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Open Thread 11/4/2015

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– Hunger Strike at Texas Detention Center Swells Into the Hundreds

– Why I don’t encourage my patients to report sexual assault

– Well, the rest of the country had not so liberal an election night.

– Good old self-reliance

I mentioned on Monday, I’m going to be taking a bit of a break from writing. Probably just a couple weeks. I’ll still put up open threads, but they’ll be shorter than even this nonsense. See you in a few.

Open Thread.?.

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– I haven’t turned in my ballot in yet, so I sort of feel like Seattlish is yelling at me. I was going to vote Goodspaceguy to protest how Gregoire has been bad in the position. But now that the Seattle GOP endorsed him (and also he has terrible positions as opposed to blah blah space), I don’t want to send the wrong message. Should I leave it blank? Also, I usually just blindly support the tax advisory votes, because it’s dumb that they’re there, but I’m opposed to the marijuana one because it seems like it took a mess and made it messier in an attempt to clean it up. Also, Port of Seattle and Seattle School Board always feel like they’re close to turning a corner, but it never seems to actually get there. Also, why do we vote on judges? That’s kind of dumb.

– This is creationism, or crime-fighting on a hunch. But creationism is a respected tradition in America, extending from “draeptomania” to “they’re raping our women” to “negro cocaine fiends,” to “crack babies,” to “super-predators,” to “wilding,” to “the knock-out game” and now to “the Ferguson Effect.” There is something of a trend here—the creationist-style of crime control takes a special and discriminating interest in black communities. This is our heritage.

– It’s really pretty striking how much the ACA has helped states that are willing to accept that help.

– Ben Carson Is Saying Stupid Things About Abortion—Again

– What do you do with those uneasy feelings?

GOP Debate Open Thread

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Well…I got a late start at it, but here is your open thread for the GOP debate…

I’ll add some snark and tweetery as the mood strikes.

So…one of the reasons I am so late is that I didn’t realize there was no livestream from CNBC. I ended up on some live-feed that includes a panel of wingnut pundits. Google infowars.com and livestream or something.

One pundit dude refers to “Paul Rino” and later says he doesn’t think Rubio is unqualified.

5:43: Issues? Issues anyone?

5:47: I agree with Cruz…let’s put some substance into this debate!

5:48: Of course, Cruz dodged a debt ceiling question in the process.

5:49: Awwwwww…that’s adorable. They let Rand talk.

5:50: Christie gets a turn. Christie claims the govt. lies to you about Social Security, and then goes on to make the amateurish mistake of calling it “an entitlement”. It isn’t. You paid in.

Good question!

6:18: Carson is ALL for equal rights for same sex couples…but NO MARRIAGE!

6:27: The Donald goes after SuperPacs…is he running for Bernie’s VP?

6:30: Cruz, “Loose money”. For some reason David Vitter jumps to mind….

6:34: Mr. Huckabee, I’ve known gas bags and you are one gas bag.

6:52: Christie, “When I’m president, police will know it!” Yep. Overtime traffic jam duty pay.

7:10: Chris Christie’s run-on, repeated rant is the second “runaway blimp” story of the day!

7:15: Christie repeatedly said he was “deadly serious” about changing things. Did he mean “dead serious”? In any case, brings to mind that bridge traffic jam….

Well…that was “a thing.” It was my first GOP debate this cycle (and I was mostly listening to the audio), and it was pretty much the vacuous puffery that I expected. The only surprise to me was Trump’s strong statements against PACs. Other than that, Trump was just a meaningless braggart. Rand Paul morphed into Ron Paul, and came off more fringy than ever. Christie spewed pre-prepared platitudes. Rubio sounded angry and whiny. The Huckster is still a nut. Carson said things, but I don’t really remember them. And there were some other people talking, too. The debate moderators were TERRIBLE (and I am sure that is a bipartisan sentiment).

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– Seattle Bike Blog has endorsements.

– That’s important to remember as you’re filling out your ballot; even if you can’t vote in 3, you CAN vote in District 8 (where Burgess is running against Jon Grant, who does support Kshama/is not taking money from Republican PACs). You may also, depending on where you live, be able to vote for Tammy Morales, who spoke before Sawant at a rally on Monday about housing affordability.

– Over and over, members of the Republican elite express shock at the true nature of their party, as if they didn’t cultivate it to be precisely so, and Jeb Bush’s mystified temper tantrums about Donald Trump are just the latest iteration in this same tired tale.

