Palestine: Change in government.
Money in the UK: Government buys up to 77 percent of Lloyds Banking Group.
In prison news: Bagram remains open in Afghanistan.
In Vatican news: Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re supports the excommunication of 9-year-old girl and her doctors in Brazil.
In art news: Artist unemployment rate is way up.
Term limits: President Karzai says he could rule beyond the end of his term.
Just relax: RNC Chairman Michael Steele attempts to soothe the GOP.
Taxmen: IRS will no longer use private debt collectors.
Ground breaking: Big hoopla for beginning of University Link construction for Sound Transit.
Soup kitchen: Temporary closure in Ballard.
Just like stealing cookies from a Girl Scout: Cookies found in the car trunk of suspect in a Bremerton fraud case.
Seattle’s new chief librarian: Budget cuts for the Seattle City Library system.
Standoff in West Seattle: Armed man occupies Rite Aid and then possibly a nearby apartment. He is now at large.
Daylight Saving Time: It’s that time of year, again.
Daily dose of British humor and the philosophy of excess…
Dear catholic church: the more you try to make 9 year olds give birth, the more you cede your ‘moral high ground’.
re:Bagram
What is going to be different under Obama? I am disheartened by how much remains the same as under Bush.
Could ECB or someone else at the Stranger please write an explanation of why Sound Transit got $2 BILLION DOLLARS to dig a tunnel (!!!) from Husky Stadium to Broadway to Westlake Center for a light rail line? Isn’t that corridor already basically the best-served (only well served?) one in all of the Metro busing system?
I haven’t lived on Capitol Hill in a decade and a half, but when I did I seem to remember that I could walk on foot right downtown to the Westlake Center area, or over the Montlake Bridge to the U District, in a fairly short amount of time. Seattle is not exactly a big city. At least the rail line to Sea-Tac and the South Central area through Beacon Hill makes some sense.
This project makes absolutely zero sense to me, and I’m trying to resist the urge to get extremely pissed off about yet another colossal waste of money by Sound Transit. I’d love to hear this project defended or at least explained.
Aaron Pickus give Daylight Spending Time can of Rize, Daylight Spending Time drink Rize, freak out, Saving out, DAYLIGHT SPENDING TIME BECOME DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME!
DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME WILL MAKE EVERYONE LOSE ONE HOUR OF SLEEP TONIGHT!
On behalf of The Incredible Sulk, please be advised that no, he does not feel like letting it go.
Dear Just Askin:
Yes at $2 billion that’s about $600 million a mile. They build 32 mile tunnels under the alps for less than that. It’s a big mystery no news reporters ever get into. topography difficult? They have mountains and glacial till in a few other places around the world with lots of tunnels. Japan, duh. Local incompetence? Well the original predicted cost was way less. Like, $1.9 billion for the whole 21 miles from Seatac! Maybe the engineers doing the predicting are incompetent? Did they ever mess up anything else? Nobody knows, this is not gone into. Anyhoo, rest assured that after indulging in the expense of underground tunnels that cost billions we WILL have little short light rail trains only one block long — not the big 6 or 8 car trains of a real subway — because lots of the route is in the street. Oh wait that also means you can’t run the trains zoom zoom zoom one after the other cuz cross traffic has to clear! So, actually we get the flow capacity of a light rail ilike Portland, but to satisfy the engineers and concrete industry we are buildling a tunnel, like a subway, for part of the route.
So we have a nice compromise to please everyone:
short trains, limited capacity, light rail like Portland; AND expensive tunnels, with the limited capacity inherent in short trains, so the tunnel is like NYC (woo hoo!) but then we don’t actually have to carry so many people like in a real city (yuk, people! they press against you on a subway. Shudder!)
It’s kind of a faux subway, cuz, you know, we don’t want to have a real city actually.
Bonus: after they built the tunnel the throughput capacity is maxed out so you can’t add any more trains through it from North Seattle, ever ! Whoo hoo! So we don’t have to worry about adding more lines like 520 or from Ballard or Shoreline etc. Nope, our $2 billion tunnel will be maxed out on opening day and it can handle only the one line.
See how it works? We get one line so we can say we have transit, but not all those awful lines going everywhere all over the city. Cuz that would actually, um, make us a deense city!
Everybody gets a little bit of something, that’s the Seattle way!
Understand now?
I heard they only excommunicated the parents and doctors; they decided the 9 year old was a victim. Of the abortion, not the rape.
Dear Unpaid Intern:
Suggest you read the BBC article about “Vatican News” more closely.
You: ” Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re supports the excommunication of 9-year-old girl and her doctors in Brazil.”
Article you cite: “He said the excommunication would apply to the child’s mother and the doctors, but not to the girl because of her age.”
Respectfully,
Andrew
@3, 5: I’m not ECB, but I’ve looked into this a little bit.
A huge chunk of cost comes from a need to shore up the foundation of the I-5 ship canal bridge BEFORE tunneling.
@2, there’s a huge difference between Obama and Bush. More people are unemployed under Obama.
@9:
Yes.
Because of Bush. Obama inherited George W’s complete ineptness.
10
Obama inherited a situation.
The ineptness is all his.
As someone who’s tangled with the IRS, public or private, they are still the same lying, thieving bastards.
#3,#5
The people who run Seattle don’t live in it.
They run real estate and contracting firms in Snohomish and Bellevue where they can live in mansions. As far as whether any of this benefits “the people of Seattle” or is “cost effective” — who cares?!
Make it as expensive and useless as possible so they can afford more granite counters…
@2, how does it feel to have 9’s hand up your backside? That was pretty ingénue-ish for any of the “robs” that regularly post here.
14
how do you know 2 and 9 aren’t the same clever boy?
@8, okay, that makes sense. I actually don’t doubt that the engineering involved in the project has got to be phenomenal (correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds like they’ll have to drill down under the Montlake cut, then all the way back uphill to Broadway, then downhill (?) again to Westlake). What I don’t understand is the “Why?”, as in, “Why is this being done at all?” or “Why is a single dollar being wasted on this?”
Because transit is a system, not a set of points.
It’s true that UW-bus tunnel is the best link in the bus system. But it makes zero sense to build a light-rail system that doesn’t serve downtown or UW, so it’s necessary to duplicate some of the best bus routes in order to build a transit SYSTEM that connects the most useful places. Downtown, the UW, Capitol Hill, and the airport are probably the four single most important dots on the potential route map. Having a transit system that leaves any of them to the bus side of the equation is stupid.
“Police found Girl Scout cookies in the trunk of a car belonging to a fifth suspect in a Bremerton counterfeiting ring that used fake $20s to buy cookies.”
Hah, proof marijuana really is behind a surge in crime in Washington! This is a crime only a stoner would commit!
Spiegel-Online says sales of blood plasma, hair and sperm are up in the U.S. Would you rather purchase sperm donated in a boom or in a bust? Wait…
@11
You just proved my point. You really are.
Obama’s done more right in his first 30 days than W managed in his first four years.
Is the catholic church going to execute the rapist stepfather too? My guess is no.
Religion is such a waste of time.
@myself in 22
I meant to say, “excommunicate” not execute. Freudian slip, I guess.
Fork you, Urgutha!