– The funny looking building that I write too many posts about is turning 10 this week.
– Congrats Daddy Constantine.
– Glad to see crisis pregnancy centers having trouble with their deceptive advertising.
– When did appeals to realism become a trump card in pop culture criticism? And when did we agree that a certain kind of Internet commenter is the final arbiter of what is real and what is not? (has a blurred out, but maybe still NSFW picture)
Last week’s contest was won by Theophrastus. It was Bonn, Germany.
This week’s a random location from the Google Maps views, good luck! (you may have noticed that the redesign allows for larger images in these posts from now on, thanks Goldy!)
And Happy Mother’s Day!
Jeremiah 20:14-18
Cursed be the day I was born! May the day my mother bore me not be blessed! Cursed be the man who brought my father the news, who made him very glad, saying, “A child is born to you—a son!” May that man be like the towns the LORD overthrew without pity. May he hear wailing in the morning, a battle cry at noon. For he did not kill me in the womb, with my mother as my grave, her womb enlarged forever. Why did I ever come out of the womb to see trouble and sorrow and to end my days in shame?
Happy Mother’s Day! Discuss.
University of Missouri defensive end Michael Sam became the first openly gay player to be taken in the NFL draft, when the St. Louis Rams selected him in the seventh round, the 249th pick out of 256.
At 6-1, 261 pounds, Sam is considered undersized for his position and not a great fit for the Rams’ 4-3 defense, so he’d have to be considered a long shot to make the team. But still, his high-profile draft selection breaks an awfully important barrier for gay athletes weighing the career implications of coming out of the closet. So kudos to the Rams for using a draft pick to make this statement.
Ten years ago today I published my first blog post, and HA is celebrating with a long overdue facelift: Bigger, cleaner, mobile responsive, and easier on my aging eyes. (Oh no! Changes! Complain in the comment thread if you want—I’m still making tweaks, and I’m eager to consider your feedback before mostly ignoring it.)
As for HA’s bilious innards, well, that’s sure as hell not changing. Re-reading that introductory post, it’s kinda funny how I managed to get the original vision for HA so remarkably right, while at the same time being so totally clueless as to how blogging would come to dominate my life. At the start, I told myself that blogging would be a good exercise in forcing myself to write every day. Writing three, four, sometimes five posts a day was never in my plans.
Anyway, I don’t feel like getting sentimental, and I certainly don’t want to put too much thought into the next ten weeks of HA, let alone the the next ten years. For the moment, I’m back writing here part-time while making a living taking on contract and freelance work. Thank you to everybody in the HA community (except for some of the vilest trolls) for this amazingly weird and gratifying decade. I appreciate being appreciated. Though of course, I also appreciate money.
Jon: The NY State Senate’s great yogurt debate.
Mark Fiore: Creative Execution.
Thom: The Good, The Bad, and the Very, Very Ugly.
Richard Fowler: The tale of indicted GOP Rep. Michael Grimm.
Jon: Occupy Jail.
Monica Redux:
Ed: Michele Bachmann launches mission to block National Women’s History Museum .
ONN: The Onion Week in Review.
Liberal Viewer: FAUX News, “Huge Christian cross isn’t religous”.
FBI investigates Bundy supporters over death threats (via Crooks and Liars).
Sam Seder and Cliff Schecter: What’s the difference between Tea Party and Establishment Republicans?
Stephen: Everywhere is guns.
Mental Floss: 60 Regional foods you shouldn’t eat anywhere else.
Emily’s abortion video.
White House: West Wing Week.
Thom: Gov ID nightmare.
Bill Maher: New Rule for Justice Thomas.
BENGHAAAAAAAAAAZZZZZZZZZIIIIIII!!!!!1!!11!1! Derangement Disorder:
Stephen: Tip and Wag.
Thom: ALEC is trying to take down the EPA.
David Pakman: GOP ObamaCare hearing goes horribly wrong…for the GOP.
