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This evening President Obama will deliver his State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress. So please join us at the Montlake Ale House for a SOTU-watching party at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally .

For this week only, we will meet at 5:30 pm (PDT). Obama’s address is scheduled to begin at 6:00 pm. Liveblogging will ensue.

For many people, this is also an election day, so deal with your ballot first. Make sure it will be postmarked today, or else find a drop box.

We meet every Tuesday at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Our regular starting time is 8:00, but we will move that up this week for the SOTU address.

The Ale House will have TV coverage of the address, and reasonable audio levels. But bring your own radio and headphones (or ear buds) if you want to concentrate on the SOTU—there will be the normal high background noise of an active pub. Also, there is free WiFi available for streaming the audio. Ask your server for the WiFi password.

Can’t make it to Seattle tonight? Check out one of the other DL meetings over the next week. Tonight the Tri-Cities and Vancouver, WA chapters meet. On Wednesday, the Bellingham chapter meets. On Thursday Drinking Liberally Bremerton meets. Finally, next Monday, the Aberdeen, Yakima and Olympia chapters meet.

With over 200 chapters of Living Liberally, including fourteen in Washington state, four in Oregon, and two more in Idaho, chances are excellent there’s a chapter that meets near you.

– Everybody with a special election ballot, get it postmarked or dropped off by today.

– Cheney is a jobless former vice president who’s been wrong about everything, and who has criticized Obama since before he became president. That he’s still hailed as a newsmaker tells us only bad things about the news industry.

– Is Tim Sheldon’s wife really upset that the Democrats aren’t going to fundraise for him anymore? I don’t know what’s awesomer that she wants to defend her being a Democrat in the same paragraph as she quotes Sarah Palin, or the obnoxious sexism.

– We have a new King County Council member.

– More Biblical families.

– I feel like it says something about our conversation at the moment that lower costs of health care aren’t in and of themselves as important a story (and headline writer in particular) as the deficit.

– Yum

Dominic Holden writes about two King County Sheriff’s Deputies going through some withdrawal:

A man is being charged with a felony for selling $5 worth of marijuana to undercover officers, King County Superior Court records show, even though he never offered to sell any pot in the first place. Only after being lured with cash did the defendant agree to sell a joint.

According to records filed in January by the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s office, the incident began when two King County Sheriff’s deputies—Officer Escobar and Officer Schwab—boarded a Metro line last July in Tukwila for “a covert bus ride.” A 51-year-old black man who will remain nameless had also boarded the bus and struck up a “casual conversation” with one of the officers. That officer spontaneously brought up the subject of pot: “Detective Schwab told [the man] he was looking for marijuana.” According the the report, the man asked how much marijuana the undercover officer wanted (it must be noted that this part of the report seems odd, because, as you will see, the man shows no interest in selling marijuana nor has marijuana packaged for sale). After Detective Schwab said he wanted to buy $20 worth of pot, the man “told Detective Schwab that he only had a joint.” But the man did not offer to sell the joint, rather, he “offered to share it with Detective Schwab at the next bus stop,” the report continues. “Detective Schwab declined to smoke with him but offered to purchase the marijuana cigarette from him to smoke later.”

Finally, the man “agreed” to sell his joint for $5, the report explains, and officers arrested him. He reportedly told them that he “does not sell drugs and was only going to use the money to get to Tacoma.”

I-502 was supposed to force police officers to go cold turkey on the war on pot, but apparently some officers still can’t kick the habit.

UPDATE: In the comments, “Moderate Man” points out that the arrest was pre-502 (last July)

It’s strangely sectional, but I love it when the national media notice Washington people in Congress (for good things; it’s the worst when it’s for something awful). So I’m glad to see The Raw Story notice how ably Maria Cantwell handled the stupid arguments against the tribal portions of Violence Against Women Act (h/t).

Cantwell noted that Native American women experience domestic violence and sexual assault at a rate far above the national average.

“However, less than 50 percent of the domestic violence cases in Indian country are prosecuted because of a gap in our legal system,” she explained on the Senate floor. “This isn’t about politics. This isn’t about a debate on what is a good way to win votes somewhere in America. This is about the life or death of women who need a better system to help prosecute those who are committing serious crimes against them.”

