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The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight (and every Tuesday), 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. What better way to beat the heat than some icy cold beer, and… um… air conditioning?

Not in Seattle? Liberals will also be drinking tonight in the Tri-Cities. A full listing of Washington’s eleven Drinking Liberally chapters is available here.

UPDATE:
Almost forgot… King County Prosecutor candidate Bill Sherman will be dropping by tonight. I would publicly endorse him tonight, but I’ve pledged to keep Drinking Liberally above politics.

In announcing his candidacy for King County Prosecutor, acting prosecutor Dan Satterberg made a big show of promising to keep his office “above politics,” instructing his staff that he would “not permit members of the office to either contribute money or a personal endorsement to my campaign,” yet when civil division chief Sally Bagshaw emailed attorneys at the region’s top law firms, saying she was “supporting” Satterberg, and asking for their endorsements, Satterberg said he thought it was “an appropriate thing to do.”

Huh. That’s a pretty fine parsing of the meaning of the word “endorsement.” So since I obviously lack his sharp legal mind, perhaps Satterberg could explain to me how his admonishment against staff contributing a “personal endorsement” is consistent with Bagshaw’s name appearing on his own web site’s list of… um… personal endorsements…?

SNIDE ASIDE:
On a tangential note, in her controversial June 9 email, Bagshaw stated that “Our goal is to get the top lawyers in King County to endorse Dan early, and I would like to place 1000 lawyers’ names onto the website this week.”

One month later she seems to be about 700 lawyers short of her goal.

Joel Connelly mounts his high horse today and launches some invective at anyone and everyone who’s been pointing fingers at Chief Kerlikowske over police oversight issues. Josh Feit has already responded, easily swatting down Connelly’s lazy accusation that The Stranger has been hypocritical when it comes to dealing with the accuracy of police reports. But the real hypocrite here is Connelly, who actually writes the following two paragraphs in succession:

The loudmouths should allow Hizzoner’s panel to do its work. Our 1960s-era activists should recognize that “this due process thing” (as a media colleague calls it) applies to police chiefs, even to police officers.

Overseers of our law enforcement agencies ought to appreciate the requirement that complaints get acted upon quickly, or dismissed. Our cops have a pretty tense job, filled with judgment calls. It makes no sense to leave a line officer, working under pressure, hung up in the city’s preoccupation with “process.”

So we should recognize that due process applies to police officers, but when dealing with police officers, we shouldn’t be preoccupied with “process?” Huh?

I caught a lot of grief for my post last week calling for Kerlikowske to resign. Since then, another group, the Minority Executive Director’s Coalition (MEDC), has also called for the chief to be replaced. And James Kelly of the Urban League, who was originally defending Kerlikowske, now also agrees that the chief should be explaining himself in writing when he fails to act on the recommendations of the existing police oversight panel.

The evidence that there’s a problem with oversight at SPD has been pretty substantial since the beginning of this story and has been well documented by both The Seattle Times and The Stranger. So when Connelly invokes the idea of this just being about “1960’s-era activists”, that’s when I tune him out. As someone who was born after the end of the Vietnam War, I don’t carry any of that baggage. Instead, I’ve seen a different set of civil rights issues – the Rodney King trial, “Driving While Black”, record numbers of African-Americans being hauled off to our prisons, many of them for doing things that well-off white kids get away with every day. In my lifetime, I haven’t seen the racial divide in this country disappear as much as I’ve seen it ignored. Progressives proclaim that affirmative action is saving the black community but then bury their heads in the sand about why we have 6 times the percentage of African-Americans in jail than South Africa ever had of their native population under Apartheid. And some of the worst states in this trend are blue states like California, Illinois, and New York.

As I mentioned in last week’s post, according to a survey from 2000-2001, Seattle’s racial disparity in drug arrests is higher than any other city of comparable size in the United States. It shouldn’t be a surprise then that this case is focused on two cops (one with a long history of problems with the black community) who made a drug arrest this January of a black man in a wheelchair who claims that the cops planted drugs on him and later roughed him up while in custody. After video of the arrest surfaced showing some inaccuracies with the officer’s report (and not showing any clear evidence that drugs were taken from the suspect), the charges against the man were dismissed. This case, and the way that both the chief and the mayor have been quick to defend the police involved, have been at the heart of the calls for Kerlikowske to resign. There simply isn’t an excuse for the mayor and the chief to be so incurious as to what really happened to George Patterson that night.

Newark, NJ mayor Cory Booker, a Rhodes’ Scholar who came into office determined to fix the endless violence that has plagued that city, is now pointing his finger at the drug war and calling it an economic genocide against black communities. But here in Seattle, where the black community has less clout, the mayor and the chief happily continue the war. This case obviously goes well beyond just drug law enforcement, as The Stranger continues to find new instances of general police brutality against people of color here. But the guise of keeping drugs out of the black community is the mandate that problem officers like Greg Neubert have in order to treat every person in the black community as a suspect. It’s a recipe that begs for situations to escalate.

