Community rallies against hate

The Columbian reports:

It comes in many forms. Starting as name-calling, it escalates to violence. Or it shows up on a car door, on a street sign or in a driveway.

It’s hate, pure and simple. And a recent rash of graffiti in the Truman neighborhood just outside the city has drawn a chorus of condemnations from community leaders.

…

Meanwhile, last weekend’s racist graffiti have also spurred a flurry of public outcry. Several outraged community members plan to spearhead a cleanup effort to remove graffiti left in the Truman neighborhood.

On June 20, graffiti were found on cars, driveways and garbage cans at five residences in the neighborhood. They included a racist slur on Northeast 44th Avenue that named a 16-year-old black Fort Vancouver High School student, Shamarica Scott, specifically.

And the YWCA’s Jay Atwood observes:

Hate incidents are more common in Clark County than most people realize, said Jay Atwood, the YWCA’s social change program director. A recent YWCA study, which interviewed members of various minority groups, found racism ranging from subtle stereotypes to name-calling. The worst was violence.

"A lot of people in Clark County don’t report them," Atwood said. "They vary and are prevalent in all minority groups you see here in Clark County. They go from things in the mall to things on the street to things in the workplace."

To get a baseline of where we’re at as a community, I spoke with the Washington State Human Rights Commission to obtain the number of complaints in Clark County, broken down by Employment, Housing and Public Accommodations discrimination for the decade:

Year	Employment	Housing	Public Accommodations
2000	59	13	4
2001	56	6	2
2002	43	12	4
2003	38	5	3
2004	36	1	1
2005	45	9	2
2006	41	13	6
2007 (first nine months)	24	9	6
Totals:	342	68	28
source: Washington State Human Rights Commission

At a glance, it would appear that we hit a trough of complaints in 2003-2004, only to see the numbers edge up as the housing bubble in Clark County continued apace from 2005-2007.  What's not in here are the number of graffiti, intimidation, or other hate crimes, as that doesn’t fall under the Human Rights Commission's jurisdiction.

The immediate need is repairing the damage done by the graffiti.  The longer term need of course is to keep having an honest discussion of problems in the community. To paraphrase Martin Luther King, there is no separate path here, we are truly “bound together in a single garment of destiny”.

Russell to challenge Baird

Somebody has to be the sacrificial lamb:

WASHOUGAL, WA- Jon Russell, City Councilman & co-owner of Columbia Gorge Medical Center announces that he will seek the Republican nomination for U.S. Congress.

“This is a day that has taken a lifetime of preparation and months of planning. I look forward to meeting voters on the campaign trail and making the case for new representation for Southwest Washington. I represent a new generation of reformers who are fed up with career politicians in Congress because they suffer from a lack of vision and the will to do the right thing for the people. I am running for congress to represent the ideas and hard work of everyday people; I believe we can balance the federal budget….

<snip>

Blah blah blah, young angry TeaBagger (that’s him at a recent TeaBag party) files for Congress. Someone please find an editor for this guy. While Michael Delavar was perhaps not the greatest candidate, he kept things succinct.

And all you really need to know is here:

Jon is also the former Executive Director of Faith & Freedom Network.

Cook Political Report has the 3rd Congressional District at dead even. As long as Baird stops the “I hate my base” strategy, he’s locked in.

UPDATE: Some other guy from Olympia is running too:

CASTILLO ANNOUNCES KEY ENDORSEMENTS

Olympia, WA – Congressional candidate David Castillo announced key endorsements as he seeks to unseat Brian Baird in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District:

Rep. Richard DeBolt, House Minority Leader, 20th Legislative District
Senator Dan Swecker, 20th Legislative District
Rep. Gary Alexander, 20th Legislative District
Rep. Ed Orcutt, 18th Legislative District
Rep. Skip Priest, 30th Legislative District

I'd provide a link to Castillo's web site, but Google search results are warning that the site has computer viruses. What's curious here is Ed Orcutt's endorsement for Castillo and not for fellow 18th LD'er Russell. What, no love for Faith & Freedom Network from Orcutt?

