To me, there's a striking resemblance between former Olympia school board member Richard Nafziger's on-again-off-again blog and the new blog of the state Senate Democrats (mostly penned by majority leader Lisa Brown).

Makes a lot of sense for Nafziger to be Brown's blog father, but the similar blogging styles almost makes you think that its Brown's chief of staff that's doing the blogging. Both write long (almost too long) and really smart discussion posts, rather than short, clippy newsy posts. I would assume that the short clipply post would better serve a legislative caucus blog.

Nafziger's current personal blog has only two posts up on it, though he's been blogging for at least three years. But, on the internet, nothing is really gone. I've subscribed to his blog since before he quit the school board, so I shared some of his old deleted posts here.

To me, it doesn't matter at all if Nafziger is really doing the blogging. Good on him, good on the caucus, good on Brown.

The only thing I'd like to see improved is the length of the posts. In my internet reading habit, I've never been able to get my head around his posts in time to comment, though I'd like to.

      

http://www.ecy.wa.gov/climatechange/2008CompPlan.htm

      

http://eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/31/64/a4.pdf

      

Olympia's Josh Bomb casts his eye on Olympia's flyer art.

HAPPY-GO-LUCKY? There was a lot to like about this movie. It's great success? It traversed the ovoid enjoyment of carpe diem alive in the hard corners of space.

Gentrification is often defined as the transformation of neighborhoods from low value to high value. This change has the potential to cause displacement of long-time residents and businesses. Displacement happens when long-time or original neighborhood residents move from a gentrified area because of higher rents, mortgages, and property taxes.

http://www.cdc.gov/HEALTHYPLACES/healthtopics/gentrification.htm

      

“An analysis of sediment core samples retrieved over several decades provides us with empirical evidence that environmental regulations have had a positive impact on the overall water quality of the Puget Sound,” said PNNL marine chemist and co-project lead Jill Brandenberger. She noted that some pollutants have returned to pre-industrial concentration levels.

“Unfortunately, our data also suggest that although pollution coming from a specific source or location may be decreasing, non-point sources, such as storm water discharges, are becoming more significant,” she said.

http://www.pnl.gov/news/release.asp?id=342

      

http://www.sustainablebusiness.com/index.cfm/go/news.display/id/17333

      

http://thetyee.ca/News/2008/12/19/StopGapHousing/

      

This is a Public Service Announcement! All analog television sets will go black after February 18th 2009 in the transition to move to all digital transmitting of Americans Favorite Pasttime. To not leave anyone behind, many, many, many millions of dollars have been and are getting spend in a effort to reach every American with the message [...]

WEEK 7: Seventh week of fall shares. What’s in the box this week? Carrots | Potato | Garlic | Onion Update!! The Farmer’s Market might be going slow today - many Farmers didn’t make it in today. Some vendors did show up though - so there will be some activity. Also, the Farmers Market will be open the next few of days [...]

“Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping…“ into the longest night of the year. It’s been a snowy Oly week and I hope you’ve all been keeping yourselves safe and relatively warm. That being said, week #2 of our links:

The Student Orchestras of Greater Olympia (SOGO) Conservatory Orchestra, under the direction of Maestro John Welsh, will be performing selections from Handel’s Messiah.

http://www.washingtoncenter.org/season/season_detail.asp?event_id=1068

      

The Sitting Duck got up and left after five years and some months in Olympia. After having passively read it for most of the five years and closely for the past few months (ever since publisher Knight got into a scuffle in Lewis County), I'm not sad to see the paper and the publisher leave.

Actually kind of happy.

I was never all that impressed by the journalistic effort of the Sitting Duck, and after reading the "see you later (not!), screw you" edition of the paper, I know exactly why.

Knight writes about bee-bopping around Olympia in the Summer of 2002, just more than a year after the bottom fell out of downtown. The Nisqually earthquake disconnected downtown by closing down the 4th Avenue bridge, so the downtown Olympia that Knight found was a depressing shadow of the downtown that I loved.

His specific reference to the Spar is especially troubling to me. By the time he made it to the Spar, it was the same sad shadow of the restaurant that I grew up with. To me, Mcmenamins buying the Spar was a sigh of relief. The service is worse there now, but I'm still glad it moved on to new ownership.

