Joel Connelly has a great piece on the Farm Bill, and what the House GOP’s failure to pass it means for Washington.

The defining program for American agriculture expired on Sept. 30. It should have been renewed by Congress last year. The Senate passed a bipartisan bill by a 68-32 vote earlier this year. The House Agriculture Committee cooperated and produced a bill. But it was stalled by a revolt in the House Republican Caucus by members demanding deep cuts in food stamps.

“Those are the same people who wanted to shut down the government,” Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said in disgust Thursday.

Cantwell and Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., who sits on the House Agriculture Committee, held a briefing in a cold Seattle warehouse to discuss the consequences.

I am struck again and again with the cruelty of the GOP position. The fact that they’re willing to sacrifice so much so that they can, what, harm people on Food Stamps? It’s so far away from the ideal that we’re all in this together.

I’m generally of the belief that primary challenges are good for the side that makes them. There’s free media, and by virtue of who usually issues a challenge, when the incumbent survives, they can point to it in the general and say how they’re not extreme like those people over there. Over at Blue Oregon, Kari Chisholm has a piece on a brand-new primary challenge to the Eastern Oregon Republican representative.

As I said last month when this challenge started to materialize, stranger things have happened. Walden’s got farmers mad at him for failing to pass a Farm Bill. Walden’s got the Club for Growth mad at him for supporting higher spending in the stimulus. And now, he’s surely got Wall Street mad at him for voting in favor of default.

Sure. If this is a chance to highlight how bad he’s been, by all means people should use it. And of course if the possibility helps attract a good Democrat who can actually put up a challenge, even better.

C’mon folks, let’s do a little crowd-sourced brainstorming. Who are plausible Democratic candidates for Congress in OR-2?

– Mars Hill break new ground in lying for Jesus.

– Assorted Thoughts on the Seattle/Tacoma UFCW non-strike

– “Tyson’s story,” and it is indeed quite a story, is hardly an “American original.” The powerful man who spends his life harming women, only to be publicly rehabilitated again and again, is about as routine as American stories come.

– There’s a piece in Grant’s memoir where he says that if the founding generation were alive they would think that instant communication across the Atlantic via telegraph was witchcraft. This Oliver Willis piece is a nice thing along those lines.

– Here’s an Indiegogo campaign for an academy to train women in software development right here in Seattle. Given our worst in the nation gender gap and reliance on tech for our economy, this seems like an important thing.

– The Affordable Art Fair looks like fun.

Tom at Seattle Bike Blog reports on an event tomorrow for bike lighting.

Bike lights are not optional. Aside from being required by law (technically, only front light and rear reflector are required), lights are vital if you are going to be visible to folks driving, biking and walking at night and sun-in-the-eyes situations.

Studies have shown that people on bikes naturally feel more visible to others than they actually are. Unfortunately, this leads people to a false sense of security about biking without lights (or with very poor lights).

[…]

The city and Commute Seattle want to help you out. They are hosting an event Thursday from 4-6 p.m. at 5th and Stewart.

It’s a good chance to get the right gear. With the days getting shorter, and the commute in the dark — as well as this fog — it’ll be more and more important to be light up properly.

As promised, here’s a thread about the Seattle Mayor’s race. For the first time that I can remember, I’m undecided on who to vote for in a big race like this. I got my ballot and filled most of it out, but still haven’t filled either mayoral bubble. I’m definitely leaning toward McGinn, but I like both of them quite a bit. Four years ago, when Ed Murray was considering a write in campaign, I wrote that I would support him if he ran because I liked him the best, but that I hoped he didn’t because he would probably take more votes away from McGinn than Mallahan and that I was worried that a self-funded person who was the more conservative would be able to win when he really shouldn’t. He didn’t run, and I eventually volunteered for McGinn’s election.

