The Hook

The Hook Blog

Political News. Freshly caught. A Tyee Blog

Election Central

Running for Seattle mayor: basketball player, sex columnist, enviro guy

Looks like our neighbours to the south will have their own interesting civic election.

The Seattle media were filled with the news yesterday that a former Sonics basketball player is saying he’s going to run for mayor against Greg Nickels. Here’s just one story on the topic.

He’ll be joining Dan Savage, the Savage Love sex columnist whose column in this week’s Georgia Straight is about a man with a fetish for women wearing fins during sex (hey, I had to read SOMETHING while I was eating lunch), and Michael McGinn, former head of the Sierra Club there.

Now that’s what I call choice.

I was amused to note on the TV coverage of James Robertson’s announcement that one of his reasons for running was Nickels’ poor handling of snowploughing over the winter.

It’s great to see how snow has become the wedge issue of choice for those trying to foment popular unrest among city residents here and there.

In Seattle, however, the issue’s been given a little more teeth by recent investigative stories in the Seattle Times that looked at who was in charge of ploughing and which streets got ploughed.

You can read a recent piece on that here.

Frances Bula publishes the State of Vancouver blog where this item originally appeared.

0  Comments:

Login or register to post comments.

Democratic Trust

About The Hook

As British Columbia and other jurisdictions consider allowing online voting, can it be made secure enough that people will trust it? Will it encourage more people to vote? But if something goes wrong, will it further erode people's confidence in their democracies? And what role is the media likely to play in shaping the debate?

These are among the issues to be considered at a May 26 discussion that Fair Voting BC and PartyX are hosting at The Hive in Vancouver. I'll be on the panel, along with UBC Law's Fathima Cader and SFU computer scientist Steve Wolfman. The results and recommendations are to inform the two organizations' public positions on online voting.

Meanwhile join me and other contributors on The Hook as we bring you the latest from B.C. and across Canada.

-- Andrew MacLeod