Joe Szilagyi

Warning: if you’re not from Seattle you won’t care about this. Even if you are, you probably won’t.

I wrote about who I wanted to win the local Seattle elections this year and how I did on my predictions–Six for six!–before. But if you want some evidence of why one of them was a seriously good pick, read this article on The Stranger about the supposed fallout from the new City Attorney, Pete Holmes, cleaning house. The voters spoke. These professionals need to deal with it and move the on. If some of these city attorneys did get replaced for their parts in unpopular actions that voters rejected, that’s how the political cookie unfortunately crumbles. The lesson is that if you do stuff that basically pisses off a politically active base of voters, and they vote your boss out, odds are you’ve been voted out as well.

A complete posting of the letter is here, which is even funnier. One of the complaints about Holmes:

The Draconian use of fear and subterfuge to try to pacify this Division will not make one who is unqualified an effective leader.

Not unlike how the ‘old’ City Attorney governance model was to use Draconian fear against the Seattle nightlife culture?

It looks like even our geographically cloistered corner of the nation isn’t immune to the fun times that is the Tea Bagging political movement. You have to read these completely demented bills Republicans have in the first two days of our new session introduced to the Washington State legislature. Snippets of a complete lack of understanding of how things like states’ rights, the nature of the US Federal government, and the very existence of the United States exists. All because (as this site points out) local Republicans are scared the Tea Baggers may target them next for political termination for not being completely raving lunatic anti-government ultra-Right fundamentalists.

Replace Federal paper currency in Washington with gold and silver coins:

…restore gold and silver money in accordance with the Constitution, then phasing out the Federal Reserve System and its inflationary paper money, the Federal Reserve Note.

And my favorite, get into a shooting war (?) with the Federal government if they try to take and use any Federal tax funds taken from Washingtonians:

…all federal taxes be remitted to the state, and held in escrow, and includes the rather startling threat that any action by the feds against a WA citizen for complying with the act (you know, like not paying the IRS your taxes) would be considered a “hostile and unconstitutional action against Washington state and its citizens,” against which the state would take “all necessary measures.”

Yes, let’s start a second Civil War. Sounds like a brilliant plan.

In no real or specific order, these are probably my favorite local Seattle institutions and places, since we’ve moved out here in 2005.

• Best new bookstore: Elliot Bay Book Company in Pioneer Square. All wood, all creaky floors, all nice helpful stuff. It’s scale is absurd, too, for an independent book store.
• Best used bookstore: Twice Sold Tales (the Capitol Hill one, not the one in the University District, but that one is good too). Inexpensive, great selection, and the place is lined with sleepy, bored, and surly cats.
• Best coffee shop: Seattle Coffee Works at the Market. Their stuff is just the best, sweetest coffee. Runner up: Espresso Vivace’s little sidewalk bar on Broadway.
• Best food shopping: Pike Place Market. Duh.
• Best grocery store: Safeway, hands down.
• Best park: I really like Volunteer Park, but I have to go with Alki Beach in West Seattle. Rocky expanse of water, bitterly cold and windy in the winter–it reminds me of home. And one of the best views of the downtown Seattle skyline. Nail in the coffin: when the sun sets over the Olympic Mountains to the west, around 10pm in the summertime, Alki is hands down the best place to watch it. On a clear day, the sun ignites the whole sky with what I’ve been told (who knows if it’s scientifically accurate?) remaining particulates from the Mount St. Helen’s eruption. It looks like the sky is on fire, and the mountains as if someone ripped a slice out of the sky into blackness. Gorgeous.
  

  View of the Space Needle from Alki Beach.

