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Entirely devoid of compelling candidates or, you know, ideas, the GOP just sent out a fundraising email offering a free, plush toy elephant with every $35 donation. The email reads in part:

“Meet Maxine, the newest member of the Republican National Committee.

Embroidered with the official logo of the RNC, Maxine proudly shows off her allegiance to the Republican Party’s principles of lower taxes, a strong national defense, limited government and personal responsibility.”

And judging from the state of the GOP these days, it looks like Maxine is the member of the RNC who is making most of the day to day decisions.

My inbox is inundated with Democratic and progressive fundraising emails talking about ending the war in Iraq, combating climate change, protecting our privacy and personal freedoms, promoting health care security and economic justice, and touting the qualities of various candidates. But the Republicans, they’ve been reduced to hawking toy elephants.

Hmm. I wonder if these toys, like the GOP’s consumer protection policies, are made in China?

Apparently, Jonah Goldberg has some difficulty figuring out when people are making fun of him.

How bad is the economy in Michigan? Despite having the best record in the NHL, the Red Wings have only sold out a handful of games this year. They had an 11 year long sellout streak that only ended in 2007.

Frustrated with the slow pace of Bush’s efforts to bring freedom to the Middle East, people in Gaza took matters into their own hands this week.

Mexico is still a mess.

The term libertarian is now one step closer to having no definition at all.

It rained last night in Seattle. Who knew?

I was watching the “storm coverage” last night on KIRO-7, and actually burst out laughing a couple times… you know, like at the shot of a reporter in Bonney Lake standing in a dusting of snow, in front of a bare road, talking about hazardous driving conditions… or the shivering driver exclaiming that the temperature dropped all the way down to thirty degrees! And I couldn’t help thinking… what a bunch of fucking pussies.

For a region with one of the most temperate climates in the world (it could be 58 degrees and drizzling virtually any day of the year,) we sure do spend an awful lot of time talking about the weather.

Whenever I’m at the bank, I like to pick up a few of these:

With a pocket full of twenty or so dollar coins, I like to spread them around. Sometimes people will give you this look that says, “Why did you give me this? I know that it’s real, and that it’s a dollar, but why do you purposely upset the rickety apple cart that is my life with this coin?”

Today I gave one to a Real Change vendor. The fella looked at it and gave me the biggest grin I’ve seen in a long time.

I’ve found that dollar coins work in every modern vending machine I’ve run across. There is a reason why this is true. The vending machine political lobby is a major player in the “dollar coin” movement. Dollar coins are much cheaper to accept than “paper” dollars. Those bill readers are an extra expense they’d love to be rid of. Alas, Americans (other than myself) aren’t taken by the dollar coin phenomenon.

King County Metro takes them, however. If you’ve ever seen someone try to feed a buck into the fare box during rush hour, you know that this can be excruciating. Dollar coins would solve this problem.

The dollar coin has had two recent iterations. Several years ago was the “Sacajawea”, and more recently was the “Presidential” series. The “Sac”, as it was nicknamed (by me), didn’t really catch on, so the new ones are shinier and more robust in their features. Also, the Native-American choice may have thrown some folks. Not me, but I do find the choice somewhat odd. It’s like, “sorry about the years of genocide. Here’s a coin.”

Of all people, Republicans should love these coins. You guys love to put Reagan on all sorts of shit. Here’s your chance.

So the next time you’re at the bank, ask the teller to load you up on some dollar coins. You’ll never have so much fun spending your money.

I appreciate everything ECB’s been doing to bring to light some pretty egregious anti-woman crap. That said, what did you think was going to happen? Hillary Rodham Clinton has been hated by the Right for years and years. This stuff is not a surprise.

Besides, politics ain’t beanbag. If her political operation can’t handle this stuff, then she doesn’t deserve to carry our banner in November. Plain and simple.

Four years ago, the GOP took aim at a Vietnam war hero, a recipient of the Silver Star, and mocked his war medals. They’re shameless.

There is no reason to think that they’ll be any more reasonable if Hillary is our nominee.

Jesus… if John McCain makes Pat Buchanan “nervous”, the rest of us should be shitting bricks.

