For what it’s worth—and it ain’t worth much, since he’s running unopposed—the Stranger is probably gonna yank our Nickels endorsement on Monday. So if you’re filling out your absentee ballot this weekend and you’re consulting a Stranger cheat sheet, you might wanna write in someone else.

Oh, and I want my money back. I made a $300 contribution to Nickels’ campaign based in large part on his support—despite how perfunctory it always seemed—for bringing elevated rapid transit to Seattle. At his campaign kick-off breakfast, Nickels promised to build the monorail. That promise is now inoperative, it seems, or it was a lie to begin with. So I want my money back, Greg. I’m not going to do anything idiotic with the money—I’m not going to give it to any of the dopes running against you (but I might give it to whoever winds up facing Casey Corr in the general election)—but the money ain’t yours anymore.

Yeah, yeah: We’re not single-issue voters around here, and we still dig your urban growth agenda, your density vision, etc. But your dishonest, cowardly, kick-`em-when-they’re-down Monorail Double Cross is a deal breaker, Greg. We’ll go into it at length in this week’s paper, but I wanted to get this up on the Slog now.

Vote for someone else, readers.

Give my money back, Greg.

And grow a sack, Greg. That Newsweek from the 1960s with Mayor Daley on the cover that you pulled out at our endorsement interview at College Inn Pub? That was cute, we got it—you wanna be Seattle’s Daley, you wanna build things, you wanna make this a city that works. But Daley, corrupt as he was, knew something about making a city work. Doing something as vital as building urban rapid transit requires vision and guts and nerve—the kind of vision, guts and nerve that Daley had. The kind of vision, guts, and nerve that you wanted us to believe you had. But you ain’t got it, Greg. The going got tough and you pussed out. Are you sure you’re from Chicago?

So, at his press conference this afternoon the Mayor said, “the people of Seattle have the final say in this project.” However he also said, “I’m withdrawing city support for the Seattle Monorail Project.”

So, which is it?

Well, I just got off the phone with Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis who said, “We’ve made our decision. We’re pulling the plug.”

So, if the city is pulling the plug—Nickels is canceling the project’s Transit Way Agreement—what exactly are the people deciding? Well, Nickels—having killed the transit way agreement—is asking the council to send an advisory measure to the people asking them if the city should stop supporting the monorail. It’s like taking the wheels off a car and asking people if they still want to buy it.

(And this from a guy who really respects the will of the people. Remember, Nickels was one of the County Council members who voted to approve the baseball stadium despite the vote of the people against it.)

The other problem here is the double standard. Consider: Back in 2000, Sound Transit— $1.1 billion over budget, with its federal money in limbo—had a year and a half to come up with a new plan. Why did the city give the monorail agency a month?

Here’s a real solution to Seattle’s transportation problems.

Just a few hours ago, Mayor Nickels commended Jan Drago for her work overseeing the monorail. (He knows it wasn’t her fault the finance plan sucks.)

This just in from Drago’s opponent, Casey Corr. Apparently he didn’t get the mayor’s press release:

“For more than a year, Council President Jan Drago ignored warnings of a Monorail debacle in the making. She ignored calls to protect taxpayers that came from the State Treasurer, the State Auditor, four former mayors and many others. She resisted calls for a vote and provided no leadership to resolve this crisis. Today, after weeks of refusing to do so, she finally agreed with me that it’s time for a vote on the Monorail’s future.â€�

Pitchfork can be unfairly harsh sometimes. Other times, their harshness nails a couple excellent points with great sarcasm. They did the latter today with a review of the new Dandy Warhols.

So, the Death Cab for Cutie/Harvey Danger benefit show at the Showbox sold out in like, minutes, leaving many fans empty handed and heartbroken. But all hope’s not lost, because you now have a chance to put pen to paper and WIN some FREE tickets to the Sept 21st show in an essay contest!

