HorsesAss.Org

Ho-hum… Chris Vance is alleging fraud again. At a press conference yesterday, the GOPolitburo Chair put forth the following curious piece of logic:

“If the books don’t balance and you can’t figure out why, you have to assume fraud took place.”

Um… no, Chris… if the books don’t balance you have to assume that the books don’t balance. If you’re going to allege that Democrats stuffed ballot boxes (which is what he’s doing,) you’re going to have to find some actual evidence of Democrats, uh… stuffing ballot boxes. At least if you plan on winning in court.

In fact, part of Vance’s fraud claim is based on an alleged 875 vote “discrepancy” between the absentee ballots counted and the number of voters credited. But Judge Bridges has already ruled that the voter credited records would not be accepted as evidence of ballots cast, so really, all Vance is doing is talking. This is all old news, being rehashed in a press conference, in the hope of stirring up a little voter outrage.

Vance is essentially accusing Democrats of being criminals, without any evidence to back up the claim. Well I’ll tell you what: I’m a Democrat, and I’m not a criminal, and I resent being called one. On the other hand, while I certainly wouldn’t want to generalize about all Republicans, I think I have collected ample enough evidence to definitively state that Chris Vance is an asshole.

A cute puppy… who’d of thunk?

My cat isn’t too happy, but my daughter’s thrilled.

Speaking of Tim Eyman, the initiative he’s shilling for the 2005 season would implement performance audits, which might actually be a great idea, if the Legislature hadn’t already done so. (And if Tim hadn’t written his initiative so stupidly. As usual.)

WA State Auditor Brian Sonntag’s office has already put up a web page dedicated to explaining the new legislation, and allowing citizens to follow along with its progress. Sonntag promises to enable citizen input via the web page, but if you really want to get involved, they have posted an application form with which you can apply to join the Citizen Advisory Board yourself.

My suggestion to all you “waste, fraud, and abuse” righties out there is to put your money where your mouth is, and apply for the Board.

Every child deserves a puppy, and my daughter is every child. So I’m headed out to pick up a crate, some puppy food, a few chew toys, and oh yeah… a puppy. I’ll post a picture of “Feisty” later today.

In the meanwhile, I’m bound to be distracted, so expect some light posting. I’m working on a historical analysis of gasoline prices and the WA state motor fuels tax, adjusted for inflation, so that we can all have a fair, balanced and totally unprejudiced discussion of the incredibly stupid and misleading gas-tax-repeal initiative that was filed last week. I’ve also got some interesting observations in the works about last November’s poorly written “Top-Two Primary” initiative.

In the meanwhile, I think I’ll just take the easy way out and point you towards The General’s advanced preview of the coming line-up for Republicanized public broadcast: “Tonight on GOPBS.”

Andrew Villeneuve of NW Progressive Blog has a guest column in today’s Seattle P-I, rebutting yet another Tim Eyman $30 car tab initiative. [“Eyman out to destroy representative democracy.” Andrew wrote his column on behalf of Permanent Defense, but he is also the force behind the ever-useful Pacific NW Portal. Busy guy.

It’s been nearly three years since Eyman has managed to qualify one of his “grassroots” initiatives for the ballot, and I think it’s time to acknowledge that he has officially gone pro. For April, Timmy raised only $5,000 from his core group of contributers, but raked in another $75,000 from Woodinville “investment executive” Michael Dunmire, whose total contributions to I-900 now amount to $315,000 of the $415,000 raised thus far. Within the past year, Dunmire also gave $20,000 to Tim’s personal compensation PAC.

The good news is that Eyman’s grassroots fundraising has nearly dried up, his longtime contributors finally tiring of throwing good money after bad. The bad news is that there are still wealthy people stupid enough to bankroll Eyman’s follies. Last year Eyman spent $700,000 of gambling industry money to qualify I-892 for the ballot, but crapped out at the polls. Eventually, Dunmire will learn the same thing Eyman taught the gambling industry: his initiatives are a bad investment.

My guess is, Washington voters have learned that lesson as well.

Pigs are flying, they’re throwing snowballs in Hell, and I’m about to agree wholeheartedly with the Evergreen Freedom Foundation (EFF).

