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[NWPT62]Rather than relaxing with a pot of coffee and a copy of the Sunday Times (the New York Times, not the Seattle Times… the latter wouldn’t last me longer than a thimbleful of joe)… I am seething. Literally seething. Torrents of cartoon steam are shooting out of my ears, as my eyes spin round like an old time slot machine.

(Okay, maybe I’m metaphorically seething, but you get the point.)

Splashed across the front page is a lengthy piece on the driving force behind so-called intelligent design: Seattle’s very own Discovery Institute… which apparently draws the name “Discovery” from its concerted efforts to squash it. That the institute should get well-deserved scrutiny in the NY Times, rather than its home town paper, is another story for another day. But what really pissed me off was the following little tidbit of information about another Seattle area connection to Discovery’s zealous efforts to dumb down the nation’s science curriculum — for in addition to such well known right-wing patrons as Richard Mellon Scaife….

A closer look shows a multidimensional organization, financed by missionary and mainstream groups – the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provides $1 million a year, including $50,000 of Mr. Chapman’s $141,000 annual salary…
…
The institute also has support from secular groups like the Verizon Foundation and the Gates Foundation, which gave $1 million in 2000 and pledged $9.35 million over 10 years in 2003.

I do not care that this particular grant pales in comparison to the hundreds of millions of dollars the Gates Foundation gives to eminently worthy causes, or that it is supposedly targeted exclusively towards the institute’s Cascadia project on regional transportation. In giving money to Discovery, Bill Gates not only provides financial support, but lends credibility and respectability to an organization whose primary activities are antithetical to the principles of scientific discovery on which Microsoft — and Gates’ unparalleled personal fortune — was built.

Gates would do better to follow the lead of more experienced Seattle area philanthropists, such as Bullitt Foundation director Denis Hayes, who describes Discovery as “the institutional love child of Ayn Rand and Jerry Falwell,” saying, “I can think of no circumstances in which the Bullitt Foundation would fund anything at Discovery today.” Indeed, that the world’s most powerful technologist should provide any support, financial or otherwise, to an organization that describes its goal as “nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies” in favor of a “broadly theistic understanding of nature,” is absolutely unacceptable.

There is no dispute that Gates is a brilliant man and that his foundation achieves great social good. But as has been proven by Microsoft’s missteps over its flip-flopping support for the gay civil rights measure, HB 1515, both he and his subordinates can make mistakes. And has also been proven by that PR fiasco, the full force of the progressive blogosphere can be successfully applied to convince Gates to correct his errors.

Gates’ support of the Discovery Institute — a vital cog in the right-wing propaganda machine… and an enemy of science — is an outrage and a scandal. And I call on my fellow members of the blogosphere to hammer this issue, and make clear to Gates that the only acceptable remedy is to instruct his foundation to pull its funding immediately.

The US has built its economic and military prowess on our scientific and technological leadership, and if organizations like Discovery are permitted to continue their Talibanization of our once proud educational system, the consequences for the American people and our standard of living will be catastrophic. A generation from now, when the economies of Europe and China are kicking our devoutly unscientific butts, we will have only ourselves to blame. And when the next Microsoft arises not in Silicon Valley or in Redmond, but in Paris or Beijing, it would be sadly ironic if the seeds of our own technological collapse were unwittingly nurtured by Bill Gates himself.

[Cross-posted at Daily Kos… please recommend!]

Darryl at Hominid Views takes a break from his family vacation to report on the partial collapse of the Dunn Memorial Bridge in upstate New York.

As Darryl points out…

The relevance to the Seattle area is obvious. The Dunn Memorial Bridge was built in 1971; the Alaska Way Viaduct (AWV) was built in the late 1950s. Dunn was inspected a couple of years ago and rated a 5 out of 7 for safety. The AWV has had widely recognized safety problems since the Nisqually earthquake of 2001.

No one was injured or killed, but had the top deck collapsed entirely, it could have taken two other levels with it to the bottom of the Hudson river, with catastrophic consequences for people on the bridge, and the economy of the region. As it is, there are no estimates of when the bridge will reopen.

Will Seattle be so lucky when (not, if) the AWV fails? Let’s hope so, because the Viaduct is a double-decker structure, a collapse of one section could result in a chain reaction, leading to the deaths of hundreds of people. Even a partial collapse similar to that in Albany would result in traffic mayhem in Seattle. Interstate 5 would pick up the majority of the 100,000 plus vehicles that use the roadway on a daily basis, contributing to what is already one of the worse traffic problems in the nation.

Of course, I-912 would repeal funds for replacing the AWV, as well as dozens of other projects throughout the state intended to fix unsafe intersections, interchanges and other sections of roads with a history of accidents and fatalities. But even if we dodge the bullet of a catastrophic AWV collapse….

