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The Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight, and every Tuesday evening, for some political discussion over an ice cold drink.

We meet 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. We’re in the back room.

Can’t make it to Seattle? Check out another Washington state chapter of Drinking Liberally over the next week. The Tri-Cities and Shelton chapters also meet this Tuesday. The Lakewood and South Seattle chapters meet this Wednesday. And on Thursday, the Spokane and Tacoma chapters meet.

With 202 chapters of Living Liberally, including eighteen in Washington state, three in Oregon and three in Idaho, chances are excellent there’s a chapter meeting somewhere near you.

Just got the latest signature verification numbers on Forward Seattle’s referendum, and it doesn’t look good for the anti-$15 minimum wage crowd:

Referendum No. 2 (Forward Seattle)

Number of signatures submitted	18,928
Number of signatures reviewed	8,389
Number of signatures verified	6,409

With about 44 percent of the signatures verified, that’s a validation rate of just 76.4 percent, far short of what’s necessary to produce the 16,510 valid signatures needed to qualify for the ballot. The first batch of 3,353 signatures validated at 75.5 percent rate, so at first glance the validation rate appears to be trending slightly in Forward Seattle’s favor. But some of this improvement is due to a small number of “signature miscompares” being rehabilitated under review from supervisors, and then folded back into the total, so it’s not really possible to entirely compare validation rates from one batch to another.

And in case you think there’s something fishy about such a low validation rate, think again:

As you can see, the bulk of the rejected signatures are from people who are either not registered to vote, or are registered outside of Seattle. There’s nothing subjective about that. Meanwhile, since the number of duplicate signatures tends to rise exponentially as the sample size increases (for obvious reasons), that number should jump to close to 200 by the time the process is completed.

Given just the numbers above, Forward Seattle would need an impossible 95.8 percent validation rate on the remaining signatures in order to qualify for the ballot. Not gonna happen. But there are also an additional 455 verified signatures out of 567 submitted from a second referendum drive. If these are added to the total (and it’s not clear that they legally can), Forward Seattle would still need a 91.5 percent validation rate on the remaining signatures. Again, not gonna happen. And that’s not even counting the “hundreds” of signature withdrawal affidavits Working Washington collected.

So stick a fork in it, this referendum is done! And it’s not even close: Forward Seattle will fall a couple thousand signatures short of the threshold. There will not be a $15 minimum wage referendum on the November ballot.

 

The Seattle Times has endorsed Republican Edward Barton over two-term Democratic state Representative Luis Moscoso in the 1st Legislative District, and omigod, I don’t even know where to start with this one.

First of all, this is now the second race (that I am aware of) in which the editors have endorsed making the state legislature even whiter. As if that’s possible. By my count there are currently only ten nonwhite members of the 147-member legislature (none in the Republican caucuses, unless we want to go back to counting the Irish).

Moscoso is one of only two Hispanics currently serving in Olympia, while Representative Sharon Tomiko Santos is one of only four Asian Pacific Islanders. The Seattle Times would prefer to replace both of them with middle-aged white guys.

Second, the editors’ pre-House biographical description of Moscoso as simply “a former Community Transit bus driver,” is an absolutely stunning lie omission, even for an editorial board that has raised lies of omission to the highest form of art.

Yes, Moscoso drove a bus. But more significantly he was a union organizer and four-term president of ATU Local 1576. He was the Government Relations Director for the Washington Public Employees Association, and served three terms as Secretary of the Washington State Democratic Party. Moscoso has also served on numerous other boards and committees including the Puget Sound Regional Council and NAACP of Snohomish County, but it is his union organizing and Democratic Party activism that makes up the bulk of his professional resume. And it is also the biographical detail to which the anti-labor editors truly object.

And last, but certainly not least, I have to admit I had trouble falling asleep last night after reading this favorable description of Barton’s education policy:

On the critical issue of education, Barton is rightly skeptical of the state Supreme Court’s heavy-handed education-funding mandate, but advocates for additional funding through the so-called levy swap proposal, which has been advanced by some key House Democrats.

Oh. My. Fucking. God.

How many times do I have to explain that the “levy swap” provides no additional funding for education?! It just doesn’t! I’ve laid out in detail how a levy swap would would work. I’ve shown my math. It is an accounting trick, pure and simple, to preposterously claim that a levy swap provides “additional funding” to K-12 education.

