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From Gov. Chris Gregoire’s new tax proposal:

Excise Tax on Carbonated Beverages
Carbonated beverages are a discretionary purchase. Their consumption leads to growing public health issues, including childhood obesity and diabetes. Through an excise tax of 5 cents per 12 ounces, this proposal would raise $93.6 million this biennium.

Or, you know, we could just build some more sidewalks. That’s what Gov. Blethen would do.

(And in case you’re wondering about the headline… um, here.)

I’ve been too preoccupied to conduct my usual fisking of Seattle Times editorials in recent days, but that hasn’t made them any less worthy of mockery.

Temporarily increase the King County sales tax to maintain police, jails and courts? “Enough is enough,” the Times proclaims. “This page does not have a detailed, prescriptive answer to King County’s whole problem,” Frank Blethen’s crack editorialists admit, but that doesn’t stop them from insisting that criminal justice services — which account for over 70 percent of the county’s general fund — must be maintained at current levels, in the face of dramatically declining revenues, but with no tax increases. I guess that’s what passes for bold leadership down at Fairview Fanny.

And the Times consistently pushes its no-tax/yes-spend prescription on a number of other issues. We hear little argument from the Times that the state isn’t underfunding basic education, yet they maintain their virulent opposition to the sort of revenue hikes or tax restructuring necessary to pay for it. And just today their editorial page lauds First Lady Michelle Obama for her soft approach to childhood obesity that doesn’t include government mandates or taxes.

What is most appealing about the first lady’s approach is it is neither heavy-handed nor naive. The federal government will not become the food police but will instead encourage sensible initiatives such as added sidewalks to spur walking and exercise.

And how will we pay for these sidewalks and public service campaigns and whatnot? Certainly not by taxing sweetened beverages, the number one source of calories in the average American diet. The Times acknowledges that “obesity contributes to the nation’s soaring health-care bill,” but a targeted tax aimed at reducing consumption of empty calories while providing a revenue source to help pay for obesity’s growing consequences, well, that would be “heavy-handed.” And worst of all, it would be, you know, a tax.

So how would the Times editors balance their own conflicting demands for more government services and lower taxes? Well, despite their refusal to put forth “prescriptive answers,” I suppose we might tease a few hints as to how they might run state government, by examining how they have run their own business, and imagining how very different Washington state might look today had Frank Blethen been governor over much of the past decade, with his editorial board holding the reins of the legislative leadership.

Buoyed upon the economic euphoria of the previous bubble, the first thing Gov. Blethen would have done upon taking office in early 2001, would be to purchase the state of Maine, and at a highly inflated price, only to sell it at a total loss a decade later after pumping millions of dollars into subsidizing his acquisition’s own growing deficits. Then, with hundreds of millions of dollars of highly leveraged debt coming due at the same time revenues started their precipitous tumble, Gov. Blethen would fight vociferously to drive neighboring Oregon out of business in the hope of attracting a substantial portion of its loyal taxpayers.

But none of this would be enough to balance the books. Wages would have to be cut, benefits slashed, jobs eliminated and unions busted… because it was organized labor, after all, who was really responsible for that whole Maine fiasco. And, just like the Times has managed to maintain the breadth, depth and quality of their news coverage while closing bureaus and dramatically shrinking their newsroom, so too our state government, under Gov. Blethen’s deft leadership, would be able to maintain, or even increase critical public services and infrastructure, while substantially decreasing both salaries and staff. I mean, just imagine how much better DMV would function if they had fewer offices and less staff servicing the same number of customers… and at lower wages to boot. All we need to do is make government operate more like a business!

As for schools, despite the worsening revenue crisis, we could trust Gov. Blethen to finally cut class sizes… by, you know, physically cutting classroom sizes, the same way the Times has cut the width of its newsprint by 15% in recent years. Just crowd those desks a little closer; the kids will never know the difference.

You get the point. Frank Blethen has done such a remarkable job guiding his proud family newspaper from perpetual prosperity to the verge of bankruptcy, that if there is anybody who we should turn to for advice on how to fix what ails state and local government, it is he and his fellow economic wunderkind on the Times editorial board.

I’m just sayin’.

UPDATE:
Carl points out that he kinda had this idea first.

Please join us tonight for special Fat Tuesday edition of Drinking Liberally. Our point du Mardi is the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning at about 8:00 pm. Or stop by earlier to enjoy a rich, fat dinner for your Carnival celebration.

Not in Seattle? There is a good chance you live near one of the 344 other chapters of Drinking Liberally.

I think this may have just become my new, favorite blog.

Dino Rossi’s record winning streak in hypothetical races remains unbroken, with the latest Rasmussen poll showing him eking out a 48% to 46% win over incumbent U.S. Senator Patty Murray. Man… has this guy ever lost a race he didn’t run for?

