History, politics, people of Oly WA

Category: Washington Politics (Page 22 of 27)

Walter Neary of Lakewood is still totally cool

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?

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

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?

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

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

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?

Nafziger opens up

I thought it was interesting when folks were noting that Oly’s Rich Nafziger got a new job in the political hierarchy, that no one noted his blog. That’s too bad, because while Rich often takes months of weeks between posts, when he does get something up, its usually worth the read.

No exception this week (or now at this link or this link I guess):

Olympia is one of the strongest school districts in the State of Washington. Ask the parents, teachers, and community members in Olympia….

But if you ask Board directors Russ Lehman, and Bob Shirley, they will tell you that the district is mediocre at best. They argue that voters should elect the candidates they are working to elect (Jeff Nejedly and Lucy Meltzer), give them a majority and then heads will roll and the district will move forward to excellence.

I worry that if they gain a majority on the board, the Olympia School Board will become the Seattle School Board. A board that is infamous for its negativism, political correctness and disdain for the teachers and other employees of their district.

The post is called “burning down the house” and it doesn’t seem to pull any punches on what Rich thinks of Lehman and Shirley. It seems to be in reaction to this situation in which Lehman and Shirley are asking to start a much needed budget discussion sooner rather than later. But, maybe not, Nafziger never really talks about the budget.

There are two contested school board races this year in Olympia: incumbent Carolyn Barclift is facing off against newcomer Lucy Gentry-Meltzer and Jeff Nejedly and Frank Wilson are facing off for an open seat.

From what I know, Barclift and Wilson are supported by Nafziger and Gentry Meltzer and Nejedly are supported by Lehman and Shirley.

Just for the record, the teacher’s union is supporting Frank Wilson.

On a side note, the local school board is probably one of the more mysterious local government agencies to me. I keep a close eye on the city and the port always seems to be in the news, but its interesting to see so much school board stuff popping up in blogs.

Various Baird notes from over the weekend (mostly focussing on TeacherRefPoet)

Jim did a really good job live-blogging the town hall in Olympia, and here’s his more personal debrief. He struck a thought in me. Solidarity is over-rated. More on that later.

Randy notes the Olympian’s story. Randy should link to more blogs.

TeacherRefPoet takes a strident point of view on the entire debacle and says “My party has lost the moral upper hand.” Its worth pointing out that TeacherRefPoet and I agree a lot over the past few weeks. Actually, his above post is about the best thing I’ve read on Baird and our reaction to him since beginning of this entire thing in late August.

From his post:

Because I disagree with Baird, I’d look closely at anyone running against him from either party. But I am deeply saddened at how hypocritical my party has become. They want me to love their dogma more than I love evidence, analysis, and legitimate debate. But my dedication to cool, reasoned disagreement and careful consideration of issues has me defending Baird here.

I disagree with Baird. I think he’s wrong. That doesn’t mean its o.k. to heckle him.

And, Arthur Ruger up at Washblog has a roundup of Baird’s visit to Raymond.

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