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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.

Albert Einstein famously defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

So four years into a preemptive occupation that has seen US casualties escalate as Iraq descends into a bloody civil war, it is interesting to explore how Congressman Dave Reichert’s position has evolved in response to changing conditions on the ground:

“I support the troops and the president’s decision to go to war in Iraq.”
— Seattle Times, 10/22/04

“Reichert says the invasion of Iraq is part of the broader war, and he would back the invasion again, even with information now showing there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”
— Seattle Times, 10/22/04

On national security, Congressman Reichert says, “I put my trust in the president.” — KCTS Connects, 1/8/06

“I would have voted to go to war with the majority of Congress and support the president’s decision. After September 11th we were attacked and people must remember that. We are at war! We are at war!”
— Speech to Seattle City Club, 1/23/06

“And what I do is that when you ask me, as a sheriff, should there be a timeline? It is clear to me: no.”
— Speech to Seattle City Club, 1/23/06

“I see us being in Iraq for a while.”
— Speech to Bellevue Chamber of Commerce, 8/16/06

Hmm. With Bush administration officials preparing the American people for a 50-year military presence in Iraq, it is time to ask Congressman Dave Reichert if he still puts his trust in the president, and if he too supports a permanent presence in Iraq?

8th District voters need to know if a vote for Reichert is a vote for insanity.

I know some of you were a bit concerned with Goldy’s claim that he was “planning to blow up SeaTac.”

And I understand your concern. It wasn’t about the safety of SeaTac. I mean, really, even the dopiest brainwashed rightwing wackjob couldn’t read Goldy’s post and seriously believe he was out to get SeaTac. Rather, the concern was the possible ramifications for Goldy’s liberties (and, who knows, maybe Goldy will yet announce that he is taking a “break”). It seemed conceivable at first glance that Goldy might get himself into deep trouble, because we now live in an America where “security concerns” are allowed to override common sense. We’ve been hoodwinked into believing that being “safe from terrorism” has a higher priority than our freedoms.

Here’s how it happened. After the initial overreaction to the attacks on 11 September 2001, an insidious erosion set in because the Bush Administration was constantly fear-peddling. America’s collective psyche sank into some kind of post-9-11 cowardly funk. Now some significant portion of our population is actually fooled into believing that their safety is tangibly threatened by terrorist acts. Sure, acts of terrorism very slightly increase ones risk of death or injury in the actuarial tables. But, this risk is trifling compared to every-day risks like crossing a busy street daily or driving an hour a day in a car.

The real injury from terrorism is the fear; the larger tragedy of terrorism is that people limit their life and willingly give up their liberties to accommodate those fears. You know who I am talking about. They’re the cowards who say things like, “I don’t care if they listen to my calls and read my emails—I have nothing to hide.”

Pussies!

I’ve written lots of negative stuff about Mike McGavick, but I completely concur with his statement from two days after 9/11 (Seattle Times, Sep 16, 2001. pg. D.2, [my emphasis]):

“I guess now I know more about the evil humans are capable of than I did before, and I’m sadder for it.”
[…]

“There is nothing a coward can do to change my behavior,” he said, anger filling his voice, “and that’s a rule I’m not going to start to break.”

That’s American Spirit! But the Bush administration will have none of it. It has methodically undertaken the pussification of America (as Jon Stewart might put it)—and they’ve done it to consolidate and hold domestic political power.

Now, in our “post 9/11 world,” every time some group of crackpots, oppressed street persons, or angry youths talk to an undercover FBI agent about “the revolution,” the FBI sets up a sting operation. Someone “offers” funding and support…they bite…a bust is made. The news headlines play up the “thwarted attack” of “horrific proportions” on the skyscraper or an airport.

“But it was more aspirational than operational.” (Doesn’t the idea of an “aspirational crime” have the look and feel of a “thought crime?”)

And a few more persons of color are sent off to jail for a long, long time.

