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– King County Metro: Prepare For Bus Cuts This Weekend

– Poor Clint Didier can’t even get the murder weapon fetishists on his side (second story).

– What the everloving fuck, Fox News?

– Every 28 hours a black man is killed by the police. This time it’s Cameron Tillman, a 14 year-old freshman gunned down by a sheriff’s deputy in Houma, Louisiana.

– I’m not happy about people with all of the money jumping into campaigns, but at least when it’s environmentalists taking back the State Senate for Democrats, it’s better than if it was only Republicans doing it.

– More of Hillary Clinton’s dastardly childhood letters emerge.

Part I’ve-lost-count in an infinity part list.

This time he’s spamming out pictures of children with a gun pointed at their heads.

Constantine’s courageous call for the Legislature to repeal I-747 got Eyman’s attention, as did his proposal to send King County voters a levy to fund early childhood and youth services next year. Prompted by Constantine’s speech, Eyman decided to go fishing for media coverage by sending out an attack email with a false, derogatory subject line (“King County Exec Dow Constantine: “Pay higher property taxes or I’m throwing kids with diabetes under the bus”).

Along with his screed, Eyman enclosed a disgusting image of a woman holding a gun to a baby’s head, which he obtained from the Huffington Post.

As with so much of Tim Eyman’s bullshit, you don’t know if it makes more sense to address the substance or to point out the disgusting nature of the stunt. I think in this case, you have to go with the stunt. Holy shit! Kids with guns pointed at their head because you disagree with something the Exec said about you? That’s so awful, I can’t even comprehend it.

Even if the substance of Eyman’s argument somehow made sense — and it never does — that’s still no. Just no. Hell, I have a lower opinion of HuffPo and Tim Eyman because they both thought that picture was appropriate at various times, and I wouldn’t have thought that was possible.

And sure, people fuck up sometimes. If this was an isolated incident, I’d say give him the benefit of the doubt. But it’s long past that point with Eyman.

So, after six years on staff, Dom has left The Stranger to spend more time with his family or something. Good for him. Unlike me, at least he got to walk out on his own two feet instead of being carted off the premises in the trunk of a Cadillac DTS and unceremoniously dumped in the Meadowlands.

But Dom’s sudden departure has people asking questions. In a span of only nine months, first Cienna, then me, now Dom have all been scrubbed from the paper’s masthead. Of The Stranger’s four-person Pulitzer prize-winning news team, only Eli remains.

Cunning, devious, ruthless Eli.*

Now that the Great Purge is complete, the truth can be told: The Stranger’s news department has been reshaped by a brutal internal power struggle, engineered by the Machiavellian mastermind that is Eli Sanders—or, “the Butcher of Barca” as he’s fearfully known in the office. Don’t let his mild-mannered demeanor fool you; it’s all an act. The man is vicious. You should see what he did to his boyfriend—nearly ripped the poor guy’s arms off!

Eli is a monster. And now he’s ruling The Stranger news department with an iron fist. Just like he long plotted.

So beware, Anna and Ansel: the warm embrace of Eli’s carefully crafted cult of personality can be intoxicating. But dare challenge his boundless ambition and you too could soon find yourself stumbling through the muck of a New Jersey swamp, desperately trying to pluck an ice pick from your back.

UPDATE: Honestly, folks, get a sense of humor. It was joke. Really. Eli Sanders is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.

 

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* I double-checked my sources: Eli does not have a single ruth.

– Glad to see the Angry Black Lady Chronicles returning.

– As I just showed in the paragraphs above, a couple of rudimentary searches would find the facts in this case. But rather than inform the public, KXLY sensationalizes instead.

– And you thought the end of Obama’s presidency might mean the end of the GOP’s Saul Alinsky Saul the time obsession.

– Rand Paul is not the spokesman for the entire civil liberties community or the anti-war faction of this nation. In fact there are principled Democrats and Independents whom liberals should celebrate on these issues instead — after all, they aren’t going to vote against NSA spying with one breath while cutting Social Security and Medicare the next. They’re not going to demand that the government get out of our lives today and then vote to restrict a woman’s right to control her own reproduction tomorrow. They won’t rail about liberty even as they fight to ensure that gay people don’t have the freedom to marry. You can’t have it all, none of these people are perfect. But you can have everything Rand Paul is offering — and a whole lot more common human decency.

