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Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza!

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Ed: Boehner blames Obama for GOP’s incompetence.

Guns and Stuff:

Thom with some more Good, Bad, and Very, Very Ugly.

Roy Zimmerman: Vote Republican, D.C. episode:

Hillary’s Day:

Sam Seder: What the fuck went on inside Michele Bachmann’s campaign???

Maddow: Is America a liberal country?

Re-Inauguration:

Gov. Jay Inslee makes some announcements.

Thom: The Good, The Bad, and The Very, Very Ugly.

G.O.P.’s War on Elections:

Sam Seder with another episode of Random Rush.

The “No warming in 16 years” myth.

Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

Because Of Course They Did

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Oh look what Rodney Tom’s majority is looking to do now:

SB 5156 would completely repeal RCW 9.02.100, otherwise known as Washington’s abortion law. The law was adopted by public vote in 1991 to shore up state law with the US Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade (so that if Roe were ever overturned, Washington women would still continue to have the same rights and protections. It states, among other things: “Every woman has the fundamental right to choose or refuse to have an abortion.”

The bill would also repeal in its entirety 9.02.110, “The state may not deny or interfere with a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion prior to viability of the fetus, or to protect her life or health.”

Allen says that Planned Parenthood’s legal team is still trying to suss out how, exactly, this bill’s passage would affect women’s access to abortion providers in Washington state, given that Roe is still the federal law of the land. Regardless, it’s troubling: Washington voters have repeatedly confirmed women’s right to make their own pregnancy decisions, beginning in 1970, when voters approved Referendum 20 and legalized abortion in the early months of pregnancy.

“We don’t believe it’s an accident,” Allen says.

It’s hidden in a bill that’s ostensibly about parental notification, and you can read at the link why that’s fucked up enough on its own.

Of course even if it passes the Senate, it’ll never see the light of day in the House. And if it somehow got to Inslee’s desk he’d veto it. And even if it somehow became law, Roe is still the law of the land. But still, we were told that this session the Senate would be all about kicking poor people off social services and hating teachers. And that we’d avoid social issue fights. “You are going to see individual members do what they want to do, but what we have said is, we’re not going to let social issues divide our focus.” Whoops.

Telegraphing Tomorrow’s Meeting

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Cathy McLain at the Seattle Times has a post with some info about tomorrow’s meeting between Gov. Inslee, AG Ferguson, and US AG Holder that I wrote about yesterday:

Rick Garza of the Washington Liquor Control Board said Monday he expects the federal government will try to take action if Washington’s system has loose controls. He says it’s important for Washington to have a strong regulatory structure that would limit how much marijuana is grown to ensure that it’s only meeting demand for in-state users.

I-502 already codifies a lot of the specifics of the regulatory scheme, but also leaves a lot up to the discretion of the state liquor control board. If you look at the text of the new law [PDF] on page 18, you’ll see the following:

NEW SECTION. Sec. 10. The state liquor control board, subject to the provisions of this act, must adopt rules by December 1, 2013, that establish the procedures and criteria necessary to implement the following:

…

(3) Determining the maximum quantity of marijuana a marijuana producer may have on the premises of a licensed location at any time without violating Washington state law;

That section also deals with how the LCB can regulate other parameters of a legal marketplace, including how many retail outlets will be allowed in an area and how marijuana can be advertised. If Garza is speaking with knowledge of what Holder is planning to do, this is a good sign that they’re willing to tolerate I-502’s implementation.

On the other hand, what could end up happening is that we’ll get overly restrictive regulations based upon a fear that Washington will become a supplier for other states. If that’s the case, we’ll be the pioneering state for all of this, but we might end up with an archaic and inefficient regulatory model similar to what we previously had for liquor, while other states are freer to set up smarter regulations when they later take this step.

MAP

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Seattle teachers who decided not to administer the MAP test here are there reasons:

Seattle’s ninth- and 10th-grade students already take five state-required standardized tests, with 11th- and 12th-graders taking three. Seattle Public Schools staff admitted to a Garfield teacher the MAP test is not valid at the high-school level, because the margin of error is greater than expected gains.

