Goldy

I’ve been too preoccupied to conduct my usual fisking of Seattle Times editorials in recent days, but that hasn’t made them any less worthy of mockery.

Temporarily increase the King County sales tax to maintain police, jails and courts? “Enough is enough,” the Times proclaims. “This page does not have a detailed, prescriptive answer to King County’s whole problem,” Frank Blethen’s crack editorialists admit, but that doesn’t stop them from insisting that criminal justice services — which account for over 70 percent of the county’s general fund — must be maintained at current levels, in the face of dramatically declining revenues, but with no tax increases. I guess that’s what passes for bold leadership down at Fairview Fanny.

And the Times consistently pushes its no-tax/yes-spend prescription on a number of other issues. We hear little argument from the Times that the state isn’t underfunding basic education, yet they maintain their virulent opposition to the sort of revenue hikes or tax restructuring necessary to pay for it. And just today their editorial page lauds First Lady Michelle Obama for her soft approach to childhood obesity that doesn’t include government mandates or taxes.

What is most appealing about the first lady’s approach is it is neither heavy-handed nor naive. The federal government will not become the food police but will instead encourage sensible initiatives such as added sidewalks to spur walking and exercise.

And how will we pay for these sidewalks and public service campaigns and whatnot? Certainly not by taxing sweetened beverages, the number one source of calories in the average American diet. The Times acknowledges that “obesity contributes to the nation’s soaring health-care bill,” but a targeted tax aimed at reducing consumption of empty calories while providing a revenue source to help pay for obesity’s growing consequences, well, that would be “heavy-handed.” And worst of all, it would be, you know, a tax.

So how would the Times editors balance their own conflicting demands for more government services and lower taxes? Well, despite their refusal to put forth “prescriptive answers,” I suppose we might tease a few hints as to how they might run state government, by examining how they have run their own business, and imagining how very different Washington state might look today had Frank Blethen been governor over much of the past decade, with his editorial board holding the reins of the legislative leadership.

Buoyed upon the economic euphoria of the previous bubble, the first thing Gov. Blethen would have done upon taking office in early 2001, would be to purchase the state of Maine, and at a highly inflated price, only to sell it at a total loss a decade later after pumping millions of dollars into subsidizing his acquisition’s own growing deficits. Then, with hundreds of millions of dollars of highly leveraged debt coming due at the same time revenues started their precipitous tumble, Gov. Blethen would fight vociferously to drive neighboring Oregon out of business in the hope of attracting a substantial portion of its loyal taxpayers.

But none of this would be enough to balance the books. Wages would have to be cut, benefits slashed, jobs eliminated and unions busted… because it was organized labor, after all, who was really responsible for that whole Maine fiasco. And, just like the Times has managed to maintain the breadth, depth and quality of their news coverage while closing bureaus and dramatically shrinking their newsroom, so too our state government, under Gov. Blethen’s deft leadership, would be able to maintain, or even increase critical public services and infrastructure, while substantially decreasing both salaries and staff. I mean, just imagine how much better DMV would function if they had fewer offices and less staff servicing the same number of customers… and at lower wages to boot. All we need to do is make government operate more like a business!

As for schools, despite the worsening revenue crisis, we could trust Gov. Blethen to finally cut class sizes… by, you know, physically cutting classroom sizes, the same way the Times has cut the width of its newsprint by 15% in recent years. Just crowd those desks a little closer; the kids will never know the difference.

You get the point. Frank Blethen has done such a remarkable job guiding his proud family newspaper from perpetual prosperity to the verge of bankruptcy, that if there is anybody who we should turn to for advice on how to fix what ails state and local government, it is he and his fellow economic wunderkind on the Times editorial board.

I’m just sayin’.

UPDATE:
Carl points out that he kinda had this idea first.

I think this may have just become my new, favorite blog.

Dino Rossi’s record winning streak in hypothetical races remains unbroken, with the latest Rasmussen poll showing him eking out a 48% to 46% win over incumbent U.S. Senator Patty Murray. Man… has this guy ever lost a race he didn’t run for?

Of course, Rasmussen also had Rossi leading Gov. Chris Gregoire by a similar 47% to 46% margin at the same point in their 2008 gubernatorial race, and had Rossi up 52% to 46% as late as two months prior to election day. Rossi went on to lose by 6.5 points in the only poll that really mattered.

