Goldy

Kshama Sawant’s District 3 seat was supposed to be easy pickings in November, 2015. I wouldn’t exactly call it conventional wisdom, but a lot of Democratic establishment types sure seemed to have convinced themselves that the socialist city council member was a wacky, one-hit wonder who voters would quickly tire of. The chamber was preparing to spend big to take her down, and serious candidates like the ACLU’s Alison Holcomb were being recruited. This was going to be easy.

Well, not so fast. As PubliCola reported last week, a new poll by respected firm EMC shows Sawant with some of the highest approval ratings on the council. Citywide, Sawant enjoys a 50 percent “favorable” rating, second only to Nick Licata’s 51 percent. And within her district, Sawant’s favorable stands at a remarkable 61 percent, well above Licata’s 46 percent second place showing.

Critics will point out that at 30 percent citywide and 21 percent within District 3, Sawant also has the highest unfavorable rating. But at 80/82 percent city/district, she also has the highest name ID as well. Voters know Sawant. And despite all the Democratic eye-rolling, they’ve overwhelmingly made up their mind in her favor.

Personally, I was never all that concerned. District 3 was Sawant’s best district in her 2013 at-large victory, and while she might not match the chamber’s war chest, she’d certainly be able to raise the $250,000-plus necessary to get her message out. From everything I’ve heard, Democratic efforts to peel labor support away from Sawant have so far proven fruitless. And of course, everybody continues to underestimate the impressive (and increasingly sophisticated) ground game that Socialist Alternative is putting together. Really.

A lot can change in a year. But there’s an argument to make that at this point in time, Sawant looks like the least vulnerable incumbent of them all.

Genesis 4:13-18

Cain said to the LORD, “My punishment is more than I can bear. Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.”

But the LORD said to him, “Not so; if anyone kills Cain, he will suffer vengeance seven times over.” Then the LORD put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him. So Cain went out from the LORD’s presence and lived in the land of Nod,  east of Eden.

Cain lay with his wife, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Enoch. Cain was then building a city, and he named it after his son Enoch. To Enoch was born Irad, and Irad was the father of Mehujael, and Mehujael was the father of Methushael, and Methushael was the father of Lamech.

Discuss.

Hooray for really rich people!

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are donating $25 million to the CDC Foundation to help address the Ebola epidemic.

The money will be used by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Ebola response effort in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone and elsewhere in the world where Ebola is a threat, the foundation said Tuesday.

The grant follows a $9 million donation made by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen last month. Zuckerberg and Chan are making the grant from their fund at the nonprofit Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

Sure, the money is great and all. So thanks. But… um… we’re the United States of America! We put a man on the fucking moon! (Actually, 12 men!) So you’d think the CDC would have the financial resources to adequately address the Ebola threat without begging for money from billionaires!

Seriously, America! How about taxing the super wealthy sufficient to meet our national needs, instead of just kinda hoping they care enough to gift us money when and if they think we really need it? Wouldn’t that be a much more rational way to run a government?

Sometimes no news is big news, as was the case with Friday’s monthly PDC filing deadline for campaign contributions and expenditures. The National Rifle Association, potentially facing a momentous defeat at the polls, reported raising and spending absolutely nothing during the month of September in opposition to Initiative 594, which would impose background checks on all private gun sales. Assuming they’re actually obeying Washington’s campaign disclosure laws (and that’s merely an assumption), it sure does look like the NRA has turned tail and fled rather than shoot it out with I-594’s well-heeled backers.

Cowards.

As for professional initiative sponsor Tim Eyman, he’s never been one to run away from certain defeat—although that sort of boldness is easy for a guy who has only ever played with other people’s money. But what happens when the well runs dry? Irrelevance. As in the zero dollars raised in September for his yet to materialize statewide anti-minimum wage initiative.

Eyman had kicked off his campaign to personally profit from the minimum wage debate with a neat $50,000 each from two Seattle real estate baronesses, but has yet to raise another dime to toward the $1 million he says he needs to buy enough signatures to qualify his initiative by the end of the year. I suppose it’s possible that a deep-pocketed backer like, say, the International Franchise Association could dump in the necessary cash all at once. But why bother with Eyman? He’s just a middleman. And an expensive one at that.

It’s now been two years since Eyman has managed to qualify an initiative for the ballot. If you’re struggling to make ends meet, Tim, I hear The Stranger is hiring.

