Archives for February 2009

Nice catch by Niki Sullivan over at the TVW blog during testimony on SB 6035, which would reform the retrospective ratings plan system (the infamous “retro” money that BIAW uses as a slush fund to launch endless and usually untruthful attacks against Democrats.)

Rick D. (Didn’t catch his last name): “The Retro program is desperate for serious reform… this program is completely lacking in rigorous … accounting.” He said he participated in the BIAW Retro pool for some time. He would receive refunds, but never knew why or what it was based on. When he found out the BIAW was using some of the refund money to buy political ads, he protested. He says he was kicked out of the program for questioning it.

But it sounds like a couple of senators weren’t buying it so much:

Sen. Karen Keiser asked Rick if he ever received any safety information from his retro program. Yes, he said. He attended training that was “invaluable.”

Sen. Janea Holmquist said she was having a “hard time believing” that Rick didn’t know where the money was spent. She asked if he was on the board of the program. He said yes, for one meeting.

“I just want to highlight that this is a voluntary program,” Holmquist said. You belong to the Retro pool voluntarily and give them your money voluntarily.

Unless, of course, you say something the BIAW doesn’t like, then they kick you out.

It would be a shame if BIAW had to actually go out and solicit donations to fund its vicious campaigns. It’s pretty clear a lot of their own members don’t even like what they do.

Today Sullivan rounds up the proposed legislation here. Requiring an actuarial review and requiring refunds to members, less administrative costs, sounds pretty reasonable. But wait!

That’s the basic framework. But there’s more: During the 2008 campaign, the state Democratic party raised concerns about the Building Industry Association of Washington (BIAW, the largest retro program) using some of its retro refund for political activity — something that is not illegal. In the public hearing yesterday, some who testified in opposition to the bill said they thought it was an attempt to curb political speech. Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles, a sponsor, said the bill has nothing to do with that.

To back the train up to the starting point: most regular citizens would be beyond surprised to know that BIAW funds its political activities from rebates in a worker’s compensation fund. It’s downright sleazy and outrageous, and there’s no logical reason to allow the practice to continue, despite the whimpering from BIAW and others.

It’s a freaking insurance program administered by the state, for crying out loud, and protestations about free speech are more than a little ridiculous in that context. The state is under no obligation to enable BIAW or any other group to divert insurance funds towards politics.

Sure, BIAW will cry like stuck pigs about “retribution,” but who cares? Side with the little people for once, Democrats! All those small contractors deserve to get their money back, especially with the economy in the toilet, not pay for a bunch of horseshit right-wing television ads.

Via Slog…

The senate’s judiciary committee just voted seven to one for a bill that would provide legal immunity to those who call medics for someone overdosing on drugs. The bill is designed to encourage folks, who are afraid of getting busted, to call for help instead of abandoning an overdosing person to die. Drug overdoses killed 700 people in Washington in 2006. […] Only state senator Pam Roach (R-31) voted against the bill.

Which is ironic, considering that Roach is also the only state senator on the committee with a child who has been caught on videotape snorting oxycontin, and subsequently convicted on a felony drug offense.  Go figure.

In case you missed this:

Considering the reality of what we are facing in these economic times, why would we want to write a check to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct with the most expensive, most risky, least studied and slowest-to-construct option?

That’s from Rep. Geoff Simpson’s recent opinion piece in the Seattle Times. It’s about the tunnel. You know, the thing that’s got all that “critical mass“?

Here’s something I bet you didn’t know:

In other parts of Washington State, the highways are built and maintained using the state’s tax dollars. But the legislature and Governor Gregoire have proposed adding extra taxes, taxes that will be paid by the residents of varying taxing districts:

Residents of King County would pay the state gas tax each time they fill up their tank and about $200 or more for car tabs each year. Then, the taxpayers in the Port of Seattle’s district — which again is everyone in King County — will be on the hook for another $300 million from property taxes. Through the shell game of tax-increment financing and other city taxes, Seattle’s citizens alone will shoulder nearly a billion dollars. And finally, if the state Senate transportation chair has her way, we’d each have to pay a toll to drive in the new tunnel.

In other parts of the state, it doesn’t work this way:

in Eastern Washington and other parts of the state, the state actually pays for state highways. What confuses me is why local taxpayers should be taxed time after time to pay for infrastructure that is vital to the entire state’s economy. State highway projects anywhere else in the state would be paid for with state funds, not local taxes.

If the state doesn’t have the money for a tunnel, where does that leave us?

