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The news coming out of Mexico City is worrying as 61 68 people are now confirmed dead, and more than a thousand sickened from a new variant of the H1N1 flu virus that has apparently jumped from birds to pigs, and is now easily transmissable through human to human contact.  Mexican authorities have closed schools, theaters, libraries and museums in an effort to curb the spread, but with cases now being reported throughout Mexico, and confirmed in both Texas and California, officials at both the US Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization are sounding increasingly alarmed over the possibility of a worldwide flu pandemic.

And perhaps the most chilling news…

Most of Mexico’s dead were young, healthy adults, and none were over 60 or under 3 years old, the World Health Organization said. That alarms health officials because seasonal flus cause most of their deaths among infants and bedridden elderly people, but pandemic flus — like the 1918 Spanish flu, and the 1957 and 1968 pandemics — often strike young, healthy people the hardest.

It’s times like this when strong, decisive and well-prepared government leaders can make the difference between life and death.  As the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1919 was killing an estimated 50 million worldwide, Seattle Mayor Ole Hanson preemptively shut down schools, theaters, businesses and other public places in a controversial effort to minimize the local outbreak.  Seattle was relatively spared compared to other US cities… and Hanson was literally run out of town by outraged business and civic leaders angered over the loss of revenues and the disruption of the city’s daily routine.

In that tradition, King County Executive Ron Sims has long made the inevitability of another flu pandemic a primary focus of the region’s disaster preparedness efforts, a focus I first learned about back in September of 2005, when I heard Ron talk at a post-Katrina, Red Cross fundraiser.

But rather than talk about New Orleans, he spent most of his time talking about the county’s own disaster preparation efforts. By far their primary focus? Not earthquakes, not terrorist attacks… but avian flu. It was a sobering talk with zero political upside for a man who was in the midst of what was supposed to be a tough fight for reelection, and I came away wishing every voter had the opportunity to talk with Sims one-on-one.

And it wasn’t just talk.  Seattle & King County Public Health has a detailed and informative Pandemic Flu Preparedness page, which includes links to videos, fact sheets, resources… even a 12-page comic book available in 16 languages.  The agency’s 50-page Pandemic Flu Response Plan is available here.

It is ironic that the legislature is about to slash public health spending exactly at a time we might need it most.  And more than a little bit scary.

Earlier this week, this post at Eschaton about a girl being prosecuted for “sexting” made me recall an event that used to take place every year at this time – the Ann Arbor Naked Mile.

As a freshman at the University of Michigan in 1993-94, my roommate was a junior on the crew team. According to his version of events, the crew team started the Naked Mile in the late 80s by streaking across campus at midnight after the last night of class. In the years following, the event grew significantly larger. Throughout the school year, my roommate tried convincing everyone in our hall to run with him. I had a pretty strong anti-authoritarian streak in me by then, but it still took a little bit of coaxing to get me on board.

On the night of the event, there were four of us assembled in our room downing shots (my roommate was over 21 by then, so that was only partially against dorm rules) and drinking Mountain Dews. The route of the Naked Mile went across campus from east to west, basically taking us back to our dorms. Despite it only being in the 40s, I headed across campus wearing only a pair of soccer shorts and sneakers. When I got to the starting area, though, much of the nervousness about doing this was going away. There were hundreds of people there milling about naked, waiting for midnight. It was like a giant co-ed locker room outside in the cold. I took off my shorts and waited for everyone to start running.

The weird thing about the run is that you don’t get to do it as a herd. Because of the massive amounts of people who were now showing up for the event, the runners end up doing much of the race in a single-file line through the crowd on the main part of campus. The run began somewhat uneventfully at first, but as we approached the arch that separates the shops on South University from the campus diag, the route got blocked by the crowd. My roommate, cool as a fucking cucumber, yells out “anybody got a cigarette!” Someone in the crowd hands him a cigarette. He yells out “anybody got a light!” An outstretched hand held a lighter. He smoked it as we all stood around waiting for the path to clear.

We weren’t at the very end of the runners, but we were pretty close. My roommate’s smoke break separated us from the rest of the runners enough so that people in the crowd ahead thought that the run was over. As we finally made our way through the arch and into the diag, we were even more enmeshed in the crowd. By the time we got across the diag to State Street, we were way off course. In order to get to where we knew the end point was, we decided to cut through a small landscaped area just across State Street. After we jumped in, though, we realized that the ground inside that area was lower than the sidewalk we’d just jumped from. After we’d climbed up through a tall hedge to get back onto the sidewalk, I still vividly remember hearing my friend behind me saying, “Damn, I think I scratched my scrotum.” Still makes me laugh to this day.

