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Apparently, quite a few people thought my piece on comment spam was disrespectful to Milton Friedman… which kind of surprised me because I didn’t really think the post was about Milton Friedman. It was about comment spam, and those free market ideologues who would oppose nearly all government regulation. (And who happen to look to Friedman as some sort of hero, whether they’ve actually read him or not.)

In any case, I’m guessing the free market folk might be displeased as well by the following editorial in Tuesday’s Seattle P-I:

In all the shock surrounding the Bellevue crane collapse, there’s one aspect for lawmakers to remember. The public seemed deeply surprised that no special effort is made to oversee the huge equipment that daily operates above construction sites and nearby traffic, pedestrians and office and housing complexes.

[…] With construction booming, the region is seeing more cranes. But the state has no license for crane operators and no training or testing requirements. A group formed to improve standards statewide in the aftermath of a 1994 accident at the Kingdome fell into inactivity.

[…] State certification of crane operators ought to be enacted quickly. With so many construction projects under way, the public deserves reassurance the state is exercising serious oversight, not waiting for more deadly surprises.

I’m curious to hear the arguments against inspections and certification of construction cranes, but my knee-jerk reaction is to come out in support of such legislation, if only to piss off the BIAW.

UPDATE:
The Seattle Times chimes in:

Self-regulation is perfectly adequate if the public is willing to accept the risk, or, if not, the concentric rings of expense if tougher governmental requirements are imposed.

[…] Beyond the ultimate lessons learned from this fatal accident, the Legislature might wonder if exhaustive investigations after the fact are sufficient.

That’s a reasonable analysis. Regulations cost money, and society needs to make a cost benefit analysis of whether the money saved (by industry and/or taxpayers) in not requiring licensing and inspection is worth the risk of having a giant crane fall on your head.

Um… how will we know which is which?

The Seattle Times editorial board seems to like Gov. Christine Gregoire’s “Washington Learns” proposal, but…

The elephant in the room, however, is education funding. Sidestepping this massive beast threatens the very underpinning of reform efforts. Gov. Christine Gregoire promised a new way of looking at education and investing in it. The smart, holistic proposals from her committee give us the former. Now, where’s the latter?

[…] Pressure is growing to address the funding issue. Lawsuits are being prepared challenging disparities in state money among districts and over the inadequacy of basic education funding.

The time to tackle the funding beast is now.

Hmm. The Times is editorializing in favor of increased funding for education. Great. But… um… didn’t they just spend most of the past year shilling for an estate tax repeal initiative that would have cut $100 million a year from education spending?

Tell you what Frank, I’ll trade the estate tax for an income tax, and that way we all come out ahead. What say?

Tonight’s lineup on “The David Goldstein Show” Newsradio 710-KIRO, from 7PM to 10PM:

7PM: What can we expect from the new Democratic majority in Congress? Ken Vogel joins me to answer that question and others. Ken is a former political reporter for the Tacoma News Tribune, and is currently and investigative reporter for a new Capitol Hill paper, the Capitol Leader.

8PM: Unfazed by Tasers? UCLA campus police repeatedly Tasered at student in the school library this week for being uncooperative and talking back? Is this appropriate use of force, or just another example of our nation’s newly relaxed attituded towards torture?

9PM: Is it time to reinstate the draft? The Democrats just took control of Congress, and now Rep. Charles Rangel, one of their most senior House members, has come out in favor of reinstating the draft. Is this the best way to keep Americans out of senseless wars, or the best reason to prepare to move to Canada?

Tune in tonight (or listen to the live stream) and give me a call: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).

Famed economist Milton Friedman died this week, and in pondering how best to eulogize the Andy Warhol of post World War II economics, I was reminded of another recent death — that of the comment spam that plagued HA on and off for most of the past two years. For if Friedman is a father figure to free market advocates everywhere, then spammers, comment or otherwise, are surely his rightful heirs — the logical online manifestation of a selfish and mean-spirited ideology that looks to Friedman for its economic scholarship and Ayn Rand for its moral philosophy (such as it might be.)

