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As reported earlier today on Publicola, an “independent” expenditure campaign on behalf of Susan Hutchison is about to hit the airwaves. As Erica reports, the group has booked $135,000 on cable and TV, but sources tell me that may only be the initial ad buy.

And who is behind the man behind the curtain?

That’s unclear, but one rumor has it that it’s Bellevue developer Kemper Freeman.

And that’s what I’m hearing too.

So, even though Hutchison says she supports light rail, she enthusiastically endorses the Washington Policy Center’s anti-light rail screed, while benefiting from a large IE paid for by a man suing to prevent light rail from crossing I-90.

Huh.

Live by the PDC complaint, die by the PDC complaint, that’s the painful lesson the Susan Hutchison campaign ironically learned yesterday after a press conference was derailed by questions regarding alleged reporting violations.

PDC complaints are a dime a dozen during election season, a standard campaign tactic intended to discredit the opposition and distract the press. Our disclosure requirements are complicated and time consuming, and mistakes are made, unintentional or not, and thus there’s rarely a top of the ticket campaign that hasn’t had a PDC complaint filed against it, and/or had a PDC complaint filed on its behalf. Hell, even I’ve filed a PDC complaint or two… that’s how common they are.

In that spirit, Hutchison and her surrogates have been pushing a complaint against the Constantine campaign for weeks, accusing it of illegal coordination with an independent expenditure campaign with which it shares treasurers, Jason Bennett. Illegal coordination is a pretty damn serious charge, but like many such complaints, this one is also pretty damn unsupported by the facts. Bennett serves as treasurer for dozens of campaigns, a role that largely consists of, well, filing PDC reports. In fact, it was Bennett himself who first notified the PDC of the potential conflict after he saw the IE come through from his other client.

And that’s the kind of thorough attention to detail Hutchison could’ve used from her own campaign treasurer, judging by the 81 reporting violations contained within the PDC complaint filed yesterday by the King County Democrats. To be fair, individually, the bulk of the violations are of the piddling variety, normally attributable to sloppiness and incompetence, though taken together they sure do come off as a general disregard for our public disclosure laws. Chronically late reports… missing employer information and sub-vender detail… these are the kinda things the PDC tends to try to work with campaigns to resolve, though given the extent of the violations, I wouldn’t be surprised to see at least a minor fine come down, if many months after the election. Or maybe not. The PDC can be inscrutable this way.

But buried amidst all the apparent sloppiness are a couple of doozies Hutchison will find much harder to explain… as she did at yesterday’s press conference, when she first refused to answer reporters’ questions regarding the four bedroom Laurelhurst house she uses as a campaign headquarters, but doesn’t report as either a contribution or an expense, before proceeding to dig herself even deeper by spinning an obvious fib.

Finally, Hutchison told [KIRO-TV reporter Essex] Porter the home was “not donated” and that it was “the residence of my campaign manager.”

[Jordan] McCarren, who works for a California-based Republican consulting firm,  is not from Seattle.

McCarren tells PubliCola that he rents the property. “I have a rental agreement with the landlord.” However, asked who the landlord is, he says, “Honestly, I would have to look that up.”

You don’t know who you pay rent to? “We have offered all that information to the PDC.”

As Publicola uncovered, the rental home is managed by a company owned by wireless mogul and Republican moneybags Bruce McCaw, who has already double-maxed to Hutchison to the tune of $1,600 in contributions. And as for the claim that McCarren pays the rent, well, that’s hard to believe, at least not at fair market value.

Numerous searches of Craigslist and various rental services have shown similar houses in the neighborhood renting for between $2,300 and $4,000 month. That’s a pretty typical range for an $800,000 home, and far beyond the reach of a campaign manager in a county executive race.

As noted, Hutchison’s expenditure reports are a bit of a mess, but the only reported expense that appears to match his position is a $4,500/month recurring “communications consultant” fee, of which McCarren’s employer, Dresner Wicker, certainly takes a piece. So it begs credulity that McCarren would blow the bulk of his after-tax salary renting a four bedroom house in Laurelhurst for six months. Clearly, either McCaw’s company is renting Hutchison’s campaign headquarters to McCarren at well below market rates, which constitutes an illegal and unreported campaign contribution, or the rent is being illegally subsidized in some other fashion. And even if McCarren was paying market rent out of his own pocket, Hutchison still couldn’t use it as campaign headquarters without reporting it in some manner.

