Hella Bus Blog

This past Tuesday I attended a community forum organized by the members of the Washington State Budget & Policy Center that effectively articulated and discussed what women want and what they should have.  The big take away - it doesn't take a mind reader to figure out how to solve women's problems (sorry, Mel Gibson) and the speakers at the event provided excellent suggestions for improving the current situation.

AND THE SITUATION IS:

While the devastating effects of the recession on our state are well known, the fact that women were disproportionately affected was new to me. Women still predominantly work in lesser paid yet invaluable industries, including social work, education, and healthcare, the majority of which are funded heavily by our state government.

The recent $20 billion state budget loss this year caused tremendous cuts in funding for these female dominated industries and consequently forced thousands of women into unemployment. So, women who are already underpaid and have fewer benefits than men are now facing larger expected funding cuts and fewer job prospects. Sucky, huh?

IT GETS WORSE:

As the Bus has previously covered, there has been an ongoing attack on women’s reproductive rights. In the last year 135 abortion restrictions were enacted nationwide.  To top this off, experts are seeing an influx of women who are victims of domestic abuse, which confirms the already well-established correlation between economic stress and violence against women. The lack of state funding eliminates a big chunk of social services, and many of these women have nowhere to turn for help.

IT AIN'T ALL BAD:

There's a lot that's being done to improve the situation. Seattle passed a groundbreaking Paid Sick Leave Policy which will take effect in September! This policy will allow about 150,000 Washington workers, men and women (but women in particular due to the above inequalities), to earn paid sick days on the job and no longer have to choose between getting a paycheck and taking their kids to the emergency room.

And there are ways to limit the cuts to social services and curb female unemployment rates. Increasing the state revenue would be a great first step, and could be achieved by introducing a progressive Income Tax (like Oregon). Paying higher taxes might sting in the short-term, but the benefits of keeping women working and financially independent would be a net gain for our state overall.

My takeaway: GIVE WOMEN WHAT THEY WANT! It can only benefit us as a society as a whole.

Newark, New Jersey Mayor Cory Booker, taking a quick break from carrying constituents out of burning buildings, gave an awesome speech on putting the rights of a minority group up for public vote.

Bet he looks amazing in spandex.

Extra points for putting a plug in for a high-earners income tax to fund vital government services.

Please welcome the newest member of the Hella Bus Team!

Kseniya Husak is a recent graduate from the UW holding an eyebrow raising combination of degrees in Philosophy and Accounting. She arrived in the US from Ukraine in 2004. Since her arrival to the cornucopious US of A, she has substantially improved her knowledge of Star Trek and Star Wars and can now successfully hold not-terribly-awkward conversation with most Americans. In her spare time Kseniya enjoys reading about politics, internet stalking various political leaders and informing others (mostly friends, family, and strangers on the bus) about current political developments. Although she’s conducted research on juvenile prostitution and human rights crises on a global scale, she is excited to engage more with local politics. Kseniya’s favorite food is ice cream, and she’s currently actualizing her long time dream of eating copious amounts of said ice cream by working at Molly Moon’s, where you are welcome to holla at her.

VIVA LA CATS AND WASHINGTON BUS!

Quietly, the first phase of one of the most important lawsuits of the year concluded Tuesday.

No, I'm not talking about the Affordable Care Act. I'm talking about the petty and overly litigious suit being brought against Google by Oracle, the owner of Sun Microsystems and proprietor of the Java programming language. Most of the world's phones are built on Java. It's a hugely important language. Ars Technica has great coverage of the ongoing arguments here.

The case against Google is that it copied certain elements of Java's API in designing its own Android phone operating system. The API is an enormous collection of built-in functions which any Java program can call at any time. Basically, Oracle claims that certain parts of Android's programming look too much like the inner workings of the Java API.

Google's defense rests on two claims. First, that the API is totally central to Java. Without the functions provided by the API, you could basically add and subtract numbers. I'm not enough of a Java programmer to know if you could print those numbers to a screen, but I think the answer is no. The fact is, Java is designed around its API, the standard library of functions available to any program, and the two really are inextricable.

Google further claims that programming languages cannot be copyrighted. This is perhaps more arguable. But it's certainly in line with their unofficial corporate motto, Don't Be Evil.

To say that programming languages cannot be copyrighted is to say that a method of problem-solving is not intellectual property. To me, that's a pretty cool position. It's also the one that Oracle took when it released Java to the world in the first place, as Google keeps reminding Larry Ellison. Let's work towards a world where we can solve problems together, without worrying about infringing on someone's rights to make money off of the process.

As an urban cyclist, I've locked up my bike to a lot of funky spaces.  But this is the coolest bike rack I've ever laid eyes on.  And it's at the Seattle Center.

The Bus's own Toby Crittenden was on KUOW this morning talking about gay marriage and the youth vote.  The podcast is available on iTunes or can be streamed right here.