When we arrived at the Cube sculpture where the “Mile” (it’s not even close to an actual mile) ends, we met up with some of the clothed members of our co-ed hall. And despite the fact that the run was over and I was hanging out with the girls from the room next door, I didn’t even feel the need to get dressed again. It’s something that you’d never expect, but once you’re naked in public with a good excuse, you can begin to feel very comfortable with your nakedness very quickly.

I wound up running it all four years I was in Ann Arbor, but I never had as much fun as I did that first year. In subsequent years, I began to notice the things that would eventually bring an end to the city’s and the University’s tolerance of the event. The major problem was that despite there being about 8 to 10 male runners for every female one, the event brought out the perverts in full force. Even in that first year, the size of the crowds amazed me. Then, with each year, the amount of video cameras just multiplied. One year (I believe my junior year), I let my drunkenness get the best of me and got thrown to the ground by a man whose very expensive video camera I’d just broken.

In my senior year run, some runners around me ran while also chanting “PER-VERTS” to the assembled gawkers. Unfortunately, gawking wasn’t the only thing going on. My girlfriend ran with me that year and said that she nearly got groped by some guys along the way. Several other girls who ran said the same thing, and some had actually been grabbed and pulled to the ground. We tried to find a police officer (Ann Arbor police tolerated the event and even did crowd control), but couldn’t find one interested in helping. Within a few years after that, the University tried to shut the whole event down.

I was thinking back on this history when I read the original post above, where a young girl who’d taken revealing pictures of herself with her phone found herself in a courtroom where a bunch of old men were planning to review the evidence and potentially punish her for doing so. On the one hand, I recognize the desire to keep teenage girls from doing this, as many of them have no fucking clue how populated this country is with sexually repressed and psychologically disturbed individuals who might do them harm. On the other hand, though, attempting to charge them with a crime is arguably the dumbest possible way to dissuade them from doing so. As the girl in the article realized, the biggest punishment that could occur is for creepy old men to see her naked.

It’s been tempting to conclude that the overeager prosecutor in this case, George Skumanick Jr., is focusing on these cases simply because of his own perverted desire to see revealing pictures of teenage girls. It’s certainly possible. But it’s also possible that he’s just another product of a justice system that far too often sees its role as moral nanny, and refuses to acknowledge the dangers of taking a heavy handed approach to getting teens not to make risky personal choices. It’s also kind of interesting that this case is happening so close to where the recent scandal over funneling young people to jail for money took place.

Another major concern here is that unless we clearly push back against the idea that anyone who doesn’t guard their own nakedness with sufficient zeal as a child pornographer, we’ll continue to expand the ranks of “sex offenders” beyond the point where it makes sense. The term sex offender should refer to actual dangerous people, who have victimized other people in a sexual way (like the perverts who grabbed and assaulted female runners at the Naked Mile). When we start trying to label people as sex offenders who make moral choices that sexually repressed members of our justice system are offended by, we completely undermine the purpose of having that distinction in the first place.

A few years after the Naked Mile was shut down, they made an American Pie movie that was based on the tradition. Not surprisingly, it was the same kind of idiotic overly-sexualized view of the event that wound up bringing hundreds of perverts out of the woodwork to line the streets of Ann Arbor every April. Back in the early-to-mid 90s, pictures posted from the Naked Mile on University of Michigan student websites were some of the first instances of web porn out there (which probably didn’t stay up for very long). On today’s internet, it probably wouldn’t even pass for porn, just blurry pictures of naked people running.

Today, the trend of “sexting” is the new thing, and a lot of kids simply haven’t been smart enough to realize that when they send a photo to their friends, it’s a short journey to the internet where the whole world can see it. As cases like that become more and more common, more and more kids will be smarter about not doing it. It doesn’t require that law enforcement officials spy on our teenagers’ phone traffic. It doesn’t require that District Attorneys threaten them with a “sex offender” tag that would haunt them their whole lives. It just requires explaining that there are a lot of freaking weirdos out there and expecting kids to be smarter.

The latest from Eric Schwartz:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRCbMc4YPzk[/youtube]

And Bill Maher has some New Rules:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyv_Oqsr9f8[/youtube]

(There are some fifty other media clips from the past week in politics posted at Hominid Views.)

Here is yet another reason to think about the structural budget issues that Goldy has explained at length to  incredulous and/or cynical activists and elected officials this year: federal monies.

