Joel Connelly has the details on the public comment period for the coal train hearing next Thursday.

Previous “scoping sessions” in Whatcom, Skagit and Spokane Counties — held by the Washington Dept. of Ecology, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and Whatcom County — have drawn overflow crowds.

Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn, and other Northwest Washington mayors, have warned about the disruption of having a succession of mile-long coal trains, bound for Cherry Point, move along the waterfronts of their cities each day. McGinn worries that after waiting for one long train to go by, waterfront traffic lineups won’t be able to clear in time for the next train.

“Transportation impacts evolve into economic impacts,” McGinn said this week.

I’m opposed to the coal trains, but if they run them, I hope the city and the state have a plan to mitigate the traffic and coal dust. So come on out and make your voice heard.

The Dec. 13 meeting in Seattle will be held at the Washington State Convention Center, Ballroom 6f. The ballroom has a capacity of 3,500 people. Doors will open at 3:30 for people to find seats, and to put down their names for the upcoming drawings.

I hate to make promises about these things, especially because I haven’t done the proper inquiries about media, but I think I’m going to live blog it.

– Frequently asked questions about Medical Marijuana (Cannabis) in Washington State

– Way Past Wonderful

– What, you want me to actually name the spending cuts I support?

– To schedule a wedding with a district court judge you, please follow these instructions.

– Hip hop, like nearly every other genre has some people who support gay civil rights.

Rob McKenna’s wife is right about marriage equality (h/t).

In an email to The Seattle Times, Marilyn McKenna added that while she and her husband disagree on the subject, they respect each other’s opinions. “I believe that being pro-gay marriage is completely consistent with being a Republican too. It’s a matter of personal choice that the government has no right to interfere in,” she wrote.

She added in a second email: “Both the government and the Republican Party need to get the hell out of people’s bedrooms and get a life!”

Great. I mean sure. I’m glad to have Republicans on board the human decency train. Of course that’s easy enough to say after marriage equality passed, and when it’s a done deal. I hope this is part of a genuine reassessment on the part of the GOP, but I fear they’ll be just as backwards on whatever is the next issue of basic dignity in the state as they mostly were on this one.

Of course we’ve known since election day, or thereabouts, that today would be the day marijuana and gay marriage would be legal in Washington. Still, going to bed reading about the people waiting to start the process finally at midnight and waking up knowing that they live in a state that lets them get married is great. Before I went to bed, I wondered if I should go down to a repeal day event even though I don’t smoke marijuana and then I woke up knowing that people around the state weren’t going to jail for that.

It’s a rare thing to wake up in a state that’s so much better than when you went to bed. Today was one of those days, so savor it.

I’d have guessed that Ed Murray wouldn’t run for Seattle mayor. He just became the Democratic leader in the Senate and with the long session next year, he won’t be able to fundraise as well as the rest of the candidates. But if blogging has given me any insight it’s that I shouldn’t make predictions. He has formed an exploratory committee.

I had expected to be a McGinn partisan, and still may go down that road. But instead of it being a definite thing, I’ll have to look at both of them. I just don’t have enough of an idea of Murray’s vision for Seattle to know one way or the other. I certainly like what he’s done in the legislature.

Also, it’ll be interesting to see — to the extent that it isn’t all behind the scenes — how as Majority Leader who is running for mayor, he’s able to shade legislation that he might want to run on. He’s already pretty good on transit funding, and God knows he’ll be running on having passed marriage equality. But the next session will be a chance to burnish those credentials.

– ACORN are still scary.

– Back to marrying couples for the first time since 2004.

– We’ve seen remarkable reductions in pedestrian collisions since the start of the Center City Holiday Pedestrian Safety Campaign four years ago – down on average 34 percent – but even one collision is too many.

– As a Hillary Clinton partisan in 2008, and probably one again if she runs, Joan Walsh’s note of skepticism is pretty much correct.

– It will surprise nobody that Patty Murray’s priorities for the debt negotiations are better than many of her colleagues.

– Lynwood missing link.

– Fuck you Boston and San Francisco.

The Tacoma News Tribune looked having any relevance at all in the future in the face, and decided fuck that noise.

When your subscription does renew, print subscribers will receive digital access on all platforms for an additional $2.50 a month (just over eight cents a day). Nonsubscribers who want to subscribe to The News Tribune only on a digital platform will pay $9.95 a month (about 33 cents a day).

Our digital offerings include our website (thenewstribune.com), our mobile apps available for both the iPhone and Android phones, and our digital replica edition of the printed News Tribune (available on the desktop, laptops and tablets). Digital subscribers will also get access to our archives and to databases not otherwise available to print subscribers. And we are working on other products that will become available to subscribers with digital access in coming months.

