HorsesAss.Org

As some folks close to this blog already know, I became a father last week. In the months leading up to the big event, I did a lot of thinking about how different a world my son will be growing up in than what I grew up in. Admittedly, I was mostly intrigued by the superficial, like the kinds of pop culture icons that will seem totally ancient to him: Cheers will seem as old to him as I Love Lucy seemed to me. Nirvana will seem as old to him as the Beatles seemed to me. And E.T. will look as dated to him as movies like Inherit The Wind seemed to me.

But beyond the superficial, there’s a major technological gap between even those of us born in the 1970s and those being born today. Even with a father who worked in the early high-tech industry, I didn’t grow up in a world of gadgets. My son is likely to be using high-tech toys and playing with high-tech games that I couldn’t even conceive of as a youngster. But there are even starker divides among the living that I began to think about as I held my day-old son in the hospital while Willard Scott was on TV wishing people a Happy 100th Birthday.

Someone born in 1909 was raised in a radically different world than what we have now. If someone wanted to send a birth announcement across the country, the letter would’ve taken weeks to get there. If someone in Seattle wanted their relatives on the East Coast to hear their son’s voice, they’d have to wait until at least 1915 when transcontinental phone service was first set up. If a family wanted to take that newborn child to Japan and back, it would take them weeks or even months. And if that family wanted to be informed about events in the world that their son was growing up in, they relied on printed newspapers, often produced by well-heeled interests who would allow their personal biases to strongly influence how they presented the news to their readership.

It’s odd that with all of the technological progress we’ve made in 100 years, we still seem a little surprised to see this massively outdated way of keeping people informed going away. Even with TV and radio, newspapers still provided an advantage in that the consumer could easily skip over things they weren’t interested in, but all three of those media suffered from the same problem, that only a limited number of people had influence over the content. If a news outlet had an interest in hiding the truth or manufacturing a separate reality, it often had the means to do so. Taking that possibility to an extreme can lead to overly conspiratorial thinking, but it certainly was the reality sometimes. And alternate perspectives could often be sidelined.

The internet, of course, has blown the lid off of this. In 1909, if someone – or a group of people – could prove that something in the daily newspaper was intentionally misleading or false, most people would never find out. Today, liars in print journalism are quickly exposed. Fraudulent reporting is frequently called out. The internet has allowed us to fill in the gaps where the traditional media of newspapers, magazines, and television have failed us. The first major illustration of this was the Iraq War. People began to understand the extent to which they weren’t being properly informed by the outmoded media outlets of the 20th century, and we began to rely more on better avenues for keeping ourselves informed.

I remember telling people back in 2006 or so that the internet was about 2 years ahead of traditional media outlets when it comes to framing the issues in more truthful and more realistic ways. This has been true for issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where Americans are now far more aware that this is a conflict where Israeli aggression shares as much blame as Palestinian terrorism for the deadlock. This has been true for gay marriage, where public opinion has shifted significantly as more and more people are exposed to the human reality of in-born homosexuality. And this has been true for universal health care, as the fiscal and functional superiority of socialist-minded European systems has become more understood (and Michael Moore’s movie arguably played a big part in that too). At the time, I predicted that a drug policy shift would be coming, and sure enough, it has now exploded onto the national scene, primarily because the internet community has been forcing the traditional media to catch up to its level of understanding.

In each of these cases, the traditional media has either ignored reality or actively tried to hide it. Why? It’s been done for a number of reasons – historically strong sympathies with Israel, concerns over alienating a large conservative Christian news consumer base, wealthy special interests, and sometimes just general inertia and a fear to challenge conventional wisdom. But whenever media interests are controlled by a small number of extremely wealthy individuals as they are now, it’s unrealistic to expect them to truly be the voice of the people or to take our perspective into account. Of course, as the tea-baggers are now demonstrating, not all of us have the ability to figure out when the wealthy are convincing us to believe in stupid shit in order to further their own interests.

Last week on the Colbert Report, Phil Bronstein of the San Francisco Chronicle gave a familiar response concerning the death of newspapers, warning that it cost the Boston Globe over a million dollars to investigate the Catholic Church pedophile scandal, and therefore things like that won’t get uncovered if newspapers go away. Of course, Microsoft once believed that since they spent millions of dollars developing operating systems, office productivity software, web servers, and databases that no one could do those things for free too.

