Comments

1
Keep in mind the Times endorsed - tepidly - both school levies. Then, right before the election, they come out with this hit piece about capital spending (which would be Prop. 2). They could have printed this months ago (as the reporter who wrote it has long since moved onto the legislative beat) and yet somehow they print it now.

Almost as if the Times wants that levy to fail. Unlike other levies when they had the leadership THEY liked but now, they don't like the leadership.

Interesting but it won't work. Seattle Schools does need to be as fiscally responsible as possible but we have rundown schools and overcrowded schools. We desperately need this capital levy.
2
re: "Three Feet Of Snow In New York City."

Ummm... no. Maybe a foot. These kinds of headlines are what happen when Hyperbole meets at the corner of Weasel Words.

The rest of the hyped prediction reads, "From New York City to Boston and beyond." I think you'll find the three feet falling mostly in the beyond. Boston's only expecting up to two feet.
3
"Number one it's your right, your Second Amendment right to own a firearm, no matter what kind it is"
Exactly. If you read the Second Amendment that way, then anybody should be able to have a machine gun, or a mortar, or a bazooka, no questions asked. There's nothing in the amendment that tells us to draw a line between semi-automatics and fully automatics. There's no line in there that tell us we have any right to restrict access to nuclear bombs, in fact. It says the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Nukes are arms. End of discussion.

Which is crazy. Hence the phrase "gun nut."

Is that what we want? The alternative is to understand the reference to a well regulated militia as meaning Congress may set limits and draw lines somewhere. And then we need to figure out where that line belongs. Which is a complicated question with no right answer for everyone everywhere for all time. The line changes with the times.

Gun nuts hate this because it's complicated and it requires a lot of thought and most especially, it requires working with other people and negotiating a middle ground. Gun nuts can't deal with ambiguity, and they can't deal with other people. Hence the name, "gun nut".
4
@2 That all said, we are expecting some bitchin' winds, so even with only a foot, we could end up with 6 or 7 foot snow drifts here and there.
5
@3 While it's a "cute" publicity stunt, it was hardly any kind of statement of conscience or act of civil disobedience. All the stuff he gave away is completely legal at the moment.

It would have been a lot more dramatic if he tried to give away that gun with an auto-sear and selective-fire lever installed.

Gun-nut prima dona fail.
6
@5

They could be giving away one of these.

http://www.heraldnet.com/article/2013020…
7
Hey, that painting from the bath tub is not half bad, in an outsider-art sense. I think it's charming. It'd be interesting to have a Bush/Gacy double exhibition.
8
@3: Blah blah blah gun nuts blah blah repeat.

You're in the process of completely losing the national fight and your response is to ramp up the bitterness and deny reality, trying to find some minimal piece of shit toothless legislation with which to declare victory in a purely political sense, while absolutely nothing of substance gets done in the real world where 20 or so people today will kill themselves with guns and another handful will die at the hands of criminals.

Nice work.

I will grant that the emerging alternative strategy of trying to quickly replicate the NY bum-rush laws in other Team Blue states while praying for a rubber-stamp-Team-Blue-fillable Supreme Court opening in Barry's second term is the best approach I've seen so far - the only danger being that the laws get rushed through SO quickly that they come up for review before a current Team Red justice keels over.

Meanwhile, keep up what you're doing, it should be worth emptying a few Senate seats whether anything passes or not.
9
Walk Scores are complete bullshit. My neighborhood, which is a pocket of near-total unwalkability even though it's in the near north, supposedly scores a 60 even though the figure for my house is more like a 15. That's because they have a marker placed for a "grocery store" a few blocks away which is actually just some guy's house, and the store it supposedly marks is an Ethiopian grocery in Renton. There's a "restaurant" nearby, too -- a Subway sandwich shop at the corner of 61st and Aurora, which will come as a huge surprise to anyone who's ever driven past there; the actual Subway marked is in Kent, 30 miles away. The next-closest "grocery" sells Japanese pastries to restaurants -- nifty, but not really what anyone would call "groceries". Nearly all the data near my house is completely bogus.

And they also completely disregard obstacles like uncrossable streets, hills, waterways. Aurora is an example, but so is Denny in the Denny Triangle. Even if you're not crossing, having a million lanes of alternately racing and backed-up traffic does not promote walkability, as can easily be seen by the lack of amenities on the Denny streetside. That's a cliff, not a street.
12
@9

Yeah. My "grocery" two blocks away is a Shell station where you can buy condoms and a bag of corn chips. Great.

It's a nice concept though. It could work with better data.
13
So Dom, we should just keep throwing money at the school system and never look at how it's being spent and whether it's being used effectively? We shouldn't compare our system with cities of similar size? Even when there's ample evidence of significant waste and fraud in very recent history?
14
@9, @12

And as I've said my neighborhood here on Kent East Hill is rated moderate to low for walkability.

However, at any time day or night you will see lots and lots of people walking (and biking). Sometimes miles and that includes old people, and moms with kids and strollers!

Whereas I've already reported, and SLOG acknowledges, that Belltown after dark is a no man's land for pedestrians although there are pockets of liveliness.

But here on East Hill I'm talking about seeing people walking (and biking) at all hours of the day.

Now why is that? My best guess -- they don't have cars. You see, we have these people with very, very small eco-footprints. They are called "poor people". Not homeless. Just low income and immigrants who work hard, but might not have that second (or first) car.

Should this neighborhood be rated "walkable" simply because people actually walk here? Fool that your are, if you thought the Agenda would be so logical as to give as much credence to a gulag as to the palace.
15
um i live in denny triangle and walk all over - most of my neighbors do.... not sure where you checked your facts
16
That 502 post is the very definition of concern trolling. I could feel the hands wringing in worry.
17
@9,

I've played around with that website, entering a bunch of different addresses in the Seattle area and even my old childhood home in California. Going by the results, their crappy data aside, any score less than maybe 90 is almost totally unwalkable. Your neighborhood's 60 rating is not a good one.
18
Those walk scores can give you a general idea, but I don't think that company has ever actually put any boots on the ground to verify that their algorithm isn't barking up the wrong tree. Out of curiosity, I scored an ex's folks' house—the closest town (of 400) was four miles away, no sidewalks in between, it still came up with something like a walk score of 40.
19
If Hempfest is still going to be full of the mouthbreathing anti-folks, I think I'll be skipping out this year. They made last year incredibly uncomfortable to be at.
20
Uh, Dominic?

I realize you're locked up in your Capitol Hill office space all day, but while you're tweeting and gawkering away your day, or whatever, there are fucking shittons of people walking around in the Denny Triangle/South Lake Union/Belltown area.

Wake up, maybe? Live a little bit in the city you write about?

It's a dead zone after dark, of course, but maybe (just maybe!) those "walkability" scores aren't heavily weighted in favor of "walking from a nice gay bar to a nightclub, at 11:30pm?"

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