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Drinking Liberally — Seattle

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DLBottle

It’s always fun when debates happen to fall on a Tuesday. And it’s happened once again—CNN will host a G.O.P. debate tonight. So please join us this evening for a special debate watching edition of the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally.

We meet tonight and every Tuesday at the Roanoke Park Place Tavern, 2409 10th Ave E, Seattle. You’ll find us in the small room at the back of the tavern. Our normal starting time is 8:00pm, but this week we will start at 5:30pm for the debate.

Note: We’ll have sound and video for the debate. But the pub has other customers, so the sound may not be as loud as you want, especially with the background noises of a busy tavern and peripheral conversations. If you are intent on hearing every word, I recommend you bring stuff to stream the audio. The pub has free wifi.




Can’t make it to Seattle tonight? Check out one of the other DL meetings happening this week. Tonight the Tri-Cities, Vancouver, WA, and Shelton chapters also meet. The Lakewood meets on Wednesday. On Thursday, the Tacoma chapter meets. And next Monday, the Aberdeen and Yakima chapters meet.

There are 186 chapters of Living Liberally, including eighteen in Washington state, three in Oregon and one in Idaho. Find—or start—a chapter near you.

Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza!

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Judge not lest ye be judged: the quiz game.

City Hall Drama: Nick Licata battles Kshama Sawant aid Clay Showalter.

Jimmy Dore: Erick Erickson trashes his own mom to defend his racist lie Part I and Part II.

The Koch Brother’s Climate change deniers’ anthem.

Lee Camp: The truth about being a drone pilot.

Mental Floss: 25 facts about the science of music.

Islamophobia: Woman yells at and hits Muslim praying in California park.

The 2016 Clown Convention:

Stephen helps the cause of free speech in Turkey.

Harry Reid blasts Justice Scalia’s racist remark.

KPLU: A preview of the Inslee–Bryant gubernatorial race.

Jimmy Dore: What could Obama possibly say to appease the Republicans?

VSauce: Supertasks.

For the First Responders:

White House: West Wing Week.

Jimmy Dore: Jokes of the Week.

Pap and Farron Cousins: Congress critters own stock in the pharma companies that they (de)regulate.

David Pakman: Could a guaranteed basic income work?

Sam Seder: GOP terrifies people then argues policy should be formed around ‘feelings’.

How I feel right now as a Muslim in America.

The Week in Gunz:

Rent-An-Endorsement : hooks politicians up with celebrities!.

Congressional Hits and Misses of the week.

Jimmy Dore: Dick Cheney predicted the quagmire he later created.

Jay Pharoah and Michelle Obama: Go To College Music Video.

Sens. Al Franken and John McCain do some trash talkin’:

Mental Floss: Does cracking your knuckles cause arthritis?

Friday hot takes.

Seth Meyers does Hillary:

Stephen: How to defeat ISIS.

Pap and Farron Cousins: Texas is trying to redefine “personhood” to keep Blacks and Hispanics from voting

Jimmy Dore chats with John Boehner on life after Congress.

Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

Republican Gubernatorial Candidate Bill Bryant Stakes Anti-Minimum Wage Claim, Because He’s a Terrible, Terrible Politician

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Bill Bryant

Terrible politician Bill Bryant opposes raising the minimum wage.

The high point of Dino Rossi’s 2008 gubernatorial redemption tour came in mid-September, in the days following the Republican National Convention. After months of trailing in the polls, Rossi had finally clawed ahead of Democratic incumbent Governor Christine Gregoire to claim a small but significant lead. Things were looking good for Republicans up and down the ticket. Rossi’s people were starting to sound downright cocky. Then the minimum wage debate happened.

At an Association of Washington Business sponsored debate in Blaine, Rossi came out against Washington’s minimum wage. And as Josh Feit first reported here on HA, that didn’t play too well with minimum wage workers:

Rossi took the opposite point of view. Touting his Washington Restaurant Association endorsement (the most adamant opponents of the minimum wage), he said:   “The minimum wage was not meant to be a family wage. It’s meant to be an entry level wage.”

The news pissed off [convenience store worker Garner] Palomata. “If he lowers it,” he said, “I don’t want to vote for him. I’d be cutting my head off. I don’t want to demote myself.”

The Gregoire campaign immediately seized the opportunity, running ads attacking Rossi for opposing the minimum wage. It worked. The Rossi bubble burst, and he quickly dropped in the polls. Rossi, who had managed a virtual tie just four years before, went on to lose by 6.5 points.

