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In what may be a sign of End Times, Democrats and Republicans will commingle at tonight’s State of the Union address by President Obama. So please join us tonight as we prepare for the Rapture with an evening of politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. We meet at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E.. We normally begin at 8:00 pm, but show up at 6:00 this evening to catch the whole SOTU.

I heard that Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-ME) will sit with Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME). I’m hoping that Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA-01) will sit with Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC-02) to offer him assistance with any impulse control issues that might arise…. It is just a vicious rumor that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) will be with Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA-04). But I know Graham isn’t that type. I mean, he’ll sit with another Senator.

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY-09) will sit with Rep. Peter King (R-NY-03), apparently in pursuit of some sort of cold war-style mutual restraint:

Not in Seattle? There is a good chance you live near one of the 209 other chapters of Drinking Liberally.

More on Slog….

Anyone notice that Cynical hasn’t been hanging around in the comment threads lately, relentlessly flogging Rasmussen’s presidential approval poll numbers? Hmm… I wonder why?

Of course, most of the fluctuation in Obama’s approval rating has come at the hands of independents, which is in itself a sad commentary on the state of American politics. These independents are the ones politicians have to appeal to in order to win elections… you know, the exact same voters who can’t seem to make up their fucking minds. That explains a lot.

In reading the New York Times coverage of today’s tragic bombing at a Moscow airport, I found the summation by former Department of Homeland Security official Stephen A. Baker to be rather curious:

“They’d like to be bombing planes and they can’t, so they’re bombing airports,” he said, adding that the attack “validates the focus that the U.S. has had on security at airports.”

Um… really? And how exactly would our focus on airport security have stopped a determined suicide bomber like the one who struck in Moscow today? As I wrote back in December:

In fact, if I were a dedicated suicide bomber (and just to be clear to federal authorities, I’m not), I’d pack a rolling, carry-on suitcase with as much explosives as possible, pick the busiest time of the day, wheel it through the snaking security line until I was in the very middle of the crowd, and then… BOOM!

Depending on the sophistication of the device, such an attack would kill and injure dozens, possibly hundreds, and achieve the same catastrophic impact on the airline industry without having to devise a way to sneak a weapon through security. And since the target is created by the screening process itself, such attacks would be virtually unstoppable, as any attempt to expand the security perimeter would merely create more targets.

I wasn’t prescient at all. Just stating the obvious.

As a 13-year-old visiting London in 1976, during the height of the IRA’s bombing campaigns, I was somewhat amused by the repeated announcements at Heathrow Airport that unattended baggage would be “removed and destroyed.” Less amusing were the armed soldiers who patrolled the halls, a sight that seemed incredibly incongruent to a sheltered, American suburbanite. But suicide bombings were not the IRA’s schtick, and so heightened security and vigilance had obvious rewards.

But in the age of the suicide bomber, not quite so much. There’s simply no practical way to screen passengers and their suitcases prior to arriving at the airport, and as today’s Moscow bombing illustrates, no amount of TSA screening can protect the crowds amassed outside the security perimeter. So if anything, I’d say today’s tragedy invalidates our focus on patting down 13-year-old girls… unless, of course, TSA’s real mandate is to protect the airplanes, not necessarily the people flying on them.

In an editorial entitled “A Cheech and Chong ‘medical’ marijuana bill“, the Tacoma News-Tribune’s Patrick O’Callahan goes after the medical marijuana bill introduced by Senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles and discussed last Thursday at the Capitol. O’Callahan’s editorial is fairly typical of the snide, dismissive editorializing that remains standard within many of our nation’s newspapers, but in the off-chance that anyone is taking this pile of nonsense seriously, I’d like to break it down and provide an informed perspective:

It must have taken some doing, but advocates of “medical” marijuana have come up with a bill that would actually invite more abuse of the drug than straightforward legalization.

Right away, O’Callahan starts with a mistaken premise. By assuming that even straightforward legalization “invites more abuse” of the drug, he ignores a significant amount of research showing that drug laws themselves have no demonstrable bearing on the amount of drug abuse a society encounters. And as has been pointed out numerous times over the years, the amount of marijuana use in Holland, a nation which has tolerated sales of marijuana in coffeeshops for over 35 years, has less marijuana use than the United States, where we arrest over 750,000 people per year just for possessing it.

