HorsesAss.Org

I mean honestly what the fuck?

In the genteel world of bridge, disputes are usually handled quietly and rarely involve issues of national policy. But in a fight reminiscent of the brouhaha over an anti-Bush statement by Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks in 2003, a team of women who represented the United States at the world bridge championships in Shanghai last month is facing sanctions, including a yearlong ban from competition, for a spur-of-the-moment protest.

At issue is a crudely lettered sign, scribbled on the back of a menu, that was held up at an awards dinner and read, “We did not vote for Bush.”

By e-mail, angry bridge players have accused the women of “treason” and “sedition.”

“This isn’t a free-speech issue,” said Jan Martel, president of the United States Bridge Federation, the nonprofit group that selects teams for international tournaments. “There isn’t any question that private organizations can control the speech of people who represent them.”

Not so, said Danny Kleinman, a professional bridge player, teacher and columnist. “If the U.S.B.F. wants to impose conditions of membership that involve curtailment of free speech, then it cannot claim to represent our country in international competition,” he said by e-mail.

It only gets more insane. These women make their living playing bridge. They are some of the best in the world, and they’re being threatened with a years’ banishment because they held up a menu that said “We did not vote for Bush”? Seriously.

I’m super pissed off that there’s honestly any discussion of people losing their livelihood because they held up a menu that said how they voted. These are mothers and they held up a sign during a victory celebration. While waving American flags and singing the National Anthem.

And by the way, the French team got the American ideal better than our country:

“By trying to address these issues in a nonviolent, nonthreatening and lighthearted manner,” the French team wrote in by e-mail to the federation’s board and others, “you were doing only what women of the world have always tried to do when opposing the folly of men who have lost their perspective of reality.”

Anyway, next up is my expose on Pinochle: what do they do with all the low value cards, anyway?

Simple Majority is now up by almost 15,000 votes, and Tim Eyman is still a horse’s ass.

Not doing anything this evening? Then stop by the Hales Ales Brew Pub, 5-8PM, for state Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles annual post-election panel and fundraiser. A distinguished panel of pundits and insiders will hash out last week’s results, including Dave Ross, Ron Reagan, Dwight Pelz, James Kelly, Kelly Evans, Rep. Helen Sommers… and me. (I didn’t say distinguished at what.)

We all remember the images from the civil rights movement of the 1960’s, the local sheriff turning fire hoses and dogs on peaceful marchers, many just kids. It was these images of police using violent force against nonviolent protesters that helped turn the tide of public opinion nationally, eventually leading to the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 respectively.

That era seems so far away now, a time when tear gas was used indiscriminately against anti-war protesters, and police seemed to take pleasure bashing in the heads of the hated “hippies.” Perhaps no incident of American-style police state violence is more iconic than that which occurred on the campus of Kent State University on May 4, 1970, when members of the Ohio National Guard opened fire on students protesting the US invasion of Cambodia, shooting 13 and killing four, some of whom were just watching or walking by.

Student photographer John Filo, who took the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of 14-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling over the dead body of Jeffrey Miller, describes the inevitably chilling consequences that come from a state sanctioning violence against its own people:

The bullets were supposed to be blanks. When I put the camera back to my eye, I noticed a particular guardsman pointing at me. I said, “I’ll get a picture of this,” and his rifle went off. And almost simultaneously, as his rifle went off, a halo of dust came off a sculpture next to me, and the bullet lodged in a tree.

Whatever it is that allows a citizen-soldier, sworn to protect his fellow Americans, to fire live ammunition at an unarmed photographer, that state of mind is not arrived at overnight. The Kent State Massacre was the culmination of a divisive decade in which the government not only refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of public dissent against an increasingly unpopular war, but relentlessly branded the dissenters as enemies of the state. It was the culmination of a decade in which the state routinely relied on illegal wiretapping, domestic spying, and physical force to achieve its political ends.

Three and a half decades later, is history preparing to repeat itself?

Civil disobedience can be a disruptive tool for creating awareness and effecting change, but in a civil society we should always expect our law enforcement officers to respond proportionately. If I disobey a lawfully given order, and choose to peacefully occupy an area from which I am instructed to disperse, I should have every expectation of being handcuffed and arrested, but as long as I do not actively resist arrest or threaten violence, I expect the police — whose salaries I pay — to treat me respectfully and humanely.

