Archives for April 2009

From an Editor and Publisher article about how traditional journalists may be alienating younger readers with outdated pop culture references.

The Times is a citadel of retrotalk, on its Op-Ed page especially. Columnist Frank Rich once commented that George W. Bush had “a slight, almost Chauncey Gardiner quality,” referring to Peter Sellers’ simple-minded character in the 1979 movie “Being There.”

The Queen of Retrotalk is Times columnist Maureen Dowd. Dozens of examples I’ve harvested from her columns include “Nosey Parker,” “Ma Barker,” “Norma Desmond,” “Palin’s Imelda Marcos moment” and “Hillary’s inner Eve Harrington.” To describe how it felt to drive through Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and see no women on the streets, Dowd invoked a “Rod Serling–type feeling.”

I’m not sure this is the media’s biggest problem. I find familiarity with American’s TV history to be quite valuable when considering politics.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-yLYz6ejqw[/youtube]

Guns make you safer:

A Fort Lewis soldier is dead after being accidentally shot in the head and killed by his wife in Olympia, the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office says.

Lt. Chris Mealy of the sheriff’s office told KOMO-TV the soldier was teaching his wife how to handle a handgun when he was shot early Sunday. Mealy told The Olympian that the semi-automatic handgun was the soldier’s personal property.

I’m just sayin’.

As first reported on Seattle Transit Blog, the state House passed a $4.9 billion two-year transportation budget on Friday that restored funding for moving I-90’s HOV lanes (work necessary to keep the voter-approved East Link light rail project on schedule) and which removed language that would have barred the state Department of Transportation from negotiating air rights with Sound Transit for access to I-90.

This blog has long made the case that Rep. Clibborn has long been opposed to Link crossing I-90, so we hope that this is the first sign of a House that is friendlier toward transit — perhaps due to advocacy pressure. One legislator described our outreach campaign as “a deluge of emails set off by bloggers,” but we think it’s important that transit advocates let the state know how important voter-approved light rail projects are to the region.

It is difficult to accurately gauge the impact of citizen advocacy, but the folks at STB deserve a ton of credit for taking the lead on covering this issue, and pushing awareness amongst both rail supporters and legislators alike.  If I were them, I’d quietly put another notch in my belt.

But after talking to a number of reliable sources both in and outside Olympia, I’m not so sure it was Rep. Clibborn’s opposition to Link crossing I-90 that was the real motivation behind the anti-Link nature of the original bill.  Clibborn and others, I’m told, weren’t really hoping to scuttle East Link, which is pretty much accepted in Olympia as a done deal.  No, this was more of a shakedown… part of a calculated effort to extort a billion dollars or more from Sound Transit for access rights to I-90… money House Speaker Frank Chopp hopes to target to his preferred, but monstrously expensive, “Option K” Montlake tunnel alternative for the Western approach to the new 520 floating bridge.

At least a billion dollars, possibly two, that’s what Chopp has privately told lawmakers and lobbyists he wants for access to I-90 (a bridge, by the way, built 90% with federal dollars), and that’s why, I’m told, he had his lieutenants throw roadblocks into DOT’s negotiations with Sound Transit.  That’s potentially enough money to fund all of the controversial Option K tunnel.

Now, as House Speaker, I kinda expect Chopp to play games like this.  That’s politics.  It’s part of his job description.

But Chopp also represents the voters of Seattle’s 43rd Legislative District… voters who overwhelmingly voted last November to tax themselves to build light rail across Lake Washington, not a highway tunnel under Montlake.  We tried to pass a roads and transit measure back in 2007—I aggressively supported it—and it failed.  The successful 2008 ballot measure, on the other hand, was explicitly transit only.

The Speaker’s efforts to steal money from East Link to help pay for Option K, may be a clever political maneuver, but it clearly ignores the will of the voters, and threatens the ability of Sound Transit to complete a project that, due to the Great Recession, is already seeing lower than projected tax revenues, and for which ST had never factored in the cost of tunneling under Montlake.

And it’s not at all that clear that this effort is dead, even with passage of a relatively ST-friendly transportation bill.

Mike McGinn is running for mayor of Seattle. According to lots of people (including Publicola’s Josh Feit), McGinn rides his electric-assist bike all over Seattle:

Where’d you get that bike, Mike? Where does one get an electric bike around here?

For all the incessant attacks from Republicans questioning his fitness to be Commander in Chief, President Obama appears to have engaged rather forcefully in the recent standoff with Somali pirates:

U.S. Navy Seals had a standing order from President Barack Obama to take out the pirates who held an American captain in a standoff on the high seas, according to Pentagon officials and White House aides.

Over the course of the five-day standoff, Obama, who said little publicly about the hostage situation, received more than a dozen briefings and gave the Department of Defense policy guidance and the authority to use force if the situation compelled it.

Mission accomplished.

Last week’s contest was won by wes.in.wa. It was the north end of the CNN complex in downtown Atlanta. Here’s this week’s, good luck!