Presidential candidate John McCain shocked observers on Sunday when he told a crowd of supporters, "There’s going to be other wars. … I’m sorry to tell you, there’s going to be other wars. We will never surrender but there will be other wars."

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough asked old-line conservative Pat Buchanan about McCain’s remarks, saying, "He talked about promising that more wars were coming. … Is he so desperate to get off the economic issue?"

Pat Buchanan replied that McCain never used the word "promise" but simply said there would be more wars, and that from McCain’s point of view, "that is straight talk. … You get John McCain in the White House, and I do believe we will be at war with Iran."

"That’s one of the things that makes me very nervous about him," Buchanan went on. "There’s no doubt John McCain is going to be a war president. … His whole career is wrapped up in the military, national security. He’s in Putin’s face, he’s threatening the Iranians, we’re going to be in Iraq a hundred years."

I’m pretty sure that Pat Buchanan and I agreeing on stuff was prophesied as a sign of the impending End Times. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if John McCain wins the Republican nomination, this election won’t be about the war in Iraq, it will be about war with Iran.

WhackyNation’s eminently whacky Mark Gardner accuses me of “smearing” Assistant State Treasurer Allan Martin, by describing him as a licensed mortician. But… um… Martin is a licensed mortician:

Martin, 54, is a former funeral director who says he has kept his license current for doing funerals and embalming.

Because as State Treasurer, you never know when that might come in handy.

Ironically, in his zeal to brand me as unworthy of serving in a profession that includes such beacons of journalistic integrity as Michael Savage, G. Gordon Liddy and Bill O’Reilly, Gardner overlooked a genuine factual error in my original post, that could actually rise to the level of constituting a “smear” had I known the information to be incorrect. But since the error concerned one of the Democrats in the race, Gardner apparently couldn’t give a shit.

In my post I pointed out that the name of the state’s chief economist, Dr. ChangMook Sohn, appears as a signatory to an online petition from the libertarian Cato Institute, calling for Social Security privatization, and technically, this true — Dr. Sohn’s name does appear on the petition. But Dr. Sohn assures me via email that he has “never signed or been asked to sign a petition to privatize Social Security,” and has no idea how his name got on the Cato petition. Furthermore, when asked specifically about his stance on the issue, Dr. Sohn writes:

As a principle, I do not comment on the Federal government policy issues. I am a state government official. As a private citizen, however, I oppose Social Security privatization. Given its expected negative cash flow situation within 10 years, the overhaul of the current system is inevitable, I believe.

I raised the issue in the first place because Social Security privatization doesn’t strike me as a Democratic value, and I am pleased to clarify that Dr. Sohn does not support it. I have contacted the Cato Institute, asking them to explain how Dr. Sohn’s name came to be attached to their petition, but have yet to receive a reply.

As for Martin, if he wants to send me an email denying that he is a licensed mortician, I’d be happy to post that correction as well.

Standing four-foot-something with a metal hook in the place of a left hand, Oregon US Senate hopeful Steve Novick certainly doesn’t look like your typical candidate… and he certainly isn’t running your typical campaign ads. I don’t know if these ads are effective in terms of actually getting votes, but damn do I love ’em.

Seattle Times political reporter David Postman is reporting from eastern Washington this week, and he’s sending back some great stuff. His most recent post is from Garfield County. (Anti-government types, pay attention: Garfield’s two largest employers are the federal government and the county itself. Go figure.)

Postman interviews some rock-ribbed Republican family farmers, and finds that not everything is going as planned:

These are no longer the energetic Republican backers who in 2000 spent $3,000 of their own money to make a batch of 4-by-8-foot “Save Our Dams” signs that urged people to vote Republican. You won’t see them at a rally this year, or maybe even at the Republican caucus Feb. 9. Where Mary had “a totally intense feeling” about the campaign in 2000, today there is a palpable sense of disillusionment.

In the GOP’s SOP, meaningless fringe issues are used to rile the peons, while the Wall Street faction gets exactly what they want. (Dividend tax cuts! Corporate tax cuts! A farm bill that pays millions to ADM and peanuts to the little guys!)

