Archives for 2010

Opponents of Initiative 1107 — the beverage industry sponsored measure that would slash hundreds of millions from education and health care by repealing state taxes on soda, candy, gum and bottled water — are sponsoring a decline to sign campaign hoping to keep this well financed initiative off the ballot. You can learn more by going to Rebuilding Our Economic Future.

But what if you already signed I-1107, not realizing the measure’s impact, or snowed by the bullshit claims by many of the paid signature gatherers that it repeals a bill extending the sales tax to food? (It doesn’t.) Well it turns out that you can request the Secretary of State to remove your name from a petition if you change your mind before the deadline, and to make it easier, Rebuilding Our Economic Future is facilitating the withdrawal process online here.

Understand that the millions of dollars the beverage industry is pumping into this campaign has nothing to do with the interests of Washington state; it’s all about stopping it here before other states seek to raise taxes on calorie-laden soft drinks in the interest of public health. The beverage industry wants to make an example out of Washington state. Don’t let them.

You know I love you Josh, and I did my best to help you breath life into PubliCola, but honestly, how do you write this about Rob McKenna, without mentioning this?

I mean, the whole raison d’etre behind PubliCola at its onset was to help fill the huge news hole left by the sudden collapse of the Capitol press corps, yet this is exactly the kinda lazy conventional-wisdom-spouting-in-the-face-of-conventional-wisdom-changing-facts that McKenna is counting on to sneak his way into the governor’s mansion as, you know, a “different kind of Republican.”

Yeah sure, McKenna won a Supreme Court case he should’a won (thanks in no small part to the staff attorneys that actually wrote his brief), but the fact that he did his job for a change is not reason enough to ignore the times he doesn’t.

Really.

Every year at least one bill is introduced in the Washington State Legislature to cap payday lending rates somewhere short of the 391% annualized rate currently charged. And every year, due to a total lack of support by Republicans, and aggressive opposition from key, payday-industry-captive Democrats, the bill fails.

Yet Illinois — yes, famously corrupt Illinois — doesn’t seem to have the same problem reigning in legalized loansharking:

Payday loan predators have peddled consumer installment loans with interest rates which have averaged 341% in Illinois, but have also reached 1,000%. Under the new law, rates on consumer installment loans will be capped at 99% for loans $4,000 and less and 36% for loans greater than $4,000.

A few years ago, when a 99% top rate was floated here in WA as a compromise between the 391% currently charged and the 36% rate reformers had proposed, opponents screamed that it would be industry killer. Makes you wonder… if an industry can’t get by charging 99% interest, perhaps it shouldn’t exist?

Meanwhile, all reformers managed to squeeze out of the WA legislature was a law limiting customers to eight loans in a 12-month period, a measure intended to prevent borrowers from having their debt snowball indefinitely. Yet the industry quickly managed to run around even this modest reform.

You’d think Washington could do better in defense of some of our most vulnerable citizens.

A volunteer with the I-1068 campaign catches some paid gatherers in Tacoma duping people into signing another petition by telling them it’s the Marijuana Reform Act.

I’ve had several occasions throughout this signature gathering cycle where paid gatherers have expressed frustration over the difficulty for them to get signers for their initiatives. One lady outside of my local Safeway took a few of my I-1068 petitions because people kept asking her if she had it for them to sign. At Folklife, one of the paid gatherers shadowed me for a bit to try to get more signatures from the people who were signing I-1068.

But in the end, those less popular initiatives will be on the ballot while I-1068 may not be. It’s all about having the money to pay people to get the signatures, and that simple fact is something that has made me more fully appreciate the mess that our initiative system has become.

UDPATE: Obviously, if the scam described in the post above is more widespread than just this one incident, there’d be a certain number of people who think they’ve signed I-1068, but really haven’t (and therefore would decline to sign the actual I-1068 petition if offered). With yesterday’s Supreme Court decision, we may be able to have the traceability required to figure out who’s been scammed and who was doing the scamming. You’re required as a signature gatherer to sign your name to the petitions you turn in.

Two days in a row of seventy-some degree, almost sunny weather? How could we stay inside?

In defending his refusal to fulfill his statutory duty to represent Public Lands Commissioner Peter Goldmark in court, Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna has publicly worried that an appeal in the underlying eminent domain case could create “bad law,” an ironic concern considering that by forcing a constitutional showdown with Goldmark, McKenna could end up narrowly redefining the powers of his office… including his claimed power to participate in the Florida lawsuit seeking to toss out key provisions of the landmark Patient Protection and Affordability Act.

As I’ve previously explained in detail (here and here), Washington’s constitution and statutes are unambiguous. In states where the constitution requires that the attorney general “shall perform such other duties as may be prescribed by law,” courts have generally ruled that the office does not retain the traditional common law powers attributed to the position, but rather only those that, well, “may be prescribed by law.” And  RCW clearly states that “It shall be the duty of the attorney general” to represent the commissioner “when requested so to do by the commissioner.”

