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Goddamn liberal Seattle and its goddamn job-killing liberal policies!

April’s jobless rate of 6.1 percent was down from 6.3 percent a month earlier.

Joblessness in the Seattle metro area, which includes Bellevue and Everett, also declined two-tenths of a percentage point in April, to 5.0 percent.

As usual, Seattle accounted for most of the state’s job growth, with 7,100 of the 7,700 total coming from King and Snohomish counties alone.

No wonder the rest of the state hates us: our high taxes are stealing their jobs!

Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat gets it half right when it comes to special levies:

If you’re feeling fatigue at all this, council members say: Blame Tim Eyman. The property-tax cap inspired by Eyman forces the city into paying for services “a la carte,” one special request at a time. They said constantly asking for more money creates a perception that taxes are high, but they remain about average for a big city.

“The reason we keep going back to this well is because of Tim Eyman,” Burgess said.

Except other local cities have figured out how to survive under Eyman’s boot heel without being in a perpetual state of need or crisis. Bellevue, for instance, has only one special levy, a parks tax that passed six years ago.

Um, so here’s the thing, Danny: We’re not Bellevue. Or Renton. Or Issaquah. Or Zillah for that matter. We’re Seattle. Which means we have different values and different needs than other cities. I don’t expect Snoqualmie, for example to feel it necessary to raise taxes to buy back in-city bus routes. But then, Snoqualmie’s not nearly as transit dependent as Seattle is. So if they don’t want to pay extra to preserve Metro, that’s up to them. But Seattle is different.

Do you think other cities are magically spending money more efficiently than Seattle? No, they’re just making the political decision to provide fewer public services. Should Seattle reject universal preschool simply because none of our neighboring cities pay for it?

The point to remember, and it’s one I’ve emphasized repeatedly, is that none of these special levies and transportation benefit districts would have been necessary without Eyman’s initiatives. The whole purpose of these initiatives was to force the funding of public services to a la carte public votes. And with the sole exception of universal preschool, all of the levies we’re being asked to approve are to preserve existing services, not create new ones.

Seattle is not a high tax city. Never has been. So rather than comparing ourselves to how other King County cities tax themselves (none of which compare to Seattle in any way), we should be focusing on what we need, what we want, and what we can afford.

By all accounts Mayor Ed Murray is expected to ask the city council to send to the ballot a measure to buy back in-city Metro bus service cuts via a $60 car tab fee and tenth of a cent hike in the sales tax. Sound familiar? That’s the exact same tax that was rejected by King County voters last month in the form of Proposition 1, because it’s the exact same taxing authority also granted to the city via a transportation benefit district.

Call it Proposition 1.1.

I suppose this funding option is as good as any other, especially considering that Prop 1 passed here in Seattle. Even better, it’s Ed’s idea rather than Ben’s, so that means Prop 1.1 will enjoy Ed’s enthusiastic support. Which is fine. I don’t really care who gets the credit for things as long as good things get done. And buying back Metro bus service cuts is a good thing.

That said, I just can’t help but feeling a little wistful over the fact that just couple years ago Seattle voters rejected a similar car tab measure targeted toward expanding transit service—precious taxing authority we’ll now be using merely to preserve transit service. That’s not much of a step forward. Also, it is of course a shame that suburban and exurban Metro riders will be totally dicked over by these cuts.  But what are we to do? Suffer in sympathy?

It’s not often that I find myself passionately on the same side of a controversial issue with the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and the Seattle Times editorial board. Then again, there really shouldn’t be anything controversial about net neutrality.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has suffered a barrage of criticism since he proposed allowing Internet service providers (ISPs) to cut deals with content providers to pay more for faster service.

Wheeler’s pay-for-prioritization proposal means the end of net neutrality, the idea that all Internet content is treated equally — free of toll booths or fast lanes.

