HorsesAss.Org

Perhaps I was dreaming, but I believe my clock radio awakened me this morning to the sound of Rep. Deb Eddy (D-48) telling KUOW listeners that she supported an income tax.  Of course, most Democratic legislators privately support an income tax, but damn few are willing to talk about it publicly, and it was particularly heartening to hear this kind of talk coming from a suburban Dem.  So maybe we made a little progress on this issue after all?

In the meanwhile, it looks like there’s still quite a bit of unfinished business in Olympia, prompting immediate talk of the governor calling a special session to tie up a few loose ends, and opening the opportunity for some mischief making.  Here’s hoping the progressives in the Democratic caucus can get their shit together and make a little mischief.

After confirming 20 cases of the Mexican swine flu in five states, and four more cases in Canada, U.S. health officials declared a national public health emergency today in order to intensify resources toward diagnosis and prevention, and to release funds to purchase and distribute supplies of anti-viral drugs.

So far there have been no known deaths attributed to this new strain of swine flu outside of Mexico, and only one US victim has thus far required hospitalization.  Still…

Officials said they expect more severe cases as reports of infection multiply.

“You don’t know how much it’s spread, but you’ve got to at least make the assumption that there’s a lot more virus in this country than is seen at the moment,” Jeffrey Koplan, the C.D.C. director from 1998 to 2002, said in a telephone interview.

As always, DemFromCT is following the issue closely on Daily Kos.

Last week’s contest was won by 2cents. It was The Rhein Tower in Dusseldorf, Germany. Here’s this week’s, good luck!

Not done yet.

And more foreclosures are looming. One-third of Washington homeowners who financed with adjustable-rate mortgages are still paying low, introductory rates. Those teaser rates, some as low as 1 percent, will jump in the coming year.

In most other states, those low initial rates have already expired, according to the Washington Budget & Policy Center.

“When they reset, it’s not going to be pretty,” said Glenn Crellin, director of the Center for Real Estate Research at Washington State University.

Good, research-based article with human interest by the Seattle Times reporters. When one contemplates newspapers going away, it’s solid efforts like this that would be sorely missed.

The disaster that is real estate in Washington state seems likely to continue for some time. Plenty of blame to go around. Yes, some people bought houses they had no business buying, but in order to do so all they needed was a “heartbeat” and they got the loans, as the article puts it.

So all of us suckers who played by the rules get to help clean up this stinking mess, and if anyone needs to sell their house because of legitimate reasons like a transfer, an illness or something, the market is all messed up with REO’s and short sales. Luckily our household doesn’t need to move, I’m just sayin’.

So thanks a lot to the wieners who ran Countrywide! We’re likely going to re-finance not only because rates are so absurdly low, but because the thought of writing any more checks to Countrywide makes us want to vomit. I don’t really care who owns them now, B of A is being a bunch of jerks with their credit cards, so they can bite us too.

Strange business strategy if you ask me, hacking off the good customers who pay their bills on time. If B of A wants any money from us they’ll probably need to buy back our loan at a new, fabulously low interest rate. I kind of wish I had a B of A credit card so I could enjoy putting it through the shredder.

Worried yet?

Officials around the world on Sunday raced to contain an outbreak of swine flu as potential new cases were reported from New Zealand to Hong Kong to Spain, raising concerns about the potential for a global pandemic.

Governments issued travel advisories urging people not to travel to Mexico, the apparent origin of the outbreak, where 81 people have died and some 1,300 have been infected. China, Russia and others set up quarantines for anyone possibly infected.

Cases of the Mexico City strain have now been confirmed in California, Texas, Kansas, and New York, with suspected cases in several other states. Thus far the American victims have suffered mostly mild symptoms, but the number of confirmed cases is not yet large enough to be statistically significant, so here’s hoping that Mexico’s mortality rate—consistently running at a stunning 6 percent as new cases are reported and confirmed—turns out to be the anomaly, not the norm.

Of course, it’s too soon to panic, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a run on surgical masks over the next few days.  And this wouldn’t be a bad time for folks around these parts to restock your earthquake survival stores to make sure you have enough food to last several weeks.

– Jim McDermott has added his name to the small but growing list of Congressmen who are finally speaking up about the need to legalize marijuana as part of the response to our nation’s economic mess. Mary Ann Akers at the Washington Post writes about Howard Woolridge, the lobbyist for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. The conventional wisdom has long been that there’s a danger for politicians to embrace McDermott’s position because of the voters, but for some reason, Ron Paul keeps getting re-elected by wide margins in one of the most conservative parts of the country. The problem is not that voters will reject it. It’s that politicians and special interests (law enforcement agencies, prison lobbies, and pharmaceutical firms) have a strong interest in holding it back.