Even worse, his editorial never fully explains how he came to this conclusion. He’s just spit-balling criticisms, hoping they’ll stick.

The “medical” belongs in quotation marks here, because the measure in Olympia would junk a key rule designed to prevent common drug seekers from getting marijuana on medical pretenses. And once recreational users or addicts got their pseudo-medical authorizations to use the drug, they’d enjoy more privileges than simple legalization would give them.

O’Callahan never specifies what the “key rule” is, so I can only guess at what he’s referring to. But in looking at the bill, and knowing how the system currently works, I can’t imagine any way in which it gets any easier or harder for someone to get a medical marijuana authorization under this bill. My best guess is that he’s referring to the removal of language that specified that a condition couldn’t be alleviated by other medicines in order for the authorization to hold up in court. But that never made a difference to doctors, only judges and prosecutors. And the language was removed precisely for that reason. A judge – or any other government employee – is not your doctor, and shouldn’t be in a position to second-guess doctors over what medicines you should be taking.

They’d be protected, for example, if ex-spouses objected to leaving children in their care; judges would not be permitted to consider marijuana use as a factor in custody arrangements except in extreme cases involving “long-term impairment” – whatever that means.

What that means is that if you get cancer and your doctor authorizes you to use marijuana to deal with the nausea you experience as you go through chemotherapy, your ex-wife or ex-husband can’t use that to prevent you from seeing your kids. That’s just one example, but there are many others that warrant this provision in the bill. If a parent is irresponsible or incapable of being a parent, that’s one thing. But the reality of medical marijuana is that most of the people who use it lead very normal lives and can function perfectly well as parents. They don’t get “high” from the drug and act loopy all day. In fact, if you want to see a good profile of a parent who uses medical marijuana, watch the CNBC documentary “Marijuana Inc”, where they interview a patient’s two sons who tell the reporter that medical marijuana “gave them their father back” because it allowed him to deal with his pain and lead a normal life. If you think that someone like that should be prevented from seeing his kids, your moral compass isn’t pointing north.

The bill would bring down the hammer of discrimination law on companies with anti-drug policies. Employers who refused to hire or employ marijuana users – the drug stays in the body long after use – could be investigated and sanctioned by the state Human Rights Commission.

As I mentioned after the hearing, this is one area where it’s possible the language of the bill will have to be reworked to be compatible with existing anti-discrimination rules (I’m far from an expert on that). But the intent of the clause is clear. Unless a job entails public safety, you shouldn’t be allowed to discriminate against someone simply because they’re authorized to use medical marijuana. Of course, if that person is not capable of doing their job because of their medical marijuana use, then companies should be free to either fire them or not hire them in the first place. Getting the proper balance here is difficult, but I thought this bill did a good job trying to find it.

That’s just scratching the surface of this amazing piece of legislation. It would also legalize large-scale commercial marijuana grow operations and wholesaling – no specified limits on quantity. Cities and counties would not be permitted to ban grow operations in their jurisdictions; the measure leaves all control over licensing to the state.

Oddly, this is the exact opposite criticism of Proposition 19, California’s initiative to fully legalize marijuana production. Proposition 19 left this up to the individual counties and cities, and the criticism was “Oh my god! This will create a patchwork of different laws across the state!” In this bill, we have one law for the state, and the criticism now is that cities and counties have no control. Huh? Not to mention that O’Callahan leaves out the fact that under this bill, cities and counties can use zoning laws to ensure that a production facility can only be located in an industrial or commercial area.

Growing, processing and selling could be conducted in secrecy. Call this one the Home-Buyer’s-Surprise Provision.

This is really the dumbest thing in the entire editorial. The reason that this bill is being introduced is precisely because the “growing, processing and selling” is “conducted in secrecy”. By licensing and regulating both growers and dispensaries, you take this industry out of the shadows and allow the cities and counties to establish the proper location for these activities to take place. This bill fixes the problem of having large numbers of grow operations hidden in people’s basements. The fact that O’Callahan thinks that this bill would cause that is the clearest indication that he doesn’t have the foggiest idea what the hell he’s talking about.

