HorsesAss.Org

Over the past couple weeks I’ve been posting a bit about budget priorities, pointing out that the decisions we make in Olympia in regard to both taxing and spending, reflect our priorities as a state.

For example, if lawmakers choose to cut yet another couple billion dollars from K-12 education while refusing to even consider the repeal of nonproductive, special interest tax exemptions, well, that reflects our priorities. If the state continues to slash funding and raise tuition at our community colleges and four-year universities at the same time businesses claim they can’t find enough qualified workers in the midst of near record-high unemployment, well, that reflects our priorities too.

And of course, the fact that our state and local governments have steadily shrunk themselves over the past couple decades both as a percentage of the total economy and in the number of FTEs compared to population, that sure as hell reflects our priorities, as does the fact that nationwide, Washington now ranks 45th in spending on K-12 education, but 14th in spending on corrections.

But unfortunately, when I write about stuff like this, I’m mostly ignored. Oh, call out the Seattle Times editorial board for licking Rob McKenna’s balls, and that might earn me a link from some self-anointed arbiter of journalistic integrity, but spend a little time and effort exploring the conventional “government must learn to live within its means” narrative, and refuting it with actual, you know, numbers, well that just elicits a collective yawn from our political press corps. I guess, because, I’m just some foul-mouthed local blogger (as opposed to a real journalist like Joni Balter), so you can just ignore my math, even when it’s lifted directly from the OFM. And… I sometimes use the word “fuck.”

Well, okay then… if you won’t pay attention to little ol’ me, perhaps you’ll listen to State Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown, a trained economist, who on the Senate Dems blog writes about how we pride ourselves on being one of the top states in the nation in terms of quality of life, but how we’re increasingly at the bottom of the pack in terms of our willingness to pay for it:

In Washington, we want to be among the top quarter of states in public services, but we’re in the lower-half in amount paid in state and local taxes. In fact, we’re lagging far behind the same mid-West states like North Dakota and Minnesota that Lake Wobegon is meant to poke fun at.

We may laugh at the gap between what people from Lake Wobegon think of themselves and reality, but if Washington levied the same amount of state and local taxes per $1000 of personal income that North Dakota levies – North Dakota –  we’d have 29 percent more revenue than we have today. That’s more than $9 billion, which would more than cover our current revenue shortfall, and then some…

In Washington, we have a bigger Lake Wobegon gap than Lake Wobegon does. We’re in the third year of significant recessionary impacts on our state budget. And for the third year in a row, we hear loud talk about making Washington live within its means by cutting state spending to match diminished revenues.

The truth is, state spending compared to personal income has been declining for a decade. And all this talk about “living within our means” masks another important truth: We can’t keep cutting spending without downgrading the public services mentioned above. And if we keep downgrading these same services, we can’t expect to maintain our quality of life, much less improve it.

Both Sen. Brown and I are making the same basic assertion, and we’re making it based not on ideology, but on math. We cannot continue to shrink government, the services it provides and the human and infrastructure investments it makes, while continuing to maintain the quality of life Washingtonians have come to expect.

Republicans and their ball-lickers on the editorial boards would have you believe that we have no choice but to make do with tax revenues that continue to fall even as the economy recovers, but the reality is, thanks in part to the public investment of prior generations, we are a wealthy state that can afford to do more… particularly the wealthiest amongst us. Whether we choose to, well, that reflects our priorities.

I’m watching the Seahawk’s game, and I’m wondering… why the hell would anybody patronize one of those bars in the Miller Lite commercials with those bitchy, emasculating, female bartenders?

As for the game itself, I’d much prefer my Eagles play either one of these teams than the Green Bay Packers.

UPDATE:
Seahawks win! And get to host the Saints next week. It would be fun to see the the Seahawks face the Eagles, but that would require the former getting past the Saints and the Falcons, and the latter getting past the Packers and the Bears. Not a likely scenario.

Last week’s contest was won by John McKay. The correct location was the building in Panama City, Florida where a gunman fired at members of the local school board.

Here’s the week’s, just a random location. Good luck!

Deuteronomy 23:12-14
Set up a place outside the camp to be used as a toilet area. And make sure that you have a small shovel in your equipment. When you go out to the toilet area, use the shovel to dig a hole. Then, after you relieve yourself, bury the waste in the hole. You must keep your camp clean of filthy and disgusting things. The LORD is always present in your camp, ready to rescue you and give you victory over your enemies. But if he sees something disgusting in your camp, he may turn around and leave.

Discuss.

This year I resolve to write a shit-ton of posts, have a better election, and, alas, help my daughter grow another year closer toward adulthood.

I wrote a shit-ton of posts, the election didn’t go so well, and my daughter, alas, grew yet another year closer toward adulthood. Other than that, 2010 was mostly a blur.