We don’t need a tunnel because there is another option that is faster, cheaper and less risky. Replacing the viaduct with the surface/transit proposal is the best available option because it is financially responsible, better for the environment and leaves our options open for the future. It removes the dangerous viaduct earlier and we could still build a tunnel or another elevated roadway. And it will carry enough traffic to get by for several years.

If it takes an op-ed from a Kent firefighter to shake up the stale conventional wisdom that surrounds the viaduct debate in Olympia, then that’s what it takes. What I want to know is, where are my Seattle legislators? I want to know why they’re ready to sign on to a project that’s 1% designed, a project that could cost as much as 12 billion dollars. Why are Seattle legislators so willing to lock us in to a terribly unfair scheme of local taxes for a state highway?

Here’s a great money-saving tip for travelers planning to fly on US Airways (you know, other than the obvious tip, which is don’t):  an easy way to get around the failing airline’s self-defeating checked baggage charge ($15 for the first bag, $25 for the second, and an insulting $100 for each bag thereafter).

Just bring your luggage to the gate and make them force you to check your bags there during boarding.  This works great with any item you can squeeze through the scanner at security, as US Airways is simply unequipped to charge you at the gate or on the plane for something you’ve managed to carry that far.

Screw you, US Airways!

Coming soon, a full review of my flight yesterday from Fort Lauderdale to Seattle, which was far from the worst flying experience I’ve ever endured, but certainly the most intentionally humiliating, and the final straw that has turned my former first choice in flying into my last.

It may be nothing, but worth noting in case it is something:

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has postponed a public meeting for Wednesday that was intended to answer questions about the recent closure of the Bank of Clark County.

The meeting was to have been held at Skyview High School, near Vancouver.

FDIC officials plan to hold the meeting at a later date, said Anne Butler, a former bank employee who is working for the FDIC since the bank closure.

Readers may recall that some depositors were tipped off about the impending problems at the bank, and well, others were not. Best anyone can tell that’s all legal, if not fair. Little old un-connected people didn’t seem to come out so well.

This town (Vancouver, WA) stinks to high heaven and I wouldn’t be surprised if we find out all sorts of interesting stuff someday. But that’s just a hunch. Most likely it will all go away in the end with a combination of fake “I’m sorries” and a bunch of mumbo-jumbo. The little old ladies who lost their uninsured deposits, you know, they’ll die sometime.

It is a special evening for the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally.

Tonight’s meeting will be held at Seattle’s Town Hall for a talk entitled “Barack Obama and the Challenge of the Bush Legacy” by Walter Williams (emeritus professor at the UW’s Center for American Politics and Public Policy) and Bryan D. Jones (professor at the University of Texas, Austin Department of Government). Start time is 7:30pm.

After the talk (around 9:00pm) the Drinking Liberally crowd will migrate to a (currently) undisclosed location for debriefing, drinks and discussion.

Not in Seattle? The Drinking Liberally web site has dates and times for some 320 chapters of Drinking Liberally spread across the earth. There’s bound to be one near you.

This time it’s a Texas banker (yeah, what are the odds?)

Hoping to halt what it called “a fraud of shocking magnitude that has spread its tentacles throughout the world,” the Securities and Exchange Commission charged billionaire R. Allen Stanford and other executives at his massive financial services company, Stanford Financial Group, with operating a multibillion-dollar fraudulent investment scheme.

In a complaint filed early Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Dallas, the SEC alleged Antigua-based Stanford International Bank (SIB) fabricated investment returns in order to market and sell high-yielding certificates of deposits.

The complaint charged SIB with selling approximately $8 billion of CDs to investors by promising improbable and unsubstantiated interest rates.

You kind of wonder what it’s going to take to get Republicans espousing “free-market” solutions to admit that the “market” has not functioned as such. It’s apparently been a non-stop, gigantic crime wave by people using offshore accounts and white collar trickery instead of guns and knives.

The moral decay in our society is widespread and palpable, and it’s not confined to one party. But there is one party that is more intensely and palpably rotten than the other, and most regular Americans know that.

I’m sitting in the Fort Lauderdale airport watching my flight for Seattle via Charlotte board without me.  It was scheduled to depart at 2:55PM ET, it is now 3:45, and there are still about 25 people waiting to board.  There’s no way this flight leaves the gate less than an hour late, which makes it highly unlikely we could catch our 6:10PM connection… the last flight from Charlotte to Seattle tonight.  So we’ve rebooked through Phoenix, scheduled to arrive in Seattle a couple hours late, after having spent an extra couple hours in the airport at FLL.

Flying sucks.  It totally sucks.