A couple weeks ago, when I first set out on my recent series of obsessively wonky posts on Washington’s budget crisis and the structural revenue deficit at its heart, I pretty much knew what to expect.  Readership would trail off, incoming links would virtually disappear, and my comment threads would fill with automatic gainsaying, tired, anti-tax rhetoric, and pointless personal attacks on my manhood, my alleged socialism, and of course, my ethnicity.

i told u in your last post goldstein, get out of here and go to that garbage dump israel, and take that homo barney frank with u

No, my trolls rarely fail to disappoint.  And neither have the local media, whose coverage of this crisis, as expected, has largely focused on the spending side of the equation and the political machinations behind it, while providing little if any discussion of its causes, outside of the frame of the current economic cycle.

It is easy to point to a four-year period and show that spending has increased from X to Y.  It is much harder to cogently place this increase within the proper historical, economic and statistical context.  And so, for the most part, our media has failed to even try, and understandably so, for properly done, the subject matter is inherently godawful dry and boring.  Why should a daily newspaper devote precious column inches to explaining a premise that is at its best tedious, and at its worse, a maddeningly counter-intuitive and downright unpopular challenge to conventional wisdom?

Thus I was pleasantly surprised to read Seattle Times economic columnist Jon Talton this morning proclaim that now is the “Time for state to discuss taxes despite difficulties.”

It’s quixotic — or deranged. Such are most of the reactions, depending on political persuasion, to state Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown’s idea of an income tax on high-wage earners to help fund education.

Huh.  Sounds like Talton is calling out his own editorial board.  But…

Even so, Brown’s proposal ought to open an important conversation about taxes and the state’s future competitiveness. It’s one that’s difficult to have without arousing partisan passions, cooked statistics and charges of socialism or a sales-tax-driven war on the poor. It’s one we should have nevertheless.

There… was that so hard?

As Talton points out, Washington’s individual and corporate tax “burden” remains relatively low while our per capita income remains high, and our heavy reliance on the sales tax leaves us with the most regressive tax structure in the nation.  Talton also peeks beneath the robes of the rarely challenged orthodoxy that inexorably links tax rates to private sector competitiveness.

Some of the states with the highest tax rates and tax burdens (taxes paid divided by income) are also the richest and most economically powerful.

These include New York, Connecticut, New Jersey and California. Some states with very low taxes also suffer from limited economies and a relative lack of well-paid jobs. This doesn’t mean that high taxes can’t ultimately hurt competitiveness, only that reflexive tax cutting is no panacea, either. Rather, tax policy seems to be one element in a state’s overall competitive DNA.

Our problem, as Talton explains, is that despite such facts, talk of higher taxes is generally political suicide.

Anti-tax activists have been effective in portraying government as always bloated and inefficient. This sidesteps answering what roles government must do well and which cost money to enhance competitiveness in a complex, global economy.

That’s all I’ve been asking for:  a public conversation on the proper size and scope of government, and how best to adequately, sustainably and fairly pay for those services and infrastructure investments we collectively want and need.  With rare exceptions like Talton’s column, we aren’t getting that conversation in our local media, and apart from Brown and a handful of other legislators, we aren’t getting that conversation from our elected officials either.

I’m not saying it’s an easy conversation, or one that won’t come with political costs.  But in the long run, it’s a conversation we can’t afford to avoid.

It looks like the Bush Administration’s war on terror continues.

UPDATE: I want to congratulate commenter Rick D, who has officially broken the world record for stupidity in the comment thread down below. When claiming that Obama hasn’t released his birth certificate is only the 3rd or 4th stupidest thing you’ve said in a comment thread, you’ve accomplished something special.

I think Jon Stewart had a pretty good take on these nutballs.

I’d have to agree that with Sam Taylor of the Bellingham Herald that teabagging is going to be news. The teabaggers should prance around all they want in public with their teabags. Life is like a box of teabags, and stupid is as…well, you know.

I heartily encourage the teabaggers to publicly present their dissent, even though some of them doubtless were calling liberals traitors and such for daring to dissent six years ago.

What would be interesting to know is the thought process, such as it is, that inspires teabagging. Sure, they’ll blather about “out of control government spending,” but they didn’t give a flying fig about it during the last administration and if someone today dares to talk about reforming the defense procurement system then the teabag noise machine starts in about “threatening America’s safety.”

So it’s really “government spending on things they don’t like that helps people they don’t like” that pisses them off. Wasting trillions on weapons systems that don’t work and invading countries that shouldn’t have been invaded was just fine with them.

Now, there is certainly ample room to criticize flaws in the TARP and the stimulus plan, but that’s not really what the teabaggers are doing. They’re just banging their tribal teabagging drum as loud and as hard as they can, the pulsating and quickening rhythm sending shivers of delight up their spines, as Glenn Beck weeps and Rush Limbaugh explodes. It’s all so..nostalgic.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNHuI0Pw0m8[/youtube]

Funny thing, though: elections have consequences. If the teabaggers don’t like it they should prance around with their mildly stimulating beverage bags, and see if a majority of the American people agree with them. I think we all know the answer to that already.

