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It is puzzling indeed that it is the Weekly Standard’s William Kristol who has earned the appellation “Always Wrong” from the snarkosphere. As far as being persistently, punishingly, jaw-droppingly wrong on issue after issue, for year after year, Kristol has nothing on the likes of Andrew Sullivan.

Sullivan, whose popular blog, The Daily Dish, runs on the website of the Atlantic, has exhibited stunningly bad judgment for well over a decade. To run through just a few of his greatest hits: in 1994, while editor of the New Republic, Sullivan ran a lengthy excerpt from the Bell Curve, the discredited and toxic polemic which argues that innate racial IQ differences account for the achievement gap. (To this day, he’s “proud” of having done so.) Also while editor of TNR, he ran Betsy McCaughey’s dishonest attack on the Clinton health care plan – an article which is said to have been partially responsible for the defeat of ClintonCare. (As a result, the great James Fallows nominated McCaughey for his coveted “most destructive effect on public discourse by a single person” award.) In 2001, in the wake of the 9/11, Sullivan charged that American liberals “may well mount . . . a fifth column,” and side with the terrorists. He was a zealous supporter of the Iraq war, and heaped abuse on those who dared to disagree with him. For the past two years, he has fanned the flames of Trig Palin birtherism, frantically and fanatically claiming that Sarah Palin is not the mother of her child. Even his predictions regarding the Obama presidency have turned out laughably off-base. In a 2008 Atlantic cover story, Sullivan argued that an Obama presidency would end the racial and cultural wars that have divided this country.

We see how well that has turned out.

But the purpose of this post is not merely to bring to light the myriad mess-ups that Sullivan is responsible for – I’m not attempting to write a (longer) Moby Dick here. Rather, I wish to point out another disturbing element of Sullivan’s thinking: his equation of all that is venal and corrupt with the feminine, and his worshipful view of all that he associates with masculinity. His is a Manichean worldview that is as simple-minded as it is sexist.

Let us begin with Sullivan’s contemptuous view of the feminine – and his concomitant hatred of some very powerful women. Take his attitude towards Hillary Clinton. In 2007, and 2008, as Clinton was mounting a run for the White House, Sullivan’s blog was a hotbed of inflammatory and derogatory rhetoric aimed at the then-New York Senator. He charged that Hillary Clinton had “betrayed feminism” which occasioned the American Prospect’s Dana Goldstein to ask, “who stepped down and named Andrew Sullivan king of feminism?” In extraordinarily condescending fashion, he lectured women and feminists that “it’s time feminists realized that Clinton is a dream gone sour . . . One day, there will be a woman worth electing to the White House. But not this one.” And it hardly escaped notice that the pictures he chose to run of Mrs. Clinton were always highly unflattering, either showcasing her wrinkles, or using shadows and darkness to make her appear almost demonic.

His attitude towards Sarah Palin would require a book-length treatment in itself, but here, at the very least, is a representative post. Famously, Sullivan has been ferocious in arguing that Palin is not actually the mother of her child. On his blog, weeks were spent consumed with the subject, and he continues to flog that horse to this day. Indeed, the real question Dana Goldstein should ask is, “who stepped down and named Andrew Sullivan Sarah Palin’s OBGYN?” While Sullivan is clearly a highly emotional man, prone to fits of passion, he has never displayed the kind of scorn and hatred for men that he does regularly for women like Clinton and Palin. He also applies a double standard to lesbian women: while on the record as an opponent of outing closeted gays, he nonetheless demanded a public accounting of the sexual orientation of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan.

Conversely, all that Sullivan sees as good, he portrays in hyper-masculinized language. Take his frequent use of the term “balls.” He champions the “fiscal balls” of Chris Christie. He celebrates April Fools, with “bigger balls.” In complementing the journalist Spencer Ackerman, he gushes that “Spencer is a good person, dedicated to real investigative journalism and with more balls and capacity for hard work than most of his peers.” And he says that members of the Journolist mailing list are “devoid of any balls whatsoever.” Apparently, to Sullivan, virtue is equated with the posession of testicles. And Sullivan writes in near worshipful terms of virtuous, masculinized men. Of Reagan: “his visionary focus [was] matched only by a gentleness of character and a brilliance of rhetoric,” of Obama, “he’s the best thing we’ve got.” Even women sprout balls when they agree with Sullivan. He says that Maggie Gallagher “has balls.” (“In a good way,” he hastens to add.)

