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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?

Already up at the Urban Dictionary:

Stupak–A medical condition (subset of sepsis) resulting from unsafe – unnecessarily so – back alley abortions as a result of the “Stupak Amendment” to the 2009 Health Care Reform Bill.
Doctor: Unfortunately, while this would have been covered under private insurance carriers, public plans were barred from including women’s health measures. I’m sorry, you’ll have to see “Dr. Julio” in the alley behind 7-11.

(Three weeks later.)

Doctor: I believe you’ve developed Stupak, a form of sepsis, a severe illness in which the bloodstream is overwhelmed by bacteria.

I guess you can go to Urban Dictionary and vote if you wish. While there are others worthy of scorn in this sorry episode, Bart Stupak deserves to go down in history as the misogynistic disease that he is. If his barbaric poison pill is in the conference report, there will be political hell to pay.

(Props to Firedoglake and Eschaton.)

AND–From an article at The Hill, here’s a paragraph that neatly summarizes why the Stupak amendment is so asinine:

Stupak’s language not only prohibits abortion coverage in the public insurance option included in the House bill. It would also prevent private plans from offering coverage for abortion services if they accept people who are receiving government subsidies.

So, as far as anyone can tell, that would be virtually all plans.

Former U.S. Marine Jay Clough will announce his candidacy tomorrow for Washington’s 4th Congressional District, currently held by Republican incumbent Rep. Doc Hastings.

“I expect our Representative in this district to work harder.  As I traveled throughout the district in the last few months, I heard over and over that people did not see or hear from Doc Hastings. We need a representative who is proposing new solutions and providing real leadership. Someone who regularly travels to all parts of the district to listen to people’s concerns and bring common sense solutions back to Congress.”

Hastings has a well-earned reputation as one of the laziest members of the House. It’s only a matter of time before somebody sneaks up on him and takes him out by surprise.

UPDATE:
Oh yeah… Clough is running as a Democrat.

King County Elections just dropped another 19,562 Seattle ballots, and these went strongly for Mike McGinn, 53.2% to 46.8% for Joe Mallahan, once again doubling McGinn’s lead to a 2,384 vote margin.

Mike McGinn	85,416	50.31%
Joe Mallahan	83,032	48.91%

Based on today’s earlier drop, I think it’s fair to say that this is the trend we had all expected, and that Mike McGinn has just been elected Seattle’s new mayor.

UPDATE:
What I said yesterday:

With today’s drop, KCE should have finally worked its way through the ballots it had already received and sorted as of 5PM Friday, and while ballots are not necessarily tallied in any sort of chronological order, we can be somewhat certain that the remaining ballots consist mostly of those that were mailed during the final days of the campaign. So if there is a trend, liberal or conservative, for McGinn or for Mallahan, it should start making itself known tomorrow.

And it did. This thing’s over.

Washington’s best political satire site is without a doubt, Red County, a pitch-perfect, Colbert-esque parody of the angry, deluded, self-denial that tends to fill the right-wing blogs. And it doesn’t get any better than their frenetic mock analysis of the King County Executive race:

The general election result that shattered any hope of Republican resurgence in the state was the King County Executive’s race. Councilman Dow Constantine smashed blue dog, moderate Democrat Susan Hutchinson in that election contest. Republicans in King County now go down in defeat again in their attempt to elect someone other than radical, leftwing, crackpots like Constantine. Many are questioning why the King County Republican Party backed Susan and not a principled conservative in the first place!

Susan Hutchison is a “blue dog, moderate Democrat” who lost because she wasn’t conservative enough? Absolutely brilliant! And delivered with such unwavering deadpan and stereotypically stilted cadence, you can almost hear the (u)SP crowd angrily cheering along.

Funny stuff.

I’m going to spend a lot of time over the next few days talking about trends, and what that predicts for the handful of close races in today’s election, but the maps above clearly illustrate what I believe to be one of the most gratifying trends demonstrated by voters today.

The maps above show the county-by-county vote for initiatives 1033 and 960 respectively, the green representing counties that voted yes, and the yellow counties that voted no. I-960 passed in 34 of 39 counties back in November of 2007, by a statewide margin of 51.2% to 48.8%. I-1033 is on its way to losing in 21 counties by a statewide margin of 55.5% to 45.5%.

Both initiatives professed to limit government spending. Both initiatives ran during off-year elections. Both initiatives were sponsored by Tim Eyman.

