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Olympia Time, where did it die?

March 4, 2010 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

It didn’t, but I thought I’d give myself the same treatment I gave Olyforums here.

I haven’t been blogging recently and I never explained why, so if anyone was worried, I apologize. But, I’m going to assume that most of the people who read this blog either also follow my twitter feed or are friends on facebook, so they know I’m not totally gone.

But, I have been blogging, but in another capacity. I started up Informed Community, a blog that I will hopefully carry forward in the role of a trustee of the Timberland Regional Library. I’ve applied for the position (I don’t know yet when the Thurston County commissioners will appoint someone), but I’ve decided to put my blogging where my mouth was.

Since I’ve started talking to elected officials in person, I’ve always berated them on their lack of social media presence. So, hopefully, in my new role as a (not elected, but still) public official, I’ll be able to show what I’ve been babbling about for years.

Which if all goes well, will also mean less time blogging here and at other places. But, feel free to email me, follow me on twitter (which I’ll hope I can keep up) and read my library stuff.

Dems keeping Hyer on the list

February 22, 2010 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Unless someone makes a move for a vote among the PCOs tomorrow night, it looks like the Thurston County Dems are leaving Joe Hyer on the list for Thurston County Treasurer:

For immediate release
2/21/2010 7:00 PM

From: Jim Cooper, Chair, Thurston County Democrats
Contact info: 360-451-xxxx or jimcooper@thurstondemocrats.org

We support Councilmember Joe Hyer as a friend and political colleague. Joe is an integral part of the “citizen corps” that makes Olympia and Thurston County tick. Until we have seen specific charges and evidence against him it is the position of the Thurston County Democrats’ (TCD) Executive Committee that Joe Hyer is innocent until proven guilty and only he, the County Commissioners, or the Judicial System can make the choice as to whether he is qualified to serve as County Treasurer.

Should Joe, or any other candidate, become unfit to serve (through withdrawal of their own name or a statement by the County Commissioners or the Courts) TCD will be constitutionally obligated to rescind our entire list of nominees for the interim appointment of County Treasurer and open the process again in order to refresh the list to three qualified applicants.

Anti-Tim Sheldon bill would make Joe Hyer choose a position

January 20, 2010 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

While SB 6588 (pdf warning is aimed at Mason County commissioner/State Senator Tim Sheldon, it would also force Joe Hyer to choose to be a city council member or county treasurer.

Hyer, who sits on the Olympia city council, is also running for county treasurer. He also might be applying to temporarily fill the position that is already being vacated by the sitting treasurer.

The proposed bill does have some built in wiggle room:

Any elected official holding two positions prior to this bill’s effective date may continue to serve out the remainder of each term. At the expiration of each term, that elected official may subsequently only hold one elected office at a time.

So, if the law becomes effective this summer, Hyer is appointed to fill out the remainder of the open treasurer term and is elected in November, it sounds like he’d need to resign the city council soon after that.

One county commissioner, 10 city council-members, three school board members (and some more) come out for Stew Henderson

January 8, 2010 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

The list is long and deep and it looks like local Dems are lining up behind Stew Henderson for the 22nd LD:

The full list of endorsements announced today include:
• Karen Valenzuela, Thurston County Commissioner
• Doug Mah, Olympia Mayor
• Karen Rogers, Olympia City Council
• Joe Hyer, Mayor pro tem, Olympia City Council
• Cynthia Pratt, Lacey City Council
• Andy Ryder, Lacey City Council
• Mary Dean, Lacey City Council
• Ron Lawson, Lacey City Council
• Joan Cathey, Tumwater City Council
• Betsy Murphy, Tumwater City Council
• Ed Stanley, Tumwater City Council
• Eileen Thomson, Olympia School Board
• Mark Campeau, Olympia School Board
• Allen Miller, Olympia School Board
• George Barner, Olympia Port Commissioner
• Chris Stearns, Public Utility Commissioner
• Jay Manning, Chief of Staff to Gov. Chris Gregoire and former Director of Ecology
• Karen Messmer, former Olympia City Council Member
• John Cusick, immediate past Chair, Thurston County Democratic Party
• Debby Pattin, WA State Democratic Party Committeewoman for Thurston County
• Roger Erskine, WA State Democratic Party Committeeman for Thurston County

Here’s what Jay Manning has to say:

“I’ve known Stew for years, both personally and professionally. He will be an outstanding legislator, bringing excellent judgment, honesty and a great work ethic to the table,” said Jay Manning, former Director of the state Department of Ecology and current Chief of Staff to Governor Chris Gregoire.