From the moment the blogosphere exploded into existence, harnessing the power of the Internet to create an historically unparalleled marketplace of ideas, the spammers descended, guided by pure, individual self-interest, aggressively seeking to exploit this new market for personal, economic gain. This is in many ways a perfect illustration of an unregulated free market at work, a market in which comment spammers seeking to up the Google ranking of say, a bukkake video website, would willingly bring the entire blogosphere to its semen-drenched knees… if only they could find a way around the latest anti-spam measures.

In upgrading HA last week I effectively stopped the spammers… for now. But this isn’t the first time I’ve managed to achieve the upper hand, and it won’t be the last time I’m forced to do so. I have spent untold hours filtering, deleting and combatting spam — hours I once billed out at lucrative rates to lavishly funded dot.coms, before that market collapsed under the weight of its own manipulations. The spammers have cost me time, they have cost me money, and they have caused me much hard work and frustration… all in pursuit of a vocation for which I receive little or no monetary reward. This is a war of escalating innovation, in which spammers relentlessly develop increasingly sophisticated techniques to evade bloggers’ increasingly sophisticated defenses.

Now some might argue that this “competition” is an example of perfectly balanced forces at work creating a more efficient market, but then these are the same sort of people who would ridicule me for complaining about the volume of email spam I receive, arguing that if I’m foolish enough to publish my address then I “get what I deserve.” (As if encouraging my readers to communicate with me privately reveals some sort of Darwinian weakness.) Yes, these are same sort of people who deride victims of identity theft for not being more responsible with their personal information.

But the main problem with the notion that competition always leads to greater efficiency is that it is wrong. Blog software developers could be devoting all of their energies to creating better platforms for engaging in public debate, but instead must divert valuable time and resources towards fighting the thousands of spam-bots that threaten to flood our threads with ads for payday loans and penile enhancement products. And there is absolutely nothing efficient about the fact that during the time it’s taken me to write these first five paragraphs, 47 new comments have been snagged by my filter, and that I must now manually scan through a list of spam hawking “big black cocks” and “online Texas hold’em” in order to rescue the occasional legitimate comment that gets inadvertently caught in the dragnet.

Comment spam should be illegal, whatever the prospect of actually enforcing such laws. Hell, if anybody deserves to be handcuffed and repeatedly tasered it’s the sick, vicious bastards seeking the top Google ranking for the phrase “dad fucking daughter.”

But no, there are those free market purists — those who lionize Friedman as some mythic hero — who would argue against any sort of government regulation or interference, however economically distorted or dehumanizingly cruel the market may be. Multinational corporations market powdered baby formula to new mothers in nations that lack a safe drinking water supply. RJ Reynolds, fully aware of the toxicity of its product advertised that “doctors prefer Camel.” My local filling station drops the price at the pump by 75 cents a gallon in the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s election, only to raise it 20 cents in the days after, even as crude oil prices fall. If there’s something wrong here, we’re told, the market will sort it out. The market is always more efficient than the government, and always corrects itself in the end. Or so the theory goes.

I’m sure there are those who are prepared to argue that my analysis is a gross misreading of Friedman’s work, but… well… I’ve hardly read Friedman at all. The truth is, it doesn’t really matter what Friedman wrote or what sort of economic policies he actually advocated, for in striving to become the most famous economist of the latter half of the Twentieth Century, Friedman’s influence has been mostly symbolic. Indeed, if we were to judge Friedman’s impact purely by the lasting economic policies he directly shaped rather than those he merely advocated, history would long remember Friedman primarily from his Keynesian days, as “the father of federal tax withholding.”

But that’s not the Friedman eulogized by his most ardent admirers, many of whom have never directly read his work either, and who would lack the economics training to properly understand it if they did. No, the Friedman they eulogize is the one of popular culture, the Prometheus of free market ideology… the patron saint of Enrons everywhere.

It is this Friedman that free marketeers look to for inspiration as they fight government regulations of all stripes. It is this Friedman a comment spammer might point to in defending his right to grind my blog to a halt if a buck can be made in the process.

Our nation’s Calvinist ethos survives today in a cult of the market that seems to equate individual economic prosperity with the will of God. But it must be remembered that the unfettered “free market” these ideologues passionately advocate is in theory amoral at its very best, and often deeply and disturbingly immoral in practice.

