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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.

Josh Feit:

Supporting the $904 million on I-405 expansion in this November’s regional transportation plan (the same plan that Seattle voters must vote for if they also want to expand Sound Transit light rail) GOP King County Council Member Reagan Dunn told the Seattle Times:

The I-405 project, especially, will improve traffic for people who must “drive until you qualify” for affordable suburban homes, said King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn. “The benefits are real. It will help young people; it will help our future,” he said.

His point is: People can’t afford to live (“live” meaning big houses, big yards, two car garages) in the city and so, to provide affordable housing we have to provide roads for them.

Josh must not get off the “Hill” much. “Drive Until You Qualify” is not some GOP trick. It’s exists. My folks bought land in what was rural King County, built a house, and raised two kids. My parents weren’t rich; my mom was working in social services, and my dad worked at the gas company. Even back then, gas company wages didn’t get you a house in Seattle. Or Bellevue. Or lots of other places. If they wanted a safe places to raise children, they had to look further away to unincorporated King County.

More Josh:

It’s a clever bit of demagoguery because it plays to the truth that yes, housing is becoming more and more expensive in Seattle. However, the GOP solution is a Catch-22. The more you drive people out to the ‘burbs, the more you keep Seattle from addressing its housing and transportation crisis, because suburban development takes dollars and developers away from transit and in-fill density.

No matter how much Josh Feit protests, young families are not going to buy “in-fill density” in Seattle. Maybe some will, but they are the exception that proves the rule. You can’t force young families into condos. Not when they can buy a house in Algona for the same price.

You can, however, give people options. Let’s build transit- lots more- in the city and elsewhere. Let’s expand HOV lanes. Let’s spend a little less time telling people what they should want and more time giving them options.

Josh has too much passion for correcting other people’s behavior (except when it comes to smoking indoors, in which case Josh is a flaming libertarian!). If Josh thinks the winning strategy is to lecture suburban folks, and to accuse them of defiling the environment, then he’s got another thing coming. People can only be “lectured to” so much. They can, however, be convinced. Perhaps we should try to convince people instead of just pointing fingers at them.

UPDATE (Goldy):
Josh will be joining me on “The David Goldstein Show” tonight at 7PM on 710-KIRO. Will knew that when he posted this. But I guess Will’s not man enough to come down to the studio and say to Josh’s face. He’s afraid of Josh’s passion.

Peter Callaghan of The News Tribune notes that Dwight Pelz sometimes uses baseball analogies when talking politics. And sometimes they’re tortured baseball analogies:

So, Pelz said, having the state’s primary on Feb. 19 is akin to having a ticket to the fifth game of the series – it’s not too late and it’s not too early and it might be just right. Maybe you had to be there. And to think that Republican Party Chairman Luke Esser, not Pelz, is the former sportswriter.

Ahhh…yes, Luke “The Truth” Esser. He began his sports journalism career writing for The Daily, the student newspaper at U-Dub. One of my favorite columns was from 1986, where Luke used an interesting sort of political analogy metaphor allusion in describing a national championship football team:

A prominent associate editor of a great big Seattle paper as much as wrote my name in the loss column after the Husky football team lost to B.Y.U. on national television 31-3. According to Columnist ‘X’ and various B.Y.U. players, some unsavory comments I made about the Cougars the season before (when those polygamists won a national championship there was no way in hell they deserved) were responsible for the 28-point win.

Does this mean Luke isn’t going to be a Mitt Romney supporter?

Immigration is a big, big deal in agricultural communities. Fruit growers, who often vote Republican, know how important immigrant labor is to their industry, so they back common sense reform.

So it’s hilarious to read this about one of Yakima’s state rep’s [From The Other Side] moral quandary:

No part of American agriculture would benefit more from a temporary worker program than our bountiful Yakima Valley – rightfully known as the Fruit Bowl of the Nation.

But apparently Charles Ross, Yakima’s newly elected state representative and lifelong resident of these parts, is a picture of confusion on this vital national and regional issue.

Sunday’s Herald-Republic carried a full-page ad – in purple ink – that delivered this thunderous message: “WE SUPPORT COMPREHENSIVE IMMIGRATION REFORM.”

The hundreds of names was a list of the pillars of agricuture in Central Washington: the decision-makers, major employers, orchardists, growers, packers and suppliers, many of them members of pioneer families who founded the state’s tree fruit industry.

