Archives for August 2013

– It’s sad that there needs to be an app for school lockdowns.

– I like seeing what The New York Times thinks of Seattle developments. It’s very provincial of me, but I don’t care. They are rather fawning over Jeff Bezos.

– The Many, Many Jobs That Won’t Earn You Enough to Live in Your City

– I forgot to mention it in the post on Friday, but this editorial in the Ballard News-Tribune was what set me off thinking about a city post-Seattle Times.

– I have jury duty starting tomorrow in Seattle. Since it’s city, it’ll only be a misdemeanor, so I don’t anticipate it being very long. They said there would be WiFi in the waiting room, so I’m hoping y’all don’t notice anything, but my posting schedule may be a bit different than usual.

Last week’s contest was won by zzippy. It was in Fairbanks.

This week’s is related to something in the news from August, good luck!

1 Samuel 20:30
“You stupid son of a whore!”

Discuss.

Yesterday, King County released the precinct level results of the August primary. I’ve created a database of the results. Obviously, the most interesting race of all was the one that narrowed the large field of candidates for mayor down to the last two. Who, as we all know, are Mike McGinn and Ed Murray.

Though I’ve collected all of the data, I haven’t yet gotten into it very deeply. Eventually, I hope to create map representations of the results. More on that (I hope) later.

My first shallow dive into the numbers involves the 43rd Legislative District, in which I reside. Not only is the 43rd one of the two LDs that are entirely within the city of Seattle (the other is the 36th), it’s also Ed Murray’s home territory. Ed received the sole endorsement of the 43rd District Democrats, and you’d expect it to be the center of his electoral strength.

Overall, the official outcome of the primary was:

• Ed Murray ….. 42,314 (29.8%)
• Mike McGinn ….. 40,501 (28.6%)
• Peter Steinbrueck ….. 22,913 (16.2%)
• Bruce Harrell ….. 21,580 (15.2%)
• Charlie Staadecker ….. 6,288 (4.4%)
• Doug McQuaid ….. 2,546 (1.8%)
• Kate Martin ….. 2,479 (1.7%)
• Mary Martin ….. 1,498 (1.1%)
• Joey Gray ….. 1,318 (0.9%)
• Write-ins ….. 334 (0.2%)

Turnout within the city was 35.0%, but 2,535 of the 144,306 who cast ballots in Seattle didn’t even bother to choose a mayoral candidate. Murray led McGinn by 1,813 votes, 1.2% of the valid votes.

Obviously, then, Ed must have done much better in home sweet home than the rest of the city. Right?

In a word, no.

Oh, he pulled in more votes than McGinn, but not by much. Here’s what happened in the 43rd:

• Ed Murray ….. 10,959 (33.9%)
• Mike McGinn ….. 10,638 (32.9%)
• Peter Steinbrueck ….. 5,117 (15.8%)
• Bruce Harrell ….. 2,994 (9.3%)
• Charlie Staadecker ….. 1,173 (3.6%)
• Kate Martin ….. 448 (1.4%)
• Doug McQuaid ….. 342 (1.1%)
• Joey Gray ….. 304 (0.9%)
• Mary Martin ….. 280 (0.9%)
• Write-ins ….. 67 (0.2%)

Ed beat Mike in his home LD by a mere 321 votes, a tiny bit under 1% of the ballots. Mayor McGinn actually led the count in 118 of the 43rd’s 209 precincts, far ahead of Murray’s 83 precincts won. The two tied for the lead in another five precincts. The rest of the LD’s precincts were a Harrell/Murray tie (McGinn in third place) and a win apiece for Charlie Staadecker and Peter Steinbrueck (M and M were 2nd and 3rd in both).

From what I know of the distribution of precincts within the 43rd, it appears that McGinn was strong in Fremont and Phinney, perhaps Wallingford as well. But he also won precincts in Capitol Hill. However, my cursory examination of the 43rd doesn’t account for the magnitude of a candidate’s advantage in a particular precinct. In the precinct-level analysis, a one-vote advantage in a small precinct counts just as much as an overwhelming lead in a large one.

Along with mapping, I also plan to examine the pairwise comparison between McGinn and Murray, ignoring the other candidates. Concurrently, I might look at how the two did in precincts won by someone else — who did better in precincts where Harrell or Steinbrueck did best in the primary?

I’m not saying that these results show strongly positive indications for Mayor McGinn; it’s still Ed Murray’s election to lose. But what we see here indicates that the script of the one-on-one race for November may not match pre-primary (or even data-free post-primary) expectations.

Thom with the Good, the Bad, and the Very, Very Ugly.

Chris Hayes: FAUX News’ despicable manufacture of ‘white-victimhood’.

Millennials — The laziest generation?