– As important as it is to call out Mars Hill, how churches avoid becoming the next Mars Hill is probably more important going forward.

– Wasteful as it would be, I would dig the hell out of flame decals on Metro.

Sure the headline merely asks the question—”What would 15% cut mean for state colleges?”—but why is this even a conversation?

Double-digit tuition increases. Class cuts that would make it harder to finish a degree in four years. Enrollment cutbacks that would make it more difficult to get admitted to a state university.

Washington’s public college and university presidents, warning that a hypothetical 15 percent cut to higher education would be devastating to public colleges and universities, are in a standoff with the state Office of Financial Management (OFM) over fiscal planning for the next two years.

Washington’s state colleges and universities have had their funding cut for years. Tuition has skyrocketed. We’re having trouble retaining top professors. We’re already 25,000 degrees a year short of demand. I mean, we either want a state college and university system or we don’t. If we do want a state college and university system then we need to fund it at a level sufficient to support quality, access, and capacity. If we don’t want a state college and university system, then we should just stop pretending, and shut it down already.

But hypothetical conversations about hypothetical 15 percent cuts achieve nothing except making a smaller, say, 5 percent cut more likely. So shut up already about further cuts to higher education, and instead shift the conversation to something useful, like making the case to voters for raising taxes.

Honestly, what a bunch of assholes:

Unfortunately for King County taxpayers, Metro’s focus on efficiency has also been like a teenager’s — wavering.

Until now.

Voters’ rejection of the $1.6 billion, 10-year King County Proposition 1 in April has forced Metro to do some soul-searching. Rather than cutting 600,000 hours of bus service, as was initially threatened if Proposition 1 failed, Metro this week said the real number is now 400,000 hours, due, in part, to suddenly found efficiencies.

It’s amazing that after a few months of budget-scrubbing, the agency can find $123 million in savings within its two-year, $1.4 billion operating budget.

Are you fucking kidding me? Do they honestly believe that these sort of savings happen overnight? The bulk of the savings in this budget come from cost-cutting efforts that have been ongoing for years—and take years to pay off. Other savings aren’t really savings at all, but rather shifts from capital spending to operations—shifts that will accumulate their own costs over time.

But even with these savings, a 400,000-hour cut in bus service is nothing to celebrate when it comes at a time when we should be adding 500,000 hours of service just to meet current demand! That’s a 900,000-hour shortfall! Almost a third of total bus service!

This is an austerity budget, pure and simple, and it is strangling our region’s ability to sustain economic growth.

Fuck the Seattle Times editorial board and its dishonest efforts to dis any proposed tax increase at any time for any purpose under any circumstances.

– I don’t care. I’m still linking to those silly lists of cities when Seattle tops them.

– The Seattle Women’s Commission is looking for new people. If you know someone who would be good, including yourself the info is here. [h/t]

– When I was growing up, I remember wondering why my grandma always insisted on walking and busing to get around, even when others were willing—would, in fact, have preferred—to give her a ride. Now, I am in her shoes: trying to explain that yes, I really do want to take the bus, and no, it’s not (usually) a hardship or an inconvenience; it is part of who I am.

– A Feel Good War

– A 15 cent minimum wage increase is better than nothing, Oregon. Still not great.

– Being the specific type of nerd I am, I’m surprised it took me as long as it did to check out the Pink Elephant’s Graveyard podcast, the K Records podcast. Quite great if you’re into that sort of thing.

If the fairness issue can’t move the serious people to start the conversation on tax restructuring (and Washington State does have the most regressive tax structure in the nation), perhaps the negative economic impact of our current tax structure will?

Washington is among the states that depend most heavily on sales taxes for revenue, and a new report links a decline in growth of such funds to the rising concentration of wealth for the richest U.S. households.

The study by credit-ratings agency Standard & Poor’s shows a significant decline in annual average state tax growth among the 10 most sales tax-dependent states, which includes Washington.

That report ties the slowed growth to rising income inequality, which appears to stunt overall economic growth. S&P also links it to a slowdown in average yearly gains in state tax revenues.

