History, politics, people of Oly WA
Ever since David Postman mistook the name of my blog (he called it my Olympia WA blog) and since Noemie told me she liked the “old name,” I’ve been toying around with changing my banner. Its always been Olympia Time, but since my last redesign with the new banner, that has been very unclear.
So there you go, smaller and more clear on the name, plus I changed the perspective on Olympia to try to recreate this.
I had two posts at Washblog this week (here and here) grinding the stone on getting a Presidential primary next year. It turned out all wrong at the state central committee in Bellingham.
The best post of the conversation was Steve’s (who turns out to be the man behind the initiative to get the primary in the first place):
A second major reason to support the Presidential Primary is that it, and not the caucus,is a better and more realistic organizing tool for Democratic politics. The Presidential Primary is a trial run for candidates to turn out voters to support them and more accurately reflects the actual pool of voters who will be voting in November Presidential election. There is a big difference in mobilizing 1% of the voters to turn out for a Democratic caucus versus trying to get the a majority of registered voters to vote for you in a primary.
Awhile back I posted a comment at ROS regarding their plans to produce a show on the “Latinization of Baseball.” Good, idea, but it was backwards. Baseball hasn’t become latinized, Latin Baseball has become infected with MLB:
Regarding the “latinization of baseball” show idea, I think we should stay away from the “how Latin players impact the game” line of thinking that dominated the Japanese Baseball show.
When I’ve gotten into discussions about bringing baseball to lesser communities in the US (Portland OR or Las Vegas), I’ve often counter argued that some Latin markets deserve consideration (San Juan PR or Monterrey MX). My thought was that MLB should expand into Latin America. But, that assumption had to do with a different view of Latin baseball than the one I hold today.
I thought Latin baseball leagues were organized separately from MLB, but I’ve come to realize slowly that practically every Latin league of note, from the Liga Mexicana de Beisbo, to the Venezuelan Summer League, and even the Caribbean Series are infected one way or another with MLB.
This may sound insanely naive, but its almost as if MLB maintains relationships with Latin leagues in order to ensure a cheap supply of talent. I’m sure there is a “How Soccer Explains the World” type parallel going on here.
It might be worth looking at Jorge Pasquel as a starting point.
Now, with the possibility of the Cuban embargo being lifted, MLB is laying plans for the mining of Cuban talent:
Baseball is contemplating a strategy for teams to sign Cuban players in an effort to create an orderly system for acquiring talent from the island, according to three baseball officials and a scholar who was briefed on the plans.
“There may not be any significant changes with our relationship with Cuba in the near term, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think about these things,” Joe Garagiola Jr., the senior vice president for baseball operations, said in a telephone interview. “We are thinking about them, and that is probably the extent of what we can say at this point.”
Garagiola, a former general manager of the Arizona Diamondbacks, is coordinating baseball’s discussions on Cuba.
Baseball is also considering moving a minor league team to Cuba and building training academies similar to those that nearly all teams have in the Dominican Republic, according to a report earlier this month by Fortune magazine.
I’m not interesting in Anglo-American baseball teams importing Cuban players. Not because I see them taking jobs away from ‘merican boys, but because I would rather like to see a Pan-Latin baseball league on par with MLB. There is no reason Cuban players shouldn’t be able to play major league games in Cuba, Mexico City or Monterrey.
MLB has treated Latin America as a source of cheap raw material for too long without sharing the wealth. There is a powerful corollary here between how MLB treats Latin America and how we as Americans treat Latin America.
Remember Rep. Sherry Appleton’s idea to ban the paid-per-signature initiative model (here and here)?
Looks like Montana is going to pass that reform, along with a few others, after a big debacle last summer. The attention is being paid to a ban of out of state signature gatherers though, not the paid-per-signature ban that got everyone all fired up here.
It probably helps that three initiatives were thrown off the ballot last year because of fraud.
By the way, in case you were wondering, and I know you were, Montana is one of the states that allows printer sized initiative petitions.
My general impression of this book, after completing the first four chapter a year or so ago was that it would have been better had Binns staid within the realm of a book about his own youth and life. Instead, what could have been a nice deep map of western Washington gets blurred into a history/travelogue of the entire state.
