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I’ve been hitting Rep. Dave Reichert pretty hard on his uncompromising opposition to raising the federal minimum wage, which at $5.15/hour now sits at a 50-year low, adjusted for inflation. So I thought it only fair to ask the Congressman to explain his position.

I didn’t get a direct quote from Reichert, but his press secretary Kimberly Cadena was kind enough to respond. She wrote:

Congressman Reichert voted no because he believes that minimum wage should be dictated by economic indicators and state and local governments, not the federal government. That principle works successfully in Washington State, which has one of the highest minimum wage rates in the country, higher than the current federal minimum wage rate. Even if the proposed federal minimum wage increase had passed, Washington State’s minimum wage rate is still higher than the proposed increase.

Hmm. This seems to indicate that Reichert supports Washington state’s minimum wage, but opposes one nationally. Yet this not only puts Reichert in the uncomfortable position of denying to other Americans the same benefits offered to his constituents at home, it also seems to put him at odds with the Washington State Republican Party’s own platform, whose section on “economic opportunity” includes:

Reforming the current Washington State minimum wage law to make Washington businesses more competitive.

So… if as Reichert (or at least, his press secretary) says, his principle on the minimum wage “works successfully in Washington State,” how exactly does one reform it to make WA businesses “more competitive?”

Here’s a suggestion: raise the federal minimum wage to $7.25/hour so that our businesses are on a more level playing field with those in neighboring states.

Barring that, Reichert is left in a kinda logical bind. If he claims that WA state’s nation-high minimum wage has not hurt the competitiveness of our state’s businesses, thus refuting the WSRP plank that calls for reform, he undermines the argument that raising the federal minimum wage would hurt the competitiveness of businesses nationwide. Yet if he supports the competitiveness premise of the plank, but refuses to level the playing field by raising the federal minimum wage, he’s really only left with one option: lowering WA’s minimum wage to bring it in line with other states — the lowest common denominator approach.

No doubt different states have different economic conditions and different costs of living, so if one believes in a minimum wage one can make a reasonable argument that it should vary somewhat from state to state. But we’re not talking about mandating anything close to a living wage here — even at $7.25 an hour a full time worker would earn well below the poverty line. The federal minimum wage is merely a floor below which the race to the bottom by low-wage employers can go no further. Like WA, other states can always set their minimum wage higher.

So I it leaves me wondering… does Reichert really support the concept of a minimum wage at all, or does he just assume it’s not such a big deal to his own constituents because they’re already covered via state initiative?

I just have a hard time understanding how the highest minimum wage in the nation “works successfully” here in WA state, yet raising it elsewhere would somehow hurt businesses and workers nationally. Perhaps Kimberly will explain further.

A little free advice to local politicians: don’t do The Colbert Report unless you are funny.

You know, there is a grain of truth to the popular myth of the so-called “Liberal Press,” in that despite the right-wing politics of their corporate bosses, rank and file reporters tend to lean a little more to the left. But the best example of journalists’ personal political bias comes not from a liberal skew in their coverage, but ironically, from the higher standards to which they seem to hold liberal and Democratic politicians.

A great example of this is the cynical, negative coverage of the Cantwell-Wilson rapprochement coming from our city’s urban daily, the Seattle P-I — a newspaper most honest observers would admit to being more liberal than it’s competition, the Seattle Death-Tax Repeal Times.

Yesterday columnist Robert Jamieson focused his cynicism on the inside politics behind Mark Wilson’s decision to campaign full time for Cantwell, and today an unsigned editorial solemnly urges the Cantwell campaign to immediately reveal how much Wilson will be paid for his efforts… you know, instead of waiting until the Sept. 7 reporting deadline.

Um… who cares?

First of all, I find this extreme curiosity over how progressives earn their money to be pointless and insulting. In interviews, one of the first questions posed to me is always “How much money do you make off your blog?” The answer: one or two bucks a day in advertising, plus the occasional beer money donation. (I make more in three hours on KIRO than I make from my blog in three months.) But if some union or progressive organization put me on the payroll so that I could continue doing what I do and still pay my bills… so what?

Both Jamieson and the P-I’s anonymous editorialist collect checks from the mighty Hearst Corporation, and nobody accuses them of being paid off… and the media in general has no ethical qualms about Mike McGavick’s mult-million dollar golden parachute so long as it is technically legal. So why the different standard for people like me and Wilson? Few people are wealthy enough or foolish enough (like me) to devote so much time to politics without getting compensated, so what’s the big deal if the Cantwell campaign pays Wilson to campaign for her full time?

Second of all… how can the dailies possibly justify all their cynical attention to inside political bullshit like this, when they are virtually ignoring McGavick’s own cynical approach to the issues? How about a column or editorial on McGavick’s intentional obfuscation of his position on reproductive rights?

