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On the same day that real estate salesman Dino Rossi teases the NRSC with word that he’s seriously considering a run for the U.S. Senate, the 18,000-strong Washington Association of Realtors announce their enthusiastic endorsement of Democratic incumbent Sen. Patty Murray:

“Realtors are proud to endorse Sen. Murray as she has been a tireless advocate for housing affordability and the American dream of home ownership,” said Bill Riley, Washington Realtor president. “She has also been keenly aware of the state of the housing market and its importance to our economic recovery.”

With the Realtors’ endorsement comes the financial support of the RPAC, the state’s largest political action committee, with as many as 10,000 annual contributors. RPAC endorses Democrats and Republicans who share the organization’s concerns for the housing industry, home buyers, and homeownership in Washington state. In 2008, Realtors invested more than $750,000 to support political races around the state; about 93 percent of Realtor-endorsed candidates were elected to office.

Oh man, that’s gotta sting, doesn’t it, when the folks who know you best endorse your opponent? Kinda like David Irons losing the endorsement of his own mother.

The Podcast emerges from its undisclosed location to make a fleeting appearance at Drinking Liberally. Goldy and his panel of political wonks and blogoratti take the opportunity to celebrate the passage of sweeping health care reform legislation…because it IS a big fucking deal! At the same time, they express collective bemusement in the Republican response to the new law: “It’s Armageddon!”

At the local level, the panel takes bewildered delight in the decision by Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna to join the Florida anti-health-care-reform lawsuit. Rob, who everyone knows is running for Governor in 2012, has done a wonderful job maintaining the façade of a moderate Republican. The panel dissects the decision and concludes that the lawsuit was a huge political blunder, and one that will re-brand McKenna as something of a “far rightie Tenther nutcase.” Explaining McKenna’s blunder proves more elusive for the panel. Was it anger? Was it self-delusion? Was it extortion? Was he reacting to a potential primary challenge by Dino Rossi?

The panel wraps up with a discussion of the remaining reconciliation process and Republican prospects and reactions in the immediate post-health-care-reform world…seemingly, “no!,” “nuh-uh,” and “naaah.”

Goldy was joined by Drinking Liberally Seattle co-host Chris Mitchell, Effin’ Unsound’s & Horsesass’s Carl Ballard, Peace Tree Farm’s N in Seattle, and me.

The show is 53:07, and is available here as an MP3:

[audio:http://www.podcastingliberally.com/podcasts/podcasting_liberally_mar_23_2010.mp3]

[Recorded live at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. Special thanks to Confab creators Gavin and Richard for hosting the Podcasting Liberally site.]

Via DailyKos.

“[Rob McKenna] may represent the people of Florida, but not on the dime of the taxpayers of Washington.”
— Washington Governor Chris Gregoire

Perhaps this helps explain why over 6,500 Washington citizens have already joined the Washington Tax Payers OPT OUT of Rob McKenna’s Lawsuit Facebook group?

UPDATE:
Oops.  A new USA Today/Gallup poll shows public opinion swinging strongly in favor of health care reform.

Americans by 9 percentage points have a favorable view of the health care overhaul that President Obama signed into law Tuesday, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, a notable turnaround from surveys before the vote that showed a plurality against it.

By 49%-40% those surveyed say it was “a good thing” rather than a bad one that Congress passed the bill. Half describe their reaction in positive terms, as “enthusiastic” or “pleased,” while about four in 10 describe it in negative ways, as “disappointed” or “angry.”

The largest single group, 48%, calls the bill “a good first step” that should be followed by more action on health care. An additional 4% also have a favorable view, saying the bill makes the most important changes needed in the nation’s health care system.

Perhaps this is why Republicans vehemently opposed passage… because the knew public opinion swing in the Democrats favor once it was passed? And notice how 48% call it “a good first step”… seems to be a pretty clear indication that a lot of the folks previous polls reported as opposing the bill, merely thought it didn’t go far enough.

Writing on the Washington State Insurance Commissioner’s official blog, Rich Roesler explains what yesterday’s passage of federal health care reform means for us here in Washington state:

The health care reform bill passed by the U.S. House Sunday will cut the number of uninsured in Washington state by more than 500,000, provide better coverage to those with insurance, and save $500 million in uncompensated care – health care that’s delivered in Washington state but not directly paid for.

