Maybe what people should do is email their Legislators and demand that they immediately pass a budget that guts K-12 and higher education and contains no new taxes, or they will never get one more dime from us.

Then they “ethically” can’t do it! (Insert Nelson Muntz “ha ha” here.)

But watch out, you might find a state trooper knocking on your door!

Washington House Democrats report that last night their chamber passed HB 1393, their version of a homeowner’s warranty protection bill. It passed 52-45.

Send me flowers. Or else.

The state Senate has taken up debate on SB 5895, the Homeowners Bill of Rights. There’s a bunch of strikers to deal with, so it could take a bit.

UPDATE–The bill passed 25-24. What took so long was not the strikers but the Republicans bowing down before their lords and masters at the BIAW and predicting the entire economy will be destroyed by allowing homeowners to be made whole when shoddy construction occurs. Sen. Don Benton, R-Vancouver, led things off for the GOP by scoffing at the idea that those in construction trades should be certified to do the work properly.

Yeah, that’s nuts. ‘Cause if the guy who put a black iron fitting between my water meter and water service line had known what he was doing, then it wouldn’t have corroded seven years later and spewed thousands of gallons of water down the street, and I wouldn’t have had to find a plumber I could pay to fix it. That is an economic problem, meaning less work for contractors to fix mistakes they shouldn’t have made in the first place.

Senator Janéa Holmquist, R-Ephrata, ended the Republican homage to the BIAW by taking a swipe at former state senator Brian Weinstein, who worked repeatedly during his tenure to pass the bill in that chamber, calling the bill “Son of Weinstein.” Then she gave a little “cutie-pie” look like the smart alec kid in the class who thinks she just made a good one. I’m sure the Sith Lords are very proud, Sen. Holmquist.

The bill, as is commonly done, was transmitted to the House. (Yeah, I know.) That’s another day.

Weinstein called me during the debate to express his congratulations to the Senate Democrats and especially Sen. Rodney Tom, D-Medina, the prime sponsor.

Whew. That was fun!

Yikes.

Gov. Chris Gregoire and the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate announced this morning that they will no longer consider taking action on a worker privacy proposal because of an e-mail that linked action on the bills to campaign contributions

Senate Bill 5446, and House Bill 1528, known as “the Worker Privacy Act,” would prohibit an employer from requiring an employee to attend a meeting, or listen to, respond to, or participate in any communication relating to political, labor or religious matters. The proposal requires an employer to post a notice of employee rights in a conspicuous place accessible to the employees at the employer’s place of business.

Plus they’ve called the cops! Seriously. I’m not kidding.

Here is the State Patrol’s statement:

The Washington State Patrol has received a request to look into potential criminal allegations surrounding communications pertaining to SB 5446 and HB 1528 – Worker Privacy Act.

As with any on-going investigation, no evidence or further information will be released at this time.

The WSP will be working hand in hand with prosecutors (We don’t know who may/may not have jurisdiction yet.) as we progress.

We just received the request and little is known at this time.

The WSP is taking this very seriously as we do with any potential criminal allegations and will work closely with prosecutors to determine a course of action.

Well that’s all clear as mud. Nothing against the state patrol, of course, they gotta do what they gotta do.

I’m not even going to pretend to speculate. Bizarre.

PBS’s The News Hour had a fascinating story yesterday about how the financial calamity is threatening dozens of transit agencies around the country with extreme financial problems.

The short version is that, with the blessing and encouragement of the federal government, many agencies engaged in what are called “buy-leaseback” arrangements with banks. Since public agencies can’t depreciate purchases of say, rail cars, since public agencies don’t pay taxes, they would sell them to banks. The banks would then get the tax shelter, while the agencies got extra funds, part of which were used to lease the rails cars or whatever from the banks.

But guess what? They needed insurance to do these kinds of deals. And who was the main insurer? None other than global behemoth AIG, and since their ratings are in the toilet, a lot of transit agencies are considered to be in “technical default” on these deals. These kinds of deals eventually were outlawed, but lots of them are still coming due around the country.

Pretty cool how neo-liberals worked things, huh? They insisted the public sector be starved of funds, then they found a way to profit from it by using the tax code and financial shenanigans, and now some of the transit agencies may fail (or at the very least be forced to massively defer maintenance and capital investment,) which will “prove” once again that the public sector is wasteful.

It’s a very funny tale to tell over cocktails for some Banksters. Not so fun for a physically challenged worker in D.C. who depends on transit to get to work, as portrayed in the PBS story.