It is this ethos that fills our mail boxes and comment threads with spam, and as such, is as appropriate a tribute to Milton Friedman as any.

Great news for WA state Democrats: 21 of the 36 remaining members of the recently diminished state House GOP caucus voted Friday to retain Rep. Richard DeBolt (R-Chehalis) as minority leader.

Why is this good news? Democrats picked up six seats last Tuesday, increasing their hold on the state House to a commanding 62-36 majority, and I think it’s fair to lay at least some of the blame for the GOP’s electoral failure at the clay feet of DeBolt and his ham-fisted, hardball tactics.

House Majority Leader Lynn Kessler, D-Hoquiam, was unsure of what to expect from the Republican leadership team in the 2007 session.

She noted the DeBolt-led GOP’s fiery tactics on the 2006 session’s opening day, when the minority tried to bypass protocol and force a vote on a sex-crime bill. The caucus’ political committee later issued mailers criticizing Democrats for their positions on sex offenders.

“In 2004, [DeBolt] was really great to work with. I enjoyed working with him,” Kessler said. “In 2006, not so much.”

If you’re looking for a reason why an Iraq-war-fueled national Democratic wave managed to sweep so many local Republicans out of office, I think you have to look at the mean-spirited, Rove-like tactics of the state and local GOP over the past couple years. The fake sex offender mailings, 2005’s last minute voter registration challenges, the vicious, gay-bashing demagoguery before and after historic passage of WA’s gay civil rights bill… all this helped to make our relatively defanged, homegrown sub-species of Republican virtually indistinguishable in the eyes of average voters from the corrupt, feral and politically rabid breed that inhabits the other Washington.

Thanks in part to DeBolt and his caucus’s efforts to mimic the tactics of their national Party, voters concluded that a Republican is a Republican. And in 2006, that wasn’t a very good thing for a politician to be.

Now the Republican caucuses in both state houses are so small that Democrats don’t really need their votes or input on anything but a constitutional amendment. (And we’re only a few votes shy of not needing them on that either.) Given this disparity of power it would be awfully tempting to dis the GOP caucus the way their Congressional leadership dissed Democrats for most of the past 12 years, but Kessler says she plans to work with DeBolt.

“Because we have this big majority, we feel an extra responsibility to work with the Republicans and keep them engaged,” she said. “I’m hoping he will accept that from us.”

If DeBolt is smart he’ll accept Kessler’s olive branch, though personally I don’t think he deserves it. Considering the geographic divide between the two parties it is in the best interests of all of the state’s residents if the two sides can manage to work together… at least during the session.

Howard Dean defines the new Democratic Party:

“We are going to do the 50-state strategy for the next 150 years so we can be the dominant party power in this country again,” he said. “You can’t be the powerful party in this country who controls the government unless you are willing to let the people control you. And the only way you can do that is ask everybody for their vote, understand everybody is our boss even if they vote for you or not.”

New York Times reporter Timothy Egan is a great writer, and while I haven’t read his new book — “The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl” — I have no doubt he well deserves the National Book Award he just won.

This is a prestigious award, and it’s great to see the Spokane-raised Seattle resident get some local recognition. Front page, above the fold in yesterday’s Seattle Times; that’s quite a tribute, and while I’d rather see Seattle Times reporters writing like Egan than writing about him, I certainly can’t begrudge him the spotlight. Congratulations Tim, you deserve it.

But an editorial in today’s Seattle Times as well? Man, that’s spreading it on a little thick. I mean… who do you gotta sleep with on the Seattle Times editorial board to get gushy coverage like that?

This grainy video was shot on a cell phone Wednesday night at UCLA’s Powell Library, and shows a university student being tased repeatedly by police, apparently for the high crime of talking back. John Aravosis has been following the story extensively at AmericaBlog, as has the Los Angeles Times, but the UCLA Daily Bruin provides the most authentic, first hand report:

At around 11:30 p.m., [Community Service Officers] asked a male student using a computer in the back of the room to leave when he was unable to produce a BruinCard during a random check. The student did not exit the building immediately.The CSOs left, returning minutes later, and police officers arrived to escort the student out. By this time the student had begun to walk toward the door with his backpack when an officer approached him and grabbed his arm, at which point the student told the officer to let him go. A second officer then approached the student as well.

