HorsesAss.Org

While Obama hasn’t released his budget yet, the reports are that it will include a proposal to include chained CPI for calculating Social Security inflation. It’s technical and if you manage to stay awake with a detailed explanation of it, congrats. The bottom line is that the calculations of inflation would rise more slowly on the assumption that seniors, people on Social Security Disability and widows would replace things for cheaper ones, so we can give out benefits at a lower rate than inflation.

I’m asleep just writing about it, but it’s a major benefit cut. To get out ahead of it, I’m writing Senators Cantwell and Murray and Representative McDermott (the 3 people who represent me in Congress). I hope you’ll do the same.

Dear Senators Murray and Cantwell and Representative McDermott;

I’m writing to ask you to oppose tying Social Security benefit increases to chained CPI instead of to to inflation. We should be looking at ways to increase benefits to seniors who’ve been paying into the system their whole lives, or at the very least preserving the current benefits.

Social Security is not in crisis right now. While some tweaks may be necessary down the line, they shouldn’t be made just to show that you’re doing something. it’s also abhorrent to talk about benefit cuts — either through this sort of thing or raising the retirement age — before raising or eliminating the earnings cap all together.

Thank you,

Carl Ballard

– Cycle Tracks

– Rodney Tom is a dick.

– People are complicated, but Michael Kelly still helped lead us into an unnecessary war.

– Margaret Thatcher has died.

– I’ve always been concerned with people who use Islamist.

– The death of ironic justice

I don’t have a whole lot to say about the issue of having private clubs within bars where individuals can use marijuana. There’s certainly a valid concern about the effect of mixing alcohol and marijuana and then having people drive home at night. But I think the best way to approach that is to promote an alternative rather than trying to make it impossible for anyone to gather and use marijuana.

Amsterdam has its coffeeshops and it’s always made sense to me that Seattle could replicate that, even if they were all private clubs rather than your typical Starbucks. But it makes sense to me that if you want to stop people from publicly partaking in a certain type of venue, you should give them a smarter alternative.

Last week’s contest was won by Ludicrus Maximus. It was Barcelona, Spain.

This week’s is another random location somewhere on earth, good luck!

Job 9:23
When a good person dies a sudden death, God sits back and laughs.

Discuss.

Young Turks: Sarah Palin’s embarrassingly hypocritical PAC expenses.

Kimmel: This week in unnecessary censorship.

Maddow: NC GOP takes war on voting to college students:

Young Turks: Weed wins.

Stephen on ‘Morning Joe’ supporting Mark Sanford.

Bill Press: Shocking statistics on poverty in America.

Young Turks: Michelle Obama, the single mom.

Sam Seder with an episode of Random Rush.

WA tries to close down private clubs that serve pot vapor.

Bearing Arms:

• Sam Seder and Cliff Schecter: This week in gun control
• Young Turks: Jim Carey and “Cold Dead Hands” fallout.
• Thom: Let’s start treating guns like cars.
• Bill Press praises CT for passing gun safety laws.
• Sam Seder: The “Family Protection Ordinance”
• Young Turks: The disasters and the successes in gun safety regulations
• 154 rounds in 4 minutes.
• Obama speaks on reducing gun violence
• Mark Fiore: Your Daily Gun.
• Susie Sampson’s Tea Party Report: GOP leaders reveal opinions on kids with guns:

Young Turks: The craziest conspiracy theories believe in.

Pap on the G.O.P. autopsy.

Sharpton: The Republican War on Women is revived.

Sam Seder: Idiot conservatives think that Google honored Hugo Chavez on Easter.

Cracking up over global warming.

Maddow: Once again, GOP embarrasses the U.S. on the world stage.

Sharpton: Bestiality is “The Stupid Party’s” new obsession.

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

Lawrence O’Donnell: How wrong the G.O.P. has been on marriage equality over the years.

Young Turks: Morning-after pill restrictions thrown out by judge.

Stephen takes down Jeremy Irons.

Fox & Rice:

• Jon on Sean on Rice.
• Young Turks: FAUX News disappointed more coaches aren’t abusing players.
• Sam Seder: FAUX News and the ‘wussification’ of America!

White House: West Wing Week.

Young Turks: Obama and the “best looking Attorney General”.

Lawrence O’Donnell: Hillary tops challengers for 2016.

Maddow: Defying extremist’s threats, clinic reopens with community support.

