The first Washington gubernatorial debate starts in a few minutes. If you’re actually settling down to watch it, a helpful drinking game from the Washington State Democrats:

Because it’s Saturday evening, and many of you will be watching tonight’s gubernatorial debate from the comfort of your own home or office, many with a cocktail in hand, Washington State Democrats have taken the liberty of putting together a little drinking game to enhance your enjoyment of tonight’s festivities.

This game is only made possible by the fact that Republican Dino Rossi is running a campaign that’s entirely bereft of substance, has changed little-to-nothing about his so-called “message” since 2004, and uses the same folksy anecdotes and one-liners to distract from the fact he’s got no vision, besides the failed Bush Republicanism Washingtonians have already rejected, to lead this state forward. ***WARNING: because of the predictability of Rossi’s fluff, this game is nearly certain to get you drunk, should you choose to play.

Continue reading "Gov. Debate Drinking Game" »

Yes, you’re opposed. But a nice, clear, loud emphatic “no” would be nice. NYT:

Could Senator Barack Obama’s popularity among black voters hurt gay couples in California who want to marry?

That is the concern of opponents of Proposition 8, a measure on the November ballot that would amend the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage, which was legalized in May by the State Supreme Court.

Mr. Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, is against the measure. But opponents of the proposed ban worry that many black voters, enthused by Mr. Obama’s candidacy but traditionally conservative on issues involving homosexuality, could pour into voting stations in record numbers to punch the Obama ticket—and then cast a vote for Proposition 8.

“American football fans prefer Obama”:

Americans would rather have Barack Obama over to watch football than John McCain. This is about more than football and beer.

College Football by rdesai on Flickr, Some Right Reserved
College Football by rdesai, Some Rights Reserved

In a closely watched poll, Americans said by a slim margin that they would prefer Barack Obama over John McCain to kick back with in their living rooms to watch the football game.

Obama came out on top by 50-47% in the Associated Press-Yahoo poll. That roughly mirrors the tight race in national polls.

Very sad story, and local, and not YPW’s usual fare.

Washington State Patrol troopers believe [24-year-old Preston] Newby was placing a 9-1-1 call at an accident on Interstate 5 when he was struck by a car and killed Monday night outside Toledo, Wash.

“It’s one of those things where a good Samaritan gets hurt,” said Washington State Trooper Dave Bourland. “It’s a tragedy, and it happens out there.”

Newby, a Tualatin resident who worked as a youth pastor at Lake Bible Church, was traveling to Canada with his pregnant wife Tera and toddler son Jacob when the tragedy occurred. The Newby’s reportedly left late Monday night after Preston Newby had finished with a youth group activity.

Condolences to Newby’s family.

Theater

‘Gutenberg! The Musical!’

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

Hey, they don’t just draw blood! Some local pit bulls are giving blood.

And in other pit bull news… three pit bulls maul six year-old boy in Chicago; cops kill two to get the dogs off the boy, the third dog escaped. Woman in Seattle attacked by pit bull, escapes with only a damaged sweatshirt. Loose pit bull attacks woman walking her dog in Indiana. “He’s normally so well behaved,” says owner of pit bull that mauled another dog to death in Ontario. Police in New Jersey searching for owner of pit bull that attacked five children in a playground during recess. In New York a pit bull breaks through a door to get at a four year-old boy; boy currently hospitalized with serious facial injuries. Owners of three pit bulls that mauled a woman to death on Christmas day to face charges of “letting dangerous dogs run loose,” which carries a maximum penalty of three years in prison. Pit-on-pit violence comes to Omaha. And in Nevada…

They have the reputation of being a vicious animal. And just last week, a little girl died after being attacked. Pit Bulls cause big controversy and now, more than ever, local shelters are having a difficult time finding homes for them.

And in the interests of fairness and balance: pit bull saves man from house fire in Missouri. But, hey, who set the fire?

Sounds like a plan:

“Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.”

Says Josh Marshall at TPM:

If the Obama folks are smart—and they are—they’ll ride this one all the way to the election.

Man, I hope so.

But I think we should take McCain’s advice. Washington should do for the health care industry just what it did for the banking industry. We’ve pretty much got ourselves socialized banking, credit, and mortgage industries in the US now, thanks to “innovative products” and all that freedom from “state-based regulation.” (Faith-based regulation is soooo much more effective.) So let’s deregulate the fuck out of the health insurance market, run the whole thing off the cliff, and then nationalize the whole shebang when the inevitable crisis comes!

Socialized medicine, here we come!

Three readings and an open mic today.

At Elliott Bay Book Company, Harry Rutstein reads from Marco Polo Odyssey, in which he retraces the steps of Marco Polo, who you may remember as the inventor of the hilarious and fun pool game. The book has a lot of maps, also.

Later at Elliott Bay, Larry Beinhart reads from Salvation Boulevard. I took the book on a Lunch Date last week. As I said yesterday, I eventually abandoned the book due to lack of interest. But Beinhart is a weird guy—he wrote himself into the novel that eventually became Wag the Dog—and the reading could be interesting.

Up at Third Place Books, Christina Pratt reads from An Encyclopedia of Shamanism. All you shamans should get to it. Everybody else, avoid Third Place Books at all costs tonight.

The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is here.

Sad as the racial bias numbers in that article are, my disgust was compounded by these findings:

Three in 10 of those Democrats who don’t trust Obama’s change-making credentials say they plan to vote for McCain.

and

Nearly 17 percent of Clinton’s white backers plan to vote for McCain.

Of course, most of these people are probably the same racist fucks who won’t vote for Obama because he’s black—they’re just pretending it’s because they just love Hillary soooo much, or that they just don’t feel like Obama will change things enough, so they’d prefer to have things change not at all.

On the bright side, cell phone users may return a couple of those lost-to-racism percentage points back to Obama.

