HorsesAss.Org

At the top of the Obama Transition Team’s change.gov website is the following quote from the President-elect:

“Today we begin in earnest the work of making sure that the world we leave our children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today”

The website allowed for users to submit questions through the site about the incoming administration’s agenda. After visitors to the website were able to vote for or against the submitted questions, the following question was the most popular:

“Will you consider legalizing marijuana so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and create a billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.?”

One could easily argue that this isn’t the most pressing issue facing America right now, but it’s certainly the one for which the continued lack of a sane answer from politicians confounds the highest number of people. Obama’s response was predictable:

President-elect Obama is not in favor of the legalization of marijuana.

While I never expected Barack Obama to simply end maijuana prohibition from the Oval Office, there are potential situations for which his role in drug policy will be interesting to watch. During the Democratic primary campaign, he vowed to stop the federal raids in medical marijuana states (then again, so did Bush in 2000, but that certainly didn’t happen). If Obama follows through on that promise, it’ll be a good start. But what happens if a state takes the next step and moves towards regulated and taxed sales as a budget-boosting measure? Will Obama use federal government resources to fight it, or will he also view that as a states’ rights issue?

The reason that these questions matter is because much of the reluctance at the state level to move forward on drug policy is because they fear coming in conflict with federal law. If we have an incoming administration that accepts the right of the states to decide these issues for themselves without interference – even if its something that Obama doesn’t necessarily support – we may start seeing states finding that ending a costly and counterproductive prohibition is a smart move in these tough economic times (remember that alcohol prohibition ended very quickly in the early 1930s after the economy went south).

This morning, President-Elect Barack Obama defended his decision to have Rick Warren deliver the invocation at the inauguration (video here): 

 It is important for America to come together even though we may have disagreements on certain social issues.

And I would note that a couple of years ago I was invited to Rick Warren’s church to speak, despite his awareness that I held views entirely contrary to his when it came to gay and lesbian rights, when it came to issues like abortion.

Nevertheless, I had an opportunity to speak, and that dialogue, I think, is a part of what my campaign’s been all about, that we’re not going to agree on every single issue. What we have to do is create an atmosphere where we can disagree without being disagreeable, and then focus on those things that we hold in common as Americans. So Rick Warren has been invited to speak, Dr. Joseph Lowery—who has deeply contrasting views to Rick Warren about a whole host of issues—is also speaking.

During  the course of the entire inaugural festivities there are gonna be a wide range of view points that are presented and that’s how  it should be because that’s what America is about. Part of the magic of this country is that we are diverse and noisy and opinionated and so that’s the spirit in which we have put together what I think will be a terrific inauguration.

Here’s what bugs me about O’s “logic”: He cites an admirable political goal—diversity—as the reason to prioritize someone who totally rejects that goal.

Including Warren isn’t tantamount to holding a world peace conference that includes adversaries like America and Iran (that’d be cool), it’s the equivalent of inviting the aliens from Independence Day , who are committed to destroying earth, to the same conference. They don’t believe in the overarching goal at hand, just like Warren doesn’t believe in the overarching goal of diversity.

Obama’s allowed to tap Warren to kowtow politically, but saying he’s doing it to support diversity doesn’t make much sense.  

Meanwhile, Obama’s comparison between Warren inviting Obama to speak at Warren’s private Saddleback Church in California to Obama inviting Warren to speak at the inauguration of the next American President is insane.

Paul Weyrich, one of the founders of the Heritage Institute, and a leading force in the modern Conservative movement, died this morning at age 66.  No cause of death was reported, but I’m guessing it was of a broken heart.

… at least by Seattle standards.  I’m guessing in Erie, PA, not so much, but here in Seattle, who could argue?  It’s just a shame to have canceled school yesterday based on the possibility of snow.

Now let’s see if the various districts have the common sense to just call off tomorrow in advance, and let everybody officially start Winter break early.

Your liberal media: Juan Williams NPR sound file.

Very rough translation, with liberties: ideology is bad, so it’s good Obama is working with moderates who hate ideology, because today the term “ideology” is a cudgel used without any analysis of the beliefs any particular ideology actually embraces.

The implicit assumption is that progressive are an exact and opposite force to movement conservatives and hence equally loathsome, no matter the evidence. Torture, universal health care, whatever. Ideology ideology ideology! Regular Americans hate all of them, even the ones that are for them!