In addition, teachers are forbidden to see contents of the MAP test so they can’t prepare students. Teachers who have looked over the shoulders of students taking the test can tell you that it asks questions students are not expected by state standards to learn until later grades.

This test especially hurts students receiving extra academic support — English-language learners and those enrolled in special education. These are the kids who lose the most each time they waste five hours on the test. Our computer labs are commandeered for weeks when the MAP is on, so students working on research projects can’t get near them. The students without home computers are hurt the most.

Students don’t take the MAP seriously because they know their scores don’t factor into their grades or graduation status. They approach it less seriously each time they take it, so their scores decline. Our district uses MAP scores in teacher evaluations, even though the MAP company recommends against using it to evaluate teacher effectiveness and it’s not mandated in our union contract.

I’m not sure if it spreads, or where it goes from here. But I’m glad the teachers at these schools are standing up for education.

Open Thread 1/18

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– Picking a favorite part of this Pam Roach presser is damn near impossible. But I think “not even arguably” she cares more about people than anyone else in the Senate is probably it.

– Jonah Goldberg’s opposition to hucksters in movement conservatism is only hostility to the competition.

– Assholes gonna asshole.

– Mayhap they’ll start including a list of each athletes favorite performance enhancing drugs on their collectable cards!

– This Brandon McCarthy Twitter battle encapsulates everything right and wrong with sports people on social media.

Reproductive Parity Act

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If Washington NARAL are pushing the Reproductive Parity Act again this session then that’s good enough for me.

Washington voters have a long history of ensuring a woman’s ability to make the decision to have an abortion. As Washington proceeds with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Washington women could face increased barriers in their ability to access reproductive health care, including abortion services. Anti-choice politicians in Congress tried to undermine the ACA by inserting a provision to roll back reproductive healthcare. This legislation addresses that problem and guarantees access to a full range of reproductive healthcare including abortion.

The link is a petition, and if that’s your thing, I’d encourage you to add your name. If writing your legislator directly is more your thing, you can find them here. Presumably it’ll be able to pass the State House again. But even before the GOP coup, this was going to be tougher in the State Senate. I assume it’ll go to the Health Care Committee where Senator Becker will kill it. But if you’re represented by someone on the committee, you might want to let them know how you feel.

Bee Nicerer

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I’m slowly making my way through this biography of William Seward. There’s an interesting story I wasn’t aware of from his days as a Senator. By 1858, he was a leading opponent of slavery in the Senate. Still he was cordial with many Southern Senators. One story in particular: “In early 1858, when Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi was suffering from a sever eye illness and confined to his darkened room for seven weeks, Seward visited him every day and spent an hour amusing the invalid with stories.”

If we didn’t all know what was coming, that would be the type of how-DC-Used-To-Be stories that the beltway press like to tell themselves. If we didn’t know that in 3 years they’ll stand on opposite sides, as over half a million people die in the Civil War, it might be a lovely story of the bipartisan niceness of a bygone era. Viewing it as that also obscures that one side was right on one of the least morally ambiguous issues of our history: slavery was wrong.

So that’s what I was thinking about when I read at Balloon Juice that reporters are using their question at a press conference to ask Obama why he and his staff don’t socialize more.

I’d like to ask you, now that you’ve reached the end of your first term, starting your second, about a couple of criticisms — one that’s longstanding, another more recent. The longstanding one seems to have become a truism of sorts that you’re — you and your staff are too insular, that you don’t socialize enough.

DC is a place with strange values.

Ted Talks

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Ted Nugent wants you to know (my emphasis):

“A person who lives by logic and studies history and tries to implement the lessons learned by history cannot begin to rationally explain the conduct of this president or his attorney general or this administration,” Nugent told conservative radio host Aaron Klein. “It is psychotic, it is crazy, it’s illogical — I believe it’s clearly and dangerously anti-American, anti-humanity.”

This reminded me of my former life as a volunteer political consultant. Once I had to offer Mr. Nugent some advice after he announced his intentions to run for Governor of Michigan…to a British reporter for a British magazine. That was the first of many political faux paux for the novice gubernatorial wannabe.

