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Joel Connelly mounts his high horse today and launches some invective at anyone and everyone who’s been pointing fingers at Chief Kerlikowske over police oversight issues. Josh Feit has already responded, easily swatting down Connelly’s lazy accusation that The Stranger has been hypocritical when it comes to dealing with the accuracy of police reports. But the real hypocrite here is Connelly, who actually writes the following two paragraphs in succession:

The loudmouths should allow Hizzoner’s panel to do its work. Our 1960s-era activists should recognize that “this due process thing” (as a media colleague calls it) applies to police chiefs, even to police officers.

Overseers of our law enforcement agencies ought to appreciate the requirement that complaints get acted upon quickly, or dismissed. Our cops have a pretty tense job, filled with judgment calls. It makes no sense to leave a line officer, working under pressure, hung up in the city’s preoccupation with “process.”

So we should recognize that due process applies to police officers, but when dealing with police officers, we shouldn’t be preoccupied with “process?” Huh?

I caught a lot of grief for my post last week calling for Kerlikowske to resign. Since then, another group, the Minority Executive Director’s Coalition (MEDC), has also called for the chief to be replaced. And James Kelly of the Urban League, who was originally defending Kerlikowske, now also agrees that the chief should be explaining himself in writing when he fails to act on the recommendations of the existing police oversight panel.

The evidence that there’s a problem with oversight at SPD has been pretty substantial since the beginning of this story and has been well documented by both The Seattle Times and The Stranger. So when Connelly invokes the idea of this just being about “1960’s-era activists”, that’s when I tune him out. As someone who was born after the end of the Vietnam War, I don’t carry any of that baggage. Instead, I’ve seen a different set of civil rights issues – the Rodney King trial, “Driving While Black”, record numbers of African-Americans being hauled off to our prisons, many of them for doing things that well-off white kids get away with every day. In my lifetime, I haven’t seen the racial divide in this country disappear as much as I’ve seen it ignored. Progressives proclaim that affirmative action is saving the black community but then bury their heads in the sand about why we have 6 times the percentage of African-Americans in jail than South Africa ever had of their native population under Apartheid. And some of the worst states in this trend are blue states like California, Illinois, and New York.

As I mentioned in last week’s post, according to a survey from 2000-2001, Seattle’s racial disparity in drug arrests is higher than any other city of comparable size in the United States. It shouldn’t be a surprise then that this case is focused on two cops (one with a long history of problems with the black community) who made a drug arrest this January of a black man in a wheelchair who claims that the cops planted drugs on him and later roughed him up while in custody. After video of the arrest surfaced showing some inaccuracies with the officer’s report (and not showing any clear evidence that drugs were taken from the suspect), the charges against the man were dismissed. This case, and the way that both the chief and the mayor have been quick to defend the police involved, have been at the heart of the calls for Kerlikowske to resign. There simply isn’t an excuse for the mayor and the chief to be so incurious as to what really happened to George Patterson that night.

Newark, NJ mayor Cory Booker, a Rhodes’ Scholar who came into office determined to fix the endless violence that has plagued that city, is now pointing his finger at the drug war and calling it an economic genocide against black communities. But here in Seattle, where the black community has less clout, the mayor and the chief happily continue the war. This case obviously goes well beyond just drug law enforcement, as The Stranger continues to find new instances of general police brutality against people of color here. But the guise of keeping drugs out of the black community is the mandate that problem officers like Greg Neubert have in order to treat every person in the black community as a suspect. It’s a recipe that begs for situations to escalate.

Connelly ends his column by making a comparison to the oversight of road repair and wondering why people who are angry at the Department of Transportation can’t stir up the kind of shitstorms that people who are angry at the police can. I’ll explain that to him in more detail the next time I see him at DL, but it helps to look at the very last paragraph:

Leaving rubber behind on Second Avenue, a fiendish thought flashed across my mind: “If only I were a street drug dealer, protesting a bust, I could raise hell in this town.”

He’s referring to Patterson, the man arrested in January. There’s only one problem. Patterson insists he’s not a dealer, and the charges were dropped. And basic common sense tells you that a man in a wheelchair isn’t a very effective person to have as a street dealer in a business where people steal from and shoot each other. But for Joel Connelly and much of Seattle’s “progressive” community, due process may not be for everyone. And sometimes, the relationship between Democrats and the black community can be eerily similar to the relationship between Republicans and the military.

