HorsesAss.Org

If the video Goldy posted last night was the perfect example of why marijuana prohibition needs to end from a civil liberties standpoint, this may be the perfect example of why it needs to end from an economic standpoint:

The Brooks County Sheriff’s Department has a marijuana problem. They’ve got 200,000 pounds of pot, and they’re complaining that it would be too expensive to destroy it.

Even if you assume that this is all cheap Mexican weed, that’s still easily over $100 million worth of marijuana. Yet this Texas police department is worried about blowing their budget trying to destroy it. If they turned around and sold 1% of their looted stash, they could easily destroy the other 99% and probably upgrade their whole fleet of vehicles. Why we can’t do this math as a society (for a drug that makes people giggle and eat junk food) is why we arguably deserve the economic mess we’re living through.

That half-hour, thousand-point, momentary drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average today? Oops…

In one of the most dizzying half-hours in stock market history, the Dow plunged nearly 1,000 points before paring those losses—all apparently due to a trader error.

According to multiple sources, a trader entered a “b” for billion instead of an “m” for million in a trade possibly involving Procter & Gamble.

During this afternoon’s half-hour ride, P&G fell from $60 to $39.37, then back again, eventually closing at $60.75. But that was nothing compared to Accenture, which over the course of a single minute plunged from $40 a share to one penny. Accenture shot back up to close at $41.09, down 2.6% for the day.

How fucked up is this? Both NASDAQ and the NYSE have announced that they would cancel all trades were a stock moved more 60% from it’s price at 2:40 PM, but there are sure to be parties who will have made or lost fortunes on today’s market… um… “glitch.”

So yeah, I guess the Republicans are right… Wall Street doesn’t just doesn’t need government regulators getting in the way of its smooth operations.

Day four, and I still don’t have my DSL restored.

After several unfulfilled assurances by phone and email, I called Qwest this morning fairly resigned, and the tech support rep I reached wasn’t much more enthusiastic. He didn’t even try to reset my line or reprogram my modem. He just insisted that it was too old and slow to deliver the 7 Mbps service it had delivered reliably up until the moment Qwest fucked with my line Monday morning, and rather than wasting anymore time for either of us, he offered to send me a new one, free of cost.

That means I won’t be back up until tomorrow, or possibly Monday. Assuming the new modem works. But at least that’s better than the status quo, so I accepted.

The main reason I refused to upgrade to 12 Mbps was that I didn’t feel like dealing with the support hassle, and potentially being left without service for a day or more. I guess Qwest showed me.

My trolls like to disparage me as a Darcy Burner fanboy, but I’m much more pragmatic than most folks imagine, for while other local bloggers had quickly lined up behind Darcy by the early fall of 2005, I insisted on waiting until after I saw who else might jump into the race.

In fact, I didn’t merely wait, but rather proactively reached out to then Republican state Rep. Fred Jarrett, urging him to challenge incumbent Dave Reichert… as a Democrat. And Fred’s thoughtful response not only deepened my respect for him, but ultimately convinced me that Darcy’s relative youth was an asset, not a liability:

I’m honored you’d make such a suggestion.  Thanks.  The truth is that I’m too old to run for Congress.  It would be a waste of the state’s time.  We need someone at the oldest in their early 40s (early-to-mid-30s would be best) to be Norm Dicks’ replacement.  Notice what his seniority has done for the state, or better still, look at how the South has been able to dominate national legislative policy through their “seniority strategy.”  All of Robert Caro’s books on LBJ demonstrate this in spades.

I hope that Fred doesn’t mind me publishing our private correspondence these years later, but his words of advice came back to me on news of Rep. David Obey’s retirement, and the likely elevation of Washington’s own Rep. Norm Dicks to the chairmanship of the powerful House Appropriations Committee.

Like it or not, a substantial segment of our state’s economy has long been dependent on our national military-industrial complex. Turn up your nose at such “pork barrel politics,” but that Air Force tanker contract for example, it’s gonna create jobs — either here in blue Washington, or to a lesser extent in red Alabama — and whatever the technical merits of Boeing’s bid, our aerospace workers would be at a severe competitive disadvantage without a powerful congressional delegation to back them up.

