Jonah was looking for a place to play Big Buck Hunter earlier. Damn, I should have invited him over for dinner. My housemate Mary, you see, her father and brother hunt deer. And they recently offered to share their meaty harvest. It’s a tempting offer. Ever since I read Diet for New America as a teenager, I’ve felt pretty bad about eating store-bought meat. Eating wild deer seems more humane—at least they run free before being gunned down. However, I’d never eaten venison, let alone prepared it. But then Mary—a vegetarian, like the rest of my roommates—told me how her family actually hunts the deer: with a bow and arrow. Send it over.

Three white paper packages stamped “Not For Sale” arrived in my kitchen, and tonight I invited my mom and some friends over to devour the big, antlered rodent. Slicing through the raw round-steak, the tight fibers verified this was not lazy cattle from a corral, but a forest creature that darted from wolves and leapt over creeks. The scent of animal blood was everywhere. I marinated the cuts in Côtes du Rhône, seared them brown, and braised them in beef stock and more wine. Bambi tasted like free-range Jesus.

Clockwise from bottom: Braised venison round steak topped with a cranberry-port relish with blanched citrus zest; a mix of caramelized onions wheels, Portobello mushrooms, shallots, cherry tomatoes, and, thank you, O great pig-Lord, bacon; a gratin of organic Russet potatoes and gruyere; arugula and D’Anjou pear salad in a lemon, shallot, and mint vinaigrette. Wines, from me mum’s native Australia, brought by me mum: St. Hallett Shiraz, 2002, from Barossa Valley; Lindemans Pyrus, 2000, Cabernet, Merlot, and Cabernet Franc, from Coonawarra. Big buck hunting, indeed.

Recipe after the jump.

Continue reading "Archery and Ungulates" »

The fat-acceptance community is going to have a stroke when they get a load of this editorial in the Independent: “Let adult fatties eat themselves to death. The kids we can save.” The government in the UK has declared war on obesity—they’re less tolerant than our government, you see, because they have national health care, and it’s more expensive to provide a nation of obese people with health care. The government is talking vouchers for health centers, warning stickers on junk food, and paying people to lose weight. Janet Street-Porter isn’t having it:

At the moment around a quarter of all adults are classified as obese, and if the level continues to grow the burden on the NHS will be considerable. New ideas include better food labelling, a £75m advertising campaign to promote healthy diet and exercise, and more cycle lanes. The NHS website will also offer personalised advice about what to eat and how to exercise.

There’s some way to go: an episode of Dispatches on Channel 4 the other week looked at why people think they are obese—the reasons offered by the Mr and Mrs Blobbies filmed were patently risible—ranging from thinking it was “genetic” to “glandular.” One family claimed to eat a healthy diet but a secret camera filmed mum stuffing food into her mouth with both hands while walking….

I’ve said it before, and still the Government seems reluctant to acknowledge, that by the time a child is 10 the war on a trim waistline is won or lost—and that is where, if we are going to fight a “war” we have to direct all our efforts to teach all kids to cook, understand nutrition and be able to shop sensibly before they leave primary school. Instead of government targets of a paltry two hours’ physical exercise a week, kids should have an hour every day, achieved by walking to school or playing sport at lunchtimes.

The number of adults who manage to lose weight and keep it off permanently is very small. Waving vouchers or promising cash as an incentive is doomed to failure. It would be better to abandon the current generation of fatties and pour all resources into ensuring that the next ones grow up fit.

Sheesh. Janet makes my positively polite comments about obesity look… well, just a positively polite as they were all along, doesn’t she?

Not all Muslims are planning to blow up subway trains… but it sure seems like everyone planning to blow up subway trains these days is a Muslim.

I need your help. I’m on a mission to play Big Buck Hunter tonight, and the machines at the two bars I’ve been to are broken. Help me, Sloggy-Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.

Live from Mexico. Results coming soon…

In the meantime, Ambinder has these tea leaves:

**Clinton’s en route to Tennessee…. **Cable nets know who won and by how much …can barely contain the news… **ABC News: More than half of voters in SC are black… Early exit polls analyzed by CBS News show that the economy was the major issue for more than half of voters….. **57% say Bill Clinton’s campaigning was important in determining their vote **53% of voters wanted change, versus 24% who wanted a president who cared about them, versus 14% who wanted a president with experience ** Independents about 23% of the electorate

UPDATE: And now, some leaked exit polling:

Per the network/AP early exit poll results:

African-Americans: Obama 81%, Clinton 17%, Edwards 1%

African-American women: Obama 82%, Clinton 17%, Edwards 0%

Whites: Edwards 39%, Clinton 36%, Obama 24%

Edwards winning white men, Clinton white women.

UPDATE: Via The Caucus:

7 p.m. | Polls Close The polls just closed and CNN, the networks and the Associated Press call it instantly for Barack Obama.

UPDATE: MSNBC on the delegates at stake and the turnout:

South Carolina’s primary offered 45 Democratic National Convention delegates, as well as the campaign’s first indication of Obama’s political appeal in a state with a large black population.

Interviews with voters as they left their polling places indicated about half the electorate was black…

Roughly half the voters said former President Clinton’s campaigning for his wife was very important to their choice.

Which suggests that Bill Clinton’s South Carolina tactics backfired big-time.

UPDATE: And how does Bill Clinton spin this? Well, today he was pre-spinning it this way:

In a chat with reporters today in Columbia, Bill Clinton was asked what it said about Mr. Obama that it “took two people to beat him,” a reference to Mr. Clinton’s running with his wife.

“That’s’ just bait, too,” Mr. Clinton said. “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice, in ‘84 and ‘88. And he ran a good campaign. Senator Obama’s run a good campaign here, he’s run a good campaign everywhere.”

This is being widely interpreted by TV pundits as further evidence that Mr. Clinton is trying to marginalize Mr. Obama’s win in South Carolina.

UPDATE: Via TPM:

Too close to call between Hillary and Edwards, CNN reports.

That might explain why Hillary resorted to anti-Edwards robocalls at the last minute.

UPDATE: More on what voters thought of all the South Carolina attacks:

In the exit polls, we asked voters in this primary if the candidates were attacking each other unfairly. Fifty-six percent of those voting so far think Obama attacked Clinton unfairly, and while that is a high number, more people thought Clinton unfairly attacked Obama — 70%.

UPDATE: Obama will give a victory speech at 9 p.m. EST.

UPDATE: Clinton projected to get second place, with Edwards third.

UPDATE: Hillary Clinton puts out a statement, in which she looks ahead to Florida (a state whose delegates don’t count) and the Feb. 5 states.

I have called Senator Obama to congratulate him and wish him well.

Thank you to the people of South Carolina who voted today and welcomed me into their homes over the last year. Your stories will stay with me well beyond this campaign and I am grateful for the support so many of you gave to me.

We now turn our attention to the millions of Americans who will make their voices heard in Florida and the twenty-two states as well as American Samoa who will vote on February 5th.

In the days ahead, I’ll work to give voice to those who are working harder than ever to be heard. For those who have lost their job or their home or their health care, I will focus on the solutions needed to move this country forward. That’s what this election is about. It’s about our country, our hopes and dreams. Our families and our future.

UPDATE: Is America ready for a black president? Some interesting findings from the exit polls:

7:58 p.m. | Is America Ready? More than half of black voters in S.C. consider the country definitely ready for a black president, while white voters are less sure. Only a about a quarter of white voters surveyed said the country is definitely ready for a black president and 45 percent said the country is probably ready, according to the exit polls.

Here’s another interesting tidbit from the exit polls: Only about 40 percent of whites who said the country is definitely ready for a black president actually voted for Mr. Obama. What was going on with those other 60 percent? Some may think the country is ready for a black man but supported Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Edwards for other reasons, but some may have been afraid to tell pollsters that they did not think the country was ready. Either way, the Clinton and Edwards campaigns will be looking to those voters as we turn to Feb. 5.

UPDATE: John F. Kennedy’s daughter endorses Obama.

UPDATE: Obama is about to speak. I’m livestreaming it here.

UPDATE: Another powerful speech from Obama. He hit his themes of unity and hope, as usual, but he also hit the Clintons—hard.

After four great contests in every corner of this country, we have the most votes, the most delegates, and the most diverse coalition of Americans we’ve seen in a long, long time…

But… Make no mistake about what we’re up against.

We are up against the belief that it’s ok for lobbyists to dominate our government - that they are just part of the system in Washington. But we know that the undue influence of lobbyists is part of the problem, and this election is our chance to say that we’re not going to let them stand in our way anymore.

We are up against the conventional thinking that says your ability to lead as President comes from longevity in Washington or proximity to the White House. But we know that real leadership is about candor, and judgment, and the ability to rally Americans from all walks of life around a common purpose - a higher purpose.

We are up against decades of bitter partisanship that cause politicians to demonize their opponents instead of coming together to make college affordable or energy cleaner; it’s the kind of partisanship where you’re not even allowed to say that a Republican had an idea - even if it’s one you never agreed with. That kind of politics is bad for our party, it’s bad for our country, and this is our chance to end it once and for all.

We are up against the idea that it’s acceptable to say anything and do anything to win an election. We know that this is exactly what’s wrong with our politics; this is why people don’t believe what their leaders say anymore; this is why they tune out. And this election is our chance to give the American people a reason to believe again.

That’s it for my blogging of these results. Obama’s full speech—well worth a read for its multiple digs at the Clintons and its attempt to create a South Carolina narrative that is not about race—is in the jump.

Continue reading "South Carolina Results" »

Tune in 710 KIRO tonight.

It was a busy week in the state legislature. For one thing, the Democrats’ Amnesty, Acid, and Abortion agenda took a hit when Sen. Karen Keiser (D-33, Des Moines) decided to table her bill to make sure pharmacies filled Plan B scrips. But they’re still pushing: an expanded domestic partnership bill; tax rebates for the working class who can’t otherwise get a break in our regressive sales tax system; and $50 million in additional funding for low-income housing.

Oh, there’s also a bill to kill Sound Transit.

Also, Erica has a story this week that’s got the political classes texting.

The first half of the show, however, will be all about the results in South Carolina with James Boyce from The Huffington Post.

Join us tonight at 7pm when we go on with host David Goldstein.

People reports (via DListed) that the New Kids on the Block are staging a reunion tour.

Better late than never!

The news:

Oscar nominations were announced Tuesday. Not a bad year at all for the major categories, though the foreign film selections are an embarrassing mess. The ceremony itself is still imperiled, but the WGA made some significant concessions this week, raising hopes for a red carpet with actual stars.

After high expectations, sales were quite slow at Sundance. Baghead, a horror-comedy by the directors of the laidback The Puffy Chair, sold yesterday to the mini-major Sony Pictures Classics, so you should be seeing that in theaters sometime this year. Previously sold: Frozen River, about poverty and human smuggling in upstate New York; the high school doc American Teen; an adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke; the high school comedy Hamlet 2; and Henry Poole Was Here, a “spiritual drama” starring Luke Wilson. Manohla Dargis loves Sugar, which sounds awesome (it’s a baseball drama from the directors of Half Nelson), and a strong crop of regional films.

And you all already know Heath Ledger is dead, right? Depressing.

Opening this week:

In On Screen this week, it’s all about the ladies. The engaging Persepolis (an adaptation of the graphic-novel memoir about growing up during the Iranian Revolution, by Marjane Satrapi, whom I interview here), the John Cusack-starring Grace Is Gone (technically about a dead lady—Jen Graves says, “The whole movie is a fake, charming though it may be in the scenes that feature blissfully ignorant 8-year-old Dawn, played by Gracie Bednarczyk, who could be forgiven for not realizing she’s in a sad movie”), the vagina dentata-themed Teeth (me: “The studiously insipid imagery, the ersatz ‘promise’ rings—abstinence-only education was way past due for a camp takedown”), and the Canadian-Caribbean step extravaganza How She Move (me again: “The only reason to watch How She Move is the elaborate, thrilling dance routines at the climactic competition”).

A ridiculous number of limited runs this week, thanks to a wide-ranging Children’s Film Festival at NWFF (labeled “CFF” in the drop-down movie times search) and the awesome Rialto series at SIFF Cinema. Don’t miss Eyes Without a Face tonight or Band of Outsiders Wednesday (playing in a double feature with Two or Three Things I Know About Her). For something more lowbrow, check out the rare prints in the grindhouse double feature at Grand Illusion. Prefer something free? Check out Banished: How Whites Drove Blacks Out of Town in America, an advance look at an upcoming PBS doc.

Seattle Police say Maurice Alan was shot on the street outside of the Baltic Room. SPD could not confirm whether Alan had been inside the club last night.

The 25-year-old man was transported to a nearby hospital, where he died.

Police don’t have much information on the shooter—who fled the scene—only saying that the suspect is “probably a male.”

SPD’s gang unit was on the scene and homicide detectives are investigating.

According to state records, The Baltic Room’s owner also co-owns the Level 5 nightclub—formerly Club Element—on lower Queen Anne.

In October, three people were shot outside Level 5, after an argument in the club spilled out into the street. Prior to that, in July, SPD broke up a fight involving nearly 100 people at the club, during a birthday party for NBA player Brandon Roy.

UPDATE:

According to the owner of a business near the Baltic Room, there was no fight or argument preceding the shooting. The business owner, who witnessed the shooting, says Alan—a Franklin High School graduate—was standing in the smoking area in front of the club when another man turned around and shot him 3 or 4 times.

The business owner says he often sees fights outside of the Baltic Room, but that things have gotten especially bad since they started their hip-hop night. “There’s a really bad energy around there,” he says.

No, I’m not really being serious. But this is one heckuva praise sandwich. Maybe even a double-decker?

“While I think it would be good based on my personal life experience to have the first woman president,” [Bill] Clinton said in this town that shares his name, “I also understand why a lot of African-American voters think it would symbolically powerful and important to elect a brilliant, articulate, compelling vision embodied in Sen. Obama as the first African-American president.”

More legitimately, there’s been a lot of talk recently about Bill’s role in the campaign and what that would mean for an HRC presidency. I recommend Josh Marshall and this NYT op-ed.

The polls opened at 7 a.m. in South Carolina today, and they’ll close at 7 p.m. Eastern time.

(That’s 6 p.m. West Coast of Mexico time and 4 p.m. Seattle time.)

Expectations games here and here. High turnout predictions here.

The assumption is that Obama will win—though, keep in mind, that was the assumption going into New Hampshire. Still, it seems a somewhat more well-founded assumption going into South Carolina, where the state’s large black population has been telling pollsters it’s overwhelmingly for Obama. Barring some sort of black-voter Bradley effect, Obama is likely to get a much-needed popular victory tonight, along with a boost in his delegate count. The question is: If Obama’s win hinges solely on the black vote, does that make him vulnerable to being painted as the “black” candidate?

See you when the results come in.

