The blow-up over the Burlington Coat Factory Islamic Center is quite possibly the most impressive display of American ignorance in my lifetime. From the inability to comprehend the actual purpose and location of the project to the completely inaccurate characterizations of the folks behind it, a majority of Americans are now opposing something that just about none of them seem to understand. After years of demanding that moderate Muslims speak out against terrorism, we encounter a moderate Muslim who’s spoken out against terrorism, and promptly call him a terrorist and tell him his religious freedom is conditional. We’ve become a nation that doesn’t deserve the great legacy of religious tolerance we’ve inherited from those before us.

If there’s one underlying truth to this sad episode, it’s that Americans don’t see a distinction between moderate and radical Islam. And I think one of the reasons that many Americans don’t make this distinction relates back to how Islam has grown as a faith in this country. African Americans often converted to the religion in what was seen as an act of defiance against a nation that long didn’t consider them equals. It was the religion of Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan. Throughout the years, Islam has become synonymous with black radicalism. Wealthy and moderate immigrants from places like Jordan, Iran, and Egypt – who co-exist happily with America’s cosmopolitan elite – don’t fit into that stereotype.

Obviously, 9/11 did much more to cement this view in the minds of Americans and broaden it to include more than just black Americans, but also those in the Middle East. And far too many now imagine that Islam is a religion premised upon a defiance of American values. The reality of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf would thoroughly shatter that illusion, so instead Americans end up believing that he’s someone he’s not (with a big assist from media personalities who are trained to never shatter the illusions of those whose comfortable loyalty comprise their ever-precious ratings).

And it’s this phenomenon that explains why a growing number of Americans claim to believe that the President himself is a Muslim. It’s rather obvious that Obama isn’t a Muslim. He doesn’t worship at a mosque or pray to Mecca five times a day. He drinks beer, he eats pork, and he’s certainly not fasting for Ramadan right now. Not to mention that he attended a Christian church in Chicago for most of his adult life. But when you internalize the belief that Islam is a religion based upon rejecting American values, another person’s religion isn’t about what they actually do, it’s about how you perceive their background and their motivations.

UDPATE: Another bizarre perspective on this topic comes from Franklin Graham:

“I think the president’s problem is that he was born a Muslim, his father was a Muslim. The seed of Islam is passed through the father like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother. He was born a Muslim, his father gave him an Islamic name,” Graham told John King. “Now it’s obvious that the president has renounced the prophet Mohammed and he has renounced Islam and he has accepted Jesus Christ. That’s what he says he has done, I cannot say that he hasn’t. So I just have to believe that the president is what he has said.”

…

“Well, you know, you can be born a Muslim, you can be born a Jew, but you can’t be born a Christian,” said Graham.

All day, I’ve been wondering if people with a Jewish father and a Muslim mother are like seedless grapes. And what’s even sadder is that it appears that Franklin Graham believes that you can be born Muslim, but being gay is a choice.

Had I gone through middle school today, rather than during the dark ages of the 1970’s, there’s a good chance I would have been expelled, or quite possibly even imprisoned or institutionalized. Oh, not for anything I actually did, but for what I wrote.

By sixth grade I had left juvenile fiction behind, plunging headlong into the books that lined my parents shelves. I devoured authors and their oeuvres whole, starting with Kurt Vonnegut and moving on to J.P. Dunleavy, Philip Roth, and J.D. Salinger, before an astute clerk at a local bookstore directed me to the short stories of Harlan Ellison and a decade long passion for “speculative fiction.” I’m not sure I understood all of what I read — in fact, from subsequent re-readings, I know I didn’t — but there’s no doubt these authors had a huge impact on me and my writing, especially the numerous short stories I churned out between seventh and ninth grades, most of which remained unread by any eyes but my own.

I’d always had a taste for the absurd and the macabre, and inspired by the likes of Vonnegut and Ellison (not to mention the adolescent hormones running through my veins) my own stories sometimes tended toward the violent and the bizarre. While some stories were more mundane, others dwelled on murder, suicide and meticulously descriptive narrative of gruesome deaths, all juxtaposed against the banal routines of everyday life… in short, the ravings of an obviously disturbed child.