As I wrote earlier today:

One would think this same libertarian streak would bode well for Tim Eyman’s government drowning I-1033, but this is where personal self-interest comes into play. For as much as rural Washingtonians bask in their self-image of rugged independence, their limited tax base leaves them more dependent on state tax dollars than more populous regions of the state, and thus their communities would be disproportionately impacted by the inevitable cuts in state spending I-1033 would necessitate over time.

Already struggling to meet basic needs, I-1033 has received little support from local elected officials, even Republicans. And local voters are swayed by their local leaders.

Democrats in general and progressives in particular need to take advantage of the awareness that Eyman helped create in traditionally government-hostile areas of the state, about the central role that government plays in improving our quality of life.

I think the Post Globe has been the best thing to rise out of the former P-I. And I generally like this piece on McGinn’s final town halls (incidentally, I’ve been making calls for McGinn, and the last time I did, we were pushing undecided voters to one of the town halls). Still, this piece of conventional wisdom repeating was a little disappointing.

Surprisingly, McGinn wasn’t asked about what Mallahan in particular has been describing as his flip flop over the viaduct.

Why are you surprised? First off, these are undecided voters. The people who are passionate about the tunnel one way or the other, who would ask that as their only question at a town hall (even in West Seattle) have made up their mind about the mayor’s race. They’ve got better things to do on a Saturday.

More important though, nobody outside of the political class thinks that the tunnel is the issue of the campaign. Sure it’s important, and it’s where one of the biggest distinctions can be drawn. But people are more concerned with, for example, crime and education than they are about a few miles of a state highway.

But of course, reporters who drive into Belltown from all across the region and leave before the crackheads come out probably put a higher emphasis on traffic on 99 than on crime in the city. And if they’re sending their children to Bellevue or Edmonds public schools, they probably don’t care as much about education as a parent worried about the quality of their neighborhood school. In fact, they’re more likely to laugh off McGinn’s education plans as unrealistic or someone else’s job.

Still, reporters, in these last few days of the campaign, please don’t be surprised that people care about more than just the tunnel. Don’t be surprised that Seattle voters care about rising crime, or that we care about the cultural institutions of the city, and dealing with the dropout problem. Please consider that whoever we support, we might care about parks and neighborhoods. Please also understand that we think transportation is more than just the Viaduct: that we want improved bike lanes, better mass transit, and a road system that works throughout the city.

Earlier this week, the New York Times unloaded some big news about Afghanistan:

KABUL, Afghanistan — Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.

The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.

I won’t excerpt the entire article here, but it’s an enlightening read. Karzai, of course, denies both the payments and his role in the drug trade. But while the payments are a revelation, it’s long been a not-so-well-kept secret that he profits from Afghanistan’s opium production. As I’ve mentioned before, when an industry accounts for over a 1/3 of nation’s GDP, the powerful are either part of that industry or they risk losing their power. This is the dilemma we continue to face in Afghanistan and it’s the reason why the Taliban has been resurgent.

In order to really understand the depths of this clusterfuck, it helps to go back to another piece in the NYT from last summer, by former State Department anti-narcotic official Thomas Schweich. Schweich’s piece was a masterpiece of utter delusion, which I’d initially discussed here. Even then, I only scratched the surface of how clueless this man was in describing his genuinely earnest efforts to rid Afghanistan of opium plants. Here he is discussing a 2006 meeting with Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice:

I emphasized at this and subsequent meetings that crop eradication, although claiming less than a third of the $500 million budgeted for Afghan counternarcotics, was the most controversial part of the program. But because no other crop came even close to the value of poppies, we needed the threat of eradication to force farmers to accept less-lucrative alternatives. (Eradication was an essential component of successful anti-poppy efforts in Guatemala, Southeast Asia and Pakistan.) The most effective method of eradication was the use of herbicides delivered by crop-dusters. But [President Hamid] Karzai had long opposed aerial eradication, saying it would be misunderstood as some sort of poison coming from the sky. He claimed to fear that aerial eradication would result in an uprising that would cause him to lose power. We found this argument perplexing because aerial eradication was used in rural areas of other poor countries without a significant popular backlash.

