Kate Starbird: Yikes. www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...

Yikes. www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...

The WA GOP put it in writing that they’re not into democracywww.seattletimes.com Some Republicans have been defensive that the party has a strong anti-democratic bent. But the state GOP convention embraced it, writes columnist Danny Westneat.

Time to permanently retire the “saying the quiet part out loud” thing.

Yeah definitely, but on the other hand this is what total defeat of a state Republican party as an electoral force looks like, which under the circumstances should be the goal in every state. Radicalizing but politically powerless state GOPs are better than far-right state GOPs with power, imo.

The state GOPs in the west show that they won't moderate to start winning elections again. Look at California. So for the time being this can actually be taken as a sign that a state's citizens are safe from Republican policies at the state level (even if they're not safe from political violence).

The individual GOP reps do still get elected by liberals to positions such as Seattle city attorney however

also, you know, the eastern 50% of the state

We are working on turning the east side more blue! We did manage to recall Bird (and the other 2 MAGA people off our school board) and then elect 3 decent people to their positions🎉

hell yeah nice!

The worse Idaho gets the more Eastern WA sees how bad the MAGAts really are. WA stands to make a lot of money off Idaho's policies.

Who the hell is this Bird character that the GOP wants to endorse for governor? He sounds AWFUL. (Bring it on, fools!) They didn’t learn their lesson with that dumb woman they ran for Patty Murray’s seat! Saying she was “prettier” than Patty did NOT win votes, for some reason. 🙄🙄🙄😊

Yeah I was trying to say it looks like the WA GOP is giving up on winning state-wide elections. But you're right that a lot of the land mass (if not 50% of the people, thankfully) are electing very fringe weirdos, like this dude writing bad Gilead fan fic.

Rep. Matt Shea takes credit, criticism for document titled ‘Biblical Basis for War’www.spokesman.com Washington state Rep. Matt Shea acknowledged Wednesday he had distributed a four-page manifesto titled “Biblical Basis for War,” which describes the Christian god as a “warrior,” details the compositi...

Because Seattle Democrats screw up. And I am a liberal Democrat but I can’t believe how stupid things get in Seattle.

True. They can take power in fascist coups.

That's always a non-zero probability event in any democracy. The point of my post was that I am not sure what the rest of us are expected to do. It's on state GOPs to pull back from the brink and make an attempt to win state-wide elections. In some western states, they don't seem to want to.

The long-term goal should be to have a conservative (not radical reactionary or fascist) party that can responsibly alternate with a liberal party. It's called democracy. Admittedly, the US right now is very far from that.

I agree that would be swell, but self-identifying conservatives in a state like Washington need to *want* to create a viable center-right political party. And it's pretty clear that they don't right now, because they keep not doing it despite decades of state-wide electoral defeats.

Hence, long term. You need to educate the young about the virtues of democracy, so that the conservative-minded will participate effectively, instead of going bonkers.

Wait, so instead of having senators selected by the same people who select the baboons in Olympia, they want senators selected by... the baboons in Olympia?

Excellent point!

Republicans can't gerrymander Senatorial elections, so they want Senators appointed by legislative bodies that *can* be gerrymandered. Probably also why they rejected the old approach of having governors appoint them.

When they tell you who they are, believe them.

paywalled… I wish there was a simple way to pay by the article somehow, I can’t subscribe to every paper in the country.

Yes, paying onesie would be great but the cost of the transaction is $$$. Information isn’t free, and the ST is an independent, family-owned paper. - Libraries have access to newspapers through their websites - Press Reader uses your library login to give you access to 100s of newspapers.

Ask nicely and a subscriber might be able to give you a copy.

The first article or two is free, so that suggests you’re a more regular reader.

thanks for telling me stuff I know! again I don’t expect newspapers to be free. I subscribe to 6 I believe. and I know that for individual newspapers to develop a microtransaction method would be prohibitively expensive. but it would be great for (for example) google and apple to do together.

this is why I said “I wish there was” a pay-per-article method and not “seattle times should develop” a pay-per-article method.

Some folks might not know! It’s a shame newspapers haven’t set up a co-op like AP to create a system for reading multiple papers. Apple has done something with them for Apple News. So has EverNote. I’ll shoot a copy to you when I’m back on my laptop.

That’s the model that Post has tried to get going.

Gift Links/Gift Articles feed any good?

I didn’t even know about that! TIL! it might solve my immediate paywall… but still what I’d really like is a way to pay for it, vs get it free.

WA GOP are such clowns. I’m no Dave Reichert fan, but I can’t blame him for wanting to distance himself from them.

Dave was my Representative. He boasted that our district got NONE of Obama's stimulus money. In terms of bills passed he was one of the worst in Congress. He never held town hall meetings and did nothing for his constituents. Why would anyone want him as governor?

Fair, though he’s probably still better than Semi Bird. Not that either will ever be the governor.

“We keep losing.” “Maybe we should change our ideas.” “NO! The problem is that people can choose!”

Clearly the Democrats’ fault! By calling themselves Democrats, they have made democracy a partisan issue.

📌

Weeeee

The convention was mid-month. www.spokesman.com/stories/2024...

State Republican Party convention erupts in chaos after GOP leaders try to stop governor endorsement votewww.spokesman.com Roughly 1,800 delegates showed up to the three-day political gathering at the Spokane Convention Center, marking the annual event’s highest turnout in history, officials said. The GOP’s attempt to for...

Kate … I am stunned. BTW, I saw your job posting for the research assistant too late!

uhhhhhhh that sounds real bad

It is. It’s real real bad.

And yet, the Seattle Times will continue to exclusively endorse Republicans.

Good thread on that here bsky.app/profile/seth...

Really interesting polling data here. Of course, this is the finding that especially stood out to me--about 80% of GOP county chairs endorse the "republic, not a democracy" meme that the John Birch Society tried to inject into the nation's political bloodstream in the late 1950s and early 1960s.