– Fort Hood can’t catch a break. Video loads automatically.
– City Hall Starts to Give a Shit About Women’s Pay Equity Again
– I love that Sound Transit has pictures for specific stations, but some of them don’t make a lot of sense (to me). Answer some questions to help them design the pictures for new light rail stations. [h/t]
– Supply and demand is a thing in housing.
One of the questions with the Oso disaster that people are asking now is why did we let it happen? We knew that the hill was in danger, and yet people were allowed to live below it. Emmitt tries to tackle that with a bit of a historical perspective. And as is often times the case when he does a historical overview, the early settlers to the area from New England and from the Appalachian region play a large part.
But, the ability to do anything about it stopped where it became obvious that no one wanted to listen to them. The deep sense of individualism that came west with the Appalachians in Cascadia still rules the point of view, especially along the Stillaguamish River.
Sadly, one of the former political leaders on the Appalachian end of the spectrum likely died in the Oso mudslide.
Sure, it is possible to offer enough money to make anyone want to move. But, it isn’t like Snohomish County had magic public funds growing fairy dust. And, when it came to spending that limited public money on someone that really didn’t want to move in the first place. Well, you see where the attention of Snohomish civic leaders can be distracted.
Its easy to point to the available evidence and blame well intentioned people for not doing more. But, it is worth looking back at our origins here and seeing that it isn’t simple.
I don’t know how much we can to do to prevent these sorts of things as long as we’ve decided that the government is going to enforce property rights (something I’m generally for), and it has limited funds. Maybe there isn’t a way. I mean if the state took money out of education, or whatever, to pay to move some people who chose to live in dangerous places (and there must be thousands of dangerous places across the state), or if the county took money away from fire or police protection, people would rightly scream bloody murder.
None of this is to take anything away from the rescue efforts or to say that this was what they had coming, of course. As a liberal, I think we’re all in this together; as a human, I have nothing but sympathy. And as someone who lives in the city of Seattle where the next big one is overdue, I know it’s only a matter of time before I or my neighbors need the same sort of help. And nowhere is perfectly safe. Still, the tough decisions about how we minimize the damage from future events haven’t suddenly become as clear as we might like.
Refrigerator-sized utility cabinets like these may be coming to a planting strip near you if CenturyLink has its way.
As I wrote about a few months back on Slog, CenturyLink has long argued that its efforts to upgrade broadband speeds throughout the city have been hampered by regulations requiring neighboring homeowners to give their approval before installing refrigerator-sized utility boxes on city-owned sidewalks, planting strips, and alleys. These utility boxes—like the ones pictured above, just a couple blocks from my house—are unquestionably both an eyesore and a graffiti target. But CenturyLink says that 21,000 households would have access to faster broadband speeds today, had they the freedom to to liberally plop these down throughout the city.
And that’s a freedom that Mayor Ed Murray now says he’s ready to bestow. Um… hooray?
Look at the utility cabinets above. Now picture them installed on the planting strip in front of your house. Now honestly ask yourself whether you and your neighbors should have zero say in how and where they are installed?
Some residents of Beacon Hill and other underserved neighborhoods had been asking for a pilot program that would have suspended these regulations in certain neighborhoods, just to see how things worked. But the mayor’s proposal would apparently eliminate these regulations altogether. And CenturyLink says it will take that as an opportunity install 349 cabinets in the first year alone.
That could provide welcome broadband upgrades to thousands of Seattleites. Which is good. But it would also create hundreds of new eyesores. (Of course, CenturyLink could alternatively install these cabinets underground or on utility poles, or pay homeowners to install them on private property, but that would cost more money, so no go.)
Personally, I support the notion of a pilot program. But completely eliminating the current restrictions without getting any binding promises back from CenturyLink just strikes me as regulatory giveaway and recipe for some very disgruntled homeowners.
Great news for billionaires, as the US Supreme Court further unravelled campaign finance and disclosure regulations by striking down the overall limit that individuals may donate to candidates and political parties.
Under one of the last remaining useful provisions of the McCain-Feingold (a provision that dates back to the post-Watergate election reforms), individual donors had been limited to $48,600 in overall contributions every two years to all federal candidates, and $74,600 to political parties. (The $2,600 cap per candidate remains in place.) Now, really, really rich people like the Koch brothers can dump even more money into politics, assuring that their voice can finally be heard.
