Posted Fri, Nov 18, 4:14 p.m.

Calling somebody "stupid" because you disagree with them ought to be beneath you, John Carlson. You don't have a better argument than that?

Posted Fri, Nov 18, 4:05 p.m.

I'm not sure this is a play for dog lovers. I've had a lot of dogs, and not one of them was anything like Sylvia. Any close observation of dogs ought to suggest they don't think they're people. They think we're dogs. I like some of Gurney's work a lot, ...

Posted Mon, Oct 10, 6:18 p.m.

Holy carp. Burns told a pretty good story about policy gone wrong. That's not enough? Hey, he didn't mention health care, either! Or gambling and prostitution! (Feel free to insert your pet cause here.) While I have no use for marijuana personally, I think the drug war has gone past ...

Posted Fri, Sep 2, 1:58 p.m.

Really? Okanogan wines are a bit pricey and the Canadian sample-pour rule (half an ounce!) doesn't give you a chance in hell of telling whether they're any good. The stuff we bought was mediocre at best. Sorry, but heat does a make a difference.

Posted Tue, Apr 19, 7:11 p.m.

Bluelight, the only things your comments indicate is that you don't appreciate journalists saying things you don't want to hear. Ergo, your criticisms make very little sense. The world is not better off without newspapers. None of them are perfect, but they try to make sense of the world. The ...

Posted Tue, Feb 15, 4:23 p.m.

Heaven knows we wouldn't anything at the Center that would draw people. We go to the Rep and Intiman because there's parking and they're easy to get to. Move them downtown and we probably stop going. If Intiman is suffering it's more likely because their season is so uninteresting.

Posted Thu, Feb 3, 9:49 a.m.

Mr. Parsley's students are lucky to have him. His argument underscores what some of us have been saying for years: The problem with American schools is not a lack of reform, it's too much reform. Let teachers do what they do best -- teach! And not every teacher teaches the ...

Posted Tue, Feb 1, 3:39 p.m.

Whatever it does, the legislature needs to stop finding ways to muddle through, and cut things people will really notice and probably miss. Too few people in this state seem to have any idea just what government does for them. And if they do, they think it should be free. ...

Posted Fri, Jan 21, 4:51 p.m.

Zahara, which college are you talking about? Every college doesn't cost as much as an Ivy League education. And you know what? We're already doing a lot with technology -- offering online and hybrid courses, and supplementing traditional learning with all sorts of online goodies. But surprise! That does not ...

Posted Fri, Jan 21, 12:45 p.m.

Why is the presumption so often that every class at a traditional college is presented by a boring professor before hundreds of students in an overcrowded classroom? What is this based on? It's going to be somehow less boring on the internet, where there's really less chance of interaction? Oh, ...

Posted Mon, Jan 10, 6:44 p.m.

Knowing how to be presidential and speaking well does not entirely substitute for understanding policy, which, on the economic front, FDR clearly did not know how to do. He attempted to save capitalism by ending it; he battled to keep the budget balanced through nearly 10 years of Depression and ...

Posted Thu, Jan 6, 12:38 p.m.

How exactly do we have an excess of community colleges when we can't serve everybody who wants to be served now? And how exactly do you measure performance? Graduation rates? Most people who come to community colleges don't even intend to graduate -- they come for classes that lead to ...

Posted Thu, Nov 18, 9:41 a.m.

Actually, the top-two primary is a longstanding feature of Louisiana elections. We didn't invent it either.

Posted Fri, Nov 12, 8:01 a.m.

The Obama commission's suggestions are just this side of ludicrous, particularly cutting taxes to balance the budget, which, you might have noticed, has never worked. So I'm not exactly sure why yet another study will help. John Carlson's idea of using people not in office is probably a good one, ...

Posted Wed, Nov 10, 2:06 p.m.

Didn't Rasmussen have Dino winning the election? Their polling method leaves a lot to be desired. This wasn't a push poll? Please.

Posted Thu, Nov 4, 9:36 p.m.

How do you possibly get consensus with a group of Republican leaders who have consistently said they will not compromise on anything with the president? It's not much of a stretch to imagine that they will spend two years trying to make the president look bad, with an eye to ...

Posted Mon, Nov 1, 9:44 a.m.

Nice piece, but as I understand it, Edgar Bergen tended to move his lips regardless of whether he or Charlie was speaking.

Posted Fri, Oct 29, 9:50 a.m.

The whole thing underscores one of my laws of political economy: Everyone favors competition, except when it applies to them. Will it hurt small firms? Certainly. The bigger problems with the initiatives remain 1. Essentially giving away the state's liquor business, which should be auctioned, not given away for free; ...

Posted Wed, Oct 27, 1:20 p.m.

Obama is not pursuing anything like what FDR tried. There is no NRA, no effort to save capitalism by ending it. Even after the NRA and AAA were overturned by the courts, the actual level of regulation was minuscule compared to today, and the market did not right itself. The ...

Posted Mon, Oct 25, 1:19 p.m.

Dr. Elway remains, among pollsters, as my students used to say, "da bomb." Mr. Vance has engaged, throughout this campaign, in a lot of wishful thinking.

Posted Tue, Oct 12, 9:48 a.m.

I think there are some basic flaws with the premise of this study: Governments can "control" crime? If it was that easy, wouldn't we have done it by now? The real bottom line, it seems, is that if citizens have enough decent jobs, the other problems all seem to take ...

Posted Tue, Aug 24, 9:19 a.m.

Primary voter turnout is so low it should be difficult to generalize from these results. Primaries tend to attract the ideologically devout from the right and the left. That hardly seems like a tide to me.