After Binns leaves the wet side of the state and begins meandering up the Columbia River, his experiences leave off and what he has read in books and learned from other people picks up. From that point on, The Roaring Land reads a lot less like what Murrary Morgan would do with his histories of Washington starting tens years later than cheap boosterism.
That said, the best line in the book comes from the worst chapter, the final “Living Map of Washington,” which repeats the airplane level history Binns eventually dives into. Speaking about people who would generalize about Washington:
To them the whole state is forested with giant evergreens, rain falls year round, and radicalism flourishes in the wet shade of the forest.
Add something about coffee or grunge rock, and that would still apply.
My favorite chapter is the second, Steamboat Era. It gives a view of my particular corner of Washington (the deep South Sound) from a vantage point we don’t get very often. We follow a young Archie and his family as they travel from their stump farm near Shelton as they get on a ferry in Hammersly Inlet and travel by saltwater (switching boats once) all the way to Tacoma.
I may have sounded harsh, but the other great chapter in the book is Center of Gravity, which covers what was the center of gravity in Puget Sound country in Binns’ time, the Kent Valley. Binns looks at the valley in much the same way we do, in a “wow, hasn’t that changed.” While we’ve seen a transformation from farms to cement parking lots, Boeing industrial areas and the Tuckwila mall area, Binns’ generation (and his dad’s generation) saw the transformation from old growth forest to farms.
For him, the farms were the pinnacle of advancement, the malls of Tuckwila not even imagined.
He also made an interesting note about the character of the people of the Kent Valley (which served as a way for him to explain the character of all Puget Sounders). Since farms (and timber operations) were in that time small, everyone owned a piece of something. Or, at least worked a piece of something. Since there were no big owners, everyone depended on each other for business and socially. When someone was down on their luck, it was easier for Puget Sounders to pick up their neighbors than it would have been for dry siders, who mostly owned or work for large operations.
The next book will be The Laurels Are Cut Down, a review of which can be found here.
The participatory democracy argument in favor of caucuses is disingenuous at worst and misguided at best. Last night when we were debating whether to support a primary election or caucus system for next year’s choosing of presidential delegates, two people argued the participatory democracy side of the caucuses.
This isn’t a direct quote, but it gets pretty close to what one of the guys was talking about:
It takes more of a commitment to come to a caucus, very little commitment to vote in a primary. We want to encourage commitment, not just drop in participation.
And
The caucus system is where people are coming together, and talking, it’s a real plus. It shows that the people in the state of Washington are really interested in creating relationships with people in their communities.
I agree with the sentiment of both of those arguments, caucuses are awesome in that they are participatory. People come together and chat, which is much more what democracy should be about than just indicating your preference in private.
That said, the Washington State Democratic Party does nothing else beyond the caucuses to encourage participatory democracy. Actually, its even worse. Before last night’s vote state party chairman Dwight Pelz gave a talk to the 22nd LD meeting (which every quarter happens right before the TCD meeting). He spelled out the ground game plan for 2008, which centered around a lot of people coming to the caucuses.
When all those folks are sitting on their hands while the precinct results are being tabulated, we PCOs are supposed to chat them up to see who we can get interested in volunteering with the party until election day. “We can use them for the next six months,” was something he said towards the end of his talk.
The caucuses aren’t about coming together and knowing your neighbors, if they were we would be doing them more often. They’re about recruiting ground troops for the fall of 2008.
What was implied to me was that after November of 2008, we don’t really care what happens to those folks. Some of them may stay on and stay engaged, but we’re not really worried about that.
The precinct caucuses should be the end result of a civic engagement campaign, not the beginning of a faux engagement campaign. People should come to the caucuses because the party is relevant and important to them in their community, not because we’re blackmailing them to come because its their only opportunity to vote in the Democratic primary.
John Setterstrom, president of the Thurston County Economic Development Council, wrote a column for the Olympian yesterday, trying to refute some recent Olympian coverage (and here) of the EDC. I don’t particularly like the kind of column he wrote, its an attempt to argue against the original case of the Olympian, but it basically sandbags the reader with points that really only someone very close to the action would get.