People will die if I912 passes

Did Karl Rove and Scooter Libby lie to the grand jury?

Two top White House aides have given accounts to a special prosecutor about how reporters first told them the identity of a CIA agent that are at odds with what the reporters have said, according to people familiar with the case.
…
These discrepancies may be important because Fitzgerald is investigating whether Libby, Rove or other administration officials made false statements during the course of the investigation.

So of course, the big question on everybody’s mind… if Rove and Libby share a jail cell, which one will be the bitch?

President Bush concluded meetings with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong of Singapore yesterday, by signing the tersely titled “Strategic Framework Agreement Between the United States of America and the Republic of Singapore for a Closer Cooperation Partnership in Defense and Security.” In a joint statement the two hereditary dictators described the Agreement as “a natural step in the expansion of bilateral ties.”

It was born out of a shared desire to address common threats such as terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which called for even closer cooperation between the United States and Singapore. The Agreement recognizes Singapore’s role as a Major Security Cooperation Partner and will expand the scope of current cooperation in areas such as counterterrorism, counter-proliferation, joint military exercises and training, policy dialogues, and defense technology.

And just to show how important this “strong U.S.-Singapore partnership” really is, President Bush also took the time yesterday to nominate a new ambassador to Singapore, with unparalleled experience in the areas of counterterrorism, counter-proliferation, joint military exercises and training, policy dialogues, and defense technology… former King County Republican Party chair Patricia Herbold.

Looking at Pat’s resume, it is hard to imagine another person more qualified to serve as ambassador to a strategic partner in the fight against terrorism and WMDs. In addition to a two-year stint as chair of the KCRP, she has also been active in the Bellevue Senior Coed Softball League.

Previously Pat has served as an Assistant Prosecuting Attorney for Clermont County, Ohio, City Councilmember and Mayor of Montgomery, Ohio and was Vice President and General Counsel for Bank One in Dayton, Ohio. Since moving to Washington State she has given her support as a Board Member to the Seattle Art Museum, Long Live the Kings (salmon recovery program), Performing Arts Center Eastside, Downtown Bellevue Tomorrow and other worthwhile causes.

And oh yeah… she’s also served on the steering and/or finance committees for President Bush and ex-Congresswoman Jennifer Dunn… not that this could possibly have had anything to do with her nomination.

UPDATE:
Oh… according to the Seattle Times, maybe this “plum ambassadorship” did have something to do with money after all…

The Herbolds are both important GOP fund-raisers. Patricia Herbold is one of the founding members of The Club for Growth, a powerful national business coalition that supports changes in Social Security. That group collected more than $20 million for Republicans in 2004.

Herbold’s own record is substantial. She has given more than $100,000 to GOP candidates and the state party since 1998, including $25,000 to the joint state victory committee last September.

She contributed more than $61,000 to individual candidates, including Bush. And she gave $17,000 to GOP committees in other states. She was on Bush’s finance committee in 2000.

Robert Herbold has given nearly $20,000 since 1997; he also has been an active fund-raiser.

Ah well… I guess being a major contributor and fundraiser for one authoritarian leader might make you qualified to be ambassador to another.

I was disappointed, though not entirely surprised, to see the anti-roads initiative, I-912, turn in 420,000 signatures on Friday. Barring historically massive signature fraud the measure will surely qualify for the November ballot. But I will not join the gloom-and-doom coming from some opponents, for its passage is no sure thing, and there is an attainable strategy towards defeating I-912: the media must simply do its job.

I don’t mean that it is the media’s job to defeat I-912… I mean that their job is telling voters the truth about what the transportation package means to their local communities. It will take a lot of work and a lot of research, but it’s their responsibility as journalists. And if voters across the state understand exactly what their communities will lose if the transportation package is repealed, then I-912 stands a reasonable chance of being defeated.

Understand first that despite the steady stream of propaganda coming from the initiative’s on-air sponsor KVI, I-912 is likely headed for a big defeat in King County… by an even larger margin than David Irons will be thumped in the race for King County Executive. Irons’ own polling shows I-912 losing by a 55% to 38% margin… 75% to 18% among Democrats. Even a third of KC Republicans oppose the initiative.

And this was a Republican poll designed to “push” some of the questions. Given steady, honest, thorough coverage in the local press, and sufficient paid media, the initiative should be defeated in King County by 10 to 20 points. I’m guessing a similar effort in Snohomish and Pierce, could make those counties a wash, while communities heavily dependent on ferry service will provide a modest margin of defeat.