All the important details can be found here (or below), and submissions must be received by this coming Sunday, September 18th, which is the very same day Harvey Danger just so happens to be playing an in-store performance at Sonic Boom Records in Ballard at 6 pm.

Good luck everyone!

Continue reading "Death Cab/Harvey Danger tickets!" »

Josh—

Now, I’m not the monorail reporter—or the city hall reporter—but this line from Mayor Nickels’ press release announcing his withdrawn support of the Monorail seems to undermine Casey Corr’s continued criticism of his opponent, Jan Drago.

“Jan Drago has shown fiscal accountability, integrity and leadership in her handling of the monorail,” Nickels said. “She understands the public confidence is critical to making progress on transportation.”

So perhaps Corr—who claims Drago’s “failed oversight of the Monorail” is her main shortcoming—isn’t Nickels’ bitch after all? (Or vice-versa.)

Miramax just acquired rights to distribute Ward Serrill’s The Heart of the Game, a documentary about the girls’ basketball team at Roosevelt High School in Seattle—the story comes complete with a “maverick tax professor” as coach and a star player who gets knocked up. The film had its premiere yesterday at the Toronto Film Festival. (Thanks to Shannon Gee for the tip.)

After reading this story from the Times-Union in Jacksonville, Florida I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. It’s about a high school senior who wore a blatantly racist t-shirt to school, then was surprised when someone decked him in the melon.

Here’s a description of the shirt:

The undershirt the white student wore had a confederate flag on the front with the words “Keep it flying.” On the back, a cartoon depicted a group of hooded Klansmen standing outside a church, waving to two others who had just pulled away in a car reading “Just married.” Two black men in nooses were being dragged behind.

And here’s his explanation of why he wore it:

He said he put the shirt on in the morning because he planned to wear it to a party that night with others who, like him, had enlisted in the Marines.

Ah, yes. America’s finest.

As someone who spends about eight hours a day listening to music on headphones, I found this report to be a real day-darkener, for there are few more pleasurable activities known to humanity than blocking out the rest of the godforsaken world with glorious music.

AP’s Martha Irvine reports in an article titled “Headphone Use May Worsen Hearing Loss”: “One telltale sign that you’ve done damage to your ears is when you leave a loud venue with ringing ears. If you rest your ears, they might recover, at least partially, doctors say. But with repeated exposure comes more damage to the hair cells in the inner ear, which are key to good hearing.â€�

To counter this problem, one local music aficionado recommends these earplugs. What what?

I had Bush on the car radio during the speech. My main reaction: It’s perfect comeuppance for a tax slashing Republican like George Bush to be forced to embrace FDR alphabet soup politics. He even felt compelled to reference FDR’s heroics during the Great Depression—while outlining his own federal government rescue mission. (Norquist must have been fuming.) It was a perfect ending to the Gingrich thru Bush era. They came face to face with the failure of their policies. And there’s Bush singing the praises of big government. HYPOCRITE!!!

However, immediately after the speech this beautiful thing happened that will stand forever for me as a memory of this whole Katrina era. In honor of Kanye West’s zeitgeist moment on TV (“George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People”), I bought West’s new CD yesterday. (I want it to be #1). I hadn’t listened to it yet, and so, immediately after Bush was done, I put on the CD and drove around listening to that. And it turns out, there’s even a line about Bush in one of the songs: “Who gave Saddam anthrax? George Bush got the answers.”

The other thing that’s notable about Sullivan’s post is that he echoes a theme I heard repeatedly from television commentators last night, after the president’s address ended.

…sick of the glib arrogance and excuses for failure that dot the landscape from Biloxi to Basra.

The failure in New Orleans is starting to merge in people’s minds with the failure in Iraq. As Cindy Sheehan told me for my story this week on the Gold Star mom phenomenon, this is exactly what the Gold Star moms are hoping will happen as they prepare for a huge march on Washington, D.C., on Sept. 24. (There will be a companion action here in Seattle on the same day.)

