Turnout was huge at Saturday’s 41st LD Town Hall at Somerset Elementary School in Bellevue. Scores of people were standing around the perimeter of the gymnasium. The largest component of the crowd was school teachers dressed in red, many of them holding signs in favor of fully funding education.  There were scores of teachers outside…

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ URGENT: Is one of your WA State Legislators on the House Appropriations Committee? (ALSO – See Solutionary Rail article at Crosscut.com) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Friends, Solutionary Rail is one of those rare projects that is nearly bullet-proof for interests across the State regardless of political affiliation. Agriculture, labor, municipalities, and environmentalists and more have reason to…

Unwanted pregnancy is contributing to a new “caste system” in America. Is that about to get worse?  When new and better technologies become available only to people who are already privileged, the rich get richer and opportunity gaps get wider. That’s exactly what’s happening with family planning—and unless trends change, a recent revolution in contraceptive technology…

A number of local organizations have been working with a couple of members of the Seattle City Council (Mike OBrien and Kshama Sawant) to bring a resolution forward against the TPP (the secret Trade Agreement that corporations are hoping will get fast-tracked very soon by congress). Support was building and a plan was formed to…

Hell with the DNC! We’ve got to be able to do better than the Pepsi versus Coke brand war of Republicans versus Democrats and their Bush versus Clinton dynastic choices. We need an independent progressive party and independent candidates. It’s not that I don’t agree that any party championing progressive policies couldn’t inspire more Americans…

You know those vast parking lots at Northgate Mall, Walmart, Home Depot and other big box stores? Not only do they take up space and create an environment hostile to pedestrians, they contribute to stormwater runoff pollution and they stand nearly empty much of the time. And yet, they’re totally exempt from the Commercial Parking…

In What scares the new atheists John Gray argues that militant atheists, such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Danniel Dennet, are mistaken in their belief that secularism can cure the world’s problems. Rather, suggests Gray, the atheists are cultural imperialists who, like the proponents of Social Darwinism a century or so ago,…

Robert Kuttner, of the American Prospect, has written a clear and convincing repudiation of right wing worship of the free market — the kind of worship you hear from the Freedom Foundation. Kuttner writes in It’s Bizarre: Libertarians Are Clueless About the ‘Free Market’ That They Worship: “the free market is neither efficient, nor fair,…