Connelly ends his column by making a comparison to the oversight of road repair and wondering why people who are angry at the Department of Transportation can’t stir up the kind of shitstorms that people who are angry at the police can. I’ll explain that to him in more detail the next time I see him at DL, but it helps to look at the very last paragraph:

Leaving rubber behind on Second Avenue, a fiendish thought flashed across my mind: “If only I were a street drug dealer, protesting a bust, I could raise hell in this town.”

He’s referring to Patterson, the man arrested in January. There’s only one problem. Patterson insists he’s not a dealer, and the charges were dropped. And basic common sense tells you that a man in a wheelchair isn’t a very effective person to have as a street dealer in a business where people steal from and shoot each other. But for Joel Connelly and much of Seattle’s “progressive” community, due process may not be for everyone. And sometimes, the relationship between Democrats and the black community can be eerily similar to the relationship between Republicans and the military.

There will be some gnashing of teeth by the Washington State Republicans to this July 3rd press release from Governor Gregoire:

Governor Chris Gregoire today designated the Washington Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) as a voter registration assistance agency and directed the agency to appoint a voter registration assistance officer, efficiently help citizens register to vote and work with the Secretary of State’s office to ensure compliance with established voter registration procedures.

“It is one of the primary duties of government to make available to all citizens the opportunity to register to vote and, if needed, provide registration assistance,” said Governor Gregoire. “Our social service agency serves a diverse group of people every day and therefore is an ideal place to help more Washingtonians register to vote.”

Governor Gregoire also encouraged all state agencies to provide on their web sites a link to the Secretary of State’s voter registration page and to consider other ways in which they might support and promote voter registration.
[…]

This is the way government ought to work. It should take concrete steps to maximize opportunities for all eligible citizens to exercise their constitutional right to vote. It is curious, then, that over the last decade the Republican Party has increasingly become the party of voter suppression and disenfranchisement. (Luke Esser looks prescient with his 20-year-old disenfranchisement satire.)

We saw the Republican vote suppression in action days before the 2005 election when Lori Sotelo (apparently inspired by a Karl Rove briefing, filed an error-prone series of voter challenges. Subsequently, the Washington State laws were changed to prevent such abuse.

Under the worst of circumstances, the Republican-sponsored disenfranchisement becomes operational through a Republican-controlled government…. In 2000, we saw a massive, and error prone disenfranchisement operation undertaken in Florida, under the supervision of Secretary of State Katherine Harris—an operation that almost certainly swung the presidential election by inappropriately purging thousands of African Americans from the voter rolls. A US Commission on Civil Rights report summarized it this way:

…poorly designed efforts to eliminate fraud, as well as sloppy and irresponsible implementation of those efforts, disenfranchise legitimate voters and can be a violation of the VRA. Florida’s overzealous efforts to purge voters from the rolls, conducted under the guise of an anti-fraud campaign, resulted in the inexcusable and patently unjust removal of disproportionate numbers of African American voters from Florida’s voter registration rolls for the November 2000 election.
[…]

African American voters were placed on purge lists more often and more erroneously than Hispanic or white voters. For instance, in the state’s largest county, Miami-Dade, more than 65 percent of the names on the purge list were African Americans, who represented only 20.4 percent of the population. Hispanics were 57.4 percent of the population, but only 16.6 percent of the purge list; whites were 77.6 percent of the population but 17.6 percent of those purged.
Florida easily could have, and should have, done much more to protect the voting rights of African Americans and other Floridians.

(They also found other ways that African American voters were disproportionately disenfranchised in Florida in 2000.)

On the face of it, the Republican problem seems to be paranoia, with the biggest cheerleader of paranoia being Karl Rove. Don’t you believe it. If there is anything that Republican strategists learned from the 2000 election is that disenfranchising voters works for Republicans! Karl Rove almost certainly knows he is feeding the Republican masses a load of horseshit.

Republican voter fraud “paranoia” is really theatre in two acts, designed to disenfranchise subpopulations that vote Democratic.

The first act shakes the confidence of ordinary voters in the election system—that is, it spreads paranoia through unfounded fears of widespread (presumably Democratic) election fraud.