But Bronstein isn’t completely wrong. There needs to be some new form of revenue for people who provide good journalism. The best opinion and area expert bloggers out there rely on good reporting and are just as lost as the rest of us without it. And I think it falls to us – opinion and area expert bloggers – to decide how much value we place on being informed, and to come up with a way to preserve and promote good journalism before it goes away. But I also think we have the technology and the resources to develop a system that’s far superior to what we ever got from the top-down controlled media empires we’ve all grown up with.

It seems extremely unlikely at this point that any pay-per-view model will ever take shape on the internet. Putting new content behind a subscription firewall doesn’t bring in revenue as much as it decreases the amount of traffic, which is arguably the more important commodity for sustaining a journalistic enterprise today. Today, there are still tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of paid journalists across the globe putting their content online for free. But as newspapers cut back and fold, how much of that will we start to lose? I think it’s a very real possibility to get to Phil Bronstein’s worst case scenario, where big news stories simply have no one covering them.

I’m throwing out an idea here that I’ve begun to formulate, but haven’t shared with anyone yet. I want to encourage people to send me feedback on it. The idea is for a monthly “subscription” portfolio. (I put the word subscription in quotes because it’s actually more like a donation than a subscription) For instance, a standard portfolio would be like $20 a month, and you would set each dollar of that portfolio to go to a journalist that you rely on for good, accurate reporting. Or maybe it could go towards a group of journalists at a legacy outfit.

What I see this doing is two-fold. First, it creates a bottom-up way of rewarding good journalism. Second, it separates the legacy newspaper function that bloggers have trouble replacing (report journalism) with the one that they’re often significantly better at (opinion and analysis). Some journalists, if they choose, could provide perks for that $1 “subscription”, like a daily email or the ability to have specific questions answered and investigated. For instance, let’s say I want to “subscribe” to an Olympia reporter. Because I subscribe to that reporter, I may be able to have them pop into Frank Chopp’s office and get the answer to a specific question for me (as I’ve learned from experience, I will not get an answer if I email that clown directly). Maybe that privilege costs $5 a month. Who knows?

Again, these are just some preliminary ideas that I’m throwing out for discussion and feedback. I’ve been hearing a lot about catastrophic consequences to the death of print journalism. I don’t think this is an area where we need a government bailout or anything, but it may end up being entirely up to us in order to figure out how to sustain an industry that we’ve relied on in order to reach a new plateau in keeping us all better informed. It’s a beautiful thing to have right now and something I want to preserve for the next generation.

Eschaton has a post today regarding some rather poor planning by some teabaggers in D.C. It seems nobody got a permit to dump a million tea bags on public property, so they are winding up in the conference room of a right-wing stink tank. Nice.

And from here in Vancouver, WA., comes another oops.

Organizers of a Saturday anti-government-spending protest in downtown Vancouver have failed to get the required city permits.

—snip—

“The fire department would like to know about canopies and tents and what size they are. If you have any cooking going on during the event, fire needs to inspect that as well. The police department needs to know about the gathering and the route the walk is taking. Are you going to be following the law and using the traffic signals and crosswalks? They also need to know about the route so if they have an emergency call, they don’t send cop cars flying through the crowd of people.”

The city was also kind of wondering about stuff like bathrooms.

Don’t get me wrong, permits should not be used to prevent free speech. While my experience with rallies and such is from the last century, usually you can call up government entities like parks departments and police departments and they’ll work with you. Mostly they just want to make sure everyone is safe, since if it’s on their property they can be sued if some horrible teabagging accident happens.

Luckily the Vancouver event isn’t until Saturday, so maybe things can be worked out.

UPDATE 3:54 PM– The Columbian has updated the original article (linked above) and it sounds like the organizers will indeed work everything out. Free speech rocks. Sadly, I will be cleaning lint out of drawers on Saturday.

Michael Steele
Republican National Committee
310 First Street
Washington, D. C. 20003

Dear Michael,

When that bunch of old white males at FOX decided to stage teabagging protests they were, no doubt, clueless about the damage they would cause. Let’s get real…the mental image of Rush Limbaugh, trousers around his ankles, with his droopy teabags festooned into a gagging and gently weeping Glenn Beck isn’t anybody’s idea of a recruitment tool. That this image will be scorched upon the minds of hip-Americans, and “refreshed” every April 15th, suggest to me that the entire generation is lost to the G.O.P.

Any hopes you have of winning the hearts and minds of young America no longer lies with hip-hoppers. Instead you need to go after the cutting edge of youth subculture—the Emo kids.

