Archives for January 2013

Who Cribbed Whom?

by Carl Ballard — Friday, 1/18/13, 7:32 pm

I’m a bit worried that Senator Ericksen thinks he invented the aspirational goal of cheap electricity. Not that he invented some way made electricity cheaper — that would be awesome — but just talking about cheaper energy. Like he thinks he invented talking. About cheaper energy. How else do you explain titling his press release “Ericksen pleased to hear Inslee echo his energy goals“?

Yes, the governor. Who wrote a book about energy. Is echoing some state senator. The governor. Whose signature issue has been energy for over a decade. Is echoling some state senator.

Obviously, what laws pass matters most. And if they see eye to eye, that’s probably a good thing.

MAP

by Carl Ballard — Friday, 1/18/13, 6:12 pm

Seattle teachers who decided not to administer the MAP test here are there reasons:

Seattle’s ninth- and 10th-grade students already take five state-required standardized tests, with 11th- and 12th-graders taking three. Seattle Public Schools staff admitted to a Garfield teacher the MAP test is not valid at the high-school level, because the margin of error is greater than expected gains.

In addition, teachers are forbidden to see contents of the MAP test so they can’t prepare students. Teachers who have looked over the shoulders of students taking the test can tell you that it asks questions students are not expected by state standards to learn until later grades.

This test especially hurts students receiving extra academic support — English-language learners and those enrolled in special education. These are the kids who lose the most each time they waste five hours on the test. Our computer labs are commandeered for weeks when the MAP is on, so students working on research projects can’t get near them. The students without home computers are hurt the most.

Students don’t take the MAP seriously because they know their scores don’t factor into their grades or graduation status. They approach it less seriously each time they take it, so their scores decline. Our district uses MAP scores in teacher evaluations, even though the MAP company recommends against using it to evaluate teacher effectiveness and it’s not mandated in our union contract.

I’m not sure if it spreads, or where it goes from here. But I’m glad the teachers at these schools are standing up for education.

Open Thread 1/18

by Carl Ballard — Friday, 1/18/13, 8:05 am

– Picking a favorite part of this Pam Roach presser is damn near impossible. But I think “not even arguably” she cares more about people than anyone else in the Senate is probably it.

– Jonah Goldberg’s opposition to hucksters in movement conservatism is only hostility to the competition.

– Assholes gonna asshole.

– Mayhap they’ll start including a list of each athletes favorite performance enhancing drugs on their collectable cards!

– This Brandon McCarthy Twitter battle encapsulates everything right and wrong with sports people on social media.

Reproductive Parity Act

by Carl Ballard — Thursday, 1/17/13, 7:41 pm

If Washington NARAL are pushing the Reproductive Parity Act again this session then that’s good enough for me.

Washington voters have a long history of ensuring a woman’s ability to make the decision to have an abortion. As Washington proceeds with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Washington women could face increased barriers in their ability to access reproductive health care, including abortion services. Anti-choice politicians in Congress tried to undermine the ACA by inserting a provision to roll back reproductive healthcare. This legislation addresses that problem and guarantees access to a full range of reproductive healthcare including abortion.

The link is a petition, and if that’s your thing, I’d encourage you to add your name. If writing your legislator directly is more your thing, you can find them here. Presumably it’ll be able to pass the State House again. But even before the GOP coup, this was going to be tougher in the State Senate. I assume it’ll go to the Health Care Committee where Senator Becker will kill it. But if you’re represented by someone on the committee, you might want to let them know how you feel.

When Eastern Washington Needs It

by Carl Ballard — Thursday, 1/17/13, 8:05 am

Looking at the House vote for Sandy relief, I noticed that Doc Hastings and Cathy McMorris Rodgers voted against it. It’s morally abhorrent to see another part of the country devastated, and first to take this amount of time to help, and then to vote against it. It also seems pretty short sighted.

I can’t imagine any Northeast politician giving them help the next time there’s a wildland fire in Eastern Washington. For that matter, I can’t imagine any Northeastern politician giving them any help on anything they want to do. “Oh, you voted against relief for people who are still homeless in my community months after Sandy, here let me help you secure funding for a road” seems like something said by nobody ever.

Open Thread 1/16

by Carl Ballard — Wednesday, 1/16/13, 5:19 pm

Evening edition (AKA, having been out for a few days kind of screwed me up).

– Any bill that doesn’t allow me to buy the rights to the Rodney Tom Can Go Fuck Himself Overpass still needs some work.

– We should take a moment and remind ourselves who are the people of the state and who are we

– I keep forgetting to post this anti-Sully piece.

– We’ve got ourselves a brand-new governor.

– The sincere answers to asshole petitions manager would be a fun job at the White House.

– Vote’s in Five Minutes!

