses as a powder, a method that had far more intense effects for the user. Just as alcohol prohibition led to the consumption of alcohol in more dangerous ways, the prohibition of coca eventually led to a trend of ingesting the drug in ways that were baffling to South Americans, where chewing on coca leaves or brewing them in tea has been commonplace for many generations.

[Read more…]

Sometime over the next day or so we’ll be introducing a new feature, with posts from Publicola (and eventually, other JOA blogs) occasionally appearing “cross-posted” to HA, and vice-versa.  Of course cross-posting is nothing new—I occasionally cross-post to Huffington Post—and on the surface, it won’t appear like much of an innovation to the casual reader.  But JOA’s new integrated cross-post works a little differently.

How is it different?  Well, when I cross-post to HuffPo, I create two separate posts, one here and one there, with two separate comment threads and two separate audiences.  But a JOA cross-post is a single post that merely appears in multiple places; edit the source on Publicola, and the changes instantly appear on HA.  And more importantly, a JOA cross-post has a single comment thread, allowing JOA sites to not only share content, but also, share community. So don’t be surprised is click on post at HA and find yourself in a comment thread on another blog.

This is admittedly a baby step toward a much larger vision, but a step nonetheless, and a demonstration of where I think this little experiment of ours needs to go.  Ultimately, the goal is to share revenue as well content, and integrated cross-posting could play an important role in efficiently distributing quality content to the widest audience possible while proportionately rewarding both content producers and traffic drivers for the value they create.

In a monetized environment, cross-posts, links and even block-quotes all have monetary value:  if I link to Publicola, I should get a piece of the revenues generated from the page views I create, while Josh should get a proportionate piece of the revenues generated from my page views that include his content.  How big a chunk each partner gets should be left to the market, but I’m pretty sure that it is only through the creation of a shared co-operative that a market for shared content can be created without giving up the largest chunk of the revenue stream to the entity who sets the rules and facilitates the transactions.

But I’m getting way ahead of myself.  Look for the new cross-post thingy.  And look for more new features coming soon.

From The Oregonian:

Two students in a foreign exchange program died and seven other people were injured Saturday night when a 24-year-old man with a gun opened fire outside a popular underage nightclub in downtown Portland.

Police identified one of the victims as Ashley Wilks, 16, of Happy Valley. People familiar with the student exchange program said Wilks — a Clackamas High School sophomore — was preparing to head to a foreign country for study.

It appears authorities have yet to name a suspect, who according to the newspaper shot himself and is in critical condition. At this point police seem to believe the shooting was random.

How utterly awful.

Robert Reich pens an open letter to Limbaugh, Hannity and Malkin. Short version: please stop lying, anyone can read or listen to what I actually said.

As a foul-mouthed blogger, I’m grateful there are smart, nice, civil people in the world like Reich. Variety is the spice of life and all that.

Funny how uncivil and lying behavior by the right is so accepted as part of the media landscape that you rarely see traditional outlets get all upset about it, and in the case of the falsehoods about Reich’s views traditional media figures like Lou Dobbs at CNN have also spread them quite deliberately. As we have seen countless times in the past, deliberately telling outright lies is not just wrong, it warps rational discourse and causes stupid people to believe whatever the hell they want, facts be damned.

And it’s only when the DFH wants something totally insane like health insurance coverage for all Americans that we get the preachy editorials about civility and bi-partisanship.

This country is in a crisis. We can no longer afford to let stupid people believe lies, they must be told the truth. Stupid is what got us here in the first place.

Last week’s contest was won by ‘Change in Time,’ who found the view at 20th St and Mississippi St in San Francisco. And speaking of changes in time, this is the last contest that will be posted at this time. Starting next week, I’ll be posting these up on Sunday at noon (Pacific Time).

Here’s this week’s, good luck!