Of course, Rasmussen also had Rossi leading Gov. Chris Gregoire by a similar 47% to 46% margin at the same point in their 2008 gubernatorial race, and had Rossi up 52% to 46% as late as two months prior to election day. Rossi went on to lose by 6.5 points in the only poll that really mattered.

As for the Republicans actually running against Murray, well, they don’t fare so well, trailing by between 12 and 15 points. You know… hypothetically.

Huh. I’m tempted to blow up an American airliner, just to prove Fox News host Steve Doocy wrong.

Some of you may have noticed that my posting has been a little lighter than usual over the past week or so, and I just wanted to reassure folks that no, I haven’t burnt out. I’ve just been busy. Busy teaching myself how to program the iPhone.

It’s been about eight years since I last played around with a compiler, and ten days into the iPhone SDK I’m still not sure that I have sufficient programming chops to get the job done. The unfamiliar Xcode IDE does both more and less than I had expected, and Objective-C, well, it might as well have been Objective-Mandarin for all I knew when I started. I was hoping that with a UI this sparse, Apple might have layered a real RAD environment on top of it — like a Visual Basic or a Hypercard — but no, here I am defining classes and declaring protocols and managing memory for chrisakes. (No garbage collection? What’s up with that?)

Anyway, I’ll keep folks informed of how this project goes, but in the meantime, be prepared for days when I’m a little preoccupied.

Dick Cheney giving advice on foreign policy is like Kevin Smith giving advice on dieting.

Dear Airline Industry,

I’m writing this missive from dreary Seattle rather than sunny South Florida, and you only have yourselves to blame.

For years now, Presidents Day weekend has been the time of year I’ve taken my daughter to visit her grandma and pop-pop near West Palm Beach, a welcome respite from the height of our rainy season, and conveniently coordinated with her school’s mid-winter break. But after months of hesitation on your various reservation websites, I just couldn’t pull the trigger.

Part of the problem is that the Mercer Island district where my daughter now attends middle school only offers a four-day weekend off, but that didn’t stop us the last two years. Combine a red-eye with perhaps an extra day off school, and we could enjoy at least four full days in the sun.

The bigger problem is, the last couple years I’ve come home more in need of a vacation than when I left.

Flying has grown increasingly miserable over the past decade, and to be honest, it just isn’t worth it anymore. You airlines expect me to show up at the gate on time, or else forfeit the value of my ticket, but if your airplane isn’t at the gate to greet me, well, fuck me. Or if we do take off some time that day, but you fail to get me to my connecting flight, fuck me again. Perhaps, you tell me, you’ll get me out on a later flight, or the next day, or the day after that, but in the meanwhile I’m left to fend for myself in Charlotte or Atlanta or Dallas or Chicago or Phoenix or some godforsaken hub airport like that. Snow in Boston, you tell me, means delays in Houston, so you don’t owe me a thing but the promise to get me home sometime, you know, if a seat is available.

And while delays like this have always been a part of air travel, your increasingly hostile attitude has not. There once was a time when you treated us like valued customers, but over time we’ve just become those annoying, fragile things you store above the cargo hold. And as your customer service has declined you’ve increasingly resorted to pulling the post-9/11 security card to keep disgruntled passengers in line.

I know. You’ve done it to me. And fuck if I’m going to pay you for the public humiliation.

So this is probably the third or fourth flight I’ve elected not to take over the past couple years, not because your service isn’t inexpensive, but because it’s cheap. Based on personal experience, I just don’t trust you to get me and my luggage to my destination on time, safely, and in a reasonable amount of comfort. And I simply don’t trust your employees to treat me as anything more than just another potential terrorist.

$400 to fly roundtrip from Seattle to Florida is a good deal, but it’s still $400, and so I kinda expect the people I’m forking it over to not to consistently treat me like shit. You don’t even pretend to care about my business anymore, and that makes me feel like a chump every time I give to you.

So in conclusion, fuck you. Fuck your crappy service, your hostile demeanor and your poorly maintained planes. Fuck paying $7 extra for a pillow, $20 to reserve two seats next to each other and $25 for the privilege of having my valuables stolen out of my checked luggage (even sun screen for chrisakes… they’ve stolen fucking sunscreen). And fuck an industry whose standards have fallen so low that passengers now view themselves lucky to end their flight standing hip dip in water on the wing of a plane in the middle of the Hudson River.

Happy Presidents Day,

Goldy

Well, I suppose that’s one way to deal with education funding at a time of record state budget deficits:

In an effort to bridge a $700 million budget shortfall, Republican state Sen. Chris Buttars has put forth a plan to eliminate 12th grade in high school…

Of course, that’s just one Republican state legislator, and yeah, it’s Utah we’re talking about, so I guess it wouldn’t be fair to brand all Republicans with the same crazy stick, but when your party is philosophically opposed to raising taxes under any circumstances, this is the type of, um, creative proposals you’re gonna come up with.

Republican priorities at work.