I really wasn’t particularly impressed with McGinn, but figured at least he wasn’t running a self-funded campaign on “TAXEZ BAD ME SMASH” and (after the post went up) unsure about abortion rights like Mallahan. I mean McGinn was saying the right things about transit and bikes, but everybody says the right things about them around election time, but usually they don’t do anything. He was also talking mostly about things that aren’t really the Mayor’s prerogative: education, broadband, and transit, and usually when people talk about those sorts of things and then get elected, they then ignore them.

Since then, they’ve both done things that I give high marks to. I’ve been surprised that I liked most of McGinn’s tenure as mayor (there are exceptions, like foot dragging on police reform and the Chihuly garden). He pushed a mostly reluctant City Council to put a doubling of the Families and Education Levy on the ballot, and it passed handily. There’s high speed Internet coming to much of the city.* He has also kept social services funded despite the recession and a tax cut from the council right before he took office.

Meanwhile, Ed Murray has cemented his already impressive legacy, passing marriage equality and shepherding it to a vote with a positive result. While he did preside over the loss of the Democrats’ caucus, I don’t really blame him for it. Rodney Tom hates Seattle and Tim Sheldon hates Seattle and gay people (to the extent he knows there’s a difference). So if the problem with him is that he’s from Seattle and gay, well that would be a dumb reason to be upset with him. Given the restraints, he has mostly kept the rest of the caucus from caving to the worst aspects of the GOP.

Finally, there are social issues. There’s some discussion that they’re off the table. And I agree neither of them is going to try zone abortion clinics out of the city or deny gay employees benefits, for example. They’re certainly closer on most of the defining social issues of the day than they are apart. But I have to say it’s been nice that Seattle has had four years where strippers and all ages music weren’t regularly being attacked from the mayor’s office. I hope that will be true of the next four years with Murray, but it’ll almost definitely be true with another four years of McGinn.

So that leaves two candidates I like quite a bit, and a campaign I’m the opposite of happy with, especially on Murray’s side. I don’t like all the third party money and I think it has been unnecessarily negative, and often not factual. Murray has courted the anti-transit and anti-bike people despite his record in the legislature being pretty good on those issues. Part of the reason I’ve been reluctant to decide is that it seems like everyone who has taken a side thinks that their flawed but pretty good lefty candidate is awesome and the other, flawed but pretty good lefty candidate is shit, and I’d rather not take that up. But I can’t really put off the decision any longer, and I’m going to have to fill in a bubble.

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– There won’t be a grocery strike.

– The HUGE difference between Davis and Cruz that I want to draw attention to in this post: the support in person of citizens at the capitol in which they stood and talked. Davis had THOUSANDS of constituents who showed up to support her. Cruz barely had any support inside the chamber, forget outside of it.

– Washington seems to be signing up people for health care at a nice clip.

– It’s pretty easy to interview long dead politicians if you just make up their answers.

– I for one am glad that my work station doesn’t look like the bridge of the Enterprise.

Hey to the Washington voters, who are you supporting for various races around the state? Is there some county or city race that you’re excited about? Is there some initiative or county charter amendment that you feel needs some attention? Is there a hospital district or school board that you want to reflect on? Some cemetery commission candidate who you want to rant about? Well, the ballots are out, so here’s a chance to do it.

(I have some thoughts on the Seattle Mayor’s race, so I’ll have a post up specifically about that. Feel free to comment on it here if you want, but FYI, there’s a dedicated one coming up probably Wednesday.)

– The list of companies trying to make sure you don’t know what’s in your food is about what you’d expect but it’s good to have it confirmed.

– All-day training session for anti-KXL activists in Tacoma — Sat., Oct. 26

– I really like Dean Nielsen, but this is below the belt and he should apologize.

– There are those small town values that make people proud that they don’t have to lock their door at night… …and then there are those small town values that make a body wonder how anyone sleeps at night.