About a month or so before the November election, Mass Transit Now communications director Alex Fryer stopped by Drinking Liberally to help push the Prop. 1 cause, and we got to talking about the state of the campaign and the media coverage of it.

Fryer, a ten-year veteran reporter for the Seattle Times before jumping ship in 2007 to work for Mayor Nickels, complained about the difficulty he was having pushing the campaign’s message to the local media.  He lamented the paucity of coverage of Prop. 1’s impact on Eastside communities, yet couldn’t find a single reporter who considered Eastside transportation issues to be their beat.

The Time’s spent years building up its Eastside bureau, Fryer recalled wistfully.  And today… nada.

Talk to communications professionals around the region, many of whom are ex-journalists themselves, and you’ll find Fryer’s frustrating experience far from isolated.  As our local media universe contracts, the opportunities for media relations contract with it, a particularly troubling trend for the political community, which has watched the size of our state political press corps shrink by as much as two-thirds over recent years.

Imagine you’re a Seattle area legislator or advocacy group attempting to garner a little hometown coverage for a particular bill that would benefit your constituency.  It wasn’t so long ago that Seattle’s print media alone had a half-dozen or more reporters and opinion writers based in Olympia during the session, plus a slew of political journalists back at home.  But today, if the Times’ Andrew Garber isn’t interested in your story, or he already has his dance card punched, you’re pretty much out of luck.

What’s the solution?  Well, I suppose communications staffers could just work harder—be more diligent, more creative, and more relentless—and I know that our state’s various progressive organizations could do a better job coordinating their message.  And, I suppose these organizations’ backers could sink more money into their communications efforts to help defray the added expense of going around the traditional media gatekeepers and straight to decision makers and the public at large.

Or, of course, the broader progressive community could come together to fund and support the creation of  independent progressive media… you know… like the kinda work we’re doing here at HA, Publicola and the JOA News Co-op.  An independent media that not only moves stories into the corporate press and helps to frame the coverage therein, but also, increasingly over time, reaches a larger and larger direct audience.  A truly independent media, that’s honest about its bias and fearless in its opinions, and never shy about biting the hands that feed it, if that’s what events dictate.

That’s what folks like Josh and I are attempting to do here with the JOA, but we can’t do it alone and we can’t do it for free.  A credible and sustainable independent media is going to have to pay real journalists to do real journalism, and until we can establish a large enough audience and revenue stream, it’s going to require a cash subsidy, pure and simple… a cash subsidy that should be coming from the backers of all those progressive organizations and candidates for whom our success would directly benefit.

Sure, that’s a pretty self-serving analysis, but if there’s a better idea out there of how to address this growing communications crisis, I’ve yet to hear it.  And as for those progressive organization communications directors concerned about protecting their own budgets and salaries from hungry vultures like me, well, I’m the least of your worries, for no amount of media relations is going to help you get your message out if there isn’t any media left to relate to.

There’s a familiar cliche about the Chinese character for “crisis” meaning “danger” plus “opportunity,” and while it’s apparently not quite true, it’s still an apt metaphor for our current communications crisis, which does indeed present a great danger to the progressive community while also presenting an opportunity to reshape the local media landscape in our favor.  But there’s another cliche that also comes to mind in describing our efforts thus far to muddle through in the face of our local media’s dramatic collapse: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”

Over the coming weeks I not only intend to expand on my thoughts about what we need to be doing differently to confront and exploit our changing media landscape, I also intend to start demonstrating this vision by example. But while it has been tremendously gratifying to hear from folks about how much they appreciate my work, at some point, some of this appreciation needs to translate into substantial financial support for me to have any hope of success.

This is way more than I ever wanted to know about Barack and Michelle:

(There are some 60 other clips from the past week in politics posted at Hominid Views.)

Given the state of our government’s budget situation, and the sense of urgency that our legislators are trying to display with their current round of budget freezes, it was eye-opening to see Brad Shannon’s report earlier this week that newly minted Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn had made an appearance in front of the citizen salary commission to, let’s be honest, whine about his salary.

