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Mark Kleiman once again lays out his “grow-your-own” idea for legalizing marijuana use while keeping the sale of the drug illegal. This is an argument he’s made before, and one in which I’ve written about my disagreements.

This time around, E.D. Kain at Balloon Juice does a superb job of addressing the shortcomings of Kleiman’s proposal. I don’t really have anything to add to what Kain wrote (or to Pete Guither’s long post here). Yet I noticed today that Adam Serwer, an excellent blogger on civil liberties, attempts to defend Kleiman’s idea:

E.D. Kain doesn’t like the idea, and prefers outright legalization and commercialization:

Furthermore, I’m much more afraid of violent drug dealers, over-eager SWAT teams, and the whole awful black market cycle of violence than I am about the lobbying arms of a few big corporations which apparently fill Kleiman with fear. I’ll take lobbyists over drug cartels any day.

I think Kain is missing at least part of Kleiman’s point. The whole idea behind decriminalizing marijuana possession is to eliminate the “black market cycle of violence”; since people wouldn’t necessarily be dependent on dealers, dealers would have a hard time plying a lucrative trade, and paramilitary SWAT teams wouldn’t be shooting dogs and old ladies trying to get at the hidden cannabis stash of a 72 year-old with cataracts.

And I think Serwer isn’t quite grasping Kain’s point. To clarify, I’m assuming that Serwer is talking about more than just decriminalizing possession here (which was already done back in the 1970s in a number of states and won at the ballot box in Massachusetts in 2008 with nearly 2/3 of the vote); he’s talking about fully legalizing the ability for someone to grow marijuana on their own – or as part of a co-op. Serwer thinks that this would put the drug dealers out of business. Kain is arguing (correctly, in my opinion) that it won’t.

As Kain points out, you will still have large numbers of marijuana consumers who have little interest in growing their own or being part of a co-op. They simply want to buy their marijuana like any other product and they’ll prefer to buy it from a grower who knows how to produce a quality product. On the flip side of that, there will always be people who see growing marijuana as their preferred avenue for making money and will become very good at it. These two forces simply won’t be outweighed by armies of marijuana consumers being proactive in order to comply with the law. This should be obvious. In the end, sales of the drug will still occur, and law enforcement will still be tasked with stopping it. And as long as that combination exists, we’ll still see paramilitary SWAT teams shooting dogs and old ladies because the police thought that they were going after an illegal seller.

Second, while I’m not quite sure where I stand on the choice between legalization and criminalization, I do think that marijuana abuse is a relatively minor problem. I’d like to preserve that status quo while eliminating the draconian penalties and absurd amount of law-enforcement resources devoted to preventing people from toking. But I think Kain is being a bit to dismissive in arguing that there would be no adverse consequences from the mass marketing of marijuana. It seems entirely possible to me that commercializing the drug could create a problem where none really exists — businesses have to make a profit; someone growing their own doesn’t. A world where a smaller, less profitable illicit market that continues to exist looks a lot like our own without the outsize penalties and adverse consequences of over-enforcement. I’m not sure what a world with a fully commercialized marijuana industry that profits from turning people into potheads looks like, but it makes me nervous.

We currently have a commercialized alcohol industry that profits from turning people into alcoholics, and we’ve grown quite accustomed to it. Hell, it’s impossible for me to go through a single day where I’m not exposed to some form of marketing for booze. Despite this barrage, and despite the relatively non-minor problems caused by alcohol (car accidents, domestic violence, liver disease, alcoholism), people in this country remain far more concerned about Muslims building swimming pools in Lower Manhattan than they do about alcohol.

I completely agree that a legalized marijuana market could lead to companies engaging in bad behavior. I’m rather certain it would happen. But there are ways to deal with that other than by resorting to an unrealistic prohibition-lite. You could make laws against advertising. You could even have the state control the distribution. Either of those proposals are far superior to continuing to enforce a ban on the sale of the drug.

Via West Seattle Blog:

[The following] video is getting West Seattle a bit of national attention tonight in the ongoing controversy over Target’s donation to a Minnesota candidate with a history of opposing gay rights. The musical protest took place in the Westwood Village Target store on Saturday, apparently around 11 am

A new WSJ/NBC poll (via Daily Kos) reinforces my sense that our nation’s profound regional divide is just one of the reasons why 2010 won’t be like 1994:

The GOP has a HUGE generic-ballot edge in the South (52%-31%), but it doesn’t lead anywhere else. In the Northeast, Dems have a 55%-30% edge; in the Midwest, they lead 49%-38%; and in the West, it’s 44%-43%.

Heading into the 1994 election the Dems held roughly 59% of House seats in every region of the nation, and while they ended up losing big everywhere, they got walloped in the South. Heading into the 2010 election the Dems control the exact same number of seats they did heading into 1994, but the regional disparity is startling, ranging from 82% in the Northeast to 43% in the South.

Here in the “Far West” the Dems hold a pre-1994-like 63% majority, but it’s hard to imagine 1994-like results. Back then Washington alone flipped from 8-1 D to 7-2 R, but this time around WA-03 is the only truly promising GOP pickup opportunity in the state, and even that’s gotta be ranked a toss-up. I suppose Rep. Rick Larsen needs to look over his shoulders in WA-02, but by that measure so does Republican Rep. Dave Reichert in WA-08. So a safe prediction might be a net one-seat Republican pickup here in Washington compared to a six-seat pickup in 1994. Maybe two at the most. Maybe none.