– A major bust in Belltown brought charges against 32 individuals for drug dealing. The answer to the PI’s question is No. Arresting people does not fix an area’s crack problem. Here’s my question: How many more decades will this approach have to fail before we finally recognize that it always fails?

– I’m having a lot of trouble understanding the logic inside Obama’s Justice Department. This week, they recommended that Charles Lynch, the medical marijuana dispensary owner who was raided by the Bush Justice Department, be sentenced to 5 years in prison. This is only weeks after Eric Holder said that Obama would no longer target those in medical marijuana states like Lynch who follow state law. The Times article quotes U.S. Attorney Thomas O’Brien as saying that Lynch was violating state law, which is clearly bullshit. Not only did Lynch have the mayor of the town at his side when he opened his dispensary, but during the trial, the Federal Prosecutors went out of their way to prevent the jury from knowing that he was following state law.

So to sum up the Obama Administration’s DOJ stances: We won’t prosecute people for torture because that’s looking towards the past, but we will honor previously-imposed mandatory minimum sentences for things that we no longer think should be enforced. I’m sorry, but that’s every bit as bad as the Bush Administration was. On issues of civil liberties, Obama and his fellow Democrats need to start getting serious or they’ll start bleeding independent voters before 2010.

– PubliCola writes about how Civil Liberties legislation fared in Olympia this session.

The news coming out of Mexico City is worrying as 61 68 people are now confirmed dead, and more than a thousand sickened from a new variant of the H1N1 flu virus that has apparently jumped from birds to pigs, and is now easily transmissable through human to human contact.  Mexican authorities have closed schools, theaters, libraries and museums in an effort to curb the spread, but with cases now being reported throughout Mexico, and confirmed in both Texas and California, officials at both the US Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization are sounding increasingly alarmed over the possibility of a worldwide flu pandemic.

And perhaps the most chilling news…

Most of Mexico’s dead were young, healthy adults, and none were over 60 or under 3 years old, the World Health Organization said. That alarms health officials because seasonal flus cause most of their deaths among infants and bedridden elderly people, but pandemic flus — like the 1918 Spanish flu, and the 1957 and 1968 pandemics — often strike young, healthy people the hardest.

It’s times like this when strong, decisive and well-prepared government leaders can make the difference between life and death.  As the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1919 was killing an estimated 50 million worldwide, Seattle Mayor Ole Hanson preemptively shut down schools, theaters, businesses and other public places in a controversial effort to minimize the local outbreak.  Seattle was relatively spared compared to other US cities… and Hanson was literally run out of town by outraged business and civic leaders angered over the loss of revenues and the disruption of the city’s daily routine.

In that tradition, King County Executive Ron Sims has long made the inevitability of another flu pandemic a primary focus of the region’s disaster preparedness efforts, a focus I first learned about back in September of 2005, when I heard Ron talk at a post-Katrina, Red Cross fundraiser.

But rather than talk about New Orleans, he spent most of his time talking about the county’s own disaster preparation efforts. By far their primary focus? Not earthquakes, not terrorist attacks… but avian flu. It was a sobering talk with zero political upside for a man who was in the midst of what was supposed to be a tough fight for reelection, and I came away wishing every voter had the opportunity to talk with Sims one-on-one.

And it wasn’t just talk.  Seattle & King County Public Health has a detailed and informative Pandemic Flu Preparedness page, which includes links to videos, fact sheets, resources… even a 12-page comic book available in 16 languages.  The agency’s 50-page Pandemic Flu Response Plan is available here.

It is ironic that the legislature is about to slash public health spending exactly at a time we might need it most.  And more than a little bit scary.

Earlier this week, this post at Eschaton about a girl being prosecuted for “sexting” made me recall an event that used to take place every year at this time – the Ann Arbor Naked Mile.

As a freshman at the University of Michigan in 1993-94, my roommate was a junior on the crew team. According to his version of events, the crew team started the Naked Mile in the late 80s by streaking across campus at midnight after the last night of class. In the years following, the event grew significantly larger. Throughout the school year, my roommate tried convincing everyone in our hall to run with him. I had a pretty strong anti-authoritarian streak in me by then, but it still took a little bit of coaxing to get me on board.

