HorsesAss.Org

This July, five Washington medical marijuana patients will be tried in federal court in Spokane. The plight of these defendants, known as the Kettle Falls Five, has started to gain national attention. Despite the passage of I-502 and the overwhelming popular support across the nation for allowing the use of medical marijuana, the ugliest aspects of the drug war continue in this state, if only in the parts where fewer people live.

The facts of the case are relatively simple. On August 9, 2012, police came to the home of 70-year-old Larry Harvey and his 55-year-old wife Rhonda Firestack-Harvey in Kettle Falls, WA. The Harveys had a collective garden of marijuana plants used to provide relief for themselves and three others patients – their son, his wife, and a family friend – all with valid doctor’s authorizations. Here in Washington state, where an attempt to create a fully regulated medical marijuana distribution system failed in 2011, this was still the only proper legal avenue for medical marijuana patients to provide for themselves.

During this initial visit by police, Harvey was in violation of state law in only one way. He had too many plants in his garden. Collective gardens are limited to 15 plants per patient with a maximum of 45. Many gardens have tried to get around the maximum limit by establishing multiple plots on a single property, but officials generally don’t allow that when they come across it. As a result, police confiscated the 29 plants over the limit and left them with 45.

In most parts of the state, that would be the end of it. Here in very rural Stevens County, it wasn’t. A week later, another group of law enforcement officials showed up. These were federal officials, and federal law still maintains that any amount of marijuana is illegal. During this raid, they took all the plants and confiscated their car, motorcycle, ATV, computers, cash, and several legally owned firearms. The U.S. Attorney’s office for Eastern Washington is charging all five as drug traffickers, using the confiscated firearms as justification for the harsh charges. Because of federal mandatory minimums, all five are facing minimums of a decade or more behind bars.

Ever since Obama came into office, there have been assurances that the federal government will respect state marijuana laws. But the memos issued by the DOJ to provide guidance have given individual U.S. Attorneys enough leeway to bring about these types of senseless prosecutions. In Washington, the more liberal western half of the state has been more lenient. In the more conservative eastern half, under U.S. Attorney Mike Ormsby, we’ve seen several prosecutions of individuals who were attempting to comply with state law.

In the end, five individuals who pose no threat whatsoever to society will be sitting in a Spokane courtroom this summer fighting to stay out of jail for decades. None of these individuals were doing anything different from what thousands of other Washington residents have been doing. And yet, because of the way federal trials are stacked against defendants, none of the five will be able to present evidence that they were medical marijuana patients or that they were attempting to comply with state law. None of those facts are relevant in a federal trial so federal judges routinely bar those defenses from being made.

Even worse, the seriousness of the charges being thrown at these defendants comes from the fact that they were also legal gun owners. Even putting aside the fact that gun ownership in rural Stevens County isn’t unusual, folks who maintain medical marijuana gardens across the state are at a higher risk of having armed intruders trying to rob them. It makes sense for them to be armed. They’d be crazy not to have guns for their own protection. Yet this fact has allowed Ormsby’s office to charge these five innocent people as if they were operating as some kind of dangerous drug cartel. This is completely insane.

It’s hard to accept that this level of bullshit still happens in Washington in 2014. When this trial begins in July, adult residents of Spokane will be able to walk into newly-opened state-licensed retail stores and buy marijuana for recreational use. Yet this trial will continue in that same city, within a giant bubble of bullshit carefully crafted to blindfold the reality that the Harveys are the real victims here. Hopefully, the pleas to Attorney General Holder will be heard and this outrageous abuse of power will be ended before then.

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray released a 22-page proposal (pdf) today for implementing high-quality universal preschool in Seattle, starting with a four-year demonstration project that would serve 2,000 three- and four-year-olds in 100 classrooms by 2018. If approved by the city council, a $58 million property tax levy ($14.5 million a year) that would add about $43 a year to the average Seattle homeowner’s property tax bill would be put before voters on the November, 2014 ballot.

(FYI, while the document is boldly labeled “Mayor Murray’s Proposal,” it is largely the result of an effort led by city council member Tim Burgess long before Murray was sworn in as mayor. So credit where credit is due.)