• Best museum: The Museum of Flight at Boeing Field. Fine arts? Modern art? Sculptures on the waterfront? Yeah, sure. But do you have a stealth fighter docked in your museum? I didn’t think so.
• Best movie theater: Cinerama on 4th Avenue. Fantastic sound system. Fantastic screen. Gigantic, enormous screen, bordering Imax levels. They show old films sometimes–Lawrence of Arabia is a regular there in the off seasons from the big blockbuster releases. Sit in the balcony, dead center, about 4-5 rows up for the magical sweet spot.
• Best comic book store: Golden Age Collectables. It’s a retail Disneyland for geeks and nerds in every way.
• Best way to get around: King County Metro bus service. To be honest, it’s almost like having Boston’s train lines just… everywhere. They even put a lot of their information out in the public, for people to make tools like One Bus Away. This is the reason I do not miss having a car any longer (for a city of our nature, size, and scale, a surprising amount of the population relies heavily on Metro).
• Best cheeseburger: Charlie’s on Broadway. Runner-up: a Dick’s Deluxe, any of their locations. Greasy, vile, perfect.
• Best breakfast: The Athenian Inn at the Market, for their wonderful Hangtown Fry. An omelette with oysters? Yes, please. Even better with liberal hot sauce usage and a Bloody Mary.
• Best place to see a show: The Triple Door, hands down, full stop. Runner up: The Showbox at the Market.
• Best pizza: Pagliacci; Grand Salami Primo. If only a) they delivered before 4pm; b) they weren’t so pricey…
• Best local beer: Pike Place Place Brewery, “Kilt Lifter Ale”.
  

  Nectar of the gods.

Amazing, that it’s been already one year since hatred and improper out-of-state financial carpetbagging by Mormon extremists conned California into rejecting equal civil rights via Proposition 8. The fact that civil rights, or any human rights, are something that can be voted on is a whole other filthy mess that needs to be legally challenged up to our Supreme Court level. At least in Washington state, when the hatred of Referendum 71 was presented–similar to California’s Proposition of hate–our state voters smartly and overwhelming rejected it despite more out-of-state financial carpetbagging by Christian extremists from Oregon and other areas.

The people of Maine were not so fortunate, where it was reported that some Catholic churches conducted secondary collections to help fund anti-gay voting.

Like women’s rights and interracial marriage, delegating the question of equality to the whims of the state level are fundamentally flawed and unethical. Like what happened with abortion in Roe v. Wade in 1973 and the rights of blacks to marry whites in Loving V. Virginia in 1966, I’m thinking this won’t end until someone can challenge it to the Supreme Court. You simply don’t vote on “rights”. The biases of any religion cannot be allowed to affect the lives of all your other citizens who don’t follow that religion, full stop.

It’s gotten so bad now one year later with dangerous religious extremism trying to sway American legal destiny that the Catholic Church announced it would terminate all charity work in our nation’s capital if Washington D.C. legalized gay marriage locally, in revenge.

We’re now getting closer daily to the desires of the far Right for concepts like dominionism and Christian doctrine to be our version of an American Sharia law. Both ideals are patently dangerous, wrong for a secular multi-cultural nation like ours, and frankly evil if imposed on everyone who doesn’t subscribe to those limited precepts. If it happens, our nation is pretty much doomed to become the next Iran.

There were nationwide protests a year ago this weekend, where millions of people opposed the religious hatred and civil rights violations last year in California. These were my photos from the Seattle protests:

In regards to this blog post from four days ago, I just found this in my inbox tonight:

Back in 2007, King County initiated discussions with the federal government’s Department of General Services Administration (GSA), who administers the DOTGOV domains on the Internet, regarding King County’s web address. King County wanted to register the user-friendly address “kingcounty.gov”. Simultaneously, the GSA wanted King County to relinquish the address “metrokc.gov” in order to comply with their web address policies and also due to possible confusion with the city of Kansas City, Missouri. After negotiations, it was agreed that both would occur–King County would receive use of the domain name “kingcounty.gov” and King County would relinquish control of the domain name “metrokc.gov” effective January 31, 2009.

