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As I learned this week at Netroots Nation, some leaders lead through mere words, while some lead by example. For Drinking Liberally’s Justin Krebs, it’s definitely the latter.

Mike Lux of OpenLeft and many other progressive organizations will be at Drinking Liberally tonight, chatting it up with the locals, and plugging his new book, The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be. From the inside flap:

The next time you hear a conservative accusing progressives (a.k.a. liberals) of being unpatriotic and anti-American, tell them this: “Progressives invented the American ideal and inspired the American Revolution. Conservatives, then known as Tories, opposed it. Since then, every major advancement in American freedom, democracy, social justice, and economic opportunity has been fostered, fought for, and won by progressives against conservative resistance. Now who’s anti-American?”

That’s my kinda rhetoric.

Join us at the Montlake Alehouse, 8PM onwards.

UPDATE:
You can listen to Mike on the third hour of today’s Dave Ross Show:

[audio:http://icestream.bonnint.net/seattle/kiro/2009/07/p_Dave_Ross_Show_20090721_11am.mp3]

I grew up about a half-mile from Cynwyd Station, and as kids, my friends and I found the train to center city Philadelphia much more convenient than relying on our parents to cart us around to movie theaters, sporting good stores, and other attractions. But it wasn’t just those of us with youthful vigor who frequently hoofed our way to the rail stop, for every morning as I prepared to walk to school, I’d see a stream of business suit clad men lugging their briefcases down the street in the other direction, some of whom routinely walked to the station from more than a mile away.

These weren’t granola crunching tree-hugging hippies. These were doctors, lawyers, businessmen and other professionals who, weather and circumstances permitting, left their cars at home in the driveway most days, not because it was the right thing to do, or the less expensive thing to do, but because it was the obvious and natural thing to do. Why battle traffic on the Schuylkill Expressway each morning when the train was a 10 minute walk away?

The commuter suburb of my youth grew up around the station, not by accident, but by design. Built in 1886, this short spur of the Pennsylvania Railroad was as much a real estate development project as it was a transit line, and that rail-centric ethos survived at least a century, before SEPTA budget woes resulted in drastically reduced schedules. The point is, people didn’t take the train because they had to, but because they wanted to, and with parking always limited at the station, many were happy to walk a mile or more for the convenience.

So when I continue to read news reports about complaints over the lack of free parking around most stations on Seattle’s soon to be opened Link Light Rail, I can’t help but shrug my shoulders. Build it, and they will walk. And if the folks who live there now aren’t willing to hoof it, over time these neighborhoods will attract new residents who will.

Which gets me thinking about my own relationship to the Seattle light rail system I’ve so passionately advocated, and how far I’m willing to walk to use it. I’ve half-jokingly complained for years about the elimination of the Graham Street station from the final plan, which would have been a mere 10-15 minute walk from house, quite possibly close enough to bump up my property value. I’ve also wistfully talked about moving into Columbia City to be walking distance both to its business district and its light rail station. But I’d never actually measured the distances myself.

As it turns out, the little map app on my iPhone says that Othello station is about a mile away, only a quarter mile further by foot than the corner of MLK Jr. & Graham, so my dog and I decided to walk it today for ourselves. At a comfortably brisk pace we clocked 18-minutes there, and 20-minutes back (climbing the hill from Rainier Ave. on the way home), and we could probably have made it a little faster but for the need to obsessively mark the path with urine, and briefly stop to pick thistle from our paws.

So, will I walk to light rail?

Well, at least for the moment, I don’t commute, so it’s kinda a moot point in the context of this discussion, but if I were a commuter, and the rail line took me reasonably close to my workplace, yeah, I’d be willing to walk a mile in each direction, weather and circumstances permitting. If it was really hot or really cold or raining very hard, I don’t know that I’d be up for that hike, and if my afterwork plans took me inconveniently off-route, I’d probably take my car. But some days—perhaps most days—I find it a reasonable distance to walk.

