There’s a reason why babies cry… it works:
State Auditor Brian Sonntag won a scarce commodity today – more money for his budget.
Gov. Chris Gregoire and Sonntag reached a deal that’s expected to give Sonntag an additional $14 million for performance audits, giving him around $26 million to spend on the program over the next two years.
Tim Eyman and the editorial boards went ape-shit when Sonntag’s office was asked to absorb the same sort of cuts everybody else was enduring, and so of course the Governor caved. But even worse was the related veto…
The budget contained a provision that would have allowed Sonntag to recoup some of the money if he could prove his audits actually save the state money. Performance audits are aimed at finding efficiencies in state and local governments. Sonntag blasted the Legislature, saying the move would make him a bounty hunter.
“What a dumb idea and a stupid way to manage,” he said recently.
Get that? The guy who argues that performance audits are so important that he’d rather deny kids health care and education than scale back his office for a couple years, thinks it is “dumb” to audit his own audits. Let’s hear it for accountability.
Yet another reminder that after we dispatch the Republicans, we’ll still have work to do, because there are plenty of execrable Democrats.
If you’re a critical thinker, like me, then you’ll ask yourself why Goldy wants the auditor’s office to have less money? What doesn’t he want the auditor to discover?
I think the parents of those kids should pay for their healthcare. That how I do it as did my father.
How To Eliminate The Federal Deficit In One Easy Step
Make Comcast pay first-class mail rates for their junk mail.
Seriously! I get 3 to 5 mailers a week from these hucksters. You’d think that after 10 years and over 1,000 mailers, they’d get the idea that I don’t want their service — but they don’t care because they’re not paying for it. We are! Every time you mail a bill or personal letter, you’re subsidizing bulk mailers like Comcast. You pay 44 cents; they pay 14 cents; the 30-cent difference comes from you. And then you pay again for the privilege of recycling the unwanted and useless junk mail they flood you with. And, of course, as a federal taxpayer you’re also subsidizing the cheap paper that comes from cheap trees cut from federal forests their junk mail is printed on. It wouldn’t surprise me if the ink is a profit center for someone at taxpayer expense, too.
Why would a company in its right mind send over 1,000 pieces of junk mail to a rabbit who has never bought anything from them? A rabbit living in a hole in a public park, who pulls free (albeit fuzzy) signals out of the air with a coathanger antenna? Not exactly a prime prospect for $75-a-month cable TV service to begin with?
Because that’s how modern American business operates. They don’t market anymore; they harass. They’re not only jamming my mailbox full of circulars that you and I have to pay for, last week they sent a door-to-door salesman to my burrow. The message is: We’re not going to leave you alone until you buy from us. Call it Mafia marketing, or whatever you like; it used to be considered extortion, which as far as I know is still against the law.
I once got a company into trouble with the state attorney general because of its harassment marketing tactics. This was before the Do-Not-Call law, when Gregoire was attorney general and ran a Consumer Protection Division that actually tried to protect consumers. I was getting called by this company’s telemarketers every day. This went on for months. When I asked them to stop, they ratcheted up the harassment. The message was: We won’t stop until you buy our product. So I filed a formal consumer protection complaint against this company with Gregoire’s office, and their telephone harassment stopped.
The company? Oh, you’re gonna get a chuckle from this: The Seattle Times.
Here’s a message to the corporate socialists who make taxpayers pay for their Harassment Marketing: Your marketing tactics piss me off. I’m not going to buy a subscription from you even if Hell freezes over. I hope your company goes bankrupt. The government ought to shut down your shakedown operations, and send your executives and salesmen to jail! But first, let’s start by revoking your mail subsidies, not only as a consumer protection measure, but as an act of fiscal responsibility.
You can read more about bulk mail subsidies on Huffington Post here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.....01928.html
The states budget will be $31 billion over the next two years. The auditor’s office receives only $13 million a year. Goldy wants that number drastically slashed. Why? What doesn’t Goldy want the auditor to find?
@2 “If you’re a critical thinker, like me …”
BWAAAA HAAA HA HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR
Are you trying to make Seattle Jew spit coffee all over his keyboard? That’s mean!
@3 I think the employers of those parents should pay them a living wage so they can afford health care for their kids. That’s how my parents’ employers did it as did my employers.