…

We share your concern for effective and consistent service to our citizens. King County’s web site is critical to those services. It was for that reason that King County pursued the “kingcounty.gov” name. In fact, as you can see from the GSA’s policies regarding naming conventions (http://www.dotgov.gov/dnc.aspx#county), GSA policy requires us to have the web address “kingcounty.wa.gov” or “kingcounty-wa.gov”, however, in our negotiations with the GSA, we sought a very simple name to ensure that our citizens receive the benefit of the most logical and easy to remember address possible. It was for the reason of compliance with GSA policy that we surrender the legacy name, and with the impending shut-down of that old address, King County is now in compliance with that federal directive.

There’s a bit more and a tiny bit of interesting metrics on usage of the old name, but that’s the gist of the situation I mentioned.

Absolutely reasonable and absolutely understandable given the situation, but almost completely (near as I can see) unexplained until I fired off a “what is this?” e-mail that also CC’d the King County Executive’s office. From some searching around just now, I can’t easily find any reference to nor mention of the specifics behind this online. That’s the sort of stuff that should be, you know, mentioned to your users and stake holders. King County has a blog–it takes only one quick blog post or alternately a press release to communicate this out.

If they already did message this out back in 2007 or 2008, they didn’t apparently do so again almost a year later (a scale of years, in Internet Standard Time) when they finally flipped the magic switch before the old domain name goes dark for our regional government. An IT department’s job is to over-communicate. It doesn’t take much to do this. Lack of communications from IT is one of my biggest pet peeves professionally. Good on them to explaining it to me in e-mail, but now I wonder if they’ll actually post the reason behind this. At the least, it’s rather interesting for nerds. For everyone else around here, it will give people another reason to grumble about Kansas City and the Midwest. They steal our basketball team, now they steal one of our domain names…

I’ve got 1,870 photos on my Flickr account. I don’t think I’m a great photographer by any stretch. I point, I shoot. Sometimes I muck around with trying to get good lighting, angles, and all that. I can’t quite figure out why Flickr thinks that this photo is my best and most interesting, a long-distance photo I took of a woman’s profile at the Market in August 2008:

I actually think this one, from the same day, is much better. It doesn’t even make Flickr’s Top 20 for my photos, though:

I can never figure out their Interestingness formula.

The group that manages the official King County web sites has apparently retired it’s longstanding metrokc.gov domain to replace it with kingcounty.gov, which is all well and good. It’s a better name, anyway. But what they’ve done is redirect ALL requests for the old host names to a useless dumping ground instead of just aliasing the old names over the new ones. This is what they have done:

Why is this incredibly stupid and improperly done? Say you have any number of bookmarks or embedded tools (say, mobile applications–iPhone or other) that aim at http://tripplanner.metrokc.gov. That now arbitrarily dumps you on http://www.kingcounty.gov/About/metrokc.aspx rather than forward you to the matching URL on the new host on http://tripplanner.kingcounty.gov/. This applies to all of these in the chart above. Who on Earth approved this way to do it? No one just “retires” and kills off a major domain name, let alone one so old and embedded all over who knows where. All you’ve done is now break all prior internet connectivity to various parts of the county’s web infrastructure.

You also did no favors to search engine optimization and Google searches for the county, either.

If you’re in King County please e-mail them at:

http://info.kingcounty.gov/about/contact/default.aspx

To let them know what a bone head move this is.

UPDATE: I’ve been told that the KC “old” domain name previously forwarded to the new one, on a 1:1 URL basis, but that was discontinued as a practice last week. Why would you stop doing that? It makes perfectly logical sense that you do that indefinitely. Unless you wanted to actually repurpose metrokc.gov for some completely separate purpose, which would be odd and pointless, the actual stopping of the forwarding is… odd, pointless, and disruptive to all users of the web site. It needs to be fixed.

…is how I am so far, barring any last minute changes to election results, in the local Washington state and City of Seattle elections. I called and voted:

§ Initiative 1033: Oppose
This was our horrific TABOR anti-taxation extremist mess that would have basically eviscerated all of state and local governments within years; the act of anti-tax wingnuts spitting in society’s eye.