[…]

Cantwell denied the tribal provisions would violate the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens. She noted the U.S. Department of Justice would partner with tribal courts and non-tribal Americans would have the ability to appeal their case to a federal court. The legislation also specifically prohibits tribal courts from violating Americans’ rights.

– Less steaming, less flying, less training.

– Which isn’t to say that America hasn’t fallen into a culture of violence. Of course it has. But that culture has nothing to do with fantasy on the small screen or on the big screen. It has to do with reality.

– Apparently Fox News is less than honest sometimes.

– It’s nice to see former Boy Scouts returning their badges to protest the organization’s homophobia.

– I think the Pope saying he’ll resign is an early April Fool’s Day prank.

– Professor Droney

– Don’t curb our 2nd Amendment rights

Last week’s contest was won by Dan Robinson. It was LP Field in Nashville.

This week’s is a view from Google Maps. This one’s pretty tough, so you can see a list of recently updated areas of coverage here. Good luck!

1 Corinthians 7:9
It is better to marry than to burn.

Discuss.

Stephen’s sister runs for congress.

Roy Zimmerman: I Want to Marry Like they Had in the Bible:

White House: West Wing Week.

Ann Telnaes: America’s dirty laundry.

Thom: Homophobic Scouts of America.

Stephen: America’s next President.

Greenman: Joe Romm on Climate, Obama, Keystone, and Consequences:

Skeeters:

• Mark Fiore: Skeet Truth.
• GIFs of Obama shooting things.
• Red State Update: Obama’s skeet shooting photo

Pap: Is the Tea Party over?

Ed: GOP re-branding fail…Talk of trans-vaginal probes.

Young Turks: Dick Morris lies on CNN about lies on FAUX News.

The story of Kid President.

Drones:

• Sam Seder: Bush’s torture morphs into Obama’s drones.
• Jon on leaked drone memo.
• Pap with Jim Hightower: Drones coming to a town near you.
• Thom: Drones, Obama, and the Constiution.
• Sam Seder and Chris Hayes: Obama’s drone strike policy.
• Jon: Obama’s drones ruin his show.
• Seattle Mayor McGinn shoots down Drone program
• Thom: Sky stalkers.

Sam Seder: The real reason the Post Office is canceling Saturday deliveries.

Liberal Viewer: Karl Rove and does contraception contradict Capitalism?:

Maddow: Republicans try to hide their racist, bigoted, extremist base with ‘rebranding’ talk

Young Turks: O’Reilly lies about lying.

Lawyers, Guns, and Money:

• Ann Telnaes: Semi-automatic.
• Zina Saunders: Shootout at the Constitution Corral
• Gun owners show up in Olympia.
• Thom: Did Ronald Reagan kill 20 children in Newtown?

Sam Seder: Marco Rubio on climate change…whatever.

Thom with some Good, Bad, and Very, Very Ugly.

The Ashley Judd Threat:

• Lawrence O’Donnell: Karl Rove is scared shitless of Ashley Judd
• Young Turks: The Republican attack against Ashley Judd.
• Ed: Ashley Judd responds.

Jon laments America’s biggest losses.

Morris is out at FAUX News.

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

Honestly, I know that this is even a controversy — and I hesitate to even use that word — because Dori Monson can’t fill his entire air time with actual news and commentary.

The basic back story is that since 1983, the state has had a law on the books that says we’ll use gender neutral words and phrases in our laws. So instead of fireman, laws drafted since 1983 say firefighter. Instead of somewhere being manned, it’s staffed, etc. You know: acknowledge that women are a part of the government. It doesn’t fix the social problems around gender in the state, but it acknowledges that women and men can do the same jobs.

This year, Senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles introduced a bill to fix the law from before 1983 so it matches up with what has become law since. It wasn’t a high priority; people had been working on it since 2008, and if they’d wanted to rush it through, it would have been done in 2008. But they’re finally confident that it’s good to go, so it passed the Senate unanimously. Easy. Done. You can find a few examples that seem to go a bit overboard if you’re looking for them but basically this is a way to correct past mistakes in the way we talk about women in government.

So Dori, seeing that this has already happened, decides to get angry at all the time being wasted. Only problem is that there wasn’t really any time wasted. Legislators pass bills to fix the code all the time, like it’s part of their job. And even if you’re worried about the time wasted, the fact that he’s ranting and railing about it and bringing Senator Kohl-Welles onto his show is taking up more time than if he hadn’t decided this was in issue. The few times she brought it back to serious issues like the budget or child protection, he wanted to keep asking her about the non-issue he decided was an issue.

