DAILY NEWS
Post-Janus update ● Parking planes ● Trump needs Pelosi ● Shiver
Friday, April 5, 2019
THIS WASHINGTON
► In today’s Seattle Times — After late-night amendments, fate of school levy bill remains unclear — A bill that might have given Washington school districts some flexibility about how much money they can raise locally imploded in a series of late-night votes Tuesday. Now, the fate of the original proposal remains unclear as lawmakers work against the clock to reach a final budget agreement before the end of the month.
ALSO at The Stand — Senate panel’s amended bill attacks teachers
► In today’s Spokesman-Review — Senate passes $52.2 billion operating budget — A $52.2 billion plan to cover most state programs and salaries for the next two years easily passed the Senate on Thursday with some Republican votes, setting up the next phase of the legislative budget process: Negotiations between the two chambers and the governor’s office to find a plan that all three can support. They’ll have just over three weeks to work out the details if the Legislature is to adjourn on time on April 28.
► From KUOW — Motel 6 and Washington state settle over privacy violation — Motel 6 will pay $12 million for violating Washington state residents’ privacy. The agreement comes after an investigation found the national motel chain was sharing guest information with immigration agents. The State Attorney General sued Motel 6 more than a year ago for unlawfully and routinely providing guest lists to ICE.
BOEING
► From Bloomberg — Boeing races ahead with 737 output, parking some in Everett — Boeing will soon learn whether the financial fallout from the global grounding of its best-selling jetliner will be a brief jolt — or a much more painful ordeal that would have repercussions for suppliers and the U.S. economy. Production of the 737 MAX in Renton has continued at full tilt even though regulators grounded the single-aisle jet following a March 10 crash… For now, the company and its supplier base are sticking to a carefully orchestrated schedule, which predates the disasters, to raise monthly output to 57 jets by midyear. That’s about 10 percent higher than the current factory tempo, which is already a record. But if regulators take their time in certifying the MAX’s return to the skies, Boeing would be forced to stash hundreds of factory-fresh jets at airports across the Western U.S.
► From The Hill — Boeing admits ‘erroneous’ data contributed to 737 MAX crashes — Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg on Thursday posted a video saying that “erroneous” data contributed to a pair of Boeing 737 Max 8 plane crashes. He said that two recent accidents involving the planes were caused by a “chain of events” but added that it was the company’s responsibility to resolve the issues with the system. “It’s our responsibility to eliminate this risk,” he said. “We own it and we know how to do it.”
We at Boeing are sorry for the lives lost in the recent 737 accidents and are relentlessly focused on safety to ensure tragedies like this never happen again.
Watch the full video here: https://t.co/kZawq35YnZ pic.twitter.com/G9uIHjxsWi
— Dennis A. Muilenburg (@BoeingCEO) April 4, 2019
► In today’s Seattle Times — Reacting to crash finding, congressional leaders support outside review of Boeing 737 MAX fixes — The FAA announced this week the formation of a review panel headed by former NTSB chairman Christopher Hart comprising a team of experts from the FAA, NASA and international aviation authorities. The group will conduct a comprehensive review of the certification of the automated flight-control system on the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, as well as its design and how pilots interact with it, the FAA said. Both Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon) and Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) endorsed the FAA’s plan.
THAT WASHINGTON
EDITOR’S NOTE — When the House passed it, Washington Republican Reps. Jaime Herrera Beutler, Dan Newhouse, and Cathy McMorris Rodgers voted against it. All Democratic members of the state’s delegation voted to pass it.
ALSO at The Stand — Union Sisters pointed the way to gender equity (by April Sims)
► In today’s Washington Post — Pelosi expresses doubts about Medicare-for-all, says she would rather build on Affordable Care Act –The House speaker also wondered whether the proposal embraced by several presidential candidates would be too expensive.
► From The Hill — Dems struggle to unite behind drug price plan — Progressive House lawmakers met this week with Speaker Nancy Pelosi‘s top health care staffer, Wendell Primus, to push for a drug pricing bill authored by Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) that would impose severe punishments on pharmaceutical companies that refuse to negotiate prices with the federal government. The concern among liberals is that a competing measure being crafted by Pelosi’s office will go easy on drug companies. They’re also wary of Pelosi’s staff holding talks with the White House about drug price reforms.
► From Reuters — Canada says reopening USMCA trade pact could be a ‘Pandora’s box’
► In today’s NY Times — One Trump victory: Companies rethink China — The trade war is nearing a possible truce, but global companies are nevertheless moving to reduce their dependence on Chinese factories to make the world’s goods.
► From Politico — How Trump conspired with the Freedom Caucus to shut down the government — Months after the 34-day standoff that followed, the full story of how the president was pushed into the shutdown is a lesson in how to take the reins in Trump’s Washington. The lawmakers around Trump who wanted a shutdown knew exactly how to bring the president around to their side: threaten that others might perceive him as weak and push that threat around Capitol Hill and, eventually, all the way to Fox News. It helped to have a man on the inside, too—in this case, acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney.
► In today’s Washington Post — Potentially damaging information in Mueller report starts political fight — Attorney General William Barr is facing more pressure to release the full report by special counsel Robert Mueller amid revelations that members of the Russia probe team are frustrated with the limited information that Barr has released so far.
► From The Onion — White House says Mueller report must be kept private because it’s so exonerating it would drive public mad
NATIONAL
EDITOR’S NOTE — Get a union! Get more information about how you can join together with co-workers and negotiate a fair return for your hard work. Or just go ahead and contact a union organizer today!
► From the AP — Hiring rebounds as U.S. employers add a solid 196,000 jobs — Wage growth slowed a bit in March, with average hourly pay increasing 3.2% from a year earlier.
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT
► In today’s Washington Post — Die, robocalls, die: A how-to guide to stop spammers and exact revenge
T.G.I.F.
► Twenty-five years ago today, at the age of 27, Kurt Cobain killed himself at his Seattle home. Six months earlier, he and his Nirvana bandmates, along with some members of the Meat Puppets, performed for the “MTV Unplugged” show. They played a set list (with none of their hits) in a single take (unusual for the show) and concluded with this Lead Belly song. The Atlantic’s Andrew Wallace Chamings wrote that it “ranks among the greatest single rock performances of all time”…
“For the final line, ‘I would shiver the whole night through,’ Cobain jumps up an octave, forcing him to strain so far he screams and cracks. He hits the word ‘shiver’ so hard that the band stops, as if a fight broke out at a sitcom wedding. Next he howls the word ‘whole’ and then does something very strange in the brief silence that follows, something that’s hard to describe: he opens his piercingly blue eyes so suddenly it feels like someone or something else is looking out under the bleached lank fringe, with a strange clarity.”
The Stand posts links to Washington state and national news of interest every weekday morning by 10 a.m.