“I’ve never been so fired up for a campaign in my life,” said Pridemore, D-Vancouver, who is serving his second term in the state Senate. “It’s 320 days to Election Day, and the clock has started.”
Pridemore said he has assembled a strong campaign team and will begin raising money immediately, even as he prepares for a grueling 60-day legislative session in January.
So there you have it.
Cherisse Luxa has passed away. I didn’t know Cherisse, but others did. Condolences to her family.
Cafecito at Daily Kos:This morning, Washington’s netroots community lost one of its most wonderful and spirited activists when Cherisse Luxa, the founder of Burien Drinking Liberally, succumbed to stomach cancer. Cherisse was sixty two. She resided in the 34th LD, known for its strong and vibrant Democratic Party organization.
If you have ever attended Drinking Liberally, you almost certainly know of Cherisse’s incredible energy and her unstoppable drive to make our community a better place. From her decades as a King County Sheriff’s Deputy to her impressive track record as an activist an advocate, Cherisse made a huge difference, both for Burien and for the broader community.
Cherisse, like many of us, got religion with Howard Dean’s run.
Cherisse touched thousands of lives and was a role model for many of us. We will sorely miss her.
Barbara Coombs Lee has a follow-up diary at Daily Kos on the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ directive that mandates that Catholic health care facilities employ feeding tubes and other life-prolonging measures even when an individual’s living will specifically prohibits it. When I last posted on this, I’d sent out an email to a number of Catholic hospitals and hospices across the state to see if any of them were planning to ignore the directive.
It’s been five days, and I haven’t heard any responses from any of the 10 contacts I was able to find. In the comments of the original post on this, Joel Connelly claimed to have spoken with an administrator who says her facility will ignore the directive. I got that person’s name from Connelly today and emailed her directly. I’m still waiting for a reply.
UPDATE: Joel Connelly is up to some more shenanigans in the comments. He writes:
After asking for my assistance today, you deliberately distort what I heard up at the Bellingham City Club forum.
Absolutely not. I’ve distorted nothing. Here’s what you said to me, with a link to the comment:
As one with a living will, I’ve been told several times by Catholic hospital administrators that my wish not to be kept alive by artificial means would be fully respected.
I emailed you today with the following request:
I emailed as many Catholic hospitals and hospices as I could find contact emails for and not a single one has emailed me back saying that they will ignore the end-of-life instructions given to them by the bishops. If you have contact info for the person or persons who told you so, please forward that on to me.
You wrote back with the name of the person I then emailed. Either you’re not following what you’re saying to me or you’re deliberately trying to lie. Which is it?
I just received a news release announcing that state Rep. Deb Wallace, D-Vancouver (17th LD,) is definitely running for Congress for the third district seat that will be vacated at the end of the term by U.S. Rep. Brian Baird, D-Wash. Here’s a sample quote.
“From day one, I’ve been committed to being open and accessible to my constituents and being responsive to their needs. My focus has been investing prudently and in a fiscally responsible manner to improve education, modernize our transportation network, encourage economic development and job growth and ensuring public safety. I’ve always believed that government should live within its means, just like our families do and I will bring that same approach to Congress,” added Wallace.
Wallace would seem to be a strong candidate and potentially a good fit for the district. Her resume would stack up well against Republican state Rep. Jaime Herrera, R-Ridgefield (18th LD,) who announced her candidacy yesterday within hours of Baird’s announcement that he will not run again.
Wallace’s 17th LD is definitely the most swing district in Clark County. Encompassing the sprawling eastern areas, the other legislators are Rep. Tim Probst, D-Vancouver, and Sen. Don Benton, R-Vancouver. It’s an area high in strip malls, low information voters, and some amount of far right nutballs, although it’s nothing like the 18th LD in that regard. One can make a reasonable argument that the ability to win in the 17th is a decent credential for trying to win district-wide.
While there have been plenty of names other than Wallace floating around the rumor-sphere on the Democratic side, Wallace has moved the fastest, and apparently has hired a consulting firm, based on the where the news release came from.
UPDATE ON THE GOP SIDE—State Rep. Jaime Herrera, R-Ridgefield (18th LD,) told The Columbian that she will make an official announcement next week. She might just be getting her ducks in a row, but this appears to be a step back from yesterday’s news that she was definitely running.
Herrera, R-Ridgefield, announced this morning that she will give the idea “serious consideration” and make an official announcement about her plans next week.
I suppose someone should tell Politico.
