– Saving the PI Globe.

– Employer Authorization for Contraception

– A view from the deck.

– Rush Limbaugh’s non-apology.

– What’s the matter with white people? is obviously a provocative title, but well worth the read.

– Freewayblogger is looking for slogans about climate change for the next tour.(h/t)

– Yes, this is mostly an excuse for the Democrats to get you on their email list, but you can commit to the Democratic caucuses here.

– Rushed Apology

Hey, remember when Ed Murray sold teachers down the river in an effort to secure votes for the budget? How’d that work out?

The data for pedestrian safety after the Nickerson Street road diet (pdf) is worth looking at. And as someone who supports road diets in general, it’s worth pointing to the good. Pedestrian collisions are down from the average of the last 5 years. But if we’re looking at accident rates to tell us something, we’ll have to factor in the fact that “SDOT installed two new marked crosswalks at Dravus Street and 11th Avenue W” at the same time.

Although, obviously reduction in speeds helps too:

Speed data was recorded between 6th Avenue W and 3rd Avenue W in June, 2007. Prior to the project, the 85th-percentile speeds in both directions exceeded the speed limit: 40.6 mph westbound and 44.0 mph eastbound. Approximately 90 percent of drivers exceeded the speed limit. Speed data was collected at the same location after rechannelization in February, 2011. The 85th percentile declined to 33.1 mph westbound and 33.3 eastbound. After rechannelization, the percent of speeders declined by two-thirds and the percent of drivers exceeding the speed limit by 10 or more miles per hour dropped by more than 90 percent.

Of course I don’t know what’s better for pedestrians, and they surely work in tandem. In any event, those of us who support road diets should talk about the success of Nickerson in terms safety walking the neighborhood. But we should also acknowledge that it’s more complex.

Is anyone going to caucus for president based on The Seattle Times’ endorsement? I don’t think so, and further, I think they realize it. Why else would they open their endorsement (bold mine):

THE 20th, and possibly last, debate among GOP presidential candidates is mercifully over. Washington’s Republican precinct caucuses on Saturday force a choice.

Hmmm. Ah, Mitt Romney. The former Massachusetts governor has the most potential in a thin field to represent his party in head-to-head competition with Democratic President Barack Obama.

This is certainly no endorsement of Romney’s candidacy. We share Republican Attorney General Rob McKenna’s obvious ambivalence about making an early commitment.

First off, what does Rob McKenna have to do with anything? Seriously, what? They didn’t even introduce it as anything. They just — what — think everyone who reads their editorials follows Rob McKenna as closely as them? There was no reason to mention him whatever.

Second, congrats for putting some actual snark in the ed page. I mean it when I say it could use more that, even if this time they executed it poorly.

More to the point, I love the phrase “this is certainly no endorsement” in the middle of the endorsement. It’s not like anyone is forcing them to endorse. Literally nobody changed their mind because of what they read in the editorials this morning. Nobody.

– Suck it, Portland.

– And hopefully we’ll get a transportation revenue bill.

– a state capital gains tax would tap into the enormous profits generated by such exclusive investment clubs, generating roughly $700 million a year in new resources for investments in education, health care, and other core economic structures.

– Andrew Breitbart has died.

– And how is Carol doing at the fish stick factory?

– I would totally watch all of these horrible, horrible movies.

As some of you know, I’m planning to caucus with the Republicans for Fred Karger, by far the least objectionable. Pro choice, pro marriage equality, he’s actually not horrible on a lot of things. But he’s a solid Republican, and so in a general, I’d still prefer Obama to him.

But I don’t really expect him to win. Thus caucusing for Karger is more to send a message to the GOP that no, it doesn’t have to be that way. You can change. That while we can have reasonable disagreements about economic policy, they don’t need to demonize women and gay people.

Anyway, it’s somewhat impressive that Fred got well over 1000 votes in Michigan.

Looks like snow, but not enough to stick. There were a few flurries downtown already mixed in with drizzle. Not ideal biking weather, but I’m trying to bike more, especially with gas prices so high. So what the hell, I’ll be out in it today. Hopefully it won’t be too bad.