Gov. Christine Gregoire had modestly proposed eliminating a handful of tax loopholes, valued at more than $50 million annually, to help close the state’s yawning budget gap, but as the Seattle P-I reports this morning, the Legislature failed to repeal a single one. That leaves 503 tax breaks — over $32 billion a year — still on the books. The Legislature also failed to enact a bill that would have required periodic review of tax exemptions, a “good government” issue I felt so strongly about, that I actually drove down to Olympia to testify before the House Finance Committee on its behalf.

While I don’t remember seeing Jason Mercier testify at the hearing, from his quotes in this morning’s P-I, the EFF’s budget analyst and I apparently agree that all of the state’s tax exemptions should be reviewed, and in a perfect world, revoked.

“From our perspective, you shouldn’t have any tax exemptions at all. The state should have a uniformly low tax rate that allows businesses to prosper or fail based on the free-market system, and not corporate welfare,” he said. “The answer is not to pick and choose the state’s winners and losers based on the power of a firm’s lobbyist, but to treat everybody equally with a uniformly low rate.”

He said that addressing problems with the tax code by granting exemptions is a solution for one business, “but not for the rest of the employers and employees who are being harmed by that problem.

“That was the biggest frustration with the state’s Boeing thing. Boeing wouldn’t have needed this massive tax break if the state had been addressing the legitimate business climate problems over the last decade,” he said.

“It’s a vicious cycle now because you have a bidding war between the states, trying to out-subsidize each other instead of trying to make the best business climate.”

I couldn’t agree more (which is really saying something, considering I vacillate between thinking the EFF’s political agenda is either stupid… or just shy of evil.) And considering Jason’s comments, I can’t help but wonder why the EFF didn’t join me in supporting Ron Sims’ Tax Plan, which would have met both of their stated goals: it eliminates business tax exemptions by eliminating business taxes entirely. As I wrote back in August:

While I personally had some initial reservations over this aspect of the plan, I have grown to appreciate it’s subtle brilliance. Eliminating corporate taxes is not only a clever political move in regards to the plan’s passage, it also eliminates one of the most corrupting forces in Olympia… the annual feeding frenzy of corporate lobbyists influencing legislators to pass billions of dollars of special interest sales and B&O tax exemptions. Without corporate taxes there can be no corporate tax exemptions. While the Sims’ plan is sure to be a job creator over all, it is certain to put more than a few lobbyists out of work.

To be fair to Jason, Sims’ plan was met with a stunning lack of imagination from both the right and the left. Sims proposed to eliminate the state portion of the B&O and sales tax, and replace the revenue with a graduated, personal income tax. This would have left the state with no direct tax on business operations, a thought so shocking to some of my fellow liberals that it sent many to orthopedists with tragic knee-jerk related injuries. Meanwhile, for people like Jason, the thought of even thinking about considering discussing the thought of the remotest possibility of a debate on an income tax, is apparently analogous to clutching a copy of Das Kapital to your breast, while belting out a rousing chorus of The Internationale.

I, on the other hand, have my eyes firmly on the prize: correcting Washington’s cruelly unfair tax system… by far the most regressive in the nation. And that is something the Sims Plan would clearly do, in spades.

If fully implemented, the Sims’ proposal would transform Washington’s tax structure from the most regressive in the nation to one of the least. That it would also create the most pro-business state tax environment in the US, while eliminating the economic distortion generated by our tangle of tax exemptions, is a definite bonus. Believe it or not, it is possible to be both liberal, and pro-business, and I’m confident that if more people took the time to seriously consider the Sims Plan, it could garner enthusiastic support from both sides of the aisle.

But I’m guessing that’s not what Jason and the EFF really want. For when they talk about eliminating taxes on businesses, they’re not particularly interested in replacing the revenue from somewhere else. Their goal is not just to eliminate taxes, but for the most part, to eliminate much of government as well.

So enjoy the porcine aviation while it lasts, for I’m guessing it will be cold day in Hell before the EFF and I voice agreement on tax policy again.

