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How do you pat yourself on the back if you don’t have a spine?

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Pat on Back

Given a budget that unsettles every remaining human brain and heart in the State and reveals the spineless nature of our elected officials, it is lucky that the Legislature has discovered this tool to pat their own backs.

Little more than a week ago,  the state’s zombies marched on zombie headquarters — the State Capitol — only to find  few brains and fewer hearts. Today, responding to our most desperate moans, budget writers from both parties this morning announced a bipartisan agreement to effectively replace the State Budget with the script of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. (This is known as “the Senate approach.”)

Democratic budget leads Ed Murray and Ross Hunter led the way, announcing the agreement with a slight giddiness due to the triple-exhaustion of their human energy, life spirit, and remaining sense of morality. Mostly they spent their time at the budget press conference offering effusive and abundant compliments for everybody’s hard work cutting, gouging, slicing, and eliminating. That may have seemed gratuitous and off-key given the impact of the cuts on human voters (which impacts they claim to recognize), but this is hard work. Really, you’d be surprised how tough a claw-slash can be on the wrists — a werewolf drafting legal language is an ergonomic nightmare.

Highlights of the Budget Release Announcement

The best moment of the spineless let’s-pat-ourselves-on-the-back bipartisan budget announcement was when Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown referred to a “Senate Democrats retreat.” For self-evident reasons, that is an unfortunate string of words for her to deliver, and a phrase that had strong resonance for all the wrong reasons.

Another noteable takeaway was that Frank Chopp, famous for an unblinking robotic ghostly approach that usually wins the day, appears to have lost on almost every count, from teacher pay reductions to disability lifeline cash benefits. He maintained his usual silence during the press conference.

The only plausible explanation for this result is that that the full moon of last week gave Zarelli super-strength to have his way. During the press conference, Zarelli raised some hairs on a few backs in his discussion of “reforming” benefits — even as his own hairy nature remained in check due to the current cycle of the moon. However, the “care not cash” approach he mentioned was actually a drafting error by committee staff that will be corrected with a floor amendment: the intention of the Legislature is clearly aimed at a “neither cash nor care” approach. An alternate amendment proposes a “scare and bash” approach. We’ll see how that turns out.

After the conclusion of this bipartisan admiration society of a press conference, it still remains unclear why members of the Legislature thought anybody actually cared about what the process was like for them rather than what the impact would be on children, workers, the poor, and the vulnerable. The ranks of the undead narcissists are apparently larger than even we had known…

A few concerns

Like Republican House leaders Gary Alexander and Richard DeBolt, however, we can always find cause to complain. Sure, our greatest undead desires are being fulfilled to an extent that reminds us of our glory days in London in the heyday of the Industrial Revolution. However, while the budget agreement cuts teacher pay by 1.9%, this falls short of 3% cut proposed by the hounds of the Senate. We have mixed feelings, but at least this isn’t the radically misguided class size reductions and cost-of-living pay increases voters said they wanted.

The Legislature may still follow the lead of the Chamber of Horrors and make it easier to fire teachers, too, because arbitrary supervisory decisions that don’t require a showing a just cause are known to improve job performance markedly. However, this falls short of our demand for truly old-fashioned teacher reform, including enhanced interrogation in lieu of supervisory evaluations, time & motion studies to improve efficiency, and re- classification of teachers as farmworkers for the purposes of labor law.

Despite these minor concerns, the budget announcement certainly finalizes the chiseling of the tombstone the Democrats unveiled a month ago. It reads: Washington State Democratic Party: Alienated friends and embrace foes. Here its future lies.

Funding for construction of the official mausoleum, however, is contingent on the Capital Budget, at this writing still unresolved.

The long view

One key long-term impact is that this bipartisan budget of destruction redefines who should be considered the most vulnerable people in the state. Despite the gashing done to so many safety net programs that benefit so many vulnerable groups, the most vulnerable aren’t disabled workers. It’s not homeless veterans. It’s not victims of domestic violence. And it’s not immigrant children or any other constituency the bleeding-heart humans may trot out.

The most vulnerable people in the state are now the Democrats in the State Legislature. And they shouldn’t expect to be getting a lot of cash or care from those constituency groups who have been paying attention.

But they certainly have the support of the undead community. Why, you ask? Well, just reflect on how different this budget would be if Dino Rossi were Governor: we’d have an all-cuts, no-leadership proposal from the Gov’s mansion just like now — but we might actually have one party opposing these moves to bring the Kingdom of Hell here to Washington. That’s why we at Undead Olympia love our zombie Governor. It makes our feeding time bipartisanly delicious!

In closing

As you wait for the delightful chorus howling to begin in the biennium ahead, we ask that you reflect on how much progress we’ve made towards a more undead Olympia. Just think of the bad old days, when the word “sustainable” resonated with human values of multigenerational responsibility instead of echoing with the death rattles of the present day.

And finally, for the record: we didn’t cut into those delicious delicate necks with our teeth — we reformed them.

We now simply await the close of the session. Sine virtute: without virtue.


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