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Over on Slog, Josh writes about outgoing state Sen. Brian Weinstein and his quest to pass his Home Buyer’s Bill of Rights before he retires at the end on this session. Some had suggested Sen. Weinstein was using his Senate committee to hold hostage a condo conversion bill recently passed by the House; Sen. Weinstein, a consumer protection champion, denies the two are related, telling Josh “I expect to pass it.”

He also said he had a good meeting with House Speaker Frank Chopp (D-43, Capitol Hill) about the homeowners’ rights bill. Last year, Weinstein accused Chopp of caving to the BIAW by snuffing Weinstein’s homeowner bill.

He didn’t say Chopp promised to move the bill forward, but he did say: “It was a good discussion. He asked good questions and it was a good meeting. Last year at this time, the bill was dead.”

Oh to be a fly on the wall at that meeting. Sen. Weinstein has a well deserved reputation as a tough negotiator, but what kind of leverage can a retiring senator hold over our famously risk-averse House Speaker?

Well, the buzz amongst the consumer protection community is that Sen. Weinstein has been quietly talking about possibly unretiring should his bill fail to get through the Legislature this session… potentially creating a very messy Democratic primary battle between an incumbent senator and newly minted Democrat, Rep. Fred Jarrett.

Did Sen. Weinstein make this threat to Speaker Chopp? I’ve got no idea, but it certainly would be a doozy. Sen. Weinstein, for all his merits, can be a bit abrasive, and I’ve heard that our amiable Speaker doesn’t like him all that much — so buying Weinstein a one-way ticket out of Olympia might be well worth the price of the bill to both Chopp and the BIAW. And the last thing Speaker Chopp and Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown want at this late stage in the game is to have their neatly arranged 41st LD races thrown into disarray. The Democrat seeking to replace Jarrett in the House, Renton’s Marcie Maxwell, is no sure thing, and a Godzilla versus Mothra battle for the Senate seat would surely draw money and resources out of the House race.

The easiest way to avoid this mess is to pass Sen. Weinstein’s bill, which merely gives buyers of new construction a minimum legal warranty on the biggest purchase they’ll ever make in their lives. (Two years on materials and workmanship, ten years on structural defects.) And what’s so wrong about that?

My friend in the mortgage industry back in Philly sent me a funny Powerpoint presentation that’s floating around to help explain the subprime loan mess. I’ve embedded it here using Powerpoint’s semi-adequate Save as Web Page feature. Enjoy.

UPDATE: Apparently, the link does not work for Mac users. I’ll see if there’s another way I can embed it.

UPDATE 2: ‘Sidereal’ in the comments found it at another link. Click here. That should work for everyone. Thanks!

In the several years I’ve lived in Belltown, you’ve been a good neighbor. The people who take classes with you are most nice, well-adjusted kids, and they don’t cause trouble. You’ve got a nice location, right on the waterfront. I use your parking garage often whenever I grab a Flexcar Zipcar for a few hours. All in all, it’s been a good relationship thus far. But there’s something on your campus I’ve got my eye on.

Your basketball court.

See, the City of Seattle took away a half court when they put in the dog park at 3rd and Bell. The closest public basketball court in now up at the Denny Playfield, which doesn’t get the love it should.

Belltown is home to some interesting open space. There’s the Belltown cottages, Victor Steinbrueck Park, the aforementioned dog park on 3rd and Bell, and the Olympic Sculpture Park. The latter has a sign which says, “no active sports allowed.” So while my neighborhood has a gigantic typewriter eraser sitting on a grassy burm, it doesn’t have a b-ball court.

Is there an agreement we can come to that might allow Kurt Rambis-types such as myself the chance to shoot hoops at your court, until the city finally puts up some rims under the Viaduct? I want to play some pick-up basketball without having to leave my neighborhood.

Can we make this happen?