Washington is in fact the most sales-tax-dependent state in the nation, and it is crippling our ability to make the human and physical infrastructure investments we need. Our state’s inability to fund McCleary? Blame the sales tax. King County Metro’s 400,000 hours of service cuts? Blame the sales tax.

Seriously, serious people, we need to add some sort of tax on income and/or wealth into the mix.

These sort of stories—a deaf man allegedly Tased, beaten, and arrested by Hawthorne, California officers who mistook his attempt at sign language as a physical threat—generate the usual outrage over excess use of force. But there’s one detail consistent with nearly every excessive force incident that doesn’t seem to generate the outrage it should:

In February, Meister had been loading boxes of winter clothes and a snowboard that belonged to him at a friend’s house when a neighbor mistook him for a robber and called police. When officers Jeffrey Salmon, Jeffrey Tysl, Erica Bristow, and Mark Hultgren arrived on the scene, they encountered Meister and ordered him to stop. The only problem is that Meister is deaf and couldn’t hear the officers so he couldn’t obey their commands.

After grabbing his hand, a startled Meister began communicating the only way he can- by using sign language. As he desperately tried to make them understand him, the cops decided that Meister was trying to resist and assault them. So they jumped him, took him to ground, shot him twice with a Taser and punched and kicked the crap of him until they finally arrested him and charged him with assault.

This automatic charge of assaulting an officer and/or resisting arrest nearly every time officers assault a suspect is one of the more pernicious practices of modern policing. I understand that police use it to justify their actions, and that it gives prosecutors and city attorneys leverage in negotiating plea deals or in persuading victims to drop lawsuits (“We’ll drop our charges if you drop yours”).

But the officers are lying.

It is one thing to be so fucking stupid as to beat and arrest a deaf man for not adequately responding to verbal commands. But by the time those charges were formally filed, everybody involved had to be totally aware of what had actually transpired. And yet they filed the assault charges anyway.

If I were to knowingly file a false report with the police, it would be a crime. Officers who file false reports to cover their tracks should be held criminally liable too.

Some combination of my ancient computer being a problem while I type on public transit and how I’m using jokes for the date instead of actual dates this week, and I seem to have somehow posted this into the Open Thread for Monday, and I’m not quite sure how to undo it. So I’m reposting it here, as an open thread. Um, sorry to people who really wanted whatever ephemera I’d posted there.

– I know that there is a large group of the chattering class that hate Seattle passing resolutions. But I think this opposition to the Hyde Amendment is right the fuck on.

– Sad face for Mars Hill.

– I’m not sure I’m qualified to say anything about Ray Rice that goes outside of just cliche. But holy shit, Fox News, shut the fuck up.

– Redmond will fund Overlake Village bike/walk bridge

– We tend to think of activism as an “all-in” sort of affair where one eats, sleeps, and shits the struggle. If you don’t live up to this romanticized notion, you’re a fraud. In reality, many of the people fighting for basic things like access to clean water, good schools, and affordable housing are, in fact, people with lives and families and other responsibilities.

So I’m wreaking havoc in the other Washington for a few days, but that doesn’t stop me from reading the Seattle Times editorial page. (Because I’m stoopid.) And for obvious reasons, I just couldn’t wait to click through to the following headline: “Washington’s tuition stability good for students, GET program.”

WASHIINGTON’S prepaid tuition plan rebounded into financial solvency on the wings of a rebounding stock market and a shift in legislative policy. That’s good news for the state: In 2013, the Guaranteed Education Tuition (GET) program was underfunded by $631 million. Absent the rebound, Washington would’ve been on the hook.

But the real winners in the rebound are Washington college students and their families, whether they had GET accounts or not. The prepaid plan’s deficit had been compounded by a ruinous state policy of huge tuition increases.

But if you were expecting the editors to eat a little well-deserved crow, think again. Absolutely zero mention of the editorial board’s prior advocacy to shut down GET at a taxpayer cost of $1.7 billion. Though in their defense, perhaps not even Seattle Times editors can bear to read the paper’s awful editorial pages.

One other comment, though:

The Legislature wisely reversed the gouge on college students and froze tuition increases for the past two years.