I’ve only just skimmed the proposal, so you’ll have to wait for a more detailed analysis, but my initial response is that it is very thorough, very promising, and not quite as ambitious as I had hoped for.

During the demonstration period, enrollment would be open to all 4-year-olds, and all 3-year-olds from families earning less than 300 percent of the federal poverty level ($71,550 for a family of four). Tuition would be free for students below 200 percent of the federal poverty level ($47,700 for a family of four), and subsidized on a sliding scale based on income. Families up to 600 percent of poverty ($143,100) would pay no more than 40 percent of the project $10,700 per student costs.

That’s a bargain. So of course demand will far outstrip supply. Enrollment will be prioritized to children already in the program (the previous year’s three-year-olds), children with siblings concurrently in the program, and geographic proximity to the classroom. The plan calls for prioritizing the initial placement of classrooms in neighborhoods with the lowest levels of academic achievement. These enrollment and location priorities will tilt demonstration project access to Seattle’s neediest families.

The stated 15- to 20-year goal is to serve 80 percent of of all three- and four-year-olds from families under 300 percent of poverty by 2035. Which like I said, could be more ambitious. But considering the existing constraints on both classroom infrastructure and trained teachers, the demonstration program looks like a very good start.

Again, this is a very thorough proposal, so a more thorough analysis will have to wait. But with both $15 minimum wage and universal preschool proposals working their way through council, 2014 is shaping up to be a very exciting year.

In the comment threads at HA and elsewhere, some critics have shrugged off the looming Metro bus service cuts in suburban and exurban King County by asserting that most folks out there already have cars. Eliminate the less efficient feeder routes, they argue, and just focus on providing more park and ride spots. Which I suppose would be a welcome solution for Mercer Islanders accustomed to fighting for spots at its overcrowded park and ride.

But for the suburban poor, not so much.

The problem is, not everybody owns a car and not everybody who does own a car can really afford one. According to AAA’s annual Your Driving Costs report (pdf), released just this week, the average cost of car ownership is $8,876 a year.  By comparison, a full-time worker earning the Washington State minimum wage of $9.32 only takes home $19,385 in pre-tax income.

Of course, you can drive for less. But not as much less as you might imagine. AAA estimates average depreciation and finance charges at $3,510 and $847 respectively. So if you inherited a 15-year-old car from your grandmother, you can subtract that. But older cars generally have lower average fuel economy and higher annual maintenance costs (AAA estimates about 5 cents a mile for normal routine maintenance and wear and tear just over the first five years of the car, plus another penny a mile for tires), so you gotta figure those costs would be substantially higher on your typical beater. As for insurance, sure you can save bucks by declining collision and comprehensive on grannie’s clunker, but the poor generally have lower credit ratings and thus higher insurance rates, and the young (or their parents), well, they’re just generally screwed when it comes to auto insurance.

So when every penny is counted, I’d be surprised if there are many folks who can drive a car for much less than $4,000 a year. By comparison, a two-zone Metro bus pass costs $108 a month.

One of the side effects of Seattle’s booming economy and relatively strong real estate market is that we have been relentlessly driving our middle class families, let alone the working poor, out of the city and into cheaper suburban housing. It’s a tradeoff: longer commutes in exchange for lower rent. But for many households who rented an apartment or purchased a house based on proximity to a bus route that is no longer there, adding a car to their monthly budget just doesn’t pencil out.

Short term, there’s not much Seattle voters can do for suburban bus commuters. But we shouldn’t just shrug off their plight.

– I’m assuming we won’t see any opinion pieces from Senator Pearson complaining that people breaking the law to get their way on steelhead release are bullies. [h/t to Roger in the comments]

– Congrats to Idaho couples and activists.

– The Clackamas County Clerk is sure a decent person doing her job well, so stop saying that she isn’t.

– Recess Shrinks At Seattle Schools; Poor Schools Fare Worst

– Ramesh Ponnuru is one of the conservatives that the liberal intelligentsia loves to like. He isn’t a James Dobson bible-beater, nor is he a Louie Gohmert reactionary. He’s the kind of conservative who wears a suit, speaks in measured tones, and is still a liar.

– Here are some South Sound sports.

Goddamn liberal Seattle and its goddamn job-killing liberal policies!

April’s jobless rate of 6.1 percent was down from 6.3 percent a month earlier.

