Free Republic

SEATTLE — Kshama Sawant said she needs to see progress on a $15 per hour minimum wage soon, or she and her supporters will move ahead without the help of her fellow city council members and the mayor. She said if there is not significant progress soon she will start collecting signatures to put a minimum wage measure on the ballot. Sawant said signatures are due June 10. The socialist council member is holding a rally this coming Saturday where she will lay out her latest plan of action moving forward.

“Give me a bite of your burrito,” Mahamed Abdi, 24, allegedly demanded of a stranger noshing Saturday afternoon outside a Seattle restaurant. When the burrito owner declined Abdi’s request (and remarked “That is rude”), Abdi pushed him and again demanded a bite of the Mexican food favorite. As the diner then arose from his seat, Abdi allegedly punched him in the forehead and fled on foot, according to a Seattle Police Department report. Witnesses described the attacker as a black male in his 20s wearing “a gray ‘beanie’ and white fur coat.” Cops subsequently caught up to Abdi as he...

A Seattle teen shot and killed a man for his cellphone — then went to a friend’s house and complained the stolen gizmo wasn’t nice enough, police say. Byron White, 17, now faces charges as an adult for killing David Peterson last month in the Washington city’s Greenwood neighborhood. White was on the lam for a week after the shooting until cops caught up to him at the airport last weekend as the boy tried to board a flight to Atlanta, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported. “David Peterson went out for a walk around the neighborhood after dinner and never returned,...

Why don't music innovators win competitions like America's Got Talent? Or is this guy too Vegas-y? Coming from a string instrument background, I am baffled by the idea of tuning each of the strings.

If you’ve ever wondered how the United States got in to its current mess of a stagnant economy and out-of-control government, I have a suggestion. Take a good look at what a handful of voters in one of America’s finer suburbs did to themselves and the rest of their community, and realize that it is a microcosm for what’s happening all across the country. The city in question is Seatac, a small suburb in the state of Washington (it’s name is derived from the larger neighboring cities of Seattle and Tacoma). Last year a group of activists there were...

SEATTLE, Wash. — Seattle city councilmember Kshama Sawant advocates a bold idea for ending the dispute between taxi companies and rideshare businesses - she says the city should take over the taxi business. Taxi drivers feel they’ll be crushed by competiton, despite the limits on rideshare companies that city council members voted to approve last night. Because rideshare companies use high-tech service to lure customers away from taxis, councilmember Sawant says the city should step in. “The real solution to this problem is for the city to have the app, the smartphone app and the dispatch system and to employ...

Seattle, Wash. — At an organizing event and rally for a $15-per-hour minimum wage, Councilmember Kshama Sawant emphasized the movement should not accept any watered-down version of the wage increase “I’m throwing down the gauntlet,” Sawant said, declaring herself the first politician to support a true $15-per-hour rate. She and other rally speakers cautioned against politicians and businesses who say they support a minimun wage increase but want loopholes and exemptions.

Lars Larson, substituting for KVI’s John Carlson, listens to a mildly contentious exchange between the two city council members during a Monday council hearing where council President Tim Burgess ordered councilwoman Sawant to stop talking when she went ‘off-topic’. Sawant was venting about her pet issues, employer wage theft. Also, Larson discusses the now interminable delay of the Seattle downtown tunnel dig because of damage to the drilling machine known as Big Bertha.

Seattle radio station KIRO 7 says that a local woman has been accused of sending over 100 abusive and violent messages to the frontman from nine different Twitter accounts, including posts which threatened to rape his 13-year-old daughter.

The tech-bus protest isn’t just a San Francisco thing anymore. This week, the anti-gentrification act of blocking a private shuttle full of high-paid tech workers spread to Seattle, where a handful of buses carrying Microsoft employees were stopped by demonstrators. The protest was chronicled by local Tweeps and community websites.

Researchers plot course of ancient American tsunami Researchers have calculated the scale of a giant wave that devastated the north west coast of America 1,100 years ago. Japanese scientists used computer modelling to recreate the devastation from the ancient tsunami. The team from the Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institution in Kobe say the work will help planners minimise the impact of any future wave. The researchers took clues from silt deposits found in the Puget Sound, a Pacific inlet above earthquake fault lines in the Seattle area. Experts say the tsunami could have reached up to seven metres in...