As for the rest of the West, Republicans can maybe count on picking up a seat in Idaho, one or two in California, and two or three more throughout the rest of the region, while almost certainly losing their recent special election pickup in Hawaii. Maybe. That wouldn’t make for a good year for Democrats, but it’s far from an electoral repudiation.

Of course the poll analysis does include this regional caveat:

Many of the congressional districts Republicans are targeting outside of the South resemble some of those Southern districts they’re hoping to win back in November — where you have whiter and older voters.

True, but this just serves to further point out the difference between 1994 and 2010, at least here in this Washington, for back in 1994, two of the six WA seats the GOP picked up were WA-04 (Jay Inslee) and WA-05 (Speaker Tom Foley)… exactly the kinda older, whiter, more conservative districts the R’s are now targeting. But, you know, you can’t win back a seat you’ve never given up.

The point is, the 45-seat pickup necessary for a Republican takeover this time around is made all the more difficult by our current regional divide. The Republican’s generic advantage is staggering in the South, but there is so much less low-hanging Democratic fruit down in Dixie than there was 16 years ago, the R’s simply can’t take back Congress without a somewhat comparable national wave. And at the moment, I just don’t see that sort of wave reaching the Pacific.

Goldy may hate to dwell on this, but I’m going to keep piling on. The Seattle Times’ “Calitaxication” editorial is one in a long series of deeply misleading claims they’re making about the crisis here in California. In order to ensure that Washington doesn’t follow California’s path, it’s necessary to do as thorough a demolition job as possible on the Times’ editorial as possible.

I think Goldy’s done a good job of hitting the flaws of the Times’ argument that I-1098 would somehow replicate the taxes found in Oregon and California. But there’s a deeper point that needs to be made: California’s budget woes aren’t due to too much tax – instead the issue is that taxes aren’t high enough on the upper end.

One piece of the Times’ editorial that needs further attention is this:

California did that. Its state income tax on high earners is 10.8 percent, and its sales tax mostly ranges from 8.75 to 9.75 percent. Such high levels of tax have not brought wealth and balanced budgets to California. Skilled people are leaving.

This isn’t really true. And since it’s at the core of the argument against taxing the wealthy – that doing so would cost jobs and lead skilled workers to leave – it’s important to show how this too is a flawed statement.

Despite the reputation the Times gives California, the Golden State isn’t actually all that tax happy. After Republican Governor Pete Wilson pushed through an income tax increase in 1991, the top tax rate was 11% for high earners (individual incomes of $200,000 and above). Those expired at the beginning of 1996, but did not prevent California from coming back from the severe early ’90s recession by that time – nor did they lead to any mass exodus of the rich and the skilled from the state. In fact, the numbers of people paying the higher rates under the Wilson tax increases in the 1990s rose, according to research from the California Budget Project:

The number of California’s joint personal income tax filers with incomes of $200,000 or more rose by 33.4 percent between 1991 and 1995 – a period in which California temporarily imposed 10 percent and 11 percent tax rates on high-income earners. In contrast, the total number of joint filers declined by 6.7 percent.

In the late 1990s Wilson pushed through a massive tax cut, including to personal income taxes, justified by the dot-com boom. By 2002, this lost revenue played a key role in producing the state’s large budget deficit that ultimately brought down Governor Gray Davis and gave Arnold Schwarzenegger his opening to become governor in the 2003 recall.

In 2004, however, California voters approved Proposition 63, which raised the tax rate to 10% on incomes over $1 million in order to fund mental health services. It passed with over 53% of the vote.

According to the Seattle Times, this should have destroyed the state’s economy and caused a flight of the rich. It did no such thing. The numbers of people who paid that tax rose after it was enacted, just as it did in the 1990s (again from the CBP):

The number of millionaire taxpayers – those with adjusted gross incomes of at least $1 million – increased by 37.8 percent between 2004 and 2006, after voters approved an additional 1 percent surcharge on taxable personal income above $1 million, which took effect on January 1, 2005. During the same period, the total number of personal income taxpayers increased by 4.2 percent.

As we well know, California’s bubble burst in 2007-08, and again revealed the underlying weakness of the state’s budgetary system. But the problem isn’t high taxes – instead it is the legacy of the notorious Proposition 13, passed in 1978, which capped property taxes and forced state and local governments to rely on more volatile sources of revenue, such as the sales tax. This legacy was compounded by the extremely reckless Wilson dot-com era tax cuts that I mentioned above.

So are skilled people leaving California as a result of these tax increases? As we saw above, the opposite seems to be happening: tax increases on the wealthy if anything have been accompanied by an increase in the number of people paying the tax. California’s boom and bust economy has many causes – an overreliance on real estate, a lack of public services to help secure and grow the middle class – but taxes on the wealthy aren’t one of them. Skilled workers continue to come to California to start businesses, work at our leading corporations, and to innovate the 21st century economy.

Neither are these taxes leading businesses to flee the state. Jed Kolko of the Public Policy Institute of California debunked this notion back in June 2010:

Rhetoric aside, California loses very few jobs to other states. Businesses rarely move either out of or into California and, on balance, the state loses only 11,000 jobs annually as a result of relocation—that’s just 0.06 percent of California’s 18 million jobs. Far more jobs are created and destroyed as a result of business expansion, contraction, formation, and closure than because of relocation. Business relocations, although highly visible, are a misleading guide to the overall performance of the California economy. The employment growth rate, which takes into account job creation and destruction for all reasons—not just relocation—is a much better measure of the state’s economy.

