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Category: Washington Politics (Page 7 of 27)

Last word on Veldheer, EBO and those Catholic bishops too

July 6, 2009 / / 0 Comments

JLW over at Olyblog has the last good word on Veldheer:

When the Citizens for a Responsive Local Government were considering Karen’s candidacy (by the way, she did eventually receive the CRLG’s endorsement), we were aware of Karen’s religious affiliation, and speculated about whether it would impact policy decisions at the city. So I called her up and asked her about it. She told me that it wouldn’t be an issue, that she had no objection to same sex partner benefits. She and I had quite an interesting discussion about faith, and tolerance. Karen strikes me as an honest and genuine person. I trust her. I’m surprised that this is even an issue. Are we afraid that every Catholic politician is going to do his or her best to ban birth control? Are we afraid that Jewish politicians will insist that everyone have a bris? I just don’t see any red flags here.

Janet (?) does a much better job explaining than Karen did, but her explanation does open up more questions for me about CRLG’s endorsement process. Since it was so early in the season, it would have been great for them to provide the metadata surrounding their suggestions, including this story. They considered a lot of factors, and since their for responsive (and I assume open) city government, more details about what information they gathered would have been great.

Also, just a note to show that even us Catholics have crappy representation in our church hierarchy, just like Karen’s church:

The Washington State Catholic Conference (WSCC), which “represents the Catholic Bishops of the State of Washington on issues of public policy”, has posted a link to this notice on the main page of their website (hyperlinks are mine).

…

Opposing “unjust discrimination” implies that some discrimination is justified, that it can be just to discriminate. According to the bishops of Washington, it is just to destabilize and undermine LGBT families. The bishops believe it just to disadvantage children by preventing their LGBT parents from protecting them to the fullest extent of the law via domestic partnerships or marriage.

Who wants a general election challenge (from HA)

June 13, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Back in the day David Goldstein didn’t like the Top Two primary, though he probably still doesn’t:

Supporters of the top-two primary, like Sec. of State Sam Reed, keep arguing that it offers voters more choice. Well, in the 36th LD, the district highlighted in the article, voters will be given the choice this November between a progressive Democrat and a liberal Democrat.

That quotes makes an interesting contrast to today’s post from Goldstein on challenging sitting Seattle legislative Dems from the left:

The irony is, we all know there’s a fair share of deadwood in the Seattle delegation, along with a handful legislators who simply aren’t as progressive as their constituents on a number of important issues, such as pay day lending, the homebuyers bill of rights, tax restructuring, and more. Indeed, start this conversation at nearly any political gathering, and the same names keep popping up again and again, the usual suspects of Democratic incumbents who deserve a serious, well-financed primary challenge, and who just might not survive should they face one.

A primary challenge is one thing. In the old days of actual party-based primaries a well healed incumbent could slap down an insurgent in September, well before the actual public discussion ever got going. And, with the primary in August now, the debate is even shorter in duration.

Most Democrats from Seattle, once they got past the primary, were able to coast through to November with token opposition from a Republican or maybe a Green. But now, a serious progressive insurgent Dem could challenge a sitting moderate Democrat all the way until November, pushing the discussion harder and actually giving voters in liberal Seattle districts a real choice from within the party.

I’m surprised Goldstein hasn’t seen this utility of the Top Two and is still calling for “primary” challenges, when it is really unlikely that a challenging Dem to totally knock off a sitting legislator in August.

Hold a special legislative session in Ellensburg

May 8, 2009 / / 0 Comments

The Other Side blog got me thinking just now.

With the news that no special session will be forthcoming, this is a bit of a non-starter anyway, but what would prevent the governor from calling a special session somewhere other than Olympia?

Logistics, for one. All the legislative stuff is here. So, for a month long special session, it would be unworkable.

But, for only a few days, or even just one day, why not hold a special session in Ellensburg?

As far as I can tell, there’s nothing in the state constitution or RCWs that would prevent it. There is some language related to the “seat of government,” but I think that is more open to interpretation.

You would always assume that the state supreme court is a equal level of government as the state legislature. But, while they usually meet in Olympia, they never shy from taking their show on the road. Is Puyallup the seat of government in Washington State? Nope, but the state supreme court met there recently. And, no one really minds that.

