HorsesAss.Org

– Who could have predicted?

– You don’t know how much time I tried to think of a war on Cranksgiving joke for here. Like 3 minutes at least. There isn’t one.

– Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell have a petition asking the House to take up ENDA.

– No, Mr. Feaver, Katrina isn’t shorthand for “bungled administration policy.” It’s an actual tragedy in which at least 1,800 people lost their lives. Thousands of others were left stranded without food or water in their flooded neighborhoods, on freeway viaducts, in hospitals and nursing homes, and in the televised hell-hole of the Superdome.

– Regional subtext to the Boeing special session: Left Coast (Cascadia) vs. Deep South Also, I’ve linked to several from the series, but I don’t think I’ve come out and said go read Emmett’s Cascadia Exists pieces, but you totally should if you’re interested in what makes the region unique.

– Sadly, pathetically, too many of us still see the mentally ill as crazy, nuts, losers, cursed by God, and so on. Few of us would joke about the bald head of a woman fighting cancer, but that same woman, mentally ill, wandering the streets and talking to herself – left on her own as many of the mentally ill are – would be mocked and laughed at endlessly. The woman would be the same woman, just suffering from different health ailments. The difference would be us: our knowledge and our attitudes.

– I realize you shouldn’t read too much into a press release, but it looks like good numbers for the Washington exchange.

-There is no nadir.

Last week’s contest was won by Wes. It was Christchurch, NZ.

This week’s is somewhere in the state of California, good luck!

Zephaniah 1:2
I, the Lord, now promise to destroy everything on this earth.

Discuss.

So…the President walks into this bar…

Michael Brooks: The fraud, Chris Christie.

So…’sup in Canada?

• Jon: Rob Ford is like a one man episode of Cops.
• Young Turks: Rob Ford stuns crowd with comment about oral sex

The GOP: Not fresh, not new:

Mental Floss: 24 untended scientific discoveries.

Thom: The real web of economic life.

Audience laughs as Sen. Ted Cruz claims he didn’t want a shutdown (via Crooks and Liars).

Is Bitcoin coming to a campaign near you?

The Tragedy of Affordable Health Care for All:

• Jon: Healthcare.gov fiasco has turned Obama administration into ‘This Is Spinal Tap’
• Totally Biased: Colorado’s weird ObamaCare ad
• Sam Seder: Congresswoman’s demented outrage at equal healthcare coverage for women.
• Chris Hayes: The only way out is through (via Crooks and Liars).
• Rep. Ellison: “I actually believe the President didn’t mislead the public”
• Best late night ObamaCare jokes
• Stephen wants in on Obamacare.
• The numbers behind ObamaCare
• Ann Telnaes: Our health care system is not the best in the world.
• Young Turks: ObamaCare web site model was bullied.
• Sam Seder: Serial plagiarist Rand Paul fears that Obama is after his doughnuts!!!!
• Jon on FAUX News’ Medical ‘A’ Team.
• Ann Telnaes: Sarah Palin talks health care.

Red State Update: Episode 52, The Fat Elephant in the Room.

Chris Hayes: Shrub and Jews for Jesus.

Young Turks: Koch brothers’ corruption on steroids.

Kshama Sawant goes national (via Slog).

Mark Fiore: Right-Winglandia.

Bill Maher with some new rules (via Crooks and Liars).

Minority Report:

• Young Turks: Gun ownership and racism linked in new study
• Elon James White: People who are wrong on the internet:
• Totally Biased: Anything to say to a black guy.
• Young Turks: White Supremacist gets a surprise
• Mitt Romney one year later: “My campaign fell short in attracting minority voters”.
• Stephen defends “totally not racist” Richard Cohen.
• Young Turks: Washington Post writer’s racist rants
• Daily Show: Racist or Not Racist?
• Young Turks: Politician pretends to be black to win election

Sam Seder: Gun rights group terrorizes mothers advocating for gun safety.

White House: West Wing Week.

Ed and Pap: The Rick Scott $1.4 billion fraud.

