Archives for September 2013

ONN: The Week in Review.

Mark Fiore: Obama’s reassignment surgery.

Maddow: Now N.C. G.O.P. giving high school students the finger: .

Weiner Outburst:

• Jon: Weiner shouldn’t have run.
• Matt Binder: There’s more to the Weiner video than meets the eye.

Alex Wagner: The Cheney family feud plays out on the national stage.

Ed: The moral obligation of Obamacare amidst GOP/Tea-Party heartlessness and racism.

Young Turks: Study shows that politics wrecks your brain.

Pap: Conservatives threaten our future.

Maddow: “Fiscal conservative” Gov. Bob McDonnell’s LOOT!

Pickin’ on John Kerry:

• Jonathan Mann: John Kerry Sorta Looks Like Odo.
• Young Turks: Is John Kerry a lizard person?

Mental Floss: 107 regional words.

Sharpton: Tea bagger racists outraged by a black man’s foot on oval office desk!!!

White House: West Wing Week.

Thom: Should Hurricane James Inhofe hit the East Coast?.

Pickin’ on McCain:

• Jon: John McCain’s gambling.
• Sam Seder: Disgraceful McCain gambles.
• Happy Birthday, Sen. McCain.
• Maddow: How many wars would we be in under Pres. McCain?
• McCain bitchslapped by constituents.

Matt Binder: What Republicans hear when Obama talks.

Bigger Pizzas: A Capitalist case for health care reform:

Seattle cop accidentally shoots unarmed woman in the leg.

Sharpton: Shameful Republicans push the poor to hunger.

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

Syria’s Consideration:

• Ann Telnaes: Familiar Drumbeat.
• Maddow: Bipartisanship all around!
• Sam Seder: Getting real on the U.S. Intelligence on Syria.
• Maddow: Hans Blix on Syria
• Jon hits Obama on “red line.”
• Tweety interviews Rep. McDermott on Syria.
• Young Turks: Rand Paul v. John Kerry.
• Matt Binder: Rep. “You Lie!” claims Obama using Syria as Benghazi, IRS coverup! BENGHAAAZZZZZIIIIIIII!
• Ed: Rep. Joe Wilson’s Imaginary War
• Stephen: Obama could learn from Bush how to sell Syrian war.
• Maddow: The “Bush Boys” pipe up on Syria:
• O’Donnell: War criminal Rummy opens his mouth on Syria.

Thom: Why prisoners should be allowed to vote.

Ann Telnaes: The “Job Creators” get a raise.

Michael Brooks: TSA will sell your freedoms back to you…for $85.

Sharpton: The GOP’s “family values” hypocrisy.

Pickin’ on FAUX News’ Eric Bolling:

• Stephen on FAUX News host Eric Bolling.
• Young Turks: Bolling makes a clown out of himself.

Clinton on Obamacare.

Pap: Fracking away our water.

Red State Update: Week in Review, Podcast #42.

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

I don’t put much stock into endorsements in general. God knows people I like have endorsed people I don’t, and people I can’t stand have endorsed people I really like. There are also considerations beyond policy that influence endorsements. So as I say, politicians endorsing one another don’t sway me, and I don’t think they sway very many people.

But when there are endorsements of that kind, I think it can be interesting to see how it plays into the narratives around a campaign. So as Ed Murray nears a quorum of the Seattle City Council endorsing him, I thought it might be worth considering one of the main narratives of the race: namely that Mike McGinn doesn’t play well with others.

Maybe he does, and maybe he doesn’t. But the City Council went out of their way a couple times to poison the well early on. Of course the City Council voting on the Viaduct replacement tunnel less than a month before the election was an attempt to support McGinn’s opponent, and to take things out of the hands of the voters. If they cared about making irenic gestures or whatever, they could have waited until the election was over. They were on track to have an 8-1 majority of pro-tunnel council members, so there was no need to hold the election then. They also repealed the head tax after McGinn won but before he was sworn in. That vote was 8-1, and it might have been 7-2 after O’Brien was sworn in. Again, they could have waited and negotiated with him if they cared about working with him, but with a veto proof majority as a backstop. Maybe a solution would have worked out and maybe it wouldn’t. But they didn’t even try.

Also, not on policy, but I went to several McGinn events after the election but before the transfer of power.* None of the City Council members who complain about how he doesn’t work with them made even a token appearance. If they’d have wanted to work with him in any meaningful way and not just butted heads, just showing up would have gone a long way.

None of this is to say McGinn is easy to work with or that Murray wouldn’t be better at that skill set. But if it was really the problem for Ed Murray that he claims, well, he would probably blame both sides. And, yes, I know that’s not how campaigns work: you go after your opponents, not the people who endorsed you. I just wish someone whose emails his campaign returns would ask him about it the next time he complains about McGinn not working well with others.

[Read more…]

The Puyallup Fair starts today (TNT link). The organizers are insisting on calling it the Washington State Fair in Puyallup, but that’s just being dumb. I mean they have their reasons and bless them for that. But honestly, how many humans had to agree to that change? I bet it was more than one human.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for upending tradition when it’s needed. If calling it The Puyallup Fair was racist or sexist, for example, I’d say tradition be damned, find a new name. But there’s no need to change it, and it was lovely that we called that instead of the State Fair. Every state has a state fair, but only we had The Puyallup Fair. So I’m going to keep calling it that.

