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Here’s your weekly sandbox. Poop away.

Wing-nuts roasting on an open fire,
Jack boots stomping through the snow,
Yuletide pundits join the paranoid choir
That claims that Christmas has a foe.

Bill O’Reilly knows this turkey of a president
Needs an enemy to fight,
So the ACLU, and George Soros too
Now find it hard to sleep at night.

They know the boobs who watch Fox News
Will blame the “War on Christmas” on the liberal Jews.
And every mother’s child will look in scorn,
To see if Soros really has devil’s horns.

And so I’m offering this simple phrase
To wing-nuts, one to ninety-two,
Although you’d prefer it be said different ways:
Happy Holidays… fuck you!

(With apologies to Mel Torme and Bob Wells… and nobody else.)

There are a handful of Republican senators who deserve a great deal of credit for standing up to the bullying of their own leadership.

The Senate on Friday rejected attempts to reauthorize several provisions of the USA Patriot Act as infringing too much on Americans’ privacy and liberty, dealing a huge defeat to the Bush administration and Republican leaders.

In a crucial vote early Friday, the bill’s Senate supporters were not able to get the 60 votes needed to overcome a threatened filibuster by Sens. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and their allies. The final vote was 52-47.

Feingold and Craig want to extend the Patriot Act in its current form for several months so that the Senate has time to add more civil liberties protections, but Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has refused. The failure to close off debate and bring the bill to a vote came in the wake of today’s New York Times report that Bush authorized domestic surveillance of phone calls and emails of thousands of private citizens.

The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.

“This is really a sea change,” said a former senior official who specializes in national security law. “It’s almost a mainstay of this country that the N.S.A. only does foreign searches.”

Hey… remember the good old 1990’s, when the right-wing, whacko, militia-types spouted their paranoid fantasies about government intrusion and “black helicopters” and all that? Should it be any surprise that now that these same wing-nuts are running the country, they’re attempting to use on the rest of us the exact same tactics they imagined were once being used on them?

Okay… maybe that’s overstating things. But to those ardent GOP loyalists who would defend the Bush administration turning our intelligence apparatus inward, authorizing domestic spying on US citizens without court order… would you be so cavalier about our civil liberties if the enormous power of the state rested in the hands of a Democratic administration? Because if we still have a democracy, you’ve got to expect that it will eventually.

You know, there’s this other local blogger who’s name escapes me at the moment, who claims to be all over election reform and all that, and I’ve been waiting all day to see his analysis of the reform package proposed yesterday by Secretary of State Sam Reed (a Republican)… but so far, nada. Hmm. I guess for some people election reform isn’t really election reform unless it makes it harder to vote.

Reed’s proposal (PDF), on the other hand, is actually quite sensible, and includes two major provisions: moving the primary to August, and allowing for online voter registration via the SOS website.

Ask any county auditor in the state, and they’ll tell you that their number one reform priority is moving the primary… preferably to the spring, but they’ll take August if that’s what they can get. Reed’s proposal moves the primary from the 3rd Tuesday in September to the 3rd Tuesday in August, giving elections officials a much needed cushion before ballots go out for the general election. Reed’s proposal also makes a few other tweaks in this area, increasing the time for certifying a primary from 10 to 15 days, and requiring military and overseas ballots to be mailed out 30 days before the election (an impossible timeline under the current system.) Reed would also ease the legislative fundraising freeze to help accommodate the accelerated schedule.

Reed’s other major proposal would allow voters with a WA state driver’s license or state ID card to register to vote online; the SOS would obtain the voter’s signature from the Department of Licensing to pull into the voter rolls. This is an incredibly progressive, efficient, cost effective reform that would make WA only the second state to allow online voter registration. The only reason I can see why someone might argue against it would be if they don’t want to make it easier for citizens to register to vote. (Um… I expect there to be some passionate opposition.)

There are a bunch of other lower profile reforms in Reed’s proposal, mostly dealing with cleaning up the election statutes, and clarifying some of the rules regarding ballot measure petitions. One change that immediate stood out to me would make it “a gross misdemeanor to circulate a petition that appears to support a measure that differs from the actual measure attached to the petition.” Hmm. I wonder if that would apply to say, the time Eyman printed a petition for a property tax cut initiative with the headline “No New Income Tax!”…? Sure hope so.