Tonight: I-1033 got it’s ass rightly kicked. Horrible idea.

§ Referendum 71: Support
This was an attempt launched initially by a church in Oregon–OREGON–to undo Washington’s laws that grant legal rights and protections to domestic partnerships, because our state decided to extend those protections to same-sex couples. What the hell gives the churchgoing a right to dictate the legal rules that govern the rest of us? This is 2009, not 1009.

Tonight: R-71 appears to be comfortably passing, as Washington State residents endorse civil rights and reject the rule of a minority of foreign Oregon fanatics.

§ Housing Levy: Support
This was our city-level measure to continue funding for expansion and maintenance of low-income housing.

Tonight: Easy win.

§ King County Executive: Dow Constantine
The guy matches expected and traditional King County morals, standards, ethics, and ideals. His opponent, not exactly.

Tonight: Dow pretty much kicked his opponent’s stealth conservative ass, making months of “ZOMG SKYS FALLING!!!” local polls pointless.

§ Seattle City Attorney: Pete Holmes
His opponent was basically at ideological odds with possibly the entire populace of Seattle, aged 18-35, and often seemed to be proud of the fact. He’s absolutely entitled–he was the elected City Attorney, and I have to say he had a massive pair of brass balls to be that way in this city.

Tonight: Pete Homes is our new City Attorney, now, by a 3-1 voting margin, the last I saw.

§ Seattle Mayor: Mike McGinn
McGinn is up 50%-48% as of tonight, a difference of thousands of votes. This will take several days to shake out.

Tonight: I hate photo finishes. I’m calling it for McGinn.

Edit: Wow, I’m good at math. I posted this as “five for five” at first.

Will you vote, or do you suck? Only you can save America from the forces of evil, and keep our country building toward an ethical future where no citizen is left behind, or without the same protections, freedoms, and rights that every other citizen has.

If you’ve not voted yet, and are in Washington state, click here for my voters guide. It has specific info for City of Seattle voters, as well.

I was thinking about what happened to our Comcast service when we first moved to Seattle, after our recent slight mix ups with their digital conversion. We moved into our new apartment, and mysteriously, Comcast on every channel is just one thing: hard core, and I mean REALLY hard core porn. Specifically, the audio is nothing but flesh slapping flesh for minutes on end combined with screaming. I have no idea what channel it was, and while it was fun for a few jokes and “Wow, is this for real?” moments, we wanted regular TV in the end.

The field lady that come out to investigate–the Comcast dispatcher thought we were kidding–took one look at it, handed me a replacement box to hold a moment while she bent over to undo the old one from Connecticut–and said:

“I don’t see a problem with that,” and couldn’t stop laughing, but neither could we. It was the first time I ever had fun with someone coming out to fix something. Win! The local Seattle staff for them has always been awesome. National, definitely not so much, but with 100,000 employees I suppose it has to be a dice roll there. But local Seattle staff? Always fantastic.

Update: It turns out our recent problem was also caused by the fact that our older Series 2 Tivo apparently doesn’t play nice with the Comcast digital conversions and most “standard” Tivo setups with Comcast converter boxes. That’s now a 3rd or 4th very nice Comcast trip out to our place in as many years. Sadly, no incredibly cute/hot repair lady to chuckle over porn, but this last guy totally looked like Alan Tudyk (Wash from Firefly).

Mainly, this is since S2 Tivos have only internal analog converter cards. We use the infrared controller, that Tivo supplies, so this lets us control the Comcast channel changing via our Tivo remote. We can still control and run the operation, but had lost most of our basic cable because of this. Reformatting the Tivo into old school single tuner mode (AKA, “The Fancy VCR”) let us get the channels back. The problem is that a lot of the magic firepower of Tivo is with the dual tuner, to let you record two things and watch a third, and that is now gone on the S2 models. We ended up biting the bullet and ordering a Series 3 Tivo because of this, and because Tivo had a conveniently priced (and timed!) upgrade offer for old-timer customers like us. All digital, three signals again, and we can stream Netflix directly into the new one.

