Smart Bombs: Pledging to close minds
Business interests lobbied heavily for a transportation package, but Sen. Michael Baumgartner was the lone Republican in the Spokane area to vote for the gas-tax increase that will finance it. In the last go-round, he was also the only Republican advocate from around here.
Though his fellow Republican legislators agreed that the North Spokane Corridor must be completed, they said they couldn’t vote for the previous gas tax unless our region got more projects and Democrats agreed to some reforms. This time, the project list was more favorable to Spokane (we get more spending locally than we send in tax dollars to Olympia), and Democrats agreed to phase out the sales tax on highway projects. Democrats also dropped their call for a low-carbon fuel standard.
Those concessions resulted in no gain in support among local Republicans. Clearly, they were never going to vote for a gas tax, even if is good for business and the economy. Just goes to show that you can’t negotiate with a no-new-tax pledge.
Bad timing. My son is heading off to college this fall, so the 15 percent to 20 percent reduction in tuition is fantastic for us. Washington is the lone state to cut tuition, though some have frozen it.
However, for recent Washington graduates, the news must sting. Their timing for attending college, in the wake of the Great Recession, could not have been worse because tuition rose by 34 percent over the past five years. From 2008 to 2015, the state had the third-highest tuition increase, according to a recent report by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.
We should be proud that Washington has taken the lead on restoring sanity to college costs. But perhaps something can be done for those who will be paying for circumstances beyond their control for many years to come.
False flag. In war, history is usually written by the victors. But that hasn’t been true with the Civil War, says James W. Loewen, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Vermont and the author of “Lies My Teacher Told Me” and “The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader.”
In a Washington Post op-ed, Loewen notes that 90,000 Kentuckians fought for the North and 35,000 for the South, but the state has 72 Confederate monuments and two Union ones. There’s a confederate memorial in Frederick, Maryland, where Confederate Gen. Jubal Early threatened to burn out residents if they didn’t come up with $200,000 (worth $3 million today).
Confederate sympathizers also succeeded in getting the conflict called The War Between The States, a postwar moniker. Plus, they persuaded textbook writers to convey the notion that the war was substantially about states’ rights and not slavery. To increase sales in the South, publishers went along.
In fact, Loewen says, states’ rights were not featured in documents drawn up by states to justify secession. Texas, for example, was upset at Northern states for passing laws that made it more difficult to enforce the federal Fugitive Slave Act, which was designed to compel states to return fleeing slaves. No respect for state autonomy there.
To drive home the point that the war was about dominion over African-Americans, Texas included the following in its declaration of secession:
“We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.”
So, yeah, it actually is offensive to fly that flag.