Category: Past Councilmembers

Monday’s torrential rains – two inches in six hours in some neighborhoods – left puddles throughout the city, but a boatload of heavy flooding in South Park. One such area at 14th and Concord (pictured), a low-lying basin in the business district, was a virtual lake, afloat with ill-advisedly parked cars, perhaps three feet deep in places, and stretching a quarter of a block.

The problem is caused when narrow drainage pipes are overrun. The neighborhood is a low-lying area (barely above sea level) along the Duwamish. The river bed once meandered across the plane. But during settlement, the Duwamish was “straightened.” When winter storms come, the waters tend to return to their original glacier-carved channels. And South Park’s … Continue Reading »

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd thinks the players in the Petraeus scandal are like Shakespeare’s MacBeth and Othello. A better analogy would be to another Shakespearean general: Coriolanus.

Shakespearean tragedies are defined by fatal character faults. MacBeth’s was envy; Othello’s was jealousy. Coriolanus, on the other hand, was driven by ambition. And that certainly seems to loom large in the Tragedy of Gen. David Petraeus: a man motivated, from the beginning, by ambition. He wowed them at West Point and climbed the social ladder by wedding the West Point Superintendent’s daughter. He climbed the ranks to earn his fourth star and embraced fame as a military idol.

He didn’t travel alone. He once arrived at a … Continue Reading »