With only non-airport workers "winning," SeaTac's Propositon 1 court ruling signifies a damaging loss of face for proponents.

This past Friday, King County Superior Court Judge Andrea Darvas essentially gutted the heart of SeaTac’s Proposition 1, which mandated a $15 minimum wage for non-union contract and concessionaire workers at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Darvas had already telegraphed her attitude toward the measure when she ruled last summer that it did not qualify for the ballot due to signature “irregularities.” This was later overruled on appeal. This time Darvas ruled that although the measure was technically “constitutional,” the voters of the city of SeaTac had no authority to pass regulations that effected airport operations, which is under the purview of the Port of Seattle. According to the judge, only the state legislature has the authority to force the Port to raise wages. 

Thus it will only be workers in “hospitality” businesses and parking facilities outside the airport presumably used by airport customers who will benefit, since they reside outside the jurisdiction of the Port, and within the city’s. This means that only a quarter of the 6,300 workers originally envisioned to receive the new minimum wage on January 1 will, presumably, receive their wage bump. 

Proponents of Proposition 1 say they will appeal to the Washington State Supreme Court. I have already voiced my opposition to the measure and my reasons for it. While I still stand by this, and the judge’s ruling was legally correct and should not be overruled, I can’t help but be cynical about the driblets on the peripheries. For example, an argument by one of the plaintiffs is that workers should only expect to receive a “living wage,” sick pay and health benefits through “promotion.” The problem with this argument is that somebody has to do the low-level “dirty work,” and that is the vast majority of airport workers; the opportunity for promotion is actually rather limited. 

Another item of interest is the fact that labor groups and unions who are behind Proposition 1 badly miscalculated. First of all, they didn’t necessarily want to help contract workers who worked in the airport, but to harm their employment status to the benefit of the existing union work force. Even more so, it wasn’t their intention to see only workers from the city’s private businesses to benefit, in fact those workers were never the intended targets of the measure, but just thrown in there to show that proponents were not targeting just non-union airport workers for potential hurt. But the effect of the judge’s ruling has the contrary effect of giving the people who have jobs like sitting in those little shacks in parking lots all day a “minimum” wage of $15 an hour—practically a king’s ransom for them.

Why did this happen? Proposition 1 proponents should have known that the best argument against the measure—that the city had no authority over Port of Seattle operations—was the major flaw that foiled their underhanded intentions. They should have known that it was the Port—not the city—that should have been the focus of their efforts. If Darvas’ ruling stands, not only will airport unions have suffered a setback, they may find that the matter of “trust” that thwarted their efforts to unionize contract workers at the airport will blow back in their faces once the sense of “unfairness” about who actually now benefits from the measure is understood.

Rodgers shakes off the rust in time to beat the Bears, while Manning pads his stats

I confess that I preferred to see Matt Flynn start for the Green Bay Packers against the Chicago Bears, partly because I thought that Aaron Rodgers would be too rusty after his long lay-off, and because I suspect that Flynn will never again have an opportunity to put in this kind of significant playing time. He was 2-2-1 for the Packers, and could easily have been 4-1 despite a “lay-off” of nearly two years. Of course, Flynn probably feels he is fortunate to be alive, after his near decapitation last week by Steelers linebacker Lawrence Timmons while he was sliding (even the Steelers’ Jason Worilds appeared disturbed at what Timmons almost did); last season Timmons was fined $21,000 for a helmet-to-helmet hit on Mark Sanchez, but wasn’t fined or even penalized for the potentially more career-ending attempt on Flynn.

In any case, for a while against the Bears, my suspicions about Rodgers seemed well-founded; although he completed a high percentage of passes, most of them didn’t go further than five yards downfield, and two early interceptions were more than Flynn had thrown in any one game. A bizarre fumble return for a touchdown by Jarrett Boykin, after Rodgers lost the ball on a sack and other players were standing around waiting for the whistle to blow, and then a Bears’ fumble deep in its territory bailed Rodgers out again and staked the Packers to a 13-7 halftime lead. 