A letter I just sent off to my state senator and representatives. If you’re in Washington state, I suggest you do likewise.

Hello,

Thank you all for your continued hard work and service.

I came across this news story, about the TVW and Dow Constantine situation. If you are unfamiliar with this, I implore you to read the below news article. This is troubling for all Washington state taxpayers.

Background: TVW is a 501 (c)(3) non-profit corporation, not a government agency. It is governed by an independent board of directors. The majority of TVW’s operating cash – approximately $2.5 million per year – comes from the Legislature via a contract-for-service through the Secretary of State. TVW receives more than $11 million per year in the form of in-kind contributions of channel space from Washington’s cable television industry.

The story about TVW and Down Constantine is here: http://publicola.net/?p=17512

Politics aside, I am troubled by the fact that materials produced by money levied from taxes paid for by Washington citizens are being held in some form of “copyright” claim by a private entity like TVW, or anyone else. Many US state governments (and many foreign governments) are moving toward any materials produced by the government being “free”, in the public domain or under what is known as a Creative Commons license, which is increasingly popular year over year.

For example, this is a list of state-level US agencies and some Federal that issue content under Creative Commons:

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Government_use_of_CC_licenses#United_States

Virginia’s stance is particularly strong:

http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?091+ful+CHAP0791

Washington is a leading state in the fields of technology. We have many prominent tech corporations, innumerable technology start-ups, and are known nationally on this stage. The ideals of ‘open sourcing’ and free licensing are a core component of the ethos of many of these corporations. Our state government should at the least be in compliance with what is becoming nationally standard.

What I would like to request is consideration for a bill like the above Virginia one, but with stronger language, that any goods “produced” with tax funding in a fixed form: written text, visual recordings, maps, videos, audio, anything official to come out of Olympia or local government, state and local laws, a random video the City of Spokane may make, etc. be required to be produced and released under a license such as the Creative Commons licensing that simply requires “Attribution”.

This link details the specifics of the licensing I think would be best:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/

Washington state would still ultimately retain ownership of all the content in this scenario, but by law it should be mandatory that any government-funded (in any way) materials should be freely available, with no copyright restriction beyond attribution. I have zero problem with an entity like TVW turning an ultimate profit from what they’re doing, that originated with state dollars. Anyone is welcome to do that–good for TVW for coming up with a successful model. But they, nor anyone else, should have exclusive claim over content *I* paid for.

What I’m upset about is that any organization then leveraging copyright claims to squash what is protected “fair use” of their materials that were paid for by my tax dollars. In the wake of the Constantine fiasco posted about on Publicola, they are now going after a political blogger for reposting the now notorious video on another “video sharing” service, as detailed at this link: http://horsesass.org/?p=21640

Please help Washington state be a leader in the realm of intellectual property law, and allow us to do better than other states, such as Virginia. Please initiate legislation based on the Virginia example above, but with stronger language than the “preference” tone they set. Make it mandatory, to allow Washington state tax payers to always have free access to what we have already paid for with our taxes.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Joseph Szilagyi

I posted the other day about that Seattle Viaduct (it’s actually the Alaskan Way Viaduct, or I-99). These are a couple of views of it. This is what the Viaduct looks like, eyes toward the south and the SoDo neighborhood of Seattle, with the stadiums in the distance. Taken from Victor Steinbreuk Park, click for bigger views:

Driving north on the viaduct, into downtown, this is what you see:

Bonus points: Want to watch the viaduct come down in a simulated earthquake put together by the Washington Department of Transportation? Click here.