Jon: What is it with Republicans and animal fucking?!?

Sam Seder: Where are the female Libertarians?

Maddow: America’s other Tar Sands oil spill:

Young Turks: VA’s ‘criminalize blowjobs’ gubernatorial candidate.

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

I remember in the distant past at a group of activists trying to get the county I was living in at the time to build sidewalks on some street that was perceived (and probably was in fact) unsafe to walk in the shoulder. At some point someone suggested that the group just build its own sidewalk. There was some discussion about if we get the county’s permission or if we just go ahead and do it.

Nothing came of it, but the idea for that sort of DIY project that should be the government’s job as activism has always stuck in my head. So I was glad to read about this, even if it was only as a publicity stunt.

An extremely polite group of anonymous guerrilla road safety activists armed with $350 worth of reflective plastic pylons turned the painted Cherry Street bike lane under I-5 into a protected bike lane Monday morning.

The group—calling themselves the Reasonably Polite Seattleites—wanted to make a statement about how easy and affordable it would be for the city to use the method to make bike lanes safer all over the city. To stress how polite they are, they attached them using an adhesive pad for easy removal, according to an email sent to SDOT and Seattle Bike Blog.

I would really like to see some of these actions for real. Maybe don’t tell SDOT, and just put them up until they become part of the community, next time.

Ben Livingston writes in Slog about how the state Office of Financial Management was using some fuzzy calculations to overestimate the tax revenues that’ll be generated by I-502. It’s not terribly unusual to see drug law reformers overstating this case, but it’s a clear sign of how times have changed when a state agency is doing it.

This concern over failing to pull in the expected revenues from I-502 is echoed by Mark Kleiman, the state’s new “pot consultant”, in his recent interview on TVW (which you can see at the bottom of Livingston’s post). From that same interview, Kleiman is additionally concerned about whether people who are already in the medical marijuana community will switch over to the non-medical market when it’s available:

Washington state many he headed toward a situation where recreational sales of marijuana are not profitable due to heavy taxes, regulations and, most importantly, competition from the untaxed “collective gardens” where the state’s medical marijuana is grown, Washington’s newly hired pot consultant said last week.

“Any revenue estimate depends on actually having people come to the licit market rather than having them use one of the parallel markets,” UCLA professor and author Mark Kleiman commented last week’s episode of the Washington-based news program “Inside Olympia.” “What if you gave pot legalization and nobody came? It is entirely possible that by the time we finish regulating and taxing this product, it’s going to be uncompetitive with what you can get at the collective gardens.”

[Read more…]

This is a reminder that tonight the Northwest Progressive Institute’s Spring Fundraising Gala will be held at the Mercer Island Community Center (8236 SE 24th Street). A reception begins at 6:30 pm and the main program is at 7:15 pm.

This year’s speakers include Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-WA-1), Sound Transit CEO Joni Earl, State Rep. Gael Tarleton (D-36), and NPI founder Andrew Villeneuve. Tickets are $60 for individuals, $90 for households, and $20 for students and “those living lightly”. Kids are free. Tickets can be purchased here or at the door.

I’ve been to these in the past, and they’re quite enjoyable!

Obama, you’re better than this:

Speaking at a Bay Area fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee, the president said Harris is “brilliant,” “dedicated” and “tough.” Then he added, “She also happens to be, by far, the best-looking attorney general.”

According to reports from the fundraiser, the crowd laughed and Obama said, “It’s true! C’mon.”

Some cringed at the remarks, given the historic hurdles women have faced to be recognized for their accomplishments rather than their looks.

Ugh. No. I mean, I get it: you were trying to pay her a compliment, and it didn’t work. It ended up saying we should judge her on her looks on top of her brilliance, toughness and dedication. It happens, and now is the time to apologize.

– Who could have predicted the GOP budget would be a clusterfuck?

– the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Fortnight for would-be Pacific Northwest coal exporters

– Washington’s tax code is so full of holes it’s a doily

– The religious right are supporting Mark Sanford. Because of course they are.

– Thank God they protected us from Sharia Law!

– Hockey would be more interesting if they had hypersonic gas guns.

Rob McKenna had an editorial in The Seattle Times over the weekend about how the Republican party can come back. I guess I’m doing metacommentary on it.

Op-ed: How Republicans need to change in Washington state

Spoiler, it’s not how they can adjust their policies to be decent, it’s about branding. Now, I won’t say branding is totally bad, but you can only make a bad product look good for so long.