Most of the game Rodgers seemed to be wanting to feed Jordy Nelson, who was snubbed like all the rest of the Packers by the Pro Bowl selection process; Nelson was targeted 16 times by Rodgers. Randall Cobb was targeted but twice, but they were huge plays; the first for a 7-yard touchdown catch that allowed the Packers to retake the lead 20-14, and then a dramatic 48-yard touchdown catch on 4^th-and-8 with 38 seconds to play that gave the Packers the victory and the NFC North title despite posting only an 8-7-1 record.

On that final drive Rodgers finally was “himself,” dramatically converting on 3 fourth down plays, the last the touchdown strike to Cobb. Next week the Packers play the San Francisco 49ers, who were a Seattle Seahawks loss away from being the #1 seed in the NFC. Here is to hoping the temperatures in Green Bay are in the teens; that might give them a fighting chance this time.

The Bears, in finishing the season 8-8, didn't seem to have improved much over last season's 10-6 record under the still unemployed Lovie Smith, despite a lot of hype over the "improved" offensive scheme under new coach Marc Trestman.

The other game of interest to me was the Denver-Oakland game, not because I thought it would be competitive, but to see what Peyton Manning would do to pad his statistics. The Raiders were about as listless as the Miami Dolphins were the past two weeks, who lost again when they need one win to clinch a playoff berth (today they wilted under the 80 degree Miami heat, which only seemed to swell-up the Jets’ Geno Smith into his best game of the season—a relative thing to be certain). The Raiders defense was very obliging in accommodating Manning’s needs, in this case throwing for enough yards to pass Drew Brees’ single season passing yardage record. 

Admittedly Manning had to work at it; going into it, 59 percent of the Broncos’ designed plays were running plays; in this game, nearly 75 percent of the plays—31 out of 43 in the first half—were designed pass plays. His five-yard touchdown pass in the waning seconds of the first half allowed Manning to best Brees’ mark by one yard—5477 to 5476; but with the score 31-0 and Terrell Pryor doing his best to leave the field for his counterpart, it would have seemed a little too egoistical even for Manning to go out in the second half. I frankly would like a recount; although the NFL cannot invalidate the Manning touchdown pass last week that should have been nullified (Decker did not have full control of the ball), statisticians can subtract yardage from the final statistics.  

But with the first season over, now comes the postseason, which perhaps doesn’t matter as much to Manning because the passing stats don’t “count.” As we may recall, last season the Broncos were the top seed in the AFC, and lost in the divisional round to the eventual Super Bowl champion Baltimore Ravens.

Undelivered Christmas gifts further proof that privatizing mail delivery is a bad idea

In 2006 the Republican-controlled Congress and White House passed and signed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act; this was clearly an underhanded effort by Republicans to make the Postal Service non-competitive with private carriers, and force it—by the requirement to pre-fund retiree health care benefits to the tune of $5 billion a year—to shed services in order to stay solvent. Their ultimate goal is to shut down the Postal Service and privatize all postal delivery; although USPS receives no funding from the federal government, it has certain expected responsibilities to customers mandated by Congress, and cannot conduct its business like a private business. While this is actually a good thing, it also suggests that Congress—or at least Republicans—doesn’t have an inkling of the kind of “service” people might expect if the mail delivery system as we know became privatized.

The aforementioned act prohibits the Postal Service from functioning in a “non-competitive” fashion. But it already does so, in relation to for-profit carriers like UPS, Fedex, DHL, Ontrac and others. It has been reported that “thousands” of people woke-up Christmas Day to discover that their presents were missing, thanks to undelivered packages that retailers like Amazon promised their customers would be delivered in time for the holiday. Carriers like UPS claimed that they were “swamped” by packages within a shortened window, thanks to the late arrival of Thanksgiving Day this year, and bad weather.

Yet strangely, USPS had rather less problems in this regard. An order that Amazon informed me would arrive after Christmas in fact arrived on the Sunday before, thanks to the fact that regardless of rain, hail, sleet or snow, the Postal Service is mandated to provide “maximum” service regardless of the cost—thus unlike those private carriers, it feels it has a greater “responsibility” to customers, despite losing money in the process.

