The biggest impact of the Andromeda strain swine flu on Americans so far is to render television “news” shows even more unwatchable than they already were. Swine flu swine flu swine flu swine flu, good morning, swine flu swine flu swine flu, back to you!

Fifty degrees and swine flu, rained out and swine flu.

Maybe the octomom will marry a Somali pirate who got a DUI in So Cal while auditioning for American Idol, it would be a comparative blessing.

Probably the best preparedness for individuals would be a stack of DVD’s and books, and tons of canned soup. Or you could panic and try to hoard things like prescription medicines intended for people who actually get the flu, that would really add to the overall merriment.

Not done yet.

And more foreclosures are looming. One-third of Washington homeowners who financed with adjustable-rate mortgages are still paying low, introductory rates. Those teaser rates, some as low as 1 percent, will jump in the coming year.

In most other states, those low initial rates have already expired, according to the Washington Budget & Policy Center.

“When they reset, it’s not going to be pretty,” said Glenn Crellin, director of the Center for Real Estate Research at Washington State University.

Good, research-based article with human interest by the Seattle Times reporters. When one contemplates newspapers going away, it’s solid efforts like this that would be sorely missed.

The disaster that is real estate in Washington state seems likely to continue for some time. Plenty of blame to go around. Yes, some people bought houses they had no business buying, but in order to do so all they needed was a “heartbeat” and they got the loans, as the article puts it.

So all of us suckers who played by the rules get to help clean up this stinking mess, and if anyone needs to sell their house because of legitimate reasons like a transfer, an illness or something, the market is all messed up with REO’s and short sales. Luckily our household doesn’t need to move, I’m just sayin’.

So thanks a lot to the wieners who ran Countrywide! We’re likely going to re-finance not only because rates are so absurdly low, but because the thought of writing any more checks to Countrywide makes us want to vomit. I don’t really care who owns them now, B of A is being a bunch of jerks with their credit cards, so they can bite us too.

Strange business strategy if you ask me, hacking off the good customers who pay their bills on time. If B of A wants any money from us they’ll probably need to buy back our loan at a new, fabulously low interest rate. I kind of wish I had a B of A credit card so I could enjoy putting it through the shredder.

John Brown, bitches.

Oregon critics of the CRC project, including Steve Duin at The Oregonian, continue the drumbeat that plans for a new bridge are too big and too ugly. From Duin’s column this morning:

The Columbia River Crossing design, of course, is boxed in by all manner of restrictions, including the ludicrous height limits that owe to the proximity of Vancouver’s podunk Pearson Air Field.

But the most daunting constraint, notes Metro Council President David Bragdon, “is the restriction on the imagination of the two state Departments of Transportation.

“You have two DOTs that are just driven to build huge slabs of concrete. That’s what they do. That’s what they’ve done for the last 40 years. They engineer the biggest, baddest thing they can, and think about the design later, the budget later, the community impacts later.”

I’m kind of wondering how long it will take Vancouver Mayor Royce Pollard to respond to Duin’s slam on Pearson Air Field, an historic site that Pollard has made clear is a vital part of Vancouver’s heritage and downtown future.

[Read more…]

Don’t forget, the “will of the people” only counts when that will is expressed as anti-tax, anti-consumer and anti-worker sentiment intended to destroy things.

No worries about a special session to fix this!

The House passed the bill, HB 2363, on an 84-12 vote. It now goes to the Senate.

The raises were spelled out in Initiative 732. But they would be suspended through mid-2011 for school district employees, community and technical college academic employees and classified employees at technical colleges.

Obviously paying teachers enough money to afford extras like food and housing was a bad idea, because that would be constructive, not destructive.

So when citizens decide they want to support things like education, it doesn’t matter, the Legislature will just discard the program rather than work on the tax system. You don’t really hear crap about the “will of the people” now, because the only people who count are politicians, lobbyists and well-heeled contributors who can buy their way onto the ballot.

The suckers are the ordinary citizens who play by the rules, buying houses and goods they can actually afford, paying bills and taxes on time, expecting only some basic opportunities from the state like quality, affordable education.

But teachers and parents should vote for a regressive sales tax increase to fund health care this fall! Because it makes so much sense to lay people off, crowd classrooms, raise tuition and then ask for a regressive tax increase.

Good luck with that, Democrats, you’re going to need it.

Knute Berger, writing at Crosscut, in a spot-on piece about populism and the loony right’s paranoid tendencies:

(Fox Noise personality Glenn) Beck’s world view does share with some incarnations of populism a distinct paranoia — his diatribes come complete with screen-filling images of Nazi swastikas and jackboots on the march and dire warnings that Obama is selling us out to the international socialists. But his critique is mostly incoherent, as if someone dropped the tray of right-wing refrigerator magnets. Lyndon Larouche makes more sense.

Full column worth a read.

It seems the traditional media in the NW has some freaks in their midst:

Alan has never denied owning multiple Web sites catering to people interested in the sexual practices known as BDSM (for bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism). It’s long-term research, he says, adding that the true focus and scope is, for the time being, a secret.