For instance, at one point, the reporter was asking a question about a past incident, and Mr. Nugent interrupted:

Nugent: “Neither did I poke my erect penis through a map of West Virginia – did you read that?”

Reporter: “No.”

And, at another point in the interview that was taking place in Mr. Nugent’s basement:

He fires at a Styrofoam bear using his weapon of choice, a traditional bow and arrow. “Straight through the heart… dead bear,” says Ted, as his heavily pitted target submits to yet another onslaught. “Both lungs… dead bear.” The arrows, which he makes himself, keep flying. “Dead bear… dead bear… dead bear.”

Psychotic? Crazy? Hmmm….

In his recent musings, Mr. Nugent…

criticized the leadership of Obama’s gun violence task force, saying that putting “crazy uncle” Biden and Attorney General Eric Holder in charge was akin to “hiring [serial killer] Jeffrey Dahmer to tell us to how to take care of our children.”

I guess he is suggesting that the Vice President and Attorney General are killing, and possibly eating, children. This seems rather illogical, considering that the administration hasn’t undertaken any actions on this issue or even announced future actions base on the recommendations of the gun violence task force.

Mr. Nugent’s deep concern about “dangerously anti-American, anti-humanity” tendencies may have some basis in reality, as revealed in that British interview through his own ideas for achieving a Utopian world:

“I say if somebody robs you, shoot ’em. I’d like all thieves killed. And all rapists. And carjackers. No more graffiti. No more ‘snatch-pursing.’”
[…]

“How do you get peace, love and understanding? First of all you have to find all the bad people. Then you kill them.”

Psychotoc? Crazy? Illogical? Dangerously anti-American? Anti-humanity?

All of the above.

Paternalism and Parallels

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Andrew Sullivan has been dutifully debunking some of the terrible arguments in defense of marijuana prohibition. Conor Friedersdorf has been doing the same. The discussion in those posts centers around a defense of paternalism being made by those in favor of keeping marijuana markets underground. Mark Kleiman here makes a partial defense of those arguments:

Sullivan is horrified by the frank paternalism involved, but horror isn’t a criticism, and he’s wrong to attribute to Frum and Dreher the notion that “all American adults are basically children that we have to protect from their own choices.” What Frum and Dreher are saying is that some Americans – many of them minors – are indeed in need of protection from their own bad choices. (Dreher is especially clear-minded in pointing out that the need for paternalistic protection varies not just from person to person but from choice to choice: lots of people are capable of managing their diets but not their retirement financial planning. I, for example, want paternalistic protection against being sold adulterated drugs or contaminated food.) There’s no logical flaw in the idea that more-liberal policies in a variety of domains might serve the interests of those better-placed to make good choices at the expense of those worse-placed.

There’s an important distinction that’s not being made here. There’s a difference between an uninformed choice, where a buyer is unaware of the true consequences of their decision-making, and a potentially “bad” choice, where people are fully aware of the consequences of their decision-making and are willing to accept the risks. In the former, we should certainly have laws that protect consumers from having to make uninformed decisions where the seller has an advantage that they can exploit. That’s true in our financial markets and in various other places. But it’s not true for adults buying marijuana.

When adults buy marijuana, they’re not being conned into buying a product they don’t understand. For minors, you can more easily make that argument, and that’s why the folks pushing for the end of marijuana prohibition support age limits on its purchase in a regulated market. Like Kleiman, I’d love to see “paternalistic” laws against being sold adulterated marijuana, but those laws are only possible in a legal, regulated marketplace. But identifying any adult purchase of marijuana as a “bad” choice that needs to be prevented is a far different level of paternalism than trying to keep people from being suckered into a bad mortgage or buying contaminated fruit.

The second half of Kleiman’s post tries to make an interesting parallel between prohibition and a lack of prohibition, which was summarized in this tweet:

Both Pete Guither and I found this to be odd, but perhaps for slightly different reasons. I find this to be a very uneven parallel between prohibition and regulated markets. Even under prohibition, the risks of drug abuse still exist, and in some ways they can be exacerbated. Yet under a regulated market, drug dealing is called “commerce”. There aren’t people being tempted into a potentially lucrative (although usually not) life of illegally producing or selling those drugs. The tradeoffs are far from equal in their magnitude.