Impeach Dick Cheney, or invade Iran. Your choice.

Erica C. Barnett, from an article attacking Mayor Nickels for not going far enough in reducing Seattle’s carbon footprint:

If Seattle is serious about reducing emissions, Baker continued, it needs to reassess its plans for major road projects, including SR-520 (which the mayor and council want to expand to six lanes) and the Alaskan Way Viaduct (which Nickels wanted to expand into a wider underground freeway).

What Erica fails to mention is that, while SR-520 would go from four to six lanes, the added lanes would be for High Occupancy Vehicles (or HOV). You know, for people who carpool or ride the bus. People who, according to every environmental group I’ve ever heard of, are doing the right thing by the environment.

These same environmental groups used their political moxie to prevent Eastside developers, Republicans, and the Seattle Times from getting an eight lane, or even ten lane, SR-520 bridge. Instead, we’re getting HOV lanes, bike lanes, and big fat pontoons for future light rail expansion. Pretty good for a bunch of gutless, caving sellouts.

There will be some gnashing of teeth by the Washington State Republicans to this July 3rd press release from Governor Gregoire:

Governor Chris Gregoire today designated the Washington Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) as a voter registration assistance agency and directed the agency to appoint a voter registration assistance officer, efficiently help citizens register to vote and work with the Secretary of State’s office to ensure compliance with established voter registration procedures.

“It is one of the primary duties of government to make available to all citizens the opportunity to register to vote and, if needed, provide registration assistance,” said Governor Gregoire. “Our social service agency serves a diverse group of people every day and therefore is an ideal place to help more Washingtonians register to vote.”

Governor Gregoire also encouraged all state agencies to provide on their web sites a link to the Secretary of State’s voter registration page and to consider other ways in which they might support and promote voter registration.
[…]

This is the way government ought to work. It should take concrete steps to maximize opportunities for all eligible citizens to exercise their constitutional right to vote. It is curious, then, that over the last decade the Republican Party has increasingly become the party of voter suppression and disenfranchisement. (Luke Esser looks prescient with his 20-year-old disenfranchisement satire.)

We saw the Republican vote suppression in action days before the 2005 election when Lori Sotelo (apparently inspired by a Karl Rove briefing, filed an error-prone series of voter challenges. Subsequently, the Washington State laws were changed to prevent such abuse.

Under the worst of circumstances, the Republican-sponsored disenfranchisement becomes operational through a Republican-controlled government…. In 2000, we saw a massive, and error prone disenfranchisement operation undertaken in Florida, under the supervision of Secretary of State Katherine Harris—an operation that almost certainly swung the presidential election by inappropriately purging thousands of African Americans from the voter rolls. A US Commission on Civil Rights report summarized it this way:

…poorly designed efforts to eliminate fraud, as well as sloppy and irresponsible implementation of those efforts, disenfranchise legitimate voters and can be a violation of the VRA. Florida’s overzealous efforts to purge voters from the rolls, conducted under the guise of an anti-fraud campaign, resulted in the inexcusable and patently unjust removal of disproportionate numbers of African American voters from Florida’s voter registration rolls for the November 2000 election.
[…]

African American voters were placed on purge lists more often and more erroneously than Hispanic or white voters. For instance, in the state’s largest county, Miami-Dade, more than 65 percent of the names on the purge list were African Americans, who represented only 20.4 percent of the population. Hispanics were 57.4 percent of the population, but only 16.6 percent of the purge list; whites were 77.6 percent of the population but 17.6 percent of those purged.
Florida easily could have, and should have, done much more to protect the voting rights of African Americans and other Floridians.

(They also found other ways that African American voters were disproportionately disenfranchised in Florida in 2000.)

On the face of it, the Republican problem seems to be paranoia, with the biggest cheerleader of paranoia being Karl Rove. Don’t you believe it. If there is anything that Republican strategists learned from the 2000 election is that disenfranchising voters works for Republicans! Karl Rove almost certainly knows he is feeding the Republican masses a load of horseshit.

Republican voter fraud “paranoia” is really theatre in two acts, designed to disenfranchise subpopulations that vote Democratic.

