HorsesAss.Org

The Washington caucus is coming up in early March [in the comments N in Seattle points out the GOP caucus is March 3 and the Dems are April 15], and it seems to me that liberals and moderates who want to get involved have a few options:

First, caucus for Obama. You’re not going to decide the nomination, but it’s still worthwhile to show your support.

It’s also your only real chance to change the platform. While most of the platform will be whatever Obama wants, there will be a push for a marriage equality plank. It probably won’t be a floor fight or anything like that, but every vote for delegates who support that plank is helpful. In any event, you don’t get to have your say on the final product unless you show up.

The second option is the chaos option. Goldy outlined it here. Vote for Santorum, and hope that it gives him the momentum to eat up Romney resources. The fight will ultimately hurt them.

I’m not convinced that this is a good idea for a few reasons. Primary elections are generally good for the party that has them. They get to test their message, they get to build organizations early. While this year may be different, it doesn’t seem like we need to take that chance with Obama already ahead in the polls. The other reason is I really don’t want Rick Santorum to win Washington. Even if he loses the nomination, every state he wins mainstreams his horrible philosophy. I for one, don’t want to say I helped increase his speaking fees, got him more TV time, or made outright opposition to birth control more mainstream in this country.

So if you’re looking to move the Republican party with your caucus vote, I’d like to recommend a third option: Fred Karger. No, he isn’t going to win. But voting for him sends a much more clear message than voting for Satorum, or even Obama. It says to the GOP enough with demonizing gay people and trying to push women’s rights back to where we’re arguing about birth control.

So I’m probably going to show up for Karger. Who knows? In Seattle, there might be few enough delegates that I can take that message to the next level.

We’ve come a long way, baby! Over the past decade, and particularly over the last couple of years, public opinion polls have increasingly found a majority of people in support of marriage equality. But nothing says, “the bigots will lose,” like this:

Dick Cheney is quietly lobbying at least one Maryland state lawmaker to back marriage equality, the Baltimore Sun reported on Thursday. Since leaving the vice president’s office, Cheney has been increasingly vocal in his support for same-sex marriage, but the extent of his engagement on the issue was not previously well known.

The man without a heartbeat finds his heart. Cheney’s change of heart (no pun intended) is, no doubt, about his daughter Mary Cheney.

In New Jersey, a marriage equality bill passed the New Jersey Assembly yesterday, and was sent to Gov. Chris Christie today. Christie has vowed to veto the bill.

Democrats who identified same-sex marriage as their No. 1 priority for the two-year legislative session that began in January have adopted a more long-term view. […]

…[T]hey plan to bide their time in hopes that support for gay marriage — 52 percent for gay marriage, 42 against it, in New Jersey, according to one recent voter poll — will continue to grow.

“We do have two years,” said Reed Gusciora, a Trenton Democrat who sponsored the bill in the Assembly and who is one of two openly gay state lawmakers. “We changed a lot of views in the last couple of weeks. Give us two years and we’re going to change a heck of a lot more.”

Here in Washington state, opponents of our new marriage equality bill have launched a campaign to collect 120,577 valid signatures to get Referendum on the ballot. If they succeed, the law will be put “on hold” so that voters can approve or reject it.

The new referendum drive is not unlike the 2009 signature drive that resulted in R-71, asking voters to approve or reject the state’s domestic partner registration law. The signature drive was successful, and voters ended up supported the “all but marriage” law by a healthy 53% to 47% margin.

There is one big difference between the 2009 signature drive and the current effort: we now know that petitions are public documents. That is, if you sign a petition to put a referendum on the ballot, you cannot hide the fact. The Supreme Court says so.

Just yesterday, a searchable database of those who signed R-71 went live at whosigned.org. You can search by names, streets, cities, zip codes, etc. One justification for the page is to assist in spotting fraud. Did someone sign a petition in your name? Go find out.

The other reason for putting the name on-line is so that you can learn about the bigots in your neighborhood. Got acquaintances who are closet homophobes? Check out whosigned.org.

Want to know who to NOT invite to your next Christmas party? Check out whosigned.org.

I looked up who signed from Redmond. I didn’t sign it. Few of the people in my immediate neighborhood signed. I couldn’t find any friends or acquaintances who signed it. Unsurprisingly, Redmond’s famous bigot, Ken Hutcherson, did sign—as did his wife Patricia and daughter Avery.

So…folks who sign petitions to put Washington’s marriage equality law on the ballot should know: we will know you signed. You won’t have to make crude fagot jokes for us to know you are a bigot. Your signature on that petition accomplishes the same thing.

We will put your name and address in an open, searchable web page.

We will encourage your friends, neighbors, and acquaintances to learn that you signed.

We WILL express our disappointment in you and our disapproval of your ignorance and bigotry.

And we will (when we can, legally) discriminate against you.