There’s more: Police officers would have to check state databases for medical marijuana licenses before responding on probable cause to “cannabis-related incidents” (also known, under federal law, as “crimes”).

I’m having trouble not getting too snarky about this, but this attitude is extraordinary and O’Callahan’s lack of understanding of the law is terrifying. For starters, our local police aren’t supposed to be enforcing federal laws, so the fact that marijuana is illegal under federal law is irrelevant to any law enforcement official in this state. Second, asking that a police officer check a database – before bursting into someone’s home with weapons – to see if the person they’re about to invade might be a law-abiding citizen is not unreasonable. In fact, it should be considered a very basic part of a police officer’s job.

Individual officers could be personally fined or sued for failure to do so. There’s no obvious reason this wouldn’t apply to, say, a cop who spots dope and money changing hands in a dark alley. Odd: The law doesn’t paint a legal bull’s-eye on officers for responding to “alcohol-related incidents.”

As far as I can tell, this is completely untrue. If a police officer sees a transaction between two people in a dark alley, the officer should be able to respond exactly the same way whether it’s alcohol or medical marijuana being purchased. Those transactions should not be occurring outside of licensed establishments.

The bill, sponsored by state Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles, has been touted as a “clarification” of the legal status of the illegal marijuana dispensaries that Washington cities and counties – including Tacoma – have begun to tolerate.

The measure’s actual reach is far, far more sweeping; it amounts to legalization with privileges.

Again, O’Callahan says this but doesn’t provide any actual evidence to back it up. This bill does not change – in any way – the process by which an individual with one of the qualifying conditions goes to a doctor and gets an authorization. Recreational use is still illegal. The result of this bill won’t be an increase in the amount of medical marijuana users, it will be a better system for ensuring that those individuals can have a safe place to obtain it.

To legitimize the dispensaries, the logical first step would be to impose genuine medical-pharmaceutical rigor on the authorizations that allow people to acquire “medicinal” pot in the first place.

And that would be a wonderful thing that just about every medical marijuana patient would welcome, but sadly the Federal Government makes this impossible so long as marijuana is considered a Schedule I drug.

As things stand, a handful of clinics – often fly-by-night operations – do brief, assembly-line-style “exams” of marijuana seekers and churn out authorizations like factories. They rubber-stamp the documents – often for about $200 a pop – for users with nebulous complaints of “intractable pain.” These mills have been transforming who knows how many garden-variety marijuana smokers into “patients.”

The law permits little effective regulation, and no one has ever been sanctioned for over-authorizing marijuana. The lack of controls blurs the line between legitimate providers and money-hungry enablers.

I have no doubt that this happens. And I have no problem with medical boards coming down on doctors who do it. But this phenomenon has minimal effect on anyone. In some ways, it’s better that recreational users become medical users because then the money they spend on marijuana is more likely to go to a local business rather than a criminal organization. That’s why over half the people in Washington state just want it legalized for both medical and recreational use. But until that point, you’ll likely always find some subset of the medical profession who decide that money is more important than their integrity. Just like journalism.

Instead of tightening the process, Kohl-Welles’ bill would actually loosen it. Under the existing law – an initiative approved by the voters – marijuana is largely treated as a last resort to be used only when legal, conventional treatments and FDA-approved medications fail. Her measure would let it be used as a first resort.

As I mentioned above, this language was taken out because it was putting judges in a position to make medical determinations for the folks in their courtrooms. It’s odd that in a world where we’re so easily terrified of “death panels” and “government getting inbetween you and your doctor”, a newspaper is actually editorializing in favor of giving the government the ability to send you to jail for a health decision that you and your doctor agree upon. That’s stunning.

With this in place, any drug abuser who didn’t get his get-out-of-jail-free card would deserve to be arrested for sheer stupidity.

This is even more stunning. Regardless of how one feels about the language of the bill, believing that “drug abusers” belong in jail is a sign of complete moral bankruptcy. Hardly anyone in our society still believes that the proper way to deal with a drug addict is to send them to prison. Even worse, that’s still quite separate from the reality here. The vast majority of both medical and recreational marijuana users aren’t “abusers”. They aren’t destroying their lives with it. But to believe that the few who do abuse the drug will turn their life around if you send them to jail is beyond stupid. Seeing something that dumb in an editorial from one of the state’s largest newspapers is quite remarkable.