According to a blog post on the Business Examiner website (which bills itself as “The South Sound Business Information Resource”), Pierce County businesses are having a helluva time finding qualified employees:

About 70 percent of businesses responding to a Workforce Central survey said they find it necessary to seek talent outside the county to fill job openings. And 47 percent of respondents said they find it necessary to look outside the county for qualified workers most or all of the time.

WorkForce Central surveyed 130 Pierce County employers from across industries in November and identified the following concerns:

• 52.5 percent have difficulty finding a sufficient supply of local talent.
• 45.1 percent say that current employees do not have up-to-date skills and knowledge needed.
• 28.7 percent are concerned about a talent/brain drain because of an increase in retirements of experienced employees.

Um… really? At the time this survey was taken, Pierce County’s unemployment was hovering around the 8.6 percent rate, about the same level as the state as a whole. And employers still couldn’t find enough qualified local workers to fill the available jobs?

Hard to believe, but if it’s true, you gotta wonder about the wisdom of slashing funding and raising tuition at Washington’s community colleges and four year universities at the same time jobs remain unfilled in the midst of 8.6 percent unemployment. I mean, forget about taxes, there’s no way businesses can afford to stay in Washington state if we don’t have a qualified workforce, right?

Of course the Seattle Times editorial board enthusiastically supports Attorney General Rob McKenna’s call for liability reform. He’s Rob Fucking McKenna, the WA GOP’s Kwisatz Haderach. Hell, if McKenna had come out in favor of strangling kittens, the Times would’ve surely urged broad bipartisan support:

“Kitten lovers will not like these ideas,” the Times editors might write. “Democratic lawmakers are sure to be lobbied against them. McKenna is a two-term Republican appealing to a Democratic-controlled state Legislature for reform.”

Oh please.

Consider this: In 2009, the state paid out more than $50 million in legal judgments and settlements. According to McKenna, that is between four times and 12 times as much as comparably sized states, including Massachusetts, Arizona, Tennessee and Indiana. The tally for this biennium may approach $125 million.

Now, I’m not totally dismissing out of hand the notion of some sort of liability reform, and I’m willing to hear the arguments pro and con, but consider this: perhaps it’s not just our liability statutes that account for the rising cost of legal judgments against the state, and the dramatically lower costs elsewhere. Perhaps, just maybe, Massachusetts, Arizona, Tennessee and Indiana pay out less in legal settlements because they have better lawyers?

I mean, it’s not the law that changed back when McKenna first won election in 2004, just the management of his office. So shouldn’t he accept at least a teensy bit of responsibility for losing all those expensive cases, rather than, as the Times attempts to do, pinning all blame on the trial lawyers who keep kicking the AG’s ass (not to mention Democratic legislators)? Isn’t it reasonable to at least consider the possibility that the rise in the cost of judgments against the state has something to do with a decline in the quality of our legal representation?

Republicans are fond of saying that government should be run more like a business. Well, if I were the CEO of a large corporation, and my legal costs suddenly spiked concurrent to the tenure of my Chief Legal Counsel, I’d probably look into hiring myself a new Chief Legal Counsel… you know, one who’s not such a sucky lawyer.

– Publicola provided an update on the ongoing friction between the ACLU of Washington and Sensible Washington regarding legalization initiatives. Last year, the ACLU didn’t like the way the initiative was set up and refused to endorse it. Sensible Washington is once again planning to file an initiative and there are two issues that continue to keep these two organizations apart.

The first is the lack of regulation language in the bill. After the failure of Proposition 19 in California this year, it should be pretty clear that an initiative that doesn’t adequately address the regulation aspect of ending marijuana prohibition is a ripe target for effective “scare” ads. I think the ACLU is absolutely right to pressure Sensible Washington to include some language to that effect.

The other issue involved the timing of an initiative. I’m not in agreement with the ACLU that there’s much to be gained by waiting until 2012. When I crunched the numbers to compare demographic turnouts between 2008 and 2010 in California, I found that it would’ve only made a 2.4% difference in the percentage of Yes votes. But those two years represented two opposite extremes in which types of voters came out to vote. As Publicola points out and Dawdy backs up, off-year elections don’t tend to be skewed too greatly either for or against liberal causes in this state. And it’s not clear that 2012 will have as heavy a liberal turnout as 2008 did. It’s very likely that the difference between running in 2011 and running in 2012 would be negligible.

– The Cannabis Defense Coalition was curious about how the Washington State Department of Revenue arrived at their recent decision to send out tax notices to the state’s still-illegal medical marijuana dispensaries, so they did what they do best and filed a public disclosure request. After reading through the documents, there are few surprises to be found. The Department of Revenue was contacted several times (the first time in 2006) about whether dispensaries should collect sales tax on what they sell to patients. The DOR investigated and found that: a) it doesn’t matter that the money is being made illegally, and b) medical marijuana is not a prescription, so it isn’t exempted by the existing laws that don’t allow a sales tax on prescription drugs. Despite this, the internal emails among the DOR did reveal some interesting discourse.