– The 26th District race between Democrat Nathan Schlicher and Republican challenger Jan Angel has already seen a combined spending of $1.9 million, with about half of that money being spent by third-party groups. (Tri-City Herald link to an AP story. Not sure if they have a cap on the number of articles)

– What the Fuck Should I Be For Halloween (h/t) Also, it knows me pretty well because it came up with a pun for me (lewd zeppelin, that I’m not doing but that I appreciate).

Goldy points to The Seattle Times’ endorsement of the repeal position on the estate tax advisory vote. We just voted for an estate tax like a few years ago, didn’t we? Whatever. But what I find interesting is The Seattle Times’ insistence on calling it a “death tax” as if that’s a thing.

Reading that got me thinking about their other insistence regarding taxes. Specifically, that taxes harm whatever you’re taxing. So they’ve been taking the line for years that you can’t increase taxes during a recession/recovery because it will harm the economy.* But if that’s true, they should support a “death tax” because it will stop people dying. By The Seattle Times’ logic, The Seattle Times wants more death. QED

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Greg Walden, who represents Eastern Oregon in Congress, is one of the few Representatives from Cascadia who voted to continue the government shutdown and to have the US default on its debts. After Blue Oregon wrote about it, former Labor Commissioner Jack Roberts left a comment:

I think it’s fair to say that Greg knew how the vote was going to turn out before he cast his. Sort of like Obama’s vote against raising the debt ceiling when he was a senator.

Kari at Blue Oregon has some interesting things to say about what that means in terms Walden’s honesty. But I’d add that there was a major difference: The Democrats weren’t in the majority when Obama took that vote, and the minority party typically has more room to make those types of symbolic protest votes.

When Republicans whine and whine and whine and complain and whine and moan and shriek and whine about how Democrats weren’t willing to make any concessions, this puts the lie to it. When most of the votes to keep the government open had to come from the minority party, well, that’s more of a compromise than ought to have been necessary to keep the lights on. That’s meeting the Republicans more than half way by doing something that wasn’t typically the job of the minority. It meant that the GOP didn’t have to whip its caucus as much as they might otherwise, it means that Democrats might have to eat shit in some districts for blah blah debt ceiling. If the GOP wants to be in the majority, they ought to use it to fucking govern.

And even better news for same sex Oregon couples:

Gay couples are still legally banned from getting married in Oregon, but, effective immediately, their marriages will be recognized in the state if they choose to get hitched elsewhere in the country.

In an interesting half-step toward marriage equality, Oregon’s chief operating officer Michael Jordan issued a memo stating that all state agencies are required to recognize the unions of gay couples who wed outside the state.

“Oregon agencies must recognize all out-of-state marriages for the purposes of administering state programs,” reads the memo. “That includes legal, same sex marriages performed in other states and countries.”

It is welcome news even as it shows that there is more work to do. I suspect that it will be good for the wedding industry in Southern Washington and Northern California as couples come here to get legally hitched back home. I welcome the economic activity and the spread of love. And those of us who voted for marriage equality in Washington will have helped couples from the other side of the Columbia get married.

Still, for people in parts of Oregon that aren’t near the border, getting access to those rights might be tough. A couple farmers in Southeastern Oregon, or some college kids in Eugene who money is tight for might not be able make the trip.

Goldy details the AG’s complaint against the Grocery Manufacturers Association for their anti-I-522 campaign financing.

According to the complaint, the GMA funded its anti-522 efforts through voluntary assessments on its members (major food companies) separate from their normal association dues. Invoices were sent to GMA members in March and August of 2013, with the goal of raising $10 million to oppose I-522. As of the No on I-522’s most recent disclosure report, the GMA had contributed $7,222,500.

Of course, the GMA and its members are free to spend as much as they want opposing I-522; the issue here is their failure to disclose the source of the money. GMA members—familiar brands like Pepsi, Kraft, Coca-Cola, General Mills, and Kellogg’s—faced a ton of bad publicity for the millions they contributed to defeat the similar Prop 37 in California last year. The complaint outlines what appears to be a deliberate effort to shield these companies from similar publicity, in direct violation of Washington’s voter-approved public disclosure laws. In addition to penalties and legal fees, the AG is seeking to force the GMA to register as a political action committee and reveal its donors.