In a decision that could be a huge boon for Washington state’s wine industry, the U.S. Supreme Court today struck down laws in New York and Michigan banning direct shipments of wine from out of state. The 5-4 decision called such laws discriminatory and anticompetitive, and puts in doubt similar laws in 22 other states.

With over 300 wineries, 30,000 acres of vines, and $628 million in retail sales, Washington state now ranks as the number two producer of premium wines nationally, second only to California. The industry creates 11,250 full time jobs, and has an estimated $2.4 billion impact on Washington state’s economy.

The decision could be particularly advantageous to the state’s many small wineries, who do not have the distribution prowess of their larger competitors. Without an interstate ban on direct shipments, a functioning website and some good reviews could open the market to higher margin, direct, national sales.

It’s not often I get to be out in front of Frank Rich on an issue, but as usual, my favorite New York Times columnist, manages to make his point more eloquently and persuasively than I could ever hope to. [“Just How Gay Is the Right?“] Ah well, I suppose that’s why Rich is an Op-Ed columnist for the paper of record, whereas I’m… well… just some blogger.

Rich uses the DVD release of the 1962 political potboiler “Advise and Consent” as a springboard for discussing the right’s war on the judiciary and the violently anti-gay rhetoric that fuels it. The movie focuses on a McCarthy-era confirmation battle, and the gay secret of a conservative Senator from Utah. It depicts the gay-baiters as the real menace.

That message remains on target now. But in the years since, even as it has ceased to be a crime or necessarily a political career-breaker to be gay, unprincipled gay-baiting has mushroomed into a full-fledged political movement. It’s a virulent animosity toward gay people that really unites the leaders of the anti-“activist” judiciary crusade, not any intellectually coherent legal theory (they’re for judicial activism when it might benefit them in Florida). Their campaign menaces the country on a grander scale than Drury and Preminger ever could have imagined: it uses gay people as cannon fodder on the way to its greater goal of taking down a branch of government that is crucial to the constitutional checks and balances that “Advise and Consent” so powerfully extols.

Rich goes on to present a rogues gallery of right-wing notables “whipping up homophobia” including Jerry Falwell’s “Declaration of War” against homosexuality, Pat Robertson’s claim that activist judges are a greater threat than Al Qaeda, and former Alabama chief justice Roy Moore (of Ten Commandments monument fame) who has suggested the state has the power to prohibit homosexual conduct at penalty of death. And of course, Rich points out the irony that I have been somewhat dwelling on recently.

What adds a peculiar dynamic to this anti-gay juggernaut is the continued emergence of gay people within its ranks. Allen Drury would have been incredulous if gay-baiters hounding his Utah senator had turned out to be gay themselves, but this has been a consistent pattern throughout the 30-year war. Terry Dolan, a closeted gay man, ran the National Conservative Political Action Committee, which as far back as 1980 was putting out fund-raising letters that said, “Our nation’s moral fiber is being weakened by the growing homosexual movement and the fanatical E.R.A. pushers (many of whom publicly brag they are lesbians).” (Dolan recanted and endorsed gay rights before he died of AIDS in 1986.) The latest boldface name to marry his same-sex partner in Massachusetts is Arthur Finkelstein, the political operative behind the electoral success of Jesse Helms, a senator so homophobic he voted in the minority of the 97-to-3 reauthorization of the Ryan White act for AIDS funding and treatment in 1995.

But surely the most arresting recent case is James E. West, the powerful Republican mayor of Spokane, Wash., whose double life has just been exposed by the local paper, The Spokesman-Review. Mr. West’s long, successful political career has been distinguished by his attempts to ban gay men and lesbians from schools and day care centers, to fire gay state employees, to deny City Hall benefits to domestic partners and to stifle AIDS-prevention education. The Spokesman-Review caught him trolling gay Web sites for young men and trying to lure them with gifts and favors. (He has denied accusations of abusing boys when he was a Boy Scout leader some 25 years ago.) Not unlike the Roy Cohn of “Angels in America” – who describes himself as “a heterosexual man” who has sex “with guys” – Mr. West has said he had “relations with adult men” but doesn’t “characterize” himself as gay. This is more than hypocrisy – it’s pathology.