We certainly saw this fear-mongering played out in Washington State in 2004. During the election contest trial, Republican lawyers opened with a bold statement about how they would prove election fraud. The trial proceeded without any evidence of election fraud being offered. Judge Bridges Oral Decision stated:

There is no evidence that anybody associated with any of the candidates in the governor’s race had anything to do with causing the errors. There is no evidence that has been produced in this Court to suggest that the errors resulted from partisan bias. During the 2004 general election, the various polling sites across the State were populated by inspectors, judges, Accuvote judges, observers, attorneys and the media. No testimony has been placed before the Court to suggest fraud or intentional misconduct. Election officials attempted to perform their responsibilities in a fair and impartial manner. There is no evidence before the Court to question ballot security as to those ballots actually counted.

The second act in the G.O.P. theatre is to make registration and/or voting more difficult for “certain voters.” That would be the poor, people of color, and people living in urban environments. You know, various schemes to cancel registrations, laws to require photo IDs at the polls, that sort of thing. These gimmicks particularly hit poor people of color—people that some Republicans believe shouldn’t even have a right to vote.

That is why Gregoire’s memo will cause some political consternation and constipation among state Republicans. We all know who uses DSHS: the same people Republicans build gated communities to keep out.

Editor & Publisher summarizes today’s editorials slamming President Bush for commuting convicted felon Scooter Libby’s sentence.

Here are a couple of poignant ones:

From the [New York] Times’ Tuesday editorial: “Mr. Bush’s assertion that he respected the verdict but considered the sentence excessive only underscored the way this president is tough on crime when it’s committed by common folk …

“Within minutes of the Libby announcement, the same Republican commentators who fulminated when Paris Hilton got a few days knocked off her time in a county lockup were parroting Mr. Bush’s contention that a fine, probation and reputation damage were ‘harsh punishment’ enough for Mr. Libby.

“Presidents have the power to grant clemency and pardons. But in this case, Mr. Bush did not sound like a leader making tough decisions about justice. He sounded like a man worried about what a former loyalist might say when actually staring into a prison cell.”

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: “President Bush’s commutation of a pal’s prison sentence counts as a most shocking act of disrespect for the U.S. justice system. It’s the latest sign of the huge repairs to American concepts of the rule of law that await the next president.”

San Jose Mercury News: “Other presidents have doled out pardons and the like, usually on the way out of office. It’s never pretty. But few have placed themselves above the law as Bush, Cheney and friends repeatedly have done by trampling civil liberties and denying due process. Chalk up another point for freedom. Scooter’s, at least.”

Read the rest of ’em here.

(Story and photo via AmericaBlog.)

Republican hypocrisy was on full display today. The supposedly “tough on crime” President George W. Bush commuted part of Scooter Libby’s sentence. Literally, Bush gave Scooter a “get out of jail free card.”

Tough on crime my ass.

Libby is still a convicted felon, will have to pay $250,000 and will be on probation should his appeal fail. (The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Libby’s request to remain free on bail while his appeal is under way, so the writing is on the wall as to the persuasiveness of his rather unorthodox legal arguments.)

Apparently obstructing justice, committing perjury, and making false statements is not really so bad if you are a Republican…at least, not bad enough to spend time in prison over.

The hypocrisy is overwhelming. While Governor of Texas, George W. Bush oversaw the execution of over 100 people, including three people who were borderline mentally retarded. Apparently, death is the right sentence for criminals who lack the mental capacity to fully understand their crimes. But Libby, a lawyer who rose to an important position in the White House, who knew full well he was obstructing a very serious criminal investigation, and who presumably has an IQ greater than 70…he walks. Maybe “selective on crime” is a better tag line.

(On the other hand, maybe Bush does not have the mental capacity to understand what he has done? I mean, really, has George W. Bush ever done anything that would peg his I.Q. at over 70?)

Here is how Dubya tried to justify his soft-on-crime decision:

Mr. Libby was sentenced to thirty months of prison, two years of probation, and a $250,000 fine. In making the sentencing decision, the district court rejected the advice of the probation office, which recommended a lesser sentence and the consideration of factors that could have led to a sentence of home confinement or probation.

I respect the jury’s verdict. But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive.

Excessive? Umm…pardon my cynicism, but wasn’t Judge Reggie Walton appointed precisely because he had a no-nonsense, tough-on-crime attitude?

In the end, the hypocrisy should be overshadowed by the simple logic of what just went down. Libby took a bullet for Dick Cheney, who clearly orchestrated a smear campaign against Valerie Wilson. Libby is convicted (instead of Cheney). Bush takes the sting out of Libby’s sentence. Pure and shameless abuse of power. Mark my words…in the end, Bush will pardon Libby.

I mean, that’s just the way organized crime works.

The blog ate my homework edition:

I thought it might be a slow week in bullshit locally until Goldy decided to cover Dino Rossi’s bullshit non profit. Still no word from those guardians of electoral integrity over at (un)Sound Politics. Hmm.

It has been a banner week in prudishness from local people. Lou Guzzo doesn’t like that the federal government took over a legal brothel for a short time almost 2 decades ago after its ownership fell behind on their taxes. And Michael Medved saw a study that the kids are having s-e-x and kinda freaked out.

