WA voters want to keep carbon and capital gains taxes
Washington voters rejected three out of the four Republican-backed initiatives on Tuesday's ballot, including the measures to repeal the capitol gains tax and cap-and-invest system. They also voted to keep participation in the state's long-term care insurance program mandatory. As votes continue to be tallied, the fate of the ballot measure seeking to protect natural gas as an energy option remains undecided.
Brian Heywood, the Redmond hedge fund manager and founder of Let's Go Washington, the organization behind all four initiatives, said at an election night event that he felt the results were evidence that it's possible to introduce initiatives and get widespread support for them.
“If Olympia steps out of line ... we’ll be pushing back against it, and I’ve figured out how to do that in a way that’s economical,” Heywood said. “We’ve got a group of volunteers now that can make things happen fairly quickly.”
Brian Heywood, founder of the initiative organization Let’s Go Washington, sits for an interview at his election night party in Kirkland. (David Ryder for Cascade PBS)
At an election night watch party hosted by the Washington State Democrats, Governor Jay Inslee criticized Let's Go Washington, which raised more than $8.5 million for the ballot initiatives.
“When people came into our fair state and tried to destroy our ability to take care of our senior citizens, to destroy our ability to get money for our schools and bring fairness to our taxes, to destroy our ability to save our grandchildren’s future from climate change – we did not just defeat them. We thrashed them, we humiliated them, we dominated them, we hammered them,” Inslee said. “This was not a win. It was a tidal wave.”
Mossback's Northwest: 'The Graveyard of the Pacific'
The point where the Columbia River enters the sea is called Cape Disappointment, and it's in good company, as a number of landmarks in the area also bear gloomy names, like Deadman's Hollow and Dismal Nitch. And the whole area around the river's mouth has long been called "The Graveyard of the Pacific," due to the treacherous waters that made entering the Columbia from the sea a dangerous, often deadly, proposition.
The remains of ships and stories of maritime disasters going back to the 1600s still linger in the area, and the 1852 loss of a steamer, the General Warren, fully cemented the Columbia Bar's fearsome reputation as a shipwrecker. The town of Astoria, Oregon, perched on the Columbia's mouth, was the first U.S. settlement west of the Rocky Mountains, and still has the vintage feel of the older, more rugged Pacific Northwest.
WSU study: Presidential debates trigger ‘fight or flight’ response
Washington State University researchers measured people's emotional reaction to presidential debates by monitoring participants' sympathetic nervous system responses while they watched the September debate. The study found that Democrats had a more intense emotional response to both candidates, and had similar biological reactions to Donald Trump as they would to a perceived danger, like an important exam. Democrats were also more likely to indicate a willingness to donate to their party at the conclusion of the study, compared to Republicans.
Dr. Paul Bolls, founder of the Murrow Media Mind Lab, a neuroscience and media psychology research lab at WSU, said it was challenging to recruit participants on the far right end of the political spectrum, but he still believes the study is representative of the average American's response to debates. Bolls says this study is an early foray into what he hopes will be a much larger body of research. One future area of focus is the role of emotional regulation, or the ability to control emotional responses to political media.
Your Last Meal | Ken Burns’ film career was born of tragedy
Most people can't pinpoint an exact moment in their lives when they knew what they wanted to do. But documentary film icon Ken Burns can. His mother had cancer for the first nine years of his life and died just a few months before his twelfth birthday; he'd never seen his father cry, throughout the course of her illness and eventual death. But one night when they were up late watching movies together, a film about the Irish Troubles brought his dad to tears. He knew then that he wanted to move people via cinema.
In this far-ranging conversation with Rachel Belle, Burns discusses the salad that's named after him, as well as his newest documentary, which investigates the life of Leonardo da Vinci. And Belle consults an Italian archaeologist to find out what exactly the apostles were eating in da Vinci's most famous work, The Last Supper.
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