Leavitt goes up with statement

Good to see local leadership step up:

Hate and bias crimes are serious offenses that must not be tolerated. No citizen should feel unsafe in our community.

…

It is time for the City of Vancouver to make a strong statement against hate and bias crimes, and work with the County and local advocacy organizations to promote community understanding and collaboration.

I am working on a draft resolution, to put before the City Manager and City Council, to stand strong with the County and others in our community against hatred and intolerance, and help make Clark County and the City of Vancouver a place where every resident can feel safe.

And I’d be remiss to not mention the Clark County Sheriff’s Office press release from Wednesday:

Recently the Clark County Sheriff’s Office became aware of a series of criminal incidents involving racist and bias graffiti in a local neighborhood, on vehicles, and other items of personal property. The Sheriff’s Office needs the community’s help in solving this series of crimes and would like anyone who has information about these incidents to please call the Sheriff’s Office West Precinct at (360) 397-6079, Central Precinct at (360) 397-6195 or 911 after 5 p.m. to report.

Sheriff Garry Lucas would like the community to know that these recent criminal acts are reprehensible and this sort of conduct should not be tolerated. Citizens are urged to call 911 immediately if they become the victim of a hate crime, or if they have information about subjects involved in these sorts of criminal acts.

And the YWCA Clark County is taking the lead role on this incident:

Bias incidents can be very frightening for victims, and can leave people feeling vulnerable and unsupported. The Sheriff’s Office has taken a firm stance in attempting to document and address this behavior in the community and is working closely with the YWCA on a series of community forums that will attempt to open dialogue between law enforcement and our diverse communities. Planning is in progress for an event to be held in the fall. Details will be released as soon as they become available.

For information about the work being done by the YWCA with regard to Hate Crimes and Bias Incidents, please contact the YWCA’s Social Change Director, Jay Atwood at (360) 696-0167.

In these times of severe budget cuts, it’s organizations like the YWCA that play a critical a role in shoring up our local social safety net. I realize dollars are scarce these days, but please consider making a tax-deductible contribution directly to the YWCA Clark County:

https://payments.auctionpay.com/ver3/?id=W025012

You can direct your contribution specifically to the graffiti incident by indicating so in the “in memory of” section.

Vandals target high school basketball player

This is completely unacceptable:

Racist graffiti showed up on car windows, in driveways and on garbage cans in the Truman neighborhood. But the most painfully personal was a message Shamarica Scott found down the road from her house.

"Shamarica is a dumb (derogatory term)," the tagging read.

"It made me feel really unsafe," said Scott, a 16-year-old black student at Fort Vancouver High School. "What did I do to get my name on the street?"

Shamarica’s not only a student at Fort Vancouver High School, she’s on their varsity basketball team:

Exploding on the scene. Watch out basketball community, here she comes. Shamerica Scott is a virtual unknown to the high school varsity basketball community. After playing JV for Fort Vancouver, and playing over the summer in the traveling team circuit with Premier Elite, she has raised eyebrows and made waves with the basketball crowd. So much so, that without a minute of "high school varsity experience" she has received over a dozen 'letters of interest' from college coaches around the country.

So these animals targeted a girl high school basketball player. Let that one sink in for a moment. But Shamarica’s not the kind of person who’s letting this get her down as you can see from her interview in the KPTV news story. I certainly wasn’t that well put together in my sophomore year of high school.

One can theorize on what kind of family inculcates this kind of patterning in their kids that engenders this behavior. Meanwhile, there’s a driveway that needs repair.

Long time readers of this blog will remember fundraising efforts from last year that resulted in a car completely repaired. Due to a local body shop that donated their labor, the fundraising ended up with a balance. That balance will now get applied to repairing the Scott’s driveway.

It is sad that this kind of fundraising needs to exist in this day and age. But what’s gratifying is to see a community taking a stand on this. We take care of our own in this community. You can help out with a small contribution at any local IQ Credit Union C/O Victims of Racial Vandalism Fund.

