The League of Education Voters has released it’s annual Citizen’s Report Card , and Washington’s education system is far from making the honor roll:
And that’s an improvement from the previous two report cards.
But, you know, if that’s good enough for Washington’s children, it’s better to just cut education funding rather than even starting a conversation about raising additional revenues.
I’ve been neck deep in tech stuff recently, preparing for some cool new stuff in the HA universe, so I haven’t been writing much recently. But I will again. And soon.
So please be patient.
My favorite video from the 2008 presidential campaign did not come from a network or cable broadcast or a Web news site. It came from YouTube and was a musical ditty called "Hockey Mama for Obama" — a spoof on Sarah Palin sung to the tune of "Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina." Don’t speak for me, Sarah Palin, the chorus went. "My son plays hockey and I’m his mama/But I am voting Barack Obama."
YouTube displays the number of views of a video. When I first saw Mama for Obama, views were in the tens of thousands. The next time I clicked, they were in the high six figures. Within a few days the views had exceeded 1 million. The count slowed after the Nov. 4 election, but as of this writing it’s at almost 1.5 million.
The video was an amateur production — two people in their living room. But as it turned out, the piano accompanist and the singer were professional musicians. They were a cut above, in other words. The more I clicked (I probably watched the thing 30 times) and linked (to family, friends and email lists), the more it occurred to me how unfortunate it was that I couldn’t pay them for giving me and my circle so much enjoyment. As a content professional myself, I like to pay for the good stuff, partly in hope that pay-to-play karma will somehow infiltrate written material on the Web.
The first issue, of course, was the right sum. I may want to go beyond free, but at a buck a pop like iTunes, I’d run out of money pretty fast.
Then it hit me: A penny a click. [Read more…]
So if “everything is on the table” at all levels because everything is completely SNAFU, budget-wise, are we still going to stupidly spend tons of money arresting and locking up pot smokers?
In related, Atrios points out ending prohibition is the current number two issue at change.gov.
UPDATE [Lee]: Jon, the answer is no for the state legislators who introduced this bill today.
Okay, not to rain on the tunnel parade but Seattle isn’t the only metropolitan area in the Pacific Northwest with a pressing mega-project in waiting.
Combine river, wind, eco-friendliness and smooth sailing across the Columbia River and what do you have? A new Interstate 5 bridge with wind turbines generating electricity.
You read that right: The latest bridge design features vertically spinning turbines that would generate an unknown amount of juice while proclaiming loudly that the Portland-Vancouver area is the sustainability center of the world.
Personally, since I don’t live in Seattle, I’ve refrained from commenting much on the whole tunnel versus surface thing. You folks who live there should get the major say.
But since you can’t put wind turbines in your tunnel, you lose the coolness war. Sorry.
Now fork over some more money for down here too. Whaaaa? Money is tight to non-existent?
Oh. Could we have a rowboat or something?
This is bad any way you slice it:
Retail sales plunged far more than expected in December, a record sixth straight monthly decline as consumers were battered by a recession, a severe credit crisis and soaring job losses, none of which are likely to ease anytime soon.
The Commerce Department reported Wednesday that retail sales dropped 2.7 percent last month, more than double the 1.2 percent decline that Wall Street expected.
And it’s especially bad for a border county.
Retail sales in Clark County experienced a sharp decline in last year’s third quarter as the effect of the housing slowdown continued to seep into the local economy.
According to a report Tuesday from the Washington Department of Revenue, the county’s store-only sales totalled $499.9 million in the three months ending in September. That was down 7.9 percent from $542.6 million spent at retail stores in the third quarter in 2007, and weaker than statewide trend.
Store-only taxable retail sales throughout Washington declined by 6.2 percent to $12.4 billion.
State lawmakers and local governments are chasing a constantly moving revenue target, and the target is going down, down, down.
That’s what happens when your system of taxation relies far too heavily on a regressive sales tax. By the time new revenue estimates are available, they’re most likely already outdated.
People are understandably worried about their own personal pocketbooks. I’m not so sure the wider public truly understands the huge impact on things we all take for granted, like schools, roads, police, parks and other basic services.
