– The best way to make sure McCleary is enforced is to make sure that there are no penalties on anyone.

– Tim Eyman said that the biggest lie of his life was when he paid himself when he told people he was campaigning out of the goodness of his heart. But I think the idea that there’s any traction, even statewide, to repeal Seattle’s $15 minimum wage is a bigger lie of his lifetime.

– More Than ‘Just Women’s Issues’ in Moral Week of Action

– I like the idea of time limits on Sunday parking.

– Probably was cited for something more serious than parking in the bike lane.

– #WeCareAboutFerguson

– I’m of 2 minds about Washington NARAL’s Men for Choice fundraiser. When I went to lobby day with them this year, there were like 10 to 1 women to men, and it is important to get men to show up. And it is important that these things not just be women’s issues. On the other hand, I’d rather more men show up at lobby day and at their other fundraisers than that. Still, if you want to go, I’m sure it will be a good event.

– The man a big believer in feck.

– More job killing by the $15 minimum wage and the sick leave/safe leave laws.

– Car-free “vacation”: Yakima

– SPD officers have a right to respond to criticism, of course. But this makes them look pathetic.

– Oh good, because the queue of books I want to check out from the library wasn’t long enough as it is.

– The story of the Indian shirt story is pretty fascinating.

– There’s a shooting happening in Fort Lee.

– Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. In conclusion, look at his fucking necklace.

– White Center needs more bike parking.

– Why not blame a rain delay on Obamacare too?

– I don’t know what one does with a used fire boat, but I think I would like one.

– Solid diplomacy there, UK.

– Reparations for Ferguson

– Somebody should ask Dave Reichert if he agrees with Newt Gingrich that Obama is a food stamp president. Or many of the other horrible things he has said and done over the years.

– Spokane’s Downtown is for People – and their Buses

– Women in the Workplace: Marination

– Parody is killed again. Now, you might say that this is flagrantly unprincipled. But, to borrow Mark Tushnet’s line, it is simultaneously 0% and 100% principled.

– You should probably have a better organizing principle than annoy the left if you want to achieve anything.

– This is What Climate Leadership Looks Like

– With its own credibility on the line, the British Columbia government on Monday ordered an independent investigation of the tailings dam breach on Aug. 4 that sent huge quantities of water and metal-contaminated sand into important-salmon spawning waters.

– Yay for low income fare Metro trips.

– In case you’re interested in the proposed bike corridors in Olympia (and I can’t imagine you aren’t) here you go.

– Yakama Nation to Coal: And Stay Out.

– Congrats to Scarecrow Video. Here’s hoping the transition to nonprofit works out well.

– Y’all are listening to the #FERGUSON Dispatch on TWIB, I hope.

– Meanwhile, in Missouri…

– Last Words: A Visual Tribute to Men Killed By Police

– At that point, the only way you would believe that it happened is if you had some unusual faith in my honesty…or you really wanted to believe it.

– Bearded Gits Are The Real Heroes

– Here’s hoping the State Supreme Court does the right thing in the I-1240 case.

– I also enjoyed Your Feast Has Ended

Reading the Seattle Times editorial that Goldy linked to yesterday, it seems like The Seattle Times can link anything to wanting to repeal the estate tax. I mean if you want more family farms in Issaquah the idea that you’d look to estate tax policy over, say, land use and the related urban sprawl issues is clearly a sign of an unhealthy obsession. So I thought it would be funny to shoehorn random complaints into whatever the top article was on The Seattle Times’ site. Then I thought I shouldn’t link to The Seattle Times if I can help it, so here’s that same joke with the top story on The Spokesman-Review.

A recent article, “Quality, quantity at QB for Eagles” shows the need to end THE ESTATE TAX OF DEATH!

