Author: Emmett O'Connell (Page 163 of 177)

If nominated, I will not run. If elected, I will not serve. From an email exchange with John Griogaire Bell:

Greetings,

I apologize for the delay in responding to your e-mail.

For personal reasons, I have been unable to actively campaign and I would be unable to accept the position on city council if I were to win the election. Therefore, I have decided that it would be unethical to take contributions or to participate in any candidate forums.

It is not possible to remove my name from the ballot nor change the statement in the voters pamphlet, so I am contacting you with this information. I will also be placing this notice on the website provided in the statement.

Thank you,

John G. Bell

On Sep 30, 2005, at 7:29 PM, Emmett O’Connell wrote:

Hi John,

This is Emmett from Olympia Time (olywa.blogspot.com). I haven’t heard much from you since you commented a couple months ago. How is the campaign going?

There is no Michael Normoyle for City Council website (that I know of). There are some Ira Knight-like Normoyle signs up around town. But, it is interesting to point out that if you want to see the books for Mr. Normoyle’s campaign, you need to go to Lacey.

Leaving town for a city council campaign’s books isn’t all the interesting, since skilled Treasurers sometimes live outside of Olympia, but it looks like Mike rents a conference room for his public books. Huh, an Oly conference room not good enough for you?

The Olympia Times, not Olympia Time, is now over on the right hand side under Olympia Blogs. In addition to being another good local blog, this guy can take some serious pics. Being someone who is paid to take pictures, and fully knowledgeable of my limitations in that regard, I respect his skill.

Thurston County Democrat Discussion Group will take on the issues brought up by I-912, which seeks to revoke the recent 9.5 cent gas tax. We will also discuss progressively framing the broader issue of taxation.

Tuesday, October 11, 7-9 p.m.
Olympia Center
222 Columbia St NW
Olympia, WA
Room 102 (first floor)

The Discussion Group is a meeting for Democrats in Thurston County who want a “low impact” informative meeting to discuss topics of the day and to get more involved in the Democratic Party.

For more information on groups fighting I-912, go to:
Washington Defense
Keep Washington Rolling

For more information on the Democrat Discussion Group, go here.

Months and months into his chairmanship, Gov. Dean’s plans are apparently in place:

Making Democrats the party of values, community and reform. Armed with extensive DNC polling, Dean is consulting with party leaders in Congress, mayors and governors to recast the public’s image of Democrats with a unified message.

Improving the party’s “micro-targeting,” the tactic of merging political information about voters with their consumer habits to figure out how to appeal to them.

Building a 50-state grass-roots organization, using the same Internet and community-building tools that took Dean’s presidential bid from obscurity to the front of the pack before Iowa

This is good to hear, especially the last bullet point. Since the launch of the new Democrats.org, it has been well short of my expectations in a meetup-like (or even Moveon.org like) community building system.

This never would have happened at the Olympian, but Rick McKinnon of Olyblog tracked down Robert Schumacher, a sailor serving on the USS Olympia who not only blogs, but now blogs at Olyblog. And, if that doesn’t surprise you at all describes himself as a “mainly liberal Democrat.” Take that, Ira Knight.

Obviously, the conversation with Rob at Olyblog went almost directly to the Nuclear Free Zone ordinance that the Oly Council recently passed. Rob the submariner had this to say initially:

Interestingly enough on the submarine blog I co-contribute to, one of the topics today was Los Angeles-class sub relations with namesake cities. I wasn’t really familiar with the NFZ issue until a few weeks ago when I reported to Olympia and my buddies at the sub blog let me know about it (most of them are very conservative and had…opinions…on the issue).

…I’m part of the engineering department, a reactor operator by rate, and I can tell you there is a night-and-day difference between nuclear weapons and nuclear power. While I’m pretty liberal myself, I think nuclear energy (for purposes like electrical power generation) is a great way to go, if managed and given the proper oversight. I can’t speak to civilian nuclear power, but I can tell you the Navy has an unparalled record of safety and success with it’s plants, both shipboard and land based.

Read the entire conversation, its a great take on the entire NFZ and the entire situation surrounding the USS Oly.

No, he never really fixed the spelling issue, but he just took down the page with “pundant” on it for a pointless redesign of his website. If you’re wondering, yes, you can still sign waive for Ira.

Washblog had a great headline to a short post that really got to me. It referred a horsesass.org post about Microsoft giving more money to Republicans than Dems. Well, any money at all it turns out.