Columbian editor emeritus Tom Koenninger serves up a stinking dung bowl of war on Christmas bullshit in an opinion articled headlined, “Despite PC Crowd, Merry Christmas!”
If you want to view a school Christmas program this year, you may have to go to the Inchelium School District on the Colville Indian Reservation. That’s 90 miles north of Spokane. You won’t find such a program in Clark County’s public schools, at least not by that title.
Santa and Christmas are banned in the schools because they are politically incorrect. The legal beagles declare they are constitutionally incorrect, a violation of church and state separation, even though the American Center for Law and Justice pointed out in 2004: “It is important to note that nothing in the U.S. Constitution prohibits students in public schools from exercising their constitutional rights to express their religious beliefs, especially during the Christmas season.” That goes for the public square, too, they maintain.
Or if you wanted to see a Christmas play at a school you could go see one at a local Christian school, there are over eight thousand of them in Clark County alone. Bet Tom never considered that basic fact, or more accurately, he deliberately chose to bitch and moan about not being able to shove his religion down my kids’ throats.
So to his “Merry Christmas” I issue a cheerful, “Go Fuck Yourself with a Holly Branch, Tom.” Pass the eggnog.
As for the “legal beagles” Koenninger laments, I think they’re called “The Supreme Court of the United States.” The dirty fucking hippies have to live by any horrid decision they make, like Bush v. Gore, but somehow upholding the separation of church and state is worthy of contempt. There are fine distinctions to be made, but that may be why the place is made out of marble I guess.
Koenninger goes on to complain about various examples of how poor, poor picked-upon Christians have to deal with things like sorting out whether a Christmas tree should be in a public school. Granted, there are reasonable positions to discuss, but that would require some small attempt at empathy, something always in short supply for righties this time of year.
Striving for the PC Christmas, a lot of self-proclaimed do-gooders have done silly things. Last week, an elementary school principal in Ashland, Ore., removed an artificial Christmas “giving tree,” which held tags requesting gifts for needy children, after a family complained it was a religious symbol. Dozens of parents were upset, noting the tree was not a religious symbol but a way to celebrate the season and help those in need. Last year, the director of Seattle Schools Department of Equity and Race, Caprice D. Hollins, distributed a letter suggesting Thanksgiving is a difficult time for “many of our Native students.” She referred staff to a Web site that declared the holiday “is a bitter reminder of 500 years of betrayal returned for friendship.” Oh, those rotten Pilgrims!
Those rotten liberals, asking people to do unto others as they would have done unto them, it’s offensive.
The War on Christmas idiots complain endlessly about some vague threat against Christmas, but Christmas is everywhere you look right now. I was taught it’s in the heart, but I guess that’s not good enough for some people.
Hell, some of us might be tempted to come back to the organized religion if it weren’t for petty, narrow-minded fools like Koennigner. That’s about the last thing I need on Sunday morning, listening to some self-righteous prick tell me the difference between good and evil, knowing that the prick’s newspaper works tirelessly to fuck regular working people over the other six days of the week.
If someone gets cancer without health care they’ll be comforted if they can watch second graders sing “Silent Night” on public school grounds, because nothing is more comforting than the tribal culture war against liberals. People may go bankrupt, lose their houses and lives, but it’s all worth it just to generate animosity towards those who try to defend Constitutional principles that conservatives find troublesome, ie all the ones that don’t involve guns.
I say we put a Hindu “giving cow” on top of the new Columbian building and see what folks say. Well, we’d have to ask the bank that actually owns the new Columbian building first I suppose. Nobody could have predicted…
Yesterday, I once again made the argument for legalizing marijuana and taxing the hell out of it. Today, Publicola reports that Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson is collecting co-sponsors on a bill that would do exactly that.
How’s this for a magical pot of revenue to help fix the state’s $2.6 billion shortfall? Seattle state Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson (D-36) is collecting co-sponsors for a bill that would legalize marijuana. And tax it.
This is not a fringe proposal folks, and it’s past time to seriously debate it.
UPDATE [Lee]: The bill can be read here. I’ll be posting more about it later this week.
The Washington State Bar Association has endorsed a bill that would decriminalize simple marijuana possession, reducing the maximum punishment from the current $1000 fine and 90 days in jail, to a $100 ticket.
Well… um… yawn.