Some famous people came to town last week. Torture boy going anywhere but his impeachment hearing is bullshit. And when Howard Dean came to town, it inspired a bullshit press release from the state Republicans.

Nationally, Jonah Goldberg changed the name of his bullshit book. That he still has written, so there.

In thank God they aren’t in the majority any more news, Pete Domenici and Norm Coleman are trying to weaken the Violence Against Women Act.

Finally, the big piece of bullshit today is the Scooter Libby pardon not quite a pardon. By a man who once said, “I don’t believe my role [as governor] is to replace the verdict of a jury with my own, unless there are new facts or evidence of which a jury was unaware, or evidence that the trial was somehow unfair.” But those were just for people being killed by the state, not as big a deal as say his friend outing a CIA agent.

It’s not a good week to be Mitt Romney. The story of how he once drove across New England with his dog on the roof of his car is getting some serious attention, but that’s actually pretty minor compared to what two of his close associates have been involved with:

As The Hill noted last week, 133 plaintiffs filed a civil suit against Romney’s Utah finance co-chair, Robert Lichfield, and his various business entities involved in residential treatment programs for adolescents. The umbrella group for his organization is the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASPS, sometimes known as WWASP) and Lichfield is its founder and is on its board of directors.

The suit alleges that teens were locked in outdoor dog cages, exercised to exhaustion, deprived of food and sleep, exposed to extreme temperatures without adequate clothing or water, severely beaten, emotionally brutalized, and sexually abused and humiliated. Some were even made to eat their own vomit.

But the link to teen abuse goes far higher up in the Romney campaign. Romney’s national finance co-chair is a man named Mel Sembler. A long time friend of the Bushes, Sembler was campaign finance chair for the Republican party during the first election of George W. Bush, and a major fundraiser for his father.

Like Lichfield, Sembler also founded a nationwide network of treatment programs for troubled youth. Known as Straight Inc., from 1976 to 1993, it variously operated nine programs in seven states. At all of Straight’s facilities, state investigators and/or civil lawsuits documented scores of abuses including teens being beaten, deprived of food and sleep for days, restrained by fellow youth for hours, bound, sexually humiliated, abused and spat upon.

According to the L.A. Times, California investigators said that at Straight teens were “subjected to unusual punishment, infliction of pain, humiliation, intimidation, ridicule, coercion, threats, mental abuse… and interference with daily living functions such as eating, sleeping and toileting.”

You can read more about the history of Mel Sembler’s “rehab” centers here and here. A compendium of links can be found here (a lot of the stories are not for the weak of stomach). When Romney says he wants to double Guantanamo, I believe him. He’ll need the extra room if he thinks we should be sending our kids there too.

When Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels decided to start signing up US cities in the fight against global warming, I don’t think he ever though he’d be this successful:

Mayor Greg Nickels welcomed 52 more cities to Seattle’s climate protection campaign bringing the total to 592 as an influential organization of mayors unanimously supported a national goal of reducing climate pollution 80 percent by 2050.

Five hundred and ninety-two? To think, this whole thing started a few years ago.

“It’s time for the federal government to follow the lead of mayors across this country and begin taking action to address the growing threat of global warming,” Nickels said. “Everyone has a role to play in saving our planet from the effects of climate change. Cities have rolled up their sleeves and now it is time for the federal government to do the same.”

The 52 cities joining the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement come from just two states, Florida and Iowa. The announcement means 596 cities across America have now joined the Seattle-led effort to cut greenhouse gas pollution.

While conservatives extol the virtues of “local control”, that creed goes out the door when it comes to global warming. Righties mocked Nickels for his DIY approach, saying it wouldn’t add up to much. Hundreds of cities later, their apologies aren’t forthcoming. (I’m sure their congratulatory emails are just stuck in the “tubes”)

Meanwhile, the full U.S. Conference of Mayors today endorsed a resolution sponsored by Nickels that calls on federal leaders to approve aggressive climate pollution reductions as part of an ambitious, five-point climate-protection plan.

Co-sponsored by the mayors of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, Miami and 24 other cities, Nickels’ resolution calls on the 110th Congress and the White House to set a national greenhouse gas reduction target of 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, a threshold most scientists say is necessary to stabilize the climate. Coupled with the target is a call for a flexible national cap and trade system and incentives to reward energy conservation and development of clean energy technologies.

The conventional wisdom on global warming is that the American people aren’t ready to makes the changes necessary. With so many mayors signing on to needed legislation, why is Congress so gutless? Folks are ready for the kind of inventive free-market solutions to global warming. It’s just the guy in the White House who doesn’t get it.