Here’s his full list of endorsements.

How a newspaper works

January 6, 2010 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

It may seem as simple as interesting text and sells ads around it to support you writing interesting things, but Alec Clayton’s post on how he became a newspaper man shows there’s something deeper and something harder about it.

His description of Everything for Everybody, which was less a newspaper and more a representation of a larger community:

It was 1973, New York. I had recently joined a crazy kind of hippy employment agency/apartment finder/social network called Everything for Everybody and teamed up with a band of handymen who called themselves, variously, The Midnight Carpenters, Uncle John’s Band, and TANSTAAFL (an acronym for There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch), and moved in with two of the TANSTAAFL guys, Sam and Mike, in an apartment on 165th Street.

…

An explanation about Everything for Everybody is in order. It was an organization that claimed to do just what the name boasted—everything for everybody. For a five dollar monthly membership fee you could list jobs wanted, services offered, apartments for rent, or if you were looking for a mate or friend or wanted to start a book club or learn yoga. No limits on what you could list or how many listings. The listings were all kept on index cards in a storefront on 8th Avenue and 10th Street. Members had free access to all listings, so if, for instance, you needed someone to walk your dog you could find a listing for a dog walker and give him or her a call. It was as simple as that. All of the listings were also published in the organization’s monthly newspaper, which Mike and Sam put together. Sam was nominally the editor, but Mike did all the work.

Everything for Everybody is a drastic example, but a good newspaper should be for its community what the E4E newspaper was for its community, a representation of the social network between people. A newspaper should speak to the people within a community in a much different sense than how it would seem to an outsider.

In that sense, a newspaper can now be in a real sense, obviously not even printed. A tight online social network can serve much the same purpose E4E did.

It should also be hard to put together, because there’s a need to do it right:

We worked for a couple of hours until we discovered that there were many more listings than there was space for them. “They won’t fit,” Mike said. “We’ve got to leave a few out.”

He decided which ones to leave out. He cut out half the older listings.

…

We ended up eliminating about 50 listings that in Mike’s judgment were repetitious and unnecessary. We finished the newspaper about midnight, put the sheets in a big flat box and hopped in the A Train to take it to Jack in his apartment on Bank Street in the Village. We used to do a thing we called surfing the A Train, standing up and trying to hold balance with the swaying and lurching of the train without holding on. We did that all the way from 165th Street to 14th Street. We got to Jack’s apartment, handed him the sheets to look over, and Sam let out that we’d eliminated a lot of the listings. Jack went ballistic. He told us that the members paid for those listings and they could not be left out—as if he had to tell us that. He told us to go back and add four pages (for people who don’t know, you can’t add a single page; they’re sheet fed through the printer with four pages per sheet).

So we surfed the train back home and added four more pages. Now we needed filler. Mike wrote an article, and I think I wrote one too. I designed a big ad for TANSTAAFL, creating a logo on the spot and hand lettering the acronym with a felt tip pen, and we found a cartoon and a poem that had been submitted by other people but never used. We worked all night and delivered the finished newspaper to Jack at seven o’clock the next morning. He said it was the best looking edition yet—which was not saying much; I’d seen earlier editions and they were not much to brag about.

Olyforum, where did it die?

January 5, 2010 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

This hilarious ONN report reminded me of a dead local online civilisation, the once vaunted (by me) Olyforums:

So, what happened to Olyforums?