This impressive group of industry leaders implored Congress to pass an immigration reform package that will strengthen Yakima Valley ag in particular and the American economy in general.

Fast forward to Tuesday’s Herald-Republic and read where Rep. Ross had committed to speak at a rally in downtown Yakima hosted by Grassroots on Fire – a racist organization viscerally opposed to immigration reform of any kind.

Ross canceled his appearance. But the very notion of this legislator playing footsie with the extreme right wing is disturbing to say the least. If he read Sunday’s paper, he probably saw the names of the very people who got him elected last fall – his voter base, solidly rooted in ag.

The GOP doesn’t know who to listen to- their business base or their crazy, racist/nativist base. All the while, the latino/hispanic vote, after flirting with the GOP in ’00 through ’04, is running away from the GOP.

Classic.

Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns is making some very interesting claims:

NATO has intercepted Iranian weapons shipments to Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgents, providing evidence Iran is violating international law to aid a group it once considered a bitter enemy, a senior U.S. diplomat said Wednesday.

“There’s irrefutable evidence the Iranians are now doing this,” Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns said on CNN. “It’s certainly coming from the government of Iran. It’s coming from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard corps command, which is a basic unit of the Iranian government.”

I’ve written a lot about Afghanistan at Reload, and I just want to quickly explain why we should be very skeptical of what Burns is saying. This post will be short on links because I’m on my lunch break, and I don’t have time to look up everything I’ve cited in the past on this.

Long story short, Afghanistan, as we all know, is the major opium producing country in the world – by far. The heroin that’s produced in hidden labs throughout Afghanistan is smuggled out in several different directions, most of which ends up in Europe, but a growing percentage stays in the countries along the smuggling routes (India, Pakistan, Russia, and Iran). Iran actually has one of the worst heroin problems in the world, and this is very clearly something that the theocratic Iranian leadership is not happy about.

The attempts by NATO forces and the Karzai government to destroy the opium production from within Afghanistan is beyond futile. The industry is roughly one half of the entire country’s GDP. You can’t just wipe that out militarily. Even with the unanimous support from outside the country to eliminate the trade, drug smugglers still dominate large areas of Afghanistan – especially in the south. But because the trade is still illegal, and coalition forces still have a mandate to assist the Karzai government in destroying the opium fields, the Taliban have been able to set up a protection racket, where they can collect ‘fees’ from the drug smugglers in exchange for making sure that their fields are spared when the eradication teams come through.

The Taliban doesn’t get paid in stacks of bills, though. Instead, they get paid in something that’s more valuable to them – weapons that they can use to fight the coalition forces. That’s where the Iranians come in. Seeing the massive increase in drug smuggling coming across the Iran-Afghanistan border, the Iranian government began to more heavily patrol the area. The intention was never to arm the Taliban, but that was the inevitable result. The Iranian government is notoriously unable to enforce its own strict laws, and high-ranking Iranian officials were bound to find ways to get in on the massive profits to be made by helping all that heroin make its way to London. This is why Iranian arms have ended up in the arms of the Taliban.

Obviously, these accusations aren’t coming out of nowhere. We’ve got a fleet of warships off the southern Iranian coast and we continue to have dimwitted Congressmen making severe threats against the regime. There’s a strong movement among a small subset of Americans to start a war with Iran, a move that would end in disaster. Those of us who still have our common sense intact need to keep dealing with the facts.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid gave a talk on energy legislation before the Center for American Progress yesterday. He began by offering a few observations about some political colleagues:

My staff told me to make sure that I stayed away from presidential politics today. And I’m going to do that. Other — I’ve learned one thing in listening to all the debates and reading about all these people running for office, and the one fact I’ve learned, I can’t get out of my mind, is that Rudy Giuliani has been married more times than Mitt Romney’s been hunting.…

(Via Political Wire.)

Today’s Seattle P-I covers the candidate filings for this year’s elections. And, once again, HA commenter and political troublemaker, Richard Pope’s name comes up:

Serial candidate and municipal gadfly Richard Pope filed against Councilwoman Jane Hague, R-Kirkland. Although he has run as a Republican in several past races, Pope is a Democrat this time.