This is merely the tip of the iceberg; Sullivan’s blog posts upwards of twenty items a day, and in attempting to follow Sullivan’s vacillations, wild swings of opinion, and overheated rhetoric, one is liable to contract whiplash. But, suffice it to say, the same pattern is clear — the gender-bifurcated worldview is the one constant of the Daily Dish.

Many of Sullivan’s acolytes like to point out that he has apologized for some of the colossal errors of judgment that he has made in the past. The Iraq War is an example: he has publicly declared that he was mistaken to support the invasion.

But in what terms did Sullivan apologize? “I supported the war in Iraq like a teenaged girl supporting the Jonas Brothers,” he has said. Ah, of course: according to Sullivan, supporting the Iraq war was the girly thing to do.

Image by AFP via @daylife

Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner made its overseas debut last week, and, by all accounts, was a smashing success. At the Farnborough Air Show in the United Kingdom, the Dreamliner was the Grand Dame of the show. (It easily outshone the hideous “airplane by committee” monstrosity that is the Airbus A380.) There are now over 800 787s on order.

It’s easy to see why the Dreamliner has proved so commercially successful. No airplane is more environmentally-friendly: those worried about greenhouse gas emissions will be pleased to learn that the 787 is 20 to 30 percent more fuel efficient than the Airbus A330 and the Boeing 767, its closest cousins. The airlines, always looking for ways to cut costs, are obviously over the moon – or, at least, over 33,000 feet – at these potential cost savings. The airplane itself, by the way, is an aesthetic marvel. I recently toured the Boeing factory in Everett, Washington, and saw the graceful bird firsthand. It’s nothing short of astounding.

Cars are similarly undergoing a revolution in fuel efficiency and “greening.” The Nissan Leaf, a zero emissions car, will be available by the end of this year. Chevrolet’s Volt, another electric car, will be on the market by November, and Honda has recently announced its intention to get into the electric car market.

And so those two “scourges” of the earth, those toxic belchers of greenhouse gas emissions, cars and airplanes, are becoming more and more environmentally friendly. Progress, right? Something to celebrate, yes? But why is it, then, that even as this revolution is happening, the environmental elites become ever more committed to limiting our mobility? Why, as transportation becomes greener, do they become redder and redder with rage?

Consider, first, civil aviation. Even as the 787 looks set to radically reduce the environmental impact of flying, environmental and governmental elites are attempting ever more aggressively to prevent us from taking to the skies. The Obama Administration has been breathtakingly hostile to the airline industry, slapping needless fees and surcharges on the industry. The United Kingdom has recently declared war on aviation, and likened frequent flying to drug abuse. The German government is also now looking to ground its flying public. And flyers are increasingly subjected to moral hectoring from the greener-than-thou among us.

Hostility to cars, especially in urban areas, has also reached a fever pitch. The very trendy Slate magazine has recently been running a series on how to “improve” urban transport. All of the suggestions center on ways to reduce car use. Congestion pricing, the highly regressive measure that penalizes people for driving in their own cities, is an idea we often hear bandied about. And cities like my own continue to pour dollars into public transportation projects, while neglecting to fund the construction of roads, highways, and bridges.

It would appear, then, that environmentalists’ concerns over flying and driving don’t actually have much to do with the Earth. Perhaps its an aesthetic dislike of cars and planes, a hatred of man’s supposed “hubris” for daring, Icaraus-like, to fly, or maybe it’s simply a deep-seated distrust of modernity that explains the continued war on freedom of movement. In a way, it’s temping to feel sympathy for the environmental movement. After all, in a world where transportation is becoming increasingly environmentally friendly, it’s not easy being green.

UPDATE: I edited this post to correct a typo in the initial version. Many thanks to commenter ‘Zach Hensel’ for pointing this out.

I wrote you about this yesterday, but I continue to be curious as to why it is that you’re writing this series of stories based on misleading descriptions of excerpts of JournoList emails where you don’t post the full text of the emails online anywhere.

best,
Matthew Yglesias

Then at 4:07 PM Eastern, Strong finally replied:

Mathew,

I was hoping to chat with you for a few minutes this afternoon regarding Journolist. If you could call me at 202-xxx-xxxx, I would appreciate it.

Best,
Jonathan Strong

I redacted the phone number to protect Strong’s privacy. Yglesias afforded him no such courtesy. Needless to say, this is a shockingly churlish action on the part of Yglesias.

