Voting

Local elections up here Seattle way are next Tuesday, should anyone local read this and not be aware. Vote!

No, wait: educate yourselves well, and then vote.

What's that, you say? You want to hear my opinions? Surely not! I am but a... oh, fine. You were gonna hear 'em anyway. Might as well.

Proposition 1 (Sound Transit & RTID)
This one was a tough call. In the end I had to swallow my pride and beat down some old, stupid prejudices I had left over from my days as a teenage environmentalist misanthrope. Look, here's the deal: we're not going to get rid of cars. It doesn't matter how much some people might want to. We're just not. We can however, get some cars off the road, and light rail will help with that quite a bit. No, this isn't the perfect light rail setup, but it's a start!
And yes, this allocates money to road repair and even roadbuilding, but if we're going to have roads, and have cars on them, they ought to be safe and efficient, right? Even if you just want to look at it from an emissions standpoint, the faster cars get to their destination, the less time they spend idling in traffic, right?
So: Prop 1? Yes.

City Council
Having listened to the candidates talk in pretty reasonable depth about their pet issues, I came away from the election coverage of a couple city council races with pretty strong impressions. Here's the deal:
Venus Velasquez and Bruce Harrell: Harrell, hands down. He isn't the ideal candidate in my book, but Velasquez is a weasel at best. After her recent DUI she claimed frequently and extravagantly that she was "regretful" and that she was accepting "full responsibility," but she pled not guilty. When asked why she admitted guilt and then pled not guilty, she responded that she thought that responsibility and guilt under the law were two different things. While I might agree with you if the law were coming down on your for your race, miss Velasquez, in this case you committed a crime and endangered others, and now you're trying to weasel out of the consequences. I do not want a policy-making elected official to say that she thinks that responsibility and the law are different things. That is not appropriate. Fuck you, Venus Velasquez. I hope you lose the race and your trial.
Sally Clark and Judy Fenton: I don't think there's much danger of a naive little prairie muffin like Fenton winning this race, but just in case, I thought I'd chime in. Here's my impression: Sally Clark, the incumbent, is a competent official, and I rather like her. Judy Fenton has no experience in any office, has no positions on any important issues, and is only running because she wants to have a naked statue at the art museum covered out of a misguided sense of conservative middle-America morality that I - and, unless I have a badly mistaken impression, the rest of Seattle - do not want.

That's it for today. Check out those voting guides, and get your butts to the polls on Tuesday. Local elections are where your vote can actually make a significant difference.