That’s a lesson you’d think Republican gubernatorial hopeful Bill Bryant might have learned before claiming the anti-minimum wage mantel:

Minimum wage is one economic issue where the two candidates diverge: Inslee supports a statewide minimum wage hike. Bryant does not, although he did back an $11.22 an hour wage at Sea-Tac airport.*

“Statewide level, the concern I have is that we can’t or we shouldn’t pin a minimum wage to the cost of living in King County,” Bryant said. “So I don’t think we can have a one-size-fits-all system.”

To be clear, Washington’s up-until-recently nation’s-highest minimum wage has proven both excellent policy and excellent politics, which is why raising the minimum wage remains exceptionally popular with voters. When workers have more money, businesses have more customers. And when businesses have more customers, they hire more workers. Our minimum wage is one of the reasons why our state economy is kicking ass.

So if the legislature fails to pass a minimum wage increase next year (and Bryant’s colleagues in the Republican-controlled senate won’t), a minimum wage initiative will be put on the state ballot and it will pass overwhelmingly. And you can be sure the Inslee campaign will make it clear to voters which candidate supports it and which doesn’t.

* Oh, and by the way, Bryant’s alleged support for an $11.22 an hour wage at Sea-Tac is bullshit. The port commission has obstructed the minimum wage struggle for years, first claiming that it had no authority to impose a minimum wage at the airport, and then suing that only it had the authority to do so after the SeaTac $15 initiative passed. Bryant only acceded to the $11.22 number after Alaska Airlines acceded to it first. Just sayin’.

Another Lunatic Fringe Right Wing theory shot to hell

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So…this is what Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was thinking about the other day:

When a reporter asked him at an Iowa campaign stop Sunday evening about suspect Robert Lewis Dear saying he was motivated by “no more baby parts,” Cruz countered that he’s also been reported to be a “transgendered [sic] leftist activist.”

Cruz explained, “We know that he was a man registered to vote as a woman.” This discrepancy on Dear’s voter registration was first reported by The Gateway Pundit, a self-described “right-of-center news website,” under the claim that he “identifies as [a] woman.” Conservatives have since run with the claim that Dear is transgender.

Yeah…that makes perfect sense. Because transgendered [sic] women always sport a full, scruffy beard and a mustache. You know, especially if they are “transgendered [sic] leftist activist[s].”

Reality turns out to be a bit more mundane:

Records show Dear traveled 65 miles to a Colorado Springs clerk and recorder’s office to obtain his driver’s license and his voter’s registration card, Parsell said.

Although Dear clearly identified himself as a man, the information was incorrectly logged into a computer, Parsell added.

“Our employee inadvertently clicked on ‘female’ and gave the confirmation to Mr. Dear to review,” he said. “He missed it and signed it.”

Thirteen days later, Dear received the erroneous driver’s license in the mail. Records show he traveled to a Department of Motor Vehicles office in Salida to report the error and request a corrected license, which he received, Parsell said.

To change his voter’s registration card, however, Dear would have had to mail a separate request to his local clerk and recorder’s office.

Crackpots of the week: Ted Cruz and the rest of the right wing “scruffy bearded transgendered woman” theorists.

Holy shit.

HA Bible Study: Exodus 21:22-25

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Exodus 21:22-25
Suppose a pregnant woman suffers a miscarriage as the result of an injury caused by someone who is fighting. If she isn’t badly hurt, the one who injured her must pay whatever fine her husband demands and the judges approve. But if she is seriously injured, the payment will be life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, cut for cut, and bruise for bruise.

Discuss.

Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza!

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Lee Camp: Hell frozen over? A CEO is jailed!

PBS & NPR: Are pesticides to blame for the massive bee die-off?

The 2016 Clown Auditions:

Minute Physics: Why isn’t it faster to fly West?

Pap: Corporate media wants you to be stupid. Let’s fight back.

Mitch McConnell drinks.

Refugophobia:

Thom with Steven Gaffney: Really! How do you know a politician is lying?

Jimmy Dore: God refuses to apologize for Paris.

California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom (with Bill Maher): Why raise the minimum wage.

Redacted Tonight comedy special with Lee Camp.

Farron Cousins: Corporate media is hungering for a war.

Actual Terrorism That Happened in the U.S. This Week:

Congressional hits and misses: Thanksgiving leftovers edition.

John Oliver: Pennies.

Thom: The Good, the Bad & The Very, Very Gallionicly Ugly!

