Eideard

Folks in the state Senate gallery applauding passage of the bill

Washington appeared almost certain to become the seventh state to allow same-sex marriage after the State Senate voted late Wednesday for a measure that would allow gay and lesbian couples to marry beginning this summer.

Supporters had considered the Senate to be the more challenging chamber in which to pass the bill, but it was approved easily, by a vote of 28 to 21, after less than 90 minutes of debate. The measure now moves to the House, where it has wide support and could be voted on as soon as next week. Gov. Christine Gregoire has urged the bill’s approval. The governor is a Democrat, and both legislative chambers are controlled by Democrats.

“Regardless of how you vote on this bill, an invitation will be in the mail,” Senator Ed Murray of Seattle, the prime sponsor in the Senate, said in his final remarks before the vote. Mr. Murray, who is gay, has noted many times publicly that he and his longtime partner hope to marry in their home state.

The measure, echoing one passed in New York last June, includes language assuring religious groups that they would not be required to marry same-sex couples or allow them to marry in their facilities. Washington would join New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont and Iowa as states where same-sex couples can marry. Washington, D.C., also allows same-sex marriage…

The floor debate late Wednesday was civil and relatively succinct… A wonder in American politics.

A few Republicans joined Democrats in support of the bill.

In general, the reactionary wing of America’s artificial political division into two parties continues to come down against civil rights and civil liberties – our Constitution and Bill of Rights notwithstanding.

Predictable. I retain theoretical hope for true multiple-party electoral politics in this nation. One of these centuries.

 
Thanks, Ursarodinia

Pierce County prosecutors have charged Anthony T. Clark with first-degree murder, unlawful possession of a firearm and unlawful possession of a controlled substance…

Prosecutors allege Clark shot 16-year-old Devondre Davis in the back of the head on Wednesday…

Clark gave conflicting statements about what happened in the apartment and to Davis.

According to court documents, he initially said he didn’t know why he was arrested. He later said he’d shot Davis but it was an accident. He then told detectives that Davis had arrived at the apartment with rock cocaine and a gun. Clark said Davis was near the bedroom closet because they were looking for Clark’s mother’s jewelry to steal and sell.

The Pierce County Medical Examiner’s Office has identified the the 16-year-old boy found slain in a garbage bin on Tacoma’s East Side this week as Devondre D. Davis…

Tacoma police arrested the man Wednesday after he asked some neighbors if he could put a dead body in their trash can in an alley in the 500 block of East 36th Street. The neighbors reported the encounter to officers, who found Davis’ body.

Unlawful possession of a controlled substance? Charge him with unlawful possession of a brain!

“I told you we left the truck down here!”

On Washington state’s remote and wooded Olympic Peninsula, major commotion is usually limited to a log tumbling off an overloaded lumber truck. But lately the peninsula has been roiled by a noisy debate over the expansion of a Border Patrol station in Port Angeles, a three-hour car and ferry ride away from the U.S.-Canadian land border.

The U.S. Border Patrol is spending nearly $6 million to renovate a Port Angeles building that could house up to 50 of its agents.

Prior to the attacks of September 11, 2001, four agents were stationed in Port Angeles, a city of about 20,000 people some 15 miles across the Strait of Juan de Fuca from Canada.

“It’s not needed, there’s nothing for them to do up here,” said Lois Danks, a local writer and organizer of Stop the Checkpoints, which last month staged a small protest near where the Border Patrol’s new station is being built.

She says border agents “drive around and hassle people without any reasonable suspicion of anything except for possibly the color of their skin.”

“They park across the street from Hispanic grocery stores and taco stands and watch who comes and goes,” according to Danks…

Port Angeles border agent Christian Sanchez says he and his colleagues are “paid to do nothing…”There’s nothing to do,there are no gangs or cross-border activity. I haven’t seen it.”

Sanchez told the not-for-profit Advisory Group on Transparency he never intended to become a whistle-blower, but decided to speak out publicly after he felt his complaints about the Port Angeles station’s “lack of mission” were being brushed aside by supervisors.

Sanchez told the panel he ran afoul of supervisors for refusing overtime he didn’t feel he was entitled to since, he said, there was so little work to do.