Pick on someone your own size! Why an elderly lady with a big fighting spirit refused to sell her home to developers When Barry Martin took on the role of construction supervisor of a huge Seattle shopping complex, he never imagined that he would end up caring for Edith Macefield, a stubborn 84-year-old who had refused $1 million from the developer to move house. Here he describes their unlikely friendship.

SEATTLE (CBS Seattle) – According to a recent study, fatal car crashes involving pot use have tripled in the U.S. “Currently, one of nine drivers involved in fatal crashes would test positive for marijuana,” Dr. Guohua Li, director of the Center for Injury Epidemiology and Prevention at Columbia, and co-author of the study told HealthDay News. Researchers from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health gathered data from six states – California, Hawaii, Illinois, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and West Virginia – that perform toxicology tests on drivers involved in fatal car accidents. This data included over 23,500 drivers that...

The city expects around 300,000 people - the same attendance as Seafair Parade - along the parade route to celebrate the Seahawks Super Bowl XLVIII Champions, the first Super Bowl winners in franchise history. >snip The Seahawks victory parade is scheduled for 11 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. Wednesday. It will begin just south of Seattle Center at Denny Way and travel south down 4th Avenue past Westlake Park and finish at the north entrance of CenturyLink Field. >snip A Super Bowl celebration will be held at CenturyLink Field following the parade. The celebration is expected to start around 1 p.m....

**SNIP** The Bureau of Labor projects the majority of jobs developing to be low-wage service jobs. Is this the fault of the unemployed who are still out there looking for decent work, or is this the fault of big businesses who have greedily outsourced their production jobs for increased profit? There was an article a couple of years ago about Henry Ford. He paid his assembly line workers a $5 per day back in 1914 (that’s $118 in today’s dollars, according to MeasuringWorth.com). He did this because he wanted to increase productivity and reduce turnover — and if his employees...

After the Seattle Seahawks won their first Super Bowl in franchise history on Sunday, fans in Seattle jumped on cars, took over intersections, torched couches, and riot police had to be brought in to restore order.

According to the police, Musab Mohamed Masmari tried to torch a crowded gay bar. It was just after midnight on New Year’s Eve while nearly 700 people crammed into Neighbours for a celebration when customers noticed the staircase at the iconic gay club was on fire. Management at the iconic gay club in Capitol Hill later discovered a gasoline container near the stairs. Neighbours released surveillance video that police believe shows Masmari as he walks into the club. The video was captured around the time of the countdown to midnight on New Year’s Eve. Masmari is carrying something in his hand. -snip...

Musab Mohamed Masmari, 30, was arrested as a suspect in the arson attempt on ‘Neighbours’ Gay night club as he was on his way to the airport. But that’s not all. As part of the Obama Regime’s Department of State’s International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP), Masari, a native of Benghazi, Libya, was also a cultural ambassador on behalf of the 9/11 Media Arts Center for the Arabic speaking visitors. Capitol Hill Seattle (h/t SusanK) On January 1st, a man poured gasoline over a staircase inside Neighbours and lit it on fire as the nightclub was packed with more than 700...

**SNIP** Lesson #9: Join the Fight Last but not least, we had Kshama Sawant – an intelligent, eloquent, passionate yet tactful immigrant woman of color running against stale establishment white guys in both 2012 and 2013. Sawant is an impressive speaker and a determined fighter, no doubt. But she is also an ordinary person who happened to attend a couple public forums in 2008 and was impressed with the Socialist Alternative speakers’ political clarity. Through discussions with Socialist Alternative, she decided to dedicate her life to fighting for a socialist world. Most ordinary people gravely underestimate our own potential to...

"Administrators at Seattle Children's today said they predicted this would happen, and it's even worse than they expected," says the local news anchor. "Patients being denied specialty treatment at the hospital by insurance providers on the Washington health benefits exchange. Children's filed request on behalf of 125 of their patients. Of those, they say they got only 20 responses, eight of which were denials. Dr. Sandy Melzer says all this comes after reassurances of certain unique specialty cases would still be covered."