While there are other reforms I would like to see, all in all, I can’t find anything in Reed’s proposal that I might object to. After the recent escalation of partisan tensions over the GOP’s voter challenge debacle, I was kind of dreading Reed’s proposal, but once again he has pleasantly surprised me. This appears to be a package of reasonable, modest reforms, and I hope beyond hope that it receives the kind of bipartisan support it deserves.

My what a difference a year makes. It wasn’t so long ago that the national GOP had targeted Sen. Maria Cantwell as the most vulnerable Democratic incumbent in 2006, while WA state Republicans were drooling over what they saw as the inevitable backlash over the 2004 gubernatorial election contest. Now, less than a year before the election, things don’t look so hot for them.

Last week I reported that both Rasmussen and GOP pollster Strategic Vision show Cantwell at the magic 50% or better against anointed challenger Mike McGavick… and now the new SurveyUSA poll is the latest to show Cantwell’s approval ratings tracking up, 55% to 34%, her net approval rising 9 points since last month’s survey. Far from being vulnerable, Cantwell now ranks right in the middle of the 100 senator pack, and most impressively, she now enjoys positive net approval across nearly every demographic group in the state.

What explains her sudden popularity? Well, she’s finally getting a little press around here, but my guess is that voters are beginning to pay a little more attention now that the 2005 election is over and McGavick is making a little more news. Absent an opponent, approval ratings can be a little nebulous, but voters, particularly Democrats and independents, are beginning to view Cantwell in the context of a head-to-head with McGavick. Indeed, Cantwell’s biggest jump was with voters who identify themselves as liberals. There may still be some resentment in this group over a handful of Cantwell’s votes, but they’re realists; no self-respecting liberal is going to hand this seat over to an insurance industry lackey like McGavick.

There was a time when state R’s expected the national party to pour lavish sums into this race, but it’s beginning to look like that money would be better spent defending Representatives Dave Reichert and Cathy McMorris. (And who knows… maybe even “Doc” Hastings.)

Wednesday the House of Representatives voted 308-122 to bar torture of military detainees, and I just thought it curious to note that the only member of the WA state delegation to vote against this measure calling for the ethical treatment of prisoners was none other than House Ethics chair Richard “Doc” Mengele Hastings. Makes you proud to be a Washingtonian, huh?

Here’s a guy who can’t even vote against the GOP leadership when it comes to something as basic as torture… and we expect him to impartially investigate members of his own party?

I just hope, for the sake of consistency, that if his committee ever gets around to investigating the likes of Representatives Tom DeLay and Bob Ney, his investigators utilize the same inhumane interrogation techniques Hastings endorses for use by our military. I’m guessing a couple hours of going Abu Ghraib on their sorry congressional asses would not only blow the whole Abramoff scandal wide open, but might also end with DeLay confessing to being the gunman on the grassy knoll.

For those of you offended by the “hypocrite fish” (which by the way, I think was intended to ridicule hypocrites, not Christians), I’m sure you’ll enjoy this new holiday music video by comedienne Sarah Silverman: “Give The Jew Girl Toys”

(Thanks to Eli Sanders of Slog for the tip.)

I just gotta pass on this amusing exchange between outgoing council members Dwight Pelz and David Irons. It’s not verbatim, and it’s from a secondhand source who wasn’t in council chambers at the time, but I’m just a lowly blogger, so secondhand, paraphrased accounts are good enough for me.

Apparently, during the course of a discussion of something or other during the council meeting, Pelz mentioned that he’s running for chairman of the state Democratic Party. Irons piped up, “Can I vote for you?” And Pelz shoots back, “No, but your sister can.” After a pause, Pelz added, “In fact, I’m hoping for four votes out of your family.”

Gotta laugh.

(For those who don’t know, Irons’ sister Di is the State Committeewoman from the 5th Legislative District, and thus will definitely have a vote in January’s election of a new state chair.)