Imagine if, let’s say, HA suddenly started loading a quarter as fast as the Seattle Times—or perhaps not at all—because I couldn’t afford to pay Comcast and Qwest the “prioritization fees” necessary to get my content to their customers  via their fast lanes? No wait. I don’t have to imagine. I’ve already been through something like that in a prior venture.

When I first started up my software company in the early 1990s, large software retailers like Egghead, Computer City, and CompUSA all bought direct. We got crappy terms, and it was often a hassle (Computer City had us ship directly to individual stores, sometimes ordering as few as two copies per store), but at least we had access to the market.

But it was right around that time that an explosion of consumer titles and a wave of consolidation started changing everything for small independent publishers. One by one the major retailers stopped buying direct, instead insisting on buying through one of two or three distributors. But we were too small to get into distribution. The two largest distributors demanded annual six-figure “market development funds”—essentially a retail channel entrance fee. A second tier distributor took us on before quickly going bankrupt, stiffing us on tens of thousands of dollars in accounts receivable.

But wait. It gets worse.

Once we lost access to brick and mortar retail, the mail order catalogs, which had previously accounted for more than 70 percent of our sales, started jacking up the “co-op advertising fees” to independents like us who had no other options. An eighth of a page ad that cost us a few hundred bucks a month in 1993 could run as much as $8,000 a month by 1996. It wasn’t that there wasn’t a market for our rhyming dictionary software, it’s that we could no longer afford to access to it. So products like ours disappeared from the market until the App Store model democratized the software industry more than a decade later.

It’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s close enough. When I first started blogging a decade ago, I had every disadvantage but one: equal and unfettered access to readers. And so I was free to compete in the marketplace of ideas, winning what readership I could based on the quality of my content rather than the whims (or extortion) of some gatekeeper. This relatively low barrier to entry is one of the things that has made the Internet so transformative. But take away net neutrality and you will ultimately create a sort of broadband apartheid—a separate and unequal Internet forever in the grasp of those who levy the tolls, and those few who can afford to pay them.

Save the Internet!

– The funny looking building that I write too many posts about is turning 10 this week.

– Congrats Daddy Constantine.

– For all the chatter about the law’s unpopularity, the fact remains that Obamacare is not only more popular than the Republican repeal fantasy, it’s also more popular than Republicans.

– Glad to see crisis pregnancy centers having trouble with their deceptive advertising.

– When did appeals to realism become a trump card in pop culture criticism? And when did we agree that a certain kind of Internet commenter is the final arbiter of what is real and what is not? (has a blurred out, but maybe still NSFW picture)

Local transit advocates are righteously pissed at Mayor Ed Murray for his public and private opposition to an initiative that would raise $30 million a year in property taxes to buy back looming Metro bus service cuts within Seattle. And Murray—who has always bristled at the charge that he is in any way “anti-transit”—is righteously pissed right back. So as a public service, I thought I’d take a moment to explain the two sides to each other in the hope of encouraging a Murrayesque consensus.

First of all, Ed, you have to understand that when critics call you anti-transit what they really mean is that you are not sufficiently anti-car. Nobody really thinks you hate buses and trains (well, nobody whose opinion you should care about). They just think that you are way too conventional in terms of your transportation thinking. Not 1950s conventional. But 1990s conventional. And a lot has changed in Seattle since you first headed to Olympia. The shift toward transit, bike, and pedestrian oriented transportation planning that may have seemed radical a quarter century ago is the consensus in Seattle today. And many transportation advocates here rightly fear that your lack of buy-in will get in the way of their urbanist vision.

It’s a balance thing. You may be more pro-transit than the majority of legislators. But that’s not good enough for Seattle.

As for Murray’s critics, you have to understand that he really means this when he says this:

Regionalism must be an element of any transit plan: Any transit financing plan – either short-term or long-term – must reflect the reality that Seattle’s economy depends on people coming into the city from throughout the Puget Sound region.