Meanwhile the Dyes sold off their life insurance policies, reduced their health insurance to a bare minimum, and put their kids on the state’s Basic Health Plan. And they all scrimped. When there was a bit of milk left in the bottom of a glass, it got poured back into the carton for another day. Mary said:

“In large part, there’s something really awful to me about a man who has been farming since 1978, now in his mid-50s, having to struggle like this.”

Farmers were at the epicenter of the Progressive movement in the early twentieth century. They said, through their great champion, that they would not be crucified on a “cross of gold.”

Mary stayed involved in politics up until mid-2004. She was a Bush supporter and leading the Washington state effort to draft that year’s party platform. Then as her family and friends struggled she no longer wanted to be part of the system that had once energized her.

She quit the campaign and all the party business. She didn’t tell anyone why and everyone was apparently too polite to ask.

“George Bush has betrayed me personally. … I just definitely thought he understood.”

Software folks have a saying for when something doesn’t work right. They say “it’s a feature, not a bug.” The Bush Administration was always all about screwing the little guy and using the government for the advantage of the powerful. That was the idea all along.

It would be easy to go all “What’s The Matter With Kansas?” on these folks, and to dis them for voting against (what I perceive to be) their economic self interest, but that’s gauche. I can’t expect them to be wooed by an argument of economic populism if the leading Democratic candidates aren’t wooing them with one. It’s as simple as that.

Huh. The polls were off big time again in South Carolina, predicting 38-percent of the vote for Barack Obama, when he actually pulled in over 55-percent. And yet nobody is leveling charges of election fraud, like the did in New Hampshire. Hmm. I wonder why?

Tonight on “The David Goldstein Show”, 7PM to 10PM on News/Talk 710-KIRO:

7PM: Are you wonked out Daily Kos?
Joel Silberman from Daily Kos joins me for the hour to talk about the tension between political wonkery and emotional generalism, and how it’s playing out in the current electoral cycle.

8PM: Is it time to reform mortgage lending?
Home foreclosure rates are rising, as more and more homeowners are falling victim to adjustable rate mortgages they can no longer afford, with many claiming they were misled by mortgage brokers and lenders. Maya Baxter from the Statewide Poverty Action Network joins me for the hour to discuss the crisis, and two bills that have been introduced in the state legislature to address this issue.

9PM: TBA
The usual liberal propaganda

Tune in tonight (or listen to the live stream) and give me a call: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).

So, the Seattle Times has endorsed Sen. Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination. Big deal. Next week they’ll also endorse Sen. John McCain on the Republican side. If the Times really embraces the kind of change they believe Obama represents, they wouldn’t endorse anybody for the Republican nomination, least of all a warmonger whose idea of straight talk is promising crowds “there will be other wars.”

Personally, I doubt many Washington state Democrats are looking to the op-ed pages for advice on who to caucus for on February 9, but if they are, I’m guessing the most influential endorsement of the primary season may have come today in the New York Times, and I’m not talking about an unsigned editorial. No, the big news following Obama’s impressive 29-point rout of Hillary Clinton in yesterday’s South Carolina primary was the moving op-ed column written by Caroline Kennedy, “A President Like My Father“:

OVER the years, I’ve been deeply moved by the people who’ve told me they wished they could feel inspired and hopeful about America the way people did when my father was president. This sense is even more profound today. That is why I am supporting a presidential candidate in the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama.

My reasons are patriotic, political and personal, and the three are intertwined. All my life, people have told me that my father changed their lives, that they got involved in public service or politics because he asked them to. And the generation he inspired has passed that spirit on to its children. I meet young people who were born long after John F. Kennedy was president, yet who ask me how to live out his ideals.

Sometimes it takes a while to recognize that someone has a special ability to get us to believe in ourselves, to tie that belief to our highest ideals and imagine that together we can do great things. In those rare moments, when such a person comes along, we need to put aside our plans and reach for what we know is possible.

[…] I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president — not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans.

I suppose I might have a reputation for being a hard-edged cynic, but my eyes actually teared up a bit when I first read Kennedy’s words. I so desperately want to believe what she believes, that Obama really does have that “special ability” to inspire and to lead and to bring us back together as a nation. I fully understand her father was just a man, as flawed as any, but that doesn’t diminish President Kennedy’s impact as a leader, however symbolic, and I too long for a president who can inspire me the way so many of my parent’s generation were inspired by him.

