I’m sympathetic to the proposal by the Washington Association of School Administrators to cut 5 days the school year. They’re responding to the reality that the state almost certainly isn’t going to raise taxes significantly. If we’re not going to figure out how to fund education at the state level, we may as well figure out how to make it work as well as possible at the shitty funding level we’re going to get. And there are worse things than fewer days.

So, yeah, it may not be as bad for state children as some of the other godawful options. It may be that better education can happen in those 175 days than in 180 days spread thinner. And cutting levy equalization will hurt the most vulnerable children.

Still, if Seattle* voters support every district levy for decades, if they support the Families and Education Levy and doubled it last time, and still see their children get a week less of school, I don’t know how much they’ll be willing to support paying for education at the state level. I think we’re still willing to pay state taxes to improve education all over, but we’re not willing to see our children lose out when Seattle hasn’t done anything wrong.

For it’s one thing for Seattle to subsidize the rest of the state. But to hurt our children for that is something entirely new. We’re willing to let the state skim off the top, but I don’t know that we’ll be willing to lose school days to subsidize other districts.

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Don’t cut Medicare without getting millionaires to pay their fair share.

– Carrying condoms shouldn’t be used as proof of prostitution.

– Completing a missing link.

– You contact the police

– Lee has already mentioned the inaccuracies in Bill O’Reilly’s book, but this is still funny.

– We need the debate audience to help Michelle bring her campaign back to life by clapping their hands to show they believe in her.

I know I already linked to this, but I really quite enjoy the Google Street View of bike trails. I think part of it is the little I’ve explored, people are impressed by this thing. There are people waving and pointing in what looks like giving directions. And yeah, you get that some in the street view, but not as much.

And I think this reflects the best part of riding a bike: the fact that you aren’t boxed into a car. The interactions when you’re at a stop light that you just couldn’t get with other things. The fact that you can slow down and look at something. You get an experience that’s totally different from driving.

It’s not all positive; Seattle’s rain and hills make me glad to sometimes trap myself in my car. And I hate sharing the road with shit drivers. While it’s unnerving in a car or in a bike those thousands of pounds of metal a seat belt and air bags will protect me better than my helmet. Still, I’m glad for the experience biking provides.

I’m glad chat with people about we’re going or the weather. I love exploring nooks and crannies of the city you can’t get to in a car. And I love seeing things I wouldn’t on a car.

One of the saddest things I’ve seen in Seattle was the Pier 91 Trail after nightfall. I was going into downtown after spending some time in Magnolia. It really shocked me, even as someone who lives downtown, how many homeless people there were.* It wasn’t an experience you’d get in a car even passing a homeless camp by the freeway. It’s a different perspective from a bike than from a car.
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– Repeal Seattle’s jaywalking laws.

– Google street view of Seattle Trails

– You would think that a study analyzing the consumption of fast food by poor people would take into account a massive sea change in the way fast food was consumed by poor people. But then again, I’m not a science-type person.

– How dare you call our hero self-sacrificing?

– Hanson endeavors to drag Cain up by Cain’s bootstraps, and he does so by denigrating women and black people with such ease one suspects that Hanson has never met a stereotype or bias that he didn’t call “science.”

– This Twitter language map is pretty amazing.

I was reading this piece from Goldy about how we need to repeal the B&O exemption for newspapers in these troubled times, and he quotes a recent Seattle Times editorial that says:

Essentially I-1163 says to legislators, “Find $36 million per biennium and spend it on this. We do not care where you find the money. That is your problem.”

Now I understand from the context, and the fact that they’re using a made up number, that this isn’t an actual quote. No, the initiative doesn’t have that language in it, and it hasn’t come to life and started talking. But, why put it in quotes at all? That has to be confusing to the senile segment of the population that still reads the Seattle Times Ed board for information. I don’t want to do Ryan Blethen’s job for him, but wouldn’t it make more sense to just say, “I-1163 fores legislators” and not deal with imaginary quotes?

Also, as I understand it, the initiative is talking here. So why is it speaking in the second person plural? If you’re going to make up a quote from a single inanimate object, it should probably say “I” rather than “we.”

