Archives for March 2010

Honestly, I’m as much of a cultural elitist as the next guy, but is this really the best use of Seattle Center’s precious open space?

A plan to turn part of the Seattle Center grounds into exhibit space for glass artist Dale Chihuly is generating controversy after gliding along quietly for months.

The plan would use the Center’s existing Fun Forest arcade building, plus much of the open space where kiddie rides now stand, to create 44,000 square feet of exhibit space for Chihuly’s work. Patrons would have to pay to enter the building, but some works would be installed outside, where the public could view them for free. The site would include an “art garden” and “glass house” separate from the building, as well as a gift shop and café inside.

As a divorced father with a young child, the Seattle Center was a bit of a mecca for us. Between the Children’s Museum and the Science Center and the various rotating events at the Center House and elsewhere, there was a several year span when my daughter and I probably visited the Seattle Center at least once a month. And yes, the Fun Forest was a regular part of our outings, and, in fact, often the highlight for my adrenaline-addicted, roller-coaster-loving little girl.

Personally, my preference would be to keep the Fun Forest, as tacky and cheesy and déclassé as it might be. But if the economics don’t support it, do we really have to convert the space into yet another hangout for latte-sipping yuppies? I mean, Chihuly is great and all that, but he already has a fantastic museum in nearby Tacoma, plus several excellent public installations throughout Seattle. But what we don’t have in our city, as evidenced by the hordes of young families who already crowd the Center in good and bad weather alike, are enough great spaces for children to be children.

So here’s a rather simple idea: rather than converting the Fun Forest into yet another high-priced museum (for the cost of our combined tickets to the EMP, for example, my daughter could have gone on 15 rides), why not convert the space into the nation’s most kick-ass public playground?

Think about it: climbing toys, ball pits, zip lines, slides, swings and fun stuff like that, part open to the sky and part covered (it sometimes rains in Seattle, you know) and all of it attached to an indoor/outdoor cafe where parents can keep an eye on their kids while relaxing with a cup of coffee or a civilized glass of wine. A destination where families can hang out together, instead of yet another place to just, you know, look at art, if you’re willing and able to pay the price of admission.

Seattle’s a great city, but it isn’t exactly family-friendly, and we sure as hell don’t make it any family-friendlier by replacing an amusement park with yet another museum. A kick-ass playground is what this city really needs — a huge, outrageous, jaw-dropping, eye-popping, whimsical, indoor/outdoor play zone. And the Seattle Center’s dingy old Fun Forest is the perfect place to build it.

Rep. Eric Massa, D-NY, who just resigned yesterday amidst charges of sexual harassment, and who went insane on a New York radio station over the weekend, is supposed to appear on the Glenn Beck cable television show today. Some righties think this will be the end for all Democrats!

Er, maybe not so much. The Washington Post is reporting:

Former Rep. Eric Massa has been under investigation for allegations that he groped multiple male staffers working in his office, according to three sources familiar with the probe.

The allegations surrounding the New York Democrat date back at least a year, and involve “a pattern of behavior and physical harassment,” according to one source. The new claims of alleged groping contradict statements by Massa, who resigned his office on Monday after it became public that he was the subject of a House ethics committee investigation for possible harassment.

So yes, Massa described himself as a progressive, but he is also an ex-Republican from a very conservative district, so who the hell knows what makes the guy tick? Was his supposed progressivism just an act during a period of wide-spread dismay over Republican actions and policies? Don’t know.

What we do know is that, in an era of spectacular crash and burns, this one is pretty strange, and so of course Glenn Beck would try to glom on. Beck doesn’t need to worry about his credibility, because he doesn’t have any, at least among anyone remotely serious about achieving better governance.

This sorry episode would seem to highlight, with an exclamation point, the need to make sure candidates are thoroughly vetted before progressives support them. That’s easier said than done, of course, because ordinary folks aren’t in the business of running detective agencies. But you can tell a lot about people by what they do and who their supporters are, which is at least a starting point.

