Archives for 2010

I’m embarrassed to admit that I kinda like Seattle Times editorial columnist Bruce Ramsey… you know, as a person, not as an editorialist for chrisakes. But I’d like him a helluva lot more if he were a bit more consistent.

For example, today Bruce is outraged over legislative attempts to reform the initiative process (reforms that are brought up every session, yet predictably never get out of committee). Applying campaign finance limits to initiative campaigns? Spiteful. Requiring paid signature gatherers to register with the PDC? Punitive. Raising the $5 filing fee from its 1912 cost to something approaching an inflation-adjusted value (about $110)? Well… um… Bruce defiantly stamps his foot down:

[T]he state constitution declares that the people’s right of petition “shall never be abridged.”

Really, Bruce? Huh, I don’t remember you coming to my defense when your own editorial page urged a Thurston County court to bar Initiative 831 from the ballot, and I sure as hell don’t remember you pontificating about my “right of petition” when the judge issued a wholly unconstitutional order barring me from filing my petitions with the Secretary of State.

No, I guess denying me and my tens of thousands of supporters our right to petition our government was okay, because we weren’t taking the initiative process seriously enough for civic leaders like you and your fellow editors. Besides, I guess I should’ve been satisfied enough, having “successfully placed the phrase ‘horse’s ass’ into dozens of family newspapers.” As if I held a fucking gun to your heads.

In the end, a humorless assistant AG and a humorless Superior Court judge denied me my constitutional rights, knowing full well that I lacked the resources to file an appeal. Written in the form of a resolution, the AG argued that I-831 was not legislative in nature because it failed to amend the RCW, and thus was outside the scope of the initiative process. And so for only the second time in our history , the state stooped to pre-ballot review to invalidate a proposed measure.

And you and your paper cheered them on.

So here’s your chance to make amends Bruce. An initiative was recently filed seeking to change our state’s official seal to that of “a tapeworm dressed in a three piece suit attached to the taxpayer’s rectum.” I’m the last person to come out against the use of the initiative process for satirical purposes (even if it’s totally misguided considering that WA hasn’t raised a single tax since 2005), but I’ve read the initiative, and while it seeks to direct the Legislature to change the seal, like I-831, it doesn’t actually amend the RCW itself. Thus under the precedent set in Goldstein v. Gregoire, that should place it outside the scope of the initiative process.

So if you want to be consistent in your advocacy for the integrity of the initiative process, I would expect you and your editorial board to urge the AG to deny this initiative a title, and if it ultimately goes before a judge, to editorialize in favor of denying this petitioner the same fundamental rights that were denied to me.

Or… would that run counter to your impassioned defense of initiative sponsors against any and all obstacles?

I’m confused, Bruce. Perhaps you can explain why it’s so outrageous to, say, bar convicted sex offenders and identity thieves from being hired to gather our addresses and signatures, yet it’s okay to use the full legal resources of the state to harass a petitioner and bar his satirical initiative from the ballot? Or… would you argue that your ed board was wrong in advocating that I-831 be tossed from the ballot?

I await either an explanation or an apology.

I may not be a big fan of the Seattle Times editorial board’s prose, but it turns out it’s better than their verse.

“HOW do you solve a problem like Pamela?” reads the Times’ lede on the latest Pam Roach soap opera, apparently thinking they’ve made a clever reference to the iconic song “Maria” from the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic, The Sound of Music.

But they haven’t. Because “Pamela” and “Maria” don’t rhyme. They don’t even share the same meter.

“Maria” is a double or feminine rhyme, with the accent falling on the second to last syllable, whereas “Pamela” is a triple rhyme (or antepenult) with the accent falling on the third to last syllable. To rhyme with “Maria” you’d need a word that mimics its final two syllables, like “Korea” or “diarrhea” or “onomatopoeia.” To rhyme with “Pamela,” you’d need a word that mimics all three syllables, absent the “P.”

Not only doesn’t “Maria” rhyme with “Pamela,” offhand, I can’t think of another word in the English language that does.

And to make matters worse, not only isn’t the Times lede singable as written, nobody but nobody refers to Pam Roach as Pamela. So this supposedly clever reference fails on two fronts. (Not to mention the fact that 95% of non-gay-male readers under the age of 40 probably aren’t even familiar enough with the song to get a properly made reference in the first place.)