But it’s Eastern Washington where the MSM really has to step up to the plate and explain the local impact of the transportation package to their local audiences. The package includes hundreds of improvement projects, many of which are intended to fix dangerous roads, intersections and interchanges… high accident areas where people have lost their lives. The package replaces crumbling bridges and other infrastructure, not just in Seattle, but throughout the state… structures whose collapse would not only present a physical danger, but would inflict great economic harm to local communities. The package includes many local projects that local community leaders have spent great time and effort working with their legislators to obtain, and to repeal this package would nix funding for the foreseeable future.

No, we shouldn’t stop trying to refute common misconceptions about the tax side of the equation… we need to repeat and repeat that even with this increase the state gas tax will be at historically average levels in real dollars, and that transportation revenues do indeed flow from the wealthiest, most populated counties towards the rest of the state. But as George Lakeoff argues, if the facts don’t fit the frame, the facts are discarded and the frame stands.

The only way to defeat I-912 is to soften the Yes vote by making voters understand the very real, local transportation projects that they are being asked to repeal. And the only way to achieve this effectively and believably is if voters hear it from their own local media. They need to hear the personal stories of neighbors who lost friends and family on dangerous roads, or of local farmers and other businesses who depend on the roads for the efficient flow of goods to port and market. They need to hear from local business and civic leaders as to how these projects benefit their community.

If this initiative is simply about repealing a tax, then of course it will pass. Nobody likes to pay taxes. But if this initiative is about the local projects that this tax buys, then the transportation package has the opportunity to survive a repeal based on its merits, rather than just anti-government rhetoric.

So to my friends in the media I say it is all up to you. Instead of just covering the politics behind I-912, dig into the package and explain to your audiences the local impact of repeal. I’ll stick my neck out and predict that if you do your job, the initiative will fail. Here is your opportunity to prove me wrong.

One of the more reaffirming internet stories of the past year was that of the way the online community rallied to the aid of Seattle voting rights activist Andy Stephenson, raising $50,000 in 11 days to pay for surgery to treat his pancreatic cancer. One of the more disturbing internet stories of the past year was the way some vile righties deflated the feel-good story — and successfully slowed both donations and Andy’s treatment — by launching a vicious, heartless smear campaign charging that Andy scammed his donors by faking his illness.

Well, I suppose Andy has once again proven his detractors wrong. He died Thursday at the age of 43.

I never met Andy, and was only peripherally aware of him and his activities. From all accounts he was a great guy, and a tireless activist. I share my sincere condolences with his family and friends.

But I also share their anger, as Andy’s illness and the right-wing response is a vivid example of how dirty politics can have potentially deadly results. In a post to Democratic Underground entitled “Say hello to a bottomless rage,” William Pitt displays what I believe is an appropriate response to right-wing tactics that delayed Andy’s treatment, and possibly cost him his life.

Throwing sand into the gears of the PayPal donations blew Andy off the surgery rotation, causing him to have to wait a lot longer for his operation.

Spewing the claim time and again that the whole sickness was a fraud, very publicly and on as many blogs and boards as you could find, robbed Andy of the hope and will he needed to overcome this thing.

I think you fuckers should be forced to dig his grave. I think you should be buried with him.

I kept my mouth shut about you these last weeks because every time I said something about you or to you, you got a stiffy from the attention and ramped up your viciousness again. That’s over with now.

I am going to make you famous in all the worst kinds of ways. I know your names, I know your addresses, I know your IP numbers, I have screen shots and copies of every vile statement and threat you ever made. I know everything I need to know. Get ready for the ram.

Frankly, I hope William can follow through on his threats.

A memorial service for Andy will be held at Town Hall in Seattle at 1119 Eighth Ave., on Saturday, July 16, at 2 p.m.

Seattle has been very lucky to have Foolproof’s American Voices series bringing some of the nation’s top progressive speakers to local audiences, including President Bill Clinton, Bill Moyers, Gov. Ann Richards, Molly Ivins, Dr. Cornel West and most recently George Lakoff. But as critically successful as the series has been, ticket sales cover only 70 percent of the costs.

Now Foolproof needs your help to keep these great speakers coming to Seattle audiences. A core group of American Voices supporters has made a challenge… they will match dollar for dollar all individual contributions made by July 30, up to $50,000. I urge you to go to Foolproof’s donations page, and give what you can. And with a donation of $100 or more, you may choose to receive a CD of a recent American Voices presentation: Bill Moyers, Michael Eric Dyson, Robert Reich, Arianna Huffington, Paul Rusesabagina or Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

And a reminder… Congressman Barney Frank will speak on Aug. 3 at Benaroya Hall as special benefit for American Voices. Tickets are on sale now.

Earlier today I raised the question of whether our “War on Terror” had actually made us safer, and if perhaps it might be time to start discussing some other strategies. The response from some of my righty readers was that we should not discuss other strategies, and that they wouldn’t mind seeing me die in a terrorist attack, just for raising the issue.

Yeah… well screw you, too.