The folks that I understand to have been the main moderators over there, S6, Christie, Rummy, and Just Plain Onry (I can spell that one out) haven’t signed on to their forums since late last summer. The drop off in posting seemed to occur in late spring, but the dead rot didn’t seem to really set in until September.

Anyway, what happened over there? Here are some possibilities:

1. Summer is a hard time to blog. Lots of sunshine, lots of travelling, people just get bored with it and sometimes it just drops away. And, sometimes everyone drops away at the same time.

2. Twitter and FB done killed it. I noticed a trend the year that my attention was being sucked up by my other social media accounts and I had less energy to blog. I am a lot less active at Olyblog and the blogging I have been doing has been over here. I can expect that other users at OF have experienced the same thing and just don’t have time to put up with a forum where they can hear from people they don’t particularly like. Moderating is a headache too, as we’ve learned.

3. Just a bit too caustic to live? Since the beginning, Olyforums was supposed to a be a place where everyone could hate on each other without being afraid of being banned. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t moderation, but the invention of invisible in you’re just browsing subforums (The Basement and the War Zone) was supposed to give more freedom to people who just wanted to yell at each other online.

Maybe a bit of history is needed. My understanding is that the founder of Olyforum, S6, started it up in reaction to moderation policies at another local blog, Olyblog. The core idea was that Olyforum would be friendlier place for conservatives who chafed at the apparent liberal bent of moderation policies at Olyblog.

Anyway, what could have happened is that when you found an online forum based on the core principal that everyone is allowed to be a shit head to each other, eventually, people get tired of going to a place full of shit heads. Rather than asking people to better their discourse, the place eventually falls apart.

I think this late thread in the deep dungeon of Olyforum points to that. In the thread which is housed in the War Zone subforum, apparently a really weird and threatening PM from one member to another causes the messaged member to drop out of the forum. Apparently, a lot of people were experiencing that.

Some Coug from Tumwater files for the open Brendan Williams legislative seat

December 30, 2009 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

I’ve never heard of this guy, but he sounds like a pretty qualified and uhmmm… ambitious fellow.

Via email:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Chris Reykdal
December 30, 2009
(360) 790-3151

CHRIS REYKDAL TO RUN FOR 22nd DISTRICT HOUSE SEAT

OLYMPIA – Last night, Tumwater School Board member Chris Reykdal announced his candidacy for the 22nd District House seat being vacated by incumbent Representative Brendan Williams.

“There is something lacking in the politics we see today,” said Reykdal, a Democrat who resides in Tumwater with his wife Kim and their 5 year old son Carter and 3 year old daughter Kennedy. “I am running for State Representative so that all of our children are handed a community that is better than the one handed to us.”

Chris Reykdal was first elected to the Tumwater School Board in 2007, and previously served for three years on the City Planning Commission. He is a former legislative staffer, High School teacher and the current Deputy Executive Director of the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges. Chris will bring with him to the legislature a comprehensive knowledge of education issues that is second to none.

“Our state is facing unprecedented challenges,” continued Reykdal, “We have avoided critical conversations for too long – from education funding, to environmental protection, to tax reform. I pledge to the citizens of the 22nd District that if they send me to the Legislature, I will take the tough votes and work tirelessly to secure the values that make our community a wonderful place to raise our families.”

Chris Reykdal understands the struggles so many families across the 22nd District are facing because he’s faced these challenges himself. The youngest of eight kids, Chris was raised in Snohomish. With the help of food stamps and Government assistance, the Reykdal family persevered. Through the hard work of both Chris and his family, he was able to attend Washington State University, where he was the President of the College Democrats. He met his wife Kim at WSU and they attended graduate school together at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill.

In the legislature, Chris Reykdal will work every day on behalf of families struggling to make ends meet, just as his family struggled in his youth.

“I am heartbroken at the thought that my kids and their generation may be the first in American history to experience a lower standard of living than the generation before them. One person, one legislator, one dad can’t turn this around by himself, but I am deeply committed to adding my talents and passion to a body of distinguished legislators who do have the power to make a historical difference in the lives of future Washingtonians.”