Ed and I have been having this argument for years. This isn’t just talk. He passionately believes in taking a regional approach to transportation planning, and chafes at any suggestion to the contrary. It’s one of the reasons I didn’t vote for him. But of course, he’s absolutely right. I mean, there’s at least as much utility in saving bus routes serving commuters heading to and from Seattle as there is in saving routes that operate entirely within city borders.

So regionalism should be an element of any transit plan. But the same could be said of the minimum wage, paid sick leave, and universal preschool. All of these would be better implemented at the county or state level. But they’re not. So Seattle has chosen to go it alone. Because that’s the only practical political option we have.

Still, nothing seems to shake Murray’s core belief in the efficacy of regional transportation planning, or his skepticism of Seattle-only solutions, be it for funding light rail expansion or saving the bus service we already have. So if you want to win Murray’s support for a Seattle-only bus funding measure you are going to need to convince him that it is both absolutely urgent and absolutely short term—and that you absofuckinglutely pledge to support his efforts to achieve a permanent regional solution. (Personally, I’m in a fuck the rest of King County mood at the moment, but I understand that’s not constructive.)

Shorter Goldy: Ed, stop being so defensive about being labeled “anti-transit”—it’s meant as a relative term. And everybody else, you need to pledge to support Ed’s regional approach. Then maybe we can all quit the kvetching and save some bus routes.

What the headline says:

The research literature on whether minimum wage increases kill jobs is decidedly mixed. Some economists have found that hikes lead to small job losses among teens and in industries like fast food. Others have found that losses are nonexistent, or at least negligible. In the end, I tend to argue that even if you assume reasonable job losses, middle-class and poor families come out ahead in the bargain. Though some workers end up unemployed, enough get raises to make the tradeoff worthwhile.

But that assumes we don’t lift the pay floor too high, too fast. Minimum wage studies have typically looked at small increases, somewhere around 50 cents or a dollar. Seattle’s proposal would be far larger. It would also have virtually no U.S. precedent.

So, there’s no good evidence to show that increasing the minimum wage to $15 would kill jobs, but there’s no proof that it wouldn’t. So we better not try. Or something.

Because if there’s one thing that capitalism discourages, it’s taking risks.

Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat better watch his tongue, or he soon may find himself writing at some foul-mouthed blog:

Dear Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education:

Hello from the other Washington! I’m writing to say that you can take your No Child Left Behind law and shove it.

I’d add “up your ass,” but that’s just me. Other than that, I completely agree with everything Westneat has to say about No Child Left Behind’s failed testing regime, and the political stupidity of picking a fight over it with Washington State:

I’ll close by saying I think you’re messing with the wrong state. You should try to change this “fundamentally flawed” law, rather than impose it on us out of pique. A prediction: We like to do our own thing out here anyway, and your action will only fuel more boycotts of these tests, as well as suspicion of the entire education-reform industry.

When those letters go out informing parents at every public school in the state that their school is a failure, parents, teachers, and administrators should mock these letters with celebratory dunce caps and All Children Left Behind parties. Perhaps schools should even take a day off from mandated testing to teach students important lessons of civil disobedience in American history, like the pre-Revolutionary War non-importation agreements and the various peaceful protests and boycotts of the civil rights movement.

This is a teachable moment, if not a testable one. Which is exactly the point.

Washington State will be better off resisting the feds on No Child Left Behind, and the rest of the nation would do well to our lead.

When I laid out the details of the mayor’s minimum wage proposal last week, I promised to follow up with a political analysis. But man is this a difficult post to write. Political journalists may not like to admit it, but there is an observer effect to what we do—a kinda Heisenberg uncertainty principle of politics, in which the mere act of analyzing the political process can influence its outcome.

And so it is with many, many, many caveats that I reluctantly characterize this deeply flawed and disappointing compromise as a huge fucking victory for minimum wage workers.

Um… huh?