Apparently, I have kidney stones, a malady I’ve heard others describe as more painful than childbirth.  I’m not sure why I’d be prone to the disease, considering I sit at home most days drinking copious quantities of green tea, water and seltzer, so I’m just going to blame our frustrating lawmakers in Olympia, and the fistfuls of Tums they’ve prompted me to swallow over the past couple months.

The symptoms started about a week ago, but last night was the first time the pain got bad enough to keep me awake.  Still, it’s not so bad at the moment, and I hope to get through this without cracking open my prescription of Vicodin.  We’ll see.

I mention my ailment, not to elicit your pity, but to point out how stupid our health care system is.  According to the NIH, each year kidney stones prompt 3 million visits to health care providers, and half a million people to visit emergency rooms.  So it’s a pretty common ailment.  And without robust insurance, it’s a pretty common way to find oneself in a financial hole.

If I pass my stones on my own it’s going to cost me only a few hundred dollars in doctors office visits and lab work, but should I require further diagnosis and treatment—CT scans, ureteroscopy, surgery, a hospital stay and follow-up—it’ll cost me thousands of dollars before my deductible is exhausted and my co-insurance stoploss kicks in.  And that’s with an insurance plan on which I already pay a couple hundred dollars a month.

I’m sure I’ll manage to get by.

But a lot of families wouldn’t.  For many folks, even in good times, five to six thousand dollars in medical expenses could mean the difference between keeping or losing the house, or perhaps, completing a college degree.  And for the uninsured, the costs from an ailment as common as a tiny chunk of calcium stuck in your kidney could easily exceed $40,000.

There are those on the right who resent what social safety net we have, and who rail against being asked to pay for the consequences of the poor choices of others.  But affordable insurance simply isn’t available to tens of millions of American families, and God knows, nobody chooses to have a kidney stone.  So in the end, what good is the best health care available anywhere in the world, when there’s no functional system for providing it?

Dean Becker of the Drug Truth Network interviewed State Representative Roger Goodman (Kirkland).

Dean Becker: It wasn’t that long ago that there were just a handful of elected officials, willing to even talk about this drug war; to talk about regulation control or legalization. But I think, if I dare say, there are several score, perhaps even a hundred now, nationwide that are like you, willing to address this issue and if I remember right, your opponent, in this last election cycle, had a lot of similar thoughts. It’s not that rare anymore, is it?

Rep. Roger Goodman: Yeah. Let me tell you the timeline here. OK. So, three years ago I ran for office. I was the sort of renegade, grenade thrower, unpredictable, radical guy. Because if you ’Google’ Roger Goodman or Roger Goodman drugs, you’ll find all the things I talk about. ‘The fact that prohibition doesn’t work.’ ‘We need to assert regulatory control.’ People were sort of translating it to like… we’re going to legalize drugs and hand it out to kids in school yard or something.

But anyway, when my opponent, in my first election, hit me on that, my poll numbers went up. I got more votes after people found out what I’m working on to find this exit strategy for the war on drugs and so that backfired, for sure. The people get it, you know?

Now, just last year, I had an opponent who agrees with me that the war on drugs is a failure. He’s on the republican side but he’s also strongly libertarian and so he actually criticized me, in public, for not being aggressive enough… {laughter} … on drug policy reform.

So in a two year period, we had a switch all the way from one side to the other, where first of all I’m going to end civilization as we know it and then on the other side, I’m not doing enough. So again, the people get, the politicians are a little bit less afraid.

We still have a long way to go inside of the chambers of the legislature, but to a person, when I talk to them confidentially, my colleague’s in the legislature and other public officials all agree, that the policy’s broken and we need to change it.

I’ve talked to Roger about this same thing myself and I still have trouble understanding why this has so long to go inside the legislature. If being in favor of legalizing marijuana helped Roger get votes in a suburban area like Kirkland, what exactly is the political risk any more? Why is the legislature still dragging its feet on this? Don’t we have a “progressive” in the Governor’s mansion? Don’t we have “progressive majorities” in the Senate and House? Don’t we have massive budget problems that can be partially ameliorated by having a system of regulation and taxation for marijuana?

UPDATE: In the comments, Mark1 provides an excellent link demonstrating the kind of violence and gang activity that would disappear if the legislature removed its collective head from its ass and set up a legal system for producing and selling marijuana. Thanks Mark!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F26vC_1_8xw&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

(Some fifty other media clips from the past week in politics can be found at Hominid Views.)

The Washington State Budget & Policy has revised their chart tracking Washington state government spending and revenue as a percentage of personal income to include the projected 2009-2011 budget… and it’s pretty damn dramatic.

It is important to note that while state spending has remained fairly flat for the past decade, apart from a spike during the real estate bubble revenue has been steadily eroding since before the current economic crisis.  As for the current downturn, the decrease in revenue is twice as steep as previous declines, and the proposed budget cuts are substantially deeper as a percentage of the economy than any other budget over the period of time charted.

Those who insist our current budget crisis is the result of out of control spending will just have to continue to ignore the facts.