This Week in The G.O.P. War on Voters™:

• O’Donnell: Colin Powell criticizes voter suppression tactics by G.O.P.
• Pap: Stand up for your right to vote…now.
• Al Sharpton: Powell spanks the G.O.P. over voting suppression.
• Maddow: North Carolina GOP’s massive voter suppression effort:
• Chris Hayes: DOJ sues Texas over voting suppression.

Michael Brooks: Scott Brown considers awesome Presidential run.

O’Donnell: Lewis Black hits back at Gov. Perry.

Maddow: Gov. McDonnell’s scandal deepens with stock revelations.

War Criminals:

• Sam Seder: Obama administration requests immunity from war crimes for George W. Bush and company.
• Young Turks: DOJ wants blanket immunity for war criminals.

ONN: The Presidential Democrakiosk Debate.

Thom takes a long, hard look at Carlos Danger.

Susie Sampson’s Tea Party Report: Week in Review.

The Oily Topic of Texan Canadian Cruz:

• Sam Seder: How Canadian is Sen. Cruz?
• Ted Cruz, “I am not a Canadian!”
• Ann Telnaes: Senator Ted Cruz will renounce his Canadian citizenship.
• Young Turks: FAUX News birfer hypocrisy.
• Maddow: The Ted Cruz lovefest in Texas.
• Maddow: North Carolina GOP-led board closes voting precinct, targets campus voting
• Sam Seder: Curz to renounce his Canadianness.
• Alex Wagner: Ted Cruz squirms over his birth certificate.
• Rep. Cruz takes it on the chin
• Al Sharpton: No Canada!.

Biden and Obama speak on college affordability.

Farron Cousins: The Republican circular firing squad.

Thom: The Good, The Bad, and The Very, Very Ugly.

The newest Obama:

NSA Bugs Some People:

• Ann Telnaes: NSA breaks privacy laws.
• Mark Fiore: Glenn Greenwald killed the Internet.
• Michael Brooks: UK Detains Glenn Greewald’s S.O.
• Ann Telnaes: The White House gets a new dog.

Obama mocks Congress with Schoolhouse Rock quip (via Crooks and Liars).

Red State Update: This Ain’t My First Racist Rodeo (Podcast episode 40).

Thom politically corrects FAUX News nutburger Steve Doocy.

Who had the worst week in Washington (D.C.).

White House: West Wing Week.

Rev. King’s March on Washington

• Sam Seder: 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington.
• 50 years after MLK.
• Hoodies up for the 50th anniversary march on Washington (via Crooks and Liars).

Mental Floss: Foods named after people.

Alex Wagner: Secretly, GOP hypocrites are taking advantage of “Obamacare”.

Young Turks: God smites Creation Museum worker.

Thom: ALEC is messing with Texas.

Obama’s Fault?!?

• Sam Seder: LA Republicans blame Katrina response on Obama!?!
• Sharpton: G.O.P. blames Obama for Katrina!
• Young Turks: Obama blamed for Katrina response?!?

Maddow: Virginia Republican Bob Goodlatte road-blocks path to immigration reform.

Texas Lt. Gov. to cop: Do you know who I am?.

Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

The man who massacred Afghan civilians was sentenced today at JBLM.

A military jury on Friday sentenced a U.S. soldier who massacred 16 Afghan civilians last year to life in prison without a chance of parole.

The decision came in the case of Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, 40, who pleaded guilty in June in a deal to avoid the death penalty.

Bales did not recount specifics of the horrors in court when he testified Thursday or offer an explanation for the violence, but he described the killings as an “act of cowardice, behind a mask of fear, bulls— and bravado.”

I believe in the parole system, even for awful cases. And Robert Bales is certainly an awful case. So I would have liked the possibility of parole to come up at some distant point in the future. But I certainly can’t begrudge the toughest sentence available given the circumstances.

These sort of posts almost inevitably get misconstrued as me wanting The Seattle Times to go away. I don’t. More voices are better. More journalism is better. But I think that given The Seattle Times’ turning away from the web, their continuous pissing away their credibility, and the general state of newspapers, it’s not very out there to assume that their day will come. So this post is looking at some of the things that might happen if they went away.

The first, and I think scariest option, is nothing. It’s possible that given the state of the newspaper industry that nobody would want to put out a daily in Seattle. The money making pieces of the newspaper have already been made less so with craigslist and with sports blogs. So perhaps we would just lose the reporting that we get now.

But I think it’s more likely that something would replace them. There is already a lot of solid local reporting on the ground in Seattle. From West Seattle Blog to Capitol Hill Seattle to the blogs of the weekly papers, you can get decent, current, reporting today outside of a daily. It’s no substitute, but I suspect those things would step up, and other online voices would fill any gap left behind.

However, I’m also not convinced that in the absence of The Seattle Times would mean the end of a daily in Seattle. I think it makes a certain amount of sense that one of our local millionaires or billionaires would take it on as an act of good will. They could either buy The Seattle Times outright or they could start their own paper if it went under. This paper might manage to be even more pro-corporate friendly than The Seattle Times currently, if that’s possible.

