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It’s Tuesday…and that’s Drinking Liberally night in Seattle. So please join us for an evening of politics under the influence at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking liberally.

We meet at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. at 8:00 pm. Stop by earlier for a quiet dinner.

Can’t make it? The Tri-Cities chapter of Drinking liberally meets every Tuesday night as well. And the Vancouver, WA chapter also meets tonight. On Thursday, Drinking Liberally Tacoma meets. And the Everett chapter of Drinking Liberally meets in Snohomish next Monday. With 226 chapters of Living Liberally, chances are good there is one near you.

What is the Editorial Board really saying in this Seattle Times editorial titled Gubernatorial hopeful Jay Inslee should shift gears toward state issues?

U.S. REP. Jay Inslee is wasting voters’ time by making an issue of federal health-insurance reform in his campaign for governor in 2012. Instead of attacking Attorney General Rob McKenna’s challenge to “Obamacare,” Inslee should focus on state issues.

Translation: “By ‘wasting voters’ time’ we mean that you can only discuss one issue at a time. And this isn’t it! Come on, Inslee, you’re killing us here. Rob made a mistake—showed his cards, if you will—but we still want folks to believe that McKenna is an honest-to-gosh moderate.”

That the health insurance law will apply in this state does not make it a state issue. The law applies in all the states. It is a federal law being challenged in federal court regarding the federal Constitution.

Translation: “The Tea Party is quite unpopular in Washington state, so stop pointing out that McKenna jumped into this Tea Party-inspired lawsuit. That’s just dirty politics to tarnish McKenna with his own actions.”

Opponents argue that the Constitution gives the federal government no power to order individuals to buy insurance. The Obama administration argues it has that power under the Commerce Clause. This is just the sort of argument the Supreme Court is designed to settle, and the argument was bound to arrive there. That McKenna joined one side and Gov. Chris Gregoire joined the other will not affect the outcome. Nor will a future governor of Washington, whether Inslee or McKenna.

Translation: “Whatever you do, don’t remind people of what has happened in other states when a Teabagger Republican has taken the reigns as Governor. Mentioning the lawsuit makes people fear that a future Governor Rob McKenna might do to Washington state what Florida Governor Rick Scott or Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker have done to their states. We don’t like that. So stop it and talk about other stuff.”

All the while, there boils a huge state issue: the $2-billion budget shortfall. Gregoire has ordered state agencies to offer a list of 10-percent cuts. She will use this list to recommend a package of cuts to a special session of the Legislature. Does Inslee support this?

Translation: “Jay, do you support a Governor being able to collect information from state agencies and make recommendations to the Legislature? Really?!? Because…we’re not so sure….”

Does he think the governor should be empowered to make discretionary cuts if the Legislature does not? How would he close a $2 billion gap? Cuts? Tax increases? Reforms?

Translation: “And don’t even think of bringing up the fact that our own reporting finds McKenna’s state budgetary ideas utter fantasy.”

This gap should be closed by the time the new governor takes office in 2013, but the questions are likely to be similar.

Translation: “So even though our recommended “issue” will quite possibly be irrelevant for the next Governor, and you have 13 more months to talk about similar issues anyway, and regardless of the Health Care reform lawsuit being a timely news item now, and ignoring the fact that McKenna has admitted to losing control of the lawsuit’s agenda, and dismissing the fact that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Washingtonians will be hurt by success of the lawsuit that McKenna claims to have co-founded, please, please talk about only what we want you to talk about.”

Inslee has been in Congress since 1999, and he is still thinking about national issues. He needs to shift gears.

Translation: “Inslee should shift away from discussing things McKenna has done to harm the people of Washington. The people don’t need to know.”

“P.S. We won’t be endorsing you.”

1) Crime is down in the city, but we’ve seen some horrible incidents with the police in recent years. How do we ensure public safety and not have those sorts of things happen in the future?