The conservative majority on this court won’t do squat to stop the GOP’s campaign of voter disenfranchisement, but they are absolutely outraged at the notion that wealthy people shouldn’t be allowed to spend as much money as they want influencing the few proles who are actually allowed to vote.
Hooray for democracy!
– Your April Fools joke isn’t as funny as you think it is.
– Fox News is awesome at graph making.
– And it’s not like we won’t know that people signed up.
– It’s sort of precious, isn’t it? Kind of like a 5th grade essay about a little girl’s puppy.
– Anyone doing 30 days of biking?
I was thinking of doing an April Fools post in which I announced that I had been hired by the Seattle Times as a political blogger and columnist. But every time I sat down to write it, it never came out funny.
The fact is, and as immodest as it may sound, there is no media outlet in Seattle that could profit more from my services than the Seattle Times. I would deliver the kind of edgy, funny, and provocative commentary younger audiences demand, while helping to combat the common perception of the Seattle Times as a paper hostile to our city’s urbanist and progressive values. I’d create a little havoc, sure—I mean, what kind of paper hires a columnist who is guaranteed to debunk their own editorials?—but those sort of intramurals make for a helluva good read. And given my tireless blogging and my decade of cultivating political sources, my blog would quickly become the most politically relevant feature in the paper since “Postman on Politics.”
And relevance is something the Seattle Times could use more of.
True story. The very last event I covered as an employee at The Stranger was a minimum wage forum held down the street at Seattle Central Community College. At one point, King County Council Member Larry Gossett quotes something from a Danny Westneat column, only to be met with blank stares from the couple hundred community college students in the room. “Danny Westneat… the Seattle Times?” Gossett prompts the crowd, raising his hand by example. “How many of you read Danny Westneat?”
Nobody raises their hand.
KC council member Larry Gossett at SCCC min wage forum: “How many of you read Danny Westneat?” Nobody raises their hands.
— David Goldstein (@GoldyHA) March 4, 2014
About ten minutes earlier, Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant had cited something in The Stranger, and mentioned that “Goldy” was in the room. A lot of heads turned around looking to see which person was Goldy.
This isn’t meant as a knock against Danny. I like Danny. He’s a smart, coherent, and thoughtful writer (if a bit too conventional for my tastes). And had that forum been held in front of the Municipal League instead of a bunch of grungy kids, nearly every hand in the room would have been raised at the mention of Danny’s name. But most of them would’ve been familiar with my work too, if less sympathetic. Love me or hate me, that’s the sort of broad relevance I could bring to Seattle’s last remaining daily.
Look, I know I haven’t always been kind to publisher Frank Blethen. But this is business. And I’m convinced that bringing somebody like me on board as a brash counterweight to his paper’s staid status quoist zeitgeist would be good for business. Then again, if the Blethen family was motivated purely by business interests, they probably would’ve unloaded the paper more than a decade ago.
So here I am howling into the wind on my lonely blog, as Blethen watches his aging readership gradually die off. Not sure which one of us is the bigger April fool.
Don’t be a fool…join us tonight for an evening of political punditry over a pint at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally.
We meet every Tuesday at the Roanoke Park Place Tavern, 2409 10th Ave E, Seattle. The starting time is 8:00 pm, but some folks may show up even earlier for dinner.
Can’t make it to Seattle? Check out another Washington state DL over the next week. They’re everywhere! The Tri-Cities chapter also meets this and every Tuesday night. The Lakewood chapter meets this Wednesday. For Thursday, the Spokane and Tacoma chapters meet. On Friday, the Enumclaw chapter meets. And next Monday, the Yakima, South Bellevue and Olympia chapters meet.
With 215 chapters of Living Liberally, including nineteen in Washington state, four in Oregon, and three more in Idaho, chances are excellent there’s a chapter meeting somewhere near you.
Eager to share our brilliant political commentary and blunt media criticism, but too genteel to link to horsesass.org? Well, good news, ladies: we also answer to HASeattle.com, because, you know, whatever. You're welcome!