In addressing my questions, I thought it might be useful to point out that the number of major terrorist attacks worldwide have actually tripled between 2003 and 2004.

The number of “significant” international terrorist attacks rose to about 650 last year from about 175 in 2003, according to congressional aides briefed Monday on the numbers by U.S. State Department and intelligence officials.

650 is an awful lot of terrorist attacks, but according to the Financial Times, it’s not quite as large a number as 3,200.

In April the US State Department had said there were 651 “international” terrorism incidents last year. But using a broader definition to include attacks that “deliberately hit civilians or non-combatants” the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) on Tuesday raised that number to 3,192. The incidents resulted in the deaths, injury or kidnapping of almost 28,500 people.

Of course the number of terrorist attacks in the US was nearly zilch, a number the Bush administration claims represents the success of their anti-terrorism policies. But apart from the occasional abortion clinic bombing or animal rights nutcase (yes, the left has a few crazies of its own), terrorist attacks on US soil are exceedingly rare, and almost always of domestic origin. Eight years passed between the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the devastation of 9/11, and for the life of me, I can’t think of another attack on the homeland by foreign terrorists.

But the “War on Terrorism” is a world war… a war we are openly fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, and covertly fighting throughout the world. So the best measure of the war’s progress is the number of terrorist attacks worldwide. And the trends just don’t look so good for our current policies.

The chart above was created by BTC News using the Terrorism Knowledge Base. And what it clearly shows is that the number of terrorist attacks declined throughout the Clinton years, and have increased year by year since Bush took office.

And so again, I think it is fair to ask: has the Iraq war made the world a safer place? And isn’t it time we have a reasonable discussion over whether military might alone is enough to defeat international terrorism?

As we embark on what is likely to be a vicious political war over Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s replacement, I think it important to take a quick a look at the issue that will be at the heart of much of the vitriol coming from both the right and the left: abortion. There is no question that President Bush is being pressured by his patrons in the religious right to appoint a justice who will vote to reverse Roe v. Wade, and so it is instructive to explore the likely, practical impact on American women should their right to choose be denied or narrowly restricted.

Writing in The Guttmacher Report on Public Policy in May of 2003 (“Envisioning Life Without Roe: Lessons Without Borders“), Susan A. Cohen did exactly that, compiling historical data on abortions and maternal mortality for the pre- and post-Roe United States, as well as that for a number of nations with either liberal or restrictive abortion laws. The conclusion is clear:

The American pre-Roe experience, just as that in the developing world today, demonstrates quite clearly that liberal abortion laws do not cause abortion, unintended pregnancy does. Indeed, some of the world’s lowest abortion rates may be found in countries with the most liberal abortion laws, where services are easily available and even subsidized; by contrast, high abortion rates (and, generally, high maternal mortality rates as well) may be observed in countries where the procedure is severely restricted.

As Cohen points out, illegal abortion was quite common in the US prior to the 1973 Roe decision, with as many as 800,000 procedures a year estimated to have taken place during the 1950s and 1960s. While affluent women could travel within the US or overseas to seek safe, legal abortions, poor women, mostly young and minority, often suffered severe health consequences. Even after the introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s dramatically reduced abortion-related maternal deaths, maternal mortality rates remained high compared to current levels.

Before and after comparisons like that in the US can be repeated country by country, but perhaps the most striking example is that of Romania, where abortion was legalized in 1957, outlawed in 1966, and legalized again after Ceaucescu’s fall in 1990.

When abortion was against the law in Romania, from
1966 to 1989, abortion-related deaths soared.

Romania’s abortion-related death rate soared after abortion was outlawed in 1966, and plummeted after it was relegalized in 1990. The lesson in Romania and elsewhere is that women will seek abortions whether they are legal or not; restricting access merely makes them less safe. According to the World Health Organization, unsafe abortions are responsible for about 13% of the half million annual deaths worldwide from pregnancy-related causes… in the most restrictive nations of Latin America, the rate is as high as 21%.

Indeed, not only do restrictive abortion laws uniformly increase maternal mortality rates in developed and developing countries alike, some of the nations with the most restrictive abortion laws also have some of the highest abortion rates.

ABORTION LAWS, RATES AND MATERNAL MORTALITY
Country	Abortion rate per 1,000 women, 15-44	Maternal Deaths per 100,000 live births
Where abortion is Broadly Permitted
Australia	22	6
England/Wales	16	10
Finland	10	6
Netherlands	7	10
United States	21	12
Where Abortion is Severely Restricted
Brazil	38	260
Chile	45	33
Colombia	34	120
Dominican Republic	44	110
Mexico	23	65
Peru	52	240
Note: Most recent data available. Sources: Abortion data — AGI, Sharing Responsibility, Appendix Table 4, p. 54; Finer LB and Henshaw SK, Abortion incidence and services in the United States in 2000, Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 2003, 35(1):6-15. Maternal mortality rates — United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD), The World’s Women 2000: Trends and Statistics, New York: UNSD, 2000/updated 2002.

