(Yes, I’m shamelessly linking a lot, since I somehow became the number one hit for this on search engines, and Junkbucket is awesome so I will use my bizarre and trivial search engine powers for good rather than evil. So there.)

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?

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.

• 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.

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:

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 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.

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.

§ 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.

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.