Washington Liberals

Backbone participated in five of the seven coal train scoping hearings across the state, bringing imagery, helping promote, and generally providing strong visual and messaging support to the effort to defeat this insane/foolish/greedy/ridiculous proposal in the court of public opinion.. These photos are from our effort at the final hearing in Seattle. It has been…

Given the decision of the Washington State Supreme Court in the McCleary case, which highlighted Washington’s failure to adequately fund education, the new legislature and Governor will soon be looking for new revenue to meet the state’s financial obligation to basic education. Educational reforms alone will require at least $1 billion in new public revenue in the 2013-15…

Julia Chase and others have started a petition to keep progressive radio on the air in the Pacific Northwest.  See The attack on progressive radio in the Pacific Northwest. They contacted progressive talk host Norman Goldman, who responded as follows (and who asked that his words be shared with others): What i would like to…

Actually, we’re not coming to get your guns, unless you have something like an assault weapon. We just want to make it harder for dangerous people to massacre innocents, and that just requires some reasonable background checks on buyers and limits on the types of guns that are available. People say that gun control wouldn’t…

Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan says in a Wall Street Journal essay: “Republicans are now in the habit of editing their views, and they’ve been in it for 10 years. The Bush White House suppressed dissent; talk-radio stars functioned as enforcers; the angrier parts of the base, on the Internet, attempted to silence critical thinkers.…

I attended the coal hearing at the Washington State Convention Center Thursday, December 13th, along with about 3,500 other people.  Seattle Mayor McGinn spoke in opposition to granting a permit for coal exports from Bellingham, followed by representatives from the Lummi, Swinomish and Tulalip tribes who also spoke eloquently against the proposed coal terminal.  I…

See Resolution condemning the actions of Senators Rodney Tom and Tim Sheldon and Brendan William’s frank analysis of the Rodney Tom debacle, and the Dems’ dilemma

HSBC, a London-based bank, is huge. How huge? According to Forbes, it’s the 3rd largest bank (the NY Times rates it 5th), and the 6th largest public company in the world. Per Wikipedia, it was formed in 1991 when the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation decided to buy Midland Bank. This week, HSBC agreed to…

This post is part of the research project: Northwest Coal Exports and was originally published at Sightline Daily. If ever an industry needed good PR, it’s coal. The industry can’t hope to promote its own coal export schemes in the Northwest so instead it buys support from local consulting and PR firms willing to do coal’s…

[There are several similar resolution in the works.] At the December 12, 2012 membership meeting, the 32nd Legislative District Democrats unanimously passed a resolution condemning the actions of Senators Rodney Tom and Tim Sheldon. In choosing to caucus with the Senate Republicans, Senators Tom and Sheldon have chosen to ignore the will of the voters,…