Think about it…their culture of building esteem out of a sense of alienation and ironic self-loathing makes them a perfect ideological fit for today’s Republican Party. It’s a match made in, um…Haydes.

So, here’s the plan. Next April, you call for a nationwide series of “Tax Cutting Parties” to be held all over the land. The concept is, of course, “taxes as another form of self-harm.” The protests will give participants a way to literally feel the pain of taxation as they “draw the line” on the government taking their money. And the next morning the scars of taxation will be upon them and remind them how the Republicans helped them hate themselves for paying taxes. And, privately, they’ll feel a bit of pride in themselves and the G.O.P. for that.

Oh…and you might get Mike Huckabee on board. He has a thing about razor blades, too.

Yours verily,

Darryl
hominidviews

Seattle PostGlobe debuted yesterday, the first of two planned efforts by former Seattle P-I reporters and editors to help fill the gap left by the  daily’s print death, and the layoff of the bulk of its newsroom staff.  It will be interesting to watch this experiment progress.  I wish them the best of luck.

While the hard-right response to liberal dissent was basically “STFU, you commie traitors,” the progressive response to hard-right dissent seems to be “please keep talking.”

I sincerely hope each and every teabagger gets quoted by a traditional media outlet. While we just had elections last fall, the mid-terms are next year! Let the American people judge.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbDy3Lm06uo[/youtube]

Dammit, Janet, don’t pay your taxes and show up wearing an Uncle Sam costume. Wingnuttery is hot.

Finish up that 1040, stamp it, seal it, and drop it in the mailbox. And then join us at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally for an evening of politics under the influence. The festivities take place at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning at 8:00 pm. Or stop by earlier for dinner.

Tonight we’ll probably spend some time finalizing our super secret plans for infiltrating the Wingnut teabagging events.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrfEy5-Do30[/youtube]

Not in Seattle? The Drinking Liberally web site has dates and times for 328 chapters of Drinking Liberally spread across the earth.

In the autumn of 2004, about six months after the death of my horse’s ass initiative, and about six months before I would start blogging, my fellow activist Steve Zemke somehow managed to arrange a meeting for us with House Speaker Frank Chopp and then House Finance Committee chair, now State Treasurer, Jim McIntire.  Our purpose was to urge them to pursue some sort of progressive property tax reform in an effort to preempt Tim Eyman’s next initiative, but the conversation drifted broadly toward our structural revenue deficit, and thus inevitably, to an income tax.

Both Frank and Jim supported an income tax—in theory—but neither seemed too keen on raising the issue anytime soon.  In fact, I clearly remember Jim warning me that any attempt to push an income tax prematurely could set our efforts back by a decade or more.

But Jim did put forth one scenario in which he could envision an income tax passing voters, a thesis I’ve since heard from other Olympia insiders, and which I’ve dubbed the “Phoenix Model.”  Under this scenario, a brutal economic downturn combined with a decades-long erosion of our sales tax base could create a budget crisis so severe that legislators and voters would have no choice but to resort to an income tax, or… dramatically reduce the role and scope of Washington state government.  Out of this budgetary Armageddon a new tax structure would be born, so the theory went, like the mythical phoenix rising from its own ashes.

So… um… aren’t we in that scenario now?

How much worse does the budget crisis have to get before voters and their elected officials accept that we cannot build a 21st century economy on the back of an early 20th century tax system?  How many more hundreds of thousands of Washington citizens must be thrown off the health care rolls or denied a college education?  How many businesses must flee our state or avoid starting up here due to the lack of an adequate transportation system or educated workforce or any number of other vital investments in public and human infrastructure?

How many billions of dollars must our budget be in a hole, and how many consecutive budgets must this hole be plugged through cruel cuts and regressive stopgap measures before the emergence of political leaders who are more concerned with long term solutions than with short term political gains?

In the Senate, I have been heartened by the leadership provided on this issue by Majority Leader Lisa Brown, and by the public support displayed by Senators Kohl-Wells, Regala, McDermott, Murray, Kline, and Fraser.  Folks in the know suggest that should a high-earners income tax come to a vote in the Senate, Brown could likely corral enough support to put it on the fall ballot.

But from the House leadership, all we hear are crickets.

