Archives for February 2009

A couple weeks ago I made fun of a Seattle Times editorial for suggesting that public agencies actually profit off of public records requests, for which some folks attacked me as some sort of anti-sunshine government stooge.  Well, in a guest column this week, attorney Ramsey Ramerman also took issue with Times, reiterating that open government is worth it, but it doesn’t come cheap:

Open government is not easy. Trust is hard to mint. It also isn’t free. Unlike in most states that allow agencies to charge for search time, agencies in Washington charge only for copy costs. Taxpayers foot the bill for the rest. Fairley’s bills try to look out for taxpayer dollars by making sure requesters are paying for the actual cost of copies they request. Why should taxpayers have to pay for copies when a requester asks for copies and then chooses not to pick them up?

Our public servants work hard to keep government open and to serve as prudent stewards of taxpayer dollars. It is too bad The Times insists on attacking them simply because they are trying to do both in hard economic times.

Something for nothing is always a popular position, but it isn’t very realistic or responsible.  The Times wants government agencies to be more responsive to public records requests, but doesn’t want to invest the money that would make this possible.  Pretty typical.

Sorry for the family’s pain, actually. Too many media flashbacks involving sharks. Anyhow.

An arrest may be near in the nearly decade-old slaying of federal intern Chandra Levy, whose disappearance in 2001 ended Gary Condit’s congressional career, several television stations reported.

The California Democrat was romantically linked to Levy, but was not considered a suspect in her death or disappearance. Television stations, KFSN and KCRA in California and WRC in Washington, D.C., reported that police were seeking an arrest warrant.

Speaking of the media, that second graph is kind of confusing. If you google around it appears authorities are looking at some guy, not Condit, who is in prison already.

If one were to point to an exact moment when people started passionately hating the legacy media, the Chandra Levy-summer of sharks frenzy would merit serious consideration. Again, sad for the Levy family, having your loved one’s death compounded by an absurd media circus. I’m sure all the right wing radio blowhards are very very sorry now.

Silver Falls Bank, Silverton, OR.

For those keeping score at home, that’s a total of three Pacific NW banks so far this year. The previous two were Pinnacle Bank of Beaverton, OR., and Bank of Clark County of Vancouver, WA.

Of course, the number of banks is not so important as the size. If you go back to last September, there was some big NW banky thing that had to be dealt with, even if they were technically listed as Nevada and Utah institutions.

I have to say, cat blogging is way cuter. I can haz natunilization pweeze? :-)

The Stranger’s Dominic Holden catches the Seattle Times rewriting a federal prosecutor’s press release on a marijuana conviction.  Oops.

Reporters rewrite press releases all the time—usually about restaurant openings or events without much widespread impact. But the war on drugs costs billions a year, kills innocent people in raids, and has resulted in increased drug use. News coverage of any other miserable war would get a some scrutiny after 30 years of empty-handed results. In the service of objectivity, reporters for daily newspapers make a moral virtue of getting “both sides of the story.” The war on pot deserves more than regurgitating government press releases and some scrutiny—at least a fraction the scrutiny our reporters give plastic bags.

And for this they want a tax break?

Inside is an excerpt from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1936 speech at the Democratic National Convention.

[Read more…]

I don’t get this whole “Griffeymania” thing, especially considering his obvious lack of dedication to the game.

I mean, if Griffey really cared about the fans, he would have always done his utmost to excel by, you know… pumping himself full of dangerous, muscle-building steroids, like his ex-teammate A-Rod.  But no, Griffey just allowed himself to get old.

How selfish.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGAgu6zI9v0[/youtube]

Props to Ryan Chittum at Columbia Journalism Review for quoting from History of the World, Part I in a column about Count de Monet’s Rick Santelli’s “revolutionary” outburst today.

Count de Monet: “The People Are Revolting!”
Louis XVI: “You said it—they stink on ice!”

The first poll in Washington’s 2010 US Senate race has been released, and it looks good for incumbent Democrat Patty Murray.