I’m not entirely sure how Schweich could’ve believed this considering that it was in December 2005 that a former coca grower named Evo Morales was elected president in Bolivia – the first country aerial eradication was ever conducted – as a backlash against America’s drug eradication efforts. And President Karzai, a man who’d already survived several assassination attempts, wasn’t about to do anything that would guarantee that he’d have even more guns fixed on him. Unfortunately there was already a push within the Bush Administration to give Schweich the green light on carrying out his drug warrior fantasies. Part of that push was to send former Colombian Ambassador Anne Patterson to Afghanistan:

Even before she got to the bureau of international narcotics, Anne Patterson knew that the Pentagon was hostile to the antidrug mission. A couple of weeks into the job, she got the story firsthand from Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, who commanded all U.S. forces in Afghanistan. He made it clear: drugs are bad, but his orders were that drugs were not a priority of the U.S. military in Afghanistan. Patterson explained to Eikenberry that, when she was ambassador to Colombia, she saw the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) finance their insurgency with profits from the cocaine trade, and she warned Eikenberry that the risk of a narco-insurgency in Afghanistan was very high. Eikenberry was familiar with the Colombian situation, but the Pentagon strategy was “sequencing” — defeat the Taliban, then have someone else clean up the drug business.

What Schweich fails to mention about Colombia (and Patterson pretends isn’t true) is that the overall amount of cocaine coming out of Colombia hadn’t changed much over Patterson’s time there. Instead, what happened was that pro-government right-wing paramilitaries just took over more of the trade as they were also gaining more influence within the Uribe government. The reason that FARC was losing out on drug profits was because the Colombian government was so utterly powerless to stop the corruption within the ranks of their own paramilitary supporters.

In Afghanistan, we’ve ended up with the same dynamic. Ahmed Wali Karzai’s paramilitary fights against the “narco-terrorists” in the Taliban for his brother’s government and NATO forces shrug off the fact that he’s just as involved in supplying the rest of the world with heroin. But as Schweich mentioned in his piece, the debates between Secretary of State Rice (who favored a stronger anti-drug push) and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld (who didn’t want to get more involved with anti-drug efforts) were being won by Rice (with Bush being “the decider”). And despite continued push back from the Defense Department, more and more emphasis throughout Bush’s second term was being placed on trying to eradicate the opium plants.

One of the more puzzling moves in our time in Afghanistan was our prosecution of Haji Bashar Noorzai. Noorzai was an ally in southern Afghanistan who’d turned against the Taliban, but was lured to America (he believed he was coming to volunteer his help for American forces) and arrested for being a drug trafficker. He’s now serving a life sentence in an American jail. Nothing about this case ever really made sense, until the New York Times report from this week, which ended with this bit of information:

Some American counternarcotics officials have said they believe that Mr. Karzai has expanded his influence over the drug trade, thanks in part to American efforts to single out other drug lords.

In debriefing notes from Drug Enforcement Administration interviews in 2006 of Afghan informants obtained by The New York Times, one key informant said that Ahmed Wali Karzai had benefited from the American operation that lured Hajji Bashir Noorzai, a major Afghan drug lord during the time that the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, to New York in 2005. Mr. Noorzai was convicted on drug and conspiracy charges in New York in 2008, and was sentenced to life in prison this year.

Habibullah Jan, a local military commander and later a member of Parliament from Kandahar, told the D.E.A. in 2006 that Mr. Karzai had teamed with Haji Juma Khan to take over a portion of the Noorzai drug business after Mr. Noorzai’s arrest.

Even with this knowledge, the rationale behind our arrest and prosecution of Noorzai still makes no sense from a strategic standpoint, but it demonstrates how much power Ahmed Wali Karzai has that he could get us to undermine our nation building efforts in order to expand his own illegal activities – all while still being paid by the CIA. Either he’s a criminal mastermind of epic proportions or the people who were making decisions about how to wage that war were morons (and yes, I know which one it is).

Going back to Schweich’s article again, there’s one passage that’s just infuriating beyond belief:

By late 2006, however, we had startling new information: despite some successes, poppy cultivation over all would grow by about 17 percent in 2007 and would be increasingly concentrated in the south of the country, where the insurgency was the strongest and the farmers were the wealthiest. The poorest farmers of Afghanistan — those who lived in the north, east and center of the country — were taking advantage of antidrug programs and turning away from poppy cultivation in large numbers. The south was going in the opposite direction, and the Taliban were now financing the insurgency there with drug money — just as Patterson predicted.

It’s called a self-fulfilling prophecy, dumbass. When you take the largest industry in the country and make it illegal, you end up with a well-financed insurgency. And as you try harder and harder to eliminate that industry, a higher percentage of the profits will end up being concentrated among the people most unwilling to submit to your authority. And if you do it for long enough, those insurgents will eventually start taking over parts of the country, which is why thanks to our attempts to eliminate the opium trade, the Taliban have once again recaptured large parts of Afghanistan and record numbers of coalition troops are being killed.