Which makes it hard to explain why Republicans Dave Reichert, Doc Hasting and Cathy McMorris-Rodgers would vote against it. Unless, of course, their votes were purely ideological and/or political.

Ezra Klein makes this point magnificently:

When Medicare was being considered, the American Medical Association hired Ronald Reagan to record a record housewives could play for their friends. It was called Operation: Coffee Cup, and you can listen to it in the clip atop this post, or read the text here.

Reagan was a more graceful speaker than Blackburn, but his point was much the same. Kill the bill. “If you don’t do this and if I don’t do it,” he said, “one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.”

Well, the bill passed. And moments ago, Rep. Paul Ryan was on the floor of the House, bellowing against Democrats who would dare propose “across-the-board cuts to Medicare.” This is breathless opportunism from Ryan — he has proposed far deeper across-the-board cuts to Medicare, and is making arguments against the Democrats’ bill that would be far more potent and accurate if aimed at his own — but leave that aside for a moment. The GOP’s embrace of the program that Ronald Reagan fought, and that Newt Gingrich sought to let “whither on the vine,” is based on the lived experience seniors have had with the bill: It has made them more, rather than less, free.

Blackburn’s introduction aside, people do not “celebrate” the freedom to not be able to afford lifesaving medical care. They don’t want the freedom to weigh whether to pay rent or take their feverish child to the emergency room. They don’t like the freedom to lose their job and then be told by insurers that they’re ineligible for coverage because they were born with a heart arrhythmia.

When faced with the passage of programs that would deliver people from these awful circumstances, the Republicans adopt a very narrow and cruel definition of the word “freedom.” But when faced with the existence of programs like Medicare, and the recognition that their constituents depend on those programs to live lives free of unnecessary fear and illness, they abandon their earlier beliefs, forget their dire warnings and, when convenient, defend these government protections aggressively. There’s nothing much to be done about that. It is, after all, a free country. But Americans should feel free to ignore these discredited hysterics.

The House now has the votes to pass this thing.

Once again, the Change.org website held an open forum for voting on which issues Americans want the Obama Administration to address. The results were announced and – once again – ending marijuana prohibition was one of the top issues voted on. In Canada, Prime Minister Stephen Harper discovered the same thing when he agreed to respond to questions from the online community. He was expected to respond to these questions today.

[Read more…]

Yesterday I griped about the Seattle Times myopic focus on the revenue side of the state budget equation, while providing very little coverage of the steep spending cuts in virtually every state agency and program:

You wouldn’t know it from reading the Times, because that doesn’t fit in with their lazy waste/fraud/abuse meme. No, the Times never writes about the thousands of state employees who have lost their jobs — further depressing our local economy — because they’re too busy expressing outrage that the remaining state employees still enjoy the same kind of health care benefits newspaper employeesused to enjoy as recently as a decade ago.

And today, as if on cue, the Times initial coverage of the just released Senate budget proposal focuses exclusively on tax increases.

If all you read was the Times, you might not remember that the legislature and governor addressed last year’s record revenue shortfall with a dramatic, all cuts budget, and you might think that the Senate is looking to close this year’s additional $2.7 billion gap entirely on the back of taxpayers. No, you’d have no idea that the Senate budget proposal includes another $838 million in additional cuts.

I’m just sayin’…

Sensible Washington is having its kickoff meeting for Olympia area volunteers tonight. Also, Philip Dawdy responds to the ACLU of Washington’s decision not to endorse I-1068:

Sensible Washington is disappointed that the ACLU of Washington is refusing to support I-1068. We believe that in so doing the group is ignoring the wishes of many of its members and contradicts its years of support for marijuana drug reform. We find it especially ironic that the organization which initially promoted legalization and reform in Washington State should retreat from its last 10 years of work on that front.

We are especially disturbed by the characterization of I-1068 as irresponsible based upon lack of regulation when the ACLU of Washington is well aware that the initiative could not include a regulatory scheme. Federal preemption issues make a comprehensive tax and regulate scheme impossible and the single issue rule for initiatives in Washington State does not help either. Those restrictions limit the scope of any initiative to removing criminal penalties for adults. If I-1068 is passed this November it will fall to the State Legislature to provide a legal framework for adult marijuana use, possession and cultivation. The ACLU of Washington has been involved in developing such frameworks, making its current position on I-1068 even more curious.