David Pakman: World hunger is a social construction.

Young Turks: Koch brothers building their own CIA to spy on progressives.

Surviving the survivalist game.

Quagmire Happening:

Jimmy Dore: Not drunk Bill O’Reilly calls about Muslims, responsibility & Muslims:

David Pakman: More Mexicans are leaving U.S. than coming in to the U.S.

White House: West Wing Week.

Maddow: Origin of the “freakin’ Presidential turkey pardon”.

Thom: Why the Kochs really embrace criminal justice reform.

Stop war and start cuddling.

Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

Welcome, Hanna Brooks Olsen, to Nick Hanauer’s Crass Menagerie

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Back in March, when I welcomed Paul Constant to our then-unnamed policy/messaging shop, I joked about our boss’s weird hobby:

Most 1 percenters just don’t know what to do with all their filthy lucre. Some rich people collect art. Other rich people collect cars or even houses. But Nick Hanauer, America’s premier self-loathing plutocrat, seems intent on ostentatiously collecting ex-Stranger writers.

Well, I’m happy to announce that Nick has recently added Hanna Brooks Olsen to his crass menagerie.

Hanna has a number of freelance bylines at The Stranger and elsewhere, though she’s certainly best known to local readers as one of the forces behind the popular tumblog, Seattlish. Mostly, Hanna will be heading up a top-secret internal Civic Ventures project, but she’ll also contribute regularly to our Civic Skunkworks blog. In fact, her first Skunkworks post just went live today: “It’s Too Soon to Tell if a Higher Minimum Wage is Eliminating Restaurant Jobs.” Give it a read, and then pretty much ignore just about every headline you see on the so-called “early” impact of Seattle’s minimum wage.

So welcome to Civic Ventures, Hanna. Now let’s all go out there and change the world… you know, hopefully for the better.

The Uterid

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Once upon a July day, Washington Republican leaders were haunted by thoughts of lady parts making baby parts with capitalist intent.

“We will investigate this outrage of endometrial entrepreneurship!”, they cried from the belfry.

The scrivener issued a clarifying scroll, “Yes, we believe in free markets, unless a uterus is involved. And then we demand Big Government Regulations”

So they hatched a bold plan to use Collective Action to get the job done:

Thirty-four Republican state representatives have asked state Attorney General Bob Ferguson to investigate whether Planned Parenthood affiliates in the state have illegally profited from the sale of fetal body parts.

The leaders waited as General Ferguson’s investigation underwent a months-long gestation. They would take the fruits borne of this disquisition, parade the findings before the masses, take them apart and serially disseminate them in pursuit of political contributions.

But the fruits were bitter and cruel to the union of uterine-overseers. There was no nourishment to be had for their War on Women™.

In a 48-page report, Attorney General Bob Ferguson rejected claims that Planned Parenthood has performed partial-birth abortions or that any of its clinics sell fetal tissue for profit “rather than simply recovering costs.”

“We found no indication that procedures performed by Planned Parenthood are anything other than performance of a legally authorized medical procedure,” Ferguson wrote in his report.

Ferguson’s findings are particularly important because Washington is one of only two states where a Planned Parenthood clinic allows women to donate fetal tissue to medical research. The report is a result of a four-month investigation, which was requested by state Republican leaders.

There was no endometrial entrepreneurship to be found in the lands. The report was barren and lifeless. Their plans to sew the seeds of discontent and grow their coffers would have to be aborted.

“Surely, the investigation has overlooked something.”

“We’ll keep looking and root out endometrial entrepreneurship yon.”

More than a dozen other states have also ended investigations of Planned Parenthood without finding any illegal or suspicious activity.

“Inconceivable”, some bellowed.

“Unbearable findings”, others howled.

“More investigation!,” one cried.

“Yes…More investigation!”, another.

And they satisfied themselves by repeating the chant in rhythm, until their distant leaders took their cause.

Congressional leaders have announced their own probe into the organization, which consists of about a dozen members from both parties.

They were, once again, filled with great hope of finding endometrial entrepreneurship, but only so that they could properly abhor it. And plant the seeds of fundraising.

And so it goes.

HA Bible Study: 1 Samuel 18:25-27

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1 Samuel 18:25-27
“Say to David, ‘The king wants no other price for the bride than a hundred Philistine foreskins, to take revenge on his enemies.’” Saul’s plan was to have David fall by the hands of the Philistines.