The New York Times article from this week tends to make the CIA look incompetent or even reckless, but the story is more complex than that. It’s probably because when I think of CIA agents, I get a mental image of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character in Charlie Wilson’s War, but I can easily see them getting angry to the point of punching a wall over having to deal with people like Schweich and Patterson, whose boundless naivete drove the mission in Afghanistan into a hole. When I write about Afghanistan and what’s still possible to accomplish there, it’s easy to approach it from far too theoretical a perspective, without taking into account the damage that’s already been done. I’m done doing that. We’ve managed to fuck things up so spectacularly that anything other than a rapid withdrawal is a mistake. We simply don’t understand what we’re doing well enough to justify keeping a single soldier in that country.

One of the things that irritates me most about Seattle Times editorial columnist Kate Riley is the way she writes so authoritatively about things she knows absolutely nothing about.  For example…

But Constantine really stepped outside the lines of propriety, not for nastiness, but for violating the copyright of a revered institution, the nonprofit TVW, Washington’s version of CSPAN — and for refusing to cut it out. TVW has asked that it be taken down, and Constantine’s lawyers have refused. Constantine’s spokesman Sandeep Kaushik told seattlepi.com that the use is justified.

Riley is just flat out wrong about the basic legal facts. Once again, in utilizing clips from TVW, neither the Constantine campaign nor myself have violated TVW’s copyright. We may have used their material without their permission, and contrary to their stated policy, but we were totally, 100-percent within our legal rights to do so under the Fair Use doctrine of U.S. copyright law.

Indeed, in all their public statements and interviews, not even TVW has gone so far as to claim that the Constantine campaign has violated its copyright. In fact, TVW President & CEO Greg Lane himself appears to acknowledge Constantine’s legal right, even while abusing him for daring to exercise it, complaining to Publicola, “They’re hiding behind a fair use legal argument and ignoring the greater public interest.”

Hear that Kate? Lane is accusing Constantine of “hiding behind” copyright law, not violating it.

Which raises an interesting aside. The courts have previously determined that copyright holders must make a good faith effort to consider the Fair Use doctrine before issuing DMCA takedown notices. Thus if Lane acknowledges Constantine’s usage is Fair Use, then, under the DMCA TVW has legally perjured itself in issuing a takedown notice to YouTube. (The same would be true of the takedown notices TVW issued to YouTube and Vimeo regarding my videos). Huh.

Riley insists that Constantine should pull the ad and apologize, but if you ask me, it is Constantine who deserves the apology from TVW, after Lane’s organization knowingly issued a bad faith takedown notice in its efforts to enforce a policy it has no legal right to enforce.

And in fact personally, if I had the money to hire attorneys, that’s exactly the argument I’d be making in court Monday morning.

TVW is still playing their stupid little takedown notice game, now having my “Suzie Huckabee” video pulled from Vimeo, after first having it pulled from YouTube. Only this time their actions have resulted in all my videos being pulled from Vimeo, even those which consisted solely of footage I shot myself.

In response, I’ve filed a counter-notice with Vimeo, and have edited all my posts to include the embed from LiveLeak displayed above. But I doubt it will end here.

TVW’s copyright policy notwithstanding, they do not have the right to deny me permission to use clips in this manner under the Fair Use doctrine of U.S. copyright law. I assume their attorneys understand this, and thus I also assume that their continued actions constitute little more than an intentional effort to harass me into submission.

For example, just take a look at the statement TVW issued in demanding that the Constantine campaign pull a TV ad that also makes fair use of one of their clips:

The citizens of Washington trust TVW to provide unedited and unbiased access to public policy events. Editing and using our programming for political ads both violates that public trust and puts at tremendous risk the public’s access to these events.

Yesterday, I spoke directly to representatives of the Constantine campaign, requesting that the offending ad be pulled from the air immediately. This morning, the campaign’s lawyers responded that the Constantine campaign is refusing to abide by our request. We are disappointed with their response, which completely ignores the public interest and the tradition of respect maintained for TVW’s unique role.

Notice how they make the public policy argument, but not the legal one. That’s because there is no good legal argument for pulling the ads. And yet they continue to issue legal takedown notices to YouTube, Vimeo and other video hosting services pursuant to 17 U.S.C. Section 512, knowing full well that these videos are protected under U.S. copyright law as Fair Use.

Huh. One might reasonably argue that TVW has actually perjured itself in issuing these takedown notices. And given a pro bono attorney, that’s a legal argument I very well might make in a court of law.