To be clear, this is not the minimum wage proposal I would write—its phase-in is too long and complicated, its definition of “small” business too broad, and the temporary tip and benefit deduction it imposes is both unwarranted and unfair. But I’m no idiot. Given where we were just a year ago on this issue, this proposal is a bit astounding. By 2025 every worker in Seattle will earn an inflation-adjusted equivalent of $15 an hour (in 2017 dollars)—twice the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour—no tip penalty, no health benefit deduction, no total compensation, no nothing. And most fast food and other national chain workers will earn this by 2017.

Come on. Be honest. When fast food workers first walked out last year demanding a $15 minimum wage, did you really think they were going to get it?

Sure, given the strong public support for $15 and the very real threat of passing a less business friendly ballot measure, I had hoped that labor leaders would have held out for a better deal. But that said, if the city council doesn’t further water down this deal, and if our local business community not only refrains from challenging the ordinance at the ballot, but stands with workers to defend it against challenges coming from outside the city, Seattle will have achieved something truly momentous. Business buy-in wasn’t necessary to pass a $15 minimum wage at the ballot in Seattle; a ton of grassroots canvassing and a couple million dollars of well-spent media likely would have been enough. But the acquiescence of businesses groups here in Seattle will help set the frame for the minimum wage debate nationwide.

Second, let’s be clear that if it breezes through into law with little further opposition, that this minimum wage proposal will not only prove a huge win for minimum wage workers, but for the advocates who fought on their behalf, from the folks at SEIU and other unions who organized the fast food strikes and masterminded the SeaTac initiative, to Kshama Sawant, Socialist Alternative, and 15Now.org. Yes, Sawant voted against the proposal on the committee. Because that’s her role. And she’s played it astoundingly well. For without the legitimate threat from the left that Sawant and her organization provides, labor leaders would have been less able to squeeze concessions out of a business community that went into negotiations hoping to pad their profits with tip credits and total compensation and other giveaways.

If a minimum wage ordinance passes the council 9-0, and Sawant suddenly pivots to claim victory, it will be without a drop of irony. And if 15Now.org should suddenly pivot the impressive grassroots organization it is building from pushing a ballot measure to defending against one, well, minimum wage opponents should know that they will have a helluva fight on their hands.

It won’t be easy for 15Now.org to make that pivot, as this is far from a perfect proposal. Workers at small businesses who will only be earning $11 by 2017, the same year some big business workers start earning $15, will be particularly screwed by the lengthy phase-in and the temporary tip/benefit deduction. So they have every right to feel betrayed at being thrown under the bus.

But if this is ultimately the deal, and if the council can keep itself from carving out any additional loopholes, and if the business community delivers on its promise to support and defend it, then I’m enough of a political realist to know a political win when I see one.

What a bunch of fucking hypocrites:

RIGHT now the Washington state Legislature is cringing like a student who turns in homework and knows that it is incomplete. An impatient state Supreme Court demanded a fully fleshed-out plan for financing K-12 education, on its desk, by April 30.

Last week, lawmakers handed in a report that says they couldn’t reach agreement this year. It explains what the Legislature has done so far, reminds the court of the role of the judiciary, and makes a promise: We’ll take it from here.

What the court ought to do is to take lawmakers at their word, recognize that the Legislature plays a role as important as its own, and let it get down to business.

That’s right, the same editorial board that urges legislators to hold students and teachers accountable through rigorous standardized testing and inflexible graduation requirements, advises the Washington State Supreme Court to back off from holding legislators accountable for failing to meet a court order to which they are clearly in contempt.

Personally, I’m not confident that there is anything the legislature can do anymore to head off this looming constitutional crisis. But encouraging the court to do nothing pretty much assures that it will be ignored. And that’s bullshit.

Also, there’s this:

For too long, they have shorted education in all its forms, and they have spent the state’s money where the special interests were the noisiest.

… Now that Washington’s economy is recovering, the Legislature should earmark the majority of its rebounding tax revenue for education. That won’t sit well with public-employee unions and other interests that would prefer to see a tax increase.

First, that was Rob McKenna’s gubernatorial platform. And he lost. So fuck you.

