I’m at a hearing for the APALA. I’m here to hear people’s stories, and from elected officials and community leaders. I’ll share them with you as it happens.

… First panel is the education panel. Students who’ve seen cuts at the UW, and are seeing the quality of education go down. SCCC nursing student whose workforce is being squeezed.

… Working with high school dropouts. Wants us to know that getting a GED is an equivalent to a high school diploma. That No Child Left Behind sees a GED as a failure, but that working with people who’ve dropped out, and getting their GED is just as good for everything you want to do.

… High school teachers are being asked to pay for more things for for their students, while at the same time losing wages. They can’t pay for extracurricular activities or to better themselves. Year 4 or 5 many teachers can’t keep up with this.

… Story of an undocumented student. Mongolia had it’s revolution, and her parents started a business, but when it failed, they came into America. She didn’t even know she was here illegally until she started working at 15. She couldn’t get a job except under the table because she didn’t have a Social Security number. Her parents go from low wage jobs to low wage jobs. Her bosses have cheated her out of wages and tips and sexually harassed her.

Nobody says one day, “let’s go to America and live there illegally.” They just want a better life for themselves and for their children. But now she doesn’t know that she’ll be able to use her degree. The immigration system especially hurts children.

… A new panel of government workers. DSHS worker. Sees the difficult lives that people are having especially new immigrants. A postal worker who was injured on the job and has been denied compensation, and the union is working to make sure he can get it. He has a daughter in high school so can’t retire.

… Service Sector Panel. A union steward a Boeing. The language barrier and the accent is an issue for many Asian workers. They are treated like kids (even if the managers are younger than their own children) because of it, and bosses don’t make an effort to work with them. Bosses “think they know more than us because they can talk.” The company forgets they’re part of the team and doesn’t respect them.

… Trying to organize a union at SeaTac. Wheelchair service is hard work but it’s important. People doing it make $8.67 and don’t have good benefits. Management will send people home early when they ask for their 10 minute break. So she wanted to start a union. Managers tried to say that they’ll fix everything, and the union will just take their money, and are punishing her. But she needs the job to support her family.

… A grocery worker who has worked throughout the area. Managers talk to people like they’re stupid. Talk slow and not like other employees, but the workers don’t complain. The language barrier makes it tough to solve problems. Workload is bigger for fewer hours, so there are more accidents: In delis working with knives, and people getting burned regularly. There’s no consistency in work schedule that makes it difficult to spend time with family.

In their last strike, they put out their demands in multiple languages. They presented the Chinese version to their manager to show how difficult it is to work when presented in another language.

… A Walmart worker. OUR Walmart. Organization United for Respect at Walmart. People working for Walmart are exhausted now preparing for Black Friday. They’re suffering to work paycheck to paycheck. They don’t even get $10 an hour when their company is a multibillion dollar company. If we can change Walmart, we can change the world.

… A janitor who was told he has to clean 13 stories of bathrooms in 4 hours. When he told his foreman he would do his best, he was told he’d be fired if he couldn’t. The foreman swore at him, and called other managers down. He’s been told by the company that he’ll be fired if he can’t do that in the future.

… That’s the end of the testimony from workers and students. But there’s still the “Distinguished Panel” of community members. A man from OSHA says that while overall injury rates are going down, it’s going up in health care where there is a lot of lifting and in hotels. People need to know they have the right to come to OSHA and state agencies.

… Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In the Seattle office has noticed that working with immigrant populations, employers are going to abuse their workers because of language, because of culture, because of immigration status. People are scared of losing their jobs, especially in this economic climate. Immigrants are abused, are exploited, are raped, but they’re afraid of being fired or retaliated against. But people have a right to go to work and there are laws to protect them.

… To wrap up, I think this was an amazing forum. Letting people give their stories is amazing. It was just the tip of the iceberg, and there are so many more of these kinds of stories all across the state and the country. Thanks for the invite from the organizers, and thanks to everyone who spoke for telling your stories. I’ve edited this post a bit and added links since putting it up.

– Occupy Sammamish.

– Dwight Pelz’ letter supporting marriage equality in Washington State.

– I know Stamper is talking about nationally, but the police response to Occupy Seattle has been much better than to WTO.

– Although, obviously, still a lot of room for improvement. Lots of room.

– On top of the bike getting you to the story first, bike gloves are the best for typing in Seattle’s cold.

– Keep the birth control requirement in the health care law.

– There once was a pine tip moth from Nantucket

This is almost a week old now, but that’s the only time to call it out. I’m not sure if it gets funnier or less funny each time I ask how can you have a typo like that at the top of your blog for a week. But this gem from Bruce Ramsey has been at the top (emphasis mine) of the Ed Cetera blog since Veterans’ Day. “Nov. 11, Veterans’ Day, is the day tin 1918 the great powers ended World War I, a war America has almost forgotten.”

They should do what I do with typos and either edit them out or (more often) have other posts in the next 6+ days so it falls off the top. One of the most important pieces of web only content from the state’s most important newspaper, ladies and gents.

Riffing off of Neil’s idea here:

I don’t know how NBA contracts work. But I’m wondering if it would be possible for the players to organize themselves into teams outside the formal NBA organization and make money by playing games.

