HorsesAss.Org

By all accounts Mayor Ed Murray is expected to ask the city council to send to the ballot a measure to buy back in-city Metro bus service cuts via a $60 car tab fee and tenth of a cent hike in the sales tax. Sound familiar? That’s the exact same tax that was rejected by King County voters last month in the form of Proposition 1, because it’s the exact same taxing authority also granted to the city via a transportation benefit district.

Call it Proposition 1.1.

I suppose this funding option is as good as any other, especially considering that Prop 1 passed here in Seattle. Even better, it’s Ed’s idea rather than Ben’s, so that means Prop 1.1 will enjoy Ed’s enthusiastic support. Which is fine. I don’t really care who gets the credit for things as long as good things get done. And buying back Metro bus service cuts is a good thing.

That said, I just can’t help but feeling a little wistful over the fact that just couple years ago Seattle voters rejected a similar car tab measure targeted toward expanding transit service—precious taxing authority we’ll now be using merely to preserve transit service. That’s not much of a step forward. Also, it is of course a shame that suburban and exurban Metro riders will be totally dicked over by these cuts.  But what are we to do? Suffer in sympathy?

Feisty and I just went for a walk, and I took the opportunity to stream Philadelphia sports radio station 97.5 The Fanatic on my phone. Because I’m a diehard Philadelphia Eagles fan, and I was interested in hearing Philly sports talk’s take on the Eagle’s draft. But all any of the callers wanted to talk about was The ESPN Kiss: Missouri linebacker Michael Sam’s emotional embrace of his boyfriend after getting the news that the St. Louis Rams had made him the first out player drafted by an NFL team.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKwsqAERmic

Most of the callers were pretty damn mad. Or disgusted. Or both. Which I guess is a sad commentary on how much anti-gay prejudice remains in mainstream America.

But here’s the thing: host Mike Missanelli forcefully defended the kiss, repeatedly calling out his callers on their bigotry. “If Michael Sam chooses to kiss is boyfriend on national television, what rights does that take away from anyone else?” Missanelli rhetorically asked his audience. “Zero,” he answered. Indeed, Missanelli didn’t just defend Sam’s public display of gay affection, he ridiculed his callers for their outrage, repeatedly comparing it to the outrage people used to express at seeing a black man kiss a white woman.

This is sports talk. In Philadelphia. A disproportionately white, middle-aged, blue collared, Catholic (Italian & Irish) audience. And the hosts are calling their listeners bigots for objecting to a televised gay kiss.

The next generation of sports fans are going to be influenced by these talkers. And that’s progress.

It’s not often that I find myself passionately on the same side of a controversial issue with the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and the Seattle Times editorial board. Then again, there really shouldn’t be anything controversial about net neutrality.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has suffered a barrage of criticism since he proposed allowing Internet service providers (ISPs) to cut deals with content providers to pay more for faster service.

Wheeler’s pay-for-prioritization proposal means the end of net neutrality, the idea that all Internet content is treated equally — free of toll booths or fast lanes.

Imagine if, let’s say, HA suddenly started loading a quarter as fast as the Seattle Times—or perhaps not at all—because I couldn’t afford to pay Comcast and Qwest the “prioritization fees” necessary to get my content to their customers  via their fast lanes? No wait. I don’t have to imagine. I’ve already been through something like that in a prior venture.

When I first started up my software company in the early 1990s, large software retailers like Egghead, Computer City, and CompUSA all bought direct. We got crappy terms, and it was often a hassle (Computer City had us ship directly to individual stores, sometimes ordering as few as two copies per store), but at least we had access to the market.

But it was right around that time that an explosion of consumer titles and a wave of consolidation started changing everything for small independent publishers. One by one the major retailers stopped buying direct, instead insisting on buying through one of two or three distributors. But we were too small to get into distribution. The two largest distributors demanded annual six-figure “market development funds”—essentially a retail channel entrance fee. A second tier distributor took us on before quickly going bankrupt, stiffing us on tens of thousands of dollars in accounts receivable.

But wait. It gets worse.

Once we lost access to brick and mortar retail, the mail order catalogs, which had previously accounted for more than 70 percent of our sales, started jacking up the “co-op advertising fees” to independents like us who had no other options. An eighth of a page ad that cost us a few hundred bucks a month in 1993 could run as much as $8,000 a month by 1996. It wasn’t that there wasn’t a market for our rhyming dictionary software, it’s that we could no longer afford to access to it. So products like ours disappeared from the market until the App Store model democratized the software industry more than a decade later.