If House Finance Committee chair Ross Hunter (D-48) were to take the lead on a high-earners income tax he could rally support behind it and perhaps even push it to the floor for a vote.  Yes, I know he’s focused on passing the education reforms on which he’s passionately dedicated himself for years, but few of these reforms are possible without the funding to back them up.  And yes, I understand that he plans to run for King County Executive, but taking the lead on a high-earners income tax could be exactly what he needs to grab the edge with Seattle voters over Seattle liberals Larry Phillips and Dow Constantine.

But Hunter isn’t even technically a member of the House Democratic Leadership.  So where’s Rep. Larry Springer (D-45) who represents an Eastside district where education funding routinely tops the list of voter concerns, or Rep. Zack Hudgins (D-11) a guy at least as comfortable palling around with DFH’s like me as he is with Olympia power brokers?  Where’s my own representative, Majority Whip Sharon Tomiko Santos (D-37), a long time member of the Tax Fairness Coalition who represents citizens about as adversely effected by our regressive tax structure as any in the state, and who would suffer mightily under the proposed cuts?

For that matter, where the hell is our entire Seattle House delegation?

Yes, I know, I know, I know that Frank is as steeped in the conventional Olympia wisdom as the majority of the observers in the establishment press, and I know that he fears for his majority.  And I know that Frank doesn’t really believe a high-earners income tax could pass voters, regardless of its surprisingly good showing in recent polls.  But he can be nudged.  He can be pushed.  He could even be shoved.

Frank’s not a monolith.  He is open to persuasion, and he does change his mind.  But he’s clearly not going to take the lead on this issue on his own.

That’s why for those of you in the House who believe that an income tax is the only solution to our long term structural deficit, and who understand that after the federal stimulus monies disappear and a temporary sales tax increase expires, we’ll be right back where we started, even with an economic recovery—and I’m confident that covers the majority of the Democratic caucus—the only responsible thing to do is to stand up and take the lead on this issue now, while we actually have an opportunity to pass it.

Don’t wait for Frank!  He’s way behind the electorate on this issue, and while I’m confident he’ll do the right thing and do it well once he’s brought up to speed, he’ll never get there unless some influential members of his caucus clear the way.

If a temporary sales tax increase was a sure thing at the polls, I’d understand your reluctance, considering the dire consequences should a revenue measure fail.  But it isn’t.  And in many ways, a high-earners income tax has considerably more political upside than any sales tax proposal.

So take a look at the recent the polling, and dive into the details.  Talk to your constituents and listen to their concerns about further regressivity.  And then somebody, anybody, please stand up and take the lead.

I’ll be on KUOW’s The Conversation this afternoon, between 12:15 and 12:30, talking about proposals for a temporary sales tax increase.  Listen live or download the podcast.

And for those of you listeners coming to HA looking for the statistics I’ve cited, here are some useful links.

Sales Tax vs Income Tax: A Short Primer in Fairness and Adequacy

Out of control spending?

Per capita revenues at 15-year low

Structural deficit

UPDATE:
If KUOW listeners are typical (and I’m not suggesting that they are,) they are a lot better informed, and a lot more supportive of an income tax than many of our politicians imagine.

Ow.

Washington state’s unemployment rate shot up to 9.2 percent last month, still higher than the national rate and nearly double what it was a year ago.

The increase was nearly 1 percentage point from February’s revised rate of 8.3 percent.

And in Oregon, really, really ow.

I’m taking a couple of days off, but I can’t help thinking about the news that Oregon’s unemployment rate has now climbed to 12.1 percent – equaling the worst of the state’s last deep recession, in the early 1980s.

It seems we’ve moved, as predicted, from a financial-sector-housing fraud-bubble crisis to a continued downward slide.

Both states need to reform their tax systems. Oregon hamstrung itself with California-style property tax restraints, and of course up here in Washington we have the stupid, broken, Depression-era “temporary tax system” that has been in effect for seventy years or whatever.

Nothing is a panacea, but having the traditional “three-legged stool” of state taxes would seem to be worth considering. Sales taxes play a role in moderating consumption, allowing consumers not to pay some of the tax by buying less. But income taxes have the advantage of automatically adjusting to changing economic conditions.

When you talk to regular folks about taxes, one of the first things they will say is that if you allow a new form of taxation, “they’ll just raise our taxes more.” Which, you know, is understandable, as the right-wing culture of resentment has been pushing this line of thought for forty years. But given the serious nature of the crisis and the threat to our long-term economic well being, especially in education, it would be nice if the state could at least try to reform the stupid, broken tax system.