The first act shakes the confidence of ordinary voters in the election system—that is, it spreads paranoia through unfounded fears of widespread (presumably Democratic) election fraud.

We certainly saw this fear-mongering played out in Washington State in 2004. During the election contest trial, Republican lawyers opened with a bold statement about how they would prove election fraud. The trial proceeded without any evidence of election fraud being offered. Judge Bridges Oral Decision stated:

There is no evidence that anybody associated with any of the candidates in the governor’s race had anything to do with causing the errors. There is no evidence that has been produced in this Court to suggest that the errors resulted from partisan bias. During the 2004 general election, the various polling sites across the State were populated by inspectors, judges, Accuvote judges, observers, attorneys and the media. No testimony has been placed before the Court to suggest fraud or intentional misconduct. Election officials attempted to perform their responsibilities in a fair and impartial manner. There is no evidence before the Court to question ballot security as to those ballots actually counted.

The second act in the G.O.P. theatre is to make registration and/or voting more difficult for “certain voters.” That would be the poor, people of color, and people living in urban environments. You know, various schemes to cancel registrations, laws to require photo IDs at the polls, that sort of thing. These gimmicks particularly hit poor people of color—people that some Republicans believe shouldn’t even have a right to vote.

That is why Gregoire’s memo will cause some political consternation and constipation among state Republicans. We all know who uses DSHS: the same people Republicans build gated communities to keep out.

My latest at EffU. Bring it on, wingnuttia.

Before I left my Belltown apartment, I checked the Metro Trip Planner to find out exactly which route to take and where to catch it. It told me to catch the 26 at 4th and Blanchard. The 26 never showed up. I had taken the 16 to the same Wallingford address, so I rounded the block to the 16’s stop. The 16 was there in less than a minute.

After the fireworks ended, I walked down to Stoneway Ave to put myself in the path of either the 16 or the 26 (or any bus headed for downtown). I lucked out, and the 16 arrived within a few minutes. Thankfully, it wasn’t jammed full of people. But when my bus neared the Seattle Center, the whole operation came to a halt. The bus was jammed, stuck in the same traffic as folks driving their SOVs. The bus driver had trouble getting from the right lane to the left lane to merge onto 5th Ave (under the monorail). It was a good 15 minute slog to go about 10 blocks.

All in all, taking public transportation to and from the event was okay. The biggest hassle was the Seattle Center area. When folks I respect, like Joel Connelly, talk about eschewing light rail in favor of more buses, I wish he’s riding the bus with me so he can see what I see. When Ted Van Dyk and Richard Morrill (two old guys who haven’t relied on public transport since the Eisenhower administration) talk about how light rail is a waste of money, I just smile. They’ll be eating dirt while the next generation rides the rails.

What is your idea of patriotism on this most extraordinary 4th of July?

Our friend Shaun, a true patriot of the Pacific Northwest, shares what Independence Day means to him.

(Via Crooks and Liars.)

Tonight there will be another fun-filled meeting of the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. I appeal to you to scooter on over and join us for an evening of politics under the influence. We meet at 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Pardon the pun, but it’s an easy commute.

Drinking Liberally’s Seattle hosts are Nick Beaudrot of Electoral Math and HorsesAss contributer TheHim (also at Blog Reload and EFFin’ Unsound).

If you find yourself in the Tri-Cities area, there is a Drinking Liberally for you—Jimmy will have the details.

The Drinking Liberally web site has dates and times for 210 chapters in 44 states (plus DC). And if you don’t find a chapter near you…start one!

Editor & Publisher summarizes today’s editorials slamming President Bush for commuting convicted felon Scooter Libby’s sentence.

Here are a couple of poignant ones:

From the [New York] Times’ Tuesday editorial: “Mr. Bush’s assertion that he respected the verdict but considered the sentence excessive only underscored the way this president is tough on crime when it’s committed by common folk …

“Within minutes of the Libby announcement, the same Republican commentators who fulminated when Paris Hilton got a few days knocked off her time in a county lockup were parroting Mr. Bush’s contention that a fine, probation and reputation damage were ‘harsh punishment’ enough for Mr. Libby.

“Presidents have the power to grant clemency and pardons. But in this case, Mr. Bush did not sound like a leader making tough decisions about justice. He sounded like a man worried about what a former loyalist might say when actually staring into a prison cell.”

