– I’m taking Monday off for Labor Day. Do you guys want an Open Thread on Tuesday-Thursday or to wait until Wednesday?
– I support the Seattle teachers.
– Finally a place where cars and bikes can gang up on other people. I don’t mind waiting at drawbridges that much, but I don’t bike past a bridge for my commute (generally).
Ten years ago today I received the following email from an HA reader:
I think I’ve told you that I’m into Arab horses. Well, for 3 years Michael Brown was hired and then fired by our IAHA, the International Arabian Horse Assoc. He was an unmitigated, total fucking disaster. I was shocked as hell when captain clueless put him in charge of FEMA a couple of years ago. He or the WH lied on the WH presser announcing him to FEMA. IAHA was never connected to the Olympic Comm, only the half Arab registry then and the governing body to the state and local Arabian horse clubs. He ruined IAHA financially so badly that we had to change the name and combine it with the Purebred registry.
I am telling you this after watching the fucking shipwreck in the Gulf. His incompetence is KILLING people.
After a little bit of sleuthing I turned the tip above into this scathing post that quickly went viral, transforming FEMA’s inadequate response to the tragedy in New Orleans into a national conversation about cronyism. Within days, FEMA director Mike Brown was out of a job. A month later, while testifying before congress, Brown would blame HorsesAss.org by name for his agency’s failures:
The path this story took—from a single reader’s small piece of specialized knowledge, to a local blogger, to a national blog, to the national media—may not be the first example of the transformative power of blogging. But it’s certainly one of the clearest. And I’ll always be proud to have played my little role.
Mark Fiore: Smokey the Climate Scientist.
Mental Floss: Does ginger ale really help with stomach aches?
The 2016 Clown Show:
Mental Floss: Misconceptions about cancer.
Young Turks: Terrorist attempts to bomb abortion clinic.
Gunzzzz:
Mental Floss: 31 amazing facts about household items.
Bill Maher with some New Rules.
White House: West Wing Week.
New Orleans, Ten Years after Katrina:
Sam Seder: FAUX News, “It’s hard out there for white people”.
Congressional hits and misses: Best of Ted Cruz.
Eric Schwartz: Fuck You:
Nuclear Football:
Slate: What is sex like in space?
Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.
Three tourists from Rhode Island were beaten, burned and robbed outside the 3rd Avenue transit tunnel entrance on Monday night. Why am I not surprised?
The 3rd and Pike area is so terrible that it has it’s own Twitter feed. On most days the tunnel entrance and sidewalk outside are full of drug dealers and thugs who fuck with people coming in and out of the tunnel. I stopped using that tunnel entrance and now use the one across the street next to Macy’s because of this reason. The King County Sheriff department seems to be less interested in providing security and more interested in getting themselves fired. The city and SPD have tried with the 9 1/2 block strategy to reform the area, and it has had some success, apparently not as much as could have been hoped for.
My favorite part (if you want to call it that) of the incident is this:
Police arrived at the scene, but the group of suspects had fled. However, officers did arrest one man at the scene after he interfered with medics’ efforts to treat the victims, and told the victims they “deserved’ to be beaten and robbed. Police are investigating whether the man was also involved in the robbery.
If you have anything to share regarding the crime, you can contact the SPD Robbery Unit at (206) 684-5535.
– Huzzah. It’s raining. Remember, people forget to drive in the rain every summer in Western Washington, and I’m sure this year will be worse than normal.
– A homeless woman was beaten to death so can we all just get on board with encampments now?
– The Seattle Times Editorial Board Can Go Phở Itself
– I think Donald Trump could check out the HA Bible Study if he wants to find a new favorite verse.
– My worst nightmare would be being Tim Eyman.