And if it is, I’ll just take the bus. I’ve been meaning to write about how nice it is that you can just throw your bike on the front rack and go. It’s such a great freedom to be able to have that as a plan b, and not have to figure out what to do with your bike. I got mine stolen about a year ago, and I’ve been worried about leaving the new one around ever since.

So if we have more than flurries when I’m heading home, or if I just don’t feel like riding, it’s nice to have an alternative.

– I can’t think of anything more horrifying than Brent Bozell deciding who can use contraception.

– 1% tip. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with people? (Apparently this was a hoax. My apologies that my bullshit detector didn’t go off.)

– In fairness to Rick Santorum, everything he does makes me want to throw up.

– I’m not sure it was inadvertent.

– The “war” on steroids always has been Kafka rewritten by Lewis Carroll. It is always going to have victims like Ryan Braun — or, worse, some player is guaranteed one day to be the victim of a demonstrably false positive result — because that is the nature of all authoritarian solutions.

– a list of ten ways in which a Republican president would have responded differently to Afghan concerns

It’s not time to hit the panic button yet, but this is certainly a really bad sign.

PubliCola has learned that the Washington State Department of Transportation, which initially predicted it would be able to raise $400 million in toll revenues to pay to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct with a tunnel, now believes tolls will raise only $200 million, half the original projection.

The $200 million figure comes from WSDOT’s proposed tunnel budget (see page 9), which is currently being reviewed by the state legislature. The revised budget now assumes $702 million in funding from the federal government—$219 million more than the original assumption of $483 million.

As Erica C. Barnett says, so far federal money will pay for this. And if the economy picks up, some of the toll money is likely to recover. So it’s not a showdown between the city and state at this point. But it brings us closer to that point.

Can someone explain to me why the most recent editorial on the Seattle Times’ Ed Page is from February 24?

… And they’ve fixed it.

– Poor, poor Koch Brothers.

– If Rick Santorum had his way, I wouldn’t have been able to get that test, and she most likely would have died. Because according to him, tests that give parents vital information about the health of their unborn children are morally wrong. Though he has no medical training, and no business commenting on the medical decisions that women and their doctors make, he argues that such tests shouldn’t be provided, or that employers at least should be allowed to opt out of paying for them on “moral grounds.”

– Shaun has some more on the proposed marriage equality plank for the Democratic platform.

– If the Yes Men have corporate America so afraid, they must be doing something right.

– Nobody expects the vaginal inquisition.

– the female orgasm is a violation of religious liberty.

I realize this is kind of old, but the house GOP Budget is called the “all-priorities budget.” I don’t need to go into the specifics: every out of power caucus presents an unrealistic budget that gets ignored. Then they run on, “our budget doesn’t cut education as drastically as their budget. Then never mention that they do that by ignoring all the things they would have had to put back in if they were trying to actually pass a budget. I’m not blaming them for that, if Democrats didn’t control the levers of democracy, their House budget would have tax increases that won’t actually pass, etc. Then not run on the tax increases bit.

But what interests me is the branding here. “All-priorities budget” seems like it was focus grouped to sound great. But here’s the thing: governing, especially in times of uncertainty and cuts, is about picking some priorities over others. The branding “all-priorities” implies that they think you can have it all.

Seeing the first gubernatorial poll where Inslee isn’t behind is certainly heartening news. I don’t know if it’s an outlier at this point or if the race has tightened up recently. In any event, for the thousandth time, I’m going to point out that we’re not simply passive observers.

As people who’ve been reading this blog for a while know, I’m a big proponent of getting out and doing what you can for candidates. For citizens volunteering. Knocking on doors and having conversations will be more persuasive than whatever ads get TiVoed passed or mailings that go straight into the recycle bin. And calling people reminding them to vote will push the numbers up.

So, I know I’ll volunteer throughout the campaign. And I hope some of you do the same.

– Peter Gleick

– This is sort of a win? Maybe? The state can violate your bodily autonomy only on your abdomen and not in your vagina. Yay?

– 100% accurate Oscar picks.