There’s no doubt California faces serious challenges. Our unemployment rate is 12.2%, much worse than Washington’s 8.7%. But that is due largely to the much more severe impact of the housing market bust than the impact of taxation, as shown above.

Here in California, we’re all too familiar with the impact of tax cuts, which have destroyed our public services and our ability to balance our budget. It’s not for nothing that some of us call this state “Failifornia” (in fact, it was the title of my Netroots Nation panel on California politics). As someone with a lot of family and friends left in Washington State, I urge you to not believe the BS that the Seattle Times is trying to sell you as they try to turn Washington into Failington by adopting the insane anti-tax policies that have devastated California.

(Oh, you might be wondering who I am. I lived in Seattle from 2001 to 2007, but now live in Monterey, California, where I work as Public Policy Director for the Courage Campaign, a 700,000 member organization working to make California more progressive. I also write at the website Calitics, the state’s leading political blog. I’ve also written several articles at the Olympia Newswire earlier this year on state budget and tax issues.)

Hendrik Hertzberg writes about the proposed Islamic center in lower Manhattan, a few blocks from Ground Zero:

Like many New Yorkers, the people in charge of Park51, a married couple, are from somewhere else—he from Kuwait, she from Kashmir. Feisal Abdul Rauf is a Columbia grad. He has been the imam of a mosque in Tribeca for close to thirty years. He is the author of a book called “What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America.” He is a vice-chair of the Interfaith Center of New York. “My colleagues and I are the anti-terrorists,” he wrote recently—in the Daily News, no less. He denounces terrorism in general and the 9/11 attacks in particular, often and at length. The F.B.I. tapped him to conduct “sensitivity training” for agents and cops. His wife, Daisy Khan, runs the American Society for Muslim Advancement, which she co-founded with him. It promotes “cultural and religious harmony through interfaith collaboration, youth and women’s empowerment, and arts and cultural exchange.”

As someone who often trolls the right-wing blogs, this proposed center (which sounds a lot like the Jewish Community Center where I used to go to day camp when I was 6) is seen by many as some kind of threat. Coincidentally, these are the same people who talk about how Obama is going to take away their “freedom” and how much they care about the Constitution. Every day that goes by and every issue that comes up just lifts the veil on that charade. America’s right wing is motivated primarily by one thing – an irrational fear of our multicultural society. Everything else is just talk.

Arthur Silber has a great post up dealing with Wikileaks and how it confounds those who seek a level of control that can never be obtained:

Wikileaks has taken the only weapon it has — its ability to make information freely available to anyone and everyone — and aimed it directly at the heart of those who seek control and demand obedience. It has scored an immensely powerful hit. No wonder States and those who advance their policies are so panic-stricken. They’re powerless, and they know it.

I’ve often defined a neocon as someone who overestimates the power he has to use fear and intimidation to influence the behaviors and actions of others. And the hallmark of our neocon-inspired foreign policy is that we convince ourselves that we can succeed if only we control the flow of information and the messages that people hear. But unless you’re someplace like North Korea – where free technology is completely absent – that level of control is unattainable.

That doesn’t mean that we’re not trying in Afghanistan. This editorial from an American intelligence analyst who’d served in Afghanistan demonstrates how truly lost we are:

The Taliban’s media machine runs circles around our public information operations in Afghanistan. Using newspapers, radio broadcasts, the Internet and word of mouth, it puts out messages far faster than we can, exaggerating the effectiveness of its attacks, creating the illusion of a unified insurgency and criticizing the (real and imagined) failings of the Kabul government. To undermine support for United States troops, the Taliban insistently remind the people that America has committed to a withdrawal beginning next summer, they jump on any announcement of our Western allies pulling out troops and they publicize polls that show declining domestic American support for the war.

To counter the spin, we need to add the Taliban’s top propagandists to the high-value-target list and direct military operations at the insurgents’ media nerve centers. A major reason that people in rural areas are so reluctant to help us is that Taliban propaganda and intimidation have created an atmosphere of fear.

With a straight face, the individuals directing our mission in Afghanistan say that in order to combat a climate where dishonest propagandists create an atmosphere of fear among the public, that we must militarily attack those people. And somehow this will lead to the people of Afghanistan being less afraid of us. What?

Our entire mission there is premised on the ability to control the uncontrollable and silence the unsilenceable. And even in one of the least technologically advanced countries on Earth, we can’t do it. That should give you a pretty good idea of how much luck the Pentagon will have in stopping Wikileaks. Even if they’re successful at going after the individuals who maintain the site, it only emphasizes to more of the world why they too need to be wary of what those with power are capable of doing.

Perhaps I’ve underestimated the ideological cravenness of the Seattle Times editorial board, what with their refusal to endorse any Democratic legislative incumbent even remotely tied to organized labor, regardless of their accomplishments or the lack of qualifications of their opponents… but I still think they’re going to endorse Sen. Patty Murray in November.

Why? Well, the more than $500 million she just won for our state in additional federal aid for Medicaid and public schools is just one of many examples of how important she is to our local economy. That’s $500 million  to be spent right here in state. That means thousands of jobs that won’t disappear due to even further draconian cutbacks. That means smaller class sizes, and more kids getting preventative health care.

Had Dino Rossi been senator, he would have stuck to his ideological guns and voted with the Republican leadership to block the amendment. But not only did Murray fight hard to pass the amendment, she’s the one who sponsored it.