Considering her strength was supposed to be in the suburban and rural areas of King County, it must be at least a bit of blow to Susan Hutchison to lose the endorsements of both the Mercer Island Reporter and the SnoValley Star.

The MI Reporter was more circumspect in their Dow Constantine endorsement… kinda along the lines of what I had actually expected from the Seattle Times, before they totally jumped the shark.

The Reporter also endorses Dow Constantine for the position of King County executive. Mr. Constantine not only votes in every election but brings a great deal of knowledge and experience to the table. As chair of the King County Council and as a member of the Board of Directors of Sound Transit, he knows what is ahead for King County. His experience, we say, is much more complex and multi-faceted than that of his opponent. He is better suited for the job ahead.

But the SnoValley Star was more blunt in their criticism of Hutchison:

Susan Hutchison, Dow’s opponent, has many fresh ideas, but they are ideas not yet grounded in substance. For example, she now thinks State Route 520 should be the cross-lake route for light rail, even though voters approved a crossing over Interstate 90 — which was designed for just that purpose.

She touts her nonpartisan roots without seeming to understand that nonpartisan does not mean she won’t need political savvy.

We question her integrity — as evidenced by the details of her dismissal from her television career — and her commitment to public service — as as evidenced by her dismissing as unimportant the fact thatat she missed voting in eight elections in the past eight years.

Notice how they taunt the Seattle Times by snarkily referring to Hutchison’s “fresh” ideas? Gotta love that.

I’ve never been one to give too much weight to editorial endorsements in top of the ticket races, but this sure doesn’t help Hutchison regain momentum. And with the election heading into its final few days, momentum is certainly not on her side.

Susan Hutchison has made much hay in recent days about an email from County Councilmember Reagan Dunn that allegedly shows he was concerned that he would lose funding for projects within his district if he didn’t vote for a ferry district tax sponsored by Dow Constantine.

In his Nov. 5, 2007 e-mail to County Council attorney Jim Brewer, Dunn asks if “vote-trading” is legal in Washington, and asks whether council members can legally “remove projects located in one Councilmember’s district when that Councilmember refuses to vote in favor of tax increases.”

Dunn said today he was worried that senior centers and other programs in his district would lose funding if he voted against the tax to fund passenger-only ferries.

At first I just wrote off Dunn’s alleged concerns to woosy naivete, or perhaps naive woosiness. I mean, horse trading in politics? Heaven forfend!

But as it turns out, Dunn is just a shameless hypocrite, as evidenced by how proud he is over his councilmanic arm-twisting to restore funding to the King County Fair in Enumclaw:

King County Councilman Reagan Dunn is pushing the issue in Seattle, urging his fellow council members to include at least $318,000 in the 2010 budget to make the fair a reality.  … Dunn said he’s working on the rest of the county council, calling in favors when necessary.

“This is budget politics at its best,” he said, referring to the give-and-take that occurs when nine elected officials must come together to pass a working budget.

So let’s see… when Republican Dunn twists arms and calls in favors to save projects in his own district, that’s “budget politics at its best,” but when Democrat Constantine allegedly does the same, well, that’s a clear sign of corruption.

Uh-huh.

Yesterday, in admitting my decision to vote for Mike McGinn (I don’t like to do “endorsements” per se), I questioned some of his political judgement, specifically: “I still think his unwavering opposition to the tunnel loses him more votes than it wins him.”

And lo and behold, a few hours later, McGinn backtracks his previously intractable stance against the tunnel, explaining to Publicola:

“I still oppose the tunnel. I think it’s a terrible decision for the city of Seattle. My statement is a simple acknowledgment of how the Democratic process works. The mayor is obligated to follow a 9-0 vote of the council. It’s not an option for the mayor to just ignore legislation.

I’ve consistently been against the tunnel. I remain opposed. Yesterday, I acknowledged that it’s not the mayor’s job to ignore legislation passed by the council.”

Huh. Maybe there’s a political advisor job waiting for me in the McGinn administration?

Don’t get me wrong, I too opposed the tunnel, convinced that a surface/transit option was the best alternative given current financial constraints, but I’m not so opposed to it that I’d be willing to indefinitely block the Viaduct replacement until the crumbling freeway fell down on its own. Yeah, the Big Bore is overly expensive, possibly unnecessary, and as the least engineered and studied of all the proposals, by far the most financially risky option that could have been adopted, but there’s no debating that it enjoys overwhelming support within our political establishment, and, well, sometimes, you just can’t fight City Hall… even from City Hall.

