ANTI-VACCINATION MOVEMENT - Consequences of Misinformation

"Washington state’s measles outbreak coincides with low rates of immunization" PBS NewsHour 1/28/2019

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Washington state is experiencing an outbreak of measles, with 35 confirmed cases in a single county.  The disease's flare-up is reinforcing concerns about insufficient immunization in some communities.  Hari Sreenivasan talks to Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health about why measles remains a serious disease and how to address misinformation within the anti-vaccination movement.

REMINDER:  Not vaccinating children endangers other children, not just the parent's own child.

Frontline: "The Vaccine War"

A must view to see the truth, pay close attention to the Denmark study.

BRIEF BUT SPECTACULAR - Austin Jenkins

"Why journalists are needed in state capitals across the country" PBS NewsHour 1/10/2019

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SUMMARY:  Washington state is growing in terms of population and budget, but the number of reporters covering politics in Olympia, its state capital, has declined.  And according to Northwest News Network political correspondent Austin Jenkins, “state houses are the incubators” for national public policy.  He shares his brief but spectacular take on being “overwhelmed” in order to keep viewers informed.

POLICING IN AMERICA - Seattle Says NO to Attorney General

"Seattle sticks to Obama-era police reforms amid review" PBS NewsHour 7/8/2017

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SUMMARY:  Attorney General Jeff Sessions has ordered a sweeping review of police reforms initiated under the Obama administration, suggesting a potential rollback in federal oversight of police nationwide.  One city still committed to reform is Seattle.  Special Correspondent Joanne Elgart Jennings reports on how the reforms, five years in the making, have been received.

MAKING THE GRADE - Media Literacy

"How media literacy can help students discern fake news" PBS NewsHour 6/6/2017

Common Sense Media

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SUMMARY:  Recognizing bias in news stories is one form of media literacy.  Spotting when the news is totally fabricated is something else entirely.  How can teachers help students tell fact from media fiction?  Educators and media literacy advocates in Washington state are working together with legislators to address the problem.  Special correspondent Kavitha Cardoza of Education Week reports.

CARBON TAX - View From State of Washington

"Pay for carbon pollution?  Why some environmentalists don't support this state tax" PBS NewsHour 10/20/2016

NOTE:  "The state of Washington is one of only seven states that does not levy a personal income tax."  They use a sales tax system.

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  In Washington state, economist Yoram Bauman is leading a campaign to cut carbon emissions by imposing a revenue-neutral carbon tax.  Everyone would have to pay, but instead of creating more revenue, existing taxes like the state sales tax would be cut.  Economics correspondent Paul Solman reports that the opponents and proponents of the measure are not who you might expect.

YORAM BAUMAN, Carbon Washington:  You might be an economist if you don't read human interest stories because they don't interest you.

(LAUGHTER)

PAUL SOLMAN (NewsHour):  At Seattle's Museum of Flight earlier this year, Climate Night, headlining, Yoram Bauman, who claims, with a straight face, that he's the world's first and only economic comic.

YORAM BAUMAN:  You might be an economist if you have ever gone into a bank or other financial institution in the hopes of getting a date.

(LAUGHTER)

YORAM BAUMAN:  If you adamantly refuse to sell your children because you think they will be worth more later.

(LAUGHTER)

PAUL SOLMAN:  But when we visited Seattle in April, Bauman had begun a dead serious fight, to combat climate change in his home state of Washington by imposing a tax on carbon emissions.  He'd founded the grassroots group Carbon Washington to put the issue to voters.

MAN:  Initiative 732, it's going to be on the November ballot.

MAN:  I-732 works by charging polluters with a carbon fee, which lowers pollution.

WOMAN:  And then the revenue that is created will go to reducing other taxes in the state.

PAUL SOLMAN:  Making the carbon tax, starting at $25 per ton of CO2, about 25 cents per gallon of gasoline, revenue-neutral.

YORAM BAUMAN:  The revenue from the carbon tax goes to cut existing taxes.  Most of it goes to cut the state sales tax by a full percentage point.