Pathetic.

This election season, Seattle voters will elect a mayor. It’s a crowded field for the primary, and while I can’t speak to every candidate on all of the issues, in general they’re all good liberals. So I’d like to make a plea for even when you disagree with people over who to chose for mayor, don’t think it’s because the person picking a candidate is a bad person.

The specifics matter, of course. And the abilities of the candidates to do what they run on matters. We should debate them. And we should pick sides. And we should be partisan and passionate about that.

But the people supporting a different candidate care about Seattle. And they have similar values to most of the rest of the city. So by all means highlight the differences in candidates with whatever level of vitriol against the candidates you want. If you want to question if Ed Murray’s experience in the legislature translates to the mayor’s office, go for it. If you think whatever candidate doesn’t have a broad base, mention it here, by all means. If there’s some issue that’s a deal breaker, let the deal be broken in whatever way you like. If you think Mike McGinn is a dumbass, great! Let the world know your opposition to any candidate however you want.

But I’m going to try to assume most people who support a candidate are doing it in good faith. That’s different, of course, from pointing out that a person’s supporters might be problematic. The bottom line is we’re all going to have live in the city no matter what 2 people get through the primary and no matter who is mayor net year.

Publicola is reporting on the Senate Transportation Committee complaining about the Highway 99 Tunnel. As someone who will be complaining about the 99 Tunnel for years to come, and who is pro oversight generally, that’s fine. But Curtis King (R-Yakima) is a jerk.

That pissed King off even more: “I’ll make one more comment, and then I’ll shut up. So, the city of Seattle is concerned about diversion because they’re the ones that are going to be affected. [But] we should be concentrating on the cost of our portion of this project [the state promised $2.6 billion for the tunnel as a whole]. And if they want the tolls so low that it only generates $165 million, then they can help us replace the additional monies that we’re losing because we don’t have the toll revenues that we had origianlly [sic] projected.”

No. First off ignore that the chair of the Transportation Committee seems to not understand the problem with tolling right after it was explained to him, or we’re never going to get anywhere with this post. Focus instead on the fact that it’s a state highway. We in King County don’t ask Senator King (R-Jerk)’s constituents for our money back for social services or education that we give his constituents. We don’t ask for the tally of all these things as we make policy because it would make us look like jackasses.

No. King County gets 62 cents back from the state for every dollar spent. Yakima County gets $2.24.* The state could literally take all the money it spends in King County, match it 2 to 1 and just make a massive bonfire of 1 dollar bills and we would be considerably less profligate spenders than Curtis King (R-Jackass)’s constituents.** I mean what kind of fucker looks at that math and demands the 62 cents people pay more?

No. Senator King (R-Fucker)’s constituents are a disproportionate share of the state’s people in need of social services. And King County happily, happily, happily pays for the social services that the state provides. We want to do it, because we care about our state. We believe that they’re our neighbors and but for the grace of God go us, etc.

Further, Seattle and most King County school districts are able to pay for our levies. Hell, Seattle made up a work around when we hit the artificial limit imposed by the state. But even though Yakima can’t be relied on to pass its levies, we’ll still willingly spend money on educating Yakima children. We recognize that the state’s interests are tied up together. East and West we should all be educated.

Sometimes Seattle needs money from the state. When that happens, state legislators shouldn’t try to complain about the way the money flows. It makes them look like goat fuckers.

All that said, I recognize that there are plenty of people of good will in Senator King (R-Goat Fucker)’s district and in every district throughout the state. People who realize that we’re all in it together in the state. I just wish he didn’t feel the need to pander to his constituents by bashing Seattle.

[Read more…]

– When does the US have the right to kill its citizens without a trial? Hardly ever, probably never, I’d say. And if we are in the killing US citizens abroad business as a country, we’d better be damn transparent about when and why. Still, the DOJ whitepaper leaked earlier this week (pdf) gets us closer to knowing the government’s position on the matter.

– Eulogy for Kathryn Ann Blair, 1952–2013

– “Seattle will be the first city to consider drone legislation to protect the public’s civil liberties,” Harrell’s staff wrote in a press release announcing the legislation.

– Seems like vagrancy laws in the past were overly broad.