Joblessness in the Seattle metro area, which includes Bellevue and Everett, also declined two-tenths of a percentage point in April, to 5.0 percent.

As usual, Seattle accounted for most of the state’s job growth, with 7,100 of the 7,700 total coming from King and Snohomish counties alone.

No wonder the rest of the state hates us: our high taxes are stealing their jobs!

State Senator Kirk Pearson takes a strong stance against bullying. Is he opposed to people beating up kids because they’re gay? Maybe, but not in this article. Is he trying to figure out a way to make sure that schools and workplaces are free from harassment? No! He’s against bullying to the extent that it’s a metaphor for advocating a position he doesn’t like (Everett Herald link).

Most of us have to deal with bullying at some point in our lives. The key is to recognize the type of bullying you face and make sure that you don’t respond the way the bully wants. Most of all, you should never give in to intimidation or threats, lest you plan to hand your milk money over on a regular basis.

That’s how it is in movies and TV, but I’m not so sure it’s how it works best in real life. Maybe go to an authority figure? I don’t know, it probably depends on your specific situation. Anyway, OK, so that’s a setup. Now maybe we can smoothly transition away from that and talk about the thing he wants to talk about.

It’s a lesson the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife apparently has yet to learn. The agency claims its mission includes providing sustainable fish and wildlife recreational and commercial opportunities, yet it recently slashed fishing opportunities by cutting a deal with Wild Fish Conservancy — a bully threatening the state with lawsuits.

OK. So a group saying that they’ll sue if they don’t think the state is living up to its responsibility hardly sounds like a bully. More like fairly routine. Lawsuits and the threat of a lawsuit are part of the way these environmental protection laws are designed. You can disagree with it if you want (and for what it’s worth, I don’t have any opinion one way or the other), but it’s not really accurate to say that just because you disagree with it, that it’s bullying. Anyway, then for a while he talks about policy, and then more leaning on his shitty metaphor.

By giving in to bullying, DFW has created an unequitable and unacceptable situation for sport fishermen, tribes and our state’s economy as a whole.

Does Senator Pearson understand that actual people are actually the victim of actual bullying? Because I feel like he might choose a different metaphor if he did.

True, the federal court agreement will keep the bully at bay for the next 2 ½ years at most, preventing the Wild Fish Conservancy from suing DFW over its Puget Sound hatchery programs during that time. But like any bully, it is likely that the group will simply resume the pursuit of its agenda by threat and lawsuit once that window has closed. And what is to prevent others from seeing the success of this tactic and launching similar bullying strategies of their own?

Like any bully, if you hammer out an agreement with them in Federal court, they’ll be back. Look, I realize that not every metaphor works. Lord knows that.

Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat gets it half right when it comes to special levies:

If you’re feeling fatigue at all this, council members say: Blame Tim Eyman. The property-tax cap inspired by Eyman forces the city into paying for services “a la carte,” one special request at a time. They said constantly asking for more money creates a perception that taxes are high, but they remain about average for a big city.

“The reason we keep going back to this well is because of Tim Eyman,” Burgess said.

Except other local cities have figured out how to survive under Eyman’s boot heel without being in a perpetual state of need or crisis. Bellevue, for instance, has only one special levy, a parks tax that passed six years ago.

Um, so here’s the thing, Danny: We’re not Bellevue. Or Renton. Or Issaquah. Or Zillah for that matter. We’re Seattle. Which means we have different values and different needs than other cities. I don’t expect Snoqualmie, for example to feel it necessary to raise taxes to buy back in-city bus routes. But then, Snoqualmie’s not nearly as transit dependent as Seattle is. So if they don’t want to pay extra to preserve Metro, that’s up to them. But Seattle is different.

Do you think other cities are magically spending money more efficiently than Seattle? No, they’re just making the political decision to provide fewer public services. Should Seattle reject universal preschool simply because none of our neighboring cities pay for it?

The point to remember, and it’s one I’ve emphasized repeatedly, is that none of these special levies and transportation benefit districts would have been necessary without Eyman’s initiatives. The whole purpose of these initiatives was to force the funding of public services to a la carte public votes. And with the sole exception of universal preschool, all of the levies we’re being asked to approve are to preserve existing services, not create new ones.

