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Archives for 09/15/2005 - 09/15/2005

Thursday, September 15, 2005

Live-Slogging the Presidential Address

Posted by on September 15 at 5:53 PM

(With Amy Jenniges)

ELI 5:57 PM: Pre-speech show, and Paula Zahn is channeling Kayne West. She asks Howard Dean if he thinks the president doesn’t care about black people. Dean’s answer is essentially: Well, if you look at Bush’s policies, it’s hard to escape that conclusion.

ELI 5:59 PM: A graphic shows the president’s poll numbers. Four different polls show his job approval rating in the low 40s. I repeat: The man is drowning.

ELI 6:00 PM: Ah, hearing Bush mispronounce Lake Pontchartrain is a pleasure.

ELI 6:04 PM: The anchors have prepped me to be looking for a bullhorn moment. Not seeing one. The camera frame makes it look like the statue of a horse is trampling Bush’s head.

ELI 6:07 PM: Bush says it is impossible to imagine the United States without imagining New Orleans. He looks frightened, as if what’s really impossible is for him to imagine poll numbers this low.

AMY 6:08 PM: It’s really bothering me that he didn’t bother to button his top button.

AMY 6:10 PM: Man, the piped in audiences from shelters look like they don’t believe a word.

AMY 6:14 PM: He’s starting to smirk.

ELI 6:15 PM: My friend calls the toll-free number Bush has offered. He made it seem as if the federal government was offering this hotline, but really it’s run by the Red Cross.

AMY 6:18 PM: The urban homesteading act, a lottery for low income citizens, to get free federal property… That sounds greatBush’s first real ideabut how much surplus property can there really be? Moreover, why not do that nationwide for low income families, not just in the Gulf?

ELI 6:20 PM: Zoning laws, building codes, zzzz. He’s giving a list of things to do and things already done, but he’s not connecting. No sweeping vision, no big emotion. Nothing but hesitation in his eyes.

ELI 6:22 PM: Understatement of the evening: “As some of us saw on television, there’s also some deep, persistent poverty in this area as well.”

ELI 6:23 PM: Bush will take “the side of entrepreneurs” in the recovery effort (i.e., not workers, whose guarantee of a minimum wage he has waved because of the disaster).

ELI 6:24 PM: Ok, all Americans will be needed in the recovery effort, he says. Is this… a call for actual sacrifice? Nah. We just all need to feel a little more compassionate, he says.

AMY 6:24 PM: “The Armies of Compassion” sheesh.

AMY 6:25 PM: “Everyone should find their role, and do their part.” Everything he’s suggestingthat groups contact their counterparts in the Gulf region, and offer to pitch in, Americans have been doing. FOR FIFTEEN DAYS. Points like that just underscore how little he and his administration have done in the past two weeks.

ELI 6:25 PM: “I consider emergency planning to be a national security priority.” But only when my polls are down.

ELI 6:26 PM: On his failure: “I as president am responsible for the problem. And the solution.” Ouch. Having to say that in the fifth year of a presidency built around preparing the nation for catastrophe is pretty damning.

ELI 6:27 PM: But he stops short of calling for an independent investigation into the failures. Of course.

AMY 6:27 PM: “Americans have never left their destiny to the whims of nature.” We have, however, left our destiny to the whims of a bumbling idiot.

AMY 6:27 PM: “We were looking for a bullhorn moment. I don’t think we got it,” says Mark Whitaker on CNN. Moreover, “Why are we hearing it weeks after the event, rather than days?”

The Compton Report

Posted by on September 15 at 5:35 PM

Has anyone seen this man?

Former newscaster and current city council member Jim Compton is missing in action. If you walk by his office on a day when his committee isn’t in session (like yesterday, for example), you’ll find his door shut and his office dark. (I called today, but no one was there to answer.) Admittedly, Compton’s responsibilities as chairman of the council’s Utilities and Technology Committee aren’t exactly arduous (on last week’s agenda: an update on drainage rates and a briefing on the Cedar River Treatment Plant Awards). But you’d think a guy who makes $97,000 a year could at least be bothered to show up to work.

Stripping for Katrina Survivors, Tonight at the Eagle

Posted by on September 15 at 5:35 PM

I’m participating in Phil Picken’s t-shirt auction benefit at the Eagle tonight. I’m auctioning off a white wife beater emblazoned with the memorable slogan “The only bush I trust is my own”, made by Periel Aschenbrand, the rad NYC artist/designer who also wrote the book of the same name.

Naturally, my big fear is that no one will bid on my ass, so please come down, save me from such embarrassment and help raise money for hurricane Katrina survivors. The event kicks off at 10pm and also includes a slew of other local musicians and industry-types.

It’s worth noting that we actually have to take off our shirt and give it to the winning bidder, so there’s another incentive for the perverts among you.

Jeanne E. Dixon Does Exist

Posted by on September 15 at 4:52 PM

The mysterious mayoral candidate sent me a package today. The enclosed letterfive pages, handwritten in prim school-teacher cursiveis addressed to Mr. Wayne Barnett, executive director of the city’s Department of Ethics and Elections. (In it, she refers to herself as the “1905 MAYORAL CANDIDATE”perhaps that explains why her election filing doesn’t list a phone number?)

Mr Barnett:

I am forwarding my answer here to the news media weeklys in the hope you will end the long series of oppressive threats to my campaign to cover up more of this office’s 2005 election frauds still before the publicThe Very Reason for which I determined at the last Minute to Campaign for the Mayoral position.