Sen. Murray is just too valuable an appropriator, too powerful a defender of Boeing and the thousands of high paying jobs it brings to our region for Frank Blethen to have the balls to instruct his ed board to endorse the light weight Rossi. I mean, he wouldn’t sacrifice the best interests of our local economy just to score an ideological victory, would he?

UPDATE:
In the comment thread, classic HA troll Mr. Cynical poops out some classic GOP bullshit:

Goldy–
All she did was increase the National Debt.
It’s a shell-game the Dems are using.
In the end, the credit card bill will come due…for our grandkids.

Uh-huh. Except, it’s not true. The cost of the Murray amendment is actually paid for through closing several tax loopholes, including one that rewards companies for moving jobs overseas. In fact, the Murray amendment actually reduces the deficit by $1.4 billion.

Which, of course, Rossi opposes, because you know… anything to avoid closing corporate loopholes.

By now it’s a familiar pattern to those who really pay attention. Rep. Reichert (WA-08) equivocates on an issue. He refuses to take a stand on an issue that anyone can really pin to him. And then he votes against the interests of his district—and hopes nobody notices.

This time it is about big oil. Reichert recently voted against the CLEAR Act, that was in response to the BP gulf catostrophy. The act got rid of the $75 million oil spill liability cap and revamped Federal oversight of the offshore oil industry.

And…

…[i]n addition to a number of Gulf Coast restoration and research programs, the bill also fully funds the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) at $900 million, using money generated from oil and gas drilling royalties, and closes a loophole that exempts oil and gas projects from the storm-water runoff regs under the Clean Water Act. Another major onshore reform is the removal of “categorical exclusions” used to exempt some drilling applications from environmental review on public lands.
[…]

“Americans will be asking, ‘Will Senators stand with the people or the polluters?’” Todd Keller, senior manager of Public Lands Campaigns for National Wildlife Federation, said in a release.

We now know where Reichert Stands…with the polluters.

This is precisely the type of vote that Reichert could have used to make a bold statement in favor of his more-environmentally-aware-than-average constituents. Hell…he could have used this vote to do a little damage control following his embarrassing semi-private statement about pandering to the environmentalists. Instead, he voted with the Party of NO!™ (ideas) and against the interests of his constituents. Apparently, Republican obstructionism is more important to Reichert.

Fortunately, Reichert is pretty much impotent as a legislator—the act passed in the House without any acts of courage on Reichert’s part.

If you thought yesterday’s post on dog poop bags was just a quick toss-off, well think again, for the moment I saw the Seattle Times/AP piece on cash-strapped Everett spending $8,430 on plastic dog poop bags, I immediately recognized an opportunity to provoke a conversation on what I believe to be the most pernicious aspect of today’s conservative movement: its stubborn insistence on choosing ideology over reality.

And at least in this regard, my comment thread did not disappoint:

6. Rae spews:

How about dog owners’ be responsible and thus, bring their own poop bags? This isn’t a public service at all, but yet another way the liberal government is sending a message that people aren’t or don’t have to take responsibility for their own actions. Want to have kids? Let someone else feed them, clothe them, provide day care for them. Want a dog? Provide poop bags. Get real.

07/27/2010 AT 10:21 AM

22. The Riddle of Steel spews:

Why cant dog owners(who apparntly can afford to own a dog) purchase their own shit-bags instead of making everyone else pay for them?

This has to one of the stupidest fucking govt programs I have ever heard of. Its shit like this that pisses people off and keeps them from voting for higher taxes.

mommy govt at its finest…..

07/27/2010 AT 4:30 PM

Of course, in a sense, both Rae and Riddle are right; dog owners should be more responsible about cleaning up after their pets, and there are many other things I’d rather spend taxpayer money on than plastic poop bags. Personally, I rarely leave the house without a ready poop bag in my back right pocket, and neither should any other conscientious dog owner. (Next time you see me, ask me to show you my poop bag; I bet I’ll have one.)

But this ideologically driven, moralistic approach ignores the fact that the free-dog-poop-bag policy itself has proven damn effective at keeping dog shit off the soles of our shoes, and out of our waterways.

Fecal coliform bacteria is one of the most serious pollutants in many of our nation’s urban streams, and modern DNA tests routinely trace the majority of the contamination back to dog waste. That’s why, in an effort to combat both this very real health concern, and the general nuisance factor of unpicked-up poop, municipalities nationwide have pursued a coordinated campaign that includes general public outreach and education, the creation of dedicated off-leash parks with adequate waste handling facilities, and yes… providing and stocking taxpayer funded poop bag dispensers at parks, trails and other popular dog walking routes.

Municipalities maintain this expense, even in the face of dramatic budget cuts, because it works… not just due to the convenience, but because the mere visible presence of these bag dispensers and waste receptacles is socially reinforcing, resulting in a dramatically higher compliance rate with existing pooper scooper laws. From a public health and quality of life perspective, few public expenditures produce such bang for the buck as the $8,430 Everett spends on plastic poop bags.

But that’s not good enough for the personal responsibility crowd. The mere notion of spending public dollars on something individuals should do for themselves offends their sensibilities. And so they would prefer to see their public sidewalks, parks and trails covered in shit than admit that sometimes, reality trumps ideology.

Substitute poop bags with condoms or sex education or health insurance or the minimum wage or unemployment compensation extensions or carbon credits or marriage equality or “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” or any number of other issues, and you begin to understand why conservatives are so passionately opposed to so many of the policies we in the reality-based community consider no-brainers.

