HorsesAss.Org

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Dino Rossi is getting a lot of media mileage out of his “the President wouldn’t be coming here if Patty Murray wasn’t in trouble” meme, mostly because our media is so heavily invested in this being a close race. So it’ll be interesting to see, when Murray ends up winning by about the same margin as Gov. Gregoire did in 2008, how the media ultimately explains her relatively comfortable victory.

What’s also funny about this meme is that you can be damn sure that the President would have been out here campaigning for Rossi, had John McCain won the 2008 presidential election. Only difference is, rather than a public rally of a couple ten thousand all-comers, McCain’s visit would have been just like all the other Beltway and Wall Street insiders who have come out here to campaign for Rossi: a high-donor, carefully screened fundraising event, held exclusively behind closed doors.

I’ve been meaning to get to this topic for a while, but with the G.O.P. currently predicted to take control of the U.S. House, if not the Senate, I plan to join the folks over at Campaign for America’s Future and focus a bit of my energies over the next week or so talking about Social Security… and what the Republicans and their wealthy patrons plan to do to it, should they be given the chance.

Of course, it’s one thing to be against something — like the privatization “reforms” nearly every Republican congressional nominee in Washington supports, even if they refuse to clearly say so on the record — but I thought it best to start out by stating some core principles that I would hope all of the Democratic incumbents and challengers in this year’s election would support:

Social Security has a surplus of $2.6 trillion, which it has loaned to the federal government. Social Security did not cause the federal deficit. Its benefits should not be cut to reduce the deficit.

Social Security, which has stood the test of time, should not be privatized in whole or in part.

Social Security is insurance and should not be means-tested. Because workers pay for it, they should receive it regardless of their income or savings.

Social Security is fully funded for more than 25 years; thereafter it has sufficient funds to meet 75 percent of promised benefits. To reassure Americans that Social Security will be there for them, Congress should act in the coming few years outside the context of deficit reduction to close this funding gap by requiring those who are most able to afford it to pay somewhat more.

Social Security’s retirement age, already scheduled to increase from 65 to 67, should not be raised further. That would be a benefit cut that places the greatest hardship on older Americans who are in physically demanding jobs, or are otherwise unable to find or keep employment.

Social Security, whose average benefit is $13,000 in 2010, provides vital protection against the loss of wages as the result of disability, death, or old age.  Those benefits should not be reduced, including by changes to the cost of living adjustment or the benefit formula.

Social Security’s benefits should be increased for those who are most disadvantaged.  The benefits, which are very important to virtually all workers and their families, are particularly crucial to those who are disadvantaged.

You can read more about these Seven Principles at StrengthenSocialSecurity.org.

Also at the website you will find a list of the 136 members of Congress who have already signed on to the Grijalva-Conyers-Maffei Letter to President Obama, pledging their strong support for the principles above. FYI, Seattle’s own Rep. Jim McDermott is the only Washington state representative to sign the letter thus far.

I hope to change that.

But mostly I plan to use these posts to expose our state’s Republican congressional slate’s plans to undermine and weaken Social Security in the cynical name of “fixing” it.

[Disclosure: Campaign for America’s Future is paying me a small stipend in exchange for cross-posting at their site. But everybody who knows me knows that I only advocate for candidates, campaigns and issues that I believe in.]

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I keep hearing that liberals like me are the real danger to America, yet unlike Republican congressional nominee Stephen Broden (TX-30), I don’t hear anybody on our side threatening to win by violence what they can’t win at the polls. Huh.

During the first two weeks of October, Suzan DelBene invested another $1.35 million of her own money into her 8th CD race, bring her total contributions and loans to $2.4 million. The press may not be paying attention, but she obviously believes she has a shot at knocking off Reichert.

More on Slog.

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Watch the current crop of ads from both Democrats and Republicans alike in Washington state, and you’ll find one thing that nearly all of them have in common: they feature either women, or women’s issues.

That’s because both public and private polls show undecided women representing the most coherent demographic chunk still left up for grabs, and thus the campaigns’ best shot at swinging the race in their direction. And you gotta think that this development favors Democrats.

Why? Because I’m not sure there’s a single Republican congressional candidate in the state with a record of supporting women’s issues; they are all anti-choice, anti-equal-pay, and in many cases even anti-family-planning. It’s actually kinda astonishing how the socially libertarian moderate Republicans have been drummed out of the party over the past couple decades, leaving a crop of candidates behind that would probably have made Ellen Craswell proud.

And when women understand this, they’re more likely to vote Democratic.

