Goldy

The headline in the Seattle Times sounds awfully hopeful, “Wash. lawmakers take next step toward ed reform.” So what exactly is that next step?

They haven’t found a single new dollar to pay for their ideas, but state lawmakers and education officials are pushing ahead with plans to start implementing education reform.

A new education reform committee recently held its first meeting. It is chaired by the superintendent of public instruction and counts among its members the speaker of the House and the chair of the Senate Education Committee, so the political will to move on is there.

No money to pay for their ideas, or any idea how to raise the money, but at least they started a new committee.  Can’t get much bolder than that.

But some of the faces around the table have sat at similar meetings, battling similar issues for years.

Oh. That’s not an encouraging sign.

First came the governor’s Washington Learns task force that published an ambitious plan to improve education in 2006. That report led to the state’s new Early Learning Department, but the Legislature could not find the money to implement most of the other ideas.

There’s that pesky money problem again.

Then came the reinvented State Board of Education, which moved ahead on some related ideas, including new high school math requirements and a proposal to require high school students to earn 24 credits instead of 19 to graduate.

Next, the Basic Education Finance Task Force, wrote a road map last summer for completely changing the way the state distributes its education dollars. The task force’s ambitious plans would cost an estimated $3 billion to $4 billion a year, on top of the $7 billion a year the state already spends on education.

And the money…?

The 2009 Legislature adopted some of the task force’s ideas and put a new group, the Quality Education Council, in charge of implementing the plan, but with a new twist. This time, the task force is also in charge of finding the money to pay for the changes.

Rep. Skip Priest, R-Federal Way, has sat around many education reform tables, including Washington Learns and the Basic Education Finance Task Force.

“I think it’s time we have a sense of urgency about this issue,” Priest said after the Quality Education Council held its first meeting at the end of August.

No shit, Sherlock.

Honestly, there is no substantive education reform without the money to pay for it, and all the committees and commissions in the world won’t change that. So in a state facing its deepest fiscal crisis perhaps ever, and a long term  structural revenue deficit as far as the eye can see, the real “next step” to education reform in Washington state is an honest debate about tax restructuring, and unless Republicans like Skip Priest are willing to push for that debate, they really aren’t approaching education reform with any sense of urgency at all.

I’m just sayin’.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofxVMlU97yA[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yUMQR_Bo7s[/youtube]

In Part II of my “Talkin’ with Teabaggers” adventure, I chat with an elderly gentleman protesting last Thursday’s pro-healthcare reform rally (you know, the one that never happened).  No snarky subtitles or silly inserts this time, just a few minutes of unedited conversation about healthcare, and why us whippersnappers don’t need or deserve it.

In what has become an ironic cliche that typifies the inanity of the current healthcare reform debate, this eighty-ish-year-old man may be opposed to government run health insurance, but he sure does love him some Medicare. When asked if he’s happy with Medicare he says “yes.” When asked if he’d want it taken away, he says “no.” When asked if the government has done an “okay job” running Medicare, he says “As far as I’m concerned, it’s been okay with us.”

In fact, his high degree of satisfaction with his government-run Medicare seems to form the basis for his opposition to any plan that might include a government-run public option for the rest of us. “Why mess it up for old people?” he asked me.

Good question. Perhaps we should give up on this “public option” thing and just allow everybody to buy into Medicare, regardless of age? I know he thinks young folks don’t need it (hell, he didn’t have health insurance until he was 40, so why should anybody else?) but if that’s true then they’d sure be cheap to insure. Meanwhile, they’d still be subsidizing his Medicare coverage through their payroll taxes, just like they’re doing now, so how could that possibly mess anything up for him?

Yeah, sure… under that scenario, Medicare would be the public option. But shhhh, don’t call it that, and we might get his support.

I mostly have a reputation as a foul-mouthed, partisan muckraker and agitator, and with a brand name like HorsesAss.org, why shouldn’t I? But I think it of interest to note that in the wake of Friday’s WTO ruling that EU nations illegally subsidized Boeing rival Airbus, I actually took the time to interview a US congressman, and write a thoughtful, objective analysis of the decision, whereas the Seattle Times—our region’s paper of record—relied solely on reporting and analysis from the Associated Press and Bloomberg News.