Municipal gadfly? What is that supposed to mean? I mean, the papers refer to people as “gadflys” all the time, but municipal gadfly? The term aptly describes Will Baker who has been called that “Tacoma gadfly” (News Tribune, 10 Jun 2004, pg. B06), “[Tacoma’s] most vocal political gadfly” (Seattle P-I, June 5, 2004, pg. B3), and a Tacoma “council gadfly” (News Tribune, 26 Aug 2003, pg. B06).

And then there is Glenn Baldwin who earned the headline “Vancouver Council Gadfly Tosses His Hat in the Ring” in The Columbian (August 03, 1995, pg. A8):

Vancouver City Council candidate Glenn Baldwin says his attendance at council meetings is better than that of the incumbent he’s challenging.
[…]

Once a milk man in Vancouver, Baldwin spent most of his career driving delivery trucks for Blue Bell Potato Chips in Portland. He retired in 1992 and planned to complete several repairs to his house. Instead, he became a City Council gadfly, attending meetings and writing to the council and The Columbian.

The Seattle Weekly once ran an article about dangerous dogs (March 1, 2001, Pg. 16) and mentioned another municipal gadfly:

Mitzi Leibst, a former Army intelligence officer and longtime city gadfly, whose concerns actually extend well beyond last summer’s code changes. “For years and years and years,” she charges, “the city’s gotten away with this kind of fascist mentality on dog bites. Seattle is one of the few jurisdictions in the state that doesn’t allow you to have a dangerous dog. That’s just crazy.”

Crazy, indeed…all we really need is concealed canine permits. Leibst died before a series of high-profile pit bull attacks; she left a sizable sum to the Pigs Peace Sanctuary.

Now those are examples of municipal gadflies.

(Apparently other governmental bodies can have their own fly problem, like former port commissioner Jim Wright, who was called “a port gadfly” by the Seattle Times [12 Sep 1993, pg. B1].)

Richard is an eastsider, and his gadflightery isn’t limited to any municipality, level of government, or even political party. He is more of a generalized political gadfly (and a perennial candidate).

For example, Richard has recently won the love and adoration of State Republicans (like former truck mechanic and failed King County Executive candidate David Irons Jr. and Benton County Republican Party Chair Patrick McBurney) over his PDC complaints about GOP campaign reporting violations. Ever the multi-partisan, Pope has also filed an unsuccessful PDC complaint against the state Democrats, and an ethics complaint against Gov. Gregoire last fall over a dinner date.

And last year, in a move that Ralph Nader could be proud of, Pope threw the election for King County Judge; his candidacy knocked out incumbent Mary Ann Ottinger in the primary and resulted in a victory for Frank V. LaSalata.

Pope is more like his brother-in-perennial-candidacy Michael Shanks, a.k.a., Mike the Mover. Before becoming a perennial candidate, Mr. Mover fought tirelessly (and did some jail time) to get rid of licensing for movers. It earned him his own Seattle P-I (15 Sep 2004) headline calling him a “political gadfly.” The Spokesman Review (15 Sep 2004, A1) referred to him as “perennial political gadfly Mike the Mover.” Most recently Mr. Mover ran against Cantwell for the Senate.

Maybe Pope is more akin to Dale Washam, described as “an unsuccessful office-seeker and political gadfly” by the Columbian (05 Sep 1996, pg. A3). Washam is, perhaps, most famous for suing Newt Gingrich for stealing his ideas when Newt created the “Contract with America.”

Washam, 58, a former Democrat, ran unsuccessfully for the Puyallup School Board in 1991, Pierce County executive in 1992 and Pierce County auditor in 1993.

When Washam won the Republican nomination for auditor, the county GOP chairman said he was voting for the Democratic incumbent.

In each election, Washam filed a notarized “political employment contract” containing campaign promises and a pledge to resign if requested in petitions bearing the names of at least 51 percent of the voters in the last general election. Citizens who felt he violated his campaign promises also could try to oust him with a breach-of-contract suit, he said.

In a complaint, Washam said Gingrich, Eikenberry and the state GOP “plagiarized as their own the plaintiff’s Political Employment Contract idea, concept and contents when drafting their 1994 ‘Republican Contract with Washington State,’ the ‘Contract with America’ and the defendants’ book ‘Contract with America.’ ”

In any case, look for a highly parsimonious campaign from perpetual political gadfly and perennial candidate Richard Pope. Richard is always proud to point out his very high ratio of votes to campaign dollar invested.