Eastern Washington’s quarterback coach says he’s “having fun,” but how much fun can you truly have when you know that if you make a lot of money and then you die, only a very large portion of your estate will go to your children after taxes? This tax that in a way is a TAX THAT STRANGLES CHILDREN must be holding back his livelihood. Just think of how much happier he, and in fact all of us, would be if we repealed it.

And what of the quarterbacks themselves? They are probably the most affected by the IN NO WAY HYPERBOLIC WHEN I SAY IT IS LITERALLY POSSESSED BY A DEMON TAX. Washington simply won’t be able recruit college athletes to a Division I school unless we repel this GOES ON A MURDER SPREE AND THEN PISSES ON YOUR GRAVE TAX for everyone.

The VENOMOUS SNAKE THAT’S ABOUT TO POUNCE TAX will hurt these quarterbacks but it will also hurt the rest of the team. As the article goes on to note “The Eagles announced team captains Thursday morning, and all are seniors.” Eastern Washington University is forced to field at least 5 senior citizens on their college football team because of the SAPS THE VERY LIFE OUT OF YOUNG PEOPLE AND TURNS THEM TO SENIORS PREMATURELY, EVENTUALLY KILLING THEM TAX. These senior citizens are very brave to play football against teams without a OH NO, IT’S RIGHT BEHIND YOU RUN AWAY IF YOU VALUE YOUR LIFE TAX but they shouldn’t have to.

I’m writing to urge you to support Rep. Hank Johnson’s bill to limit and track military surplus* local police departments can receive. We’ve seen in recent days, and sadly plenty before that, that departments with this sort of military equipment treat their citizens as enemies in a war zone instead of people they have pledged to protect and serve. It has to end and Representative Johnson’s bill is a step in the right direction.

While this is important all across the country, as people who represent Seattle citizens, it should be especially important to you. After all, Seattle’s police in recent years have been found by the Department of Justice to have (pdf) a “pattern or practice of constitutional violations regarding the use of force that result from structural problems, as well as serious concerns about biased policing.” Those very same structural problems and bias will be worse when the Police Department uses surplus military weapons and equipment instead of standard, civilian policing.

Again, I hope you will do everything in your power to help move this bill. I realize that the legislative branch isn’t exactly moving forward very quickly on controversial bills these days, but it is still important to pursue.

Thank You,

Carl Ballard

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– Explain all that and then explain to me why the hell we should be anything less than angry.

– If you want, you can fit plenty of people on gondolas.

– The National Religious Broadcasters make their awards worthless when they give them out to racists.

– Women in the Workplace: Joanne Ort CPA

– As much as Mark Driscoll not being invited to Act Like Men conferences surely is a good thing, the problem is still that his ideas make Act Like Men conferences a thing.

– I think we can all agree that Rick Perry is awesome having no better judge than Rick Perry.

– #TwitterFail: Twitter’s Refusal to Handle Online Stalkers, Abusers, and Haters

– This litigation, admittedly, does seem to be based on a principle that has been around for nearly two decades; namely, Judge Costanza’s dictum that it’s not a lie if you believe it.

– I wonder how much of Seattle’s pretty good but could be improved pedestrian safety is on drivers and how much is on the pedestrians (and other factors). I mean it’s the only big city I’ve lived in where people don’t expect to jay walk. On the other hand, the people who do jay walk are really, really bad at it by and large.

– It’s embarrassing for everyone saying that this is all about humanitarianism to pretend that oil isn’t in the equation.

– Torture was torture, and it’s a shame the New York Times wasn’t more on top of that.

– I could use a Universal Converter Box.

– If restaurant owners in Seattle are upset about our new minimum wage, they have the example of one Minnesota job creator.

– I had no idea who Brian Dunning was before this, but yikes.

– Put simply, there are two sets of rules: one for liberals and Democrats, the other for conservatives and Republicans. The former are supposed to be fair-minded and rule-abiding, as befits a tradition that harkens back to the likes of Jefferson, Madison, Montesquieu and Locke. The latter are expected to be Nixonian streetfighters—whatever they do is “just politics,” and “everybody does it,” so there’s “nothing to see here.”

