– Dori Monson is so, so awful.

– Two important nutrition/education bills to keep an eye on

– It’s kind of late in the game to be researching new transit alternatives for Highway 99.

– Looks like Obama can walk and chew gum at the same time (not a metaphor).

– Tacoma has a brand-new sick leave law.

– I have jury duty starting today (yes, again), so who knows? Maybe I’ll have lots of time to write or maybe I’ll be my usual hardly posting self.

There’s a bill to raise the minimum wage in the state to $12, and it got a hearing in the House Labor Committee yesterday.

Washington, one of nine states where minimum-wage raise bills have been introduced in 2015, would go from $9.47 an hour to $12 in a series of 50-cent hikes every Jan. 1 under the bill.

House Labor Chairman Mike Sells, D-Everett, said the bill “has a lot better chance in the House” than last year’s failed attempt for a $12 minimum wage because it phases in the raise slower. He is one of 41 co-sponsors of the bill, all Democrats. It could face longer odds in the Republican-led Senate, where all but one of the 20 names attached to the bill are from the minority Democrats.

If you’re interested in writing your legislator and telling them, politely, that you support this bill, you can find them here. Either ask you member of the House to support the one that just got the hearing, or your Senator that you’d like the bill to get a hearing. If you’d like to contact a member of the House Labor Committee, you can find them here.

– The health care law does whatever the GOP says it does, even if they said it did other things in the past.

– If you’re not happy about unfunded mandates, you could fund the things the voters passed rather than have a crappy amendment to the state constitution.

– Another reason to eat at Tutta Bella

– Since we’re going to hear a lot of har-har-har Algore since there’s a storm in the Northeast in January, it might be a good time to remind your uncle on Facebook or the Superbowl party next week that we had record highs here. Also, neither of those proves nor disproves global warming so much as the overwhelming scientific evidence.

– Lindy West talking to one of her trolls on This American Life was maybe one of the most amazing things I’ve ever heard.

– Either the NFL is opposed to the Marshawn Lynch victory celebration or they try to make money off it. [h/t]

– Such exquisite concern-trolling hardly needs explaining but basically Hemingway thinks we can all agree it’s bad when the GOP trips over its dick because “if Republicans can’t pass wildly popular legislation protecting innocent unborn children, what’s going to happen when they face difficult legislative battles?”

– Youz guyz, I’m so sad that the Ark Park is probably going to have trouble finding an audience.

Look, I don’t really care if a bill is bipartisan or not. If a bill is a good idea, then the party makeup of that bill’s sponsors don’t matter as much as the number of legislators supporting it. Of course, in the state Senate with GOP control, the measures I support will probably need some bipartisan support to pass. And in the state House, I suspect most bills I like will be improved by being more partisan and getting GOP support would water them down. But whatever, the process is the process. And for people who are less partisan than me, bipartisanship is important.

If you want bipartisanship qua bipartisanship, there are ways you can reach out to the other side without compromising your values. Let’s see how whoever is in charge of the House GOP Twitter feed tried to show they are bipartisan.

As of last night, @WaHouseGOP members have introduced 151 bills with Democrat co-sponsors. #bipartisanwa #waleg

— WaHouseGOP (@WaHouseGOP) January 24, 2015

“Democrat co-sponsors”? It wouldn’t have cost them anything to write “Democratic” and show they were actually committed to a process that respects both sides. I mean honestly, it’s not that big of a deal, but they could try to make their tweets a bit less self-refuting.

Also, I tried to find some context and was only somewhat successful. If I’m reading this right it looks like there have been 1229 bills introduced in both houses. If you assume half of them are in the House of Representatives, that’s most bills in the House aren’t bipartisan. I don’t know. It’s 7:30 on Friday, and this is exactly how much research I’m willing to do before I go out.

– I am a woman. I am a feminist. And it took me 12 years to admit that someone I loved was a sexual predator.

– I’m glad that Sound Transit are so popular, but I’m still not so sure it will matter to the legislature

– Even in Emmett’s piece complaining about Crosscut and using “Olympia” as a stand in for the state government, he has more nice things to say about them than me.

– NARAL Pro Choice Washington are asking you to contact your legislator in support of the Reproductive Health Act.

– The 49ers should absolutely pick up Lane Kiffin. Maybe they can finally get a 100 yard field goal attempt.

Sorry this was so late.

– My Statement – Shanley [h/t]

– I can hardly believe that Fox News apologized to the mayor of Paris.

– Perhaps Seattle Should Find a Plan B for the Downtown Tunnel Project

– As is usually the case with sports stories, Joe Posnanski’s take on the Seahawks’ playoff victory was probably the best.

– Schools not only duty state has

– It’s always awesome that fetuses get more rights than women.

– Which Washington Legislators Take the Most Coal, Oil, and Gas Money?

– The longer we indulge in this tragic fantasy of the internet’s unreality, the longer such extremists can play us for fools.

– Well, that was quite a game.

The US House of Representatives passed a law repealing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that lets young people here without documentation a path to citizenship.

The House vote would put 600,000 so-called DREAMers back in danger of deportation.

An amendment, passed on a 218-209 vote, denies federal money or use of fees to enroll young people in the DACA program, and would not allow those already enrolled to renew.

This isn’t really a national blog, but I’m writing about it because I’m heartened by Patty Murray’s response: calling the vote “something horrible” casts it in moral terms as opposed to just well let’s have a difference of agreement. This is an important moral issue, and it’s important to say so. It’s important to raise our voices that, you know what, this is a really dickish thing to propose. And if it’s for political reasons or for what they actually believe, it’s still immoral. It’s still horrible. And it’s still worth calling out with that language.