While the consequences of having an abortion depend on whether it is safe and legal, the cause is universal: unplanned pregnancies. 28% of the 210 million annual pregnancies worldwide are unplanned, and 22% end in abortion. Reducing unwanted pregnancies through wider and more effective use of contraception is the only effective means of reducing abortion rates… making our abortion laws more restrictive will only make abortion less safe.

In the three decades since Roe became law, Americans have forgotten their history and grown complacent about the very real human costs of illegal abortions, allowing the debate to increasingly focus on moral and religious beliefs rather than the public health issue that abortion really is. Abortion foes have successfully struck an emotional chord by illustrating their arguments with images of the undeniable horror of dead and mangled fetuses. Meanwhile, pro-Choice forces have tended to make a more intellectual appeal, arguing a vague and unwritten constitutional right to privacy.

But if Roe is overturned and Congress or the States narrowly restrict access to legal abortion, the public health calamity will be very real and very bloody. Thousands of young women will die of sepsis from botched, back-alley abortions. That is the undeniable conclusion from studying the impact of abortion laws at home and abroad. And that is the emotional, rhetorical appeal supporters of Roe must make if we are to educate our fellow Americans as to what is really at stake.

It is time to fight horror with horror.

Last night on the McLaughlin Group, MSNBC political analyst Lawrence O’Donnell said that information handed over to the grand jury by Time Magazine would show that Bush-brain Karl Rove was reporter Matt Cooper’s source in the Valerie Plame case:

“What we’re going to go to now in the next stage, when Matt Cooper’s e-mails, within Time Magazine, are handed over to the grand jury–the ultimate revelation, probably within the week of who his source is.

“I know I’m going to get pulled into the grand jury for saying this but the source of…for Matt Cooper was Karl Rove, and that will be revealed in this document dump that Time magazine’s going to do with the grand jury.”

If true, we’re looking at a possible perjury charge for a high-ranking White House official. The special prosecutor in the case has interviewed Rove, Bush, Cheney and others to testify before the grand jury.

Of course, this does not necessarily tell us that Rove was the original source for conservative columnist Robert Novak’s outing of Plame, a CIA official… or if it was, who gave Rove the information. Novak claimed it was a “high-ranking White House official” and all indications so far point towards Cheney’s office, or even the Vice President himself.

It may be that Cheney’s chief of state, “Scooter” Libby takes the fall, but depending on how this all plays out, perhaps Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s replacement won’t be the only controversial confirmation hearing the Senate faces over the coming year.

(Thanks to reader Christine G for tipping me off in the open thread.)

UPDATE:
It looks like the finger is pointing at Rove, and the story is about to be blown wide open. Writing on the Huffington Post, Lawrence O’Donnell elaborates:

I revealed in yesterday’s taping of the McLaughlin Group that Time magazine’s emails will reveal that Karl Rove was Matt Cooper’s source. I have known this for months but didn’t want to say it at a time that would risk me getting dragged into the grand jury.

McLaughlin is seen in some markets on Friday night, so some websites have picked it up, including Drudge, but I don’t expect it to have much impact because McLaughlin is not considered a news show and it will be pre-empted in the big markets on Sunday because of tennis.

Since I revealed the big scoop, I have had it reconfirmed by yet another highly authoritative source. Too many people know this. It should break wide open this week. I know Newsweek is working on an ‘It’s Rove!’ story and will probably break it tomorrow.

And as Jeralyn Merritt points out on TalkLeft, the issue is no longer just about who the Plame leaker was… Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald has previously stated that he already knows the identity of Miller and Cooper’s source.

The investigation has moved from one involving the identity of the White House official to one involving perjury — i.e., a cover-up. The source may have been questioned in front of the grand jury and lied.

Knowing the identity of the source is not enough for a perjury conviction. There must be two witnesses to the perjurious statement. Telephone records would not be enough, because they only provide the number dialed, not the identity of the person speaking. Matthew Cooper’s and Judith Miller’s e-mails and notes may provide that corroboration.

The plot thickens.

Apparently I had only half the story when I wrote about the burglary at the I-901 campaign’s Green Lake offices, where petitions containing about 1000 signatures were stolen. As first reported yesterday in the Tacoma News Tribune, and again today in the Seattle Times, there was actually a second break-in over the weekend targeting the anti-smoking initiative, this one at the Lacey offices of Progressive Campaigns, the signature gathering firm that collected about half of I-901’s signatures.

At the Green Lake office the perpetrators scavenged through desk drawers and boxes, taking only petitions, while leaving cash and laptop computers behind. There were no petitions in the Lacey office, and nothing was stolen.