Some of my readers have criticized me for trying to tarnish the image of the far-right Christian movement by focusing on the personal hypocrisy of a few of its leaders, but as Rich points out, this is more than just the ironic tale of a handful of secretly-gay gay-bashers… it is politics, pure and simple.

A likely inspiration for the gay plot line in Drury’s “Advise and Consent” was the real-life story of a Wyoming Democrat, Lester Hunt, who shot himself in his Senate office in 1954 after the Republican Campaign Committee threatened to make an issue of his gay son’s arrest in Lafayette Park on “morals charges.” Those were the dark ages, but it isn’t entirely progress that we now have a wider war on gay people, thinly disguised as a debate over the filibuster, cloaked in religion, and counting among its shock troops politicians as utterly bereft of moral bearings as James West.

People have always hated gays, but anti-gay sentiment is now being politicized, much in the same way the Nazis politicized long standing anti-Jewish sentiment to help secure Hitler’s ambitions in the early 1930’s. So if you think I’ve just been writing about sex or religion or hypocrisy, you’ve missed the point entirely. I’ve been writing about the politics of hate, and warning about the dire consequences to our republic should it be allowed to triumph.

It’s not just fun to write about the sexual deviancy of the holier-than-thou religious far-right — and their not quite so religious political shills — it’s also instructive. For their self-righteous preaching against decadent secularism and its anything goes sexual mores makes perfect sense in a worldview guided by their own twisted fantasies, where indeed… anything goes.

It’s not just hypocrisy; it’s projection. Or at the very least, jealousy. Constrained by the unhealthy belief that “normal” sex should be mundane and pleasureless, their own secret desires bulge out in all directions like a water balloon squeezed between your fingers.

For example, there’s the tragio-comic story of Spokane’s soon-to-be-former Mayor Jim West, a man so ashamed by his own nature, that his otherwise healthy homosexual desires were apparently perverted into pedophilia. The knee-jerk liberal in me wants to be empathetic to West, for he is in many ways a victim of society’s cruel intolerance of gays… but the writer in me can’t help but find humor in the ironic details of the former gay-bashing state Senate Majority Leader’s sudden fall from grace. The Spokesman-Review has posted a transcript of an online chat session on Gay.com between West (jmselton) and a forensic computer consultant posing as a teenager (motobrock34); the following excerpt struck me as particularly amusing.

jmselton: if i thought i would marry again, i’d marry Cathy McMorris the congresswoman.
motobrock34: is she nice?
jmselton: very and cute
jmselton: sweet is more like it.

I’m sure Rep. McMorris is flattered. Though of course, as he typed this, West was actually masturbating at his computer, fantasizing about motobrock34, and how “we’ll rub our dicks together.” In the words of the Spokane mayor, which may someday be immortalized as a kind of gay chat room farewell speech:

jmselton: yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
jmselton: crap
jmselton: oh boy

Oh boy, indeed.

Of course, if you enjoy sheer ridicule, nothing compares to the story of Neil Horsley, the folksy, anti-abortion, anti-homosexual, pro-secessionist, nut-case activist, who admitted to Fox News Radio host Alan Colmes that while growing up on a farm in Georgia… he had sex with a mule. Really. But even more amazing, is the fact that Horsley actually came back onto The Alan Colmes Show this Thursday, to further explicate his unique views on human sexuality and, um… animal husbandry.

Alan replayed a clip in which Horsley frankly explained that growing up, you experiment sexually with anything that moves, saying “If it’s warm and it’s damp and it vibrates you might in fact have sex with it.” So of course, Alan took advantage of the second interview to ask the question that was surely on everybody’s mind:

AC: Have you ever had sex with a washing machine?
NH: Um, well… I’ve never really thought about it, but the fact of the matter is that if it shakes, and there have been times I’m sure when in reality, that would be an option.

I never knew cleaning your laundry could be so dirty.

At this point, the interview started to get a little too weird, even for Alan, and so he tried to shift the conversation towards normal sexual behavior — like homosexuality — but after admitting past or potential relationships with farm animals and large household appliances, Horsley hemmed and hawed about whether he ever had sex with a (gasp) human male. Eventually, Alan was able to pin him down.