Hippies freak me out. From Flickr pool contributor Jo Marie Riedl…

Bastardizing Improv

Dart-Mondo at Historic University Theater

• See what else is happening in Theater on Saturday »
• More Stranger Suggests for this week »

Around 1 am this morning someone was fatally shot in front of the Baltic Room and Juliano’s Pizza on Pine Street near Bellevue Ave. Detectives are on the scene but keeping mum for now on what they know. One neighbor reports hearing multiple gunshots. More info when we have it.

UPDATE: I just spoke with the mother of the deceased at the scene. She says Maurice “Mo” Alan, 25, was a good kid, an amazing son.

^{Molly Norris’s Vandalized Wingtip, watercolor, glue, and thread on paper, 30 by 26 by 7}

At Gallery 110. (Today’s the last day to see the show.)

Kidding aside, Seattle Weekly’s “reporting” about Thomas Street Bistro is riddled with false and misleading information. I’m sure most of our readers don’t care, but for those who do—and for all those journalism-ethics sites out there linking to Seattle Weekly’s blog—here are the facts.

Seattle Weekly reports that Thomas Street Bistro “started running” ads two weeks after Chris McCann wrote a negative review of Thomas Street Bistro for the January 3 issue of The Stranger. That’s not true. Thomas Street Bistro started running ads in The Stranger in the December 6 issue. Then Thomas Street Bistro ran a second ad ran in the December 13 issue. Then The Stranger published a negative review of Thomas Street Bistro.

Before that review came out the owner of Thomas Street Bistro had decided to stop advertising because, as he told an ad rep (we’ve got the email), he was unhappy with the print quality of his ads. Sure enough, some of the text in those ads was unreadable. (If you have a copy of the December 7 or the December 13 issue sitting around—and I bet you do, Aimee—check out those Thomas Street Bistro ads and see if you can read Thomas Street Bistro’s web address. You can’t.)

So The Stranger extended Thomas Street Bistro’s Adam Freeman an offer that’s not uncommon—two “make good” ads at a larger size to make up for the two ads that were unreadable. In addition to the “make good” bump-ups for these ads, Freeman paid extra—in fact, double what he’d paid for December 6 and December 13 ads—to up the size of the make-up ads. That’s how Thomas Street Bistro ended up with quarter-page ads in the January 17 and January 23 issues of The Stranger after a negative review had appeared in our pages. Seattle Weekly reports that “the restaurant was given free advertising.” That’s not true. We have four cleared checks for the four ads Thomas Street Bistro has published in The Stranger, Aimee, if you would like to see them.

Why did we take down the review? Because the Thomas Street Bistro piece sparked a debate in the editorial department about when is too soon to review a brand-new restaurant. Nowhere in his review did McCann mention that the restaurant was only a few weeks old. Once upon a time The Stranger’s custom was to wait around three months before publishing full-length formal reviews of new restaurants, but that has softened into a general rule of thumb that we’ve broken countless times in order to keep readers informed about new restaurants.

I decided that the right thing to do was to take McCann’s review down and send another anonymous reviewer in a couple months. It was a decision I made independent of advertising considerations; if we allowed sales to dictate editorial decisions, we wouldn’t have published a negative review of that advertiser’s business in the first place. I was trying to be fair. But if fairness was the goal, we’d have to remove all other reviews of restaurants that we’ve published within a restaurant’s first three months. Which is why the review is back up on our website with a note that says:

This is a review of a restaurant that just opened. We’ll probably send a reviewer back after it’s been open a while, as things often change in a new restaurant’s first months.

We’ll put that on all reviews of brand-new restaurants from now on.

I’ll post a much more detailed report on this year’s domestic partnership bill later (it would add 174 rights and obligations to the list domestic partners got last year—leaving 283 to go.)

For now, however, I want to flag a fascinating aspect to one set of rights in the bill that spotlights the political calculations of Olympia’s gay leaders.

The bill would grant rights to domestic partners of military veterans like access to vet benefits. Here’s the Catch-22. The bill only grants those benefits—like it does for married couples—to partners of honorably discharged vets.

Well, lots of gays have been dishonorably discharged for being gay—you know, discharged for the very reason they can’t get married and have to get a domestic partnership instead.

Rep. Jamie Pederson (D-43, Capitol Hill), who’s leading the charge for the DP bill on the House side, smarts at the irony of the conundrum, but has made a political call not to add a common sense fix to address that problem. (Certainly, you could clarify that if you were dishonorably discharged for being gay and for no other reason, then your partner should still get benefits). However, doing so, Pedersen worries, could be spun by conservatives as a “special right.”

That is: spouses of straights who were dishonorably discharged aren’t allowed to get any benefits so gays shouldn’t be allowed to either.

I’m going to see Mike Daisey’s Monopoly on the advice of a funny friend (“There’s something for everyone: raw humor [carefully placed four-letter words] and this kind of clever underlying—or not-so-underlying—humor or smartness that is refreshing… Like any good piece of art, it leaves you thinking.”)—but, it’s sold out.

Also promising: Sgt Rigsby & His Amazing Silhouettes’ A Boy in the Beastly City at Theater off Jackson.

What are you doing?

Elenchos has a point.

A somewhat more direct comparison..

I’m really fucking glad they caught this bastard. I live very nearby, and was wondering when—if ever—I would stop feeling paranoid as fuck when I take out the garbage. This might help.

Never run an electrical current from one nipple ring to another—because, you see, that will cause the current to pass through the chest cavity and that could stop the heart of the person with whom you’re doing e-stim and that could kill her dead. You probably shouldn’t do e-stim above the waist at all—just to be on, like, the safe side.

And if you wanna do e-stim, you might want to invest in an actual e-stim unit—I recommend ErosTek products—and use actual e-stim accessories designed for safe, sane e-stim play. Whatever you do, though, don’t attach an electrical cord to your wife’s nipples rings and plug that cord into a power strip. Because that will kill your wife dead and then you will be charged with manslaughter.

More e-stim safety tips here. And I would liked to have used a picture of a girl’s nipple rings to illustrate this post—but girl tits are NSFW. These sweaty, shaved, pendulous, pierced and alarmingly pumped up male tits, on the other hand, are completely SFW. Enjoy.

David Foster reviews development proposals for southwest Seattle’s design-review board. An architect himself, he loathes that developers are using a loophole to build ugly, cookie-cutter townhouses without public notice or review—and he believes the city is allowing them to skirt the review process in violation of state law.

Large developments in Seattle are supposed to be reviewed under the State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA), which triggers a design review by the city. This ensures the finished devlopment fits with the neighborhood and doesn’t kill fish. However, some developers have found a way around that process called “piecemealing”: By applying for separate building permits for smaller adjacent properties, developers can build major projects but only submit to the scrutiny of a simple construction, like building a house. Jonah wrote about it in July. But the practice is continuing, and Foster is pissed. He studied what was happening around his office on California Ave SW and sent a letter to West Seattle Blog. Here’s an excerpt.

That project [3400 block of California] is for 16 new townhouses, which is well above the threshold for SEPA Review and Design Review, but it was issued a construction permit without going through either review.

How? The applicants employed an illegal trick called micropermitting (aka segmented permitting). The threshold for SEPA (and Design Review) in this zone (L3-RC) is 9 units or more. The developer maneuvered underneath the threshold by pulling plans for 4 fourplexes off the shelf, and applying for multiple permits. The result - unless this project is challenged - will be another crappy, cookie cutter project that did not receive proper reviews.

This situation got me curious about other projects that might be employing the same illegal strategy, so I took a little field trip through West Seattle. In an hour’s time I found 5 projects that were built in the last year, and 3 more that are under construction.

You can download Foster’s findings on the properties he reviewed (in Excel) over here.

This Wallingford townhouse devlopment isn’t piecemealed, but it shows the impact these developments have on a neighborhood.

Another crusader against unreviewed townhouses, Vlad Oustimovitch, sent a letter to the Director Department of Planning and Development last February outlining the state policy that prohibits piecemealing:

SEPA clearly states in section 2.3 that you are required to “Define the total proposal, including any independent parts” and further clarified “It is important to remember that actions are related if they are dependent on each other, so that one will not happen without the other….”

“I’d like to see a lawsuit brought against the city to see if it’s illegal,” says Foster, “because I’m convinced that it is.”

“I’m not a lawyer, but, yes, it is legal,” says Cliff Portman, a principal land use planner with the city’s Department of Planning and Development. He says that, because the city receives separate proposals, the developers can effectively argue the developments are independent. “They could take some of proposals off table, then we’d have no choice but to process the one. Then six months later the next one comes in.”

“When it’s done, it’s over the environmental-review threshold,” says Portman. “I know it sounds illogical but I guess that’s a loophole.”

Continue reading "City Design Reviewer Wants Someone to Sue the City" »

Senate Majority Leader Sen. Lisa Brown (D-3, Spokane) held her weekly press availability yesterday afternoon. Each week, the Olympia press corps gathers around the couches and chairs in her office (there were about 10 of us) and she fields questions. It’s an informal session—casual, friendly, and candid.

I have focused mostly on Seattle legislators and mostly on the House in the past, so I don’t have any relationship whatsoever with Sen. Brown. This was the first time I joined the session or have interviewed her in person. (I think I’ve talked to her on the phone a couple of times).

First impression: What a breath of fresh air. Brown has a great vibe. Sure, she dances a little bit around questions (like most politicians), but she didn’t seem to have a defensive bone in her body; she’s calm; and seemed happy to fill people in as best she could. In short, she seemed comfortable with herself and her opinions.

I had two questions for her. I wanted to know how she felt about Sen. Mary Margaret Haugen’s bill to change Sound Transit into a roads and transit agency.

(I’m nervous about the idea because I think it could undermine further light rail expansion. Part of the proposal calls for a new elected board. Who knows what agenda regionally elected board members would have? Also, Haugen’s proposal calls for making the new agency’s funding sources available for both roads and transit projects. On one level this is a good thing—it would allow some money that can currently only be used for roads to be used for transit projects. However, this is a two-way street: ST’s funding sources for transit projects would become available for roads too. That seems like a betrayal of what voters did when the voted to create the transit agency in 1996.)

Sen. Brown didn’t address those issues, saying simply that she thought it was “promising that [Sen. Haugen] put the proposal on the table. I think she’s trying to create a dialogue about where do we go from here in the failure of Prop. 1.”

She made it clear that part of the proposal—snuffing RTID—was a good idea. “We shouldn’t just let RTID continue,” she said.

It seemed that the real appeal for Sen. Brown was the part of Haugen’s proposal that would allow regional transportation districts to form all over the state. Brown is from Spokane and is interested in a regional transportation agency there, it seems.

My other question had to do with the housing trust fund. While Gov. Gregoire has proposed upping the fund—which supports low-income housing—by $50 million this session to $130 million, House Speaker Rep. Frank Chopp (D-43, Wallingford) wants to add another $50 million. Does Sen. Brown support that idea?

“The Senate’s not going to want to go further than that,” she said, explaining that she supported the Governor’s $50 million request, but no more. “That would be hard to come by,” she said.

Also of interest: Brown was asked about the family leave bill. The Senate passed a comprehensive family leave bill last year only to have the House scale it way back (and kill the funding).

Brown said this: “I believe we could get the votes to do that again. [But] we’re not going to do that this year unless we knew they were going to go there in the House…or if we had an agreement with the House.”

House spokeswoman Melinda McCrady reports that Speaker Chopp and Sen. Brown are currently is discussions about family leave and there will be an executive session on the bill in the House at 6pm on January 29. McCrady says, “There’s no final decision on the House side about family leave. Not yet.”

Brown was also asked about a state level tax rebate based on the feds Earned Income Tax Rebate. She seemed gung ho about the proposal.

Funny moment during this part of the interview. Sen. Brown was praising the tax rebate idea as a way to give low-income tax payers a break in our regressive tax system. She cited property taxes. One reporter pushed her: “Property taxes? Regressive?” Sen. Brown explained that a larger percentage of poor people’s income (it’s about twice the percentage, actually) is sucked up by property taxes than for high-income tax payers.

Another reporter asked Sen. Brown about Sen. Eric Oemig’s Bush impeachment legislation and Sen. Brown said there was “value and legitimacy” in the issues that Sen. Oemig is raising but she’s not interested in spending floor time on the issue.

She also said she supported legislation that could halt Glacier Northwest’s strip mining expansion on Maury Island—legislation that is also moving through the House at the behest of Vashon Island freshman legislator Rep. Sharon Nelson (D-34).

No one deserves to have this be the last thing they see before they die:

This is the man alleged to have murdered Shannon Harps.

Seattle Police have announced an arrest in the murder of Shannon Harps, who was fatally stabbed outside of her Capitol Hill condo on New Year’s Eve.

Police will release more information about the man at a 4pm press conference.

More info coming.

UPDATE:

Seattle Police have arrested a 48-year-old man in connection with Shannon Harps’ murder.
James A. Williams, previously convicted of assault, was already in custody at the King County Jail for a probation violation, but was transferred to SPD custody today after a DNA test came back positive.

Police say he has been a “person of interest” from the beginning of the investigation, and was interviewed the night of Harps’ murder.

According to SPD, the man had no connection to Harps.

An urgent report from a tipper of the Slog we’ll call “Jessie”:

Bill Bellamy and a few Last Comic Standing guys sat next to my friends and I at the Honey Hole this afternoon around 2p. Bill Bellamy is way taller than imagined him, and sexy! When a girl came up to say hi to him, he was very genuine and kind. We overheard him telling her that they were in town with the show, just looking for “Real Seattle People.” He ordered a French Dip sandwich.

-Jessie

A French Dip Sandwich! You don’t say!

So who is this “Jessie”, and why does she run around imagining how tall Bill Belamy might be? (AND sexy!) And who is Bill Bellamy? And what are these alleged “Real Seattle People” of which he speaks? (All of my Seattle people are quite imaginary.) And doesn’t a nice hot French Dip from “The Honey Hole” sound just lovely right now? I ask you.

I ask you indeed.

That’s the question that everyone’s been asking since Heath Ledger’s death—a masseuse called Mary-Kate Olsen, told her that Ledger was unconscious, and Mary Kate didn’t advise the masseuse—and, hey, what the hell was she thinking?—to wait for Mary Kate’s own private body guards to show up.

So what was Mary Kate thinking? 23/6 breaks it down for us.

Shooting the Shit: With members of the Spits.

Tonight in Music: Clinton Fearon, Shift’s Rottun Recordings Night, and the Seattle Symphony. And most importantly, KITT from Knight Rider!

When Will Hiphop End?: Charles Mudede wonders…

Kimya Dawson is a Saint: And other reasons why Ari Spool loves her.

New Pharmacy Video: For the band’s new song “Little Toys on the Shelf.”

Isolation: Hear “Running With the Devil” with only David Lee Roth’s vocals.

I am an Island: Journey build their own island. Their own virtual island.

Trans is a Mind Fuck: And other observations about Neil Young’s 1982 album.