The burglary in Lacey was similar to the one in Green Lake, with a shattered window, said Lacey police detective Lt. Phil Comstock.

Comstock said that, although the crimes were being investigated independently, there appear to be links between the break-ins. Police said they have few leads.

[I-901 campaign spokesman] Peter McCollum said he was unsure why the theft occurred and didn’t want to speculate.

“Could be something as sinister as political motives or it could be something as silly as a prank,” McCollum said.

I have no problem speculating. It was the sinister political motives thing.

The Times article quotes I-901 opponent Gary Murrey, vice president of the Great American Gaming Corp. — a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Great Canadian Gaming Corp. — which operates four of the state’s largest non-tribal casinos, in Lakewood, Tukwila, Everett and Kent. Forgive me for being a tad suspicious, but this is the same Canadian company that bankrolled last year’s slot machine initiative, I-892, and it is reasonable to expect that Great Canadian will bring the same shady ethical and legal standards to its WA operations that it allegedly brought to its loanshark-infested B.C. casinos, and its Hong Kong based floating brothel.

And dirty tricks are nothing new to this issue. Last year, when anti-smoking advocates attempted to push an I-901-like initiative, opponents helped scuttle the effort by filing a similarly titled initiative intended to confuse voters. So Murrey tried the same ruse again this year.

Murrey has filed a rival measure, Initiative 911, which would ban smoking indoors in places where children were present but would allow adults older than 21 to light up in businesses such as bars and minicasinos.

Hey, I have an idea Gary. Since you seem to care so much about children, why don’t we just raise the legal gambling age to 21, so we won’t have so many minors illegally smoking and drinking in your casinos, huh? Maybe I’ll file that initiative.

In any case, our Canadian neighbors have failed once again to jigger WA’s initiative process to their advantage; I-901 has collected more than enough signatures to qualify for the ballot, and I-911 hasn’t. That I-901 opponents would stoop to petty burglaries is a sign of desperation. But it should come as no surprise that an industry with a well-earned reputation as a cesspool of organized crime and addiction, might organize a crime in defense of an addictive and destructive habit like smoking.

An editorial in yesterday’s Olympian discusses a proposal to elevate multiple drunk driving convictions from a gross misdemeanor to a class C felony. HB 1451, introduced by Rep. John Ahern (R-Spokane), would make a third such conviction punishable by as much as 17 months in jail; under current law the maximum penalty is a $1000 fine and 90 days.

213 peopled died as a result of drunk driving accidents in 2004. That this was the lowest number of such fatalities since 1961 does not lessen the tragedy.

But while I’m certainly not going to argue against getting repeat drunk driving offenders off the roads, I was struck by the cost of the Ahern proposal:

Locking DUI defendants up in prison is a costly proposition. According to officials with the National Highway Traffic Safety Commission, approximately one-third of those people arrested for DUI are repeat offenders. Putting three-time offenders behind bars for up to 17 months would force the state of Washington to build another 1,000-bed prison. That would cost about $225 million over a two-year budget cycle.

And that figure doesn’t include the $60-plus million per biennium to house the extra prisoners.

That’s more than $350 million of state expenditures over the next 6 years — all to lock up a thousand or so drunk drivers — and I can’t help but wonder if maybe the problem couldn’t be addressed at less financial and personal expense? That’s not the bleeding heart liberal in me talking, it’s the calculating utilitarian. Certainly there are incorrigible drunks who will never stop drinking and driving, and they need to be locked up to protect the public. But there are others who might be stopped if proper resources were made available for treatment, education and technology. For example, repeat offenders could be required to have their cars installed with devices that require the driver to pass a breathalyzer before engaging the ignition. Such technology is expensive… but a helluva lot cheaper than incarceration.

So while I agree with the Olympian that the bill deserves “additional consideration and refinement,” I hope that lawmakers make a proper cost-benefit analysis, and consider all the options, before passing expensive legislation on what is undoubtedly a very emotional issue. It may be that a little prevention is more effective and less costly than the cure.

Joe Turner of the Tacoma News Tribune writes breathlessly today about the role of the Internet in the campaign for the incredibly myopic and cynically misnamed, “No New Gas Tax” initiative. [“Internet could play key role in No Gas Tax signature push“]

“With the short time span, we know how difficult it’s going to be,” said Brett Bader, a veteran political consultant and spokesman for the No New Gas Tax campaign. “The Web has certainly made it easier to organize. I don’t know what we would have done without it.”

On its Web site, initiative supporters can download copies of the petition, print them out and start collecting signatures. They also can make electronic campaign contributions with their credit cards and volunteer to do more campaign work.