Yeah, all I can say is that just when you think American politics can’t get any more disgusting, seamy and ridiculous, it somehow does. It’s small wonder that regular folks, going to school, jobs and taking care of their families, often throw their hands up in disgust. The irony, of course, is that the more regular people check out, the more power is ceded to those who stand to extract even more power and money from this completely fucked up political system, awash in money and moral corruption.

Nobody walking on this earth is perfect, and demanding purity and perfection from politicians is silly. But the sorry collection of freaks, sadists, perverts, criminals and liars that have dominated headlines for the last twenty years or more, in both major parties, is a sad testament to our inability to govern ourselves. We need to kick the damn walls down and get some more halfway normal people in office. I know there are plenty of them already in office, but they seem to need some help right about now.

Just sayin’.

On the one hand, the Seattle Times’ editors have long complained about aggressive panhandlers, some of them “mentally deranged,” while explicitly praising candidates from Mark Sidran to  Joe Mallahan for taking a tough stance on the issue. Yet how does the Times propose to balance our state budget while raising as little additional revenue as possible…?

The General Assistance-Unemployable program has to go. This program, which provides a temporary safety net for people not working because of physical and mental disabilities, has been on just about every list of proposed cuts year after year. And every year, House Speaker Frank Chopp saves it. He needs to give it up.

Now, I’m not suggesting that all panhandlers are disabled, mentally or otherwise, or even a vast majority (maybe they are, maybe they aren’t… I really don’t know), but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to intuit a correlation between our society’s willingness to take care of the disabled, and the number of beggars on the street. Visit a strong social-welfare state like Denmark and you’ll have a tough time finding yourself a panhandler, whereas they’ve always been part of the urban landscape here in the ruggedly individualistic Northwest, home of the original Skid Row.

I know there are those who feel little obligation to those less fortunate — after all, I didn’t make the choice to become disabled, so why should I pay taxes to take care of those who did? But morality aside, there is a simple utilitarian equation between the strength of our social safety net and the number of beggars and homeless people on the streets. As harsh as it may be to propose to eliminate GAU, while addressing the inevitable social consequences via law enforcement, it is also inefficient, and amounts to little more than a shift of burden from the state budget to the local, while undoubtedly multiplying the cost in human suffering.

But I guess that’s what the Times means when they talk about “compromise.”

Tim Burgess is pushing a measure to outlaw panhandling near ATM’s, or parking meters. One of the reasons he says that people from the rest of the city and elsewhere are afraid to come downtown. “The visitors do not feel comfortable walking from their hotels, to the market, or catching the bus without being approached by many different panhandlers and street people along their route.” That may be, but I doubt that people asking for change near parking meters (aka, everywhere downtown) is really among the top concerns of downtown residents.

In the couple years I’ve lived downtown, I’ve seen countless things worse than yellie beggars who are pretty much anywhere on the street. And while much of it is already illegal, I think the city should probably deal with open drug dealing, and use, prostitution, late night noise, and drunks spilling out of clubs yelling “Wooooooooooooooooo” and getting into fights from before midnight to well past closing time on a Friday or Saturday night. (Just to be clear, I love living downtown, but there are problems.) Talking to other Belltown residents about the proposed law, the reaction has usually been somewhere between “it’s a war on homelessness” to “I guess it’s worth trying.” Personally, I’m against it, but not terribly so, but I haven’t heard anyone say that dealing with beggars is a high priority.

So while I applaud Burgess for at least trying, I still don’t feel represented on the council. I know, I know everybody represents me, and if I want something done, let someone on the relevant committee know. But I’m relatively well informed, and I have no idea who sits on what committee, or who among all of my supposed representatives on the city council would be receptive to downtown issues. I’d really prefer to have my council member, rather than having to guess who might be the most helpful when none of them seem to be.