This is the real problem with modern conservatism… not the ideology itself, which even I admit has something to contribute to the public debate, but its relentlessly dogmatic exercise. Today’s conservatives seem so obsessed with how people should behave, that they have little or no tolerance for how people actually do behave. So steeped in faith — faith in God, faith in the market, faith in American mythology, faith in their personalized reading of the Constitution — nothing will stop today’s conservative leaders from advocating what should work over what actually does.

And that’s why, when finally given the reins over both Congress and the White House, the Republicans so spectacularly stepped in it.

UPDATE:
In the thread, HA reader Rae only reinforces my thesis by attempting to defend her previous comments:

I don’t know if I should be flattered or po’d. But you’ve missed the mark. By providing poop bags, the government has just reinforced their beliefs that the population is incapable of being responsible. And I personally object to being thought incapable of being responsible.

She objects, on principle, to a policy that works. Exactly.

Each year Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) puts together its annual “Most Corrupt Members of Congress” report a bipartisan list of the House and Senate’s 15 most ethically challenged members. But this year CREW is also producing a report on the most Crooked Candidates of 2010, and look who made the initial list: Dino Rossi!

Makes you proud to be a Washingtonian, doesn’t it?

Over at the TNT’s Political Buzz, Rossi spokesperson Mary Lane Strow angrily denounces CREW as “a big ol’ lefty front group” that gets funding from George Soros, and predominantly targets Republicans:

“It’s another one of those things where (Democrats) have some quote-unquote independent group put it out there that Dino’s sleazy,” Strow said. “Then the Murray campaign can reference it in a future ad.”

And Strow’s accusations of rank partisanship might be an effective comeback, if not for the fact that like most of the Rossi campaign’s assertions, it’s totally unsupported by the facts. Indeed, of CREW’s current list of “The 15 Most Corrupt Members of Congress,” eight of them — more than half — are Democrats, including liberal stalwarts like Rep. Maxine Waters, Rep. Charlie Rangel and Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.

Huh. That’s some lefty front group, Mary.

The fact is, and has been well documented here on HA, Rossi has spent his business and political career hanging out with some awfully shady company, from Mel Heide to Michael Mastro to the conniving, mean-spirited, campaign-finance-cheating BIAW. Perhaps it is all just “guilt by association,” as the TNT headline implies. But there are some awfully strong associations.

– Marc Lynch writes about the recently revived drumbeat for bombing Iran and why it’s still a bad idea.

– I’m still reading through the Washington Post’s report on the vast, secretive security bureaucracy that formed after 9/11. Greenwald does his thing.

– Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske may have said the single dumbest thing any Obama Administration official has said to date [emphasis mine, breathtaking cluelessness in the original]:

Well, we know that certainly California is poised to and will be voting on legalizing small amounts of marijuana. And that vote is scheduled for November of this year.

There are a number of studies and a number of pieces of information that really throw that into the light of saying that, look, California is not going to solve its budget problems, that they have more increase or availability if drugs were, or marijuana, was to become legalized. That in fact you would see more use. That you would also see a black market that would come into play. Because why wouldn’t in heaven’s name would somebody want to spend money on tax money for marijuana when they could either use the underground market or they could in fact grow their own.

I don’t even know where to start. The idea that you’re worried about legalizing marijuana because it might create a black market is like being worried about wearing a bicycle helmet because it might cause you to have a head injury.

– Marcy Wheeler writes about how our government interprets providing “material support” for terrorism so broadly that it can apply to journalists covering a story.

– Scott Morgan calls out DARE for their double-standard on recreational drug use.

– Alison Holcomb writes about Mexico and why what’s happening there is a good reason to support marijuana law reform.

– I don’t have much of the background here, but this letter appears to indicate that the Veterans Administration is no longer cracking down on veterans who use medical marijuana in compliance with state laws.

– The Seattle Times editorial board has some fans in North Dakota.

The Democratic Senate Campaign Committee this morning challenged Republican senatorial wannabe Dino Rossi to name two policy differences between him and former President George W. Bush, but I think the more interesting challenge might be to ask Rossi to simply explain the details of two pieces of policy. For judging from his recent statements, our state’s best known real estate speculator/perennial candidate just doesn’t come across as all that well informed.

For example, at Sunday’s conservative meet-up Rossi was asked how he could possibly overcome the combined forces of ACORN and SEIU, a stupid question to say the least. But even stupider was Rossi’s reply:  “SEIU and ACORN, they, they’re mean. They’re really evil in some respects.”

The SEIU slur aside (does Rossi realize he just equated 1.2 million nurses, lab technicians and home health care workers with the likes of Hitler and, well, Satan?), both Rossi and his questioner are apparently clueless that ACORN no longer exists, and regardless, was never really a player here in Washington state. So what’s there for you to overcome Dino, no matter how evil you think ACORN is/was?

At the same meet-up, Rossi was also asked whether he supported full repeal of healthcare reform, or only parts of it. Rossi insisted that he supported full repeal. But as the purity police at The Reagan Wing point out, that’s not what Rossi says on his own website, forcing the self-appointed guardians of true conservatism to wonder aloud if Rossi even knows his own position on healthcare?

To what can we attribute Rossi’s alleged change of position? Might it be that he was speaking to a conservative audience instead of to the  Evans-Gorton wing of the Washington State Republican party?