All true… but so what? As Joe points out, “none of this is new”; the Internet has become an integral part of political campaigns of all sorts. Hell… way back in 2003, it was the focal point of I-831, my initiative to proclaim Tim Eyman a “horse’s ass.” (FYI… volunteers gathered over 50,000 signatures with little money and no organization during the few short weeks before the Attorney General got an injunction to shut me down.)

So by focusing on the Internet, Joe is kind of missing the point. It’s not the Internet that’s playing an special role in I-912… it’s right-wing talk radio. This is really the “John Carlson / Kirby Wilbur Initiative”, and I-912 would be absolutely nowhere without them. After all, a website is totally worthless if you don’t have a way of driving traffic to it, and the only thing special about NoNewGasTax.com is the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of free media promoting it… courtesy of John and Kirby.

The Internet is just a tool, available to all political campaigns, to be used on any candidate or issue. Likewise, local talk radio has become an important political tool… though for the moment, it is a tool only made available to the Republican Party and conservative causes.

It is time we even the playing field.

Yeah sure… I know the righties will yell back that conservative talk doesn’t even begin to balance the mythical “liberal media,” but that’s a load of shit not even worth arguing in this context, as it sets up a false comparison. You can’t compare KVI with, say… NPR, because John and Kirby are not journalists. They are propagandists… they are political operatives… they are GOP activists. And they are using their enormously powerful platform to execute a political agenda.

That is why now, more than ever, progressives need people just as shamelessly partisan as John and Kirby to promote their own causes and candidates on local talk radio. AM 1090 is planning to deliver local programming, but in choosing their hosts they can’t just choose any old liberal loudmouth. They need hosts who are willing and able to use their loud mouths as an organizing tool for local progressives. And not just because this will be good for Democrats or the progressive movement… it will also be good for 1090.

For politics aside, talk radio is still a business… and smart politics as it is, John and Kirby’s I-912 campaign is an even smarter business strategy. Launched as interest peaked around the election contest trial, the I-912 campaign is designed to rile up the faithful and hold as much audience as possible during the inevitable post-trial decline. Furthermore, volunteering time — and especially money — creates a much stronger affinity between listeners and the host than the mere act of tuning in. Supporters aren’t just giving to the campaign, they are personally giving to John and Kirby… and in doing so they become emotionally invested as part of the “KVI community.”

I would argue that the political activism coming out of conservative talk is not just a byproduct of the format’s success… it is an integral part of the format itself. There is a symbiotic relationship between the hosts and the causes they promote; in the minds of supporters, John and Kirby don’t just promote the campaigns, they become part of them. Their shows not only feed off of the emotional fervor and passion political campaigns create, they also become organizational focal points… an on-air gathering place for campaign supporters and like minded voters.

There simply is no liberal media equivalent. That’s why local progressives need 1090 to survive… and it won’t unless it does local programming, and it does it right.

UPDATE:
For those interested, blatherWatch expounds on KVI’s role in promoting I-912. Michael thinks their oughta be a law against such blatant abuse of the public airwaves for partisan political purposes. I’m not sure that you can write a law that could stop this, so I say, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

So how is Air America Radio, and progressive talk in general, really doing? Michael at blatherWatch has the scoop on both the numbers and the politics… and contrary to the doomsayers from the right, it’s looking pretty good.

Here in Seattle, KPTK 1090 continues its very respectable with growth:

Anderson mentioned mention several cities where the format has shown great success. Seattle’s newly talk-formatted KPTK, doubled in the Winter book, Portland’s KPOJ AM grew 1000% in audience share.

I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to 1090 going local.

I scan the Philadelphia Daily News online almost every day. Well… the sports pages, at least. But HA reader Spyder pointed me towards a column in Tuesday’s edition, by Temple University statistics professor Josh Mitteldorf: “My Election 2004 bad dream.”

Working with the National Election Archive Project, Prof. Mitteldorf co-authored a controversial statistical analysis of the November 2004 exit poll discrepancy; the exit polls predicted a Kerry victory by 3.0%, whereas the official tally had Bush winning by 2.5%… a discrepancy that cannot be attributed to chance. The report concludes that there is a strong case that “significant irregularities” occurred.

“The absence of any statistically plausible explanation for the discrepancy between Edison/Mitofsky’s exit poll data and the official presidential vote tally is an unanswered question of vital national importance that demands a thorough and unflinching investigation.”

Writing in the Daily News, Prof. Mitteldorf addresses straight on the common perception that people like him are conspiracy theorists:

On a recent flight to Nashville, I sat next to a man who asked what I was writing. Preparing a talk, I told him, for a conference of people sharing evidence that the 2004 presidential election was stolen. Without missing a beat, he asked. “Isn’t that next door to the convention on UFO sightings?”