It seems to me like at least for this year, the player’s union could organize something. My ideal solution would be to find coaches or captains who were agreeable and figure out how many players are willing to play something like this:

Chose teams schoolyard style (or call it a universal draft, or something boring if you like). Everyone is eligible to go to any team and the coaches/captains pick their team. Then they play a short, short, short regular season. Just enough to fairly have seeding for a tournament. Most fans don’t really care about the regular season, but pro basketball players at the highest level playing meaningful games would attract fans and TV even without the NBA.

You can pay the players a percentage of the take based on how well they did in being selected for the team (the first player gets a higher percentage than the second, etc.) and how far their team got in the tournament.

I’m not sure how many players would join a league like this. It would mean less pay and more uncertainty about where they were for a season even than normally in professional sports. But it beats doing nothing.

I’m sympathetic to the proposal by the Washington Association of School Administrators to cut 5 days the school year. They’re responding to the reality that the state almost certainly isn’t going to raise taxes significantly. If we’re not going to figure out how to fund education at the state level, we may as well figure out how to make it work as well as possible at the shitty funding level we’re going to get. And there are worse things than fewer days.

So, yeah, it may not be as bad for state children as some of the other godawful options. It may be that better education can happen in those 175 days than in 180 days spread thinner. And cutting levy equalization will hurt the most vulnerable children.

Still, if Seattle* voters support every district levy for decades, if they support the Families and Education Levy and doubled it last time, and still see their children get a week less of school, I don’t know how much they’ll be willing to support paying for education at the state level. I think we’re still willing to pay state taxes to improve education all over, but we’re not willing to see our children lose out when Seattle hasn’t done anything wrong.

For it’s one thing for Seattle to subsidize the rest of the state. But to hurt our children for that is something entirely new. We’re willing to let the state skim off the top, but I don’t know that we’ll be willing to lose school days to subsidize other districts.

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Don’t cut Medicare without getting millionaires to pay their fair share.

– Carrying condoms shouldn’t be used as proof of prostitution.

– Completing a missing link.

– You contact the police

– Lee has already mentioned the inaccuracies in Bill O’Reilly’s book, but this is still funny.

– We need the debate audience to help Michelle bring her campaign back to life by clapping their hands to show they believe in her.

I know I already linked to this, but I really quite enjoy the Google Street View of bike trails. I think part of it is the little I’ve explored, people are impressed by this thing. There are people waving and pointing in what looks like giving directions. And yeah, you get that some in the street view, but not as much.

And I think this reflects the best part of riding a bike: the fact that you aren’t boxed into a car. The interactions when you’re at a stop light that you just couldn’t get with other things. The fact that you can slow down and look at something. You get an experience that’s totally different from driving.

It’s not all positive; Seattle’s rain and hills make me glad to sometimes trap myself in my car. And I hate sharing the road with shit drivers. While it’s unnerving in a car or in a bike those thousands of pounds of metal a seat belt and air bags will protect me better than my helmet. Still, I’m glad for the experience biking provides.

I’m glad chat with people about we’re going or the weather. I love exploring nooks and crannies of the city you can’t get to in a car. And I love seeing things I wouldn’t on a car.

One of the saddest things I’ve seen in Seattle was the Pier 91 Trail after nightfall. I was going into downtown after spending some time in Magnolia. It really shocked me, even as someone who lives downtown, how many homeless people there were.* It wasn’t an experience you’d get in a car even passing a homeless camp by the freeway. It’s a different perspective from a bike than from a car.
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– Repeal Seattle’s jaywalking laws.

– Google street view of Seattle Trails

– You would think that a study analyzing the consumption of fast food by poor people would take into account a massive sea change in the way fast food was consumed by poor people. But then again, I’m not a science-type person.

– How dare you call our hero self-sacrificing?

– Hanson endeavors to drag Cain up by Cain’s bootstraps, and he does so by denigrating women and black people with such ease one suspects that Hanson has never met a stereotype or bias that he didn’t call “science.”

– This Twitter language map is pretty amazing.

I was reading this piece from Goldy about how we need to repeal the B&O exemption for newspapers in these troubled times, and he quotes a recent Seattle Times editorial that says:

Essentially I-1163 says to legislators, “Find $36 million per biennium and spend it on this. We do not care where you find the money. That is your problem.”

Now I understand from the context, and the fact that they’re using a made up number, that this isn’t an actual quote. No, the initiative doesn’t have that language in it, and it hasn’t come to life and started talking. But, why put it in quotes at all? That has to be confusing to the senile segment of the population that still reads the Seattle Times Ed board for information. I don’t want to do Ryan Blethen’s job for him, but wouldn’t it make more sense to just say, “I-1163 fores legislators” and not deal with imaginary quotes?

Also, as I understand it, the initiative is talking here. So why is it speaking in the second person plural? If you’re going to make up a quote from a single inanimate object, it should probably say “I” rather than “we.”

– Occupy Comics

– If anyone who voted for (or against, I suppose) the Seattle Housing Levy wants to know where your money goes. It goes in part to “seven new apartment buildings that will serve homeless individuals, low-income families and seniors. The investment, primarily Seattle Housing Levy funds, will help create 476 new permanent apartments, including some set-aside to serve veterans.”

