Comments

1

ELEVEN Times Loser*
[good you caught it]
MkKkevin kKkarthy
can't count votes
can't make Deals
this Could take
Years.

governing just ain't
their particular Style
they're mostly into
grifting profiteering
keeping womenfolk
in their Proper place
and them gays they'll
get around to plenty
soon enough. why do
so Many give then the
time of day? boggoling.

*so far
but it's
Early.

UPS works
in FUCKING
Windstorms?

those Clever Capitalists.
gotta give'em Credit:
they're Assholes

2

I sure hope that there are decent candidates running instead of Pollet. I disagree with Pedersen on most issues, but from what I can tell, he is a reasonably smart guy. In contrast, Pollet isn't. He would be bad for so many reasons.

I sure hope we don't get a repeat of the District 9 race. For those of you new to town, it went down like this: Three serious candidates ran. On the far left there was Nikkita Oliver, who got the endorsement of The Stranger. On the right was Sara Nelson, who got the endorsement of the Seattle Times. The most qualified and arguably most progressive candidate was Brianna Thomas. She got respect from both papers, but no endorsement. She did get the endorsement of former Stranger writers (Erica C. Barnett and Josh Feit who write for "C is for Crank") but she was basically stuck in the middle during the primary (even though she had plenty of progressive bonafides). Thomas and Nelson advanced, and of course, most of the city picked Nelson, as Oliver came off as a demagogue. Thomas would have beaten either candidate easily, but we don't have a voting system that rewards that sort of thing.

Anyway, I hope we don't have a repeat of that. Pollet will most certainly gain the support of the Seattle Times and thus advance. Unless progressives nominate someone more electable than Oliver, we will be hosed.

3

Old whites should live out their political days in the legislature where their out of touch worldviews are more easily diluted. Or if they're bored, perhaps consider retirement.

6

@2: Ross, please just let it go already. Your preferred candidate’s loss does not itself constitute proof we need a different balloting system.

Thomas’ mistake was not running against CM Mosqueda in the 8th, where she might have won. Thomas instead chose to run in the 9th, where she contended with two well-financed candidates, each of whom also had great name recognition from a recent near-victory. That’s why Thomas lost.

Please get Thomas to run for the 3rd district seat this year. Recently, the incumbent there almost lost to literally nobody. Thomas would start with over 49% of the vote.

8

Compromise.

9

downtown sucks. it's always sucked. this isn't a homeless thing or a covid thing. it's ugly. there's no heart. no vibe.

I'd rather spend my money in literally any other area of the city

11

@4 Do you not know how primaries work?

12

@2 you pretty much had this dynamic in the 4th when Petersen won in 2019. If you recall his opponent was TS endorsed Shaun Scott who basically is another version of Sawant/Oliver and who apparently hates golf as much as the police. Voters rejected him in 2019 even when other progressives had a bow wave from the Amazon backlash. If Scott runs a again which is probable or Mitnick and make it through to the general against a moderate they will get trounced again.

14

@11 The way math works is that if Oliver got third place then Thomas would get almost all of their votes and if Nelson got third place then Thomas would get almost all of her votes.

But personally, I think if we had proper ranked choice voting Oliver would have won and we'd be in a much better place than we are today.

15

Of COURSE the neofascist RepubliKKKan Party's #2 Rapist, Matt Gaetz would cast a vote for RepubliKKKan Rapist #1, the Orange Turd, itself, for Speaker of the House!
When is this criminal insanity going to end? When every worthless bootlicking member of the Party of the Orange Turd is annihilated along with the rest of us in another senseless global war? This time it would be thermonuclear. Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un are all too eager to press the doomsday button, laughing hysterically at us.

@9 Brent Gumbo: As a Seattle native, I have to disagree with you, Brent. Downtown Seattle WAS beautiful, and had a thriving middle class. The dot.com era, starting in the late 1990s, the Tech Age, and the Rise of Amazon have decimated the city's livability. Developers have since been given the green light to build out of control for profit. A lot of soulful landmarks and historical buildings, not to mention needed trees and greenbelt, are gone. Unique single family neighborhoods are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Crumbling infrastructure is not being adequately addressed. Traffic going in any direction is currently a poorly designed, highly congested nightmare. The Big Bertha tunnel project turned out to be a costly joke at the expense of commuters (does anyone miss the Alaskan Way Viaduct along the waterfront?). Why build needed affordable housing when you can go for New York City style high density condos at $2 million a pop?
And Seattle's Mayor Bruce Harrell is patting himself on the back because only the rich can live in Seattle and SPD cops can kill on sight. I believe Seattle's ugliness started in 2000 when Paul Allen's former Experience Music Project (now MoPop) was built on 325 5th Avenue N. Now with Jeff Bezos' hideous Amazon building, with Bezos balls casting a gray shadow over what once was, THAT is what you and everyone wanting a beautiful and livable city need to be angry about. It's as if architectural designers are free to outdo each other in the World's Ugliest Building contest.