– I think Social Security is stronger than its critics would have you believe, but I appreciate Chad’s take on what the payroll tax holiday might mean for the program.

– I’d also missed that the right wing is freaking out over the phrase freedom of worship.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a good solid metacommentary piece, and I’ve been meaning to get back into it here. So even though this isn’t local, and plenty of liberal blogs made fun of this days ago, I’m going to give this crap a try.

What are women for?

Go fuck yourself. Jesus, I’m not even past the title and I’m just saying, “go fuck yourself.” This could be a long one.

In a simpler time Sigmund Freud struggled to understand what women want. Today the significant battle is over what women are for. None of our culture warriors are anywhere close to settling the matter. The prevailing answer is the non-answer, a Newt-worthy challenge to the premise that insists the real purpose of women is nothing in particular.

Maybe because it’s only a question a jackass would ask. Maybe, and I know this will sound silly, the billions of women are individual, autonomous humans and not “for” anyone or anything.

Also, did Freud live in a simpler time? Didn’t he live through the first World War? Oh, hey there’s a good chance you’ll have children who die before adolescence. Everyone is on cocaine. Simpler, simpler times!

Such an answer may or may not be a landmark in the progress of the human race, but it is anathema to most conservatives of any political party, and for that reason conservative folkways, prejudices, and ideals are once again on trial.

Are those even words? I feel like each of those words are words, but together, I don’t think any of them are, strictly speaking.

Rick Santorum may be easing up on the rhetorical throttle as his fortunes seem on the upswing, but everyone else feels their civilization is in peril, and the bile rises accordingly. On birth control, the Catholic Church is portrayed as the extremist fringe of its own faithful. On abortion, activists labor to extort Komen for the Cure.

Rick Santorum is still as much a jackass as ever, the Catholic hierarchy is out of step with its membership. And the Komen debacle was only about abortion insofar as they decided to make Planned Parenthood’s cancer screenings about abortion. If that’s the sign of civilization in peril, well good news, civilization isn’t in peril.

As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes observes, Republicans are being excoriated for voting against the Violence Against Women Act, for pushing transvaginal ultrasounds, and for holding an all-male hearing on birth control. Conservatives are even being reviled for “slut-shaming” sexy CPAC attendees. “Is there no one in the upper echelon of the GOP establishment,” Hayes wonders, “who can explain to them how all this looks when strung together?”

And, they’re all quite bad on their own. They wouldn’t get excoriated if they acted like women deserve respect and should be allowed to make their own choices. This isn’t a perception problem, it’s a human decency problem.

Alas, Carly Fiorina is not quite upper echelon. But before liberals ritually invoke the glass ceiling, they might want to conduct an agonizing reappraisal of their own. If the conservative movement’s nominal unity is actually belied by a stunning range of right-wing views on the status and purpose of women (and believe me, it is), the left’s alleged philosophical uniformity on the woman question is a complete fabrication — despite the fanatical discipline and norm-enforcement of much of the liberal cultural establishment.

Is the rest of this going to be an honest, thoughtful look at sexism in the Democratic party? If so, Meg Whitman might have been the better choice there. A writer who appreciates crafting a piece might then circle back to the time that she was called a whore. As a Hillary Clinton supporter in 2008, and someone who has tried to call out sexism in my own party, I would actually appreciate that effort. And while the Daily Caller isn’t really the best place to write that, it’s still a legit story. Or I’m wrong about all that and more nonsense:

The purpose of lifting the left’s Potemkin skirts is not to score tits for tats. Anyone serious about thinking through the role of women in today’s civilization is doing worthless work unless they take the controversies on the right hand in hand with the unsuccessfully suppressed tensions on the opposite side of the spectrum, where disagreements far more volatile in their profundity roil respectable liberalism.

OK, well that paragraph certainly feels like it’s only there to push up the word count. But is that a reference to Potemkin villages? The implication that nobody in the Democratic party actually is a woman? That they’re just fake women? Whaaaat?