Now, it appears, the post in question has been removed from Yglesias’ blog. No comment has been made regarding the post; no apology, no explanation, no mention of it ever having happened. Into the ether.

Remember this the next time Yglesias lectures his colleagues about journalistic ethics.

UPDATE: The post in question is back up — complete with Strong’s office number. Yglesias has now added more private correspondence to the post as well, which, given the cause of this brouhaha, is profoundly ironic.

UPDATE THE SECOND: Epstein’s Razor cuts deep. Yglesias now posts the following:

A technical glitch temporarily caused this post to be deleted from the blog. It was just an accident, don’t read anything into it. Let me also note that the controversy in comments over the phone number is much ado about nothing, that number is the publicly listed phone number of The Daily Caller not Strong’s home phone or anything.

Yglesias is being somewhat misleading regarding the “publicly listed” number of the Daily Caller, however. The number that Strong gave Yglesias is not listed anywhere on the the Daily Caller’s website.

Even more damningly, the number Strong gave Yglesias is not the the Daily Caller’s number that is listed in the White Pages. Only reverse google searches reveal that the number Strong gave Yglesias belongs to the DC. This hardly constitutes being “publicly listed.”

Maybe it’s not just UnYthical Yglesias. It’s Misleading Matt, also.

Image by Getty Images Europe via @daylife

Christopher Hitchens has previously wished wasting diseases on his political opponents, so it’s hardly surprising that is he is now dancing in the streets over Mel Gibson’s self-immolation. Today in Slate, Hitchens asks, with palpable relish, “When will Hollywood, and the wider society, finally decide to shun and spurn him utterly, both for what he is and for what he represents?” – as if this isn’t already happening. (Gibson will soon be fleeing to Australia, if the Daily Mail is correct.) But disregard for a moment the lack of empathy for a fellow human in a state of emotional turmoil, evidenced by recent writings of Frank Rich, Hitchens, and a bevy of True/Slant commenters (message: I am fine with people suffering, so long as they are right-wing), and focus instead on the peculiar logic that Hitchens employs in his latest missive.

It is Gibson’s brand of conservative Catholicism that explains his latest tantrum, Hitchens would have us believe. “It would be highly surprising if a person marinated in the doctrines of this ideology did not display all sorts of symptoms that were also sexually distraught,” he writes today. Yet rather than focus on Gibson’s own views, he uses his column to instead focus on the beliefs of Gibson’s father. In a bizarre application of “the sins of the father” logic, Hitchens impugns Mel Gibson’s character by impugning Mel Gibson’s father’s character. Here is a representative paragraph:

This schismatic crackpot sect is headed by Mel Gibson’s father, Hutton Gibson, a nutty autodidact with a sideline in Holocaust denial. During the controversy over The Passion of the Christ, Gibson junior said that he had never heard anything but the truth from his father. I have some of old man Gibson’s books on my shelf, including his self-published classics Is the Pope Catholic? andThe Enemy Is Still Here!, which essentially accuse the current papacy of doing the work of the Antichrist. My favorite sample of his prose style is the following: “Our ‘civilization’ tolerates open sodomy and condones murder of the unborn, but shrinks in horror from burning incorrigible heretics—essentially a charitable act.” He attacks the late Pope John Paul II for having said, in one of his “outreaches” to the Jewish people, “You are our predilect brothers and, in a certain way, one could say our oldest brothers.” Hutton Gibson’s comment? “Abel had an older brother.” I don’t think that there’s much ambiguity there, do you? Like many ultra-conservative Catholics, the Gibsons, père et fils, have never forgiven the Vatican for lifting the charge of deicide against the Jews in 1964.

Fine: Gibson’s father is a grotesque figure. We can all agree on this point. But so what? It is absolutely preposterous to indict somebody based on the behavior of his parents. (This is what the North Korean government does; three generations are imprisoned based on the “criminal” act of one person.)  And who are we to demand that Gibson disown his own father? That is a heavy and unfair burden. But leave all that aside. Instead, let us apply a bit of Hitchens’ logic to himself.