Except, I wasn’t disturbed. At least no more than your typical, suburban 14-year-old. No, in retrospect, what I was engaging in was a healthy cathartic outlet in which I could channel all my frustration, rage, depression, confusion, mania and whatever into brutal but harmless fiction.

But had my stories been discovered by school authorities in today’s paranoid climate — say, the one in which I imagined the intricate, Rube Goldberg-like demise of a hated teacher, or the one in which a seemingly happy and popular student unexpectedly lights fire to the locker room, with the football team locked inside — you can just imagine the response. Good chance the courts would be involved, as would the press, who would surely sensationalize the lucky prevention of another Columbine. Yet all I did — all I ever did — was imagine the worst, and put it down on paper. And in most cases, I wasn’t even imagining myself in the perpetrators’ shoes.

In his collection of short stories titled Shatterday, Ellison rails against the tendency of readers and critics to assume autobiographical hints, explaining that “writers take tours through other people’s lives.” Likewise, it wasn’t me who performed the horrific acts I chronicled, or who even wanted to perform them, it was my characters.

And in Roth’s The Ghost Writer, a character has tacked above his desk Gustave Flaubert’s advice to a young writer: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” This is advice that has stuck with me throughout my adult life, and which has been most fully realized in this blog, much to the consternation and confusion of my trolls and other readers who apparently lack the imagination and/or nuance to distinguish between the writer and his words.

At the time, I shared little of my most violent work, not because I feared how adults might react, but because I rightly feared that it wasn’t very good. (It wasn’t. I stumbled on one of my old notebooks a few years back, and found the stories to be overly ambitious and profoundly derivative.) But it never occurred to me that I might actually get in trouble for something I imagined; in fact I handed in the story about a teacher’s elaborate death to the teacher on which the main character was clearly based, and while he didn’t particularly like it, the only consequence I suffered was a rather middling grade.

Which brings me, convolutely, to the inspiration for this post, the news that Seattle Public Schools has established a new policy in which they can discipline students for content posted to public sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, “even if done at home on their private computers.”

“The safety of our students and the security of our students is our first concern,” said Teresa Wippel with Seattle Public Schools.

Wippel says the Seattle School Board voted yes for the measure so schools can respond to kids who may be planning something on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or by texting that will be disruptive.

But, what exactly is disruptive?

Wippel says, for example, a threat to fight another student after school, or bullying another student would be considered disruptive. But what if it’s a student saying something negative about a teacher? Is that free speech or is that disruptive?

“I think, again, that would be up to the principal to decide after he’s taken a look,” Wippel said.

So… is lovingly describing a teacher’s slow, excruciating death “disruptive”? I guess under the Seattle Schools new policy, that would be up to the principal to decide. In other words, hello Juvenile Detention.

But this new policy offends the child in me at a more fundamental, less paranoid level, for what is being presented as an anti-bullying measure is at it’s heart an assertion that children have no rights — no right to free speech, no right to free expression — even when exercised off campus. And since the determination of what is offensive, inappropriate or disruptive is somewhat subjective, individual principals will surely enforce this policy in a somewhat subjective and arbitrary manner… a particularly disturbing development in a world where so much speech now takes place online.

Take, for example, my own 13-year-old daughter, who has recently become an obsessive writer of fan fiction on a particularly bloody series of Japanese manga. She spends hours upon hours writing and rewriting new chapters before posting her work to FanFiction.net, where she is instantly rewarded with numerous comments and critiques. It is a medium that is as educational as it is gratifying, permitting her to hone her craft via constant and immediate feedback. I wish I had that opportunity when I was her age.

But what if a school official were to stumble upon her work and be shocked or offended by the violence she portrays, or the foul language that is common in the genre but totally inappropriate at school? What if the principal discovered that other students were joining in, writing reviews of my daughter’s fan fiction, and adding equally violent and foul-mouthed chapters of their own? What if the principal feared this activity was disruptive?

Fan fiction, like blogging, is an online, participatory medium… one in which you cannot engage without making your writing public. Surely I cannot warn my daughter to think twice before posting, out of fear of how teachers and principals might overreact, for how can any artist learn her craft while constantly looking over her shoulders? Of course, she can’t.