Maddow: Massachusetts Tea-Party politician, Mark Fisher’s million dollar ransom.
Sharpton: The death of a GOP talking point:
Richard Fowler: A huge week for minimum wage.
Jon: 2016 will be a lame remix of Bush and Clinton.
White House: Inside the WH solar panels.
Stephen interviews a teabagging vampire.
Ann Telnaes: Climate Change cooking.
Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.
Lots of changes to the website going on tonight. Hopefully. So if you find HA temporarily in a state of disarray, don’t worry. Either I’ll fix it, or give up and return everything to the way it was.
Local transit advocates are righteously pissed at Mayor Ed Murray for his public and private opposition to an initiative that would raise $30 million a year in property taxes to buy back looming Metro bus service cuts within Seattle. And Murray—who has always bristled at the charge that he is in any way “anti-transit”—is righteously pissed right back. So as a public service, I thought I’d take a moment to explain the two sides to each other in the hope of encouraging a Murrayesque consensus.
First of all, Ed, you have to understand that when critics call you anti-transit what they really mean is that you are not sufficiently anti-car. Nobody really thinks you hate buses and trains (well, nobody whose opinion you should care about). They just think that you are way too conventional in terms of your transportation thinking. Not 1950s conventional. But 1990s conventional. And a lot has changed in Seattle since you first headed to Olympia. The shift toward transit, bike, and pedestrian oriented transportation planning that may have seemed radical a quarter century ago is the consensus in Seattle today. And many transportation advocates here rightly fear that your lack of buy-in will get in the way of their urbanist vision.
It’s a balance thing. You may be more pro-transit than the majority of legislators. But that’s not good enough for Seattle.
As for Murray’s critics, you have to understand that he really means this when he says this:
Regionalism must be an element of any transit plan: Any transit financing plan – either short-term or long-term – must reflect the reality that Seattle’s economy depends on people coming into the city from throughout the Puget Sound region.
Ed and I have been having this argument for years. This isn’t just talk. He passionately believes in taking a regional approach to transportation planning, and chafes at any suggestion to the contrary. It’s one of the reasons I didn’t vote for him. But of course, he’s absolutely right. I mean, there’s at least as much utility in saving bus routes serving commuters heading to and from Seattle as there is in saving routes that operate entirely within city borders.
So regionalism should be an element of any transit plan. But the same could be said of the minimum wage, paid sick leave, and universal preschool. All of these would be better implemented at the county or state level. But they’re not. So Seattle has chosen to go it alone. Because that’s the only practical political option we have.
Still, nothing seems to shake Murray’s core belief in the efficacy of regional transportation planning, or his skepticism of Seattle-only solutions, be it for funding light rail expansion or saving the bus service we already have. So if you want to win Murray’s support for a Seattle-only bus funding measure you are going to need to convince him that it is both absolutely urgent and absolutely short term—and that you absofuckinglutely pledge to support his efforts to achieve a permanent regional solution. (Personally, I’m in a fuck the rest of King County mood at the moment, but I understand that’s not constructive.)
Shorter Goldy: Ed, stop being so defensive about being labeled “anti-transit”—it’s meant as a relative term. And everybody else, you need to pledge to support Ed’s regional approach. Then maybe we can all quit the kvetching and save some bus routes.
In fact, it’s so secret that Mayor Ed Murray doesn’t even know it yet! But if he really wants to save Seattle from devastating Metro bus service cuts, and he really wants avoid putting a transit-oriented property tax initiative on the ballot this fall, here’s all he and his allies on the city council need to do: restore the head tax and and raise the commercial parking tax.
Both can be done councilmanically—that is, without being referred to voters—and combined, the two taxes could raise up to $50 million, almost twice that under the proposed property tax initiative. Just push a transit package through the council now, and there’s no need to send the initiative to the ballot. Simple!
That said, I sure don’t buy the argument that there isn’t available levy capacity to fund both transit and universal preschool, and I caution both transit and preschool supporters that this is a rhetorically dangerous argument to push.