To expand on that a bit, I certainly know some folks here in Washington who have more interest in trying marijuana now that it’s legal. Taking away that stigma of illegality will certainly expand the amount of folks who are willing to try it. But that subset of the population tends to be older, and far less likely to embark on a lifetime of vaporizer sessions after breakfast. So Kleiman is correct to note that drug use could go up, but on the other side of that, regulated markets that limit sales only to adults will put up a barrier at the other end of the age scale.

Most people accept that lots of young people will still be able to get access to marijuana through friends or with fake ID’s (just as with alcohol), but it’s an additional barrier that didn’t exist before. And it’s being put where it can do the most good, as numerous studies have shown that the earlier in life a marijuana habit begins, the more likely it is to become a more serious problem. Even if that trade-off yields higher overall use rates, it could potentially still be better overall from a drug abuse standpoint.

And thankfully, we already have the experience of Holland over the past several decades to know that an open marketplace for marijuana doesn’t lead to large increases in use. Compared to neighboring countries, the Dutch don’t use marijuana at a higher rate, despite the temptation of coffeeshops where it can be freely purchased.

The main point here is that the first part of Kleiman’s trade-off is largely negligible in its magnitude (and possibly non-existent). Yet the second part is enormous, when you factor in the overall societal costs of funneling tens of billions of dollars into a lucrative black market, tempting those with few options into risking arrest to get some of that money. Kleiman suggests that in poorer neighborhoods, this trade-off might still be close. I find that to be laughable, and more and more people in poor and minority communities are demanding an end to the drug war for the very same reason.

In Need of an Editor

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I was intending to do another zzzzzzz post for McGinn. I’ll probably vote for him, but I’m still giving Ed Murray and Peter Steinbrueck a look. I mean mostly, he’s been good but his standing in the way of police reform has been problematic. Part of the original consist was that it was the holidays when the other people announced. But still, mayor runs for mayor would have worked. Anyway, in stead of that, I’m going to make fun of this article in Crosscut (h/t to my friend Brice):

Luck of the Irish: McGinn makes his campaign move

Awesome title. The fact that he’s Irish is relevant to his campaign, somehow. And I think we can all agree that the colon was appropriate: after all a campaign move flows naturally from luck/and or his ancestry. He quotes his mom as saying “it’s better to be lucky than smart” without any context from the piece. And there’s no mention of his Irishness after the title, so really great job all around. I don’t know if Crosscut writers write their own headlines, but this is certainly not a great start.

Location, location, location, and the location where Mayor Mike McGinn chose to announce his bid for reelection spoke volumes: far from the madding club crowds of Capitol Hill and Belltown that helped drive his first election, at the Filipino Community Center on MLK Way in the heart of the Rainier Valley.

I didn’t know where to break this up, but that’s one sentence. “Location, location, location, and” what the fuck is that? I know it’s supposed to be what people look for in real estate, but Mike McGinn isn’t buying it. You can say the location, location, location thing, I guess, but just throwing it out there doesn’t help anything. Then he seems to think there are club crowds in Capitol Hill and Belltown on a Wednesday afternoon. FACT: Some people go to clubs and live in the South End.

It was a perfect stage for a perfectly casual event, in a suitably undersized, overstuffed room that reinforced the impression of clamoring urgency for, as supporters chanted twice, four more years.

Anywhere is fine for a casual event, especially on Wednesday afternoon. I don’t think holding it in South Seattle is bad. I’ve been to several South Seattle McGinn events, and I’m glad McGinn makes an effort to include that area.

A representative selection of minority community leaders sang his praises. El Centro director (and campaign co-chair) Estela Ortega, who, “in the spirit of Roberto Maestas,” capped her passionate panegyric with a few fist-pumping rounds of “Viva Mike McGinn!” Rep. Kip Tokuda, fellow co-chair Tony Lee, and Mohammed Yussuf variously echoed the themes she sounded: The mayor listens.