But that is the message the Seattle School Board is sending to all its students in enunciating its new, intrusive policy. It is one thing to develop policies to patrol and discourage bullying, but nobody benefits when these same policies are inevitably used to discourage free expression.

Yes, I know, the Supreme Court has repeatedly weighed in on this issue and determined that minors do not enjoy the free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment, and that yes, School officials can discipline students for expression that occurs off campus. But that doesn’t mean they should.

I’ve got an appointment this morning (apparently, it takes both parents these days, in person, to renew your child’s passport), so don’t expect much from me until after noon. So in the meanwhile, here’s your daily Daily Show.

Responding to an email query, King County Elections Communications Director Kim van Ekstrom reports that 9,300 new ballots were received at their Tukwila headquarters today, but only about 1,900 had postmarks that indicated they were mailed on time.

That strikes me as a pretty big number of late postmarks, and while they won’t be counted in the final results, they are useful when considering turnout as a reflection on voter enthusiasm, which looks to have been not all that bad. In fact, in both percentage and raw numbers, this primary looks to be second in turnout only to the 2004 primary, at least over the 12 years for which the county provides data online.

As for who is turning out in King County, it’s hard to say, but given the numbers in Eastside legislative races, it certainly looks to be skewing a bit more Republican than it has in recent years. That said, the best apples-to-apples comparison I can think of is 2008’s top two primary, which had only slightly lower turnout numbers, and in which Gov. Gregoire led Dino Rossi 60 to 31 percent. Patty Murray currently leads Rossi here 58 to 28 percent.

Gregoire went on to beat Rossi in November by a 64 to 36 point margin amongst King County voters. Make of that what you will.

Given the proper motivation — and I guess, lack of moral compass — I’ve always felt that I’d make an excellent terrorist. I’m both devious and technically minded, giving me the skills to mastermind an audacious attack, and have a flair for the dramatic that would surely be useful in extracting the maximum emotional impact.

Just call me by my new nom de guerre: Goldy al-Ḩmār.

And so in the spirit of computer hackers who expose security flaws in an effort to make our devices and networks more secure, I’ve decided to offer my own services to the Transportation Security Administration, free of charge, in an effort to make air travel as absolutely risk free as humanly possible. I mean, clearly, if the imminent threat of terrorist attack is so great that we must now irradiate our children before allowing them to board a flight, then TSA can surely use all the help it can get.

Remember, the goal here is to eliminate all risk, no matter how improbable, and no matter how expensive, inconvenient or irradiating the means. With that in mind, my first tip to TSA is:

Eliminate Web Check-In.

Web check-in, in which you check in and print your boarding pass from home, has proven a huge convenience and time saver for tens of millions of passengers, not to mention a big money saver for the airlines. But it’s another 9/11 just waiting to happen.

Assume for a moment that the TSA’s limit on liquids, gels and aerosols is based on legitimate security concerns rather than pure fantasy. Currently, such substances must be in containers no larger than 3.4 ounces, and all such containers must fit in a single, one-quart, zip-locked bag per passenger. Now assume that the TSA is actually capable of scanning for such substances, rather than like, say, when I recently returned from Vegas and forgot to remove the very visible 750 ml bottle of water from the mesh enclosure on the outside of my backpack, only to have it pass through the x-ray machine without comment.

Well, assuming liquids are potentially dangerous, and assuming TSA is capable of consistently screening them out, web check-in creates the opportunity for a team of terrorists to individually carry through security, and combine on the other side, dozens of 3.4 ounce bottles of liquid explosive… without even buying tickets for each member of the cell!

See, TSA doesn’t actually scan the bar code on your boarding pass like they do before you board the flight, they just look to see if it’s for today, and whether the name matches the name on your ID. So all an enterprising group of liquid bombers has to do is print one boarding pass, capture the image, and photoshop it to create and print additional boarding passes for each member of the cell. No cost, and no need to tip off authorities that a bunch of people with dangerous sounding names are all traveling from the same airport on the same day.