We are confused that the ACLU of Washington doesn’t seem to get that it is wrong for the State of Washington to continue to waste about $105 million a year in taxpayer funds to arrest, prosecute and imprison over 12,000 otherwise responsible citizens a year for marijuana-related offenses. We are confused that the ACLU of Washington would be willing to accept a state medical marijuana law which offers little legal protection to sick and dying patients. And we are utterly baffled that the ACLU of Washington does not get that the repeated failure of the Legislature to reform this state’s marijuana laws indicates that an initiative to the people is the only responsible method to achieve the kind of reform that the citizens of Washington State clearly desire.

I think the main stumbling block for the ACLU here is that they’ve become so enamored with having good relationships with certain powerful folks in the state that they’ve been willing to completely compromise on making any progress in order to keep that seat at the table. During the push to modify the medical marijuana law in 2007-2008, they ended up compromising so much that patients ended up more likely to be arrested (see update 2) with the new law than they were before. The ACLU was prominent in those discussions. The I-1068 initiative is a recognition that trying to negotiate with the legislature is no longer a good strategy. This initiative is a way to force the legislature’s hand to deal with this problem head on and stop dicking around. And my own hunch (and it’s just a hunch) is that this made the ACLU uncomfortable. Otherwise, as Philip explains quite well in that post, their opposition to the initiative simply doesn’t make sense logically.

UPDATE: One additional aspect of this that’s worth noting is that the ACLU of Washington was the main driver behind the recent decriminalization bills in the legislature (which didn’t pass either the House or the Senate, despite merely trying to make our marijuana laws more similar to states like Ohio and Mississippi). Some of the folks who put together I-1068 had been very vocal in their criticisms of Alison Holcomb and the ACLU of Washington over not pushing for full legalization. Again, I have no idea exactly what drove Holcomb to come out against I-1068 (which has been endorsed by a broad range of folks already), but considering the ACLU of Washington’s track record in drug law reform, it’s probably a good thing they’re not involved.

UPDATE 2: After being challenged on the assertion noted above, I’m going to remove it from the post. This has been my perception from following a number of cases, but I don’t have any data to prove it, so I’m striking it from my original post. I do feel confident in saying that the revision of the law did nothing to prevent patients from being arrested, since the recent State vs. Fry court decision affirmed that the law does nothing to prevent patients from being arrested. My larger point that the attempts to work with the legislature were a complete failure still stands.

Last week, I wrote about the story of Kathy Parkins. Parkins was a 51-year-old medical marijuana patient from Washington who was arrested in late 2007 after being pulled over in Arizona with a small amount of marijuana. She was allowed to serve out her probation in Seattle, but ran into some corruption and incompetence within the Washington Department of Corruptions, including being illegally detained and kept in jail for a week in May 2008 without any charges. Following that, she spent over a year trying to get a hold of a document that showed that a corrections officer falsified information in an attempt to have her sent back to Arizona. The document was finally released in the most recent public disclosure request and contained several fabrications – things that clearly could not have been accidental.

I’d also mentioned that Carla Cole, Parkins’ roommate at the time of the arrest, had been trying to get an explanation from the DOC. In February 2009, DOC Head Eldon Vail sent Cole a reply claiming that the officers didn’t inaccurately fill out paperwork or fabricate anything. At the time, the DOC was still refusing to let Parkins actually see the report in question, an Interstate Compact form that allowed for her to serve out her probation here. So after the report was revealed in the public disclosure request – proving that, in fact, Officer Jeremy Praven made several things up – she sent off another letter to Vail asking for an explanation.

In a letter dated last Wednesday, February 10, the DOC once again tried to claim that there’s nothing to see here, although the letter did not come directly from Vail. It was from Regional Administrator Jim Harms:

I have been asked to respond to your letter dated January 24, 2010 addressed to Secretary Eldon Vail. You wrote about information contained in a public disclosure request response concerning the Washington State Department of Corrections and medical marijuana, and the circumstances of the arrest of your former tenant, Kathleen Merry in May 2008.

We take the concerns of you, and in fact, all citizens very seriously and carefully review all complaints. As Secretary Vail indicated in his February 20, 2009 letter to you, your allegations of misconduct were investigated. Both the Unit Supervisor and the Field Administrator followed up with identified staff.

