This isn't related to Olympia issues specifically, but I think it's a very important evolution in the degeneration of the Bush White House Executive Administration:
Cheney says war critics 'dishonest, reprehensible'
Wed Nov 16, 2005 8:23 PM ET
By John Whitesides, Political Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In the sharpest White House attack yet on critics of the Iraq war, Vice President Dick Cheney said on Wednesday that accusations the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to justify the war were a "dishonest and reprehensible" political ploy.

Cheney called Democrats "opportunists" who were peddling "cynical and pernicious falsehoods" to gain political advantage while U.S. soldiers died in Iraq.

The comments were the latest salvo in an aggressive White House counterattack on war critics, launched as Democrats step up their criticism of the war and polls show declining public support for the conflict.

In rebuttal:

These are from pages 31 and 32 of the pdf version of the article (pp. 25 and 26, respectively, of the orginial,) if you care to check for yourself.

This is a congressionally commissioned audit of the executive administration's misleading statements vis a vis the war in Iraq.
This audit can be found here (linked.)

President Bush made 55 misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq in 27 separate public statements or appearances.

Of the 55 misleading statements by President Bush, 4 claimed that Iraq posed an urgent threat; 14 exaggerated Iraq’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons; 18 overstated Iraq’s chemical or biological weapons capacity; and 19 misrepresented Iraq’s links to al Qaeda.

Vice President Cheney made 51 misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq in 25 separate public statements or appearances.

President McCann surprised the students when he announced, at the start of the 1976-77 school year, that he was going to resign halfway through his second 6 year term as President. By coincidence, Gov. Evans, who was not running for a 4th term of office, was going to be looking for work after Jan. 1977. The students wanted to have a say in the hiring process, but when we returned from Christmas break, we discovered the Trustees, all appointed by Dan Evans, had appointed Dan Evans as the new President of TESC. Dr. McCann was given a two-year sabbatical as well. This whole affair really generated a lot of bad press for Evans, McCann, and TESC. The legislators, led by Sen. A.L. "Slim" Rasmussen, investigated the ethics of this transfer of power and as a result came closer than any other time to closing or traditionalizing (like that word? I just made it up) the school. Locals called TESC, "Dan the Man's Retirement Plan."

I'll let the headlines of the era tell the story. Here's the key: ST=Seattle Times, DO=Daily Olympian, TNT=Tacoma News Tribune, BS=Bremerton Sun, SPI=Seattle Post-Intelligencer, VC=Vancouver Columbian, A=Argus, DJA=Daily Journal American.