Since dropping its racial tiebreaker in the face of a lawsuit by parents, Seattle’s high schools have grown dramatically less integrated. And now that the U.S. Supreme Court has issued a sweeping, 5-4 decision ruling Seattle’s racial tiebreaker unconstitutional, school districts across the nation will swiftly re-segregate.

Indeed, but for some caveats in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s concurring opinion, the Roberts Court has all but overturned the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision that led to desegregation throughout the South and the rest of the nation. Writing in dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer warns that this is a decision we will all regret.

Finally, what of the hope and promise of Brown? For much of this Nation’s history, the races remained divided. It was not long ago that people of different races drank from separate fountains, rode on separate buses, and studied in separate schools. In this Court’s finest hour, Brown v. Board of Education challenged this history and helped to change it. For Brown held out a promise. It was a promise embodied in three Amendments designed to make citizens of slaves. It was the promise of true racial equality.not as a matter of fine words on paper, but as a matter of everyday life in the Nation’s cities and schools. It was about the nature of a democracy that must work for all Americans. It sought one law, one Nation, one people, not simply as a matter of legal principle but in terms of how we actually live.

Not everyone welcomed this Court’s decision in Brown. Three years after that decision was handed down, the Governor of Arkansas ordered state militia to block the doors of a white schoolhouse so that black children could not enter. The President of the United States dispatched the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, Arkansas, and federal troops were needed to enforce a desegregation decree. See Cooper v. Aaron, 358 U. S. 1 (1958). Today, almost 50 years later, attitudes toward race in this Nation have changed dramatically. Many parents, white and black alike, want their children to attend schools with children of different races. Indeed, the very school districts that once spurned integration now strive for it. The long history of their efforts reveals the complexities and difficulties they have faced. And in light of those challenges, they have asked us not to take from their hands the instruments they have used to rid their schools of racial segregation, instruments that they believe are needed to overcome the problems of cities divided by race and poverty. The plurality would decline their modest request.

The plurality is wrong to do so. The last half-century has witnessed great strides toward racial equality, but we have not yet realized the promise of Brown. To invalidate the plans under review is to threaten the promise of Brown. The plurality’s position, I fear, would break that promise. This is a decision that the Court and the Nation will come to regret.

Seattle is gradually becoming a segregated school district. Those on the right who cheer this decision, and who cheer their success at establishing a rigidly ideological majority on the bench that has no use for the doctrine of stare decisis and no respect for the wisdom of those justices who came before them, will be held politically accountable for the consequences of their agenda. Unfortunately, politics will come four years too late to save our nation from the Roberts Court.

Republicans should beware. This is a court, that should it live up to its principles, will overturn Roe v. Wade. And that disaster would surely lead to the unraveling of the Republican Party, if not its permanent destruction.

The Supreme Court just saved Jesus from peer pressure to try drugs. Today the Court ruled 5 to 4 against a student displaying a “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner at an off-grounds school event.

I suppose we can call this the “free-expression hits 4 Jesus” case.

The school principal thought the banner promoted drug use and, as a consequence, she confiscated the banner and suspended the student. The student, Joseph Frederick, simply thought the slogan was funny—and that it would attract the attention of TV crews covering the journey of the Olympic torch.

The majority opinion (Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy and Alito) held that:

[t]he First Amendment does not require schools to tolerate at school events student expression that contributes to those dangers.

“Danger” refers to the harm of illegal drug use—in this case, the harm of drug use by a vulnerable Jesus.

This goes to show that conservatives really are humor impaired. Further studies will be needed to determine if this humor impairment syndrome (HIS) has some genetic underpinnings, is caused by environmental toxins, or whether it reflects a deficient childhood nutritional environment—you know, like being nursed by hyenas to avoid exposing the child to its mother’s breasts. I’m betting on the hyena scenario.

Justices Stevens’ dissenting opinion held that:

…the school’s anti-drug policy “cannot justify disciplining Frederick for his attempt to make an ambiguous statement to a television audience simply because it contained an oblique reference to drugs.”

The majority, apparently, equates promoting drug use for Jesus—a man who was executed in the First World War on Terror some 2,000 years ago, isn’t a citizen of the U.S., would take bong hits in the privacy of his own kingdom which, in any case, is outside the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S.—might have the pernicious effect of inducing HIS-afflicted conservative students to take up drug use. (In other words, Jesus is just a gateway target.)

The same reasoning might prohibit “Bong Hits 4 Hitler,” since it could still provide pernicious inspiration for some HIS-positive conservatives.

Perhaps a safer slogan is “Bong Hits 4 Brontosaurus?” Oh…wait…among science-impaired HIS-positive conservatives, this is tantamount to promoting drug experimentation with family pets.

