Seattle


Oh What Fun It Is…

Megan finds DC drivers a bit lacking:

You’ve never seen anything like the DC reaction to snow. Yesterday, as I walked through the snowy streets, I looked at the drivers inching along and thought “they’ve never seen snow before”. After a while, though, I began to think “they’ve never seen cars before”. It’s as if each of those little white flakes was composed of some sort of powerful explosive activated by contact with car tires or shoe leather.

I suspect they are head and shoulders above Seattle.


Late Night Reading

Mark Kleiman has finished Quicksilver and writes about it. Worth reading no matter where you are in the Quicksilver Process. Me, I’m in hiatus at 180 pages…back to it soon.
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, much maligned on certain talk radio spews, has stood up for the citizens of the US in ruling unconstitutional portions of the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. See How Appealing and Talkleft for details.
Good Night!


On the Dole

You and I are subsidizing the builder and the folks who are going to live on this new hillside scar. According to the Seattle Times:

About one-fifth of the funding for the nearly $178million interchange and road, and much of the drive, came from Port Blakely Communities, the company building a 3,250-home “urban village” called the Issaquah Highlands on the south end of the Plateau.

The rest came from taxpayers to the tune of about $43,815 per home (assuming 80%).
There is a lot of glowing talk in the article about future tax benefits to the state and local communities and improvements in traffic flow. But there were other solutions to the traffic problem that did not involve lining a corporate pocket book with tax payer’s money (cf, bush and the Texas Rangers). Look at these projected tax revenues on a net instead of gross basis they won’t glow quite so brightly and, of course, they do little or nothing to compensate the out of area taxpayers who contributed significant federal dollars to the project.
Let’s send Port Blakely an additional bill.