Posted Tue, Aug 24, 9:17 a.m.

Perhaps the sponsors of the initiative have somewhow addressed this, but the problem with the initiative could be constitutional. The state Supreme Court declared in 1932 (in throwing out our first income tax) that income is property, and constitutionally all property must be taxed at the same rate. Having a ...

Posted Wed, Aug 18, 7:41 a.m.

I realize this is how they write about soccer in the UK (where I believe they all still think they're getting paid by the word). So I guess if you're just writing for the rabid enthusiast, that's OK. But if you have any interest in communicating with a broader audience, ...

Posted Wed, Aug 11, 3:19 p.m.

Is there something about people who write about soccer that compels them to substitute vague metaphor for actual description? Parts of the story are just unintelligible.

Posted Tue, Aug 3, 9:07 p.m.

Mr. Berger's complaints about the Muni League are something of a straw-man agument -- as others have noted, of course they're biased. Everybody is. Meanwhile, in response to dbreneman, I'm not sure how believing that government has a positive role to play in society equates to "big government," let alone ...

Posted Fri, May 28, 12:54 p.m.

There are perfectly fine places to stay and eat in and around Yakima; it almost sounds like, to the writer, that what distinguishes quality is how much you spend on it. Meanwhile, Napa is, frankly, a pretty sterile place. Sonoma is quite nice, but also very spendy. But I guess ...

Posted Sun, Oct 4, 9:21 a.m.

I forgot to add: Jane Jacobs said a lot of interesting and useful things, but she also once faulted Seattle for not having developed "a region," apparently missing the remoteness of our geography because I guess there's some switch you can pull or catalog you can order from to get ...

Posted Sun, Oct 4, 9:19 a.m.

It's lovely to think, in one's post-modern urban fantasies, that we'd all just adjust to losing a major arterial. But losing the Viaduct completely would push even more traffic to the badly designed I-5, and make north-south travel even more honerous than it is. But, as usual, the people who ...

Posted Fri, Sep 18, 7:39 p.m.

Racism is a sideshow issue? What century are you living in, Ted? You've got Fox TV hosts trumpeting Obama's alleged hatred of white people and idiots across the land comparing Obama to Hitler for wanting to reform health care. This isn't about Joe Wilson. This is about a loud, vocal ...

Posted Thu, Aug 13, 8:11 a.m.

Progressives also believe in markets. There's nothing in your material that even mentions markets. Everything Fuse mentions on its website -- in all my conversations with people from Fuse -- in all of your endorsements -- represent nothing more than traditional American liberalism. It doesn't matter what you call yourselves. ...

Posted Thu, Aug 6, 3:11 p.m.

To respond to Mr. Wade: Thank you for your note of warmest contempt. Libertarianism was tried in this country in the 19th century with the result that we had a serious economic crash about every 15 years. It makes no more sense than Marxism. It's not based on facts, results, ...

Posted Tue, Aug 4, 10:28 p.m.

There's nothing so terribly wrong with the city's or the county's budget that won't be fixed by economic recovery. Mr. Van Dyk seems to be arguing that we should always be managing for Black Friday. Could we be more prudent? Certainly. Could we have been so prudent that the recession ...

Posted Thu, Jul 30, 12:02 p.m.

In response to Dr. Lippmann: You have truly impressive academic credentials. However, you did not attend the forum, so I could not judge your fitness for office. Beyond that, you seem to have missed the fact that only Congress has the constitutional authority to coin money, so the idea of ...

Posted Sat, May 2, 8:13 a.m.

I read Mayor Bozeman's comments and I think he's missing the point. His comments about Aurora in particular are redolent of urban renewal, which many African Americans in the '60s and '70s referred to as "N" removal. Not-very-attractive neighborhoods may in fact contain a lot of life and economy. And ...

Posted Fri, May 1, 12:49 p.m.

They should have kept Willie Bloomquist, also hitting over .300.

Posted Thu, Apr 23, 10:22 a.m.

1. I'm not in favor of higher taxes. I just don't happen to agree that taxes are so high now they're killing the economy. Demonstrably, we have lower taxes than much of the rest of the world. 2. Mr. Vance, nowhere did I suggest that we can sustain massive deficits ...

Posted Wed, Mar 25, 7:07 p.m.

Ted, the general drift of your earlier comments was that the stimulus package doesn't have enough tax cuts. But basically, you haven't responded to the counterargument that the tax cuts will largely only make the deficit bigger while doing little in the short-term to reboot the economy (unless you have ...

Posted Tue, Mar 17, 8:08 a.m.

Mr. Van Dyk, your analysis is questionable and your expectations unrealistic. If I recall, your idea for a stimulus package was more tax cuts, which I am not alone in pointing out that given more tax cuts, people will save, not spend, so that tax cuts which won't stimuluate recovery ...

Posted Fri, Feb 13, 12:11 p.m.

Speculating on the intent of the Founders is rather problematic. First, the evidence is fairly clear that James Madison, chief architect of the Constitution, intended it be purposefully vague so that we would be forced to reinterpret it on a regular basis. Second, the Founding fathers also believed that women, ...

Posted Fri, Jan 30, 12:33 p.m.

You guys crack me up. Unions force employers to manage by something other than whim and favoritism. Unions do not degrade the quality of service; bad management degrades the quality of service. Do you work for free? Would you prefer to work for minimum wage? What is it that's so ...

Posted Wed, Jan 14, 10:47 a.m.

Hoover was not Gingrich or even like him. I think you can argue that government should do less all you want, but history is not on your side. You need a strong private sector to keep the power of the state in check, and a strong state to keep the ...