Either way, here it is: “Linux, Apple, Open Source, Competition, Democrats.” Contrasted with the text of the post: “Windows, Diebold, Proprietary, Monopoly, Republican.”

This reminded me of all the stuff I was writing about over the summer when I was all abuzz about the Top Two primary. My point back then was that there is a deep down difference between nature of the the two parties. Now I just have a different way to articulate it:

Democrats are Firefox (or some other open source software).

Republicans are Explorer (or some other failed proprietary software).

In the Top Two realm, this would mean that Democrats would be ok with whomever chose to vote in their party ranks, even up to election day. Republicans would be a bit more stodgy about such an arrangement and get all bent out of shape.

The Democratic Party should be an open source party, because when you get down to it, all politics should be so called open source.

Good ideas are good ideas, and good candidates don’t neccesarily get endorsed by the state chair.

Being involved in politics or your community (I don’t think they’re exclusive at all though) is good, it means your part of the solution. Not being involved is being part of the problem.

Open source software works because there are lots of people involved, making “whatever” work for the good of the everyone.

Politics works when everyone gets involved and everyone is heard. Its our democracy and it should be our Democratic Party.

Certainly an oh crap moment:

The word on the street is that Congressman Brian Baird of the 3rd District may be contemplating retirement in the not-so-distant future. Baird has spent 6 years in Congress, and recently welcomed twins into the family. It is not clear if this news relates to 2006 or 2008, but times they are a changing.

We will keep you informed as more details or news emerges, but put that feather into your cap.

For all the complaints Olympia Dems have about Brian Baird, I constantly remind myself that the WA-3 not too long ago was represented by Linda Smith.

UPDATE: chirrido at Washblog offers more details to the initial post:

In response to some of the commentary about Baird’s announcement regarding 2006, we wanted to share an additional tidbit that has come this way. We have heard, but not yet confirmed, that a member of the State Legislature recently hired a senior Baird campaign official, ostensibly to manage the 2006 reelection campaign for said legislator. This caused us to ask why a legislator that lives in the 3rd Congressional District would need a congressional-caliber staff member to manage a campaign for a less than competitive legislative seat. As we said before, this is pure conjecture, and merely for your amusement and discussion. But it is definitely another feather worth putting in your cap.

Sounds like for folks in the know, they can just work backwards and fill in names of the state legislator and staffer. I’m not so inclined though.

Ever since I started to read Bowling Alone I’ve had this impression that stong community ties, strong civic values, are elements of progressive and Democratic communities. Specifically the level of trust people have with each other, I’ve been thinking, is a direct line to their trust of local institutions such as government.

Since Democrats tend to like government more that Republicans… well, you get the point.

Eric over at the Cascadia Scorecard points to a study by Ichiro Kawachi, a Harvard man, that shows that states with stong civic connections also vote Dem.

While studying the connections between social capital and health I stumbled across something rather odd. States with high social capital–strong connections between people and their communities–tend to vote democratic.

Harvard researcher, Ichiro Kawachi, one of the leading lights on social capital and health, has performed several studies that make state-by-state comparisons; and he’s shown that, on average, states with higher social capital also have better health outcomes. But as I was peering over some of his charts I couldn’t help but notice that states with higher social capital also tended to be “blue” states–they voted for John Kerry in the last presidential election.

Unfortunately, Kawachi reports the results for only 36 states (the others did not have sufficient data to support his study) so my little “finding” here refers only to those states, though they do include all the big ones. That’s just one of the limitations, but I still think it’s interesting that 6 of the 10 states with the highest social capital voted for Kerry in the 2004 elections. Meanwhile, 8 of the 10 states with the lowest social capital voted for George Bush in ’04.

…While Kawachi never mentions the voting comparison, in a separate study he offers a plausible explanation in the context of health outcomes. He suggests that high social capital leads to more civic engagement and, in turn, to more investment of resources, money, and concern into the community at large. For Kawachi, that investment is a partial explanation for better health outcomes–places with high social capital care more about the welfare of others.

Democrats should talk about this in a serious way, and more than just in “Its takes a village” sort of way. Just because large government social programs have mostly failed doesn’t mean that the moral obligations to our communities and neighbors aren’t still there. It is still our responsibility to be good neighbors.

Should I care if people from exurbs vote for my guy?
It’s community, stupid
I couldn’t agree more, build communities
The future of parties