Christopher Hitchens likes to boast of his anti-imperialist bona fides. He was a staunch opponent of the Vietnam War, just as he was a staunch opponent of Saddam’s annexation of Kuwait (well, not really, but he now likes to claim as much), and he abhors Turkey’s imperialist presence on the island of Cyprus. But Hitchens’ father (whom he fails to disown in his new memoir) was a servant of the British Empire, and a militarist: he was a Naval Officer. Indeed, Hitchens described his father in a 2007 C-Span interview as “imperialistic.” Yet that description was not followed by a breathless denunciation of his father’s immoral and imperialist actions. Thus, according to the Gibson Standard, Hitchens is an imperialist warmonger.

Christopher Hitchens may want to tread lightly on this subject. After all, if every child has to disown his parents because they are wrong, his nest is going to be very empty in the years ahead.

The British government wants to limit the affordability of air travel.

I recently used this space to bemoan the British government’s War On Travel. Under the guise of environmentalism, the newly installed Tory government has undertaken a scheme to limit the mobility of its citizenry, by imposing punitive taxes on flying, and by limiting arrivals and departures. The new government has a particular ire for budget carriers like Ryanair, whose cheap flights have done much to level the traditionally stratified British class system. Like the Tory elitists they are, Britain’s new rulers, led by Prime Minister David Cameron, want to see to it that the working classes stay in their place. No more saucy weekends in Budapest – it’s back to blighted Brighton with them.

We’ve now reached a new nadir in the Tory reassertion of old-fashioned class superiority. The UK’s new government has taken to likening cheap flights and travel to drug addiction and alcohol abuse, and therefore working class travelers to junkies and boozers. In the UK, taking cheap flights to Spain, Estonia, and Portugal is now known as “binge flying.”

As the New York Times reported earlier this month, “The government decided that enabling more flying was incompatible with Britain’s oft-stated goal of curbing emissions. Britons have become accustomed to easy, frequent flying — jetting off to weekend homes in Spain and bachelor parties in Prague — as England has become a hub for low-cost airlines.” This all in an effort to fight what the government spokespeople, without irony, call “binge flying.” It’s telling that flights on legacy (and hence more expensive) carriers like British Airways are not maligned as “binge” carriers. Rather, it’s the working man’s airlines that get that designation.

It’s a shrewd – if appalling – move on the part of the Tories to liken cheap travel to binge drinking and drugging. After all, it plays into widespread stereotypes in Britain regarding the working class and its alleged predilection for heavy drinking and drug taking. In the UK, young, white, working class people – known colloquially as yobs or chavs – are maligned as dangerous and decadent hedonists. Thus, they are subjected to increasing levels of supervision and surveillance, with booze bans, strict anti-smoking regulations, and other illiberal restrictions now the law of the land. By referring to travel as just another form of substance abuse, it becomes logical for the British government to take steps to limit it. Logical, if distasteful. Distasteful, if not outright disgusting.

I’ve long thought of England as the European equivalent of “Flyover Country,” just a dull expanse to pass over on the way to more interesting destinations, like France, Germany, Denmark, or the Netherlands. Apparently, now, that’s one thing that David Cameron and I agree on.

Getting ready to strap Mel up there.

He endured public humiliation, ridicule, torture, and scorn. He was jeered, mocked, and savagely beaten. The blood-thirsty rabble, blind to its own flaws, heaped self-righteous reprobation upon him. His suffering and torment were made public, for the world to enjoy. The Passion of the Christ? No: the trials and tribulations of erstwhile movie star Mel Gibson.

Nobody deserves to have their private anguish broadcast publicly – least of all, private citizens. Gibson is just that; he is not a politician, his personal life should not concern us. But so long as his rantings and ravings have now made it into the public square, the situation does bear comment.

The Gibson tapes present the image of a man in profound emotional anguish. Disregard the profanity and the few (and indefensible) racial slurs, and you find a man who is genuinely suffering. Here is someone who feels his “life is being ruined,” that he gets no “support,” that he and his lover, Oksana Grigorieva, share no “spiritual ground.” He feels that that Grigorieva”doesn’t care for him” even now, when he is “having a hard time.” He worries about his young daughter, frets that Grigorieva is not being attentive to her needs. To be sure, Gibson comes off as relatively crazed in these tapes. But it’s the kind of crazed state that is familiar to many who have been in intense and grueling relationships. Love makes fools of us all, after all.

Prominent readings of the situation have been comically, preposterously bad. David Brooks of the New York Times ludicrously claimed that it was Gibson’s “narcissism” that led him to act the way he did. Yet, if anything, Gibson comes off as desperate for Grigorieva’s affection in the tapes. He craves her approval and support. This it not self-love manifesting itself; this is insecurity and neediness. If anything, Gibson appears to be suffering from a lack of self-love.