In many categories rates of crime are down in Seattle. However, that didn’t make my neighbors around Graham Hill School feel any better last spring when there were more than a dozen home break-ins in the area. It also didn’t matter to the families when the young pregnant woman was shot and killed in south Rainier Beach in the spring. It hasn’t mattered to any of the Pioneer Square or Belltown people I’ve spoken with who are angry and frustrated by on-going street dealing and violence.

We make progress by staying focused on the places we know experience trouble, policing them consistently, engaging the surrounding community to build stronger families and institutions, and connecting people with options that change lives, like Community Court, Drug Court and Mental Health Court.

We’ve all seen too many cell phone-captured incidents on television of incidents we don’t associate with the vast, vast majority of officers who do a great job. Fundamentally, there’s no place for abuse by any public servant. We avoid incidents like the few we’ve seen by investing in great recruitment (for problem solvers from all parts of our community), training and supervision, and, when necessary, in clear discipline. In the wake of the John T. Williams tragedy I joined with the other members of the Council’s Public Safety Committee to put forward a set of 11 recommendations to the Chief of Police and the Mayor. The recommendations touch on investigation procedures, department transparency, supervisory expectations, hiring and training. While a handful of the recommendations will require contract negotiations, many can be executed immediately by the Chief of Police and Mayor. Some require further vetting with communities of color and officers. Diversity and sensitivity training are a constant process. I don’t believe that work is ever done.

2) Now that the Viaduct is coming down, what should the waterfront look like?

Whether rain or shine, Seattle’s Central Waterfront will be a place we want to visit to see the water, perhaps touch the water, take visitors, go jogging, walk the dog, sit on the grass, catch a concert, watch a street performer. As we walk, wheel or ride from north to south we’ll move through zones with different character or activities depending upon how the seawall is rebuilt in that section and on how much right-of- way is recaptured when the Viaduct comes down. The reclaimed area will be well- maintained and programmed through a successful partnership between public and private (both for-profit and foundation) funders. Surface transportation will effectively move people and goods, but also be minimal in its physical spread. The Waterfront will be an awesome place to experience the every-day beauty of our city’s surroundings, all watched over by the Olympics and Seattle’s own skyline.

3) As the great recession drags on, the city budget is still hurt. What do we need to cut, what do we need to keep, and do we need to raise more money via taxation?

The challenge during this very, very, very slow economic recovery is to protect the core services required of local government (police, fire, clean water and mobility infrastructure to name a few) without hampering our future success in areas not considered core services but which enable us to be a great place to make a life (affordable housing, human services, community-building and urban planning to name a few).

My top General Fund budget priorities are public safety (patrol officers and firefighters), survival services for low-income and at-risk people in our city, and protecting areas where our spending leverages other dollars and shows measurable outcomes. The Neighborhood Matching Fund is an example of the latter. NMF is the catalyst and boost that produces not just hardscape projects all over our city, but yields a stronger, more resilient community as a result of neighborhood partnerships.

As the economy recovers to the point where we see additional revenue, I am committed to returning to the SPD hiring plan abandoned with the economic downturn. I believe we need to be hiring to both replace retiring officers and to increase the overall number of officers on patrol. I would also like to invest new dollars into more effective shelter programs, ones that provide 24-hour shelter, better meet the needs of people currently sleeping outdoors, and ones that show positive results moving people into housing.

We need to cut or restructure efforts that don’t yield measurable results. This is easier said than done. We have a great deal of recently compiled information on both general crime prevention efforts and youth violence prevention efforts. The efforts under way, involving millions of dollars, serve community needs. They involve great community volunteers and city staff, and they serve constituencies. However, not all the efforts underway can demonstrate through outcomes that they move the needle in a positive direction when it comes to crime.

Note: In this answer I’m addressing the city’s core budget. I favor other infrastructure investments (street care connections and extensions, better street infrastructure, a great waterfront) but these are topics being discussed in relation to supplemental revenue sources.

4) With its budget shrunk at least until the end of the recession what should Seattle parks look like?