Washington State has a mail-ballot system, so that we can vote ahead of election day by up to three weeks. On the six “big” elections, as it applies to the City of Seattle, this is how I will be voting:

§ Initiative 1033: Oppose

This is the stupidest bit of “citizen governance” that I’ve ever seen in my entire life, or even heard of being proposed. It’s so stupid, in fact, that it’s fooling people into thinking it’s a good thing by hiding it’s stupidity in plain sight. It’s an initiative to lower taxes! Yippee, what could go wrong there? Read on.

The existence of I-1033 is essentially the State of Washington being trolled by far-Right lobbyists from various extreme anti-taxation camps. How bad will the state be if we had I-1033 in place for a decade? Even if the recession breaks 100% on January 1st, 2010, Washington State will be locked into the nightmare financial situation we’re in today. In most ways it’s an end run around calling it outright a Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, a sham concept pushed by the ultra-right and anti-government groups.

As far as I know, the only real “taxpayer bill of rights” that’s somehow become law was in the state of Colorado, and it caused so many problems for them that over several years they legislatively neutered it into irrelevance. The Colorado TABOR, as they call it, has been a disaster for them. We can’t even allow this craziness to get a foothold here, and have to stop the fringe and wealthy barbarians at the gate now. If we don’t, we’d end up cutting all manner of social services, teachers–everything.

This initiative exists to serve no purpose but to save money for the selfish wealthy. I have zero desire to live in a Washington State that looks like a Mad Max film.

Thankfully, it looks like it’s finally starting to show signs of death in polling. Why is I-1033 stupid? Simple: It ties government spending to current levels, and forces the state and local governments to refund collected taxes above those limits–and ties all of this to the level of spending and tax revenues for the preceding year. It basically forces all state and local governments to freeze their taxation at 2009 levels, which are the lowest they’ve been since the GREAT DEPRESSION.

I-1033 lock us into that approximate level of government taxation and revenue for the entire time period that the initiative is law. Even if we need to raise funding for critical reasons, it forces you to cut spending elsewhere. Need more teachers? Cut homeless shelters. Need more homeless shelters? Cut some animal shelters. Need some more animal shelters? Cut some teachers, and so on.

Vote oppose on I-1033.

§ Referendum 71: Support

Besides I-1033, R-71 is the huge war currently rolling, which has even reached the United States Supreme Court before it’s even been fully voted on, and there are a host of side lawsuits already underway. Every last bit is being fought over, up to and including anti-gay groups trying to get Washington State’s campaign finance laws overturned as an “exemption” so that they can flood the state with anonymous (literally!) money for more advertising. From Approve Referendum 71.org, this is why point by point we need Referendum 71 to pass:

Gay and lesbian families need domestic partnership laws to provide essential protections for their families. Committed couples who want to take care of each other should be allowed to visit each other in the hospital, take family and medical leave when a loved one is seriously ill, and have insurance coverage. By voting to Approve Referendum 71, you will vote to ensure that all families are provided the same protections under the law.

Families with children need the protections provided by domestic partnership laws, especially when a parent dies. By voting to Approve Referendum 71, you will vote to ensure that all children are provided the same protections under the law.

Seniors need the protections provided by domestic partnership laws. For seniors, domestic partnerships mean that their hard-earned social security, military or pension benefits are not put at risk. By voting to Approve Referendum 71, you will vote to ensure that all seniors are provided the same protections under the law.

Police officers and firefighters who risk their lives to protect our communities need domestic partnership laws if they are hurt or killed in the line of duty, so that their families are taken care of by their pension or workers’ compensation. By voting to Approve Referendum 71, you will vote to ensure that all of our communities’ first responders’ families are provided the same protections under the law.

Short version: If R-71 isn’t approved, unmarried couples and same-sex couples in Washington State will lose all their legal protections, as R-71 will negate existing state legislation that gives all of these tens of thousands of couples various rights. A vote against R-71 is an endorsement of hatred, bigotry, prejudice, and unchristian ideals of intolerance. Vote support.