There are two ways to look at state Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown’s income tax proposal. I suppose you could, as her office has done, brand it a “high earners income tax,” and in many ways, it is just that. Or, it would also be quite accurate to describe it as a “flat-tax,” the mythical creature of fair taxation to which all righties aspire. (At least, those who believe in taxation at all.)

After all, Sen. Brown’s proposal would impose a single tier flat-tax of 4.5 percent, with a single personal exemption of $200,000 per individual, or $400,000 per household. Those earning, say, $40,000,000 a year would be taxed at the same exact rate as those earning $400,001. Everybody gets the same exemption, and everybody pays the same rate on the remainder; what could be fairer or flatter than that?

Sure, the Brown proposal includes an awfully big personal exemption, but lots of taxes include exemptions. Our federal income tax includes a sizable exemption, as does our state B&O tax. Indeed, the conservative Washington Policy Center has argued for raising the B&O exemption to $200,000 or even higher for new businesses. Indeed, it’s tempting to call tax exemptions a downright conservative concept.

So I have a hard time understanding why the Seattle Times and other conservative critics so vehemently oppose Sen. Brown’s classically conservative flat-tax proposal?

When the state legislature suspended Initiative 960’s blatantly unconstitutional two-thirds requirement for passing tax increases —a measure approved by a mere 51% margin in a low-turnout, off-year election — the Seattle Times editorial board excoriated lawmakers for violating the sacred will of the people.

“Surely the people wanted it that way,” the Times insisted, citing both long-past measures and a recent made-for-TV opinion survey, conveniently assuming that populist pose they are wont to assume when, you know, it conveniently suits their purpose.

Yet the Times’ faith in the intelligence and good will of voters apparently only goes so far, for while they’ll defend to the death a tax-limiting measure approved by barely 20% of registered voters, should our legislators even dare to publicly discuss the notion of putting an income tax measure on the ballot for an up or down popular vote, well, that would be a “truly awful idea.”

The tax measure is a mix of desperation and splashes of bribery and extortion … even asking the question assumes voters are chumps.

Huh. Then why so worried? If the will of the people is so sacred, and their say at the ballot so well informed, what is the harm in putting this proposal before voters? I mean, if the idea – a 4.5% income tax on households earning over $400,000 a year, in exchange for a 1 cent  cut in the state sales tax — is so “truly awful,” voters can be trusted to reject it, right?

Right?

I mean, the irony is so thick you could cut it with a  knife. On the one hand, the Times lavishly defends I-960, a measure whose most prominent provision explicitly forces lawmakers to put proposed tax increases on the ballot, while on the other hand, the Times viciously ridicules Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown for proposing to do exactly that. Could the Times’ editors possibly be bigger hypocrites?

I’m not sure what the Times really thinks of Washington voters, but there’s little question they assume their readers to be chumps.

When Henry Wooten was arrested in Tyler Texas for smoking a joint, police found a couple baggies with 4.6 ounces of marijuana on him. And because he was caught within 1000 feet of a day care center, that landed Wooten a 35-year prison sentence.

A post at Dallas/Ft. Worth NORML explains:

This is, more or less, a warning for those who would openly defy Marijuana Laws in Texas. The Texas Justice system is a series of policies designed to incarcerate people, not rehabilitate or help them in anyway. Henry’s case is unique because his possession limit was on the cusp of being a misdemeanor. In Texas, it is a misdemeanor to possess four ounces or less. One to two ounces is a class B, and three to four is a class A misdemeanor. Henry was found guilty of possessing four ounces to one pound, a felony which could be 2 years in jail and a $10,000 fine. However, since Henry was in a “drug free zone”, Smith County Assistant District Attorney Richard Vance had asked for the jury to give Wooten a sentence of 99 years. Do you think he got off easy?

Or perhaps we should phrase that question from a different perspective: do you think Texas taxpayers got off easy? Will society benefit from the hundreds of thousands of dollars that will be spent to imprison Wooten for the next three and a half decades, for the simple charge of possessing a substance we could all easily grow in our backyards?

