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Open Thread 3-18

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If people reading this blog know one thing about me, it’s probably my politics. If they know anything else about me, it’s my sense of humor. But somewhere on the list is my love of the library. Seattle has a great system. New York where I grew up also has a great system, but I honestly don’t remember much about it. What I remember more is that I have family near the first public library paid for with tax money in the country, and hearing that history over the course of many summers rubbed off on me.

Currently, I have 4 books checked out of the Seattle Public Library and I spend far too much time managing my hold list. I’ve recently started reading comics for the first time since I was a kid, and the graphic novel selection is great. I doubt I’d have gotten into them if not for being able to check out some, often pretty silly ones, for free.

Anyway, all this to say fuck the Koch brothers for making anti-library robocalls. What kind of monsters do that?

NPI Fundraising Gala

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Having been kicking around local lefty Internet circles for (approximately) ever I’m glad that we have Andrew Villeneuve and Northwest Progressive Institute around. From his activism against Tim Eyman, to helping build the netroots and his role as part of that netroots, Andrew has been a great part of the community. There were many times when I used to do multi-link open threads or tried on the old blog to at least have one local link a day and going to the Progressive Portal or the Regional Blogroll.

And while I’m always more of a build community on the Internet kind of person, Andrew and NPI are just as much in on the ground stuff. Permanent Defense goes after Tim Eyman in a real way, and the fundraising gala attracts a lot of big name people every year.

Well, the fundraising gala is happening again, and this year is no exception:

What: A special event to benefit the work of the Northwest Progressive Institute
Who: U.S. Representative Adam Smith, former Seattle City Councilmember Tina Podlodowski, and additional speakers to be announced
When: Friday, April 1st, 2016 | Reception starts at 6:15 PM, main program at 7 PM
Where: Mercer Island Community & Events Center
8236 SE 24th Street, Mercer Island, 98040

I know a billion people in politics ask for your money. But NPI are good people and it looks like a fun event if you can make it.

Open Thread 3-16

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I saw a countdown clock to St. Patrick’s Day recently that had days, hours, and minutes. I realized that it’s counting down to Midnight on St. Pat’s. I may be a bit of a prude, but I suspect that if anyone is in a bar at 11:59 on an weekday, they’re not waiting on the holiday to start drinking. I mean, I get that it’s a big drinking day but I think there’s time enough to not have to be up to the minute.

Also, please don’t yell “wooooooooooo” right outside my apartment. What? You’ll yell “woooooooooo” wherever you damn well please? OK.

Election night discussion thread

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I’ll try to offer some commentary throughout the evening, but the real fun will be in the comment thread….

Lil’ Marco has “suspended” his campaign after losing his home state of Florida.

What’s with this “We are ‘suspending’ the campaign” bullshit. “We” are not. You (singular) are. “Suspend” is a weasel word. Why can’t these weasels tell it like it is: “I’m quitting”, “I am dropping out of the race”, “I surrender to Mr. Drumpf”.

Oh…that’s right. They’re fucking weasels.

7:48: While Cruz is giving his “victory” speech, CNN updates the vote totals and Cruz goes from 1st place to 2nd place.

8:40 Carl Ballard commentary on the GOP primary: [fart noises]

Drinking Liberally — Seattle

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DLBottle

Join us on this sub-Super Tuesday for an election watching party at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking liberally. Voters go to the polls in five states (FL, IL, MO, NC, and OH) and Republicans caucus on one island entity (Northern Mariana Islands). For Republicans, the presidential primary outcome is “winner take all” in all but the IL and NC primaries. We’ll have election results on the TV.

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. We start at 8:00pm, but feel free to join us early to watch election returns.





Can’t make it to Seattle tonight? Check out one of the other DL meetings this week. Tonight, the Tri-Cities and Vancouver, WA chapters meet. The Lakewood chapter meets on Wednesday. On Thursday, the Tacoma, Bremerton, and Spokane, chapters meet. Finally, on Monday, the Aberdeen and Yakima chapters meet.

There are 178 chapters of Living Liberally, including twenty in Washington state, three in Oregon and one in Idaho. Find—or go out and start—a chapter near you.

Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza!

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A brief history of cell phones on Capitol Hill.

Minute Physics: The limb of the sun.

Sorry Mitch.

Matthew Filipowicz: Rick Snyder wants taxpayer money for Flint water crisis legal fees:

Stephen: Late Night Wheel of News.

What is dark money and how does it influence elections?

Jim Earl: Antonin Scalia remembered with a moving obituary.

Stephen: Bernie only smoked pot twice?!?

White House: West Wing Week.

The 2016 Clowning Inferno:

Explaining politics to a drunk: superdelegates, candidates, etc.

Mental Floss: 23 facts about U.S. cash.

Jim Earl: Oregon terrorist Lavoy Finicum remembered with obituary.

James Corden: Idaho politics is as weird as it gets.

Who made it okay to hate Muslims?

Songify the News: Bernie and Hillary have a sing-off:

Why is America’s water infrastructure failing?

Congressional hits and misses.

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

Open Thread 2/11

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Well, no supplemental budget. No deal on McCleary. I guess that means mass vetoes. I’m here for it. Hell, he could have pull an Arnold Schwarzenegger* and just do an acrostic with all his vetoes. At this point, he could just write a note that says “Fuck you” and hand it to the sponsor with each veto and still be in the right here.

It also means we get a special session. So maybe the legislators having to deal with Pam Roch and Matt Manweller some more is a fuck you enough.

[Read more…]

Open Thread 3/9

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I was going to do this post about Inslee’s mass veto threat. Shorter: I’m pro but with reservations because there are some good things he’s probably going to have to veto.

