HorsesAss.Org

Oh hey, Clint Didier is still running for office. This time it’s for Congress from Eastern Washington. And his campaign is giving away guns (Tri-City Herald link). Because sure.

Supporters must submit their names, ZIP codes and email addresses at Didier’s website to get updates from his campaign.

The winners of the guns — two pistols and a military-style rifle — will be randomly chosen. The contest allows people to civilly show support for the Second Amendment at a time when it is being threatened, Didier told the Herald.

“All these shootings are occurring at gun-free zones by individuals on some type of drugs with mental issues,” Didier said. “The guns are not pulling the trigger, the people are pulling the trigger. These gun-free zones are enticing people to go to these areas to do these terrible deeds.”

[…]

The prizes are two Ruger 2300 LC9 pistols and a DB-15 S rifle, including a 30-round clip with ammunition, Didier’s website said. He will give away the guns when he reaches 10,000 “likes” on his Facebook page or followers on Twitter, or July 4, whichever comes sooner.

The winners will have to follow all laws — including being of legal age and going through a background check — to claim their prizes, Didier said.

I had originally read Joel Connelley’s piece that doesn’t include reference to background checks, but when I asked the campaign about it, their spokesperson Larry Stickney* directed me to the longer piece on the Herald.

When I asked how a background check would weed out people on drugs or “with mental issues” he didn’t respond. It seems like the maybe not the greatest plan to give a potential murder weapon to some random stranger because they were nice enough to give you their name, email address, and zip code, even if they are able to pass a background check.

[Read more…]

Remember how opponents warned that a $15 minimum wage would surely cost the city thousands of jobs, hurting the exact same low-wage workers the ordinance was intended to help? Well, in Seattle’s booming hospitality industry, not so much:

The former Red Lion Hotel in downtown Seattle sold Thursday for $130.7 million, or nearly $410,000 a room, the highest price ever paid in the metro area, according to hotel experts.

But the record price for the 319-room hotel, now known as Motif Seattle, could quickly be surpassed by the pending sale of the 120-room Hotel 1000: Two groups are buying it for $63 million or about $525,000 a room, according to a report this week in The Wall Street Journal, which didn’t identify its sources.

“It is the highest price paid (per key) ever for a hotel in Washington state,” said Chris Burdett, senior vice president of CBRE Hotels in Seattle, which was not involved in the transaction.

The record-price deals for downtown Seattle hotels are the latest good news for a surging hotel market that’s kicked off a wave of new construction. Downtown Seattle has roughly 12,000 hotel rooms; the construction of R.C. Hedreen’s mega-convention hotel and smaller hotels could add another 3,000 rooms to the inventory.

Wait. I thought the $15 minimum wage was supposed to destroy capitalism as we know it. And yet in the immediate wake of its passage, investors continue to sink hundreds of millions of dollars into an industry that is one of the city’s largest employers of low-wage workers. I’m so confused!

And it’s not just here in Seattle. Just weeks after SeaTac voters passed their $15 minimum wage, Cedarbrook Lodge, one of the initiative’s most vocal opponents, announced a $16 million 67-room expansion. It’s like the industry’s mouth is saying one thing while its money is saying something entirely else. Weird.

I can only conclude one of two things. Either paying hotel housekeepers and other low-wage workers $15 an hour won’t squeeze all the profits out of Seattle’s labor-intensive hotel industry, or all the smart capitalists investing hundreds of millions of dollars into our soon-to-be-living-wage hotel industry are in fact incredibly stupid.

The International Franchise Association’s hilarious lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Seattle’s $15 minimum wage ordinance prompted instant ridicule from actual lawyers. “Crazy talk,” laughed labor and employment attorney Dmitri Iglitzin. “Frivolous,” scoffed University of Washington School of Law lecturer David Ziff. “Bonkers,” wrote Ian Millhiser, the Senior Constitutional Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

But while most of the suit’s claims were based on absurdly broad constitutional reaches (like alleging that impinging on a business’s profits would violate its First Amendment right to commercial speech), there was one claim that gave some attorneys pause—that the slower phase-in schedules for businesses providing health benefits were preempted by the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). It’s not that the attorneys thought the claim had any merit, just that ERISA is an incredibly complex area of the law in which none of them had particular expertise.

