– Like we should be protecting parking lots from the evil expansion of multistory housing.

– Someone will be president after Obama, and I wish I shared Oliver’s optimism that it won’t be any of these people.

– The pay gap for women working at King County is much better than the City of Seattle. More work needs to be done on the pay gap by race.

– Maybe not having the CRC was good for Oregon?

– A Stillborn Child, A Charge of Murder and the Disputed Case Law on ‘Fetal Harm’ [h/t]

– Why is there nutrition info for unpopped popcorn?

Governor Inslee isn’t happy with the state of the Federal Government’s plan for Hanford cleanup.

After meeting with U.S. Energy Secretary Ernie Moniz, Inslee said the federal department’s “draft cleanup plan” was inadequate on two respects. It doesn’t address what the federal government will do in the near future with leaking tanks of hazardous waste from decades of making parts for nuclear weapons. It doesn’t have an adequate long-term plan for containing the waste and shipping out of state to a permanent storage facility.

Inslee said the plan Moniz provided was merely a draft, not a completed plan, but doesn’t give Washington the predictability the state needs. The governor said he is consulting with state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, who said his office would hold the federal government “legally accountable for environmental cleanup at Hanford.”

You know, other than the sort term and the long term, things are looking just fine. Looking at it from Western Washington, Hanford feels like a problem that never gets any better. Democratic or Republican administration, the Feds don’t know how to deal with it.

– But if Ryan genuinely stumbled heedless into a racial tinderbox then it suggests he, and most likely many other conservatives, has fully internalized a framing of social politics that was deliberately crafted to appeal to white racists without regressing to the uncouth language of explicit racism, and written its origins out of the history.

– Mark Driscoll still seems problematic in all sorts of ways, but at least he understood one bad thing he did was bad. Maybe he can cool it with the homophobia and hating women next?

– Here’s wishing Justice Jim Johnson a pleasant retirement (Spokesman-Review link). He wasn’t a favorite around here, but you always hope to beat people you don’t like at the ballot not for health reasons.

– Quite a disparity on bylines by gender.

– The Strange Bedfellows of the Anti-Contraception Alliance

– KUOW is having their membership drive soon if you want to help out.

– RIP Jim Compton.

For some people, St. Pat’s means wearing green or drinking. For others there’s traditional food like corned beef and cabbage. For some it’s a time for a parade or just in general celebrating their Irishness. I suppose some people will go to church. For me, it’s finding a poem by William Butler Yeats and copy and pasting it here.

When You Are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

– Buffer zones for abortion clinics are necessary.

– When the Washington State Legislature adjourned without getting much done, at least it didn’t get the bad stuff done.

– A while ago in an open thread, I’d mentioned that Rodney Tom has an opponent, Former Kirkland Mayor Joan McBride. If you’re interested, here’s her website. [h/t]

– The first is a new rule vigorously enforced: Pay to play. It now costs money to get a close up look at America’s political leaders, or ask them a question.

– Given my grammar, punctuation, and poor word choice, far be it from me to make fun of a typo by the Discovery Institute. But not far be it from me to link to someone else making fun of a typo from them.

– I don’t know that any rules or laws will ever be adequate to that task. Social norms are actually probably more important in something like this (which is why it’s so depressing to see so many people defending this stuff and condemning those who object.)

Look, people. The Senate GOP worked really hard on making a transit package this legislative session. Just because there wasn’t a transit package, you can’t get mad at them for not passing a transit package.

King says failure to pass transportation package not due to lack of effort

See. If the person who brought us not having a transit package in the state Senate can be blamed for our not having a transit package, then what? Also, I thought the GOP philosophy on hard work was that you could tell the amount of effort based on the result. So if people are on food stamps, even if they are working full time, the GOP prescription is for them to work hard. The GOP can tell they didn’t work hard because they’re on food stamps. So I think we can tell the GOP weren’t working hard on a transit package because the legislature adjourned without a transit package.

At a news conference today – one day before the scheduled end of the 2014 legislative session – Sen. Curtis King, R-Yakima, and co-chair of the Senate Transportation Committee, lamented the fact that lawmakers did not pass an agreed-upon transportation revenue and reform package before adjourning. King added that the Majority Coalition Caucus, which leads the state Senate, repeatedly made compromises sought by the Senate minority, but to no avail.