Young Turks: Trolls Invade AMA of Seattle Pastor Mark Driscoll.

Ann Telnaes: Our perpetual state of war.

Michael Brooks and Cliff Schecter: The Democratic Party’s future is progressive.

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

This is a sad development for Seattle radio:

Although I love my KIRO family, our listeners and my blog readers, I’ve decided to leave this job at the end of this year. In 2014, I’ll begin a new career that doesn’t involve being at work by 2AM. Those jobs do exist, right?

Radio is an industry where people often disappear from the dial. That leaves some listeners cheering the departure. “Finally, somebody there wised up.” Others feel like they’ve lost a friend. “I’ll never listen to that station again.” I hope you’ll cheer on the person who replaces me. I also want you to keep listening to KIRO Radio and keep checking MyNorthwest.com, as I will.

She doesn’t say what’s next, so hopefully she’ll still be around Seattle. Institutional, local knowledge and smart, well delivered news is a pretty rare commodity.

Darryl wrote about it when Kshama Sawant took the lead in the ballots. Now that lead is looking pretty insurmountable, it will be interesting to see how she governs. As 1/9th of one branch of one city’s government, this is hardly a socialist takeover.

Hopefully, she can be an effective voice for something other than market based solutions. Hopefully, she can figure out ways to work with the majority of the council to get things done and won’t be isolated. Most of those colleagues spent the last 4 years trying to isolate Mike McGinn for being too out there, so um, that doesn’t bode well. Still, she’s charming and some of her policies overlap the rest of the council, so maybe she can accomplish some things.

It’s so rare that someone in government is to my left, it’ll be interesting to see what it actually looks like.

Boeing’s threat to take their ball and go somewhere else, while hardly surprising, is incredibly short sighted.

On Thursday, Boeing made good on its threats and began looking elsewhere to develop its popular new 777X airplane. A spokesman for Utah Gov. Gary Herbert said Boeing officials called him to begin talks that could bring the work — and thousands of jobs — to that state.

Boeing Co. spokesman Doug Alder declined to specify where the company is now looking, saying there is no short list and that there are many places both within Boeing’s current operations and outside that are being explored.

“Everything is back on the table,” he said.

I’m sorry Boeing doesn’t know this, but the best place to build planes anywhere in the world is the Puget Sound. The fact that Boeing has build that up for over a century means something. It means that the people who are going to make the best quality airplanes are living here. It means they have experience and know how, and the people with a passion for it have moved here. It means that they will help get the job done.

By threatening to go other places, they’re saying they’re willing to put out an inferior product. They’re signaling that when your safety and security is on the line, they’re at least considering going on the cheap. They’re saying that they know they can do better, but fuck it. That doesn’t sound like a long term strategy. You get what you pay for, and they’re clearly establishing that they don’t want to pay for quality when you’re in a tube in the air.

Also, there’s the fact that so much of their business model is to get free money from taxpayers. And I think it’s fair to say that taxpayers are more willing to pay for good jobs than the ones Boeing thinks it should give its employees. Between the largest bit of corporate welfare in US history that the Washington State Legislature just offered them and all the military contracting, Boeing lives off government largess. And it’s tough to imagine Patty Murray going to the mattresses on the tanker deal or the legislature caving so quickly to all of their demands if the jobs were not good ones.

– The machinists have more spine in standing up to Boeing’s bullshit than our state legislators.

– The state makes Metro going it alone seem more and more attractive.

– And speaking of our legislature. I realize they just opened up some massive tax loopholes, but Majority Rules has a petition asking our legislature to cut some of them.

– In theory these changes should help safety-net hospitals become less reliant on DSH payments. In practice, however, twenty-four states run by troglodytes have rejected Medicaid expansion, and will thus voluntarily decimate their safety-net hospitals.

– Darrell Isa’s partial transcripts are total bullshit.

– I liked both of Rachel Held Evans’ books, but I didn’t realize they were like the Berenstain Bears.