– The process for selecting the next Federal judge from Idaho is strange [h/t].

– The Day the GOP Turned the Benghazi Tragedy Into a Farce

Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza!

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Trevor Noah calls Wolf Blitzer a mean girl bully.

Larry Wilmore: Will the NRA suggest arming every toddler?

How gun advocates sound to normal people:

Young Turks: Lincoln Chafee drops out.

The 2016 Festival of Clowns:

White House: West Wing Week.

Red State Update: Political news of the week

BENGHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaZZZZZIIII!!!!!1!!11!!!

Thom: The Good, The Bad, and The Very, Very Lutulently Ugly!

Farron Cousins: Republicans are paid to be stupid.

Texas Blues:

Mental Floss: Misconceptions about the Greek and Roman myths.

Farron Cousins: Nutjobber House Republicans are talking about impeaching Clinton when they lose

Trevor Noah: Canada’s hot new Prime Minister.

Ryan Eyes:

Ole Miss students want Mississippi state flag off campus.

Farron Cousins: Sen. David “DiaperBoy” Vitter got prostitute pregnant and told her to have an aborition.

Congressional hits and misses of the week.

Biden His Time:

Jon and Tracey Stewart on life after the Daily Show.

Mental Floss: 41 fascinating sports facts.

Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

Fuck Dori

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I know, what can you expect? Gigantic asshole gonna gigantic asshole (I saw this on Facebook over the weekend, but I can’t find who linked to it now).

During his October 7 show on KIRO-FM, Dori myopically focused on a part of POC Yoga’s class description which put forth “white friends, allies, and partners are respectfully asked not to attend.” Despite on-air claims that he had “zero problems” with POC Yoga, was “perfectly fine” with the practice, and believed POC Yoga “should be free”—he also openly accused POC Yoga of being “racist,” “exclusionary,” and more than once (instead of calling the collective by its self-chosen name) referred to it as “no whites yoga class.” Dori gave no historical context, did not acknowledge whites disproportionate privilege in a white-dominated culture, and made no mention of the ongoing microaggressive to extreme racism people of color have faced in America for centuries.

Jesus. When I hear his show, he isn’t typically interested in, for example, making sure that Black kids aren’t gunned down by the police. Maybe I missed it. He’s on the air for like 500 hours a day. And, inexplicably, halftime in the Seahawks’ radio broadcast.

I guess, if he wanted to make a perfectly race neutral type argument, he would naturally spend time trying to figure out why there’s still a wage gap between the races. Again I haven’t seen it. You’d certainly think someone who wants to call out racism so much he’s worried about a yoga class wouldn’t be so quick to call George Zimmerman “a hero” and “a superhero” in the clip (not in the context of murdering a Black child, but still: Holy shit).

Anyway, that’s the argument qua the argument. But were there any consequences to his dumbassness?

Directly following Dori’s heated criticism, Teresa said hate calls and death threats started pouring in every five minutes. There were all together over 200 phone calls, and hundreds and hundreds of emails filled with hostility and hate. What had just been anger generated out of a Nextdoor post spiraled into a violent, racist fervor that swept the country and made its way onto inflammatory websites like Infowars and Drudge Report. She rushed out that day to get a security system for her home though she stayed with a friend that night for safety. From that point through the weekend POC Yoga and Rainier Beach Yoga (the studio where class was held) filed several police reports. On Monday they filed an FBI report.

“Those death threats alone illustrate exactly why people of color need safe spaces,” said Joe R. Feagin, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M. Feagin is author of over 200 research articles and over 60 books on race, class, and gender. He has been studying patterns of white discrimination against people of color in the United States for 50 years and has reviewed hundreds of empirical studies. Feagin says the empirical data is clear. “Racism is still extraordinarily widespread in this country and does great harm to people of color,” he explained. “Therefore it is not only logical but necessary that people of color create safe spaces away from whites in which to deal with the stresses of racism and build up strategies to resist.”

Now Dori isn’t responsible for all the dumbassness that his dumbass listeners do. But maybe he’ll think a little next time.

Open Thread 10.16

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– You may have heard of the Mother Jones – Frank VanderSloot lawsuit. Well, even though Mother Jones won, they could use your money.

– The gender-swapped Twilight sounds like it doesn’t do what it set out to do.

– I know Banks wants to win this election, but “you’re not from here” is so not OK.

– The GOP staffers on the Benghazi committee buying guns on taxpayer’s time is the most GOP story imaginable.