– Occupy Comics

– If anyone who voted for (or against, I suppose) the Seattle Housing Levy wants to know where your money goes. It goes in part to “seven new apartment buildings that will serve homeless individuals, low-income families and seniors. The investment, primarily Seattle Housing Levy funds, will help create 476 new permanent apartments, including some set-aside to serve veterans.”

– Someone should probably do something. Maybe throw a body upon the gears and what not?

– You know when I was a kid the War On Christmas didn’t start until after Thanksgiving.

– Yikes, again.

– Seattle Transit Rider’s Union public forum.

– Hippocracy

– There are too many stars.

– Very realistic.

I’ve watched this presentation by Bug Girl on social media a couple times. The part that intrigues me the most is who she finds her competition to be. And it isn’t other insect bloggers, but rather everything else. She finds other insect bloggers to be her collaborators. And I sort of feel the same way about Washington/Northwest liberal blogs.

In the early days of local blogging, the landscape was pretty bare. Before Slog, before Postman’s blog or the rest of the local media, before Goldy started blogging, it was a threadbare community compared to now. And I made an effort with what little platform I had 2 blogs ago to promote the rest of the community. It grew into something fun and interesting. And even with my 100-150 readers a day at most, I remember having people come up to me at Drinking Liberally or at other blog events and thank me for a link and tell me all the traffic they got out of it.

Some of them have gone, but a lot of them are still part of the community. I hope that the support of this community comes through in the Open Threads where I try to link to a variety of local blogs, even if I unfortunately tend toward the more established ones. Because I really don’t consider them the competition. I love the community both of comments and of other blogs. I don’t know what that means going forward, but I’m going to try to keep it in mind when I write here.

Joel Connelly has a piece, the last half dealing with the rejection of Prop 1. Here’s the conclusion, and the only part that talks about the future:

The state can hopefully get on with transportation projects, using variable (rush hour) tolls as a constructive carrot-stick approach to relieve congestion.

The Sierra Club will, one hopes, go back to being a player in Northwest conservation rather than an instrument of the McGinn-O’Brien agenda. Bellevue plutocrat Kemper Freeman will, one trusts, think twice before blowing another $1.1 million on an Eyman initiative.

The Seattle City Council should have the sense to bring more cooks into the kitchen, and give its next transportation package a little more time in the oven. Voters don’t like spending hard-earned money on something half-baked.

For someone who has written repeatedly (including in the non-quoted part of this piece) that a big problem with the car tabs was that it was regressive, he seems to have forgotten to make any sort of push to the legislature to give us an MVET or some other progressive means of paying for it (a 1% high earner’s income tax would be even better, although I have no idea how much it raises).

Anyway, the only solutions by government agencies Joel mentions are the legislature should do something transit related and the city should talk to more people. But unless the state allows us to tax ourselves more fairly, the biggest problem will persist (and Olympia isn’t likely to act without people like Joel pushing them).

Finally, not to spend too much time on an aside, but the Sierra Club does a lot of conservation work. The first non-election thing on the Cascade Chapter’s website is logging trails, for instance.

In a unanimous decision issued in NEDC v. Brown, a case involving logging roads on Oregon State lands, the Ninth Circuit ruled that polluted stormwater generated by logging roads is subject to regulation under the Clean Water Act’s National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES). The August 2011 decision requires that logging roads meet the standards of the Clean Water Act that would protect our clean water and salmon and steelhead. We are stunned that Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna would join with very conservative states such as Arkansas in urging the Supreme Court to overturn this court decision.

– Battles Won

– I don’t know why Darryl didn’t include the links to King County or Washington State results last night, but here they are. Most counties report this afternoon.

– Yikes.

– Call for artists for mile markers in the Interurban Trail in Shoreline.

– The Hidden World of Girls

– #OccupyDance

I assume you’re all aware that today is election day. But if for some reason you’re reading a Washington State political blog on election day and didn’t realize that, here’s your helpful reminder. Get your ballot postmarked by today. If you’re dropping it off in a mailbox, check to see what the pickup times are.

Not sure if I’m going to DL or to some candidate/initiative party, but presumably there will be some results here as well.

I don’t disagree with this piece in the Yakima Herald that combating crime is important.