Fail, fail, fail.

And even as a fail, the Times’ reference is unoriginal. Indeed, I castigated Newsweek on similar lines just a couple months ago, for attempting to force “Sarah” into the same lyric in a feeble cover headline.

Of course, it is possible to make this lyrical reference work, as I did in a headline not too long ago. My secret? Having the discipline to only make the allusion where it fits.

So my advice to the Times’ editorialists is to leave the rhyming verse to the experts, and stick to… well… I’d prefer they leave the editorializing to experts as well, but I suppose we can’t have everything.

It’s a double-header Drinking Liberally in Seattle this evening. You get two chances to engage in politics under the influence. The early meeting will be at O’Asian Kitchen 800 5th Ave starting at 5:30 and going to 7:00 or 7:30. The later meeting is at the usual place: Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning about 8:00 pm. Or stop by earlier and join some of us for dinner.

Not in Seattle? There is a good chance you live near one of the 344 other chapters of Drinking Liberally.

Nobody wins elections they’re not running for like Dino Rossi.

After losing an excruciatingly close race to Christine Gregoire in 2004, Rossi went on to win multiple gubernatorial opinion polls in 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2009, as well as several head to head match-ups with Sen. Maria Cantwell in 2005. Indeed, just about the only poll Rossi has lost over the past five years was the one counted, in November of 2008.

And now comes news that Rossi has defeated Sen. Patty Murray in an opinion survey conducted by Moore Insight.

Encouraging news indeed for those Republicans living in that alternate universe where contests are decided months or even years before or after election day, and solely on the basis of surveys conducted by Republican pollsters.

Well, sorta. The Academy Award nominations came out today, and “The Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardner” was nominated in the category of Documentary, Short Subject. The film chronicles our former governor’s Initiative 1000 campaign, in which voters overwhelmingly approved the “Death With Dignity” measure.

I hadn’t even heard about the film until Will, who worked for the campaign, called me with news. Here’s hoping the shots of him didn’t all end up on the cutting room floor.

Now that’s rich… the Seattle Times editorial board giving Apple’s Steve Jobs business advice:  “Apple’s latest iDevice needs a new name.”

Huh. Now let’s see. Since returning to Apple about a decade ago, Steve Jobs has rescued it from oblivion while introducing a string of hit products that have led to soaring market share, unmatched margins, and quarter after quarter of record profits… even during the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression. In the process Jobs has also managed to redefine both the music and smartphone industries, while increasing Apple’s share price some 2800%.

Meanwhile, over that same decade, the Times has watched its readership, influence, newsroom and revenues shrink to the point where 49% shareholder McClatchy has essentially written off its investment to zero.

And they’re telling Jobs how to run his business?

But it’s not so much the misplaced smugness of the Times editorial that bugs me, or the fact that it’s based on a lazy joke that had run its course within hours of last week’s product announcement. It’s that with everything else going on in the world today, this is what they waste precious op-ed column inches on?

And I’m the one who’s accused of not being serious.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in favor of dropping the armed forces’ 16-year-old “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, and for the first time allowing openly gay men and women to serve in the U.S. military.

“No matter how I look at the issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens,” Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee. He said it was his personal and professional belief that “allowing homosexuals to serve openly would be the right thing to do.”

When President Bill Clinton attempted to address this issue early in his first term, the ensuing controversy sidetracked his administration, and resulted in the insulting and unworkable half-measure we have today. But it increasingly looks like President Obama need expend little political capital to fulfill this particular campaign promise.

My what a difference a decade and a half makes.

The headline in the Seattle Times says it all: “Gregoire opposes Seattle officials’ request to rethink 520 bridge.”

Of course she does. As does Judy Clibborn (D-41) and Mary Margaret Haugen (D-10), the respective chairs of the House and Senate transportation committees.

And what do all three elected officials have in common? None of them are from Seattle.

Meanwhile, a bill is meandering through the Legislature that would severely limit cities’ local control over large projects in their district, like, you know, the Alaskan Way Viaduct Tunnel, and the 520 bridge.

Of course my gut reaction is to rail against the rest of the state for their “Fuck Seattle” attitude, and the way elected officials outside the city explicitly and implicitly exploit it to their own political advantage. But really, we only have ourselves to blame.

