It is always risky to make predictions, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and make a few predictions.
News Item: A suicide bomber on Tuesday killed 20 people at U.N. headquarters in Baghdad
Prediction: Ariel Sharon will not issue a public call for Kofi Annan to act with restraint.
News Item: Bob Ferguson is running for King County Council on the slogan "Time for a Change"
Prediction #1: If elected, Bob Ferguson, the one-time Executive Director of the King County Democratic Party, will not make any noticeable changes. Neither will any of the tens of thousands of other candidates for offices great and small who are all campaigning on the "time for change" platform.
Prediction #2: There will not be any candidates this season campaigning on the slogan "It's time to keep everything the same".
News Item: Palestinian-American Sam Bahour opened a new shopping mall near the West Bank city of Nablus this week.
Prediction: We will not see any religious Jews dressed up as Arabs blowing themselves up in the entrance to the mall.
News Item: The Seattle Times editorial page bemoans the fact that "Seattle continues to be a city marked by racially segregated neighborhoods" and calls for racial preferences in school assignments, because "Colorblind school assignments would render our schools as segregated as our communities". Meanwhile, editorial page editor James Vesely apparently thinks that integration is an exercise best left to his readers. Vesely lives in the Seattle suburb of Mercer Island, which, according to the US Census Bureau, is 84% White and 1% Black -- a bit more, uh, segregated than Seattle, which is 70% White and 8% Black. Vesely moved into a new home earlier this year. Census data suggest that his old block had 5 Black residents, while his new block doesn't have any Black residents at all.
Prediction 1: The Seattle Times will continue to call for racial preferences to integrate the Seattle Public Schools.
Prediction 2: None of the Seattle Times' White editors will move his or her family into a predominantly Black neighborhood this year.
News Item: House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi calls Bush's tax cuts a "reckless tax-cutting binge" and says that this policy "shortchanges working families to help the wealthy"
Prediction: Nancy Pelosi and her fellow House Democrats will not be donating their own tax rebates to the Bureau of the Public Debt.
A Prediction: Another US President will leave office still behind the learning curve in grasping that Palestinians are liars and can't be negotiated with.
Posted by: penny on August 20, 2003 08:03 AM