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Mike Stark is at it again, this time ambushing Republican congresspersons to ask them whether or not they believe Barack Obama is a natural born citizen of the United States, and thus constitutionally eligible to be president.

Some of them, like our own Dave Reichert (WA-08), simply obfuscate (his inarticulate and poorly illustrated response is particularly amusing), while others, like Cathy McMorris Rodgers (WA-05) actually run away from the camera… though not before admitting “We’re all going to find out… I’d like to see the documents.”

Huh. She sure does sound like a birther to me. Even while Ann Coulter, of all people, is calling the birthers “cranks.”

When Coulter has become the GOP’s voice of reason, you know the party is in trouble.

One story I never got around to covering over the weekend was Saturday’s signature gathering deadline for R-71, the church-backed referendum to repeal Washington’s recently expanded domestic partners statute. R-71 backers claimed they turned in about 138,000 signatures, almost 18,000 more than the 120,577 needed to qualify for the ballot, but as Sec. of State spokesman Dave Ammons says, that slight cushion still only puts this measure in the “iffy range.”

On average, about 18% of signatures are disqualified due to duplicates, mismatched signatures, incorrect address information, or simply because they didn’t come from registered voters; historically, invalidation rates in Washington have ranged from as low as 8% to as high as 25%. (In some states, blatant acts of signature fraud have driven invalidation rates well over 50%.)

Assuming the 138,000 signature estimate is accurate, that means R-71 would fail to qualify for the ballot if a mere 12.7% of signatures are ruled invalid.

So what are R-71’s chances? Tim Eyman recently qualified I-1033 with a 12% invalidation rate, but that’s unusually low for him, and he does have more than a decade of experience running professional petition drives. Perhaps the R-71 petition drive was more centralized and organized than I thought, but I’d be slightly surprised to see them pull this one off with such a small cushion.

Regardless, there should be some fun coming out of Olympia later this week as the Sec. of State’s office goes through the tedium of matching every signature to the voter registration rolls. First they’ll count (and recount) the signatures to give them a starting point, and then they’ll go through the petitions line by line, reporting the number of valid signatures versus the number of invalid ones, giving us a running total of the invalidation rate up to that point, and thus the ever shifting odds on R-71’s ballot prospects. Once enough signatures have been qualified or disqualified to determine the outcome, the counting stops.

Stay tuned.

Think Progress notes that thousands of formerly classified images that show the impact of global warming on the Arctic and elsewhere, including Washington’s South Cascade Glacier, have been released after a group of scientists filed a declassification request. This is truly unnerving stuff, click through if you wish. The photos of the Beaufort Sea speak for themselves.

And since it’s very hot today, I get to point out to certain unsound pinheads that climate change is real, since they always claim it’s not whenever they see a snowflake.

I suppose now they’ll just start saying that the South Cascade Glacier is actually in Kenya or something.

A lot of other blogs and newsy sites tend to shut down over the weekend, but not HA, because we’re writers, and write is what we do. So in case you missed it, here’s a summary of the some of the more important stories, commentaries and observations posted over the weekend:

Is the public option a “slippery slope” to single-payer?
Gov. Howard Dean spoke about healthcare reform at Town Hall Friday night, and as he was finishing signing books, I asked him if Republican critics are right when they claim that the public option is merely a slippery slope to a single-payer system. And his answer…? Listen to the audio for yourself.

Stars and Steel Bars
King County Initiative 100, whose aim was to prevent the building of a new jail, fell short of the number of signatures needed to qualify for the ballot. But as Lee reports, the campaign did raise an important question as to why “we’re considering such a costly infrastructure investment that hardly anyone wants and is not necessary”…?

U.S. Rep. Rick Steves?
Those righties who just hate travel writer Rick Steves for his outspoken advocacy for ending our prohibition on marijuana, and who spit up bile watching his humanizing PBS travelogue of Iran, will go absolutely nuts at the thought of Steves running for Congress. But word is, that’s exactly what Steves plans to do when Rep. Jay Inslee steps down to run for governor.

Inslee announces agreement on Medicare reimbursement
And speaking of Rep. Inslee, the WA-01 Democrat held a sparsely attended press conference Saturday to announce a major healthcare agreement he helped broker, that nobody in our local press seems interested in covering. I’ll have more later today.

I went looking for my usual Monday morning fodder on the Seattle Times editorial page, only to be confronted with these headlines from the Times’ home page:

Huh. I suppose that’s one way to deal with the Nightmare on Fairview. If only it were that easy.

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Rep. Jay Inslee (WA-01) held a press conference this afternoon at Seattle’s Childrens Hospital to announce an agreement struck to correct the dramatic regional disparities between Medicare reimbursement rates, disparities that have penalized Washington’s relatively efficient healthcare delivery system to the tune of tens of of millions of dollars a year. It is also an agreement that, as I will explain later, helps pave the way to a public option.

Above is raw footage of Rep. Inslee’s announcement. Stay tuned for additional footage, selected clips and further analysis.