For those of you who, like me, miss my weekend radio gig (and especially for those few of you who have made it clear that you definitely do not), I am pleased to announce that I will be back on 710-KIRO, if only temporarily, filling in for Dave Ross for most of the next two weeks. So tune in 9AM to Noon, February 25th through the 29th, and again March 3rd through the 6th, as I bring my drive time propaganda to the masses while wiping my liberal stink all over Dori’s microphone.

Sure, I’d prefer my own show, but if they’re still letting me sit in for Dave, I suppose I must not suck all that much after all.

The Seattle Times fires off another editorial ripping Democrats for caucusing:

Washington voters pride themselves on their independence. Many had trouble reconciling the fact that they had to sign an oath of allegiance to a party for their vote to count. The parties insisted on that.

Can you believe it? The Democrats insist that only Democrats* participate in their nominating process. What assholes!

You know, if independents and Republicans get to decide who gets the Democratic nomination for president, I should be allowed to weigh in on who the Seattle Times endorses. It’s only fair.

*or people willing to say, for one day, that they are a Democrat.

More from Josh Feit’s interview:

Sure, endorsing Obama was calculated political pandering. But we like being pandered to.

To believe that Gregoire endorsed Barack Obama for political reasons is just wrong. Clearly, the “smart political move” would have been to not endorse in the race. Gregoire pissed off a lot of women by not endorsing the woman in the race. (My mom, for one.) Clinton backers would have dumped some fat checks on the Gregoire ’08 campaign. They may not, at least not for a while.

Hey, I got an idea… Maybe Gregoire was actually inspired by Barack Obama in the same way she was inspired by John F. Kennedy? Why it always has to be a “calculation”, I don’t understand.

Yo know, some of this governor’s biggest achievements have been non-political in nature, such as reaching an agreement between insurance companies and lawyers, or on water rights in eastern Washington.

And you know what? Maybe rushing into the implementation of a cap-and-trade isn’t the best thing. Says Gregoire:

We’re trying to get everybody to stay together. Here’s why: It’s one thing to get a bill passed, but it’s another thing to get it implemented. The way to make it move forward is to get everybody committed to implementation. This isn’t about taking away from Ecology. It’s saying, “Ecology, you develop a cap and trade, but bring it back to the legislature for approval,” versus, “You have the authority to adopt the rules and implement them today.” That’s the difference. That’s what they [business interests] want, and I’m okay with that.

Considering Gregoire ran the Ecology Department under Gov. Booth Gardner, I think she knows what it’ll take to get this done in a way that get all the parties on board. It reeks of competency and cooperation, not calculation.

This week’s Birds Eye View Contest is posted.

If you haven’t, you should read Josh Feit’s good-but-too-snarky interview with Gov. Chris Gregoire. The part that jumped out at me was about light rail:

Gov. Gregoire:

I would do north before south. I’ve said to both the mayor and Joni [Earl, Sound Transit executive director]: Let me see what it is.

Josh Feit:

Wrong answer. The right answer: “I’m excited to see their plan, and I’m excited to promote light-rail expansion this year.” After all, she was gung ho about a light-rail plan that included 185 miles of new roads. Why so finicky about light rail only?

I think the Governor is focused on replacing the 520 bridge and pushing ahead with the Alaskan Way Corridor Project. Light rail is a local issue, and besides freeing up MVET for use by Sound Transit, the Governor should not be a major player on the issue.

The fact that Josh is asking Gregoire to do heavy lifting for a light rail package that doesn’t exist yet is goofy, especially considering The Stranger’s ignorant slagging-off of light rail between the airport and Tacoma. I mean, what happens when Sound Transit 2.1 comes out and they find that not enough of it is being built in Capitol Hill?

Sen. John McCain says he’s “going to go to war” with the New York Times, because frankly, that’s all McCain knows how to do. War, metaphorical or otherwise, is his response to everything. I swear, the guy is suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder… his “fight or flight” response is stuck permanently on the former.

And there are folks who want this guy to be the one with his finger on the button?

In related news, The New Republic brings us the story behind the story of the McCain/Iseman affair, while Josh suddenly claims to have standards.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Joel Connelly seemed almost prescient in his column yesterday, accusing his colleagues in the legacy media of holding Sen. John McCain to a “different standard.”