UPDATE: You can contribute online directly to the YWCA Clark County, just mention Graffiti Incident in the "In Memory Of" field. Donations to the YWCA are tax deductible.

Nixon’s Southern Strategy

Dick Nixon opines on abortion:

Nixon worried that greater access to abortions would foster “permissiveness,” and said that “it breaks the family.” But he also saw a need for abortion in some cases, such as interracial pregnancies.

“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white,” he told an aide, before adding: “Or a rape.”

At the moment one thinks that George W. Bush was quite possibly the worst president ever, Nixon comes roaring back from the grave.

Our shared national amnesia

National amnesia, brought to you by your friends at Fox News:

BARNES: then when you see, you know Obama has used — the most pathetic thing is to say, gee, well, we were involved in 1953 — 1953! This is an extremely young society. You think those demonstrators are thinking, well, we hope the U.S. stays out because they were involved in 1953? That's total nonsense.

POWERS: I think there is a history there.

BARNES: 1953?

POWERS: They do remember the United States meddling.

BARNES: No, they don't.

Who you gonna believe, Fred Barnes, or say an actual Iranian?:

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: I think on this issue actually you see a big cultural gap between the American public and the Iranian public. For the Iranian public, the ‘53 coup shapes basically Iranian history, as Stephen shows very much in his book. But for Americans, the ’53 coup was something unreal for them. It wasn’t something they were aware of. If they were aware it, it was like Jimmy Carter saying that this was ancient history. For the U.S. it may have been ancient history but for Iranians it was not. So when the students took over the embassy, they actually called it the “den of spies” because they knew that in ’53 the coup had been actually plotted from the U.S. compound.

Orwell would have been proud.  Our penchant for enforcing our narrative on other countries is alive and well, broadcasting twenty four hours a day on Fox News.

The Columbian will survive on GOP columnists

From the department of dying newspapers comes this:

Newspapers' underlying problem isn't political slant, Campbell said.

The Columbian's cancellation orders include about "10 a month from people who think we're too liberal and 10 from people who think we're too conservative," he said. "I don't intend to solve that any time in my career."

Slant is fine, as long as you have a diversity of opinion.  What Campbell glosses over is people who simply will not even subscribe in the first place given The Columbian’s lack of diversified opinion.

For example, the departure of Dena Hovde appears to have opened up a regular slot for the opinions of Ann Donnelly, former chair of the Clark County GOP, who tells us in her second column that:

The Obama executive branch has since adopted solutions chillingly similar to those of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, essentially nationalizing banks and auto companies. With no deference to due process, Obama has usurped constitutional rights of bondholders, shareholders, and corporate employees whose contracts have been revoked by presidential decree.

That’s the best of the national GOP talking points right there, distilled into one paragraph.  It screams “socialism” and fake comparisons of Obama to Chavez.  It confers victimhood on the bondholders who got caught playing chicken with the government, bondholders who wanted to liquidate those automakers for their profit rather than looking out for the employees who worked there.  Bottom feeding speculators who don’t deserve the time of day in any serious discussion about the future of the auto industry.

In Donnelly’s world, the U.S. taxpayer would be on the hook to bail out the auto industry without demanding a workable bankruptcy proceeding for that investment.  Rather than owning up to the fact that holding bonds is inherently risky, and that in order for capitalism to properly function, risk is a part of the system.  Moral hazard has no place in Donnelly’s way of thinking.

Donnelly of course gets her digs in against Howard Dean, and that’s all well and good.  I’m not going to knock her whole Goldwater inspired rejection of “democracy”, that’s her axe to grind.  But I do know that after Kathie Durbin’s by the numbers piece on Dean’s visit, the only voice we get to hear analyzing his speech is from the far right.

Folks on the center-left have a right to be tetchy about the continual drift ever rightward of the op-ed page, especially after the Washington Post’s firing of Dan Froomkin.  Donnelly is just a local symptom of that trend.  So while you have an electorate who votes for centrist candidates, your local paper deems it necessary to give space to the far right agenda without balancing that out with a nod to the left.