For some non-local news, there’s an interesting scandal brewing in Alabama. It involves a janitor named Lorenza Hooks at the State House in Montgomery who was busted in 2006 after video footage showed him carrying a backpack (which he admits was his) containing two pounds of marijuana (which he claimed was not his) into a legislator’s office. Not only was Hooks not charged, but he kept his job. Eighteen months later, in May 2008, he became a suspect in a shooting and was put on leave from his job. This May, as the Legislative Council debated whether to reinstate Hooks, a legislator learned about the backpack incident and raised it as an issue, causing him to receive death threats. No reference to the incident was found in his personnel file. After failing to be given his job back, Hooks was arrested earlier this month on drug charges.

Loretta Nall is trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

Last week’s contest turned out to be a tough one. It wasn’t solved until Tuesday afternoon when wes.in.wa came up with the correct location of Auburn, Alabama. The building pictured was Cater Hall, on the campus of Auburn University. That’s two in a row for wes.

I’ve generally been treating these posts as open threads, but last week got way out of hand, so I’ll be deleting any off topic nonsense from the threads from now on.

For those new to the contest, you can click the picture below to go to the bing.com map tool. Click the ‘Bird’s eye’ button to switch to Bird’s Eye view and search away.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!

Everybody knows that Democratic U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee (WA-01) has long had his eye on the governor’s mansion, and is widely expected to give up his House seat to run for our state’s top office in 2012. But who of note has his eye on Rep. Inslee’s coveted House seat, once it becomes vacant?

Word is that noted travel writer and TV and radio personality Rick Steves is seriously considering giving up his globetrotting ways for an extended stay in the other Washington, and is already working the local Democratic circuit in preparation for a potential run. The latest evidence? Steves jumped at the offer to be the keynote speaker at the Snohomish County Dems’ Annual Gala fundraiser on Sept. 12.

Yes, I know, 2012 is quite a ways off, but it wasn’t so long ago that Inslee was a top candidate for the number one or two position in President Obama’s Department of Energy, giving Steves a more immediate opportunity to explore his own political ambitions. And it was during this time, with a potential special election looming, that Steves reportedly firmed up his intention to run.

Through his popular guidebooks, website, radio and TV shows, the ever likable and seemingly unflappable Steves has expanded his Edmunds WA based tour business into a low-key, travel empire, making himself a nationally known public figure in the process. And in recent years, Steves has increasingly leveraged his national audience and stature to insert his own unique experiences into the public debate.

While his website is still largely devoted to his tour business and travel guides, it now contains an entire section devoted to “Social Activism,” including commentary arguing for a “European perspective” on drug control policy (he urges America not to be “hard” or “soft,” but rather, “smart on drugs”), and a link to his controversial ACLU-sponsored video urging the end of our nation’s failed “prohibition on marijuana.” Steves has also recently earned himself the unbridled hatred of many on the knee-jerk right for his thoughtful documentary on traveling through Iran, in which he shows the Iranian people as anything but an axis of evil.

But rather than protect his business by pulling back from his activism in the face of increasingly strident attacks, Steves chose to respond to his critics with a new book, “Travel as a Political Act.” Indeed, it appears that the harsh reaction from the right has only served to further politicize Steves.

For the life me, can’t understand why Steves would want to give up what appears to be one of the best jobs in the world for one which often appears to be one of the worst (I once phrased the same question to KIRO radio host and former WA-08 contender Dave Ross, who genuinely, it seems, believes in something he calls “public service”), and with 2012 such a long ways off, Steves still has plenty of time to come to his senses. But if he doesn’t, I think he’d make a great candidate, and while not everybody will be as thrilled as fellow HA blogger Lee, I know a lot of folks who would welcome Steves to the race.

The initiative campaign against the new jail, I-100, fell short of its signature goal. I-100 wouldn’t have directly prevented the jail from being built. It would have only forced the city to analyze alternatives, examine the racial disparity in the prison population, and then put the question up for a vote. In the failure, however, there appears to be one potential bright spot [emphasis mine]:

The deadline for turning in the signatures is Thursday and theoretically the campaign could ask for a 20-day extension, said campaign manager Natalie Novak.

However, Novak said the campaign raised an issue “no one really knew about before.” Additionally, the county has said it would allow cities to bring people to the jail for misdemeanors beyond 2012. The county had said the cities had to stop before 2012, setting off the debate over building a jail.

I’m not entirely sure what that means for the overall jail debate now. If anyone has more specifics, please feel free to share in the comments or email me directly. I still remain puzzled that with our economy in the condition it’s in that we’re considering such a costly infrastructure investment that hardly anyone wants and is not necessary. And despite what many I-100 opponents have insisted, we’re not diverting anywhere near as many people as we should be. This was made abundantly clear in a report from Nina Shapiro at Seattle Weekly back in January [again, emphasis mine]:

While liberal groups have fought for years for more lenient drug policies, our state’s financial woes are helping accomplish what their arguments alone could not. This is true at the county level as well. Faced with a $5 million budget cut to his office, King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg in October started kicking felony cases involving less than three grams of narcotics down to District Court, where they are prosecuted as misdemeanors. He says the move affects two-thirds of his caseload.