Of course, if my circumstances were different, a daily walk to and from the train station would be more of a no-brainer. Before our divorce, we were a one-car family, and the opportunity to save the expense of buying and insuring a second car (let alone fueling and parking it) would make a walk+rail commute all the more attractive. But as a single father, going carless in Seattle isn’t as much of an option, and thus the cost savings of commuting by rail aren’t nearly as great.

As for my recreational use of light rail, the 2-hour parking restriction presents much less of a problem, as it’s only enforced 7AM to 6PM, Mondays through Friday, leaving the spots open nights and weekends for casual hide & riders like me. Meeting folks for drinks or dinner downtown? You can freely park your car near the station starting at 4PM, and make it downtown in plenty of time for happy hour. As a moderate drinker (even when Drinking Liberally), I’d likely choose that option over hiking it home late at night.

Opponents of light rail have long criticized it as social engineering, and to some extent they’re right. Like the commuter lines of the old Pennsylvania Railroad, the South Seattle segment is proving as much a real estate development project as it is a transit line, as evidenced by the massive residential redevelopment going on along MLK Jr. Way. Mixed income houses, townhouses, apartments and condos are being built for folks who want the convenience and economy of living a reasonable walking distance to a light rail station, and as these developments expand further out from the stations, so will the notion of what a reasonable walking distance is.

If anything, these quarter-mile restricted parking zones are too small, and neighborhoods will likely clamor for their extension when hide & riders cluster along the border. And after a while, the notion of healthily walking a couple miles a day to and from work, rather than driving to and from the fitness club for your daily workout, will become as commonplace around here as it was in the commuter-rail suburb of my youth.

And the best thing is, if you don’t want to be part of this new, socially engineered, walk & ride culture, there will always be plenty of Seattle neighborhoods without it.

Seattle Times editorial columnist Bruce Ramsey stopped by Drinking Liberally last night, and I immediately groused about how a dearth of irritating editorials in recent weeks has reduced me to dumpster diving over at Crosscut. Ramsey explained that he’d just returned from vacation, and that my complaint would be remedied in the morning with an editorial he penned on trade.

He didn’t disappoint: “Anti-trade bill that would hurt Washington state trade jobs should be stopped.”

At the risk of destroying his credibility with his co-workers, I have to admit that Ramsey is my favorite Times editorial writer (though as I explained to him last night, “it’s a pretty low bar”), largely because I find his columns both readable and consistent. The latter quality I attribute to his passionate libertarianism, a passion clearly on display in today’s editorial:

The Trade Reform, Accountability, Development and Employment Act makes private commerce subject to the moral imperialism of advocates who do not conduct trade and don’t care about it.

Under the bill, if a foreign trading partner’s government doesn’t have “adequate labor and environmental regulations” — the adequacy determined by busybodies — the trade can be stopped.

If the foreign government hasn’t “taken effective steps to combat and prevent private and public corruption” — the effectiveness defined by busybodies — the trade can be stopped.

If the foreign government doesn’t have “transparency” and “due process of law” to suit American tastes, the trade can be stopped.

Uh-huh. Passion… check. Consistency… check. Facts… not so much.

Putting aside his efforts to dismiss those of us who care about human rights and environmental protection as mere “busybodies” (you know, “busybodies” like the Pope), Ramsey’s passionate hyperbole substantially misrepresents a bill that doesn’t actually include the authority to “stop” anything. Rather, the stated purpose of the TRADE Act is to review existing trade agreements, draw up standards on which to base future agreements and renegotiations, and provide greater Congressional oversight of the process, its main provisions consisting of:

• Require a comprehensive review of existing trade agreements with an emphasis on economic results, enforcement and compliance and an analysis of non-tariff provisions in trade agreements.
• Spell out standards for labor and environmental protections, food and product safety, national security exceptions and remedies that must be included in new trade pacts.
• Set requirements regarding public services, farm policy, investment, government procurement and affordable medicines and compare them with components of current trade agreements.
• Require the president to submit renegotiation plans for current trade pacts prior to negotiating new agreements and prior to congressional consideration of pending agreements.
• Create a committee made up of the chairs and ranking members of each committee whose jurisdiction is affected by trade agreements to review the president’s plan for renegotiations.
• Restore congressional oversight of trade agreements.