A ruling in a controversial international trade dispute that directly impacts one of our region’s most important employers, and the Times couldn’t even be bothered to assign a reporter to cover the story and attempt to get a richer local angle. Kinda pathetic.

Now, I don’t mean to pat myself on the back. It was Rep. Jay Inslee’s staff who deserves the credit for reaching out to me and offering a few minutes with the congressman—an opportunity I jumped at—but if Inslee was making himself available to foul-mouthed bloggers like me, you can be sure he was making himself available to the Seattle Times. In fact, I can’t help but wonder if Inslee only had the time to talk with me because most of the rest of our local media simply weren’t interested in putting the effort into such an admittedly wonky story?

Perhaps I was too harsh in implying some sort of bias in our local media’s refusal to cover last week’s pro-healthcare reform rally? Maybe our local media is just lazy?

In defending his efforts to achieve a local monopoly, Times publisher Frank Blethen long promised that freed from the financial drain of the JOA, his newspaper would emerge stronger and more vibrant, but most observers would agree that the Times’ local coverage has continued to shrink since the P-I ceased print publication. Here’s hoping that once this economy turns around, Blethen actually attempts to fulfill his civic promise.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOygV8lvaaU[/youtube]

At Thursday’s healthcare reform rally (you know, the one the Seattle Times insists never happened), there didn’t seem to be much to be gained from hanging with my fellow travelers, so I wandered across the street to the couple dozen, sign-waving counter-protesters, and attempted to strike up a conversation. I eased into it with a subject on which we could all agree—cupcakes—and then moved into a policy discussion from there.

Posted above is a six-minute conversation with the guy with the bullhorn, in which I present his answers unedited, and totally within context (my snarky subtitles and inserts aside). If at times he comes off as a tad inconsistent, it had nothing to do with any iMovie magic.

That said, I think he does make a point which is worth considering when attempting to refute the arguments coming from the other side. When talking about Social Security and Medicare he freely acknowledges that “these programs might seem like they take great care of people, which is wonderful, they do,” but he simply doesn’t believe that the money will be there long term to continue to provide this care in the future… and this is the same financial trap he sees our nation falling into with a public option.

This is different from the government can’t do anything right sentiment that seems to be shared by some of his companions (even while lovin’ their Medicare, which I’ll get to in a later clip), and deserves a different and more thoughtful response. Bullhorn man clearly doesn’t believe that he will ever benefit from these programs, and thus resents paying into them now, and he doesn’t want to pay for yet another social program—healthcare reform—that won’t benefit him in the long run either. And who would?

When he talks about the current systems having already been “robbed of their money” by Congress, it appears that he doesn’t seem to understand that Social Security et al have always been “pay as you go” programs, in which payroll deductions from the current generation of workers pays the benefits of the current generation of retirees, but it would be a mistake to dismiss these concerns nonetheless. Republicans may have lost the political battle to privatize Social Security, but their rhetoric about its imminent collapse is clearly paying dividends in the current healthcare debate.

Anyway, make of the video what you will, and please excuse the shoddy camerawork. In such close quarters I have to hold the camera so far back that I can’t actually see the view screen, so I don’t always get everybody in frame; such is the life of the amateur video blogger.

As has been widely reported, the World Trade Organization ruled today that Airbus received illegal subsidies from European Union nations, setting the stage for billions of dollars in sanctions against the world’s leading aircraft manufacturer. But what does all this mean for Boeing?

While the thousand-plus page document has yet to be released, Washington state’s congressional delegation was the first to be briefed by U.S. trade officials, and I just got off the phone with Rep. Jay Inslee, who shared some of the details as well as some thoughts on how this ongoing trade dispute might play out. And while it could be a couple years before WTO sanctions are officially invoked, if ever, Inslee believes the ruling could and should have a near term impact on Boeing’s prospects.

