You see, the reason the NBA this week turned away Hansen's bid to buy the Sacramento Kings and move them to Seattle was that he was honest about his intentions. If he had followed the established NBA model, he would have gone about this thing entirely differently.

Clearly, the chief reasoning of NBA owners for declining to add Hansen and Steve Ballmer to their list of owners was that they were from Seattle. When the NBA ripped their team of 41 years out of Seattle back in 2007, it was intended as an object lesson for the rest of the league: Unless you bow to our extortion demands, you will lose your team.

Sacramento, obviously, got that lesson. After teetering on losing the Kings because of the failure to build a new arena, the city gave up every ounce of its soul in its desperate effort to keep the NBA in town. The new arena deal requires the taxpayers to foot about 60 percent of the tab.

So of course the NBA was going to reward the city that gave in to their extortion demands. And it would continue to punish the city that insists on limiting the taxpayers' role in enriching billionaire owners and their exposure to ever-ratcheting arena costs.

You see, Seattle thought it had done everything right for years. Its fans always supported the Sonics -- even when they sucked, the team still averaged 15,000 a game -- and were among the most rabid and knowledgeable in the league. (I was myself a season ticket holder for over a decade.) There's a reason so many NBA teams are populated with players from Seattle high schools: It is a basketball-saturated town.

We even bellied up to the bar in the 1990s on the arena demands -- spent $100 million tearing apart and renovating the old Seattle Center Coliseum, three-quarters of which was paid for by Seattle taxpayers. When it reopened in 1995, David Stern came and proclaimed the new facility as state-of-the-art for the next generation.

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From Slog, a blog from the The Stranger,* this shameful little tale of passive-aggressive douchebaggery: A coffee chain owner who announces a "surcharge" to cover the city's new mandatory sick pay law -- instead of quietly raising his prices:

We received a tip this afternoon from a reader who noticed that Cherry Street Coffee, which has seven locations in and around downtown Seattle, has just put up shiny new signs at all their registers alerting customers to a new "Sick Leave Surcharge" of 1.5 percent on every order.

The sign reads: "Sick Leave Surcharge: To help offset the costs of the City of Seattle's paid sick leave policy we are adding a 1.5% surcharge to all orders. We appreciate your understanding and continued patronage."

If you'll recall, on September 1, 2012, Seattle's new paid sick and safe time law went into effect, mandating that all Seattle employees receive paid sick leave. As Cienna reported at the time, the law was in part aimed at food-service workers, who often don't get sick leave and who, for the love of God, should not be serving you food or brewing your coffee while they are sneezing or barfing (or even just feeling a touch sneezy or barfy).

Says Slog Tipper Whitney: "There were many ways I could have dealt with this. He could have upped prices slightly to compensate, for example." But instead, says Whitney, "he chose to call himself out as a royal dickhead for life, because now we all know he wasn't paying for sick leave before forced to by law."

I called Ghambari to see if he agreed with that assessment. Incidentally, he says on his website that "Cherry Street is all about building love and community."

Because nothing says love and community like someone with the flu sniffing and hacking over your food, amirite?

Ghambari confirms that he's the author of the signs, which went up at all the cash registers last week. "Obviously, this is something we never had in our budget," he says. "We never had sick leave before." He says offering sick leave will cost him "$25,000 to $30,000 a year, easy," for his 45-plus employees.

"My employees know, hey, you're gonna get 40 hours time off for sick leave," he says. "Even if you are not sick, you'll get that paid to you anyway." Under the new law, for a business his size, 40 hours of accrued sick time can be rolled over from one year to the next. "If one of my employees is not sick for the whole year," he says, "all of a sudden next year, you've got 80 hours... I don't want my employees calling in sick when they're not sick to get a day off."

I asked him how the rollover of sick leave would cause his employees to be dishonest. He did not have an answer. "It's not about dishonesty," he says. "I'm not driving a Mercedes, I'm actively working my business. I feel pretty comfy with [this decision]. If some people don't feel good about it, bring it on, we'll talk about it." But so far, he says, "We haven't gotten any comments about it."

Even though several customers already told Slog they'd complained. Be sure to read the comments, because . Ali's not quite as beloved as he likes to think!