Also, and most important to me. If the legislature passes a bill in Ellensburg (let’s just say for keeping certain pork products out of the state), Richard Roesler can write: Ellensburg says not to pigs.

I always knew the “Seattle chill” was bull shit

April 24, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Depending on how you want to view it, Eric at Sightline’s piece about the “Northwest Personality” will either reaffirm your belief in the Seattle Chill or convince you still it doesn’t exist.

From Eric:

Northwest states are among the most open and least neurotic places you can find, but we are also among the least extraverted. Not surprisingly, Oregon and Washington perform almost identically on every measure. More interesting, perhaps, is that Alaska, Idaho, and Montana are also very similar in some respects (though quite different in some others).

…

The good news is that the Northwest is not a neurotic place. Washington is the 46th least neurotic state in the union, followed by Alaska at 47th, and Oregon at 48th. (Idaho and Montana rank 32rd and 39th, respectively.) To get any less neurotic, you’d have to move to South Dakota (49th), Colorado (50th), or Utah (51st).

The other nice thing about the Northwest is our openness. Oregon is the 3rd most open state in the nation while Washington is 5th. (Only New York, Massachusetts, and DC are comparably open.) But move away from the urban Northwest and the openness appears to fall off: Montana is 16th; Idaho is 30th; and Alaska is 49th.

What do you call a region that is neither neurotic nor extroverted? Totally sane. Yeah, say you take a state that ranks both high in neuroticism and extroversion (like Pennsylvania) I guess you could say they weren’t as chill(y) as us. I’d also say they were also totally unhinged.

What outsiders say is our tendency to be on the surface nice but total dicks in action, I say we’re just not as freaking crazy as you are, so can you please get a grip of our sanity?

Also, another note that Eric makes is that as a region, the Northwest flows pretty well as a group through the personality traits, except for openness. As Oregon and Washington rank pretty high the more conservative northwest states are lower down (Montana 16th, Idaho 30th and Alaska 50th). Northwest conservative, in that regard, means you are less open.

Driving the local in civic dialogue

April 21, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Walter Neary, Lakewood’s blogging city councilman, conducted an experiment via twitter and facebook and got no comments from the locals:

The news was that the city of Lakewood’s collection of traffic fines is up 40 percent for the first three months of 2009 compared with the first three months of 2008, for total of about $200,000 more. I have to say, I didn’t get a lot of feedback, but what I got was very high quality.

…

I have to tell you … I was very impressed with the points of view.

BUT

and there’s a BUT

Not a single one of these folks lives in Lakewood.

So … great views. Great Internet exchanges. Zip interaction with Lakewood.

A simple solution could be to create a facebook account for “city councilman” Walter Neary and only accept relationships with your constituents. It could be made semi-public so anyone could see your information and what is going on on your wall, but only friends could comment. It would also be separate from a personal account, which would make it easy to divide from personal stuff.

Or, in the long term, I wonder if something like this would work:

I’ve been toying around with an idea in my mind, a sort of super public comment tool for state government on down. Each level of government in Washington at some point has a need for public comment. It would be interesting to create a system online where a citizen could create a user profile using their voter registration (or some stand in for folks who aren’t registered) and then see open public comment processes in the jurisdictions they reside in.

So, in my case, I’d see public comment for the city of Olympia, Thurston County, the local PUD and port and the state of Washington.

I’d be able to post comment to any of the open processes and either have it archived for whatever public official will review the comment or immediately accessible to other users so they could comment back on my comment.

Of course, normal rules like not being able to overuse the system (three comments a week, for example), not being rude and not using particular language, would apply.

For this system, the important thing would be to segregate people into public comment processes that they actually are involved in. So, keeping Kitsap residents from commeting on an interesting issue in Renton would be a priority.

Unfiltering the legislative session

April 8, 2009 / / 0 Comments

The response to the fewest number of credentialed reporters covering the legislative session wasn’t that a blogger was eventually credentialed, but rather this.

Or, a lot of stuff like that.

This winter and spring the four caucuses (but the Dem ones the most and the Senate Dems the most most) have been rolling out social media tools that allow them to directly connect with the people that would typically read legislative coverage.