– Revisiting public financing for local elections
– I join Seattlish in being proud of Mount Si High
– I like the idea of tech companies being able to disclose NSA surveillance. Go Suzan DelBene.
– Congrats to Ron Sims on the new job chairing the Washington Health Benefit Exchange (Spokesman Review link).
– Portables are gross.
I hadn’t noticed it at the time, I suppose because I was so focused on my own employment situation, but the Seattle Times lost another two political reporters this spring, longtime Olympia correspondent Andrew Garber and promising young local reporter Brian Rosenthal. (And that’s on top of the paper’s recent exodus of women reporters.) Garber has joined the Seattle Police Department as a senior media advisor, while Rosenthal’s Twitter bio says he he is now covering Texas state government for the Austin bureau of the Houston Chronicle.
Congratulations, Brian, I guess. But how bad must it be to work at the Seattle Times to make moving to Texas a better option? (I know—Austin. But still, it’s fucking hot, and filled with Texans.)
As for Garber, I believe his departure may leave the Olympian’s Brad Shannon as the last man standing from the Olympia press corps I met when I first started going down to the state capitol a decade ago. So I’ll make the same joke I made when David Postman left the paper: If many more reporters leave the profession to take media relations positions, pretty soon there won’t be any media left to relate to. (Oh wait. That’s pretty much what’s already happened.)
As far as I know, neither Garber or Rosenthal have been replaced yet.
Now that SeaTac has and Seattle will likely have $15 minimum wages, we ought to look at what that means for the Port. Since the lawsuit is still underway in SeaTac, maybe there won’t be a gaping hole. But for now, it looks likely that jobs at SeaTac Airport and Port of Seattle facilities in Seattle won’t be covered by the minimum wage laws.
Presuming that the previous ruling gets upheld, I see a couple ways to protect the quality of those jobs. First the state could change the law to make it so that state sponsored port authorities have to apply all local minimum wage laws. I’m not a lawyer, and I haven’t read the lower court verdict, but I assume this could be done legislatively. That would be a bit of a stretch if the state Senate is still controlled by Republicans, but if it requires a constitutional amendment that’ll pretty much be off the table. So that means the Port, I guess. Elections are on odd numbered years, but pressure can be put on the members now (click on the individual pictures to email them).
Of course, the market will take care of some of this. Alaska Airlines have already raised their wages (not to $15) in response to the initiative in SeaTac.
Well, as prospective employees flocked to apply for $15-an-hour jobs, Alaska Airlines raised wages for its contract employees inside the airport to $12 an hour. Clearly, in order to attract and retain the best workers in the area, Alaska Airlines had to sweeten the pot, even saying the new wages “more accurately reflect the local market.” Some of the raises were as high as 28%, showing how a rising wage tide can lift all boats, rather than the right-wing idea that jobs can only be created when wages are depressed.
Still and all, if the two most important cities for the Port Of Seattle raise their minimum wage. The port ought to follow suit, at least in those cities, and preferably throughout their jurisdiction.
The research literature on whether minimum wage increases kill jobs is decidedly mixed. Some economists have found that hikes lead to small job losses among teens and in industries like fast food. Others have found that losses are nonexistent, or at least negligible. In the end, I tend to argue that even if you assume reasonable job losses, middle-class and poor families come out ahead in the bargain. Though some workers end up unemployed, enough get raises to make the tradeoff worthwhile.
But that assumes we don’t lift the pay floor too high, too fast. Minimum wage studies have typically looked at small increases, somewhere around 50 cents or a dollar. Seattle’s proposal would be far larger. It would also have virtually no U.S. precedent.
So, there’s no good evidence to show that increasing the minimum wage to $15 would kill jobs, but there’s no proof that it wouldn’t. So we better not try. Or something.
Because if there’s one thing that capitalism discourages, it’s taking risks.
