“I’ve never been so fired up for a campaign in my life,” said Pridemore, D-Vancouver, who is serving his second term in the state Senate. “It’s 320 days to Election Day, and the clock has started.”
Pridemore said he has assembled a strong campaign team and will begin raising money immediately, even as he prepares for a grueling 60-day legislative session in January.
So there you have it.
Should be a fun race to watch!
Completely Off Topic:
Just got back from Paine Field where I saw the 787 first flight takeoff. I didn’t have a decent camera with me. Boeing usually prohibits cameras on it’s property (unless you have a camera permit), so I didn’t take one out of habit. But Boeing simply ignored the ban today, just about everyone had a camera or cell-phone camera today, and was using it. Some friends have promised to send me there pictures, but there are already lots of pictures available online.
Boeing used to be rather low-key on first flights, because everyone in the aviation industry knows that there can be a thousand reasons why a first flight might be delayed, for a few minutes, a few hours, or even a couple of days, none of them serious. But the news media might interpret such a delay as being a serious problem, and report it as such. That’s why Boeing’s prior policy has been to not give much publicity to first flights – until after they happen.
But this time Boeing executives made it into a big P.R. event, inviting customer VIPs. I presume Boeing executives were in attendence (a Boeing BBJ flew in yesterday afternoon), so they can talk with customers, smile, give a news conference, and otherwise take credit for building the airplane before they fly back to Chicago where will they stay until first customer delivery when they will repeat the exercise.
I also got a tour of a new 777-300 ER for a foreign carrier. It’s got four classes of seats – economy, super-economy, business, and first class.
The first-class seats are really cubicles with fully reclining seats (they become a bed) and large video screens. Business-class seats are a smaller version, and don’t recline all the way into beds. The “super economy” seats are the equivilent of first class on U.S. airlines. On this plane, the business-class seats took up 2/3rds of the aircraft.
U.S. carriers have been itching to get into the new international terminal at Haneda airport (near downtown Tokyo), which was a primary motivation for the “Open Skies” agreement recently signed. How well do you think the U.S. carriers are going to do in competition with foreign carriers, against this sort of configuration flying the same routes? U.S. carriers keep thinking that if the economy eventually improves, the MIGHT get around to returning to levels of passenger service last enjoyed by passengers in the early 1970’s.
In the meantime, the foreign carriers are going to be skimming the creme off the top of the market, with business and wealthy flyers paying a bit more to fly in comfort, with enough polite flight attendents and gate agents who have time to deal with each passenger. The U.S. carriers will be left with the budget passengers who are willing to tolerate a 10-hour flight in crammed seats with overworked flight attendents and getting six mini-pretzels and 1/3 of a can of pop for a meal.