This isn’t a particularly good place to break it up, but it’s as good as it gets from here (and we’re still in the lede!). The support of this community is great for him. Still, I suspect they’d get on the light rail if the event were Downtown. Or on a car if it was further North. Or maybe take a car. Some McGinn supporters drive sometimes.

He didn’t cut social programs during the bust, and now that the money’s rolling back in he’ll expand them (including ours). He gets “tangible results”: rebuilding the seawall, a new basketball stadium, clearing the snow from the streets (a dig at McGinn’s predecessor, Greg Nickels). He got the libraries open on Sundays and a jumbo Families and Education levy passed.

Yay. We’re finally done with the first paragraph. I’ve been nursing a cold today, so I don’t think this will get the metacommentary it deserves. But I’d be missing the reason to write it if I didn’t skip to:

When he enumerated his transportation accomplishments and goals, Mayor post-McSchwinn [?] knew not to mention bikeways to this crowd. Many here still smart at seeing steep Othello Street/Myrtle Place squeezed down to one crowded lane each way for bike lanes that no pedalers [sic] use — while no one thought to include bike lanes when Sound Transit ran rail down wide, level MLK Way.

There were probably political reasons for not mentioning bikes. But honestly, my fat ass has no problem riding those hills, so at least don’t pretend nobody does it. Hell, McGinn probably rode there, so he might have taken those same routes that nobody takes.

Honestly, it’s not a bad rough draft. But it’s not a story yet, Crosscut.

Dear Senators Cantwell and Murray;

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I’m writing today to ask you to oppose John Brennan’s nomination to head the CIA. This country should not put into office someone who helped bring about the torture regime. It’s bad enough that it happened at all. It’s bad enough that it happened in our name. It’s bad enough that that there were no prosecutions above the lowest levels. But for God’s sake, the least the Senate can do is oppose a high level torturer for a job at the CIA.

And look, I know that other than the torture, Brennan is highly qualified. But what a qualifier to have to add! It seems that some things should be off limits.

And yes, I realize this could be a political blow to Obama. I recognize the problems with that, and as someone who supported him, that will be too bad. But he shouldn’t have nominated someone who supported a program that “included slamming detainees’ heads against walls; prolonged standing in stress positions; beating and kicking; prolonged shackling of hands and feet; and much more.”

Thank you,
Carl Ballard

If you want to write Cantwell or Murray an email, the forms are at their names.

Documenting the King Tides

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West Seattle Blog passes this along this Department of Ecology request to help document the high tides in the coming month.

The dates for January’s king tides vary slightly depending on location:

· In the Strait of Juan de Fuca, king tides will occur Jan. 8-13.

· Along Washington’s outer coast, they occur Jan. 10-12.

· The Puget Sound dates for king tides are Jan. 14-17.

Follow these steps to participate:

· Use Ecology’s king tide map and schedule to find when and where the highest tides will occur. Go to http://www.ecy.wa.gov/climatechange/ipa_hightide_map.htm.

· Locate a public beach by checking out Ecology’s Coastal Atlas at https://fortress.wa.gov/ecy/coastalatlas/.

· Take photos during a king tide, preferably where the high water levels can be gauged against familiar landmarks such as sea walls, jetties, bridge supports or buildings.

· Note the date, time and location of your photo – then upload your images on the Washington King Tide Photo Initiative Flickr Group at http://www.flickr.com/groups/1611274@N22/.

· Play it safe! While the winter king tides occur during daylight hours, don’t venture out during severe weather and keep a close eye on rising water levels.

I love the citizen participation aspect of this. Hopefully they get a lot of good data.

The House I’m Destined To Live In

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Mark Kleiman accuses Eugene Jarecki, director of the anti-drug war movie “The House I Live In”, of engaging in some truthiness:

I saw a screening of the anti-incarceration documentary The House I Live In some months ago. The film is right that prisons are horrible places and that we have vastly too many people in them. And it’s right that the “war on drugs” causes untold needless suffering. But the film strongly implies that the mass-incarceration problem consists mostly of non-violent drug dealers serving ludicrously long terms. False.