The City of Seattle enjoys a Department of Parks & Recreation that runs the spread from natural open spaces (East Duwamish Greenbelt, for instance) to heavily-scheduled recreation fields (Woodland Park, Delridge and Dahl, for instance), tiny skate dots up to recreation and teen life complexes (Garfield, for instance). We serve thousands of people, some of whom have deep pockets some of whom don’t know where they’ll find their next meal. Parks and parks facilities and beloved and the classic government service – a community “good” not expected to make a profit. The problem is we can’t continue running the system at the subsidy levels we have now. DPR has been hit hard in the past couple of budget cycles. We’ve cut budgets, raised fees and demanded more revenue be generated out of community centers and boating facilities. While DPR receives a charter-mandated level of minimum funding that level is nowhere near the cost of running the system we have now. Additionally, you can find plenty of people who believe we short-change ourselves via less-than-regular maintenance of our active park spaces. We can raise fees only so far before we lose the ability to attract the kids and adults our ballfields, courts and community centers should serve.

City parks should be beautiful and well maintained. Community center activities should be diverse in content, co-determined with the community, and accessible to anyone regardless of income. Facilities should be spread through the city with regard to great transit, proximity to density and with regard to social equity. The city should continue to partner with the Associated Recreation Council to run programming and should be more aggressive about finding other programming partners; groups that can fill our community centers, pools, fields and courts during the days and evenings to generate some additional earned income. We should also work closely with ARC, the Parks Foundation and others on additional ways to under-write the costs incurred when low-income kids sign up for swimming, the computer lab, tennis, rowing, etc. Perhaps an endowment to under-write partial costs for kids who fall under a defined family income threshold.

5) What is Seattle’s role in education and public transportation given how important they are to the city, but that other agencies are tasked with them?

High quality public schools and safe, efficient, comfortable transit are key if we are to be successful in our urban development goals. While City government directly controls neither of these areas we can and do play a significant role in shaping the success of both systems in Seattle. With both education and transportation Seattle’s opportunities can be found in setting clear expectations, demanding accountability, and furthering our goals through partnership.

In terms of expectations, I have been a part of ongoing work with the Seattle Scholl Board about our mutual interest in high performing neighborhood schools. We have a long way to go in the south half of the city, but I have lead conversations in Rainier Beach and other neighborhoods about what we want from our neighborhood schools. With regard to Metro, we have a transit plan (currently be revised) that sets a course for “frequent” transit headways of 10 minutes. The Transit Master Plan serves as a clear statement of expectations for a transit plan in the city (involving both Metro and Sound Transit) that supports our city and regional growth goals.

With regard to demanding accountability, I am using the commitment to neighborhood schools, the school “report cards,” and school visits as a way to track progress on improvement. We’re also using the outcome requirements attached to funding from the Families & Education Levy as a way to produce accountability. In the transit realm, the city has flexed accountability muscles after snowstorm shutdowns and, in less crisis fueled times, in determining where Rapid Ride routes should run. I’ll put in a plug for a colleague – Councilmember Tom Rasmussen. Tom has done a terrific job building relationships and trust with electeds from other cities and King County on the Regional Transit Committee and the Transit Task Force. Through this work we have built a new agreement regarding Metro service allocations with better outcomes (at least theoretically) for Seattle.

Partnership plays out on an every-day level and through special efforts like the Families & Education Levy renewal proposal before voters this fall, Transit Now (passed by voters in 2006) and the maintenance and mobility car tabs proposal slated for this fall. These are supplemental dollars earmarked for specific objectives via the schools or Metro. The funding helps Seattle Public Schools and Metro with system objectives and ensures Seattle gets specific services and outcomes important to our goals. On a regular basis I work in partnership with Seattle Public Schools on facilities and neighborhood development issues that come up related to the Council’s Committee on the Built Environment, the committee I chair. I look for opportunities to make facilities changes logical and predictable for the school system and the community, and I look for opportunities to weave school system planning into our work planning for new development in urban villages.

