HorsesAss.Org

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Over the weekend of April 19-20 last year, the city of Chicago was enjoying the springtime. Tourists filled Millennium Park and walked along Michigan Avenue. Music fans crowded the Lincoln Park Zoo for Earth Day concerts. The Cubs swept the Pirates at Wrigley Field. And local son Barack Obama was campaigning in Pennsylvania as a sense was growing that we were about to see history by the end of the year. But not all of Chicago was in a festive mood. Over that same weekend, there were 37 shooting incidents across the city. Police superintendent Jody Weis simply said “you have too many guns and too many guns and too much drugs on the street.”

It was in these neighborhoods in the mid-1980s that Barack Obama was an idealistic young man with an Ivy League degree determined to make a difference. It was also during that time that the death of Len Bias led to Joe Biden’s Anti Drug Abuse Act of 1986. That legislation was meant to help out our inner cities by targeting the drug gangs. But as Obama has rocketed up the political landscape, he had a front row seat to the real and disastrous effects that those laws were having in the neighborhoods of Chicago.

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Olympia – In front of a crowd of more than 30 legislators, supporters and families of same sex couples Wednesday afternoon, state Sen. Ed Murray (D-Seattle) announced the introduction of Senate and House bills that would expand full state marriage rights to domestic partners, but would stop short of calling the relationships marriages in the eyes of the state.

The House bill has 57 sponsors out of 98 total Representatives, including two Republicans, Maureen Walsh (R-College Place) and Norm Johnson (R-Yakima), and the Senate offering has 20 sponsors from the body’s 49 members.

No Republican Senators, however, found the cause worthy of sponsorship.

The pair of bills would add over 300 rights and obligations for domestic partnerships ranging from survivor and pension benefits to business license transfers, which Rep. Jamie Pederson (D-Seattle), the chief sponsor of the House bill, said would “make sure our families are treated exactly the same.”

Still, even if the state legislation passes, certain same sex couples will lack some Federal benefits until President Obama makes good on his promise to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act.

Besides the usual measure of equality and long-time-coming, the legislators also took time today to frame the issue in terms of the sour economy.

“Families across this nation feel more and more insecure. If there was at theme for this session,” Murray said, “it would be family economic security.”

Extending crucial benefits to families of same-sex couples, the implication suggests, is even more important now than it was before. He said now is the time that there needs to be a conversation about the concrete ways that families of same sex couples are harmed because they lack the same benefits as heterosexual couples.

To help hammer home the need for domestic partnership benefit rights, four same-sex couples, half of them with young children in tow, spoke about their feelings of going through everyday life not only with the hardships that come from improper benefits, but the stigma that their families, especially their children, have from being excluded.

It was a regular all-American display, with one of the couples’ nine year old daughter doing her best Piper Palin turn, struggling to hold onto her baby sister as she stood beside her mother at the podium.

Another couple, both of whom hold PhDs from the University of Washington, informed the reporters that their elementary school aged daughter was “just coming to terms with the fact that our family doesn’t have the same recognition and rights that her friends’ families do, and it is confusing to her.”

Then there was the Tacoma police officer who grew emotional while reminding those gathered that she faces the same dangers on the streets each day as her straight co-workers, yet she is saddled with the additional stress of knowing that if anything happened to her, only now, with the help of this bill, would her partner receive the full spousal benefits she deserved.

Those blatant displays of humanity aside, Murray commented that one of the aspects most worthy of celebration with the announcement of these bills was the relative lack of fanfare from the other side.

“I would say the most remarkable thing about this bill is that it is unremarkable,” Murray mentioned, explaining that many of the fiercely fought battles that had been fought in the last few decades were inconspicuously absent from today’s atmosphere, even resulting in the aforementioned Republican sponsors of the House bill.

“Instead of culture wars,” Murray said, “we see a legislature that is mostly on board.”

But if the atmosphere is so good, and domestic partnerships are such a no-brainer these days, why not just go all in and join the ranks of Massachusetts and Connecticut, the two states who currently recognize gay marriage?

The lawmakers answered this question in part by passing the buck to a public that they said, outside of the greater Seattle area, was still coming to terms with gay rights.

“We are involved in a conversation with the people of this state,” Murray said. “It is still new to a lot of people in this state.”

Plus, there will be the matter of initiative battles like the recent Proposition 8 that rocked the civil rights world in California this past year.

“On a personal level, it is kind of amazing what the opposition is willing to do,” Murray said, implying that the supporters of gay marriage intend to swing with a knockout blow when they finally push for full equality. “We know that there will be an initiative at some point. We are preparing ourselves for that battle…We plan to win. We don’t plan to win and then lose.”