Fnarf guest posting over at Slog (yay for guest posters!) has a great post about the Port of Seattle parks. They are a mostly hidden treasure:

For all of the many malfeasances of Mic Dinsmore’s and Pat Davis’s crony operation down on Port 69 (where elected officials and port businesses gather to fellate each other), they did a fantastic and largely unheralded job building a network of waterfront parks. Some of these fulfill the classic parks ideal of picnic tables in a field of grass, but they also don’t shy away from the truth about Seattle’s waterfront. Work goes on there, heavy industrial work, work that is a lot of fun to watch.

These parks are tucked in between working port sites and can be hard to spot. Some of them have sexy, romantic names like “T-105 Park”, but don’t let that put you off. They’re quite pretty, and have lovely river views. The Duwamish lives beneath the radar of most Seattleites, but it is the center of our Indian heritage, our early white settler heritage, and our industrial heritage.

Click over for some great pictures. My only complaint is nary a mention of my favorite Port of Seattle park, Jack Block. The best view of the skyline and some good biking. Near Alki, so well integrated into the Seattle Parks system.

In any event, I’ll have to check out some of the other parks this weekend. If you see someone who seems overdressed, especially given his crazy facial hair, say, “hi” and even if it isn’t me, it’s a nice thing to do.

King County Councilman Bob Ferguson is not running for County Prosecutor, and that means (a birdy tells me) Bill Sherman definitely is.

Sherman a longtime deputy prosecutor and a former aide to Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit, was one of the most pleasant surprises coming out of last year’s hotly contested 43rd Legislative District race. But don’t listen to me heap praise on Sherman, read what the Seattle Times had to say in endorsing his candidacy:

Sherman is a bright new entrant to elective politics who brings a very promising résumé and set of skills.

[…] Sherman has the right mix of temperament, attitude and résumé.

Sherman was an aide to Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt during the Clinton presidency, so he comes with political savvy and awareness of public-policy issues.

Sherman is currently a deputy prosecutor for King County who focuses on domestic violence, something that always can use extra awareness and voice in Olympia.

Sherman is a solid environmentalist with endorsements from Washington Conservation Voters and the Sierra Club.

He is also supported by Allied Arts of Seattle, and is an advocate for improved public education.

His law-and-order job helped draw support from former Seattle City Attorney Mark Sidran, who describes Sherman as a pragmatist and common-sense Democrat best qualified to work with Democrats, Republicans and suburbanites in Olympia.

[…] Sherman is the best all-around candidate. He is a very strong newcomer who will represent the district admirably.

I don’t mean it as a knock against Ferguson, but the Democrats ended up with a better candidate in Sherman. He’s an experienced prosecutor, who, well, is simply much more qualified for the job. And while he doesn’t have Ferguson’s winning track record at the polls, he came from nowhere to be surprisingly competitive in the 43rd LD race.

Sherman will also match up better in the general, pitting his years in the courtroom against Acting Prosecutor Dan Satterberg’s years as an administrator. This’ll be a great race.

UPDATE:
Bill Sherman has confirmed via email:

I’ve decided to run, and will file tomorrow afternoon. I decided to run because I can bring the perspective of a front-line trial prosecutor, working with victims and offenders every day. The Prosecutor’s office needs to focus on protecting the most vulnerable among us; on leading the way in dealing with criminals with severe mental health problems, and stopping the cycle of crime by probationary offenders. I’m excited to lead that effort, and it starts tomorrow.

Sherman has also confirmed that he will be a guest on “The David Goldstein Show“, Sunday night on Newsradio 710-KIRO.

The Discovery Institute’s own Michael Behe has a new book. I’ll admit I don’t know enough about protein-protein binding to actually understand what the hell he’s talking about. But I do know that scientists are laughing at him.

