Last week, I finished my opinion piece by offering to take up the cause of those people who are against the school levies (if they could convince me). About a third of the voters vote against them, and I wanted to know why. Here are their top reasons.
On the last day of Barack Obama’s first year as president, the voters of Massachusetts, one of the few states more reliably Democratic than Washington, sent Republican Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate.
Kaboom.
Up until two weeks ago, I produced special events for a local city. My position was eliminated as a result of budget cuts, but I’m not angry about it. Truth be told, I was burnt out and sought a new direction in my life. After the events of last week, however, it would have been nice to have been able to quit – if only to stand up for my principles.
I’m always curious about the reasons why 35 percent of us vote against school levies. Maybe you’re in this group, and you have good reasons, but we just haven’t heard them yet. No one filled out a statement against (for Tahoma School District levies) in the voter’s pamphlet this year.
In the past I have told you how community college job-skills training programs have helped people build entirely new careers after a layoff. I have written of Boeing engineers who retooled their skills at Bellevue College then found new employment in health care at even higher salaries than before, and the single father who, by learning information technology skills with us, was able to move his family off welfare and build a future of promise.
There is a mood developing; you can almost feel it… of increasing anger toward government borne of mistrust. It’s not just about taxes, spending, deficits and debt. It’s about people in both parties and even no party looking at their federal, state and sometimes local government and saying: “I don’t trust you anymore”.
I can’t blame you for not wanting to go to the informational meetings and open forums put on by our local governments and schools; I’ve had more fun in hospital waiting rooms.
But what happens when nobody shows up is that a tiny handful of people get to make all of the decisions. And then we get angry when the tiny handful don’t make the decisions that we like. The consequences of some decisions aren’t fully revealed until many years later, and we’re left to blame the bad decisions on a lack of foresight. Except now we’re five years behind.
A friend was telling me about an article she read about New Year’s resolutions with a different take on the annual appeal for self-improvement. Not only did it give us a good chuckle, but it got me thinking.
But what happens when nobody shows up is that a tiny handful of people get to make all of the decisions. And then we get angry when the tiny handful don’t make the decisions that we like. The consequences of some decisions aren’t fully revealed until many years later, and we’re left to blame the bad decisions on a lack of foresight. Except now we’re five years behind.
When the media went looking for an authority on national security after the attempted airline bombing on Christmas Day, they called a former U.S. senator from Washington. The one who’s been out of office for nine years, Slade Gorton.
One of the most popular and oft-repeated cliches in American history, which comes to us from Benjamin Franklin, humorously posits that “in the world, nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.”
This short phrase, which is both simple and concrete, has spawned many variations over time, but all of them contain the memorable words “death and taxes.”
The Washington state Legislature convenes Monday, Jan. 11. Its members face a daunting task the state’s projected deficit is $2.6 billion.
Sometimes I feel like I was born to be a cranky old fart, and I’m just suffering through my youth until I can realize my true self.
So right now, I’m in the middle of forming my 20-year window of the “good old days,” which I can use as a lens to view everything through when I’m finally old.
Today, Tuesday, Jan. 5, is my first official day as a working mom.
It was a strange thing walking out the door for the first time without my daughter, who is just shy of seven weeks old as I write this, to get into my car and go back to work.
When Barack Obama became the first Democratic presidential candidate to receive more than 50 percent of the popular vote in 32 years, much of the world rejoiced. All that bellicose rhetoric from George W. Bush about fighting “evil” was replaced by the lofty eloquence of the new president with a new tone who promised to extend America’s hand to its enemies “if you will unclench your fist.” Nine months into his presidency, he even received the Nobel Peace Prize.
A lot of us get trapped into our routines. Admittedly, it’s far easier to simply go through the motions instead of seeking out a better way of doing things.
At about this time last year I wrote, “Predictions can be perilous,” and went on to make four of them anyway about what I thought would happen in 2009.
If necessity is the mother of invention, then the military helped raise one of her biggest children.
The Internet evolved from Cold War competition between the U.S. and former Soviet Union. Experimentation by the Department of Defense was instrumental in pushing and shaping the Internet’s development decades before “online” became a household term.
Frank Shiers looks back at 2009
In this season of caring and hope, I would like to share the moving story of two young men whose futures, far more than most of ours, depends on inner strength and a positive outlook.
One copes with the challenges of cerebral palsy. He spends most of his day in a wheelchair, and his verbal communication is hindered by the muscular issues that come with this disease.
I normally don’t quote other news articles if I can help it, but a recent Associated Press story caught my eye. It was about women war veterans, and the battles they face when they come home.
Like their male counterparts, they should be getting a hero’s welcome.
Quite often, they are not.