Well in fact, there is plenty of relevant case law on this issue, and not surprisingly it turns out that the IFA’s ERISA claim is just as frivolous as the rest of its ridiculous suit. From Ironworkers Dist. Council of the Pacific Northwest v. Woodland Park Zoo Planning & Development:

We agree with the attorney general opinion that the prevailing wage statute does not require employers to establish benefit programs or make benefit contributions. The respondents concede, both in their briefing and at oral argument, that an employer can satisfy the statute by making cash payments in lieu of benefits. Because J.A. Jones ‘s preemption holding was based on the faulty premise that the statute requires employers to make ERISA contributions and to make them at a certain level, we do not adopt it. Rather, we follow other jurisdictions that hold that ERISA does not preempt prevailing wage statutes similar to Washington’s, which consider the amount of usual benefits in computing the total prevailing wage, but do not require that employers actually make such contributions. See Associated Builders & Contractors, Saginaw Valley Area Chapter v. Perry, 115 F.3d 386 (6th Cir.1997); Burgio & Campofelice, Inc. v. NYS Dep’t of Labor, 107 F.3d 1000 (2d Cir.1997); WSB Electric v. Curry, 88 F.3d 788 (9th Cir.1996), cert. denied, 519 U.S. 1109, 117 S.Ct. 945, 136 L.Ed.2d 834 (1997); Minnesota Chapter of Assoc. Builders & Contractors v. Minnesota Dep’t of Labor & Indus., 47 F.3d 975 (8th Cir.1995); Keystone Chapter, Assoc. Builders & Contractors v. Foley, 37 F.3d 945 (3d Cir.1994).

Each of these cases hold that prevailing wage statutes that consider the amount of usual benefits but do not require the establishment of benefit programs or benefit payments are not preempted by ERISA because they regulate wages, not benefits. Wages are a traditional subject of state concern and are not within ERISA’s coverage. Massachusetts v. Morash, 490 U.S. 107, 118, 109 S.Ct. 1668, 1674–75, 104 L.Ed.2d 98 (1989). Like the prevailing wage statutes in the above cases, Washington’s statute does not prescribe the type of benefit plans or amount of contributions. Nor does it impose any sort of administrative burden on ERISA plans. Most importantly, the employer can comply with the prevailing wage statute without any ERISA plan whatsoever. Accordingly, applying the Travelers analysis, we conclude that the prevailing wage statute does not “relate to” any employee benefit plans because Congress did not intend that ERISA control state wage regulation and the prevailing wage statute does not have an impermissible effect on ERISA plans.

That’s a lot of federal case law the Washington State Court of Appeals cites, and it all concludes the same thing: “Congress did not intend that ERISA control state wage regulation.” And while the above case deals with prevailing wage law rather than minimum wage law, the issues raised in the IFA suit are entirely analogous. IFA claims that the ordinance is preempted by ERISA because it “relates to” employee benefit plans, but the courts have repeatedly ruled that such wage statutes do not.

Minimum wage critics love to disparage “burger flippers” as unworthy of earning a livable wage, yet they have no qualms about paying attorneys $1,000 an hour to file a ridiculous lawsuit like this. Amazing.

– On Monday my computer was acting up, so we had a later in the day Open Thread, today I’m just acting up (ie, I didn’t prep enough earlier) and we have an afternoon Open Thread. Any preference if it’s morning or evening on Mondays and Thursdays?

– I don’t know if it’s sad or saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad that his polling firm is still trying to unskew the polls on Eric Cantor’s race.

– Women in the Workplace: Bryant Corner Café and Bakery

– One of my favorite things about the Internet is when people who don’t share my obsessions do something. This piece about how Fox News would cover The Marvel Universe is great even as a non-comics guy.

– Report: Obama Can Act to Reduce Inequality for Women, Minorities

– A lot of sports try to sell the economic benefits to a place rather than the cultural ones. And most of the time that’s bunk. If you care about the fact that the US Open is coming to the area next year, I’d think what it says about us is more interesting than the potential dollars. But Emmett tries to sort it out.

– We break it Obama owns it

How freaked out are the wingnuts at the prospect of gay-loving, pot-smoking, $15-minimum-wage-paying Sodoms and Gomorrahs like Seattle and San Francisco economically out-competing the gun-toting, free-market-loving regions of the country? Via email, my new friend Tom explains:

Looking at the election returns, few patriotic Americans remain on the Left Coast, and their relative numbers will be further reduced by the current influx of illegals occasioned by the feckless narcissist squatting in the Oval Office. Granted, the loss of even one human (by definition, this term excludes ‘progressives’) is to be grievously mourned, yet such would be more than offset by the social, financial, health and security advances inevitably following the extermination of the leftist scum and their fellow travelers. Damn shame there is no virus which specifically vectors those defectives with the survival-adverse gene mutation causing liberalism. Then again, perhaps Michael Savage is correct in his claim it is a mental disease and thus treatable. In either event, there is an immediate need for a cure if America is to survive.