Seattle is not a high tax city. Never has been. So rather than comparing ourselves to how other King County cities tax themselves (none of which compare to Seattle in any way), we should be focusing on what we need, what we want, and what we can afford.

During her successful campaign for Seattle City Council I pooh-poohed critics who denounced Socialist Alternative candidate Kshama Sawant as unelectable due to her party’s stance in favor of collectivizing the Fortune 500. She was running for city council, for chrissakes. It’s not like she was going to make collectivizing Boeing a councilmanic priority.

But the collectivization thing does rub a lot of people the wrong way, striking them as both un-American and impractical. And while I generally share that skepticism, that won’t stop me from making the following bold proposal: Collectivize Comcast.

Comcast is fast becoming a dangerously large corporation with the economic power, media might, and political influence to twist public policy contrary to the public good. While perhaps not quite yet a monopoly in the old Ma Bell sense of the word, its dominant position as a broadband provider threatens to saddle American businesses and consumers with slower speeds and higher prices than much of the rest of the world enjoys. Comcast’s push to end net neutrality could impose a toll on innovation, while its self-interest in sucking profits from the infrastructure it has rather than investing in the infrastructure we need must be viewed as nothing less than a tax on US economic competitiveness.

Besides, everybody hates Comcast. So let’s collectivize it.

And by “collectivize,” I don’t mean taking their assets by eminent domain or some extraordinary property grab. I mean collectivizing the American way: via a hostile takeover of a public company… but financed by US taxpayers rather than hedge fund managers or LBO conmen.

At about $50 a share, Comcast currently has a market capitalization of just under $130 billion. Offer $60 a share—a 20 percent premium—and a majority of shareholders would likely sell out in a heartbeat. And you don’t even need to buy all the shares. Just enough to control the board. For a federal government that’s created trillions of dollars in new money via “quantitative easing,” that sort of cash would be chump change.

And we don’t even want all of Comcast. Once taxpayers seize control of the company we can recoup some of the cost by selling off all the parts we don’t need: NBC/Universal, its professional sports teams and stadia management business, and other valuable properties. All we want is the broadband business—a public utility—as the basis for building a national, publicly-owned broadband network.

It’s not as outrageous a proposal as it may at first sound. The federal government bought controlling interest in GM, Chrysler, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac when they faced collapse, because our leaders determined it to be in the public interest. Well what could be more in the public interest in the 21st century than assuring open and equal access to an affordable, high speed Internet?

Besides, just talking about collectivizing Comcast has value in itself. Remember, everybody thought Sawant was crazy for campaigning on a $15 minimum wage, and a year later, Seattle is on the verge of passing one. Debating a public takeover of Comcast seriously, by whatever term of art we choose, would be an exercise in going on the political offensive. And if executives at Comcast and other telecom giants begin to feel some genuine pushback, perhaps they’ll think twice before pushing their anti-competitive agenda too far.

Yeah, yesterday’s poll finding 73 percent support in Seattle for a $15 minimum wage is a union-sponsored survey producing a union-friendly result. So take that with a grain of salt. It is also a survey that was structured and released so as to support the minimum wage compromise that Mayor Ed Murray hammered out between labor and business leaders, and is now under consideration by the city council. Again, context.

But EMC Research is a reputable polling firm, and 550 likely voters is a decent sample size, so it would be silly simply to dismiss these results as biased. On the core question—do you support setting Seattle’s minimum wage at $15 an hour?—voter preference is unambiguous:

I’m not saying that millions of dollars of TV ads portraying small business owners warning they’ll close up shop or move out of town won’t nudge the needle. But that’s an awfully heavy needle to nudge. So defeating $15 at the polls would be a dubious proposition.

Even more dubious? Persuading city council members—all of whom are up for reelection in 2015—that there won’t be a price to pay for undermining this very popular proposal. Richard Conlin was ousted by a socialist after casting the lone vote against paid sick leave. I’m not sure there’s anybody on the council who relishes the thought of being branded as the anti-$15 minimum wage candidate.

