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My fellow Pacific Time Zone residents, I trust you are all up and doing something useful by now. I hope you didn’t have to get up at 4:45 local time like I do on weekdays to address the reading needs of our eastern brethren.
Being this distant from the Emerald City of Washington has its advantages, as I know from having spent many (perhaps too many) years there. You are unlikely to overhear eager young Hill staffers talking about yesterday’s Finance Committee markup if you go out to lunch, and by the time the work day ends in LA or Seattle or Las Vegas, many of the Beltway’s Huge Controversies have faded in significance with the perspective of a few hours.
But it helps to have a listening post in DC, and we try to provide that at Political Animal (where I am the second chief blogger to reside in California) and the Washington Monthly generally. If you can, please make a donation to keep us alive, so you can keep your sanity—and your distance—when it comes to the DC Follies.
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JustBeingPedantic on June 22, 2012 12:33 PM:
As a west coast transplant from a much more confrontational east coast city, I feel compelled to point out to those still living back east that the true Emerald City of Washington isn't the one on the banks of the Potomac River, it's the one on the shores of Puget Sound. Those few hours of perspective on the DC Follies that I enjoy living in Seattle remind me that denizens of "the other Washington" need to get out into the real world a lot more often.
ex-curm on June 22, 2012 12:54 PM:
Many folks who live in the Washington D.C. area do live in the real world. It's just the people on Capitol Hill in W DC and in the mainstream media political world who are trapped in their bubble.
Re donations, While I like what is here on the site, I do wish the Monthly could acknowledge in blogposts some issues raised by those farther on the left--Greenwald; Digby; Firedoglake; even tpm-- even if you do not agree with them.
JustBeingPedantic on June 22, 2012 12:59 PM:
@ex-curm: I lived in the DC area for many years, too. The "denizens" I was referring to are the precisely the ones you describe as living in the bubble.
Rabbler on June 22, 2012 1:03 PM:
"I trust you are all up and doing something useful by now"
Isn't that what they said at Woodstock?
Tom Hilton on June 22, 2012 3:00 PM:
JustBeingPedantic: my first thought was Seattle, and it was only when I re-read the sentence that I understood he was talking about some other (much lesser) Washington.
ex-curm: Greenwald's legal incompetence and habitual mendacity render him entirely useless. Firedoglake is the Jonestown of blog communities (Tbogg excepted). Taking tips from them would be silly and self-defeating.
That's not to say Ed should ignore every issue any of them write about. Just that if he does write about any of their pet issues, he should go to a sane & reliable source instead of Greenwald or the Firebaggers.
Hannah on June 22, 2012 8:43 PM:
LOL, I too read "Emerald City of Washington" as being Seattle (esp. since Ed started by addressing we West Coasters). In fact, I lived in Seattle when the city had a contest to change its nickname from The Queen City (that came from the fact that Seattle is in King County - and Seattle is its "Queen", OK it's dumb). Anyway Emerald City won out, though we wondered if we'd moved to Oz, or Kansas, and where our ruby slippers and Toto, let alone the wicked witch, might be.
Hannah, now in Oregon