How Reichertesque. Or perhaps that’s why Rossi was so reluctant to post an issues section on his website: it would require him to actually read it.

Indeed, a better question might be to ask if Rossi actually knows what’s in the healthcare reform bill he wants to either repeal in full or in part, depending on the day and the audience. For example, in his recent, hyperbolic fundraising letter (the one in which he says that Barack Obama and Patty Murray are bigger threats than the terrorists), Rossi describes the new law as “a partisan, ill-conceived health care bill that requires 16,500 new IRS agents to administer and pay for it…”

16,500 new IRS agents? Really? That might strike some as a frightening number if it weren’t, you know, total bullshit.

This was a GOP talking point totally refuted way back in March by the nonpartisan FactCheck.org:

Q: Will the IRS hire 16,500 new agents to enforce the health care law?

A: No. The law requires the IRS mostly to hand out tax credits, not collect penalties. The claim of 16,500 new agents stems from a partisan analysis based on guesswork and false assumptions, and compounded by outright misrepresentation.

In it’s full answer, FactCheck.org dismisses the claim as “wildly inaccurate,” and yet there it is as a central argument in a Rossi fundraising letter… four months later. Either Rossi gets all his facts on healthcare reform from FOX News and GOP press releases, or he’s just plain lying to supporters.

Forget about pressuring Rossi to take a clear stance on major issues; reporters need to ask him if he’s actually capable of explaining the issues. Does he know the major provisions of the health care bill, let alone what his bogus “16,500 new IRS agents” claim is based on? Or how about the Wallstreet reform legislation Rossi opposes on grounds that it leaves taxpayers on the hook for another bailout, even though Sen. Murray included a provision to specifically make sure that it doesn’t…? Can Rossi explain in context what a “derivative” is, or “exchanges” or “clearinghouses” or  “aggregate position limits”…? (If not, he might want to ask Sen. Maria Cantwell.)

Is that too much to ask for? A candidate who actual has the intellectual curiosity, capacity and inclination to the study the issues on which he’ll be asked to pass judgement? Or are our media really just going to let Rossi’s ideological laziness slide by once again as mere tit for tat politics as usual?

Last week, the NAACP called on Tea Party groups to repudiate the racism within its ranks. Dave Weigel, writing at The Daily Dish, dismissed the idea as foolish, while elsewhere at the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote several good posts explaining why the NAACP was right to raise their concerns about some of the racially charged things that have been seen and heard at Tea Party rallies.

What this exchange reminded me of was a post from a couple of weeks ago from Weigel’s former colleague at Reason Magazine, Radley Balko, at his personal blog The Agitator:

Dear Tea Partiers,

Ask Joe Arpaio to be your keynote speaker, and you’ve lost me.

He’s a power-mad thug with a badge, the walking, mouth-breathing antithesis of the phrase “limited government.”

Yes, this is but one state chapter in your movement. So distance yourself from them.

It’s one thing to have a few idiots and nutjobs show up at your rallies.

It’s quite another to invite one to speak.

John Cole has written a few times about the effort among the staff at Reason to continually dismiss the idea that there’s racism in the Tea Party movement. Balko’s post above should be a clue that what the Tea Partiers are about isn’t quite what the folks at Reason imagine them to be about. Polls on Tea Party members illustrate this:

While big government is a favorite tea party target, several bloggers were surprised by the results of the poll question about whether the benefits of government programs such as Social Security and Medicare are worth the costs to taxpayers. Sixty-two percent of tea party supporters said yes. In follow-up interviews, they favored a focus on “waste” instead of slashing the programs.

“Some defended being on Social Security while fighting big government by saying that since they had paid into the system, they deserved the benefits. Others could not explain the contradiction,” the Times reported.

The Tea Party movement isn’t a movement about limited government and it never has been. They may make signs and shout slogans against “socialism”, but as surveys like that one show, they have no problem with things like Medicare or Social Security, or tightly regulating Wall Street. When they talk about socialism, they’re talking about something else. They’re expressing their anxieties about multiculturalism. They’re expressing a belief that our increasingly diverse society is becoming an economic burden to what they perceive as “real Americans”. To them, socialism is the idea that America is becoming more and more inundated with those who will mooch off the rest of us. And their reaction to that is to decry the kinds of government expenditures that many of them continue to rely on:

Liberal pundits like Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen seized on a comment by Jodine White, 62, of Rocklin, Calif., as evidence that tea partiers are “a confused group of misled people.”

“Maybe I don’t want smaller government. I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security. I didn’t look at it from the perspective of losing things I need. I think I’ve changed my mind,” White told the Times.

“These folks claim to be motivated by concerns over taxes, but tea partiers tend not to know anything about the subject. … They claim to hate expensive government programs, except for all the expensive government programs that benefit them and their families,” Benen charged.

The staff at Reason have had a natural desire to believe that the Tea Party folks are their fellow travelers – intellectually consistent free-market libertarians whose opposition to big government comes from a firm understanding of the writings of Bastiat and Hayek. But that’s just not who most of the Tea Partiers are.

They’re more often than not folks who think that Barack Obama is cynically trying to steal their money and give it to people who refuse to work hard and who don’t care about America as much as them. They’re more often than not willing to believe that illegal immigrants are coming here because our government entices them to come with endless giveaways, rather than because of free market forces of supply and demand in the labor markets. And this is why they’re demanding to hear from big government authoritarian thugs like Joe Arpaio at their meetings and not from Reason staff members.

