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.”
Currently home care workers have to take a 36 hour training, get a background check, and do 10 or (I forget which) 12 hours of continuing education a year. I-1163, simply ups the training requirement and switches from DSHS doing the back ground checks* to the FBI doing the back ground checks. The funding comes from the same places it currently comes from, it’s just more money.
*I’ve found shit using Google that disqualified people from working in group-homes that DSHS missed. Workers have to pass yearly background checks and it’s also common for DSHS to flag workers that haven’t done anything wrong. Matter of fact they flagged me one year. There’s two people in the state of Washington with my same name and age. They mistook me for the other guy. Which is hard to do when you consider that I somehow got skipped when it came to issuing me an SSI number and my parents didn’t sing me up until I was 2 years old. There’s no way that other “Michael” has an SSI number anywhere close to mine.
We now return you to the real point of the post…
What the Seattle Times editorial board is saying to its readers, and its state’s citizens, is this: “Find $4 billion in spending cuts, because we don’t want you to raise a nickel in new revenue, especially since the most obvious place for that new revenue is the one percent who get the most benefit but don’t currently pay anywhere near their fair share. That is, us. And we’re not willing to pay it, either. That is not our problem.”
Okay, so the Times didn’t really say that…oh…wait…Yes, they did. Never mind.
“I-1163 fores legislators” — does that imply placing legislators on a tee, yelling “Fore!”, and whacking them with a driver to see how fair down the fairway you can make them fly?
No, I think plural is correct, because the STEB visualizes I-1163 as the living embodiment of the electorate that passed it.
On the other hand, if you hear I-1125 whispering, surely that is a disembodied voice, because I-1125 has no living embodiment.
“So why is it speaking in the second person plural?”
Maybe it has a tapeworm.
It will provide the legislature cover to cut their favorite things; K-12 and higher ed.
Bunch of unimaginative wussies they are