Comments

1

The city generously offered them shelter beds for the holidays complete with warmth and meals, rather than sleep outside in 40 degree weather in a children's park with all manner of criminal. How awful, what an attack!

2

"... KOMO, which is owned by conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group and produces video packages calling for unhoused people to be imprisoned on islands... "

Excellent.
Heads UP
Orcas, Mercer
Bainbridge Islands

you're about to see Poor People
prepare for Shocking Sights
'cause here we Honor
Property RIGHTS
over the
People.

4

@Gaseous one
your Leaps Olympic
your 'comprehension'
gone & your Extrapolations
Extraordinary. try try try again?

6

@3: Did you really expect an intelligent well-written answer?

8

@ duck soup
have you READ @ 2?
get back to me when you Do?

(hint: it's a Heads Up
to the Isles of Rich).

@raincloud -- great Projection!
as per Always.

11

@7: You're right, I remember seeing one a couple of weeks ago. Wasn't from kristofartarain though.

12

"Included [in Congress's -- the fawking Senate's, rather -- admission that WE, the People are indeed Out There and that it is, Indeed their fawking Job to Provide for the General Welfare -- NOT the Welfare of the Rich -- they get Too Much Welfare already] is likely to be vaccine distribution and unemployment benefits, you know, the stuff that other nations figured out long long long ago. Great country." --MB

well, the overly-Entitled figured out Long Ago if EVERY one were doing Alright, they might be doing slightly less Alright then they already are -- so we're Stuck with victim-blaming / shaming cum calls for more Bootstrappery, less Education and Total corporate Impunity re Immunity. my Gawd, what a Country!

13

Good thing you gave Nat the day off, she looks to be quite bored. Popped-over to her Twitter and all the photos are of environmental destruction caused by the campers. A nylon tent full of fireworks set ablaze, trash everywhere, scrapped refrigerators undoubtedly leaking coolant. Really ties-in with Inslee's green budget proposals, nice work Nat. Back to you in the studio, Matt.

14

"I was wondering whether we share a commitment to bedrock American values like freedom of the press... " @whatsthatSmell?

you mean the wholly-corporate-Owned mass media
Sinclair Broadcasting* which Owns all those thousands of teevee stations all broadcasting their (OUR) God=Freedom 24/7. Yeah, no, I do NOT support total corporate ownership of OUR Airwaves. they gave us the trumpf kkkrime fambly ffs.

*motto: Fear Gawd
or Else

16

I need a visual Matt to understand your knitting tips. I think it warrants its own article!

17

@15
Bingo.

18

Abolish public parks! Parks are privilege!

20

The guy from Miami Vice was DON Johnson. RON Johnson was the loser stereo salesman who went after underage girls in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

22

Throwing rocks at journalists? Sounds trumpian to me. Imminent 'attack' on Cal Anderson? Typical young people hyperbole.

25

Sinclair Media may be noxious, but their reporters and news crews are still accredited media. If Proud Boys did this to an MSNBC crew or even just Natalie at the park, we would be rightfully howling. The irony is that the rock-throwing attack on Sinclair's crew just strengthens their editorial argument that the park should be cleared. Which is to say, in the eyes of many it will weaken their justification for occupying the park.

26

@20,

I salute your knowledge of 1980's entertainment trivia good sir or madam!

27

@21: There are local corporate conglomerates who own local media.

28

Reprehensible and disgusting:

https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2020/12/16/trump-appointee-demanded-herd-immunity-strategy-446408

30

That "SPD Raid Underway" headline didn't age well. Perhaps the SPD is the Seattle Parks Department and the raid was one of those Pokémon go things?

31

@19:

Oh, the sweet naivete of the clueless. There's no such thing as "free media"; somebody pays for that media, whether it's advertisers or subscribers. Just because it doesn't cost YOU to consume it doesn't mean it doesn't cost someone else to put it in front of your eyeballs in the hopes you'll impulsively purchase something you see there, which is, after its entire "raison d' etre".

And the only difference between Sinclair Broadcast Group and Pravda is the end of the spectrum from which they generate their propaganda. Actually, even that's no longer true since Pravda has become a far right organ of the Putin regime.

33

From the Nation
Talk Radio: Democrats Can’t Win if They Don’t Play

The vast right-wing talk-show network across the United States has enormous political sway—and Republican politicians know and embrace it.

“Why Did So Many Americans Vote for Donald Trump?” asks the headline in The New York Times shortly after the election. Weirdly, that article—and hundreds like it purporting to explain the previous 2016 election—lacked even a single mention of the roughly 1,500 right-wing talk-radio stations that saturate every corner, no matter how remote or rural, of America.