McKenna appears to claim a broader power to protect the public interest that trumps his statutory duty to provide legal representation to state officers, a claim on which he seems unlikely to prevail given the clear language of the constitution and the statutes. And the state Supreme Court could merely leave it at that, granting Goldmark a writ of mandamus, and compelling McKenna to either bring the appeal or hire outside counsel to do so.

But the court could go further, by settling this issue once and for all. And if the court were to follow the West Virginia example and rule that office grants the attorney general no common law powers, but only those powers and duties prescribed in statute, it could prove a major blow to McKenna’s efforts to fend off a lawsuit from Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes that asks the court to compel McKenna to withdraw from the Florida suit.

Indeed, as part of a recently filed brief, Holmes makes the exact same argument in a section titled “The Attorney General has only the authority granted by statute.”

Respondent assumes that the fact he is “independently elected” somehow clothes him with extrastatutory authority. … The history and provisions regarding the role of the Attorney General in this state demonstrates otherwise.

Holmes goes on to quote State ex rel. Winston v. Seattle Gas & Electric Co. (the same case I’ve previously cited), in which the court was unambiguous about the matter:

The legislation of the state shows that the legislature has not considered that the attorney general is clothed with any other power than that conferred upon him by the constitution or by express legislative enactment. Where it has been deemed necessary for the attorney general to appear and represent the state, authority for that purpose has been give to him by express enactment.

While I admit that there is a stronger legal argument to make that the attorney general has the discretion to take affirmative actions than he does to refuse statutory duties (for example, McKenna probably could have brought the appeal on his own initiative without Goldmark’s request), a ruling in Goldmark v. McKenna that confirms Holmes argument against extrastatutory powers would breath new life into a case that few have paid much attention to thus far.

And in the event that Holmes prevails, and the state Supreme Court orders McKenna to withdraw from the Florida lawsuit, it could have a huge impact in other states that share similar statutory construction where parties are challenging their attorney general’s power to join the Florida suit.

That’s admittedly a lot of “ifs,” but if McKenna is as cognizant of creating case law as he implies, then perhaps he should have thought this thing through before stubbornly denying an equally stubborn Goldmark his right to due process.

Not surprisingly, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld Washington’s Public Records Act today, rejecting Referendum 71 backers’ claims that revealing the names of those who signed the petition would violate their First Amendment right to free speech. The court ruled 8-1, with only Justice Clarence Thomas dissenting.

R-71 would have repealed WA’s recently passed domestic partnership law. During the signature gathering phase, some gay rights activists had threatened to publish the names of people who signed the petition.

I say the decision is not surprising because state and federal courts have already recognized that there are limited circumstances in which petitions and campaign finance records can be withheld from public disclosure to protect the rights of the participants, so there was no need for such a sweeping ruling. Indeed, the SCOTUS referred the case back down to the lower courts to determine whether R-71’s signers can be revealed under its particular circumstances.

You can read the whole opinion here.

UPDATE:
As mentioned in the comment thread, SCOTUSblog has a good synopsis of the ruling, so I don’t really feel the need to go into any additional detail, except to thumb my nose at Tim Eyman.

A little more than a year to the day that I freed myself from the international seltzer cartel, I finally drained my CO2 tank, and swapped in a replacement.

I figure we’ve been averaging two to three liters of carbonated beverage a day (mostly water, though some juice, and a few other weird experiments), which is pretty much in line with the 1000-liter estimate I’d seen for a 20-lb tank. So my initial $240 investment worked out to a cost of about $0.24/liter over the first year.

From here on out though it really starts to pay off. The tank exchange cost only $18 with tax; that’s less than two cents a liter from here on out, compared to about a buck a bottle for two liters of the store brand variety. Sweet. (Well, actually, fizzy.)

Whatever your opinion of President Barack Obama and General Stanley McChrystal, and whatever you think about the nature of McChrystal’s remarks or the circumstances in which they were said, I would hope you would agree that the change in military command that took place today is emblematic of the democratic values that have preserved the American experiment over the past couple centuries.

In many other nations, including many democracies, the president or prime minister would have been reluctant to remove a top general under similar circumstances out fear of how the rest of the military might react. But here in these United States, our President had to remove Gen. McChrystal for exactly the same reason.

The President is the Commander-in-Chief of our armed forces, and under our principle of civilian control such public mockery of the President by a top general and his staff is no more acceptable than public mockery of the general by his lieutenants. Regardless of the immediate impact on the war in Afghanistan, had President Obama not accepted McChrystal’s resignation of command, it would have set a dangerous example that could only lead to further insubordination, and a deterioration of military discipline.

While many pundits seem surprised by President Obama’s actions, it’s hard to see how he had any other choice.

Judging from the cursory coverage thus far of the Goldmark v. McKenna dispute, I can only assume that our local media just doesn’t get it. And while I expect this sort of thing from the McKenna-infatuated Seattle Times, I’m a bit surprised by the apparent lack of interest from even our dramatically shrunken Olympia press corps.

