HorsesAss.Org

From Seattle Weekly:

According to L&I, a glitch in its computer coding resulted in the agency refunding $10 million to $15 million more per year to employers and groups that participate in the so-called Retrospective Rating program for workers’ comp insurance. That is, they were getting a bigger refund on their premiums than their actual injured-worker claims would have justified.

It’s impossible to say, without knowing many more details, how much the BIAW might have benefited from this overpayment. But the builders’ lobby is the biggest participant in the “retro” program and uses the refund money to fund its political machine. The fact that government “incompetence” has, for years now, been helping the BIAW underwrite its war on government is either fitting or ironic, it’s hard to know which.

When I think back to all the distorted attack ads and the hysterical, right wing baloney the BIAW has pumped out over the years, it makes me want to puke. Turns out they had a good thing going, and they didn’t have the good sense to shut up and enjoy it.

Maybe now the Legislature will actually do something about the noxious “retro” program. Like end it.

So if toxic assets aren’t worth anything, who are the private sector people that are going to buy them?*

*Yes, I can be horribly mean and snarky. A lot. But I really don’t know the answer to this, nor, from what I understand, do many smart people who have degrees in business and economics. It’s not meant as an insult, it’s meant as a serious question, because the new administration is taking questions from bloggers and everyone and stuff.

Personally I imagine President Obama would answer this question pretty well, if someone can ask it.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFDcUY6HiAo[/youtube]

Eddie “Clean Head” Vinson. I’m fine, the economy, well, you know. Rough patch. Talk amongst yourselves.

Please join us for an evening of politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. Start time is 8:00 pm at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Or show up earlier for dinner.

For tonight’s activity…we’ll come up with some “fair and balanced” stories for FOX News. Someone needs to take over for the Republicans as they take a break to figure out the new face of the Republican party. (Hint: the one that shows up.)

If you’re not in Seattle, the Drinking Liberally web site has dates and times of a chapter within sleighing distance of you.

That’s what the PI is now reporting:

Seattle police Chief Gil Kerlikowske has been appointed to a law enforcement post within the Obama administration, which would return him to Washington, D.C., after almost a decade as Seattle’s top cop.

A administrator in the Seattle Police Department said Tuesday that Kerlikowske notified commanders that he would be appointed as director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, a cabinet-level post often referenced as the White House “drug czar.”

I’ve been critical of Kerlikowske in the past (specifically about the way SPD has dealt with complaints of police violence), but I’ve never thought of him as an overly aggressive drug warrior. Maybe I’ve never seen that side of him, or maybe the ONDCP will have some more sensible leadership than it has. I’m not sure yet. I’m curious what those who have followed his career more closely than I have think.

I totally agree with the Seattle Times editorial board in arguing that government should “use technology to provide public records cheaply,” but I can’t sign on to their actual arguments.

In fact, our public records statutes can create an incredible burden on public agencies, requiring untold hours at taxpayer expense to fulfill requests that often amount to little more than vindictive fishing expeditions.  (I’ve often been tempted to file a public records request asking for the cumulative cost to taxpayers of Stefan’s many public records requests… but I didn’t want to waste taxpayer money on a lark.)  So when the Times complains about proposed legislation that would raise the maximum copying charge to $0.25/page, or deny requests to people who refuse to pay their outstanding balance, they make it sound like fulfilling a request requires little more effort than feeding some documents into a copier.

Hardly seems right that public agencies would be making such a profit off documents to which citizens are entitled. Though municipal lobbyists suggest the higher fee would offset costs of staff time in fulfilling the request, that is expressly prohibited by the state’s Open Records Act.

Um… so… if the Times recognizes that there are actual “costs of staff time in fulfilling the request,” why would they suggest that public agencies are making a profit?

Of course, they’re not.  The Times is just being the Times.  But at least they attempt to be constructive.

A better idea? Require cities, counties, ports and school districts to better manage their records. Why not make documents available by e-mail or copying them on to a disc — pennies a serving — even less if the requester provides the disc.

Yeah, that would address the cost to the requester of making copies, but it does nothing to address the real cost:  the many staff hours spent gathering documents and fulfilling the request in the first place.  In fact, it takes just as much effort, if not more so, to scan a document to disk as it does to feed it into a copier.

So how about an even better “better idea”?  Since most records are produced on computers, why not just take every electronic document or file that would be open to a public records request, and just automatically place them in a searchable online database?  Every email.  Every Word document.  Every spreadsheet or PowerPoint presentation.  Everything.

Because the vast majority of public records requests would probably be unnecessary if the records were actually, um, public.

UPDATE:
Erica takes umbrage:

Goldy argues that the “many hours of staff time” it takes to fill records requests should be compensated, and argues that every single public record maintained by government agencies should be put in computer files for the public to sift through themselves. The logic is tortured: Government agencies provide a valuable service we should pay them for (sifting through records to fill requests), therefore we should get rid of that service entirely and make people who file records requests find the records they want themselves. Not to mention the fact that most agencies don’t have a surplus of public-disclosure staff; in my experience, most government agencies only employ one public-disclosure officer. Is Goldy really arguing that we should eliminate that position from every government agency?