Despite this ongoing conversation, Rep. Jim Moeller (D-Vancouver) will be introducing a bill in the House this session, H.B. 1745, that would bring full civil marriage rights to same sex couples in common with their fellow heterosexual citizens.

“There is nothing more personal than the decision between two human beings who make the decision to be committed to one another,” Moeller said and compared the issue to private entities that know that “discrimination is no way to run a business. What we know is what we have always known for a long time, that separate is not equal.”

That bill has 40 sponsors already, including Republican Walsh, yet it won’t be considered in committee.

All part of the process, co-sponsor Rep. Marko Liias (D-Mukilteo) assured me later Wednesday afternoon.

“That’s where the conversation is centered right now,” Liias said, echoing Murray’s sentiment from earlier in the day. “Not everyone who needs to be part of the process is ready to go there right now. There isn’t quite the consensus we need.”

Liias also gave some recommendations for gay marriage’s staunch advocates.

“Get out there and start doing the community organization,” he advised, “and get folks to start writing in from all over the state. Those folks need to start speaking to their friends and neighbors.”

Even if the legislature stops short by simply adding domestic partnership benefits, Sen. Murray predicted today that it won’t be long.

“It will take some years,” he said, “but it will not take the 29 years that the civil rights bill took. It is a multi-year effort, but not a multi-decade effort.”

Those of you trying to read HA and Publicola tonight between about 9PM and 10:30PM (and for about 15 minutes this afternoon) were greeted with the dreaded White Screen of Death.  No error message, no nothin’, just a blank, white screen.

At this point, I don’t know what causes it, or what fixes it.  It’s pretty damn frustrating.

Anyway, if anybody out there has some expertise with WPMU, and would like to offer their help, I’d greatly appreciate it.

HR 1

It’s “Time” for Portland to deal with Sam Adams.

Feeling they were on the verge of a breakthrough, Jaquiss and Willamette Week went after Adams again. The new mayor denied the claims again. But on the Monday before Inauguration, he called his colleagues and supporters to say there was truth to the charges. “I believe what I said was, ‘You’re a f___ing moron,'” says Wiener. “I was, and am, pissed and saddened by it.”

Civil rights are for everyone because they’re inviolate. Respect you have to earn and keep.

Adams and the celebrities who threw in to support Adams may have had a point about the traditional media jumping the gun, but come on. Adams is a scumbag and it damages the progressive movement to defend people like this. Enough already.

We’ve got a bridge to build. Six months or a year of the Portland mayor (who is a complete scumbag) being distracted is not what the region needs. And please, spare me the sanctimony about “personal lives.” Honorable people don’t make out with kids in city hall bathrooms and then destroy potential political opponents with lies.

Jobs going in a puff of steam:

Starbucks will cut 6,000 positions as it closes 300 stores worldwide over the next eight months and will eliminate about 700 non-store workers by mid-February as it cuts costs to stem its eroding profits.

The immediate layoffs include about 350 employees at its Seattle headquarters, about 11 percent of the 3,200 people who work there. The 300 store closures will include 200 U.S. shops.

Yet another blow to the Northwest. It’s too bad, I always liked Starbucks. You may now have to cross the street to get to one up there in Seattle, however.

Thanks mostly to its bizarre name, HorsesAss.org is probably one of the leading political blogs nationwide… in terms of traffic from Googling pornographic search terms.  And yet, I almost totally ignored the sensational Enumclaw horse story, and the easy page views that would have come with it.  Go figure.

So to make up for that business miscalculation, I thought I’d block-quote this paragraph from an AP story today about an Oregon couple, jailed for sexually abusing their dog :

Chase said Baalbergen performed oral sex on the dog and received oral, vaginal and anal sex. He said Baker received anal sex.

Ugh.  But two thoughts.

First, I’m no dog whisperer or anything, but I’m not sure most dogs would classify that as “abuse.”  And second:

The dog, Max, had to be killed.

“Because of the way it was taught to interact with people, it couldn’t be placed in another home,” Chase said.

I’ve known plenty of dogs who were incorrigible leg humpers, but unless you cooperate by pulling your pants down and getting on all fours, I’m not sure what the big problem is.  Maybe they could have tried a couple squirts from a spray bottle before offing the poor dog?

Yesterday Gov. Chris Gregoire was in Clark County to visit with the bidness guys and gals, and the whaaaaambulance was screeching away full throttle. I’m sure someone in the room voted for her. Well, actually, I’m not sure about that, but it’s a theoretical possibility at least.