That said, if there’s anything that I’ve heard from the council that unsettles me it’s the chatter about exploring whether to make the tip and/or benefit deduction permanent. There is a certain logic to a tip credit that I imagine might be compelling to the Bagshaw, Burgess, Clark, Rasmussen camp. Meanwhile, Harrell is particularly being pressured by minority and immigrant business owners to soften the deal on their behalf.

But a permanent tip credit would virtually guarantee a competing $15 Now initiative with at least partial labor support, so with only 23 percent of respondents voicing support for a permanent tip credit or benefit deduction, council members who value their jobs should think long and hard before undermining Murray’s grand bargain.

No, there’s nothing definitive about this poll, and yes it was commissioned by pro-minimum wage groups. But if the business community had polling that refuted the core premise that support for a $15 minimum wage remains very strong, they would have released their polling numbers too.

Council members who value their jobs should be very wary of ignoring these results.

A new poll conducted by EMC Research on behalf of labor organizations finds 74 percent of Seattle voters support a $15 minimum wage, up from 68 percent support in January (PDF). Also, voters find socialist Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant more credible than the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, the Seattle Times, and the Washington Restaurant Association.

More thorough analysis in the morning, but for the moment I’m busy drinking this:

– Yes, bikes can be bad drivers too.

– Looking forward to specially colored bus lanes.

– This is kind of old, but (a) thank goodness Musab Mohammad Masmari plead guilty, even if it wasn’t to a hate crime and (b) the history of the attacks on Neighbours was interesting and scary.

– The story is a welcome corrective to the bromide that “government should be run like a business”–as though business is some unassailable fortress of morality.

– What I love most about this story is the assumption that aliens would want to be baptized Catholic. I mean maybe, but it seems like they’ve got their own thing going on. Did they come to Earth just to get baptized? Do they not have their own belief systems?

– Get better soon, Kathleen Hanna

As expected, Mayor Ed Murray announced today a Seattle-only tax package that would buy back 90 percent of bus service reductions financially strapped King County Metro has proposed for in-city routes. The $60 vehicle license fee and tenth of a cent sales tax increase would raise approximately $45 million a year—$42 million to restore and preserve Seattle bus routes, and $3 million towards a “Regional Partnership Fund” intended to attract matching funds from surrounding cities to spend toward preserving intercity commuter routes.

This is of course the same tax package rejected by county voters in Proposition 1 last, relying on the same “transportation benefit district” authority the state grants cities and counties. (I’ve dubbed it Proposition 1.1.) The only real differences between the two measures are that Prop 1 would have spent 40 percent of revenue on roads, whereas Prop 1.1 is dedicated entirely toward transit—and of course that Prop 1.1 will be voted on only in Seattle, where voters overwhelmingly favored Prop 1 by a better than two to one margin.

Murray was prodded into pushing forth his own proposal by a competing initiative to buy back Seattle bus service via a $30 million a year property tax increase. “We are thrilled that Seattle voters will have a chance to vote to preserve their bus service this fall,” initiative sponsor Ben Schiendelman of Friends of Transit replied via email. “With several progressive revenue sources available, we hope the council will take a serious look at all funding options before putting transit on the ballot.”

Schiendelman says that his organization has suspended signature gathering. Mission accomplished.

As for me, I’m agnostic as to the revenue source, as none of the options are great. “It is not ideal,” admitted Seattle City Council member Tom Rasmussen at this morning’s press conference. “We sought a motor vehicle excise tax from the state. They failed us.”

They certainly did.

Murray and others repeatedly stressed that this was just a temporary solution until the legislature grants Metro a viable regional funding option. But I’m not so sure. Given the thrashing Prop 1 took by county voters, I don’t know that a more progressive MVET would have passed either. And I’m not hopeful that we’ll get MVET authority out of Olympia until the Democrats retake control of the state senate, an iffy prospect this November. “This is really up to voters,” offered state Senator Jamie Pedersen (D-Seattle). Good luck with that.

But the good news is that there appears to be strong support within Seattle from both the electorate and our elected leaders to tax ourselves to maintain crucial bus service. So while the suburbs may suffer, Seattle will attempt to at least take care of its own.

TANGENTIAL ASIDE: What is up with Seattle Times headline writers today? “County, city take variety of routes on bus rescue“…? No, they’ve taken the exact same route: cities buying back bus service hours. Not as bad as the Obamacare headline, but do the headline writers bother reading their own paper?