I apologize for any confusion or frustration this incident caused you, but no indications of misconduct, intended inaccuracies or fabrications have been found in this case.

Once again, you can see the document in question in this PDF file of released documents, pages 20 to 22. As I documented last week, within that report, Praven makes a number of completely fictional claims:

– That Parkins has no family ties to Washington state and only came here because of the medical marijuana laws. In fact, Parkins has lived in Washington state nearly her entire life, only recently deciding to move to California. Her children and grandchild live here, along with 9 aunts and uncles.

– That Cole belongs to an organization called the ‘Marijuana’s Growers Association of Washington’. No such organization has ever existed.

– That Parkins was not authorized to use medical marijuana in Washington state. Parkins had received an updated authorization that morning. She claims that when she offered to show it to Officer Praven, he wasn’t interested in seeing it.

There simply isn’t any ambiguity about this. Anyone with rudimentary critical thinking skills can recognize that these lies showed up in Praven’s report as an attempt to have Parkins sent back to Arizona. Coupled with the fact that Praven illegally detained Parkins before filling out this document – and then left her in jail for a week without any information about why she was being held – there’s no justification at all for claiming that no misconduct occurred. And it’s a clear lie that no intended inaccuracies or fabrications ended up in Parkins’ paperwork.

The apparent suicide of a longtime professional signature gatherer threatens to blow wide open the heretofore hidden world of organized petition fraud in Washington state.

Spokane based Dennis O’Shea had worked for years supervising crews of paid signature gatherers for a number of contractors, most recently Citizens Solutions, the Lacey WA firm that gathers signatures for Tim Eyman’s initiatives. Documented back in 2003 making false statements to signers about the initiative he was hawking, O’Shea had years to learn the ins and outs of the sometimes shady signature gathering business. So when detectives reportedly found his body along with a box of documents labeled to the attention of the police, they had reason to take notice.

Next month, partially as a result of the investigation stemming from O’Shea’s death, a mother and daughter signature gathering team will face charges on 45 counts of forging signatures on petitions for Eyman’s 2008 Initiative 985. And judging from both the suspicious circumstances, and the well documented history of petition fraud in other states, there is good reason to suspect that this case might represent only the tip of the iceberg.

According to court documents recently acquired by the Ballot Initiative Network, Theresa Dedeaux came under investigation in June 2008 after two petition sheets were turned over to Spokane County Elections officers, and subsequently the Secretary of State. An SOS official determined that 37 of the 40 signatures on the sheets did not match the signatures on file, and further forensic work by the Washington State Patrol determined a number of these to be forgeries. Affidavits were sent out to all 40 of the alleged signers, and all 29 of the affidavits returned confirmed that theirs was not the signature on the petition.

When confronted with this evidence by the WSP, Dedeaux made a statement to investigators implicating her supervisor: “Everything we did was at the direction of Dennis O’Shea.” When asked what she meant by “we,” Dedeaux went on to implicate her daughter Mercedes, “My daughter did it too.”

While details remain sketchy, it appears that O’Shea committed suicide sometime during the investigation, and according to sources, he left behind a box of documents directed toward the attention of the police, that included copies of several petition sheets collected by Mercedes Dedeaux. Investigators sent affidavits to 34 alleged signers whose signatures were suspected of being forged; all 29 of the returned affidavits attested that the signature was not authentic.

What else was in the box of documents O’Shea left behind? I have no idea, and I have no idea whether it is currently being investigated by the Spokane County Sheriff, the WSP or the SOS. What I do know, is that O’Shea thought it important enough to set aside for investigators as he prepared to take his own life. And I do know that the kind of fraud perpetrated by the Dedeauxs has proven to be common place in other initiative states, and that there has never been any reason to assume that Washington’s signature gatherers are uniquely clean, especially given the laxness of the laws and procedures regulating our initiative process.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” opponents of initiative reform like to argue, pointing to the absence of evidence of signature fraud in Washington state, but the truth is, we can’t possibly uncover evidence we’re not looking for, and lacking the tools to track signatures to the paid canvassers who gathered them, even evidence of fraud would be unlikely to incriminate the perpetrators.