– Always, always, always check the ellipses when a conservative quotes something to make a point (in fact, it’s a good idea in general).

– The Trib is right about the pain budget cuts in the special session can cause. But still, not a word about raising taxes.

– Reading Unnecessary Journalism Phrases is going to waste a lot of my time.

– I don’t stay up at night worrying if Rick Santorum is a jackass.

– Does anyone know anything about Michael Baumgartner?

– Anyone seen Saving Aimee?

Last week’s contest was won by Right Stuff. He didn’t get the exact location, but he was within a few blocks and he guessed correctly that it was a Solyndra building in Fremont, CA.

This week’s contest is a random location somewhere in the world, good luck!

A special NYPD Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna edition of HA Bible Study:

Exodus 21:24
An eye for an eye

Discuss.

Pap: Climate change leading to food shortages.

Olbermann with Valerie Plame Wilson on ridding the world of nuclear weapons:

Comcast Newsmakers interviews Gov. Christine Gregoire.

Thom: The Good, the Bad and the Very, Very Ugly.

CNN’s Dana Loesch triumphs over the Toe Sucker and Aqua Buddha to snatch the title of Worst Person in the World.

Wall Street Occupied:

• Sam Seder: Really, the Occupy Wall Street message couldn’t be clearer.
• Alyona’s Tool Time: Michael Bloomberg.
• Olbermann with Matt Taibbi on the evolution of the Occupy Wall Street protests.
• Jon on Occupy Wall Street.
• Young Turks: Pepper spraying cop.
• O’Donnell: Unprovoked brutality on Wall Street.
• Maddow: Why occupy Wall Street?
• Sam Seder: Interviewing the occupiers.
• Aloyna’s Fireside Chat on Occupy Wall Street.
• Thom: News from Wall Street.
• Sam Seder: Media ignore the Occupation but cover Teabagger meeting at Dennys.
• Olbermann: DA investigation of the pepper spraying.
• Thom: Occupy Wall Street—who will win?
• Young Turks: Michael Moore’s street speech.
• Olbermann with Sam Seder on the protests.

Alyona’s Tool Time: Bill-O and his NPR hypocrisy.

Maddow: The French 75.

Mark Fiore: TEMA.

Racism in America:

• Thom: The College Republican’s “race-based” bake sale?.
• Young Turks: Pat Robertson talks racism.
• Herman Cain thinks Black folks are brainwashed.
• Ed with some major Psychotalk from Herman Cain.
• Olbermann with Janeane Garofalo on how “Herb” Caine helps Republicans hide their racism.
• Pap: Teabaggers are still driven by racism.
• Thom: Is racism responsible for infant mortality in the U.S.?
• Racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz. is Worst Person in the World.

Greenman: NASA on Arctic sea ice.

Capitol Hostage Situation:

• Newsy: The Onion tweets fake capitol hostage situation.
• ONN: Video from inside the congressional hostage situation.

Ed with Pap and Joe Madison: At last, Obama fights back.

Olbermann and Markos Moulitsas on Roger Ailes’ attempt at rebranding Fox.

Thom gives Teabaggers a constitutional lesson.

Jon does Bill-O.

Maddow: Unalienable rights are not subject to a vote.

Comcast Newsmakers interviews Peter Goldmark.

The G.O.P. Primary Asylum:

• O’Donnell: GOP Debate gives comedians material
• Ann Telnaes: Newt proposes pro-market health care.
• Young Turks: God, the Bible, evolution and Newt.
• Read Rick Perry’s lips (via Slog):
• Young Turks: Rick Perry backs off Immigrant stance.
• Ann Telnaes: The GOP balloon ride .
• Stephen on Rick’s lousy debate performance.
• Stephen: Perry’s heartless gaffe and education for immigrants.
• Young Turks: Christie presidency unlikely for 2012.
• Alyona’s Happy Hour: Is Christie too fat?
• Ed and Pap: Is Chris Christie healthy enough to run for president?
• Newsy: Is Chris Christie too fat to be Prez?
• Sharpton: Inside Governor Chris Christie’s uncouth bullying tactics.
• Bachmann babbles something about Obama and the Arab spring.
• Ed with some major psychotalk from Michele Bachmann.
• Actual Audio: Santorum gets all frothy over gay soldiers.
• Jon and Larry Wilmore on Herman Cain’s surprise Florida straw poll win.
• Newsy: Rudy thinks about it.
• Maddow: Former McCain Palin staffers discourage a Palin 2012 run.
• O’Donnell: Is Palin on thin ice with FAUX News?
• The Oddest Couple:

White House: West Wing Week.

Thom with more Good, Bad, and Very, Very Ugly.

O’Donnell: Lynch-mob Republicans can’t get enough of the ‘death penalty’ and misery of others.

Rep. Allen West (R-FL) beats a couple of other kooks for title of Worst Person in the World.

Thom: Time for a revolution?

Pap: Time for Democrats to fight.

Stephen ingests Karl Rove’s PAC fundraising secrets.

Greenman: The 2011 Arctic ice minimum.

ONN: Who is/are the worst liars in D.C.?

Thom: Even more Good, Bad, and Very, Very Ugly.

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

So what we have here is Rob McKenna participating in the multi-state lawsuit, now fully aware that the goal of the lawsuit is to strike down the entire law.

If McKenna is successful, Washington state gets credit for the downfall of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Ouch! Like that sooooooo represents our state. But that’s nuttin’.

Just for shits and giggles, I decided to look up the immediate effects should the lawsuit succeed in killing the law—the things that would affect hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Washingtonians.

Here’s what I found:

• Strips small businesses of the 35% tax credit (50% beginning in 2014) provided to make employee coverage more affordable.
• Eliminate for early retirees the temporary re-insurance program (pending the full development of insurance exchanges).
• Eliminate consumer protections and the external review process for appealing insurance company coverage determinations or claims.
• End the prohibition on recissions—that is, insurance companies will, once again, be allowed to drop sick people from coverage.
• End the prohibition on insurance companies denying coverage to children (and, in 2014, everyone) with pre-existing conditions
• Eliminate caps—once again allow insurance companies to place lifetime caps on coverage.
• End prohibition of certain annual coverage limits—some are in effect right now but all such restrictions will be eliminated by 2014.
• Re-open the Medicare part D “donut hole” by eliminating the 50% discount on brand name drugs for those in the donut hole, and put a halt to the gradual elimination of the donut hole by 2020.
• Reinstate co-payments for preventive care and, under medicare, once again allow preventive care to be included in deductibles.
• Eliminate funding for state consumer assistance programs that help folks navigating the health care insurance process.
• Eliminate funding for resources and new screening procedures that reduce fraud and waste in Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP.
• Eliminate the option for young adults to remain on their parents’ insurance plan until they turn 26.

That is a selection of the tangible benefits that have already fully or partially kicked in under the law.

It will be painful…particularly to our state’s youngest and oldest citizens.

There are many more benefits to come. Some are extremely important, like getting insurance for the estimated 50 million uninsured Americans.

And then there is the fiscal effects, to the tune of quashing the $210 billion in deficit reduction over the next 10 years, and an estimated $1 trillion over the next 20 years.

Shit…with gubernatorial wannabes like McKenna…who needs al Qaeda?

– I love the short plays in WordPress.

– at least a few people who will stand outside of the right buildings and yell (h/t)

– Anyone have any idea if the display coming to the bus stop at 3rd and Pike is going to be a one off there, or if there are more planned around town?

– As someone who really likes cartoons on the web, this is a problem.

– All the other states are doing it.

– I’m not a fan of the wild card, but after the last day of the regular season, well I still don’t like it, but it did produce this year.