Out of courtesy, I’ll keep Tom’s full name and email address to myself (along with the names of the online gun forums on which he frequently deals firearms). But that is some seriously fucked up shit.

You know, what the headline says. Really.

No doubt there are local business owners who genuinely fear for their own profit margins, but nationally, this is an ideological conflict. And if the economies of cities like Seattle and San Francisco continue to thrive despite imposing the highest minimum wage in the nation, it would strike a substantial blow against free market dogma.

No, just because a $15 minimum wage works here in Seattle doesn’t mean it’s appropriate for Yakima. But this is about more than just the minimum wage. This about undermining the deregulatory, low-tax, supply-side orthodoxy that has guided US economic policy since the Reagan administration, and that has played a major role in creating the crisis of income inequality we face today.

It’s also about being proven right or wrong. And everybody hates to be proven wrong.

Finally, I can move back to Philadelphia!

PHL Local Gaming — one of the five contenders for that ever elusive casino license in Philadelphia — has announced a potential new feature for its LoSo Entertainment Center: a 615-foot-tall Skyspire with rooftop restaurant and observation deck, both of which would be reached by gondola. The tower would be designed to look much like Seattle’s Space Needle, though it would be 10 feet taller (take that, Seattle!).

Except for the casino part, it sounds great.* Though personally, rather than the Skyspire, I would opt for the Polercoaster, which instead of those stupid gondolas would wrap the tower with a 615-foot vertical roller coaster!

* Note: Not really.

I did an interview with Fox News about Seattle’s $15 an hour minimum wage, which of course is bringing a lot of new readers to HA. For example, Tom, who via email, goes out of his way to establish himself as an Old Testament Christian. Genesis 18-19, to be exact.

Here’s hoping the next earthquake, or better yet, wild fire, will wipe out everything within 50 miles of the existing coast …. If it should, I promise to celebrate even more joyfully than I did the death of the Chappaquiddick swim champ – toasting it with a grin on my face, a song in my heart and an appropriately delightful aged single malt I can savor in my memory for years as I recall the pleasure taken in the demise of the vile scum infesting this Republic.

Not sure what you have against the Olympic Peninsula, but hey, thanks for the constructive criticism, Tom!

As for the rest of my new Fox friends, please feel free to use this post as an open thread in which to wish death and/or destruction on us freedom-hating liberals.

In a press release about the budget forecast there’s, a paragraph about McCleary where Representative Terry Nealey says:

“The demands by the state Supreme Court for the Legislature to meet educational funding requirements under the McCleary decision will likely lead for new calls during the 2015 session to raise taxes. That would be devastating to our state’s economy. The correct course of action is to fund education first within the budget and let the economy heal by resisting job-killing tax increases. If we stay the course, Washington’s citizens will have more job opportunities, our state will reap the benefits of higher revenue, and we will be able to meet our constitutional requirements as it relates to education.”

This is a broader press release about how the revenue forecast increased $157 million for the biennium. But we’re billions behind. As long as 2 billion or so is more than 157 million, we’re not just going to be able to grow out of our problems.

But I will meet Rep Nealy part of the way: Yes raising taxes can have a deleterious effect on the economy. That’s true. But what the GOP never acknowledges is that so does cutting government services. So I would like to hear how the state could cut the difference between what grew or what the state can expect to grow and what’s needed to fulfill the McCleary obligations. Because suddenly making massive cuts to social services will also affect the economy in a negative way.

Hell, even the largely mythical wringing efficiencies from the government or cuts to wages and pensions would hurt the economy as it would mean less money being pumped into the economy. Government spending drives the economy in its way. Obviously, when we have a balanced budget, those efficiencies are generally balanced out by the taxes that have to be paid to fund them. But that’s the point: we’re going to have to look at spending and at taxes if we want to fix McCleary without doing too much damage to the economy. And since we’ve been mostly cutting in the past years, it may be time for more taxes.

Yet another reminder that for the vast majority of Americans, guns don’t make you safer:

JIM MCMAHON would leave home and forget how to get back.

Sometimes, he would stay in his room and lie on his back in the dark because the pain in his head was so excruciating. At his darkest moments a few years ago, when it was just about too much to handle, the former Chicago Bears quarterback thought about killing himself.