To that end, there are two bills that are still alive in the current legislative session that attempt to address this issue. The first is HB 2614, which merely closes a loophole created via an opinion by state Attorney General Rob McKenna. Petitions are currently required to contain a declaration identifying the signature gatherer, but bizarrely, McKenna has advised the SOS that the statute does not require the signature gatherer to sign it. HB 2614 would clarify the existing law, explicitly requiring that the signature gatherer sign the declaration before the petition is filed with the SOS.

The second bill, SB 6449, is much more sweeping. In addition to closing the loophole above, SB 6449 would require that paid signature gatherers register with the PDC, and provide evidence of said registration while gathering signatures. Individuals convicted of fraud, forgery, identity theft, elections violations and sexual offenses would be denied registration, and permanently ineligible to work as paid signature gatherers. Volunteer signature gatherers would be exempt from such requirements.

Both of these bills represent prudent reforms that have been successfully implemented in other states with a history of signature fraud and other abuses. As it stands now, nothing would stop the Dedeauxs from working again as paid signature gatherers. Likewise, convicted identity thieves and sex offenders could be out there in front of the Safeway as I type, collecting the addresses and signatures of prospective victims.

Last year the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center ranked Washington’s initiative laws some of the most permissive in the nation, handing us a big, fat “F” in its nationwide Ballot Integrity Report Card. And yet this year, like in past sessions, the smart money is on the Legislature chickening out of addressing these long overdue reforms.

Opponents insist that there is no evidence of fraud, but the Dedeaux case proves otherwise, while the box of documents O’Shea left behind almost certainly contains additional incriminating evidence. Now is the time for the Legislature to act to protect the integrity of our initiative process.

In a decision that should come as a surprise to absolutely no one, King County Superior Court Judge John Erlick ruled today that the state has failed to meet its “paramount duty” to make “ample provision for the education of all children,” as required by Washington’s Constitution, and ordered the state to provide stable and dependable funding to do so.

In response, Gov. Gregoire issued the following statement:

“Improving the quality of our schools and the education system has been, and remains, the top priority of our state. I agree with the court that we have a duty to provide a high quality education to our children.

Working with my staff and the Attorney General’s Office, I will be reviewing this decision to determine where we go from here.

Last year we passed significant legislation that would institute major funding reforms to ensure the necessary resources and programs to help every student succeed. That work must continue.

Regardless of whether this decision is upheld, I will continue working with the legislature to improve school accountability, close the achievement gap and ensure we provide our children opportunities for success in the global marketplace in which they will be competing. The legislative process is the best avenue we have available to determine those components.

Right now there is legislation being considered that would reform our education system. In light of this decision, I think it’s even more important that we pass these proposals that will put us in a better position to improve educational opportunities for every student in our state.”

To which I say:  Show me the money!

That was always my problem with last year’s education reform package. It promised improvements that would cost an extra billion dollars or so by 2018, but it never actually provided the funding mechanism to make it happen. Meanwhile, school funding has been substantially slashed in the here and now.

The truth is, education reform without tax structure reform is a hollow promise, and we’ll never be able to sustainably fund K-12 and higher education until we move to a fairer and more adequate tax system. Everything else is just talk.

Speaking of investigative reporting, Michael Hood’s got the first of a two part series up on BlatherWatch, exposing former KVI host Peter Wiessbach’s exploitive janitorial business.

It’s an insight into how sleazy operators like Weissbach use illegals. Business always claims American workers won’t do such lowly work, but this demonstrates that some employers give preference to the undocumented.

SBM systematically hired and exploited workers who, because of legal status complied in fear of losing their jobs or being detained and deported.

Janitors who questioned or complained about these practices were summarily fired- as were such managers- after first being frozen out of the management loop.

An ex-manager describes workers with so little English he needed take another worker away from his work to translate the manager’s instructions. When he asked HR asked why he couldn’t get anyone who speaks English, he was told: “[We] don’t hire those kind of people. [We] only hire illegals who mainly speak very little- if any- English.”

Just to be clear, not all conservative talk hosts are exploitive, hypocritical scumbags. They may be 99% wrong 99% of the time, but personally, I’ve never met a KVI host I didn’t like. Then again, I’ve never met Wiessbach.