Read it and weep:

“Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll…. The pollsters set out to determine why Obama is locked in a close race with McCain even as the political landscape seems to favor Democrats. The findings suggest that Obama’s problem is close to home—among his fellow Democrats, particularly non-Hispanic white voters. Just seven in 10 people who call themselves Democrats support Obama, compared to the 85 percent of self-identified Republicans who back McCain. The survey also focused on the racial attitudes of independent voters because they are likely to decide the election. Lots of Republicans harbor prejudices, too, but the survey found they weren’t voting against Obama because of his race. Most Republicans wouldn’t vote for any Democrat for president—white, black or brown.

“Statistical models derived from the poll suggest that Obama’s support would be as much as 6 percentage points higher if there were no white racial prejudice.”

I’m currently obsessed with this endlessly awesome blog called Shorpy, which features beautiful, high-res photographs from 1900-1950.

Thought you should know.

Back in August I trekked out to Federal Way to review The Midnight Meat Train, a Clive Barker brain-smooshing horror movie beset by distribution problems (Lionsgate released it in less than 100 discount theaters nationwide). Needless to say, this experience was traumatic for me:

Listen, horror. I’ve said it before. I hate literally everything about your genre. I can’t abide gore unless it is camp. Cold-blooded skull squishery does not interest me, nor does Ted Raimi’s eyeball blasting from its socket, nor does a human strung up and bleeding out like a slaughtered piggy. Nor monsters. It’s nothing personal, I just DO NOT WANT IT IN MY AREA.

But I very much respect that there ARE people who want to see Midnight Meat Train on the big screen. And if YOU are one of those people and you just happen to live in Kitsap County, well then, FUCK YEAH! A nice man at the Historic Port Orchard Theater e-mailed me to let me know that they’re screening Midnight Meat Train September 19-25. So get thee to Port Orchard, horror fans.

And while we’re on the subject, this gives me the chance to correct a woeful mistake. In that column about Midnight Meat Train, I listed a series of “far, far worse horror movies” in which I jokingly referred to the movie Saw II as “Saw II: Back in the Habit.”

Clearly, this joke would have been much funnier if I had written, “Saw II: The Legend of Curly’s Gold.” I apologize for the oversight.

There are so many books I’d like to review, and not enough space in The Stranger to print all the reviews I’d like to run, so I’d like to call your attention to this review over on our Books page.

Lala Pipo—the name is a play on the way poor Japanese speakers of English mangle the phrase “lot of people“—is a new paperback original just released by Vertical Press.

This is a novel in six parts, telling the story of six people who are linked in distant ways. None of them are good people, and they’re all hung up on their own weird sexual appetites. A man readjusts his entire life so that he can more easily masturbate to his upstairs neighbor’s enthusiastic sexual encounters. An older housewife with a disgusting secret buried in the mounds of rotting garbage that fill her house is lured into a lucrative career starring in pornographic films. A stuffy writer can’t stop having sex with underage prostitutes.

I liked the book a lot, but it’s certainly not for everyone. You should go and check out all the book reviews on the Books page. The economy’s collapsing; you should buy yourself a book to celebrate!

Hey lords & ladies.
There’s a whole bunchload of stuff playing this week, some good, some bad. Plus, the weather is totally shitty! Go see a movie! Go see three! (Not these three.)

Opening today:

Regarding Ghost Town, a movie about a grumpy dentist (Ricky Gervais) forced to help ghosts transition from somethingness into nothingness, Charles Mudede wonders: “Why do the dead want to really die? What’s wrong with being a ghost? You have died, you are still around—you can haunt this street, that home, those shops. This order seems sensible enough: To be alive is the best, to be a ghost is not the worst, and to be nothing is unimaginable. Why, then, do ghosts want the unimaginable? Why?”

On Lakeview Terrace, Andrew Wright chronicles the de-fanging of Neil LaBute: “Only once, during a housewarming-party chat gone wrong, do LaBute’s old habits come to the fore and threaten to pin the audience’s ears back. Otherwise, chalk it up as a potentially decent B-picture stymied by the director’s newfound tendency to stay within the lines. We need him mean, or not at all.”

The esteemed A. Birch Steen has some constructive criticism for Battle in Seattle:”One day, the true story of the brave officers who fended off the masses of drooling, illiterate, antiestablishment troglodytes will be told—hopefully in a film starring good, conservative Americans like Tom Selleck, Wilford Brimley, and Bruce Willis.”

Sean Nelson “suggests the living fuck” out of Mister Foe: “He does these things because he misses his dead mother, who drowned in the lake behind the stately home he lives in with his stately father and Verity (!!!), his much younger superfox of a stepmother. He obsessively believes that Verity murdered his mom and made it look like suicide. This does not stop him from desiring her sexually, which makes for a complicated home life.”

PLUS: David Schmader on Stealing America: Vote by Vote (“Why am I recommending you spend 90 minutes of your life watching a boringly thorough movie that makes you murderously furious? For the primary reason anyone watches any documentary: To see amazing real-life shit that you can’t fucking believe you’re watching”); Mudede on A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (“How wonderful it is to see Wayne Wang in his element: the Chinese-American experience”); I find Alan Ball’s Towelhead to be just okay (“Towelhead wants you to know that IT IS NOT AFRAID TO MAKE YOU UNCOMFORTABLE”); and Megan Seling is delighted by Igor (“It’s funny to try to kill yourself over and over again so long as you’re an immortal bunny”).

