HorsesAss.Org

Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) is sponsoring an immigration bill that could devastate Eastern WA’s agricultural industry. The bill would increase border patrols and build a 700-mile fence along the US-Mexico border. It would also criminalize giving assistance to illegal immigrants, potentially handing out five-year prison sentences to doctors, priests and church volunteers who provide humanitarian aid. But as the Seattle Times editorial board points out, what the bill doesn’t do is actually deal with reality.

Missing from Sensenbrenner’s bill is a legal guest-worker program. With only enforcement and no accommodation of economic realities, industries such as agriculture and construction will get stuck with apples left on trees or buildings unfinished.
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Washington Republican Reps. Doc Hastings and Cathy McMorris, who represent the state’s two most agrarian districts, voted for Sensenbrenner’s bill even though both support a guest-worker program in concept. They acknowledge this bill’s approach makes for a job only half done.

Once again McMorris and Hastings are voting with the GOP hardline over the sentiment and interests of their own constituents. I’ve watched Yakima Valley farmers plough under fields of ripe tomatoes for want of the farm workers to pick them. I’ve seen orchards littered with fallen fruit as growers failed to round up sufficient labor to meet the narrow window for harvest at optimal quality. The farm labor shortage isn’t hypothetical — it’s happening now — and it will only get worse should Sensenbrenner’s draconian and shortsighted immigration bill pass.

Illegal immigration is driven by economic reality: poverty abroad and the need for cheap labor at home. Nobody is suggesting we should ignore border security, but neither should McMorris and Hastings ignore the economic well being of their own constituents.

New Years Eve party didn’t end until 3 AM. Went to bed. Awoke at 8 AM to piss. Pissed. Pissing woke up the dog, who made it clear she had to piss too. Walked the dog. Dog pissed. Went online to look at headlines; learned that George W. Bush is still president. Really pissed.

The Seattle P-I has posted their “Five to remember” and “Five to forget” from 2005, and lookie who made the list:

And five to forget …

Stefan Sharkansky and David Goldstein

The right-wing Shark and left-wing Goldy have dominated the local political blogosphere, which during the governor’s race controversy sounded like a schoolyard shouting match.

Newspaper reporters dissing bloggers? Imagine that.

(Hmm. I’m guessing that if the JOA goes the way we all expect it to go, it will be Stefan and I who will be forgetting the P-I in a couple of years.)

The last sandbox of 2005. Please feel free to turn it into “a schoolyard shouting match.”

The so-called “Coalition of the Willing” was always a load of bullshit, a flimsy cover for President Bush’s unilateral decision to invade Iraq… and it’s getting flimsier every day. Yesterday Poland announced plans to reduce it’s 1,500-weak force by 40 percent, just days after Bulgaria and Ukraine completed their troop withdrawals. And today the South Korea parliament voted to cut it’s deployment by about one-third to 2,300.

The U.S. has always provided over 90 percent of the foreign troops in Iraq, with most of the rest coming from the British. At 3,200 members the South Korean forces currently comprise the third largest contingent in the “coalition.” To put this in perspective, the U.S. still has over 30,000 troops stationed in South Korea.

For his Iraq War, President Bush’s father managed to put together an actual coalition, but all W could ever muster was a phrase. And an overtly Orwellian one at that.

I’ve been a touch light on posting during the busy holiday season, so yesterday I filled some space with a little joke derived from the death of John Diebold, which prompted a comment near the top of the thread from our good friend Stefan:

Hey, Goldy, joking about the late Mr. Diebold is perfectly tasteless. But I’m glad we have common ground in finding flaws in Diebold election technology. After all, it is Diebold software and a Diebold business unit that help process King County’s mail-in ballots and which helped cause hundreds of ballots to be misaccounted for and illegally counted last year. I’m glad you agree with me that Diebold helped put the wrong person in our Governor’s chair.

As to his first point… um… duh-uh. Joking about anybody’s death is tasteless. But I’m pretty sure that the majority of HA readers prefer posts that taste good over those in good taste.

But it’s his second point I really want to comment on, because it is yet another example of the type of rhetorical bullshit the public has been treated to in its coverage of King County Elections. Stefan correctly states that KC uses Diebold equipment and software to count ballots, but then disingenuously insinuates that this flawed technology was manipulated to “put the wrong person in our Governor’s chair.”