See more at CapitolHillSeattle.com.
*Edited to reflect correct name of publication

In Kirkland, WA, on Saturday, Markos Moulitsas, founder of Daily Kos hosted an afternoon reception followed by a townhall event in Seattle for Darcy Burner who is seeking a congressional seat in Washington's first district.

In a first for Moulitsas, he explained to the crowd "If like me, you think Congress is broken, that we have a lot of work to do to pull it out of the mess it is in, one vote is not enough. This is the one race in the entire country right now where I can look at a candidate and say "She is going to give us more than one vote." She is going to be able to corral people, bring them together and help build a movement that moves not just the party forward...but the country forward. That is why I am here, and that is why I wholeheartedly support Darcy Burner."

Ms. Burner has been a featured "chat" guest here at CrooksandLiars for Blue America. If you're so inclined, you can donate to Darcy Burner's campaign on her Blue America page.

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We've had an unusual spike in gun fatalities here in Peacenik Seattle this spring -- twenty-one since January, compared to only three such deaths at the same time a year ago. Everyone is trying to figure out why. And after yesterday, it's not just a rhetorical question.

Because this one was a real wake-up call:

A man described by his family as "angry toward everything" went on a deadly shooting rampage in Seattle on Wednesday, killing five people and critically wounding another before turning a gun on himself hours later as police closed in.

Ian L. Stawicki, 40, was identified by family and law-enforcement officials as the man who shot five people just before 11 a.m. at Cafe Racer Espresso in the University District — a hangout for a tight community of artists and musicians.

Four of the cafe shooting victims died. A fifth victim was fatally shot near Town Hall in downtown Seattle.

This happened not very far from where I live. At the park where my daughter's classmates were playing at their recess, the police came and told everyone to go back to their school and stay inside. Schools closer to the crime scenes were locked down entirely.

Everyone wants to know why this is happening. It isn't hard to figure out a couple of things that were clearly at play here: We're now a society awash in guns at unprecedented levels. And we're also awash in an increasingly untreated population of mentally ill people.

Over at Slog, Jonathan Golob explains:

In Washington State, it is exceedingly difficult to involuntarily commit mentally ill individuals—particularly for extended periods of time—unless someone is an imminent threat to themselves or others. Individuals with illness severe enough to be committed to a mental health facility in other communities are—by plan—allowed to try to integrate into the community.

In place of (costly and arguably inhumane) warehousing of the mentally ill, the plan for decades in Washington state has been to provide aggressive outpatient case management. Psychosis, bipolar disease, depression, anxiety and others are all treatable diseases. The notion—and it's not a bad idea at its core—is to use an army of social workers (state employees) to keep mentally ill people in the community engaged with treatment and the community safe.

Over the same decades, our investment in social services has dwindled. Right-wing propagandists like the Seattle Time's editorial board, Tim Eyman, and everyone you know who has uttered the phrase 'a more efficient state government' are directly responsible for our social service network being gutted, the many safety nets being left tattered and unmanned.

The reign of radical right wing financial policy in Washington State has left (the richest of) us with some of the lowest tax burdens of any community in the United States. The cost is a day like today.

But we haven't only government-gutting conservatives to thank for this problem. Because we can also thank the far-right paranoid gun nuts who run large national "gun rights" organizations for having gutted any kind of reasonable restraints on the public's access to guns.

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As the time for new business at the Amazon shareholder meeting Thursday morning arrived, the audience grew restless. For those of us holding legal proxies or actual shares, a confrontation was coming on issues around political disclosure, climate change, ALEC funding, workplace conditions and Amazon's corporate taxes.

Two shareholder initiatives had qualified for the official ballot: Climate change transparency and accountability and transparency about corporate political contributions to candidates and organizations.

In addition to Jeffrey Bezos, Amazon's board of directors consists of venture capitalists and corporate CEOs, which is fairly typical for a public company. That group, for whatever reason, decided to recommend against political transparency and a climate change disclosure and transparency policy.

Amazon and Political Transparency

Bruce Herbert is founder and CEO of Newground Social Investment, and he was the author and filer of the political disclosure resolution, which he read aloud at the meeting. The resolution called for disclosure and review of all corporate political contributions, who they were paid to, identification of the Amazon official authorizing the disclosure with a statement of their purpose in authorizing it, and for all information on these expenditures to be posted on the Company website.