§ Housing Levy: Support

This one is simple, and a no-brainer. Vote yes. By voting to support the new extension of the Housing Levy, we keep the annual funding from the city to maintain or expand affordable housing at their current levels, plus inflation. You’d have to hate poor people to oppose this.

§ King County Executive: Dow Constantine

Simple: if you want someone who is in alignment with traditional Seattle and King County values, you want Dow Constantine. If you want someone who’s gone on the record as supporting a woman’s right to choose, you want Dow Constantine. If you want someone that will work to protect existing mass transit, that our region relies on, you want Dow Constantine. If you want someone who is willing to move forward with the voter-approved and voter-endorsed plan to expand light rail over the planned, budgeted, and paid-for East Link corridor over the I-90 bridge, you want Dow Constantine. If you want someone who wasn’t previously affiliated with an extremist right-wing foundation that praises conservatism, and that advocated for the teaching of Christian creationism in public schools, you want Dow Constantine. If you want someone that hasn’t contributed to the election campaign of socially regressive politicians like Mike Huckabee… do you see a trend? Dow Constantine.

§ Seattle City Attorney: Pete Holmes

This is easy.

Read this.

Then read this.

Then read this. And this. And this. And this.

Can you see where this is heading? Voting for Holmes is voting to endorse the existence of a viable nightlife and culture in Seattle. It also means voting for a City Attorney that will put the needs of his constituents and the people of Seattle first. Vote for Pete Holmes.

§ Seattle Mayor: Mike McGinn

McGinn gets my vote over Joe Mallahan for several simple, bullet pointed reasons.

• McGinn has more civics experience than Mallahan.
• McGinn’s campaign has been run by a volunteer, grassroots organization, unlike Mallahan’s paid staff.
• McGinn is always willing to speak directly to the media. Mallahan speaks through the campaign.
• McGinn’s views on the Alaskan Way Viaduct are generally inline with my own. It needs to come down yesterday, not six years from now.
• McGinn came from running a community non-profit. Mallahan came from the corporate world. Little thing, big difference.
• I agree with McGinn’s positions on transportation.
• I agree with McGinn’s positions on the city budget.
• I strongly agree with what he’s saying on land use in Seattle.
• I disagree in various ways with Mallahan’s positions, and don’t feel he’s clueful about what Seattle truly needs.
• As a final game breaker, McGinn has a nice beard.

§ Summary:

I-1033: NO
R-71: YES
Housing levy: YES
King County Exec: Constantine
City Attorney: Holmes
Mayor: McGinn

I just realized this October marks our fourth anniversary in Seattle. Time flies too fast…

L-R: Space Needle, Seattle Center in the summer; 2nd Avenue with what counts as our bad weather during summertime; sunrise in our neighborhood; former King County Exec Ron Sims during a rally; people dancing at Westlake; Julie & Andi under the Needle.

If you’re not from Seattle or Washington State, this may bore you and/or go over your head.

This isn’t surprising, but I hope they litigate the hell out of it. From the article:

Public records from the state Department of Transportation (WSDOT) contain a number of disturbing revelations about the process that led WSDOT to move forward with the deep-bore tunnel on the downtown waterfront early this year.

Emails, internal memos, and other agency documents reveal that WSDOT appointed longtime advocates for the deep-bore tunnel as “experts” on tunnel costs; redistributed tunnel costs to make the price appear lower; and failed to study the surface/transit/I-5 alternative, subbing in a faux four-lane “surface” alternative that included none of the transit and surface-street improvements in the surface/transit/I-5 proposal.

I went on a tour of the Alaskan Way Viaduct that the deep-bore tunnel is slated to replace back in March. I’m wondering now how much of what seemed like a well balanced, reasonable series of explanations and science presented there were in hindsight political spin and out-and-out nonsense. I’ve got photos here, if you’re curious what the viaduct tour is. For people not from here, it’s our waterfront elevated freeway that needs to be desperately replaced, and that has been at the center of endless legal battles on both the state and local level. It’s especially bad if they played dirty politics here, since this deal to build the tunnel had the City of Seattle on the hook for any and all cost overruns. Not the state.