Nina Shapiro at the Seattle Weekly writes about Tuesday’s protest in Tacoma over the city’s threat to close down eight medical marijuana dispensaries:

Yesterday’s showdown in Tacoma over the city’s medical marijuana dispensaries all but guarantees that the Legislature will finally attempt to resolve the question of whether such business are–or should be– legal. After the city initially threatened to shut the dispensaries down, it agreed last night to hold off until the end of the coming legislative session. Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles (D-Seattle) has already drafted a bill (see pdf) that proposes legalizing dispensaries. A number of fellow legislators, including a former cop and Republican senator named Jerome Delvin, are working with her. “There’s momentum,” says Kohl-Welles.

At the protest I spoke with an older woman who’s authorized to use marijuana to deal with severe muscle spasms that make it difficult for her to walk. I asked her where she’d be able to get her supply of marijuana if her dispensary were to close. She didn’t have an answer. The reality is that our medical marijuana law doesn’t work unless the law provides a safe and legal place for patients to obtain it. The one-patient-per-provider rule has left numerous patients – especially those who are disabled – from being able to obtain medicine. And the opposition to this obvious change is going to come from the same place once again:

On the other side of the spectrum, Rep. Christopher Hurst (D-Enumcluw) says he believes many legislators will oppose any bill that favors dispensaries. “You only need to look south” to California, he says, to realize that the dispensary business is a “sham,” a “nightmare,” and a “disaster.” Instead of serving people with real medical needs, he contends, California’s ubiquitous dispensaries sell pot “to anyone who walks in the door.” He says that’s why Los Angeles, among other jurisdictions, are currently cracking down on dispensaries, even while a broad pot legalization initiative is on the ballot.

California’s system is constantly held up as an example of how medical marijuana leads to “chaos”, but the only evidence of this is that unscrupulous doctors often authorize recreational users for profit. And even with that, California isn’t negatively affected in any way by its dispensary system. In fact, crime rates continue to drop across the state – to levels far lower than in the years before medical marijuana became legal.

That’s the root of the issue here. The more we legitimize this economic activity and bring it out of the shadows, the less violence there is surrounding it. Mexican drug cartels operate in Washington state. When locally-operated dispensaries are prohibited from forming, that just means more of the money goes towards those less afraid to break the law. Whether Representative Hurst understands it or not, what he’s doing is benefiting these organized crime groups.

It may seem hyperbolic to say that Hurst “stands up for the drug cartels”, but that’s unquestionably what’s occurring here. There’s no other way to characterize his position. The experience in Los Angeles, if anything, is an argument to craft realistic regulations for dispensaries (as Oakland and many other California cities did) rather than to follow Hurst’s lead and pretend everything would be better if they didn’t exist. If Los Angeles had set up a smarter method for licensing dispensaries, they’d have a small number of well-regulated dispensaries (again, like Oakland) rather than hundreds of unregulated ones that they’re now having difficulty shutting down.

Well… um… yeah… this is my idea of flirting.

I’ve always had a thing for potty-mouthed Irish women, so I gotta confess to a kinda schoolboy crush on the BIAW’s profanatory, trash-talking PR maven, Erin Shannon. (Really. So give me a call Erin, and lets hook up sometime for a drink or five. Don’t worry; I’ll drive.)

But when it comes to her politics, Shannon is just plain awful. You know, in that batshit-crazy Hitler-was-the-first-environmentalist/DOE’s-storm-water-regulations-are-worse-than-the-Holocaust sorta way that defines the ideological crack-house that is the BIAW.

The rest of my daily Slog post actually makes a point, but I just so enjoyed dipping Erin’s ponytail in the inkwell, that I just had to repost it over here.

Seattle Times home subscribers found this helpful cheat sheet stuck to the front page of their Sunday edition, but when one of the initiative campaigns the Times opposes called to purchase something similar, they were told no, political advertisers can’t buy these sort of stickers, at any price.

It can only be given. Because ownership has its privileges.

Once again proving my point that it’s not bias that is the problem with modern media, but ownership. For as long as our media continues to be dominated by wealthy corporations and individuals, it will continue to largely reflect and serve their own selfish interests.

No, I didn’t end up going to the Obama rally today, as I just couldn’t give up that many hours of the day, so I can’t share my first hand observations. But Andrew at NPI was live blogging and tweeting it, and from all accounts it was a lively, overflow crowd at the Hec Pavilion. You know…  no sign of an enthusiasm gap, at least here in Seattle.

I’ll look for coverage elsewhere, but if you were there, I’d love to read your personal observations in the comment thread.

