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A chance for a fresh start: Aaron Reardon’s resignation

originally published in The Herald

Thursday’s resignation of Snohomish County Executive Aaron Reardon was a joyless capsule on tainted leadership. Cathartic it wasn’t, because catharsis requires accountability, authenticity, a willingness to make amends.

A career politician adroit at taking credit for the labor of others, Reardon stood defiant, unwilling to shoulder blame or responsibility –or even feign humility — for a crisis of his own creation.

As the late Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, said to the White House congressional liaison in 1980, “You guys came in like a bunch of jerks, and I see you’re going out the same way.”

At his State of the County address, Reardon announced that he would resign at the end of May because of “false and scurrilous accusations” emanating from “groups that oppose” him. Exceptional investigative reporting by The Herald’s Scott North and Noah Haglund revealed evidence of online harassment and surveillance of Reardon’s political enemies — a list that extends to those who cooperated in the Washington State Patrol’s investigation of Reardon’s use of public money.

What, precisely, is false? Reardon merits an opportunity to defend his character and leadership but, like a third-world autocrat, he prefers to isolate, refusing to answer questions. It’s an evocative silence.
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February 22, 2013 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

The selling of The Herald: A new challenge

originally published in The Herald

Over the past decade, disruption in media has become the norm. Curmudgeons are hauled to seminars to learn about online gadgetry. The mantra rings like a line from “The Graduate:” I want to say just one word to you. Just one word. Digital.

Herald scribes, as they always have, show up every day, try to find out what’s going on and then spread the word. Whatever the medium, whether print, mobile or brain implant, people hunger for substance and quality. Ownership is something that happens on a higher floor.

For more than a century, The Herald has provided in-depth reporting and community coverage. The first draft of regional and state history is written by Herald veterans such as Sharon Salyer, Julie Muhlstein, Scott North, Eric Stevick and Bill Sheets. Institutional memory and judgment can’t be replaced.
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February 7, 2013 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

Why coal royalties matter: The coal-train reaction

originally published in The Herald

The paradox of the American West is the terrible beauty of a landscape largely owned and managed by the feds, nourishing a population of independent spirits skeptical of big government. Eastern Washington is emblematic of the bite-the-hand contradiction, home to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and beneficiary of Depression-era public works projects that made the high Columbia desert bloom. Love for the feds? Not so much.

Cross federal lands with private enterprise and a bureaucratic culture sensitive to criticism, and the resulting appetizer serves up the challenge of coal terminals.

Last week, Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, chair of the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the committee’s ranking Republican, sent a letter to U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar demanding specifics on the management of federal coal royalties. Their questions flow from a series of Reuters articles detailing the loss of millions of dollars from coal mined on federal land in the Powder River Basin. Presupposing that the Gateway Pacific Terminal at Cherry Point is green-lighted, the basin is the starting point for coal on its way to East Asia via rail.

The possible loss of revenue also costs states where federal coal is mined, specifically Wyoming and Montana. In 2011, Montana and Wyoming exported nearly 18 million tons of coal. Wyoming’s Republican Gov. Matt Mead and Montana’s Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer are working to ensure that citizens get a fair return on investment.

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January 8, 2013 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

For gun-injury research: Gun violence in America, Part 4

originally published in The Herald

Historian Richard Hofstadter called it the paranoid style in American politics. The NRA’s bloviating Wayne LaPierre is Exhibit One, an angry mind hankering to enshrine George Orwell’s “1984” catchphrase, that ignorance is strength.

The child massacre in Newtown cast into relief LaPierre and the NRA’s decades-long campaign to supplant health research on firearms and violence. Research and facts a hazard? In the paranoid war on firearms data and public health, the paranoid are winning.

Dr. Fred Rivara of the UW’s Department of Pediatrics and Seattle Children’s Hospital experienced the NRA’s data stiffling first-hand. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, Rivara and his colleague, the Rand Corporation’s Dr. Arthur Kellermann, conducted firearm-injury research. The hammer fell in 1996, when an NRA-obsequious Congress whacked $2.6 million from the Centers for Disease Control. As Rivera and Kellermann note in an online essay for the Journal of the American Medical Association, $2.6 million just happened to be the amount dedicated to firearm-injury research. They quote the Appropriation language which underlines the point. “None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.” The inference is that empirical, control-tested data might demonstrate a relationship between gun control and a public good (say, fewer murdered children.) What if the opposite is true, and the NRA’s prescription of armed guards at schools has merit? As the National Academy of Sciences reported in 2004, there is inadequate data to determine what’s effective. Doctors and social scientists need to analyze inputs, but the NRA and its minions in Congress — and even the Washington Legislature — will have none of it.

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December 28, 2012 phjackson Leave a response , , , ,

Political power’s limits: The coal train reaction

originally published in The Herald

Truth and conventional wisdom don’t always align. In the debate over coal trains, two narratives merit a closer review. One involves the nature and limits of political power. The other centers on the inviolable railroads that built the American West.

