The Idiocy of The Columbian never ceases to amaze: In our view April 16: Progress for Felons

As stated here, here, here and here, the sheer unadulterated idiocy of restoring voting privileges before the completion of a sentence, is the decreased likelihood of the payment of restitution to a criminal's victims or government is obvious.

The leftist moron who wrote this editorial supporting this bizarre nonsense fails to address in his haste to restore the felon's "rights" that the felon violated the victim's rights without a second thought.

We're lied to:

First, regaining the right to vote could encourage many felons to obey laws and avoid recidivism. They were accustomed to rewards for good behavior in prison, and this would be one more reward for them to earn.

Utter nonsense. They provide not one shred of proof that recidivism is influenced in any way by voting rights. Not one. It sounds good, so they print it.

But I just can't feature any of these clowns going, "Gee, if I rob this 7-11, I won't be able to vote in the upcoming school bond levy."

Second, it would encourage participation in the democratic process. After being under government's thumb (deservedly, for they broke the law), felons could reclaim in the right to vote a way to help elect those who serve in that same government.

This non sequitur is a right they voluntarily gave up by violating the rights of their victim. And who would they vote for? A candidate more likely to get tough on crime? Or a candidate more likely to be lenient while the public gets caught in the middle and screwed?

Third, this change would signal to felons that society is more interested in compliance with the law than in exacting revenge. Our state's current prohibition of voting by felons after incarceration is not only malicious, it's essentially a poll tax, denying to poor felons the right to vote that affluent felons are able to reclaim. Currently, felons cannot vote until completion of parole or probation and payment of all restitution and other court fees. The new law would allow them to vote as long as they stay current on payments.

I'm touched by the concern expressed here for the criminal. But when it comes to the victim?

Not so much. What this law "signals" to a criminal is that when you shoot someone, either killing them or crippling them, this newspaper is going to be far more concerned about your right to vote then it is your requirement to pay your restitution.

They falsely equate restitution, which is, after all, an effort to at least partially make your victim whole, with a bogus poll tax. That is a crock of pure, grade A BS.

When the "new law" fails because felons WILL NOT "stay current" on their restitution payments, how long will it be before this newspaper leads the charge to remove even THAT requirement?

And what mechanism has that waste of skin Sam Reed implemented to enforce any of these requirements?

Reed will make sure that all felons are registered as a part of their release program, and then do absolutely nothing to make sure that they ARE current. If he couldn't set up a program that would keep track of convicted felons that haven't had their rights restored, how can anyone expect this incompetent boob to set up a program to keep track of these felon's payments?

This bill is sheer idiocy. I wonder when we're going to see this rag write an editorial demanding that convicted felon's gun rights be restored?

After all, the Second Amendment isn't the second suggestion, and all these arguments for restoring felon voting rights can certainly be applied to restoring felon gun rights.

In fact, substitute the word "gun," for the word "vote," and you come up with a pretty persuasive argument... right?

First, regaining the right to possess guns could encourage many felons to obey laws and avoid recidivism. They were accustomed to rewards for good behavior in prison, and this would be one more reward for them to earn.

Second, it would encourage participation in firearms training. After being under government's thumb unarmed for so many years (deservedly, for they broke the law), felons could reclaim in the right to own firearms to help protect others from criminals.

Third, this change would signal to felons that society is more interested in compliance with the law than in exacting revenge. Our state's current prohibition of denying felons the right to possess or own firearms after incarceration is not only malicious, it's essentially a requirement for felons to remain helpless and unarmed, denying to poor felons the right to self defense that affluent felons are able to reclaim. Currently, felons cannot own or possess firearms until completion of parole or probation and payment of all restitution and other court fees. The new law would allow them to own or possess firearms as long as they stay current on payments.

That, of course, is "different" somehow. Right?

But is it?

A "right" is a "right." Voting is a "right," and so is owning or possessing a firearm. How can anyone supporting this bill oppose the restriction of ANY "right" by these people?