When the attendants told David these things, he was pleased to become the king’s son-in-law. So before the allotted time elapsed, David took his men with him and went out and killed two hundred Philistines and brought back their foreskins. They counted out the full number to the king so that David might become the king’s son-in-law. Then Saul gave him his daughter Michal in marriage.

Discuss.

Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza!

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How the Keystone victory was won.

Mental Floss: What causes motion sickness?

Tweety: GOP Sen. Vitter chose prostitutes over patriots.

Romance with a young Hillary Rodham.

The 2016 Festival of Clowns:

Minute Physics: How to go to space.

Mark Fiore: Climate Interuptus.

Maddow: $15/Hr nationwide strike by fast food workers.

Stephen: Senators McCaskill & Klobuchar explain how women get things done.

Trevor: The Myanmar Daily Show.

David Pakman: New jobs accelerate as unemployment keeps dropping.

Congressional hits and misses of the week.

Thom: The good, the bad, and the very, very osmagoguely ugly!.

Our generation our choice.

Daily Show: Solution for outdated voting machines.

Maddow: Arizona Republican’s border wall flops! Oops.

Sam Seder: Bill-O-the-Clown thinks all colleges are fascist training camps.

Honest Political Ads: Meet Mrs. Fullbright.

Dick Cheney is the GOP guest of “honor” this week.

Stephen: The next debate will feature Hillary, Bernie and Mumford & Sons (sp?).

War on Christmas Caffeine:

Young Hillary gets ready to party.

How to speak like a presidential candidate.

Mental Floss: 24 facts about GOP Candidate Whine wine.

Farron Cousins: Make voting day a national holiday.

How its built: Political scandals.

Young Turks: WA school football coach won’t stop leading prayers.

Adam Ruins Everything: The Electoral College:

David Pakman: FAUX News hosts confused about good jobs numbers.

Stephen: Climate change and coital frequency.

Young Turks: Good news in the battle for voter rights.

The Adventures of Young Hillary: Hillary in the stacks .

Harry Reid’s special relationship with Roll Call’s Niels Lesniewski.

John Oliver: Prisoner re-entry.

Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

Lisa Herbold Likely to Win Seattle City Council District 1, While District 2 Is Still Too Close to Call

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Bruce Harrell

Betcha Bruce isn’t smiling right about now.

 

So, on Election Day I predicted that “several races will be left officially undecided after tonight’s ballot drop,” a prediction I apologized for the very next day, writing: “Some will likely tighten up, but I will be awfully surprised if any of last night’s top-line winners end up losing.”

Well, I apologize for my apology.

Over the past few ballot drops the races in both Districts 1 and 2 have tightened to the point where they really are too close to call. No, wait. I take that back. For although Lisa Herbold still trails Shannon Braddock by a 104-vote, 0.56% margin, I’m calling this one for Herbold. And to understand my confidence, you need understand the way our all vote-by-mail ballot counting works.

It is both an over-simplification and a generalization, but ballots tend to be tallied in the order in which they arrive. Election night results include most of those ballots that arrived through Monday; these are the “early” ballots. Most of the subsequent tallies are of “late” ballots from voters who didn’t cast their ballots until Monday or Tuesday. And as we saw two years ago with Kshama Sawant’s stunning 8-point comeback from election night to the final tally, early voters and late voters can sometimes constitute dramatically different electorates.

On election night, Braddock led Herbold 52.92% to 46.48%, but since then the margin has flipped, with Herbold winning a progressively larger share of each day’s totals. Combined, Herbold has won 52.88% of all late ballots, and 57.25% of the Friday evening drop. Assuming about 3,350 votes left to count (and that’s a complicated and iffy assumption), Herbold needs only 51.55% of the remaining votes to win. Based on my experience tracking previous elections, there’s simply no good reason to expect Herbold to fall below that threshold. I would now be surprised if Herbold didn’t win this election.

Meanwhile, in D2, where incumbent Bruce Harrell held a seemingly invincible 10-point election night lead, we have seen an even bigger late ballot swing, with unheralded challenger Tammy Morales winning an impressive 53.44% of the late vote. But unfortunately for her, Morales may have had too large a deficit to overcome: my spreadsheet suggests Morales will need 57.3% of the remaining votes to take the lead, somewhat above the 55.15% she won in the most recent ballot drop. It’s not impossible. But at this point I’d have to put my money on Harrell squeaking out an embarrassingly narrow victory. But to be clear, had Morales benefited from a Sawant-like GOTV effort, Harrell would be out of a job come January.