(And there’s no doubt the house is her campaign headquarters; that’s how it’s identified in her KCTS profile, and that’s what the campaign calls it in their own email.)

But whoever is paying the rent, it’s a pretty damn serious charge — amounting to as much as $20,000 in illegal contributions — and a damn sight better supported than the merely speculative complaint lodged against Constantine and Bennett. Combine that with the other $20,000 in late primary expenditures the complaint alleges the campaign also failed to disclose, and Hutchison has some serious ‘splainin’ to do.

The irony is, if the Hutchison camp hadn’t so emphatically pushed their complaint against Constantine, our fair and balanced media might not have felt quite so empowered to aggressively question Hutchison about her own alleged reporting violations. “Let she who is without sin cast the first stone” and all that… now that’s a Biblical verse Hutchison should be familiar with.

But more than just ignoring a Bible lesson, Hutchison also failed to learn from a Nixonian one: it’s the coverup, stupid.

I don’t doubt that McCarren may sleep there, but it’s “the residence of my campaign manager” does not answer the question as to why she didn’t report the use of the house as either a donation or an expense. She could have just said “Oops, my bad,” and promised to work with the PDC to clear up any discrepancies; a final determination on the complaint, and any accompanying fines wouldn’t come until months after the election, so little harm done.

But for a candidate who has made transparency a central theme of her campaign, her transparent lie yesterday didn’t do much to shore up her own credibility.

Frank Schaeffer isn’t exactly your typical bleeding heart liberal. He is the son of Dr. Francis Schaeffer, one of the founders of the religious right movement, and he followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming a prominent speaker and writer on the evangelical political circuit. So when he warns of increasingly violent Christian right rhetoric escalating into actual violence, he well knows the sort of people he’s talking about.

“Since President Obama took office I’ve felt like the lonely — maybe crazy — proverbial canary in the coal mine,” Schaeffer said. “As a former right wing leader, who many years ago came to my senses and began to try to undo the harm the movement of religious extremism I helped build has done, I’ve been telling the media that we’re facing a dangerous time in our history. A fringe element of the far right Republican Party seems it believes it has a license to incite threatening behavior in the name of God.”

[…] “Sadly that line from the ‘Godfather’ sticks in my brain about the fact that anyone can be killed,” Schaeffer told Raw Story. “The scary thing is that there are a number of pastors on record as saying they are praying for the President’s death. Can you imagine what some gun-toting paranoid who hears that in a sermon is thinking and might do? And to them the fact that ‘the world’ likes this black man is reason enough to hate him. You wait. The reaction to Obama winning the Nobel Prize will be entirely negative from the far Religious Right. ‘See the world, all those socialists like him that just proves he’s a — fill in the blank — communist, secret Muslim, the Antichrist, whatever.'”

No doubt with so many on the right inciting violence, there will be violence, whether it’s an assassination attempt or another Oklahoma City, or just some of your run of the mill hate crimes. The willingness to raise arms against perceived domestic enemies is, after all, what some on Left Behind inspired far Christian right imagine when they talk about God and country.

Yup, this is how Republicans congratulate our president:

“They love a weakened, neutered U.S and this is their way of promoting that concept.”
— Rush Limbaugh

“It’s not Republicans that are throwing their lot in with terrorists — it’s the White House.”
— Michael Goldfarb

“Before they break out the champagne at the White House, they may want to pause over the fact that Obama now shares this honor with Mohammed el-Baradei, Yasser Arafat, and flagrant liar Rigoberta Menchu Tum.”
— Mona Charon

“Now as he nears a critical decision on whether or not to provide the troops his commander in the theater is pressing for even as appeasers in his inner circle council appeasement of the Taliban, he is awarded the world’s most prestigious prize.”
— Hugh Hewitt

“I did not realize the Nobel Peace Prize had an affirmative action quota for it.”
— Erick Erickson

“After a number of years, the NFL renamed its Super Bowl trophy after its most fitting recipient — it’s now called the Vince Lombardi Trophy. I’d like to see the Nobel Foundation follow suit. If today’s headlines said, ‘Barack Obama Wins Yasser Arafat Prize,’ that would be perfect.”
— Andy McCarthy

And the DNC’s appropriate response?