It’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s close enough. When I first started blogging a decade ago, I had every disadvantage but one: equal and unfettered access to readers. And so I was free to compete in the marketplace of ideas, winning what readership I could based on the quality of my content rather than the whims (or extortion) of some gatekeeper. This relatively low barrier to entry is one of the things that has made the Internet so transformative. But take away net neutrality and you will ultimately create a sort of broadband apartheid—a separate and unequal Internet forever in the grasp of those who levy the tolls, and those few who can afford to pay them.

Save the Internet!

– The funny looking building that I write too many posts about is turning 10 this week.

– Congrats Daddy Constantine.

– For all the chatter about the law’s unpopularity, the fact remains that Obamacare is not only more popular than the Republican repeal fantasy, it’s also more popular than Republicans.

– Glad to see crisis pregnancy centers having trouble with their deceptive advertising.

– When did appeals to realism become a trump card in pop culture criticism? And when did we agree that a certain kind of Internet commenter is the final arbiter of what is real and what is not? (has a blurred out, but maybe still NSFW picture)

Last week’s contest was won by Theophrastus. It was Bonn, Germany.

This week’s a random location from the Google Maps views, good luck! (you may have noticed that the redesign allows for larger images in these posts from now on, thanks Goldy!)

And Happy Mother’s Day!

Jeremiah 20:14-18
Cursed be the day I was born! May the day my mother bore me not be blessed! Cursed be the man who brought my father the news, who made him very glad, saying, “A child is born to you—a son!” May that man be like the towns the LORD overthrew without pity. May he hear wailing in the morning, a battle cry at noon. For he did not kill me in the womb, with my mother as my grave, her womb enlarged forever. Why did I ever come out of the womb to see trouble and sorrow and to end my days in shame?

Happy Mother’s Day! Discuss.

University of Missouri defensive end Michael Sam became the first openly gay player to be taken in the NFL draft, when the St. Louis Rams selected him in the seventh round, the 249th pick out of 256.

At 6-1, 261 pounds, Sam is considered undersized for his position and not a great fit for the Rams’ 4-3 defense, so he’d have to be considered a long shot to make the team. But still, his high-profile draft selection breaks an awfully important barrier for gay athletes weighing the career implications of coming out of the closet. So kudos to the Rams for using a draft pick to make this statement.

Ten years ago today I published my first blog post, and HA is celebrating with a long overdue facelift: Bigger, cleaner, mobile responsive, and easier on my aging eyes. (Oh no! Changes! Complain in the comment thread if you want—I’m still making tweaks, and I’m eager to consider your feedback before mostly ignoring it.)

As for HA’s bilious innards, well, that’s sure as hell not changing. Re-reading that introductory post, it’s kinda funny how I managed to get the original vision for HA so remarkably right, while at the same time being so totally clueless as to how blogging would come to dominate my life. At the start, I told myself that blogging would be a good exercise in forcing myself to write every day. Writing three, four, sometimes five posts a day was never in my plans.

Anyway, I don’t feel like getting sentimental, and I certainly don’t want to put too much thought into the next ten weeks of HA, let alone the the next ten years. For the moment, I’m back writing here part-time while making a living taking on contract and freelance work. Thank you to everybody in the HA community (except for some of the vilest trolls) for this amazingly weird and gratifying decade. I appreciate being appreciated. Though of course, I also appreciate money.

Jon: The NY State Senate’s great yogurt debate.

Mark Fiore: Creative Execution.

Thom: The Good, The Bad, and the Very, Very Ugly.

Richard Fowler: The tale of indicted GOP Rep. Michael Grimm.

Jon: Occupy Jail.

Monica Redux:

• Young Turks: She’s back!
• WaPo: Lewinsky’s top five targets in Vanity Fair.
• Ed: Lynn Cheney’s crazy conspiracy.
• Sharpton: Wingnuts go conspiratorial over Lewinsky story.
• Alex Wagner: The mythical power of The Clinton.
• Ann Telnaes: Cheney’s have a blue dress in their past, too.

Ed: Michele Bachmann launches mission to block National Women’s History Museum .

ONN: The Onion Week in Review.

Liberal Viewer: FAUX News, “Huge Christian cross isn’t religous”.

FBI investigates Bundy supporters over death threats (via Crooks and Liars).

Sam Seder and Cliff Schecter: What’s the difference between Tea Party and Establishment Republicans?

Stephen: Everywhere is guns.