Perhaps like many people who make purchases from e-commerce retailers like Amazon, I much prefer the shipping by USPS, and become disturbed when any other carrier is involved in the process. Fedex, UPS, Ontrac and especially DHL almost never deliver standard packaging on “expected” delivery dates, while USPS quite often delivers a day or two earlier than “expected.” This is because there is no profit for the private carriers in small package delivery for home consumers. While ins some cases private carriers have coordinating agreements (like Fedex’s “Smart Post”) with USPS to fly mail to certain locations and hand it off to local post offices for the actual delivery, these “partnerships” seem to benefit the private carriers more; they only ship when they have the time or space, and USPS takes the blame for their tardiness. 

The Postal Service handles 160 billion pieces of mail a year, about 40 percent of the world’s total; yet its network is such that it can handle this volume that the private carriers cannot possibly match even if they tried. DHL, supposedly a U.S.-founded company but now a subsidiary of the privately-run Deutsch Post, is an example of a carrier that dominated the world small package delivery market everywhere—except the U.S. If you check the Internet, you will find countless people expectorating their bile on DHL and its “services.” International deliveries via DHL to the U.S. is beyond horrible, with packages sitting in a warehouse in some place called Croydon, UK for at least a month, but its domestic U.S. service makes one’s hair stand on end. Whenever I see DHL as the shipping carrier for something I ordered, I’m thinking NOOOOO! No matter how often I write Amazon begging not to use DHL—or any other private carrier—on anything I’ve ordered, they still persist on using them. 

It is a fair question to ask “why?” since Amazon’s consumer forums continually bewail the use of private carriers. While USPS works overtime, in 2008, less than seven years after it entered the U.S. market, DHL temporarily called it quits; it had suffered net losses $10 billion and let go 15,000 workers. Apparently that famous German “efficiency” is a matter of who defines it. According to a story in BusinessWeek, “DHL has faced massive criticism for the way it managed the U.S. business. Readers responding to an earlier report on BusinessWeek.com, many of them identifying themselves as DHL employees or customers, savagely attacked what they said was lackadaisical service and top-heavy or even incompetent management.”

DHL reentered the U.S. market recently, but only to overseas shipments. Its chief competitors here, UPS and Fedex—despite longer presence in this market—are no better suited or equipped to handle the enormous responsibility that USPS has succeeded for the most part in carrying out. Unfortunately, Republicans in Congress have made the Postal Service a partisan politics project, making bogus claims that it is riddled with inefficiency while deliberately making it more difficult to carry out its mission in the hope of eventually killing it and privatizing the mail delivery system. We should all rue that day if it ever comes.

Is it time for the Catholic Church to convene another major council to reinvent itself to "adapt" to the "modern" world?

Today is, what, Christmas? I suppose that when I was a kid it had “special” meaning, and if you happen to be employed in non-service jobs it means a week or two of vacation. Since I currently work in a transportation-related job, “holidays” are just another day of the year. This year Christmas just happened to fall on my regular day off. I was reminded of the meaningless of the day for me when I walked across a street today. I was waiting for the walk sign at an intersection, and proceeded across the street once it did so. Half-way across I was almost struck by car making a left turn; who was the idiot who didn’t understand right-of-way and committed a reckless traffic violation? Why, a smirking Kent cop who obviously thought this was “funny” in an intimidating fashion.  My expression told of my displeasure, and the cop proceeded to drive down the road very slowly; since I knew he was looking at me through his rearview mirror, I gave him a “salute.” Christmas—bah, humbug. Scrooge had it right.

Christmas, of course, means other things, as Linus told us in that Peanuts Christmas special. I haven’t been a regular practicing Christian for many years, so I’m not going to give a sermon on the “real” meaning of this day. I was raised in the Roman Catholic faith, and attended a Catholic grade school for eight years. While I don’t have many fond memories from my youth, the ones I do have were during those years. I admit I didn’t care for attending church service before school every morning, or being made to feel “guilty” about not going to confession every week--having to make-up bad things to tell the priest (I confessed to lying, talking back to my parents and taking the Lord’s name in vain so often I thought I detected a “here we go again” in the confessor’s tone whenever I entered the booth). But I never questioned church dogma; the Catholic Church has been around so long that I figured there must be a reason for the things it did. 