But once again Stefan’s overeagerness leaves his own arguments open to ridicule, for as I wrote a couple weeks ago in reporting security flaws uncovered during tests in Leon County Florida, just because the Diebold system can be hacked, doesn’t necessarily mean it was.

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.

To imply that the software was fraudulently manipulated to alter the vote tally is utterly ridiculous… but wait… Stefan really didn’t imply that, did he? Carefully rereading his comment, no… but in the context of my joke about paper trails, that’s surely what he intended readers to infer. And that in a nutshell is really where most of the public’s misconceptions about the 2004 election come from… insinuations, inferences, and various “facts” intentionally misrepresented and taken out of context.

Furthermore, I find his sudden interest in Diebold’s security flaws doubly curious, considering how little attention he has paid to it over the life of the election controversy. GEMS is built on top of Microsoft Access for chrissakes! Who the hell would want to run an election on that? Yet this is the first I’ve heard from Stefan — a computer guy — that he has any concerns about running elections on buggy, proprietary software from companies like Diebold.

Stefan and his fellow travelers at (un)Sound Politics have become champions of election reforms that make it harder for people to vote, yet seem to ignore reforms that actually ensure that these votes are counted properly. Where’s their outrage over the touch screen voting machines in Snohomish County, where the prosecutor’s office received numerous complaints on election day 2004 about machines recording the wrong vote? Where’s their demand for voter verifiable paper trails? Where’s the debate on (u)SP over the merits of moving towards open source software?

No, instead, one of the major reforms promoted by the (u)SP types is to eliminate hand recounts… thus eliminating the one absolutely foolproof audit on our vote tallying software.

The evidence shows that in the wrong hands the Diebold software can be hacked, but the hand recount proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that in 2004 in WA state, it wasn’t. So if Stefan and I really do share common ground in believing the Diebold software to have serious technical flaws, perhaps we can put the rhetoric over the 2004 election aside for a moment, and discuss some real solutions?

I’ll start. Hey Stefan… what’s your opinion on the relative security tradeoffs involved in moving to open source software?

Hey… it looks like annointed GOP senatorial nominee and Safeco CEO Mike McGavick will draw a primary challenger after all. Um… sort of. Fresh on the heals of his surprisingly strong third place finish in the 2004 Republican senatorial primary, Brad Klippert is once again seeking to represent the right wing of his party.

In the 2004 voter pamphlet Klippert wrote:

I, Brad Klippert, am a husband and father. I am a full time law enforcement officer, a veteran and active Major/pilot in the U.S. Army National Guard. I have a Masters Degree in Teaching and I am a licensed minister.

I am a God fearing, Bible believing, Ten Commandment honoring, evangelical Christian candidate. I firmly stand for and fully support traditional family values; the committed marriage between a man and a woman/husband and wife.

I believe that every life is precious and valuable with great potential; including the life of unborn children.

Hard to argue with any of that… that is, if you are a God fearing, Bible believing, Ten Commandment honoring, evangelical Christian. Which raises an interesting dilemma for McGavick, who needs to run to the left of his party to have a hope of capturing enough Democratic and independent voters to beat Cantwell, yet not so far to the left so as to disenchant the right wing of his party.

Now, I’m certainly not suggesting that Klippert can mount a serious primary challenge, but given the opportunity, his candidacy could serve to help Christian conservatives focus attention on everything McGavick is not. You know… one of them. Sure, he’ll try to pander to the religious right, but to win statewide he’s going to have to run one of those undefined, mushy centrist campaigns with a wink and a nod to the right. (Think Rossi.) But if Klippert forces him on a couple key issues, that won’t be so easy.

Where does McGavick stand on choice? On gay marriage? On teaching Intelligent Design? My guess is that the contrast between the ordained minister and the preordained nominee is pretty stark.

The problem for McGavick is that contrary to popular belief, Christian conservative voter turnout can be pretty soft, especially when the Republican candidate gives them little to get excited about. And as much as McGavick needs to draw votes from Dems and independents, he also needs a strong showing from the GOP base.