It’s not that I don’t support the WSBA’s resolution, it’s just that it’s hard to get excited about a half-measure that’s at least twenty years behind the times, and fails to take full advantage of a budget crisis that could force legislators to take a new and creative look at our state’s antiquated drug policies. For as I’ve previously argued, it’s time to fully legalize marijuana, and sell it through our state stores.
Other states may be further along the political path toward de facto legalization, but no other state, with the exception of my native Pennsylvania, has a more robust system already in place for effectively executing it. Washington already heavily regulates the in-state manufacture of wine, beer and distilled spirits, and maintains an extensive statewide network of retail stores and distribution centers for the sole purpose of operating its exclusive monopoly on the retail sale of liquor. A similar monopoly on the legal sale of marijuana would not only be easily implemented, but highly profitable for taxpayers and state farmers alike.
At an estimated street value of over $1 billion a year, marijuana is already Washington’s number two cash crop, second only to apples, and consistently ranking us among the top five pot-producing states. By legalizing and regulating a crop that is already being grown, the state could impose standards of consistency and quality on the product, and by setting prices as the only legal buyer for the crop, farmers could be assured a stable, legal income for their efforts.
And considering the existing federal ban on marijuana, and the federal government’s constitutional authority over interstate commerce, Washington’s State Stores, by necessity, would initially only be able to buy and sell state-grown product, thus nurturing a nascent hemp industry that would eventually produce a valuable export commodity once the ban is lifted nationally, perhaps even dominating the market.
According to the Office of Financial Management, decriminalizing marijuana could save state and local authorities as much as $16 million a year in law enforcement resources. But regulated growing, and a State Store monopoly, could contribute hundreds of millions of dollars to state and local coffers, with plenty left over to dramatically expand our treatment and prevention programs.
As Lee has extensively documented here on HA, our nation’s war on pot is an abject failure. It’s time for our nation to accept the reality that tens of millions of Americans choose to enjoy the recreational use of marijuana. And what better place to start than here in Washington state?
Of all the tidbits from last’s night’s post-mayoral-election consultancy tell-all, the conversation about McGinn’s tunnel “flip-flop” was the one I was looking forward to the most:
Just two weeks before the Nov. 3 election, McGinn shocked many by saying he would no longer oppose the controversial, $4.2 billion tunnel replacement. McGinn made his announcement immediately after a City Council vote to move forward with the project.
McGinn campaign guru Bill Broadhead said his candidate made his statement after what he said was a surprise council vote, and McGinn wanted to emphasize he [would] “honor agreements.”
“He didn’t flip,” Broadhead said.
McGinn did flip, and he flipped his way into the mayor’s office, Neuman said.
“It was a brilliant move, genius,” said Neuman, who added she initially thought McGinn’s “flip/flop” would hurt him. “For the first five minutes, I thought, ‘yep, this is my Christmas present.’ Five minutes later, I thought, ‘oh, fill in the blank with your favorite four-letter word.’ This could really work for him. Flip-flopping is an inside baseball game. And Mike McGinn is no John Kerry, he can articulate things very well.”
Huh.
And what did I write at the time?
McGinn’s admission that a 9-0 council vote (not to mention the pro-tunnel stance of the governor and the legislature) is not something a mayor is likely to overcome shows a pragmatic side that I wasn’t sure he had coming into this campaign, and should help assuage the concerns of some who feared a vote for McGinn would be a vote for gridlock, both figuratively and literally.
I’d previously argued that McGinn had “overestimated the breadth and depth of popular opposition to the tunnel,” and that if he ended up losing, this was the issue that might have done him in. So I’m feeling kinda smart right about now.
I think the tunnel has always been a much more nuanced issue than it is usually made out to be. And in the end, voters turned out to be pretty damn nuanced as well. Who’d a thunk?
HA contributors were unusually busy over the weekend, a typically slow time of the week when both posting and traffic generally dips, so here’s a brief summary of the posts you might have missed.
Even business guys befuddled about Baird’s vote
Spiraling healthcare costs is the number one issue for small businesses here and nationwide, which according to Jon, has even U.S. Rep. Brian Baird’s constituents in the business community puzzled over his vote against healthcare reform.
Post-Election Analysis Heresy
In which I make the downright heretical suggestion that, campaign strategery aside, perhaps the results of our recent election indicate that local voters are for the most part satisfied with the performance of our local government, and think both King County and Seattle are headed in the right direction.
The Great Mystery of Afghanistan in 2005-2006
Rather than a long, slow decline into chaos, the situation on the ground in Afghanistan didn’t start to take a sharp turn for the worse until 2005-2006. What changed at that time? Not surprisingly, Lee focuses in on our futilely misguided War on Drugs.
