Just in time for the inauguration, Seattle Met published a feature this week called “Hope and Resistance in Seattle” which makes the case that as a leading progressive city in the United States right now, Seattle is that proverbial “city on the hill” (boy do I love turning a Ronald Reagan reference against the GOP this week).
Image: Phil Wrigglesworth
The word “city” is key in that phrase because it symbolizes the collective force and bright focal point of resistance that urban centers like Seattle have become as the American landscape falls under the shadow of a demagogue like Donald Trump.
With an article about Seattle’s status as a sanctuary city, a roundup of the progressive Seattle organizations you should be writing checks to ASAP, a report on our city’s environmental leadership, an article about the implications for legal pot during a Trump administration, an essay on Seattle’s own incriminating Japanese internment policy, interviews with Trump supporters, and details on the renewed fight for reproductive rights, Seattle Met editor James Gardner has put together an important and remarkable manifesto for January 20th.
I’ve got a couple of articles in the feature too, including interviews with the Nasty Women of the Puget Sound—your mostly all-female delegation in D.C. right now (U.S. senators Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray and U.S. reps Suzan DelBene and Pramila Jayapal) who are Seattle’s voice in the frontlines against Trump.
And a piece on Trump’s LOL ethics, which, noting how Seattle’s ethics code is more strict than the federal code, begins like this: “Donald Trump probably couldn’t even be mayor of Seattle. And I don’t mean he couldn’t be mayor because our liberal electorate wouldn’t ever vote for him—though, of course, it wouldn’t. No, I mean, legally Trump would likely run afoul of our city’s venerable ethics code.”
I also netted this quote from former Seattle ethics commissioner Amit Ranade, who went on to chair the state Public Disclosure Commission: “It is mindboggling how many ways he would violate that code.”
The Pedestrian Chronicles 