McGavick’s strategy will be to pretend that Klippert doesn’t exist, so don’t expect to see any candidate debates. But while the state GOPolitburo will surely treat Klippert like a fringe candidate, I hope the editorial boards give him his say and allow him to draw McGavick out on important issues of the day. Voters in both parties deserve to know where McGavick stands; it would be a disservice to allow him to duck controversial issues the way Dino Rossi did in 2004.

It’s not just McGavick who deserves a primary challenger… it’s the voters.

John Diebold reportedly died the other day, and I was going to joke that doctors won’t confirm his death until they check the paper trail on the EKG… but as it turns out, he had nothing to do with vote fixing counting machine manufacturer Diebold, Inc. Too bad. Would’ve been a good joke.

So… um… rest in peace, John.

One of the things that pissed me off about last year’s over-hyped election contest controversy — I mean, really pissed me off — was the constant abuse heaped on King County Elections about felon voters. Yes, hundreds of ex-felons who had not properly had their voting rights restored voted in 2004, but this happened throughout the state, in every county. But because the state GOP so successfully promoted their cherry-picked list of KC felons, many voters came away thinking this problem was mostly due to negligence and/or malfeasance in KC.

The fact is, felon votes were pretty evenly distributed throughout the state, and were the result of a decentralized and inefficient system of reporting convictions. Indeed, the problem was so well known and so widespread that a federal law was passed in 2002 requiring the development of statewide voter registration databases to help clean the voter roles of felons, dead people, and duplicate registrations.

Well, WA’s database goes online Jan. 1, just in time to meet the federal deadline, and while it’s not a cure-all, it should make a huge a difference. For example, the new database is hooked directly to records from the prison system, State Patrol and the courts, rather than relying on haphazard communications at the local level. And one of the biggest improvements comes in removing registrations due to death…

To remove dead voters from the rolls, county auditors currently rely on reports from the state health department or obituary notices in newspapers. But those sources may be insufficient if a voter dies while out of state.

With deaths, the new system’s reach will be nationwide, Excell said, because of a tie-in to information from the federal Social Security Administration.

“If you’re dead, we got you,” [Pierce County Auditor Pat McCarthy] said.

Uh-huh.

See, what pisses me off is that King County Elections was publicly crucified for problems that had nothing to do with King County, and for which solutions were already under development at the state level. There was absolutely nothing nefarious or peculiarly incompetent about the way KC handled these registrations… these registrations were the result of a poorly designed system — nationwide — that was in the process of being fixed.

And yet the headlines from last year told a different, inaccurate story… a story that will shape public perceptions of KC elections for years to come.

UPDATE:
It has been pointed out to me that it was Assistant Sec. of State Steve Excell to whom I should have attributed the “If you’re dead, we got you” quote. Ooops.

Last week I wrote that Dwight Pelz had the inside track on being the Democrats’ new state party chair, but now that former state senator/supreme court justice/gubernatorial candidate Phil Talmadge has entered the fray, I hear it could be a horse race. Already the landscape has changed, with former King County Democratic chair Greg Rodriguez withdrawing from the competition.

I like Greg. I don’t feel particularly qualified to pick a party chair, but I’m sorry to see his voice lost from the debate. In a letter to supporters Greg said his decision to withdraw was mostly due to family matters, but he also sounded more than a bit disappointed by the tone of the politicking against him. I’d heard the questions about his fundraising prowess, but nothing more personal than that. But then, appearances to the contrary, I’m not much of a party insider, so who knows what’s been said?

Greg’s letter also contains some suggestions for what he’d like to see from the new chair, and I think they’re worth repeating:

First and foremost we must run our Party in a more business like fashion. We need to provide our Districts and counties with up-to-date and efficient communications, lists and training resources. We must find and hire the most professional people and insist on the utmost levels of ethics and accountability. The thoughts and ideas of the Eboard, Chairs, and caucus leaders should be listened to and acted upon much more than they have been. Decisions should be made collaboratively and not done in back rooms and assumed that everyone will go along with them.

We must improve our voter file and technology presence. It is true we have one of the most advanced systems in the country, but that does not mean we should rest on our laurels. We must utilize the people that have the technological know how and who have offered support to this Party (but have been turned away) to make our system better and more user-friendly. Our website must be translated into Spanish and other languages as well as any printed materials we develop.

