Are you one to keep track of sustainability news in your local paper, maybe The O and perhaps online? Do you faithfully follow LUBA appeals and UGB hearings? Are you looking for the next green tax credit, or want to keep tabs on how your elected reps are working to protect the planet?
There are a bunch of you out there like that here in the great PNW, but as with any proactive search for news and information, it's a hell of a chore to keep up, even if you know just where to look. Wouldn't it be great if someone was doing the watching out FOR you, and simply dropped the best of what they've found to your email inbox every day? And threw in a little economic and cultural news for good measure?
Sightline Daily is a free news service and blog featuring sustainability, economic, and social news from around the Northwest. Sightline Daily emails give you a snapshot of the day's news. Our editors get up at 5AM every weekday, check more than 40 papers, and handpick the top 10 stories affecting life in our region.
Weekly Score emails give you the best of our blog every Friday. From walkability and transit to climate policy and human health, Sightline's researchers provide commentary and connect the dots across issues.
When you sign up, you’ll join a group of journalists, policy makers, and engaged citizens who use Sightline Daily to stay on top of their game. Readers call it “a great way to get the most important and interesting headlines of the day in one quick location."
Granola in vanilla Silk for breakfast, with a side of NW enviro news--how can you top that?
Ah, but you can: if you sign up for the Sightline Daily before October 29, you'll be entered to win more than just the sense of well being that comes with being properly informed. How's an all-expenses, two-night trip to the Emerald City sound?Two Amtrak tickets, two nights at the snazzy new Hyatt Olive 8 with breakfast included, vouchers for dinner at the equally hip Lark and Sutra, plus other goodies for activities during the day. Does. Not. Suck!
Even if you don't get the chance to sign up by the 28th, or don't win the trip, you'll still come out a winner if you sign up. A well-informed electorate is a powerful electorate!
Here's a bit of a nasty story, which at first I thought concerned Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland, and which made me a) somewhat antsy, given the sound and fury that develops when violence chances to occur downtown, and b) wonder why I was apparently the only one who'd seen the story, since there was no mention of it in other papers or the blogosphere that I saw. Then I realized...oh:
An out-of-town visitor was sent to the hospital with a serious head injury this week after he was assaulted while trying to retrieve a necklace that had been snatched off his body by a panhandler in Pioneer Square.
According to Seattle police, the 25-year-old Oregon man was near the intersection of Occidental Avenue South and Yesler Way around 1:40 a.m. on Tuesday when he was approached by a panhandler asking for money.
The panhandler grabbed the chain from the victim's neck and assaulted the victim when he tried to retrieve it, according to police.
When police arrived, they found the victim unconscious and bleeding on the ground. He was taken to Harborview Medical Center.
OK, that's pretty fucked up. There's a reason it's not generally wise to mess with strangers, even if they've just ripped you off--unless you know some good martial arts. But I notice that while there's always a crowd of folk in any discussion about Portland's Pioneer COURTHOUSE Square claiming that they're routinely intimidated and threatened by panhandlers and other vagrants, I don't seem to recall the types of truly violent incidents Seattle is now reporting. I wonder, what's the difference? Rent-a-cops? A more closed-feeling space that perhaps discourages open violence? A more small-town feel than downtown Seattle provides? (People still mad Cobain killed himself?)
One thing I know is not responsible for our somewhat better-behaved street folk, is the creation and enforcement of the notorious sit-lie law, which simply moves people along after an hour, or eventually cites them to pay money they typically don't have. That doesn't stop the flacks at the Portland Business Alliance and Oregon Law Center from defending it in the Portland Trib--on the basis of what others have demanded be done in exchange:
given the increased access to support services (day space, showers, public restrooms and benches), the challenges around enforcement do not demonstrate the ordinance is being used inappropriately to push homeless people out of downtown.
What if the Bush administration had said, "Sure, we're holding people illegally without charge down in Gitmo...but man, you should see the buffet spread they get every night for dinner! So how can you complain about their civil rights?" OK, bad example--they basically did say that. But thinking, feeling people hopefully recoiled at such a sad attempt at justification: we harrass because actually we care!