I was reminded of it by this ECB Slog post about KC exec candidate Dow Constantine’s effort to boost King County infrastructure by funding a full-time county employee to coordinate stimulus grants to win money for the county. In this climate, it is as good a plan as any, if not better.

But turning to D.C. with palms facing up is not a solution that the state can ethically count on in the long run, especially after all that Bush-era war spending.

State Sen. Minority Leader Mike Hewitt (R-Walla Walla) makes this same point, though backwards, in an AP article today.

“This is a temporary fix,” Hewitt said of the federal stimulus money going toward the state budget. “I really don’t believe this is going to help us sustain for the next two to four years.”

It won’t, and that is the point. We need to do it our own selves, but not by slashing important services like the old skool contingent wants, but with a forward-thinking tax system.

Again, I’m not referring to current stimulus spending, which we should embrace, but rather the kind of federal grant and pork project cash that comes in to bail out states all over the union on a regular basis (putting added stress on relatively awesome states like Washington, btw).

Our national debt is spiraling out of control while governors across the country boast about balanced budgets to anyone who will listen. It isn’t because governors are inherently geniuses while presidents are stupid (even if the most frustratingly ignorant guvs are the ones who tend to seek a higher perch in D.C.). It is because state electeds can swindle voters into thinking they are fiscally responsible by sticking money into their front pockets (state budgets) while taking it from their back pockets (federal).

It’s NIMBY, baby, and it is all the more reason to make the changes necessary to create a solvent long term.

Personally, I don’t necessarily fall in line with the full-on income tax idea, but a federal grant/paltry sales tax/incomprehensible business tax/property tax/tourist tax scheme might hold some water, but it is as leaky as a pre-santorum asshole.

Like Goldy says, just think about it.

P.S. I first read, in a convincing way, about the federal/state discrepancy in an op-ed in the Times or something like that last year. Anyone able to find the link for that?

How does the proposed state budget measure up?  The Spokesman-Review’s Rich Roesler dives into the details and finds that its 515 pages only comes to about an inch and a quarter.  (No word yet on whether that’s printed single or double sided.)

Rich also provides links to highlights and agency details, but as for me, if our legislators can’t be bothered to think creatively in crafting this budget, I can’t be bothered to read it on such a beautiful, sunny day.

As a vestige of a previous life, I still somewhat track the personal computer industry, with a particular interest in the fortunes of Apple, a company I have long admired for its innovative and elegant products.  And it has always been particularly amusing to read the dire warnings and earnest advice of industry analysts and other “experts” pontificating about Apple’s latest imagined misstep.

Most recently, as the world economy headed into a nosedive, the fear and loathing focused on price… specifically, Apple’s continued refusal to dip its toes into the low end of the market at a time consumers are rightly counting their pennies.  For the first time in years, Macintosh market share was on the decline in terms of units shipped.  Low cost netbooks were the hot new thing, yet Apple was snubbing its nose at the market.  Meanwhile, Microsoft was more than happy to pick up on the “Macs cost too much” meme with an advertising campaign that featured Windows PCs’ low cost versus Apple’s pricey cool factor.

Yet this week, amidst all the usual economic gloom and doom, and even as Microsoft was announcing its first revenue decline, well, ever, Apple bucked the trend by reporting a 15% profit increase, and its best non-holiday quarterly revenue and earnings on record.

So much for conventional wisdom.

There are a number of factors that have contributed to Apple’s relative success during these tough economic times, but I think there are two that stand out from the rest.  The most obvious is that Apple’s counterintuitive strategy of focusing on the high end of the market during an economic crisis turned out to be pretty damn smart.  The high end is where people with money tend to hang out, and these are exactly the people suffering the least during the Great Recession.  Apple’s devotion to quality, design, and yes, coolness over price, is also responsible for enabling the company to maintain gross margins the rest of the industry drools at.

The other major factor in Apple’s success, and somewhat related to the first, is that, at least since Steve Jobs retook the helm, Apple has displayed an uncanny knack for giving consumers what they want.  Not what they think they want… and certainly not merely what they think they need. No, once they see it, touch it, feel it… Apple gives consumers what they really, really want.

Sure, one could buy a generic, plasticy, yet perfectly functional Vista laptop for hundreds of dollars less than the lowest priced MacBook… but one gets the feeling that even those characters in the latest Microsoft ads would have chosen the Mac if price was no object.

But… um… this is a political blog.  So what am I doing delving into the Mac vs PC wars?  Well, it all comes back to conventional wisdom.