Um… no.  I’ve reread the post, and I don’t find myself making that argument anywhere.  I didn’t present an either/or.  Rather, I suggested that merely delivering records requests electronically doesn’t save all that much money, and that the real savings would come from putting as much of the public record as we can online, where much of the snooping could be done in a self-service manner.  But I don’t see how one infers from this post that I favor eliminating public-disclosure staff.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rX7-R54-Q8[/youtube]

Fixing up school buildings for the wee kiddies is waste-fraud-abuse-communism-the-end-of-America. Making sure the assholes on Wall Street who did this to us get more money and keep their jobs is virtuous!

After reading Goldy’s post below, I had to check out whether or not the number of people who voted Yes on I-25 in November 2007 outnumbered the total number of votes cast in the special election they voted to have.

Almost…

King County Initiative 25 – 11/07

YES 240998

Director of Elections – 2/09

Ballots Cast: 249086

So, either there were really less than 10,000 people who both voted NO on I-25 and then voted in this election, or there were a large number of people who went to the polls in November 2007 to demand that our elections director be elected, then didn’t even have the motivation to fill out a ballot that was sent to their house and mail it back in.

Hooray for apathy!

I will agree with the whiners over at (u)SP about one thing: the turnout in last week’s special election for Elections Director was absolutely pathetic.  A week into the counting it looks like barely 22% of registered King County voters cast a ballot last Tuesday, compared to almost 84% in November.  To put that in perspective, the 48,001 votes runner-up David Irons Jr. managed to garner would have only amounted to about 5% of the November vote.

Huh.  I guess folks weren’t all that exercised about the performance of the elections office after all, a notion reinforced by the fact that Sherril Huff, the winner, was not only the incumbent, she was the only candidate in the race to speak out against electing the Elections Director in the first place.

It has been suggested to me that with the 2004 gubernatorial race finally over (and this was indeed the final nail in the coffin of that controversy), we can perhaps amend the charter back to appointing the Elections Director before the position goes back on the ballot in 2011.

Well, good luck with that.  Understandably, voters rarely vote for less democracy, no matter how sensible that option might be.

At Blue Oregon, former Senate candidate Steve Novick makes the case for restoring the education funding slashed by the mindless “centrists” in the Senate, and goes one further:

What are we worried about ­ a Republican filibuster? Bring it on! Let teachers and parents and principals and economists and Governors deluge their Senators with calls begging them to do the right thing! Let these so-called “moderate” Republican Senators (and a few self-styled “moderate” Democrats) explain why hundreds of billions for banks, hundreds of billions for the war in Iraq, are just james dandy, but saving our schools from cuts, rebuilding schools first constructed in the first New Deal, helping college students facing huge increases in tuition ­ oh, no! They’ll cave.

I’d have to agree at this point. The threat of a filibuster has to be tested or the GOP will always obstruct, delay and grandstand. Might as well get it on now while the country’s attention is focused. While delay is not desirable, it might actually save time because I’m hard pressed to believe the House is going to go along with the Senate version.

Let the nation watch, spell-bound, as Senate Republicans try to explain to the American people why they have to save our kids’ futures by letting the economic crisis decimate the public school systems.

My daughter and I are flying to Florida later this week, and I’d love to get my hands on one of those nifty new Amazon Kindles to help pass the time on those long travel days, and perhaps a little more time while sitting by the pool.  But to be honest, I’m not a speedy reader, and I doubt I’ll get through even one book on this trip, let alone the twenty-or-so books I could buy with the money spent on the $359.00 Kindle alone.

Sure, it’s a cool piece of hardware, and the electronic-ink display is literally easy on the eyes—the best display technology I’ve yet seen for reading large amounts of text… you know, short of the printed page.  But the feature I covet most is the ability to wirelessly download one of hundreds of thousands of books, in minutes, from just about anywhere.

That’s the way content should be: totally and completely ubiquitous.  And while the book may yet survive as our last physical medium holdout (despite Jeff Bezos’ best efforts), content consumption in general is inevitably moving online.  No more CDs. No more DVDs or BlueRay.  And in some cities, no more newsprint.  Even radio and television broadcasters’ airwave monopoly will collapse as audio and video consumption increasingly shifts to the Internet.

I know there are a lot of people who worry about finding a business model that can support content creators in this new online world, but me, not so much, especially when there are so many smart, creative folks like Jeff Bezos out there willing to risk failure.  Yeah, sure, in the short term these new technologies are incredibly disruptive, but then, history tells us that new technologies almost always are.  

If we don’t find a viable business model, in the end, I believe, a viable business model will find us. In this, you could say, I almost have faith.