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In an editorial today, the Seattle Times warns that “Police shootings threaten the public’s trust.” Yeah, true. But you know what else these shootings threaten? The public.

The Times goes on to caution against “armchair quarterbacking or efforts to prejudge the police,” and again, I’d agree that the we have not yet had enough time or facts to determine whether any or all of our region’s seven recent police shootings were completely justified or not. But it’s never too soon to put these events in context and attempt to discern some truth that might prevent more such tragedies from occurring in the near future.

And the obvious context is that our recent spate of police shootings comes in the wake of a string of tragedies that left six police officers dead in 2009.

Human nature being what it is, and the memory of their fallen comrades still fresh, it is perfectly understandable, if not necessarily forgivable, if when confronted with a perceived threat, local officers are a bit quicker to react with lethal force than they might have been only a a year ago. Likewise, it is also understandable if supervisors, politicians, the press and the public are more willing to justify such violent confrontations than they might have been before last year’s tragedies.

In other words, it is reasonable to ask if last year’s tragic slaying of six police officers played any role in facilitating the spate of police shootings we’ve seen this year? And it is incumbent upon our law enforcement officers to ask themselves whether the heightened sense of danger they must surely feel has in any way endangered the public they are sworn to protect?

It is not illegal to openly carry guns, knives and other weapons in Washington state, and the failure to instantly respond to police commands should not inevitably result in a barrage of bullets. Police officers are presumably trained to quickly react to perceived threats, but they should constantly remind themselves that the public is not. Deafness, inebriation, confusion, stupidity or even perhaps a misplaced trust in the restraint of the officers confronting them, need not result in tragedy.

Our police officers choose to put their lives on the line on our behalf, and for that they deserve our respect and support. But we should be wary of using last year’s tragic police slayings as any justification for the unnecessary use of lethal force.

I meant to post this last night, but have been buried up to my neck in changes to my fantasy football website. Throw out your predictions for the season in the comments below. Will the Seahawks be a .500 team? Can they win the division? Does the old man in Minnesota have another year in him like last year (didn’t look that way last night)? Will McNabb and Shanahan make the Redskins a winner? Can the Cowboys become the first team to play in their home stadium for the Super Bowl? Has the NFL milked the Saints-Katrina storyline enough, or is there still some juice in that raisin?

Former Tacoma News Tribune political reporter (and avid Philadelphia Eagles fan) Ken Vogel reports for Politico on the sudden plethora of political events scheduled for this 9/11 compared to recent years.

Some, like dueling New York City rallies over the proposed Burlington Coat Factory Mosque, are specifically timed to commemorate the day, while others, like Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s Razorbacks tailgate party just treat the date like any other Saturday. But one event in particular stands out for its willingness to cheapen the memory of the attack by expropriating it for political gain:

Washington GOP Senate nominee Dino Rossi’s speech at a Tacoma-area Republican women’s club fundraiser dubbed “Let’s Roll on to Victory” (a take on the exhortation of a passenger on a doomed flight who fought back the hijackers during the 2001 attacks)…

Diana Landahl, president of the Gig Harbor (Wash.) Republican club that is holding the “Let’s Roll on to Victory” fundraiser, said “it was kind of coincidental that we ended up on 9/11, but once we realized it, we decided to make note of this.”

Landahl told Politico that “people seem to be forgetting what happened to us on 9/11,” and of course, what better way to keep this memory fresh than to hold a closed-door, high-donor, political fundraiser at a private residence behind the closed gates of the exclusive Canterwood Golf & Country Club?

When Todd Beamer yelled “Let’s roll!” as he and his fellow passengers heroically stormed the cockpit of United Flight 93 in a suicide mission that ultimately ended in ashes in a field in Pennsylvania, I’m sure this is exactly what he had in mind. Hell, perhaps next year, Rossi should celebrate the day by making the phrase a theme of one of his real estate seminars, as in: “Let’s Roll on to Profits in the Lucrative Foreclosure Market!”

Admittedly, I’m not that sentimental a guy, and I don’t really expect candidates to forever take the day off, especially this close to such a contentious election. But let’s be honest: had it been Patty Murray who shamelessly scheduled a “Let’s roll”-themed fundraiser on 9/11, Rossi’s people would have been all over her for cheapening both a national tragedy and the personal suffering of the victims and their families. And no doubt our local media would have obliged by covering the “controversy.”

But Rossi, well, we all hold him to a lower standard, so don’t expect to see his thoughtless fit of poor taste mentioned on the 11 o’clock news.