The most obvious and immediate impact could be on the controversial Air Force refueling tanker contract, originally granted to Airbus under disputed circumstances, and now awaiting rebidding as the Air Force reconsiders the specifications for the program. Boeing had originally proposed a tanker based on the 767, which would have kept that model’s Everett, WA assembly line running for the foreseeable future, but in a blow to our local economy the Air Force initially selected a tanker based on the bigger Airbus A330, largely citing that model’s greater fuel carrying capacity.

But whether Boeing ultimately rebids a 767-based tanker, or one built on the larger capacity 777, Inslee argues that the Air Force “can and should” take today’s WTO ruling into consideration. Although the ruling is under appeal, and thus imposition of WTO sanctions are still a year or two off, Inslee pointed out that trade agreements have always given the U.S. a legal right to exercise a “national security exemption” when awarding military contracts, and now the WTO findings have given the U.S. a moral justification as well.

“I don’t know how you can justify to American citizens giving billions of dollars of contracts to a company that has acted illegally,” Inslee told me, arguing that the WTO ruling “should have a bearing on, if not outright bar” another Airbus tanker contract.

As for the impact on sales of commercial airplanes, Inslee explained that once appeals have been exhausted and the WTO sets a dollar value to the sanctions, President Obama could set a tariff of sorts on the sale of Airbus products in the U.S., thus making their aircraft less competitive compared to Boeing’s. While European sources have attempted to downplay Boeing’s victory by claiming that the ruling does not apply to the A350—Airbus’s competitor to the 787—Inslee says that the U.S. could still impose tariffs on the A350 as a sanction for the billions of dollars of illegal “launch aid” assistance Airbus received from European governments for the A380.

Furthermore, the only reason the A350 wasn’t part of today’s decision is that WTO rules prevent plaintiffs from adding to complaints once they’re filed. Inslee says that the U.S. has accumulated plenty of evidence of similar illegal launch aid for the A350 since the current complaint was filed in 2004, and would likely file a new complaint unless an agreement is reached in the interim.

Of course, European nations have also filed a counter-suit alleging illegal government subsidies to Boeing, much of it focused on the billions of dollars of tax credits extended by our own state legislature in its efforts to keep 787 final assembly here in Washington state, but Inslee argues that these subsidies are different in both scale and substance.

While the $3.5 billion tax credit extended Boeing certainly has a huge impact on state coffers, it is significantly less than the $20 billion in direct cash aid Airbus received from European governments. Inslee also notes that unlike the illegal Airbus subsidies, the Washington state tax credits are not technically limited to Boeing only, and would be equally available to Airbus and other aerospace manufacturers should they seek to operate similar manufacturing facilities in state. (Our state constitution technically forbids tailoring tax incentives to specific businesses, though in practice that provision is pretty easy to get around.) In any case, the WTO has in the past been loathe to mess with the nitty gritty of local tax code, and the sovereignty issues that would entail.

So if the Airbus ruling remains on appeal, the counter-suit remains unsettled, the size of the sanction remains unknown, and the ultimate imposition date remains a year or two in the future, how could today’s ruling have any immediate impact on commercial aviation sales? By creating uncertainty in what is already a very volatile business.

“Airlines placing orders with Airbus now, just don’t know how much sanctions will cost them when they take delivery,” Inslee suggested. And considering the huge and long term investment an airline must make in adopting one model or another, that in itself is enough to count today’s ruling as a win for Boeing, and perhaps, for the Puget Sound economy as well.

One thing to note about yesterday’s pro-health reform rally is that there were no violent confrontations between supporters and counter-protesters… which is really too bad, because with a few thousand of us and only a couple dozen of them, we could’ve really kicked us some teabagger ass.

Oh, it’s not that I advocate violence, it’s just that apparently that’s the only way we’re going to get any media attention, for on the same day that the Seattle Times totally ignores a massive—and peaceful—pro-reform rally in its own backyard, it sees fit to reprint an AP story on the finger-biting incident Los Angeles.

