Goldy

The state Senate Health and Long-Term Care Committee held a work session last Thursday to discuss national health care reform, and how the various proposals might impact our state-administered Medicaid program. Testifying was DSHS staffer Roger Gantz, and almost from the start, Sen. Cheryl Pflug (R-Obstructionville) attempted to disrupt the discussion by threatening him with an ethics complaint.

Her beef? DSHS and the committee were using state resources to research and discuss pending federal legislation, an action she equated with illegal lobbying and campaigning.

What a load of shit.

As Sen. Ed Murray (D-Reality) helpfully pointed out, it is not an unusual practice for committees to have briefings on the scenarios the federal government may act on, and goes on to suggest that Pflug’s own efforts to threaten and intimidate Gantz, may in fact violate Senate rules on how they treat people coming before their committees.

But Pflug’s lack of etiquette aside, what this exchange really demonstrates is how incredibly frightened Republicans are to have a debate about healthcare reform at all, and how eager they are to shut it down. I mean, honestly, apart from the senators and the two people testifying, what are there, six other people in the hearing room, and maybe another couple dozen watching on TVW? And for this she’s willing to make herself look like an idiot by suggesting the Health and Long-Term Care Committee is ethically bound to avoid any long-term planning?

Coward.

Or if you hate children, and don’t want to properly educate them, I guess you’d want to vote Yes on I-1033.

Former state Republican Party Chair Chris Vance, has a somewhat startling admission to make:

I have spent the bulk of my career opposing higher taxes and increased spending. In the Legislature I voted against Governor Mike Lowry’s 1993 budget and tax increases. On the King County Council I voted against two budgets because they increased spending and raised property taxes — budgets written by my fellow Republicans while we were in the majority. During all of my 11 years in elected office I served on the budget writing committee, and every year I listened to Democratic governors and county executives talk about tight budgets, while revenues and spending went up and up.

As a fiscal conservative, therefore, I hope I can say this with some credibility: King County really does have a revenue problem. In fact, it is closer to a revenue crisis.

See, when I lay out the facts behind the counties’ structural revenue deficit (and it’s not just King County, but all counties), there are those who dismiss me as just the Horses’s Ass guy. But here’s Vance, a lifelong Republican and self-described fiscal conservative, pretty much making the same exact case.

Huh.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSL3dFcTfXY[/youtube]

Not exactly sure why, but I haven’t laughed this hard in a long time. Guess I’ve always had a thing for escalation of the absurd.

Those of you who have been missing Will Kelly-Kamp’s posts here on HA (and there certainly must be at least a few of you) will be pleased to know that he just landed a paying gig as a freelancer at The Stranger, where his posts on city issues, transportation and politics in general will appear on Slog on a daily basis.  Starting… well… now.

I first gave Will posting privileges, not because we agree on everything (we don’t), but because I saw him as a natural (if at times raw) writing talent whose snark, wit and irreverence meshed well with the attitude I had cultivated here on HA. It’s great to see him rewarded for his efforts, and I’m confident he’ll only become a better writer under The Stranger’s editorial guidance.

Congrats Will.

One more quick comment about the Seattle School District’s new assignment plan, to note that with the majority of students already attending neighborhood schools, much of the impact of the plan will depend on how thoughtfully the district redraws the new reference maps. For example, take my daughter’s old school, Graham Hill Elementary. Living on the same block as the school, we couldn’t get much closer, so no amount of gerrymandering would have impacted us. But the same wouldn’t be true for some of her friends who lived only a few blocks away.

The problem with the current map for the Graham Hill community is that the school lies near the northern end of a stretched out reference area that extends southward along Lake Washington before jutting west past Rainier AVE, just south of Othello ST. Indeed, back during the 2006 closure process, one of the arguments the district used to justify closing the school was that so few of its students lived within its boundaries; not surprising considering that the bulk of its potential families actually live closer to one of three other other schools — Brighton, Wing Luke and Dunlop — and in many cases, closer to all three schools than to Graham Hill.

On the other hand, when looking at the percentage of students who actually lived within a one-mile radius, Graham Hill had one of the highest walkability scores in the district, drawing many of its students from the Whitworth reference area just to the north. Down in our area of the city, most families already are choosing their neighborhood elementary school… they’re just not doing so along the artificial boundary lines the district has drawn.