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Forgive the cheap riff on Olbermann's Worst Person in the World designation, but if the epithet fits, no one wears it better than Glenn Beck.

All that apologizing for racist comments he did last year? Yeah, not so much. Now listen to the clip at the top and try to count how many dog whistles he jammed into 64 seconds.

With regard to President Obama:

BECK: When you see a typical person like the president of BP, he [Obama] has a reaction that has been bred into him.

Now that actually kind of works. It does, if you understand who his parents were, and who his grandparents were. Because they're not really the typical white people.

His mother wasn't. His mother was a revolutionary.

His father wasn't. A revolutionary.

His grandparents, they went to the communist Little Red Church just outside Seattle. They had communist friends.

So it's almost like Marxism has been bred into him.

Yep, piling scum on scum: Beck is once again viciously and falsely smearing Obama's parents. Doesn't he claim to have a rule that "you leave the families alone"?

I really hate writing about Glenn Beck because I'd like to make him a footnote on the back end of history. He's the equivalent of a two-bit carnival barker with a shape-shifting magical box, where he can put facts in and pull them out as bull.

But after reading Over the Cliff and previewing Bill Press' new book, the emerging trend is too scary to ignore.

With each passing day the rhetoric gets more violent, more ridiculous, loaded with even more hyperbole and scary images, with the sole intention of stoking fear, anger, and loathing into those with ears to hear.

If they win the propaganda war, it will be because we didn't call it out when we saw it and call it what it is: bare, naked racism blended with a scary witches' brew of long-standing key terms, fears, and biases.

This is why law student Angelo Carusone listens to four hours of Glenn Beck every day and then pushes advertisers to drop their ads from his show. It's his mission: to make it more and more difficult for Beck to have a platform to spew this nonsense.

He's successful, too. He's gotten hundreds of advertisers to drop their sponsorship. In the UK, Beck's show has NO advertisers. None. While this might not cause Fox to drop his show entirely, it does expose the Murdoch agenda quite clearly. After all, any businessman without an agenda would have dropped him like a hot potato when the revenue to support the show dried up.

But no. Beck is such a lowlife scumbag that he just ramps up the nasty a few more notches and carries on, while all the time claiming to be a patriot.

What he is is a whore. Plain and simple.

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I have to give Max Blumenthal, who I had the pleasure of hosting here in Seattle this past week, credit for coming up with the ideal question to ask the fans of Glenn Beck who showed up Saturday in the Seattle area to root for their favorite right-wing fearmonger:

Do you think President Obama hates white people?

The first person I asked was Sean Salazar, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate -- he wants to take on Sen. Patty Murray, and so far appears to be leading the GOP field -- standing outside Safeco Field, where Beck's Seattle event was held.

Salazar, as you can see, hedged and stammered and then quickly found someone else to talk to. But he typified the response in Seattle: "When did Glenn Beck say that? Really? He said that? Well, I need to see the context." One woman said that "Beck explained that," but I pointed out to her that all he said was that he was sorry how it was worded, but that it's still a "serious" question Americans need to be asking. So I was asking them.

I also asked the man who was carrying the big sign making fun of Beck. He pointed out how white the crowd was. And it was true, particularly inside the stadium (more on that shortly). Eventually, I did manage to find an African-American man who was outside gathering signatures on behalf of Ron Paul's "Campaign for Liberty." He said he wasn't going in to see Beck.

Finally, right at the end, I did encounter one honest soul. As you can see.

I met many, many more of these folks at the Beck rally in Mount Vernon later that afternoon and into the evening. Unfortunately, I didn't manage to capture most of them on video (a camera burp) -- just one couple towards the end of the evening. But I had at least five different people at Mount Vernon, supporters of Beck's, tell me they firmly believed Obama was a racist who hated white people.

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The scene at Mount Vernon was radically different from the one in Seattle. Outside Safeco, there were only 30 or so anti-Beck protesters. Everyone evidently saved their energies for Mount Vernon, where the mayor, a Republican named Bud Norris, unwisely decided to give the hometown-boy-gone-bigtime the keys to the city.

