Results tagged “congress”

The Congressional Bike Caucus, founded by Rep. Earl Blumenauer of Portland, gets a boost from the NYT. In case you're wondering who represents for the spokes-folks in Washington State, it's alternative-energy friendly Jay Inslee, Adam Smith, Rick Larsen, and Jim McDermott.

Our compatriots at DCist have been scouting for information on inauguration tickets. Turns out you can't get them from TicketMaster. For one thing, they're free. And for another, it's a government hand-out.

Tickets to the 56th Inaugural Ceremonies will be provided free of charge and distributed through Members of the 111th Congress. The Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies does not provide tickets to the public. Members of the public interested in attending the Inaugural Ceremonies should contact their Member of Congress or U.S. Senators to request tickets.

By coincidence, it was while we were sitting in the over-crowded number 14 bus on the way to work when we came across this gem of an article in the : "Drop in Miles Driven Is Depleting Highway Fund; Loan From Mass Transit Is Urged." Our sneering disbelief was interrupted by being smacked in the face by the laptop bag of the guy standing next to our seat in the aisle; the 14 is standing room only by our stop, the third on the line, from about 8 a.m.-10 a.m.

...you're all about to be caught.

We've been following the Dead Prez/Evergreen State College story here, here, and definitely here in our search to understand what actually happened after that hip hop concert. It certainly was not the beginning of a revolution, as Evergreen students have been protesting anything and everything since time began; it also wasn't The Man reenacting Tien'anmen Square.

We have gathered some of the top political writers in the country and asked them to discuss the presidential race throughout the year. Today they will discuss the Democratic race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Like anybody else, we appreciate the sentiment of the Presidents' Day long weekend--well, for those of us who have that day off or are able to take it. It provided us the perfect opportunity to temporarily ex-patriate ourselves and pump money into Canada's economy. That's what it's all aboot, anyway. This so-named Presidents' Day has become just a reason for the commercial sector to entice us with Fabulous Savings. Nobody thinks about Washington or Lincoln anymore, much less Millard Fillmore, say, or Grover Cleveland if we are to buy into this doubletalk about the inclusivity of the day. But--ZOMG--holy crap! Fry's has HDTVs on sale!

M. Coy Books on Pine is closing, and, because we spent hours and hours there as a teenager without buying anything, we're feeling a bit jerk-ish for not having patronized the place more in adulthood.

Last night there were tons of Ron Paul's people outside the Showbox Sodo. Before, during, and after Barack Obama's fundraising event/rally, the Paul supporters waved their signs and interacted with anyone who would give them the time of day. Too bad they couldn't afford tickets to the event due to the current tax structure--if only someone would abolish the IRS and the Federal Reserve.... Meanwhile, inside the venue was a crowd of teens, twenty-somethings,...

While trolling through today's Floor Proceedings of the U.S. House of Representatives for our other job (it's an exciting one), we noticed something that will probably get no coverage anywhere else. However, we think it is important to note when Congress singles out one faith as important. We think it's doubly important to note when the vote is taken while Congress fights with the Bush Administration over funding the government for the next year, haggles...

So we all know the world is going to hell in a hand basket, right? The climate's changing, San Diego is burning to the ground and we're at war because the president lied to Congress. Things are bad. But every once in awhile you come across someone who is doing the right thing because it's the right thing to do.

The Stranger has endorsed a No vote on the RTID Proposition 1 (along with the Seattle Times, but thankfully with more logic and, er, research). Their reasoning? "Rather than letting compromised politicians tell us what's possible, the people should tell the leaders what's needed: more light rail without massive roads expansion."

It's not exactly mind-blowingly awesome legislation, but our lady Maria Cantwell and her pals in the Senate have managed to negotiate a mileage standard for all U.S. cars and SUVs today. Currently, cars have to get at least 27.5 miles per gallon, while SUVs only have to get a measly 22 mpg. That's pretty pathetic from an environmentalist perspective, but it's also irresponsible from a business perspective. After all, just about every other country has been making cars that get far better gas mileage for years now. Who wants a gas-guzzling American car (Ford Focus gets 26 mpg!) when gas prices are hovering around $4/gallon and there's the option of getting a high-mpg car like Honda's Insight (61 mpg) or Volkswagen's Beetle (38 mpg)?

