Partied on the streets of Capitol Hill tonight until nearly 3AM after attending both the Republican and Democrat state campaign parties.
True story: I don’t recall seeing a single black person at the Republican state campaign party. I walked into the Democrat party and had to stop myself as I tried to figure out what was wrong with this sight. There was one Middle Eastern guy at the Republican party and that was it that I can remember.
I’m 100% serious. Maybe the biggest WTF moment in my life so far. I’m going to be watching pictures from the Republican party damned carefully.
Also gave out 300 cookies on Capitol Hill to celebrate. Woot! for cookies. Tastes like freedom!
my post is obviously a little too late to make any difference since gregoire has seemingly won, but as i understand it, no funding would’ve been stolen from what were obviously more important issues.
iirc, to help keep the sonics, the city needed approval from the state to continue a hotel/car rental/restaurant tax that was already in place to help pay off safeco field through to its original term. the stadium was to be paid off 4 years early, so this tax was to be discontinued.
the balmer group was offering $150 million of their own money to remodel a public facility. the city was pitching in $75 million. what we didn’t get was the state’s approval to maintain an already existing tax that was being payed into in large part by out-of-towner’s.
the state’s claim was there was not enough time to get this done. allegedly, a lack of effort to call an emergency session to finalize what should have been a win-win situation. i mean damn, the key arena is going to need to be upgraded at some point anyhow, but the way things unraveled, state tax payers will likely be paying more of that cost than if something had been accomplished at that time. all they had to do was approve to keep an already existing tax running for its intended duration. a tax that we, the voters, had already approved when we gave the okay to fund a baseball stadium.
to be sure, this would not have been a guarantee that the sonics would have stayed, but it definitely would have made for a stronger case in court and amongst the nba relocation committee and all the team owners that approved the move.
true the key is now paid for with the money from the buyout, but its main tenant is gone. i haven’t kept up with what is scheduled at the key for the next several months, but i can’t imagine them filling all those lost home game dates from nov-april (guaranteed regular season) up with concerts and the like. so where we once had a potentially promising professional sports team (although quite the shit-storm of a club for a long while), we now have a major public facility mostly just gathering dust.
northwest basketball fans were the victims of a lack of government effort, a lack of public awareness, and grimy dirt bag politics.
Gregoire supports giving gay and lesbian partners the same rights that married couples have today, as long as it isn’t called marriage. Rossi opposes such a move and would consider rolling back a new provision in state law that allows a domestic partner to inherit assets without a will.
Gregoire says pharmacies should be required to sell Plan B emergency contraception, the so-called “morning-after” pill. Rossi said pharmacists should have the right to refuse to fill those prescriptions.
Gregoire says she opposes teaching abstinence-only sex education in the classroom. She also opposes teaching creationism in schools, saying “I want science-based education in our schools.” Rossi supports allowing school districts to decide if they want to offer abstinence-only sex education. He also says local school districts should decide “whether or not to teach creationism along with evolution.”
I believe these are bigger issues than a basketball team. I also don’t see how anything in your post qualifies as ‘grimy dirt bag politics.’ I think it’s funny, though, that you would blame the governor and not the people who run the team.
This is what the key was to me. The lateness of the funding.
And not just KeyArena but the whole damned Seattle Center needs major renovation in my book. So a stop-gap fix for KeyArena is interesting… but I’d rather see them rip apart Seattle Center as a whole and make the whole thing a jewel of the city again. I wouldn’t mind seeing the old abandoned Disney proposal looked back into again. Don’t get me wrong: the Seattle Center has got a lot of greatness to it, but at the same time there’s a lot of it that could really use some rework.
But if I ascribe to the ‘one drop’ theory, then that means that he’s not half-white, but ALL HONKY.
Anyway, I was very happy with the election. Proposition 8 notwithstanding.
Somewhere I read that exit polls indicated that black voters in CA were strongly pro prop. 8? Anyway, it’s a crying shame, either way. A real god-damned shame.
I saw in a Seattle Times article today that the mayor was thinking about a levy for Seattle Center in the 2010 election cycle. So hopefully that happens. =\