DEFEATS like those suffered by many of my Republican colleagues and me last November are cause for sober reflection, as opposed to finger pointing. Rather than focus on blaming others for our defeats, party leaders and activists should instead consider how changing demographics, rapid technological change and relatively swift shifts in public attitudes have contributed to the Democrats’ recent successes in our state and nationally.

Also, how Democrats’ policy positions have been good for those groups of people. There has been a long move over the last century from the Democrats being the whites only party to being the party of everybody deserves a spot at the table. The GOP has let itself become the party of white male identity politics, and they can’t shake that off without changing policy.

The challenge and opportunity for Republicans is in offering bold solutions that encourage more voters to support GOP candidates.

Fortunately, I’ve seen that constructive approach offered in recent weeks by leaders such as Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, among others. All have championed forward-looking policies that will benefit all Americans, not just those in battleground states or among narrow constituencies.

Policies that I will say exist, but won’t say what they are.

I heard the same approach last month when I hosted a roundtable with Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and two dozen of our state’s most active campaigners. I came out of that meeting impressed that Northwest Republicans, despite our losses, remain motivated to build the party and offer real alternatives to Olympia’s stale political culture.

What same approach? You didn’t say what the approach was, only that you think it exists. Name some policy that you think will help move people rather than some people.

If we want to be trusted to improve our public schools, grow our economy and govern more effectively, then as Northwest Republicans we must build stronger governing coalitions — and we need to welcome new people inside our party’s tent to do so. As Priebus said, we will win through addition and multiplication in our ranks, not through subtraction and division.

I’m not inherently opposed to what he’s trying to say. But again, it’s the GOP policy that isn’t inclusive. It’s the policy that’s cruel. It’s the policy that people don’t want. And even here, he says schools and the economy are important but doesn’t mention any actual policy for improving them. Anyway, blah blah blah, the national party. I’m skipping that.

In the ethnic and minority communities I visited while running for governor, I invariably received a warm welcome and much encouragement.

So I hired someone with a history of making fun of Asians on Twitter. Also, I didn’t mention policy.

And to be clear, if you want to reach out to minority communities, you have to actually reach out to minority communities. The Democrats were once the party of white supremacy and were worse for minorities than the Republicans are now. But the Democrats took the long, difficult, sometimes painful road to inclusion. It cost us the solid South (LBJ said for a generation, but he seems to have underestimated it), and probably more than a few elections in the North. But the party transformed itself by listening, and by actually changing policies. As Darryl’s post this afternoon demonstrates, that’s not something the GOP seems to be willing to do right now.

In the Sikh temples, at Latino and Asian-American community events, in meetings with African-American education reformers, and on the Indian reservations I revisited during my campaign — in all these communities and places, people expressed their appreciation for my presence. But they also asked, “Where are the other Republicans”?

Maybe this would be a good time to mention a policy change that happened when you went to those communities and listened to what they had to say.

They would go on to say, we have seen you many times outside of campaign season, but often our elected officials (in both parties) wait until election year to come around. That must change. In the deepest sense, Republicans “must be present to win,” as in winning over more support in these communities.

Mention policy.

Our candidates must improve their connection to our state’s many diverse communities. Before we can win their votes, we have to spend time in their communities, and not just in the few months before Election Day, to learn how their personal priorities align with Republican principles.

(a) Mention policy. (b) I love how this paragraph reads like like Rob McKenna knows that none of the GOP candidates might actually be from those communities he’s trying to get votes from. What we’re done with the part about trying to recruit minorities without mentioning policy? OK. I’m going to skip over most of the rest of it, and in fairness he will mention vague outlines of policy in his section on getting younger voters. I’d be remiss if I didn’t include this paragraph though:

Fortunately, we are starting from a competitive position in Washington state. In the governor’s race, I won majorities in five of 10 congressional districts, in 31 of the state’s 39 counties and collectively in the 47 legislative districts that were not located entirely within Seattle city limits. To put it in perspective, had fewer than 48,000 of the more than 3 million voters who cast ballots chosen differently, this would be a very different guest column.

TOO BAD WE LET SEATTLE VOTE. It’s always a great way to expand your votes by literally saying if we ignore a segment of the population, we’d have won.