Meanwhile, the King County jail is already nearly full, and the county has said it will no longer have room for misdemeanor prisoners from the cities as of 2012. So Seattle and several suburban cities have started planning to build a new multimillion-dollar jail of their own.

There just isn’t any ambiguity about this. When two-thirds of our county prosecutor’s caseload involves people with less than .003 kg of drugs or less, our local court systems are being clogged with low-level drug offenders. If you hear any local politician talking about how we already do a good job of diverting these folks out of the system, they’re lying. We don’t. In fact, we shouldn’t be arresting any of them in the first place, which is what Portugal decided to do in 2001, and it’s been an unquestioned success.

This problem is understood in the most morally bankrupt light when we see the affect that aggressively prosecuting low-level drug offenses has on the African-American community:

While African-Americans are represented in King County average daily jail population by six times their percentage of population, five Seattle public schools that primarily serve African-American communities were closed this year to save the school system a meager $3 million.

Somehow, the city of Seattle had $110 million for a new jail, but couldn’t seem to locate $3 million to save some schools. I think that says everything you need to know about how Seattle’s city leadership views its minority communities.

It was hot last night at Seattle’s Town Hall, both literally and figuratively. Outside, advocates of a single-payer healthcare system were chanting and leafleting. Inside, as Gov. Howard Dean spoke about healthcare reform, the crowd was only slightly less boisterous.

Though friendly and receptive as Gov. Dean took the podium, when it came time to take questions from the audience it quickly became apparent that the many of those inside shared the sentiments of those on the street, with some of the questioners filibustering their opportunity at the mic to take an uncompromising stance in favor of single-payer, and opposed to anything less. It was apparently a familiar scene for Gov. Dean, who had just arrived from a similar engagement in Portland, OR, where several single-payer advocates had to be removed from the audience after disrupting the proceedings.

Gov. Dean, a licensed physician and former presidential candidate and DNC Chair, is on tour promoting his new book “Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform,” but for many true believers, Gov. Dean’s prescription—take a public option and call me in a decade—isn’t real enough. What plays out is the sorta classic confrontation between idealism and pragmatism that so often undermines reforms coming from either end of the ideological spectrum, leaving those in the mushy middle so firmly in control. And it’s the kinda confrontation that the insurance industry and big pharma are counting on to stave off reform for another generation.

As Gov. Dean repeated throughout the Q&A, he’d personally prefer a single-payer system, as it’s the only reform that can guarantee universal coverage while quickly providing the level of savings needed to get our healthcare costs under control. But as he also repeated, polling consistently shows that the general public just isn’t there yet, let alone the laggards in Congress, so while single-payer shouldn’t necessarily be taken off the table, it would be unrealistic to expect it to move any further… at this point in time.

And here’s where that confrontation between idealism and pragmatism really comes into play. Public option opponents on the left dismiss the proposal as mere half-measures, while public option opponents on the right attack it as a slippery slope to single-payer. And they’re both right. The question is, will the lack of enthusiasm for the public option from idealists on the left ultimately play into the hands of the pragmatists on the right in their efforts to scuttle any substantive reforms at all?

As I’ve argued before, the public option is a slippery slope to single-payer, if implemented and executed correctly. Now some might characterize this admission as cynical and dishonest, but good policy done right is inherently a slippery slope toward better policy. As it should be. And it’s a slope we slide down only with the approval of a majority of voters.

So after he finished signing books I asked Gov. Dean whether he believed the public option would be a slippery slope to single-payer. I wanted him to say yes, and I sensed that he wanted to say yes as well. But he’s too smart for that… and too pragmatic. Instead, he enunciated what I think is the most rhetorically effective response I’ve ever heard to the right’s slippery slope argument, a response that totally undermines their objection, even without denying it:

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This will be the change that the American people want at the pace that they want it. So the opponents have no right to make that argument. The Republican ability to make that argument assumes that they know better than the American people, that they’re so smart that the American people have no right to make up their own mind.

That’s what this bill is about. This bill is not about whether to have a single-payer or a public option or a private system; this bill is about whether the American people get to choose for themselves, or whether congressmen take it upon themselves to override the will of the American people and do something different. It’s a straight up vote between whether you’re in favor of the health insurance industry, or whether you’re in favor of your constituency. Everybody’s going to have to make that vote, and we’ll be watching.

The same could be said to the uncompromising advocates of a single-payer system.

I may not live to see the bottom, but I still believe that the public option will ultimately set us down that slippery slope to single-payer, and my sense is that many of its proponents believe the same, whether for pragmatic reasons, they’re willing to publicly say so or not. If given the choice, many Americans will flock to the public option, and if private insurers simply aren’t able to compete, I’m alright with that. It is ironic, after all, that those who insist there is no fundamental right to basic health care, also tend to be those who insist that there is a fundamental right to selling private health insurance.

Of course, there isn’t. And if the single-payer advocates can be as patient as they are passionate, I’m confident the American people will ultimately prove them right.

Digby discusses the arrest of Henry Louis Gates and our views of police power.

Republicans are horrified at the thought of the government being involved in your health care. Unless you’re a woman of child-bearing age, or use a non-traditional medicine or face a terminal illness, of course.