“People are still dying every day in Iraq and we still have a war going on,” Sheehan told me. “We need to link them together, and they’re connected. It’s just another example of failure by this administration. Since the media’s not merging them together it’s going to be hard, but we’ll keep trying.”

Sullivan often talks about the hot memes of the moment — so often that I had to go figure out the meaning of the word “meme.” A meme is an idea that’s spreading rapidly in a culture, and if this is the meme that’s spreading ten days out from the march on D.C., that’s a very good sign for the Gold Star moms. (Remember them? They’re the ones who were camped out at Bush’s ranch in Crawford, getting all kinds of media attention before Hurricane Katrina bumped them off the TV screens.) The spreading of the “failure from Biloxi to Basra” meme indicates there will probably be a strong appetite among media people for flipping straight from unhappiness with New Orleans back to unhappiness with Iraq, and the march on D.C. next week will be their obvious news peg.

Here’s the text of a cringe-worthy poem displayed on ten signs along the Burke-Gilman Trail to notify bicyclists that a portion of the trail will be closed through Fremont for the next two years. The city’s transportation department wrote the signs with the help of a PR consultant.

We all love the Burke-Gilman Trail
Wending by hill and through dale,
But not far ahead
The trail you must shed
And along 34th you will sail!

You’ve followed the signs without fail
With nary a whine or a wail.
The path’s yours again
For a run or a spin
Viva la Burke-Gilman Trail!

According to Andrew Sullivan, not many bloggers bothered to live-blog the president’s speech last night. Amy and Eli had it all to themselves, apparently. This morning Andrew explains why he couldn’t be bothered to watch POTUS blow us:

I guess I wasn’t the only one who decided to skip watching the president live last night. Across the blogosphere, it seems as if many others decided to catch it later, or on the web, or just read the transcript. Why? Because I knew what was coming: an attempt at spiritual uplift, greased by billions and billions that we don’t have, organized by a federal government that, under Bush, cannot seem to organize anything competently. I’m not saying we don’t need to spend money on the reconstruction of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. I’m saying I don’t want to hear it from this guy. As a friend of mine commented last night over a drink, I don’t hate this president and never have. I’m just sick of him. Sick of the naked politicization of everything (Karl Rove over-seeing reconstruction?); sick of the utter refusal to acknowledge that there is a limit to what the federal government can borrow from this and the next generation; sick of the hijacking of the conservative tradition for a vast increase in the power and size of government, with only a feigned attempt at making it more effective; sick of the glib arrogance and excuses for failure that dot the landscape from Biloxi to Basra.

Pike/Pine updates:
This neighborhood of coffee shops, bars, auto dealerships, boutiques, and salons is about to welcome… another fistful of the same. 517 E Pike, a lovely airy space which was a Halloween superstore this time last year and has been vacant since, is becoming an auto showroom. The former auto-repair shop that abuts the Eagle will soon be home to Victrola’s coffee roasting operations. The empty disco at 916 E Pike (once Spintron) has a liquor license application notice on the door bearing the cringe-inducing name “Bad Boys Club.” And the husk of the Bad JuJu (1518 11th Ave) is being transformed into Barbie’s, a lounge named after the owner who’s also a partner in Manray.

The Mayor’s Boy, Casey Corr, sent out a suspicious press release this morning.

He writes: “Today, I am once again calling on Council President Jan Drago to follow my leadership and put the Monorail on the ballot. In today’s Post-Intelligencer, Jan Drago is once again missing in action on this question. As council president, she shouldn’t wait for the mayor to propose a solution.”

Funny. Corr’s press release, hyping his call for a re-vote, came about 20 minutes in advance of the Mayor’s press release. (Nickels press release announced a 2pm press conference, where he’ll make a statement about the monorail.)

Do you think Corr got a little briefing from the mayor last night, and so knew exactly what the mayor was going to say today, and was able to send out a coordinated press release that would make Casey look like a bold leader…rather than what he is: Team Nickels’s class pet and lackey.