In fact, only about 20% of U.S. incarceration is on drug charges, and by no means are all of those folks non-violent. That’s still way too many drug prisoners; have drugs-only incarceration rate higher than the total incarceration rate of anyplace we’d like to compare ourselves with. But if we let them tomorrow, we’d still have four times our historical incarceration rate and four times the incarceration rate of any other OECD country, instead of five times.

I haven’t seen the movie yet, so I can’t say for sure that Kleiman is misrepresenting Jarecki’s viewpoint, but his use of “strongly implies” rather than “says” makes me very suspicious that he is. If Jarecki is merely saying that the drug war is primarily responsible for our mass incarceration problems, he’s correct. And Kleiman’s response that only 20% of those incarcerated are there for drug charges misses the bigger picture by a mile.

The most widespread damage done by the drug war isn’t necessarily that low-level drug offenders go to jail for a long time. The damage is done by the downstream effects of having that in your criminal record for the rest of your life. Even if someone arrested for simple drug possession never goes to jail, they often take plea deals that leave them with a criminal record. And that follows them everywhere, making it extremely difficult for many of them to get money for school, get into public housing, or find employment. People caught in this situation often become destined to a life of more serious and more violent crime.

So to imply that 80% of America’s prisoners would still be there regardless of the war on drugs is incredibly off-base. A significant number of those prisoners had their first contact with the criminal justice system as a result of the drug war and – as a result of that contact – were set on a path of likelier criminality. This phenomenon is explained very well by Michelle Alexander in “The New Jim Crow”. And with over 1 million drug arrests occurring annually, we’re putting enormous amounts of Americans down this path, particularly minorities and the poor.

In addition, this analysis doesn’t even take into account the fact that many of the violent offenders in the criminal justice system are there because of the prohibitionist policies that lead to violent confrontations within black markets in the first place. As one of the commenters to the post pointed out, the Global Commission on Drug Policy points out quite simply that “Drug Policy and the incarceration of low-level drug offenders is the primary cause of mass incarceration in the United States.” I have trouble believing that Kleiman would dispute that, but his post “strongly implies” that he does.

Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza!

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Young Turks: Republican Santa?!?

Rappin’ up 2012

Young Turks: Dick Armey’s armed teabagging coup:

Sam Seder on Social Security hater Alan Simpson.

Fiscalcliff-n-Debtceiling:

Thom: The Good, The Bad, and The Very, Very Ugly.

Young Turks: DUI for a dry politician?

Guns, God, Kids, and Schools:

White House: West Wing Week.

How Republicans will raise your milk prices (via Crooks and Liars).
Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

Tim Sheldon is a Fucking Idiot

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I hadn’t read this New York Times piece on the GOP takeover of the Washington State Senate until today. It’s pretty much a standard recap, but I hadn’t heard Tim Sheldon’s view that Jay Inslee doesn’t represent the state.

“Seattle-centric,” said Senator Tim Sheldon, a two-decade veteran lawmaker and Democrat from a district west of Olympia, summing up the combination of forces that alienated him: safe seats in Seattle, campaign money raised in safe seats but spread around, and a caucus that rewards and reinforces the safe-seat equation with powerful leadership posts. “They’re not representative of the state,” he said.

The fact that Gov.-elect Jay Inslee, a former Democratic congressman, will take office in January having won majorities in only eight liberal counties* while losing in the other 31 only bolstered the case for change, said Mr. Sheldon, who said he voted for Mr. Inslee’s opponent, Rob McKenna, the state’s attorney general and a Republican.

He lost the counties 8 to 31, but we don’t vote by county. We have human beings vote. And the human beings pretty easily supported Inslee. To imply that Jay Inslee is less representative of Washington because he didn’t do as well in Adams or Mason counties is the height arrogance.

Those of us who live in Seattle, in addition to funding the schools in Tim Sheldon’s district, in addition to funding social services in his district, have the right to vote. If Tim Sheldon is out of step with the state as a whole when we vote for governor, well, maybe that’s because the state is more Seattle centric than he is.

[Read more…]

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