I’m not talking violence…I’m talking about stigmata: loss of reputation, public humiliation, and withdrawal of personal and social support.

You’ve been warned.

Toward the beginning of this ridiculously condescending (even the parts I agree with) piece by The Seattle Times about Obama coming to town, we get this paragraph:

Never mind that Obama’s National Labor Relations Board went after Boeing a few years ago for moving part of its operation to South Carolina, looking stridently anti-business. It all worked out and last fall’s landmark labor agreement was win, win, win for workers, the company and the Northwest.

Of course we should mind it. It was one of the best things to happen because we elected him. The Seattle Times needs to get over this great thing that happened for the region!

Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn and King County Executive Dow Constantine held a joint press conference this afternoon to announce…yet another new sports stadium for our region.

This one would draw both an NBA team (Basketball? Yyyyyyyyawn. More green Jell-o commercials? Wait…that’s right. I LOVE Jeremy Lin! I’m a HUGE fan…Always have been. This is GREAT!) and an NHL team (hey…that is cool!).

So…is this another fuck-the-tax-payers-for-wealthy-team-owners deal? Apparently not, at least if Goldy, normally a curmudgeon on such things, is to be believed:

Honestly, objectively, and not just because I’m a hockey fan itching for an NHL franchise, this really does look like a damn good deal for the region and taxpayers. Assuming it actually happens.

Goldy provides an overview of the deal:

Under the terms of the proposal…a private investment group led by Seattle-born Chris Hansen, would put up $290 million toward building a new sports arena just south of Safeco Field, matched by a joint city/county contribution capped at $200 million. The city/county would own the arena, with its debt service paid through a combination of taxes generated by the facility, and rent paid by both the teams and the facility operator. In years where revenue falls short of the debt obligation, the teams and operator would be required to pay additional rent to cover the difference.

The city/county would issue a 30-year bond to finance its portion of the construction costs, and the teams would sign a 30-year lease with a binding non-relocation clause.

If all the pieces come together, we get an arena, NBA and NHL teams, all with zero new public taxes. Sounds like a Lin-Lin deal.

– This so-called birth control battle is about a lot more than contraception…it is about not having to beg, negotiate, or endure a forced public confession to get access to services and medicine denied based on some employer’s morality glitch..

– They should call it PolitiCowersToConservatives.

– Caring Across Generations in Seattle. (h/t)

– God Hates Checkered Whiptail Lizards

– $105 for permission to use one of my images is the average amount that keeps me clothed, fed, and housed enough to continue producing more images.

– And as long as I’m linking to copyright pieces: Authors Have a Moral Right to Profit From Their Works

Elway has released a new poll today of 405 registered Washington state voters interviewed from Feb 7-9. The poll offers several interesting head-to-head match-ups with Obama:

Here are the highlights:

• Obama is +11% against Romney, 49% to 38%
• Obama is +8% against a generic Republican, 50% to 42%
• Romney loses about 6% of Republican voters compared to a generic Republican candidate.
• When Ron Paul is added to the mix, 17% abandon Romney for Paul.

Republicans are having troubles warming up to the Mittster.

Obama has maintained a solid lead over Romney in Washington state. He led by +8 (49% to 41%) in last November’s Survey USA poll. Before that, the October Washington Poll found Obama leading by +9.5% (50.2% to 40.7%):

Obama will be visiting Washington state on Friday where, among other things, he’ll visit a Boeing manufacturing plant in Everett.

I know I’ve been complimenting the legislature a lot recently. It feels quite strange. But fortunately, the state Democrats are back to being gigantic pissants who’ll fuck over their constituents for no reason.

The senate passed a compromise teacher evaluation bill this afternoon, 46-3. Republicans and moderate Democrats had been pushing a teacher evaluation bill for a couple of sessions now, but liberals had balked, echoing union concerns that it was unfair to teachers, who’ve already seen K-12 funding cut by $2.5 billion during the recession and who have already been working on district-by-district pilot projects to determine evaluation criteria.

…

However, Sen. Ed Murray (D-43, Seattle), with an eye on counting moderate Democratic and Republican votes necessary to pass his budget, resuscitated the bill, triggering negotiations between the reform contingent and the opponents.

Yes, as part of an effort to make deeper cuts to education, Ed Murray has decided to fuck over teachers by imposing an arbitrary evaluation system. This will be more teach to the test instead of quality learning in an effort to punish the teacher’s union.

Rich Wood, spokesman for the teachers’ union, the Washington Education Association, complained that the union was left out of the negotiations and didn’t see the bill until a few hours before the vote. He said: “This new legislation must not derail, short-circuit or otherwise interfere with the evaluation pilot work that is already underway, and educators must be allowed the flexibility to meet the unique needs of students in their local schools.”

