– President Obama was in town over the weekend.
– I wonder if the public transportation data for Thurston County would look the same for the rest of the state.
– Like so many aspects of American life, holidays have become 2-tiered
– And speaking of, I don’t know about the rest of the bloggers here, but I don’t think I’ll post anything on Thursday or Friday.
I-502 got more than 54% of the vote in Pierce County. So naturally, you’d think that politicians in the county would be, if not eager, at least willing to zone marijuana businesses. You’d probably not think they would support banning any business until the Federal government decides to legalize marijuana. Maybe somewhere like Franklin County where it lost more than 61% of the vote. But not a Puget Sound county where a majority of voters supported legalization at the ballot, surely.
Well, a majority of the Pierce County Council voted to not allow any marijuana businesses. Fortunately, it was vetoed by the exec (Tacoma News Tribune link; hat tip to Sensible Washington on Facebook).
Pierce County Executive Pat McCarthy has vetoed the County Council’s ordinance that prohibits licensed marijuana businesses from operating until the U.S. Congress removes marijuana from the list of federally controlled substances.
McCarthy said the county’s ordinance conflicts with state law. She said the county must comply with state law, which permits the licensing of marijuana businesses.
[…]
An override requires five of seven council votes.
[…]*
The council adopted the ordinance Nov. 5 by a vote of 4-3.
So yay. It probably won’t be overridden.
Still, it seems strange to me that people are so hesitant to support marijuana legalization where it’s popular. I mean I get that drugs-are-bad is the default position that a lot of people have. And the Federal government is a big scary thing people can point to. But I-502 was passed with popular support and the sky hasn’t fallen. It’s time for people to stop fighting it.
– The Seattle Weekly has an interesting piece on Rosellini’s FBI file.
– Obama is better than George W. Bush. Still it’s still too many deaths in wars.
– Oh, and hey, a deal with Iran for 6 months.
– I’m glad KEXP is going to be DJing the New Year’s Eve at the Space Needle but this article seems to think that Pearl Jam and The Ramones are what’s hot in the streets. What?
Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky. It was Barstow, CA.
This week’s is related to something in the news from November, good luck!
Hosea 3:1-3
Once again the Lord spoke to me. And this time he said, “Hosea, fall in love with an unfaithful woman who has a lover. Do this to show that I love the people of Israel, even though they worship idols and enjoy the offering cakes made with fruit.”So I paid fifteen pieces of silver and about ten bushels of grain for such a woman. Then I said, “Now you are mine! You will have to remain faithful to me, though it will be a long time before we sleep together.”
Discuss.
So…the Vice President walks into a sub shop.
Cheney on Cheney:
Lawrence O’Donnell with Bill Maher: North American politics:
Young Turks: FAUX News Freaks out over Oprah race comments.
Bashir: Why Sarah Palin is a ‘a racist, world-class idiot’.
The “Constitutional Option”:
Sarah Silverman on first meeting Obama.
Young Turks: The Obama “one nation under God” fake controversy.
“Walmart Poor:”
Sam Seder: Caller humiliates Rush Limbaugh.
Ann Telnaes: Selfies we’d like to see.
The Audacity of Affordable Health Care for Everyone:
Stephen: On Russia’s gay Olympics ban.
Hundreds of gallons of highly radioactive waste leaking into groundwater at Hanford.
Bashir: U TX Young Republican’s totally no-racist Catch-An-Illegal-Immigrant ‘Game’.
Fifty Years Ago, A Tragedy:
ONN: News of the Week.
Christie’s Governors: The extreme class of 2014.
The News to the North:
Stephen: Oklahetera!
White House: West Wing Week.
Maddow: Right wing abandons facts to bash Obama:
Congressman Coke Hypocrite (R-FL)
Ed: How Ohio Republicans are planning to rig the 2014 vote.
Maddow: Marriage equality spreads.
Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.
Contained in this snarky piece about Murray’s transition is some serious talk about the $15 minimum wage.
I asked Murray about the $15 minimum wage, an issue he ended up campaigning on and which has a lot of traction in the city, with Kshama Sawant’s win and the win in SeaTac. On the trail he didn’t give a real timeline for how to get there, but today he said, “We’ll begin our process immediately… We’re having our discussions in the transition team already.” He wants to “bring people to the table” (a politician? Who knew?!), and says “if we end up in a labor-business war, it won’t happen.” He also wants to be “especially sensitive to our small neighborhood businesses—like the Pike/Pine corridor,” he laughed.