Another couple of possibilities I’ve been thinking about are a bit more out there. I could envision either The Stranger expanding to a daily if there was no daily or the newspaper guild starting a paper like they did during the strike. I don’t know if there would be any will to make these things happen, but I don’t think they’re outside the realm of the possible.

I hope that we have The Seattle Times for a good long while, and I’m rooting for it to get better as a paper. But it seems reasonable to think about what happens if they go under.

Over the weekend I’m going to send out questions to the City Council candidates who will be on the ballot in November. I could do similar questions to the Mayor’s race, at least 1-4. 5 was less policy and more executive specific. So I could add another policy question or if you think there’s something Council specific that ought to be addressed, that would be fine too.

I should also note that I don’t actually expect anyone to answer them. I’ve made joke endorsements when only one candidate from a crowded field responded (although I have always voted for them if I made the endorsement), but honestly, I know HA, especially post Goldy is low on the list of places to respond to. Two years ago it felt like only one of the races got any serious coverage. Maybe that’s the nature of things when it’s all insider incumbents. Or maybe it was the perceived nature of the candidates. But I didn’t like the powers that be deciding that the challengers don’t really count. This year I think some of the challengers have got better press, so it’s maybe not as important. But I’d like to let people answer the questions in a way that isn’t gotcha or soundbite journalism if they want to.

All this to say, if you have an issue you’d like to see covered that isn’t addressed in the linked questions, let me know. And if you’d like questions asked in any other race, by all means suggest away.

Whenever I have long hair (such as now) I take it off the brush and put it out for the birds. This is something my mother told me to do and I think her mother told her to do before that. Apparently, I’m helping mangle pigeon feet.

“There are a few diseases that damage urban pigeons’ feet… Pox is one, but pox certainly never destroys the whole foot,” Roberts says. “I would say that 99.9 percent of the pigeons with damaged feet I have seen owe the damage to the carelessness of human beings in disposing of their rubbish. It isn’t just guesswork—the cotton, hair, fishing line is still evident after toes and even feet have been lost, embedded deeply into the skin.”

Human hair, I ask? “Human hair is awful. If it tightens around a bird’s foot, it digs in deeply and it doesn’t snap. It is extremely difficult for even a rescuer to get an implement like a seam cutter under embedded hair to remove it, and soaking it doesn’t soften it.”

But how in the world does human hair end up on a pigeon’s foot, I ask? “People are actually advised to leave their hair clippings out for birds to use in nest building. Women with long hair will remove the hair from their hairbrushes and drop it out of the window for the birds (I have seen them do this), thinking it will help the birds. But the damage it does, particularly to pigeons who will turn in circles and therefore get the long hair tangled round both feet, then tightened, is just terrible.”

Although Mudede doesn’t believe it’s the cause — or much of the cause anyway– I’m willing to go with his expert. I will stop depositing my hair on the ledge of my apartment from here on out. I was always worried that they got caught up in a storm drain anyway.

Or maybe it’s time for a haircut what with it being 80 something degrees.

– I’m not sure RT was lying about America, but it is important to get the truth of Russia’s anti-gay horror show out there on a Russian station.

– This has nothing to do with keeping the babies safe and everything to do with a government that has decided that the 4th Amendment is getting in its way and that an expectation of privacy is an anachronism that only a bunch of irrelevant cranks or criminals care about. I don’t see how you can interpret their actions any other way.

– A dual endorsement in the general election is strange, but OK, King County Labor Council.

– I’m fine with the GOP not having Presidential debates on CNN and NBC if they want. But the fact that there’s going to be a documentary on one of the most important people of the late 20th century doesn’t strike me as a good excuse.

– The Snoqualmie Valley Trail bridge looks pretty neat.

– But if you want proof of how silly the whole thing is, it would be hard to do better than simply glancing at the homepage of the Seattle Times online this morning. Even as the world’s leading climate scientists warn of the sea level rising by three feet by 2100, the Times is twisting a debate about the wisdom of coal exports into an election year kerfuffle.

– Macklemore talking about how he gets more leeway because he’s white.

– Is it strange that all I want to do now is move to Asshole Jupiter?

I didn’t set out today to just say nice things about random statewide elected Democrats. I mean I have problems with all of them. But kudos to Attorney General Ferguson for this opinion.

Any public health district in Washington that provides maternity care must continue to offer “substantially equivalent benefits” in the form of contraception and abortion services, even if it contracts with a religious-affiliated medical organization, state Attorney General Bob Ferguson said in an opinion Wednesday.

“I fully expect all public hospital districts to comply with this opinion,” Ferguson told a Seattle news conference.