You know what, I can’t say it strongly enough: if you don’t give teachers a spot at the table when drafting legislation, you obviously don’t give a shit about education. You obviously want it to fail. That any Democrat would vote for that is a fucking disgrace.

There are ways to have testing that let teachers know what they need to work on, and how they can improve. This is clearly not that.

Just in time for Valentines Day, Gov. Christine Gregoire has signed the marriage equality bill. Help us celebrate on Tuesday. Grab your sweetheart and join us for a celebration of love and equality under the influence at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking liberally.

(Mercifully…there are no Republican debates or primary events to kill the mood….)

Drinking Liberally–Seattle meets every Tuesday at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Our starting time is 8:00 pm, but some of us show up a little earlier for dinner.

---

Presidential candidate Valentines day cards.

Roy Zimmerman with a new version of vote Republican:

---

Can’t make it to Seattle? There are also meetings on Tuesday night of the Tri-Cities, Bellingham, and Vancouver, WA chapters. The Tacoma chapter meets this Thursday. And next Monday there are meetings of the Woodinville the Olympia, the Yakima, and the Shelton chapters.

With 232 chapters of Living Liberally, including twelve in Washington state and six more in Oregon, chances are excellent there’s one near you.

– Who could have predicted that Obama’s birth control compromise wouldn’t placate conservatives?

– A joint press release from Metro, Sound Transit, Community Transit, Pierce Transit and Kitsap Transit on the awful transportation bill.

– Neighborhood greenways

– Conservatives are good at articulating the complete visions of the society they want; we aren’t so great at that.

– Both left Congress under reasonably disgraceful conditions and were soon rewarded with millions of hard-earned dollars by our meritocracy. When you hit the bricks, new whips, money ain’t a thing.

– Happy Anniversary Shaun

Obviously, the big news is that Gregoire signed the marriage equality bill into law. While we’ve known it was going to happen for some time, it’s still quite amazing. Very recently this seemed like an impossibility, and now it’s a reality. Of course there’s a real possibility that it will come before voters in November, but for now, it’s just wonderful.

Also, even though the bill info isn’t updated in the legislative web page [sorry, I linked to the senate version, here’s the correct link, and it works fine. I remain an idiot], I’m getting a press release from Washington NARAL that:

This evening the Washington House stood up for women’s health and passed the Reproductive Parity Act (HB 2330) by a vote of 52-46. This legislation, sponsored by Rep. Eileen Cody (D-34), requires all health insurance policies that cover maternity care to cover abortion care. NARAL Pro-Choice Washington thanks the representatives who voted to protect women’s access to basic reproductive health care coverage.

And it looks like it’s going to pass the state senate.

And I’m not.

So on the one hand, who cares about the inside baseball stuff? But on the other hand, here’s a story about how the Rick Santorum campaign still feels like it’s amateur hour.

On Friday, I heard that Santorum would be in the area, so I went about trying to find a press person. First, to the campaign website. None of the tabs were a press person, and it looked like there were only a few offices, none in Washington. But! There was an 800 number.

So I tried it on Friday night, but it was pretty late. I tried it again Saturday morning, and was on hold for quite a while, before I decided “fuck it, it’s just not that important that I go.” So the end, right? There have been plenty of campaigns and elected officials who don’t get back to me. I also emailed Romney about his campaign appearance, and they also didn’t get back to me. I assume they see Horse’s Ass, and are like “fuck it, it’s just not important that we have him at our event.” That’s really fine. This blog is written by people in our free time and we don’t have time or the staff to follow up on this sort of thing like the professionals.

So, why am I writing this? Well, about 7:00 on Sunday I get a call back from the Santorum campaign (I didn’t leave a voice mail; I was just on hold for a while). I told them I was a blogger here in Seattle, and would very much like to attend Santorum’s rally. They said, I’d have to contact Nathan, their contact in (I think, but I didn’t write it down) Colorado, but that they’d love to have me. So fine, I left him a voice mail yesterday and again this morning. I called several other times and he never picked up. So I wasn’t making a trip to Tacoma if there was no WiFi or no electricity, and thus am heading home.

I know it’s a minor thing, but, don’t tell me I’m going to be able to attend and then not get back to me with any sort of arrangements. And really, nobody could direct me to someone in Washington who might be able to answer questions?

Now, compare that to when I saw Hillary Clinton 4 years ago. A few calls and I’m on the list, no problem. Compare it to Obama who could organize the Key Arena quickly and who had bloggers (although not me, I had to work) attend. Both of those were on almost as short notice as the Santorum campaign.

– Blue-green alliances.

– I’m as big a McGinn supporter as you’ll find and I agree with most of this. But I don’t think either the business community or Occupy Seattle are very happy with his handling of Occupy Seattle.

– And keep in mind; we’re not talking about abortion anymore. We’re talking about birth control.

– Obama’s Spotify playlist is pretty pedestrian.

– United States Bureau of Chronology