Washblog

I will keep this brief. Today, in honor of The World Cup, Yahoo has turned their special Penalty Shootout Game (RED) in order to help raise money for AIDS In Africa.

What this means is that all day today, you can take a break and play the game and for every goal you score, Yahoo will donate $1 up to a maximum of $100,000 to help buy life-saving drugs for those living with AIDS in Africa.

Now, true it may not be as much fun as taking a shot at Sarah Palin, but it is for a better cause, and as (RED) has shown with their documentary, The Lazurus Effect, just 40 cents a day can literally help save someone's life.

So please, take a moment, and play. I bet right here at Washblog, we're good for $10,000 today.

Those who are regular visitors to this space know that I post stories across the country, and to do that I have to follow stories from a number of states.

Because I post at Kentucky's Hillbilly Report, I've been paying particular attention to the Rand Paul campaign, and the news from the Bluegrass State (via "The Rush Limbaugh Show") is that Paul's planning to write his own balanced budget proposal for the Federal Government.

But there's a catch.

He doesn't plan on doing it until after the election.

Well, now, why in the world would a guy who's running for office based on his really good ideas want to hold back the best one?

That's not a bad question, and if we make the effort we can probably figure out the most likely answers.

From the Huffington Post:

A key question at the heart of the controversial bailout of AIG is just how much money the government lost. The Federal Reserve and Treasury Department have worked to keep that number secret and to conceal who was on the winning end.

An unredacted document obtained by the Huffington Post list the damage in detail. Goldman Sachs alone, for instance, got $14 billion in government money for assets worth $6 billion at the time -- a de facto $8 billion subsidy, courtesy of taxpayers.

We are again having to take a short bypass on our planned writing journey; this time to a place that's, according to their Facebook page, about 148 beer stores north of Toronto, Ontario (which, for the benefit of the less-geographically aware reader, is in Canada).

It's a crazy place, where duct tape is more truly the coin of the realm than loonies, but we're going to try to explain it all today...and in the effort we may even learn about a few things that really matter, like the unimportance of importance, and the kind of quality of life that comes from having a junk pile and a sense of adventure.

So grab the bug spray, Gentle Reader, because it's time to visit Possum Lodge.

We're now into day way too many of the BP oil spill, and the President has just yesterday been down on the Louisiana coast--again.

There have been suggestions that the Administration should take action to essentially push BP out of the way and take over the work itself, particularly as it relates to the cleanup.

It may have even occurred to you that an official declaration of some sort might be needed, in order to bring the full power of the Feds into play.

That's some good thinking, but before we go jumping right into declaring things we better understand the law, because if we don't, we could actually make things worse.

We don't have a lot of time for a big discussion today, but I wanted to take a second and talk about basic Federal Government economics as they apply to Rand Paul.

It is his stated vision to reduce the size of Government...and it is an undeniable reality that the vast majority of the Federal Budget is focused on only a few areas of spending.

Today, we'll quickly run through that economic reality, and we'll challenge Dr. Paul to tell us where he stands.

From Bloomberg this morning:

The cost of living in the U.S. unexpectedly dropped in April for the first time in more than a year, reinforcing forecasts that the Federal Reserve will keep interest rates near zero for much of 2010.

The 0.1 percent fall in the consumer price index was the first decrease since March 2009, figures from the Labor Department showed today in Washington. Excluding food and fuel, the so-called core rate was unchanged, capping the smallest 12- month gain in four decades.

As the governments of virtually every state in the Union prepare a wave of massive budget cuts this Summer, something else is coming in with the tide. Every journalist in the world has successfully dusted off her old Econ 101 textbook and opened it to the section: "How Government Borrowing and Monetary Expansion Help Create Inflation". The price of gold nears 1200 dollars and an even thousand euros as "libertarian" greedheads rub their hands anticipating riches from hyperinflation. The problem is that there is no inflation.

Ben Bernanke has done his "helicopter drop" of liquidity into the private sector. President Obama has gotten his stimulus package - well, most of it - and the Republicans have gotten yet more hundreds of billions in unheralded federal tax cuts. The Treasury has offered cash for clunkers, subsidies to first-time home buyers and 100 cents on the dollar to AIG. The banks are reporting flawless trading quarters. Yet with all this, prices do not go up. I have two words for you: Uh-Oh.