The Republican Party has thrown in its lot with the terrorists — the Taliban and Hamas this morning — in criticizing the President for receiving the Nobel Peace prize. Republicans cheered when America failed to land the Olympics and now they are criticizing the President of the United States for receiving the Nobel Peace prize — an award he did not seek but that is nonetheless an honor in which every American can take great pride — unless of course you are the Republican Party. The 2009 version of the Republican Party has no boundaries, has no shame and has proved that they will put politics above patriotism at every turn. It’s no wonder only 20 percent of Americans admit to being Republicans anymore – it’s an embarrassing label to claim.

Embarrassing indeed.

Well, he may have lost in his bid to win the 2016 Summer Olympics for his hometown of Chicago, but I guess his international standing has not totally eroded, as President Barack Obama was just awarded the Nobel Peace Prize nonetheless.

President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize today for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” a honor that came less than nine months after he made United States history by becoming the country’s first African-American president.

The award, announced in Oslo by the Nobel Committee while much of official Washington — including the president — was still asleep, cited in particular the president’s efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

“He has created a new international climate,” the committee said.

For Mr. Obama, one of the nation’s youngest presidents, the award is an extraordinary recognition that puts him in the company of world leaders such as Mikhail Gorbachev, who won for helping to bring an end to the cold war, andNelson Mandela, who sought an end to apartheid.

Oh man that must tie the righties’ underwear up in knots. In fact…

But it is also a potential political liability at home; already, Republicans are criticizing the president, contending he won more for his “star power” than his actual achievements.

You know, actual achievements like 9/11, the failed response to Hurricane Katrina, disastrous missionless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the greatest economic meltdown since the Great Depression and other highlights of the Bush administration.

In one sense, the award was a rebuke to the foreign policies of Mr. Obama’s predecessor,George W. Bush, some of which the president has sought to overturn. Mr. Obama made repairing the fractured relations between the United States and the rest of the world a major theme of his campaign for the presidency. Since taking office as president he has pursued a range of policies intended to fulfill that goal. He has vowed to pursue a world without nuclear weapons, as he did in a speech in Prague earlier this year; reached out to the Muslim world, delivering a major speech in Cairo in June; and sought to restart peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

“Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future,” the committee said in its citation. “His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.”

The world still looks to the United States for leadership, moral and otherwise. Here’s hoping President Obama has the strength, ability and opportunity to deliver on today’s recognition.

During remarks last year before the Washington Policy Center, a conservative think tank funded by wealthy, right-wing donors, King County Exec wannabe Susan Hutchison took a moment to plug their Policy Guide for Washington State, a collection of policy proposals for key areas of government.

“I’d like to put in a plug for a book that you have on your tables. It’s called the Policy Guide for Washington State and it’s published by the Washington Policy Center. Let me tell you about this book. I have read it cover to cover and it is one of the most extraordinary pieces of work about Washington State and the policies that make our government run. It hits on 10 different subjects from health care, education, transportation, tax policy and others. But let me tell you, folks… if you started this book tomorrow morning and read it through you would be smarter by dinnertime tomorrow night. This book makes you smart. So I highly recommend that you take it and that you read it.”

So… what exactly are these “smart” ideas that have Hutchison so excited?

On transportation…

Manipulating transportation policies to force a particular behavior coerces people into abandoning their individual liberties in favor of a socialistic benefit where supposedly a greater collective good is created.

[…] Reduce spending on costly, ineffective fixed-route mass transit. Policymakers should change spending priorities that heavily favor mass transit systems despite chronically low ridership. Riders of these expensive systems, like light rail and the Sounder Commuter Train, are being heavily subsidized by automobile commuters, yet research shows that fixed rail does nothing to reduce traffic congestion.

[…] The problem is that transportation spending is based on other agendas rather than congestion relief. As a result, the cost of bringing goods to market rises and consumers end up paying more for products.

