Caffeinated news and gossip. Your daily Morning Fizz.

1. Although assaults on transit operators are going up nationwide (attacks on drivers on New York City buses, for example, are up 20 percent this year over last, and assaults on subway operators are up 24 percent), attacks on drivers have remained mostly stable in Seattle. There have been just four more assaults on drivers in the first nine months of this year (69) compared to the same time period last year (65), according to figures provided by King County Metro.

Both 2010 and 2011 saw far fewer assaults than 2009, when there were 109 assaults on drivers between January and September (and 146 during 2009 as a whole).[pullquote]The city council's budget committee unanimously approved numerous changes to the 2012 city budget first proposed by Mayor Mike McGinn.[/pullquote]

2. The city council's budget committee (consisting of the entire council) met yesterday and unanimously approved numerous changes to the 2012 city budget first proposed by Mayor Mike McGinn (less money for streetcar funding, no merging of the Office of Economic Development and the Office of Housing, less money for snow response). Check out some of our budget coverage here , here, here, here , and here.

3. The council has been more or less begging protesters to come down to City Hall Plaza ever since the new City Hall at Fourth and Cherry opened in 2003. Regardless (or perhaps because) of city officials' earnest invitations, advocates for and against every cause from the war in Afghanistan to anti-gay-marriage proposals in California have gravitated toward either the downtown Federal Building or Westlake Plaza to do their thing.

Occupy Seattle is no exception.

Despite pleas from Mayor Mike McGinn for protesters to congregate at City Hall (and camp there at night), the City Hall Occupation yesterday consisted of three guys (plus a phalanx of Port-a-Potties):



The group has gravitated uphill rather than downtown, setting up shop—and tents—on Capitol Hill at Seattle Central Community College.

4. Speaking of the Occupy Wall Street protests, when things heated up in Seattle with arrests here a month ago, PubliCola noted that US Sen. Maria Cantwell, with her populist rhetoric and lead role in trying to reenact Glass-Steagall (now one of the more discernible demands of the 99 Percenters), deserved recognition for being one member of the establishment who was on their side, substantively so, and had been long before the Occupy protests began.

Identifying her positions as precursors to this year's burst of popular dissidence, we wrote:

Cantwell seemed positioned, in 2009, to lead the Democratic rejoinder to the Tea Party, as a detail-oriented populist who was addressing some of the same issues that the mad-as-hell Tea Party crowd were rallying around, but with a much different response: strict regulations on Wall Street.

However, her big push to re-institute the Glass-Steagall Act (a firewall between commercial and investment banking) and her fight for on-the-books rules governing risky derivative markets were sidelined in the big financial reform package.

In retrospect, her strong dissident rhetoric (she was constantly at odds with her own party’s then-popular president and his treasury secretary Timothy Geithner) was a clear precursor to the class-conscious 99 Percenter movement.

Yesterday, the New York Times drew the same conclusion, coupling Cantwell with Massachusetts senate candidate Elizabeth Warren as a Democrat who's tapped into 2011's (and 2012's?) populist zeitgeist from the left.

In a mini-profile of Cantwell by NYT writer Timothy Egan, the Times writes:

She has been after the lords of big finance for almost a decade, and is furious now that reforms intended to rein in the kind of car-bomb speculation that brought down the global economy have been seriously diluted. Wall Street has not changed its ways.“People are really frustrated,” she said. “Where are the regulators? Why aren’t the banks lending? Where’s the money for small business? Why do we only bail out the people with power?”

If populism, directed at the manipulators of paper wealth and the politicians in their pockets, is a path to electoral victory next fall then the Democrats could do no better than to look at Cantwell on this coast, and Elizabeth Warren on the other. Two women, long-belittled by the suits, have been laser-focused on corporate excess since well before protesters decided to occupy Wall Street. And in the process, they’ve angered many of their own party members, whose hands are soiled by “the largest lobbying force ever assembled on the face of the earth,” as Warren characterized it. ...

Cantwell voted against the bank bailouts — “turning the keys of the Treasury over to Wall Street,” she called it. She held up the financial reform package passed by leading Democrats last year until she could get stronger language limiting high risk and arcane securities bets. But now that the rules are being formulated for the so-called Dodd-Frank law, she is angry at how Wall Street prevailed. There are still not enough cops on the beat, she says.

“We don’t have a rule to rein them in,” she said, of what was intended as the main tool in the new law. “We have Swiss cheese.” And if she needed any more proof that Wall Street was once again up to gaming the global economy, she got it with the recent collapse of MF Global, the brokerage firm once run by Jon S. Corzine.