@3 (continued) Cheap labor conservatives have spent 30 years breaking unions and beating down wages to third world levels, and now they blame workers for not being able to afford health care.
I won’t vote for that, and if you vote for it, you’re shooting your own balls off. Any parent who votes Republican should be prosecuted for child neglect.
What a shame to waste your life being a bitter liberal mad at everything with no personal accomplishments and jealous as hell of anyone who took a chance and made it on their own and then say “its not fair”.
@6 What has the auditor found so far? With the millions of taxpayer dollars that Eyman showered on him? Anything? Anything at all? Can you name one thing?
If you want to see waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer funds you need look no farther than Stefan’s bullshit lawsuit against King County and what that cost taxpayers. The Legislature should eliminate PRA penalties before it eliminates teachers or health care for poor kids. That’s a matter of keeping priorities straight.
RE: I gave Gregoire my I-900 t-shirt after her veto — but it’s not all good news
I arrived in the Governor’s reception area yesterday afternoon wearing a black, long-sleeve, Initiative 900 t-shirt with a menacing 900 pound gorilla on the front and back. Legislators and staffers milled around, doing everything possible not to acknowledge me — I was, as usual, the skunk at the party. Going in, I didn’t know what Gregoire was going to do.
I was nervous: was the Governor going to veto the Democrat Legislature’s gutting of performance audits or would she let it stand?
Speaker Frank Chopp walked in, shook hands with several folks, we made eye contact, he came over and said “Hi Tim”, I replied “Hello Frank”, and after a little small talk, he said “I think we’ve got you covered” and then walked away. I was encouraged.
All of us were then invited into the main room for the bill signing. Lots of people, lots of media, lots of pomp and circumstance. Gregoire was surrounded by legislators and gave a short speech about the tough budgeting decisions they had made, then said there were several bills she was going to veto. First up was the issue of performance audits. She said straight-out that she was going to veto the $29 million transfer and also was going to veto a totally whacko provision giving the Auditor a ‘bounty’ payment for savings realized from his audit recommendations (Sonntag said such a requirement would completely interfere with auditing standards and objectivity and was horrible public policy).
At this point, I was very, very pleased.
Then Gregoire said something very disturbing, explaining that she had reached an agreement with Auditor Sonntag for him to transfer a smaller amount — $15 million — from I-900’s dedicated account for performance audits toward other government spending during the next legislative session. That’s very bad news and I address that more fully below. But back to the bill signing:
After the Governor and Democrat legislators gave their speeches and after their Q&A session with the media was completed, I went up to the Governor and said “Well, here you go Governor” and I took off my I-900 t-shirt (I had another t-shirt underneath) and said “I’m giving you the shirt off my back for doing the right thing. Well done, Governor.” I then made a joke, telling her that wearing the shirt in 2012 would likely be a vote-getter for her reelection campaign. I then received an official pen from the Governor from the bill signing.
All of you should be very proud of yourselves. The past two weeks produced hundreds of emails, phone calls, and letters to the Governor from all of you. Your messages to her were passionate, persuasive, and pointed. You were all incredibly respectful and polite. I firmly believe she would not have vetoed if not for your activism and your persistence. Again, you should be very pleased with what we all accomplished together.
But as Amber Gunn of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation accurately points out, the proposed $15 million transfer from I-900’s dedicated account is totally illegal. Here’s what she wrote about that:
The hitch in this story, however, is found in the governor’s veto message, which states in part: “The Auditor has committed to a $15 million transfer that can be accomplished in the next legislative session.” Auditor Brian Sonntag may have agreed to such a transfer, but the citizens haven’t. Initiative 900 (the performance audit law) was strictly crafted to protect performance audit funding. The law established a dedicated performance audit account that can be tapped only by the State Auditor and only for the purpose of funding performance audits. Note the excerpts from sections 3 and 5 below.
Beginning on December 8, 2005, 0.16 percent of the taxes collected under subsection (1) of this section shall be dedicated to funding comprehensive performance audits required under section 2 of this act. The revenue identified in this subsection shall be deposited in the Performance Audits of Government Account created in section 5 of this act.
Money in the account shall be used to fund the performance audits and follow-up performance audits under section 2 of this act and shall be expended by the state auditor in accordance with this act.