“I am glad I don’t have any weapons in my house or else I am pretty sure I wouldn’t be here,” McMahon said. “It got to be that bad.”

I know, I know… the gun nuts will scream in the threads that I want the guvmint to take away their guns. That’s not the point of these posts at all. What I want is to educate Americans that guns don’t make you safer. Especially handguns. They just don’t.

If you’re a hunter or a sportsman then you need a gun. I’ve got no problem with that. Hunting is at least as moral as factory farming (assuming you intend to eat your kill), and I know from personal experience that target shooting can be loads of fun. But if you’re just some average Jane or Joe purchasing a handgun for personal protection, you’re making a big mistake. Having a handgun in the house dramatically increases the risk of you or a loved one being a shooting victim. Men in particular are much more likely to shoot themselves than an intruder.

The best way to reduce gun violence is to reduce easy access to guns—particularly handguns. And the best way to do that is to change Americans’ attitudes towards guns so that we’re less likely to keep one lying around the house.

– Where the Growth is Happening

– For a town that is really proud of being progressive and pro-lady and pro-gay and pro-brown-people and pro-equality, we have still got some truly rotten, stinking, embarrassing, hateful slop festering just barely under the surface. And it’s down to all of us to talk about it and act on it.

– I’m just going to say it: Boo Canada.

– This WaPo piece on a Heritage Foundation panel hating Muslims has been going around, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point to it.

– Summer Meltdown

– It almost sounds crazy to write this, but 45 years ago today, the Seattle City Council tried to destroy the Pike Place Market.

No doubt Starbucks’ new tuition reimbursement program is better than a kick in the teeth, and I suppose the company deserves some credit for doing more than many of its competitors. But forgive me for not sharing in the credulous headlines. First of all, the program isn’t nearly as generous as first reported. Second, if limiting low-income students’ options to taking online courses from a single university is the “new model” for higher education that Arizona State University president Michael M. Crow envisions, I seriously doubt it will do much to address our nation’s growing opportunity gap.

It’s hard to suss out the exact details of the program from Starbucks’ publicly available documents (pdf), but it appears that the cost to the company will be far less than the $30,000 per employee benefit some headlines have touted. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Starbucks expects to spend an average of $3,250 per student per year in upfront scholarships (presumably per academic year rather than calendar year, as these are per credit grants), plus reimbursements to juniors and seniors of “however much it needs to cover any other unmet tuition costs.” Tuition reimbursements will only be paid to employees after completing 21-credit blocks—the company says that the “vast majority” of employees will receive less than $5,250 in tuition benefits in any given year.

But at between $480 to $543 per undergraduate credit, ASU’s online classes don’t come cheap. The 120 credits necessary to get a four-year Bachelors degree, comes to about $15,000 a year for a full-time online student—a couple thousand dollars a year more than resident tuition and fees at the University of Washington. So it’s not a bargain. Starbucks and ASU expect that most students will qualify for federal grants and other financial aid—hence the lower than sticker price cost to Starbucks for juniors and seniors—but even upperclassmen expecting full reimbursement will likely have to take out student loans to cover upfront costs.

If you’re a Starbucks employee just a semester or three shy of a college diploma, this program could prove a boon. But for freshmen and sophomores, not so much. Community college credits are cheaper, even accounting for the Starbucks subsidy, plus come with the added benefit of a live classroom and campus experience. Nothing against distance learning as a supplement to a traditional college education, but it hardly seems worth paying a premium for online courses.

I doubt most Starbucks executives would choose an online-only college education for their own children. So why should that be good enough for their employees?

So yeah. Starbucks’ “College Achievement Plan” is better than a kick in the teeth. It’s not nothing. And other highly profitable companies should be ashamed for not making at least as much effort to better the lives their workers. But it does relatively little to address the core problem facing low-income youth today: Low wages and skyrocketing tuition costs.

To put this into perspective, Starbucks’ estimated average cost of $3,250 in tuition subsidies per student per academic year would be the equivalent of paying a full-time student an additional $3.12 an hour on a part-time 20-hour week. But for a full-time barista earning only 3 credits per term (ASU tells students to expect to put in 18 hours a week in work per 3-credit class), Starbucks’ tuition benefit drops to only $0.78 per hour. The benefit for most Starbucks workers who take part in the program will be somewhere in between.