Packing Irony
Wouldn’t it be ironic, I mused, if the guy packing a pistol into the West Seattle Community Center had been shot in the process by another gun-toting civilian? (Because guns make us safer, you know.)
Another Domino Falls
Lee reports that even the stodgy, old American Medical Association has adopted recommendations encouraging the Federal government to reclassify marijuana away from being a Schedule I drug.
Grandstanding Reichert really shows them
Jon reports on U.S. Rep. Dave Reichert’s expanding war on old people, and the congressman’s failed efforts to have the AARP regulated as an insurance company in retribution for their endorsement of healthcare reform.
Times ed board outsources ideas to South Carolina
The anti-union/pro-Republican editors at the Seattle Times absurdly advise organized labor as to what’s good for workers and the general welfare of the Democratic Party. I, of course, make fun of the Times in response.
Bird’s Eye View Contest
Lee’s weekly aerial photo puzzle, which I personally don’t really get, but apparently has a loyal following. Go figure.
Rep. Dave Reichert, R-WA-08, is “just getting started” in his jihad against AARP. From The News-Tribune:
In e-mails to the office of Washington’s insurance commissioner, Reichert’s staff wanted to know if AARP needed to be regulated under state insurance laws. An official in the insurance commissioner’s office, Gayle Pasero, company licensing manager, responded that AARP didn’t qualify as an insurance company covered by state law.
Wow. Just wow. AARP is now cowering under its covers at the mighty wrath of Dave, who called the state insurance commissioner, and was rejected. EPIC—well, you know.
Next up: Davey turns his back on AARP when it wants to play, staring at the ceiling and pretending not to notice AARP wagging its tail.
I also notice via Think Progress that Grandpa John McCain supposedly wants seniors to cut up their AARP cards to protest the group’s support of health care insurance reform. Yeah, like they’re going to give up those 5% discounts at RV parks, sure.
This is still the fundamental problem with Republicans: they don’t live in the real world. Gun owners may loudly proclaim that some undetermined, mythical entity will have to pry their guns from their “cold, dead fingers,” but try taking away a twenty five cent ketchup coupon from an AARP member. You’ll pull back a stump.
Via Attackerman, I see that John Hannah, a former aide to Dick Cheney, is still scratching his head about what went wrong in Afghanistan:
Ever since last year’s presidential campaign, there’s been an unfortunate tendency to assess America’s Afghan campaign as one long, steady downward spiral to disaster. “Eight years of drift,” according to Obama administration officials seeking to explain their lengthy deliberations over strategy and troop numbers. But, as Stephens suggests, the reality is a good deal more complex. The fact is that, after a period of genuine progress following the Taliban’s removal in late 2001, the situation in Afghanistan only began to deteriorate markedly between 2005 and 2006. Suicide attacks quintupled that year. Remotely detonated bombs more than doubled. Insurgent attacks nearly tripled. And the trends have steadily worsened every year since. The question is why? What changed in that time period that might help account for the sharp decline in America’s war fortunes?
Hannah provides a couple of guesses, but doesn’t stumble upon the answer. But what happened there during that time wasn’t much of a mystery. In fact it was fairly obvious that it would produce the outcome that it did. Let’s take a look back at what happened:
Paul Leonard of Vancouver Business Journal, in a piece dated yesterday:
One of the reasons behind his “No” vote, according to Baird, was that there was not enough time to consider Republican amendments to the legislation – a concern apparently held without regard to the GOP-led chants of “Kill the Bill” outside the Capitol last week.
As written here and here, the spiraling cost of employee healthcare coverage is the number one issue for small businesses – one that threatens the survival of those lucky or nimble enough to get this far through the deepest and most prolonged recession in 60 years.
These are concerns that Baird, as evidenced by VBJ’s Q&A with the Congressman last September, shares with his business constituency – making his vote against the healthcare bill all the more puzzling.
Small business is frequently hailed in campaign ads as the backbone of the American economy, if not its soul. Which is fine, as thriving small businesses hold the promise of future breakthroughs in technology and industry.
So it’s kind of strange that the national debate hasn’t featured more talk about the sometimes insurmountable challenges small businesses face when it comes to health care insurance. They need reform as badly as anyone.
Just a reminder to join me tonight for a 5oth birthday roast of Geov Parrish, with all proceeds benefiting Eat the State!