And secreting through security large quantities of liquid (or individually innocuous looking parts for some easily assembled weapon) is just one of the many nefarious things a terrorist might achieve via the fake boarding pass scam. For example, a terrorist on the watch list could simply purchase a ticket in somebody else’s name, and then photoshop the name on the boarding pass to match his own ID; the airlines and TSA would have no idea that this terrorist was even flying!

So while web check-in may be a welcome time and money saving convenience, as long as there’s even a vague risk of it being used as part of a terrorist plot, TSA has no choice but to shut it down and go back to the old system where we all waited in line for hours to check in.

For if Goldy al-Ḩmār can imagine it, so too can the real terrorists. And can we ever be too safe?

I’ll be on KUOW’s The Conservation today at about 12:40 PM to discuss the installation of pointless, stupid, dangerous full-body scanners at Sea-Tac… and I’ll do my best not swear on air.

You know in the end why Newscorp felt so comfortable giving $1 million to the Republican Governors Association… why it felt such an unprecedented political contribution would have absolutely no impact on the credibility of FOX News? Because it’s never really cared about the credibility of FOX News, and it knows that neither do most of its viewers. And that, above all, is what has freed FOX News to become so successful.

While traditionalists fret about the decline of objective journalism, Rupert Murdoch long ago had the insight that objective journalism never really existed — that it could not exist — and that fairness and balance is not the responsibility of the individual news outlet, but of the entire news media as a whole. So while most of his competitors squeezed their eyes closed real tight and wished and wished for the news industry to be what they hoped it be, Murdoch went out and kicked their ass by producing products designed to exploit the way the industry really is.

I mean, honestly… do you really believe that FOX News executives really believe that their network is “Fair and Balanced,” or did they specifically choose that motto as a playground taunt to their stodgier, holier-than-thou competition?

So laugh or cry or scream or whatever at the blatant hypocrisy of Newscorp’s million dollar contribution to the Republican Party, but as long as we continue to pretend that we can do something about it, Murdoch and his minions will continue to kick our collective ass. For while there is still a place for traditional journalism, it is time to admit that FOX News is not the exception, but the rule. This is the way the game is played, and FOX deserves credit for playing it better than the rest of us.

Bravo, Rupert. And game on.

Jesus Fucking Christ…

Sea-Tac International Airport passengers will soon begin undergoing full-body scans as the federal government installs equipment that will help identify terrorist threats but poses concerns about privacy, health risks and longer waits in security lines.

[…] The scans, which effectively allow agents to see through clothes by scattering low-dose X-rays at a passenger’s front and back, produce a blurry nude image that can be screened for nonmetallic items such as weapons and explosives hidden under clothes.

[…] To quell privacy concerns, TSA is making the screening optional, has agreed not to store the images, and has set up a system so the pictures are viewed by a screener in another location where passengers can’t be seen in person.

“Every passenger has the option to refuse to go through these,” and walk through a metal detector instead, Baird said. Those who do will be subject to a pat-down, a procedure that takes extra time, but one that privacy experts recommend for those who feel uncomfortable.

Well… fuck that!

I, for one, will refuse to allow my daughter through one of those scanners, and will refuse to walk through one myself. I’ll see how intrusive the pat downs turn out to be, but if they are, I guess I’ll just no longer fly out of Sea-Tac. Flying will just have to be a once every several year experience for me, if at all.

I mean, honestly… would you trust TSA to bombard you or a loved one with ionizing radiation? And when some enterprising terrorist responds by boarding a plane with a stick of dynamite up his ass, what’s next? Cavity searches?

This stupid, fucking, pointless security theater has gone too far; we should’ve drawn the line years ago at the no-liquids bullshit, but I’m certainly drawing it at TSA rent-a-cops irradiating my flesh. Not gonna happen. No way. Never.

I’m almost tempted to bring down an airplane myself, just to prove a point.

King County Elections reports that it received 95,000 ballots this morning at its Tukwila headquarters, the largest single day of ballot returns so far this primary election.

“It was exciting to see so many ballots arrive today,” said Sherril Huff, Elections Director. “Typically Election Day is associated with the highest number of ballot arrivals. We’re processing the ballots as quickly as possible, and expect to include an additional 40,000 in the results report today.”