16

Yes, let’s go back to the good old days of Real Seattle-
back when you could have a schooner of Rainier at the 611 or the Doubleheader. Or go to the gay bathhouse in Denny Regrade.

17

And speaking of good old days and Congress- instead of all these meaningless votes for Speaker, why not have a duel and get it over with? In the tradition of Hamilton vs Burr- 10 paces, turn and fire!

18

@9: I lived in Pike-Pine for twenty years, and in Belltown for another four. Downtown had theatres, art, restaurants, Pike Place Market, great views, amazing sunsets. Would do it all again in a heartbeat. Now? Not so much since the Progressive dream of high crime, tents everywhere, dying stores, and filth has triumphed.

19

@14 False. RCV would not have changed the outcome of the election because the way it played out was essentially ranked choice voting. Nelson and Oliver were the top two candidates in the primary so in the general those that voted for Thomas or the other candidates had the opportunity to essentially reallocate their vote. I hope we both can agree that those who voted for Nelson/Oliver in the primary were unlikely to switch in the general so the election essentially came down to reallocating the Thomas et all votes and they not only went to Nelson they overwhelmingly did so. In your scenario you assume the Thomas voters would move farther left and in fact they did not. The same can be said for the city atty race. The Holmes voters decided that election and they overwhelming rejected NTK.

Since it it Friday though and I love a good fantasy story feel free to regale us with tales of how having Oliver on the council would have put us in a much better place. Just this week they were tweeting out about shutting down the King County Jail even though they don't live here anymore. Oliver would have been an idealogical disaster for the city.

20

@2, @11, @14: The longer you guys talk about changing the voting system, the less I want to do it — and I’m a math-geek engineer who likes tinkering with stuff like this. We’re talking about a primary election where the top-two candidates EACH received THREE TIMES as many votes as the third-place candidate. It should be obvious that any scheme which put that third-place finisher on the general-election ballot would be per se (and profoundly!) undemocratic.

Likewise, the general election wasn’t close either, for the reasons given @19. So any system which put the ultimate loser of the general election in office would also be fundamentally undemocratic.

All of this feeds the suspicion you simply don’t like how other citizens vote, and so you’re advocating for a new system, one which would be fundamentally rigged to disenfranchise them in your favor.

21

@20 of course they are hoping to game the system in favor of more activist candidates. None of these proposals really gained traction until after the progressive disaster of 2021 and as you read above many of them are convinced if only we had RCV then the Gonzales, NKT, Oliver slate would have sailed through. RCV works best when you have candidates that are closely aligned politically so you can gain nuance in their positions. In the case of Seattle lately you have had some very fringe type candidates gain traction because they are promoted by the activists and TS. They are able to win in the primary but don't stand a chance in the general and the same thing would play out under RCV because they are just too extreme. They would not be people's 2nd or 3rd choice as most of the voters are not comfortable with positions such as abolishing the police, rent control, draconian taxes on business and free reign for criminals. RCV is going to be expensive to implement and it will cause voter confusion leading to disenfranchisement (most likely among low information voters) and most likely won't change any of the results. It sounds like the perfect Seattle solution to me.

22

@2: Again, if you want Thomas on the Council, District 3 would be your best way of getting her there. The Stranger has published both a headline post on the current, ineffectual incumbent, and your own comments in the same topic: (https://www.thestranger.com/news/2022/12/28/78789251/best-and-worst-moments-for-progressives-on-seattle-city-council-in-2022/comments) Having a woman BIPOC opponent would baffle CM Sawant’s usual plays of the race and gender cards, and Thomas has done actual legislative work.

23

@16 and especially @17 pat L for the WIN!!!! +2 Every member of the GOP should face a firing squad or the guillotine. Let's subject them to the French Revolution [May 5, 1789 through November 9, 1799] since they're so hellbent on pushing the U.S. centuries backward. Obviously, the only way to save our democracy is to annihilate every last bootlicking RepubliKKKan left standing, down to the most shamelessly blindsided of MAGA dupes.

24

@23: Let's face it---the GOP's shameless stalling of votes for Speaker of the House is exactly what the RepubliKKKan Party of the Orange Turd wants---a sequel to the American Civil War. And ~75 million batshit crazies are ready to violently commit senseless acts of high treason, just because their "idol", the Orange Turd told them to overthrow the U.S. Government because it refused to concede to the elected victor, President Joe Biden, exactly one year ago today. This is the current GOP: the Party of Domestic Terrorists.

25

@24: My goof--make that sadly already 2 years ago, January 6, 2021, not one. AAAIIIIGGGHHH!! Why does the criminal attack on the U.S. Capitol seem like it happened yesterday? What does the Investigation Committee have to report?

Kevin McKKKarthy demonstrated this weekend that he, along with the rest of the Party of the Orange Turd, can be bought--and the sleazier the RWNJ extortionists, the better.


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