I’ll be emceeing as Knute Berger (Crosscut), former school board president Brita Butler-Wall, Tim Harris (Real Change), Lansing Scott (ETS!), Maria Tomchick (KEXP) and Mike McCormick (KEXP) futilely attempt to out-duel me in terms of the cruelty we lovingly can heap on Geov.
The festivities take place at the University Baptist Church, 47th & 12th NE in Seattle’s University District, where there will be cake, desserts, the usual party frivolities, and of course, roasted Geov. Tickets are $15 or two for $25; all proceeds benefit. Doors open at 7PM.
In the wake of the Obama Administration’s declaration that the federal government would respect state medical marijuana laws, Kirk Johnson in the New York Times reported the following:
For years, since the first medical marijuana laws were passed in the mid-1990s, many local and state governments could be confident, if not complacent, knowing that marijuana would be kept in check because it remained illegal under federal law, and that hard-nosed federal prosecutors were not about to forget it.
But with the Justice Department’s announcement last week that it would not prosecute people who use marijuana for medical purposes in states where it is legal, local and state officials say they will now have to take on the job themselves.
Why? If it’s legal, then what job is there to take on? The article appears to be implying that it’s the job of state and local officials to enforce the federal law over the state one. That’s just not true. Here in Washington, our state law enforcement officials should be following the voter initiative passed in 1998 (and the follow-up legislation from 2007), not the Federal law. Unfortunately, our Attorney General doesn’t seem to agree. Rob McKenna’s office has been trying to undermine Washington State’s medical marijuana law, and thanks to a Public Disclosure Request, we’re finally able to shine some light on what they’ve been doing.
After the PDR was filed, nearly 800 pages of emails and other documents from the Department of Corrections were recently released to the Cannabis Defense Coalition. They’re broken up into eight 100-page PDF files. The documents are not in any order, so I created a chronological index for easy searching of specific events.
The reason that so much attention is focused on the DOC is because a number of qualified medical marijuana patients have been raided by police and arrested (the medical marijuana law does not provide an affirmative defense from arrest), pressured into accepting plea deals that would keep them out of a jail cell but still on probation, and then put under the supervision of the Department of Corrections. The Department of Corrections would then claim the authority to deny those individuals the ability to use medical marijuana through internal rules that they’d made up after consulting with the AG’s office. They would then easily enforce those rules by administering drug tests. In the end, you had individuals who’d been authorized by their doctors to use medical marijuana having law enforcement interfere with that decision and either force them to stop using that medicine or to use a less effective alternative like Marinol.
This end-around of the voter-approved medical marijuana law worked on a number of medical marijuana patients. Pamela Olson was one victim before her husband Bruce fought his own case in Kitsap County court and won (sadly, they lost their home in the process). It’s not clear, even with the released documents, exactly how many people were affected by this (names are redacted throughout), but lawyers who defend authorized patients have been dealing with cases across the state for several years now and are still hoping to bring some kind of legal action against the Attorney General, the DOC, or both.
What we do know from the documents just released is that there was clearly some nervousness within the DOC about how the Attorney General’s office was advising them to deal with those under their supervision who were authorized by a doctor to use medical marijuana. The actual advice from the AG’s office is also redacted throughout the documents (using the same attorney-client privilege argument that the Bush Administration used to initially keep the infamous torture memos under wraps), but emails like this one from a DOC employee make it clear that the Attorney General was advising them to do things that were morally questionable at best and against state law at worst [emphasis in original]:
Karen, Lori, Eldon let me offer a few off the top of my head thoughts and comments. How DOC handles the medicinal use of MJ depends on whether this is the hill we want to die on? The advice from the AGO may* (see below) be correct, as far as it goes, i.e. [<—————-redacted—————–>] But the real question is not whether DOC can violate an offender who proves the prerequisites for the medicinal use of MJ, but can/should DOC recognize it as a defense? From a small “p” political standpoint does DOC want to violate an offender for activity that the state legislature recognizes as lawful? Something they made lawful in recognition of the medical necessities occasioned by the offender’s illness.
Consider if you will the purpose and intent of the enabling statue: “The people of Washington state find that some patients with terminal or debilitating illnesses, under their physician’s care, may benefit from the medical use of marijuana. Some of the illnesses for which marijuana appears to be beneficial include chemotherapy related nausea and vomiting in cancer patients; AIDS wasting syndrome; severe muscle spasms associated with multiple sclerosis and other spasticity disorders; epilepsy; acute or chronic glaucoma; and some forms of intractable pain. The people find that humanitarian compassion necessitates that the decision to authorize the medical use of marijuana by patients with terminal or debilitating illnesses is a personal, individual decision, based upon their physician’s professional medical judgment and discretion.” So how would this look? Offender XY is HIV positive and has full blown AIDS.
