A proposal by County Commissioner Tom Mielke that Clark County should withhold some public health services from people without valid Social Security numbers has inflamed some Latino civil rights advocates.Yes, and we have a problem with cranky old white guys as well who seek to divide this community at any opportunity. Perhaps this is Mielke's attempt to improve the GOP's Hispanic outreach program, who knows?
At a hearing Wednesday, Mielke said he was "concerned about the service that we give to illegals, and the cost."
"If we don’t have those Social Security numbers, I would like to know who those individuals are who we are serving that are here illegally, and why we serve them and help them in their health," said Mielke, a Battle Ground Republican. "I think Sheriff Lucas is very interested in who they are."
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"Latinos aren’t the only problem we have," Mielke said. "We have people from eastern India and Russia and everything else."
by Lew Waters : 5/30/09 9:35pm - Report AbuseAt the point that members of LULAC start riding by horseback across the county at night while in white hoods and setting crosses on fire, I'll share Lew's opinion.
Reading "local members of LULAC will be monitoring Clark County Commission meetings from now on" sounds much like a threat. Would we be so grateful for the KKK to "monitor Clark County Commission meetings?" I think not.
Just who is monitoring LULAC? Perhaps we citizens should watch them closely as well.
Please post a meeting schedule so we may attend your meetings to "monitor" your group closer.
The clarity of her support for limits on campaign fundraising and her background as a pioneering campaign regulator is raising eyebrows among election law experts who say her record is more substantial and explicit than that of any Supreme Court nominee since the dawn of the modern, post-Watergate campaign finance regime.Even worse, she's adopted extreme positions!
But Bopp said her Suffolk Law Review article is more telling, showing that “she’s bought into the most extreme campaign finance reformer rhetoric. And considering that she has on occasions extolled the legitimacy of policy preferences guiding judicial decisionmaking, including her own, you’ve got to take her personal policy preferences seriously.”Who's this James Bopp character? Politico doesn't really disclose that, other than saying he's a "leading conservative attorney" who's argued some election law cases before the Supreme Court.
CEO Wayne Nelson is the third-highest-paid public worker in the county, at $202,228. Even the district's No. 20 employee, water quality manager Steven Prather, makes $113,126.with nary a mention of private utility salaries:
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But can utility customers — who have few other choices to obtain power and water — be sure their investment is paying off?
Fowler's 2008 pay included $1.4 million in cash, $907,611 in stock awards, and a $2.2 million increase in the value of her pension and supplemental executive retirement plan.is laughable.
It brings her three-year compensation since PGE separated from its bankrupted parent company Enron to almost $10 million.
Christopher L. Reinhold will serve eight days in the Clark County Jail and perform 20 days of community service for sending racist e-mails last year about Battle Ground City Councilman Paul Zandamela.Remember kids, don't send the slime if you can't do the time. What's still unclear at this point is where Mr. Reinhold learned this as acceptable behavior, but everyone gets a chance to overcome their upbringing.
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According to court documents, Reinhold e-mailed a message Jan. 8, 2008, to city council members about Zandamela, a black man who was sworn in as a city councilman the previous evening.
"Our city government must be corrupt to have this (derogatory term) as an elected official," read the message in part. The message included four slurs and was signed, "Sincerely, a (derogatory term) hater."
After Mayor Mike Ciraulo wrote back and told the council to ignore the message from "battleground anonymous," Ciraulo received a second message calling him a "stupid (derogatory term) lover."
We are now at the point where the Democrats should be consolidating control over the political system for the next 36 years or so (the typical period between realigning elections), but Obama's moral and political cowardice, echoing Kerry's own fear to break with the once-dominant power that has now been twice defeated at the polls, is precisely the sort of fatal failure that could actually enable the Republicans to come back, when they have nothing whatsoever to offer except the thoroughly discredited policies that have brought our country to a state of ruin unparalleled since they last held power in dark days of the early Great Depression.And Glenn Greenwald lights into DNC chair Tim Kaine:
It's amazing how desperate some Beltway Democrats -- and the Democratic Party establishment -- are to lead the way now in insisting that there be no investigations of any kind into the chronic crimes of the Bush administration. Watch DNC Chairman Tim Kaine squirm endlessly on Meet the Press this morning as he advocates a position that, at least according to polls, only a small portion of Democrats share: let's just forget about all that lawbreaking and torture stuff; who cares if our highest government officials committed serious crimes? Is that the official position of the DNC?
No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can’t. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration’s high ambitions.Why is getting this issue right so difficult for the political establishment? Why does the political establishment, no matter what the era (looking at you, Torquemada), feel it necessary to reserve to themselves the right to torture?
Fee hikes, which commissioners expect to discuss at a work session Monday, could reduce taxpayers' ongoing subsidy of the county's unprofitable development department by up to $5 million over 18 months.Let me use some right-wing rhetoric here. In a normal business, a department this unprofitable would simply be eliminated. No more building permits, and no more rampant socialism for developers.
The development department's costs are theoretically offset by the fees it charges to the developers it regulates.
But the department has operated in the red since 2006. Last year, it relied on the tax-supported general fund for $2.3 million in support.
Mielke also expressed concern that builders might unfairly pay for the county's troubles.
"To balance our budget on the backs of somebody else is the wrong thing to do," Mielke said.That's right, we need to balance the budget on the backs of the taxpayers. In Mielke's world, the money pit otherwise known as the development department should be subisized while the rest of county government suffers. I happen to have video tape of a slightly sweaty Tom Mielke at the last county commission meeting:
The state Department of Corrections budget gives the clearest example of how a change in policy translates into cutting workers and thereby saving money.I'm sorry, but didn't this community just go through the shock of this:
A case in point is Senate Bill 5288. This is the measure that says many, many inmates won't be supervised as long once they are released from prison or jail and sent back out to communities.