Proponents of the Gateway Pacific Terminal at Cherry Point have been vastly outnumbered at the scoping hearings on the proposal’s environmental impacts. Nevertheless, a mass of coal skeptics, minus local, environmental data, won’t derail an export facility. The mission of the scoping process is not to jawbone the wisdom of exporting American-subsidized coal to China and its contribution to climate change, nor is it a cumulative, comprehensive economic analysis to determine the net fallout to the Northwest.
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December 27, 2012 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

The time for real decisions: Gun violence in America, Part 3

originally published in The Herald

An Everett-born Jesuit priest, the Rev. Patrick J. Conroy, sits in the nation’s capital, forbidden to buttonhole politicians. A different kind of crucible, a Political Science major, an aspiring politico and Snohomish High grad, squelched.

As chaplain of the U.S. House of Representatives, Conroy offers spiritual ballast, not policy guidance. Last Wednesday, on the heels of the child massacre in Newtown, Conroy crossed the numinous with hard sense. “As we continue to recover from such a great tragedy, endow the Members of this House and all our governmental leaders with the wisdom to respond with whatever policies and laws might be needed to ensure greater peace and security in our land,” Conroy prayed.

Those policies and laws to ensure greater peace are nearly as absent as the wisdom to curtail gun violence. Even facts are elusive. After heavy lobbying by the National Rifle Association, Congress de-funded research by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) concerning guns and public health. The NRA’s Wayne LaPierre said in 1995, “The problem that I see with what the CDC is doing is that they are not doing medicine, they’re doing politics.” On Friday, the same LaPierre promoted a police-state approach to Newtown, with NRA-trained guards stationed at every school in the country. Enough. The NRA’s mission is to sustain the NRA, not the public interest.
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December 23, 2012 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

Advancing mental health: Gun violence in America, Part 2

originally published in The Herald

Gun violence generates a latticework of fix-something brainstorms, from arming teachers to repealing the Second Amendment. Arguments, both ad hominem and rational, cross-hatch the public square, but unite on mental health.

Here, consensus runneth over: Mental-health services must be enhanced, with an emphasis on intervention and access to care.

As an action-forcing horror, the Newtown shooting teased up a stereotype, of those living with mental illness gravitating to violence. In fact, the mentally ill are much more likely to cause harm to themselves than to others. Violence manifests when severely ill patients go untreated. While disease stigmas fester, they aren’t changeless. Cancer was stigmatized. So was AIDS. Education is the antidote, setting mental health on par with the broader spectrum of community health needs. (Parity means just that.)
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December 21, 2012 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

Leadership on gun control: Gun violence in America, Part 1

originally published in The Herald

In times of crisis or shock, overreaction is hard-wired. A political spasm, an upwelling of sentiment, is followed by amnesia. A few public memories, such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks, are forever. The horror and scale impress on lives and pass along to future generations. That is the case of the Newtown massacre. Too many murdered children.

The salient lesson from 9/11 was, in all things, judgment. The Patriot Act passed by Congress was freighted with a number of ill-considered measures, including “sneak and peek” searches and warrantless surveillance. The Iraq war was lit on a false premise. The touchstones for federal action after Newtown will be what works and who benefits.
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December 20, 2012 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

The horror in Newtown: Elementary school murders

originally published in The Herald

Children magnify the rawness of insensible death.

Friday’s massacre at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school, the unfathomable number of murdered kindergarteners, the visitation of evil in the time of Advent. As we wrote earlier this year, how do Americans make sense of the senseless? Elie Weisel said years ago, “Words, they die on our lips.”

“The majority of those who died today were children, beautiful little kids between the ages of 5 and 10 years old,” President Obama said on Friday. “They had their entire lives ahead of them: birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own.” The president, that taciturn profile of reserve, was weeping. Edmonds Police Chief Al Compaan told The Herald, “You just can’t imagine. All these kids, why?”
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December 16, 2012 phjackson Leave a response , , , ,

Immigration reform now: A sensible approach

originally published in The Herald

In the verve and anarchy of the campaign season, immigration reform devolves into code words. The pronoun “they” and shorthand “illegals” serve a political end–to evoke fear, to scapegoat, to conjure a sense of disorder. Ironically, just floating the how-do-we-tackle-it question kindles anti-immigrant sentiment. In 2009, Georgetown University Professor Daniel Hopkins documented various communities experiencing demographic change which then convulse in an anti-immigrant slow burn as “salient national rhetoric politicizes that demographic change.” (Read: immigration is easy to demagogue.) Political speech, honed to the lesser, Xenophobic angels, diminishes us. Punting, the default position for the Obama Administration and Congress the past four years, is unacceptable.

Kick-em-out applause lines won’t ameliorate a crisis that threads together employment, public safety, health, agriculture, entitlement spending and social justice. It’s governing season. Comprehensive immigration reform is the only tenable solution.

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November 13, 2012 phjackson Leave a response , , ,