Olympia Time

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Category: Washington Politics (Page 22 of 27)

Fan owned Sonics

October 5, 2007 / / 0 Comments

False info from Save Our Sonics:

Q. Let’s buy the teams and have public ownership.


A. False: The situation in Green Bay is unique in sports. Leagues have rules to prevent it from happening again.

With NBA teams suffering operating losses it is imposible for a team to exist owned by the people in a city. Here, of course, it’s even worse because the City of Seattle can’t find the money to fix potholes, much less cover the operating losses of an NBA team.

Owners like Howard Shultz recover their losses when they sell the teams and that defeats the purpose of public ownership.

Of course that again assumes that the new owner would consider selling and that isn’t apt to happen.

Actually, the Green Bay Packers aren’t owned by the city of Green Bay, but rather individual stock owners. And, while every major sports league in the United States ban non-profit or government ownership of teams, only the NFL bans corporate ownership to prevent stock sales of teams.

But, the NBA totally allows stock ownership systems. Both the Boston Celtics and the Cleveland Cavaliers.

So, what’s stopping anyone from filing a corporation with the Secretary of State’s office and selling stock to try to buy the Sonics. Nothing at all.

The governor isn’t allowed to participate in civic engagement

October 4, 2007 / / 0 Comments

Because, some people might think that she’s campaigning.

She’s not raising money, she’s not asking for votes. She’s simply getting out of Olympia and talking to people.

This tour is actually a repeat of a similar tour last year, which strangely didn’t get the criticism of this year’s tour.

Stefan above cynically points out that the governor is bringing along a pollster, but he fails to point out what that pollster is doing. In each city Gregoire visits, there are random focus groups that are talking about government performance.

What this really gets down to is the role the governor plays in Washington. Is she supposed to just sit in her office and talk to her staff? Or is she supposed to get out around the state and actually talk to citizens?

Here’s a somewhat boring episode of TVW’s Inside Olympia about last year’s tour.

Walter Neary of Lakewood is still totally cool

October 3, 2007 / / 0 Comments

If you live in Lakewood and ever have the chance to vote for Walter Neary, I’d suggest it. He turned on the comments on his blog, so you can chat with him if you want.

Here’s his first post with comments enabled.

He also left this nice comment here earlier today:

Wow. You remember Cappy, the Capitol Lake monster. We had a lot of fun with that, although he/she never really succeeded as a tool of economic development. I’m not sure we ever did capture any tourists. Cappy was really meant to be an in-joke for people who have seen the lake drained. Really, I think newspapers need more personality if they want to survive.

We did see the Web page posted on several occult sites with Nessie, though, which I thought was a good early warning indicator of how gullible – or maybe the word is trusting – the Internet can be.

To be honest, I was waiting to turn on comments until I had more readers and then just sort of forgot about it. We have a couple people, one of them with a lengthy police record, who write A LOT – if you know what I mean – and I wanted to make sure others were there to put their comments in context.

People have not asked for comments, which might be a bad sign about reader interest. But what the heck. I’ll turn ’em on later today and see what happens. You’ll see a long screed I wrote last night after an odd council meeting so feel free to post later or to something more relevant to the spirit of Cappy.

So, to review: if you live in Lakewood, vote for Walter and at least chat with him on his nice blog.

Why is Fred Finn running for the state legislature in the 35th LD?

October 1, 2007 / / 0 Comments

Oh, so glad you asked:

It is now time to bring to bear the experience I have gained in government, nonprofit, military and business, for the benefit of all the citizens of the 35th District. I hope to ensure for the next generation the educational and health care opportunities I have had, to safeguard the precious environment that brought us here and to promote a business climate that provides family wage jobs so that all our children and grandchildren may enjoy this wonderful place.

Read the entire thing, its pretty good. Also at the blog of the 35th LD, read about the man he hopes to replace, Bill Eickmeyer.

TVW is so cool, getting cooler

September 26, 2007 / / 0 Comments

I can’t find anyone that’s noted it, but TVW.org has undergone a radical redesign recently. I’ve had my issues with TVW in the past (here, here, here and here), but I have to say that I’m impressed with where they’re going.

Most of my past problems with TVW is that they didn’t make it easy to share what they were putting up on the internet. Its still not that easy, but I can see them going in that direction.

I had problems with the new website, so I emailed the help line on a Saturday. And, on that same Saturday their Director of Information Technology emailed me back. On a Saturday. That’s cool.

