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Two things struck me about Obama’s big infrastructure investment speech.

1. His “use it or lose it” line—”if a state doesn’t act quickly to invest in roads and bridges in their communities, they’ll lose the money”—was nothing less than a threat that states better vote Democratic.  

Indeed, as lefties are starting to bash O, it’s worth noting that his program is a sly organizing move for Democrats. When voters hear this “use it or lose it” riff, they’re going to be reluctant to elect obstructionist Republicans. 

Face it, even though Republican icon Dwight Eisenhower got the shout out in Obama’s remarks (the federal highway system), the Democrats and not the GOP are the party that supports investing public money and building things these days: Mass transit, schools, green collar projects; this is D Party platform stuff.

The GOP, obstructionists on public works (locally, they tried to repeal the gas tax), has hitched its fate to anti-tax rhetoric that scoffs at the notion of public investment. For years now, Republicans have framed investment as dirty liberal code for “tax and spend.” Obama’s warning took the GOP at its word, and so, was a serious F.U. and an endorsement of Democrats.  

2. I like that Obama ended his speech (broadcast nationally on the radio) by saying, “Thanks for listening” instead of being all “God bless America.” It was another F.U.

We are going to have a president who will side with regular folks.

President-elect Barack Obama said that union workers in Chicago who are protesting their factory’s sudden closure with a sit-in are justified in demanding their benefits and pay.

“I think they’re absolutely right,” Obama said today in response to a question at a Chicago news conference. “And understand that what’s happening to them is reflective of what’s happening across this economy.”

Obama, who gave up his Illinois Senate seat last month after the Nov. 4 election, was asked at a press conference today to weigh in on the protest at Chicago’s Republic Windows & Doors factory, which closed on Dec. 5 after Bank of America canceled its line of credit.

Obviously one could dream up a scenario where a president has to make a tough call that involves compromise. The real world is not simple, nor is it perfect.

But here we have Obama siding with workers who are simply demanding what is theirs. That is a profound change.

You never know how history will shake out when you are living it. But the workers at Republic Windows and Doors deserve not only their pay, but the thanks of the entire country for standing up to the corporate oligarchy. Who knows what their action will inspire? The financial sector thieves who brought this mess upon all our heads need to be held accountable, for starters.

Perhaps King County should also levy a special tax on shoes, strollers and wheelbarrows.

Dirty hippies with their feet, babies and dirt anyhow.

Death with Dignity is now legal in Montana.

Yeah, know any good lawyers?

Plaxico Burress is an obnoxious ass who plays for a team I loathe. But all it took was for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to act like he committed the crime of the century for me to start sympathizing with him.

The incident itself was so stupid, it’s almost surreal. Burress goes into a night club with a loaded gun tucked into his sweatpants and accidentally shoots himself in the thigh. The gun was illegal for him to possess in New York City. He was certainly in violation of the law. But Mayor Bloomberg is pushing for a 3 1/2 year mandatory minimum jail sentence. Really? 3 1/2 years in jail? Is this really worse than what Michael Vick was doing?

It’s starting to become more well-known that many NFL players are carrying guns to protect themselves. A number of players have been feeling targeted recently. Redskins cornerback Sean Taylor was shot and killed in his own home last year in a burglary attempt. ESPN Magazine recently profiled a number of players who say that they fear for their lives when out in public. The vast majority of those players are responsible gun owners.

But Burress clearly isn’t. I think he should be punished for not having his weapon properly registered and for allowing it to go off in a public place, but I still find myself far more threatened by nanny state zealots like Michael Bloomberg than I do by dumbasses like Plaxico Burress.

Last week’s contest was won by Brian in record time, 7 minutes. It was JFK Airport in New York.

Here’s this week’s…good luck.

We celebrated the 75th anniversary of the end of alcohol prohibition this week, making many wonder about the parallels that exist between then and now when it comes to the illegality of marijuana. Pete Guither takes out the fisking tools and goes to work on this column in the Los Angeles Times that warns about regulating and taxing this widely used and far safer drug.

I thought it would make some news when the state Attorney General, the man charged with prosecuting campaign finance and reporting violations, was credibly accused of campaign finance and reporting violations himself. But I never went to J-school, so what do I know?

Then again, our local media is so in love with the notion of Rob McKenna as the good Republican, I’m pretty sure he’d have to be caught on tape strangling a six-year-old to generate any negative press.

I’ve been an atheist since I was about 14. By my senior year in high school, I really, truly disliked religious people. I was dating a girl whose mother was an insufferable religious fanatic. I even made a Sunday School teacher tear up. But unlike the idiots who posted the sign at the Capital, I eventually grew up. That sign was unnecessarily mean-spirited. You don’t have to tear others down to find validation, but sadly, too many atheists still see their religion as antagonism rather than an intellectual pursuit.

And I know Goldy made this point on Tuesday night, but it really needs to be made again. In a week where Congress is debating whether to invest massive amounts of our tax dollars into a dying industry, where unemployment levels are the highest point in my lifetime, and where India and Pakistan are sitting on a very steep precipice, we actually had Bill O’Reilly talking to Goldy at the top of the hour on Tuesday night, railing against “political correctness” because he’s offended by a sign. And of course, the end result for the atheists is that being idiots got their sign on millions of TV sets across the country. Bill O’Reilly, making America dumber and more obnoxious every day.

Not only did Clark County go for Obama, Evergreen High’s band will be in the parade on Jan. 20 back in DC.

Very very cool and congrats to Evergreen.