Under Steve Jobs’ leadership, Apple is a company that has consistently defied conventional wisdom, and profited handsomely from it.  While the rest of the industry has responded to the recession by focusing on affordability, sacrificing margin for market share, Apple understood that most of those already willing to pay a premium for its products would continue to be able to afford to do so.  Apple also refuses to lower its standards in pursuit of lower prices, a steadfast resistance to commoditization that consistently earns it by far the highest consumer satisfaction ratings in the industry.

Now compare that to the budget compromise Democrats are hammering out during the final days of the legislative session.

Despite a gaping $9 billion revenue shortfall, a proposal to partially fill the gap with a high-earners income tax was largely scoffed at by the conventionally wise, as a politically futile and/or anti-stimulative tax increase during a recession.  Instead, the Legislature has settled on a cuts-only budget that includes a sweeping rollback of spending on education, health care, public safety, parks and other popular and essential services and investments.

Not exactly the Apple way.

No doubt Democrats expect that, as unpopular as the cuts might be, they’ll at least get credit for being fiscally responsible, but I think it’s just as likely that their race to the bottom will actually make it more difficult to generate public support for refunding these services in the future.  By joining the likes of Alabama and Mississippi as one of the Windows netbooks of state government—small, cramped, slow, clunky and cheap—Washington is setting consumer expectations awfully damn low.

Over time, some voters will grow accustomed to reduced services and expectations, and decide that a governmental netbook is good enough.  (Today, we call these people “Republicans.”)  Others will still long for the governmental equivalent of an iPhone or a MacBook Air, but will no longer trust the state to deliver these sort of “premium” services, at any price.  Alas, a brand once tarnished is hard to rebuild.

What Democrats in Washington state consistently miss is what Microsoft’s ad campaign intentionally obscures:  that there is a difference between price and value. Apple has thrived by delivering value that cannot be measured simply in terms of gigabytes and megahertz… a lesson Democratic leaders would be wise to learn, however unconventional.  If we diminish public education, voters will be less willing to pay for it, as they rightly perceive government to be incapable of delivering value for their tax dollars, and the same holds true for nearly every other government service, commodities all.

Any Democrat who thinks our party will ultimately benefit from holding the line on taxes has another thing coming; what voters will really remember is the crappy service and real hardships these cuts will inevitably produce.  As such, this budget will make it more difficult to enact a progressive agenda, not just in the short term, but in the long term as well.  For who in their right mind would ever be willing to pay the so-called “Apple tax” on a brand better known for cheap, PC clones?

Speaking of Texas, a new Research 2000 poll for Daily Kos shows Texas Republicans are split, 48%-48% on the issue of secession.

Do you think Texas would be better off as an independent nation or as part of the United States of America?

US: 61
Independent nation: 35

Democrats: US 82, Ind 15
Republicans: US 48, Ind 48
Independents: US 55, Ind 40

Do you approve or disapprove of Governor Rick Perry’s suggestion that Texas may need to leave the United States?

Approve: 37
Disapprove: 58

Democrats: Approve 16, Disapprove 80
Republicans: Approve 51, Disapprove 44
Independents: Approve 43, Disapprove 50

Traitors.

John Brown, bitches.

“The only difference between you and Tim Eyman,” a prominent member of our state’s media/political complex once privately chided me, “is that Tim actually manages to get his measures on the ballot.  That’s why he’s taken seriously and you’re not.”

Ouch.

We weren’t talking about my recent advocacy for a high-earner’s income tax ballot measure, which apparently is now officially dead, but we could’ve been.  While a handful of state senators, a couple of representatives and one or two journalists deserve kudos for attempting to at least start a conversation on the issue, my posts were generally greeted in the halls of power with a dismissive roll of the eyes.  Washington voters will never approve an income tax, and my exhortations to the contrary did nothing but chip away at what little credibility I had.  Or so I’ve been told.

Regardless, I remain convinced that 2009 was the perfect political climate in which to put a high-earners income tax on the ballot—perhaps a unique confluence of reality and perception that won’t be there in 2010 or beyond—but barring the imminent donation of the half million dollars or so necessary to buy the requisite signatures between now and the July 3 deadline, my hypothesis will never be tested.

And that gets to the real difference between me and Tim in regards to our relative influence on Washington politics: the half million dollars or so necessary to get an initiative on the ballot.  There’s nothing particularly populist or credible about hiring signature gatherers; all it requires is the money.  And for the past several years Tim has relied on Woodinville investment banker Michael Dunmire to fund the bulk of his signature drives.

