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Archives for June 2015

Drinking Liberally — Seattle

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DLBottleThere are just under 500 days to the next presidential election, but plenty of of local regional and state-wide issues to discuss now. So please join us for an evening of conversation over a beer at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking liberally.

We meet tonight and every Tuesday at the Roanoke Park Place Tavern, 2409 10th Ave E, Seattle. You’ll find us in the small room at the back of the tavern. Our starting time is 8:00 pm, but some folks stop by earlier for dinner.




Can’t make it to Seattle tonight? Check out one of the other DL meetings this week. Tonight the Tri-Cities chapter also meets. The Lakewood chapter meets on Wednesday. On Thursday, the Tacoma chapter meets. And next Monday, the Yakima and South Bellevue chapters meet.

There are 191 chapters of Living Liberally, including eighteen in Washington state, four in Oregon and two in Idaho. Chances are excellent there’s a chapter meeting near you.

Threadin’ Ope

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– Well looks like we’ll probably have a transit package with full funding for ST but a stupid carbon thing

– Fox News just fired one of its hosts in the most vicious & humiliating way imaginable

– I wonder if Metro could steal the color scheme idea from SWIFT. If the actual buses are different colors (I couldn’t tell from the post, but I’d bet not), it might be a problem on the C and D lines, but otherwise, it’s doable. Also, holy cow, SWIFT 2 looks like it’ll be pretty great.

– Westlake Park, in a lot of ways, is ground zero for DSA and the the city’s fraught relationship with public demonstrations. Remember when people ~*~so angry~*~ about the death of an unarmed Black teenager got just too damn close to singing children at the tree lighting ceremony? A Speakers Corner would corral that pesky anger into somewhere more comfortable, giving shoppers the chance to not see that anger if it’s making them not feel like spending all their money at the mall that day! What a win for our city’s business interests!

– JEB!

Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza!

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Mental Floss: What did the original colonists sound like?

Maddow: RNC distributes confusing fake primary ballot:

The Ever Expanding 2016 Clown Parade:

Jon Stewart is soooooo SICK.

Forgotten Assholes of History: The Christian Killing Emperor.

Burning Flag:

Kimmel: This week in unnecessary censorship.

Farron Cousins: CIA engaged in human medical experimentation.

A SCOTUS Rainbow:

A new kind of climate movement.

Obama honors the life of Reverend Clementa Pinckney.

Mental Floss: 27 weird world records.

Oops…I Did it Again:

Congressional hits and misses of the week.

Sam Seder: SCOTUS upholds the real meaning of the Fair Housing Act.

Thom: The Good, the Bad, and the Very Very Immundly Ugly!

SCOTUSCare?!?

White House: West Wing Week.

David Pakman: How FAUX News uses black people to say racist things.

Minute Physics: How to detect a secret nuclear test.

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

Civil Liberties Roundup

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Didn’t have time for longer commentary this week, just a note about the scope of these roundups. When I initially started this, I didn’t intend to follow incidents involving government interventions over parenting. This tends to be a difficult area with respect to things like vaccines and extreme religious beliefs. In some of those cases, I fully support government intervention if there’s a clear public health justification. And in some cases, I can be convinced that a person’s religious beliefs cross the line into the abuse of a child.

But the recent incidents involving arrests over merely allowing young kids to play or walk alone go way beyond the line of what should be acceptable for the state. I plan to track incidents like these as well, as I think they warrant importance and belong in the same category as the other things I write about and link to here.

News from the past two weeks:
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Op’n Thr’d 6/26

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– Congrats to all future married gay couples! (video loaded automatically for me)

– Even though I mostly agree with this fact-check about the rainbow flag crosswalks, how about just a little joy and whimsey is good enough?

– Even though it’s obviously based on bullshit, I suppose I support the GOP call for Roberts’ ouster, as long as Obama is still president.

– I’m looking forward to the First Hill Streetcar whenever it eventually gets going.

– Bristol Palin’s politics are awful, but her pregnancy really isn’t my business.

Give ‘Em Hell Angie

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Anyone active blogging locally here in Washington is probably familiar with Angie in WA State. She was an early commenter on my first blog (blogspot seems to have taken down the comments from that era, but if memory serves, she was the first person who I didn’t know personally to comment there). She is most active as a diarist and commenter on Daily Kos, but she is all over. In recent years, her Twitter has been an inspiration to read.