But as has been repeatedly demonstrated during the anti-war protests at the Port of Olympia, “nonlethal violence” has apparently become the preferred response to disobedience of any kind, no matter how peaceful. Tear gas and pepper spray are routinely used to disperse and subdue the crowd; unarmed civilians are methodically lined up and maced. Perhaps lulled by the marketeers of these “nonlethal” weapons, physical force is fast becoming the first resort of law enforcement officials everywhere, apparently oblivious to the fact that violence breeds violence, and that it is a short step from a taser to a billy club to a loaded rifle.

Of course, police prefer to use these “nonlethal” weapons because they are efficient, effective and economical. But they are not always nonlethal. Dramatic amateur footage was released yesterday of a recent incident at Vancouver Airport, were a confused and distraught Polish man died shortly after being tasered by police. Police had claimed the man fought back, but the video proves otherwise, and clearly shows the taser being used as a tool of convenience.

Eventually, such policy will backfire, as individual citizens and mass protesters begin to understand that their peaceful actions are routinely answered with physical — sometimes deadly — force. There is only so much abuse that the average person is willing to take before they respond in kind. It may be inconvenient to tolerate the protests in Olympia. It may be downright disruptive to the Port. But if the police continue to ratchet up the violence, lethal or not, they will eventually find their batons soaked in blood.

Is anybody else getting bored with the Times super congratulatory coverage of “Media ownership crisis! 2008!” because frankly, I am. In my circles, dissing the whole “indymedia” thing is akin to saying that Radiohead is underrated. (And they are! OK Computer was the last thing I listened to and liked from them.) Today, I looked at the Times homepage and was overwhelmed:

Read about it here…

and here…

here…

and here.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the Times anti-media consolidation stance. But it’s reeks of “people who own newspapers covering things that are important to people who own newspapers.” There’s this “eat your vegetables” vibe to the whole thing that is starting to bug me.

If the Times put half the effort into having a basic understanding of light rail instead of that stuff above, I’d be happy.

Big congratulations to Sherman Alexie, who won the prestigious National Book Award last night for his children’s book The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian. Alexie, a Seattle resident, is (in addition to being an amazingly talented artist) a good guy who lends himself to innumerable worthy causes. It’s nice to see him get the recognition. (This is the second year in a row that a Seattle resident has won the National Book Award; former New York Times correspondent Timothy Egan won it last year.)

As for serious hype, the Dalai Lama will visit Seattle next April. Let the human interest stories begin.

I highlighted it yesterday when they lost, so fair’s fair: last night your their Oklahoma City Sonics (0-8) clashed with the Miami Heat (1-6) in an alleged NBA game: the resistable object meeting the movable force. (When these two teams meet, you can throw out the records…and everything else…) Someone had to win (I guess), and it was your their Sonics, 104-95, breaking a 13-game losing streak and ensuring at least one win for the month of November. Next up: the underwhelming Atlanta Hawks, Friday. Oh, and UW beat Utah Wednesday night, 83-77, sending the 2-0 Huskies to New York for the final round of the preseason NIT next week.

One last election tidbit: the school levy simple majority measure (EJHR 4204) is now up by 11,000 votes and certain to win. But you knew that.

Elsewhere in the news, 50 or so more people were arrested at the Port of Olympia yesterday trying to block shipments of military gear coming in to a Stryker brigade at Fort Lewis. This has been going on for a week now, and why both the P-I and our state’s supposed newspaper of record (the Seattle Times) have been relying on wire reports for what is by any reckoning a major local story escapes me. The Iraq war is something a lot of people are interested in, and so, whether you agree with or loathe the Olympia folks, it’s hard to read the essential ignoring of this story as anything other than a political choice by our allegedly objective local media.

(Personally, I sympathize with both the aims of the Olympia protesters and their apparent frustration at their seeming powerlessness, but their tactics mystify me. When they were trying to block shipments of gear going out to Iraq earlier this year — in advance of the troops themselves, so it wasn’t endangering anyone — there was a certain logic to their protest. But this comes off more like a tantrum.)

This tidbit, meanwhile, concerning an actual national security threat, should piss anyone off: a new GAO report reveals that while you were getting cavity-searched for rogue toothpaste tubes at the airport, and three-year-olds were being kept off flights by the no-fly list,

Undercover investigators carried all the bomb components needed to cause “severe damage” to airliners and passengers through U.S. airport screening checkpoints several times this year, despite security measures adopted in August 2006 to stop such explosive devices…Agents were able to smuggle aboard a detonator, liquid explosives and liquid incendiary components costing less than $150, even though screening officers in most cases appeared to follow proper procedures and use appropriate screening technology…

Your tax dollars at work. At least the Saudis are getting a bunch of nice new jet fighters from us, right?