So I went looking for stories on Google News. And all of the stories were kind of a similar summation, or an opinion piece. Fine. In situations where it’s not one particular piece, but just the story, I try to find pieces that aren’t just written by white dudes. It’s a tiny nudge to newsroom diversity (yes, from this white dude writing in a space that’s mostly white and male).

When I looked at the author’s names, I noticed that they were all men, and as far as I could tell, all white. I may have missed someone. But I think newsrooms can do better.

Drinking Liberally — Seattle

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DLBottle

It isn’t quite Super Tuesday, but is is another interesting Tuesday for a watching party at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking liberally. Republicans and Democrats have primaries in Michigan and Mississippi. Republicans vote in an Idaho primary and caucus in Hawaii. Overseas Democrats get a chance to vote as well.

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. We start at 8:00pm, but feel free to join us before that for the election returns.



Can’t make it to Seattle tonight? Check out one of the other DL meetings this week. Tonight, the Federal Way, Tri-Cities and Redmond chapters meet. And on Thursday, the Kent and Bremerton chapters meet.

There are 177 chapters of Living Liberally, including twenty in Washington state, three in Oregon and one in Idaho. Find—or go out and start—a chapter near you.

Nancy Reagan Is Dead. Now Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming

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The_Reagans_waving_from_the_limousine_during_the_Inaugural_Parade_1981Of course, my sympathies go to the Reagan family on the death of their matriarch, Nancy. But as the national media gears up for another round of fawning eulogies and bullshit mythologizing, I’m reminded of the post I wrote 12 years ago on the death of her husband.

HA was less than a month old at the time, and I had very few readers. Which is a shame, because looking back on it, this was a damn good post. So I’m repeating it below:

I was never a Ronald Reagan supporter, and the benefit of hindsight has not mellowed my opinion of his Presidency. I remain confident that the judgment of history will more closely resemble mine than that of the fawning revisionists who, like the man they endlessly eulogize, seem prone to confusing his movie roles with the role he played in public life.

Thus I never thought Reagan’s death would touch my life so personally, until both PBS stations chose to preempt their morning children’s programming to show coverage of his memorial service.

Some things should stay inviolate: The Bill of Rights… my grandmother’s pinwheel cookie recipe… a seven-year-old’s morning routine.

Even on 9-11 and the days that followed, with the nation transfixed by the tragedy of those terrible attacks, our PBS affiliates wisely shielded our children from the horror, sticking to their familiar schedule of Sagwa and Dragon Tales and other god-awful-boring but thankfully commercial-free fare. Well the rest of us watched and re-watched the clips of planes flying into buildings and towers collapsing like some recurring, national nightmare, my daughter could obliviously munch her Cheerios as she watched for the umpteenth time as Arthur triumphed over his personal nightmare that he forgot his pants.

But not this morning. No, instead of watching Clifford once again help Emily Elizabeth make amends with that bitch Jenna, we found ourselves viewing a flag-draped coffin while somber announcers struggled to pretend that the death of the body of a 93-year-old man was somehow more tragic than the Alzheimer’s disease that years ago robbed him of his mind.

I watched for a few moments, imagining an enormous red dog rampaging through the National Cathedral, crushing dignitaries as he tossed the withered body of a dead president high into the air, like some rawhide chew toy.

But my cartoon fantasy was quickly interrupted by reality. Not the reality of a national media who buys and sells the spin that Ronald Reagan was a great leader simply because he happened to preside over the culmination of the Soviet Union’s decades-long collapse. No, it was the reality of a disgruntled seven-year-old, clearly suspicious that I had somehow conspired with PBS executives to rob her of her precious kid shows.

I slipped a tape into the VCR, and the image of a procession of mourners was quickly replaced by that of dancing cartoon cutlery, which struck me as no less illusory, no less scripted than the caricature of national grief that danced in unison across six local broadcast channels.

Of course I have sympathy for Reagan’s family and friends who watched a terrible disease slowly squeeze the humanity from his once vital body; and I hope these ceremonies can bring them closure.

But their grief is not my grief. And it certainly shouldn’t have been imposed on a seven-year-old girl who asked little from the world that morning, but a bowl of Cheerios and a brief diversion of talking dogs and dragons, before trudging off to a hard day of first grade.

As parents, we often try to protect our children from the realities of our adult world… a world where towers crumble and planes fall from the sky and the most powerful nation in history can crush another in retribution, on the whims of a single, ordinary man.

Yes, even presidents are ordinary men (some, more ordinary than others.) For all the eulogizing of our week-long national shiva, I think my daughter summed up Reagan’s legacy best, when staring briefly at his flag-draped coffin she eloquently pointed out: “There’s a dead person in there.”

Ronald Reagan is dead. And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Same goes for Nancy.

Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza!

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How does money influence U.S. elections?

Nightly Show: Planning a plantation wedding.

Obama debunks GOP “alternate reality” on economy.

The 2016 Clown Slugfest:

Hillary Clinton’s Lena Dunham strategy.

Jon Connor and Keke Palmer: “Fresh Water for Flint”.

Mental Floss: 26 facts about the science of friendship.

White House: West Wing Week.

Seth Meyers: A close look at a Texas abortion case.

Thom and Farron Cousins: How can an entire party reject the reality of climate change?

Sam Seder: MI officials call for Gov. Rick Snyder to resign over Flint water disaster.

Super Tuesday!

Thom: The Good, the Bad & the Very, Very Coadunately Ugly!

Nightly Show: Keep it 100%–Black History Month edition.

David Pakman: Clanence Thomas speaks for first time in a decade.

Farron Cousins: Court agrees…Bill-O-The-Clown is a horrible person.

Does giving up privacy keep us safe from terrorism?

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

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