Mental Floss: 60 Regional foods you shouldn’t eat anywhere else.

Emily’s abortion video.

White House: West Wing Week.

Thom: Gov ID nightmare.

Bill Maher: New Rule for Justice Thomas.

BENGHAAAAAAAAAAZZZZZZZZZIIIIIII!!!!!1!!11!1! Derangement Disorder:

• David Pakman: FAUX and Fiends link Benghazi to missing flight….
• Sam Seder and Cliff Schecter: Benghazi and the GOP conspiracy machine
• Sharpton: GOP’s Benghazi clown act.
• Alex Wagner: The GOP’s Benghazi-funding strategy
• Thom: The FAUX News hardon for Benghazi.
• When in doubt…BENGHAAAAAZZZZZZZZIIIIIIIII!1!I!!!1!!!

• Matt Binder: FAUX News blames Nigerian girls’ kidnapping on…BENGHAAAAAAZZZZZIIIIII!!!!1!!1!
• David Pakman: Right wing media cashes in on Benghazi
• Chris Hayes: Over dead bodies—The GOP runs on #Benghazi
• Young Turks: Republicans raise money off the dead
• Reid Report: The GOP’s McCarthyism & Political witch-hunts of today
• Sam Seder and Digby: The politics of Benghazi
• Steve Kornacki: GOP Benghazi feeding frenzy, Part I
• Steve Kornacki: GOP Benghazi feeding frenzy, Part II

Stephen: Tip and Wag.

Thom: ALEC is trying to take down the EPA.

David Pakman: GOP ObamaCare hearing goes horribly wrong…for the GOP.

Maddow: Massachusetts Tea-Party politician, Mark Fisher’s million dollar ransom.

Sharpton: The death of a GOP talking point:
http://youtu.be/FJGvS_5X3qg

Richard Fowler: A huge week for minimum wage.

Jon: 2016 will be a lame remix of Bush and Clinton.

White House: Inside the WH solar panels.

Stephen interviews a teabagging vampire.

Ann Telnaes: Climate Change cooking.

Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

Lots of changes to the website going on tonight. Hopefully. So if you find HA temporarily in a state of disarray, don’t worry. Either I’ll fix it, or give up and return everything to the way it was.

Local transit advocates are righteously pissed at Mayor Ed Murray for his public and private opposition to an initiative that would raise $30 million a year in property taxes to buy back looming Metro bus service cuts within Seattle. And Murray—who has always bristled at the charge that he is in any way “anti-transit”—is righteously pissed right back. So as a public service, I thought I’d take a moment to explain the two sides to each other in the hope of encouraging a Murrayesque consensus.

First of all, Ed, you have to understand that when critics call you anti-transit what they really mean is that you are not sufficiently anti-car. Nobody really thinks you hate buses and trains (well, nobody whose opinion you should care about). They just think that you are way too conventional in terms of your transportation thinking. Not 1950s conventional. But 1990s conventional. And a lot has changed in Seattle since you first headed to Olympia. The shift toward transit, bike, and pedestrian oriented transportation planning that may have seemed radical a quarter century ago is the consensus in Seattle today. And many transportation advocates here rightly fear that your lack of buy-in will get in the way of their urbanist vision.

It’s a balance thing. You may be more pro-transit than the majority of legislators. But that’s not good enough for Seattle.

As for Murray’s critics, you have to understand that he really means this when he says this:

Regionalism must be an element of any transit plan: Any transit financing plan – either short-term or long-term – must reflect the reality that Seattle’s economy depends on people coming into the city from throughout the Puget Sound region.

Ed and I have been having this argument for years. This isn’t just talk. He passionately believes in taking a regional approach to transportation planning, and chafes at any suggestion to the contrary. It’s one of the reasons I didn’t vote for him. But of course, he’s absolutely right. I mean, there’s at least as much utility in saving bus routes serving commuters heading to and from Seattle as there is in saving routes that operate entirely within city borders.

So regionalism should be an element of any transit plan. But the same could be said of the minimum wage, paid sick leave, and universal preschool. All of these would be better implemented at the county or state level. But they’re not. So Seattle has chosen to go it alone. Because that’s the only practical political option we have.

Still, nothing seems to shake Murray’s core belief in the efficacy of regional transportation planning, or his skepticism of Seattle-only solutions, be it for funding light rail expansion or saving the bus service we already have. So if you want to win Murray’s support for a Seattle-only bus funding measure you are going to need to convince him that it is both absolutely urgent and absolutely short term—and that you absofuckinglutely pledge to support his efforts to achieve a permanent regional solution. (Personally, I’m in a fuck the rest of King County mood at the moment, but I understand that’s not constructive.)