Emmet that new windows media 11 plug-in is tricky with Firefox. There are a few fixes for Firefox that should be applied and the browser should be re-started after the installation of the plug-in. one thing to also note: you have to have the regular version of windows media player 11 installed on your windows machine. Version 10 will cause the version 11 plug-in to fail. this should fix your issues.

We do use flash in a minimal fashion but because of the lengthy nature of our events, we are waiting until the mpeg4 codec is supported in flash player 9 (coming in fall) until we start a migration of our streaming servers to flash via mpeg4. So in short, soon. I hope this helps and there are many help items online about this issue.

Its also worth noting that TVW’s executive director Cindy Zehnder is going to be the governor’s chief of staff next week. In my whining about TVW, Ms. Zehnder was very responsive to my concerns and I was invited to a meeting up in Seattle that sought to brainstorm about the future direction of TVW. I wasn’t able to go, but being invited was very cool.

So, does this mean that Dave Ammons will be blogging?

September 26, 2007 / / 0 Comments

Dave Ammons (the king of Olympia based political reporters) wrote a strange column last week that sort of points to him blogging sometime in the near future. The only concrete thing I got out of the column is that he won’t be writing his weekly “Ammons on Politics” column every week, but rather “when events warrant an analytical touch.”

What got people thinking that he was blogging is the references he made to changes in the media world:

Today, political discourse is becoming more real-time, with instantaneous access to Web sites, blogs, YouTube, and a relentless 24-hour news cycle.

I just don’t get the logic of saying “yeah, technology has changed things, so I’m just going to scale back.” Isn’t recognizing that you can’t just write a weekly column and be relevant (surprising though how relevant his columns were given the medium) the first step to embracing the new media?

There are some political reporters in Ammons’ circle that are blogging and doing a very good job of it. Postman on Politics is pretty much the gold standard of Olympia based political reporter blogs, but Eye on Olympia is older and in some ways cooler. Yeah, and there’s Strange Bedfellows too, I guess.

If Dave is looking for some examples of AP reporters blogging, there are some bad ones and what seem to be a couple of pretty good examples.

Kenny Pearce does the best preview of the Top Two Primary case in the Supreme Court

September 26, 2007 / / 0 Comments

People are noting everywhere (here and here) that the Supreme Court is going to hear arguments next week in the case of the Top Two Primary.

But Kenny Pearce, that “The Evangelical libertarian philosopher” formally of the Palouse and currently of Philadelphia, has the best breakdown.

Read the entire thing here (its long), but here’s a good part of his analysis:

A man with very ugly teeth publicly endorses Listerine. He does this with no malice; perhaps he is trying to argue that his bad teeth are not his fault. The man goes so far as to buy television ads in support of Listerine (featuring himself, bad teeth and all). This has a devastating effect on Listerine’s brand image. What recourse does Listerine have? If the man does not make false representations implicitly or explicitly, and is not intentionally attempting to damage Listerine’s brand image, he can’t be charged with slander, or false advertising. It also doesn’t seem that he is infringing Listerine’s trademark, since he isn’t using it to refer to a different product in the same field, and that is the primary use trademarks are intended to protect against. It seems that the only recourse Listerine has is to (1) ask him to stop (he is not obligated to comply) and (2) issue statements to the effect that his results are not typical, possibly buying their own television advertisements at great expense. Certainly neither Listerine’s free speech rights, nor its associational rights are violated (or even “burdened,” whatever that’s supposed to mean – libertarians reject this category; rights are either violated or they are not).

I love this paragraph because it echoes essentially what I understand to be one of the major points of the Cluetrain Manifesto. Parties that try to control their label through top down hierarchy and lawsuits are doomed to fail. People know what a Democrat is either because they know they are one or they know someone else who claims to be one. That personal claim of allegiance (I’m a Democrat because I’m for grassroots government) if far more important than a party by-law or platform.

From the 95 Theses:

Brand loyalty is the corporate version of going steady, but the breakup is inevitable—and coming fast. Because they are networked, smart markets are able to renegotiate relationships with blinding speed.

You Don’t Own Your Brand — Your Customer Does
You don’t own your brand

Re: Nafziger opens up

September 25, 2007 / / 0 Comments

Ok, this is obviously what Rich Nafziger was talking about.

If you’re into that kind of thing, the comments are one-sided against the Nafziger split on this whole thing:

If Nafziger really said what the Olympian reported, he has no business being on the board. Being a board member means you make REAL decisions and take action, not that you are a rubber stamp for the superintendent. Nafizger wants to just go along and watch, not to lead. Why is he interested in holding public office?

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