And in Limited Runs:

Creepy Dr. Seuss “Technicolor freakout” The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T plays at SIFF Cinema. Also at SIFF Cinema, Devil Music Ensemble Presents Red Heroine and The Human Condition Part Three: A Soldier’s Prayer. Don’t miss the final few days of Momma’s Man at Northwest Film Forum. Do go ahead and miss Outsourced at Central Cinema (Annie Wagner: “It’s exactly like every other movie in the world, and I don’t know why anyone would bother watching it”). Film critic Robert Horton talks about Napoleon this Sunday at the Frye. Over at the Grand Illusion, see Ten Nights of Dreams (featuring “lots of blood, barf, and a beautiful pig-woman in a kimono who assaults her enemies with a special ‘fart attack’”). Both late nights are good this weekend: The Grand Illusion has Viva, which Paul Constant luuuvs. And at the Egyptian it’s the Gump-tastic Return to Oz. Tonight you can join fellow concerned citizens at Keystone Church for USA Vs. Al-Arian; OR stay at home and completely avoid the weak documentary The Universe of Keith Haring at NWFF.

Ta-daaah! That’s about it.

As always, visit our complete movie times and listings HERE.

And don’t forget that you can comment on articles now everywhere on The Stranger’s website. Did you see Bangkok Dangerous and love it? Am I a complete asshole? Tell us how much we suck! Exclamation points!

The US Government Announces This: Record for marijuana arrests.

The Same Week It Does This: Toasts the the 75th anniversary of the end of alcohol prohibition. Here is part of the House’s irony-free resolution:

Whereas throughout American history, alcohol has been consumed by its citizens and regulated by the Government;

Whereas prior to the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, which established Prohibition in the United States, abuses and insufficient regulation resulted in irresponsible overconsumption of alcohol;

Whereas passage of the 18th Amendment, which prohibited `the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors’ in the United States, resulted in a dramatic increase in illegal activity, including unsafe black market alcohol production, organized crime, and noncompliance with alcohol laws;

Whereas members of the licensed alcoholic beverage industry have created and supported a wide range of national, State, and community programs to address problems associated with alcohol abuse, including drunk driving and underage drinking: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That Congress—

(1) celebrates 75 years of effective State-based alcohol regulation since the passage of the 21st Amendment; (2) recognizes State lawmakers, regulators, law enforcement officers, the public health community and industry members for creating a workable, legal, and successful system of alcoholic beverage regulation, distribution, and sale; and (3) continues to support policies that allow States to effectively regulate alcohol.

Government Officials in Massachusetts Said This:

An army of young drug addicts and dealers could flood the streets if voters don’t snub out a proposal to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana, a cadre of Bay State officials said.

The Coalition for Safe Streets, a joint group of law enforcement, religious and community leaders backed by Mayor Thomas M. Menino and Attorney General Martha Coakley, warned yesterday the proposal would spark a crime wave and efforts to keep kids clean would go up in smoke.

In Harder News: FDA cracks down on online Viagra.

Down in Bolivia: Kicks out US ambassador, gets blacklisted by US for drugs.

Meanwhile, in Canada: Green Party leader says, “I apologise” for having “never used marijuana.”

Today Paul Constant is wearing a T-shirt that reads “WHERES THE CHILIDOGS“—just like that, with no punctuation. He claims ignorance as to the origin of his shirt. Shirt, I say to you: IN SEATTLE HERES THE CHILIDOGS.

The estimable Michael Stern agrees here.

Cover art by Jessixa Bagley.

Back to School 2008: An Indispensable Guide to the Things No One Else Will Tell You By the Only Newspaper in Seattle that Isn’t Ridiculous and Irrelevant^TM
Everything there is to know about college (including tips on campus life, how to skip classes, and how to bang a professor). Everything there is to know about the city (the lay of the land, where to get pizza/have an abortion/Dumpster dive). And everything there is to know about life (how to drink like an adult, how to do hallucinogens, how to get someone to sleep with you, and more).

Jonah Spangenthal-Lee on the Scrap Over the Proposed Pit-Bull Pan
“A group working to ban potentially dangerous dogs from Seattle has abruptly canceled plans to submit a citizen initiative after receiving threatening e-mails from pit-bull enthusiasts, group members say. ‘You should be publicly executed for your actions against our beloved pets,’ one e-mail reads. ‘You all ought to be neutered,’ says another.”

Paul Constant on the Mysterious Silence Surrounding the Departure of Hugo House’s Director
“On September 11, rumors of Lyall Bush and Hugo House parting ways spread through Seattle’s literary community with the speed usually reserved for an apocalyptic plague outbreak in a thriller. The Stranger sent e-mails to Hugo House and promptly received confirmation from Brian McGuigan, Hugo House’s program associate: ‘Yes, it’s true; Lyall is no longer the executive director of Hugo House.’”

Dan Savage Answers Your Questions about HUMP!
“Do I have to show my face in my film? Nope! We need proof of age—a photocopy of a passport or driver’s license—for everyone who appears in your film, but you can be shot from the neck down. Or you can wear masks. Or makeup. Or a Sarah Palin wig and glasses. So long as your film is creative and hot, it’ll make the cut!”

Bethany Jean Clement Ventures to the Triangle Pub
“Marooned next to the giant pit is an old three-story brick beauty with ghosts of old advertisements painted on the side. The only word that’s legible is ‘QUALITY.’ It’s the 1910 Flatiron Building, still standing because it’s a historic landmark, and a historic landmark because it used to be a brothel. It’s home to the Triangle Pub, a wedge of old-fashioned, run-down goodness on a decimated, soon-to-be-fancy block.”

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Sarah Palin’s sinking ratings; how conservative activists are planning to infiltrate Seattle colleges; the case of the two Vulcans; the construction boom’s secret laborers; a very long sentence about David Foster Wallace; Lindy West sees three horrible movies in a row (and makes a horrible metaphor out of it); Trent Moorman interrogates CSS; Dave Segal on Earth and other bands named after planets; Theater Review Revue (in which we have thoughtfully divided each show’s ticket price by the run time [Shrek the Musical will cost you $0.42 per minute]); plus all the usual columns and calendars.

