The WA Post has back to back stories in my digest this morning that I found interesting. In the first story, the Government Accountability Office found that the Republican’s budget showdown over the debt limit coast the county 1.3 billion dollars last year. That is money that we could have used somewhere else in my…

Thurston County will get to vote to authorize the Public Utility District to expand into electricity in November. It is on the ballot, friends. We did it. No paid signature gatherers, just volunteers knocking on doors. Let’s talk about Puget Sound Energy for a moment. It is not a Puget Sound based company despite the…

Washington Post carries story this morning about pressure from both sides to have Romney release more tax returns. I don’t think he is going to do it. I think he is going to try to tough it out and claim principled stand that he has shared enough personal information. That would fly better if his…

I came across this article this morning and I wanted to share some thoughts about sympathy and sexual orientation. Social darwinism is probably better understood and more influential than the complexities of Darwin’s natural selection and evolution, even though there is good reason to spend time trying to understand Darwin’s ideas and little reason to…

Washington Post has a story on tax rates. I know that a lot of people will think that the low tax rates are a good thing, and they may be in a few ways, but these low tax rates translate into austerity political decisions, cuts in services, cuts to environmental protection, cuts to education, cuts…

I have noticed that the foolish and/or dishonest folks who remain interested or reimbursed to disseminate misleading information about anthropogenic global warming are repeating the story about the fall in US CO2 emissions. That misleading presentation is being framed as evidence that the burning of fossil fuels and emission of C02 is not a real…

The economy is a financial shadow of the state of the physical world. Economics is simply one way of measuring certain activity here on a small planet on a spiral arm of a somewhat non-descript galaxy in the known universe. There are lots of planets, rocks, planetoids, stars, dust motes in the universe that appear…

The campaign to get the Thurston County Public Power Initiative on the ballot is rumored to have collected more than 11K signatures!   It should be assumed that there are hundreds of invalid, duplicate signatures, so the campaign continues.  We need to round up a couple thousand more signatures to make sure that the public power…

Caught this on Juan Cole’s Informed Comment this morning.

It’s hard to know what to do in the current political environmental. Scanned a piece today on Climate and Capitalism website. This piece was a reaction to a favorable review of Derrick Jensen’s book Deep Green Resistance that ran on Canadian Dimension. Jensen seems to catch a lot of reactionary ink to his proposals to…