From earlier this year:

A botched gun-trafficking investigation that allowed suspected criminals to purchase roughly 2,000 firearms — many which later crossed the border into Mexico — came under renewed criticism on Tuesday as federal officials responsible for implementing and overseeing the operation testified before Congress.

The hearing came just hours after the release of a joint House and Senate report providing new details on the investigation, code-named “Operation Fast and Furious.” According to the report, at least 122 guns tied to the operation have been found by Mexican authorities at crime scenes or were recovered during police action against drug cartels.

The operation was “a perfect storm of idiocy,” Carlos Canino, a senior ATF agent in Mexico, said in the report. Other current and former ATF agents testified at the hearing that the operation violated basic agency protocols.

The “Fast and Furious” operation first ignited controversy in March after whistleblowers within the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms revealed to the media and members of Congress that a gun tied to the program had been found last December among a cache of weapons at the murder scene of a Border Patrol agent.

From yesterday:

Firearms dealers in states that allow medical marijuana can’t sell guns or ammunition to registered users of the drug, a policy that marijuana and gun-rights groups say denies Second Amendment rights to individuals who are following state law.

Federal law already makes it illegal for someone to possess a gun if he or she is “an unlawful user of, or addicted to” marijuana or other controlled substances. A Sept. 21 letter from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, issued in response to numerous inquiries from gun dealers, clarifies that medical marijuana patients are included in that definition.

So let me get this straight. Gun sales to people who are widely expected to use those guns to kill people are ok (as long as the ATF thinks that there’s a chance that it could help them bring down Mexico’s drug trafficking organizations), but gun sales to people who have permission from their doctor to use a medicinal plant that makes you more passive are not.

Every time I think members of our government have managed to do the dumbest thing possible, they always top it.

Professional writer who writes for a living at the Tacoma News Tribune, Cheryl Tucker, sure is pleased to use “ironic” wrongly. From her post about how she feels that it’s ironic that Tacoma Teachers want to get paid, “(And I’m sure some teacher will write in to tell me that I’m misusing “irony.” Go tell it to Alanis Morrisette).”

First, super current. Great job keeping up with the zeitgeist. Second, I’m going to have to take a pass on mocking the obvious disdain for teachers: I could just do posts making fun of editorial writers’ disdain for teachers, but there are only so many jokes, and they would quickly get as stale as an Alanis Morrisette joke in 2011.

All that aside, it’s the calling things ironic at all that bugs me. Not so much for the getting it wrong, but that it’s completely unnecessary. If you just describe the thing you think is ironic, and then it turns out not to be ironic, you’ve told an interesting (hopefully) story, and you don’t look the fool. If your story turned out to be ironic, well, congrats on telling a story where irony was a factor, that didn’t need to spell it out for your audience. I mean it’s not like when Romeo is killing himself at the end of the play that he says, “it sure would be ironic if Juliet was still alive” because fuck that, it would be terrible. I guess what I’m saying is why can’t everyone on the Internet write as well as the Bard?

But I’m not just here to criticize meta uses of literary devices and references from the early 1990’s. I’m also here to help. So here’s a list of things you might say instead of “ironic” when you still feel the need to describe a thing, but perhaps you’d like to do so a bit more accurately or interestingly:

• Interesting
• Coincidental
• Poetic justice*
• Hypocritical
• Silly
• Odd
• Amusing
• Strange
• Funny (ha ha)
• Funny (the other kind)

[Read more…]

Rob “Cupcake” McKenna has lost control of the multi-state lawsuit against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

McKenna made the unilateral decision to join the lawsuit, against the will of the voters, the Governor, and the state legislature. He then repeatedly reassured us all that the aim of the lawsuit is only to overturn the “individual mandate” while keeping the rest of the law intact:

When Attorney General Rob McKenna signed on to the partisan Republican lawsuit challenging the federal Health Care Reform law, he claimed that he was not trying to overturn or repeal the entire law, only part of it.