If a stripper strips and there’s no one there to look at her tits, did she get naked?

That’s a philosophical debate we can avoid if we get our asses down to New Orleans ASAP after the French Quarter re-opens—and that’s going to happen sooner than folks were predicting a week ago. Check out this story, which was originally headlined “French Quarter Races to Reopen.” Here’s an uplifting quote from a respectable New Orleans businessman:

“It’ll be better than ever,” said Jason Mohney, the owner of four strip clubs on Bourbon Street, the bawdy and tacky haven for tourists in the heart of the French Quarter. “A lot of federal money will be coming in here. Big-time developers will come, too,” he said late on Thursday as he and a team or workers cleaned up at one of the clubs, hoping to open as early as the weekend.

The President of the United States is quoted in the story too—after the heroic strip club owner.

“There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans, and this great city will rise again,” Bush said in a televised prime-time speech from the French Quarter’s historic Jackson Square on Thursday night.

Yes, Mr. President, the great city of New Orleans will rise again—plenty of things will surely rise again in New Orleans—thanks to the efforts of Mr. Mohney and his crew.

Katrina was a tragedy, and if I had the power to retroactively prevent a hurricane, I’d do it. But in a way you’ve got to love a natural disaster that result in the thoughts of strip club owners taking precedence over those of the president.

Some funny Will Durst quotes are up on Daily Kos this AM, including this one:

“As soon as New Orleans gets back to normal, I plan on volunteering to go down there and help drink their economy back on its feet.”

I couldn’t agree more. There have been tons of benefits in Seattle for Hurricane Relief and the Red Cross, and we organized a little benefit here at The Stranger to raise money for the employees of the Gambit, the alt weekly in New Orleans. But if we really want to follow through—if we really want to make New Orleans whole—then we’ve got down there and drink just as soon as the city re-opens for business. I think a group of Seattle’s hard-drinking do-gooders should start working on a package tour to New Orleans once it’s booze & boobs & business as usual. Let’s charter a couple of flights to New Orleans, book a couple of floors of a hotel, and head down there with money to spend, livers to abuse, and tits to flash.

Members of the American Taliban—members in good standing, not cranks—are running around telling their Christian Jihadists that God destroyed New Orleans to snuff out the rampant hedonism on display in that city every night of the week. That’s bullshit, as I pointed out in an earlier post. God destroyed Biloxi’s casinos utterly and completely, but He left the French Quarter relatively unharmed. The French Quarter, of course, is the atmospheric magnet that draws hedonists to New Orleans. If God wanted to put a stop to foot-long margaritas and flashed tits, He would have destroyed the French Quarter and left everything else standing. But He didn’t do that, did He?

The French Quarter survived. If we want to help put New Orleans back on its feet, we need to do our part not just for the refugees and the Red Cross, but for the bartenders, club owners, cocktail waitresses, strippers, hookers, and the guys who hose the vomit off the streets of the French Quarter in the AM. I’m completely serious: Let’s book a flight, sell tickets, and go!

A clarification on something we wrote in our endorsement of mayor Nickels. We said: “His biggest shortcoming is not forcing neighborhoods to accept more density. A whopping 75 percent of Seattle is zoned single family and unless that changes his urban-center density plan will backfire. Instead of driving housing prices down through increased development, he will drive them up by creating unaffordable yuppie enclaves.”

We should have said—as we do in the on-line version: “A whopping 75 percent of Seattle’s residential land is zoned single-family and unless that changes, his urban-center density plan will backfire. Instead of driving housing prices down through increased development, he will drive them up by creating unaffordable yuppie enclaves.”

Last night, I criticized the President’s fashion choices. Specifically, his top button, which he left undone during a serious, extremely important national address.

Now, in our Forums, astute reader Rone points us to Daily Kos, where photographic evidence shows that the president mis-buttoned his shirt (as in, he was off by a button) and left the top one open to disguise his ineptitude.