So if the district were to adopt a neighborhood assignment plan while leaving the current boundaries unchanged, it could fracture the communities at four neighborhood schools, while ironically increasing transportation costs. Surely an unintended consequence, but a very possible one nonetheless.

My concern, coming off my unhappy experience with the school closure process, is whether the district is pursuing this strategy for the sake of efficiency, with too little empathy for how disruptive this policy change could be for the current generation of students, and without nearly enough input from the neighborhood schools themselves.

I guess we’ll soon find out.

A lot of families are awfully anxious as they await tomorrow’s release of the Seattle School District’s new assignment plan, one which intends to assign the majority of students to their neighborhood schools, with fewer options and less flexibility than we currently enjoy.

Will many of my friends here in SE Seattle, whose children are comfortably on an academic track they thought would guarantee them a slot at Garfield, happily accept an assignment to Rainier Beach? I don’t think so. Likewise, on the even more contentious issue of middle schools, an assignment to Aki Kurose in its present form would be the equivalent of a one-way ticket out of the district.

Criticize me all you want for stating the obvious, but that’s just the way it is.

I’m on the record as a passionate proponent of neighborhood schools, but I’ve been equally vocal in criticizing the lack of equity within the district. And with schools increasingly relying on PTSA money to fund things that used to be considered part of basic education (tutors, teaching assistants, art, music, physical education, books, equipment, field trips, etc.), the disparity between the educational haves and have nots can only grow wider.

At some schools in more affluent neighborhoods, PTSA’s raise more than $1,000 per student a year to pay for services the district and state can no longer afford to provide, while some schools in poorer and working class neighborhoods have no PTSA at all. This unofficial and unspoken “PTSA Levy” amounts to a not-so-secret tuition system that only exacerbates the inherent demographic disparity.

A few years back when we toured the TOPS K-8 program in the hopes of securing our daughter a desirable academic home for middle school (she got in for 4th grade, but we ultimately declined), the PTSA representative wasn’t shy about making his expectations clear. TOPS would give our children the equivalent of a private school education we were told (and in my opinion, oversold), and those of us who could afford that type of tuition were expected to pony up accordingly. Of course, there’s no enforcement mechanism, but there are parents at some schools who routinely write four and even five figure checks, while during our seven years at Graham Hill we where happy if we raised better than $50 a student.

No doubt Seattle would be better off with a neighborhood school system that would be more convenient to parents, provide much greater continuity to students, and save the district millions of dollars in transportation and other costs. But attempting to address the assignment issue before meaningfully addressing the equity issue, virtually assures that the current level of disparity between schools will only grow worse, while the district’s seemingly inexorable march toward resegregation will continue apace.

So here’s hoping the new assignment plan is about much more than just saving money.

Why would we want a government sponsored public healthcare option, when we have corporations like Wellpoint competing with each other to look after our interests?

The proud citizens of Brazil weren’t the only ones celebrating Rio’s selection as the host of the 2016 Summer Olympics; American conservatives apparently held an impromptu Carnival of their own:

When the International Olympic Committee voted against Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics this morning — after the President and First Lady flew to Copenhagen to push for it in person — the Weekly Standard newsroom burst into applause.

“Cheers erupt at Weekly Standard world headquarters,” wrote editor John McCormack in a post titled “Chicago Loses! Chicago Loses!” … McCormack’s fellow conservatives joined in the celebration…

“Chicago and Tokyo eliminated. No Obamalypics,” Michelle Malkin tweeted, following up with, “Game over on Obamalympics. Next up, Obamacare.”

“Please, please let me break this news to you. It’s so sweet,” said Glenn Beck on his radio show.

“Hahahahaha,” wrote Red State’s Erick Erickson. … The Drudge Report announced the news like so: “WORLD REJECTS OBAMA: CHICAGO OUT IN FIRST ROUND. THE EGO HAS LANDED.”

“For those of you … who are upset that I sound gleeful, I am. I don’t deny it. I’m happy,” Limbaugh said. “Anything that gets in the way of Barack Obama accomplishing his domestic agenda is fine with me.”

