Bruce Ramsey

Cozy financial dealings with a powerful banker, a state treasurer, and angry stockholders. Trials were held, but all went free.

Seattle people love streetcars — at least, the idea of them. In recent times, they’ve allowed their leaders to spend millions of dollars on two short streetcar lines that hardly go anywhere and aren’t connected. Yet the city once had a system that had lines to West Seattle and the Rainier Valley, to the U District and Ballard, and a web of lines covering Queen Anne, Capitol Hill, and the Central District.

On the question of trees versus housing in Seattle, there are many voices, most of them favoring the trees. The dominant thought is that housing versus trees is a false choice, and that Seattle can have more housing and save the big trees.

For Seattle City Light the pursuit of carbon neutrality means electric rates will be going up over the next few decades, and probably not by a small amount.

To Hollywood, the “Red Scare” was a witch hunt — a term that implies that it was the pursuit of an imaginary danger. But in some big, important cases, it was not imaginary at all, though the persecution of Oppenheimer was shameful.

The editors gave him an entire section front in the July 9 paper. That’s an indication of what they thought of him and what he wrote. Then Volodzko made his mistake: “I posted the column on Twitter and compared Lenin and Hitler.” He added, “It’s the kind of topic that you can debate among trusted friends over drinks or dinner.” Not with anonymous nitwits on Twitter.

“Here is a classic symbol of overwrought totalitarianism, dropped in the middle of an anarcho-libertarian neighborhood, available for all to mock and ponder the horror of,” writes one of the Times’ readers. “He gets a yellow rubber duck on his head for Easter,” writes another.

Economist Jacob Vigdor argues that Americans may be looking at “the emergence of a ‘seller’s market’ for labor, which may in fact prove to be the ‘new normal’ in the United States” — which will bring about “a 40-year reduction in income inequality.”

The people who invented “cap and trade” wanted the oil companies to pass on the cost to consumers. The program’s purpose is to prod people into using less fossil fuel, and ultimately to switch to electric cars and trucks. If the program isn’t raising the price of gasoline and diesel, it’s not working.

It didn’t matter if the criminal defendant had been referred to Community Court a dozen times before, and blown it off each time. Always the system offered another slice of social services.