City councilmember blogs about Schwartz sentence

| Crime | Safety | West Seattle news | West Seattle politics

One of the city council’s newest members, Tim Burgess, blogged tonight about the light sentence given to West Seattle rabbi Ephraim Schwartz for the November 2006 47th/Admiral crash that killed Tatsuo Nakata — who worked as chief of staff for the then-councilmember that Burgess defeated a year later, David Della. In his blog post, titled “Wrist Slap for Traffic Death,” Burgess (left) — a former detective — recaps our city’s pedestrian-vehicle crash stats, as well as calling the Schwartz sentence “inappropriate.” (Side note: Before publishing this, we looked to see which other city councilmembers blog; looks like only Sally Clark. Her newest post is mostly about Burgess’ blogging, which she seems to be saying he does too often; not sure what that’s about, since if you scroll down his main page, you’ll see he doesn’t even post daily.)

Alvis March 2, 2008 (9:52 pm)

Nick Licata arguably has the oldest council blog. “Urban Politics” is updated about once a month, although it’s distributed via email instead of being posted online. Issue 200 went out last week.

WSB March 2, 2008 (10:45 pm)

Newsletters are cool but they’re not blogs if they’re not online where they can be found by anyone, not just subscribers, and commented on … :) I’m surprised that more public officials haven’t just jumped in – one recently elected official using his blog in an interesting way is school board member Harium Martin-Morris, who doesn’t write his opinions so much as create open threads for people to comment on various hot topics (he had a thread going on Denny-Sealth, too). His blog is here:
http://harium.blogspot.com/

Rhonda Porter March 3, 2008 (6:43 am)

It’s great to see someone is his position has a blog. Often times large companys, governments or schools may try to stop or control a blog because they do not want opinions vocalized or they don’t understand the freedom of speech that blogging promotes.

Jiggers March 3, 2008 (1:34 pm)

Rhonda–

Your still cencored here. I’ve made comments in the past here that wasn’t posted, but were true about people. Freedom of speech isn’t what you think it is. If I can’t truly say what’s on my mind, its not freedom. I am not a passive-aggressive type like a lot of people are out here. I say what I want and will call it like I see it.

WSB March 3, 2008 (1:42 pm)

Jig, I’ve said this before a hundred times. We do have just a few rules. If you break ’em, and very very few do, your comment doesn’t go through. However, we also – as stated in our comment policy – have the absolute right as site owners to delete or disallow any comment at any time for any reason. Call it censorship if you want to, but we’re calling it “we have a few rules, we’re the ones who spend our time and money to run this site (and are legally on the hook for what happens here), and we ask that you follow them.” We don’t even require that people register to post blog comments, which an increasing number of sites do, and we take flak for that looseness all the time.

seaweedtoasted March 6, 2008 (2:35 pm)

Back to the topic-
Tatusuo was in a crosswalk and killed by someone driving and talking on a phone (and probably speeding). The driver has been able to drive since Tatsuo’s death and his only punishment is not being able to drive for 2 years. Did you know he got a ticket for running a red light after this tragedy? His punishment was too light and he lives in our neighborhood. I could condemn him and send him nasty notes or I can pledge to never talk on my phone while driving and always drive the speed limit – esp up and down Admiral, Avalon, Fauntleroy. Maybe Tim’s blog makes other people be mindful also.

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