What the Hell Are You Talking About?: Trent Moorman grills the Wild Orchid Children about their new record and… goat hooves?

Currently Streaming: Fleet Foxes are featured on Pitchfork’s Forkcast, and Mars Volta have posted their new record in it’s entirety.

Limited engagement! Three weeks only! Enjoy Thomas Street Bistro Review while you can! Last chance to read on Stranger website! National tour of Thomas Street Bistro Review cannot be delayed!

Andrew Sullivan—he of the recent Ron Paul endorsement—has, once again, declared himself the arbiter of what is and isn’t “feminist.” Today, he slams Hillary for committing a “sad, final betrayal of feminism” by letting her husband praise her in a South Carolina ad. Thank you, Sullivan, from feminists everywhere, for giving us our weekly update on the Sullivan-approved Feminist Agenda.

See also: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here,. Rarely before has so much woman-hating bile been disguised, straight-faced, as “feminism.”

I’ve been too busy working on next week’s print edition to report on my exciting day in Olympia yesterday: Interview with Senate Majority Leader Sen. Lisa Brown (D-3, Spokane); ran into gay Rep. Jamie Pedersen (D-43, Capitol Hill) and gay Sen. Ed Murray (D-43, Capitol Hill) right after their meeting with the Governor about this year’s domestic partnership bill; and had a meeting in a weird Raymond Chandler-type motel off campus with a lobbyist.

Full reports on the way.

The loose, rough, and stupid talk the R candidates have been mouthing about immigration is starting to get to me. Walls, mass expulsions, wasting grazillions of dollars on more enforcement and tougher laws—it’s dumb and dangerous.

Story number one:

TULSA, OKLA. - Edgar Castorena had diarrhea for 10 days and counting, and the illegal immigrant parents of the 2-month-old didn’t know what to do about it.

They were afraid they would be deported under a new Oklahoma law if they took him to a major hospital. By the time they took him to a clinic, it was too late.

Object lesson: Immigrants aren’t the problem—it’s not integrating immigrants into the system that’s the problem. Want them to pay taxes? Want them to send their kids to schools? Want them to take their kids to hospitals when they’re sick? Then let ‘em.

Story number two:

Savvy criminals are using some of the country’s most credible logos, including FedEx, Wal-Mart, DirecTV and the U.S. Border Patrol, to create fake trucks to smuggle drugs, money and illegal aliens across the border, according to a report by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

The report says criminals have been able to easily obtain the necessary vinyl logo markings and signs for $6,000 or less. Authorities say “cosmetically cloned commercial vehicles are not illegal.”

Object lesson: You cannot restrict the flow of money, good, and people with laws, where there’s a will there’s a way, etc. For another example, see Egypt, circa now. (And remember when the falling American dollar achieved, almost literally overnight, what all the might of the federal government couldn’t—retarding the pot trade with Canada?)

So it’s gratifying to hear an actual GOP immigrant-politician with a national profile and presidential aspirations say something not-asinine about immigration:

With the California primary approaching on Feb. 5, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has advice for Republican presidential hopefuls who intend to come to the Golden State and exploit the immigration issue: Don’t.

“Those people didn’t choose (to come illegally),” he said. “It’s the only way they can get in here. It’s not like you can stand in line and wait a few days and then you can get in. There’s no way. There is a system that has been created on purpose to look the other way and to bring them in because everyone knows that we cannot function without them.”

The Seattle Police Officers’ Guild (SPOG) has won arbitration over whether the Office of Professional Accountability Review Board (OPARB)—a citizen oversight panel that reviews SPD’s internal investigations—should get access to unredacted files.

In 2006, SPOG filed an unfair labor practices complaint, alleging that the City Council had failed to negotiate OPARB’s unrestricted access into SPOG’s contract with the city.
Yesterday, the Public Employment Relations Commission (PERC) agreed with SPOG’s complaint and ordered OPARB to return or destroy all of the unredacted files it has received.

The Seattle Police Officers’ Guild is calling this a major victory against the City, and it’s going to have a huge impact on one of the City’s layers of police accountability.
“This ruling is a resounding slap down to the City Council,” says SPOG President Rich O’Neil.

O’Neil believes the ruling will make it unlikely, if not impossible, for the city to negotiate for OPARB’s unrestricted access in future bargaining sessions. “Once you get a ruling like we just got, it’s very rare any arbitrator would grant them that in the future,” he says.

It’s clear the guild doesn’t want a civilian panel to have access to unredacted files. However, the only rationale O’Neil provided as to why OPARB’s access should be restricted, was that looking at unredacted files wasn’t in their job description.

While O’Neil seems elated with PERC’s ruling—which will undoubtedly be editorialized to death in SPOG’s next issue of The Guardian—this ruling could actually end up improving Seattle’s police accountability system. By crippling our current police accountability system, which already seemed to be working in officers’ favor, SPOG has forced the City to go back to the drawing board, which may require our accountability system to be rebuilt from the ground up.

By effectively cutting OPARB off at the knees, SPOG may have just reopened the debate over police accountability, which has quieted down substantially since the controversial Patterson case exploded last Spring.

After all was said and done, the public seemed OK with keeping the multi-tiered oversight system in place, and even Josh Feit argued that the system was working. Now, SPOG has effectively removed one of those layers and upended the system, a move which will almost certainly require a larger look at how police accountability works in this town.

With two new councilmembers at the helm of the public safety committee—formerly headed up by Nick Licata—the baggage from past negotiations may be gone. Councilmembers Tim Burgess and Bruce Harrell—Chair and Vice-Chair of the public safety committee—may get the opportunity to build an accountability system from scratch. Hopefully they can come up with something that works.

Just saw this at Sullivan:

Novak reports on some rumors that Obama could offer [Edwards] the Justice Department if he pledges his delegates to the Illinois senator. I have no clue if this is true or not. But it does indicate that Obama is planning on fighting this all the way. Which is probably what he’ll have to do. And a grueling, long victory over the Clintons would be stellar training for the general.

Authorities have charged a teenage boy who said he planned to hijack a commercial jetliner in an attempt to commit suicide, an FBI spokesman told CNN late Thursday…. “His stated intent was to hijack the airplane and commit suicide,” said George Bolds, an FBI spokesman in Memphis, Tennessee. “He did indicate he intended to die in Louisiana. It appears he had a ticket to Louisiana.”

Bolds said the boy indicated he had lived in Louisiana.

The teen wanted to crash the plane into a Hannah Montana concert in Lafayette, Louisiana, two CNN television affiliates in Nashville, WSMV and WTVF, reported, citing unnamed sources. The concert is scheduled for Friday night at the Lafayette Cajundome.

Via Towleroad.

Bruce Bawer tells me that I’m an infidel and not, as I indicated yesterday, an apostate. I regret the error.

I don’t really like to flog shows here, but these are exceptions worth breaking the rule for. I saw them all yesterday, and they’re all opening this weekend, so if you find yourself with any free time at all—

Jean-Luc Mylayne at the Henry

Dawn Cerny at the Henry

R. Crumb at the Frye

Palmer, AK at Solo, courtesy of Flickr pool contributor soundonthesound…

As the Washington Post reported yesterday (via Grist), drought conditions produced by climate change could force nuclear power plants to scale back or shut down later this year, “because drought is drying up the rivers and lakes that supply power plants with the awesome amounts of cooling water they need to operate.” Of the nation’s 104 nuclear reactors, 24 are located in areas experiencing the most severe levels of drought, and all but two are located on lakes or rivers, relying on submerged pipes to draw billions of gallons of water for cooling and condensing steam. If the plants do shut down, replacement power will cost ten times as much as nuclear. Nuclear plants are not designed for the wear and tear of repeatedly stopping and starting. Whatever you think of nuclear power, it’ll be pretty hard to argue that it’s a panacea for climate change if, you know, it doesn’t work.

Where are the two major Democratic candidates on nuclear power? Obama supports continued use of nuclear power; his sixth biggest contributor is a company called Exelon, which owns and operates more nuclear plants than any other company. Although Clinton has said she’s “agnostic” about nuclear, she is also on the record as being “very skeptical that nuclear could become acceptable in most regions of the country, and I am doubtful that we have yet figured out how to deal with the waste,” adding, “we should not be putting a heavy emphasis on nuclear.”

God, people, you know a LOT of red-hot locals. It’s going to be extra difficult for the editors to winnow the contenders this year—there are already dozens of sexy women, boys, grrrls, boyz, tattoos, men, muscles, lips, and eyebrows in the lot.

^{Brook, by kristeefistee}
Check them out. (They’re not all set to public, so log in or create a Flickr account to see all 131.)

Before you start complaining about the lack of over-fortysomethings, ethnic diversity, and ample bellies, remember that you possess the power to affect the mix—you have until February 1 to nominate the objects of your desire. Just upload your shots to Stranger Photos on Flickr and tag them “seattlesexy.”

^{Ken Fandell’s A Spider, Long Ago and The Same Spider, Shortly Thereafter, diptych, archival ink on paper (2008)}

At Howard House.

Scandinavian Sacrilige

Lo-Ball! at Mr. Spot’s

• See what else is happening in Theater on Friday »
• More Stranger Suggests for this week »

^{Alice Tippit’s Authority, oil on panel, 9 by 12 inches}

At Grey Gallery & Lounge, having a grand opening party at 8 pm tonight.

Well, the dumbest show after McLaughlin Group, of course. Has anyone else been suckered into an episode of Bravo’s awful, abysmal, really bad, no good Make Me a Supermodel?

LAST NIGHT I HAD A DREAM THAT JOHN MCCAIN WAS MY GRANDPA. He gave me a hug and kissed me on the forehead and he said, “I love you,” and I said, “I’m not going to vote for you, grandpa,” and he said, “That’s okay, kiddo, I love you anyway.”

Update: Then I woke up and my pillow was gone.

Apparently, these guys are making good on their threats with denial of service attacks and more.

Fight crazies with crazies.

What the fuck?

Via Sullivan.

In WSJ:

In a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the software tycoon plans to call for a “creative capitalism” that uses market forces to address poor-country needs that he feels are being ignored…

“We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well,” Mr. Gates will tell world leaders at the forum, according to a copy of the speech seen by The Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Gates isn’t abandoning his belief in capitalism as the best economic system. But in an interview with the Journal last week at his Microsoft office in Redmond, Wash., Mr. Gates said that he has grown impatient with the shortcomings of capitalism. He said he has seen those failings first-hand on trips for Microsoft to places like the South African slum of Soweto, and discussed them with dozens of experts on disease and poverty. He has voraciously read about those failings in books that propose new approaches to narrowing the gap between rich and poor.

What Bill is looking for is socialism. But not the old form of socialism, but one that emerges from state socialism, a socialism without the state. Capitalism will never soften or be creative. Capitalism is by its nature anti-social. Capitalism as a social system is making the means the end. But socialism in its desired condition, meaning outside of the instrument of power, the state, makes the human, and not the means, the end.

That was then (November 11, 2004)…

About a year ago I was visiting West Point, and I was talking to a big officer, a general or colonel. But he had the medals and ribbons and the stature, and he asked me what I thought of President Bush. I tried to explain what most impressed me about Mr. Bush, and I kept falling back on words like “courage” and “guts.” I wasn’t capturing the special quality Mr. Bush has of making a tough decision and then staying with it if he thinks it’s right and paying the price even when the price is high and—

I stopped speaking for a moment. There was silence. And then the general said, “You mean he’s got two of ‘em.” And I laughed and said yes, that’s exactly what I mean. And the same could be said of Reagan.

This is now (January 5, 2008)…

George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other. He did this on spending, the size of government, war, the ability to prosecute war, immigration and other issues.

Scientific American confirms the scariness of clowns:

A study of hospitalized kids in England found that they positively hate clowns, which are often depicted on the walls in children’s wards. Researchers from the University of Sheffield spoke to 255 kids between the ages of 4 and 16, and none of them liked clowns. According to the magazine Nursing Standard, one researcher said, “We found that clowns are universally disliked by children. Some found them frightening and unknowable.” On the other hand, kids do like images of the Simpsons, Spongebob Squarepants, characters from Monsters Inc., pictures of local teams and athletes, and photos of the local region.

According to the report, the researchers are using their findings to create kid-friendlier hospital environments.

In other news: Screw you, Patch Adams
.

Will at HorsesAss:

Who takes a train from Seattle to LA? I’d rather fly some shitty cattle-call airline like Southwest for $49 and be subjected to screaming infants and douchebags in cutoffs reading Joel Osteen books out loud to themselves.

Amtrak sucks, and it’s not because it’s government run. Railway networks in Europe awesome, and they’re all government run. Why? Infrastructure investment: they invest in theirs, and we don’t invest in ours.

A Bothell man accused of critically injuring his 6-week-old baby was charged Thursday with first-degree assault of a child.

James Robert Stephen, 23, told police he jerked the baby boy around on several occasions and “may have been too rough,” according to court documents…. Stephens already had been reported to Child Protective Services on other occasions for abusing another of his young children, King County prosecutors said.

…if the University of Washington gave every taxpayer a pair of those Terminator-style contact lenses researchers are developing at the UW. Here’s an actual CSI-style photo of one of the lenses:

“Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside,” said Babak Parviz, a UW assistant professor of electrical engineering.

So the world would look a bit like this.

Oh, and Woodland Park bunny huggers may not want to follow the link to the UW’s page. They’re testing these lenses on rabbits, and there’s a freaky close-up picture of bunny’s eye with one of these terminator-style lenses. It’s all fun and games until a six-foot-tall rabbit cyborg from the fuuuuuurture shows up at your front door with a sawed-off shotgun looking to kill your mother before your ass has a chance to get born.

Originally posted yesterday at 7:30 pm

Sen. Karen Keiser (D-33, Des Moines) called me back late in the day (I was heading home on I-5 with my secret lobbyist carpool mate when she called) to confirm that she has indeed tabled her bill to mandate that pharmacies fill Plan B prescriptions.

She sounded personally devastated by the decision, but emphasized that the consistent legal advice she got was to drop it.

The bill, she explained, was complicated by the pending case (filed by a pharmacy) against state rules that mandate Plan B scrips are filled.

I put the word pharmacy in italics because the lawsuit against the pharmacy board rules concern pharmacists, and so, her bill initially seemed to circumvent the issues at play in the case.

However, the fact that the suit actually involves a pharmacy, Ralph’s Thriftway in Olympia, made the case relevant to Sen. Keiser’s proposal and created a dynamic between the legislation and the case, she said, that convinced her to let the court decide the issues without the histrionics (on both sides) that could have impacted the case.

Top 2: New York Times endorses HRC and McCain.

Bushy, You Got Some ‘Splainin’ to Do: Federal judge orders Bush administration to explain why CIA interrogation tapes were destroyed.

Fatal Error: Saddam thought US wouldn’t invade.

Pissed-Off Pilots: Zacarias Moussaoui’s flight instructors scrap over $5 million government reward.