– Someone should probably do something. Maybe throw a body upon the gears and what not?

– You know when I was a kid the War On Christmas didn’t start until after Thanksgiving.

– Yikes, again.

– Seattle Transit Rider’s Union public forum.

– Hippocracy

– There are too many stars.

– Very realistic.

I’ve watched this presentation by Bug Girl on social media a couple times. The part that intrigues me the most is who she finds her competition to be. And it isn’t other insect bloggers, but rather everything else. She finds other insect bloggers to be her collaborators. And I sort of feel the same way about Washington/Northwest liberal blogs.

In the early days of local blogging, the landscape was pretty bare. Before Slog, before Postman’s blog or the rest of the local media, before Goldy started blogging, it was a threadbare community compared to now. And I made an effort with what little platform I had 2 blogs ago to promote the rest of the community. It grew into something fun and interesting. And even with my 100-150 readers a day at most, I remember having people come up to me at Drinking Liberally or at other blog events and thank me for a link and tell me all the traffic they got out of it.

Some of them have gone, but a lot of them are still part of the community. I hope that the support of this community comes through in the Open Threads where I try to link to a variety of local blogs, even if I unfortunately tend toward the more established ones. Because I really don’t consider them the competition. I love the community both of comments and of other blogs. I don’t know what that means going forward, but I’m going to try to keep it in mind when I write here.

Joel Connelly has a piece, the last half dealing with the rejection of Prop 1. Here’s the conclusion, and the only part that talks about the future:

The state can hopefully get on with transportation projects, using variable (rush hour) tolls as a constructive carrot-stick approach to relieve congestion.

The Sierra Club will, one hopes, go back to being a player in Northwest conservation rather than an instrument of the McGinn-O’Brien agenda. Bellevue plutocrat Kemper Freeman will, one trusts, think twice before blowing another $1.1 million on an Eyman initiative.

The Seattle City Council should have the sense to bring more cooks into the kitchen, and give its next transportation package a little more time in the oven. Voters don’t like spending hard-earned money on something half-baked.

For someone who has written repeatedly (including in the non-quoted part of this piece) that a big problem with the car tabs was that it was regressive, he seems to have forgotten to make any sort of push to the legislature to give us an MVET or some other progressive means of paying for it (a 1% high earner’s income tax would be even better, although I have no idea how much it raises).

Anyway, the only solutions by government agencies Joel mentions are the legislature should do something transit related and the city should talk to more people. But unless the state allows us to tax ourselves more fairly, the biggest problem will persist (and Olympia isn’t likely to act without people like Joel pushing them).

Finally, not to spend too much time on an aside, but the Sierra Club does a lot of conservation work. The first non-election thing on the Cascade Chapter’s website is logging trails, for instance.

In a unanimous decision issued in NEDC v. Brown, a case involving logging roads on Oregon State lands, the Ninth Circuit ruled that polluted stormwater generated by logging roads is subject to regulation under the Clean Water Act’s National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES). The August 2011 decision requires that logging roads meet the standards of the Clean Water Act that would protect our clean water and salmon and steelhead. We are stunned that Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna would join with very conservative states such as Arkansas in urging the Supreme Court to overturn this court decision.

– Battles Won

– I don’t know why Darryl didn’t include the links to King County or Washington State results last night, but here they are. Most counties report this afternoon.

– Yikes.

– Call for artists for mile markers in the Interurban Trail in Shoreline.

– The Hidden World of Girls

– #OccupyDance

I assume you’re all aware that today is election day. But if for some reason you’re reading a Washington State political blog on election day and didn’t realize that, here’s your helpful reminder. Get your ballot postmarked by today. If you’re dropping it off in a mailbox, check to see what the pickup times are.

Not sure if I’m going to DL or to some candidate/initiative party, but presumably there will be some results here as well.

I don’t disagree with this piece in the Yakima Herald that combating crime is important.

Have you ever been a crime victim? Have you ever felt the violation of having your home broken into? Do you know someone who’s been mugged or murdered? If you have been lucky enough to have escaped victimization, then look around you; look to your immediate family and neighbors and ask yourself if any of them have been victims of crime. At this point, the numbers shrink pretty close to zero. Yakima is one of many cities in America where crime is a sad fact of life.

I don’t dig this second person construct. But yes, crime is bad, and we should do what we can to stop it. OK, so what should we cut? Or will this argue for tax increases? OK, what taxes? Oh it doesn’t? It just says public safety is good. So is education.

Public safety, along with education, must be the foundation of any civil society. Don’t take my word for any of what I have written. Do the homework, then ask yourself what the possible consequences of such draconian budget cuts will be. Too many of us have already been victims of crime. Are we safe enough to allow the bar to be lowered even more? I think the answer must be a resounding no.

Right. And a social safety net is also important. We’re long past the relatively easy things to cut. We need to raise taxes, and to do so in as progressive a way as we can. But even when an article begging no to cut corrections and education can’t mention raising taxes, we’re not going to have that discussion.