The Seattle Times editorial board routinely posts video of its endorsement interviews with political candidates. They posted video of the Patty Murray/Dino Rossi interview, and they recently posted video of the interview with Jay Inslee and his Republican opponent (whose name escapes me at the moment, but is not really worth the effort to Google).

Unfortunately, there were no camera’s present at the recent Suzan DelBene/Dave Reichert interview, which explains the lack of video there, but the Times did record audio, which as far as I know, has never been publicly released. Which is a shame, because I hear that Reichert threw a bit of a fit at the end, pounding his fist on the table when pestered about his unwillingness to debate.

I’m not sure why the Times won’t release this audio, but given that this is the only time during the entire campaign that the two candidates have answered questions face to face, they are surely doing 8th CD voters a disservice by withholding it. And, assuming the audio disproves my assertion that the incumbent is brain-damaged and/or stupid, they are doing Reichert a disservice as well.

I’ll be on KOMO-1000 this morning at about 9:35, talking with John Carlson about my feature in this week’s Stranger on Dave Reichert’s Brain. No doubt John will attempt to defend Reichert.

In the meanwhile, for a second opinion on just how serious a chronic subdural hematoma can be, you might want to check out this recent case study in the New York Times.

The folks at the Stranger have briefly rescued me from the Siberian gulag that is Slog (little known fact: “Slog” is a contraction of “Siberian” and “gulag”), giving me temporary refuge in their print edition. The result: this week’s feature story, “Dave Reichert’s Brain,” in which I take a slightly different whack at the three-term congressman’s head:

Seven years before whacking himself in the head with a tree branch, Dave Reichert was on the fast track to the governor’s mansion.

This was in 2003, nearly two decades since a Republican had occupied the residence, and in the silver-haired sheriff from King County, GOP muckety-mucks were convinced they had found their savior. Brawny and photogenic, with the kind of common-folk touch that could only come from being… well… very, very common, the self-proclaimed made-for-TV “hero” of the Green River Killer case would be the Republican party’s best shot at the governorship in years.

But at a meet and greet with the state House Republican Caucus, the Reichert Express quickly jumped off the rails. While the hair and the biceps were as dazzling as promised, once Reichert opened his mouth, it quickly became apparent that the candidate was not. Rambling and incoherent, unknowledgeable and unprepared, Reichert was so bad at answering even the softest of softball questions that he had his fellow Republicans literally shaking their heads in disbelief.

Then-Republican state representative Rodney Tom, now a Democratic state senator, recalls listening to Reichert in stunned silence on a caucus room couch with two colleagues when one of them leaned in and whispered, “If he’s running for governor, the three of us should run too.”

According to another caucus member present at the meeting, Reichert had walked into the room the presumptive Republican nominee for governor, but by the time he walked out, talk had already turned to recruiting eventual two-time loser Dino Rossi. And the rest is history.

[…] This depiction of Reichert as unstudied, confused, and bafflingly incoherent—if not, you know, kind of stupid—these are all testimonials from his fellow Republicans! So when longtime Reichert observers started speculating that his recent head injury may have resulted in permanent brain damage, the first question I had to ask myself was: “How would you know?”

Stupid or brain damaged? Read the whole thing, and then decide for yourself.

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Before the Seattle Times endorsed Republican Steve Litzow for his alleged ability “to reach across the political aisle in an increasingly partisan atmosphere in Olympia,” they might have wanted to take a closer look at how well Litzow did interacting with the person sitting right next to him on the putatively nonpartisan Mercer Island City Council. And in strident opposition to improving safety at a dangerous crosswalk, no less.

As the ad above says, it’s hard to reach across party lines when you’re yelling.

I actually drive by the intersection of Merrimount Dr. and Island Crest Way several times a week, as does Litzow, I presume, as our children attend the same middle school, and Island Crest is the main thoroughfare to and from. And from what I’ve seen, I sure has hell wouldn’t want to be a pedestrian in that crosswalk, so it’s hard to understand why Litzow would so angrily oppose the proposed improvement.

And yet he not only voted against the proposal, after it passed without his support he cut a deal with other politicians to pull the project’s funding.

19 days later, another child was hit by a car in the intersection.

So if that’s your idea of “fiscal conservatism,” I guess you should vote for Litzow. Otherwise, I strongly urge 41st LD voters to reelect State Sen. Randy Gordon.

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This is exactly the sorta ad I wish Darcy Burner had been able to run during the final weeks of the 2006 and 2008 campaigns. But she couldn’t.

Why? More on Slog.