It almost certainly has nothing to do with his work for the Cascade Policy Institute, a conservative political think tank. That’s a campaign to root out Oregonians who might cast fraudulent votes by assuming the identities, and ballots, of people who are dead.

“Fraudulent voters.” Um, yeah, okay.

I’m sure it’s just me, but every time I hear that phrase I get a little voice intoning “Republican crazy douche.” Just another MSM bad apple, nothing to worry about, or so we thought.

The BDSM media were wrong about invading Iraq and also wrong about how property values would go up forever. But you should go ahead and trust anyhow.

Please keep in mind left wing bloggers are shrill and don’t understand foreign policy or bidness. This has been proven by their opposition to foreign policy blunders and bidness bailouts.

Left wing bloggers will surely never survive in the age of virtually free internet service. Someone in the traditional BDSM media will point out the shrillness of left wing bloggers, and handcuff them to newsprint.

That would be a crime.

Let’s say I’m hiring you to build me some cabinets, but rather than paying you I will insist that you build the cabinets using precision laser cutters instead of saws, because precision laser cutters work so well.

Even though nobody has any laser cutters yet, and nobody could afford them anyhow, I will only pay you if you use laser cutters. Never mind the foundation that’s cracking beneath your feet, that’s not your concern. We have foundation experts for that, and they assure us that it can be fixed for a third of a penny or so.

The timing of my payment to you will depend on how some crazy people who hate cabinet makers feel about you getting paid. If they yell too loud I just might decide not to pay you at all, or I might decide to take the money and use it for a new garage door opener or garbage disposal instead.

In any event, you must build my cabinets, because you are a cabinet maker.

If Texas secedes again, then we get to build a giant fence around it, right?

I wonder if Rick Perry has considered this clause in the 14th Amendment?

Section. 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Thus Rick Perry must resign immediately, as he no longer meets the Constitutional requirements of citizenship to hold office. Check and mate.

Look, if people (a governor!) are going to be so silly then there’s really little choice but to also be silly. If Perry wants to pursue this line of thought so badly, then I propose we finally finish Reconstruction, starting with Texas. I’ll volunteer to be the military governor. If the paranoiacs on the right want to fetishize another Civil War, who am I to begrudge them their fantasies?

If I had a bunch of money to make a film this would be the perfect time to make another Red Dawn movie, this time featuring ACORN activists. If you could get Tina Fey and Will Ferrell…

Texas used to have a tourism slogan that declared, “Texas, it’s like a whole other country.” Which, well, it kind of is, but they get carried away with their Texas exceptionalism down there. Give it a rest, people. Mostly what Texas has given us is mentally defective politicians and criminal enterprises like Enron. They should thank their lucky stars we don’t throw them out of the union.

Like any big state it has the good, the bad and the ugly, the ugliest being the right wing loons who dream of one more Rebel yell. I kind of like the idea of cheap Texas bastards having to pay enough taxes to be their own country, though. That border with Mexico and the Gulf coastline are pretty long, and aircraft and ships aren’t exactly cheap. So yeah, Texas, go for it.

And by the way, Texans, mesquite is not in any way a proper smoking wood, it is a noxious weed. Real barbeque uses hickory. Maybe you folks should spend more time on the important things in life.

Eschaton has a post today regarding some rather poor planning by some teabaggers in D.C. It seems nobody got a permit to dump a million tea bags on public property, so they are winding up in the conference room of a right-wing stink tank. Nice.

And from here in Vancouver, WA., comes another oops.

Organizers of a Saturday anti-government-spending protest in downtown Vancouver have failed to get the required city permits.

—snip—

“The fire department would like to know about canopies and tents and what size they are. If you have any cooking going on during the event, fire needs to inspect that as well. The police department needs to know about the gathering and the route the walk is taking. Are you going to be following the law and using the traffic signals and crosswalks? They also need to know about the route so if they have an emergency call, they don’t send cop cars flying through the crowd of people.”

The city was also kind of wondering about stuff like bathrooms.

Don’t get me wrong, permits should not be used to prevent free speech. While my experience with rallies and such is from the last century, usually you can call up government entities like parks departments and police departments and they’ll work with you. Mostly they just want to make sure everyone is safe, since if it’s on their property they can be sued if some horrible teabagging accident happens.

Luckily the Vancouver event isn’t until Saturday, so maybe things can be worked out.

UPDATE 3:54 PM– The Columbian has updated the original article (linked above) and it sounds like the organizers will indeed work everything out. Free speech rocks. Sadly, I will be cleaning lint out of drawers on Saturday.

While the hard-right response to liberal dissent was basically “STFU, you commie traitors,” the progressive response to hard-right dissent seems to be “please keep talking.”

I sincerely hope each and every teabagger gets quoted by a traditional media outlet. While we just had elections last fall, the mid-terms are next year! Let the American people judge.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbDy3Lm06uo[/youtube]

Dammit, Janet, don’t pay your taxes and show up wearing an Uncle Sam costume. Wingnuttery is hot.

Ow.

Washington state’s unemployment rate shot up to 9.2 percent last month, still higher than the national rate and nearly double what it was a year ago.