Verbal agreements between the governor and auditor notwithstanding, the State Auditor does not have the unilateral authority to authorize a legislative transfer from the dedicated performance audit account. The account is held in trust by Auditor Sonntag on behalf of citizens to conduct performance audits as directed in the law. Even if he has agreed to give the money away, he does not have the authority to do so.
Here’s Amber’s complete analysis: http://www.libertylive.org/blo.....st_id=1416
Sonntag was given a choice – agree to a $15 million transfer later or allow the entire $29 million transfer to go forward now. In Olympia, that’s business-as-usual and it’s called a ‘deal’ — out here in the real world, it’s called blackmail. In the movie the Godfather, Don Vito Corleone, played by Marlon Brando, famously said: “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.” That’s what happened here. But because of the Governor’s veto, we live to fight another day. Next session, there will be a bill introduced that takes away $15 million from I-900’s dedicated performance audit account. During the hearing on that bill next year, all of us will work together to push against their proposed illegal transfer.
The fight continues. But with the Governor’s veto, we’ve achieved an important victory that would not have happened if not for your hard work. Congratulations, everyone!!
Stefan proves Rossi won and there should be about 50 King County employees in prison including Ron Sims. I hope they all get ass cancer.
@10 I can’t think of anyone in this country who “took a chance and made it on their own.” What I see all around me is a corporate culture that depends on taxpayer subsidies and government protection of their market positions to survive. No one risks their own money, and no one makes it on their own, in this country anymore. You’re way behind the times, son. For some time now, the game has been OPM* and fraud on a systemic scale.
* Other people’s money. This used to be money conned from gullible investors, but after the supply of gullible investors was exhausted, entrepreneurs like Stefan (and the entire Republican Party) turned to coercing money from unwilling citizens by using the power of government to tax them for corporate subsidies and bailouts.
@14 “Stefan proves Rossi won”
Bullshit. You’re blowing smoke out of your ass.
One thing that must be noted, though, is that we elected Gregoire and got Rossi. I mean, really, can you tell the difference between Gregoire’s budget and Rossi’s budget? I can’t.
The world’s two remaining practitioners of Stalinism are North Korea and the Republican Party. Both are anti-democratic, and both depend on slave labor.
@13 Tim, you’re pretty much a skunk everywhere. You’re a guy who lied to your supporters about paying yourself a salary when you were; you’ve lied to voters about what your initiatives would do (e.g., false claims about how much property tax relief your slot machine initiative would produce for homeowners); and you’ve taken credit for things that were, in fact, enacted by the Legislature and were not a result of your initiatives that failed in court. Even in Olympia, which is no temple of virtue, you’re too rancid to be seen with. That’s why you’re shunned.
Running a performance examination requires that the goals of the entity being audited are explicit.
Otherwise, it’s all opinion and conjecture. Where can we find samples of Sontagg’s audits to determine if they meet the definition of a performance audit.
I’m really asking. I have no ax to grind.
@19 agreed. Tim is an ass that smells of skunk. Does not matter which shirt he has on.
This issue of funding audits over health care and education in tough times is a tough one to take. I would have been happy to see a two year stall in the spending of tens of millions of dollars on audits that could be carried out in three years revealing all of the same findings. This would have been a good place from a cash management standpoint to cut some spending over the short term.
Still, my understanding of this veto, which brings the auditors budget back to where it was in the governors budget, is that it was only agreed to after the auditor agreed to sign a letter promising that he would not spend the money which, if generated, will accumulate in the auditors account.
As a result, this same money can be taken at a later date should the state face an even more tough budget situation next spring.
@10 Yes, in America you can make it on your own if you take risks and work hard, but as 36-year-old Ryan Blethen’s recent promotion demonstrates, you can go farther and faster if your daddy runs the company.
I mean, seriously, there are all kinds of smart, well-educated, talented people who end up in dead end jobs because they lack the two things that matter in America: Family money and family connections. Believe me, between talent and ownership, owning wins every time!
There are only two kinds of Americabs: Owners and owers. Owers work, owners don’t, it’s that simple. Workers pay 3 times the tax rates as Owners, because Owners have all the political power and workers have none, and when it’s time to hand out 40% tax breaks, the Owners get tax relief and workers get more taxes, for the same reason.