If these are such great ideas (and they are, mostly), why can't we just enact them WITHOUT the sit-lie ordinance? Wouldn't that be even better, to help them WITHOUT curtailing their liberties? The authors don't contemplate this little wrinkle--"you mean treat them humanely AND help them? But what's in it for us?" they seem to be saying. "How does that keep the icky people away from our storefronts?" is what they're really saying. That's what they're about; the showers and the day centers are just the silver coins being tossed from the coach as the king's procession rides on through. It's enough to make you stage a sit-in to protest! Oh...dammit.
It's the rare story with no Oregon content whatsoever, but Washington is as close as you can get without actually being Oregon, and so we have a special bond with our Canada. But we also have a tremendous affinity for Congressional challenger Darcy Burner, the Microsoft exec running to take out "Sheriff" Dave Reichert in Seattle's 8th District. She showed last time she was the real deal, and this time is a powerhouse of netroots outreach and firm vocal support of core progressive issues. She's got leadership in her future if she can make the gig.
Which is all the more poignant that her house and all of the family's belongings were destroyed in a fire earlier this week. There are two good news videos--boy, do they know how to cover the shit out of a fire!--the first of which is more right-after-it-happened, while the second seems a bit more philosophical already on Burner's part. (Oh, the irony of the name!) But the most interesting thing about part two is how heroic her five year old son was--and how well she had taught him.
The Man lurks just behind every sweet smelling rosebush, and for David Goldstein--otherwise known as Goldy, the proprietor of HorsesAss.org and absurdly liberal weekends at LDS-owned KIRO 710 in Seattle--The Man dispatched The Turk* to come a calling. Summoned suddenly--never a good sign--to the station on Wednesday, the news came from management that the ax was falling on weekend live talk, where Goldy lives on both evenings in prime time. According to him, over 40 hours of local programming in the schedule have been cut recently, and nationally or regionally syndicated feeds piped through instead.
This is definitely not a disconnected cost-cutting move by one station; this kind of de-localization of media, and radio in particular, has been moving apace for at least the last decade. It's ugly; it makes creating a hit record or a buzz story that much easier: you know when you send it out, all the stations along the line are dutifully carrying it. The advertisers are buying time in bulk and spreading their bland messages en masse. And the people are, generally unwittingly and at the least subconsciously, picking it up and reacting in predictably similar ways to it.
McDonald's perfected the consistency of franchising; you knew in every McDonald's in any city in America, you were going to get the same Big Mac, fries and Coke. Clear Channel and some limited others like the LDS Church's Bonneville group that owns KIRO have done for/to radio what McD's did for beef tallow. You can go on vacation, find the JamminXX station for the good hiphop, the PowerXX for more straight R&B and oldies, BearXX for country, HotXXX for hits, and listen to exactly the same shit as at home--because it's the same tape playing the same song at the same time back home while you're here on vacation.
Redhook Ale Brewery of Woodinville has agreed to pay about $50 million in stock for Widmer Brothers Brewing in Portland. The new company, called Craft Brewers Alliance, will have management offices in both cities, the companies said in a joint press release this afternoon.
Both companies will keep their existing breweries, including Widmer's breweries in Portland and Redhook's in Woodinville and Portsmouth, N.H. They also plan to continue making their existing beers, including Redhook's ESB and Widmer's Hefeweizen.
With combined production of roughly 600,000 barrels a year, the new company will be one of the country's largest craft brewers.
I'll be showing up at 9 tonight with David Goldstein, AKA "Goldy" from Horse's Ass.org and the king of weekend Seattle talk at night, blasting wicked watts from KIRO's tower of power. If you're still out of earshot of all that power, luckily for you it comes over the tubes in live stream as well.
In another iteration of the "blogger's panel" that we've tried a couple of times, Jimmy from McCranium in Eastern WA and McJoan (most notably of DailyKos) will be joining me for the hour, and we'll talk about what's going on in our respective neighborhood necks. Because Seattle is going through its own debate on lightrail we'll be talking about their use of Oregon as an example to follow (or not), but I'll probably sneak in some time to talk about the Senate race as well.
Hope you'll listen, and maybe even call in if you've got the gumption.
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I'll be showing up at 9 tonight with David Goldstein, AKA "Goldy" from 