Likewise Washington is constantly competing with other states for billions of dollars of federal grants for education, health care, transportation, and other critical services and infrastructure projects. Again, it’d be nice to be more high-minded about it, but that wouldn’t get us very far in such an adversarial appropriations process.

So while Dicks might not be my favorite member of our state’s House delegation, he’s by far its most powerful, and thus we all have a selfish stake in his ascension to the Appropriations chair, and in assuring that Democrats maintain control of Congress. That’s something voters in WA-03 might want to consider as they fill the open seat down in that swing district; if Democrats lose control of the House, Dicks will lose much of his ability to help his colleagues bring home the bacon. And we all love bacon.

The same, by the way, holds true for Sen. Patty Murray. As a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee and the chair of its subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies, Murray has played a key role in securing federal dollars for vital local projects. Billions of dollars for Hanford cleanup? Thank Sen. Murray. $813 million to finish the Link Light Rail tunnel from Westlake to the UW? Sen. Murray has been Sound Transit’s “chief patron.” The federal dollars needed to fix the failing Howard Hanson dam? It’s Sen. Murray who is leading the charge in the other Washington.

It takes years to build up that kind of seniority and power. Decades. Sen. Murray is one of the most powerful Democrats in the U.S. Senate. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that she could even be Majority Leader come January, 2011. So lose Sen. Murray and Washington state stands to lose billions of dollars in desperately needed federal money. That’s just the way the system works.

And that’s why, for example, I expect the Seattle Times to endorse Sen. Murray this November, regardless of her opponent. And I’ve proven pretty uncanny in predicting Seattle Times endorsements.

Yeah, sure, the economy sucks, and it’s always cathartic to send politicians a message. But Washington state simply does not have that luxury when it comes to senior congressional leaders like Rep. Dicks and Sen. Murray, and the Democratic majority that grants them their power. Thus wherever you stand ideologically, it is hard to argue that a Republican wave this November would be in the interest of Washington state.

Just to be clear, the police only found a small amount of marijuana, enough for a misdemeanor, but prosecutors tacked on a charge of child endangerment just to be assholes. Of course, what isn’t child endangerment apparently, is having a SWAT team kick down a front door in the middle of the night and shoot a kid’s dogs in front of him.

This is crazy. Absolutely crazy. How can anybody defend a national drug policy that leads to this?

The latest Elway Poll shows Sen. Patty Murray with a comfortable lead over all rivals.

Last week KING-5/SurveyUSA had Dino Rossi leading incumbent Democratic Sen. Patty Murray by a stunning 52-42 percent, a margin both camps dismissed as an outlier. Well, now that the latest Elway Poll has Murray leading Rossi by an even more impressive 51-34 percent margin, it’s easy to understand the insiders’ reluctance to accept SurveyUSA numbers at face value.

SurveyUSA had Murray only garnering 73% of both self-identified Democrats and Liberals, and a paltry 46% of metro Seattle voters… unimaginably low numbers come November. By comparison, Elway found Murray enjoying the support of 92% of Democrats, and 73% of Seattleites.

Further, Elway examines Murray’s job performance ratings, a number often looked to as an indicator of electoral strength, and while incumbents never want to come in under 50%, Elway points out that “Murray’s ratings have historically been mediocre,” and that her current 48% rating falls only slightly below her 17-year average. So Republicans shouldn’t take much encouragement from that either.

What does this all mean for Rossi, who was widely expected to announce his candidacy by the end of April, and who we know to have had lengthy meetings and conversations with consultants and fundraisers in recent weeks? Well, there’s simply no strong evidence that Murray is quite as vulnerable as Republicans would wish her to be. Sure, this is just one poll amongst many, and the election is still a long ways off, but as Elway concludes:

The world is going to turn a few times before voters actually cast ballots, and campaigns make a difference. But no matter how these findings are sliced, Patty Murray appears to be in a formidable position.