The fact is that the primary driver for this bill, our utterly worthless leftist-masquerading as a Republican Secretary of State, Sam Reed, has shown a monumental level of incompetence when it comes to administering the issue of keeping felon voters of the rolls.

Of course, that incompetence is, in part, driven by his agenda which has included the elimination of the felon voter rules for years now. To that end, Reed has done absolutely nothing to set up a system to identify felon voters to keep them from voting.

Well, he HAS whined, repeatedly, about how HARD it is to do that particular task, but besides that, he's done absolutely nothing to implement that requirement, and in the last election, he was directly responsible for sending out 10's of thousands of ballots to felon voters disqualified from voting by their felony conviction.

And now, we expect this clown to implement a far more exacting, far more complicated and cumbersome system than a blanket prohibition?

Ohhh. I'm really confident. Aren't you?

The leftist rag sickeningly claims racism as the basis for the opposition to this issue, contending that because of the "disproportionately" high percentage (I guess the idea that a "disproportionately" high percentage of people committing crimes just happen to be "of color" doesn't enter in to their world) of criminals are "of color," that could "conceivably" ("Conceivably?" Is this guy smoking crack? What was the minority vote in the last election?) favor Democrats.

I oppose this bill ONLY because those who will benefit from it are those who cheerfully and willingly violated the rights of their victims without concern to voting rights.

The ONLY question to consider is this: Will this bill make it MORE likely... or LESS likely that restitution will be paid.

The restoration of rights should ONLY be granted after the COMPLETION of ALL of a sentence. To complete incarceration... mandatory... required incarceration because YOU have VOLUNTARILY committed a crime or crimes, EARNS you nothing.

Again, I seriously doubt that any of the morons supporting this travesty face the possibility of restitution from a convicted felon. I seriously doubt that any of the women who had voted for this had been rape victims. I seriously doubt that any man who voted for this had a murdered wife or child. I seriously doubt that any of these people have had a knife held to their throat, had their house burned down or have been robbed at gun point.

Ladies and gentlemen, this isn't about race. This is about holding those who would victimize us fully accountable for their actions... not scamming the system with $5 per month payments so we can get more criminals voting.

And this newspaper presents NOTHING... and those supporting this garbage present NOTHING that eliminates the need for accountability... and to make the victims whole.

You want to crank this up?

Then put these people on a repayment schedule and LOCK THEM BACK UP WHEN THEY FAIL TO STICK TO IT.

But don't even think they'll give a damn enough about this precious right to avoid recidivism just because a bunch of liberals got together and decided to remove yet another layer of accountability.

In our view April 16: Progress for Felons
Those who have completed incarceration are one step closer to regaining right to vote

Thursday, April 16 | 1:00 a.m.

State senators correctly voted on Wednesday to restore voting rights to tens of thousands of felons once they complete their incarceration. The decision was as decisive as it was logical. The vote was 29-19, basically along party lines, with Vancouver Democrat Craig Pridemore wisely voting for the measure and local Republican senators Joe Zarelli and Don Benton opposing it.

The bill returns to the House, where it passed last month, for a vote on an amended version. Senators on Wednesday approved an amendment that would allow voting rights to be revoked again if a felon intentionally fails to comply with legal financial obligations. We're not sure that amendment contributes much to the bill. It would seem to place on felons who no longer are incarcerated an additional financial requirement to vote that nonfelons do not face. Even so, the imperfect bill would be an improvement over the status quo. We hope it is approved by the House, where its sponsors include Rep. Jim Moeller, D-Vancouver.

Arguments both for and against felons regaining voting rights (after incarceration) are rational and reasonable. Two opposing views are presented in capsulized forms accompanying this editorial.

If this change occurs, Washington will become the 14th state (joining Oregon) to restore voting rights to felons who complete their incarceration. Two states — Vermont and Maine — allow even incarcerated felons to vote. That's too lenient, in our view, but once a felon comes out from behind bars, regaining the right to vote could accomplish three things.

