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If we’re going to be stimulatin’ and subsidizin’ the construction industry, an admittedly wise step considering the scope of the financial scandal and related crash, could we pretty please with sugar on top have basic consumer protections in return?

Is there something I don’t understand here? You buy a new car, you get a warranty and you’re covered by the lemon law. If the wheels fall off you have options.

You buy a new house and the plumbing fails, well, sorry pal. Caveat emptor.

It doesn’t make any sense, and it really won’t make any sense if we inject hundreds of millions of dollars into a sector without providing basic consumer safeguards. This socialism stuff has to be about all the people, not just the bidness guy socialists. Otherwise it’s Chi-Com Socialism!

This past week saw the passage of nearly every drug law reform initiative on ballots across the country. Among the big ones, medical marijuana is now legal in Michigan. Possession of up to an ounce of marijuana has been decriminalized in Massachusetts and replaced with a $100 civil infraction. And Hawaii County, Hawaii residents made marijuana enforcement the lowest priority for the police. All three initiatives were landslides. In fact, the percentages of people voting for the initiatives in Michigan and Massachusetts were higher than the percentages who voted for Obama.

The result was clearly not from a lack of opposition. Drug Czar John Walters even traveled to Michigan in October to beg people not to vote for medical marijuana (which is probably a violation of The Hatch Act of 1939). In Massachusetts, law enforcement officials actively campaigned against the decriminalization measure. Now that the voters have loudly stood up for more sensible drug policy, law enforcement officials are throwing temper tantrums over it. Let’s break down five of the dumbest things said this past week by those who can’t figure out why voters are giving them the finger.

1. Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association representative Jim Carnell

“Few people, if any, who were arrested for simple possession were ever in any real jeopardy of a serious nature, provided they learned from past transgressions.”

The initiative in Massachusetts has law enforcement officials all twisted around. After complaining that the initiative was unnecessary because pot smokers never really had anything bad happen to them, they’re now complaining about how there’s no teeth to the marijuana laws any more. It’s been comical to watch them try to have it both ways.

The major reason why this initiative was needed was because people with an arrest for even minor marijuana possession will have a lifelong criminal record that makes it difficult for them to obtain housing and jobs, even if there wasn’t a conviction. In 2006, nearly 7,000 people were arrested for marijuana possession. Now, the vast majority of those people would only be written a $100 ticket (although there’s an interesting question as to whether police can ask for a person’s ID to be able to write that ticket).

2. Holyoke, MA Police Chief Anthony Scott

“It’s basically telling young people that it’s okay to possess an ounce or less of marijuana, after we have been spending millions of dollars trying to tell kids to say no to drugs, not to drink, and to quit smoking.”

This is totally ridiculous. Alcohol and cigaretters are legal for adults. Does that mean that we have to make alcohol and cigarettes illegal in order to tell kids that they shouldn’t drink or smoke? There’s nothing dangerous about treating marijuana the same way we treat alcohol or cigarettes. In fact, cigarette smoking among young people has been dropping. We didn’t have to make it illegal to accomplish that.

3. Six Michigan Law Enforcement Officials

“How do law enforcement officers respond to marijuana growing operations when the owners claim that they are “caregivers” who must cultivate marijuana for their customers?”

It’s very simple. You should find out if they’re telling the truth, and if they are, let them be.

It never ceases to amaze me that law enforcement officials think that when they bust a marijuana grow operation that they’ve somehow completely eradicated marijuana from their area. They actually believe that they’re some “front line” against marijuana, and that if they didn’t do what they do, all hell would be breaking loose. It’s just another example of the great adage that “a man will never understand something if his paycheck depends on him not understanding it.”

Whenever a grow operation is busted, another one that doesn’t get busted just gets richer. In the end, organized criminals end up controlling the entire trade and getting filthy rich. Not exactly a smart way to protect people in a community, but for reasons that continually amaze me, law enforcement officials will fight tooth and nail to keep doing it this way.

4. Hawaii County, HI Police Chief Lawrence Mahuna

“If you’re pro-drug, or pro-marijuana, you’re automatically pro-terrorist.”

What a moron. I don’t even know what to say.

5. The Drug Czar’s new ad campaign

“Hey, not trying to be your mom, but there aren’t many jobs out there for potheads.”

Actually, there a quite a few jobs out there for pot smokers. For one, President. The last time we had a President who’d never smoked pot before was 1992. There’s a video here with the many, many other people who smoke pot and have jobs, including scientists, businessmen, and entertainers. Personally, I know of doctors, lawyers, corporate executives, and people of all walks of life who enjoy smoking pot. The myths about this drug are dying. Hopefully, prohibitionists will figure this out and stop making asses of themselves.