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: “President Bush’s commutation of a pal’s prison sentence counts as a most shocking act of disrespect for the U.S. justice system. It’s the latest sign of the huge repairs to American concepts of the rule of law that await the next president.”

San Jose Mercury News: “Other presidents have doled out pardons and the like, usually on the way out of office. It’s never pretty. But few have placed themselves above the law as Bush, Cheney and friends repeatedly have done by trampling civil liberties and denying due process. Chalk up another point for freedom. Scooter’s, at least.”

Read the rest of ’em here.

(Story and photo via AmericaBlog.)

Republican hypocrisy was on full display today. The supposedly “tough on crime” President George W. Bush commuted part of Scooter Libby’s sentence. Literally, Bush gave Scooter a “get out of jail free card.”

Tough on crime my ass.

Libby is still a convicted felon, will have to pay $250,000 and will be on probation should his appeal fail. (The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Libby’s request to remain free on bail while his appeal is under way, so the writing is on the wall as to the persuasiveness of his rather unorthodox legal arguments.)

Apparently obstructing justice, committing perjury, and making false statements is not really so bad if you are a Republican…at least, not bad enough to spend time in prison over.

The hypocrisy is overwhelming. While Governor of Texas, George W. Bush oversaw the execution of over 100 people, including three people who were borderline mentally retarded. Apparently, death is the right sentence for criminals who lack the mental capacity to fully understand their crimes. But Libby, a lawyer who rose to an important position in the White House, who knew full well he was obstructing a very serious criminal investigation, and who presumably has an IQ greater than 70…he walks. Maybe “selective on crime” is a better tag line.

(On the other hand, maybe Bush does not have the mental capacity to understand what he has done? I mean, really, has George W. Bush ever done anything that would peg his I.Q. at over 70?)

Here is how Dubya tried to justify his soft-on-crime decision:

Mr. Libby was sentenced to thirty months of prison, two years of probation, and a $250,000 fine. In making the sentencing decision, the district court rejected the advice of the probation office, which recommended a lesser sentence and the consideration of factors that could have led to a sentence of home confinement or probation.

I respect the jury’s verdict. But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive.

Excessive? Umm…pardon my cynicism, but wasn’t Judge Reggie Walton appointed precisely because he had a no-nonsense, tough-on-crime attitude?

In the end, the hypocrisy should be overshadowed by the simple logic of what just went down. Libby took a bullet for Dick Cheney, who clearly orchestrated a smear campaign against Valerie Wilson. Libby is convicted (instead of Cheney). Bush takes the sting out of Libby’s sentence. Pure and shameless abuse of power. Mark my words…in the end, Bush will pardon Libby.

I mean, that’s just the way organized crime works.

The blog ate my homework edition:

I thought it might be a slow week in bullshit locally until Goldy decided to cover Dino Rossi’s bullshit non profit. Still no word from those guardians of electoral integrity over at (un)Sound Politics. Hmm.

It has been a banner week in prudishness from local people. Lou Guzzo doesn’t like that the federal government took over a legal brothel for a short time almost 2 decades ago after its ownership fell behind on their taxes. And Michael Medved saw a study that the kids are having s-e-x and kinda freaked out.

Some famous people came to town last week. Torture boy going anywhere but his impeachment hearing is bullshit. And when Howard Dean came to town, it inspired a bullshit press release from the state Republicans.

Nationally, Jonah Goldberg changed the name of his bullshit book. That he still has written, so there.

In thank God they aren’t in the majority any more news, Pete Domenici and Norm Coleman are trying to weaken the Violence Against Women Act.

Finally, the big piece of bullshit today is the Scooter Libby pardon not quite a pardon. By a man who once said, “I don’t believe my role [as governor] is to replace the verdict of a jury with my own, unless there are new facts or evidence of which a jury was unaware, or evidence that the trial was somehow unfair.” But those were just for people being killed by the state, not as big a deal as say his friend outing a CIA agent.

Shit. I hate it when I agree with the Seattle Times editorial board. (Actually, I kinda like it when I agree with Times, but it’s a lot more fun to trash them.)

The Times takes former real estate salesman Dino Rossi to task for his faux “nonprofit, nonpartisan” think tank, that’s really just a dodge for running his 2008 gubernatorial campaign without revealing its contributors.