More:

The cowardice, censorship and lack of integrity of the Columbian is noticed:

When you have any organization that's run by a complete lack of integrity, that cancer spreads throughout.

If the editor is going to be a complete liar on the handling of his own column... then how is it that we can believe ANYTHING he OR HIS NEWSPAPER says? (The article and his lies are in this link.)

by R Frog : 4/6/09 8:08pm - Report Abuse

Yep, censorship is here. Trying to figure out what they removed...

by R Frog : 4/6/09 8:24pm - Report Abuse

So, I'm wondering why Lou, et al, decided to get rid of a perfectly acceptable criticism in these comments. For Van Cougar, and all those who dish out that many of us are conspiracy theorists, where's You Kiddenme's post? Comment #1? The same comment that the next comment references? Oh, that must be because if a comment is critical of this column, it deserves deletion. Thanks, Lou. Now we know even better where you stand.

by dee little : 4/6/09 9:11pm - Report Abuse

RF:

..hey...you're right.

HEY, LOU: remember this? "Dee, please get back to me why you see the YKM post remain. Thanks much.""

i'm getting back to you.

Bill Virgin, Seattle PI columnist nails it: Class final: How to kill an American newspaper

I have nothing to add to this except thanks to Bill for his efforts... and the sincere hope that those running the Columbian both read... and heed, the sentiments within:

Last updated March 16, 2009 5:57 p.m. PT

Class final: How to kill an American newspaper

By BILL VIRGIN
P-I COLUMNIST

Here in our twice-weekly seminars, you the readers have helped analyze and dissect the leading business and economic issues, trends and controversies of the day -- global competition and outsourcing, Boeing and Airbus, Microsoft and the rest of the software/online world, Starbucks and McDonald's, government taxation and spending, good ads and bad ads, paper or plastic.

For our final session together, and our final case study, it is time to turn our attention inward, to consider the forces, external and internal, that have made this the last day of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Our topic for today: How to kill an American newspaper.

One crucial point to remember right at the start is that what is happening now is hardly new or unique to this industry. Papers have been dying for decades. Gone from the ranks are such names as the New York World Journal Tribune (itself a last-gasp attempt to rescue multiple papers including the venerable Herald Tribune), the Dallas Times Herald, the Washington Star, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, the Pittsburgh Press, the Chicago Daily News ...

They, and dozens more lesser-known names, were done in by inexorable trends such as the move of families to the suburbs, the rise of television news as a competitor to the evening paper and labor strife, all of which contributed to the winnowing of many cities from three dailies to two, and from two to one. Seattle is comparatively late to the game as a big city dropping to a single general-interest daily newspaper.

Now, the prevailing worry has it, many big cities (Seattle included) are about to take the next step, from one daily newspaper to none at all.

It has become fashionable to attribute this industry's woes entirely to external forces including: the Internet and its components draining away advertisers and readers; those darn kids who won't pay for information and won't sit still for information that takes longer than five seconds to consume; and most recently a recession that has clobbered what few advertisers the industry still has.

To put all the blame, or even the bulk of it, on those factors is not only too convenient, but also downright deceptive. It obscures a long-standing truth about this business: American newspapers have been and continue to be, as a sector, the worst-run of any industry in this country.

The Internet may have helped weaken the precipice upon which the newspaper industry was standing, and the recession may have given it a helpful stomp to send us into the chasm. But it was the industry itself that walked out onto a ledge of crumbling shale and stood waiting for it to collapse.

If American newspapers want to look for the underlying source of their troubles, a mirror would be a good place to start -- and finish -- the search.

What sorts of mistakes did the industry make? Its reaction to the Internet is a mother lode. Instead of using the Internet as a complement to its print product, the industry went chasing after the Web and offering its most valuable property -- the news it so carefully and expensively gathered -- for free, while chasing the chimera that online advertising would support the whole thing.