No Babies, No Tumors: Study says contraceptive pills drastically reduce risk of ovarian cancer.

Pot Precedent: California Supreme Court says medical marijuana users can be fired for flunking drug tests.

Football Flop: No support in legislature for taxpayer financed Husky Stadium renovation.

Miracles of Science: Advances in synthetic “life,” electric roadsters and cheap ethanol.

And now, my favorite play of the year:

Marion Barber vs. the Pat’s D.

Seven missed tackles, in the endzone.

Hopefully Brandon Jacobs runs this hard in two weeks.

Southern California museums were raided early this morning by federal agents in a looting investigation involving ancient art allegedly stolen from Thailand, China, Myanmar, and Native American archeological sites.

Included were the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Pasadena’s Pacific Asia Museum, the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, and the Mingei International Museum in San Diego.

In the case of the Bowers and the Pacific Asia museums, the warrants clearly suggest that museum officials were aware that the objects were looted and overvalued and accepted them anyway.

According to the warrants, Markell at one point told the agent that LACMA was “a stickler” for checking the background of pieces but also suggested the museum had found a loophole to import restrictions on some objects.

Read it all.

Vanessa Beecroft, who inserted herself into Sudan, breastfed twins whose mother had died (their father remarried), became inordinately attached and decided to adopt them, then decided not to. At the end of all this solipsistic mindlessness, she photographed herself as a lily-white madonna holding two black babies to her breasts, nursing one. Editions of the photograph have been selling for $50,000. Now there’s a documentary, premiering at Sundance. Naturally, Beecroft says her photograph was mean to “provoke” viewers. (Lazy, stale avant-garde intentions, meet real human issues.) Says Beecroft, “Sudan is a microcosm of Africa and of the blacks in the world, and I know it is presumptuous of me to take this subject under my wing, but I actually want to. It is my interest now.” Next up: naked Sudanese refugees standing in galleries wearing heels. (Via Artsjournal.)

Say it in this open thread.

… Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

I think their endorsement of Clinton is mostly fair—I happen to disagree with their take on the candidates’ health plans, but they’re right on about Edwards’s record in the Senate, and they have a reasonable, if conservative, assessment of who is better prepared to be Commander in Chief.

However, I must take exception to this claim:

We opposed President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq and we disagree with Mrs. Clinton’s vote for the resolution on the use of force. That’s not the issue now; it is how the war will be ended. Mrs. Clinton seems not only more aware than Mr. Obama of the consequences of withdrawal, but is already thinking through the diplomatic and military steps that will be required to contain Iraq’s chaos after American troops leave.

That’s a serious misread, in my opinion. Here’s a little something from their own paper, which I quoted last weekend:

Senator Hillary Clinton has advocated that the United States rapidly draw down forces while retraining a residual force to fight terrorists, protect the Kurds, deter Iranian aggression and possibly support the Iraqi military. But it is striking that those assignments do not include the core mission of the counterinsurgency doctrine: protecting Iraqi civilians from sectarian violence, which she sees as involving American forces in a civil war.

She was asked in an interview to explain her thinking. “We would not be trying to insert ourselves in the middle between the various Shiite and Sunni factions,” she said last March in her Senate office. “This is an Iraqi problem — we cannot save the Iraqis from themselves.”

But that raises the question of whether American forces could really stay within the security of their bases if thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed outside the gates. It would probably not be long before the media and perhaps the troops themselves asked whether the nation that had taken the lid off Pandora’s box by invading Iraq had a responsibility to protect the defenseless.

Senator Barack Obama has pledged to withdraw combat forces, but perhaps not counterterrorism units or trainers, within 16 months of taking office. Mindful of the risk that such a wholesale withdrawal might lead to an escalation in sectarian killings, he has said that he would be prepared to send American troops back into Iraq as part of an international force to stop genocidal attacks. (That is hardly a far-fetched scenario; a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq issued in January 2007 by American intelligence agencies warned that the quick withdrawal of all American forces would probably lead to “massive civilian casualties and forced population displacement.”)

“It is conceivable that there comes a point where things descend into the mayhem that shocks the conscience and we say to ourselves, ‘This is not acceptable,’ ” he said in a November interview in his Chicago office. “We don’t know whether this is, in fact, a problem, but I acknowledge that you never know what could happen.”

But fighting their way back into Iraq in the middle of a raging civil war might well be far more difficult and dangerous for American forces than their current operations.

Obama is thinking ahead. I’m not so sure about Clinton.

Stimulus, stimulus, and stimulus—all financed with more debt. Zero wage growth for the working class in the recent economic expansion. A collapsing dollar—against everything but the Yuan. Massive losses to the American manufacturing base. Huge public and private indebtedness.

How did we get into this mess?

Through the quarter-century in which China has been opening to world trade, Chinese leaders have deliberately held down living standards for their own people and propped them up in the United States. This is the real meaning of the vast trade surplus—$1.4 trillion and counting, going up by about $1 billion per day—that the Chinese government has mostly parked in U.S. Treasury notes. In effect, every person in the (rich) United States has over the past 10 years or so borrowed about $4,000 from someone in the (poor) People’s Republic of China. Like so many imbalances in economics, this one can’t go on indefinitely, and therefore won’t. But the way it ends—suddenly versus gradually, for predictable reasons versus during a panic—will make an enormous difference to the U.S. and Chinese economies over the next few years, to say nothing of bystanders in Europe and elsewhere.

Check out the fantastically lucid account by James Fallows of how this obscene and unsustainable mis-balance was created, sustained and will likely unravel.

If you find the machinations of global capital as unbearably sexy as I do, here’s a tidbit explaining how the Chinese government forces this situation:

At no point did an ordinary Chinese person decide to send so much money to America. In fact, at no point was most of this money at his or her disposal at all. These are in effect enforced savings, which are the result of the two huge and fundamental choices made by the central government.

One is to dictate the RMB’s value relative to other currencies, rather than allow it to be set by forces of supply and demand, as are the values of the dollar, euro, pound, etc. The obvious reason for doing this is to keep Chinese-made products cheap, so Chinese factories will stay busy. This is what Americans have in mind when they complain that the Chinese government is rigging the world currency markets. And there are numerous less obvious reasons. The very act of managing a currency’s value may be a more important distorting factor than the exact rate at which it is set. As for the rate—the subject of much U.S. lecturing—given the huge difference in living standards between China and the United States, even a big rise in the RMB’s value would leave China with a price advantage over manufacturers elsewhere. (If the RMB doubled against the dollar, a factory worker might go from earning $160 per month to $320—not enough to send many jobs back to America, though enough to hurt China’s export economy.) Once a government decides to thwart the market-driven exchange rate of its currency, it must control countless other aspects of its financial system, through instruments like surrender requirements and the equally ominous-sounding “sterilization bonds” (a way of keeping foreign-currency swaps from creating inflation, as they otherwise could).

These and similar tools are the way China’s government imposes an unbelievably high savings rate on its people. The result, while very complicated, is to keep the buying power earned through China’s exports out of the hands of Chinese consumers as a whole. Individual Chinese people have certainly gotten their hands on a lot of buying power, notably the billionaire entrepreneurs who have attracted the world’s attention (see “Mr. Zhang Builds His Dream Town,” March 2007). But when it comes to amassing international reserves, what matters is that China as a whole spends so little of what it earns, even as some Chinese people spend a lot.

Swoon! Worth a read…

Uh… things have been nuts today, and I’m just now getting to my emails. About eight million people have sent me this link. And this one. And this one. And this one. And this one. And now this one.

At the moment I have no comment. Carry on.

A new neighborhood group has popped up to fight the Casa Latina day labor center’s move to 17th and Jackson. Next week, the Jackson Street Community Association (JSCA) will hold a meeting at the Douglass-Truth Library on 23rd and Yesler to discuss Casa Latina’s proposed move

While JSCA appears to be fairly organized—although their sole focus appears to be Casa Latina—they’re not actually recognized by the city as a neighborhood group.
At their meeting next week, the group says they’ll address issues like

• What is a day laborer center and why are there concerns? What are day laborer sites like nationally? What can we learn from other cities? • What has the City done to support our neighborhood? What is the “Good Neighbor Agreement” and why will it not be effective? • What can go wrong? What does this mean for surrounding businesses, organizations, and residents?

Sound familiar?

In September, a small group of neighbors enlisted the help of Christopher Farrell, of the right-wing, anti-immigrant Judicial Watch, who gave a presentation at Douglass-Truth about supposed nationwide problems with day labor centers, and made vague legal threats to the City for its funding of Casa Latina.

Judicial Watch appears to backed off since the September meeting, but now the JSCA appears to be picking up where they left off.

Yesterday, the JSCA sent a letter to the City Council, complaining that the Casa Latina relocation committee had failed to come to terms on a Good Neighbor Agreement. According to the JSCA’s letter, an agreement was supposed to be reached by September 30th. JSCA also accused a consultant, hired by the city to mediate the Good Neighbor Agreement committee, of defrauding the city by improperly collecting signatures of stakeholders.

It’s unclear if the JSCA is associated with the group of neighbors who called in Judicial Watch, and JSCA’s website doesn’t provide much information about the group. Only one member—President Genji Shiga—is named on their site.

I’ve got a call out to Casa Latina and the JSCA to find out more about this latest development.

Thoryk Architecture has submitted an initial set of designs for 1200 Stewart—the twin skyscrapers proposed for the intersection of Denny Way and Stewart Street. At 400 feet – including three floors of commercial units, a hotel, and residential units (likely luxury condos) – the towers will be among the developments going up on Denny that, in effect, expand the area we think of as downtown.

The above design shows the relationship to the surrounding neighborhood. However, in another design preferred by the design review board and the developer, Lexas Companies, the two towers would be aligned with Denny, like this…

It won’t actually be Grimace-colored.

Paul Thoryk, president of San Diego-based Thoryk Architecture, says, “I want a lot more breathing room with the building on Stewart.” He’s referring to the proximity to the Stewart | Minor | Tower (with the lines in there like that), which is represented by that big yellow shaft. He was also considering views looking west: “I wanted to create a narrower vision for the people from Capitol Hill.”

“He is being generous here,” Thoryk says of Eric Midby at Lexas. “If he just wanted to make money, he would have three big boxes. He wouldn’t have hired me.” Indeed, Thoryk’s buildings don’t suck. You can check out the final renderings for another Seattle building designed by his hand, the Escala. Thoryk says, “He is very sensitive to the environment, esthetics, and wants a very well-done building and to please the community. We want to make it a neighborhood-friendly environment.” See pictures of what’s at the site currently and read my praises of the proposal (and my bitching about the massive underground parking garage) over here.

And, yes, the title of this post is in response to Christopher’s The Demolition in Georgetown.

Mope, Probably: What Would Morrissey Do?

“What a Bunch of Fags”: Stereogum Commenters: More Eloquent, Thoughtful than Line Out’s?

Speaking Of…: Opinions, Assholes, Dan Deacon

“I Am Worried For Cavities Too”: The Latest PWRFL Power Tour Diary

Face the Music: Sleeveface

Celebrate!: It’s Sammy Drain Day

Soft Openings: King Cobra Gets Ready for Business

Tonight in Music: White Williams, HEALTH, Mr Lif, Beausoleil

Cosmic Reservation: TJ Gorton on Orlando Riva Sound

‘Round the Outside: Malcolm McLaren’s Global Pop Moment

Women’s advocates tell me Sen. Karen Keiser (D-33, Des Moines) has tabled her bill to require pharmacies to fill Plan B prescriptions.

Developing…

I know you won’t believe me when I tell you that I took the above picture a short time ago, during the late afternoon of the fourth day of something that is not, technically, a vacation. That’s the part you won’t believe, the “not a vacation” part.

It’s really not, at least not in the sense that you’re imagining right now. But who wants to hear why someone with a view like that isn’t, technically, on vacation? I barely even want to hear it, to be honest.

What you more likely want to hear about—and what I definitely would rather hear about, even in Mexico—is this presidential race. I came down here promising to institute a media blackout on my refresh-button-junkie self but that vow (obviously) hasn’t worked any wonders against the allure of getting online and checking the latest.

I tried. I turned off my cell phone as soon as I got to SeaTac. I brought my laptop with me, yes, but only for my personal writing. There would be no wireless here, I assumed, so no problem.

On day one I noticed a guy in my tiny hotel using his laptop in the lobby. I couldn’t resist. I asked if there was wireless. He said yes. I told myself no, but by day two I was at the front desk asking for the password, feeling a bit like Bubbles on The Wire. I then told myself I would only use a little gmail to catch up with old friends. No blogs, no news sites, and definitely no Slog. That lasted until I got a gmail from a friend saying:

YOU HAVE TO WATCH CLIPS FROM THE DEM DEBATE FROM LAST NIGHT. Obama came to fight and him and Clinton straight up brawled.

Ok, maybe a little YouTube, I thought. I spent forever downloading the handy debate recordings of some guy named researchris, listening to the waves hit the beach as the red “loading” line crept across the YouTube player, and didn’t regret a second. That was, as most of you know already, the best debate of the season.

Day three came and I was mainlining the political blogs again. It was sad, really. But I felt great. (When I didn’t feel pathetic.) I don’t know if it’s the addictive qualities of the Internet, or this particular election, or both in tandem, but I am certifiably cracked out on the presidential race. Will The Stranger’s benefits pay for me to go to one of those Chinese internet addiction treatment centers when this is all over?

Anyway, comes now day four and my brother arrives holding the current New Yorker, which he tells me contains a long profile of Hillary Clinton by George Packer. I tell him I already have the piece up on my browser and am planning to read it tonight. He looks much less disappointed in me than I am.

I make one of those junkie rationalizations: It will be less a sign of internet addiction to grab my brother’s copy of the magazine, take it down to the beach, and read it there. Something about paper not being part of the problem, or some such.

I walk down to the beach.

Where, shortly after finishing the article, I decide to come back up to my room and blog about the piece, thus negating any fake progress I might have made on pretending to reinstate my media blackout by reading things on glossy paper rather than online.

And now here I am, your click-addled presidential election coverer, telling you, as per usual: Read this!

It’s good, and it zeros in on the different attitudes toward presidential leadership on the part of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately:

The alternatives facing Democratic voters have been characterized variously as a choice between experience and change, between an insider and an outsider, and between two firsts—a woman and a black man. But perhaps the most important difference between these two politicians—whose policy views, after all, are almost indistinguishable—lies in their rival conceptions of the Presidency. Obama offers himself as a catalyst by which disenchanted Americans can overcome two decades of vicious partisanship, energize our democracy, and restore faith in government. Clinton presents politics as the art of the possible, with change coming incrementally through good governance, a skill that she has honed in her career as advocate, First Lady, and senator…

These rival conceptions of the Presidency—Clinton as executive, Obama as visionary—reflect a deeper difference in how the two candidates analyze what ails the country. Obama’s diagnosis is more fundamental: for him, the illness precedes the Bush years and the partisan deadlock in Washington, originating in a basic failure of politicians to bring Americans together. A strong hand on the wheel won’t make a difference if your car is stuck in the mud; a good leader has to persuade enough people to get out and push. Whereas Clinton echoes Churchill, who proclaimed, “Give us the tools and we will finish the job,” Obama invokes Lincoln, who said, “As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

Ok, back to pretending I’m on some sort of not-quite-a-blackout media diet. See you when I’m back in Seattle on Monday—or, more likely, see you tomorrow or Saturday when the South Carolina primary brings me back online.