Dorn gets paid $121,618 each year in his new post, and he told the commission that ranks him below his chief of staff, below the state Department of Early Learning head, and even below 121 district superintendents here in the state.

Adding some perspective, the 122nd largest school district in the state according to the 2000 census is located in lovely Coupeville, and a few other comparable in size include Elma, Naches Valley and Chimacum. Some of my favorite places all of them, but nothing one would equate with educational or cultural dominance.

It really begs the question, is Dorn grossly underpaid, or are these superintendents overpaid?

To be fair, Dorn didn’t ask for a raise, and he did acknowledge that he chose to run for the office knowing the pay grade in advance, but he basically made an official proclamation that, as the kids these days might put it, I’m just sayin’, is all.

Dorn added, according to Shannon, that he was more concerned that the most qualified administrators might not seek the post when they can make at least twice as much in any of the major school districts in the state.

Really, now?

Meanwhile, Dorn himself benefited from the lack of credible candidates in the race. When early favorite Richard Semler, the Richland superintendent, dropped out of the race because of a family health issue, it essentially became a two-person race between Dorn and incumbent Terry Bergeson, who obstinately stood by the WASL even when she couldn’t answer some of the test questions herself.

Still, to call attention to his comparatively low pay at a time when state salaries are frozen, unemployment is rising pretty much everywhere but Pittsburgh, and even just four days before the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act passes in the U.S. Senate shows a galling lack of tact.

Especially since this isn’t Dorn’s first money grab. Recall that back in May of last year, he tried to boost his pension by getting his old colleagues in the legislature to make his retirement benefits based on his cushy $137,705 salary as the head of the Public School Employees Union instead of the $57,720 he earned as principal of Eatonville High School.

Dorn came to the office by way of Eatonville, a small Pierce County town that is best known to some of us as the home of former national prep football record holder Bobby Lucht, but this recent meeting smacks of an entirely different former Northwest athletic hero.

But hey, at least he is taking on the WASL, and most of us can agree that is far, far more important than a few thousand bucks here or there for a government job.

That’s what Publicola is reporting:

King County Executive Ron Sims has accepted a post in the Obama administration, according to a source in D.C. Details are sketchy, but Sims, who has been KC Executive since 1996, is reportedly going to D.C. for a job at HUD, the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Calls to the Sims office were not immediately returned this morning.

Hmm… perhaps it was more than just the chocolate that had King County Councilmember Larry Phillips in such high spirits last night at Chocolate for Choice?  (Come to think of it, Councilmember Bob Ferguson seemed in pretty good spirits too.)

UPDATE:
Sims’ office denies it.

Olympia – Senate Democratic leaders held a press conference today, joined by a few of their House colleagues, to announce their intention, as Josh mentioned earlier, to tighten the belt that holds up our state government’s proverbial pants.

Another way to describe the event would be to pose it as follows:

Q: How many times can a group of lawmakers use some variance of the phrase “belt-tightening” in a thirty minute press conference?

A: Considerably more than you would think.

Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown (D-Spokane), acting somewhat gubernatorial in her initiation of hard budget cuts, kicked off the afternoon presser by announcing the news that, in light of recent gloomy budget news, the state Senate would begin cutting operations in order to save money even before final cuts are made later on in the session.

Those cuts include reducing administrative budgets and freezing salaries, hiring, travel and major spending.

Brown emphasized repeatedly that the actions Democrats were taking had bipartisan support across the board, though Republicans used their position to talk some too-little-too-late smack, with state Sen. Joe Zarelli telling the Tacoma News-Tribune’s Joe Turner that “we moved from a 52-inch waist to a 51-inch waist and we desperately need to get down to a 32-inch waist.”

Zarelli also told Turner that the Senate’s plan to wait until late February or early March would further hurt the state’s ability to maximize budget savings. Brown, however, reiterated during the press conference that cuts for the sake of cuts were unwise, and that her caucus would be “deliberative as well as urgent.”