Second, if the editors at the Seattle Times have any idea as to where in the state budget legislators can find an extra $3 billion to $7 billion in unnecessary spending, they have a fucking daily newspaper editorial board page in which to enlighten us. But of course, they’ve got no ideas other than UNIONS! and SPECIAL INTERESTS! and useless dog whistles like that. So fuck you.

We’re talking about our constitutional “paramount duty” here, for chrissake! We need billions a year in new tax revenue to meet McCleary. Nothing else can do it. It’s simple math. And any advocacy against raising this revenue is advocacy against both the interests of our children and against the preservation of the rule of law.

– Who could have predicted that less stimulus would mean a slower economy?

– But, as the media and general public turn their attention to other issues, it’s worth remembering that Bundy’s fringe ideas are mirrored by current efforts in many Western states to seize federal lands

– A while ago, I was farting around downtown and got on the Atlantic Street Overpass sidewalk. It wasn’t particularly helpful, but it’s nice to see that there’s now a bike path under it.

– The situation at the Bundy ranch, where armed militiamen and “Patriots” are camped out, has deteriorated so badly that competing factions apparently drew weapons on one another during heated arguments.

– Well, it’s a lousy substitute for losing our buses, but bus poetry is coming back.

– Oh, hey guys, we know the length of a day on Beta Pictoris b

It’s tough running a small business.

Your rent goes up, but what can you do? So you muddle on. Fuel costs go up, but you muddle on. The cost of supplies goes up—food, inventory, whatever—and you muddle on. The cost of borrowing goes up, and you muddle on. Health insurance premiums go up (oh man do they ever), and you muddle on.

But lawmakers talk about raising the minimum wage, and you throw up your arms and threaten to close your doors.

So what makes the cost of labor different from all those other fluctuating costs business owners must deal with every day? Labor is the only cost of business where you set the price.

And that’s where I think a lot of this emotional response to the minimum wage comes from. It’s about control. Both controlling one’s costs and controlling one’s employees. A government mandated minimum wage upsets the traditional power relationship between management and labor. And understand: for many small business owners, that’s the only power relationship in which they currently hold the advantage.

Like I said, it’s tough running a small business. I know. You put so much equity into your business—both sweat and monetary—and yet it feels like so much of what determines success or failure is beyond your control. The economy. The competition. Consumer tastes. Disruptive technologies. Taxes and regulations. Hell, even the weather. And now the City of Seattle is going to tell you how much to pay your workers? Folks who’ve never owned a business—who’ve never hired and fired—may not understand it, but the experience often comes with a profound sense of a lack of control.

I get it. And I’m not dismissing the very real financial challenge that a $15 minimum wage would pose to some businesses. But my advice to small business owners in general is to acknowledge that at least some of your negative response to this proposal is emotional, and to trust that like most of the other challenges you face on an everyday basis, you will ultimately find a way to muddle on. In fact, experience from previous substantial minimum wage hikes tells us that that’s what most small businesses manage to do. Because as much as it doesn’t feel like it, you actually have a lot more control over the success or failure of your business than simply the power to dictate wages.

Because they can:

A proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10, an underpinning of President Obama’s economic agenda and an issue that Democrats hope to leverage against Republicans in the midterm elections, failed in the Senate on Wednesday.

The vote was 54 to 42, with 60 votes needed to advance the measure.

All but one Republican voted to sustain a filibuster against the measure, saying that the increase would damage the fragile economy and force businesses to cut hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Democrats were mostly united behind the bill.

Think about that. Republicans bothered to filibuster a bill that would raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to just $10.10 an hour—despite the fact that this bill was almost certainly never would have reached the floor in the Republican controlled House. That’s how much Republicans are opposed to raising the incomes of working people.

There is class warfare being waged in our nation, and Republicans are not on the side of the vast majority of Americans.

God Damn.