Take my word for it, owning beats the shit out of working! That’s why I own shares of companies like NOV, IBM, and AT&T instead of working. Being in debt and holding a job are fool’s games. As an Owner, I get to sit on my fat rabbit ass in front of a computer all day, flipping stocks and spewing rabbit shit, and I get tax breaks for not being productive or worth anything to society. It sure beats working to make some other asshole rich!
Sometimes I wonder if Goldy secretly emails Roger Rabbit and asks him to steer the topic off in another direction when he’s uncomfortable with how close to the truth I’ve come.
@23 Why would he? That’s as illogical as the rest of the barf you vomit on this board.
@19 At least Timmy acknowledges he’s a skunk. That’s progress, although he still has a long way to go before he’ll be truly enlightened.
For the record, I didn’t call Eyman a “skunk.” He called himself a “skunk.” I merely took his word for it.
One thing that must be noted, though, is that we elected Gregoire and got Rossi. I mean, really, can you tell the difference between Gregoire’s budget and Rossi’s budget?
————
Amazing, isn’t it? She said time and again she wouldn’t raise taxes AND it was apparent things were going to get worse before they got better. Add it all up and you get BIG budget cuts.
The problem isn’t Gregoire but those who SOMEHOW expected a different result . . .
Rog: We just got a memo from the BIAW leadership committeee (will e-mail, but I wanted you to know about it ASAP). The BIAW has $4.6 million cash on hand to back a challenger to Barbara Madsen next year. And I quote “Next step, locate a good lawyer to run . . .. That progressive *&7t is in the crosshairs, and she know it.”
The BIAW! Asswipes. Rog, get the word out – whomever they select MUST go down!
As the elder statesman of this blog, I understand the gravitas and weight which my thoughts and words … brb … important business call.
Hey Mark @14 you sure seemed focus on ASS you inbred cunt. Speaking of cancer – let’s hope your kids get it before you do and they die before your very eyes you piece of shit!
Jon, Rossi would have based his cuts on corruption which would have lined his pockets by slashing social programs with cuts ten times deeper and would have given the extra savings to big business while rolling back government regulations across the board.
Oh, and FYI. Only the House and Senate have the power to pass new taxes. The Gov would then get a chance to sign or veto. This never took place as a result of no majority in the house or senate for any tax increases.
29 Take your time….we’ll do just fine in your absence.
@32
ArtFart, do you think I have gravitas?
Ever notice when Troll starts to get caught up in his own spin an “important business call” miraculously happens.
Obviously, this numbskull never had Aesop Fables read to him.
Troll, I would suggest you go down to your local, tax-payer funded library and proceed straight to the children’s section. Ask the librarian to read “The Kid and the Wolf” to you.
Hint: kid doesn’t refer to a child, nor is this the “boy who cried wolf” fable.
Good luck with your new found insight.
@34
Okay, GBS, since ArtFart didn’t answer me, I’ll ask you the same question. In terms of gravitas, on a scale from one to ten, with ten being the … business call, brb.
@31 Rossi would have based his cuts on corruption which would have lined his pockets by slashing social programs with cuts ten times deeper and would have given the extra savings to big business while rolling back government regulations across the board.
———-
So maybe RR @17 now has a better appreciation of why he voted for Gregoire . . .
@27 Yes, the problem is Gregoire because she deliberately chose not to support a rational tax policy, and without tax reform nothing else is possible in this state. Of course you can’t keep taking money from those at the bottom of the income scale, when they’re already paying 5 1/2 times as much as those who aren’t paying their fair share. Any policy dependent on a tax system like that is bound to fail.
@33 No, but you have the same specific gravity as shit.
Troll @ 35:
I don’t read enough of your posts to know how serious your thoughts are, so I won’t rate you on the gravitas scale — yet.
But, you made a good enough funny that I’ll pay attention to your posts and report back in a couple of weeks.
NEW RULES
Given the verbal masturbation (defined as fruitless self manipulation) of certain trolls here, it seems only fair that they be asked to contribute a ten cents per post sin tax to the common good of HA!
The Governonr does the right thing; Tim and his supporters win again; Goldy’s head explodes.
Oh if only I could fondles Eyman’s balls.