⢠A piece in the Seattle Times last Friday mocked Chelsea Manning for being transgender. Editorial board member Bruce Ramsey wrote that he "burst out laughing" when he saw a recent photo of Manning wearing lipstick and a wig. "Be all you can be, eh?" Ramsey goaded. After readers called the post bigoted, Ramsey clarified: "I was not making fun of transgendered people." Sorry, but laughing at a transgender person for the way she looks is making fun of a transgender person. Editorial page editor Kate Riley didn't respond to three requests for comment. The Seattle Times remains unapologetic for its anti-transgender article.
⢠King County Superior Court judge Andrea Darvas has blocked an initiative seeking a $15 an hour minimum wage for airport workers, after invalidating the signatures of 61 registered voters who'd signed the petitions more than once. Contrary to standard elections practice, Judge Darvas struck the original signatures of these voters, as well as duplicates, leaving the initiative 17 signatures short of qualifying for the November ballot. The sponsors may get an additional 10 days to submit more signaturesâstay tuned.
⢠A Clearwater, Florida, man denies he was threatening staff at Seattle's 5 Point Cafe when he called to ask whether its new gun-free zone would stop someone from "coming in and shooting up the place." Reached by phone, Daniel McMahon, 25, says his gun-rights advocacy stems from an incident near his home in which he says a man was stabbed, beaten, thrown in a dumpster, doused with gasoline, and set afire. "I vowed I would never end up like that," McMahon solemnly declared, as if being stabbed, beaten, and set afire in a dumpster was a common occurrence.
⢠A lawsuit filed on August 22 in Pierce County Superior Court accuses the Puyallup Police Department of discreetly filming select female detainees, and one man, as they changed clothes and went to the bathroomâacts that Seattle attorney James Egan, who's representing 12 such videotaped plaintiffs in the complaint, characterizes as felony voyeurism. The Puyallup city attorney said the videos were selectively cherry-picked out of a broad records request that the attorney initiated.
⢠Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech, a moment that looms so large in the popular imagination that it overshadows the economic demands specifically articulated by the organizers of the August 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, including a $2 an hour minimum wage. Adjusted for inflation, $2 would be worth $15.27 today, meaning that in a very real historical sense, one of the core demands underlying King's famous speech was a $15 an hour minimum wage. 