One of the primary recommendations of the Independent Task Force on Elections appointed earlier this year by King County Executive Ron Sims was the creation of an outside “turnaround team” to evaluate and, if necessary, shakeup management of the elections department. In following through on his promise to follow the task force’s recommendation, Sims has chosen a contractor and requested $1.35 million from the council.

But now, as the council balks at appropriating the money, it’s own independent Citizen’s Election Oversight Committee is recommending against hiring a turnaround team at all.

Several members of the Citizens’ Election Oversight Committee, reconvened by the County Council after errors in the 2004 election, said Tuesday that the elections division has made great strides in improving the elections process.

But League of Women Voters representative Joan Thomas said a turnaround team could end up “turning around every bit of progress we’ve made, and starting all over again.”

The county virtually eliminated the mishandling of provisional ballots and dramatically improved its ballot accounting in the November election.

“It’s too late” for a turnaround team, committee chairman A.J. Culver said.

While administration insiders have previously assured me that Sims fully intends to follow the Task Force’s advice, and that Dean Logan’s fate would eventually be determined by the turnaround team’s recommendations, there has also been some internal debate over whether the turnaround team might disrupt the reforms already underway. The general administration consensus is that procedural improvements within elections have already been dramatic — an evaluation strongly echoed by the Citizens Oversight Committee — but that the turnaround team could be useful in recognizing and fixing the “cultural” and management issues that have long afflicted the department. Sims and his staff have also considered the turnaround team a necessary step towards restoring public faith in the system.

In telling the Seattle Times that Sims welcomed the council’s thoughts on a turnaround team, administration spokesman Sandeep Kaushik didn’t so much backpedal as he did leave the door open to reconsideration.

“We did make a commitment to the task force, which is the group that Executive Sims created, to implement this turnaround-team idea. That remains our position at this point.”

Well, at this point, the Council won’t be ready to vote on appropriating funds for the turnaround team until they reconvene in January… right around the time the Task Force is scheduled to reconvene as well. Considering how much is at stake both in terms of money and in continuing the successful transformation that is already occurring in the elections department, the first task before the Task Force should be to reevaluate their turnaround team recommendation in light of the improvements that have already been made.

After successful primary and general elections, the Citizens Oversight Committee seems downright enthusiastic about the improvements they have seen, while council members on both sides of the aisle seem to be questioning whether a turnaround team is still necessary. If the Task Force publicly agrees and drops this recommendation, it will save taxpayers $1.35 million, while further shoring up public faith in the system.

I’m not suggesting that just because KC elections has managed to run a couple of smooth elections, all the endemic cultural issues have been solved… but there are less dramatic and costly remedies. A management consultant could be brought in to review operations and make recommendations. Or perhaps State Auditor Brian Sonntag might be invited to come in and conduct one of those much-ballyhooed performance audits… on the state’s dime.

In any case, I think it’s time for everyone to stop viewing KC elections through the prism of the hyperbolic election contest controversy, and start evaluating it based on its recent performance. We may discover that a turnaround team is a solution in search of a problem that no longer exists.

Yesterday came more bad news for embattled vote counting rigging machine manufacturer Diebold. On Monday, Diebold CEO Walden O’Dell unexpectedly resigned due “personal reasons,” one day before a securities fraud class action suit was filed against him, Diebold, and seven other current and former officers. (RawStory has more details on the company’s woes from Diebold insider “Dieb-Throat.”)

Well, now comes word from Black Box Voting that a major security flaw has prompted Leon County Florida supervisor of elections Ion Sancho to announce that he will never again use Diebold in an election, and will request funds to replace the Diebold system in his county.

A test election was run in Leon County on Tuesday with a total of eight ballots. Six ballots voted “no” on a ballot question as to whether Diebold voting machines can be hacked or not. Two ballots, cast by Dr. Herbert Thompson and by Harri Hursti voted “yes” indicating a belief that the Diebold machines could be hacked.

At the beginning of the test election the memory card programmed by Harri Hursti was inserted into an Optical Scan Diebold voting machine. A “zero report” was run indicating zero votes on the memory card. In fact, however, Hursti had pre-loaded the memory card with plus and minus votes.

