At a time when too many politicians are obsessed with their poll numbers and their legacy, Pew Research says Gerald Ford will go down in history as just an “average” president.

An “average” rating would devastate most elected officials, yet that wouldn’t haunt the 37th president. Far from your “average” leader, Ford was willing to suffer defeat to do what he believed was best for our nation.

Much of Ford’s public image was reshaped when he pardoned Richard Nixon one month after Nixon resigned. One of the nation’s most vilified presidents, Nixon was about to be impeached for his role in the Watergate break-in.

Pardoning Nixon touched off a national firestorm. Ford, the well-liked and respected House minority leader, immediately became one of the nation’s most despised politicians. read more »

The Electronic Frontier Foundation

A report first published in the British newspaper the Guardian confirmed that the National Security Agency (NSA) is currently collecting the call records of every Verizon customer in America. The NSA order forces Verizon to provide “on an ongoing daily basis” all call records for any call “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls” and any call made “between the United States and abroad.”

And that’s not all. On June 7, the Washington Post and the Guardian published reports based on information provided by a career intelligence officer showing how the NSA and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies. The government is extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time. read more »

U.S. Rep. Derek Kilmer, D-Wash., continued his monthlong listening tour with stops to meet with local business leaders and workers at SAFE Boats in Bremerton and Paladin Data Systems in Poulsbo.

At the SAFE Boats manufacturing facility in the Port of Bremerton’s Olympic Industrial Park, the new congressman held his first “Kilmer at Your Company” event on Jan. 18. read more »

Luxury retailer Nordstrom Inc. has jumped into the controversial same-sex marriage debate by openly supporting the rights of gays and lesbians to marry.

The Seattle retailer joins other prominent Washington corporations such as Starbucks Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. in favor of approving Referendum 74 to legalize same-sex marriage in the state.

Company president Blake Nordstrom sent a companywide memo — co-signed by brothers Erik and Pete, also executives at the retailer — laying out the retailer’s “philosophical approach” to business, which includes a workplace where “every employee is welcomed and respected.” read more »

When Democrat Congressman Jay Inslee announced last year that he was going to run for governor again this year (he ran in 1996 and lost in the primary and was hinting at another try in 2004 but got cold feet) my response was, I’ll believe it when I see it. But resigning his 1st district seat effective March 20 to devote fulltime to his gubernatorial campaign (I really hate the word gubernatorial) proves this is where he hopes to go.

Personally, I don’t think he can beat Republican Rob McKenna who is giving up a sure shot at reelection as attorney general and has been way ahead of Inslee in polls so far. Governor is the best job in politics other than president because you’re the boss. Even U.S. senators, the first tier of political royalty, have to start out in the back row, while the newest governor moves into a mansion. We taxpayers even foot the bill for the servants. read more »

I’ve really missed Dixy since her death since she was my primary source on why all this fuss about climate change being mostly caused by man is a bunch of hooey, but I’m glad to report Professor emeritus Don Easterbrook of Western Washington University is taking her place.

Not by his choice. I don’t know him and he doesn’t know me, but a friend sent me a copy of an interview he did with Western Washington University’s The Western Front newspaper which puts him squarely on our side. read more »

ITEM — Letter grades have disappeared from many elementary schools and they may soon fade from middle and high schools as well. Students are getting report cards with ones, twos and threes instead of A’s, B’s and C’s. It’s called standards-based grading, focusing on which skills a student has mastered, rather than how hard he or she worked to attend class or turn in homework. Grading consultant Ken O’Connor said “instead of providing a single grade for a student, you get a profile of student performance.” read more »

It’s really too bad that we don’t have a mandatory retirement age for members of Congress the way they do for our state supreme court and superior court judges.

Efforts to term limit Congress get nowhere because the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that voters can limit the stay of members every time an election rolls around. Writers of our state constitution, however, apparently feared having old coots on the bench and said flatly that a judge of the supreme or superior court shall retire from judicial office at the end of the calendar year in which he attains the age of 75 years. read more »

Al Rosellini was one of the best governors we ever had.

To this day, I do not remember whether I voted for him or Dan Evans when they ran against each other because I admired and liked them both equally.

He paid me one of my greatest compliments when he told me “Adele, you always stabbed me in the front.”

I first met him when be was a state senator who, said one old time senator, fondly, “was an absolute master at voting for all the programs and none of the taxes.” Oddly enough, his nickname during his governorship was “Taxolini.” read more »