Majorities, how the fuck do they work?

Seriously, this is what happens when you hand out things — like a majority — to people who haven’t earned it. Sure, they say they’ll work hard, but the results are the results.

“During the 2013 transportation feedback forum tour, we visited ten cities across Washington in five weeks. The vast majority of citizens made it clear that they wanted reforms before they’d accept any gas-tax increase, and we listened to the people.”

Those lazy roustabouts will lash out and make excuses. But in the end, if they wanted to pass a transit package, they could buckle down, work hard, and pass something.

“From the very beginning, the MCC has prioritized reforms, and additional revenue was never off the table. But in the end, the Senate’s minority Democrats weren’t serious about making the tough reforms. They were more interested in tax increases and sound bites, despite knowing as well as I do that the state can’t win public support for a multibillion-dollar transportation package without first establishing that we are serious about fixing the waste, mismanagement and abuse that exists within the system.”

These reforms are so popular and good that the GOP isn’t even going to mention even one specific reform in their press release.

“Add to that the governor’s signing of a climate-change compact with Oregon, California and British Columbia. Of those governments, the only state that has not yet implemented low-carbon emission standards is Washington. California is expected to see an immediate 12-cent hike in gas taxes with a possible increase of up to 40 cents in the next year because of these types of standards, and Governor Inslee’s refusal to acknowledge his plans to unilaterally impose low-carbon emission standards was an obstacle to finalizing a transportation package.”

An unrelated thing that Governor Inslee did is responsible! Look, GOP, just stop making excuses.

“The MCC offered a new compromise proposal February 13 and revised the offer on February 21, again moving significantly toward the Democrats’ position. However, it became obvious to us over the last month that Democrat leadership in the House and Senate is not interested in seeing a transportation package move forward this session, and their response to our most recent proposal told us – in no uncertain terms – that they are not interested in reaching agreement and moving forward.”

The House passed a package a year ago. It’s plenty problematic, but they got the job done. If the Senate wanted to pass a transit package, they could have passed a transit package. Don’t lash out at other people who are doing better than you. It’s not the House’s fault.

“The MCC remains committed to addressing Washington’s transportation needs, and will continue to work toward that goal even after the 2014 legislative session adjourns.”

Yeah, we’ve seen promises before. But they never seem to materialize, do they?

– Wayne LaLaPierre’s speech at CPAC was troubling. Even by speech at CPAC standards.

– War-mongering is self-justifying. If you bungle a war in Iraq, it does not mean you need to sit back and reflect on the bungling. It means you should make more war, lest Iraq become a base for your enemies. If Vladimir Putin violates Ukrainian sovereignty, it is evidence for a more muscular approach. If he doesn’t, than it is evidence that he fears American power.

– Because the city of Seattle has been so awesome on civil rights issues, they really need new things like facial recognition software for video surveillance. The logic is solid.

– The amendment does not define “vicinity”. Nor does it specify a cap on how much a city can charge for Restricted Parking Zone (RPZ) permits. In theory, the City of Bellevue could deem the whole city to be in the “vicinity” of Sound Transit infrastructure, declare the whole city to be an RPZ, charge $1 million per annual permit, and require Sound Transit to pay the entire cost of these $1 million annual parking permits.

– The Very Real Consequences of Young People Not Voting

– The worst part about Putin’s power grab is that it’s totally copyright infringement.

Sad to see (Spokesman-Review link).

Sen. Tracey Eide, a Federal Way Democrat, said she will not run for re-election this year, opening up a seat in one of the state’s swing districts.

Eide, an 18-year-veteran of the Legislature, has served for the last two years has shared bipartisan leadership of the Senate Transportation Committee. During that time the Legislature has tried, without success, to find a package of major transportation projects and related tax increases that would satisfy both the Democrat-controlled House and the Senate controlled by a coalition that is predominantly Republican.

There is no requirement that people stay in their office, of course. And God knows that state legislature in general, and the Senate in particular, are all kinds of fucked. But it may be a tough seat to hold on to. I don’t know the district well enough to speculate on who’ll run. The district is represented in the state house by a Democrat and a Republican. I don’t know if either of them are interested in the Senate.