In an interview with BJ Shea on KISW, McKenna stated, “We don’t think we can stop this entire bill, we don’t think we can or that we should.”

In a video on his official website, McKenna stated, “There are two provisions that are focused on in this lawsuit. None of the thousands of other provisions in the law are affected because we are just addressing these two provisions. . . . . the individual health insurance mandate. . . .and Medicaid.”

In an interview with KING 5 News, McKenna stated, “We are not challenging the policy, that is not our role.”

McKenna’s official website reads, “This suit will not ‘overturn’ or ‘repeal’ the new health care reform legislation. In fact, this lawsuit will not affect most provisions in this 2,400-page bill.”

Has McKenna been lying to us all along? Or…maybe he just didn’t know what the fuck he was doing by joining the lawsuit. Because the principles of the lawsuit see a larger purpose:

“This health-care law is an affront on Americans’ individual liberty,” said Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who asked the high court to strike down the entire law, not just its mandate that all Americans have health insurance. […]

Bondi’s request to strike down the entire law was at odds with McKenna’s statements when he made Washington state a plaintiff in the case last year.

McKenna, a Republican candidate for governor in 2012, said his goal in joining the lawsuit was not to strike down the entire law, just the provisions he argues are unconstitutional — chiefly the mandate. But the plaintiffs’ legal briefs since then repeatedly have sought to scrap the entire law.

McKenna’s office said he has been overruled on that point by his co-plaintiffs.

So, whether he initially lied or was just too fucking stupid or incurious enough to know what he was signing up for, the one thing we know: McKenna hasn’t been influential enough to convince his fellow AGs to limit the scope to what he promised us.

McKenna should now do the right thing and pull out of the lawsuit.

Nina Shapiro’s profile of former U.S. Attorney John McKay is long, but a very interesting read. As I’ve written about a few times here, McKay has undergone a big transformation from Republican U.S. Attorney to an outspoken advocate of marijuana legalization and other issues important to civil libertarians. It’s very reminiscent of former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr’s transformation earlier in the decade.

Despite my reservations about the New Approach Washington initiative, I’m glad to see McKay lending his voice to the effort to end marijuana prohibition. It’s rare that people make these kinds of radical political changes after a long career, and Shapiro goes back through the last decade to recount the history of how McKay made that journey. Much of it is a tale we’re very familiar with, as the Bush Administration’s DOJ became politicized and expected Bush-appointed U.S. Attorneys to be political actors.

More and more Seattle folks are biking to work. From Seattle Bike Blog:

Seattle rose to the number two spot among major US cities in terms of the number of people commuting to work by bike in 2010. The percentage of people using a bicycle as their primary mode of getting to work in Seattle increased 22 percent between 2009 and 2010, according to the annual American Communities Survey conducted by the US Census.

This data confirms the city’s 2010 downtown bike commute count, which measured an increase of 21.4 percent in the same time period.

Between 2005 and 2010, the percentage of people commuting by bike in Seattle increased 57 percent. Between 2000 and 2010, it increased 93 percent.

On top of what it says about the infrastructure improvements in the last decade or so, I think there is a cultural aspect that gets lost in the war on cars nonsense. And that’s that most Seattle drivers are perfectly willing to share the road with bikes.

Yes, there are asshole drivers. Yes, the recent spate of bicyclist deaths has been tragic. Yes, several media outlets have invested themselves in a story of a clash between driving and riding a bike. Yes, I’ve read the comment threads whenever there’s a bike story in the paper. But for the most part, drivers are willing to give you a bit of room and to slow down if they can’t. Speaking personally, I’ve had pleasant chats with people in cars with the windows down who just started talking to me when we were both stuck at red lights. Probably more than people yelling at me or honking their horns.

And while I don’t have any hard data, lots of Seattle drivers also ride bikes. There’s certanily some self interest for me when I’m driving and I see a bike. On top of wanting to make sure not to hit the person, I also feel that I’d better give room and slow down, etc. to put kindness to bicyclists out into the world.