Last week, I wrote about the story of Kathy Parkins. Parkins was a 51-year-old medical marijuana patient from Washington who was arrested in late 2007 after being pulled over in Arizona with a small amount of marijuana. She was allowed to serve out her probation in Seattle, but ran into some corruption and incompetence within the Washington Department of Corruptions, including being illegally detained and kept in jail for a week in May 2008 without any charges. Following that, she spent over a year trying to get a hold of a document that showed that a corrections officer falsified information in an attempt to have her sent back to Arizona. The document was finally released in the most recent public disclosure request and contained several fabrications – things that clearly could not have been accidental.

I’d also mentioned that Carla Cole, Parkins’ roommate at the time of the arrest, had been trying to get an explanation from the DOC. In February 2009, DOC Head Eldon Vail sent Cole a reply claiming that the officers didn’t inaccurately fill out paperwork or fabricate anything. At the time, the DOC was still refusing to let Parkins actually see the report in question, an Interstate Compact form that allowed for her to serve out her probation here. So after the report was revealed in the public disclosure request – proving that, in fact, Officer Jeremy Praven made several things up – she sent off another letter to Vail asking for an explanation.

In a letter dated last Wednesday, February 10, the DOC once again tried to claim that there’s nothing to see here, although the letter did not come directly from Vail. It was from Regional Administrator Jim Harms:

I have been asked to respond to your letter dated January 24, 2010 addressed to Secretary Eldon Vail. You wrote about information contained in a public disclosure request response concerning the Washington State Department of Corrections and medical marijuana, and the circumstances of the arrest of your former tenant, Kathleen Merry in May 2008.

We take the concerns of you, and in fact, all citizens very seriously and carefully review all complaints. As Secretary Vail indicated in his February 20, 2009 letter to you, your allegations of misconduct were investigated. Both the Unit Supervisor and the Field Administrator followed up with identified staff.

I apologize for any confusion or frustration this incident caused you, but no indications of misconduct, intended inaccuracies or fabrications have been found in this case.

Once again, you can see the document in question in this PDF file of released documents, pages 20 to 22. As I documented last week, within that report, Praven makes a number of completely fictional claims:

– That Parkins has no family ties to Washington state and only came here because of the medical marijuana laws. In fact, Parkins has lived in Washington state nearly her entire life, only recently deciding to move to California. Her children and grandchild live here, along with 9 aunts and uncles.

– That Cole belongs to an organization called the ‘Marijuana’s Growers Association of Washington’. No such organization has ever existed.

– That Parkins was not authorized to use medical marijuana in Washington state. Parkins had received an updated authorization that morning. She claims that when she offered to show it to Officer Praven, he wasn’t interested in seeing it.

There simply isn’t any ambiguity about this. Anyone with rudimentary critical thinking skills can recognize that these lies showed up in Praven’s report as an attempt to have Parkins sent back to Arizona. Coupled with the fact that Praven illegally detained Parkins before filling out this document – and then left her in jail for a week without any information about why she was being held – there’s no justification at all for claiming that no misconduct occurred. And it’s a clear lie that no intended inaccuracies or fabrications ended up in Parkins’ paperwork.

Last week’s contest was won by Dave Gibney. It was Karlstrup Strand, Denmark.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!

The signature gathering for I-1068, the Marijuana Reform Act, has begun. If you’re on Facebook, Sensible Washington has a page here.

UDPATE: Here are some upcoming kickoff meetings:

Tacoma Meeting: February 16th – 6pm-8pm – Anna Lemon Wheelock Library (3722 North 26th Street)
Seattle Meeting: February 17th – 6:30pm – 7:45pm – Ballard Library (5614 22nd Ave. N.W.)

– A Washington State-Vancouver student is filing an initiative to lower the drinking age to 19.

– Barbara Coombs Lee describes several scenarios where advance directives could potentially be ignored at Catholic hospitals.

– Not too many people showed up to Mike McGinn’s town hall for selecting a new police chief. And there’s two more left.

– The U.S. Department of Transportation has responded to the study showing that state cell phone bans don’t work to reduce accidents with the same logical fallacy that perpetuates the drug war as well:

Unfortunately, a study released by the Highway Loss Data Institute casts doubt on the reality of this epidemic. Not explaining likely reasons for the surprising data encourages people to wrongly conclude that talking on cell phones while driving is not dangerous!

If you question the ban, you’re encouraging the behavior. That’s bullshit, and it’s the same bullshit you hear from drug warriors every time a study shows that drug prohibitions don’t reduce drug consumption. Cell phone bans don’t work because they only discourage the behavior among people who aren’t going to cause accidents in the first place (which is also similar to the dynamics of the drug war).

– Blackwater: not exactly the best face we’ve ever shown to the world.

– I haven’t seen Avatar yet, but this is a pretty interesting indication of the global reach of our pop culture.

Mark 10:25
“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

Luke 12:48
“From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.”

Karl Marx
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

Discuss.