Hasta whatever that was I was hoping for with my failed attempts at staying offline, and hola, once again, politics and internet addiction.

As she did last year, Senator Cheryl “Drug Money” Pflug (R-5, Maple Valley) spoke out against a bill that would require drug companies to disclose gifts to health-care providers.

Despite her advocacy for the drug companies—she argued incorrectly that the bill held drug companies and health-care providers to a different standard than legislators, who she absurdly claimed don’t have to disclose gifts—the bill passed out of the health care committee today, 5-4.

The bill died in the senate rules committee last year.

While it’s easy to focus on what candidates say they’ll do when in office (each campaign’s web site offers a long list of policy platform statements), it’s a more instructive exercise (assuming you care about policy and not just personality or “likability”) to look at the candidates’ records in office and see how they line up against your personal priorities. The Guardian recently did a roundup of significant votes by Clinton and Obama, and, as you might guess, both candidates’ records are mixed.

For example:

In 2005, Clinton voted against an energy bill that subsidized “clean coal” researchers and ethanol producers while Obama voted for it—because he supported the subsidies.

Obama voted for new restrictions on cluster bombs (which tend to go off years after battle and frequently kill or wound civilians) while Clinton voted against it, possibly to avoid angering Israel and possibly because she bought arguments that restricting the bombs would tie military leaders’ hands.

Obama voted for a Republican bill that barred law enforcement from confiscating civilians’ guns during an emergency; Clinton voted against it.

Clinton opposed some key Bush appointments, including interior secretary Dirk Kempthorne (who received a 100 percent one percent, duh! lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters) and army chief of staff George Casey; Obama voted for them.

Clinton voted against an ethics bill Obama sponsored, arguing that it still allows members of Congress and their aides to attend parties thrown by lobbyists; but she voted against reforms that would have made the legislation stronger.

Bonus: No pro-HRC commentary! Feel free to fire away about what you think I’m ignoring in the comments.

“Dwarves Zipped in Suitcases Steal from Swedes”

(Thanks to Slog tipper Reggie.)

He’ll announce tomorrow, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He doesn’t plan to endorse anyone else in the primary, though he threw his non-viable supporters to Obama in Iowa.

The Seattle Police Department has released a sketch of a suspect—not a “person of interest,” but a real-live suspect—in an assault, which left a Seattle elementary school teacher with possible brain damage.

On January 17th, Joseph Skillings, a teacher at Adams Elementary in Ballard, called 911 after he saw the suspect harassing a woman at a bus stop on the 300 block of East Pine Street. The suspect saw Skillings on his phone, and allegedly knocked him to the ground. Skillings hit his head on the cement and suffered a seizure.

SPD describes the suspect as:

A black male in his late 40’s. He is described as between 5’9” to 6’ tall, 150 pounds, with a slim build. He has been described as having a “wrinkled face.” He was last seen wearing a black knit ski cap, black thigh length coat with a 1-2” white stripe down the length of the sleeve. He may have been wearing a black velvet sweat suit and was carrying a large black backpack. He may also be wearing gold rings and/or bracelets.

Police are asking that people call (206) 684-5550 if they have any information about the suspect.

So the Brits sentenced Samina Malik, a 23 year-old Muslim woman, to nine months of probation for the crime of… writing a poem. But what a poem!

How to Behead

It’s not as messy or hard as some may think.

It’s all about the flow of the wrist.

Sharpen the knife to its maximum.

And before you begin to cut the flesh.

Tilt the fool’s head to its left.

Saw the knife back and forth.

No doubt the punk will twitch and scream.

But ignore the donkey’s ass.

And continue to slice back and forth.

La la la. Islam means peace. Now to be fair the Brits, they didn’t exactly arrest this lovely young woman for writing a poem. They came down on her for “possessing records likely to be used in an act of terrorism,” which included “an al-Qaida manual, a booklet on mujahedeen poisons and bomb-making instructions.” And guess what? This poetess of peace worked at London’s Heathrow Airport as a shop assistant, and was familiar with security procedures designed to protect heathen donkeys from, oh, murderous Muslim radicals and other terrorists.

The poem was read on NPR this morning in a piece about the emergence in Britain of “militant Islamist feminism”—which makes about as much sense as “radical gay heterosexuality.” When the poem was read I about choked on my toast. I fly into Heathrow now and then and there are always lots of women working in headscarves and I suppress my… well, I suppress my worst impulses. They’re in the West, I tell myself, they’ve immigrated for a reason, they’ve embraced Western values, and the nice woman in the headscarf selling me my International Herald Tribune at Heathrow isn’t thinking about sawing off my pole-smoking, beer-swilling, apostate head.* (The charming and talented Ms. Malik, however, “spent much of her time at work writing about her desire for martyrdom,” according to NPR.) They’re here, they’ve immigrated, they’re used to us!

But when I heard this next bit on the radio, well, I made up my mind to fly into Shannon next time I go to Europe:

Recent polls have shown that as many as four in 10 British Muslims want Sharia, the Islamic law, applied in Muslim-populated areas of Britain.

Sharia, which is practiced in many parts of the Islamic world, is a religious code of living. But it also specifies stoning and amputation as normal punishment for some crimes.

Sharia also specifies the beheading as “normal punishment” for homosexual acts.**

La la la. Islam means peace.

As much as I hate to sound like a member of the National Front… gee… I just gotta say this: There’s no shortage of backwards, fucked up, unpleasant shitholes where Sharia is practiced. If someone longs to live under Sharia, why the fuck would that someone emigrate to Europe or remain in Europe? Why not emigrate to, say, Pakistan or Iran or Saudi Arabia or Sudan or Nigeria or a whole host of islands in Indonesia? If you long to attend public amputations and beheadings, if you think the victims of rape should be imprisoned and whipped, what the fuck are you doing in Britain? Or the Netherlands? Or Belgium? Or France? Or Germany? Wanna live under Sharia? Well, get thee to a Sharia-enforcing shithole already.

I’ll be accused of being xenophobic, of course, for typing what any sensible person thought to him or herself listening to NPR this morning. I am not xenophobic. Or Islamophobic—unless being afraid of particular Muslims, like Ms. Malik, makes one Islamophobic.***

One of the things I love most about the good, ol’ US of A and thoroughly modern Europe—and miss most living here in Seattle—is the ethnic, racial, and religious diversity. But the price of admission to a pluralistic, multi-ethnic society has to be… a desire to live in that place. And a desire to live and let live, and a certain base-level tolerance for people that look, pray, and fuck differently than you do. You should, of course, be free to impose Sharia on yourself and yourself alone (not your daughters, for instance), just as Christians and Jews should be free to impose the most conservative interpretations of their faiths on themselves alone. But that’s it— you’re not free to impose it on others, even your co-religionists. Period.

And if you can’t hack that…. if you can’t handle pluralism… if you hate us punks and donkeys and fools much… and if you long for Sharia so terribly… then get the fuck out.

••••••••••••••••••••••

* I don’t have this reaction when I see women in headscarves in American airports—all of that here-in-the-West-for-a-reason actually applies to American Muslims, it seems. (Someone please inform the Department of Homeland Security.)

** Yes, there’s some “kill the homos” crap in the Bible, but no predominantly Christian states are executing homosexuals.

*** I’m afraid of some Muslims. But I’m afraid of some Christians, some Jews, some men, some women, some of my relatives, and many, many homosexuals too. Does this make me Christophobic, Jewophobic, guyophobic, girlophobic, uncleophobic, and homophobic as well?

It’s been underway for several days now. These were taken yesterday afternoon.

Those thick pipes on the upper floors to the right are cooling pipes, as the building used to be refrigerated.

Now they spill out of it like spaghetti.

The fence along Airport Way has pink roses, white carnations, yellow daises, and plastic orange flowers threaded into it.

Even though demolition has been going on for days, Airport Way was crawling with photographers—amateurs with their cell phones, professionals with real equipment. I asked one of the photographers (not pictured) if he worked for a newspaper. “Yeah, Seattle Times,” he said. Then he walked up to a row of gleaming scooters parked outside Big People Scooters, which is directly across Airport Way from the Rainier Cold Storage building, caught the half-demolished building reflected in one scooter’s rearview mirror, and tried to find an angle to take a photo of the reflection.

The bar at Jules Maes, which is next to Big People Scooters, has a perfect view of the wreckage. A bartender told me that even though Airport Way, the street you have to use to get to Jules Maes, was closed for the first two days of the demolition, Jules Maes “got a lot of business.”

Down the street at All City Coffee, a barista smiled when asked about what she thought of the building coming down. “It’s not at the top of the list of things I’m thinking about right now. Also, I’m just sick of talking about it. I’ve been talking about it all weekend.” I asked what’s at the top of the list of the things she’s thinking about right now. She said she had a biology test in the morning.

After I took the unusual step of deleting a comment by Slog troll Ecce Homo earlier today (it said, in part, that I needed to “get a dick” and “beg a strait [sic] boy to have sex with [me]”), commenters including Ecce accused me of censoring posts and said I needed to “grow a thicker skin.” So, since we at the Stranger celebrate free speech (while I would point out to those who haven’t read it in a while that nowhere does the Constitution say you have a legal right to say whatever you want on somebody else’s blog), I’m going to highlight a few of the comments that Slog’s loyal pack of haters have made in the last 24 hours. Did I mention that almost all the most abusive commenters hide behind fake names and falsified e-mail addresses?

Posted by that’s a good Southern white girl fo sho

Anyone else amused that Erica deleted ecce’s comment about her needing a dick, but left this one alone?

Posted by R ECB,

I hope this is finally what gets you canned from the Stranger.

shame on you.

Posted by Gina kudos for being an absolute moron and check out jonathan kauffman’s feature in the weekly for the REAL story.

Posted by Grant get over your fucking self.

While all of these comments are rude, they don’t violate Slog’s extremely liberal comments policy, which states simply that “we remove comments that are off topic, threatening, or commercial in nature, and we do not allow sock-puppetry (impersonating someone else)—or any kind of puppetry, for that matter. We never censor comments based on ideology.”

What does violate our comments policy? Comments like these:

I could care less about her sexuality, but her smug moralistic bullshit annoys the hell out of me. Her suppressed sexuality is nothing more than a street sign that one can observe that directs you to the core problem. The problem is that she is consumed with her own moral superiority.

She needs some strait male attention, something I can never give.

Now can’t we get back to discussing why bicyclists are retards playing with childish toys who pitch temper tantrums when they don’t get their way? Something ECB is quite adept at demonstrating.

I think that ECB secretly likes the word [cunt], but doesn’t like to admit it because it would indicate a sexuality that she has long since burried [sic].

Dan needs more dicks in his mouth.

Since nobody else gets what you are trying to say here, Erica, let me be the one to say thank you for not reproducing.

These comments are off topic and don’t add anything to the conversation. If it was up to me, of course, I’d adopt a much stricter policy—no personal insults would be a start— because I think it would encourage readers who don’t want to wade into the comments slime now to participate. But I think it’s worthwhile to take a moment and appreciate (or lament) Slog’s comments policy, which guarantees that even the most worthless, cowardly, and abusive comments are given the chance to see the light of day.

While the feds are offering up a tax rebate to stimulate the economy (which Erica thinks won’t do much to help lower-income workers), the libs in Olympia are proposing a bill that directly focuses on tax rebates for low-wage workers.

Sen. Craig Pridemore (D-49, Vancouver, Minehaha, Hazel Dell, Walnut Grove) has a bill—written by the left wingers at the Washington Budget and Policy Center—that would allow Washington taxpayers to take advantage of the Earned Income Tax Credit.

Lower-wage workers can already take advantage of the rebate on federal income taxes—Washington taxpayers got about $600 million back from the feds in 2004 through the EITC program.

Unfortunately, because Washington State doesn’t have an income tax (we’ve got a sales tax), minimum-wage workers haven’t been able to get similar rebate help out of our regressive system.

Higher-income workers can get state rebates by itemizing their tax returns based on expenses under our sales tax. No so for low-wage workers.

So, without an income tax here, how can low-wage workers get any state rebate?

Sen. Pridemore’s bill solves the problem by providing a state tax rebate equal to 10 percent of a taxpayer’s federal EITC credit.

Colby Underwood—the 30-year-old Democratic fundraising consultant who’s suing his ex-employee McKenna Hartman for a million dollars—won a temporary injunction barring her from doing any fundraising work until his lawsuit moves forward. As I wrote in this week’s paper, Underwood is accusing Hartman of “poaching [his] clientele and stealing [his firm’s] trade secrets.” Although Underwood and his lawyer, Janyce Fink, had not showed up to a scheduled court hearing when my story went to press (at which point they were both an hour and a half late), Hartman’s attorney Gregory Karp reports that they did eventually arrive, and that a superior court judge granted the temporary injunction that prevents Hartman from engaging in gainful work in her field.

Following up on her bill to streamline the process for women to get protection from stalkers (billed as the “Rebecca Griego Act”), Senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles (D-36, Seattle) held a hearing this morning on another bill that addresses the tragedy at UW last year.

Her bill would allow college campuses to ban guns. Currently, campuses can ban guns (at the UW, for example, you cannot carry a firearm without prior approval from the administration), but gun-control advocates worry that that current regulatory authority is not strong enough to withstand a constitutional challenge.

Sen. Kohl-Welles’s bill explicitly gives campuses the right to prohibit firearms which would make a court challenge more difficult.

Her bill seems a lot more substantive than a related bill that she’s proposing at the request of Governor Gregoire (also heard in committee this morning) that would direct campuses to come up with a safety plan.

A few weeks ago, Stranger freelancer Chris McCann reviewed Thomas Street Bistro. Two weeks ago we pulled the review from our web archive because our timing was off. The restaurant opened in November and McCann was assigned to review it less than two months later, which was against our editorial policy of waiting at least three months before doing a formal review of a new restaurant. That’s why you can read comments about McCann’s review, but not the review itself, on our restaurants page. We’ll do a formal review of Thomas Street Bistro at some point in the future.

Meanwhile, if you’ve been to Thomas Street Bistro and want to write your own review, there’s no policy against readers reviewing restaurants at any time. Have at it.

UPDATE: Ladies and gentlemen, the review is back!