In the comments of my last post, commenter Russell Garrard wrote the following:

The Bush-haters will tell us that the supreme head of our government and his minions are supremely sinister and fiendish liars (albeit also moronic bumpkins). Then they turn around and tell us that only government can be trusted to vet what we put in our mouths and bodies. I don’t get it….

The larger argument that Russell is making (and we continued the back and forth in the comments over it) is that the government shouldn’t be trusted to do anything because free market forces will invariably do it better. I’m amazed at how often I hear this considering how much evidence there is that it’s not true in a number of circumstances (see: Larry Kudlow looking ridiculous on his own show when defending free market health care against Ezra Klein). The logic behind it is that companies will be so afraid of the financial ramifications of doing things against the public interest (secretly having bad things in their products or implementing cruel labor practices) that it’s pointless to have any kind of oversight by the government. This ignores a massive amount of history and common sense. Companies pursue profits and there have been many situations where that pursuit of profit has run counter to the general welfare of the citizens.

One of the more common ways in which this has happened is when it comes to addictive substances. From the tonics of the 19th century that secretly contained morphine to the cigarette industry of the 20th, companies have often put their pursuit of profit before the public good. These industries weren’t reformed because the corporations stopped seeing the profit potential of their actions, they were reformed because the government established rules (in the case of morphine, laws were created in the late 1800s that forced manufacturers to identify the ingredients of their tonics, causing many of them to immediately go out of business rather than admit their product contained morphine). Not all of the rules that our government has made over the years are perfect – in fact, some have been terrible – but a society is strongest when it allows for free enterprise, but also ensures that government can act as a corrective mechanism that can establish rules and safety nets for a system that, by design, ends up with winners and losers and a growing gap between the haves and have-nots.

Part of the myth that government is useless and unnecessary is rooted in a belief that any time government spends money, it’s an inefficiency. If there were a real need to spend that money, some say (and please feel free to read through this Sound Politics post and the comments if you think I’m just inventing a ridiculous strawman) that it’s only worthwhile to do if an actual person or company sees a profit potential. In this mindset, no roads, schools, or scientific research should ever be funded unless a company saw profit potential in that investment. Otherwise, it’s a waste. I never imagined that I would encounter so many people believing in such oversimplifications, yet I manage to come across it all the time when looking for things on our local right-wing blogs to make fun of. For all of these people, the moon landing must be the greatest boondoggle of all time, especially since some people still aren’t convinced we really went there.

Like the moon landing, there are valuable things that government can do that don’t provide the kind of immediate direct profit potential that a corporation would be interested in. From building transit to improving park space, there are various things that would give a return on investment for an entire community or even the entire country, but wouldn’t make sense for a corporate bottom line. As a capitalist system grows and matures, I believe that it can eventually allow for more and more of these things to be done by private entities (and this often puts me at odds with many liberals), but a belief that there’s some truism that a corporate entity is always the superior option distorts the proper balance we need to have between having the things we need provided for us by those motivated by money and those motivated by the ballot box.

Going back to the Sound Politics post I linked to, the Edmonds School District administration building obtained an espresso machine. The price tag ($10,000) alarmed the Sound Politics peanut gallery and many wailed about how wasteful government spending has become. The only problem is that the espresso machine was bought so that faculty could purchase their morning brews for less money inside the administration building and the proceeds would go towards the district’s general fund and toward school lunches. The machine was expected to pay for itself in less than two years. If that’s true, and there’s no reason to believe it wasn’t, it was an intelligent use of school budget funds and government doing something smart.

But that’s not how it works among the faith-based capitalism crowd. Whenever government spends money, it’s an inherent inefficiency to them. To demonstrate how this can lead to pure silliness, let’s say there are two cities that each have a park that needs to be refurbished. The first city finds a coalition of business owners and private citizens who pony up the $50,000 for the refurbishing. The second city uses public funds. There’s an argument to be made that the second city is not wisely spending taxpayer money, just as it’s possible that the business owners in the first city might not get what they think they may get back from their investment (good publicity). But what I don’t agree with is the idea that the actual job of refurbishing the park will be done more or less efficiently depending upon which avenue is chosen. The idea that those being paid by a for-profit entity will work harder than those being paid the same rate by a government entity has no basis in any reality that I’m familiar with, yet it’s an article of faith for so many. The issue of accountability usually appears in that theory as well, but anyone who’s ever worked in the private sector can tell you that massive inefficiencies and beaurocracies exist in for-profit entities as well.

Leave it to our friend Stefan to take this idea and go careering over the hills with it.

Last weekend I asked readers to suggest a word to represent the opposite of “Statism”. Thanks to all who participated in the ensuing discussion. Among the best suggestions: classical liberalism, small-l libertarianism, objectivism, Americanism, capitalism. My personal favorite, suggested by Eric Earling, “civic entrepreneurialism”. That best captures the spirit of what I was looking for — civic engagement based on private enterprise, as opposed to state coercion. But I’d still prefer a single snazzy word to represent the concept.