Yeah, this is one of those extreme, hyperbolic examples, but our prisons are filled with these extreme, hyperbolic examples, in Washington state and throughout the nation. Why? Because our drug laws simply don’t make any sense. And that’s why we need a more Sensible Washington.

Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky. It was Cottage Grove, Oregon.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!

Exodus 23:9
“Do not oppress an alien; you yourselves know how it feels to be aliens, because you were aliens in Egypt.”

Discuss.

Well, it’s kind of hard to say. Eli Sanders of The Stranger, Heck’s biggest fan north of Lacey, doesn’t know.

And check this out. From The Columbian via the (Longview, Wash.) Daily News:

Heck declined to say specifically what he thinks should be included in a health reform bill.
“I specifically favor those measures that will provide more people with affordable health care,” he said. “I will freely admit I have not read the 2,000-page bill.”

So he specifically didn’t say anything at all. Which isn’t unusual in politics, but it does contrast rather neatly with Craig Pridemore’s clear stance in support of the public option and clearing procedural hurdles placed in the way, including using reconciliation to do so.

Maybe those establishment folks in the Puget Sound region who felt they had to support Heck would like to ask themselves a few simple questions like: why am I supporting a guy who can’t even take a stand on the single biggest issue of the day? What if the voters who actually live in SW Washington’s 3rd Congressional District figure that out?

(And there is more of where that came from at Hominid Views.)

That guy who shot two cops outside the Pentagon last night? Guess which side of the ideological divide he hailed from:

The California man who opened fire last night outside the Pentagon was a property rights extremist who railed against the government’s ability to “confiscate the resources of their citizens to fund schemes that need only be justified by lies and deception,” and wanted to “eliminate the role of the government in education.”

In a recorded manifesto called “Directions To Freedom”, the audio of which he posted online in 2006, John Patrick Bedell, of Hollister, California, praised private property as “the most successful basis for structuring society that humanity has ever known.”

Bedell shot two police officers last night during the rampage, before being mortally wounded himself.

Surprise, surprise.

Now I know folks are reluctant to characterize violent political extremists like Bedell and Joseph Stack, the anti-tax wacko who flew his plane into an IRS  building, as terrorists — because they’re not brown-skinned ragheads or anything — but I just looked up the word “terrorism” in the dictionary, and whadda ya know:

1.  the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that all teabaggers are terrorists, but, well, violent rhetoric does occasionally foment actual violence, so nobody should be surprised when patriots like Bedell and Stack are inspired to act on the anger, fear and violence the teabaggers and other far-righties preach.

In a probable preview of interrupted dinners and kiddie bedtimes this year, the good folks at the NRCC have unleashed a last-ditch effort to stop health reform with that most hated of intrusive tactics, the robo-call, including down here in WA-03.

That’s the seat being vacated at the end of the term by Rep. Brian Baird, D-Wash. The major Democratic candidates running to replace Baird are former state legislator and TVW executive Denny Heck and sitting state Sen. Craig Pridemore, D-Vancouver.

Media Matters has a script of robo-calls going out nationally, but so far I haven’t been able to obtain a recording of one here in the district. I am told by the Pridemore campaign that they received a fair number of outraged calls yesterday from recipients of the robo-calls.

I’m not sure if the same script would work against candidates, but here it is in any case. If you click through you can read Media Matters’ typical and careful deconstruction of the baloney.

Hello, I’m calling from the National Republican Congressional Committee with a code red alert about an impending health care vote in Congress. Even though a majority of the country wants them to scrap it, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Obama are planning to ram their dangerous, out-of-control health care spending bill through Congress anyway.

What’s worse, Congressman XXXXXX might vote for it. XXXXXX votes with Nancy Pelosi XX% of the time and may follow her orders on this bill too. XXXXXX might vote for a bill that will kill jobs, raise the costs of health care, and increase taxes. XXXXXX should be focusing on creating jobs, yet he might be the deciding vote that causes this massive new spending bill to pass.