The Daily Kos/Research 2000 survey polled head-to-head matchups between Sen. Murray and both Dave Reichert and Rob McKenna, both of whom Murray led by double-digit margins.  Sen. Murray scored a respectable 55% favorable rating, whereas Reichert and McKenna registered 38% and 34% favorable respectively.

Not surprising really, though apart from Murray’s strength I think the survey also reveals the inherent weakness of the Republican bench here in Washington state. Indeed, that DKos/R2K would even bother to poll head-to-head with Reichert and McKenna is telling, considering that neither is likely to challenge Murray in 2010.

Reichert is a political lightweight with demonstrated shallow support even within his own district.  There is absolutely nothing to suggest that a Reichert Senate run would end up any differently than 2004, when an equally politically diminutive George Nethercutt got his ass whipped by the physically diminutive Murray.  Reichert might be stupid enough to give it go, but I doubt his handlers are.

Meanwhile, only 63% of respondents even had an opinion of McKenna, despite him being the highest ranking Republican official statewide, and arguably the most talented politician in the WSRP.  McKenna is widely considered to be biding his time in preparation for a 2012 gubernatorial run, a race for which, four years out, many political insiders rank him the frontrunner, despite his obvious handicap (ie, his Republicanism).  McKenna would have to be absolutely crazy to risk his gubernatorial bid on a quixotic challenge of Murray.  And McKenna is not crazy.

Of course, if DKos/R2K was going to run a poll, they had to do a head to head with somebody, and for the life of me I don’t have any better suggestions.  Dino Rossi?  Cathy McMorris-Rodgers? Mike!™ McGavick?  I don’t expect any of them to run, and I wouldn’t expect them to win if they did.  But who else does the WSRP have?

Just goes to show you how weak the Republican bench is in Washington state these days.

dec⋅i⋅mate [des–uh-meyt]
-verb (used with object), -mat⋅ed, -mat⋅ing.
1. to destroy a great number or proportion of: The population was decimated by a plague.
2. to select by lot and kill every tenth person of.
3. Obsolete. to take a tenth of or from.

I’ve heard a lot of talk around Olympia and throughout the rest of the state about how proposed budget cuts are going to “decimate” crucial state services.

Huh.  On the one hand, that’s an incorrect use of the word.

“Decimate,” in the modern sense of the word—referring to destroying a nonspecific but great proportion of—really only applies to the killing of people.  Of course, one could apply it to any object in the more technical and archaic form of the word, but in that sense, “decimation” only means to reduce by 10-percent, whereas in reality many state services will be cut by much more than that.

But on the other hand, “decimation” is perhaps the perfect word to describe our impending budget cuts, at least in terms of its Latin origin:

Decimation (Latin: decimatio; decem = “ten”) was a form of military discipline used by officers in the Roman Army to punish mutinous or cowardly soldiers. The word decimation is derived from Latin meaning “removal of a tenth.”

A cohort selected for punishment by decimation was divided into groups of ten; each group drew lots (Sortition), and the soldier on whom the lot fell was executed by his nine comrades, often by stoning or clubbing. The remaining soldiers were given rations of barley instead of wheat and forced to sleep outside of the Roman encampment.

Later today the new revenue forecast will be released, and the budget gap is only expected to widen.  Unless they also consider the revenue side of the equation, legislators will soon embark in earnest on the process of decimation:  determining who gets stoned to death and who merely loses their food and their tent.

Rep. Brian Baird (D-Vancouver) is one of two congressmen currently taking a trip to the Gaza Strip. TPM has the story.

Joining Baird on the visit is Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), America’s first Muslim congressman. They will, according to a joint press release, meet with key officials from the Palestinian Authority and “view first-hand the destruction from recent Israeli air and ground attacks, and to meet with international and local relief agencies.”

It sounds bad, too.

“The amount of physical destruction and the depth of human suffering here is staggering,” Baird says in the release. “Entire neighborhoods have been destroyed, schools completely leveled, fundamental needs such as water, sewer, and electricity facilities have been hit and immobilized.”