Our system of taxation never made much sense, and now it is just going to make things worse. And down here where a short drive over the river takes one to sales tax free Oregon, the trend is likely to accelerate.
Deep thought: usually recessions are relatively short and the state’s coffers are replenished. Is anyone talking much about what will happen in an extended downturn of say, two to four years?
Crying in your beer over the impending demise of the Seattle P-I? Well join the sobfest tonight at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally, which meets every Tuesday night from 8PM onwards at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. As always, some folks will show up earlier for dinner.
If you’re not in the Seattle area, no worries. check out the Drinking Liberally web site for dates and times of a chapter within snowshoeing distance from you.
How things change…
Last month, Gregoire issued her findings on the viaduct options, saying the state could afford the $2.8 billion elevated highway but said the finance plan for the $4.6 billion, six-lane tunnel didn’t pencil out.
The overall project is estimated at $4.25 billion, with $2.8 billion coming from state gas taxes and federal bridge funds. That is supposed to cover the tunnel construction, as well as most of an interchange and elevated segment in Sodo.
How can “not having the money” be grounds to spike a tunnel in 2007, but not in 2009? What has changed, other than time?
In any case, back in 2007, State Sen. Ed Murray (D-43) seems to have nailed it:
Murray said he doesn’t believe the idea of eventually building a tunnel is dead yet.
“We’re not done,” he said.
In the early 1990s I had a disturbing conversation with Nathan Myhrvold, then Microsoft’s chief futurist. Myhrvold was talking about how online technology would “disintermediate” commerce. When it comes to media, the term by its very definition suggests the breakdown of mass media. Newspapers, Myhrvold surmised, would be one of disintermediation’s biggest casualties.
What Myhrvold meant by disintermediation was the removal of gatekeeping functionality, or middle men, between purveyor and consumer. The interactivity of online meant users could select for themselves what to read. They didn’t need reporters and editors deciding what was important for them. A company or official didn’t need newspapers either; they could reach their constituents or customers directly (e.g. MyObama and iGoogle). Most of all, readers had no need for a physical product delivered to their doorstep.
Myhrvold, one of the smartest guys at what was then one of the smartest companies, made it sound as if the death of newspapers was right around the corner. But change is always further off than one initially imagines. It’s also true that change, when it happens, seems to do so all at once. The forces leading to a change, ignored for so long, are forgotten; we’re left feeling blind-sided even if we saw it coming and warned of it for years. This helps explain why someone like Seattle Times publisher Frank Blethen could say with perfect honesty that he was “shocked” by the P-I’s announcement of sale and probably shutdown. Sure he was shocked. We all were. But were we surprised? (Today Myhrvold hunts dinosaur bones and was featured in a recent New Yorker profile by Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell. He probably has forgotten all about disintermediation.)
For all Myhrvold’s foresight and my own trepidations over the years, I was shocked as well. As a lifelong journalist (I started at The Seattle Times in 1967), I hate to see the P-I go — not just for its own sake but for its implications for The Times, Seattle, and an informed society. The P-I is just the first shoe to drop. Even the most casual reading of any newspaper, containing page after page of adless or ad-shy layout, reveals an unsustainable business proposition. I’m very worried about The New York Times, which I still get delivered to my doorstep and prefer reading over breakfast with my wife. It’s a vital ritual for us; we have our best conversations reading the paper, a process that reaffirms why we love each other and how much our intellectual lives revolve around knowledge of the day. (Admittedly I also notice how we’re calling out to each other more and more from our laptops, “Hey, did you see this on HuffPo?”) I know that it’s costing The New York Times a whole lot more to get its paper to me than I’m paying for the privilege; I just heard the paper is considering going to three deliveries a week instead of daily.
Although I sensed Myhrvold was right, for years I figured newspapers could transition to online if they just did a few things right. Now I’m not sure anything would have worked. Not only are newspapers dying, the type of “news” they purvey — uninterpreted, blandly regurgitated, pre-spun information supplied and shaped by a stakeholder with the intent of policy manipulation — has lost its relevance as well. Just look where the growth in news is — Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, Jon Stewart, Huffington Post — and you get the idea. Journalism today is a process of un-newsing the news.