– Washington lawmakers are allowed to accept free meals on an infrequent basis — but that’s never been defined. A Senate bill to have the Legislative Ethics Board decide what infrequent means also died. It never got a hearing despite having a dozen sponsors.

– “Six different pods are participating in the hunger strike, and apparently there’s about 150 people per pod,” she said. “The number 130 strikes me as very low.” (TNT link)

– I sometimes, and inexplicably since I’ve never lived in Oregon and have a WA phone number, get random GOTV from the Oregon GOP. Recently they polled me about Greg Walden. I told them that I hoped someone primaries him and that I was born in 1956. Anyway, I’m glad he’s going to have a serious opponent.

– Obviously, the CIA shouldn’t spy on Senators, but it’s too bad that that’s what it took to get Senators to notice problems with the CIA.

– Honor codes at evangelical universities have some really shitty outcomes (the link has some descriptions of sexual violence).

– I hadn’t heard of Portolan Charts, but now I’m fascinated.

– I’m pretty excited about what’s happening on Pike/Pine

– Solid headline.

– Rasmussen says he thinks WSDOT has been “keeping things very close to the vest,” in part because of a lack of information from the tunnel contractor, Seattle Tunnel Partners. And he says it seems increasingly unlikely that the tunnel will open by its 2016 target date.

– I had never thought of bossy as a problem before.

When I started writing my first blog, the people whose voices I liked the most, I didn’t even know their real names. Media Whores Online and Bartcop. What strange fake names. But they always wrote with a passion and humor that I loved reading. I mean, I remember reading Bartcop during the Clinton administration! There weren’t too many voices as strong and as fun back then.

While the late, great, MWO stopped a while ago, it was by choice. Today I learned that recently Bartcop has died [h/t].

If you’ve ever wondered why the lefty blogs are so much funnier than the conservative ones, well, there are a lot of reasons. But Bart blazed a pathway of mixing humor and dead seriousness that so many on the left over the years looked at and thought “shit, I can do that.” Too bad not many of us could as well as him.

And don’t get me wrong, the guy was hardly perfect. He always flirted with 9/11 conspiracy nuts, for example. But he was right more than he was wrong: From Bill Clinton’s impeachment to the Iraq war to trying to legalize marijuana, he got it right more than he got it wrong and at a time most media pontificators were as wrong as wrong could be. He got it right from Oklahoma when so many of us on the coasts couldn’t. He was funny more than he fell flat and decent more than not. 3197 issues and countless side pages and podcasts are a hell of a legacy, and even though he never rose to the same prominence as some other bloggers, he was an original, and he’ll be missed.

So, good news: the bus tunnel will have cell service in the near future. It will be nice to not have whatever you’re doing cut out when you pull past the International District station. And while you’re waiting, you can pull out your phone and fart around a bit.

The bad news: the bus tunnel will have cell service in the near future. I can’t tell you how many times it’s been a relief to have someone yelling into their phone have to turn it off. Formerly, a moment’s quiet. Now lost.

Last Friday, I and much of the Washington lefty establishment, noted that State Sen. Jan Angel at the behest of Rodney Tom killed funding for state homeless programs. Anyway, finally Senator Angel has decided to address the problem head on. By demanding that Governor Inslee study the issue to death.

Sen. Jan Angel today sent a letter to the governor requesting his leadership in establishing a task force to evaluate funding sources for local homeless housing and assistance.

Her decision to hold House Bill 2368, a measure that would extend a temporary surcharge tax to support homelessness, in the financial institutions, housing and insurance committee has caused a flurry of controversy and inaccurate accusations, despite her good intentions.

“I was half an inch away from being homeless myself, so this issue is extremely important to me, despite what others are so quick to assume,” said Angel, R-Port Orchard. “People need to understand all of the facts surrounding an issue before they point fingers.”

Yeah, just because she withheld funds, how dare you ignore her personal story? Don’t you understand individual, unverified, claims are more important than the actual policy she pushes? Stop holding her to account for her actions, you meanies.

Angel said her main concerns about HB 2368 have to do with a lack of supporting data and reporting from the state Department of Commerce, strong discord among involved stakeholders, and the fact that the surcharge tax falls on the backs of one small and unpredictable sector.