We’re the ones so caught up in the Seattle Way that we can’t ever seem to make a firm decision for fear of pissing off one constituency or another, and we’re the ones who consistently elect perhaps the most anemic political class of any major city in America. Theoretically, the Seattle delegation represents the largest and most powerful political block in the Legislature, and yet they’re either incapable of working together that way, or unwilling to do so out of fear of reinforcing the stereotype that Seattle dominates the state.

Well I’ve got news for you: Seattle should dominate the state! This is where the largest chunk of voters live, and this is where an even larger chunk of the wealth (i.e. tax base) resides. Unlike the goddamn U.S. Senate, we elect all our legislators by the person, not the square mile, and so it’s only fair that our population-dense city gets a disproportionate share of state spending and power.

And yet at a time when two major transportation projects threaten to reshape the city for the next half century or more, we can’t even manage to put one of the transportation committees in the hands of a Seattle legislator. We’re pathetic.

The Seattle Times is earning well-deserved kudos for its three-part exposé of abuse and neglect at adult family homes… which is kinda ironic considering how vociferously its editorial board has opposed an initiative that would require adequate screening, training and certification of long-term-care workers.

Initiative 1029 was overwhelmingly approved by voters in 2008, securing 72.5% of the vote statewide, and passing by better than 20-point margins in all 39 counties. According to King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, writing in its defense, the measure was intended to do two simple things:

• It requires FBI criminal-background checks for all long-term-care workers.
• It requires home and community-based long-term-care workers to complete 75 hours of training — the national standards for nursing-home workers — and pass a certification exam to demonstrate basic competence.

Yet despite the glaring need for better qualified long-term-care workers, and the unparalleled popularity of the measure, the Times, our state’s paper of record, urged voters to reject the initiative before the election, and has repeatedly argued for its repeal several times since, including just days after it passed:

Voters’ good, compassionate intentions were abused by the sponsors of Initiative 1029, which purported to ensure higher-quality long-term-care workers for the elderly and people with disabilities.

This measure, which passed handily, is nothing more than an artfully worded ballot measure that belies the bad public policy it is and the serious blow it will give to our state’s troubled budget — about $30 million over the next three years. … The Legislature and the governor should exercise their right to overturn this initiative immediately.

Tim Eyman’s tax-limiting I-960, which passed with a bare 51% of the vote, that the Times argues should be inviolable. But I-1029, the first statewide measure ever draw over 2 million votes… well… voters were hoodwinked or something, so the Legislature should just toss that one right out.

Why? Well, the Times argues that we just can’t afford $28 million over three years for training and certification. Oh, and the Times liked a supposedly “bipartisan” bill better.

But if you read through its several editorials on the subject, one pattern quickly emerges:

“The SEIU spent $650,000 of union funds to promote its proposal as I-1029.”

“Workers already organized would be trained by the SEIU and paid by the state.”

“Then the SEIU drafted this union-building, state budget-busting initiative and played off voters’ good intentions to get a better deal.”

SEIU this, SEIU that. This isn’t about responsible budgeting or a deliberative legislative process — and it certainly isn’t about the welfare and well being of seniors. No, the Times editorial board’s vehement and relentless opposition to I-1029 stems mostly from its vehement and relentless opposition to SEIU, and organized labor in general.

See, if it’s supported by labor, it’s opposed by the Times, the painful, puss-filled, oozing bedsores of neglected seniors be damned.

Online retailing giant Amazon caved to book publisher Macmillan over the weekend, first pulling then restoring their catalog in a dispute over e-book pricing. Not too surprising.

But what really struck me was the statement Amazon issued Sunday afternoon in announcing their capitulation:

“We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books,”

Really? Macmillan has a “monopoly” over their own titles? Isn’t that kinda like saying that McDonald’s has a monopoly over its own burgers, or that, say, Amazon has a monopoly over the sale of its own Kindle devices?

It is a rather startling implication — that there is something wrong with a publisher maintaining monopoly control over its own titles — but not as purely silly or resentful as it may first appear. The sale of goods and e-goods are not the same thing, and this shift away from physical media to online distribution may in fact demand a dramatic rethinking of the traditional relationship between content creators, owners and resellers.

And it will be fascinating to watch how this all works out.