AC: Let’s get it on the record Neil. Before you found Jesus, you had sex with a man, right?
NH: Certainly. I’ve had sex with anything that would move. If we had a warm watermelon out in the field I might give it a name.

Graphic courtesy of the National Watermelon Promotion Board

Come to think of it, the one on the right looks kind of cute… sweet is more like it. Look at those full, sexy lips… yeahhhhhhhhhhhh hhhhhhhhhhhh… oh boy!

Horsley continued to expand on his theory that we are all born in sin, and thus it is natural (if not normal) for a male to express his sexuality in any way possible, and that the only reason we don’t is that we are socialized to express it in more acceptable forms. Alan disagreed, saying that he personally never had any desire to have sex with farm animals or other men… and Horsley actually made fun of him, blaming his sexual hang-ups on his mother:

NH: What happened to you is that you got pussy-whipped at a very early age.

That’s right Neil… there’s something wrong with Alan. I suppose it’s no surprise that Horsley would eventually come to Jesus, considering he pretty much came to everything else. News Hounds has more coverage of the second interview, and you can listen to an excerpt yourself, courtesy of Fox News Radio.

Now I’m not suggesting that all anti-gay, anti-abortion, traditional-values Christians are closeted homosexuals like West, or somewhat-repentant vegephiles like Horsley. Some of them are just cruelly and sadistically heterosexual, like Dr. W. David Hager, a prominent obstetrician-gynecologist and Bush Administration appointee to the FDA’s Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs.

As some of you might know, the Advisory Committee voted 23-4 to make emergency contraception, known as Plan B, available over-the-counter, and it was Dr. Hager who was key in persuading the FDA to make the highly unusual decision to reject the recommendation. (A decision that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists called a “dark stain on the reputation of an evidence-based agency like the FDA.”) Dr. Hager recently delivered a sermon at his alma mater, Asbury College, a small evangelical Christian school in Wilmore, Kentucky, in which he warned that a war is being waged in this country against evangelical Christians like him, and that God had used him to stand in the breach. It was in this sermon that he revealed the role he played in the FDA’s controversial decision.

It was also this sermon that convinced Linda Davis, his former wife of thirty-two years, to break her silence about the sexual abuse and humiliation she suffered during their long marriage. As an article in The Nation reports, she was enraged by her ex-husband’s public moralizing on sexual matters: “It was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard.” Davis alleges that she was repeatedly sodomized without her consent.

“I probably wouldn’t have objected so much, or felt it was so abusive if he had just wanted normal [vaginal] sex all the time,” she explained to me. “But it was the painful, invasive, totally nonconsensual nature of the [anal] sex that was so horrible.”
…
“I would be asleep,” she recalls, “and since [the sodomy] was painful and threatening, I woke up. Sometimes I acquiesced once he had started, just to make it go faster, and sometimes I tried to push him off…. I would [confront] David later, and he would say, ‘You asked me to do that,’ and I would say, ‘No, I never asked for it.'”

As The Nation points out, Dr. Hager is no fringe character, but a well-credentialed and respected OB-Gyn and the author of six books on women’s health issues. (FYI, I highly recommend the General’s Amazon review of Hager’s As Jesus Cared for Women.) He doesn’t advocate faith as a substitute for medicine, but rather relies on his conservative Christian ideology as the basis for his paternalistic approach to women patients… a worldview in which men are expected to act as benevolent authority figures for the women in their lives.

At home, Dr. Hager apparently practiced what he preached… well, the authority part, not the benevolence. As Davis told The Nation….

Sex was always a source of conflict in the marriage. Though it wasn’t emotionally satisfying for her, Davis says she soon learned that sex could “buy” peace with Hager after a long day of arguing, or insure his forgiveness after she spent too much money. “Sex was coinage; it was a commodity,” she said. Sometimes Hager would blithely shift from vaginal to anal sex. Davis protested. “He would say, ‘Oh, I didn’t mean to have anal sex with you; I can’t feel the difference,'” Davis recalls incredulously. “And I would say, ‘Well then, you’re in the wrong business.'”