Rand Paul came to town recently. He said some nonsense about guns:
It was a terrible morning to glorify guns. At the exact same time that everyone on the internet was horrified by the latest in a seemingly unending string of mass shootings, Paul’s adulation of the 2nd amendment felt awkward and dripping with an unpleasant machismo. ( “If you doubt me on the 2nd Amendment, come into my house unannounced,” Paul warned as the room applauded the thought of Paul shooting another person to death.) Before Paul took the stage, local politician Elizabeth Scott was proudly introduced as a member of the NRA. Meanwhile, on Twitter, people were scrolling past auto-play videos filmed by a man as he murdered two innocent people in cold blood. For a candidate who repeatedly claims to be uniquely in touch with reality, Paul is surprisingly out-of-step with an America that overwhelmingly favors commonsense gun safety laws.
When I talk about gun control with my pro gun friends, I’ll almost always hear someone talk about responsible gun ownership. But this sort of braggadocio is alarmingly common. Oh, give me the chance to kill the fuck out of someone who comes to my house unannounced. That’s not a death penalty offense, but I’m so excited about it I’m going to share this fantasy that to a decent person would be one of the worst days of their life with several hundred supporters.
It’s something decent people aren’t fantasizing about. It isn’t something the sort of people who feel responsible would say. And if people wanted hold him responsible, they could boo instead of applaud.
Now sure, I realize that one candidate from one party who isn’t doing very well in the polls isn’t indicative of the whole of gun owners. But this sort of thing rarely, if ever, gets called out from the people who tell me they’re the responsible sort. Hell, a dickbag can wrap bacon around his gun, get what type of gun it is wrong, and nobody who claims to be all about responsible gun ownership is like “Um, noppers buddy. That’s not how ya’ do it.”
So you know, step the fuck up. Or people like me — that rare breed who do actually want to take your gun away — are going to keep being the ones to call it out.
– Maybe we shouldn’t reward Chuck Schumer for being so wrong on Iran by making him the next Democratic leader.
– Seriously, birthright citizenship is the best, and anyone opposing it is the worst. QED.
– The seawall project is over budget.
– The Breitbart people should be ashamed of themselves. Part something in an infinity series.
Mark Fiore: The toxic mining law.
Mental Floss: Why do people and animals tilt heads when confused?
Stop Being a Baby When It Comes To Access To Reproductive Health Care :
Julian Bond:
Red State Update: Black Lives Matter and Hillary and Bernie and Mike Huckabee.
Jimmy Carter talks about his cancer.
Congressional Hits and Misses: Steny Hoyer edition.
Young Turks: Will the world end in September?
The Intimate Explainer: Sweet Nothings about the Iran deal.
AT&T Helps NSA Spy on Americans:
Thom: The Good, the Bad – and the Very, Very Matronymicly Ugly!
The Iraq war hawks are back…for Iran.
Maddow: July 2015 was the hottest month ever recorded on planet earth.
Mental Floss: 21 failed inventions.
Mike Papantonio and Farron Cousins: The U.S. burns while Congress fiddles.
The 2016 G.O.P. Circus Show:
Fans want Jon Stewart to moderate a presidential debate.
Richard Fowler: Nutbag Rep. Steve King things you can marry your lawn mower.
Thom: Here are the different rules for Democrats and Republicans.
White House: West Wing Week
Pap and Farron Cousins: Florida’s criminal Governor still stealing trom tax payers.
Mental Floss: Misconceptions about space.
Citizen Zimmerman:
Who funds the anti-immigrant hatred?
College Humor: 31 words that sound like slurs…but aren’t.
A baby seal responds to Shell Oil Drilling in the Arctic.
Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.
When the legislative session finally ended, Senator Schoesler — the Majority Leader — decided to write about how excellent the session turned out. In light of the legislature being in contempt for how badly they fucked up on education (paraphrasing the recent McCleary ruling), I thought it would be fun (?) to revisit. Enjoy…
This year’s Legislature did not impose a general tax increase. We did end a couple of small tax breaks, which some members of the Democratic majority in the House are calling a major victory, and we raised gas taxes for road construction with our transportation package. But that’s not quite the same thing as imposing $1.5 billion in new and increased taxes to finance the growth of government, remake the state economy to suit liberal urban activists, and set the state up for an income tax in the future.