Rossi’s group could well be legal, but falls in a gray area. The group is keeping Rossi’s potential gubernatorial candidacy alive through speeches and travel. […] The state Public Disclosure Commission is doing preliminary work before beginning an investigation on Rossi’s group and may not conduct a full investigation. It should decide whether such a group is legal under campaign laws or if such activities violate the spirit of our laws, which is more likely.

[…] Voters have a right to wonder why Rossi invented a group and pretends it is not part of a campaign.

The Times goes on to say that even if he technically managed to skirt our state’s public disclosure laws, “Rossi ought to announce contributors and the amounts donated.”

Yeah, fat chance. The Stranger’s Josh Feit talked with Forward Washington executive director Ted Dahlstrom today, who said: “We have not violated any rule. We have no plans to disclose our list.”

If anything, the Times’ admonishment was too reserved. Forward Washington is a ruse, and everybody knows it. It doesn’t just allow Rossi to hide the identity of his big money contributors, it also allows them to vastly exceed campaign contribution limits. And oh yeah… Rossi gets to draw a salary… expressly forbidden in a real campaign. Sweet.

Rossi ran in 2004 as an agent of change, promising to shake things up in Olympia after two decades of Democratic governors. Now we see the kind of change Rossi was talking about.

UPDATE:
You know what…? The more I think about it, even I was being too reserved:

I first posted this back on December 23 of 2004. In this Public Disclosure Commission filing, Rossi declares that he is running for governor in 2008, and if you look above his signature you’ll see that he certifies that this report is “true, complete and correct.” And he continued to file with PDC until February of 2006.

So then… what happened to the $324,000 he’d raised for his official 2008 campaign? What happened to the computers, office furniture and other assets his 2008 campaign bought? What happened to the $79,000 he had left over in the bank? Did he really shut down his campaign and start Forward Washington, or did he just hang a different shingle on the door?

Now Rossi claims that he was only raising money to pay for his lawsuit? Well, he was either lying to the PDC back in December of 2004… or he’s lying to the PDC (and the public) now.

There’s no question that Rossi is intentionally skirting the law, but if the PDC determines that this is technically legal, than he has laid out a roadmap for killing public disclosure and campaign contribution limits in Washington state. Every candidate can be “undeclared” or “undecided” until officially filing. Every candidate can run a shadow campaign, hiding contributors, and directly drawing a salary.

The public has a right to know: who is paying Dino Rossi’s bills? The only thing stopping this disclosure is Dino Rossi.

SeattleJew gave me the OK to post this up to the front. He wrote:

Crack and theft, not to mention more violent issues are commingled in the African American community, Can the cops be expected to separate these issues? I guess that would mean only arresting a suspected perp for jay walking? Am I being sarcastic? No. Capone was never charged with murder, etc. “We” the good guys got him for tax evasion. On a grander scale, Nixon was on the road to impeachment not for treason but largely for profanity. Libby, may he rot in jail, was caught for this cover up, How is this different than the cops arresting a pimp for possession of a few black crystals?

Ignoring the fact that I have no idea what drug he’s referring to with the term “black crystals”, is he lying when he later says this?

As for the word Pimp, I did not use it esp. for anyone of any race.

Discuss.

UPDATE: More fun with SeattleJew. He also writes to me:

You seem to have some sort of similar problem with seeing others as racist. Could I call it, “Blogging while disagreeing with Lee?” This is why I warned you of McCarthyism. Throwing words like racist around is too easy.

I agree. Here’s something fun everyone can do. Open up the post where this comment appears and do a Ctrl-F. Type in the word “racist” and click Find Next. Was it in my lengthy post calling for Chief Kerlikowske to resign? Nope, it’s in the first full sentence of the first comment. Written by who?

SeattleJew. Strange that.

There’s a lot of speculation going on as to why Mariner’s manager Mike Hargrove would quit the team in the midst of a promising season and an eight-game winning streak. Well I’ve got my own theory: al-Qaeda.

And in the face of such an imminent threat there’s only one thing the Mariner’s can do if they want to save their season. We must bomb Iran. And Pakistan. Preferably with nuclear weapons.

Destroy “America’s pastime” and you destroy America. It is time for an preemptive strike.