Most households are going to pay a few hundred dollars a year more for fossil fuels and a few hundred dollars a year less for everything else.

ANNIVERSARY - Mtount St. Helens

"From Mt. St. Helens' volcanic ashes, Mother Nature rebuilds" PBS NewsHour 5/18/2016

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SUMMARY:  Wednesday marks the 36th anniversary of the deadliest volcanic event in U.S. history: the eruption of Mount St. Helens, which killed every living thing in a 230 mile radius.  But the slopes around the volcano are now beginning to repopulate with plant and animal life, giving biologists a unique opportunity to watch an ecosystem develop in real time.  Science correspondent Miles O'Brien reports.

MILES O'BRIEN (NewsHour):  Thirty-six years after its spectacular, deadly eruption, Mount St. Helens still rumbles and bears scars from that earth-shattering day.

But hike down the slopes, away from that jagged crater just a little, and you will see Mother Nature hard at work.  And there's a good chance you will bump into a team of scientists led by John Bishop.  He is an evolutionary biologist at Washington State University-Vancouver.

JOHN BISHOP, Washington State University-Vancouver:  The goal of our research is to understand how plant and animal communities reform after a catastrophic disturbance.

MILES O'BRIEN:  Bishop is one of a select group of researchers studying this rebound from a volcanic eruption.  Back in 1980, Mount St. Helens had given scientists all kinds of clues that a big disturbance was brewing.

Two months before it blew, the volcano was venting huge amounts of steam and there was a series of earthquakes.  Even with all those ominous signs, the eruption was larger than anyone predicted.  It happened at 8:32 on the morning of May 18, 1980.  An earthquake caused the north face of the mountain to collapse.

JOHN BISHOP:  After that, it uncorked an explosion that was directed horizontally, and leveled the forest to 13 miles out from the volcano.

MILES O'BRIEN:  The eruption column of volcanic ash and gas rose 80,000 feet, while a tsunami of 1,800-degree gas and rock raced down the valley at 450 miles an hour, a so-called pyroclastic flow.

JOHN BISHOP:  Anything biological that was remaining after the landslide would've been completely vaporized.  It was just a barren landscape, gray and pumice-colored.

MILES O'BRIEN:  It killed every living thing in a 230-square-mile area.  What was left was akin to a moonscape; 57 people died.  Some remains were never recovered.

Bishop and his team have had a front-row seat as nature got busy bringing this place back to life.  They wanted to know where it begins and how it takes root.  Here, it started with these purple flowers.  Alpine lupine were the first plants to return.  For many years, they were pretty much the only game in town.  But as they went through their life cycles over several seasons, they created soil from the volcanic ash.

And that made it possible for woody plants, like the Sitka willow, to find a home.  They are how a forest gets started, but it hasn't been easy for them.

WASHINGTON STATE SUPREME COURT - SeaTac Looses Minimum Wage Exclusion

Also for the company Greed Files.

"Court gives SeaTac workers a raise after $15 minimum wage exclusion" PBS NewsHour 8/27/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  In SeaTac, Washington, home of the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, citizens voted in 2013 to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour.  But airport businesses challenged the law in court, excluding 5,000 or so workers from receiving the increased benefits.  Now the State Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the employees.  Economics correspondent Paul Solman reports.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  Now, how low-paid workers are winning some key battles.

Today, the National Labor Relations Board ruled a large company could be held responsible for labor decisions held by a contractor it hires, even if it doesn’t directly supervise the employee.  That could mean unions may be able to negotiate directly with McDonald’s Corporation, for example, instead of just its franchises.

That win comes after another recent victory over a wage hike at Washington’s Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.  The state’s Supreme Court ruled last week that employers must pay workers $15 an hour.  Airport businesses had challenged a 2013 referendum.

Our economics correspondent, Paul Solman, has updated his report.

Here’s a reprise of his Emmy-nominated story.  It’s part of our weekly story Making Sen$e, which airs every Thursday on the news hour.