Incidentally, the concept of private initiative in lieu of state coercion is, IMHO, the preferred alternative not only where it is traditionally proposed (e.g. education, social services), but also for traditionally social conservative issues. Take, for example, abortion. This merits a longer post, but if the goal is to reduce the number of abortions, wouldn’t it be more effective for private organizations to deliver positive messages to change people’s minds about the issue, than to expect government intervention to solve the problem?

After I read this post, I sat back in my chair, stroked my goatee, looked up at the ceiling, read it again, thought about driving down the coast this summer, paced around the room a few times, read it a third time, rubbed my temples for a minute and then just turned the computer off. After a few days, I think I’ve got it.

Going back to the example with the parks, Stefan has actually convinced himself that not only can private enterprise refurbish the park more efficiently than government can for that $50,000, but it can do a number of things that government is completely incapable of doing as well.

It’s true that there are a number of things that government can’t do. Following drug policy, I’m well aware of what the limits of government are. Whether it was alcohol prohibition of the 20s or the current drug prohibition, people in our government have been trying to do the impossible. It just can’t deter people from exhibiting irrational behavior, and drug addictions are irrational behaviors. If those irrational behaviors have been shown to be detrimental to others, we obviously demand the government deal with that person, but putting them in jail doesn’t “fix” their irrational behavior – even when the sentence they are given is justified. This is why government-run drug treatment programs have been shown to be very cost effective from a taxpayer standpoint.

But this is very different from establishing rules or openly participating in a marketplace, where people overwhelmingly display more rational behaviors. People may not always make the smartest decisions when it comes to their own finances or running a large corporation, but they tend to have a rational basis for their decisions. As a result, government can be much more effective at using prison or financial penalty as a deterrent and to get people to play by the rules. There will always be a small subset of people who will act irrationally out of greed, and just as those whose drug addictions cause them to violate the freedom of others, they should still be sent to jail (or fined), even it doesn’t deter their irrational behavior without counseling or other psychological help.

For Stefan, and the Sound Politics nut squad, government can’t do anything at all, and beyond that, who knows what things they’ve tried and failed at that the free market can do! People are still having abortions? Hell, we haven’t unleashed the grand power of capitalism at that scourge. A few Wal-Mart funded PSA’s and the abortions just disappear. Haven’t solved drug addiction? Give Bank of America the keys. Can’t defeat terrorism? Try Blackwater (oh wait, we already did that).

Even though government has no ability to make people act responsibly if their motivations are irrational, it does have the ability to be responsible in dealing with those who are acting rationally. In other words, government is mainly useless in changing behaviors done in the pursuit of pleasure, since those behaviors tend to be impulsive or irrational, but it can be useful in dealing with those done in pursuit of profit. The pursuit of profit is a major motivator in life, but it’s not the only one, and government can utilitize other motivators like patriotism, compassion, and scientific curiosity to accomplish things as well. It’s just imperative that we hold the people we put in government accountable for what they’re doing.

Kemper Freeman Jr. doesn’t like the fall roads/transit ballot measure. In fact, he’s funding the opposition. He’s been vocal for years about how he sees transit as a waste of money. Recently, he compared transit supporters to commies and terrorists.

But don’t think Kemper Freeman Jr. isn’t thinking for himself. See, Junior has his own roads plan.

The engineers found that if we simply increased the capacity of the overall road system – 6 percent more lane miles, half of which would be additional lanes on existing freeways, the other half would be additional lanes mostly on existing arterials – we would reduce congestion from today’s level by 36 percent. And it would fully accommodate the 45 percent increase in trips expected over the next 30 years.

Hmm… Only 6 percent more lane miles? But isn’t there another way to reduce congestion the “Freeman Family Way”? I got to thinking.

Kemper Freeman’s Jr.’s grandfather, Miller Freeman, was a renowned racist and white supremacist.

“To-day, in my opinion, the Japanese of our country look upon the Pacific coast really as nothing more than a colony of Japan, and the whites as a subject race.”

Or this:

“My investigation of the situation existing in the city of Seattle convinced me that the increasing accretions of the Japanese were depriving the young white men of the opportunities that they are legitimately entitled to in this State.”

In fact, when Japanese Americans were herded into internment camps, nice businessmen (not unlike Miller Freeman) were kind enough to hold onto their property for them. In fact, some of them still do!

So is there a way to mix Miller Freeman’s racist vision for a “white’s only” region with Kemper Freeman, Jr.’s vision for wide-open freeways? Simple.

Intern The Asians. Stay with me, people.