Read the rest: http://publicola.net/?p=16697

I mailed my state representatives in Olympia late night on Monday, October 19th 2009, for the 36th WA state congressional district. It was based on this submission I did concurrently to Slashdot, which was published by Slashdot early in the morning on Tuesday the 20th: Legal War For WA State Sunshine Law

I wrote to them:

Hello,

I am copying all my 36th reps on this. Please introduce something like this. The I-1033 & R-71 obfuscation is a cancer on WA state. Proposed wording:

###

All Initiatives and Referendums in Washington State are public activities for registered voters, and for purposes of open government, transparency, and so that voters can check all such activities to ensure they are not falsely misrepresented, shall be public record.

The State of Washington shall publish the full names, date of voter registration, town or municipality of the registered voter in Washington State, and the date and location in which they signed the initiative or referendum petition, in a public manner on the Internet for all Washington State residents to review.

The data must be accessible to the public on the Internet with no registration required, in both a searchable (“free, online”) web-based format in addition to normal “offline” formats.

All state generated referendum data will be considered a matter of public record for the good of the community and transparency. Actual public elections and votes will remain private, as subject to other laws.

###

Please get this proposed in Olympia as law. Get it passed, and then if the anti-democracy types want to challenge this in court, let them make a stand.

Thank you.

That went to Senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles, Representative Reuven Carlyle, and Representative Mary Lou Dickerson.

I joined in today at the rally at Volunteer Park in Seattle, Washington, which then became a march across Capitol Hill, down Pine Street, and finally into a huge celebration and second rally at Westlake Center. I guestimated about 10,000 people, and am seeing estimates online now of 6,000-9,000. It was amazing, and a strong nationwide civil rights action. There were protests and actions in nearly all major American cities, it looks like. These are my photos:

Click here for a non-slideshow view of them all.

So Andi has me watching reruns of Almost Live!, an comedy show that ran locally in Seattle from the 1980s to the 1990s. It’s got some famous alumni, like Joel McHale, who is now The Soup on E!. This bit kills me. May be not be as funny to folks not living in or from Seattle:

Well, the law of intended consequences from stupid people has escalated things here way, way beyond what is required. Like I only just mentioned yesterday, The Stranger, a local newspaper in Seattle, published some photos of houses with excessive Republican political advertising on them, and put up the addresses so that you could go look at them as well. Matt Drudge got wind of it, and pretty soon half the conservative blogtrollosphere went nuts, to the point where they were publishing the home street addresses of all of The Stranger’s business staff, and the employees began receiving death threats:

After the piece came out on Wednesday morning, there was no violence, no vandalism. There was some debate on The Stranger’s website on Thursday and Friday about the piece’s inclusion of addresses—about the homeowners’ and The Stranger’s right to free speech, and about yards signs as public discourse—and some readers posted addresses of Stranger staffers in comments, because turnabout is fair play. We did not remove those comments and left our own addresses up on our website.

On Saturday morning the piece exploded on right-wing blogs, and death threats were made on our staff.

Since that final post, The Stranger staff hasn’t updated their blog–which is very, very unusual for them as they put out a frighteningly frequent stream of content there. The entire situation sucks, due to the fact that some people (the people that made the calls) have now indeed won in at least a short term via political intimidation to shut down one of the most vocal left-of-center news sources in the United States.

I’m not really that cynical–I’m more sarcastic than anything–but part of me honestly keeps wondering if this is the tip of the iceberg of what could happen in the next four to eight years, if things line up a certain way. What happens if we get Obama in the White House, control of the House and Senate, and try to push through something like the Fairness Doctrine again to balance out the hatemongering out there? Will we see more things like this happening to people that try to stand up to big business and it’s supporters, and the religious right?