By the 1980s, according to Davis, Hager was pressuring her to let him videotape and photograph them having sex. She consented, and eventually she even let Hager pay her for sex that she wouldn’t have otherwise engaged in–for example, $2,000 for oral sex, “though that didn’t happen very often because I hated doing it so much. So though it was more painful, I would let him sodomize me, and he would leave a check on the dresser,” Davis admitted to me with some embarrassment. This exchange took place almost weekly for several years.

And it gets even worse. In 1995 Davis was diagnosed with narcolepsy, and she says her husband took advantage of the disease, as an opportunity to regularly sodomize her.

Somehow, I don’t think this is how Jesus would have cared for a woman.

Dr. Hager’s term on the FDA panel expires this June, and he is widely expected to be reappointed, possibly to the panel’s chairmanship. That there would be such a stark contrast between his public and private life is not surprising — there are, of course, hypocrites on both sides of the political spectrum. But that this is the kind of person the Bush administration would seek to lead the FDA on women’s health issues is at the very least disappointing, if not frightening.

The aggressive overreaching by the religious right in their campaign to impose their own biblically inspired sexual mores on society as a whole, begs the question: what are they so afraid so?

And I think I know the answer: themselves.

Okay… so in case it wasn’t clear, let me explain again the concept of these Open Threads. I give you a thread here, to post whatever you want on whatever topic you want… and you agree to try to keep the other threads somewhat on topic. I don’t mind if the other threads organically stray off track, but if you have something entirely unrelated to say, this is the place to do it.

It makes me proud to be a Washingtonian — and a Jew — to know that our region boasts such a well-connected and influential rabbi as Daniel Lapin. Known locally mostly for his incredibly boring radio show (no wonder he’s forced to buy his own air time on KTTH) Lapin has recently gained national notoriety as the man who introduced disgraced uber-lobbyist Jack Abramoff to disgraced House Majority Leader Tom Delay.

New York Times columnist Frank Rich called Lapin a “show rabbi” for the Christian right, and as the investigation deepens into the Delay/Abramoff corruption scandal, we’re beginning to learn more about Lapin’s role in the neo-theo movement, and about his own questionable business practices.

Rick Anderson has a great piece in the current Seattle Weekly (“Meet the Lapin Brothers“), and local talk radio blog blatherWatch has also been providing excellent coverage for weeks. Today’s installment (“Rabbi Daniel Lapin, a long look backward“) provides a fascinating look at Lapin’s personal blend of God, business and politics. It’s a must read.

So for those of you who think I focus unfairly on the schemes of right-wing Christian Evangelicals, I just want to make it clear that I’m an equal-opportunity, non-sectarian critic of fundamentalist extremists everywhere. Especially the corrupt, hypocritical kind.

For those of you on the right who constantly complain about the size of government — how much it costs us in tax dollars, and how it distorts our economy — you may be interested to learn that the U.S. military is Washington state’s single largest employer, with over 94,000 uniformed personnel and civilian workers.

Well, the latest round of base closings has been announced, and fortunately for our state economy, Washington has been spared any major losses. In fact, it looks like we’ll be picking up about 800 personnel statewide. This is big news for a state economy still struggling to recover from recession. Huge.

Still… I’ve always been uncomfortable with the way these base closures pit states against each other, and the ensuing battle between politics and logistics during the decision making process. For example, the Philadelphia area where I grew up, just got the bad news that it will lose yet another major installation, the Willow Grove Naval Air Station. Pennsylvania has lost over 16,500 military jobs in the four rounds of base closures since 1988, and the local economy was hit particularly hard by the shuttering of the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in 1991. If approved, this latest round of closures will cost Pennsylvania another 1,658 jobs.

“This is not good news, but I can tell you the entire congressional delegation, the governor, all of us will go to bat,” said U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum.

Yes, that is exactly what congressional delegations around the nation will be doing during the coming months, in one of the few D.C. rituals where a hate-filled, right-wing, partisan whacko like Santorum is actually willing to reach across the aisle to his Democratic Keystone State colleagues. So as we digest this good news, we all owe a big thanks and our continued support to Gov. Christine Gregoire and our congressional delegation for all their hard work in protecting our own, selfish, economic interests.