And BTW, Rick Warren supporting Prop. 8 is not at all ideological. Obama is, in fact, a genius for reciprocating! Rick had Obama over and now Village decorum dictates Obama have Rick over, like it’s the PTA or something.

They’ll probably just talk about the weather and pie and stuff, maybe how the brain dead can smile.

Obama must reach out to people who will never vote for him in a million Pleistocene epochs, because it angers the left.

These are the defined, clinically insane parameters of American politics, and within such confines we must confront the greatest economic challenges (perhaps) of all time.

If making hippies and the gays mad were money, problem solved!

School let out about an hour and half ago, and the first few drops of rain are starting fall.  But still no sign of snow.

What do you think the chances are that Seattle schools will be open tomorrow, when the roads will be considerably icier than today?

Although tech blogs from both the civil liberties left and the free market right  have supposedly debunked Monday’s hot Wall Street Journal article about Google reversing its long standing pro-Net Neutrality position, other irksome (and locally relevant) revelations in the article remain standing: Two major Seattle tech-culture companies, Microsoft and Amazon, also longtime advocates of Net Neutrality, are getting squishy on the issue. 

Net Neutrality is the James Madison-y idea that all content is created equal. Practically speaking, it means this: Internet companies like AT&T cannot give preferential treatment to content companies, or any website for that matter. Walmart.com cannot get better treatment than Hel-Mart.com, for example.

The concept has been contested by transmission companies like AT&T who want the option of offering better delivery for companies willing to pay more. They argue that big content companies should get better service (and pay more) because they use more bandwidth. But that’d be like Seattle Public Utilities giving a wealthy family living in North Seattle faster and hotter water than someone living in South Seattle just because the fancy family used more water and paid more. 

While the tech blogs went after the Journal article, defending Google’s honor by pointing out that Google was only promoting a long standing concept called edge-caching— which apparently doesn’t jeopardize net neutrality  — the accusations that Seattle’s own Microsoft and Amazon are reversing themselves on Net Neutrality remains in question.   

 

In the two years since Google, Microsoft, Amazon and other Internet companies lined up in favor of network neutrality, the landscape has changed. The Internet companies have formed partnerships with phone and cable companies, making them more dependent on one another.

Microsoft, which appealed to Congress to save network neutrality just two years ago, has changed its position completely. “Network neutrality is a policy avenue the company is no longer pursuing,” Microsoft said in a statement. The Redmond, Wash., software giant now favors legislation to allow network operators to offer different tiers of service to content companies.

Microsoft has a deal to provide software for AT&T’s Internet television service. A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment whether this arrangement affected the company’s position on network neutrality.

Amazon’s popular digital-reading device, called the Kindle, offers a dedicated, faster download service, an arrangement Amazon has with Sprint. That has prompted questions in the blogosphere about whether the service violates network neutrality.

“Amazon continues to support adoption of net neutrality rules to protect the longstanding, fundamental openness of the Internet,” Amazon said in a statement. It declined to elaborate on its Kindle arrangement.

Amazon had withdrawn from the coalition of companies supporting net neutrality, but it recently was listed once again on the group’s Web site. It declined to comment on whether carriers should be allowed to prioritize traffic.

Microsoft kinda sorta denied that they’re backing away from Net Neutrality in this follow-up article, but they don’t address the specifics of the WSJ’s accusations. 

Sidenote: The WSJ article also indicates that Obama—who was a loud advocate of Net Neutrality during the campaign—may also be reversing course.

I’ll be on KUOW’s The Conversation today at around 1:30PM, talking about the most underreported news stories of the year.

My contribution?  Well, it’s an underreported aspect of a heavily reported story: the long term structural revenue deficit at the heart of our state’s current $5 billion-plus budget shortfall.

Good economies mask the problem while bad economies, like our current one, merely exacerbate it.  But no matter how you futz the numbers, long term tax revenues simply cannot keep pace with economic growth or growth in demand for public services.  That’s a fact.

So what we’re getting by default is an ever shrinking government by the only metric that really matters, and we’re getting it without any public debate.

What Dan said…

Once again here’s my surefire plan for saving daily papers: scare away the old folks once and for all. Those readers are killing you. Go tab, charge a lot more for home delivery, offer papers for free in boxes downtown, put “fuck” in a headline on the front page above the fold (if you haven’t gone tab), identify with the cities you’re freakin’ named for (and the not the freakin’ suburb your publisher lives in), and stop swimming with one anvil tucked under your left arm (“family newspaper”) and another tucked under your right (“objectivity”). Papers are for adults, not children, and mincing around about profanity turns off adult readers; people prefer openly biased media because letting your bias hang out there is, at least, honest; and, once again, catering to old timers and making sure there’s nothing in your paper that can’t be read to a six year-old at bedtime turns off adult readers.