Locals chanted: "Change the locks! Change the locks!" And there were hundreds of them; the crowd estimate was at about a thousand, including several hundred pro-Beck counter-protesters. Those were the folks I talked to the most, and the toxic Obama-hatred was far stronger among this group than it was with the attendees in Seattle.

Fortunately, they were badly outnumbered.

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I've been in California this week, but my friend Goldy back in Seattle managed to make it out to last week's massive rally in support of health-care reform.

There were several thousand people there, with only a tiny smattering of teabaggers opposed to reform. Goldy has photos and reportage on just how large the support for a public option was.

And yet, guess what? The media completely ignored the rally. Even the local paper -- the ostensibly neutral but in fact Republican-run Seattle Times -- ran not one single word about it.

Of course, forget about the national media bothering to report this, too.

They've been too busy telling us that the public option is dead because of the supposedly massive opposition to it created by teabaggers.

As Goldy says:

None of this happened yesterday in downtown Seattle because no ex-marine angrily yelled down a congressman and nobody got the tip of their finger bitten off and nothing apparently is going to get the media to move from the well-entrenched meme that support for reform is steadily slipping as the public turns against Obama and the Democratic Congress… not even a show of force by the public itself.

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There are some things that are always constant. It rains a lot in Seattle, their coffee is great and it's north of California. And whenever Bill O'Reilly feels threatened he summons Juan Williams to appear on The Factor to apologize for BillO's actions. Last night Juan did his job well. He plays a good faux liberal when BillO needs one. Just remember, "when O'Reilly's in a jam, who's he gonna call? JuanBusters." Check this out.

Williams: There are people who are going to try and use this now to make others who have critical of a women having the right to choose, make that into a political tool to beat people up and to try and convince people that these are all extremists and the fact is that you're not extremist. There are a lot of people who by a matter of conscience are troubled by abortion, especially late term abortion and I know you O'Reilly, what you did is you said it bothered you personally and there's nothing wrong with that.

----

But let me just say, they're going after you, Bill O'Reilly and I've never heard you say to block a clinic , I've never heard you say to create violence to intimidate women who are legally seeking an abortion. I've never heard you say go after the doctor's, berate them, certainly not kill them. Never. Never! Not true.

No, he just used his ambush producers to stalk him.

Oh, my friend Brian Russell was on that segment.

And of course he doesn't want to be a vigilante but...

And if I could get my hands on Tiller -- well, you know. Can't be vigilantes. Can't do that. It's just a figure of speech.

David Neiwert has an excellent post with with some great video.

Bill O'Reilly has Dr. George Tiller's blood on his well-stained hands

O'Reilly similarly accused anyone who refused to buy into his accusation of coddling killers:

I don’t care what you think. We have incontrovertible evidence that this man is executing babies about to be born because the woman is depressed…if you don’t believe me, I don’t care…You are OK with Dr. Tiller executing babies about to be born because the mother says she’s depressed.

O'Reilly later attacked Kathleen Sebelius for her refusal to prosecute Tiller. And he kept it up. As recently as this spring he again spent a segment excoriating Tiller as a murderer. Priscilla at Newshounds ran through the file in March.

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Both in his Talking Points Memo segment and later on in "Policing the Net," Bill O'Reilly is shocked, shocked that those dirty-minded liberals at that competing network actually had a little fun with the "Tea Bag" protests.

In the later segment, O'Reilly brings on Amanda Carpenter, who can't bring herself to openly reference "teabagging," and the Gallant Sir O'Reilly won't let her go there. Of course these scumsucking perverts earn nothing but contempt from him for their dirty-mindedness and low sexual mores.

So sayeth the author of Those Who Trespass:

"Say baby, put down that pipe and get my pipe up."

"I would like you to unhook your bra and let it slide down your arms. You can keep your shirt on."

"Cup your hands under your breasts and hold them for ten seconds."

Funny thing: I always thought it was liberals who lacked a sense of humor.

We can only hope they don't decide to hold any Bareback Parties, or Fudgepacking Parties. Or even worse, Santorum Parties. It will drive us all insane with suppressed laughter.

Meanwhile, I'm sure Amanda and Bill will be appalled, but I had to share this shot from a lonely liberal who showed up too early yesterday (like me) at Seattle's Tea Bag party site: