– Where fighting this might have at least resulted in an awareness of what was happening, years of Democrats chasing votes that were never going to come their way resulted in zealots quietly passing laws at the state level making abortion more and more difficult to obtain. I guess that’s what the anti-choice minority in the Democratic Party calls “winning.” They must be so pleased.

– I don’t mind Amazon’s drone program as much as some people, but there is something disquieting about it.

– It is pretty amazing that a smear against Obama can be dumb enough for the GOP to drop.

– This story of recovering a stolen bike off a rack is the greatest thing I’ve ever read.

– Willie fucking Bloomquist?

– No, you decided to buy Mirah Playing Cards even though you still have most of your Christmas shopping ahead of you.

Goldy has a map of the Seattle City Council District where Kshama Sawant will probably run for reelection.* It went pretty overwhelmingly for her. And it pretty much breaks down by neighborhood with Capitol Hill and First Hill overwhelmingly supporting Sawant and the rest of the district pretty overwhelmingly supporting Conlin.

While the district that Sawant lives in and would most likely run in is the most obvious to look at, that race might be a decent proxy for the other races on the ballot. For while it wasn’t the highest profile race, it was one with a fairly high profile and a real ideological divide. The mayor’s race was, of course, the highest profile, but it was at least as much about personality as it was about issues. O’Brien-Shen was probably more of an ideological divide for a council seat, but it turned out to be a bit less high profile after Shen not doing well in the primary. It was also so far apart, it probably doesn’t tell us much except don’t run a pro-bidness campaign anywhere in Seattle.

So there’s the Sawant-Conlin race. It pitted the only member to vote against paid sick leave/paid safe leave against the biggest proponent of a $15 minimum wage on the ballot. And of course one side pushed the socialism label pretty hard while the other didn’t. I’d think that someone running in a district where Sawant won might have a bit more leverage to push social and economic justice issues, and someone running in a district where Conlin won would have to be a bit more traditional lefty.

Or maybe I’m reading too much into one race with two unique people.

[Read more…]

– Mark Deiscoll is the worst and he steals from the worst.

– Oh look people are actually getting health care coverage.

– I’m rather excited for the campaign for a $15 minimum wage coming to Seattle

– Jameis Winston, and the Overlapping of Football Culture and Rape Culture

– This is maybe the least thought out heist of all time (Seattle Times link).

– Are you ready for some traffic between Monday Night Football and maybe some snow?

A few months ago when Oregon said they would recognize same sex partnerships that happened in states where that’s legal, I wrote that it would probably be a boon to Vancouver. Looks like that has happened (there were some ads that may be NSFW, depending on where you work; h/t).

So, you know, congrats to the couples who got married, and I’m sorry that your state has yet to get on board. It must be strange to have to travel, for some a short distance, for others quite a long way, to have to get legally married. It’s better than your home state not recognizing it at all, but it’s so far from the ideal.

I’d add that as long as you’re coming to Washington, the train ride up to Seattle is pleasant (driving is not so much). As long as you can’t get hitched in your own state, you might as well enjoy Seattle if you can.

While writing about Boeing threatening to leave the Puget Sound, I’ve had some thoughts batting around my mind about corporations more generally. I think all major (and most minor) corporations have 4 obligations. 3 that I think are necessary to their survival, as well as just decency and one that’s important but not really in the same way. Corporations have obligations to their shareholders and their investors. They have an obligation to their workers. They have an obligation to their customers. They also have an obligation, although probably not at the same level, to the community where they’re based.

I know this sounds naive, and it probably is. Still, I think those obligations, even though they’re sometimes in competition with each other, make corporations worth having as instruments in society. Obviously, we put a lot of emphasis on shareholders and investors. Probably too much, but they do play a role. And if they’re getting paid a reasonable amount for bringing a return on investment, then fine.

Still, businesses must have an obligation to their employees. When companies like Boeing threaten to leave, we keep hearing about the jobs they provide. But we rarely ever hear about an obligation to provide good jobs. When companies are lagging in this, unions, or government regulation like workplace safety and a minimum wage can force a minimum standard. But I think corporations have an obligation to the people working for them to treat them as something more than just cogs.

They also have an obligation to their customers. Ultimately, they’re making a product or service for someone or some group. When I use a good product, it reflects well on the company that made it, and when I have a bad product it feels like a bit of a betrayal. I think that’s part of the reason that people are sensitive to bad customer service.

Finally, and more generally, businesses have a duty to the communities where they’re located and where they do business. When companies give to charity, we call it “corporate citizenship.” As long as we understand that’s a metaphor, and corporations can’t actually be citizens, that’s fine as far as it goes. Still, there ought to also be an obligation not to pollute and to pay their taxes. Basically, it ought to be better for the community that a corporation locates there. Otherwise, why have them?