Oh no! “Insurers propose up to 26% increase in health-plan rates,” the headline on the front page of the Seattle Times website warns. Goddamn Obamacare ruining everything! Except, read the actual article and…

The proposed rate changes range from a decrease of 6.8 percent — from Molina Healthcare of Washington — to an increase of 26 percent from Time Insurance, a national company with relatively few Washington policyholders.

Most rate-change requests, particularly from larger insurers, were in the middle ground, with most asking for increases from about 2 to about 11 percent.

To anyone who has had individual insurance, premium increases are not surprising: Records show that, on average, insurers have proposed rate increases for individual plans from about 9 percent to more than 18 percent every year from 2007 to 2013.

So that one 26 percent rate hike proposal was an outlier—almost double the next highest request—that affects few Washingtonians, while the average rate hike request is actually lower than that during the previous six years! Yay for Obamacare! But you wouldn’t know that from the incredibly biased and misleading heading.

I mean, they could’ve written their headline to read “Insurers propose up to 6.8% cut in health-plan rates,” and been just as accurate. But they didn’t.

This is actually a really important election year story. Republicans have been looking to the rate hike requests as an election year opportunity to spin Obamacare into a disaster for consumers. But if the rate hike requests are actually coming in lower than in previous years, then that is at least preliminary evidence that the exchanges are pulling in enough healthy Americans to balance the costs.

So thanks, Seattle Times editors, for attempting to spin relatively good news on one of the first post-Obamacare rate hike requests into an anti-Obamacare national headline.

UPDATE: So how do other headline writers interpret the news? “A Washington State Health Insurer Plans to Cut Rates in 2015,” declares the Wall Street Journal, taking the opposite (and arguably sexier) spin. Pretty embarrassing for the Seattle Times.

UPDATE, UPDATE: As Richard points out in the comment thread, the editors updated the article at 10:35 am, changing the headline to the far more neutral: “Most state health insurers seek rate boost: Proposals compared.” Score another victory for Seattle Times Voluntary Ombudsman David Goldstein!

Tuesdays are made for politics. So please join us this evening for some politics over a pint at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally.

We meet tonight and every Tuesday at the Roanoke Park Place Tavern, 2409 10th Ave E, Seattle. The starting time is 8:00 pm, but some folks show up earlier for dinner.

http://youtu.be/cjuGCJJUGsg

http://youtu.be/2HruwVGO-20

Can’t make it to Seattle? Check out another Washington state chapter of Drinking Liberally over the next week. The Tri-Cities, Vancouver, WA, and Redmond chapters also meet on Tuesday. On Wednesday, the Bellingham chapter meets. For Thursday, the Tacoma chapter meets. And next Monday, the Aberdeen, Yakima and Olympia chapters meet.

With 215 chapters of Living Liberally, including nineteen in Washington state, four in Oregon, and three more in Idaho, chances are excellent there’s a chapter meeting somewhere near you.

For legislative bodies, I’m of the opinion that individual legislators really ought to subsume their constituents’ needs to the need of the whole. So yeah, state legislators should advocate for the areas they represent, but they should do what’s best for the state when the two are in conflict. After all, they’re state legislators. And yes, I realize in practice it doesn’t work that way for most politicians. So I’m glad that Ed Murray has for the bulk of his career in government had a regional/statewide view of problem solving.

Still, now that he’s no longer a legislator, he should probably knock it off. I mean, finding regional solutions are great if they benefit Seattle. But if they don’t benefit Seattle, there’s really no point in him doing them.

So now that there’s a plan to save transit in Seattle, I hope that he can find more times when Seattle needs to, or it’s just Seattle’s best option to, go it alone. Sure it would have been in Seattle’s best interest to be better connected to the suburbs. And it would be better for the planet if the rest of King County used buses more. But the rest of the county’s rejection of buses means it’s in Seattle’s best interest not to tether ourselves to the rest of the county on transit.

Seattle is big enough and different enough politically from the rest of the state and the county that sometimes the best thing is to go it alone. I realize that might offend the mayor’s sensibilities. But he wanted to be Mayor and not Senate Minority Leader, so his job isn’t to form the best coalitions, it’s to lead one city.