As a 2008 Pew Research poll found, 16 percent of Americans got their general election-year information about presidential candidates from talk radio, a percentage that had held constant for eight years at that point, despite the explosive growth of the Internet over the same period.

Talk radio gave Lindsay Graham the edge to hold his seat in South Carolina—defeating Jaime Harrison’s advertising—with 16 radio stations covering the Palmetto state. And in that flood of coverage, there was not one progressive voice speaking to the white community. Graham bet national and local talk-radio hosts would back him, and he was right, a reality that polling seems to have missed.

If Republicans had to lease just the English-language conservative airtime nationwide, it would cost them over $5 billion a year; instead, they get it free, subsidized by advertising, giant right-leaning radio station monopolies, and, as documented by Politico, right-wing billionaires and their foundations.

Progressives, on the other hand, have large stations in a handful of cities, but across the entirety of most red and swing states, the only way to hear progressive talk radio is with a SiriusXM satellite account.

Pass legislation to bring back radio and TV station ownership caps that were initially scaled back by a directive to the FCC from Reagan in 1986 and the 1996 Telecommunications Act that mandated a series of death-by-a-thousand-cuts FCC rule changes.

(When I started in radio in 1967 in Lansing, Mich., every station in town was locally and independently owned; today there’s only one. This is bad for local communities, the economy, and our political discourse.)

The takeaway? Radio works. In 2000 and 2016, Rush Limbaugh and his national and local right-wing colleagues helped put Bush and Trump in office, along with thousands of state and local Republican candidates all across America.
By Thom Hartmann
TODAY 5:30 AM

Tonnes more at
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/conservative-talk-radio/

35

oh and Thom Hartmann ROCKS

https://www.thomhartmann.com/radio/listen-live

36

Moving the homeless from one place to another does not solve homelessness. The only thing that solves homelessness is providing the homeless a permanent place to live. This has been proven over and over and over. Homeless given a place to live tend to be able, given the stability, get their lives together, especially if provided access to other services they require, usually health care (including mental health care) and employment. Every single city in this country that has successfully reduced or ended homelessness has done it by providing homes to the homeless.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over and expecting different results.

I was horrified when I saw the photos of Cal Anderson Park. I used to work in the building right in front of the Jimi Hendrix statue (it was DMX Music at the time, before they fired everyone and left Seattle). I lived three blocks from there. I walked to work, I spent my lunch hours and my free time in that park. When I got seriously ill and had to go out on short term disability during extensive medical testing I would sit in that park for comfort.

Seattle's refusal to address the cost of rent and it's insistence that the homeless are a nameless, faceless horde they simply need to move out of sight is not a strategy.

Here are strategies: (just a sampling of the information out there)

There are truly thousands of available resources, including information from locations that have successfully eradicated homelessness. All of this information is out there and FREE to access and use.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90316607/3-cities-in-the-u-s-have-ended-chronic-homelessness-heres-how-they-did-it

https://endhomelessness.org/ending-homelessness/solutions/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK519590/

https://www.cbpp.org/research/housing/commentary-we-need-rental-assistance-and-services-not-punitive-policies-to-end

http://www.evidenceonhomelessness.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Homelessness_Prevention_Literature_Synthesis.pdf

37

@35 Kristo, did you ever listen to AM 1090 when it was Progressive Talk (if you're in the Seattle area)? Good times. I used to love Brunch With Bernie.

38

I did not, Lastlight.

But I did listen to Brunch with Bernie on the Thom Hartmann Program on local 91.3 KBCS. I think it must have been right after the Sole Progressive Voice am1090 -- was it Air America? --ran outta Ca$h -- they needed a Billionaire or two...

(say, MacKenzie Scott, you haven't a few [lousy] hundred Millions lying around, just Idle, to toss around, have you? 'Cause this Country need a Progressive [radio/teevee] Heart way more than it 'needs' more Business cum Profiteerers.)

Congressman then Senator cum People's Partay Senator Sanders (I-VT) was on Thom's shows for More Than a Decade. he's an Honorable Man and Genuine, and, sadly, I've just not seen all that Many in the political arena.

@36 -- THANK YOU
xina.

39

@20 dvs99: Thanks and bless you beating me to it. :)
Matt--how could you confuse Don Johnson, Miami Vice star with Phillip Michael Thomas, and the father of Dakota Johnson (also daughter of Melanie Griffith, and grand-daughter of Tippi Hedren), mentioned in this same article--with Ron Johnson, a lecherous stereo salesman in the 80's film, Fast Times at Ridgemont High? :o

@36 xina: Thank you for your consistently insightful comments and resources.


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