On the night of the event, there were four of us assembled in our room downing shots (my roommate was over 21 by then, so that was only partially against dorm rules) and drinking Mountain Dews. The route of the Naked Mile went across campus from east to west, basically taking us back to our dorms. Despite it only being in the 40s, I headed across campus wearing only a pair of soccer shorts and sneakers. When I got to the starting area, though, much of the nervousness about doing this was going away. There were hundreds of people there milling about naked, waiting for midnight. It was like a giant co-ed locker room outside in the cold. I took off my shorts and waited for everyone to start running.

The weird thing about the run is that you don’t get to do it as a herd. Because of the massive amounts of people who were now showing up for the event, the runners end up doing much of the race in a single-file line through the crowd on the main part of campus. The run began somewhat uneventfully at first, but as we approached the arch that separates the shops on South University from the campus diag, the route got blocked by the crowd. My roommate, cool as a fucking cucumber, yells out “anybody got a cigarette!” Someone in the crowd hands him a cigarette. He yells out “anybody got a light!” An outstretched hand held a lighter. He smoked it as we all stood around waiting for the path to clear.

We weren’t at the very end of the runners, but we were pretty close. My roommate’s smoke break separated us from the rest of the runners enough so that people in the crowd ahead thought that the run was over. As we finally made our way through the arch and into the diag, we were even more enmeshed in the crowd. By the time we got across the diag to State Street, we were way off course. In order to get to where we knew the end point was, we decided to cut through a small landscaped area just across State Street. After we jumped in, though, we realized that the ground inside that area was lower than the sidewalk we’d just jumped from. After we’d climbed up through a tall hedge to get back onto the sidewalk, I still vividly remember hearing my friend behind me saying, “Damn, I think I scratched my scrotum.” Still makes me laugh to this day.

When we arrived at the Cube sculpture where the “Mile” (it’s not even close to an actual mile) ends, we met up with some of the clothed members of our co-ed hall. And despite the fact that the run was over and I was hanging out with the girls from the room next door, I didn’t even feel the need to get dressed again. It’s something that you’d never expect, but once you’re naked in public with a good excuse, you can begin to feel very comfortable with your nakedness very quickly.

I wound up running it all four years I was in Ann Arbor, but I never had as much fun as I did that first year. In subsequent years, I began to notice the things that would eventually bring an end to the city’s and the University’s tolerance of the event. The major problem was that despite there being about 8 to 10 male runners for every female one, the event brought out the perverts in full force. Even in that first year, the size of the crowds amazed me. Then, with each year, the amount of video cameras just multiplied. One year (I believe my junior year), I let my drunkenness get the best of me and got thrown to the ground by a man whose very expensive video camera I’d just broken.

In my senior year run, some runners around me ran while also chanting “PER-VERTS” to the assembled gawkers. Unfortunately, gawking wasn’t the only thing going on. My girlfriend ran with me that year and said that she nearly got groped by some guys along the way. Several other girls who ran said the same thing, and some had actually been grabbed and pulled to the ground. We tried to find a police officer (Ann Arbor police tolerated the event and even did crowd control), but couldn’t find one interested in helping. Within a few years after that, the University tried to shut the whole event down.

I was thinking back on this history when I read the original post above, where a young girl who’d taken revealing pictures of herself with her phone found herself in a courtroom where a bunch of old men were planning to review the evidence and potentially punish her for doing so. On the one hand, I recognize the desire to keep teenage girls from doing this, as many of them have no fucking clue how populated this country is with sexually repressed and psychologically disturbed individuals who might do them harm. On the other hand, though, attempting to charge them with a crime is arguably the dumbest possible way to dissuade them from doing so. As the girl in the article realized, the biggest punishment that could occur is for creepy old men to see her naked.

It’s been tempting to conclude that the overeager prosecutor in this case, George Skumanick Jr., is focusing on these cases simply because of his own perverted desire to see revealing pictures of teenage girls. It’s certainly possible. But it’s also possible that he’s just another product of a justice system that far too often sees its role as moral nanny, and refuses to acknowledge the dangers of taking a heavy handed approach to getting teens not to make risky personal choices. It’s also kind of interesting that this case is happening so close to where the recent scandal over funneling young people to jail for money took place.

Another major concern here is that unless we clearly push back against the idea that anyone who doesn’t guard their own nakedness with sufficient zeal as a child pornographer, we’ll continue to expand the ranks of “sex offenders” beyond the point where it makes sense. The term sex offender should refer to actual dangerous people, who have victimized other people in a sexual way (like the perverts who grabbed and assaulted female runners at the Naked Mile). When we start trying to label people as sex offenders who make moral choices that sexually repressed members of our justice system are offended by, we completely undermine the purpose of having that distinction in the first place.