Large, peaceful, pro-reform rally in Seattle: not newsworthy. Isolated and bizarre finger-biting incident in LA: stop the presses! That’s the level of coverage of the health care debate we’re getting in Seattle.

Next time, perhaps I’ll show up at one of these events armed to the teeth and swinging a samurai sword; betcha that’s worthy of a headline.

Author and food activist Jill Richardson will be in Seattle tonight to speak about and sign her new book Recipe for America: Why Our Food System is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It. Sponsored by Drinking Liberally, Northwest Progressive Institute and Sustainable Seattle, the event will be held 8:00 – 10:00 PM at Fx McRory’s, 406 Occidental Ave. S. in Pioneer Square.

Hope to see you all there.

I’ve no idea where I was yesterday afternoon, but it couldn’t possibly have been at an energetic, 3000-person strong pro-healthcare reform rally in Westlake Park, because I couldn’t find even the tiniest mention of it in this morning’s Seattle Times, so apparently, it never happened. And I have absolutely no idea where all those photos and videos on my camera came from.

It’s like my own personal Twilight Zone.

Of course, whatever didn’t happen in downtown Seattle yesterday, the picture above doesn’t even begin to do it justice, with a sea of bodies extending building to curb, and all the way back under the cover of the trees. Aided by a live band and the wafting aroma of food from street vendors, there was a party atmosphere to the rally which made it feel kinda like a Bumbershoot pre-event. Or at least, it would have felt that way, had it actually happened.

There was also, apparently, no counter-protest yesterday. No really, there wasn’t much of one, with only a couple dozen angry teabaggers at most, cordoned off along a four-foot-wide strip of sidewalk in front of the Starbucks across the street.

This was the most flattering picture I could find, and it’s pretty anemic:

But like I said, since our paper of record didn’t bother to report on it, none of this actually happened. 3000 people of all ages, races and walks of life didn’t crowd into Westlake Park to rally in support of health care reform. A congressman didn’t join business, labor and civic leaders in encouraging the crowd to make their support known. And a well-organized effort by counter-protesters couldn’t muster up much more than a bullhorn and a handful of signs.

None of this happened yesterday in downtown Seattle because no ex-marine angrily yelled down a congressman and nobody got the tip of their finger bitten off and nothing apparently is going to get the media to move from the well-entrenched meme that support for reform is steadily slipping as the public turns against Obama and the Democratic Congress… not even a show of force by the public itself.

UPDATE:
Apparently, I wasn’t the only one imagining yesterday’s health care reform rally, and like me, they managed to capture their hallucinations on camera too.  Weird.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouYXq5tSXb0&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

So, while flipping through the channels I stopped on 33, where I noticed for the first time the slogan for ION Television: “Positively Entertaining.”

Get it? Ion… positively… it’s a pun. A scientific pun.

See, ions are electrically charged atoms or molecules. Sure, some are negatively charged, depending on the number of protons and electrons (CATION Television, now that would be positively entertaining, assuming it’s entertaining at all), but let’s not pick nits. It’s still a pretty damn clever pun.

Except… what with the woeful state of science education in the U.S. these days, who the hell would know?

For example, take the Pew Research Center Science Knowledge Quiz… no really, take it. And in my opinion, if you don’t get a perfect 12 out of 12, you’re a fucking idiot. But don’t you worry, a less than perfect score would put you in the company of 90-percent of your fellow Americans who couldn’t answer basic science questions like are the continents moving, or which is smaller, an atom or an electron?

And if you didn’t get that last one—and only 46-percent of Americans did—how the hell are you going to get the pun in ION TV’s slogan?

Or more importantly, how is our nation going to maintain itself as a scientific, technological and economic leader when, say, only 32-percent of Americans accept evolution as true? 32-percent. That’s pathetic.

So when Susan Hutchison and her supporters insist that her service as a director at the anti-science Discovery Institute has absolutely no bearing on the race for King County Executive, I say we positively can’t afford that kind of dumbed down political leadership.

About an hour before the scheduled start, this is about the best the teabaggers could put together.