By comparison, Starbucks baristas average less than $9 an hour in pay nationally, a little higher here in Washington State. Thus a $15 minimum wage would do far more to make college affordable than Starbucks’ complicated tuition benefit program, while giving workers the choice of which college or university to attend, and more than just the 40 areas of study that ASU offers online.

The flip-side to this equation is that programs like this wouldn’t be necessary at all if we had not abdicated our responsibility to adequately fund our state college and university systems. “If it’s all about state legislatures appropriating more money, guess again,” says Crow cynically, but that’s awfully self-serving coming from the president of a university that just signed an exclusive deal with Starbucks to provide online degrees to potentially tens of thousands of workers.

Many of today’s lawmakers worked their way through college at a time when one could. Higher pay and lower tuition is the key to making college broadly affordable again, not corporate altruism.

The only thing keeping us from making a public university degree affordable again is the will to tax ourselves to pay for it. The revenue isn’t there because taxes as a percentage of income are at an all time low. We can afford to pay to properly educate our young the way we did in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s if we once again choose to adequately tax the wealth and incomes of billionaires like Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. Skyrocketing tuition is the result of a policy decision, not a natural disaster. If we as a society choose to make higher education affordable again, we can.

But we don’t.

And that is why, far from excited by Starbucks’ announcement, I came away rather depressed. For however altruistic Starbucks’ intentions may be, and however many workers might ultimately take advantage of the program to complete their degrees, this is a model that ultimately takes away options from America’s youth, while easing pressure on the current generation of decision makers to give future generations the same educational opportunities that we enjoyed.

Please join us tonight for an evening of politics over a pint at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally.

We meet tonight and every Tuesday 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.

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 Spokane chapters meet.

With 206 chapters of Living Liberally, including eighteen in Washington state, four in Oregon, and three more in Idaho, chances are excellent there’s a chapter meeting somewhere near you.

– Enough is enough. Tell our legislators to commit to action on gun safety.

– I’m not usually one to heap much praise on car companies, but well done Tesla.

– I am not a fan of the 3 strikes law. At least there’s some possibility of clemency.

– Maybe trying to make sense of the Klan ideology is a fool’s errand, but trying to recruit military people because you think the government is overreaching and about to collapse, seems like one or the other.

– I’m sure the American authorities would be very understanding of a Mexican national coming over the border with a bunch of guns claiming that he got “lost.” But that’s because we’re good and they’re evil.

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray has scheduled a 1:15 press conference today to announce the results of “for-hire industry mediation,” and from what I’ve been hearing from folks on the taxi industry side of table, its pretty much a capitulation to Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar: No caps on the number of so-called “ride-share” vehicles and a relaxation of already relaxed inspection and insurance requirements.

If, like my ex-coworker Dominic, you despise Yellow Cab, and can’t wait for the traditional taxi industry to die, this is a huge victory. But let’s not pretend that’s not what’s going to happen.

This “mediation” was allegedly made necessary by the initiative Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar filed in the wake of the city council’s new ordinance imposing a cap on the number of vehicles per network. Which is ironic, because by addressing administrative issues rather legislative issues, the TNCs’ initiative is likely outside the scope of the local initiative and referendum process. The taxi industry has filed suit, but Murray doesn’t appear willing to wait for the results.

I guess what really pisses me off about this is how incredibly dishonest the process has been. We are essentially moving toward total deregulation of the taxi and for-hire industry without ever seriously debating making that policy decision. But you know, as long as Capitol Hill hipsters don’t have to wait too long for a ride on a Friday night, I suppose it’s worth the disruption to the thousands of Seattleites lacking the credit cards and smartphones necessary to use these services, and the hundreds of Seattle families who are about to lose their livelihoods. So no need to debate this any further, I guess.

UPDATE: Yup, that’s pretty much what happened. Murray led off his press conference bragging about an agreement that allows “all players to compete fairly,” and yet it uncaps the “ride share” companies while leaving the taxi industry capped (albeit with an additional 200 over the next four years).  Hard to see that as a level playing field.

Murray did bring the flat-rate/for-hires onboard by giving them hailing rights, but the traditional taxis have been totally screwed. From the time they first started appealing to the city a year ago to enforce the law and prevent others from stealing their fares to today’s press conference, they have seen their livelihood snatched away from them. Perhaps the new technology makes that inevitable. But it’s a farce to present this as some sort of compromise that works for all sides. The taxi industry has been totally fucked. This idea that the city will make for-hire licenses “property” like medallions is completely worthless if one can’t make a living from the license.

So congratulations to Uber, Lyft, Sidecar and their high priced lobbyists. You won!