Why not just talk to his buddy Paulie and see if he can let people move into Rollin Street Flats?

I was torn about it: my libertarian and progressive instincts both told me to support it (individual rights), but I’m conservative enough to be cautious about a potential radical social change like this. The radical changes I tend to support, like, say, universal health care and high-speed rail, are commonplace in nearly every other industrialized nation — which makes them a no-brainer in my mind. But PAS has a much shorter track record, and is legal in only a handful of places.

I realized that I didn’t know much about the law, or how it had been administered next door in Oregon, so I decided to do some research.

The Seattle Times lays out some facts about I-1000, modeled on Oregon’s law: the patient must have less than 6 months to live, two doctors have to certify that diagnosis and refer the patient to counseling if they suspect depression. Also, this is not euthanasia (which is legal in The Netherlands): the doctor can’t kill you. S/he can only prescribe a lethal dose of barbituates, which you have to be well enough to take on your own.

The State of Oregon’s Dept. of Human Services provides annual reports on the law, going back to its inception 10 years ago (Oregonians pased it 60%-40% in 1997). A few dozen doctors statewide write an average of 54 prescriptions each year, and of those, an average of 34 patients actually use the drugs to end their lives (see the 10-year summary, .pdf). The overwhelming majority are terminal cancer patients.

Out of our conversation came several potential objections to the law:

1. Suicide should either be completely legal or illegal. It’s either right to kill yourself or it’s wrong, and this law is a half-baked compromise
2. the diagnosis could be wrong
3. It’s a “slippery slope”: Why not 7 months? Why not include non-terminal patients (as former Governer Booth Gardener wants to do)?
4. Patients may be depressed.
5. It elevates doctors to a new role in society, giving them the kind of authority that we usually limit to the legal system (this is why the Oregonian newspaper objects, though they admit that their concerns about safeguards were unfounded)
6. Relatedly, doctors are potentially persuadable (“come on doc, I got 7 months, but can you just say it’s 6?”)
7. It’s not a fundamental human right. “The right is life. Where does death fit in?” writes Joel Connelly.

I’m sure there are others. Something that the insurance industry is behind it, so they don’t have to pay for end-of-life care. But there’s no evidence of that, just insinuation, to my knowledge.

The first thing to note is that no law is perfect, and the perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of the good. I want universal health care, but I’ll settle for insuring every kid under 18. At least for now. Which gets us to the “slippery slope” argument. Could this law eventually lead to total legalization of sucide? I don’t know. But I do know that the great thing about democracy is that we’ll get to choose. Slippery slope arguments are used all the time, from gay marriage to gun laws. Liberalism itself is one, big slippery slope between the good of the many and the good of the individual.

Second, with respect to the doctors, I realized that what we’re talking about is not so different from “Do Not Resuscitate” or DNR laws, which I support. If you can tell a doctor that you don’t want to be hooked up to machines, why can’t you tell him/her you want a lethal dose of pills? And while I suppose the doctor is potentially corruptible (as in #5 and #6 above), we already assume the impartiality of doctors in so many other places in our society (say, with respect to diagnosing that a criminal is legally insane), is this really the one place to make an exception?

That gets to the fundamental challenge of this law, and how you view it. One way to view it is through the abortion lens, which is to say that it’s a personal choice, and the government shouldn’t get in the way. Dan Savage makes that argument in a very moving piece about the recent death of his mother. Another way to look at it, though, is as a natural societal adaptation in the face of advanced medical technology. We can prolong life artificially nowadays, sometimes nearly indefinitely. DNRs, which became popular in the 1960s with the first wave of defibrillators, were society’s way of adapting. Advanced cancer treatments can prolong life as well, sometimes equally painfully.

Finally, I can’t quite figure out how it hurts me if a terminally ill patient wants the option to end their life. I support public education and universal health care because it hurts me — economically, socially, etc. — when a poor kid can’t get a good education or health care. I support gay marriage, though, because it doesn’t hurt me at all if two people want to get married.

In general, suicide has negative externalities, negative costs to society: it hurts the ones you leave behind, it costs society money, public suicides (say over the Aurora Bridge) cause anguish to bystanders, etc. But I don’t think those negative costs really apply to the three dozen or so terminally cancer patients who want to go, in peace, at a time of their choosing.

I’m open to persuasion, but I think as of now I’m voting yes on I-1000.

What’s that about?