The student began to yell “get off me,” repeating himself several times.

It was at this point that the officers shot the student with a Taser for the first time, causing him to fall to the floor and cry out in pain. The student also told the officers he had a medical condition.

UCPD officers confirmed that the man involved in the incident was a student, but did not give a name or any additional information about his identity.

Video shot from a student’s camera phone captured the student yelling, “Here’s your Patriot Act, here’s your fucking abuse of power,” while he struggled with the officers.

As the student was screaming, UCPD officers repeatedly told him to stand up and said “stop fighting us.” The student did not stand up as the officers requested and they shot him with the Taser at least once more.

Of course, after a 300kV shock, it is quite likely the tased student could not stand up…

According to the many sources, a shock of half a second duration will cause intense pain and muscle contractions startling most people greatly. Two to three seconds will often cause the subject to become dazed and drop to the ground, and over three seconds will usually completely disorient and drop an attacker for at least several minutes and possibly for up to fifteen minutes.

But that’s really beside the point. If the police didn’t need a good reason to tase the student the first time, they didn’t need a reason to tase him the second. Or the third, or the fourth time, for that matter. As Aravosis laments:

In America, even being an asshole isn’t sufficient justification for the authorities to use violence against you. At least it wasn’t until just lately. This incident isn’t just about a student at UCLA, it’s about what’s happened to our country over the past six years and what it means, anymore, to be American.

What’s happened to our country is that America has become a nation that condones torture, and so it only makes sense that some people in law enforcement and other government offices now believe that they have the authority to torture American citizens. (And make no mistake, an electric shock baton or taser is an instrument of torture.) Watch the video. The police repeatedly tase the man in front of dozens of fellow students as if, well, that’s just the way one deals with backtalking trouble-makers. In fact, when bystanders started pleading with the officers to stop, they threatened to tase them too.

As the student and the officers were struggling, bystanders repeatedly asked the police officers to stop, and at one point officers told the gathered crowd to stand back and threatened to use a Taser on anyone who got too close.

Laila Gordy, a fourth-year economics student who was present in the library during the incident, said police officers threatened to shoot her with a Taser when she asked an officer for his name and his badge number.

Now, I don’t say this lightly, and I fully understand the implications of what I am suggesting — but if the crowd of bystanders had attempted to protect their fellow student from the officers by resorting to physical force, they would have been morally justified. During the late 1960’s this was exactly the type of incident that would have sparked a campus riot. And it probably should have yesterday as well.

This was the third time in a week LA area officers were caught on video committing acts of physical abuse. In one incident an officer beat a suspect after a foot chase, and in another incident an officer doused a suspect’s face with pepper spray as he sat handcuffed in a patrol car. And now campus police not only torture an innocent student, they are so confident in their righteousness that they do so in front of a room full of witnesses.

No doubt the vast majority of law enforcement officers respect the rights of the citizens they are sworn to protect, and we should all be grateful to them for putting their lives on the line every day. But when official violence is left unchallenged, unpunished and unanswered, it can only lead to more violence.

UPDATE:
According to an editorial in today’s UCLA Bruin Daily the student, Mostafa Tabatabainejad, was tased five times… the final four times while he was handcuffed and immobilized.

If you’re not doing anything tonight, come on down to the Seattle Follies at Town Hall, and watch me and KUOW’s John Moe duke it out in a post-election political boxing match.  Seattle City Councilwoman Sally Clark hosts, 7:30 PM, $15 at the door.  More info…

The federal government’s failed response to Hurricane Katrina, a nearly endless parade of congressional corruption scandals and the deteriorating war in Iraq all played huge roles in creating the anti-Republican tide that swept Democrats into power last week. But to the average voter, nothing brought home the incompetence and arrogance of the Republican regime like rising prices at the pump.

High gas prices were an affront and a hardship that voters angrily faced every day, and so it was with some suspicion that I watched gas prices inexplicably plummet a national average of 75 cents a gallon during the final two months leading up to the election. I’m not a big fan of conspiracy theories, but if oil industry executives wanted to do their best to prop up the corporatist-sponsored Republican leadership… this was a great way to do it.