I don’t really know what my point is here, but I think the discussion is too much on shareholder value or return on investment, and not on the other things that companies ought to do.

– President Obama was in town over the weekend.

– I wonder if the public transportation data for Thurston County would look the same for the rest of the state.

– Obamacare remains a great deal for Boehner and his contemporaries, and while eliminating the law altogether might save Boehner a small amount of money if he re-entered FEHBP, it would be a huge liability for a much greater number of 64 year olds without Boehner’s wealth and job security.

– I don’t know why the grade-school hero fantasies of conservatives are allowed to et the terms of all of our political debates. But that’s how we do things.

– Like so many aspects of American life, holidays have become 2-tiered

– And speaking of, I don’t know about the rest of the bloggers here, but I don’t think I’ll post anything on Thursday or Friday.

I-502 got more than 54% of the vote in Pierce County. So naturally, you’d think that politicians in the county would be, if not eager, at least willing to zone marijuana businesses. You’d probably not think they would support banning any business until the Federal government decides to legalize marijuana. Maybe somewhere like Franklin County where it lost more than 61% of the vote. But not a Puget Sound county where a majority of voters supported legalization at the ballot, surely.

Well, a majority of the Pierce County Council voted to not allow any marijuana businesses. Fortunately, it was vetoed by the exec (Tacoma News Tribune link; hat tip to Sensible Washington on Facebook).

Pierce County Executive Pat McCarthy has vetoed the County Council’s ordinance that prohibits licensed marijuana businesses from operating until the U.S. Congress removes marijuana from the list of federally controlled substances.

McCarthy said the county’s ordinance conflicts with state law. She said the county must comply with state law, which permits the licensing of marijuana businesses.

[…]

An override requires five of seven council votes.

[…]*

The council adopted the ordinance Nov. 5 by a vote of 4-3.

So yay. It probably won’t be overridden.

Still, it seems strange to me that people are so hesitant to support marijuana legalization where it’s popular. I mean I get that drugs-are-bad is the default position that a lot of people have. And the Federal government is a big scary thing people can point to. But I-502 was passed with popular support and the sky hasn’t fallen. It’s time for people to stop fighting it.

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– The Seattle Weekly has an interesting piece on Rosellini’s FBI file.

– Obama is better than George W. Bush. Still it’s still too many deaths in wars.

– Oh, and hey, a deal with Iran for 6 months.

– But the GOP has no plan if ObamaCare works. They have no plan for the sick, the healthy, or their own political future. What that should do is twofold; It should tell you clearly that we’re going to win and it should terrify you. The Republicans are in the midst of madness and with it comes a blindness that will destroy them. Let’s hope they don’t take the rest of us with them.

– Are you being persecuted?

– I’m glad KEXP is going to be DJing the New Year’s Eve at the Space Needle but this article seems to think that Pearl Jam and The Ramones are what’s hot in the streets. What?

Contained in this snarky piece about Murray’s transition is some serious talk about the $15 minimum wage.

I asked Murray about the $15 minimum wage, an issue he ended up campaigning on and which has a lot of traction in the city, with Kshama Sawant’s win and the win in SeaTac. On the trail he didn’t give a real timeline for how to get there, but today he said, “We’ll begin our process immediately… We’re having our discussions in the transition team already.” He wants to “bring people to the table” (a politician? Who knew?!), and says “if we end up in a labor-business war, it won’t happen.” He also wants to be “especially sensitive to our small neighborhood businesses—like the Pike/Pine corridor,” he laughed.

I’m going to take that as a positive sign that stuff can get done quickly, and not that it means that the Chamber of Commerce or other bidness groups get a veto. He did run on it, and presumably in 4 years will want it as an accomplishment not as a place where a challenger can stake out a position to his left. And, you know, it’s the right thing to do and popular. And he’ll have at least one City Council member pushing him pretty hard on it.

I go to the House and Senate GOP caucus websites fairly often to look for pieces to make fun of. It’s where I found Baumgartner’s piece the other day. But somehow I’d missed that they went with an offensive picture for another featured story. They had a press release about how they’re opposed to human trafficking. It’s an important issue, but they fubbed the execution.

Basically, despite the fact that most victims of human trafficking are women of color, they chose to illustrate it with a stock image of a white lady being grabbed by black hands (Spokesman-Review link).

This morning, the Senate Republican Caucus web site was down, and the photo was removed, although a spokesman for Committee Chairman Mike Padden said that was probably a coincidence. The hearing was more than a week ago, Eric Campbell said, and the site was rotating features to get more current things up.