All existing trade treaties remain in force, and this bill provides no authority to modify or “stop” them. As for future agreements, the language within the bill is far from anti-trade or heavy handed, for example, Section 4, Subsection D:

(D) provide that failures to meet the labor standards required by the trade agreement shall be subject to effective dispute resolution and enforcement mechanisms and penalties that are included in the core text of the trade agreement…

In truth, the “busybodies” Ramsey refers to are members of Congress, and even if they were to determine that a particular trading partner was, say, violating fundamental human rights (defined in the act as “the rights enumerated in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights”), they still wouldn’t have the power to unilaterally “stop” the trade as Ramsey implies. Rather, under future treaties, our government’s recourse would be to pursue “effective dispute resolution.”

Hardly a draconian, anti-trade provision.

Ramsey is right that Washington is perhaps the most trade dependent state in the nation, which makes trade a sensitive subject for members of both parties. And if anybody doubts the extent to which “free traders” like Ramsey control the debate in this state, look no further than the fact that none of our state’s House delegation are among the 110 U.S. representatives who co-sponsored the TRADE Act… not even typically reliable progressives like Jim McDermott and Jay Inslee.

But Ramsey does a disservice to our state and to his readers when he reduces a 44-page bill into a 229-word, knee-jerk screed against trade restrictions of any kind:

The idea behind this bill is that commerce is bad and is making workers in America poor. Tell that to workers assembling aircraft, writing software, or moving containers on the docks.

Yeah, well, tell that to the tens of thousands of Washington workers who have seen their jobs shipped overseas to low-wage nations with lax environmental, workplace and product safety standards, and often no right to organize at all.

I appreciate that Ramsey’s objections to this bill are consistent with his steadfast libertarianism; in fact, I almost respect it. But rather than foster informed public debate on this issue, his intent appears to be to quash it, and I expect better than that from my favorite Seattle Times editorial board member.

About a month or so before the November election, Mass Transit Now communications director Alex Fryer stopped by Drinking Liberally to help push the Prop. 1 cause, and we got to talking about the state of the campaign and the media coverage of it.

Fryer, a ten-year veteran reporter for the Seattle Times before jumping ship in 2007 to work for Mayor Nickels, complained about the difficulty he was having pushing the campaign’s message to the local media.  He lamented the paucity of coverage of Prop. 1’s impact on Eastside communities, yet couldn’t find a single reporter who considered Eastside transportation issues to be their beat.

The Time’s spent years building up its Eastside bureau, Fryer recalled wistfully.  And today… nada.

Talk to communications professionals around the region, many of whom are ex-journalists themselves, and you’ll find Fryer’s frustrating experience far from isolated.  As our local media universe contracts, the opportunities for media relations contract with it, a particularly troubling trend for the political community, which has watched the size of our state political press corps shrink by as much as two-thirds over recent years.

Imagine you’re a Seattle area legislator or advocacy group attempting to garner a little hometown coverage for a particular bill that would benefit your constituency.  It wasn’t so long ago that Seattle’s print media alone had a half-dozen or more reporters and opinion writers based in Olympia during the session, plus a slew of political journalists back at home.  But today, if the Times’ Andrew Garber isn’t interested in your story, or he already has his dance card punched, you’re pretty much out of luck.

What’s the solution?  Well, I suppose communications staffers could just work harder—be more diligent, more creative, and more relentless—and I know that our state’s various progressive organizations could do a better job coordinating their message.  And, I suppose these organizations’ backers could sink more money into their communications efforts to help defray the added expense of going around the traditional media gatekeepers and straight to decision makers and the public at large.

Or, of course, the broader progressive community could come together to fund and support the creation of  independent progressive media… you know… like the kinda work we’re doing here at HA, Publicola and the JOA News Co-op.  An independent media that not only moves stories into the corporate press and helps to frame the coverage therein, but also, increasingly over time, reaches a larger and larger direct audience.  A truly independent media, that’s honest about its bias and fearless in its opinions, and never shy about biting the hands that feed it, if that’s what events dictate.