Anyway, this is preamble to say that she’s running for Congress in the 3rd, against Herrera Beutler. She’d make a hell of a great Congresswoman, and I bet she’d make a hell of a great candidate too.

I hope you’ll consider a donation, or volunteering to walk a precinct. I don’t know if the Democrats are actively running anyone down there, but I can’t imagine there’s anyone I’d prefer to see in Congress from the area. She’s going to try to run a grass roots campaign more than a money-focused one, but all campaigns need money.

Good luck!

Open Thread the 24th of June

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– The embarrassment is not limited to the flag, itself. The fact that it still flies, that one must debate its meaning in 2015, reflects an incredible ignorance. A century and a half after Lincoln was killed, after 750,000 of our ancestors died, Americans still aren’t quite sure why.

– Good for gender neutral city bathrooms in Seattle.

– So wait, there’s a cost to inaction on climate change?

– Five Thousand Ladybugs of Highly Effective People

Drinking Liberally — Seattle

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DLBottle

Please join us tonight for a summer solstice edition of the Seattle Chapter of Drinking liberally. Stop by for an evening of informal conversation over an ice cold beer.

We meet tonight and every Tuesday at the Roanoke Park Place Tavern, 2409 10th Ave E, Seattle. You’ll find us in the small room at the back of the tavern. Our starting time is 8:00 pm, but some folks stop by earlier for dinner.




Can’t make it to Seattle tonight? Check out one of the other DL meetings happening this week. Tonight the Tri-Cities chapter also meets. On Wednesday, the Bellingham and Burien chapters meet. And the Spokane, Woodinville and Kent chapters meet on Thursday.

There are 190 chapters of Living Liberally, including eighteen in Washington state, four in Oregon and two in Idaho. Chances are excellent there’s a chapter meeting near you.

Open Thread June 22

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– It’s also crucial that white allies reject the lie that there is an epidemic of black men raping white women, which has motivated so much white violence toward black bodies historically. The systematic lynching of black men in the South was routinely built on the idea that there was an epidemic of black men raping white women in the South, and so many years later, reports of the shooter’s own words indicate that the protection of white women was a direct motive for killing so many innocent people, including six women.

– Nothing can ever be politicized.

– What does that fundamentalist word-salad actually mean? It means this cartoon. It means this hideous envisioning of precisely the diseased ideology that terrorist Dylann Roof described as he murdered nine faithful Christians at their Wednesday night Bible study.

– Anyone else find #CharlestonSyllabus helpful?

– You guys, crows are awesome, but also crows are the worst

– 18 Missing Link victims will go to the hospital by the time the trail study is complete

Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza!

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Thom: Texas rejects a woman’s right to choose.

“Holy Encyclical, Batman!”

David Pakman: Paul Ryan falls apart (again) on FAUX News…has no plan to replace ObamaCare.

Congressional Hits and Misses of the week.

WTF? Another Right-Wing Extremist Mass Shooting?!?

Mental Floss: 14 facts about parasites.

Rep. Derek Kilmer (D-WA) gets a jump on Father’s Day

Young Turks: What woman should appear on the $10?.

Pap and Sam Seder: GOP trash economics sends Kansas back to the dust bowl.

VSauce: Dinosaurs.

Mental Floss: Misconceptions about famous stories.

The 2016 Clown Parade—“Even More Clowns” Edition:

Mental Floss: Why do we blush when embarassed.

Farron Cousins: The death of another Republican talking point.

Kimmel: This week in unnecessary censorship.

Thom: How big money is undermining voter rights.

Racial Identity Politics:

White House: West Wing Week.

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

Just No

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They’ve taken the tweet down and changed the headline, but for most of yesterday, The Seattle Times had headlined their story copy of an AP soty and tweeted “Concentrated evil” or “sweet kid”: Details on the suspect in Charleston church shootings. Ansel at Slog gives some context to the harm done by various attempts by the media to humanize these killers. And that’s an important thing to say.

That context is important, but this case it’s ugly enough on its own. We’re talking about a racist crime. We’re talking about terrorizing a community. We’re talking about a man who committed the grossest of acts. And it doesn’t matter if you can find some friend’s parent who vouched for him at some point “sweet kid” is disgusting.

Look, I’m all for finding out all about how the people who knew him felt about him before. If it’s in the wire story, I guess run it. But The Seattle Times chose to highlight that. And it’s a fucking disgrace.

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