Washington Liberals

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,…

Republicans in Washington State are planning to raise your taxes. On Monday, March 2, the State Senate, under control of the Republicans, voted to raise gas taxes by 11.7 cents over three years. Now, in fact, I support raising the gas tax, both because it generates revenue needed for transportation and because it discourages driving,…

For background, see Democrats Challenge Republican Two Thirds Rule, Shut Down Senate Transportation Vote The Democratic amendment, which lost on a party line vote, would have also blocked a controversial GOP amendment that takes all sales tax revenue from transportation projects out of the general fund (about $1 billion) and puts it into the transportation…

Legislative language on the home stretch: One of our winter deliverables was to finalize our legal language, so here’s an annotated copy of another new draft following our legal team meeting earlier this week. The tweaks from the previous version were fairly minor, so we expect the ballot title to be similar to the ballot…

If you had a child at the University of Washington at the beginning of the Great Recession, you may have been set back by the tuition. In the 2008-09 academic year it was $7,254 (in today’s dollars), almost one-fifth of a full time job paid at the median wage. You may have thought that was…

Christian Appy spoke at Town Hall Seattle, Feb 16, 2015 on his latest book, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity. Appy is a professor of history department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Appy was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1955. In 1964, his family moved to Westport, Connecticut where he attended…

In Road Kill: How Bertha Left the Surface-Street Option In the Dust, Ellis E. Conklin reports that “Powerful interests rallied around the tunnel and diverted then-Governor Gregoire from a less costly route.” Specifically, “The downtown business interests, the Chamber of Commerce, Boeing, the unions, they all wanted a highway, period. Nothing was going to stop…