Last year it took us a whole extra day to make it home from our annual pilgrimage to visit grandma in Florida, while this October a nonstop flight to Philadelphia turned into an all day ordeal as our plane turned back to Seattle an hour into the flight due to leaky toilets, only to have us reboard the same plane with the same leaky toilets hours later.

And talking to my fellow travelers, my experiences are far from the worst, let alone unique.

Of course, mechanical failures and bad weather happen, but back when I was my daughter’s age—you know, back in the good old days of regulation—the airlines would respond by booking you on the next available flight out, regardless of carrier.

It’s time for a passenger bill of rights that guarantees the same.

Here’s an interesting article from Financial Week that suggests existing law would allow for a faster fix of the insolvent banking system:

The law, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act, was signed into law in 1991. In an interview with Financial Week, Bob Eisenbeis, a former research director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, said the FDICIA contains more than enough tools for regulators to help stem the current financial crisis.

If regulators had applied FDICIA’s provisions once the solvency of major banks was first called into question, Mr. Eisenbeis said, many would already have been taken over by Uncle Sam.

That would mean that their good assets would have been separated from their bad and sold off to healthy institutions or other investors.

This, he claims, would have gone a long way toward solving the credit crisis.

The article quotes a blog post made by at The Big Picture by a financial consultant named Christopher Whalen:

“When the Q1 numbers for the financials come out, the children’s hour in DC will end,” Mr. Whalen wrote in a note posted on the blog, The Big Picture. “The markets will react and Washington will finally be forced to have an adult conversation with the global community as to how much we haircut the bondholders.”

Yes, reading and discussing economic and financial stuff gets old, but to regular citizens it sure appears we are still headed off a cliff in many ways. The stimulus plan is a start, of course, but fixing the financial system is now paramount.

If I understand all this, the argument is that the Paulson-Geithner approach has us in a holding pattern. If existing law can be applied as Eisenbeis claims, it would seem to warrant consideration so that we can get on with things. Whatever name people wish to use can be affixed to the action–temporary nationalization, receivership, or my personal suggestion of “restructuring awards,” we need to just do it. The longer uncertainty prevails, the worse things will get.

Props to The Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter

The Seattle Times wants to change the deadline for mail-in ballots:

WASHINGTON voters are no strangers to suspenseful elections — but our state has a habit of dragging the suspense out for way too long.

Secretary of State Sam Reed wants to bring elections to more decisive ends sooner. His proposal would require ballots be received in election offices by Election Day. Now, the ballots need only be postmarked by Election Day. That means ballots straggle in throughout election week, often putting off the decisive conclusion for days — given Washington’s propensity for razor-thin margins.

This, of course, is a huge problem for newspaper headline writers who require definitive results by midnight, but for the rest of us… eh, not so much.  In fact, you’d think especially with our state’s “propensity for razor-thin margins” the emphasis should be on counting the ballot of every single registered voter, rather than finishing the counting on election night.

On Election Night in November, Democratic challenger Darcy Burner was leading in her bid to unseat incumbent Republican Dave Reichert for the 8th Congressional District seat. But Reichert pulled comfortably ahead over several King County and Pierce County ballot counts by Friday to win re-election.

Again, apart from the anxiety it caused the candidates and their most fervent supporters, I don’t really see what the problem is.  Speedy results would be nice, but voter participation and tabulation accuracy are what we really should be shooting for when it comes to running an election.  So I just don’t see why we have to make voting more difficult, and inevitably disenfranchise pathological procrastinators like me, just to get things over and done with by Tuesday night.

Think about it.  Right now the deadline is clear, precise and uniform:  postmarked by election day.  That means in the recent special election I dropped my ballot off at the Columbia City post office by about 4PM, a good hour or so under the wire.  But under the new, stricter law Sam Reed and the Times are proposing, the deadline would have been Saturday, or if you’re  lucky, Monday, or maybe Friday or Thursday or even earlier, depending on where you live.  Different voters would effectively have different deadlines, and they would change for every election.

That totally sucks.

No doubt Reed’s “reforms” would make things easier for election officials and the news media, but at the inevitable cost of disenfranchising voters.  The Times looks at Oregon and argues the change would likely invalidate “only” a few hundred ballots… which I guess doesn’t sound like all that many unless one of those ballots is yours.

Sam Quinones writes about Mexico in the Foreign Policy online magazine:

I’d recently lived in Mexico for a decade, but I’d never seen anything like this. I left in 2004—as it turned out, just a year before Mexico’s long-running trouble with drug gangs took a dark new turn for the worse. Monterrey was the safest region in the country when I lived there, thanks to its robust economy and the sturdy social control of an industrial elite.