And do all this now.

I’d add to that: think of your reporters as writers.  And as such, allow your writers to express their personalities in their writing.  Readers want to trust your reporters, but it’s much easier to develop that sort of personal relationship with a real person than it is with a faceless, disembodied byline.

Do the folks in the Seattle school district responsible for closing schools due to snow actually live in Seattle, because down in my SE Seattle neighborhood we’ve seen barely a flake, and the roads are clear and dry.  Same holds true for a friend in the Mt. Baker neighborhood, who left an angry rant on my voicemail this morning: no snow, clear roads, and clamoring kids without childcare arrangements.

The kid in me still reflexively cheers at the mere prospect of a snow day, but the adult in me understands what an incredible burden it is on single- and two-working-parent families… the vast majority of households with school age children here in the 21st Century.  By closing the schools out of fear it might, just might snow a little later today, the Seattle, Mercer Island, Bellevue and other school districts have not only disrupted our children’s education, they’ve created an unnecessary hassle for thousands of parents, in some cases costing them a day’s wages, or even their job.

It’s pretty damn ridiculous.

The weather’s not going to get any better between now and the end of the week, so if this is all it takes to twitch their itchy school closure finger, they might as well just cancel Thursday and Friday now, and let us all start the Winter break a few days early.  At least that way we could plan ahead.

The chair of the Oregon GOP says he is surprised at the accusations against one of the accused Woodburn bank bombers. Two law enforcement officers were killed and another gravely wounded in last Friday’s explosive attack. From The Oregonian:

And the arrests of two members of the Turnidge family — which decades ago helped start the Salem Academy Christian schools — have left those who know the family incredulous.

“I would be very surprised if Bruce Turnidge was involved in that,” said Vance Day, the Oregon GOP chairman and a Salem attorney who has known brothers Bruce and Pat Turnidge for several years. “I know him to be strong, very pro-American. He doesn’t believe in violence of that sort whatsoever.”

Marion County prosecutors arraigned the son Tuesday on six counts of aggravated murder, which, if Turnidge is convicted, could carry the death penalty. He also faces two counts of attempted aggravated murder, manufacture of a destructive device, possession of a destructive device, first- and second-degree assault and conspiracy to commit all of the crimes with one or more unidentified persons.

To be clear, the persons accused by authorities in the case are Joshua Turnidge and his father Bruce Turnidge.

People are presumed innocent in this country until proven guilty. Still, with law enforcement yet to offer a possible motive, it’s one hell of a strange and disturbing case.

Join us at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally for an evening of politics under the influence. We start at 8:00 pm at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Some of us will show up early for a bite to eat.

Not in Seattle? Check out the Drinking Liberally web site for dates and times of a chapter near you.

Idaho state Rep. Stephen Hartgen (R-Twin Falls) is considering drafting legislation that would make anonymous blogging illegal, a bill that would be just as unlikely to achieve its stated goal as it would be to pass constitutional muster…

“Anonymity takes away the responsibility to say things in a civil and accurate manner. It provides a cover for the ugliness we see in the debate today. It’s hard to read political blogs any more because they are so inflammatory.”

What a fucking douchebag.

See, I’ve never blogged anonymously, and I have absolutely no problem sticking my name on a post, no matter how uncivil, ugly or inflammatory.  So suck on that, Rep. Hartgen, you fascist, freedom-hating sack of shit.

Now, I know that there are those in the political and media establishment who would prefer that credibility be limited to those writing under a prestigious masthead and in the familiar, suffocatingly polite manner of the traditional family newspaper.  But here in the new media we earn our credibility through the content of our words, not the number of letters in them or the byline above them.  That’s why I am free to address Hartgen’s idiocy with the foul-mouthed blue streak it deserves, and without damaging my own credibility… because I’ve earned that right over four-plus years of providing accurate news reporting and thoughtful analysis, however salty my language.

But even if I had never attached my real name to my screen name—even if “Goldy’s” true identity had remained a mystery until this very day—my credibility would still not be diminished, because my nom de plume is as much a valid signature on my body of work as my actual, legally binding chicken scrawl.  On the flip side, the bulk of the anonymous trolls in my own comment threads have no credibility at all, because they simply haven’t earned it, and when you write anonymously you start from nothing.