Anyways, in keeping the religious aspect, I might as well provide my view of a recent local incident. According to the Seattle Times, there has been “growing condemnation” against Eastside Catholic School’s firing of vice principle Mark Zmuda over his marriage to his same-sex partner, despite being warned that it was against the Church’s policy and he would be dismissed if he did so. I don’t know if this “growing condemnation” is a media creation or not, although the Times claims that the protests against the decision seem to be louder than those supporting the school’s. Since Eastside is a private school, it is within its right to establish rules in accordance with Roman Catholic Church policy. I suspect that most of those kids seen supporting Zmuda are not even Catholic; they were mostly (white) female, which isn’t surprising, since they tend to protest anything not out of morality or ethics, but out of power and contrariness.  

Regardless of the rightness or wrongness of the policy, I find it equally hypocritical of these people and the media to criticize Church policy while failing to recognize reasons why it might have for maintaining these policies (again, rightly or wrongly). The Catholic Church has had well-publicized pedophilia scandals involving priests and boys. It can be speculated that a few men who became priests did so because they wanted to conceal their sexual orientation, and the since the Church has a ban on marriage for priests, it was a convenient way to avoid the appearance of not “preferring” women. Having relationships with adult males is too risky, and unfortunately a few of these could not avoid another kind of temptation. The point here, of course, is that practicing homosexuality in the priesthood has been a huge and expensive embarrassment for the Church. Those who criticize Church policy while ignoring the consequences of turning a blind eye to the problem that sexual orientation has caused the Church are merely exploiting scandals for ratings and anti-Church personal satisfaction.

The church’s ban on marriage by priests and nuns is apparently due to the belief that they should be devoted only to the teachings  of God, and not be “sidetracked” by domestic entanglements. Would allowing priests to marry attract more men, whose principle complaint is that they have certain biological needs that being a priest doesn’t meet? That would require a major policy change that the Pope is unlikely to make unilaterally, along with altering its attitude toward homosexuality, abortion and female priests.  In the past, the Church has faced the challenges of “modernity” with grand councils of bishops. There had always been “heretical” threats to the Church, but with the coming of the Renaissance there was increasing resistance to the secular power of the Pope, and the disreputable worldly ambitions and accumulation of wealth by some in the clergy. One of the more contemptible practices was the sale of “indulgences,” in which forgiveness of sins and a place in Heaven could be had for a sum of money. 

In the face of the threat of the Protestant Reformation, beginning in 1545 the Council of Trent attempted to address doctrinal disagreements and abuses in the Church. Although German Protestants initially took part in the meetings, they were frustrated in their demands for doctrinal change and reduction of the Pope’s power in setting religious policy. A majority of the council rejected Martin Luther’s reform doctrine of salvation by faith alone, and for all practical purposes this split the church. Afterwards it was only in the last stages of  the meetings that abuses by the clergy and the indulgences issues were addressed, and seminaries were established to prevent the clergy from becoming beholden to secular patrons. 

In 1869, the council known as Vatican 1 was convened to deal with the new threats to dogma, such as from secular philosophies like liberalism and materialism. However, the principle and most controversial action taken by the council was to make a definitive statement in regard to the infallibility of the Pope in setting church policy.  The second Vatican Council in the 1960s again attempted to adapt the Church to a rapidly changing world, including untightening some of the restrictions of dogma to make the Church more flexible by giving additional authority to local bishops and giving lay persons a greater role in the practice of Church policy, rather than just making them sit in a pew and putting money in the basket. Lay persons were even allowed to do readings during church services. 

So the Church does have a history of addressing major contemporary issues that threaten its existence. In this age of 24-hour news, rapid exchange of information and the abandonment of many of the Church for either the “greener” pastures of “don’t worry, be happy” sects or simply lack of belief in religions generally, it may be time for another grand council to address issues like the nature of the priesthood, homosexuality and abortion. But one shouldn’t expect this to happen any time soon; especially concerning abortion, these will require dramatic shifts in the interpretation of Biblical statements. That most of the attacks of the church are coming from outside the Church, or within from “heretical” nuns’ organizations likely means that there isn’t sufficient pressure for this come anytime soon; if it does, it will certainly be the mostly highly contentious since Trent.