As Robert Reich points out here, under-employment is yet more yucky icing on a very nasty cake of unemployment figures. (Okay, Reich is far more eloquent and would never likely come up with such a pathetic analogy.) But still–yikes. From Bloomberg:

More Americans than ever worked only partial days in November as the deepening recession prompted companies to cut full-time employment.

The number of Americans saying they worked part-time last month due to economic reasons — either because their hours were cut or they couldn’t find full-time jobs — surged to 7.32 million, the most since records began in 1955, from 6.7 million in October, the Labor Department reported today.

The increase in part-time workers helped prevent the jobless rate — which rose to 6.7 percent last month from 6.5 percent in October — from climbing even more. Counting part- timers who would prefer full-time work, as well as discouraged workers who are no longer looking for jobs, the jobless rate would have jumped to 12.5 percent from 11.8 percent in October.

And to answer the question Reich asks in the title of his post, um yeah, it’s a Depression. I know it’s a matter of semantics, but since Karl Rove and Karen Hughes are busily trying to re-write history even as it happens, I think it’s only fair we get Bush’s name attached to this last bitter pill.

I propose we call it the “Bush Financial Depression,” at least for now. Hopefully it will not become Great Depression II. If things get that bad nothing can save one shred of the Bush-Cheney legacy.

At this point it’s not about blame. It’s about not listening in the future to people who have been clearly and repeatedly wrong about every last damn thing, military, economic and diplomatic. Basically, when a Republican opens their mouth, a traditional journalist should have a mental checklist about how many times that person has been utterly and completely wrong. Eight long years of right wing fantasy have led us to this point, and fantasy is something we can no longer afford.

So when you hear that state and local governments are facing tough times, this is what it means to communities. From The Columbian’s Michael Andersen:

What will change the most?

Probably public health, code enforcement, drug and mental health treatment and (don’t scoff) the county’s internal computer team.

The public health department will change radically, laying off a third of its staff by the end of 2009 and instead trying to recruit nonprofits to do the same work for less pay. The county will lose three of its seven code enforcement officers. Nobody knows yet where the cuts will come in drug and mental health treatment, because they depend on state decisions next year. And with five positions cut from the computer team, all the county’s computers will crash more and employees won’t be trained as well in using computers.

Will any county services improve?

The county sheriff’s road patrols will add four new deputy positions in 2010. The sheriff says that’s not enough to keep up with the population, so it’s an open question.

One thing worth noticing is that large portions of relatively urban areas are not incorporated in Clark County. We’re basically an unincorporated city being governed by county government, replete with all the resulting tension between urban and rural needs.

This area includes Salmon Creek, Felida and Hazel Dell, if you know the geography here. Lots of houses, schools and shopping areas were built in these places in the last fifteen years, but because of historical animosity towards Vancouver, the odds are the city will never be able to annex. Past efforts to form a separate city have failed miserably.

So we’re stuck being governed by a three-member county commission, the same system of government that we had at statehood. Right now control of that body is technically still in doubt as we await the results of an automatic recount in a county commission race, a recount which is being held up by a computer glitch. Most observers expect, though, that Republican Tom Mielke will hang on to win by about 200 votes.

We have all the challenges of other urbanized areas: traffic, crime, a need for more family wage jobs, etc. But our form of government is the same as when everyone grew peaches for a living. Don’t know if there were a ton of untreated mentally ill folks wandering around peach orchards back in the day, but it looks like one possible future for life in Clark County. Such are the costs of the Bush Depression.

A dear friend of mine lost his job yesterday. 

He was a research analyst for an investment bank on Wall Street. His job was to research an industry, become an expert on it, and write reports on the industry for his firm’s investors. His research and analysis helped his firm’s investors make decisions about where to invest their money.

My friend covered the newspaper industry.

If Bill O’Reilly thinks our state’s opinion leaders are going to follow his lead in whipping up a tempest in teapot over the Atheist display in the state Capitol, he has another thing coming:

The state of Washington seems to have hit on the right approach for a nation that evolved because of people seeking the right to worship as they want. This year, the state Capitol displays not only a menorah, commemorating the eight-day Jewish festival of Hanukkah, and a Nativity scene depicting the Christmas story, but also a statement of a thoroughly dissenting opinion. The Freedom From Religion Foundation has placed a sign that reads: “Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.”

The pluralism of the holiday display might be a little unruly, but it is a reasonable alternative to stripping from government buildings any reference to these holidays that are such an important part of many citizens’ lives.

Gov. Gregoire’s staff has fielded thousands of calls since O’Reilly started broadcasting her phone number on TV and radio, but staffers tell me they’re mostly coming from out of state, and I’ve got news for Billo and his legion of angry automatons… out-of-staters don’t pay taxes here in our Washington, and they sure as hell don’t vote.  So they shouldn’t expect more than passing attention from our very busy governor.

Personally, I don’t much disagree with the content of the “Reasons Greetings” sign, though I would not have definitively stated that religion “hardens hearts and enslaves minds,” (it can and sometimes does, but not always), and I certainly wouldn’t have placed such an unnecessarily anti-religious message in a holiday display.  But one doesn’t have to defend the message to defend the messenger’s right to express it on an equal footing with other religious groups.  In Washington, as in the rest of the nation, government simply cannot express preference for one religion over another, nor for religion over non-religion.

The consequences of the First Amendment may at times be messy and irritating or even offensive, but the rights enunciated within provide the bulwark from which all our rights are protected.  This near absolute reverence for freedom of religion, speech and the press was a uniquely American invention, and has always been our nation’s greatest strength.

So if I had the opportunity to answer O’Reilly’s questions with one of my own, I suppose I’d ask Billo… “Why do you hate America?”