I’m going to take that as a positive sign that stuff can get done quickly, and not that it means that the Chamber of Commerce or other bidness groups get a veto. He did run on it, and presumably in 4 years will want it as an accomplishment not as a place where a challenger can stake out a position to his left. And, you know, it’s the right thing to do and popular. And he’ll have at least one City Council member pushing him pretty hard on it.
Unlike my colleagues here at HA, I have clear, full memories of the events of 50 years ago. Darryl was just three years old at the time. It was years before Lee was born, many years before Carl was a twinkling in anyone’s eye, and possibly even before Roya’s father arrived.
In November 1963 I was 13 years old, an 8th-grader at Heritage Junior High School in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Just after we’d gotten back indoors from band practice (we were scheduled to play at halftime of the high school’s football game the next day … a game that was never played), the unimaginable announcement came over the loudspeaker as we were putting away our instruments.
Everything between that moment and arrival at the front door of my house has vanished from my memory. No recollection of gathering up my belongings, of boarding the school bus, of the half-hour ride with dozens of other dazed 12- and 13-year-old kids.
Once I got home, however, along with my entire family I was glued to the TV for days. We were a Huntley-Brinkley family, so we watched Frank McGee on NBC rather than Cronkite’s CBS. We saw President Johnson’s brief speech at Andrews AFB. We saw Lee Harvey Oswald murdered by Jack Ruby. We saw Kennedy lying in state in the Capitol rotunda. We saw the funeral procession, with muffled drums, the caisson, the riderless horse, the international leaders from far and wide, John-John’s salute, the burial in Arlington National Cemetery.
Like everyone else, we were in shock. And we were still in shock on Thanksgiving, six days after the assassination. We celebrated (if that’s the appropriate word) the holiday with relatives who lived in the DC suburbs. Over that weekend, we went to Arlington to pay our respects to the President. On that cold, blustery, sunny morning, we filed slowly and silently past the raw, freshly-turned soil of the grave. We had to be careful not to trip over the gas pipe (not yet buried) feeding the eternal flame … not an easy task with tear-filled eyes.
Since I started blogging almost 11 years ago, I’ve written a number of essays about what the assassination of President Kennedy means to me. On my own Peace Tree Farm blog, there’s Forty years (2003), The end of the innocence (2004), and 43 … and 46 (2006). My DailyKos diary on the subject is JFK and the “Where were you when…?” moment (2008). And I wrote The tricks that memory plays two years ago here on HA.
November 22, 1963 remains a central, seminal event in my life. For me, that is the day the Sixties began. The sudden, wrenching events in Dallas led directly to the immense discontinuity between the staid, black-and-white Fifties and the counter-cultural, many-colored Sixties.
How might American and world history have been different if JFK hadn’t been shot? Would there have been a Nixon, a Reagan, a Dubya presidency? Would the Vietnam War have been shorter or less lethal, or even been short-circuited completely? On the other hand, could John Kennedy have strong-armed Congress into passing the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare? We’ll never know, unless we can somehow jump into the alternative universe in which Oswald worked somewhere other than the Texas School Book Depository, or the one in which he stayed in the Soviet Union, or just the one in which he missed his target in Dealey Plaza.
I wish we lived in one of those other universes.
I go to the House and Senate GOP caucus websites fairly often to look for pieces to make fun of. It’s where I found Baumgartner’s piece the other day. But somehow I’d missed that they went with an offensive picture for another featured story. They had a press release about how they’re opposed to human trafficking. It’s an important issue, but they fubbed the execution.
Basically, despite the fact that most victims of human trafficking are women of color, they chose to illustrate it with a stock image of a white lady being grabbed by black hands (Spokesman-Review link).
This morning, the Senate Republican Caucus web site was down, and the photo was removed, although a spokesman for Committee Chairman Mike Padden said that was probably a coincidence. The hearing was more than a week ago, Eric Campbell said, and the site was rotating features to get more current things up.
[…]
We should note that this is a “stock photo”, one that has been used other places to illustrate sex trafficking or child pornography, primarily on web sites with ties to religious organizations. In some versions of the image, the hands over the mouth don’t seem to be quite as dark as in the above image.
It’s tough to figure out why the GOP has a problem attracting minority voters. And to be clear, I don’t think whoever put it up was acting out of malice: They probably just googled human trafficking, that came up, and they called it good. But they didn’t have any black folks in the office who’d see it before it came up to say, “google that a little harder.”