Like we’ve never heard this one before, but the first thing to do is blame the workers. From The Columbian:

Elie Kassab, president of Prestige Development, said he advertised in The Reflector last year to fill eight entry-level jobs and had 221 young applicants. “The biggest problem we have is the 50-cent minimum wage increase,” he said. The minimum wage, tied to the Consumer Price Index, jumped 48 cents to $8.55, the nation’s highest, on Jan. 1.

Yeah, I’m sure that extra $3.84 per hour to hire eight workers is killing him. You really can’t make this stuff up.

If blaming minimum wage workers isn’t your cup of tea, you could always blame environmental regulations:

Contractor Roy Frederick drew applause when he urged Gregoire to take another look at strict new state stormwater runoff rules that require builders to set aside more land for retention ponds.

“Tell your Department of Ecology to do a cost-benefit analysis on these stormwater regulations,” he said. “It’s a giant train wreck. It has stopped development in Clark County.”

I guess it had nothing to do with the housing bubble, securitization of mortgages or fraud in the house building, financing and selling sector, nor the continued credit crunch caused by zombie banks pocketing taxpayer money instead of lending. Nope, nothing at all.

The whining is not limited to our state, however. The house building industry is peeved over in Oregon as well. From The Oregonian:

Portland-area homebuilders say things are bad enough with the recession. Now they suspect members of the Metro council – elected officials who have much to say about how and where the area grows – are philosophically bent against them.

Tom Skaar, president of the Home Builders Association of Metropolitan Portland, says council members think growth means “sprawl” – so he wrote in a letter to Metro Council President David Bragdon

Well, growth has historically meant sprawl, at least since the construction of the interstate highway system.

To be fair, construction and associated businesses are a valuable and needed part of any economy. There are, of course, good and decent builders, real estate agents, sellers of furniture and such who are being wiped out. This is bad, and it’s every bit as tragic as a factory worker or high-tech worker getting wiped out.

It seems not to have really sunk in among the developers, however, that things are unlikely to return to normal any time soon, and may not ever be quite the same. Clark County functioned for years as a safety valve for Oregon, absorbing huge population gains while providing sub-standard urban services in many respects. Many children attend school in portable classrooms, sidewalks go nowhere, parks go undeveloped and public safety services struggle for money.

The citizenry of Clark County has already paid for the bubble, through taxes and hidden costs such as traffic congestion and environmental challenges. We simply cannot afford to keep growing in the fashion we did the last 15 years or so. There’s no money left, anywhere. It’s vaporized, along with the fish.

So while it is in everyone’s interest to have economic recovery happen, and the construction sector should share in that, it’s going to take enormous sums of public money (and it already is, through the TARP and FDIC.) That means the interests of the community as a whole need to be taken into account, not just the pet peeves of bidness guys grinding the same far right axes they’ve been grinding for the last thirty years.

Times are tough for many people. Everyone deserves a seat at the table, but nobody should own the table.

Elections have consequences, you know.

After reporting a quarterly loss of $56 million ($968 million in its commercial airplane division), Boeing announced plans to cut 10,000 jobs in 2009.

That number includes the 4,500 job cuts previously announced, mostly in the Puget Sound area.  And how many of the remaining 5,500 job cuts will target our region?  According to the P-I, “some“… with the cuts being spread across the company geographically.

Considering that almost half of Boeing’s 162,000 employees are in WA state, I suppose we should expect to absorb almost half of these newly announced cuts.

I few thousand here, a few thousand there… pretty soon this starts to add up to a bad recession.

Click for Part 3

Recently, Afghan President Hamid Karzai asked “This war has gone on for seven years, the Afghans don’t understand anymore, how come a little force like the Taliban can continue to exist, can continue to flourish, can continue to launch attacks?” What sounds like an innocent query by someone truly bewildered by the strength of his political opponents is more of a rhetorical question than anything else. Karzai knows exactly how and why the Taliban are flourishing. He’s hoping that Americans, and the incoming Obama Administration, will finally start to ask themselves this question as well.

The answer lies primarily in the opium fields that yield over 90% of the world’s supply of heroin. Just as Mexican cartels have made themselves untouchable throughout much of their own country on drug profits, the Taliban are funding their massive resurgence through the same means. Unlike the Mexican cartels, however, they have a much more nationalist and anti-Western outlook, making this drug war failure potentially far more disastrous to our national security than anything encountered before it.

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Yes you can. 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. Some folks show up earlier for dining.

If you’re not in Seattle, no worries…stop by the Drinking Liberally web site for dates and times of a chapter within skeetching distance of you.

Where will Oregon eventually come down when it comes to the CRC project to build a new bridge on I-5 between Vancouver and Portland? Not clear. From The Columbian:

A high-level meeting of elected officials did little Monday to reach consensus on how many lanes should be built on a new replacement Interstate 5 bridge.

