Katie Buskey, a senior captain on Tahoma High’s girls basketball team, had pink laces in her blue Nike high tops when I saw the squad play at Kentlake on Jan. 11.
During the game I remembered admiring her shoes from the stands — blue is my favorite color — and after the Bears won I interviewed Buskey for a story.
We must be living in a bizarro world if a state Democrat is complaining about wealth redistribution.
Rep. Reuven Carlyle represents the 36th District in the heart of Seattle, the Northwest’s beacon of liberalism, which regularly makes the Top 20 lists of liberal cities in the nation.
Sometimes my daughters asks me what I do all day. After one especially frustrating day, I decided I should write out what my typical daily activities are so they know what I do all day.
At nearly every town hall, legislative action meeting, or budget question-and-answer session that I’ve been to in the last few months, someone has inevitably brought up the subject of tax loopholes, wanting to know why Gov. Chris Gregoire and legislative leaders aren’t talking about raising revenue by repealing outdated, unnecessary exemptions that no longer serve the public interest (or never did).
Land wars – this nation has been involved in one long land war ever since Columbus missed India and landed somewhere in the Bahamas. No wonder he thought America would be such a cool place to vacation.
The latest buzz in local news is the new $50 fee put in place by the King County Medical Examiner’s Office. Everyone who dies in King County will now have that fee attached to the funeral home bill, which pays for an official review of the cause of death. Nobody dies for free anymore, at least not in King County.
They’ve barely finished counting the votes on I-1053 and already Gov. Chris Gregoire is trying to get out from under it’s restrictions. She now wants to change the operation of the state ferry system. It’s another case of the state ducking its responsibility and should be rejected by the Legislature.
Health care has become one of the hot potatoes of the political season and there is nothing like turning a life and death gamble for millions into a philosophical spitball contest that will fit on bumper stickers.
An old ad for Pep cereal says that “the harder a wife works, the cuter she looks.”
That ad shows the 1950s shirt-and-tie businessman doting on his apron-clad housewife, who holds a duster in her helpless little hand. She thrives on cooking, cleaning and dusting because “I always get my vitamins” from the cereal.
I made it back to the Southcenter Mall again this past weekend (movie theater), and good news; no reported shootings this time. The situation was probably helped by the very visible presence of no fewer than eight Seattle Police Gang Unit officers, who wandered the mall with an eye on deterrence. Instead, the only nearby shooting this week was very close my house.
Defying the conventional wisdom that they can’t accomplish anything significant during the last few weeks of an even-numbered year, lawmakers in our nation’s capital recently concluded a remarkable period of post-election activity, which culminated with the approval of several important legislative priorities that had previously been stalled.
For many of us, holidays look better when they’re ahead of us, and not quite as appealing in retrospect. If you’ve managed to get through December with your budget intact and your children, spouses, significant others, relatives and other associates happy and feeling duly acknowledged, kudos and felicitations!
The week after Christmas is usually one of my favorite weeks of the year. First, it means that Christmas is over, with all of its sometimes-mean, procrastinating customers (I’m a retailer) and meeting the perfect-Christmas expectations of friends and family. Bah humbug is right.
I make about 30 pounds of almond roca every Christmas. It’s weighed and packaged in eight ounce treat bags and we give them as gifts for family, friends and teachers. I have learned to give families their own bags, as there has frequently been fighting among spouses over who is eating the most candy.
In a previous column published in the Dec. 3 edition I pointed out the hopeless quest of finding the perfect Christmas gift for a wife or girlfriend.
Apparently I hit some secret chord only women can hear because shortly after the column was published a flood of women began telling me how their very own special dummies bought the worst gifts the world has ever seen.
This Christmas Eve, hundreds of people in our towns will put on their Sunday best outfits for one of their twice-a-year visits to church. The other annual visit is for Easter, which led some churchies to invent the slightly derisive term “Chreaster people” to describe these semi-annual migrators.
Imagine figuring out your check book balance and suddenly realizing you are a little short, like about a billion bucks. So much for buying beer and pizza Friday night.
Now imagine what to chop out of your life to balance your budget. The gym is first because everyone really hates exercise, and pizza tastes the same with good beer or cheap swill. After that it starts getting really hard.
Get ready for a few more years of uncertainty.
As you probably already know, a federal judge in Virginia was the first to rule that the big health care overhaul bill was overreaching in its authority. U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson said that the federal government can’t force individuals to buy a private insurance product, which was one of the main complaints by conservatives and libertarians.
For every one of us fortunate enough to have the security of employment and good medical insurance, there are too many who do not. It’s a sad fact that the most vulnerable, the sickest and the poorest, are hit hardest at times like these.
Throughout these last few weeks of autumn, a debate has been raging over taxes at both the state and federal level.
State voters have rejected proposals to raise taxes to protect public services, and approved proposals to defund services.