PAUL SOLMAN (NewsHour):  A lot was at stake last week in SeaTac, Washington, home of the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, as local citizens decided the fate of a proposition to jack up the minimum wage there to $15 an hour, for thousands of workers, the promise of a huge pay hike, 63 percent if they were making the state minimum of $9.19 an hour, plus paid sick leave, which promised to be a benefit for the flying public as well.

WOMAN:  Every employee that I work with comes to work sick because they have to put food on the table.

ABDIRAHMAN ABDULLAHI, Car Rental Employee:  Imagine you’re flying on an airplane.  The worker who clean up the airplane before you fly, he was sick and he’s cleaning the airplane, imagine you eating on that table, you know?

PAUL SOLMAN:  But higher costs would boomerang against low-income workers, business spokesman Maxford Nelson insisted.

MAXFORD NELSON, The Freedom Foundation:  The workers who retain their jobs might be better off, but an increased number of other workers lose their jobs entirely.

PAUL SOLMAN:  A bitter, costly campaign ensued, a recount, and, in the end, the ayes had it by 77 votes.

But, on decision day, Alaska Airlines, the main opponent of the $15 minimum wage proposition, filed a lawsuit in county court, arguing that a city can’t set ordinances for an airport operating within its borders.

SCIENCE - Undersea Volcanoes

"To study Earth’s most extreme environment, researchers wire up an undersea volcano" PBS NewsHour 7/7/2015

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SUMMARY:  Hundreds of miles off the coast of Oregon and Washington, there's an undersea volcano known as Axial Seamount.  Two months ago when it began spewing lava, it wasn't a secret to a group of scientists engaged in a groundbreaking research project.  Hari Sreenivasan reports on their Cabled Observatory -- a network of sensors, moorings and cameras that offers views of a little-known world.

HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour):  What if a volcano erupted and nobody knew about it?  That used to be the case 300 miles off the coast of Oregon and Washington for undersea volcano known as Axial Seamount.

But two months ago, when it started spewing lava, these scientists knew instantly.

You have 25 sensors sitting on the lip of a volcano, and it’s all feeding information back here.

JOHN DELANEY, Oceanographer, University of Washington:  That’s right.  It’s really exciting.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  University of Washington oceanographer John Delaney is the director of a groundbreaking research project called the Cabled Array, also known as the Cabled Observatory, that has, in effect, turned Axial Seamount into the world’s first wired volcano.

JOHN DELANEY:  Well, we’re standing in our control room that allows folks that are here on campus at the University of Washington to actually interact with the instruments that might be as much as 400 kilometers, 300 miles offshore.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  On the day of the eruption, a network of sensors on the volcano started measuring more than 8,000 small earthquakes, and the seafloor dropped seven feet.

DEBBIE KELLEY, University of Washington:  We have been waiting our whole lives to have that kind of information come in.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  Debbie Kelley was one of those closely watching the eruption data.  She’s a chief scientist on the team who studies underwater volcanoes.

This volcanic ridge is like thousands of miles of ridges that circle the Earth beneath the oceans.  It’s also a spot where two tectonic plates pull apart, making it an ideal location to study.  Kelley says that the Cabled Observatory, which will eventually send back real-time data and images anyone can access, will finally give scientists, and the general public, insight into a complex world they know very little about.

SEATTLE - Battle Over the Minimum Wage

"How much does it really cost to live in a city like Seattle?" PBS NewsHour 4/22/2014

Excerpts

GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):  The battle over raising the minimum wage may be at a stalemate in Washington, D.C., right now, but, in Washington State, the fight is still under way.

Our economics reporter, Paul Solman, has the next in his series of stories on that subject, this one on just how much it really costs to live in a city like Seattle.

It’s part of his ongoing reporting Making Sense of financial news.

PAUL SOLMAN (NewsHour):  In Seattle this spring, rallies to raise the minimum wage, but not to the $10.10 being debated nationally.  Here, they’re talking about $15 an hour citywide, 62 percent higher than this year’s inflation index state minimum wage of $9.32, already highest in the nation.