I mean, you’d think one of several story lines might catch some editor’s attention. You’ve got one statewide elected official taking another statewide elected official to the state Supreme Fucking Court… and for not doing his job, for chrisakes. That sure sounds sexy. And then you have the Okanogan County born and raised Commissioner of Public Lands — the only statewide elected official hailing from the other side of the mountains — attempting to protect his obscure part of the state from the Republican 2012 gubernatorial frontrunner’s expansive defense of a rapacious use of eminent domain. Just imagine the headlines.

Well, you may have to keep on imagining, because to be honest, political reporting in Washington state just isn’t all that good.

On the one hand, reporters in Olympia know state government really well, but politics… not so much. Oh, they think they know politics, because they hang out with legislators, but considering the odd fact that legislators don’t really drive politics in Washington state, this actually puts the Olympia press corps at a disadvantage. Then you have the Seattle reporters, who tend to kinda get the political stuff, but don’t really know the ins and outs of state government… at least not as well as the Olympia full-timers.

Oh… and our state’s few remaining experienced environmental reporters… the journalists most likely to be assigned a story that appears to concern natural resources…? No offense intended, but they really don’t know politics or state government.

Of course, everybody thinks they know everything — that’s human nature — so they don’t bother to ask about what they don’t know they don’t know.

It wasn’t always this way — you know, just a few years ago, when the Capitol press houses were packed to the gils with seasoned reporters competing with each other to break stories — but the sudden collapse of political coverage in our state has been absolutely stunning. And so stories like this tend to fall through the cracks because they are too political for environmental reporters, too environmental for Capitol reporters, too inside-Olympia for Seattle reporters and too wonky/legal for just about everybody in a state press corps that I’m not sure includes a single lawyer amongst its ranks.

And that’s how a constitutional crisis gets virtually ignored while a cute baby seal grabs front page headlines.

The United States advances to the second round of the World Cup tournament with a 1-0 victory over Algeria, after dramatically scoring their second goal of the match in the 91st minute of, um, a 90 minute game. Go figure.

One of the downsides to media relations staff refusing to relate with the media, is that with our questions left unanswered, we’ve got no choice but to speculate. And one of the speculations going around the environmental community these days is that Attorney General Rob McKenna decided not to appeal, partially at the urging of representatives from the Public Utility Districts.

So I repeat the question I posed to his office in the email they refused to even acknowledge:

7. Has the AG or his staff discussed this case with representatives from the Okanogan PUD or the WA PUD Association? Whom? When?

I believe there may already be a public records request put in on this question, but I’m not really interested in whether McKenna slipped up and communicated with the PUDs via his state email address, or arranged a meeting or telephone call via official channels. I want him to come clean with the public and tell us whether he or his staff ever talked to the folks on the other side, under any circumstances, before deciding not to file the appeal.

Because listening to him talk about his obligation to protect the broader public interest, it certainly sounds that way.

A few random items:

– How a drunken bus ride from Paris to Berlin may result in a major change to our Afghanistan train wreck.

– Adam Serwer writes about how we turned Faizal Shahzad from a warrior into a pathetic loser by giving him access to our justice system.

– Haven’t been able to sign the I-1068 petition yet? Just pick up a copy of The Stranger this week.

– Gene Johnson writes about how medical marijuana patients can get the shaft in custody disputes.

– KUOW aired a discussion on marijuana policy yesterday. I didn’t get a chance to listen to it yet, but you can listen to it online here.

– Mark Cooke also discusses the futility of the recent DEA sweep.

UPDATE: And one more link…

– What happens if both liquor privatization initiatives pass?

Please join us tonight for an evening of politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. We meet at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning at about 8:00 pm. Stop by even earlier and enjoy some dinner.

Not in Seattle? There is a good chance you live near one of the 327 other chapters of Drinking Liberally.

Who says my comment threads are total garbage? Well… I often do, but of course I’m exaggerating, as there’s always the occasional gem amongst turds, like yesterday’s comment pointing to this post from The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: “If you tax them, will they flee?”

The conclusion? Not really.

As Ezra Klein’s research desk explains, most studies show that rich people don’t flee higher-tax states for lower-tax ones and “the revenue generated by state tax increases on high earners overwhelms that lost from taxpayers’ leaving.” …  In fact, raising taxes on the highest-income households — a group that’s enjoyed the greatest rise in incomes and the greatest decline in taxes in recent decades — is a sensible and effective way for states to help offset the huge drop in revenues during the recession.

Tax rates just aren’t a big part of most people’s decisions about where to live — though that doesn’t stop some opponents of raising taxes on the wealthy from stringing together a few anecdotes in hopes that the rest of us will believe millionaires are in full flight from states that have called on them to pay their fair share.

[…] Perhaps the most definitive study, by Princeton University researchers, found that after New Jersey increased taxes on those making over $500,000, it experienced a yearly revenue loss of about $38 million because of those who left — but a gain of more than $1 billion from those who stayed.

I mean, it’s strange enough that one of I-1098 opponent’s loudest arguments against a high-earner’s income tax is that wealthy people are essentially a bunch of selfish, bean-counting misers who will collectively pick up and move to Nevada to avoid it. (A little projection there?) But it’s not even true.