There’s no question the economic downturn has been hard on house builders. But at least one BIAW-affiliated official is optimistic. Here’s David Roewe, executive director of the Building Industry Association of Clark County, the local unit of the BIAW, in a Columbian business section article:

Roewe predicted home sales would improve after the first of the year and continue to pick up in the second quarter of 2009.

“Springtime is when you’ll see the release of money, with the new (presidential) administration in office,” he said.

See, even some BIAW folks are rooting for President-elect Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress to succeed. Now that’s refreshing.

Seattle Times editorial page editor Jim Vesely is deeply disappointed by Gov. Chris Gregoire’s reelection, so much so, that’s he’s taken to bad mouthing his own readers:

Democrats are doing well on the Eastside of metropolitan Seattle, either through onslaughts by good candidates or the inevitable party-switching that represents tidal change. Yet before the Republican majorities in the far Eastside are snuffed, something remains of their efforts: a general sense that self-absorbed Seattle is not the definer of metropolitan life, that political independence is not the sponge to be soaked up by King County Democrats, and that a way of life on the exurban Plateau has meaning beyond Seattle’s persistent, and effete, condemnation.

“Self-absorbed” and “effete”…?  Really?  This is the sort of profound disaffection Vesely ironically holds for the city whose name is featured in his paper’s masthead?  Wouldn’t it be more honest to rename the paper “The Sammamish Times”?  Is it possible for subscribers to sue the Blethens for false advertising, based on the so-called “Seattle” Times’ blatantly misleading name?

Honestly, how can the Times editors claim to represent the interests of Seattle when they hold such obvious contempt for the city and its residents? And how can their holier than thou exhortations against partisanship be taken the least bit seriously when they prove so eager to fan the flames of such petty and divisive sub-regional factionalism?

I’m just askin’….

I happened to recently see a replay of a documentary entitled “Liquid Assets-The Story of Our Water Infrastructure.” The film is part of a project at Penn State.

There’s a lot of talk right now about funding infrastructure as both a sensible investment in our future and as a means of stimulating the economy, although as Robert Reich pointed out on-air today on CNN, critics will point out large projects can take a while to get going.

But as the documentary mentions, there are projects all over the country involving water and sewer that need funding, and while they may not be as um, sexy, as light rail or big bridges, they are no less vital. And the film doesn’t just focus on big city projects like Atlanta and New York, it also features a small town in Pennsylvania that simply has no sanitary sewer. The lines just empty into the creek, or even worse, back up into lawns and streets. In 2008. Despite a decade or more of efforts to fund a sewer system, little progress has been made. And nobody should care whether these are “real” Americans or “fake” Americans, they’re Americans for crying out loud.

These are the kinds of nuts and bolts issues that Republicans have ignored with their endless and robotic attacks on government and taxes. Sure, nobody wants to pay more taxes, but poop backing up into lawns and streets isn’t exactly a neat thing either.

So as we move into the next administration, it would be wise for the Congress to fund basic water and sewer projects, not only to help the environment but to help our country compete on a global stage. It’s kind of hard to attract business without clean water and sewer systems.

I’m in the midst of writing a rather longish post-election analysis of the gubernatorial race, attempting to explain Gov. Chris Gregoire’s decisive victory in what most observers expected to be a nail-biter of a rematch, but I thought I’d take a moment to quickly share a rather heretical observation:  Gregoire not only ran a better campaign, her winning strategy was exemplified by her much maligned ads attacking Dino Rossi for opposing embryonic stem cell research.

Of course it is true, as many critics have pointed out, that few if any voters would cast their ballots based on an issue the Seattle Times angrily argued had “nothing to do” with the job of governor, but that critique misses the broader symbolic value of the issue.  What the Gregoire campaign accomplished with these ads was something they failed to even attempt in 2004:  they defined Rossi as a religious conservative, a strategy that ultimately pays off big dividends with our state’s politically split, but decidedly socially libertarian electorate.

In fact, I’d argue that the Gregoire campaign borrowed an earmarked page from the Republican playbook, successfully portraying the Governor as the candidate who best represented the values of the majority of voters.  And toward that end, these stem cell ads proved to be an extremely effective if subtle tactic.

One could have attacked Rossi on his opposition to legal abortion, but a lot of people oppose abortion on moral grounds, and we tend to be a religiously tolerant nation.  One could have attacked Rossi on the pharmacist rule or abstinence only sex education, but these are complicated issues not easily explained in a 30-second spot.  But the stem cell research issue proved to be a perfect proxy, defining Rossi as a candidate who would impose his own conservative religious values even into the realm of science, adversely affecting the ability of individuals to make health care decisions for themselves.  In effect, these stem cell ads defined Rossi as too conservative for Washington, along the lines of Ellen Craswell and John Carlson.