Oh, and even though he hasn’t been charged with anything (yet), a new defense fund has been set up for former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Send your sacks full of small, unmarked bills to…

I saw this at Washington Outsiders.

The Simple Majority majority is now over 11,000 votes, with about 43,000 ballots left to count, over half from King County. But you know, voters sent an anti-tax message last Tuesday, so what do I know?

…and he’s not excited about paying for a ferry in Kirkland either:

Cook is a South Park computer geek who, through her front window, has a commanding view of what ought to command the attention of King County: the South Park Bridge.

It’s a drawbridge over the Duwamish. It’s 77 years old and feels twice that. With a safety rating of 4 out of 100, it’s the most dangerous road around (the Alaskan Way Viaduct is a 9). Twenty thousand cars and trucks cross it daily.

King County owns this bridge. Engineers say they will shut it in a few years if nothing is done. Money to fix it was in the Roads and Transit plan that failed last week. Now the county has no plan for what to do.

“We aren’t going to be able to come up with the money for that by ourselves,” says Dow Constantine, the councilman who represents South Park.

So it rankles Cook that there the council was Tuesday, approving new taxes for ferries. For flood levees. For mental-health services. Worthy causes all, she said. But what could be more basic, more utilitarian than a neighborhood bridge?

“I don’t understand their priorities,” she said. “How can they just abandon a bridge?”

You know, it’s not like the county hasn’t seen this coming for years. It’s all a matter of setting funding priorities. King County should shelve the ferry to Ballard/Kirkland/Des Moines, cancel plans to remodel Seattle Center (which isn’t their’s to remodel in the first place) and focus on the South Park bridge.

First impressions count, and so the election night meme of a nascent tax revolt continues to hold sway over our political class, despite all evidence to the contrary. Or does it?

Yesterday the King County Council raised three new taxes: property taxes of 10 cents and 5.5 cents per $1000 of assessed value respectively for flood control and expanded foot ferries, and a tenth of a cent per dollar sales tax increase to fund mental health services. That’s about $90 a year in new taxes for the median county household… plus, a 25 cent hike in Metro bus fares. Meanwhile, after a contentious campaign season in which its public subsidy became a major issue, the Port of Seattle yesterday voted to increase its tax revenues by $10 million over 2007, levying 23 cents per $1000… about $92 annually on a $400,000 home.

Opponents of Prop 1 argued that we simply couldn’t afford Sound Transit’s proposed 50 mile light rail extension, and the half cent per dollar sales tax increase that would fund it at a cost of about $150 per year for a typical household. And yet just one week after voters soundly rejected the package at the polls, the council tacks another $90 a year onto our annual tax bill, without raising an eyebrow… or a public vote. Taxes equal to 60-percent of the cost of ST2 got raised just like that, with hardly any public debate. Doesn’t sound like the council fears an anti-tax climate to me. Indeed, I’d wager that Prop 1’s defeat made it easier for the council to raise taxes, as it left more of the tax base available.

So if you voted against Prop 1 thinking you were going to save yourself money, think again. Somehow, someway, you’re going to pay for RTID’s major roads projects, and without Sound Transit competing for your tax and toll dollars, probably a few more projects to boot. Tax revolt, my ass.

Let’s start with the most taxing of all: Your Their Oklahoma City Sonics stunk out the joint against Orlando last night, losing 103-76 in a game that wasn’t that close. Rashard Lewis, one of the two Sonics stars dumped in the offseason by new Oklahoma owner Clay Bennett, had 19 by halftime. The Sonics are now 0-8, and, having lost the last five games last year, have now lost 13 straight over two seasons, a new club record.

Lee may well be right that the plot may be to make the Sonics so bad that nobody will care if they leave, but if so the ploy is backfiring: the Sonics are so bad one can’t help but watch, like a slowly unfolding car wreck or a grisly horror movie. They’re that bad.

The local papers are reporting this morning what HA readers already know: EHJR 4204 is now passing. The measure to allow school districts to pass levies with 50 percent, rather than 60 percent, of the vote, while dropping the requirement of a 40 percent voter turnout, has pulled ahead primarily on absentee ballots from King County, which has solidly supported the measure (unlike much of the state).

King County Council passed three new taxes yesterday: a one-tenth of a cent hike in the sales tax for a dedicated fund for substance abuse and mental health programs; 10 cents per $1,000 valuation in additional property tax to pay to repair substandard flood control levees; and 5.5 cents per $1,000 valuation to pay for new passenger ferry district.