To repeat, a levy swap is by design revenue neutral. It merely replaces local levy dollars with state levy dollars—any increase in state school spending is offset by decreasing aggregate local school spending by an equivalent amount. Furthermore, in “property rich” urban and suburban districts like Seattle, Bellevue, and Redmond (communities whose interests the Seattle Times allegedly serves), a levy swap would substantially raise our property taxes while providing zero additional funds for our local schools. In fact, a levy swap would actually erode our local K-12 funding over time!

I know folks at the Seattle Times read me—I can see the traffic coming in from nwsource.com.  So there is absolutely no excuse for continuing to perpetuate this lie.

Reading between the lines of the paper’s endorsements this year, the editors have clearly made education reform their overriding priority… if by “reform” you mean busting the teachers union, promoting the Gates/Walmart-backed corporate education agenda, and defying the Supreme Court’s mandate to spend more tax dollars on public schools. I suppose that’s their right. I just wish they had the integrity to be honest about it.

– Are you staying cool? I’m decidedly not.

– I’m glad to read Joel Connelly’s piece on sidewalk closures. Here’s hoping Scott Kubly is up to the task.

– Do better, Democrats.

– The Yakama Nation vs. Coal Pollution

– The DOJ will be on the right side of history in any marriage equality case in the Supreme Court.

– The very naughty whistleblower

Last week’s contest was won by Seventy2002. It was Miami.

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

Good on the Seattle Times editorial board for voicing support for US Senator Patty Murray’s efforts to protect reproductive health care from the Supreme Court’s dangerous Hobby Lobby ruling…

Republicans and other Democrats in the Senate and House need to step up to this legislation, and its basic protections. Does anyone really believe that employees surrender their religious beliefs and civic prerogatives to their employers?

Shuffle the demographics, ethnicities and roles a bit, and no doubt the GOP opponents would be outraged by some potential employer-employee scenarios.

Timely and appropriate legislation in Congress restates the history and intent of existing federal laws so it will be clear, even for the nation’s highest court.

Of course, Murray’s bill has no chance of passing the Republican-controlled House. So, you know, if they really cared about defending women’s access to reproductive care, perhaps the editors might want to stop endorsing so many goddamn Republicans for Congress? Just sayin’.

1 Corinthians 6:1-4
If any of you has a dispute with another, do you dare to take it before the ungodly for judgment instead of before the Lord’s people? Or do you not know that the Lord’s people will judge the world? And if you are to judge the world, are you not competent to judge trivial cases? Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more the things of this life! Therefore, if you have disputes about such matters, do you ask for a ruling from those whose way of life is scorned in the church?

Discuss.

I’ve yet to see the exact numbers, and they don’t appear to be available online, but word is that King County Elections has reviewed about 4,000 of the approximately 19,500 signatures Forward Seattle submitted on their anti-$15 minimum wage petitions, and validated only 75 percent on the first pass. That’s far short of the 84.6 percent rate necessary to produce the 16,500 valid signatures required to qualify a referendum for the ballot.

I’ve no idea if those first 4,000 signatures were a random sample or a contiguous batch of petition sheets, but either way it’s bad news for Forward Seattle, which would now need an 87.1 percent validation rate on the remaining signatures to meet the threshold. That’s not impossible; all of the rates posted above are within the range of past experience. But 87.1 percent would be more of an optimistic outlier than the norm.

And that’s before considering the “hundreds” of signature withdrawals Working Washington tells me they collected.

Considering the lengths Forward Seattle had to go to generate signatures—you know, lying to voters about their petition—a 75 percent validation rate would not be surprising. It takes low standards to run a signature drive this way, and those low standards almost guarantee a degree of sloppiness and cheating.

In other words, you get what you pay for. A maxim the business owners funding Forward Seattle might want to take to heart in reconsidering how they compensate their own low wage workers.

Ann Telnaes: America’s selective righteousness.

Sam Seder: The Hobby Lobby decision is already getting worse.

Rubin Report: Easiest and hardest places to live.

Mental Floss: 20 misconceptions about sex.

Maddow: Why Rick Perry will never be Prez, Part I
Maddow: Why Rick Perry will never be Prez, Part II

Thom: Time to fine-tune Washington’s pot laws.

John Oliver: Antartic tourism.

David Pakman: House may spend more on Banghazi panel than Veterans Affairs Committee.