Sound Transit’s East Link proposal is a good example. Reconfiguring the center lanes across Interstate 90 (I-90) for light rail, as agency officials propose, would not only fail to reduce traffic congestion, it would, according to the state Department of Transportation, worsen traffic congestion by 25 percent.

On the environment…

Proclamations about the risks from climate change have been revised again and again, always downward, and other information has been shown to be more about politics than science.

[…] Eliminate the mandated “green” building standards for public buildings…

On science…

Even when the science is accurate, it does not indicate that the problem ought to be addressed or that particular policies should be followed.

On I-1033…

Adopt a constitutional amendment to limit the growth of spending to inflation and population growth.

[…]

Colorado’s spending limit, in contrast, was enacted as part of the constitution and has proved much more effective at protecting citizens from aggressive state spending. Passed by the people in 1992, Colorado’s Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights (TABOR) limits the amount of tax revenue the state can keep each year to the sum of inflation plus population growth.

That’s right, in enthusiastically embracing Washington Policy Center’s recommendations (and in giving them over $100,000 from the foundation she ran), Hutchison was for I-1033 before she was against it, only worse, as the Policy Guide calls for the population-plus-inflation limit to be cemented in the state constitution, just like Colorado’s disastrous TABOR measure.

Hutchison can talk all she wants about being a moderate nonpartisan, but these are the policies she’s endorsed, these are the policies she’s helped fund, and these are the policies we must assume she’d pursue. If Hutchison wins in November, right-wingers will hail it as a huge victory, because she is one of them.  But her only path to victory is to hide this fact from voters.

Box Turtle Bulletin notices something interesting about a new anti-71 ad.

The second image you see flashing on the screen, of Adam and Even in the Garden of Eden, is a copyrighted image from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. You can find a copy of that image on their web site as part of their Gospel Art Picture Kit. Another one found on a web page titled, “What Do Mormons Believe About Adam and Eve.” It’s interesting reading, since it hints at a fallible God — or at least a God that gives conflicting instructions and it’s up to us to decide which set of instructions to follow.

Since the image is copyrighted by the LDS, either there is copyright infringement going on or, um, the Mormon Church is up to its usual anti-equality antics.

Yeah, it’s a laughably bad spot, but as I used to point out, so far my marriage and my children are just fine, despite attempts to extend the same civil rights heterosexual couples enjoy to gay couples.

As a casual observation, I would have to argue that adjustable rate mortgages and high credit card rates have done far more to destroy marriages in my community than the existence of scary gay people, so if we want to “protect the children,” maybe we should get serious about financial sector reform. LDS can put that in its pipe and smoke it.

(Props to DKos diarist Clarknt67.)

Looks like the gloves are coming off in the race for mayor of America’s Vancouver, which pits city council member Tim Leavitt against veteran incumbent Royce Pollard.

From The Columbian:

Vancouver mayoral candidate Tim Leavitt has missed “an outrageous” 16 elections over the past 10 years, including primary elections in 2008 and 2006 and general elections in 2002, 2000, 1999 and 1998, according to a review of voting records by the Vancouver Firefighters Union. Leavitt doesn’t dispute missing the votes, but says it has nothing to do with his ability to serve as mayor.

And an IBEW political action committee, PAC 48, has put up a little web site in honor of Leavitt called “Stop Lying Tim Leavitt.” Nothing subtle about that.

Jeff Mapes at The Oregonian had an interesting little post today concerning a $15,000 donation made to an Oregon IBEW committee from wealthy Clark County resident David Nierenberg, who has given mightily to all sorts of Democrats, philanthropic causes and his former boss Mitt Romney. From Jeff Mapes on Politics:

As it happens, though, the PAC operated by Local 48 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers on the same day – Sept. 23 – gave $30,000 to PAC 48 of Washington. That PAC is also operated by the union, but it operates across the river where many of the union’s members are located.

So it appears Nierenberg is coming in big in support of long-time incumbent Royce Pollard. Well, $15,000 isn’t really big money for a guy like Nierenberg, but in a Vancouver mayor’s race it’s still a decent chunk of change. (Full blogger ethics panel disclosure: I knew Nierenberg from a campaign group called Evergreen Citizens for Schools from roughly 1998-2002. While he would probably take a phone call from me, I haven’t spoken to him for several years.)