A few election cycles ago, I wrote that the stereotype about Seattle always passing a tax increase was just that. I mean we’re probably more willing to tax ourselves than the average Washingtonian. And we’re able to pass library and school levies pretty easily. But we are concerned both with how progressive/regressive the taxes we pass are and what they pay for. Since it looks like Seattle has rejected public financing with a slight tax increase (albeit in a tight race) we can have a more proper discussion of what taxes Seattle will support and what taxes we won’t?

Since my post a couple years ago, we’ve rejected that transit measure and now the clean elections measure. We’ve also passed taxes for libraries and education in the last few years, and helped pass the Medic 1 and other King County measures.

Of course the iconic tax measure that Seattle rejected in the last decade or so is still probably Early Learning and Care Campaign, AKA the Latte Tax. That would have paid for education in the city. Now, we happily supported education in the city in other measures. Maybe it’s that it was made fun of pretty much everywhere, maybe there doesn’t seem to be much connection between education and espresso drinks, maybe it was somewhat regressive.

And the regressive nature of the transit package was even more evident. A flat fee as opposed to a more progressive tax on the value of the car was one of the main reasons people opposed the measure, at least one of the main arguments against it. Seattle doesn’t really oppose taxes, but we understand that when the poor end up paying a disproportionate share, they tend to be tougher to enact (I think that’s different from the state as a whole).

As more measures come forth, and Seattle and King County are asked to vote on tax measures, I hope we figure out how to make them as progressive as possible, and how to make sure they go to good things.

So, obviously, this idea is impracticable. And nonsense. Jamie Pedersen is almost certainly going to replace Ed Murray, as he should so long as we have a system where we replace people without elections. And the idea of a Republican representing one of the most heavily Democratic districts in the state clearly does not live up to our democratic ideal. But it would accomplish two things.

First, and most importantly, it would give the GOP a clear majority in the Senate. Now, I know that as a lefty blogger, that’s the sort of thing I’m generally opposed to, but the GOP are going to control the state Senate anyway, and this way they would probably not give the Majority Leader post to Rodney Tom. I mean, why would they elevate this whiny asshole who has already betrayed them once if they didn’t have to?

We all know they’re planning it if they manage to take another seat in the Senate in the next election, so might as well make it happen now. Give a fuck you to Rodney Tom, and oh by the way, have some clarity on what’s going on in the Senate, and how to negotiate. We wouldn’t get any positive social issues through, but we haven’t under Tom’s leadership anyway. It would basically be the same as it is now, but with a real Republican instead of a fake Democrat at the top.

So yes, it would mostly be a fuck you to Rodney Tom and Tim Sheldon. But it would also mean that the Senate seat isn’t just given to someone. It would mean that we could have a real election for the seat. In our democracy, primaries for open seats are important times to have a debate about the future of the legislature, and I never like losing that to it just being picked.

The seat would revert back to Democratic control after the next election given how Democratic the seat is, so it would be the equivalent to having a placeholder.

Wow. This evening’s King County ballet drop has just made Seattle City Council Position 2 race much more interesting!

Socialist Kshama Sawant has just taken the lead over the formerly unbeatable Richard Conlin. The current tally is 79,751 votes (49.91%) for Sawant to 79,710 votes (49.88%) for Conlin. That’s a 14 41 vote edge for Sawant.

We still have some way to go (14 more days) until the election results must be certified by King County. If I am reading the spreadsheet correctly, 26,878 (or about 14.4%) of the ballots remain to be counted in this race. The trend has favored Sawant in the later ballots.

“First they came with a statue, and I said nothing….“

A week after the election, we still have a few nail-biters in Seatac, Seattle and Virginia. So please join us tonight for an evening of electoral prognostication over a pint at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally.

We meet tonight and every Tuesday evening at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Our normal starting time is 8:00pm.

Initiatives….

Can’t make it to Seattle tonight? Check out one of the other DL meetings over the next week.

Tonight there are meetings of the Tri-Cities and Vancouver, WA chapters. On Wednesday, the Bellingham chapter meets. On Thursday the Bremerton chapter meets. And next Monday, the Aberdeen, Yakima and Olympia chapters meet.