The Republican Party 2012 Autopsy that goes by the name Growth and Opportunity Project is a couple of weeks old now. Two major foci of the report were on messaging and on building “demographic partners.” Essentially, communicating in a way that doesn’t promote the widespread perception that the G.O.P. doesn’t care about people.

Let’s look at today’s news to see how they’re doing.

From the “Killing Us Softly With Our Song” file: Today, RNC Chair Reince Priebus pens a piece at Redstate (via Steve Benen):

The President, the Senate Majority Leader, the House Democratic Leader, and the Chair of the Democratic National Committee (in whose home state this hearing occurred) made funding Planned Parenthood an issue in the 2012 campaign. They should now all be held to account for that outspoken support. If the media won’t, then voters must ask the pressing questions: Do these Democrats also believe a newborn has no rights? Do they also endorse infanticide?

The inference is that if you support Planned Parenthood you support INFANTICIDE! Clearly, users of Planned Parenthood are part of the vast infanticide conspiracy!

There’s one hell of a make-over there! It’s a big tent…unless you support or use the services of Planned Parenthood.

And from the “South Will Do it Again” file: Eleven NC lawmakers come up with a novel interpretation of the U.S. Constitution so that they can do things like establish a State religion:

The Constitution “does not grant the federal government and does not grant the federal courts the power to determine what is or is not constitutional” according to a resolution sponsored by North Carolina House Majority Leader Edgar Starnes (R) and ten of his fellow Republicans — a statement that puts them at odds with over 200 years of constitutional law. In light of this novel reading of the Constitution, Starnes and his allies also claim that North Carolina is free to ignore the Constitution’s ban on government endorsement of religion

Ian Millhiser points out that this is a sorry attempt to undo the Fourteenth Amendment that is a major constitutional legacy of the Civil War.

Really…it IS a big tent, as long as you worship the right God (i.e. atheists and non-Fundamentalist Christians need not apply). Oh…and you believe North Carolina was on the right side of the Civil War.

And, from the “Catholic Schoolgirls Rule” file comes this from Tennessee:

Republicans are taking a second look at [a school voucher] bill after the possibility arose that some Islamic schools could apply for the same funding made available to other religious schools.

The bill is a top priority for Republican Governor Bill Haslam, but several anti-religion lawmakers in the state senate, led by Sen. Bill Ketron who sponsored several anti-Islam bills in the last few years, are hoping to strip away the ability for any school that caters to Muslim children and their families to receive public dollars:

You see…it REALLY IS a big tent UNLESS you worship the RIGHT God (i.e. the Old Testiment God shared by Islam, Christianity and Judaism) but under the wrong brand name.

And from the “Jamie’s Got a Gun” file comes this NPR interview with Rocky Mountain (CO) Gun Owners President Dudley Brown:

“This is a very Western state with traditional Western values,” he says. “And citizens had to have firearms for self-defense, and right now that’s still the case.”

And maybe the need for guns is for reasons bigger than just self-defense….

“I liken it to the proverbial hunting season,” Brown says. “We tell gun owners, ‘There’s a time to hunt deer. And the next election is the time to hunt Democrats.’ ”

Yes…in this time of troubled shootings of school children, politicians, prosecutors, law enforcement personnel and movie-goers, there is nothing that says, “We care about you” more then not-so-subtle calls for violence against your political opponents.

Feel. The. Love. (or else!)

Today’s news blurbs are just a microcosm of a trend that spells big troubles for the future of the G.O.P.:Republicans are increasingly isolated on major political and policy issues”.

It’s a Big Tent…a Big Empty Tent.

It’s been nine years now, and we are still going strong. Please join us tonight for another evening of politics over a pint at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally.

We meet every Tuesday at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Starting time is 8:00pm. Some people show up earlier for Dinner.

Can’t make it to Seattle tonight? Check out another DL meeting over the next week. Tonight the Tri-Cities chapter also meets. And on Thursday, the Spokane and the Tacoma chapters meet.

With 205 chapters of Living Liberally, including fifteen in Washington state, four in Oregon, and two more in Idaho, chances are excellent there’s a chapter that meets near you.

– Potential routes at risk for reduction or elimination if Metro doesn’t get the funding it needs.

– State employees are being demonized in Oregon too.

– How to Get a Black Woman Fired

– I worry that my tweets about strawberries and soup may have driven Nick off the Twitter.

– The New York Times has the best obits, but this is clearly a huge fuck up.