– I think there ware some 13th amendment issues.

– Lamar Odom is not a punchline. He’s someone who has lived in a state of self-medication as a means of self-preservation. Now he’s fighting just to live. Unless you are sending out prayers for his survival, please just shut the hell up. That goes for everyone from the bottom-feeding Piers Morgan to the random Twitter egg. Too many people are too destroyed by this to have to sense your bile. Be better than that for them. Be better than that for Lamar Odom. Be better than that for everyone who carries the weight of tragedy yet still makes others happy to be alive.

First Democratic Debate Open Thread

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Have at it!

5:54: I’ll throw in some random stuff like…


You know…Vincent Foster.

6:00: Anderson is to Hillary as Megyn was to Donald?

6:06: Republican Debate: “Raise your hand if you believe in Evolution.
Democratic Debate: “Raise your hand if you believe in Capitalism.

6:25: Goldy: “She is better than anyone else in the room.”

Cyberwarfare? Really?

6:46 Back from intermission. Time for some emails.

6:48: “The American people are sick and tired of hearing about the damn emails!” An that was not Clinton…

6:49: Bernie just earned himself an Ambassadorship.

6:50: “Secretary Clinton, do you want to respond?” “No.” We have ourselves a WINNER!

6:52: ‘Black lives matter” question interrupted by a “Child Abduction Emergency”.

6:54: Where do the get the Atari computers to run those Amber Alert notices?!?

7:08: Chafee just had a slow motion “oops” moment trying to explain his vote.

New York Alki

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So, first there was this. And now, this:

Seattle City Council candidate Jon Grant claims the developer of a project across from City Hall tried to shake him down, and a text message sent to former Mayor Mike McGinn reveals some of what went on.

Grant says Brett Allen, a senior vice president at Triad Capital Partners, approached him at a Saturday campaign event and asked for help settling a lawsuit brought by Grant’s former employer.

Grant says he was told the payoff could be that a new political committee gearing up to spend heavily against him would go away.

On the one hand, I appreciate the way Seattle’s political establishment is attempting to make me—an expatriate of Philadelphia and New York’s corrupt political machines—feel right at home. But on the other hand, what the fuck?

It’s one thing to use the threat of a big independent expenditure campaign to intimidate a council candidate, but it’s another thing to preserve the details of that threat in a goddamn text message. That’s just incompetent. I mean, if Seattle’s cabal of downtown developers can’t even shake down a politician correctly, how can we trust them to properly develop downtown Seattle?

Open Thread 10-12

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– Had a more interesting conversation about Mara Willaford and Marissa Johnson with my Real Change vendor than with like 90% of Bernie Sanders supporters.

– At a certain time, the GOP are going to have to find a new fake Clinton scandal. Maybe they can go back to crack pipe Christmastreegate.

– Yet, because the party has leaped so far to the right, they have been unable to perform basic functions of government, and have to end up relying on Democrats to keep them propped up, requiring that the fantasies they’ve promised base voters have to stay off the table to keep those votes.

– It’s too bad that Disability Rights Washington is suing Seattle, but sometimes those sorts of suits are necessary.

– Seattle radio gets a mention in Obama’s press pool report. Oh, also the President was in town.

What’s Next, Bruce? Walking-Around Money?

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Seattle City Council member Bruce Harrell was look awfully pleased with himself at last week's 37th LD Dems endorsement meeting.

Seattle City Council member Bruce Harrell was look awfully pleased with himself at last week’s 37th LD Dems endorsement meeting.

Seattlish has the scoop on some very shady goings on in my own political backyard:

Bruce Harrell’s campaign may be in some hot water following allegations that they essentially bought the 37th District Dems endorsements for both him and Pamela Banks.

An SEEC complaint alleges that, before the deadline to become a voting member of the organization in time for endorsements, 15 new memberships were paid for in one batch, with sequential money orders purchased at the same location.

It gets sketchier: These new memberships came on the heels of the Harrell campaign calling and asking if it would be OK for them to pay for new memberships (they were told it was not). … Just after the vote, it was determined that at least five of the new members shouldn’t have been permitted to vote at all, because, per the 37th Dems themselves, they didn’t even live in the 37th LD.

This is the sort of sneaky, manipulative Democratic machine politics that might earn Harrell fear and/or respect in Chicago or New Jersey or my native Philadelphia, but here in squeaky-clean Seattle, not so much. In fact, it pretty much confirms the worst suspicions of the disaffected, young, left-leaning voters Democrats so desperately need to bring to the polls.