I just want to make it clear to the rest of the state that since the rejection of the tunnel and rebuild options at the polls, a consensus had been building in Seattle for the less expensive, surface/transit option to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct. And now the state is essentially imposing the most expensive option, a deep bore tunnel.
Strange.
All I can say is that state and city leaders better find the extra couple billion dollars from somewhere other than Seattle taxpayers, because if we’re forced to pick up the tab ourselves, there’s going to be an awful lot of resentment about being forced to pay so that north/south drivers can get through the downtown a few minutes faster.
Seattle taxpayers are extremely generous; we’re not shy about paying for infrastructure and services we want, and we’ve a long history of quietly subsidizing infrastructure and services in the rest of the state. But if you’re wondering why Seattle needs a $4.3 billion tunnel when a $2.8 billion alternative would do, don’t look at us.
Given the choice, I’d rather spend the extra couple billion dollars building light rail from West Seattle to the downtown, and onward to Ballard. But it doesn’t look like I’ll be given that choice.
The Seattle Federal Home Loan Bank has problems.
The Federal Home Loan Bank of Seattle joined its San Francisco counterpart in suspending dividends and “excess” stock repurchases, after devalued mortgage bonds dropped its capital below a regulatory requirement.
The likely shortfall on Dec. 31 was caused by “unrealized market value losses” on home-loan securities without government backing, the Seattle bank cooperative said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission today.
Calculated Risk says uh-oh and quotes Congressional testimony (PDF) by Nouriel Roubini from February of last year:
[T]he widespread use of the FHLB system to provide liquidity – but more clearly bail out insolvent mortgage lenders – has been outright reckless. … A system that usually provides a lending stock of about $150 billion has forked out loans amounting to over $750 billion in the last year with very little oversight of such staggering lending. The risk that this stealth bailout of many insolvent mortgage lenders will end up costing massive amounts of public money is now rising.
So as state and local governments struggle with the crashing economy, and individuals struggle with uncertainty, unemployment, the loss of homes and debt, we still don’t really know the extent of the damage by this insane financial disaster.
It’s like the car has gone off a cliff and we’re somehow going to suspend it in mid-air by giving people $500. Folks may like the money, and the very serious people who have been wrong about everything for eight years will insist the car can be suspended, but most folks won’t have much time to enjoy the dough. The ground is coming up at them too fast.
UPDATE: Looks like embedding isn’t working right now, video is here.
UPDATE 2: A happy ending to an ugly saga involving a local police officer who had the courage to speak out against the drug war.
[T]he bored bypass tunnel, along with surface and transit improvements, must be among the options that move forward for further environmental review and design when the Gov. Christine Gregoire announces her viaduct-replacement recommendation.
I think the Alaskan Way Viaduct, and the circus surrounding it’s replacement, are proof that Seattle is one of the least corrupt cities in America. If we were a little more corrupt, the civic elite, with the city’s monied interests, would have put this issue to bed long ago, and we would never had had that ridiculous, and totally ignored, advisory vote back in 2007. After all, asking for the people’s input is really only useful if you plan on following their suggestions.
To answer eburger’s perhaps rhetorical question, yes Republicans in the Legislature tend to be wildly inconsistent. Their constituents want and need things that cost money (roads, schools, cops, etc.) but the GOP is so wedded to outdated anti-tax rhetoric that hypocrisy is the only possible outcome. Those proud, independent real Americans on the east side of the mountains need highways after all! Frankly I kind of wonder why the Republican Party still exists, other than tradition. It serves very little purpose.
When I consider things calmly and rationally every year or two, I realize that a sincere and dedicated opposition party would be very beneficial in running something as big and bureaucratic as a state government. There are always things to improve and it would be naive to think there is not corruption in places, if not illegality then certainly shady practices, back-scratching and nods and winks. You know, like the Bush administration, if we’re looking for textbook examples. But these things are endemic to bureaucracies the world over, public and private, and nobody has a monopoly.
But the GOP never seems to start from a place other than loud, angry, destroy-the-government rhetoric. I guess that’s their purpose, to just be angry. Fun for us as it’s great sport to return the favor. Elections have consequences, you know.
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