Given how curmudgeonly I feel about this in my 30’s, I’m already sorry for people who know me in the future. I also call it the Bus Tunnel even though I probably use it for rail more than buses now, and I call the stadium where the Seahawks play Seahawks Stadium.

Seattle Bike Blog is reporting that Seattle will spend its school zone speeding camera money on school safety improvements.

The city installed a couple cameras last year, and the revenue generated far exceeded expectations (bad and good news). But there are also signs that the cameras themselves are changing behavior. Citations have fallen 16 percent since cameras were installed, and nearly every person who has received one ticket has not received a second.

So generating the money makes streets safer, and investing the money makes streets safer. Perfect.

The end game for the cameras would be zero speeding in school zones. People in Seattle will know that school zone speeding is taken extremely seriously. Of course, this would theoretically dry up the millions the cameras generate for school safety, but that would be a beautiful problem to have.

As long as the money comes from and goes to reducing those violations, it seems like a pretty good thing. I wouldn’t want the city to become dependent on that money for social services or whatever, vital as that is.

– Scientists warn that climate change is causing oceans to warm and expand, triggering sea level rise. New models estimate seas could climb from 18 inches to well over 50 inches by the turn of the century, a level that would inundate downtown Olympia. (h/t)

– Since this is a Northwest blog, I don’t know how much in the open threads to mention other states. But ugh Texas, and ugh Texas.

– The GOP plan on health care seems to be to make as many people suffer as possible in the hope that people blame Obama for their suffering.

– Back to school, everybody.

– Are 21 stores going to be enough for your marijuana needs, Seattle?

– The Seattle City Council unanimously approved a couple bills to help make bike share a reality in the city.

– I just know we’ll get it right this time.

Lee and Darryl posted on the Federal government’s backing off of our and Colorado’s marijuana laws. It means that at least for a while things can proceed. So it got me thinking, now that the lowest of the low hanging fruit has been plucked, what’s the next step for Washington voters/activists to push for in ending the drug war? If I do the rest of this as a series of questions, it hopefully encourages discussion, and means I don’t have to do any actual research.

In an open thread the other day, I noted the proposal to make it not a felony to have larger quantities of drugs provided there wasn’t an intent to distribute. Is that a good next step? Are there questions about the ways to make sure that the marijuana legalization is implemented in a proper manner that we can best serve as a model for the rest of the country? Is there money in the budget for rehab and other programs that would be better than prison?

Anyway, have at it, in the comments.

Goldy reports on a press conference on the possibility of getting a transit package in a special session.

Both Inslee and Constantine spoke about the importance of including additional tax authority for King County in the package to stave off a projected 17 percent cut in Metro bus service. But it’s not clear that even a November special session can come soon enough to prevent some cutbacks. The transportation package that passed the House—the one Inslee said he was ready to press the “go” button on if the Senate passed it—would give King County the authority to raise up to a 1.5 percent Motor Vehicle Excise Tax (MVET), but only on approval of voters. A special election would take months to mount, and implementation would take months more. But Metro will run through its reservers by the end of June, 2014.

I hope we can get a transit package that gives King County a chance to tax ourselves as we want. I’m not thrilled with tying that to spending money on roads, but fine, whatever. And I hope it actually saves Metro from serious cuts. But if Metro is cut, I hope it’s disproportionately from Rodney Tom’s district. I want people to be in this together, but Rodney Tom has personally made the Senate an unworkable pile of bullshit. So yeah, the cuts should hurt his district more than the rest of us. As long as he has no incentive to be decent, he won’t be.

Please join us for a late summer evening of political conversation over a pint 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. Some people show up earlier than that for Dinner.

Can’t make it to Seattle tonight? Check out another DL meeting over the next week. The Tri-Cities chapter also meets tonight. And for Thursday, the Spokane, Lakewood, and Tacoma chapters meet. On Friday, the Enumclaw chapter meets.

With 207 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 hope you had a lovely Labor Day weekend. As a downtown resident, I spent most of the weekend avoiding the Bumbershoot and PAX crowds.

– I’m glad Obama is asking Congress for permission on Syria, but other than that, it seems problematic.

– Sometimes our trolls will link to some story ostensibly about a White Trayvon Martin. Oliver Willis provides a handy flow chart for them to see if it holds up.

– Dear WSU fans, you have a problem (h/t to Nick on Facebook).

– Still glad that Mike Kreidler is insurance commissioner.

– Under this new proposal, the possession of any drug, when not intended for distribution, would be reduced from a felony charge, to a misdemeanor, reducing the maximum sentence from 5 years, to 90 days. This would explicitly apply to cannabis, given that – despite the possession of 28 grams or less not being a crime (thanks to Initiative 502) – the possession of over 40 grams is an automatic felony, which is something that not many in Washington State understand.

– That Lt. Governor of Texas seems super nice.

Yes, HA was down most of yesterday, and no, I don’t know exactly what the problem was or why it took so long to fix. Something to do with a problem with our hosting company’s “main upstream internet provider” or something. In any case, you shouldn’t have spent such a lovely day indoors commenting on some local political blog anyway, so consider it a gift.

Last week’s contest was still unsolved as of Thursday night. It was the store in Zurich where Oprah Winfrey was told she couldn’t afford a handbag that costs more than my car.

This week’s is a random location somewhere on earth, good luck!

1 Samuel 5:6
But the hand of the LORD was heavy upon those of Ashdod, and He destroyed them and smote them with hemorrhoids.

Discuss.