Now, when Goldy makes a point through an outrageous statement, we stop to contemplate whether this might trigger some kind of “security concern” that gets him thrown in jail. A student at Purdue University learned about this the hard way. He is in deep shit because he “threatened” Bush administration officials in a chat room:

A judge refused to throw out a Purdue University student’s indictment on charges alleging he urged the assassination of President George Bush and made threats against other administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife.
[…]

Buddhi, an Indian national who was attending advanced engineering classes at Purdue’s West Lafayette campus, faces an 11-count complaint for alleged comments he made in an Internet chat room in 2005 and 2006.

Oh…and do you think that being a foreigner with a non-Christian-sounding surname had anything to do with it?

What were those egregious threats he made?

“It is now legal under international law to bomb key sites in the USA. Iraqis! Give Anglosaxons the tit reaction for the tat action of Bush and the Republicans,” Buddhi wrote in one posting, according to federal court records.
[…]

For example, on a message board pertaining to defense contractor Halliburton, Buddhi posted that “Bush is a President of Mass Destruction” and “should be electrocuted.”
[…]

[He called for] for someone to “Kill GW Bush” and “Rape and Kill Laura Bush”

So there you have it…”threats.”

In the past, these statements would be dismissed as sophomoric, heated rhetoric, but rhetoric that falls under the protections of free speech:

… a 1969 U.S. Supreme Court case in which an 18-year-old war protester told a crowd at the Washington Memorial, “If they ever make me carry a rifle, the first man I want to get in my sights is LBJ (President Johnson).”

The high court ruled the protester’s comments were simply crude political speech and overturned his conviction.

Unfortunately, the post-9/11 pussification of America means that Mr. Buddhi will lose his liberties for some time until a court throws out the charges.

I look forward to the day that Americans get past this post 9/11 bedwetting-chickenshit-scared phase, take a little advice from McGavick and grow a pair! Because giving up parts of the Constitution out of fear—and fear that is largely manufactured for political gain—is just so…fucking un-American!

Postscript:

On a lighter note, and just to demonstrate that I haven’t completely lost my sense of humor this evening, here is an instructional video on the topic of forbidden speech:

Standing Tower Guard on a 6′ scaffold at the Federal Building in downtown Bellingham, Iraq Veteran Evan Knappenberger, 1st BDE, 4th Infantry Division, started a week-long vigil on June 1st to draw attention to the US military’s STOP-LOSS and INACTIVE RESERVE policies, which he submits are being used as a substitute for conscription in a political war.

More…

This morning I thought I might write about the oil stain on my garage floor. Or, perhaps, the blue fuzzy lint I cleaned out of my navel this morning. But I was just a little too lazy to write on a topic of such irrelevance.

Besides, Alicia Mundy beat me to it this morning. In her Letter from Washington column in the Seattle Times, Alicia writes about Rep. Dave Reichert (R-WA-8)…and his utter irrelevance:

The annual power rankings from Congress.org have dropped Reichert, now a sophomore Republican, from 168th among 439 members to 419th. That puts him lower than emissaries from the District of Columbia (100), Guam (177) and Puerto Rico (377), none of whom represent a state or have actual voting rights in the House.

Reichert ranks lower than most Republicans, and every Democrat except Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA-2), who has been marginalized ever since the FBI filmed him taking bribes.

In short, Reichert has no recent accomplishments (well…he did successfully pretend to get a school bus driver fired). Furthermore he has shown no capacity to adapt—to find some kind of functional niche—in a House controlled by Democrats.

“But…but…but, what do you expect, Reichert is only a sophomore!” Sophomore, indeed…but, Reichert ranks 38th out of the 41 Representatives in his class of 2004.

So I guess Ms. Mundy was having one of those “I think I’ll write about something completely irrelevant” days, and she reported irrelevant old news about Washington’s 8th Congressional District’s irrelevant Representative.

If Ms. Mundy had been in the mood for a little more relevancy, she might have written about, say, sophomore Rep. McMorris Rogers (R-WA-5), with a ranking of 231 of 439, or 12th of 41 in the class of 2004 (and she spent the session pregnant until giving birth last month and missed much of May as a consequence).

Ms. Mundy could have done that…but, then again, McMorris Rogers doesn’t have that head of rich, silvery hair, bulging biceps, and those washboard abs….

Microsoft CEO and kajillionaire Steve Ballmer wants the state to spend more money on education:

“If you’re the CEO of the state of Washington, the first thing that you have to do is recognize that there is a capacity problem in our four-year institutions,” Ballmer said, when asked what he would do to help more people take advantage of job openings in high-skill fields here.

[…] “We have some issues about traffic … but at the end of the day, the most important thing in the context that we’re talking about here is education.”

Wow. Great minds think alike. In fact, way back in July of 2004 (before HA became a must-read blog) I lamented the UW’s decision to stop accepting community college transfers due to lack of capacity, warning that higher education is the economic engine that drives local economies.

Cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and even rust-belt poster-child Pittsburgh, survived the collapse of their manufacturing industries — and prospered — due largely to the influx of talent attracted to their prestigious colleges and universities. The best and the brightest don’t just grab their degrees and leave; many settle in their adopted cities, creating new businesses and industries, or attracting existing ones to the growing pool of qualified workers.

My question is, which schools are going to be the economic engines for Washington, when we won’t even spend the money to educate our own children, let alone attract talent from out-of-state?

I moved to Seattle as an adult about 12 years ago, so I don’t have the same provincial pride in local institutions as most of you natives. And I’m not ashamed to admit that from my snobbish, east coast, elitist perspective there is not a single undergraduate program in the state that I could brag to family about my daughter attending.

Or rather, I am ashamed to admit this, because I’m a Washingtonian now, and I’m embarrassed to see my neighbors talk about how hard it is to get into the UW — like it’s some kind of west coast Harvard — when in fact increased admissions competition is due to declining funding not rising academic standards.

The state Labor Market and Economic Analysis Branch projects about 4,400 new job openings a year for computer specialists through 2014, while Washington is graduating fewer than 700 a year in this field.

“The state does not need to produce 4,400 computer and math occupation workers every year,” Weeks said. “The state needs to hire that many every year. … Some of them are going to come from Ohio or overseas.”

Yeah, or, some of those jobs might eventually move to Ohio or overseas. It’s not like you need to invest in a multi-billion dollar factory to hire a keyboard jockey. This is an industry with a lot of inherent mobility, and if I understand my Adam Smith, our region’s high-tech industry might easily move these jobs to where the qualified labor is.

And don’t put it beyond companies like Microsoft to do exactly that. Indeed, Ballmer’s statement is more than a touch ironic considering that Microsoft already maintains a corporate headquarters in Nevada — presumably for some tax advantage — and while it’s not really fair to single out Microsoft for its tax avoidance strategies (apparently, that’s what wealthy corporations do,) I wouldn’t mind hearing Ballmer talk a little about how we might raise the extra dollars he advocates investing in education.

That said, Ballmer’s insight should not be lightly dismissed. When the CEO of our state’s most prolific millionaire mill says that increasing capacity at our four-year institutions is more crucial to the region’s economy than increasing capacity on SR-520, lawmakers might want to take notice. Washington state has a lot of amenities that makes it uniquely attractive, but our university system is not one of them. As I concluded back in 2004:

The UW is a good state university… but it is only that.

And it is not going to get any better unless we fund it properly. That doesn’t simply mean more tax dollars. We also need to build the kind of multi-billion dollar private endowment that all the best schools rely on. And we need to move away from subsidizing all students equally, towards a means-tested system where tuition approaches market prices, and students receive generous financial aid based on need.

Either that, or we can continue exporting our best and brightest out-of-state.

Not to mention our best paying jobs.

A former director of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was sentenced to death today, for taking bribes to approve untested medicines. Um, a former director of China’s FDA, that is.

The developments are among the most dramatic steps Beijing has publicly taken to address domestic and international alarm over shoddy and unsafe Chinese goods — from pet-food ingredients and toothpaste mixed with industrial chemicals to tainted antibiotics.

The Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court convicted Zheng Xiaoyu for taking bribes in cash and gifts worth more than $832,000 when he was director of the State Food and Drug Administration, the official Xinhua News Agency said. The court then issued the death penalty, the report said.

[…] In one instance, an antibiotic approved by Zheng’s agency killed at least 10 patients last year before it was taken off the market.

On the bright side, China’s burgeoning organ transplant industry just gained another healthy donor.

The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight (and every Tuesday), 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E.

Please join us for the first DL of the post-Charles Nelson Reilly era.

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

It is so hard to keep up with all the Republican scandals these days. One almost needs an instant message service just devoted to these scandals. Admittedly, quite a few came to light even before Congress jump-started its dormant oversight functions early this year. Now that the oversight machine has gotten warmed up, expect a new scandal to surface every couple of weeks or so.

One recent junior-level scandal is about to get bigger. Remember Lurita Doan, the Administrator of the General Services Administration (GSA)? She recently gave testimony before the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform investigating GSA misconduct. If you don’t remember, here is an exchange between Ms. Doan and Rep. Bruce Braley (D-IA) over a meeting she attended, on GSA property, in which the White House Office of Political Affairs presented strategies for winning the 2006 elections. The presentation included things like a list of targeted Democratic seats. Multiple witnesses reported that after the presentation, Ms. Doan stood up and said “How can we use the GSA to help the Republicans in the next election.” She, of course, had no recollection of the presentation or her own statements afterward.

The problem for Ms. Doan is that the activity, on the face of it, violates the Hatch Act of 1939. That isn’t just the opinion of a spiteful liberal like me; in fact, it’s the opinion of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (here is a pdf version of their report).

The report has gotten Ms. Doan a second date with the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on June 7.

The Chair of the committee, Rep. Henry Waxman (R-CA), just gave an interview to the Center for American Progress to explain the rationale for asking her back for a second date. In summary:

By pressing forward with the investigation, investigators have revealed a disturbing pattern by Doan to mislead and cover-up her true intent regarding these partisan briefings. Some examples:

• When asked by the OSC investigators about her role in the briefing, she said “she was uninterested in the topic” and “was on her Blackberry…reviewing emails…and only periodically looked up and down.” But a review of her e-mail use during the meeting failed to corroborate that she was checking or sending email via her BlackBerry.
• Doan claimed the GSA employees who spoke out about her were employees who were poor performers. The OSC investigators said that Doan’s claim regarding the witnesses “appears to have been purposefully misleading and false” since none of the seven employees had “between a poor to totally inferior performance.”
• Doan claimed “she does not care about polls or election results.” But investigators report that Doan contributed $226,000 to Republican candidates and Republican organizations. Doan responded by testifying that the contributions had been “taken out of context.”

Here’s the thing. It is possible that this is an isolated case of a senior Bush appointee just not understanding the rules.

It’s possible…but why is it that every time something suspicious is investigated, it turns out that Republican appointees are breaking the law (or at least bending the law to the point of breaking) in order to squeeze out partisan advantage? And they never remember a thing about it afterward!

I’m talking Gonzogate (“I would never, ever make a change in a United States attorney for political reasons”), Monica Goodling (“I crossed the line of Civil Service policy”), Plamegate, the Armstrong Williams & Maggie Gallagher propaganda scandals, a fake reporter in the White House press corps, GAO-gate, and so on and so forth. And we’ve just scratched the surface.

Collectively, it is clear that (1) these people think they are above the law, (2) the GOP comes before country to them, (3) they feel being in power entitles them to use their power to keep power at any cost, (4) this abuse of power is systematic. The Bush administration’s great innovation has been to refine the concept of distributed power abuse it in a way that hasn’t been seen in generations (if ever before). It’s a pernicious, distributed, largely low-level abuse of power at all levels of government. And we have only scratched the surface.

When it comes right down to it, this current pack of criminals in the White House makes Richard Nixon seem like a real amateur.