Prof. Mitteldorf then proceeds to describe the “sober professionals, none who seem overtly loony” he met at the conference, who have reported to have uncovered massive voting irregularities throughout the nation.

I met David Griscom, a retired physics prof who spent months with colleague John Brakey poring over election tapes, signature rosters and “consecutive number registers” from Brakey’s Tucson home precinct.

They audited and verified, one by one, the 895 votes in the precinct and found: 12 innocent and unsuspecting voters who had their names duplicated on the roster and their votes for Bush counted twice. Twenty-two “undervotes” where the machine had failed to register a preference for president, and these had been dutifully and meticulously converted to 22 votes for Bush.

The “Republican” and “Democratic” co-directors of the polling place were a local fundamentalist preacher and his wife. Thirty-nine of their parishioners from another precinct had cast provisional ballots, which were (illegally) converted to regular ballots and passed through, all 39 for Bush.

I met Richard Hayes Phillips, a geologist from New Hampshire who was invited to Ohio to study the integrity of the vote, and realized that a complete inventory of lost and miscounted votes was needed. To date, Phillips has analyzed 15 of Ohio’s 88 counties, and by his most conservative estimate has found 101,000 uncounted Kerry votes – 136,000 is the margin by which Bush officially defeated Kerry.

I heard Clint Curtis talk about working in 2001 as a programmer for Yang Enterprises in Florida. He was assigned to a meeting with State Senate Speaker Tom Feeney, who asked to have a program written into the software that controls voting machines so that the totals could be manipulated without leaving a trace. Curtis, the whistleblower, is now unemployed. Feeney, the politician, is now the U.S. representative from Florida’s 24th Congressional district.

I was inspired to hear the travails of Ohio lawyer Cliff Arnebeck. After the Green Party raised $200,000 and obtained authorization for a recount in Ohio, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell staged a charade in which every state rule about the conduct of the recount was thrown out, and two hand-picked precinct captains emerged from behind locked doors to report that yes, indeed the numbers were exactly right and all was hunky dory.

As my regular readers know, I have been reluctant to report on allegations of a stolen presidential election, but it is clear that there were significant voting irregularities in Ohio and elsewhere. Likewise, I have said little about a controversial statistical analysis of the results from Snohomish County, which by the way, is now rumored to be quietly considering scrapping their touch-screen voting machines (over the objections of County Auditor Bob Terwilliger) after numerous incidents of “calibration errors” and a number of election day complaints from voters, that screens registered a vote for Rossi when they intended a vote for Gregoire.

I have shied away from these allegations because there is no proving them, and I did not want to engage in the same sort of rumor and innuendo that passes for news on the right-wing blogs.

But as we prepare to head into the seventh month of unprecedented scrutiny of King County Elections, I’m just getting sick and tired of a double-standard that permits somebody like Slade Gorton — a former U.S. Senator and WA State Attorney General — to get away with the ridiculous “conclusion” that “King County has the worst election administration” in the nation.

Fuck you.

Many of the problems discovered in King County were systemic statewide, including mishandling of provisional ballots, and an inability to sufficiently screen the voter rolls for felons. And while there were dozens, possibly hundreds of potentially valid ballots left misplaced and uncounted in King (as well as other counties,) they represent a tiny fraction of the total ballots cast.

But for all the problems, it was nothing like the shit that went on elsewhere. It was in North Carolina where a computer inexplicably and irretrievably erased thousands of votes. It was in Ohio where tens of thousands of voters in urban precincts were forced to wait for hours in the rain, and where one precinct gave George Bush 4,258 votes out of 638 ballots cast. It was in Florida where tens of thousands of legal voters — mostly minorities — were wrongfully purged from the rolls, and where some voting machines were found to have actually counted backwards!

Yet question for a moment whether Bush actually won either of his elections, and the righties will laugh you off as “aluminum hat boy.” Meanwhile, the paranoid, partisan shills on the right-wing blogs and talk radio freely use words like “fraud” and “corruption” to describe our so-called “stolen election”… going so far as to suggest that Dean Logan deserves jail time.

What’s lacking from the Republican’s steady attack on the integrity of Logan and King County Elections, is perspective. There is no evidence of fraud, no evidence of conspiracy, and no evidence of official misconduct. The election was conducted in an extraordinarily transparent fashion, and has been excruciatingly scrutinized… and while a number of disturbing mistakes have been uncovered — mistakes that can clearly be fixed — they would have been insignificant if not for the bizarrely close gubernatorial election. Thus to attack our election as a “total mess” while dismissing the massive problems reported in Ohio, Florida and elsewhere, is an act of shameless hypocrisy.

If Rossi’s attorneys can prove that irregularities cost him the election, then he will prevail in court. But if they want to continue to characterize King County as having the “worst elections” in the nation, then it’s the Rossi folk who should be wearing the aluminum hats.