Behe uses a pitiful number of examples (count’em: four) to attempt to establish a generalization that binding sites can’t evolve, ignores numerous known cases where binding sites are known to evolve, and then concludes that anything involving the evolution of two or more binding sites is impossible without mystical unspecified guidance by a mystical unspecified supernatural force that somehow mysteriously frontloads nonrandom mutations into the beginning of the universe. Or something. Behe even says explicitly that malaria and HIV are intelligently designed in just this fashion. Along the way he repeatedly violates the First Commandment of Competent Argument Against Evolution – Get Thee To A Library and Double-Check Thy Generalizations About Biology Against The Biological Literature Or Thou Willst Look Like A Fool. My biggest problems with Behe are within this last point, but Chu-Carroll shows that the math area is just as bad. And I’m sure the philosophers will jump in at some point. Most amazingly, in The Edge of Evolution, Behe treds onto ground occupied by population geneticists. Behe’s first book talked about stuff like flagellum evolution, which was actually pretty devious because the number of people who know enough about evolution, creationism, and a random obscure biological organelle to give a detailed rebuttal is bound to be pretty small. But vast herds of population geneticists stampede around the evolution meetings, trampling all foolish enough to get between them and another exciting session on Drosophila genetics. So Behe invading that turf is kind of like the “land war in Asia” scenario. Not a good idea.

Or to make it more simple:

Wow, double the irreducible complexity! You can’t build cilia without a functioning IFT, so now you have to explain both the origin of the IFT and the origin of cilia. Except that, as Nick shows, this claim is just plain false. Just as his claim in his earlier book that every single factor in the blood clotting cascade must be present in order to function was easily disproven by pointing to dolphins, which lack Factor XII (Hagemann factor) yet still have blood that clots), this claim is easily disproven by showing that, in the real world, there exist organisms which have cilia but do not have the IFT.

Nick shows a chart and offers a citation showing that there is an existing organism that has a cilium but does not have IFT, an organism in a group called Apicomplexans. Specifically, a parasitic organism in that group. More specifically, a parasite known as Plasmodium falciparum. You might know it by its better known name: malaria. Yes, the very organism that Behe spends much of his book using as evidence of IC actually disproves his claim about the cilia/IFT system being irreducible. Oops.

Hmm. Well maybe a research assistant who deals with infectious diseases can shed some light on the subject.

1. Evolution can be modeled in terms of a static, unchanging fitness landscape.
2. The fitness landscape is a smooth, surface made up of hills and valleys, where a local minimum or maximum in any dimension is a local minimum or maximum in all dimensions.
3. The fitness function mapping from a genome to a point of the fitness landscape is monotonically increasing.
4. The fitness function is smoothly continuous, with infinitessimally small changes (single-point base chanages) mapping to infinitessimally small changes in position on the fitness landscape.

Ouch. I dont talk about my research directly a whole lot here (except for pretty pictures, of course), but like I put in my blurb, I study the evolution of HIV within patients and within populations. Fitness and fitness landscapes are vital to my research. And if Mark has summarized Behes claims properly– Im kinda peeved *fumes*

No one can have a basic, basic, basic understanding of ‘fitness landscapes’ and come out thinking those four points are valid. Just watch, Ill explain fitness landscapes to you all right now in the context of HIV, and you will get it! You, even those of you with zero biological training, will be able to refute Professional Creationist Michael Behe! Yay!

And if you’re like me, you won’t actually get it, but you’ll get closer, so you might as well read go read it.

And this has some obvious real world implications. Namely if you don’t know how malaria works, it becomes very tough to cure malaria. Same with HIV or any other virus. If you’re hoping that God or magic or whatever unseen, unknowable force is acting on these diseases, well, I certainly believe in the power of prayer, but I also believe in knowing how things work. In experimentation. In moving slowly, one piece of data at a time, one experiment at a time, one peer reviewed paper at a time toward the truth.

That’s where the creationists and the intelligent designers bug the fuck out of me. Because even more important than any real world implication, is a basic attack on the truth. We humans believe a lot of crazy things (I certainly believe in the power of prayer). We take shortcuts in our thinking and we all bring in biases and our partial information to whatever we’re trying to discover. So science has taken great pains to figure out ways to minimize these problems so that we can get at the truth. And then these anti-intellectual institutions think they can just yell “nu hu!” and that their argument is just as good as the scientific method. But if evolution isn’t the best explanation, then do what plate tectonics and what quantum physics and every other new discovery in science has done: prove it! Make claims that can be proven wrong with experimentation (as opposed to God might do something, or He might have done something). Then if those claims aren’t proven wrong, you’re on the way. Publish in scientific journals. Repeat like a zillion times so you know it wasn’t a fluke and people will start to believe you. Then, maybe you can write your book.