UPDATE:
In case you’re wondering, here are the base closures proposed for WA state. You can view the official BRAC list in its entirety here.

Washington:
1LT Richard H. Walker U.S. Army Reserve Center
Army National Guard Reserve Center, Everett
Navy-Marine Corps Reserve Center, Tacoma
U.S. Army Reserve Center, Fort Lawton
Vancouver Barracks

As the something for nothing folk get all excited at the prospect of repealing the recently passed gas tax hike, I’d just like to point out that this is the sort of thing that comes from allowing our transportation infrastructure to fall into disrepair.

A crew from a highly respected national TV news program will be in Seattle on Monday, filming a segment on youth gambling. They are looking for teenage gamblers to interview.

If you know of any teenager who is a frequent gambler, or has experienced symptoms of problem gambling, who is willing to talk on camera, please contact me, so I can forward the information.

Tuesday, Gov. Christine Gregoire signed model legislation that creates treatment and prevention programs for our state’s growing number of problem gamblers. While other states fund similar programs, Washington is the first to legislate a permanent funding source, thus avoiding a biennial appropriations battle.

The legislation is modest in that it only budgets $750,000 a year through fees on commercial gaming operators, a fraction of the amount needed to meet current demand; by comparison, Oregon, with roughly half our population, spends $3.5 million a year. Washington Tribes have agreed to kick in an additional $450,000 to help fill the gap, but the commitment is neither permanent, nor nearly large enough to be commensurate with the size of the tribal gaming industry.

Still, anybody who has ever tried to push a bill through the legislature — especially one that raises taxes or fees — knows that even this watered down bill is an accomplishment. Many deserve credit for its passage, but as Peter Callaghan observed last week in The News Tribune, probably none more so than WA’s leading advocate for problem gamblers, Jennifer McCausland.

Jennifer McCausland, who joined the fight in memory of her son Ben, whose death was indirectly caused by his gambling addiction, believes the program is too timid. She opposed the final bill.

“I’m so terribly disappointed that I couldn’t activate any legislator’s sense of obligation to do more than the very minimum,” she wrote in an e-mail. “After all these years of neglect of the problem and overt willingness to have both hands in the pockets of gamblers, this was the best they could do?”

But McCausland doesn’t give herself enough credit. Her advocacy put a human face on the issue. And her scolding pushed legislators into doing the right thing.

I first met Jennifer last spring, when I was looking for ammunition to battle Tim Eyman’s gambling industry backed effort to legalize slot machines, the incredibly selfish and stupid Initiative 892. Jennifer is a passionate and persuasive advocate on behalf of compulsive gamblers and their families, and while I had hoped to recruit her to the fight against I-892, it was she who quickly converted me to her cause.

She taught me that gambling could be just as addictive as drugs and alcohol, and the consequences at least as devastating, destroying businesses, families, and lives. And I learned that problem gamblers were not merely an unfortunate by-product of the gambling industry, but rather, its core business… with over 50% of industry profits coming from 5% of its customers. Indeed, the science of slot machine design is the science of creating compulsion.

I spoke with Jennifer shortly after the bill signing, and she was perhaps a bit more philosophical with me than in her email to Peter Callaghan. While still disappointed over the amount of money allocated, she recognizes the accomplishment, and hopes it is only the first step. She told me that Olympia created a public health crisis by allowing a massive expansion of legalized gambling with little thought to the consequences, but that legislators were about to get their “eyes opened” to how big this problem really is.

“Once the program is fully implemented and legislators see how far demand for treatment outstrips supply,” Jennifer predicted, “it will be harder for them to ignore the need for adequate funding.”

Given the size of both our population and gambling industry, Jennifer believes the proper funding level should be at least $3.5 million a year, and possibly twice that. She also strongly believes that the tribal casinos must become a permanent part of the solution. But despite her resoluteness, she does not plan to lobby this issue full time, and has turned much of her advocacy efforts towards youth gambling, an issue she believes is dangerously ignored, not just in WA state, but nationwide.

She has converted me to that cause as well, and I will continue to support her efforts as best I can.