Chris at Politics is a Blood Sport has a pretty straight-forward take on Nierenberg’s involvement:

David Nierenberg contributes to causes and candidates that he believes will benefit the region. While there’s little agreement from this little blog about the benefits of a Mitt Romney, there’s a wide range of agreement on other candidates Nierenberg has backed over the years.

Pollard is truly in the fight of his political life, and he’ll need all the help he can get from IBEW Local 48 and others if he is to succeed. What may have started as a simple off-year mayoral race is turning into a referendum on the new bridge, light rail, and the overall direction of Vancouver for years to come.

Leavitt has mounted a serious challenge to Pollard, that’s for sure, but he’s done it by exploiting economic uncertainty and trying to have it both ways on tolling when it comes to the CRC project that would build a new bridge on I-5 between Vancouver and Portland. A lot of Leavitt’s rhetoric is that same old “waste fraud abuse” stuff, burbbling about government being run like a business, etc. You know the type.

There isn’t going to be a new bridge without tolls; the Congressional delegations know it, Oregon officials remind us of it repeatedly, and at least Royce Pollard faced up to this basic fact a long time ago. Leavitt can try to finesse the issue all he wants, but he’s built a campaign by capitalizing on the issue and if elected mayor, it would seem to be difficult, if not impossible, for him to endorse tolling. In essence, the bridge project would most likely be doomed.

There’s a great irony in all this. Leavitt is the preferred candidate of the local BIAW chapter, whose members presumably would benefit from improvements in transportation between Clark County and Portland. In a conventional political world like the ones in political science textbooks, the bidness guys and gals from the BIAW would get behind the moderately conservative, pro-business incumbent who wants to make it easier for people to live and shop in their city. But the conventional, tidy views of politics that still find voice in newspapers and on NPR exist only in some imaginary pony land. In the real world, conservatives pull out all the stops, on every issue, from the top to the bottom, and with control of both Clark County and the City of Vancouver within their reach, they’re not bloody likely to let up now, and they’re not at all sentimental about all the good things Royce Pollard has done over the years, either for them or the community at large.

I don’t know who the BIAW thinks buys their warranty-free houses, or rather will buy them again if the economy recovers from the international financial larceny made possible by the same neo-liberal ideology that informs every action of the right, and a fair portion of the “left.”

The BIAW long ago gave up any pretense of being interested in anything other than ultra-conservative ideology and gutting government for the sheer hell of it. It’s not a bug, it’s a design feature. If Leavitt becomes mayor, Vancouver might as well change its name to “Vista, Washington.”

Former state Republican Party Chair Chris Vance, has a somewhat startling admission to make:

I have spent the bulk of my career opposing higher taxes and increased spending. In the Legislature I voted against Governor Mike Lowry’s 1993 budget and tax increases. On the King County Council I voted against two budgets because they increased spending and raised property taxes — budgets written by my fellow Republicans while we were in the majority. During all of my 11 years in elected office I served on the budget writing committee, and every year I listened to Democratic governors and county executives talk about tight budgets, while revenues and spending went up and up.

As a fiscal conservative, therefore, I hope I can say this with some credibility: King County really does have a revenue problem. In fact, it is closer to a revenue crisis.

See, when I lay out the facts behind the counties’ structural revenue deficit (and it’s not just King County, but all counties), there are those who dismiss me as just the Horses’s Ass guy. But here’s Vance, a lifelong Republican and self-described fiscal conservative, pretty much making the same exact case.

Huh.

Back in June, when I wrote that mayoral candidate Mike McGinn was having trouble securing endorsements from fellow environmentalists due to his reputation for not working and playing well with others, my post drew passionate rebuttals from McGinn and his supporters. And a few weeks back, when I reported that his fellow environmental leaders were, um, less than enthusiastic about McGinn’s surprising primary victory, I once again heard from McGinn faithful, accusing me of pulling this meme out of my ass.

“[T]he sentiment I heard from many of his fellow environmental leaders was more along the line of ‘oh well, I guess we kinda have to endorse him,’ rather than the outright enthusiasm one might have expected,” I wrote at the time. But, well, I’m man enough to admit my mistakes, for it looks like they didn’t really hafta endorse McGinn after all:

In an affront to environmental poster boy, Sierra Club leader and mayoral candidate Mike McGinn, the King County Conservation Voters have decided not to endorse either candidate in the mayor’s race.