That’s what folks like Josh and I are attempting to do here with the JOA, but we can’t do it alone and we can’t do it for free.  A credible and sustainable independent media is going to have to pay real journalists to do real journalism, and until we can establish a large enough audience and revenue stream, it’s going to require a cash subsidy, pure and simple… a cash subsidy that should be coming from the backers of all those progressive organizations and candidates for whom our success would directly benefit.

Sure, that’s a pretty self-serving analysis, but if there’s a better idea out there of how to address this growing communications crisis, I’ve yet to hear it.  And as for those progressive organization communications directors concerned about protecting their own budgets and salaries from hungry vultures like me, well, I’m the least of your worries, for no amount of media relations is going to help you get your message out if there isn’t any media left to relate to.

There’s a familiar cliche about the Chinese character for “crisis” meaning “danger” plus “opportunity,” and while it’s apparently not quite true, it’s still an apt metaphor for our current communications crisis, which does indeed present a great danger to the progressive community while also presenting an opportunity to reshape the local media landscape in our favor.  But there’s another cliche that also comes to mind in describing our efforts thus far to muddle through in the face of our local media’s dramatic collapse: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”

Over the coming weeks I not only intend to expand on my thoughts about what we need to be doing differently to confront and exploit our changing media landscape, I also intend to start demonstrating this vision by example. But while it has been tremendously gratifying to hear from folks about how much they appreciate my work, at some point, some of this appreciation needs to translate into substantial financial support for me to have any hope of success.

Last night, while driving home from Drinking Liberally (two pints of Manny’s over four hours FYI, before any of you trolls start going on about DUI), I ran into a fog bank on 23rd with almost zero visibility.

And it got me wondering… why isn’t anybody bitching about Mayor Nickels’ failure to clear our streets of fog?

I mean, it’s been days now, with no improvement, and what has the Mayor done?  No salt.  No plows.  No fleet of giant fans blowing the mist from major arterials.  Nada.

I’m just sayin’…

Here are a few updates on some recent news items I’ve been following before I head off to Drinking Liberally:

– The marijuana decriminalization bill introduced in the State House is here. After some more asking around, it appears that the bill is being held up by State Representative Chris Hurst (D-31), whose Criminal Justice and Corrections Committee does not plan on holding hearings, or even allowing a vote. I have an email out to his office in the hopes of getting an explanation. As Dominic Holden has pointed out, the bill would potentially save Washington taxpayers roughly $7.5 million per year. And the decriminalization is extremely limited. In fact, the bill’s proposed marijuana possession limits without being a criminal offense would still be more stringent than Ohio’s.

– The pre-trial motions in the Bruce Olson case (previous posts here, here, and here) will be on Monday, January 26 at 9am at the Kitsap County Courthouse (614 Division St. in Port Orchard). Prosecutors are trying to deny Olson’s ability to testify that he’s an authorized medical marijuana patient. Supporters of the Olsons are encouraging people to come to the courthouse to show their support.

Daniell Kirkdorffer of On the Road to 2008,, who created and implemented the innovative Pacific Northwest Topic Hotlist, has rather symbolically announced this morning he will stop blogging, although his archives will remain on-line.

The announcement bears a posting time of 12:01 AM this morning. It’s well worth your time to read the whole thing if you have a chance, as Kirkdorffer captures well the reasons regular folks decided they had to do something during the bleakest, darkest days of the Bush administration. I like this bit:

The road to 2008 that I embarked on took me places I did not envision. A single voice in a multitude of blogs meant that I was never likely to be a heavily read blogger at a national level, but my gradual evolution to writing about more local issues was far more about educating myself about them, than it was about finding a mass audience. Instead I soon developed a dialog with fellow local bloggers, and got to meet most of them in person at gatherings such as Drinking Liberally and other organized events. Today I count many of them as friends that I would never have met otherwise, and as I conclude my own blogging activities I have nothing but admiration for their ongoing efforts.

