SeattleCrime.com | 911 Log

SeattleCrime.com has a webmap of crime in Seattle, half an hour later, I thought I should post a link to it here. I am hooked.

http://seattlecrime.instinews.com/911

Oh, ya, there is good reporting on crime and the police on this site, too.
Go there, SeattleCrime.com, now.

Have a great day,
Mike Baker

Sent from my iPhone
Visit me here:
http://ManyWordsForRain.blogspot.com

While filling out my voters' ballot I will be watching Burt Lancaster in "The Swimmer"

Ah, politics and each contest, like The Swimmer, series of swimming pools that greet you in different ways.

In the end, we make the best of each pool, believing and hoping the next pool will be more refreshing than the last.

If you make-believe hard enough, then it's true for you

In a key scene, he encounters a solitary boy playing a flute at a lemonade stand below a tree. The boy's parents are away somewhere. Merrill has no money but cajoles the boy into giving him a drink. He asks the boy if he can use his pool... but when they arrive at the pool, they find it empty. The boy says he can't swim very well. Undaunted, Merrill gives the boy a lesson, and they simulate different strokes across the floor of the dry pool. "If you make-believe hard enough, then it's true for you," Merrill tells him, and the boy is suddenly delighted by his apparent success in swimming an entire length.

But as Merrill departs, he hears a sinister reverberation... he turns, sees the boy bouncing on the spring-board above the deep end.... Yes, in this low tech but high concept film, symbolism is everything.
Film Court | copyright 2001 | Lawrence Russell

Here are my endorsements that I made a couple weeks ago, that I am still sticking with, some more tightly than others.

In-Kind "Media" Contribution of the Day

It is a tie. These two are actually from yesterday, but here they are:

Did Knute Berger celebrated Crosscot.com's switch to a not-for-profit Journalist-ish media outlet with a little slander?

While pretending to be on the fence between the two Seattle mayoral candidates, Joe Mallahan and Mike McGinn, Berger slung a little mud (emphasis mine).

If Mike McGinn is a conviction candidate — as contrasted with Mallahan, who seems to be an avatar (or is it shill?) of Seattle's power establishment — he's undercutting his main strength, which is to take bold, challenging stands against the conventional wisdom. You can say this is smart politics, and I suppose it would be if he were running as a conventional politician, but everything about his campaign's appeal — the low budget, the accessibility of the candidate, the insurgent tactics, even the beard — have pointed in a different direction. Are we going to discover that McGinn is now just a more rumpled, perhaps more articulate but also more lawyerly version of Joe Mallahan.
Berger, McGinn's tunnel cave, Crosscut.com

Calling McGinn a rumpled lawyer is factually correct. Would it be a stretch to call Mike McGinn, and his development brokering company, a shill for local developers wanting to greenwash housing devepment?

Calling somebody a shill is a pretty serious charge. In some states it is against the law to be a shill. Berger should know this.

But I am not sure how Berger can call Mallahan a shill, as if he is he pretending to be someone that he is not in order to misslead people into buying into him?
So, I will just chalk this up to a political in-kind contribution from a non-profit media organization.

The other in-kind media contribution of the day was from Publicola.net's Erica C. Barnett, ironically from a column/report called Contribution of the Day. in this report Barnett lists who contributed money to which political campaign. But for Barnett the facts are not enough.

. . . conservative mayoral candidate Joe Mallahan.
Erica C. Barnett, Contribution of the Day, Publicola.net

This label prompted the first comment to the story to question the author:

1. Stacy, Stacey, Stacie says:
@ECB

“Conservative mayor candidate Joe Mallahan?”

Are you even going to pretend to be a journalist Erica? Susan Hutchison yes, Joe Mallahan no. That tag is bullshit and you know it.

The answer is clearly no, Barnett is not even going to bother to pretend to be a journalist. And yes, it is "bullshit".
A conservative candidate for mayor, in Seattle, really?
It looks like Publicola.net's endorsement of Mike McGinn for Mayor does not stop with its editorial staff (whoever that is).

What is the monitary value of media bias? Should Mike McGinn have to claim these labels applied to his opponent as a contribution?
No, but the public should be aware that these two media entities are not newspapers.