We have to pay more attention to our Democrats outside the I-5 corridor. This means in rural and urban places on both sides of the mountains. We will never regain a Democratic stronghold if we write these places off. It will not happen over night, but we must find ways to get our message out, recruit and train candidates, and work with our local County and District organizations to strengthen the Democratic base across this state. In addition, we must utilize all of our caucuses, our friends in labor, choice and peace groups, environment and yes even business to craft and deliver messages appropriate to the different demographics and geographies of the State of Washington .

We need to develop a Party leadership mentoring program and learn how to encourage our youth to take on more positions of leadership. We must end the politics of personal and organizational destruction that occurs even within our own Party. This will get us nowhere and in fact has caused people to leave the Party organizations in this State. While so many of our goals in this Party may be different, we have far more that are the same and should work more and more to find that common ground and assist our rising stars and growing organizations in achieving their fullest potential.

Good points all. That said, I also like both Pelz and Talmadge.

As I’ve previously stated, Pelz can be a bit of an asshole… but he’s our asshole; if local elections were decided by a barroom brawl between party chairs, I’d want Pelz slugging it out for the Dems. As it is, there’s something enticing about the thought of Pelz verbally kicking Chris Vance’s fat tuchus all over the evening news. But maybe that’s not the chair’s primary role.

I understand that Talmadge can be a bit of an asshole too (again, in a good way), but mostly, I like him because he’s smart. In fact, last night at Drinking Liberally there was some discussion as to whether Talmadge was too smart to be chair.

I’m not suggesting that Pelz isn’t smart too, it’s just that Talmadge is all about being smart… and he’s not shy about letting people know it. The couple of times I’ve had the opportunity to talk to him I’ve found him insightful, passionate, and incredibly well informed on a wide variety of issues. But again… maybe that’s not the chair’s primary role.

What do I know? Neither Talmadge nor Pelz might be the best choice for party chair… but either one should be fun to watch in the role.

An Alaska Airlines MD-80 was forced to make an emergency landing Monday when a hole in the fuselage blew out at 26,000 feet.

An investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said baggage handlers had bumped the plane’s fuselage with loading equipment and caused “a crease” in the side of the aircraft. The handlers are contract workers hired to replace unionized workers in May.

Hmmm. I suppose there can be consequences when a company cheaps out, replacing experienced, loyal, unionized employees with the lowest bidder.

About 20 minutes after takeoff, the crease blew into a 1-foot-by-6-inch hole, said Jim Struhsaker, an NTSB senior air-safety investigator.
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Port of Seattle police weren’t notified about the incident until Tuesday, when operations staffers for Alaska contacted them, airport spokesman Bob Parker said. The airline asked police to fill out a “hit-and-run report” because an employee struck the aircraft with a baggage tug, he added.
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Alaska saw an increase in ground-damage incidents at Sea-Tac after it replaced 472 unionized workers in May with workers from Menzies Aviation, based near London, the airline said. The switch contributed to a sharp increase in delayed departures from Sea-Tac.

I know that organized labor is a favorite Republican whipping boy, but I’m wondering whether even the righties amongst you can enjoy the same peace of mind flying Alaska, knowing that the airline’s “Always Low Prices” approach to maintenance and ground crews almost brought down yet another jetliner?

Are well-paid, well-trained union employees more expensive? It depends on how much you value human life.

Trent Lott may not run for reelection, and according to righty columnist Robert Novak, Mississippi Republicans fear the seat might go Democratic.

Trent Lott within the next week plans to decide between seeking a fourth term in the U.S. Senate from Mississippi or retiring from public life.

That could determine whether Republicans keep control of the Senate in next year’s elections. For the longer range, Lott’s retirement and replacement could signal that Southern political realignment has peaked and now is receding.

Mississippi, one of the reddest of the red Republican states, has not even been on the game board of the Washington analysis forecasting the 2006 Senate outcome. But in Mississippi, prominent Republicans are worried sick. They believe Lott will probably retire. If so, they expect the new senator will be a Democrat, former State Attorney General Mike Moore. Republican politicians in Mississippi believe Rep. Chip Pickering, the likely Republican nominee if Lott does not run, cannot defeat Moore.