But if you yell “nu hu!” enough, and let your biases and prejudices interfere with human advancement toward the truth, you create your own world. And that world can be scary to those of us looking at it from outside.

These folks living in their own world give skepticism a bad name. If it’s these creationists or if it’s Exxon scientists. And skepticism is vital to that advancement toward the truth. I’m thrilled that people are questioning even our basic assumptions. I’m disgusted that people think just saying “no” without proving it, or really even trying is the same thing as honest skepticism.

And it is embarrassing that a Seattle institution is getting in the way of finding the truth. It’s horrible to have to read, “Seattle’s Discovery Institute” as if the city had something to do with those freaks.

After a decade of producing 5-10 columns a week for various outlets, I’ve been mostly taking a break from writing these past few months, which is why Goldy’s comment the other day about my technically being a poster. But the P-I’s article this morning on city council candidate Joe Szwaja pissed me off sufficiently to post – and then I see Will already got to the article last night.

I really like Will, but his post on Joe Szwaja’s troubles in the past misses a really simple point: Why did the P-I run this story? How did Angela Galloway think to check Wisconsin court and newspaper records, and just happen to have a story on it ready the same week Szwaja’s kickoff event raised over $17,000? And if you’re going to compare Szwaja to Dixon, as Will does – a sort of ridiculous comparison anyway, since this is a non-partisan race and most of the people who have backed Szwaja for this race have nothing to do with the Greens – why did the P-I run only one story mentioning Dixon’s (non-) voting record, and never run any mention of his extensive legal problems, either Dixon’s current misdemeanor ones or his two prison stretches for rather serious crimes in the 1980’s? Somehow, that wasn’t relevant or newsworthy, but Szwaja’s misdemeanor incidents from nearly 20 years ago are.

I’ll tell you exactly why the P-I is running this story: because Godden’s campaign fed it to them. Jean Godden worked at the P-I for many years before jumping to the Times, and she has consistently received glowing, uncritical coverage from both papers during her four years on council despite being its most inert member. When running four years ago, her editorial board interview at Seattle Weekly showed a stunning lack of awareness of civic issues, and she hasn’t improved on the job – treating that powerful $100,000+ a year job as some sort of civic retirement prize for having attended all the right parties during her decades as a gossip columnist. I’ve had several council aides tell me privately the same thing I’ve seen with my own eyes: In four years, Godden literally hasn’t done anything of significance on the council. She’s barely kept the seat warm.

Want to know where the P-I is coming from? Any writer or editor will tell you that the subtle little twists of wording, as well as what’s omitted, are how you lead a reader:

Although he initially declined repeatedly to elaborate about what he said were inaccuracies in Madison newspaper accounts, he was more forthcoming in a later interview Wednesday…

A lot of interview subjects won’t comment on the record, or so do extensively, when first ambushed with questions about, say, their past personal life; when I did a piece on former radio host Mike Webb for the Weekly last year, I spent nearly a month getting him to go on the record with detailed responses, which, to his credit, he eventually did. It’s a standard part of the reporting process to get people to talk. I’ve never seen this sort of caveat dropped into the story itself.

[Szwaja] said he has had a good driving record since moving to Seattle in 1993.

You think the P-I didn’t check this? So why present it as Szwaja’s unsupported claim?

And so on.

Szwaja’s web site has a reasonably good response to these charges (another contrast with Dixon), and I’ve spoken with him about them and am satisfied with his answers. I’ve known Joe (though not well) through any number of activist connections over the years, and have always wished the Greens had more people like him. He’s smart, competent, and principled – and unlike Godden, he won’t treat a council seat as a gold watch. Maybe that’s why Godden’s campaign felt threatened enough to go after him through her former employer.

Rep. Adam Smith will appear tonight on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, as the latest victim in the show’s “Better Know A District” segment. Why? According to Rep. Smith’s press release: “A lapse in judgment on the part of Smith’s communications director.”

No truer words were ever spoken. Or, um… written.

Last night I posted a rant about how, in a “post-9/11 world,” common sense has surrendered in the pursuit of pseudo-security. I used an example from an Indian student at Purdue University who is on trial for his inflamed political rhetoric on an internet chatroom.

Twelve hours later, Kos diarist chiniqua posted this diary detailing her experience of being the target of an investigation based on her perfectly legal web page.