Even a politician like Rand Paul, who’s considered a free-market libertarian, knows that he can’t keep Tea Party support without rejecting that philosophy when it comes to illegal immigration. Sharron Angle, the Tea Party candidate for Senate in Nevada, once expressed support for the reinstatement of alcohol prohibition. This only happens because the Tea Partiers are far more concerned about the culture war than about economic philosophy. They’re for limited government when it comes to things they perceive as encouraging our multicultural society and they’re for big government when it comes to things they perceive as threats from that multicultural society.

Racism has changed a bit since the 1960s. Racism was overt back then – a belief in the necessity of segregation and for preserving separate sets of rules for people of different groups. Today, racism is somewhat different and more subtle. It’s a belief that certain groups of people are an economic burden on society due to our cultural differences. It’s a belief that it’s wasteful when government does things to improve the lot of poor minority groups or to help immigrants assimilate into American society, but not wasteful when it does things that benefit the more privileged classes. Media charlatans like Glenn Beck are masterful at transforming these types of nationalistic impulses into economic theories with fully-developed alternate American histories to go along with them. And it’s foolish to believe that the Tea Party movement isn’t being driven in a significant way by this sleight of hand.

Watching the recent fireworks in the Minnesota gubernatorial race, where presumptive Republican nominee Tom Emmer is under increasing fire for supporting a lower minimum wage for restaurant workers, I can’t help but be reminded of Washington state’s 2008 gubernatorial contest, in which a similar statement by Republican nominee Dino Rossi arguably proved to be the turning point in a race that had appeared to be tilting in his favor.

By the end of September 2008, in the midst of the short-lived Palin bounce, polls showed challenger Rossi closing the gap on incumbent Democratic Governor Chris Gregoire, and perhaps even taking a small lead. Republicans were ebullient and Democrats more than a little nervous as the rematch of our bitter, statistically-tied 2004 contest headed into the homestretch.

And then everything changed.

As evident in his current senate campaign, Rossi rarely makes the mistake of clearly addressing issues on which he is out of step with voters, but during a candidate debate near Blaine WA, and perhaps flush with overconfidence from recent events, Rossi finally tripped up.  As first reported by Josh Feit in his pre-PubliCola, exclusive election coverage here on HA, the candidates were asked if the minimum wage was supposed to be a “living wage,” and whether either candidate would consider scaling it back.

“I don’t know of anybody getting rich on the minimum wage,” Gregoire told the hostile crowd (the debate was sponsored by the Association of Washington Business and the questions came from their membership). “The people of Washington are struggling. They go to the gas pumps and can’t afford to fill up the car, they go to the grocery and can’t afford to put food on the table…Washingtonians need to be able to provide for their families. Plenty of people are working minimum wage jobs that need to provide for their families, and I want to stand with Washingtonians.”

She said she supported the voter-approved minimum wage, $8.07 an hour. She also said she supported training programs for teen workers.

Rossi took the opposite point of view. Touting his Washington Restaurant Association endorsement (the most adamant opponents of the minimum wage), he said:   “The minimum wage was not meant to be a family wage. It’s meant to be an entry level wage.”

Josh went on to write about a conversation he’d had that night with a Blaine convenience store clerk who had just sold Rossi a can of beans, some Certs and a Red Bull. “I’m a Republican. I like the Palin thing,” the clerk told Josh, explaining why he planned to vote for Rossi. But when Josh recounted the candidates’ exchange over the minimum wage, the suddenly not-so-star-struck clerk got pissed off:

“If he lowers it,” he said, “I don’t want to vote for him. I’d be cutting my head off. I don’t want to demote myself.”

Suddenly, WA’s highest in the nation minimum wage became one of the hottest issues in the campaign, and within days, the governor had cut a new ad bashing Rossi with it.

It didn’t take a convenience store clerk or a focus group to tell you that this was a bad issue for Rossi. Washington’s minimum wage was tied to inflation via a citizens initiative that passed by a two to one margin only a decade earlier, a policy that remains widely popular with nearly everybody except, well, restaurant owners and other low-wage employers. But rather than attempting damage control, Rossi’s people only stepped in it deeper.

When the state Dems sent an operative to stand outside a Rossi rally in Ellensberg, holding a sign criticizing Rossi’s support for slashing the minimum wage, Rossi’s top economic adviser, Kittitas County Republican chair Matt Manweller (known here on HA as “the Nutty Professor”), simply went ballistic. Prof. Manweller vehemently defended Rossi’s position while angrily attacking the young protester and the 300,000 minimum wage workers he claimed to represent.

“You and those 300,000 people are dumber than a post,” Manweller yelled. Go ahead, watch it. It’s kinda stunning.

The minimum wage remained a focal point throughout the remainder of the campaign as Gregoire gradually pulled into a commanding lead. When the ballots were tallied, Gregoire had won by a comfortable 195,000-vote margin (6.5%), compared to her disputed 133-vote victory in 2004.

No doubt there were other factors that led to Gregoire’s victory, but the minimum wage provided an invaluable toehold at a time when she was quickly losing ground, and proved a potent message for differentiating the two candidates on economic issues at a time of great economic uncertainty.

And it provides a lesson you’d think that Emmer and his fellow Minnesota Republicans might want to learn.

If you haven’t read it yet, you really need to take a gander at Dominic Holden’s in-depth spelunking of the deep-bore tunnel cost-overrun controversy in the current issue of The Stranger, in which a local journalist finally asks the rather obvious question: “What Could Possibly Go Wrong?”