Now they’re going to go with the New York Times model and offer limited amounts of free views before it’s shut down.

Nonsubscribers will be able to access only a limited amount of digital content after Dec. 16. Access to the home page, the obituaries and classified advertising will not be restricted, but most other content will be limited to 15 page views a month.

Of course, The New York Times can get away with that because there is a group of people who will pay for access to The New York Times. I don’t know other than some government employees who would pay for The Tribune online.

So if I make less fun of their odd pre-defensiveness, or Lee only makes fun of 15 fucked up drug war editorials a month now you know why.

And look, I’d very much like the Tribune to survive. Their coverage of the Tacoma Teacher’s strike was great (the editorials about it, not so much). And they cover an important piece of the state that I don’t know how it’ll get replaced if they go away. So even with this I’m still pulling for them. But I think it’s a mistake.

I don’t know how much the tip jar and the value of health care offset the low wages at Starbucks. But surely they can do better.

The National Employment Law Project analyzed large companies whose employees are making minimum wage, or barely above. Overall, their 2012 report found minimum wage today is worth 30 percent less than it was in 1968.

Most of the 12 largest employers studied are national restaurant chains, such as McDonald’s, Burger King, and Starbucks. The others are national retailers, such as Wal-Mart, Target, and Sears.

Starbucks ranks seventh on their list. With a workforce of 176,533 and 12,903 stores in the U.S., Starbucks had revenue of $13.3 billion and net income of $1.4 billion. CEO Howard Schultz earned $16.1 million in compensation.

Sigh.

– Democratic support is creeping East.

– The next four years are going to be awesome.

– There is nothing I don’t love about Kenny G’s manager yelling at The Stranger.

– Stay classy, rightwing media.

– I don’t want to sit around with my beer and wings on Sunday and wonder whether my pastime contributed to the murder of a young mother and the orphaning of a little girl. I’m just not up for it.

– Dooooooomed!

I forgot to link to this in this morning’s open thread, but this is sad. Glad she’s doing OK.

A woman was struck and dragged by a dump truck at Pike and Boren shortly after 9 a.m. Thursday morning. The 25-year-old was taken to Harborview in stable condition.

[…]

The woman appears to have no serious injuries or fractures, according to the Fire Department. EMTs arrived on the scene first and pulled her from under the truck.

She told firefighters she was hit and dragged by the dump truck. Medics then transported her to the hospital.

She’s doing well, and for this story, that’s obviously the most important thing. But these sorts of incidents are far too common. Sometimes reading Seattle Bike Blog is just a litany of horrible accidents.

– 6,000 speeders can’t be wrong.

– Your birthright is being one person ahead in this line.

– I wouldn’t have guessed the West Seattle Tool Library would be a hit, but clearly it’s doing something right.

– The Onion has the best explanation of our anti-tax moment yet.

– Glenn Beck does something ridiculous; day follows night.

– I’ve linked to the Seattle City Hall weddings for gay couples on the first day it’s available. but here’s some more information.

– It’s better not seeing what’s coming.

– Clearly the Tacoma Druggists is the greatest name for a baseball team ever.

Howie has an interesting link to a piece on Obama and the drug war. Everybody go read it but please come back, because I’m going to nerd out on you about the graphic that illustrates it.

So, OK, there are 4 gears. But one of them, the CIA gear, isn’t part of what I’m getting at here. Just look at the bank gear, the prison gear, and the money gear. They’re interlocked. And you can’t have an odd number of interlocking gears.

Each gear turns the gear next to it the opposite way that it goes. So if the money gear is going clockwise, it will turn the bank gear counterclockwise that will turn the prison gear clockwise and it will go back and turn the money gear counterclockwise. So now that gear wants to go both clockwise and counterclockwise. So instead of a clockwork, it’s just a few unmoving gears.

Or maybe they’re not meant to be interlocking and they’re just meant to symbolize different gears in a larger machine. Then they should be further spaced out.

With Romney’s loss, despite a strong push from the White Evangelical community, the influence of that particular group is waning. But in the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s and throughout the Bush years, these politically conservative Evangelicals had quite a bit of power and money behind them. And with that came a large group of scam artists.