One of the data points I’m most interested in from this primary is the relative turnout from various regions of the state. Because the two parties have become so dramatically regionalized, I’m curious to see whether the so-called “enthusiasm gap” would result in significantly lower turnout in overwhelmingly blue King County than in its overwhelmingly red counterparts. And last night’s results would initially suggest this to be the case.

But due to obvious logistical reasons, the big, Democratic leaning counties tend to report their results slower than the rest of the state, explaining the oft seen phenomenon in which Democrats tend to pick up support as the vote drags on and Democratic precincts make up a larger and larger percentage of the daily ballot dumps.

For example, last night King County reported 243,755 ballots counted out of 1,074,731 registered voters, for a voter turnout of only 22.68%, compared to about 29% for the rest of the state. But add today’s 95,000 new ballots to the estimated 55,000 ballots left uncounted last night, and King County’s turnout rises to a respectable 37% with likely tens of thousands more ballots still in the mail. Indeed, just last Friday Huff projected a rather optimistic final turnout of 495,000 ballots, or roughly 45 percent. We’ll see.

Apart from simply gaging voter enthusiasm, or rather, its impact on voter turnout, the large number of ballots outstanding in King, Snohomish, Kitsap, Thurston and other counties where Patty Murray outperformed her current statewide average suggests that her percentage of the total vote will likely rise a bit over the coming days, painting a somewhat rosier picture for November… that is, if you believe these primary results to be the least bit predictive. Again, we’ll see.

UPDATE:
King County Elections just updated its results, adding 42,375 ballots to the count, with another estimate 107,000 ballots remaining. Interestingly both Patty Murray and Clint Didier did slightly better in today’s batch of ballots than in last night’s reported results, while Dino Rossi performed slightly worse. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues.

And FYI, Murray has climbed from 44% of last nights early results to about 46.7% this afternoon, while Rossi has fallen from 38% to 33.5%. Interesting, though not necessarily meaningful.

It often seems the surest path to winning a seat on the Washington State Supreme Court is to have the last name “Johnson.” So I wonder if instead of Stan Rumbaugh we had run, say, John Thomas, we might’ve had a better chance of removing that dick Jim Johnson from the bench?

As Joel Connelly reported yesterday, Dino Rossi is a big proponent of extending the budget-busting Bush tax cuts:

Rossi argued that 2 1/2 million people in Washington benefit from the 2001 Bush tax cuts, the extension of which will be a major issue in Congress this fall.

Rossi described as “this class warfare program” the Obama administration’s plan to extend the cuts enjoyed by middle-income taxpayers, while repealing tax cuts for high-income households.

Huh. I’m not sure what’s more distorted, Rossi’s view of the lifestyle of your average Washingtonian or Rossi’s definition of “class warfare”…?  As Think Progress explains:

There are about 6.7 million people in Washington state, so for Rossi’s number to be accurate, he’s either claiming that Obama and Murray want to raise taxes on people that they don’t, or he is claiming that more than one-third of the state’s population is making more than $200,000 per year. According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, there are 105,209 households in the state that would be affected by the expiration of the Bush tax cuts (or about 1.6 percent of the total population). So Rossi inflated his state’s wealthy population by 24 times. Also, as The Wonk Room explains, Rossi’s push to extend the tax cuts for the rich would definitely help one Washingtonian: Dino Rossi.

I guess when you pretty much only hang out with folks making over $200,000 a year, $200,000 doesn’t seem like all that much.

I’d like to propose a compromise in what FOX News tells us is the most important issue facing America today: Muslims can build a mosque just a few blocks from the World Trade Center, if we can build a Burlington Coat Factory Outlet in Mecca. Agreed?

What with our lack of both party ID and a statistically useful track record with the top-two format, the only thing we really learned from yesterday’s primary election was who made it through to the November general. But since I’m one of those bullshit pundits of sorts, who folks come to the morning after for bullshit punditry, I’ll do my best to oblige.