Seattle Police have closed off East Union Street between 27th and Martin Luther King Way after a cyclist collided with an open car door.

According to Seattle Fire Department Spokeswoman Dana Vander Houwen, the cyclist, a 22-year-old was taken to Harborview with non-life threatening injuries.

SPD spokesman Mark Jamieson says he doesn’t know when the street will reopen.

The word of the day at Urban Dictionary…

Coincidence? Dunno. I do know, though, that Dan and Terry’s baby is almost 11 now, and we never once used the term “gaybie” to describe him…

You’ve gotta clear up some erroneous shit, por favor. I’ve got a buddy who’s got a buddy who has a girl who says that she comes—she has a goddamn orgasm—just from sucking dick. Like, she sucks his dick, and she climaxes as a result. That shit can’t happen, right? Right? RIGHT?

Looks Infinitely Exaggerated, Sir

It’s never happened to me, LIES, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. (I mean, cunnilingus has never happened to me either.) Sex advice professionals are always saying that the biggest sex organ is the brain, of course, and I suppose it’s possible that this woman is so turned on by sucking dick that her great big sex organ overwhelms her lesser sex organs and she somehow climaxes without touching herself.

But how does that Occam’s Razor thing go again? Oh, right: “All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best.” Or as I’ve often put: the likeliest and most obvious answer is usually the right answer. And it seems likelier that this guy is either a braggart out to make his friends jealous—”My girl gets off just sucking me, man, I don’t even have to touch her!”—or that his girlfriend brings just as much gusto to servicing his ego as she does to servicing his cock.

In this week’s online edition, eight Stranger writers consider the Washington Mutual meltdown: What it means, the pro and cons of converting your cash to gold, and whether this might be a good time to panic.

Jonathan Golob on where it all went wrong:

Then the housing bubble popped and some of those “top-rated” loans were no longer getting paid. Worse, it became impossible to sort out the good top-rated debt from the bad top-rated debt, because the banks collected so little information. WaMu—like many other financial organizations that invested in these “safe” investments—can only sell these mortgage-backed investments for pennies on what it paid. Our money, to an unknown extent, is gone.

Bethany Jean Clement on leaving WaMu forever:

I began to hate you, Washington Mutual. I said that I would like to close my account and that I was pressed for time three separate times. I said that I did not want to continue this conversation. You became increasingly agitated, and you browbeat me, intimating that I did not understand financial matters and saying that I was being “rash.” I did not say, “Would you say that to a man?” But would you, Washington Mutual? You did not say it to Tim Keck, the publisher of this paper, when he closed his account the day before I did. Mr. Keck was neither rash nor emotional: He was merely a man who wanted his money.

Eli Sanders on his sentimental attachment to Washington Mutual:

I know now that this business of storing money probably shouldn’t be about mushy sentiment. But it’s hard for me not to be sentimental about Washington Mutual. The place treated me like an adult when I was a kid. It respected me—even when all I had to offer were inconsequential sums and a financial legitimacy that only existed because of my mom’s guarantee.

Plus Dominic Holden on whether credit unions are safer, Jen Graves on why there’s no reason for panic, Dan Savage on his shitty mortgage, Charles Mudede on the failure of neoliberal policy,and me on why poverty is the best defense.

Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe (GOPeemypants) once famously observed—on the floor of the US Senate!—that he could proudly state that there were no queers in his family and that there never had been any queers in his family and that there never would be any queers in his family, so help him God. Anyway, it appears that an 18 year-old gay porn star named Andrew Rice somehow secured the Democratic nomination to run against Inhofe, who is up for reelection this year.

And you gotta love Inhofe’s latest campaign commercial (via JoeMyGod):

You would never know watching that ad that Andrew Rice is a married man—a married-to-a-woman man, thank you very much!—and has a kid, seeing as Inhofe makes Rice look like he just walked off a shoot with/shoot in Brent Corrigan. (But we can safely assume that Rice now regrets posing for all those boy-band publicity shots back in the day.)

But here’s what I love most about Inhofe’s ad: SCARE GROOMS! They’re a little like “square quotes,” but small and plastic and found on top of wedding cakes especially baked to terrify anti-gay bigots. Inhofe uses scare grooms to particularly good effect here: the ominous music, the swooping camera angle, the sinister look on what are clearly a couple of very cheap-ass grooms, and the sad, blurry bride consigned to the edge of the shot.

Message? While it may be praiseworthy for Sarah Palin to have a kid with downs syndrome and shit, Andrew Rice wants gay babies with downs syndrome to grow up and marry their identical twin brothers! And that ain’t right—particularly when there are lots of good, decent, hard-working, completely blurry Oklahoma girls out there just aching marry gay guys with downs syndrome.

Oh man, I love me a good pair of scare grooms! Anti-gay bloggers frequently illustrate posts about gay marriage with images of scare grooms (examples here and here), and the authors of books that come out strongly against gay marriage also find scare grooms hard to resist….

I’d like to find more examples of scare grooms—and scare brides!—so that I can start collecting them and posting them on Slog. (Hey, it’s that or more pictures of Gregoire yard signs, people.) So if you run across a pair of scare grooms—plastic cake toppers, not just pictures of gays getting married—on a conservative blog, the cover of a magazine, an anti-gay website, or in a gay-baiting campaign commercial, please send it my way!

It’s a beautiful thing to see the Wall Street Journal rip into John McCain:

John McCain has made it clear this week he doesn’t understand what’s happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does. But on Thursday, he took his populist riffing up a notch and found his scapegoat for financial panic — Christopher Cox, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Mr. McCain clearly wants to distance himself from the Bush Administration. But this assault on Mr. Cox is both false and deeply unfair. It’s also un-Presidential.