[T]he national press corps’ “big feet” owe it to the country to put aside their pack mentality and subject McCain to the same critical scrutiny as other presidential hopefuls.

A year ago, on “Hardball,” Matthews asked about Hillary Clinton’s presidential aspirations: “What have you done to deserve this job?”

The program’s guest allowed that this was a “tough question” facing the full field of candidates.

“Not so much for McCain,” Matthews interrupted. “He has deserved the presidency. Whether he should be president or not, it’s up to the voters.”

It’s a different standard.

I don’t know if Joel was tipped that the New York Times bombshell was about to drop, but his column couldn’t have been more timely. Last night after reading the headlines of McCain’s alleged affair with a lobbyist 30 years his junior, and his inappropriate ties to firms with business before his committee, I flipped through the cable news channels expecting to see the media in a fevered feeding frenzy. Virtually nada. You’d think CNN and FOX News hadn’t discovered the Internet yet, while what little coverage I saw on MSNBC was almost apologetic: it’s a “ten year old story”, we were told… “anonymous sources” and “firm denials” from the campaign… there’s no there there. This despite the fact that as they spoke the Washington Post had already named names:

John Weaver, who was McCain’s closest confidant until leaving his current campaign last year, said he met with Vicki Iseman at the Center Cafe at Union Station and urged her to stay away from McCain. Association with a lobbyist would undermine his image as an opponent of special interests, aides had concluded.

By this morning, the right wing propaganda machine was in top gear, attempting to make this a story about the NY Times credibility, not Sen. McCain’s… and how this unfolds over the next few days and weeks will tell Joel everything he needs to know about the objectivity, impartiality and courage of his colleagues in the legacy press. Anybody who knows anything about the workings of the corporate media knows that the NY Times only ran this story after extensive research and internal debate, and only after an excruciating vetting by their attorneys. And, at it’s heart, this is not merely a story about an inappropriate relationship (sexually consummated or not) between a then 63-year-old US senator and a 32-year-old lobbyist; this is a story about an inappropriate relationship between a US senator and lobbyists and their clients who had business before his committee. This is the story about a presidential candidate who runs on his reputation as a champion of campaign finance reform and breaking the power of special interests, while at the same time using his influence on behalf of companies giving him tens of thousands of dollars in contributions and flying him around on their private jet.

This is a story about hypocrisy.

If this were a story about Barack Obama it would likely cost him the nomination. If Hillary Clinton, a married woman, was exposed as having had a romantic affair, it would likely end her political career. But “Straight Talk” McCain, a man who has admitted to past infidelity (he began his affair with his current wife before divorcing his first)… he, we are told, should receive the benefit of the doubt. If he denies having sex with Ms. Iseman, then that should be the end of that. And if the sexual allegation is dismissed, then that means all the other very serious allegations in the NY Times article should be dismissed as well. At least, that is the GOP spin we’re hearing today coming from their official and unofficial mouthpieces.

But this is not an unsourced smear as the McCain camp has framed it, and it is not a he said/she said about sex. The NY Times published a well sourced article about official corruption, and it is time for the DC media to abandon their myth about the straight talking McCain, and as Joel says, subject him to “the same critical scrutiny as other presidential hopefuls.”

The right will attempt to do to the NY Times what they did to Dan Rather. Shame on the traditional media if they succeed. And shame on us in the blogosphere if we allow that to happen without putting up one helluva fight.

Now that I’m a flesh-eatin’, red votin’ member of the Washington State Republican Party, I suppose have some ethical obligation to make these goofballs look good less idiotic. One way to do that is show that there are Republicans in other states who are even more incompetent and corrupt than our crop.

So, Washington state Republicans…this post’s for you!