The other day, when I opined on defamation law and the vindictive and authoritarian way some establishment types would like to see it used to rein in bloggers like me, one of the examples I used was that of my friend Carla and the way she infuriated the pusillanimous pantywaists that patrol the comment threads at Blue Oregon. Carla had merely suggested, after laying out supporting evidence, that “it’s my belief” that a well known lobbyist was involved in feeding negative stories to the press, and it was for this act of subjective speculation that a handful of trolls relentlessly warned her about crossing a line that could lead to financial ruin.

In truth, they didn’t just warn Carla, they gloated over the notion that she might be dragged into court on defamation charges. It was, at least for some of the trolls, an attempt at intimidation, pure and simple. It was also laughable, as proven once again this week by a real life defamation suit in which a jury determined that even honest to God false statements didn’t rise to the very high standard needed to prove defamation under U.S. law.

Metropolitan King County Councilmember Jane Hague’s 2007 re-election campaign made a false statement about a supporter of her opponent but didn’t defame him, a jury has determined.

A King County Superior Court jury decided Aug. 28 that Hague doesn’t owe damages to Bellevue electrician Paul Brecht because a flier mailed by her campaign didn’t meet the legal standard for defamation.

Although the flier erroneously said Brecht had “at least one assault conviction,” the jury determined Hague and her campaign consultants either didn’t know the statement was false or didn’t act with “reckless disregard” to whether it was true or false.

A judge ruled earlier that Brecht’s public support for County Council candidate Richard Pope made him a public figure in the case, requiring that he prove defamation under a higher standard than is required for other citizens.

“I would characterize it as an overwhelming victory for the defendants,” Hague attorney Scott Ellerby told the press, apparently celebrating his client’s right to use baseless lies to impugn the reputation of an opponent’s supporters. But, you know, that’s the way our defamation laws work. As Erica explains over at Publicola:

[A]lthough the jury did determine that Hague had defamed the supporter, Paul Brecht, it did not rule that she had made the false statements [in] actual malice or “reckless disregard” for the truth, and so did not require her to pay compensation. Brecht had to meet a higher-than-usual standard to prove defamation because he was determined to be a “public figure” for the purposes of the campaign—in part because, as a 2008 deposition makes clear, he frequently defended Pope in the comments on political web sites and was interviewed about the campaign on KING5 and KUOW.

Participating in comment threads makes one a public figure? That’s a high standard indeed. As it should be.

There is a healthcare reform rally scheduled for 6PM tonight at Westlake Park in downtown Seattle, and I urge everybody to take the time to visibly show your support. In addition to a list of speakers including Rep. Jim McDermott, I’m told there will also be a live band.

Word is that teabaggers are organizing an effort to disrupt the event, and plan to start showing up between 4PM and 4:30PM. It’s time to show them and the media that there are many more of us than there are of them, and that we refuse to give in to their tactics of intimidation. I plan to be there, camera in hand, just in case.

UPDATE:
Perhaps those more knowledgeable on the subject can correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe since Washington is an open carry state, and Mayor Nickels proposed gun ban has never gone into effect, it would be perfectly legal to proudly carry and display one’s firearms at today’s rally. And since this is the West, where gun ownership transcends the political spectrum, it would be awfully interesting (and even amusing) to see how the teabaggers might react when confronted with gun-toting liberals.

Just thinkin’ out loud….

Cue the world’s smallest violin, those crybabies at the Seattle Times are at it again, whining about Google making all the money off of their, um, meat:

When criticized for appropriating the work of others for its shelf, Google notes that Google News has only headlines and the first few lines of a story. To read the whole story, the reader has to click through to the newspaper, and then the traffic is the newspaper’s.

It sounds all so very fair. Google provides the bun and the newspaper provides the meat. But the result is that most of the money goes for the bun and not the meat. The bun people prosper and the meat people don’t.