Still though, regardless of editorial slants, the business model of newspapers is ultimately flawed.  I’ll let the Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett, do the honors:

If Mr Guttenberg had come up with the internet instead of movable type back in the late 15th century and for 400 years we had used the internet for news and all types of entertainment and all kinds of everything else and I came along one day and said I have got this wonderful idea we are going to chop down some trees up in Canada and ship them to a paper mill which will cost us a fortune to run through and deliver newsprint and then we’ll ship that down to some newspaper and we’ll have a whole bunch of people staying up all night writing up things and then we’ll send a bunch of kids out the next day all over town delivering this thing and we are going to really wipe out the internet with this… it ain’t going to happen.

That website looks so…

familiar:

The blue gradients, the layout, and the flag image in the northeast corner are the dead giveaways.  Who knew that Team Leavitt were such ardent Obama copy-cats emulators?

Familiar Rhetoric

Shawna Forde, former denizen of Everett, Washington, is now in jail for the double murder of a nine-year old girl and her father, both Hispanic Americans, in Arizona.

Forde’s statements in this KCTS appearance should be familiar to those following rhetoric put forth by certain locally elected officials in Clark County:

And they continue to come here, and it’s not just Hispanics, it’s all races.

vs.

"Latinos aren’t the only problem we have," Mielke said. "We have people from eastern India and Russia and everything else."

(h/t The Mex Files)

Good question

The City of Vancouver gets around to questioning C-Tran's board composition:

The local transit agency currently is managed by a nine-person board consisting of the three Clark County commissioners, three Vancouver City Council members and three representatives from the county's smaller cities.

A memo written by Ted Gathe, Vancouver city attorney, says almost 60 percent of the agency's sales tax revenue and 40 percent of its population come from within the Vancouver city limits.

So they get 33% of the representation for 60% of the revenue, that sounds pretty unfair. But Tom Mielke believes that it's all about "representing people":

Mielke said he was "amazed" to hear talk about how much a city has in terms of population and what that means for board representation.

"We are supposed to be representing people," he said. "We are not here to jury-rig an area or jury-rig a board."

Riiiiighhhhhtttt. In Mielke's world, taxation with proportionate representation is just "jury-rigging".

I've pointed out before the incredible imbalance in overall political mojo between Tri-Met and C-Tran:

The core of the problem with C-Tran appears to be it's governance. Tri-Met is a State of Oregon chartered corporation with board members appointed by the governor. C-Tran is this itty bitty county level entity with the Board of County Commissions and the mayors of Clark County as board members. It's several orders of magnitude lower on the totem pole, and it shows. How the BoCC is able to wear both hats and devote the time necessary to real transit infrastructure planning is beyond me.

It's an imbalance that disserves Clark County in the CRC negotiations especially. And having Mielke on board to add his special level of inanity worsens the prospects for a viable bridge design. When C-Tran gets to the negotiating table, the crazy uncle gets to come along too.

Mielke's unfunded mandate

Let's pretend for a moment that Tom Mielke's batshit insane proposal to require passports or somesuch to obtain county public health services comes to pass.

Checking the county's public health budget for 2009-2010, there's four main areas of the pie: Community Health & Wellness, Environmental Health, Epidemiology, and Health Department Administration. Out of the four, only Epidemiology specifically spells out services for "refugees" in the area of health screenings (e.g. tuberculosis) and immunizations for adults and children. Out of a total public health budget of $33.9 million, Epidemiology is $5.2 million of that.

Since up-to-date immunizations are a requirement in order to register for school, the children of undocumented workers are barred at the door. Mielke has made no statement on this likely outcome, but one has to assume that this is a desired effect.

If stringent citizenship documentation is required to obtain public health services, the net effect will be increased administrative cost while also making it more difficult to obtain services for citizens who don't have their papers in order. That's what's happening in other localities:

Colorado's new law banning state spending on illegal immigrants has cost more than $2 million to enforce - and has saved the state nothing.

