You finally find yourself wanting to help out Charlie Chong; not vote for him, necessarily, just help him make the mayor’s race more interesting by tying together the obviously disconnected strings of his campaign. The avowedly “populous” cause almost always wins elections in Seattle and nothing sells better than those old salted chestnuts, “neighborhood values.” So Chong’s single theme of Read More ›
The apartment on Seattle’s First Hill was nice, though modest, like its occupant. But it also had an inspiring view out over the city Joel Pritchard treasured. He said recently, “Almost every place with the most meaning in my life is within sight,” and that surely included Queen Anne Hill and Bainbridge Island, lands laden with childhood reveries. These were Read More ›
Here’s a riddle: How can a child’s mother become his sister, and his grandmother his mom? Answer: By government edict in America’s newest welfare trend, “kinship care.” Thanks to a biased social service system, welfare recipients anxious for more benefits, and gullible elected officials, the nation’s burgeoning foster care system is being used to discourage adoption of at-risk children and Read More ›
This time next year, when you think of taking the family up to Canada for a visit, or go on your own trip for business, you could find yourself waiting in lines of seven or eight hours duration at Blaine while totally superfluous paperwork is handled by Immigration and Naturalization (INS) officials. Something nearly as grim could await you at Read More ›
Americans have decided, if the polls are right, that the most important issue facing this country is campaign finance reform. But the polls probably are not right, reflecting, as they do, the media’s priorities and the lack of any military or economic bad news. This may be a case where the survey respondents are trying to guess the answer that Read More ›
We are enjoying–maybe even wallowing–in the increasing “peace dividends” from the ending of the Cold War. Yet few in the media or academia are reflecting on what caused the war or how the peace was achieved. In an age that synthesizes victimhood in many ways, it is curious how little attention is paid the hundreds of millions of genuine victims, Read More ›
In the next few weeks the Federal Communications Commission will decide whether the U.S. telephone industry unleashes a new birth of competition, entrepreneurship and innovation. When Congress completed last year’s comprehensive revision of telecommunications legislation–the first in 60 years–pundits foresaw a flowering of new services in the telecommunications marketplace. The Baby Bells were to take on the long distance companies, Read More ›
He was a restless young attorney who was also a frustrated architect and planner. On Sunday afternoons in the late 60’s he used to recruit his wife and a friend (me, on some occasions) to drive around Seattle looking at any new buildings going up. He would complain about the lack of good planning in town and sketch in the Read More ›
The general theme of my argument is, Don’t solve problems. When you solve problems, you end up subsidizing your weaknesses, starving your strengths, and achieving expensive mediocrity, and in a competitive global economy expensive mediocrity goes out of business. Washington has a compulsion to solve problems, and that is really the basic flaw of the Washington approach to problems-it tries Read More ›