From Flickr pool contributor Jo Marie Riedl…

^{Ken Kelly’s Theory, oil and enamel on canvas, 2007}

Behind the desk at James Harris Gallery hangs a dirty-white painting by Squeak Carnwath that reads, in pencil scrawl in the center, “Painting is no ordinary object.” Right-o. A painting is an extraordinary thing. Or: painting is a verb, not a noun. Fine. Whatever. While you’re trying on the various attitudes toward painting, Carnwath’s scratchy, splotchy surface, with its assertions, glitches, and erasures, takes over. Painting always wins. A writer I know says painting never dies because, deep down, we love it so much that we want it to succeed.

It’s painting month at the major galleries in Seattle—a rarity: Adam Sorensen’s semi-toxic/semisweet landscapes painted on thin pieces of panel and Claire Cowie’s watercolors are at James Harris, Darren Waterston’s smooth apocalypses and Katy Stone’s painted Mylar stacks are at Greg Kucera; Lawrimore Project is showing Prom: A Semi-Formal Survey of Semi-Formal Painting; and Howard House recently opened with new abstractions by Ken Kelly.

Of all these (though admittedly I haven’t been yet to The Prom), Kelly’s laconic paintings draw me in. His restricted palette (red, black, white, and tones of these) and repetitive grids of little rectangles are out of step with fashionable (and, often, let’s face it, fun to look at) psychedelia and pictorialism. They’re also a departure from his signature style, which set slick stenciled imagery on thick, heavily worked surfaces—a style he cultivated for almost 15 years.

Now, the Seattle painter’s new works are portraits of patterns, or to be more evocative, systems, painted by hand in rows of dots of varying sizes that seem to stream across the surface of the paintings like encoded back-end information. They fuse the digital, the modern, and the ancient, and they also provide a recording of the decisions that went into making the painting.

The grids—strictly geometric from afar but blurry and idiosyncratic up close—evoke not only computer chips and early video games, but also traffic patterns, photographs of cities at night, Morse code, Native American basketry, and traditional African textiles. They also emit the surprising feeling—for grids—of having been improvised.

What’s more, like a perspective painter, Kelly applies an underlying grid before he starts making his daubs inside it. In certain paintings, he leaves the grid visible in the end, which cuts the painting visually, turning it into a seeming collage, where one segment has been excerpted from a particular world or system and the one right next to it represents another place entirely. Grouping the smaller paintings in a grid on the wall has a similar effect. Where is all this information from, and where is it going? It’s a pleasure to wonder.

Well, a DNA test might have failed to link that 29-year-old “person of interest” to the Capitol Hill stabbing, but a local murder from 1978 has finally been solved, 30 years after the killer, a hooker and hitwoman, confessed to the feds. From the Times:

Karen L. Martin, 52, pleaded guilty last week to second-degree murder for the 1978 shooting of Leroy Grant, 36, according to King County Superior Court documents. She faces between 15 years and life in prison when she is sentenced Feb. 8.

Though Martin confessed to federal investigators and an assistant U.S. attorney about a year after the crime, she wasn’t charged until December 2006, according to court documents. The assistant U.S. attorney, J. Ronald Sim, now a criminal defense attorney, had offered Martin immunity in exchange for information about organized crime, but the immunity was never made official and Sim never told local authorities about her confession.

In 2006, a local cold-case unit interviewed Martin, hinted her DNA had been found at the scene (it hadn’t) and tricked her into confessing all over again.

Leroy Grant was an auto mechanic involved with organized crime who, Martin said, acquired some money “he was not supposed to have gotten.” Martin’s husband, who was in jail at the time, said she could make some money if she killed him.

So Martin met the mechanic, made up a story about a Corvette that needed restoring, drove with him into the woods, and shot him three times.

She was promised $10,000 for killing the auto mechanic. She never got paid.

Kick-Ass Sequel

Week of Fun 2:
The Weekening at Central Cinema

• See what else is happening in Theater on Thursday »
• More Stranger Suggests for this week »

So Bush is giving us all tax rebates. Hoo-fucking-ray. What bugs me about this “economic stimulus” plan—beyond the fact that it’s of dubious worth (liberal and conservative experts agree that the rebates come too late and that people usually sock them away instead of spending them)—is that it rewards married people with multiple kids—particularly high-income married couples in which the mom stays at home. The rebates will amount to $600 for struggling single workers like me—and $2,400 for a couple in which the man makes $150,000 and the woman stays at home with four kids. Given that we need to stop having so goddamn many kids if we’re going to salvage the planet (and given that married people get all kinds of breaks—breaks that aren’t available to single people, unmarried hetero couples, or gay couples), why are we still paying people to get married and have children?

Footnote 1: The Democrats agreed to drop expansion of the federal food stamp and unemployment insurance programs in exchange for small rebates ($300) for people too poor to pay federal income taxes—those making around $20,000 for a family of four. As usual, Bush’s plan fucks people at the bottom of the income ladder and those without jobs—and, as usual, the Democrats are going right along with it.

Footnote 2: Obama’s economic stimulus plan relies heavily on similar tax rebates.

No analysis from me. If it is true, it is what it is.

The Conjugal Harmony Difference Imagine having a wife who is always glad to see you, never cheats or stays out all night, and who rocks your ever-loving world twice a month with a pent-up vengeance you haven’t felt since college. Now imagine she never takes your credit cards, doesn’t spend all day talking to her mother, and never knows if you’re out with friends or sleeping around. Now stop imagining and open your eyes to the world of Conjugal Harmony. For almost a decade we’ve connected honest, background cleared, non-prisoners with exciting, passionate, loyal mates on the inside, and with rates so low you might think you’re the crook!

The profiles are amazing…

^{Robbert Flick’s Untitled, gelatin silver print (1977)}

At the Henry Art Gallery, in Silver See, A Portfolio of Photography from Los Angeles.

A little hope during a gloomy week:

At least four major firms have pulled advertising from Michael Savage’s nationally syndicated radio show following a campaign highlighting his inflammatory rhetoric. One other company, Geico insurance, is expected to follow suit.

The campaign, launched recently by Brave New Films, generated thousands of calls urging advertisers on the Savage Nation show to sever financial ties to the widely popular (and frequently offensive) talk host.

In less than a week, four agreed to pull their ads from the show, including Union Bank of California (whose representative says they were advertisers on the Savage show by mistake and were glad to be taken off), Intuit, Chattem, ITT Technical Institute.

Maybe advertisers on John Gibson’s show will follow suit.

After yesterday’s ridiculous bullshit, today brings a heroic burst of sanity from MSNBC’s Dan Abrams:

Further Ledger-related eloquence comes from Slate’s Dana Stevens:

[T]hen there’s Brokeback Mountain, a movie in which Ledger belongs so completely that, in the end, the movie belongs to him. That’s not to discount Jake Gyllenhaal’s fine performance as the volatile, openly needy Jack Twist. But it’s the recalcitrance of Ennis Del Mar, Ledger’s more deeply closeted cowboy, that drives the story forward. Brokeback Mountain isn’t just about the impossibility of two men loving each other; it’s about the impossibility of anyone loving this particular man. Not only Jack Twist, but Ennis’ wife (Michelle Williams, who fell in love with Ledger during the filming) and a dime-a-dance bar girl (Linda Cardellini) all hack away unsuccessfully at Ennis’ shell. I remember, when Brokeback came out, two friends telling me separately that the flinty, secretly tender, intermittently rageful Ennis reminded them painfully of their own shut-down fathers. An impressive achievement for an actor who was 26 at the time.

Agreed. What Ledger accomplished in Brokeback Mountain is exactly why his death affects me in a way that, say, Brad Renfro’s didn’t. Brokeback director Ang Lee concurs:

“Working with Heath was one of the purest joys of my life,” Lee said in a statement released to People.com. “He brought to the role of Ennis more than any of us could have imagined…His death is heartbreaking.”

A tentative deal has been reached on tax rebates. The deal, if finalized, will reportedly deliver

tax rebates starting at $300 and business tax cuts to jolt the slumping economy. Families with children could get even larger rebates.

Those larger rebates for families will be $300 per child. The total cost of the deal will be around $150 billion.

Not everyone is happy with the proposed deal:

The emerging package was already drawing fire from liberal activists and labor unions upset that proposals to extend unemployment insurance and boost food stamps had been dropped. Many Democratic lawmakers had assumed those proposals would make it into the package, and critics of the deal said those ideas could pump money into the economy more quickly than tax rebate checks that won’t be delivered until June.

The AP reports this morning:

(AP) - Don’t look to crown any presidential nominees on Super Tuesday. The race for delegates is so close in both parties that it is mathematically impossible for any candidate to lock up the nomination on Feb. 5, according to an Associated Press analysis of the states in play that day.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton leads the race for delegates to the Democratic National Convention this summer. She has 236, including separately chosen party and elected officials known as superdelegates, giving her a 100-delegate lead over Sen. Barack Obama.

There will be nearly 1,700 Democratic delegates at stake on Feb. 5, enough to put a candidate well on his or her way to the 2,025 needed to secure the nomination. But even if somehow either Clinton or Obama won every single one of those delegates, it wouldn’t be enough. And with two strong candidates, the delegates could be divided fairly evenly because the Democrats award their delegates proportionally - not winner-take- all.

Our caucus—97 delegates at stake— is on Saturday, February 9.

From William Grimes’ review of The Forger in today’s NYT arts section…

In June 1942 a 20-year-old Jew named Cioma Schönhaus stood in front of a Nazi bureaucrat in Berlin for final processing before being deported to a concentration camp in Poland. Asked if he had any money, he replied, “Yes, my lucky penny.” The penny went into the coffers of the Third Reich, duly noted in an account book.

The Forger is a memoir—by Cioma Schönhaus, the kid that lost his lucky penny along with his family—but not his life—to the Nazis.

How much do right-wing talkers hate gay people? They hate us so much that they’ll mock a heterosexual actor less than two hours after his tragic and accidental death—why? Because that actor had the nerve to play one gay role over the course of his more than decade-long career. Via Towleroad:

FOX News host John Gibson revelled in Heath Ledger’s death yesterday on his radio show, finding a new opportunity to mock Brokeback Mountain (and by proxy, gay love), which in 2006 he called a “gay agenda movie,” Think Progress reports:

“Playing an audio clip of the iconic quote, ‘I wish I knew how to quit you’ from Ledger’s gay romance movie Brokeback Mountain, Gibson disdainfully quipped, ‘Well, he found out how to quit you.’ Laughing, Gibson then played another clip from Brokeback Mountain in which Ledger said, ‘We’re dead,’ followed by his own, mocking ‘We’re dead’ before playing the clip again.”

Here’s hoping actors and directors in Hollywood take note and, like Barack Obama, refuse to go on Fox News programs. You can hear the clip at Think Progress.

What a fucking pig.

UPDATE: In case you feel so moved…

Gibson’s email: john.gibson@foxnews.com. Show’s email: myword@foxnews.com. Network’s email: yourcomments@foxnews.com. CEO of Fox News: roger.ailes@foxnews.com.

And, yes, Gibson’s comments go a long way toward perpetuating the injustice documented in the post below this one.

Privacy Shmivacy: Senate actually considering giving immunity to phone companies for warrantless wiretaps.

Killing Fields: Starving African refugees slaughtering wildlife to survive.

Body Count: FDA will require drug companies to track suicides during drug trials.

Let the Bidding Begin: Prime 700mhz real estate is now up for sale.

Information and Incarceration: UK government fights release of WMD dossier, pushes legislation to hold terrorism suspects for longer.

Flight Rights: Push for passengers bill of rights hits state senate.

Health Panic of the Day: MRSA and job related stress.

Space Oddity: Virgin Galactic reveals crazy ass commercial spaceship design.

But What Will I Carry My Overpriced Groceries In Now? Whole Foods tosses plastic bags.

And now, lil’ MoJo blows up big old Shawn Merriman.

33rd Ave & E Spring Street

Madrona Elementary was on alert today, following 14-year-old DeChe Morrison’s funeral last weekend.

Morrison—a freshman at Cleveland high school—was shot and killed on January 11th in South Seattle. The Seattle Police Department’s gang unit has been investigating the murder, and police were also present at Morrison’s funeral.

According to Seattle Schools spokesman David Tucker, district security and Madrona administrators received information which led to the alert. “There were some heightened concerns,” Tucker says, “and we wanted to increase our security as a precautionary measure. Tucker would not comment on the nature of the information the school received.

Today, all but one of the school’s entrances were secured and staff were told to be on alert for visitors. Classes continued as normal.

I know it looks the news team (and our film editor) have lost sight of the local scene and are just flipping out about this little thing of nominating the first woman or first African American to run for President of the United States, but really we’re still doing our jobs and obsessing about local news.

This week’s news section is loaded up: Erica C. Barnett has a hot story on big wheel local political fundraiser, Colby Underwood, whose once-fawned-over business (that’s you, Crosscut) seems to have hit some weird snags.

Jonah Spangenthal-Lee continues sussing out evidence of questionable SPD conduct.

And he wraps up our coverage of Rev. Ken Hutcherson’s controversial MLK Day speech at his daughters’ high school.

My Olympia column looks at a bill in the Senate transportation committee (sponsored by the committee chair) that may end Sound Transit as we know it.

And In Other News breaks a little news about the city’s failure to hire more cops and about the Democrats’ Abortion, Amnesty, and Acid agenda in Olympia.

Please check out this week’s full news section here.

…call one of the Olsen twins?

The masseuse who discovered the body of Heath Ledger in a Manhattan apartment on Tuesday twice called a friend of his, the actress Mary-Kate Olsen, before calling 911, New York City police officials said on Wednesday.

Apparently Ms. Olsen has her own police force:

A masseuse, Diana Wolozin, arrived to give Mr. Ledger a massage about 2:45 p.m. At 3 p.m., after Mr. Ledger did not emerge from his bedroom, with the door closed, the masseuse called him on his cellphone but got no answer. She entered the bedroom and saw him lying in bed. She took a massage table out of the closet and began to set it up near his bed. She then went over to him and shook him, but got no response. Using his cellphone, she used a speed-dial button to call Ms. Olsen in California to seek her guidance, knowing Ms. Olsen to be a friend of Mr. Ledger’s.

According to the authorities, Ms. Wolozin told Ms. Olsen that Mr. Ledger was unconscious. Ms. Olsen said she would call some private security people she knew in New York, and hung up. Ms. Wolozin again shook Mr. Ledger, called Ms. Olsen a second time, and said she believed the situation was grave and would call 911…. Emergency medical workers arrived at 3:33 p.m., at almost exactly the same moment as a private security guard summoned by Ms. Olsen.

God of the Sea: The Duke Spirit will release Neptune Feb 4.

Hey There: I don’t know why you’d want to, but meet the real life Delilah.

More Italo Disco: Terry Miller on Jane & Barton.

Win Free Tickets: The Showbox gives away tickets to next week’s Liars show.