Indeed, this values theme was repeated throughout Gov. Gregoire’s paid media, for example, on the issues of education and children’s health care.  Even on the issue of our state’s projected multi-billion dollar revenue shortfall, the Gregoire campaign focused on her pro-children values, emphasizing that Rossi attempted to cut health care for 40,000 children while the Governor expanded the rolls, and that Gregoire had increased spending on education while Rossi’s transportation spending proposal would come at the expense of our schools.  Who do you best trust to balance our budget, Gregoire asked, leaving it to voters to choose the candidate who best represented their values.

By comparison, the Rossi campaign was for the most part value free, attacking Gregoire on her performance in office—taxes, spending, budget deficit, etc.—while failing to even attempt to define the Governor as too liberal, apart from a half-hearted last ditch effort to claim she would impose an income tax.  Likewise, following 2004’s successful Tabula Rossi strategy—in which voters read moderation into his refusal to discuss social issues—Rossi even declined to define himself.  Only this time around, the Gregoire campaign did it for him.  As Stuart Elway noted in his October poll:

“Gregoire has an edge on values among those who care most about those issues.  Gregoire is seen as Moderate Liberal.  Rossi is seen as conservative.  He wasn’t in 2004.”

This shift in public perception of Rossi’s values proved to be one of the major differences between 2004 and 2008… and it didn’t happen by accident.  Score one for the Gregoire campaign.

The King County Sheriff’s Department, prosecutor’s office and other law enforcement officials have sounded the alarm over impending budget cuts, warning that they could result in a significant adverse impact on public safety.  And no doubt that’s true.

But as municipal governments statewide struggle to cope with the economic downturn and its resulting decline in sales and property tax revenues, it is important to remember that the criminal justice system comprises over 70 percent of the general fund of nearly every county in the state, and thus any substantial decline in local tax revenues is going to inevitably impact public safety.  You simply cannot effectively address substantial budget shortfalls without addressing the largest part of your budget.

Washington Democrats have every reason to be cheered over last Tuesday’s election results, but as far as I can tell our party leaders have no plan in place to address our long term state and local structural revenue deficit… a deficit that when adjusted for good and bad economic times, assures that tax revenues cannot possibly keep pace with economic growth, and thus cannot possibly keep pace with growth in demand for public services.

If what we want is a dramatically smaller government, we can elect Republicans, or, apparently, we can elect Democrats, and just gradually get to the same place by default.  If that’s what voters really want, just don’t complain when the Sheriff’s Department starts laying off officers.

Right Wing Nut House proprietor Rick Moran writes at American Thinker:

No one is saying that the Democrats are trying to steal the Minnesota senate race between GOP incumbent Norm Coleman and Democratic clown Al Franken – yet

And after citing an article comparing the Minnesota Senatorial election to the Florida 2000 debacle, Moran goes on to suggest that the election is being stolen, but in a slightly different way:

This is shaping up more and more like the transparent way the Washington state governor’s race was stolen by Democrats in 2006 when hundreds of ballots were suddenly “found” in Democratic King County – many of them coming from people (it was later determined) with unverifiable addresses.

Here we see the seeds of the type of propaganda effort, based on twisting of the truth and downright factually incorrect information (what is called, in less polite company, fucking lies), that occurred during the previous Washington state gubernatorial contest.

Interestingly, the the previous bullshit propaganda is cited as “evidence” to bolster the new propaganda efforts. I guess this is what Bush meant by “catapult the propaganda.”

Let’s ignore the first error—the race in question was 2004, not 2006. That’s an honest mistake that any out-of-state Wingnut could make.

The propaganda begins by the suggestion that ballots were “suddenly ‘found,'” in King County, as if nobody had any idea where the ballots came from. The implication, of course, is that they were manufactured after the election and thrown into the mix to change the outcome

There were several batches of “found” ballots in King County. The first batch resulted when elections workers put aside ballots from people whose signatures had not been previously scanned into the computer system. The workers were supposed to check the signatures against the paper records, but they didn’t. This was only discovered because King County Councilman Larry Phillips was one of the victims. A total of 561 absentee ballots were “found” this way.

The other source of found ballots came from the insides of secured voting machines and trays stored in a secure warehouse. There were 723 ~160 of these ballots literally found. But they were valid ballots cast during the election, and the voters who cast them were entitled to have them counted. The Republicans sued to prevent these ballots from being canvassed. The state Supreme Court rejected that idea.

The other implication in Moran’s statement is that, somehow, King County stood out as the source of “found” ballots. There were other counties that also “found” ballots. In fact, King County did not have the highest “error rate” in the state—there were four counties with higher rates. King County did have errors, but only at a rate slightly higher than the background rate for the whole state. King County also had a substantially higher voter load, with the same amount of processing time as other counties, so this is hardly surprising. The Republicans lost the election contest lawsuit in every way—except for the propaganda wars.

