Today at noon, about a hundred people showed up at a rally in Seattle at City Hall Park in support of funding for King County Metro Transit. “Where’s The Funding?”, they shouted. The rally was organized by the Transit Riders Union. They were collecting grievances and stories about transit and placing them into the “grievance…
This evening I attended a viewing of the film Shift Change. “It tells the little known stories of employee owned businesses that compete successfully in today’s economy while providing secure, dignified jobs in democratic workplaces.” The filmmakers, Mark Dworkin and Melissa Young, were present to answer questions. They live in the Renton area, I believe….
Democratic Representatives Adam Smith, Derek Kilmer, Rick Larsen, and Dennis Heck voted with 134 Republicans to help defeat the Amash Amendment to shutter the NSA’s surveillance function. (Boo!) Jim McDermott and Suzan DeBene voted FOR the amendment. (Hurray!)  “A majority of Democrats, 111, voted for Amash’s amendment despite the full court press while 83…
Control of the state Senate hangs in the balance, depending on the outcome of a special election in the 26th LD. On one side is Democrat Nathan Schlicher, who was selected early this year to temporarily replace Derek Kilmer, after Kilmer left the state Senate half way through his four year term to serve in…
I read Lee Kuan Yew: The Grandmaster’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World. You might call Yew a benevolent dictator. There’s no freedom of the press in Singapore, and people who criticized him usually ended up broke or in jail. But Yew is considered a genius, for in one generation he turned…
(courtesy of Carol Davidek-Waller) We’re sending our money to Washington, D.C. and Wall Street, but we have the power to bring it back. “How do I protect my own assets from the corruption. So I started my own investment advisory company” and financial software firm. The aim is to decentralize power and money via the…
King County Executive Dow Constantine spoke to the 41st LD Democrats Wednesday night. He said that King County is the 13th largest county in the country. It has a population of over 2,000,000 people, making it more populous than 13 or 14 states (each of which has two US senators). King County accounts for about…
The Washington Alliance for Gun Responsibility announced today that a judge gave final approval to the language of their ballot initiative, I-594, which will establish background checks for gun purchases. Gun rights groups had litigated to change the wording of the initiative to something more favorable. The original proposed wording of the ballot initiative was…
Representatives Rick Larsen and Jim McDermott have signed the Ciccline letter “Expressing the sense of the Congress that the Chained Consumer Price Index should not be used to calculate cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security benefits.” And Rep. McDermott has signed several other letters in support of Social Security (see table below). But no Washington State…
The editorials and cartoons of the local newspaper, the Bellevue Reporter, almost always have an anti-government and anti-taxation message. During the 2010 election cycle, when the high earner’s income tax initiative I-1098 was on the ballot, they published a cartoon depicting government as a fat pig. In response to one of their recent anti-government editorials…