As both a liberal and an American, I have long felt cheated by history… robbed of a promising future by a handful of assassins’ bullets. Had President Kennedy lived to complete his terms, might we have avoided the mistakes that led to an all out involvement in Vietnam, a war that divided our nation and drained us of precious blood and treasure? Had Bobby Kennedy survived to win the White House, would American liberalism have survived to finally achieve the vision of economic justice and security first enunciated by FDR, and wouldn’t Americans have retained the faith in government that carried us through the Great Depression and World War II, rather than seeing that faith shattered by the betrayal that was Watergate? Had Martin Luther King Jr. lived to guide our nation to the Promised Land, rather than just glimpsing it from some far-off mountain top, would the Republican Party have been free to so ruthlessly exploit Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” to advance their selfish, conservative agenda?

My critics like to characterize me as some wide-eyed, lefty moonbat, but I’m nothing more or less than a 1970’s-era centrist who has been radicalized in style if not in substance by a decades-long, right-wing campaign to defile the proud legacy of American liberalism, and to brand its adherents as idiots, ideologues, traitors and worse. The radicalized middle from which I come did not lightly seize on unbridled partisanship as our political weapon of choice, but that is the weapon that has been used to cudgel us into submission for far too long. That the fierceness of the netroots and the new progressive movement to which it belongs frightens the political and media establishment, is understandable, but there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that our aggressive rhetoric and tactics have not played a significant role in our recent electoral victories. Only now that a netroots-powered Democratic majority is on the verge of seizing unchallenged control of the federal government, do we hear a renewed call for bipartisanship… and that is why I wince every time I hear Obama echoing their frame.

When Obama talks about reaching his hand across the aisle, the cynic in me envisions the other side leaping at the opportunity to lop it off. When Obama talks about bipartisanship, I fear it means willingly sacrificing the very political advantages we have fought so hard to achieve. It’s not that I don’t trust Obama, it’s just that I don’t trust the Republican leadership to reciprocate in kind… not these Republicans… not the party that so joyously swiftboated a war hero, and took a man who left three limbs on the battlefield and morphed him into Osama bin Laden. Hardened by decades of partisan, political war, I admit to finding a certain degree of solace in the more calculating nature of Hilary Clinton — the very same quality that appears to turn off so many other voters. Better to be calculating than naive.

That said, I want to believe, like Caroline Kennedy, in the promise of Obama. I want a president who I don’t simply admire, but one who I find truly inspirational. I want my eyes to fill with tears, not at the thought of what might have been, but what can be. And not since Mario Cuomo ended his flirtation with a White House bid back in 1991 have I found a presidential candidate who offers me this hope.

Tomorrow, Sen. Ted Kennedy will appear with his niece at a rally in Washington D.C., to announce his endorsement of Barack Obama, and to personally pass the torch of Camelot on to a new generation. No doubt the right will take the opportunity to vilify Sen. Kennedy in the hope that some of their ridicule might rub off on the man he supports, but in doing so they perilously dismiss the power of symbolism, for even Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” was a reference to Camelot, and an attempt to co-opt the aura of the Kennedy era as his own.

Perhaps Camelot was always only a dream, but that doesn’t mean it can’t someday come true. Tomorrow, Barack Obama, surrounded by his beautiful wife and young children, standing beside the daughter and brother of the fallen king, has an unprecedented opportunity to rekindle this dream in the hearts of Americans. It is an opportunity to restore the faith of even hardened cynics like me.

Richard Holbrooke, former ambassador to the United Nations, continues his strong criticism of the Bush Administration’s approach to dealing with Afghanistan’s opium problem:

“I’m a spray man myself,” President Bush told government leaders and American counter-narcotics officials during his 2006 trip to Afghanistan. He said it again when President Hamid Karzai visited Camp David in August. Bush meant, of course, that he favors aerial eradication of poppy fields in Afghanistan, which supplies over 90 percent of the world’s heroin. His remarks — which, despite their flippant nature, were definitely not meant as a joke — are part of the story behind the spectacularly unsuccessful U.S. counter-narcotics program in Afghanistan. Karzai and much of the international community in Kabul have warned Bush that aerial spraying would create a backlash against the government and the Americans, and serve as a recruitment device for the Taliban while doing nothing to reduce the drug trade. This is no side issue: If the program continues to fail, success in Afghanistan will be impossible.