Boehner, Bachmann & Steinweitz: Attorneys against deadbeat Presidents:

Washington Goes To Pot:

• Washington gets legal pot stores
• Young Turks: First to buy pot
• David Pakman: Legal pot sales in WA
• Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes “exercises this new personal freedom

Maddow: Right-wing Republican hypocrisy on prostitution scandals, Part I.
Maddow: Right-wing Republican hypocrisy on prostitution scandals, Part II.

Sam Seder: Fox and Friends humiliated by a child.

Young Turks: Obama is first ‘Jew-Hating’ President claims FAUX News nutjob “hate expert”.

Pap with Digby: Corporate media enables Teabagger oddballs.

Mark Fiore: Blasy the Drone, To Protect and Swerve.

Jimmy Dori: Luke Russert’s stupid tweet.

Sarah Palin’s Comedy Corner:

• Rubin Report: Sarah Palin Wants to Impeach Obama.
• Ann Telnaes: Sarah Palin beats a dead horse.
• Huff Post Live: Awwww….Sarah Palin calls for Obama’s impeachment
• Sharpton: Palin wants Obama impeached.
• Even FAUX News cannot take Palin seriously.
• David Pakman: Sarah Palin wants to impeach Obama for following George W. Bush’s law
• O’Reilly, Goldberg, Boehner think Palin’s plan is crazy.
• Alex Wagner: Sarah “Death Panel” Palin equates ‘Obama impeachment’ to ‘a gunfight’!

Sharpton: Boehner unveils bill to authorize his stunt ‘lawsuit’ against Pres. Obama.

Rubin Report: The reality of who actually earns minimum wage.

Grace Parra’s Pretty Strong Opinions: Batten down the snatches:

WaPo: Things to do in Denver when you are Prez.

What’s the Matter With Kansas?

• Young Turks: Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback fulfills promise to destroy Kansas.
• Chris Hayes: The State of Kansas is poor.

Ed: ‘Obama economic growth’ ruins GOP’s HATE-talking points.

Young Turks: Bob Beckel earns his pay as FAUX News’ clown ‘liberal’ racist.

Pap: The Republican 50 state strategy.

The NSA spying scandal.

Nutburger Immigration Conspiracy Theories:

• Michael Brooks: Rick Perry pushes border conspiracies.
• Young Turks: Rick Perry chewed alive by his own words.
• Chris Hayes: Texas Gov. Rick Perry accuses Obama of co-ordinating mass migration of kids into the U.S.
• David Pakman: Louie Gohmert has a bizarre theory of immigrants.
• Sharpton: Cheap shot Rick Perry’s Texas sized hypocrisy & lies on immigration
• Alex Wagner: Republicans accuse Obama of ‘importing’ immigrant children in thousands

White House: West Wing Week.

Bill Maher: GOP and FAUX News refuse to stop telling stupid zombie lies about Obama.

Pap with Abby Martin: Blackwater’s criminal history.

Young Turks: ‘Legitimate Rape’ idiot takes back his apology and doubles down.

UCB Comedy: Senatorial Candidate for Human-Dog Marriage.

Ann Telnaes: Pandora’s Hobby Lobby box.

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

I mentioned in the last Open Thread that Governor Inslee has released a clean water plan. The piece I linked to had mentioned Senator Mark Schoesler’s objections. I’ve now read the relevant press release, and I’m not sure why they needed to quote it.

Water-quality standards need to increase and any new standards must balance a cleaner environment with protecting family budgets and jobs. Most people can’t afford to have their sewer bills jump to $200 per month. Any extreme increase in regulations jeopardizes jobs and hurts the poor. Extreme measures, like what we’ve seen in Oregon, won’t bring the balance we need to make this work for everyone.”

OK. So we’re looking to find balance. Just finding the right balance. Senator Schoesler and I would probably disagree about where that balance might be, but at least we can all agree that we should look both at environmental concerns and at economic and other uses of our waters.

Obviously, Governor Inslee did that. Senator Schoesler may disagree with where he found that balance. Hell, I might disagree. Let’s see what balanced questions Senator Schoesler is asking.

• How much local fish do Washington residents actually consume, and if we don’t know, why don’t we know the real number?

Well, it varies. I’m not much of a fish eater. But a lot of people eat a lot of fish. Of course you want to protect the people who eat more. There are plenty of people who eat more than 23 meals with seafood a month, and plenty who don’t.