No doubt Rossi is still getting a lot of encouragement to enter the race from the NRSC and the Republican consultancy class, even in the face of these daunting numbers, so I hope he takes seriously a bit of free advice from someone with nothing to gain from his decision one way or the other. Nobody has ever profited from underestimating Patty Murray… except, you know, the dozens of pollsters, fundraisers, consultants, media buyers and other political professionals who have made millions off previous failed attempts to unseat her, and who would make millions more off of your campaign.

Remember, politics is just as much a business as real estate, so don’t trust their salesmanship any more than you would trust your own.

Update: [Darryl] I’ve done some further analyses here, including a combined analysis of the two polls today and last week’s SurveyUSA poll.

Dan Savage has been bringing us the latest anti-gay zealot to be exposed as having a secret gay lifestyle.

I’ve always wondered (and may have even asked this question before at HA), is there an equivalent to this when it comes to being fervently anti-drugs? Have any hardcore drug warriors ever been exposed as secret drug users? Off the top of my head, I can only think of this one, but that guy was neither a politician, nor all that zealous a drug warrior. What’s the difference, then? Obviously, the major difference between homosexuality and drug use is that homosexuality is in-born, while drug use is a choice, but I’m not sure that difference alone explains why the phenomenon of self-loathing only happens with homosexuality.

UPDATE: In the comments, Troutski points out that Elvis was made an honorary narcotics enforcement official by Nixon. That also made me think of an obvious example of this, Rush Limbaugh, whose love of Oxycontin and frequent railing against druggies certainly qualifies.

I’ve now gone over 48-hours without DSL at my house, and seem nowhere closer to getting this fixed. The good news is that Qwest’s automated tech support line reports that I actually have an open ticket. The bad news is that it reports that I’m scheduled to have it resolved by January 1. After 45 minutes on hold, I gave up waiting for a live representative.

Technical breakdowns happen, but the most annoying thing about this outage is that there is nothing technical about it. My line and my modem were fine until somebody at Qwest reprovisioned me to faster, more expensive service without my permission. And despite support’s promises, they’ve been unable to reset my line to the where it was prior to 9:30 am Monday.

I’ve probably wasted five hours over the past two days attempting to deal with this, and many more hours traveling about in search of open WiFi networks. This sort of customer service is inexcusable.

State Rep. Chris Hurst (?-31) has started identifying himself on his campaign website as an “Independent Democrat,” which I suppose as far as bullshit, swing-district, campaign rhetoric goes, isn’t so remarkable. (Cowardly, disloyal and whiny, yes… but remarkable, no). But word is he’s planning to take his pouting subterfuge to the next level by identifying himself on the ballot as “Prefers Independent Democrat Party”… and he’s reportedly urging several colleagues he presumes to be equally cowardly, disloyal and whiny, to join him in pissing on their own caucus.

Yeah, well, that sorta transparent gamesmanship may be acceptable from the lying bastards in the Prefers Grand Old Party Party, but if Hurst and his cohorts want to deny the Democrats, then I say turnabout is fair play. Any candidate who refuses to identify himself as a Democrat to voters simply can’t be trusted to uphold Democratic values and unity, and thus should be denied any party support during the election. Furthermore, should Hurst or others follow through with their petty little game, I wouldn’t mind seeing them stripped of their caucus rank and committee chairmanships.

After all, it would be unfair to voters to allow Hurst to run as an “Independent,” yet serve as a Democrat.

Playing games like this with the ballot is both a disservice to voters and an insult to the rest of the caucus, so if Hurst and others are so disgusted with their fellow Democrats that they can’t bear to identify themselves as one, then I suggest they man up and start their own party.

UDPATE [Lee]: Hurst also happens to be the biggest roadblock to getting even basic drug law reform passed through the House. If being an “independent Democrat” means putting law enforcement union special interests over fiscally responsible and morally sound progressive policy, then it might be worthwhile for the voters of the 31st District to send someone else to Olympia.

Please join us tonight for 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. 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 352 other chapters of Drinking Liberally.