The trend was no service to either readers or advertisers -- people read far more in print, and see more ads, than in an online version. The bandwidth for delivering material may be nearly infinite online, but readers' ability to absorb it isn't, and it gets even narrower online.

In the process, what newspapers did was devalue their brands and the heritage and legacies built into them, their core products and the value proposition that brought them readers and advertisers in the first place.

The genius of the American newspaper was never that it was the only place you could get information. Given enough time, money and energy, even in the age of the telegraph you could assemble the same information

But the essential point was that you didn't have to. The newspaper went to that trouble for you and delivered what it collected in a portable, affordable, easily digested form. That readers didn't consume it all didn't matter; by providing enough elements of interest to enough people (sports scores, local news, the crossword and Sudoku, the weather map and TV listings, letters to the editor, the comics, maybe even a business column or two), the daily newspaper aggregated enough readers to be attractive to advertisers seeking a mass audience.

Or at least newspapers did until they began lopping away content and features readers had come to expect. The rationale the industry used was that readers could and would get that information elsewhere, especially online, so why waste valuable print real estate on them? But the message readers got from the newspapers was they ought to go elsewhere for TV listings, stock quotes and the like. Surprisingly enough, readers took the advice and did.

Those were hardly the only blunders made by the industry. The strategy of going after younger readers with pandering and condescending content managed to both drive away older, loyal readers, while also alienating younger demographics who understandably weren't buying what papers were selling. Newspapers treated conservatives with a mixture of revulsion, contempt, indifference and puzzlement, and there went another potentially loyal segment of the reading audience.

Those mistakes were compounded at the local level by missteps made by this newspaper. The emphasis on a Seattlecentric view of the world accomplished the task of bifurcating the market into two and then focusing on the smaller, slower-growing portion. The strategy also rendered the paper irrelevant to those who lived on

this side of the lake but worked on the other, and vice versa.

The P-I also found itself bound in a business relationship with a partner that clearly did not want it around and whose management of the arrangement was, to be charitable, desultory.

Squandered opportunities and botched advantages are not a new phenomenon for American newspapers. Over the years they have created openings for alternative and local-music weeklies, independent business weeklies and city lifestyle magazines. Would those have emerged had newspapers been more diligent about spotting potentially lucrative markets and getting to them before new entrants did? Probably. Did daily newspapers make it far more likely that those startups would thrive? Absolutely.

Despite that bungling, daily newspapers managed to survive for decades, with a few papers lost along the way, on the strength of a franchise so valued by the public that even the industry couldn't screw it up.

Until now. In business there is a phenomenon known as the death spiral, in which the measures intended to rescue a company or industry not only fail to stem the losses, they actually accelerate the decline. In the case of newspapers, the loss of readers and advertisers led to cuts in content and features and greater irrelevancy, which led to more lost readers and advertisers, which led to still more cuts, which led to ...

Which leads to the present, potentially fatal predicament for newspapers, or at least the one you're reading now.

What is the lesson for the rest of the business world?

No business or industry is exempt from challenges and competitive threats (what business hasn't been upended by the Internet, or the economy, or both?). None is promised, much less guaranteed, perpetual survival. What matters is not the nature or severity of those challenges, but how well prepared the company or industry is to evade, counter or adapt to those threats. Newspapers weren't; now they're facing the consequences.

It's a lesson too late learned to help us, but just maybe, dear readers, it might help you.

Class dismissed.

Occasionally, the post of a commenter on a Columbian story rises to this level.

The only thing I'm going to add is paragraph breaks.

Well Lou, I do buy both the Columbian and Oregonian every day. My problem with subscribing is that sometimes I am out of town and do not like newspapers piled up signalling my place is available for a burglary.

Now first of all, I am not here to join the chorus of bashing. Did you see how far and wide your story on the case of Christina Kopinski went and how fast? (Google it). And I would like to think that you all did that story not because she was a journalism teacher, but would have done it had she been an Art teacher.