Asians comprise 12.9% of King County, 7.4% of Snohomish County, and 5.7% of Pierce County [check out the scary facts here]. That means Asian people are more than 6% of the population of the three counties served by Sound Transit and the RTID.

Taking 6% of the region’s drivers off the road will free up highway space for loyal, hardworking Caucasians like me. Also, interning Asian people will be cheaper than building new highways, and we can lock them up quicker than pouring new concrete.

Instead of 6% more highway, how about 6% fewer drivers? As a loyal American, isn’t that my birthright? Isn’t it yours, too?

For the past couple weeks I’ve been hearing rumors of Republican wags bragging that Dan Satterberg has a $180,000 head start in the race to replace the late Norm Maleng as King County Prosecutor. Seemed like an awful lot of money to raise so quickly. But now I understand what they were talking about.

According to a press release issued today by the Washington State Democratic Party:

Top Democrats today responded to widespread rumors that the Republican Party is planning to funnel the $194,000 remaining in the campaign coffers of late King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng into partisan attacks intended to influence the special election this fall to name Maleng’s replacement.

Under state law, it is illegal to transfer so-called “surplus” campaign funds – the money left over after retirement, loss, or death – from one candidate’s accounts directly to that of another candidate. It is, however, legal to donate to charity, or to a party organization— but if the funds do go to a political party, any quid pro quo understanding that the funds will then be donated to or spent in support a particular candidate would run afoul of Washington State’s campaign finance laws.

In the case of the prosecutor’s race, State Democratic Party Chairman Dwight Pelz says that if large amounts of cash from Maleng’s campaign coffers are funneled through the Republican Party back to the GOP nominee for the position, Republican Dan Satterberg – as some Satterberg backers have been whispering is likely – it would be tantamount to the sort of illegal and unethical political money laundering that Republicans have become known for on the national level.

“A fair minded leader like Norm Maleng should not have his campaign cash laundered through a Tom Delay-style money machine,” said Pelz, who worked with Maleng during his eight years on the King County Council. “Out of respect for Maleng’s legacy, that money should rightfully go to charity, not to fund attack ads or earmarked to help anoint a partisan replacement.”

Maleng gets a lot of well-deserved credit for having kept politics out of his office, and both Satterberg and Democratic frontrunner Bill Sherman have promised to build on that legacy. But I don’t see how Satterberg can fulfill that pledge if he allows his handlers — such as two-time Bush-Cheney WA State chair Mike McKay — to help him win office by sullying Maleng’s memory through creative accounting.

On the other hand, the rumor I heard may only be just that. Maleng was the co-chair with Gov. Chris Gregoire of the Seattle chapter of the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network (CAN). Seattle CAN is holding a long-scheduled fundraising breakfast next Tuesday, June 26, at the Washington Athletic Club, and I’ve also heard rumors that Maleng’s wife Judy will not only be attending in his place, but will announce a “large donation” in his honor.

Now that would be a non-partisan use of surplus campaign funds worthy of Maleng’s legacy.

FYI, tickets for the Seattle CAN breakfast ($100 to $5000) are still available.

UPDATE:
Mike McKay responds:

“No money will be spent directly or indirectly to help (acting prosecutor) Dan Satterberg,” Seattle attorney Mike McKay said unequivocally Tuesday. He said Judy Maleng, the late prosecutor’s widow, “has made that clear.”

That’s good to hear.

Since filing to run as a Democratic candidate for the King County 6th District seat, Richard Pope has been a big hit with both Democrats and Republicans. Wait…I mean, he has gotten big hits from both parties. Goldy recently shared some of the love shown Pope by the King County Democrats.

Last Wednesday, King County Republican Chairman Michael Young, in a weekly e-news update, offered his own moving tribute to Mr. Pope:

I was a bit surprised to see that Republican incumbent County Councilmember in the 6th District, Jane Hague, drew a rather infamous opponent in gadfly [hey!], Richard Pope. Ever since 2002, Pope has been a Republican PCO, only recently discontinuing this status when he didn’t run for reelection in 2006. You can probably understand my bewilderment when he filed as a Democrat against well-liked and longtime King County and national leader, Jane Hague. But then again, his antics over the last decade have proven his willingness to do almost anything for the purpose of self promotion and adulation. I have great disdain for those who cannot pick a side and stay with it. Richard Pope is no friend of the Republican Party and has only succeeded in further diminishing his reputation with both political parties.

(Come on…is it really possible for anyone to “diminishing their reputation” by dropping out of the Republican party? I mean, ‘specially here in Washington state?)

I think the subtext of Michael’s message is, “Thank you, Richard, for your four years of service as a PCO. And thank you for helping us get our finances in order.”

One thing is absolutely clear: Nobody brings people of all political persuasions together in King County as effectively as Richard Pope.