“I do believe that choice should exist, but I believe choice should be narrow.”

Come on… what the fuck does that mean? Why not pin McGavick down on some specifics rather than delving into all this pointless speculation about whether a multi-millionaire like Dal LaMagna was somehow bought off by the Cantwell campaign? Gimme a break.

Sure, I’m into all the inside politics horse race crap, and I’m sure most reporters and editorialists are too. But that’s the least important part of this race. In the meanwhile, while we’re all debating the intricate workings of the Cantwell campaign, McGavick is criss-crossing the state in a fucking RV for chrisakes, pretending to be just an average guy with a sensible, moderate agenda… which we all know is a complete and utter load of bullshit!

McGavick wants a federal ban on gay marriage. He wants severe restrictions on abortion (possibly as extreme as South Dakota’s new law, but he won’t tell us, so who knows?) He wants to privatize Social Security and drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He’s opposed to Net Neutrality, but supports all the provisions of the Patriotic Act and the Bush Administration’s execution of the war in Iraq.

On all these issues McGavick is out of step with the mainstream of Washington state voters, and that might create a problem for him in November if voters actually understood his positions. But instead, all we read in the papers is cynical meta-analysis of whether Cantwell’s newest campaign staffer should actually be paid for his work.

But then, that’s the “Liberal Press” for you.

Yesterday I admonished Rep. Dave Reichert for repeatedly blocking a vote on raising the minimum wage, which at $5.15/hour is now mired at a 50-year low. (Although as far as I know he’s never objected to a Congressional pay raise.)

I implied that opposing a living minimum wage was simply a Republican Party value, but according to the National Journal’s Hotline this isn’t necessarily true of the party’s real “moderates”:

A group of 25 moderate House Republicans — most of them affiliated with the Northeast/Midwest-heavy GOP labor caucus — has penned a letter to Maj Leader John Boehner seeking a vote to increase the minimum wage before the August recess. The list of signees includes many of the House GOP Conference’s most vulnerable members: All three from CT, NY Rep’s John Sweeney and Jim Walsh, plus PA’ans Curt Weldon and Michael Fitzpatrick.

Hmm.

Reichert is one of the most vulnerable Republicans in the House. Vulnerable moderate Republicans are seeking a vote on raising the minimum wage. Yet Reichert is not amongst them.

So… is Dave Reichert a moderate?

UPDATE:
Hotline is quick with an update…

Looks like Boehner and Co released the Conference. By a margin of 260-159, the House this afternoon passed a non-binding “motion to instruct” procedure in support of upping the minimum wage to $7.25 per-hour. Though symbolic, the vote allows the vulnerable GOPers to point to an actual vote matching their promises. All the endangered GOPers on the letter voted ‘yea,’ as did Ney and Gerlach.

The vote also provides the Dems with a record of which GOPers voted ‘nay.’ Those opposing it, as Rahm surely scribbled down, included: Mike Sodrel (IN), Charlie Taylor (NC), Thelma Drake (VA), Dave Reichert (WA) and J.D. Hayworth (AZ).

So Reichert refuses to join vulnerable moderate Republicans in supporting a vote on the minimum wage. I suppose that just shows Reichert for what he really is: a vulnerable conservative.

UPDATE, UPDATE:
I just want to be clear about why this vote is so important. Vulnerable, moderate Republicans voted for the minimum wage, yet even when freed to vote his conscience, Reichert voted against it. That surely says something about Reichert’s conscience.

Yup. That’s a picture of me with Sen. Joe Lieberman. And I’m smiling. I wonder how this is going to play with folks in the “peace and justice” movement?

In the great tradition of patriot Sam Adams, we came back from our Fourth of July hiatus all boozed up and ready to foment revolution.

Joining me in patriotic desecration of the American political system were Will, Carl, Nick, Sandeep and Ray. Topics of discussion included whether former challenger Mark Wilson’s endorsement of Sen. Maria Cantwell would mollify the "anti-war" wing of the Democrat party, President Bush pathetically pointing to a $296 billion deficit as evidence that his economic policies are working, and Rep. Dave Reichert’s "moderate" vote against raising the minimum wage. Meanwhile, young bucks Will and Nick debated the tension between Belltown residents and Belltown bars, while the rest of us old folk fondly reminisced about the days when noisey street revelers were a greater threat to our sleep than apnea.

The show is 52:55, and is available here as a 33.8 MB MP3. Please visit PodcastingLiberally.com for complete archives and RSS feeds.

[Recorded live at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. Special thanks to Confab creators Gavin and Richard for producing the show.]