Have you ever been a crime victim? Have you ever felt the violation of having your home broken into? Do you know someone who’s been mugged or murdered? If you have been lucky enough to have escaped victimization, then look around you; look to your immediate family and neighbors and ask yourself if any of them have been victims of crime. At this point, the numbers shrink pretty close to zero. Yakima is one of many cities in America where crime is a sad fact of life.

I don’t dig this second person construct. But yes, crime is bad, and we should do what we can to stop it. OK, so what should we cut? Or will this argue for tax increases? OK, what taxes? Oh it doesn’t? It just says public safety is good. So is education.

Public safety, along with education, must be the foundation of any civil society. Don’t take my word for any of what I have written. Do the homework, then ask yourself what the possible consequences of such draconian budget cuts will be. Too many of us have already been victims of crime. Are we safe enough to allow the bar to be lowered even more? I think the answer must be a resounding no.

Right. And a social safety net is also important. We’re long past the relatively easy things to cut. We need to raise taxes, and to do so in as progressive a way as we can. But even when an article begging no to cut corrections and education can’t mention raising taxes, we’re not going to have that discussion.

– Early last year, 75 percent were receiving checks. The figure is now 48 percent — a shift that points to a growing crisis of long-term unemployment. Nearly one-third of America’s 14 million unemployed have had no job for a year or more.

– Zombie Jurnolist

– On high tech lynchings.

– Godden had actually filed the public records request for the performance reviews, and we posted about them to show she was digging for a smear that didn’t exist..

– I’ve never even been to Ohio, and I know don’t say this.

– Parallel Earth Primary.

Bruce Ramsey seems awful upset by a press release from Mike O’Brien that says, “I got sick of all the fees and hassle of the big banks, making life difficult for customers while reaping record profits.” He takes issue on the fact that Bank of America (who O’Brien didn’t name as his bank) didn’t make a profit for a few years, showing their profits and losses from 2006 to 2010:

2006 $21 billion
2007 $15 billion
2008 $2.6 billion
2009 ($2.2 billion) loss
2010 ($3.6 billion) loss

So, how much did B of A to make in the third quarter of 2011, you ask? Oh, $6.2 Billion. Still, I don’t think O’Brien begrudges the banks their profits, I think it’s more the hassle and fees that he cites that are the problem.

Ramsey is also upset about the fact that O’Brien is sharing this in a press release. But it seems to me, it’s information his constituents might want.

– Olympia is Occupied

– At Occupy Seattle and in general, I’ve only had positive experiences with Seattle police. But this is unacceptable.

– The liberal media’s reputation is coming out of this a whole lot healthier than the conservative media’s reputation, isn’t it?

– If it turned out that Kardashian is actually a performance artist deftly exploiting American’s patriarchal fantasies and hang-ups, I wouldn’t really be surprised.

– Surely they all deserved it.

– #OccupyTemple

During Roads and Transit the no vote basically went 3 ways: Taxes bad, don’t spend the money on rail, or don’t spend that money on roads. This is, obviously, wildly simplified but the don’t spend that money on roads faction told people that the transit portion was good, but we should come back with just the Sound Transit. People are comparing that to the current debate on Prop 1. The programs are worthwhile but the funding mechanism isn’t as progressive as it could be. And lots of the opponents of the measure are saying come back with a better funding measure.

But the difference now is that there isn’t a plan B if Prop 1 fails. It’s hope the legislature sees a no vote as a signal from Seattle voters that they’d like an MVET or some other more fair tax, then hope Olympia gives a shit about that signal and passes an MVET, then a City Council that just lost a vote puts that MVET on the ballot. Then they’ll support it. Let’s call that unlikely.

They don’t have a fully formed plan only that car tabs are unfair. Contrast that with The Stranger and The Sierra Club who wanted to put just ST2 on the ballot. I mean nobody reading this believes Ted Van Dyk or Bruce Ramsey are going to support a progressive MVET, if it pays for the things the car tabs pay for, right? And opponents of car tabs weren’t pushing for an MVET or anything else when the legislature passed the authority. I don’t recall John Fox lobbying in Oly making the case for a better way for local jurisdictions to pay for these things.

Look, I disagreed with The Stranger and The Sierra Club on Roads and Transit. But at least they had a plan and some skin in the game. The anti-Prop 1 people need to explain their plan B and what they’re going to do to make it happen, and so far I haven’t heard that.