Observations and ruminations

Why do we need to allow “Tent Cities” in Lacey anyway?   There seem to be plenty of churches and organizations in Tumwater and Olympia which want to provide this service.  I don’t think it’s necessary that Lacey join the fray.  It also seems to me that the recent Lacey City Council’s 4-3 vote on requiring churches to keep homeless populations inside was just an excuse for banning homeless encampments.   A good one, if you ask me.

Saw where Thurston Regional Planning Council’s senior planner Pete Swenson says the reason Thurston County has the sixth highest per capita income of all 39 counties in Washington is because we have so many people commuting out of town to work in Seattle.  I think Swenson’s been working for government too long.  The real reason we have the sixth highest per capita income of all counties is because we have 47,000 government employees in Thurston County, most of whom make a good  living drawing government pay checks.

When I was in Peru several years ago, I was taken back by the number of police officers on city streets, all of them carrying automatic weapons.  Now I see where New York City is equipping its police officers with automatic weapons to patrol the subway system.  I’m sure terrorists will be so afraid of those automatic weapons that they’ll cease any effort to attack the subways.  If I were a subway rider, I’d be more afraid that some patrol officer would use the weapon.

MoveOn.org, the ultra liberal left wing  webcast has released a poll it took of Washington state residents, showing that 70 percent of Washington residents oppose the war in Iraq.  But a closer reading shows that the poll involved only 644 people, and we don’t know what list they used.  It could have been the phone book, it could have been voter registration books or could have been a list of  Democrats who voted in the last election.  The fact of the matter is that no poll can be trusted when taken by a partisan group with an agenda.   What’s even more troubling is that our own local newspaper The Olympian played up the story with a big headline on the South Sound section.  It shows once again The Olympian’s  liberal bias and how you can’t really trust anything you read on its pages.