“The taxpayers are paying us all this extra money to do nothing on this peninsula, where it’s a water-based border,” Sanchez said during the panel discussion. “It’s a burden on the taxpayers right now especially with the economy, with Medicare being cut, with the foreclosures.”

Another one of those aspects of change that are unchanged. If you can use the magic definition – “homeland security” – you’re golden. You can steal as much as you can carry in the name of bureaucracy and it’s OK with Congress and the White House.

Whoever has the biggest boondoggle gets the biggest salary.

There were no protests and not much politics when the Suquamish Tribe quietly confronted one of the most tender social issues of the day.

This spring, a young woman stood up at the tribe’s annual meeting on its reservation here on Puget Sound and asked it to formally approve same-sex marriage. The response from the 300 or so people present was an enthusiastic “yes” in a voice vote. There was no audible dissent. Then, after another, smaller meeting (still no opposition) and a little work by the tribal attorney, the tribal council voted unanimously this month to approve same-sex marriage.

No court fights. No ballot measures. No billionaires behind the scenes.

“It was an important statement, but it wasn’t one that was a real struggle to make,” said Leonard Forsman, chairman of the tribe. “We really saw this as a housekeeping issue.”

No same-sex couple has expressed interest in getting married on the reservation soon. Nor is it clear that there would be a practical impact if they did, in part because Washington State already has a domestic partnership law that extends most marriage benefits to same-sex couples.

Yet people involved in the process say the new law was an important act of self-determination. While its specific purpose is to affirm marriage rights for same-sex couples, supporters say the law also is an effort to assert tribal culture and authority over outside influences by people whose very identities have been under assault for more than two centuries, since non-Indian settlers began arriving in the Pacific Northwest.

“The reason for passing it had nothing to do with ‘What benefits do I get out of it?’ ” said Michelle Hansen, the tribal attorney. “You have this community saying, ‘Where we can avoid discrimination, we’re going to do it…’ ”

Experts note that some tribes, including the Navajo and the Cherokee, have passed laws opposing same-sex marriage, but the precise marriage policy of many tribes is not known because tribes do not always make their laws public.

Scholars noted that before tribes came into contact with Christian missionaries, homosexuality was not necessarily viewed negatively.

“It went from tolerated in some tribes to very highly regarded in others,” said Karina L. Walters, the director of the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute…

“It wasn’t thought of as homosexual, necessarily, it was thought of as another type of gender,” she said. “The whole idea behind it is tribes never excluded people.”

We’re obviously witnessing the failure of Christian missionaries to instill a proper belief in inequality and gender superiority…and other similar Anglo foolishness.

As a 64-year-old woman with a grandchild, state Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson, D-Seattle, says she’s not the type of person you would normally associate with marijuana. And yet Dickerson has again introduced legislation that would legalize, regulate and tax marijuana in Washington state.

“I believe that it’s a smart way to raise badly needed revenue,” said Dickerson, who chairs the House Health and Human Services Appropriations and Oversight Committee. “It also would at the same time mean that we can focus our law-enforcement efforts on more important things.”

House Bill 1550, filed Tuesday, would regulate marijuana much like alcohol. It proposes that pot be sold through state liquor stores to adults age 21 and older, that the sales be taxed and that the state Liquor Control Board issue licenses to commercial growers. Most of the revenue would go to health care, and substance-abuse treatment and prevention.

The bill would also classify as felonies interstate transportation of marijuana and unauthorized transportation of marijuana within Washington above a certain amount.

Dickerson proposed a similar bill last year, but it failed in a House committee. New provisions in this year’s bill include authorizing the production of industrial hemp and allowing limited growing of marijuana at home for personal use.

Amazing. Someone in Washington state with a brain has been elected to state office.

Good thing we needn’t worry about that happening in New Mexico. Or Congress.

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Even as the Obama administration moved to stop training and equipping Pakistani Army units that have killed civilians in the offensive against the Taliban, the United States said Friday that it planned increased aid for Pakistan’s military over the next five years.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton made the announcement in Washington alongside the Pakistani foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, as leaders from both nations convened for a series of meetings.

The new aid package, totaling $2 billion, is meant to replace one that expired Oct. 1. It would complement $7.5 billion in aid that the United States has already pledged to Pakistan for civilian projects, some have which have been directed toward helping the nation recover from the damaging floods.