To be clear, freezing tuition after four years of double-digit increases is good. But the legislature has not “reversed the gouge.” Lawmakers who paid an inflation-adjusted $2,500 a year for their own tuition a generation ago have still left today’s students paying around $13,000. It would take a couple decades of tuition freezes to truly reverse the gouge. And we all know that’s not likely to happen.

So if the editors truly care about Washington college students and their families, they would marshal their advocacy on behalf of raising the tax revenue necessary to both add capacity and restore some fiscal balance to our state college and university system.

– I know that there is a large group of the chattering class that hate Seattle passing resolutions. But I think this opposition to the Hyde Amendment is right the fuck on.

– Sad face for Mars Hill.

– I’m not sure I’m qualified to say anything about Ray Rice that goes outside of just cliche. But holy shit, Fox News, shut the fuck up.

– Redmond will fund Overlake Village bike/walk bridge

– We tend to think of activism as an “all-in” sort of affair where one eats, sleeps, and shits the struggle. If you don’t live up to this romanticized notion, you’re a fraud. In reality, many of the people fighting for basic things like access to clean water, good schools, and affordable housing are, in fact, people with lives and families and other responsibilities.

Hey, remember how just a year and a half ago the oh so wise Seattle Times editorial board vociferously (and dishonestly) backed up Rodney Tom’s call to shut down GET (the state’s Guaranteed Education Tuition Plan), deriding it as “too generous,” while arguing that “lawmakers should be seriously concerned about a projected $631 million future shortfall” in the program?

“Closing GET to new enrollees would cause a $1.7 billion hit to the state treasury,” the editors wrote in January 2013, back when they were editorializing in favor of, you know, closing GET to new enrollees. And yet just 19 months later, according to today’s Seattle Times, GET is now funded at 106 percent of obligations:

The state’s prepaid college tuition is no longer underfunded, and has fully recovered from the recession.

That’s right: following the editors’ sage advice would have cost Washington taxpayers an unnecessary $1.7 billion, while eliminating our state’s only college savings option that allows middle-class families to securely plan for their children’s college education. Oops. Not that this wasn’t entirely predictable. As I explained in my contemporaneous fisking of this insane editorial:

Why the fuck would we want to lock in a $1.7 billion loss that we’d never have to pay if we’d just fund higher education at the level we all say we want to fund it? I mean, that’s just crazy. Inflation has averaged between 2 and 3 percent over the past few decades. Limit tuition increases to 7.5 percent a year and the GET program easily outgrows its shortfall.

As it turns out, the legislature ended up freezing tuition for two years. That and a booming stock market predictably led to GET’s full and speedy recovery.

Seriously… where do these clowns get off telling us how to run a government? Nobody should ever, ever, ever listen to their budgetary advice.

– I guess there’s a game of foot sports today. Given how crazy the city got for preseason foot sports, it might be a good idea to leave downtown right now.

– Phyllis Schlafly has great ideas that sure sound neat.

– So if you could use a Taser instead of killing someone, then logically a civilized society would want police to have them. But I see no reason for Tasers to even be in the hands of cops if that’s the way they’re going to look at it.

– It’s tough to see potential February Metro cuts.

– Pumpkin Spice is a real sign that this too hot summer is ending, so I’ll take it.

Republican challenger Pedro Celis’s chances of toppling Eric Cantor just got a little bit better. To bad for him, though, that he’s running against Democratic incumbent Suzan DelBene:

After a shaky primary-election showing, Republican congressional candidate Pedro Celis has reshuffled his campaign, replacing his campaign manager and hiring a pair of young strategists who helped tea-party challenger Dave Brat beat House Majority Leader Eric Cantor earlier this year.

Brat’s campaign manager, Zachary Werrell, is now managing Celis’ campaign, replacing local Republican strategist Don Skillman, who had been campaign manager for the primary. Gray Delany, another Brat campaign staffer, is now Celis’ campaign spokesman.

Uh-huh. He can blame his former staffers all he wants, but the problem, according to people who have watched Celis in action, is that he is just an awful candidate. Flat. Unoriginal. Uninspiring.

This was supposed to be a competitive race: a first term Democrat in a midterm election being challenged by a well-financed Republican in a swing district. But the Republicans simply did not field a competitive candidate.