And now that election day has passed? Hmm. Well I don’t know about your neighborhood, but prices here in South Seattle started rising within days, and are already up as much as a dime a gallon at some stations. And a little bit of Googling finds prices up in Oregon and California as well.

I’m just sayin’.

Yet another indication of the declining fortunes of our city’s two daily newspapers:

Rented furnishings and hidden cameras were among the props Seattle police vice detectives used to arrest nearly 100 men who showed up at a ritzy downtown condo in the past two weeks expecting to pay for sex.

Nearly three-fourths of the men who were arrested on suspicion of patronizing a prostitute responded to postings in the “erotic services” category on craigslist, the free online community where people can search for apartments, jobs, used cars, friends and dates. The rest answered escort ads found in the back pages of The Stranger and Seattle Weekly.

It wasn’t so long ago when the first place Seattle’s horny Johns might have looked for a fair view of a fanny was the pages of Fairview Fannie herself, but her classified ads — once the cash cow of dailies everywhere — are now little more than an afterthought. Nowadays, no self-respecting hooker would advertise her wares in the Times classifieds — it just doesn’t make business sense.

(Of course, I think the fact that this trivial prostitution story is currently the featured headline on its website — the preferred medium of readers in this tech-savvy region — also says something the Times‘ gradual decline.

It took me long enough, but I’ve finally managed to upgrade HA to the latest version of WordPress, giving me access to all the latest and greatest features… not the least of which being the ability to finally deal with all that damn comment spam.

For the most part, the site pretty much looks the same, but you’ll notice a few items that aren’t exactly in the same place any more, along with a much improved comment page that features live preview. Perhaps the best layout change is that the author’s name is now listed at the top of the comment, so you can skip over those written by trolls you have no interest in reading. (And if people really miss the old non-resizable pop-up window, I’m sure you’ll let me.)

I’ve still got some tweaking to do, and I haven’t even begun to explore the plethora of plugins available for WP 2.0, so expect a few feature upgrades over time. And I haven’t extensively tested this on various browsers, so if you’re experiencing any problems, please let me know.

Anyway, a little bit of fiddling with the anti-spam features should clean up the threads. Now if only I can get rid of all those damn readers.

I finally have all my work arounds in place to upgrade from WordPress 1.2 to 2.0.5, and plan to take down HA for an hour or so later tonight to make the transition. I hope.

HA will maintain it’s general look and feel, but with a couple significant changes. Things will move around the sidebars a bit, giving the blogads a more prominent placement, and the whole layout will widen to fill the screen. I’m doing away with the popup comment window (at least for the moment,) instead opting for a better laid out permalink/comment page with a much requested comment preview function.

And oh yeah… the new version enables me to use the latest comment spam blocking plugins, so hopefully all that garbage will be a thing of the past.

Anyway, just thought I’d give you all a heads up. Talk amongst yourselves.

UPDATE:
Comments are temporarily CLOSED while I replicate and upgrade the database. Please be patient.

UPDATE, UPDATE:
I’ve turned comments back on for posts from the last couple of days.

From the National Review online:

As for the horserace, multiple GOP sources say that the contest for Min Leader isn’t much of a contest at all. They say current Maj Leader John Boehner has solid backing in the conference and will win with ease this Friday morning when the secret ballots are cast. Many acknowledge that there is a hunger for change after last Tuesday’s losses, but they say RSC chair/Rep. Mike Pence (R., Ind.) is not a popular alternative. Few give Energy & Commerce Committee chair Joe Barton (R., Tex.) much of a shot, though he could pick up backing from fellow Texans and members of his committee.Holed up in his Capitol office, Boehner is devoting his time to member contacts, not media appearances. Key Boehner allies in the effort include Rep’s Pat Tiberi (R., Ohio), Mike Rogers (R., Mich.), and Dave Reichert (R., Wash.).

So… Reichert has quickly emerged as a “key ally” of Boehner and the corrupt, K Street-controlled, Republican establishment. That didn’t take long.

So much for Reichert’s alleged “conscience-driven independent” streak. (The Seattle Times’ new motto: “All the news that fits our way of thinking.”)