The eight ballots were run through the optical scan machine. The standard Diebold-supplied “ender card” was run through as is normal procedure ending the election. A results tape was run from the voting machine.

Correct results should have been: Yes:2 ; No:6

However, just as Hursti had planned, the results tape read: Yes:7 ; No:1

The results were then uploaded from the optical scan voting machine into the GEMS central tabulator, a step cited by Diebold as a protection against memory card hacking. The central tabulator is the “mother ship” that pulls in all votes from voting machines. However, the GEMS central tabulator failed to notice that the voting machines had been hacked.
The results in the central tabulator read:

Yes:7 ; No:1

Of course, the fact that a system can be hacked, doesn’t mean it has been hacked. It should be noted that while this is exactly the same type of Diebold system used in King County and throughout much of WA state, our state’s electoral integrity survived the most grueling and definitive test of all: the 2004 gubernatorial hand recount. Apart from the ballots legally added between tabulations, the difference between the hand and machine counts was statistically insignificant, proving that there was no manipulation of the data coming from the optical scanners or the GEMS central tabulator.

Curiously, one of the election “reforms” pushed by WA state Republicans is to remove hand recounts from our election procedures, thus eliminating the most definitive check on our automated vote tabulation systems. Hmmm.

The lesson that should be learned from all this is that the franchise is simply too valuable to trust to proprietary software from a private corporation. The only way to assure the integrity of our vote tabulation system is to move towards one based on open source software.

Rep. Doc Hastings, a Republican from Eastern Washington, should be ashamed of himself for allowing the House ethics committee he chairs to turn into a dysfunctional joke. It is an embarrassment to the state, to the country and even to the Republican Party that swept to power on the promise of clean government.

The Olympian’s editorial board doesn’t mince words in this editorial sticking it to Hastings for fiddling while the House burns around him.

It’s time for Hastings to stop his petty squabbling with the Democrats and start doing his job. Lord knows there is plenty to do at a time when one representative is headed for prison for accepting bribes and former House ma-jority leader Tom DeLay is under indictment in a Texas campaign finance scheme. Yet Congress has no functional ethics committee to hold elected leaders accountable.

The Republican leadership gave Hastings the job exactly because of his reputation as a do-nothing congressman, and they are getting exactly what they expected: absolutely nothing. Last year, committee chair Rep. Joel Hefley (R-CO), two other members, and most of the committee staff were purged after the panel twice voted to admonish Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX). After a year under Hastings “leadership” a new chief of staff is still not in position, and investigators haven’t even been hired. Meanwhile, seven lawmakers have either been indicted, convicted, pled guilty, or are under investigation for bribery, money laundering, conspiracy and other crimes.

“There is no ethics enforcement in Congress today, and it’s inexcusable,” said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a conservative monitor of government ethics.

“No matter what level of corruption the members of Congress engage in, the ethics committees do nothing,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of the liberal-leaning Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “It’s a national embarrassment.”

It certainly is, and it’s humiliating that a Washington state lawmaker is part of the problem.

My has Hastings star risen. Formerly just an embarrassment to the 4th CD, he’s now humiliating the entire state, prompting both the Olympian and the Tacoma News Tribune to editorialize against Hastings inexcusable recalcitrance. Hmmm… I wonder when the Seattle Times editorial board — which fancies itself our state’s paper of record — will weigh in on Hastings shameful performance as chair of the Ethics Committee?

The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight (and every Tuesday), 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E.

Be there or be thirsty. (I’ll be there.)

Democrat Darcy Burner, running for the party’s nomination to oppose first-term incumbent Dave Reichert, has a post up on Daily Kos attacking Reichert and the GOP leadership for failing to act on homeland security:

One of the critical issues that all Democrats will face in the 2006 elections is the assertion that they are too soft on national security issues. It will certainly be an issue in my race, where I am running for Washington’s 8th Congressional District against an incumbent, Dave Reichert, who is a former sheriff, and whose entire message last cycle consisted of “I will protect you.”

I think that we spend a lot of time allowing the Republicans to ask the wrong questions, and then we attack their answers when we shouldn’t cede them the questions in the first place.