Today in Local Hiphop: Brought to you by Larry and Charles.

Illegal Leak of the Week: The new Mountain Goats, Heretic Pride.

Lick My What?: An 8th grader reviews Captain Beefheart.

Different Strokes: Nate Dogg is recovering from a mild stroke.

Sunday Bloody Sunset: Kwab Copeland returns to the Sunset with a new Sunday afternoon showcase.

Skeletons With Flesh on Them: Their new record uses Jeff Kirby’s favorite aspects of jangly ’90s indie pop rock.

Parents Just Don’t Understand: Eric Grandy’s mom cut up his Gas Huffer t-shirt and threw it in the trash.

Presidents of the USA Announce Seattle Show: With USE!

The Debate Continues: Will King Cobra survive? Should we even be asking that question?

And now, a smoking wallaby:

(Thanks, Robby.)

The man with his back to us in the photograph above is Seattle artist John Grade. Mounted on him is his sculpture Collector: two horn shapes made of interlocking wood parts, first displayed at Davidson Contemporary Gallery last year. Back then, the piece hung on the white wall—in a refined state. That was before Grade took it hiking.

Now, the piece has acquired a mane of seaweed: It lies among the oysters—watched over by some oystermen—in Willapa Bay. Here are views of it there.

Later this year, Grade will take it out of the water, remove the oysters that have grown on it, and eat them in a formal feast on the site. After that, the horns will be mounted onto the front of Grade’s red pickup truck, where they’ll acquire a layer of bug guts as he drives them down to a slot canyon in Utah.

This particular canyon was the driving force behind the shape of the horns in the first place—that and an experience Grade had with hostile Ugandans during a trip a few years ago. (For the full story on that, you have to listen to the podcast.) The horns were shaped to fit snugly into the canyon, and in the spring, the rushing water that goes through the canyon will either scrub the horns bone-clean, or destroy them. Grade will wait to see.

Until recently, Grade was known mostly for his small, intensely controlled charcoal and graphite drawings, like this one, Bog (2005).

His other familiar work was finely wrought, faux-weathered sculptures. The new work comes out of both these traditions. It’s formally tight, at least to start. It’s not faux-weathered, it actually weathers. It changes with its site, like the process work of Turner Prize winner Simon Starling, and according to the lapsing of time, like (Turner Prize nominee) Darren Almond’s videos. (Grade admires both British artists.)

Bog is a drawing that refers directly to an installation Grade unveiled last week: a giant, sagging false ceiling dotted with craters, made of paper pulp and hanging in Suyama Space in Belltown. That’s where I met him to talk for this podcast.

Seeps of Winter is the new installation’s title. Grade first got the idea for it during a residency near a bog in Mayo County, Ireland. Running by, Grade couldn’t help thinking about the human beings frozen under the thick surfaces of bogs for thousands of years—the ones who surface occasionally, staring upward. In Suyama Space, the false ceiling acts as the bog surface; you can lie on the floor to look through at the natural light above.

Like Collector, Seeps of Winter has an adventurous life ahead of it.

Hear about it here.

A man accused of drugging his 9-year-old daughter with cold medicine so he could meet his mistress has pleaded guilty to endangerment for leaving the girl and her younger sister alone at night.

In court, Richard Bowen did not admit to giving one girl Nyquil so she would sleep, but prosecutors said he admitted it during phone calls from jail.

Police said Bowen was responsible for his 8- and 9-year-old daughters while his wife worked overnight. On several occasions between February and May, he allegedly gave the cold medicine to the 9-year-old, then put both girls to bed before leaving to visit his mistress.

If the wife was at work and the kids were drugged… why not invite the piece-on-the-side over? That’s what any responsible gay parent would do.

Actual ad from a 1976 issue of Tiger Beat:

And I thought those tween-porn American Apparel ads were creepy.

Via.

Yeah, it’s a hopeless cause, but isn’t it odd how ECB has somehow overlooked her pet issue when deciding which candidate to support?

When we think of the major threats to our national security, the first to come to mind are nuclear proliferation, rogue states and global terrorism. But another kind of threat lurks beyond our shores, one from nature, not humans - an avian flu pandemic. — Barack Obama, 2005

Floor speeches, successful legislation—what’s a guy gotta do to buy a flu-fearer’s love?

(Yes, of course I know about the faux scandal. Blind trust, he lost money, etc.)

H5N1 says, vote against Barack Obama!

I’ve been dating this guy, a year older and supposedly way more experienced than I am, for about a month and a half. At first it seemed we had a lot in common but then everything started going down hill FAST. He is really sensitive about everything and has insisted on calling me 2-3 times and hour, and if I don’t pick up he has his friend call me to see whats up. He’s basically a cross between an uber-preppy rich girl and a puppy but over-weight, broke, male, and has no fashion sense. He’s clingy and likes to invite himself over A LOT.

The thing that REALLY pissed me off was when he had the audacity to call me spoiled. I work full time and go to college full time, along with having another job on the side. He’s 20, not going to school, has no job; in fact, he never has, lives with his parents rent free, doesn’t clean, doesn’t even have a license. I’m paying my own way through college on a very small government loan. I don’t think I’m the spoiled one here.

He pisses me off to a point where I’ve called his mom to pick him up. I haven’t talked to him at all in 2 weeks. Another problem is since I haven’t been talking to him I’ve been thinking a lot about this girl i liked in high school. We still talk and she’s made it clear she likes me. What the hell should I do???

Anon.

You’re kidding, right? DTMFA.

I wish I were. I’m a nineteen year old girl, I work in theater, as a techie, I can’t deal with dating a guy who makes Elle Woods look like a lumberjack. I’m forced to deal with enough prima-donnas already. And this other girl, I’ve worked with her on and off for 4 years and we always have fun. So what do you think I should do, my Savage guru?

Anon.

I think you should dump the motherfucker already. Why are you even wasting your time on this clingy piece of loser shit? And if you would rather date the girl, date the girl already. Sheesh.

Oh, here’s one: Knocking it down.

Today’s big story in the NYT stars Hamas knocking down an Israeli-built border fence between Gaza and Egypt that had cut Palestinians off from essential supplies.

The history-making quote, in my opinion, is here:

People began pouring over the fence before dawn, said one witness, Fatan Hessin, 45. She had crossed into Egypt to be reunited with a childhood friend. “I am not Hamas or Fatah, but I thank Hamas for this,” she said.

Washington state has the faggiest state legislature in the whole faggy country.

The Washington state Legislature has more openly gay lawmakers than any other state in the country, edging out California after a new young representative was appointed to the statehouse this year.

Marko Liias, a 26-year-old Democrat from Mukilteo, started the legislative session earlier this month, replacing former Rep. Brian Sullivan, who left the Legislature for the Snohomish County Council. Liias’ arrival gives Washington six openly gay lawmakers, ahead of California’s five.

Some of California’s openly gay lawmakers are lesbians, while all of Washington state’s openly gay lawmakers are gay men. So Ken won’t think the state has totally gone to hell. But still.

Now I know where to go when I need a Guinea pig or some other rodent for, well, that’s between me and the rodents—which I can acquire from the white van parked parked by the train tracks across from the Boxcar. From Sleepless in Magnolia:

This creep was parked for the majority of saturday down by the train tracks accross from the Boxcar watering hole. Out of sheer curiosity and annoyance I decided to investigate. When I approached the rear of the van (which was open) I saw no less than a dozen small animal wire cages lining the inside of the van, and a potent odor of cigarettes and animal waste. When I asked this man what he was doing, he proudly told me “I’m sellin’ them guineas!!” He proceeded to tell me that he breeds guinea pigs and other rodents in high numbers and sells them around the neighboorhood. There were no license plates, but I immediatley called 911 to report what I’d seen. The officers assured me they would look into it. I am disgusted by what I saw and hope that this neighboorhood does not become some sort of RODENT STUD FARM as a result of this man’s filthy habit and fetish. Has anyone else seen this monster?

Rodent fetishist? Or enterprising small businessman?

Thanks to Slog tipper CJ.

TPM is reporting that former Nixon dirty trickster Roger Stone has launched a new group opposed to Hillary Clinton: “Citizens United Not Timid: A 527 Organization to Educate the American Public About What Hillary Clinton Really Is.” Meanwhile, an all-male news panel on MSNBC cackled when commentator Mike Barnicle said Clinton looked like “everyone’s first wife standing outside a probate court” when she reacted to Obama in Monday’s debate.

It seems to me that every time there’s a televised debate starring the Democratic candidates, it helps Hillary Clinton.

She was supposed to get walloped in NH. There was a debate. She won the primary three days later.

Nevada was supposed to be too close to call. There was a debate. She cleaned up the popular vote.

In South Carolina there was a debate on Monday that set a national cable viewership record for debates—4.9 million viewers.

Well, check out the national tracking polls. On the day of the debate (Monday night 1/19) Clinton was leading Obama 38 to 32. She’d been hovering between 37 and 38 for a while. Well, promptly after the debate in SC she jumped to a 42 to 30 lead.

My gut tells me Obama is the better nominee, but Clinton sure seems to score points with the public after televised debates.

Obama is supposed to win SC pretty handily and that might give him some momentum going into February 5th’s primary showdown, but there’s also going to be another Democratic debate in Los Angeles on January 31.

Here’s hoping CNN pulls a Kucinich on Edwards, and we get to see Obama and Clinton really tangle.

The Seattle Police Department just sent out a press release, saying that “forensic testing and investigative efforts” have not led to an arrest in the murder of Shannon Harps, who was fatally stabbed outside of her Capitol Hill condo on New Year’s Eve.

SPD’s announcement comes days after news that DNA tests were being done on a 29-year-old man—being held on an unrelated Department of Corrections violation—to see if he could be linked to Harps’ murder.

Seattle Police would not confirm whether their press release was related to the 29-year-old man’s DNA test. However, they did confirm that they don’t have anyone in custody for the murder.

SPD has increased patrols on Capitol Hill, and is advising residents to “remain vigilant.”

A superior court judge has ruled in favor of the Seattle Education Association (SEA), which filed an injunction to quash a public disclosure request filed with the Seattle School District last October.

The union argued that requested emails—communications between union representatives about contracts and teacher grievances, sent through their district email accounts—could unfairly impact future collective bargaining with the district.

Indeed, the judge agreed and the requested emails have been sealed. According to the court, the emails are not “public records” even though they were sent over the district’s public email server. Typically, public agencies’ emails are subject to disclosure requests.

Because the ruling does not address future disclosure requests, Seattle Public Schools Spokesman David Tucker says the district will comply with future requests, unless a court says otherwise.

Reuters reports that Scotland is considering lobbying the U.S. to lift a ban on haggis, hoping to boost sales of the sheep-stomach-based national dish.

The U.S. banned imports of Scottish haggis after Britain’s outbreak of mad cow disease, which is linked to the human brain illness Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.

Scotland’s government insist its haggis — which usually contains the heart, liver and lungs wrapped inside a sheep’s stomach lining — is safe and wants the ban lifted.

“The Scottish government will consider engaging the U.S. government on its haggis import ban … It is safe or we wouldn’t eat it here,” said a spokeswoman. “We think there is a large market for it amongst expatriate Scots there.”

Stay tuned for further updates on the lifting of the haggis ban. In the meantime, those craving the taste of sheep stomach but fearful of meat-borne illness can enjoy this:

Yes, it’s real. Savage bought it for me in Yoorup. Ingredients listed on back: oatmeal, turnip, vegetable fat, kidney beans, lentils, onions, mushrooms, mixed chopped peanuts/walnuts/almonds, water, seasoning, herbs. I will never eat it. (But I may consider auctioning it in next year’s Strangercrombie.)

The only interesting/beautiful thing about LAX—that space ship held aloft by soaring concrete arches—is covered in scaffolding right now. And it actually makes the thing more beautiful, particularly when you drive under it.

Anyway, sitting on the plane, bracing myself for my flight home from LA last Saturday, a recurring morbid thought tormented me as we taxied to the runway: The takeoff and landing are the deadliest and most dangerous moments of a flight. Takeoffs and landings: that’s when the overwhelming majority of plane crashes occur. So if the plane I was on was fated to crash and I was going to die on this flight… would I prefer die during the take off or landing? Everyone agrees that flying is thoroughly miserable… so why endure the misery of the flight itself if you’re just going to die on landing? Better to die on takeoff. But everyone also agrees that every single moment of life a precious, precious gift and a few extra hours of life—spent reading, thinking, sipping a ginger ale, and wishing the two people behind you would shut up so you could sleep—are worth savoring even if you’re doomed to spend them on an old, filthy Alaska Airlines jet. Better to die on landing.

I go back and forth when I white-knuckle my way through this entertaining little debate. Sometimes I decided it would be better to die during takeoff, sometimes I decide it would be better to die during landing. I’d like to settle this debate once and for all, though, so I’m putting it to a vote. Die on takeoff or die on landing? It’s up to you, Sloggers….

From Flickr pool contributor bianca g…

Even though Derick Phanord confessed to setting his pit bull on fire last year, tying it to a tree and leaving it for dead, the Brentwood man said in court yesterday that he loves animals and is heavy with guilt for killing his pet.

…gay marriage.

“Gay men and women ought to have the same rights as heterosexual men and women—to make contracts, to have hospital visiting rights, to join together in marriage, and I don’t understand why it is considered by some people to be a threat to heterosexual marriage. Shouldn’t we be promoting [that] kind of faithfulness and loyalty to ones partner regardless of sexual orientation?”

He is so not running for president.

Funny, you’d think if Obama was under “Big Coal“‘s thumb that he’d at least make the top 20 recipients of coal industry donations for the 2007-8 cycle. Clinton is number 20 with $9,200; Obama isn’t ranked there, but has received $4,795 from the coal industry.

Here’s what Clinton had to say about the virtues of clean coal in 2006:

We have to deal with coal, because we have huge resources of coal. Coal is to us what oil is to Saudi Arabia. And part of our domestic strategy must involve coal.

But unless we learn to burn it cleanly, the price of independence from imported oil by using coal will be accelerated global warming. Even if the United States never burned another lump of coal, China is bringing on-line a 1,000 megawatt coal-fired power plant every 10 days. So if we’re going to reassert our leadership on climate change — which I think we should — we’ve got to deal with coal.

And the first step is to take a mandatory cap-and-trade system, like that developed in the McCain-Lieberman legislation that I support, but obviously going out and trying to reengage the rest of the world in this issue.

But unless we get to clean coal, it’s going to be very hard to achieve.

Geologic sequestration, storing carbon deep within the earth after you extract the carbon from the burning coal, holds the key to making coal use compatible with the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Scientists believe we will be able to store nearly all of the carbon dioxide we currently emit for hundreds of years. But we need more real-world data, and that can only come from large-scale testing.

I propose we do two things to scale up the potential of clean coal.

First, undertake five large-scale tests of geologic sequestration in a variety of settings to really investigate the viability of this technology.