PHILIP LOCKER, Socialist Alternative Party:  Wall Street and big business crashed the economy.  They got bailed out.  They’re making record profits.  But working people are faced with what?  Poverty wages, low wages, McJobs, student debt.  What’s our future?
---
PAUL SOLMAN:  Seattle multimillionaire investor and entrepreneur Nick Hanauer is a leader of the $15 wage movement, but he still helps run his family’s pillow company.

NICK HANAUER:  And, indeed, we have factories where we do not pay workers $15.  If my competitors pay $10 and we pay $15, we will surely go out of business.  A great challenge we face in the city of raising the minimum wage to $15 is precisely that dynamic.

PAUL SOLMAN:  But, look, says Hanauer, every economic decision involves tradeoffs.  It boils down to weighing the costs against the benefits.

And in this case:

NICK HANAUER:  The benefits overwhelm the costs.  When worker compensation goes up, everyone benefits, right, because those workers both go buy more stuff and need less services from taxpayers.

MINIMUM WAGE - Look at Seattle-Tacoma Airport Deal

"SeaTac airport workers fight exclusion from $15 minimum wage" PBS NewsHour 4/17/2014

Excerpt

GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):  We move now to the Pacific Northwest and part one of a Paul Solman series on the debate over raising the minimum wage.

Tonight, he has the latest on a story he first brought to our attention last fall.

It part of his ongoing reporting Making Sense of financial news.

PAUL SOLMAN (NewsHour):  A lot was at stake last November in SeaTac, Washington, home of the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, as local citizens decided the fate of a proposition to jack up the minimum wage there to $15 an hour, for thousands of workers, the promise of a huge pay hike, 63 percent if they were making the state minimum of $9.19 an hour, plus paid sick leave, which promised to be a benefit for the flying public as well.

WOMAN: Every employee that I work with comes to work sick because they have to put food on the table.

ABDIRAHMAN ABDULLAHI, Employee, Sea-Tac’s Hertz Car Rentals:  Imagine you’re flying on an airplane.  The worker who clean up the airplane before you fly, he was sick and he’s cleaning the airplane, imagine you eating on that table, you know?

WASHINGTON STATE - Nightmare Mudslide

"Washington state mudslide conditions present ‘nightmare scenario’ for rescue team, says geologist" PBS NewsHour 3/24/2014

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JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  Rescue teams are continuing a difficult, hazardous and grim hunt this evening for survivors in a large mudslide in Washington State.  More than 100 people are unaccounted for, although the precise number of people missing is uncertain.  At least eight are confirmed dead.

The huge slide has prompted many questions about the cause — the cause of this.

Jeffrey Brown explores that part of the story.

JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour):  The mudslide destroyed some 30 homes and occurred about 55 miles northeast of Seattle, near the town of Oso right off state Route 530.  Just before 11:00 a.m. Saturday, a wall of mud and debris slammed into the former fishing village, covering an area about one-square-mile wide and 15-feet deep in some places.

David Montgomery is a geologist at the University of Washington.  And he joins us now with more.

Well, thanks for being with us.  So what can we say so far?  What appears to have happened to cause this mudslide?

DAVID MONTGOMERY, Geologist, University of Washington:  Well, the proximal cause is that we had one of the wettest months of March on record.  That region had something north of seven inches of rain, as I understand it, in the last month.

It’s been very wet out here lately.  But that slide — that slide had actually slid before.  This is a reactivation of a prior slide that was actually a reactivation of a much older prior slide.  So the hill had failed before, so it was prone to weak — it had been weakened by the act of sliding in the past.

And the material that forms that hill is glacial sediments.  It’s fairly weak material for such a tall cliff.  And so you had a naturally unstable exposure that received an awful lot of rainfall lately.  And there’s this other factor of a river that’s been cutting into the toe of the slide for the past few decades.

WASHINGTON STATE - Is Health Care Threatened by Mergers of Secular and Catholic Hospitals

"Catholic Hospitals Grow, and With Them Questions of Care" by Nina Martin, ProPublica 10/17/2013

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Over the past few years, Washington state’s liberal voters have been on quite a roll.  Same-sex marriage?  Approved.  Assisted suicide?  Check. Legalized pot?  That too.  Strong abortion protections?  Those have been in place for decades.