After tense negotiations with Florida Pastor Terry Jones, I have agreed to call off my plans to shred and compost the Christian Bible in exchange for him dropping his plans to publicly burn copies of the Islamic Quran.

Call it a stunt if you will, but you can’t deny I get results.

I just got back from Nollie’s Cafe, where Sen. Patty Murray sat down this morning with a handful of local bloggers electronic journalists online-ish media types who write substantively on politics. (Are Erica Barnett of PubliCola and Eli Sanders of The Stranger “bloggers?” Am I a “journalist?” I don’t wanna go there.) In addition to me, Erica and Eli, we were joined by Joan McCarter of Daily Kos, Dave Neiwert of Crooks and Liars, and Andrew Villeneuve of the NPI Advocate.

We were promised a half an hour, and got a bit more than that from a U.S. senator who clearly knows the issues as much as she obviously cares about them. A similar coffee klatch with the nearly totally inaccessible Dino Rossi would be almost unimaginable, and it is equally hard to imagine Rossi coming off anywhere near as knowledgeable or as thoughtful as Murray on such a broad range of topics. (Nor as down-to-earth likable, either.)

So much for the GOP’s self-soothing meme of Murray as the dumbest member of the Senate. But don’t take my word for it, you can listen to all 38 minutes for yourself:

[audio:https://horsesass.org/wp-content/uploads/PattyMurray.mp3]

I’ll come back with a more thorough report later, after I’ve had the opportunity to listen to the audio and parse my illegible notes, but I came away convinced that if every voter in Washington state could have the same opportunity to sit down with Sen. Murray for half an hour, she’d win reelection in a landslide.

Given that this is the year that we finally see an income tax initiative on the ballot, it’s hard for me to believe that this could be the worst initiative season ever… but this has gotta be the worst initiative season ever.

I mean, honestly, the way that corporate interests have so totally hijacked our state’s initiative process this year makes Tim Eyman look like Thomas Jefferson.

See, the Seattle Times editorial board agrees with me. Only in a lot more boring fashion. And I agree with them: Rev. Terry Jones is “an idiot.”

If Jones wants to be a beacon instead of a bozo, why doesn’t this clown organize an interfaith group to feed the poor, build housing and help sustain families of all faiths through this economic crisis?

But the question is, would 25th LD Republican nominee Hans Zeiger agree with the Times call for “interfaith” outreach, or would he find the editors to be a bunch of watered-down ecumenists?

Unitarians, mainstream Baptists, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, members of the “Military Pagan Network” and other watered-down ecumenists will hold an “Interfaith Day of Prayer and Reflection” on the steps of the Oklahoma State Capitol today to pray to the generic god.

[…] But … the significant difference between the kumbaya sessions and interfaith vigils and atheist protests of the Religious Left and the Bible studies and prayer circles of the Religious Right is that our God is real.

I dunno… sounds like Zeiger considers Jones to be one of the real Christians praying to the real God. Perhaps, if the Times wants to do its job of educating voters, it should ask Zeiger about that, along with all the other batshit-crazy stuff he wrote?

NY Times

The $83 million local taxpayers still owe on the Kingdome, ten years after it was demolished, gets a mention in today’s New York Times article on the extraordinary bad deal publicly financed stadiums turn out to be, but that’s nothing compared to the most Giant boondoggle of them all:

It’s the gift that keeps on taking. The old Giants Stadium, demolished to make way for New Meadowlands Stadium, still carries about $110 million in debt, or nearly $13 for every New Jersey resident, even though it is now a parking lot.

And that’s just the debt on Giants Stadium alone. Three and a half decades after workers first broke ground, New Jersey taxpayers still owe $266 million on the entire Meadowlands project.

So I guess we got off relatively easy with the Kingdome. How many years we taxpayers will be paying off the bonds on Safeco and Qwest fields after they’ve been abandoned or demolished, now that’s another question. And what more useful or productive purposes we might have put that money to, rather than padding the pockets of billionaires, well, we can only speculate at this time when city, county and state governments are facing unprecedented deficits.

As the NY Times article concludes:

With more than four decades of evidence to back them up, economists almost uniformly agree that publicly financed stadiums rarely pay for themselves. The notable successes like Camden Yards in Baltimore often involve dedicated taxes or large infusions of private money. Even then, using one tax to finance a stadium can often steer spending away from other, perhaps worthier, projects.