Damn, I think these people wrecked everything. You kind of expect to go outside every morning and find a banker and a Congress-critter loosening the lug nuts on your wheels.

Only initiatives that wreck government are sacrosanct and represent the will of the people. Initiatives that do non-wrecking things like promoting clean power sources do not meet this definition, and thus can be safely wrecked themselves without fear of a special session being called.

An update to a couple of recent posts about the Homeowner’s Bill of Rights. You can find the previous posts here and here.

First, a reliable source emailed me this afternoon to tell me Senate leadership has made it clear that they are not holding up a vote on the bill.

And now Andrew at NPI reports that the Senate is going to consider the bill tonight.

So there you have it.

UPDATE, the next morning: There was a flurry of activity in the Senate last night, but SB 5895 didn’t come up for a vote best I can tell. I had TVW on in the background last night and the Senate Floor Activity calendar doesn’t show that it came up yet. I think they’re coming back at 9 AM.

Goldy may not miss the SuperSonics, but if anyone is missing the spectacle of incredibly rich people getting public guarantees to build their sports playgrounds, Portland seems glad to oblige. The plan is to build a new minor league baseball stadium, probably where Memorial Coliseum now stands, and to refurbish PGE Park for soccer. It used to be called Civic Stadium, and hasn’t been refurbished since way back in 2001. The horror.

As always, there is absolutely no risk to the taxpayers. None. Not possible. Not in a million years.

From Blue Oregon:

Without any apparent sense of irony, the Oregonian this morning offers us up the following in vouching for the deal reached between city negotiators and Merritt Paulson:

Mayor Sam Adams and Commissioner Randy Leonard, who negotiated the agreement, said [the] city is getting solid assurances from a wealthy family. Paulson’s father is Henry Paulson, the former U.S. treasury secretary and Wall Street mogul.

The timing of those “solid assurances” is, well, unfortunate, to put it mildly. On Friday the Congressional panel charged with overseeing the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) released its latest report, and this week the panel’s chairwoman Elizabeth Warren has been making the rounds on tv and radio to discuss their findings.

Warren minces no words: she accuses then Secretary Paulson of lying to her and the panel about the ways in which they used public funds to bail out the banks. Warren had asked Paulson whether, in purchasing assets from the troubled banks, they were receiving assets “at par” – and he answered yes. But the panel’s own investigations revealed that Treasury was receiving them often far below equivalent value – on average a third below.

Nope, everything should work out just fine for Portland.

Vancouver residents will be magically transported to games at the new facilities via an organic bio-fuel flying carpet, as the aging Interstate Bridge spans will be converted to a fixed-gear velodrome.

Nobody could have predicted.

The Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) of Seattle said it didn’t meet a regulatory capital requirement at the end of last month because of the declining value of mortgage-backed securities.

The FHLB of Seattle, a government-chartered cooperative, said in a statement Monday that because of the capital deficiency it is disallowed from paying a dividend or repurchasing capital stock.

The Seattle bank in January became the second FHLB, after San Francisco, to warn of a potential capital shortage and take steps to guard reserves. As many as eight of the 12 banks may fall short of capital requirements after writing down holdings of so-called nonagency mortgage securities, Moody’s Investors Service predicted.

As Atrios relays:

Awhile back I met someone in the mortgage broker business who had, unsurprisingly, seen his business decline and seen many of his coworkers laid off. At the time he told me, ominously, that all the action had just moved to the FHLB system…

Round and round it goes.

Richard Roesler at Eye on Olympia notes the Washington House of Representatives has approved a bill that would prevent cities and counties from prohibiting recreational vehicles in parks, an apparent attempt to provide people with a residence of last resort.

And of course a growing tent city in Sacramento has drawn international media attention.

Wall Street gets the TARP, everyone else gets a blue tarp. Pass the beans.

And now a follow up on this post from yesterday, which had its genesis in a Joe Turner article about the Senate killing an asbestos lawsuit bill in retaliation for newspaper ads runs by the firm employing former state senator Brian Weinstein.

Readers may recall that not only did Senators kill the asbestos bill, it looks like they also killed off the Homeowner’s Bill of Rights, something that Weinstein worked on very hard when he was in office. Here’s a nugget from Turner’s article yesterday, because scrolling down is so difficult:

In four years, he (Weinstein) never really learned a thing about how this place works,” Sen. Brian Hatfield, D-Raymond, said Saturday. Hatfield was supporting a couple changes that Kastama and Haugen wanted to make to the original bill, changes that Weinstein’s firm did not want.