I’ve never doubted McGinn’s ability to throw a hefty monkey wrench into the works, but blocking Seattle from moving on something is a helluva lot easier than pushing it to move in another direction, and I just didn’t see how McGinn was going to get us from here to there. 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. Though considering the establishment support Joe Mallahan has garnered, it may be too late.

We’re going to build the tunnel, regardless of who’s in the mayor’s office, but with the question of cost overruns still on the table, I’m a lot more comfortable having McGinn defending the interests of Seattle taxpayers than Mallahan.

Check out Joe Copeland at the Post Globe.

But the council endorsements underline the odd disconnect between a very progressive city population and how its only remaining daily paper’s editorial page, at least on – one guesses – issues in which the Blethen family ownership makes its views known. The council editorial started by almost holding the editorial board’s collective nose to support the re-election of Richard Conlin, who is quietly brilliant on environmental issues. “It’s not that we agree with Conlin often; we don’t,” the editorial proclaims. They go on to cite his reversal of position on an employee head tax, something the chamber is dying to end and Conlin now thinks was a bad idea.

More confusingly, The Times writes, “His challenger, David Ginsberg, shares many of the same values. The key difference is who is more enthusiastic about environmental sustainability — not much of a differentiation at all. Ginsberg is in more of a hurry, which comes off as naive.” Maybe that means The Times doesn’t like the green Conlin, but at least he is in less of a rush about sustainability? But does The Times really have a problem with Conlin’s environmental positions? This summer, the editorial board had the good sense to endorse – unsuccessfully – the grocery store bag tax this summer.

In the comments of my last post about the epic saga of the empty jail in Hardin, Montana, Jason Osgood asks:

Is anyone else disturbed that a new jail was someone’s idea of economic development and jobs creation?

Yeah, me too. And while there was a lot in that story to gawk at, that was certainly a big one. Why the hell did a small town in Montana with no immediate need to house prisoners build a huge jail? TPM’s Justin Elliott looked into it:

But an investigation by TPMmuckraker into how Hardin ended up with the 92,000 square foot facility in the first place suggests that, long before “low-level card shark” Michael Hilton ever came to town, Hardin officials had already been taken for a ride by a far more powerful set of players: a well-organized consortium of private companies headquartered around the country, which specializes in pitching speculative and risky prison projects to local governments desperate for jobs.

Elliott shines a welcome light on the way private prisons make their money. Private corrections firms aren’t talked about much as one of the industries that have tremendous power in this country, but they should be. As America has become the world’s most prolific jailer, this is an industry that has been driving it and profiting from it.

One of the biggest misconceptions I hear when it comes to drug laws is that we can’t change them because of public opinion. This tends to be widely accepted as fact wherever you go, but it really isn’t true. Ron Paul continues to get re-elected in a conservative part of Texas every two years even though he has advocated for legalizing marijuana since the 1980s. The reality is that most people don’t pay much attention at all the drug war, and those who do overwhelmingly want it to end. Things like needle exchanges create mini-uproars from a small fringe of drug warriors, but after they’re enacted, they work exactly as expected to reduce the spread of diseases and no politician ever loses their job over them. Aside from small attempts to minimize the damage of drug prohibition, though, we still remain completely unable to shift away from one core aspect of the drug war – the idea that putting large numbers of people in prison will fix the problem.

This isn’t just a national mental block on the part of voters. We’re nearing a national majority of people being in favor of having marijuana sold legally to adults. In survey after survey, people tend to understand that putting people in jail for drug crimes doesn’t work. Instead, it’s the private corrections industry (and other special interests) that have a very strong interest in continuing the status quo. Prison overcrowding is their life-blood. The more people we arrest, the more prisons have to be built, and the more the American taxpayers can be soaked to house them all. This desire dovetails perfectly with the interests of law enforcement unions and prosecutors as well.

But in one way or another, all this insanity comes out of our pockets. Putting people in prison isn’t an investment. It produces nothing of value. In fact, it compounds taxpayer expenses in a number of ways, from the costs of trying to re-integrate former prisoners back into society to the downstream effects of having large numbers of single parent (or no parent) households in low-income communities. Putting people in prison should be seen as a necessary evil in society, an unavoidable side-effect of human nature that’s required to provide justice for the victims of crime. It shouldn’t be seen as an opportunity for government to invest in job creation. I believe that governments at all levels can and should provide stimulus for communities with high unemployment. But building a new prison that relies solely on the premise that we don’t have enough people locked up in our society already is the most counterproductive way of doing it.