It is prospective and retroactive. Add up the two and you have a two-year budget savings of $48 million and a reduction of 265 "full time equivalents" (aka "workers").
Those are mostly community corrections officers, the folks who keep an eye on offenders after they get out. (They formerly were known as "parole" officers).
VANCOUVER -- The Clark County Sheriff's Office arrested a man Monday evening in connection with the stabbing death of a teenage girl.This does put the elimination of the local bicycling program in perspective, since budgeting is about priorities. But one would think that public safety programs would not be subject to the same level of draconian cuts experienced by other areas of government.
Detectives arrested Darrin Eugene Sanford, 30, about 6:30 p.m. on suspicion he killed Alycia Nipp, 13, on her way home from Wal-Mart, said Sgt. Scott Schanaker, a Clark County sheriff's spokesman.
Sanford is a registered sex offender convicted of approaching children in 1997 between the ages of 8 and 11 outside Harney Elementary in Vancouver and offering them money to come to his house for sex, according to public records. Sheriff's deputies said he is a transient and has been seen at an abandoned house near where Nipp was slain.
"If voters do not pass this legislation, people will die."Unfortunately this past legislative session was like a bad hostage negotiation gone horribly wrong. Voters don't appreciate having to respond favorably to ultimatums to increase the sales tax, especially when other alternatives aren't even considered.
Todd Boulanger, a well-known transportation planner and former Alice B. Toeclips award winner (2005), has been laid off by the City of Vancouver.For us bike geeks out there, Boulanger's lay off is a really bad sign, since it means that livability concerns are getting short shrift. And even Boulanger acknowledges this:
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City Transportation Manager Thayer Rorabaugh sent an email to staff on Monday that he had decided to eliminate the Neighborhood Traffic Program that Boulanger oversaw.
Boulanger feels the loss of the program will hurt the city’s ability to respond to neighborhood requests for livability improvements.This also raises the question for how ultimately the CRC bridge design plays out for the biking community. With Boulanger's departure, local bicyclists just lost an experienced planner, and I'm much less sanguine about the prospects for a decent outcome on the CRC.
Transportation and livability improvements were a top priority for City Council in those days, says Boulanger, but in recent years transportation has fallen down the rung of priorities. These days City Council’s top priorities are waterfront development and police and fire services.
There's the diploma mill that sold 10,000 phony college degrees to buyers in 131 countries. The $31 million parking-garage bond hustle that snared fund firms Vanguard, Nuveen and Smith Barney. And the many questionable enterprises around the continent that turn for legal and accounting services to firms in the heart of the Pacific Northwest's Inland Empire.I was somewhat waiting for a mention of our former 18th Legislative District Republican state rep Richard Curtis and his most excellent adventure to Spokane's casinos (among other amusements) while being a sitting member of the state gaming commission, but that's a minor quibble and somewhat inside baseball around these parts. Rather, the article is a great primer on what happens when frontier capitalism is allowed to be unregulated.
Welcome to Spokane, Wash., a metropolitan object lesson in what can befall the unwary when rugged individualism is revered and consumers unsuspecting.
I get the impression that the permaculture proponents for 78th Street have made an impression on the folks on the Sounding Board, the County project management team, and the public.What's key here is that the Old Poor Farm project is probably the last place where lazy suburbanites like myself will get a chance to get their hands dirty and get some first-hand knowledge of the county's myriad of farm products.
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Everyone, including Mark McCauley (Director of General Services, Clark County), made comment that farmers, permaculture experts, etc. need to be involved with the development and execution of the master plan. The majority of folks there seemed to realize they couldn't just hand this project to an architect and say, "Make me a sustainable, permaculture, educational agriculturally focused facility and include all of these design elements."
As Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke delivered an upbeat outlook on the nation’s economy Tuesday, Portland economist Bill Conerly spoke optimistically about this region.
"I think we’re in the neighborhood of the bottom of the recession," Conerly told the nearly 250 people gathered to hear his economic forecast.
"It’s not going to feel like it’s over until we regain all that lost ground," he said. "That’s going to be the summer of next year."
This quarter will be one of transition, he said.
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He predicted an eventual return to the rapid population growth Clark County has experienced in the past, perhaps reaching 3.5 percent a year.
As to the Fed’s claim that the equity of homeowners as a group stands at 43%, she points out that what the Fed neglects to tell you is that roughly a third of them have their houses free and clear. Lo and behold, some basic arithmetic reveals that 67% of homeowners with mortgages have equity of less than 15%. That, Stephanie comments drily, suggests the “destruction priced into the credit markets hardly seems out of whack with potential reality.”Gosh, who to believe? Some paid cheerleader over at the Heathman Vancouver, or the reality on the ground, with the specter of ARM re-sets coming just around the corner? And somehow population growth is supposed to return to prior levels? With what job base?
And while, thanks to “the transfer of toxic assets to taxpayers” and the magic of accounting legerdemain, the scarred financials to some significant extent may be spared further pain, the same, alas, can’t be said for the nonfinancial sector. Little recognized, she insists, is how much the extraordinary gains in domestic nonfinancial profits from the low in 2001 to the peak in 2006 — a stunning rise of 388% — owed to the housing bubble.”
The Obama administration is moving toward reviving the military commission system for prosecuting Guantánamo detainees, which was a target of critics during the Bush administration, including Mr. Obama himself.
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Still, during the presidential campaign Mr. Obama criticized the commissions, saying that “by any measure our system of trying detainees has been an enormous failure,” and declaring that as president he would “reject the Military Commissions Act.”
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The Bush administration’s commission system was criticized in part because it permitted evidence that would often be barred in federal court, like evidence obtained through coercive interrogations and hearsay.