They are asking the question: “Are we tough enough to finish what we’ve started in Iraq?”

The question that needs to be asked is: “Are we safer than we were on September 11, 2001?”

Don’t cede them the question. Ask the right one, and then answer it.

In light of last week’s blistering report card from the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, criticizing the Bush administration and Congress’s failure to act on many of their most crucial recommendations, Burner’s post is not only relevant to voters in her district, but to voters nationally. Please read the whole thing, and then recommend it so that it can get some national attention.

Writing for Salon.com, Michelle Goldberg goes into some of the long history behind the right-wing crusade against a non-existent liberal “war on Christmas.

Henry Ford was sounding the alarm about the war on Christmas in his notorious 1921 tract “The International Jew.” “The whole record of the Jewish opposition to Christmas, Easter and other Christian festivals, and their opposition to certain patriotic songs, shows the venom and directness of [their] attack,” Ford wrote. He listed local outrages: “Christmas celebrations or carols in Philadelphia, Cincinnati, St. Paul and New York met with strong Jewish opposition … Local Council of Jewish Women of Baltimore petitions school board to prohibit Christmas exercises … The Council of the University Settlement, at the request of the New York Kehillah [Jewish leadership], adopts this resolution: ‘That in the holiday celebrations held annually by the Kindergarten Association at the University Settlement every feature of any sectarian character, including Christmas trees, Christmas programs and Christmas songs, shall be eliminated.'”

To compare today’s “war on Christmas” demagogues to Henry Ford is not to call them anti-Semites. Rather, they are purveyors of a conspiracy theory that repeatedly crops up in America. The malefactors change — Jews, the U.N., the ACLU — but the outlines stay the same. The scheme is always massive, reaching up to the highest levels of power.

Goldberg is careful to avoid labeling the current crusade as anti-Semitic… but I’m not. At first I found the deluded rantings of Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly and John Gibson to be so pathetic as to be funny. But I’m not laughing anymore. I’ve done a lot of thinking and a lot reading on this subject over the past couple days, and I’ve come to the conclusion that this is anti-Semitism, pure and simple.

When you talk about a war on Christmas, or anything Christian, most Christians do not instantly think of the enemy as secular humanists or even Muslims… they think of Jews. Yes, like other forms of racism, anti-Semitism has mostly been pushed beneath the surface of respectable American dialogue for the past few decades, but two millennia of institutionalized Jew-hatred is not so easily washed away. Whether the intent is to blame the Jews for the rash of secular “Happy Holidays” that’s supposedly destroying our nation is not the point… many Christians, in buying into this bullshit rhetoric, will naturally blame Jews… whether it be the Jewish lawyers of the ACLU or Jewish merchants or whatever. Furthermore, this latently anti-Semitic “war on Christmas” rhetoric is clearly being harnessed for political purposes.

In her seminal work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt distinguishes between good old fashioned religious Jew hating, and modern, political anti-Semitism. While the latter certainly draws upon the former, anti-Semitism is more of a secular, racialist ideology, generally harnessed for political purposes. Indeed, Arendt argues that far from being just a terrible by-product, anti-Semitism was actually an organizing principle of the Nazi’s totalitarian regime.

This is, above all, a political crusade, and when O’Reilly and his ilk rage against a “war on Christmas,” they dangerously appeal to the inner demons of Christian society, for when Gibson talks about a vast anti-Christian conspiracy reaching into the heart of American life, it’s only natural for some Christians to look towards their historical boogeyman. Gibson writes:

“Last Christmas most people had a hard time finding Christmas cards that indicated in any way that Christmas commemorated Someone’s Birth. Easter they will have the same difficulty in finding Easter cards that contain any suggestion that Easter commemorates a certain event. There will be rabbits and eggs and spring flowers, but a hint of the Resurrection will be hard to find. Now, all this begins with the designers of the cards.”

No wait… that wasn’t Gibson, that was Henry Ford again, writing in his infamous 1921 anti-Semitic tract. Eight-five years later, Gibson and O’Reilly are careful not to name the enemy, but the vile rhetoric and its impact are unchanged. For who else would wage a “war on Christmas” than Christianity’s favorite 2000-year-old enemy… the Jews?