You could have maybe been on the path to sustain education if not for that. Anyway, I’m sure that knowing that the state officially fucked up education, we can look back on the education part of the post and see how the top GOP person thought about that issue.
Victory number two? We fully funded basic education, passing the best K-12 budget we have seen in the last 30 years. We increased spending by $1.3 billion and we made significant progress in satisfying the state Supreme Court mandate that we do right by our schools.
Um, not so much.
Now, I know the fuckuping on education has come with Democratic governors and with legislatures from both parties. But honestly, this is some pretty awful bragging given how horrible the courts have found it.
Roll Call: Congressional Hits and Misses…Best of Ted Poe.
Young Turks: FAUX News has zero journalistic integrity.
Coke-backed study says drinking soda isn’t bad for you.
“Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran”:
King Crockduck: Helping Hovind to understand the speed of light.
White House: West Wing Week.
Young Turks: Ted Nugent talks about getting naked and masturbating to Megyn Kelly:
Veterans for Peace want to end all wars.
Thom: Why is Shell dumping ALEC?
Mental Floss: 22 bizarre conspiracy theories.
The 2016 Clown Parade
Red State Update: Bernie Sanders v Black Lives Matter, Trump v Fox.
Mental Floss: Misconceptions about things that kill you.
Young Turks: FAUX News reacts to announcement that Jimmy Carter has cancer.
David Pakman: It is getting difficult to ignore that ObamaCare is really working.
How to be water self-sufficient.
Thom: The Good, The Bad, And the Very Very Iscarioticly Ugly!
Democratic Plan for College Students:
Liberal Viewer: FAUX News says California is breaking bad.
NSA Whistleblower Thomas Drake explains how the government violates our privacy.
Happy Birthday Social Security:
Young Turks: John Kerry raises US flag at Cuban embassy (and some Wingding heads explode).
David Pakman: EPA is responsible for Colorado’s yellow river.
Mental Floss: Why are there silent letters in English words?
Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.
Last week Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant* and I got into a conversation about rent control via email, and she provided such a clear and straightforward explanation of her position, that I asked if I could just repost it here to HA. Instead, she got back to me with the following slightly expanded, better formatted, and presumably copy edited version of her initial off-the-cuff response.
Critics have attempted to dismiss Sawant’s affordable housing advocacy as narrow, divisive, and unrealistic—at best a distraction from the real work at hand. But as you will read from the thoughtful response below, that is a gross mischaracterization. Sawant calls for a “comprehensive” approach. She supports using bonding capacity to build publicly owned housing. She supports most of the HALA recommendations, but would go further by including a “robust linkage fee.” Still, I specifically asked about rent control, and that is the focus of her response.
To me, the most compelling policy and political argument Sawant makes is the way she compares rent control to the minimum wage: they are both minimum standards necessary to protect against the natural imbalance of of power between landlord and tenant, or employer and employee. Rent control is not about repealing the market; it’s about reining in its excesses. And according to Sawant, the alleged construction-destroying impacts of rent control are just as unsubstantiated as the alleged job-killing impacts of the minimum wage.
Makes sense. But you can read for yourself:
Which Way for Affordable Housing in Seattle?
Seattle is booming with job growth and a major influx of working people. Yes, we need increased housing supply. Yes, we need zoning changes to build more housing, and to enable a denser and more walkable and accessible city. But why is there such a severe shortage of affordable housing in Seattle? And what is the solution to the problem?
Is It Just about Supply and Demand?
We are told that we need only rely on the so-called “free market.” We are told it is simply about supply and demand. Let developers build, let the supply of market-rate units increase. And at some point, magically, prices will come down and create housing affordability.Not one of the proponents of this trickle-down theory can give a plausible idea, or even so much as a rough estimate, of how many units would have to be built for that point of affordability to be reached. We are asked to go on faith.