I could go on for awhile now about how I resent being told about the soul of my town from someone who moved here in 2002 and is now leaving, but let me just say this.

Knight is nothing freaking full of himself. The ending of his "I'm outa here" column, Knight speaking of himself as the hero in "The Magnificent Seven:"

And so they ride back and shoot up the bad guys and in the process get pretty well shot up themselves. But they've empowered the villagers as best they can, and now its up to (the villagers) to protect themselves.

Like many before us, we had fallen in love with the curious character of our moderatly famous ccommunity, and believing that ideas, truth, and words still make a difference, were determined to give it a voice. That's what we came ere to do and we have done our very best. We tried to fight the good fight. The fight isn't over though -- it never is -- and our biggest worry is that during the next few years, Olympia will need, more than ever, an alternative and original voice.

...

Our work here is done. And now it's time to ride on.
Well, since you did your harm to public discourse in this town, I'm happy to see you leave. We did an ok job before you got here, we'll survive without your inflating ego.

Berd wrote over at the Olympian:

There are some substantial differences between the battle between a Citizen's Group and the Port of Tacoma over Rocky Prairie; and the battle between Citizens' Groups and the City of Olympia and Developer Triway Enterprises over the downtown Olympia "isthmus." But there are a lot of similarities. Similar sets of logic apply to the situation here in Olympia, as compared to the situation in Rocky Prairie. Despite the differences, the best decision in the local Olympia case might very well be to pull the property off the market. City Council has the ability to enact a moratorium ordinance on the currently passed rezone. That would provide time to figure out how to go about creating a truly wonderful and novel park feature - a park feature that would accent the natural beauty that exists in such quantity here in Olympia. Would that be the right move to make? Seems so to me.

The main difference in terms of environmental restoration between the isthmus property and the Rocky Prarie property is that the isthmus property is more expensive and matters less.

Not to say that the isthmus property doesn't matter at all or that the cost is impossible to get to to buy it and restore it, its just the Rocky Prairie property is current undeveloped, is still ecologically connected to other large pieces of habitat. The isthmus properties, though easier to find on a walk from my house, would be islands of good habitat among bad.

A regrettable, yet real, concept being kicked around in restoration circles is called triage. Basically, with the limited resources we have to put towards species and habitat restoration, we have to choose what to go after first.

Here's a basic primer on the debate and another and a response to it.

So, if I had $100,000 to spend on saving some land from development, I'd spend it at Rocky Prairie first, then figure out where to go from there.

By the way, God bless you for being out there tonight.

If we sent the Seattle Times $100,000, do you think they'd be able to bring David Postman back?

I'm not eager to link to him two days in a row, but Goldy is proposing raising $15,000 to send Josh Feit (who I have my own immature problems with) to Olympia to cover the legislature. I'd assume that people would chip in, maybe even the entire amount, because not only do they fear the effects on democracy of a shrinking press corp, they particularly like Feit's politics.

Fitting that Goldy puts this out there on the same day that Andrew Garber from the legacy Seattle Times points out he doesn't have that many people of the same profession to hang out with.

I think its fitting that now that we have a state budget database, that the governor can release her budget during a snow storm and get it out online and that TVW is more robust than ever, that the actual press corp is shrinking.

I do see a real role for honest brokers (along the lines of Fact Check), but the role's of people like Josh Feit will be more and more imporant. Garber's piece noted that former reporters, lobbyists and PR folks outnumber actual reporters in Olympia. That's not exactly a bad thing, as long as some of them are keeping eyes on each other.

I envision organizations hiring more people like Feit to do thingly vieled partisan journalism. Instead of paid reporters standing between the sides, telling you what's going on second hand, you'll actually see hand to hand combat, sort of like the opinion page blew up all over the front living room. With searchable databases, of course.

Or, sort of like the good ol'days of Publius and Silence Dogood.

As much as I dread driving in the white stuff, I think snow is one of God’s most remarkable inventions. I suppose I can attribute my wonder to the way the white flakes drift silently through the air and toss about with the wind. I marvel at how just a light coating of snow can [...]

I still haven’t watched LOVE ACTUALLY this year, and it’s bugging me a lot, since it’s one of my favorite movies of all times and the perfect movie to get me in the Holiday mood. Well, this year, among the busy-ness I haven’t had much time to “get-into-the-mood” and the days are flying by. Now, with [...]