Please call XXXXXX now at 202-225-5311 before it is too late and tell him to vote no on Nancy Pelosi’s dangerous health care scheme. Visit www.nrcc.org/codered to learn more. This call was paid for by the National Republican Congressional Committee and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. [Plum Line, 3/3/10]

When it comes to the positions of Baird and Heck in the WA-03 race, Brad Shannon at The Olympian notes that:

Baird voted against the House reform bill last year and has sounded equivocal this time around; Heck also has expressed misgivings about last year’s bill.

To which I would like to add this declaration from Pridemore, sent in an email to supporters yesterday evening:

Let me be clear: I believe that Democrats in Congress should pass the bill, include a public option, and clear the procedural hurdles (including using the reconciliation process.)

The time for debating parliamentary procedure is over. And the time for taking action on health care is now.

Shannon, the Olympian reporter, also notes that none of the Republicans have offered diddly squat (obviously I’m paraphrasing, he doesn’t write like that.)

So let’s see: there are four supposedly major candidates for Congress, two from each major party, and only one of them is championing the view of the majority of the voters in the district when it comes to health care. Yeah, that sounds like our broken politics, and it also shows how lucky we are to have Pridemore in the race.

Luckily as well, you can help. This is going to be a race watched closely at the national level, and while it may not have the sizzle of taking out a sitting corporate-Dem in Arkansas, this is also important. Please do what you can.

Bruce Ramsey, the Seattle Times editorial board’s resident libertarian (you know, the one who hates government on principle), chronicles the travails of a would-be gentleman farmer who has given up his dream of tilling 89 acres of Snoqualmie Valley hillside and bottomland due to excessive King County rules and regulations. And while it’s hard to defend the permitting hassles Ramsey cites, at least offhand, there was one paragraph that kinda jumped out at me (the emphasis is mine):

To pave a driveway, the blueprint — one sheet — cost $1,000. The county, which funds its permit department through fees, wanted $22,000 to review the one sheet. Capeder hired a lawyer, and they settled for $10,000.

A thousand dollars for a one sheet blue print? Another $22,000 to review it? That sounds rather outrageous, and it doesn’t take a libertarian to realize how such steep upfront permitting costs can discourage entrepreneurialism.

But this anecdote also demonstrates the delicate balance that government must strike every day in protecting and promoting the commonweal, while levying the costs of the services provided relative to the individual and communal benefits enjoyed, as fairly, pragmatically and efficiently as possible.

Still, setting aside those who would argue for little or no government regulation of private land (there’s no arguing with ideologues), let’s start from the assumption that the community as a whole benefits from land-use regulations and the permitting process it necessitates. After all, even Tim Eyman would object were I to purchase the house next door, knock it down, and propose to replace it with, say, a Hooters, or an auto-wrecking yard or something similarly out of place in the midst of a residential neighborhood… and rightly so.

On the other hand, Tim might also object were I simply to buy the house next door and propose to live in it, though in this case he would have no moral or legal right to stop me. So hyperbole aside, I think most of us can safely agree that there are limits to both the rights of the landowner, and the rights the community to limit the rights of the landowner.

With that established, let’s get back to the woes of our gentleman farmer. $22,000 to review a permit for a driveway sure does sound excessive, though given the size of the property, I’m guessing were not talking your typical, 40-foot residential driveway here, but rather something more akin to a private road through agricultural land, with all the environmental impact that implies. So whether the fee was $22,000, or the $10,000 figure on which the department finally settled, let’s just assume that this represents the actual cost of reviewing the permit in a manner thorough enough to actually meet the intent of the rule that requires the permit in the first place.

Now, who should pay for this?

