Washington Liberals

State Representative Mary Lou Dickerson has written a timely and eloquent post on the Slog: I am Angry. She says that the state budget cuts will make life miserable for many vulnerable people. She describes how the voters repeatedly vote for costly initiatives (for example, to decrease class sizes and raise teacher salaries) but then…

If state legislatures from enough states agree, we can do away with the Electoral College and elect presidents by popular vote — thus avoiding the pernicious concentration of electioneering in swing states, as well as the real risk of electing a president who loses the popular vote. Is the bill even being considered in the…

There’s a burn ban in effect in much of the Puget Sound area (http://www.pscleanair.org/airq/burnban/default.aspx), but many of my neighbors ignore it. Often the air is thick with smoke that burns my eyes. So much for the great environment of the Northwest! See also What is a burn ban? and http://www.pscleanair.org/airq/status.aspx. Video: “Where There’s Smoke, There’s…

Get The Money Out Of Politics Two Days of Action and Education Move To Amend – Occupies The Courts – Friday People Ignited Against Citizens United – Saturday January 20 & 21 in Downtown Seattle (due to snow, the Jan 20 event is canceled) A broad coalition that includes Occupy Seattle, Move to Amend, People…

The Jan 12, 2012 edition of Fortune has this to say about Mitt Romney: The last thing Romney is concerned about is income inequality. “I want to make everybody richer,” he says. “I don’t want to make the few rich poorer and make everyone else poorer at the same time.” It’s an argument that Republicans…

“CNN contributor and Big Journalism editor Dana Loesch cheered on an Internet video reportedly showing U.S. Marines urinating on what appear to be dead Afghans, saying she would ‘drop trou and do it too.’”  Loesch is also editor in chief for one of Andrew Breitbart’s discredited websites. Source.

The following resolution has been submitted for approval to the King County Democrats. Whereas the platforms of the King County Democrats and the Washington State Democrats specifically oppose publicly funded charter schools and vouchers; and Whereas the voters of Washington State have defeated charter measures three times; and Whereas peer-reviewed research shows that 83% of…

David Horsey, who moved from the Seattle P-I to the LA Times at the beginning of this year, is getting high profile notice.  His cartoon and article about Limbaugh freaks as Romney lays claim to Obama’s bailout was shown at the very top of the list of articles at http://news.google.com. Horsey is intelligent and progressive.  …

(watch on YouTube)

We need transcendent, transformative politics in this country and the world, but the mainstream paradigm remains a struggle between established power bases – one, a social democrat model as epitomized in Scandinavian models and the other, a Thatcher/Reagan model of social darwinism wearing a mantle of trickle down, supply-side economics. There is no question that…