“ChicagP\/\/n3D!” tweeted Newsmax, of recent fame for running, then pulling, a column about an impending military coup against Obama.

Yup, conservative Republicans really do hate America. Or perhaps, as TPM’s Josh Marshall astutely quipped, right-wingers just don’t consider Chicago to be part of America?

For the life of me I can’t find an obvious way on Comcast’s website to report a downed wire, so if anybody from Comcast reads my blog:  hey… you’ve got a wire down in the street on S. Morgan, just East of the intersection with 51st AVE S!

Just thought you’d want to know.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj4I2f0ZO6g[/youtube]

If there’s anything worse than being a crybaby, it’s being a fake crybaby.

Back in June, when I wrote that mayoral candidate Mike McGinn was having trouble securing endorsements from fellow environmentalists due to his reputation for not working and playing well with others, my post drew passionate rebuttals from McGinn and his supporters. And a few weeks back, when I reported that his fellow environmental leaders were, um, less than enthusiastic about McGinn’s surprising primary victory, I once again heard from McGinn faithful, accusing me of pulling this meme out of my ass.

“[T]he sentiment I heard from many of his fellow environmental leaders was more along the line of ‘oh well, I guess we kinda have to endorse him,’ rather than the outright enthusiasm one might have expected,” I wrote at the time. But, well, I’m man enough to admit my mistakes, for it looks like they didn’t really hafta endorse McGinn after all:

In an affront to environmental poster boy, Sierra Club leader and mayoral candidate Mike McGinn, the King County Conservation Voters have decided not to endorse either candidate in the mayor’s race.

Now, McGinn and his supporters can get all huffy if they want about the works and plays well with others meme, but when the region’s broadest coalition of environmental leaders just can’t bring itself to endorse one of their own — a man with unchallenged environmental credentials — it’s gotta say something about the many toes he’s stepped on (biked over?), if not his political style, doesn’t it?

I’m not saying I want a Mr. Nice Guy in the mayor’s office. It’s just always struck me as ironic that one of the big knocks against Mayor Nickels was his alleged unilateralism, and now we may be on the verge of electing a new mayor with the same bull in a china shop reputation.

Whenever I attempt to highlight the growing danger of the far right’s increasingly violent rhetoric by provocatively pondering the potential impact of liberals openly carrying arms, my friend at the local Newsmax-wannabe site Orbusmax excitedly throws up an above the fold headline, warning about my dangerous, violent rhetoric. Some people just don’t get nuance.

So I wonder if The Orb is equally frightened by the column that appeared yesterday in his beloved Newsmax, which longingly mulled over the “gaining possibility” of a military coup to “resolve the Obama problem”…?

There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America’s military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the “Obama problem.” Don’t dismiss it as unrealistic.

[…] Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.

Military intervention is what Obama’s exponentially accelerating agenda for “fundamental change” toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama’s radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.

Unthinkable? Then think up an alternative, non-violent solution to the Obama problem. Just don’t shrug and say, “We can always worry about that later.”

A military coup in defense of the Constitution? Uh-huh.

Still waiting to see that alarmist, above-the-fold headline, Orb.

Following up on yesterday’s post in which I explain for reporters why population-plus-inflation does not result in a stable revenue stream necessary to maintain government services at constant levels, I thought I’d quickly raise one more question in the minds of the press before they attempt to cover I-1033 in an objective and even-handed manner: what problem, exactly, is I-1033 intended to solve?

It can’t be because Washington is a high tax state. Even by the measurement of the conservative Tax Foundation, the organization whose stats Tim Eyman has long cherry-picked to support his tax cutting initiatives, Washington now ranks 35th in terms of state and local tax burden, and has climbed to 9th on the list of states with the best business tax climate.

And it certainly can’t be because government spending is out of control. Again, according to the Tax Foundation, Washington’s state and local tax burden (the percentage of one’s income one pays in state and local taxes, on average) has steadily dropped over the past 15 years from 10.4% in 1995 to 8.9% in 2008. And as I have pointed out on numerous occasions, per capita state tax revenues, adjusted for inflation, have also sunk to a 15-year low… and that’s before most of the impact of the Great Recession kicked in.

So what exactly is Timmy trying to fix? Certainly not out-of-control government spending. And certainly not potholes.