Toby starts up at around the 17 minute mark.

The time has come!  Charles Darwin himself would be proud.

Today Obama came out for Marriage Equality!!!!  The most powerful man in the land just added his voice to the Marriage Equality Movement.

WOOHAH!

Also, thank you Biden, you lovable blabbermouth!

Over the weekend, Vice President Biden made his ceremonial bi-weekly gaffe by coming out unequivocally in support of gay marriage.  Remember of course, that in politics, the biggest gaffes are when a politician accidentally tells the truth.

All public policy should be based on Will & Grace.

On Monday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan followed suit and came out in favor of Gay Marriage.  That makes him the second powerful Secretary to publicly endorse Marriage Equality; Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan stated his support in November.

Which puts Obama's stance on Marriage Equality squarely in the spotlight, exactly where he doesn't want it during an election year.

Obama's Communications Director David Axelrod was quick to tweet out a statement in an attempt to walk back Biden's comments.

Obama has now placed himself in the incredibly oxymoronic position of being Against the Defense of Marriage Amendment, but not supporting Marriage Equality. Obama came out against California's Proposition 8 (albeit quietly) back in 2008, and and has spoken against North Carolina's Prop 1, both of which define marriage as between a man and a woman.

It's incredibly hard to see Obama, a Harvard-trained lawyer who grew up during the civil rights movement, really believing that gays and lesbians don't deserve equal rights federally.

In fact, back in 1996 Obama told the Windy City Times that he fully supported gay marriage.

The United States Postal Service is dead broke.  The business that employes 554,000 employees who drive to your door and personally hand-deliver paper for 45 cents a piece is predicted to run a $14 billion deficit by the end of this year.

On April 24th the United States Senate passed a bipartisan bill intended to aid the financially troubled Postal Service.  The bill would maintain Saturday delivery for two years, and make it harder to close down rural post offices during that time. It also would allow USPS to take back $11 billion in over-payments in order to offer incentives for postal workers to retire early.  But the bill fails to address the actual problem plaguing the Postal Service.

The Root Of The Problem:

Most of the reporting on the Postal Service's money problems so far has been attributed to the decrease in first class mail.  According to USPS's data, mail volume has dropped consistently over the last 10 years.  In 2002, the Postal Service handled approximately 203 billion letters.  In 2011, that figure was 168 billion.

But blaming e-mail for the Postal Service's financial troubles is missing the real story. Even as mail volume decreased, the Postal Service was still making a profit up until 2006, when George Bush signed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act into law.

As Alex posted yesterday, I too was down at the Occupy Seattle May Day rallies.  And as has been widely reported everywhere, it was a little crazy.  The technology behind HellaBus (one of the mogwai from Gremlins posting in an AOL chat room) is too slow to post all my photos as they're happening...

But looking beyond the broken windows and boarded up downtown shopping areas, the day was a lot of fun.

I'll see you later.

People of all ages were dancing in the streets. Children were being pushed in strollers, grandmothers marched in solidarity with "Don't pepper spray me, I'm a Nana" signs attached to their chests.  And the majority of people at the marches signed off on graffiti that looked more like this:

Illustrious Hella Bus writer Devin Glaser is at the May Day rallies in Seattle today. Below are swiftly transcribed texts and camera phone photos of the day. Follow the jump for the updates!

In case you missed it, The Occupy Movement is kicking off a national day of protest today.  Here locally, there will be marches and what appears to be a buttload of musical performances at Westlake Park in downtown Seattle.

I'm headed down to go witness the action and will post pics as I get them.  But by all means, check out their extensive line up after the jump.

While it's incredibly awesome that Washington's legislators signed gay marriage into law, marriage laws extend beyond state-based rights.

One of the federal rights currently being denied by DOMA is the right to immigrate via marriage.

On April 24th, Phillipa Knudson-Judd was deported from the United States. She was forced to leave behind her legal wife (married in Iowa) and young daughter and return to England.  Phillipa would have been granted citizenship if she was in a heterosexual relationship.

Approving Referendum 74 will be just the first step.  DOMA needs to be repealed and we need to work on comprehensive immigration reform.

If somehow Saturday night you weren't rabidly following what Washington insiders refer to as "Nerd Prom", President Obama and Jimmy Kimmel delivered a series of clever speeches two nights ago at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

The jokes were a highlight reel of inside-the-beltway humor (Etch-a-Sketch, dog-eating, the Republican primary), but ideally anyone following Hella Bus religiously (all of you) will get a kick out of it.

"Jimmy got his start years ago on The Man Show.

In Washington, that’s what we call a congressional hearing on contraception."

The White House Correspondents Dinner was started in 1920 to recognize the value of a free press.  It's traditional to invite a comedian to roast the President and both political parties.  Kimmel's awesome speech after the break.