That story was a step forward followed by the gutsty[sic] editorial. Why do I say "gutsy" editorial? Because in my 16 years in this community, and I am a native Washingtonian (in two ways) more often than not, The Columbian was an integral part of [and cheerleader for] this subterranean, non-transparent and non-accountable network of power that includes boards, trustees and regents of the local educational institutions, certain charities and community service organizations, business media, chambers of commerce, Mayor Pollard's office and some of his friends and minions, certain politicians in both parties, some clergy and churches, some local historical trusts, some of the old "pioneer" families and old money, port of vancouver members, etc.

They run this place like a cross between a feudal fiefdom, a country club, a Rotarian meeting, a Southern planatation and parts of eastern Kentucky and Appalachia where family trees do not branch. The bottom line is there is no need to keep anything, whether an act or a whole power structure, covered-up if it is clean--only if it is dirty, smug, entitled and unaccountable. There is no need to pile-on and frame the likes of Christina Kopinski and so many other innocents at Clark College, if they were guilty (their guilt would expose, indict and convict them) only because they were/are innocent. And there is no need to run from and arrogantly refusing to answer, non-problematic and non-incriminating questions (as the Clark trustees and administration have done repeatedly) only problematic and incriminating ones.

The point Lou, is not so much what The Columbian routinely covers as much as it is what The Columbian does not cover and why. Take a page from the playbook of a master triangulator like Brian Baird. He knows how to feed the left, right and middle what issue-postures matter most to them in ways that will cause them to hold their noses and still vote for him despite his positions on other issues with which they are in total opposition to him: a trip to Gaza for the left, the continuation of the illegal Iraq War for the right, and a little granola and faux environmentalism for the centrist greenies but not enough to tick-off the loggers in Longview-Kelso.

For if the Colmbian[sic] starts doing what real journalists like IF Stone, George Seldes, Edward R. Murrow and Seymour Hersh did do and do, real journalism without fear or favor, and reporting with no fear of loss of possible "preferred access" to the local movers and shakers who do not do much newsworthy anyway, then you will get your readers and subscribers because people are sick and tired of the incumbent, smug and entitled politicians and community powerbrokers, their lies, manipulations, along those who institutions that so uncritcally[sic] and sycophantically spread their lies even outside of editorial pieces where story choice, placement and who is or is not quoted can work at the subliminal levels just like an open editorial.

If you do that, those on the left will not mind your occasional favorable coverage of the right and vice versa because you will be viewed as writing from conviction and not from opportunism. Courage, integrity, honesty and fair dealing sell because there is so little of it and people are so desperate for it.

"Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable"; that is the job of journalism and the reason why journalism is the only profession explicitly mentioned and protected in the U.S. Constitution. That is also why the likes of Christina Kopinski at Clark College, and the courage and integrity she demonostrated, must be protected and those who took their covert machinations against her must be outed, relentlessly questioned and exposed.

Lou Brancaccio and editors around the country need to re-orient their filters.

They need to ask, of every article and newspaper editorial:

1. Is this factually correct?

2. Is this article fact, or opinion?

3. When we attack someone, have we talked directly to them to get their position? Or do we just crucify them without being fair, like Mielke in today's idiotic cheers and jeers?

3. Are ALL sides covered, even sides we don't "like?"

4. Are ALL relevant issues covered?

5. Are OUR biases getting in the way of our duty to be fair, just and honorable?

6. If we disagree with community opinion, have we at least honored that opinion by exploring it so that maybe we can be persuaded that WE are wrong... and the community is right?

7. Have we remembered to admit when we're wrong; to right past transgressions and to be careful of the application of our power?

There may be many other standards to consider when a newspaper prints an article. But what's clear here is that it's the rare occasion when this newspaper bothers with these criteria. And if this newspaper or editor actually believes that they ARE following these minimal rules... well, that just tends to show how out of touch they actually are.

Thanks so much to Omahkohkiaayo I'poyi for his comment... a much more civilized way, in many respects, of saying that which I was trying to say. in every post taking the Columbian to task.