It is to say the least ironic for establishment Democrats who take such offense at Kshama Sawant’s insinuations of corruption to respond to her campaign with, you know, actual corruption. (And yes, legal issues aside, I consider this sort of flagrant violation of both the spirit and letter of the LD’s rules to be a form of political corruption.)

To be clear, I’m taking this personally, and not just because I’m a passionate Sawant supporter. This is my LD. And I hate the way this is tearing my LD apart—especially the mean-spirited behind-the-scenes attacks on LD members who dare to question the obviously compromised integrity of the endorsement process.

I’ve always tried not to cover internal Democratic Party politics, and I don’t want to start now. But man, the stories I could tell. Just sayin’.

Shorter Seattle Times on Inclusionary Zoning: “Do as I Say, Not as I Vote”

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No nits to pick with the policy direction of the Seattle Times’ surprisingly forceful editorial in favor of stronger inclusionary zoning rules. I agree: “The policy makes sense in a city like Seattle, where population and job growth are boosting housing costs and most new developments cater to high-end renters.”

That said, if the editorial board really means what it says when it concludes…

The City Council should consider a more aggressive target that caters less to developers’ interests.

… it might want to endorse City Council candidates who cater less to developers.

Just sayin’.

HRC and Progressive Drug Policy

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In Johann Hari’s great new book on drug addiction and the drug war, “Chasing the Scream”, he recounted a story about Switzerland’s first female president, Ruth Dreifuss:

The police officer who accompanied Ruth Dreifuss had tears in his eyes. He was taking the future president of Switzerland through an abandoned railway station in Zurich, down by the river. All the local drug addicts had been herded there, like infected cattle.

Ruth had been looking out over scenes like this for years now. A few years before, she had been to the park in Bern that played the same role there. There were girls being openly prostituted out and there were addicts staggering around, out of control, incoherent. There were people injecting themselves “in places you couldn’t imagine,” she says, because every other vein couldn’t be traced, as if it was trying to escape. Above the bustle, dealers were yelling their prices at the top of their voices. As she heard them, Ruth thought of Wall Street brokers, barking on the trading floor. The threat of violence hung over everything as dealers fought for customers.

Most Swiss people had never seen anything like this. The police were not just crying; they were afraid. This was Switzerland in the 1980s and 1990s, but it was an affront to everything the Swiss thought about themselves.

That was 20 years ago, and since then, Dreifuss went on to spearhead one of the most successful drug policy experiments in the modern world.

Earlier this month, Hillary Clinton released a proposal to deal with America’s growing heroin problem. In an editorial in the New Hampshire Union Leader, she wrote:

ON MY first trip to New Hampshire this spring, a retired doctor spoke up. I had just announced I was running for President, and I had traveled to Iowa and New Hampshire to hear from voters about their concerns, their hopes and their vision for the future. He said his biggest worry was the rising tide of heroin addiction in the state, following a wave of prescription drug abuse.

To be candid, I didn’t expect what came next. In state after state, this issue came up again and again — from so many people, from all walks of life, in small towns and big cities.

In Iowa, from Davenport to Council Bluffs, people talked about meth and prescription drugs. In South Carolina, a lawyer spoke movingly about the holes in the community left by generations of African American men imprisoned for nonviolent drug offenses, rather than getting the treatment they needed.

Writing at Vox, German Lopez finds a lot to like about Clinton’s proposal:

Clinton’s $10 billion Initiative to Combat America’s Deadly Epidemic of Drug and Alcohol Addiction is the most ambitious attempt of any presidential candidate to tackle America’s struggles with drug abuse. It’s an approach that public health and drug policy experts have demanded for years. But Clinton is the first candidate to dedicate such a large sum of money to the cause — and if approved by Congress, it could help combat what some public health officials and experts have called a drug overdose epidemic.

The big idea behind Clinton’s plan is to shift public policy on drug abuse and addiction from the criminal justice system to the health-care system. It would also help fill a big gap in health care: Nearly 90 percent of people who have a drug or alcohol abuse problem don’t get treatment, according to federal data.