David Frum tries to fill the pair of clown shoes that have been sitting around the CNN offices since Lou Dobbs left:

Many Americans carry in their minds a family memory of upward mobility, from great-grandpa stepping off the boat at Ellis Island to a present generation of professionals and technology workers. This story no longer holds true for the largest single U.S. immigrant group, Mexican-Americans.

Stephen Trejo and Jeffrey Groger studied the intergenerational progress of Mexican-American immigrants in their scholarly work, “Falling Behind or Moving Up?”

They discovered that third-generation Mexican-Americans were no more likely to finish high school than second-generation Mexican-Americans. Fourth-generation Mexican-Americans did no better than third.

If these results continue to hold, the low skills of yesterday’s illegal immigrant will negatively shape the U.S. work force into the 22nd century.

Ignoring for a second the obvious flaws in this argument – that the poor educational results aren’t necessarily a result of ability, but of circumstance and environment, both which can be improved upon – you can click through to the report to see that Mexican-Americans do about as well as African-Americans. In other words, David Frum is arguing that African-Americans and Mexican-Americans negatively shape the U.S. work force. The overall argument he’s making regarding immigration is no different than if he was arguing that we need to save the U.S. economy by keeping black people from having children.

Of course, this sentiment among conservatives shouldn’t be surprising to hear. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina specifically pointed to his state’s large African-American population as a “problem” facing his state. Conservatives often like to claim that the racism of the 1960s is dead. And in a way, they’re right. But a different racism has taken its place. What was once a more individualized contempt for any and all people of a different color has just transformed into a more subtle belief that people of a different ethnicity are collectively a burden on greater society.

My DSL stopped working at about 9:30 am this morning, and I’ve been on and off the phone with Qwest ever since. So I’ve been reduced to pecking stuff out on my iPhone.

Just thought you should know.

UPDATE:
So here’s the scoop.

Last week, a Qwest sales rep called me, trying to sell me their new 12 Mbps service, up from the 7 Mbps I have now. I’m always interested in faster broadband, but the woman didn’t quite seem to have a handle on how much more it would cost, and whether I’d need to spend $70 on a new modem, so I told her to call me back in a couple days so I’d have some time to check out the costs and specs and think about it. The next day a different Qwest rep calls with the same pitch, and I told him I’d already spoken with somebody, and would let them know.

Well apparently, I didn’t say “no” definitively enough, and somebody at Qwest decided to pad their commission by putting through the order anyway.  So at about 9:30 AM, my line was re-provisioned, and no, my old modem doesn’t handle the higher speed connection.

It took about an hour with tech support to figure this out, and another couple hours to try to reprogram my modem to get it working — apparently, they couldn’t just throw a switch and bring back my old profile — at which point the rep promises to get this fixed and call me back. An hour and a half later, I call back Qwest and get tech rep number four on the phone, who assures me that everything has been fixed, the 12 Mbps order has been canceled, and the I’ve been switched back to the 7 Mbps service.

So then, why doesn’t everything work? The modem is now successfully synchronizing, a positive sign, but refuses to actually connect.

Oh, the tech rep explains, that’s because this new order won’t go through until 5 PM tomorrow. That’s just how long it takes to re-provision the line, and there’s nothing he can do about it.

So essentially, I’ll go the better part of two days without Internet service, all because some asshole at Qwest either couldn’t understand the word “no,” or simply didn’t care. (I say “asshole” rather than “idiot” because I assume the latter.) And the land line companies wonder why they keep losing customers?

Honestly… fuck ’em. Comcast offers similar speeds at similar prices (I think… I mean their website is incomprehensible when it comes to ordering broadband without cable TV), and even Clearwire looks like a reasonable alternative, so it’s not like I don’t have options. So if I’m gonna lose a couple days of service at their whim, I might as well lose it playing the special offers, getting discounts to switch from one to the other and back again.

On the bright side, I’m surfing the web now from a window seat at the Columbia City Alehouse, enjoying a $3 Happy Hour imperial pint along with a side order of free WiFi. If anybody reading this is in the neighborhood, stop on by and join me in raising a pint to the demise of Qwest.