Archives for 2010

Speaking backstage at the 10,000-strong pro-immigration reform rally in Seattle today, Rep. Jim McDermott puts aside the moral argument for reform, and presents it as a straight-up pocketbook issue:

“People have to understand there is a direct connection between cheap food in this country, and the fact that we have this workers who are coming from other countries.”

Americans spend a smaller percentage of their income on food now than they have at any time in our history, steadily falling from 24.2% of income in 1930 to  9.6% in 2008, and part of what makes our food so cheap is all that cheap immigrant labor. So while I suppose we could, with great effort and expense, seal off our borders and deport millions of immigrant laborers, we all better be ready to give up those 99-cent value menus in return.

I’m at the pro-immigration reform rally in Occidental Park, where thousands of enthusiastic supporters have already gathered in advance of today’s program.

No angry sign-waving white people, so we’ll see if the media gives the rally the coverage it deserves.

I guess this is the kinda thing that many in the teabagger rabble fervently wish for President Obama and the Democratic Congress:

Polish President Lech Kaczynski and some of the country’s highest military and civilian leaders died on Saturday when the presidential plane crashed as it came in for a landing in thick fog in western Russia, killing 96, officials said.

Russian and Polish officials said there were no survivors on the 26-year-old Tupolev, which was taking the president, his wife and staff to events marking the 70th anniversary of the massacre of thousands of Polish officers by Soviet secret police.

The crash devastated the upper echelons of Poland’s political and military establishments. On board were the army chief of staff, national bank president, deputy foreign minister, army chaplain, head of the National Security Office, deputy parliament speaker, civil rights commissioner and at least two presidential aides and three lawmakers, the Polish foreign ministry said.

It’s not hard to imagine the Pat Robertson types celebrating such a tragedy as a vengeful act of God. I wonder if the Polish opposition is as twisted politically as ours is here in the U.S., or if democracy is still so novel and cherished to them that they honor it even in losing?

Washington states scores big:

…from Tacoma.

(And there are some fifty more media clips from the past week in politics at Hominid Views.)

Politifact does a good job knocking down what has become Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske’s most elaborate attempt at drug war propaganda so far. But even so, I think they’ve undersold their argument:

To offer a more concrete example, it’s unclear how much impact a joint of marijuana inhaled two weeks ago may have on a driver today. It could well be that the two-week-old joint is less of an impairment than a legal level of alcohol in the blood — even though the study would count the marijuana user as part of that 16 percent “under the influence of drugs” yet exclude someone with .07 percent alcohol from the 2.2 percent of alcohol-impaired drivers.

A joint that you smoked two weeks ago impairs your driving ability less than the following things:

– Clouds being in the sky
– The radio station playing a crappy song
– A pimple on your ass
– Your lingering suspicions that Rob McKenna really doesn’t have a law degree
– Trying to remember when you last cleaned your cat’s litter box
– The lame sunglasses that you’re afraid to wear in public, but still keep in your car
– Laughing at someone with a Sarah Palin bumper sticker

Yet our Drug Czar continues to count people who simply test positive for marijuana in their system as ‘impaired drivers’. It’s not just a lie, it’s a huge lie, and one that he should be ashamed of saying in front of the mirror at his house, let alone to the country.

[via Pete]

Gary Randall’s Faith and Freedom Network blasted an email to its list yesterday (essentially duplicating the content of this blog post), informing them of an important letter from the very official sounding “American College of Pediatricians”:

Out of concern for the health and well being of all youth, the American College of Pediatricians (ACP) has mailed a letter to the superintendents of all public schools in the country, expressing their concerns.

In the first paragraph of the letter, the ACP states, “We are increasingly concerned, however, that in many cases efforts to help students who exhibit same-sex attractions and/or gender confusion are based on incomplete or inaccurate information.”

They further state that when dealing with adolescents experiencing same-sex attractions, “It is essential to understand there is no scientific evidence that an individual is born ‘gay’ or ‘transgender’, in fact there is evidence that there are multiple factors—primarily social and familial, that predispose a child to homosexual attraction and/or gender confusion.”

The email goes on to guide readers to a new website set up by the ACP, FactsAboutYouth.com, purportedly “created by health professionals to provide policymakers, parents and youth with the most current medical and psychological facts about sexual development.”