[Front paged: NM]

By Alison Holcomb, Drug Policy Director, ACLU of Washington

Last Thursday, the AP ran a ground-breaking piece of investigative journalism. It spelled out how U.S. taxpayers have financed a $1 trillion "War on Drugs" that, 40 years after its launch, has failed to meet any of its declared goals.

Originally posted at The Left Shue

On Saturday, May 15th delegates to the Washington State Labor Council (WSLC) met at the labor organization's C.O.P.E. (Committee on Political Education) convention to vote on their endorsements for the 2010 campaign. While many have seen this event as a sort of kumbaya moment for Labor and incumbent Democrats in the past, recent legislative setbacks for Labor and the emergence of the new "DIME-PAC"; established to more effectively target labor friendly candidates, helped to produce more than a couple of surprises.

A reliable source informed me late this afternoon that Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) just signed onto The Military Readiness Enhancement Act of 2010 (S 3065), Sen. Lieberman's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT) repeal bill.  With today's addition of Sen. Murray, the bill now has 29 co-sponsors.  The news is still too fresh to be reflected in Sen Murray's official bill co-sponsorship list.

Was Equal Rights Washington (ERW), Washington's premiere statewide LGBT advocacy organization a driving factor in getting Sen. Murray to finally take the plunge?  Circumstances make the question an enticing one.

In 2009, Protect Marriage Washington attempted a voter repeal of Washington's Domestic Partnership Expansion Law of 2009 via Referendum 71.  By a 53% margin Washington voted to keep the comprehensive domestic partnership law, the first state in the nation to affirm a same-sex relationship recognition law at the polls.

Once the Referendum 71 petitions were submitted to the Secretary of State for checking, they became public documents as per Washington's Public Records Act.  Protect Marriage Washington argues that this is an unconstitutional breach of petition signers' privacy.  The question is now before the U.S. Supreme Court in PMW's case Doe v. Reed.

At last week's Doe hearing Justice Ginsberg very neatly turned PMW's privacy argument on its head, and PMW attorney James Bopp was forced to admit that petition sponsors like PMW emperil signers' privacy themselves by selling or trading signers' names and addresses (links added):

JUSTICE GINSBURG: May I -- may I ask you one -- something that was not in your brief, but was in the secretary's brief. Is this list available to Project Marriage? And specifically on page 34 of secretary Reed's brief, the statement is made. The sponsoring organizations sometimes sell or trade these lists. They use them for fundraising purposes. So that would be the end of a person's privacy, at least on one side. Is that true, that the initiative sponsor uses these lists?

MR. BOPP: Yes.

JUSTICE GINSBURG: Yes?

MR. BOPP: Yes, this is an act of private association. The petition signers are associating with the referendum committee for purposes of placing -

JUSTICE GINSBURG: They don't say: Now, I agree you can use my name for fundraising purposes. But that's -- it's implicit, you say, in their signing the petition that the -

MR. BOPP: Well, what -

JUSTICE GINSBURG: -- signature collector can sell the names, use them for its own fundraising purposes?

MR. BOPP: What is implicit is they are associating with this group for a purpose, and that is support for, in this case, Referendum 71. And so they use those names for valid purposes.

At the end there Mr. Bopp was trying say that PMW isn't really infringing on R-71 signers' privacy by selling signers' names because the signers agree with PMW on the issue of the domestic partnership law.  Justice Ginsberg saw through that bull, and used PMW's own brief to show that people sign petitions for all kinds of reasons besides agreement with the sponsor (read on after the flip).

From Ernest Hemingway:

"How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked.

"Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually and then suddenly."

In this 2008 post I suggested that deflation was going to hit the United States in the form of state defaults by the end of the year. I forgot one thing: American Accounting. Here, states have been going broke "gradually". In the Eurozone, we're starting to see what "suddenly" looks like:

So let's take a look at the "contagion" everyone is worried about with Greece and see how the state of Washington could avoid and even benefit from it.
 

Baton Rouge (FNS)—Facing both a massive oil slick from a sunken offshore drilling platform and a second year of declining tourism revenues along the Louisiana Gulf Coast caused by high gas prices, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal today introduced a new tourism promotion that he reports is going to “...make lemons into lemonade”.