As for the Republicans actually running against Murray, well, they don’t fare so well, trailing by between 12 and 15 points. You know… hypothetically.

Huh. I’m tempted to blow up an American airliner, just to prove Fox News host Steve Doocy wrong.

Some of you may have noticed that my posting has been a little lighter than usual over the past week or so, and I just wanted to reassure folks that no, I haven’t burnt out. I’ve just been busy. Busy teaching myself how to program the iPhone.

It’s been about eight years since I last played around with a compiler, and ten days into the iPhone SDK I’m still not sure that I have sufficient programming chops to get the job done. The unfamiliar Xcode IDE does both more and less than I had expected, and Objective-C, well, it might as well have been Objective-Mandarin for all I knew when I started. I was hoping that with a UI this sparse, Apple might have layered a real RAD environment on top of it — like a Visual Basic or a Hypercard — but no, here I am defining classes and declaring protocols and managing memory for chrisakes. (No garbage collection? What’s up with that?)

Anyway, I’ll keep folks informed of how this project goes, but in the meantime, be prepared for days when I’m a little preoccupied.

Dear Airline Industry,

I’m writing this missive from dreary Seattle rather than sunny South Florida, and you only have yourselves to blame.

For years now, Presidents Day weekend has been the time of year I’ve taken my daughter to visit her grandma and pop-pop near West Palm Beach, a welcome respite from the height of our rainy season, and conveniently coordinated with her school’s mid-winter break. But after months of hesitation on your various reservation websites, I just couldn’t pull the trigger.

Part of the problem is that the Mercer Island district where my daughter now attends middle school only offers a four-day weekend off, but that didn’t stop us the last two years. Combine a red-eye with perhaps an extra day off school, and we could enjoy at least four full days in the sun.

The bigger problem is, the last couple years I’ve come home more in need of a vacation than when I left.

Flying has grown increasingly miserable over the past decade, and to be honest, it just isn’t worth it anymore. You airlines expect me to show up at the gate on time, or else forfeit the value of my ticket, but if your airplane isn’t at the gate to greet me, well, fuck me. Or if we do take off some time that day, but you fail to get me to my connecting flight, fuck me again. Perhaps, you tell me, you’ll get me out on a later flight, or the next day, or the day after that, but in the meanwhile I’m left to fend for myself in Charlotte or Atlanta or Dallas or Chicago or Phoenix or some godforsaken hub airport like that. Snow in Boston, you tell me, means delays in Houston, so you don’t owe me a thing but the promise to get me home sometime, you know, if a seat is available.

And while delays like this have always been a part of air travel, your increasingly hostile attitude has not. There once was a time when you treated us like valued customers, but over time we’ve just become those annoying, fragile things you store above the cargo hold. And as your customer service has declined you’ve increasingly resorted to pulling the post-9/11 security card to keep disgruntled passengers in line.

I know. You’ve done it to me. And fuck if I’m going to pay you for the public humiliation.

So this is probably the third or fourth flight I’ve elected not to take over the past couple years, not because your service isn’t inexpensive, but because it’s cheap. Based on personal experience, I just don’t trust you to get me and my luggage to my destination on time, safely, and in a reasonable amount of comfort. And I simply don’t trust your employees to treat me as anything more than just another potential terrorist.

$400 to fly roundtrip from Seattle to Florida is a good deal, but it’s still $400, and so I kinda expect the people I’m forking it over to not to consistently treat me like shit. You don’t even pretend to care about my business anymore, and that makes me feel like a chump every time I give to you.

So in conclusion, fuck you. Fuck your crappy service, your hostile demeanor and your poorly maintained planes. Fuck paying $7 extra for a pillow, $20 to reserve two seats next to each other and $25 for the privilege of having my valuables stolen out of my checked luggage (even sun screen for chrisakes… they’ve stolen fucking sunscreen). And fuck an industry whose standards have fallen so low that passengers now view themselves lucky to end their flight standing hip dip in water on the wing of a plane in the middle of the Hudson River.

Happy Presidents Day,

Goldy

Well, I suppose that’s one way to deal with education funding at a time of record state budget deficits:

In an effort to bridge a $700 million budget shortfall, Republican state Sen. Chris Buttars has put forth a plan to eliminate 12th grade in high school…

Of course, that’s just one Republican state legislator, and yeah, it’s Utah we’re talking about, so I guess it wouldn’t be fair to brand all Republicans with the same crazy stick, but when your party is philosophically opposed to raising taxes under any circumstances, this is the type of, um, creative proposals you’re gonna come up with.