Friday’s post on Kemper Freeman Jr. generated quite a few angry responses from apologists who insisted it was unfair of me to brand the Eastside real estate mogul with his own shameful family history. But if Freeman insists on wielding his wealth and power to influence public policy, I think it only fair and useful to evaluate his words and deeds within a broader historical context.

There is no such thing as a self-made man, and Freeman is arguably less so than others. Inheriting a family fortune built on the suffering of Japanese Americans and the taxpayer largesse that built two floating bridges to his Bellevue real estate holdings, Freeman’s own business investments can be seen as a continuation of a development strategy first laid out by his father and grandfather decades earlier. This is the family that raised and trained him, and from whom he clearly inherited the auto-centric/anti-rail philosophy that drives his civic participation. So why should his family history be ignored when attempting to discern Freeman’s personal motives?

Of course, I don’t raise these issues merely to fling poo at someone with whom I disagree politically (although I must admit that it can be pleasantly cathartic), but rather to chip away at the undeserved credibility Freeman appears to enjoy on transportation planning issues. The fact is, Freeman and his family have prospered handsomely from the public subsidy of our automobile culture, and thus his vehement pro-roads/anti-rail advocacy must be understood in that context. Likewise, as the great-grandson of a Confederate veteran and the grandson of the president of the Anti-Japanese League, it is only reasonable to explore the roots of Freeman’s passionate opposition to allowing South Seattle rail riders convenient access to his exclusive Bellevue properties.

Again, this all comes down to credibility. If his credibility largely stems from his personal wealth, then the circumstances of his wealth are fair game. But if his credibility is supposedly based on merit, then that should be evaluated too.

For example, my first introduction to Freeman came shortly after I began blogging in 2004, while covering Initiative 883, the Freeman backed measure that would have opened up HOV lanes to single occupancy vehicles, while diverting money from transit and other programs to build more highway lanes. After spending $350,000 on the campaign, 90% of it his own money, Freeman abruptly pulled the plug on the initiative just weeks before the petition filing deadline. The campaign told the Seattle Times that it had collected about half the 197,000 required signatures, but even that is surely an exaggeration.

So how do you spend that much money on a signature drive, and yet fall so far short of the mark? Well, you do it by spending your money very poorly.

According to PDC reports, over the course of its several month signature drive, I-883 spent only $92,000 on “voter signature gathering” (enough for maybe 60,000 signatures, tops), compared to $180,000 on “management/consulting services.” That’s gotta be the most inefficient signature campaign I have ever seen.

To put this in perspective, were Freeman put in charge of our region’s transportation budget, and he managed it as efficiently as he managed the I-883 campaign, for every $1 billion we spent constructing new roads, we’d spend an additional $2 billion on management and consulting fees.

So much for the private sector being more efficient than the public.

I mean, any idiot can successfully run a well financed signature drive (you know who you are, Tim), and yet Freeman couldn’t even manage that. And this is the guy who routinely attacks our regional transportation planning as wasteful and inefficient?

So if Freeman’s perceived credibility on transportation planning doesn’t come from merit, and it doesn’t come from any particular expertise on, you know, transportation planning (former State Transportation Secretary Doug MacDonald labeled some of Freeman’s proposals “wacky“), where does it come from? Apparently, simply by virtue of him being Kemper Freeman Jr.

And that’s all the more reason to make every effort to put Freeman’s advocacy in its proper context.

Speaking of investigative reporting, Michael Hood’s got the first of a two part series up on BlatherWatch, exposing former KVI host Peter Wiessbach’s exploitive janitorial business.

It’s an insight into how sleazy operators like Weissbach use illegals. Business always claims American workers won’t do such lowly work, but this demonstrates that some employers give preference to the undocumented.

SBM systematically hired and exploited workers who, because of legal status complied in fear of losing their jobs or being detained and deported.

Janitors who questioned or complained about these practices were summarily fired- as were such managers- after first being frozen out of the management loop.

An ex-manager describes workers with so little English he needed take another worker away from his work to translate the manager’s instructions. When he asked HR asked why he couldn’t get anyone who speaks English, he was told: “[We] don’t hire those kind of people. [We] only hire illegals who mainly speak very little- if any- English.”