Left opinion is no longer defined by the comfortably careworn liberal consensus that Sandra Day O’Connor conveyed in the abortive plurality decision of Planned Parenthood v. Casey. There, the metaphysical trouble kicked up by the elective killing of fetuses was relegated to the realm of life’s cosmic mysteries — a place liberals contemptuously deride as beneath human dignity when referenced in terms of the suffering of the crucified Christ. No judge, O’Connor and company concluded, could judge what it so much as meant to end fetal life.

I’m starting a band called “Abortive Plurality.” Also, is a Reagan appointee who was often the swing vote on the Supreme Court part of “the comfortably careworn liberal consensus” or is she a Potemkin skirt?

Lurking beneath this procedural non-judgmentalism was a stubbornly conspicuous judgmental end. Roe couldn’t be overturned, the plurality argued, because Americans might think the Supreme Court was bending to public pressure. The court’s solution was to bend to the public reality that millions of women had altered what it meant to be a woman — and what status that meaning conferred — by having or supporting abortions. On the bogus theory that all linear change is progress, the plurality embraced the immoderate view that a descent into barbarism is impossible.

I’m pretty sure the point of that argument wasn’t that we should all be barbarians.

Continued on Page 2 >>

Oh fuck, fine. I’ll press on.

Liberals, of course, generally and characteristically deny that abortion is barbaric. But the Casey decision substituted a progressive passivity for that very active moral claim. Today, the left is increasingly torn between old-school modern liberals who think like O’Connor and new-school postmodern liberals who find their cognitive elders in thrall to a haute-bourgeois conventionality that the deep premises of their own thought seem to strip of authority.

I. Well. Huh? You know. Um, use an editor next time.

So postmodern Cynthia Nixon, who used to be straight but now isn’t, tells The New York Times Sunday Magazine exactly what establishment liberals don’t want to hear when it comes to the sexual politics of women — “you don’t get to define my gayness for me.” As Laurie Essig understated it in The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Such talk is heresy among some people in the gay advocacy and the reaction was both immediate and predictable.” Nixon was swiftly accused by the left’s cultural policemen of “aiding and abetting bigots and bashers.”

I’m not sure what makes Cynthia Nixon postmodern, but whatever. She and the gay rights advocates all want the same thing (gay rights), so hell of a rift. She can define her sexuality however she wants, like any adult.

The piece forgot to define what the other side wants for her. Maybe say why it’s heresy instead of just quoting someone who says that it is. Then we can see for ourselves if these disagreements are actual disagreements on the left, and maybe how to resolve them.

Lip service is often paid to the impression that the point of empowering women is to empower them to do whatever they want, but much of the left stops well short of the more radical implications of that easy answer. The left’s culture of celebration is hamstrung by the very assertions of should and shouldn’t that contemporary women have inevitably come to make — as the ongoing debate over the advisability of marriage reveals. Reihan Salam has hinted that typically left-wing implications of academic theories like “erotic capital,” including mainstreaming prostitution, point in directions quite at odds with the dominant but failing framework of liberal sexual politics.

I don’t know what erotic capital means, but how about this: women do what you like. If you want to get married, great! If you want to stay single, great! If you’re for monogamy, great! If you want to still see other people while you’re in a relationship, great! If you want children, great! If you don’t, great! You know, like women are autonomous humans who know what’s best for themselves.

To the growing discomfort of many, that framework hasn’t come anywhere close to answering even the most basic questions about what women are for — despite pretty much universal recognition across the political spectrum that a civilization of men, for men, and by men is no civilization at all, a monstrously barbaric, bloody, and brutal enterprise. A few inherently meaningful implications about what women are for flow naturally from this wise and enduring consensus, but no faction of conservatives or liberals has figured out how to fully grasp, translate, and reconcile them in the context of our political life.

WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT? Anyway, how about using ironically in a way that’s guaranteed to piss me off and then finish up with nonsense:

Ironically, one of the best places to look for a way out of the impasse is the strain of left feminism that insists an inherently unique female “voice” actually exists. That’s a claim about nature. Much good would come from a broader recognition that women have a privileged relationship with the natural world. That’s a relationship which must receive its social due — if masculinity in its inherent and imitative varieties (including imitation by quasi-feminized males of quasi-masculinized females!) is not to conquer the world.