Goldy deflects some of the flack coming at Kshama Sawant for suggesting the Boeing workers take over production, and start producing things that aren’t used for war. The piece is fine as far as it goes, but I think he misses the biggest problem with this kind of dismissive commentary: it doesn’t give us any idea of what a takeover might look like.
Now I have certainly no idea what a worker takeover at Boeing by its workers might look like. The best guess off the top of my head is something like Mondragon. Or maybe she has something completely else in mind; Mondragon isn’t a panacea. And in any event how the state, or others, might move from Boeing making unreasonable demands to whatever she’s pushing wasn’t discussed. It was a short speech at a rally, and there’s only so much nuance you can give. So there are more questions than answers.
But, gosh, the best people to get those answers are reporters. Rather than writing dismissive pieces, they could ask her for details. I mean they could eventually get to dismissive if that’s their position, but it would be nice to know what she’s actually proposing and how she expects to get from point A to point B before dismissing it.
Now to be clear, I don’t think I agree with her (again, to the point that I understand what she’s proposing). The best thing is probably for Boeing to realize that they need the Puget Sound workforce. But if that doesn’t happen, and Boeing continues the slow decline of their Western Washington workforce, there will be people in the region with manufacturing skills, and no job. It might make more sense for them to start something collective rather than hope that some other big company will come to the rescue, and if this discussion makes them realize that there are other options, well, I’d rather not have pundits — especially ostensibly lefty ones — shutting that discussion down.
– Two Ed Murray things. I love this story of him helping a fallen cyclist (Seattle Times link). Also, here’s the transition webpage if you’re interested.
– Does anyone care about the WA Dem Chair race? I tried to write about it, but nothing really came together. I could give it another try if y’all care.
– It was the 150th anniversary of The Gettysburg Address this week, and the biggest deal about it is that Obama was asked to read one of the versions of it. Also, how does it compare to President Whitmore’s speech from Independence Day? I’m glad you asked.
Unlike most Seattle Democrats, Reuven Carlyle is willing to push an agenda pretty hard. Unfortunately, often times (privatizing public education and the Boeing giveaway for example) he pushes a terrible agenda. At other times, like defending King County against the state trying to vacuum up all of the money, he’s better. So, while most Seattle Dems inspire apathy and a wish that they would use their safe seats for something better than acting as placeholders, Carlyle actually has bold proposals. This is one that I like.
But Carlyle believes lawmakers and the public deserve to know how much a company like Boeing pays in state taxes, especially if that company comes to the Legislature asking for special consideration in the tax code.
Washington is certainly not alone in guarding corporate tax information. Oregon and Idaho do the same. But in Wisconsin, anyone can fill out a form and request a company’s—even an individual’s—net tax information.
Sounds good to me (although I’m not sure about individuals, or really how that would work in our sales tax heavy state). But it seems reasonable to know how much business are paying. And I was somewhat taken aback by the fact that we don’t know.
Last night The Occupy Committee to End Homelessness in King County Coalition held a camp in at Westlake Park to bring attention to Seattle’s homeless problem (and our lack of will to implement any solutions). It’s a brave thing when last night was freezing or near it. But I suppose for many of them, it’s not much of a choice.
I walked through it last night, and it was a few dozen people in sleeping bags. Then I walked home past people sleeping in doorways.
Anyway, they’ll follow it up with a march to Seattle City Hall where the Committee to End Homelessness in King County are meeting. The coalition is demanding, among other things, that we as a community divest from banks that have been active in foreclosures and that we build more affordable housing.
It’s time to let out your inner Socialist! Please join us for an evening of politics over a pint at tonight’s gathering of the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally.
We meet tonight and every Tuesday evening at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Our normal starting time is 8:00pm.
Can’t make it to Seattle tonight? Check out another nearby DL meeting over the next week. Tonight the Tri-Cities and Shelton chapters meet. The South Seattle chapter meets this Wednesday. And for Thursday, the Spokane and Tacoma chapters meet.
With 212 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.
– The $15 SeaTac minimum wage initiative looks like it has the votes. Congrats to everyone who made that happen.
– Virginia state Sen. Creigh Deeds in critical condition after stabbing
– People are submitting so many applications for state licenses to sell marijuana.
– A Shocking Number Of Non-Violent Americans Will Die In Prison (h/t)
– Seattle Transit Blog looks at what the service cuts to Metro might look like for Seattle and the East Side.
– I don’t even know with young Republicans.
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!