And why should Tim have all the fun?

So if you’re a rich liberal looking to make a splash in the political scene, have I got an initiative for you:  a 3-percent tax on incomes over $250,000/year, 5-percent on incomes over $1 million… combined with a full one-cent cut in the state sales tax.  No, it doesn’t raise much additional revenue for the state, but that’s the Legislature’s problem, not mine.  What it does do is make our state’s tax structure a little less regressive, while putting cash back in the pockets of 96-percent of voters.

Using a sugardaddy’s money to pander to voters… that’s apparently what gets Tim taken seriously.  And if it’s good enough for Tim, it’s good enough for me.

So, Rep. Cathy McMorris-Rodgers has a Downs child who she clearly loves and cherishes and sees as “a special gift.”  Good for her, and good for her son.

But that still doesn’t give her the right to tell other women what to do with their uterus.

I mean, really, the very notion that raising a special needs child gives McMorris-Rodgers some sort of special authority to speak on the sanctity of life… well… it’s kinda offensive.  She made her choice, and other women should be equally free to make theirs.

Oregon critics of the CRC project, including Steve Duin at The Oregonian, continue the drumbeat that plans for a new bridge are too big and too ugly. From Duin’s column this morning:

The Columbia River Crossing design, of course, is boxed in by all manner of restrictions, including the ludicrous height limits that owe to the proximity of Vancouver’s podunk Pearson Air Field.

But the most daunting constraint, notes Metro Council President David Bragdon, “is the restriction on the imagination of the two state Departments of Transportation.

“You have two DOTs that are just driven to build huge slabs of concrete. That’s what they do. That’s what they’ve done for the last 40 years. They engineer the biggest, baddest thing they can, and think about the design later, the budget later, the community impacts later.”

I’m kind of wondering how long it will take Vancouver Mayor Royce Pollard to respond to Duin’s slam on Pearson Air Field, an historic site that Pollard has made clear is a vital part of Vancouver’s heritage and downtown future.

[Read more…]

I’ve spent an awful lot of time criticizing the Legislature these past few weeks, and I’ve no apologies.  I put a lot of effort into helping to elect Democrats, and thus I have a special obligation to keep their feet to the fire once they’re in office.  But as frustrating and disappointing as the budget battle has been, there have been quite a few positive things to come out of this session, not the least of which is HB 1517, which finally reforms our states convoluted system for restoring voting rights to felons who have served their time.

For decades, Washington has been home to some of the nation’s most restrictive felon voting laws, which as of today have effectively disenfranchised over 167,000 otherwise eligible citizens.  As no less an authority than the American Correctional Association has long argued, felon disenfranchisement is “contradictory to the goals of a democracy, the rehabilitation of felons and their successful reentry to the community.”

Under HB 1517, felons may now register to vote once they have served their sentence and completed state supervised parole or probation. It wasn’t an easy vote for many Democrats, who are often made the victim of Republican efforts to label them as soft on crime, but it was the right thing to do.  And ironically, while our restrictive felon voting laws have long had a disproportionate impact on minority communities, Washington’s felon population is still overwhelmingly white, male and working class… the state GOP’s core demographic.

Amongst Rossiphiles, the felon voter is still a potent bogeyman.  But if there is anything positive to have come out of the GOP’s losing arguments in the 2004 gubernatorial election contest, it was the increased awareness of our undemocratic and unworkable felon disenfranchisement laws, and this new bill that reforms them.

Lots of volunteer opportunities this weekend and beyond:

* Seattle Parks

* King County Parks

Leave others in the comment thread.

When I wrote this morning about a House amendment that sticks Seattle taxpayers with potential cost overruns from the risky Big Bore tunnel, I suggested that “now is the time for Mayor Nickels and other local political leaders to send a clear message to Olympia” that if they change the deal, the deal is off.

Well, I didn’t hear what I wanted from Mayor Nickels, but we did get a quick response from challenger Mike McGinn, who in a press release today promised exactly that:

Michael McGinn today announced his opposition to the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement plan emerging in the Legislature.

“This deal keeps getting worse”, said McGinn. “As Mayor, I will not authorize the use of city tax dollars for the tunnel or associated cost overruns.”

In highlighting the riskiness of this project, McGinn points out that a bored tunnel of this size, 54 feet in diameter, has never been built anywhere in the world.  And that’s a financial risk that Seattle’s taxpayers, who voted overwhelmingly against a tunnel, should not be expected to bear on their own.