Words fail. This bill could have been written by Cheech and Chong 30 tokes past midnight. Any lawmaker inclined to support it should make a point of reading it first.

I’m not sure what else there is to say. The sad reality is that people this clueless and blindly ideological are still employed by the major newspapers of this state, even as they’ve been under intense pressure to trim budgets. Like O’Callahan, I strongly encourage every lawmaker to read this bill, and if they have as much trouble as O’Callahan did in understanding it, I’d encourage them to do something he didn’t do: talk to someone who’s actually knowledgeable about medical marijuana and the history of how the law has worked in this state.

UDPATE: I was just sent this clarification to the “long-term impairment” part of O’Callahan’s editorial over email:

[T]he “long-term impairment” that confuses Mr. O’Callahan is exactly the same “long-term impairment” already described in the statutory provision allowing judges to preclude or limit visitation based on a parent’s struggles with “drug, alcohol, or substance abuse,” RCW 26.09.191(3)(c). Family law judges and attorneys are quite familiar with it.

Last week’s post was won by wes.in.wa. It was in Olympia.

This week’s is (loosely) related to something in the news from January. Good luck!

Isaiah 45:7
I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.

Discuss.

– I’m not sure it’s possible to exaggerate the differences that would exist if Gulet Mohamed and Jared Loughner were in each other’s respective situations. If Congresswoman Giffords and 18 others had been shot by a Muslim-American like Mohamed, all of the people who are falling over each other trying to absolve the paranoid and eliminationist right of any responsibility would be screaming bloody murder about how the entire Muslim world was responsible. And if a white American like Loughner were held by the FBI after visiting relatives in Europe, tortured, put on a no-fly list and prevented from returning to his desperate and anxious family (with no evidence that he’d committed any type of crime), there would be a bi-partisan consensus demanding that Obama step down over it.

– Last night on Real Time with Bill Maher, Stephen Moore humiliated himself more than anyone I’ve seen since Michael Steele did (right before he became RNC Chairman). It got so bad, he was trying to act surprised when others were pointing out to him that mandates were a Republican idea.

– One of the most horrific domestic drug war tragedies of the past few years will be in the spotlight again next week. Cheye Calvo, the mayor of Berwyn Heights, MD, is suing Prince George County over the 2008 drug raid where he and his family were mistakenly targeted by a SWAT team that also shot their two dogs.

– A more recent drug war tragedy comes from Utah, where the police video has been released of a SWAT team executing a 45-year-old man as they stormed his home.

– Video of Thursday’s testimony from Olympia on the medical marijuana bill SB 5073 can be seen here on TVW. Most of the testimony against the bill was fairly unconvincing with the exception of some testimony explaining that the workplace discrimination protections may not viable. This is a tricky issue to get right. It’s difficult to balance the need for any employer to fire an individual who is impaired at work and incapable of performing their duties with the need to protect individuals who use medical marijuana outside of work, are fully capable of doing their jobs, but who test positive in a drug screening.

Anybody who says that media consolidation isn’t the greatest threat to our democracy, is either a liar, a fool… or somebody who wants a career in media.

Phil Mocek was acquitted today by a New Mexico jury after he was arrested in 2009 for refusing to show ID to TSA at the Albuquerque airport. I’ve known Phil for a couple of years, and I have to admit, when I first heard about what happened to him, I thought it was a strange point to take a stand on. But he was right. TSA doesn’t have the right to force you to show ID in order to travel within the United States. And as a quick note to all the Tea Partiers screaming about death panels and the socialist tyranny that exists only in their imagination, this is what it looks like when a citizen truly believes in limited government – and is brave enough to stand firmly on the front lines.

Following up on Carl’s post yesterday, calling for a downtown legislative district, I’d like to join him in raising my voice in favor of also changing the way Seattle elects city council members.

Right now, all nine city council members are elected at-large, running in, and allegedly representing, the city as a whole, the result being, as Carl points out, that we are all represented by “everyone and no one.” It has also resulted in a relative lack of diversity on the council, not just in terms of race and gender, but in style and ideology. Combine the at-large system with the contrived way in which challengers jockey with each other to face off against the weakest opponents, and we tend to fill the council with citywide compromises.