The right’s war on the “war on Christmas” is a political strategy intended to divide the nation along religious and cultural lines, and like all wars, there will be victims. How many Fox viewers have openly and angrily derided this attack on Christian America, and how many Jewish children have already been harassed by their schoolmates as a result? Anybody who has ever been a child should understand that this sort of open hostility happens everyday, and that the subtle strains of discrimination that lie beneath the surface of 21st Century America are not so subtle to the children who are its target.

And so the more the likes of O’Reilly and Gibson feign offense at this imagined attack on the rights of our nation’s white Christian majority, the more offense I shall take at their dangerous and hateful rhetoric. Intentional or not, they are harnessing the force’s of anti-Semitism to achieve a political end, and it’s time people started calling it for what it is.

One of the election “reforms” the Washington state GOP has aggressively proposed is eliminating the process of ballot “duplication”, through which ballots that could not otherwise be read by the vote tabulating machines are manually copied to register the clear intent of voters.

“This whole process makes us very nervous,” [State GOP chair] Chris Vance says … “You’ve got human beings making judgments and human beings touching the ballots. It just leads to mischief. … We could say, ‘Let the machines count the ballots and that’s it.’ ”

Yeah… well… according to an article in today’s Seattle Times, calming Vance’s nerves would have required disenfranchising 8.3% of King County voters in November’s general election, and nearly 113,000 voters in the state’s nine largest counties.

There’s a reason the GOP’s early claims last year of a ballot duplication scandal were quietly dropped during Dino Rossi’s ensuing election contest: there is no scandal. WA is a “voter intent” state, and that means officials must do what they can to count a ballot if the voter’s intent can be discerned. Ballot duplication is a transparent, well-documented process performed in every county in the state.

“The purpose of an election is to discern the will of the majority,” says Dean Logan, King County’s elections director. “It’s not to determine whether voters can follow directions.

“Are we going to disenfranchise someone because they used the wrong pen?”

[Secretary of State Sam] Reed, a Republican, agrees. “To deny somebody the right to have their vote counted because they made a mistake is not something we want to do,” he says. Many of those voters are elderly or disabled, Reed adds.

What types of ballots require duplication? Well, some are damaged in the mail, and others are those where voters corrected a mistake, as instructed, by drawing an X through the oval they already filled in, then filling in the right one. But the vast majority are simply ballots where voters used the wrong color pen, or just didn’t follow instructions… circling, checking, or putting X’s through ovals instead of filling them… or using some other creative ballot marking method. On the vast majority of these ballots the voter’s intent is clear and unmistakable… the handful remaining go to the canvassing board for final determination.

So why would Vance and the Republicans want to disenfranchise people who simply make mistakes? Because a statistically significant majority of these ballots come from the very old and the very young, the very poor and the least educated, and of course, first time voters… demographic groups all of which lean Democratic. This is why Democrats, across jurisdictions, tend to pick up votes during recounts, when more care is given towards counting all ballots, and not merely those the machine happens to read on the first pass.

So let’s be honest. Republicans know that if not for ballot duplication, Dino Rossi would likely be our governor, and it would be Slade Gorton running for reelection next year, not Sen. Maria Cantwell. Nearly all of the electoral “reforms” the Republicans have pushed have been naked efforts to achieve a partisan advantage. The harder they can make it for somebody to register to vote, to cast their ballot, or to have their ballot properly tabulated, the easier it is for Republicans to win close elections. The voters who are most likely to be disenfranchised by these “reforms” vote disproportionately for Democrats. Out of touch with the mainstream of voters in WA state, and unwilling to match their agenda to the wants and needs of the majority of the people, the GOP has instead chosen a strategy of shrinking the voter pool to more closely match the demographics of their base.

Had all the Republican “reforms” been in place during 2004, over a quarter of a million eligible voters would have been disenfranchised statewide. That is the GOP strategy for seizing power in WA state, and nationwide. And that is a strategy that Democrats must make their number one priority to fight.

[Cross-posted on Daily Kos]