Due to my shameful 2-11 record in fantasy football this season, I welcomed the league to my house on Sunday for the game (it’s been a tradition for the last place finisher to host the Super Bowl every year). Our league started 15 years ago with a bunch of recently-transplanted Boeing engineers straight out of college. Most of us have left the company or been laid off, but a few of the original crew are still at the company. In talking to one of them this weekend, it’s clear that the battery problems with the 787 are a serious headache for Boeing, but many of the problems with the 787 were things that a lot of folks (even going back to when I was there and it was still the 7E7) were fully anticipating. And it sounds like some are starting to voice that a little more.

I left the company in 2000, but even prior to that, the vision of a global outsourcing model to build the next big Boeing plane had already been articulated. Some of the older folks in my group (I was a flight control test engineer) were nervous. Others were beyond nervous and predicting doom. One of them fired off a long, angry email to the all-company email list. He was reprimanded, but not fired. I’d love to read that email today, as I’d expect it would be like reading the scrolls of Nostradamus.

Outsourcing has occurred in a lot of different work environments. And in some of them, it’s arguably achieved its objectives – lower production costs with equal or near-equal production. But within the tech world, nearly all the attempts at outsourcing I’ve seen have been disasters. I’m not talking about just tech support or research or some specialized one-off skill, I’m talking about efforts to design, build, and test a large-scale development project with different project groups located around the globe. The logistical difficulties and communication issues involved quickly overwhelm your ability to move at the pace you need to move at.

Let me give a simple example more related to the world I currently inhabit, the world of software services and big data. This’ll be familiar to more people than the innards of a jumbo jet, but I promise I’ll get back to Boeing afterwards.

[Read more…]

Well now a thing that never should have happened probably won’t keep costing us all money too far into the future.

Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn says the garage has been a drain on the general fund, with a projected loss of more than $4 million in 2012 and 2013. The city financed the construction of the garage with $73 million in bonds in 1998, to help jump start the shopping complex in downtown. City provided statistics show the gamble paid for several years, until the economy turned south and increased competition from shopping complexes which offer free parking. Debt payments are now bigger than revenue, despite a cut in parking rates.

Thank goodness. I don’t have an ethical problem with the city owning a garage per se. I mean providing parking is a reasonable thing for the city to do. But a bad investment is a bad investment, and that’s what the garage has always been.

Also, I like how revenue is less despite the fact that they cut rates is shocking. What a surprise, King 5.

The suggestion that Gov. Gregoire could be Obama’s next Secretary of the Interior has turned out to be wrong. Instead, another woman will get the job:

Sally Jewell, a retail executive and outdoor enthusiast, is President Barack Obama’s pick to oversee the national parks and vast energy reserves on public lands as Interior secretary, an administration official said on Wednesday. […]

Her private sector experience, most recently as chief executive of outdoor retailer REI, drew praise from conservationists and some industry groups…

And the Republican reaction to the nomination?

…Jewell’s nomination drew skepticism from some Republicans in Congress.

“I look forward to hearing about the qualifications Ms. Jewell has that make her a suitable candidate to run such an important agency, and how she plans to restore balance to the Interior Department,” said U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, the top Republican on the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

Jewell has been a leader in land conservation in the Pacific Northwest, but she worked in the energy and finance sectors early in her career.

(By, “restor[ing] balance.” Murkowski means “increased drilling while opposing laws to cap greenhouse gases that are blamed for global warming.”)

Gregoire is not out of the running for two other cabinet positions, as was recently pointed out:

Gregoire, who has made energy issues a cornerstone of her gubernatorial tenure, is likely headed for one of three Cabinet-level jobs that are vacant now or will soon become vacant: Energy secretary, Interior secretary, or head of the Environmental Protection Agency. As a former head of Washington state’s Department of Ecology, Gregoire is steeped in experience in energy and environmental issues. Her enthusiastic support for renewable energy has won plaudits from environmentalists, but she’s also known for her ability to speak effectively about the realities of the fossil-fuel economy.

Either remaining position, EPA or energy secretary, seems like a good fit to Gregorie’s experience, strengths, and interests.

My money’s on energy secretary. Gregoire has a long history of doing battle with the Department of Energy over the Hanford clean-up. More recently, the battles have turned into happy agreement, adoring joint statements, and public praise.

That’s the tell.