So what is the ACP? If we call it astroturfing when a business or other special interest creates a puppet “grassroots” organization in order to create the appearance of popular support, what do we call it when they create a supposedly scholarly or professional organization in order to fake the appearance of expert authority? Ass-troturfing? Well, whatever, that’s what the ACP is.

The American College of Pediatricians was created in 2002 by 60 of the 60,000 members of the 75-year-old American Academy of Pediatrics, in response to the latter organization’s passage of a statement supporting second-parent adoptions by gay and lesbian parents.  In its own published history, the ACP states that it was founded by “a small group of pediatricians who vocally opposed the AAP’s support of homosexual parenting.”

Opposition to homosexual parenting was the guiding principle of the ACP’s founders, a group of self-described “Judeo-Christian, traditional-values” doctors who numbered barely one-tenth of one percent of the AAP’s national membership. But reading their website — or Gary Randall’s email — you’d think the ACP was some sort of respectable, scholarly professional association representing the mainstream of pediatrics rather than only a tiny, reactionary fringe. (You can read more on the ACP and their new website at the excellent Pam’s House Blend.)

How fringe? I was actually sitting in the waiting room of my daughter’s pediatrician yesterday when word of Randall’s email came across my iPhone, so I asked him if he’d every heard of the American College of Pediatricians. Um… “No.”

It is one thing for the Faith and Freedom crowd to push their religious views on their followers, but when they attempt to back it up with fringe science from some official sounding faux medical organization (and I say “faux” because the ACP was founded on religious principles, not medical ones), their misinformation does everybody a great disservice… but especially the unfortunate gay and lesbian teens who are sure to be tortured by parents and teachers following “medical” guidelines that 99.9% of pediatricians officially disavow.

I don’t know what’s normal and regular, but it’s a little disturbing this guy could get out on $20,000 bond, according to the AP. The judge ordered that he would have to be under curfew, and Wilson can’t have his precious guns. It’s something, anyhow.

The government that Wilson seems to hate so much is treating him with a remarkable amount of leeway, given that he apparently wished to assassinate a U.S. Senator. I’m going to put my full faith in the professionals who have made it their careers to protect the public, and figure they know what they’re doing.

One of the more amusing/infuriating moments from last week’s public hearing on the Space Needle’s proposed annexation of the Fun Forest, was the well-heeled supporter who fretted how his wife and young children are afraid to visit the Seattle Center in its current scary state. Really. And this is the kinda suburban dandy who we should be looking to for advice on how to redevelop an urban park at the center of our city?

Indeed, the project’s backers appear to be tremendously out of touch with the wants and needs of the typical Seattle resident, as evidenced by their lack of preparation for (and apparent disbelief of) the overwhelming public opposition their proposal has faced. But why should they be in touch with Seattle residents, when the proposal’s main architects don’t even live in Seattle.

Of course I’m referring to Space Needle Board Chair Jeffrey Wright and Space Needle CEO Ron Sevart, who commute to work from Hunts Point and Issaquah respectively.

Now I don’t expect wealthy, out-of-city purveyors of mushy, $17 crab cakes to fully appreciate the way us common folks use the Seattle Center. But I don’t expect them to deign to tell us what to do with it either.

To add an exclamation point to Jon’s post below:

an·ar·chist –noun

1. a person who advocates or believes in anarchy or anarchism.
2. a person who seeks to overturn by violence all constituted forms and institutions of society and government, with no purpose of establishing any other system of order in the place of that destroyed.
3. a person who promotes disorder or excites revolt against any established rule, law, or custom.

Far be it for me to suggest that the teabaggers’ violent, anti-federalist rhetoric is in any way anarchistic, but it seems downright silly to attempt to lump anarchists in with us liberals and progressives who admittedly seek an expanded role for government in the economic sphere.

Anarchism is not an ism of the modern left. If anything, it is libertarianism taken to its logical extreme.

Ordinarily, I would ignore these yahoos, but in the climate of violence that has emerged in this country you can bet that somewhere, someone on a message board or newspaper thread is trying to make a false equivalence between the “anarchists” that so plague many demonstrations and the insanity of the right. It’s an old rightie trick: take any stupid thing that someone not associated with liberals, progressives or the Democratic Party, and try to make us own it. You know it’s coming.