First off, what a stupid metaphor, no doubt prompting many of us over the age of thirty to cry out “Where’s the beef?”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug75diEyiA0[/youtube]

But poor choice of metaphor aside, it’s time for the Times to come clean about what it is arguing for: a wholesale rewriting of our copyright laws, and what does and does not constitute “fair use.” Think about it… if Google can’t reprint a headline, a link and a brief excerpt without permission, then neither can I, and if that sort of basic linkage can be broken without the express written approval of corporate lawyers then we’ll have cut the threads that tie together what we now call the world wide web. It’s both a selfish and self-destructive proposal that shows a totally lack of understanding of what makes the Internet useful.

It also completely misses the obvious reality that Google drives to the Times hundreds of thousands of readers a month who have no interest whatsoever in Seattle news and opinion, and who would otherwise never even know the paper existed, let alone read one of its articles. You’d think a company that makes its money selling ads at exorbitant prices would understand how this business works. The Times doesn’t sell content; like Google, it sells eyeballs, and that’s what advertisers are paying for. In that sense, it’s Google that is delivering the beef, not the Times. Indeed rather than demand that Google pay them for the privilege of driving them traffic, the Times should be damn thankful that they’re not being charged for inclusion in Google News.

There was a time when, if you were a local merchant looking to reach local customers, you had little choice but to pay the Times the asking price for that privilege, and the Blethen family grew fat off their near monopoly. But the Times delivered as promised, and if the merchant couldn’t figure out how to monetize these eyeballs and profit from their ads, well, that was their problem, not the Times’.

And that is the situation in which the Times finds itself today, with the glaring exception that they pay nothing for the valuable service that Google provides. How valuable? Note that the Times admits that it could ask to have its pages excluded from Google News, but it doesn’t want to be “cut off.” And with good reason, for without the traffic that Google drives their way, the Times’ claimed 1.7 million readers a month would surely dwindle to a mere few hundred thousand, and that would diminish the Times’ ability to deliver a valuable service to their real customers… their advertisers.

There are a lot of reasons why I don’t particularly feel like covering this fall’s election season, not the least of which being the need to post on Tim Eyman’s Initiative 1033, a task I approach with a lack of enthusiasm that borders on dread.

For all my reputation as a foul-mouthed muckraker and agitator, I’m not sure that any political observer in Washington state has written more substantively on a broader number of issues than I have over the past few years, and on no issue have I focused more acutely than those concerning government revenue and spending. Yet if you think my lengthy and wonkishly obsessive essays on, say, Washington state’s regressive and inadequate tax structure, can be boring to read, just imagine how painful they can be to research and write. That is the type of relentless effort necessary to adequately explain and refute I-1033, but the problem is, it simply doesn’t deserve it.

You see, I-1033 is a joke, totally undeserving of serious scrutiny, not because it stands no chance of passing (it does), or because its impact on our state and its citizens wouldn’t be devastating (it would), but because as an act of policy it is a capricious, vindictive, ridiculous, cynical piece of legislative bamboozlement based totally on lies, falsehoods, fabrications, distortions and lies, and thus any effort to discuss its provisions on substance—even on a lowly blog named HorsesAss.org—would be an insult to the public debate.

Bluntly, Eyman is a whore and Michael Dunmire—the man who pays for his signatures—is his john, and that makes I-1033 their cum-filled, santorum-stained condom.  There is nothing credible about this ballot-measure-buggery or the mercenary manner in which it qualified for the ballot, and yet when our state’s political reporters and editorialists discuss this issue in their typically objective and solemn manner, they will undoubtedly do so with a measure of undeserved respect that quite frankly makes me sick.

As for me, I guess I too will reluctantly play my role in deconstructing one last Eyman initiative because it’s kinda-sorta my job, but if there’s anything more demeaning than making it one’s business to pen and peddle his sort of political pornography, it’s making it one’s business to review and critique it. And after a half decade of having my business inextricably attached to his, I can’t tell you how dirty it makes me feel.

UPDATE:
Dan Savage corrects me:

Santorum can’t stain a condom, Goldy. A condom can be santorum-streaked, but not stained. Please make a note of it. But it’s hard to argue with your larger point…

Seeing as Dan coined the word, I defer to him and his superior knowledge of santorum.