Now is the perfect time for Seattle to pass a “millionaires tax.” With the minimum wage battle coming toward a peaceable end (or so the mayor promises), city council member Kshama Sawant will be free to turn toward the next item on her socialist agenda: taxing the income of millionaires. And with the city in need of finding new revenue to adequately fund human services (not to mention universal preschool, transit, and parks), who better to turn to for a little extra cash than Seattle’s untaxed rich?
But more importantly, there may never come another time when the Washington State Supreme Court is more predisposed toward revisiting the controversial constitutional question that has long threatened our state’s prosperity: Is income property?
That was the 5-4 ruling of the court in 1933 after voters overwhelmingly passed a graduated income tax initiative, and it has hampered our state government’s ability to fund our basic needs ever since. Even in its day it was a controversial ruling, based on scarce and tenuous precedent—precedent that has since been rejected by every other state and federal court in the land. Everywhere else in the United States of America the courts have determined that income is a transaction that is taxable as such. Only in Washington State do we cling to this arbitrarily contrary definition, backed by not a single word of our state constitution. Go ahead, read it. It’s not mentioned once.
Normally, our elected justices are loath to tackle issues that might anger voters—for example, the decade and a half of legal wrangling it took to force the court to issue its equally inescapable and unpopular ruling on the now-dead two-thirds supermajority requirement for tax increases. But the shameless contempt our legislators have shown toward the court’s McCleary decision may put justices in a different frame of mind.
Under McCleary, the court ordered legislators to increase K-12 spending by an additional $4 billion to $7 billion by 2017 in order to meet our constitutional “paramount duty … to make ample provision for the education of all children.” But that is a legally binding order that legislators aren’t even close to fulfilling. Sure, they’ve restored a little bit of funding to public schools as the post-Great Recession recovery continues. But anybody who knows anything about the state budget, and who discusses it with integrity (that rules out you, Seattle Times editorial board), understands that it is mathematically impossible to comply with McCleary without raising new revenue. And legislators have made zero progress toward that end.
So what are the justices to do? They can’t very well pass tax legislation themselves—that is beyond the power of the judicial branch—and even if they could seize control of the budget writing process, they couldn’t do much better given the insufficient resources available. And as much as I’d love to see some legislators tossed in jail on contempt charges, I’m not sure that would be either legal or constructive.
But what the court could do, given the opportunity presented by a Seattle millionaires tax and the inevitable lawsuit it would provoke, is overturn the 1933 decision, tossing a political hornets nest into house and senate chambers by dramatically multiplying the revenue options available to lawmakers.
That might send a message.
Again, under normal circumstances, the justices would avoid this issue like the plague. Any opportunity to defer due to some procedural or preemptory issue would likely be seized upon. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and with a constitutional crisis looming, the court may welcome any opportunity to give the legislature a kick in the pants.
Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat better watch his tongue, or he soon may find himself writing at some foul-mouthed blog:
Dear Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education:
Hello from the other Washington! I’m writing to say that you can take your No Child Left Behind law and shove it.
I’d add “up your ass,” but that’s just me. Other than that, I completely agree with everything Westneat has to say about No Child Left Behind’s failed testing regime, and the political stupidity of picking a fight over it with Washington State:
I’ll close by saying I think you’re messing with the wrong state. You should try to change this “fundamentally flawed” law, rather than impose it on us out of pique. A prediction: We like to do our own thing out here anyway, and your action will only fuel more boycotts of these tests, as well as suspicion of the entire education-reform industry.
When those letters go out informing parents at every public school in the state that their school is a failure, parents, teachers, and administrators should mock these letters with celebratory dunce caps and All Children Left Behind parties. Perhaps schools should even take a day off from mandated testing to teach students important lessons of civil disobedience in American history, like the pre-Revolutionary War non-importation agreements and the various peaceful protests and boycotts of the civil rights movement.
This is a teachable moment, if not a testable one. Which is exactly the point.
Washington State will be better off resisting the feds on No Child Left Behind, and the rest of the nation would do well to our lead.
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