###

The only thing that makes me wonder about announcements like these is their impersonal nature. Its written the same way most press releases are, as faux news stories, quoting in this case the obvious author. If you’re quoting yourself, why not just write a nice message?

“Hey, I’m Chris, I’m running for state representative.”

Review in five thoughts of “Olympia: a People’s History”

December 28, 2009 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

In celebration of the 150th anniversary of Olympia, the city published a collection of historical essays. I picked it up a copy from the library a few days ago, and have a few thoughts.

1. I don’t like that the edition was hardback, I don’t like that the content is copyrighted. Hardback, 8.5×11 books are a bummer to read, seem worth keeping on your bookshelf as collectibles than actually reading them.

Also, while its not illegal for a local government entity to copyright a work, its not something I’m a big fan of. We should consider why the federal government is not allowed to copyright, and then think about why our taxes are used to put together content that we are not all free to use.

2. Using the phrase “People’s History” is curious. Typically, something titled “People’s History” is a reference to the seminal Howard Zinn history or an offshoot that Zinn himself edited. This book is obviously not of that series, and less obviously, doesn’t even follow the same theme.

3. That’s not to say that there aren’t some good sections in the book. The sections on Rebecca Howard, Women, the Chinese Community and (in part) Little Hollywood were what I thought the book would be. Unrepresented stories of Olympia’s history that don’t get told much.

Its interesting that the most fascinating chapter and a topic I’ve never seen discussed anywhere else (Rebecca Brown) was written by the least experienced of the writers.

4. Important points of history missed.

The essay on John Miller Murphy by Roger Easton was pretty good, but it paints Miller as a up from the bootstraps newspaperman. An important part Easton missed on Murphy’s return to Olympia in 1860 was that he came back to establish a Republican newspaper in 1860 near the beginning of the Civil War. Democrats up to that point had been in charge of territorial politics, but with the Democrats also leading the fight to secede in the South, Republicans were ready to take the advantage in Washington.

Daeg Aerlic Byrne’s essay on Little Hollywood misses the point on why the city in the late 30s worked to remove the shanytown. In the paragraph that he writes that “something changed” and that “no available document explains why” Olympia city fathers would want to do away with Little Hollywood, he Byrne also names what exactly changed. The year before the city moved to get rid of Little Hollywood, the state legislature began funding what would eventually become Capitol Lake. Before they built the lake, they had to get rid of the shantytown, its pretty simple.

5. Still worth checking out from the library too. The book itself is a bit high priced ($35), but it does go to a good cause (the Bigelow House museum). What this book did spell out to me is the need to collect and encourage ongoing scholarship about Olympia’s history.

Maybe after a year of selling the original run, why not post the essays online (minus copyrighted images) and develop an online historical journal?

TDN uses initiative results to draw a bad conclusion in WA3

December 28, 2009 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

The WA3 may very well be a swing district, but you shouldn’t use the recent ballot initiative results to prove it, as the TDN did last week:

While voters across the state soundly defeated a Tim Eyman anti-tax measure and, by a narrower margin, supported the rights of same-sex couples in November, Southwest Washington voters in the 3rd Congressional District had other ideas.

By a small margin, the 3rd District backed Initiative 1033, Eyman’s proposal to cap government tax collections. And by six percentage points, the 3rd District defeated Referendum 71, which extended rights to elderly and same-sex couples similar to those given to married couples.

The numbers, released this month by the Secretary of State’s office, are further evidence that the district can be fickle about its politics — and why political pundits say next year’s battle to replace outgoing Congressman Brian Baird will be a donnybrook that could become the most expensive campaign in state history.

As I wrote last week, there are two reasons to reject this premise:

1. If you are using initiative results, the 3rd was much more conservative last time there was an open race, when Baird beat a Republican by a healthy margin.

2. The No on 1033 campaign did not compete on the air in SW Washington. If they had spent any money in the Portland television market, the narrow win by 1033 would have been a loss.

Olympia Time