The editorial basically echoes Obama’s speech in Eli’s post—McCain is panicking, thrashing around, looking for someone to hit. And even the conservative press is criticizing him for it.

McCain accused Cox and the SEC of allowing naked short-selling. The WSJ slaps him for his obvious distortion:

Take “naked” shorting, in which an investor sells a stock short — betting that it will fall in price — without first borrowing the shares he is selling from an investor who owns them. The SEC has never condoned the practice, and since 2005 it has clamped down on short selling in any stock that shows evidence of naked shorting. The SEC further tightened its rules against naked shorting just hours before Mr. McCain excoriated Mr. Cox for doing nothing.

McCain’s (and Palin’s) obvious, easily debunked lies show a profound contempt for the American public and its interest in—and ability to apprehend—the truth.

Go get ‘em, WSJ.

Yesterday I received this email:

Hi, Eli.

I haven’t seen this slogged but I was curious about your thoughts into the investigation into the conductor’s conduct before the commuter train collision in Los Angeles. He was gay and going through a difficult time in his life, including surviving the suicide of his HIV+ partner. Now it looks like he was text messaging teenagers at the time of the crash.

How do you think the gay/pederasty angle will be played in the media?

I guess this question came to me because I’m gay (or maybe because the emailer thinks I’m a pederast) but I’d like to answer as someone who’s at this very moment riding a train that’s speeding along tracks somewhere between Longview and Portland.

My feeling is that anyone responsible for other people’s lives—like the person driving the L.A. train, like the person driving this train I’m on right now—has a duty to set his or her sad, sad troubles (and his or her sketchy, sketchy text messages) aside while doing things like, oh, say, driving a train at very high speeds. You don’t get a pass on this kind of stuff just because you’re gay and having a rough time, and if you fail to do this you shouldn’t get extra blame in the media just because you’re gay and having a rough time.

Just drive the trains right, people. Please. That includes you, person at the helm of this here Amtrak.

Here we are, at the end of a week of awful economic news, and Barack Obama is now right back up to where he was, Gallup-wise, during the after-glow of the Democratic National Convention.

I repeat what I said yesterday, and add this: Obama seems to be taking the right lesson from these polls, which is to be relentless—keep up the attacks on McCain’s judgment, his “panicked” campaign, and his economic credentials.

Here’s Obama today in Florida:

The polls will tell us more in the coming days, but my guess is that this is the magic bullet Obama’s been looking for. If the debate is about the economy (not race, not gender, not moose-hunting, not POWs), and if Obama can convince enough of the electorate that McCain is a bad economic bet, then it looks like Obama wins. That’s what the swing in this poll seems to indicate, anyway.

It also reminds that the story of Obama’s spectacular rise has, in many ways, been his spectacular luck. Just when things are looking bleak, a political gift falls in his lap. When he was running for state senate in Illinois, it turned out his most threatening Democratic opponent hadn’t gathered enough signatures to get on the ballot. When he ran for U.S. Senate, his Republican opponent had to withdraw because of a divorce records scandal.

Yes, Obama has made a lot of his own luck. I have no doubt he’s made far more than he’s received. But to have the economy go into paroxysms of panic six weeks before the election, and to have your opponent’s first response be to claim the fundamentals of the economy are strong—this kind of thing can only be described as incredible, gift-from-on-high luck.

What Obama does with this luck will be a test of his political skill and, more specifically, a test of his ability to be merciless while at the same time appearing likable and presidential.

We’ve decided to shake things up a little bit in regards to our Party Crasher column: from now on, when you invite Party Crasher to your house party (partycrasher@thestranger.com), you never know which Stranger staffer you’re going to get to cover your party.

You may have noticed that David Schmader wrote Party Crasher last week. Here’s a taste:

One of these guys sports a button on his jacket, featuring what looks like the face of Mick Mars, the guitarist and ugliest member of Mötley Crüe. “Is that Mick Mars?” I ask the owner, who responds in the affirmative. He’s in a band—Ivory in Ice World—and wears the button to honor his status as “the Mick Mars of the group.” I ask him if this means he’s the guitarist or the ugliest member. “Both!” he replies.

It was a great Party Crasher. You may also have noticed that Christopher Frizzelle crashed Fnarf’s birthday in this week’s Party Crasher:

…he heard the word “incest” and said, “Incense?”

“Incest.”

“Oh, incest,” Steve replied. “A game the whole family can play.”

Will Kelly O be the one to try your artichoke dip? Will Dan Savage attend your birthday party? Will Brendan Kiley leap from a second-story window onto a bus roof at your nephew’s Bar Mitzvah? Will Lindy West batter your piñata into submission? Will I make things a little more awkward at your gay orgy? You’ll have to invite us (partycrasher@thestranger.com) to your upcoming house party to find out.

…courtesy of Best Week Ever.

Each entry includes a celebrity falling down, so all are recommended. But here’s my favorite, featuring all three members of Destiny’s Child going boom.

Thank you, Slog tipper Bradley Steinbacher. (And confidential to pratfall list-makers: Where’s the clip of Courtney falling off that chair onto her face at the VMAs?)

Barack Obama’s campaign rally in Coral Gables, Florida Friday was interrupted by a group of about 10 African-American protesters holding signs that called themselves, “Blacks Against Obama.”

The signs said Obama was for gay marriage and abortion, and said his candidacy was “endorsed by the KKK.” Another sign said, “Jesse Jackson hates Obama.”

Perhaps they’d seem a teensy bit credible if it weren’t for the “white supremacists support the black man” sign. But the great thing here is actually how Obama handles the little twits.