Hey, guess what? The Seattle Times isn’t laughing at Ron Sims anymore!

The first time Ron Sims tried to set up a county office to study the effects of global warming, he was mocked.

A Seattle Times editorial said King County Council members Sims and co-sponsor Bruce Laing were belching “hyperbolic clouds of rhetorical gas,” and suggested they instead buy some tomato plants and steer manure.

“The point is,” wrote the amused editorialist, “that the sky-is-falling, icecaps-are-melting, oceans-are-rising rhetoric must be tempered by common sense.” With little support for the idea from the environmental community and none from council colleagues, the proposal quickly disappeared.

That was 1988, before rising temperatures, increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and melting ice sheets persuaded most of the scientific community that the planet is undergoing potentially disastrous climate change caused by human activity.

Now county executive, Sims has set up a climate-response planning team

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Nationally, the minimum wage has not been raised in over nine years — adjusted for inflation the current $5.15/hour is now at a half-century low. In 2006 a full time minimum wage worker will earn only $10,712, about $6,000 below the poverty line.

So of course today, self-proclaimed “moderate” Rep. Dave Reichert once again voted against raising the minimum wage, joining his party in blocking a vote on H.R. 2329 for the fifth time in a month. The bill would have raised the wage $2.10 an hour over two years, to a whopping $7.25… well below WA state’s minimum wage of $7.63/hour.

Here’s a fact: Dave Reichert is a Republican, and both nationally and locally the Republican Party opposes a living minimum wage. How can I be so sure? Well, apart from counting their votes, I can also read their platform:

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…Of course, that goes without saying. We all know I need help, and recognizing this is the first step towards recovery.

Specifically, what I need is some technical help.

Like many of you, I’m sick and tired of my own comment threads. Sure, they can be amusing at times, and certainly the trolls contributed to HA’s early success (inadvertently) in their own weird way. But I work hard on many of my posts, and once in a while I’d like to generate a little substantive discussion. It would also be awfully nice to finally expand some of the functionality on HA to enable user “diaries” or something like that.

But I just don’t have the time or the money to get to where I want to go.

Perhaps I just need some help to complete the final 10 percent of the transition to SoapBlox I started in February? Or maybe something like CivicSpace would be a better solution? Or maybe I should go all the way to Scoop? Or maybe there’s some other better solution out there I haven’t even heard of?

Anyway, if you want to play a role in moving HA to v2.0 (and by that I mean do a lot of work for no money,) please drop me an email or show up at Drinking Liberally sometime and let’s chat. I can’t pay you, but I can barter you some valuable promotional space on one of the most widely read local liberal blogs in the nation.

(Oh… and if you’re a top-notch graphic designer, I could probably use some help in that department too.)

The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight (and every Tuesday), 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Well… almost every Tuesday. We didn’t meet last week because we were all patriotically drinking at various 4th of July parties. (And because the Ale House was closed.)

Anyway, I’m looking forward to a cold pint of Manny’s and a lively edition of Podcasting Liberally, also back after a one-week hiatus.

Oh… and if you happen to be a liberal drinker on the other side of the mountains, the Tri-Cities chapter of DL also meets Tuesday nights, 7 PM, Atomic Ale, 1015 Lee Blvd., in Richland. Go ask Jimmy for more details.

Personally, I’m beginning to get a little irritated hearing about the so-called “peace and justice movement,” the clear implication being that people like me are opposed to, you know… “peace” and “justice.” So just a reminder to some of my fellow progressives that the battle for WA’s U.S. Senate seat is not a battle within the Democratic Party, but a battle between the Democrats and the Republicans.

Sen. Maria Cantwell is a Democrat, and as much as he doesn’t like to publicly talk about it, challenger Mike McGavick is a Republican. So where does McGavick stand on peace and justice? Well, here are just few planks from the WA State Republican Party platform, enthusiastically adopted at their May 26, 2006 convention:

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Rep. Dave Reichert has spent $526,000 sending out 1.5 million pieces of franked mail… that’s 20 percent of his entire office budget. Up Front with Robert Mak has details, and kind of sticks it to Reichert. (I especially like the part where Reichert looks over his shoulders at an off camera aide when he can’t answer a question.) Anyway, watch the video.

The Seattle Times op/ed page (of all places) neatly highlights American Liberalism at work, lauding two local government proposals for increased disaster preparedness. [“Levees to lahar, disaster preparation.”]

King County Executive Ron Sims has proposed a new countywide flood-control district that would raise about $335 million ($15 to $30 a year on a $300,000 home) to pay for repairs and extensions to the county’s many levees. Meanwhile, the small town of Orting, which sits on lahar debris in the shadow of Mount Rainier, is proposing a new bridge across the Carbon River at a cost of as much as $12 million, to speed evacuation in the inevitable event of another major mudslide.

