Posted Thu, May 27, 8:23 a.m.

TVD, I'm a writer on the web too (though I go by my real name, of course). So I'm well-accustomed to the nastiness that sometimes accompanies online discourse. Yet I've come to quite the opposite conclusion. Bad arguments will out. "Low-grade opinion and unthinking opinion" are usually plainly obvious to ...

Posted Thu, May 27, 7:50 a.m.

Anonymous commenting is important because it is fundamentally democratic. When writers are anonymous, readers must grapple with actual arguments, not with credentials or affiliations. TVD already has a undue penchant for the "argument from authority," seeming to believe that his experience give him some special knowledge of policy-making that others ...

Posted Sun, Sep 20, 4:40 p.m.

Van Dyk's inability -- or refusal -- to grasp basic numbers makes everything else he writes suspect. Light rail romped to a resounding victory in 2008, passing by 57 to 43. That's a landslide. In King County, it passed by better than 60 to 40. And in Seattle it passed ...

Posted Wed, Aug 26, 7:27 a.m.

Not a bad piece, Mossback. Thanks. But two issues: 1. "The growth is not in high-density urban cities but rather in suburban and exurban areas." That's an error of mathematics. Percentage growth is different than absolute growth. If you start with a very small base population (like each of those ...

Posted Wed, Aug 19, 4:53 p.m.

And if we're looking for half-baked theories to explain the outcome, I'd say that voters once again expressed their strong disapproval for the tunnel. It's a fiscal nightmare and an environmental travesty, yet only two candidates are clearly opposing it: Mike and Mike. Given the tunnel's unpopularity -- something that ...

Posted Wed, Aug 19, 3:53 p.m.

As I read it this piece is pure conjecture. Did the bag fee measure really draw out greens in disproportionate numbers? There's no exit polling or other empirical evidence to suggest that it did. Did these greens really vote Mike/Mike in large numbers? Who can say. It's useful to note ...

Posted Wed, Aug 5, 10:39 a.m.

Ted -- thanks again for your willingness to engage here. I appreciate it, but I find myself frustrated by your argumentation. In your earlier comments you said that the bag fee would impose "indirect costs." I ask again, what are these indirect costs? Clearly, the fee imposes a modest and ...

Posted Tue, Aug 4, 8:03 p.m.

Ted, Thanks for elaborating your position on the bag fee. A couple of questions however: 1. You still haven't explained how the fee is "mis-represented" to voters by the proponents of the fee. (Clearly, it's been mis-represented by the main opponents, however.) Moreover, I don't see how a referendum being ...

Posted Tue, Aug 4, 4:48 p.m.

"Referendum 1: No on the shopping-bag tax, which has been misrepresented to voters and would be a stupid nuisance." Seriously, that's Van Dyk's incisive analysis? Mis-represented to voters how exactly? In fact, it's been demonstrably misrepresented to voters by the opposition, which most folks know is mainly Big Plastic (Dow, ...