So far, the balance of questions is 1 for less regulation and 0 for more.

• The City of Bellingham estimates that sewer bills will increase to $200 per month. How will low-income families and households on fixed incomes afford $2,400 per year for their sewer bills?

Wait, to $200? What is it now? If it’s $199.99 that’s very different from if it’s free (to take two extreme examples). Also — and this will shock you from a GOP press release — there’s no link to the actual source. But I highly doubt that this is in relation to the governor’s plan given that the plan had been out less than a day when this press release was put out.

I’m all for municipalities figuring out how to make bills more based on people’s ability to pay than on just the cost of providing those services. But I don’t think we should wait until they figure that out to act on clean water.

Two questions for less regulation and zero for more. Balance.

• If 90 percent of fish that people eat is from a foreign source, how will we measure the benefits to people’s health?

Again, no source. And again, it’s not going to be perfectly balanced. Some people, people who fish or who look for local food in particular, are going to be affected by this decision more than people who buy imported fish. If we can figure out ways to protect them too, that would be great. But those are the people who eat fish who Washington State can best protect.

Balance update: 3 questions for less regulation, 0 for more.

• How will cities, counties and businesses comply without the necessary technology to meet the new water standards?

I’m not 100% sure what the question is. Is it how does technology advance to meet needs or is it what if businesses and municipalities don’t want to pay for the technology? If it’s the first, you know markets tend to be pretty good at figuring that sort of thing out. If it’s the later, um, tough shit that’s why we have regulations.

Balance: 4 questions for less regulation 0 for more regulation.

• What is the real economic impact in lost jobs, wages and community economic health that your regulations will cost us?

The question assumes that nobody looking into those standards considered economic impact. Or perhaps, this is supposed to hang on the word “real.” You know: we should all assume that because some GOP press release wanted to know “the real impact,” that that any talk about the economic impact is fake. Also, toxic chemicals in the water may have negative consequences, even real economic ones.

So final count: 5 questions for less regulation, 0 for more. So “the balance we need” is just as little regulation as possible.

Goldy, January 29, 2010:

[C]ategorizing Freeman’s market philosophy as somewhere to the right of Rich Uncle Pennybags, well, that’s about as speculative as predicting a Seattle Times editorial endorsement. (November, 2012: “Rob McKenna for Governor; a different kind of Republican.” You mark my words.)

The Seattle Times, October 6, 2012:

Rob McKenna is the best candidate to replace Chris Gregoire as governor of Washington. … McKenna has an independent mind. He is willing to work with Democrats and he is willing on occasion to buck his party.

I don’t lay claim to any peculiar powers of prescience. This is just who they are and what they do.

Hate to make HA all Seattle Times-bashing all the time,* but over at PubliCola, Josh deftly highlights how blatantly dishonest the editorial board’s Parks District “No” endorsement is, by dredging up the paper’s “No” endorsements against the previous two parks levies:

Isn’t it weird that … the Seattle Times editorialized this week that voters should reject this year’s permanent parks funding measure because they’d prefer Seattle’s traditional levy renewal funding approach, yet they came out against the last two levy proposals?

(No inconsistency, I guess, but to mangle an old phrase: They were against parks funding before they were against it.)

How can anybody take the Blethenites seriously?

* No I don’t.

Back in 2012, just for kicks, I got myself elected a Rick Santorum delegate from the 37th Legislative District Republican precinct caucus. How’d I manage that? I was the only “Republican” to show up from my precinct. That’s how much of a joke the GOP is in this overwhelmingly Democratic district.

Yet that didn’t stop the Seattle Times editorial board from hopelessly endorsing an unknown Republican against 8-term incumbent Democratic state Representative Sharon Tomiko Santos. I mean, what the fuck?

THE 37th Legislative District’s Position 1 needs a legislator willing to compromise and represent the best interests of a diverse district where many schools are struggling and persistent achievement gaps threaten to leave students behind.

That means turning out the incumbent in favor of the promising political newcomer, Daniel Bretzke of Seattle. The moderate Republican faces an uphill battle against a 16-year legislative veteran, state Rep. Sharon Tomiko Santos, D-Seattle.

If by “uphill battle” they mean running face-first into the base of a sheer vertical cliff, sure.