“Stadiums are sold as enormous draws for events, but the economics are clear that they aren’t helping,” said Andrew Moylan, the director of government affairs at the National Taxpayers Union. “It’s another way to add insult to injury for taxpayers.”

An interesting side note, the new $1.6 billion dollar Meadowlands Stadium both the Jets and the Giants will inaugurate this fall, was built entirely with private money, so it can be done. By comparison, taxpayers picked up the cost for 71% of Paul Allen’s Qwest Field. Go figure.

It has been suggested to me that burning books outdoors may actually be illegal in Washington state due to clean air restrictions, so in celebration of our region’s hippie-ish, environmental dogooderism, and our nation’s culture of inclusive religious intolerance, rather than burning Christian Bibles and other holy books this 9/11, it might be more appropriately symbolic to compost them.

So does anybody have a heavy-duty chipper/shredder available that could chew up the word of God — hard or soft bound — with little effort? Let me know, and perhaps we’ll have a party.

Please join us tonight for an evening of Bible burning politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. We meet at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning at about 8:00 pm. Stop by even earlier and enjoy some dinner.

Not in Seattle? There is a good chance you live near one of the 245 other chapters of Drinking Liberally.

With a small, Florida hate church announcing today that it will follow through on its plans to burn copies of the Quran in commemoration of the 9/11 attacks, it is incumbent on us patriotic Americans to prove to the rest of the world how tolerant and pluralistic our nation truly is. And the only way to properly send this message, is to, well, fight fire with fire.

In other words:  who’s up for a good old fashioned book burning?

While Pastor Jones and his fellow islamophobes down in Florida are selectively burning Qurans, folks here in America’s least churched city could gather for a more inclusive celebration of religious hatred, roasting hotdogs and smores over a raging bonfire of Holy Bibles. Mmm… toasty.

But why stop with just the teachings of Christ? In fact, I’d encourage folks to toss in copies of the Torah, the Vedas, the Tao-te-ching, the Book of Morman, Dianetics or even the Origin of the Species for all I care… whatever you consider holy or unholy, it’ll all burn just the same.

And for an added spark to the festivities, we could use American flags for kindling.

The point is, this is America, so of course the ironically named Dove World Outreach Center has the constitutional right to burn the Quran — you know, in the same way that we all have the right to draw cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed — no matter how distasteful, offensive, or provocative this might appear to Islamic communities at home or abroad. See, that’s the thing about free expression: for this right to be the least bit meaningful, it has to be just as available to assholes is it is to the rest of us.

That’s a hard point to get across to folks who aren’t accustomed to our freedoms, so the only real way to combat Pastor Jone’s message of religious intolerance and hate is to dilute it with a more egalitarian message of religious intolerance and hate of our own. And that’s why we need to make a show of burning all the holy books, especially, but not exclusively, Pastor Jones’ beloved Holy Bible. Think of it as a “Bonfire of Inanities.”

Unfortunately, Seattle parks limits legal beach bonfires to firewood only, so we’d likely have to light ours on private property. If anybody has suitable space for a backyard bonfire this Saturday, let me know. I’ll bring a couple growlers of Manny’s. And, a Bible.

25th LD Republican nominee Hans Zeiger on religious diversity:

It just so happens that the “Religious Right” is the only significant religious group in America that is really dedicated and interested in praying to God. That isn’t to say there aren’t folks who occasionally pray to false gods or the multi-faith/inter-faith god or themselves in various corners of the Religious Left, but they don’t tend to be the prayer warrior types.

It’s only a state House race, so we can’t rely on our local political press — the watchdogs of democracy — to present Zeiger to voters in his own words. I guess that means Democratic incumbent Dawn Morrell is going to have to educate voters all by herself. And that means she needs you help.

Imagine how much cheaper air travel would be if the airlines could finally succeed in busting the pilots union.

The Seattle Times editorial board wants young voters to get more engaged in politics, and with hip, engaging prose like this, how could they not?

COME out, come out wherever you are. Experts predict younger voters, those pumped up, enthusiastic Millennials age 18 to 24 who helped propel President Obama to victory, will not participate so much in the 2010 midterm elections.

That is both predictable and a shame.

“Come out, come out wherever you are…” that’s your lede? What… did “olly, olly oxen free” come off as too sophisticated? Um, the minimum voting age is eighteen, for chrisakes, not eight.

I mean, perhaps young voters might get more engaged in politics if our political media didn’t constantly come off as a bunch of sclerotic, condescending scolds. I’m just sayin’.