– A Message to Guys Who Comment on Internet Videos (video)

Bee Nicerer

by Carl Ballard — Wednesday, 1/16/13, 7:55 am

I’m slowly making my way through this biography of William Seward. There’s an interesting story I wasn’t aware of from his days as a Senator. By 1858, he was a leading opponent of slavery in the Senate. Still he was cordial with many Southern Senators. One story in particular: “In early 1858, when Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi was suffering from a sever eye illness and confined to his darkened room for seven weeks, Seward visited him every day and spent an hour amusing the invalid with stories.”

If we didn’t all know what was coming, that would be the type of how-DC-Used-To-Be stories that the beltway press like to tell themselves. If we didn’t know that in 3 years they’ll stand on opposite sides, as over half a million people die in the Civil War, it might be a lovely story of the bipartisan niceness of a bygone era. Viewing it as that also obscures that one side was right on one of the least morally ambiguous issues of our history: slavery was wrong.

So that’s what I was thinking about when I read at Balloon Juice that reporters are using their question at a press conference to ask Obama why he and his staff don’t socialize more.

I’d like to ask you, now that you’ve reached the end of your first term, starting your second, about a couple of criticisms — one that’s longstanding, another more recent. The longstanding one seems to have become a truism of sorts that you’re — you and your staff are too insular, that you don’t socialize enough.

DC is a place with strange values.

Drinking Liberally — Seattle

by Darryl — Tuesday, 1/15/13, 5:14 pm

Please join us for an evening of politics over a pint at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally.

What’s the buzz? Lawmakers returned to Olympia yesterday, and Senate Republicans are in charge with their “majority coalition.” Jay Inslee gets sworn in tomorrow. And guns.

We meet every Tuesday at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Starting time is 8:00pm. Some people show up earlier for Dinner.

Can’t make it to Seattle tonight? Check out one of the other DL meetings over the next week. Tonight the Tri-Cities chapter also meets. The Longview chapter meet this Wednesday. On Thursday, the Spokane chapter meets. And on Monday, the Yakima, Aberdeen and Olympia chapters meet.

With 201 chapters of Living Liberally, including thirteen in Washington state, four in Oregon, and two more in Idaho, chances are excellent there’s a chapter that meets near you.

Ted Talks

by Darryl — Tuesday, 1/15/13, 12:52 am

Ted Nugent wants you to know (my emphasis):

“A person who lives by logic and studies history and tries to implement the lessons learned by history cannot begin to rationally explain the conduct of this president or his attorney general or this administration,” Nugent told conservative radio host Aaron Klein. “It is psychotic, it is crazy, it’s illogical — I believe it’s clearly and dangerously anti-American, anti-humanity.”

This reminded me of my former life as a volunteer political consultant. Once I had to offer Mr. Nugent some advice after he announced his intentions to run for Governor of Michigan…to a British reporter for a British magazine. That was the first of many political faux paux for the novice gubernatorial wannabe.

For instance, at one point, the reporter was asking a question about a past incident, and Mr. Nugent interrupted:

Nugent: “Neither did I poke my erect penis through a map of West Virginia – did you read that?”

Reporter: “No.”

And, at another point in the interview that was taking place in Mr. Nugent’s basement:

He fires at a Styrofoam bear using his weapon of choice, a traditional bow and arrow. “Straight through the heart… dead bear,” says Ted, as his heavily pitted target submits to yet another onslaught. “Both lungs… dead bear.” The arrows, which he makes himself, keep flying. “Dead bear… dead bear… dead bear.”

Psychotic? Crazy? Hmmm….

In his recent musings, Mr. Nugent…

criticized the leadership of Obama’s gun violence task force, saying that putting “crazy uncle” Biden and Attorney General Eric Holder in charge was akin to “hiring [serial killer] Jeffrey Dahmer to tell us to how to take care of our children.”

I guess he is suggesting that the Vice President and Attorney General are killing, and possibly eating, children. This seems rather illogical, considering that the administration hasn’t undertaken any actions on this issue or even announced future actions base on the recommendations of the gun violence task force.

Mr. Nugent’s deep concern about “dangerously anti-American, anti-humanity” tendencies may have some basis in reality, as revealed in that British interview through his own ideas for achieving a Utopian world:

“I say if somebody robs you, shoot ’em. I’d like all thieves killed. And all rapists. And carjackers. No more graffiti. No more ‘snatch-pursing.’”
[…]

“How do you get peace, love and understanding? First of all you have to find all the bad people. Then you kill them.”

Psychotoc? Crazy? Illogical? Dangerously anti-American? Anti-humanity?

All of the above.

Open Thread 1/14

by Carl Ballard — Monday, 1/14/13, 8:01 am

– Our Times Will Get More Interesting

– You know how your conservative friends are saying Hitler banned guns? Turns out, that’s the exact opposite of true.

– The dreamers are pretty amazing.

– As organizations like Planned Parenthood back away from the “pro-choice” label, what is next?

– No pants day on LINK Light Rail is still a story.

– The White House response to the Death Star petition.

A blogging note: I’ve still got a bit of the yucks (to use the technical term) so this is the only post from me today, and possibly tomorrow.