Her complaint? It seems to stem from a September 9 letter from the city, admonishing her for ignoring earlier city requests to file the proper campaign paperwork. “As of today, you have not responded to our request. The [filings] originally due on August 12, 2005, are now twenty-seven days late,” executive director Barnett wrote. “Therefore we are compelled to impose late filing penalties of $540.”

I’m sure somewhere in Ms. Dixon’s five-page retort, she explains where she’s coming from, and why the city’s wrong. (I can somewhat make out that she claims she did file the paperwork…) But the cursive is giving me a headache. I’m going to leave this one to the experts at the PDCMs. Dixon cc’d them, tooto sort out.

Flowers are never out of style

Posted by on September 15 at 4:16 PM

While I was in a meeting just now someone left a mysterious and fantastic bouquet on my desk. Awesome.

Re: You Didn’t Leave a Number

Posted by on September 15 at 1:47 PM

Absentee voters don’t have to vote the second their ballot appears in the mail, either. You know the Stranger’s going to release endorsementswhy not wait until we do? Or call us beforehand, to ask when they’ll be out?

You Didn’t Leave a Number

Posted by on September 15 at 1:46 PM

To the Woman Who Called in to Complain About Our Endorsement Issue Because You Wanted to See Our Picks Sooner,

You complain that we always run our endorsements one week out from election day instead of two weeks out because most people vote by mail nowadays, and so, they’ve already voted. This is true, which is exactly why we’ve run our endorsements two weeks out from election day every year for the last five years.

The reason we published them a week out this year is because we hosted an all-candidates debate for the public last week (two weeks out), and we didn’t think it would be appropriate to have our endorsements on the street while we had a debate going on. (And, even though our Ed board had already spent the month of August interviewing the candidates at our offices, the public debate ended up dramatically influencing some of our picks.)

Why didn’t we do our debate three weeks out, so we could have published two weeks out? Cuz, that would have put our debate in August, and no one is paying attention to elections in August, and we wanted the candidates to have a big audiencewhich they got: 200 people and media coverage in the Seattle Times. You should have been there.

Per usual, our endorsements for the general election will come out two weeks in advance.

I fucked up

Posted by on September 15 at 1:32 PM

The Suggests I wrote for Monday Sept. 19th about the Director’s Label Preview at the Triple Door actually happened last Monday the 12th. Unless you have a time machine, please strike this listing from your calendar/memory. Thanks, and my apologies.

Get your rocks off

Posted by on September 15 at 11:18 AM

Attention drinkers: Drunk of the Week columnist Kelly O and I will be DJing (or, let’s be honest, playing the booty hiphop, rock, and techno CDs we like in a nice order) tonight at Neumo’s newly renovated back bar from 10pm until 2am. The place has some new decor from the old Bad Juju and it’s free to come in and have a drink. So we say come on in and have a drink, keep Kelly and I company—and you never know, you could end up the next DotW yourself.

A funny thing happened on the way to the printer

Posted by on September 15 at 10:25 AM

A very annoying and prominent error appears in Dave Eggers’s audience review in this week’s printed issue. You will find it at the end of the second paragraph. What’s missing is half of the last sentence of the second paragraph, and then the entire third paragraph. It’s a short paragraph, but it’s necessary.

This is my fault. I’m the editor who signs off on this page. But in case you’re curious, here’s what happened: somewhere in the process of getting the page ready to go to the printer, a chunk of text was highlighted, and then someone — who knows — typed the letter z. As the page went off to be committed to history, no one saw this (and at least six eyes looked).

This is especially embarrassing because Eggers is a great writer who’s never written for The Stranger before, and we are thrilled to have him in this issue. Check out the correct piece here. It’s a great piece. It made another one of the editors here almost cry.

Whatever happened to my rock and roll

Posted by on September 15 at 8:33 AM

Last night was the perfect setting for Black Rebel Motorcycle Club to come through town. The weather’s getting a bit chilly, people are pulling their fall clothes out the closet…it’s a good time to sip wine and wrap yourself in some stylish music. And BRMC is stylish music—the handsome musicians, all that reverb, the lyrics about rock ‘n’ roll—but there’s still much substance there as well. I’ve seen the band play from the time they were still very much in San Francisco through their swings through Seattle and I’ve yet to see a bad show. Last night was no different. I will say the stripped back, bluesier songs off the new record don’t hold a candle to the feedback drenched enormity of the older songs, but still those guys put on a great live show, even when it’s just one guy, his harmonica, and a guitar. It’s nice when the crowd is so into it too, save for the one drunk idiot who kept yelling “Tragically hip” repeatedly between songs.

Good God

Posted by on September 15 at 8:09 AM

I just received the harshest direct mail solicitation ever.

It came from Unicef, the United Nations Children’s Fund. The group mailed me a nickel, and the envelope carrying the nickel read: “This nickel could save a child’s life!” I sat here wondering: What am I going to do, keep the nickel?

I wasn’t going to keep the nickel. I was ready to make a guilt-induced donation. Until I read the even harsher P.P.S. at the end of the letter. It was written, of course, in an electronic rendering of a child’s cursive:

P.P.S. In the time it took you to read this letter, dozens of young children died painful, preventable deaths.

Now I’m putting the nickel toward therapy.