Tuesday 19 April 2005

Time to Get Local

This site was christened last May as a place for me to air my thoughts about national and global matters, and general political theory. But I live in a very particular locality, and while I'll always tend to seek a big picture perspective, it's high time I crawl out from under my global rock and wake up to things closer at hand. With that in mind, I've started paying more attention to Washington State's governance, where we have the opposite situation from that in D.C., with Democrats in control of both chambers of the legislature and (in a now famous squeaker) the governorship. We've had a Democratic governor now since 1992, but it's the first time in over eight years that there's been a majority in both houses.

Look soon for a post here on the recent failed attempt to do away with the super-majority requirement for local school levies to pass.

While doing my research on that, I've been becoming better acquainted with other Washington State bloggers, including many of those linked to by the Pacific NW Portal. Carl Ballard who provides us with the Washington State Political Report kindly linked to my linguistic profile post yesterday, more than doubling my usual traffic. Brian Moran (I think that's his name) gives us washblog, which has in its sidebars the most usable list of links to government, party (Greens & Dems), and media sites across the entirety of our state that I've ever seen. And then I stopped long enough at horsesass.org to discover the wonderful writing of David Goldstein, who I knew of heretofore only as the initiator of the "Tim Eyman is a horse's ass" initiative, which was killed before I had a chance to sign it. In fact it's a testament to the extent to which I've eschewed local issues here that this is the first mention Eyman has gotten on my blog. Along with Tom DeLay, Eyman is one character whose very name or image causes the blood vessels in my neck to bulge, and my face to redden.

Goldstein recently appeared to start a post as an afterthought to a reference to an article on Daily Kos, but really got rolling with one of the best indictments of the ascendency of the scary right in America that I've ever seen. Stick with it; it's worth the read!

2 comments:

-epm said...

Ironically -- or perhaps inevitably -- this is the predicament in which I find myself as well: motivated by events on the global/national scene I now find myself looking closer to home and have become more active in the local community. We stopped a recent sprawl development effort and are now looking to do more in the way of planned development that is sensitive to conservation and historic buildings.

This is grassroots at its best. Knowing what's going on Washington state -- the challenges and solutions for progressive action -- helps me better understand my local political landscape, notwithstanding our three thousand mile and three time zone separation.

Please keep posting even if it's just local issues, because you know... all politics is local.

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