Unpaid, sometimes reviled, often dismissed, political bloggers spend an awful lot of time writing about issues, and rarely is there any payoff for the effort. We champion candidates or policies, some that win election or passage, but many that don’t, and sometimes we’re lucky if we simply help shape the debate, but I cannot imagine a world anymore without blogs, and the collective impact they’ve had on news coverage, information, and the pursuit of the truth in a matter. Left to their own devices the mainstream media would continue to let us down, and we’d have few places to turn to truly understand an issue. With the demise of daily print news, online resources will only continue to grow, and bloggers will be at the forefront of that change. It isn’t a perfect forum, but it is an invaluable one.

Indeed.

Here’s wishing Daniel the very best in everything he does. Well done, sir.

Heads up… newly elected Commissioner of Public Lands Peter Goldmark will be stopping by the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally tomorrow night, where we can all bask a bit in the afterglow of his sweet victory.  So come on by to chat with Peter and toast a new administration that won’t be in the pockets of the mining and timber industries.

Last night at the 46th Legislative District Democrats monthly meeting, elections activist Jason Osgood announced his intention to run for King County Elections Director… which really didn’t come as much of a surprise considering Jason told me as much Tuesday night at Drinking Liberally.

Hmm.

I like Jason, and I appreciate his activism (if at times I think his focus is misplaced), so I sure hope he hasn’t conflated the 1.2 million votes he received in his recent run for Secretary of State into some sort of base of support.  Sure, Jason ended up pulling in about 41.5% of the vote while barely spending a dime—but that’s still only a few percent of voters greater than those who would pretty much vote for anybody with a “D” next to their name, and not much better than then-Republican Richard Pope, who in the 2000 Attorney General’s race garnered more than 38% of the vote against popular Democratic incumbent Christine Gregoire.  Indeed, Richard actually won 14 of 39 counties, while Jason barely eked out a victory in just tiny San Juan.

Still, if this were a normal election, I’d urge Jason to pursue his bliss, as he’ll certainly add some important issues to the debate.  Unfortunately, it’s not a normal election, and as I told him privately Tuesday night, I hope he’s prepared to bow out if support coalesces around a qualified candidate.

See, the Elections Director will be chosen in a February special election, with no primary, top-two or otherwise, to thin out the field.  And while the office is officially nonpartisan, we all know that true nonpartisanship is a fiction that lives only in the minds of editorialists and idiots.

From all accounts, Republican wingnut State Senator Pam Roach intends to throw her hat in the ring as the culmination of her decades long quest to earn a six figure salary from the government she loves to cut.  And given a crowded field of Democrats on the other side, she very well could win.

This would be a disaster.

A number of other names are being bandied about, but if we want this to be a fair fight they’re going to have to agree to agree to winnow themselves down to one.  The name that intrigues me most thus far is Port Commissioner Lloyd Hara, an uninspiring politician, but an auditor by trade, who would arguably bring the appropriate skill set and temperament to the office.  Despite his best efforts to show up at the right events, Hara doesn’t strike me as particularly progressive or Democratic; in fact, from a partisan perspective, he doesn’t strike me as much of anything.  And isn’t that, combined with competence, exactly what we need from an Elections Director to restore and maintain confidence?

So Jason, good for you for acting on your activism, but if you really care about elections integrity, I’m hoping you’ll step aside if the alternative means handing the election to Roach.

I’m sitting in the PDC meeting right now, courtesy of Toby Nixon, who reminded me of it when he stopped by Drinking Liberally last night, and I realize I forgot to report that Toby has announced that he will not be running for the now elected position of King County Elections Director.

Toby was one of the forces behind changing the position from appointed to elected, and given his interest in the elections process (and his failure to win back his seat in the state House), many of us just assumed he’d run for the post.  Well… no.

Given our conversation last night, I wouldn’t rule out another run for the legislature, but as for now, we won’t have Toby Nixon to kick around anymore.

At Hempfest last weekend, posters titled “What’s Gregoire Smoking?” were being circulated through the massive crowds of people checking out the nation’s largest pro-pot gathering. The posters are advertising a rally for the hearing that the state Department of Health will be holding in Tumwater on Monday to discuss the proposed draft limits for medical marijuana patients.