That’s why she didn’t go through the normal committee process and instead killed it in a surprise legislative move. A move that caught even most of her GOP colleagues off guard. If she had wanted more reporting or more information, well, she’s the chair of the relevant committee. She could have made that happen without killing funding. For God’s Sake.

“This isn’t a matter of being for or against homeless people. This is about finding a sustainable solution that is agreed upon by all affected stakeholders – things that the measure did not do.

Look, it isn’t a matter of being against homeless people; It’s a matter of taking action against homeless people. And then waiting a week to find a way to deflect the actual reasons that you did it.

“That’s why I have called on the governor for his leadership. I am sure that he would agree that Washingtonians living in cars should be at the top of our priority list.

Jan Angel has called on the governor to lead, because we can be assured of one thing: Jan Angel will not lead on her own. No, what we need most of all in these troubled times is a commission or something. And, in the mean time, if people are hungry or cold we can just tell them, “there’s a taskforce in some office in Olympia leadershipping.”

“When you are put in a leadership position, you have to be willing to make the tough calls for the betterment of people. As co-chair of the committee, I decided to hold the measure because I know we can do better.”

But even after a week, I have no idea what better is. Leadership, as you know, is having no ideas and asking for someone else to rescue you from you own actions.

Angel said the current surcharge tax is at the mercy of virtually one industry that experiences severe peaks and dips depending on the economy. Instead of putting this kind of responsibility on the backs of one small sector, she is looking to the governor to help pull everyone together to evaluate more stable and permanent funding options that would truly meet the needs of the homeless.

Of course, the governor would have had more time to figure that out if she hadn’t killed the funding in a surprise last minute maneuver.

Kudos to Senator Pedersen for this bit of throwing the GOP nonsense back in their face.

Sen. Mike Baumgartner, R-Spokane, and Sen. Doug Ericksen, R-Ferndale, introduced amendments to the transportation bill that triggered alarms for Sen. Jamie Pedersen, D-Seattle. Ericksen’s amendment sought to pay the 520 bridge replacement costs with toll revenues. “I wanted to stop the gigantic sucking sound” of 520 overruns, Ericksen said. Baumgartner’s amendment would have made Seattle’s property owners responsible for cost overruns on the downtown tunnel project. Baumgartner was unavailable for comment after the Senate showdown.

[…]

Pedersen decided to introduce to file his own amendment to make the property owners of Medina, at the east end of the 520 bridge, liable for cost overruns on the 520 project. “My objective is to get rid of those two (Ericksen and Baumgartner) amendments,” said Pedersen midway through Tuesday night’s showdown.

Ericksen withdrew his amendment. Then the Senate passed Pedersen’s amendment to put Medina on the hook for 520 overruns by a voice vote — in which senators shout as groups or stand in groups to show their positions without a formal roll call. The vote on Pedersen’s amendment showed that some Republicans wanted to have Medina pay for 520 cost overruns, or at least wanted to punish Tom.

In the end, neither provision was in the final Senate Supplemental Transportation Budget. It’s nice that a Seattle Democrat is willing to throw an elbow. And look, something good actually came out of it. If Seattle Democrats are a bit more willing to throw a punch now and again, that probably bodes well for future projects.

Also, it’s nice that enough GOP members were willing to throw Tom under the bus. Or at least Medina, and that’s somewhat less nice. Either they don’t like Tom as much as many Democrats (but are still willing to make him Majority Leader!), or they really can’t tell the difference between Seattle and the suburbs with their hate. In some ways their irrational hatred of Seattle is an irrational hatred of the Puget Sound region. As much as Tom may go out of his to demonize Seattle, Medina — and the whole of the Eastside and for that matter all of King County — are just about as hated by the people who hate Seattle.

– Welcome back Goldy.

– Is the marbled murrelet habitat on the Olympic Peninsula worth $600,000?

– Too much rain, you guys. It’s starting to get expensive for King County and the rest of Western Washington.

– It seems to me that putting young people and their families thousands of dollars into debt for a fraud is more than just a little bit evil and more than just a little bit sinful.

– With all the problems with Russia, one could be forgiven for being distracted from what North Korea is doing, but what the fuck is North Korea doing?

– Justice James Johnson is not a favorite around here, but I wish him the speediest of recoveries.

– Welcome to the Pac 12 Women’s Basketball tourney.