There is an awfully strong argument to make that developers should pay for the cost of permitting and inspecting their own projects, as they’re the ones who enjoy the most immediate economic benefit from their developments. And make no mistake, that’s what Ramsey’s gentleman farmer is — a developer — for the permits in question are not for farming, but rather for the development he proposed to build processing, retail and tourist facilities on his property, and the private road driveway to get there. Ramsey’s column is titled “Rules and roadblocks make farmland difficult to farm,” but that’s a bit misleading, as it’s the agribusiness related land development that is the subject of permitting, not the farming itself, and the question of whether farming such expensive land is economically viable without this development is still an open question.

I’m not arguing against this guy’s integrated farm/processor/retail/tourism concept; I think it’s a brilliant, creative approach to turning expensive exurban farmland into an economically viable operation, and I’d love to see him succeed here in King County rather than Skagit. But the concept requires building stuff, building stuff requires permitting, permitting costs money… and somebody’s got to pay for it. If it works, our gentleman farmer stands to make a pretty penny off his venture, so shouldn’t he pay for the costs of starting it up, rather than shifting the cost to taxpayers like me and Ramsey?

On the other hand, by requiring the permitting department to recover the costs of its operations solely from its users, perhaps we’ve made the upfront costs of development too high, discouraging such innovative projects that would ultimately prove an economic boon to the surrounding community, while keeping precious farmland in use as such? Perhaps the benefits to the community of such development are so great, that we should all bear the costs? Perhaps by shifting the cost of an essential government service to the individual user, we’ve made the service unaffordable, and tipped the balance too far in one direction?

For example, as homeowners, we all pay a not insubstantial portion of our property tax each year to fund the local fire department, a government service most of us will never use. But were we to shift the cost of firefighting to the individual user, few would be able to afford the service; imagine losing everything you own in a fire, only to have the fire department hand you a $50,000 bill for snuffing out the flames. Yet like the land-use permits, we can’t make firefighting optional, as failing to fight your fire would put my property at risk as well.

That would be ridiculous, of course, and so we socialize the cost of firefighting and other essential services by forcibly collecting it from the community as a whole in the form of taxes. Nobody likes to pay taxes, not even tax-and-spend liberals like me. But we all benefit from the services and infrastructure they fund.

So perhaps, if the cost of permitting a “driveway” through 89 acres of Snoqualmie Valley farmland is too high, and the benefits to the community of such development are so great, then perhaps we should shift some of the costs incurred by the permitting process away from the individual user and onto the community at large… you know, us taxpayers? I’m not arguing for this shift, just that these sort of equations are part of the delicate balance between the needs and rights of the individual and the needs and rights of the community that every functioning government must strike.

And that is the irony of Ramsey calling out the self-funding nature of the permitting department, for while he no doubt would prefer that such permits weren’t required at all, this anecdote only serves to illustrate the broader nature of government and the inherent flaws in the libertarian agenda as a whole. For when we devolve government services and infrastructure, shifting the costs from the community to the individual users, either  through “user fees,” or ultimately through privatization, much of what government provides ceases to be affordable to all but the wealthiest consumers.

The costs of some government services should be borne directly by users, and I’d argue that permitting fees generally fall into this category, though since my position is based on pragmatism not philosophy, I’m willing to consider the alternative. But while Ramsey is happy to lay out the $22,000 driveway permit as an example of government regulation run amuck, judging from his oeuvre I’m guessing he’d be unwilling to consider raising taxes on the rest of us — including himself — to help make such innovative development more affordable. Nor does he even attempt to engage in the question of whether there should or should not be a permitting process for paving a private road through agricultural land, or who, if anybody, should pay for it.

No, as the Times’ resident libertarian, Ramsey is content merely to grab a couple of anecdotes out of context and present them as an example of, well, of government regulation run amuck. And considering how little popular support there is here in King County for the kinda regulation-free, libertarian dystopia that would be the logical conclusion of the philosophy Ramsey appears to espouse, I’m just not sure that this moves the conversation anywhere.