The limits were patterned after Oregon’s limits, and while their limits have managed to protect their patients (even ones who require more than the limits allow), there are some differences between our system and theirs, the major ones being that providers can grow for multiple patients and that there’s a state-run registry system for patients that the police respect. The Cannabis Defense Coalition, a newly formed group of activists working together to protect patients from arrest (I’m a member), details some of the concerns with having to rely primarily on the limits to protect the patients:

1. The definition of a “mature” plant as any plant that reaches twelve inches in height is neither reasonable, nor grounded in science.

2. The new rules as written are absolute upper bounds, not “presumptive amounts” as mandated by SB-6032. If a patient has more than the presumptive amount, the new rules require a doctor to state the amount of marijuana required by that patient. This is illegal under the federal Conant v. Walters case, and doctors risk losing their federal licenses if they abide by this state requirement. This will have a disastrous effect on the legality of medical marijuana in Washington State.

3. That the limit of six “mature plants” — is too low. Cannabis typically takes 8 or more weeks to mature once blooming is triggered. Most patients produce 1-2 ounces per plant, or 6-12 ounces for their 60-day supply. Blooming at twelve inches will decrease yield to under half an ounce per plant, or less than 3 ounces for a sixty day supply.

These numbers are far less than the 24 ounces of dried medicine allowed for under the new rules. In short, the new rules do not honestly take into account the real world mathematics of marijuana growing, let alone the non-scientific, arbitrary limit on plant height written into the rules at the request of Governor Chris Gregoire.

On Saturday at the Hemposium tent, the area of Hempfest where music takes a back seat to politics, there was a lively panel of patients, activists, and attorneys discussing what happened during the process and what still needs to be done to make sure that patients stop getting arrested around the state. During the session, Douglas Hiatt – a local attorney who represents patients across the state – introduced Robert Dalton, a qualified patient who was not only arrested by Kitsap County authorities but may also lose a quarter-million dollars worth of his property.

Among the panelists, there was little disagreement over how we got into this mess. The State Department of Health originally came to a very workable proposal for the limits, 35 ounces and a 10ft by 10ft growing area. The Governor then told the DOH to solicit more input from doctors and law enforcement. The proposed limits were far more restrictive, and as Hiatt pointed out, every patient he knows is now at risk of arrest, and that some arrests have already taken place in Spokane County.

Where there’s a lot of disagreement is on why the Governor stepped into the process and told the Department of Health to revise the numbers. Some are chalking it up to cluelessness or apathy, but others think the Governor is deliberately making the limits unworkable in order to keep law enforcement happy (although Steve Sarich, the loudest voice in that camp, had to be corrected by the crowd when he asserted that every single police group in Washington State supports Gregoire, which we know pretty well by now is not true).

After getting a chance to ask the Governor about this mess in person at her recent pop-in to Drinking Liberally, I’m still in the camp that chalks this up to cluelessness and apathy. I don’t think she understands how disingenuous the concerns from law enforcement are, and I don’t get the impression that she cares enough about authorized patients getting arrested. After I pressed the issue, she said that if patients continue to get arrested after the limits are set that she’d work with the police chiefs to have the situation resolved. However, when you have rogue prosecutors like Russell Hauge in Kitsap County, I’m not sure how much the Governor can do.

Monday’s hearing is at 11AM at the Department of Health offices at 310 Israel Rd. SE in Tumwater. This may be the last chance to get this right, so whether you care about protecting patients or just don’t like law enforcement wasting more of your taxpayer dollars to throw sick people in jail, it’s your chance to be heard.

Primary night festivities for me began at Drinking Liberally in Seattle. But “festive” didn’t really describe my mood. Rather I was feeling about 80 years old and in pain owning to a back injury I sustained Monday morning.

At 9:00, I shuffled back to my car and began the slow process of climbing in without the use of specific back muscles. I almost went straight home. But heading back to Redmond, I swung by the Darcy Burner party in Bellevue.

Perhaps it was my heightened sense of senescence, but I ended up in lengthy conversation with an older woman. She had something to get off of her chest and was eager to share it. I didn’t catch her name, but I’ll call her Daisy.