Women's ice hockey knows how to "inspire" little fans

I’m no fan of ice hockey. Although I hear it told that the sport is exciting to watch live in an arena, on the small screen it is difficult to keep track of the action, making it dull fare for all but committed fans. Of course, there have been efforts in the past to liven-up the proceedings. “Old Time Hockey” became a euphemism for a time when hockey was a “gentlemen’s” game focusing on skill. In the 1970s, hockey changed into a game of brute force, where “enforcers” were deployed, expected to physically intimidate and even injure opponents. In 1976, the Soviet Union's Red Army team was so stunned by unexpected "unsportsmanlike" conduct that resulted in one of their players being  knocked out in an exhibition game against the Philadelphia Flyers--known at the time to be the "dirtiest" team in the NHL--that they walked off the ice and went home.

Ramming into walls, cracking skulls, breaking noses, loosening up teeth and fist fights in general became an expected part of the “entertainment.” Fighting in hockey became so infamous that a movie was made about it, which I was reminded of by the recent release of the Paul Newman comedy Slap Shot on Blu-ray disc. Although it is not quite at the level it once was, it isn’t hockey without at least one brawl per game.

Which leads me to the point of this post. Some people might be surprised to learn that there are now women’s hockey teams, especially to those who don’t pay attention to hockey at all. But it is true. Some major universities field women’s teams, and quite often their opponents are tiny colleges of which only people who live within a ten-mile radius of the campus know exist. I watched a clip of one of these contests on YouTube; if there were not more people on the ice than in the stands in an arena that fit 5,000 I’d be surprised. 

If you were expecting women’s ice hockey to be more “genteel” than the men’s version, then you underestimate the need to be seen as “equals.” Naturally I'm all for equality of opportunity (particularly since there is a certain demographic that doesn't need it, while denying it for others), but that doesn’t mean you’re receiving equal product, no matter what Billie Jean King says these days. As usual, women’s sports teams only make “headlines” when something “unusual” occurs, and this was the case last week during a hockey game between the U.S. and Canadian women’s national teams. According to a story posted on a rarely visited fringe on ESPN’s website, 

“Jocelyne Lamoureux (of the U.S.) took exception to Brianne Jenner's late run at Josephine Pucci, setting off another fiery round in the U.S. women's hockey team's rivalry with Canada. Lamoureux nailed Jenner with an illegal bodycheck and, seconds later, Lamoureux, sister Monique and U.S. teammates Hilary Knight, Gigi Marvin and Kacey Bellamy were brawling with Canada's Jenner, Melodie Daoust, Jocelyne Larocque, Meaghan Mikkelson and Vicki Bendus.” 

Apparently these two teams have considerable bad blood, which sparked a similar brawl involving 10 players last October. According to Katey Stone, coach of the U.S. team, "I'm not a proponent of fighting in hockey, but I am a proponent of standing up for yourself. We will not be pushed around." It was reported that “young girls” in the stands “cheered wildly” as the action was played out. When asked about this, Lamoureux thought it was “pretty cool” that she could serve as an “inspiration for some of these little girls that came out here tonight."

Now, there is a YouTube video of this particular brawl. While the whole thing lasted about 30 seconds, there was plenty of fightin’ action going on, or at least appeared that way since the blows seemed to be delivered in slow motion. The most interesting throw-down was between Knight and Larocque, with the latter putting a wrestling move on the former, pinning her on the ice and pounding on her head. 

One suspects, however, that this was all just for show; after it was over, everyone got up as if it was a fake fight scene in a movie. I mean, where were the bloody faces that you usually expect to see after a men’s hockey fight?  I think fighting in hockey is nothing more than legalized assault, but if you are going to do it and be an “inspiration” for “little girls,” you should show them the “real thing.” But then again, they might get a little squeamish and “uninspired” at the idea of having their faces altered and teeth knocked out.