Bird’s Eye View Contest

by Lee — Sunday, 1/13/13, 12:00 pm

Last week’s contest was won by Darryl. It was in Markham, Ontario.

This week we shift over to Google Maps to find this random location somewhere on earth, good luck!

HA Bible Study

by Goldy — Sunday, 1/13/13, 6:00 am

Leviticus 11:20-22
All flying insects that walk on all fours are to be regarded as unclean by you. There are, however, some flying insects that walk on all fours that you may eat: those that have jointed legs for hopping on the ground. Of these you may eat any kind of locust, katydid, cricket or grasshopper.

Discuss.

Paternalism and Parallels

by Lee — Saturday, 1/12/13, 6:30 am

Andrew Sullivan has been dutifully debunking some of the terrible arguments in defense of marijuana prohibition. Conor Friedersdorf has been doing the same. The discussion in those posts centers around a defense of paternalism being made by those in favor of keeping marijuana markets underground. Mark Kleiman here makes a partial defense of those arguments:

Sullivan is horrified by the frank paternalism involved, but horror isn’t a criticism, and he’s wrong to attribute to Frum and Dreher the notion that “all American adults are basically children that we have to protect from their own choices.” What Frum and Dreher are saying is that some Americans – many of them minors – are indeed in need of protection from their own bad choices. (Dreher is especially clear-minded in pointing out that the need for paternalistic protection varies not just from person to person but from choice to choice: lots of people are capable of managing their diets but not their retirement financial planning. I, for example, want paternalistic protection against being sold adulterated drugs or contaminated food.) There’s no logical flaw in the idea that more-liberal policies in a variety of domains might serve the interests of those better-placed to make good choices at the expense of those worse-placed.

There’s an important distinction that’s not being made here. There’s a difference between an uninformed choice, where a buyer is unaware of the true consequences of their decision-making, and a potentially “bad” choice, where people are fully aware of the consequences of their decision-making and are willing to accept the risks. In the former, we should certainly have laws that protect consumers from having to make uninformed decisions where the seller has an advantage that they can exploit. That’s true in our financial markets and in various other places. But it’s not true for adults buying marijuana.

When adults buy marijuana, they’re not being conned into buying a product they don’t understand. For minors, you can more easily make that argument, and that’s why the folks pushing for the end of marijuana prohibition support age limits on its purchase in a regulated market. Like Kleiman, I’d love to see “paternalistic” laws against being sold adulterated marijuana, but those laws are only possible in a legal, regulated marketplace. But identifying any adult purchase of marijuana as a “bad” choice that needs to be prevented is a far different level of paternalism than trying to keep people from being suckered into a bad mortgage or buying contaminated fruit.

The second half of Kleiman’s post tries to make an interesting parallel between prohibition and a lack of prohibition, which was summarized in this tweet:

Legalizing drugs tempts people into drug abuse. Banning them tempts people with drug dealing.

— SameFacts (@SameFacts) January 11, 2013

Both Pete Guither and I found this to be odd, but perhaps for slightly different reasons. I find this to be a very uneven parallel between prohibition and regulated markets. Even under prohibition, the risks of drug abuse still exist, and in some ways they can be exacerbated. Yet under a regulated market, drug dealing is called “commerce”. There aren’t people being tempted into a potentially lucrative (although usually not) life of illegally producing or selling those drugs. The tradeoffs are far from equal in their magnitude.

To expand on that a bit, I certainly know some folks here in Washington who have more interest in trying marijuana now that it’s legal. Taking away that stigma of illegality will certainly expand the amount of folks who are willing to try it. But that subset of the population tends to be older, and far less likely to embark on a lifetime of vaporizer sessions after breakfast. So Kleiman is correct to note that drug use could go up, but on the other side of that, regulated markets that limit sales only to adults will put up a barrier at the other end of the age scale.

Most people accept that lots of young people will still be able to get access to marijuana through friends or with fake ID’s (just as with alcohol), but it’s an additional barrier that didn’t exist before. And it’s being put where it can do the most good, as numerous studies have shown that the earlier in life a marijuana habit begins, the more likely it is to become a more serious problem. Even if that trade-off yields higher overall use rates, it could potentially still be better overall from a drug abuse standpoint.

And thankfully, we already have the experience of Holland over the past several decades to know that an open marketplace for marijuana doesn’t lead to large increases in use. Compared to neighboring countries, the Dutch don’t use marijuana at a higher rate, despite the temptation of coffeeshops where it can be freely purchased.

The main point here is that the first part of Kleiman’s trade-off is largely negligible in its magnitude (and possibly non-existent). Yet the second part is enormous, when you factor in the overall societal costs of funneling tens of billions of dollars into a lucrative black market, tempting those with few options into risking arrest to get some of that money. Kleiman suggests that in poorer neighborhoods, this trade-off might still be close. I find that to be laughable, and more and more people in poor and minority communities are demanding an end to the drug war for the very same reason.