Being all white and stuff, I shall demur from commenting on what appears to be, um, let’s just call it a conflict of interest. But as a faggot, I shall seize this moment criticize my own ilk who vote against our interests: Log Cabin Republicans can go fuck themselves.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, the big socialization of risk that I’ve—and many others—have been foreseeing has occurred:

The actions began to get under way on Thursday with discussions between the Treasury, Federal Reserve and Congressional leaders on what could become the biggest bailout in United States history, a plan likely to authorize the government to buy distressed mortgages at deep discounts from banks and other institutions….

In a move against traders who have sought to profit from the financial crisis by betting against bank shares, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a temporary ban on short sales of 799 financial stocks, following similar action in Britain on Thursday.

And the Treasury, moving to restore confidence in another financial bedrock, said that it would guarantee, at least temporarily, money market funds up to an amount of $50 billion to ensure their solvency, a startling intervention into what had been considered among the safest investments.

The stock market is certainly happy about this. Should you, as a taxpayer, be happy?

For years, I’ve had to put up with conservatives bitching about the moral hazard posed by FDR’s New Deal. Today’s actions reveal these “free market” proponents as gigantic, hypocritical assholes.

Don’t be too shocked.

Want to distill down the New Deal-era financial reforms? If you want our money to bail you out, you have to play honestly and by our rules. If something is important enough to the economy that we’d consider bailing it out, it deserves regulation first, bailouts second.

For example, the Glass-Steagall Acts prevented risky investments from shacking up with the safe—keeping investment banks and commercial banks separate. The same laws created the FDIC insurance of our savings account also limited where and how aggressively insured banks could invest.

Most of Glass-Steagall’s regulatory provisions were written out of law in 1999, setting the stage for our present catastrophe. Today’s “solution” to the present crisis is all bailout, no regulation—the mirror image of FDR’s. It’s going to fail.

“Free market” conservatives—like our current SEC chairman Christopher Cox—for years have been telling us the market will collapse irresponsible companies, relieving the government of the responsibility to actual bother regulating the financial industries. Well, when the irresponsible have started collapsing, Cox and others are right there with our wallet, dumping cash on the table to “restore confidence.” I have an ugly truth for you: confidence shouldn’t be restored in this system.

Want to restore confidence? I have a suggested governmental takeover for you: The entire debt rating industry. If the goal is to calm down global investors, who were burned by “high rated” debt that was anything but good, a public execution of Moody’s and others would be the perfect way to do it.

Take the money we’re now showering on the greatest failures in two generations to pay for a new governmental debt-rating agency. Pay the employees of this agenccy usurious wages—wages beyond any bribe. Grant these employees the right to tear into the books and documentation behind all of the financial derivatives, and give honest ratings to the relative quality of the debt.

With that, I know my confidence would be restored—in more than just the financial system.

So I was walking down Pine Street this morning, on my way to catch the train to Portland, and off in the distance I see an orange face peeking out of a white hoodie, crossing the street between Chapel and Bauhaus.

I know sightings of Blayne from Project Runway are a dime a dozen in Seattle these days, but I this was my first. I walked faster.

I caught up with him at Pike and Boren and said, “Sorry you got kicked off.”

He smiled, thanked me, and we started chit-chatting. I asked him who wins. He wouldn’t say. I asked him if Kenley is as awful in real life as she seems on the show. He said she’s actually very sweet and nice, and blamed the editing for the hatred everyone I know currently feels toward her. I asked what he’s up to next. Working on a men’s collection, maybe moving to L.A., but still working at that cafe in West Seattle in the meantime.

He was wearing fire-red sneakers, designer jeans, and a deep-diving gray v-neck under his white hoodie—which, of course, he was wearing with the hood up.

I asked Blayne where he tans in Seattle. He told me but I immediately forgot. Sorry, admiring tanorexics. He was seriously tan, though, and quite proud of it. He unzipped his hoodie, pulled at his v-neck, and showed me how dark his chest was. It was, I would say, burnt orange.

We were approaching 5th Anenue at this point, and I had to turn left. He was in the middle of telling me about the grief he gets from people who think he’s promoting cancerous behavior, and how he uses a tanning “cocktail”—something about lying under non-cancerous bulbs plus a full body spray afterward, a combination that is, if I heard right, both deeply satisfying and less carcinogenic. But I don’t know if I heard right. It was all very quick.

Someone shouted across the street, a garbled kind of shout that might have been his name, and we both turned our heads. It was not someone shouting his name. It was just some people fighting with each other.

Not a licious word passed between us, Blayne haters. It was all very pleasant. We shook hands, and then we walked in different directions.

He was headed to pick up his car. I wondered—based on the sleep in his eyes, the coffee in his right hand, and the fact that he was early-morning walking to get to some far-away place where he’d left his car last night—whether I had just had the distinct honor of sharing with this Project Runway also-ran a few moments of a walk of shame.

In the comments section to my story about the Hugo House, Stranger Genius Matt Briggs is having an ongoing discussion with brilliant short story writer Ryan Boudinot about the future of the Hugo House. Briggs wants a smaller, more community-oriented Hugo House—kind of the opposite of what former House Executive Director Lyall Bush is famous for promoting—and Boudinot is in favor of continuing the world-class readings series. Briggs has just challenged Boudinot to a face-off:

It has come down to this. You and me. The future of the Seattle writing community clearly, certainly, depends on us and our ideas about outreach programs at Richard Hugo House.

I concede, too, that perhaps a business minded approach is appropriate considering we are talking about an arts organization with a budget and employees and things.

In this spirit, I suggest we resolve our difference in the time honored traditional of all business minded people: dueling PowerPoint presentations outlining the potential futures of Richard Hugo House. In the yawning vacuum of Lyall Bush’s mysterious departure, sense must be made, preferably in three word bullet points.

I suggest we meet in appropriate corporate or edgy marketing attire at a suitable location — a whiteboard perhaps, an AV projector.