I know it’s all the fad these days amongst the Rainier Club crowd to roll one’s eyes at the mention of Mike McGinn’s name, all the while planning for Mayor Burgess’s election night victory party, but considering what’s at stake, it’s nice to know that there’s at least one elected official standing up for Seattle taxpayers (whatever his motives or sometimes clumsy methods). For at a time when the Seattle Center is preparing to auction off a couple acres of rare, designated open space to the highest bidder, in pursuit of a mere couple hundred thousand dollars of additional annual revenue, just imagine what a couple hundred million dollars in cost-overruns will do to our ability to pay for the things we want and need, let alone the billion-plus bill we could be presented with should things go seriously wrong.

And as Dominic explains, things could go seriously wrong.

Now I’m not one of those who points to Boston’s “Big Dig” and similar fiascos and concludes that America has somehow lost its ability to engineer and construct big projects. Large infrastructure projects do sometimes come in on time and near budget, and WSDOT has had a particularly good track record in recent years. But I’m no pollyanna either, especially when it comes to the least studied, least engineered, most speculative of any of the various Viaduct replacement alternatives.

In fact, when the Discovery Institute first floated the idea of what I immediately dubbed “The Big Bore,” I ridiculed their apparently faith-based proposal as “Intelligent Transportation Design.”

I once proposed building a gigantic rollercoaster along the West Seattle to downtown portion of the Monorail’s abandoned Green Line, and you didn’t see my joke of a transportation proposal picked up by the MSM, let alone labeled “visionary”. And yet the Seattle Rollercoaster Project is no less technically challenging nor politically, well, utterly fucking ridiculous than Discovery’s deep bore, crosstown tunnel. … In a city where completion of a 1.3 mile vanity trolley line is feted like some transportation miracle, the very notion that local voters might commit more than a half billion dollars a mile to an untested technology is a dramatic tribute to Discovery’s primary mission of promoting the exercise of faith over reason.

Much to my chagrin our political establishment quickly embraced Discovery’s Big Bore proposal, ignoring the technical challenges while attempting to bypass the political ones by excluding Seattle voters from the process… only to run into the electoral equivalent of a stuck tunnel-boring machine: the surprising election of Mayor Mike McGinn.

Like a stuck TBM, Mayor McGinn can’t possibly reverse himself, and with the cost-overrun issue still conveniently blocking his way, he sure as hell ain’t moving forward. Vindictive, short-sighted and/or lazy legislators may have thought they cleverly short-circuited our city’s famously obstructionist civic fetish with process, but where there’s a will, there’s a Seattle Way.

Observers who don’t believe last year’s mayoral election was at least in part a referendum on the Big Bore Tunnel are smoking crack. McGinn long and loudly campaigned on his opposition to the tunnel, and even when he relented during the final weeks, he still promised to fight any effort to stick Seattle taxpayers with open-ended cost-overruns. So why should anybody roll their eyes at the sight of Mayor McGinn attempting to fulfill his promise? The irony is, while the wise, old sages at the Seattle Times blame Mayor McGinn for the cost-overrun controversy, it’s actually the controversy that deserves the blame for Mayor McGinn.

As with the underlying technical challenges in drilling the largest diameter deep-bore tunnel ever, the powers that be have also failed to fully think through the financial and political challenges associated with the proposal. When I hear Governor Gregoire, City Council president Richard Conlin and other tunnel boosters warn that further delays will only increase costs, my immediate response is, well what the fuck did you think was going to happen to when you attempted to ram this through? It’s been nine years since the Nisqually quake marked the Viaduct for immediate demolition; did anybody really think that spitefully sticking Seattle taxpayers with all the risk for a tunnel they don’t particularly want was gonna speed up the replacement process?

And what if the tunnel comes in way over-budget, as mega-project history suggests it is likely to do? Where’s the money gonna come from to finish it? Are we gonna sit for years with a half-dug hole in the ground while the state and the city endlessly litigate their financial obligations? Or will the state shift funds from other parts of the project to complete the tunnel, while leaving the decrepit Viaduct standing like some ancient Roman ruin, until some future tumbler finally knocks it over onto the waterfront? I mean, how the fuck do you even start a project like this without knowing how you’re gonna ultimately pay for it?

There is not, as the Times and others suggest, consensus support for a multi-billion dollar tunnel with no downtown exits or onramps that will only serve 40,000 vehicles a day, though there may very well be a consensus by now to just get this debate over with and build something. I even find myself in “something” camp these days. Hell, I’d settle for anything.

But I’m not willing to settle for anything at any cost… and outside of the Times editorial board, the folks at the Discovery Institute and an apparent majority of city council members, neither are most Seattle taxpayers.

There may not have been consensus support for the surface/transit proposal either, but had the legislature forced that option down our throats — the cheapest and least financially risky of any of the alternatives — we’d probably be building it already, because whatever its downsides, it was by far the most technically, financially and politically doable. Instead, the legislature chose to risk the future fiscal stability of our city for the sake of folks wanting to quickly drive through it.

As utterly fucking ridiculous as the original Big Bore proposal was, that’s nothing compared to the notion of the state assuming all of the responsibilities for building it, while assuming absolutely none of the risks. And until the state proves it can navigate the well-charted sink holes and boulders of Seattle politics, nobody should have confidence in its ability to bore through the uncertain terrain hidden beneath the city.