The final bit of propaganda in Moran’s statement is an irresponsible falsehood. He states that the “found” ballots in King County had “unverifiable addresses.” Um…no.

I don’t know where this notion came from. Perhaps Moran is confusing the 2004 election contest with a 2005 Republican scandal in which the senior vice president of the King County Republican Party, Lori Sotelo, challenged 1,944 voters days before the election, based on some sloppy attempts to find voter addresses that were not real residences (mailbox outlets or storage facilities). The challenges were potentially perjurious, fradulent, and hugely error prone (only 58 ballots of 1,944 challenges were disqualified). The episode had nothing to do with the contested 2004 election.

In sum…Moran doesn’t know what the fuck he is talking about.

He probably doen’t care…truth and accuracy are not what it is all about. It’s the early stages of a shameless propaganda effort.

Let’s hope the politicians, the political parties, the media, and the bloggers do a better job with fighting Republican bullshit about election-fraud in Minnesota in 2008–2009 than they did with Washington state in 2004–2005.

At the end of Thursday night’s Browns-Broncos game, Broncos receiver Brandon Marshall caught the go-ahead touchdown with 1:14 remaining in the game. He appeared to pull something out of his uniform, but Brandon Stokley, his fellow Bronco receiver, ran over to him shaking his head no. I saw this clearly and couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on. After the game, Marshall explained:

After the game, Marshall, who is black, read a statement he wrote about how inspired he was by Obama becoming the first black man elected to the nation’s highest office.

“Barak Obama’s election as the 44th president of the United States is a tremendous symbol of unity,” Marshall said. “I want to create that symbol of unity because Obama inspires me (and) a multicultural society, and I know at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised that black glove and fist in a silent gesture of black power and liberation.

“Forty years later, I wanted to make my own statement and gesture to represent the progress we made,” Marshall said. “I might get some criticism, but social landmarks are bigger than fines to me, especially two days out of an historic election.”

Stokley had a good reason to do what he did. The NFL flags people for excessive celebrations and a 15-yard penalty on the kickoff might have eventually cost Denver the game. But the NFL missed out on what would have been a very memorable moment for the league. Instead, they reinforced their stereotype as the No Fun League. They do this to avoid controversy, but when you’re always trying to avoid controversy, you end up just being boring. I’m ok with a stupid Terrell Owens touchdown celebration once in a while if it means we get to see one that’s truly inspired.

Last week’s Birds Eye View Contest went unsolved, but something weird did happen with the picture. When I first copied it last week, at intersection of Amethyst St and Raynol St in Los Angeles, there were no homes ready to slide down the hill. I went back there just now, and…homes have been built! Doesn’t Southern California have enough empty houses already? Sorry to everyone who tried solving that one, although I think wes.in.wa was on it. That was way hard.

Here’s this week’s…it’s not impossible. Good luck.

Control of the Clark County commission may hinge on a recount. The Columbian reports that Republican former state legislator Tom Mielke has a slim 78 vote lead over Democrat Pam Brokaw. Since Republican incumbent Marc Boldt won handily, and Democrat Steve Stuart was not up this year, partisan control will rest on the outcome of the Mielke-Brokaw race.

Don’t know exactly why ballots counted later tend to break Republican, and I suppose it doesn’t matter as the votes are the votes, but it is like water torture, as Aneurin observes.

So maybe Darcy should complain to the Washington News Council, that supposedly objective collection of movers and shakers who have arrogated to themselves the right to decide what constitutes real journalism. They did so in the WA-08 race in 2006, when they voted thumbs down on a P-I story about the real story behind Dave Reichert’s investigation of the Green River Killer. The P-I wisely rejected their findings, but the Washington New Council got their little kangaroo court broadcast on TVW, if I recall correctly. So our tax dollars were being used against us in a bald political manner, even if it was all dressed up in legal niceties. Still waiting on the Legislative hearings asking TVW um, WTF?

Here we are two years later and the Seattle Times indisputably did a hit job on Darcy Burner, so I’m sure the Washington News Council will be all over it.

And the Washington News Council is having a nice dinner tomorrow night! You should go. Really. I bet they’ll just be outraged about what happened to Burner and can’t wait to get to the bottom of it.

Here’s the poster:

Yesterday, I was watching President-elect Barack Obama’s first post-election press conference, when Will called, and I scolded him for interrupting me while I was watching “my President.”  And I suddenly realized how long it’s been since I was able to utter the phrase “my President,” without throwing up in my mouth.

A historic election indeed.

To find out why this is the coolest thing ever, click here.