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

[Read more…]

– 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.

[Read more…]

– 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

– Jim McDermott’s editorial in The Hill: VA needs more primary care doctors

– I didn’t know anything about the Spokane sit-lie ordinance before this piece.

– The long history of hating and loving Boeing

– There are legit criticisms of Democrats, but hey lets vote for Rand Paul isn’t the answer to those criticisms.

– I only tweet emergencies. I guess I’ll have to change up my Twitter strategy.

– Those things can kill ya

– I was against the Free Ride Area because it concentrated all of the problems with free buses in one place while losing a lot of fare box recovery. But I am tantalized by the idea of free systemwide.

– The best part of the Blue Angels is definitely the lane closures.

– The Case for Express Cascades Trains

– Children Of The Sun Trail Maintenance

– The S Word, indeed.

– Dear the Stay-at-Home Daughters Movement; Even by the standards of purity movement, you are creepsville.

– Dear the guy whose superPAC opposed Congressman DeFazio; Pay your damn taxes.

– Dear anti-abortion groups; I already knew you were awful, but this is low, vile, disgusting and awful even for you.

– Dear Mars Hill; You are gross. Just a reminder.

– Dear murder weapon enthusiasts; You aren’t helping your cause.

– Dear everyone complaining about how there’s a do nothing Congress; No! Have a little look at the important work Dana Rohrabacher is doing!

XOXO,

Carl Ballard

Were you looking for some rambling thoughts on the PSRC’s Evaluation of Regional Impacts for the Proposed Gateway Pacific Terminal at Cherry Point? No? Well, you’re here, so you might as well continue.

First we should have a discussion of the study itself:

What this could mean is that the negative impacts of the coal traffic on the region’s commerce could outweigh any benefit from jobs at the terminal itself.

Earlier predictions had already increased expected wait times by 30 minutes to 2 hours and 45 minutes in the region, without the coal, by 2035.

If the terminal is built, rail gates could be closed from 38 minutes to 85 minutes longer than previously predicted on the BNSF Railway line that runs along the I-5 corridors by 2035, this most recent study said.

The study identified 101 rail crossings in the Puget Sound area, 77 of them in cities and towns.

That adds up to quite a lot of time. The study talks about mitigating impacts, but notes that they are expensive. I’d hope first and foremost that BNSF pay for mitigation.. If that doesn’t happen, I would hope it would be done either by the state or by the areas that are most benefiting from the terminal jobs.

The main impacts the study mentions are the traffic and potential land value decreases near the rail. The Environmental Impact Statement should deal with dust and noise more than this study, but I would like to highlight this from the summary:

Environmental Justice Considerations. The potential for impacts to be disproportionately felt by populations that are minority or low income was a criteria used to select at-grade crossings for analysis in the study. An examination of these populations by census tract showed that low income and minority populations in Kent and Seattle would have the highest disproportionate impacts from train operations. Low income and minority populations in Everett, Auburn, Algona, Pacific and Fife could also be impacted by additional trains travelling [sic] to and from the proposed terminal.

Finally, for those interested after the derailment yesterday, the study talks about oil trains, a bit but it isn’t the focus. We won’t have that until October. And obviously, this study won’t deal with that derailment specifically.

– Yay for private charity, boo for thinking it can replace public safety net programs.

– Now, we can have a discussion about noblesse oblige, but the fundamental thing here is that McCain really doesn’t have a problem with the noblesse, it’s just that he thinks there should be no oblige.

– Can we acknowledge that we don’t know what the fuck we’re doing with the death penalty at this point?

– As she points out, regretfully, there’s a big gap between male and female artists. The stats are grim: Although 60 percent of arts graduates are women, galleries display only about 25 percent of women’s work nationally. Seattle’s record at 39 percent is somewhat better. Less than 4 percent of museum collections are credited to women artists.

– Conservatives trying to evaluate the goals of the ACA are like elephants trying to play a toy piano.

– I’m not really excited about this year’s Capitol Hill Block Party because I’m fully 1000 years old, but if you go, here’s hoping you have a good time.

– This carmageddon will be different.

– Most law-enforcement bodies have discretion over what they test, and many shelve kits if a victim seems untrustworthy or a suspect has already been identified, according to the National Institute of Justice, a research arm of the Department of Justice. Police also give priority to cases in which the suspect is a stranger and the victim is visibly injured. Yet perhaps eight in ten rapes take place between people who at least vaguely know each other, and most lack signs of violence. Acquaintance rapists are often chronic offenders, says David Lisak, a clinical psychologist. [h/t]

– Well done Standing Against Foreclosure and Eviction and Mayor Murray.

– After you’ve lost everyone who’s disgusted with the child abuse and hate, this is what’s left, and they’re running the place.

– Spokane people, any of you going to miss the Parkade Plaza Fountain?

– I don’t think the GOP have really thought through the Halbig case.

– Jonah Goldberg is a horrible person, but he’s a horrible person in a specific way that has allowed a lot of people to make fun of him over the years.

– Are you surviving I-90mageddon, and should I care if you aren’t?

– I can’t imagine a Bible Museum in DC would do well. Who in their right mind would skip the Smithsonian for the ridiculous interpretations of Jesus building?

– I still don’t know enough about him, but good luck to Larry Nyland.

– Everyone is biking across the Freemont Bridge.

– Nice new cart!