A few years after the Naked Mile was shut down, they made an American Pie movie that was based on the tradition. Not surprisingly, it was the same kind of idiotic overly-sexualized view of the event that wound up bringing hundreds of perverts out of the woodwork to line the streets of Ann Arbor every April. Back in the early-to-mid 90s, pictures posted from the Naked Mile on University of Michigan student websites were some of the first instances of web porn out there (which probably didn’t stay up for very long). On today’s internet, it probably wouldn’t even pass for porn, just blurry pictures of naked people running.

Today, the trend of “sexting” is the new thing, and a lot of kids simply haven’t been smart enough to realize that when they send a photo to their friends, it’s a short journey to the internet where the whole world can see it. As cases like that become more and more common, more and more kids will be smarter about not doing it. It doesn’t require that law enforcement officials spy on our teenagers’ phone traffic. It doesn’t require that District Attorneys threaten them with a “sex offender” tag that would haunt them their whole lives. It just requires explaining that there are a lot of freaking weirdos out there and expecting kids to be smarter.

The latest from Eric Schwartz:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRCbMc4YPzk[/youtube]

And Bill Maher has some New Rules:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyv_Oqsr9f8[/youtube]

(There are some fifty other media clips from the past week in politics posted at Hominid Views.)

Here is yet another reason to think about the structural budget issues that Goldy has explained at length to  incredulous and/or cynical activists and elected officials this year: federal monies.

I was reminded of it by this ECB Slog post about KC exec candidate Dow Constantine’s effort to boost King County infrastructure by funding a full-time county employee to coordinate stimulus grants to win money for the county. In this climate, it is as good a plan as any, if not better.

But turning to D.C. with palms facing up is not a solution that the state can ethically count on in the long run, especially after all that Bush-era war spending.

State Sen. Minority Leader Mike Hewitt (R-Walla Walla) makes this same point, though backwards, in an AP article today.

“This is a temporary fix,” Hewitt said of the federal stimulus money going toward the state budget. “I really don’t believe this is going to help us sustain for the next two to four years.”

It won’t, and that is the point. We need to do it our own selves, but not by slashing important services like the old skool contingent wants, but with a forward-thinking tax system.

Again, I’m not referring to current stimulus spending, which we should embrace, but rather the kind of federal grant and pork project cash that comes in to bail out states all over the union on a regular basis (putting added stress on relatively awesome states like Washington, btw).

Our national debt is spiraling out of control while governors across the country boast about balanced budgets to anyone who will listen. It isn’t because governors are inherently geniuses while presidents are stupid (even if the most frustratingly ignorant guvs are the ones who tend to seek a higher perch in D.C.). It is because state electeds can swindle voters into thinking they are fiscally responsible by sticking money into their front pockets (state budgets) while taking it from their back pockets (federal).

It’s NIMBY, baby, and it is all the more reason to make the changes necessary to create a solvent long term.

Personally, I don’t necessarily fall in line with the full-on income tax idea, but a federal grant/paltry sales tax/incomprehensible business tax/property tax/tourist tax scheme might hold some water, but it is as leaky as a pre-santorum asshole.

Like Goldy says, just think about it.

P.S. I first read, in a convincing way, about the federal/state discrepancy in an op-ed in the Times or something like that last year. Anyone able to find the link for that?

How does the proposed state budget measure up?  The Spokesman-Review’s Rich Roesler dives into the details and finds that its 515 pages only comes to about an inch and a quarter.  (No word yet on whether that’s printed single or double sided.)

Rich also provides links to highlights and agency details, but as for me, if our legislators can’t be bothered to think creatively in crafting this budget, I can’t be bothered to read it on such a beautiful, sunny day.

As a vestige of a previous life, I still somewhat track the personal computer industry, with a particular interest in the fortunes of Apple, a company I have long admired for its innovative and elegant products.  And it has always been particularly amusing to read the dire warnings and earnest advice of industry analysts and other “experts” pontificating about Apple’s latest imagined misstep.

Most recently, as the world economy headed into a nosedive, the fear and loathing focused on price… specifically, Apple’s continued refusal to dip its toes into the low end of the market at a time consumers are rightly counting their pennies.  For the first time in years, Macintosh market share was on the decline in terms of units shipped.  Low cost netbooks were the hot new thing, yet Apple was snubbing its nose at the market.  Meanwhile, Microsoft was more than happy to pick up on the “Macs cost too much” meme with an advertising campaign that featured Windows PCs’ low cost versus Apple’s pricey cool factor.