Judges 11:29-40

Then the Spirit of the LORD came upon Jephthah. He crossed Gilead and Manasseh, passed through Mizpah of Gilead, and from there he advanced against the Ammonites. And Jephthah made a vow to the LORD : “If you give the Ammonites into my hands, whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me when I return in triumph from the Ammonites will be the LORD’s, and I will sacrifice it as a burnt offering.”

Then Jephthah went over to fight the Ammonites, and the LORD gave them into his hands. He devastated twenty towns from Aroer to the vicinity of Minnith, as far as Abel Keramim. Thus Israel subdued Ammon.

When Jephthah returned to his home in Mizpah, who should come out to meet him but his daughter, dancing to the sound of tambourines! She was an only child. Except for her he had neither son nor daughter. When he saw her, he tore his clothes and cried, “Oh! My daughter! You have made me miserable and wretched, because I have made a vow to the LORD that I cannot break.”

“My father,” she replied, “you have given your word to the LORD. Do to me just as you promised, now that the LORD has avenged you of your enemies, the Ammonites. But grant me this one request,” she said. “Give me two months to roam the hills and weep with my friends, because I will never marry.”

“You may go,” he said. And he let her go for two months. She and the girls went into the hills and wept because she would never marry. After the two months, she returned to her father and he did to her as he had vowed. And she was a virgin.

Discuss.

I have been advocating for universal preschool for years, both here on HA, and more extensively at The Stranger. High quality early learning is the only education reform absolutely proven to work. And that is why I will be voting for Proposition 1B.

I’m not totally unsympathetic to the stated goals of the labor-backed Prop 1A, but to be clear, it does not implement preschool. It’s about raising the pay, training, and certification of childcare workers, and it sets a goal of reducing childcare costs to 10 percent of a family’s income. Which are good things. But it’s totally unfunded. And it does not create a single preschool classroom, let alone a high quality one.

Childcare and preschool are not the same thing.

Prop 1B, on the other hand, fully funds the gradual phase-in of citywide universal high quality preschool through a modest 11 cent per $1,000 of assessed value hike in the property tax—about $50 a year for the average homeowner. This evidenced-based program would ultimately be free to all three- and four-year-olds from families earning below 300 percent of the federal poverty line (currently $71,550 for a family of four), with generous sliding scale tuition subsidies for families earning more than that.

Yes, the implementation is a bit slower than a lot of people would like—the plan is to serve 2,000 children by 2018—but we have no choice but to implement slowly. Serving 2,000 students is the equivalent of creating five new elementary schools in a district that’s already struggling to meet capacity; we simply lack both the physical infrastructure and the number of trained and certified  teachers sufficient to implement a high quality program overnight. And experiences in Boston and elsewhere teach us that implementing preschool right is more important than implementing it fast.

Furthermore, implementing a successful preschool program here in Seattle is the first step toward implementing high quality early learning statewide. If we do it right here, we’ll soon see similar programs in cities like Bellevue, Mercer Island, Shoreline, Renton, and Tacoma. Pretty soon voters throughout the state will demand the same opportunities for their children. Reject Prop 1B and you could set back Washington’s early learning agenda by a decade or more.

So yes, I am enthusiastically voting for Prop 1B, without reservations. Whatever the disappointing political machinations that led to this showdown, the clear choice on the ballot is between a measure that actually implements universal preschool, and a measure that doesn’t. I’m voting for the one that does. And so should you.

Deuteronomy 7
When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you- and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your sons away from following me to serve other gods, and the LORD’s anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you. This is what you are to do to them: Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols in the fire. For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession.

Discuss.

Back in 2013 the Seattle Times editorial board repeatedly advocated against a technical fix to Washington’s estate tax, calling it both “legally and economically wrong.”

Given the current crisis of income inequality in America they are certainly welcome to continue to argue the latter. But as for their stoopid, stoopid legal arguments, well, the Washington State Supreme Court has once again proven the editors to be constitutionally incapable of interpreting the constitution:

The state Supreme Court has upheld the Washington estate tax as it was amended by state lawmakers in 2013.

The court handed down its unanimous ruling Thursday. The opinion was authored by Justice Charles Wiggins and leaves in place a tax-law change that was meant to preserve an estimated $160 million in the current biennium.

I’m not sure what’s worse—that the editors arrogantly thought they knew better than all the lawyers advising state legislators, or that they didn’t think they knew better and just decided to fake it in an effort to snow readers?