Republican priorities at work.

Mark 10:25
“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

Luke 12:48
“From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.”

Karl Marx
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

Discuss.

In America, we’ve come to accept these sorta things as the cost of living in a free society where the Supreme Court gives more weight to the vague caveats of the Second Amendment than it does to the unqualified imperatives of the First, so the only thing really surprising about yesterday’s tragic shootings at the University of Alabama was the identity of the shooter: a woman.

Not some disaffected teenage boy looking to kill himself, and take a few classmates with him, or some crazed homophobe with a grudge against Unitarians. Not a Timothy McVeigh or a Seung-Hui Cho or a Nidal Malik Hassan or a gangbanger, a skinhead, a terrorist or something like that. You know, not a man.

I’m no criminologist, but from anecdotal experience, I’m guessing that Prof. Amy Bishop just doesn’t fit the profile.

Yet, she had a loaded gun. And in America, that’s all you really need to make a mark on the world.

It’s not like we don’t have any QFCs, Walgreens, 7-11’s or McDonalds in our neck of the woods, storefronts where Redbox co-locates its dollar-a-day DVD rental vending machines. It’s just that our QFCs, Walgreens, 7-11’s and McDonalds don’t have any Redboxes.

Hmm.

The other day I offered a free beer to the first Seattle elected official to enthusiastically come out in support of pitching a proposal to participate in Google’s experimental fiber network. Well, Mayor Mike McGinn was the first to answer the call.

Seattle will actively seek to partner with Google in creation of a fiber network here. The city itself has many assets to bring to the partnership, including an extensive existing fiber network of over 500 miles connecting every school, college and major government building in the city. In Seattle, 88% of residents have home computers, 84% have Internet access and 74% already have Internet access faster than dial-up. Seattle is a high tech city, with many technology firms both large and small, and a culture of entrepreneurism and innovation.

Fiber-to-the-premise networks will serve as an engine for business and economic development. Seattle would be an excellent place to construct such a network because we already have a high tech industry and population.

I don’t know how much of a chance we’ll have at winning a spot in the project, but at the very least it will help focus the city’s collective mind on what we need to do to provide our residents and businesses with first-rate, high-speed broadband infrastructure… something many of our neighborhoods sadly lack.

Living only a couple blocks from a major Qwest switch, I reliably enjoy better than 5Mbps downstream via DSL, but that makes me one of the fortunate ones, and while new WiMax service from Clear is (spottily) filling the gap in some neighborhoods, there are many Seattle households that are lucky to sustain 1.5Mbps, regardless of the provider.

But 1Gbps… hell, I’d happily settle for the 20Mbps my sister in suburban Philadelphia is getting from Verizon’s FIOS service.

If Seattle wants to remain a high-tech leader, we need to build the ultra-high-speed broadband infrastructure necessary to nurture and sustain our lead. And if Mayor McGinn wants to drop by Drinking Liberally sometime to discuss his broadband plans, the beer’s on me.

The apparent suicide of a longtime professional signature gatherer threatens to blow wide open the heretofore hidden world of organized petition fraud in Washington state.

Spokane based Dennis O’Shea had worked for years supervising crews of paid signature gatherers for a number of contractors, most recently Citizens Solutions, the Lacey WA firm that gathers signatures for Tim Eyman’s initiatives. Documented back in 2003 making false statements to signers about the initiative he was hawking, O’Shea had years to learn the ins and outs of the sometimes shady signature gathering business. So when detectives reportedly found his body along with a box of documents labeled to the attention of the police, they had reason to take notice.

Next month, partially as a result of the investigation stemming from O’Shea’s death, a mother and daughter signature gathering team will face charges on 45 counts of forging signatures on petitions for Eyman’s 2008 Initiative 985. And judging from both the suspicious circumstances, and the well documented history of petition fraud in other states, there is good reason to suspect that this case might represent only the tip of the iceberg.

According to court documents recently acquired by the Ballot Initiative Network, Theresa Dedeaux came under investigation in June 2008 after two petition sheets were turned over to Spokane County Elections officers, and subsequently the Secretary of State. An SOS official determined that 37 of the 40 signatures on the sheets did not match the signatures on file, and further forensic work by the Washington State Patrol determined a number of these to be forgeries. Affidavits were sent out to all 40 of the alleged signers, and all 29 of the affidavits returned confirmed that theirs was not the signature on the petition.