Shorter Goldy: Ed, stop being so defensive about being labeled “anti-transit”—it’s meant as a relative term. And everybody else, you need to pledge to support Ed’s regional approach. Then maybe we can all quit the kvetching and save some bus routes.

In fact, it’s so secret that Mayor Ed Murray doesn’t even know it yet! But if he really wants to save Seattle from devastating Metro bus service cuts, and he really wants avoid putting a transit-oriented property tax initiative on the ballot this fall, here’s all he and his allies on the city council need to do: restore the head tax and and raise the commercial parking tax.

Both can be done councilmanically—that is, without being referred to voters—and combined, the two taxes could raise up to $50 million, almost twice that under the proposed property tax initiative. Just push a transit package through the council now, and there’s no need to send the initiative to the ballot. Simple!

That said, I sure don’t buy the argument that there isn’t available levy capacity to fund both transit and universal preschool, and I caution both transit and preschool supporters that this is a rhetorically dangerous argument to push.

– Revisiting public financing for local elections

– I join Seattlish in being proud of Mount Si High

– It is all too common for sports media to find themselves reporting on sexual assault cases, most often when an athlete is alleged to be the perpetrator of the crime. While sexual assault is a problem throughout U.S. society — nearly 20 percent of women will be assaulted in their lifetimes — it often seems to garner the most attention when a sports star is involved.

– I like the idea of tech companies being able to disclose NSA surveillance. Go Suzan DelBene.

– Congrats to Ron Sims on the new job chairing the Washington Health Benefit Exchange (Spokesman Review link).

– Portables are gross.

I hadn’t noticed it at the time, I suppose because I was so focused on my own employment situation, but the Seattle Times lost another two political reporters this spring, longtime Olympia correspondent Andrew Garber and promising young local reporter Brian Rosenthal. (And that’s on top of the paper’s recent exodus of women reporters.) Garber has joined the Seattle Police Department as a senior media advisor, while Rosenthal’s Twitter bio says he he is now covering Texas state government for the Austin bureau of the Houston Chronicle.

Congratulations, Brian, I guess. But how bad must it be to work at the Seattle Times to make moving to Texas a better option? (I know—Austin. But still, it’s fucking hot, and filled with Texans.)

As for Garber, I believe his departure may leave the Olympian’s Brad Shannon as the last man standing from the Olympia press corps I met when I first started going down to the state capitol a decade ago. So I’ll make the same joke I made when David Postman left the paper: If many more reporters leave the profession to take media relations positions, pretty soon there won’t be any media left to relate to. (Oh wait. That’s pretty much what’s already happened.)

As far as I know, neither Garber or Rosenthal have been replaced yet.

Now that SeaTac has and Seattle will likely have $15 minimum wages, we ought to look at what that means for the Port. Since the lawsuit is still underway in SeaTac, maybe there won’t be a gaping hole. But for now, it looks likely that jobs at SeaTac Airport and Port of Seattle facilities in Seattle won’t be covered by the minimum wage laws.

Presuming that the previous ruling gets upheld, I see a couple ways to protect the quality of those jobs. First the state could change the law to make it so that state sponsored port authorities have to apply all local minimum wage laws. I’m not a lawyer, and I haven’t read the lower court verdict, but I assume this could be done legislatively. That would be a bit of a stretch if the state Senate is still controlled by Republicans, but if it requires a constitutional amendment that’ll pretty much be off the table. So that means the Port, I guess. Elections are on odd numbered years, but pressure can be put on the members now (click on the individual pictures to email them).

Of course, the market will take care of some of this. Alaska Airlines have already raised their wages (not to $15) in response to the initiative in SeaTac.

Well, as prospective employees flocked to apply for $15-an-hour jobs, Alaska Airlines raised wages for its contract employees inside the airport to $12 an hour. Clearly, in order to attract and retain the best workers in the area, Alaska Airlines had to sweeten the pot, even saying the new wages “more accurately reflect the local market.” Some of the raises were as high as 28%, showing how a rising wage tide can lift all boats, rather than the right-wing idea that jobs can only be created when wages are depressed.

Still and all, if the two most important cities for the Port Of Seattle raise their minimum wage. The port ought to follow suit, at least in those cities, and preferably throughout their jurisdiction.