Apparently, her MySpace page elicited concern when, using her handle China, she said:

China’s Interests:

The eventual destruction of the capitalist system and the military industrial complex, revenge, culty TV shows, narcotics trafficking and naps.

Wow. Terrorism, drug trafficking, pop culture and sinister siesta speech all in one brief sentence!

She also linked to the New York Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) Underground, after getting a myspace friend request. The CCRB investigates complaints against the police department, and chiniqua used to work as an investigator for the CCRB.

Clearly this woman is a terrorist who presents a clear danger to those around her. Well…she presents a danger if you’re a cowardly, bed-wetting, irony-impaired idiot!

So she was being investigated by an NYPD-FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force team:

The detective pulled out a folder and took out a piece of paper. It was all the pictures from my myspace page printed out. He pulled out some more papers and (basically) said this:

Some ‘concerned citizen’ was trolling myspace and came across CCRB Underground. Somewhere on [the CCRB underground page] there was the quote from Back to the Future about how Doc got the uranium to power the time machine by stealing it from some Libyan nationalists: “They wanted me to build them a bomb, so I took their plutonium and in turn, gave them a shiny bomb-casing filled with used pinball machine parts.” This citizen took it upon his or herself to look at who the friends were on this site and found me. […]

He or she then sent an email through the NYC.gov site saying (as far as I can tell) CCRB Underground was some sort of terror group and I advocated armed revolution and narcotics trafficking. Somehow this ended up on the Mayor’s desk the Commissioner got upset and then the gears went into motion. A priority investigation was launched and, they said, the original CCRB Underground guy had his computer confiscated.

The detective proceeded to ask me if I traffic in narcotics, if I am involved in terrorist activities or armed violence, what is my primary email address, who do I live with, where do I work, what do I do, how long have I been there, whether I had travelled outside the country in the last ten years, who the other people in the pictures on my page were, if I knew anyone involved with CCRB Underground, or recognized any of the people from the page.

Investigated for a fucking MySpace page? Computers confiscated for quoting Back to the Future? (But…but…but isn’t Libya a partner nation in the War on Terror™ now?) Yeah…this kind of thing is making us safer.

I wonder if this is how it happened to the Roman Empire, too?

I know I said I was stepping back, but as far as statements from public officials go, this has got to be the best press release ever.

Today, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said the use of the words “fuck” and “shit” by Cher and Nicole Richie was not indecent.

I completely disagree with the Court’s ruling and am disappointed for American families. I find it hard to believe that the New York court would tell American families that “shit” and “fuck” are fine to say on broadcast television during the hours when children are most likely to be in the audience.

The court even says the Commission is “divorced from reality.” It is the New York court, not the Commission, that is divorced from reality in concluding that the word “fuck” does not invoke a sexual connotation.

[…] If ever there was an appropriate time for Commission action, this was it. If we can’t restrict the use of the words “fuck” and “shit” during prime time, Hollywood will be able to say anything they want, whenever they want.

That was FCC Chair Kevin Martin responding to yesterday’s ruling that the networks could not be fined for inadvertently airing blurted expletives on live broadcasts.

As my regular readers know, I am fond of foul language. And there is no better example of how expressive and powerful these words can be than the fact that Martin chose to illustrate his point by using the words “fuck” and “shit” ten times during the brief course of a two-page press release.

Ironically, despite Martin’s foul-mouthed objections, even he acknowledges that this ruling might push the FCC towards a more First Amendment friendly, free market solution.

Today’s decision by the Court increases the importance of Congress considering content-neutral solutions to give parents more tools and consumers generally more control and choice over programming coming into their homes. By allowing them to choose the channels that come into their homes, Congress could deliver real power to American families.

Permitting parents to have more choice in the channels they receive may prove to be the best solution to content concerns. All of the potential versions of a la carte would avoid government regulation of content while enabling consumers, including parents, to receive only the programming they want and believe to be appropriate for their families. Providing consumers more choice would avoid the First Amendment concerns of content regulation, while providing real options for Americans.

Hmm. Given an a la carte option, I might actually subscribe to cable. For example, I might subscribe to educational programming like the History Channel and Animal Planet, while shielding my daughter from the obscenity that is FOX News. Sounds fuckin’ good to me.