Washblog

Kathya Alexander, Justice Works! new Executive Director served as Resident Manager and later Vice President of the Board of A Woman's Place in Champaign Illinois, one of the first domestic violence shelters ever opened in the country, if not the first.  She worked directly with women as a counselor at the Eastside Domestic Violence Program in Bellevue. She was Director of Student Life of Parkland College in Illinois, which had over 10,000 students.  She served as Employment Director at The Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle.  She was most recently Manager of Rainier Valley Cultural Center.
L: Lea Zengage, Founder and Executive Director of Justice Works!  R: Kathya Alexander, Justice Works! new Executive Director		I met with Kathya Alexander and Lea Zengage at Justice Works! (JW!) headquarters and Gift and Thrift shop on Rainier Avenue in Seattle.  Kathya had just accepted the position of Executive Director of this grassroots criminal justice reform organization. Lea, after nearly a decade as Executive Director, is stepping down.  The two women will work together for several months for a smooth transition.  Lea will stay with Justice Works! as an organizer. It's a milestone for the organization.  Lea has served without pay since JW! was founded in 2001 under the name, Justice Passage.  Kathya, a founding member of JW!, will be paid.  The shift to new leadership - and the paid staff position are signs of the organization's growth.

Isn't it normal to deduct some portion of state income tax paid from federal income tax? If so, how much?

If I made over $200k, I'd prefer to send more of my money to Olympia, vs DC. To pay for schools, roads, and other nice stuff. Last I checked, Washington State hadn't blown one trillion dollars on any illegal wars.

When I-1098 passes, I'll save ~$200 on property taxes. Woohoo! Use this tax calculator to see how much you'll save.

Those of you who’ve followed my work over a period of time know that I’m usually the one suggesting moderation and keeping everyone in the big tent, and, even in this most difficult year, I’m the one telling folks that sometimes you just have to hold your nose and vote for the candidate that sucks less.

And even though the last thing I’d ever want is a Speaker Boehner or a Leader McConnell (or even worse yet, DeMint), the fact remains that there are two Democratic Senators I would actually vote against, even if the candidate that sucks more does win...and those two are Arkansas’ Blanche Lincoln and Nebraska’s Ben Nelson.

One of those two is up for re-election this year, and thanks to a particularly ridiculous vote by Senator Lincoln, we found ourselves in a bit of an email exchange, which is what we’ll be talking about today.

We last got together about ten days ago, when I put up a story that hoped to explain to the Islamic world that, Qur'an burning aside, we don't really hate either them, or our own Constitution.

I pointed out that, just like everywhere else, about 20% of our population are idiots, that this means about 60,000,000 of us might, at any time, be inclined to burst into fits of random stupidity, such as the desire to burn Qur'ans to make some sort of statement, and that the same First Amendment that protects the freedom of stupid speech also protects the rights of Islamic folks to freely build mosques...and finally, that this apparent "paradox of freedom" is exactly why the US is the kind of country that many Islamic folks the world over wish they lived in as well.

I then went off to enjoy my Godson's wedding, and I ignored the posting until the next Monday.

On the two dozen sites where it could be found, this was apparently considered to be a fairly innocuous message...with one giant exception, which is what we'll be talking about today.

Long story short, some portion of this country's population has some bizarre ideas about Islamic folks...but maybe if they knew my friend Wa'el, they might see things a bit differently.

Originally posted at Examiner.com

With the August primary election results now certified by the Secretary of State, it's time to start examining some of the races that will be on the general election ballot in Snohomish County.

The race that will determine how the county's criminal justice system will be administered moving into the future, the contest between county council appointed incumbent County Prosecutor, Mark Roe, and challenger, Jim Kenny will be a referendum on maintaining the status quo or moving ahead with some much needed reform in that office.

Will Your Vote Count? A Look at 100 Years of Suffrage and How Voting is Changing Today

Thursday September 9th
7:30 to 9:00 p.m.
MOHAI Auditorium (directions)

On the 100th anniversary of woman's suffrage, what are the current challenges to our democratic processes? With Reed's push to adopt email ballot (voting via the Internet), I expect this to be a lively discussion.

I am one of those people who will actually watch those boring, boring, hearings on C-SPAN that most of us flip right on past while watching TV, and this past week I've been watching one of the longer events the channel broadcasts...but it's been far from boring.

The Coast Guard and what used to be the MMS were in Houston looking into what caused the Gulf oil spill and they're taking testimony from representatives of the involved parties...and let me tell you, this is more than just an accident inquiry--it's also a warm-up for the lawsuits that are surely going to follow.

We've had dozens of trial attorneys basically conducting a deposition process, witnesses who can teach a master course in "plausible unawareability"©, BP employees who have taken the Fifth and refused to testify at all, and, overseeing the entire process, a retired Federal District Court Judge and a Coast Guard Captain who might very well be on the way to trading his eagles for stars one day soon.

Do you really believe all those "we'll make it right" BP commercials?
If you watch this hearing, that impression may well change.

Monday night, I sent the following letter to several active local (5th CD)Democrats including the leadership of the various local committees:

I have been an active part of the organized Democratic Party since 1983 or so. Since I live in the 9th LD and Whitman County, I've had to get up and continue after a loss, more often than not. I've lost primaries and been at the winner's office the next day offering my help and support. I've walked this walk I am about to talk I would hope that the organized Democratic Party groups of the 5th CD are pragmatic, wise and grown-up enough to accept the results of the only poll that matters. Daryl Romeyn  is the Democratic winner of the primary election. So what if he was not the endorsed choice of the organization(s). If not for the unfortunate "top two" fiasco we are stuck with, this would have been an ordinary contested primary. There was an insider, an outsider, a perennial, and even a "nutjob" or two.

