You could not pay me enough money to be a police officer in this area. Whether it's accusations of excessive force, people complaining that you're trigger-happy, racist, unstable, unwilling to follow police procedure--I wouldn't do it. I don't know how those in this area do it either.

This morning, King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg announced ( Read more... )

With the size of the state budget deficit looming, I would hope that the Senators and Representatives would be hard at work down in Olympia, cutting funding to wasteful programs, eliminating redundancies and reducing the deficit day by day. Then I remember what state I live in, and was therefore unsurprised to find that our Congress is hard at work ( Read more... )

If little Martians were to come down to earth here in the Puget Sound area and they said "Please take us to the biggest waste of time you can thing of," at the top of the list would be a public forum in Seattle. All the same, the City as well as Chief of Police John Diaz put on a meeting with the general public to discuss the accountability of ( Read more... )

I get an e-mail from the Seattle Times any time there's some sort of breaking news, and today I got one that a member of The University of Washington's basketball team will not stand trail for accusations of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl. While he won't face felony charges, he could still be charged of providing alcohol to a minor.

I enjoy ( Read more... )

http://mynorthwest.com/?nid=17&sid=419161

This is a terrible story on its face anyhow; a company buys dogs expecting that they'll make some money hiring them out to take people on sled rides through the snow. But business slows and instead of doing just about anything else, a worker from Outdoor Adventures Whistler is instructed to execute a hundred ( Read more... )

On Saturday night, corrections officer Jayme Biendl was found dead in the chapel of the Monroe Correctional Complex. She died at the hands of Byron Scherf, a three-strikes lifer who

There's no beating around it: this is a terrible incident. There are plenty of questions. Why was a woman of Jayme's size left alone with someone with a lifetime pass ( Read more... )

In the run up to the 100th birthday of President Reagan (am I the only one who wishes that the "he would have been 100 years old today" thing needs to be put to rest/), his son Ron has been making the rounds of anyone who will talk to him. Ronnie seems to be intent on completely burying his dad's legacy by insinuating that his dad was suffering ( Read more... )

"We're in deep trouble. The country is in a bad way: fourteen trillion dollars in debt and growing. Citizens of Greece rioted as their country's spending reached 115% of GDP, and the state couldn't sustain it. We're on that path where we spend everything we make. With some reasonable cuts, we can grow out of debt. Here are some of the cuts I ( Read more... )

For me, Rule One of Fight Club is: don't over tax me. Rule Two is: if you're gonna tax me, please don't waste it. Put the money to good use and get decent utility for it. When I see the story about what Pierce Transit wants to do, it goes against both of my (admittedly unenforceable) rules ( Read more... )

Yup, I said it. And I'm not going to apologize for it, unlike CNN's John King. While discussing Chicago's mayoral race, King's guest Andy Shaw used the phrase "in the crosshairs" to refer to some candidate whose name I cannot be bothered to look up because 1) they're in Chicago so I don't care and 2) it doesn't really change the point I'm going to ( Read more... )