If you think about it, what can be more incompetent and corrupt than, say, calling a Republican caucus for Sen. John McCain before any real data becomes available to support the claim? How about this: failing to get McCain qualified for a state’s primary election ballot. Seems difficult to believe such a thing could happen. But apparently it has in Indiana. From Blue Indiana:

Now, I’m originally from the 4th District, so curiosity led me to check out who had made it (and by how much) in my old stomping ground. To my surprise, I noticed that John McCain — the presumptive front-runner for the GOP nomination — was just a little short in a few districts, including my precious 4th, despite the fact that Attorney General Steve Carter had already turned in their petitions. I made a few phone calls, and one by one I found out that the McCain camp had got the job done across the state.

Except in the 4th District.

In the 4th District, they are short.

By my latest count, they turned in 496 signatures for the 4th, and the latest IED report for this morning shows them with only 491.

So this afternoon, I filed a challenge with the Secretary of State’s office to keep John McCain off of the ballot. You can check it out here.

By the “Indiana Standard” sending out the same postcard with the same picture to several different districts warning people of a sex offender in their neighborhood…just looks like a mean-spirited adolescent prank.

Had we sunk to the Indiana Standard, I believe those postcards would have gone to Idaho addresses….

So hold your head high, my fellow Washington state Republicans, we’re not the most incompetent!

Finally… a Republican sex scandal involving a man and a woman.

One of the most entertaining local blogs in the Seattle area is run by my friends Carl Ballard and Lee Rosenberg. While also posting at Horse’s Ass, they also blog at EFFin’ Unsound, a blog dedicated to skewering slow-witted, doughy headed right wing bloggers. EFFin’ Unsound is in heavy blog rotation.

Check out the post by Lee in which he describes Dino Rossi sycophant Mathew Manweller’s foray into the blogosphere. Or this post, wherein Carl dissects Eric Earling’s shit swallowin’ vote for John McCain. It’s good stuff.

“Matt Manweller”… What is that, his porno name? Not quite as good as “Lou Guzz-oh”, but still decent.

This is an Open Thread.

Last week, I attended a press conference at the downtown Seattle offices of the ACLU with travel show host Rick Steves. Many people know Rick Steves from his television shows or his books, but one thing that many people don’t know about him is that he’s been a longtime advocate of reforming our marijuana laws. Having spent so much time in Europe, it’s given him a broader perspective on what works and what doesn’t when it comes to dealing with the problems of drug abuse and drug addiction. For example, in a country like Holland, where adults can walk into a licensed coffeeshop and purchase marijuana without penalty, fewer adults and teens use it than here in America, where we still try to send sick people to jail for using it as medicine on the false premise that doing otherwise would “send the wrong message to our kids”.

The contrast between the two approaches is clear for anyone who is willing to put aside the overwraught exaggerations of the dangers of this drug and simply look at the facts. Towards this end, Steves has set up a new website at MarijuanaConversation.org and released a half-hour infomercial-style video that discusses the history and the current state of this country’s war on marijuana. The video is available to Comcast Digital Cable subscribers through On Demand and will eventually be seen on some of the state’s major network affiliates. I’ve already seen the video myself, and I’m hoping that it reaches a wide audience in the state. Little of what was presented was new to me, but it will likely be surprising to those who’ve only learned about marijuana from sources with an incentive to maintain its illegal status.

The national prohibition of marijuana didn’t even begin until 1937 in this country. Before that time, and especially as far back as in colonial days, the hemp plant was a valued resource. It was used for ropes and sails and both The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were written on hemp parchment. It wasn’t until the early 20th century that there were attempts to make hemp’s psychoactive relative, which had always been known by the term cannabis, illegal. A man named Harry J. Anslinger was put in charge of the new Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which was made up of a number of federal employees whose jobs were rendered useless by the end of alcohol prohibition in 1932. In an attempt to preserve those jobs, he proceeded to drum up a lot of fear about the use of cannabis. In order to draw on America’s racial fears, he began referring to it as ‘marihuana,’ which was the Mexican term for the drug. Despite opposition from a number of medical professionals, Anslinger’s propaganda campaign, which incredibly claimed that marijuana was “the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind” actually worked, and it was made illegal through the Marijuana Tax Stamp Act of 1937.