Just to be clear, not all conservative talk hosts are exploitive, hypocritical scumbags. They may be 99% wrong 99% of the time, but personally, I’ve never met a KVI host I didn’t like. Then again, I’ve never met Wiessbach.

Personally, I don’t look to the Seattle Times for this kinda stuff anymore. Like most people today, I purchase most of my seniors on Craigslist.

(All snark aside, if there’s anything that makes daily newspapers essential, it’s investigative reporting like this.)

On Friday, Slog reported that an income tax initiative had been filed, prompting the following commentary from the Secretary of State’s office:

“You cannot have a graduated state income tax without amending the state constitution. The court has been clear on that,” says Dave Ammons, spokesman for the Secretary of State.

To which I have two main responses. First, the Washington State Supreme Court last explicitly ruled on this issue way back in 1933; our current slate of Supreme Court justices have never addressed this issue, and as the precedent flouting majority on the U.S. Supreme Court recently demonstrated, the opinions of the current justices are the only ones that matter. Second — and I mean this with all due respect to Dave Ammons, Secretary of State Sam Reed and the rest his office — it’s none of their fucking business.

To elaborate on my second point first, up until the moment the petitions are filed, the Secretary of State’s role in the initiative process is purely administrative, and even then the grounds for rejecting petitions are quite limited, so I can’t help but wonder why Ammons would comment on the measure’s constitutionality at all? I don’t remember Reed’s office commenting on the constitutionality of any of Tim Eyman’s initiatives. Hell, I’ve seen the SOS quietly process initiatives that don’t even amount to a complete sentence.

So while I’ve no doubt that Reed personally opposes an income tax, his office has no business nor expertise in commenting on its constitutionality.

Which brings us back to my first point, the constitutional question itself. I’ve written extensively on this subject, most recently highlighting this excerpt from the Washington State Tax Structure Committee report:

[T]here is ample reason to believe that a modern income tax, established by the Legislature or by the voters, would now be upheld. The basic reason is that [Culliton v. Chase] was based on an earlier Washington case which the State Supreme Court clearly misread. More importantly, the earlier case was based on a line of United States Supreme Court cases that have subsequently been reversed. Our Court would likely take a “clean slate” approach to the income tax today.

See that? Courts sometimes overturn earlier decisions, both old and new. Indeed, the SCOTUS just overturned a century of precedent on campaign finance law — precedent it had upheld as recently as seven years ago — so it’s kinda silly to dismiss a state income tax as patently unconstitutional based on a 77-year-old 5-4 decision that has left Washington with a legal definition of “income” that is at odds with virtually every other court in the nation, state and federal.

Furthermore, if you read the text of the proposed initiative, it becomes instantly clear that the authors have bent over backwards to accommodate the bizarre semantics that constitute our state’s current legal framework on the subject — one which, for example, allows the state to levy a nonuniform business tax on gross revenue, but not on net revenue (i.e., income). Aping the language of our existing Business & Occupation tax, the measure attempts to levy a 5% “excise tax” on joint adjusted gross incomes over $400,000 a year (9% on the portion over $1 million), while simulating exemptions by redefining the tax otherwise due as a “credit.”

Split hairs all you want, but it’s hard to understand how a reasonable person could define gross personal income as property but gross business income as not. That’s a distinction without a difference that could just as easily give today’s court the grounds to invalidate our existing B&O tax as it would the income tax this initiative proposes.

But all that is neither here nor there. The Secretary of State’s job at the moment is merely to assign the initiative a number, and transmit it back and forth between the sponsor, the Code Reviser and the Attorney General. If petitions are ultimately filed, his job will be to count and verify the signatures, and if the signature threshold is met, his next and final task will be to assure that the initiative properly appears on the ballot. At no point is the question of the measure’s constitutionality of any official concern to the Secretary of State or his spokesman.

As for the Attorney General, his job would be to defend the measure in court should it ultimately pass and be challenged, thus any effort on his part to publicly question the initiative’s constitutionality would present a conflict of interest that could undermine his ability fulfill his own office’s constitutional duties.

Indeed, as I’ve previously written, the whole constitutional question is a red herring intended to quash public debate on this very important issue. And that is the context within which Ammons’ comment should be understood.

Last week’s contest was won by Dave Gibney. It was Calexico, California.

This week’s is a challenge. If no one gets this by Monday morning, I’ll post up a clue. Good luck!