They are in considerable pain and a licensed doctor has agreed that MJ will relieve this offenders suffering. If all of the statutory requirements are met, this person’s possession and use is not against state law. Should DOC still violate this offender for actions that our state legislature recognized was necessary for, “humanitarian compassion”. Do we really want to die on this hill?
That memo was from April 2008. A month later, as a number of the indexed items show, the DOC was forced to apologize to a medical marijuana patient who was improperly arrested and held for six days until her blood pressure shot up to dangerous levels. At around the same time, the DOC finally formalized their policy on dealing with medical marijuana, which was little more than a smokescreen that made it appear as if they were accommodating the law, but in reality was simply denying everyone who had their doctor fill out the DOC’s verification form. On several occasions, they were informed that they were violating state law, but those warnings don’t appear to have made any difference in their policy.
The larger question for the attorneys, doctors, and patients who’ve been fighting the DOC over this policy continues to be focused on what Attorney General Rob McKenna’s office was doing and why. All of the deliberations and discussions at the beginning of this timeline happened during the Bush Administration, when it was still the Federal Government’s policy to expend resources to override state medical marijuana law (which the Obama Administration just reversed). But Rob McKenna doesn’t work for the Federal Government. He’s our state’s top law enforcement officer. There’s no reason for him to be trying to enforce Federal laws over our state laws, especially a state law that was passed by a wide margin in a voter initiative and maintains widespread support. It’s clear from reading through these documents that the AG’s office was giving advice that led to a policy that undermined the law, but until there are enough resources to take them to court over their claims of attorney-client privilege, their communications to the DOC will stay hidden.
For anyone who hasn’t followed the fight over medical marijuana in states where it’s been legalized, Kirk Johnson’s description of the attitude of local law enforcers may seem surreal. At a time when we have prisons that are bursting at the seams and budgets that are running low, you’d think that people who collect a salary on the taxpayer dime would have more sense than to remain so concerned about stopping people with serious ailments from using a medicinal plant. Throw in the fact that the voters of this state have demanded that this be legal, and it’s beyond comprehension that police are still actively trying to stop people from using it. Whatever the rationale is for Rob McKenna to continue to undermine the state’s medical marijuana law, the least we should be able to get from him is more transparency into what his office has been doing.
***************************************
The Cannabis Defense Coalition, who put in the PDR request, is expecting to get two more document dumps from the DOC. The requests are not free, so if you feel inclined to pitch in, they have a Paypal donation page here.
UPDATE: A Public Disclosure Request was filed, not a FOIA. The post has been updated.
Well, okay, this is not a secret if you follow Washington politics, but it’s worth bringing up right now.
According to Open Secrets, Rep. Brian Baird’s (D-WA-03) top three metro areas for donations last cycle, excluding PAC contributions, are Portland-Vancouver, Seattle-Bellevue-Everett and Washington, D.C.
And it sounds like the heat is ratcheting up. From Politico:
A delegation from Vancouver’s Clark County Democratic Central Committee on Monday requested a meeting with Baird in the district to encourage him to vote yes on the final version of the Health Care Reform bill.
Chris Bassett, a Vancouver-based Democratic activist who writes a blog about Clark County politics, said the congressman had damaged his standing within the party.
“Brian’s really moving the wrong way,” he said. “A lot of Democrats are going to sit on their hands in 2010.”
“This, for a lot of folks like myself frankly, is the last straw,” Bassett said.
I’ve been tempted to write that the lesson I took away from the Guns of August was that being over-the-top rude and crazy is the best way to get Baird’s attention, but as we all know, liberals are expected to be civil at all times. Don’t want anyone hitting the fainting couch. Jolly good, tea and crumpets, gov’nor.
So I politely and respectfully hope that individual donors to Baird, many of whom live in the Puget Sound region, will consider politely encouraging him to vote for the final bill, assuming the Stupak-sepsis amendment is removed. Did I mention be polite?
Eager to share our brilliant political commentary and blunt media criticism, but too genteel to link to horsesass.org? Well, good news, ladies: we also answer to HASeattle.com, because, you know, whatever. You're welcome!