People made good money telling white conservative evangelical Protestants who were afraid of the other — afraid of gay people, afraid of black folks and black churches, afraid of women who acted in any way other than submissive to their husbands or virginal, afraid of women who’ve had abortions, scientists, anyone who isn’t Christian, anyone who is Christian in a way they don’t approve of — that their fear made them good Christians. These modern day witch-prickers ruined lives for money and when they’re questioned they found clobber verses and said “it’s in the book.”*

If this didn’t have any political impact it would still be awful. It would still cause people to abandon their gay children. It would still cause women to stay in abusive relationships because of these antiquated notions of gender roles in marriage and on the nature of divorce. It would still cause divisions among people based on their religions.

But of course, it also has a political dimension. They lobby hard against the rights of gay people and women, and they make policy worse.

Among the worst of the bunch are Tim and Beverly LaHaye: He had a horrible combination of John Birch Society and apocalyptic (I don’t even want to say Biblical, since what he describes and what’s in the Bible are so different) predictions that eventually lead to his co-writing the Left Behind books. And she founded the organization Concerned Women for America that pushed some of the worst of this hatred out there.

And why this history is relevant to a Washington State blog is that before running for office, newly minted Seattle mayoral candidate Tim Burgess worked at a firm that did consulting for Concerned Women for America. As Erica C. Barnett explained when he first ran for City Council.

Burgess, however, has a client in his past that won’t sit well in progressive Seattle. Burgess’s ad firm provided media planning, copywriting, media buying, and other consulting services to Concerned Women for America (CWA), a fundamentalist Christian group that’s best known for fighting against equal rights for gays and lesbians. Gay former council member, Tina Podlodowski, who has endorsed Burgess, says CWA is “not a group I could ever support. Clearly, he made a big mistake.” Among other things, CWA advocated against making emergency contraception available over the counter, arguing that access to it would encourage promiscuity; has said that legalizing gay marriage would destroy the fabric of society; actively opposes the Equal Rights Amendment; and believes that “politicians who do not use the Bible to guide their public and private lives do not belong in office.”

The firm Burgess cofounded, now called Merkle/Domain, services non-profits. According to Burgess, the firm represented CWA for eight or nine years. “We generally did not have an ideological screen on clients. We’ve served all kinds of groups, [including] some others that I don’t always agree with,” Burgess says. According to the Washington Secretary of State’s corporation listing service, Burgess’s clients did not include any liberal equivalent of CWA. They did include the African Wildlife Foundation, Mercy Corps, and the Lance Armstrong Foundation.**

Look, Burgess should be judged more on his time in office than for a consulting gig a decade ago. But it seems to me that this is a window on his character. He saw a scammy group that was doing harm to people’s lives and claiming to be Christian. And rather than use his position as an outspoken Christian to denounce that, Tim Burgess figured out a way to get a cut. Given that a lot was made out of it by activist groups when he first ran for City Council, you would think it would at least play a part in the biographies people are running now. But so far, I haven’t seen it.

[Read more…]

– Not really Only in Seattle, so much as one building designed around bicyclists.

– What Pierce County Prop 1’s loss means for transit.

– Does Donald Trump realize he’s a joke?

– The Deep South is more pro-Obama than 4 years ago (also, I can’t figure out Upstate NY. I was talking to Darryl about it yesterday, and he hadn’t seen the map but thought it might be a reaction to Sandy. Maybe, but CT and Downstate changed in the other direction).

– I have to be pretty far out of town earlier in the day, but I’m going to try to make it to the Balloon Juice meetup in Seattle on Saturday.

There are a lot of angles you could take writing about Tim Harris writing a positive piece about McGinn’s downtown public safety program. Taking two paragraphs to set up how much you assume the ideas are at odds, as Josh Feit (?), does here doesn’t strike me as particularly helpful.

McGinn started his term with the support of an unlikely alliance of social justice lefties (like Real Change director Tim Harris) and urbanist greens (like the Sierra Club, where McGinn once served as chairman); typically those factions are at odds, with the social justice activists criticizing the urbanists as bourgeois and the urbansits criticizing the social justice advocates as provincial.

McGinn had some success keeping the coalition together, vetoing the panhandling ordinance for example. But as he pushed hard on urban density and light rail he has rubbed some advocates for the city’s lowest-income and homeles sresidents [sic] the wrong way; they’ve argued that density and high-cost rail transit increase the cost of living for Seattle’s poorest.

I mean, I’ve always felt it was a natural alliance. People in Seattle are generally supportive of both goals. And given that bad environmental things are generally shitting on poor people, they’re pretty intertwined. Really, wanting to put transit in poor neighborhoods isn’t as opposed by social justice activists as the piece assumes (although dealing with higher prices, etc. that can come from it absolutely is part of the social justice agenda). Now recently, I’m not so sure how solid McGinn’s commitment to social justice is with his response to the DOJ on police accountability, for example.