Under the old rules (which are possibly still the rules in some local bylaws) the Central Committees would have remained neutral until last week. AND promptly come together and worked hard to win the general!

They better not build that mosque down by Ground Zero, we're being told, not just because it's insensitive, but because we have no idea what they'll be up to down there.

I mean, where did the money come from?

Who does this Imam hang out with, anyway?

And, at a time when our Nation faces more threats than ever, why would we let these Muslim madmen situate their "terror command posts" anywhere?

Well, I don't know about all of that...but I do know a place where lots of these Islamic terrorists go to obtain the equipment and supplies they need to support their particular craft, and I decided to make a bit of an undercover visit to the spot, so that I might "observe and report" on what goes on at this specific location.

So put on your dark glasses...and let's go see what we can find out.

It was about a week ago that we saw the ruling throwing out California's Prop 8; that decision has now been appealed, and we will see, at some point in the future, how the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals handles the matter.

A couple of days later, I had a story up that walked through the ruling, describing the tactics used by the Prop 8 proponents, which, in the opinion of the Judge who looked at the evidence, were basically to try to scare Californians into thinking that gay people, once they're able to get gay married, will somehow now be free to evangelize your kids and make them gay, too.

In the course of answering comments on the several sites where the story is up, I noticed that there were those who felt the Bible should be guiding our thinking here...that if it did, we would be better off than where we are today, with all those immoral gay people running around free to do all those immoral gay things.

This led me to an obvious question: are those who have been using the Bible as a sort of "divining rod" to figure out who is immoral and who is not...actually any good at it?

Sometimes stories happen because of planning; other times serendipity intervenes, which is how we got to the conversation we'll be having today.

In an exchange of comments on the Blue Hampshire site, I proposed an idea that could be of real value to unions, workers...and surprisingly, employers.

If things worked out correctly, not only would lots of people feel a real desire to have unions represent them, but employers would potentially be coming to unions looking to forge relationships, and, just to make it better, this plan bypasses virtually all of the tools and techniques employers use to shut out union organizers.

Since I just thought this up myself, I'm really not sure exactly how practical the whole thing is, and the last part of the discussion today will be provided by you, as I ask you to sound off on whether this plan could work, and if so, how it could be made better.

It's a new week...so let's all put our heads together and rebuild the labor movement, shall we?

As I pick up the pace of work again, coming into the midterms, I have to get some stories cleared off the desk in order to make room for some others, and that's what we're about today.

We'll be talking about saving more than 300,000 of this country's most important jobs, and paying for it in a way that is not only good policy, but is a real problem for Republicans who are yelling "no new taxes!" once again while pretending they care about actually paying for actual spending and actually want to cut actual unemployment.

We have a bit of work to do today, but we want to keep it somewhat short...so let's get going.

The airwaves (and the print and blog waves, for that matter) are filled with the news that a Federal Judge in California has declared that State's Proposition 8 to be unconstitutional, which could clear the way for the resumption of same-sex weddings in the State.

Ordinarily, this would be the point where I would present to you a walkthrough of the ruling, and we'd have a fine conversation about the legal implications of what has happened.

I'm not doing that today, frankly, because the ground is already well-covered; instead, we're going to take a look at some of the tactics that were used to pass Prop 8, as they were presented in Judge Vaughan's opinion.

It's an ugly story--and even more than that, it's a reminder of why it's tough to advance civil rights through the political process, and what you have to deal with when you're trying to make such a thing happen.

L-R: Dolphy Jordan, Ari Kohn, Chris Jones, and Pollard Fa'alogo.  Dolphy and Pollard are current PPEP students		I met Chris Jones as he entered Jillian's Billiards Club surrounded by family and friends.  We were there to celebrate his acceptance of an Associate of Science degree earlier that afternoon from North Seattle Community College.   Ari Kohn, Founder of Post Prison Education Program (PPEP) introduced us and Chris led me to a table at the edge of the party to share reflections on his transition from prison with the help of that program.  A Phi Theta Kappa key glinted on his lapel as if releasing a tiny wattage of his tremendous energy.
There was in the room a sense of celebration of Chris Jones as a person, his hard-won success in moving past active addiction, the spiritual awakening in prison that had transformed his world view, his academic honors (a 3.71 grade point average in a challenging science curriculum), the honor of delivering one of the student addresses at the graduation ceremony that day, his volunteer work as a tutor to other PPEP students, and his new enrollment in the Electrical Engineering program of Washington State University.

We have already seen some impressive efforts in this campaign season to do a bit of résumé padding, particularly as it regards things military; so far Illinois' Mark Kirk has managed to turn himself into a kind of camouflage Austin Powers, while Connecticut's Richard Blumenthal's trying to catch up with some "Vietnam" service of his own that no one else in the theater of operations exactly knew about.

But now, in the race for Alabama Governor, we may have seen something that takes us to a whole new level of "inflation": the Republican candidate is running an ad that not only suggests that he served in Vietnam...it seems to imply that he actually died there, and has now come back to save the State.

Which is some serious irony indeed, considering that the candidate is actually a medical doctor.

And with that, let me introduce you to the either living...or undead...Dr. Robert J. Bentley.