Less than a year after politically charged debates on illegal immigration, officials are reporting high costs, no savings and unexpected problems with the new laws.

Once touted by statehouse Republicans and Democrats as the toughest anti-immigration package in the nation, the Colorado crackdown is falling apart.

County budgets are already stretched exceedingly thin, but Mielke would impose another unfunded mandate to the pile. That's just not common sense.

What is common sense is passing legislation penalizing employers who continue to hire undocumented workers for below market wages. Rather than continue to demonize undocumented immigrants, it's high time to look at those who are hiring the undocumented and provide a level playing field for all workers.

If Grandpa falls at Wal-Mart, will they dial 911?

Do not take grandpa to Wal-Mart:

"She said, 'Mom, Grandpa fell and it's really bad!'"

Rita Mixter said family members asked a parking-lot attendant to call 911, but instead, the attendant used his radio to tell managers there'd been an accident outside.

When an assistant manager emerged from the store, she asked family members to fill out an accident form. Asked to call 911, she allegedly refused, saying it was against company policy, Rita Mixter said.

How do you not call 911? Who are these people? Oh right, the same company that used to buy "dead peasants insurance" on its employees:

Mike Rice was a 48-year-old assistant manager when he died of a massive heart attack at the Wal-Mart store in Tilton, N.H. His widow, Vicki, became the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against the company after she discovered Wal-Mart collected $300,000 from a life insurance policy it owned on him.

Why does anyone still shop there again?

Clark County is Howard Dean Country

You'll just have to bear with my fan-boy enthusiasm for a second as I reflect on a super night for local area Democrats.  What a coup landing Howard Dean as the featured speaker for the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner!

I had a chance to speak with Dean directly (thank you, Dena Horton), and check in on what he's doing now after wrapping up such a successful turn as the DNC chair.  And yes, he does feel vindicated about the 50-State Strategy, which turned out pretty well during his tenure that saw Democrats taking back Congress and the White House.

What Dean is up to now is focusing on the public option for health care, having just spent the day earlier in Portland with Congressman Earl Blumenauer.  He's definitely sympathetic to those who support single-payer, since it pulls the health care debate into a more progressive direction, but it's definitely a situation of not letting "the perfect be the enemy of the good".  Advocates for single-payer are in many ways their own worst enemy, and protesting his visit in Portland will do little to help their cause.

Regarding Dean's return to DFA, he described it as a return to activist politics, in search of mobilizing the grassroots in getting people involved in the health care discussion.  He also plugged the new Stand with Dr. Dean web site as a way to get more involved with the health care issue.  According to Dean, the public option means real reform, since individuals will get to decide whether they want public or privately provided health care.  

Hard core Deaniacs will remember his "What I want to know" speech from 2003.  Little remembered from that speech was Dean's repudiation of Nixon's Southern Strategy, and the use of coded language to divide the electorate along racial lines.  I asked Governor Dean if the 2008 cycle was a direct repudiation of the Southern Strategy, and he agreed, pointing to elections in Alabama and Mississippi that Democrats were winning.  In other words, it's not just the election of Obama that signals the end of the Southern Strategy.  

What put the nail in the coffin of the Southern Strategy was the younger generation.  They're multi-cultural, adept with technology, and they reject the politics of confrontation.  It's an astute observation and one that Gen-X'ers like myself need to reconcile with.

Dean reminded everyone that you can't just take a vacation from politics, or bad things happen to the body politic.  An engaged electorate acts as a check on what we just witnessed over the past eight years, an "extra-constitutional government" as Dean put it.  It's also important to remain engaged now that the Democrats are in charge, since now is when the real work begins.  We simply cannot allow "bi-partisanship" to sink meaningful reform, especially in health care policy.

I don't know anything about Vermont politics, but if Pat Leahy or Bernie Sanders retires, "Senator" Howard Dean has a nice ring to it.