Now, though, the state finds itself in the middle of a trend that hardly anyone there ever saw coming: a wave of mergers and alliances between Catholic hospital chains and secular, taxpayer-supported community hospitals.  By the end of this year, the ACLU estimates, nearly half of Washington’s hospital beds could be under Catholic influence or outright control.

Many of the deals have been reached in near secrecy, with minimal scrutiny by regulators.  Virtually all involve providers in Western Washington, which voted heavily for same-sex marriage last November and the Death with Dignity Act in 2008.  The cultural divide between the region’s residents (Seattle recently edged out San Francisco as the area with the largest proportion of gay couples) and the Catholic Church (whose local archbishop led the effort against marriage equality and is overseeing a Vatican crackdown on independent-minded American nuns) couldn’t be wider.  And yet more and more hospitals there — sustained by taxpayers, funded by Medicare, Medicaid, and other government subsidies — could be bound by church restrictions on birth control, sterilization and abortion, fertility treatments, genetic testing, and assisted suicide.

In affected communities, the news is not going over well.

“It’s the perfect storm here,” said Kathy Reim, president of Skagit PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) north of Seattle, where four area hospitals have been in merger talks this year.  “We are the only state that has all these rights and privileges available to our citizens.  Yet many of our hospital beds are being managed by a system that, for the most part, cannot and will not honor these rights and laws.”

Meanwhile, the deals just keep coming.  Earlier this month, hospital commissioners approved a letter of intent between Skagit Valley Hospital and PeaceHealth, a Catholic enterprise that runs nine medical centers and dozens of clinics in three states.  The week before, Franciscan Health System (which already has six hospitals in the region) said it would affiliate with an acute-care facility in the sprawling suburbs south of Seattle.  In mid- September, UW Medicine, which includes the University of Washington’s teaching centers, signed a “strategic collaboration” with PeaceHealth to provide advanced specialized in-patient care.

In all, Washington has seen at least 10 completed or proposed Catholic-secular affiliations in the past three years, more than anywhere else in the country, says Sheila Reynertson of MergerWatch, a New York-based nonprofit group that tracks hospital consolidations.  Three of the state’s five largest health-care systems are Catholic.

Catholic providers have actually been an integral part of Washington state’s health-care infrastructure since the late 1800s, when nuns from the East Coast and Europe braved rain and worse to minister to loggers and miners in remote outposts around the region.  A century later, those historical ties — and their relative robustness — have made them attractive partners for community hospitals for whom the choice is: affiliate or get crushed.

“It’s harder than ever before for independent health-care organizations to thrive without alliances,” said PeaceHealth spokesman Tim Strickland.  One of the main reasons: health-care reform.  “It’s happening all over the country, with all kinds of providers,” he said.  “We don’t perceive this trend as a Catholic scenario so much as a health-care scenario.”  (Indeed, the consulting firm Booz & Company predicts that a fifth of the nation’s 5,000 hospitals could merge over the next few years.)

In some places — including big swaths of Western Washington — Catholic providers are becoming the only source of health care for an entire region. (Approximately 8 percent of what the federal government calls “sole community hospitals” are Catholic.)

The dilemma is that Catholic hospitals — there are 630 or so in the United States, representing 15 percent of all admissions every year — are not independent entities.  They are bound by a 43-page document called the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, which have been around in some form since 1921 and were last revised by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2009.

REMINDER:  Religious organizations are NOT democratic.  The leaders of any religion dictate policy and members do not get a vote.

HEALTH - State of Washington's Puget Sound Toxicity

"Scientists Search for Solution to 'Toxic Cocktail' in Washington's Puget Sound" PBS Newshour 3/14/2013

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SUMMARY:  In Washington state's Puget Sound, scientists have made discovery of a "toxic cocktail," made up of excess rainfall that flows into the nearest body of water, carrying pollutants along with it.  Kate Campbell from KCTS-9 in Seattle reports on efforts to prevent that runoff from making it into the sound.