A botched execution using a disputed new drug combination left an Oklahoma inmate writhing and clenching his teeth on the gurney on Tuesday, leading prison officials to halt the proceedings before the inmate’s eventual death from a heart attack.

Clayton Lockett, 38, was declared unconscious 10 minutes after the first of the state’s new three-drug combination was administered. Three minutes later, though, he began breathing heavily, writhing on the gurney, clenching his teeth and straining to lift his head off the pillow.

Shame on us as a society for allowing this to happen. There has always been the option of not executing people no matter how horrible their crimes.

No doubt there are some actual Dems who are actually disappointed at the way Kirkland mayor Joan McBride was shoved aside in the 48th Legislative District state senate race in order to make room for incumbent Democratic state Representative Cyrus Habib. McBride had gotten into the race early against turncoat incumbent state Senator Rodney Tom, but once Tom dropped out, she and Habib quickly switched races. It’s a smart political move given that the seat could determine control of the senate, but I certainly empathize with McBride or her supporters if they feel like she got the short end of the stick.

That said, the concern-trolling coming from the Washington State Republican Party is hilarious!

Democrat Kirkland Mayor Joan McBride has been running for the State Senate in the 48th legislative district for months. However, Representative Cyrus Habib has now pounced on a perceived opportunity, seeking to throw yet another woman Democrat under the bus. Habib, taking the easy way out, avoided running against Rodney Tom, but now that Tom has announced he will not seek reelection Habib wants McBride to step aside so that a more high-profile candidate (such as himself) can seek the seat. He promised he would have “a number of conversations” with party leaders. The goal seems clear: push the woman Democrat to the curb and tell her to support a male Democrat who wants to advance his personal political career.

That’s a, um, hysterical line of attack coming from state GOP chair Susan Hutchison after she made such a big stink about her party paying her less than her male predecessor. “The pay cut defies the concept of equal pay for equal work, playing into the ‘war on women’ narrative against Republicans,” Hutchison lamented at the time. But this recent I’m-rubber-you’re-glue press release is more than just ironic; it’s also an entirely calculated response intended to blunt criticism of the GOP’s anti-women policies, by, you know, accusing Democrats of hating women too!

“You know, it confuses the voters so much when both sides are accusing each other,” Hutchison told fellow GOPers January 25 at the Mainstream Republicans annual Roanoke Conference, “that you just say ‘okay, it’s a wash.’ Both anti-women.”

Ha, ha! Voters are sooooo stoopid, says Hutchison! (Okay. Maybe. But I’m not a state party chair, so I can say it.)

But Hutchison’s war on the War on Women doesn’t end there. In addition to advising Republicans to accuse Democrats of hating women, Hutchison also has some advice specifically for male candidates: “Please don’t mention the word ‘rape’ in any way,” Hutchison sagely advises. “Also, let’s not talk about anything to do with women’s reproductive cycles or um, um, women’s sexuality,” continues Hutchison before state Representative Liz Pike (R-Camas) helpfully adds in: “Don’t talk about things in the bedroom or the doctor’s office.” Because letting women know that Republicans want to control their sexuality makes it harder to win women’s votes, I suppose.

Instead, if the topic comes up, just change the subject. “Talk about the Seahawks,” suggests Hutchison.

Really:

A moment later, just beyond the end of the audio above, Hutchison goes on to amazingly describe former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee as “a victim of the war on women.”

That she even has to tell male candidates not mention the word “rape” tells you everything you need to know about a Republican Party whose policies are profoundly anti-woman. But it’s not just talk, it’s action. Hutchison’s party opposes choice—both when it comes to abortion and birth control. Republicans overwhelmingly opposed the Violence Against Women Act. They even opposed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, an irony apparently lost on Hutchison in her own struggle for equal pay.

The truth is, Democrats effectively brand Republicans as being anti-women because Republican policies are anti-women. The embarrassing “rape” talk only make it easier. So if Hutchison really wants to change that perception, perhaps she should advise the men in her party to change the party platform?