It’s a process story rather than a policy story, and I don’t think people really vote based on that (for specific candidates they do, I’m not convinced they do for ballot initiatives). Still, perhaps this feeds the narrative more than usual. The Frankenfood industry doesn’t want you to know who is spending money in the initiative process just like it doesn’t want you to know what you’re eating. I don’t know.

– 144 Representatives, all Republicans none from WA, voted to keep the government shut down and for the US to default. That’s gross in at least two ways.

– In case you missed it during the shutdown, a Seattle resident was awarded the Medal of Honor for heroism at the Battle of Ganjgal.

– The 60 Minutes strenuously fact-free assertions about disabled people “leeching” off the system are even more pernicious in this context, since they add to the narrative that the United States bears no collective responsibility to support any of our poorest citizens, regardless of their circumstances.

– Are you ready for Seattle Startup Week?

– Seattle has had a long history of women at the head of bike organizations (see also: Barb Culp). But this is the first time, at least to my knowledge, that a woman has held every top spot.

– I’ve never played either of the Plants versus Zombies games, but the psychology behind those sorts of games is interesting.

I’m sure y’all are reading the NPI Advocate. When Andrew goes into live blogging mode or when he’s making fun of Tim Eyman it’s always solid. So as soon as I saw the title of this piece about Eyman speaking at the transit listening committee was of course going to be great.

“The people attending these meetings, including myself, are not a representative sample of the taxpayers of Washington,” Eyman said, instantly drawing another round of boos and jeers. “Normal people are at home recovering from a long day at work, but their voices deserve to be heard too,” he added.

“We’re normal people!” shouted several indignant audience members in a near simultaneous (but uncoordinated) reply. “I came here straight from work,” one young woman sitting near me said loudly.

People in the room were offended, and certainly they had every right to be.

Were I not an activist who has been watchdogging Tim Eyman and fighting his destructive initiatives for over a decade, I would have been offended too. I’d have resented Eyman’s sneering implication that I was not a “normal” person because I had chosen to give up part of my evening to share my opposition to Metro service cuts with the people charged with deciding what our laws and budget should be.

[…]

Eyman may not be normal – after all, he’s a well paid professional politician – but plenty of people who showed up at tonight’s hearing are regular Washingtonians who claim to represent nobody but themselves. They spoke as citizens and activists, not lobbyists or political operatives. Unlike Eyman, they don’t get paid big bucks to promote cynical initiatives designed to wreck government.

Just because Tim Eyman isn’t normal, he shouldn’t smear the rest of the people who show up on a Monday night to participate in the process. Usually in Olympia at hearings and committee meetings these sorts of things are overwhelmingly dominated by lobbyists and other people more like Tim Eyman who make their living taking one side or another. When they actually come to Seattle and other parts of the state, they can hear from a broader selection of people.

Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler and I don’t agree on much. But at least she can see the value of not shutting down the government over a law she doesn’t like (Seattle Times link). Eventually.

In a statement released Tuesday, Herrera Beutler said she’s avoided public comment before now because she wanted to give Republican leaders leeway to craft a deal.

But she said the time has come for Republicans “to face reality” and made it clear she will not vote for “poison pills” seeking to end the Affordable Care Act, which have no chance of passing the Senate or being signed into law.

Unlike Dave Reichert, who I complained about earlier, this seems legit. As we’re on the eve of a potential default, it seems like a praiseworthy thing. Especially since it’s a pretty conservative Republican who was first elected in the Tea Party wave (and who post-redistricting might be more likely to face a primary challenge than be defeated by a Democrat). So, I doubt I’ll make a habit of praising conservative Republicans in this state, but thanks Representative Herrera Buetler for recognizing reality.