The opium issue in Afghanistan has often been treated as a side issue, and Holbrooke deserves credit for strongly challenging that perspective. The way we’re dealing with the opium production is as central to the difficulties we’re having as anything else commonly cited for why we’re losing ground to the Taliban (targeting civilians in airstrikes, being distracted by the Iraq occupation).

Fortunately, Bush has not been able to convince other nations or Karzai that aerial spraying should be conducted, although he is vigorously supported by the American ambassador, William Wood, who was an enthusiastic proponent of aerial spraying in his previous assignment, in Colombia. Wood, often called “Chemical Bill” in Kabul, has even threatened senior Afghan officials with cuts in reconstruction funds if his policies are not carried out, according to two sources.

Aerial spraying in Colombia (under the plan initiated by Bill Clinton in 2000 and continued by the Bush Administration) has been a complete disaster. It has failed to achieve any of its intended objectives and has caused a significant amount of damage to America’s reputation in that region because aerial spraying has a number of additional consequences that affect far more than just those who grow the prohibited crops. In Afghanistan, unleashing a similar disaster would strengthen the Taliban at an even greater rate than what’s happening today.

The current approach of manual eradication, favored by the British and by the Karzai government, is only slightly less counterproductive. The Taliban provide security for the opium traffickers against the government’s eradication teams for a fee (often paid with weapons). In other words, it’s not the profits from the opium trade by itself that enrich the Taliban. It’s the need for protection from the government’s eradication teams that enriches them. If Chemical Bill and the Spray Man get their way, the need for protection will increase and the Taliban will get paid by the traffickers to shoot down low-flying aircraft (aerial eradication of crops has to be done from a very low altitude). It simply has no chance of working in such a poor security environment.

In a nation where roughly 50 percent of the national economy comes from the opium industry, there’s simply no way to uproot it, either by going after the farmers, the traffickers, or the high-ranking government officials who profit from it (including Hamid Karzai’s brother). As much as it may strike people as being irresponsible, simply doing nothing about the opium farming would actually be better than what we do now. Holbrooke doesn’t hold back in his assessment:

But even without aerial eradication, the program, which costs around $1 billion a year, may be the single most ineffective program in the history of American foreign policy. It’s not just a waste of money. It actually strengthens the Taliban and al-Qaeda, as well as criminal elements within Afghanistan.

According to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, the area under opium cultivation increased to 193,000 hectares in 2007 from 165,000 in 2006. The harvest also grew, to 8,200 tons from 6,100. Could any program be more unsuccessful?

Well, the one favored by Chemical Bill and the Spray Man would be. But otherwise, thank god we still have people like Holbrooke who are speaking up about this.

Tonight on “The David Goldstein Show”, 7PM to 10PM on News/Talk 710-KIRO:

7PM: What happened down in South Carolina?
Minutes after the polls closed everybody called it for Barack Obama, and in a “rout”. Democratic strategist, blogger, pundit James Boyce joins us again with his analysis of today’s results from the South Carolina Democratic primary, and a look toward Tuesday’s big Republican showdown in Florida. Does Obama really have the momentum heading into the Feb. 5 primary-palooza? Is Rudy Giuliani really the Max Bialystock of politics?

7:30PM: What’s happening down in Olympia?
The Stranger’s Josh Feit joins me for an abbreviated look at the week’s news, focusing on his first hand observations from the legislative session. A progressive tax break? Not so pernicious transportation governance reform? New domestic partner rights? All that and more.

8PM: Saturday night comedy with Riggs
Local comedian Riggs joins us for our not so wonky Saturday night conversation with somebody who really is funny, instead of somebody who just thinks he is.

9PM: TBA
The usual liberal propaganda

Tune in tonight (or listen to the live stream) and give me a call: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).