9/15/76 "Evergreen College President to Resign" ST
9/15/76 "'Nine Years is Enough' : McCann to Quit Evergreen" DO
9/16/76 "Evans Possible Replacement for Evergreen President?" ST
9/17/76 "Will Evans Take Over Evergreen?" DO
10/4/76 "Gov. Evans Has to Find Work Fast to Make Ends Meet" DO
12/8/76 "Evans Family Home-Hunting" DO
12/10/76 "Evans Out-- Or is He?" DO
12/12/76 "Evans Still Thinking About Evergreen" ST
12/15/76 "Dan May Take Job Back East" DO
12/21/76 "Dan Lines Up Job in State" DO
12/23/76 "Evans to Head Evergreen College" TNT
12/23/76 "TESC Presidency-- For Whose Benefit?" DO
12/27/76 "What's Dan Evans Done?" BS
1/2/77 "Cronyism" [letter to ed.] DO
1/5/77 "Highly Qualified for the Job, but --- " [editorial] ST
1/6/77 "Evans May Work, Travel in Europe" ST
1/7/77 "Dan Plans Long Trip" DO
1/8/77 "Rasmussen Seeks probe of Evans' College Position" TNT
1/9/77 "Senators Eye Evans TESC Move" DO
1/10/77 "Convert Evergreen to State Government Use" [letter to ed.] ST
1/11/77 "Is Dan Evans Qualified?" [letter to ed.] DO
1/11/77 "Senators Split on Dan's Job" DO
1/12/77 "Dan Starts Parttime TESC Duties Tomorrow" DO
1/13/77 "Evergreen to Pay Two Presidents Two Years" TNT
1/13/77 "Evergreen's President Leaving for School, Returning in Two Years as Faculty Member" DO
1/14/77 "Furor Arises On Evans' New Job" SPI
1/14/77 "Nest-Feathering at Evergreen" [editorial] ST
1/15/77 "Two Senate Bodies Probe Evans' Job" TNT
1/15/77 "Evans Starts Job With Hope Amid Hassles" TNT
1/16/77 "Rep. Keller Raps TESC's Paying Both McCann, Evans as President" TNT
1/17/77 "Rasmussen Growling About Evans' New Job" ST
1/17/77 "Higher Education Chairman Backs Evans Appointment" DO
1/18/77 "Needles Out for Evans" VC
1/19/77 "McCann Says Paid Leave Arranged Long Time Ago" DO
1/19/77 "Teachers Angry Over 'Pay-Off'" DO
1/20/77 "Evergreen President Defends Sabbatical Terms" ST
1/21/77 "Self-Serving and Cynical" [editorial] A
1/22/77 "Evergreen Trustees Say : Evans McCann Moves 'Honorable'" TNT
1/23/77 "Costly Sabbaticals Should be Probed" [editorial] SPI
1/24/77 "Senator Says Sabbaticals Hit Taxpayers in Pocket" DO
1/27/77 "Evans' Job, McCann's Pay Get Hard Look" DO
1/27/77 "Evans-McCann Storm May Sweep Campuses" TNT
1/27/77 "Evans' Appointment 'Appalling' to GOP" TNT
1/28/77 "'Didn't Want To Go Through Charade of Long Search' : TESC Search Short-Circuited" DO
1/28/77 "Evergreen Trustees Admit : Evans Hired by 'Short-Circuit'" TNT
2/1/77 "Fire Them Both!" [letter to ed.] TNT
2/1/77 "Anger Develops Over News About Dan Evans" [letter to ed.] DO
2/2/77 "Talk of Closing Evergreen is Serious" [editorial] DJA
2/7/77 "Evergreen Studied as UW Branch" TNT
2/8/77 "Donohue Proposes TESC Become UW Grad Branch" DO
2/12/77 "Can Evergreen College Survive the Politicians?" DJA
2/17/77 "Bill to Kill Evergreen College Hits State Senate" DO
2/27/77 "Educator-Senator Says Evergreen Needs Revamp" TNT
4/1/77 "A Matter of Cronyism" [letter to ed.] DO
5/24/77 "Senate Approves Bill to Trim Sabbaticals" DO
6/15/77 "Evans Dodges Politics in First Day on Job" DO
7/13/77 "'It's No Hippie College'-- Evans" SPI

Terrence Zander recently posted an interesting email to the OMJP email list:

Ian Kirouac, a fellow in our community, has a very good presentation on a building like this in Olympia. His plan is well thought out and very workable. In fact, I know there are people actually looking to buy a building for this purpose. I think the next step is to bring many people from a wide range of concerns (environment to social justice to peace issues to faith organizations) to the table to see what happens.

Here is an example that he points to.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation has put together a guide to legal issues for bloggers.

I've lived in Olympia for awhile now. In an apartment complex that til recently was not a safe place.

Because of the high level of crime here, for awhile I had a lot of interaction with local police. And I have tried to keep up with community-police interactions over the years. I know there have been some challenges and I know they are being addressed. I have some not so positive stories myself.

But most of my stories are good. Here is one.

Years back, Olympia was hit by another hate mail dump. People found incredibly horrible racist and anti-semitic flyers, all tucked neatly into rain proof baggies, on their lawns, along streets, etc.

I found one in a west side parking lot. I called the police department to talk with them about it, assuming that probably I would be blown off, they would not care.

