[Edited and extended on June 15, 2018] On Monday, June 11, I went to the Bellevue City Council hearing about the proposed Eastgate homeless shelter. About seventy people had signed up to speak (three minutes each). The first pair of speakers were Betsy Hummer and Stephanie Walter from the East Bellevue Community Council. They reported…
A friend emailed me: On my driveway today was a ziplock bag with a melted Snickers bar and a leaflet that says, “KEEP AMERICA AMERICAN. REPORT ANY AND ALL ILLEGAL ALIENS THEY ARE NOT IMMIGRANTS THEY ARE CRIMINALS CALL 1-866-DHS-2ICE. BLOODANDSOIL.ORG Honestly, I am shaking and thoroughly disgusted that fascists are at work here. The…
FactChecking Trump’s Nashville Rally
If taxes on corporations kill jobs, as opponents of Seattle’s head tax claim, shouldn’t we tax only the middle class? 🙂 After all, the rich will just take their money and invest it elsewhere — in other states or, perhaps, the Cayman Islands. Indeed, tax avoidance is a national and international problem and is a…
On Thursday, May 18 I attended “The Difference a Home Makes: A Dialogue about Homelessness and Housing on the Eastside” at the First Congregational Church in Bellevue. The church donated the use of their attractive facilities for the meeting. (See also Report on the Mercer Island forum on homelessness of May 15, 2018.) The meeting…
On Tuesday night several dozen people attended a homelessness forum at the Jewish Community Center of Mercer Island. The forum was arranged by Clarity Bellevue, which has been involved in the debate about plans to build a low-barrier homeless shelter in the Eastgate area of Bellevue. (Clarity Bellevue is generally opposed to locating the shelter…
Govtrack.us has a useful chart that purports to show where each member of Congress stands on a continuum from liberal to conservative. The chart is based on co-sponsorship relationships between members of Congress: how often they cosponsored each other’s bills. Lawmakers who cosponsored another lawmaker’s legislation are placed close together. The X axis measures ideology…
Fox News Analyst Quits, Calling Network a ‘Propaganda Machine’ A longtime analyst for Fox News is leaving the network, saying that he could not “in good conscience” remain with an organization that, he argued, “is now wittingly harming our system of government for profit.