Go ahead present your vision of the future in a succinct, and sizzly deck.

I will also have a nice PowerPoint presentation prepared.

20 minutes each. 20 minutes to blow people’s minds.

And then, the people can decide provided they are still awake.

Mr. Boudinot, author of The Littlest Hitler and soon to be released novel Egg and Sperm, I am calling you out. I challenge you to a PowerPoint-off. I demand this, or I demand your immediate concession to my generally sensible and cogent explanations and thoughts about the future of Richard Hugo House.

Name your time. Name you place. Check my Outlook calendar and schedule a rumble.

Thank You,

Matt Briggs

I know this is partially meant in jest, but I think this is a great idea. A PowerPoint-off about the future of the Hugo House. (Briggs suggests the MacLeod Residence as a neutral territory.) The Hugo House is right now figuring out what it’s going to be for at least the next five years by choosing its next Executive Director. This would be a fun way for everyone to get their respective opinions heard. I say yes, please.

If you think you’re having a bad day at work, please note, it can’t be half as bad as this guy’s, PART TWO…

ECB and I just boarded Sound Transit’s Lunch Bus which will allegedly take us on a tour of the unbuilt light rail line, which opens next year.

The bus is fricking amazing. Each seat is roomy, has a reading light and CLIMATE CONTROL! It’s like an airplane.

There are about 30 people on the bus and a lot of grey hair. Our excellent tour guide just pointed out “some very large galvanized poles” on the side of the road and an old woman just screeched for him to “speak a little more slowly”.

Most of the people on this bus won’t be alive by the time the light rail is up and running.

12:05-

Facts about the train: during peak hours (6-9 am/3-6 pm) trains will run every six minutes.

On elevated sections of track, the trains will be moving at about 55mph. At ground level, the trains will go the city speed limit. Theoretically, a train could get a speedi

ST will use fare insectors to audit riders, a system which hasn’t worked out so well for the Sounder train system.

You can also take your bike on the train. Although ST hasn’t figured out where bikes will be stowed during rush hour.

12:13- important update: We’re going to the airport!!!!

12:20- The ST airport station looks awesome but is filled with some terrible public art. There’s a weird lightbulb/teardrop thing hanging from the ceiling. As ECB says: “why can’t public art ever be good?”

2:12- The bus stopped for lunch. Longest lunch ever. I think they had to blend up food for half the crowd.

We’re passing the entrance to the Beacon tunnel. Apparently ST named their giant drill machine the Emerald Mole.

…but until yesterday I did not.

I’m speaking of the freakish wealth of King of the Hill-related pornography readily available on the internet, which I became acquainted with after sending the words “Peggy Hill” into Google Image Search for this post. And not just any old King of the Hill-related pornography—King of the Hill-related incest porn.

I will not supply such images for you here, you sick fucks. Suffice it to say that watching Bobby Hill have intercourse with his mother while his dad looks on in horror is exactly as enticing as it sounds.

This blog reports on Joan Didion’s recent appearance at the Brooklyn Book Festival. The blog’s not particularly well-written—the title is “Joan Didion Discourses at the Brooklyn Book Festival” and includes the phrase “The choir had been preached too”—but anything involving Joan Didion is interesting.

Here’s a bit:

…she focused on what has been said by all the pundits and television talking heads about Palin: she has a great “story.” McCain, the war hero, has a great “story.” It is a tactic used, she asserted, to “downplay their capacity for trouble.” Condoleezza Rice had a great “story.” Hearkening back to the 2005 confirmation hearings to install her as secretary of state, she said how at the time everyone noted that Rice had great success as provost of Stanford. “It was as if everyone on the Fox News Terror Alert Team had come off the provost beat.”

In conclusion: Hooray for Joan Didion!

Film

‘Momma’s Man’

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

Light rail opponents are crowing today about a collision between an L.A. light rail train and a bus that turned into its path—proof, they say, that light rail is untenably dangerous. In an email to local media, rail opponent Emory Bundy wrote,

The population is smaller along the five affected miles of the MLK corridor than it is in south LA, so maimings and deaths will be less frequent than in Los Angeles. But they will occur, as Sound Transit acknowledges, buried in the fine print of its EIS. Rather than engineer the line to assure safe operations—like it intends to do in more affluent neighborhoods—Sound Transit will tell the people in the Rainier Valley to be careful, and then, when accidents occur, blame the victims for being careless. Even victims who are children, or with impaired sight or hearing.

Because the only acceptable transit system is one that never has a single accident—and, as everyone also knows, buses never have accidents, especially accidents involving disabled people or innocent children.

Nope, buses are 100% safe, unlike those dangerous, dangerous light rail trains.

Meet Claudio Henrique Barack Obama:

The US is not the only one having elections this year, as we, here in Brazil, have some too in October. Ok, it is less important and world shocking but for the local people the election for mayor and the municipal council are of utmost importance.
And so … Obama inspires and candidates in Brazil “borrow” his name

The candidate for the presidency of the United States Barack Obama enthused and inspired candidates for prefeito (mayor) and vereador (councilman) in Brazil, adopting his name in the municipal elections in October. There are candidates for mayor and councilman taking a ride on the fame of the US Democrat presidential nominee and decided to couple the name of Obama in their quest for success in the polls. No candidate in Brazil is using the name of John McCain.

When I run for a council seat in Seattle, I’ll call myself: Charles Mudede Barack Obama.

The cover of this month’s American Scholar reads: “Meet the World’s Most Evil Man.” Which sounds like dumb hyperbole until you actually read the article—it makes a pretty good case.

I can’t exactly recommend you read it too, because it’s deeply depressing—about an evil German Evangelical named Paul Schaefer who founded a lil’ utopia (32,000 acres) in Chile where he could terrorize, torture, and rape its inhabitants into submission.