One of the silliest aspects of the Tea-Bagging-Town Maul spectacles last August was the widespread proclamation by conservatives that they are carrying on the movement of Saul Alinsky. While it was (and still is) laughable that people fighting on behalf on privilege and concentration of power could in any way lay claim to Alinsky’s legacy, it’s instructive to note just how delusional conservatives have allowed themselves to become.

For example, the anti-ACORN agit-prop activist James O’Keefe, arrested this week with three others in New Orleans for allegedly trying to bug the office of Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-Louisiana, was a main proponent of this nonsense.

Here’s O’Keefe being quoted by Politico in September of 2009:

James O’Keefe, the activist and filmmaker who posed as a pimp for an expose of several ACORN offices in the Northeast, told the New York Post earlier this week] that he, too, had been inspired by “Rules for Radicals,” which includes such tactical lessons as “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon” and “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.”

O’Keefe told the paper he was trying to expose the “absurdities of the enemy by employing their own rules and language.”

“If you can make impossible demands on your enemy, you can destroy them,” he said.

Yeah, ridicule is indeed a potent weapon, as O’Keefe and his little band of modern-day Plumbers are about to find out.

O’Keefe has his actual roots, not in community organizing, but in the wingnut welfare system that sponsors far right “alternative” college newspapers, and it appears a couple of his fellow travelers do as well. Check out TPMMuckraker for more on that.

O’Keefe had his moment of glory, and became a hero to conservatives, because his clearly deceptive and unethical assault on ACORN was pushed into the broader media environment by Fox Noise. But this is not knew, and conservatives rarely pay much of a price for their egregious statements and actions, and in fact one can argue it only endears them to their supporters.

The problem for the rest of society is the conservative agit-prop artists become steadily more outrageous and egregious. Because the legacy media has become accustomed to right wing demagoguery, it seems to barely register when someone on the right jokes about kidnapping and torturing the Speaker of the House. Ha. Ha, whatever. Nobody would really go kill a doctor Nancy Pelosi, don’t be silly.

As progressives have known for a long time, the mind-set of many conservatives is basically akin to that of criminals who justify their wrong actions through excuse-making and an unjustified sense of victimhood. In this parallel universe, fostered, nurtured and encouraged by the broad array of stink tanks, news outlets and operatives now known as the Noise Machine, wrong actions against perceived enemies are justified because the very existence of the country is at stake. Never mind the law, never mind the truth, never mind what a democracy actually can be.

The conservative tribe demands that the enemy (that would be us) be attacked, and meanwhile our tribe is in the nurse’s office because we glued our balls to our legs again, to steal a recent quip about health care reform from Jon Stewart.

And now this is all manifesting itself in outright criminality, and of course that’s not new either. From the Palmer Raids to the McCarthy and Nixon eras, the song remains the same. Remember how much hard time Oliver North did? Yeah.

Some of the national commentary about O’Keefe has centered on what his “motivations” were, which I suppose has some bearing but also acts to disguise the foul nature of being caught in such a situation. I mean, they were pretending to be telephone repairmen in the office of a Senator who sits on the Homeland Security committee? One of them apparently had a listening device in a car nearby? Is there some kind of explanation possible that would justify that, other than being lunatics?

Some national commenters have predicted that O’Keefe’s future is in jeopardy, but that seems unlikely. If history is any guide, O’Keefe could very well wind up in charge of a giant right wing agit-prop machine to wield against his perceived enemies, just like the man who gave him so much air time in the first place, Roger Ailes of Fox Noise. (For those not clicking the preceding link, Ailes got his first big national political job in the 1968 campaign of Richard M. Nixon. The song remains the same.)

Given O’Keefe’s problems choosing between right actions and wrong actions, for anyone in the legacy media to ever, ever, ever again lend O’Keefe credibility is to deny what is plain and obvious to everyone outside the conservative pathology bubble: much of the right-wing in this country is utterly and completely unhinged. Normal people want to be able to afford doctor’s visits and pay for groceries, they don’t think about bugging Senate offices, and normal people consider law breaking to be wrong.

And they don’t believe a damn word coming out of Fox Noise.

Of course, I’m not plotting to blow up the Supreme Court, despite the intentionally provocative headline, and anybody who would believe for moment that such constitutes an actual threat is a complete and utter idiot. But I wonder if the Republican majority on the Court who just voted to gut our campaign finance laws by throwing out a century of precedent, respect my right to free speech as much as they respect that of corporations?