Now, McGinn and his supporters can get all huffy if they want about the works and plays well with others meme, but when the region’s broadest coalition of environmental leaders just can’t bring itself to endorse one of their own — a man with unchallenged environmental credentials — it’s gotta say something about the many toes he’s stepped on (biked over?), if not his political style, doesn’t it?

I’m not saying I want a Mr. Nice Guy in the mayor’s office. It’s just always struck me as ironic that one of the big knocks against Mayor Nickels was his alleged unilateralism, and now we may be on the verge of electing a new mayor with the same bull in a china shop reputation.

Via Publicola:

Supporters of Seattle Port Commission candidates Rob Holland and Max Vekich charge that supporters of his opponent, David Doud, have been reporting every link on the Reform the Port organization’s Facebook page as “abusive,” which results in an automatic removal of the links. “It’s just seventh-grade stuff—it’s not like that’s going to win an election,” Reform the Port supporter Heather Weiner says. Reform the Port is not formally affiliated with either the Vekich or the Holland campaign.

That kinda shit is just plain petty, but unfortunately it’s happening more and more all the time. For example, it’s become a common practice to issue bogus takedown requests to YouTube, sometimes prompting YouTube to pull one’s entire library of videos, with little recourse. (It’s happened to me, which is why I now post to multiple accounts.)

Politics is a contact sport, and that’s okay, but dirty tricks like this threaten to ruin these online services for the rest of us. Shame on Doud and his supporters.

Well, I guess that’s one way to address growing complaints about King County Animal Control and conditions at its Kent shelter… shut it down:

“This is a transition or evolution for regional animal care and control, not an ending,” said Executive Triplett. “We must phase out the county’s general fund support for animal control and sheltering because although protecting animals and protecting people from animals are both important, providing animal care and control as a contractor for 32 cities is neither a required nor a core business of King County, nor is it self-sufficient.”

Currently, providing animal care and control services requires $1.5 million of the county’s general fund dollars every year above the revenues collected from city contracts for those services.

“In an era where we are mothballing parks, eliminating human services programs and closing health clinics, we can no longer afford to subsidize animal care and control,” said Triplett.

Now if only King County would also get out of the business of providing roads, parks, libraries, courts, law enforcement, jails, elections, social services, buses, public safety, public health, emergency management and a few other things, we might eventually get county government down to the size where Susan Hutchison is actually qualified to run it.

Looks like I’m not the only one calling for an end to Metro’s inflexible 40/40/20 rule. Over on Crosscut, State Sen. Fred Jarrett (D-Mercer Island) echoes my complaint about the rule sacrificing efficiency for sake of political expediency:

There are a number of strategic and tactical steps Metro can take to use the crisis as an opportunity to shape the region’s future. First, the failed “20-40-40” service allocation formula must be scrapped. Originally put in place as a political way to make each region of the county feel there was some degree of equity in the allocation of service, it has instead created an artificial barrier to the county’s ability to shape regional mobility and support our growth management goals.

Meanwhile, Dow Constantine, the Democratic nominee for King County Executive released a reform plan today that also calls for the rule’s repeal. I guess great minds think a like.

In an article in New York magazine, a man operating a small business in New York City made this startlingly honest confession:

I hate to say it, but there’s no way I’m hiring a black guy to work for me.

Is this a good indication of how racism still significantly affects our society and continues to create artificial barriers to success for minorities? Absolutely, but not in the way you think. The business owner who made that statement isn’t a racist at all. He runs one of New York’s marijuana delivery services, and he knows that if he hires a black man to be a delivery person, that person is significantly more likely to get arrested on his route. He then tells reporter Mark Jacobson:

Fact is, pot is legal for white people but not for black people, which is total bullshit.

Recent arrest statistics compiled by Queens College Professor Harry Levine back up this observation:

In this way, the NYPD has arrested tens of thousands of New Yorkers every year for possessing small amounts of marijuana. These arrests are expensive, costing nearly $90 million a year. And there are other costs: an arrest record can result in severe collateral consequences, like loss of employment, or the chance at a college scholarship. Spending the night in one of the City’s overcrowded holding pens or in Riker’s can itself be traumatic.