As the Times succinctly points out:

We live in a region with the potential of natural disasters that can be exacerbated by inadequate infrastructure. It makes sense to invest in safeguards now instead of paying for widespread destruction later. New Orleans taught us that.

We hear a lot from the right about the sanctity of the free market and the inherent inefficiencies of government, but there are some necessary public investments like education and safety that are simply outside the realm of the free market. No private corporation could make a reasonable return on adequately educating the children of the poor. No financial calculus could justify the private investment of $12 million in saving several hundred school children from a lahar that may be centuries away.

And yet most of us recognize that these are investments that must be made… that spending tax dollars protecting homes and businesses from inevitable floods both saves lives and prevents huge losses to our economy as a whole. Most of us recognize that this is a proper role for government, and thus most of us implicitly accept the basic ideological tenets of modern American Liberalism.

There is certainly a legitimate debate to be had over the proper size and scope of government, but while neo-cons and theo-cons have spent the better part of the past three decades denigrating the word “liberal” and vilifying those who would take its label, all but the most wacked-out, extremist nutjobs (that’s you, Grover Nordquist) accept that government regulation and public investment plays a necessary role in our modern democracy and economy. Indeed, when Alaska Senator Ted Stevens publicly argues the case for his infamous “bridge to nowhere” he appeals to the core principles of Liberalism, however cynically.

Liberalism was our nation’s overwhelmingly dominant political philosophy throughout the period in which America grew into the greatest economic, military and political power in the history of the world. It was Liberalism that guided us out of the Great Depression and through World War II, the Cold War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was Liberalism that desegregated the South, irrigated the desert, and (for better or for worse) built the interstate highway system.

No ideology has all the answers and all can be pushed absurdly to the extreme, so sure, I recognize the need for there to be a balance between our nation’s liberal and conservative impulses. Yet even in the face of a proto-fascist administration that seeks in the name of God and national security to break the shackles of our Constitution by extending its tentacles into every aspect of our private lives, I remain a steadfast believer in the power of an activist, principled government to better the lives of all its citizens.

That is why despite the inherent inadequacy of political labels, I continue to proudly identify myself as a “liberal.”

Just thought you might want to know.

[UPDATE: Sen. Cantwell to call in at 8:07PM.]

It’s a jam-packed lineup tonight on “The David Goldstein Show”– Newsradio 710-KIRO, from 7PM to 10PM — lots to talk about and lots of people to talk with.

7PM: Why does President Bush hate working Americans? Kathy Casavante of the AFL-CIO’s Voice@Work Campaign will join me to explain administration efforts to redefine the word “supervisor” so as to take away the right to organize from millions of workers. Later on in the hour we’ll be joined by nurses from Virginia Mason Medical Centers, whose proposal to reclassify all 600 registered nurses as supervisors is nothing more than a naked attempt to bust the local and state nursing union.

8PM: Democratic challenger and putative anti-war candidate Mark Wilson just dropped out of the race, endorsed Sen. Maria Cantwell, and announced his intention to campaign full time on her behalf. I’ll talk with Sen. Maria Cantwell at the top of the hour, and then Mark join me to take your calls and answer the question: What changed his mind?

9PM: You say you want a progressive revolution? Progressive Majority Executive Director Gloria Totten joins me to tell us what her organization is doing to turn our nation around from the ground up, by training and supporting local progressive candidates in local races. And later on I’ll ask the question if, in addition to all the grassroots, hard-work, infrastructure building… maybe Democrats also have to start getting dirty?

Tune in tonight (or listen to the live stream) and give me a call: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).

UPDATE:
Sen. Cantwell is now joining me at the top of the 8PM hour, and I’ve moved Gloria Totten to the 9PM hour to make accomodate the Senator’s schedule.

As David Postman reports, Mark Wilson will endorse Sen. Maria Cantwell tomorrow, drop his challenge, and campaign on her behalf full time between now and the November election. I just got off the phone with Wilson, and he sounds as enthusiastic as ever.

As much as he might have tried, and as much as some anti-war Democrats wished it to be, Wilson is no Ned Lamont and Cantwell is no Joe Lieberman. Wilson never had a shot at defeating Cantwell in the primary, and it sounds like he understood this from the get go. What he said he thought he could do was encourage a vigorous debate on the war in Iraq, while keeping those Democrats opposed to the war engaged in the process.

Now, he says, it is time for the party to heal, and come together to help take back the Senate and take back some control of our foreign policy. He says he had a long, personal meeting with Sen. Cantwell and came away convinced that she’s working to bring our troops home. But I’m sure he’ll be willing to put all this in his own words tomorrow.