No doubt there are some of you out there who believe this headline crosses a line for which I should be subject to criminal penalties. After all, to maintain a safe and civil society the First Amendment cannot possibly be absolute; you can’t yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater, and all that. And yet I’m guessing that that those of you who would relish the thought of armed federal agents kicking down my door in the middle of night in response to a mere rhetorical device, are the same folks who are cheering the Court’s 5-4 decision to protect corporate America’s unfettered First Amendment right to corrupt our government through unlimited political spending.

No, I’m not plotting to blow up the Supreme Court, nor do I support or encourage such a radical revisionist agenda, because unlike the Court’s Republican majority, I actually respect the institution. But I fear for a nation whose highest court consistently grants money more free speech rights than speech itself.

The New York Times announced today that it intends to charge readers for frequent access to its website, starting in early 2011.

Starting in early 2011, visitors to NYTimes.com will get a certain number of articles free every month before being asked to pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the newspaper’s print edition will receive full access to the site without extra charge.

What exactly the NY Times considers “frequent,” and how much they will charge, not even the paper’s executives seem to know, but the move to squeeze subscription fees from online readers doesn’t come as much of a surprise.

Will it work? That is, will revenue from online subscribers substantially exceed the online advertising revenue lost due to the inevitable drop in page views? I dunno. The NY Times fills a kinda unique position in our media landscape as our nation’s undisputed paper of record. So, maybe.

But the big question for me is, successful or not, will this prove to be a viable business model that, say, the Seattle Times might follow in an effort to turn around its own declining financial prospects?

I don’t think so.

The Seattle Times simply does not play as vital and unique a role in our local community as their New York counterpart does nationally. While the NY Times consists almost entirely of original content from some of the best and most highly respected reporters and columnists in the nation, the Seattle Times relies heavily on the Associated Press and other newswires and syndication services to fill its pages. For example, two of the four articles on the front page of today’s dead-tree edition are newswire reprints, including an above-the-fold lead story culled from the pages of… the New York Times.

Why would I pay twice for the same story? Indeed, why would I pay at all for a newswire story I can read elsewhere for free?

Well, I might, because part of my schtick is critiquing the Seattle Times, but as an unrepentant news junkie, I’m the exception that proves the rule. Unless the news industry universally adopts the NY Times model, I just don’t see how dailies like the Seattle Times can demand a high enough flat-rate subscription fee to offset the inevitable loss of readership that would come from hiding their content behind a firewall.

Newspapers are kinda like information department stores, presenting a broad variety of content on a range of subjects and issues in one easy to consume package. But the hierarchy of the Internet is flat, and the barriers to entry relatively nonexistent in terms of capital and infrastructure investments, leaving publications like the Seattle Times vulnerable to specialized competitors.

In the old media technology, where folding a bunch of pages together into one convenient bundle was the most efficient means of distributing news and opinion, the Seattle Times merely needed to do everything well to fend off new competitors. But in the new media technology, being merely good is not good enough.

If The Stranger provides better coverage of the music and arts scene, and the neighborhood blogs provide better coverage of the neighborhoods, and Publicola provides more thorough coverage of Olympia, and HA provides more entertaining and relevant political commentary and analysis… what exactly is the economic incentive for consumers interested in those subjects to subscribe to the Seattle Times as a whole? Indeed, ironically, it is specialized news and opinion sites that have the more compelling argument for placing their content behind subscription firewalls, a model that has worked well for the Puget Sound Business Journal and other online trade publications.

I don’t mean to dis the valuable original reporting that the Seattle Times does produce, but I’m not sure there’s enough of it to make a flat-fee, all-you-can eat subscription a compelling product. I don’t subscribe to cable TV for the very same reason. Sure, there are networks I might purchase on an a la carte basis, were I given the option, but I’m not going to pay $60/month for 500 channels of stuff I’ll never watch. Especially not now, with so much equally compelling content available over the Internet.

No doubt Frank Blethen and his bean counters are encouraged by the NY Times pioneering effort, but they shouldn’t be. The Seattle Times simply is no NY Times, and I don’t see how the business model of one easily translates to the other.

I’m not sure what the solution is for the Seattle Times and other dailies. Hell, I’m not even sure there is one.