The need to move away from our criminal justice approach to drug addiction has been urgent for awhile. On this point alone, Clinton deserves a lot of credit for getting with the times and rebuking the old approach. Her proposals for diverting addicts out of prison into treatment, to provide first responders with overdose prevention drugs, and to compel insurance companies to cover addiction treatment costs are all important and long overdue. Cracking down on doctors who prescribe opioids makes me a little nervous as this power has been greatly abused by prosecutors, but on the whole there’s more to like than dislike in this proposal.

Here in Seattle, for instance, the promising LEAD program is something that could ideally be expanded with this approach. LEAD’s four year experiment in Belltown diverting addicts to treatment instead of jail has been hugely successful at reducing subsequent arrests. But the funding for it isn’t a guarantee from year to year. Federal matching funds for this and similar programs around the country could reduce both local health care and criminal justice costs.

Funding those types of treatment programs would certainly be a great start, but there’s more we could do, and some of it is already being done elsewhere.

Up in Vancouver, the inSite safe injection facility is a place where addicts can safely use drugs without fear of arrest. Medical professionals are on hand to deal with medical emergencies and to counsel those trying to quit. The efficacy of this approach has been studied for years now, and the results are overwhelming. Allowing addicts to have safe place to use heroin has led to less crime and more addicts diverting into treatment. It has also lowered the rates of AIDS and Hepatitis cases and greatly reduced the amount of overdoses. It’s worked so well that despite pressure from an ideological Harper government, the Mayor of Montreal is willing to break the law to open one in his city.

Would Clinton’s proposal allow for a facility like inSite in the United States? The city of San Francisco tried to open one in 2007, but South Carolina Senator and noted federalist Jim DeMint used his position in the Senate to force the city to abandon its plans. It’s possible that even if Clinton became President and supported it, a Republican-led Congress would have the power and motivation to kill it once again.

But let’s go back to Switzerland, where they did something even more radical and progressive than that. Again from Hari’s book:

It had been discovered a few years before in Switzerland that there was a clause in Swiss law that allowed heroin to be given to citizens provided it was part of a scientific experiment. So far that had been done with only a tiny handful of people.

So Ruth said–Okay, we are going to have a really large experiment. We are going to make it much easier for any addict who wants it to get methadone, and for the people who can’t cope with that, we will prescribe them heroin. Switzerland has a political system built on consensus. No one official can drive a policy on her own. She needed to persuade her colleagues, and the cantons. So Ruth fought for it. This is an emergency, she explained, and in emergencies, you take dramatic steps.

Everything Americans have been conditioned to believe about drugs and drug addiction leads us to believe that this approach is completely nuts. We believe that anything but a cold turkey approach to drugs invites complacency and encourages more drug use. But much to the surprise of strict prohibitionists, the experiment worked, and Swiss voters overwhelmingly voted to keep it legal in 2008. The number of Swiss who regarded drug addiction as a serious problem plummeted from 64% to 12% between 1988 and 2002.

Many myths of heroin addiction and recovery were shattered by this experiment. Addicts did not continually demand higher and higher doses. They didn’t become complacent and give up on trying to kick their addictions. In fact, the opposite happened. The addicts receiving maintenance treatment became more likely to slowly wean themselves off the drug or to seek alternate treatments like methadone.

An approach like this remains explicitly illegal in the United States. Doctors are prohibited from prescribing heroin to anyone. Many of them are targeted by prosecutors simply for not being stingy enough when prescribing legal opioids to pain patients. Moving us in the opposite direction would require a lot of political courage. Could Clinton do it? Would she fight for it the way Ruth Dreifuss did?

The prohibitionist mindset tells us that the availability of drugs is the main determinant of drug use. But this is completely wrong. It’s certainly one determinant, but many other factors play into the equation, and have a far greater impact. After doing the research for his book, Hari came away believing that the presence of deep emotional scars was the predominant precursor for addition. People in that situation had to be helped to help themselves. But trying to enforce a prohibition by sending countless people through our criminal justice system tends to have the opposite effect, along with a whole host of unintended consequences.

This remains difficult for many Americans to accept and understand. We still tend to think of addicts as freeloaders, and the act of taking drugs as a form of rebellion that we shouldn’t give in to. This mindset only becomes shattered when someone we know and love falls victim to an addiction. Maybe the Swiss are more able to see the addicts in Needle Park as their brothers and sisters in ways that we here in America can’t. Or maybe we’re finally reaching that turning point in public understanding, just as we’ve reached a major turning point on pot prohibition in the past decade. However close we might be to a truly progressive drug policy, Hillary Clinton seems willing to move us closer to that point, and that might be good enough for now.

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