Meanwhile, here at True/Slant, Todd Essig, a psychologist, argued that “hatred” motivates Gibson’s behavior. But this is another incredibly wrong-headed reading of the situation. Gibson is not motivated by “hatred” here – he is motivated by a pathological need to be approved and loved by others. Far from “hatred,” and the hardened state that that implies, Gibson appears a needy, almost child-like figure.

The elite media’s sick celebration of this spectacle calls to mind another phrase associated with this fine actor: Payback. In 2004, when the Gibson-helmed Passion of the Christ was released, our cultural gatekeepers were shocked and appalled. Frank Rich devoted no fewer than four of his New York Times columns to the film. Christopher Hitchens, writing in Slate, said that Gibson deserved a “flogging,” and that the movie was “fascist.” The New Yorker said it was “one of the cruelest movies in the history of cinema.” All of this may be true – I have not seen the movie, but, from what I understand, its politics and aesthetics are truly despicable. It’s worth noting, however, that our cultural elite was appalled at Gibson’s treatment of the crucifixion insofar as it was hyper-violent and disgusting. But now they’re relishing the opportunity to crucify Mel, themselves.

Jack Kevorkian. He used his medical expertise to kill over one hundred people.

I recently argued in this space that legalizing Doctor-assisted suicide based upon the claim that there is a “right to die” lacks logical rigor. (Leave the lack of ethical rigor aside for a moment.) As I put it, “Legalizing assisted suicide has the effect of bureaucratizing what would otherwise be a personal, private choice. In sum, rather than increase the scope of personal liberty, legalizing assisted suicide actually shrinks it.” All that remains true.  But the recent efforts of a doctor here in Portland to open an assisted suicide clinic bring to mind another way in the which the “right to die” argument is pure sophistry.

Even though suicide is technically illegal in many jurisdictions, there exists no way to enforce this law. If a person wants to kill himself, alas, he shall succeed. There is even a formal lobby that supports this so-called right: the Guardian has reported on an organization called the Hemlock Society, which supports peoples’ rights to shoot, poison, and stab themselves. Thus, the codification of a formal “right to die” hardly prescribes the way society operates: it merely describes it.

Assisted suicide laws do not, therefore, guarantee a right to die. Rather, they create a new right through legislation: the right of doctors to kill their patients. The only party whose rights are expanded by assisted suicide laws are those of physicians who wish to terminate their patients’ lives.

Given that American physicians are held to the Hippocratic Oath – that of, “Do No Harm,” – it is increasingly clear that Doctor-assisted suicide is philosophically and logically untenable. “Harm” is injury, and death is the gravest harm of all. Let’s euthanize assisted suicide laws before they do any more harm.

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Next week will mark the one year anniversary of the The Daily Dish’s Andrew Sullivan’s arrest in Massachusetts on a marijuana charge. In 2002, Eric Alterman correctly noted that, “Andrewsullivan.com sets a standard for narcissistic egocentricity that makes Henry Kissinger look like St. Francis of Assisi. Readers are informed, for instance, that Andy’s toilet recently overflowed; that he had a rollicking dinner chez Hitchens; that he might have seen Tina Brown across a hotel lobby, but he’s not sure; and that, in separate, apparently unrelated incidents, he had a nightmare and ate a bad tuna-fish sandwich that upset his tummy, requiring many “stomach evacuations.” Yet, despite Sullivan’s penchant for venting (quite literally) his spleen on his blog, he has, to my knowledge, said very little about his arrest. Perhaps this is because the manner in which the charges were dropped raises serious and disturbing questions about the way our justice system works.

The great Jonathan V. Last summed up the matter this way: “So Andrew Sullivan gets caught for possession on park service grounds. The penalty is a $125 fine. But because he’s Andrew Sullivan, the State quickly decides to drop the charges “in the interest of justice.” The interests of justice seem to be that this $125 fine would create a record which would hinder Sullivan’s immigration status.” This occasioned a brilliant memorandum from one Judge Collins, taking issue with the manner in which the case was dismissed. I would recommend you read the whole thing, which clearly articulates the unfairly preferential treatment that Sullivan received by virtue of his celebrity. As it happens, Last excerpted the key points, and characterized the issue as thus:

Sullivan and his attorney claim that paying the $125 fine would create a record of his being charged with possession of a controlled substance. Collings notes that whether or not Sullivan ever paid the fine, “if asked by immigration authorities, [he] would have to answer truthfully that he had been charged with a crime involving controlled substances.” So why would it matter whether or not Sullivan just pays the $125? Because if he doesn’t pay it, it makes it easier for him to answer untruthfully.