Anti-war protests continued yesterday at the Port of Olympia, where protesters poured cement onto railroad tracks to try to keep trains from leaving the Port with military shipments. The brief, unbylined Seattle Times article on the topic is notable for relying solely on Olympia police as a source, without bothering to pick up the phone and call, you know, anyone from the Port or any protesters. Without any context at all (e.g., the protests that have been going on since last Friday down there), the article is a complete cipher. If you want context, try this much better piece from yesterday’s Olympian.

Nationally, after carefully taking a full working day to consider the seven hours of public testimony at last Friday’s FCC public hearing in Seattle, on Tuesday FCC Commissioner Kevin Martin issued details of his proposal to further deregulate broadcast station ownership, specifically lifting a ban on newspaper/TV cross-ownership in any one market. A tale of two headlines: New York Times: “Few Friends for Proposal on Media.” The always-friendly-to-DC-bureaucracy Washington Post: “FCC Chief Offers New Plan On Cross-Ownership.” Amazingly, neither article mentioned the overwhelming public opposition to Martin’s proposal, choosing largely to focus on the Tribune Co., Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., and other large broadcasters that would be affected by the change. The Times’ “Few Friends” headlines refers to broadcasters who want still more lenient rules — not the public that thinks media has already consolidated quite enough, thank you. But then, it’s kind of hard to expect that public concerns would be acknowledged, let alone that we get (God forbid) balanced coverage on this issue, when both the Post and the Times have extensive newspaper and broadcast media properties themselves.

Another disaster, another delayed response. Another round of finger-pointing, another chorus of denial. The San Francisco Bay oil spill isn’t getting the nation-wide attention of Hurricane Katrina, the Minneapolis bridge collapse or the SoCal wildfires, but its aftermath is depressingly similar.

Having been in the Bay Area since the spill happened a week ago, I have no feel for Seattle’s level of awareness. Think of it this way: If inner Puget Sound was coated with brown gobs of sticky goo, if beaches were closed to the public (even to volunteer cleanup), if boats at local marinas had tarred bathtub rings marring their hulls, and if waterfront property owners had days of cleanup on their hands…well, you might be seeing some play in the local media.

Puget Sound and San Francisco Bay have a lot of physical similarities, which makes it all the more puzzling that oil-spill experts from the Seattle area were not hustled down here as soon as the magnitude of the spill became apparent. (They may have been, as were crews from Texas and elsewhere, but it reportedly took three to four days to summon any outside assistance.) In any case, once oil spills in an enclosed estuary, it doesn’t exactly disappear in the wash. Expertise in current patterns, containment technology, weather and other variables is badly needed, and response time is absolutely critical.

So what did we have in the Bay? The Cosco Busan, a 902-foot-long container ship heading out of harbor in a heavy fog, apparently was warned by the Coast Guard that it was on collision course with the Oakland Bay Bridge, but kept going because, as the ship captain evidently radioed back, radar showed the ship position to be safe. One might think you call a time out in this situation to do some trouble-shooting, but the boat kept going. The next thing anyone knew, it had “touched,” as Capt. John J. Cota termed it, a bridge tower. He could have said “kissed,” he could have said “nicked.” But what really transpired was a demolished wood-and-wire tower bumper and a 160-foot-long, 4-foot-deep tear in the vessel’s side. Within half an hour, 58,000 gallons of really toxic diesel fuel had seeped out, the bay’s biggest spill in 20 years.

But we didn’t know that, either. Initial reports were that only 140 gallons had spilled. It took more than 8 hours before the full magnitude of the spill became apparent, more than 12 to send out a full alert. The fog had something to do with this, hindering air surveillance. But let’s face it, some folks weren’t using much common sense, either.

The initial fumble made everything else about the spill just that more awful. Bay Area jurisdictions weren’t notified in a timely fashion. Additional equipment and expertise took that much longer to get in motion. Days after the spill, hundreds of volunteers still were being physically barred from the beaches (at least one was arrested for disobeying authorities) with the warning that they could do more harm than good, and might get sick from the stuff. Hundreds of oiled birds, many dead, were found, the crab and oyster seasons have been affected, and experts say that the bulk of the oil will never be recovered and may play havoc with the bay’s ecosystem for decades. Next to history’s really big oil spills, 58,000 gallons seems like a spitball. But diesel fuel is heavier, more toxic and more persistent than oil, and the Bay is more bathtub than washing machine. The stuff doesn’t have anywhere to go.