On the other hand, there are obvious disadvantages to moving to district elections, which might inevitably create rifts in the council along neighborhood lines at the expense of the greater city good. If only there were a system that incorporated the best of both worlds.

Of course, there is, and a lot of other cities use it: a hybrid system in which some council members are elected by district, and others are elected at-large. And that’s exactly what I propose for Seattle in order to elect a council that is both responsive to the divergent needs of its constituent communities, while reflecting the larger needs of the city as a whole.

Specifically, I’d propose electing five council members by districts—central, northeast, northwest, southeast and southwest—and four at large. And if anybody wants to put up the money to put such a charter amendment on the ballot, I’d wager you’d have a damn good chance of getting this passed at the polls.

Future co-worker Lindy West and I sat next to each other at the judges table at last night’s Chocolate for Choice, and I couldn’t help but notice a disparity in our name tags. Lindy, by virtue of her tenure at The Stranger, is identified as a “journalist,” whereas me… well… they weren’t sure how to describe what I do (Blogger…? Writer…? Crackpot…?), so they just left it blank.

But soon, thanks to the magical, instant credibility of a newspaper masthead, I can only assume that I will be a real journalist too!

My mother will be so proud (though not as proud as if I were a real lawyer, but at her age, you learn to take what little joy from life that you can get.)

Goldy already mentioned that he’s a judge at Chocolate for Choice, the fundraiser for NARAL. It’s a great event for a wonderful organization. But I especially like the list of judges including:

Erica C. Barnett, News Editor at Publicola.net
Riz Rollins, DJ at KEXP
Sally Clark, Seattle City Councilmember
Lindy West, Writer for The Stranger

Name and a job title. Simple. But when it gets to Goldy:

David Goldstein, HorsesAss.org

I would have gone with writer. Or if whoever wrote that was feeling ambitious, publisher. But I guess not. Anyway, come on down and say hi to him and to me (I’ll be paying like the rest of you).

Winston Churchill once quipped that “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried,” and nothing bears that out more than Seattle Public Utilities’ packed workshop at the Rainier Community Center last night, where angry citizens gathered to loudly voice their (sometimes ill-informed) concerns over the North Henderson Combined Sewer Overflow Reduction Project.

That’s right, over sixty citizens gathered on a Wednesday night to debate storm water overflow reduction alternatives, a heartening and surprising display of grassroots democracy in action. Unfortunately, a handful of attendees quickly disrupted the meeting out of misplaced fear that SPU was intent on seizing their private property (by far the least likely outcome of any project of this sort), and/or in staunch opposition to spending any rate payer dollars to reduce the 100 million gallons of raw sewage contaminated storm water Seattle dumps into its waterways every year. One woman even angrily stormed out of the meeting after being informed that yes, she would be required to pay for this citywide project whether she wanted to or not. Sigh.

I suppose it’s unfair to refer to these angry citizens as “teabaggers,” as I did in a tweet last night, for there didn’t seem to be anything organized or overtly political about their actions. But in their knee-jerk assumption that government was out to get them and their wallets, and in their willingness to disrupt the proceedings for everybody else, in the service of loudly voicing their own personal objections, they sure did appear to embody the spirit of the Tea Party movement.

And, just like the teabaggers, they didn’t seem to want to let any facts get in the way of their outrage. This was the fourth such meeting with SPU I’ve attended in my efforts to help safeguard the interests of tiny Martha Washington Park, and it was more than a little frustrating to waste so much of my time on some angry newcomer yelling about tunneling and soil conditions, when by this point in the process it is already clear that the preferred alternative for North Henderson is unlikely to include any tunnels at all. As for that angry woman and the others who objected that Lake Washington was already “clean enough,” had they bothered to listen to what the SPU reps were telling them, they might have understood that yes, their objections were being heard… but they were objecting to the wrong people. SPU didn’t establish the policy to reduce storm water overflow to one event per year per outlet—the EPA and the state legislature did—and SPU must meet this mandate or risk legal and financial consequences.

I guess the point is, democracy is hard. It’s complicated. It’s messy. It’s inefficient… perhaps, especially at the community level. But it becomes nearly impossible when citizens enter it so profoundly skeptical and distrustful of the democratic process itself.