Watch Seattleites Make Rain Gardens to Curb Stormwater Pollution on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

JOBS - "College Cellars," Training for Wine Industry

"School of Wine: Training Students for Jobs in Washington State's Wine Industry" PBS Newshour 9/10/2012

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JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): Now, higher education, jobs, and, yes, fine wine.

Leaders in business and politics are increasingly looking to community colleges to help train students and, in some cases, even connect them directly with potential employers.

Special correspondent John Tulenko of Learning Matters has a story about the unusual path that one college in Washington state is taking.

JOHN TULENKO: The 2012 Seattle Wine Awards, showcasing the best in Washington state wines.

JOEL BUTLER, wine judge: We have over 700 wineries. And we make some of the best Cabernet, Serrat, Riesling, and Merlot. So, we're one of the top places in the world now for making fine wine.

JOHN TULENKO: One champion receiving three double gold medals was an entry few had ever heard of, College Cellars.

HEALTH - Washington State, Whooping Cough Epidemic

"As Whooping Cough Rebounds in U.S., Infants at Greatest Risk" PBS Newshour 8/22/2012

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GWEN IFILL (Newshour): ....the troubling return of an old disease that can be deadly to the youngest of children.

NewsHour health correspondent Betty Ann Bowser reports.

BOY: Whooping cough shots!

BOY: Whooping cough!

BETTY ANN BOWSER: In Washington State, whooping cough is now something to stand on the corner and shout about, because the state is in the grips of the worst epidemic in half-a-century.

Health officials in Everett are so concerned that on a recent Tuesday night they held a free clinic to get as many people vaccinated as possible. Whooping cough's official name is pertussis, but whatever you call it, the disease is making a comeback across the country.

EDUCATION - Reinventing Summer School Part-2

"Year-Round School Commits to Students from Middle School to Last Day of College" (Series Part-2) PBS Newshour 8/21/2012

Excerpt

SUMMARY: Rainier Scholars, a Seattle non-profit, is trying to curb high school drop out rates. Taking the long-term approach, they identify students with high barriers to higher education and ask them -- some as young as 10 -- to commit not just to finishing high school, but to graduating from college. Hari Sreenivasan reports.

GWEN IFILL (Newshour): Now the second in a pair of stories about efforts to keep students from losing ground over the summer.

Last night, we looked at a Rhode Island school district's attempts to close the achievement gap between rich and poor.

Tonight, we head across the country to Seattle. A nonprofit group there runs a year-round program which aims even higher: to college graduation.

Our report is part of our American Graduate series, and we turn again to Hari Sreenivasan.

HARI SREENIVASAN (Newshour): As summer draws to close in a Seattle, roughly 50,000 K-12 students across the city are ending vacations and preparing to head back into classrooms.

AMERICA - Companies Supporting Marriage Rights in State of Washington

"Starbucks, Google back gay marriage in Washington" (state) by KING 5 News 1/25/2012

Starbucks and Google are the latest corporations to support gay marriage in Washington state.

Washington United for Marriage announced Wednesday that the two companies are among dozens of businesses that are supporting SB 6239 and HB 2516 (state bills).

These companies bring the total number of supportive businesses to more than 100. The list of companies includes Microsoft, Nike and Group Health Plan.

"Marriage equality provides a multitude of intangible benefits to Washington businesses. Recognizing the relationships of all - irrespective of sexual orientation - means an open and innovative business climate that ensures fundamental fairness and basic civil rights for all," said Lacey All, Chair of Washington United for Marriage. The addition of these companies continues to show that momentum in Washington State is on the side of equality for all Washingtonians."

At this time, six states plus the District of Columbia recognize marriage for same-sex couples under state law: Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, and Vermont.

Nine states - California, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington - provide same-sex couples with access to the state level benefits and responsibilities of marriage, through either civil unions or domestic partnerships. Same-sex couples do not receive federal rights and benefits in any state.

Another win on the side of Human Rights, and Equal Rights (aka equal treatment under the law).

I cannot think of ANYTHING more sacred that the relationships of consenting adults. Local, state, nor federal law should anything to say about this, which would include marriage (or Civil Unions).