[…]

We should note that this is a “stock photo”, one that has been used other places to illustrate sex trafficking or child pornography, primarily on web sites with ties to religious organizations. In some versions of the image, the hands over the mouth don’t seem to be quite as dark as in the above image.

It’s tough to figure out why the GOP has a problem attracting minority voters. And to be clear, I don’t think whoever put it up was acting out of malice: They probably just googled human trafficking, that came up, and they called it good. But they didn’t have any black folks in the office who’d see it before it came up to say, “google that a little harder.”

Goldy deflects some of the flack coming at Kshama Sawant for suggesting the Boeing workers take over production, and start producing things that aren’t used for war. The piece is fine as far as it goes, but I think he misses the biggest problem with this kind of dismissive commentary: it doesn’t give us any idea of what a takeover might look like.

Now I have certainly no idea what a worker takeover at Boeing by its workers might look like. The best guess off the top of my head is something like Mondragon. Or maybe she has something completely else in mind; Mondragon isn’t a panacea. And in any event how the state, or others, might move from Boeing making unreasonable demands to whatever she’s pushing wasn’t discussed. It was a short speech at a rally, and there’s only so much nuance you can give. So there are more questions than answers.

But, gosh, the best people to get those answers are reporters. Rather than writing dismissive pieces, they could ask her for details. I mean they could eventually get to dismissive if that’s their position, but it would be nice to know what she’s actually proposing and how she expects to get from point A to point B before dismissing it.

Now to be clear, I don’t think I agree with her (again, to the point that I understand what she’s proposing). The best thing is probably for Boeing to realize that they need the Puget Sound workforce. But if that doesn’t happen, and Boeing continues the slow decline of their Western Washington workforce, there will be people in the region with manufacturing skills, and no job. It might make more sense for them to start something collective rather than hope that some other big company will come to the rescue, and if this discussion makes them realize that there are other options, well, I’d rather not have pundits — especially ostensibly lefty ones — shutting that discussion down.

– Two Ed Murray things. I love this story of him helping a fallen cyclist (Seattle Times link). Also, here’s the transition webpage if you’re interested.

– It’s not as if the GOP aren’t marketing BS to the public on a daily basis. But I always hold out hope that people running for office won’t be so obvious about it. Color me naive.

– Does anyone care about the WA Dem Chair race? I tried to write about it, but nothing really came together. I could give it another try if y’all care.

– It was the 150th anniversary of The Gettysburg Address this week, and the biggest deal about it is that Obama was asked to read one of the versions of it. Also, how does it compare to President Whitmore’s speech from Independence Day? I’m glad you asked.

– WARONCARZ

– I would hate to be a former Zimmerman juror today. I’d also hate to be Sean Hannity, but that’s true every day.

Unlike most Seattle Democrats, Reuven Carlyle is willing to push an agenda pretty hard. Unfortunately, often times (privatizing public education and the Boeing giveaway for example) he pushes a terrible agenda. At other times, like defending King County against the state trying to vacuum up all of the money, he’s better. So, while most Seattle Dems inspire apathy and a wish that they would use their safe seats for something better than acting as placeholders, Carlyle actually has bold proposals. This is one that I like.

But Carlyle believes lawmakers and the public deserve to know how much a company like Boeing pays in state taxes, especially if that company comes to the Legislature asking for special consideration in the tax code.

Washington is certainly not alone in guarding corporate tax information. Oregon and Idaho do the same. But in Wisconsin, anyone can fill out a form and request a company’s—even an individual’s—net tax information.

Sounds good to me (although I’m not sure about individuals, or really how that would work in our sales tax heavy state). But it seems reasonable to know how much business are paying. And I was somewhat taken aback by the fact that we don’t know.

Last night The Occupy Committee to End Homelessness in King County Coalition held a camp in at Westlake Park to bring attention to Seattle’s homeless problem (and our lack of will to implement any solutions). It’s a brave thing when last night was freezing or near it. But I suppose for many of them, it’s not much of a choice.

I walked through it last night, and it was a few dozen people in sleeping bags. Then I walked home past people sleeping in doorways.

Anyway, they’ll follow it up with a march to Seattle City Hall where the Committee to End Homelessness in King County are meeting. The coalition is demanding, among other things, that we as a community divest from banks that have been active in foreclosures and that we build more affordable housing.

– The $15 SeaTac minimum wage initiative looks like it has the votes. Congrats to everyone who made that happen.

– Virginia state Sen. Creigh Deeds in critical condition after stabbing

– People are submitting so many applications for state licenses to sell marijuana.

– A Shocking Number Of Non-Violent Americans Will Die In Prison (h/t)

– Seattle Transit Blog looks at what the service cuts to Metro might look like for Seattle and the East Side.

– I don’t even know with young Republicans.