I don’t know who the bidness guys and gals think are going to be the workers and leaders of tomorrow, but with massive tuition hikes and drastic cuts to K-12 looming as distinct possibilities, there is a danger the real threat to our future comes not from government spending but from savaging our public assets. Good luck with all that international investment in about ten-twenty years, guys. Most international corporations are looking for a highly skilled, highly educated work force.

It’s all a bit harder to explain than how to wave a teabag, but I figure most ordinary folks are still pretty darn worried about retirement and education. There’s an inherent suspicion about government, but there is also a genuine desire to have quality services in public safety, health care, transportation and education. What regular folks expect is value for their taxes, and if one cuts the very programs that help create a large, stable middle class, one is basically doing the work of the right for them.

So the issue for the leaders of this state is rather simple. Do something meaningful now about our stupid, broken tax system and be prepared to wage a battle against the know-nothing right wing assholes funded by right-wing foundation and PAC money, or do piddly little regressive sales tax measures in the hopes of threading a needle that can’t be threaded, and then be prepared to do battle against the know-nothing right wing assholes funded by right-wing foundation and PAC money.

The question isn’t when or how the right wing assholes will attack, the question is how much ground Democrats cede to them before actually fighting. (Does this sound in any way familiar to anyone? Did we not learn anything from the last eight years?)

In other words, fight now or fight later. Might as well do what’s in the best interest of the citizenry as a whole. In an economy continuing to fight deflationary pressures, public spending and investment is in the public interest.

In the most positive assessment since Gallup started polling the question in 1956, 48% of Americans now say the amount of federal income tax they pay is “about right,” while 46% say it is “too high,” marking a dramatic shift from the historic norm.

On the macro level, this shift in opinion should serve as a warning to Republicans who have long relied on cutting taxes as the central theme of their political campaigns.  But on the local level, I hope it prompts Democrats in Olympia, and their various constituent groups, to reevaluate the conventional group-think that insists an income tax is a non-starter for Washington voters.

Yeah, I know, I know… a broad personal income tax got trounced at the polls the last time it was on the ballot back in 1973, and an off-off election year is typically the worst time to put a progressive measure before voters who will surely skew to the right.  But this isn’t 1973, and in the midst of the Great Recession and an extended Obama honeymoon, we may be passing up a once in a generation opportunity to enact real reform.

Voters are in a mood.  They’re anxious about the economy and angry at the fat cats on Wall Street who led us into this crisis, which may help explain why a high-earners income tax is polling just about even with a third of cent increase in the sales tax. Obama campaigned on raising taxes on households earning over $250,000 a year, and he won by a wide margin here in WA state, so why wouldn’t WA voters support the same locally?  Well, given the right package, the right reasons and an effective communications campaign, they might.  I’m not saying a high-earners income tax measure is a sure thing, but for the first time in a long time, neither is its failure.

So the next time someone points to 1973 as evidence of political futility, I say point to this Gallup chart illustrating the dramatic shift in national attitudes over the past 36 years, and ask the question:  are Washington voters really all that different from the rest of the nation? Personally, I don’t think so.

From an Editor and Publisher article about how traditional journalists may be alienating younger readers with outdated pop culture references.

The Times is a citadel of retrotalk, on its Op-Ed page especially. Columnist Frank Rich once commented that George W. Bush had “a slight, almost Chauncey Gardiner quality,” referring to Peter Sellers’ simple-minded character in the 1979 movie “Being There.”

The Queen of Retrotalk is Times columnist Maureen Dowd. Dozens of examples I’ve harvested from her columns include “Nosey Parker,” “Ma Barker,” “Norma Desmond,” “Palin’s Imelda Marcos moment” and “Hillary’s inner Eve Harrington.” To describe how it felt to drive through Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and see no women on the streets, Dowd invoked a “Rod Serling–type feeling.”

I’m not sure this is the media’s biggest problem. I find familiarity with American’s TV history to be quite valuable when considering politics.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-yLYz6ejqw[/youtube]

Guns make you safer:

A Fort Lewis soldier is dead after being accidentally shot in the head and killed by his wife in Olympia, the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office says.

Lt. Chris Mealy of the sheriff’s office told KOMO-TV the soldier was teaching his wife how to handle a handgun when he was shot early Sunday. Mealy told The Olympian that the semi-automatic handgun was the soldier’s personal property.

I’m just sayin’.