How “this place” works is this: Not only did the senators kill SB 5964, they also killed the so-called Homeowners Bill of Rights, a measure that Weinstein had championed for most of term in the Legislature and which he nearly got passed. It passed the Senate, but died in the House.

I talked to Weinstein this morning, and he sounded pretty incredulous at the turn of events, especially when it comes to the current Homeowner’s Bill of Rights.

“I’ve never lobbied for the current bill, I didn’t go testify, I haven’t even read the bill,” said Weinstein.

Over at Publicola, Josh reports that an “insider” offered the “conjecture” that a vote on the HBR is being put on hold because they “Just gotta wash the Weinstein off.” To which one can only offer a shake of the head, and the all too frequent observation that a lot of politicians have their heads where the sun don’t shine if this is how they view things that impact regular citizens. Talk about losing sight of why they were elected in the first place.

Weinstein pointed out this moring how nuts this all has become. “It’s totally absurd for the Senate to be punishing homebuyers by trying to punish me when I had nothing to do with this (current) bill.”

Indeed. We all know what needs washing, and it’s ain’t Brian Weinstein. The insider, frat-boy-sorority girl behavior may be acceptable and common in OIympia, but frankly given the economic calamity facing this state it’s pretty offensive.

Now tell me why I need to support a tax increase, Legislators. Or are you going to kill that bill to teach me a lesson?

McClatchy is laying off the equivalent of 1,600 workers, and others are having salaries cut as part of a restructuring.

The four McClatchy newspapers in Washington state are The Olympian, The News-Tribune, The Bellingham Herald and Tri-City Herald.

Some well-known papers owned by the firm around the country include The Kansas City Star, The Sacramento Bee and The Miama Herald.

McClatchy has some very fine reporters here, around the country, and in its DC bureau. This is a shame.

Still trying to wrap my head around this one. Joe Turner of the News-Tribune has an article posted about the death of SB 5964, which had something or other to do with asbestos lawsuits. Some mean lawyers ran newspaper ads trying to stop changes to the bill, so the Senate has apparently just spiked it. Or at least that’s what it sounds like from Turner’s report. Check out this bit:

The targeted senators lay most of the blame on a former colleague, Brian Weinstein, a Mercer Island lawyer who until December had been a Democratic senator representing King County’s Eastside communities. Weinstein is now a member of Bergman Draper & Frockt, the Seattle law firm that paid for the ads and which has been lobbying for passage of the bill.

“In four years, he (Weinstein) never really learned a thing about how this place works,” Sen. Brian Hatfield, D-Raymond, said Saturday. Hatfield was supporting a couple changes that Kastama and Haugen wanted to make to the original bill, changes that Weinstein’s firm did not want.

How “this place” works is this: Not only did the senators kill SB 5964, they also killed the so-called Homeowners Bill of Rights, a measure that Weinstein had championed for most of term in the Legislature and which he nearly got passed. It passed the Senate, but died in the House.

Let’s review how being a citizen works in this state, shall we?

Citizens bring up needed consumer protection legislation, and then it never ever ever ever fucking gets passed.

Geebus. Notice how the Legislature doesn’t ever pass bills, especially consumer protection bills, in retaliation for over the top political advertising (cough cough BIAW cough cough.)

Democrats: a circular firing squad of cats who won’t be herded towards a gun safety class where free tuna is being served.

Oh this is hilarious.

According to the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, sales of Atlas Shrugged hit an all-time high last year, and have “almost tripled” in the first seven weeks of 2009 against last year.

Michelle Malkin is the Norma Rae of this Galt moment, walking the virtual shop floors of the country’s “wealth producers,” but instead of “Strike!” her sign reads “Going Galt!”

I’m not so sure Norma Rae is the correct analogy. Maybe more like “The Creature From the Black Lagoon” meets “Risky Business,” with a soupçon of “Weird Science” thrown in, with Malkin in the role of the tormenting brother.

This would be so awesome. What’s stopping them? Anyone stupid enough to “go Galt” is likely a drag on the economy in the first place. Go ahead, righties, go Galt! Ha ha ha ha. In this economy there will be twenty people to take your place. Dear me, who on earth will we get to cook up new derivatives schemes? We’d most likely need to search the prisons for that skill set.

It’s always breathtaking how the most privileged (and often crooked) are always the victims in rightist mythology. Ayn Rand. Bwhaaaaaha ha ha ha. I needed a good belly laugh.