So for the record, violence is wrong, and your mother probably told you that. And the Beatles sang about carrying pictures of Chairman Mao. And so on. Putting a bandana over your face and hurling rocks at cops and newspaper photographers, or whatever actually happened, is just stupid, pointless mayhem. More seriously, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a highly sophisticated and deeply moral reason for his theories of non-violent change, which anyone can explore using the Tubes of the Internet. It’s not a game, but once you throw a rock or a punch, you’re out. I don’t know how he did it, and every time I go back and re-read some of his works I’m still in awe.

To be fair, there have been some voices from the right denouncing the death threats against politicians and such. I happened to catch talk show host Kirby Wilbur doing so on KIRO-TV the other day, so good on him. I hope he keeps speaking out.

Unfortunately, conservatives in this country have always owned violence, it’s their cultural tradition, not ours. That’s what a lot of people don’t seem to understand about the 1960’s: much of the violence that happened was either state-sponsored violence against its citizens, or was reactionary right-wing violence against social change. Somehow the right has twisted history so that many folks only seem to remember the relatively few loons who tried to build bombs in a brownstone and blew themselves up. If we’re being honest, we do need to remember that the Weather Underground did mount dozens of terrorist attacks, and that while they issued telephoned warnings in an attempt to avoid loss of life, it was still patently insane. My point is that was the end, not the beginning. Americans hated it and hated them.

In any case it’s ironic that the right is now falling victim to the same base tendencies that undid the tattered remnants of the New Left in the early 1970’s. I think it’s a form of political nihilism, as I’ve stated previously. It’s self-indulgent nearly beyond comprehension and offers nothing but destruction, which is one thing it has in common with rock-throwing “anarchists.”

One thing objective observers may note: the Democratic Party doesn’t have a massive communications infrastructure geared at whipping up “anarchists,” nor is the Democratic Party making “anarchists” a centerpiece of the election this year. We don’t have a cable tee-vee network and countless AM radio stations telling everyone how we understand that something made the “anarchists” mad. We aren’t feeding them ridiculous conspiracy theories and telling them that the government is going to kill them and take their most valued possessions.

So honest observers will not accept any false equivalences involving a few “anarchists.”

U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has announced he will retire this summer, giving President Barack Obama his second appointment to our nation’s highest court.

A Republican, appointed by Republican President Gerald Ford, Stevens was originally considered a center-right vote, but with the extreme ideological shift of the court in recent years he has since become the leader of the bench’s “liberal bloc.” In that capacity, the 89-year-old Stevens gamely and nobly survived the Bush administration, saving the appointment of his replacement for a president not seeking to place our Constitution in the hands of a radically partisan, activist court.

In addition to being its liberal leader, Stevens is also the court’s lone W.A.S.P., the other eight justices being Roman Catholics and Jews of varying ethnicities. With that heritage in mind, and with an eye toward diversity, many court observers expect President Obama to appoint another white, Protestant to the “W.A.S.P. seat” on the bench, much like the first President Bush appointed Clarence Thomas to fill the “black seat” vacated by Justice Thurgood Marshall.

UPDATE:
The Republican Senator from Cloud Cuckoo Land chimes in:

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), a member of the committee, issued a statement calling for Obama to avoid “activist judges.”

You mean the kinda “activist judges” that ignore a century of legal precedent on campaign finance? Yeah, well, eat me.

Marijuana growers in Northern California are worried about the legalization initiative passing because it might lower the price of their artificially overpriced commodity.

Must be another one of us violent, extremist liberals, right?

An East Texas man who federal prosecutors allege left explosive devices including pipe bombs in multiple area mail boxes, was motivated in part by anger at the government, Brit Featherston, first assistant U. S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas tells TPMmuckraker in a phone interview.

Perhaps the Palin/Hannity/Teabagger crowd is betting the that the crazies they inspire are just too crazy and/or stupid to successfully carry out one of their domestic terrorist attacks? I sure as hell hope so.

I was reading through the felony complaint filed against Sen. Patty Murray’s would-be assassin, reading the transcript of his threatening phone calls, and the hateful, violent, offensive prose just sounds so familiar… well… I was wondering if anybody here had heard from HA troll “manoftruth” since Charles Alan Wilson’s arrest?

Just curious.