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* No, Seattle Times publisher Frank Blethen isn’t technically dead, just the five-generation family media empire that’s been pissed away on his watch.

Richard Branson has made Virgin Management the latest of a handful of companies to offer employees “unlimited” paid vacation time. The idea is that these companies won’t track your hours as long as you get your work done. Which, as a binge worker, sounds pretty damn great me.

But “beware the implications of unlimited vacation,” warns Bloomberg Businessweek’s Vanessa Wong:

The glow of trust and togetherness that such policies provide could actually make employees less likely to take time off. Already, some 40 percent of American workers don’t use all their paid vacation days. Even away from the office, employees can still choose to be on their BlackBerrys (BBRY) for 168 hours a week (as the device’s marketing materials point out, to every worker’s distress). Abolishing official vacation days also means you can’t trade unused days for cash, or hoard them for 20 years and take a hard-won paid sabbatical before retiring.

Um… what century is Wong living in?

I’m 51 years old and have never stayed in one salaried job long enough to accrue more than two-weeks of paid vacation days a year, let alone hoard them for cash or sabbatical. Wait. I take that back. Last February, on my three-year anniversary at The Stranger, I qualified for a third week of paid vacation for the coming year. I was fired one month later.

And my penchant for job hopping isn’t so abnormal. The average worker today stays at one job for a median of 4.4 years—for Millennials, half that. So a national paid vacation standard that starts at two weeks and is tied to length of tenure ends up being cruel, counterproductive, and downright stupid. This is a policy that inevitably leads to burnout while distorting the labor market by punishing workers for switching jobs.

So I’m all for any policy that helps shake up America’s draconian attitude toward vacation days.

Usually the Seattle Times is quick to tout the new additions to its editorial board, while lauding the contributions of its departing editorial columnists. But after only six months on the job, Erik Smith was suddenly disappeared from the editorial board over the weekend, entirely without comment or explanation.

What kind of a cowardly newspaper would do something like that?

Whatever our political differences (and they were profound), our personal interactions were always friendly and professional. As an editorial writer Smith may have been wrong about everything, but he worked hard at it, and was certainly the most prolific member of the editorial board during his brief tenure.

That said, Smith was also the author of the paper’s breathtakingly dishonest and inaccurate “death tax” editorial. So while as a fellow ex-newspaperman I can certainly empathize with Smith, as a media critic I won’t miss him.

Exactly what is it that the Seattle Times editorial board doesn’t get about the Constitution?

Recent high-profile rulings should make Washington uneasy, as the court eases restrictions on state authority and gives itself unprecedented authority to dictate government actions.

In 2012, for example, the court threw out the two-thirds-for-taxes rule, wildly popular with voters, which made it harder for the Legislature to vote for tax hikes.

The two-thirds rule may very well have been wildly popular with voters, but it was also wildly unconstitutional. Are the editors seriously suggesting that the justices should have deferred to election results rather than the very clear and unambiguous letter and spirit of the law? Because that would have been malpractice.

Some states—like California—permit voters to amend the constitution via initiative. Washington’s constitution does not. I’d argue, wisely. Are the editors arguing that Washington should be more like the California? If so they should advocate for amending the state constitution as such instead of cowardly casting aspersions at our justices for doing their job.

But to suggest, as the editors do, that the justices basing their ruling on the constitution rather than popular opinion “should make Washington uneasy,” just makes the Seattle Times look stupid.

Revelation 12:1-6
A great and wondrous sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on his heads. His tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that he might devour her child the moment it was born. She gave birth to a son, a male child, who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter. And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. The woman fled into the desert to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.

Discuss.

State Senate Republicans are blaming Democrats for rising tuition at our state colleges and universities. Of course they are. And they’re right. Democrats are to blame. But more so the Republicans.

For while Republicans didn’t officially seize control of the Senate until Rodney Tom and Tom Sheldon betrayed their constituents in 2013, thanks to the disloyalty of “roadkill” Dems, Republicans more or less controlled the Senate budget-writing process for some time. In fact, back in 2011, former Republican Senator Joe Zarelli personally boasted to me that he wrote the Senate budget, not then Democratic Ways & Means chair Ed Murray.

But whatever. I’m less interested in apportioning the blame than I am in fixing the problem. And this sort of bullshit doesn’t help:

Bailey fingers a “lack of commitment by elected leaders” but also a lack of accountability on the part of universities as the causes of ballooning tuition that has “functioned like a tax on our middle-class families.”

