Liberal Talk Radio

Brier Dudley’s right: tax incentives for Yahoo! and Microsoft to build data centers in WA are triply absurd. (1) there’s no other place they can go for cheap hydro power, (2) Microsoft’s going to shut down the Yahoo! data center as soon as they buy the compay, and (3) data centers don’t create jobs. [...]

Nick Beaudrot (of Drinking Liberally fame) has put together a map showing the county-by-county breakdown of Obama’s victory in Washington State.
You can see that Clinton did better (but still lost) out on the coasts in the working-class towns around Aberdeen, and in the Latino-heavy areas around Yakima and the Tri-Cities.

The bill I blogged about last week on climate change and the GMA is out of committee, says Josh Feit, but that may or may not be a good thing:
Yesterday, the bill got the yay vote out of committee and the green light from leadership to get it into Rules (the last stop before it [...]

I’ve long harped on the fact that changing land use policies is central to curbing emissions. We simply can’t cut greenhouse gases substantially without changing our living, traveling, and commuting patterns. In that vein, here’s a good bill being debated in Olympia that would tie climate change to the State’s Growth Management Act. [...]

On the show this week, we railed a bit on the Democrats in the Washington State legislature for being incredibly timid with this upcoming session. It’s not quite clear to me how much of this is House Speaker Frank Chopp’s doing, and how much of it is Governor Gregoire’s (who’s up for re-election). [...]

Two stories today are bad news for people who are fans of the Planet called Earth. Both revolve around the fact that, despite having a weakening economy and a weak president, the United States government is still powerful enough to kick the Earth in the proverbial shins every now and then.
In Bali, [...]

It’s considered newsworthy that the waste management business might be engaged in some unethical behavior.

Gov. Gregoire has called the legislature into special session to restore the 1% cap on property tax increases, caving into Republicans and Tim Eyman right before an election year.
Goldy’s pretty hot and bothered over it, but why? I mean, doesn’t he realize that Dino Rossi will be so awesomely outmaneuvered by Gregoire’s clever ploy [...]

The true consequences of I-960 are just starting to be felt in Olympia.
Legislators can take some solace in the fact that I-747, a past Tim Eyman initiative, was just declared unconstitutional.
I-747 passed in 2001. Could it take 6 years for I-960 to meet the same fate?

Austin Jenkins offers some good updates on R-4204, which would have required a simple 51% majority to pass a education funding (it currently requires 60%):
Supporters are stunned and bummed. They’ve been trying for more than a decade to muster the two-thirds vote in the Legislature to put the question before voters. It finally happened this [...]