The headline: "White House E-Mail Inquiry Will Widen." The story: how the Bush administration has quite possibly made a major infraction, broken big giant rules, or in the 's words, "committed 'extensive' [legal] violations."

reports on his blog that state Sen. Joe Zarelli recently hosted right-wing Israeli politicians and others at a two-day conference down in Vancouver, to fan the flames of Islamophobia.

City Council President Nick Licata will be fulfilling his wettest dream on Thursday when he testifies before Congress on the negative economic impact of publicly-funded sports arenas (something we wrote our senior thesis on, thank you very much).

Kyle Sampson, the top aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, has resigned, as it becomes more and more clear that US attorneys who were fired in December, including Seattle-based John McKay, were fired for political reasons.

Another in a string of online sex stings recently caught ex King County Prosecutor's Office employee Lawrence Corrigan trying to meet up with a 13-year-old for sex. You asshole, Lawrence.

Sometimes, The Seattle Times has got to make you wonder. It was one thing to go ahead and endorse David Reichert for Congress over Darcy Burner despite widespread dissatisfaction with Republican leadership, but to spin his shameless partisanship as moderation? That's a new low.

In the old days, when men were men and trees fit in the ground, newspapers were no less biased than the average KVI caller. Most were organs of one political party or the other, and as a result were very entertaining.

What did we learn at trivia last night? We learned that Mike Piazza's homosexuality-denial campaign has largely been successful. We learned that Shawn Kemp jokes are not only limitless, but very funny. And--from the names of two teams--about a scandal in Congress regarding some Foley fellow.

A common liberal criticism of Congressman Dave Reichert (R-Eastside) is that, despite cultivating an outsider image, he's in lockstep with the Republican Party.

We sat down to write something about congress's attack on internet gambling and the parallels to Washington state's recent anti-online poker legislation, but a few quick Google searches that started out as "research" morphed into an hour of Texas Hold 'Em. An hour, it turns out, is exactly as long as it takes a complete idiot to lose $1000 of play money at a poker table.

As fall settles in and another calendar page gets turned, thoughts turn from bbq's and vacations to holidays and the realization that '06 is coming to an end. With all that going on, with change in the air, we wonder what is it that made that makes the -ists ponder?

As both the Seattle Times and P-I are reporting the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's latest national ad campaign in support of Republican lawmakers has had to be tweaked a tiny bit.

The guy at Fort Lewis who has "serious reservations" about war fighting in Iraq to the extent that he's refusing to deploy is Honolulu native Ehren Watada. Assuming that he's the sole Ehren Watada from Hawaii it looks like his dad is Bob Watada who was the executive director of the state Campaign Spending Commission in Hawaii for a long time and according to the available reports kicked a lot of ass in that capacity. He retired in 2005, but not before doing a bunch of good stuff like this:

Congressman Jim McDermott will be playing all the hits, sending out your long distance dedications, and generally getting the Led out all week.

The weeks starts out right when a sucker punch on the field lands Chicagoist in the middle of a Sox/Cubs throwdown and the fists continue to fly in the comments. Despite suburban resident Ms. Pinney's best little try no books will be banned anytime soon and the El is really really gross.

Londonist prepares a Happy Birthday bath for Buddah this week and then things get all cliched. A madman goes on a rampage while axe-wiedling and London's mayor warns an American diplomat to avoid the kitchen if the heat bothers him so much.

Well, it was certainly eye catching. We tried to walk past the P-I on a newsstand yesterday and it might as well have reached out with with a cluster of fish hooks to our eyeballs. What kind of a headline was that? A bunch of different colors, a bunch of different weights, a bunch of different sizes; it had it all and it took up the entire front page. When we first saw it we thought we'd come across the special retirement home edition or something, but we looked around and they all were printed like that.