…

That week in Monterrey, newspapers reported, Mexico clocked 167 drug-related murders. When I lived there, they didn’t have to measure murder by the week. There were only about a thousand drug-related killings annually. The Mexico I returned to in 2008 would end that year with a body count of more than 5,300 dead. That’s almost double the death toll from the year before—and more than all the U.S. troops killed in Iraq since that war began.

But it wasn’t just the amount of killing that shocked me. When I lived in Mexico, the occasional gang member would turn up executed, maybe with duct-taped hands, rolled in a carpet, and dropped in an alley. But Mexico’s newspapers itemized a different kind of slaughter last August: Twenty-four of the week’s 167 dead were cops, 21 were decapitated, and 30 showed signs of torture. Campesinos found a pile of 12 more headless bodies in the Yucatán. Four more decapitated corpses were found in Tijuana, the same city where barrels of acid containing human remains were later placed in front of a seafood restaurant. A couple of weeks later, someone threw two hand grenades into an Independence Day celebration in Morelia, killing eight and injuring dozens more. And at any time, you could find YouTube videos of Mexican gangs executing their rivals—an eerie reminder of, and possibly a lesson learned from, al Qaeda in Iraq.

Of course, when it comes to the traditional media’s coverage of the drug war, the devastation in Mexico isn’t as interesting as whether or not Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane was going to arrest Michael Phelps.

The frog bastards:

In Paris, hot meals are prepared on the premises of each of the city’s 270 public day care facilities. Nothing is mass produced, ingredients are more often fresh than frozen, and the chefs try to use organic products when they can. And the cost of the food is not exorbitant — only about $2 per meal per child.

At La Margeride day care, delicious smells waft out of the kitchen. By 9 a.m., the preparation of lunch is well under way. Chefs Elizabeth Morel and Martine Belaud have been happily working together for the past 14 years.

Literally hell on earth. Fresh foods, people working proudly in food preparation for over a decade, kids learning to eat healthy. No wonder conservatives hate the French.

It would be so much better if they fed their kids salmonella-laced frozen peanut butter sandwiches with the crusts cut off.

The Seattle P-I’s Joel Connelly asks “Is there no one to challenge Mayor Nickels?” — to which I answer:  why not you, Joel?

Really… why not?

Of course, you likely wouldn’t win, but there’s no shame in losing, and while you may not qualify as a “front-rank foe,” you’d certainly provide a better rhetorical challenge than your run of the mill also-ran.  And if you did win, well, you could probably use the job…  and wouldn’t you prefer being the mayor rather than working for the mayor like nearly every other ex-journalist in Seattle?

But seriously, Joel’s got a point:  why is there no one to challenge Mayor Nickels?  I don’t dislike Mayor Nickels, and considering Seattle’s endemic indecisiveness, a little Chicago-style politics isn’t always such a bad thing, but come on folks, it’s not like he’s Richard Friggin’ Daley.  Third terms are never an easy win for executives out here, where even our political establishment easily tires of itself, and a serious challenge would be good for both the city and Nickels.  (Unless, of course, he loses.  Then it’s not so good for Nickels after all.  But you get the point.)

So with Burgess and Smith out, and Licata and Steinbrueck dithering, I say run, Joel, run.  At the very least it would give your friends on the Seattle Times editorial board conniptions come endorsement season.

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

I’m guessing there are a lot of folks who had expected to support Larry Phillips, who now don’t know what they’re going to do.

Larry is a good, reliable progressive who’s done a good, reliable job letting us know how good and reliable he is.  I don’t think there’s a single, substantive issue on which we disagree.

Dow’s pretty progressive too, I think, but he’s less of a politician than Larry, so I’m not quite as sure.  In fact, a lot of Dow’s appeal comes from the fact that he comes across as less of your typical politician and more of an ordinary guy.  (If only he hadn’t declared for the office, he’d have the Seattle Times endorsement all sewn up.)

Me… I don’t know who I’m going to support, and there are still more candidates to come.  (Rep. Ross Hunter has gotten his name in the news a lot recently.  Hmm.) It’s gonna be an interesting race.

Last week’s winners were YLB, who first guessed that it was Oslo, Norway and Don Joe, who found the link.

And to clear up a question that arose last week in the comments, the reason that I don’t select locations in places like Africa is because there are no views there yet. And as wes.in.wa points out, if they ever do get views for cities like Kampala, this contest gets a lot more interesting.

Here’s this week’s view, good luck!