In other words, the State decided that it was in the interest of justice to help Andrew Sullivan lie to another agency of the State.

All of this goes to show that the concept of “equal protection under the law” was made a mockery of by Sullivan, his lawyer, and the state. Sullivan, himself a putative believer in the “rule of law,” used his clout to flout the law. For Americans who don’t appear regularly on Real Time With Bill Maher, things don’t always end so well. For example, 2000 young Californians were denied access to student loans because of marijuana charges in 2006 alone. Evidently, due to not their not being the authors of famous blogs, they were not able to see the charges dismissed.

In sum, this is a flagrant case of the privileged and powerful manipulating the justice system, and receiving treatment far more generous than Americans of modest means. As such, it should offend any self-proclaimed progressive. Astonishingly, this is a form of trans-national privilege as well: Sullivan is not even an American, yet he was treated with more deference than thousands of Americans are each year. Even those who support the legalization of marijuana must agree that this kind of unfair treatment under the law is quite disturbing.

Many expressed joy at Lindsay Lohan’s jail sentence earlier this week. Finally, the consensus was, a celebrity is being treated like a normal person! Yet before we celebrate this blow for egalitarianism, let’s not forget that, a mere year ago, Andrew Sullivan was “dished” some seriously preferential treatment.

Don't make Mount Saint Helens mad.

The place where I make my home, Portland, Oregon, sits directly across the Columbia River from the city of Vancouver, Washington. (Or, Worshington, as the natives pronounce it.) Each day, I half-expect a flotilla of Washington residents – on inflatable rafts, or perhaps even bathtubs – to come floating across from Washington to Oregon. They will be escaping from Washington State’s punitive and poverty-punishing tax codes. Indeed, they will be fleeing from what may convincingly be called America’s most regressive state.

This is not merely the rantings of an unabashed Oregon loyalist who only goes to Washington under extreme durress: take it from the Washingt0n (DC) – based Institute For Taxation and Economic Policy. According to a report put out by the think tank last year, Washington State’s tax system is the nation’s most regressive. As the Seattle Post-Intelligencer characterized it, “People earning less than $20,000 annually pay 17.3 percent of family income toward sales and excise taxes and property taxes, the report said. People making between $99,000 and $198,000 each year pay 7.6 percent toward their tax bill. Meanwhill, people in the top 1 percent of earners – those making more than $537,000 a year – pay just 2.9 percent, the report said.”

A number of flagrantly regressive tax schemes account for this sorry state of affairs. Washington imposes no income taxes, so Seattle’s super-rich corporates class collects mass sums unmolested. It levies a sales tax of 8%, and in many counties, that number is far higher. (In King County, home of Seattle, the tax on prepared beverages and meals comes to 10%.) Sales tax burdens, of course, fall disproportionately on those with lower incomes.  And the state has now fallen in love with “sin taxes,” which punish people who like to eat candy and drink bottled water. Sin taxes’ regressive nature, of course, also sees to it that lower income people suffer the brunt of the punishment. The extra 25 cents on a pack of gum won’t cause Paul Allen much pain, but it will certainly hurt a Wal-Mart worker plugging along in Federal Way.

Sometime in the past few decades, Washington State garnered a reputation for “progressivism.”  Perhaps this is attributable to Washington’s Left Coast location, its rampant Seattle Boboism, or the fact that it spawned the band Sleater-Kinney. Progressives, of course, ostensibly support the interests of the working and lower-income classes. Yet no state in the union confiscates more money from poor people, while protecting the interests of the moneyed elite.

Tragically, this is a trend that is replicating itself nationwide. States dominated by liberals and Democrats – California, Illinois, La Belle Rhode Island - now levy some of the highest sales tax rates. In the current Oregon governor’s race, it is the Democrat who has proposed imposing a sales tax, and the Republican who has outright rejected the idea. (Oregon is one of five states with no sales tax.) If states across the country elect to punish the poor to balance their budgets, we will know that they looked to the Washington model for guidance. Like Nirvana two decades ago, Washington State will have spawned another noxious national trend.