Caffeinated news & gossip. Your daily Morning Fizz.
1. Mayor Mike McGinn’s first re-election fundraiser last August was a lo-fi affair in his backyard with Solomon Burke songs on the CD player, veggie burgers on the grill, brownies on the picnic table, and not a single member of the establishment in sight among the 75 folks on hand.
Money quote (no pun intended) from McGinn that late summer evening:
You may have noticed something about the last mayoral campaign. I didn’t get a lot of money from the people that normally hand out money. They didn’t want to give me the money because I was taking on something that they believed in and were defending. And they didn’t want to give me that money, but there’s a flip side to that, I don’t answer to them.
Well, “them” was in the house last night at the latest McGinn reelection fundraiser at Branzino in Belltown, where business consultants such as public affairs guru Bob Gogerty, longtime government lobbyist and Jane Hague ally Steve Ohlenkamp, state house speaker Rep. Frank Chopp (D-43), and a member of former deputy mayor Tim Ceis’ new lobbying shop were in the crowd.
2. Up-for-reelection Seattle School Board member Harium Martin-Morris is considering a rule change that would scale back freedom of press for student journalists.
The change would push the rules in the opposite direction—more control to the principal to decide what can and can’t be published—than the direction that state legislators have tried, but failed, to put in place in recent years. Liberal house members, such as state Rep. Dave Upthegrove (D-33, Des Moines) have pitched a return to the US Supreme Court’s legendary Tinker Standard that proclaimed in a 7-2 decision: “It can hardly be argued that … students … shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech … at the schoolhouse gate.”
The Tinker standard was overturned in 1988 by the Hazelwood case, which allowed schools to limit student speech in the way the pending rule at Seattle Schools would do.
Here at PubliCola, we are big fans of the Tinker standard.
KUOW has the story.
3. Speaking of free speech. The ACLU has appealed the Israeli bus ad case.
Last month US District Court dismissed a lawsuit filed by a group called the Seattle Middle East Awareness Campaign, which tried to run bus ads decrying US support for Israeli “war crimes.” The ads weren’t allowed to run and the SeaMAC sued.
The ACLU is appealing the case to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
“We continue to believe that the county acted improperly in canceling the contract to run the ads. When government accepts paid ads to run on public buses, it cannot refuse to run an ad because it stirs controversy. The cancellation of SeaMAC’s ad amounted to censorship,” ACLU-WA legal director Sarah Dunne says.