The increase was nearly 1 percentage point from February’s revised rate of 8.3 percent.

And in Oregon, really, really ow.

I’m taking a couple of days off, but I can’t help thinking about the news that Oregon’s unemployment rate has now climbed to 12.1 percent – equaling the worst of the state’s last deep recession, in the early 1980s.

It seems we’ve moved, as predicted, from a financial-sector-housing fraud-bubble crisis to a continued downward slide.

Both states need to reform their tax systems. Oregon hamstrung itself with California-style property tax restraints, and of course up here in Washington we have the stupid, broken, Depression-era “temporary tax system” that has been in effect for seventy years or whatever.

Nothing is a panacea, but having the traditional “three-legged stool” of state taxes would seem to be worth considering. Sales taxes play a role in moderating consumption, allowing consumers not to pay some of the tax by buying less. But income taxes have the advantage of automatically adjusting to changing economic conditions.

When you talk to regular folks about taxes, one of the first things they will say is that if you allow a new form of taxation, “they’ll just raise our taxes more.” Which, you know, is understandable, as the right-wing culture of resentment has been pushing this line of thought for forty years. But given the serious nature of the crisis and the threat to our long-term economic well being, especially in education, it would be nice if the state could at least try to reform the stupid, broken tax system.

I don’t know who the bidness guys and gals think are going to be the workers and leaders of tomorrow, but with massive tuition hikes and drastic cuts to K-12 looming as distinct possibilities, there is a danger the real threat to our future comes not from government spending but from savaging our public assets. Good luck with all that international investment in about ten-twenty years, guys. Most international corporations are looking for a highly skilled, highly educated work force.

It’s all a bit harder to explain than how to wave a teabag, but I figure most ordinary folks are still pretty darn worried about retirement and education. There’s an inherent suspicion about government, but there is also a genuine desire to have quality services in public safety, health care, transportation and education. What regular folks expect is value for their taxes, and if one cuts the very programs that help create a large, stable middle class, one is basically doing the work of the right for them.

So the issue for the leaders of this state is rather simple. Do something meaningful now about our stupid, broken tax system and be prepared to wage a battle against the know-nothing right wing assholes funded by right-wing foundation and PAC money, or do piddly little regressive sales tax measures in the hopes of threading a needle that can’t be threaded, and then be prepared to do battle against the know-nothing right wing assholes funded by right-wing foundation and PAC money.

The question isn’t when or how the right wing assholes will attack, the question is how much ground Democrats cede to them before actually fighting. (Does this sound in any way familiar to anyone? Did we not learn anything from the last eight years?)

In other words, fight now or fight later. Might as well do what’s in the best interest of the citizenry as a whole. In an economy continuing to fight deflationary pressures, public spending and investment is in the public interest.

From an Editor and Publisher article about how traditional journalists may be alienating younger readers with outdated pop culture references.

The Times is a citadel of retrotalk, on its Op-Ed page especially. Columnist Frank Rich once commented that George W. Bush had “a slight, almost Chauncey Gardiner quality,” referring to Peter Sellers’ simple-minded character in the 1979 movie “Being There.”

The Queen of Retrotalk is Times columnist Maureen Dowd. Dozens of examples I’ve harvested from her columns include “Nosey Parker,” “Ma Barker,” “Norma Desmond,” “Palin’s Imelda Marcos moment” and “Hillary’s inner Eve Harrington.” To describe how it felt to drive through Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and see no women on the streets, Dowd invoked a “Rod Serling–type feeling.”

I’m not sure this is the media’s biggest problem. I find familiarity with American’s TV history to be quite valuable when considering politics.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-yLYz6ejqw[/youtube]

I’d have to agree that with Sam Taylor of the Bellingham Herald that teabagging is going to be news. The teabaggers should prance around all they want in public with their teabags. Life is like a box of teabags, and stupid is as…well, you know.

I heartily encourage the teabaggers to publicly present their dissent, even though some of them doubtless were calling liberals traitors and such for daring to dissent six years ago.

What would be interesting to know is the thought process, such as it is, that inspires teabagging. Sure, they’ll blather about “out of control government spending,” but they didn’t give a flying fig about it during the last administration and if someone today dares to talk about reforming the defense procurement system then the teabag noise machine starts in about “threatening America’s safety.”

So it’s really “government spending on things they don’t like that helps people they don’t like” that pisses them off. Wasting trillions on weapons systems that don’t work and invading countries that shouldn’t have been invaded was just fine with them.

Now, there is certainly ample room to criticize flaws in the TARP and the stimulus plan, but that’s not really what the teabaggers are doing. They’re just banging their tribal teabagging drum as loud and as hard as they can, the pulsating and quickening rhythm sending shivers of delight up their spines, as Glenn Beck weeps and Rush Limbaugh explodes. It’s all so..nostalgic.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNHuI0Pw0m8[/youtube]

Funny thing, though: elections have consequences. If the teabaggers don’t like it they should prance around with their mildly stimulating beverage bags, and see if a majority of the American people agree with them. I think we all know the answer to that already.