“For years higher education funding has been used as a piggy bank to offset funding reductions in other areas of the budget,” she wrote. “As we work through the budget process and policy proposals, it is important to hold the line on higher education funding. We also expect higher education institutions to hold the line on tuition increases.”

Oy. How many times do I have to go through this? It’s not the cost of a college education that’s skyrocketing, it’s the price:

As you can see from the chart above, adjusted for inflation, the cost of educating a student has remained relatively flat over the past two decades. Tuition has been rising not in response to rising costs, but as a direct response to cuts in state funding.

No doubt there’s room for universities to try to be more accountable and efficient, but it’s not accountability that’s been the problem. It’s a lack of funding. And the only way for universities to hold the line on tuition increases is for legislators to hold the line on funding. (Or, I suppose, we could just offer a cheaper, lower quality college education. Is that what Senator Bailey is arguing for? I don’t think so.)

Yes, state lawmakers have used higher education as a piggy bank of sorts. But that’s not because Democrats hate higher education. It’s because there’s so little truly discretionary spending available to cut in the state budget. And Republicans have made it impossible to raise taxes.

That’s the problem. Collectively, our taxes are too low to sustain the government we want and need. In fact, as a percentage of income, our state and local taxes are now 20 percent lower than they were 20 years ago. If Republicans want to argue that we should be spending more money on higher ed, then they need to tell us which taxes they want to raise or which social service programs they want to cut. Because that’s the only other place to find the money.

So good on Senator Bailey for recognizing that tuition hikes function like a tax on middle-class families. We all agree. Now if only she and her fellow Republicans would permit a conversation replacing this virtual tax with a real tax on the wealthy households who can afford it.

So, after six years on staff, Dom has left The Stranger to spend more time with his family or something. Good for him. Unlike me, at least he got to walk out on his own two feet instead of being carted off the premises in the trunk of a Cadillac DTS and unceremoniously dumped in the Meadowlands.

But Dom’s sudden departure has people asking questions. In a span of only nine months, first Cienna, then me, now Dom have all been scrubbed from the paper’s masthead. Of The Stranger’s four-person Pulitzer prize-winning news team, only Eli remains.

Cunning, devious, ruthless Eli.*

Now that the Great Purge is complete, the truth can be told: The Stranger’s news department has been reshaped by a brutal internal power struggle, engineered by the Machiavellian mastermind that is Eli Sanders—or, “the Butcher of Barca” as he’s fearfully known in the office. Don’t let his mild-mannered demeanor fool you; it’s all an act. The man is vicious. You should see what he did to his boyfriend—nearly ripped the poor guy’s arms off!

Eli is a monster. And now he’s ruling The Stranger news department with an iron fist. Just like he long plotted.

So beware, Anna and Ansel: the warm embrace of Eli’s carefully crafted cult of personality can be intoxicating. But dare challenge his boundless ambition and you too could soon find yourself stumbling through the muck of a New Jersey swamp, desperately trying to pluck an ice pick from your back.

UPDATE: Honestly, folks, get a sense of humor. It was joke. Really. Eli Sanders is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.

 

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* I double-checked my sources: Eli does not have a single ruth.

Sure the headline merely asks the question—”What would 15% cut mean for state colleges?”—but why is this even a conversation?

Double-digit tuition increases. Class cuts that would make it harder to finish a degree in four years. Enrollment cutbacks that would make it more difficult to get admitted to a state university.

Washington’s public college and university presidents, warning that a hypothetical 15 percent cut to higher education would be devastating to public colleges and universities, are in a standoff with the state Office of Financial Management (OFM) over fiscal planning for the next two years.

Washington’s state colleges and universities have had their funding cut for years. Tuition has skyrocketed. We’re having trouble retaining top professors. We’re already 25,000 degrees a year short of demand. I mean, we either want a state college and university system or we don’t. If we do want a state college and university system then we need to fund it at a level sufficient to support quality, access, and capacity. If we don’t want a state college and university system, then we should just stop pretending, and shut it down already.

But hypothetical conversations about hypothetical 15 percent cuts achieve nothing except making a smaller, say, 5 percent cut more likely. So shut up already about further cuts to higher education, and instead shift the conversation to something useful, like making the case to voters for raising taxes.