Amanda Burden, the director of New York City’s Department of Planning, a couple of years ago acknowledged that she had truly believed that NYC could build its way out of an affordable housing shortage. She said the city “built tremendous amount of housing” with that hope, “and the price of housing didn’t go down at all.”
Why Are We Losing Existing Affordable Units?
Supply and demand do explain why Seattle rents are going up. How much your rent increases, however, is determined by the relative balance of forces between tenants and the real estate lobby. Much the same way that wages and benefits in the workplace are a reflection of how much power workers have, including whether or not they have a union, to allow them to negotiate better working conditions.In the absence of substantial tenant protections, rents tend to not only increase in a high-demand market, but to skyrocket. Why? Because developers and landlords can get away with it.
This opportunity to jack up rents means that tenants residing in market-available affordable units experience massive rent increases, which implies economic eviction. After the tenants are driven out, the previously affordable units are renovated, sometimes even minimally, and then rented for twice or three times the original rents.
What Policies Would Make Housing Affordable?
To actually create new affordable housing, we need a comprehensive policy program. I support most of the recommendations of the HALA committee, although they don’t go far enough. We need a robust linkage fee on big developers to generate a billion dollars to build affordable housing. We must also leverage the City’s bonding capacity to build thousands of units of City-owned affordable housing.But it will take years to build the thousands of affordable housing units that Seattle desperately needs. In the meanwhile, policies that stabilize rent increases are essential in order to prevent price gouging. The citywide wave of economic evictions and displacement will not be stemmed without rent regulation.
Why Rent Control and What Does it Mean?
Price gouging is not inevitable. It happens in the absence of any real protections for tenants in the form of regulation on rent increases, just like worker exploitation happens in the absence of a minimum wage. That’s where rent control comes in.By rent control, we mean linking rent increases to inflation. Landlords could still make profits and finance maintenance, but the massive rent hikes and economic evictions that we are seeing in Seattle would be prohibited.
Contrary to the myth that rent control slows construction and hurts housing supply, the two largest building booms in New York City history occurred in periods of strict rent control, first in the 1920s and again from 1947-1965. Demonizing rent control is inconsistent with what the numbers tell us.
But Republicans Control Olympia, So We can’t Win Rent Control Anyway, So Why Even Discuss It?
Rent controls are most needed in areas with runaway prices, which is typically localized metropolitan regions such as cities or counties. So the real estate lobby has always fought rent control by pouring money into the campaigns of conservative state-level politicians running from rural districts, where constituents are not demanding rent stabilization. Nothing unique about Washington State there.And the only way metropolitan areas have won rent control despite all the real estate lobby money is by building a mass movement in their cities and counties and pushing back against the state. This is exactly what I have proposed as a political strategy here in Seattle. As a first step, Councilmember Licata and I have introduced a resolution to demand that Olympia repeal the ban on all rent regulations. I urge you to sign the petition in support of this resolution.
Rent Control is One of Many Tenant Protections Seattle Needs
We need rent control, but in the meantime we also need to urgently enact other laws to protect tenants. Developer loopholes need to be closed so relocation assistance can be expanded to tenants experiencing economic evictions. Tenants need more than 60-day notice in case of large rent increases (greater than 10 or 20%). Tenants with expiring leases need just-cause eviction protections.Additionally, late fees and move-in costs for renters need to be capped. Penalties for deposit theft need to be increased. And we need a law that will require interest accrued on deposits to be returned to tenants.
To make all this possible, the City must fully fund the enforcement of tenant rights in the same way that we are setting out to enforce labor laws with the new Office of Labor Standards.
I would view the full spectrum of tenant protections (including regulating rents) with a lens similar to workplace rights. Laws such as minimum wage, paid sick leave, anti-discrimination, occupational safety, and the right to unionize haven’t killed jobs or prevented companies from making profits.
These laws protect workers and provide for a better quality of life for working people. Even the proponents of the free market theory are themselves beneficiaries of the gains of labor struggles. The gains from successful housing affordability policies will be no different. The victory on the $15 minimum wage shows what workers can win when they organize and fight back. We need to build a similarly powerful organized movement for housing justice. Let us begin.
* Duh-uh, I’m a Kshama Sawant supporter. Only an idiot would need this disclaimer, but, well, you know….
Julianna Forlano: An Absurd Minute.
The 2016 Clown Convention:
Daily Show debunks the christian anti-discrimination myth.
VSauce: The Banach–Tarski Paradox:
Thom: The Good, The Bad and The Very, Very, Ancipitally Ugly!
The Obama–Stewart Conspiracy:
Obama lectures Congress as he signs 3 month highway funding bill.
David Pakman: Boy Scouts end ban on gay adults.
Things your racist uncle says on Facebook.
Fetal Attraction:
Mark Fiore: Plutonians of color.
Young Turks: Jewish fundamentalist attacks gay pride parade.
The hidden costs of U.S. wars.
Lion Killer:
Obama: Addressing AIDS/HIV in America.
Mental Floss: 25 things you didn’t know about dreams.
The NY Times Botched Clinton Email Story:
Kimmel: The week in unnecessary censorship.
Mental Floss: Misconceptions about religions.
David Pakman: In 2015, 204 mass shootings in 204 days.
Black and White and Red All Over:
How many countries have the U.S. invaded?
White House: West Wing Week.
Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.
Maybe it’s a coincidence or maybe it’s corporate policy that have caused all 3 Seattle area Chick-fil-A stores have failed their health inspections recently. Some people might say that places are going to have bacteria and that’s why we have health inspectors in the first damn place. But my guess is God is punishing them.
God was like, “I sent my only Son to tell you to love your neighbor as yourself, and instead you guys act like a dickbags: Here have some bacteria. Also, Ezell’s is still pretty good.”
I hope that sounds absurd, but there is a version of the fundamental attribution error — call it the fundamentalist attribution error — that certain religious people can subscribe to. They believe that everything that happens that they agree with is God’s doing and everything that they don’t agree with is just stuff that happens.
Chick-fil-A should be less hateful not because God might send them some disease, but because it’s the right thing to do. While their ownership would probably disagree with me, I’d also say it’s the Christian thing to do. And they should also do a better job cleaning up. Because ick.
Exodus 32:27-29
Then he said to them, “This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: ‘Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.’” The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people died. Then Moses said, “You have been set apart to the LORD today, for you were against your own sons and brothers, and he has blessed you this day.”
Exodus 20:13
Thou shalt not kill.
Discuss.
At the beginning of July, I was out east visiting relatives and friends and took a break from the roundup. A few days before leaving, I was at Town Hall to see author Max Blumenthal speak about the latest war in Gaza. The next day, his latest book “51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza” was released and downloaded to my Kindle. The day after that, I had a 4.5 hour flight to start reading it.
Blumenthal’s book is maddening and depressing, but ultimately not all that surprising. Even following traditional news sources, the devastation and cruelty of that war was clear, and the hopelessness of the aftermath all too predictable. Civilians were deliberately targeted, even children. Entire apartment buildings were destroyed. Hospitals were blown up. Critical infrastructure left in ruins. And with promises for future retaliation, there’s little desire for the world to rebuild things that Israel will just blow up again in a few years.
The cynicism behind this military approach is clear, as Blumenthal writes in Alternet:
Behind the quasi-apocalyptic destruction exacted on Gaza by the Israeli military during Operation Protective Edge lies a sadistic strategy whose aim is to punish residents of the besieged coastal enclave into submission. The “Dahiya Doctrine,” named after a southern Beirut neighborhood the Israeli air force decimated in 2006, is focused on punishing the civilian populations of Gaza and southern Lebanon for supporting armed resistance movements like Hamas and Hezbollah. In “Disproportionate Force,” a 2008 paper published by the Institute for National Security Studies, a think tank closely linked to the Israeli military, Colonel Gabi Siboni spelled out its punitive, civilian-oriented logic clearly: “With an outbreak of hostilities, the [Israeli army] will need to act immediately, decisively, and with force that is disproportionate to the enemy’s actions and the threat it poses. Such a response aims at inflicting damage and meting out punishment to an extent that will demand long and expensive reconstruction processes.”