Sen. Rodney Tom (D-Mercer Island), who himself may seek greener pastures in the future, added that this move was more than just financially important, it was necessary to show the public that their elected officials have a real “sense of urgency” and that through across the board cuts the message they hoped to put across was that “we are all in this together.”

Tom also added, on multiple occasions, that the Senate plan goes above and beyond the governor’s call, citing a $78 million figure from the governor’s office compared with the $105 million that the state Senate aimed to cut.

House Democrats are also hoping to instigate some budget cuts, though they are taking the more traditional approach of calling for an early action budget bill.

“We appreciate what the Senate did in dropping an early action bill,” said House Ways & Means chair Rep. Kelli Linville (D-Bellingham), and added that the House was taking the more traditional route of creating a fast-tracked budget bill, evoking President Obama’s call for a line-by-line budget review.

“Everybody is going to share the pain,” she added.

Linville appeared tempted, but ultimately refused to give any examples of specific budget cuts prior to caucus meetings, which were set to take place after the conference. She did, however, say that they were hoping to save about $300 million from this budget, which would carry forward into $600 million during the next biennium.

Still, in spite of all the gloomy news for those on the wrong end of the budget machete, the day was not totally without cheer.

When the press conference opened up to questions from the gathered hacks, the politicians responded with the kind of comedy gold that tends to be glaringly absent from the political trail that we have been following for the last year and a half.

A couple of examples:

Asked who would be the watchdog for the coming budget cuts, Brown jokingly responded that it would have to be the seven or eight gathered journos, before immediately amending her answer to say that it would instead be the doomed P-I, which was greeted with equal amount of groans and chuckles.

Sen. Jim Hargrove (D-Hoquiam), meanwhile, did his best Dark Helmet impression when he stated that the Senate Dems would be working at, I kid you not, “ludicrous speed” in order to get the budget cuts rolling.

I suggest they go on a comedy tour with proceeds going toward paying down the budget deficit. Watch out, Paul Blart, Washington State Senate Democrats are gunning for you.

I’ve been writing a lot about marijuana news recently, but it’s because a lot has been happening. There’s an increased focus in the media on the absurdity of the current prohibition that feels more intense than ever. I’m not sure it has only one reason, but either way, I welcome the increased spotlight and hope that it triggers even more debate. Here’s the roundup:

– There are two television specials to check out before the weekend. Tonight, CNBC is airing Marijuana, Inc, which takes a look at the economics behind the current growers of the plant in northern California. And tomorrow night on Dateline NBC, they’ll be covering the case of Rachel Hoffman, the young woman in Florida who was killed by drug dealers after she’d been pressured into becoming an informant rather than face jail time for selling pot to her friends.

– Scott Morgan has posted on some breaking news from the Lake Tahoe area this evening, where DEA agents raided a medical marijuana dispensary. President Obama vowed to end these raids, so it will be interesting to see what he does in response.

– Nina Shapiro writes in the Seattle Weekly about the coalition of legislators, the Governor and other public officials who are moving towards ways to reduce the amount of money spent to lock up non-violent drug offenders. This part knocked me for a loop:

Faced with a $5 million budget cut to his office, King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg in October started kicking felony cases involving less than three grams of narcotics down to District Court, where they are prosecuted as misdemeanors. He says the move affects two-thirds of his caseload.

That’s just amazing. To get an idea of how much 3 grams is, put three paper clips in your hand. Having that much drugs on you has not only been treated as a felony (a felony!), but it bogs down the majority of what even the most progressive County Prosecutor’s office in the state has been working on. Wow!

– Finally, the Cannabis Defense Coalition (full disclosure: I’ve been a member since last year) has updated its website with more information about the upcoming prosecution of medical marijuana patient Bruce Olson in Kitsap County.