– Seriously, seriously, seriously. One seat on a crowded bus, people [h/t].

– Why We Only Freak Out About Brown Terrorists — And Why That Helps Terrorism Spread

– Now we know the specific improvements Seattle bus riders will get thanks to the vote for Prop 1.

– We have some questions about the Seahawks “Would?” video.

– The animals at Woodland Park Zoo are supporting the Seahawks.

I was not really familiar with the Ag-Gag laws that various states are enacting. In Washington, it falls to hero of freedom, Representative Joe Schmick to take up this noble cause.

“I view it as a way to protect the farmer,” Rep. Schmick was quoted as saying in the Capital Press. “You can edit anything to make it look really bad.” (Rep. Schmick has ties to ALEC and, as of 2010, was listed as a member of its national “energy, environment, and agriculture task force.”)

That is literally true of any topic. But the great thing is that if you feel that speech isn’t right or good or just, instead of appealing to the state to squash it, you can respond if you like. Or you can just ignore it. Or — and I know this is way out there — you can respond to criticism in a way that maybe improve practices so that it’s less likely you get caught doing bad things in the future. And you become better.

I was reading this piece about the GOP opposition to passing a carbon tax or any type of actually funding a transit package.

While some Puget Sound motorists are angry about longer commute times, House Republican Leader Dan Kristiansen of Snohomish said his constituents are telling him “you guys are blowing my money” on failed projects.

I was someone who was for a cheaper alternative. I was hoping that we could have a surface-transit option. But the state didn’t want that, and so the city voted to approve something different. I think it was a waste of money (although I also think given the will of Seattle voters, we still should try to press ahead as long as the state doesn’t try to force us to pay for the overruns).

But for the infinity squared time, Seattle really isn’t wasting money of Snohomish voters, or, like, Dan Kristiansen, um, personally. Snohomish County gives back about as much as it gets back from the state. And while I don’t have the district-by-district numbers, something tells me that’s more to do with Everett and the North Seattle suburbs than Snohomish. Meanwhile, King County gives about 62 cents for every dollar it gets back from the state. So, sure, there’s some waste in some state projects in Seattle, but it isn’t Seattle forcing poor ol’ Snohomish to pay.

If these GOP lawmakers were so concerned about the parts of the state “blowing my money” they would literally never complain about Seattle projects. We could probably fill the hole in with gold, and it wouldn’t be as wasteful as some counties, like, existing. To be clear, I understand the reasons that it costs the state more to provide services in rural and exurban areas, and am happy to pay for them for the most part. I just wish that their legislators wouldn’t pretend that city folks are blowing their money when we spend much more to get less.

– What could go wrong with catastrophic failure?

– I think we can all agree that when a celebrity talks about her abortion, the important thing to do is to talk about how sad they must be.

– Heads up, Burke-Gilman trail users, there will be closures under I-5 starting in mid-January, so be prepared for the detour.

– A Balloon Juice meetup would be fun.

– Oh hey, the Discovery Institute are still wrong.

– The threat to our way of life comes in the reaction and I’m sorry to say that it’s these critics who are facilitators in that project.

– Cathy McMorris Rodgers press release translated into English.

– I may be (totally am) a big ol’ crank, but I’m not sure a random bluegrass band would be an improvement in my commute.

– #foxnewsfacts

– So, welcome to Olympia. Don’t say Olympia.

– A big Congrats to Dave Neiwert on 12 years’ Blogging. I’m looking forward to what he’ll do with the blog next.

– We are starting to get the outlines of what the budget debate is going to look like this session.

– I don’t know what to do about Boko Haram out here in the West, but jeez.

– Je suis Charlie, indeed. Unless vous êtes Republican.

I can’t find the press release mentioned in this article online, so I’ll pass doing the full metacommentary on it. But Senators Mike Baumgartner and Doug Ericksen are pushing to change the rules in the GOP controlled Senate so that it would take a 2/3 vote to pass tax increases.

It’s a terrible idea, of course. On top of being an anti-democratic copycat of an unconstitutional idea, it assumes that tax increases are somehow a different category than spending cuts. But things being terrible ideas never stopped the GOP from having them.

Without getting too deep into the parliamentary weeds, the changes involve steps before a final vote. Technically a bill should receive three “readings” before coming to a final vote. But full bills are never read completely. A clerk starts on the text and before he or she needs to take a breath the presiding officer usually calls “last line”, meaning the reader skips to the final line of the legislation, whether it’s at the bottom of that page or 1,000 pages later.

The second reading is usually skipped in a procedure called a “suspension of the rules” that allows the bill to jump forward for a final vote. Baumgartner and Ericksen want to change that rule to require a two-thirds vote to move a bill forward for the final vote. They also want to change another bill requiring that super majority when the Senate agrees to a bill that comes over from the House for final passage after being batted back and forth for changes.

Could the Democrats as stridently do that sort of nonsense? Could we require a 2/3 vote for — I don’t know — tax breaks for major corporations in the state House? Or for renewing unproductive tax cuts? Or for spending cuts? Or for spending money on counties over what they send back to the state?

And not to sound like a broken but why 2/3? What’s magic about that particular fraction? I realize several unconstitutional 2/3 initiatives passed, but is it really appropriate to say that some number Tim Eyman pulled out of his ass is the right thing? It’s just so arbitrary.