Official response has ranged from the ludicrous (Dianne Feinstein called it a “learning experience” — like Exxon Valdez wasn’t?) to the litigious, with one attorney estimating damage claims will total “well into nine figures.” The crew, all Chinese, has been subpoenaed. After visiting the magnificently restored (before the spill) Crissy Field, which must have taken a nasty hit, Nancy Pelosi suggested it might be time to double-hull retrofit fuel tanks of container ships, a costly requirement surely to be resisted by the shipping industry. The Coast Guard, now in high dudgeon, says the incident was “preventable human error” without embracing an iota of culpability. There’s even the suggestion that Coast Guard resources have been so diverted to Homeland Security that it cannot be bothered with mere oil spills any more. But hey, couldn’t anyone at least have ordered the ship to cut engines or something?

Meanwhile, a solitary eeriness haunts Bay beaches during remarkably balmy 75-degree, sunshiny, Indian summer days. If you doubt martial law could succeed in the U.S., all you have to do is spend a little time encountering guard after guard, blockade after blockade, barring access to the Bay’s multitude of public beaches.

Like Katrina, the Minnesota bridge and San Diego fires, the Bay oil spill will fade all too soon into our domestic-disaster woodwork. But one more brick has been laid in a disturbing bulwark of flubbed response and feckless hand-wringing, with the expectation of eventual cultural amnesia and resultant whitewash.

It all may seem like institutionalized ineptitude, starting at the top with G.W. Bush and his pernicious band of neo-con merrymakers. Listening to the Coast Guard commandant on the radio gave me the deja vu of Heckuva Job Brownie and Do Not Recall Gonzales, putting on airs of genial but simple-minded folk in way over their heads.

Instead, watching Bush himself fly over the devastation of Katrina back when, it occurred to me that incompetence is the strategy. We know neo-cons hate government, that they want to, as Grover Norquist puts it, drown the baby. But were they to act like it and execute on it, they know a compassionate and democratic public would revolt. So they simply act like they just can’t do any better. They appoint political hacks to make sure all the public’s money gets given away to their lackeys, and when a real crisis hits they simply fart around. Let the levees breach and the bridges collapse and the fires rage and the oil slime. What better opportunities to show how evil, useless and unnecessary government really is?

King County just dumped today’s results, and added to ballots counted earlier today elsewhere in the state, EHJR 4204, the Simple Majority amendment, now leads by over 5,000 votes statewide.

No doubt there may be a little seesawing over the next few days as ballots get tallied county by county, but this is first time since the polls closed that Simple Majority has been in the lead, and you’ve got to be encouraged by the trend. Late absentees apparently broke for the initiative, and it sure looks like Darryl’s prognostication is being proven true.

UPDATE:
More counties have reported, increasing 4204’s lead to 7,198. Although the ballots left to count number is always a rough estimate, nearly 60-percent of ballots remaining come from counties where 4204 is leading, while late absentees continue to trend Yes throughout the state. If trends continue, 4204 will likely exceed the roughly 7,900 2000 vote margin needed to avoid an automatic recount.

UPDATE, UPDATE:
In the comment thread RonK points out that an automatic recount occurs if the margin is under 0.5% and 2000 votes. My bad. Oh… and the latest count has it up by 6,952.

Join us tonight for a fun-filled evening of politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. We meet at 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E.

No doubt there will be cries of angst over media consolidation and, more importantly, beer consolidation.

Tonight’s activity might just be a redneck handyman contest for the best constructive use of a firearm in the categories home repair, automotive maintenance and politics.

Finally, tonight’s theme song: Rock The Boat by The Hues Corporation.

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

UPDATE [Lee]: I believe tonight’s Seattle DL is canceled due to Husky basketball.

UPDATE [Darryl]: Naaaa….there WILL be a DL this evening. The Husky basketball crowd will be gone by 8:00, which is when the game starts.

UPDATE [Goldy]: Darryl and I will be there, and that makes it a quorum by my count. If the rest of you don’t show up, that’s more Manny’s for me and Darryl.

UPDATE [Carl]: I’ll be there too, but I’m still two buses away, so who knows when that will actually be?

Kudos to Sam Machkovech at the Slog for making the inevitable comparison between the Sonics situation and the plot of the movie “Major League,” where the widowed owner of the Cleveland Indians wanted to move the team to Miami. In order to do this, she filled the roster with a bunch of washed-up no-names so that the attendance would fall to levels that allowed her to move the team.

If nothing else, the speculation that Clay Bennett is secretly trying to lose for the same reason might be the most intriguing thing about the Sonics right now (they’re now 0-7, the worst record in the NBA). I think we’ll know the fix is in if Jim McIlvaine ends up back in a Sonics uniform sometime this year.