In exchange for being left alone, Schaefer did lots of Pinochet’s dirty work—tortured and executed political dissidents, mostly, who were brought to Schaefer’s small kingdom of terror, up in the Chilean mountains.

Here is probably the gentlest, kindest thing Schaefer ever did:

All challengers to Schaefer’s authority—real or imagined—were rooted out and destroyed. No one inspired greater love and admiration among the children of the Colonia than Santa Claus. It is said that in the days shortly before Christmas one year in the mid-1970s, Schaefer gathered the Colonia’s children, loaded them onto a bus, and drove them out to a nearby river, where, he told them, Santa was coming to visit.

The boys and girls stood excitedly along the riverbank, while an older colono in a fake beard and a red and white suit floated towards them on a raft. Schaefer pulled a pistol from his belt and fired, seeming to wound Santa, who tumbled into the water, where he thrashed about before disappearing below the surface. It was a charade, but Schaefer turned to the children assembled before him and said that Santa was dead. From that day forward, Schaefer’s birthday was the only holiday celebrated inside Colonia Dignidad.

Schaefer was finally arrested in 2005. He lives in jail now.

The rest of the horrible story is here.

NYT:

Todd Palin, the husband of the Republican nominee for vice president, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, has refused to testify in a legislative inquiry into whether Ms. Palin or members of her administration abused their power in the dismissal of a top state administrator, a spokesman said Thursday.

Mr. Palin, one of 13 people served with subpoenas in the inquiry, is a close adviser to his wife and is at the center of the controversy over the firing in July of Walt Monegan, then the public safety commissioner.

Ed O’Callaghan, a spokesman for the McCain-Palin campaign here, said that Mr. Palin would not testify and that he had filed “objections to the validity of the subpoena” with the independent investigator leading the inquiry for the Legislature, Stephen E. Branchflower, a former Anchorage prosecutor.

So do we all get to make are own judgment calls about subpoenas now? Are they, in the wake of Bush administration, merely invitations for testimony and/or evidence, and is honoring a subpoena entirely left to the discretion of the person served with the subpoena? Do subpoenas come with RSVP cards now? If I were to be served with a subpoena could I just shrug and say, “Hey, I have objections to the validity of this here subpoena!” and get away with it?

^{Matt Browning’s Another Sport (2008), yarn from baseballs, cedar, staples; 6 by 9 by 1 inches}

At Crawl Space. (Gallery site here.)

It doesn’t look like much at first, maybe a scrap of carpet cut out and mounted on the wall as if it were a painting, apparently stretched over an armature the way a canvas might be. Is it some kind of low-rent hipster take on abstract painting?

It isn’t. It’s made of yarn from baseballs. The artist carefully knitted this little thing. You wouldn’t know he has a background in fiber arts from the rest of his show, full of smart, post-minimalistic, rough-living sculptures—a miniature ski jump that doubles as a limp dick, a beer shot-gunning machine that looks like some sort of birdhouse. The whole thing is really worth seeing, not just this one. This is a young artist to watch.

Outsider Art earns the splashy reference books, but Outsider Media is where it’s at.

Case in point: The St. Louis Evening Whirl, a weekly newspaper I first became acquainted with in the summer of 1990, when my parents were living in Missourri. The nearest local equivalent is The Facts, Seattle’s primarily African-American newspaper, but the Evening Whirl exists on a planet of its own.

What initially drew me in was the weekly column Wife Beaters and Sweetheart Mistreaters (all linked PDFs drawn from the Tuesday, June 12, 1990 issue of the Whirl I’ve been toting around for the past 18 years). Along with the dazzling title, the column featured an awesome tagline-in-dialogue (“Oh Daddy Don’t”/”Be Good and I Won’t”) and, of course, the Whirl’s signature brand of reporting:

Terry [REDACTED], 37, of 5513 [REDACTED], was at home with his beloved Miss [REDACTED], 28, who is his live-in mama and sex alarmer. He struck Miss [REDACTED] about her head, arms and body and also her “fanny” early in the morning before the break of day with a baseball bat. Do you call that love or hatred? Just think! ‘Twas the hour when they should have been making love with the blanket rising and falling with concerted movements. But no! A slave driver and woman beater although Terry was arrested.

The redacted names are my doing—the Whirl regularly published the full names and home addresses of alleged criminals, and news stories typically kicked off with a rhyming couplet. Even short items boasted amazing headlines. And then there was my favorite ongoing column, the crytpic yet explicit WHO?:

Much to my delight, this morning I stumbled across a 2006 Believer article profiling the Whirl and its founder Ben Thomas. But nothing compares with reading the instigating material. As the Whirl’s boasted in its pages for decades, “Missing an issue of the Whirl is worse than missing a meal.”

From MinnPost.com:

Charges will be dropped against journalists who were arrested and charged with misdemeanors for unlawful assembly during the Republican National Convention, St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman said today.

Many reporters, photographers and bloggers were among the 818 people arrested during the Sept. 1-4 convention. Many were trapped on a bridge with protesters on the Thursday night, just before Sen. John McCain made his acceptance speech. Police had warned the large group to dissipate, then closed in from both sides of the bridge and made mass arrests.

“This decision reflects the values we have in Saint Paul to protect and promote our First Amendment rights to freedom of the press,” Mayor Coleman said. “A journalist plays a special role in our democracy and that role is just too important to ignore. At the scene, the police did their duty in protecting public safety. In this decision, we are serving the public’s interest to maintain the integrity of our democracy, system of justice and freedom of the press.”

First: Can police just insist a large group of peaceably assembled people to dissipate and start arresting them when they don’t?

The crowd’s permit to march on downtown that day had expired an hour or two prior, according police on the scene. So police corralled them into a tense, but peaceful standoff, then started arresting.