Yet this week, amidst all the usual economic gloom and doom, and even as Microsoft was announcing its first revenue decline, well, ever, Apple bucked the trend by reporting a 15% profit increase, and its best non-holiday quarterly revenue and earnings on record.

So much for conventional wisdom.

There are a number of factors that have contributed to Apple’s relative success during these tough economic times, but I think there are two that stand out from the rest.  The most obvious is that Apple’s counterintuitive strategy of focusing on the high end of the market during an economic crisis turned out to be pretty damn smart.  The high end is where people with money tend to hang out, and these are exactly the people suffering the least during the Great Recession.  Apple’s devotion to quality, design, and yes, coolness over price, is also responsible for enabling the company to maintain gross margins the rest of the industry drools at.

The other major factor in Apple’s success, and somewhat related to the first, is that, at least since Steve Jobs retook the helm, Apple has displayed an uncanny knack for giving consumers what they want.  Not what they think they want… and certainly not merely what they think they need. No, once they see it, touch it, feel it… Apple gives consumers what they really, really want.

Sure, one could buy a generic, plasticy, yet perfectly functional Vista laptop for hundreds of dollars less than the lowest priced MacBook… but one gets the feeling that even those characters in the latest Microsoft ads would have chosen the Mac if price was no object.

But… um… this is a political blog.  So what am I doing delving into the Mac vs PC wars?  Well, it all comes back to conventional wisdom.

Under Steve Jobs’ leadership, Apple is a company that has consistently defied conventional wisdom, and profited handsomely from it.  While the rest of the industry has responded to the recession by focusing on affordability, sacrificing margin for market share, Apple understood that most of those already willing to pay a premium for its products would continue to be able to afford to do so.  Apple also refuses to lower its standards in pursuit of lower prices, a steadfast resistance to commoditization that consistently earns it by far the highest consumer satisfaction ratings in the industry.

Now compare that to the budget compromise Democrats are hammering out during the final days of the legislative session.

Despite a gaping $9 billion revenue shortfall, a proposal to partially fill the gap with a high-earners income tax was largely scoffed at by the conventionally wise, as a politically futile and/or anti-stimulative tax increase during a recession.  Instead, the Legislature has settled on a cuts-only budget that includes a sweeping rollback of spending on education, health care, public safety, parks and other popular and essential services and investments.

Not exactly the Apple way.

No doubt Democrats expect that, as unpopular as the cuts might be, they’ll at least get credit for being fiscally responsible, but I think it’s just as likely that their race to the bottom will actually make it more difficult to generate public support for refunding these services in the future.  By joining the likes of Alabama and Mississippi as one of the Windows netbooks of state government—small, cramped, slow, clunky and cheap—Washington is setting consumer expectations awfully damn low.

Over time, some voters will grow accustomed to reduced services and expectations, and decide that a governmental netbook is good enough.  (Today, we call these people “Republicans.”)  Others will still long for the governmental equivalent of an iPhone or a MacBook Air, but will no longer trust the state to deliver these sort of “premium” services, at any price.  Alas, a brand once tarnished is hard to rebuild.

What Democrats in Washington state consistently miss is what Microsoft’s ad campaign intentionally obscures:  that there is a difference between price and value. Apple has thrived by delivering value that cannot be measured simply in terms of gigabytes and megahertz… a lesson Democratic leaders would be wise to learn, however unconventional.  If we diminish public education, voters will be less willing to pay for it, as they rightly perceive government to be incapable of delivering value for their tax dollars, and the same holds true for nearly every other government service, commodities all.

Any Democrat who thinks our party will ultimately benefit from holding the line on taxes has another thing coming; what voters will really remember is the crappy service and real hardships these cuts will inevitably produce.  As such, this budget will make it more difficult to enact a progressive agenda, not just in the short term, but in the long term as well.  For who in their right mind would ever be willing to pay the so-called “Apple tax” on a brand better known for cheap, PC clones?

Speaking of Texas, a new Research 2000 poll for Daily Kos shows Texas Republicans are split, 48%-48% on the issue of secession.

Do you think Texas would be better off as an independent nation or as part of the United States of America?

US: 61
Independent nation: 35

Democrats: US 82, Ind 15
Republicans: US 48, Ind 48
Independents: US 55, Ind 40

Do you approve or disapprove of Governor Rick Perry’s suggestion that Texas may need to leave the United States?

Approve: 37
Disapprove: 58

Democrats: Approve 16, Disapprove 80
Republicans: Approve 51, Disapprove 44
Independents: Approve 43, Disapprove 50

Traitors.

John Brown, bitches.