This is the irony that the sniveling, cowardly Hartgen misses entirely:  anonymous discourse is often the most honest of all, because it is judged entirely on the quality of the content rather than the presumed reputation of the name on the label.  (Here’s a thought experiment:  put Mr. Cynical’s byline on Ted van Dyk’s columns, and see how eager the oh-so-respectable editors at Crosscut would be to publish his rambling, incoherent posts?)

But perhaps the worst thing one could say about Hartgen’s proposal is not that it is merely assinine, unconstitutional, unnecessary or even mind-numbingly stupid, but that it is downright unAmerican—an unpatriotic insult to the proud pseudonymous tradition of Publius, Anonymous, Mrs. Silence Dogood and other founding fathers.

If these great pamphleteers were alive today, they’d be bloggers all, and I’ve no doubt they’d join me, anonymously or not, in asking Rep. Hartgen the question that should be posed to all those who threaten the essential freedoms ensconced in our First Amendment:  why do you hate America?

I’m not really sure why I still bother to read him, considering nobody else of influence seems to bother to read him much these days, but I couldn’t help but be amused by our friend Stefan’s conspiracy theories about “Blagojevich-style quids pro quo in the elections director race.”  Stefan obsesses on efforts by state and county Dems to consolidate support around a single candidate, ultimately current elections director Sherril Huff, and not surprisingly determines the process was criminally corrupt:

The “read between the lines” understanding among people who are familiar with the discussions is that Osgood and Hansen were promised jobs to get out of the race and Baker was promised help with a bid for Seattle City Council.

Oh no… unnamed sources “familiar with the discussion” (but not actually present), “read between the lines” to conclude that Osgood and Hansen were promised pay to not play!  Quick, call the FBI!

Still, I have sources too, first hand at that, and I’m even willing to name some of them.  KC Dem Chair Suzie Sheary, one of the participants at the meeting in question, simply laughed off Stefan’s speculation as “a hoot,” while Jason Osgood, who Stefan essentially accuses of taking a bribe, sarcastically sighed “And here I am thinking people are starting to take me at my word…”

“No machinations. I woke up, read that Huff was running, called her to confirm, congratulated her, told her she was the right person for the job, and bowed out. I heard about the Tuesday meeting after the fact. I haven’t spoken to anyone who participated.”

Say what you want about Jason, but he’s nothing if not a true a believer.  With his accumulated name ID coming off his recent run for Secretary of State, and his unquestioned devotion to election reform, he would not have dropped out of the race if he wasn’t convinced that Huff was both qualified and, in a better position to win.

Jason’s take on the process?  “Play to win and know when you’re beat.”

Of course for Stefan, Jason and Suzie’s denials only prove his suspicions:

Naturally, folks who were at the meeting claimed that “They weren’t pressured into bowing out and weren’t offered anything for doing so”. What would one expect them to say even (especially) if there were pressure and inducements to bow out? But why would these folks go to a meeting to discuss this at Democratic Party HQ in the first place?

Yup, that’s the sort of journalistic rigor and “when did you stop beating your wife” kinda logic we’ve come to expect from WA’s preeminent righty blogger, relying on speculation from unnamed secondhand sources to charge conspiracy, while tautologically proffering the alleged participants’ firsthand denials as incriminating evidence.  But, then, you know… anything related to King County Elections brings out the very worst in Stefan, so I guess we should cut him some slack.

So what really happened at last Tuesday’s meeting?  Dwight and Suzie kicked the GOP’s ass, that’s what, consolidating support around a single, viable candidate, while the Republican faithful will largely split between armed and dangerous Pam Roach and David Irons and his dangerous hands.

Political horsetrading is neither illegal nor unethical; candidates are pressured all the time to bow out of races with promises of future support and/or threats of political retaliation.  And if that’s what was necessary to clear the field for Huff, then the Democratic leadership deserves kudos for their efforts to bring a semblance of sanity to this stupid and irresponsible no-primary, low-turnout special election.

So to raise the specter of Blagojevich-style corruption under these circumstances, based on secondhand conjecture, is not only silly, it ultimately serves to minimize real corruption, like that of the real Blagojevich.  Someday, Stefan might dig up an actual scandal, but given his boy-cries-wolf track record, how would we know?