HorsesAss.Org

This video has been making the rounds, and it’s pretty awful/amazing on a number of grounds. Two young immigration activists approach Republicans Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Steve King at an Iowa fundraiser, offering to let them tear up their Dream Act cards. Rep. King is just the stupid, fucking, immigrant-hating asshole he always is, but watch how Paul—a presidential hopeful—just runs away from the table before he can even swallow his mouthful of food:

Gotta wonder, as president, what else Sen. Paul might run away from if he can’t even look in the face two young Americans he wants to deport to countries they’ve never known?

With the “ballot deadline” just 12 hours away, I thought I’d just string together a few final observations about the dishearteningly dishonest campaign against Proposition 1, which would create a Metropolitan Park District to provide an adequate and stable level of funding to Seattle Parks & Recreation.

• “No on Parks” is a Republican campaign largely funded by Republican donors, being run by a Republican political consultant, and endorsed by the Republican editorial board of the Seattle Times. So if you are a Republican, vote no on Prop 1. But if you are a Democrat, don’t kid yourself that voting “no” would do anything other than advance the Republican agenda of drowning government in a bathtub.
• There is an unspoken class warfare aspect to the No on Parks campaign. In their guest post on Slog, campaign co-chairs Don Harper and Carol Fisher pin their credibility on the fact that they have “volunteered thousands of hours and raised over $2 million for neighborhood parks.” Good for them. And good for their neighborhood parks. But that sort of volunteerism just can’t be relied on in neighborhoods where most folks are working two or three jobs just to scrape by. The same way Southend school children can’t benefit from PTA fundraisers the way more affluent North Seattle school children can. This No campaign just reeks of geographic factionalism—not sure what the particulars are, but opponents sure do seem determined to maintain a status quo that does okay by them.
• Playing dirty works. This has been an incredibly “dirty campaign.” Even Joel Connelly says so, and he’s been covering political campaigns for the PI since the Garfield administration. And if folks are willing to play this dirty in a campaign over how we fund our parks, just imagine how dirty these people are going to play in two years, when all nine city council seats are up for reelection. I warned you about Faye Garneau during last year’s districts campaign, but did you listen, Seattle? No. Speaking of which…
• Our Democratic establishment has totally failed to explain to voters how taxes work, and that has created an uninformed electorate that is an invitingly ripe target for those deliberately attempting to misinform (I’m looking at you, Seattle Times editorial board). If there is a lesson to learn from this campaign it’s that if we ever want to fix our tax structure into something that is both fair and sustainable, educating the public about the way taxes work is a project that our political leaders must pursue at every opportunity—24/7, 365 days a year—and not just during those campaign seasons when we have a tax measure on the ballot. If at that.
• Unforgivable. If you vote No on Prop 1 you are either a Republican or an idiot or regrettably misinformed (not all Republicans are idiots, some are just mean-spirited, selfish, or wrong). That happens. But as for No on Parks’ principals, you have earned my permanent enmity by running such a dishonest and disrespectful campaign. This isn’t about a policy disagreement—I’ve had plenty of those, and have still been able to work with the folks on the other side. This is about tactics and context. You simply cannot be trusted ever again. And any campaign you touch in the future will be tainted by association.

As for what will happen when the ballots drop tonight, I’ve no idea, but I’m bracing myself for disappointment. That said, unless it’s a decisive margin one way or another, who the fuck knows which way the late ballots might break, so it’s likely we won’t be able to confidently call this election for at least a few more days.

Hey…it is primary election day in Washington state. So, you know…don’t be an asshole: vote. Fill out that ballot, drop it in the mail or a drop box, and then join us for an evening of electoral politics and conversation over a pint at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally.

We meet tonight, and every Tuesday evening at the Roanoke Park Place Tavern, 2409 10th Ave E, Seattle. The starting time is 8:00 pm, but some folks show up before that for dinner and the election returns.

Can’t make it to Seattle? Check out another Washington state DL over the next week. The Tri-Cities chapter also meets this Tuesday. The Lakewood chapter meets this Wednesday. And on Thursday, the Tacoma chapter meets.