– There is no Obama Doctrine, and that’s probably a good thing.

– I am excited about Romeo and Juliet at SAM Sculpture Park, but we as a society need to stop calling it “the greatest love story ever told.” You know what’s a greater love story? Literally any story that doesn’t end with a 13 year old girl killing herself.*

– I’m not much of a drinker or in particular a beer drinker, but even I noticed this at Mariners games.

[Read more…]

– Oh hey, Park(ing) Day is coming up.

– The Real I.R.S. Scandal

– The Parks District looks even more like a thing than election night.

– There is something truly awful about the people who worked so hard to make the ACA work worse than as designed complaining about how it works.

– Whatever happens next with Sports On Earth, the need for a place like that on the Internet is still around.

– SIFF is eventually going to own ever movie theater in this city. I’m looking forward to the reopened Egyptian.

– Light on a dark moment in U.S. history: Bainbridge Exclusion Memorial

– All on social media, people kept telling me I should vote today, but I voted several days ago.

– If people don’t want to be accused of waging a war on women, maybe they should stop.

– TV news sure is car-focused. And specifically angry drivers focused.

– Photos from the Mars Hill Church Protest in Bellevue

– NPI’s 11th anniversary picnic is coming up.

– Good job, Lego.

Fuck me I have to do math again. Another Republican state legislator complaining about how Washington’s pollution shouldn’t count when we talk about reducing Washington’s pollution. This time State Sen. Ann Rivers’ opinion piece in the Columbian. I’m not going to do metacommentary on the whole piece, but I will draw you to this paragraph.

Washington is already a low-carbon place — especially when compared to a carbon giant such as China, which produces around 8,000 million metric tons annually compared to Washington’s 96 million. And while China’s carbon emissions are on the rise, Washington continues to find ways to reduce our carbon footprint without layering on new costly and intrusive regulations.

Seems dishonest to say we’re a low carbon state because we pollute as one state less than the most populous and one of the most polluted countries in the world. First because China isn’t a benchmark in that anything below them is somehow inherently good. Also, comparing one state to an entire large country doesn’t seem like a useful metric. It’s like comparing a couple apples to a crate. Or to an orchard.

But again we can do some easy math* to see where we are per capita. When we last checked in with dishonest Republicans we discovered that there are 6,971,406 Washingtonians as of 2013 according to the Census. The above paragraph gives us a number we can use to divide! 96,000,000 tons divided by 6,971,406 humans gets that Washingtonians on average are responsible for about 13.77 tons of carbon per person yearly. China, according to Wikipedia, has a population of 1,363,950,000 humans. Divide that into the 8,000,000,000 tons of carbon in the above paragraph and you get about 5.86 tons of carbon per person.

Each Washingtonian makes more than twice as much carbon than a person in China. So we probably have twice the obligation to fix the problem. Maybe? I’m not sure it works that way. And again, the comparison was facile to begin with. You can’t really compare Boeing workers with a long commute in a single occupancy vehicle to Gobi nomads. But that was the comparison Senator Rivers made hoping to make Washington look like it wasn’t much of an emitter of carbon pollution.

It is also something the Columbian thought was fine having in its opinion pages. I don’t know what the process of getting into the paper is, and I suppose if a local legislator wants some room, you probably give it to them. But surely there must be an editorial process to weed out things like this that are so glaringly obviously obfuscation that even I can see it.

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– Did your bus survive the first round of Metro cuts?

– Why does Ted Cruz hate the Special Olympics?

– In the last few months, Seattle’s chattering class has become enamored of the idea of “regressive taxation,” which they are now tossing off in argument as often as possible, regardless of whether or not it actually applies.

– Corporations are people. The type of people who don’t have to be held accountable for environmental or workers rights violations. Or for paying off death squads.

– What to do if you see a hit-and-run