In any case, it sure does look like all those post-election post-mortems were way premature. The final tally will tell a much different story than the spin we heard on election night.

Not just debate moderators, G.O.P. candidates cannot handle kids with strong language

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Last week, Obama made a laughingstock of the Republican Candidates. He pointed out their words about how they would be so “tough” dealing with Putin, and then chided them for their insufferable whining over uncivil debate moderators.

Now they are whining about children expressing anger over Trump’s ugly racism in this ad:

The Donald doesn’t like it one bit.:

“I think it’s terrible, I think it’s just terrible,” the Republican presidential candidate said on Fox Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria Bartiromo.”

Young kids speaking that way “is a disgrace,” he added….

…a disgrace to The Donald because, typically, when little brown kids talk to him that way, he fires their parents.

Marco Rubio is also outraged,

“People are looking at it and say, these people are grotesque. I mean these are little children. What kind of parent allows their children to go on a video like that and use that kind of profanity and what kind of parents allow a kid to do that?”

Rubio, born to two non-U.S. Citizen immigrant parents, might qualify as a non-citizen “Anchor Baby” in Donald Trump’s world.

So…apparently, children using four letter words is more threatening than an opponent who would strip him of his citizenship.

Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza!

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Congressional Hits and Misses: The essential John Boehner.

Stephen: Farewell whoever you were.

VSauce: Juvenoia.

Thom: Here’s what Democratic Socialism is:

Ending gun violence.

How to FOIA the NSA for data about you.

White House: West Wing Week.

Ryan Eyes:

Maddow: The Teabagger scandal that won’t die.

David Pakman: Teabaggers are at a record low.

Trevor Noah: My first American Health Care experience.

Mental Floss: Why does daylight saving time vary by country.

Thom: Un-Koch my campus.

Redskins vs. Reformed Whores: Let’s get it on!

Was MSNBC too easy on the Koch brothers?

Ann Telnes: More proof that SCOTUS is behind the times.

Chris Cillizza: Why Joe not running matters.

Congressional Hits and Misses of the week.

The 2016 Festival of Clowns:

Anonymous KKK Hack.

Sam Seder: FAUX News infotainters have difficulty understanding jobs numbers.

Thom: Will ObamaCare survive in Kentucky?

Obama on Keystone XL.

Nancy Pelosi: “The Republican Committee to Attack Women’s Health”.

Seven mistakes in Bill-O-The-Clown’s book about Ronald Reagan.

Simone Sebastian: If you oppose Black Lives Matter, you would’ve abhorred Martin Luther King.

Mental Floss: Misconceptions about famous composers.

David Hawkings’ Whiteboard: Wealth of Congress:

Red State Update: RIP Fred Thompson.

Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

Fuck You Up the Fucking Fuckhole, You Fucked-Up Fucking Fucktards

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Because, this:

Seattle Times, fucking idiots

THE most expensive race in state history for a seat in the state House might be tilting a politically divided Legislature even more toward the middle.

In the race to represent Federal Way’s 30th Legislative District, Republican Teri Hickel held an eight-point lead over Democratic Rep. Carol Gregory in Tuesday voting returns. If that lead holds in future vote counts, a win by Hickel would skinny the once-mighty Democratic majority in the House down to a 50-48 margin.

The consequences of this shift should be welcome to Washington voters seeking moderation in Olympia.

Right. Because it’s the Democrats who are immoderate and obstructionist, rather than the Republicans who have pledged not to ever raise taxes ever, for any reason, under any circumstance, no matter what. You know, the Republicans who also oppose marriage equality, reproductive rights, gun responsibility, reducing carbon emissions, teaching evolution, and just about everything else the editors claim to endorse. A Republican Party that is so bereft of ideas or intellect (or, let’s be honest, morality) that it has elevated trickle-down-regurgitating student-harassing child-bride-marrying Matt Manweller to the status of rising fucking star.

That is the party to which the wise editorial board members of our state’s paper of record look to bring “moderation” to Olympia.

Sigh. I try not to wish for the day the Seattle Times shuts down its presses. But honestly—fuck you.

Open Thread 11/4/2015

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– Hunger Strike at Texas Detention Center Swells Into the Hundreds

– Why I don’t encourage my patients to report sexual assault

– Well, the rest of the country had not so liberal an election night.

– Good old self-reliance

I mentioned on Monday, I’m going to be taking a bit of a break from writing. Probably just a couple weeks. I’ll still put up open threads, but they’ll be shorter than even this nonsense. See you in a few.

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