The level of death and destruction in this war was not an unavoidable aspect of urban warfare. It was a deliberate strategy of intimidation and terror. It was meant as a way to convince the population of Gaza to turn against its armed factions and stop resisting the occupation.
But this strategy is pure lunacy. Human beings don’t respond to having their homes blown up and their loved ones killed by agreeing to pledge their loyalty and respect to those dropping the bombs. It only solidifies the resistance behind the most radical elements of the resistance, and making compromises and mutual respect even more impossible. As a result, Gaza has transformed from a place where Hamas once challenged the Palestinian authority to be more militant into a place where Islamic State supporters now challenge Hamas to be more militant. It’s a strategy that continually backfires, but Israelis can no longer conjure up any alternatives.
Political outlooks tend to be defined by our fears. Progressives fear entrenched power limiting opportunity and progress. Conservatives fear societal change. Libertarians fear government abuses. Authoritarians fear criminality. Within different societies there can be differing levels of validity for each of these fears. But as long as the fears are rational, a democratic political process can arrive at a sensible compromise.
What’s broken in Israel is that their outlook is now dominated by fears that are largely irrational, and in a country where migrations to and from the rest of the world are common, it’s becoming self-reinforcing through those migrations. One of the striking things in Blumenthal’s recent work is how hostile Israeli society has become for those on the political left. Many are simply leaving. As Israel’s approach to the occupied territories becomes more extreme, its ability to moderate itself in a democratic process is slowly being washed away, not too differently than what happens in Gaza after weeks of bombing. The main difference is that in Gaza, the fears that work against political moderation are far more real.
In the aftermath of the nuclear agreement between the U.S. and Iran, the irrational fears that consume Israeli politics are being put on full display. Matthew Duss, one of the sharpest analysts on Israel and its place in the Middle East, explains it really well in this piece. Israel equates anti-semitic remarks by Iran’s theocratic rulers with a desire to use military force to destroy the entire state of Israel. That’s a huge logical leap, and entirely absurd. To demonstrate how crazy it is, he points out that Richard Nixon also once made a bunch of anti-semitic remarks, but had absolutely no desire to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.
But this has also historically been the mindset in Israel when it comes to the Palestinian population and their desire for self-determination. We’ve always been told that the real goal of the PLO, and then of Hamas, is not mere self-rule, but to destroy the state of Israel. And they’ve always been able to point to instances of anti-semitism and other extreme rhetoric to make this claim. To some extent, the history of the Holocaust makes these fears seem more rational, but they’re not. The next Holocaust isn’t around the corner, and neither the Palestinians nor the Iranians have any ability to threaten the existence of Israel, nor do the vast majority of people in those places want that to happen.
This is what drives the largely incoherent opposition to the Iran agreement and the completely devastating military approach in Gaza. It’s an irrational fear of democratic rule and self-determination throughout the Middle East and it goes well beyond Iran and Gaza. It also stifles democratic progress in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and it played a role in our disastrous invasion of Iraq. Obama deserves a lot of credit for getting this agreement done, but it’s only a small step towards where we need to be.
As an American Jew, it’s hard to come to the realization that our blindness to the Israeli leadership’s irrational fears is so central to the various crises in the Middle East, but that’s where I find myself today. Yet no one has become a bigger lightning rod over this conflict than Blumenthal. The Amazon reviews for his book are amazing to read through, nearly all either 5 or 1 star. But the perspective he’s providing is a necessary counterpoint to Israel’s increasingly authoritarian mindset in much the same way that the Black Lives Matter movement has been a necessary counterpoint to America’s authoritarian police culture. I don’t know what works best to fix a society that has seemingly gone off the rails, but telling hard truths and not backing down is a good place to start.
In the news from the last two weeks…
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