  • Sen . Lisa Brown is writing a seriously blunt blog, taking issues on in a somewhat dense, but very direct way. House Dems also have a less fun blog, but its still there.
  • Each caucus has embraced twitter (SD, HD, HR, SR), though I’m a bit unsure of how this is an advancement beyond or just the use of a tool. Here’s a funny thing about caucus twitter feeds. I though I was already following the senate Republicans because I followed WASenateGOP. Turns out that is their campaign committee and the actually caucus twitters at WashingtonSRC.
  • Same thing with each caucuses use of video and audio casts. Its great to make all the stuff available, but its another thing to distill it in some form.

Does the lack of reporters covering the legislature drive the caucuses to adopt social media? Probably not, I’ve heard conversations around these topics for years, but everyone was getting hung up on rules (that you apparently couldn’t blog during session because it was campaigning? Weirdness).

Its more likely that the ramping up of caucus based social (or at least internet) media and the nose-dive of traditional state house reporting are happening on parralel, if not slightly overlapping, tracks.

More in the Rich Nafziger bloggin’ chronicles

April 2, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Over at Olyblog, Russ Lehman, an old opponent of Rich Nafzigers when they were both on the Olympia School Board, takes a swipe at Nafziger and his blog:

The flap over Rich Nafziger’s blog, where he comments about the very un-Democratic way we make laws and policies in Olympia, as well as his view of the Governor as, well, somebody less than the leader we need at this time of crisis, misses the point just as the comments about our city council members who have the attention span and restraint of children missed the most important point about their egregious behavior.

The voices of disgust about certain city council member’s prurient and truly anti-Democratic impatience and intolerance, focuses on the violations of the Open Public Meetings Act instead of the true “crime” committed – an affront to our very Democracy. They validated people’s worst fears about policymaking – that politicians are interested in primarily, if not only, the interests of those who can pay to have their voice heard.

Nafziger is right about what plagues our lawmaking system. It is not truly interested in “the little guy’s” voice; responds very differently to those who make a living lobbying; is populated by many (though not all) people who seem much more interested in ego gratification then open, deliberative, courageous policymaking.

The problem is, according to those inside the Olympia beltway, not what he said, per se, it’s that he “pissed where he sleeps”. The common refrain in Olympia is that he was crazy to lambaste his political patrons (read: bosses).

Also, if you’re interested in reading everything Nafziger has put on his blog and then regularly takes right back down, I’ve tried to share as much as I can here. The posts aren’t in order of when they were posted by Rich, but rather by when I marked them in my feed reader. So, you may need to dig around a bit before you find what you are looking for. Like the one where he gives Gov. Gregoire a Hoover award.

Anyway, I’m going to ask him again in the comments of one of his blog posts why he keeps on taking his old posts down. I still wonder why

Port of Shelton, Paul Harvey and Genocide

March 13, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Beyond the entire interesting part of governing from a three person commission (one commissioner cannot make a decision alone) was the part about the port commissioner wanting to lower the flag to honor the death of Paul Harvey.

A lot of people seemed to like Harvey, but I’m wondering about the wisdom of honoring somone who looked fondly back on the North American genocide and nuclear war.

Hey Chase Gallagher, are you going to run for port commissioner up there anytime soon?

The imaginary battle for Washington’s state capitol

March 9, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Jerry Reilly deploys hypothetical politics to defend the state legislature stepping into a local planning process (or Olympia telling Olympia what to do):

Opponents of this legislation should consider two questions:

If the state were just now deciding where to locate our capital city, would it be reasonable to ask the City Council of Olympia to agree to forgo intense development on the isthmus in order to protect the views from and to the Capitol Campus?

Would city leaders be likely to accept this limitation as a fair trade for the enormous benefit of being the capital city?

Here’s my consideration:

The last time there was a serious attempt to move the state capitol from Olympia was just about 100 years ago. Tacoma tried to step in and snatch the seat of government. There was a less serious attempt in the 1950s that involved quietly moving state agencies up to Seattle. We beat back that challenge, along with others.

So, I don’t really consider the threat to move the state capitol serious, even hypothetically.

And, for the “enormous benefit” we receive as being the capitol city, I wonder how many city’s our size would appreciate their largest industry not paying property taxes?

Also, since Lacey and Tumwater are now having nice new state buildings built in them, its high time the state legislature dip into their local planning processes as well.

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