The opinion impacts a growing trend in Washington, in which small local hospitals have chosen to affiliate with larger health organizations, including Catholic-affiliated PeaceHealth and Providence Health and Services.

Good work. It’s no substitute for the Reproductive Parity Act, but it’s a good opinion and hopefully it will spur action in the next legislative session (I can hope).

I’m glad that Mike Kreidler is the Insurance Commissioner.

Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler is fining four insurance companies for overcharging consumers in Washington state.

Kreidler’s office said Tuesday that Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co., Hartford Casualty Insurance Co., Hartford Insurance Co. of the Midwest, and Trumbull Insurance Co. have agreed to each pay a total fine of $100,000 split up among the companies.

I’m not sure that would have happened if there were a Republican in that role. Maybe everything would be the same, but I suspect their corporate friendly agenda would have led them to do the minimum if they even bothered with the case at all. It’s important to have strong rules, but it’s also important to have people who will enforce them.

It’s another stunningly beautiful summer day in Seattle. So join us this evening for some celebration and politics at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally.

We meet tonight and every Tuesday evening at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Starting time is 8:00pm, although some people show up earlier than that for Dinner.

Can’t make it to Seattle tonight? Check out one of the other DL meetings this week. Tonight the Tri-Cities and Shelton chapters also meet. The Enumclaw and South Seattle chapters meet this Wednesday. And the Woodinville chapter meets on Thursday.

With 208 chapters of Living Liberally, including eighteen in Washington state, four in Oregon, and three more in Idaho, chances are excellent there’s a chapter meeting near you.

– I don’t know enough about the Frequent Network Plan but it’s worth a look.

– 82% of Americans are correct.

– Goldy is more thrilled than me with the prospect of a State GOP Chair Pam Roach. I think she would be as problematic as before, but with a larger platform.

– Just as was the case before Roe, women’s abortion access in many states across the country is largely becoming dependent on two arbitrary things: where she lives, and how much economic privilege she has.

– Cascade Bikes is asking you to write a letter to SDOT to help complete the Missing Link.

– I think we are on solid biblical footing, in other words, to say that the current effort among House Republicans to gut SNAP is an example of the sin of Onanism. The anti-welfare rhetoric and ideology of the tea party — with its denunciations of “takers” and “moochers,” and the rallying cry of its founding in rejection of mortgage assistance for soon-to-be-homeless families — is a virulent, vicious strain of Onanism

– Anyone going to see Romeo & Juliet at the Sculpture Park? Also, in case you ever have to promote it, it is not “the greatest love story ever told.”

In the current issue of The Seattle Weekly, Ellis E. Conklin has a piece on the Seattle Times-Mike McGinn perpetual dispute. It begins thus:

On February 24, 2011, Seattle Times reporter Lynn Thompson penned a comically snarkish account of how (“Seattle’s most famous bike rider”) Mayor Mike McGinn’s dark-green GT Slipstream was stolen out of the City Hall parking garage. The bike, which McGinn accidentally left unlocked, actually belonged to his wife, prompting the mayor to tweet: “Peg is pissed.”

The story, complete with the requisite “Mayor McSchwinn,” included anonymous e-mails from readers. One sarcastic missive, in particular, drove McGinn through the roof. After suggesting the theft was a publicity stunt by a pol seeking sympathy, the commenter meanly observed, “He has the body of Homer Simpson and apparently doesn’t own a bike himself.”

The city’s since slimmed down chief executive is reportedly still seething about the Homer Simpson crack.

Says McGinn, “We let them know that was inappropriate.”

Not long after the article appeared, an angry Peg Lynch called The Times and canceled the McGinn family’s subscription.

When the Stranger’s Eli Sanders brought the news of Mrs. McGinn’s pique to light more than a year later, Times executive editor David Boardman tweeted, “What kind of mayor cancels his subscription to his city’s daily newspaper? Our mayor. Thin skin, @mayormcginn?

Sooooooooooooooooo: The Seattle Times realizes that Mike McGinn has been the victim of a crime. Rather than just report that, they go for making up nonsense with about as much evidence as a birther. In the process they call him fat using a cultural reference that’s two decades past its prime.

In response to that, McGinn’s wife cancels their home copy of the paper. Their ostensibly straight newsman sees that and tweets that the problem is Mike McGinn. Holy shit. I’m being serious when I wonder: (a) How the fuck did that get into the paper in the first place? (b) How in God’s name wasn’t Lynn Thompson publicly disciplined? (c) How is it that David Bordman thought that was a thing to rally behind? If The Seattle Times were a real newspaper, they would hire him back just so they could fire him for this, that’s how pathetic it makes their paper look to rally around making fat jokes about an elected official they don’t like.

To be clear, I want a Seattle Times to be tough on elected officials. But if they can’t tell the difference between journalism and bullying, they should pack it up because they don’t do the city a service.