With 204 chapters of Living Liberally, including eighteen in Washington state three in Oregon and three more in Idaho, chances are excellent there’s a chapter near you.

Fuck me I have to do math again. Another Republican state legislator complaining about how Washington’s pollution shouldn’t count when we talk about reducing Washington’s pollution. This time State Sen. Ann Rivers’ opinion piece in the Columbian. I’m not going to do metacommentary on the whole piece, but I will draw you to this paragraph.

Washington is already a low-carbon place — especially when compared to a carbon giant such as China, which produces around 8,000 million metric tons annually compared to Washington’s 96 million. And while China’s carbon emissions are on the rise, Washington continues to find ways to reduce our carbon footprint without layering on new costly and intrusive regulations.

Seems dishonest to say we’re a low carbon state because we pollute as one state less than the most populous and one of the most polluted countries in the world. First because China isn’t a benchmark in that anything below them is somehow inherently good. Also, comparing one state to an entire large country doesn’t seem like a useful metric. It’s like comparing a couple apples to a crate. Or to an orchard.

But again we can do some easy math* to see where we are per capita. When we last checked in with dishonest Republicans we discovered that there are 6,971,406 Washingtonians as of 2013 according to the Census. The above paragraph gives us a number we can use to divide! 96,000,000 tons divided by 6,971,406 humans gets that Washingtonians on average are responsible for about 13.77 tons of carbon per person yearly. China, according to Wikipedia, has a population of 1,363,950,000 humans. Divide that into the 8,000,000,000 tons of carbon in the above paragraph and you get about 5.86 tons of carbon per person.

Each Washingtonian makes more than twice as much carbon than a person in China. So we probably have twice the obligation to fix the problem. Maybe? I’m not sure it works that way. And again, the comparison was facile to begin with. You can’t really compare Boeing workers with a long commute in a single occupancy vehicle to Gobi nomads. But that was the comparison Senator Rivers made hoping to make Washington look like it wasn’t much of an emitter of carbon pollution.

It is also something the Columbian thought was fine having in its opinion pages. I don’t know what the process of getting into the paper is, and I suppose if a local legislator wants some room, you probably give it to them. But surely there must be an editorial process to weed out things like this that are so glaringly obviously obfuscation that even I can see it.

[Read more…]

Yesterday morning I tweeted out a photo of an overflowing trash can at a neighborhood park, admonishing my fellow Seattleites to hike out your own garbage when the park trash can is full. Because honestly—be a mensch. Well, this morning my dog and I arrived at the park to see a Seattle Parks & Recreation pickup truck driving away, and the weekend’s mess completely cleaned up.

Your tax dollars at work!

I mention this because one of the memes in every anti-tax campaign is that government needs to prove that it can be less wasteful with taxpayer money before we give them any more of it—and when we hear that relentlessly coming from the likes of the Seattle Times editorial board, what they really mean is “fuck those lazy, overpaid, unionized public employees.” You know, the lazy, overpaid, unionized public employees whose job it is to pick up our trash.

The problem with increasingly relying on voter-approved levies to run our parks is that these levies must be written in a way to attract voters, and “Pick up the trash after voters’ lazy asses” is not exactly a winning bullet point. Yet routine maintenance is the bulk of what the parks department does. And so rather than writing budgets based on what our parks really need, we’ve been writing them based on what might appeal to voters at the polls—and that, along with our city’s structural revenue deficit, is what has led to the parks’ $270 million deferred maintenance backlog.

Let’s be clear: voter-approved levies represent a relatively new way of funding our parks. Seattle’s first parks levy wasn’t until 2000, and that maintenance backlog has exploded since. So how’s all that “direct democracy” working out for you, Seattle?

If anything, Seattle voters have had too much of a say in how we run our parks, not too little. Give our parks department the stable revenue it needs to do the unsexy everyday work of maintaining our parks. Vote “Yes” on Prop 1.

Omigod, really, Seattle Times editorial board…?

The zoo receives many tens of millions of dollars from public coffers but resolutely refuses to explain how it spends the money. Tax dollars disappear into a void with no transparency or accountability. …

The zoo would be a beneficiary of Proposition 1’s Park District, which only compounds the taxpayer-provided free lunch, and builds the wall of secrecy higher.

The zoo has three unhappy female elephants in cramped space. … How bad are things at the Woodland Park Zoo for elephants? What does cramped space really mean? One of the poor creatures has suffered from urine burns, scalded by her own waste water.

There are no good arguments against Prop 1 other than “we don’t want to pay higher taxes,” so instead the opposition has resorted to, well, anything.

It’s hard to believe that a campaign over parks funding for chrissakes, could turn into one of the most dishonest and fear-mongering campaigns ever. But don’t be fooled. Vote “Yes” on Prop 1. (And mail in your goddamn ballot!)

– Did your bus survive the first round of Metro cuts?

– Why does Ted Cruz hate the Special Olympics?

– In the last few months, Seattle’s chattering class has become enamored of the idea of “regressive taxation,” which they are now tossing off in argument as often as possible, regardless of whether or not it actually applies.

– Corporations are people. The type of people who don’t have to be held accountable for environmental or workers rights violations. Or for paying off death squads.

– What to do if you see a hit-and-run

Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky. It was Synagogue Don Isaac Abravanel in Paris, where angry protests over the war in Gaza took place. Last week’s contest was also the 300th, so the stats for contests 201 to 300 are down below this week’s image.

This week’s is another random location, good luck!

Wins between contests 201 and 300:
milwhcky – 37
wes.in.wa – 14
Geoduck – 11
Liberal Scientist – 8
Seventy2002 – 6
zzippy – 4
Theophrastus – 2
waguy – 2
Dan Robinson – 2
poster child – 2
Ted – 2
10 winners with 1 (Two dogs, Deathfrogg, ChefJoe, Brian, don, BA1959, Jay S, Ludicrus Maximus, Darryl, Clara)

A special Pastor Mark Driscoll edition of HA Bible Study:

Jeremiah 23:30
Therefore, behold, I am against the prophets, declares the Lord, who steal my words from one another.

Discuss.

“Join us, the League of Women Voters, and the Seattle Times,” the almost certainly illegal anti-Parks 911-robocall closes. So you’d think the Seattle Times would want to protect its reputation by disassociating itself from such irresponsible tactics. But so far, crickets from our paper of record.

KOMO News, however, they ran with the story. Because it’s news:

No doubt the Seattle Times will finally cover this story once charges have been filed. You know, after it’s too late to impact the election.

Mental Floss: 26 unusual occupations.

Sam Seder: Dick “I’m Never Right” Morris wants you to trust him with your money.

Honest Political Ads: Kentucky, my new home:

Jimmy Dore gets a call from Rick Perry.

Do-nothing Obstructionist, Litigious Congress:

• Jon: Who has armed the Middle East?
• Steve Kornacki :Borderline INSANITY in the House
• Sharpton: G.O.P. toddlers stuff themselves with Obama lawsuit
• Ann Telnaes: Congress is on break AGAIN.
• Lawrence O’Donnell: House Republicans bail on their border vote
• Jon: Congress is the ‘Sharknado 2’ of government.
• Sharpton: Dazed & confused GOP bails on border bill
• David Pakman: The Republican lawsuit against Obama backfires.

ONN: The Onion Week in Review.

Sam Seder: Ewwwwww….Ben Stein has a sexting scandal.

Jon: A Midsummer News Dream.

Chris Christie stars in Minor League.

White House: West Wing Week.

Jonathan Mann: Ridiculous Laws.

Farron Cousins with Howard Nations: Cliven Bundy ignited a hellstorm of right wing hate.

Ed: Why Republicans have zero credibility on the U.S. Economy.

Impeach!

• Young Turks: Whose idea is it?
• Sharpton: Ridiculous Republican claim on impeachment.
• David Pakman: Boehner rules out impeachment, claims impeachment talk is a Democratic scam.
• Ed: The GOP’s miserable ‘Impeachment PIT’
• Chris Hayes: The GOP’s stupid denials echo 2013 government shutdown.
• Sam Seder: The insane push to impeach Obama.
• Sharpton: The Republican ‘comical’ Obama impeachment whiplash

A Congresswoman’s poem: “Do I dare be interviewed by Dr. Colbert?”.

David Pakman: K-K-Krazy-ass Michele Bachmann believes Obama wants migrant kids for medical experiments.

The Koch Bros’ Anti Obama “Care”nival.

Maddow: Mississippi GOP Gov. Phil Bryant sabotages ObamaCare then blames Obama!

Sam Seder: Sorry conservatives, polls show US is center-left.

Thom: The Good, The Bad, and The Very, Very Ugly.

Stephen: On the Sarah Palin Channel.

Barely Political: The Washington Redskins new name revealed.

David Pakman: More undocumented immigrants came into the U.S. under Reagan than Obama.

Ana Kasparian and friends: ‘Modern Family’ actor stands up to anti-gay Rick Santorum.

Conflict in Gaza:

• Mark Fiore: Not equal—Gaza in over 1000 frames.
• Jimmy Dore calls Peter King to talk about the war in Gaza:

• Stephen: Why it’s so difficult to cover Israel-Gaza conflict
• Jimmy Dore gets a call from Bibi “Eat it Gaza” Netanyahu

Kimmel: This week in unnecessary censorship.

Young Turks: Meet Seattle’s #1 anti-pot cop.

Sam Seder: Rand Paul lies about his support for Civil Rights Act.

David Pakman: Crazy-ass Republican equates EPA rules with “Terrorism”.

Thom: Will the GOP sabotage of ObamaCare backfire?

Liberal Viewer: Neil deGrasse Tyson and Maher on anti-Neil deGrasse Tyson article.

Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

If the No on Parks folks think it was just clever gamesmanship to spoof “911” in the caller ID of their recent robocall, they’re gonna have to make their case to the police. From SPD Blotter:

Dozens of confused Seattle residents have called Seattle police over the last 24 hours after receiving hangup calls, which appeared as if they came from 911.

In fact, these calls—which appear on caller IDs as “911-9111″—are the result of caller ID fraud, or “spoofing,” and are not coming from SPD’s 911 Communications Center.

The 911 Communications Center is researching the origin of the calls and is referring the case to detectives for investigation.

SPD blogger Jonah Spangenthal-Lee confirms that emergency operators saw a surge in volume yesterday as worried residents called 911 in response to these spoofed caller IDs. He was not familiar with the apparent connection to the No on Parks campaign. But now SPD is. According to an internal email sent out to volunteers yesterday, No on Parks committee co-chair Carol Fisher claimed “100,000 robo calls went out today.”

So, hey, thanks, Carol Fisher, Don Harper, Jon Hansen, Faye Garneau, Alyne Fortgang, Jim Coombes, and the rest of you anti-tax lying liars for creating a public safety hazard in the service of spreading your lies.

If your phone rings today and you see “911-9111” in the caller ID, don’t worry that it’s a reverse 911 call warning you about a toxic gas leak or an armed fugitive or something in your neighborhood. In fact, don’t pick it up at all. It’s just those lying liars from the “No on Parks” campaign attempting to trick you into listening to their robocall.

I’ve heard from several people who’ve picked up this call, initially alarmed that this might be coming from 911. One annoyed recipient posted a screen shot from his phone to Reddit. Pretty damn shady.

Also shady are the robocall’s now familiar claims that a Metropolitan Park District can “sell our parks, build stadiums, [and] fund development.” Bullshit scare tactics. All the evil that opponents claim the mayor and city council could do with parks money, they can already do now. But they don’t. Because they answer to voters.

But there’s one more subtle bit of trickier in this robocall. Near the end, before identifying who has paid for the call, the speaker says: “Join us, the League of Women Voters, and the Seattle Times.” Of course, that first comma can be read one of two ways—it could be understood to separate “us” from “the League of Women Voters,” or it could be understood to describe “us” as “the League of Women Voters.” The speaker glides through it in an intentionally* ambiguous manner.

Clever. But also incredibly dishonest. Just like the opponents entire lying lie-filled “No” campaign.

So don’t let bullshit win. Vote “Yes” on Prop 1.

UPDATE: To be clear, 206-911-9111 is not a valid phone number, and it has been suggested to me that such caller ID spoofing may in fact be illegal, punishable by a fine of up to $10,000 per violation. I won’t speculate further, but I’ve been told that this call went out to 100,000 voters, so if the courts were to interpret it as fraud, it could potentially add up to a $1 billion fine!

 

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* And yes, the starting point is to assume that every detail in a political campaign is intentional. If it wasn’t, then the campaign’s Republican political consultant, Sharon Gilpin (who likes to tout herself as a “savvy political operative”), wouldn’t be doing her job.

Earlier this week, we learned this (my emphasis):

House Republicans want to use their final week in Washington before the August recess to send a signal that they are ready to govern.

As the country’s attention turns to the fight for control of the House and Senate, Republicans want to show they are capable of handling two of the nation’s toughest issues: the thousands of children crossing the border, and the veterans in need of healthcare.

“This is a crisis situation. We need to show that we can respond in a crisis in a thoughtful way,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said of the effort to move a border bill.

Are the Republicans ready to govern?

By their own measure…apparently not:

House GOP leaders ditched their plans to vote on a border supplemental today after failing to secure the votes to pass it.

“We don’t think we have the votes,” said Kay Granger, R-Texas, one of the architects of the bill.

How can a party, whose fundamental philosophy is that the federal government is evil, ever be ready to govern?

They can’t…it simply doesn’t make sense.

Contrary to the scare tactics being employed by opponents, Proposition 1 is not about “accountability” or “new stadiums” or “caged zoo animals” or “waterfront hotels.” In fact, the truth is, Prop 1 isn’t even really about parks. It’s about taxes. And to understand why it’s so important for Seattle to tap into the taxing authority available to a Metropolitan Park District (MPD), you need to understand the way property taxes work.

From a budget writer’s perspective, the property tax is the best tax ever, because if done correctly, it always brings in almost exactly the amount of money projected. That’s because, unlike the stupid, stupid sales tax, budget writers don’t actually set a rate and just hope the money comes in, they request a dollar value—for example, $47.9 million a year for the first six years in the case of the interlocal agreement that accompanies Prop 1—and then the county assessor adjusts the property tax rate annually based on current assessed value, and subject to statutory limits, in order to generate the requested revenue. If property values rise from year to year, the rate goes down; if property values fall as they did when the real estate bubble went pop, the rate goes up. But the MPD is almost guaranteed to generate that $47.9 million a year.

Over the long run, nominal property values will almost certainly rise. So while the voters guide projects an MPD tax rate of $0.33 per $1,000 of assessed value in year one, even a relatively modest 5 percent average annual rise in home values would leave the rate at less than $0.26 per $1,000 of assessed value by year six.

But unfortunately for city budget writers, as reliable as the property tax is, it is subject to two very important limitations. The first is known as the “statutory dollar rate limit”: the City of Seattle’s property tax authority is limited to $3.60 per $1,000 of assessed value. That is the maximum theoretical rate the city can levy without voter approval. But thanks to the second limit, known as I-747’s “101 percent limit” (or more accurately: “Tim Eyman’s Revenge”), the city’s actual regular levy authority falls far short of the statutory dollar rate limit.

Under the growth limit factor first enacted in the 1970s, and then punitively reduced to 101 percent under Eyman’s I-747 (and later reinstated by a cowardly legislature after the state supreme court tossed the initiative out), the dollar value of property taxes collected may not exceed 101 percent of the taxes collected in the highest of the three most recent years, plus an allowance for net increased property value in the district resulting from new construction.

I know—that’s very complicated. But suffice it to say that thanks to the 101 percent limit, revenues generated from Seattle’s regular levy generally don’t even keep pace with inflation, let alone rising property values. As a result, the actual maximum levy rate available to the city council has been steadily falling as I-747’s 101 percent limit has ratcheted down revenue growth.

Fortunately, state law does allow for 1 to 6-year “lid lifts,” enabling the city to raise revenues in excess of the 101 percent limit, but within the $3.60 statutory cap, subject to voter approval. That’s what the expiring Parks Levy is—a lid lift—as is the Library Levy, the Families and Education Levy, Bridging the Gap, and so on. When you add up Seattle’s regular levy together with its various lid lifts, Seattle is currently levying a combined rate of just under $2.91 per $1,000 of assessed value (although about $0.26 of this expires at the end of 2014 with the Parks and Pike Place Market levies).

Got it? Okay then, so why do we need the additional taxing authority of the MPD if we still have so much room available under the statutory cap? Why not just go to voters with another parks levy as the Seattle Times disingenuously contends? Because we don’t really have that much room.

First, remember how I said that a property tax almost always generates the revenue requested, if done correctly? Well, doing it correctly requires accounting for the possibility that property values might fall in the short term. Seattle property values fell about 12 percent during the real estate bust. Had Seattle been levying within 12 percent of its statutory cap it would have resulted in a budgetary disaster. So it would be imprudent to go beyond $3.20 per $1,000 of the $3.60 cap available.

Second, this limited cap space leaves little room to fund other pressing needs. For example, voters will be asked to approve a Preschool Levy in November, generating about $14 million a year in revenue. But it will eventually cost much more than that to fully implement the program. Likewise, our current Parks Levy was never enough to both operate parks and chip away at the growing deferred maintenance backlog. Even with the levy, we’ve been underfunding our parks for years. But to fully address parks via another lid lift would limit the city’s ability to adequately fund preschool and other pressing needs.

So if you really, really, support universal preschool, you should really, really support Prop 1.

That’s the primary attraction of an MPD: it comes with its own separate $0.75 per $1,000 of assessed value, meaning that we no longer need to pit parks against other crucial services like libraries, roads, and preschool in a competition for precious cap space. With the MPD, parks will finally have a reliable revenue stream sufficient to address its maintenance backlog over time. But the tax-averse amongst you can rest assured that for all the same reasons that the city can’t access its full $3.60 rate, the MPD could never access its full $0.75 either, even if the mayor and the council were the evil bastards MPD opponents make them out to be.

Finally, I want to address the opponents’ claim that “for a hundred years Seattle citizens have supported voter-approved levies that give each neighborhood a legacy voice” in blah, blah, blah. That’s bullshit. For a hundred years parks have been primarily funded through the city’s regular levy, which requires no direct voter approval. It wasn’t even until the 1970s, when a growth limit factor was first imposed, that a lid lift even became a thing. Indeed, the city’s first parks levy wasn’t passed until 2000, and the shift in funding to lid lifts didn’t take off until after 2001, when Eyman’s absurdly unsustainable 101 percent limit kicked in. Bond levies aside*, this voting on maintenance and operations levies for parks, libraries, roads, and whatnot is a relatively new phenomenon. And an incredibly stupid way to budget.

That said, the MPD won’t change how we fund these other services. While it would leave more room for other lid lifts to meet other pressing needs, these lid lifts would still have to go before voters.

Opponents present Prop 1 as some sort of sinister plot to privatize our parks and build stadiums for jillionaires. That’s crazy. Or incredibly dishonest. I’m not sure which is worse. But all it really is is a modest tax increase dedicated to parks, that provides an adequate and stable source of funding, while leaving voters the option to tax themselves to pay for other needs.

If you simply hate taxes (hello, Seattle Times) vote “No.” But if you support essential services like parks, libraries, preschool, and roads, vote “Yes” on Prop 1.

 

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* There is also the option of rarely-used voter-approved “excess levies,” which get around the statutory cap entirely, but since they are limited to 1 year, they’re not really practical for dealing with anything but an emergency.