But an officer drove out to talk with me in that parking lot. We had a great conversation. We talked about how hatred destroys communities, about the history of intolerance, about the health of Olympia.

The cop didn't give me a bad time about who and what I was. He gave me a some encouragement, some praise, lifted my spirits. I had an opportunity to pass on thanks for good policing work done in my neighborhood.

And I discovered that the police did care about what I had found and they did want me to tell them about it.

Four banks robbed in a month, and a concern was that the woman responsible might escalate even further, more crime and possibly more violence. This morning a 22 year old woman was arrested on the west side of Olympia. Sounds like our police force did an excellent job.

Here's a pretty good article highlighting the Welfare State and what's wrong with it. I have only posted an excerpt, with the rest of the article found at the link on the bottom.

"There's plenty wrong with America, since you asked. (Everybody's asking.) I'm tempted to say, the only difference from Canada, is that they have a few things right. That would be unfair, of course -- I am often pleased to discover things we still get right.

But one of them would not be disaster preparation. If something happened up here, on the scale of Katrina, we wouldn't even have the resources to arrive late. We would be waiting for the Americans to come save us, the same way the government in Louisiana just waved and pointed at Washington, D.C. The theory being, that when you're in real trouble, that's where the adults live.

And that isn't an exaggeration. Almost everything that has worked in the recovery operation along the U.S. Gulf Coast has been military and National Guard. Within a few days, under several commands, finally consolidated under the remarkable Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, it was once again the U.S. military, efficiently cobbling together a recovery operation on a scale beyond the capacity of any other earthly institution.

We hardly have a military up here. We have elected one feckless government after another, who have cut corners until there is nothing substantial left. We don't have the ability even to transport and equip our few soldiers. Should disaster strike at home, on a big scale, we become a Third World country. At which point, our national smugness is of no avail.

From Democrats and the American Left -- the U.S. equivalent to the people who run Canada -- we are still hearing that the disaster in New Orleans showed a heartless, white Republican America had abandoned its underclass.

This is garbage. The great majority of those not evacuated lived in assisted housing, receive food stamps and prescription medicine and government support through many other programmes. Many have, all their lives, expected someone to lift them to safety, sans input from themselves. And the demagogic mayor they elected left, quite literally, hundreds of transit and school buses parked in rows to be lost in the flood, that could have driven them out of town.

I am dedicated to planting this into my memory.

Capital is a principal city. Olympia is the Washington state capital.

I remember a teacher long long ago trying to tell we students that the way to remember the correct spelling of principal is to remember that the school principal is our pal. Uh huh. And capital.......I forget that part.

We live in the capital city. In the capital city is the legislators' building, that is the capitol.

Okay. And the lake that is part of the plan for the capitol campus, which is in the capital city, is named Capitol Lake.

I best quit while I'm ahead. It's the principle of the thing.

I really did try to walk away from this. But look. On the Official City of Olympia Web Site, there is a link to The State Capitol Campus, it goes to the G.A. State Capitol Vistor Services. Good deal. But. Scroll down on the Oly city page and there is a link for Capital Campus, which gives us The State Capitol Campus.

(Don't even bring up Capital Theater.Their name is fine, I just don't have any mind power left after this exercise.)

Our local Crisis Clinic has an excellent web site of information, including an in depth searchable database of resources

From The Olympian:

OLYMPIA -- It's official: Downtown has a new revenue source to pay for safety, parking, marketing and other improvements next year.

The City Council on Tuesday unanimously passed a law creating a Parking and Business Improvement Area. Merchants in the 70-block district will pay an annual fee for the next five years, generating at least $114,000 annually.

'It's an experiment,' Councilman TJ Johnson said. 'We don't know how it's going to work. People have had strong emotions on both sides of the issue. I think it's the next step to take here.'

Businesses now have to pony up between $150 and $750.

The names of businesses that don't pay in 30 days will be forwarded to a collection agency. The fine will double and the late payment will be reflected on the merchant's loan history.