The most alarming component of these arrests, however, are the racial disparities. Nearly 90% of all those arrested for possession of marijuana are Black and Latino. Whites comprise 35% of the City population, but make up less than 10% of all those arrested for possession of marijuana. These disparities are not indicators of who uses marijuana–over 1/3 of all adults U.S. have tried marijuana, and anyone on a casual weekend stroll through the Upper West Side or Prospect Park will find a number of white people puffing away.

As Gabriel Sayegh also points out in that same post, the number of arrests for low-level marijuana possession have risen from 900 in 1993 to 40,000 in 2008. With nearly 90% of those arrests being of minorities (and most of them young), those arrests tend to erase the kinds of opportunities that would otherwise be available. This trend hasn’t just been with marijuana either. All forms of drug enforcement – especially the long disparity between crack and cocaine sentencing guidelines – have created a gigantic divide between how the drug war affects white communities and how it affects minority communities.

It’s become fashionable to claim that racism in America is largely over and that the folks who claim it isn’t are attempting to exploit the gullible. The numbers from America’s drug war emphasize how false that belief is. Wherever one goes in America, the racial disparity in drug arrests is only becoming more extreme. In California, blacks are only 7% of the population, but make up 33% of marijuana felony arrests. There are six times as many whites and blacks in the state, but more black men are picked up for marijuana felony offenses than whites, even though whites and blacks use marijuana in equal percentages and there are six times as many whites in the state. From coast to coast this occurs, giving us a massive disparity in our prison population and creating a huge wealth gap between white and minority communities.

What’s interesting to note about this phenomenon is that throughout the criminal justice system, from prosecutors to police officers to judges, the individuals within the system will be adamant that they’re not racists themselves. And I think most of them are telling the truth. The system itself really isn’t the root of the racism. The racism tends to come from what the community expects of this system and pushes politicians to do with it. When it’s understood that way, as the manifestation of lingering American eliminationism, the results we have start to make more sense.

A perfect illustration of this phenomenon occurred a few years back in an exchange I had with a blog commenter from the Bay Area. She first left a comment agreeing with me that marijuana prohibition is stupid and that people shouldn’t be arrested for using it. Then, when I mentioned the racial disparity, her attitude changed. She became defensive of law enforcement and falsely claimed that blacks get arrested because they commit more drug crimes (they don’t). Finally, I posted a video of an old episode of COPS, where several black men where being tackled and arrested after buying small bags of weed from an informant. She quickly went from being against marijuana prohibition to expressing gratitude to the police for getting these dangerous people off the streets. To this day, I guarantee you that she doesn’t think of herself as a racist, and if you ever accused her of it, she’d flip out just as she did in the comments of that post.

This is the difficulty in understanding the real level of racism that infects our political debates today, and more specifically, the extent to which racism drives the “teabagger” movement. I sympathize with genuine small government conservatives who have been consistent in their opposition to both Republicans and Democrats. But I also get the sense that they don’t recognize how miniscule they are within the ranks of those who are waving tea bags and calling Obama a Communist.

On the other hand, I think Jimmy Carter is wrong when he says that the reason for such heated opposition is because Obama is black. It’s not simply because Obama is black (one could easily see the same protests if Hillary Clinton was President), it’s because Obama is a Democrat, and the Democrats are seen as the party that represents the interests of black America. The reason we’re seeing such an intense backlash to government spending all of a sudden is not because government is being more irresponsible with its spending than it was during the Bush era, it’s because the perception is that the money is being spent on the undesirables within our society, the same people who always seem to bear the brunt of our nation’s drug war.

As Glenn Greenwald points out in this post, it makes absolutely no sense to be more concerned about the tiny sums of money that we dish out to ACORN for the relatively minor scandal that they’ve been caught up in after years of being disinterested in the vast sums of money that we’ve given to war profiteers like Blackwater, or various war-crime-committing nations, or to the financial services companies that drove our economy into the ground. The only explanation is that ACORN is representative of black America, and therefore is seen as a threat disproportionate to their actual influence. But don’t dare call that phenomenon racist.