Anyway, it reminded me of some quick research I did after reading the original coverage.
1. The TCEDC is 59 percent publicly funded, either through direct funding from our local governments or through programmatic funds from the state. Despite that, 13 of the 20 board members are from private industry. And, all three executive officers (separate from the board) are from private industry.
2. The RCW that governs the state’s relationship with organizations like TCEDC says: “The organizations contracted with in each community or regional area shall be broadly representative of community and economic interests .” Here is the RCW. I think there is an argument to be made that the TCEDC doesn’t really represent Thurston County’s community (no church or nonprofits) or economic (no labor) interests.
I could imagine recruiting board members to represent local faith communities, labor unions (who from the make up of the board, seemingly don’t have an opinion in economic development?) and non-profits. The voice of economic development in Thurston County, especially a mostly public organization, should reach beyond the business community.
A statement on economic justice from my own particular faith tradition has some relevance to the purpose of the EDC:
As people of faith, we believe we are one family, not competing classes. We are sisters and brothers, not economic units or statistics. We must come together around the values of our faith to shape economic policies that protect human life, promote strong families, expand a stable middle class, create decent jobs, and reduce the level of poverty and need in our society. We need to strengthen our sense of community and our pursuit of the common good.
“Putting citizens at the center of the 2008 election.”
Its named after the day after election day, and its something we all (especially those up us who pimp one particular candidate) should take a long, close look at. The November Fifth Coalition is a growing group of civic organizations that are trying to change the debate leading up to the 2008 election. And, not change the debate in “lets talk about this particular issue that I found really interesting,” but actually changing how we debate.
Last night we watched “Man of the Year,” which wasn’t the movie I assumed it would be. I should have watched the extra features, because all of the trailers that I saw were pretty horrible at portraying the actual plot arch of the movie. Anyway, there was a point in the movie when the Robin William’s character was ranting during a Presidential debate, seemingly trying to point out that what the debate was trying to portray had no relevance to who the election was for, the voters.
One of the more salient points the November 5 Coalition is making is for candidates and campaigns to open up the debate. More actual talk, fewer fake town halls, for example.
So far, they have a manifesto up, but they’re going to start posting white papers on actual positions. Especially exciting for me is that the guy I’m for (see right), Bill Richardson, is on the board of one of the coalition members.
During the heyday of May Day in Olympia (1999 to 2001) there was histories of May Days past published and distributed as part of the official pirate media campaign. This year, Olyblogger Sarah is putting together what she can find on Oly May Days past. She’s doing a really good job.
Commies, Queens, & Pretension [1919 – 1930s]
Liberation & Anarchy [1997, 1998]
Street Party & Phase II [2000]
Planting Seeds [2001]
“Buzzing Around” [2002]
I’ve not really been a big fan of protest lately, walking in the streets to prove a point. But, the coverage of the high school walkout in Seattle yesterday made me think differently. Protest can be good, and for some reason, really good if you’re in high school.
High school students have no other choice than to be in school, so walking out of class is the supreme level of civil disobedience. Its a world of difference from middle aged protesters taking on the Iraq War on the weekend or college aged kids doing May Day.
For the rest of us, protest should be weighed more heavily against other types of engagement, like voting, participating in public life and running for office. Have I mentioned that if you protested either the Port of Olympia or Tacoma recently, you should run for port commission? Lots of openings!
I especially liked the response to unnamed critics in the PI’s article:
Students also fired back at cynics who suggest they’re just lazy kids looking for a day off from school. Those who skipped school Wednesday could have opted to go shopping downtown or simply could have gone home instead of attending the rally, Salas said.
The fact they showed up “is very demonstrative that these kids care,” she said. “Adults need to see we’re willing to get detention for the day and get yelled at by our parents to do this.”
This is the same world that hundreds of thousands of high school aged and younger keep American Idol afloat, and we’re worried about high school students actually paying attention and reacting to the world around them.
Its also nice to see a little bit of online organization (here and myspace), even if it did get only 300 protesters from a district with tens of thousands of students. I would like to know more about how online or non-traditional organizing tools were used, just because I’m curious.
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