2006 is shaping up to be an awfully tough year for the GOP. If they’re worried about defending their turf in the Deep South, it’s hard to imagine them mounting a tough challenge out here in the Pacific Northwest.

Settled into those post-Christmukkah, pre-New Years doldrums? The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight (and every Tuesday), 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E.

I’ll bring a menorah, we’ll all say the barucha, and then we’ll unwrap a pitcher of Manny’s.

I thought it worth pointing towards today’s Seattle Times editorial on all-mail voting, mostly because it’s conclusion echoes the main point in my previous post on the subject:

FOR all the political huffing and puffing about a plan to make elections in King County all-mail voting, the key thing to remember is that voters chose the new system.
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A vote-by-mail system is inevitable. Elected officials are catching up with the public.

28 of WA’s 39 counties voted by mail this November, and 5 others are in the process of making the change. Perhaps King County is making the switch a little sooner than we had expected, but the timing is right for a number of reasons.

The recommendations from three outside reviews of KC elections all focused on the immediate need to consolidate operations into a single elections center. But it makes absolutely no sense to design and build a new multi-million dollar elections center to handle an elections system (polling place voting) that is destined to become obsolete in a few short years.

No doubt the move to all-mail voting will be a challenge. While less than 30 percent of KC voters cast ballots at the polls last month, that still represents more ballots than cast by any means in any other single county in the state. To put this in perspective, moving us remaining, stubborn polling place voters to mail-in ballots will be like adding all of Pierce County into the system.

If the county council approves the switch (and with Bob “Swing Vote” Ferguson on board, that seems a sure thing) it must also appropriate the funds necessary to do the job right. That includes building the consolidated elections center everybody agrees is absolutely necessary. Now.

Another Christmas has passed, and alas, so has the Jewish secular humanist war on it… at least until next December. I spent the weekend in nonstop celebration with my daughter’s large Irish-Catholic family (in truth, the celebration continues later this morning with brunch), and I must glumly report from the front that we have once again lost the war. It was a joyous day for all. Damn.

A couple weeks back I wrote about the bogus “War on Christmas”, pointing out that it was far from just a harmless marketing ploy to bump ratings for Fox News. Such rhetoric cannot help but stir latent, anti-Semitic sentiments:

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.

Okay… maybe I was wrong to warn that anti-Semitism lies just beneath the surface of American society. As several of my readers made clear in the comment threads, anti-Semitism and other forms of racial discrimination remain an open wound for all to see. Curiously, in addition to the usual gloating over my inevitable consignment to the fires of Hell, one of the Christian soldiers’ recurring themes was to question my Jewishness. I was dismissed as a “JINO”, accused of being an enemy of Israel… I was even compared to Hitler. (Unfavorably.) I suppose their tactic is to undermine my critique by destroying my credibility as a Jew… a stunning lack of insight that demonstrates by example the rarely understood fact that anti-Semitism is more about race than religion: it isn’t our Judaism that people hate, it’s our Jewishness.

But it’s not just old “Nazi behind every bush” Goldy who sees the “War on Christmas” for what it really is. In yesterday’s New York Times, my favorite columnist, Frank Rich, points out the obvious anti-Semitic undercurrents. [“I Saw Jackie Mason Kissing Santa Claus.”]

Rabble-rousing paranoia about a supposed assault on Christmas also has a strong anti-Semitic and far-right pedigree. In Salon, Ms. Goldberg noted that fulmination about supposed Jewish opposition to Christmas dates to Henry Ford’s infamous “The International Jew” of 1921. That chord is sounded in the very first anecdote in the book by the Fox News anchor John Gibson, “The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought”: a devastated father discovers that his 4-year-old son has brought home preschool artwork showing a Hanukkah menorah and Kwanzaa candles, rather than a Christmas tree. But Mr. Gibson goes on to add ecumenically that “not just Jewish people” are out to kill Christmas. As he elucidated on Christian radio, all non-Christians are “following the wrong religion,” though he reassures us that they will be tolerated “as long as they’re civil and behave.”

Well, I for one am not willing to be civil and behave, and some of my righty readers have shown their intolerance in response. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t hate Christmas. What I hate is the way assholes like Gibson and O’Reilly stir up hate and resentment towards minorities by perpetuating this cynical myth of an oppressed Christian majority.