See, here’s how this thing usually works. The Seattle Times will hold its nose and endorse a Democrat in an uber-Democratic district, because to do otherwise would make them look feckless, impotent, and stoopid. If there’s a competitive race for an open seat, they’ll generally go with the Democrat with the fewest labor endorsements, but otherwise it’s the incumbent. That way the editors can point to their handful of Democratic endorsements in safe Democratic districts as a defense against accusations of partisanship arising from, say, their endorsement of lifelong asshole Drew Stokesbary over his more qualified Democratic opponent in a swingish 31st Legislative District.

So what explains this astounding act of editorial futility?

The Democrat chairs the House Education Committee and is in a position to make a huge difference for kids. Yet, she has repeatedly used her power to stall meaningful education reforms opposed by the teachers union.

While Santos should be focused on the Legislature meeting its court-mandated obligations to fully fund education, she wants to make the challenge worse. She supports Initiative 1351, the teachers union-backed measure that requires class sizes across all grades to be reduced, the hiring of thousands more teachers and building of more classrooms. Yet, there is no funding mechanism in sight.

This past session, Santos ignored Seattle Schools’ plea for a change in the law to include some level of student test scores in teacher evaluations.

I’ve got my own problems with Santos, dating back to her stalwart defense of payday lenders. She refused to support last year’s minimum wage legislation, and she’s long scorned much of the environmental agenda as something that’s more of a concern for rich white people than her own diverse working-class district. She’s actually far less liberal than her district. But I appreciate her work as chair of the Education Committee where she’s been a strong opponent of charter schools and much of the rest of the Gates/Walmart backed corporate education reform agenda.

And that, of course, is what has the editors’s undies so tied up in a knot. They absolutely hate the teachers union, and by association, teachers. And so in their eyes, Santos’ support for “hiring thousands more teachers” is a transgression so unforgivable that they are willing to stake what’s left of their withered reputation on a challenger who I could outpoll with a half-hearted write-in campaign.

It is an oversized gesture of unabashed futility that demonstrates once and for all that when it comes to understanding or representing the values and interests of its citizens, Seattle has, alas, become a no-newspaper town.

Damn you, $15 an hour minimum wage!

Capitol Hill food+drink summer report: 27 bars, restaurants and cafes still to come 2014

If not for the city council’s job-killing, small-business-destroying socialism, it could’ve been 28!* Amirite?

* (But seriously, it sure does seem to be business as usual in Seattle despite the impending $15 minimum wage. Go figure.)

It’s no October Revolution, but kudos to socialist council member Kshama Sawant and her fellow traveler Nick Licata (literally a communist, in that he once lived in a commune) for fighting to make the city’s proposed Metro buyback funding package just a little less regressive.

Sawant and Licata propose replacing the 0.1 cent sales tax increase component of the package with an increase in the Commercial Parking Tax (from 12.5 percent to 17.5 percent), and a modest restoration of the Employee Hours Tax: $16.68 per employee per year, with small businesses exempted. That would cost a Seattle business only $1.39 per employee a month, about 8 cents an hour—hardly the type of burden that would drive jobs out of booming Seattle.

I won’t belabor the details here; Sawant has posted an informative FAQ on her council blog. Go read that. But I will take the opportunity to editorialize.

As I see it, there are two compelling reasons for the council to adopt the Sawant/Licata proposal: 1) It’s more fair; and 2) The resulting tax package would be more likely to pass voters.

On the first point, Washington already has the most regressive tax system in the nation, and by far. This tax swap doesn’t do a lot to reverse that, but at least it doesn’t add to it the way a highly regressive sales tax increase would. About 40 percent of downtown Seattle workers rely on Metro to commute in to work; all Sawant and Licata are doing is asking businesses to pick up a little bit of the cost of maintaining the bus service on which they rely.

On the second point, because the sales tax is so regressive, it is also highly unpopular, which surely contributed to the defeat of the countywide Prop 1 in April. If the Sawant/Licata amendment passes, the council would impose the Employee Hours and Commercial Parking taxes directly. Only the $60 car tab increase would go to Seattle voters in November. Considering how crucial maintaining bus service is to our local economy and the welfare of low and middle income commuters, the council should do whatever it can to best assure passage. Replacing the regressive sales tax component with more progressive alternatives will surely help.

The Sawant/Licata proposal will be debated at today’s Transportation Committee hearing, at 2 p.m., and possibly submitted to a final vote. If you can’t show your support in person, scroll to the bottom of Sawant’s FAQ and email council members. Also, sign this petition.