In announcing the aid, Mrs. Clinton did not discuss the administration’s moves to stop financing certain elements in the Pakistani Army that have killed unarmed prisoners and civilians…

One senior administration official said there was “a lot of concern about not embarrassing” the Pakistani military, especially during a week in which officials are here for the third “Strategic Dialogue” in a year…

President Obama met Wednesday in Washington with Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and other senior Pakistani officials before leaving on a campaign trip to the West Coast, but the White House provided only a vague description of their conversations. Most of the strategic dialogue is focused on coordination of a range of subjects, including counterterrorism, nuclear security, flood relief and trade.

“I told the White House that I have real concerns about the Pakistani military’s actions, and I’m not going to close my eyes to it because of our national interests in Pakistan,” Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the author of the amendment, said Wednesday from his home in Vermont. “If the law is going to have teeth, it has to be taken seriously. Pakistan’s military leaders have made encouraging statements about addressing these issues, but this requires more than statements.”

Our various governments, you know, administrations we are told are vastly different from each other – have been consistently giving away billions of dollars for so many years I honestly can’t tell them apart once I’m outside the United States.

Pakistan alone has been getting 10 figures a year for a decade and longer. What sort of security has the United States received from that? What have the people of Pakistan received? Nothing, nada, squat, nuttin honey!

Two Comedy Central funnymen are apparently entering into the partisan political fray with rallies of their own in the nation’s capital.

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have set October 30 as the date for their respective rallies.

On Thursday night’s airing of “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” the comedian announced plans for a “Rally to Restore Sanity.”

“See you October 30 on the National Mall to spread the timeless message, ‘Take it down a notch for America,’ ” he said. Stewart dubbed the event a “clarion call for rationality…”

On “The Colbert Report,” which airs immediately after Stewart’s show, Colbert fired back with plans for his “March to Keep Fear Alive.”

“Now is not the time to take it down a notch. Now is the time for all good men to freak out for freedom,” Colbert said…

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Port Orchard, Washington –

A 33-year-old Bremerton man showed up for a court appearance on a meth charge Tuesday carrying a bag of the drug in his pants pocket, according to documents filed in Kitsap County District Court.

Before making his court appearance, the man had to be booked into and released from the Kitsap County jail. That’s standard procedure for these sorts of crimes, officials said.

While at the jail, a guard performed a security pat-down and found a bag of meth in the man’s right front pocket. The 33-year-old was then booked into the Kitsap County jail on $10,000 bail on the new felony possession charge.

Uh – OK. You were expecting maybe Willie Sutton?

A 10-year-old boy, who has been investigated numerous times by Seattle police since he was 8, has been charged in connection with a botched robbery aboard a Metro bus and an unrelated theft of a bicycle in June.

The boy and his two half-brothers, ages 12 and 14, were charged in King County Superior Court with first-degree attempted robbery in connection with Tuesday’s incident aboard the bus, in which the younger boy accidentally shot himself in the arm during a scuffle. The 10-year-old also was charged with second-degree robbery and intimidating a witness in connection with the theft of a bicycle June 24 in downtown Seattle.

The felony charges were filed one day after the three boys appeared in juvenile court and were ordered to remain in custody at least until hearings scheduled for next week…

Over the past two years, the 10-year-old has been investigated 13 times for crimes that include theft, robbery with assault and robberies with a weapon, according to police. During that period, six cases have been referred to the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office for potential criminal charges, but Friday marked the first time charges were filed against the boy.

Police say the three boys belong to the Down With The Crew gang in Seattle’s Rainier Valley…

Details of the 10-year-old’s remaining five cases referred to prosecutors have not been released by authorities. Dan Donohoe, spokesman for the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, said one theft case was sent back to Seattle police for further investigation and the four additional cases were found to have “insufficient evidence” and were not filed in court.

Though the boy has been charged for the incident on the bus, there will be a special hearing to determine whether he will stand trial in that case as well as for the June robbery. According to state law, children between the ages of 9 and 11 “are presumed to be incapable of committing crime” unless a judge determines the youth has the “sufficient capacity to understand the act or neglect, and to know that it was wrong.”

Phew! Anyone for a remake of the Bad Seed?