Kate Brown’s Plutopia is the tale of two atomic cities — twin siblings of the Cold War, created for the purpose of harvesting the plutonium that fueled the post-war nuclear arms race.

The top-secret reactors at the Pentagon’s Hanford plutonium plant lead to the creation of Richland, a planned city built in the wind-scraped wastelands of Washington State. The residents – all white and privileged – lived in a perfectly landscaped consumers’ paradise complete with federally subsidized housing and free medical care. Russia’s plutopia was called Ozersk. It was built in the Urals, near the plutonium mills of Maiak, and it was so secret it didn’t appear on official maps.

Same-sex couples began joyfully marrying in Washington state six months ago this week. The couples, some having waited decades for the opportunity, many with children and extended families in tow, celebrated their love as a welcoming community cheered them on. Re-live the moment through some of the thousands of #MEDayWA tweets marking the occasion, and see through these first-hand accounts how profoundly meaningful the freedom to marry is for the couples, their families, friends and supporters.

Family Policy Institute of Washington is so eager to get a parental notification law passed in Washington state that its executive director, Joseph Backholm, is apparently willing to misrepresent court-documented facts.

As you may have noticed over the past few days this blog, as part of the FDL mothership, was being held internet-incommunicado because technology sucks. As a result, we were not able to hold President NObama accountable for all of his 2.6 million federal employees and now America is doomed and the Canadians will probably invade us because those wiley folks from America’s hat can smell weakness like it was a skunky beer.

I welcome our Beiber-spawning overlords.

A bill (SB 5927) filed late last week by Washington state Sen. Sharon Brown (R-Kennewick) and nearly half of the state legislature’s Republican caucus seeks to roll back part of the state’s anti-discrimination law to allow businesses to deny services to customers “if providing those goods or services would be contrary to the individual’s or entity owner’s sincerely held religious beliefs, philosophical beliefs, or matters of conscience”.

A dozen Republican members of the Washington state legislature are so outraged that a florist would be forced to sell flowers to gays or lesbians that they have put forward a bill to protect homophobic business owners from anti-discrimination lawsuits. Actually, that’s not quite right — the homophobic beliefs have to be “sincerely held” in order to protect the owner from a lawsuit.

Let’s take a moment and imagine just how a lawyer would probe those allegedly sincerely held beliefs . . .

And we note for the record that the mere fact that someone is sincere in their hatred of someone else doesn’t make it right, and certainly doesn’t make it worth protecting.

The Washington state Public Disclosure Commission (PDC) has decided to investigate allegations made last summer that Preserve Marriage Washington violated state law “by failing to disclose contributions received or expenditures made in connection with staff services,” a letter from the PDC says.

Preserve Marriage Washington was the National Organization for Marriage affiliate that attempted to repeal Washington’s freedom to marry law via Referendum 74. Voters across Washington state approved the law 53.7% to 46.3%

Anti-gay campaigner and former televangelist Gary Randall is coming out of retirement to host a daily radio show which he hopes will help unite the warring factions within Washington state’s radical-right Christian wing.

There are books about Washington and books about business. Rarely do these worlds collide so dramatically than in Hedrick Smith’s Who Stole The American Dream. He explores pivotal decisions and their relative impacts in these two seemingly disparate worlds with keen insight and analysis. The relationships and connections he traces can be described as a “mash-up” of some of his best reporting.

Pastor Gary Randall, the retired Oregon televangelist who has long advocated against civil equality for LGBT Washingtonians, today admits that life goes on despite Washington state voters having approved the freedom to marry law last November.