While marijuana use at that time was fairly limited, the 60s brought about a massive increase in the drug’s popularity. It became a symbol of the counter-culture movement that was challenging many of the more socially conservative norms that developed through the Depression and World War II. When Richard Nixon was in the White House in 1970, he assigned a special commission to look at the dangers of this increased level of use and to recommend solutions. The Shafer Commission surprised Nixon by saying that marijuana is not very dangerous at all and recommending that it should be decriminalized. Nixon completely ignored the commission and launched what we now know as the modern “war on drugs.”

Today, nearly 100 million Americans have used marijuana, including our current and former Presidents, and numerous members of Congress. Yet it still remains illegal under federal law for anyone in this country to possess it or grow it. Over 800,000 people were arrested last year on marijuana offenses, over 700,000 for simple possession. Minorities, especially blacks, are more likely than whites to be arrested for possession and more likely to go to jail for it. While few of those 700,000 actually do serve jail time, the overall costs to taxpayers for maintaining this nationwide prohibition amounts from somewhere between $7 billion and $40 billion per year, depending on whether or not you try to factor in the potential revenue from taxing its sale. It is currently this country’s #1 cash crop.

As the generation who grew up in the 1960s nears retirement age, many of them have been finding that marijuana really does have the medical uses that the physicians in the 1930s said it did before being shouted down by Anslinger’s angry mob. Thirteen states now have laws that allow medical marijuana use when approved by a doctor, but the Bush Administration continues to deem those laws invalid under federal law, sending federal agents throughout those states to close down medical marijuana facilities that are legal under their respective state laws. Despite petitions and lawsuits, marijuana is still classified as a Schedule I drug, meaning that the federal government deems it to have no medical use and to be more dangerous than both cocaine and amphetamines. In another rebuke to that ridiculous classification, the American College of Physicians, a group of 124,000 doctors, gave their endorsement last week for the medical use of marijuana.

I’m hoping for the best when it comes to this effort by Steves to start a new conversation and to reach out to more people with the message that our approach to marijuana in this country is fundamentally flawed. There’s a major divide between how the politically active online community sees our marijuana laws and how it’s viewed among other demographics. I get very little disagreement when I discuss marijuana legalization online, even from many of the right-wing folks who disagree with me on almost everything else. The unnecessary cost to taxpayers and the overbearing nanny state aspect of the federal marijuana prohibition resonate with conservatives, while the racial disparities and the effects on voting eligibility and the lack of opportunity for those with past convictions resonate with liberals. But Steves’ message is powerful because it reaches another very large group: parents.

As anyone who’s ever watched his travel show knows, Rick Steves has a family, and a big part of why he’s doing this is because he sees our marijuana laws as a detriment, rather than a benefit, for his own kids. Like any good parent, he doesn’t want his children to be involved with marijuana. But through his travels, he’s discovered that our marijuana laws are extremely counterproductive on that front. By choosing outright prohibition instead of a model that allows for the strict regulation of its sale for adults, it’s actually much easier for children in this country to get marijuana than it is for them to get a bottle of whiskey or a pack of cigarettes. The person who sells marijuana doesn’t check ID and doesn’t face a strict penalty for selling to a minor. As a result, young people themselves often become part of the supply chain. This is something that happened during alcohol prohibition as well and was one of the big reasons why many people began to turn their backs on that failed social experiment. The special that he recorded hits this point extremely well and I imagine that it will resonate with a lot of parents in this country who have seen marijuana prohibition both as children and adults. While they certainly don’t want their kids to be involved with drugs, as one young mother in the audience noted, it’s much worse for a young person to have a criminal record. And that’s why it’s time to start this conversation now.

UPDATE: SeattleTammy sent me an email with a link to a review she wrote of Burning Rainbow Farm, one of the best books for grasping the sheer lunacy of marijuana prohibition. If you’re in Seattle and want a copy, head to Jackson Street Books and grab one.