Today, when I wasn’t really planning to write anything, I got an invitation to a birthday house party by the Obama campaign. My first thought was, “Wait a minute, these guys know it’s my birthday? That NSA spying has gotten really out of hand….” Unfortunately, the truth is even worse: I’m invited to a “house” [...]
As a kid growing up in the 1960′s and 70′s, I really believed that America was rapidly becoming a better place, and the future looked bright. In first grade and kindergarten, I attended a school in a nearby “ghetto” neighborhood, where the “War on Poverty” lured privileged white kids like myself by offering gym classes, [...]
So it seems that the bubbly but bonkers Delaware Senate (!) candidate Christine O’Donnell helped herself to about twenty grand of her many campaign funds over the years, and now that mean ol’ Melanie Sloan at CREW is getting all schoolmarmish about it. The humanity! Everybody knows at this point that all folks who are [...]
UPDATED BELOW: Well, I fully expected this to be a rather depressing day, what with the President’s concession speech ahead, but boy, oh, boy, did it turn out differently. First, Measures 66 and 67 passed by a veritable landslide, at last count 54-46, and a lot of obnoxious rich people will have to make good [...]
The battle over measures 66 and 67 is heating up here in Oregon; and as an all-mail election state, these battles are more protracted here than other places. Last year the legislature, attempting to close a $700 million or so budget gap, decided to raise our corporate minimum tax (for companies who report no profits) [...]
UPDATED BELOW: More Democracy news… or its opposite. In a stunning victory for the plastics industry that funded the initiative, Seattle voters yesterday voted to overturn a twenty cent surcharge on plastic bags previously passed by the city council. Thus, a product so intrinsically crummy that it’s incapable of holding a box of cereal or [...]
Yesterday I was standing in the park outside CHNN World Headquarters, waiting for the streetcar in the humid 96 degree heat, and I spotted a familiar sight around here, a clipboard-carrying signature gatherer, approaching people in the park with a petition of one sort or another. Rather than the usual scruffy college kid (for liberal [...]