The trip was not sanctioned by the Obama administration.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEZB4taSEoA[/youtube]

Because the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is exactly like the rest of America.

Cute to throw in the concept of a Chicago Tea Party, when what’s actually happening is more like the attempted escape from Versailles.

I say take Santelli back to Paris, and keep an eye on him. Revolutionary analogies are fun, though! I’ll take the Winter Palace for $800, Alex.

As Jon already reported, Seattle Times publisher Frank Blethen was down in Olympia yesterday asking legislators for a 40-percent cut in the newspaper industry’s B&O tax to help them through these tough economic times.  (You know, on top of the sales tax exemption the industry already enjoys.)  Still…

“Some of us, like The Seattle Times, are literally holding on by our fingertips today,” Blethen said.

No doubt.  And as a former small business owner myself preparing to dive headlong into a new and even riskier venture in the flailing news industry, I know first hand that paying a B&O tax while losing money makes survival all the more difficult for any struggling business.

But rather than handing out business tax breaks based on one’s ability to exert political pressure, wouldn’t the more rational solution to Frank’s very real problem be to move from our antiquated B&O tax on gross receipts to a fairer and simpler corporate income tax on net profits?  You know… like nearly every other state in the union?

For those of you who’ve never paid the B&O tax it is bizarrely byzantine with 17 tax classifications and 25 different credits that has some industries paying more than ten times the effective rate of others, and which, despite DOR’s best efforts, can be an absolute bitch to figure out.  For example, as a small software developer and publisher, our income was taxed at three different rates under four different tax classifications:  retailing, wholesaling, royalties and services.  (Perhaps five different tax classifications… I could never quite figure out whether some of our “wholesaling” business was actually “manufacturing”, though it didn’t really matter as both activities are taxed at the same rate.)

Much simpler would have been a corporate income tax, as we were already figuring out our profit/loss for the IRS, and while the B&O tax was never onerous (we never grossed more than a few hundred thousand dollars in a year), paying a tax on our losses didn’t make it any easier to start up a new business.

So it is more than a little disappointing to see our newspaper publishers, struggling under the weight of heavy losses, selfishly lobbying for a narrow tax break for themselves rather than using their unique position as opinion leaders to advocate for a more rational and fairer tax system that would address the needs of other struggling businesses while promoting entrepreneurialism and new business creation.

But then, that’s the sort of knee-jerk opposition to even debating an income tax that we’ve come to expect from our state’s opinion leaders.

Sounds like there could be a campaign to keep Washington state alive!

With another dismal state revenue forecast expected today, House Democratic leaders now say they’ll likely propose sending voters a tax package this year to help deal with a staggering shortfall in the state budget.

“I’m assuming there will probably be something that goes on the ballot,” said House Ways and Means Committee Chairwoman Kelli Linville, D-Bellingham. House Majority Leader Lynn Kessler agreed.

And of course the gate-keepers would want to keep on gate-keeping, assuming they can stay in business:

Seattle Times publisher Frank Blethen and Scott Campbell, publisher of The Columbian in Vancouver, told the Senate Ways and Means Committee they need help during tumultuous times in the industry.

Under the proposed measure, the business and occupation tax on newspapers would be cut by 40 percent through 2015.

Yes, newspapers are important. But really? Someone is seriously considering yanking, in effect, money that could be used in my kids’ classroom to keep publishers like Blethen and Campbell in business?

So all that right-wing agit-prop about free markets and how terrible unions are was just a joke, or what? Why don’t they ask Don Brunell for the money, he’s been placing columns in The Columbian for years now. I’d say he owes them.

Odd duck Douglas Tooley isn’t at all happy with The Stranger’s Erica C. Barnett. You see, Erica is advocating for more transit-oriented development in SE Seattle:

Hey ECB there’s a word for how you environmental folks are treating the people in SE – it’s called H A R R A S S M E N T, or if you wish, environmental racism.

Why don’t you start with your own neighborhood and make that work, rather than taking over everbody elses?

Where does Erica C. Barnett live?

SE Seattle