Second, provide tax credits for carbon sequestration to encourage domestic oil production. Oil companies already inject carbon dioxide into mature fields like the ones we have here in the United States to recover oil. The Department of Energy estimates that with oil priced at $40 or higher per barrel, it is economical, with ample CO2 supply, to use CO2 to recover 47 billion barrels of oil from existing U.S. fields.

Think of what we could recover at today’s prices, as we were cleaning the air at the same time.

Her Strategic Energy Fund makes a number of promises, but first on the list is clean coal:

Deliver Clean Coal Technology. $3.5 billion in tax incentives and grants to build 5 clean coal plants that can capture and store carbon dioxide and reduce global warming.

Look, I don’t think Obama is perfect on coal. He’s from a coal-producing state, and his voting record reflects that constituency. But let’s not pretend Clinton is any better on this issue.

Remember when Clinton went to bat for a major polluter?

The department of things you already knew has released another ground-breaking report. This one, by the Northwest Multiple Listing Service, says housing prices in Seattle jumped the shark last August. Thank you, experts. The PI takes on the task of breaking it down for us over here.

What does this all mean to readers? Houses are cheaper or prices are at least leveling. And how do the buyers feel? Elated? Well, who knows. The article is titled, “Two sides to ‘07 housing market,” but there is only one side to the story: Doom and gloom.

“We had a very strong market in King County until August hit,” said J. Lennox Scott, chairman and chief executive of John L. Scott Real Estate.

Glenn Crellin, director of the Washington Center for Real Estate Research at Washington State University, expected that slower sales eventually would affect prices. He theorized that the median prices earlier in 2007 were masking some softness because buyers were getting more for their money, rather than spending less.

“Finally, it got to the point where they were able to afford all they wanted and spend less money, too,” he said.

But Crellin said the softness would continue if inventory surges this spring, and some other analysts were gloomier.

“If you find a place that you like and you can afford it, are you really going to try to time the market?” he asked. “Because, when it really comes down to it, nobody knows.”

Oh, fucking Jesus in hell. You’d think a kitten dies every time someone buys a bungalow for less than a million dollars. Ya know, prices can drop but developers and real estate agents will still make money, albeit a bit less. I know this may be sad for them, but this article never bothers to say, “Hey, maybe the housing bubble was totes over-inflated and this means that people can afford houses. We don’t want a scarce housing supply in a region that has high demand; we can fill in with apartments, condos, and more houses.” The plateau is a good thing. It’s not a tragedy that housing prices won’t forever be rocketing upward. This is the real estate market—the thinking outside the pages Seattle’s daily papers is that it will resume at a more reasonable pace in a couple years.

It’s a bad sign that I can’t remember who was eliminated on Project Runway last week. All I know for sure is that it wasn’t Ricky, which was criminal. There’s no excuse for his continued presence on the show after this. I mean, please.

But I’m going to be tuning in tonight regardless. He’s gotta get the boot this week and I want to drink his bitter, bitter tears. So we’ll be Live Slogging PR tonight. Sorry we neglected to Live Slog last week’s episode—and the last Democratic debate, which was almost as important—but, uh, we were drunk or something. Or out of town. Anyway… 10 PM tonight.

Faced with growing competition from cheaper rivals, Starbucks Corp. is testing $1 short cups of drip coffee with free refills in its hometown.

Do you own an Xbox 360? Then you should turn it on at some point between today and Sunday, connect it to the Internet, and dig through its downloadable games section. Doesn’t matter if you subscribe to the system’s paid online service or not; Microsoft is giving away a free game until Sunday, and it ain’t too shabby. Undertow is the latest in the burgeoning sea-combat genre, ranking right up there with…uh…um…the Jaws game for NES from the ’80s? No matter. You swim around and blow people up. Looks nice, controls smoothly. There’s not much of a learning curve, so the fun is immediate, and now that tons of people are nabbing the game, Undertow’s online team fights might finally be interesting.

Boy, aren’t our friends in Redmond some charitable folks? Thing is, the move is in response to the Xbox Live servers crashing and melting a few weeks ago, right around Christmas. Fanboys got pissed, posting their rage on Digg an average of two times for every racist epithet they weren’t able to shout on Xbox Live during the holidays. Even though MS quickly announced a game giveaway to calm the throngs, it was too little too late for three gamers who filed a class-action lawsuit. This is rich—the week of semi-outage comes to a grand total of not even one dollar per person ($50/year = 13 cents/day). Yeah, I get how class-action suits work—huge lump sum to cover every affected person—but seriously. If you’re lucky, guys, Microsoft will settle by offering you a free copy of Xbox Scientific Calculator ‘09.

Music

Gui Boratto at Nectar

• See what else is happening in Music on Wednesday »
• More Stranger Suggests for this week »

Music

Gui Boratto at Nectar

• See what else is happening in Music on Wednesday »
• More Stranger Suggests for this week »

^{Fire Retard Ants (Fred Muram and Mike Simi), Why Do You Piss With the Door Open? (2007)}

At SOIL.

How else are we to read this cover?

There will be a public hearing on January 28 at Seattle Center’s Rainier Room at 6:00pm about a City proposal to expand its power to sweep up homeless encampments.

To get up-to-date on the issue, check out Real Change, which has been doing a series of reports on the new proposal.

Also check out Real Change Executive Director Tim Harris’s blog. He’s pretty fired up:

It is unacceptable to allow the work of ending homelessness to be confused with the systematic practice of eradicating the evidence. By harassing homeless campers out of the city, we only deepen their misery and decrease the odds that they will ever find the services they need.

This week, Seattle will hold the Annual One Night Homeless Count. More than 700 volunteers will fan out through the city in the middle of the night to assess whether we’re winning or losing the war.

By turning the fight against homelessness into an attack upon the homeless themselves, the Mayor has undermined the integrity of the longest-running, most sophisticated homeless count effort in the nation.

This is profoundly sad. And sadder still if he gets away with it.

Um… I’m not sure what this message is driving at or what I’m missing exactly—besides an apostrophe, of course—but I can’t quite see how this message moves soft-serve ice cream. Would it make more sense if there was “but” before that “were”? Or maybe you have to be from Michigan to get it? Kelly O? Care to translate?

Thanks to Slog tipper Matthew.

…criminal backrub technique.

Prosecutors Tuesday said the Rev. William Procanick’s guilty verdict of sexually abusing a 7-year-old girl suggested nobody should mistake his actions for a harmless backrub.

“It was apparent the jury found that he had, in fact, went beyond a simple backrub in caressing and massaging the sexual or intimate parts of a child for the purpose of sexual gratification,” Assistant District Attorney Doug DeMarche Jr. said.

Procanick, the 54-year-old former pastor of Resurrection Assembly of God church on Kirkland Avenue, was found guilty in Oneida County Court of first-degree sexual abuse and endangering the welfare of a child.

While there’s obviously a subterranean campaign to convince people that Barack Obama is (gasp!) a Muslim who was sworn in to the Senate on a Koran, there also seems to be—at least judging by the e-mails we get here at The Stranger—a campaign to convince people that Hillary Clinton is controlled by the Zionists.

Here’s a bit from this morning’s installment from the “Civilian Intelligence Network.”

Let there be no mistake the Clinton’s have been chosen by the New York Zionist to be the next President’s of America . The agreement was made many years ago. Al Gore and John Kerry both won their Elections the Zionist cheated in New Hampshire and Nevada the Zionist represent the Clinton’s and the answers are below in the words of the Zionist on how they manipulate and cheat! Remember All Zionist Are Not Bad! The Zionist intelligence agency knew on 911 what was going to happen and let it happen to get the United Statesinto a war in the Middle East. Stay tuned for the story why the Zionist took out Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church is planning to picket Heath Ledger’s funeral.

Yes. WBC will picket this pervert’s funeral, in religious protest and warning: “Be not deceived; God is not mocked.” Gal. 6:7. Heath Ledger thought it was great fun defying God Almighty and his plain word; to wit: God Hates Fags! & Fag Enablers! Ergo, God hates the sordid tacky, bucket of slime seasoned with vomit known as Brokeback Mountain—and He hates all persons having anything whatsoever to do with it. Heath Ledger is now in Hell, and has begun serving his eternal sentence there—beside which, nothing else about Heath Ledger is relevant or consequential.

Sigh.

Speaking of religion making people insane: Yesterday an Afghan court sentenced a 23-year-old journalism student to death for printing a paper critical of Islam off the internet.

Less than a year left to endure.

A week ago Sunday, a couple dozen people paid $40 each to go to a farm in Port Orchard, watch a pig die, butcher it, and then eat (parts of) it. Watching animals die (or killing them personally) is the latest trend for chefs—see this New York Times piece—but this event, put on by Seattle’s Culinary Communion, was open to the public.

The pig was named Hector and insistently referred to as such, even when very dead, a conceit I found precious. You don’t name a ham. So, this is Hector:

After the break, a photo essay including a couple more shots of Hector and then plenty of The Pig Formerly Known as Hector. This is not for the squeamish.

Photos by Reena Kawal

Continue reading "How to Kill a Pig" »

935: The number of false statements made by the Bush administration leading up to the war.

Body Count: War in Congo kills 45,000 every month.

And So It Begins: India on the verge of a bird flu disaster.

Case Closed: Jose Padilla sentenced to 17 years in prison.

That Other Presidential Race: Russian prosecutors open case against Putin opponent, alleging signature gathering fraud.

By The Numbers: New York chain restaurants now required to list calorie counts.

Only Sixty Bazillion More to Go: China shuts down 44,000 porn sites, internet fails to notice.

High-Ankle Sham: Tom Brady strolls through NYC wearing a leg cast.

And now, another 2007 NFL highlight:

Rick Boucher, Big Coal’s anti-cap-and-trade water boy in Congress (known in environmental circles as D-Coal) has endorsed Obama. I’m not saying you can judge a person’s politics entirely by the people they surround themselves with, but the combination of Obama’s endorsements, his campaign statements, and his record in Congress makes a pretty convincing case that Obama has been, and will be, no great friend of the environment.

Truth is Stranger Than Fiction: Trent Moorman’s real vs fake band name game. Oh, and something about smoking crack.

Eric Grandy Asks a Valid Question Regarding the Future of a New Club: And everyone gets all snippy.

Cheering for the Underdog: TJ Gorton on LTG Exchange.

Valerie Dore: Terry Miller examines the project, not the woman.

PWRFL Power Tour Diary: Kaz’s crazy trip continues with stories about esurance, French toast, and a black beret hat.

Comback Kid: David Schmader examines why Kimya Dawson is (deservedly and suddenly) hot shit.

Tonight in Music: Whiting Tennis at the Rendezvous.

Coming to Seattle: Ellen Allien and Sascha Funke.

Matador Signs Another Pretty Girls Spin-Off: Cave Singers were first, now it’s Jaguar Love’s turn.

The Password is What? Exactly!: The best moment in Purple Rain.

Jenny Bendel to Book King Cobra: Just in case you haven’t already heard.

Coachella Announces Their Line-Up: And it’s sorta boring.

And from Kimya Dawson’s appearance on The View:

am sorry about my question. am a little embarrass about asking you this. first of all i read your article in the village voice newspaper. am a married woman and my husband want to have sex with me from behind. but am scared because he has a big package. am scared i will get hurt. i want to make him happy but i don’t know what to do. he is always mad at me. can you help me.

Don’t have anal sex with someone that is mad at you.

Anal sex requires a lot of preparation and you need to be relaxed and comfortable and be to trust that the person fucking your ass is as concerned with your health and safety and pleasure as he is with his own. Your husband’s hostility and selfishness is going to make you feel anything but relaxed or comfortable. If he can’t let go of the anger, don’t have anal sex with him at all, ever, period. If he can let go of the anger, anonymous married lady, here’s how to overcome your fear…

Engage in mutually agreeable anal sex play the first few DOZEN times you explore your butt. This means NO big-package-in-butt penetration for you, no expectation of big-package-in-butt penetration on his part, for the first few DOZEN or so times. Only tongues, fingers, and small toys—SMALL dildos or buttplugs and vibrators—at the start. Have a few dozen orgasms during safe and low-stakes anal explorations and you may start to associate anal play with pleasure, not fear. Then you can work up to full-on anal penetration—which can only be done with LOTS of lube and patience and consideration.

You CAN get hurt having anal sex with an angry, inconsiderate, or impatient partner. If your husband is any or all of those things, anonymous married lady, tell him it’s just not going to happen.

I also recommend that you buy these two books:

The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women by Tristan Taormino, and Anal Pleasure & Health by Jack Morin.

And tell your husband that nothing—not tongues, fingers, toes, toys, or dick—is going anywhere near your ass until he reads both these books. (You, of course, should read them too.) You can have anal sex with someone that has a big package—lots of folks do—but you shouldn’t do it under duress.

The world’s first commercial cargo ship partially powered by a giant kite is setting sail from Germany to Venezuela.

The designers of the MS Beluga Skysails say the computer-controlled kite, measuring 160sq m (1,722sq ft), could cut fuel consumption by as much as 20%.

Rest of the story is here.

The SkySails website (“turn the wind into profit!”) is here.

Text messages exchanged in the wake of Heath Ledger’s devastating end:

RIP Heath Ledger!

HOLY SHIT!

I KNOW! TOTES SHOCKING!

I feel hella sad about that one, bro. I mean, not quite as insane as the Croc Hunter, but 2nd place for sure.

Totally. I was like, how could Ledge be deceased when Bonaduce is roaming around town with steroids for blood?

GOOD POINT! Also, I feel like I should get the afternoon off for bereavement leave.

I know. I just talked to Sonia and we think that this might beat out Steve Irwin, because he DID hunt crocs for a living. Also, do we really have to start on the James Dean comparisons?

Seriously. Car accident is not the same as OD in M-K’s apt. He’s more like the next Renfro, if you have to make a nonsense comparison.

GP. God, I’m barely over Renfro. BTW, the coverage of this on cable news is hilarious. They called him a gypsy!

Well, he WAS constantly crystal-gazing. And he did train Matilda to pick the fanny packs of unsuspecting white tourists.

Now they’re saying that playing the Joker haunted him and gave him insomnia. REALLY? HAUNTED TO DEATH BY THE JOKER?

RIP, man. RIP.

Director Terry Gilliam has a long, complicated history of his movie projects suffering catastrophic disasters. There’s even a documentary about it: Lost in La Mancha.

His latest? He is in the middle of filming The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus starring Heath Ledger.

Because this is the kind of work she made for more than two decades before she died in 2002, this is what a work of art by Niki de Saint Phalle is generally understood to look like:

Source: Jonathan Novak Contemporary Art

But there’s another, far lesser-known Niki de Saint Phalle: Niki the Shooter. According to the Tate Modern’s web site, de Saint Phalle started attaching paint-filled bags to backings and shooting them in 1960—and she stopped in 1963, saying, “I had become addicted to shooting.”

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