– Some data was released recently showing that 59 police officers across the United States were shot and killed in the line of duty this past year. That figure includes federal, state, and local officers. To give some perspective on the Mexican drug war, nearly 70 municipal police officers were shot and killed in Juarez alone in 2010.

When a troll comes to my blog, in my comment threads, and in response to my political speech, repeatedly and viciously attacks my daughter, and then backs up his threats by posting my home address, well, I suppose the appropriate course of action would be to forward his comments and IP address to the police. Instead, and for only the second time in six years, I’ve permanently banned a troll from the threads.

I think even my harshest critics would agree that no blogger anywhere has been more tolerant of dissent than I have, even when that tolerance has been flagrantly abused in the most hateful, personal and disruptive manner. But in the end, this is my blog, and everybody who comments here does so only through my grace. The First Amendment guarantees you a right to free speech, but grants you no such right to expect me to publish it.

I never wanted my comment threads to be a one-sided yahoo chorus of the type one so often sees on other partisan political blogs, and so I steadfastly refused to moderate them. It’s too bad so few on the other side could manage to treat this open forum with respect.

There’s been a bit of an uproar recently over a series of new “history” books in Virginia, which amongst other errors, repeat the bullshit claim that African Americans fought on behalf of the Confederacy during the Civil War:

“I absolutely could not believe the number of mistakes — wrong dates and wrong facts everywhere. How in the world did these books get approved?” said Ronald Heinemann, a former history professor at Hampden-Sydney College.

To be fair, much of what we teach our elementary school children about our nation’s past is a carefully sanitized, if not outright mythologized version of American history, but really… a century and a half after Fort Sumter, and the South is still fighting to defend its traditional values? Can’t we just settle this once and for all that slavery was bad (you know, for the slaves), and that in fighting to maintain the institution, the South was on the wrong side of history? No ifs, ands or buts?

Of course the author, Joy Masoff, vehemently defends her work:

“As controversial as it is, I stand by what I write. I am a fairly respected writer.” But when it came to one of the Civil War’s most controversial themes — the role of African Americans in the Confederacy — she relied primarily on an Internet search, according to the report. And the results were based on the work of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a neo-confederate group based in Tennessee.

Masoff’s other literary achievements include “Oh Yuck! The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty” and “Oh Yikes! History’s Grossest Moments.”

Now that’s what I call quality scholarship, and since we both primarily rely on the Internet for our research, I suppose that makes me a “fairly respected writer” too. Maybe I should put my Ivy League history degree to good work, and write some elementary school textbooks? Couldn’t do much worse.

The Seattle Times editorial board wants Metro Transit to get out of the advertising business… you know, just like the Times itself has been gradually, if involuntarily doing over the past couple years.

Metro is learning the hard way that it should not be in the advertising business. Instead of scrambling to craft better policies on noncommercial ads on buses, Metro should get out of the advertising business altogether.

And I’m sure the fact that the Times competes with Metro for local ad dollars has absolutely nothing to do with their opinion.

FOX News’ Megyn Kelly is livid over an effort by the Society of Professional Journalists to persuade news outlets to stop using the prejudicial phrases “illegal alien” and “illegal immigrant” in favor of the more neutral “undocumented immigrant,” leading her to rail against what she sees as the tyranny of politically correct language:

“You know, we did a segment earlier in the year on how little people find the term midget offensive, and so you can’t say that anymore,” Kelly lamented. “There’s so many words that are suddenly becoming hurtful, and part of the group thinks it’s hurtful, and the other group doesn’t, and you’re left as a journalist saying, I don’t know what to do.”

Huh. Okay, so, if someone were to defy the tyranny of political correctness and describe Kelly as, I dunno, a “cunt,” would that be fine by her?

I mean, I’m not using that word, and I’d never use it to describe Kelly or any other woman. In fact, I’m not even sure I’ve ever typed that word before. But if someone else were to use that word to describe Kelly and her mean-spirited, disingenuous screed (no Megyn, “undocumented immigrant” is not equivalent to calling a “rapist” a “non-consensual sex partner”), well, I’d kinda understand what they were getting at, even if I found their choice of words to be offensive.

But then, who am I to bow to political correctness?

I spent most of the morning writing a passionate response to Dave Meinert’s stupid proposal over on Publicola to solve our budget crisis by dramatically expanding tribal and commercial gambling in Washington state. And then at the last minute, I decided to send the post over to Slog, where it might get a larger audience and a more reasonable comment thread.

Anyway, read the whole thing.

Please join us tonight for another evening of politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. We meet at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning at 8:00 pm. Or join some of us for dinner around 7:00 pm.

Not in Seattle? There is a good chance you live near one of the 235 other chapters of Drinking Liberally.