With 211 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 near you.

– The largest state subsidy in US history goes to Boeing. Because all of our other priorities are so well met.

– And speaking of priorities, Seattle is making cuts to expanding the LEAD program? Did the City Council actually believe the rhetoric about downtown crime during the election, and somehow think that it was that program’s fault? The economy is expanding, time to cut programs?

– I supported Hillary Clinton last time and will probably again if she runs for President again. And I’m the biggest supporter of primaries I know. But can we all just pick a narrative and run with it for a while?

– Anti-change advocates don’t assess facts. They just claim, absurdly, that America currently has “the finest healthcare system in the world” and then cite horror stories about sick people dying in streets because they have to wait so long to get the (terrible) healthcare services available to them under “socialist” healthcare. (h/t)

– The word “unlucky” presumes that virtually all adult white men can be found, at some point, in full-on Michael Richards-mode and those of us who would shame them for it are the real culprits.

– Legal Horseplay

Almost a week has passed since the general election. One of the more interesting set of races was in Virginia, in which the Governor and Lieutenant Governor positions were won by Democrats, and the Attorney General race was narrowly in favor of the Republican Mark Obenshain over Democrat Mark Herring. Since last Tuesday, precincts across the state have been correcting their counts. As of this morning, Obenshain was up by a mere 17 votes out of some 2.2 million votes tallied.

Over the past few days, discrepancies, including a missing tally from an entire machine, have come to light in the Democratic stronghold of Richmond. A couple of hours ago, a hearing was held by the Richmond electoral board to clarify those discrepant or suspicious results in eight precincts. The rather dramatic review of those eight precincts netted Herring a total of 132 votes, giving the Democrat a lead of 115 votes.

The Republicans immediately demanded a review of ten more precincts. The request was granted, and those are being examined as I write this post. But, the first five precincts examined so far have resulted in exactly zero changes—they keep their election day tallies. I note that the Richmond electoral board is composed of two Republicans and one Democrat, so it will be hard for Republicans to concoct rational conspiracy theories around the hearings (as if “rational” has ever been a criterion!).

Of course we are still a long way from having this resolved. The loser will almost certainly request a recount, although N in Seattle tells me that the Virginia recounts rules are far more restrictive than what we are used to here in Washington. And then there will be the inevitable lawsuit a la the first Gregoire–Rossi race in Washington or the Franken–Coleman race in Minnesota.

The other likely set of changes to the vote count will come from about 500 outstanding provisional ballots. Most outstanding provisionals will come from blue-leaning areas—the great majority from Fairfax County, and a handful from Roanoke city. These will be adjudicated through tomorrow afternoon, when the final tallies must be certified. It is always dicey projecting provisional ballots, but we should expect Herring to pick up at least a thin majority of the provisional votes that are accepted. (BTW: there was a flap over the weekend about “rule changes” in who could represent provisional voters. The flap turns out to be pretty much bogus.)

So it looks damn likely that Democrats will have swept the three statewide races in Virginia. Given that the current Virginia Attorney General and failed gubernatorial candidate, Ken Cuccinelli, was openly boasting about being the first AG to sue the federal government over ObamaCare, his gubernatorial loss combined with the loss of the Republican in the AG slot would be a stunning symbolic victory!
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– Happy Veterans Day.

– Reading Patty Murray’s Washington Post editorial on the need to close loopholes in the Federal tax code is yet another reminder of how intransigent the GOP really are.

– Here’s hoping Larry Phillips and Dow Constantine live up to their threats of going it alone.

– At 95, Graham is frail and in ill health. His image and his legacy have been usurped as political tools used by his son Franklin Graham, who seems desperate to be a political player and kingmaker. Not content with living off the interest of his father’s legacy, Franklin has been burning through the capital.

– You know how gun nuts are always telling us that their having all the guns is protecting all the freedoms? I’m pretty sure they meant this sort of thing.

– Dudes Are Such Whiny Baby Liars About Girls With Short Hair