Daisy’s issue was the Bush prescription drug plan that, she felt, had needlessly cost her money. But, more importantly, the plan had made it impossible for some of her less healthy friends to afford the medications they needed. She mentioned cost issues (resulting in maxing out on benefits) and problems that some needed medications were simply not covered by the plan.

Daisy felt strongly enough about the issue that she had talked to Dave Reichert. She reenacted her conversation with Reichert, in which he didn’t seem to “get it.” Rather than listening to the specifics, Reichert simply asserted that she and her friends must be better off under the plan. That’s what it was supposed to do.

When she finished with her story I asked, “So that’s how you became a Darcy Burner supporter?”

Daisy responded emphatically, “No…that’s how I became: ‘Anyone. But. Reichert.'”

Fair enough!

Thirty minutes later, I noticed that Daisy had struck up a conversation with someone else:

In the middle of a busy night filled with media, hugs, handshakes, and cheers, Darcy Burner took some time to listen to Daisy’s story. I’m guessing that’s how Daisy became a Darcy Burner supporter.

On my way out the door, I ran into Darcy and asked, “Can you share a few words with HorsesAss readers about tonight?” And she graciously obliged:

[Audio:https://horsesass.org/wp-content/uploads/darcy19aug2008.mp3]

So that, dear readers, will have to serve as our podcast—let’s call it our micro-podcast—for this week.

The appearance of Gov. Christine Gregoire at Drinking Liberally last night offered me the perfect opportunity for some gonzo-journalism. All politicians are alike, right? So in the interest of being “fair and balanced” in my journalistic endeavors I pulled out my video camera….

Earlier this morning, Postman wrote:

I was talking to a smart friend over the weekend who bemoaned the oh-so-careful approach Gov. Chris Gregoire is taking to governing. He’s a supporter. But he worries that out of fear of alienating someone, somewhere, Gregoire has traded activism for near-paralysis.

The topic of that post had nothing to do with drug policy, but with the deadline for having the State Department of Health establish the 60-day supply limits for medical marijuana patients coming up tomorrow, I find myself in the same boat as Postman’s unnamed friend – if not even more critical of the Governor.

As of my typing this, I still have no idea what the released limits will be. Earlier this year, it was revealed that preliminary numbers of 35 ounces and a 100 sq ft growing area caused the Governor to get more involved in the process and demand more feedback from law enforcement and medical professionals. Many patients and advocates within the medical marijuana community saw this as an attempt by the Governor to derail the process in support of the state’s law enforcement union, while the Governor’s dishonesty about why the process was derailed didn’t exactly convince people that she was acting in good faith.

At the follow-up meeting (which the DOH attempted to keep closed to the public, but failed), the two parties who the Governor claimed were underrepresented in the initial round of workshops were in attendance. The law enforcement officials again iterated that the decision should be left up the medical professionals, and the one medical professional who showed up said that 35 ounces might be too low of a limit for some patients who ingest it within food. Law enforcement officials also asserted that the limit shouldn’t be so high that criminals could hide behind it, but believing that someone with a small growing area in their basement could launch a massive criminal enterprise is more than a little absurd, considering that marijuana is already the most lucrative cash crop in the state of Washington.

The released limits tomorrow (if they’re even released) will go a long way towards showing whether or not Governor Gregoire is someone who can put politics and special interests aside and do what’s right for the citizens of this state.

Earlier this month, I visited a partially disabled medical marijuana patient in Tacoma who spent over a week in jail this winter. She was kept from receiving the special liquid meals she requires for nearly the entire time. In her mid-40s, she was a former nurse who told me she was staunchly anti-drug before discovering that marijuana worked best for her illnesses. She and her husband then became active in helping other registered patients learn how to grow for themselves.

Stories like that one are common. The list of other patients being hauled into court across the state has been growing. At Drinking Liberally and other events, I occasionally talk to people close to the Governor, and they rarely seem to understand that this is more than just a number. It could be the difference that causes someone to lose their house, their livelihood, or what’s left of their health, should they be sent to jail without adequate medical needs being met. Hopefully, the Governor herself doesn’t suffer from her own paralysis on this one.