When confronted with this evidence by the WSP, Dedeaux made a statement to investigators implicating her supervisor: “Everything we did was at the direction of Dennis O’Shea.” When asked what she meant by “we,” Dedeaux went on to implicate her daughter Mercedes, “My daughter did it too.”

While details remain sketchy, it appears that O’Shea committed suicide sometime during the investigation, and according to sources, he left behind a box of documents directed toward the attention of the police, that included copies of several petition sheets collected by Mercedes Dedeaux. Investigators sent affidavits to 34 alleged signers whose signatures were suspected of being forged; all 29 of the returned affidavits attested that the signature was not authentic.

What else was in the box of documents O’Shea left behind? I have no idea, and I have no idea whether it is currently being investigated by the Spokane County Sheriff, the WSP or the SOS. What I do know, is that O’Shea thought it important enough to set aside for investigators as he prepared to take his own life. And I do know that the kind of fraud perpetrated by the Dedeauxs has proven to be common place in other initiative states, and that there has never been any reason to assume that Washington’s signature gatherers are uniquely clean, especially given the laxness of the laws and procedures regulating our initiative process.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” opponents of initiative reform like to argue, pointing to the absence of evidence of signature fraud in Washington state, but the truth is, we can’t possibly uncover evidence we’re not looking for, and lacking the tools to track signatures to the paid canvassers who gathered them, even evidence of fraud would be unlikely to incriminate the perpetrators.

To that end, there are two bills that are still alive in the current legislative session that attempt to address this issue. The first is HB 2614, which merely closes a loophole created via an opinion by state Attorney General Rob McKenna. Petitions are currently required to contain a declaration identifying the signature gatherer, but bizarrely, McKenna has advised the SOS that the statute does not require the signature gatherer to sign it. HB 2614 would clarify the existing law, explicitly requiring that the signature gatherer sign the declaration before the petition is filed with the SOS.

The second bill, SB 6449, is much more sweeping. In addition to closing the loophole above, SB 6449 would require that paid signature gatherers register with the PDC, and provide evidence of said registration while gathering signatures. Individuals convicted of fraud, forgery, identity theft, elections violations and sexual offenses would be denied registration, and permanently ineligible to work as paid signature gatherers. Volunteer signature gatherers would be exempt from such requirements.

Both of these bills represent prudent reforms that have been successfully implemented in other states with a history of signature fraud and other abuses. As it stands now, nothing would stop the Dedeauxs from working again as paid signature gatherers. Likewise, convicted identity thieves and sex offenders could be out there in front of the Safeway as I type, collecting the addresses and signatures of prospective victims.

Last year the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center ranked Washington’s initiative laws some of the most permissive in the nation, handing us a big, fat “F” in its nationwide Ballot Integrity Report Card. And yet this year, like in past sessions, the smart money is on the Legislature chickening out of addressing these long overdue reforms.

Opponents insist that there is no evidence of fraud, but the Dedeaux case proves otherwise, while the box of documents O’Shea left behind almost certainly contains additional incriminating evidence. Now is the time for the Legislature to act to protect the integrity of our initiative process.

The Virginia House of Delegates recently passed a bill that prohibits companies from forcing employees to be implanted with tracking devices like RF microchips, an act of legislation that as a civil libertarian I find both obvious and laudable.

But far from acting out of a concern for personal privacy in the digital age, Republican Delegate Mark Cole says he proposed the bill out of fear that the implants could turn out to be the mark of the beast as prophesied in Revelation:

“My understanding — I’m not a theologian — but there’s a prophecy in the Bible that says you’ll have to receive a mark, or you can neither buy nor sell things in end times,” Cole said, as quoted at the Washington Post. “Some people think these computer chips might be that mark.”

Uh-huh. It’s good to see that Republicans have their priorities in order.

Um… huh?

FINALLY someone has stood up to the institutional urge at Seattle Public Schools to adopt constructivist or reform math: Judge Julie Spector of King County Superior Court ruled Thursday that the district’s adoption of the Discovering series of high-school math texts was “arbitrary” and “capricious.”

This is a kind of judicial activism, and as a method of selecting or rejecting math books it makes us uneasy. Normally a judge would defer to the School Board. But … Don’t appeal the ruling.

Shorter Seattle Times: This is a kind of judicial activism, but that’s okay when we agree with it.