Jindal, flanked by British Petroleum's Director of Marketing Dick Timoneous and the Executive Director of the Louisiana State Tourism Board, Jenna Talia, announced that the “All The Oil You Can Carry Festival” would officially commence today just east of New Orleans, and last at least through the month of May.

Shortly after 10 am Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the Doe v. Reed case.  This is the case stemming from Referendum 71.  Religious conservatives led by Protect Marriage Washington were unsuccessful in using R-71 to repeal Washington's domestic partnership law, and Washington became the first state in the nation where voters approved, by a 53.2% margin, a comprehensive relationship recognition law for gays and lesbians.

A few days ago PMW posted an essay written by their attorneys, James Bopp, Jr. and Scott F. Bieniek.  Presumably this piece was meant to be their final stage-setting statement in advance of the hearing.  The essay, which is reproduced in full at the end of this diary, is a regurgitation of the same flimsy legal reasoning, conflation of marriage with domestic partnership, and projection of PMW's own bullying onto The Scary Gays^TM we've come to expect from PMW.  But there was one new element which was frankly shocking, even amid all that.  PMW chose to impugn, without a shred of evidence, Washington's Secretary of State Sam Reed.

Now [Attorney General Sam Reed] is willing to allow access to petitions knowing that they will be used to harass and intimidate individual citizens.

"Knowing"?  This is a serious personal attack against Mr. Reed, because nobody can know what will happen in the future.  What Bopp & Bieniek should know is that not one of the over 1 million referendum and initiative petition signers whose names have been posted on the internet has ever been hurt as a result.  They also surely know that the Washington Public Disclosure Commission voted unanimously against PMW's request to hide the names of their campaign donors because PMW failed to identify even one individual donor who was mistreated because their names were posted online by the PDC.  So what PMW and their attorneys have done here is choose to find Sam Reed guilty of an imaginary future crime based on non-existent evidence.  Remind me who the bullies are again?

While we wait for the SCOTUS to post transcripts from the hearing, it's worth watching a 3 minute story aired on Monday by KCPQ's Q13 Fox News (video below the fold).  The show sought comments on Doe from representatives from both sides of the Referendum 71 campaign: Anne Levinson, Chair of Washington Families Standing Together, and Bob Struble for PMW.  Levinson lays out a clear and rational description of the deeper anti-gay and anti-democratic agenda behind Doe.  Struble simply categorically attacks gay people as "vicious", "shrieking self-proclaiming homosexuals" bent on "mainstreaming sodomy".  (Is Struble on the WAFST payroll?  He's the next best thing to Fred Phelps, I swear.)  Notice the images of the normal, loving gay and lesbian couples and families that Q13 intersperses throughout the story.  I guess their vicious.homo.cam was out for repair. :)

Related:

• Conservatives and progressives unite to defend Open Government
  
• I, Citizen Legislator
  
• Gary Randall makes puzzling claims about the Doe v. Reed lawsuit
  
• Challenge to Washington's Public Records Act to get hearing by USSC

[Front paged NM]

Few issues seem to transcend party politics these days, but efforts to protect open government and public records laws are solidly uniting interests across the political spectrum.  Case in point is Doe v. Reed, a case stemming from the failed efforts of anti-gay religious conservatives in Washington to repeal a comprehensive domestic partnership law via Referendum 71.

What the Doe plaintiffs are asking for is a serious departure from open government.  They will be arguing before the US Supreme Court on Wednesday that referendum petition signers have a First Amendment right to anonymously step into a legislator's shoes and trigger legislative action.  Signing a referendum petition is a legislative act because it demands that a duly-enacted law be put on hold and directs the Secretary of State to call an election.  The Doe plaintiffs want the identity of citizen legislators to be immune from public disclosure.

The plaintiffs imply that they are the only stakeholder in the referendum process whose rights deserve consideration.  In reality, there are two other stakeholders whose rights must be considered: voters whose rights may be taken away by the referendum; and voters concerned that government remains open, fair and accountable to the people.

Voters concerned with open government represent the entire conservative-progressive spectrum, as evidenced by the respondents in the Doe case.  Defending Washington's republican Secretary of State Sam Reed before the US Supreme Court is Attorney General Rob McKenna, a republican who ran on an open government platform in past elections and who chose to argue this case personally before the Court.

Related:
* I, Citizen Legislator