The Portland City Council and the Metro Council, in a rare joint work session, spent close to two hours in a wide-ranging discussion of the lane issue, bridge tolls and projected effects on greenhouse gas emissions and urban development.

The meeting, however, only underscored the division between Washington and Oregon on a bridge-freeway-transit project that could cost $3.5 billion or more.

An interesting comment from one official:

Metro Council President David Bragdon said officials agree on a number of issues, including the need to replace the bridge and to extend light rail into Vancouver. On the day a light-rail line opens connecting Portland and Vancouver, it would have the highest ridership of any route in the Portland-Vancouver area, he said.

If politics is the art of the possible, hopefully a grand compromise can be worked out between the two states and the two cities. There are hysterical types on both sides of the river, on one side proclaiming a new bridge will inevitably lead to greater sprawl and on the other side proclaiming the end of freedom due to communist choo-choo trains. It’s all so silly, and unsupported by fact.

The bridge project (bridge influence area in planner-speak) is focused on a short stretch of I-5, the main commercial artery on the West Coast. The sub-standard interchanges and bridge present a real safety and efficiency hazard, and it’s long past time a new bridge is planned and constructed.

The detail that concerns me the most is how tolls are presented to the public. If the proceeds are used to pay for construction and maintenance, the public will accept them. If tolls are used to “manage demand,” far fewer people will be happy and there is the risk of an intense public backlash in Clark County. Since the public will have to be asked to approve taxes to run light rail on this side of the river, that’s a big risk to take.

That may not be how some transportation experts see it, as new technology and the hope of influencing congestion through pricing is a somewhat attractive proposition, but it will be seen as punitive and an example of government being out to get the little people. And frankly, since any toll would be new, as passage across the bridge has been free for decades now, there would be a de facto limiting effect anyway. The quick jaunt across the river to purchase merchandise from big box retailers will have to be weighed against the cost of the tolls.

Complicated toll pricing schemes will just muddy the political waters. I sure hope they don’t do it that way.

Bellingham Herald reporter-blogger Sam Taylor, regarding a new cat blog put up by someone in the Olympia press corps:

Meanwhile, has anyone else checked on the journalists there lately? They seem lonely.

Um, meeee—ow?

With the economy in the drink and state coffers running dry, Gov. Gregoire has proposed adding 10 new state-run liquor stores, while allowing the sale of alcohol related items like cork screws and ice, in an effort to pump up revenues.  (Existing law currently prohibits State Stores from selling ice?  That’s just plain silly.)  At the same time, kinda-sorta Democratic Sen. Tim Sheldon will propose shuttering the State Store system entirely, and privatizing the sale of liquor, because… you know… there’s no time better than a $6 billion revenue shortfall to hand off $322 million in revenues to the private sector.

I’ve often heard my fellow Washingtonians complain about their inability to buy a bottle of Makers Mark at 3AM at the local 7-Eleven, but coming from Pennsylvania, with an even stricter state store system—grocery stores can’t sell beer or wine either—I don’t find it much of an  inconvenience.  After all, it’s not like the stuff goes bad, so you can always stock up… and if you really need a bottle of rotgut at 3AM, perhaps it’s best that it’s not so freely available anyway?

But what really galls me in nearly every debate about the state store system, are the knee-jerk arguments from the invisible hand crowd about unfair state competition:

The proposals, particularly increases in nonliquor sales at state-run stores, have drawn fire from grocers as an anti-competitive encroachment on private business.

[… ] Jan Gee, president of the Washington Food Industry, said the independent grocers belonging to her organization would be hurt by increases in the number of state-run liquor stores. … “We want them out of competition with us,” Gee said. “We want them out of beer and wine, and we don’t want them to even be considering an expansion into what they call bar products.”

Yeah… sure… the state sells a limited selection of beer and wine from drab storefronts staffed by well-paid, union workers with good benefits.  How could independent grocers possibly compete with that?

I mean really… if a private business can’t out-compete the state in the sale of ice and corkscrews, perhaps it shouldn’t be in business in the first the place?  They’re gonna have to come up with a better argument than that.

The appropriateness of a state monopoly on the sale of liquor, well, that’s an entirely different debate, but given alcohol’s quantifiable impact on public health and safety, there are plenty of strong arguments in favor of the status quo, however inconvenient it might be to late-night boozers or “antiquated” it may appear to Sen. Sheldon.  In fact, if we really want to increase revenues and cut government expenses, I’d not only keep the state store system and its liquor monopoly intact, but expand it to include a state monopoly on the legal sale of marijuana.

Our current state store system grew out of the end of prohibition on alcohol.  I’d say it’s past time to end the failed prohibition on pot as well… and then tax hell out of it.