Now, I may be an unfrozen caveman lawyer, but what I do know is that the Guv stopped governing a couple of years ago, afraid that if she actually did anything, Rossi might use it to run against her this fall. I elaborated on this back in January:

The deluded thinking seems to be that Rossi and the state GOP will look at one another and say, “well boys, there’s nothing to run on this year, so we might as well pack up our bags and hand this one to the Democrats.”

But of course, in reality, the GOP will do no such thing. The more ground that Gregoire/Chopp concede, the more Rossi will advance, pushing the whole state agenda farther to the right, despite the fact that Democrats control both houses AND the governorship! To call this infuriating would be an understatment.

It didn’t have to be this way. When she was first elected, Gregoire took her puny 127-vote victory and, Bush-style, turned it into a mandate. Even David Broder was impressed. But then she got quiet, running to the center and otherwise abdicating leadership on a whole host of issues (Viaduct, anyone? Sin taxes? Kowtowing to Eyman??). Now all she can do is hang on to Obama’s coattails for dear life and pray for another squeaker. It’s tragic, really.

This puts someone like me in a dilemma. I don’t want to reward this behavior. But if I don’t vote for the Governor, and she loses, then the message that our spineless Democratic caucus will take away is that they need to run further to the right to try and win independents and retake the state. But that’s absurd, as Al Gore, John Kerry, Maria Cantwell, and Patty Murray have shown (and as Barack Obama will show next month). Real Democrats win in Washington every time if they just act like real Democrats.

The Governor’s very smart. Why this is lost on her is… well, it’s lost on me.

(via)

For years, I’d heard the rumors that the Seattle police actually write tickets for jaywalking. Well, turns out the rumors are true.

Just when I was starting to think of Seattle as home …

P.S. I want to say a special thanks to Officer Cook (badge #4675). With crime, public drunkeness, the terror threat, and everything else in Seattle perfectly fine on this day, he certainly had his priorities straight this morning.

Many people who live and work in the neighborhood around there get traumatized by all the dropping bodies. The P-I had a story recently about a kayaker who tried to help someone who went in the water and the jumper was so scared he grabbed onto the kayak and nearly drowned them both. It’s a real public health problem, and not just for those who choose to jump.

Indeed, as a liberal, my biggest beef with Gregoire is that she hasn’t invested enough in the state. If she was actually the tax-and-spend socialist that the Times portrays her as, I’d be a lot happer with her performance right now!

(assuming, of course, that the money was spent wisely, and not on the gubernatorial equivalent of blow and hookers)

I think a large part of the answer is simply the fact that Democrats control both houses of the legislature and the Governorship. Initiatives referenda are better suited to the party out-of-power.

But Feit also makes a larger point here that goes way beyond initiatives:

Why do conservatives attack on all fronts, pushing legislation and running ballot measures … while liberals twiddle their thumbs?

Conservatives are simply much better at playing permanent offense (it’s not coincidental that Permanent Offense is also the name of Tim Eyman’s organization). This goes way beyond just Washington state initiatives; it’s true of electoral politics at every level, as Karl Rove showed. Got a Senator who lost three limbs in Vietnam? Question his patriotism! No-holds barred.

I go back and forth on this. On one hand I want Dems to come out guns blazing on this stuff, but on the other hand, I believe pretty strongly that the Democrats are a natural majority party, and they don’t need to be quite as divisive to win.

As the various parties try to sort out a new solution for the Seattle waterfront (divert some traffic through downtown, add some bus rapid transit, and build a four-lane surface boulevard along Elliott Bay), they are trying to find some ways through the Chopp roadblock. Some opportunities for getting into what’s known as “Frank’s values field”: viewing platforms and low-income housing on some blocks.

In other words, if the Sonics would just agree to convert some of those luxury boxes in Key Arena to homelss shelters, we’d have had a new arena yesterday.

Oh and (4) we need the damn revenue.

Nick Beaudrot (of Drinking Liberally fame) has put together a map showing the county-by-county breakdown of Obama’s victory in Washington State.

You can see that Clinton did better (but still lost) out on the coasts in the working-class towns around Aberdeen, and in the Latino-heavy areas around Yakima and the Tri-Cities.

Yesterday, the bill got the yay vote out of committee and the green light from leadership to get it into Rules (the last stop before it goes to the floor.) That sounds like good news, but I say keep your eye on this one. There is heavy opposition from business.

I think part of the reason it was nudged out of committee (some sly Dem opponents on the committee reportedly gave it the thumbs up) is because it’s easier to mug things in the crowded Rules Committee where bills die all the time without the spotlight of contentious policy committee votes.