U.S. Senate race surprises analysts by producing no surprises
Had either Democratic incumbent Sen. Patty Murray or her Republican real estate speculator challenger Dino Rossi scored five or more points higher or lower than either one did, it might really tell us something about what to expect in November. But at roughly 46-34 in a 15 person race… not so much.

Would Murray have liked to have topped 50 percent? Sure. Would Rossi have liked to have garnered at least half the number of raw votes he tallied in his 2008 gubernatorial primary? You betcha. Both numbers will rise as the ballots are tallied and the big counties catch up with the rest of the state, but neither really tells us anything we didn’t already know heading into Tuesday.

Coffee-swilling Washingtonians brew weak tea
For all the huff and puff of our state’s teabaggers, they sure as hell didn’t blow my house down with their candidates’ performance in Tuesday’s primary. Clint Didier looks like he’ll break double digits in the final tally, but with all the Palin winks and free press he got, that’s not saying much. And while he did well in Benton and Franklin counties, there just aren’t that many people there, while he couldn’t even carry his home county of Kittitas.

Meanwhile down in WA-03, teabagger favorite David Castillo, who many had predicted to shock establishment GOPers by sneaking into the top-two, looks to finish a disappointing fourth behind two other Republicans. I mean, what’s up with that?

Let’s just say, except for the comparable size of our respectively immense, illicit pot-growing industries, Washington is no Kentucky.

Our regions voters are out of touch with the Seattle Times editorial board
In a bold and surprising move, the Seattle Times endorsed Democrats Suzan DelBene and Tim Dillon in the WA-08 primary, abandoning former ed board heart throb, Republican Rep. Dave Reichert. And while absolutely nobody is surprised to see Reichert and DelBene face off in November — they were the only serious candidates in the race from an organizational and fundraising perspective — it was kinda amusing to see Dillon come in fifth, behind some guy named Tom Cramer and the very, very, crazy teabagger, Ernest Huber.

What were voters thinking to diss a candidate the Times lauded as… um… not as unstudied or unacceptable as Reichert?

Or, I guess the real question is, if they believe Reichert is so undeserving of reelection, why didn’t the Times just give their sole endorsement to DelBene, who they surely knew would be his November opponent? Huh.

Roaches check in but they don’t check out?
A collective groan arose from the state’s political press corps last night, as early results suggested that gun-toting, flower-speechifying, blog-foddering Republican State Sen. Pam Roach may actually find herself in serious trouble this November. It’s not just that she only scored 40% of the vote, but that it looks like her top-two opponent is going to be a fellow Republican. Ouch.

Olympia without Pam Roach would be like the Asylum of Charenton without the Marquis de Sade. (Or some other, less literary analogy.) Say it ain’t so!

Meanwhile, a bit of irony elsewhere in the 31st LD, where Roach’s son, State Rep. Dan Roach, and Pierce County Councilman Shawn Bunney had a gentleman’s agreement to swap offices. (Word is that, underpaid at his wife’s gym, Roach needed the money that comes with the more lucrative council seat, while Bunney, apparently having never visited the place, longed for the glamor and excitement of the State House.) Well, the best laid plans and all that, because Bunney currently finds himself in third place, behind fellow Republican Cathy Dahlquist and fellow Democrat Peggy Levesque.

However, should Bunney manage to hop Levesque in the final tally, 31st LD voters won’t see any Democrats in any of their three legislative races in November. (And no, I haven’t forgotten about Rep. Chris Hurst.)

Checking the latest election results from the Secretary of State’s website, I find that it’s not only down, but apparently has been since August 19, 2008. Huh. Maybe that’s why they call it the SOS?

Anyway, last time I saw, Patty Murray was winning with about 48% of the vote or something, which is about where I expected her to be. Meanwhile, Tea Party wunderkind Clint Didier is having trouble breaking into double digits. Ooh… I’m scared. And Dino Rossi? Whatever.

UPDATE… Color me Didier:
Apparently, not only is the SOS running their website off an old TRS-80, but due to budget cuts, they can only afford two colors on their county maps. So while you wouldn’t know it by looking at the top of the page, Didier has actually won at least two counties, Benton and Franklin. Yeah for him!

UPDATE… Gruber Wins!
Huge upset brewing in Snohomish County: